The Eye of Minds

Irritated, Michael waits out the “disturbing dark vacuum of nothingness” (151) before he resurrects within Devils of Destruction. He trudges through the snow again, puzzling over how he can use his coding skills to help in this brutal game. He sees Bryson and Sarah at a distance, and follows their path skirting the battles. He avoids looking at the carnage of the other players’ gleeful violence. He uses code to make his knife more powerful, then begins searching trenches. He feels discouraged at the time it takes to search each one for weak points. When a woman attacks him, he uses his augmented knife to knock her into one of the deep trenches, then hurries away. When he finds a soldier sleeping in a trench, he kills him preemptively, struggling to remember that this isn’t a real murder. Another pair of soldiers kill him with a grenade.

When Michael wakes in the entrance tunnel this time, Bryson is there, too. They continue searching for days, which Michael considers “pure hell.” The soldiers cease fighting at sundown and dine and sleep together, laughing about the day’s carnage. The next day, it repeats.