The Rendering Read Online Free PDF

“And no disobedience. Everyone will follow the program. Everyone will have a function and will perform that function perfectly.”
    “Or what?” she asked.
    “Or the programmer will modify the faulty code.”
    “You’re gonna digitize people against their will,” she said, realization dawning on her face. “Scan them into your machine, even if it kills them.”
    “They won’t die. They’ll be reborn in new forms, immortal and perfect. They’ll expand my digital realm, making me stronger—so I can digitize more, and get stronger still. Until there is nothing left of this foul world but acres of supercomputers humming in my underground vaults. And on those computers, we’ll live forever—in perfect order.”
    “And you’ll delete the mind of anyone who objects?”
    “Of course not. I’ll merely debug them.”
    “You
are
insane,” my aunt said.
    “Madness and genius …” Roach grabbed a pair of handheld scanners, like those shock paddles you see on TV shows when doctors jolt someone back to life. “They’re two sides of the same equation.”
    Then he pressed the paddles to my aunt’s temples.
FALLING DOWN
    You know what’s worse than suddenly falling through the air? Suddenly
stopping
.
    I hit the ground hard and groaned for a few seconds. Then I felt something digging into my face and realized I was clinging to Auntie M’s computer—which was still, somehow, sending data to Jamie’s laptop.
    Directly under my aunt’s office was the Holographic Hub, the main CPU of the Center. I’d peeked inside on that tour I mentioned, through the observation window, and you know what I saw?
    Nothing.
    An empty white room. But inside that room, every molecule, every electron and atom was imprinted with information, like a track on a CD. It looks empty, but it’s coursing with energy, with data.
    And I fell right into the middle of it.
    I didn’t know that the explosion—the
first
explosion, I mean, a thousand times weaker than the final blast—was a mercenary attack. I didn’t know they’d targeted the blast to neutralize the backup security while sparing the rest of the building so they could steal the technology. I didn’t know anything.
    To be honest, I thought the explosion was probably
my
fault. Not that I really cared, because I suddenly remembered the sign on the hub’s door: HIGHLY VOLATILE—APPROACH WITH EXTREME CAUTION .
    I needed to get out of there.
    Yet I couldn’t even stand. My strength was gone, and I felt myself getting weaker every second. Being inside the hub sapped my strength, made my brain buzz and my vision blur.
    I forced myself to roll over and crawled toward the door.
    Locked.
    I looked for something to smash the observation window with. Everything from Auntie M’s office had fallen through the floor with me. I saw her chair ten feet away. A scattering of books from her shelves. A few drawers from her desk, with the contents spilled everywhere.
    I dragged myself back to her computer, figuring I could use it to break the window. It took all my strength to cross those ten feet; then I was too weak to lift the monitor. Instead, I keeled over. I lay there, staring at the white floor and the white walls and a scattering of junk from Auntie M’s drawers:
    Paper clips and sticky notes and pens.
A bottle of vitamins.
An old smartphone, the screen now broken.
A framed picture of me as a baby with my parents.
A Memory Cube with an orange label.
    I blinked a few times, first watching a strange foggy glow around the Memory Cube, then peering at the picture. Theysay I look like my father. He was tall and lanky with messy dark hair—and always smiling or laughing in every picture I’d ever seen.
    I smiled back at him.
    Then I collapsed.
MY CUBIST PERIOD
    Roach pressed the paddles to my aunt’s temples and pulled the triggers.
    The machine hummed, and my aunt screamed. Then she fell to the floor, where she lay unmoving. He’d erased her brain, transferred every synapse through the