Free Daniel X: Game Over by James Patterson, Ned Rust Page A

of ice age and we were on a glacier, and then the glacier was gone and there was a grassland, and then a forest with really weird trees, and then—
    “This should do,” said my father, looking around at the primitive jungle. “So, Daniel, it’s time you got caught up on your homework. What do you know for a fact about Number 7 and Number 8?”
    “They run a video-game company, live in Tokyo, have a son, a really nice apartment, and they like to hunt and eat endangered aliens?”
    “So what puts them in the List’s top ten?”
    “They’re plotting to decimate the human race by brainwashing kids to become killing machines like the ones in their video games.”
    “You mean to go after them, and
this
is all you know? What’s the rest of their plan? How will they initiate it? How do you know it hasn’t already begun?”
    “Well—” I started to say, but I knew he was right. Had I ever been this badly underprepared for anything?
    “And how about Number 1?” he asked me. “We’ve heard he’s been in town recently. What have you learned about him after all these years on the same planet with him?”
    “You mean other than that he can give a person bad nightmares?”
    “What do you know about him in terms of his abilities or physical appearances—”
    “Well, he has dreadlocks, red bug eyes, looks like a big giant praying mantis—”
    “Always?”
    “Well, the List computer says he’s a shape-shifter—”
    “So, he could, in theory, look like
this?
” asked my father, morphing into a twenty-foot-tall carnivorous dinosaur with red bug eyes and dreadlocks.
    “Run, Daniel.
Run,
” he roared.
    I didn’t ask. I just did.

Chapter 29

     

 
    I GUESS YOU’VE got to trust your parents know what’s best for you. Even when they’re in the form of the largest land-based predator the Earth’s ever known and are testing your ability to survive by attempting to
kill
you.
    “Daniel,” boomed my tyrannosaur father, knocking down a huge fern tree as he charged after me. “Here are the rules to this little training exercise—” He cut himself short to lunge at me with his wicked six-inch teeth. I barely managed to leap over a moss-covered boulder and out of reach.
    “Each time you survive one of my attempts on your life, you earn a catechism question.”
    “What kind of reward is
that?!
” I panted.
    My dad was big into what he called his “catechism”—a way of verbally instructing me with hard-core questions on all manner of philosophical and ethical topics.
    “And each correctly answered question—” he roared, stubbing one of his big clawed toes on a spiky cycad plant, “will earn you the next level. Complete all the levels, and today’s training will be complete.”
    “And if I don’t complete all the levels?”
    “You ever wonder what it would be like to get bitten in half?” he said, stopping and snapping his enormous jaws down at me.
    I leaped out of the way and took off in a new direction.
    “Okay,” he bellowed. “First catechism question: Give me a Japanese proverb on the subject of the difference between wisdom and memory.”
    I
knew
this one: “Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an, um, donkey.” Call me crazy, but even if my dad was conjured up by my own mind, I wasn’t fond of using what my mother would call “coarse” language around him.
    “I trust you can see how the saying applies to your current situation.”
    I didn’t have a chance to think it through right then.
Bam!
Dad was now back as his usual self, and we were standing in the future—
way
in the future by the looks of it. We were in some sort of high-tech, robot-operated assembly plant with silver Honda logos all over the place. Laser saws, titanium rivet guns, and ceramic shears were slicing, dicing, puncturing, folding, and hammering large shapes out of metal, carbon fiber, glass, and plastic all around us.
    This was clearly a place for machines, not people. Theair was stifling