I met his eyes. “Any problems, sir?”
“Just my daughter,” he said. He slipped the papers into his coat pocket. “She’s starting to pick colleges and everyone in the family has different ideas where she should apply.”
I smiled. “I meant with the surgery.”
He gave me a wink and a pen light slipped out of the same pocket. “I don’t think so,” he said, “but we’ll know for sure in a few moments.” He flicked the light back and forth across my eyes. “Focus on my finger.”
I followed his index finger as he moved it around my face, then up and down in front of his own chest. No problems. Monkey-boy came back with a paper cup of water. I reached for it and my wrist clanked. I was handcuffed to the hospital bed’s railing.
“Just a safety precaution,” said Sorensen. “People can be disoriented after surgery and we didn’t want you wandering off and hurting yourself.”
“What if I need to use the latrine?”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“We’ll have you out in a few minutes anyway. Make a fist with your left hand. Good. Now your right. Good. Hold this pencil as tight as you can.”
It was a cheap pencil. It snapped into three pieces. He smiled at that.
The more tests he did, the more I realized I felt fine. Aside from a splitting headache and stiff limbs, I couldn’t sense anything wrong with me. And that made me suspicious, because this wasn’t the first time I’d woken up from surgery in my life. My appendix when I was fifteen and a torn meniscus in my knee four weeks after Basic ended. I knew some part of me should hurt more than everything else.
“No dizziness?” asked Sorensen. “No funny tastes in your mouth?”
“No, sir. Just really dry.” I sipped the water.
“It’s a side effect of the anesthesia. You were in surgery for sixteen hours.”
I let my eyes slide down to my bare arms. Handcuff on one. Basic IV on the other. No stitches. No butterflies. Nothing. “Did something go wrong, sir? Why didn’t they complete the surgery?”
“Do you know why my predecessor’s attempts at this project failed, Sergeant Kennedy?”
I shrugged. The handcuffs jingled.
“He thought you had to force the body to achieve the performance levels we’re hoping for. He spent weeks pumping soldiers full of myostatin blockers and somatotropin and other things which made a mess of their biochemistry.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what any of that means.”
“Of course. Sorry. Let me explain it to you like this. When you were very young, did you play a lot?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Play. Run around, jump, chase other children, that sort of thing.”
“I was a tomboy, sir. I did all that and fought with boys, too.”
“Did you ever do so much you collapsed?”
“Probably. I mean, didn’t everyone?”
“Everyone did,” he agreed. He paused to brush a piece of lint off his pants. “We ran and lifted things and burned through a day’s worth of calories in just a few hours. We pushed our bodies to their full potential. Except...”
He paused again, as if he was searching for the right word. It was a lecture, I know that now. At this point he’d already given this speech a dozen times to other candidates as they woke up.
“...we made ourselves sick,” he continued. “We got hurt. Maybe we even hurt one or two of our friends by accident. We learned it wasn’t always good to operate on those levels unless it was absolutely necessary, and often not even then. You see, everyone on Earth carries the seeds of superhuman ability within them.”
I took another sip of water and flexed my feet back and forth under the bedsheet. No tightness or sore spots on my legs that I could feel. “You mean like mutant genes or something?”
He shook his head. “No, I mean the things you’ve heard about your whole life.” He ticked off examples on his fingers. “People who lift cars with their bare hands to rescue loved ones. People who run their first marathon with no training or who can swim underwater for three minutes without taking a breath. Children who fall off ten-story buildings and only get scratched. Did you know a woman once fell almost two miles from an exploding plane and received only minor injuries?”
I thought I’d heard the story before, so I nodded.
“The human body is an amazing machine,” said Sorensen. “It’s powerful and durable all on its own, without much help from us. We rarely see that, though, because we all learned early on not to use our bodies to their full potential. Even professional athletes who train constantly are working under a system of automatic restraint. We hold back. We don’t push ourselves to our maximum limits because we instinctively understand how dangerous it can be, to others and to ourselves. And as we got older our bodies responded, getting slower and weaker because we weren’t pushing them to be their best. I’m sure you’ve heard stories of addicts on phencyclidine—PCP—who can fight half a dozen men or punch through walls.”