Tim

  “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”

  --William Blake

  A tall man in a stylish, light-brown leather jacket glances from an app on his smartphone to what looks like five starships spread out over his workbenches. An odd hum comes from them as pinpoints of blue and green light briefly flicker into being over their surfaces and then go dark. Each one is over 7-feet long, and as we walk in, a panel in the center of each slides back to reveal their vertical takeoff turbofans.

  “Guys, this is my Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul, here’s Haley Donovan and Kei Kimura. They’re friends of mine from school.”

  “Awesome,” Uncle Paul says, scooping up a controller from his worktable. “You’ve got the conn. Evening, girls. C’mon, guys.” The turbofans of the five drones whir to life and they rise into the air with a muffled roar. Haley blinks and Kei cocks her head at them. They look like five small, identical spaceships. I know drones well enough to realize just how much effort had gone into reducing their weight and muffling their engines so that we can still talk instead of being almost deafened.

  Judging from Haley’s wide eyes and Kei’s narrowed ones, they have an idea, also.

  “You… build models, then?” Haley asks, obviously trying to make sense of things. “Drone models for sale?”

  Paul gives her a quick scout’s salute with two fingers. “Good guess. And something like that. Tim said you guys were smart.”

  “Those are some models,” Kei observes with a wry grin.

  “I’ll say,” Paul answers with a grin of his own. He looks over at me. “I’ll be testing the AIs and their sensor suites for a while. Lock up, don’t wait up. I’ll be back when I’m back.” He picks up a shining silvery cylinder – perhaps four-inches wide by 2-feet long – by a handgrip on its back end and stuffs it in his trusty backpack. Something new, I realize. Paul throws the pack over one shoulder.

  “It’ll be a bit of a hike, so I might be out of cell range, so call whoever you need to if you can’t reach me.” He points to the back of the shop, where I can see some of his automated machines – from 3D printers to CNCs – working away on the project I’m babysitting. “There they are. Look but don’t touch.”

  “Sure…” Haley says slowly. “What’re you going to be doing?”

  Paul snorts. “Hunting monsters.” He grabs a set of keys and heads for the double doors that open into the garage and loading dock. “Like I said, don’t wait up.” He pulls open both doors and waits while his swarm of drones flies past, then follows them out.

  A minute later, the garage door opens, and the drones and Paul’s self-driving hybrid van roll out.

  “So,” I say finally. “Let’s talk.”

  “Yes. Let’s.” Kei looks out a window, watching as Paul, surrounded by his drone squadron, turn a corner on the back road away from the workshop. She looks back at me. “About more than just the school, maybe.”

  “Let’s not get sidetracked,” Haley interjects. “Not by… whatever that was.” She turns and focuses on me. Joy. “So, we’re here. Screens. Notes. Confessions. Let’s have it.”

  “Sure,” Kei agrees, folding her arms across her chest. “I’ve already got questions about this place once we’re done.”

  I give an inward sigh. Letting these two into my life isn’t going to be comfortable, but I don’t have many peers – many people at all, really – who I can talk to about my suspicions.

  I tap a smaller touchscreen to wake it, then wave at them. “Percy, pull up those files. Data, graphics, everything. Including whatever you’ve worked out.”

  A smooth voice fills the room. “Of course, Tim.” Along the walls of the shop, eleven vertical 8-foot by 4-foot sheets of coated, transparent plexiglass blaze to life, and begin swimming with text and images.

  Haley blinks as Kei walks slowly forward, eyes darting from screen to screen.

  “What’s this?” Haley asks. It isn’t clear if she’s talking about the setup, which is cool, or the data, which is mind-blowing, so I go with the data. The special effects speak for themselves.

  “This,” I clarify, “is what they’ve collected on all of us over the last seven months. Grades, test scores, physical tests, body changes, medical reports – everything. Want to know everybody’s shoe size? They’ve got it. Want to know what they were last year? They’ve got that, too.”

  “Big Brother is watching you,” Kei quips with a ghost of smile.

