Cause and Effect 39

--Silence--
--
Shepard's fingers worked at lightning speed, her omni-tool beeping, the lights on the display flashing as she worked. The instructor for this aptitude and placement test noticed her only because, of all those finish their first level of N-training (which equated to a sort of special ops basic), she was the quietest.

Most would swear at the problem by now. Not that they could solve it, but they did not know that.

Looking closer at the thin face, the calm aura of determination which seemed to resonate around her in palpable form, the instructor found himself not so sure of this. If she knew the problem was unsolvable at her level, it would account for the unusual show of calm.

This test not 'what can you do', or 'what do you know', it was 'how do you cope, when you don't know what to do'. She was either crazy, or on a very even keel.

He pulled up her file, words jumping out at him. Mindoir. No living relatives. Psychological risk factor: 7.

That had slowly downgraded from ten. For her it would never drop below a five. It would keep her out of some of the very senior positions. He'd be very surprised it she made it to service chief, let alone any further. Psychological dependability was something screened for.

As she got older, the likelihood of a psychological break would increase, or so the eggheads said. Fortunately Ns allowed more leeway for oddity.

Shepard continued working in silence, and the instructor gave up his mental assessment.

Shepard hunched over her omni-tool, but was not working on the problem. She recognized it, but did not remember how to solve it. Not straight out, anyway. So she remained staunchly silent as she tried to work around it. Listening to the other students swearing under their breaths (or sometimes more audibly), she blocked it out.

She felt the instructor eyeing her, aware she was the odd one out. Fortunately this was, to her, a state of normalcy so she thought nothing of it. With a deep breath she forced herself not to swear at the problem out of habit. No problem presented by an instructor was ever solved by swearing at it.

Or kicking it.

But both had psychological benefits, especially when dealing with tractors. Shepard paused her work for a moment. Maybe she ought to have gone into vehicular maintenance, where she could kick and swear however she liked when a rover refused to cooperate.

The impulsive thought vanished, like a wrinkle tugged out of a tablecloth. Rovers were good, but she was a nerd at heart. A nerd with a gun-so 'Infiltrator School' it was.

Shepard looked up from her omni-tool after her third attempt to go around the problem failed. Leaning on her desk, jiggling her foot, she gazed at the whiteboard, containing the particulars of the problem the instructor set for them. There had to be an easier way to go around a problem than to…

If you can't go around, go over it.

Shepard hunched over, her taps on her omni-tool redoubling, aware her time in which to make an impression was limited. Even in a room so full of murmured words, like the hum of aggravated bees, a silence began to press on her eardrums as all sound was blocked, so all energy and resources usually reserved to translate sound into meaning cut off. Who cared what Lancaster was calling his omni-tool…or the instructor?

Shepard's omni-tool began to flash and whir as she worked. The little lamp sitting upon the instructor's desk, an old-fashioned thing with a bulb and needing to tap into an electrical socket, shone softly. Shepard glanced up at it. Hacking into the building, getting past all the firewalls protecting the lamp was too hard, she had no skill that high as yet.

But a marine would adapt, improvise, overcome.

There was no way she would let a lamp triumph over her.

Shepard looked away from the glowing lamp, half-smiling to herself, as many of the others let themselves become worked up. Perhaps that was the object of the lesson, learning to control annoyance so it did not edge out logic and reason-or make your work sloppy.

"Five minutes," the instructor noted placidly.

Shepard nodded once, looking back down at her omni-tool. She could do this in five minutes, but only if she held her mouth right, as the saying went.

Four minutes. Shepard grit her teeth. The class fell silent, whispered words vanishing like smoke on the wind.

Three minutes. Her muscles tensed, as though preparing for a blow, or a jump from a high place.

Two minutes. Come on…work!

One minute. She hated countdowns, hated them with a passion-thank goodness this one was only in her head.

Thirty seconds…

In the silence, the lamp on the desk dimmed, but did not go out. The instructor looked over at it. A moment later the lamp gave a fizzling sound and the tungsten filament in the bulb suddenly gave out.

Shepard smiled. A story from some unremembered individual echoed in her ears, about an old-fashioned fan and light setup-with real light bulbs like this lamp-and how, if you pulled the fan pull chain while the light was on….light bulbs would blow out.

Shepard understood enough about electrical wiring to know she could trip the generators-down in the basement, and unguarded-to cause a power spike-a spike which blew the light bulb, but left the heavy-endurance equipment of the facility alone.

Things here had to be heavy endurance, with all the students doing strange things to or with it. It did not, as the exercise demanded, 'turn off the light', but now there was no light to turn off.

The class gaped; the instructor did not. "All right, who did it?"

Shepard stood up. "Shepard, Jalissa A."

The instructor nodded. "You owe me a new light bulb, recruit."

Out of the silence came a cheeky, "Aye-aye."