Daniel X: Game Over (12 page)

So I did the next best thing. In an instant, I gauged the distance, studied the ground by her side, and teleported myself there.

“Grab hold of me!” I yelled

Teleporting others is not a good idea unless you happen to know the location and nature of every molecule in their bodies, because if you make any bad assumptions, well… just be sure to bring a bucket and a mop.

So that meant right then I had somewhere on the order of 1.043 seconds in which to physically carry her out of harm’s way.

She started to grab me as I turned and glanced into the yellows of the approaching demons’ loathsome eyes. I quickly calculated the leap I was going to have to make to get us airborne and to safety. But there was something wrong with how she was holding on to me—something
painfully
wrong. I turned to look at her and saw what it was.

She was no longer a cute little girl with a cute little stuffed animal in her arms; she was a long-tailed, red-skinned demon—a demon with very sharp teeth that she had just sunk into my left arm. The pain was beyond anything I’d ever experienced. To complicate matters, the Hello Kitty doll had grown an evil monobrow and six-inch-long claws that it was using to climb up my back, probably so it could slice my throat.

Time seemed to slow, and all the panicked stretched-out split-seconds made me realize that, aside from the raging pain of being bitten and clawed, (a) I could no longer leap clear of the oncoming motorcycles, at least without leaving my arm behind, and (b) I was about to become 110 pounds of alien roadkill.

I was about to die.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d come this far and then, just like that, it was the end.

Only, of course, it wasn’t exactly.

The scene disappeared, and I was back in my deluxe suite at the Fujiya Hotel with Dad.

“Daniel,” said Dad in a sad voice, “if this training exercise had been a test at school, you would have received
a forty-seven point four out of a hundred. In other words, an F. It’s entirely clear that you can’t possibly win against Number 7 and Number 8 right now, much less with Number 1 in the picture. You should leave Japan. Immediately.”

“But I can dive back through time and take it again, can’t I?”

He shook his head. “No. No, you can’t, Daniel. These training exercises are all in your mind. You’ll see that if you try it in real life, you won’t be able to. Since your last adventure, Number 1 has put a disruption field over the entire planet.”

“What the heck does that mean?” I asked, suddenly remembering what Number 1 had told Number 7 and Number 8.

“It means you couldn’t time-travel if you tried.”

“I don’t believe you!” I said, and tried to visualize the surface of time so I could dive through. I was going to jump back thirty seconds, just to prove my point; but I couldn’t see it! Everything was gray and filled with static, like an old TV set when you don’t have a good signal.

“You see?” asked my father. “Leave Japan, Daniel. There’s no hope for you this time.”

“I can do it anyway,” I insisted.

But there was nobody there to hear me. Dad was gone.

YOU KNOW WHO wins in a fight between Exhausted and Stressed Out? Yeah, Stressed Out. I not only didn’t pass that all-night test with Dad; I managed to fail it with flaming colors.

I decided against taking a much-needed nap and soon found myself standing a block away from the GC Tower, contemplating the best way to get inside and do some more spying on Number 7 and Number 8. My window-washing gig had worked out okay, but it definitely had certain drawbacks. Like the fact that if they didn’t happen to be in a penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows, I’d have no idea what they were up to.

I didn’t have much time to rig up the window-washing
gondola now anyway. If there was one thing Dad’s test had done—besides making me even more tired—it had proved that I needed to become better prepared—and fast. I needed to learn
everything
I could about these two. I needed
unlimited access.

I considered a few options. In theory I could make myself into a computer virus and infect the building’s security systems, hacking into the cameras and microphones they had doubtless installed throughout the facility. But that was probably too risky. Although I’d been doing a lot of research on digital information systems lately, I hadn’t actually tried to be a computer program before, and, judging by Number 7 and Number 8’s success with their video games, their digital security would probably be light-years better than anything Earth had ever seen.

I also considered disguising myself as a security guard again. But this time I was going to be among top-ten List aliens, and it was highly unlikely I’d be able to bluster or brainwash my way past them.

No, if I really wanted to be a fly on the wall, the best thing to do was to make myself into a creature as common to Japan as it is the United States:
Musca domestica,
the ubiquitous housefly. One with a miniaturized Alien Hunter brain in its tiny head.

When nobody was looking, I transformed myself and flew over to the uniformed shoulder of a passing teenage boy who, sure enough, was headed straight into the GC
flagship store for an early-morning video-game session before heading off to school.

Now I just needed to hope that Number 7 and Number 8 weren’t as high-tech with the building’s pest control as they were about other things.

TWENTY THOUSAND HIGH-RANKING alien thugs were making their way through the building’s lobby. Well, that’s how it looked through fly eyes anyhow. It took me a moment to get used to my new senses and to realize there were just a dozen of them. Still, that was a lot.

