He pressed a button, and sound came out of the computer’s speaker, a woman’s voice.
“—there. It’s not so bad.”
“It hurts.” The child stretched the word out into three syllables.
“I told you to be careful with that one. That boy is trouble. You can’t trust him.”
A moan, and then a quiet sob. “They were all laughing at me. Why were they laughing? I thought they were my friends.”
Something cold snaked through Cooper’s belly. The woman, he presumed the one he’d seen break up the fight, continued. “I saw them all laughing at you. Laughing and pointing. Is that what friends would do?”
“No.” The voice was thin and forlorn.
“No. You can’t trust them either.
I’m
your friend.” Her voice saccharine. “It’s okay, sweetie. I’ve got you. I won’t let anyone get you now.”
“My head hurts.”
“I know it does, baby. Do you want some medicine?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I can make it all better. Here. Swallow this—”
Norridge tapped a key, and the sound vanished. “Do you see?”
Cooper said, “You have the whole
place
bugged?”
“That was our solution for the first years. However, in a facility of this size, and given the outdoor spaces, the rough play, it’s impossible to assure coverage. Now we have a better way.” Norridge paused, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips.
Why would that be? What would make the man so pleased with himself?
“It’s not the school you wire,” Cooper said slowly. “It’s the children. Somehow you’re bugging the children.”
The director beamed. “Very good. When subjects enter an academy, Davis or any other, they are given a thorough physical examination. This includes inoculation against hepatitis, PCV, chicken pox. One of those shots implants a biometric device. It’s a dazzling piece of work, recording not only physiological statistics—temperature, white blood cell levels, and so forth—but also relaying an audio broadcast to receivers placed all over the school. It’s quite something. Advanced nano-technology, powered by the child’s own biological processes.”
Cooper felt dizzy. His job didn’t really entail any overlap with the academies, and so while there had always been rumors about them, he hadn’t really imagined they might be true. Yeah, every few years some journalist tried to write an exposé on the places, but they were never granted access, so he’d chalked up the more outrageous claims to sensationalism. After all, there were rumors about Equitable Services, too.
His first taste of the reality had come on his way in, when he’d passed a group of protesters on the road. Demonstrations had become a fact of everyday life, part of the background that people didn’t really notice anymore. There was always someone protesting something. Who could keep up?
But this group had been different. Maybe it was the size of the police response. Or that cops were arresting people rather than just containing them. Or maybe it was the protesters themselves, sane-looking people in decent clothes rather than shaved-headed radicals. One in particular had caught his eye, a woman with pale, slack hair who looked as if she might once have been lovely but now was shrouded in sadness; sadness draped her shoulders, sadness hugged her chest. She held a placard, two pieces of poster board stapled across a wooden handle. The sign bore a blown-up photo of a grinning child with her cheekbones and the markered text, I
MISS MY SON
.
As two cops closed in on her, she’d locked eyes with Cooper through the windshield and made a tiny gesture with the sign, just raised it an inch. Visually underlining it. A plea, not a screech. But with his eyes, he could see the turmoil beneath.
“Who’s the boy?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The boy who got beaten. What’s his name?”
“I know them mostly by transponder number. His name is…” Norridge clicked at the keyboard. “William Smith.”
“Another Smith. John Smith is the reason I’m here.”
“There are many John Smiths.”
“You know the one I mean.”
“Yes. Well. He was before my time.” Norridge coughed, looked away, looked back. “We’ve thought about discontinuing use of the name, but that seemed a victory for terrorism. Anyway, I’m afraid there’s no relation between this one and the one you’re looking for. We reassign all of the children’s names when they arrive. Every boy here is Thomas, John, Robert, Michael, or William. Every girl is Mary, Patricia, Linda, Barbara, or Elizabeth. It’s part of their indoctrination. Once a child is admitted to an academy, they remain here until they graduate at eighteen. For our work, we find it’s best that they not be distracted by thoughts of the past.”
