The Proving (7 page)

Yes, the Artemis Bow. Cleo laughed. “Because what better way to save humanity than by throwing a ship full of fools through a wormhole? What could
possibly
go wrong? Get aboard this giant spaceship, everyone! OK, now hold on . . . this giant station shaped like a bow is going to open a wormhole . . . nothing to worry about!”

Cleo unstrapped her Ecosuit, climbing into it and pulling her feet through the leggings. It was a little tight — she’d put on a few pounds since she’d been fitted six months ago. But she’d also made some improvements. Nothing too extreme, and certainly nothing that would get her disqualified from the Proving (she’d double- and triple-checked the guidelines). First, she was absolutely
not
wearing the combat boots provided with the suit. For one thing, they weren’t that comfortable. For another thing, she had a sixth toe on her right foot. For
another
thing, she didn’t like the color gray. It was bad enough that the suit was mostly gray — the only saving grace was the purple lining around each of the suit’s plates to signify Clan Persia’s official color.

So she cut the bottoms of each leg on the suit using a laser cutter, made just a little modification to ensure her ankles would be comfortable if her feet began swelling (which they sometimes did) and then added her specially fitted
black
combat boots.

That was it. Just a simple modification. A hack to ensure optimum quality, comfort, and style. She zipped up the suit, tightened the purple-lined straps around her torso, then shut the closet door and looked in the mirror. She looked good. Her black hair, buzzed on the sides and sitting lazily on her shoulders, contrasted well with the gray suit. Her skin, a fair shade of brown, looked just a little oily but most of the previous week’s zits had disappeared. All in all, she was ready for this.

She didn’t
want
to do it, but at least she was
ready
.

“Reza!” she shouted. “You’d better be up or I swear I’ll drag you out of bed!”

She stepped over the papers on the floor that were surrounding an old half-rebuilt bot engine (still leaking veggie oil from somewhere, hence the papers). She pressed the top button on the glass computer screen beside her bedroom door. Her gadget drawer slid out of the wall, revealing a veritable assortment of doodads, electronics, and junk. Old cell phones, old datasticks, broken portable MRI devices swiped from school that she’d modified to take really good magnetic images, even a little motherboard containing some interesting information regarding field tests for Excelsior Corp’s newest line of driverless cars. And that was just the regular junk! There was also the pure junk: a variety of wires, LCD screens (plus two cracked holo-bulbs), old datapads whose buttons had been worn down by thousands (millions?) of finger taps.

But there was also a variety of
goodies
, not the least of which being Cleo’s super-secret datastick. The datastick contained all of Cleo’s best programs, from simple banking software to a premium hack that simplified any vehicle’s controls into a uniform schematic. It came in handy when autotaxis broke down, and best of all it had been so simple to make that she hadn’t even needed to sacrifice homework time to finish.

Now the backdoor virus surf she’d designed to sneak into private communication channels?
That
was a headache. It still didn’t work quite the way she wanted it to . . .

Then there was her prized possession: her VRacelet. Every New Adult in Clan Persia got a VRacelet for their 18th birthday and the moment and it was programmed to recognize the wearer’s DNA signature. It checked Cleo’s as she strapped it around her wrist, taking a simple skin sample from the small square hole in her spidersilk fabric sleeve. Once the DNA sample was confirmed, the VRacelet’s touchscreen booted up.

A bright blue shimmer engulfed her hand, and then just as quickly it was gone. Cleo ran her finger along the touchscreen, opening up the Combat program. It took a moment. It wasn’t supposed to take a moment, but then again this particular VRacelet wasn’t supposed to do much besides carry the most basic programs. Every parent in Clan Persia had to chip in for their kid’s VRacelet, and there were different models. The idea was to encourage parents to be a little responsible (“Hey, your kid might have to fight Specters so you should probably save up for a good VRacelet”) but the problem was that Cleo’s parents had apparently missed that memo.

And so she was stuck with the cheap one. Which of course meant she had to spend a good deal of her free time tinkering with it to make it a little bit more useable. At least until she could afford a better one. Maybe in a year or two, after some Persian data corp was sufficiently impressed with her programming abilities and offered her a job.

She flicked her wrist to the right. The blue shimmer reappeared, encapsulating her right hand like a weightless, translucent sledgehammer. Slowly, she closed her hand into a fist. Two triangle-shaped objects emerged from the blue image, like the horns of some mighty beast. Proton blades. Harmless to humans — minus a little shock to anyone not wearing an Ecosuit — but downright deadly to Specters.

