Insignia

  Tom remembered the profile information he’d seen in that fleeting second, every last word of it. “Jason Chang, BSN. Top secret LANDLOCK-6 . . . How did I remember that?”

  “You have a photographic memory now, Mr. Raines, and there’s a directory in your processor of everyone’s names. You’ll see a basic information list the first time you look directly at the faces of the other personnel here in the Spire, and once you’ve seen it, you won’t ever forget it. Now, let’s test your internal chronometer. What’s the time?”

  “Oh five fifty-three,” Tom answered immediately. Then he realized, surprised, that he was thinking in the military’s twenty-four-hour time.

  “Well done.”

  He blinked three times. He watched the lieutenant lifting a bedside conferencer, tapping in 1-380-4198-4885. Chang spoke, “Dr. Gonzales, Mr. Raines is A and O times three. I understand. I’ll run him through the standard assessment.”

  “I feel strange.” Tom’s voice registered in his brain, lower than he remembered.

  “It’s natural.” Lieutenant Chang slanted him a dark gaze from almond-shaped eyes. “Your brain needs to adjust to the software. You’ll have difficulty at first sorting through the influx of data. It will pass.”

  Tom glanced up at a seventy-watt light glowing overhead. He’d gazed at this light all day. He’d been awake for a while, blinking at fifteen second intervals. Eighteen days, four hours, nine minutes, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight seconds . . .

  “I’ve been awake,” Tom realized. “My surgery was eighteen days ago.”

  Chang peeled a blood pressure cuff from Tom’s arm. “Your surgery was eighteen days ago, but no, you have not been awake in the traditional sense. Your brain’s been undergoing restructuring. The implanted trainees all have to optimize. You’ve been conscious and unconscious at intervals, but you were unaware. Your mind needed to adjust to the new neural pathways forged by the hardware in your head. Your brain will regain homeostasis now that you’re awake. The extra details will disappear. Soon enough, you’ll feel like your old self again. Better than your old self, actually.”

  Even now, Tom felt like he was regaining a sense of normalcy. He raised his hand to touch his scalp. Only the faintest trace of a scar was there. A thin incision of 3.1 centimeters. His hair was back, 0.7 centimeters of it. He’d been lying here long enough for it to grow. His hand roved down to a numb spot on the back of his neck, and he found a flat, metal port there. A neural access port. He just knew what it was.

  “Now, Plebe, I’m going to run you through a few procedures to test whether we can send you out yet.”

  “Already?” Tom croaked. “I’m going to combat now?”

  Lieutenant Chang’s laughter rippled through the stale, cold room. “Not that soon. You’ll need years of training before you become a Combatant.”

  “Right.” Tom closed his eyes, because there was a datastream blasting the answer through his head: Standard advancement path in the Intrasolar Forces at the Pentagonal Spire: Initial Training as plebe, followed by Middle Company, Upper Company, and in cases where the trainee is found to excel, Camelot Company, the Combatant group. In cases where a trainee is found unsuitable for intrasolar combat, avenues with other government agencies will be considered, including the NSA, the CIA, the State Department, the . . .

  Tom willed the datastream to stop, and it ceased immediately. So strange. He knew the information was coming from the neural processor, but it had felt like he was thinking it, like it was an ordinary thought that belonged there.

  He was distracted when Chang ran him through the basic assessment, checking his pupils, his sensation of touch, his circulation. And then the lieutenant turned on a recording with various musical notes and asked Tom to identify them.

  “I don’t know anything about music—” Tom began to protest.

  But he did know them. With a strange shock, he listed E, C, D, A.

  The nurse saw his shocked face, and patted his shoulder. Then he gestured for Tom to sit up. “We upload a few gigs of information to test you out, plus some class assignments so you don’t start off behind. You should have a reference database for your first week here, correct?”

  Tom’s brain called it up. “Yes.” There was a file manager in his brain. In it were three files: Civilian Classes, Calisthenics, Trainee Specific Programs. And he couldn’t put his finger on how he knew he could just will them to open and peruse them—he just knew already that he could.

  “And where are you supposed to go right now?” Chang asked him.

