Insignia

  Tom imagined the post. “Deranged one seeks fearsome warrior?”

  “Try, ‘Hideous beast,’” she finished for him.

  Tom regarded her over the point of her dagger, wishing he could see her real face, wishing he could tell if she was really going to follow through on this. “You sure you’ll check?”

  “I’ll check,” she assured him. Then she slashed his throat.

  TOM OPENED HIS eyes in Blackburn’s office, blown away. She’d agreed to meet him again. She’d actually agreed. He rubbed at his throat, where the skin stung with the memory of that sword slash.

  He became aware of a blinking in his neural processor, and his blood froze.

  He’d set the alarm to track Blackburn’s GPS signal in the Spire, and to go off if Blackburn returned to the eleventh floor. He’d been too immersed in the fight to notice it. His heart jolted in his throat, because Blackburn was stepping out of the elevator now—and Tom didn’t have time to flee down the hallway.

  He hurled himself under the desk just as the door slid open.

  “. . . and you’ll want to try any new programs on a simulated neural processor first.” Blackburn’s heavy footsteps moved into the room, followed by Wyatt’s lighter ones, and the doors slid shut behind them. Tom felt sweat break out on his forehead. He pressed back as far as he could under the desk, his heart hammering. This was not good. Not good at all.

  Blackburn circled around so Tom could see his boots less than two feet away. The desk rumbled as a drawer was yanked open. If Blackburn stepped back just a bit, or leaned over to root through another drawer, he’d see Tom.

  He heard Blackburn shuffling through the drawer. And then he must’ve found what he was looking for, because the desk rumbled as the drawer slid shut again.

  “Here, work with this one, Enslow. Initiate a program just like you would normally. It’ll give you all the information you need about how the person’s processor and physiology would be reacting to your coding. It’s a safe way to experiment so you don’t have to use other trainees as guinea pigs. Oh, and here’s something else that might help.”

  There was a loud smack on the desk that made Tom jump. He looked upward, wondering what it was.

  “A cognitive science textbook?” Wyatt’s voice rang out.

  “Yes, yes, I know it’s a bother having to read the pages one by one—”

  “I don’t mind that.”

  “No, you don’t, do you?” There was an appreciative note in his voice. “Well, the military sees no need to offer this in your upload feed—however much I’ve tried to convince them people with computers in their brains should learn something about those brains, not just the computers. Some of the research in here is outdated, so I crossed those sections out. But read it. This book got me started. It’s a clear, understandable primer. If you want to learn to program the way I do? You have to start by learning the human brain.”

  Blackburn settled into his chair, his knees at level with Tom’s head. Tom flattened himself against the back of the desk and scrunched his legs up to his chest to avoid Blackburn’s boots kicking him. The air was split by the crackling sound of old textbook pages being turned.

  “‘The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia,’” Wyatt read. She was quiet a second, then said defensively, “It flipped right to this page. I didn’t mean to open it to that.”

  “It opened right there because I looked at that chapter almost every day for a year. That’s where I started. The first time I reprogrammed my processor, I was trying to control the dopamine. It turned out, I needed to do a lot more than that, but it was a first step.”

  “You just experimented with your own brain like that?”

  “I had nothing to lose. My mind was gone, my career was over, my wife—” He stopped abruptly.

  Silence hung on the air. Tom could practically sense Wyatt working herself up to asking something—he knew her that well by now.

  “What’s being crazy like?” Wyatt blurted.

  Wyatt, don’t, Tom thought, wincing, certain Blackburn was going to make her sorry.

  Blackburn didn’t answer her for a drawn-out second. Tom could hear his fingers begin drumming on the desk. “It really depends, Enslow. What’s being tactless and completely inappropriate like?”

  The question seemed to catch Wyatt off guard. “Oh. Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t . . .” Her footsteps thumped over, and there was a squeak as she settled in the other chair. Tom hoped they weren’t getting ready for a long conversation. “I don’t try to be rude,” she said. “My mom flew in her old pageant coach to live with us one summer and teach me all about how to talk to people . . . but eventually, she just told me I should try not to talk when anyone’s around.”

