by Leito, Chad
The assembly hall door slammed behind Asa as he entered, much louder than he intended. Still, no one looked up from their work or seemed to notice him. The entire room was filled with the sound of clacking keys, and hundreds of Fishies sat alert and erect, typing as quickly as they could while the man on stage spoke.
Asa recognized him. The man was slender and balding, with ribs that stood out strongly against his black suit. His spine was contorted so that he leaned to the right, afflicted with a harsh case of scoliosis. Asa had first seen the man on the island in the center of the moat; he had been following the man in the white suit with black gums, and scribbling frantically on a yellow legal pad. He had looked frightened then. Now, he looked as though he had just consumed a barrel of black coffee. From the back of the room, Asa could see his long, slender hands twitching while he spoke. His head rotated in quick, stop-and-go twitching movements as he looked around the room. His voice was high, strained, and cracked every couple of sentences.
His body had changed some since Asa last saw him a couple days ago—he appeared to have aged a decade; his hair was sparser, his eyes had deep bags under them like yellow welts, and when he talked, he was missing teeth. Asa didn’t remember him missing teeth while walking down the cobblestone. The man’s neck was swollen, and blue in places. He had a six-centimeter laceration that was sowed shut on the top of his forehead: it was still red and healing. It looked to be brand new.
Asa considered for a second the possibility that this man was suffering from the Wolf Flu. If so, he was the first person that Asa had seen since Dr. Varbas at Alfatrex Station number Sixty-Three. But, after a moment’s consideration, Asa dismissed the idea. The man was moving much too fast. It reminded Asa, not of those afflicted with the virus, but of Harold Kensing. They both had eyes that moved in a dumb, paranoid type manner.
Stranger still, than the slender man, was the animal that was on stage with him. It was in a harness—a big, thick leather one, made of straps big enough to hold a saddle on a horse, though the harness wasn’t tied to anything. Asa felt his breath catch as the thing looked at him. Those eyes—those green eyes. They seemed to show recognition, like they had seen Asa before, or an image of him.
Laying there, on the stage, next to the professor, was what appeared to be a mountain lion. Asa knew enough about the animals to tell buy its body composition and light fur that it was a female. Female cougars average 95 pounds, and this one, Asa thought, was much bigger than average.
It yawned, showing yellowed teeth at two inches long, and stretching out its tongue. It closed its eyes, and rested its chin on its paw. Is that the professor’s pet? Asa asked himself?
On the screen above the stage was a black-and-white picture of a young boy. Above the photograph was script:
Robert King
Age 6
The man on stage spoke in a frenzied sort of way—“By the time Robert King was six, people knew that he was a prodigy. It was so obvious, anyone would have known, understand?”
No one said anything. The clicking of keys continued on.
“Like I said, he could read at two and play chess at four. By the time that he was six, he was doing high school math. All of the teachers were amazed. They knew that he was bound for greatness. They would often say…”
Asa searched for a seat and considered what was being said. Robert King, although he was the richest man in the world, did not seem too smart. In fact, his slow drawl made it appear as though his brain processed information, if not slower than others, than on par with the average human.
“They tested his IQ at that time,” the man in front went on, shuffling around the stage. “The IQ, or intelligent quotient, test, is a measure of how smart a person is versus their cohorts, or people their own age. For instance, an IQ score—“
He paused, and actually growled out at the audience. Many of the Fishies had taken a break from typing to flex their overworked hands.
The man began to scream and jump where he stood—“You’re going to have to know this, you idiots! Don’t be stupid! You’re all so stupid!” His face had turned red with crazed anger. He pounded his fists into his broomstick thighs and pointed a long finger out at no one in particular. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Don’t ever say it. If you don’t pass this test on the History of the Academy after this six-month period, you’ve got no hope here. If you can’t do this, what hope of you at completing the strict regimen ahead?”
He took a deep breath, smiled, and then continued on.
“As I was saying, the intelligence quotient test…”
The assembly hall was packed. The only seat that Asa could find was next to Sam, Charlotte’s redheaded friend. As Asa made his way down the row to sit, he smiled at Samantha. Her reaction was unexpected: instead of smiling back, or giving a small wave, she closed her eyes, as though Asa was a bomb that was about to go off. Asa continued down the row to his seat.
The man was still lecturing. Asa turned his armband into a laptop and began to take notes.
“And so, as a small boy, he was developing at an unprecedented rate. Scientist Hilary…”
“Ahhhh-Chooo!” Someone in the assembly sneezed.
“Bless you,” someone said back.
It sounded as though bombs were going off, the way the sound echoed throughout the hall. Gunshots rang out from up above on a balcony, and a young man sitting on an end row was killed in a mess of blood and metal.
The person who had sneezed screamed, and a chaperone swooped down from above, wings extended. Asa saw a short male frame and curly blond hair. The girl was snatched up, and flown to an above empty balcony. From there, she was shoved, screaming, into the back hallway and out of sight. Asa couldn’t see her anymore, but he saw flashes and heard gunshots. She stopped screaming.
