Prodigy

by Dave Kalstein

  Cooley never liked pills. Even as a six year old he found himself freaked out by the ghoulish, far-off stares on the faces of the older specimens. He stashed his meds in his pockets and dumped them in the trash when he was alone, like a kid avoiding Mom’s asparagus. He figured no one would know the difference, but pretty soon Cooley realized that there was a reason he fell behind in rudimentary-level progressions after the first day of school each year. Taking notes from the teacher’s lecture was like trying to count bullets as they left the barrel of a machine gun. He’d catch colds and miss classes, slowly grasping the reason he was the only one lying around in the school infirmary. Routine three-hour exams left him exhausted; the black filled-in bubbles on his Scantron sheet went blurry eighty minutes in. Cooley would watch in disbelief at the sight of specimens polishing off five hundred pages of Dostoyevsky in one sitting, prior to banging out corresponding essays the same night. He tried everything, the tutors and study groups, but no one had the patience or time to slow down for him.

  In the beginning, the school paid special attention to him, never suspecting that he’d skirted the med cycle. The cycle, after all, made the hard stuff—studying, comprehension, producing results—that much easier. What specimen wouldn’t accept the advantage? By the time the physical effects of shirking the cycle became obvious—the school’s tailors had to custom-make his uniforms because Stansbury’s patented IGF-1 (insulin growth factor-1) protein never got the chance to boost his muscle growth and immune systems to average specimen levels—the administration decided Cooley was better off being ignored. No one would notice the sight of one student in approximately four thousand falling through the cracks. And after all, he was just an orphan without a tuition-paying family expecting a better return for their investment.

  Cooley knotted up his tie while running out the door. The hallway was empty. An elevator pod beeped around the corner, ready to make its journey up 120-odd floors to the Stansbury atrium and the morning’s progressions. He had seven seconds before the doors slid closed. Seven seconds before he lost another five minutes waiting for another elevator during rush hour. Seven seconds before this absurd world left him behind once again. Cooley counted down the time while breaking into a sprint, as thoughts and numbers flew through his head.

  Seven seconds …

  Ninety-eight percent: the odds that a specimen on the med cycle would be on time.

  Twelve percent: the odds a random candidate would be accepted at Princeton University.

  Five seconds …

  Fifty percent: the odds a Stansbury specimen would be accepted at Princeton University.

  Thirty-four: the amount of dollars Cooley had in the bank.

  Six million: the amount of dollars his twelve-year, full-ride Stansbury scholarship was worth.

  Three seconds …

  (Couldn’t they have just given him a check instead?)

  One: the average number of Stansbury Lottery–winning orphans per year that didn’t end up going to college. The Class of 2036’s lucky guy? Yours truly.

  One second …

  Four: the number of days until Cooley was let out of this big metal dick of a prison forever, thereby getting on with the rest of his life.

  Fifty-fifty (and maybe the only numbers that mattered): the odds he’d be able to convince Sadie to push back her first year of college to spend it with him.

  Cooley slowed to a leisurely stroll upon seeing that Bunson was propping open the elevator doors, keeping the pod in place. Seven other specimens stood behind him, checking their watches and glaring helplessly. Cooley grinned and stepped inside. The pissed-off looks evaporated. No one said a word. The pills might’ve gotten them better scores, he thought, but they couldn’t teach these kids about being The Man. It wasn’t in the grades. It was in the way you walked.

  The doors slid closed and Cooley considered what he might be when he grew up. Bunson had Princeton. Cooley had been wait-listed by this riddle in his head: whatever happened to Mom? One rumor: she dropped him at the orphanage after meeting some rich guy who didn’t want kids. Another: he ended up with the rest of the motherless children after his own mother took yet another beating. One she would not wake up from. Cooley didn’t hold it against her. He just hoped she went down swinging.

  Graduation. Fuck the speeches and fancy writing on sheepskin, fuck all the specimens ready for another four years of servitude at some college. He rehearsed his own commencement day speech: Dear Mom … You never wrote. You never called. Are you dead or what? Hope you kept that light on, though, ’cause next week I’m coming home.