The blades were weightless and see-through, like some primitive hologram. She flicked her wrist left. The proton blades disappeared. A small red flickering beam appeared from the front of the VRacelet. She flashed the beam across the panel on her bedroom door. Immediately, a flood of data appeared on the touchscreen.

“Chi, open,” she said. Nothing happened. Oh right! She’d changed the protocol on her VRacelet. “Crudmissile, open.”

The door slid open. Cleo snickered at her own inside joke.

She went into the bathroom. The glass on the shower stall was dry, which meant Ma and Pa hadn’t showered yet this morning. They would be late for work again. Or maybe they took the day off to take Cleo and Reza to Parliament . . .

“Yeah right,” she whispered, tapping the white tiles underneath the porcelain sink. Her drawer slid out from the film-encrusted cabinet, revealing her personalized necessities for everyday life. She had a system. As much as she hated the stereotype that everyone in Clan Persia was an obsessive-compulsive, she liked having her morning routine. Normally, this meant a shower first followed by a unique application of makeup to cover a couple cheek zits, but today there was no time. Instead, she hastily swished mouthwash as she ran a brush through her snarly black hair, gathering it back in a ponytail. That would have to do.

“Reza!” she shouted down the hall. “Get. Up!”

The mirror began beeping in reminder, accompanied by a little blinking light in the lower left hand corner. “Thank you,” she murmured, blowing onto the red light. Green text appeared on the bottom of the mirror:

PLEASE WAIT.

“No rush,” Cleo said, grabbing her pair of contacts from the little case in her drawer. She popped them in while the mirror continued profiling her DNA data. “Crudmissile: lens power on.”

A little targeting reticule appeared on her face in the mirror. Transparent light-emitting diodes turned each contact lens into a computer screen. Her lenses and her VRacelet exchanged packets of data. Blue words appeared beside her reflection:

NAME: CLEOPATRA KASHANI

CLAN PERSIA

18 YEARS OLD

“Crudmissile: ID system off.”

The diodes inside her lenses stopped projecting the words. Her reflection stared back at her, shoulders slumped, bags under eyes, hair just a little too frizzy. She didn’t need her contacts on to notice that her normally beautiful brown skin just didn’t have the same golden glow without a good shower. What these contacts needed was a program that taught them how to hide blemishes.

Her contact lenses had a wireless chip inside them that transmitted information to the VRacelet. The VRacelet could take commands and transmit them to the lenses, but it needed a name to differentiate between commands and regular conversation. Otherwise, the user might be talking to a boyfriend and say the wrong word and then (wham!) all of a sudden another friend’s personal social network profile is blotting out his cute face.

Any name could be used to send commands. Most people stuck with the standard “Chi.” Cleo chose “Crudmissile” for sole purpose of making her classmates laugh.

Her instructor had not been amused. There had been a long discussion containing key phrases like “VRacelets are not toys” and “what if you forget while you’re being chased by Specters?” and “Blah blah blah technology should be respected.”

The green words at the bottom of the mirror changed:

DNA SCAN COMPLETE. NO ANOMALIES DETECTED.

“Fantastic,” she said, bounding out of the bathroom. She speed-walked to the end of the hall and pounded on her brother’s door. “Reza! Did you hear me? We’ve gotta go NOW!”

Her brother gave a muffled response. She tapped the button beside the door.

Locked.

“Reza, you’re not smart enough to keep me locked out!” she shouted, flicking her VRacelet left. The scanning tool reappeared. She scanned the button beside her brother’s door. It took a snapshot of the code, then sent it directly to Cleo’s personal cryptography program. In the blink of an eye, the door whooshed open.

Reza was sitting at his computer terminal, dressed in his Ecosuit and slumped in his chair. His shades were drawn. Unlike Cleo’s shades, Reza’s were currently displaying a violent still image from DoomMaster3, the newest adventure game that every thirteen-year-old wanted to play. Reza wasn’t playing that game at his console, though . . . he was playing something else entirely. Something with a wizard shooting bolts of blue lighting in every direction. It made her mad, seeing him glued there. He’d clearly been up most of the night (or never went to sleep at all). It reminded her of their parents and if there was one thing she didn’t want Reza to become, it was their parents.

