Insignia

by S. J. Kincaid

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  Chapter Fourteen

  TOM AND VIK 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.

  “Gotcha,” Karl exulted, but he wasn’t laughing for long. When he tried to step out of the elevator, he turned right. When he tried to go left, he went right. He bellowed and tried to change direction, and he turned right again.

  Tom had planned to say, “Don’t get too dizzy” to rub it in a bit, but instead heard himself shriek, “I’ll spit on your grave!” He covered his mouth and left Karl turning in endless circles in the middle of the elevator.

  He arrived at the Lafayette Room several minutes late. Vik glanced up as Tom slid onto the bench next to him. “Have your head on straight yet?”

  “Oladae holovii inuladus,” Tom answered.

  “Ooh. Got Exorcisted, huh?”

  Out of habit, Tom tried to say yes. Instead, he shrieked, “I’ll eat your soul!”

  At the front of the room, Dr. Lichtenstein jerked, startled by the noise. Vik muffled his laughter, and Tom just covered his mouth to stop it from chanting more pseudo-Latin or homicidal phrases.

  “The program’s all compiled. We’re on for taking down the Evil Wench tonight?” Vik said in a low voice.

  Tom nodded, hand still over his mouth.

  “Are you sure? That was a reluctant nod. I’ll really feel a lot more confident if I hear you say yes or no. Just say it out loud for me.”

  Tom glared at him, knowing he just wanted him to Exorcist a little more, and gave him a nonverbal reply. It only required one finger, too.

  NIGHT CAME, AND Tom and Vik made their first move: they tricked Yuri into getting locked in the Census Chamber so he couldn’t stop them. Then they began stalking Wyatt like stealthy hunters. The Evil Wench settled in the arboretum, probably to read the way she did sometimes. They waited until the last five minutes of the war games to spring their trap, just so she wouldn’t have a chance to strike back.

  At 1855, Tom gave Vik a thumbs-up. “It’s time. I’m going in, Doctor.”

  Tom was the decoy. In a minute, Vik would pop out of the shadows and unleash their devastating program, a combination of Exorcist, Nigel Harrison, Walk Only Right, Secret Indian Ninja Attack, and of course, Frequent Noisome Farts.

  “Good luck, Doctor.”

  “You, too, Doctor.” He waited for Vik to slip away, then began whistling and strode forward toward Wyatt.

  He made sure to give a cry of startled horror when he came upon her, sitting by a fern and reading a book. She closed her novel and raised her keyboard.

  “Wait, wait.” Tom raised his hands, and ducked behind one of the plants. “I didn’t even realize you were here.”

  Wyatt held her distance as he emerged from behind the leafy canopy. “You didn’t?”

  “No, I only came here to hide out the last minutes of the war games.” Tom shoved his hands in his pockets. “Can we play it cool?”

  Wyatt lowered her arm. “You’re tired of fighting all the time?”

  “Oh, yeah. Always being on guard against attacks . . . It’s exhausting.” Tom saw Vik sneaking out from behind her and fought his smile.

  Wyatt’s brow furrowed. “Can you tell me something, Tom? Something important?”

  Tom hesitated, didn’t give Vik the signal yet. “What?”

  “I just really need to know—how stupid do you think I am?”

  “Er, what?”

  “How stupid? Just tell me. On a scale of one to ten.”

  “Is ten very stupid or very smart?”

  “You love fighting. You’d do it all the time if you could. The way I figure it, you’re probably just distracting me so Vik can sneak up behind me and send me a virus.”

  Vik froze in place behind her. Tom felt a thrill of foreboding. They’d blocked Vik’s GPS signal from the Spire’s tracking system. Obviously not well enough.

  “Of course”—Wyatt set her book aside— “what you didn’t realize was that I lured you here for our final showdown.”

  Vik mouthed the words disbelievingly as Tom said them: “A final showdown?”

  This was not going to plan. It was supposed to be their ambush of her, not her ambush of them.

