Insignia (33 page)

“James Blackburn, yes.”

“Outright adversarial.”

Vengerov shook his head. “Blackburn was never my concern. He’s quite easy to neutralize, if you push the right buttons, and the boy’s programmed to do exactly that, if necessary. What I want to know about is the family situation. I know about the mother, naturally. What about the father? Will he make trouble for us over this?”

Mr. Prestwick laughed. “It’s what, mid-afternoon on the West Coast? His old man’s still lying in a pool of last night’s vomit somewhere. Isn’t that right, son?” He clapped Tom’s back.

Tom looked at him. A mental image of gouging out Mr. Prestwick’s eyes passed through his brain, then the repressive voice in his head:
Mr. Prestwick is my friend. Mr. Prestwick is always right. Public displays of temper don’t become me
.

Mr. Prestwick’s hand squeezed on his shoulder. “Isn’t it right?”

Agree with Mr. Prestwick
.

Tom choked back the words that wanted to come up. Never. He would
never
say them.

“Well before, he was—” Mr. Prestwick began.

Vengerov held up a finger, eyes like a hawk’s on Tom. “This is a critical test of the software. Make him agree with you.”

Mr. Prestwick turned back to Tom, grabbed his shoulder again. “Isn’t it right, Tom?”

Tom’s teeth ground together so hard his jaw ached. Vengerov and Mr. Prestwick both watched him closely, and that voice in his head commanded,
Agree with Mr. Prestwick
. He felt like something was squeezing his skull, crushing it.

“Isn’t it right?” Mr. Prestwick said, voice hard.

AGREE WITH MR. PRESTWICK
.

“Yes, he probably is,” Tom said. Then he felt a sudden, insane relief like a vise had stopped squeezing his head.

Vengerov nodded crisply, then shook Mr. Prestwick’s hand. “My people will call yours with the bill.”

“Always a pleasure to do business with you.”

Soon after that, Tom was sent back to the private neural interface for his next packet of software. He passed right by the portcullis, mere feet away, and couldn’t seem to tear his gaze from it as he headed to the private neural access room. Then he hooked himself in to receive more and more programming in his brain.

T
HE NEXT FEW
times Tom met Medusa, he did it in free hours using a VR parlor in the Pentagon City Mall. He couldn’t bring himself to sneak into Blackburn’s office or the officers’ lounge again, because for some reason, there was this voice in the back of his head warning him,
Don’t draw attention to yourself. Don’t attract Blackburn’s attention. Don’t break rules
.

It was foreign, and sometimes made him feel a bit ill whenever he heard it, but he couldn’t seem to ignore it without that feeling like his head was about to be crushed. And as soon as he thought about something else, he couldn’t even remember the voice was there.

So he didn’t hook in. He just logged in from a VR parlor and faced her in regular video games, missing the full fighting experience. But he stopped caring as they fought in one sim after another. She always beat him. It was always close, too—there was one move she made that he didn’t, one moment she was faster than he was.

Medusa wasn’t a big talker, and Tom liked fighting more than talking, so they didn’t get much use out of the computerized voices the first couple of times. But then they began using voice chat, and the taunts started. Tom never won the games, so he started rubbing his small victories in her face. (“Aw, look at that! You thought you were going to shoot me. But hey, at least you killed that frightened villager, instead.”) She started rubbing her large victories in his face. (“Oh no, where did your head go? Maybe it got tired of not being used?”
)
Sometimes they lingered after the battles, talking about what had happened. (“If I’d just ducked, I’d have had you. I had a dragonslayer ax.” “No, because I was waiting for you to duck, and I had a dagger ready.”
)
Then sometimes, the talk strayed to the real-life battles Medusa fought.

At one point, when Tom started rambling about Medusa’s victory on Titan, Medusa asked Tom whether he was stalking her.

“I am,” Tom admitted. He even owned up to watching her battles 394 times.

Strangely enough, his honest admission that he was unhealthily obsessed with her made her like him more, and let her own guard down. She started speaking in her real voice, so he started responding in his real voice.

