Teek Page 29

  The whole right side of her body itched.

  She looked at the clock and saw she had nearly fifteen minutes before the nurse came with her little yellow pill. The thought was depressing, but at least she had time to shower. She needed it.

  Her mind was still wrapped up in Euclid Heights High as she walked into the bathroom, so she didn’t notice until she turned on the light.

  The right side of her body, especially her arm, was covered in fragments of paint and rust. She had to restrain herself from gasping.

  It’s not there. It’s like the leaves. A hallucination…

  That didn’t make her feel any better. She told herself to ignore it. She couldn’t start cracking now. She especially couldn’t start cracking in front of any hidden cameras. Who knows what they’d do with her if they thought she was going crazy.

  What if I am going crazy?

  She got into the shower and tried to calm herself down. It didn’t help that the rust and paint flakes stubbornly refused to wash off. When she finished her shower, that whole side of her body was flushed and red from scrubbing. And it still itched.

  When the nurse came, at seven thirty, just like last time, Allison expected some comment about the dirt on her arm. It felt as if it was actually starting to raise a rash. But, as she’d feared, the nurse didn’t even seem to notice.

  She went through the routine with the pill, and by the time the nurse left, the paint, the rust, and the itch were all gone as if they’d never existed. Just like the taste of leaves, before.

  9:23 AM

  Her first “class” was at nine-thirty. She had learned that via yet another unsubtle invasion of privacy— as if she had any privacy left. While she had been out getting breakfast, someone had gone into her room, collected her notebooks and her backpack, and had arranged it all on her bed along with a little computer-printed schedule.

  Her first reaction had been a desire to throw the backpack across the room, but she was restrained by the paranoid instinct telling her that they were always watching. So she put on a show of taking it in stride.

  Inside, though, she still burned. She wanted out of this place. She wanted Dad, she wanted Macy, and she wanted her own life back. She told herself that she’d gladly give her teek back to get away from these people.

  However, what frightened her was the possibility that was a lie. She wanted her teek, and she was afraid that they might offer it back— take her off this drug— and ask something in return she shouldn’t give.

  That was what preoccupied her as she sat in a lecture room in Prometheus’ classroom building. Everyone else seemed to just accept things here. Even Zack took this captivity, and the desires of their captors, as given, unalterable.

  The “students” that filed into the hall didn’t look like prisoners. They didn’t act like prisoners. She couldn’t help but wonder how many in this room were dragged here by force. If many were, the acceptance they showed did not encourage her.

  It would be easier if I just gave up.

  The thought, after everything that had happened, especially after what happened to Mom, made her ashamed of herself. Thinking about Mom now, knowing that there wasn’t anything she could do—

  The instructor interrupted her thoughts. She wiped her eyes and glanced at the printout. She wasn’t even sure what class she was in, she had just gone to a room number. The sheet told her that this was “Standard Orientation.”

  Below her the instructor was saying, “…every first Monday. All new students are required to attend each monthly lecture their first year here.”

  It was hard for her to conceive of a more depressing thought than the idea of her “first year” at this place.

  “Some of you are new arrivals, and some of you have been here for a few months. I want to remind you all to pay attention, since what we cover here in this orientation lecture is fundamental to your ability to understand and do well here at Prometheus. Everything I’ll say bears repetition, and you should pay attention even if you’ve heard it before—am I right Mr. Harris?”

  Someone in the first row turned around to face the front. “Yes, ah, right, Dr. Lawrence.”

  Allison wiped her eyes and watched Dr. Lawrence. It was just like any other class she’d ever attended, except this one felt as if it might be a matter of life or death. She paid attention.

  ◆◆◆

  As Zack had told her, the orientation told her more about PRI’s classification system, and it told her why she was so valuable to these people.

  PRI divided psychic abilities into three broad classifications.

  Class I was defined as purely sensory in nature, and was statistically the most common talent among the kids here. According to Dr. Lawrence, almost all of these talents could be considered variants on telepathy. Even things like psychometry— the reading of “psychic impressions” on objects— and precognition, were telepathic in nature. The telepathic talent seemed to operate on some quantum level where commonsense ideas of time and location meant very little. Images from the past or future meant contact with a past or future mind, and the mind was a non-localized event, a wavelike entity that extended beyond the physical body.

  Much of it went over Allison’s head. Dr. Lawrence often apologized for all the scientific jargon, but he went on using it anyway.

  Class II was defined as non-physical interference in the physical world. That contradictory definition applied to the much rarer talents that affected probability in some predictable fashion. The operation of these talents was obscure and not well understood, and Dr. Lawrence didn’t do a good job of explaining it. Allison gathered that this group included the dice-rollers she had heard about. From the explanation, the Class II’s did not directly affect the motion of the dice to make a number come up; they altered the probability of a number coming up. Dr. Lawrence said that Class II’s directly altered the probabilistic wave equations of quantum mechanics, whatever that meant.

