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want to deal with the government," he said. Weakly.
    Vickie allowed herself to smile slightly. "Just talk to them, Kyle. It won't hurt you to talk, will it?"
    He grumbled something too low for her to hear.
    "It's either that or sell out to Disney," said Vickie. She knew that would get him to do what she wanted. Muncrief had no intention of letting any other company get its hands on ParaReality.
    Vickie was not sure that he could keep his independence. The competition was already sniffing around ParaReality, trying to make deals with some of the employees for inside information. Industrial espionage, it was called. Victoria Kessel knew all about industrial espionage. She was already involved in it.

CHAPTER 4

    Angela had desperately wanted her father to take her to school on this first day, but Daddy had stayed home to help unpack. And Mommy had been busy with little Phil, like she almost always was. Angela loved her baby brother, of course, but ever since he had been born Mommy had less and less time for her.
    Her only friend was Amanda, the thumb-sized doll that her grandmother Emerson had made for her out of knitting yarn when she had been just a little girl, back in Dayton. Amanda was faded and frayed, but Angie had slipped her into the pocket of her jeans. She needed a friend with her this first day in a strange new school. She knew that Amanda was only an imaginary friend, but that was better than being all alone among strangers
    Mr. Muncrief had been nice, though. His car was totally hot and he walked her all the way into the school building and right to her classroom. It made her feel important because all the teachers and grownups in the school seemed to know Mr. Muncrief. He was an important man.
    Her teacher, Mrs. O'Connell, made Angela feel pretty much at home right away.
    "This is a brand-new school," she explained to Angela, "so everyone here is a newcomer."
    She brought Angela to the front of the classroom and introduced her. "Angela has come to us from Dayton, Ohio," she explained. "Is that the farthest any of us have come from?"
    The kids buzzed among themselves for a moment, then several hands shot up eagerly. After a few minutes the class decided that the one who had come the farthest distance was a blond, good-looking boy from Santa Barbara, California. His name was Gary Rusic.
    Angela did not have to say anything more than "Hello," to them all and when she smiled she kept her lips closed so nobody could see the braces on her teeth. She wormed her hand into the pocket of her jeans and felt Amanda there, comforting and familiar. Then she noticed that several of the girls wore braces and she felt a little better.
    "This is a different kind of school," Mrs. O'Connell told the class once Angela had taken the seat assigned to her. The students' desks were scattered around the room, not lined up in rigid rows the way they had been back in Ohio.
    Pointing to the six doors at the rear of the room, Mrs. O'Connell said, "We're going to be using virtual reality programs and games quite a bit. I know you're going to like them, because instead of listening to me tell you things or reading things out of a book, the virtual reality system will allow you to go places and do things so that you'll be in the places you're supposed to be learning about."
    Angela felt a little confused about that. Daddy worked on virtual reality stuff, she knew that. But she could not imagine how the things he did could be used here in school.
    She quickly found out.
    There were only eighteen students in the class, and Mrs. O'Connell divided them into three groups. Angela was in the second group. She read from a brand-new textbook about how the Native Americans lived before Columbus discovered the New World. But she kept one eye on the back of the room, where Mrs. O'Connell was helping the first six kids into the booths back there.
    After a while the teacher returned to the front of the room and started talking with the children about life in