He forgot that when he heard a shrill scream. Tom glanced back in time to see that Beamer had fallen behind into the clasp of the Scottish warriors. A Scotsman drove a sword through his gut.
“Aaah!” Beamer screamed, thrashing on the ground. “The pain. The terrible pain!”
“Oh God, no, Beamer,” Vik cried, anguished. He grabbed Tom by the collar. “For God’s sake, run faster. Run faster or that will be your fate, too!”
Tom’s easy assurance this wasn’t dangerous evaporated into real fear. Vik was panicking, Beamer had screamed like he was being killed. Was something wrong with the simulation? This wasn’t supposed to be like real battle with people being killed, was it?
He was heaving for breath by the time he skidded to a stop before a solid rock wall. That’s when the scenery shifted around him, and he saw Beamer again, standing at the base of a wall, doubled over in laughter.
“Vik, did you see new guy’s face?” Beamer crowed.
Vik bellowed a laugh and socked Tom’s shoulder. “Poor Tom. You really thought he got gutted, huh? Nah, Beamer just bailed on the workout and let them kill him. He’s lazy that way.”
Beamer nodded proudly.
Yuri had skipped the ladders and chosen to scale the rock wall itself. He was already halfway up, but he paused to look down at them and shook his head. “That was not a nice prank to play on Tim.”
Tom understood then: the battlefield really was just a sensory illusion. You couldn’t actually feel anything in an illusion. Beamer had faked the agonized death, and Vik had gone along with it.
“You’re still a funny guy,” Tom told him.
Vik began to hoist himself up the wall. “This is phase two, interval training. You going to die again, Beamer?”
“No way am I climbing up that,” Beamer grumbled, surveying the looming stone wall.
“See you in the next life—or rather, the strength training segment. Come on, Tom.”
Tom followed Vik up the ladders, leaving Beamer behind to the angry Scotsmen. In the real world, this was one of those climbing walls he’d seen. Here in the simulation, it resembled the wall of a castle of sorts. Tom scrambled up the rungs of the ladder, engaging a new set of muscles, and found himself jerking up toward medieval English soldiers waiting at the top, cursing them for being “scurvy barbarian invaders.”
When they reached the top of one wall, another wall presented itself. Behind him, Tom heard more battle cries. He looked back and saw that the massive army of angry Scotsmen was climbing up the walls, too, still chasing them. Beamer got—or rather, let himself be—impaled again. He didn’t fake scream this time. He dropped onto the ground and waved lazily up at Tom and Vik.
Up and down ladders, they were chased, until Tom was heaving for breath—the Scotsmen pursuing relentlessly. And then Tom met the rest of the plebes in a four-walled armory. He followed them, seized a sword off the wall, and nearly dropped it. It was unexpectedly heavy.
“How do you fight with this?” Tom asked Vik, hoisting it up with two hands.
“You don’t fight, really. Lifting it. That’s the point of phase three: strength training.”
Screams pierced the air. Tom braced himself for whatever was coming next.
Japanese ronins rushed into the room.
Tom started laughing. It made no sense having Japanese ronins in a medieval English castle under siege by Scotsmen—but this was great. He hurled himself into fighting with the heavy sword. He ignored the fact that blocking the blows from the ronin invariably began to resemble lifting weights in a gym—the illusion of the fight made it so much better. He saw Vik dodge a sword and spotted Beamer in the corner, getting impaled for a third time. Yuri leaped forward to avenge Beamer and then threw himself gloriously into the battle with two ronins at once, wielding a sword in each hand. Then he heroically stepped between Wyatt and the ronin besieging her and began fighting three ronins, all at once.
“Yuri, stop showing off!” Wyatt snapped at him, shoving him out of her way and taking on the ronin herself again.
And then the ronins faded away, the dank castle walls vanished, and Tom found himself standing in the middle of the arena, heaving for frantic breaths, a thick iron weight clutched in his grip. Yuri had a weight in each of his hands, and he set them on the floor with a plunk. He didn’t even look like he’d broken a sweat.
Vik turned to Tom, his tunic plastered to his chest. “So what do you think?”
