“Now, if you’ll just hold still a bit, these tests I’m about to run will help us shape and mold our controller to the precise, Platonically ideal standards of your unusually large hands, while calibrating the response ratio of our AI input-output fields to the precise biometrics of your nervous system. It should only take three or four weeks.”

I shrugged. “Your funeral, bro.”

Never taking his eyes off me, Paul the Scientist picked up some kind of control panel and started turning dials and pushing buttons. The machines around me began to buzz and beep even louder, and I could feel waves of electricity coursing through my body.

My muscles spasmed, my eyelids started fluttering faster and faster, and every hair on my body stood on end. Slick Daddy took on a life of his own, doing this crazy-ass caterpillar dance right under my nose. Pretty cool, actually.

I was pissed. I knew I shouldn’t be here—I was better than this. Yeah, I was broke. Yeah, my only TV was a black-and-white Sanyo. And yeah, I had been starving since breakfast.

But to make a deal with two nobodies off the street for nothing but a nontransferable 12 percent discount off a goddamn joystick? That wasn’t me. That wasn’t why I’d left home. I’d left the nest to become a warrior. To be the most dominant gamer in the history of the universe. And I knew it.

“My God!” Paul said excitedly, glancing at the readout. “I’ve never seen biometrics like this before! We can do so much with this information—so much! Screw joysticks. We can cure cancer… create the perfect sports-energy drink and launch it in Shanghai… clone an entire army of identical supersoldiers…”

That finally did it.

I mean, curing cancer would be cool. And who wouldn’t want the perfect sports-energy drink? But create more than one Doc? An entire army of Two-Times? What would that even be? Four Thousand and Thirty-Eight–Times?

Doesn’t matter, man. There can only be one Dr Disrespect.

Focusing all my energy, all my rage, I flexed every wildcat muscle in my six-foot-eight frame. The noise from the machines became deafening, lights started flashing, alarms blaring everywhere.

“Amazing!” Paul shouted. “You’re off the charts! I literally have to create a new chart right now!”

He turned toward a monitor and I saw my chance. I pulled against my bonds with everything I had, every ounce of strength, every molecule of my being.

CRACK!

The straps exploded, and like lightning streaking through the night sky, I jumped off the exam table, drew a hidden blade out of my secret ankle sheath—why do morons never check for a secret ankle sheath?—and whipped it at Paul’s head.

THWACK!

The blade point pierced the collar of his lab coat, missing his face by millimeters and pinning him to a wall of instruments with a burst of sparks and smoke.