The Man

            Images flashed on the wall, a face in intense close-ups, footage of a man on a rampage.

            “This man killed your parents.”

            Gem flinched inside. He hated how Mr. Raines could see inside him enough to know how it hurt that he didn’t have parents. He had wondered for so long what had happened to them, who they were, why they didn’t live with him. Everyone had parents, didn’t they? He tried to hide it carefully away and be on the outside only what Mr. Raines wanted him to be. But Mr. Raines knew it, and now…was he giving him a piece of the puzzle? It was never that simple with Mr. Raines.

            And now he learned he had no parents. They were dead, killed by the man whose face filled the wall before him. He tried to hide the anger and pain that stirred in his stomach, the loss of a future he had barely allowed himself to hope for. He stared at the face…and found himself lost in a pair of eyes.

            Could you drown in another person’s pain? What about when that person’s was as close to you as your own? When the pain in his eyes was your own?

            “He doesn’t seem like a killer. He seems…sad, Mr. Raines. Like there’s this void in his life that’s depriving him of any true happiness. Perhaps loss of a loved one, or the loss of family. Maybe he feels the same way I do, not knowing who he is, or where he came from.”

            Mr. Raines rasped, “You’re not concentrating. He’s no different from any of the others.”

            “I don’t know. I—I just—” Without knowing it he reached out and touched the face on the wall. A stranger’s face, and yet his soul cried out in identification. “I know I have a connection with him.”

            “If you can’t find him, he’ll go out and kill another little boy’s parents, just like he killed yours. Do you understand me?”

            He shuddered inside, staring up at Mr. Raines.

            “Good.”

Being Gem

            For three years now they had been hammering it into him. This man killed your parents. Gem had no choice but to believe what Donoterase told him. The part of him that protested, the instinctual knowledge that said This man is good, the way he felt the man’s soul inside his own—he learned to distrust them. All he had to do was think of the parents he would never know, and something inside him raged. He heard the stories of the man’s brutality, and he feared him.

            But at night when he dreamed about him, he never saw that face filled with murderous rage. He only saw the pain, the gentleness, the strange familiarity. In his dreams he knew him as he knew himself. Upon waking, the dreams disappeared and there was cold reality. Out there a man lived who had killed Gem’s parents and sought a way to kill him, too. Donoterase protected him. He was safe there, in the little world that was all he knew. The dichotomy was all part of the life that was Gem’s.

            In his deepest soul, in the place even he dared not examine, for fear Mr. Raines would find it out, he hated his life. How could you hate the only thing you’d ever known? If he hated it, he would be a bad person, because his life was about helping others, about doing his duty. But in the secret places of his psyche, he hated it. He hated being the center of attention, judging attention. He hated being afraid his simulation results would not please Mr. Raines or the other shadowy figures that surrounded him. He hated the simulations and the nightmares they gave him. He hated having to hide the nightmares from Mr. Raines, the effort it took to present an untroubled face day after day. He hated the nights when liquid stung his eyes and his chest felt a heavy weight, and he had to lie perfectly still with his face in his pillow to keep the liquid from coming out and betraying him. He hated how waves of emotion he couldn’t name but knew were unacceptable surged through him. He hated the feeling that his inner self was unacceptable, that to be the Gemini he was supposed to be, he had to stifle the Gem he knew himself to be. Why was so much of him unacceptable? Why was he such a bad person?

            He knew he was bad, because he hated Mr. Raines most of all. It was bad because Mr. Raines was in charge of taking care of him, of teaching him, of making sure his simulation results helped someone. He owed everything to Mr. Raines. But nothing terrified him as Mr. Raines did. He didn’t have to raise a hand to terrify him, though he raised a hand often enough. Gem had seen inside his mind, once, when he couldn’t help it, and now he felt a shudder of horror every time he saw him. Surely that was wrong. It had to be wrong that his nightmares involved Mr. Raines and the rare dreams that brought him comfort involved the man who killed his parents.

