Catalyst

by S. J. Kincaid

  “Not the casino part. That’s real. I mean . . . Oh, you wouldn’t understand. I saw some of his memories when I saw the census device footage, and it was . . . He’s like two people. There’s the way he acts and there’s the way he really is. If you knew the stuff I knew, you wouldn’t have given him that program.”

  There was a thump as Vik settled on the floor. Then he sighed. “Okay, I have no idea what you’re talking about here, but I’ll give you a few points. There are things that don’t add up, and I’ve noticed. I’m not blind. For instance, how did Tom get promoted? Tom was blacklisted by the Coalition companies. We all knew that. He had no chance of making Upper Company. But here he is, in Upper Company. Suddenly, he got promoted. How’d that happen? He never explained it. It makes no sense.”

  “There’s something I’ve wondered about, too,” Wyatt chimed in, suddenly eager. “How did Tom block off the cell phones of all the people in the Beringer Cub? I know it’s been a long time, but that’s always bothered me.”

  “The cell phones?”

  “Tom locked them inside, and then they got stuck there all night. Nothing should have stopped them from calling for help unless he jammed their cell phones, but how did he do that? The only way I can think of is jamming the satellites, but that’s impossible.”

  “Tom said something once about satellites . . .” Vik trailed off. “No, forget it. I don’t really know what he was saying. But you know, speaking of Tom lying, he didn’t tell us the truth about getting stuck outside in Antarctica for a long time. I thought that was weird. Why did he lie to us for so long? And with that stupid story about going to the bathroom and going out the wrong door, too. He didn’t tell us Vengerov had driven him out there. Why hide that from us?”

  Wyatt’s voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Remember how he knew in Obsidian Corp. that the alarms were about to go off? He knew Joseph Vengerov had detected us. He warned us. And he specifically said it was Joseph Vengerov who knew, and a few minutes later, Joseph Vengerov himself starts talking to us over the intercom. Tom knew Vengerov was handling the situation personally. How is that possible?”

  Vik snapped his fingers. “For that matter, remember when Medusa’s ship busted into the warehouse? Tom wasn’t in there with us. He was outside. Remember that?”

  Wyatt drew a sharp breath. “You’re right. He did go outside. When the warehouse started burning and you grabbed me and we couldn’t find him, but then he ran in and helped us—he ran in from the outside.”

  “I saw his face. He was just as surprised as we were when Medusa showed up, so he wasn’t out there waiting for her to rescue us. . . . What was he doing out there if he wasn’t waiting for her?”

  “I don’t know. He knew he’d freeze to death outside. Why would he go out there?”

  Vik started laughing. “Enslow, you don’t know this guy, either. Neither of us does. At all. He seriously has a secret life.” He shook Tom’s shoulder. “Are you in the CIA, Tom?”

  “We should talk to Yuri. He has to have noticed things, too.”

  “Why haven’t we asked each other this stuff before?”

  “You call me Man Hands, and you put weird templates in my bunk. That’s not great grounds for conversation.”

  “First off, the Man Hands ship sailed long ago. I defy you to remember any occasion I’ve called you that since we were fifteen . . . plus, you can’t take me seriously. I’ve got three sisters. In the Ashwan household, you learn young: mock or be mocked. I’m a mocker, but I do it out of love. Tom gets that. You should, too.”

  “You don’t mock Yuri.”

  “The Android’s a tough case. What do I make fun of? The chiseled good looks or the eight-pack abs, or maybe the way he climbed Annapurna when he was eleven? No, that won’t work. Your boyfriend is as close as a real person can get to being Superman. Not much to mock there.”

  “So . . . so what do you think we should do about this Tom thing?”

  “The part where he’s unconscious or the part where he has a secret life?”

  “The second one. If we ask him, he’ll just lie.”

  “There’s gotta be some explanation, Enslow. We’ll investigate.”

  “Investigate Tom?”

  “Why not?” A rustling as Vik rose to his feet. “I’m not sure where to start, but—”

  “I know where. He told me recently that he had a way to talk to Medusa that no one could detect, but he couldn’t explain it to me. I thought he was deluding himself. But then I thought about it, and he really had been getting away with talking to her without anyone noticing for a while. He was sure he couldn’t possibly get caught. For some reason.”

