Chapter 1 - The Adam Bug

 The professor paced the front of the classroom. The floor-to-ceiling displays were covered with equations, pictures, diagrams, and theorem. The attendants in the lecture, numbering in the hundreds, all sat on the edges of their seats, hanging on every word.

“The Adam Bug,” she began “anyone know what it is?” There was a brief pause as the class discerned whether the question was rhetorical. An intrepid youth raised his hand. “You. Mr. Ross. What is the Adam Bug?”

“The Adam Bug is a custom-developed bacteria invented by Tyson Dale in the late twenty-second century.”

“Good, and what does it do?” The professor turned on her heels and paced the other direction. Everyone in the class was intently focused on the young man.

“Well, I don't know exactly. It eats radiation.”

“Well done, Mr. Ross, thank you. For today's lecture, we're going to talk about exactly what radiation is, and how the Adam Bug, as Mr. Ross so astutely put it, 'eats radiation.'”

Jim sat back down and began jotting down notes as the professor talked. Occasionally, she would stop to ask a student a question. Occasionally, like Jim, the student got it right. Most of the time, however, the student would get it wrong, and Professor Cecilia would pull up some diagram, or swipe away some other formula so she could craft another one on the display.

Jim really liked Professor Cecilia. She was firm, but kind, and very intelligent. She gave great lectures. They were interesting, easy to understand, and he always felt like he learned something. Advanced Chemistry was often the only class at Lyceum that he cared about attending, even if he didn't particularly care about, nor was he necessarily good at chemistry. He had already taken all the other science classes she offered. Physics, Engineering, Biology. Chemistry was the only one left, sadly. As this was his senior year, however, he'd be shipping off to Basic for his compulsory military service after semester. He'd been hoping to get into pilot's school, but his grades weren't necessarily up to snuff.

As class wound down, Jim started to pack his bag. A.Chem was his last class for the day. “Mr. Ross, can I have a word with you?” Professor Cecilia boomed, her deep-but-feminine voice carrying over the din and shuffle of students. Jim finished packing his satchel, threw it over his shoulder, and made his way down the lecture hall to her.

“Mr. Ross. It's getting very close to graduation time,” the professor said, not raising her eyes from her desk as she shuffled her notes around.

“A few weeks, ma'am,” Jim shifted his weight to his left foot and adjusted the satchel to hang across his body.

“Indeed. Will you be attending Gymnasium after your studies here?” The professor paused from adjusting her notes and looked up at Jim over her slim black-frame glasses. Her tight ponytail was curled up and the pencil holding it in place poked up over the back of her head.

“No, sadly, Professor Cecilia. Me and my parents can't afford the buy-out, so I'll be heading to Basic right after graduation.” The professor was standing straight now so she could look at Jim directly.

“'My parents and I,' Jim. And that's a shame. Have you talked about a program with your recruiter?” The professor crossed her arms and began to idly chew on tail-end of a pen she had been holding. It showed signs of previous chewing.

Jim gaped a little bit, his eyes slightly widened. He'd been in Professor Cecilia's lectures for the better part of three years now, and this is the most he'd ever spoke to her. “Uhh, no. I...I wanted to be a pilot, but the recruiter said that 'with my grades that probably wouldn't be a program I could make it into.' I think I'm probably going to go into an engineering role though. My dad was a mobile platform mechanic when he did his time. It doesn't sound too bad. I was going to talk to my recruiter after class today and see what I can do.”

The professor shifted her weight to her other leg. She wore very plain clothes. Looser-fitting jeans, a plain white tee-shirt and a shimmering blue brocade vest. White flats and a digital watch finished the outfit. She shifted her folded arms and flashed the watch in front of her eyes. “Little too late for that. If you left here, you wouldn't make it to central recruiting in time. “

Jim looked at his own watch, a cheap gold analog timepiece. She was right. Even if he had left right after class, he'dve missed the shuttle down to central recruiting. “Darn. Well, I don't have a lecture tomorrow afternoon, I'll just go then.”

“Are you busy tonight, Jim?” The professor unfolded her arms and put the pen she'd been chewing behind her ear. She leaned back down and went back to shuffling her notes into her briefcase.

