Kaine turned to him. “Listen.” He rubbed his chin, lost in his own thoughts, and Michael stopped as well. He didn’t know when it had happened, but at some point Kaine had stopped being an enemy, entirely. He’d stopped being just a piece of code also. Something about him had turned almost…human.

Kaine shook his head. “I didn’t think I was ready for this yet, but maybe these Tangents are the perfect test subjects. Though, if it goes wrong, don’t blame me. It’s all I’ve got.”

Michael had no idea what Kaine was talking about. “What?” he asked.

“The reboot.”

“Reboot?” Michael was thoroughly confused now. “Isn’t that some word they used like fifty years ago with plug-ins? What does it even mean?”

Kaine folded his arms. “You need to learn your history, son.”

“At least I recognized it. But what does it have to do with anything?”

“Reboot,” Kaine said again, only this time Michael heard something like dread in his tone. “It’s part of the plan I showed you. One of the keys to living forever. When you’ve lived out your fifty years within the VirtNet, you’re rebooted into a new body in the real world.”

Michael recalled the visions Kaine had shown him. The lines of kids getting into the Coffins. “So are you saying we should…reboot…who? The people those rogue Tangents stole the bodies from?”

“Yes!” Kaine replied. “It’s just not how I’d planned it. And I haven’t tested it in the cycle yet. But it might be the only way to rid ourselves of those traitors before they get in our way again.”

“Wait a second,” Michael said. He thought about what Weber had done at the World Summit. How those guards had just dropped to the ground, dead. And Helga had done the same thing to one of Trae’s group outside the barracks. But hadn’t that been the true death? “Back at the summit, Weber sent some kind of message to the VirtNet and these guards just dropped. Is that what we’re talking about?”

Kaine shook his head. “No. That’s what you’ve been insisting we can’t do—the true death. The true death kills both the Tangent and the human—the body and the consciousness. I’m telling you that we can prevent the deaths of the original humans. We can reboot them—use the Mortality Doctrine to send them back into their own bodies.”

Michael almost smiled at how ridiculous his life had become. “And that would kill the Tangents? They’d be gone forever?”