  3

  The elevator dinged and stopped on Level 19. Misters Nathan Donald Oates, Robert Ryu Sugiyama, and Miles Boyd Mancuso stepped in. The seven geek specimens already inside the pod took a few steps toward the back, making room. Cooley and Bunson nodded. The doors slid closed. Oates, Sugiyama, and Mancuso started giggling. Cooley and Bunson cracked smiles.

  “Blew my fucking mind,” grinned Oates.

  “Tripping on the dopazone,” said Sugiyama. “Nice.”

  “You’re gonna hook us up, right, Cooley?” asked Mancuso. The geeks in the back exchanged glances, rolling their eyes and straightening already straight ties. Oates stared them down.

  “What’re you looking at?”

  They stopped straightening and commenced with studying the elevator pod’s gray carpeting.

  “Clean piss,” said Cooley. “Yeah, I’ll hook it up.” Out of habit, he glanced up at one of the tiny fiber optic camera/surveillance mic holes that the tower had installed in the top left-hand corner of every elevator pod. Similarly discreet monitoring apparatuses dotted all of the public spaces in the school, but had not been active since 2019, when a group of seniors successfully petitioned Doc Stansbury to allow the specimen body a larger degree of civil liberties. Far from being reincarnations of the radicalized student protestors of years past, the petitioners made their case—based on arguments hearkening back to philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Voltaire, among others—rationally, patiently presenting their logic to the board of trustees without any threats of boycotting classes, agitating their peers, chaining themselves to furniture, or worst of all, going to the media. Stansbury and the board decided their tower of prodigies had earned their trust, and besides, so their thinking went, the med cycle had successfully eradicated the more serious delinquent urges. Since then, as professors are fond of telling their specimens, Stansbury Tower has felt less like a police state and more like organized civil society. Still, Cooley eyed those camera and microphone implants each day. To him, their continued (albeit inactive) presence despite the 2019 ruling loomed as a constant, subtle reminder that the school could change its mind on a whim.

  “Word is, the piss man’s coming this week,” murmured Sugiyama. “If we want to test clean, we’ll need the samples by—” Bunson glowered down at him. Sugiyama shut up.

  “The piss man’s coming tomorrow,” Bunson said.

  “Says who?” asked Mancuso, posing the question more to show that he wasn’t intimidated than out of genuine skepticism.

  “Harvey. Works the reception desk downstairs. Piss man’s logged in on the visitor list.”

  Sugiyama went pale. Cooley looked at Bunson.

  “When did Harvey tell you that?” he asked.

  “Last night. We were tripping. I forgot to tell you.”

  “What if he doesn’t let me out today?”

  “He’ll let you out.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Sugiyama cut in.

  “He’s gotta let you out,” Bunson resumed. “He’s not gonna let us take a fall like this four days before graduation. He can’t. And Mr. Riley likes you, he’ll—”

  “He’s not a fuckin’ specimen anymore.” Cooley snapped. “Just call him Riley. Christ.” The geeks in the back gave each other looks. Mancuso suppressed a smile. Cooley took two steps in Bunson’s direction, jamming him into the back corner of the pod, lowering his voice to a whisper. “You’re tellin
g me that I’ve got to get off campus to San Angeles, track down Riley, and convince him to produce fourteen urine samples, all within four hours?”

  “Well, yeah … I guess so,” stammered Bunson. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of cash, and handed it to Cooley. “This is enough for all of us. Man … I feel bad about this, but—”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Uh … Cooley,” stammered Oates, “so you’re gonna—”

  “I’ve got it under control.”

  “But that means you’ve got to cut class and go like, right now if you’re gonna…” Sugiyama glanced at Bunson. Bunson laid a huge hand on Sugiyama’s shoulder.

  “He said he’s got it under control.”

  The elevator dinged and stopped on Level 21. The pod went silent. Miss Shannon Louise Evans, Miss Katherine Mary Lewis, and Miss Sadie Sarah Chapman strolled through the doors. The guys checked them out: navy blue cardigans with gold Stansbury emblems over white button-down shirts, charcoal gray skirts that gave way to three long pairs of legs in navy blue knee socks and black flats. Sadie stood in front of Cooley, her back to him. He leaned in and got a whiff of her familiar scent: hair that smelled like fruit from some tropical island he’d never visited but had seen on the school’s plasma screens plenty of times.

