“What was it you did?”
“Mostly air dropped things. Pamphlets, drugs, odd little boxes built by the CIA—”
“No, I mean you were one of PRI’s kids weren’t you? That was why they recruited you, right?”
“Oh yes…”
Dad told her that, by the time he entered the Army, the ASI had developed a number of blood tests that could screen out probable psychics. They had a laundry list of indicator hormones and neurotransmitters, and they were able to slip the tests into otherwise normal physicals. In Vietnam they managed to screen out over a thousand people that way. Many of the talents were unstable, liable to burn out while the person was still a teenager, most of the people ASI recruited were eighteen, and half were still “usable.”
Dad’s talent was what Prometheus called a Class II. He was a dice roller. Or, as his friends in the army called him, he was a lucky charm.
“It was a side effect of my talent that most of my tour was boring. Most of the time we were never even shot at. There was one time we were hit by a SAM, but the missile never went off, it just sheared the tip off of one wing.”
ASI had him pilot thirty of forty missions, into North Vietnam, until the blood tests suggested his talents were flaring out. Shortly after he was grounded, he slipped in an Officer’s Club and fractured his leg. He spent the rest of his military career in a hospital.
“By then, I’d put in my time and the Army discharged me.”
Unfortunately for Dad, things had changed while he was away. His brother and grandfather had died in a fire that had swept through the farmhouse. His parents dealt with it as best they could, but the stress ended in their divorce, and the sale of the farm.
“My grandparents?” Allison asked.
Dad smiled. It was a sad smile, but the first real one he’d given her. “Oh, they’re still kicking. Your granddad opened a farm supply store back home. He’s still running it and a few others as well. He refuses to retire. Your grandmother went back to school, moved to Washington DC. I think it might be a reaction to my being drafted, but she became an anti-war activist. She actually met your mom before I did. She’s working for Amnesty International last I heard— but I don’t keep in touch much.”
It was bizarre hearing about his half of her family. It was bizarre just having an extended family.
“I’d like to meet them someday.”
Dad reached out and squeezed her hand. “I hope you can.”
“Your brother,” Allison asked, “how old was he?”
“Sixteen.”
“Do you think…?” Allison couldn’t finish the question. But she could see in her Dad’s eyes that he knew what she was asking. These talents PRI bred, they could be dangerous. Dad had said that the more powerful the talents of the second generation were, the less reliable they were.
“That he could have been the cause of the fire? I wish I knew.”
“Why did you keep working for them?” Allison asked.
Dad sighed. “No grand reason. I did it because they hired me and they paid well.”
“So you ended up running security here?”
“Eventually—”
Dad was interrupted by the door opening. “Your hour is up,” said Mr. Busey, as Allison had begun thinking of the guard.
“But—” she objected. The time had gone much too fast for her. There was so much else she wanted to talk about, even when she excluded the things she couldn’t say while PRI was monitoring their conversation.
“Shh Allie,” Dad said as he stood up. “I’ll see you in a couple of days. They don’t want you to think they’re keeping me from you.” There was a little smile in the way he said that, as if he was hoarding some secret victory between them.
“Yeah, right.” Allison said, realizing that Dad was aware of how much Stone valued her. He might even know that she was the one who’d forced the meeting.
“Hey, this will work out somehow.” Dad’s voice made it an empty sentiment, but something in his eyes said “we’ll get them.” She wondered if she imagined it.
“Believe it or not, I do love you.” He squeezed her hand as he said “love” and let it drop as he left.
Allison looked at her hand. There were things she needed to talk to Dad about. Things she couldn’t talk about in front of microphones.
But what if those things weren’t what she was talking about? She kept staring at her hand, thought of Zack’s comic books, and began developing the germ of an idea.
“This will work out somehow,” she whispered.
8:15 PM
George sat at one end of the table in the briefing room. Stone sat at the other. George shook his head, an expression of disbelief on his face.
Stone held up his hand to silence a scientist who was speaking. “Is there something wrong, George?”
George let out a humorless chuckle. “Wrong? If I understand right, you killed Elroy to cut open his brain. What the hell could be wrong?”
The scientist who had been addressing the room said, “There were chemical and structural studies that we couldn’t do with the MRI—”
“Christ, Simpson thinks I’m objecting on a practical basis.” George whispered.
“We can talk about your problems later,” Stone said to George. Then he turned to Simpson and said, “Please continue.”
Simpson nodded, glancing at George before he went on. He pressed a button on the remote in his hand and, in response, an image was projected on the wall of the room. The image showed a magnified view of a tangled mass of nerve cells. “This shows what I’ve been describing about Billy Jackson— Elroy. Pay particular attention to the density of the interconnections here.” He pressed the remote again. “And here. These are from sites we know are related to Class I activity. And for your reference—” The image changed again to show a picture formed of a series of vertical gray bars, each crossed by random black stripes of varied intensity. Three sites had been highlighted by red boxes. “This is Billy Jackson’s genetic profile. The sites we relate to Class I, II and III activity are marked.”
