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![The Rule of Thoughts (The Mortality Doctrine, Book Two) by [James Dashner]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51J2JPHg2SL._SY346_.jpg)
The Rule of Thoughts (The Mortality Doctrine, Book Two) Kindle Edition
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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!
Michael thought he understood the VirtNet, but the truth he discovered is more terrifying than anyone at VirtNet Security could have anticipated.
The cyber terrorist Kaine isn’t human. It’s a Tangent, a computer program that has become sentient. And Michael just completed the first step in turning Kaine’s master plan, the Mortality Doctrine, into a reality. The Mortality Doctrine will populate Earth entirely with human bodies harboring Tangent minds. The VNS would like to pretend the world is perfectly safe, but Michael and his friends know that the takeover has already begun. And if they don’t stop Kaine soon, it will be game over for humanity.
The author who brought you the #1 New York Times bestselling MAZE RUNNER series and two #1 movies—The Maze Runner and The Scorch Trials—now brings you an electrifying cyber-adventure trilogy that takes you into a world of hyperadvanced technology, cyber terrorists, and gaming beyond your wildest dreams . . . and your worst nightmares.
Praise for the Bestselling 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
- LanguageEnglish
- Grade level7 - 9
- Lexile measure750L
- PublisherDelacorte Press
- Publication dateAugust 26, 2014
- ISBN-13978-0385741415
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“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
"An exhilarating adventure story with touches of Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game."-Booklist.com
“More realistic and addictive than any video game—The Eye of Minds sucked me in from the very first page. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meets The Matrix in a vividly rendered world of gamers, hackers, and cyber-terrorists. I can’t wait to read the next book in the series!”—Kami Garcia, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Beautiful Creatures and author of Unbreakable
“A gripping page-turner, Dashner’s latest is sure to please.”—BookPage
"Dashner's descriptions are screenplay-ready...This book will satisfy the author’s fans...[and readers] in search of an adrenaline rush."-School Library Journal
“Full of action [and] a rather surprising twist that will leave you flipping pages.”—fanboynation.com
“High on concept, this is an intriguing read for the digital generation.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Dashner once again creates a dystopian world in which nothing is what it seems."-VOYA
A Junior Library Guild Selection
A YALSA Teens Top Ten Pick
From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
James Dashner is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Maze Runner series: The Maze Runner, The Scorch Trials, The Death Cure, and The Kill Order, as well as The Eye of Minds and The Rule of Thoughts, the first two books in the Mortality Doctrine series. Dashner was born and raised in Georgia, but lives and writes in the Rocky Mountains. To learn more about James and his books, visit jamesdashner.com, follow @jamesdashner on Twitter, and find dashnerjames on Instagram.
From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From School Library Journal
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
He lay on the bed of a stranger, staring up at a ceiling he had seen for the first time just the day before. He’d been disoriented and sick to his stomach all night, catching sleep only in fitful, anxious, nightmare-fueled jags. His life had blown apart; his sanity was slipping away. His very surroundings--the foreign room, the alien bed--were unforgiving reminders of his terrifying new life. Fear sparked through his veins.
And his family. What had happened to his family? He wilted a little more every time he pictured them.
The very first traces of dawn--a gloomy, pale light--made the shuttered blinds of the window glow eerily. The Coffin next to the bed sat silent and dark, as foreboding as a casket dug from a grave. He could almost imagine it: the wood rotting and cracked, human remains spilling out. He didn’t know how to look at the objects around him anymore. Real objects. He didn’t even understand the word real. It was as if all his knowledge of the world had been yanked out from under his feet like a rug.
His brain couldn’t grasp it all.
His . . . brain.
He almost burst out in a laugh, but it died in his chest.
Michael had only had an actual, physical brain for the last twelve hours. Not even a full day, he realized, and that pit in his stomach doubled in size.
Could it really all be true? Really?
Everything he knew was a result of artificial intelligence. Manufactured data and memories. Programmed technology. A created life. He could go on and on, each description somehow worse than the one before it. There was nothing real about him, and yet now here he was, transported through the VirtNet and the Mortality Doctrine program and turned into an actual human being. A living, breathing organism. A life, stolen. So that he could become something he didn’t even understand. His view of the world had been shattered. Utterly.
Especially because he wasn’t sure if he believed it. For all he knew, he could be in another program, another level of Lifeblood Deep. How could he ever again trust what was real and what was not? The uncertainty would drive him mad.
