Chapter 134. Eight Doors Open

Eight departments. Eight autonomous divisions with their own budgets, analysts, and clearance protocols, all created for one purpose: to control everything that comes through the portals along with S-Power and anything that affects people. And without so much as blinking, the Ministry had forcibly assigned me to all eight at once.

My room was dim behind the drawn curtains, lit only by the bluish glow of the monitor. I leaned back in my chair, feeling my brain still humming faintly after the grueling, accelerated training, and took a slow, deep breath. Before my evolution, a situation like this would have sent my pulse racing and tied that familiar, clammy knot of panic in my chest. It was the old reaction of an ordinary office clerk, the kind of man who got irritated when the coffee ran out and lived in fear of deadlines. Now my brain worked differently. My biology had changed, wiping out that pointless physiological response and leaving only cold, clear calculation.

I pulled the keyboard closer and methodically started rereading the incoming correspondence, one message at a time.

Back when I was an accountant at a major firm, we had our share of idiots who thought they were hilarious. Petty, pathetic guys with inflated egos. Their favorite trick was to create a fake email address that looked like it came from management by changing a single letter in the domain, something an exhausted employee coming off a twelve-hour shift would never notice, and then send out ridiculous directives. I remembered two guys from the finance department dragging themselves across the entire city at seven in the morning on their only day off, only to find a genuinely bewildered senior executive waiting for them, completely unaware that he had supposedly called them in.

I had fallen for the same trick myself once. I received a notification saying I had been awarded a bonus and spent half an hour standing in accounting, trying to prove the email was legitimate while the clerks stared at me like I had lost my mind. It was a horrible feeling. And the most infuriating part was that those bastards never faced any consequences. The moment security started asking questions, the fake mailbox was deleted, and the pranksters, never caught, kept coming to work as usual.

I closed my eyes for a moment, exhaling the last of that old irritation, then returned to reality. Time to think clearly.

Who in the Corps could have played such a vicious prank on me? If I considered everyone with access to the Corps' internal structure and my email address, the list was practically endless. As Hawk had demonstrated quite clearly, access to my personnel file seemed to be available to almost every administrative clerk in headquarters.

But if I eliminated the faceless mass and kept only those who knew me personally and had definitely seen my email address, the list narrowed to three.

First was Selina. I crossed her off immediately. She was perfectly capable of making my life miserable in a dozen other ways. She loved slowly driving people insane, one teaspoon at a time, and she had a particular fondness for poisonous sarcasm. But petty mischief was simply beneath her. I could not picture her hiding around a corner in her high heels, snickering at my predicament. It was far too cheap a trick for someone with her intelligence and pride.

Second was Danny Kim, my former handler. He was young, hyperactive, and had the temperament of someone who enjoyed practical jokes. But for all his goofiness, Danny had never crossed the line or deliberately screwed me over. I preferred to believe his moral compass was still working.

And third was Leon.

I had never given him my email address directly. But that war dog had spent half an hour sitting in my room, watching me and commenting on my job applications. He was observant, and his memory was sharp. Copying an address from the screen would have taken him all of two seconds. Leon did not strike me as the prankster type at all, but he was still number one on my list. Simply because, lately, his actions had been making less and less sense.

I opened the source code of the messages, pulled up the electronic seals and digital signatures of all eight departments, and retrieved the very first message from the archive: the official order drafting me into the Corps, whose authenticity had never been in doubt.

The comparison took ten minutes. Pixel for pixel. Hashes, digital certificates, the Ministry's encryption keys, everything matched down to the last detail.

So this was not a simple spoofed address. Had Leon hacked into the Corps servers and sent the fake messages from inside the system? Given his skills and clearance, I could believe it, although that would be bordering on outright insanity. One thing was seducing my ex-girlfriend just to piss me off. Another was risking a court-martial. I crossed Leon off the list of suspects.

That left one final possibility: a system failure on the Ministry's own servers. Technology glitched all the time, especially when it was overloaded with software designed to monitor the Awakened.

It was hard to believe the document was real. Expecting one person to handle the workload of eight divisions at once? Absurd. Sure, after my physiological changes, three hours of sleep were enough for a full reset, but everyone else still operated on a normal human schedule. Nobody was going to sit at headquarters until midnight just to make sure Tom Ross got through his workload.

This was either an elaborate provocation or a colossal bureaucratic mistake. And I did not have time to figure out which. I just needed to ask someone who understood how the system worked.

There was no point calling the other Awakened. Neither Danny nor Megan worked across more than two departments, and there was little chance either of them had ever encountered this kind of bureaucratic insanity. It was time to reach out to the people who could see the system from the inside.

