Kaine shrugged. “That’s the problem. I don’t know. Like I said, I haven’t tested it yet. In theory, we should be able to swap intelligences in and out of biological brains indefinitely without harm so that we can all live for eternity in body after body. The Tangents should upload back into the VirtNet. Should being the key word. But there’s still a lot of work to do.”

“Okay,” Michael said, “so you’re sure we can put these humans back into their own bodies, but you’re not sure what will happen to the Tangent?”

“Something like that,” Kaine said, a twinkle of excitement in his eye. Michael felt uneasy. It seemed like they were playing God, rolling the dice to see who lived and who died. Like it was all some sort of game. “And I’m pretty sure I know some programming that would take care of the Tangents.”

Michael let out a sigh. “All right,” he said. “Then let’s do this. I guess they aren’t real, so no one’s going to miss them anyway.”

A look of disgust washed over Kaine’s Aura. It was only there for an instant, but it made Michael feel terrible. He was talking as if he’d been a human all his life instead of having taken Jackson’s body. He really was playing God, which seemed like the very thing he and his friends were trying to stop. What made him better than these other Tangents?

Then Sarah’s face surfaced in his mind. Her expression when she’d been shot, the life draining out of her. He thought of all the other people who’d lost their lives to this Mortality Doctrine, and he steeled himself. He couldn’t let it keep happening.

“Okay,” he said to Kaine. “Show me what we need to do.”

2

Kaine spun them through the diseased realms of the Sleep, launching past glitching cities and broken code. Numbers and letters and symbols scattered like leaves in a windstorm, and pixels crumbled around them. Kaine’s prowess in coding was something Michael still watched in awe. He’d always known Kaine was good, but the Tangent manipulated their way through it all with the ease of splashing through a puddle.

The journey took less than a minute. They vaulted through eroding mountain ranges, black seas, and razed cities. Code was collapsing everywhere.

They flew through a soundless darkness, interrupted by violent explosions of light, and suddenly the vast wall of the Hive appeared before them. It stretched seemingly endless in every direction, glowing orange; it looked like some kind of alien planet.

Jackson’s here somewhere, Michael thought. He’s still alive.