• • • • •
“No one’s ever finished all five sections.”
The Lead Agent spoke in barely more than a whisper even though the two-way mirror was as soundproof as the rest of the monitoring room where she and the other two agents were standing.
“That was two-hundred and fifty pages in under twenty-five minutes.” The other agent was whispering, too.
All three agents looked like they were either mesmerized or in awe, as they stared through the glass wall. When the third agent finally spoke, it was in complete amazement.
“It would have been faster if he hadn’t stopped and straightened the stacks of paper between each section.” Then he dragged his eyes away from the thick plate glass and looked over at the other two. “What should we do? He’s already finished. We can see that… He’s just sitting there doodling in the air.”
The lead agent finally pulled her eyes from the two-way mirror.
“You know the protocol… especially with this one. We wait until the time is up… Or until he presses the button and says he’s finished.”
Then she turned back to the glass partition. After a moment, her jaw hung down slightly. She was unquestionably in awe. She’d never seen anything like this, and she’d been with the program since it began.
On the other side of the double paned panels, the boy with the big brain was getting really tired of this current test. In fact, he was getting tired of all of the tests. It was not that he wasn’t any good at tests. Oh no. That was not the case at all. He was exceptional at tests. Testing was like a game to him, and he loved that game. It didn’t matter what type of test it was, the boy always aced it. The child was gifted, and he knew it.
Which was one of the reasons why he was getting so tired of these tests.
He knew all he was doing was proving to these people that he knew how to take a test; that he was smart; that he was smarter than they were. Hell, he was smarter than anyone he’d ever met in his entire thirteen-year-old life. He hadn’t met anyone smarter than he was since he was eleven and took the first of these tests. After that first test, he began to be tested almost every day, which was how he got into this current situation; locked inside a room where he sat at a table in front of a large plate mirror on the wall. The boy knew the mirror was a two-way mirror, which had people standing behind it. He also knew those people were talking about him, even as he was watching the slightly skewed reflection of himself in the fake mirror.
In front of him on the table, were five stacks of paper neatly spread apart and aligned by their bottom edges. The boy had taken the time between each section to place and straighten each sheet. A pen was sitting across the middle stack, opened but no longer being used. There was a stack of pencils at the end of the table next to a timer. The boy had snuck in the pen. He never looked at either the stack of pencils or the timer, which had eighteen minutes left before it would reach the red arrow. The red arrow signified the end of the forty-five minute allotted time period for this set of tests.
The thirteen year old boy had the final page of the test in front of him, and for the last two minutes, he’d been doodling in the air over the bottom corner. He didn’t touch the page. In fact, he didn’t even look at it. He never looked at a test sheet once he marked it and moved to the next page. He didn’t double-check any of his answers on the test, either. He never did. He was pretending to write out the first twenty-seven pages of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; his latest mental memorizing and recall practice book.
His natural born speed reading ability allowed him to go through three complete encyclopedia sets before he was seven years old. And when he read through these numerous encyclopedias, he didn’t just browse through the pages and look at the pretty pictures. He read every word, from cover to cover, of each lettered edition in three separate adult encyclopedia sets. Then he read fourteen years of the Britannica update journals, as well.
And his memory, which he practiced on regularly, allowed him to recall every word of it. The young boy had a total, conscious recall and a true photographic eidetic memory.
For instance, he could recall when he took the very first of these tests. And he recalled vividly when the results came in. That day, he had been pulled out of class and taken to the middle of the empty auditorium. Then he was spoken to at length by a group that included the Principal of the school, his teacher, plus three new people. There would never be less than five people directly involved in any aspect of this child’s educational future, again. His parents, however, were not yet involved. In fact, very shortly after his second IQ test, his parents would no longer find out anything about the young boy’s educational future. The boy realized within a week what was happening to him. He also realized that he was not going to let his parents have anything to say about whether or not he would be allowed to do it. He’d been able to manipulate his parents for most of his conscious life. Which, according to him, began inside the womb of his mother.