  Allison was a Class III because she dealt directly with physical matter and energy. Class III grouped the only talents that dealt with the gross manipulation of macroscopic objects. It was the rarest talent of all, amounting to two people in all of PRI. Three people including Allison. Fortunately, Dr. Lawrence didn’t point her out to the rest of the class.

  There were countless subtleties to PRI’s classification system. There were Class I talents that didn’t fit into a subclass of Telepathy. And when Dr. Lawrence began talking about tests and comparisons, Allison was uncomfortably aware of the film she had seen.

  Those twins had been here, and they had died here. She became conscious of the things Dr. Lawrence wasn’t talking about. Like how they had come to find what certain drugs did, or how they had located the hot-spots of activity in the brain.

  “By now all of you, even those of you who have recently arrived—” This time Dr. Lawrence did look at her. It was the first time he’d acknowledged her presence as anything other than just another captive student. “—have some idea of where you are in this classification system. I would like to remind you that this is merely a catalog, and not a measure of worth. All these talents are incredibly valuable when reproducible, and all our researches indicate that they come from a common source in the brain. The same neurochemistry is involved in all of these, and as we progress with our genetic sequencing, it appears that a common cluster of genes is responsible as well.”

  He walked out in front of the podium to look at all of them, but Allison in particular. “As we teach you about your own powers, you’re teaching us how they work. And all of you who show any ability have the potential to show them all. Think about that whenever you feel unduly burdened in one of your classes. Someday one of you may give us the key to unlock all of this in all of you…”

  The bell rang. Dr. Lawrence looked up at the clock and said, “Class dismissed.”

  1:15 PM

  The phrase, “all of this in all of you,” ran through Allison’s head for most of the day. What if PRI could manage that?
What if there was some magic neurotransmitter that could give everyone with the right genes the ability to read minds, or levitate—

  Or to teek a quarter at the speed of a bullet?

  No wonder so many kids seemed to accept this. They were being offered a huge incentive, “stick with us and one day you’ll work miracles.” Allison now understood that there were more than the obvious reasons that she, and Zack, and Jessica were valuable to PRI. They were proof that such power was possible. They could encourage their students by telling them that, one day, they could do the same.

  The rest of her morning had been filled with classes that wouldn’t be out of place at Euclid Heights High. In fact, they gave her some of the same classes. Someone, somewhere, must have gotten hold of her old class schedule. That served to make her just that much more paranoid, and feel even more alone and exposed.

  And all that was nothing compared to what she was undergoing right now. She’d known that, eventually, they would insist on some sort of physical examination. But she wasn’t prepared for it. After everything else, the little computer-written line on her schedule, “1:30 PM Medical Appointment— Room M 1005,” terrified her.

  Now, at fifteen after, after barely eating lunch and ignoring Zack in the cafeteria, she sat in a cold waiting room clutching the little slip of paper.

  The waiting room was uncomfortably similar to every other hospital waiting room she had ever been in. The chairs were cheap metal tubing and plastic, the floor slick linoleum tile, and the walls were cream-colored and covered with standard public health posters. Somehow the ordinariness of this place made it worse. Her mind kept drifting back to the last time she was in a hospital, right after Chuck had attacked her.

  Worse, when she didn’t think about that, she thought about the film, and long needles. She thought of walking away several times. But what good would it do? She was trapped, and they were more than capable of forcing her to cooperate, and cooperation was the only real lever she had with these people.

  The last line on her paper was, “6:00 PM Family Visit— Room A 3307.” That kept her going, and it trapped her. She was going to see Dad and Macy, but if she began fighting now, they could easily take that away. She had made a bargain with Stone, cooperation for Dad and Macy.

  She was ashamed by the wish that she wasn’t bound by such a deal, and by the wish that she didn’t care about the hostages they held for her benefit.

  “Allison Boyle?” called the nurse, like every other nurse in every other waiting room.

  They try so hard to keep this all normal, Allison thought, and all they manage is to make everything more surreal.

  ◆◆◆

  They tried to make it comfortable. They even had a woman doctor do the examination. It didn’t help. Allison still had to undress, and even with the hospital gown they gave her, she still felt naked throughout the whole endless process.

  They took her blood, her urine, her saliva. They poked and prodded every crevice in her body. They laid her on a slab, strapped her head in a vise so it couldn’t move, and rolled her into a huge machine they called a nuclear magnetic resonance imager. They taped electrodes to her chest, her arms, and her forehead, and recorded a lot of wavy lines.

  Allison grit her teeth and endured it all, even though it seemed a more thorough rape than Chuck ever could have managed. The only high point to all of it was when they commented that they would be testing her telekinetic abilities sometime tomorrow. The thought that they would take her off their little teek-nullifying drug, even for a little while, made the rest of their examinations tolerable.

  TWENTY FOUR

  NAVARRO COUNTY, TX: Monday November 1, 1999

  5:43 PM

  “Christ man, when are you going to do something?” Allison’s friend, Macy paced through the living room making a point of walking in front of the television.

