The Seven
Sean Patrick Little
Dog Ear Publishing (2009)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: General, Fiction, Science Fiction, Adventure, Conspiracies, Human Experimentation in Medicine, Genetic Engineering, Teenagers, Mutation (Biology), Superheroes
Generalttt Fictionttt Science Fictionttt Adventurettt Conspiraciesttt Human Experimentation in Medicinettt Genetic Engineeringttt Teenagersttt Mutation (Biology)ttt Superheroesttt
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A shadowy, underground, anti-America paramilitary group called the Trust has pooled its resources and contracted a brilliant geneticist to force the next step in human evolution. The doctor, unaware of the group's true purposes, chooses seven children from a bank of DNA profiles and has them brought to 'the Home,' the name the kids give to the laboratory where they are raised. Through their adolescences, they are subjected to gene splicing, chemical enhancements, mechanical and biological implants, and rigorous testing. When Posey, who was treated with avian DNA, begins a massive physical change, the other six teenagers realize that their time with the Home is coming to an end and decide to steal Posey and run. Led by John, a genetically enhanced 'super-soldier,' the seven make their break from the Home, but Sarah (who can run faster than the speed of sound) is captured and taken to a hidden military installation. The others have to rescue her and shut down the base so the Trust can't continue with its plans to take down the U.S. Government in a military coup using the incredible powers of the genetically altered teenagers. As each of the seven comes to terms with his or her powers, they make a final, epic stand against base commander General Tucker and the Trust.
The Seven
Sean Patrick Little
Book One
Origins
Sarah knew where to find him. She always knew where to find him. It was like they had a psychic bond. When they were kids, he was always the first one she found when they played hide-and-seek; Andy could never hide from her for long. Sarah could always make a beeline for Andy's hiding spot.
She walked deep into the woods behind the Home, meandering along the old logging road with a flashlight in her hand. It was still daylight, and would be for a while, but where Andy was hiding, a flashlight would come in handy. After a time, she came to an old game trail and veered off the dusty tire rut into the heart of the forest. Tall, overhanging oaks laid down a thick blanket of shade and kept the late August sun from being unbearable. Locusts droned constantly in the trees and birds twittered mindlessly, cheerful despite the heat. A steep embankment along the path angled into a low, narrow valley. At the bottom of the valley was a dry creek bed that led deeper into the woods and to a small cave that Sarah and Andy had discovered years ago, not long after they first came to the Home.
The cave was carved into a hillside, a vein chiseled through limestone. The opening was small, barely big enough to squeeze though. When they were kids, it was huge. Now, Sarah eased her narrow frame through the opening feeling a hint of claustrophobia. Once through the opening, there was a gently sloped descent that opened into a small, round room. That's where she knew he would be.
Andy was in the middle of the cave, flat on his back, his bulky frame taking up a good portion of the space. Andy wasn't tall, but he was wide and thick, more muscle than fat, but a fair amount of chubbiness. He had thick, beefy arms and legs like tree trunks. His broad stomach, slightly paunchy, rose and fell slowly with his breath; his arms and legs were spread-eagle. Sarah trained her beam on him. His eyes were closed, but the light made him squeeze his eyes shut a little more.
"Andy, are you okay?"
For a long time, Andy didn't move. He didn't acknowledge Sarah in any way. Then, he inhaled sharply and blew out a long slow breath. "I'm tired, Sarah."
"I know." Sarah sat down cross-legged in the dust and dried leaves next to him. She caught the thin outline of a cave spider in the flashlight and quickly turned off the beam, shuddering.
"They ask so much of us, you know?" Andy's voice cracked a little. It wasn't like him to get upset. He was usually a rock, the one everyone else went to for a shoulder to lean against when they felt low. Sarah felt a tinge of worry creep into her belly.
"I know."
"I can't keep it up."
"Yes, you can. You're strong," said Sarah. "Stronger than the rest of us."
"Whatever," said Andy. He rolled to his side and pushed up to one elbow. "They keep saying that we're all going important to some stupid research thing and that we'll all understand one day...but, you know what I think? I think they're full of crap."
"You just have to keep working, Andy."
"No! No, I don't! I've been doing everything they asked of us. I haven't complained once, have I? I just keep on going through the tests and the surgeries, and I keep putting up with Cormair's crap and for what? For nothing. Nothing has happened to us in all this time! We're seventeen now! That means we've been under Cormair's control for ten years, can you believe it?"
Sarah shook her head. "It doesn't feel like ten years."
"To you, maybe. To me, it feels like twenty." Andy flopped back down into the leaves and closed his eyes. "Remember what it was like when we first came to the Home?"
Sarah remembered it clearly. It wasn't one of those things a person could forget. She remembered the long, dark bus ride with six other children. She remembered the crisply uniformed soldiers on the bus, large, muscular men in dark gray fatigues who gave them candy and soda. She vaguely remembered her parents' faces, filtered through a smudged, grimy bus window as they waved good-bye, before the soldiers put up the metal window covers blocking out her final view of her family.