He could recall things from an age where no one was supposed to be able to remember things. His mother constantly doubted whether or not the things he said he could remember were true. Once when he was nine years old, he sat down and drew a perfect floor plan of the house they lived in when the boy was born. The family had moved out of this house when he was only sixteen months old. The accurately scaled drawing had every piece of furniture labeled, marked, and in the correct position; including those pieces in the garage, like the washing machine and dryer. When he was finished, he tore the sheet of paper off the legal tablet and handed it to his mom.
“Mom… What happened to our old couch? The one that was at our old house… when I was a baby. The one I used to climb on against the wall, here.” He pointed to the drawing in her hand. She glanced at the drawing quickly, then did a double-take.
“Where did you get this drawing, honey?” Her head was now tilted slightly as she looked at the drawing with recognition.
“I drew it just now,” he confidently told her.
“But, that’s not possible. You couldn’t…”
She let her sentence trail off as she recognized the yellow legal-sized paper from the tablet in her work briefcase on the kitchen table. Suddenly, she realized the things her precocious son had been telling her about his ability to remember things were true. She looked down at the drawing in her hand and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her son was not a normal child. He was something special. And the boy also knew it. So it was no surprise to him when two years after that incident, he tested an IQ score so high, that he was immediately retested because it was feared the testing was wrong, or he had somehow cheated.
But the second test did not assuage their fears or concerns. Because the second test came back much higher than the first, like perfect.
When asked about the difference in his scores, the boy explained he had just gotten a new telescope and had been up all night before the first test. But he got a good night sleep last night, so he could focus on this test.
Two years later, and the boy was still being tested. Although now, it was not in the same manner as the original IQ identification tests that he took. These tests were administered to pre-teen U.S. children starting in the 1970’s, and they continued into the late 90’s when the program was terminated. The purposes of such tests were simple. To help identify those children who were considered special. They achieved this goal by using the standardized IQ test combined with batteries of specialized intelligence and knowledge evaluation exams.
Children from all over the country who tested at certain levels on these tests were allowed to be moved into special advanced programs. Each state had different programs that were overseen by a certain obscure department in the Federal Government. But, children who scored exceptionally high on any of these tests, garnered the attention of the Federal Agency overseeing this innocuous Department of Education program. If these children scored high enough, and they matched certain profiles, they were tested again and again.
And
each time they tested them, the number of students who would go to the next level got smaller. Finally, the number of children culled from this nationwide testing program had been cut down to twelve. And that was how the first members of the elite über intelligent teen super-geniuses were found. In fact, it would be this initial group of twelve children that made the U.S. military adopt the first recorded use of the term ‘super-genius.’
None of the children knew of each other. They all came from different cities and went to different schools. They were involved in the normal program for advanced children in each of the schools they attended. However, the other children in these advanced classes at these normal schools were not like that one child who was a member of the intelligent über geniuses, which had been identified by this mystery Federal group with both military and scientific backgrounds.
These twelve special children would continue to go school in their place of residence. And they would be involved in these normal advanced programs until they graduated from their normal high school, at whatever individual pace they chose. When one child graduated from the group, another was recruited in from the ongoing testing around the nation. The team always consisted of twelve children.
The individual children who were actively part of the dirty-dozen intelligent kids in this program were watched closely at every stage of their educational advancement. In addition to their normal school classes, they would also be allowed to spend half of their day at a specialized educational location near their regular school of attendance. The students were taken to this testing center on a bus, on which they were the only student. And they were delivered back to their normal school before the end of the day, so they could return home with their normal advanced classmates. These specialized testing centers were usually located near universities. Each of these centers was also located near a military base. It was not coincidence.
The things that these super special children learned in the afternoon was ostensibly college-level course material. And it did, in fact, contain such material. However, these children were also exposed to other types of training, educational systems, and learning methods that were experimental at best. Each child was slowly introduced to specific concepts and information which was tailored to their individual minds. Over the three decades that the program was covertly running, none of the children ever knew the ulterior motive or purpose of their educational testing exams.
With the exception of one.
