The Rule of Thoughts

   (Spoiler Warning) 

    A few weeks ago I finished reading The Rule of Thoughts, the second book in the Mortality Doctrine by James Dashner. My previous two blog posts were on The Eye of Minds, the first book of the series. One thing I noticed from reading the series is that there is almost no correspondence between the title of the book and what actually happens in the book, which is the only critique I have on this series.

    In the beginning of this book, we find out what the Mortality Doctrine really is. As it turns out, Michael, the main character, was actually a tangent for the entirety of the previous book. A tangent is someone (or something) who isn't a real person, but only exists as a program within the Virtual Network (VirtNet). The Mortality Doctrine is an effort by Kaine, the villain, to download tangents' minds into existing people's bodies. This essentially erases the minds of the "template people", and they get replaced by tangents with whom Kaine wants to populate the world. Michael was the ever tangent to be placed into a living body. 

    I find this concept very interesting, because it means that it is possible to download/export a human mind and save it somewhere, and also it's possible to import a mind into a another human body. I see various real world applications of how this could be used: such as teleportation of your mind. Kaine however used it to essentially kill people, and replacing them with his own friends.

    The Rule of Thoughts contains many other fascinating sci-fi topics and is a very fun book to read: a group of friends travel through different worlds, fighting a cyber criminal who is trying to take over the real world, and the virtual world. At times Michael and his friends don't even know in which world are they. Programming and coding is also a big part of the book, but it's nothing a common person can't understand. And for that reason I recommend this series to everyone, because of the adventures that take place, and the mind boggling concepts which are presented: uploading minds to a network, and many more.

-Lenny