Simpson walked in front of the projection and pointed to the one box that enclosed a number of black bars. “Obviously, from Billy Jackson’s profile even the non-biologists here can see this is the Class I site. The other markers are absent.” He indicated the other red boxes, which enclosed empty spots on two other bars.
“Now, back to the anomaly—” he pressed his remote. The image changed to a view of neurons again, similar to the first but slightly different. “This is from the only site— so far— that we can associate with Class III activity. These branchings should not be there. And the biochemical tests bear out the fact that Billy Jackson had developed into a latent Class III.”
Stone shook his head. “Is this something we could have missed earlier?”
“Emphatically not. Biochemically, at least, Billy Jackson had changed after he had gone into the field. For the first time we have a brain and neurochemistry different from the genetic profile.”
“I assume you’ve double-checked everything?”
Simpson nodded.
“So what about the girl?” Stone asked.
“We’ve only got preliminary tests from the blood the field team extracted. We’ll have better data after this afternoon’s tests are fully processed—”
“Fine,” Stone said, “You’ve hedged. Now what do we know?”
“She just has the Class III genetic markers, which we could have predicted. But the chemical markers—” he paused.
“Yes?”
“This is preliminary, you understand.”
Stone nodded.
“She has all the markers we associate with Class I and Class II activity.”
One of the seated scientists shook her head. “Great, you’ve just shot down all the work we’ve done in genetic sequencing.”
“No,” George said. He was still shaking his head, and he said with a weary voice, “He hasn’t. Your great Change, Stone, isn’t it?”
“It’s why I called this briefing.” Stone gave George a cold smile. “You should be happy that, for once here, physics has led the life sciences.”
The scientist who’d complained about genetics spoke, “Would someone explain this to me?”
Stone looked at George, “You are the physicist, and you did bring the girl in.”
The color drained from George’s face as he stood. He gave a curt nod to Simpson, almost a dismissive gesture, and began to address the assembled scientists. “Most of you are here, at PRI, because you are practical scientists. My realm has been theory, trying to explain the data you people keep handing me. Collectively, we in physics have tried to provide the Institute with a coherent description of the non-local mind, a quantum description of the events you record here. A description of the mind as a wave function.”
George stopped walking while he stood in front of the projected neurons. He did not look like a man used to talking before an audience. His eyes tried to hide in the shadows of the projected image.
“Our best efforts so far have been predicting the interference of one mind with another, especially how some talents will cancel others. But is characteristic of waves that interference need not be destructive, damping the wave. There is a possibility, which we’ve predicted, that there could be constructive interference.”
There was an excited babble in the room which persisted until Stone cleared his throat. George loosened his tie as the room silenced. Stone said quietly, “Layman’s terms, for the psychologists.”
There was one nervous chuckle in the room. It wasn’t from George.
He walked over to a lab cart where a pair of small devices sat. “Mr. Stone wanted a demonstration. I have here a pair of signal generators.” He switched on one of the devices, and a low, bass tone filled the room. “You’re listening to a rather low-amplitude sound wave.” He turned on the other. Another low sound filled the room, and the combined noise was barely audible. “Two sounds are now being piped in from opposite ends of the room, through the PA system. In a perfectly controlled environment you would be hearing nothing now, because both waves are exactly ninety-degrees out of phase. The interference is destructive, the waves are destroying each other, in the way that psi talents cancel each other out…”
George adjusted the dial on one device, “Note I am not changing the amplitude—the ‘volume’— of the waves—”
Even so, the low bass sound became louder and louder until it hurt the fillings in the listeners’ teeth and vibrated the floor beneath them. The sound became intolerable just at the point Stone said, “Enough.” He had to raise his voice.
George flipped the switch on one of the boxes. The sound level dropped down to the original soft bass tone. “That was constructive interference.”
11:05 PM
Allison sat on the roof of the girl’s dormitory. The area was fenced in well short of the roof’s edge, but she still had a view of the area beyond where she was supposed to go. At the moment she was staring off in the direction of the landing strip, invisible now except for the lights along its edge.
She had been sitting here, and thinking, for hours.
“Allison Boyle, I presume.” The voice was female, and it came from behind her. Allison turned to face the speaker, though she had an idea of who it was.
“Jessica Mason,” Allison said.
It was. Her red hair was unmistakable, even in the ill-lit gloom up here. Something subliminal about Jessica— her expression, her body language— put Allison on edge.
“I’m here to offer a belated welcome to the Institute.” She smiled at Allison, but it was a frightening smile. It was a smile someone might make while inflicting, or receiving, great pain.
Allison nodded and said, “Thank you.” It was the only appropriate thing she could think of.
Jessica walked to the fence surrounding the small courtyard on the roof. Light from below painted chain-link shadows on Jessica’s face. “I see you’re already pushing the boundaries, Allison.”
“Huh?” Allison stood up.
“It’s an hour after curfew. What if security found out?”
