by Greg Cox
Nearby, only a few feet away from the entrance where Roberta now stood, a tiny little Japanese girl, who couldn't have been more than three years old, was painting a flawless re-creation of the Mona Lisa with her watercolors. What's more, she appeared to be doing so from memory. Next to her, a slim blond boy was busy scribbling quadratic equations all over a mounted blackboard, while a distinctly intimidated-looking tutor struggled to keep up. Two more children squatted upon a paint-stained Persian carpet, meticulously constructing a miniature Taj Mahal out of Legos without any visible set of instructions. Nearby a cute little girl with red hair and freckles sang an aria from La Boheme ( flawlessly) while jumping rope at the same time.
I don't believe this, Roberta thought. It was one thing to theorize about building smarter kids through creative biochemistry, but confronting a whole room of such super-tots was a whole different mind trip. When I was that age, she thought, aghast and embarrassed, I felt like a whiz kid if I could get all the way through the alphabet without screwing up!
Remembering the handsome little Indian boy she had made eye contact with the day before, Roberta glanced around the playroom. She quickly spotted him sitting in a lotus position upon the floor, his nose buried in a large hardcover book that was much too thick to be either Curious George or Green Eggs and Ham. She squinted to make out the title of the book, and gulped audibly when she saw that it was Dante's Divine Comedy —in the original Italian, no less!
“Ohmigosh,” she blurted out, still not quite believing what she was witnessing. Her eyes sought out Takagi's for confirmation. “Please, please, tell me this is the advanced class.”
Takagi chuckled, enjoying her thunderstruck reaction. “They're all advanced classes,” he informed her.
“All?” A tremor crept into her voice as the full implications of Takagi's response sank in. “There are more?”
“A few hundred,” he stated chirpily. “Chrysalis is packed with educational facilities like this. It meant a bit more construction, naturally, but the smaller groupings allow for more individualized attention and instruction. Besides,” he added, giving Roberta a friendly wink, “it's easier to monitor our progress if we can track each new batch of kids separately.”
Let's hear it for quality control, Roberta thought sarcastically. Despite his affable manner, Takagi suddenly sounded a bit more cold-blooded and clinical than she was comfortable with. These were kids he was talking about, not lab projects. Happy, healthy kids.
Maybe even extra-healthy kids, for that matter. Surveying the entire classroom, she observed that every one of the children appeared to be perfectly fit, lacking any obvious handicaps or birth defects. Nobody was wearing glasses or needed braces on their teeth. None of the kids were too skinny, or sickly, or overweight, or coping with a mild case of the sniffles. I bet they don't even have any cavities, she thought, both appalled and envious. She couldn't quite bring herself to complain that the toddlers were too perfect—how could anyone object to insuring a child's good health?—but there was something unnervingly weird about the class's eerily uniform physical fitness.
Noting Takagi's and Roberta's arrival, one of the adult instructors, a thirtyish woman with severe features and frosty blond hair tied neatly in a bun, detached herself from the little genius she was assisting and approached the front entrance. “Hello, Walter,” she said warmly. Alert blue eyes regarded Roberta with curiosity. “Who's your friend?”
“A new addition to the project,” he replied, introducing “Dr. Veronica Neary” to the other woman, a highly trained educator and child psychologist named Maggie Erickson, who, according to Takagi, had once written a much-talked-about doctoral thesis on the care and education of extremely gifted children. “I couldn't wait to show Ronnie just how impressive our kids are.”
“I can't blame you,” Erickson said, her lack of an accent ( as far as Roberta was concerned) branding her as another American. “At the risk of tooting our own horn, we're working wonders here. Not only are these children intellectually advanced, but their physical development is vastly superior to any ordinary child. They have fifty percent more lung capacity, for example, as well as a significantly improved cardiac system.” She smiled sincerely, clearly delighted at the opportunity to show off her precious prodigies. “Come, let me introduce you to one of our star pupils.”
