Insignia (26 page)

“What’s going on with you, Beamer?” Vik asked him. “Why are you being such a pansy today?”

It was worse than Tom would’ve done. He jabbed his thumb toward the door. Vik raised his arms and left him to it.

Tom took over his spot at Beamer’s side, then realized he had no idea what to say, either.

“Look, I’m sorry I beheaded you, okay?”

Beamer opened his eyes. “God, Tom, you are so selfish! This is not about you.”

“Then what? I don’t get it. I don’t. Do you need the social worker?”

Beamer shook his head, staring at the ceiling.

“Look, I’m not trying to make fun of you. I can get her to come up here.” He braced himself, because this was about as self-sacrificing as he could ever remember being. “I will even say it’s for me if you’re embarrassed.”

Please say no
, Tom added mentally.

“No,” Beamer said.

Tom’s shoulders slumped in relief.

“Don’t you see, Tom? Don’t you see what my problem is?”

“Yeah, you thought something was wrong with the program and you were gonna die. So you got freaked out.”

“No. Yes, but not just that. I thought I was going to die. And afterward, it made me think. Really think. About this.” He tapped his head with a pale finger. “About what I’ve done. I thought this would be fun, Tom, okay? Coming to the Spire, messing around with machines. But I didn’t think it through. I didn’t think about whether this is what I want. What if I die?”

“You’re not gonna die anytime soon. You’re fourteen.”

“How can you know that?” Beamer sat up in bed, red spots on his cheeks. “We don’t even know what this stuff in our heads is. Are there any eighty-year-olds walking around with neural processors?”

“They didn’t have this tech back then. But look at Blackburn. He got it sixteen years ago. Other than the acute psychotic break, he’s fine.”

Beamer rolled his eyes and slumped back down. Tom could admit that “other than the acute psychotic break” was a pretty stupid thing to say, but he didn’t know why Beamer would be so touchy about the details right now.

“It’s not even that. Don’t you get it? We never get these out. Never. We signed up for a few years in the Spire, but this stuff in our heads ties us to the military for life. Do you realize that? They own it. They own
us
.”

Tom found his thoughts turning back to his night in the infirmary, the way Dr. Gonzales had a final say over his hGH and not him. But he just said, “What does it matter? They need us. They’re not going to do anything bad to us.”

“We will always be the front line. The military gets first dibs on us for the rest of our lives, whatever we do from here—don’t you see that? Who’s going to repair the processor when it breaks, otherwise? And what happens if the Russo-Chinese programmers come up with some great new computer virus to vaporize our brains? … If Russia and China ever have a chance to really take down America, we’re the first ones they’ll kill!”

Tom laughed at that. It sounded so ridiculous. “Come on. No one kills in war anymore.”

“It’s war, Tom. War. That used to mean stuff like the Battle of Stalingrad, get it? And one day, it might again. Someone might remember one day. Someone might remember this is World War III. Blackburn said it—don’t you remember? He said they want to cut open our heads and look at the coding inside!”

“That’s Blackburn trying to scare us. Look, I get it, Beamer. I was actually worried about some of this stuff, too, back before I got the neural processor.”

“
You
. Worried.”

Tom shrugged, trying to remember his conversation with Heather back when he was making up his mind about whether to enlist. It was funny how much murkier his memories before the neural processor felt—not time-stamped at all, not perfectly detailed. Like a different person had those experiences.

“Yeah, I was worried. About the brain surgery being a surprise and the way the military was—well, just some of the same stuff you mentioned. But … come on. Come on, Beamer. Look around you. Who else gets to do what we do? Who else gets to be what we are? We’re important. We can learn any skill with a download. We can speak any language we want. We’re faster and smarter than regular people. We can do anything now.”

Beamer rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “I could’ve done anything before if I’d tried really hard. I started a business, you know. I figured out how to make some things, so I sold water filters and grills at tent cities. I mean, ever seen one of those places? They’re not completely poor. A lot of them have jobs, but they just can’t afford a real place.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen a few.” Neil always pointed them out to him. He said they were the only alternative to moving from casino to casino.

