But a few people thought, “Why stop there?” Why not turn ‘B’ students into geniuses, ordinary girls into supermodels, average ball players into pro athletes? There's nothing astonishing about this; parents have been trying to improve their children since time began. Only now, they had the means to actually do it. While gene correction was plug-and-play—just pop a pill—gene tweaking was intricate custom design, laborious, expensive, and ultimately tragic.
It's a well-known fact that every tweak has a glitch. If you went to elementary school with the first wave of tweaks like I did, then you saw at least a few of the worst glitches, the organ failures and the fatal seizures and the howling brain malfunctions. You saw the paramedics come and cart those kids away.
But most of the glitches were less catastrophic. One tweak I remember was an incredible athlete. He could bench 450 and run the 100 in eight seconds flat. When he was twelve. The next year, he started high school and was the star everything on the varsity football team. Then somebody at another school found out what his glitch was. He could hear up into the very high frequencies, like a dog can. And whenever somebody blew a dog whistle, he would come running. I'm not kidding. He came to stuff that dog whistle down the throat of whoever was blowing it, but he came. So from then on, whenever this kid got the ball in a game, people from the other school would blow dog whistles, and he'd run out-of-bounds to chase them. Like I mentioned, people are usually cool about rejects, but they're pretty brutal to tweaks. Don't want them thinking they're better than us, after all.
Xander's glitch was his real name. Hearing it would trigger some kind of feedback loop in his brain. I found out about it when we played peewee soccer together when we were six.
That was back when he was just finding out that he was different from the other kids. I didn't have his extra height and strength, but we could both perform amazing tricks of memory and calculation. It made him happy, I think, to find someone a little like him, even though I had gotten my abilities from my mother, and his came from a lab.
Once you are Xander Sparks’ friend, you are always his friend. Even in high school, when he was a top ten local personality with his own syndicated reality show and recurring spots on a dozen others, and I was a complete nobody, he would still suspend his live feed once a week or so to play air hockey or just bum at my place. It was a little like Apollo descending from Mt. Olympus to hang with an old mortal buddy.
If I had wanted, he would gladly have let me tag along with him in the social stratosphere, and it would have meant residuals and a second-class type of celebrity. But I didn't want that. If I made it there, I wanted it to be on my own terms. I guess that's why I was a little reluctant at first when he asked me to run his campaign for student body president.
"You practically ran that first campaign for your dad,” he said, trying to convince me.
"But we lost."
"Yeah, but you learned a lot. You're the man for the job, Park. Besides...” He tapped the mobile clipped to his shoulder twice for a twenty-second blackout and waited until I did the same.
"You'll get a lot of face time,” he said. “That's like free advertising for your dad."
I glanced at his mobile warily. The activation light was still dimmed. “You know he'll be running against Nikki's dad."
"Nikki's dad's unbeatable. You said so yourself. I know how the game's played. You win the primary this time, then you're a lock in two years when the term limit's up.” He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “We need to keep that congressional seat in the family, right? My campaign will be good practice for you.” Then a faint shadow crossed his face. “And you know about stuff."
I knew what he meant. As far as I knew, I was the only one at school who knew about Xander's glitch, and I had never told anybody. But somehow, Aiden Gorby found out about it.
It was during the debate. Gorby was Xander's opponent on the final ballot, and he looked so smug as he walked out to his lectern that it gave me a bad feeling.
"A student body president must understand the people he represents,” said Gorby to the assembly. “To understand you, he must be one of you, as I am, not a privileged wonder boy like—” He paused, flashing a malevolent grin at Xander. “—Stephen Alexander Sparks."
Xander went rigid. He gripped the top of his lectern so hard that I though it might snap off. I knew that in a few seconds his eyes would roll back in his head and he would start shaking, just like that time in peewee soccer when some assistant coach had called roll using the full names of all the players. I was the only one who figured it out back then; everybody else just thought he'd been sick. From then on, Xander's parents had always made sure that he was listed only as “Xander Sparks” on any roster.
