If anything goes wrong with the plan, I’ll be losing all my best people. Nothing better go wrong.
May 8, 2015
CDC mission massive success, mostly thanks to C. Starting to think letting him help out isn’t such a bad idea. He’s always been clever, not surprising that applies to military strategy too. Raphael says having C. think about this shit is a bad idea, says he’s too young or too traumatized or some BS. He doesn’t know my brother.
Will have Calix look at specs for June mission, see what he thinks.
CHAPTERFIVE
Autumn dragged into winter with a slurry of ice and snow. Noam met with Lehrer every weekday, and every weekday he was assigned a corner and a book to read, long blocks of problem sets, and chapters fromA Physics Primer. Noam slept in the barracks, cold and austere, no mezuzot to touch as he went through doors. No one to take care of but himself. Weekends he spent reading ahead in his textbooks, feverishly late into the nights with sheets pulled over his head and flashlight in hand.
He had to study. The best way to prove his utility to Brennan, at this point, was to use his power and bring Brennan everything he could find from the Ministry of Defense servers. No way was he good enough to break past their firewalls with code.
But if Noam could use magic—Carolinia’s most treasured resource—for the Atlantian cause, then maybe being a witching wasn’t such a bad thing.
Studying meant he had an excuse to avoid Dara, at least. After that first lesson, Dara had made a point of never speaking to Noam. Everything about him was baffling. Dara never met Noam before that day in Lehrer’s study, presumably hadn’t even known Noam was Atlantian. He just took one look at him and hated him. The best justification Noam had come up with was that Dara thought Noam was here to steal his special lessons with Lehrer.
A huge stretch, considering Dara was there every day to see what little regard Lehrer had for Noam’s ability to do more than p-sets. But whatever. Dara could take his good looks and cool power and bewildering popularity and fuck right off.
The only glimmers of respite were Noam’s daily meetings with Swensson, who disliked Noam every bit as much as he disliked everyone else but was a remarkably good instructor all the same. He helped Noam practice his technopathy, assigning him four new programming languages to learn and ordering him to write a basic integer-sorting program without using a single one of those languages (indeed, without touching the keyboard at all). Noam spent the whole hour of their lesson sitting in front of a computer, willing it to sort the damn integers, half-convinced this whole thing was a government conspiracy to make him look like an idiot.
“You’re not thinking this through,” Swensson accused him after two sessions, looming over Noam with his arms crossed. “You understand how magic works, surely. Why are you a technopath and not, say, a telekinetic?”
Noam sat very still, certain that if he moved an inch his frustration would boil over. “Because I understand computers but not physics.”
“Exactly. So why are you sitting here, thinking how nice it would be if this machine just did what you wanted? Think about what youneed. Think through each and every step, then tell the computer to execute them.”
But what was the point of writing a program in his head when he could type it out just as quickly? What was the point of being a technopath if it just came down to doing what he could’ve done anyway with a perfectly good Ursascript?
He obeyed all the same, and to his simultaneous frustration and delight the computer spat out an elegantly efficient radix-sorting algorithm. When he asked Swensson why he didn’t just write a code to do the same thing, Swensson said it would get easier the more he practiced, that eventually he’d accomplish impossible technological feats with just a thought.
It was a minor victory when, a month after he first began lessons in Level IV, Noam managed to get a computer to connect to the internet, open a browser window, bypass security measures, and send an email from his account to Swensson’s, all without coming within ten feet of a holoreader.
“Twelve seconds. Not bad,” Swensson said, “for a juvenile delinquent.”
The next lesson, Noam did it in five.
His success with technology didn’t mean much to the other cadets, though. Somehow word got out that Noam hadn’t just failed the placement exam but that he hadn’t gone to school at all for three years. It wasn’t clear just how much else they knew, but Taye and Dara both started locking their dressers when they left for classes in the morning, like they thought Noam would steal their socks if they weren’t careful.
“I’m sure it’s not personal,” Bethany reassured him one evening. They were both up late with curriculum work, Noam’s intro math books sprawled next to Bethany’sCardiovascular Physiology. Her presenting power was healing, apparently. Bethany had her toes tucked under Noam’s leg and holoreader propped up against her thighs, slouched so far down on the sofa her head was below the armrest. She was the only cadet willing to spend time with him—and that, he suspected, was just because she was nice.
“Not personal?”
When Bethany glanced up to meet his gaze, Noam made a face.
“Dara’s a really private person,” she said. “Taye’s probably just taking his lead.”
As usual, just hearing Dara’s name sparked a new flame of irritation. Of course Bethany made excuses for him. Dara was perfectly charming when she and the others were around, all smiles, but as soon as it was just him and Noam—or him and Noam and Lehrer—all that switched off like a lamp going dark.
Noam took it as a compliment. If the only person Dara despised as much as Noam was Minister Lehrer, then Noam must be doing something right.
“Where do you reckon they are, anyway?” Noam asked, tipping his head toward the empty barracks.
“The others like to go to this club over in Raleigh on off weekends,” Bethany said, tapping her holoreader screen. “I expect they’re still out.”
And Bethany hadn’t gone with them. Was that because she didn’t want to go, or because she felt sorry for Noam staying home alone?
Noam had never really enjoyed partying. After Carly died he went out some, mostly from a misguided sense that he needed to move on, to meet somebody. And yeah, he met people. But he’d never been able to muster the energy for the kind of relationship they wanted from him. Those romances fizzled out, quick and ephemeral as the rush from a tequila shot.
