Memetic Drift - J.N. Chaney Page 0,46

floating silently through space. I found myself wondering if this was how it had been when Katerina disappeared. Did everyone go on working, waiting for her to come back until it finally became obvious that she was never going to? What if that was exactly the case right now, and Andrea had merely run away from Section 9 to be reunited with her adoptive mother? Had our field commander been killed in action or had she gone rogue?

With those thoughts running through my head, I was having trouble focusing on Vincenzo Veraldi’s instructions. He had me on a treadmill, while he monitored everything from my breathing to brain waves. He frowned at whatever he saw on his screen.

“You seem distracted, Tycho. Something on your mind?”

Veraldi tended to be critical, so I wasn’t too concerned that he had something to say about my performance. “Just thinking.”

“Mmm. Well, your performance on this test is exceptional. A significant improvement over your baseline. Let’s move on to the strength test.” I would consider going straight into that to be another kind of endurance test, but complaints wouldn’t garner results. I stepped off the treadmill and went over to the weights.

“Over here?”

“Yes. I’d like to see if you can lift the big one.”

I looked down at “the big one,” a barbell loaded with heavy weights on either end. I counted eight 75-kilogram plates. “That’s crazy,” I protested. “Veraldi, this is competition weight.”

“Just give it a shot.”

I shrugged. He didn’t need to see me attempt something that wasn’t possible. He could just mark it and move on to a more reasonable set of weights. I squatted down, grabbed the bar with both hands, and stood. It came up with me, and the weight wasn’t even especially challenging.

“That can’t be right,” I said.

“You’re underestimating how augmented you are. Try to raise it up to your chest.”

That was a bit of a challenge, but not as much as I’d expected. We moved on to the next exercise on his list, to much the same effect. He conducted the entire strength battery with the heaviest weights we had available, and I was able to lift all of them with ease. I wasn’t even getting tired.

“This is incredible, Veraldi. I can hardly believe what these prosthetics can do.” He didn’t look anywhere near as impressed as I felt in that moment, realizing that I was now as strong as a professional weightlifter. He just nodded perfunctorily and checked off some boxes on one of his dataspike forms.

“They’re performing well on endurance and strength. That was the easy part.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I expected you to do best on those tests. Strength and endurance are the two traits prosthetics are most likely to improve. What comes next is not so simple.”

Somewhat deflated by his reaction, I followed him into our shooting range. He handed me a pistol, then sent a target out to ten meters. “The rubric for this test doesn’t include speed, so take the time to aim.”

“Understood,” I answered and raised the weapon. I fired all fifteen rounds consecutively and it went exactly the way it always had before, with every shot grouped inside the center bullseye. Vincenzo nodded and replaced the target as I reloaded. He set it further away than the first and motioned for me to fire once again.

This time I missed the first shot completely. I readjusted, figured out my correction, and nailed the rest of them, more than a little irritated with myself for missing that one shot. I would have been able to hit it with no problem before the crash. Still, missing just one was not so bad.

On the third target, I missed two shots, and on the fourth target I missed three. That was a less than twenty percent margin of error, but in the world of espionage that may as well be one hundred.

Veraldi was frowning thoughtfully, which didn’t seem like a good sign. “These results are roughly what I expected, but I want you to try one more.” He set up a fifth target at fifty meters, the maximum possible distance.

I fired slowly and deliberately. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy at that range, but it was so far away that I couldn’t see the bullet holes. I didn’t know how I’d done until he brought the target back. I was feeling optimistic, but it turned out I had missed nearly half my shots. Missing so many with a sidearm at that distance is not unusual,