  “To meet Vikram Ashwan. My new roommate.” Tom paused. Again, something he just knew. “This is so weird.”

  The nurse nodded. “You’ll get used to it, I’m told. You’re dismissed, Plebe.”

  Tom opened his mouth to tell him he didn’t know where to go, but the Pentagonal Spire answered him this time, a mainframe with a careful tracking module following every recruit within its walls, feeding data into Tom’s neural processor.

  Tom hopped down from the bed. His legs held, and he wasn’t even dizzy after lying in bed for three weeks. He started for the door.

  “Ah, Raines—don’t forget this,” Lieutenant Chang called, holding something out in his hand. “It’s yours now.”

  Tom reached out and took the metal object. He held it up and realized it was a Challenge Coin just like the one General Marsh owned. The coin was stamped US INTRASOLAR FORCES. It flashed green when he held it, just like the general’s coin had.

  A strange but awesome feeling shivered through him as he gazed at the bald eagle and realized this was now his.

  He felt Chang’s dark eyes on him. “Welcome to the Pentagonal Spire, Mr. Raines.”

  CHALLENGE COIN IN pocket, Tom followed the map that loomed in his awareness like some nagging worry. The Spire said Vikram was 8.6 meters northwest of him. He stepped through the door into the first floor hallway, and indeed, Vikram was 8.6 meters away from where he’d been. Tom’s neural processor even ticked down the distance as he closed it.

  When he clapped eyes on the Indian boy waiting for him, more text planted itself in his vision:

  NAME: Vikram Ashwan

  RANK: USIF, Grade III Plebe, Alexander Division

  ORIGIN: New Delhi, India

  ACHIEVEMENTS: Top honors for Youth Innovation at the International Science and Engineering Fair, recipient of the Enterprise India Scholarship

  IP: 2053:db7:lj71::338:ll3:6e8

  SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-3

  Tom must’ve looked shell-shocked, because the kid with dark skin, bushy eyebrows, and a high hairline of bristly hair flashed him a grin. “Weird, right?”

  “Weird,” Tom agreed.

  “Great thing is, you and I don’t need introductions, Thomas.”

  “I guess not, Vikram.”

  “Call me Vik. Not Vikram.”

  “Tom. Not Thomas.”

  Vik studied him as they headed toward the elevators. “That’s strange. You have N/A listed under Achievements. Not available?”

  Tom realized Vik must be seeing his profile, the way he’d seen Vik’s. “More like not applicable,” he said honestly.

  Vik raised his eyebrows. “Brace yourself. Everyone here has achievements. You’re going to get asked that a few million more times.”

  “Right. Guess I can’t change it.”

  Vik thought about that. “Actually, you could if you wanted to. There’s a girl who can stick something in there. I heard she tweaked some profiles for people before the last round of promotions. We’ll see her at morning meal formation.”

  The time for the Spire’s formal breakfast popped instantly into Tom’s brain. “At oh seven thirty.”

  “Right, at oh seven thirty, so you’ve got just enough time to get into your uniform.”

  Then, information hit: Uniforms. Black tunics with an Intrasolar Forces insignia on the collar, division-specific insignia on the sleeve, camouflage fatigues, combat boots, gloves, portable keyboard . . .
r />   Tom must’ve stared a bit too long at the sudden images dancing before his eyes, because Vik waved in his face, then jabbed his thumb at the open door to the elevator—something Tom hadn’t even noticed. Tom headed inside, and Vik punched the button for floor six.

  “That data flow’s a pain, right?” Vik eyed him knowingly. “See, neural processors are useful because there’s no fixed time of year for new plebes to join the Spire, but then latecomers have to download a lot more material just to catch up with the trainees who have been around longer. It makes a rough transition even worse.”

  “When did you join?”

  Vik shrugged. “Couple months ago. But I remember it like it just happened. I kept noticing all the stupid details about stuff and couldn’t tune them out, and the processor kept defining every new term. It took me maybe three hours to start getting my head straight.”

  Tom touched the scar on his head. “I don’t think this is so bad now.”

  “Really?” Vik wagged his thick eyebrows. “So you’re saying you’re better at handling a neural processor than I am?”