The Change

            The Change happened. It was the biggest thing that had happened in Gem’s life. He was to be taken from Donoterase to another place. Out of Donoterase! To a new place, new walls, new rooms, new people. He paced around his room, wondering what it would be like. Would he—would he get to see outside? Perhaps as they traveled…

            One of the things Gem had never been able to hide was his curiosity. He tried to learn everything he could about everyone and everything around him, to somehow put a picture together about the outside world. It was a dark, dangerous place, he knew that from his simulations, but it was also wide and intriguing. He observed the things people brought in to Donoterase and tried to figure out what they were for. He listened to conversations—about cars breaking down, about dates, about a football game—and he tried it imagine what all these things were like. He’d seen flowers once, carried past him by a woman, bright, fragrant things that glowed in his mind when he remembered them. He had seen people eating things he had never seen before, round red things that crunched and square brown things in plastic packages. What exactly was chocolate? he wondered.    

            Once he had heard someone say, “Merry Christmas,” like a greeting, and he always wondered what it meant. Merry—happy—laughing. Christmas was meant to be pleasant. An event maybe, or a time, since people always said, “Good morning,” and “Have a nice day.” An event for merriment. He couldn’t quite imagine it, but sometimes he said it over to himself. “Merry Christmas, Gem.”

            Once he had seen someone give another person a box covered in brightly-colored paper and the person had admired it, smiling, then—strangely—ripped apart the paper she had admired, open the box, and pull out a shirt. Which was strange. Why would you put a shirt in a box and then decorate the box, only to have someone destroy your work and take out the shirt? The woman had looked pleased. She had hugged the person who gave her the box, and her friend looked as pleased as she did. It was most perplexing, but it had given Gem something interesting to mull over for days. Why did other people do these things, but he didn’t?

            But now the Change was coming, and he might get to experience some of those things other people got to experience. He could never be like other people; he knew that, and he didn’t want to be. But he wanted to know what it was like.

Encounter

            They took him to a new room to await transport. Did he regret leaving his old room? He wasn’t certain. It was home, that room of bare, concrete-block walls. He knew every square inch of it, every shadow cast by the lamp on the table, every creak of the bed, every squeak of the heavy metal door, every whiff of formaldehyde that came in when it was opened. Did he hate it, or would he miss it? Maybe both.

            The new room was just a big, square block of light, with a huge window, a door, and a square structure in the center. For a while he walked around the square, wondering if this was a simulation, trying to find some clue as to what he should do. There were people in the room on the other side of the window, watching him. What if he failed to figure out what he was supposed to do? But eventually they all walked away, and he was alone. He had decided a long time ago that alone was good. It meant no one was watching, except the video cameras. It meant a moment of freedom to be himself. He did what he had wanted to do from the beginning and climbed up on top of the square block. He stood on it for a moment, examining things from his new vantage point. Next he sat down, looking out into the other room with its green walls and cloth-covered floors. Most of the walls he knew were green, though some were white and some blue. He didn’t think he liked green. It was a very dull color. Why did everything in this safe place have to be dull? Maybe in the new place it wouldn’t be.

            At last, with perhaps a touch of defiance, Gem lay down on the square with his back to the window. Sometimes it was a relief to exercise that small, dangerous amount of autonomy, orienting himself with his back to the viewing window or the video camera. He tried to imagine what life would be like without being watched all the time. He couldn’t imagine it.

            Behind him he heard the sound of the door opening. A familiar squeaky sound made him tense, but he didn’t move. He could get away with pretending to be asleep. He could make even Mr. Raines believe he was asleep.

            “Time to transport him,” Mr. Raines said, and Gem’s heart beat suddenly very fast, but he still didn’t move.

            The door opened, closed again. There were two men in the room, he could tell, even with his eyes closed, and one of them was Willie, Mr. Raines’ normal sweeper. He and Willie had met often before. The first time they met, something about Gem had seemed to astonish Willie. He often thought that the sweeper believed he had met him before and didn’t like him.

            Willie’s dark hand fell on his shoulder and shook him. Gem pretended to wake up and sat up dutifully. Each of the sweepers took one of his arms and led him to the door. He wanted to tell them that he knew how to walk by himself, but he didn’t dare.

