Marcus Sakey - Brilliance

Easy, Coop. You might never have seen it firsthand, but you knew these places wouldn’t be rainbows and unicorns. Maybe there’s more here than you understand.

Try not to kill the director until you do.

He forced a neutral tone. “Central to your work? How? Is the older boy a plant?”

“Heavens, no. That would defeat the purpose.” The director walked around his desk, pulled out a leather chair, gestured to one on the opposite side. “It’s crucial that all of the children here be gifted. Most are tier one, although there are a handful of twos who demonstrated significant aptitude in other areas. Unusually high intelligence, for example.”

“So if they’re all abnorms and none of them are in on it—”

“How do we incite incidents like this one?” Norridge leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Though these children all possess savant-level abilities, they remain children. They can be manipulated and trained just like any other. Disagreements can be fostered. Betrayals engineered. A confidence whispered to a trusted friend can suddenly be heard on everyone’s lips. A favorite toy can vanish only to reappear, broken, in the room of another child. A stolen kiss or the secret arrival of menstruation can become common knowledge. Essentially, we take the negative formative experiences that all children experience and manufacture them according to psychological profiles and at a dramatically higher rate.”

Cooper imagined rows of cubicles with men in dark suits and thick glasses listening to late-night confessions, to the frantic sound of masturbation in a toilet stall, or to the sobs of homesickness. Analyzing it. Charting it. Calculating how each private shame could be exploited to maximum effect. “How? How do you know all these things?”

Norridge smiled. “I’ll show you.” He activated the terminal on his desk and began to type. His fingers, Cooper noticed, were long and graceful. Piano player fingers. “Here we are.”

He pressed a button, and sound came out of the computer’s speaker, a woman’s voice.

“—there. It’s not so bad.”

“It hurts.” The child stretched the word out into three syllables.

“I told you to be careful with that one. That boy is trouble. You can’t trust him.”

A moan, and then a quiet sob. “They were all laughing at me. Why were they laughing? I thought they were my friends.”

Something cold snaked through Cooper’s belly. The woman, he presumed the one he’d seen break up the fight, continued. “I saw them all laughing at you. Laughing and pointing. Is that what friends would do?”

“No.” The voice was thin and forlorn.

“No. You can’t trust them either. I’m your friend.” Her voice saccharine. “It’s okay, sweetie. I’ve got you. I won’t let anyone get you now.”

“My head hurts.”

“I know it does, baby. Do you want some medicine?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I can make it all better. Here. Swallow this—”

Norridge tapped a key, and the sound vanished. “Do you see?”

Cooper said, “You have the whole place bugged?”

“That was our solution for the first years. However, in a facility of this size, and given the outdoor spaces, the rough play, it’s impossible to assure coverage. Now we have a better way.” Norridge paused, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips.

Why would that be? What would make the man so pleased with himself?

“It’s not the school you wire,” Cooper said slowly. “It’s the children. Somehow you’re bugging the children.”

The director beamed. “Very good. When subjects enter an academy, Davis or any other, they are given a thorough physical examination. This includes inoculation against hepatitis, PCV, chicken pox. One of those shots implants a biometric device. It’s a dazzling piece of work, recording not only physiological statistics—temperature, white blood cell levels, and so forth—but also relaying an audio broadcast to receivers placed all over the school. It’s quite something. Advanced nano-technology, powered by the child’s own biological processes.”

Cooper felt dizzy. His job didn’t really entail any overlap with the academies, and so while there had always been rumors about them, he hadn’t really imagined they might be true. Yeah, every few years some journalist tried to write an exposé on the places, but they were never granted access, so he’d chalked up the more outrageous claims to sensationalism. After all, there were rumors about Equitable Services, too.

His first taste of the reality had come on his way in, when he’d passed a group of protesters on the road. Demonstrations had become a fact of everyday life, part of the background that people didn’t really notice anymore. There was always someone protesting something. Who could keep up?

But this group had been different. Maybe it was the size of the police response. Or that cops were arresting people rather than just containing them. Or maybe it was the protesters themselves, sane-looking people in decent clothes rather than shaved-headed radicals. One in particular had caught his eye, a woman with pale, slack hair who looked as if she might once have been lovely but now was shrouded in sadness; sadness draped her shoulders, sadness hugged her chest. She held a placard, two pieces of poster board stapled across a wooden handle. The sign bore a blown-up photo of a grinning child with her cheekbones and the markered text, I MISS MY SON.

As two cops closed in on her, she’d locked eyes with Cooper through the windshield and made a tiny gesture with the sign, just raised it an inch. Visually underlining it. A plea, not a screech. But with his eyes, he could see the turmoil beneath.

“Who’s the boy?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The boy who got beaten. What’s his name?”

“I know them mostly by transponder number. His name is…” Norridge clicked at the keyboard. “William Smith.”

“Another Smith. John Smith is the reason I’m here.”

“There are many John Smiths.”

“You know the one I mean.”

“Yes. Well. He was before my time.” Norridge coughed, looked away, looked back. “We’ve thought about discontinuing use of the name, but that seemed a victory for terrorism. Anyway, I’m afraid there’s no relation between this one and the one you’re looking for. We reassign all of the children’s names when they arrive. Every boy here is Thomas, John, Robert, Michael, or William. Every girl is Mary, Patricia, Linda, Barbara, or Elizabeth. It’s part of their indoctrination. Once a child is admitted to an academy, they remain here until they graduate at eighteen. For our work, we find it’s best that they not be distracted by thoughts of the past.”

“Their past. You mean their parents , right? Their family, their home.”

“I understand that this is startling to witness. But everything we do here has a careful logic behind it. By renaming them, we emphasize their essential sameness. It’s a way of demonstrating that they have no value until they have finished the academy. At which point they are free to choose their own names, to return to their families if they choose. Though you might be surprised to learn that a large percentage do not.”

“Why?”

“Over their time here, they have built a new identity and prefer it.”

“No,” Cooper said. “Why do this? I thought that the purpose of the academies was to provide specialized training in their gifts. To raise a generation that had mastered its potential.”

The director leaned back in his chair, elbows on the armrests, fingertips touching in front of him. Anyone could read the cold defensiveness, the go-for-the-throat approach of the embattled academic. But Cooper saw more to it. Something in the easy way Norridge maintained eye contact, the steadiness of his speech as he said, “I would have thought that an agent of the Department of Analysis and Response wouldn’t need to be told.”