Insignia (27 page)

“But Elliot’s the one who fights there,” Tom pointed out. “And he’s not the best one in CamCo.”

The doors slid open and they strode into the plebe common room, heading toward Alexander Division. “But we call him our best. And from the outside, it’ll look like Elliot and Svetlana are the ones fighting because they’ve got the pretty faces and the stage presence. So they go through the gestures of facing off for the cameras, while behind the scenes, proxies do the actual fighting. Elliot sure does, and everyone assumes Svetlana does, too.”

Tom sputtered a laugh. “Wait. Wait. So he just goes there and pretends to fight?”

“Yeah,” Vik said. “It’s kind of funny. See, the public doesn’t know about neural processors, so Elliot and Svetlana even have a wheel, a throttle, and controllers like they’re steering ships in space, while somewhere else their proxies are hooked in and actually navigating the ships.”

“Who’s the proxy?”

“Last year it was Alec Tarsus. But since Svetlana is sure to be proxied by Medusa this year, and Alec always gets stomped by her in space, I’m not sure who they’ll use this time around. I’m guessing Heather Akron or that Genghis Division guy Yosef Saide maybe? He won’t beat Medusa, but you’ve seen Yosef in action. He’s big on mass destruction. He might pull off something insane that’ll make them both lose.”

They passed Beamer as he left his bunk for the bathroom. “Hey,” Tom called, “who do you think will …”

But Beamer walked past them like they weren’t even there. A cold fist seemed to curl in Tom’s stomach, and it wasn’t until Vik tugged on his shoulder that he headed on his way again.

Once they were inside their bunk, Vik accessed the Spire’s internal processor and ran a cursory virus scan to try locating the other malicious attacks planted in neural interfaces. He pulled back with some shock when he was done and showed Tom the results: Wyatt Enslow had sabotaged everything.
Everything
. She’d planted attacks in the homework feeds, in the databases. She’d even manufactured firewalls that blocked other people’s viruses from infiltrating the feeds.

Vik sat back on his heels, blown away. “Doctor, you realize Man Hands has stomped everyone.”

“She needs a proper supervillain name. Man Hands isn’t doing it for me.”

“You’re right. How about ‘Evil Wench from the Darkest Reaches of Mordor’?”

“Too wordy.”

“Just Evil Wench, then. Look, I refuse to concede defeat here.”

“Every villain has a weak spot. What’s hers?”

Vik rubbed at his chin and frowned at the wall. Tom flopped down on his bed and propped his head up on his elbow, concentrating on the carpet.

Wyatt didn’t play games. They couldn’t sneak something into a VR sim. She liked reading, but Tom couldn’t think of any way to sneak her a Trojan in a book. She never hooked into those, so the text would just get memorized by the processor. She just read them word by word like a regular person without a neural processor did.

“Training room neural interface sockets?”

“How do you know what cot she’ll pick?” Vik pointed out.

“You’ll have to plant some virus in all of them.”

“You’ll get it, too.”

Tom waved that off. “I’ll take it just to score a point against her.”

“And Elliot will get it.”

“Oh.” Tom’s hopes faded. They couldn’t risk hitting Elliot. “Well, there’s gotta be some other …” And then, suddenly, he knew what Wyatt’s weakness was: “Vik, what about Yuri?”

Vik’s eyes shot to his. “The Android. Of course. He’s been her best friend since she got here. She trusts him.”

“So we get him to sneak her a virus,” Tom said. “He doesn’t have to understand any of it. We just tell him to show her something and send a file.”

Vik grinned. “She’ll get curious and look!”

It was perfect.

There was just one catch: Yuri was horrified at the very idea of helping them take Wyatt down. “I cannot do that.”

“You don’t have to do much of anything,” Vik protested. “Just ask her to take a look at a program of yours, have her hook in.”

“And bam. She’s in virus town,” Tom finished.

“It is too deceitful,” Yuri said.

