Chapter 25

Monday morning was as perfect a day as I could have asked for from August. It was hot and sunny without a cloud in the sky. I longed to go to the beach, but today was my first day with the program officially. It was the most important day of my life. I just didn’t know it yet. I sighed and put my laptop and a couple of notepads and pens into the backpack I’d gotten from the Harvard bookstore after breakfast and the girls assured me that they weren’t going to be out in the sun either. They were starting the mountain of shopping with a trip to the mall. It was going to be a girls day out with both mothers and Lilly while I sat through scans and preliminary tests.

They dropped me off at the Harvard campus with kisses from my girls. They were traveling in two cars, but had both come to see me off to my first day on campus.

Dr. Saddler was waiting for me in his office when I knocked. “Come in Mr. Russell,” he said, shaking my hand and showing me to a chair across his desk from where he had been working.

“You should probably call me Matt, Doctor,” I told him. “Calling me Mr. Russell for the next five years is likely going to get tedious for both of us.”

He chuckled. “No more so than Dr. Saddler gets. Carl, please.”

“Agreed. So what are we going to be doing today?”

“Well, I want an initial CT Scan of your brain for the beginning of the study and then we’re going to take you over to the neuroscience labs to get a real-time scan of the electrical activity in your head when you’re processing information. We’ll do the same in the CT Scan. We’ve rigged up something that should keep your head steady while you read, then we’re going to try some audio stimulus to see if that’s any different in processing.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad. I thought there’d be a lot more too it,” I admitted.

“Oh the CT Scan is as tricky as brain surgery in the back of a moving car,” he told me. “Movement throws off the scan, so we have to find a way to get you enough material to read without disrupting it or putting anything heavy into the machine. We may have to do it more than once.”

“So you can’t put a book into the machine, can’t have me move to scan new pages and no one else can stick a hand in there,” I said, frowning. “That is complicated. What about a scroll?”

“A what?” he asked, surprised.

“A scroll,” I repeated. “Like they used to use in the ancient world. Unroll it to read it and roll it up to put it away.”

“That’s an interesting thought, but where would we get a scroll in this day and age?” he asked.

“Well dot matrix printers are a thing of the past. Otherwise that would have been pretty ideal. The only other solution I can think of is to make one. Print a document and then tape or glue the sheets together. Tape each end to a stick and then reel the pages from one stick to the other. Would that work?”

He nodded. “It would, but that would take some time to manually tape the feed together like that.”

I shrugged. “The only other solution I can think of is a dot-matrix. I don’t know where you could find one of those that was still in service and that we could print a document on, but it might be worth a call to the computer sciences department. They might have one for some reason.” I shrugged. “Even if they have a box of the paper, that would be a little quicker than taping that many pages together, right?”

He nodded and picked up the phone. He consulted his directory and I got the sense that he didn’t talk to the department often. He called the department and asked about the printer, listened for a little while and made a surprised sound. “Really? Will it take basic text or is it just set up for that? Perfect. If I send you a file, can you have it printed out for me? It’s for a test. We’re doing a CT scan and need to have the subject reading to get a scan of his brain activity. We can’t give him a book to read, so we need something we can feed into the machine smoothly. Yes, we can pick it up in an hour.” He was working at his computer as he spoke and said he’d just sent the file. He thanked the person on the other end and hung up.

He fixed me with a shrewd look. “Well reasoned, Matt,” He said with a smile. “The computer sciences lab still has a printer in use for returning the outputs on programs written in several classes. It’s easier for the students to go over the output and correct mistakes in the program. We’re going to go get started on the initial CT scan while they print it out, then we’ll go pick it up and roll it around something so we can run it through the machine.”

“Sounds good. Glad I could help.”

We spent the next hour in the preliminary scans at the medical department’s CT Scanner and then went to the computer sciences department where I met the department head, who had apparently heard of Dr. Saddler’s Wonder-boy as I was being called. I still wasn’t thrilled with the nickname but the tales of the Grant Board interview had spread through the faculty apparently. I promised I’d consider Computer Sciences courses, but I was honest and told him that I’d learned the basics of C++ in a day. I felt like I’d be bored sitting a class like that for four months.

