Insignia

  Nigel stared around the room, looking like he’d entered some surreal nightmare, and then he lost it. “Stop it,” he shrieked. “Stop it!”

  But getting upset made his face twitch harder, and his facial twitch triggered their facial twitches—and a whole debacle ensued where Nigel began threatening to hit people with his meal tray. Eventually, he fled the room in tears of rage, pursued by laughter and shouts of “Go cry to the social worker!”

  Tom and Vik missed the incident, though they both passed Nigel Harrison outside the Lafayette Room, and therefore spent the next hour irritated by continual facial twitches. They skipped lunch altogether, too busy putting together their program for the duel with Karl. It was beautiful. They called it Frequent Noisome Farts.

  “You ready for this, Doctor?” Vik asked Tom.

  “I’m ready, Doctor. Let’s go.”

  They marched out into the plebe common room at 2000 to face Karl. From the fiendish pleasure emanating from Karl’s jowled face beneath his new haircut, he had something nasty ready, too.

  “On three.” Vik’s eyes were locked on those of Karl’s companion Lyla Mortenson. It was the first time Tom had really seen her up close, and her profile flashed before him.

  NAME: Lyla Mortenson

  RANK: USIF, Grade IV Middle, Genghis Division

  ORIGIN: West Palm Beach, FL

  ACHIEVEMENTS: Amateur flyweight winner of six world and national boxing championships

  IP: 2053:db7:lj71::275:ll3:6e8

  SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-4

  “One-two-three,” Lyla shouted all in a jumble, and Tom was too startled to react right away.

  Karl cried, “Ha!” and struck first.

  Nothing happened. Datastream received: program Rabid Fido initiated. Value null, flashed across Tom’s vision center.

  “Nice try, buddy boy.” Tom launched Frequent Noisome Farts.

  Karl waited. And waited. Then laughed. “Value null, Plebe.”

  “Secret Indian ninja attack!” Vik raised the portable keyboard he’d snuck behind his back and unleashed their supersecret, superexperimental backup program.

  “Ka-pow!” Tom cried triumphantly.

  Karl and Lyla looked back at them questioningly.

  Lyla scratched her nose. “My nose itches. Does your nose itch?” she asked Karl.

  Karl shook his head. “Nah.”

  “Secret Indian Ninja Attack doesn’t make your nose itch,” Vik said.

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s all I’m noticing. The itchy nose.”

  “Another null, Plebes,” Karl announced.

  They all looked at one another for a long time. Karl pounded one first into a meaty hand, visibly longing for a chance to pummel them the old-fashioned way. Then they headed off their separate ways.

  “Worst duel ever,” Tom decided.

  “Tom,” Vik said as they entered their bunk, “we suck so much it’s depressing.”

  UNFORTUNATELY, BLACKBURN AGREED with them. The next day, he played their duel on the overhead screens for the class, and even he had to smother his palm over his mouth to fight his laughter.

  Tom decided he hated the census device. After they’d transmitted their source code to Blackburn, he ordered all four of them down for memory viewing—just for this. Blackburn had played a vast number of humiliating programming failures for their entertainment and capped it all off with Tom and Karl’s epic duel.

  “The last three days have confirmed it,” Blackburn said. “The vast majority of you, to put it gently, are pathetic. Hannibal Division is winning, with Machiavelli at a distant second. This appears to be solely due to the efforts of Nigel Harrison and, to my endless surprise, Wyatt Enslow.”

  Cheers and whoops from the other Hannibals and Machiavellis rang through the Lafayette Room. Tom looked over and saw that Wyatt’s cheeks had grown bright red. She wasn’t used to being the center of attention—and certainly not accustomed to being celebrated by the other members of a division that mostly ignored her.

  “What’s your secret, Enslow?” Blackburn said, leaning on the podium, gray eyes fixed on hers. “How did you turn into a prodigy on me?”

  Tom saw Wyatt duck her head, letting her dark hair swing in her face. “I just really wanted to attack people before they attacked me, sir.”

