The Tree of Knowledge, Daniel Miller [unputdownable books txt] 📗

The professor summoned every ounce of his strength and, with one powerful move, threw his shoulders forward and down to the floor. As he dropped toward the floor, he could feel the general’s weight shift from pulling behind him to tumbling over him. Moloch’s grip released, and he rotated over Turner and off the edge of the walking bridge. The hard, slim frame somersaulted off the bridge to the floor below. Turner heard a hollow thud as Moloch’s body hit the epoxy floor.

The professor looked down to see a blank expression and blood pooling from the general’s head. He needed to go. The cadets would be coming soon.

Chapter 12

Albert exited the elevator and refocused on the entrance in front of him. It was time. Time to flip the switch.

He closed his eyes for a moment and saw the game tree in all its splendor. At its center was a simple phrase: “Find the book.” From that simple statement sprung an endless set of branches expanding in infinite complexity. Get past security. Steal relevant evidence. Escape. Each branch detailing an action was matched by a counteraction. The number of scenarios was overwhelming, but in many ways, Albert felt that he had been preparing his whole life for this. All his life, he had felt like a puzzle piece that had been forced into the wrong spot, but when his mind was inside the tree, everything seemed to fit. He was where he was supposed to be. Albert took a long breath, and just as he had in the boxing ring, his mind filtered through the deluge of data and potential scenarios and zeroed in on the one path that mattered . . . the one that would work.

“I’m ready,” he said to himself.

Albert pulled a pen and notepad out of his pocket. The empty white pad gave him the same sense of clarity he experienced back at Princeton with a blank chalkboard.

He stepped up to the door and with a quivering hand swiped the key card.

The room around him was nothing he could have imagined. Floor, walls, and ceiling were all one giant 3D screen, like being inside of a cube made of LCD. All around him stood a virtual forest, and in front of him, a rickety wooden bridge swung over a violent river bubbling below. A troll stood before him wielding an axe. Drool covered his gray skin, and his gnarled teeth jutted in every direction as he smiled. The troll’s image jumped from the screen with such clarity that for a moment Albert questioned whether he was real.

The troll spoke with a deep Welsh accent coated in phlegm. “You have reached the valley of half-truths. I am the guardian of the bridge. One man may cross. The man who speaks neither truth nor lie. You may speak but once to me. If what you say is true, I will strangle you. If you what you say is false, I will chop off your head with my axe. You have one minute.” And with that, the troll wound a gigantic clock that hung from his neck.

Albert paused a moment, attempting to absorb the bizarre reality into which he had been thrust. The screens surrounding him left and right, top and bottom, produced such vivid graphics that Albert couldn’t help thinking he had been teleported to another dimension. Cristina Culebra’s dimension. If he failed to answer this question correctly, the police, FBI, Cristina, Eva, and everyone else he feared would find him. Everything that Turner’s army had been fighting for would be lost. Albert stifled the most potent desire that ran through his mind and his chest: the desire to run.

To orient and steady himself, he began scribbling the troll’s riddle furiously in his notebook. His mind knew that the troll wasn’t real and wouldn’t strangle him or chop off his head, but his heart and stomach felt differently. The ticks of the troll’s clock pounded mercilessly as if to remind Albert that his freedom was dripping away. He took a deep breath and told himself that this was just a show. A show to distract him from the logic at the core of the riddle.

After a few seconds, Albert spoke. “OK, if I say something true, I will be killed. If I say something false, I will be killed. So I have to say something that is neither true nor false? That’s impossible.”

The troll gurgled, sensing that he had found his next victim. “Is it? Or is your mind too puny for the great troll?”

The troll’s insult snapped Albert’s mind to attention. His eyes brightened.

“Alright, I’ve got it. What is your name?”

The troll chuckled and shook his head. “You may not pass.”

“Why? That was neither true nor false,” said Albert, complaining like one of his students over a bad grade.

“Yes, but it was not a statement. It was a question.” The troll began to sharpen his axe with his teeth.

“But a statement has to be true or false.”

The troll gurgled out another foul chuckle. “Quite the paradox, isn’t it, simpleton?”

Albert stared at the troll’s clock. Twenty . . . nineteen . . . eighteen.

Suddenly, he slapped his notepad in his hand. “That’s it! It’s a liar’s paradox. I just have to say something that contradicts itself.”

He steadied himself.

“OK, troll, this is my statement: ‘You will chop off my head.’ If you chop off my head, then that makes my statement true, which means you should have strangled me. If you strangle me, then my statement is false, and you should have chopped off my head.”

The troll sighed and dropped his axe by his side.

“You may pass,” said the pouting troll. A door opened where the bridge used to be.

Albert smiled and moved on to the next room. He could sense his logical faculties overpowering his racing pulse and coursing adrenaline.

Like the room before it, this room was composed of wall-to-wall 3D screens and nothing else. Beneath Albert and on the screens to the left