The Home. It was a strange, run-down, oddly-angled Victorian-style house in the middle of a forest, a relic straight out of a Grimm Brothers' fairy tale. As the bus approached, Sarah thought it looked like the haunted mansion from Disneyworld. Dr. Cormair, the man who would rule their lives for the next decade, had been waiting at the door to greet them when the bus pulled up to the entrance. He was a thin, almost frail-looking man with dull, graying hair and severe, gray eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. His face was a permanent mask of impassiveness. He wore a starched, brilliantly white lab coat. Through the next ten years of their lives at the Home, none of the seven would ever see him without the coat, no matter the time of day.
Sarah was ushered to the porch with the other kids and they were photographed, once as a group, and then individually, front and side. They were shown to their rooms, each one sparse and devoid of character. Over the years, they would each collect a few mementos, some posters, and colored blankets or pillows with lace edges, but the walls remained the dull, light gray color they were when they moved into the Home. The rest of the rooms were just as dull. The couches in the TV room, the chairs in the kitchen, even the shower curtains, were all dull and colorless. The entire place felt barren and muted.
"I remember," said Sarah. "I was scared. I think we all were."
"Not me," said Andy. "My dad was a drunk. He hit me a lot. My mom never even bothered to stop him, because then he'd smack her around, too. When my dad was at work, my mom's depression was overwhelming. She just sat in front of the TV and stared blankly. She never played with me or my brother, or interacted with me except to tell me not to do something. The Home seemed like Heaven to me, at first. Kids to play with, I had a purpose, and best of all no one hit me. That's why I believed in the research more than everyone else at first, I think. I wanted to be special. I wanted to be important. I wanted to help people and to be able to be strong for kids like me, kids whose parents hit them and treated them badly."
"And you will be, Andy."
"When, though? Ten years of this crap. Ten years of e
lectrodes and scans and tests and surgeries and training and...and...all that other crap. When does it pay off? When do we get to see results?"
"Maybe it doesn't," said Sarah. "Maybe this will all be found out to be a colossal waste of time and money and none of us will ever do whatever it is we're supposed to do. Then Cormair will have to abandon the project and we'll all get to leave here, go back to our families, and live normal lives."
Andy sat up. "I'll believe that when I see it."
"We're almost eighteen, anyhow; I can't see that they can hold legal adults against their will for long without breaking some sort of international law or something."
"You've been reading the news online, right?"
"Of course," said Sarah.
"Two words: Guantanamo Bay."
Sarah's face fell. "But we're American, right? They can't hold Americans, right? We're not terrorists."
Andy shrugged. "As far as I know, we're government property. We have been for ten years. I don't know if we can even be called 'citizens' anymore. With all the money and research they put into us, I don't think they're just going to let us go trotting free any time soon."
Sarah reclined back in the leaves and dust and touched her head to Andy's. Neither spoke for some time, both listening to each other's shallow, measured breathing. "Maybe I should stay here with you for a while?" Sarah whispered.
"I was going to go back eventually, you know."
"I know."
"So why did you come after me?"
"Maybe because I wanted to be away from the Home for a while, too."
Indigo was always a bit different from the other six. She was the first one to discover punk music and hair dye. She was the only member of the seven to ever sneak away from the Home and go to the little town down the road. Though she was never busted by Dr. Cormair, this was still a major offense the other six would never have dreamed of committing. She was a wild spirit and often butted heads with Cormair or the cadre of teachers brought in to educate them over the past decade. She was artistic and liked to read books the other six wouldn't even touch---Camus and Kafka, Ayn Rand and Dostoyevsky. She was arrogant, blithe, and sometimes cruel, often picking fights with the others for no reason. She was the only member of the seven who was Asian, Japanese to be specific, and she was the smallest and thinnest. She was also the one who endured the most testing.
Dr. Cormair began a trial of rigorous, near-daily testing from the first day she was in the Home. Indigo wasn't entirely sure what they were testing her for, but she knew it was something about her brain because every time they strapped her to a chair, they slapped electrodes all over her head and made her do mental exercises. She'd had to have a shaved head for a while two years ago because the researchers put electrodes onto the skin of her skull and a metal neuro-net on her brain. The doctors at the Home even implanted a device into her brain that could be plugged into a jack at the base of her neck, at skin level, that connected to electrode plots in her brain to run tests, among other fiddling they had done in her head. It had all been extremely painful. In ten years, Indigo had her head opened up a dozen times.
She stood in the middle of the Home's main laboratory, an impressive room tiled on all four sides with dark gray metal sheeting and filled with all manner of instruments, scanners, electrographs, and monitoring devices. Indigo was wearing a blue plastic skull cap that was wired heavily with electrodes. On a table ten feet in front of her sat a fist-sized, bright red plastic block. She was being tested...again.
"Indigo, I want you close your eyes and try to reach out to the block on the table with your mind, okay? Pretend that you control an invisible hand that juts out from your forehead, okay?" said Doctor Sebbins. She was a pretty, young doctor who had only been at the Home for two years. She had been brought in to teach Chemistry and Biology, but her personable manner made her one of the few teachers that the kids had actually liked. At the urging of the kids, Cormair hired her on a full-time basis. She moved into the Home and became Cormair's chief assistant.
