Insignia (9 page)

“Nah. I told you, man. He’s an android.”

The doors slid open. In bounded a giant, wavy-haired kid standing at six foot eight, his body a coiled mass of muscle, a good-natured grin on his swarthy, handsome face.

Tom stared. He really did have a lower security designation than the rest of them.

“Why, hullo, fellows. Are you ready to head to breakfast soon?” Yuri’s gaze lit upon Tom. “Ah. And you. You are the new plebe. Timothy Rodale.”

Tom opened his mouth to correct him, but Vik caught his eye and mouthed, “Don’t ask.”

“You got it,” Tom said, bewildered.

Yuri bellowed a hearty laugh. “It’s very fine to meet you. I’m Yuri—but this you know.” He tapped his own temple.

“Yeah, this I know,” Tom said.

“I do not see your achievements listed.”

“It’s a mistake. We’re getting that fixed,” Vik told Yuri.

“Uh, yeah,” Tom agreed.

A ping in his head.
Morning meal formation is in five minutes
. Tom was caught off guard by the sudden notice, plastered there in his brain like one of his own thoughts. The other boys in the room responded to the same notice. They all jumped to their feet. Beamer didn’t stay there long. He keeled right over again. Yuri caught him before he hit the ground.

“Ready?” Vik said to Tom.

Tom nodded eagerly, ignoring the butterflies fluttering inside him. “Ready.”

Yuri hauled Beamer up from the floor and hoisted him over one broad shoulder for the trudge down Alexander Division’s corridor to the elevator. He hummed merrily the whole way.

“I can walk,” Beamer protested blearily.

“You said that last time, and then you bopped your head,” Yuri told him. “This is no trouble, Stefan.”

Beamer raised his bleary head, and squinted back at Tom. “Huh. New guy doesn’t have any achievements.”

That stupid profile.

Vik sidled up to Tom. “Told you that would get annoying. Want it changed or not?”

“You said there’s a girl who can do that?”

“Wyatt Enslow,” Vik answered. “It’ll take some doing, but I can talk her into it.”

“Why does he think I’m Timothy Rodale?” Tom nodded toward Yuri’s large back.

Vik spoke in a normal tone of voice as though Yuri couldn’t hear them: “Well, there’s never been an official explanation for it, but Yuri’s scrambled. Something’s wrong with his software, and none of the officers want to fix it, which makes us think he’s scrambled deliberately. We figure the military thinks Yuri’s a spy, and they couldn’t keep him out of the Spire because he has family connections, so they admitted him and then planted a worm in his neural processor’s software so he can’t hear anything classified.”

Tom glanced at Yuri’s wide back, but Yuri hummed and showed no signs of having heard them. “
His
neural processor distorts the info he hears?”

“Exactly. From what Beamer and I have figured, he seems to understand the basics of the Spire, but not our identities, IPs, strategies, or anything that might compromise the war effort. His processor’s rigged so he doesn’t hear our real names if someone mentions them. And forget confidential info. I’ll show him some code from Programming, for instance, and he’ll look at it and know just what it is, then remember it all wrong. You know how we’re talking about him right now literally five feet behind him? Yeah, the processor’s interpreting it as something else entirely, I bet.”

“Seriously?” Tom was both impressed and disturbed. This was one thing he hadn’t even thought about. He should have realized having a computer in his brain made him susceptible to misprogramming like a computer. “Vik, if they mess with Yuri’s software, how do you know they can’t do something with ours?”

Vik shot him a creepy, unsettling grin, and his eyes gleamed like a madman’s. “Why, Tom, we don’t.”

“That’s reassuring. Thanks.”

“Anytime, pal. It’s what I’m here for.”

T
HE
P
ATTON
M
ESS
Hall was already crowded. Meal trays sat at each place on the rectangular tables. Tom looked over the crowd, identifying the division insignias on the arms: a quill for Machiavellis, an ax for Genghises, a sword for Alexanders, a musket for Napoleons, and a catapult for Hannibals.

Vik elbowed him, then nodded for him to follow. They headed toward what Tom’s neural processor identified as the Hannibal female plebe table. The girls all sat at one end of the table, talking to one another and ignoring a tall, gawky girl with flat brown hair sitting alone at the other end, her shoulders hunched, eyes darting furtively between the other girls and her tray.

“Hey, Enslow!” Vik called.

The girl looked up, her eyebrows drawn closely together in a solemn, oval-shaped face. Tom’s processor identified her as

“You still helping out with profiles?” Vik asked her.

Wyatt’s lips compressed. “Feel free to shout louder, Vik. I don’t think Lieutenant Blackburn heard you on the officer’s floor. And
no
, I’m not doing that anymore. I almost got caught last time.”

“Come on, Enslow,” Vik urged. “Help Tom out. Yuri wants you to.”

“So why isn’t Yuri asking me himself?”

“He’s busy ambulating Beamer.”

“What do you guys want changed?” Her gaze settled on Tom. “Oh, that.”

“Yeah, that,” Vik said. “Someone forgot to program in Tom’s vast number of achievements.”

Tom glanced at him, fighting back a snigger. Yeah, his many great achievements. He beat lots of video games and even ate two pizzas in the space of five hours once.

“Tom here’s kind of embarrassed about looking so unaccomplished,” Vik said, jabbing his thumb at Tom.

“That would be embarrassing,” Wyatt said solemnly. “People might assume you’ve done nothing to earn your place here. Well, I’ll change that if Yuri wants me to, but you have to cover for me if Blackburn notices. You have to swear it!”

