Insignia

by S. J. Kincaid

“I am not working with you!”

  “Quiet, Tom. And I assure you, you are. It’s very lucky you’ve become a valuable asset. And I know there’s someone in the Spire advancing your interests, because General Marsh has already put your name before the Defense Committee as a promising trainee to keep an eye on.”

  Tom was too stunned for a moment to remember he was terrified.

  “Now, we’d never ask you to represent Dominion Agra with those qualms you have about our company.” Dalton tapped on Tom’s forehead. “So Hayden’s going to install some data to correct a few of the misguided views you inherited from your old man. After that, you and I, Tom? We’re going to be good pals when this is done.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Oh, we are. And hey”—a light, teasing punch to his arm—“if we’re behind you, you’re guaranteed to be Camelot Company, and we’ll make sure it happens fast. You’ll get to be a real hero. Think of the girls, Tom. You’ve never had a girlfriend, have you? They’ll be crawling all over you.”

  “Shut up. Just shut up.”

  “The first batch is ready, Mr. Prestwick,” Hayden said.

  No, Tom thought, real fear mounting in him. No, no, no—

  Dalton chuckled. “Give our boy his lesson.”

  And then the information poured into Tom’s brain. Dalton lounged in his chair, smoking that cigar, watching Tom’s face as the programming interfaced with the neural processor, then began implanting the data into Tom’s brain. Tom fought it. Gritted his teeth and fought it, rejected it. At first. At first.

  And then he couldn’t tell what was supposed to be there and what wasn’t. And he didn’t know what was his and what wasn’t. The terror receded over the horizon and his fight died away. His gaze drifted up to the ceiling, the gentle wash of commands and code sweeping over him again and again, and he couldn’t remember why he’d been so afraid a minute ago. He lay there feeling his brain being reworked.

  Dalton watched him the whole time, gazing at his face as Tom shifted into another person.

  After an hour of it, Hayden spoke. “The first layer’s installed.”

  Dalton rose to his feet. “Is it? Good work. And that’s a good boy, Tom. We’re going to be real friends soon, you and me. Aren’t we?”

  Tom answered him, “I—yes.” He was confused about what was going on but pretty certain that Dalton was right.

  “It’s Mr. Prestwick.”

  “Mr. Prestwick.”

  “That’s my boy.” Mr. Prestwick patted Tom’s cheek. “I’ll see you next Saturday.”

  TOM WASN’T SURE why Hayden had shown him the neural access port. He stood there by himself, in the middle of the empty room in the Beringer Club, staring at the access port. There was something he was missing. Something he couldn’t put his finger upon.

  “Mr. Raines, sir?” Hayden peeked his big head inside. “Your car is waiting outside whenever you’re ready.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Tom felt dumb. He didn’t even know where Mr. Prestwick had gone. He must’ve left after telling Hayden to show him this place. And the internal clock in his head said it was 1700. Had that much time passed? Why . . . How was it . . . Or . . . or was he . . . ?

  Something inside him shut down the line of thought.

  Restricted access.

  The thought resounded in his brain, forbidding.

  Restricted access. Restricted access.

  A hollow formed in his chest as his thoughts slammed into that phrase, as he realized he couldn’t access a segment of his own brain. But even as he struggled to fight his way around it, his short-term memory faded and he couldn’t quite recall what put the cold feeling in his chest.

  He emerged up the staircase into the wash of sunlight, and found himself thinking of Mr. Prestwick again as he headed to the private car. Maybe he hadn’t been fair to him all this time. He’d mindlessly hated him, and Tom couldn’t think of why.

  He remembered the smell of Mr. Prestwick’s cigar. . . .

  Restricted access

  What? The words were like an electric jolt, something foreign inside his own brain. He stared inward, aghast. What was . . . what was . . . ?