And Medusa? Yeah. She was definitely a girl.

“What time is it there?” he asked her one Saturday morning, just so he could hear her speak again.

“Five in the morning, obviously.”

Tom knew that was a stupid question. They knew each other’s time zones. He didn’t care. “When do you sleep?”

“When I’m not stomping you and your country.”

Tom laughed. He was suddenly certain she was the most awesome person he’d ever encountered. “I had a six-year winning streak until I met you.” He adjusted the microphone so she could hear him over the background buzz in the public VR parlor. His avatar was a muscular blue ogre with a samurai sword that doubled as a phase gun.

Medusa’s avatar was an Egyptian goddess with retracted, batlike wings and eyes that shot fire. “I had an eight-year winning streak when I met you. And I still have an eight-year winning streak!”

Their characters were idling in the exploratory phase of their RPG. She’d been pestering him to make up a call sign, since his avatar’s name, Murgatroid, wasn’t doing it for her. Neither was the nickname he suggested, “the Troid.”

“I’ve got one,” Tom told her. “Merlin.”

Medusa didn’t like that. Her Egyptian queen turned into a large bat that flapped across the room, like she was going to leave. Tom’s ogre leaped up to block the window and stop her escape. She transmitted a sound wave of loud booing and shot some fire from her eyes.

Tom’s ogre threw up his beefy arms to shield his face. “What’s wrong with Merlin?”

“Too Camelot Company. You said you’re not in Camelot Company.”

“What, you want me to come up with a name that’s anti-Camelot? That’s treasonous, isn’t it? It’s betraying my country to be anti-Camelot.”

The bat fluttered around his head. “Isn’t this treason right now? You’re meeting with the enemy.”

“It’s not like I’m giving you confidential info. And besides, we’re both meeting with the enemy here.”

“Well, look, it’s not that bad. It’s not like we’re going to go fight in real life tomorrow.”

“Why don’t you tell me what my fake call sign should be, then? It’s not like it counts for anything.”

Medusa transmitted the booing again. “You have to come up with your own call sign.”

“I’ve got a great one. Lord JOOSTMEISTER,” Tom joked. “All in caps.”

Fire blasted from Medusa’s eyes. She didn’t like that one.

Tom leaned back in the chair to avoid the flames. “How about Sir Roostag the Mighty and Free?”

She considered that one a second. Then, booing.

“Okay, okay. Serious one. Exabelldon.”

Medusa zinged his ogre with the fire from her eyes. Tom’s ogre bellowed, and Tom laughed.

“Now you’re trying to make up the worst names imaginable,” Medusa said.

“Fine, fine.” Tom had been trying to do just that. “How about … Mordred? He destroyed the real Camelot.”

Applause answered him. Medusa poofed back into an Egyptian queen and stopped trying to fly out the window or zing him with flames.

“Fine,” Tom said. “Mordred it is.”

Her Egyptian queen fluttered her long black eyelashes. “Mordred is a sexy name.”

Tom’s cheeks grew hot, like there really was some girl in the room teasing him. “You think so?”

“I know so.”

Tom was still remembering that exchange, when he headed back to the Spire that night. She’d called him sexy. He felt like an idiot, standing there in the middle of the mess hall, grinning about something said by a girl whose name he didn’t even know. And then he found himself meeting Karl’s gaze across the crowded room, and the massive Genghis nodded his head toward the elevator.

Karl disappeared into it but held out his hand to keep it open. Tom followed without deciding to. A sense of doom crashed over him during those few, agonizing steps to the elevator. Even though he knew something was very wrong here, he couldn’t stop himself from going inside and then walking behind Karl to an empty bunk in Genghis Division.

“We’ve done this before,” Tom realized as the door slid shut behind them.

“We sure have. More than once. And this?” Karl waved a neural chip tauntingly. “Is your last personality update, Benji.”

“And then?”

