Prodigy

by Dave Kalstein

  “No. I know I’m useless to you guys if I’m a murderer.”

  “But that’s not why you let them live.” Despite his awful predicament, he could picture that beatific, knowing smile on her lips. “It was because of the good inside of you. The good that they told you didn’t exist. You remembered the oath…”

  Smith’s brain flashed back, twelve years of a daily pledge coming back verbatim, echoing in the chorus of four thousand children speaking in obedient unison: By virtue of the Gifts bestowed upon me, I swear my Eternal Duty to all those without such Gifts. For Power may point the way, but only Honor can lead it. Good old Doc Stansbury—R.I.P.—meant well enough, but Smith and Riley always thought it was a crock. That gyro sank closer to the street. It was headed for him. He jacked a bullet into the Colt’s chamber.

  “You’re going to make it,” Stella said. “Now think about how you can—”

  “I’m not good at that! You picked us because we’re not as smart as you, goddamn it! And now we’re all dying, one by one.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get to the northwest corner of 6th Street in Sector D. Stay in the crowds. I’ll meet you there.”

  Smith got goosebumps. “You’re … you’re in San Angeles?”

  “Just go, Mr. Smith.”

  He hung up and ran for the street at the end of the alley.

  “You can’t escape this, Mr. Smith,” called out a voice from above.

  He glanced up and saw Captain Gibson looking out the driver’s side window of that unmarked gyro floating thirty feet above him in the narrow gap between tenement buildings. Gibson’s hair was wet and thin. Smith could make out the white of his scalp from where he stood down below.

  The fifteen-year-old in him thought: if Gibson’s off campus, getting soaked like the rest of us, that means I’m in really deep shit this time. But the adult in him knew: yeah, it really is gonna end. Right here. Twenty-one years old. Just like this.

  The sight of Gibson made him panic. His heart started racing again, a young man’s fear overriding his conditioning. Smith emptied the M-8’s clip in the direction of the gyro. It swerved, easily dodging the bullets. Several figures in black sailed down from above, macabre, human-sized raindrops with arms and legs and guns. Three more gyros descended. Officers approached Smith on both sides. He looked around at the alley: debris and puddles, empty cartons from McDonald’s, foul hand-and-mouth food none of the Stansbury specimens would’ve tolerated. Then he remembered another time he was in this part of town, the corner of Avenue R and Third. He and Riley snuck off campus, both of them flat broke and craving the hand-and-mouth stuff, so they traded a dog-eared September 2030 issue of Young Buns magazine for two super-sized orders of salty, steamy French fries. They held onto the cardboard containers for weeks afterward, smelling the treasure of the grease and fat like it was ambrosia inside the school’s walls.

  Brown brick buildings surrounded him on the left and right. The masked officers aiming those gleaming black guns made their steady advance. One of them pulled off his Nomex balaclava and tossed it to the side. Smith caught a glance at his face. Officer Jackson: he busted Smith for stealing a biology exam from an unlocked progression room sometime back in his junior year. Jackson smiled ruefully and raised a gun with slightly jagged edges and an angular body that required a two-handed grip to heft the large scope up to his eye. Smith didn’t recognize the model and figured it was another in a long line of experimental prototypes that some team of Stansbury ballistics experts created with the intention of hawking to the military. Jackson flipped a switch and the weapon beeped slowly, methodically. Then faster. Smith had no idea the ThermaGun prototype was locking onto the heat patterns of his body, triggering Stansbury’s new patent-pending “Fire-and-Forget” technology.

  What would Riley do, Smith wondered. Come to think of it, just what the hell is Riley going to do if … when they come after him?

