Training was extra time; Jayden and everyone else had to come in on Saturdays. It was strangely organized – there were so few people involved that they all met at once under the same instructor, Special Agent Eric Belasco, a gawky man about Jayden's own age whose long limbs and prominent Adam's apple made him look something like a red-headed Ichabod Crane. He was a rare exception – a skilled ARI user who almost never left DC, because the Bureau needed him there for the training. There was a medic present as well, just in case, who mostly read magazines with his feet up on a desk.

It was a bit like an old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse: Everyone was at a different stage in terms of skill and tolerance level in terms of working with the ARI, and so Belasco mostly set them all up with their own individual projects and schedules, then came around to answer questions and solve problems. Two of the more senior agents in the program got to go off in a corner by themselves and appeared to be screwing around excessively, laughing. There was a small blonde woman whose main activity seemed to be harassing everyone else while she had her glasses on and they had theirs off. Miller gave Jayden a little wave, then slouched into a seat in front of a desktop computer. Other trainees were assigned boxes of items or corners of the room to work through.

Jayden himself was put into a tiny, empty cubicle – carefully cleaned – and set to work learning how to set filters on his own ARI. Belasco tapped him on the shoulder every ten minutes and made him take a long break; everyone seemed to have their own scheduled time limitations that Belasco policed. Jayden looked around curiously; Miller wasn't actually looking at the screen of the computer in front of him, but groping at it with his gloved hand, his head tilting backwards. There were a few trainees rummaging in cardboard boxes. Other people were wandering serenely through the room, and Jayden envied their easy movement. The tiny woman pounced on Jayden as he rubbed his eyes.

"You're Norman Jayden, right? Joanna Croyden. Gonna scan you," she said as preamble, and began feeling at his face with her own gloved hand.

It obviously wasn't really a request, but he answered it anyway, trying not to flinch away from her: "Okay."

"Trying to build my ARI into being a medical examiner," she said swiftly, even looking vaguely apologetic as she patted next at his chest. "Got to show I can deal with living bodies, under supervision, before Belasco lets me go play with corpses any more."

". . . okay." She made a disapproving face as she trailed her fingers along his knee.

"You ever hurt this knee?"

"Tore it up pretty bad once," he admitted, impressed. "You can tell that?"

"It's saying you don't have a knee there," she grumbled, and abruptly left to fuss with the settings on her glasses.

Jayden found his programming assignment tedious after having anticipated all week being able to wander around and sample the world through his ARI again. By the end of the session, though, Belasco was satisfied with the way Jayden had managed to figure out how to pick up only fingerprints, or hair samples, or footprints, then figure out which databases to poke around in, and Jayden got to toy around with some materials in the inside of his cubicle, feel that beauty rise again around him.

"Good," Belasco said. "You've got the basics down. What you're going to do next week is work with combinations of materials, and then building elements of how you store and access information virtually. If you get through all that without a disaster, you can start experimenting at home. You'll have a schedule to stick to, though."

"What are they doing?" Jayden asked curiously, nodding at the pair in the corner. One of the two men was laughing so hard he looked like he was almost in tears, the other was grinning and flailing wildly at the air.

"Hell if I know at the moment, but in theory, they're supposed to be testing the limits and sustainability of having a shared ARI experience. They started trying it on their own, and Craig there had tremors for three days, so now they have to do it here. If they're still being jackasses next week, I'm going to make them help teach, instead."

The session drew to a close. Carruthers had been right, about everyone wanting to share. As soon as the official training time was over, as they all got ready to leave, the gathering turned into a gossip pit that reminded Jayden of high school. Almost everyone lingered. Thanks to Miller, everyone had already heard of Jayden's vomit and half-hour stress test, and wanted to see if it were true. He shyly assured them that it was, and everyone started bombarding him with their own stories of surviving the test, and others'.

