Insignia (7 page)

He pulled his hand back and grabbed his drink. Globs of whipped cream were melting into the light brown liquid. He could see Marsh’s invisible hand in this: he’d sent Heather here because he thought a gorgeous girl could talk Tom into getting his skull split open. This was more of Marsh trying to play him for a sucker. Well, his maneuver wouldn’t work.

“I know what you must be wondering.” Heather paused and bit her bottom lip. Despite himself, Tom stared at the pink flesh, his mouth suddenly dry. “I worried about it, too. I thought maybe after I got the neural processor in my head, the voice in my brain might disappear and get replaced by some robotic thing, like, ‘Good morning, Dave.’”

Gorgeous and a science fiction geek. Tom’s heart was beating faster. Okay, maybe Marsh’s maneuver was sort of working.

“But I was worrying over nothing, Tom. I’m still me. I’m just a
better
me.”

“Look,” Tom told her, before she could go on with the pitch, “it’s not the computer itself I have a problem with. I’m not even so worried about being a different person. It’s just that Marsh didn’t mention any of this brain-surgery stuff until after he was pretty sure I was sold on this. It’s the way he did it.”

Her amber eyes stayed fixed upon his. “You feel manipulated?”

“No,” Tom said flatly, “because he hasn’t manipulated me. He’s just
trying
to manipulate me. I mean, would you be talking to me right now if he hadn’t sent you?”

Heather rested her chin in her palm. “Of course he’s trying to manipulate you.”

Tom blinked, surprised she’d just admitted that.

“General Marsh even ordered me to come here and talk you into it, just as you guessed. Can you blame him? He doesn’t want you to turn this down after you’ve found out the big secret about the neural processors.” She tapped a finger thoughtfully on her lips, studying him. “Good thing you won’t.”

“I won’t?” Tom said, feeling out of his depth with her.

“Mmm, no. You won’t,” Heather said matter-of-factly. “You know exactly what it means if you come here. They stick an expensive, multimillion-dollar computer in your head. They invest tens of millions more training you. Then they give you control of billions of dollars of military machinery and a critical role in the country’s war effort. You’re valuable. So of course General Marsh has an agenda when it comes to dealing with you. But that’s really what you have to put up with if you want to be one of us. The question is, Tom, do you want to be one of us?” She leaned closer, her eyes gripping his. “Do you want to be somebody important?”

And there it was.

There it was.

Tom leaned back in his seat and tipped his drink to Heather—and the man who had just won this match.

Because, more than anything, Tom wanted to
do something
. Something other than move from casino to casino, something other than turn into his dad.

He’d give anything to be important.

W
HAT SEEMED A
timeless period later,
it
realized something was different.

It
held
itself
very still and tried to comprehend what was happening.

Its
brain was humming at a different frequency somehow,
its
thoughts meaningless yet logical.
It
blinked at the strange yet familiar symbols running through its awareness—the periodic table of elements—and recognized through some hazy curtain the chemical configuration of the medication in
its
system.
Dexmethasone
.

There was a trail of 1s and 0s, data signals moving through wires, and
it
followed them into what seemed an endless maze of electric pulses swapping back and forth.
It
became a security camera in Rio de Janeiro, gazing upon a large Jesus statue with arms flung wide over a vast, rolling city. Infrared sensors alerted the security camera to the presence of organic beings moving around the statue. The 0s and 1s were leaving there, and
it
followed them to an autonav system in a vehicle winding down a highway in Bombay. A flexure of
its
will could send this car off the road, but
it
knew better. The autonav had strict parameters that dictated
its
actions when
it
was this autonav.

And then
it
followed the next stream and settled in the filtration system in a reservoir in Northern California. Through a process of facilitated diffusion,
it
absorbed organic solutes and then bound them into an inactive compound. Water slapped and dashed at osmotic pressure sensors. But this wasn’t right, either.

It
found the Grand Canyon and managed to stay there in the security network, frightened by the knowledge that this wasn’t what
it
was, either.
It
remained there, a sensory ghost analyzing the perimeter and linking on and off like firing neurons with the autonavs of the visitor cars.
It
lurked in the fizzling thermal sensors overlooking the snoring security guard with boots propped up on the desk, watching the creature, analyzing the being’s temperature (98.5° F). Strange to regard this mammal with its vast tangle of chemical processes and the steady thump of the heartbeat (76 beats per minute) and the …

Human.

That was right.

It
was human.

It
was human. Why was
it
… Why was
he
so confused? Why was
he
drifting like this?

He. He was
it. It
was he. He knew who “he” was.

Tom Raines. Tom. Tom. Tom.

Tom clung to this sudden awareness of self, waiting for reality to resolve back into somethng he understood. He remembered things, just for a moment: the sedative he’d swallowed. Feeling woozy in the operating room. His head being shaved and washed, and being told it was an “antiseptic practice to avoid infection.” Heather tapping on the glass wall of the surgical suite and giving him a wave good-bye. The way seeing her made him smile as they strapped a mask on his face …

The thought connected him with his body, his sensory receptors, and for a frightening moment, he experienced utter numbness. His hand twitched on the metal table, and he heard a voice inside his eardrum, noting the spike in his neural activity.

“… centered on the orbitofrontal cortex. Is he aware of us?”

“That’s not possible,” said another voice. “These instruments can be faulty. I’ve requested new ones out of Denver. Do you remember that delivery girl?”

But there was something else there, too, something with him, something
not
Tom.