“Well, people bought my stuff there. I made money. I was doing just fine before the neural processor. You could’ve done anything before the processor, too. You won spelling bees, remember? That must’ve taken a lot of work.”

Tom didn’t say anything. He knew he hadn’t won spelling bees before, or even contributed to the world’s largest ball of earwax. The old Tom Raines couldn’t even make it at a reform school.

“I see you, Vik, and even Yuri, who doesn’t have a chance here and
has
to know it,” Beamer said. “You guys are just devoted to this thing. And I came here, and I wanted to do well, but I just don’t care about it anymore. Ever since that thing happened with my girlfriend and I got stuck on restricted libs, it’s like it’s all gone into perspective. I keep wondering why I’m still here. I don’t want to be Camelot Company. I hate it here. I keep thinking about high school and all those movies I saw about it, and wondering if I’m missing out on something. I want to get older and go to college. And buy a house. And have kids and marry some woman and have block parties and barbecues.”

“Barbecue?”—Tom latched on to that—“Beamer, you and me, we can go have a barbecue right now, okay? Forget restricted libs. We’ll reroute your GPS signal to the bathroom, then we’ll go outside and barbecue anything you want.”

Beamer gave a pained sigh. “You don’t understand, Tom. You can’t.”

He turned around to face the wall and buried his head in the covers.

Tom realized it, then: he didn’t understand. He couldn’t. Beamer wanted to be normal. Tom couldn’t imagine ever wanting to be nothing.

Tom would never willingly give up what he had here. He would never willingly lose the neural processor, the life full of possibilities.

He couldn’t bear to be worthless again. He’d rather be dead.

M
OST OF THE
viruses on the second full day of the war games came courtesy of Wyatt, but there were a few exceptions. Franco Holbein of Hannibal Division wrote one called Icy Night that caught a few Machiavellis when they hooked into neural access ports in their bunks. They spent all of lunch huddled together, teeth chattering, bellowing out demands for someone to turn up the Spire’s thermostat. Then Nigel Harrison pulled off a virus called Food Face that caused people sitting in the mess hall to smash their own faces into their meal trays. By the end of the day, Britt Schmeiser of Napoleon Division had retaliated with a Trojan named Nigel Harrison that triggered whenever an infected trainee’s vision center registered that Nigel Harrison was nearby.

The Trojan infiltrated the homework feed overnight and managed to infect most of the Spire. On the third day of the war games, Nigel strode into the mess hall for lunch, and the Trojan triggered in almost a hundred trainees at the same time. A sea of faces began twitching just like his face always did.

Nigel stared around the room, looking like he’d entered some surreal nightmare, and then he lost it. “Stop it,” he shrieked. “Stop it!”

But getting upset made his face twitch harder, and his facial twitch triggered their facial twitches. And a whole debacle ensued where Nigel began threatening to hit people with his meal tray. Eventually, he fled the room in tears of rage, pursued by laughter and shouts of “Go cry to the social worker!”

Tom and Vik missed the incident, though they both passed Nigel Harrison outside the Lafayette Room, and therefore spent the next hour irritated by continual facial twitches. They skipped lunch altogether, too busy putting together their program for the duel with Karl. It was beautiful. They called it Frequent Noisome Farts.

“You ready for this, Doctor?” Vik asked Tom.

“I’m ready, Doctor. Let’s go.”

They marched out into the plebe common room at 2000 to face Karl. From the fiendish pleasure emanating from Karl’s jowled face beneath his new haircut, he had something nasty ready, too.

“On three.” Vik’s eyes were locked on those of Karl’s companion Lyla Martin. It was the first time Tom had really seen her up close, and her profile flashed before him.

“One-two-three,” Lyla shouted all in a jumble, and Tom was too startled to react right away.