“Their past. You mean their
parents
, right? Their family, their home.”
“I understand that this is startling to witness. But everything we do here has a careful logic behind it. By renaming them, we emphasize their essential sameness. It’s a way of demonstrating that they have no value until they have finished the academy. At which point they are free to choose their own names, to return to their families if they choose. Though you might be surprised to learn that a large percentage do not.”
“Why?”
“Over their time here, they have built a new identity and prefer it.”
“No,” Cooper said. “Why do this? I thought that the purpose of the academies was to provide specialized training in their gifts. To raise a generation that had mastered its potential.”
The director leaned back in his chair, elbows on the armrests, fingertips touching in front of him. Anyone could read the cold defensiveness, the go-for-the-throat approach of the embattled academic. But Cooper saw more to it. Something in the easy way Norridge maintained eye contact, the steadiness of his speech as he said, “I would have thought that an agent of the Department of Analysis and Response wouldn’t need to be told.”
“This isn’t really my area.”
“Still, surely you could have gotten these answers without a trip—”
“I like to see for myself.”
“Why weren’t you academy trained, Agent Cooper?”
The suddenness of the topic change wasn’t what surprised Cooper—he’d seen it coming in the fold of the man’s lips and the crinkle of his eyes—but the content threw him.
I never told him I was gifted, or that I was tier one. He could tell on his own.
“I was born in 1981.”
“You were in the first wave?”
“Technically second.”
“So you would have been thirteen the year the first academy opened. Back then we could barely manage fifteen percent of the tier-one population. With the opening of Mumford Academy next year, we expect to be able to train one hundred percent of them. That’s not public knowledge, of course, but imagine it.
Every
tier one born in America. A shame you were born so early.”
“Not from my perspective.” Cooper smiled and imagined breaking the administrator’s nose.
“Tell me, how did you grow up?”
“Doctor, I asked a question, and I want an answer.”
“I’m giving you one. Indulge me. Please, your childhood.”
Cooper sighed. “My dad was army. My mother died when I was young. We moved around.”
“Did you know a lot of children like you?”
“Military brats?” The old snide side coming out, the part that didn’t handle authority figures well.
But Norridge didn’t bite, just mildly said, “Abnorms.”
“No.”
“Were you close to your father?”
“Yes.”
“Was he a good officer?”
“I never said he was an officer.”
“But he was.”
“Yes. And yes, a good one.”
“Patriotic?”
“Of course.”
“But not a flag worshipper. He cared about the principles, not the symbol.”
“That’s what patriotism means. The others are just fetishists.”
“Did you have a lot of friends?”
“Enough.”
“Did you have a lot of fights?”
“A few. And you’ve about hit the limit on my patience.”
Norridge smiled. “Well, Agent Cooper, you
were
academy trained. Your childhood is essentially what we try to replicate. We turn up the intensity, of course, and we also provide access to programs to develop their gifts, resources your father couldn’t have dreamed of. But. You were lonely. Isolated. Often punished for being what you were. You never had the opportunity to learn to trust other abnorms, and because you so often had to defend yourself for being one, you were unlikely to seek them out. You didn’t have many friends and lived in a constantly shifting environment, which means you placed special value on the one rock in your world—your father. He was a military man, so concepts like duty and loyalty came easily to you. You grew up learning all the lessons we teach here. You even ended up working for the government, as the majority of our graduates do.”
Cooper fought an urge to lean over and bang Director Norridge’s face into the desk three or four times. It wasn’t the things he was saying about Cooper’s life, all of which were true, and none of which had stung him for years. It was the condescension, and worse, the bullying gleefulness of the man. Norridge didn’t just want to make his point. Like the blond boy on the playground, he wanted to dominate.
“You still haven’t answered my question. Why?”
“Surely you know.”
“Indulge me,” he said.