He laughed at that. “Who promised you Computer Sciences would be exciting?” he said.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I have a friend who’s about to start second year. I’ll go through her books from last year and see what I learn and what questions I have. Okay to pick your brain about it?”

“Sure. There’s been a lot of speculation about what you’re capable of since the Grant Board thing. Just have Dr. Saddler give me a call and I’ll come visit you in whatever lab they set you up in. I assume they’ll let you have some computer resources for the project?”

“Some,” Carl allowed. “Our budget is heavily earmarked for tests and Matt’s tuition and supplies, but I’m sure we can give you something to work with. We might want to keep a skull cap on Matt while you try to turn him to the dark side though.”

“Sounds good,” he laughed. “We’ll talk again. Just let me know if you need anything else printed like this.”

After that, we quickly spooled the printout and returned to run the reading test in the CT Scanner. Carl was ecstatic over the results.

“Fantastic!” he enthused. “We’ll be able to get clear images without spending hours redoing the tests. I promise the next test will be much easier on you.”

We went to a lab where they were expecting us and they fitted me with a mesh cap that was covered with electrodes. I felt weird with the mane of wires running down my back, but accepted a book from Carl and after they got my initial scans, started reading.

I tried not to listen to what they were saying as they looked at the data, but there was some astonishment in their voices. I had to tune them out and blast through the rest of the book. It was a basic book on Physics, which was good, since I’d opted for Chemistry in high school, so the physics was a welcome distraction.

“How’d I do?” I asked when we were headed to lunch at the same place we’d eaten before.

“Well, there’s a good deal of the grad students who want in on the project now for access to the data for their own studies and a few of them that would do just about anything to conduct their own tests on what you’re capable of.” We ordered and waited for lunch to arrive.

“Male or female?” I asked with a smirk.

“Really?” he asked. “A man with four girlfriends is asking me to set him up with grad students on the side? Don’t you have enough to do?”

I shrugged. “If I told you the whole story, your head might come off,” I warned. “And the number is now 5 ... sort of.”

“Sort of?” he asked. “That deserves an explanation.”

“Someone else I know stops by occasionally for a little pick-me-up, but she has a relationship of her own,” I said in very vague terms. “So in some ways it counts, but in others, not really.”

He nodded. “It’s not Victoria, is it?” he asked and I shook my head.

“She and I talked a lot while I was in the hospital, but beyond the normal flirting that patients do with attractive doctors, it’s been perfectly professional.”

He nodded. “I wasn’t alarmed, “ he said trying to set me at ease. “I’ve known Victoria since she was a student here and she’s exceptionally gifted. She’s also deeply driven. The kind of arrangement you’re describing would be the kind of thing I’d think might appeal to her, but not while she’s your doctor. She wouldn’t cross that line, I don’t think, but I felt like I should make sure.”

“I don’t think she would do anything to compromise this study any more than I would,” I said. “She’s gained my trust and that’s not easy for an adult to get from someone my age. Teenagers have a healthy mistrust of adults. They often violate our trust in the name of protecting our interests. Too many of them have forgotten what it’s like to be young, hormonal and fearlessly certain of our own capabilities.”

“You don’t seem to have those problems,” he commented. “That’s the kind of statement I’d expect from a professor of philosophy who’s still young enough and idealistic enough to identify with who he was at fifteen.”

“I’m remarkable,” I said simply. “I know that sounds arrogant, but really, how many of the faculty have called me Wonder-boy either to my face or indirectly in their conversations with you? Enough for the name to stick. The faculty at Harvard is calling me Wonder-boy. Harvard! Not beauty school. Not career college. Harvard. At that point, my capabilities are really beyond reproach.”

“I agree,” he told me. “I’m just pointing out that you don’t suffer from the same battles with authority figures that others your age are prone to. I mention it because you’ll meet some out there that will dig their heels in and refuse to see you as an equal or even superior intellect. They’ll want to dismiss you as a child and suppress your contributions because they’re threatened by what intelligence like yours represents.”

