Stronger: A Super Human Clash (6 page)

“I’m not a creature,” I said. Or, rather, I growled.

Tremont went, “Hmm …” Then he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and said, “Count for me, please. From one to ten.”

I did as he asked. It sounded like growl, bark, growl, snarl, bark-snarl, growl-bark, and so on. Nothing like it should have.

“Let’s try again,” Tremont said, “from ten down to one.”

When I was finished, he nodded. “All the same noises, in correct reverse order. Fascinating. It could just be a form of aphasia.”

Harmony asked, “Aphasia?”

“Simply put, a fault in the brain’s language center. He knows the words,
thinks
he’s saying them, but they’re not coming out. He’s definitely intelligent. Well, as intelligent as
any
twelve-year-old boy, I expect.”

Harmony wet her lips and paused for a moment. “What are you saying, Mr. Tremont?”

“It’s
Dr.
Tremont, actually. And I’m saying that young Gethin Rao isn’t missing at all.” He pointed to me. “Our taciturn cerulean colossus
is
Gethin Rao. Am I right?”

I nodded, and pointed to my chest. I couldn’t help grinning—at last, someone understood! I was finally going to get out of here!

Then Harmony said, “You think we don’t know that?”

Dr. Tremont and I stared at her.

“We’ve known from the beginning who he is. But we can’t let that knowledge reach the public. Imagine the panic if people thought that at any moment
they
might undergo a spontaneous transformation into, well, something like that.”

I roared at her—I can’t remember what I said, but I’m sure it wasn’t nice—and threw myself at the glass door. I bounced back, landed on my feet, and did it again, and again.

When I’d calmed down a little, Tremont said, “This is in human! I demand that you release him—immediately! The boy does not deserve to be locked away. He has committed no crime!”

“He resisted arrest,” Harmony said. “
That’s
a crime.”

“
Reprehensible!
You people … How can you sleep at night? What if
your
child was taken away for no reason?”

“I don’t have—”

“Shut up!” he roared at her, loud enough that she actually flinched—it was the first time I’d seen her lose her composure. Still looking at Harmony, Tremont pointed to me. “You will
release that boy! Immediately! Or, I swear, I will go over your head! I will speak to the president himself!”

“And tell him what, Doctor? That there’s a secret base somewhere—you don’t
know
where we are, do you?—in which we are keeping prisoner a four-meter-tall blue-skinned boy? Do you think he’d believe you?” She squared her shoulders and glared at him. “You will teach him to talk. And you will not leave this compound until you’ve achieved that. Understood? We want to know why and how this happened to him.”

“Isn’t it obvious? He’s a superhuman!”

“That’s not obvious at all, no.”

“Don’t you follow the reports? He is not the only one! Maxwell Edwin Dalton, sixteen years old, able to read minds. A young woman who can control any form of energy. A young man who can fly under his own power. Another who can move so fast, the rest of the human race might as well be marble statues. And I know for a
fact
that your people have recruited a seventeen-year-old boy who’s been gifted with intelligence that’s completely off the charts.” Tremont turned away from her, came right up to the glass, and placed his hand on it, looking in at me. “There are even stories of a shape-shifter, did you know that? A man who—at will—can change into another person. Right down to the fingerprints.” He paused for a second, then looked back at Harmony. “Is that how you found out your blue prisoner’s identity? His fingerprints?”

“No. His DNA.”

“You’re telling me that he still has the same DNA?”

“Yes. And to save you the trouble of asking, it’s human. Completely human. Nothing to indicate how this change occurred. The same with Dalton and the young genius you mentioned. They’re all human.” Harmony walked up to the glass and stood next to him. “But they’re not
just
human. They’re more than that. And we have to know why.”

After that, Dr. Tremont came to see me every day, morning and afternoon, at least two hours each time.

He always called me by my first name, always treated me like a person, not an animal. He conducted dozens of tests on me. Simple ones at first, like giving me a series of cards with words on them. He’d say a word and I’d hold up the correct card. Then spelling: He gave me a pile of wooden blocks with letters on them—the same blocks you’d give to a preschool kid. I did pretty well on that one too until he got to phrases like
pseudo-mnemonics
that I’d never actually heard before, let alone learned to spell.

