Vik turned to Tom, his tunic plastered to his chest. “So what do you think?”
Tom managed a breathless reply, “Beats … running … laps.”
IN THE LOCKER room, Tom’s body shook with exhaustion as he stood beneath the hot jets of the shower, steam curling up around him. His mind swam with the images of angry Scotsmen, charging ronins, and furious English soldiers. He had to remind himself this was not a dream or a hallucination, this was his reality now. His hands scrubbed through his short hair, and over his face....
Tom froze, startled by smooth skin.
He pressed his fingers over his cheekbones, his forehead, his chin. Not a single bump. It felt as if …
He yanked his towel down from the curtain rod, wrapped it around his torso, and scrambled over to the mirrors outside the stall. One swipe of his palm cleared the steam, and for the first time since he was ten years old, he looked at his own face without seeing skin disfigured by acne.
Tom stared at his face, a strange feeling welling up inside him. This was him. This guy, he wasn’t so ugly. Not Elliot Ramirez, yeah, but this guy could walk into a high school—a real, building one—and he’d actually fit in there.
Tom had taken it for granted he’d always be that ugly kid. He knew that even if the acne cleared up, his face would be so scarred it might as well still be there. But he looked like a normal guy now. A normal teenager surrounded by other normal teenagers, with possibility and a future ahead of him. He even had a profile that proclaimed him a national spelling bee champion, not a homeless loser who couldn’t even make it at a reform school. His brain ached, but in a good way. There was this feeling inside him that for the first time in his life, he’d become a real person.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” Vik said, emerging from the steam behind him.
Tom stepped back.
“What’s up, man?” Vik’s dark eyes flicked to the mirror. “You’ve been staring at yourself for, like, twenty seconds. Now, if you looked like me, I’d understand being awestruck by your own beauty.”
“I was thinking about something. I didn’t realize they changed stuff about you when they did the surgery. Physically.”
“Oh, you mean the way you don’t get facial hair anymore?” Vik rubbed his smooth chin.
Tom nodded like that was what he’d meant.
“Yeah, it’s a pain, but the processor pretty much shuts off anything it deems extraneous like the function of hair follicles on your face when you have to be clean-shaven for the military, anyway. And I had this fantastic scar over my eyebrow that was all healed when my surgery was done, too. It’s too bad. It made me look tough.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“No, I really had a scar.” Vik pointed to his eyebrow.
“Yeah, I believe that. I just can’t picture you looking tough.”
He dodged Vik’s towel before he got snapped with it.
TOM FOUND TWO more nutrient bars in his locker. He imagined them as bacon and devoured them on the way to classes. Information popped up in his head. He examined the data, and realized it was his class schedule. He waited for that thing Vik called data comprehension to come along with the information. The schedule looked odd.
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays consisted of Calisthenics from 0800 to 0930, and then math, but only from 1000 to 1020. That wasn’t right, was it? How could a math class be twenty minutes long?
But all the other standard classes appeared to be a mere twenty minutes: English from 1025 to 1045, US History from 1050 to 1110, Physical Science from 1115 to 1135, World Languages from 1140 to 1200. After that? Just lunch and an entire afternoon dedicated to Applied Simulations.
The normal high school classes didn’t appear on the Tuesday/Thursday schedules, either. Programming from 0800 to 1130, and the entire afternoon was Level I Tactics.
Tom followed the other plebes to the Lafayette Room, the lecture hall he’d seen on his tour. He tailed Vik to a bench and slid onto the wooden seat. For his part, Yuri parted ways with them and settled down next to Wyatt. Before him, the plebes flipped back their sleeves to expose their forearm keyboards.
A ping in Tom’s brain: Morning class has now commenced. Silence descended upon the room as a small, gray-haired man mounted the stage in front of the room. Tom’s brain scrolled through his profile.
NAME: Isaac Lichtenstein
AFFILIATION: George Washington University
SECURITY STATUS: Confidential LANDLOCK-2
“Good day, trainees,” said the professor. “Please put away any extraneous materials for our exam.”
“Exam?” Tom asked Vik sharply.
“Yeah,” Vik said. “Hard-core math exam. Better pass it, Tom, or you’re out of the program.”
Tom didn’t think he’d be out of the program now that the military had gone to the trouble of installing a processor in his head, but the words horrified him.
Then the test sequence began. A question blasted itself in front of Tom’s vision. He began to read, Estimate graphically all the local maxima and minima of …
Tom had no idea how to do this. He’d never learned this. And yet as he stared at the numbers the strangest thing happened, like a series of sequential, ordered thoughts. A visual formed in his head of a cube with slices, and the values took on a new shape in his head.
Something this difficult shouldn’t make such perfect, logical sense—but it did. Tom began typing on his own keyboard. He worked through the problem, the calculations flashing through his brain like he had turned into a calculator. He submitted his answer with a tap to his forearm keyboard. The next problem was just as straightforward, and the next.
He submitted his exam, and his vision center flashed 100 percent. He stared at the number, disbelieving. He’d answered eighteen calculus questions in seven minutes. He’d never taken calculus before. He’d never even passed algebra.
At his side, Vik, who’d finished a few minutes earlier, glanced sidelong at him and waggled his caterpillar-like eyebrows, as if to say, Ha-ha, freaked you out again.
Tom fought the urge to break into peals of laughter, because this was unbelievable. How strange to think about this—to realize that something that had always been so frustrating like math could be so easy once his brain was supplemented with a computer.
Dr. Lichtenstein’s voice came from the front of the room again. “Excellent.” He was looking over the results on his own screen. “I see our lowest score was an eighty-nine.”
Beamer snorted. Tom suspected suddenly that he’d scored the 89.
“And it looks like number eleven tripped a good many of you up. Perhaps I should have clarified that concept in your homework feed. As we have four minutes left to class, we’ll go over that together.”
Four minutes later, their math lesson was done. Dr. Lichtenstein told them their assigned downloads for the Wednesday exam were already in the system and bade them farewell. It was 1020 hours on the dot. Tom watched him leave, disbelieving. The schedule wasn’t a mistake. Math class was only twenty minutes long.
The rest of the morning’s classes proceeded the same way, the plebes seated in the room, the teachers changing three times in an hour. Tom had learned more in the weeks while his brain was being resequenced than he had in four years at Rosewood Reformatory. In English, his grammar was impeccable, and his reading comprehension on his exam 100 percent. In US History, he readily filled out all the dates and names and historical implications of the major political events surrounding the French and Indian War. In Physical Science, he correctly identified quantum entanglement as the concept behind the military’s intrasolar communications grid. When the day’s World Languages teacher strolled in speaking Japanese, Tom understood her before he knew he understood her. He spoke into the microphone on the computer during the oral examination, and the processor recorded his voice patterns. His accent matched that of a native Okinawan.