Warcross Read Online Free PDF

the class whiteboard, at the interior of my locker, at plates of tasteless food. My report cards were a sea of red ink. Constant nausea stole my appetite. My bones jutted sharply at my wrists and elbows. Dark circles rimmed my eyes, something everyone noticed except me.
    What did I care, anyway? My father was gone and I was
so tired
. Maybe the fog in my chest could grow, denser and denser, until someday it’d swallow
me,
and I could be gone, too. So I lay curled in a tiny ball, watching the rain lash at the window, the wind tug at the silhouettes of tree branches, wondering how long it would take for the school to notice I wasn’t there again.
    The clock radio in the room—the
only
thing in the room, other than our beds—was on, a piece of hand-me-down technology donated to the home from a Goodwill center. One of the other girls hadn’t bothered turning it off when the alarm sounded. I listened halfheartedly as the news droned on about the state of the economy, the protests in the cities and countryside, the overworked police trying to keep up with crime, the evacuations in Miami and New Orleans.
    Then it switched. Some hour-long special began, talking abouta boy named Hideo Tanaka. He was fourteen years old then, still brand-new to the spotlight. As the program went on, I started to pay attention.
    “Remember the world right before smartphones?” the announcer was saying. “When we were teetering on the brink of a huge shift, when the technology was
almost but not quite
there, and it took one revolutionary device to push us all over the edge? Well, last year, a thirteen-year-old boy named Hideo Tanaka pushed us over a new edge.
    “He did it by inventing a thin, wireless pair of glasses with metal arms and retractable earphones. Make no mistake. They’re nothing like the goggles we’ve seen before, the ones that looked like giant bricks strapped to your face. No, these ultra-slim glasses are called the NeuroLink, and you wear them as easily as any pair of regular glasses. We have the latest pair in the studio here”—he paused to put them on—“and we promise, it’s the most
sensational
thing we’ve ever tried.”
    The NeuroLink. I’d heard it mentioned in the news before. Now I listened as the radio program laid it out for me.
    For a long time, in order to create a realistic virtual reality environment, you had to render as detailed a world as possible. This required a lot of money and effort. But no matter how good the effects became, you could still tell—if you looked hard enough—that it wasn’t real. There are a thousand little movements on a human face every second, a thousand different quivers of a leaf on a tree, a million tiny things the real world has that the virtual world doesn’t. Your mind knows this unconsciously—so something will look
off,
even if you can’t quite put your finger on it.
    So Hideo Tanaka thought of an easier solution. In order tocreate a flawlessly real world, you don’t need to draw the most detailed, most realistic 3-D scene ever.
    You just need to
fool the audience into thinking it’s real
.
    And guess what can do that the best? Your own brain.
    When you have a dream, no matter how crazy it is, you believe it’s real. Like, full-on surround sound, high definition, 360-degree special effects. And none of it is anything you’re actually seeing. Your brain is creating an entire reality for you, without needing any piece of technology.
    So Hideo created the best brain–computer interface ever built. A pair of sleek glasses. The NeuroLink.
    When you wore it, it helped your brain render virtual worlds that looked and sounded
indistinguishable
from reality. Imagine walking around in that world—interacting, playing, talking. Imagine wandering through the most realistic virtual Paris ever, or lounging in a full simulation of Hawaii’s beaches. Imagine flying through a fantasy world of dragons and elves.
Anything.
    With the press of a tiny button on its side, the