  Blackburn gave a reluctant chuckle. “Fair enough.” His legs stretched out, his boots settling an inch from Tom’s hip. Tom leaned awkwardly to the side, away from it. “‘What is being crazy like?’ It’s like . . . At the time, it felt like I was having one long moment of insight.”

  “Like when you get the neural processor and you just know some things you didn’t before?”

  “Much more powerful than that. I felt like my thoughts could burrow right through the layers of reality and see the way everything was truly interlinked. At the time, I thought it was the processor giving me this understanding of the world. I tried sharing this new perspective, but people disregarded me. It was the most frustrating thing you can imagine. I began to suspect they were willfully ignorant. Then I grew convinced they were plotting against me. I was delusional, but I believed I was the single sane one in a world gone to madness. I began to see everything I’d once believed in, as they say, ‘through a glass, darkly.’ And even now, even after all this time . . . there are things that once you open your eyes to them can’t be unseen.”

  A heavy silence settled in the air.

  “Any more awkward questions you want to get out of the way?” Blackburn prompted. “Let’s do this now. I told you that trust is the most essential thing I ask of you—and I’ll make every effort to return it. Better to ask me now than ask someone else later.”

  “Um, well, with your face . . . People say you tried to claw it off when you were crazy.”

  He laughed.

  “I figured that wasn’t the reason you have those scars,” Wyatt went on.

  “These were just my ex-wife bidding me a fond farewell. With her fingernails.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that it?” His voice was tense. After a moment of silence, “Good. And with that, Enslow, caring-sharing hour is officially over.” He rose from his seat, and Tom was finally able to stop hugging his knees to his chest. He heard Wyatt’s chair squeak as she got up, too.

  “I actually do know better than to ask about something like that,” Wyatt blurted out.

  They were moving toward the door. Tom leaned his head back against the wood behind him, relief swamping him. He’d get out of here unseen, after all.

  “Then maybe there’s some hope for you yet. Come on, now. Those processors aren’t going to configure themselves.” The door slid open and closed again.

  Tom waited a minute to rise from beneath the desk, until he was sure Blackburn’s GPS signal was back in the basement. Then he bolted safely out of the office and back into the elevator.

  Consciousness initiated. The time is now 0000.

  Tom had been asleep for two hours when his eyes snapped open. This never happened. He never woke up in the middle of the night.

  He gazed into the darkness, confused, wondering why he was awake. He heard Vik’s heavy breathing on the other side of the bunk. He threw off his covers and rose from the bed without quite knowing why he did it. His brain pulsed with the need to get out, get out into the hallway.

  Tom followed it, but once he was in the hallway there was no relief from the restless feeling. He needed to leave Alexander Division, and that was off-limits after 2300, but Tom did it, anyway. He emerged right into the common room and stood there in the darkness.
>
  What am I doing here? What am I doing? he wondered.

  And then a door slid open to another division. Karl Marsters filled the doorway to Genghis. “Come on,” he said, and didn’t wait for Tom to plod over before heading into the hallway.

  Tom scrambled after him to make it through the door before it slid back closed, even though his brain was exploding with disbelief. What was he doing? What was this?

  Karl headed up the stairs to the upper-level floors of Genghis Division. He opened the door to an unoccupied bunk and Tom followed.

  “All right, come on, already, Fido.” Karl snapped open a case and pulled out a portable data chip attached to a neural wire.

  Tom looked around. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

  “Yeah, I got that. Take the bed. Facedown.”

  Tom’s heart pounded harder and harder. He stretched out on his stomach, even though every instinct he had railed against the idea of this. Karl could beat him up if he wanted to, and Tom had no grounds for explaining why he was in Genghis Division on the wrong floor after lights-out.

  “I was pretty mad when they said you, of all people, were gonna work with Dominion,” Karl said. “That’s my gig, right? But I’ve gotta say, it cracked me up when I found out you said no. I’m gonna love watching them neuter you, Fido. You think you’re such a tough guy, don’t you? Yeah, we’re gonna see once you’ve got all these programs crammed in your brain. A few weeks from now, you’ll be a vegetable.”

  From where he was sprawled on the mattress, Tom gritted his teeth. He’d never hated Karl so much.