“And what does it represent, in your opinion?” I asked, curiously.

“The next evolutionary step in our development,” he said bluntly. “Putting aside all the notions of mutants and super-powers, your intelligence IS a super-power. Victoria has told me that you’ve had to use it like one, but wouldn’t give me the details. She told me that had to come from you. But consider this: you can process information more efficiently than anyone I’ve ever even read about. A year ago, your abilities would have been the stuff of science fiction. Certainly there are autistic persons who can assimilate huge volumes of data, but they can’t PROCESS it. Their reality only touches our own in the most superficial way. It’s the same as your gift but imperfect, impure. The structure of your brain, whether it’s because of your concussion or because of the chemical changes brought about during puberty is ... perfect. It’s a perfect congruence. I have no doubt that if we gave you the right books, got you the right tutors, you could be anything, DO anything. That’s not just intelligence. It’s a versatility that’s frightening. As a scientist, the things you would invent would change the world. As a doctor, you’d end diseases that have baffled us for generations. In Computer Sciences, you would create programs that would lead to artificial intelligence in our lifetime. It’s like watching the first proteins form single-celled life forms and having the chance to nurture them to grow. Exciting and frightening. Will you become Einstein or Hitler, Curie or Napoleon? Without doubt, you’ll have the opportunity to shape the world to your image of what it should become.”

As he spoke, I saw the passion of his conviction in his face, heard it in his voice and felt it in his words. Suddenly I was humbled by what he thought I could become. “I think I can safely say I’ll be neither Napoleon or Hitler. I have something they don’t.”

“What’s that?” he asked lightly, looking up as our server returned with our food.

I waited until she’d left before I answered. “Humility,” I said. “And I’m taller.”

He laughed at that. “Shortness as an indication of monstrous behavior?” he asked.

I shrugged and laughed and we dug in.

The afternoon was more of the same. We returned to the CT Scanner and I let it scan while an audio recording of a lecture was played so they could chart how I reacted to sound information. They performed the same test with the skull-cap and then we returned to Carl’s office and waited for my ride. Today had been a lot different than I expected and I told him so.

“I want to run these tests once a month. I also want to run a scan every week so we keep a progressive chart of your brain, but we’ll only do the reading once a month to see if there are any changes in that respect.

I nodded and asked how many courses he had lined up in case I was able to handle more than one.

“I’ve talked to some of the professors, but there’s some skepticism about how well you’d learn. Was there anything you had your eye on at the moment?”

“Engineering. Mechanical, electrical, computer. I still want to continue with the psychology and branch into other disciplines like medicine and law, but I feel like I could finish a degree before high school finishes if I apply myself. There’s a little arrogant part of me that wants to go collect my high school diploma with one hand while holding my Harvard one in the other hand.”

He laughed. “That would certainly be a thumb in the eye of anyone that’s ever bullied you in the past for being smart.” He thought about it and nodded. “I’ll press a little more firmly. I’d suggest sticking with one discipline though if you really want to graduate here in the next four years. You’ll be able to pick up courses in summer session, but those are limited. Let me see what curriculum we can plot out for you and we’ll go from there. You may have to attend some evening courses to get the credits that have participation components, but I’ll work on it. As for our next appointment, I will see you in seven days and you’re seeing Victoria at the hospital on Wednesday. She’ll keep you above water if anyone can. Now go be young for a couple of days. It doesn’t last nearly long enough as it is.”

He smiled at me and I went out to the parking lot to wait for Lana who’d texted me that she was stuck in traffic and was still on her way.

I sat on the lawn where I could see her car when it arrived and pulled out one of my notepads to start doodling idly. I wasn’t really paying attention when my phone dinged again. It was another note from Lana saying that traffic was backed up for an accident and she was trying to get out of the tangle to find a way around it.

I sent back a message for her to drive safe and I’d meet her where she dropped me off. I looked at my notepad and I’d sketched a decent likeness of her while I’d been lost in thought. Another talent I hadn’t known about before now? I thought it looked rough, but all I had to work with was a pen.

