10 PRINT "ROLL CALL";
20 GOTO 10
Who the fuck are these assholes?
"Ratchet". Huh.
Reilly squinted at the screen, counting out the letters. R - A - T - C - H - E - T.
OK, he wasn't hallucinating.
What the fuck kind of name is that...
It wasn't like most of the kids had the best names ever anyway. "Maximum"? Whatever. "Fang" was extremely questionable, but they both got grandfathered in, as it were - no one Reilly knew remembered why the six kids were named what they were.
Except maybe Jeb, and he wasn't telling.
Bastard probably thought it was hilarious.
"Ratchet." He frowned. For some reason the name reminded him of video games.
"Holden. Are you fucking serious. Holden."
It wasn't quiet in the office area - too much keyboard-clicking and the burble of the coffee machine - but he could swear he heard a laugh. Or a stifled snicker or something.
Someone was amused at his bemusement.
Fuck 'em.
Jesus, I hated that book.
(Mostly because some douche suckup with a nice ass had given a fucking soliloquy on the thing for his final in English class. It wasn't the soliloquy that was the problem so much as the fact that it was all about the deep historical symbolism of the plot, and the fact that he went ten minutes over time.)
Holden. What do his friends call him, Holdy? Hold my cock.
Asshole.
Kate. Beth.
Who the shit...
At least those were normal names. For a given value of normal.
Kate was a common one, kind of. Beth not so much.
If these kids were who he was told they were, they were fuckin' weird as shit names. This was the same group that boasted "Nudge" and "Iggy".
Next to that, Kate and Beth might as well have been named "Sunshine" and "Starsong" or some shit.
Toni. Normal-like. Kind of stupid. From the spelling probably a girl.
Who named these kids? They sounded so normal, these... five. Six. These six. He could swear he'd known friends' baby siblings named Antonia or Katherine, kids by now who'd be going by Kate and Toni.
Why do we name our weapons like we're naming our children?
Star. Of course there was a Star.
There were the hipster asshole parents - paging Holden, Holden to a white courtesy telephone - and there were the traditionalists - Kate or Beth, either one of you interchangeable fuckers - and then there were the ones who didn't know it wasn't still 1969.
Poor kid. In a class full of Tiffaneighs and Jessikas, to be the only Star?
(He'd been named Beau, but there were places for such names.)
unknown
unknown
unknown
He hit refresh again.
Technically speaking he was still an intern. No one remembered but him, but he was just a cog in this machine.
Well. A cog important enough to manage a six-unit field team mostly on his own, but a cog.
And they were his cogs - his to control. He'd programmed the server that sent them their commands. He spoke in their ears when they strayed off task.
He moved them at his whim from place to place, but he couldn't say he wasn't relieved when their locations changed from UNKNOWN.
Who are you?