Crystal Mind: A novel in the Projector War Saga

by K. A. Excell

  “I’m sorry about school,” I said.

  She nodded. “I know you are, but hey—I think I have a solution for that too. Have you ever heard of Martial Academy?”

  I shook my head. It sounded like one of those fancy private schools where they specialized in something weird like dance. It was probably expensive, too.

  “It’s a school where they teach martial arts as part of their curriculum. Someone I used to know wants to sponsor you into the school with a scholarship. It will pay for everything, and I think it might help you learn control.”

  “A school for fighting?” I swallowed hard. “But—”

  But what? How did I tell her that I hated violence and hurting other people? A school full of people trained to fight?

  I shuddered.

  Did I have another choice after getting kicked out of public school? Mom didn’t have the money for anything else. I had to take the school that had given me the scholarship—the other option was dropping out.

  No. I had to finish highschool, or I would never get to University. If I couldn’t go to University, then I could never become a real engineer and Zachary would have succeeded in ruining my life.

  I clenched my jaw as a decision module blinked in the top corner of my vision. I would take this opportunity and make the best of it. If the school trained fighters, all it meant was that I wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone else.

  “When does it start?”

  Chapter Two

  Martial Academy was old, with towering walls and an iron gate near the driveway. The walls cast shadows on the street deep enough to keep me from seeing if anything was hiding there. I wondered what the building had been before it was a school. Perhaps a military base? A prison? The wall and gate together were solid enough to keep unwanted visitors out, or perhaps students in?

  Whatever it used to be, Martial Academy hadn’t been externally modified when it was turned into a school. I scanned again for some sort of student entrance, but there was nothing. I tried a comparative analysis to both schools and prisons, only to find the words ‘abnormal conditions noted’ written on my vision. What abnormal conditions? I scanned the building a third time, but it didn’t help. I shuffled forward, through my doubt, and pressed the buzzer near the talk-box by the gate.

  “Yeah?”

  I squinted my eyes at the talk-box in an attempt to make the sounds less mushy—but it didn’t help. Instead, I pulled a newer notecard from the ‘required materials’ folder to the front of my vision and scanned over the words Mom had given me to say at the gate.

  “I’m Crystal Farina, the new student.” My hands shook, partially from the chilly autumn air, but mostly from my own uncertainty. I clenched them into fists. Fists were strong. Maybe they would make me strong, too.

  “You’re late. Warmups started forty minutes ago.”

  I bit my lip, fighting momentary panic. This wasn’t on the script Mom had given me! Then I took a deep breath and ran my fingers through my long black hair. I could handle this. It was only another new school—nothing to be afraid of. That was why Mom had helped me build the blue lines I used to analyze things when I was just a kid. If I could use my tools, I could figure out what to do in unexpected situations.

  The voice sighed and the gate clicked open just enough for a skinny girl to squeeze through. “Go on in. I’ll call the Prefect down. Don’t touch anything.”

  I thanked him and squeezed through the gate. It clicked shut behind me as I stopped to stare at the courtyard. A flagstone path wound its way across combed white sand that rippled out from where it surrounded a sakura tree in full bloom. Stray cherry blossoms dotted the sand like crystals—disturbing the perfectly circular lines in the sand. It was hard to imagine anything less like the dark Chicago street I’d just left—or the gate I had just passed, for that matter. I followed the path as I battled with the incongruity of this place. Thick, stone, military walls rose on every side as a reminder of power—and yet this place had such a fragile beauty.

  I stopped in front of the two doors on the other end of the courtyard and let my blue lines analyze them. They were eight feet tall and, so far as I could tell, made of solid wood. The drag marks on the ground next to me only verified that fact. The doors were quite literally too massive for me to overcome inertia enough to move them, so I stood there silently and watched the cherry blossoms shift in the breeze.

