Reckoning Read Free

with the rank you want, others that you have to work for it. Some say it is all about what happens on the day but there are those who insist it is about the things you have studied over the years in school.
    If Paul is going to interfere, I hope he knows what he’s doing, even though I doubt it. There isn’t enough power for any of us to go to school for more than two days a week and I know he wouldn’t be able to rival me when it comes to assembling and reassembling a thinkwatch – not that he would be aware of my talents as I hide the extent of what I can do well enough.
    Before Opie can say anything else, more Kingsmen appear, motioning for us to stand in single file.
    For the first time, I begin to feel something at the bottom of my stomach, nerves I am not used to, reminding me that the next few hours will define who I am to be. I near the front. One of the Kingsmen is holding a flat screen that looks like a slightly larger version of a thinkpad, on which I scan my thinkwatch. After it acknowledges me with an authoritative-sounding beep, the Kingsman says one word: ‘Thumb’.
    I press my thumb onto the pad as a red light scans underneath. At first nothing happens and, just for a moment, I feel a panic that something is wrong. Then, as quickly as the feeling arrived, it disappears as the machine emits another satisfied beep. The cameras are there again as we troop one by one through to a large room. Rows of tables are laid out and a tall bank of windows allows the sun to stream through. I blink rapidly to adjust to the light before I feel a hand on my arm. A Kingsman is pushing me towards an empty seat on the far side of the room.
    I stumble slightly from his shove and try to look for Opie as I move. He is at the front and though I will him to turn and look at me, he doesn’t move.
    Waiting on the desk is a thinkpad but not like the ones we usually have at school. Those are thick, scratched and heavy, but this is silvery, thin and soft. When I touch the screen, it leaves a small indentation. In the bottom corner is the communication port which I press my finger into. I feel a prickling at the base of my skull, as it scans my thoughts. I feel something in my head, asking my name and date of birth, and no sooner have they come to the front of my mind than I feel it telling me the answers have been accepted. A page of text appears on the screen, cataloguing so many things about me that I had forgotten most of them, a complete listing of everything I have ever successfully remembered at school. When you first start using one, it takes a while to figure out which thoughts you should be giving it. It doesn’t read your mind, it simply stores what you tell it. Where the information is kept, no one seems to know, but this new thinkpad has all the data from our school ones, so it must be somewhere externally.
    I look up from the device but, apart from the back of Paul’s head in front of me, there is little to see. His thumb is pressed to his thinkpad and I wonder how he might try to cheat. My only guess is by tampering with his thinkwatch. The thinkpads connect to your thoughts but we’ve all felt the tingling under the metal of our thinkwatches as it does so. On its own, a thinkwatch acts as a way for us to communicate with each other, for our days to be planned, to receive alerts, and to tell us the time. With the thinkpads we use at school – and this new one in particular – the two seem to work in tandem.
    The thinkwatches are complicated devices but logical at least. You are not supposed to remove the underside panel but, if you do, there is a trick I found through years of playing at the gully which allows you to get into programming mode. With a mixture of guesswork and experimentation, I worked out that you can use that to take advantage of almost anything you want. The only problem is that I am almost certain everything is fed back to some sort of central server. You can