Insignia (17 page)

“About the person hacking the profiles, yeah. I didn’t tell, though, so don’t worry.” He shifted back and forth, trying to figure out the best way to position himself. “Man, this girl stuff is throwing me off.” He settled with leaning back with his legs slung wide. It earned him a scandalized look from Wyatt, but he was comfortable, so he stayed that way. “A wolf is a completely different body, so you expect to move all differently, but a girl’s close enough that I keep trying to move the way I do normally.”

“You won’t notice after a few more sims.”

Tom became distracted by the sight of his own boobs. He reached down to grab them. Wyatt cleared her throat.

“What?” Tom said defensively. “They’re mine.”

“You aren’t seriously planning to just sit here groping yourself in front of me, are you? That’s kind of rude.”

Tom dropped his hand, a bit sheepish. “What, come on. You’ve got some new equipment, too. You’re not curious?”

Wyatt’s armor clanked as she shifted awkwardly in her seat. “It’s not like I haven’t played sims as men before.”

“Right.” Tom grinned. “So you’ve already done the groping thing.”

“That’s not what I said,” she protested. Her cheeks flamed so red, Tom began to enjoy himself.

“You have to have wondered—”

“I am not having this discussion!” She gathered up her scroll and pointedly moved to another table in the empty library.

Tom was just getting started, though. He hopped down to follow her to the new table, hoping to annoy her some more, but a low rumbling saturated the air. Screams drifted into the library’s open window, and he knew what must be happening.

Finally
. Tom started for the door, thrumming with excitement.

“Wait,” Wyatt called after him. “What’s happening?”

Tom wheeled back around and remembered she had a sword resting forgotten in her scabbard. He closed the distance between them and drew it before she seemed to realize what he was doing.

“Look, Wyatt, if you want to be a bookworm Lancelot, that’s fine. Just lock the door to the library and maybe slide a table in front of it. I’m stealing your sword if you’re not fighting, though.”

“What are you going to do with it? You said Guinevere can’t leave the castle.”

“She can’t. But
Queen
Guinevere can lower the drawbridge and order the castle sentries to stand down. Just like this Queen Guinevere did about ten minutes ago. Oh, and she can also send a messenger to the Saxon king to let him know Camelot’s defenseless.”

Wyatt gaped at him. “That sound outside is the Saxon army, isn’t it?”

“Yuri’s right. You really are smart.” Tom heard the screams starting, and started for the sound with a bounce in his step.

“Tom!”

He paused in the doorway, saw Wyatt running her fingers up and down the desk next to her. “Thanks for not telling Blackburn. I’m sorry I got you turned into a dog.”

“Hey, I was a dog for you, and now you’ve given a glorious instrument of death to me”—he waved the sword—“so I’d say we’re even.”

S
ATURDAY MORNING
, T
OM
woke up and wished he hadn’t. Everything hurt. Everything. His joints, his bones, his brain. He pressed his face into his pillow and lay there. His thoughts reached back to the day before when Applied Sims ended. Elliot returned to the castle after King Arthur and his knights realized the Saxons weren’t showing up at the battlefield. He strode into the throne room and found Tom lounging on Arthur’s throne, his gown soaked in blood, and the Saxon king’s head mounted on a pike beside him.

He’d offered Elliot the head as fealty, but Elliot didn’t take it. He just gave Tom a stern, you’ve-disappointed-me-young-one look and ended the simulation.

On the bright side, he hadn’t given Tom a long speech about teamwork this time.

“Get up.” Vik swatted him. “We’re going to Toddery’s Chicken Barn and then maybe downtown.”

“Toddery’s Chicken Barn?” Tom mumbled into his pillow.

“They don’t just serve chicken. It’s way better than it sounds.”

“It would have to be. Look, it’s too early.”

“Come on, man. People with neural processors don’t need to sleep in.”

