An Excellent Affiliance
- In case you wanted more plots and characters—besides spies vs. mind control and old poet vs. the world—here's Juan Orozco, a future schoolmate of Robert Gu.
- Juan is a regular kid: looking for a way to play an expensive game without paying for it.
- Juan and the Radner twins are looking for a backdoor into Pyramid Hill Amusement Park, which runs all sorts of high-tech games, like Cretaceous Returns, a dinosaur-based virtual game.
- (Also, the Radners talk about how they're waiting for some homework to be delivered by UP/Express, which tells us two things: (1) they are not good students; and (2) something called UP/Express sends packages around. That might not be important info here, but it will become important later.)
- But here's the thing about future virtual games: they can feel pretty real—if you can pay.
- So before class, the three of them hack in to Pyramid Hill to play Juan's current game of choice, Cretaceous Returns, where he's been getting eaten a lot.
- Juan contributed to the game by designing a new dinosaur species in order to get creator points.
- And then a dinosaur eats Fred Radner and offers Juan a deal. (Trust us: it makes a lot of sense in the book. There are large mechanical robots that users can take over. And in the virtual world, users can make their avatar's looks change.)
- The dinosaur is being run by another player (but who?). It offers Juan an affiliance. An affiliance means that Juan does a task for the dinosaur and gets a percentage of the profit.
- The dinosaur Big Lizard wants Juan to keep an eye on the old people in Fairmont High School, in the vocational track. People who used to be politicians, scientists, and other important people. Nothing creepy about that.
- At school, Juan goes to Search and Analysis class with Ms. Chumlig, who Juan thinks is kind of a failure at first.
- In that class are Winston Blount, an oldster who used to be a dean at the university; Dr. Xiang, a brilliant scientist with self-esteem issues; Robert Gu; and some other people who are on Big Lizard's list.
- But while he's checking out his classmates, his teacher catches him being observant, which impresses him.
- Later, Big Lizard and Rabbit talk about this affiliance and about how Chumlig interacts with Juan.
- Because—get this craziness—Big Lizard is Chumlig. What? (Most of these chapters will end with a "What?" moment.)