"You got it, Doc," said Indigo. She scrunched up her face and gave the big red block on the table an evil-eye stare. She even reached out one of her own hands and made dramatic sweeping gestures with it, imitating the old wizard she'd seen a few nights before in the late movie on television. "Rise! Rise, I command thee! Rise!"
Nothing happened.
From the bank of computers in the corner, Sebbins said, "Okay, that's good, Indigo. Now I want you to actually try. This time without the theatrics, please."
"How do you know I wasn't actually trying then?"
"I'm reading your brainwave patterns over here," said Sebbins. She tapped the computer monitor in front of her with the end of her pen. "When you actually try, other parts of your brain light up. When you pretend, it looks different."
Indigo sighed. "Fine. I'll actually try."
"That's all I ask."
"What are you testing me for, anyhow?"
"I'm measuring activity levels in your hypothalamus. Now stop talking and concentrate."
Indigo sighed and flopped into the comfy wing chair in the testing room. She looked at the table where the red block lay on a plain, single-mold, white plastic card table. Indigo had been used to this sort of test. She'd figured out years ago they were training her to be some sort of psychic or clairvoyant or telekinetic or something. That's why they kept testing her brain. Ten years of pointless tests and still she hadn't been able to move so much as a mote of dust in a sunbeam or see two seconds into the future. She was beginning to think the doctors were wasting their time.
Indigo bit her lip, concentrated, and stared at the red block until it felt like it was burned into her brain. She closed her eyes and concentrated, forming the red block on the table in her mind. She concentrated on the block, fixing it in her mind's eye. She imagined an invisible arm extending from her head; she could feel the fingers closing around the block. She could feel the block's resistance. It was solid in her mind. Indigo paused. It had never been like this before. She could feel something! She began to feel elated; her heart began to race.
Using the invisible arm, she willed the fingers to grip the block and she pulled back. In her mind, she could feel the actual weight of the block as it lifted off the table. There was a tug, a pulling sensation as the weight of the block actually registered with her imaginary arm. Butterflies jumped in her stomach. She was doing it! It had never felt more real. Indigo opened her eyes, nervously, excited, fully expecting to see the block hovering before her, gripped in the invisible, telekinetic hand.
It hadn't moved an inch. It hadn't shifted. It was still on the table, stubborn and defiant.
"Damn it!" Indigo swung out with her heavy-soled Doc Martens' and kicked the leg of the table. The leg bent inward and the table collapsed, the block bounced away into a corner.
"It's okay, Indigo," said Sebbins. "Come here and look at your brain activity. This is a huge step forward. Honest. Your hypothalamus lit up like a Christmas tree just then. That's exactly the type of activity we've been waiting to see!"
"No. No, it's not. It's the same junk that has happened since I was brought here. I'm so tired of this, Seb! I thought something was supposed to be happening by now!" She ripped the cap off her head and flung it into a large, glass tank in the corner.
"Frustration is a natural reaction, Indigo. Don't let it get to you. Take a moment and then come try again."
"No! Maybe you don't let it get to you, but I let it get to me! This is useless and you know it! What are we doing? Most people stop beating their head against the wall the first time it hurts. I've been slamming my head into spikes for years and there hasn't been one iota of progress!"
"Indigo---come look!" Sebbins turned a computer monitor toward Indigo. A pattern of red spikes jutted wildly across the screen. "Look at the activity!"
"No! Screw this. I'm going to go take a nap." Indigo spun on her heel and made a perfect, huffy drama-queen power-stride out the door, as any good teenager thro
wing a tantrum should.
Indigo raced out of the lab, down a corridor, and into the elevator. The elevator let her out in the kitchen. She walked through the kitchen and into the entryway of the Home. She turned left at the large, spiral staircase that lead upstairs to the residence hall. At the top of the stairs, she turned right and walked down the hall to her room. She kicked the door open leaving a dent in the wood. She slammed the door behind her and threw herself onto her bed, fuming. Tears pricked at corners of her eyes. She had felt it this time. It had been real! For ten years, she had jumped through the hoops and been a good little trained puppy. She had done all the tests, no matter how ridiculous she felt they were. She had dealt with the pain of the poking, prodding, and needles and scans. Beneath her hair, her scalp was a weave of scars. She had put up with the constant invasion of privacy. She had buried the pain of being sent away by her parents.
But why?
What hurt the most was that deep down Indigo really wanted these alleged abilities to work. She wanted to have the abilities that Cormair hinted she might have. She wanted to be psychic, or telekinetic, or clairvoyant, or whatever the hell it was she could do with her supposedly "special" brain. To be truly unique---not just in the way she dressed or the books she read or the music she listened to---to be unique among the unique was what kept her in the Home. It kept her from running away. It kept her submitting willingly to the tests. And now she felt it was all for nothing, a pointless exercise in futility.
A fire of rage burned in her gut. Indigo didn't want to give into the tears. She swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to push away the years of failure. A scream welled up in her chest and she let it pour forth, pushing her face into the pillows on her bed so that she could scream as loudly as she wanted without alerting Nurse Hathcock or the housekeeper, Ms. Miller. She wanted to feel aggression. She wanted some sort of emotion to counteract the failure and sadness.
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