Blackburn began drumming his fingers on his podium, waiting. Despite his easy words, there was a grim, almost angry set to his features. Tom glanced around for some cue about what was going on. All the faces he saw were fixed in varying degrees of tense expectation—like they knew the mildness of their instructor’s tone was deceptive.
After a time, Blackburn glanced up into space. “That’s funny. Looks like I got . . . nothing. Do you mean to tell me those were your real programs? In that case, we need to talk about some fundamentals here for a minute, children. In fact, let’s start with fundamental number one. Are you listening? Here it is: there are computers in your brains.”
He let those words hang there and looked over the room.
“Do I need to repeat myself?” This time, he jabbed his finger at his temple with each word. “There are computers in your brains. Do you know why I am wasting my breath trying to teach you to program? No, it’s not so I can spend precious hours looking at this sea of happy, shiny faces. It’s so you can learn to control your own neural processors.” The mild tone vanished from his voice—his irritation seeping through. “Mastery of programming is mastery of self, and if you can’t take that seriously, then the joke’s not on me, it’s on you. . . . What, Ms. Akron?”
Heather’s hand dropped. Her voice rang out, “If it’s really so important we learn this, sir, then it would make much more sense to just put everything we need in the download streams.”
Blackburn puffed out his cheeks and released his breath very slowly. “I’ve said this before,” he replied, “and I’ll say it again: those neural processors can’t manipulate computer languages the way they do human languages, and there’s a very simple reason for that—it’s illegal. We have federal laws in this country. One such law prohibits self-programming computers. Your neural processor, as a computer, falls under this law. Your brain, as an organ in your skull, does not. If you have a problem with this, then you can take it up with the good folks at Obsidian Corp. who lobbied your congressmen for that legislation. You see, they built the neural processors, so it makes sense for them to keep the military dependent on their programmers. That’s why you folks are all so very lucky I’m here, and I, unlike you, realized how important it was to control the computer in my brain—even if it meant I had to sit down and teach myself the Zorten II computer language the hard way.”
Tom stared at Blackburn, still stuck on those words, “The computer in my brain . . .” How could Blackburn have a neural processor? He had to be forty, at least. General Marsh said adults couldn’t handle neural processors. But he remembered seeing an IP address in Blackburn’s profile—that must be his.
“But, sir,” Heather pressed, “some of us are Combatants. We’re fighting the war. You had more time to learn the regular way, since you were just . . .” She trailed off.
She didn’t seem able to say it, so Blackburn gave a short, harsh laugh. “I was just . . . locked in a mental institution?”
“He was in a mental institution?” Tom whispered to Vik.
“First test group was sixteen years ago,” Vik replied softly, “three hundred adult soldiers. The military didn’t know yet what neural processors do to adult brains.”
“They all went insane?”
“Only the lucky ones. The rest died.”
Tom took a moment to absorb that as Blackburn went on, “No need to dance around my mental illness, Ms. Akron. I’ve never tried to hide it from you. If there’s one monstrous representation of a neural processor’s destructive potential, you can see it standing right here. That computer in your head is a weapon, and not just one you can wield—it’s a weapon that can be deployed against you.”
“He doesn’t seem all that crazy,” Tom remarked to Vik.
“He taught himself how to reprogram his neural processor and fixed his own brain.”
“There’s this attitude,” Blackburn was saying, “and I find it in trainees again and again. The first few months with a neural processor, it’s all amazement and awe. And then? You start taking it for granted. Don’t. Never take a neural processor for granted. There is nothing natural about having a computer in your head. So while you have a point, Ms. Akron, about having a time crunch, you also fail to see the forest for the trees. Yes, I was a paranoid schizophrenic with nothing better to do than figure out how to program, but you, as an actual fighter in this war, have a much more critical reason to learn programming for yourself. Let’s start with point one: you’re fighting a war. What is the basic definition of war? I don’t need anything deep, just a quick, one-sentence answer.”
