Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles by Ted Dekker

Author:Ted Dekker [Dekker, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Outlaw Studios
Published: 2014-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

2.6

DAY 3 - 9:02 pm

AUSTIN HARDWIRED us into the system for the tandem hack. I floated in the saltwater tank, and surrendered to the darkness quickly. It came almost effortlessly this time and soon I was hanging weightless in the familiar waters of the ocean—the ocean inside Austin’s apartment. The ocean inside my mind.

This time, the fear I’d felt earlier was replaced by fascination with this strange world that I knew was real, despite logic insisting it was little more than a waking dream.

The more I let go of my attempts to explain and rationalize the mind-hacking experience, the easier it was to relax and drift deeper into the waters.

That’s what it was like, sinking deeper into a careless sea that lifted my fear and carried it away on an invisible current. The deeper I sank, the more the relentless chatter in my mind faded until it was a mere whisper. And then it was nothing at all, replaced completely by the comfortable hum.

As I began to relax I held the image of the red door in my mind, intently imagining every detail as I’d seen it in the painting.

As before, the world evaporated into the white light. Instantly, I found myself once again standing in the white void. But this time instead of a rip, there was a red door—the red door. It was a mental firewall just as Austin suspected.

I hadn’t thought of it that way until he’d said it, but he was right. The door was some kind of threshold. Whether it was really a door or just a projection of my mind didn’t matter. What did matter was that it led to a place that had a direct impact on physical reality. That much we knew. That may have been all we knew.

I turned, looking for Austin, but he was nowhere in sight. There was only dimensionless white space that stretched forever in all directions, and the wind that roared through it. Maybe he’d already gone through the door, or maybe . . . maybe . . . A dozen possibilities for why he wasn’t here occurred to me: maybe the tandem hadn’t worked and he was back in the tank waiting to hack into reality; maybe there were many doors—not just one—and he was at another door, waiting for me. What if his door led somewhere else and I wouldn’t be able to find him? What if this door opened to another place this time? There was no guarantee of anything, was there?

We knew so little.

I took a step toward the door and realized there was no knob or handle to open it. Could I just step through it?

I hesitated then leaned forward as I stepped into the blood-red door with my eyes closed. My face passed through it followed by the rest of my body. The terrible wind ceased howling and I knew without looking that I was beyond the door, beyond the firewall.

I’d hacked the first level again.

I opened my eyes, and once more I was standing in Austin’s apartment.

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