“Um, uhh, no. That was all I had planned, why?” Jim stood still and started fidgeting with the flap of his satchel. What was she playing at?

The professor finished shuffling her notes into her briefcase and snapped her fingers loudly. The text on the display zipped into a brightly colored box labeled with the date at the bottom corner of the display. “I want to talk to you about something. Do you have time to meet with me at the coffee shop?” She hefted her briefcase and moved to the front of her desk, directly in front of Jim.

“Yeah, OK. Yeah. I can do that.” Jim only had a lab and a lecture tomorrow. It being the end of the semester, there wasn't a whole lot of homework to be done. “Do you want to meet down there?”

“That works,” the professor turned sideways and glanced over her shoulder at Jim. “Be down there within the hour,” and walked away.

*********************************************************************************************************************************************************

When Jim walked into the coffee shop, Professor Cecilia was sitting at the table, sipping what looked like a very large latte. She had a laptop open in front of her and was skimming a datapad. She was young, but it would be pretty hard to mistake her for a student. In addition to eschewing the modern fashion trends, her features were that of a woman, not the children that seemed to surround her.

“Professor Cecilia,” Jim said as he approached the opposing side of the table she was sitting at. He pulled the chair out and slowly lowered himself into it.

“Jim. Good. Thanks for coming,” she didn't look up from her datapad. A blue glow from its screen reflected off her glasses. “So. I wanted to talk to you about something.” She looked up from her datapad, finally, setting it down next to her laptop and touching her finger to her temple, resting her elbow on the table. “You've followed my classes for the last couple of semesters, even when you don't get great grades,” She paused, indicating she expected a response.

“I like your teaching style. It clicks with me.” Jim, still a little bewildered and confused, responded.

“Do you board here or are you or do your parents have an apartment on campus for you?” The professor shifted her hand to rest her chin on her fist.

“No, professor. I live in the dorms. The apartments are a little out of my range. My dad works in the factory maintaining the printers.” Jim shifted in his seat. “I live in a quad with five other guys.”

“I see. What do you plan on doing after Service?” she settled her face into a neutral gaze.

“I dunno, professor. I never really thought about it. If I can land a gig in engineering, I guess I'll probably follow my dad to the factory. It's honest, stable work. My dad was home every night before dark. It wasn't hard, and you're mostly surrounded by robots and other mechanics, so it's pretty low stress. The pay isn't bad, either. Could live off it pretty well, I think.”

“What about going to Gymnasium after service on a soldier's package? Have you thought about that?” Her gaze remained unchanged. Neutral, unjudging. Inquisitive but unobtrusive. Her typical undynamically dynamic face.

“Yeah, but 22, 23 for me, is a lot older than 18, to be frank. And service changes you. A kid I grew up with back home tried it. Did a year and never went back. Was too different. Just didn't feel right. And, if he couldn't take it, I know I couldn't. Civils don't make that much more, anyway,” Jim fidgeted with his hands. He never knew what to do with them in a conversation.

“Pragmatic. Civil Engineers get to program the printers, though. They get to be creative, make things. Don't you think that'd be a lot more fun?” she prodded, her gaze still unflinching.

“Well, my parents taught me that work wasn't supposed to be fun, professor. You go to work to be productive and make a living, so that when you come home, you can have fun there.”

“What do you do to have fun, Jim?”

Jim paused for a long time. “I'm in a tournament league for my video games, professor,” he said sheepishly.

“Oh?” A slight smirk crept across the professor's face, “That would explain why you're doing so poorly in my class.” She winked at him. A moment of genuine bemusement.

“Very funny, professor,” Jim responded in a playful tone. “That's why I wanted to be a pilot. One of the guys on our team just joined up. He said it's just like the game, except you're really there, not just pretending.”

“I see,” the smirk had faded from professor's lips and her neutral gaze had returned. “What disciplines do you participate in?”

“Well, I actually qualify for the Renaissance Man competitions. I usually compete in all 3 events in the digital sports leagues. My specialty is Digital Decathlon, but that makes me good at Military Triathlon and the Fantastic Five as well. I'm the captain of our team. We're top 5 across all disciplines in the world,” Jim was trying to be modest, but the pride was hard to hide in his face.