  Tom’s fears faded along with the recollection, and his brain was again wrapped around a harmless thought. Neil always talked like Dominion Agra set out to destroy every natural-growing crop with their genetically engineered, self-terminating strains. But they hadn’t. It was an accident. It happened because Dominion Agra’s crops were better. It was an accident that they ended up owning the entire human food supply. Simple cross-pollination. Sure, they may have played a role in the neutron bombings, but didn’t they save billions on a daily basis by feeding them? And maybe they forced everyone to pay a yearly usage fee to grow crops, but wasn’t that good business?

  Tom was giddy with the beautiful sense he could suddenly make of so much he’d once hated about the world as he settled in the private car with the blacked-out windows. The Beringer Club was really something. The driver already knew he’d be returning the following week, as though the guy had psychic powers or something, and Tom found himself agreeing to get picked up at the Spire the following Saturday at 1100.

  Tom settled back into the comfortable leather seat and spent the whole ride back to the Spire marveling at the idea that maybe, maybe Dalton Prestwick was a great guy after all.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Chapter Sixteen

  WHEN TOM RETURNED to Alexander Division, he found that Vik had already been to their bunk and left a note on Tom’s bed: I suppose you fled to avoid the shame of defeat—but you’re going to pay up, sucker! Victory parade will be downstairs.

  Tom braced himself for the face rubbing soon to follow and swung by Beamer’s room to see if he could get him out of bed for dinner.

  “Beamer, want to—” Tom stopped.

  Beamer’s bed had been stripped of covers. Right now, Olivia Ossare was packing up Beamer’s belongings in a suitcase: a couple journals, a picture of his girlfriend, some civilian clothes.

  “Where’s Beamer?” Tom blurted.

  “Hello, Tom.”

  “Where is he?”

  Olivia folded her hands and settled on the edge of Beamer’s bed. “Do you want to sit down?”

  “No.” Tom stayed where he was. This was change. He’d just gotten used to the idea that things could stay the same for weeks on end, and now it was all going to get messed up again. He realized suddenly that he didn’t like change.

  “Stephen’s having a very difficult time right now. He’s going to be evaluated for a few days to see whether he needs help.”

  “So why are you packing up his stuff?”

  Her eyes flickered. “It’s probably going to be more than a few days.”

  “Is he as crazy as Blackburn now?”

  Olivia made a sound, like she’d almost laughed and caught herself. “No. Stephen’s suffering from some anxiety. We’ve given him time, but he’s just been getting worse and worse. It’s time he left here and got some real help.”

  “So what’s going to happen? Can’t they do that thing where they grow some new brain matter for him? Wouldn’t that fix him? I read about that somewhere.”

  Olivia zipped up the suitcase. “Tom, neural grafting is only used sometimes, when for some reason brain matter is deficient in the frontal lobe at birth. It’s for sociopaths, psychopaths, the brain damaged. Beamer doesn’t need that.” She propped the suitcase up on its side. “I can’t guarantee you he’ll be back here, Tom, but I don’t think you should worry about him. He hasn’t had the neural processor for very long. Worst case scenario, he’ll have a phased removal and go back to his old life.”

  Tom stepped back into the hallway of Alexander Division, feeling like a hole had opened up inside him. There really was nothing firm, nothing certain. Even here, even at this place where he thought he’d found something
permanent—everything could change in a day. Everything could be lost so quickly.

  He found Vik, Yuri, and Wyatt downstairs and broke the news to them.

  Yuri was too intent on holding Wyatt’s hand, and Wyatt on enduring the hand-holding to really give thought to Beamer. Only Vik seemed to hear Tom’s bombshell. He nodded, unsurprised.

  “Guess it was inevitable. What did you think when he started skipping classes?” Vik pointed out. “You can’t do that and get away with it.”

  “They’re not punishing him, Vik. They think he’s crazy.”

  “Look, Tom.” Vik scraped his hand through his hair. “Beamer’s a great guy. He is. He’s funny and he’s laid-back, but sometimes that’s a problem, too. He came here, and what did he do? People would cut off their arms to be here. Literally would cut off their arms if they could get the chance to do what we do. And what did Beamer do with it? He went online to meet his girlfriend. He binge downloaded. He died as soon as he could in sims, in Calisthenics.”

