Vortex

  Ugh, Heather thought.

  So what now? Send, Tom thought.

  Yes, why won’t someone tell me what to think about? Send, Wyatt thought.

  You guys don’t need to think send, Heather thought. I want you all to stop thinking send.

  Send, Tom thought. He couldn’t help it.

  Just then, Karl’s name appeared in the IRC. Stupid Fido.

  I hate Karl. Die horribly, Karl, Tom thought. Then, feeling a malicious glee, Send.

  I want to jam a gun barrel down Raines’s throat and see him choke on it, Karl thought.

  God, Karl, Heather thought. Issues?

  Ha-ha-ha-ha, appeared as Tom’s text, since the laughter wasn’t coming from his lips.

  Hate him, hate him, gonna kill him . . . Karl thought.

  Hates me so much and yet he can’t pull off a single threat, Tom thought gleefully. Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha . . .

  A string of swearwords was Karl’s response, and for a moment they drowned out all the other text in the IRC. Tom laughed harder and harder as they went on and on, and soon Karl’s swearing kept getting punctured by random “ha’s.”

  This is degenerating into chaos, Heather thought.

  Elliott thought, I need to talk to Karl later. I find this rather disturbing.

  I’m not a little kid, Karl thought. Elliot acts like we’re all five.

  Karl’s frequent, noisome farts, Tom thought.

  That launched another long string of profanity, interspersed only by Wyatt’s idle thought: I made that program work, and Tom’s, Ha-ha-ha-ha.

  Lieutenant Blackburn patted me on the back when he saw it, Wyatt thought. He said I’m smart. My parents never say nice things to me.

  How sad and pathetic, Heather thought.

  Bash his smug face, break his teeth out. Blood dripping out instead of that big, self-satisfied grin, Karl thought.

  But I said you looked pretty that time you wore makeup, Karl, Tom thought.

  More swearing from Karl.

  And then Elliot: Tom must know he’s provoking him. Clever kid but I swear he’d prod a sleeping bear with a stick.

  Elliot thinks I’m clever, Tom thought, surprised. Or stupid.

  High-spirited, but needs guidance and some table manners, Elliot thought. Sorry, Tom, musing here. Ignore me.

  Table manners? Tom wondered.

  Karl really hates Tom. He doesn’t get Tom. Tom’s a lot deeper than he seems, Wyatt thought. Wait. Don’t think about Tom. Tom. Tom. Why isn’t there a send button so I can choose not to press send?

  Send, Tom thought again. He still couldn’t help it. What are you thinking about me?

  Stop it. Stop it. You’re not allowed to do that, Wyatt sent. Don’t send. Don’t send. Don’t send.

  Send, Elliot thought.

  1 . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 5 . . . Wyatt thought.

  Very clever focusing her thoughts on the Fibonacci sequence, Elliot thought.

  I hate her, Heather thought.

  I want Raines to die and stop being here, Karl thought.

  Just needs guidance to channel some of that restless energy into something productive, Elliot thought. So much potential but he sabotages himself.

  Nigel was right. He always said Elliot acts like a day camp counselor, Heather thought.

  34 . . . 55 . . . Wyatt thought. Boobs. No!

  Boobs, Tom thought.

  Raines choking, Karl thought.

  Jesus, Karl, Elliot thought.

  These people are wasting my time, Heather thought.

  She ended the connection abruptly. Tom felt a moment of shock when his vision flooded with light again and he could see the others blinking around him, pulling out the neural wires connecting them to the decagon. Wyatt ducked her head and made herself as small as possible. Karl was flushed bright red. Only Elliot was smiling gamely. Heather threw them all a look of utter contempt but managed a stiff nod. “Okay, looks like you guys got the basics of it.”

  The rest of the hour, they rotated across the room to the other three decagons with CamCos stationed at them. Wyatt’s number sequences grew more intricate, and Tom, for his part, started learning a lot about the CamCos he hadn’t known before.

  At the next decagon, Yosef Saide was pondering whether Tom would’ve succeeded in killing him if he hadn’t been yanked out of the shark scenario, and he was eager to face him in a samurai scenario next time. Cadence Grey had a creepily silent mind, and only the occasional “om” betrayed the fact that she was actively meditating. Emefa Austerley was impatient with this whole exercise, since she imagined herself as a Spartan-warrior type, not a teacher to a bunch of annoying younger trainees—and when were Combatants going to be treated like the serious national assets they were?