The professor went on as though nothing had happened, “Trudell boasts that a good way to understand such an IQ score at such an early age is with the principal of entry-space statistical analysis.”
The slender man was talking on in choppy sentences, and hadn’t paused for even a moment. The mountain lion was still asleep on stage.
I just saw two people die.
Asa looked at Sam and saw that she had begun to cry. Asa pulled down the desk from the back of the seat in front of him, opened up the ‘Note Taker’ application on his laptop, and began to type everything that was said furiously. He couldn’t, however, concentrate on any of it.
Sam flinched when I smiled at her because she thought that I was about to get shot. I communicated! How stupid!
Asa felt sick again at the realization that he had lived because of dumb luck.
Sam already knew. That means that other people have already been shot. Who’s dead? Teddy? Stridor?
Asa continued to type, his fingers working as fast as they could, for the next three hours. Each letter that Asa typed was subsequently sowed into the fabric that served as the laptops screen. He tried to keep as still a face as possible for the rest of the session.
I’m not ready to die.
11
The Man in the White Suit’s Class
After the lecture was over, the Fishies were commanded to exit out the back and follow the purple arrows to a small area of classrooms. From there, they were supposed to follow directions that would be given on their armbands.
They were all silent, walking through the halls of the massive facility that they had been kidnapped and taken to. Asa’s upper back, next to his shoulder blades, was throbbing much worse than it had been that morning. Most upper back pain was located among the spinal column, and inhibited ease of motion. Asa’s was different; although it was located on his back, he felt that it did not prohibit him from moving freely. Motion aggravated the sensation, but did not stop it. It felt as though someone had inserted rocks into his back that stabbed as his muscle as he moved. He wanted to scratch the spot, but couldn’t reach it.
Asa had an entire bag full of pills that he knew could make the pain go away. It was a temp
ting idea. He hung onto the bag, but didn’t dare take any of them. His aunt had been addicted to muscle relaxers, pain killers, and mood stabilizers before rolling off a highway and killing herself when Asa was nine. Asa had seen what pills like that could do; they made you lazy, lethargic. Asa decided that at this time, if he wanted to survive, he needed to be as alert and oriented to his surroundings as possible. You could get killed in the Academy if you weren’t paying attention.
The footfalls of the Fishies followed the purple line, which led them through a massive, half-mile long hallway with dome shaped windows on their left, and exposed mountain-rock on their right.
Asa looked out the window as he walked. He realized that he was much higher in the mountain than he would have guessed; the trees and the Moat sat hundreds of feet below him. He looked directly South, up to the peak of the biggest mountain of The Five, and wondered if he would live long enough to know the secrets of the Academy.
In the middle of the expanse of hallway, four raccoons dangled in harnesses outside of the windows, squeegeeing the glass clean hundreds of feet above the ground below. They looked in at the Fishies as they passed and Asa examined their heads, and their skulls that protruded further upward than normal raccoons. The animals’ fur coats were puffed out against the cold, and with one hand they held onto the rope they were hanging from, while they cleaned the outside of the windows with another. A strong gust of wind came by and made them swing from their ropes. Asa watched the face of the one that hung the furthest to the right, and saw the animal look down at the drop below with an expression of concealed fright. Again, that word played in Asa’s mind: Sentient.
They walked out the end of the hallway, down a few more corridors, and reached the end of the purple line ten minutes later. Asa’s back was experiencing waves of undulating, radiating pain. Sweat dampened his hair, and he was still feeling the effects of the poison he had ingested the night before. His stomach churned and gurgled and would not settle. He feared that he might vomit again.
The purple line in the floor had led them to the most unpolished area of the Academy that Asa had seen so far. The place was dark, damp, and cold. Asa wished that he had brought his parka. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all rough, gray, jagged rock, like the inside of a coalmine. They were in what appeared to be a massive cave, lit poorly by industrial fluorescents that hung from the rock ceiling by rusting metal chains.
Wooden, unpainted doors lined the walls, with the number 1 through 32 atop them. Asa saw the other Fishies looking at their wristbands and then walking towards a certain door. On Asa’s wristband, the time had disappeared and was replaced with a white “9.”
Asa walked among the moving crowd until he found the doorway with the number 9 labeled above. He entered.
The doorway led to a classroom that held a striking contrast to the great, cavernous hall that he had just exited. The room was bright, painted with sky-blues and canary-yellows. Long, wooden tables sat with desks behind them. The walls were painted to look like a spring day, and there was a tree painted into the wall in the corner, its branches stretching over the ceiling.
Asa entered in silence among the other Fishies. He took his seat, and waited patiently for what would come next.
In the back of the room was a doorway opposite the one that Asa entered. A beam of light shown out and Asa guessed that it was a closet. From the back of the closet, an additional door opened and closed, and the shadow of a person was spilled across the floor, stretching into the classroom. Asa was staring at it—the figure was long and thin, and was bustling around in the closet, seemingly looking for something.
Asa glanced around the room at all of the Fishies. He counted twelve. A curly haired male two rows up turned his armband into a laptop, and others, including Asa, followed his lead.