With the proud instructor leading the way, the three adults navigated across the busy playroom, taking care not to step on any of the children's scarily ambitious works-in-progress. Roberta still got a little freaked out every time she peeked down to see, for instance, a threeyearold child putting together a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle in less than ten seconds, and with his eyes closed to boot. A few seconds later, she caught a different toddler examining her closely, then realized that the tiny little tyke, who was barely more than a baby, had already sculpted a perfect likeness of Roberta in Play-Doh. That looks more like me than I do! she realized in amazement, even as the pint-sized Michelangelo put the finishing touches to Roberta's portrait. The way-too-youthful sculptor eyed her creation critically, only to spot some subtle defect invisible to Roberta, who felt a definite chill tiptoe down her vertebrae as the child cheerfully squashed her miniature masterpiece and started over again. So much for immortality, Roberta quipped to herself in a doomed attempt to overcome her growing uneasiness.
The little sculptor wasn't the only child who looked up at Roberta as she passed, but none of them appeared at all alarmed by the stranger in their midst. Many of them smiled appreciatively at the sight of the sleek black cat riding upon Roberta's shoulder. Had shyness or timidity been excised from their genetic makeup, she wondered, or had the children of Chrysalis simply been raised in an exceptionally secure and unthreatening environment? The latter was a much less scary explanation.
She was not too surprised when Dr. Erickson's prize pupil turned out to be Roberta's friend, the inquisitive Indian boy from the day before. Even in a roomful of budding geniuses, this boy stood out by virtue of a unique charisma all his own. He's going to be really something when he grows up, Roberta mused, unsure if that was a good thing or not. What kind of impact could he have on the world?
Erickson introduced Roberta to the boy. “We call him ‘Noon’ for short,” she added, before addressing the child again. “Noon, Dr. Neary is very interested in learning more about you and the other children.”
“Call me Ronnie,” Roberta insisted. She knelt down on the carpet so she could converse with Noon at his own level. What with his deceptively childish age and appearance, she had to resist the temptation to speak to him in baby talk. “Hi. I guess you speak English pretty well.”
“I speak English, Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, Mandarin, French, German, spanish, and Japanese,” he stated matter-of-factly. The boy's poise and unself-conscious dignity would have been comical in a child his age, like a toddler trying on his parents' oversized clothes, except that somehow this particular munchkin could pull it off. He wasn't just playing at acting grown-up, Roberta intuited; he really was that confident and unafraid. I wonder, she thought: Is this what Gary Seven was like as a kid?
“How's your book?” she asked, still somewhat taken aback by the tyke's choice of reading material.
“Intriguing,” he answered with a certain sober gravity. “The Inferno is the most entertaining part, naturally, although I prefer Paradise Lost. ” His serious dark eyes stared boldly back at Roberta, unintimidated by the age difference between them. “Have you read Milton?”
“Er, just the Cliffs Notes version,” she confessed. Once again, she noted Noon's unmistakable familial resemblance to Sarina Kaur. I guess a little old-fashioned heredity survived all that high-tech genetic tinkering, she surmised. Kind of reassuring in a way. She felt better knowing that Noon was not entirely a product of artificially manufactured DNA.
Isis took advantage of Roberta's kneeling posture to drop lightly onto the carpet between Roberta and Noon. She stretched luxuriously, digging her claws into the rug as she exten
ded her spine and tail as far as they could go. Glossy black fur stood out sharply amid the bright, cheery colors of the classroom.
“Is she yours?” Noon asked, exhibiting an encouragingly childlike interest in the cat. Isis flirted with him shamelessly, purring and rubbing her head against his leg. He responded by gently stroking the cat's head with his pudgy little hand. “What's her name?”
“She's sort of mine, I guess,” Roberta answered, slightly startled by cat's sudden sociability; her temperamental feline cohort was usually more standoffish than this. “And her name is Isis.”
“Like the Egyptian goddess?” asked the frighteningly well read fouryearold. Observing his playful interaction with the cat, the rest of the children hurried over to join in the fun, rapidly turning Isis into a onecat petting zoo. Surprisingly, the cat seemed to bask in the attention, even lifting her head so that eager little fingers could more readily scratch the fur beneath her chin. I always knew you were just a spoiled tramp at heart, Roberta thought snidely, standing up and stepping back from the growing throng around Isis.
