by Leito, Chad
“Although the chimp and human’s DNA is 98.5 percent identical, their features are not 98.5 percent identical.
“Why is this?
“The answer to this seeming discrepancy is that only two percent of human DNA is ever ‘turned on’.
“If we were to travel up or down one of your DNA ladders, we would find vast patterns of genes that were turned on, followed by even vaster patterns of genes that were turned off. Whether or not a gene is turned ‘on,’ or ‘off’ is controlled by little switchboards on the ladders.”
Volkner picked up the knife and played with it in his hands as he spoke the information. Asa was typing fast, trying to get it all down.
“Because of this, genetic manipulation isn’t as difficult as it was once thought. This is because a lot of people have a bunch of ‘junk cells’ that can be turned on to alter the body. For instance, even though humans’ do not grow wings, they still have the genetic capability to. But, it’s just turned off. So, we give you an injection to turn it back on.
"There is an abundance of truly remarkable things in these 'junk cells,' many of which remain to be undiscovered.
“Other animals have bits of DNA information like this too; the majority of the vast library of instructions in their cells is 'turned off'. You might have noticed the raccoons. They are an example of an animal that we have genetically altered their temperament. When the Academy was founded, we needed an efficient, cheap way to clean our facilities. So, we searched for an animal that already had a natural preoccupation with cleanliness—raccoons keep their dens in tip-top shape. We brought them here, and attempted to alter them until we got the perfect mix. I believe that we killed ten thousand before perfecting the formula, but it was well worth it.
“What was I talking of originally? I tend to go off on tangents.
“Mmmmm, yes. I was talking about what I am. I am a Multiplier.
"Me being a Multiplier means many things, but for the sake of security, I will only focus on the few that you will need to know. The first thing that it means is that I am not an Academy graduate. Graduates are the members of the Academy who go out and perform the ground work for the organization. Multipliers have been band from this responsibility for the past 11 years. The second thing that my post means is that I benefit from genetic advances that no one else does. I am stronger, and faster than any non-Multiplier on earth. My muscle fibers are bound to a degree that makes them seven times denser than a normal humans." He smiled, his black gums showing again.
Vokner paused and twirled the knife in his fingers. Asa looked up from typing and concentrated on the pain in his lower back. He shifted forward and flexed his muscles, trying to feel the two distinct spots where his wings were growing—trying his best to ensure that they werent' coming in in a place that would spontaneously shoot out his spinal cord.
"Now that I've properly and thoroughly introduced myself, I will begin the task of introducing the Academy."
Volkner cocked his head at one of Asa's classmates and Asa saw, to his horror, that he was raising his hand. The Fishie with his hand raised was bald, and Asa noticed, after a second of studying him, that it was the same tall, lanky Fishie with the wine-stain scars on the back of his head that Charlotte had been talking to on the ship ride across the Moat.
Is he going to ask a question? Has he forgotten about the warnings and the talking ban? Is he trying to get himself killed?
Volkner picked up his knife and walked over to the Fishie, who was sitting in the front row. Volkner tossed his blade as he went. He stood over the boy so that his shadow fell on him. "Do you have a question?" Volkner asked. His eyebrows were raised and his mouth was contorted in a dreadful way that Asa didn't know whether to label a snarl or a smile.
The Fishie had one long, slender hand raised in the air, and was staring at his computer screen as though he didn't know that Volkner had even approached. "Why is your hand up? Communicating that you need something?" Volkner asked, stressing the word communicating.
The scarred Fishie kept his hand in the air and did not move his eyes from his computer screen. He kept as still as a statue.
Volkner bent his knees and knelt, limber as a cat, beside the Fishie. He looked him in the face. "They've told me about you," he growled. "They told me how smart you are. They told me about how you argued against Einstein on that YouTube video."
The Fishie kept his right hand held erectly in the air, and stared at his computer screen. Volkner took his blade up from beside him and pushed the laptop with the tip, making it slide across the table and out of the Fishie’s view.