A horrible, but faint smell was filling the room. It reminded Asa of the time a rat had died in his home’s ventilation system. He couldn’t tell, but he suspected that the smell was coming from the man in the closet.
Whenever the man stepped out, Asa closed his eyes for a second. Asa took one breath, and opened them; he didn’t want the man to see Asa scared.
He was wearing the same white suit that he had worn when he had poisoned Asa the day before. He smiled at the Fishies, his eyes gray and cold, and Asa noticed that his gums were not only black, but also swollen, and riddled with small growths.
Asa took a moment to take stock of the situation—He poisoned me last night, and now he’s allowed to come into a small classroom with me? Why? Why would they let him do that?
And, why me? Still, why does he want to kill me? Why did Harold Kensing pull me over? Why put so much effort into getting rid of me? What have I done? Why do I pose a threat? What is to gain by my blood?
And then there were the shootings in class today. They killed one student for saying, “bless you,” and another for screaming. I didn’t know that screaming qualified as communication, but a few seconds after she opened her mouth, they silenced her. So, then, why did this man try to poison me? Why not shoot me right now? Why be secret about it? What would be the consequences?
The man in the white suit greeted himself: “Hello, my name is Volkner. I will be your Introduction to the Academy Professor this semester.” His voice was smooth and even. He squared his shoulders, and seemed to talk with his entire body, giving subtle messages with the way that he shifted his weight. It was impossible not to listen to him; he was magnetic. “I’m glad that everyone could make it,” he said, and eyed Asa with a sneer.
Volkner opened up his jacket, and slid out a long, pointed knife. He placed the weapon on the desk at the front of the room and said—“I shouldn’t have to, but I will remind you that the talking ban does not cease for another six days. Should anyone attempt to speak, I will have to physically stop it.”
He paced back and forth and continued to talk. “Now. I know that I’ve seen a few of you out and about, and I recognize some from the cafeteria. Let me start with this: The Academy is a big and confusing place. One third of you, statistically, will make it out alive. Understand the stakes, and give it your best. That’s all that you can do.
“Do not let yourself get too worked up. I can think of a dozen students off the top of my head that have literally been driven insane by the workload and schedule that you are about to endure. You will always feel like you are drowning. It will be a suffocating feeling, and some of you, matter of fact, will suffocate. But the ones who make it are the ones who keep a positive attitude; who don’t let the dire, dim circumstances affect them too much.”
Volkner sat down atop the desk and crossed his long legs as he looked out at the twelve, typing students. “Where to begin?” he asked himself. “Ah! I forget. I am supposed to explain what I am to new students. As you may have noticed, I am not like you. I have no hair, the cold doesn’t bother me as much as it does you, and the tissue on the inside of my mouth is black, a product of virulent bacteria.”
He smiled. “You may, actually, be able to smell it. Some describe the smell of the bacteria as decaying flesh. I cannot smell it anymore, as the bacteria are constantly sitting before my nostrils; however, whenever I was like you, I remember that people like me did, in fact, smell of decaying flesh.
“I am called a Multiplier, and I am different in ways that you cannot see, or perhaps weren’t keen enough to notice. For one, I am much stronger than people like you. I am much stronger than even the chaperones are. My eyes move faster than the normal human’s. I breathe only three times a minute, unless I’m talking, in which case I must breathe to produce air to make my vocal cords vibrate. It is not for a need of oxygen. You see, The Academy is, among other things, a place that capitalizes on private advances is genetics technology.
“This, on its own, is a dangerous thing. Your nurse injected you with multiple vaccines. Many of you may have experienced a pain in your upper back. You are, believe it or not, growing wings. This alone is a risk for obvious reasons—the method has o
nly been around for a decade and a half. And it has remained private so that the testing sample is extremely small. You could, for instance, grow bones in your heart (this is an example that actually happened) puncture your myocardial tissue, and bleed to death internally. Or, a former student’s wings grew too far forward, and when they were fully developed and they were supposed to shoot straight out of the skin in her back, they took with them her spinal cord. She died. And, many more just collapse and we never figure out what’s wrong with them.
“Don’t be mistaken—growing wings is not the most extreme mutation that you will undergo here. There are some that are much more pervasive and extensive.
“The principal behind our genetics is simple, but the practice of manipulating it is complicated. Your entire body—every hair on your head, every cell of every fingernail, and every drop of pigmentation on your skin—is controlled by DNA. DNA is like a tiny, twisted ladder that sits within each of your cells, and contains information that tells your body how to grow.
“The funny thing about DNA, is that a bunch of it is simply junk. You may have heard, for instance, that chimpanzees differ only 1.5% in DNA from humans. On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. Two twins may seem to be 98.5% identical to us, while a chimp looks degrees and degrees different from a human.
“If a chimp, my genetic cousin, were standing beside me today, you would find that there were many differences between us—the chimp’s hands would be larger, and have thicker skin than mine. The chimp would have thick, full hair covering its whole body. The chimp would have bigger teeth than me. The chimp’s nose wouldn’t protrude like mine. The chimp’s big toe would be longer, more flexible, and more coordinated than mine.
“I could go on, but I think that you get the idea.