Sole Survivor

as eleven months, one as old as five. Consequently, the possibility remains that many of the forty-one will blossom in years to come-perhaps not until they experience the dramatic changes in body chemistry related to puberty. Eventually, of course, those subjects who age without revealing any valuable talent will have to be removed from the program, as even Project 99's resources are not infinite. The project's architects have not yet determined the optimum point of termination.
        Although the steering wheel was hard under his hands and slick with his cold sweat, although the sound of the engine was familiar, although the freeway was solid under the spinning tyres, Joe felt as if he had crossed into another dimension as treacherously amorphous and inimical to reason as the surreal landscapes in Salvador Dalí's paintings.
        As his horror grew, he interrupted Rose: “This place you're describing is Hell. You… you couldn't have been part of anything like this. You're not that kind of person.”
        “Aren't I?”
        “No.”
        Her voice grew thinner as she talked, as though the strength supporting her had been the secrets she kept, and as she revealed them one by one, her vitality ebbed as it had for Samson lock by lock. In her increasing weariness was a sweet relief like that dispensed in a confessional, a weakness that she seemed to embrace-but that was nonetheless coloured by a grey wash of despair. “If I'm not that kind of person now… I must have been then.”
        “But how? Why? Why would you want to be involved with these these atrocities?”
        “Pride. To prove that I was as good as they thought I was, good enough to take on this unprecedented challenge. Excitement. The thrill of being involved with a program even better funded than the Manhattan Project. Why did the people who invented the atomic bomb work on it… knowing what they were making? Because others, elsewhere in the world, will do it if we don't… so maybe we have to do it to save ourselves from them?”
        “Save ourselves by selling our souls?” he asked.
        “There's no defence I can offer that should ever exonerate me,” Rose said. “But it is true that when I signed on, there was no consensus that we would carry the experiments this far, that we would apply what we learned with such… zeal. We entered into the creation of the children in stages… down a slippery slope. We intended to monitor the first one just through the second trimester of the foetal stage-and, after all, we don't consider a foetus to be an actual human being. So it wasn't like we were experimenting on a person . And when we brought one of them to full term… there were intriguing anomalies in its EEG graphs, strangeness in its brainwave patterns that might have indicated heretofore unknown cerebral function. So we had to keep it alive to see… to see what we had achieved, to see if maybe we had moved evolution forward a giant step.”
        “Jesus.”
        Though he had first met this woman only thirty-six hours ago, his feelings for her had been rich and intense, ranging from virtual adoration to fear and now to repulsion. Yet from his repulsion came pity, because for the first time he saw in her one of the many cloves of human weakness that, in other forms, were so ripe in himself.
        “Fairly early on,” she said, “I did want out. So I was invited for a private chat with the project director, who made it clear to me that there was no quitting now. This had become a job with lifetime tenure. Even to attempt to leave Project Ninety-nine is to commit suicide-and to put the lives of your loved ones at risk as well.”
        “But couldn't you have gone to the press, broken the story wide open, shut them down?”
        “Probably not without physical evidence, and all I had was what was in my head. Anyway, a couple of my colleagues had the idea that they could bring it all down, I think. One of them suffered a timely stroke. The other was shot three times in the head by a mugger-who was never caught. For a while… I was so depressed I considered killing myself and saving them the trouble. But then… along came CCY-21-21…”
        First, born fourteen months ahead of CCY-21-21 was male subject SSW-89-58. He exhibits prodigious talents in every regard and his story is of importance to you because of your own recent experiences with people who eviscerate themselves and set themselves afire-and because of your