            When the door opened and the sweepers ushered him out ahead of them, there were two other people in the outer room, people he had never seen before. That in itself was cause for excitement. Gem’s practiced eyes took in everything about them in an instant. A short, thin, balding man in a grey polo shirt was near enough to touch him. Just behind him was a beautiful, tall woman with dark hair and blue eyes, wearing clothing like he had never seen before, a patterned grey shirt and a very long black coat, and the area around her eyes was painted a silvery white. It made her eyes look huge and blue, though maybe they only looked huge because she was staring at him as if he frightened her. He read in her shock, doubt, confusion, comprehension, and, yes, fear, as well as recognition and a strange warmth and sadness. The short man was staring as hard as she was, with fewer emotions but no less shock. Fascination and awe, too.

            “This is the Gemini,” Mr. Raines told them, pride in his voice.

            “Raines, what have you done?” the woman said, jerking the words out between her teeth.

            “Save it for later, Miss Parker. We have a schedule to keep.”

            The two sweepers took Gem’s arms again and pushed him out around the woman, man, and Mr. Raines and down the corridor beyond. Mr. Raines squeaked along behind them, and Miss Parker and the thin man brought up the rear, quarrelling quietly between them. Gem tried to hear what they were saying, but they had fallen back a little. He wished he knew what they had found so shocking about him. That he was special, he knew. He had been told that every day of his life. Special because his abilities set him apart, made him able to do things no one else in the world could do. But that was not why they had stared at him in that way. They had found his very existence to be a shock, highly significant and almost repugnant. What was wrong with him?

            Pondering the question, he stared at his shoes as he went ahead of the sweepers through the corridors. He knew these corridors well and felt no need to say goodbye to them. If he never returned to them, he would not miss them.

            The sweepers opened the heavy metal doors in front of him. All the doors at Donoterase were metal and heavy, with locks to them, to keep him and everyone else safe, Mr. Raines told him. But now he was walking out of that safety, into something entirely new.

            A sound of running feet caught him. He looked up. All his breath shuddered out of him in a terrified gasp. It was the Man! Terribly tall, pulling up short, staring at Gem with dark eyes in a suddenly white face, losing all his own breath in the same sort of shuddering gasp. The world seemed to recede away from him as he and Gem were caught up together in the same moment of horrified recognition.

            Miss Parker shattered it with a “You’ve got to be kidding me” as she and everyone else crowded in the doorway and saw the Man and the older man with him. She was pulling out a gun behind him, and the two men were running away, sweepers running after them.

            “Get them!” Mr. Raines snarled and, grabbing Gem’s shoulder, yanked him back into the hallway. For the first time in his life, Gem heard gunshots for real and a distant exclamation of pain.

            “Move! Move!” Miss Parker cried and shoved him out of the way, darted into the hallway, aiming her gun, running. Her short friend seemed undecided about what to do, but when more gunshots came from the corridors, he seemed to decide it was best to stay where he was. He kept stealing glances at Gem as Mr. Raines herded them back down the corridor they had come from.

            Why was the Man here? It was supposed to be safe! Why had the world seemed to stop when they saw each other? Why had the Man seemed so shocked? Gem was missing something. If Mr. Raines knew he was missing something, there would be trouble. He had to figure it out. Who was the Man?

The Centre

            Miss Parker and the sweepers returned, panting and furious. “We missed him. They got away. Jarod and Major Charles were both here, and we missed him!” She glared at the sweepers.

            “That’s enough, Miss Parker,” Mr. Raines said. “Now that you’re here, you may as well accompany us to the Centre, in case Jarod and his father try something. We’re already behind schedule. You take your car and go ahead of us.”

            She swung around with a look of disgust. “Come on, Broots.”

            And the sweepers took Gem’s arms again, and they went back through the corridors. This time nothing stopped them, and for the first time Gem could remember, he was outside, and there was a breeze on his face, and he could hear a sound in the distance that he recognized as a cow. They were pushing him into a long black car, but he saw enough to hold inside him and treasure for a long time. Trees, chickens, clouds.

