The Charter School’s prestige went international in 2019, when Dr. Frederick Hester, a school professor, and a team of fifteen hand-picked specimens, constructed the chemical combinations that were the basis for the world’s first affordable, effective AIDS vaccine. By the time Dr. Stansbury died of old age in 2020, he left behind a healthy private donor fund and a nearly-completed Stansbury Tower: a state-of-the-art educational complex designed by Rikka-Salvi & Partners, the famed architecture firm responsible for the postmodern-style high-rises that have come to define the skylines in megacities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur. It was intended to be a self-contained world made specifically for nurturing the elite young minds destined to be this nation’s future. The Charter School was renamed for its founder in a memorial service following his funeral. The late doctor also left behind a mission statement of sorts, and what began as a short, idealistic pledge he had posted on the wall of each progression room in the school is now known as the Stansbury Oath: 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. Since the doctor’s passing, the entire specimen body has recited this passage in unison—right hands placed over their hearts, many with their eyes closed, as if they are performing a mass séance to the spirit of Raymond Stansbury himself—as the opening ritual to the school’s daily assembly held each morning in the coliseum.
Hence, with such an extraordinary pedigree, Stansbury School required an extraordinary valedictorian. Which is where Doctors Edwin Selmer and Francine Dubonnet came in. Selmer was an authority in the field of child and early adult psychology (his book, Discipline Without Guilt, was a national bestseller). Dubonnet was a mathematician-turned-behavioral sociologist who made a name for herself when she created the multimedia personal aptitude examination, colloquially referred to as “the Dub Test,” that is now administered to all candidates up for promotion to the highest levels of authority in the fields of law enforcement and military intelligence.
From the outset, Dr. Stansbury realized that his school’s valedictorian needed more than just top scores. He or she also required an inherent understanding of the philosophical principles upon which the school was based and, just as important, a value system in accordance with his own. In other words, he or she must understand that the success of the school—and, by extension, American society—depended on the specimens’ acceptance of their elite status and the responsibilities entailed. The top specimen must be the very embodiment of the Stansbury Oath’s principles. His valedictorian couldn’t just be a showpiece to parade in a dog and pony show for the universities and the press. He or she had to be an active ally of the faculty in maintaining order and morale within the school’s walls. After all, the doctor reasoned, who had more to gain from the status quo than the specimen whom it benefited most?
The Selmer-Dubonnet test was an examination wherein the select group of top senior specimens was confronted with situation upon situation, nonstop, over a grueling four-hour period. Some samples of these test situations: the specimens’ physiological responses to video footage of violent behavior; lengthy essay questions on the nature of right and wrong; timed logic puzzles; and recordings of actual courtroom cross-examinations broadcast with critical sections missing so that the specimens were expected to argue the relevant point through intuition. The final stage? Goldsmith had been trying to forget that one since the moment it ended, but despite his wondrous intellectual gifts, he could not. Each year, the senior class’s straight-A specimens had one shot at the test. Everything that occurred during the test was kept strictly confidential, except for the only thing that mattered: who won. Goldsmith was the first full-ride scholarship orphan to be appointed valedictorian. Captain Gibson, the school’s head of security, observed Goldsmith’s entire four-hour Selmer-Dubonnet session and promptly anointed him “the natural.”
He heard the footsteps of specimens on their way to first hour progressions through the door of his personal bedroom suite. Another perk: the school gave the valedictorian his own separate space, too, no roommates allowed. Like they knew he’d be long on prestige and short on friends. He glanced at the long, flat plasma screen Nature & Co. window hanging on his wall. There was one hanging in every dorm room in lieu of actual windows. The window broadcasted a lush green forest underneath a yellow sun. A bird of indiscernible species flew past. Looked pretty close to real. Except that it was not.
He checked the screen of his late-model iPro Tabula 7000 (everything was in order: no unread e-mails, homework data was ready for upload, his vital signs were normal and healthy, and there were no voice mails waiting because he was and had always been, as previously mentioned, short on friends) and slid it into his breast pocket, then checked his hair in the mirror one final time before heading for the hallway outside. The door handle was cold in his grip. One thought got him through the days: he was graduating next week.