Everybody liked Xander. When Gorby insulted him, the crowd wasn't happy. There were angry shouts; both Gorby and the moderator were shouted down when they tried to speak. Then somebody threw something. Things were getting out of hand, and the moderator, a sophomore girl who was head of the poly-sci club, looked around the auditorium with wide, frantic eyes.
To me, everything is a puzzle; everything has a solution. That's just the way my brain works. Everything I knew about Xander flashed through my head, sorted itself out, and I saw the solution here.
The campaign managers were onstage with their candidates; Xander had insisted on this. I leaned forward and put a hand on his shoulder.
"They need you, Xander,” I whispered. “Look."
Unsteady, he managed to look up. A tough-looking kid in a football letter jacket had jumped onstage and was shaking a fist in Gorby's face. The moderator was huddled in a folding chair.
"They need you,” I repeated.
Xander let out a slow breath, and the tension in his body drained out with it. He stepped between Gorby and his attacker.
"Peace,” said Xander. He said something quietly to the guy in the football jacket, and they both chuckled. As the boy climbed back down to his seat, Xander raised a hand to the crowd and said, “Peace. We're all friends here."
The crowd quieted. Then Xander ad-libbed a speech about respecting other people's opinions and how we are more than just the sum of our parts. It was brilliant. Gorby hadn't prepared anything much beyond his sneak attack. He stammered his way through the rest of the debate. This was Wednesday, and on Thursday, Xander won huge. Afterwards, Nikki Kennedy stopped me at my locker.
"Xander told me what you did for him,” she said, watching me with the wary look she gave anybody who wasn't in her inner circle. “That was cool."
I shrugged. “I didn't do anything."
"There's a party Saturday at my place.” She gave me a fragile smile as she turned to go. “You should come."
The invitation was a big deal, but I had mixed feelings. A party at Nikki's house would be off the grid. Rep. Kennedy's security apps would force all of our mobiles into standby once we were inside. But walking into the mansion would be a red carpet event, a showcase for local celebs, and I wasn't one. I didn't have the clothes or the car or the hot girlfriend to cling to my arm and laugh at my wit. Showing up at the party would mean good residuals, but it could be a ratings disaster personally. This was Thursday.
After school, Xander took me and a couple other kids who'd worked with us on the campaign into the city to celebrate. That's when we saw the fire and I saved the convict. Then came the interview on TV Prime. By the time I got to school Friday morning, requests for my archive footage were coming in at a good pace, along with the residuals they generated. I was a national celeb.
At this point, I was looking forward to Nikki's party. My bank balance was more than high enough now to get the clothes I would need, and I expected to receive plenty of date queries. After all, Xander got about fifty a day, and he was only a local celeb. I'd pick a camera-friendly celeb girl who came with a nice car, and I would be set for the party. As the morning passed, I checked the messages on my mobile more and more often, but nothing came in.
By lunch, I was getting frustrated.
I ran diagnostics on my mobile twice and sent myself a test message. It was receiving fine. I checked my ratings, and I was still in the top 200 nationally. This was bewildering. I was pretty relieved, then, in sixth period when I finally got a text with a flirt tag. It was the only one I got all day, but fortunately, this one was perfect.
Her name was Skylar Dennison, and she was a top ten local celeb from another high school. Not only did she have a killer smile, but when I called her, she was behind the wheel of brand new Lexus. We agreed to meet at the mall that afternoon.
I had just enough time to run home and spruce up a bit. Rushing back out of my room, I caught a glance of the heap of papers on my desk, and felt a twinge of some odd feeling. I'd gotten pretty lazy about my research lately; I hadn't touched it in weeks. But fate had presented me with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here, and I had to take advantage of it.
"You want to be a mathematician?” asked Skylar, after we'd circumnavigated the mall picking out clothes and gone to relax at the food court.
"I am a mathematician,” I assured her.
"Weird. How'd that happen?” She took a sip of her diet soda.