The young boy with the big brain knew exactly what was happening around him. The boy had comprehended everything that was going on around him for as long as he could remember, which was an exceptionally long time. He had a mechanically oriented mind that could immediately grasp an enormous number of ideas and concepts. Then his mind would organize them into his brain in such a way that he had complete mastery over their details.
After a while, the young boy began to understand how adults thought.
He certainly understood what these adults wanted; the ones who used to wear uniforms around him, but now tried to dress casually. However, they couldn’t hide their relationship to whatever organization required that close-cropped haircut, and the sunglasses, and the attitude that he now related to the mystery organization known only to him as, The Federal Level.
The Federal Level of this organization; The Federal Level of this advanced program; The Federal Level of blah, blah, blah.
He was tired of The Federal Level. He was tired of the tests. He was tired of it all. Because he was starting to get it. He knew what they were up to.
He began to understand the real reasons behind the subjects of the specialized tests which had become more like the computer simulations that would be common years later. These latest tests, which were immersive, required the boy to place his mind into a situation and then come up with answers. This was something he did using a form of empathic mental placement; sort of an astral projection of his intellect into whatever situation his handlers, whoever they actually were, needed him to evaluate. It was fascinating work. And they went to extraordinary efforts to try and hide the details from him. But he understood what was going on. He knew the world events that were happening. And he had an idea why he was being asked to come up with answers to questions that were being posed to him.
He was not stupid.
The young boy would continue to test. The obscure group would continue to use his mind. And before he became sixteen years old, he would officially start analyzing things for organizations that never introduced themselves properly. By the time the boy was old enough to actually graduate from normal high school, which he continued to attend for a half-day as he had done since he had entered the program at eleven, he had decided what he would study in college. The people who spent the time and millions of dollars training him, also knew what they wanted him to study in college.
It was not mutually exclusive. But it was not mutually discussed, either.
One party, the boy, had one idea. The other party, that mysterious group called The Federal Level, had their idea, as well. A conflict between these two parties would arise, eventually. But in the meantime, the boy would start college officially at seventeen years old. By the time he was eighteen, the CIA recruiter on the campus made a point of approaching him and introducing himself and his organization. The young boy, who was now a young man, knew this day would come.
So he sat down and had lunch with the fellow with close-cut hair. Over lunch with the CIA recruiter, offers were made and agreements were nodded to. Before the end of the meal, a new official relationship was set up with the young man.
His brilliant mind had been trained and developed for just this purpose, although the secretive CIA recruiter on campus was not informed of this, and knew only the minimum he had to know to make the offer. Now, one of the real organizations responsible for his specialized education would finally make use of that training and investment. His mind was capable of grasping enormously complex issues and large numbers of details, even highly technical details. And then he would distill from these things a relationship. His ability to analyze such intel and data made him very useful in the strategic intelligence analysis field.
Through his late teens and into his early twenties, he would provide services to this organization on a regular basis. After 9/11, he provided services to a shadowy group fronted by the CIA and what would become Homeland Security. The services included everything from simple analysis of spectral satellite imagery all the way up to complex, technical evaluations of emerging technologies, which was his specialty. In fact, he eventually became known in the circles that used his services, as the go-to man when it came to any type of new technology that needed to be analyzed and placed in its strategic location on the world’s stage. The young man would continue studying in college and rack up a handful of degrees before he finally decided it was time to leave. After only four years at the university, he managed to get five degrees.
He became famous, at least in the world of the Astronaut geeks and Space fans, as the youngest member ever to be admitted into the Astronaut Corps, and he was accepted right out of college. This short newfound fame also introduced him to the woman he would marry within three months. They met at a bar outside the Space Center in Houston. She was in a bikini contest that he and a couple of his new Astronaut friends were judging, unofficially of course. The green-eyed, dirty-blond swimsuit-beauty had classic European looks from her Polish heritage. She made it known that she was there to win the contest. She was also not shy about making it known that the young Astronaut Star she recognized from the newspaper, was going to be her conquest that night.
