Insignia

by S. J. Kincaid

  TODAY, THE CALISTHENICS Arena resembled a tropical island. Tom charged forward, faster and stronger than anyone else in the simulation. At a quiet, sunlit cove, he waited to help Heather over a fallen palm tree. She leaped over the log, then stumbled, and gave a squeal of surprise. Her uniform had fallen off!

  Her beautiful eyes rose to his. “Oh no, what do I do, Tom? It’s so cold without my clothes. And zombies are attacking me!”

  A bunch of zombies began attacking her. Tom felled them all with blows of his mighty fists. Heather gasped in fear of the zombies, then in admiration at Tom’s prowess.

  Tom turned around and strode forward, towering over her by a foot, his shoulders as broad as Siegfried’s. Heather’s beautiful eyes feasted upon the sight of his perfect six-pack, bared where his tunic had been torn open by the zombies. “Oh, Tom, you’re so buff and brave. You’re ten times the man Elliot Ramirez is.”

  Wyatt walked by and said, “It’s true! He is!” Then she walked away.

  Tom gathered Heather in his muscular arms. “Don’t worry. You don’t need clothes. Not when Tom Raines is around.”

  Another girlish shriek.

  It was Ching Shih, the Chinese pirate woman Medusa played in Pirate Wars. She’d tripped over the same palm tree and lost her uniform, too. But she wasn’t actually Ching Shih—it was a younger, much more beautiful version of her. It was Medusa the way Tom imagined her.

  “Oh no, Tom,” Medusa said. “I’m cold now, too!”

  “Well, well.” Tom chuckled. “It’s lucky for you that I’ve got two arms.” He reached out for her, and Medusa pranced over and happily joined them.

  Heather pouted. “Tom, I don’t want to share you.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to share Tom with you, Heather.” Medusa pressed up against Tom’s powerful chest.

  Tom smiled at the two girls in his arms. “Don’t fight over me, ladies. Big Tom’s got enough loving for both of you.”

  They blushed, murmuring about how good-looking and charming he was, and then they looked each other up and down.

  “ALL YOUR FANTASIES go the same way,” Blackburn complained. He was seated next to the census device, coffee in hand, Tom’s mental images on the screen overhead. “Don’t you ever get bored?”

  “Feel free to stop watching!” Tom screamed at him.

  “Calm down. You’re getting hysterical . . . Big Tom.”

  Tom closed his eyes. He wanted to be shot right now. But first, he wanted to see Blackburn shot. No, eviscerated.

  He sat beneath the census device, arms strapped down to keep him from fleeing again, the points of light blaring into his temples from the suspended, upside-down claw of the census device. He hoped a meteor would hit the Spire and obliterate it around them. Anything, anything to stop this.

  As the fantasy took its natural course, Blackburn let out an exasperated breath and said, “Enough already.” He launched himself to his feet, reached overhead, and turned off the census device.

  “Are we done?” Tom asked hopefully.

  “We haven’t started, Raines. You and I have wasted three hours on these inane fantasies of yours. When will you get it through your head that you can’t hide anything from me while you’re in that chair? If you’re already fighting me on something so mildly embarrassing as these—” he seemed to fumble for the right phrase “—these implausible encounters you’ve imagined with various female trainees, then this is going to be a long ordeal for both of us.”

  Tom glared at the screen, his fists balled up against the armrests.

  Blackburn snapped his fingers to draw Tom’s attention back to him. “Try this, Raines. Don’t think of an elephant.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t think of an elephant. Do not—I repeat, do not—think of an elephant.” He let those words hang in the air a moment. Then, “You’re thinking of an elephant, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m thinking of a stupid elephant now! Why?”

  “That’s how this works,” Blackburn told him, pointing at the screen. “You’re trying not to think of that elephant, which gives you a keen awareness of that elephant. The census device can sense that awareness. It knows you’re hiding something. It won’t stop digging through the rest of your memories until it senses that you’ve stopped hiding that elephant from it.”

  “So you’re saying if I don’t stop caring that you’re going to see everything in my brain, you’re going to end up seeing everything in my brain—is that it?”

