Brilliance by Marcus Sakey
Excerpted from the New York Times, Opinion Pages, December 12, 1986
LATELY MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of Dr. Eugene Bryce and his study of the so-called “brilliants,” that percentage of children born since 1980 with exceptional abilities. While the full scope of their gifts is unknown, it’s clear that something remarkable has happened: savants are being born not once in a generation, but every hour of every day.
Historically, the term “savant” was generally paired with another word, to form an unkind but not inaccurate phrase: idiot savant. Those rare individuals with superhuman gifts were generally crippled in some way. Broken geniuses, they were able to recreate the London skyline after only a moment’s glance, yet unable to order a cup of tea; able to intuit string theory or noncommutative geometry and yet be baffled by their mother’s smile. It was as though evolution was maintaining equilibrium, giving here, taking there.
However, this is not the case with the “brilliants.” Dr. Bryce estimates that as many as one in a hundred children born since 1980 have these advantages, and that these children are otherwise statistically normal. They are smart, or not. Social, or not. Talented, or not. In other words, apart from their wondrous gifts, they are exactly as children have been since the dawn of man.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, public discussion has focused on cause. Where did these children come from? Why now? Will this continue on forever, or will it end as abruptly as it began?
But there’s a more important issue. A question with shattering implications. A question that is on the tip of our collective tongues, and yet that we do not discuss—perhaps because we fear the answer.
What will happen when these children grow up?
PART ONE:
HUNTER
CHAPTER ONE
The radio host had said there was a war coming, said it like he was looking forward to it, and Cooper, coatless and chilly in the desert evening, was thinking that the radio man was an asshole.
He’d chased Vasquez for nine days now. Someone had warned the programmer just before Cooper got to the Boston walk-up, a brick rectangle where the only light had been a window onto an airshaft and the glowing red eyes of power indicators on computers and routers and surge protectors. The desk chair had been against the far wall as if someone had leaped out of it, and steam still rose from an abandoned bowl of ramen.
Vasquez had run, and Cooper had followed.
He’d gotten a hit on a forged credit card in Cleveland. Two days later a security camera tagged Vasquez renting a car in Knoxville. Nothing for a while, then he’d picked up the trail briefly in Missouri, then nothing again, then a near-miss this morning in a tiny Arkansas town called Hope.
The last twelve hours had been tense, everyone seeing the Mexican border looming large, and beyond it, the wide world into which someone like Vasquez could vanish. But with each move the abnorm made, Cooper got better at predicting the next. Like peeling away layers of tissue paper to reveal the object beneath, a vague form began to resolve into the pattern that defined his target.
Alex Vasquez, twenty-three, five eight, a face you wouldn’t notice and a mind that could see the logic of computer programs unfolding in three dimensions, who didn’t so much write code as transcribe it. Who had waltzed through MIT’s graduate program at age fifteen. Vasquez had a talent of wondrous power, the kind they used to say happened only once a generation.
They didn’t say that anymore.