“What the heck are you doing?” she asked, kicking aside two bio-plastic racetracks strewn across the floor. One of the little toy cars landed on Reza’s messy bed. Cleo grabbed his shoulder plate and pulled. “Come on, bro-bro. We’ve gotta go.”

“I’m ready,” he said, clearly annoyed. “Let me just save what I’m doing, OK? Cleo! Cleo, stop it!”

She let go, watching his fingers glide across his keypad. There were two holographic boxes floating above the holo-bulb: one displayed a very rudimentary video-game world with a crudely-pixelated forest, while the other displayed a black box with lines of complex command strings. Words appeared quickly on the black box. It took only a nanosecond for her to realize he wasn’t saving anything. He was typing more code!

“Right. Now,” she said through gritted teeth.

Reza sighed dramatically and turned off the terminal. The two floating boxes disappeared.

“Up. Let’s go.”

“I don’t wanna do this.”

“Neither do I,” she said, pushing him toward the door. He looked ridiculous in his Ecosuit. He was a shade beyond chubby, and the purple straps on the suit had been haphazardly slapped across his torso. “Just wait,” she said, tugging on the straps and realigning them so the magnets clicked perfectly into place.

“It’s too tight.”

“Well, whose fault is that? We have a gym on the second floor.”

“Ma and Pa don’t use the gym. They’re fine.”

“Riiiiiiight.” She herded him down the hall, into the living room. The shades were drawn. There was no point in pulling them up; Ma and Pa preferred the darkness
everywhere in the house
while they lived inside their virtual world; it made it easier to escape the
real
world if it couldn’t be seen. She stopped at the door to their office, tapping the button on the wall.

The door whooshed open with a watery splash (Pa’s idea). Inside, the room was dark save for the glow of the two holoscreens set up in the middle of the room. Ma and Pa were sitting in a pair of black chairs set up in front of each screen, their eyes covered by black virtua-visors. They were playing the same game they’d been playing for two years: Mother Earth. The one that let people explore Earth beyond the safety of the city shields. An Earth free of Specters. An Earth that wasn’t orbited by the Ring so the stars could be seen every night. Earth one-point-zero.

In other words, Ma and Pa were obviously
not
going to work. Again.

“We’re leaving,” Cleo announced. “Off to certain doom. OK? OK. Bye.”

She waited a moment, just a moment. When neither responded, she pounded the command button beside the door. It closed with the sound of a wave crashing onto shore.

The elevator took them down, opening up into the apartment lobby. Their boots tapped on the tile floor. In the manager’s office, Pam was sitting at her desk talking into her earpiece. She gave a little wave and Cleo waved back. Pam was nice, but sometimes when Cleo had her networking app turned on, her contacts would announce to her that Pam wasn’t actually talking to anyone on the other line even when Pam was clearly talking to someone. That confused the heck out of Cleo. Why would someone
pretend
to be busy?

The rest of the lobby was plain, with sleek walls and two touchscreens that were programmed to play news during the morning hours. Each screen had a sound dampener built in, so when Cleo and Reza passed the news screen with the reporter discussing the latest Disc Toss scores, that’s what they heard. When they passed the second screen with a reporter discussing a temporary power fluctuation, that’s what they heard.

“. . . recorded a 1.3, and experts suggest the minor shift may have caused Phenocyte reactor two’s emergency safeguards to turn on, stabilizing the lasers.”

“Sounds like a bunch of hooey,” Cleo said. “There’s fifteen emergency safeguards built into the Phenocyte reactors.”

“Fifteen?!” Reza asked, his voice cracking.

Cleo chuckled and put an arm around his shoulders. “Ah, puberty. It’s taken a hold of you and won’t let go for years and years, bro-bro.”

All joking aside, the new report got her thinking. Maybe the power fluctuation messed with her alarm clock, resetting the volume. Those old clocks
did
have wonky operating systems . . .

The mailbox sat on the wall next to a holo-terminal, currently offering a screensaver slideshow of images of the city’s tallest skyscrapers. Each one was a slight variation of the same theme: lots of shaded windows and Durasteel exterior beams. The Clan Persia headquarters looked like it had giant steps, as if different-sized boxes had been placed haphazardly one atop the other. The Clan Athens building had a more artistic design, with a curved upper level that hung off like the letter R. The Clan Sparta building was an ugly, squat thing, located on the northern end of the city and surrounded by open training fields.