Silence. Then, a Middle Company trainee Tom’s processor identified as Jennifer Nguyen answered, “War is a violent conflict to resolve a dispute.”
“That’s right, Ms. Nguyen. This war springs from a disagreement over ownership of the solar system. Each side has laid claim to it, and each is trying to enforce that claim using violence. Point two: why do you think your identities are classified? Anyone?”
An Alexander Division Combatant Tom’s processor identified as, Emefa Austerley raised her dark hand. “Security, sir.”
“Why?”
“To protect us.”
“From what?”
No answer this time. Tom glanced around, wondering about it himself. It wasn’t like they’d be killed if their identities were in the open. That didn’t happen now.
“To protect you from violence,” Blackburn supplied. “And I know what you’re all thinking: no one kills in this war. We’ve evolved beyond that, right? Even you Combatants aren’t putting your lives on the line to fight—the battle is taking place thousands of miles from you. . . . So why protect you from violence? Nigel Harrison, you seem to have something to add.”
A slim, dark-haired boy said, “War evolves over time. It’s better to say, ‘No one kills in this war yet.’”
Blackburn snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “There you go—give the boy a gold star. No one kills in this war yet. Violence hasn’t reached you yet. Let’s face it, why would the Russians and the Chinese try to kill you? They know if they kill one of our Combatants, we’ll set out to kill one of their Combatants—and then the two companies sponsoring those Combatants will have wasted a whole lot of money on some dead kids. There are what, forty something Combatants in the entire world? You’re valuable. It’s not worth it financially to bring death into the equation. . . . So what happens a few years down the road when some discount neural processors hit the market and there are four hundred of you? What about four thousand? Here’s a hint, trainees: your stock goes down. You become expendable.”
In the front row, Elliot Ramirez must’ve said something too quietly for Tom to hear. Blackburn whipped around toward him. “What’s that, Ramirez? Say it louder.”
“I said that’s very cynical, sir,” Elliot said.
Blackburn chuckled drily. He dropped down onto the edge of the stage, legs sprawled, eyes fixed on Elliot. “Did you know that back in the nineteen fifties in the early days of nuclear technology, the military stationed soldiers close to an atomic bomb testing site? The soldiers received massive doses of radiation. So did the civilian population that lived downwind of the site. Was this done in ignorance? No, Mr. Ramirez. It was deliberate—so we could learn about radiation poisoning. Same story with mustard gas, dioxin, PCP, nerve gas, LSD—you name it, some unwitting group of nobodies got a dose of it because some bigwig deemed them expendable. Same story with me—one of three hundred soldiers who received neural processors sixteen years ago, who either died or lost their minds. People are expendable. Period. The only difference between the nineteen fifties and today is that there are billions more of us expendable human beings. If you think you have any true value beyond your impact on someone’s bottom line, you need to wake up from your dreamworld.”
A thick silence hung on the air. Blackburn let those words sit there for a long moment, and then he jounced to his feet.
“I know from birth you’ve been taught to trust in s
omething else—institutions, laws, systems. But I’m here to tell you, the only person you can trust to protect you is you. It’s your responsibility to defend yourself with every weapon in your arsenal, and one of those is knowledge—knowledge of programming. If you willfully choose to reject that knowledge, then I will have no pity for you when you wake up with an enemy surgeon cutting into your head to extract that neural processor, and you can’t move a muscle because they’ve hit you with a paralysis program you couldn’t defend against. I warned you, and you chose to delude yourself with the illusion someone else would save you. Helplessness can only be excused in children and fools. You gave up your right to be children the day you came here, and the last thing this world needs is to shelter its fools.”
Tom stared at him, surprised by the words. Everything else at the Spire so far had encouraged camaraderie, teamwork, adhering to the regulations of the place. Blackburn’s words sounded more like . . .
Well, something Neil might say.