  Tom stared at Vik, feeling like he didn’t know him. “You’re acting like he deserved this.”

  “I’m saying, maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place. Maybe he was a lousy fit. You remember all those psych test we had to do, all those screenings before coming here?”

  Tom looked at Vik, Yuri, and Wyatt. What tests? Why were they all nodding like they knew what tests these were?

  “Beamer should’ve realized then that this was serious business,” Vik went on. “Maybe he finally realized it.”

  The words didn’t make Tom feel any better.

  A STRANGE SENSE of wrongness nagged at Tom throughout the following days. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt out of place. Sometimes something—a puff of smoke in Applied Sims, the steam in the shower room—triggered a memory of the Beringer Club, but always, those words popped up, restricted access, followed by the dissolution of the memory from his consciousness.

  But the sense of something missing remained. He found himself retreating more often to his bunk, watching Medusa in the latest battles of the war. They were the only things that kept the sense of strangeness away. He thought often of their fight outside the walls of Troy and Medusa’s strange smile as he died—and just wondered. Wondered what would happen the next time they met.

  It could be years until he was Camelot Company, if he ever made it. It could be years until he faced Medusa in a real fight.

  Tom decided it: he couldn’t wait years.

  So he snuck onto the officers’ floor. He was clever about it. Wyatt told them at lunch that she and Blackburn were going to spend the evening in the basement with the Spire’s primary processor, configuring the reformatted neural processors for the network.

  “How long does that take?” Tom asked her, making sure to sound offhand.

  “Three hours. Maybe four.”

  Three hours was more than enough time for what Tom wanted to do. When Wyatt disappeared down to the basement with Blackburn, Tom set his GPS signal to the router he’d gotten from Wyatt, left the router in the bathroom, and then headed upstairs to the officers’ floor. This time he didn’t go to the staff room—anyone could come in there.

  Only one person could interrupt him in Blackburn’s office, and Tom already knew where he’d be for the next several hours.

  He hooked himself into the neural access port on Blackburn’s desk and tried to ignore the way his heart was suddenly slamming against his rib cage. He could do this. He’d done it twice.

  He focused upon the neural processor, the buzz in his brain, the connection to the Spire—and it happened again. He jerked out of himself, fused to the Spire’s network. He let himself drift that way, his brain melding first to the satellites and then to those ships near Mercury and then to Stronghold Energy’s palladium mines. And back, he caught onto that stream of data leading to the Sun Tzu Citadel in the Forbidden City.

  Through his consciousness, they flickered, the IPs of neural processors hooked into that network. He flipped through the directories, taking it all very deliberately, reminding himself every few seconds that he was a he not an it, a person and not one of those vast streams of 0’s and 1’s pressing in on all sides of him. . . .

  And then that IP registered, the same one the Spire’s databases logged as belonging to the Combatant Medusa: 2049:st9:i71f::088:201:4e1.

  He flashed between his own body—that cold, numb thing slumped in a chair—and his consciousness in the foreign network. The net-send function in his neural processor triggered with a thought, and he locked onto Medusa’s IP just as it buzzed in his consciousness. Then he took the biggest risk of his life:

  You dragged me through the dirt and killed me. I seek to avenge myself. Yours, the Deranged One. He enclosed the URL for his favorite VR sim dueling site and deposited it right there in Medusa’s neural processor.

  Tom snapped back to himself, his body tingling all over with shock at the audacity of what he’d done. His hands were slick with sweat, his heart still pounding wildly in his chest. Had it worked? Had she received it?

  There was only one way to find out.

  He logged onto the internet and went to that URL, preparing himself for what might be a long, futile wait. His vision changed. Stone walls resolved into life around him, nooks set with rippling torches. Someone had already set up a duel, which meant Medusa was already here.

  Tom started laughing, giddiness washing through him.

  This was really happening. This was happening.

