Kei

  “So there’s a gap in your memory,” Andrea says, eyeing me. “Amounting to your whole life.” Her expression says nothing.

  Anton’s, on the other hand, says everything. He gives a low whistle. “What a time to be missing.”

  I cock my head at both of them. “What did I miss?”

  Anton draws in a long breath, pauses, and then exhales again, shrugging helplessly as he looks over at his cousin. “You should take this one. Or Chris.”

  “Take what?” Christopher asks, still looking preoccupied as a drone hums up to deliver a covered cup and a bag of what smells like a Reuben sandwich. With chips.

  “Her innocence,” Andrea says.

  Christopher stops and blinks. He waits. Anton coughs hard, clearly stifling a laugh, but offering no explanation.

  “She doesn’t remember the last five years. Not really.” Andrea eyes me thoughtfully.

  “Just my dad, mostly,” I clarify. “What else was there…?”

  The three of them just stare at me. Then Christopher shakes his head.

  “Andrea, you start. I wouldn’t know where to begin.” He looks at me as he settles on one of the low walls. “Really? Nothing? Not even the Transgenic Wars? The Cold Peace? The AI Ascension? The Sneeze? Anything?”

  “Some of those are rumors,” Eric cautions.

  “And all of them,” Christopher retorts, “are true.”

  Andrea waves dismissively. “Those are overblown. Really.”

  “Maybe from the tip of the pyramid, Aspect,” Eric smiles. “We’re not all of Founder blood.”

  They exchange a glance. Andrea raises an eyebrow, and Eric raises both in return, meeting her gaze with a frank, almost amused expression. I wonder what’s unsaid, but am more interested in what’s being said now. Aloud or otherwise.

  “So when did all this start?” I ask. The disagreements would be more interesting if I weren’t somehow standing over an abyss greater than my own missing memories.

  “2005. They created transgenic rats that overproduced – overexpressed – a single protein. Which meant massively overdeveloped brains.” Eric grimaces. “Someone figured out they could also do that to human embryos.”

  I stiffen. “How did that work out?” I ask. To my ears my voice sounds tense and brittle, but Eric takes the question in stride.

  “Not… Well. Eventually they figured they needed more study if they didn’t want to be shooting blind – but they took quite a few shots with their eyes closed before they realized they couldn’t keep covering up their mistakes… Or their successes. And so the Academy was born.”

  “Why the Academy?” I ask.

  Chris exchanges a glance with Anton. “Because normal people and normal schools have no… frame of reference for how different we are. The more Gifted, the harder it is to compensate for our talents.”

  Eric laughed. “You know, I used to have sickle cell as a kid? Most people can’t imagine. Heck, most people can’t remember what that was.” He leaned back against the tree and closed his eyes, soaking in the warm sunlight. “Constant pain. Constant. Every minute of every hour of every day. Before my injection, it was always there, in the background. Then, one shot, and it was over. Other things can hurt me, but not that. Not again. Never again.” Eric cracks open one eye and glances over. “You know what I mean?”

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  I drop down to sit cross legged on the tree stump, and shake my head. “I can’t imagine.” I guess I’m one of those people, then.

  He stretches and closes his eyes again. “Most can’t. The therapies we had… It’s not like my pain going away. You may notice a change, but you’re a kid. Things are always changing.”

  “Kids are always getting smarter,” Chris observes.

  “Or dumber,” Anton shoots back, smiling.

  “But the adults notice.” I’m beginning to get it.

  “Yeah, things have been getting weird for a while now.” Eric gestures idly at the Academy grounds around us. “You can tell it’s got ‘em rattled. Some are snapping at everyone, some are walking on eggshells, some get freaked out by things we think are normal – even boring.”

  “And you?” I pluck a dandelion while he talks, but I have to admit I’m entranced.

  “I get it.” He stretches again. “When they fixed my ‘condition,’ it was like a mountain getting lifted off my shoulders. But I could tell the difference. One day, pain. The next day, nothing. Pain was all I knew until they lifted the mountain. Most of us had chains lifted we never knew were there, lifted off us before the age of ten. Some before five. We grew up like this.”

  “Why is it such a big deal to them?” I twirl the dandelion in my fingers and eye the delicate white sphere as it quivers.

  “Instinct. I’d tell you something about irrational fear, but if you do the math, it’s totally rational. We’re the exceptional ones, but even ten million kids growing up without genetic flaws, with all kinds of advantages, AIs, tech, nootropics, epigenetics… the whole thing.” He snorts. “Not one of us will grow up human. And we’ll never know the difference.”