Maybe Blackburn realized he’d taken his spiel too far, because he let out an exasperated breath. “All right, pick your jaws up off the floor and go take a five-minute break. No one’s hacking your heads open today. When you return, I’m going to call someone up here to test a firewall.” When no one reacted, he grew impatient. “Four minutes, fifty-nine seconds, fifty-eight, fifty-seven . . . Go!” He turned his attention to his wrist keyboard. A tap of his finger lowered a screen over the stage.
The mass of people in front of Tom reacted. Many trainees raised their forearm keyboards and dove into frantic work on something—maybe last-minute tweaks to their firewalls to make them stronger. A couple, like Vik, just surrendered themselves to the possibility of facing Blackburn with shoddy firewalls, and rose from their seats.
“Wanna grab something in the mess hall?” Vik asked him.
“Sure,” Tom said, thinking of turning the nutrient bar in his pocket into a burger. He rose to follow Vik from the room, but then several words popped up in his vision center.
Mr. Raines—approach the front.
Tom turned, confused—and saw Blackburn beckoning to him impatiently from the stage. Apprehension squirmed in him. “Vik, I’ve gotta—” He gestured to Blackburn.
Vik glanced back and forth between Tom and Blackburn. “It’s probably nothing,” he assured him.
“Yeah, sure.” Tom hoped so. He headed up to the stage where Blackburn was waiting, elbow propped against the podium. As he neared, Tom made out the frown lines on the man’s face and the pair of thin scars down his cheek.
“Sir, I don’t have a firewall,” Tom blurted.
“Of course you don’t, Raines. This is your first day here,” Blackburn said, kneeling down at the edge of the stage. “It may take you weeks or even months to catch up in this class. I don’t expect that of you. What I do expect, however, is an explanation from you about something.” His eyes were fixed on Tom’s, gray and intent. “Yesterday, someone hacked into one of the Spire’s classified personnel databases. Can you guess whose profile they changed while they were there?”
Tom’s heart plunged. Oh. Oh. This was about the favor Wyatt did him.
“That’s right, you’re suddenly a national spelling bee champion,” Blackburn noted. “I don’t care what background you want to make up for yourself, Raines—though I personally would’ve chosen something a bit more imposing.”
“I was going to be founding contributor to the largest ball of earwax,” Tom admitted.
“Well, there you have it,” Blackburn said, amusement in his voice. “Again, not my problem. The reason I called you up here is because that hacker committed a security breach, and I need to address it. I want you to tell me that hacker’s name.”
Tom drew a sharp breath. He’d made a promise to Wyatt. He couldn’t go back on that.
Blackburn studied him. “This is probably your first time living away from home, isn’t it? Trust me, you don’t want to start your time here by getting on my bad side. You won’t be getting anyone in trouble if you tell me who did it. I only want to speak to the hacker.”
Tom had ripped off enough people in VR parlors to know threats when he heard them. And he didn’t believe for a second that Blackburn just wanted a friendly chat with a hacker breaking into secure databases. He held Blackburn’s gaze, his heart picking up a beat. “I’ve forgotten, sir.”
“No, you haven’t. You just don’t want to tell me. Very well, Raines. If you don’t want to talk, you’ll help me with something else—by serving as the subject for my demonstration today.”
Tom glanced uneasily up at the screen, where some lines of code were now displayed. “What do I do?”
Blackburn shook his head. “You’ll do nothing but stand on the stage and receive the computer viruses I’m going to feed into your processor. The code will manipulate your brain.”
Tom’s stomach flipped. “Er, manipulate it how?”
“Oh, that’s a surprise. Get up here.”
Tom mounted the steps on the side of the stage, his legs suddenly shaky.
As soon as everyone had returned to the room, Blackburn jerked his head, summoning Tom over from where he’d been hovering uneasily by the steps.
Blackburn announced to the class, “Let’s talk computer viruses. The process of infecting a neural processor works in much the same way it would on a computer at home. If Raines here were physically connected to a computer via a neural wire, I could infect him with a virus from anywhere if I also had an internet connection and the ability to hack through the firewall protecting him. But he’s not physically connected to the internet; he’s connected to the Spire’s server via his internal transmitter. So I’m going to feed him a virus from my transmitter to his.”