The girl was not the brightest light in the socket, not by a long shot. She had spent her whole life, all twenty-three years of it, using her body, her looks, and her blatant sexuality to get her where she had gotten, which wasn’t very far. Subconsciously she knew, she would have to land herself some hottie-of-a-husband who had money if she wanted to continue living the lifestyle of a spo
iled rotten diva. Which was a remarkable feat, when you considered that she was born the illegitimate daughter of a New Orleans Saints football player and a Southern Belle Debutante turned escort in New Orleans. The idiot football player eventually married the hooker from Slidell, who promptly bankrupted him.
Then the debutante hooker new mom found another sugar-daddy to cling to, and another, and another. Her daughter followed the only example she had ever known. She attached herself to the good-looking Astronaut as fast as she could, and she never let go. She moved in with him a week after she slept with him, which was the night of the swimsuit contest the first night they met. Then she convinced him to get married by the end of the month.
The young, smart, amazing boy, who was now a brilliant young man quickly advancing in the NASA Astronaut game, had no chance.
For all of his specialized training and knowledge, he had no experience with anything like this false-blond bombshell who was now throwing herself all over him. They were married in a whirlwind weekend getaway to Vegas that she arranged without his knowledge. Then, they spent the next fourteen months in the most horrible and rocky relationship you could imagine. Nothing he did satisfied her. Nothing they had was enough. Nowhere they went was nice enough, and his friends were never good enough.
She was a bitch; a royal flaming bitch.
And everyone who met her knew it, except Luke Tomkin.
Luke was enamored with this idiot evil blond and nothing anyone could say would change his mind. Not even the daily doses of fighting or the yelling matches were enough to convince him that the relationship was never good. It got so disruptive, it almost became an issue at his workplace in the Houston Space Center when she wouldn’t stop calling and harassing him.
In an effort to get away from the condemnation of his friends, his family, his coworkers, and everyone who knew him, he decided to take his new wife on a research trip he was preparing to leave for. Luke had arranged a small grant to pay for the leasing and outfitting of a luxury sized yacht, to travel to the middle of the South Atlantic ocean for four months. He was going to study the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly, an area of weakened magnetic protection in the Earth’s field. This hole had opened up over the past few years and had become the center of the intriguing research that Luke had decided to follow.
The plan was to go to the anomaly and begin laying out special buoys he had designed to measure the extent and details of the magnetic enigma. He didn’t know it, but when he decided to take his lovely young wife with him on this research, he should have just shot himself in the heart, instead.
It would have been quicker, and more humane.
The opportunity to spend four months at sea on a luxury yacht was something the gold-digging bitch couldn’t pass up. She packed nothing more than swimsuits for the entire trip. Actually, she also packed a few sexy, slinky, low-hung, tight-fitting dresses, just in case she met someone. Because although she’d made a point to hook, land, net, gut and filet the young Astronaut she was now married to, he was not her only intimate male acquaintance; not by a long shot.
Over the first eight months of their marriage, she’d made every possible effort to sleep with virtually every guy she could get her hands on who didn’t know her husband. Luke knew none of this, of course. So when he asked her to go on this trip, she was careful to find out how many ports they would be stopping at and how long they would be staying in the Caribbean. She’d spent her wasted teens and early twenties at various Caribbean resorts trying to become famous in her waterproof underwear that never got wet. She quickly set up clandestine rendezvous with several of her former lovers who were spread throughout the Caribbean.
During the first part of the voyage through the Caribbean and past the Antilles, she successfully managed to get laid by seven guys. It would have been eight guys, but the eighth man was interrupted pre-coitus, when Luke came back to the marina where the boat had been moored. The unlucky fellow had to jump out the window into the water before Luke came into the stateroom and caught him with his wife.
Fortunately for Luke, that was the last port-of-call before they headed out to open sea for the South Atlantic.
And also luckily for Luke, the girl’s libidinous nature caught up to her. Being alone with the only male on the computerized boat, she eventually turned her sexual attention back to her husband. The encounters were often and usually violent, as the boat auto-cruised itself down to the south Atlantic. Luke was sexually exhausted by the time the yacht reached the edge of the magnetic anomaly. He began laying buoys out in a grid that would someday cover several million square miles.
