Read Online Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles by Ted Dekker - Free Book Online

ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the world ascribes. I don’t.”
    “Meaning what? They’re smart enough to not experiment on themselves, but you’re not?”
    “It’s this,” he said, pointing to his bald head. “Or death.”
    His words stopped my stuttering thoughts. So that was the truth. “You’re dying?”
    “We’re all dying,” he said.
    “I’m serious,” I said. “Are you? Dying, I mean?”
    I could hear it in his voice and see it in his eyes, however faintly: fear. In the past he had been stoic to the core, nothing ever showed. But something had shifted in him since I’d last seen him.
    He nodded once. “The tumor’s spread. It’s only a matter of time. A very short time.”
    It felt like my guts were cinching into a knot. It was the same feeling I had when I heard that my father and brother hadn’t survived the crash and when I first saw my mom at the hospital with tubes and wires coming out of her. “And . . . what you’re doing could save you?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. My condition’s advanced, but maybe what I’m doing could buy more time. The alternative is to sit around and wait to die.”
    “How long do you have?”
    “Based on my calculations, four weeks is the best-case scenario. Worst case: two weeks, maybe less. Aggressive tumors like mine are extremely unpredictable.”
    My jaw unhinged. I’ve ordered books that took longer to reach me.
    “It started here,” he said, touching a finger to the left side of his head. “And spread.” He drew his finger over his brow and stopped at the center of his forehead. “It’s in my frontal lobe now, my prefrontal cortex to be exact. Soon, it will destroy the part of my brain responsible for complex cognitive behavior and emotive expression. Austin Hartt, the unique personality that I know as ‘me’ will cease to be, and everything that makes me who I am will be gone. Eventually my autonomic system will collapse and my vital organs will shut down one at a time. My brain will forget how to keep my body alive.”
    “Austin . . . I’m sorry.” I wanted to say more, but words seemed hollow and useless. What can you say to someone who’s watching Death reach out to him? “What about surgery?”
    “The tumor’s like a weed with roots that have worked their way deep into my brain tissue. It’s inoperable.”
    “Chemo?”
    “Would buy me maybe an extra week, two at the most.”
    “But it’s something. It would be worth it, right?”
    “Hardly. Would you want to spend your final days pumping chemicals through your veins for hours on end, hoping to eke out one more day of sitting in a hospital room pumping chemicals through your veins?”
    I said nothing, but my silence spoke for me.
    “Doctors are highly risk averse,” he continued. “They play it safe, recycling the same old ideas, which leads to the same old results. It’s the outliers who push innovation, the people on the fringe who have nothing left to lose. Nothing important ever happened without someone becoming desperate. Right now, that someone just happens to be me.”
    There was urgency in his words that I’d never heard before. The stoic intellectual I’d known as Austin Hartt was peeling away. In his place was someone obviously on the brink of losing everything.
    He was brilliant, yes, but his genius was now laced with madness—not that I blamed him for it; the man was halfway in the ground. I could see the threads of insanity in his nervous, constant motions, the way he shifted his weight from foot to foot, the way his eyes darted around, never stopping on anything for more than a few seconds. His was a mind constantly churning, caged inside a dying body, desperate to survive.
    “My research has opened up completely new ways of thinking,” he said, “ways that I’d never considered before. I don’t understand everything I’m discovering and experiencing, but I do know that I’m standing on the brink of a major breakthrough that could