He rolled over and screamed into his pillow. His head--his stolen, unfamiliar head--ached from the thousands of thoughts that pounded through it, each one fighting for attention. Fighting to be processed and understood. And feeling pain here was no different from feeling it as a Tangent. Which only served to confuse him more. He couldn’t accept that before last night he’d just been a program, a long line of code. It didn’t compute. That did make him laugh, and the pain in his head intensified and spread, slicing down his throat and filling his chest.
He yelled again, which didn’t help, then forced himself to swing his legs off the bed and sit up. His feet touched the cool wooden floor, reminding him once again that he was now in a strange land. Lush carpet had blanketed the apartment he’d always known, which seemed homier, warmer, safe. Not cold and hard. He wanted to talk to Helga, his nanny. He wanted his parents.
And those were the thoughts that almost did him in completely. He’d been avoiding them, pressing them back into that pulsing swirl of thousands of other thoughts, but they weren’t going anywhere. They stood out and demanded attention.
Helga. His parents.
If what Kaine had said was true, they were as synthetic as Michael’s programmed fingernails had been. Even his memories. He would never know which ones had been programmed into his artificial intelligence and which ones he’d actually experienced within the code of Lifeblood Deep. He didn’t even know how long he’d existed--his true age. He could be two months old, or three years, or a hundred.
He imagined his parents and Helga as fake, or gone, or dead, maybe never there in the first place. It just didn’t make sense.
The ache that had crept its way into his chest filled his heart, and grief overtook him. He slumped back onto the bed and rolled over, pushing his face into the pillow. For the first time in his existence, Michael cried as an actual human being. But the tears felt no different than they ever had before. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B00IBZ3YU4
- Publisher : Delacorte Press (August 26, 2014)
- Publication date : August 26, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 9238 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 338 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #242,407 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

James Dashner is the #1 NY Times Bestselling author of over a dozen books, including The Maze Runner series (movies by 20th Century Fox, now owned by Disney). He grew up in Georgia but now lives in the Rocky Mountains with his wife and their four children. For more information on him and his books, events, etc., please visit jamesdashner.com.
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It bothered me that Michael (I think that's how you spell it) and Sarah weren't really a thing. Don't you think you could have lengthened it out a tiny bit and at least end it when they kiss?
And, the cliff hanger bothered me. I absolutely hate them. I understand what they are for, but really?! This is almost as bad as Mark of Athena (percy jackson, written by Rick Riordan. The first book is The Lightning Thief. It's amazing, and If yo love Cliffies he is for you) but did you really have to make it that bad of a Cliffie???
Okay, now that I have that off of my chest, let me go to my next point: some things were confusing at first. I'll admit that. But once I caught on, it was amazing. And let me talk about that ending. That ending was nothing close to what I thought would happen. Heck, I didn't even have a clue what I thoughtless happen! I just know that was not what I was expecting. You explained it perfectly.
I want you to know how amazing this was to me: I finished it in a little over a day. And, I ha a play yesterday. And school. I could not stop reading! It was that good! If you are thinking about reading this book, just know it ripped my heart out, and threw it to the ground. And you know it's a good book when that happens. Oh, the FEELS!
The main characters spend a lot of time with someone after them, and it is really confusing about who is actually after them. Even at the end, I still felt much of this had not been completely resolved. To add to this confusion, it wasn't always clear about when the main characters were in the wake or in the sleep. I would have thought that they would have been able to easily discern this because of the coding. Would the real world have the same coding as the virtual world? When the author tries to convince us that they couldn't tell the difference, I was extremely disappointed. Adding to this was when the author decided to change the rules of the virtual world. The purple sea is just code, so they can't actually die in it. Yet, if you jump off a virtual cliff which is just code, you can die in it. (Not to be snarky, but his is also JUST CODE).
We add to this rather confusing middle book with the continual vacillating storyline that Weber is good or she is actually evil. In the end, the book did not progress very far. It was another middle book to nowhere, and only two things have happened that actually add to the story. The kids were fooled into doing a bad thing in the wake, while they believed they were in the sleep. Everyone learns there are tangents that have taken up residence in real people. (So if you decide to not read this book, you won't be missing out on much).
Top reviews from other countries

I'd recommend this book to people over 12 but if you've already read the first book you should be fine.
Thanks for reading and I hope this was helpful!