            Mr. Raines got in on one side of him, Willie on the other, and the other sweeper beside the driver in the front. Willie wrapped something across Gem’s lap and secured it at his side with a click. The doors closed off the cool outside air and the bright colors. The windows were very dark, and Gem could hardly see through them. He tucked his hands under his thighs to hide their shaking. He couldn’t let Mr. Raines see how excited and disturbed he was. He would either be pleased that he was disturbed about the Man or displeased that he was excited about being in a car. Gem tried to sit still, as he was taught, his head a little down to hide the way his eyes went from window to window, trying to glean any glimpse he could of that great outside. At the same time his mind was working at the problem of the Man, trying to figure out what it was about him that was so disturbing. It wasn’t the same kind of disturbance Mr. Raines wanted him to feel about him. It was that old feeling of familiarity, as if he should know the Man, know him as well as he knew himself. That combined with the fact that the Man was trying to kill him and had deprived him of any chance of knowing his parents made Gem’s mind go round frantically in circles, which he was not used to his mind doing.

            The black car drove up and down and around twists and turns, through dark trees Gem could only see the forms of through the darkened windows. Sometimes another car passed them. Willie kept his hand where Gem knew his gun was. Mr. Raines’ breathing was noisy beside him. At last the trees fell away, and there was a great, open expanse, dark grey through the windows. Gem wondered what it was. And then ahead they were coming up to a building, tall and long and beautiful, and the car stopped in its shadow. Mr. Raines got out; Willie undid the belt around Gem’s waist and pulled him out after him, and then Gem could hear a familiar sound and smell a completely unfamiliar smell. Now he knew what the open expanse was. He knew the sound of waves from a simulation he had done; it was the ocean! He tried to see it, but the building was in the way, and Mr. Raines and Willie were pulling him inside.

            Trying to reconcile himself to the loss of the outdoors he had only just discovered, Gem found consolation in the strangeness of the new building. It was beautiful, far more like places he had seen pictures of than like anything at Donoterase. It had long halls with high ceilings, the walls of beautiful stone that made the memory of the concrete walls at Donoterase all the drabber. Willie guided him into an elevator, and even the elevator had interesting walls of beautiful, rich shades of brown.

            But when the elevator doors opened after a long descent, Gem knew this place wasn’t so different from Donoterase after all. Donoterase had been all ugly green walls and blue lights, and here it was dark, oppressive grey, but it was just as drab and depressing. They took Gem through a large, grey room and into an only slightly smaller grey room. Willie opened a door and pushed Gem through it, into the considerably smaller room on the other side of the door.

            Gem stood and looked around it. It was smaller than the room he had had at Donoterase, long and narrow, holding only a bed, a chair, and a small stand for a lamp. There was no lamp. The walls and door were metal. The bed was against the long wall opposite the door, in front of a flat, lighted panel set into the wall. Gem knew what that was for. It was so he could be seen at all times, as was the long, narrow window at a little above his shoulder height in the wall next to the door. As he lay in his bed, anyone could come and look through the window at him. Was he supposed to do something interesting while he slept? With a quick glance around, he identified the one place in the room where he could be and no one could see him, in the far corner between the lamp-less stand and the wall, just beyond the reach of the long window. Though he wanted to go huddle himself into it, he knew he couldn’t, not now when he had just arrived and Mr. Raines was standing there. He turned around to look at Mr. Raines.

            “Welcome to the Centre,” Mr. Raines said, and Willie closed and locked the door.

            Gem slowly sat down on the edge of the bed. Just as slowly he lay down, as if he were tired. He wished he could turn his back on the window, but that wouldn’t do, either. The only thing he could do was wrap his arms around himself, close his eyes, and remember the drive, the clouds, the trees, the sound of the waves, and the chickens.

Masks

            People were looking at him. He could feel it, though his eyes were closed. People were always looking at him. But this time it was different people than he was used to. He blinked a couple of times, like he was just waking up, and through his rapid glimpses, he saw the beautiful woman Mr. Raines had called Miss Parker standing outside the narrow window, staring in at him. Her face and mind were almost as disturbed as they had been when she first saw him back at Donoterase. There were other people with her this time. Mr. Raines was there in his normal dark suit, and with him were two men and a woman, standing back a little, aloof from Miss Parker and from Gem. One of the men was tall and had white hair and a white mustache; he was speaking to Miss Parker with a strange attitude, his whole face full of puzzled innocence but his eyes hiding everything. Gem didn’t like him, but he wasn’t afraid of him. He was automatically afraid of the shorter man with the gentle, handsome face. Both men hid things behind their faces, but while the tall man only hid selfishness and a lust for power, the shorter man hid a disturbing darkness. Gem shuddered away from him and turned his eyes to the other woman, short, blond, and pretty, with an insincere smile and eyes that hated Miss Parker. She wasn’t one to be afraid of, either. Miss Parker…under some circumstances she could be. You wouldn’t want her angry at you. But right now she was angry at Mr. Raines and the tall man, and that was fine with Gem. He hid his satisfaction with that.