  “Yes, that’s it—so you’d better desensitize quickly. If you hold out too long, I guarantee you, you won’t have much of a mind left after this is over. You can’t fight a census device.”

  Tom’s chest ached as Blackburn flipped the census device back on. He tried to duck his head, but he knew it was useless—the beams followed him and found his temples again. A sense of futility seeped through him. He was already so sick of this. He just wanted to go back to his bunk.

  “Progress,” Blackburn noted. “Very good.”

  Tom lifted his head and saw that the fantasies were finally gone. He’d desensitized to the idea of Blackburn seeing them, he supposed. But the next image the census device called up wasn’t any better.

  It was Tom’s first day of school ever. He was eleven years old and staring down at the claws of his Lord Krull avatar as Ms. Falmouth yelled at him for being insolent. Then she asked him to read something off the board. Tom hedged and made excuses, but she pressed him relentlessly, cornered him. Tom knew the letters a bit, so he tried, “Lie—in-co-le-in . . .” staring at the text of “Lincoln.” The classroom filled with laughter when his classmates realized he couldn’t read.

  Heat blasted his face. “That didn’t happen.” He couldn’t stop his lips from moving, forming the urgent lie, because he would’ve torn out his stomach before showing this to Blackburn. “That wasn’t any more real than the fantasies.”

  “Truly, Raines—I don’t care.” Blackburn sipped at his coffee, looking bored.

  Tom relaxed just a bit, realizing he meant it, and the Rosewood memories slipped away. The scene transformed again.

  Neil.

  No, not his father. Not in front of Blackburn. Please not his father

  And Tom tried to fight it so the census device stuck on that theme. It was that night when Tom was little and the two guys busted into their room. They shouted at Neil about money, they clobbered him. They took Neil’s watch since it was all he had left. Tom got so scared, huddled under the bed, that he peed on himself. Neil kept trying to coax him out afterward, telling him it was okay, they were gone now, but Tom wanted his mom and he put his hands over his ears when Neil explained again that she wasn’t coming, she wasn’t going to be here ever again. . . .

  Tom’s every muscle was clenched, and his teeth were grinding together. He hadn’t thought of that night in so long, in so many years. He must’ve forgotten it, really, and now it was there in his brain like it had just happened moments ago.

  Blackburn swung his chair around and studied him over his coffee cup. “I warned you that the census device pulls up buried memories and dismantles your psychological defenses. This is going to get worse and worse if you don’t give up whatever you’re hiding.”

  Tom’s thoughts flashed to Yuri and Wyatt, and he forced them away just as quickly. “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “If you weren’t, this would be over by now, and we’d both be at breakfast.”

  The census device kept digging, bringing up more and more memories—an endless catalog of them. Tom decided he hated the census device, hated it so much, he felt like he was choking. He wished he could fry the thing. Go into it just like the septic tank in the Beringer Club and make it blow up from the inside . . .

  And then the neural culling began digging into that memory. It plastered itself across the screen: The mesh of wires, the electricity, Tom’s consciousness diving into the septic system at the Beringer Club and interfacing with it. The sewage bubbling up as the gauges pumped
in reverse . . .

  At first, Blackburn just cast an idle glance at the image. Then he sat up ramrod straight, and by the time the screen showed the sewage seeping over the floor of the Beringer Club, he was on his feet with his mouth hanging open.

  “What is this, Raines?” He turned, his eyes blazing in the shadowed, projected light of the screen. “What did I just see?”

  Tom’s head pulsed. Great. Now Blackburn knew what he’d done to the Dominion Agra execs, and then he’d tell Marsh. “Look, I know they put a ton of money into the war effort, but those Dominion guys had it coming—”

  “Not that. The machine. What was that?”

  Tom blinked, realizing that he wasn’t even asking about the place he’d flooded. “I was reprogramming a septic tank.”

  “That wasn’t programming. You were interfacing with it!”

  “Oh. Sort of.”

