“What is Project Ninety-nine?” he asked her. “What the hell are they doing in that subterranean facility outside Manassas?”
“You’ve heard about the Human Genome Project.”
“Yeah. Cover of Newsweek. As I understand it, they’re figuring out what each human gene controls.”
“The greatest scientific undertaking of our age,” Rose said. “Mapping all one hundred thousand human genes and detailing the DNA alphabet of each. And they’re making incredibly fast progress.”
“Find out how to cure muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis—”
“Cancer, everything—given time.”
“You’re part of that?”
“No. Not directly. At Project Ninety-nine… we have a more exotic assignment. We’re looking for those genes that seem to be associated with unusual talents.”
“What—like Mozart or Rembrandt or Michael Jordan?”
“No. Not creative or athletic talents. Paranormal talents. Telepathy. Telekinesis. Pyrokinesis. It’s a long strange list.”
His immediate reaction was that of a crime reporter, not of a man who had recently seen the fantastic in action: “But there aren’t such talents. That’s science fiction.”
“There are people who score far higher than chance on a variety of tests designed to disclose psychic abilities. Card prediction. Calling coin tosses. Thought-image transmission.”
“That stuff they used to do at Duke University.”
“That and more. When we find people who perform exceptionally well in these tests, we take blood samples from them. We study their genetic structure. Or children in poltergeist situations.”
“Poltergeists?”
“Poltergeist phenomena—weeding out the hoaxes—aren’t really ghosts. There’s always one or more children in houses where this happens. We think the objects flying around the room and the ectoplasmic apparitions are caused by these children, by their unconscious exercise of powers they don’t even know they have. We take samples from these kids when we can find them. We’re building a library of unusual genetic profiles, looking for common patterns among people who have had all manner of paranormal experiences.”
“And have you found something?”
She was silent, perhaps waiting for another spasm of pain to pass, though her face revealed more mental anguish than physical suffering. At last she said, “Quite a lot, yes.”
If there had been enough light for Joe to see his reflection in the rear-view mirror, he knew that he could have watched as his tan faded and his face turned as white as the moon, for he suddenly knew the essence of what Project Ninety-nine was all about. “You haven’t just studied this.”
“Not just. No.”
“You’ve applied the research.”
“Yes.”
“How many work on Project Ninety-nine?”
“Over two hundred of us.”
“Making monsters,” he said numbly.
“People,” she said. “Making people in a lab.”
“They may look like people, but some of them are monsters.”
She was silent for perhaps a mile. Then she said, “Yes.” And after another silence: “Though the true monsters are those of us who made them.”
Fenced and patrolled, identified at the highway as a think tank called the Quartermass Institute, the property encompasses eighteen hundred acres in the Virginia countryside: meadowed hills where deer graze, hushed woods of birch and beeches where a plenitude of small game thrives beyond the rifle reach of hunters, ponds with ducks, and grassy fields with nesting plovers.
Although security appears to be minimal, no animal larger than a rabbit moves across these acres without being monitored by motion detectors, heat sensors, microphones, and cameras, which feed a continuous river of data to a Cray computer for continuous analysis. Unauthorized visitors are subject to immediate arrest and, on those rare occasions when hunters or adventurous teenagers scale the fence, they are halted and taken into custody within five hundred feet of the point of intrusion.
Near the geographical centre of these peaceful acres is the orphanage, a cheerless three-story brick structure that resembles a hospital. Forty-eight children currently reside herein, every one below the age of six—though some appear older. They are all residents by virtue of having been born without mothers or fathers in any but the chemical sense. None of them was conceived in love, and none entered the world through a woman’s womb. As foetuses, they were nurtured in mechanical wombs, adrift in amniotic fluid brewed in a laboratory.
As with laboratory rats and monkeys, as with dogs whose skulls are cut open and brains exposed for days during experiments related to the central nervous system, as with all animals that further the cause of knowledge, these orphans have no names. To name them would be to encourage their handlers to develop emotional attachments to them. The handlers—which includes everyone from those security men who double as cooks to the scientists who bring these children into the world—must remain morally neutral and emotionally detached in order to do their work properly. Consequently, the children are known by letter and number codes that refer to the specific indices in Project 99’s genetic-profile library from which their special abilities were selected.