The Illusionists Read Online Free PDF Page A

avatar in this game was a hawk. She had never seen a real one, and she had never met anyone who had. It was hard to imagine the kind of place where it was normal to have hawks roaming, flying about in the sky as if they belonged there. But she knew there was such a place. It was a place her brother had abandoned her for.
    Being a hawk in this game was a beautifully physical thing. When you took on the avatar, you
felt
your body shape change. Your torso tilted forward, stomach rounding. Your face elongated, mouth growing hard and sprouting outward. Wings pushed out from your shoulder blades, inch by giant inch. It was a delicate, complex, joyful piece of programming. Cho had contributed some of the code to it. Some people found it off-putting, feeling their bodies change like that. Others, like Cho, couldn’t get enough of it.
    You could play the flying game in multi mode, in a sky full of other avatars as people in Life from across the world played with you. You could compete for points, collecting small trinkets from hard-to-reach places. But Cho preferred single-player mode. Alone in a sky so big it felt limitless, dipping and swooping, and feeling the wind, and doing nothing but being absolutely free.
    She loaded up her avatar, waiting as the code adjusted to her account details. Then she felt herself slowly tipping forward, feet spreading, legs tucking under her. Delicate itching across her back as if tiny mice ran over her skin, their claws skimming her nerve-endings. Sprouting wings and feathers.
    When the avatar had loaded, she entered the game space. Her nest was tucked into a hole halfway up a cliff. She had done it deliberately so that the only way she could leave her starting point was by throwing herself into the sky.
    She felt the wind ruffle her feathers as she peeked a clawed foot over the edge.
    Nothing below.
    Her heart was pounding. It didn’t matter how many times she’d done it before; it felt as real as ever. That was the brilliance of Life.
    She turned slightly, sticking her shoulder out, and rolled downwards into emptiness. She could see a patchwork of vague dark green forest far below. The wind whistled in her ears.
    She fell.
    Opened her wings, trying to catch an updraft.
    For several long, horrible, wonderful seconds, nothing happened.
    Then finally, one slammed up past her belly and buffeted her wings, stopping her descent.
    She floated into the yawning, empty sky.
    FREE!
said her mind, ecstatically.
    And then she let it shut off, thinking of nothing but wind and blue. And peace, just for a while.
    In Life, you could become something else completely. You could live a second, third, fourth, seventh existence. You could play endless games and roam worlds that didn’t exist outside of the implant in your head. It was endlessly amazing, endlessly inventive. The most incredible, celebrated artists in World were Life programmers. It was imagination made tangible, shared with millions upon millions of people, all living, working, gaming in it together.
    It was better than the real. It was what the real
should
be.
    The ultimate in existence.
    And it was slowly killing them all.

CHAPTER 3
WORLD
    RUE
    The box glowed, beckoning to her with flickering blue fingers.
    It was surprisingly easy to get used to. A lot of people never switched between reality and Life, preferring to spend most of their waking hours jacked in. For those who didn’t, it was as easy as flicking a switch inside your head, wherever you happened to be at that particular moment. But Rue, with no implant, had to content herself with being holed up in Wren’s room, chained to the box, whenever she wanted to go into Life.
    Wren was gone a lot. It was his job, he said. He never told her exactly where he went, though she asked all the time. Occasionally, he came home very late at night and went immediately to bed. Sometimes he even looked a little bit ill. Once, he’d come home and locked himself in the bathroom for an