“I swear, I’ll cover for you,” Tom assured her.

She bit her lip, then yanked back her sleeve to expose the portable keyboard strapped around her right forearm. “What do you need me to put in, then?”

Vik raised an eyebrow at Tom. “Well?”

Tom wasn’t sure what accomplishment he should make up about himself. “Champion lawn bowler?” he tried.

Wyatt scowled at him. “Lawn bowling?”

“Oh yeah,” Vik agreed. “If there was a lawn bowling Olympics, Tom would’ve gotten a gold medal. He’s also a national spelling bee champion.”

Wyatt nodded crisply, obviously considering
that
a respectable accomplishment. “Many people can’t spell. It’s rather sad.”

Hoping to shock her, Tom added, “I’m also a founding contributor to the world’s largest ball of …”

“Twine?” Vik suggested.

“Why, no, Vikram,” Tom said. “Earwax.”

Wyatt lowered her keyboard an inch. “Are you making these up?”

“Of course he isn’t,” Vik said.

“I’ll put in the spelling bee stuff, but I am not sticking an earwax ball in your profile.
Or
lawn bowling. I don’t even know what that is.”

“Not everyone can be a math genius. Don’t mock Tom’s grand achievements,” Vik said.

“Yeah, it’s not nice,” Tom said.

“Fine, I’ll put in the lawn bowling, okay?” Wyatt typed briskly on her keyboard.

Tom found himself staring at her left hand as her fingers danced over the keys. She had broad palms and long fingers. They looked too large for the rest of her.

“There,” Wyatt announced.

“It’s done?” Tom said, surprised.

“Yes, it’s done.” She stared at him flatly like he’d just missed something very obvious. “And tell Yuri this is the last time I’m doing this. Lieutenant Blackburn is still looking for the person who hacked the personnel database last promotion round. He’ll murder me.”

“Enslow, he won’t murder you,” Vik said. “He’ll just report you to General Marsh.”

Wyatt’s eyes widened.

“Thanks,” Tom said hastily.

“Don’t thank me,” Wyatt said earnestly, hugging her arm to her chest. “Just go away and don’t talk to me again. Both of you.”

The strange thing was, she didn’t say it viciously. It was more like she had no idea how rude it was. Tom and Vik went away and didn’t talk to her again.

“She’s friendly,” he said to Vik as they threaded through the crowd.

“That’s just Enslow. Man name, man-sized hands, but no real sense of humor. Also, she’s got this complete inability to relate to other people on a normal human level. There’s a reason Yuri’s the only one in the Spire who hangs out with her. I guess he feels sorry for her. But that hacking she just did? It takes her thirty seconds to do something anyone else would need hours to do. She’s that good.”

They reached the Alexander male plebe table, where Beamer was holding himself up on a chair, and Yuri loomed over his own spot. He greeted Tom with a friendly wave, his teeth so perfectly straight and white, his brown hair in such neat waves over his handsome, symmetrical features, that he really did resemble some android for a moment.

“Yuri, we took advantage of Wyatt Enslow and said you sent us,” Vik informed Yuri. “I think she’s annoyed at you now. You should go apologize.”

Yuri closed his eyes and sighed. “You are not very nice to Wanda, Viktor.”

“I’m fine with Man Hands,” Vik protested. “She just wouldn’t do it if I asked her. And do you really want poor Tom here to feel all embarrassed and unaccomplished?” He gestured to Tom.

“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Tom protested. He was just unaccomplished.

But Yuri was busy viewing Tom’s profile again. “Ah, a spelling bee champion. This is impressive.”

“Yeah, I spell things while lawn bowling,” Tom said. “You know. Words like ‘lawn.’ And ‘bowling.’”

He started to dip into a seat, but Vik waved him back up. “Don’t sit yet. We have to stand at attention until Major Cromwell puts us at ease. It’s a pain, but it’s only at breakfast and at formal dinners.”

There was a ping in Tom’s brain:
Morning meal formation has now commenced
.

Silence descended upon the room, and every trainee in the room straightened and snapped to attention. A group of trainees marched inside the room, unfolded a US flag, and hoisted it up a pole for the day. Then they formed two lines by the door.

Tom glanced around, trying to see if he was standing the right way. The computer in his brain was instructing him to relax his shoulders, puff out his chest, pull in his abdomen, keep his hands to his sides, and ensure his body was in perfect alignment.

A whippet-thin, tired-looking woman in an overlarge set of fatigues headed through the door. The woman halted there, looking around at them, her face set with heavy lines and her faded auburn hair streaked with gray, a hard, downward twist to her lips. Tom’s neural processor spun out her information:

“At ease,” she said gruffly.

The bodies on all sides of Tom relaxed, and after Major Cromwell assumed her lone seat at the officer’s table in the corner, the trainees sank down in a massive black wave to their tables.

Tom took his seat. Around him, people lifted the metal lids from the food trays to reveal a standard breakfast of eggs, toast, bacon, and orange juice. Tom followed suit, but he only found two Snickers bars resting on his plate.

Vik, munching on his toast, noticed his puzzled expression. “Oh, yeah. You’ve gotta eat those.”

“Snickers? For breakfast?”

“Actually, Tom, that’s a meal bar. You’ve gotta eat about ten of those a day for a while. When you first get the neural processor implanted, your hormones go crazy. You get a spike in hGH.”

Tom’s neural processor identified that at once. “Human growth hormone?”

“Yeah. Major growth spurt comes next. It’ll go away on its own once you’ve finished your natural growth cycle. They give you the nutrient bars to help with the process.”