  Blackburn reached overhead and manipulated a few controls on the census device. The bands of light bearing into Tom’s temples vanished, and Tom felt like some rubber band, pulled taut, and been snapped. An overwhelming sense of relief surged through him.

  Blackburn replayed the memory of the septic tank again and again. “How is it possible? That tank couldn’t have been designed for a neural interface. Was it some freak hardware error?”

  Tom realized it: he was far more interested in this than in whether or not Tom was a traitor.

  Hope reared up inside him. He could use it. He was sure of it. If he just got Blackburn caught up in this, Yuri and Wyatt would never even become an issue.

  “This has to be doctored somehow,” Blackburn was muttering to himself. “It can’t be the true recollection.”

  “Actually, it can,” Tom spoke up. “It is. I used my processor to control the septic tank.”

  Blackburn turned back to him, shock written on his face. “You’ve done this more than once.”

  “A couple other times, yeah.”

  He drew a sharp breath. “At will?”

  “More or less.”

  Blackburn just gaped at him for a long time. Then he seemed to recover his ability to speak. “Show me the others.”

  “Stop the culling.”

  “Raines—”

  “I am not the traitor, sir. You know it. Swear you’ll stop the culling, and I’ll show you everything you want.”

  Blackburn’s smile was ironic. “You realize you’re threatening to keep a secret from me while strapped down under a census device.”

  “Why take all that time to dig it out of my brain if I’m willing to just give it to you, huh?”

  Blackburn considered that. “Fine, Raines. You show me the memories, and I’ll break procedure and stop the culling. We have a deal.”

  “I need a guarantee.”

  “There are no guarantees. I can only give you my word.”

  “At least take off these straps!”

  Blackburn stepped over and undid the straps. “Don’t run.”

  Tom’s stomach was twisting in knots. He didn’t have any way to force him to abide by their agreement—but if he didn’t give the memories willingly, Blackburn still won. He’d just resume the culling and force them out. All Tom could do was give in and hope Blackburn meant his promise.

  Blackburn tapped a button on the claw and reactivated the census device, but this time it wasn’t forcing memories out of Tom’s head. He yielded them: that time he sought out the satellites during the war games, and that time he sought Medusa, and even that first connection to the internet he made, back while he was unconscious after surgery. The views of Rio, the Grand Canyon, the reservoir, the Bombay highway . . .

  “Look at that,” Blackburn murmured, replaying the satellite one again. “Right through the Citadel’s firewall as though it doesn’t even exist. There isn’t a technology in the world that can do that.”

  “I don’t really know how that happens,” Tom admitted. “It’s the way I messaged Medusa the first time. I sort of went through the firewall and net-sent a hello to her neural processor.”

  Blackburn insisted on seeing that one more in detail, so Tom went back to it. Then Blackburn replayed them all, again and again. The coffee sat stagnant in his cup. Hours dragged by as he flipped between the memories. Tom started to wonder if he’d been completely forgotten. His throat grew parched. His stomach growled like it was ready to start digesting itself.

  After another cycle of replaying the memories, the screen went dark.

  Blackburn sat there in the dimness, staring where the images had just been. He spoke for the first time in hours. “Who else knows about this?”

  “Vik . . . kind of. I told him about it, but he didn’t believe me.”

  Blackburn regarded him searchingly. “This really means nothing to you, does it? You don’t have the slightest understanding of the magnitude of this. You did something that shouldn’t be possible.”

  “Sure, I know being able to interface with other tech is . . . it’s something. I just haven’t really thought about it much, uh, or really sat down and figured out what that something could be.”

  Blackburn’s gray eyed-gaze slid back and forth between Tom and the census device. “So ready to talk about this. . . . You weren’t hiding these memories. What exactly were you concealing during the culling, then?”

  “Just private stuff, okay?”

  But Blackburn was stroking his chin, eyes on him, speculative. “I looked into your records, Raines. You never had a psych screening before coming here. That’s standard procedure—did you know that?”

  “Uh, I hadn’t heard, no.”

  “A trainee who was recruited even though he has no relevant background,” Blackburn murmured to himself, turning back to face the screen, “A trainee with no education, no screening tests, no medical records . . .”

