The Ghost Network (book 1)

by I. I Davidson

  “Another island,” he shouted.

  John was glad to have a chance to reassert himself; he was pretty sure Slack wouldn’t have done any research. “That’s Big Diomede. Belongs to Russia. It’s across the dateline. It’s already tomorrow there!”

  “Whoa. Maybe there’s another school out there. Or an annex to this one?”

  “Nah, it’s uninhabited.” John couldn’t help feeling smug.

  Slack gave him a withering look and pointed at the gigantic complex beneath their feet. “You sure about that?”

  John had to grin. “Not anymore!”

  Their pilot was running half crouched to meet a figure who had emerged from a stairwell. He clasped the man’s hand, said something inaudible, then escorted him across the helipad toward them.

  John squinted against the breeze. Their new host was tall, his black hair pulled back into a neat bun that somehow defied the violence of the wind that tugged at his loose shirt and pants. He didn’t look like a teacher, thought John; he looked like he was on his way to some mountaintop retreat. He had incredibly bright eyes, so piercing that John almost flinched.

  The man came to a stop in front of them and spread his arms wide as if he were encompassing the entire ocean.

  “I am Yasuo Yamamoto,” he smiled. “Welcome to the Wolf’s Den!”

  <<>>

  That, John and Slack soon realized, was as friendly as Yasuo Yamamoto was ever going to get. By the time they were sitting cross-legged opposite him in a small zen garden, in a circular space filled with pale northern light, he had reverted to teacher mode: reserved, calm, and a lot more intimidating than Mrs. Long had ever been. He spent a long time simply staring into John’s eyes, before turning his head and giving Slack the same penetrating gaze.

  Slack was wriggling nervously. John wondered whether his friend needed to pee as much as he did.

  After what felt like an eternity, Yasuo Yamamoto tilted back his head and stared up at the glass roof.

  “Most of the time we leave it open,” he remarked. “The sky brings light and clarity. Though it can also bring mysteries.” He turned his gaze back to the boys.

  “Uh,” said Slack, “so you only do the vanishing-ground thing to impress newbies?”

  Unexpectedly, the man laughed, all his solemnity gone like the snow sliding off the platform. “Yes, basically.”

  John felt a rush of relief. “Sorry, but are you the principal here, Mr. Yamamoto?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “And call me Yasuo, please. All teachers are addressed by their first names. Except Ms. Reiffelt, who is the head teacher.” He flashed another of those sudden grins. “I wouldn’t go calling her Irma, if I were you.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” said Slack, uncrossing his legs and stretching them.

  “One of your fellow students will show you around,” Yasuo said. “She’ll be here shortly. In the meantime, you may ask me any questions. Though I can give you only the answers that I have.”

  He’d already treated them to four or five nuggets of obtuse wisdom. John wondered whether he was doing it deliberately.

  “Well . . . we know you teach advanced computer science,” John ventured. “But we don’t know exactly what that means.”

  Yasuo closed his eyes. “This facility prides itself on recruiting the most technologically gifted students in the world,” he intoned. “We shape and direct those skills to create the computing giants of tomorrow. Your abilities are raw; we hone them to skills that will one day benefit all. You are here because you have proved yourselves in ways that may have been—shall we say—morally dubious, or self-serving. Personal gain and mere entertainment will no longer be your motivation.” His eyes snapped open, pinning them like bugs. “Here at the Wolf’s Den Center, you will learn to penetrate and control the most secure systems in the world—and you will do it for the greater good.”

  John turned to Slack. Slack was staring at him with his mouth hanging open.

  “Wow,” said Slack. “I am so in.”

  “Indeed,” drawled Yasuo with a slight smile, “you are.”

  John shook himself. “Anyway, that’s the line from the brochure.” He narrowed his eyes looking at Yasuo. “What do you teach?”

  “Some things I teach,” he said with a light shrug. “Mostly, like you, I learn.”

  John wanted to cry in frustration. “So who does teach?”

