In the front row, Elliot Ramirez must’ve said something too quietly for Tom to hear. Blackburn whipped around toward him. “What’s that, Ramirez? Say it louder.”

“I said that’s very cynical, sir,” Elliot said.

Blackburn chuckled drily. He dropped down onto the edge of the stage, legs sprawled, eyes fixed on Elliot. “Did you know that back in the nineteen fifties in the early days of nuclear technology, the military stationed soldiers close to an atomic bomb testing site? The soldiers received massive doses of radiation. So did the civilian population that lived downwind of the site. Was this done in ignorance? No, Mr. Ramirez. It was deliberate—so we could learn about radiation poisoning. Same story with mustard gas, dioxin, PCP, nerve gas, LSD—you name it, some unwitting group of nobodies got a dose of it because some bigwig deemed them expendable. Same story with me—one of three hundred soldiers who received neural processors sixteen years ago, who either died or lost their minds. People are expendable. Period. The only difference between the nineteen fifties and today is that there are billions more of us expendable human beings. If you think you have any true value beyond your impact on someone’s bottom line, you need to wake up from your dreamworld.”

A thick silence hung on the air. Blackburn let those words sit there for a long moment, and then he jounced to his feet.

“I know that from birth you’ve been taught to trust in institutions, laws, systems. But I’m here to tell you, the only person you can trust to protect you is you. It’s your responsibility to defend yourself with every weapon in your arsenal, and one of those is knowledge—knowledge of programming. If you willfully choose to reject that knowledge, then I will have no pity for you when you wake up with an enemy surgeon cutting into your head to extract that neural processor, and you can’t move a muscle because they’ve hit you with a paralysis program you couldn’t defend against. I warned you, and you chose to delude yourself with the illusion someone else would save you. Helplessness can only be excused in children and fools. You gave up your right to be children the day you came here, and the last thing this world needs is to shelter its fools.”

Tom stared at him, surprised by the words. Everything else at the Spire so far had encouraged camaraderie, teamwork, adhering to the regulations of the place. Blackburn’s words sounded more like …

Well, something Neil might say.

Maybe Blackburn realized he’d taken his spiel too far, because he let out an exasperated breath. “All right, pick your jaws up off the floor and go take a five-minute break. No one’s hacking your heads open today. When you return, I’m going to call someone up here to test a firewall.” When no one reacted, he grew impatient. “Four minutes, fifty-nine seconds, fifty-eight, fifty-seven … Go!” He turned his attention to his forearm keyboard. A tap of his finger lowered a screen over the stage.

The mass of people in front of Tom reacted. Many trainees raised their forearm keyboards and dove into frantic work on last-minute tweaks to their firewalls. A couple, like Vik, just surrendered themselves to the possibility of facing Blackburn with shoddy firewalls, and rose from their seats.

“Wanna grab something in the mess hall?” Vik asked him.

“Sure,” Tom said, thinking of turning the nutrient bar in his pocket into a burger. He rose to follow Vik from the room, but then several words popped up in his vision center.

Mr. Raines, get up here.

Tom turned, confused—and saw Blackburn beckoning to him impatiently from the stage. Apprehension squirmed in him. “Vik, I’ve gotta—” He gestured to Blackburn.

Vik glanced back and forth between Tom and Blackburn. “It’s probably nothing,” he assured him.

“Yeah, sure.” Tom hoped so. He headed up to the stage where Blackburn was waiting, elbow propped against the podium. As he neared, Tom made out the frown lines on the man’s face and the pair of thin scars down his cheek.

“Sir, I don’t have a firewall,” Tom blurted.

“Of course you don’t, Raines. This is your first day here,” Blackburn said, kneeling down at the edge of the stage. “It may take you weeks or even months to catch up in this class. I don’t expect that of you. What I do expect is an explanation from you about something.” His eyes were fixed on Tom’s, gray and intent. “Yesterday, someone hacked into one of the Spire’s classified personnel databases. Can you guess whose profile they changed while they were there?”

Tom’s heart plunged. Oh. Oh. This was about the favor Wyatt did him.

“That’s right, you’re suddenly a national spelling bee champion,” Blackburn noted. “I don’t care what background you want to make up for yourself, Raines. Not my problem. The reason I called you up here is because that hacker committed a security breach. I want you to tell me that hacker’s name.”

Tom drew a sharp breath. He’d made a promise to Wyatt. He couldn’t go back on that.

Blackburn studied him. “This is probably your first time living away from home, isn’t it? Trust me, you don’t want to start your time here by getting on my bad side. You won’t be getting anyone in trouble if you tell me who did it. I only want to speak to the hacker.”

Tom had ripped off enough people in VR parlors to know threats when he heard them. And he didn’t believe for a second that Blackburn just wanted a friendly chat with a hacker breaking into secure databases. He held Blackburn’s gaze, his heart picking up a beat. “I’ve forgotten, sir.”

“No, you haven’t. You just don’t want to tell me. Fine. If you don’t want to talk, then I’m drafting you to be the subject for my demonstration today.”

Tom glanced uneasily up at the screen, where some lines of code were now displayed. “What do I do?”

Blackburn shook his head. “You’ll do nothing but stand on the stage and receive the computer viruses I’m going to feed into your processor. The code will manipulate your brain.”

Tom’s stomach flipped. “Uh, manipulate it how?”

“Anything your brain can do, I might make it do. Get up here.”

Tom mounted the steps on the side of the stage, his legs suddenly shaky. That was not reassuring.

As soon as everyone had returned to the room, Blackburn jerked his head, summoning Tom over from where he’d been hovering uneasily by the steps.

Blackburn announced to the class, “Let’s talk computer viruses. The process of infecting a neural processor works in much the same way it would on a computer at home. If Raines here were physically connected to a computer via a neural wire, I could infect him with a virus from anywhere if I also had an internet connection and the ability to hack through the firewall protecting him. But he’s not physically connected to the internet; he’s connected to the Spire’s server via his internal transmitter. So I’m going to feed him a virus from my transmitter to his.”

Blackburn began jabbing at a keyboard strapped to his thick forearm. Tom looked back, and saw Blackburn’s code dancing across the massive screen, allowing all the trainees to see what he typed.

“A virus like this gets into a system by piggybacking itself on an existing program in the target’s active applications. For the final step, I stick in my target’s IP address. You can target more than one IP. Now here”—he typed something more—“I code the initiation sequence. The malicious program will trigger as soon as it’s in his processor. Then the self-termination sequence to ensure the program stops itself in five minutes.” He clapped his heavy hand on Tom’s shoulder, jostling him. “Are you ready, Raines?”