  “Creepy,” Haley mutters, folding her arms across her chest. “They didn’t like, scan us, did they?”

  “The photos aren’t too weird,” I say. “But they know every kid in their teens had a growth spurt. Call it late or early or normal or extreme – they pass it off in a lot of ways, but it’s clear we all changed, even the ones who didn’t get a lot taller or buffer or whatever.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “How much do they know about us?” Kei asks quietly.

  “Depends on the person.” I wave at one screen, and we stop in the middle of a list of scrolling names and then begin scrolling right to reveal block after block of data on a spreadsheet. Far enough out, and only a couple people show biofeedback sessions, MRIs, or anything else interesting.

  Except for genetic testing. Every single one of us has been tested genetically. I point at the columns showing multiple tests. “I’m guessing you guys didn’t give your consent, either?”

  “Nope.” Haley’s eyes seem to be boring into the data.

  “Did our parents, though?” Kei asks, her eyes distant as she scans the data and displays on multiple screens at once. I have the strangest feeling she’s skimming them all simultaneously, even the ones only at the edges of her sight on her right and left, barely in her peripheral vision. “Or guardians?”

  Haley starts slightly. “They wouldn’t. My parents wouldn’t do that.”

  Kei gives a faint sigh. “Maybe. But even if they wouldn’t, they might accept a genescan passed off as genetic testing for disease, or something.” She waves at the freestanding screens. “Especially if they were worried.”

  “So all this,” Haley waves around at the screens, the town, and everything else, “is something they did?” Normally unflappable and upbeat, the girl is staring wide eyed and slowly shaking her head.

  “Not all of it,” I say, gesturing to the seventh screen, where a spectrum of lines intertwine and make their way across a chart. “I put together a graph showing the main factors they were tracking over time. Growth, strength, test scores, all kinds of things. Notice anything about five-years ago?”

  Everything spikes sharply upward about half a decade ago and keeps climbing.

  Haley sighs. “So you’re still hung up on the Sneeze. And your proof isn’t a wall covered in red strings, but a chart with strings in every single color.” She rubs her temples.

  “Well, when you put it like that…” I begin.

  “When you put it like that,” Kei interrupts, pointing at my chart, “it’s irrefutable.”

  We look at her. “Really?” Haley and I chorus together.

  Kei snorts as we chime together as one. “Up to a point. We know there’s a spike which hit then, but we also know every one of us in the school has been genescanned. That’s two things we can’t ignore.”

  Haley mutters under her breath. “…Straight,” is all I can hear.

  “But are those the only things? Even the biggest things? That’s what we need to know.”

  Haley looks around at our screensful of data. “Where do we start?”

  Forty-five minutes later, and I know even more uncomfortable truths and implausible shoe sizes than when we’d started.

  Yes, the free beverages at school – from the shakes, smoothies and soft drinks to the espressos and energy drinks – are definitely spiked. Custom spiked for each person, with special blends based on our “ideal bio-profile.” Apparently they know a lot about us genetically and medically… and take the liberty of testing whenever we used the bathrooms at school – because every toilet has biosensors – which is just creepy. Even for this.

  And they can inject perfectly calculated doses into our drinks the moment we use the soda fountain, pick up a coffee from an on-campus barista, whatever. I guess the vending machines are safe, though come to think of it, we hardly have any. Of course, if there’s ever a bad drug interaction – say, with something they didn’t detect in a kid’s system before dosing her or him – well, that poor punk could end up in the ER. Or the morgue.

  But they’re big on testing us all the time, so I guess they’re willing to roll the dice.

  The schoolwork is half about assessing what we can do already, half about pushing us even further, and half about accelerated learning methods they’re testing out on us. If that sounds like three halves, it is. But they’ve also increased our schoolwork about that much.

  It’s just so easy, we’ve hardly noticed.

  But something still seems to be slipping past us. Crazy as all of this is, some parts just don’t add up. They seem to know more about this than they should, and have some data going back years, not months. And there are hints their tests go back at least another generation.

