My Friend, The Gifted: A Sci-Fantasy (The Universe of Infinite Wonder Book 1)

by E. L. Aldryc

  On the table in front of her were projections of titles recommended for browsing, and on the edge was an outline of a book cover that could be instantly picked up and read with her comms. The file was small but designed with great care. Whoever made it had chosen both the title and the font in a way for browsers to handle the publication with affectionate care, as if it were their little sister’s diary. And it read: To My Best Friend, the Gifted.

  Elodie picked it up with interest, and the first few pages popped open in front of her eyes, aligned into a row of rectangles. She began to read.

  In the outlines of your wildest dreams is the person you will become. This person would be a stranger to you if you met them today. You might not even like them. But through the growing pains and the adventures that await you as you walk through the threshold of discovering your inner power, this is who you will become. Please don’t try to imagine yourself as them. I want that to be one of those beautiful surprises you always hoped you would get in life.

  I want to learn more about this person. I think they’re great.

  “Elodie? Do you want to come in?”

  The woman who was greeting the crowd left the desk to see her, offering to take her further down the hall to one of the offices. She turned back and smiled serenely. But not as serenely as Tammy Two Feathers. That was on another level.

  “I don’t want you to get lost—it can be a bit confusing at the beginning. Are you feeling okay?”

  She’d been here for a few minutes, and they’d already given her a warmer welcome than the SI did when she first started. That had been more of a “You made it, here’s a lab coat. Go work.”

  “I’m great,” she replied. The feeling she had in Belo Horizonte. It returned.

  The Art of Clarinet Improvisation

  For a moment, she thought about turning back. The hurrying was part of a selfish fear, thinking someone might put forward a reasonable argument against doing this. And there were many. She didn’t know what would change if she were successful. Just like she didn’t know what would happen if she wasn’t.

  The only thing left was imagining what would happen if she listened to Soraya. Stay away. And that was an option that would make her miserable regardless of the outcome—giving up without seeing what came after this invitation into the last unexplored fortress. The soft grey carpet reduced her steps to nothing when she entered the office. They should have closed the door behind her. Make sure she didn’t run off.

  The room was oval. Photos on walls all lined up, of nature, and not even the remarkable kind. Impenetrable forests. Perhaps they were in code, one that only the gifted could understand.

  A man was sitting behind a mahogany desk on the opposite side of the room. He greeted her with an honest smile and quickly went back to an open window of notes. He was handsome, of an indeterminable age, but with silver hair and an air of wisdom that implied a certain level of experience with life. As he leaned forward to read something projected on the desk surface, she saw a final photo hanging on the wall behind him. Not of a forest, but of him. And he wore the same turtleneck in the photo. Funny.

  Underneath the picture were big printed words. It was a book reference. “Docent Telepathos, Dr Mircea Rusu, Wellbeing and Maintenance of Benevolent Stasis in Double-Linked Hubs: A Case Study, Oxford University Press, 2341.”

  “Elodie Marchand, yes?” He said it perfectly French, with pride in the accuracy of pronunciation. “And what’s your current department?”

  “PR,” she replied. What a sad thing to say at the world’s most famous research institute. At least he’d know why she was desperate to move. “But I’m still in rotation. I’m deciding where to, erm, stop.” She flicked her hair over her shoulder. It smelled like vanilla. Superstar. She sat opposite to him on an armchair that got lost against the identical grey shade of carpet.

  “Do you have any siblings?” he said. It was an odd question to start with, but then again, Elodie’s expectations were loose.

  “Yes, three. Two brothers and a sister.”

  She had a thin notion that speaking in sentences might work better. When the telepath looked at her, there was this tiny itch against the inside of her skull. She could have imagined it. Telepaths left no traces of their work. Unless they wanted. Light lilac colour invaded the periphery of her sight.

  “And what do they do?” he asked. Dr Rusu. Docent telepathos. One day she could have an office like this. But without a silly turtleneck. Shit. Was he listening? She watched his face, which was entirely pleasant. He might have smiled.

  “My sister is head of urban development strategy for the EU, youngest person in the Commission,” she replied. “My older brother is a one of the nanotechnology leads at Byeolpyo. And my younger brother just qualified for the Olympics for the first time. Javelin.”

  Elodie could recite these things off the cuff. She practised not looking sorry when people got excited about them. Sometimes they slipped a question along the lines of “Oh, so you must be the rebel!”

  Yes, well. Not on purpose.

  Dr Rusu nodded as if every word she said was of the utmost importance.

  “They have an impressive resume,” he said.

  “My parents wanted to cover all bases,” she said. She saw the telepath note that down, urgently.

  “And they initially wanted you to do music, right?” he asked. When he did, she felt a slight touch of warmth.

  “The music school rejected me for piano. They had too many kids, and I wasn’t a natural or something. I don’t remember. So they suggested the clarinet. I tried that for about ten years, but I never went pro.”

  “You know, I used to play the clarinet,” Dr Rusu said, chuckling to as if he’d just told himself a fantastic joke. Elodie looked at him and imagined this calm and languid man struggling with the chromatic scale until he couldn’t feel his lips and got blisters on the sides of his thumbs. Impossible.

