MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Chapter 34

Jonah found the red dragon standing beside him, staring at him with its yellow eyes.

Unlike Jonah’s first encounter in the secret cellar of the gift shop, this time the dragon avatar wasn’t a recorded message. It was his father. Or at least, it was the digital echo of his dad.

‘It is you,’ said the dragon. ‘You found me. I knew you’d find me. There’s so much I have to tell you, so much you need to know. It’s so good to see you, son.’

Jonah’s heart was in his mouth.

‘Dad?’ he whispered. ‘I can’t believe you’re here! I thought I’d never...’

He ran forward, threw his arms around the red dragon avatar – and, for a blissful few seconds, Jonah was a kid again, wrapped in his father’s leathery wings, protected.

‘You could have told me, Dad,’ said Jonah, ‘about the Guardians, and about the Four Corners. I would have understood.’

‘You were always a bright kid,’ said Jason Delacroix.

‘I got into such a mess without you, but it’s all right now.’

‘We’ll have to see what we can do about that school. The virtual one.’

‘You’re here now, Dad. I’ve got you back. You can tell me what to do.’

‘You’d like to go to a Chang Academy, wouldn’t you, son? The Metasphere, that’s where the future is.’

Jonah broke out of the embrace. ‘Dad, I... I’m a teenager now. You got me into that school, but it was years ago now.’

He could tell that his words weren’t sinking in. His dad looked around him, as if noticing his surroundings for the first time. ‘This is nice,’ he said. ‘Where are we?’

Of course. He was as confused as the other avatars aboard the barge, perhaps even more so. Jonah had seen it in their expressions, in the dulling of their eyes, as they had sailed ever further out to sea. The Uploading process was clouding their minds – and perhaps that was for the best, he thought. As for his father...

His father had been dead for a long time. He was like Jonah’s grandmother now, living in his memories. Still, it was something.

‘It’s OK, Dad,’ said Jonah, smiling. ‘We’re taking a little boat trip, that’s all. The two of us, you and me. It’s all good.’

‘I knew you’d find me,’ said Jason.

Their ‘little boat trip’ was taking for ever.

Jonah assumed, at first, that the Island of the Uploaded was simply further away than he had thought it to be. Another hour passed, however, with still nothing ahead but the distant horizon. At first he suspected that, in fact, the barge was trapped in a programming loop. It was crossing the same stretch of ocean over and over.

Was this Granger’s doing? Jonah wondered. Or his own? Was it his presence aboard the barge – the only avatar with a conscious mind – that was holding it back? Even the cloaked ferryman, he had come to realise, was an Artificial Intelligence.

Would the Island simply not allow the living to approach it this way?

He told himself to calm down, to stop imagining the worst. There were at least thirty avatars on board, his own excepted. Of course it would take time for the servers of the Southern Corner to Upload them all, all that information. It made sense that the journey to the Island would take as long as it had to take.