Free The Rendering by Joel Naftali Page A

dozens of switches. No idea how to do this. So I flipped every switch and spoke into the console. “If you can hear me, get ready. Steak’s on.”
    I plugged one of the steaks into a port on the prototype and nothing happened. So I popped the safety cap beside the port and pressed the button.
    Nothing continued to happen.
    Huh
.
    I gave the console a good whack.
    Still nothing.
    “That’s just great,” I muttered.
    I didn’t really care when kilns exploded or streetlightsflickered—and fine, people called me Bug—but this was a bad time for my technology curse to kick in.
    I just shook my head and crossed toward the door. I had one more chance, if I remembered the information on that air lock screen right. Maybe not as good as the BattleArmor, but I wasn’t about to quit now.
    Halfway across the room, I heard a sudden humming. I turned and saw the steak pulsing and glowing a faint blue at the BattleArmor port.
    “That’s more like it,” I said.
    Then the steak turned brighter. And brighter. And hotter. Until some papers on the floor caught fire, and plastic started melting off computers and cables, and a fire alarm sounded.
    The steak streamed inside the suit through the port, growing bigger and hotter and brighter until I had to look away.
    The heat forced me into the hallway, and a moment before I slammed the door, the entire lab burst into a raging blue fire.
TAKE TWO
    Well.
That
hadn’t gone as planned.
    Not that I really had a plan. Still, I’d hoped for something more constructive than setting the place on fire.
    No time to worry, though. Instead, I’d check the map and start Plan B.
    “Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in nineteen minutes. Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in nineteen minutes.”
    On the same floor, in the same corridor, I found the virtual reality combat simulator. The sim looked like the cockpit of a jet fighter, with a scuba suit in the pilot’s seat. Apparently, a trainee—or “test subject,” maybe—would zip into the scuba suit, and they’d run whichever simulation they wanted, with feedback delivered through the suit.
    Urban warfare, demolitions, unarmed combat, the works.
    But, I learned later, the simulations were
too
good and sometimes actually injured trainees with virtual wounds. So they’d set the simulator to Nonlethal, for safety.
    After a minute of furious searching, I found a port at the bottom of the machine, then plugged in the steak and flipped the switches.
    This time, the reaction was immediate. Not fire:

    Tiny bursts of electricity zapped off the steak, stinging my fingers, then arcing into the cockpit of the VR simulator. I heard an ominous sizzle as the bursts started sprayingaround the room. A zigzag blast of lightning fried the potted plant beside me, and I ran, only one step ahead of the chain lightning.
HIGH SCORE
    With one last steak in the specimen pack, I’d run out of ideas.
    “Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in fourteen minutes. Self-destruct initiated. Detonation sequence in fourteen minutes.”
    Fourteen minutes. Not enough time to get away. With the Center’s AI off-line, I couldn’t expect any help, and I didn’t have any clue where to plug in the last steak.
    So I figured, what the heck?
    Might as well die with a smile on my face.
    In the employee lounge, I started a game of
Street Gang
, the Hog Stompers versus the Fists of Kung Fu, as the Center crashed and burned around me.
    On a lark, I plugged the cable of the last steak into the game port. I mean, why not?
    Maybe it would help me beat my high score.
    SIX THOUSAND ITERATIONS
    Hey, this is Jamie again.
    A few things you need to know:
    First, I’ve seen all Dr. Solomon’s digital reconstructions, and that didn’t look anything like a fridge.
    Second, those stem seeds—the “steaks”—were designed to work in the HostLink, right? To put the skunk minds, for example, back into their ordinary skunk bodies. But with an emergency override,