Tom managed a breathless reply, “Beats . . . running . . . laps.”
IN THE LOCKER room, Tom’s body shook with exhaustion as he stood beneath the hot jets of the shower, steam curling up around him. His mind swam with the images of angry Scotsmen, charging ronins, and furious English soldiers. He had to remind himself this was not a dream or a hallucination, this was his reality now. His hands scrubbed through his short, spiky hair, and over his face. . . .
Tom froze, startled by smooth skin.
He pressed his fingers over his cheekbones, his forehead, his chin. Not a single bump. It felt as if . . .
He yanked his towel down from the curtain rod, wrapped it around his torso, and scrambled over to the mirrors outside the stall. One swipe of his palm cleared the steam, and for the first time since he was ten years old, he looked at his own face without seeing skin disfigured by acne.
Tom stared at his face, a strange feeling welling up inside him. This was him. This guy, he wasn’t so ugly. Not Elliot Ramirez, yeah, but this guy could walk into a high school—a real, building one—and people wouldn’t point and laugh at him.
Tom had taken it for granted he’d always be that ugly kid. He knew that even if the acne cleared up, his face would be so scarred it might as well still be there. But he looked like a normal guy now. A normal teenager surrounded by other normal teenagers, with possibility and a future ahead of him. He even had a profile that proclaimed him a national spelling bee champion—not a homeless loser who couldn’t even make it at a reform school. His brain ached, but in a good way. There was this feeling inside him that for the first time in his life, he’d become a real person.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” Vik said, emerging from the steam behind him.
Tom stepped back.
“What’s up, man?” Vik’s dark eyes flicked to the mirror. “You’ve been staring at yourself for, like, twenty seconds. Now, if you looked like me, I’d understand being awestruck by your own beauty.”
“I was thinking about something. I didn’t realize they changed stuff about you when they did the surgery. Physically.”
“Oh, you mean the way you don’t get facial hair anymore?” Vik rubbed his smooth chin.
Tom nodded like that was what he’d meant.
“Yeah, it’s a pain, but the processor pretty much shuts off anything it deems extraneous like the function of hair follicles on your face when you have to be clean-shaven for the military, anyway. And I had this fantastic scar over my eyebrow that was all healed when my surgery was done, too. It’s too bad. It made me look tough.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“No, I really had a scar.” Vik pointed to his eyebrow.
“Yeah, I believe that. I just can’t picture you looking tough.”
He dodged Vik’s towel before he got snapped with it.
TOM FOUND TWO more nutrient bars in his locker. He imagined them as bacon and devoured them on the way to classes. Information popped up in his head. He examined the data, and realized it was their class schedule. He waited for that thing Vik called data comprehension to come along with the information. The schedule looked odd.
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays consisted of Calisthenics from 0800-0930, and then math, but only from 1000 to 1020. That wasn’t right, was it? How could a math class be twenty minutes long?
But all the other standard classes appeared to be a mere twenty minutes: English from 1025 to 1045, US History from 1050 to 1110, Physical Science from 1115 to 1135, World Languages from 1140 to 1200. After that? Just lunch and
an entire afternoon dedicated to Applied Simulations.
The normal high school classes didn’t appear on the Tuesday/Thursday schedules, either. Programming from 0800 to 1130, and the entire afternoon was Level I Tactics.
Tom followed the other plebes to the Lafayette Room, the lecture hall he’d seen on his tour. He tailed Vik to a bench and slid onto the wooden seat. For his part, Yuri parted ways with them and settled down next to Wyatt. Before him, the plebes flipped back their sleeves to expose their forearm keyboards.
A ping in Tom’s brain: Morning class has now commenced. Silence descended upon the room as a small, gray-haired man mounted the stage in front of the room. Tom’s brain scrolled through his profile.
NAME: Isaac Lichtenstein
Affiliation: George Washington University
SECURITY STATUS: Confidential LANDLOCK-2
“Good day, trainees,” said the professor. “Please put away any extraneous materials for our exam.”
“Exam?” Tom asked Vik sharply.
“Yeah,” Vik said. “Hard-core math exam. Better pass it, Tom, or you’re out of the program.”