  There was a note of challenge in his voice that made Tom’s mouth quirk. “Yeah, sure sounds like it.”

  Vik had this crazy gleam in his eyes. “So you don’t need some more sy-nap-tic pru-ning?”

  The term slammed Tom—Synaptic pruning: During the development of infant brains, excess neural connections are culled and destroyed in order for the world to take on a logical representation within the human mind. . . .

  It took Tom several moments to remember himself, to remember how to will off the datastream.

  “Maybe you have fantastic neu-ral e-las-ti-ci-ty?” Vik added.

  That term hit, too: Neural elasticity: Elasticity refers to the ability of the brain to adapt as a result of new experiences by adding or removing neural connections. The brain is most elastic during periods of youth before . . .

  “Or maybe you’ve got—”

  Tom shoved at Vik’s shoulder before he could throw out another term. “Okay, stop!” He laughed. “You got me, okay?”

  Vik gave a laugh that sounded like a giggle.

  “Funny guy,” Tom said.

  “I have a great sense of humor,” Vik agreed. “It’s been called sparkling.”

  The elevator doors slid open on floor six to reveal the plebe common room that Marsh had shown him on his tour.

  Vik waved around them. “On your tour, they probably told you this is the plebe common room? It is. Technically, it is, but we plebes never use it. It’s the largest and best equipped, so the upper-level trainees like to spend their free time here and kick out any plebes who try to linger.”

  “And you guys let them?”

  “Sure,” Vik said gamely. “We all aspire to one day be upper-level trainees who kick plebes out of their own common room. I know I do.”

  They stepped through the door marked Alexander Division into an empty corridor with three hallways branching from it.

  “Here’s Alexander Division, your home while you’re here. I’d call it a dorm, but I think the cruddiest dorms are actually nicer than this. Not much to look at, huh? Come on, we’re down here.”

  In the third hallway, toward the far end of the division, they stepped into a small room with two low beds, stark gray carpets, and off-white walls. There was a small window about the size of Tom’s head that gazed right onto the roof of the Old Pentagon, one story below.

  “Here we are,” Vik said. “Bare walls, and forget about posters or photos or anything—it’s against regulations. You earn more privileges with personalizing your bunk as you move up the ranks.”

  “It’s perfect,” Tom said, meaning it, turning in a slow circle to see the room. His room. He’d never had a room that belonged to him before, even partially.

  “Low standards. Good for you. You’ll like it here.”

  Tom spotted a leg poking out from beyond one of the beds. He strode forward and saw that the leg belonged to an orange-haired kid in a uniform who was sprawled on the floor.

  “Your bed’s that one,” Vik told Tom, indicating the other side of the room.

  “There’s a dead guy on our floor,” Tom pointed out.

  “Yeah, that’s Beamer, our neighbor.” Vik stepped over to Tom’s bed, and kicked open a drawer beneath the mattress. He swept down and yanked out a bundle of fabric. “Here’s your uniform.”

  “There’s a dead Beamer on our floor,” Tom said again.

  Vik dumped the uniform on Tom’s bed. “Not dead. He’s just being Beamer.”

  The orange-haired kid turned in his sleep, showing that he wasn’t dead but more in a stupor. The round, freckled face triggered an information stream in Tom’s head.

  NAME: Stephen Beamer

  RANK: USIF, Grade III Plebe, Alexander Division

  ORIGIN: Seattle, WA

  ACHIEVEMENTS: Winner of the NFIB Young Entrepreneur Scholarship, member of National Association of Young Business Owners

  IP: 2053:db7:lj71::342:ll3:6e8

  SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-3

  “See,” Vik explained, “Beamer made this mistake a few months ago where he snuck outside the DZ—the designated zone—to meet up with his girlfriend from back home . . .”

  “Marsh said something about that!” Tom exclaimed. “The military went to DEFCON-2, right?”

  “Yeah.” Vik laughed. “Then they descended on the girlfriend’s house with helicopters and tanks and a gunship, I think, and gave her dad a heart attack. Literally. So Beamer’s still trying to make it up to his girlfriend. He spends all night talking to her online instead of downloading homework. He’s on restricted libs—you know, restriction of liberties—so I don’t even know where he goes to do that. It defeats the point of the neural processors, though. We have computerized memory. We can put anything we want in our heads, but all that info’s useless if you don’t process it. You have to have time for your brain to make sense of all the data you’ve downloaded.”

