“Get back in your seats,” the man yelled again, “or we’ll blow the entire building up!”

Michael turned away from the door and looked back toward the center of the chamber. Another enormous hologram floated where the speaker had previously been. It was a guard, his hair disheveled, sweat streaming down his face. He held his weapon in both hands before him, right above the top of the podium.

“Last warning,” he said, this time in a softer voice. Most people in the room had stopped to listen. Only a few had actually made it out. “You will sit, you will listen, and you will watch as we change the world.”

He paused, and Michael knew what he was going to say before the words came out of his mouth.

“My name is Kaine.”

4

The truth struck Michael at that moment. His life was forever connected to two people: Agent Weber and the Tangent known as Kaine. He just had to accept it.

The guard who’d identified himself as Kaine waited as the remaining audience members filed back into the main chamber. Maybe it was something in his eyes, but most patrons in the chamber believed his threat that he would bring down the entire building.

“Wise,” Kaine said into the microphone. “You’re all very wise to do as I say.” The Tangent’s face hovered above the dais, one hundred times its actual size. Kaine always seemed to find a way to establish his presence in a grand, theatrical style.

Michael and Bryson had found their same seats, and Helga sat next to them. The rest of the crowd had done the same, except for a few stragglers who staggered around the room as if they’d lost their minds to fear.

Kaine gave them only minutes before he started talking again. “It’s good to see that humans are still reasonable when called upon to be so. Thank you for taking my suggestion. It would have been a shame to destroy such a lovely building. You will find that I’m not entirely unreasonable, either—once you see things my way. You will probably even agree with me. The world, my friends—both virtual and real—is about to become a much better place. One day you’ll tell your grandkids that you were here to witness the beginning.”

Michael scowled. He felt like he knew Kaine, not only from their interactions, but from what they shared—that they were both just lines of code when it all came down to it. But something was off. This just didn’t seem like the Kaine he knew.