I looked at her more closely. The cut of her straight black hair and her dark eyelashes had brought to mind images of some of the actresses who played Cleopatra in the old movies, only younger, of course, and prettier. She was definitely a knockout, but her face seemed somehow familiar and I couldn't remember where I'd seen her before. That bugged me.
Then she looked up at me and smiled with the soda straw between her perfect teeth. I couldn't help but laugh.
"I'm serious,” she said. “I want to know."
"When I was four, I told my mom I didn't want to go to school."
Skylar tilted her head. “What did she say?"
"She said okay. I could stay home and she would teach me herself, but only on the condition that I become a great scientist someday. If I changed my mind and wanted to do something else, I had to go to school. That seemed fair. So I skipped preschool and Mom taught me abstract math—number theory, abelian groups, some real analysis—in an elementary form."
"She must have been really smart.” Skylar would know about the accident; there are very few truly blind dates anymore, not when everyone has a downloadable bio.
"Yeah. She was a microbiologist, but she had a master's in pure math, and that's what I liked. She made a game out of it. She would encode messages so that I'd have to solve math problems to read them and get a prize. I loved it. Then she upped the stakes. She gave me messages that could only be unlocked if I solved open problems, you know, research level problems that have never been solved by anybody. She said it would take a few years, but eventually I'd crack them."
"And have you?"
"Five so far. Published the results too.” I didn't mention that it had been two years since I'd published anything at all. “And I'm that close—” I held a thumb and forefinger a millimeter apart. “—to getting the last one. It's an open problem in number theory. Not as famous as, say, Fermat's last theorem, or as intractable as something like the Riemann Hypothesis or the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, but it's important, and it'll get me published in a top journal."
"Right...” Skylar looked at me for a moment, blinking slowly. Then her slightly open mouth turned up at the corners in amusement. “I'm wearing cherry lip gloss."
We both laughed.
"I know, I know,” I said. “I'm boring."
"Not boring,” she said. “Math just blows my mind. Like that Greek guy who tries to run a mile but never gets anywhere."
I nodded. “Zeno's paradox.” That got me started on limits and infinities and transfinite numbers. I almost started explaining the difference between rational, irrational, algebraic, transcendental, and noncomputable numbers in terms of binary expansions, but I managed to stop myself. Still, Skylar didn't seem to mind; she caught on to the basic ideas quickly. I decided that I liked this girl a lot.
After the mall, we got into her Lexus and she asked if I'd like to do something a little strange.
I shrugged. “Sure."
She drove us out to old highway 33, to the grounds of a towering cathedral. The imposing building was long empty, of course, but someone had obviously been keeping the place up; the lawns were well cared for, and late afternoon sun glinted off of unbroken stained glass windows.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?” Skylar danced from one point to another, snapping pictures with a slick little camera. “I wanted some shots at this time of day. Nice shadows. I'm documenting these places before they're all gone."
"Weird,” I said. “An architectural historian. How'd that happen?"
She laughed. “My brother got me started on it."
There was a sign in front of the cathedral that said it was soon to be remodeled into the neighborhood's hottest nightclub. Across the bottom of the sign, someone had written, “What have we done?” in a beautiful, flowing script.
All in all, the date seemed to go well. When I asked Skylar to Nikki's party, she agreed.
I was pulling tags off of new pants Saturday afternoon when Xander called.
"You're coming to Nikki's, right?” he asked. I assured him I was.
"Good. Now that you're a superhero, I didn't know if you could fit us into your schedule. Need a lift?"
I smiled. “Nope. Got it covered."
About five minutes after he hung up, Skylar rang in.
"Hi, Parker.” She paused, biting her lower lip. “I'm afraid I have to cancel for tonight. Sorry."
It took a moment, but I forced myself to smile. “Sure. No problem."
"I mean, I really want to go, but I didn't know my brother would be home tonight, and I hardly ever get to see him..."
"It's okay, Skylar."
"Let's go to the mall again Monday, or something..."