  He threw his shoulder into the boarded-up wooden planks to his right and tumbled through the remnants of a doorway, landing in a darkened hall amid piles of wood and scrap metal. Smith felt a loose iron pipe grinding into his back and grabbed it, running through the abandoned building’s catacombs. No footsteps behind him. He slid around a corner into what used to be an office. It still smelled like instant coffee, menthol cigarettes, and linoleum. The pipe in his hand was about the size of a baseball bat and easy to swing. He tried it out a few times, iron whooshing through air, and got ready, twirling it like a toothpick in his caveman hands. Silence. His stomach fluttered. He couldn’t even hear the rain anymore. He picked a prime spot: no other points of entry, no windows, tucked away in a corner. They might get him eventually, but the first guy through that door would get his head knocked for a line drive off the back wall. Run, Riley—start running now, man.

  A gunshot echoed. What were they shooting at? There was no point of entry here and … A .45-caliber bullet flew around the corner, defying every law of physics he never bothered to learn, and Smith went down hard, his skull cracking against the floor, his feet flying up toward the water-stained ceiling before slamming down to the ground. His hand reflexively went to his chest. It was warm and wet, going on soaked. His fingers got covered in a sticky, shock-inducing shade of red. He started to gasp and found he could not.

  His iron bat rolled away, bumping against a wall and lying still. What’s up with these big leaguers throwing the heat high and inside, he wondered. The edges of the dingy office started to go black on him.

  Through the pain, he heard footsteps getting closer and squinted, tensing his biceps just in case they were somehow connected to his weakening eyes and brain. The shapes weren’t unfamiliar, given that he was a lifer at the school: a sleek laser-tipped syringe (just like the kind they had back in the tower) moving in, a specimen—male, maybe seventeen or eighteen (why aren’t you in class young man)—he was wearing a crisply pressed dark blue blazer with a golden patch bearing that tower and stitched-in words: ESTABLISHED 2009 STANSBURY SCHOOL NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. The truant specimen leaned closer and closer, his face still in the shadows, that laser syringe’s beam pulsating in his hand, getting closer and closer.

  Stansbury School. A New Order of the Ages.

  Smith felt the cold steel of the syringe’s barrel against his neck. Then came the light burn of the laser’s pinch as it passed through the skin and into his bloodstream. He thought of Riley. He already missed him. They never got the chance to catch up over cold beers and fill in the years since all of the insanity that began with Miss Stella No-Middle-Name Saltzman’s phone call months ago. Riley and his fringes of permanently matted hair. Smith always wondered how he got it to stick up like that. It was hard to breathe now, verging on impossible.

  Ah, Mr. Riley. The stories we could’ve told.

  1

  From a distance, Stansbury Tower seemed proud. Expensive and proud. It jutted up 125 stories—1,353 feet—from the flat desert floor, a windowless, silvery monolith that glinted like jewlery when the sun hit it just right. Ask the school’s prim, purse-lipped professors and they would have likened it to a glorious mirage, an oasis of knowledge and progress providing a beacon of hope in the wasteland of a spoiled world sown with the seeds of mediocrity.

  But if you asked the kids—sorry, the specimens—they’d have told you the tower was a big, shiny penis. The kind you’d find in a Tiffany’s catalog from Spring 2036, if they’d commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to craft the world’s priciest dildo.

  This observation was not childishly perverted. Childishly precocious, perhaps, but not perverted. They were specimens, after all. By the age of ten, they had all been conditioned to analyze the symbolic imagery—implicit or explicit—in any source of stimuli, including a glaringly obvious phallic substitute that even the non-Freudian would have spotted a mile away. But they’d never share this insight with an outsider. It would ruin their mystique. They were bred—all four thousand of the current student body, from the ages of six t
o eighteen—for top-of-the-line performance. Flagship editions of youth. And leaders, so they were taught, needed to maintain an aura about them, exist in a world where there were no vulgar temptations, curse words, or 125-story penises.