In between dropping buoys, Luke began spending most of his time two decks down below, where his computers and banks of sensor equipment had been set up to monitor the buoy data. His wife spent all of her time on the top deck suntanning in the nude. After four weeks of this, she had turned golden brown; and had managed to screw Luke’s eyeballs out on everything in the boat, at least once. Most recently was just an hour earlier. She intended to do him again after she got good and hot in the sunshine. She was now lying naked and glistening on a blanket spread over the plush pad of the recliner that she used every day on the deck of the yacht. The pad had almost become molded to her body.
She was on her back face up. Her silicone implants sat high and perky on her chest. They didn’t lay out to the side like normal, real breasts do. Her body was long, although not long enough to get her a job as a real model. But she was tall enough to make her look great in high-heels and nothing more than a few patches of fabric tied together with strings. Her body was completely shaven of hair with the exception of her naturally dirty-blond coiffure, which had been lightening from the day they jumped on the boat. It was no longer dirty-blond. Now, it was a highlighted sandy blond.
She had set up a misting sprayer from the water spigot about seven feet away from where her lounge chair was permanently set up on the deck. It misted her from head to toe keeping her from getting too hot, so that she could lay in the sun even longer. Although she grew up well past the age of the introduction of sunscreen, she rarely used any product with an SPF rating. She preferred something that would make her tan faster and deeper. Unfortunately, she’d already run out of the massive supply she brought with her. The only thing left she could use was an oil lotion with an SPF-15 sunscreen, which was what she was rubbing on her body and her breasts at the moment as she sat up and straddled her padded deck chair.
The water from the mister mixed with the oil in the lotion as she spread it over her large A-cup sized breasts, pushed up from the bottom by a silicone implant, which brought the total breast size to a very full C-cup; or a D-cup if she put on too much weight. This was her second set of implants. She had decided the first set were not large enough. Those were pulled out and replaced with the current residents of her sub-mammary spaces.
As she rubbed the lotion around her nipples, her fingertips slid across the scar tissue that completely surrounded all but a tiny piece of tissue around each of her aureola. She no longer had any feeling in either of her nipples. But she had long ago accepted that losing the feeling in her nipples was the sacrifice she had to make for looking beautiful. Her boobs had helped her land a man, which would allow her to live the lazy life she’d grown accustomed to. She continued rubbing the oil-based tanning accelerator with a minimum SPF sunscreen across her glistening wet chest as drops from the mister gathered up and ran down the sides of her much too upright-pointing breasts. Suddenly, she felt a wave of warmth running over her body as an opaque cloud moved out of the Sun’s path. It actually felt wonderful to her. The misty water had started chilling her from the ocean breeze.
When she finished applying lotion to every inch of her legs, back and shoulders that she could reach, she laid back on the padded deck chair and slid her sunglasses over her eyes. After just a few minutes, she felt the warmth grow, again. As it began to get warmer and warmer, she waited until it was really starting to burn. This was her fa
vorite thing to do. She knew that if she waited just that extra little bit, the tanning rays would make her extra golden brown. When she could no longer take the burning of her skin, even by rubbing her hands through the mist, she turned over and laid on her stomach, face down.
She took off her sunglasses and slipped them down on the deck. The mist heads quickly covered her body with cooling condensation. She had managed to cover almost her entire body with the tanning accelerator and minimum sunblock formula. The only area she had not been able to reach was a diamond shaped spot in the middle of her back. The skin on this exposed part of her back did not have any lotion or sunscreen on it at all. It was this patch of skin that began to burn faster than the rest of her back. She couldn’t see it, but the rough diamond shaped area between her shoulder blades, which outlined the spot her fingertips could not reach with sunscreen, quickly began to turn bright red. And then it got redder and redder. The rest of her body was starting to turn pink, too.
Suddenly, the middle of her back and her spine felt like they were on fire.
She quickly pushed herself up into a sitting position and looked around. The Sun was brighter than she had ever seen it. Her eyes couldn’t stand the light. She had to squint to look at it. She didn’t know what was happening, but suddenly she felt heat burning into the top of her head. She grabbed her blanket and ran into the cabin deck door. When she got inside the yacht, she started screaming for Luke.