2
“Good morning, Mr. William Winston Cooley and Mr. Thaddeus Bunson…”
“Hey lady! Nag him, not me! I’m up and running.”
“… the time is 6:45 A.M.”
“No shit. It’s fifteen fucking minutes later than the last time you…”
Bunson’s voice trailed off as he ran through the bedroom suite to the bathroom, his standard-issue black wing tip loafers pounding heavily against the white marble floor. Still curled up underneath his blanket, Cooley heard the sink running and an electric hum. His roommate was shaving, even though he shaved before lights-out last night. Good old Bunson. A man’s man with a five o’clock shadow by two o’clock, twice daily. Cooley opened his eyes and could see the InterAct light alarm’s beam casting its glow through the wool quilt, exactly where his eyes would be if they weren’t strategically shielded. This was his version of the snooze button, circa 2036.
Suddenly, the quilt was yanked off his body and sailed across the room. Cooley lay there in his boxer shorts, looking up at Bunson in full uniform. Bunson—all six feet, nine inches, and 250 pounds of him—was staring at their Nature & Co. window, shooting nervous glances Cooley’s way once every ten seconds. They’d rigged it to broadcast grainy camera footage from a strip club somewhere in one of the grimier parts of San Angeles. It beat the fake mountains and rainbows, or whatever idyllic rerun the school had playing that week. A skinny brunette doffed her top. An arm from an unseen man in the audience slipped a dollar bill into her G-string. Bunson’s hulking frame blocked most of the plasma screen. Cooley was certain the guy would’ve been a big fella even without the school’s med cycle beefing him up for the past twelve years.
“Switch the sequence back to the school broadcast,” Cooley said.
“No.”
“Do it.”
“Get dressed,” Bunson snapped.
“When I’m ready.”
Bunson flipped off the strip show, replacing it with an ocean scene. Palm trees on an island in the distance. “Fact number one,” said Bunson. “Last night’s dopazone hits were engineered to be hangover-free. Fact number two: we’re almost done with our senior year.”
“Your point?”
“You don’t have any excuse. You’re just a miserable bastard.”
Cooley rolled over. “Wake me on commencement day.”
Bunson headed for the door. “Hurry up.” The door opened and closed behind him. He stomped his way down the hall with the rest of the specimens.
Cooley sprang up and headed for his desk. He activated his network terminal and glanced over at Bunson’s workspace while the system warmed up. Photos abounded. Bunson came from a big, rich family. They made a killing on West Coast real estate when San Angeles was formed in response to the E-Bomb blast back in 2016. Back then, the United States had spent years of research and trillions of dollars building up its defenses against what everyone believed would be the inevitable, all-out strike by a hostile nation or cadre of terrorists. Huge death toll forecasts of a possible weapon of mass destruction�
�mainly of the conventional nuclear, dirty, and chemical varieties—kept the general paranoia fresh and political careers flourishing. And then, at 4:34 P.M. EST on May 9, 2016, a crudely improvised version of an electromagnetic pulse bomb—an E-Bomb, or flux compression generator—was assembled by an unknown source for an unknown group of hostiles for an estimated $400 (the total cost of the required tubing, copper coils, and plastic explosives) and detonated on a two-passenger plane two thousand feet above the Cape Cod coastline. The only direct casualty from the blast was that of the pilot, but estimates of the indirect casualties have ranged from anywhere between 100,000 to 250,000 people. The electric grids powering the entire Eastern seaboard were hit by the magnetic fields from the explosion, and channeled that huge, crippling pulse to every machine with a wire, microchip, or spark inside of it. There were no cameras left functioning to capture the sight of hundreds of gyromobiles that fell from the skies, the dozens of commercial airliners circling airports that crashed, the stories of people who died because hospitals were left without power, or the chaos of mass riots that spread like viruses in every East Coast town and city. Life was suddenly plunged back into the nineteenth century. Economic devastation, lack of communication, supply shortages, and weeks of virtually uncontained anarchy sent all of America running West for space, safety, and power sources. With its state of the art missile defense system crippled, the government braced its people for a nuclear or chemical attack piggybacked to the initial damage of the E-Bomb. It never came. Every terrorist organization on the planet took credit for the EMP, which was just as helpful as none of them doing so. And now, twenty years and scores of modernized electrical grids later, it seemed as if the entire nation was still tensed up, readying itself for that crippling blow that could still arrive at any moment.