Norridge gave a tip of his head to acknowledge the returned volley. “The gifts of the vast majority of abnorms have no significant value. However, a rare handful have abilities that make them equivalent to the greatest geniuses of our history. Individually, that is reason enough to harness their power. However, the real concern is not the individual. It is the group. You, for example. What would happen if I were to attack you?”
Cooper smiled. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“What about someone more skilled? A boxer, or a martial artist?”
“Training can teach you how to defend yourself. But unless you were very, very good, your body would still reveal what you were about to do. That makes it easy for me to avoid.”
“I see. And what about, say, three martial artists?”
“They’d win.” Cooper shrugged. “Too many attacks to track.”
Norridge nodded. Then he said, quietly, “And what about twenty totally average, out-of-shape, slightly overweight adults?”
Cooper narrowed his eyes—
He said “our history” and “their power.” He doesn’t see abnorms as human.
Despite that, he knows us so well he could identify your gift. That knowledge has been applied to every facet of life here.
He dissected your past and the sensitive spots in it based just on this conversation.
He could have illustrated this current point a hundred different ways. But he chose combat as a metaphor.
—and said, “I’d lose.”
“Precisely. And we must always hold that advantage. It’s the only way. The gifted cannot be allowed to band together. So from their youth we teach them that they cannot trust one another. That other abnorms are weak, cruel, and small. Their only comfort comes from a single
normal
figure, a mentor like the woman you heard earlier. And they learn core values like obedience and patriotism. In that way, we protect humanity.” Norridge paused, then smiled toothily. It was a strange expression, knowing. It looked like given the chance, the man might take a bite out of him. “Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” Cooper said. “I understand you now.”
Norridge cocked his head. Whether he caught the real meaning or not, he’d at least caught the tone. “Forgive me. Getting me started can be dangerous.”
No kidding
.
“I should mention the tangible benefits, too. Academy graduates have made enormous breakthroughs in chemistry, mathematics, engineering, medicine—all of it government controlled. That recording device I mentioned? The nano-technology is the work of a former pupil. All the latest military equipment is designed by abnorms. The computer systems that connect us. Even the new stock market, which is, ironically, immune to abnorm manipulation.
“All these things come from academy graduates. And thanks to our work, all are managed and controlled by the US government. Surely you can agree that as a nation—as a people—we can’t afford another Erik Epstein?”
Which people, doc?
Cooper could feel a scream boiling inside of him, a rage that he very much wanted to give in to. Everything here was worse than he had imagined.
No. Be honest. You never let yourself imagine it. Not really.
Still, now that he knew, what could he do about it? Kill the director, then the staff? Tear down the walls and blow up the dormitories? Lead the children like Moses out of Egypt?
It was either that or get the hell out of here. He stood.
Norridge looked surprised. “Are you satisfied, then?”
“Not even close.” But if he stayed another minute he was going to explode, so he stalked out of the office, down the polished halls, past the narrow windows with their rocky evergreen vistas. Thinking,
This cannot be the way.
And,
John Smith was raised in an academy. Not this one, but they’ll all be the same, and there will be a Norridge heading all of them. An administrator who holds all the power, a skilled manipulator who understands and hates his pupils.
John Smith was raised in an academy.
John Smith was at war from his earliest days.
“Ground one?”
“We’re go.”
“Ground two?”
“Go.”
“Three?”
“Freezing my tits off, but go.” Luisa, bringing her usual flair.
“Crow’s nest?”
“Two positions, overlapping sight lines. Go.”
“God?”
“The view from on high is divine, my son.” Behind the voice came the buzz of rotors. At the elevation the airship was flying, it was nothing but a darker gray spot against a bright gray sky. “God is good.”
Cooper smiled and pressed the transmit button. “Peace be with you.”
“And also with you. But woe betide the sorry shitbird who tries to run, lest we hurl a thunderbolt.”
“Amen.” He clicked off and gazed down through the double-thick glass at the meet site.