After a few weeks, he arranged for an oversized computer keyboard to be installed in my cell. It was connected to a screen that he could read, and for the first time since that day in church, I was able to properly communicate with the world.

“I want to go home.” They were the first words I typed.

“I’m sorry, Gethin,” he said. “They won’t allow that. It’s out of my hands.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Almost six months, I think.”

“They have no right to keep me. I haven’t done anything wrong!”

He shrugged. “It seems that they require neither right nor reason. I’m a prisoner here too—they won’t let me leave until I can get you to speak again. Or until it’s been proven that you’ll
never
speak again. But I don’t think that’ll be the case. Tomorrow we’ll begin working on basic phonemes. They’re the sounds that make—”

He stopped when I started typing again: “They don’t care if I can speak. That’s an excuse. They could have brought one of these machines in months ago.”

The doctor nodded. “That thought
has
crossed my mind. Gethin. Listen for a few minutes, please?”

“OK.”

“Human babies learn to speak by a sort of trial-and-error system. Have you ever heard a child learning to talk? They might know the word
dog
, and they’ll say that when they see one. Their parents encourage them. Positive reinforcement. Then they might see a cat but not yet know the name for it. But they will recognize that it has similar attributes to a dog: It’s a quadruped, it has a tail, it’s covered in fur. So they’ll say ‘dog’ and their mother or father will correct them, tell them that the word for that particular animal is
cat
. Are you following this, Gethin?”

I typed, “Sure.”

“Good. Now, when you think about it, by the time children are, say, two years old, they have learned hundreds of words, and most of the time will get them right. They are able to subconsciously
identify some very subtle differences. For example, my sister has twin six-year-old girls and a one-year-old boy. The girls are identical. I mean,
I
can’t tell them apart—they’ve played some clever tricks on me, I must say—but their brother always knows who is who.”

I sat back and watched him for a moment, wondering where this was going.

“The human brain is a remarkable machine, Gethin. Think about that. My one-year-old nephew, who has practically no experience of anything other than eating and crying, and who still gets confused about which way up a spoon should go, is better at something than I am.”

I typed, “He’s had more practice.”

Dr. Tremont laughed. “Yes, of course. That’s the point I’m steering toward…. When we’re toddlers we’re constantly learning. Testing, retesting, experimenting, guessing, and so on. That process of repetition effectively carves pathways into our brain. As we grow, we develop shortcuts. If I ask you to multiply ten and five, you know the answer is fifty. You don’t need to calculate it every time.”

“But that’s just what we call memory,” I typed.

“Right. That’s how memory works, to a degree. In the brain’s language centers we store millions of these shortcuts. I say the word
tiger
and you know exactly what that means. The word brings up a picture of a tiger in your brain, maybe with sound. Or even smell, if you’ve ever had the good fortune to encounter one up close. And it works the other way. When you want to communicate the word
tiger
to me, you don’t have to think about how to make the right sounds.
That’s already
hardwired
into your brain. The correct word just comes out.”

I nodded, then typed, “And that’s the part of me that’s gone wrong?”

“I think so, yes. Our tests have shown me that everything else is still working—and working rather well—inside your head. But when you speak, the wrong sounds come out. Now, I mentioned phonemes…. They’re the basic parts of human speech. What we’re going to have to do is work on them one at a time so that when you attempt to make a particular sound, that’s the sound we get. We’re going to reprogram your brain.”

“Will that work?”

The doctor was silent for a moment, then gave me a tight-lipped half smile and shrugged. “I’m … hopeful. It’s got to be worth a try.”

Dr. Tremont and I worked nonstop over the following two months. It was exhausting at first: For the entire first week I had to say “ah” over and over, with the doctor constantly correcting me, until something kicked in and suddenly the “ah” sound was coming out whenever I used a word that required it.

After that, my rate of progress increased, and by the end of the two months I was able to speak whole sentences without a single growl, grunt, or snarl.