  Two minutes, eight seconds later, the doors swung outward with the even pacing of an electronically-driven system. Behind the door was a woman who stood five-foot-even with red hair so dark it could be mistaken for brown and callused hands that matched Zachary’s by 40%. I risked a glance past her face, and managed not to flinch away as I met purposeful green eyes tempered by loss—and conviction. Those were eyes I could get lost in if I looked too deeply. I looked away before they trapped me, and instead scanned the hallway. For a moment, the colors were as dull as the street I’d left, but that changed as my eyes finished adjusting to this new light. I gasped. My feet moved of their own accord as my eyes traced the thick wooden walls from the deep shadows in the corner to where light from the wall sconces made the varnish glow with ethereal light. These colors spoke of age—and museum quality care. Farther in, the walls were lined with antiques. Art mixed with armor—perhaps they were the same thing—until my blue lines were nearly saturated with age calculations.

  “My name is Vera Hunt, and I’ll be showing you—” Her voice faded into the background as my eyes caught the gleam of a naked blade. I pushed past her to stare at a stack of swords hung on the wall. The largest was twenty inches long, and the shortest was barely ten inches.

  “Are those katanas?” I asked.

  I turned back to her so I could hear the answer. Her mouth turned into a frown, but she answered, “No. The top one is a katana. The next one is an ontaro.”

  I pulled a little pad of paper out of my pocket and scribbled down the names on different sheets of paper. I handed them to her. “Hold these next to the swords.”

  She sighed, but did as I asked.

  I stepped back and studied them, making sure my eyes ran over every detail and then landed on the names last. Now I would never forget which was which.

  She quirked an eyebrow when I motioned for her to lower the pieces of paper. “What was that about?”

  “I have a photographic memory. If I see the names by the swords, then I won’t ever forget.”

  “Ah.” She handed the papers back and pulled a clipboard out of a pack that was sitting against the wall. “If you’ll step over here, I have some papers you need to sign before you can get started with classes.”

  I gave the hallway one more good look and then took the offered clipboard. I glanced through the stack of papers. “What is it?”

  “A standard assumption of liability, ethics agreement, and student conduct agreement. The last page is your schedule.”

  The words were tiny and cramped together on the page. I sighed. “This is going to take me a moment.”

  One trade-off of my photographic memory was that it took forever to read anything. Mom thought it might have something to do with the fact that I couldn’t ever read anything without memorizing it. It didn’t much matter to me why I was the way I was, though. It just made things like this hard. I shifted the page to better catch the light.

  “I could give you the high points, if that would work better. You’ve probably signed a dozen just like it.” She tilted her head at an object on the wall behind me. I pulled the recording of my surroundings from my examination earlier—the object was a clock.

  I started searching for an explanatory note card, then abandoned the attempt and recalled the blue lines from their calculations. Age analysis on the antiques could wait, and so could social analysis on Vera Hunt. I needed the information on the page—hopefully it would help me stay at this school for more than a few days.


  I started scanning the words as best I could, then reading them as they surfaced in blue overlay on my vision. A few moments into it, I stopped and looked up. I’d forgotten something—oh, right. She’d said something. I scraped together what I could remember, then formed my response.

  “No summary can actually mean the same thing as the actual combination of words on the page. You see, language—especially written language—is a complex maze of visual symbols to convey a meaning. It has a vocal equivalent that also has a thought equivalent and that is how two people communicate. A summary will destroy the tiny intricacies and change the meaning of the text. I need to read it for myself. Also, I’ll forget it unless I see it.”

  She folded her arms and widened her stance to something with a seventy-nine percent similarity to military parade rest—settling in to wait—as I scanned the page. Fifteen minutes, twenty-three seconds later, I started rooting through my school bag for a pen. She handed me one without a word, and I signed all the documents. At the back of the clipboard was a copy of my new schedule. I glanced at it to get the basic picture, then pulled up the image in my mind and filled in all the details.

  “Are we going to my first class now?” I asked.