Meanwhile, the new pilgrimage West had caused Los Angeles and San Francisco to burst at the seams with overpopulation (average life span following the advent of the gyromobile and the AIDS vaccine: ninety-four years of age; average number of children per family: 2.78), so the federal and state governments, along with some savvy developers, broke in all the land between Southern and Northern California, creating the world’s most sprawling metropolis. Bunson’s family owned a chunk of something like a million acres that were targeted for the San Angeles Development Project, and they sold it for a pretty penny. Not that the huge addition of space eased the crowding for the people now known as San Angelenos. Over the years, the new, affordable, and easily dispensed disease vaccinations were such a boon to Third World and developing nations that the populations of India, Africa, and Asia skyrocketed. Simultaneously, globalization and free trade had opened up borders and kept U.S. immigration offices very busy: the influx of cheap labor, after all, is what helped the country’s economy rise up again from what was supposed to be a fatal blow.
Cooley looked at a silver frame on his roommate’s desk: Bunson and his three hefty sisters. A gold frame: Bunson and his dog, a yellow Lab named Trigger. A big wooden frame: Bunson with his toothy mom and dad. Dad had one satisfied hand resting on the kind of paunch meant to be a sign of wealth. Bunson pere was a Princeton man. He made it clear to Bunson fils that his access to the family fortune and goodwill depended solely on whether he would be a Princeton son.
Stansbury’s most recent senior class—the already legendary class of 2035—saw a record-breaking 84 percent get in to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. However, since Bunson occupied the bottom 10 percent of Stansbury’s Class of 2036, the odds were not exactly on his side. Still, he applied and waited it out, knowing the whole time that the grades on his transcript were lacking. He watched the mail and gave himself an ulcer. The school’s med technicians upped his daily dosage from the specimen’s average of 100 milligrams to 400 milligrams of Equimode anti-anxiety capsules. A thin letter bearing Princeton’s colors arrived last month. He got wait-listed when he should have been rejected outright. Forty-nine other specimens were accepted. Bunson figured his Stansbury diploma, his dad’s alumni pull, and decent final semester scores might be enough to make him number fifty. The big guy started waking up on time. He hit the med tech bay in the atrium each day and popped his four hundred milligrams. He relaxed only occasionally, letting himself do dopazone once a week to stay sane, and on the other days he came home near dawn after closing down the study hall. He was getting edgy, irritable, but Cooley understood. Suddenly giving a shit about one’s future tended to do that to people.
Cooley’s computer gave the ready signal and he turned back to his side of the room. No photos or fancy frames. No father with high expectations. No mother to make proud. No point in wondering whether having them would have made things turn out differently. He opened a drawer and grabbed a black cuff with a cord attached to it. He pulled the cord taut, plugged it into the back of the computer, and strapped the cuff to his wrist, carefully matching up the red grid network on its surface with the veins in his wrist. Cooley navigated through a series of screens on his monitor, cracked through the Stansbury network wall and arrived at a spare page that read Dopazone Domain. He typed in his user name and password. A new screen popped up with a graph indicating the reserves left in his account. Not much there—the Stansbury monthly allowance to scholarship orphans didn’t factor in many personal expenses—but enough for one hit to get him through the morning. After tightening the wrist cuff, he hit the button labeled Return.
That’s right, he thought. Return. Bring me back. Some place that’s not a plasma screen broadcast. Somewhere the light isn’t engineered.