  “Some names will be familiar to you.” Yasuo uncurled himself and rose easily to his feet. “Howard McAuliffe. Imogen Black. Carlos Sanchez Ramirez. Roy Lykos—”

  “Roy Lykos?” Slack’s voice said with a high-pitched squeak. “Roy Lykos teaches here?”

  John was rather glad he hadn’t spoken; he was sure his voice would have been even more unsteady than Slack’s. The names Yasuo had listed were a who’s who of software innovators, but Roy Lykos was on a different level. A different planet, even.

  “Lykos is a legend,” he breathed at last. He reddened. “I mean, Mr. Lykos. I mean, Roy.”

  “Indeed he is.” Yasuo turned to the gap in the polished sandstone wall that passed for a door. “Ah, Salome. Thank you for coming. These are our new arrivals, John Laine and Jake Hook. Please make them feel at home.”

  John scrambled to his feet. Polite manners weren’t one of his instincts, but something about this girl demanded them.

  Salome Abraham was very tall and slender, her skin as dark and smooth as polished ebony; she had almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and an aloof tilt to her head. John had a feeling Slack’s devotion to Akane was going to diminish as quickly as his crush on Leona.

  Sure enough, Slack’s voice beside him was little more than a croak: “Hi, Salome.”

  “Hello, Jake. Hello, John.” Her gaze swept them up and down. “Come with me and I’ll show you to your rooms.”

  “Call me Slack.” He had recovered his composure and was flashing her his most charming smile.

  “I might,” said Salome, raising her eyebrows at Yasuo. John caught the teacher stifling a smile. “Now, if you’ve quite finished staring, can I show you the school?”

  <<>>

  “Are you left- or right-handed?” Salome halted and spun on her heels.

  “Huh?” John glanced in confusion at Slack. “Right, um . . . ”

  “Then give me your right hand.”

  Suspiciously, John did as he was told. Salome took it firmly and drew a slender glass device from her pocket. In one swift movement, she pressed it down into John’s palm.

  “What the—”

  She looked at him quizzically. “It didn’t hurt, did it?”

  John stared at his palm. The puncture mark was tiny and had reddened only a little. He hadn’t felt a thing.

  Salome had already turned to Slack. “Now you.”

  “Left,” said Slack, almost defiantly, and had thrust out his hand before John could form the words, “Don’t, Slack, don’t cooperate; this seems a bit invasive.”

  “It’s your nano implant,” Salome told them casually. “Opens all kinds of doors.”

  Slack was staring at a tiny red mark on his palm that was already fading. Glancing up, he met John’s eyes. Weird, he mouthed.

  Creepy, John mouthed back, clenching his fist.

  Salome didn’t even mention the implant again. Her shoes clicked sharply as she strode ahead down an opaque glass and chrome-railed walkway that glowed pale blue with hidden lights. It felt to John as if he were walking on a bed of clouds. “You’ll be tested, of course,” she told them. “The results will determine whose classes you can attend. What did you do to get here, anyway?”

  The two boys exchanged a guilty look. “This and that,” said Slack at last. “Hacking phones and credit card numbers, for me. One time, John broke the US Department of Defense’s firewall.”

  “Yeah, that and my sister’s Snapchat,” Joh
n grinned. “What about you, Salome? What did you get up to?”

  The look she threw him could have frozen a lava flow. “I didn’t get up to anything,” she said acerbically. “Unless you count winning a computer science scholarship to Princeton.”

  “Oh” was all John could say.

  “At your age?” Slack’s eyes boggled.

  “I didn’t take it,” she told them with a toss of her braided hair. “My father said this place would be more challenging. The sheer intensity of the work means I can graduate sooner and start making a positive contribution to the world. And it will open up better opportunities.”

  “Oh,” said John again, hoarsely. Positive contribution to the world? This girl was terrifying.

  “This is Roy Lykos’s classroom.” Salome stopped to place her palm against a glowing sensor, and the glass door slid silently open. “You’ll only work with him if your test results are the best.”

  “Let me guess,” muttered Slack. “You’re in his class.”

