Cyberpunk (33 page)

“But dammit, you’re smart enough to smarm your way out of it, and

that’s why you never
learn
!” He dropped the photocube, and looked at

me.

“A lot of boys have come through here in the last fifteen years,

Harris. Some of them have been very tough cases: boys the parents have

given up on, boys who’ve gotten one too many slaps on the wrist from

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the JV courts. Boys who laugh at all authority. Some of them have been

real
yahoos
.” He looked sharp at me, flagged my blank expression, and

stabbed a finger down on his intercom box. “Chomsky!” he barked out,

“Remind me to add
Gulliver’s Travels
to the required reading list!”

Back to me. “But, Harris, this academy has managed to turn most of

these basket cases into pretty decent men. I’m proud to say that 90

percent of my boys are accepted for Officer Candidate School. Ninety

percent!”

He calmed down. “I think this proves my point: I know how to deal

with your type. The ComSurEx was a good start. What you need next is

a problem so big you can’t luck into a solution or beat it with panache

alone. A challenge so big it’ll either catalyze your sense of responsibility

or stomp you into a little, wet, greasy smear.”

He smiled at me, dangerous. Suddenly I flagged there were all kinds

of secret things loaded in that smile, and I wasn’t going to like any of

them. “The lesson of ComSurEx,” he said, soft, “is that you, and you

alone, are ultimately responsible for your success or failure. For the last

three weeks I’ve been trying to think of a way to make
sure
you’ve

learned that lesson.” Yeah, I could see now he’d been thinking about it,

all right. Now that it was too late to run and hide. The Colonel rested his

left hand on the intercom box, gave me one last evil smile, then thumbed

down the intercom button. “Chomsky, it’s time. Send in Captain

Nuttbruster.”

Nuttbruster? Zutcakes! I never even heard a
rumor
about this guy,

and that was maximum bad sign! From the name I could just picture

him: some steroid-soaked sadist with a black belt in Abusive Education

and a fondness for gelding straps!

“While we’re waiting,” the Colonel said offhand, and he tossed a

copy of
Leatherneck
magazine at me. It was open to a full-page picture

of two eyes peeking out from a bulbous wraparound head bucket.

“That’s the Mark 32 helmet,” he explained. “Full voice and data comm,

built-in snapshot radar, laser rangefinder, and sonar motion detectors.

Audio enhancers that can learn to filter out friendly noise and recognize

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an unfriendly heartbeat at a hundred yards.”

He reached across the desk and tapped the picture. “The faceplate is

a gas and bioagent filter, and if you flip down the visor, you get IR

vision and tactical map overlays.” The colonel looked at the picture

again, then sat back in his chair and snorted.

“In two years that helmet is going to be standard issue for infantry,

Harris. For common infantry!” He screwed his face up into a nasty

grimmace, and laughed, sort of. “You know how I feel about

technology. War is a nasty, brutal business, and I seriously doubt the

value of all of this crap. But what you did during ComSurEx got me

thinking.

“Harris, I will never go so far as to admit I was wrong, but maybe I

haven’t been 100 percent right. If it ever comes down to shooting, you

boys are going to be fighting with M-4 hovertanks, Yamato Land

Battleships, and M-830 Explosive Foxhole Diggers. Maybe I’m not

doing you any favors by running a low-tech curriculum.”

The inner door creaked open, and I jumped half out of my skin.

Nuttbruster
already
? Lord, take me now! But no, it was just some thin,

spectacled old wheeze, so I detensioned a notch.

The wheeze tottered into the room, dragged his right arm up into a

tired salute, and said, “Captain Nuttbruster reporting as ordered, sir.” I

wish I could have been outside of myself, watching the expression on

my face. It must have been hilarious. Nuttbruster?
Him?

The Colonel stood. “Cadet Harris, this is Captain Nuttbruster, the

camp bursar. Nuttbruster? Harris.”

Nuttbruster looked me over, speculative. “Is this...?”

“The cadet we’ve spoken of, yes.”

The old wheeze continued looking me over a few more seconds, like

I was a cockroach on his lunch or something. Then he shrugged, and

offered me a handshake. I took it, gentle; not ‘cause I was feeling

anything good about the old guy, but because I was afraid I might break

his arm off.

After we’d shaken hands, Von Schlager pointed us into some chairs

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and we sat down. “Well, Colonel?” Nuttbruster said. His voice was like

dry cornstalks rattling in the October wind.

“I’ve reached a decision,” the colonel said, as he paced across the

room. “The answer is,
yes
.” Nuttbruster smiled, I think. Hard to tell; his

mouth turned up at the corners, but it looked like a true smile would

crack his face.

The Colonel turned to me. “For fifteen years, Charlie here —,” he

jerked a thumb at Nuttbruster, “—has been nagging me to buy a

computer and enter, well, the twentieth century, anyway.” Nuttbruster

and the Colonel exchanged quick, secret smiles. “For fifteen years I’ve

fought it. But thanks to you, Harris, he’s finally worn me down.”