“Are you lost, little boy?” someone behind me said and I smiled and looked around. There was a woman approaching me cautiously as if she was worried that she’d frighten me off if she was too forward.

“No, I’m not lost,” I assured her. “I’m just waiting for my girlfriend to pick me up and it was too nice to spend it indoors. I’m Matt. Matt Russell.”

“My name’s Emma,” she said, not providing a last name. I didn’t ask, figuring that she was smart enough to know that people can track you down online with just a name. “Were you taking one of the day-camps here?” She came and sat down next to me, catching a glance at what I’d been drawing. “Hey, that’s really good!”

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s my girlfriend. I just started sketching her. And I guess you could say I was here for day camp,” I chuckled. “You’re a student here?”

She nodded. “I start in a few weeks, but I decided to come early to make sure I knew my way around campus.”

“Cool,” I said. I took another look at her and realized she was beautiful then dismissed the thought as irrelevant. “Where are you from?” I asked, putting aside the pad and pen and chatting with her.

“California,” she said vaguely and I smiled.

“I was born in Riverside,” I said. My parents moved here when I was five so I don’t remember it much,” I admitted. “I live in a little suburb called Winchester now.”

“That’s nice,” she said, sounding sincere about it. “I’m looking forward to winter here. Snow always looked so beautiful.”

“It has its moments, but for every one of those gentle snowfalls that you see in Christmas movies, there’s 10 storms where it’s driven by gale-force winds and stings like you’re being pelted with gravel. Just make sure to get yourself some warm clothes before the end of October. You’ll want winter boots, warm pants and a parka with a hood, gloves and scarf. When we moved, my mom said it was worse because we’d lived somewhere warm.”

“It can’t be that bad,” she said skeptically.

“Bad enough that people die when it gets bad. Or get frostbite and lose toes. You’re too pretty to start losing parts of you to frostbite if you can help it. Anyway, that’s months away. Ask your professors and some of the local students. They’ll help you prepare. So what’s your major?”

“Psychology,” she said proudly, perking up at the change of topic. “I knew so many people back home who were so messed up that I figured it was a perfect career. I could go back there, charge a huge sum, treat all the rich and live in a huge house.”

I nodded. “There’s no shortage of people who need a hand through their worst problems. Some people are lucky enough to have good friends who can give them the advice that helps them out when they need it. Other people need to look to a therapist. It’s a good field to go into. It helps a lot of people.”

“You know someone who’s needed to talk to a psychologist?” she asked and I nodded.

“I’ve BEEN someone who’s needed to talk. That’s sort of how I ended up hanging around here today.”

“Oh,” she said, her eyes widening in realization. “Your therapist is one of the professors? I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I talked to a doctor who knew a professor here and she suggested that he see me. She was the psychiatrist. She wanted me to participate in a study here though. I’m still going to see her regularly, but mostly because of the study now.”

“What sort of study is it?” she asked, curiously.

“It’s about intelligence and information handling in the brain. I discovered I could speed-read about a month ago and that the information stays with me. So Dr. Saddler started a study to try to figure out how I do it.”

“Wait, YOU’RE him? The kid?!!? Everyone’s talking about what happened last week in front of the Grant Review Board. A couple of the dorm students were there.”

I frowned at the notoriety, but nodded. “Yeah. I’m the guy I guess. What are they saying about me? Or would I be better off not knowing?”

She shrugged. “Just that you stood up and blew the board away, someone said you had bodyguards with you, but no one believes that.”

“That was said as a joke and it was personal assassins.” I chuckled. At least the right details were getting passed around the student body. I picked up the pad. “She was one of them.”

She nodded and looked at the sketch again curiously. “How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“Fourteen,” I said, wondering what her reaction would be.

“And you’re just going into high school?”

