It was Tom’s first day of school ever. He was eleven years old and staring down at the claws of his Lord Krull avatar as Ms. Falmouth yelled at him for being insolent. Then she asked him to read something off the board. Tom hedged and made excuses, but she pressed him relentlessly, cornered him. Tom knew the letters a bit, so he tried, “Li-in-co-le-in …” staring at the text of “Lincoln.” The classroom filled with laughter when his classmates realized he couldn’t read.
Heat blasted his face. “That didn’t happen.” He couldn’t stop his lips from moving, forming the urgent lie, because he would’ve torn out his stomach before showing this to Blackburn. “That wasn’t any more real than the fantasies.”
“Truly, Raines, I don’t care.” Blackburn sipped at his coffee, looking bored.
Tom relaxed just a bit, realizing he meant it, and the Rosewood memories slipped away. The scene transformed again.
Neil.
No, not his father. Not in front of Blackburn. Please not his father.
And Tom tried to fight it so the census device stuck on that theme. It was that night when Tom was little and the two guys busted into their room. They shouted at Neil about money, they clobbered him. They took Neil’s watch since it was all he had left. Tom got so scared, huddled under the bed, that he peed on himself. Neil kept trying to coax him out afterward, telling him it was okay, they were gone now, but Tom wanted his mom and he put his hands over his ears when Neil explained again that she wasn’t coming, she wasn’t going to be here ever again....
Tom’s every muscle was clenched, and his teeth were grinding together. He hadn’t thought of that night in so long, in so many years. He must’ve forgotten it, really, and now it was there in his brain like it had just happened moments ago.
Blackburn swung his chair around and studied him over his coffee cup. “I warned you that the census device pulls up buried memories and dismantles your psychological defenses. This is going to get worse and worse if you don’t give up whatever you’re hiding.”
Tom’s thoughts flashed to Yuri and Wyatt, and he forced them away just as quickly. “I’m not hiding anything.”
“If you weren’t, this would be over by now, and we’d both be at breakfast.”
The census device kept digging, bringing up more and more memories, an endless catalog of them. Tom decided he hated the census device, hated it so much, he felt like he was choking. He wished he could fry the thing. Go into it just like the septic tank in the Beringer Club and make it blow up from the inside …
And then the neural culling began digging into that memory. It plastered itself across the screen: The mesh of wires, the electricity, Tom’s consciousness diving into the septic system at the Beringer Club and interfacing with it. The sewage bubbling up as the gauges pumped in reverse …
At first, Blackburn just cast an idle glance at the image. Then he sat up ramrod straight, and by the time the screen showed the sewage seeping over the floor of the Beringer Club, he was on his feet with his mouth hanging open.
“What is this, Raines?” He turned, his eyes blazing in the shadowed, projected light of the screen. “What did I just see?”
Tom’s head pulsed. Great. Now Blackburn knew what he’d done to the Dominion Agra execs, and then he’d tell Marsh. “Look, I know they put a ton of money into the war effort, but those Dominion guys had it coming!”
“Not that. The machine. What was that?”
Tom blinked, realizing that he wasn’t even asking about the place he’d flooded. “I was reprogramming a septic tank.”
“That wasn’t programming. You were interfacing with it!”
“Oh. Sort of.”
Blackburn reached overhead and manipulated a few controls on the census device. The bands of light bearing into Tom’s temples vanished, and Tom felt like some rubber band, pulled taut, and been snapped. An overwhelming sense of relief surged through him.
Blackburn replayed the memory of the septic tank again and again. “How is it possible? That tank couldn’t have been designed for a neural interface. Was it some freak hardware error?”
Tom realized it: he was far more interested in this than in whether or not Tom was a traitor.
Hope reared up inside him. He could use it. He was sure of it. If he just got Blackburn caught up in this, Yuri and Wyatt would never even become an issue.
“This has to be doctored somehow,” Blackburn was muttering to himself. “It can’t be the true recollection.”
“Actually, it can,” Tom spoke up. “It is. I used my processor to control the septic tank.”
Blackburn turned back to him, shock written on his face. “You’ve done this more than once.”
“A couple other times, yeah.”
He drew a sharp breath. “At will?”
“More or less.”
Blackburn just gaped at him for a long time. Then he seemed to recover his ability to speak. “Show me the others.”
“Stop the culling.”
“Raines—”
“I am not the traitor, sir. You know it. Swear you’ll stop the culling, and I’ll show you everything you want.”
Blackburn’s smile was ironic. “You realize you’re threatening to keep a secret from me while strapped down under a census device.”
“Why take all that time to dig it out of my brain if I’m willing to just give it to you, huh?”
Blackburn considered that. “Fine, Raines. You show me the memories, and I’ll break procedure and stop the culling. We have a deal.”
“I need a guarantee.”
“There are no guarantees. I can only give you my word.”
“At least take off these straps!”
Blackburn stepped over and undid the straps. “Don’t run.”
Tom’s stomach was twisting in knots. He didn’t have any way to force him to abide by their agreement, but if he didn’t give the memories willingly, Blackburn still won. He’d just resume the culling and force them out. All Tom could do was give in and hope Blackburn meant his promise.
Blackburn tapped a button on the claw and reactivated the census device, but now it wasn’t forcing memories out of Tom’s head. He steered it to that time he sought out the satellites during the war games, and that time he sought Medusa, and even that first connection to the internet he made, back while he was unconscious after surgery. The views of Rio, the Grand Canyon, the reservoir, the Bombay highway …
“Look at that,” Blackburn murmured, replaying the satellite one again. “Right through the Citadel’s firewall as though it doesn’t even exist. There isn’t a technology in the world that can do that.”
“I don’t really know how that happens,” Tom admitted. “It’s the way I messaged Medusa the first time. I sort of went through the firewall and net-sent a hello to her neural processor.”
Blackburn insisted on seeing that one more in detail, so Tom went back to it. Then Blackburn replayed them all, again and again. The coffee sat stagnant in his cup. Hours dragged by as he flipped between the memories. Tom started to wonder if he’d been completely forgotten. His throat grew parched. His stomach growled like it was ready to start digesting itself.