  A gong sounded through the entire building. I jumped and threw my hands over my ears while she just stood there looking at me. The ringing lasted several moments after the sound had actually stopped, and when I could hear again, I glared at her. “What was that?”

  “That was the starting bell for your first academic period.” She gave me a pointed look—which I didn’t dare evaluate for fear of getting sucked into her green eyes—and started walking. I reluctantly stored the partial antique analyses and followed. “I thought we were going to make it in time for you to start there, but this took a little longer than I thought. Let’s go up to the dorms so you can put your stuff away. Hopefully we’ll make it down in time for the first martial period.”

  “First martial period?” I asked.

  She stopped and folded her arms across her chest. “We’re in a school for martial arts. Half your classes are academic classes, and half of them are martial arts classes.”

  Her words were short, which was indicative of . . . something?

  I pulled a note card from memory—from one of my talks with Mom about society—and scanned through it. There, under vocal cues, below my pages of complaint about how similar they all were, was a set of descriptions.

  When a person has words shorter than the average as dictated by the location and culture that constitutes background, it is a sign that they are annoyed, angry, frustrated, etc. Generally negative emotions.

  I frowned. “Did I do something to make you annoyed?”

  Red-brown eyebrows lifted higher onto her forehead. “It takes a lot more than a clueless first-year to annoy me.” She looked up into the corner of her vision, and I could see the half-truth behind her eyes. I looked down again quickly.

  I pulled up another of Mom’s notes.

  People’s emotions are not quantitative, but rather qualitative. As such, people often round their emotions based on a self-determined threshold dependent on the situation. Many times, they will round the emotion toward the nearest positive emotion. This isn’t generally considered untruth, but rather socially conscious.

  “Now come on, or you’ll be late for your next class, too.” She didn’t wait for a response, just headed down the hall.

  I followed her, racking my brain for what I could have possibly done to annoy her.

  As we walked, she kept up a narrative about how, while there were plenty of specialized schools out there for things like Performing Arts, Martial Academy was unique. It was founded by modern warriors who felt that self-defense was as much a human right as education was. The current school administrator, Ms. Green, was continuing that legacy by boosting enrollment and expanding programs. Five minutes into her spiel, she stopped and turned to face me, eyebrows drawn together.

  “I should mention that unsupervised fighting outside of designated places or designated times is strictly prohibited and will be punished.”

  My chest grew tight. “Expulsion?” This school was my last chance. I couldn’t afford to be expelled for fighting!

  “No, but the school does believe that you should only fight when it is your last option. Should someone begin a fight, it is the defendant’s duty to end it as quickly and permanently as is reasonable.”

  I shivered as images of Zachary in his wheelchair after the ‘accident’ flashed through my head. I knew how to end fights quickly and permanently—and that moment still haunted me. Was that the sort of thing they taught here? And what exactly was a designated place? Class?

  “I say this because we’ve heard about your previous difficulties. Realize that if you pick a fight at this school, the other person can probably hit harder, faster, and more accurately than you can. Go at it all you want if you’re in class, or in the Tournament ring being supervised by a teacher. They know where to stop things if someone looks like they want to go too far.”

  “I don’t actually like fighting, you know.” The thought of deliberately hurting another person was enough to tie my stomach up in knots—but the thought of sitting there helpless while someone hurt me was even worse.

  She nodded. “And that’s why you were sponsored in. I’m not trying to sound judgemental. With your looks, you’ve probably had to deal with a lot. The ability to frame a clear ‘no’ is never a bad thing, but it can sometimes get out of control. If you want to talk about it, let me know. I’ll be around.”