“Then some of the software that’s already been installed gets triggered, and bam, you’re gone, Lassie. The little punk I know and hate is wiped. The best part is, I get to be the one to do it. I owe Dalton for this big-time.”

Tom stood there in the middle of the bunk, watching Karl set up a video camera, and felt like he was going to be sick. He wished suddenly that Vik or Wyatt or Yuri were nearby—anyone to stop this. He’d even take Blackburn.

Karl flipped the camera on, trained it on Tom, and then settled back in a chair. “Any last words, Fido?”

Tom’s blood pulsed up in his ears. “Drop dead, Karl.”

“That’s not very nice. Kind of hurts my feelings, Raines. How about you make it up to me? I know. You can get on all fours like a good little dog, and bark.”

Tom closed his eyes.
Listen to Karl and get your update
warred with
Disembowel him. Disembowel him now
. The vise around his head was back because Karl was telling him something and he was trying his hardest not to listen.

“Drop. Dead. Karl,” Tom choked out, fighting everything inside him trying to force him down.

“No, get on your hands and knees, and bark. Do it, Raines. Do it right now so I can film it.” Karl leered at him over the camera, his jowled face shadowed in lamplight. “You think I don’t get you? You wanna be the big man in charge here. You think you’re the alpha dog. But you’re not.
I
am. So you’re going to do this right now before I eradicate you.”

“I hate you.” Tom’s limbs trembled with the dual effort of trying to force himself back out the door while something else tried to force him down on all fours.

“I hate you, too,” Karl said. “Now hands. Knees. Bark. Consider it an order.”

Something about that sequence of words did it, and then Tom was on the ground, barking, while Karl’s laughter filled the air around him. By the time the wire clicked into his brain stem, that second voice in his head had already fallen silent from the sheer horror of it all.

“W
HAT IS WITH
you?”

“What do you mean?” Tom said to Vik. He was gazing into his new mirror in his bunk, very intent on gelling his hair before morning meal formation. It was long enough now that he could do something with it. Mr. Prestwick had given him a credit card and instructions to go clean up, starting with a two-hundred-dollar bottle of hair styling cream so he wouldn’t look like a street rat anymore.

He was trying very hard to ignore the way Vik was gaping at him, like he’d just walked naked into morning meal formation. “You realize you’ve been preening in front of the mirror for half an hour.”

Tom frowned, then stopped, knowing frowns made people wrinkle, and it was important he protect his youthful good looks. “You’ve told me a dozen times you’re hoping to make Camelot Company one day. Well, I hate to break it to you, but appearances matter if you want to get somewhere in life, Vik.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry, Tom. Did you displace your Y chromosome somewhere? I hope it’s not on the floor where someone might step on it.” Vik made a show of looking around.

“I’m sorry you don’t understand the value of presenting yourself in the right manner.” Tom felt bad for him.

A few weeks ago, he’d have told the world Vik was his best friend. But Vik was getting weirder by the day. He kept treating Tom like he was a freak of some sort. He sniggered when Tom started exercising in the mornings before classes or when he was the first to raise his hand with the civilian instructors or when he volunteered to escort a committee of senators and business leaders on a tour of the Spire.

Tom didn’t get what Vik’s problem was. This was how a guy got ahead in life. He connected with the right people, conducted himself well enough to give a good impression, kept up his appearance, and leaped upon opportunities as they neared. That’s what Mr. Prestwick said, and everything Mr. Prestwick said was true.

“I
DON’T UNDERSTAND
him anymore, Mr. Prestwick,” Tom told him Wednesday night, when Mr. Prestwick took him to get fitted for an eleven-thousand-dollar Italian suit. Dominion Agra executives were holding a soiree on the following Saturday night at the Beringer Club, and after a month of downloads, Tom had been deemed ready to be introduced to everyone.

The tailor stepped out of the dressing room, and Mr. Prestwick occupied himself by flipping through a rack of designer ties. “Perhaps it’s time you had new friends, Tom. They don’t sound like the type of people we want around you.”