As soon as he heard her scream, Luke quickly came up from down below. When he got into the main cabin and looked at her, he realized something was wrong. She was no longer golden bronze. She was now bright red from her head to her toes. Her skin was the color of a cooked lobster and parts of her breasts were starting to blister up in patches. He didn’t know what had happened to her, but he looked out the window and realized the Sun was much too bright. He quickly looked around and noticed the electronic equipment in the cabin was also showing signs of electrical interference. Static was suddenly coming over the speakers that had been blaring out over the back deck from the stereo system the woman had been listening to while sunbathing.
His computer-like brain rapidly put all the clues together, and he suddenly knew what was happening. He grabbed her by the arm and quickly ran down into the lower decks. When he got to the bottom of the stairs, he tripped and fell into the hall. When he hit the floor, the woman behind him slipped and fell on top of him. As he rolled around on the deck and looked at the woman he married, her beautiful bronze skin had turned dark blood red and her sandy blond hair had bleached pure white. Then she looked up at him and transformed again right before his eyes.
Suddenly instead of his wife, he was holding a bald, screaming, fourteen-year-old girl whose hair had been completely burned off her head. The skin on her back started peeling off in thick, gooey sheets, as she flailed on top of him on the floor.
She was screaming at Luke’s face, but he couldn’t push her off, and he couldn’t get himself up. He tried shoving her up with his hands, but her skin kept coming off in pieces. Finally, he rolled himself over and lifted his chest up off her, but she reached out for him with her blistered and peeling arms. Then he watched her face pull away from her skull, which emerged like a gaping grotesque flower. As he jumped off her body, he looked down and the center of her torso started opening up and spreading out. Worms and maggots on the inside of her body cavity started expanding out and falling onto the floor. Then her pelvis split open, and her ovaries popped out like large cue balls that were covered with grotesque tumors and cancerous black spots.
As Luke stumbled backward and watched, the girl burned into ash in front of him.
The young scientist and Astronaut started screaming at the top of his lungs.
He screamed and screamed, but nothing came out.
All around him, the cabin was burning, and he could tell the boat was sinking. He tried to scream, and he tried to move. But his feet were stuck; his voice was gone. As the boat around him was consumed by flame, and the smoke covered in over the young Astronaut, Luke’s eyes snapped open, and he was awake.
Sweat was pouring off of him because of the nightmare.
But this was a new twist on the normal nightmare.
In the normal nightmare, he ran his hysterical wife down below and began to treat her skin for the severe second-degree burns she had over ninety-five percent of her body. In the normal nightmare, she left him as soon as she realized the time she spent suntanning out on the deck in the increased radiation under the anomaly had caused her to become sterile. In that version of the bad dream, she divorced him as soon as she found out she was not only sterile, but she had ovarian cancer. She blamed him for taking her out on the boat, even though she knew it had been her decision to accompany him, and he had nothing to do with her extreme suntanning habits.
And in the normal nightmare, he wakes up from that horrible dream while still inside the dream. And then he thinks he’s still married to the beautiful woman who became his wife. The woman he loves. He’s overcome with a warm feeling from head to toe.
Then he suddenly realizes he’s not married to the woman he loves any more. And the whole thing is just a terrible nightmare within a dream.
And then he would wake up for real.
That was how the normal nightmare worked.
This nightmare was new.
This nightmare encapsulated the nightmare he had just lived through.
As Luke looked around the mysterious radiation shielded chamber, he remembered this new nightmare was real. Then he realized his old nightmare would never be the same again.
While Luke glance around, his uncle walked toward him in the now quiet and stationary boat.
Luke looked up at his uncle and had no idea what Marshall was about to say. His normal ability to empathically cold-read a situation had been short-circuited by a ninety-three million mile long solar jolt.
Marshall stepped up to Luke with his finger across his lips.
But he didn’t say ‘shhhhhh.’
He knew his nephew knew what he meant…