Here on the third floor, southwest corner, in a room of her own, sits ATX-12-23. She is four years old, catatonic, and incontinent. She waits in her crib, in her own wastes until her nurse changes her, and she never complains. ATX-12-23 has never spoken a single word or uttered any sound whatsoever. As an infant, she never cried. She cannot walk. She sits motionlessly, staring into the middle distance, sometimes drooling. Her muscles are partially atrophied even though she is given manipulated exercise three times a week. If her face were ever to be enlivened by expression, she might be beautiful, but the unrelieved slackness of her features gives her a chilling aspect. Cameras cover every inch of her room and record around the clock, which might seem to be a waste of videotape—except that from time to time, inanimate objects around ATX-12-23 become animated. Rubber balls of various colours levitate and spin in the air, float from wall to wall or circle the child’s head for ten or twenty minutes at a time. Window blinds raise and lower without a hand touching them. Lights dim and flare, the digital clock speeds through the hours, and a teddy bear that she has never touched sometimes walks around the room on its stubby legs as if it contains the mechanical system that would allow it to do so.
Now, come here, down to the second floor, to the third room east of the elevators, where lives a five-year-old male, KSB-22-09, who is neither physically nor mentally impaired. Indeed, he is an active redheaded boy with a genius-level IQ. He loves to learn, receives extensive tutoring daily, and is currently educated to a ninth-grade equivalent. He has numerous toys, books, and movies on video, and he participates in supervised play sessions with the other orphans, because it is deemed essential by the project architects that all subjects with normal mental faculties and full physical abilities be raised in as social an atmosphere as possible, given the limitations of the Institute. Sometimes when he tries hard (and sometimes when he is not trying at all), KSB-22-09 is able to make small objects—pencils, ball bearings, paper clips, thus far nothing larger than a glass of water—vanish. Simply vanish. He sends them elsewhere, into what he calls “The All Dark.” He is not able to bring them back and cannot explain what The All Dark may be—though he does not like the place. He must be sedated to sleep, because he frequently suffers vivid nightmares in which he uncontrollably sends himself, piece by piece, into The All Dark—first a thumb, and then a toe, and then his left foot, a tooth and another tooth, one eye gone from a suddenly empty socket, and then an ear. Lately, KSB-22-09 is experiencing memory lapses and spells of paranoia which are thought to be related to the long-term use of the sedative that he receives before bed each night.
Of the forty-eight orphans residing at the Institute, only seven exhibit any paranormal powers. The other forty-one, however, are not regarded as failures. Each of the seven successes first revealed his or her talent at a different age—one as young as eleven months, one as old as five. Consequently, the possibility remains that many of the forty-one will blossom in years to come—perhaps not until they experience the dramatic changes in body chemistry related to puberty. Eventually, of course, those subjects who age without revealing any valuable talent will have to be removed from the program, as even Project 99’s resources are not infinite. The project’s architects have not yet determined the optimum point of termination.
Although the steering wheel was hard under his hands and slick with his cold sweat, although the sound of the engine was familiar, although the freeway was solid under the spinning tyres, Joe felt as if he had crossed into another dimension as treacherously amorphous and inimical to reason as the surreal landscapes in Salvador Dali’s paintings.
As his horror grew, he interrupted Rose: “This place you’re describing is Hell. You… you couldn’t have been part of anything like this. You’re not that kind of person.”
“Aren’t I?”
“No.”
Her voice grew thinner as she talked, as though the strength supporting her had been the secrets she kept, and as she revealed them one by one, her vitality ebbed as it had for Samson lock by lock. In her increasing weariness was a sweet relief like that dispensed in a confessional, a weakness that she seemed to embrace—but that was nonetheless coloured by a grey wash of despair. “If I’m not that kind of person now… I must have been then.”