  “I don’t want that,” Tom managed when Karl approached with the wire.

  “Too bad. Nighty night, Lassie.” Karl clicked the wire into his brain stem.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  Chapter Seventeen

  SATURDAY MORNING, THE private car arrived at 1100 and took Tom to the Beringer Club. The sign read SECURITY ON PREMISES today. Tom headed down the stairs, pressed his Challenge Coin against the retina scanner, and headed inside.

  The big guy, Hayden, was there. He led Tom to a table where Dal—Mr. Prestwick was already nursing a scotch. The man surveyed him, gestured him into a seat. “Go ahead and order lunch, Tom. We’re going to meet a few others with the company.”

  The menu blurred before Tom’s eyes. He couldn’t concentrate on it.

  “Did Karl give you the update?” Mr. Prestwick asked.

  “Oh, I sure gave it to him.” Karl slouched down into the seat across from Tom’s and planted his elbows on the tablecloth. “You buying us both lunch, Dalton? I was surprised you hadn’t invited me. I had to pay for my own taxi. I think you owe me one.”

  Mr. Prestwick eyed the newcomer with what Tom would swear was distaste. “I was going to show Tom to a few of our people. I think our behavioral modifications have really made a difference.”

  “I’ll say!” Karl laughed and snapped his big fingers in Tom’s face. Tom jumped, but nothing leaped to his lips. “Got nothing clever to say right now, do you, White Fang?”

  Exasperation stole into Mr. Prestwick’s voice. “Karl, please.”

  “Yeah, sorry.” Karl grinned viciously at Mr. Prestwick. “I just wanna say, whatever you’re sticking in him, I like it.”

  “We’re trying to cultivate a suitable public persona for the Combatants we sponsor. Dignified, respectful, polite.” Mr. Prestwick spoke this pointedly, but from the oblivious smirk on Karl’s face, the large boy obviously didn’t realize Mr. Prestwick was speaking of him, too. “Tom seems to be responding very well to the reprogramming.”

  Reprogramming. They’d been reprogramming him. The vague, murky wrongness of the last several days began to take form in his head, began to make sense. Tom suddenly understood just what was happening, yet he couldn’t seem to translate the thought into action. He found himself staring at the portcullis, the steel bars that could be jammed into the ground like a cage. He could get up and walk out, close that behind him. Then they couldn’t catch him. He needed to use his arms and legs and do it. And his brain needed to agree to let him do it. He could escape, and tell someone. . . .

  His brain halted him with a thought, utterly foreign: That wouldn’t be a good idea. Mr. Prestwick’s generously given me his time and attention. Why would I leave?

  And Tom couldn’t escape. Couldn’t budge. Mr. Prestwick smiled at him and he smiled back. But the two impulses—escape and compliance—warred in his brain. He still hadn’t managed to tear his brain from it enough to read the menu by the time the waiter came by, so Mr. Prestwick put in an order for him. Salmon.

  Karl jabbed his thumb at Tom. “He’s got a huge problem with authority. That’s why he didn’t order something the way you told him to.”

  Mr. Prestwick brushed him off. “It will be fine, Karl. We have this under control.”

  After lunch, Mr. Prestwick took Tom around the room and introduced him over and over as “our newest acquisition” to various executives with Dominion Agra and its partner companies. And Tom shook the hands, and spoke when spoken to, because he couldn’t seem to ignore the urge to conduct himself in a way that would do credit to those who had taken the time to invest in him.

  One man Tom recognized as Yuri’s visitor in the Spire. Mr. Prestwick halted Tom with a hand to the shoulder and whispered hastily in his ear, “That man is Joseph Vengerov. He’s the founder and majority shareholder of Obsidian Corp. That makes him a very important person. Show him your utmost respect.”

  If Tom could’ve, he would’ve done everything he could to disrespect Vengerov—just to spite Dal— Mr. Prestwick. But instead he stayed silent as the light-haired man with pale eyebrows looked him over, then remarked in an accent that sounded like upper-crust British mixed with something else, “And how is this project coming?”