  Wyatt nodded grimly. “You see, Tom, when you stumbled right into my fiendish scheme, I knew you’d try to go out by facing me. I counted on it. In fact, I even instigated the circumstances that drew you here. I know you’re wondering how I did all this, so I’ll explain in detail. First, I—”

  Time is 1900. War games are now concluded.

  Tom didn’t believe the ping in his brain. He stood there, in shock.

  Vik stumbled forward. “What—what . . .”

  When Tom looked at Wyatt again, he realized she was grinning ear to ear. “I got you guys.”

  “You did not,” Tom protested. “You were about to spring a diabolical trap. You said so. You ran out of time.”

  “You really thought I lured you here? Wow. No. Yuri warned me over net-send that you guys had trapped him in the Census Chamber, so I figured you were coming for me next. I didn’t even have a decent program ready, so I decided to talk to you until the time ended.”

  “Wait, what?” Tom said. “We squandered our ultimate program?”

  “Pretty much. You know what this calls for?” Wyatt raised her arms up and held her hands on either side of her head, fingers bent like monster claws.

  “A bear attack?” Vik guessed.

  Wyatt dropped her hands. “I’m gloating.”

  “It looks more like you’re a bear.” Vik nodded at Tom, hoping he’d back him up.

  “You should clench your fists and make sure they’re high over your head next time,” Tom explained. “Then you say the whole I-am-awesome thing. That’s a proper fist pump.”

  “How about this instead,” Wyatt said. She put her hands on her waist, cleared her throat, then said, “I have to ask you guys something. Something important.” Her words sounded stilted, like something she’d practiced in front of the mirror several times.

  Vik clamped a hand over his eyes. “Must we subject ourselves to this indignity, Doctor?”

  “She won, man,” Tom said.

  Vik dropped his hand with a sigh, turned to Wyatt, and played along. “What do you want to ask us, Wyatt?”

  “How does defeat taste?” Wyatt said, with flourish. “Is it bitter? See, I am curious because I wouldn’t know from personal experience, and you would.”

  She let that sink in, and Tom winced. “Yeah, that’s gloating. Face rubbing, actually.”

  Vik shook his head regretfully. “The day’s officially yours, Evil Wench.”

  And then a voice spoke, “I’m disappointed.”

  Tom jumped so high, he nearly careened back into a tomato vine. Vik gave a
yelp. Wyatt just froze like an animal caught in the glare of headlights, staring at Lieutenant Blackburn as he emerged into the clearing.

  “Here I was,” Blackburn said, rubbing his hands together, “waiting with anticipation for whatever nasty program you were going to unleash on them, but it ended with a whimper, not a bang. Well, there’s one consolation: at least I can now announce the winner of this competition.”

  Vik’s shoulders slumped. “Hannibal Division, right?”

  “Wrong, Mr. Ashwan.” There was a gleeful smile on his face. He jabbed both his thumbs at his chest. “Me. I won. There is one very simple reason I wanted war games: I wanted my rogue hacker to out herself.”

  Wyatt froze.

  “And you sure didn’t disappoint, Ms. Enslow. After all that time, playing it so careful . . . what was it that changed your mind? Caught up in the competitive spirit? Maybe goaded by your peers? I hoped you would be.”

  “It’s not her—” Tom tried.

  “Tom, it’s okay,” Wyatt said suddenly. She gave a resigned shrug. “I was tired of it, okay? You’re right. It was me all along, sir. . . . So what happens now?”

  “Well, let’s see.” He folded his arms and seemed to think about it. “Hacking a classified database, not to mention altering the content . . . I’m fairly sure one or both of those are illegal. I could report it to General Marsh and have charges drawn up. They’d certainly have to remove your neural processor if you were convicted—no room in this program for felons. You’ve had the processor long enough—its removal may damage some of your intellectual faculties, but you’ll recover most of them in time. I’m sure the prison sentence won’t be so severe, given your youth. You were simply messing around, hardly committing treason, so it won’t be a nasty confinement facility either. And your record will be expunged once you turn eighteen.”