  “They should just let it go.” I blow the dandelion, and tiny seeds fly across the lawn, drifting on their downy parachutes to new lives in the grass.

  “They can’t.” Christopher sighs. “It’s already life or death for them, and they’re just figuring that out.”

  “Life or death?”

  “You know when they built the first nukes? Over 80 years ago.” Eric plucks a dandelion of his own. “The world spent generations just trying to keep 1940s technology from spreading.” He blows on the white sphere and it becomes a white wisp, scattering down the field. “Yet spread it did. Now imagine trying to tighten the screws on some random garage AI or dorm-room nanites or crock-pot bioweapons or things we don’t even have names for, yet.”

  “You’d be going crazy, too.” Anton goes back to tearing into his second sandwich. The Reuben smells amazing.

  “And it’s not like everything’s cool with us, either,” Haley says, strolling up with Emily in her wake. She perches gracefully on a huge, octagonal stone beside the inlaid chessboard, and Emily sits on it as well, setting herself smoothy down beside her sister. Anton rustles in his paper bag for a third wrapped sandwich as he polishes off his second.

  “So, Eric’s giving you the lowdown?” Emily asks sympathetically.

  “I… guess?” I shrugged. “So you guys are too smart and they’re just catching on? I don’t get that feeling from the faculty.”

  Eric snorts. “You wouldn’t. The problem with us is years of education when they expected us to be ‘gifted.’ Just not this Gifted.”

  “But our teachers are a different story,” Emily adds as she picks up her smoothy and sips it.

  Anton picks up the thread of the conversation. “They didn’t just get an upgrade and then sat on it, or simply took a few online classes and called it a day. They’re like the earlier version of us – full augmentations, years of practice, leveraging every possible tool to amp themselves.”

  “So… superhumans?” I say, feeling both assured and vaguely unsettled.

  “Varies,” Eric answers. “But some clearly know what’s going on even before we do. And if you try to play them, they’re scary smart. Even compared to us.” He pauses. “Oh, and some are just semi-regular teachers for ‘gifted’ students. A little tech, a little yoga, but pretty normal compared to the rest of us. They’re the regular geniuses who handle the ‘regular’ genius kids.”

  “It’s the ones who’ve been read in who get trigger happy,” Chris adds.

  “Fortunately, we’re a weapons-free campus.” Eric blows another dandelion aggressively.

  “But not guilt-free, microbe-free, or plasma-free.” Chris shrugs. “Or black-belt free.”

  “Watch your step,” Emily agrees. “They’re a little on edge when they don’t know what’s going on.”

  “This sounds like a nightmare,” I tell them. “People seriously don’t realize it’s happening?”

  “Some do, some don’t,” Anton says. He picks up a straw and puffed into it, shooting the paper sheath in Eric’s direction, who casually flicks it away. “People have an idea that something’s going on.”

  “But they’re arguing details,” Eric adds, “like whether an engineered savant can compete in math with just an ‘ordinary’ Amped student. Sometimes they’re arguing around the problem. Or talking in metaphors. Or have no idea what the real problem is in the first place.”

  “But we do.” Emily pauses for another sip, then looks straight into my eyes. “This place is like an early ticket to the future. You can see what the world will be like with half-a-billion of us.”

  “And there’s no way that will work,” Anton finishes. “In a lot of ways, if those early genetic experiments with superbabies hadn’t gone so badly, everything would be much, much worse.”

  “But everyone realized they needed to rethink when the first few attempts went horribly, horribly wrong.” Haley adds.

  “First attempts?” I ask, my stomach lurching.

  “Yep. North Korea may have been the first. Or maybe one of the post-Soviet republics. Suppress an enzyme, get a supersmart kid. Or a superstrong kid. Or whatever. They were doing surgery with a sledgehammer.”

  “And then their patients decided to put them down. Hard.” Anton looks haunted for a moment, but falls silent.

  “And the AIs?” I ask.

  Andrea shrugs and passes a hand over her tablet. “Still deciding our fate.” The screen flares to life. “We should talk about your classes.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “I registered. Did I make a mistake?”

  “The opposite, really. Everything you picked was for top-tier Enhanced. Your scores let you take your pick, but I was wondering if you knew what you were doing.”

  I laugh for just a second, then stop. “No,” I say, fighting a smile. “Pure instinct. No idea what I was doing then, and even less now.”

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