Volkner's voice dropped even lower. It was an awful, unearthly sound, too low for any human to make. It sounded like a lawn mower talking. "They told me that you want to be called Stridor—that you came up with the name yourself. They told me that you were bold, and smart, and that you were special. Can I tell you something, Stridor?"
A stream of black liquid, as thick as molasses and dark as night began to run down Volkner's chin from the corner of his mouth. He reached his white sleeve up and wiped away the drool, leaving a stain that looked like motor oil on his shirt. "You're not special here. I don't think you're special. You haven't proven anything to me."
Stridor kept still. He honestly looked like he didn't know anyone was speaking to him. This seemed to infuriate Volkner who was kneeling beside him. Asa could smell the breath from where he sat, two rows back. A Fishie with soft blond hair sat beside Stridor. She looked to be only twelve, even though Asa knew that she had to be around fifteen. Her hands were shaking and silent tears were rolling down her cheeks. Asa could sympathize with her: something in the way Volkner smelled, something in the stench that came out of his bacteria ridden mouth made Asa's instincts scream at him to pick up his chair, hurl it at the predator, and run for his life. His heart was racing, his blood pressure was up, and he was taking deep, quick breaths in and out of his nose. Stridor, on the other hand, seemed to be about to fall asleep. His face looked bored, and he still kept the convincing appearance that he was not aware that someone was holding a knife and breathing into his face.
The blade of the knife was eight or nine inches long, and the shaft appeared to be made of bone.
"Would it offend you, Stridor, if I called you Mark? That's what your daddy named you, right? I heard that you don't like to be called Mark, so you made up the name Stridor. It sounds tough, it really does. Especially if you don't know that you took it to sound tough; you took the new name, Mark, because you thought your daddy didn't deserve to pick your name. He picked out Mark, didn't he?"
Stridor still didn't move.
"You know, Mark," Volkner began. His voice hit an even lower, gurgling octave, and the black liquid dripped from his mouth once more. "I could make you scream. I could make you cry, like your daddy did. I could make those acid burns on your head look like childs-play." Volkner took a glance at Stridor's computer, turned, and spat sludge onto the floor. "I see what you did. You looked up that clause in the Academy Rule Book, raised your hand, and expected me to come talk about it. I could call this communication, you know? I could kill you. I could. Make my day, Stridor. Please. Say a word."
Stridor kept his composure; his hand remained raised in the air, and he continued to stare straight ahead. Asa was now torn between two beliefs; the thought that Stridor was a fantastic actor and the thought that Stridor may actually not be able to hear what's going on.
Volkner stood and faced the classroom. His face looked horrible; instead of the pale, smooth complexion he had earlier, his face was red and blotchy; instead of the serene, careless expression his face wore when he began class, his eyebrows were now bent inward in a death stare and his upper lip kept twitching into a nasty snarl; instead of the white, clean suit that he had walked in wearing, his suit was now soiled across the front with the thick, black poison that was streaming from his mouth, painting his chin and neck black on its way down.
"Class, Stridor has communicated an interesting point
. He has pulled up Section 15, document A, paragraph 4 on his laptop, raised his hand, and waited for me to come around. Paragraph four states that if an Academy member kills a Fishie for talking in the week long ban, and there are three Fishies who claim that the Fishie was wrongly killed, that the staff member who did the killing may be punished. Punished is not defined. Then, paragraph five goes on to state that if a Fishie is in an actually life threatening situation, they may use their ability to communicate in an attempt to save them.
"I don't know what you're trying to do, by bringing this to my attention, Mr. Stridor, MARK, but let me clarify something. If the Fishie communicates, under paragraph 5, they must be in an actually life threatening situation, or the clause doesn't protect them, understand. If you just think that I’m going to kill you, that doesn’t cut it."