  “Maybe there’s something to that.”

  “Maybe there is.”

  After a silence, Vik said, “You realize, his ears can probably hear us right now. Even if his hippocampus isn’t doing its job right now, the neural processor is. He’s going to know everything we’ve talked about here when he wakes up. Isn’t that right, Gormless One?” A hand jostled Tom.

  “Then I’ll remove the time segment from his processor.” Fingers typing on a keyboard.

  “Wait, Evil Wench. You’re not actually going to—”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “RISE AND SHINE, Doctor of Gormless Cretinism.”

  Tom opened his eyes and found himself back in his bunk, Vik gazing down at him. His chronometer said it was 0645. Vik kept shaking him lightly.

  “Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t wake up on time. You’d better get moving if you don’t want more penalty hours.”

  Tom sat up blearily. He felt awful. “Vik?”

  Vik shook his head. “You didn’t listen to me last night, did you? I said use the program once, maybe two or three times spaced out—emphasis on that—if it didn’t take the first time. I did not say use it nine times, and I definitely didn’t say ten and certainly not eleven. Eleven times, Tom! That’s how many times Wyatt says you used the program. Are you a madman?”

  “Just an idiot,” Tom said, his head throbbing dully, his mouth like sandpaper. He was disturbed to find he couldn’t remember anything after his clumsy walk to Wyatt’s bunk. Even the processor wouldn’t retrieve the memory for him.

  “How’d I get here?” Tom looked around his bunk. “What happened?”

  “You passed out on Wyatt’s floor. I had to sneak you back in here and pay Clint twenty bucks to keep his mouth shut. You owe me twenty bucks, by the way.”

  Tom scrolled through the other memories—the giddy laughter with Iman, wading through the reflection pool, kissing her, the way everything disappeared but the glowing moment around them. He dwelled on that. Strange how amazing that night had become after using the program.

  Everything had come so easily. All the awkwardness between them had vanished, replaced by this magnetic sort of chemistry, and he really had felt like he was being shockingly charming.

  “That program was amazing, Vik,” Tom murmured, trying to ignore the way his joints ached. He felt like he’d found something truly useful here, the answer to some question he’d never thought to ask. He wanted to feel that way all the time. “Seriously, man, thank you. That made everything so much easier. We had a great time after that.”

  Vik eyed him. “Yeah, well, don’t get used to it. Next time, you’ve got to use your own shocking charm or you’ll never figure out how to act around her.”

  “I have no shocking charm, man. I have to use yours. It took me, like, five hits to feel it, so I promise I won’t use more than that next time.”

  “No, Doctor! No abusing alcohol emulators.”

  Tom’s smile dropped from his lips. He felt a cold pit grow in his stomach. “That’s what that was?”

  “What did you think?”

  Tom felt sick, suddenly. Truly sick.

  “You look dreadful,” Vik said che
erfully, clapping his back. “Good news and bad news. The bad news is, that feeling’s probably going to last most of the day.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “The good news is, as you painfully suffer through your day, I get to taunt you for ignoring my advice.” He swaggered out, leaving Tom sitting in his bed in the sudden stillness.

  The world felt flat today, the colors less vivid. Even when Clint came in from his shower and hooted something about Tom fainting and needing to be “carried in by his boyfriend,” Tom only halfheartedly threatened him with bodily harm.

  Some part of him had always resented his father, the way Neil had never just stopped drinking, the way he’d never managed to control himself. As Tom stood under the steady stream of the shower, he thought of Neil moving through a world where every door was shut to him, where someone like him counted for nothing and unfairness was rewarded. A guy stuck taking care of a small kid he probably never wanted and never knew how to raise, a kid who he probably thought was going to end up at the same dead end he was.

  For the first time in his life, Tom understood the allure of something that erased all doubts, all insecurities, something that gave an artificial sense of power where there was none, confidence where it was missing. He could see suddenly how Neil slipped into using it often, and then every day.