Blackburn began jabbing at a keyboard strapped to his thick forearm. Tom looked back, and saw Blackburn’s code dancing across the massive screen, allowing all the trainees to see what he typed.
“A virus like this gets into a system by piggybacking itself on an existing program in the target’s active applications. For the final step, I stick in my target’s IP address. You can target more than one IP—it’s really up to you. Now here”—he typed something more—“I code the initiation sequence. The malicious program will trigger as soon as it’s in his processor. Then the self-termination sequence—the program will stop itself in five minutes. So . . .” He clapped his heavy hand on Tom’s shoulder, jostling him. “Are you ready, Raines?”
“Does it matter if I’m not?”
“No, that was a courtesy. So is this: name the part of your brain you want me to tamper with first.”
Tom felt himself tense. “How about none?”
“No preference? Fine. First target: the hypothalamus.” Blackburn began typing, and then text scrolled across Tom’s vision: Datastream received: program Insatiable Appetite initiated.
Tom cringed, expecting something horrible. But nothing happened.
Nothing except . . .
Except . . .
His stomach growled. Tom realized suddenly he was starving—absolutely starving. The painful ache in his gut consumed him. His entire brain riveted to the idea of food, delicious food. He’d kill for fries. He could eat a horse. He could eat a hundred nutrient bars. Wait, he had a nutrient bar!
He dug into his pocket frantically, so desperate for food that he didn’t care about all the eyes on him. He’d quite forgotten what he was supposed to be doing up here, anyway. He tore open the packaging of the nutrient bar with his teeth. He devoured half the bar in one bite, not even bothering to form a mental image of some food he liked.
“The neurons in your brain communicate through a series of electrical signals,” Blackburn told the class. “The neural processor mimics and interprets these signals. I can stimulate almost any part of the brain with the right program. The mind is everything. Manipulate a mind, and you manipulate the entire world as far as that person’s concerned. This is how your Applied Sims programs work—they do exactly this to convince you y
ou’re an animal, to trick you into thinking you’re in an artificial landscape. “
Text flashed across Tom’s vision as the program ended. He noticed for the first time the lumpy, grayish-green appearance of the nutrient bar, and dropped it, revolted. Without a mental image of a food he liked, it just looked the way it really did: like something someone had digested and then puked up again.
Blackburn, meanwhile, was calling a kid named Karl Marsters to the stage. A large, jowled boy with a Genghis ax on his sleeve mounted the stairs, and Blackburn said something in a low voice to him, then typed on his forearm keyboard. Another line of text flashed across Tom’s vision: Datastream received: program Fight-or-Flight initiated.
Suddenly, Tom was at his wit’s end. He wasn’t going to stick around to see what Blackburn hit him with next. He tried to bolt out of the room, but Karl Marsters was waiting for this, and he caught him. Fury exploded through Tom. He had to kill this guy! He punched Karl across the jaw, hard. Karl bellowed out, and raised his massive fist to punch him back—but Blackburn stepped in and caught his arm.
“Control yourself.” He shoved Karl back. Then, with a few strokes on his keyboard, he ended the program.
Karl glowered at Tom menacingly and rubbed his jaw.
More programs followed. A manipulation of his limbic cortex, and Tom fell in madly love with Blackburn’s podium. Just as he threw his arms around it and pledged his eternal devotion, Blackburn targeted his hippocampus—and Tom lurched back away from the podium, utterly perplexed. He’d forgotten everything from the last year. He started demanding explanations as to why he was in this strange room with these strange people, and where was his father? A program targeting the amygdala made him react to the podium again—but this time, he was deathly terrified of it. Karl grabbed him and tried forcing him to get closer to it, so Tom drove his elbow back into Karl’s stomach, doubling him over. Karl roared out and started after him again—but Blackburn stepped in his path.
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