  Blackburn let her off with that, but Tom noticed Blackburn glancing at her from time to time even after he moved on with the lecture. “Now, I’ve caught word of a few attacks on Mr. Ramirez. General Marsh doesn’t want him to be in this conflict—”

  Elliot rose to his feet. “Sir, I’m fine with—”

  “Mr. Ramirez, you have a summit at the Capitol Building coming up. As you’ll appear to be representing Indo-America, no one wants to risk messing up your software. And, let’s face it, you’re hardly a coding genius whose absence will have a devastating impact on this conflict, hmm?”

  Tom could have sworn that Elliot looked embarrassed as he dropped back down.

  “Ramirez is out, everyone. As for the rest of you”—Blackburn waved his finger in a circle, indicating the whole room—“you have one more day. I know this is asking a lot, but try to stop humiliating yourselves.”

  AS VIK AND Tom headed up in the elevator to the sixth floor, Tom asked him, “What did Blackburn mean about Elliot ‘appearing’ to represent Indo-America?”

  “Well, you know what the Capitol Summit’s really about,” Vik said. “Dominion Agra is allied with India and America, and it controls the patents on the food supply. Harbinger, Inc. is allied with Russia and China, and it controls the patents on the water supply. So this is the time of year when the Coalition of Multinationals meets and agrees that even if they’re at war in space, they’ll still enforce each other’s patents here on Earth. It’s also a big show for the public to keep them engaged in the war. Our best Combatant faces the best Russo-Chines Combatant.”

  “But Elliot’s the one who fights there,” Tom pointed out. “And he’s not the best one on CamCo.”

  The doors slid open and they strode into the plebe common room, heading toward Alexander Division. “But we call him our best. And from the outside, it’ll look like Elliot and Svetlana are the ones fighting because they’ve got the pretty faces and the stage presence. So they go through the gestures of facing off for the cameras, while behind the scenes, proxies do the actual fighting. Elliot sure does, and everyone assumes Svetlana does, too.”

  Tom sputtered a laugh. “Wait. Wait. So he just goes there and pretends to fight?”

  “Yeah,” Vik said. “It’s kind of funny—see, the public doesn’t know about neural processors, so Elliot and Svetlana even have a wheel, a throttle, and controllers like they’re steering ships in space, while somewhere else their proxies are hooked in and actually navigating the ships.”

  “Who’s the proxy?”

  “Last year it was Alec Tarsus. But since Svetlana is sure to be proxied by Medusa this year, and Alec always gets stomped by her in space, I’m not sure who they’ll use this time around. I’m guessing Heather Akron or that Genghis Division guy Yosef Saide maybe? He won’t beat Medusa, but you’ve seen Yosef in action—he’s big on mass destruction. He might pull off something insane that’ll make them both lose.”

  They passed Beamer as he left his bunk for the bathroom. “Hey,” Tom called, “who do you think will—”

  But Beamer walked past them like they weren’t even there. A cold fist seemed to curl in Tom’s stomach, and it wasn’t until Vik tugged on his shoulder that he headed on his way again.

  Once they were inside their bunk, Vik accessed the Spire’s internal processor and ran a cursory virus scan to try locating the other malicious attacks planted in neural interfaces. He pulled back with some shock when he was done and showed Tom the results: Wyatt Enslow had sabotaged everything. Everything. She’d planted attacks in the homework feeds, in the databases. She’d even manufactured firewalls that blocked other people’s viruses from infiltrating the feeds.

  V
ik sat back on his heels, blown away. “Doctor, you realize Man Hands has stomped everyone.”

  “She needs a proper supervillain name. Man Hands isn’t doing it for me.”

  “You’re right. How about ‘Evil Wench from the Darkest Reaches of Mordor’?”

  “Too wordy.”

  “Just Evil Wench, then. Look, I refuse to concede defeat here.”

  “Every villain has a weak spot. What’s hers?”

  Vik rubbed at his chin and frowned at the wall. Tom flopped down on his bed and propped his head up on his elbow, concentrating on the carpet.

  Wyatt didn’t play games. They couldn’t sneak something into a VR sim. She liked reading—but Tom couldn’t think of any way to sneak her a Trojan in a book. She never hooked into those, so the text would just get memorized by the processor. She just read them word by word like a regular person without a neural processor did.

