From James Dashner, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Maze Runner series, comes the first book in the bestselling Mortality Doctrine series, an edge-of-your-seat cyber-adventure trilogy that includes The Rule of Thoughts and The Game of Lives. Includes a sneak peek of The Fever Code, the highly anticipated conclusion to the Maze Runner series--the novel that finally reveals how the Maze was built! The VirtNet offers total mind and body immersion, and the more hacking skills you have, the more fun it is. Why bother following the rules when it's so easy to break them? But some rules were made for a reason. Some technology is too dangerous to fool with. And one gamer has been doing exactly that, with murderous results. The government knows that to catch a hacker, you need a hacker. And they've been watching Michael. If he accepts their challenge, Michael will need to go off the VirtNet grid, to the back alleys and corners of the system human eyes have never seen--and it's possible that the line between game and reality will be blurred forever. Praise for the Mortality Doctrine Series: "Dashner takes full advantage of the Matrix-esque potential for asking 'what is real.'" --io9.com "Set in a world taken over by virtual reality gaming, the series perfectly capture[s] Dashner's hallmarks for inventiveness, teen dialogue and an ability to add twists and turns like no other author." --MTV.com "A brilliant, visceral, gamified mash-up of The Matrix and Inception, guaranteed to thrill even the non-gaming crowd." --Christian Science Monitor