Stridor remained still. Volkner walked toward him with his knife outstretched until the tip was pressed to Stridor's throat. Stridor swallowed once, but that was all. Volkner pressed the blade into the skin. "Go ahead, scream," he growled.
They stood like that for ten seconds. Asa hadn't realized that there was a clock in that room until that point, when he could hear it click off time in the dead quiet of the room. Then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. Volkner lowered the blade, and began to walk back to the front of the room.
He was mid stride, moving forward, and then Volkner became a screaming blur, sprinting back the other direction. He had his knife up in the air, above Stridor's head, before Asa could blink. The muscles in his black-painted neck were bulging, and Asa tensed where he sat, ready to see blood.
It came, but not from where Asa was expecting.
Volkner reared back like he was about to stab Stridor; the young Fishie sat completely motionless, his hand still in the air. Volkner brought his left hand, the one without the knife, down onto the table with such a booming, resonating, powerful force that Asa had no doubt in his mind that the man was telling the truth about his muscle fibers—he was impossibly powerful.
The blond girl, the one who sat beside Stridor, and the one who looked much younger than she was, had been crying steadily harder throughout the whole process. By the time Stridor turned around, black sludge dripping from his infested mouth, the tears were falling from her cheeks to the ground below. When the hand struck the table, she screamed—short and piercing. She shut her mouth immediately, and was about to bring her hands up to her mouth when it happened.
The knife was brought through the back of her skull and out the front, where it was lodged into the table. The girl's head looked like a smashed pumpkin. Blood dripped to the floor. Stridor kept his hand up.
Volkner stepped back, and screamed, stamped his feet, and then kicked the desk. "Why won't you respond to me!?"
Stridor hadn't moved. He was spotted with red.
"LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO, YOU BRAT!"
The black stuff was flowing harder than before, falling to the floor as though from a water hose.
"GET OUT, ALL OF YOU. LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO! CLASS DISMISSED! OUT! GET OUT! NOW!"
Stridor finally moved. He stood, grabbed his laptop, fit it into an armband, and made his way down the aisle to the back of the room with rest of the class. Volkner retreated to the back closet. Asa was the last to exit. He couldn't be sure, but before the door shut behind him, he thought that he heard weeping inside the classroom.
12
Teddy Communicates
As Asa left the classroom, he thought about what McCoy had told him before they left Alfatrex Station Number 63—“Asa, don’t tell anyone about what happened to you, okay? Where you’re going, there are people…they’re not bad people, but… they might not know what’s best. Just be careful, okay?”
Just be careful, okay?
The words seemed absurd to Asa now. He would have to be more than careful to survive this place. He thought of how McCoy had said that there aren’t bad people in the Academy. His hands turned into fists as he walked, and he looked at Stridor out in front of him, blood covering the front his clothes. Volkner was deadly: Asa was sure of it. Harold Kensing had said so, and the more that time went on, the more Asa trusted the officer’s opinion.
As they left the classroom, a message appeared on their armbands:
Fishies,
You are free to rest. You are hereby granted the remainder of the day off. You may do with it what you please. This will not be your normal schedule. Remember, the talking ban is still in effect. Since you are in an organization designed to “weed out” the weakest, we cannot make decisions for you; however, it is highly advised that you do not enter the jungles surrounding the mountains in your free time. Keep to the walkways. The things that lurk in the vegetation are wild, unchecked, unknown creatures. It would be wise for you not to spend time with them.
Regards,
Hubert Boistly
As Asa read the message, and immense sense of joy overwhelmed him. He had been tired, his back had been hurting, and his sick, poisoned stomach had been doing awful turns during class. Even though he wanted to find out more about the place that he was in, he needed to rest.
He walked down through the cavernous opening in the mountain where the classrooms sat, down the long windowed hallway that overlooked the mountains (the raccoons were still cleaning the glass, dangling in their harnesses outside), and he followed the red arrows in a backward direction until he reached the boys' dormitory.