Tom didn’t think he’d be out of the program now that the military had gone to the trouble of installing a processor in his head, but the words horrified him.
Then the test sequence began. A question blasted itself in front of Tom’s vision. He began to read, Estimate graphically all the local maxima and minima of . . .
Tom had no idea how to do this. He’d never learned this. And yet as he stared at the numbers the strangest thing happened, like a series of sequential, ordered thoughts. A visual formed in his head of a cube with slices, and the values took on a new shape in his head.
Something this difficult shouldn’t make such perfect, logical sense—but it did. Tom began typing on his own keyboard. He worked through the problem, the calculations flashing through his brain like he had turned into a calculator. He submitted his answer with a tap to his forearm keyboard. The next problem was just as straightforward, and the next.
He submitted his exam, and his vision center flashed 100 percent. He stared at the number, disbelieving. He’d answered eighteen calculus questions in seven minutes. He’d never taken calculus before. He’d never even passed algebra.
At his side, Vik, who’d finished a few minutes earlier, glanced sidelong at him and waggled his caterpillar-like eyebrows, as if to say, Ha-ha, freaked you out again.
Tom fought the urge to break into peals of laughter, because this was unbelievable. How strange to think about this—to realize that something that had always been so frustrating like math could be so easy once his brain was supplemented with a computer.
Dr. Lichtenstein’s voice came from the front of the room again. “Excellent.” He was looking over the results on his own screen. “I see our lowest score was an eighty-nine.”
Beamer snorted. Tom suspected suddenly that he’d scored the 89.
“And it looks like number eleven tripped a good many of you up. Perhaps I should have clarified that concept in your homework feed. As we have four minutes left to class, we’ll go over that together.”
Four minutes later, their math lesson was done. Dr. Lichtenstein told them their assigned downloads for the Wednesday exam were already in the system and bade them farewell. It was 1020 hours on the dot. Tom watched him leave, disbelieving. The schedule wasn’t a mistake. Math class was only twenty minutes long.
The rest of the morning’s classes proceeded the same way, the plebes seated in the room, the teachers changing three times in an hour. Tom had learned more in the weeks while his brain was being resequenced than he had in four years at Rosewood Reformatory. In English, his grammar was impeccable, and his reading comprehension on his exam 100 percent. In US History, he readily filled out all the dates and names and historical implications of the major political events surrounding the French and Indian War. In Physical Sciences, he correctly identified quantum entanglement as the concept behind the military’s intrasolar communications grid. When the day’s World Languages teacher strolled in speaking Japanese, Tom understood her before he knew he understood her. He spoke into the microphone on the computer during the oral examination, and the processor recorded his voice patterns. His accent was dead on—he sounded like a native Okinawan.
At noon, he staggered out with Vik at his side, his brain buzzing like he’d received an electric jolt. “Wow.” Tom spoke half to himself, trying to get his head around it. “I speak Japanese.”
“Sure you do.”
“What else do I speak?”
“Depends on what language we’ll get tested on Friday.”
“And what else can I do? Create a nuke? Build a starship? Do I know kung fu?”
Vik answered, “If you’re scheduled to kung fu fight in Applied Simulations later, you got it in your homework download.”
Tom understood it finally: he could do anything now. The entire world was his.
AN HOUR LATER in the mess hall, Tom carried his tray toward the conveyer belt by the door and toyed with a fantasy: dropping in on Rosewood Reformatory with his fluent Japanese and telling them all about some starship he’d built single-handedly and won the war with. He didn’t notice the large kid with a Genghis ax on his sleeve until the guy had elbowed past him. Tom stumbled to the side, caught off guard by the sudden explosion of muscular impulses from the processor in his head, trying to balance him. His drink slipped from his tray. He watched it launch on a collision course with the dark-haired girl in front of him. . . .
But she whipped around like a striking snake and caught the glass before the dark liquid sloshed over the rim.
“Nice reflexes,” Tom said, impressed. He glanced up at her face—and caught his breath.