She also let out a sigh of relief. More than anything else, the children's enthusiastic response to Isis convinced her that these kids, no matter how stupendously smart and talented, were not, in fact, refugees from the Village of the Damned. She made a mental note to remind Gary Seven, assuming she ever made contact with him again, that these tots were more than just an unexpected complication in the Aegis's grand agenda for humanity's progress; these were innocent kids who deserved to be treated as such, no matter what Seven decided to do about Chrysalis.
“Looks like your furry friend is quite a hit with the children,” Dr. Erickson commented. Isis had virtually disappeared from view, buried beneath a crowd of excited toddlers jostling each other for the privilege of petting their feline visitor.
“Well, I wouldn't exactly call us friends,” Roberta muttered, then turned to apologize to Erickson and the other instructors. “Sorry to disrupt your class this way.”
“No problem,” Erickson insisted. “The children have been working hard on their individual projects; they're entitled to a break.” She removed a small notebook from her jacket pocket and scribbled a few notes on the children's behavior. “As a matter of fact, we've been planning to introduce some pets into their environment, in order to encourage their ability to empathize with genetically inferior life-forms.”
Like the rest of humanity? Roberta translated, biting down the first cutting remark that came to mind. Was there no aspect of these children's lives, she wondered silently, that wasn't designed to serve some quasi-scientific purpose or protocol? “That sounds like an excellent idea,” she said diplomatically.
“Thank you,” Erickson replied. “Early studies strongly indicate that—”
The American teacher's incipient dissertation was cut off abruptly by shrill cries of alarm from the nearby children, who began hurriedly backing away from the site of the impromptu kitty lovefest. At first, Roberta feared that Isis had run out of patience and scratched or bit someone, but she rapidly realized that this was a far more grievous situation. These were seriously frightened kids, with genuine tears of terror and distress streaming down their cheeks. They frantically scrambled away to the far corners of the classroom, until the only children who remained were Noon himself, holding on to Isis protectively, and a single little girl sprawled on her back upon the floor, her small limbs twitching convulsively.
With a start, Roberta recognized the underage sculptor who had so painstakingly re-created Roberta in Play-Doh only minutes before. Now that same artistic prodigy looked to be caught in throes of some sort of epileptic fit. Glazed violet eyes stared wildly at nothing in particular, their pupils dilated alarmingly. Saliva frothed at the corners of her tiny mouth, while her entire body twitched violently, as though being jolted repeatedly by a powerful electric current.
“Blast it!” Erickson swore loudly, then immediately dropped onto the floor beside the stricken child. “Help me hold her still!” she cried out to Roberta as she swiftly inserted her fingers into the little girl's mouth to keep her from swallowing her own tongue. “Get the sedative—hurry!” she shouted to the other two instructors, who also went into emergency mode. Grabbing on to the little sculptor's flailing legs with both hands, Roberta got the clear impression that the staff of the classroom had coped with this sort of crisis before.
Her suspicions were instantly confirmed when she heard Erickson mutter to herself in passable Hindi. “Dammit, not again!” she cursed, unaware that Roberta's peace-symbol pendant provided the visiting newcomer with a literally simultaneous translation. Roberta held on tightly to the epileptic child's ankles and pretended not to be listening.
While one of the other instructors tended to the rest of the children, doing her best to calm then down, the remaining tutor—a darkskinned African man—joined them alongside the spasming toddler. He smoothly and efficiently slid a hypodermic needle into her arm. Roberta had no idea what kind of potion the hypo held, but it clearly did the trick; seconds later she was relieved to feel the taut muscles in the little girl's legs relax at last. The child's breathing settled and her eyelids drooped shut as she slipped into a drugged, narcotic state.
The male instructor spoke to Erickson in Hindi, in a clear attempt to exclude Roberta from the discussion. “I was afraid of this,” he said gravely. “The medication isn't working; the neurological aberration is too severe. She should be transferred to the Developmental Deviations Unit as soon as she recovers.”