  “Training room neural interface sockets?”

  “How do you know what cot she’ll pick?” Vik pointed out.

  “You’ll have to plant some virus in all of them.”

  “You’ll get it, too.”

  Tom waved that off. “I’ll take it just to score a point against her.”

  “And Elliot will get it.”

  “Oh.” Tom’s hopes faded. They couldn’t risk hitting Elliot. “Well, there’s gotta be some other . . .” And then, suddenly, he knew what Wyatt’s weakness was: “Vik, what about Yuri?”

  Vik’s eyes shot to his. “The Android. Of course. He’s been her best friend since she got here. She trusts him.”

  “So we get him to sneak her a virus,” Tom said. “He doesn’t have to understand any of it—we just tell him to show her something and send a file.”

  Vik grinned. “She’ll get curious and look!”

  It was perfect.

  There was just one catch: Yuri was horrified at the very idea of helping them take Wyatt down. “I cannot do that.”

  “You don’t have to do much of anything,” Vik protested. “Just ask her to take a look at a program of yours, have her hook in—”

  “And bam. She’s in virus town,” Tom finished.

  “It is too deceitful,” Yuri said.

  Vik threw up his hands. “Come on. Where’s your patriotism? You’re an Alexander, for God’s sake!”

  “But I do not like this idea of attacking Wanda.”

  “It’s not like the Evil Wench is gonna ditch you for all her other friends—”

  “I will not lose her trust.”

  “We get that you feel pity for her or whatever—” Tom began.

  Yuri rose to his full height. “Why should I pity her? She is magnificent. She is so intelligent and honest, and . . .” He stopped, maybe because Tom and Vik were both staring at him like he was a madman, or maybe because he could feel how pink he was turning.

  It hit Tom like a lightning bolt. He turned to Vik, aghast. “He likes her.”

  “Yuri, no!” Vik said.

  Yuri turned redder, confirming it.

  “Yuri, come on, man,” Tom cried.

  Yuri gave a helpless shrug. “Divisions cannot divide human hearts.”

  “Oh God,” Vik cried, clapping hands over his ears. “He’s even spouting cheesy lines now. Make him stop, Tom!”

  “I can’t,” Tom told him. “My ears . . . They’re bleeding. Bleeding!”

  “It’s a brain hemorrhage! He’s murdered us!” Vik said.

  “Murderer!” Tom cried, fake collapsing onto the ground.

  Yuri shook his head. “This is not very mature.”

  But they were both on the ground now, pretending to writhe with spontaneous brain hemorrhages. Yuri sighed and stepped over them to get out the door.

  THAT NIGHT, VIK devoted himself to staying up and putting together the ultimate program to take Wyatt down. Tom wasn’t going to sleep while his partner in doom did the bulk of the programming, so he stayed awake in a show of solidarity, occasionally offering suggestions. One idea came to him very late in the night. He jumped to his feet in a flash of inspiration.

  “Vik, what if we use an outside transmitter?”

  “What? I was concentrating, Tom.”

  “Listen. Maybe we don’t need some elaborate virus. Maybe we just need to hit her from somewhere she doesn’t expect. We know her IP. And we have the authorization to allow us through the Spire’s firewall. So we find a transmitter powerful enough to send it to her from a distance, hack into that, and use it to slam her with something.”

  “Like . . . what kind of transmitter?”

  Tom leaned forward eagerly, because this was where he was sure he was being visionary. “A satellite.”

  “How do you expect to use a satellite? I don’t know a thing about how those are controlled.”

  “We hook in. Just like satellites hook into ships in space, we hook into the satellite.”

  “The ships in space are designed for a neural interface,” Vik informed him. “Satellites aren’t.”

  Tom rubbed at his head, fumbling with scraps of his memory from long ago—from the first day his neural processor was installed. “We can do it. I swear, it’s possible. Remember when you first got your neural processor installed, and you were getting configured for the internet? I remember when I kept hooking into random places—and one of them was a satellite. It was just like a neural interface. I was inside it. We’ve just gotta do something like that on purpose.”