  “My dad always moved us around, and I’ve never even been that sick, that’s why! I haven’t needed a hospital since I was born.”

  “And now this. How does it connect?”

  “Freak coincidence, sir. Are we done here?”

  Blackburn turned on him suddenly. “Have you ever had dealings with Obsidian Corp? Or a man named Joseph Vengerov?”

  Tom’s brain flickered back to the Beringer Club.

  “You have,” Blackburn breathed, seeing his face. A light stole into his eyes. “When?”

  “It didn’t have to do with this.”

  “Show me,” Blackburn demanded, turning the census device back on.

  Tom started to give the memory. Vengerov and Dalton appeared on the screen, and Vengerov was looking at Tom and speaking those words, “And how is this project coming?”

  And then he realized it: they’d been talking about his reprogramming. Blackburn would never let that rest either—he’d want to know the whole story of a Coalition company messing with a trainee’s neural processor.

  And it would lead to Wyatt giving him the firewall.

  And that would lead to Yuri’s firewall—and their treason.

  It could lead to Wyatt down here, strapped in for a culling. Then Yuri, getting his mind torn apart. It could lead to prison for both of them—and probably for Tom, too, because he was covering for them.

  He couldn’t let it happen. He forced his mind away from the memory.

  “What are you doing?” Blackburn demanded when the image froze.

  Tom was sitting in the chair, his eyes screwed shut, realizing there was no way he could do this. He thought of Wyatt again, and wondered how much worse it would be for her—after she’d trusted Blackburn, after Blackburn had turned on her . . . “No, I’m not showing that one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said no.” Tom opened his eyes, determined. “We had a deal: once I showed you the other memories, we’d be done. Well, I showed you all of them. We’re done here.”

  “First, Vengerov.”

  “No.”

  “I want the rest, Raines.”

  “No!”

  Blackburn closed the distance between
them, looking like some psycho from a horror movie in the projected light of the census device. “You will show me that memory, Raines!”

  “I WON’T! It has nothing to do with this!”

  When Blackburn moved in to tie him down again, Tom’s self-control vanished. He kicked wildly out at him. Blackburn’s fist flew toward his face, a ringing blow connected with Tom’s jaw, sending him reeling back into the chair. He recovered his bearings as the straps were already tightening on his wrists again, and he desperately tried to escape—but they trapped him in the chair.

  Blackburn backed away from him. “So here it is. You have a choice, Raines.” The projected image of Vengerov rippled over his face like he was some distorted mirror. “Either you show me the rest of that memory willingly, or I cull it out of you. So help me, I’m going to see it if I have to rip apart your mind to get it.”

  Tom gritted his teeth, his face feeling numb from the blow. “Come on, why aren’t you listening to me? It has nothing to do with any of this!”

  “Have it your way.”

  His tone sounded like a death sentence. He activated the culling and set it to full power—and the lights blared into Tom’s temples and eradicated the world around him.

  Tom slammed his head back into the headrest so hard prongs of pain jolted up his neck, and the restraints on his wrists scoured his skin. Memory after memory passed by, terrible things that felt like organs ripped from his body.

  Hours of it dragged by, as the memories flittered from one subject to another. Sometimes, a particularly nasty one hit him like he’d just broken some bone he hadn’t been aware of before. He swam back to awareness when Blackburn began pressing a cup to his lips around 2000. “You must be thirsty.”

  On the screen: Tom was nine and trying to sleep on a bench at a bus station, but Neil stood in the middle of the morning crowd, still drunk from the night before, railing stupidly at people walking past him, “Going off to vote Milgram today? He’s Obsidian’s man. Or Wantube? He’s owned by Dominion!”

  He didn’t want anything from Blackburn. He tried twisting his head away, but Blackburn caught his jaw firmly and poured—and as soon as the water touched his tongue, Tom realized he was dying of thirst. He swallowed huge mouthfuls as . . . His father kept ranting at people hurrying by him. “Ha! Either way you vote Coalition! Don’t you get it? You aren’t making a choice! Doesn’t anyone else see that?”