“You'll have to excuse me, I'm only passingly familiar with the scene. What do the events entail?” The professor truly was a master of the unmoving face. If not for the smirk, Jim would have sworn her face was cut from stone.

“Well, there are only about a dozen truly competitive games in the world. Most of the rest are either too simple or too complicated to be worthy of play. Think of chess. It's not mired with a lot of rules, but it also isn't tic-tac-toe. There's enough variance to make it easy to grasp, but hard to master.

“Military Triathlon simulates what a high-ranking soldier would encounter if he stayed on through Service as a Lifer. There's a run-and-gun event where you're in first-person simulating a soldier. Then there's the tactical event where you have to plan out armies and attack plans. And lastly there's the vehicle simulations. You have to pilot the various military vehicles through different missions,” Jim was getting very animated. He loved talking about his sport.

“In the Fantastic Five, you participate in 5 fantasy-orientated games, but they play on 5 common tropes. There's gladiator combat where each of you pick a fighter, and then duke it out in a series of rounds. In similar vein, there's the battle arena, where you and your team pick champions and wade through hordes of monsters to destroy their main headquarters. There's a platformer, where you have a linear level you have to navigate through on a time-trial; a siege defender, where you have a group of monsters march through a path, and you have to set up defensive structures to defeat them before they make it to base, and you receive a score based on how efficiently you did it; and finally a puzzler, where pieces move along a track and you have to fit them together in a constrained space. When you get the right fit, the shapes eliminate and you get points. As you complete shapes, the track moves faster. High score wins.

“Digital Decathlon is all of those plus a rhythm game where you have to synchronize movements and button presses with music, and a resource management event where you are given a set amount of time and starting resources, and you have to meet specific city-building objectives. The person who has progressed the farthest with the most resources at the end of the time frame wins,” Jim was leaning forward, his elbows on the table.

The professor jumped on the brief pause and interjected, “Jim,” she leaned back and put her hands flat on the table, “or should I say Daybreaker.”

Jim leaned back suddenly, his mouth agape, eyes wide, “You know my handle,” he gasped out.

“What do you know about the CORE project, Jim?”

It took Jim a bit to recover. “Uhh...CORE project. Same thing everyone else does, no doubt. Secret military program. Cutting edge military weapons. Secret projects. All very hush-hush. They order parts from my dad's plant from time to time. Actuators and big steel plates, mostly. No one really knows what it's all for. I'm guessing vehicles or missiles or something. The news has it on good authority that the reason that math prodigy from Gymnasium dropped out was to join CORE.”

“You shouldn't trust the news, Jim.” A big, beaming smile had crossed the professor's face.

“Word also has it that the folks across the pond have their own CORE program going along, as well. And that you guys are scared that they won't be as judicious as you will with whatever it is.”

The smile left the professor's face. “To put it simply, Mr. Ross, the CORE program is the most interesting and exciting thing our nation has going for it. I want you to join it.”

“Join it? Who are you to it?” Jim looked very confused now. “How do you know my handle? What's going on here?”

“I work for the CORE program in talent acquisition. My job is to locate, track, and vet possible candidates for the CORE program. We've been following you for a while, now, actually. About 5 years, actually.”

“You've been tracking me since I was 13?” Jim was still pressed to the back of his chair, arms on the table, eyes wide. He relaxed slightly, “Since I won Gold at the Global Digital Games in Military Triathlon.”

“And placed in the top ten out of two thousand in Digital Decathlon,” the professor finished. The smile had receded, but only slightly. “We watch the games very closely. We've been watching you very closely. When you started taking my science classes, we became more interested. When declared intent toward Service, instead of Gymnasium, we became more interested, still. When you applied for the pilot's program at central recruiting, we knew we'd found our man. It's hard work. It'll push your limits, both physically and mentally. If you question whether you'll be up to it, you probably aren't. Jim, you strike me as someone who wouldn't be content in engineering. Living a normal, boring life. We want you on the team, Jim.”

