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

hot and smelled of sulfur, but worse than the air was the noise.
Deafening
is too weak a word. It felt like hammers landing on the sides of my head. It was too loud to do anything, much less think, and I almost didn’t notice Dad leveling the Opus 24/24 at me again.
    I leaped backward, landing on a high-speed conveyor belt as the blast ricocheted off a junction box and hit an assembly robot. The poor thing actually seemed to scream as it burst into a thousand pieces.
    I smiled triumphantly back at my father.
    I couldn’t hear him, but it was easy enough to read his lips: “You only earn a question when you
survive!
” was what he said.
    I rolled over just in time to notice I was being whisked into an enormous laser cutter.
    I thought quickly. I knew from my studies that lasers are made of light and therefore will pass harmlessly through anything that’s perfectly clear. I rearranged my molecules to be transparent to visible radiation, and, sure enough, I passed through the machine and emerged on the other side entirely intact—well, except for my book bag, which I’d kind of forgotten to make invisible with the rest of me.
    I swiftly hopped off the conveyor belt and flung the flaming thing to the ground before it burned my back. At least my teachers wouldn’t have to hear that the dog ate my homework.
    Suddenly, the machines stopped and quiet returned, except for the ringing in my ears. Dad had paused time once again.
    “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve earned yourself another question. Ready?”
    I nodded wearily.
    “Who said, ‘Success is 99 percent failure’?”
    My mind was blank. I was thinking it was somebody Japanese, but—
    “Answer the question, Daniel, or if you’d rather, we can play this level again.”
    I racked my brains and did a quick search through the virtual Wikipedia I’d installed in my head. “Um,” I said, playing it cool, so Dad didn’t discover I had kind of, sort of, cheated. “Soichiro Honda, the guy who started the manufacturing company.”
    “And I trust you see why that, too, is applicable to your current situation.”
    “You mean I should assume Number 1’s going to have some serious failures coming soon because he’s had 99 percent successes so far?”
    “I’m saying you can profit from your mistakes.”
    “Ah,” I said, not following him, but once again not exactly having enough time to speculate. Because now I was standing on what looked to be a near present-day Tokyo street. Judging by the big white-and-orange concrete barriers lining it, it looked like it was closed off for a Grand Prix street-race course.
    “Next question,” Dad continued. “What two words did General MacArthur, supreme commander of Japan in the years after World War II, say summed up the history of failure in war?”
    This one I knew all too well.
    “Too late,”
I said.
    Dad nodded and was gone.
    My ears were still ringing from the car factory, but I detected a sort of roaring, thunder-like sound in the distance. And it was getting louder by the second.

Chapter 30

     

 
    IT WAS NOT a mystery that took long to figure out. In a moment, I saw the source of the noise—
motorcycles—
1400cc Hondas, in all poetic probability.
    Dear Old Dad had transported me right into the middle of a MotoGP exhibition street course in downtown Tokyo. A pack of overpowered, smooth-tired street racers was now rounding the corner about a half mile away and coming straight at me. They’d have plenty of time to stop or steer around me, assuming they took pity on me.
    But it was soon obvious, mainly from how they were laughing and pointing, that they had no interest in avoiding me. The fact that the racers were barb-tailed, cloven-hoofed, red-horned
demons—
or, at least, a species of alien that very much looked that way—was also something of a warning sign.
    Fortunately, the course was less than one hundred and fifty feet wide, so I didn’t need to sprint much faster than Usein Bolt to get to