“Yes and no. I could blow through all the material in all four years of high school in under a month. Part of the study is to try something different with me. Instead of skipping me through the grades, they’re keeping me there and supplementing me with college courses so that I don’t get bored and start lighting fires or something equally disturbing. Dr. Spencer is staying on as a consultant to the program to monitor my mental health and emotional development. They want to see if they can avoid the social development problems that kids end up with when they skip grades and leave their peer groups. Their hope is that I’ll be as socially developed and nourished as well as intellectually stimulated and ready to throw myself into the end of a degree within my first year of full time university.”

“Wow. That would kind of be awesome!” she said, surprised to find out about the extent of the program.

“That’s what they’re hoping. I intend to have at least one Harvard degree in my hand when I go to my high school graduation. That’s the bragging rights I want,” I laughed and she joined in.

“I can’t even imagine waving them both in the air like that,” she said. She was more relaxed than she’d been when she sat down.

“My first course is going to be Psychology 100,” I told her. “If we’re in the same section, I might see you for tests. They record the lectures and I can log in remotely to watch them during my high school classes. So if you see cameras recording your classes, wave to me once in a while.”

She smiled at that. “Going into psychology too?” she asked.

I nodded. “I want to study a lot of things. I honestly think I could do two four year degrees from high school if enough professors are cool with me attending that way.”

“Well I hope I see you around for more than just random tests. You’re the first guy on campus to talk to me and not my chest,” she said, poking one of her breasts with a shrug.

“They’re boobs,” I said dismissively. “Don’t get me wrong. They look like magnificent breasts, but they don’t make conversation and I’ve seen boobs before. Unless God strikes me blind in the near future, I’ll see boobs again. The best way to do that I’ve found is to talk to the girls that own them. Think of all the money I could make selling that revelation to the guys here that are someday going to be responsible for engineering NASA’s next manned space craft. All that intelligence and no clue how to talk to a girl. That’s why our project is so important. Geniuses don’t know how to get laid. Harvard’s hoping five years is enough to learn how to teach them effectively.”

She was roaring with laughter by the end of it. “That’s so true, it’s not fit!” she said. “So how long have you and your girlfriend been together?” she asked.

“About a month, but I’ve loved her forever. The day my parents moved in next door to hers, I saw her for the first time and I’d never seen anyone as beautiful as her. About a month ago, I managed to find the courage to talk to her. It’s a much longer story, but that’s the core of it.”

“And you’ve seen her boobs already?” she asked, thinking that was a little quick.

I laughed. “She moved next door to be with me. Her parents said I’d loved her for nine years. A courtship that long was longer than they had a right to ask. They just asked us not to give them any grandchildren till after college. None of us figured that I’d have a chance at finishing a degree as fast as I plan to.”

She looked shocked. “She lives with you? And her parents are okay with it?”

I nodded. “I told you it was a longer story. If you want to meet again here next Monday around noon, I’ll tell you some of it over lunch. You might think I’m crazy too before I’m done telling it.”

She mulled it over. “You’re not hitting on me, are you?” she asked, wary again.

I shook my head. “Honestly, part of the story is that I don’t have A girlfriend, I have four. I’m not looking to put some bad moves on you. You’re fun to talk to and you said that open conversation is hard to come by around campus, so it seems like a good fit for lunch. Besides, Dr. Saddler may faint when I tell him I have a lunch date. He’s still struggling with the number I’m dating now. And this isn’t exactly a story I can brag to my best friend about, so I’d like someone to tell it to.”

“Why can’t you tell your best friend?” she asked.

I smiled. “She’s my second girlfriend,” I told her.

“Bullshit!” she said incredulously.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through some of the pictures of the three of us at the amusement park over the weekend and scrolled through them with her.

“They’re frigging gorgeous!” she blurted. “Oh my God! I’d kill to have abs like hers!” she gushed over a picture of Beck in her bikini. “And her SKIN!” she said at a picture of Lana in hers. “She looks like a model! Seriously. You have both of them? AND two others?! Yeah, I can see why you want to brag about it.”

