The Genghises exchanged uneasy glances. It was true.
“We’ve been at it for a half hour and none of us has managed a program yet.”
“What do you suggest, then, Plebe?” Karl folded his beefy arms.
“We go our separate ways, program on our own time, come up with some great attacks, and then meet again later.”
Karl’s eyes narrowed. “Like a duel.”
“Yeah, like a duel. Tomorrow night. In the plebe common room.”
Karl stroked his chin, as if he had an invisible beard there. “Okay, I’d go for that. But night after that instead.”
“Night after?”
“Yeah, you have a problem with that? I said the night after tomorrow, ’cause tomorrow night, I’m scheduled to go get a haircut. I can’t cancel without twenty-four hours’ notice.”
“Night after, then.” Tom was fine with it. More time to program.
Karl gave a satisfied nod. “I don’t know anyone who can cobble together a program on the run, anyway.”
And then the doors slid open, and Tom glanced over carelessly to see Wyatt standing there again, her keyboard out this time.
“If you came to see Karl get us, you’re out of luck,” Vik informed her.
“That’s not why I’m here,” Wyatt replied. “I decided not to sit this one out.”
Vik blinked. “Seriously? Why?”
“You changed my mind, Vik.” She typed something on her keyboard, and immediately Karl and the Genghis trainees dropped onto their hands and knees and began baaing.
Tom whirled toward the Genghises, watching them all nuzzling their noses at the carpet as sheep. “You sure about this?” he asked her.
“Very sure.”
“Huh,” Vik said. “Well, guess we can have three Doctors of Doom, then.”
But Wyatt still had her keyboard up, a ruthless gleam in her eyes. “Why, Vik, we’re in different divisions, remember?”
Vik’s eyes widened. “Human shield, save me!” he cried, grabbing Tom by the shoulders.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Wyatt assured him, smiling. “I have enough for both of you.”
A flick of the button on her keyboard targeted both their IP addresses at the same time and sent text flashing across Tom’s vision center: Datastream received: program Bleating Sheep initiated.
TOM CAME TO himself, munching on a plant in the arboretum behind the mess hall. He wasn’t the only one. Far from it. Wyatt had left carnage all over the first floor. Some trainees were sheep, the way Vik still was. Some were gathered in a crowd, speaking together frantically in a cycling roster of languages, unable to remember English, and others were stumbling over their legs over and over again like they’d forgotten how to walk. She’d taken out a good thirty people luckless enough to cross her path.
“Ugh.” Tom swiped his sleeve over his mouth, scrubbing off the taste of tomato vine, and ignored the frantic baaaas of people he passed, hunched on all fours, being sheep.
Tom found Vik and nudged him with his foot, ignoring his baas of anger, until Vik snapped out of it. “What—what—”
Tom reached out and hoisted him up. “Wyatt went on a rampage. The Doctors of Doom can’t let this insult stand.”
TOM AND VIK decided to confront Yuri that night over whether he planned to unite with his fellow Alexanders to help take Wyatt Enslow down. Their tentative questions over dinner convinced them he understood just enough of what was going on to be of use to them, unless he planned to be a dirty, rotten traitor. But Yuri wasn’t in his bunk.
Beamer was.
Vik strode inside. “Hey, man, have you seen the Android?”
Beamer just lay there in bed and didn’t say a word. Tom and Vik exchanged an uneasy glance. Beamer hadn’t been at classes today. He must have spent the whole day in bed.
“What’s going on with you, Beamer?” Vik asked him. “Why are you being such a pansy today?”
It was worse than Tom would’ve done. He jabbed his thumb toward the door. Vik raised his arms and left him to it.
Tom took over his spot at Beamer’s side, then realized he had no idea what to say, either.
“Look, I’m sorry I beheaded you, okay?”
Beamer opened his eyes. “God, Tom, you are so selfish! This is not about you.”
“Then what? I don’t get it. I don’t. Do you need the social worker?”
Beamer shook his head, staring at the ceiling.
“Look, I’m not trying to make fun of you. I can get her to come up here.” He braced himself, because this was about as self-sacrificing as he could ever remember being. “I will even say it’s for me if you’re embarrassed.”
Please say no, Tom added mentally.
“No,” Beamer said.
Tom’s shoulders slumped in relief.
“Don’t you see, Tom? Don’t you see what my problem is?”
“Yeah, you thought something was wrong with the program and you were gonna die. So you got freaked out.”
“No. Yes, but not just that. I thought I was going to die. And afterward, it made me think. Really think. About this.” He tapped his head with a pale finger. “About what I’ve done. I thought this would be fun, Tom, okay? Coming to the Spire, messing around with machines. But I didn’t think it through. I didn’t think about whether this is what I want. What if I die?”
“You’re not gonna die anytime soon. You’re fourteen.”
“How can you know that?” Beamer sat up in bed, red spots on his cheeks. “We don’t even know what this stuff in our heads is. Are there any eighty-year-olds walking around with neural processors?”
“They didn’t have this tech back then. But look at Blackburn. He got it sixteen years ago. Other than the acute psychotic break, he’s fine.”
Beamer rolled his eyes and slumped back down. Tom could admit that “other than the acute psychotic break” was a pretty stupid thing to say, but he didn’t know why Beamer would be so touchy about the details right now.
“It’s not even that. Don’t you get it? We never get these out. Never. We signed up for a few years in the Spire, but this stuff in our heads ties us to the military for life. Do you realize that? They own it. They own us.”
Tom found his thoughts turning back to his night in the infirmary, the way Dr. Gonzales had a final say over his hGH and not him. But he just said, “What does it matter? They need us. They’re not going to do anything bad to us.”
“We will always be the front line. The military gets first dibs on us for the rest of our lives, whatever we do from here—don’t you see that? Who’s going to repair the processor when it breaks, otherwise? And what happens if the Russo-Chinese programmers come up with some great new computer virus to vaporize our brains? … If Russia and China ever have a chance to really take down America, we’re the first ones they’ll kill!”
Tom laughed at that. It sounded so ridiculous. “Come on. No one kills in war anymore.”
“It’s war, Tom. War. That used to mean stuff like the Battle of Stalingrad, get it? And one day, it might again. Someone might remember one day. Someone might remember this is World War III. Blackburn said it—don’t you remember? He said they want to cut open our heads and look at the coding inside!”