by Lan Chan
“Will,” Jenny warned. Another look. This time one that said she had it under control. Then she turned to me. “I’ve never known you as the type to just settle for what’s easy. There are worse things than finishing school and going to university and getting a day job.”
“Jenny’s right,” Dad chimed in. “As much as we’d like to think so, the world isn’t always kind to espers. Some have a much better life just never manifesting their powers.”
“Fine,” I said, tired of the same argument I’d been having with him for years. Maybe it was a remnant from his job, but Dad had spent a great deal of my life warning me about the downside of my powers. “I’ll try harder. May I be excused? I’m getting a headache.”
Not strictly a lie—I did feel the stirring of a familiar migraine at the base of my skull—but it was also a surefire way for me to get out of any more lecturing. They let me go, but I fell asleep listening to their hushed but terse conversation.
20
Dad insisted on driving me to the test facility the next morning. It was located just outside the country town of Bendigo. I’d booked a spot on the St. Matthews bus that was going to take the rest of the seniors, but given my unique circumstances, I guess he wasn’t taking any chances.
Besides, Dad would have gone to the facility anyway as one of their chief testing officers. He would help to assess the students from City High and some of the other kids from smaller schools. Due to a conflict of interest, he would have to stay away from St. Matthews altogether. That was fine by me.
I wasn’t complaining about the comfortable ride, but it meant leaving at the crack of dawn and enduring Dad’s antiquated taste in music.
“Seriously, what exactly is an American Pie, and why is this guy so obsessed with food that he’s written a whole song about it?” I asked, knowing full well it really revved him up when I teased him about pre-Reset music.
“He’s not talking about a food pie,” Dad said. “It’s a metaphor for a dream life that was lost. You know if you bothered to show up to music class—”
I burst out laughing. He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re hysterical; you know that? Too bad you have to finish school, or you could be a comedian.” I grew quiet again, thinking of last night’s conversation.
“You know there’s no pressure from Jenny and me if you decide you don’t want to exhibit your full esper potential today, don’t you?” Dad said after a while. He stared pointedly at the rearview mirror to avoid looking at me. As a result, the car veered to the left, cutting into the lane beside us on the highway. A semitrailer drew up dangerously close to my passenger side. I locked on telepathically to the truck’s onboard computer and slammed on its brakes. The truck driver blared his horn. Dad jerked the wheel to the right.
“Are you all right, Dad?” I asked. His knuckles were white against the steering wheel.
“Yeah, fine,” he said. “Just didn’t get much sleep last night.” I wasn’t surprised.
“Do you want me to drive?” I tapped my temple with my fingers, indicating the kind of driving that I meant.
“I can handle it,” he said dryly. “I’m serious though; the testers will be impressed enough with the strength of your telepathy.”
“You’re asking me to take a dive on my Psi-Q test?”
“No.” He shook his head emphatically. “All I’m saying is that a number on a government file somewhere isn’t the be-all and end-all.”
“But a letter on a report card is?” I countered.
“Don’t start this again.”
So I didn’t. We drove in silence for the remainder of the trip. It took over an hour and a half to reach the test facility. It used to be a military base before the Reset. You could still see remnants of barbed-wire fencing and guard posts at four corners of the site. Cold grey brick buildings sat squat on one side, and open fields with various obstacles occupied the other. It wasn’t exactly state of the art, but then again, that’s how you could tell it was a government facility.
Today was test day for the whole city. The parking lot was filling up with private cars and special school buses rented for the occasion.
This test was mandatory for all fifteen-year-olds. Most would leave with confirmation that they weren’t espers but there were enough around that the snotty feeling in my brain was in full itch mode. Maybe it was just Dad’s constant warnings, but for some reason, a chill ran down my spine. I shivered.
“Thanks a lot for getting in my head, Dad,” I grumbled. “I’m starting to freak out.” Instead of giving me sympathy, Dad gave me a goofy grin.
