His name was Yale Ambrose. He was sixteen years old, and the youngest person, ever, to be recognized as a member of the Cambridge Twenty. He was, surely, absolutely brilliant, top of his class, top of every class, ever. He'd been tested at seven, like most every other child of Bretonia, and found to be brilliant. Exceptionally brilliant. More brilliant than most everyone else, but that wasn't saying much. He was lucky, at seven, to score exceptionally high. He was special, and a standard deviation did matter. Even half a standard deviation, and a person could say more, beter, stronger, noticably more brilliant. But in his range, in that upper echelon, where he tested, probably by fluke, above a million other people, he was marginal. Better, worse, the margin was so small that no difference could be shown between him and a million other people.
Today, nine years later, there wasn't a single member of those million exceptional, brilliant, Bretonian youth who could hold a candle to his brillance.
He'd been selected, probably as a fluke, after fourteen other families refused to give up their brilliant children, after a standard school aptitude test for standard advanced classes, and been passed into the custody of the Office of the Queen's Spider. His records were altered, his history changed, his citezenship, his identy, nearly vanished. He went to special schools, recieved special doctors. Compounds were added to his food, treatments made, subliminal messages added to his constant mediaflow. Behaviors were coded into him, viruses slightly altered his DNA. He was still human, so far as such things went, but only barely. His mind was one of twenty objects, the most brilliant, dangerous things in Bretonia, the Cambridge Twenty.
There was an awfully long laundry list of people who wanted to know what, exactly, it was. People from the Ministry, people from the Home Office, Her Grand Majesty, the Bloody Queen, the Admiralty, et cetera. The only people who didn't, in fact, want to know what the bloody thing was, were the nomads, the wilde, the infested home secretary, and bloody Dom Ka'Vosh themselves, who dreampt the damn thing up, built it, and buried it on Sprague.
Why they hadn't demanded an answer of the Home Secretary, yet, rather than dumping it on the research station, he handn't the slightest idea. He hadn't the slightest idea about anything at all, and he knew everything.
The thing was simply a cube. A perfect cube, down as far as he had tools to measure, perfection. Physically, it was plain, without adornment, but if you bombarded it with specific particles, specific frequencies, at specific angles, it seemed to show other things. He'd once made it project a six sided mobius strip around itself, at other times it had displayed a map, three dimensional. Three times, so far, it had sung, hummed melodies, while the Wilde lurked on the edges of the system.
They'd found it on Sprauge. Dug it up with other objects, other artifacts, all of them dead, inert things...except for that one. Forget that thing, it was boring, a datachip, a computing crystal. It didn't...do...Whatever this thing did.
He thought it was just a trinket. It most likely was just a trinket. Projected holograms if you attached it to other such nonsensical nonsense. It was like all the other pointless objects the Dom Ka'Vosh had left behind. Silly things, things not worth taking with them when they left. And yet, it was important, a secret of state, top priority. And priorities were important. Very much so.
He understood that he was being manipulated. That he was being controlled. No one had ever tried to hide that from him, they'd figured it would be ridiculous to even try. They even told him exactly how they were doing it, so he'd give up. He knew there was triptophan in the water, and thats why he fell asleep at night. He knew there were traces of cardamine, and Euphoria was delivered to him before the officials visited, and then after, if he told them interesting things. Stupid things, too, little things that they could understand. He was encouraged to be intellegent, but not to associate with the other nineteen. He was locked in a room, given all the information he could ever want, all the processing, but no capabilty to produce. When he was thirteen, he'd hacked the system with a lurking drop point virus:
He'd delivered a message by still drop, put it in a bouy in space, and left it there. When it found what it wanted, which might never have happened, it climbed aboard that ship, as part of the mail. Crawled halfway around sirius, and then back into the closed system of the research base, piggybacking an analog voice message. Things were done by hand even more now, so it was harder to get out. They were being controlled too, his handlers, and then theirs. It all led back to one man, in smaller and smaller rings of handlers. He had five, that he knew of. Five by twenty, a hundred people. Each of them had a less perfect set of control, but they were volunteers. So was he, understand, but he was a prisoner, signed in at seven and never allowed to leave. They could walk at any point, so long as they submitted to a tapeteach mindwipe.
He'd not done any work for a while, and this was not leisure time. They could tell he'd not done any work, because his eyes had lost their dillegent focus, he'd glanced around a couple times, flicked his eyes toward the porthole too many times in their interval(he supsected it was seven minutes thirty two seconds). The background static was ramping up, and the cardamine traces were being seived out of the air. The wall colours got darker, heavier, while the gravity eased just a bit more weight on. It was subtle. He didn't realize it was happening, never did, till he cound feel it in his chest, the tightness, as he began to stress. Back to work!
