The Forever Watch Read Online Free PDF Page A

the same too, except for the addition of a new trainee, Wong, who greets me a little too stiffly and politely. Ah, to get such respect from all my subordinates. How long will that fresh-faced awe last?
    The big project I organized just before I received my summons for Breeding Duty—a new resource-tracking and analytics module—was completed in my absence. Going through the reports, it is clear that my assistant, Hennessy, has done a decent job while I was gone. The number of error reports has steadily dropped off, and at this point, 93.25 percent of user help requests can be handled by the system’s agent programs, without need for human intervention.
    He does not even seem to mind having a younger woman as his boss. That’s rare. Also, not once has he attempted to glance down my blouse during meetings. I must remember to buy him a gift.
    The first day of the rest of my life, the goal is to reassimilate into the living world. I tell myself that what happened to me is fading. I practice pretending everything is okay. I succeed in not thinking about that first waking moment, clutching my belly, knowing something is missing. Most of the time.
    This is just another transition in life. Just another test. Everyone’s life on the Noah is full of tests. My childhood had more of them than the average because, the better you perform, the more you can do, the more they push you to maximize what you might become.
    This is not nearly so terrible as the third Track Determination Exams when I was fifteen. Wasn’t it worse back then? Before the day I met Barrens, wasn’t that the worst day of my life?
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    Fifteen minutes pas—seven! How did I manage to do that! I overslept, I—
    Stayed up until five, studying. Did I misthink setting the alarm for the first time in three years? Shit, not even time to shower …
    In a pajama top with winged hearts and striped jogging pants, running for the train. Eyes on me. Yeah, don’t look at me, I’m busy, I’m a mess, I—
    â€œSorry! So sorry.” I almost knock over this older guy in a suit. I almost trip, rushing down the escalator to the S-line platform.
    Oh shit, oh shit, it’s leaving, it’s … left.
    I have to take the bus. It is another fifteen minutes to run up to the stop.
    The bus is crowded. It’s shift transit hour, when the night workers leave and the day staff start. Sweat pouring down my face, from the run, from the growing anxiety as the bus seems to have to stop at every fricking light .
    Finally here, the grim black octagon of the testing facility. And I’m late. I am so, so late.
    They do let me in to take the TDE. But half of the time for the Data Structures exam went by before I even sat at the damn terminal.
    I go through all the tricks to calm myself.
    Eyes burning. I think the proctors are looking at me, why wouldn’t they? Stupid tears.
    The terminal locks to my Implant, shuts off access to the Nth Web, isolates me from every other student taking the test, and it begins. Every correct answer gets a harder question after, and every wrong one gets an easier follow-up, and there’s no backtracking. Getting a max score in every exam is nearly impossible, but I’ve heard it’s how kids get selected for Command Officer School, something I can’t admit I’ve wanted for years, and why why why is it so hard to think? The first questions should be trivial, they’re about B-tree implementation.… I’ve done practice tests for this a hundred times, and I can feel Lyn and Jazz and Marcus staring at my back, feel them being worried for me.
    They’re only the exams that determine the path of the rest of our lives.
    All the fiddly little differences between the different kinds of lists. Messing with hash tables. Linking. Operations. Procedures. Abstract data types.
    All right, I bombed the first test. Get a grip, Dempsey. Stop crying! There’s twenty-four hours