“Maybe brag is a strong word,” I said. “More like I want to celebrate my good fortune. But don’t sell yourself short. You’re at least a 12 on a scale of 1 to 10. That’s why the guys stare and act like that. I used to be the same with Lana. My brain literally shut down whenever she was around, but when I started talking, it was like magic happened.” I was smiling and she grinned at the praise for her looks. “You’re stunningly beautiful, brilliant, fun to talk to, nice enough to try to help out a lost little boy and have an interesting personality. It’s really not surprising that they don’t know how to treat you. You’re a goddess among men. Forgive us. We’re imperfect and when we see perfection like you, we feel deeply inadequate.”

“You sure you’re not hitting on me? Because you’re doing a fair job for someone who hasn’t started high school yet.”

I chuckled and shook my head. “Although if you need protection from the wrong kind of attention, you can tell people ‘the kid’ asked you out. The faculty have taken to calling me Wonder-boy. I’m not sure I like that name, but it stuck.”

“Yeah, I heard that name too. You mind if I tell people about the girlfriends?” she asked and I got the feeling that she really wanted to add to the discussions that had been going around.

“Sure, just not that they live with me,” I said and she nodded. On impulse, I tore a page out of the back of my notebook and gave her my number. “Text me some time. You can brag that you got Wonder-boy’s private number, though I wish they’d pick a better name than that.”

“Why don’t you pick one?” she asked. “What nickname do you want people to call you?”

I thought about it and then smiled. “Epic. That doesn’t sound too arrogant does it?”

She nodded. “If you’re dating four girls and asking me out for next week, then I guess ‘Epic’ is as good a name as any.”

I heard a beep and looked up to see Lana’s car coming toward us. “That’s my girl,” I said and started to gather my stuff, putting it back into my bag and getting to my feet. Beck hopped out of the car and I asked Emma if she wanted to meet them.

“Sure!” she said, clearly wanting to see how the reality stacked up to the photos.

We walked over and Beck paused, watching us approach. She grinned at me and came to give me a kiss. “Picking up more girls, college boy?” she asked playfully.

I kissed her back and returned the grin. “Making a new friend,” I corrected her. “I spent most of my time talking about the two of you so she wanted to meet you. Emma, this is Becky or Beck for short. Well, I guess shorter, since her real name is Rebecca.” I motioned Lana to join us and she parked quickly and came to say hello.

“You are both so much prettier than the photos Matt has on his phone,” she said when the introductions were over. “I can’t get over how gorgeous you both are. You look like models. Seriously. I’m from Malibu and the girls out there spend fortunes to look half as good as you two.”

I let the girls giggle and talk for a few minutes, trading compliments before we said goodbye and got on the road.

“She seems nice,” Lana said as we left. “New girlfriend?”

I laughed and shook my head. “She thought I was a lost ‘little boy’ and wondered if I’d wandered away from one of the day-camps. Not likely to go from that to a relationship,” I pointed out.

“For someone else, you’re probably right. Friend-zoned from the kick-off. The rules don’t seem to apply to you though. Normally you’d be in a world of hurt with your girlfriend over even an innocent chat with a girl that pretty. You could parade her into the house naked and fuck her on the living room floor and Lilly would be the only one even annoyed by it,” she said with a laugh.

Beck stuck her head between the seats and added her two cents. “If you don’t want her, I’ll take her,” she suggested. “She’s gorgeous.”

“Enough!” I laughed. “Let me at least get my hands on Tabby and Collie before you start using me to lure new girls.”

“Are you going to see her again?” Lana asked sweetly.

“We agreed to meet next Monday to talk some more,” I said and got another grin from her. “JUST talk,” I clarified, exasperated. “You’re really going to be the death of me, but what a way to go.”

We all laughed and by the time we got home, I thought the topic was dead and buried. WRONG!

We were settled in to dinner which Patty and Lilly had cooked, telling me that my mother had been mostly banished from cooking for the moment. I was asking how the shopping went and Beck decided that she couldn’t let that slide.

“We didn’t pick up anything NEARLY as interesting as you did,” she assured me, making Lana laugh with her.

Everyone looked at the girls, suddenly interested. “Matt was having a quiet conversation with the most beautiful girl ever,” Lana told them eagerly and I was suddenly back in the center of attention.