  With my looks? Was Vera Hunt some sort of fashion designer? A makeup artist? The question died on my tongue as I pulled up an image of myself. Green eyes stared back at me, framed by loose black hair that fell to my waist in scraggly waves. My olive skin was far from flawless—though some of the blemishes were probably due more to the sensitivity of my eyes than any actual imperfection. Zachary said I was ugly. He said I was lucky he could stand to look at me. That, if he hadn’t found me, I would never be pretty enough to find anyone else. Mom said I was beautiful. I didn’t believe either of them; how could I? The data points were in obvious conflict, and I didn’t care enough to gather additional data. Beautiful or ugly didn’t matter much. I was me, and that was the important part. What business did Hunt have bringing up my looks, anyway?

  I shrugged and moved on as we reached the dormitories. Hunt pointed to my bed. It was the ground side of a bunk bed with a chest at the foot and a nightstand to the side. The other five beds in the room looked pretty much the same. Some had different colored blankets sitting on the top, and others had books or papers on the bed, but they all had the same structure.

  I put my bag on the bed and followed her out of the room. I would unpack later.

  On the way out, she glanced at the clock and sighed. “We don’t have time for a tour anymore, so I’ll just show you where things are as we go. Got it? Maybe you’ll be on time to First Martial.”

  “But won’t you be late to your classes?” A quick analysis showed that she was school aged, like I was. Perhaps one year ahead—probably a senior.

  She arched an eyebrow. “I’m a Prefect. We’re like mixes between students and teachers, so we have a little more flexibility. In this case, I was assigned to greet you and show you around. Like the other Prefects, I’m a teacher aid in most of my classes—so as long as I get back within the first few minutes of the next period, I’ll be fine. You might not be, if you’re late for class. The Prefect for Mr. West’s class likes to give out detention more than—well, everyone but Eugene Berry.”

  I wondered, for a moment, what that said about the Prefect’s character, then frowned. “What sets you apart from the other students?” It would be a good idea to find out more about these Prefects if they had the ability to assign detention.

  “We’re good.”

  I looked up. “That’s a qua
litative statement.”

  She blinked. “Ok, then. Prefects are fourth—and occasionally third—year students who have proven themselves both academically and martially. We learn quickly, we move fast, and we hit hard. If there’s trouble in the school, we’re the first to know, and the first to deal with it.” Her lips thinned into something that wasn’t quite a grin—more of a challenge, no, a dare. The look faded as quickly as it had come.

  I bit the inside of my lip. If she was a Prefect, that meant she excelled at martial arts; the art of hurting other people. I set my eyes to scanning her movements and comparing them with Zachary’s as we moved further down the hall.

  She was light on her feet, and her balance was generally centered—not forward like Zach’s had been. The musculature ratios were different, too. Zachary’s arm muscles had bulged with every motion. Some days he spent hours at the gym, trying to look intimidating. The result had been a large amount of upper body strength at the expense of total body strength. Hunt had less arm muscle, but more muscle overall.

  “This is your first Martial period classroom,” Hunt said. I blinked away the numbers and looked it over. It had a gold nameplate to the right side of the door that read, “West, Krav Maga”. I pulled up the image of my schedule, and compared it to the teacher’s name. Earl West.

  Just then, the gong rang through the entire hallway, filling my head with half-sounds that shifted as I tried to identify them. I pushed the sounds to the back of my mind as unimportant and hoped Hunt didn’t try to talk to me for the next twenty seconds as I tried to sort everything out. Finally, the information cleared. I reset the timer in my head to warn me before the next bell. If I didn’t figure out how to automate this process soon, the bell alone was going to leave me with a processing headache!

  Doors all over the long hallway opened and kids poured through. Hunt placed her back against the wall. As the students diffused into the open space, I began to see why. Without prompting, my blue lines started computing the physics of the situation. A secondary set of calculations opened up as I tried to keep the most empty space around myself as possible to avoid bumping into the flood of people. When the kids started piling up outside Mr. West’s classroom, I’d only just managed to push my blue lines down to a more subconscious level. As they faded from my vision, I sighed in relief. The bell might just be the least of my worries. This school was already ten times worse for sensory processing problems than any other school I’d been to.