0100010001111100101001010000101110110001100001001011111001010100 …

A number that seemed to stretch into infinity. So foreign, so alien, he jerked away from it. But then it felt like he’d been caught in a tsunami, because a great wave crashed over him and swept him back into that ocean of machines drowning him in signals....

A sense of vastness pressed in on him. It hummed all around him in a tangle of infinite complexity: the security cameras in Rio and the Grand Canyon and the reservoir filtration system and four billion car autonavs and hundreds of billions of text messages and stray data bits and computers pinging and games swapping signals and machines sending them from space and satellites and security systems of a billion different …

“Stop! Stop!” Tom’s voice never left his mouth. That body remained still on the table, its lips frozen, its muscles like lead, its hands cold, its head chilled because it was shaved. Voices chattered on, oblivious to it, and that computer in its brain offered logic and order, and kept restructuring, restructuring him … and that maelstrom of signals threatened to sweep him away into infinity itself....

A
ND THEN
T
OM
opened his eyes in the infirmary. He was in Section 1C3 of the Pentagonal Spire. He knew that because the red number glowed in the bottom right corner of his vision for a split second before vanishing. He stared up at the bars of fluorescent light hanging overhead, and then a round, friendly face appeared above his.

“Feeling better today, Mr. Raines?”

Tom blinked, because something strange was happening. He saw the man’s face, but he also saw text, scrolling rapidly through his brain.

Tom blinked again, and the text was gone.

“Tom,” said Jason Chang, drawing his attention back to the present. “Can you tell me your full name?”

“Thomas Andrew Raines.”

Lieutenant Chang flashed a penlight in his eyes. “Do you know where you are?”

“The Pentagonal Spire.”

“That’s right. Do you know why you are here?”

“Surgery. To get a neural processor implanted.”

“Tell me, what’s my name and security designation?”

Tom remembered the profile information he’d seen in that fleeting second, every last word of it. “Jason Chang, BSN?” At the nurse’s nod, Tom went on. “Your security designation is Top Secret LANDLOCK-6.... How did I remember that?”

“You have a photographic memory now, Mr. Raines, and there’s a directory in your processor of everyone’s names. You’ll see a basic information list the first time you look directly at the faces of the other personnel here in the Spire, and once you’ve seen it, you won’t ever forget it. Now, let’s test your internal chronometer. What’s the time?”

“It’s oh five fifty-three,” Tom answered immediately. Then he realized that he’d automatically switched to thinking in the military’s twenty-four-hour time.

“Well done.”

He blinked three times. He watched the lieutenant lifting a bedside conferencer, tapping in 1-380-4198-4885. Chang spoke, “Dr. Gonzales, Mr. Raines is A and O times three. I understand. I’ll run him through the standard assessment.”

“I feel strange.” Tom’s voice registered in his brain, lower than he remembered.

“It’s natural.” Lieutenant Chang slanted him a dark gaze from almond-shaped eyes. “Your brain needs to adjust to the software. You’ll have difficulty at first sorting through the influx of data. It will pass.”

Tom glanced up at a seventy-watt light glowing overhead. He’d gazed at this light all day. He’d been awake for a while, blinking at fifteen second intervals. Eighteen days, four hours, nine minutes, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight seconds …

“I’ve been awake,” Tom realized. “My surgery was eighteen days ago.”

Chang peeled a blood pressure cuff from Tom’s arm. “Your surgery was eighteen days ago, but no, you have not been awake in the traditional sense. Your brain’s been undergoing restructuring. The implanted trainees all have to optimize. You’ve been conscious and unconscious at intervals, but you were unaware. Your mind needed to adjust to the new neural pathways forged by the hardware in your head. Your brain will regain homeostasis now that you’re awake. The extra details will disappear. Soon enough, you’ll feel like your old self again. Better than your old self, I’d wager.”

Even now, Tom felt like he was regaining a sense of normalcy. He raised his hand to touch his scalp. Only the faintest trace of a scar was there. A thin incision of 3.1 centimeters. His hair was back, 0.7 centimeters of it. He’d been lying here long enough for it to grow. His hand roved down to a numb spot on the back of his neck, and he found a flat, metal port there. It was a neural access port. He just knew what it was.

“Now, Plebe, I’m going to run you through a few procedures to test whether we can send you out yet.”

“Already?” Tom croaked. “I’m going to combat now?”

Lieutenant Chang’s laughter rippled through the stale, cold room. “Not quite yet. You’ll need years of training before you become a Combatant.”

“Right.” Tom closed his eyes, because there was a datastream blasting the answer through his head:
Standard advancement path in the Intrasolar Forces at the Pentagonal Spire: Initial Training as plebe, followed by Middle Company, Upper Company, and in cases where the trainee is found to excel, Camelot Company, the Combatant group. In cases where a trainee is found unsuitable for intrasolar combat, avenues with other government agencies will be considered, including the NSA, the CIA, the State Department, the …

Tom willed the datastream to stop, and it ceased immediately. So strange. He knew the information was coming from the neural processor, but it had felt like he was thinking it, like it was an ordinary scrap of information that belonged in his mind.

He was distracted when Chang ran him through the basic assessment, checking his pupils, his sensation of touch, his circulation. And then the lieutenant turned on a recording with various musical notes and asked Tom to identify them.

“I don’t know anything about music—” Tom began to protest.

But he did know them. With a strange shock, he listed E, C, D, A.

The nurse saw his shocked face, and patted his shoulder. Then he gestured for Tom to sit up. “We upload a few gigs of information to test you out, plus some class assignments so you don’t start off behind. You should have a reference database for your first week here, correct?”