I bite my lip as I try to think of a reason. “Maybe he didn’t want anyone to take a closer look at the reports?”
My dad nods. “That’s exactly what I began to think. So one night, I logged on to my quantum and searched the shared network for the source file so I could review the documents myself. But it had been deleted. There was no trace of it anywhere.”
“Was the name of the file fifty-twenty?” I ask, my heart pumping fast.
He shakes his head, placing a hand on my shoulder. “No, honey. That’s a room number.”
My brow knits together in confusion. “A room number? All this time, I thought . . . Really, it’s a room number?”
“Yes, it’s a room at Orexis,” he says calmly, before taking a deep breath and finishing his thought: “Where Cathryn Simmons is holding my body hostage.”
For a second I think I must have misheard him or misinterpreted what he said. “What?” I ask quietly.
“I confronted Bryce about the missing file,” my dad continues, “and he just blew me off. Said it must have been some kind of downloading error.”
Where have I heard that before?
“But I knew he was lying. Mostly because he was horrible at it,” he says. “So I went to Cathryn and told her that we needed to halt production and hold off on submitting Elusion to CIT until we located the missing data and had it vetted the right way.”
“And?” I say, encouraging him to go on.
“She seemed to agree. In fact, she thanked me for coming to her with this and told me she was going to discipline Bryce.” He hesitates. “The next morning, I came to Orexis and I couldn’t access my own quantum. I spent hours trying to locate the problem. Patrick even tried to help me.”
“So you’re sure Patrick had no idea that anything was wrong with the trypnosis?”
“I don’t think so. The teams working on Elusion were very separate and didn’t have the proper permission to view each other’s files,” he replies. “Besides, Patrick wasn’t very interested in that aspect of Elusion. He loved the tech stuff, the programming and coding. The neuroscience wasn’t as enticing to him, I guess. And he didn’t have the right education for it either.”
Patrick was telling me the truth—he didn’t know anything about nanopsychosis until after my father was gone. I feel a pang of guilt, but then it drifts away when I think about how he acted in the face of adversity, how he looked out for himself instead of the people who were being harmed by Elusion and how he locked Josh and me inside Elusion because he was jealous.
What could be more cowardly than that?
“Anyway, the whole quantum fiasco was a wild goose chase,” my father goes on. “While I was caught up with that, Cathryn and Bryce submitted Elusion to CIT with falsified data behind my back,” he snaps, his voice crackling with anger. “Within twenty-four hours, we had temporary approval, meaning we could release the product in three test markets.”
“So what did you do?”
He gets up off the ground, his body tense and rigid. “I called them both to an after-hours meeting. Room number fifty-twenty.” He pauses and clenches his hands into fists. “When they showed up, I gave them an ultimatum—either withdraw Elusion from the CIT review and stop the initial distribution of the Equips and apps, or I was going to destroy Elusion.” He stops, as if remembering.
“What did Cathryn do?”
“She laughed. She didn’t think I was serious. She thought that since Elusion was made up of separate entities, these Escapes, it was indestructible. And that’s when I told them that each one of the Escapes was armed with a fail-safe mechanism that could destroy the entire program. No one knew about it but me.”
“Oh my God,” I breathe.
“Cathryn started screaming about how she would do anything to prevent me from sabotaging this project, and then Bryce attacked me,” he says, gritting his teeth. “He got me in a pretty good choke hold, but I broke free of him, grabbed my tab, and activated the destruction mechanism.”
My eyes widen with surprise. “So you did it? You took down the network with the malware?”
“Not quite,” he says. “The Elusion system is very complex, and it takes . . .” He looks at me and pauses for a minute, as if searching for the right word. “Time,” he says finally. “But the moment they realized what had happened, they both subdued me, hooked me up to an Equip, and forced me into Elusion. Bryce most likely put an override on all the safety features so he could keep me here as long they liked. And I’m sure Cathryn is paying him a lot of money to keep me alive, too.”
“I don’t understand. Why would they want to keep you in Elusion?”
“I know they told everyone I’m dead, and I’m sure they would kill me if they could. The only reason I’m still alive is because they can’t find the destruction mechanism. I’m guessing they’ve found just enough proof to know that I’m telling the truth. They probably think they can scare my subconscious into telling them where it is. But it won’t do them any good.”
I really can’t believe what I’m hearing. “What about administrator access to Elusion? Does Patrick have that?”
“No way,” my dad says. “He’s a great programmer and can code an amazing Escape design, but he’s too young for that kind of responsibility. Bryce is the only other person besides me with administrator access.”
“So Patrick didn’t lock Josh and me in here?”
My dad shakes his head.
“But how did Bryce even know where we were?”
“I don’t know,” my dad says. “He must’ve figured out how to track you.”
That pang of guilt over Patrick is back and it’s even stronger than before, and I’m still confused. There are so many more questions that I want to ask my dad—about Walden and the anagram—but I’m too engrossed in his story to get derailed right now.
I stand up and meet him, eye to eye. “So Elusion is going to self-destruct?”
“Yes. And the destabilization of the Escapes you experienced will be nothing compared to D-day.”
My blood runs cold. If Elusion is going to destroy itself while he, Josh, and I are here, we’ll most likely die. Then again, we might die anyway.
“That’s why you told me it wasn’t safe. That’s why you asked me to find you,” I say, my voice shaking with disappointment. The numbers, his message—I misinterpreted his clues, and now we’re all trapped.
“It’s not your fault. When I’m behind the firewall, the only messages I can get out are numbers, kind of like communicating in computer code—”
“Why didn’t you just tell me all this when you saw me on the beach? Or in the ice cave?” I swallow and force myself to admit the thought that’s tearing me apart. “I was at Orexis,” I say. “I could’ve found you!”
“Even though I can get into Elusion, it’s extremely dangerous for me to stay there past a few seconds. The stimuli in Elusion are too powerful for our brains to handle—the longer a user stays inside, the more damage it causes. This place provides some protection, but it’s very dangerous to be in Elusion. All of my trips there are timed, and then I’m pulled back through ping tunnels.”