  John Charvat wasn’t watching the TV anyway. He was seated in one of two chairs that occupied the living room of one of the institute’s prefab houses. He wondered if housing Macy with him was a security decision, some sort of subtle psychological move on Stone’s part, or if it was simply a matter of efficiency. There had always been something of a housing shortage here, and many employees lived “off-campus” so to speak, even though security would prefer it otherwise.

  Not much had changed here. From his point of view that was a good thing.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Macy said. “Has it sunk in to that buzz-cut head of yours that we’re prisoners here?”

  Yes, and that every word you’re saying is being recorded. John allowed himself a furtive glance upward at a vent in the wall above the television. Behind it would be one of four security cameras that covered almost every square foot of this house. He had made a point to sit with his paper, and his crosswords, right in plain view.

  “There’s little I can do, Macy. We’re fifty miles from the nearest city, twenty from the nearest Interstate. Nothing gets in or out of this place without Stone’s blessing.” John kept writing with the marker in his hand. His notes were cryptic and strayed out of bounds of the crossword puzzle. He kept the writing tilted on his knee out of view from both Macy and the camera.

  “That’s your daughter they’re keeping prisoner, and you’re sitting there with a damn crossword puzzle.”

  “What do you want me to do? Plan some daring escape? How?” John marked a bold line on the paper that represented the main fence-line dividing the tract-housing from the airstrip.

  “You worked here—”

  “Then accept that I know how implausible escaping this place is.” John knew exactly how implausible. On his little map he had marked all the observation towers in the Institute’s private little suburb, in the past two days he’d managed to re-familiarize himself with the set-up. There were only a few places where the terrain offered some cover from the cameras. He had come up with a very implausible route to the airfield.

  Even with the constant surveillance, John felt perfectly safe saying his next thought aloud. “Even if you and I got out of here— Allison’s still in there, behind three layers of security. How would you get her out?” How will I get her out?

  Macy shook her head and said, “Damn.” She dropped herself into the other chair, rubbing her arms and— to John it seemed— trying not to cry. “It’s so rotten, just sitting here, not being able—”

  “I know.”

  “If we could just pretend that we’re getting out of here. Even if we’re fooling ourselves, I’d feel better.”

  John nodded. He looked at his little map. Am I fooling myself just to make myself feel better? I haven’t flown anything since ‘Nam, and how am I going to get Allison out of that place?

  John folded the paper and reached over to attempt to comfort Macy—

  Just then, without warning, the door burst open.

  John’s first thought was, they don’t need us anymore.

  The second thought, as three of the Prometheus security goons marched into the center of the living room, was, they saw the map.

  Macy stared as if she had been expecting them. “So? What now?”

  A more innocuous-looking woman followed the guards into the living room. John noticed the nametag read “Dr. Zendel.” Unfamiliar name. After his time. Even so, looking at her, John had her pegged as psych.

  “If you’d please come with us, Mr. Charvat, we have a meeting scheduled.”

  John stood up, paper folded in his hand. “With whom?”

  “Miss Boyle,” Dr. Zendel said, with a hint of annoyance.

  Macy jumped up and said, “Allie?”

  John felt just as excited as Macy. Not just because they were letting them see his daughter. Stone had no reason at all to keep him and Macy happy, which meant that this was happening to keep Allison cooperative. The fact Stone was allowing this meeting— in fact, Dr. Zendel’s whole attitude— meant that something significant was happening with “Miss Boyle.”

  6:02 PM

  “Dad!” Alli
son cried when he walked through the door. She ran up and hugged him. He stopped in the doorway, as if he was surprised at her reaction. She’d surprised herself.

  Allison recognized the man who had opened the door for Dad. He was the evil-looking Gary Busey type who’d escorted her from Stone’s office. “One hour,” he told them. The door shut after him.

  Allison let go of her dad and looked at the door. “Hey, what about Macy?”

  “Don’t worry, she’s all right.”

  “But I’m supposed to see both of you.”

  Dad walked over and sat down on the couch. The room was an institutional attempt at a living room, including a recliner and coffee table. But the large mirror facing the couch was somewhat out of place.

  “From what they said,” he told her, “which wasn’t much, you’ll get to see her tomorrow.”

  Allison shook her head in disgust. “What? Are they afraid I’ll try and escape with both of you? You have any idea how many of their armed goons are in this building—?”

  “Actually, yes, I do.”

  Allison turned and looked at Dad. He looked trapped. Allison was confounded by equal waves of sympathy and irritation at this man she hardly knew.

  She sat down next to him. “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I’m afraid you don’t have the greatest father.”

  Allison took his hand. “Why don’t you tell me about him?”

  He chuckled. “To be honest, it isn’t very interesting—”

  Allison didn’t believe that, and her look must have told her father that.

  He sighed. “For a while I had the normal family set up— at least normal when I was growing up— two parents, a brother, and my granddad all on a little farm in upstate New York. Lived there until I was eighteen, when I was drafted.”

  Dad went to Vietnam in 1966. It didn’t take long before he was transferred into special operations run by ASI. He was promoted and placed in charge of special psychological operations over North Vietnam.