  “Come here often?” he asked. The girls cracked up. The doors started to slide closed. Sadie did a quick 180-degree twist of the hips and pecked Cooley on the cheek. Then a hand shot in between the sliding doors: five long, thin fingers with precisely manicured nails in a deep red shade. The color made Cooley think of blood dripping from the fangs of a particularly civilized but deadly predator, the kind that feasted on the carcass of its fallen prey. The motion sensors beeped and the doors slid open again. In walked Miss Camilla Moore II. Her dark brown hair was pulled back against her scalp into an efficient ponytail against pale, china-doll skin that had never seen a day of makeup. Her cold eyes shimmered behind the tortoiseshell frames of her glasses. Cooley remembered Camilla’s handwriting when they were eight years old: it was compact, elegant. Dignified. It resembled the looping black cursive on display in the laminated copy of the Declaration of Independence that hung on their progression room’s wall. Like every word she put to paper would be permanent, fit for study for the next three hundred years. (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … What a fuckin’ joke, thought Cooley.)

  Even when they were all merely children, Camilla looked like an adult, just on a smaller scale. Most of the specimens’ faces and bodies went through the normally clumsy physical tug-of-war over the years before their skin and bones finally settled on a true identity, but not her. Her template was set from the beginning. When they studied Homer’s Iliad back in second grade, the Trojan War myth inspired one of the more artistic specimens to paint a sprawling mural on the progression room’s ceiling. When he finished, everyone noticed the same thing: Pallas Athena, the hard-hearted goddess of war and wisdom who sprang from the head of Zeus fully formed, was a dead ringer for Camilla. That is, if she switched her uniform for a golden battle helmet, flowing white gown and spear. Cooley recalled trying to think of an appropriately sarcastic crack for the benefit of his peers but came up with blanks. He always imagined her whenever Homer spoke of “gray-eyed Athena,” too. A hush fell over the elevator. The doors slid closed.

  Cooley looked at Camilla out of the corner of his eye, knowing that everyone was thinking the same thing: grab a complimentary gawk at one of Stansbury’s first purebred specimens while you can. Her parents (Mr. Robert Cavil Moore and Miss Camilla Peterson) graduated back around 2010. Mr. Moore went on to invent the compressed gyroscopic engine—the basis for the gyromobile—in 2013. Time stuck a photo of him on the cover in between images of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Old Doc Stansbury would have loved Mr. Moore’s and Miss Peterson’s only child. He would have drunk in her distinguished pedigree, her lack of wasted words, the proud absence of girlish giggles, and blushed, a modern-day Pygmalion seeing a masterpiece he once dreamed up come to life.

  The other girls teased her when she was little with a nickname that stuck: Camilla Moore 2.0. Like she was some kind of upgrade on an earlier version. And according to school legend, this new model came complete with a photographic memory, supposedly the result of having two parents brought up on the med cycle; the human race ascending to the next level in the evolutionary stratosphere, so the story went. From the first day of her enrollment, she was the hot choice for valedictorian of 2036. All of Stansbury agreed. Each year, some guys in the junior class organized an underground gambling pool so the specimens (and, some say, the faculty) throughout the school could wager on the Selmer-Dubonnet winner, and this purebred girl was considered a virtual lock at 3 to 2 odds, the highest in recent memory. But then the impossible happened. She didn’t win. The title went to the dark horse, Mr. Goldsmith, and that was that. Even though Miss Moore never had any friends, the rest of the specimens took care not to mention the word “valedictorian” in her presence again, like she had become some kind of phantom who would awaken to wreak havoc if anyone dared to invoke that fateful term in her presence.