Karl cried, “Ha!” and struck first.

Nothing happened.
Datastream received: program Rabid Fido initiated. Value null
, flashed across Tom’s vision center.

“Nice try, buddy boy.” Tom launched Frequent Noisome Farts.

Karl waited. And waited. Then laughed. “Value null, Plebe.”

“Secret Indian ninja attack!” Vik raised the portable keyboard he’d snuck behind his back and unleashed their supersecret, superexperimental backup program.

“Ka-pow!” Tom cried triumphantly.

Karl and Lyla looked back at them questioningly.

Lyla scratched her nose. “My nose itches. Does your nose itch?” she asked Karl.

Karl shook his head. “Nah.”

“Secret Indian Ninja Attack doesn’t make your nose itch,” Vik said.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s all I’m noticing. The itchy nose.”

“Another null, Plebes,” Karl announced.

They all looked at one another for a long time. Karl pounded one first into a meaty hand, visibly longing for a chance to pummel them the old-fashioned way. Then they headed off their separate ways.

“Worst duel ever,” Tom decided.

“Tom,” Vik said as they entered their bunk, “we suck so much it’s depressing.”

U
NFORTUNATELY
, B
LACKBURN AGREED
with them. The next day, he played their duel on the overhead screens for the class, and even he had to smother his palm over his mouth to fight his laughter.

Tom decided he hated the census device. After they’d transmitted their source code to Blackburn, he ordered all four of them down for memory viewing just for this. Blackburn had played a vast number of humiliating programming failures for their entertainment and capped it all off with Tom and Karl’s epic duel.

“The last three days have confirmed it,” Blackburn said. “The vast majority of you, to put it gently, are pathetic. Hannibal Division is winning, with Machiavelli at a distant second. This appears to be solely due to the efforts of Nigel Harrison and, to my endless surprise, Wyatt Enslow.”

Cheers and whoops from the other Hannibals and Machiavellis rang through the Lafayette Room. Tom looked over and saw that Wyatt’s cheeks had grown bright red. She wasn’t used to being the center of attention—and certainly not accustomed to being celebrated by the other members of a division that mostly ignored her.

“What’s your secret, Enslow?” Blackburn said, leaning on the podium, gray eyes fixed on hers. “How did you turn into a prodigy on me?”

Tom saw Wyatt duck her head, letting her dark hair swing in her face. “I just really wanted to attack people before they attacked me, sir.”

Blackburn let her off with that, but Tom noticed Blackburn glancing at her from time to time even after he moved on with the lecture. “Now, I’ve caught word of a few attacks on Mr. Ramirez. General Marsh doesn’t want him to be in this conflict.”

Elliot rose to his feet. “Sir, I’m fine with—”

“Mr. Ramirez, you have a summit at the Capitol Building coming up. As you’ll
appear
to be representing the Indo-American forces, no one wants to risk messing up your software. And, let’s face it, you’re hardly a coding genius whose absence will have a devastating impact on this conflict. I think we’ll survive your nonparticipation.”

Tom could have sworn that Elliot looked embarrassed as he dropped back down.

“Ramirez is out, everyone. As for the rest of you”—Blackburn waved his finger in a circle, indicating the whole room—“you have one more day. I know this is asking a lot, but try to stop humiliating yourselves.”

A
S
V
IK AND
Tom headed up in the elevator to the sixth floor, Tom asked him, “What did Blackburn mean about Elliot ‘appearing’ to represent Indo-America?”

“Well, you know what the Capitol Summit’s
really
about,” Vik said. “Dominion Agra is allied with India and America, and it controls the patents on the food supply. Harbinger, Inc. is allied with Russia and China, and it controls the patents on the water supply. So this is the time of year when the Coalition of Multinationals meets and agrees that even if they’re at war in space, they’ll still enforce each other’s patents here on Earth. It’s also a big show for the public to keep them engaged in the war. Our best Combatant faces the best Russo-Chinese Combatant.”