The dopazone molecules transferred digitally from the site’s mainframe server to Cooley’s terminal by bouncing in between thirty-eight separate destinations, all of which were decoys designed to throw off Stansbury’s built-in security system. It was a crude technique that wouldn’t work for someone trying to bootleg real data or private files, but dopazone (a genetically engineered chemical made up of designer neurotransmitters that simultaneously mimicked the effects of dopamine reuptake inhibitors and the phenethylamines found in pure MDMA) was simple enough to pass through undetected. It was Bunson’s trick. He learned it from a dealer over winter holiday—he’d just sent in his Princeton application and was feeling daring—and added his own technical expertise for their on-campus benefit. Figures, Cooley thought. The only outsiders smart enough to beat the school were drug dealers after money. Bunson described the science behind the whole dopazone concept better, though. His grades stunk, but he still drank the Kool-Aid. He still took his meds. They made him smart. Specimen smart. Too bad they couldn’t make him care. But that, Cooley knew, was the fundamental problem behind the whole goddamned system running this …
He went light-headed and his eyes drifted shut involuntarily. The artificial sun and the dorm room’s sterile, glaring lamps faded away. The dopazone molecules rode the electric currents and shot through the wrist cuff, transferring past the skin and into his bloodstream. His capillaries bloomed wide open, neurotransmitters passed into his brain and triggered channels with a counterfeit physiological command to release huge natural supplies of dopamine, the body’s own personal pleasure juice. Cooley slid back into his chair and let the trip take him to a familiar place.
The heavy haze gave way to an image in the distance: a long, one-level imitation Neutra house (one of the cheaper prefabs that became popular around 2013), thin glass walls blending into sliding doors of tinny faux steel. The garden outside had daisies trampled by a man’s big footsteps, the man without a face in the living room who stood above a woman bleeding from the mouth, two lips split open in different places. Cooley cowered in the corner and the woman never took her eyes from him, even when she went cross-eyed from another left hook to the jaw. The man stepped in between them, cutting off her line of sight, throwing her to the side. Red drops fell from her head, staining the soft white fur of the Flokati rug. But she told the man that she loved him. Outside, the sun started to sink.
“Go and play outside, William!” echoed her voice. “I’l
l leave a light on for you.”
The man picked up a folding chair. Cooley had been on this trip before and knew he was not big or strong enough to stop him, so he tried to catch a glimpse of the woman. He always heard her voice but missed her face. The chair went airborne, skimming her head and shattering the glass door behind her like it was made of clear, smooth rock candy and—
Wait. Rewind that. Cooley’s dopazone tolerance had gotten to the point where he could half-wake himself just enough to pause the narcotic trip into his subconscious midstride and scroll backward through the images. The chair traced its ellipse back in through the door, the glass showering upward in reverse like a choreographed flock of birds swarming to the same point. Back inside the living room. Red stains on the Flokati rug went from dry back to wet, zinging up into his mother’s broken mouth like macabre raindrops arcing back up to heaven. Through the high, Cooley could feel his fingers trembling against the steel arm of his chair and tried to get back into the haze. There. His mom. She was right there, just a little blurry, but there: maybe twenty-five, a birthmark near her mouth on the left side, right where her upper and lower lips met. Sandy brown hair that would look mousy on any other strange lady, but on her looked …
And then she was gone. Disappeared into a sheet of black, like someone pulled the plug on the television of his memory. Cooley’s eyes snapped open. The computer screen sent him a message: Account Empty/Insufficient Funds.
He threw off the wrist cuff and jumped up, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Six feet tall, 175 pounds, maybe a little scrawny in his boxer shorts. A normal kid anywhere else, but among the Stansbury specimens he was a runt. In the outside world, adults cautioned children to avoid the myriad perils that would stunt one’s growth: coffee, masturbation, a lack of vegetables in the diet, too much television, et cetera. Inside the tower, adults warned specimens against being average, and the primary way to avoid this misfortune was a rigorous observance of Dr. Stansbury’s hallowed med cycle. And, as was the case most of the time (far too often for Cooley’s taste, anyway), the Stansbury people knew what they were talking about.
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