Vik threw up his hands. “Come on. Where’s your patriotism? You’re an Alexander, for God’s sake!”

“But I do not like this idea of attacking Wanda.”

“It’s not like the Evil Wench is gonna ditch you for all her other friends—”

“I will not lose her trust.”

“We get that you feel pity for her or whatever—” Tom began.

Yuri rose to his full height. “Why should I pity her? She is magnificent. She is so intelligent and honest, and her eyes are lovely.” He stopped, maybe because Tom and Vik were both staring at him like he was a madman, or maybe because he could feel how pink he was turning.

It hit Tom like a lightning bolt. He turned to Vik, aghast. “He likes her.”

“Yuri, no!” Vik said.

Yuri turned redder, confirming it.

“Yuri, come on, man,” Tom cried.

Yuri gave a helpless shrug. “Divisions cannot divide human hearts.”

“Oh God,” Vik cried, clapping hands over his ears. “He’s even spouting cheesy lines now. Make him stop, Tom!”

“I can’t,” Tom told him. “My ears … They’re bleeding. Bleeding!”

“It’s a brain hemorrhage! He’s murdered us!” Vik said. “Murderer!” Tom cried, fake collapsing onto the ground. Yuri shook his head. “This is not very mature.”

But they were both on the ground now, pretending to writhe with spontaneous brain hemorrhages. Yuri sighed and stepped over them to get out the door.

T
HAT NIGHT
, V
IK
devoted himself to staying up and putting together the ultimate program to take Wyatt down. Tom wasn’t going to sleep while his partner in doom did the bulk of the programming, so he stayed awake in a show of solidarity, occasionally offering suggestions. One idea came to him very late in the night. He jumped to his feet in a flash of inspiration.

“Vik, what if we use an outside transmitter?”

“What? I was concentrating, Tom.”

“Listen. Maybe we don’t need some elaborate virus. Maybe we just need to hit her from somewhere she doesn’t expect. We know her IP. And we have the authorization to allow us through the Spire’s firewall. So we find a transmitter powerful enough to send it to her from a distance, hack into that, and use it to slam her with something.”

“What kind of transmitter?”

Tom leaned forward eagerly, because this was where he was sure he was being visionary. “A satellite.”

“How do you expect to use a satellite? I don’t know a thing about how those are controlled.”

“We hook in. Just like satellites hook into ships in space, we hook into the satellite.”

“The ships in space are designed for a neural interface,” Vik informed him. “Satellites aren’t.”

Tom rubbed at his head, fumbling with scraps of his memory—from the first day his neural processor was installed. “We can do it. I swear, it’s possible. Remember when you first got your neural processor installed, and you were getting configured for the internet? I remember when I kept hooking into random places, and one of them was a satellite. It was just like a neural interface. I was inside it. We’ve just gotta do something like that on purpose.”

Vik stared at him like he was crazy.

“Come on, don’t you remember your installation?” Tom demanded, recalling the vast sequences of 0s and 1s, and the way his brain felt tugged in an infinite number of directions. “Your brain first gets on the network and it starts jumping around a bit …”

Vik considered him, his fingers drumming on the edge of his forearm keypad. “Tom, I’m not saying that didn’t happen, but, uh, I’m going to work on this. This program. If you have something else you think might work, give it a shot, but I wouldn’t count on it, buddy. That thing you’re talking about? It’s just not possible. There is no neural processor in the world that can interface with just any machine at will. Machines have to be built for a neural processor, or it doesn’t work. You probably just dreamed it. Anesthesia does weird stuff like that to some people. My dad’s a doctor. I know.”

Tom knew he hadn’t imagined that. “I’m going to hook into a neural interface and show you, Vik. Just wait.”

“You hook into the internet, you’re going to catch one of Wyatt’s viruses,” Vik warned him. “She’s got this whole place rigged up.”

“I’m not using the trainee server.”

A
S SOON AS
Tom reached floor eleven, a warning flashed in his head:
Restricted area
. He ignored it. He headed down the empty hallway, located the officers’ lounge, and then settled into a chair.