  Wyatt had grown completely pale, her eyes bugging out. Tom felt like there was a fire in his chest. He fought the urge to charge over and punch Blackburn’s smug face.

  “Or alternatively,” Blackburn said, “you could be removed from Programming class, which isn’t moving at the advanced pace you require anyway, and spend that time instead performing some minor software updates around this place as I deem fit.”

  Wyatt’s mouth moved without making a sound. She looked like she’d forgotten how to speak.

  “Your choice, Ms. Enslow,” Blackburn added.

  “Well, the second one,” she cried. “I would’ve done that anyway, even without choice number one.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and I would have offered it anyway, even if, say, someone had given me your identity on his very first day here.” His eyes found Tom. “I hate to see such skill go to waste.”

  Tom just stared at him. He couldn’t get his head around to the fact that he’d been protecting Wyatt from Blackburn—for no reason.

  “Go to my office, Enslow. We’ll draw up a schedule.”

  “Sure. Okay. Sure.” Wyatt scurried past him. She broke into a flat run for the door.

  Blackburn waited until she was out of the arboretum and then he turned on Tom and Vik. They both remained rooted in place. Vik gazed after Wyatt, like he wanted to flee, too, but couldn’t make himself move.

  “Mr. Raines, if I were a lesser man, I’d rub this moment in your face.” He considered that. “Actually, I am a lesser man. This must be a very bitter moment of realization for you—you could’ve avoided that entire ordeal your first day in class. Couldn’t he have, Mr. Ashwan?”

  Vik snapped to attention. “Sir, yes, sir!”

  Tom gaped at Vik. The traitor.

  “Thatta boy, Ashwan.” Blackburn leaned toward Tom and pointed at Vik. “That’s a smart kid who’s going to go somewhere. Learn from him.” With that, Blackburn turned and left them in the arboretum.

  As soon as he was gone, Tom shoved his hands into his pockets and turned on Vik. “‘Sir, yes, sir’?” He imitated Vik’s earlier words. “Why didn’t you offer to clean his office while you were at it?”

  Vik shrugged, not the least bit embarrassed. “At the end of the day, he’s our superior officer, and I wanna be a Combatant someday. Admit it, Tom, so do you, too.” He reached out and clapped his shoulder. “It’s over. He won. Just think: no more covering for Wyatt. Life’s going to be easier.”

  TOM SPENT A few days deeply suspicious that Blackburn was just luring Wyatt into a false sense of safety before springing some nasty surprise on her. But soon it became apparent that all his trouble to protect Wyatt’s secret had truly been for nothing.

  Wyatt began working in Blackburn’s office three days a week, reformatting old neural processors, then she began spending dinners telling them every painfully tedious detail about it.

  “It’s interesting to actually use Zorten II on a processor,” she told them while they ate dinner. “I can see why it would get overwhelming, reformatting all the neural processors on his own. They design the processors so you have to reformat directory by directory to erase all the info on them—”

  “What do you mean, you’re reformatting old neural processors?” Vik cut in, digging into his chicken pot pie.

  “They’re from all those adults who died in that first test group. After they died, the processors were cut out of their heads”—Vik began choking on his food—“and then they get reformatted and stuck back in our heads.”

  “They use refurbished neural processors on us?” Vik sputtered, when he caught his breath.

  “Yes,” she said, blinking at him, as though she couldn’t grasp why he was horrified. She picked up her glass of water and weighed it thoughtfully in her hand. “But it’s really okay. They’ve been completely wiped clean. Can you imagine if they hadn’t been? You’d get a neural processor with someone else’s personality stored there.”

  Tom looked up from where he’d been wolfing down his meat loaf. “That can happen?”