            They were all talking vigorously, as if they were arguing. Every once in a while someone would come up close to the window and look in at him, then turn to the others to argue some more. After a few moments Gem decided to risk sitting up to see if he could understand what they were saying. He’d developed his ability to read lips long ago, because no one told him anything or talked to him unless he was doing a simulation or having a lesson.

            The tall man was saying, “We’re producing the finest beef at our place in Argentina, each one designed to be exactly the same. Now that is progress.”

            Beef? They were arguing about beef? Gem had never tasted beef and couldn’t understand why it would be worth arguing about. Still, people arguing frightened him. When people argued, he was the one who got in trouble.

            And then a fourth man entered the room, and things changed. He, too, was tall, had a rectangular face and grey hair brushed back, and of all the things he hid, not one was to be frightened of. He came right up to the window, leaned his arms on the outside sill, and gazed in at Gem with wide eyes. His eyes weren’t surprised, but they held a grim sort of awe and…affection? Gem couldn’t quite believe that what he was seeing in this fourth man was real, but he had been trained to believe what his eyes saw.

            The man turned and spoke to Miss Parker, and now Miss Parker was angry with him, too. This anger was a little different, as if she had believed implicitly in this man, and he had broken some trust she had given him.

            Gem couldn’t see what the man was saying, but he saw the tall man’s response.

            “I’m making Sydney project coordinator on Gemini. I’m going to find out how he compares to the original Jarod.”

            Miss Parker jerked away and stared at Gem again through the window. What was an “original Jarod,” and why should that be disturbing to Miss Parker?

            It angered Mr. Raines, too, because he expostulated with the tall man, who snapped at him, “He doesn’t belong to you, Raines. He belongs to the Triumvirate, and before we deliver him, I want a performance comparison done by the man who knows more about Jarod than anybody else!”

            Maybe “Jarod” was a simulation. That was why he was here, to do a special simulation. It was a relief to learn that he did not belong to Mr. Raines, though he wasn’t sure if he liked the idea of belonging to some unknown thing called “the Triumvirate,” either. Did people ever just belong to themselves?

            The man called Sydney with the affectionate eyes joined Miss Parker at the window. He was smiling, using his smile to hide a great deal that Gem knew no one but he could see. It sometimes seemed strange that other people couldn’t see the things he saw, though he had been told time and time again that his talents were special and unique. This man named Sydney hid just as much disturbance and unease as Miss Parker revealed, but he, at least, had the sense to cover it over with a smiling acquiescence in the presence of the tall, powerful man, the short one full of darkness, and the malevolent Mr. Raines. Miss Parker was snarling something at him, completely unaware that inwardly he was agreeing with her, and he only brushed past her.

            And then he was coming in the door to Gem’s room, and there was a mask over his face, what Gem thought of as the psychiatrist mask. He had seen it on other people, when they came to evaluate him and weren’t allowed to reveal anything of themselves. Sydney did it extraordinarily well, his face faintly smiling but neutral in anything that would actually mean something, a veil dropped over his clear brown eyes. He didn’t know that Gem could see right through the psychiatrist mask, through any mask, actually. Under the mask was fear, and anger, and guilt, and a steely determination, and buried deeply under that was the affection. Something more than affection. Gem didn’t have to wonder why it was so deeply buried. You didn’t want to reveal emotions like that in a place like this, to people like these.

            “My name is Sydney,” he said. “I’ll be taking care of you for a while.”

            Willie the Sweeper shut the door behind Sydney, right in Miss Parker’s face, leaving her staring through the window. Gem wished he could figure out what was upsetting her so badly.