  But the penis thing didn’t come up very much, because the view from inside the school was much different. And since the specimens were only permitted to leave the tower’s walls twice a year (two weeks for the winter holidays, two weeks for summer—with the rare exception of a daylong field trip), time spent viewing Stansbury from a distance was too precious to waste making dick jokes. It was a complex thing, observing the way a specimen treated his or her return to school after vacation. It always happened the same way: the long gyrobus floated smoothly on a bed of air high above the desert floor, carrying its load of one hundred specimens per trip (males on the right side, females on the left), and when the tower rose up on the horizon maybe twenty miles away, a hush fell. The younger ones stopped making wet farting noises with their lips and hands and wept silently, already missing Mom and Dad. The romantics mourned the end of brief affairs with carefree, nonuniformed outsiders. The academics unconsciously nodded with pride at their return to duty. And you could always count on one of the unbalanced specimens to make a crack.

  “Looks like it’s giving us the middle finger,” said Mr. William Winston Cooley upon his return, following the winter holiday in 2036. “A bright, shiny fuck-off for coming back when we could’ve ran for the hills.” He smirked at his roommate, Mr. Thaddeus Bunson. Bunson was preoccupied with his electric razor, shaving off the last of his Christmas stubble lest he get caught with it on campus and disciplined.

  “They’d find us,” he replied, his mouth angled to the side, stretching the skin on his cheek taut for the humming blade. “They always find the ones who run.” Bunson brushed stray stubble spikes from the sterile white leather of the seat, resignation in the swipe of his hand.

  Toward the end of each return trip, when the bus slowed down for its descent, all of the specimens would go silent. In a routine as reliable as it was instinctual, each boy and girl turned his or her head in the same direction at the same time for that final, lingering glance at the setting sun. They soaked up every detail: the seared orange it happened to be at that time of the day; whether it felt warm or cool on their faces through the windows; the way its reflection in the metal of the bus walls burned the corners of their squinting eyes. The specimens then deposited the information into a special part of their well-developed cerebrums, a specific area that was not perpetually firing with efficiency and goal-directed action. It was the secret brain compartment that each of them developed unwittingly, a place where they stored the imaginary postcards bearing memories taken from the world outside the tower’s windowless walls: a sunset, a cartoon, the taste of melted caramel on the lips.

  Mr. Thomas Oliver Goldsmith went through this ritual one final time in January 2036. The bus started its descent and the hush fell. As a senior, this was the twelfth time he had returned from winter holiday, so he made an effort to watch the other specimens that day rather than the sun itself. He wanted to understand the occurrence objectively, the way an outsider might. The desert was cloudy that day, the sun wrapped inside a hard, unyielding gray. Goldsmith noticed something: all of them still turned toward the direction where the sun should’ve been (displaying tropism like the plants stretching toward light he learned about in advanced biology so many years ago) and, as if by reflex, squinted despite the presence of the shadows. It was then that Goldsmith realized the specimens never took that final gaze at the sun out of some nostalgia for nature. They did it to keep themselves sane.

  This is what a quick flip through a few of Goldsmith’s mental postcards would have revealed: natural, golden light poured into a home in perfect geometric shapes through a venetian blind while a young woman sang a lullaby with his name; the soft hands of that same woman, probably his mother, and they felt warm on his scalp. And then he remembered the stale sheets of the cot he slept in back at San Angeles Municipal Orphanage. Before Stansbury rescued him.

  A shaft of white light hit Goldsmith squarely on the eyes, but he was already awake. How did the InterAct light alarm know that he was standing by his mirror tying on his navy blue silk tie and not lying in bed?

  Good morning, Mr. Thomas Oliver Goldsmith! The time is now 6:30 A.M., said an automated voice. Some automated voices these days sound so natural you wouldn’t know they’re fake, but not Mrs. InterAct. The school kept her nice and robotic so you wouldn’t forget everything was official, regimented, that there was a job that needed to be done.

  Goldsmith finished with his tie and pulled a blazer on over a crisp white dress shirt. The gold on the blazer’s emblem matched his hair, which matched the metal glint of the wire rims on his glasses. He was one of the academics—the kind that nodded in silent obligation when the tower approached on the horizon—but not just any straight-A specimen. Stansbury had plenty of those. He was valedictorian. There was a medal hanging on his wall that said so. Placed in between the certificate affirming his place as President of the Specimen Council and his acceptance letter to Harvard (which, incidentally, was a formality—the dean of admissions extended an under-the-table offer through Stansbury’s president shortly after the first semester of Goldsmith’s junior year) was a palm-sized medal of solid twenty-four karat gold with raised letters that read VALEDICTORIAN, CLASS OF 2036.