Von Schlager walked back around behind his desk, flipped open my

record folder, and pulled out a sheet of paper. Suddenly his voice was all

cold hard authority. “Here’s your summer project, Cadet Harris! Starting

today, you report to Captain Nuttbruster! You will spend all of your

available time designing, purchasing, and installing a computer network

for the academy! The system will do tactical simulations, war gaming,

and artillery plotting; it will enable our instructors to get their paperwork

out on time—” (Aside, to Nuttbruster, “The accreditation board is

bitching about that again,”) “—and if at all possible, it will emulate a M-

905 Field TactiComp!” The colonel turned, and shot Nuttbruster a wry

little smile.

“Oh yes,” he said in a fake-weary voice, “it’s also got to do

accounting
.” This time Nuttbruster smiled a real smile. I saw it. Honest.

Von Schlager handed my new orders to me. “The captain controls

the purse strings, Harris. Your job is to provide the technical expertise.

You tell him what you need, and he’ll tell you what you can afford. Any

questions?”

I thought it over. Truth to tell, the whole thing was just starting to

soak in. A computer net. I’d just been given the go-ahead to architect a

computer net. By Woz, I wasn’t just going to be a NetMaster, I was

going to be a SystemGod! Then it hit me full stream, and my face went

flushed and hot. I could get any hardware I wanted—like a
SatLink
. I’d

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uplink to SatNet, downlink to NationNet, put through a long-distance

patch to a certain CityNet...
Mikey Harris was coming back on line!
“No,

sir,” I said in a shaky voice.

“Good. Dismissed.” Nuttbruster and I stood and saluted, and I hate

to admit it, but I was so shaky with excitement the old wheeze beat me

out the door. “Harris?” the colonel called out.

I stopped, and turned. “Yes, sir?”

He was looking down at my ankle brace. “When you get around to

installation, remind me to detail a squad of summer boys to do the grunt

work for you.”

“Thank you, sir.” I turned to leave again. Just as I got my hand on

the doorknob, he remembered something else.

“Harris?”

“Yessir?”

He looked me in the face, full. I’d never caught before just how

cold, blue, and serious his eyes were. “I want this thing up and running

by fall quarter. Not ‘in debugging’ or ‘looking promising’ or ‘90 percent

there,’ or any of those other euphemisms you computer people use when

you mean it’s not done yet.” His eyes suddenly went deadly, and it was

like looking down the bore of a double-barrelled gun, one of those big

Nitro Express things they used to use before AK-47s became the weapon

of choice for elephant poachers. “Finish on time, Harris, and you’ll be

King of Grade Three. Screw up, and I will take a
personal
interest in

making your life miserable. Understood?”

I understood. Oh boy, I understood.

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Chapter 17

Sometimes I think my brain is a half-debugged inference engine.

The
n
Is’ job was to dump in raw data by the ton, and my job was to sort

through all the crud and pull out an inference. But I say the process is

only half-debugged, because I kept pulling out the wrong inferences.

Not the ones my Instructors expected.

Or maybe they
were
the right ones. Maybe all of school is just a

supersubtle Turing Test: You pull out the expected inference, you’re a

servicable average unit. But if you’re genuinely
intelligent
(not just

simulating the appearance of intelligence), you pull out the secret,

hidden inference, and only you and the instructor know you got the

true/true answer. And sometimes not even the instructor.

For example, History. The point of a history lesson was always

supposed to be razor-sharp clear. If we didn’t use the exact phrase

Feinstein was looking for in discussion, he’d beat us over the head with

The Moral Of The Story (just like back in the Peloponnesian War days)

until we got it down cold and could repeat the words he wanted to hear

like a bunch of obedient little robots.

But then, there’d be an
other
inference. Like this one: western

civilization is descended from the Greeks. Not just ideas; not just

political systems, or philosophy, or ethics. There is a real literal
path
you

can trace that leads from Greece, to Rome, to the Holy Roman Empire,

to Constantinople. Then, as the Moslem world expands, the refugess

from Byzantium move north, and east, and around the Black Sea, and up

the Dnepr valley. And the Greek Orthodox church evolves into Russian

Orthodox. And the title
Caesar
gets corrupted to
Czar
...

Meantime, your ancient, dusty, oh-so-remote Persia of Darius and

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Xerxes and Marathon begets the Sassanid Empire, which begets the

Safavid, which begets the Pahlavi, who get swept away in the opening

blasts of the First Jihad...

Until one day you sit up sudden, buzzing with the realization that

when an airliner gets blown up over Scotland, it’s just the latest round in

the war between Greece and Persia. Three thousand
years
, and it’s still

going on. Flags, and kings, and faces of the dead have all changed a