“I do,” Tom said, even though that technically wasn’t true. He was wide-awake, and in pain. Each breath sent pinpricks racing through his rib cage, each movement an electric current down his limbs, like someone was holding a live wire to his joints.

He gritted his teeth and crammed his pillow over his head. He’d try to get more sleep and hope that helped. Maybe he’d been beaten up by someone and gotten hit in the head so hard he’d forgotten it? No. He sorted through his memories of the previous night. He couldn’t seem to find any gaps. The neural processor had even helpfully time-stamped his recent memories with the date and hour, so he was certain he’d never been throttled and subsequently forgotten it.

When another shift sent pain prickling through him, his neural processor kicked into scanning mode.

“Huh?” Tom mumbled into his pillow.

A series of statistics flashed through his brain:
pH, CO
₂
, HCO
₃
, WBC, RBC, RDW, HR, RR …
Tom pulled the pillow tighter about his head, hoping to smother himself to make the scanning mode stop.

And then one number flashed before his eyes that shocked him to his core.

He was 4.2 inches taller than he’d been on Wednesday.

Tom rolled over onto his back, and pain shot through him in a blinding jolt. He ignored it and looked down at his legs. They actually looked longer. He wiggled his toes, just making sure he really was in his own body. His toes even looked longer. His feet were bigger.

Tom raised his hands before his face, curled and uncurled his fingers, and marveled at the broadness of his palms. “Man hands,” he murmured.

“What about Enslow?” Vik said, from the other side of the room.

“Not her. Ignore me.”

Tom flopped his head back and decided it was okay that he was aching all over. After all, things couldn’t be so bad if he now had large, manly hands.

I
GNORING THE PAIN
grew trickier after Vik, Yuri, and Beamer headed out. At first, moving slowly was enough to keep it at bay. But soon, Tom found himself sitting on his bed, using his forearm keyboard and his vision center as the monitor, surfing the internet—and still clenching his jaw at the sensation like glass grinding into his joints.

The only thing that seemed to tear his mind from his physical discomfort was the thought of Medusa, the Russo-Chinese fighter. Tom had downloaded every last recording of Medusa’s engagements with Indo-American forces. He’d spent a couple hours last night with his eyes closed, accessing those files in his neural processor and playing them in his brain.

Now he started watching a few more: Medusa blasting through the rings of Saturn and shifting the course of a comet to send it crashing into an Indo-American drilling platform on Titan. In another battle, Medusa evaded a trap that got the other ships, then dodged the weapons fire from a dozen ships, all focused on him, and still managed to lure the Indo-American forces to Venus. There, Medusa planted his vessel straight into a wind current that buffeted him back into the high atmosphere, while the pursuing Indo-Americans were forced down toward the surface, hulls melted and then crushed.

Tom was so caught up in replaying that one that he barely registered the knock on his door. He jumped when the door slid open.

A girl’s voice rang out: “Are you deaf or something? You didn’t hear me knock?”

Tom cracked open his eyes, and saw Wyatt standing tall and gangly in the doorway with her customary frown.

“Nice of you to just come in anyway. Ever occur to you that maybe I was ignoring it?”

Her eyebrows sank down. “You could’ve taken two seconds to tell me to go away, then.”

He felt like he’d just kicked a puppy. “I was caught up in something, or I’d have let you in.” He mentally ordered the files to stop playback, and the images of Medusa’s vessel vanished from his vision center. “Why are you around the Spire on a Saturday? You didn’t go out with Vik and the others?”

“Yuri didn’t ask me this time. He’s the only one who ever wants me to go anywhere with him.”

Tom thought about that. “Do you remember telling me to go away and never talk to you again the first time we met? Do you say stuff like that a lot? Because people generally assume you mean it.”

Wyatt considered that. “Oh.”

“Just a thought.”

“Well, I came to ask if everything was okay yesterday. Did Elliot end up yelling at you for the Saxon thing?”

