It was finished. The creature staggered, dark blood gushing from its gaping neck wound. It sagged to its knees, then heaved up, but now other wolves tore at its tendons; its hindquarters; its soft, vulnerable abdomen. Tom licked at the fresh blood on his lips, feeling so alive and dangerous in that instant he never wanted the simulation to end.
Then he heard a low rumble. Danger swelled on the icy air.
Tom grew aware of Elliot stalking toward him, legs ramrod stiff, tail curled forward, ears slanted, jagged teeth on full display. Responding to his defiance. A warning note of instinct thrilled through Tom and he knew what Elliot was trying to do with those narrowed eyes fixed on him, with that fur bristling. Tom did not move. A ferocious bark tore from Elliot’s throat.
Tom understood the order. The instinct and parameters in his brain urged him to obey the alpha, but the blood was sweet on his lips, and to the depths of his being he rebelled against the very notion of rolling over and baring his belly, his throat, accepting a position of subservience to this one even if he was torn apart for it. Power and a sense of possibility ripped through him. He could defeat the alpha, he was sure of it. Claim the pack, make it his. He felt a prickling as fur bristled up all over his body, and his lips curled back to bare his own teeth, the growl mounting in his throat.
The other wolf rose to its hind legs and lifted a paw above its head in a completely human gesture. And in that way, Elliot ended the simulation.
TOM OPENED HIS eyes and gazed up at the slashing green line of the EKG, blazing through a standard rhythm. He grew aware of a hollow ache inside him as the sense of union, of belonging, faded away into nothing. He sat up fast enough to make his vision darken for an instant. Around him, everyone else was rousing as well.
Except for the dead ones. Beamer was already up, his elbows perched on his knees. He shrugged. “Death by moose.”
Inside Tom’s head, the neural processor registered that more than two hours had passed. Time held a very different meaning as a wolf.
“Wow,” Tom whispered, his mind blown.
Elliot sat up, tucked his wire back beneath his cot, and told them all to sit again for post-conference. He sighed loudly, focused his attention on Tom, and folded his arms over his chest. “So tell me, what did you do wrong, Tom?”
“What?”
“Tell me what you did wrong.”
Tom glanced at the faces around him, carefully neutral, and back at Elliot. “I did something wrong?”
“The point of Applied Sims,” Elliot said, pointing toward the back of his own neck, “is not just getting you used to the idea of mentally detaching from your body and interfacing with another form using the neural processor. The point is to practice teamwork.”
“I know that. You said so earlier.”
“Clearly, no, you don’t know that. The scenario was about emotional attunement: a pack of wolves working as one to take down a moose. You should’ve helped the pack kill the prey. Instead, you broke with the team and worked all by yourself. And then you tried to challenge my leadership of the pack. That indicates to me, Tom, that you don’t feel like being a team player. You didn’t feel like going with the team strategy. That concerns me.”
“But the team strategy sucked. Three of us were already dead.”
“Tell me, then, Tom, what do you call a lone wolf that doesn’t work with others?”
Tom thought about that, a bit puzzled. There was a trick question in here, right? “Uh, you call it a lone wolf.”
Elliot’s mouth bobbed noiselessly open and closed—like he was caught off guard because he hadn’t even thought of that—and then he shook his head. “No, Tom. It’s called a coyote.”
Silence filled the room.
Wyatt raised her hand and waited for Elliot to acknowledge her, as if they were all sitting together in a classroom. When he waved graciously for her to speak, she blurted exactly what Tom was thinking: “Coyotes aren’t a type of wolf. Coyotes and wolves are two entirely different species.”
But if Elliot caught the implication that he’d just said something astoundingly stupid, he didn’t show it. Instead, he nodded, like Wyatt had made his point for him. “Exactly, Wyatt. Exactly.” He turned back to Tom. “Think about what she said, Tom. Wolves and coyotes are entirely different species. Think about that long and hard.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE NEXT DAY, Tom opened his eyes, wide-awake, when the neural processor informed him, Consciousness initiated. The time is now 0630.
Vik sat up at the same time and mumbled that he was going to go check and see whether Beamer was “capable of ambulating today,” or whether he’d binge downloaded all his homework after yet another long night with his girlfriend.
Tom tossed off the covers and stretched. Sore muscles and tendons objected all over his body. He wasn’t used to exercise.
He also wasn’t used to growing 0.86 of an inch in the course of a night.
Tom registered the height change with a shock. But the neural processor informed him of it. He leaped to his feet, and found that his eyes were definitely looking down from a greater height than on the day before.
Vik hadn’t been kidding at breakfast when he’d told him about the nutrient bar. Tom was having a serious growth spurt. He loved being pseudomachine.
PROGRAMMING CLASS ALSO met in the Lafayette Room, only this time there were Plebes, Middles, Uppers, and CamCos present. It was the only class they shared with all levels of the Spire. Vik told him it was because Programming was the hardest class, and most everyone sucked at it equally.
Tom settled with Vik, Yuri, and Beamer on the same bench they’d grabbed the day before during civilian classes. “So Programming’s that bad, huh?”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Vik slung his boots up on the back of the bench in front of him. “We’re not allowed to use the neural processor to do the work for us. The processor will do some stuff, sure, like memorize the rules of syntax and semantics for you, but you actually have to sit down and piece it all together. You have to use your brain and write the code yourself. It’s tedious and awful.”
“Speak for yourself, Viktor. I am happy to use my—” Yuri grew limp and keeled over onto Tom’s side.
Vik flicked Tom an amused glance as he struggled to dislodge the dead weight. “The Zorten II computer language is Indo-American neural processor-specific. It’s classified, so Yuri’s neural processor sends him into shutdown mode.”
Between Tom and Beamer, they were able to prop Yuri up on the bench in a way that stopped him from crushing either of them.
“What does he remember happening during Programming?” Tom asked Vik.
“I asked him once what he thought of this class, and he started rambling about ‘munchkins’ and ‘fractals.’ I think he just gets so scrambled, he doesn’t even realize he’s scrambled later.”
The door to the lecture hall slid open, and chattering voices died away. Tom looked up, and saw an imposing man with close-cropped brown hair and a hawkish face stride up to assume the podium. His profile said he was:
NAME: James Blackburn
RANK: Lieutenant
GRADE: 0-3, USAF, Active Duty
IP: 2053:db7:lj71::008:ll3:6e8
SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-10
He greeted them with, “Well, folks, I had a big laugh after your class prank.”