“It is too deceitful,” Yuri said.
Vik threw up his hands. “Come on. Where’s your patriotism? You’re an Alexander, for God’s sake!”
“But I do not like this idea of attacking Wanda.”
“It’s not like the Evil Wench is gonna ditch you for all her other friends—”
“I will not lose her trust.”
“We get that you feel pity for her or whatever—” Tom began.
Yuri rose to his full height. “Why should I pity her? She is magnificent. She is so intelligent and honest, and her eyes are lovely.” He stopped, maybe because Tom and Vik were both staring at him like he was a madman, or maybe because he could feel how pink he was turning.
It hit Tom like a lightning bolt. He turned to Vik, aghast. “He likes her.”
“Yuri, no!” Vik said.
Yuri turned redder, confirming it.
“Yuri, come on, man,” Tom cried.
Yuri gave a helpless shrug. “Divisions cannot divide human hearts.”
“Oh God,” Vik cried, clapping hands over his ears. “He’s even spouting cheesy lines now. Make him stop, Tom!”
“I can’t,” Tom told him. “My ears … They’re bleeding. Bleeding!”
“It’s a brain hemorrhage! He’s murdered us!” Vik said. “Murderer!” Tom cried, fake collapsing onto the ground. Yuri shook his head. “This is not very mature.”
But they were both on the ground now, pretending to writhe with spontaneous brain hemorrhages. Yuri sighed and stepped over them to get out the door.
THAT NIGHT, VIK devoted himself to staying up and putting together the ultimate program to take Wyatt down. Tom wasn’t going to sleep while his partner in doom did the bulk of the programming, so he stayed awake in a show of solidarity, occasionally offering suggestions. One idea came to him very late in the night. He jumped to his feet in a flash of inspiration.
“Vik, what if we use an outside transmitter?”
“What? I was concentrating, Tom.”
“Listen. Maybe we don’t need some elaborate virus. Maybe we just need to hit her from somewhere she doesn’t expect. We know her IP. And we have the authorization to allow us through the Spire’s firewall. So we find a transmitter powerful enough to send it to her from a distance, hack into that, and use it to slam her with something.”
“What kind of transmitter?”
Tom leaned forward eagerly, because this was where he was sure he was being visionary. “A satellite.”
“How do you expect to use a satellite? I don’t know a thing about how those are controlled.”
“We hook in. Just like satellites hook into ships in space, we hook into the satellite.”
“The ships in space are designed for a neural interface,” Vik informed him. “Satellites aren’t.”
Tom rubbed at his head, fumbling with scraps of his memory—from the first day his neural processor was installed. “We can do it. I swear, it’s possible. Remember when you first got your neural processor installed, and you were getting configured for the internet? I remember when I kept hooking into random places, and one of them was a satellite. It was just like a neural interface. I was inside it. We’ve just gotta do something like that on purpose.”
Vik stared at him like he was crazy.
“Come on, don’t you remember your installation?” Tom demanded, recalling the vast sequences of 0s and 1s, and the way his brain felt tugged in an infinite number of directions. “Your brain first gets on the network and it starts jumping around a bit …”
Vik considered him, his fingers drumming on the edge of his forearm keypad. “Tom, I’m not saying that didn’t happen, but, uh, I’m going to work on this. This program. If you have something else you think might work, give it a shot, but I wouldn’t count on it, buddy. That thing you’re talking about? It’s just not possible. There is no neural processor in the world that can interface with just any machine at will. Machines have to be built for a neural processor, or it doesn’t work. You probably just dreamed it. Anesthesia does weird stuff like that to some people. My dad’s a doctor. I know.”
Tom knew he hadn’t imagined that. “I’m going to hook into a neural interface and show you, Vik. Just wait.”
“You hook into the internet, you’re going to catch one of Wyatt’s viruses,” Vik warned him. “She’s got this whole place rigged up.”
“I’m not using the trainee server.”
AS SOON AS Tom reached floor eleven, a warning flashed in his head: Restricted area. He ignored it. He headed down the empty hallway, located the officers’ lounge, and then settled into a chair.
There was a neural access port in the middle of the table, all ready for Blackburn. Tom pulled out a neural wire, hooked it into the port, then plugged it into the back of his neck.
The internet server for officers popped up, and Tom navigated a bit aimlessly, getting the feel of using just his brain to move through the internet, to click links. The images popped before his eyes, much more vivid and encompassing than they appeared with just a pair of VR visors.
He wasn’t sure how he’d managed to interface with the satellite right after his neural processor installation, but he knew it had something to do with following one connection to the next.
He tried focusing on his neural processor. He barely noticed the computer in his brain now, but he remembered how early on he’d been so aware of it. It used to feel so alien. If he concentrated just enough, he could still detect it, still feel the machine buzzing in his brain like another entity entirely, sending electrical impulses to something else, to the hub in the Spire.
And then like he’d received an electric jolt, Tom suddenly found himself jerked out of his body. His limbs felt cold and distant and his brain melded to the Spire, a massive charged source of energy, a building doubling as a transmitter with a hybrid fission/fusion core, sending signals into space that—
The signal tore Tom farther from himself, thrusting him into the satellites ringing Earth with their electrical impulses transmitting data, a vast ring of 0s and 1s that seemed like so much nonsense when it was flooding his brain like this, and suddenly he felt like an it again, gazing through electromagnetic sensors—
And then another stream tore him away, and he was connected to those vessels near the dark side of Mercury, the surface registering in the infrared sensors of the Russo-Chinese automated machines, floating in orbit, exchanging signals with Stronghold Energy’s palladium mines that connected back to—
The central server in the Sun Tzu Citadel in the Forbidden City, with two hundred and seven neural processors registering on the internal network, IPs flickering through Tom’s brain—
He slammed back into his neural processor, into his own body so abruptly it felt like he’d been swatted by some vast, cosmic hand. He sat there, his eyes closed, hand gripping the table, heaving in frantic breaths. He hadn’t imagined it the first time. He really had seen out of satellites. But his assurances to Vik seemed laughable suddenly. He hadn’t just seen satellites. He’d glimpsed inside the server of the Sun Tzu Citadel … where the Chinese Combatants trained. That was … that was something big. He wasn’t sure what to even make of it. Was that supposed to happen?