I had one of my flashes. “Why don't we bring your brother along to the party?"
"Hmm.” She bit her lip again. “That's an idea. Hold on.” She suspended the connection for a few seconds, then reappeared smiling. “We'll do it. See you at seven."
It was kind of a stretch, me bringing a guest besides my date to Nikki's, the first time I'm ever invited. But I thought: Skylar's a top ten local, so her brother's most likely a celeb, too. It shouldn't be a problem. And besides, I'm a national, right?
Five minutes after seven, the sun was just below the edge of a rose-colored horizon, and Skylar pulled into the driveway in her Lexus. I caught a glimpse of a dark-haired guy in the passenger side as I grabbed my jacket and searched the pockets for a breath mint. I popped one in just as the doorbell rang. Then I opened the door.
"This is my brother Quinn,” said Skylar, smiling at me and then up at the face of the young man beside her. “Quinn, this is Parker."
"We've met,” said Quinn. He grinned slightly and held out his hand. I stared at him in astonishment.
Quinn was the convict, the one I'd saved on the rooftop. That's why Skylar had seemed familiar to me; they shared the same coloring and fineness of features, especially their dark eyes. Her bio had mentioned a brother, but not that he was a convict, and I hadn't looked any farther.
For a moment, I remained stunned, but I saw Skylar watching me, her smile tentative until I snapped out of it and shook Quinn's hand. Then she was happy again.
At Nikki's, Xander met us at the door. He knew Skylar, of course, but he clearly didn't know about her brother. Just for an instant, his eyes widened as they went to Quinn's stripes, the impossible to fake iridescent insignia embedded over the left eye of every convict. But Xander was cool; he greeted Quinn with a warm handshake without missing a beat.
"I wanted to give you a heads-up,” Xander said in a low tone when we were inside. “Gorby's here."
I nodded. No doubt Xander had arranged this himself as part of a peace-making effort. We followed Xander and the pulsing beat of rock music into Nikki's living room.
There weren't a whole lot of people at the party, maybe twen
ty-five or so, mainly Nikki's best friends and their dates. They were milling around in little groups, chatting, holding plastic cups. A hand-lettered banner that read, “Congratulations President Xander!” hung on the wall.
We wandered into the kitchen for drinks. There was an ice chest full of vodka coolers and a keg of beer, but Skylar and Quinn both took sodas, so I did the same. That was cool with me; I hated the thickheaded feeling alcohol gave.
We ran into our hostess as we came out. I said “hi” and held my breath for her reaction to my tag-along, but it turned out I didn't need to worry. When Nikki saw the stripes above Quinn's eye, her face lit up; she let out a breath almost like a sigh. I've seen little kids have this same reaction. After all, it's pretty much only convicts who are willing or trusted to become teachers or babysitters these days, and children learn that the people with the sparkling stripes are the ones who will always keep them safe.
Nikki had met Skylar before, and after I introduced Quinn, she pulled him away to sit down at a ring of sofas. Skylar and I followed. From around the room more people began to join us.
"They let you come home?” someone asked Quinn.
"I can do whatever I want,” he answered.
"What if you wanted to rob a bank?” This was Gorby. His mocking eyes were already glassy from alcohol as he took a seat across from Nikki and Quinn.
Quinn smiled faintly. “I couldn't want to do anything like that."
Nikki put her hand on Quinn's shoulder. “You're not wearing a mobile."
"I don't have to."
"But how can you prove you're innocent without a video record?” There was a phrase children learned about the importance of their mobile in today's world: “Guilty unless proven innocent."
Quinn shrugged. “I can't even be charged with anything."
There was a brief pause as the group took this in. Then Gorby's too-loud voice broke the silence. “Hey, you know, Parker, you aren't the only one to bring something cool for show and tell.” He ducked into the room where coats had been stored and returned carrying a small glass bottle full of white capsules, which he laid on the coffee table in front of Nikki. The label had the words “Faith Formula,” imprinted over a picture of a burning bush.
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