“Yelling’s not his style. He’s more about the power of disapproving looks.” He gave a heavy sigh and shook his head, mock regretfully, to imitate Elliot for her.

Wyatt’s lips pulled up in a quick smile. She was still hanging back in the doorway, shifting her weight awkwardly like she didn’t know the rules of conduct for entering someone’s room.

“You can come in,” Tom told her.

She took a few tentative steps inside. After several moments of her just standing there near his doorway, staring at him and him just staring back, he searched for a distraction. “Hey, you play any games?”

Then he regretted saying it. She might stick around longer now, and then more awkward staring would ensue.

But Wyatt just frowned, like the words did not compute. “Games?”

“VR games,” Tom said, exasperated. “You know. Role-playing games. Strategy games. First-person shooters.”

“I don’t like fighting.”

“Strategy, then.” Actually, that worked for him, too. He didn’t have to move much to play most strategy games, and he could pick a game they only needed keyboards for. He flipped through the Spire’s database and found Privateers.

Privateers largely involved trading and negotiating. It wasn’t his favorite game, but it was more for brainy people, and he figured she’d be into it.

Wyatt was. She wasn’t so great at negotiating, but she plotted courses like a pro.

“You’re good at this,” Tom told her, when she reached the Polynesian Islands before he did.

“It’s just math.”

“Right. Math’s your thing, huh? The reason you got recruited.”

She was sitting with her back against the leg of Vik’s bed, her arms curled over her bent knees, tapping halfheartedly at her forearm keyboard. “I was good at it. My parents were always entering me into competitions, and if I’d wanted to, I could’ve gone to college early. Of course, since everyone here has a neural processor, it’s not like being good at math means anything now.” Her eyes flickered over to him. “I guess it’s the same for you, with the spelling bee thing. Everyone can spell as well as you now that they have neural processors.”

A laugh rose in Tom’s throat. He couldn’t help it. “Yeah, it drives me nuts knowing everyone else can spell correctly now. It really cheapens my talent.”

“Well”—Wyatt smoothed her hair back behind her ear—“at least I found something else. I don’t see why so many people don’t understand programming. I think they just don’t know how to work anymore. They’re too used to just downloading something and understanding it, so it seems like too much effort actually connecting the dots and writing out a program.”

“Blackburn seems to think that,” Tom said, remembering the stuff he’d said to Heather in class. “Too bad he’s hunting you. You’d probably have some great meeting-of-minds thing going on.”

Wyatt pressed her lips together.

“Or not?”

“I hacked the profiles my first week here to help a couple people who were hoping to get promoted,” Wyatt said flatly. “It was a dumb thing to do, and ever since, I’ve had to mess up my own code before I turn it in so Blackburn doesn’t realize I’m the one who did it. And the people I did that for? None of them have even talked to me since.”

“You didn’t do it to make friends or something, did you?”

She didn’t answer that.

“Look, Wyatt, they sound like jerks. Why would it make so much of a difference when it comes to promotions, anyway? The profile achievements are all in the past.”

“Coalition companies have more interest in sponsoring people with great backgrounds. One of the people whose profile I changed got into Camelot Company a month later. She probably would’ve gotten sponsored anyway, but her new profile helped her get the company she wanted.”

“Who was that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Wyatt insisted, and focused her attention back on the game. “It’s all over and done now, anyway.”

O
N
S
UNDAY
, T
OM
was six inches taller than when he first arrived at the Spire, and something strange was happening. His neural processor ran scans constantly, one after the other. A message began blinking in his vision center:
CA 7.3 (8.9–10.3)
.

“Vik.” Tom said to his roommate, who was sprawled on the other bed, playing a game with wired gloves he’d smuggled out of the ground floor VR parlor. “What’s CA seven point three?”

“CA … California?”

“I don’t think so.” After a moment, Tom admitted, “My bones are kind of killing me. It’s kind of hard to move.” And his lips and fingers were tingling like he had bugs crawling below his skin.