It was Allison’s turn for a grim smile. “I’m quite sure they know exactly where I am at all times.”
Jessica looked at her, and her smile disappeared. “You’re taking liberties. That’s dangerous.”
Allison folded her arms and resisted an urge to back away. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I want to know what you want, Allison.”
The tone of voice, her forced familiarity, reminded Allison of Chuck. The thought should have scared her, or at least heightened the paranoid anxiety that had gripped her ever since PRI had taken her here. Instead, Allison felt her resolve strengthen. She looked Jessica in the eyes and tried to discover something in there.
“I want to be left alone.” I want my life back.
Jessica stared back with an intensity that seemed to deaden any expression she had. “Is that all? I hope it is.”
An odd breeze brushed Allison’s cheek, a wind warmer than the cooling scrubland surrounding Prometheus, a breath of air from much earlier in the day. Then it was gone. Jessica looked away as the breeze passed, and Allison remembered what Zack said. Jessica was not under any chemical restraints.
“You’ve talked to Zachary Lanagan.”
Zachary Lanagan? In another context, Allison might have found the name amusing.
Jessica paced in a slow circle around her. “He’s given you some distorted notions of who I am.”
“So who are you?” Allison asked.
“Do you know what this place really is? Do you know what it means?” Jessica kept pacing around her. The words sounded as if they were written by Howard Stone, but the tone was different. There was no trace of idealism or mysticism, however twisted, around Jessica. Her speech was matter-of-fact, basic, practical. “Prometheus is designed to make superhumans. Everything here is designed to create people who do what we do, better than we do, freed of all the accidents of biology.” Jessica stopped pacing. “You know what it means when they succeed?”
“Stone’s Change?”
Jessica laughed. “Stone wants a Messiah. He wants his little factory to churn out a hundred thousand Christs… There’s going to be a change all right. But it’s going to be a less than spiritual one.” She turned around and looked at Allison again. “When they open that door, unleash that power, we are going to inherit this planet.”
This time Allison did take a step back. “What are you talking about?”
“Inevitability. The question is not if we’ll take control, but who will be in charge when it happens.”
“That’s insane,” Allison said. Her voice had faded to a whisper.
Jessica smiled coldly. “Why? Even with what’s here, in this compound today, a competent leader could take over a small government completely. One coercer here, a few dice rollers at the polls, enough telepaths providing enough information to control the legislature. And then there are the Class IIIs like you and me…”
Allison stepped back again, and Jessica took a step forward. “The human body is such a delicate instrument.” Jessica smiled when she said that.
“You can’t be serious about all this.”
“Don’t be naïve,” Jessica said. “Whatever Stone says, it’s why we’re here. PRI thinks they’ll be in control when the floodgates open. But it will be me.”
“I see.”
“I don’t think you do. You’ve come in here, and you’ve taken some obvious security in the value Prometheus places on your talents. But I’ve spent six years here, preparing. If I wanted to, my people could take this place. Do you believe me?”
All Allison could do was stand there and look at her. Belatedly, the fear finally came. It was no longer the paranoid fear of PRI, but fear of just how little control they might have over what they were unleashing. Slowly, she nodded.
“You want to be left alone. I’ll leave you alone. But I want you to believe t
his: I’ve earned what I have and God help anyone who threatens it. Anyone. Never once think your value to Prometheus protects you from that.” Jessica turned and left Allison alone on the roof.
Beyond the airstrip, the Texas wilderness looked lonelier than ever.
TWENTY FIVE
NAVARRO COUNTY, TX: Tuesday November 2, 1999
6:45 AM
Allison sat upright in her bed. The taste of dust was in her mouth, the memory of the abandoned corridors of Euclid Heights High fresh in her mind. Three nights in a row. It scared her. It was as if Chuck had locked himself into some dim corner of her mind and waited for the moment when her defenses were at their lowest to torment her.
That thought woke her up the rest of the way. She sat up in her bed and ran her tongue over the hallucinatory grit in her mouth. Maybe that’s exactly what was happening, why she heard the whispers about time, why she noticed all those clocks.
As if to confirm the suspicion, the taste of dust disappeared, as if she had already swallowed their little yellow pill. She shuddered. If I’m right, than I really am in some sort of contact with Chuck, and these are more than just nightmares.
It was an ugly thought, but she could almost hear Chuck’s voice saying, “Bingo, sweetcakes.”
She hugged herself and whispered, “Stop calling me that.”
◆◆◆
Allison tried to shower the feelings away. She didn’t want to believe that Chuck was still there, in her head. It was fine to think such things in a dream, but it was very bad when the idea began to make sense in the real world—
If there was still such a thing as the real world.
But it made a perverted sort of sense. Chuck’s nocturnal visits could have been a product of her own mind, but if they were, why did they cease when they put her on the yellow pill? She could even remember, before he had faded away, about him mentioning something about “anti-mindwarp crap.” Could that be the same thing as Zack’s “pharmaceutical leash?”
She even began wondering how Chuck could know something like that before she did.
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