Of the forty-eight orphans residing at the Institute, only seven exhibit any paranormal powers. The other forty-one, however, are not regarded as failures. Each of the seven successes first revealed his or her talent at a different age — one as young as eleven months, one as old as five. Consequently, the possibility remains that many of the forty-one will blossom in years to come — perhaps not until they experience the dramatic changes in body chemistry related to puberty. Eventually, of course, those subjects who age without revealing any valuable talent will have to be removed from the program, as even Project 99’s resources are not infinite. The project’s architects have not yet determined the optimum point of termination.
Although the steering wheel was hard under his hands and slick with his cold sweat, although the sound of the engine was familiar, although the freeway was solid under the spinning tires, Joe felt as if he had crossed into another dimension as treacherously amorphous and inimical to reason as the surreal landscapes in Salvador Dalí’s paintings.
As his horror grew, he interrupted Rose: “This place you’re describing is Hell. You… you couldn’t have been part of anything like this. You’re not that kind of person.”
“Aren’t I?”
“No.”
Her voice grew thinner as she talked, as though the strength supporting her had been the secrets she kept, and as she revealed them one by one, her vitality ebbed as it had for Samson lock by lock. In her increasing weariness was a sweet relief like that dispensed in a confessional, a weakness that she seemed to embrace — but that was nonetheless colored by a gray wash of despair. “If I’m not that kind of person now…I must have been then.”
“But how? Why? Why would you want to be involved with these…these atrocities?”
“Pride. To prove that I was as good as they thought I was, good enough to take on this unprecedented challenge. Excitement. The thrill of being involved with a program even better funded than the Manhattan Project. Why did the people who invented the atomic bomb work on it…knowing what they were making? Because others, elsewhere in the world, will do it if we don’t…so maybe we have to do it to save ourselves from them?”
“Save ourselves by selling our souls?” he asked.
“There’s no defense I can offer that should ever exonerate me,” Rose said. “But it is true that when I signed on, there was no consensus that we would carry the experiments this far, that we would apply what we learned with such…zeal. We entered into the creation of the children in stages…down a slippery slope. We intended to monitor the first one just through the second trimester of the fetal stage — and, after all, we don’t consider a fetus to be an actual human being. So it wasn’t like we were experimenting on a person. And when we brought one of them to full term…there were intriguing anomalies in its EEG graphs, strangeness in its brainwave patterns that might have indicated heretofore unknown cerebral function. So we had to keep it alive to see…to see what we had achieved, to see if maybe we had moved evolution forward a giant step.”
“Jesus.”
Though he had first met this woman only thirty-six hours ago, his feelings for her had been rich and intense, ranging from virtual adoration to fear and now to repulsion. Yet from his repulsion came pity, because for the first time he saw in her one of the many cloves of human weakness that, in other forms, were so ripe in himself.
“Fairly early on,” she said, “I did want out. So I was invited for a private chat with the project director, who made it clear to me that there was no quitting now. This had become a job with lifetime tenure. Even to attempt to leave Project 99 is to commit suicide — and to put the lives of your loved ones at risk as well.”
“But couldn’t you have gone to the press, broken the story wide open, shut them down?”
“Probably not without physical evidence, and all I had was what was in my head. Anyway, a couple of my colleagues had the idea that they could bring it all down, I think. One of them suffered a timely stroke. The other was shot three times in the head by a mugger — who was never caught. For a while…I was so depressed I considered killing myself and saving them the trouble. But then…along came CCY-21-21….”
First, born a year ahead of CCY-21-21 was male subject SSW-89-58. He exhibits prodigious talents in every regard and his story is of importance to you because of your own recent experiences with people who eviscerate themselves and set themselves afire — and because of your losses in Colorado.
By the time he is forty-two months old, SSW-89-58 possesses the language skills of the average first-year college student and is able to read a three-hundred-page volume in one to three hours, depending on the complexity of the text. Higher math comes to him as easily as eating ice cream, as do foreign languages from French to Japanese. His physical development proceeds at an accelerated rate as well, and by the time he is four, he stands as tall and is as proportionately developed as the average seven-year-old. Paranormal talents are anticipated, but researchers are surprised by 89–58’s great breadth of more ordinary genius — which includes the ability to play any piece of piano music after hearing it once — and by his physical precocity, for which no genetic selection has been made.
When 89–58 begins to exhibit paranormal abilities, he proves to be phenomenally endowed. His first startling achievement is remote viewing. As a game, he describes to researchers the rooms in their own homes, where he has never visited. He walks them through tours of museums to which he has never been admitted. When he is shown a photograph of a Wyoming mountain in which is buried a top-secret Strategic Air Command defense center, he describes in accurate detail the missile-status display boards in the war room. He is considered an espionage asset of incalculable value — until, fortunately by degrees, he discovers that he is able to step into a human mind as easily as he steps into distant rooms. He takes mental control of his primary handler, makes the man undress, and sends him through the halls of the orphanage, crowing like a rooster. When SSW-89-58 relinquishes control of the handler and what he’s done is discovered, he is punished severely. He resents the punishment, resents it deeply. That night he conducts a remote viewing of the handler’s home and enters the handler’s mind at a distance of forty-six miles. Using the handler’s body, he brutally murders the man’s wife and daughter, and then he walks the handler through suicide.
Following this episode, SSW-89-58 is subdued by the use of a massive dose of tranquilizers administered by a dart gun. Two employees of Project 99 perish in the process.
Thereafter, for a period of eighteen days, he is maintained in a drug-induced coma while a team of scientists designs and oversees the urgent construction of a suitable habitat for their prize — one which will sustain his life but assure that he remains controlled. A faction of the staff suggests immediate termination of SSW-89-58, but this advice is considered and rejected. Every endeavor is at some point troubled by pessimists.
Here, now, come into the security room in the southeast corner of the first floor of the orphanage. In this place — if you were an employee — you must present yourself for the scrutiny of three guards, because this post is never manned by fewer, regardless of the hour. You must place your right hand on a scanner that will identify you by your fingerprints. You must peer into a retina scanner as well, which will compare your retinal patterns to those recorded in the scan taken when you first accepted employment.