Cyberpunk (18 page)

of calisthenics. You didn’t want to be the last one done with laps, ‘cause

that meant two extra. You didn’t want to look lazy during calisthenics,

‘cause that meant ten minutes extra. And you didn’t want to do the ten

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minutes, because by the time you got done the mess hall’d be down to

oatmeal and stewed prunes. That was one lesson I learned
real
fast.

After a breakfast two notches below the Buddy’s All-Nite Burgers

$1.99 Special (now I know why they call it a
mess
hall), we’d trot back

outside for an hour or so of close-order drill, followed by a run through

the obstacle course. Drill was the only time we mixed with the other

serials: There were three groups that’d started in the weeks before us and

one that started the week after us, but we never saw them much ‘cept for

the hour each morning we spent marching around the quad and yelling at

each other. Deathless stuff, like, “Lift your heads and hold them high!

Two-Oh-Three is passing by!” Some of the jarheads got real into it,

anyway.

Then we’d hit the obstacle course, and if everybody in the unit

finished up quick enough we’d get a special treat: Free time on the firing

range.

It took me three days to decide that I hated the firing range. For

starters, the guns all were these stubby little single shot bolt-action

Stevens .22s about accurate enough to hit the long side of a bus—if the

bus wasn’t moving, and if you were
real
close. There were only ten

guns, meaning it was always a race to see who got to them first, and they

kept the guns locked up in this muzzle-ring-and-chain harness thing. So

you couldn’t help but point them downrange, but this also meant you

had to lie on your belly in the dirt to use them.

Then, to make things more nuisant, they gave you just ten rounds at

a time, and you had to give up your gun, get back in line, and return your

fired brass before you could get any more. Scott came up with the idea

that they were being awful penny-ante about recycling, until the day our

unit finished practice and came up two rounds short.

Damn, you’d have thought somebody’d copped the Queen Nancy

jewels! Suddenly the place was swarming with Grade Fours and we had

to form up and snap to for instant inspection. The detex crew came in

and started working us over one by one, until Lawrence Borec stepped

forward, did the admit, and handed over the two rounds. That’s when I

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realized, sudden, that all the hassle was ‘cause they were
afraid
we’d

smuggle live ammunition off the range.

Borec was lucky. Since he’d confessed, voluntary, he only had to

dig a new latrine.

Anyway, the true/true reason I got to hate the firing range was that

that was where I got my first solid confirm on how the cliques were

forming up. One of the junior jarheads got hung up on the obstacle

course climbing wall one day, and two others helped him over, and

that’s how we found out that Payne didn’t mind if we helped each other

through the course. After that, the jarheads started helping everybody,

because of course the faster we got through the obstacle course, the more

time they got to spend on the firing range fondling guns.

But once we got to the firing range, they were all ice and brick walls

again. A couple times in the ammo line I wound up next to Deke Luger,

and I’d smile, nod, give him a little half-wave, anything to try and get an

acknowledge out of him. No matter what I did, though, he’d just act like

I was invisible. So one morning I pushed myself right in his face and

demanded to know the secret handshake.

All he said was, “There’s this thing called status, y’know?
You
are

an Involuntary.”

Fine. I never did get step one of my escape plan figured out, but I

did grow my own clique: Scott the McPunk, Piggy Jankowicz, and

Lindsey Alistair Schmidt-Boulé, who preferred to be called Mister Style

(understandable, I think). Granted, Scott was no Rayno, and Jankowicz

and Mr. Style weren’t exactly cyberpunk material. And taken together

we weren’t so proud as the Jarheads, tough as the Slammers, or devious

as the Little Hitlers.

But between the four of us we had more
brains
than the whole rest

of the camp put together, and if his highness Mister Douglas Kemuel

Luger wanted to be stone cold, he could go putz himself. Far as I was

concerned, they could
all
get together in a big circle and putz each other,

sequential.

In ten weeks, four days, and seven hours I was gonna be out of there.

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#

After lunch we’d spend a few hours pretending The Academy was a

school—but a school for Class D morons. No DynaBooks, no reports, no

quizzes: They’d just herd us into a big room and let some Instructor

drone at us for two hours. (Yeah, Instructor with a capital I. They didn’t

have names, just initials. The SI, the DI, the EIEIO ... Got so that if they

introduced somebody new and his title ended in I, we instant hated him.)