  “No way.”

  “Ten years. I still don’t know how I made it. I hated every minute of practice, but you know how it is. You just don’t want to quit. Because that would mean it won,” he said.

  Elodie didn’t see it that way. The clarinet always won. It just either took over your life or messed it up if you weren’t good enough.

  “Were you better at tone or technique?” she asked. Her teacher always said that technique can be taught, but tone had to do with the gift of music. Elodie lacked the second, according to her tutors.

  “Tone was easy for me; the technique required practice,” he responded. His eyes focused on hers, and Elodie felt that this time, he reached a step farther. “When you're a natural at something, it's harder to improve,” he added.

  But the funny part was, it wasn’t an intrusion. He seemed interesting. The more he spoke, the more she wanted him to understand her. To look at her and tell her “I know what you mean.” She wouldn’t believe most people if they said it. She’d believe him.

  “And when you quit, it was your parents' reaction that got you to leave Bruxelles?”

  When would the test start? Was this it? Were there correct responses to questions about her background?

  “I mean, it wasn’t overnight,” she said. She never discussed the family situation. It was hard to explain. She lacked nothing at home. No one caused her harm. To feel as bad as she did around her family sounded childish whenever she spoke about it. They were all completely normal, nice people. But.

  “There were always just these jabs at the dinner table. You know families and their inside archetypes. They couldn’t pin anything on me that would stick. So eventually, you know, they made me into, like, a problem. Like nothing was good enough for me. Elodie doesn’t care, Elodie looks down on us hard-working people, will the sun die before Elodie decides on a career. Things like that.”

  “I know what you mean,” Dr Rusu said and gave her a knowing look.

  “That was uncalled for, you read my mind!” she said in fake outrage.

  “I’m sorry. I get on
e joke per test. I used it poorly,” he said. If this were the gifted, and if this was the test, then she wanted in. This quiet confidence that everyone had. The support. The way they could joke without being mean to each other, or themselves. It was so different from the rest of the Institute.

  He noted something in a semi-transparent window. It took a long time for him to jot things down in a tola-based app. If telepaths were like the rest of Rising Dawn, then they didn’t like technology invading too much of their mind, so they carried touch pens and other ancient technology that helped them look even more like a private club.

  “When I was growing up in Romania, Rising Dawn wasn’t even that organised. Very few people knew about telepathy, especially since Nada Faraji was mostly promoting prognostics and paragnostics. My whole family is very down to earth, in logistics, and we’ve had a family business for over two hundred years. I wasn’t just an outsider. My siblings were basically afraid of me.” He noted more things down as he spoke, and Elodie searched his face for sadness or resentment. She came back empty-handed. If anything, he was downright entertained by his past.

  “So I think you did the right thing by leaving,” he concluded.

  Telepaths made the best therapists.

  “Just to double check.” He focused on her again, and his grey eyes seemed to grow wider. “You did the basic security check when you started?”

  “Yes, when I was put under telepathic protection,” she confirmed. That day was a blur. She got the call that she got the job, and straight away she had to get there and do the whole induction in a day. There had been lots of jumping from building to building. The Rising Dawn induction came in the evening and it was a formality to put her under telepathic protection. Junior researchers handled sensitive data, and Rising Dawn would protect them from foreign telepathic invasion.

  “No problem. It’s just that the test requires us to go a little deeper, as you’re requesting permission to access far more classified intel,” he said, opening a new holographic window.

  “Sure,” she said, trying to remember what exactly the telepathic security probe was. All she remembered was that a person had asked her to relax, and Elodie had forgotten what they did the moment she left the room.

  Dr Rusu broke eye contact and looked to the side.

  “Relax for me,” he said.

  That was a big ask. Elodie tried to look relaxed, which she was good at. But then she realised that she was alone with all her thoughts. Fear of failure. Shame. Nervousness. That was bad.

  “All done, thank you.” Dr Rusu stopped her. As brief as it was, it made him frown and dive deeply into his notes. This was when deep wrinkles appeared on his face, possibly betraying a far more unusual age than the one he chose to display.

  “Can you tell me what I’m going to be doing tomorrow night?” he said, looking into his notes. The warmth she felt inside her head was completely gone. After the last few minutes of kindness, this caught her off guard.

  “I—I don’t know,” she said.

  “Guess,” he insisted, still looking away.

  “I don’t know,” Elodie said. So. This was when the humiliating part started. Turns out, you had to be gifted to be in the gifted club. Fear took over. Elodie promised herself that she wouldn’t let it get into her head. That she would just let it be and answer as accurately as possible. She had to say something.

  “The minute I leave, a strong desire to play the clarinet again will possess you. You’ll start browsing models, but you’ll get confused deciding whether you should get a beginner’s model, because it’s been so long, or a top tier one, because you played it for long enough and you know you deserve it. In the end, you will end up in a jazz bar in North Madilune asking to go onstage at three a.m, drunk on expensive mezcal.”