  And the last time he saw Neil, Tom had thrown the full force of his contempt and resentment in his face. It didn’t matter why he’d done it, even if he’d done it for Neil—that part had been real. Whatever happened in the years to come, Tom had unleashed that between them and he could never, never take it back.

  THE POSITIVE EFFECTS of the program had all been temporary. Tom had awoken totally infatuated with Iman Attar, but as soon as their eyes met the next morning, he realized that without Vik’s program, they’d lost all that magnetism that had drawn them together.

  Even the heady sense Tom had at the time—that this was so much easier than Medusa—had somehow gone away, also. Too awkward to approach Iman suddenly, Tom sat with his friends, and she sat with hers, even though they now had open seating at lunch again and could easily have grabbed seats together.

  He saw Iman touch her forearm keyboard, and then a text appeared before Tom’s vision center. I’m worried you have the wrong idea about me.

  Tom raised his eyebrows questioningly and looked at her through the crowd. “Why?” he mouthed.

  I think we went way too fast.

  Confused, he typed back, We can slow down. Whatever you want.

  She frowned. I don’t know if this is a good idea. Maybe we’re not right for each other.

  Tom was a bit surprised. She was dumping him? Already? Where had this come from? But he made sure not to react. Fine. Let’s forget about it all.

  A look of hurt fluttered across her face, then Iman turned away and said something to Jennifer Nguyen. Jenny began stroking her back and darting angry looks Tom’s way, like he’d been the one who did the dumping, not the other way around.

  Tom shook it off. He did not get girls. He tried focusing on his friends, where Wyatt was busy telling Yuri about her work with Irene Frayne over the last few weeks. The NSA agent had been in the Pentagonal Spire most every day of late. She’d enlisted Wyatt’s help tracking down the ghost in the machine.

  “She thinks the ghost has military training. The Spire’s one of the most powerful servers in the country, so she’s operating out of here to track him,” Wyatt told them. “And she needs my help to get to know the server.” She beamed, pleased to be useful to someone again. “Ms. Frayne said to me yesterday, ‘You’re very smart, Wyatt.’”

  Yuri blinked, then smiled encouragingly. “You are very smart, Wyatt.”

  Tom and Vik exchanged a glance.

  “What?” Wyatt said, noticing it.

  Vik sighed and leaned his elbows on the table. “I need to tell you something, too, Enslow: the sky is blue.”

  “Wyatt, you’ve gotta know this,” Tom said, gesturing to their table. “This is a table.”

  Vik lifted his fork up for her to see. “I have a fork in my hand.”

  “Vik uses forks to put food in his mouth,” Tom explained to her as Vik mimed using his fork to put food in his mouth. Tom pretended to be amazed watching someone use a fork to eat.

  “This is not nice,” Yuri rebuked them.

  “It’s okay, Yuri. I get it,” Wyatt said, turning faintly pink. She’d caught the point, though: Frayne was just stating the obvious, calling her “really smart.” “It was nice to hear. That’s all. Especially since . . .” She twirled a salt shaker between her fingers. “I know Lieutenant Blackburn doesn’t handle software writing anymore, so we couldn’t work together anyway. I’ve been starting to think he’ll never trust me again, either, after what happened.”

  A grim silence fell among all of them, because she didn’t need to say why. She’d unscrambled Yuri and then lied to Blackburn about it. It wasn’t the first time the trust between them, so tenuous, had been snapped.

  “But I don’t care,” Wyatt said after a moment, firming her jaw. “He taught me all he could, and now I can help Ms. Frayne.”

  “Why have I never seen this woman?” Vik wondered.

  Tom looked at him incredulously. “Are you blind? She’s here every day, man.”

  “It’s because she’s in stealth mode,” Wyatt said.

  “Huh?” Tom and Vik both said.

  “Stealth mode,” Wyatt said. “You know how there were areas of the Spire we didn’t see until we were Middles?”

  “I see them all now,” Yuri reported happily. Then, questioningly, “Don’t I?”

  Tom shrugged. As far as he knew, they saw everything now.

  “My point is,” Wyatt said, “General Marsh said sensitive personnel are blocked from our processors, too. Remember?”