  At the third decagon, Snowden Gainey wondered what people thought of him, and Tom let him know by pondering at length the stupidity of the simulation from Applied Scrimmages. Mason Meekins desperately needed to use the bathroom. Britt Schmeiser kept thinking about a girl he met on the publicity tour, which made Wyatt get the word “boobs” in her head again.

  At the fourth decagon, the solemn, dark-haired CamCo Alec Tarsus began thinking right away that Tom was an uneducated simpleton. He also thought Wyatt was too intelligent to function on a normal human level and that was why no one really liked her. This hurt Wyatt’s feelings, which affronted Ralph Bates, who liked her long, beautiful legs. Wyatt thought about how Ralph had given her the initial tour when she arrived at the Spire, and how even back then, he smelled like onions despite the fact that he hadn’t been eating them.

  She hurt Ralph’s feelings, so he consoled himself by thinking she had a horseface, which hurt Wyatt’s feelings and made Tom mad enough to think about punching Ralph’s face in. Ralph thought Tom was as deranged as he’d always heard he was, but Wyatt thought about how fantastic it was that Tom threatened people on her behalf. Lea Styron was annoyed by this because she felt that Wyatt shouldn’t be encouraging Tom’s behavior. Chivalry wasn’t charming, it was a weapon of patriarchy, and all in all, this felt like a waste of time to her because she’d already decided she wanted to work with Walton Covner. Tom spent the rest of the time thinking about gnome minions, which unfortunately, confirmed Alec Tarsus’s simpleton theory.

  Soon, the entire group broke up, and the veteran CamCos gathered together to laugh over things they’d gleaned from the thoughts of younger trainees.

  All except Heather. She stood apart from the group, glared at the rest a moment, then stalked out of the room. Tom remembered what Wyatt had said earlier and nudged her. “So what happened with her?”

  Wyatt beckoned for him to walk to the stairwell with her, and even once they were enclosed in there, she spoke in a whisper. “During the CamCo publicity blitzes, someone began leaking rumors about the other CamCos to the tabloids. True stuff the public couldn’t know.”

  Tom remembered those internet rumors he’d seen about the CamCos. “Britt Schmeiser’s weekend of debauchery?”

  She nodded. “That sort of thing. Alec Tarsus net-sent me over vacation and asked if I could figure out who was doing it. I traced it to Heather. I guess she wanted to give her own image a boost by making the other CamCos look bad. I told General Marsh. She ended up getting yanked from all her PR gigs.”

  “Good job.”

  “Thanks.” Wyatt ducked her head, her dark hair sliding in front of her face. “Tom, I have to ask you something. It’s very important. Above all, I need you to be completely honest, whatever consequences might ensue. Can you do this for me?”

  Perplexed, he said, “Yeah, hit me.”

  She twisted her fingers together, resembling a nervous squirrel. “Do I really have a horseface?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He expected that to make her feel better. Instead, Wyatt’s scowl deepened. “You don’t have to lie to me!”

  And to his bewilderment, she stalked off down the stairs without him.

  After dinner, Tom headed to his bunk, and there he discovere
d that Vik had been busy. At some point in the evening Vik had duplicated most of the bunk template Wyatt had given him, sneaked in, and transformed Tom’s bunk.

  Tom turned around and around to take in the full tableau. There were posters on the wall of angry-looking Wyatt scowling at Tom and following him with her eyes. Other images featured freeze-frames of Tom’s greatest embarrassments—Tom as a sheep, Tom styling his hair with gel in front of a mirror with a very prissy look on his face after Dalton Prestwick of Dominion Agra reprogrammed him, Tom eating steak off a knife. And there was a massive Tom statue that resembled Vik’s statue. It opened its mouth and proclaimed: “IT IS 1915 AND THE GORMLESS CRETIN SAYS: DERP!”

  Tom took his revenge on Vik later that night when they battled in Samurai Eternity, and Tom ripped Vik’s simulated head off with his bare hands.

  “Augh,” Vik cried, tearing off his wired gloves, as the statue boomed, “IT IS 2115 AND THE GORMLESS CRETIN SAYS: DERP!”

