I still couldn’t sit up, couldn’t feel anything. I was spacing out and hallucinating again—it was way hard to concentrate, to remember what I was doing instead of floating off into la-la land.
Think, Max.
Then I remembered I had a Voice in my head. Voice, you got any ideas?
What is it they want from you? the Voice said, shocking me. It had never, ever responded to a direct question before. At least that I could remember, right then.
Uh . . . what did they want from me? Just for me to be here. To be able to do things to me, make me jump through their hoops, be their lab rat.
What would happen if you took that away from them?
I thought. They would be very upset?
I smiled. But how could I take that away from them? I’d pretty much established that I couldn’t break out of this sardine can.
Think about it.
Now that I really thought about it, realizing how limited my options truly were kind of freaked me out. Here was a situation where all my speed, my physical strength, my cunning—none of it would do me any good.
It was mind-blowing.
If I hadn’t been so totally spaced, I would have panicked.
As it was, I felt oddly removed from the problem. Freaked, but removed at the same time. I was losing myself. Losing my mind.
Losing myself . . . losing me. They would be upset if they lost me. Because I wouldn’t be around to jump through their hoops. But since I couldn’t physically move, getting lost seemed pretty unworkable.
Except.
There was another way for them to lose me: if I died.
Which would sort of defeat my own purpose, as well as theirs. But—could I just make them think I was dead?
I bet there were monitors of some sort in here. When you put a rat in a maze, you hung around to observe the results. They’d probably been recording my crazed ranting and sobbing all along.
Now. How to be dead?
I lay back in the buoyant liquid. It supported me totally—I didn’t have to try to keep my head up or anything. My breathing slowed, in and out, one, two, three, four. I relaxed every single muscle. Then I just . . . went inside myself. It was like I was a machine and I was slowly flicking switches off. I just willed all my systems to slow down more and more.
In the yawning silence, my heart beat slower, then slower. My eyes closed. Everything was still and silent. Maybe I would lie in this watery tomb forever.
There was no time, no thought, no motion.
I hoped I wasn’t actually dead.
That would make finding our parents and saving the world really hard.
129
I see no need to go into a lot of boring detail, but we found our way to the Itex computer room. So far, the plan was working beautifully.
I shooed everyone away to the darkest corner of the room, and they actually listened to me. Then I turned one computer on, and it booted up silently. I had been told Nudge was good with computers, so I motioned her over.
“See what you can find out about Itex,” I whispered. “Be quick—I don’t know how much time we have.”
We had exactly six minutes, forty-seven seconds, according to my watch.
“Okay,” Nudge whispered back. She slid onto the stool and instantly went to the “List Programs” menu. From there she got to a C prompt, and then she typed in a bunch of gibberish.