I flew as fast as I could to catch up and landed on the hat of the tallest one, just as a security guard waved him through the turnstile.

My steed and his buddies then crammed into a single elevator that shot us up to the fifty-first floor where we entered a conference room whose walls were lined with alien antlers, bones, stuffed heads, pelts, and other hunting trophies. The conference table also looked to be from some sort of creature—the hip bone of an enormous animal. And, by “enormous,” I
mean the bone must have been at least a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. When intact, the actual creature was probably big enough to accidentally inhale a city bus.

The aliens took their seats around the table, and the meeting was called to order.

Number 7 presided from the head of the table as the thugs took off their human disguises. The hat I was riding was unceremoniously tossed to the middle of the table, and, unfortunately for me, it didn’t have ribbons or feathers or anything I could use for cover. I was totally out in the open. My only defense was to stay perfectly still. Fortunately, for the moment, nobody seemed to notice the little black fleck on the brim of the gray hat.

“As you know,” began Number 7, “today marks the launch of a new level. It will be the most challenging—and rewarding—hunt you’ve ever undertaken.”

He had them all on the hook, and he knew it.

“What is it?” demanded one of them. “A Mahoneyian Stinkbear?”

“A Corruscated Fosterite?”

“An Endomorphic Nebulan?”

“A Pleionid,” replied Number 7, cutting short the welter of speculation as if he’d fired a gunshot.

The thugs straightened in their chairs and went wide-eyed, or, if they didn’t have eyes, widened other things.

“But—” began the tall one I’d ridden in on.

“No, they’re
not
quite extinct,” said Number 7. “There’s one left. And it’s here—here in Japan.”

The hunters looked like they were about to break into applause, but Number 7 would have none of it.

“The mission brief, which I’ll feed into your consoles at sundown, will contain a link to the creature’s location. Because of its shape-shifting and self-healing abilities, we couldn’t use a traditional transponder. Nevertheless, we have another way to track the creature that will allow us to send you rough coordinates.”

A murmur of speculation rippled through the room. I too wondered how they might be tracking the Pleionid.

“Also,” said Number 7, glancing at Number 8, “to make things even more challenging, a new hunter will join us tonight, a truly formidable competitor.”

“Who is it? Is he here?” asked one of the hunters.

“You’ll see.”

“This sounds like a tough assignment,” said another. “Are there any special incentives?”

“First of all,” said Number 7, standing to his full height and briefly, somehow, turning a disturbing shade of gray, “this is not an
assignment.
This is a
hunt.
All of you signed up for this. But, yes, if you like to think in terms of what’s in it for you, I can tell you that whoever successfully kills the Pleionid”—he paused dramatically—“not only gets the trophy, but
gets to live.
”

Now it was every other alien in the room’s opportunity to turn gray.

“You mean—?” began one of them, an owl-headed goon with eyes like mirrored lawn balls.

“I should clarify,” continued Number 7. “Because of your miserable failure with the Mahlerian bird-cat, it has been decided to thin your ranks and recruit new players. Those of you who fail to bring down the Pleionid will be
terminated.
”

Another ripple of shock and surprise rounded the room, but not as quickly as I would have expected in a group that was just told they were about to die. One of them, with a face like a giant squirrel—if the squirrel didn’t have any hair on its face (
very
creepy)—was even smirking.

“I don’t care. I’ve been getting pretty tired of this game,” he said.

Number 7 smiled. “What, you mean this 5G edition of Intergalactic Safari Hunter?”

“Duh,” said the creepy squirrel.

“Do you know what ‘5G’ means?”

“Fifth Generation,” said the owl-headed goon. “It’s a marketing thing to make it sound advanced, right?”

“Actually, it’s a number we developers use to indicate the final phase of a video-game arc. Previous generations of the program entice players to continue, thereby helping us to optimize programming to ensure we have maximized its addictive properties.

“For instance, with the humans, right now we’re up to the 4G version. The next edition will be the 5G, just like yours.”

“So?” said the freaky squirrel.

“So,” said Number 7, “at 5G, it stops being a game. And
when we release that edition here—as we’ve done on several planets before, including your own—all the world’s gamers are going to start acting out the ultraviolent competitions we lay before them in
real
life.”

So that was how they were going to make humans extinct. They were going to turn all the first-person shooting and war games into the real thing. The game players of the world would go berserk across the planet.

“What does that mean for us?” asked the owl-headed one.

“Have you tried to pause the game lately? Tried to get up from your machine and go get a snack?”

The aliens looked a degree more nervous. Some of them nodded gloomily.

“You see, now you are not playing Intergalactic Safari Hunter. You are
living
it. This is not your video-game self—this is your
real
self. In other words, no more restarting the level if you happen to die.”