NAME: Heather Akron
RANK: USIF, Grade VI, Camelot Company, Machiavelli Division
CALL SIGN: Enigma
ORIGIN: Omaha, NE
ACHIEVEMENTS: Member of the Young Social Innovators, recipient of the RAIA Fearson Scholarship, Junior Miss Nebraska two years running
IP: 2053:db7:lj71::212:ll3:6e8
SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-6
Heather gazed back for a searching moment, then her yellow-brown eyes widened. “Oh, Tom, you’re here!”
She sounded so happy to see him that his stomach flipped. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“I barely recognized you without the . . .” She trailed off, eyes scanning his face. Then she said brightly, “I’ve been waiting for weeks for you to pop out of the surgery suite. I thought you’d changed your mind on us.”
Tom didn’t know what to say to that, staring into the gorgeous face of a girl who he’d thought would never give a guy like him the time of day.
Back when he wasn’t smart.
Back when his skin was messed up.
Back when he was homeless and had nothing going for him.
The thoughts fired in his brain all at once. A sense of having been reborn as a new person overcame him. He wondered at his own daring when he leaned closer, held her eyes, and said, “Sorry. I’d never keep you waiting if I could help it.”
He was rewarded by Heather’s giggle. “Aw, you’re still cute, Tom.”
“Cute?” Tom tried to puzzle that one out. Was that flattering or unmanly?
A rich laugh broke in between them. A tall, handsome guy shoved his tray onto the conveyer belt, then casually propped his elbow on Heather’s shoulder. “I see the H-bomb has claimed another victim.”
Tom didn’t need the neural processor to tell him who this was. He’d know Elliot Ramirez anywhere. The text scrolled over his vision center nonetheless.
NAME: Elliot Ramirez
CALL SIGN: Ares
RANK: USIF, Grade VI, Camelot Company, Napoleon Division
ORIGIN: Los Angeles, CA
ACHIEVEMENTS: Recipient of the Taco Bell Teen Hero Award, first place World Junior Figure Skating Championship, founder of the Shoot for the Stars Inspiration Forum for Children, Teen People’s Young
Heartthrob of the Year, winner of the Latin American Achievement Award
IP: 2053:db7:lj71::209:ll3:6e8
SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-6
Laughter tinged the Latino boy’s voice. “You’ve gotta live up to that wily reputation, don’t you, H? Toying with the affections of poor, innocent plebes.”
Heather shrugged her shoulder so Elliot’s arm slipped off. “I like poor, innocent plebes. And I’ll have you know, I helped General Marsh find Tom’s network address, and I helped run him through Marsh’s experimental screening scenario.”
“So what did you get for that?” Elliot teased. “Is the next slot for Camelot Company guaranteed to someone in Machiavelli Division?”
“Don’t listen to a word Elliot says, Tom,” Heather said sternly.
Elliot raised an eyebrow. “Actually, Raines, you’ll have to listen to what I say. You’re in my Applied Simulations group.”
“I am?” Tom said.
“Yes,” Elliot confirmed, his dark eyes flicking over some information he could see, scrolling through some manifest in his head. “Thomas Raines, my newbie.”
“Oh.” Heather pouted. “That’s too bad. I hoped I’d have you, Tom.”
Tom fervently wished she had him, too.
Elliot clapped his shoulder. “Hey, you lucked out, kid.” He winked. “Trust me, the people back home will go nuts when you tell them I’m the one training you.”
He thought of Neil’s reaction if he ever found out his kid would be taking orders from Elliot Ramirez, of all people.
“Yeah,” Tom agreed. “My dad would definitely go nuts.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Chapter Six
VIK SAID APPLIED Simulations were groups of plebes battling simulated enemies together under the leadership of members of Camelot Company. Vik really liked his group because it was led by Heather, who was apparently very hands-on, the thought of which made Tom wild with envy. Yuri, on the other hand, didn’t care for his. He was in a group led by a Combatant named Karl Marsters, who always chose the goriest, bloodiest simulations available for his plebes. Apparently, Karl especially loved assuming the role of his division’s namesake, Genghis Khan, and ordering his plebes to pile up the heads of villagers.
Insignia Page 8