  Dr Rusu laughed and quickly retorted by pointing at her as if to say she projected her own plans. But then he looked aside again, and the frowning returned.

  “Your sister, the one in urban planning. What is she doing right now, in this moment?” he asked.

  “I haven’t spoken to her for a while,” Elodie confessed.

  “I know,” he replied, “have a guess.”

  “Erm.” Elodie tried to think of a fun way to blow this, but there didn’t seem to be one. Her sister was serious and charismatic. People just followed her. There wasn’t much to joke about.

  “She’s walking up and down in her office, preparing for a meeting. And she knows she’s going to get what she wants. And everything is great,” she said.

  Dr Rusu returned to his notes for a long time.

  “How do you think this interview is going?” he finally asked.

  “Poorly,” she replied, and they both laughed. It’s the best she could do. What a stupid idea this was. What a mean question this was.

  “Well, I’m not allowed to discuss your results in front of you, unfortunately,” he said, while he noted down more things that Elodie didn’t want to hear. He closed the windows hovering around him and put the stylus into a suit pocket.

  “Can I leave you in the office for a few minutes so we can compare the results that were recording your brain activity?” he asked.

  “I’ll be right here,” she said, shrugging.

  He sprang up straight away, and she watched him rush off past her. Would you look at that? He wanted this painful meeting to end just as much as she did.

  The door rematerialised into fake wood, and she reached out to make a call as soon as she was sure she was alone.

  “Yes,” Soraya sounded absent and in a quiet place.

  “Okay, urgent, urgent,” Elodie hurried, “I’m in Rising Dawn, and this is so awkward. I need a drink. Can we forget this ever happened? Honestly, I can’t even explain.”

  Soraya switched to video and confronted Elodie with the smuggest face she had ever seen. But she had it coming.

  “Oh, how terrible. I wish someone had told you Rising Dawn isn’t worth your time.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just, I know what they’ll say. I think I should just leave. They asked me to wait. Ugh. This was so embarrassing.”

  “Ditch them,” Soraya said expectedly, “come to the seventy-third level. I have wine, and the gifted aren’t allowed this deep into the labs.”

  She smiled. Elodie exhaled pure relief. This was all she wanted to hear. Her most feared event of the month took less than twenty minutes. If she drank enough, she’d only start cringing once she sobered up tomorrow. Elodie got up to walk out. But the door clicked, and Dr Rusu returned.

  And with him, another person who introduced herself.

  “Augustina.”

  This was the only thing Elodie knew about the woman, yet when she sat down and greeted Elodie, Augustina let out a contagious vibe of ease, and Elodie felt like they were old pals. She looked at her with a gaze full of warmth and sincere interest, which made Elodie see gold at the edge of her visual field, and she blinked several times. She looked older, brightly regal against the dull grey backdrop of Dr Rusu’s office, with long ginger hair that seemed to follow its own rules of chaos. Another telepath.

  Outside these walls, a person with telepathic abilities wasn’t even allowed to look at you for more than three seconds without paperwork verifying that they were part of a hub and therefore under peer revision, which was to stop them from peeping at others’ heads freely. But this was their domain, and they did as they pleased. Making the world a happy place just by being in it and oozing chill vibes.

  This Augustina woman gave Dr Rusu a short look, which could mean anything among their kind, and it made Elodie feel uncomfortable again. What was another telepath doing here? And what were they discussing? Then she put down a new item, one that Elodie could identify. It was an active AI link. These were necessary for an AI to function in places that didn’t support their ever-presence through a good enough density of nanos. Rising Dawn was a textbook case. AI was all but forbidden and all instances of tola density that could support them were regularly dispersed on p
urpose.

  The AI link was a smooth, white half-orb that stuck itself to the surface of the table. At the very top, it gave out a warm blue glow to say it achieved the kind of sentience that severely displeased the gifted. Just like that, Augustina plugged it in, as if half of her colleagues wouldn’t pretend they were having an allergic reaction if they knew someone had activated it inside their headquarters. That was it. Elodie had to ask.

  “What’s this for?”

  “We’re just making sure we’ve got a good reading on you, sweetie. Me and Mircea will cross reference to make sure you’re not reading minds when looking for answers. And as sad as it is, we need a non-human sensor for that. That’s what the AI is for. I normally don’t trust these, but it’s a pretty simple task, so hopefully it won’t fail.”

  There was no one there to defend the opposing philosophical stand, as was usually the case with the AI. It just glowed there, waiting for a challenge.

  “It’s the standard advanced paragnostic test,” Augustina added.

  “Advanced?”

  Elodie didn’t dare to put two and two together. It didn’t make sense. Augustina looked at her and somehow pushed the weight of her confusion into the background.

  “There are two images displayed on the table. One of them is about to disappear. Which one will be left on the table?”

  “Circle or cross?” the AI said in a voice of a thousand, a sound both impersonal and magical at the same time.

  Elodie smiled bitterly. Isn’t this the same test Nada Faraji started her journey with a hundred years ago? When someone challenged her to guess it in public and face mockery?

  Extra points for failing a historical reference.

  “I don’t know. Cross?” she said, shrugging helplessly.