  My gut tells me there’s another piece, and the girls seem to sense it, too. Still, there’s nothing until—

  “Gene drivers,” Kei says, pointing at an exceptionally boring paper on the genetic history of Waycross.

  “Wait, what now?” Haley asks.

  “Gene drivers,” Kei repeats, as though that explains everything. To her mind, it probably does. “They’re what you use when you want your genetic changes to last going forward. Recessive, dominant – doesn’t matter. No matter how often you roll the dice, they always come up snake eyes.”

  “You’ll hear about them in AP Genetics, this year,” I tell Haley. “You’re seeing those?” I ask Kei, walking over to her.

  “The researchers sure did. They think we’ve got gene drivers here going back at least two generations, maybe further.”

  “Doing what?” Haley says, joining us. She peers suspiciously at the endless paragraphs of dry text.

  I blink at them as Kei continues to scroll through. The writers are so dry my eyes are getting itchy, but Kei stares hard at it, paragraphs rolling through like she’s speedreading. Which maybe she probably is.

  “Driving what,” Kei corrects her absently. “And more importantly, driven by who? No one in these documents knows where they came from. Or aren’t saying if they do.” She tapped one of the paragraphs. “They started all this with embryo selection, back in the day. Not outright genetic engineering. But the more they tested, the more they found. That they couldn’t explain.”

  Silence fills the workshop.

  “So… There’s a conspiracy beyond the conspiracy?” Haley asks. “Just to be clear?”

  “Or one conspiracy using the other conspiracy,” I mutter.

  Kei shrugs and keeps scanning files. “Well, they weren’t kidding about all the kids being above average, were they?”

  “Say, what now?” I ask.

  “’Our best bet for going fast is to go slow,’” Kei reads, sounding more like a pompous professor pontificating than a touchy teen taunting. “’We can’t bring every augmentation online at once, nor should we. We need to bend the people, not break them. But by taking the first few steps carefully, now, our children will be able to race forward.’” She sighs. “This place really was too good to be true.”

  “What were they doing, Kei?” Haley asks in a small voice.

  Kei stands silent, still staring at the words. Then she begins reading again. “’We all know the arguments for rapid enhancement. Especially those championed by—'” Her voice catches, then lurches forward again. “’—Kestrel. That way lies madness. We are less likely to forge gods than we are monsters, and our unparalleled children could turn against us. If they so chose, who could stop them?’”

  “Stop them?” I ask, exchanging a look with Haley. She glances nervously out the windows, and I feel it, too. As though we’re speaking secrets not meant to be heard aloud. And are about to be caught.

  But Kei keeps reading, her eyes half focused, as if she’s no longer entirely here with us. “’Fashion them carefully, step by step, and they will not exceed our comprehension or our counsel, our reach or resolve. They will be what we make them, before all else, and not what they make themselves.’”

  “’What we make them’?” Haley repeats.

  “’Yes, there are those who say we are taking their free will. But we have seen Kestrel’s work. And her creatures are little more than slaves. Would we wish that upon anyone?’”

  With a gasp, Kei comes to a halt, but keeps staring at the article.

  “Kei, what’s wrong?” Haley asks. She steps forward, and puts a hand on her foster sister’s shoulder.

  Kei just shakes her head mutely, biting her lip as she re-reads the words silently.

  “Slaves?” I ask. This is sounding worse all the time. The thought of kids like us being slaves – even if it is an exaggeration, or a metaphor – makes my skin crawl.

  “’Kestrel’s plans for child soldiers speak to our worst impulses,’” Kei continues reading. “’And our worst possible future. Imagine a teenager – built down to the genetic level to be a brutal warrior, possessing unimaginable abilities, and brainwashed into unthinking obedience – imagine battalions of such fanatical shock troops, raised from birth – no, conception – to be your personal army.’” Kei draws in a ragged breath. “’We must never permit such an atrocity. Because once it is in motion, it will become unstoppable.’”

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