Nova Project #1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

that, like everything else, and turned up the volume.
    So he plays. Because even if he had the money, he can’t find one who isn’t working for the game that he’d trust to cut him open again. They’re all back-street hacks with bandages and prayers. He’s looked. His parents have looked. A couple of years ago they even petitioned the Gamerunners to be allowed to use the rewards they’ve earned on him, though he’s not supposed to know that. They didn’t tell him in case the answer was no. Which it was.
    â€œYou should be glad about this,” he says. Anna raises hereyebrows in questioning challenge. “What would you rather, that I spend a couple months doing this or a couple years getting to the end of Twenty-five?”
    â€œThey said this would be more dangerous,” she protests.
    â€œIf I die trying, well, I was going to sometime anyway. We’re all playing for our lives, turning ourselves into cyborgs bit by bit because robots stand a better chance on the planet than humans do. I’m just on a slightly accelerated time scale.”
    Anna winces and turns away, gazing across the street at the last few drops of rain splashing into a puddle. He touches her shoulder. She’s smart, it’s one of the things he loves about her, but emotions aren’t always. It’d taken him longer than it should’ve to realize she’s human, a part of her had hoped she could fix his broken heart by loving him enough.
    He’s human, too. He’d hoped she could.
    â€œWant me to take you home?” he asks.
    She shakes her head. “I’ll stay for a while.”
    â€œOkay.”
    Nick claps him on the back, and Miguel steps out onto the sidewalk, heading for the nearest hoverboard hub. The tiredness takes him like this, sudden and violent, but it wasn’t the time to tell Anna that, or to admit he doesn’t have the energy to walk home. A few blocks away, a line of the silver disks, locked on their edges in a steel rack, curves like the lashes of a blinking eye.
    Always watching. Nothing anyone does is hidden, invisible.
    He types a code on the keypad at the end, and the screen lights up. ANDERSON, MIGUEL. PAYMENT ACCEPTED . The latch on the nearest board clicks open, and it rises, flips, waits a few inches above rain-slick concrete.
    â€œHigher,” he tells it. It drifts to waist height, its surface molded to allow for sitting or standing. Not that seeing little old ladies surfing the air currents isn’t its own kind of funny, but not everyone wants to do it.
    Great, he’s become his own grandmother. Excellent. But he sits anyway. “Registered home address,” he says, and it takes off.
    A competition. Winners. Prizes. It would be cool to win, and here, coasting on a breeze freshened by toxic rain, he spares a second of time to think about it. The whole world knowing how good he is at Chimera. That would be pretty awesome, but if he has to choose, he doesn’t care as much about winning as he does about living. That’s why he spends so much time in the Cubes to begin with. The biomech enhancements help in the game, sure, but they aren’t shed with the protective clothing, sensors, visor at the end of a session. Outside, under a burning sun in thinned, poisoned air, those same enhancements are every human’s best shot.
    Level Twenty-five. He can see it looming ahead, almostfeel what it’ll be like to call up the overworld and see its icon waiting for him to open it and step inside. One boss later, he can choose whatever he wants from the entire list of what the doctors are capable of, his reward for making it a quarter of the way through the game. There’s never been a question of what he’ll choose.
    But now . . .
    As he’d said to Anna, he could spend two months in the competition, get his heart, and get his life back. A life he’d spend in the game because it’s better than the real world, but