“Good to know I can still lay down the parental guilt trip,” he said. He parked in a spot close to the administration building. I got out of the car and slung my backpack over my shoulder. Each breath I took condensed in front of me. The sun had barely made it over the cloudless horizon, but it was shaping up to be a sunny day.
It might almost be summer in Melbourne, but the weather said otherwise. It was so temperamental. One second the sun would be out, and the next, there would be torrential rain. I knew better than to complain about the cold. Dad would rib me mercilessly about being weak and remind me that I was born in Scotland, where it rained non-stop for weeks. It always concerned me that I had no memories of that time. I could have sworn I had a skin-memory of a more tropical climate.
“Hey, kiddo,” Dad said. I could barely hear him because he was rooting around in the backseat of the car. “Let’s have a pizza and cartoon night tonight. Just you and me. Jenny’s staying back at work to catch up on paperwork.” He shut the door and locked the car with his remote.
Coming up beside me, he followed the direction of my gaze. Not long after we arrived, the St. Matthews bus drove through the gates. My classmates assembled below the bus steps, taking in the picturesque scene of asphalt, overgrown grass, and wreckages of light aircrafts downed by the EMP and left to decay as the country scrambled to get back on its feet. A plinth had been erected in amongst the aircraft garden, turning it into a monument. The kids laughed and joked with each other as they stood around and waited.
“Go get ‘em, kiddo,” Dad said. He gave me a hug. I was the telepath, but Dad was a master at picking up emotional cues. A lifetime of putting up with my eccentric mother would do that to a man. Not that it took a genius to figure out the inverse equation between school attendance to friend quota. It was even harder since we’d moved around so much because of Mum’s nutty whims. “You’re going to be fine, Will,” he said.
“Thanks, Will,” I said back. Despite my apprehension, our nickname in-joke shook away some of the nerves. No matter where I went, Will was with me. I hadn’t realised I needed that today.
I joined my classmates. Thankfully we didn’t have to wait long until Miss D’Amilio started sorting us into alphabetical order by our surnames. By now, everyone’s nerves were getting the better of them. So were their egos. More than once, a Telekinetic kid would lose control, and there would be sticks and trash to avoid.
City High was lined up at an entrance next to us. I recognised Jane from our encounter yesterday. She seemed to have completely gotten over her heartbreak from the way she and another boy from her school were inhaling each other’s faces.
At nine, we were ushered into a big auditorium set up like an exam room. We filed in and were handed forms and pens. Thanks again to Mum’s pain-in-the-neck surname stubbornness, I was seated pretty much in the middle of the room. I could have been at the front with all the rest of the A surname kids who got to go first and get their tests over with.
I shuffled the pamphlets stacked neatly on my desk. One was an answer form for a multiple-choice questionnaire. The other was an advertisement for the various esper friendly universities. The final papers were the standard esper information sheets produced by the government. The ones that emphasised how you shouldn’t be afraid or panic even though whatever it is was they were trying to push could kill you in an instant. They’d been placing them all over the notice boards at school
for the last few weeks. You just knew something was overkill if even a truant like me noticed them.
Out of sheer boredom and anxiety, I unfolded the flyer and actually read what it said. On the front page was a picture of a group of teens hanging out at a library. They sat together on the lawn, smiling. If that wasn’t cheesy enough, two of them made thumbs-up gestures. Because you know, being an esper was okay as long as you had friends lifted right out of a magazine!
At least the information was up to date. There were statistics I hadn’t known previously. Only one in every five thousand people had esper abilities. That meant that statistically speaking, I should be just about the only esper here today. Except there was Jane, and the other espers I had felt in my head. There goes that theory.
I moved on to the explanations of the power levels. I did not appreciate the red flag pictures next to the explanation for alpha class espers. It was such an arbitrary system. I’d read in the parapsychology textbooks at the Academy library that esper levels often fluctuated. Sometimes a person could sustain a higher level of power depending on their emotional state and other environmental factors. After the bombs and EMP bursts that disabled the world’s electronic systems, world governments were too busy rebuilding to worry much about sorting espers into groups. Even now, it was difficult to draw a definitive line between the classes. And then there were secondary powers like telekinesis, electrokinesis, and the ever-dreaded mind readers.
