Stronger: A Super Human Clash by Michael Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

I swear, I will go over your head! I will speak to the president himself!”
    “And tell him what, Doctor? That there’s a secret base somewhere—you don’t
know
where we are, do you?—in which we are keeping prisoner a four-meter-tall blue-skinned boy? Do you think he’d believe you?” She squared her shoulders and glared at him. “You will teach him to talk. And you will not leave this compound until you’ve achieved that. Understood? We want to know why and how this happened to him.”
    “Isn’t it obvious? He’s a superhuman!”
    “That’s not obvious at all, no.”
    “Don’t you follow the reports? He is not the only one! Maxwell Edwin Dalton, sixteen years old, able to read minds. A young woman who can control any form of energy. A young man who can fly under his own power. Another who can move so fast, the rest of the human race might as well be marble statues. And I know for a
fact
that your people have recruited a seventeen-year-old boy who’s been gifted with intelligence that’s completely off the charts.” Tremont turned away from her, came right up to the glass, and placed his hand on it, looking in at me. “There are even stories of a shape-shifter, did you know that? A man who—at will—can change into another person. Right down to the fingerprints.” He paused for a second, then looked back at Harmony. “Is that how you found out your blue prisoner’s identity? His fingerprints?”
    “No. His DNA.”
    “You’re telling me that he still has the same DNA?”
    “Yes. And to save you the trouble of asking, it’s human. Completely human. Nothing to indicate how this change occurred. The same with Dalton and the young genius you mentioned. They’re all human.” Harmony walked up to the glass and stood next to him. “But they’re not
just
human. They’re more than that. And we have to know why.”
    After that, Dr. Tremont came to see me every day, morning and afternoon, at least two hours each time.
    He always called me by my first name, always treated me like a person, not an animal. He conducted dozens of tests on me. Simple ones at first, like giving me a series of cards with words on them. He’d say a word and I’d hold up the correct card. Then spelling: He gave me a pile of wooden blocks with letters on them—the same blocks you’d give to a preschool kid. I did pretty well on that one too until he got to phrases like
pseudo-mnemonics
that I’d never actually heard before, let alone learned to spell.
    After a few weeks, he arranged for an oversized computer keyboard to be installed in my cell. It was connected to a screen that he could read, and for the first time since that day in church, I was able to properly communicate with the world.
    “I want to go home.” They were the first words I typed.
    “I’m sorry, Gethin,” he said. “They won’t allow that. It’s out of my hands.”
    “How long have I been here?”
    “Almost six months, I think.”
    “They have no right to keep me. I haven’t done anything wrong!”
    He shrugged. “It seems that they require neither right nor reason. I’m a prisoner here too—they won’t let me leave until I can get you to speak again. Or until it’s been proven that you’ll
never
speak again. But I don’t think that’ll be the case. Tomorrow we’ll begin working on basic phonemes. They’re the sounds that make—”
    He stopped when I started typing again: “They don’t care if I can speak. That’s an excuse. They could have brought one of these machines in months ago.”
    The doctor nodded. “That thought
has
crossed my mind. Gethin. Listen for a few minutes, please?”
    “OK.”
    “Human babies learn to speak by a sort of trial-and-error system. Have you ever heard a child learning to talk? They might know the word
dog
, and they’ll say that when they see one. Their parents encourage them. Positive reinforcement. Then they might see a cat but not yet know the name for it. But they will recognize that it has