Chapter 4

I felt bad for my mom, and for Becky, but there was no way I could go back. The look in Mom's eyes ... was just wrong. All wrong. I jogged for a while, not really sure where I was headed. I thought of going to Becky's house, but then remembered I had no idea where that was. I thought about heading for school, but nobody there even knew me at this point. I jogged to what passed for Main Street in our new home, and found a burger joint. I fished a couple of ones out of my jeans pocket and bought a coffee and a burger. Taking my haul to a table by the window, I sat, nibbled, and pondered.

I like to think of myself as an analytical thinker. Identify the problem, ruthlessly think through every possible solution to it's bitter end, make your decision with full knowledge of the possible repercussions. It had become even more necessary to think that way after Ohio. They'd changed me. Well, they'd changed all of us, but mine was the best ... and worst. A man in a uniform wandered into our Gifted and Talented program when I was in third grade. He passed out permission slips for us all to get signed by our parents. They wanted to do some brain scans of the gifted kids, to see if they could more accurately measure the strength of brain impulses ... or something. Hey, I was in third grade. I took the slip home and got it signed.

Nobody at the time realized that while they were putting the phony scanning nodules all over our faces and hands, they were feeding us a technogenic virus through the air vents in the room. Yeah, I don't know what it means either, but that's the word that I was told, so I went with it. A big part of the reason that nobody noticed any change was that it was an inert virus, activated only when large-scale hormone shifts began to occur ... you know ... like puberty? Not all of us hit it at the same time, obviously, but we were pretty close. There were thirteen of us initially, but only seven that were still with the program at that school, and Bonnie was the first of us to feel that something was wrong. One day she came in to science class, and she was hot. Like ... really REALLY hot. She sat and sweated copiously, until the teacher sent her to the nurse. From what I heard, she got taken to the emergency room when she collapsed on her way to the nurse's office, and we were told that she had suffered a fatal stroke. Apparently her brain just boiled as her internal body temperature hit about 120 degrees or so.

Carla was next, in retrospect. None of us recognized it at the time, but her hair and fingernails went into overdrive. She put her hair into a long ponytail, and it was always that ... long. So it didn't really show unless you looked close, but she was clipping her nails three times a day, and cutting her own hair every other day, so her mom wouldn't find out. She was scared, but was hiding it well. Apparently, according to information I got later, her body was regenerating cells at an astonishing rate, and sloughing off the old ones via her hair and fingernails, as well as basically shedding them, which explained her twice-daily shower habit.

When Sydney showed up having grown almost six inches over a long weekend, everyone joked about how she was going to play in the NBA, and assumed she had hit a growth spurt. When she was pushing 6'8" by the end of the week, it wasn't funny any more. She was suffering horrible growing pains in all her joints and tendons. She could barely walk or keep her balance, since her center of gravity was changing so fast. This time, there wasn't a trip to the nurse. This time another man in a uniform showed up at the school, gathering the rest of us up. We were scared, not understanding what was going wrong, and nobody seemed inclined to tell us anything at all.

They took us all to an abandoned school in the middle of nowhere, out in the backwoods hills of Ohio, and assigned us all rooms. Nobody was told what was going on, or allowed to contact any family members. Needless to say, tension was rather high. For two weeks I stayed in that room. There were rudimentary facilities, and food and water were brought to me regularly. Nobody said a word to me, though, and indeed looked at me like I might explode. Looking back on it, that was probably exactly what they were thinking.

On my fifteenth day, when the food arrived, it arrived in the hands of a new attendant. She was quite attractive, in that bookish sort of way, and had large round glasses perched on her tiny nose. She actually brought the meal into my room, closing the door behind her, and asked if she could sit down. I nodded, probably somewhat warily, and she sat down and started talking. Come to find out, there had been a branch of the government that was bound and determined to create "better humans". They were experimenting with all sorts of really bad things, gene-splicing, steroids, radical surgeries, and the like. They had come up with an airborne technogenic virus which would dramatically alter the body of an adolescent, as their hormones surged and levels changed. And they needed to test it on someone who had yet to go through puberty. So someone (and her words became rather clipped at this point) decided to go accost a Gifted and Talented program. Might as well get the brainiacs, if they could.

Which eventually brought us to the present. When Bonnie died, a report had been filed noting the symptoms and the unusual temperature increase. Apparently, there was some agency somewhere that combed the medical reports and flagged Bonnie's case. The program in question had long since been terminated, but records and knowledge of it still existed in the darker segments of the government. Someone had put two and two together, and started watching that initial test group very closely. When Sydney did her Incredible Growing Girl impression, the panic button had been pushed, and we were all collected and isolated, until they could see what the effects were on each of us.

She paused at this point, and eyed me. She asked if I felt any different, but I really didn't. She said that everyone else had already ... changed. Something in her expression had been off, though, and I asked her how they were all doing. She looked away from me as she told me that they were all dead. I blinked a couple of times, trying to wrap my brain around that. She explained that all their "changes" had run haywire. Carla choked on her own hair in the middle of the night, as it grew down her throat. Sydney had gotten so large that her bones weren't dense enough to maintain their strength, and her skull had caved in when she laid down for bed one night. So on and so forth.

So naturally, they were watching me very close, and expecting the worst. But I still didn't feel any different. Day in and day out, they checked me. Finally someone got the bright idea to check my hormone levels, and they found that the hormones were skyrocketing all around in a classic symptom of puberty. Yet it seemed, for all intents and purposes, like the whole mess had somehow skipped over me. If only.