There was, in the final analysis, nothing exceptional about her at all.
Sure, Professor Mubarak had said he wouldn’t give up on her, but he was a kind man, far too nice to tell a teenager to her face that she just shouldn’t be here. He had said to think about the things she enjoyed doing, but she had already gone over everything she could think of. Nothing was going to rescue her from the looming prospect of failure.
She liked jigsaw puzzles, but she did them consciously, looking for shapes and colors. She didn’t intuit the position of each piece by glancing at it like some kind of two-bit psychic. She liked crosswords and logic problems, but she solved them by deduction, using established rules and the occasional thesaurus. She even had a system for word searches, which were highly intuitive kinds of puzzles, and which she hated because she sucked at them.
Now, she was going to have to endure a whole afternoon of pitying glances and awkward silence while the other kids explored their grand, unconscious talents in the face of her own obvious mediocrity.
Sam heard a tentative knock at the door, but she didn’t respond. She was not in the mood for company and certainly not in the mood for talented company that was going to rub her nose in her own failures just by their very existence.
The knock repeated itself, however, followed by Kaitlyn’s voice.
“Sam? We’re going down to lunch, if you want to come?”
Sam ignored it.
“Sam?” Kaitlyn tried again.
“Come on,” Sam heard Mackenzie say. “Just leave her alone.” But apparently Kaitlyn chose not to take this advice, knocking a third time, just for good measure.
“Samantha?” Kaitlyn called out gently. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Take a hint, Susie Sunshine!” Sam finally shouted. “I’m not buying your crazy Kool-aid!”
“Hey,” Mackenzie fired back, “she’s just trying to be nice! Don’t be such a—”
Kaitlyn cut Mackenzie off before she could finish voicing precisely what it was she felt Sam was being.
“Don’t be mad,” Sam heard her say. “She’s just upset.”
‘About being a total loser and the only kid who shouldn’t even be here,’ you mean, Sam thought. Thanks a lot, Kaitlyn, cause yeah, that’s just what I need on top of everything else today, to be the guest of honor at your little pity party. Well, forget you, forget this stupid program, and forget your swimsuit edition bodyguard. I’m still smarter than all of you. I never needed any ‘pathway’ to be a genius before, and I don’t need one now.
16
Instructor Report
“Have we found ourselves the right students for the job? Can they do it?”
“I believe so, yes. Most of them are already quite aware of their own gifts, which is more than I had hoped for.”
“Most of them?”
“Samantha Prescott was not able to offer me any particular direction in which to begin our work together.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“Not yet. It is possible, I suppose, that she is not one of the ones we are looking for, but I believe our time together may still prove fruitful.”
“Fine. Just keep me posted. We can wash her out if we have to. The fewer the people who know what’s going on here, the better. If she can’t do it, she doesn’t need to know about it.”
“I understand. It may be best to isolate them from each other during the first stage of the project anyway. At least for their training sessions. There is some tension between them, and I do not want to build up any resentments. But they must be able to work together eventually if we are to achieve our ultimate goal.”
“Let the liaison worry about that. Is the Hunt kid one of the problems?”
“That is not the word I would choose. He was somewhat confrontational toward his peers, yes, but I believe the underlying issue might be relatively simple to address. He would very much like to have access to the Internet.”
“I’m sure he would.”
“It appears to be a significant source of irritation for him. And in any event, we might need to allow it in order to test his particular abilities.”
“See what you can do without it. I’m not giving them Internet access. If it becomes too much of an issue, we can always wash him out, too. Your report says we shouldn’t need them all.”
“That is true in theory, yes. But the fewer of them there are, the harder things become. Ideally, they will all be able to do what we need them to do.”
“In my entire career, never once have I seen a complex mission proceed all the way to completion under ideal conditions. Hell, even the simple ones usually turn into a soup sandwich. We’ll keep them all if we can, but if we can’t…”
“I understand.”
17
Daniel
“So, Daniel, in order to proceed, I would like first to explain what it is I mean when I speak about a pathway between the conscious and the unconscious mind, OK?”
“OK.” Daniel sat on the floor of the exercise room with his guitar bag lying next to him. He had been relieved to learn that Ammu was going to work with them individually—relieved and just a small bit disappointed, because it also meant Kaitlyn wouldn’t be there. But even the thought of playing in front of her made his palms sweat a little, and Ammu had mentioned singing…
Yeah, Daniel decided, he was definitely relieved the others wouldn’t be there.
“Throughout history,” Ammu began, “there have been a few special people in every generation, revered for their abilities—abilities so profound that their work is recognized not just for years but for centuries beyond their death. Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Mozart, Da Vinci, Galileo, Einstein. They are geniuses, not necessarily for their intelligence, per se, but for their creativity. They see art before it ever touches the canvas. They hear music even when they have gone deaf. They imagine the possibility that even the most basic and obvious assumptions about the universe may be wrong.
“I myself have been taught that what makes these people special is their ability to tap into the unconscious mind, to see and hear and feel while awake that which most people can only access in their dreams, or in brief glimpses of intuition that,” Ammu paused to wave his hand in the air with a flick of his wrist, like a magician, “slip away, almost immediately, so that we never know from whence they came.” Ammu smiled at Daniel, his eyes reflecting the passion behind his words.