  “I see Frayne, though,” Tom pointed out.

  “Of course. She already knows you. You two have interacted. She authorized you to see her and probably never got around to deauthorizing you.”

  “Are there other people we are not able to be seeing?” Yuri whispered in her ear.

  “No. Not that I know about. Just her,” Wyatt said. “I think.”

  Tom resolved to hook into a surveillance camera and check tonight—just to be very sure.

  “There’s an invisible woman walking around here,” Vik said slowly, as though trying to wrap his brain around the idea. “Why would she do that? It’s creepy.”

  “She doesn’t want to be bothered by cadets,” Wyatt said.

  Vik clanked his fork down decisively. “That’s not it. You know why she walks around invisibly? I bet it’s because she wants to see us naked.”

  “Think so?” Tom said, intrigued.

  “No!” Wyatt cried. “She doesn’t.”

  “She’s not doing it for an operation,” Vik pointed out, “and she’s not getting some optical camouflage suits that could possibly be detected. No, she specifically wants to be totally invisible, and what’s more, totally invisible to us. You know why? Because she wants to see some naked cadets. Well, you watch. I’m going to give her what she wants. She’s going to see all the naked Indian she can handle.”

  “Please don’t do that,” Wyatt said. “She’s just an average person trying to do her job and support her family. She doesn’t deserve that.”

  Vik considered that. “I’m feeling faintly insulted.”

  “Just because you’d use stealth mode to see naked people, doesn’t mean other people would,” Wyatt informed him.

  “I would,” Tom said, mouth full.

  Wyatt scowled. “Just because you and Tom would use it for that, doesn’t mean other people would.”

  All three of them looked at Yuri.

  “I wish to be neutral,” Yuri declared, to everyone’s disappointment.

  “So about legs . . .” Vik said, and Yuri frowned and kicked him under the table.

  Tom found his gaze drifting across the mess hall, his mind on Frayne—
using the Spire’s server to hunt the ghost. This person acting in the ghost’s name was going to bring more and more heat on his head . . . unless the killing of those executives was over?

  THE NEXT DAY, he found out it was not. Xi Quinghong, the CEO of Preeminent Communications, had been slain by his own company’s Praetorians in its Beijing office. Ingvar Harde, chief shareholder of Lexicon Mobile, met the same fate from his own personal Praetorians. Ten Coalition executives in total perished this time around.

  Speculation heated up. Everywhere Tom turned, he heard people wonder why no Obsidian Corp. or LM Lymer Fleet executives had been killed. People pointed out that the machines of those two companies were involved every single time.

  And then the big leak happened: someone plastered all over the internet proof that LM Lymer Fleet and Obsidian Corp. were both controlled by Joseph Vengerov.

  Tom turned to gaze at Blackburn across the mess hall the day that incredible news broke. He’d plundered that information from Obsidian Corp.’s servers the year before at meet and greets. Blackburn had clung to that damaging piece of leverage since that visit. Now it was out.

  Tom saw the cold satisfaction on the man’s scarred face as he stood with the other soldiers, watching footage on the screens from the blistering debates on the Senate floor. Politicians funded by Obsidian Corporation were at war with politicians funded by other Coalition companies, because other Coalition executives were beginning to take issue with Joseph Vengerov, the man whose top executives were immune to the attacks, the man whose machines were behind the attacks, and now the man who’d deceived them about his financial ties with an enemy company.

  The targeted assassinations had damaged Obsidian Corp.’s reputation and seemed to accomplish with swift, brutal efficiency what nothing else could: the cancellation of the beta test. The mass removal of plebes with Austere-grade processors began.

  Tom caught up to Zane right as he was being escorted out of the Spire. The small kid was wearing civilian clothes, his face foggy, lost.

  “Zane!”

  Zane looked at him, confused. Tom knew outside pressure had been applied, probably by other companies, forcing the suspension of the rollout of Austere-grade processors. Joseph Vengerov had regretfully withdrawn his sponsorship offer, as Obsidian Corp. had too much of a legal battle on its hands to court the public right now.