Miller had his disappearing room, and Rogers, his seizure. But there was also the story of a data screen that grew to the size of a football field, several fainting fits and overwhelming headaches, bloody noses, temporary blindness, severe vertigo, and a few other hallucinations, like the ceiling abruptly dropping down on Jackson. Fisher had fallen out of his chair when an imaginary swarm of bees suddenly surrounded him. Carruthers had played the same saliva trick on a few of them, and, during her test, Croyden had seen the examiner's ghostly image swell right up out of the petri dish like a genie out of a bottle, whereupon she'd tried to slap it in anger, thinking he was doing it on purpose. Even Belasco had his story: he'd seen himself turn into nothing but data, but couldn't control his body well enough to take the glasses off, had to be rescued from oblivion. A few lucky ones had managed to shut their eyes when they felt disaster approaching, but a lot hadn't, and Jayden felt a new respect for Carruthers' fussiness and anxiety over the process. He shook his head at the whole thing.

"And wait," Jayden said, "We're the ones who passed?"

A few faces fell. "Yeah," Fisher said. He was a slight man with goggling eyes. "There's been a couple of heart attacks, some more serious health stuff. Couple of real mental problems that didn't stop when the glasses came off. And some people who went through the same stuff we did, and just decided it wasn't for them, you know?"

"Pussies," said Miller.

Croyden snorted. "Oh, because you're special. You were screaming for your mom about three weeks ago, Miller. When –"

"Stop," Belasco scolded her. "Play nice. You people are such animals sometimes that I can't believe I'm teaching adults. She's right, though, Andy – you know it's hard to do what we do. There's no shame in people recognizing their limitations."

"It gets better," Craig told Jayden. "It really does. The ARI just changes the way you do everything. So much stuff becomes possible. You're your own walking crime lab." There was a general nodding of heads. "Remember, not everyone who's using it is here today. There are some people who don't have to come back and do the training any more, this is just those of us who are learning new things. Jackson," Craig nodded at the man he'd been goofing off with, "And I, we hadn't been here in ages before we started experimenting and . . . had to come back."

Belasco cleared his throat. "He already knows you learned the hard way, Craig. Couldn't stop shaking. If anything, you should emphasize that, so he doesn't get any ideas about striking out on his own without help."

"Nothing happened to Jackson," Craig said defensively. "Anyway, it gets better."

"It's already better," Jayden blurted awkwardly. He didn't know how to say it. "This is better than anything I've ever done." They all smiled. They understood.

Miller walked out to the parking lot with him. "Listen," Miller said. "Belasco's great, really knows his shit. What you're mostly going to need him for isn't the programming stuff, though he's good at that. What you really need him to teach you is how to see. Just the filters on the ARI itself aren't enough; the ARI will still show you, say, every single fingerprint in a room, including partials and repetitions, and you just sort of have to let it. Belasco can give you tricks that let you just focus on the ones you need, the ones that'll help. Some of it is stuff you can jury-rig ARI to do for you, but some of it, you need to learn to do yourself while you're using it at a scene. Ask him about that as soon as you can. That's what the real training is."

Jayden, unlocking his car, was deeply appreciative. "Thanks for the tip. Damn, I can't wait until I can practice some of this at home."

"Yeah, I remember that stage. Frustrating." Miller hesitated. "Listen. This was an unusually good week, and I want you to know that. Last week, Fisher completely shorted out and ran into a wall trying to get away from those bees of his. I guess he has a thing about bees. And there were a couple of bloody noses. There's still side effects from ARI, especially if you're not careful. Belasco will tell you that the best thing you can do about that is limit your time and cut yourself off, and he's probably right. I think that's his real gift; the guy has self-control like you wouldn't believe. He'll give you some other tips, too. You're apparently some sort of prodigy, so maybe it won't be an issue for you. But if you start getting side effects and the training's not helping, come talk to me, okay? There's some . . . unofficial things you can do, too. Stuff Belasco doesn't know, because he's never had to know. But I don't want to get into it if it's not a problem for you."

"Okay." Jayden was slightly mystified. "Thanks again. I'll keep that in mind." He felt good about the day, felt a growing pleasure at having acquired Miller as an unofficial mentor.

The following week at work was tedious. Jayden began spending all of his spare time picturing just what he was going to do the next time he was in ARI: in the shower, over lunch, after work. Flirting with temptation, he'd even slip on the glove when he was in bed, close his eyes, and go through the motions, could already anticipate the way that the programming was going to function when he could go in there again.


A/N: Oh, God, not the bees!