Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

11 - Rough Nights, Worse Days

 "Good morning, and welcome to AmpCore. This is where you will learn to change the world."

Piper raised an eyebrow, sinking lower into her seat. Hadrian's corps were always changing the world, because they owned it. The instructor carried the words with frightening conviction as she addressed the new students – a tall middle-aged woman with blond hair clamped back in a tight bun behind her head. Her white uniform was zipped up to the throat.

"To begin your studies, you will focus on five core principles," she continued, pacing back and forth, stiff as a scarecrow. "Newtonian, Atmospheric, Logistic, Internal, and Combustive. By the mastery of these core principles, you will open the door to endless possibilities. At AmpCore, we are here to help you open that door."

Piper keyed the words into her data pad. Virtually meaningless to her right now, but she just had to sit and hope that the answers were coming. The instructor kept talking; she kept typing. Her eyes wandered around the room, getting to grips with just where she was, and what she was doing.

The semi-circle of seating could fit thirty people, and she was the oldest there by quite a margin, lumped in with kids only just starting their journey down the AmpCore road. Most of them were no more than fifteen or sixteen, still getting used to their implants – only now having their full potential revealed.

It made her sick. They would have gotten the 'corporate sanctioned' grafts a couple of years before, and now that their bodies had adjusted to their new symbiosis, they would be spending the rest of their teenage years at AmpCore.

Bought and paid for, stamped and declared, with some smug, crypt-pissing corporate boss in a high tower somewhere watching and waiting for return on their investment.

No normal life for these kids. She wondered where they came from. Scooped off the streets because nobody would miss them? Gullible daughters and sons, somehow fooled into thinking this was the best way to serve their family, or their corporation? Or maybe people just stupid enough to think they could learn the power the operatives wielded without any strings attached?

Because it was impressive, she begrudgingly admitted.

As the day wore on, demonstrations from instructors and older students gave her a tiny window into just what the AmpCore grafts could accomplish. After the introductory lecture, she moved from class to class, seeing active demonstrations of the principles in question.

She watched, awestruck, as the Newtonian Principle was used to levitate objects and create invisible barriers by warping the very gravity around them. Piper felt her skeleton twitching, responding to the buckling of reality. Part of her wanted to try it – part of her was completely terrified of the very idea.

Atmospheric demonstrations conjured rain clouds inside the room; the Logistic Principle focused on navigating data streams – entering the ever-flowing ocean of Hadrian's net without getting swept away. The Internal Principle seemed mostly concerned with biology – pitched by that particular instructor as the most complex and dangerous of the principles.

Not everyone agreed on that, apparently, even with the academy hierarchy.

Still, it was incredible in its own way. She watched the instructor manipulate the body of one particularly plucky volunteer, making the kid flap his arms around, twist back and forth, even jump up and down. She remembered Demir fixing his own broken nose with a click of his wand. If you knew enough about the body, and how it worked, the Internal Principle could be both life-saving, and deadly.

By the final lesson of the day the data cache on her pad was bloated with extra assignments, secondary reading, videocaptures, photos and course texts to examine before the week was out. A fast tracked curriculum that made a dock shift look like skipping stones.