There was a neural access port in the middle of the table, all ready for Blackburn. Tom pulled out a neural wire, hooked it into the port, then plugged it into the back of his neck.

The internet server for officers popped up, and Tom navigated a bit aimlessly, getting the feel of using just his brain to move through the internet, to click links. The images popped before his eyes, much more vivid and encompassing than they appeared with just a pair of VR visors.

He wasn’t sure how he’d managed to interface with the satellite right after his neural processor installation, but he knew it had something to do with following one connection to the next.

He tried focusing on his neural processor. He barely noticed the computer in his brain now, but he remembered how early on he’d been so aware of it. It used to feel so alien. If he concentrated just enough, he could still detect it, still feel the machine buzzing in his brain like another entity entirely, sending electrical impulses to something else, to the hub in the Spire.

And then like he’d received an electric jolt, Tom suddenly found himself jerked out of his body. His limbs felt cold and distant and his brain melded to the Spire, a massive charged source of energy, a building doubling as a transmitter with a hybrid fission/fusion core, sending signals into space that—

The signal tore Tom farther from himself, thrusting him into the satellites ringing Earth with their electrical impulses transmitting data, a vast ring of 0s and 1s that seemed like so much nonsense when it was flooding his brain like this, and suddenly he felt like an
it
again, gazing through electromagnetic sensors—

And then another stream tore him away, and he was connected to those vessels near the dark side of Mercury, the surface registering in the infrared sensors of the Russo-Chinese automated machines, floating in orbit, exchanging signals with Stronghold Energy’s palladium mines that connected back to—

The central server in the Sun Tzu Citadel in the Forbidden City, with two hundred and seven neural processors registering on the internal network, IPs flickering through Tom’s brain—

He slammed back into his neural processor, into his own body so abruptly it felt like he’d been swatted by some vast, cosmic hand. He sat there, his eyes closed, hand gripping the table, heaving in frantic breaths. He hadn’t imagined it the first time. He really had seen out of satellites. But his assurances to Vik seemed laughable suddenly. He hadn’t just seen satellites. He’d glimpsed inside the server of the Sun Tzu Citadel … where the Chinese Combatants trained. That was … that was something big. He wasn’t sure what to even make of it. Was that supposed to happen?

He returned to their bunk, still a bit in shock. Vik glanced up from his keyboard. “So?”

Tom hesitated, debating what to say for a long moment, remembering Vik’s words:
There is
no
neural processor in the world that can interface with just any machine at will
.

But he’d done it. He knew now for sure that he’d done it.

But whatever it was that he’d done, it was too much for some tiny skirmish in the Spire. He wasn’t even sure what it
was
that he’d done yet.

Tom shook his head. “You were right. I guess I imagined it.”

T
OM AND
V
IK
binge-downloaded the night’s homework and then tried to walk out the door of their bunk. Neither of them made it. They collapsed in a stupor on the floor. Tom roused only when Vik cried, “Wake up! We missed Calisthenics!”

Tom jolted to his feet, feeling stupid and strange. He fell behind when Vik rushed off to Math class. Flashes of the night’s homework kept plaguing him, appearing before his eyes, confusing him, drawing his attention to irrelevant facts his processor hadn’t yet sorted out. It took him a full minute to remember how to press the button to summon the elevator.

When he finally made it inside, he found Karl Marsters already in there. The two boys froze, shocked for a full second.

Like that, Tom’s brain snapped into gear. He tore back his sleeve to bare his forearm keyboard and frantically typed. He heard Karl doing the same thing.

“Aha!” Karl cried.

Tom launched Walk Only Right as Karl launched Exorcist.

Exorcist had been floating around ever since Alec Tarsus wrote it, so Tom opened his mouth to taunt him, “You couldn’t come up with your own?” even though Vik had practically rewritten all his code for Walk Only Right. But creepy Latin-sounding words spouted out instead.