I cast a clinical eye over my fellow classmates. I imagined doing the testers’ job of slotting them into classes. I would be the alpha, of course. The girl with the red-blonde hair and a smattering of freckles a few seats behind me could be a beta class esper.
The lithe boy to my right with a dark crew cut might be a gamma esper. A taller boy a few columns away could be a delta esper, the last of the categories with actual psychic abilities. There were only subtle nuances between the levels of our telepathy, but these differences meant that anyone in a higher class could tear down a lower class’s mind shield. Not all of them would have secondary psychic powers. I baulked when I read the life expectancy stats for my kind of espers.
I then assigned the category of Whisper to a whole group of kids in the far right corner of the room. These were the people who were sensitive to telepathic energy and could converse with an esper, but that was the extent of their ability. Everyone else was a Basic. A regular human who could be read by an esper, but who didn’t possess the capacity to speak to anyone else telepathically. Then there were the Voids. The ones like Aunt Jenny who seemed to be a throwback against the effects of the radiation after the Reset.
The red-haired girl caught me staring. She shot me a glare that would have melted stone. I pulled my attention back to the forms in front of me. The questionnaire asked all manner of irrelevant questions like who our favourite celebrity was and what we wanted to do when we grew up. I was pretty sure it was supposed to be an aptitude test to weed out the potential psychos, but I was too antsy to put much effort into my answers. When I was done ticking boxes at random, I turned the form over and started sketching the supervisor, a middle-aged woman in a vintage grey pants suit with permanently pursed lips.
Testers arrived in a steady stream. They tapped students on the shoulder and led them out of the room. Stray thoughts were flying all over the place along with a mix of nerves, boredom, and heady anticipation.
I strengthened my shield to drown them out. That was another thing Basics always took for granted. That as espers we loved reading other people’s minds. It was a presumption based on arrogance and fear. Most people’s thought patterns were as dull as watching wet paint dry. No matter how evolved we became, the human equation still revolved around me, me, me.
After I gave animated life to pretty much everyone sitting next to me, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up, and my heart sank. A pair of the bluest eyes I’d ever seen were peering back at me. They reflected my disappointment. The eyes belonged to Richard Nichol, one of Aunt Jenny’s police contacts from the Academy. In another lifetime, he was also Mum’s friend. Judging by the white lab coat he wore and the clipboard in his hands, he was moonlighting as a tester. He picked up my form, clipped it to his board, and motioned for me to follow. I did so with the enthusiasm of a wet cloth.
Trudging along behind him was an exercise in patience. Most of the females in the room tracked his movement. I wanted to gag as I metaphorically swatted away their admiring glances. I rolled my eyes as their lurid thoughts about Rich bounced against my shield. He wasn’t that good-looking by a long shot.
Rich led me to a corridor of small identical consulting rooms. I peeked into the adjoining room. It was empty and looked to have just experienced a hurricane.
He took a seat at the desk and gestured for me to sit down in an armchair opposite him. Whilst he pored through my forms, I surveyed the cerebral monitor in the corner. It dangled from metal wires in the ceiling and walls like an imprisoned octopus. Beside the monitor was a poster depicting a dissected brain and all its hemispheres. Right in the middle was a little mass called the pineal gland. That was where scientists thought extrasensory perception came from.
The presiding theory was that ESP originated way back in caveman times when spoken language hadn’t been formulated yet. The cavemen often communicated in nonverbal ways that connected directly to their fight or flight responses. In the presence of danger, they fled or fought as a collective. The EMPs released globally by those internet activists who called themselves Genesis triggered the ESP in a small part of the human population. In a way, we regressed. Sensationalists often pointed out the espers were generally more aggressive individuals. Now I was being tested to confirm I was part of that small population.
