unior Generals
In the end, he was the only one headed out to the thickspace with Professor Roman. But why? Was he the only one they’d offered the class to? Or had nobody signed up for “Vac Studies?”
If that were so, it wouldn’t surprise him. For years they’d heard about how studying vacs was beneath them. How vacs can explode in violent rage at a moment’s notice and stab an integro before the Mind can shut them off. Or how unsanitary the thinspace is, teeming with wild microorganisms that can colonize your clean gut, sinuses, and skin and make you sick beyond the reach of antibiotics.
But worse than dangerous, everyone knows that vacs are boring. What’s more stupid than human machine parts? They work, and then they dream. And the rest of the time they’re empty. Vacuous. A flaccid rubber glove waiting to be filled by an integro at the start of each workday.
In the end, Isaac suspected, most of the other students would rather spend their days in the thickspace simulations or the dreamspace: more real than real. But not Isaac.
He had to hurry if he was to make it down to the corner of the building where Professor Roman was waiting. He flicked on the nav to make sure he was headed down the right corridor. He was in an area without any classrooms, near the military section and the garage.
He turned a corner, and he saw the two junior generals. Damn.
But hell if he was going anywhere but forward, where he needed to go.
Cletus, the big blond one with freckles saw him first. Cletus and Cai were always paired during operation, with Cai as the brain. Cletus was the body of the two, like the centaur’s horse-parts.
“Hey, if it ain’t the dreamer. Hey dude, check him out,” he said to Cai, the small brown-haired boy, leaning with a smirk against the wall. Cletus faced him.
“What a tool. I bet he has natural wet dreams of all the chicks he can’t afford.” Cai’s laugh was a mocking bark.
Isaac glared into the freckly face that was twisted with disdain, and rage exploded inside him. He kept walking.
At the last second the blond boy stuck out his foot behind him to trip him, but Isaac had seen it coming. He hooked Cletus’s ankle with his and kicked. But the big blonde boy didn’t fall, he just spun, and, staggering slightly, rounded on Isaac, landing a wild roundhouse punch that glanced off the side of Isaac’s jaw and clipped his ear, giving him a momentary sensation of blackness as his brain hit the inside of his skull.
Isaac leapt backwards away while Cletus was still off balance and struck the wall with the back of his shoulder. But then he felt it coming. The Mindnet’s paralysis triggered by their violent emotions. Like an off switch. Normally, this was incredibly annoying, but in this situation Isaac was finding it very convenient. He could already feel the GABA paralysis working on him, his knees were giving out under him.
Cletus was coming toward him fast, but Isaac jumped to the side and leaned against the wall, just as his limbs went out under him and he felt his whole body go limp. The other boy’s legs went soft just as he was lunging at the place where Isaac was a moment ago. As his fist struck the wall, the boy-mountain fell face first onto the blue-and-gray-speckled berber carpet. Cai sank on the other side of Cletus, his eyes vacant, his muscles going slack as he fell to the ground.
Isaac’s whole body was paralyzed and his mind was a little sleepy. Yeah, there was going to be payback for that little trick of his. Some people can do violence with a cold head. And these guys were integrated with violence. Guys like that can flip pretty quick no matter how integrated they are. no matter how much the Mind is working to restrain their violent impulses, violence is on the tips of their fists like a familiar name called to the tongue.
He sighed mentally and waited. If this went on too long, he’d miss the first part of his very first vac studies class. Soon a teacher would get here and switch off the GABA production.