  He shifted—and felt with surprise the rippling muscles across his skin. The neural processor was taking the ordinary parameters of the video game and interpreting it in three dimension for him. He looked down at his body. An information bubble registered the identity of his character: Siegfried, a legendary hero with unbeatable strength.

  “I think you have a question to answer.”

  The woman’s voice was deep, resonant. Tom whirled around to face her. The tall, muscular blond woman stood on the other side of the vast stone chamber, a curved basin with a fire between them. Her pale face flickered in the leaping flames, an information bubble identifying her for him: Brunhilde, a legendary Valkyrie who was forced out of Valhalla. She was queen of Iceland and the mightiest warrior in the world—except for Siegfried, her true love and the one man capable of beating her.

  Tom laughed. He couldn’t help it, because no guy would pick these two characters. “I knew you were a girl in real life. I knew it.”

  She didn’t take the bait. “How did you slip a message into my neural processor?” she demanded, prowling toward him.

  “Net-send function. Your neural processor’s got it, too, or you wouldn’t have received it. It’s kind of cool. You can type something out or even think it out and it’ll get sent along. Typing’s way easier, though.” He’d tried the thought interface to send a message to Vik, but a bunch of stray, unrelated things that passed through his mind completely garbled the message. He dared not risk that with Medusa.

  She considered that. “So you directly accessed that program in my neural processor. That doesn’t answer my other question. How did you get past our firewall?”

  “Maybe I’m just that awesome,” Tom suggested.

  “That’s no answer.”

  “I’d die before telling you.” He hoped the words would get her in a fighting mood.

  They did. “Oh, you’ll die,” Medusa agreed. “Again.”

  Tom gave an exultant laugh, bared his character’s pikestaff, and charged. Siegfried was powerful enough to leap clear over the flames in the fire pit. He hurtled down toward the blond woman. As soon as his pikestaff met her sword, both weapons blazed into twin columns of flame.

  Tom reared back a step and lifted his pike to admire it. “Fire weapons. Awesome.”

  “I use this site a lot. I programmed the add-on.”

  “It’s great.”

  “Thanks.” Medusa slashed at his throat.

  It was the reverse of their other fight: he
was stronger, she was more agile. He managed to swat her sword right out of her hand, but the power behind his blow unbalanced him—and she hiked herself up on his shoulder and used him to vault clear across the fire pit.

  “Nice, Medusa.” Then Tom kicked the basin toward her, upending the burning sparks.

  To his delight, the flames caught on a tapestry, and Medusa seized it and hurled it at him as he closed in again. The pain stole his breath, and it was followed by a dagger thrust to the ribs. He caught her before she could escape and twisted at her neck, trying to snap it. He saw her hands scrabbling on the castle’s table, beneath the burning wall, and then close upon a candleholder. Tom tried to wrench her neck again, and she slammed the candlestick between his legs.

  The pain was terrible. Tom doubled over, gagging. He felt it like it was really happening. He suddenly wondered if hooking in to face her was a mistake.

  Medusa danced out of arm’s reach as he collapsed to his knees.

  His voice came out choked. “You . . . are . . . a girl.”

  Her sword flashed in the firelight. He could hear her cackling laughter.

  “You have to be. No guy would resort to that!” Tom added.

  “Never denied it.” Medusa was haloed by flames climbing up the wall behind her. They were beginning to sting his throat. He heaved in frantic breaths and tried to reach for his pikestaff—but she kicked it out of reach, and her sword pressed against his throat.

  “Why did you really message me?” Medusa asked him, eyeing him over the blade.

  “For this.”

  “Just so I could kill you again?”

  Tom gave her a slow smile. “No, so I could kill you.” He kicked her legs out from under her, pinned down her sword arm, and—was halted by a dagger to his throat.

  “The next time you have a death wish, don’t hack my processor,” Medusa told him. “Someone might track you.”

  “I’d risk it,” he pledged.

  “I wouldn’t. I’ll send you a URL for a personals message board. It’s safer that way. I’ll keep an eye on it, so if you post something there, I’ll be happy to come kill you.”