  “Very well,” Mr. Prestwick assured him. “The software’s taking well. It’s everything you said it would be. I think we’ll be sending much more business your way in the near future. I’m sure we’ll find other trainees who’ll suit us.”

  “As long as you do your research. What of this one? You’re certain you thoroughly combed his background before the install? I told you, there will be a marked personality change, and I’d rather avoid a public lawsuit.”

  Mr. Prestwick shrugged negligently. “Karl assures me that Raines’s contact with most of the officers is so limited, it’s nonexistent. No one will notice. As for that fellow who works on their software there—”

  “James Blackburn, yes.”

  “Outright adversarial.”

  Vengerov shook his head. “Blackburn was never my concern. He’s quite easy to neutralize, if you push the right buttons—and the boy’s programmed to do exactly that, if necessary. What I want to know about is the family situation. I know about the mother, naturally. What about the father? Will he make trouble for us over this?”

  Mr. Prestwick laughed. “It’s what, mid-afternoon on the West Coast? His old man’s still lying in a pool of last night’s vomit somewhere—isn’t that right, son?” He clapped Tom’s back.

  Tom looked at him. A mental image of gouging out Mr. Prestwick’s eyes passed through his brain, then the repressive voice in his head: Mr. Prestwick is my friend. Mr. Prestwick is always right. Public displays of temper don’t become me.

  Mr. Prestwick’s hand squeezed on his shoulder. “Isn’t it right?”

  Agree with Mr. Prestwick.

  Tom choked back the words that wanted to come up. Never. He would never say them.

  “Well before, he was—” Mr. Prestwick began.

  Vengerov held up a finger, eyes like a hawk’s on Tom. “This is a critical test of the software. Make him agree with you.”

  Mr. Prestwick turned back to Tom, grabbed his shoulder again. “Isn’t it right, Tom?”

  Tom’s teeth ground together so hard his jaw ached. Vengerov and
Mr. Prestwick both watched him closely, and that voice in his head commanded, Agree with Mr. Prestwick. He felt like something was squeezing his skull, crushing it.

  “Isn’t it right?” Mr. Prestwick said, voice hard.

  AGREE WITH MR. PRESTWICK.

  “Yes, he probably is,” Tom said. Then he felt a sudden, insane relief like a vise had stopped squeezing his head.

  Vengerov nodded crisply, then shook Mr. Prestwick’s hand. “My people will call yours with the bill.”

  “Always a pleasure to do business with you.”

  Soon after that, Tom was sent back to the private neural interface for his next packet of software. He passed right by the portcullis, mere feet away, and couldn’t seem to tear his gaze from it as he headed to the private neural access room. Then he hooked himself in to receive more and more programming in his brain.

  THE NEXT FEW times Tom met Medusa, he did it in free hours using a VR parlor in the Pentagon City Mall. He couldn’t bring himself to sneak into Blackburn’s office or the officers’ lounge again, because for some reason, there was this voice in the back of his head warning him, Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t attract Blackburn’s attention. Don’t break rules.

  It was foreign, and sometimes made him feel a bit ill whenever he heard it, but he couldn’t seem to ignore it without that feeling like his head was about to be crushed. And as soon as he thought about something else, he couldn’t even remember the voice was there.

  So he didn’t hook in. He just logged in from a VR parlor and faced her in regular video games, missing the full fighting experience. But he stopped caring as they fought in one sim after another. She always beat him. It was always close, too—but there was one move she made that he didn’t, one moment she was faster than he was.

  Medusa wasn’t a big talker, and Tom liked fighting more than talking, so they didn’t get much use out of the computerized voices the first couple times. But then they began using voice chat, and the taunts started. Tom never won the games, so he started rubbing his small victories in her face. (“Aw, look at that—you thought you were going to shoot me. But hey, at least you killed that frightened villager, instead.”) She started rubbing her large victories in his face. (“Oh no, where did your head go? Maybe it got tired of not being used?”) Sometimes they lingered after the battles, talking about what had happened. (“If I’d just ducked, I’d have had you. I had a dragonslayer ax.” “No, because I was waiting for you to duck, and I had a dagger ready.”) Then sometimes, the talk strayed to the real-life battles Medusa fought.