Brain Jack by Brian Falkner Read Free Book Online Page B

rewarded by the movie starting to play in a small window.
    He closed it and glanced at the clock in the lower right corner of his screen (did you call it a screen when it was inside your head?) and noticed that it was 8:59 p.m.
    “Dinnertime,” he said out loud.
    Without touching the mouse or the keyboard or looking at the LCD screen of his laptop, he ventured back into the electronic corridors of the White House.
    He checked the clock in the bottom right corner again. 9:00 p.m.
    Open, he thought, staring at the file.
    It opened.
    There was a brief second or two of a standard hourglass; then the software took over the whole of his screen, the whole of his vision !
    It opened into an image, a virtual version of the White House. He was somewhere in the grounds of the big building. It was a sunny day, and the grass was green underfoot. In front of him, a fountain, surrounded by a low hedge, sprayed virtual water up into the air, digital droplets sparkling in the bright sun before cascading back to earth.
    Now, finally, he understood what Skullface had meant. It wasn’t just an online forum; it was virtual-meeting software, where their avatars would see and talk to each other in a cyberworld. Like Third Life. They would probably meet in the Oval Office itself, he thought. No, Skullface said dinner—it would be in the formal dining room.
    By thinking himself forward, he began to move, skirting around the side of the fountain toward the front doors.
    He moved across a roadway, past the white pillars, up a flight of stairs toward the huge double doors of the White House, which were set in an arched entranceway.
    He imagined the doors opening, but they did not.
    He opened his eyes and tried clicking on the doors with his mouse, but they remained solidly closed.
    He closed his eyes again and looked around.
    To the right of the doors, conveniently placed at head height on the door frame, was a black rectangular plastic shape with a white button in the center.
    A doorbell.
    Sam chuckled to himself. So simple. The final hurdle was not a hurdle at all.
    At the start it had seemed impossible, yet here he was, at the front door of the White House, about to embark on an incredible new adventure. What would he learn? Who would he meet?
    He took a deep breath and clicked on the doorbell.
    A sound intruded and he opened his eyes with a start, shutting off the audiovisual feed from the neuro-connector. The White House doors and the doorbell were still there, though, staring at him from the laptop screen.
    Surely he had just imagined that sound.
    He kept his eyes open and tried again, this time preferring traditional methods. He reached out and grasped his mouse with his right hand and moved it over to the doorbell.
    Drawing in his breath again, he clicked on the button a second time.
    And jumped out of his chair with sudden, terrible knowledge and fear.
    Outside his bedroom, past the kitchen, where his mother was preparing dinner, at the end of the hallway, at the front door of their sixth-floor apartment, the doorbell rang again.

8 | KIWI
    Sam lay on the lumpy mattress on the metal-framed bunk, staring blankly at the ceiling of his cell and watching fuzzy specks of eyeball dust float around like microbes in a solution on a microscope slide.
    He felt he was going mad. Three days locked in a cell they called a bedroom. But it had wire mesh on the windows, and the door was permanently locked, which seemed more like a prison cell to Sam.
    Three days ago, he had raced down the hallway to the front door of their apartment. Terrified of opening the door, but even more terrified of his mother opening it first.
    The man standing there wore tactical black SWAT-type coveralls and a Kevlar vest. A pistol in a black leather holster was strapped halfway down his thigh. He was in his late twenties. Not short, but not tall either. His hair was slicked back in a style reminiscent of old fifties rock ’n’ rollers, as if to make him taller, and he wore