“I’m a gamer,” he said. “They call me Rush because I’m so fast.”
“So you consider this to be your talent?” Ammu asked. It was an innocent question, but it reminded Rush of his father’s taunts, and he felt a flash of anger and resentment surge within his chest.
“When I left home to come to this place, I was number eighteen out of four million beta players in HRT Alpha,” he said forcefully. “Four million! And the only reason I wasn’t in the top five was because I didn’t want to get that high before the invitational. I’m not just good. I’m pro good. I’m as good as it gets.”
“I apologize,” Ammu said, raising one hand in appeasement. “I was not challenging your claim. I was simply confirming my understanding. A talent for video games could certainly be a pathway between the conscious and unconscious minds. I would like very much to see you play.”
“Yeah, well you can’t,” Rush said, his voice full of bitterness. “Like Kung Fu Barbie over there, I need a real opponent to show you what I can do. In fact, I need a whole team of opponents. Only we don’t have any Internet, so I don’t have anybody to play. Get me on the Internet, and I’ll show you what I can do.”
“I am afraid I do not have any control over that,” Ammu said gently, “but it seems to me that you have a whole team of potential opponents sitting right here. Perhaps we could set things up so that you could play against your classmates here at the center.”
“You don’t get it,” Rush shot back. “Unless any of these guys is a top contender, me competing against them is the same as her competing against someone who has no martial arts training. You admitted we aren’t good enough for her, so how come they’re good enough for me?” He indicated Mackenzie by thrusting his chin in her general direction over Roman’s head.
“Call me ‘Kung Fu Barbie’ one more time, and I’ll put you on the floor whether you’re good enough to bother with or not,” Mackenzie growled.
“Peace,” Ammu said, raising his hands again. “I do not want Mackenzie to fight an untrained opponent in live combat because I do not want the opponent to get hurt,” he said, explaining his reasoning. “I would like to see you play against your classmates, even though they are not at your level, because they can not be harmed by a video game, and because the Internet problem is not, as I said, under my control. Until the system is up, I would like to see something of your skill, even if it is not the best showcase for your talent. It is, at least, a place to start.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
“If you would write down for me—” Ammu began, ignoring Rush’s tone and preparing to hand him a pad and a pen, but Rush cut him off before he could finish his sentence.
“I can tell you what we need right now. Six HD monitors. They don’t have to be as big as the ones upstairs. I like a twenty-eight inch, but twenty-four is OK. Five more gaming consoles. I’d use mine. Four more controllers. Sketch can use my extra one cause I trust him not to mess it up.” Roman beamed at him. “Five more headsets if you want these scrubs to have half a chance of hearing me coming before I kill them anyway, and the Internet to download five beta copies of HRT Alpha: Year One, cause it’s not out on disc yet, and even if it was, you have to get the updates online. But if you get me the Internet, then we already have what we need, cause I can play on my own console and destroy some actual competition.”
Ammu continued to ignore Rush’s tone, calmly taking notes throughout his tirade.
“So if we could get you five more consoles with HRT Alpha: Year One—I have that title right?”
“Yeah,” Rush confirmed.
“OK. Five more consoles with the game, then you could play against the others here at the center?”
“You can’t,” Rush said. “Like I told you, it’s in beta. It’s not out yet.”
“I understand,” Ammu said, smiling graciously and putting the pad of paper away underneath his folder. “I think that is enough for this morning, everyone. You are dismissed. Lunch will be available between noon and 1:00 p.m. in the main hall. Please be back here by 1:30 to continue where we left off. Thank you for your time and attention this morning, and peace be with you.”
15
Sam
Sam held it together until she got back to the suite, but as soon as she closed the bedroom door behind her, she threw herself onto the bed, buried her face in a pillow, and screamed her frustration into its infuriatingly plush depths.
She was not in the mood for a soft, goose down pillow. She was more in the mood for a prison-issue, burlap-sack, sorry-ass excuse for a pillow that you could sling at someone in a convincingly threatening, non-comedic sort of way, but instead, this elegant thing that her mother simply would have adored was going to have to do. She would just have to suck it up and add it to her list of grievances about this day that was already promising to be the absolute worst day of her life, and here it was not even lunch time.
How had everything gotten this bad, this quickly?
She had been so proud when the invitation had arrived in the mail. The moment she had opened the letter, she had felt it again, for the first time since the morning of that crazy test: an overwhelming certainty that the huge, momentous thing she had been waiting for all her life was finally starting to unfold.
She had begged her mother to let her go, explaining (with as little eye rolling as she could manage) that attending a Homeland Security summer camp was not the same thing as joining the military and that a five-star resort lodge in Wyoming was not a likely target for acts of terrorism. Fortunately, her father had taken her side, and she had called the ICIC to accept the invitation, practically leaping out of her own skin with excitement.
But within a day or two, that feeling of impending destiny had already begun to fizzle out. Once again, her life felt perfectly ordinary, and she expected her stay at the ICIC to be nothing more than a temporary distraction in a long line of days between sixteen and ninety-six, the meaning of it all once again having been lost, if there had ever been any meaning to it in the first place.
She had clung, however, to the hope that once she arrived, things would turn around again—that the overarching purpose of her life would be revealed, some larger way in which her existence on the planet would actually matter.
Sadly, this had not been the case.
At no point yesterday had she felt any of that former sense of destiny, and then this morning, on her very first day, things had already devolved from bad to downright nauseating. She was doing nothing meaningful here whatsoever, and apparently she was going to be doing it from the very bottom of the class, her worst fear having been decisively and incontrovertibly confirmed.