  Tom stepped over Beamer toward the clothes Vik had slung over his bed.

  Vik nudged Beamer’s inert leg with his boot, testing how awake he was. “Most people plug in the homework download during their sleep. Beamer crams the homework download into a few hours, so he doesn’t understand any of it. Then he comes staggering in here first thing in the morning and passes out on the floor to make sure I either trip on him on the way out, or drag him to morning meal formation.”

  The inert, orange-haired boy’s eyes snapped open. Beamer sat up so quickly, Tom shot back a step, startled.

  “I object to this discussion,” Beamer informed Tom, his pale face cloudy, making him look for all the world like someone sleep talking. “Vik is casting aspersions on my character. Catabolic processes oxidize carbon-containing nutrients.”

  “What?” Tom said, confused.

  But Beamer slumped back down to the floor and said nothing more. It took Tom a long moment to realize he was unconscious again.

  “Moron,” Vik said fondly, his eyes dancing. “No processing, see? All that info in his brain, none of it in context yet.”

  “Guess not,” Tom murmured. He could kind of sympathize with Beamer there. He felt rather information overloaded himself at the moment.

  “Now hurry up with that uniform before the Android swings by to get us for morning meal formation.”

  “An actual android?” Tom asked. He couldn’t tell what was real and what was science fiction anymore.

  “Nah. That’s what we call Beamer’s roommate, Yuri. He goes jogging every morning even though we have Calisthenics three times a week, and he’s always in a fantastic mood. He’ll help you with homework or move heavy things for you, and he’s always trying to make friends with this weird girl Wyatt Enslow, because he feels sorry for her. Nicest guy you’ll ever meet. Beamer and I have decided he must be an android. An android slash spy.”

  “Spy?” Tom yanked on black tunic, with the eagle insignia on the collar, a single triangular point beneath it. There
was also an Alexander Division sword on the arm. He wriggled on the biker-guy type gloves, and then spotted the last item: a flat keypad.

  His neural processor told him to clamp the metal prongs on the bottom of the keyboard onto the slots of the glove on his nondominant hand.

  “Shove your sleeve over it,” Vik instructed him. “You won’t need the keyboard until later.”

  Tom pressed the keyboard against his forearm, and found it was made of a flexible polymer that bent with his arm. He hooked the ends into the slots on the glove of his left hand, then pulled down his sleeve to keep it in place.

  Vik went on, “So anyway, Beamer’s roommate, Yuri, is Russian, right? He also comes from a connected family. His dad knows this guy who practically founded the Intrasolar Forces. He got Yuri into the Spire, whether the US military wanted him or not. Since Yuri was born and raised in Russia, a lot of people think he’s a spy. The military must think he is, too, since Yuri became a plebe three years ago—and he’s still a plebe today. Most plebes are promoted after a year or so. All the others who began the program when he did have advanced to Upper Company or gone off to work for another government agency by now.”

  Toms tugged on the combat boots, did up the laces, and shoved the ends of his camouflage fatigues in them the way he saw Vik wearing his. “Do you think he’s a spy?”

  “Nah. I told you, man. He’s an android.”

  The doors slid open. In bounded a giant, wavy-haired kid standing at six foot eight, his body a coiled mass of muscle, a good-natured grin on his swarthy, handsome face.

  NAME: Yuri Sysevich

  RANK: USIF, Grade III Plebe, Alexander Division

  Origin: St. Petersburg, Russia

  ACHIEVEMENTS: Chris Canning Award for Academic Excellence, Elsevier Woods Award for Young Humanitarian

  IP: 2053:db7:lj71::236:ll3:6e8

  SECURITY STATUS: Confidential LANDLOCK-1

  Tom stared. He really did have a lower security designation than the rest of them.

  “Why, hullo, fellows. Are you ready to head to breakfast soon?” Yuri’s gaze lit upon Tom. “Ah. And you. You are the new plebe. Timothy Rodale.”