They had different bunks.
“This can’t be right,” Tom blurted.
“It happens.”
Tom stood there, rooted in place. Vik had been his roommate since his arrival at the Pentagonal Spire. He was the first trainee Tom met after his neural processor was installed. It had never occurred to him that they might get split up.
“I’m just down the corridor, Tom.”
“Yeah, I know.” Tom made sure to laugh, too, even though it sounded strange to his ears. “Whatever. You know. See you.” He started off again, but the change threw him a lot more than he wanted to let on. Tom did not like change.
He was almost at his door when Vik’s earsplitting shriek resounded down the corridor. Tom was glad for the excuse to sprint back toward him. “Vik?”
He reached Vik’s doorway as Vik was backing out of it. “Tom,” he breathed, “it’s an abomination.”
Confused, Tom stepped past him into the bunk. Then he gawked, too.
Instead of a standard trainee bunk of two small beds with drawers underneath them and totally bare walls, Vik’s bunk was virtually covered with images of their friend Wyatt Enslow. There were posters all over the wall with Wyatt’s solemn, oval face on them. She wore her customary scowl, her dark eyes tracking their every move through the bunk. There was a giant marble statue of a sad-looking Vik with a boot on top of its head. The Vik statue clutched two very, very tiny hands together in a gesture of supplication, its eyes trained upward on the unseen stomper, an inscription at its base, WHY, OH WHY, DID I CROSS WYATT ENSLOW?
Tom began to laugh.
“She didn’t do it to the bunk,” Vik insisted. “She must’ve done something to our processors.”
That much was obvious. If Wyatt was good at anything, it was pulling off tricks with the neural processors, which could pretty much be manipulated to show them anything. This was some sort of illusion she was making them see, and Tom heartily approved.
He stepped closer to the walls to admire some of the photos pinned there, freeze-frames of some of Vik’s more embarrassing moments at the Spire: that time Vik got a computer virus that convinced him he was a sheep, and he’d crawled around on his hands and knees chewing on plants in the arboretum. Another was Vik gaping in dismay as Wyatt won the war games.
“My hands do not look like that.” Vik jabbed a finger at the statue and its abnormally tiny hands. Wyatt had relentlessly mocked Vik for having small, delicate hands ever since Tom had informed her it was the proper way to counter one of Vik’s nicknames for her, “Man Hands.” Vik had mostly abandoned that nickname for “Evil Wench,” and Tom suspected it was due to the delicate-hands gibe.
Just then, Vik’s new roommate bustled into the bunk.
He was a tall, slim guy with curly black hair and a pointy look to his face. Tom had seen him around, and he called up his profile from memory:
NAME: Giuseppe Nichols
RANK: USIF, Grade IV Middle, Alexander Division
ORIGIN: New York, NY
ACHIEVEMENTS: Runner-up, Van Cliburn International Piano Competition
IP: 2053:db7:lj71::291:ll3:6e8
SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-4
Giuseppe must’ve been able to see the bunk template, too, because he stuttered to a stop, staring up at the statue. “Did you really program a giant statue of yourself into your bunk template? That’s so narcissistic.”
Tom smothered his laughter. “Wow. He already has your number, man.”
Vik shot him a look of death as Tom backed out of the bunk.
AS IT TURNED out, Tom had no assigned roommate of his own. He’d never had his own bunk before, not by himself. He spent about twenty minutes sitting in there, trying to figure out what to do with all the new space, wondering what he’d do if Giuseppe replaced him as Vik’s best friend somehow.
Tom grew annoyed with himself and headed downstairs to the Middle Company primer meeting. As he stepped into the Lafayette Room, he delved into his pocket for his neural wire and upgrade chip. Row after row of benches filled the lecture hall, leading to a massive stage with a podium, a US flag, and a flag with the logos of the Coalition companies that were aligned with Indo-American interests: Epicenter Manufacturing; Obsidian Corp.; Wyndham Harks; Matchett-Reddy; Nobridis, Inc.; and Tom’s least favorite of all, Dominion Agra.
He glared at that one as he took his place in the row before the stage, where Wyatt Enslow was already waiting.
“Tom, you didn’t brush your hair today,” she greeted him.
“Nice to see you, too. How was break?”
But Wyatt was too distressed by the messy hair issue to answer him. “General Marsh won’t be happy if he sees you. He might yell.”
“We should wait and see.”
“Tom, no! Yuri didn’t even get promoted with us, but he brushed his hair today. I saw him.”
“Maybe that’s why he didn’t get promoted with us. He brushes his hair too much.”
Wyatt frowned, genuinely perplexed. They both knew Yuri hadn’t gotten promoted because he was suspected of being a Russian spy and consequently had a lower security clearance than everyone else.
Tom surrendered. “Fine. Okay. Happy?” He pawed at his head, but he was clearly messing it up even more, since Wyatt reached up to claw at his head, too.
“No, you have to smooth down this right here. . . .”
“Ow!” Tom exclaimed as she tugged. “Don’t pull it out!”
Vik swept over to his place beside them. “Enslow, stop assaulting Tom.”
“I’m not assaulting Tom.” Wyatt smiled wickedly at Vik. “Speaking of assaults, how did you like your bunk?”
“Glorious,” Vik said dangerously. “I am going to retaliate, you realize. After all, I’m not Tom. I am far from terrible at programming.”
Tom realized Vik was mocking him. “Hey!”
“I can actually write a program every so often,” Vik went on, “a program with no nulls, no infinite loops.”
“I can write programs.”
“He means programs that actually work,” Wyatt told Tom helpfully. It wasn’t an intentional insult; it was more the Wyatt-type of insult she tended to do by accident. A lot.
Then the stern-faced, older general Terry Marsh assumed the podium on the stage. His blue eyes surveyed them over his bulbous nose, and all the new Middles lapsed into silence.
“Trainees.” Everyone snapped to attention at the sound of Marsh’s voice. “First of all, congratulations on your promotions. You are one step closer to Camelot Company. Hook into your neural chips and prepare to download your upgrades.”
Everyone connected neural wires between their brain stem access ports and the chips they received at their promotion ceremony. Code flashed before Tom’s vision, and an executable file installed itself in his neural processor. A password prompt appeared in the center of his vision.
Marsh pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket, and propped a pair of reading glasses on his nose. “It says here the password to activate the programs is ‘I can see everything twice! Eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-four, sixty-six.’”
Tom thought it out, and code whirled before his vision and abruptly ceased. Content unpacked flashed across his vision center. Tom braced himself for the mental confusion that tended to follow a binge download of too much data without enough processing time, but he found his head completely clear.