  “Of course I am.” She stepped inside.

  “I think I’ll stick with Akane,” Slack whispered to John as he followed her.

  John started to grin, but it faded as he stepped inside. “Wow,” he said.

  It was more like an auditorium than a classroom, with a sweeping semicircle of tiered seats that faced a lectern and a massive screen. Each seat had a curved acrylic desk on its right, but only a few of them were equipped with translucent flat-screen monitors—nine, John realized, counting them in his head. So this vast room, he guessed, was used by only a small, elite group of students.

  Ten monitors by next week, he promised himself silently. No, eleven. Slack will get into Lykos’s class too.

  After all, not only was Slack as smart as he was—but also John didn’t think he could bear lessons with only the humorless, morally uptight Salome for company.

  Salome was already ushering them out of the sacred classroom. “And that room over there is where you’ll take your tests. It’s really basic; you don’t need to see it. I’ll show you your dorm now. Oh. Hello, Eva.”

  There was something in Salome’s voice that made John curious. He turned as the girl named Eva strode past, glanced twice at them, then stopped.

  John thought maybe she was about the same age as them, but it was hard to tell. She was very small and slight. Her spiky blond hair, pulled back in a rough ponytail, was so pale it was almost as white as her delicate face—which looked as if she’d never seen the sun. Even so, she’d outlined her eyes heavily with black. It shouldn’t have worked with her complexion, but it matched her leather jacket, her ripped black jeans, and her heavy boots. Eva may have been a head shorter than both John and Slack, but she was instantly intimidating.

  “Yeah. Hi, Salome.” Eva had a slight tinge of an accent—Russian, maybe?—but what her voice mainly conveyed was boredom. “New boys?”

  Salome nodded eagerly. “Just arrived. This is John, and that’s Jake.”

  “Slack,” added Slack.

  Salome ignored him. “Are you going to Hack Club later, Eva?”

  The pale girl shrugged. “Maybe. If I’m not busy.”

  “Hope to see you there, then!” Salome raised a hand to say goodbye, but Eva didn’t return her wave. She just marched off down the walkway and turned into a classroom. The door slid silently closed.

  “She seems friendly,” John observed. “Not.”

  Salome sighed, but it sounded more wistful than impatient this time. “She’s interesting. Really, really smart, but I think she’s shy.”

  The girl hadn’t seemed shy at all to John, but he decided not to press. “What’s her accent? Where’s she from?”

  Salome gave a shrug. “The funny thing is nobody knows. The first records of her are from when she was found in a compartment on the Trans-Siberian Express. That was in Ulaanbaatar, but nobody knows where she got on—not even Eva. She didn’t have a clue who she was, where she was from, or how she’d gotten on the train. All she knew was her name.”

  “Wow,” said Slack, staring at the spot where Eva had disappeared. “Mystery girl.”

  “She must have had papers,” said John, frowning. “Like, a passport?”

  “No passport, no suitcase, no documents.” There was longing curiosity in Salome’s expression. “Nobody ever claimed her, either. I guess that’s why she’s so prickly. But I don’t know why nobody did. She’s super bright. Speaks German, French, and Italian. And Russian, of course, though I don’t know why I say ‘of course,’ because nobody even knows whether she’s really Russian. And she plays piano and violin like a pro. And that’s before you get to her computing skills, which are amazing.”

  It was the most Salome had said to them since they’d left Yasuo’s garden “office,” and John blinked in surprise and raised his eyebrows at Slack.

  “So, like I said—she’s interesting.” Salome shrugged again and turned to lead them onward.

  John found himself warming to Salome for the first time; it seemed the statuesque beauty was human after all. It was painfully obvious that she wanted to be friends with Eva—and that Eva couldn’t be less interested. Poor Salome. I bet she isn’t used to being rejected.

  “How about you?” he asked. “Where are you from?”

  “Ethiopia,” she told him, “though I’m from all over, really. My dad’s a diplomat. OK, here’s your room.”

  John stared at the blank door. No handle, no lock, no touch-sensor. “And, er . . . how do we get into it?”