  Vik stared at him like he was crazy.

  “Come on, don’t you remember your installation?” Tom demanded, recalling the vast sequences of 0’s and 1’s, and the way his brain felt tugged in an infinite number of directions. “Your brain first gets on the network and it starts jumping around a bit . . .”

  Vik considered him, his fingers drumming on the edge of his forearm keypad. “Tom, I’m not saying that didn’t happen, but, uh—I’m going to work on this. This program. If you have something else you think might work, give it a shot, but I wouldn’t count on it, buddy. That thing you’re talking about? It’s just not possible. There is no neural processor in the world that can interface with just any machine at will. Machines have to be built for a neural processor, or it doesn’t work. You probably just dreamed it. Anesthesia does weird stuff like that to some people. My dad’s a doctor. I know.”

  Tom knew he hadn’t imagined that. “I’m going to hook into a neural interface and show you, Vik. Just wait.”

  “You hook into the internet, you’re going to catch one of Wyatt’s viruses,” Vik warned him. “She’s got this whole place rigged up.”

  “I’m not using the trainee server.”

  AS SOON AS Tom reached floor eleven, a warning flashed in his head: Restricted area. He ignored it. He headed down the empty hallway, located the officers’ lounge, and then settled into a chair.

  There was a neural access port in the middle of the table, all ready for Blackburn. Tom pulled out a neural wire, hooked it into the port, then plugged it into the back of his brain stem.

  The internet server for officers popped up, and Tom navigated a bit aimlessly, getting the feel of using just his brain to move through the internet, to click links. The images popped before his eyes, much more vivid and encompassing than they appeared with just a pair of VR visors.

  He wasn’t sure how he’d managed to interface with the satellite right after his neural processor installation, but he knew it had something to do with following one connection to the next.

  He tried focusing on his neural processor. He barely noticed the computer in his brain now, but he remembered how early on he’d been so aware of it. It used to feel so alien. If he concentrated just enough, he could still detect it, still feel the machine buzzing in his brain like another entity entirely, sending electrical impulses to something else, to the hub in the Spire.

  And then like he’d received an electric jolt, Tom suddenly found himself jerked out of his body. His limbs felt cold and distant and his brain melded to the Spire, a massive charged s
ource of energy, a building doubling as a transmitter with a hybrid fission/fusion core, sending signals into space that—

  The signal tore Tom farther from himself, thrusting him into the satellites ringing Earth with their electrical impulses transmitting data, a vast ring of 0’s and 1’s that seemed like so much nonsense when it was flooding his brain like this, and suddenly he felt like an it again, gazing through electromagnetic sensors—

  And then another stream tore him away, and he was connected to those vessels near the dark side of Mercury, the surface registering in the infrared sensors of the Russo-Chinese automated machines, floating in orbit, exchanging signals with Stronghold Energy’s palladium mines that connected back to—

  The central server in the Sun Tzu Citadel in the Forbidden City, with two hundred and seven neural processors registering on the internal network, IPs flickering through Tom’s brain—

  He slammed back into his neural processor, into his own body so abruptly it felt like he’d been swatted by some vast, cosmic hand. He sat there, his eyes closed, hand gripping the table, heaving in frantic breaths. He hadn’t imagined it the first time. He really had seen out of satellites. But his assurances to Vik seemed laughable suddenly. He hadn’t just seen satellites—he’d glimpsed inside the server of the Sun Tzu Citadel . . . where the Chinese Combatants trained. That was . . . that was something big. He wasn’t sure what to even make of it. Was that supposed to happen?

  He returned to their bunk, still a bit in shock. Vik glanced up from his keyboard. “So?”

  Tom hesitated, debating what to say for a long moment, remembering Vik’s words: There is no neural processor in the world that can interface with just any machine at will.

  But he’d done it. He knew now for sure that he’d done it.

  But whatever it was that he’d done . . . it was too much for some tiny skirmish in the Spire. He wasn’t even sure what it was that he’d done yet.

  Tom shook his head. “You were right. I guess I imagined it.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE