THREE
He was fourteen now, and standing at attention on the other side of Dr. Halsey‘s desk. Her face, he noticed, was drawn and tight, her responses a little jerkier than usual, as if she hadn‘t been getting enough sleep or was overworked. She hid it well, but Soren, himself an expert on hiding things well, saw all the cues he was learning to suppress in himself.
―At ease," Dr. Halsey said. ―Please take a seat, Soren."
―Thank you, ma‘am," he said, and sat, a single fluid movement, nothing wasted.
She was whispering quietly to herself, scanning a series of electronic files. The files were holograms whose contents were visible to her but which he saw only as an image of a small brick wall, an image of CPO Mendez on the other side of it with his finger pressed to his lips. Someone has a weird sense of humor , he thought.
―Do you mind if I ask you a question?" she asked.
―Of course not, ma‘am," he said.
―Dr. Halsey," she said. ―No need to make me sound any older than I am. Do you remember when we first met?"
―Yes," said Soren. Hardly a day had gone by without his thinking about that meeting and everything it had led to.
―I wonder, Soren, do you remember what I said, how I gave you a choice?"
Soren wrinkled his forehead briefly, then the lines cleared. ―You mean whether to come with you or stay on Dwarka? Or was there something else?"
―No, just that," she said. ―You were young enough that I didn‘t know how well you‘d remember.
How do you feel about your choice?"
―I‘m glad I made it," he said. ―It was the right choice, ma‘am."
―I thought we already talked about your calling me that," she said, smiling. ―I wondered at the time whether I was right to give you a choice. Lieutenant Keyes wondered too. Whether you weren‘t too young to have that burden placed on you."
―Burden?" he asked.
She waved the implied question aside. ―Never mind," she said. ―The reason I‘ve brought you here is to give you another choice."
He waited for her to continue, but for a moment she simply stayed there, staring at him, the same unreadable expression on her face that he‘d noticed before, when he had caught her watching him during exercises.
―You‘re still very young," she said.
Soren said nothing.
Dr. Halsey sighed. ―You‘ve trained well, all of you. But training is only the first step. We‘re on the verge of the second step. Would you like to take it?"
―What is it exactly?"
―There‘s only so much I can tell you," said Dr. Halsey. ―There‘s only so much the bodies that we have can do, Soren. So we want to augment them. We want to modify your physical body and mind to push it beyond normal human capabilities. We want to toughen your bones, increase your growth, build your muscle mass, sharpen your vision, improve your reflexes. We want to make you into the perfect soldier." The smile that had been building on her face slowly faded away. ―However, there will be side effects. Some of these we know, some we probably can‘t anticipate. There‘s also considerable risk."
―What sort of risk?"
―There‘s a chance, a nontrivial one, that you could die during the augmentation. Even if you don‘t die, there‘s a strong risk of Parkinson‘s, Fletcher‘s syndrome, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, as well as potential problems with deformation or atrophy of the muscles and degenerative bone conditions."
He didn‘t understand everything she was saying, but had the gist of it. ―And if it works?"
―If it works, you‘ll be stronger and faster than you can imagine." She tented her fingers in front of her, staring over them at him. ―I‘m giving you an option that the others won‘t be given. I am offering you a choice, while your classmates will simply be told they are to report for the procedure."
―Why me?" asked Soren.
―Pardon?"
―Why am I the one who gets to make a choice? Why not one of the others?"
She turned her gaze to the desk in front of her, her voice distant now, more as if she were speaking to herself than the boy. ―What the Spartans are is an experiment," she said. ―In every controlled experiment you need one sample whose conditions are different so as to be able to judge the progress of the larger group. You‘re that sample, Soren."
―We‘re an experiment," he said, his voice flat.
―I won‘t lie to you. That is precisely what you are, and you—an experiment within the experiment.
An exception to a rule," she said.
―Why me?" he asked again. ―You could have chosen anyone."
She shrugged. ―I don‘t know, Soren. It just turned out that way."
He was silent for a long time, staring straight in front of him, sorting it all out in his head. Finally he looked up.
―I want to do it," he said.
―You do?" said Dr. Halsey. ―Even knowing the risks?"
―Yes," he said. And then added, ―I don‘t want to be left behind."
STRANGE, DR.Halsey thought after he had left. What had he meant by not wanting to be left behind? Where had she heard that before?
She shook her head to clear it. ―Deja," she said. ―You were listening in, I take it?"
―Of course, Dr. Halsey," said the AI‘s smooth voice. Her hologram flickered into existence on the desk beside her. Created specifically for the Spartan project, her self-chosen construct was that of a Greek goddess, barefoot and holding a clay tablet.
―Any thoughts?"
―Is that a rhetorical question?" asked Deja. When Dr. Halsey didn‘t respond, she continued. ―You didn‘t tell him everything," the AI said.
―No," said Dr. Halsey. ―I didn‘t."
―I would be remiss not to point out that, as the individual responsible for the intellectual development of the Spartans, you‘ve given him faulty information about how a control generally works in a scientific experiment. The control group generally is the group that does not experience the conditions of—"
―I know that, Deja," said Halsey, cutting her off.
Deja nodded curtly. ―I would also be remiss not to point out that Soren-66 himself is precociously intelligent and has almost certainly realized that the reasons you gave for allowing him a choice were false."
―And what were my real reasons?" asked Dr. Halsey.
―I don‘t know," said Deja. ―I have a feeling, however, that I‘m as confused about that as you are."
Dr. Halsey nodded.
―But if I had to guess," said Deja, ―knowing you as well as I do, I would say that it was a way of easing your own conscience. You just wanted to tell him. You wanted to tell one of them. You wanted to see if just one of them would make the choice for himself."
Dr. Halsey sighed. ―Yes," she said. ―You may be right. Thank you for being honest with me, Deja."
―No need to thank me. I can‘t help it," said Deja. ―It‘s in my programming."
Dr. Halsey brushed her hand through the hologram and it disappeared. She leaned back in her chair. I’ve given him a burden to live with , she thought. I’ve let him make his own decision, but Deja’s right. I’ve shifted the burden of responsibility back to him if anything goes wrong. A child.
Carrying my sins.
Let’s hope nothing goes wrong.
FOUR
He was dreaming but even in the dream it was as if he couldn‘t wake up, as if he had been asleep for days and days. In the dream he was back in the forest again, but in addition to the cold and the hunger there was also something stalking him, a strange creature, almost human but not quite: deformed somehow, its mouth cast in an odd leer, its body lumpy and irregular, dragging one of its feet behind. It was always just a little way behind him, never quite catching up with him, but he couldn‘t seem to shake it, either. He could hear it there crashing through the woods behind him.
Every so often it would give a cry of pain that was so piercing that it was all he could do to keep going. How long had he been walking? He ate what he could grab from the ground around him and kept going, dead on his feet, half-asleep, until suddenly he took a wrong turn and found the path before him blocked. And there the creature was, just behind him and on him before he could escape.
It plucked him up off the ground like a toy and hurled him. He smashed through limbs and branches and came down hard, the forest around him fading to white as he died.
Only he wasn‘t dead. What he saw, all around him, was a blank, uneasy whiteness, filled with a slow buzzing. And then the whiteness slowly resolved into a piercing light. To either side of him, dim shapes began to take form, resolving into heads, the heads themselves covered with white cloth caps, the faces hidden behind breathing masks. Beneath these heads, he saw, the clothing that covered the bodies was spattered and stained with blood. It took him a moment to realize the blood was his own.
One of the heads was speaking, he realized, a low rumbling coming out of it, though he couldn‘t understand what it was saying. It stopped and one of the other heads started to make a similar sound. What’s wrong with them , he wondered. And then, What’s wrong with me?
Then a set of fingers waved itself over his eyes. He tried to follow them but could do so only at a slight remove, his eyes moving always just a little late. A head dove down closer to his eyes, suddenly becoming crisply, painfully defined.
―Is he supposed to be like this?" the head asked, its voice muffled through the mask. Then other heads were there, suddenly looming toward him, crisp and almost as if too close. There was a flurry of movement, too, shouting, and then everything became too slow, everything moving oddly and slowly, as if underwater.
This is real, he suddenly realized. This is really happening. Then abruptly the buzzing increased and the thought slipped through his mental fingers and was lost, to be replaced by another dream, another nightmare.
IN THEdream he was sitting in a chair but couldn‘t move. There was nothing restraining him, nothing blocking his arms or his legs; he simply couldn‘t move. No, wait, he could move a little, could move his eyes very slowly back and forth. At first the room was indistinct, as if the chair were simply sitting in the middle of a vast pool of darkness, but, very slowly, it began to take form around. Not a chair, he suddenly realized, but a bed: He was lying in a bed—how had he ever thought he was sitting upright in a chair? There was a blanket he recognized, but he couldn‘t quite place it. The shape of the bed was familiar as well, the shape of the room familiar, too, but he was unable to place where he was until the door at the far end of the room opened and his stepfather, impossibly large, stooped and shouldered his way in.
I’m in my mother’s room, he thought. In my mother’s bed.
And upon thinking that, he began to realize that he wasn‘t the only one in the bed, that he wasn‘t alone. But he couldn‘t turn his head to see who the other person was. His stepfather stood in the doorway, more shadow than man, a strange piping noise coming from him—something with all the structures of a language but impossible for him to even begin to understand. He appeared to be pleading, exhorting, but maybe it just seemed that way.
And then suddenly the other person in the bed moved, began to speak in the same birdlike piping, and though he still didn‘t understand a word of it he realized, by the sound and tenor of the voice, that it was his mother. She moved and he saw just the edge of her hand, the skin gray and beginning to rot, to come apart to show a thin strip of bone below. He wanted to scream, but all he could do was let his eyes dart frantically about in his sockets as she slowly shifted in the bed, her hand carefully feeling his face. She gave a low hiss and began to pull herself up.
He was just beginning to see her face when a sudden intense pain washed over him, as if someone had worked broken glass into his veins. The dream wavered and spun and reduced itself to a small white dot on a black field and then, with a hiss, was gone, leaving nothing but darkness behind.
How long did that last? Impossible to say. He had no sense of time passing, no sense of anything but that limitless void, a vague sense of himself as part of it, but even that seemed to be blurring around the edges, any sense of himself as an individual being threatening to slip away.