  “Dormitories are of course more private than the other rooms. Look at me.”

  He’d obeyed automatically before he could think about it. The light she flashed into his right eye blinded him only briefly, but it was long enough for Salome to do the same to Slack.

  “OK. Now look at the door.”

  Hesitantly, John turned, blinking. A light glowed around the edges of the door, and it slid open.

  “Oh,” said Slack, raising his eyebrows. “Cool.”

  “Iris recognition? Could this get any more intrusive?” John felt his annoyance rising. “What does the school do with that data? I mean, it’s like—”

  “You get to settle in tonight,” Salome interrupted him, ignoring his outburst. “And your tests are at eight tomorrow morning.”

  “Eight?” Slack almost shrieked, as John pursed his lips sulkily. “No time to study?”

  Salome made a face. “No point in studying. They’re testing your skills. You pass, or you don’t.”

  “OK,” said John, taking a deep breath. What was the point in protesting? He hadn’t consented to the nano implants or the iris recognition, but they were done deals, and presumably it wasn’t Salome’s decision. If it happened to everybody, they’d just have to accept it. Besides, he was almost scared to ask, but his belly was rumbling embarrassingly loudly, and Salome was pretending not to notice: “When’s dinner?”

  “When you want it. You can get pastries and smoothies at that place we passed. Go down the corridor I showed you and there’s a sushi bar. Also salad, burgers, Thai food, Korean, tapas, Japanese barbecue, and vegetarian—”

  “Seriously?” There was a look of ravenous greed on Slack’s face.

  “Seriously. Whenever you’re hungry, as long as you aren’t in class. Don’t be late tomorrow morning!” For the very first time, Salome smiled properly at them. “And good luck.”

  As she marched off back the way they’d come, John stared at the inner surface of the door, and it slid gently closed once more. Turning, the two boys gazed around their new room.

  It was minimalist but not exactly basic: two beds, two desks, two separate, stylish sinks, and big cupboards that fit flush with the paneled walls. A huge glass screen took up most of another wall; it was set so smoothly into the paneling that at first John mistook it for a window. Two gaming keyboards and two game controllers we
re set neatly beneath it, and Slack snatched one up.

  The glass leaped to life, and a monstrous alien soldier turned and took a step into the room. Slack stumbled back and fell over.

  The heavily armored infantryman turned right and left, fingering his weapon. He looked as if he were waiting for his orders.

  “It’s 3-D,” whispered Slack, scrambling to his feet. “And you don’t need glasses.”

  It looked so solid, so real, that when John stepped forward, merging himself with the avatar, he let out a gasp of surprise. Backing off, he flopped down on one of the beds and felt the crispest sheets and the softest quilt he’d ever been lucky enough to touch.

  “How d’you think they got all this stuff to the island?” he murmured. “Must have been a heck of a logistics problem. Did you see the port as we flew over?”

  “No . . . ” said Slack, frowning. He touched a light on his game controller, and the soldier vanished.

  “Exactly. There isn’t one. They must have flown all the construction materials in. And the fittings. And the electronics. And the workers to build it. In this climate. I mean, wow.”

  “Somebody,” said Slack solemnly, “has hacked a lot of credit card details. Well, that, or somebody is fabulously rich.”

  “I wish we could contact the outside world, though. That’s a bummer.”

  “Wish we could what?”

  John threw a pillow at him. “I knew you weren’t listening to Salome. No email, no messaging, certainly no FaceTime. Our phones will be regularly spot-checked to make sure they’re offline, and if there’s a live connection? Expulsion. We get ten minutes a week with our families on the landline.”

  “But—” Slack’s face fell. “That means you don’t get to talk to Akane.”

  “I just knew that’d be the first thing in your head.” John sighed and slumped back. “But yeah. That’s going to be horrible.”

  “Why that rule?” Slack said sulkily. “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Something to do with security. Anyway, I guess it’s a small price to pay.” John pulled a book on Inuit mythology out of his bag. “I’ll catch up on my reading.”