Human.

That was right.

It was human.

It was human. Why was it … Why was he so confused? Why was he drifting like this?

He. He was it. It was he. He knew who “he” was.

Tom Raines. Tom. Tom. Tom.

Tom clung to this sudden awareness of self, waiting for reality to resolve back into somethng he understood. He remembered things, just for a moment: the sedative he’d swallowed. Feeling woozy in the operating room. His head being shaved and washed, and being told it was an “antiseptic practice to avoid infection.” Heather tapping on the glass wall of the surgical suite and giving him a wave good-bye. The way seeing her made him smile as they strapped a mask on his face …

The thought connected him with his body, his sensory receptors, and for a frightening moment, he experienced utter numbness. His hand twitched on the metal table, and he heard a voice inside his eardrum, noting the spike in his neural activity.

“… centered on the orbitofrontal cortex. Is he aware of us?”

“That’s not possible,” said another voice. “These instruments can be faulty. I’ve requested new ones out of Denver. Do you remember that delivery girl?”

But there was something else there, too, something with him, something not Tom.

0100010001111100101001010000101110110001100001001011111001010100 …

A number that seemed to stretch into infinity. So foreign, so alien, he jerked away from it. But then it felt like he’d been caught in a tsunami, because a great wave crashed over him and swept him back into that ocean of machines drowning him in signals....

A sense of vastness pressed in on him. It hummed all around him in a tangle of infinite complexity: the security cameras in Rio and the Grand Canyon and the reservoir filtration system and four billion car autonavs and hundreds of billions of text messages and stray data bits and computers pinging and games swapping signals and machines sending them from space and satellites and security systems of a billion different …

“Stop! Stop!” Tom’s voice never left his mouth. That body remained still on the table, its lips frozen, its muscles like lead, its hands cold, its head chilled because it was shaved. Voices chattered on, oblivious to it, and that computer in its brain offered logic and order, and kept restructuring, restructuring him … and that maelstrom of signals threatened to sweep him away into infinity itself....

AND THEN TOM opened his eyes in the infirmary. He was in Section 1C3 of the Pentagonal Spire. He knew that because the red number glowed in the bottom right corner of his vision for a split second before vanishing. He stared up at the bars of fluorescent light hanging overhead, and then a round, friendly face appeared above his.

“Feeling better today, Mr. Raines?”

Tom blinked, because something strange was happening. He saw the man’s face, but he also saw text, scrolling rapidly through his brain.

NAME: Jason Chang

RANK: Lieutenant, BSN

GRADE: USAF 0-3, active duty

SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-6

Tom blinked again, and the text was gone.

“Tom,” said Jason Chang, drawing his attention back to the present. “Can you tell me your full name?”

“Thomas Andrew Raines.”

Lieutenant Chang flashed a penlight in his eyes. “Do you know where you are?”

“The Pentagonal Spire.”

“That’s right. Do you know why you are here?”

“Surgery. To get a neural processor implanted.”

“Tell me, what’s my name and security designation?”

Tom remembered the profile information he’d seen in that fleeting second, every last word of it. “Jason Chang, BSN?” At the nurse’s nod, Tom went on. “Your security designation is Top Secret LANDLOCK-6.... How did I remember that?”

“You have a photographic memory now, Mr. Raines, and there’s a directory in your processor of everyone’s names. You’ll see a basic information list the first time you look directly at the faces of the other personnel here in the Spire, and once you’ve seen it, you won’t ever forget it. Now, let’s test your internal chronometer. What’s the time?”

“It’s oh five fifty-three,” Tom answered immediately. Then he realized that he’d automatically switched to thinking in the military’s twenty-four-hour time.

“Well done.”

He blinked three times. He watched the lieutenant lifting a bedside conferencer, tapping in 1-380-4198-4885. Chang spoke, “Dr. Gonzales, Mr. Raines is A and O times three. I understand. I’ll run him through the standard assessment.”

“I feel strange.” Tom’s voice registered in his brain, lower than he remembered.

“It’s natural.” Lieutenant Chang slanted him a dark gaze from almond-shaped eyes. “Your brain needs to adjust to the software. You’ll have difficulty at first sorting through the influx of data. It will pass.”

Tom glanced up at a seventy-watt light glowing overhead. He’d gazed at this light all day. He’d been awake for a while, blinking at fifteen second intervals. Eighteen days, four hours, nine minutes, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight seconds …

“I’ve been awake,” Tom realized. “My surgery was eighteen days ago.”

Chang peeled a blood pressure cuff from Tom’s arm. “Your surgery was eighteen days ago, but no, you have not been awake in the traditional sense. Your brain’s been undergoing restructuring. The implanted trainees all have to optimize. You’ve been conscious and unconscious at intervals, but you were unaware. Your mind needed to adjust to the new neural pathways forged by the hardware in your head. Your brain will regain homeostasis now that you’re awake. The extra details will disappear. Soon enough, you’ll feel like your old self again. Better than your old self, I’d wager.”

Even now, Tom felt like he was regaining a sense of normalcy. He raised his hand to touch his scalp. Only the faintest trace of a scar was there. A thin incision of 3.1 centimeters. His hair was back, 0.7 centimeters of it. He’d been lying here long enough for it to grow. His hand roved down to a numb spot on the back of his neck, and he found a flat, metal port there. It was a neural access port. He just knew what it was.

“Now, Plebe, I’m going to run you through a few procedures to test whether we can send you out yet.”

“Already?” Tom croaked. “I’m going to combat now?”

Lieutenant Chang’s laughter rippled through the stale, cold room. “Not quite yet. You’ll need years of training before you become a Combatant.”

“Right.” Tom closed his eyes, because there was a datastream blasting the answer through his head: Standard advancement path in the Intrasolar Forces at the Pentagonal Spire: Initial Training as plebe, followed by Middle Company, Upper Company, and in cases where the trainee is found to excel, Camelot Company, the Combatant group. In cases where a trainee is found unsuitable for intrasolar combat, avenues with other government agencies will be considered, including the NSA, the CIA, the State Department, the …

Tom willed the datastream to stop, and it ceased immediately. So strange. He knew the information was coming from the neural processor, but it had felt like he was thinking it, like it was an ordinary scrap of information that belonged in his mind.