  Wyatt nodded. “Once you get the neural processor, your memories start getting stored on there instead of inside your brain. So I guess a part of you actually gets stored in the neural processor. Blackburn told me it’s how they scramble Yuri.” She darted a quick glance at Yuri where he was zoning out over his salad. “They have some malware in him that downloads scraps of memory from other neural processors and jumbles what he’s hearing with them. That’s why he’ll sometimes understand some things, but not others.”

  Tom glanced at Yuri, with his glazed eyes, a bit disturbed even thinking about what was going on in his head.

  “Blackburn showed me one of the brains, too,” Wyatt went on. “It was one of the adults who survived almost three years with the processor because they gave him a bunch of epilepsy drugs. Once you look past the frontal lobe and the limbic cortex, you see the rest of the brain’s atrophied. It looks like a shriveled husk.”

  There was such a look of horror on Vik’s face that Tom started sniggering.

  “Wyatt, food,” Vik said, gesturing to the punctured crust in front of him, trying to get her to stop talking about this while he was eating.

  “Tummy troubles?” Tom asked.

  “Die slowly, Tom.” Vik glared at him as he shoved a forkful of pot pie in his mouth.

  Wyatt waited for Vik to start chewing again. “Maybe not a shriveled husk. More like ground-up shiitake mushrooms.”

  Vik choked again.

  “Actually,” Wyatt added, “I think the brain belonged to the person who used to have your processor, Vik.”

  Vik spat out his food.

  Wyatt smirked. “Just kidding.”

  “You’re an Eviler Wench every day,” Vik accused her, tossing his napkin down on his meal, giving up on eating.

  Yuri roused from his stupor as Vik said that. “That she is,” he said adoringly.

  Ever since he’d admitted to liking Wyatt, Yuri had begun sounding her out, trying to gauge her feelings for him, and repeatedly hinting about his crush. Tom and Vik found the whole thing comically fascinating, seeing Yuri try to yawn and put his arm around her in c
lass—and having clueless Wyatt complain that he was taking up her space. Seeing Yuri try to ask her to a movie, and Wyatt telling him the movie he suggested sounded dreadful.

  It took Yuri a whole week to score one victory: he finally managed to convince her to go out with him to a museum. Unfortunately, Wyatt didn’t even seem to get that it was a date, because she asked Tom and Vik if they were going, too.

  “Sure, we’re going,” Tom told her, just grinning shamelessly at Vik’s warning look. They’d made a bet about when Yuri would finally manage to get somewhere with Wyatt, and Tom was going to lose if it happened this soon.

  So when the following Saturday came, they were tailing a few steps behind Yuri and Wyatt in the Smithsonian.

  “It doesn’t count if you sabotage them,” Vik informed Tom as they passed the caveman exhibit.

  “Come on. They sabotage themselves.”

  “Ah—he’s going in,” Vik proclaimed, grabbing Tom’s arm to halt him.

  They ducked behind a mock saber-toothed tiger, out of sight of the two. Wyatt was staring fixedly at a woolly mammoth skeleton, and Yuri was staring fixedly at her. Resolve filled Yuri’s face. He leaned down, reaching out to draw her into his arms—and Wyatt turned at the same time and smacked her forehead into his.

  Tom burst out laughing. Vik’s hand clamped over his mouth to muffle the sound.

  Wyatt’s voice rang in the air. “Ow! Why’d you have to head butt me?”

  “I—I was just . . .”

  Tom fell down, laughing so hard he was suffocating. He couldn’t get to his feet. He couldn’t. He was going to die, going to choke to death on smothered laughter. Vik hauled him from the room and let Tom fall down again. Then he staggered away, waving for him to stop laughing—and fell down, too.

  “That was so—” Vik gasped, when he could manage it “—that was just so . . . so Enslow.”

  Tom clutched his ribs where they were starting to hurt. “Just pay up now, Vik. Save your dignity.”

  Museum visitors were starting to stare at them. Vik hoisted himself to his feet. Tom lurched to his feet, too, his sides aching.

  “I am not surrendering, Raines. Yuri might go for it again. Double or nothing, the Android gets his hands on Man Hands by tonight.”