  “Oh, look at your head, dripping with blood and subcutaneous tissue,” Tom told him, holding the head between his wired gloves. “What is it saying? What is it?” He leaned in closer. “It says, ‘Tom will beat you to death with your own head if that statue doesn’t stop talking.’”

  Vik scratched his real head. “Is that what it said? I have this feeling my head is very articulate, but whenever you translate something, all I hear is ‘derp, derp, derp, derp, derp.’ That’s something you’d say, Tom.”

  “You asked for this,” Tom said grimly, then grasped Vik’s simulated head by the hair and wielded it like a mallet, beating Vik over the virtual shoulders with it as Vik cackled away. Then Vik reared up, hands aloft, and surrendered. He deleted the audio feature from the template later that night. The gormless cretin statue became a mercifully silent one.

  Tom never admitted something to him, though: he was extremely pleased with the new bunk template. All the emptiness he’d felt without Vik in there had been chased away by the decorations, the visible warning that his best friend would be tormenting him for years to come, whether they were roommates or not.

  CHAPTER SIX

  FRIDAY MORNING, TOM woke up to a ping: Consciousness initiated. The time is 0520. He hadn’t even sat up before another ping demanded that he select his attire for his visit to the Coalition companies, and a third ping requested he select a departure time between 0600 and 0700. Tom found Vik’s name already in a slot and selected that one.

  Tom turned his attention to the clothing prompt, and scrolled through question after question. He chose the first option for color of tie, the first style of suit, the first style of loafer, and kept going through the text that way until it stopped annoying him. After his shower, he followed the directions in his neural processor to the twelfth-floor depository. There, he found himself in a large room filled with rounded, plastic drawers. One of the drawers in the wall slid open, revealing a suit and shirt hanging on a rack. Tom snatched them, shrugged off his uniform, and pulled them on.

  Next, a smaller drawer popped open, spitting out shoes, socks, and a tie. Tom donned them, too, hesitating only when the tie was in hand; he couldn’t help remembering Dalton Prestwick showing him how to tie one. He gritted his teeth and put it on anyway. Then he hurled his uniform down a waiting laundry chute and set off downstairs.

  Vik met him within minutes, the mess hall still dim with early morning. They were both startled when Yuri arrived in a suit of his own.

  “What are you doing, man?” Vik exclaimed. “Get your beauty sleep, Yuri. We’re the ones stuck doing some boring meetings.”

  “I have been invited to accompany you.”

  “Really? That’s awesome!” Tom exclaimed. Maybe it was a good sign if Yuri was allowed to attend an event just for Middles.

  But there was something slightly sad in Yuri’s blue eyes, even though he smiled. “Yes. It is.”

  WHEN WYATT JOINED them, they headed to the Mezzanine. It wasn’t listed as an official floor in the Spire, but the instructions in their neural processors told them to press and hold floors 1, 4, and 9 to get down there. Yuri had received a special exemption to unlock the Mezzanine in his processor, so he spent the whole ride pressing them for information about what else he wasn’t seeing. Tom and Vik had fun making things up.

  “You are not being honest,” Yuri said.

  “We totally are,” Tom replied.

  “I do not believe there is a coed naked romping court. You are inventing this.”

  “Frankly, I’m offended by your accusation,” Vik said indignantly. “Because of this, we’re not bringing you to the CNRC next time we go, are we, Tom?”

  Tom shook his head. “No way. If you don’t believe us, you don’t romp in our court. You can romp in someone else’s court.”

  Yuri scowled at them.

  “Don’t worry, they’re making it all up,” Wyatt assured Yuri, as though anyone doubted it.

  They emerged into a marble-floored corridor with a bubbling fountain in the center and crisp signs indicating various sectors of the Mezzanine. One was an administrative wing, another led straight to the hybrid fission-fusion nuclear reactor, another led to something called the Vault that was so restricted, looking in that direction plastered warnings in their vision centers: Intruders shot on sight, which made them all walk a bit faster past it. The fourth sector led to the Pentagon, and the fifth to a room empty but for two rows of fake trees and at the far wall a massive set of glass double doors that gazed into pure darkness. Tom’s neural processor told him this was the entrance to the Interstice and that he should walk inside.

