Read The Search for Sam for Free Online

internet—from a story about the birth of quintuplets
     in Winnetka, Illinois, to a grainy web-video from a Syrian insurgent—without getting
     involved in what I’m reading or seeing is a challenge, and after just twenty minutes
     of wide-eyed staring at the monitor, my eyes feel like they’re going to bleed.
    Then it gets worse.
    At the end of the first hour, a little digital bell sounds and a tab pops up on the
     upper right-hand corner of my screen. My heart sinks.
    “Oh yeah,” says Serkova, managing to smirk at me without looking up from his monitor.
     “I forgot to mention. We get ranked hourly.”
    Our individual results are tabulated at the end of every hour and broadcast to all
     the terminals. Number of Discards, number of Investigates, as well as a provisional
     computer-graded percentage score for accuracy.
    There I am, all the way at the bottom, in last place: twenty-seven Discards, six Investigates,
     and a provisional accuracy ranking of 71 percent. I scan up the list to see Serkova
     in second place, with a whopping eighty-two discards, thirteen Investigates, and a
     provisional accuracy ranking of 91 percent. I’m going to have to go a lot faster.
    “What was that you were telling your father?” Serkova cracks.
    I’m too distracted to respond. I need to improve my score, and I resent Serkova’s
     ability to work and needle me at the same time.
    “Something ’bout what a great tracker you are, how much better you’ll be at surveying
     than we are?”
    Ugh. Not only has the General given me an impossible task, in which failure will result
     in my death , he’s also poisoned the well with my new coworkers by reporting what I said about
     my superior tracking skills.
    But I don’t bother to respond: I don’t have time.
    I get back to work, fighting against my own dismay. One reason I manipulated the General
     into placing me in the Media and Surveillance facility was because I thought I might
     have enough downtime to use my console to hack into the servers of the adjacent laboratories,
     do some digging into Dr. Zakos’s research. I know that One’s only hope lies in those
     files. But if I don’t pull my ranking up soon, my father could justifiably terminate
     our agreement: I’d be killed before I even got a chance to help One.
    I need to improve my score.
    I manage to go faster. The trick, I learn, is not to process any of the information
     I encounter. Instead I let my consciousness skim just above the text or video, then
     let my judgment occur without thought or reasoning. Basically the trick is to accept
     that I am just a cog in a data-combing machine.
    Finally, I feel myself getting into a groove. In the next hourly ranking, I’ve climbed
     two positions. In the one after that, I’m position thirteen out of twenty.
    “Luck.” Serkova sniffs.
    I glare at him. I know I’m not here to compete with this jerk, but I can’t help it:
     wanting to knock him down a peg drives me on. By late afternoon, I’ve climbed up to
     position eleven.
    I figure I’ve bought myself enough of a cushion to give myself five minutes of snoop
     time. I quickly page away from the hyperlinks and try to access the hub’s central
     servers.
    But doing research with a ticking clock hanging over my head proves disastrous. I
     enter in searches for phrases like “mind transfer,” “Dr. Anu,” and “Dr. Zakos,” but
     they all lead me to restricted areas on the server, and I don’t have time to hack
     into them. I try to be more general. Remembering what Arsis said about humans in the
     lab, I do a search for “human captives.” Instead of directing me to anything about
     Anu or Zakos’s research subjects, I’m led to some internal, hub-wide memo about a
     broad new policy regarding human captives. “Whenever possible, humans suspected of
     aiding and abetting the Garde shall henceforth be held at the government base in Dulce,
     New Mexico.”
    A government base? Why would the U.S. government