Rich exhaled as his eyes scanned down the page of my form. He gave up altogether when he turned it over and saw the drawings.
“Well,” he said, “if things don’t work out at school, you could always make a living drawing people’s pictures.”
“Funny,” I said. “That’s the second alternate job suggestion I’ve gotten today. The other was a comedian.”
He stared at me blankly, and reached for his clipboard.
“All right, let’s get started. Please state your full name.”
“Willow Nguyen.”
“And what class and category of esper do you believe yourself to be?”
“Isn’t that your job to find out?”
He gave me a sharp look. It reminded me of your classic perfume ad pose. The one where the model looked like they had just sniffed something putrid. “This will go a lot quicker if you tone down the sarcasm.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and shrugged. For a moment, my thoughts flew to Dad and his claim that I shouldn’t announce my powers to the world. Suddenly, the knowledge of how powerful I was seemed very intimate. I didn’t want Rich, or indeed a faceless government, knowing what I could do.
“I’m beta class,” I lied, knowing he wouldn’t have believed any lower. We’d locked minds once when I was twelve at one of my Aunt Clare’s useless society parties. I had pretty much owned him. “Electrokinetic category.”
This, too, was half a lie. I was an EK, but there was also something off about my secondary ability. It wasn’t just electromagnetic elements that I could remotely control. It was anything metallic at all. Or anything with electrical currents running through it. Like the human body, for example. My reluctance to share increased.
I surprised myself with how quickly I was becoming skittish about spilling information. Perhaps if it were another tester, I might have been more forthcoming, but I doubted it. This room felt much too clinical. As far as I was aware, I’d never been to a doctor, so I wasn’t comfortable in here. I might be the esper, but Dad sure knew how to get into someone’s head. I made a note never to tell him that though.
Rich wrote a few short notes and then asked me to put on the cerebral monitor. I did so with great difficulty, the wires getting caught up in my long braid. The metal f
elt cold against my scalp and claustrophobic against my mind. From a drawer in the desk, he pulled out two bronze wrist cuffs with Hoffman Industries’ atom logos. I recognised them as Hoffman’s patented psi-blocking alloy but hadn’t seen this make before.
Rich must have caught the curiosity in my eyes. He grinned as he snapped the cuffs on. “They’re an upgraded model,” he said. “Guaranteed to be twenty percent more efficient at keeping out an esper.”
“How does a government organisation afford Hoffman tech?”
“Not all corporations are just out for money.”
“Especially not the ones that have a monopoly on anti-psi technology,” I said. Then I realised I was sounding too much like Mum, so I shut up. Rich activated the cerebral monitor with a remote. The metal whirred to life. Blinking green and blue lights projected from the helmet onto the walls and ceiling like a scattering of stars. Tiny filaments lining the inside of the helmet massaged my scalp. It sent shivers throughout my body. Instinctively, my mind hummed in anticipation of a mental connection.
“Now,” Rich said, closing his eyes. “Try and communicate with me through the barrier the cuffs make.” Tentatively I threw out a mental probe to his mind and immediately came up against the familiar static of anti-psi tech. My first tactic when I came across someone wearing a cuff was to disable it using my electrokinesis. I had a feeling if I broke his expensive toy, Rich wouldn’t be impressed. So instead, I skimmed the static, looking for a crack in the shield. I had to hand it to Hoffman; they weren’t lying about the increased quality of the product.
I changed the nature of my probe, letting it meld to match the electromagnetic signature of the cuff. The monitor stuttered as though it was having trouble keeping up with the rapid changes in telepathic direction.
A mental curtain slid open inside my mind. I was past the static field. That’s when I felt it –the mind of another esper. One I’d never felt before. Unlike the fuzzy radioactive field emitted by the anti-psi technology, the shield around the foreign mind was rock solid. Whoever this person was, they were potentially more powerful than me.