  “What is an ‘Interstice’?” Vik said.

  “Obviously some mode of transportation,” Wyatt said.

  “That’s helpful, Evil Wench.”

  They ventured through the fake trees, and something triggered. Green lines slashed from the plastic trunks, honing in on their eyes. One by one, their retinas were scanned, and after the green lights bit into Tom’s eyes, he saw words before his vision center: Identity verified. Trainee Raines, Thomas. Proceed to the doors.

  They’d all received the same notice, so they found themselves standing there, shoulder to shoulder before the glass doors that led to the black chamber beyond.

  And then a mechanized voice boomed in the air: “Decompression sequence initiated.”

  Vik whirled around, genuinely alarmed. “Decompression in here?”

  “Out there,” Wyatt said, poking her finger to indicate the room beyond the glass before them. “It can’t be in here because our lungs would’ve already ruptured.”

  “I would have noticed that,” Tom said.

  Yuri nodded. “And then our blood would boil.”

  “I’d notice that, too,” Tom said.

  He spotted something large and metallic rising into view in the chamber beyond the doors. It clanged to the ground loudly enough to make them all jump. It looked like a miniature metallic train car, sitting there in the darkness, the passenger cabin the only source of light in the decompressed room.

  No wonder everyone’s departures had been spread out. The metal train car had a scattering of seats, but it obviously wasn’t meant for a heavy passenger load. Information soared through Tom’s brain: The Interstice is a series of magnetized vacuum tubes designed for traversion by magnetized vactrains propelled by magnetic fields. Given the absence of friction and minimal curvatures in the tubes, maximum speeds can reach 5,000 miles per hour. The vactrain is shielded to protect equipment inside from magnetic forces.

  They all jumped when a mechanized voice boomed from overhead: “Recompression sequence initiated.” A chugging sound pervaded the air. The glass doors slid open to admit them into the room with the train car.

  They all headed over and took seats inside the tiny metallic car. The doors slid shut behind them.

  “Do we . . . press something?” Wyatt asked tentatively.

  And then the mechanized voice boomed from overhead: “Decompression sequence initiated. Prepare for departure to Wynd
ham Harks Headquarters, New York City.”

  The dark chamber depressurized around them, and the floor slid open. Tom caught a last glimpse of the room on the other side of the glass doors with its fake trees, and they were blown with stomach-swooping abruptness into the vacuum tube.

  They all flinched, but they never hit the tracks. The car remained suspended magnetically within the tube, in midair. Pitch-blackness stretched on all sides beyond the lonely confines of their metal car. Then their velocity ticked up, and up, until they were moving several thousand miles per hour. Tom’s stomach danced with mounting speed.

  “So tell us something,” Vik said, folding his arms and leaning back in his seat, eyes on Yuri. “Why are you really going with us?”

  Yuri sighed and draped his arm around Wyatt, sitting rigidly in her seat next to his. “I am being sent because Olivia Ossare believes it would be beneficial for me to see professionals with jobs that are not in the Intrasolar Forces.”

  Olivia was the Spire’s resident social worker. Tom knew that in the past, she’d encouraged Yuri to give up on the Intrasolar Forces, to surrender to the fact that he wasn’t getting promoted.

  “Maybe it’s a good idea,” Vik said.

  Wyatt glared at him. “No, it’s not.” Her scowl warned them to change the subject.

  Vik opened his mouth, then closed it. Tom said nothing. They never talked to Yuri about this. It wasn’t something they did. So they moved on to something else.

  They reached New York in no time. The vactrain admitted them to another dark room that swiftly repressurized, then they clambered out of the vehicle, and headed over to an elevator. It rose to take them to the eighty-third floor of the Wyndham Harks building. The elevator was clear glass, and as soon as they ascended from underground, Tom glimpsed the streets of Manhattan.

  “Curious. I do not see skyboards,” Yuri noted, leaning over to peer up into the sky as they ascended. “This surprises me in a metropolis so large.”

  “They’re up there,” Wyatt noted, her nose pressing to the glass as she leaned forward to see. “People who live in Manhattan pay for optical camouflaging boards in a slightly lower orbit than the skyboards. That way, they angle the images away from this area of the city. In Connecticut where I live, people pay for it, too.”