“But how? Why? Why would you want to be involved with these these atrocities?”
“Pride. To prove that I was as good as they thought I was, good enough to take on this unprecedented challenge. Excitement. The thrill of being involved with a program even better funded than the Manhattan Project. Why did the people who invented the atomic bomb work on it… knowing what they were making? Because others, elsewhere in the world, will do it if we don’t… so maybe we have to do it to save ourselves from them?”
“Save ourselves by selling our souls?” he asked.
“There’s no defence I can offer that should ever exonerate me,” Rose said. “But it is true that when I signed on, there was no consensus that we would carry the experiments this far, that we would apply what we learned with such… zeal. We entered into the creation of the children in stages… down a slippery slope. We intended to monitor the first one just through the second trimester of the foetal stage—and, after all, we don’t consider a foetus to be an actual human being. So it wasn’t like we were experimenting on a person. And when we brought one of them to full term… there were intriguing anomalies in its EEG graphs, strangeness in its brainwave patterns that might have indicated heretofore unknown cerebral function. So we had to keep it alive to see… to see what we had achieved, to see if maybe we had moved evolution forward a giant step.”
“Jesus.”
Though he had first met this woman only thirty-six hours ago, his feelings for her had been rich and intense, ranging from virtual adoration to fear and now to repulsion. Yet from his repulsion came pity, because for the first time he saw in her one of the many cloves of human weakness that, in other forms, were so ripe in himself.
“Fairly early on,” she said, “I did want out. So I was invited for a private chat with the project director, who made it clear to me that there was no quitting now. This had become a job with lifetime tenure. Even to attempt to leave Project Ninety-nine is to commit suicide—and to put the lives of your loved ones at risk as well.”
“But couldn’t you have gone to the press, broken the story wide open, shut them down?”
“Probably not without physical evidence, and all I had was what was in my head. Anyway, a couple of my colleagues had the idea that they could bring it all down, I think. One of them suffered a timely stroke. The other was shot three times in the head by a mugger—who was never caught. For a while… I was so depressed I considered killing myself and saving them the trouble. But then along came CCY-21-21…”
First, born fourteen months ahead of CCY-21-21 was male subject SSW-89-58. He exhibits prodigious talents in every regard and his story is of importance to you because of your own recent experiences with people who eviscerate themselves and set themselves afire—and because of your losses in Colorado.
By the time he is forty-two months old, SSW-89-58 possesses the language skills of the average first-year college student and is able to read a three-hundred-page volume in one to three hours, depending on the complexity of the text. Higher math comes to him as easily as eating ice cream, as do foreign languages from French to Japanese. His physical development proceeds at an accelerated rate, as well, and by the time he is four, he stands as tall and is proportionately developed as the average seven-year-old. Paranormal talents are anticipated, but researchers are surprised by 89-58’s great breadth of more ordinary genius—which includes the ability to play any piece of piano music after hearing it once—and by his physical precocity, for which no genetic selection has been made.
When 89-58 begins to exhibit paranormal abilities, he proves to be phenomenally endowed. His first startling achievement is remote viewing. As a game, he describes to researchers the rooms in their own homes, where he has never visited. He walks them through tours of museums to which he has never been admitted. When he is shown a photograph of a Wyoming mountain in which is buried a top-secret Strategic Air Command defence centre, he describes in accurate detail the missile-status display boards in the war room. He is considered an espionage asset of incalculable value—until, fortunately by degrees, he discovers that he is able to step into a human mind as easily as he steps into distant rooms. He takes mental control of his primary handler, makes the man undress, and sends him through the halls of the orphanage, crowing like a rooster. When SSW-89-58 relinquishes control of the handler and it is discovered what he’s done, he is punished severely. He resents the punishment, resents it deeply. That night he conducts a remote viewing of the handler’s home and enters the handler’s mind at a distance of forty-six miles. Using the handler’s body, he brutally murders the man’s wife and daughter, and then he walks the handler through suicide.