Erickson nodded reluctantly, gently letting go of the victim's tongue. Roberta noted deep bite marks above the woman's knuckles. “I was hoping that wouldn't be necessary,” the female teacher stated with obvious sadness, “but you're right, these fits aren't getting any better.” She sucked on her wounded fingers before delivering her final verdict on the disposition of the child. “What a waste. She's so talented otherwise.”
Feigning incomprehension, Roberta didn't like what she was hearing. The Developmental Deviations Unit? Sounds to me like Chrysalis's genetic assembly line isn't a hundred percent foolproof just yet, she guessed. But what exactly do they do with the rejects? And do I want to find out?
A gentle hand took hold of her upper arm and tried to tug her up and away from the comatose child. “C'mon, Ronnie,” Takagi urged her. “We should probably get out of here. Let's give Dr. Erickson and her colleagues some space to handle this little emergency.”
Roberta had almost forgotten Takagi was present at all. “But what was that all about?” she demanded urgently, slowing rising to her feet to interrogate her tour guide. “What happened to that little girl?”
“I'm not sure,” he stammered nervously. “I'm a biochemist, not a pediatrician.” He kept tugging on her arm, trying to escort her to the exit. “There's nothing to worry about, though. Maggie and the others know what they're doing, trust me.”
That's getting harder and harder, she thought grimly, but now was probably not the time to stage a major confrontation, not before she found out what had happened to Gary Seven. “Okay,” she assented grudgingly. “Let me get my cat.”
Alone of all the superchildren, only Noon had not fled screaming away from their convulsing classmate. Even now, he stood calmly by, stroking Isis's furry head as he silently contemplated his unconscious playmate. His stern, unreadable expression offered no clue as to what was going through his genetically enhanced mind. Is he just braver and more stoic than the other children, Roberta pondered, as she quietly retrieved Isis from Noon's arms, or simply more inhuman and unfeeling?
She wished she knew.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“WHO ARE YOU?” SARINA KAUR ASKED THE MYSTERIOUS MR. SEVEN. “Who sent you?”
Scientific curiosity mingled with more pragmatic security concerns as she observed the caged American spy. Part of her almost hoped that he could keep on resisting the serum, just to see what the ultimate limits of his endurance were, but she was also growing impatient to extract so
me much-needed answers from the man in the cage.
Who was this Gary Seven, and how had he become aware of Chrysalis's existence, despite their strenuous efforts to conceal the entire project from the outside world? What had inspired him to investigate their New York connection in the first place, and for whom? The CIA? The KGB? Interpol? There were too many distressing possibilities, and not enough hard information to point her in the right direction.
This was simply unacceptable. We've come too far, worked too hard, she thought passionately, to have the project compromised by unknown adversaries.
Williams hovered nervously behind her as she kept her attention focused on her captive. Seven's shirt was stained with perspiration and spilled tea, and he leaned weakly against the bars of his cage. A day's worth of stubble encrusted his face, which was locked in a fixed grimace as he struggled to keep his jaws clenched shut. Seven's willpower was phenomenal, she conceded, but he had to crack soon; no one could resist two full dosages of the serum. It was physiologically impossible.
Who are you? she speculated, fascinated by the man's superhuman resistance, despite the threat it posed to both the project and her peace of mind. Whoever he represented, he clearly had considerable resources at his disposal; a cursory examination of his so-called pen had indicated a degree of technological sophistication that quite possibly exceeded even Chrysalis's capabilities, while his psychological discipline suggested advanced training and possibly even posthypnotic conditioning.
He really was almost more interesting as a test subject than as a spy or potential saboteur. If I didn't know better, she mused, I'd swear he was genetically engineered himself. But that was ridiculous; Seven was over thirty at least, which meant he would have to have been conceived in the forties, which was absurd. Watson and Crick hadn't even cracked the double helix back then. No one on Earth had been even close to engineering one-celled organisms, let alone enhanced human beings.