“Slow down. Do I need to choose now? Can I think about it? You're kind of rocking my world here, professor. It's a lot to take in.” Jim shook his head, trying to knock the thoughts into place.

“I get that a lot,” she said with a wink as the smile grew across her cheeks, “You have to have a final declaration of intent into Central Office before you graduate. I can wait until then. Mull it over Jim, but I implore you. Don't pass this opportunity up.” With that, the professor stood up and closed her laptop. She shuffled it and her datapad into her briefcase. She laid a card down on the table in front of Jim, “Don't be a stranger.” Jim folded his hands in his lap and stared down at the card. The Professor put her hand on his shoulder, and then walked away.

“General Carol Cecilia, Covert Recruiting, Special Forces Division,” Jim read aloud, picking the card up and twirling it in his hand. “General?” he mused.

*********************************************************************************************************************************************************

“Will he do it, you think?” Standish reached out and grabbed Carol's bicep. “Ross. Do you think he'll do it?” The train was just pulling into dock. Standish was leaning against an exposed steel girder under the platform.

“Hard to say. You don't get where you are without being competitive, but he's quiet. Keeps to himself. No one really knows him very well, even his friends and teammates.” Standish released Carol's arm. She brushed her sleeve straight and turned around to face him. “Trench coat? Scarf? And a fedora? Really, Eli? You're supposed to be discrete. You look like an ancient movie villain.”

“He didn't seem to notice me,” Standish said, standing straight and smoothing out his trench coat.

“I did. And so did half the people in the coffee shop. You looked like a bloody rapist, Eli. They're kids; they don't get your 'retro classic sense of style.'” She scoffed at him and turned around to face the train. “And yes, I think he'll do it.” The doors to the train opened. Carol stepped inside, turning to face Standish again. A smile crept across her face again, “You really should take that fedora off. You really do look like an idiot.”

“You used to like my 'retro classic sense of style.” Standish took a few steps forward and removed the fedora.

“I also used to like cats,” Carol said, the smile beaming cheek to cheek, a touch of sneer running across her lips.

“Cold, Carol. Cold,” Eli said, putting the fedora back on. “Good night, 'professor.'”

“Good night, Eli,” she chuckled as the train’s doors closed.

*********************************************************************************************************************************************************

The weeks slipped by quickly. Finals kept Jim busy, but training was also picking pace. Next week, the day before his commencement, was a major tournament on the circuit. Qualifiers for this year's big national competition. If he wanted a shot at next year's Digital Olympics, his team would have to earn some serious circuit points at nationals. Jim usually did a good job of carrying the team through Decathlon, but most competitions weren't multi-disciplinary. Next week was team strategy. That meant he and two others from his team, Shamz and Deka, needed to score in at least the top three to make it. Shamz and Jim were strong in strategy, but Deka, one of their Fan-Fivers, was subbing for their other primary TriMil guys, Guns. Getting Deka up to speed had eaten up just about every waking free hour, and some hours that shouldn't have been waking.

“Dek, make up some heavies, I need you to flank the ping with air support as well. Shamz, manage base D and build up some ubers. I'm going to sweep the mat deposit.” Jim swiveled his head left and right. He had on a set of Heads-Up Display glasses, various game statistics populating the outer rims. A yellow reticule tracked his eye motion on screen, highlighting what he eventually rested his gaze on, giving him on-demand stats. There were 4 displays, three forming a semi-circle around him, and a 4th, transparent display that he could reposition as an overlay. With deft hand gestures, the stats from the HUD glasses would fly onto the overlay. With the twist of his head, the overlay would rest atop one of the screens. His right hand was home to a button-covered mouse. People had been proclaiming the “death of the mouse” for centuries, but it never seemed to happen. His left hand housed a hand-shaped keypad with various switches, dials, wheels and buttons. Though most things were speech- or gesture-controlled, sometimes nothing could beat the fine control of a dial or the quickness a macro could afford.

“Break, recon is showing scouts about to approach your sweep. You may want to pull back and keep them dark,” Dek's deep voice calmly advised from the surround-sound speaker system.