Eventually the
n
I would bore himself to sleep and the Grade Fours’d

splinter us into small groups to spend another hour or two talking about

it, whatever
it
was. Hard to talk intelligent when you don’t have a

chance to prep for the subject. One day we might be talking about

agriculture, the next day it might be economics, the day after we might

hit on some kind of -ology. But way too much of the time it was moldy

old history, and we burned an awful lot of hours talking about Greeks,

Persians, Hittites, Hoplites, Sodomites, Bakelites, Lavalites, Budlites—

And basically, about a lot of naked guys who ran around with bronze

swords trying to give each other vasectomies to the max. One day I got

into a truly stupid argument with Lawrence Borec ‘cause he thought it

was real cool the way the Spartans fought to the last man at

Thermopylae, and I thought it just proved that they were too stupid to

notice that the Athenians had bugged out and left them holding the bag.

Just when it looked like Borec was going to punch my lights out (typical

Class D Moron response to taking the dumb side in an argument), the

proctors interrupted and sent me off to a different group, where I stood

around for a few minutes waiting for someone to notice me and update

me on the discussing.

Nobody did. That’s when the neat idea popped off the stack. I took a

few more days to test it, discreet, and then took it to heart as a basic

given of this weird pseudoschool:
They didn’t keep records
.

They didn’t call roll, not that there was anyplace else to be. They

didn’t track which discussion group you went with, or what you said.

They didn’t notice if you never said anything at all!
Even when I had

Roid Rogers for proctor, all my tensing up was wasted ‘cause he acted

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like I was near invisible. One bald 13-year-old looks the same as the

next, I guess, and in the Von Schlager scheme of things short-timers

were hardly worth the work of harassing.

Once I flagged this, I settled in for a nice, comfty coast. When I

could, I did group with Scott, Piggy, and Mr. Style, and we cranked out

some
great
discussion. Sometimes it even had something to do with the

lecture.

When I couldn’t link with my clique, I just kept my mouth shut,

nodded and smiled a lot, and chanted my mantra:
Nine more weeks to

go. Only nine more weeks.

Nine weeks, and counting.

#

We started the war games the last week in June. One hot Monday

Payne came marching into discussion, announced that the games had

started, and read off the names of six generals: Four jarheads (one being

Deke Luger), Lawrence Borec, and my man Scott. By peculiar

coincidence, these were the same six guys who did most of the talking in

discussion. Sudden, I got this terrible nasty feeling that maybe the

proctors
did
notice who said what. Maybe they noticed
everything
.

I cut off that line of think. They’d passed out little blue rule books to

everybody, and on his way out the door Payne had casual mentioned that

we had two days to memorize the rule book and prep for the first battle.

That meant I’d better read the rule book thorough.

Scott was definitely no Rayno. If my clique was stuck with him for a

general, we were already neck deep in the latrine.

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Chapter 0/D

Cornwallis, Rommel, Yamashita: All your really great military

leaders knew how to lose with dignity. Scott Nordstrom, on the other

hand, screamed out “Shit!”, pounded half the little lead soldiers of the

Spartan army down deep into the sand, and went stomping away from

the game table cussing a blue streak.

“Piss!” He kicked the creaky wood door open, flooding the shack

with bright Friday afternoon sunlight, then stormed outside and kicked

something that sounded like a garbage can. “Ow! Bunch of
dweebs!
”

Piggy was in vegetable mode again, staring at the rafters, and Stig,

the Butthole Skinhead that Payne assigned to our army (yeah, each army

got either a Little Hitler, a Slammer, or a Butthole Skinhead; the

generals were just
thrilled
about that, let me tell you)—Stig was

nowhere to be found, so I caught Mr. Style’s attention and pointed to the

game table. “You wanna cover the post mortem for me? I’m gonna look

after Fearless Leader.” Mr. Style gave me a nod and started moving

towards the proctors. I jumped down from the bleachers and followed

Scott out the door.

It wasn’t hard to figure out. Even Lawrence Borec—excuse me,

General Larius, of the Macedonian Mercenaries—could have flagged the

reason why Scott was acting like a three-year-old. In the first battle, on

Wednesday, the ace jarhead who generaled the Spartans had spent most

of his time marching his soldiers around the 8- by 8-foot sand table,

trying to corner Deke Luger’s Athenians. It took him about an hour to

force the battle; it probably wouldn’t have taken him so long but Scott

let our Theban army get in the way and the Spartans had to waste almost

ten minutes exterminating us.

Scott took the loss pretty bad, ‘specially since the proctors spent the

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rest of Wednesday afternoon pointing out everything he’d done wrong

and the Spartans were such an insufferable bunch of smug bastards in

the bunkhouse all Wednesday night. One of the surviving vidiots made

the mistake of trying to go Tommy on them; a guy wearing vidshades

and earcorks is
incredibly
vulnerable, ‘specially to a bunch of Spartans

who are really getting into the role play. Poor guy wound up dancing