I dialed the Awakened hotline. In theory, the line had been set up to deal with urgent everyday problems: if you were rushing to a portal and your Ford had just been towed over unpaid tickets, the operator was supposed to sort it out within a couple of minutes. Naturally, nobody had given me the distribution center's contact information, but being overloaded across eight fronts was starting to qualify as a serious threat to my personal life and mental health.

They answered on the first ring. The service operated with suspicious efficiency. There were two possibilities: either there were so few Awakened in the country that the operators had nothing better to do, or someone above them was standing there with a stopwatch. Most likely, it was both.

"Hello, Mr. Ross," said a woman's voice through the speaker, perfectly polished and professional. Not a trace of sleepiness, not a single false note in her delivery. "How can I help you?"

"Good afternoon. I graduated from training camp a couple of months ago and cleared my first portal. A few days ago, I received my assignments, and they put me in eight departments at once." I laid out the facts without wasting time on unnecessary details: receiving the Bronze Star with a V device, earning the right to choose my duty station, sending applications to the six departments I was interested in, and then getting two additional assignments I had never asked for. "There seems to be a glitch in the system. Could you check?"

"One moment, Mr. Ross."

I heard the rapid clicking of a keyboard, followed by the operator's steady, measured breathing.

While she checked, I caught myself thinking about how easy this conversation felt. In the past, any call to a customer service center, with its endless "your call is important to us" messages and transfers, had left me ready to grind my teeth down to the roots. Ordinary office stress. Now it felt like a routine, completely mechanical task, no more difficult than drinking a glass of water.

"Thank you for waiting, Mr. Ross," the same clipped voice said. "I've pulled up your personnel file. Everything is correct in the database. There is no error."

"So the Ministry really expects me to fill positions in eight departments at the same time?"

"That's correct."

"That seems, at the very least, inefficient," I said calmly. "What about the two additional divisions I never even applied to?"

"The initial assignment algorithm analyzed your performance metrics and determined that your unique skill set would be most effective in those sectors," she recited with flawless bureaucratic courtesy. "Portals are opening across the country, Mr. Ross. Personnel with your qualifications are extremely valuable. Every Awakened is required to serve the interests of the United States."

"I'm not disputing the obligation to serve. I'm disputing the arithmetic. Eight departments is ridiculous. Are you sure the software didn't malfunction?"

"The program can produce errors, Mr. Ross, but every key assignment must be approved by an officer in the analytical division. If the analysts signed off on the order, then they calculated your workload."

"And do they make calculations like this often? Are there already Corps personnel working a similar schedule?"

"I'm not authorized to disclose information from other service members' personnel files."

In plain English, that meant no. If there were even one other poor bastard working a schedule like this, Megan or Danny would have mentioned him, if only as an example.

"All right," I said, returning to the matter at hand. "If it turns out that the workload is objectively impossible, can I at least withdraw my applications from those two departments that assigned me without asking?"

"If you find that you are unable to fulfill your duties and that this is negatively affecting your productivity, you may submit a report to General Crowley requesting a new fitness-for-duty review," she rattled off the memorized procedure. "Do you have any other questions, Mr. Ross?"

"No. That's all I needed."

"Please be reminded that you are required to report to the Portal Special Weapons and Tactics training center in six days. This is your primary duty station. Failure to report by the appointed date will result in a formal reprimand being entered into your personnel record. A second violation will result in a substantial fine and court-martial. Have a good day."

Click. The line went dead on that barely concealed threat.

So much for the theory that this was some stupid prank or a system error. The assignment algorithm had really spit my name into eight departments at once. Could my applications really have been that convincing? Then again, considering how my brain worked in hyperfocus mode, I might have written them so well that the Ministry's built-in filters simply lost their minds and flagged my profile as "critically necessary."

Overall, working for six civilian and analytical departments did not scare me. I would have happily settled in permanently even in Intelligence. But the two additional assignments threw the whole arrangement out of balance. Espionage genuinely repulsed me, while the Portal SWAT assault unit meant regularly clearing anomalies on the front lines, under direct fire and without a break.

My first thought was to email General Crowley directly. Fortunately, I had his address. I could request to be removed from the last two assignments. But it was too early to start making waves. Complaining about an excessive workload before I had even reported to the base was a great way to get labeled a problem soldier. Besides, if Megan was right, the assault units were the absolute bottom of the military hierarchy, where they dumped everyone who had fallen out of favor. Start pushing back, and the bureaucratic machine would happily cross me off the six cushy office jobs and leave me to rot on the training grounds with Portal SWAT.

If the system considered me a universal soldier, I might as well make the most of it. Squeeze every last bit of resources, information, and influence out of those eight clearances. I could always back out later.