  After Camilla 2.0 came up short, nobody looked at her in the same way. Her name didn’t sound quite as aristocratic coming from the mouths of teachers. She became less of an idol and more of a curiosity to the younger specimens; still respected, but not revered. Lately, unbalanced types like Misters Oates, Sugiyama, and Mancuso wondered if she was any good in bed and joked about whether they’d be able to get Miss Moore drunk enough to give her a go before graduation. Over this past winter holiday, Sadie and her family flew Cooley out to New York City for Christmas. They went on a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for kicks, wearing blue jeans and sneakers like they were normal eighteen-year-old kids. In the Ancient Greek and Roman wing, the guide brought them by an elegant twelve-foot-tall statue. It was missing an arm and half of its helmeted head, but the rest of the cracked white marble kept its proud posture, the remaining arm clutching a spear snapped in half countless years ago.

  “For some reason it reminds me of Camilla 2.0,” whispered Sadie. “Weird.” She shivered and headed off with the crowd toward the Egyptian wing’s Temple of Dendur. Cooley glanced at the tag near the statue’s feet. It read: “Athena, 2nd-Century Roman, marble.” He looked around to tell Sadie about the coincidence, but she was gone. All he saw around him were more white marble statues with jagged edges where arms, shoulders, legs, and heads should have been. There were hundreds of them. Maybe enough to match one up with every specimen who ever enrolled at Stansbury School.

  Cooley glanced at the gold emblem on Miss Moore’s navy blue cardigan, silently reading the school’s familiar Latin motto. NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. A new order for the ages. Maybe. Camilla made him think of another Latin cliché, the only other one he could recall from memory: Sic Transit Gloria. Glory fades. Even for someone like her.

  Level 22. The doors slid open. The first thing he saw was the blond hair and the calm eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. Spare me, Cooley thought. Good morning, Mr. Thomas Fucking Goldsmith.

  4

  Goldsmith entered the pod, dutifully avoiding eye contact with everyone, lest his gaze be interpreted to mean that his duties to the school were performed with anything less than strict impartiality. He stood next to Camilla. They exchanged curt nods like diplomats of enemy nations.

  “How’s it goin, Tommy?” sneered Mr. Mancuso. Goldsmith stood just in front of him, back straight, shoulders held high. He felt his jaw clench involuntarily and hoped no one else noticed. “You narc on anyone yet today?” Mancuso jabbed him in the lower back with his index finger.

  “No, Mr. Mancuso,” said Goldsmith, not turning around to face him. “I have not.”

  “Don’t look so bummed, Tommy,” said Cooley. Goldsmith felt his jaw tighten again. “It’s early yet.” Goldsmith looked over at him: the punk had his eyes pinned back, pupils dilated, probably coming down from dopazone, and the sun wa
s barely up in the sky. Goldsmith wondered what the smug bastards would think if they knew how close the school was to busting all of them for drug possession, expelling them less than a week before graduation. He also wondered if any of these burnouts had enough brain cells left to figure out—thanks to a confidential order last semester from President Judith Lang—the security detail secretly reactivated the school’s surveillance technology on two randomly selected days each week of the year. Today happened to be one of them.

  It’s funny, Goldsmith thought, Cooley’s reputation made you forget what a shrimp he was. All the guys towered over him by five inches, at least, and he stood just about eye level with most of the girls. Goldsmith was six feet five inches tall, the male average for the Class of 2036. Ten years ago, the school had to install new doorways and elevators because the specimens were getting so big. The combination of the med cycle’s IGF-1 protein gene therapy that promoted accelerated muscle growth and repair, regular hand-eye coordination drills, Phys-D progressions, and the cafeteria’s nutrient formulas had given Stansbury’s bookish young men the build and gait of NBA point guards. The girls got lithe, healthy bodies that were the fetish of just about every red-blooded male in the outside world. The ones in this elevator alone—Sadie, Katherine, Shannon, and Camilla—would render even the most jaded of lotharios in the outside world a stuttering wreck. What with their sleek five-eleven frames, their round, firm D-cup breasts straining at the thin cashmere of their matching cardigans, their long, elegant fingers, and flowing waves of hair, they looked like a team of superheroines working undercover as students. Like they had just stepped out of the pages of a beautifully illustrated comic book and into real life. The specimens all got to live forever or somewhere close to it. Projected life span for that year’s seniors was up to 117 years of age.