“Good call. We dropped a recon beacon. I bet they make a play for the deposit,” Jim made a few more clicks on his mouse and his unit, represented in the top-down 3rd person view by various clusters of gun-toting soldiers and mobile weapon platforms, hid just out of sight from the now-incoming scout.
Just as Jim had expected, the scout was tailed by a small contingent of troops. Jim ambushed the detachment. With furious mouse-clicks, he selected various troops and commanded them to attack the enemies. He specifically micro-managed his troops to make sure that they attacked the units that they were strong against, and danced away lower-health units and units being struck by attackers they were particularly vulnerable to. With lightning-quick, precise and well-rehearsed motions, his units obeyed every order, and his ambush executed perfectly, not even one unit lost. “Expanding onto the deposit,” Jim narrated to his teammates. With a flick of the wrist here, a head twitch there, his worker units descended onto the deposit and began constructing transport facilities and extracting the materials.

“Break, I'm in trouble,” Shamz voice tweeted. “They've got a horde slamming our base.” A quick peek at the campaign map showed a big red blob colliding with their central base.

“Recon out. That's their primary force, Break. It's a Hail Mary.” Deka's voice boomed through.

“I'm going to make a play, guys. There's a canyon with a choke that looks like it feeds right into their base. Deka, back up Shamz.” Jim began moving his troops along the back canyon. As expected, the geological choke point was blanketed in turrets and anti-air installments. Jim repositioned his anti-siege troops and mobile weapon platforms, and with some careful bombardments and controlled rushes, was able to clear them out. Deka and Shamz were doing a great job of baiting and rebuffing the enemy. By keeping them just enticed enough, the enemy army was committing to the fight, but with skillful dancing and unit positioning, the two were keeping casualties to a minimum while still keeping them at bay.

“Better make it quick, Break, we can't stall them forever.” Deka hailed.

“I just entered their base. Game over.” Jim's forces crossed the threshold of the canyon and filled the central sanctuary. He began by eliminating resupply stations and unit production facilities, hamstringing their ability to create defensive units. Next on the agenda, Jim began systematically dismantling their internal defensive structures.

“They're retreating. AA gone?”

With a few clicks and a few flicks, Jim's anti-siege units took out the last remaining anti-air turrets. “You're all clear, Deka.”

Deka's flotilla cut across the campaign map. The big red blob was pulling back toward their sanctuary, with Shamz' troops in hot pursuit. It was too late, however, as once Deka's aircraft arrived, they brought swift fiery death in their wake. As the last structure crumbled and burnt to the ground, the surrounding screens cleared and a big blue box flashed in the center of Jim's displays, “Victory!”

“Good job, Deka. Way to keep your head on a swivel.” Jim took his HUD glasses off and dragged his palms along his face. “If you keep that up, we may make it to Nationals.”

“Well, we will. You'll be shipping off to the top-secret CORE project, to, I don't know, club baby squirrels and develop weaponized salsa,” Shamz squeaky voice pestered through his speakers.

Jim chuckled loudly. “Burn you greasy Devil! Die a tomato-filled death, yarrr!”

“Seriously though, Day. Are you gonna follow up?” the sub-woofer made Deka's voice rattle his room.

“I haven't decided yet. I don't even know what I'll be doing. For all I know I really will be clubbing squirrels and trying to make tomatoes into bombs.” Jim thumbed his nose and rubbed his eyes.

“Just do it, man. How many times do you think an offer like that will come along? And trust me, clubbing baby squirrels still beats the hell out of Basic.” Deka was the oldest on the team. “I've been off Charter for almost a decade now, but not a day goes by that I don't remember that drill sergeant screaming at me to do more push-ups. Hell, if I hadn'tve met Cross my second week in, I don't think I could've made it.”

“Heh, something about the thought of you doing push-ups, Deka, is hard to believe,” Shamz prodded.

“Hey, I may be carrying around a little extra weight now, but it's just because I was too strong before and needed a challenge.”

“Good one, Deka,” Jim quipped. “But guys, I'm going to get some sleep. I have my last class tomorrow. Don't want to be late.”

After a chorus of “Goodnights,” Jim slipped out of his chair.