Asa was among a large group of Fishies who were also moving towards bed. He could see Teddy sauntering over the hardwood, but didn't dare make any attempt at communicating with him. In his deliriously tired state, he was almost glad for the talking ban; he was happy just turning his brain off and walking towards his bed.
Huge fires cracked and breathed up chimneys around the dormitory, warming the wooden room. Out the huge windows on the far end, Asa could see the distant, snowy caps of mountains.
He crossed over the massive hardwood floors, climbed the thick wooden ladder beside Teddy's bed, and crawled into his own. He copied other Fishies' examples, and took off his armband and slid it over the cylinder on the inside of his chest. The stitching on the screen began to reconfigure, threading itself until the word—CHARGING—appeared. Next to the cylinder Asa found, to his surprise, an icebox that he had never seen before. He opened it up and found that the area was filled with a variety of snack foods. He drained a box of orange juice, and ate a container of yogurt. When he was finished, he found a small compartment on the inside lining of his chest that had the word trash on the inside. Asa dropped his plastics down the chute, and laid back down in the bed, pulling the soft silks and linens up over his body.
He had been through so much the past few days. He had been pulled over, had his life threatened, he had been shot at, been tied to weights and thrown into a lake, and been poisoned. Asa's body and his brain were exhausted.
The skies were blue outside and Asa could see a bird flying in the far off distance, making its way over the Moat. My guardians, Asa thought to himself. Despite the distance, he could tell that the animal was a crow by the way that it moved. He felt safe knowing that the animals were near.
With his stomach full, and a view of the mountains that he couldn't help but call beautiful, Asa's eyes shut and he fell asleep.
“Fishies! Get up! Come over by the hearth. C’mon! All of you! Up! Get over here!”
Asa’s first thought upon opening his eyes was I feel much better. He looked out the large, wall-wide window before him, and saw a crow perched on the ledge, staring in at Asa.
“C’mon! Get up! We haven’t got all day!” One of the graduates was calling for them. “Everyone come over here by the hearth.”
The Fishies were sliding out of bed and pacing over to the roaring fire. Nearly all of them had been sleeping. Asa climbed down the ladder and looked at Teddy who was sitting up in bed, seemingly bewildered—his blonde hair was sticking up in every direction and he had red lines on the right side of his face where the cre
ases in his pillow had been stamped into his cheek.
Asa was getting more accustomed to the talking ban, and didn’t even feel an urge to say something to Teddy. He walked past him, and joined the crowd that was waiting around the hearth for the Academy graduate, a chaperone that he had seen before, to talk.
Although Asa had only been at The Academy for twenty-four hours, he was getting more accustomed to the way that things were ran. He had figured out through context clues that the chaperones that led the Fishies had once been a part of the Academy themselves, and graduated. Beyond that, the graduates’ past was a mystery. He did not know the extent of their duties, or if they had to go through more training than just the Academy.
Likewise, Asa was developing a better sense of what his responsibilities were. He figured that The Academy was somehow linked with Alfatrex—the company that created the Wolf Flu vaccine. If not, then why was their symbol, a black viper, everywhere, and why was Robert King so involved in everything?
He knew that Alfatrex had picked an elite group of fifteen year olds to go through some kind of program that would sift out the ones who would be valuable to the company from the ones that would not be. They had chosen the girl who made cooking gadgets, Teddy who worked at Duke, and Stridor, the math prodigy. As Asa looked around him, he would bet that Alfatrex had a reason for picking every person in the room.
But why me? What have I done that’s so great?
Asa didn’t know. He could not say what was special about him. In every way he could think of, he was either average, or just a little above or below. He was 6’01”, which put him a little taller than the average person in his age group. He scored in the average range on IQ tests. He was slightly below average when it came to tasks that required him to memorize a lot of information—history, geology, geography. He was, in every way that he could think of, completely normal.
Volkner said that only a quarter of us would make it. If prodigies surround me, what are the chances that I can survive?