I quickly learned that Dr. Gordon Tremont was not the world’s foremost expert in linguistics. He admitted that he was good, but not the best. It turned out that he’d been chosen because his psychological profile was very close to Harmony
Yuan’s, and it was hoped that—like her—he wouldn’t suffer the same reaction to me that most people did.

They were right about that, at least. Whoever “they” were. The doctor and I got along very well. He worked hard, but he was usually happy enough to chat rather than lecture.

On the last morning of the doctor’s stay, he approached my cell rather slowly. He just looked at me for a few moments, then cleared his throat. “Good luck, Gethin. I hope … I hope they see sense one day.”

“Can you do me a favor? Tell my parents I’m still alive.”

“I … Yeah. Sure. I’ll do that.”

But I could tell from his expression that he was lying. And he knew that I could tell. My captors were monitoring us, and I had no doubt that if he did try to contact my parents, the penalties would be severe.

Nevertheless, I nodded. “Thanks. For everything.”

He gave me a thin-lipped smile, then turned away.

After that, it was back to the old routine: Harmony spending hours each day just watching me.

Despite the situation I had to admire her patience and self-control, because she never seemed to be bothered by the fact that now that I’d relearned to speak, I didn’t
stop
talking. I told her thousands of times in the first couple of days that I wanted to go home.

She barely responded, of course. Now and then she would just shake her head, or say, “When we’ve found out everything we need from you, we’ll see what can be done.”

Eventually, I gave in. “How are you supposed to find out what you want to know if you don’t
ask
me anything?”

“We have a way to go yet. Your cell is rigged with sensors that monitor your heart rate, perspiration, and stress levels. If there was anyone else in there, we’d have begun the interro gation immediately because those sensors act as a very accurate lie detector. But your physiology is so much different from a normal person’s, they’re practically useless.”

“But I
won’t
lie. I want to get out of here. I’ll tell you whatever you need to hear.”

“That’s my point, Gethin. Someone in your situation is liable to lie without realizing they’re doing so if—”

“That’s the first time you’ve ever used my name.”

She stopped, and pursed her lips in thought. “So?”

“So maybe you’re finally starting to think of me as a person, not a monster.”

Her only response to that was “Hmph.”

“Tell me something…. When you’re talking about me to your bosses, what do you call me? Gethin? The boy? The prisoner? Or maybe it’s the monster?”

“The subject,” she said.

“Oh. So you’re saying that I’m
not
a prisoner?”

But she knew I was just trying to throw her off guard, and she had a lot more experience at that sort of thing than I had. She said, “Want to guess how the guards refer to you? They call you Brawn. You know that word?”

“Yeah. It means ‘strength.’ As in, ‘All brawn and no brains.’”

Harmony nodded. “That’s right.”

“That’s not very fair. I’m not an idiot. I’ve got brains.”

“Yes, but
they
don’t see that. They look at you and their immediate
reaction is to run away. We’re still trying to isolate the reason for that—and the reason that it doesn’t affect people like myself and Dr. Tremont—but there’s a strong indication that it might be an olfactory reaction. Smell, in other words.”

“But I wash every day! Well, most days.”

“I know that. Gethin, smell is a much more powerful sense than most humans realize. A sudden whiff of a particular scent can trigger immediate and overwhelming emotional responses.”

“So I smell?”

“Not as such. Some scents act only on the subconscious. It’s not like you smell of strawberries, or manure, or peanut butter. But whatever it is, it seems to trigger the fight-or-flight reaction in most people. As long as you’re like this, you’re not going to be making a lot of friends.”

“How long
will
I be like this?”

She shrugged.

“When can I go home?”

“You can’t. I’m sorry, but that won’t be permitted.”

“Then I’ll get myself out.”

Harmony smiled at that. “I really don’t think you will, Gethin. No one has ever escaped from this facility. You have to accept that you’ll be here for as long as we want you here.”

That was one thing she was wrong about.

TWO AND A HALF MONTHS
after the first anniversary of my imprisonment, I escaped.