  The school’s philosophy on valedictorians went like this: Too many specimens got top marks to appoint just one. However, appointing several would have defeated the purpose of the position in the first place—to denote the top specimen in the senior class—and watered down a goal that required twelve years of rigorous schooling to accomplish. So the faculty devised a plan. Right before the beginning of the fall semester of their final year, all of the senior specimens with perfect grades over their careers (usually between ten and twelve out of roughly three hundred and fifty) underwent the Selmer-Dubonnet Aptitude Test.

  Selmer and Dubonnet were part of the group of educators who founded Stansbury back in 2009 under the direction of Dr. Raymond Stansbury himself. These educators—mostly the top teachers from the country’s best elementary, middle, and high schools, along with some administration types—were fed up with the control and power the nation’s teachers’ unions exerted over the world of schooling at the start of the twenty-first century. The state of public schooling had become increasingly dire. Reading and comprehension levels were at an all-time low, despite the fact that the flow of information and knowledge were more readily available than at any other time in history. The problem was not the students’ access or social skills. It was the teachers. They were being paid more than ever before (a famous case in New York City was an eleventh-grade math teacher who earned $211,498 in salary and overtime in 2008 while his seventeen-year-old students were functioning at a fourth grade level) working without accountability for their students’ performance.

  Due to union labor laws, it had become virtually impossible to fire the teachers. Teachers who did not want to join the unions were physically assaulted and ostracized. The situation seemed hopeless until Dr. Raymond Stansbury, then a high school principal, organized a coalition of the best teachers from across the country—a select group of forty-five men and women from all disciplines—who promptly quit their jobs, all tendering their resignation letters on the same day. Using funds donated from private philanthropists, they founded the Charter School, based out of Dr. Stansbury’s California ranch estate.

  There were forty specimens (Dr. Stansbury himself coined the term) in the school’s first graduating class in 2009. Seventy-eight percent of them were admitted to first-tier Ivy League universities. Word spread quickly. Any parent who could afford the formidable $100,000 tuition sent their children. The following year’s senior class numbered one hundred. The year after that one hundred and fifty. The numbers kept increasing without a decline in attention to individual specimen needs. Dr. Stansbury�
�a world-renowned expert in the field of organic chemistry and pharmaceutical science—began to develop nutritional supplements that lengthened specimens’ attention spans and increased their endurance.

  Soon, Charter School specimens were requested on the research teams of major drug companies and world-class universities. They published novels before they were able to get behind the wheel of a car. Alumni were being elected to national office. Currently eight United States senators are former specimens, along with two cabinet members and the president’s head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fifty-nine alumni are serving terms as judges in federal courts across the nation, including the two who are justices of the Supreme Court (one a strict constructionist, the other a loose constructionist, as the Senate successfully convinced the Executive branch that providing a former Stansbury specimen to only one side of the debate might permanently slant the ideology of the highest court in the land). Currently, twenty-two of the top thirty Forbes 500 corporations had CEOs who counted Stansbury as their alma mater. Five years ago, motion picture director Charles Packard (the Charles Packard—Class of ’21) became the school’s first Academy Award winner. Sure enough, civil rights groups, often with the support of teachers’ unions, took to the media to protest the Charter School, calling it an elitist, racist institution, despite the fact that it boasted a population more ethnically diverse than most colleges and workplaces. In response, Dr. Stansbury and his new school president, Judith Lang—a politically shrewd young woman who looked great on television—announced the first official Charter School Lottery Fund in 2017: full-ride, twelve-year tuitions to be given to ten randomly selected orphans from across the United States each year. Goldsmith was one of the winners in 2024.