The Rebel Code

Chapter Four

"Has anyone seen the black vans around the school?" asks Mrs. Martin, calm as anything.

I'm one of a few kids who raise their hands. Malina mentions that she saw them on the football field, and a boy in the back says that they were in the school during volleyball practice. Mrs. Martin digs around in the third of our week's worth of protocol packets and finds the next DVD. Malina makes a gag-me-now gesture as the logo of whatever company made this nightmare flashes in front of us once again.

"Hi again, kids, and welcome to our third day of learning! I'm Officer Justice, and this is my assistant, Spark. Today, we're going to learn all about how our government is keeping us safe."

"Gee, Officer Justice. How do we know we're safe?"

"That's easy, Spark. We know we're safe because of the Cyber Police."

The camera cuts to another animation, this time spliced with footage of the Military Province. This is at least a little bit more interesting, since we see so little of it. The Military Province is all the way across the country on the eastern coast, with Technology and Mining.

"Many, many years ago," narrates Officer Justice, "when the 5,000 students of Criterion decided to become freeboots instead of using their skills for good, Criterion knew it had to protect us. So it studied the soldiers in the Military Province until it knew which ones were the fastest and strongest, and they became the Cyber Police."

The footage cuts to a training center, where some broad-shouldered young men are doing exercises on metal bars and sparring with each other.

"The Cyber Police know all about freeboots, and thanks to Criterion's amazing brain, they can predict where we might find freeboots next. Every day they're getting more and more information that will help them recover every single freeboot that escaped all those years ago."

The video goes on to talk about the intense training process. Interestingly, the Cyber Police don't seem to be thinkers, at least not like the freeboots. Rather, they're extensions of the computer. Their training is in following instructions, the same as us at the academy, but they get different instructions, highly precise instructions. Criterion is a prediction engine, and I'm sure it calculates freeboot activity the same as trade prices and disease outbreaks. I can't seem to shake the eerie feeling that it already has eyes on every freeboot in the country, that it's just toying with us until the time is right.

What's interesting about these videos is that they never mention what most people must already suspect. They talk about "the list" of the original freeboots that escaped from the university—it isn't actually 5,000, since a hundred or so were captured or killed before they could escape—and how they won't rest until they've recovered every name on the list. But there are more freeboots now than there were when they escaped. Criterion's plan was for them to spread information about itself until they'd exhausted their lifespans, but once they got out into the world, they multiplied. It was security, I think. They had to make sure nothing they'd learned could be lost or taken away, so they had kids and passed it on to anyone they could trust. Officer Justice talks like once every name on the list is eliminated, this will all be over and the mistake will be unmade.

But it's not as simple as that. John is an original, Mo is the daughter of two freeboots, and my lineage is a mess, but we've all got the gift. I guess Criterion took a chance that the skills it taught were skills only a computer could teach, but that's never stopped John. He's been quizzing me, testing me, for as long as I can remember. The puzzle cubes, math problems, logic puzzles, even some computer work with the machines he hides in his room. Even if I'm still "in progress" according to John, I know code like a second language.