Sydney appraised the new arrival from the African field station, hunched over in his office chair, palled, exhausted, but with alert eyes taking everything in. He had received her thick psychogenic file but there was no personal information, apart from the results of the Centre's physical exam upon arrival. A girl in her mid-teens, long dark curly hair kept carefully braided, light brown eyes, olive skin that would be tan if she was to be out in the sun, underweight but otherwise in good health. Her name was Michal, no origin indicated.

Her English was simple and stilted, her accent unfamiliar, so he tried several other languages. She knew a little French, probably from her time in Cote d'Ivoire, but it was no better than her English so he stuck with that. She would need tutors in English if her project looked promising and her stay at the Centre was prolonged. Which based on the file was a strong possibility indeed. The name could be a variation of Michael or Michelle in any number of languages, so it didn't initially help.

"Where are you from, Michal?" She stared at him and shook her head. Whether that meant she didn't know or had been told not to say, he couldn't tell. "It's all right, I'm only here to work with you and your gifts. Am I pronouncing Michal correctly?" MYE-kal.

She shook her head again. "mee-KHAL," with a fricative sound on the "kh." Something about that clicked with him, and he looked the name up on the Internet for confirmation before responding.

"Are you from Israel?" Her eyes widened in fear at his recognition, then gave the tiniest possible nod yes. Curiouser and curiouser. The Israelis had a cultural distaste for anything smacking of eugenics, for obvious reasons, so he wondered how the girl could possibly have come to the Centre's attention, let alone custody. They barely had a field office in Israel, solely for military and intelligence contacts so far as Sydney knew. Although her case was certainly one the intelligence boys would be interested in. No matter; he learned long ago to keep his head down and mouth shut when it came to the origin of any number of test subjects. Don't ask, don't tell was a cultural tradition at the Centre.

"I have the test results here from your previous location, but would you mind if we repeated some of that here? I'd like to see everything for myself." Michal shrugged an ambiguous consent.

He placed her in a small room, next door without a line of sight to another room with a computer screen. "When the light comes on here, try to tell me what picture you see on the monitor in the other room."

"No one there. I need ... people there ... to see."

"Just try. We'll do it with a volunteer in a minute."

He walked out to the control room and ran the experiment. Simple black and white line drawings appeared on the monitor in one room, and a light signaling she should guess went on in the other room. A duck, a car, a train, a cat, a shirt, a house. To his surprise she answered every trial correctly, even though no one was in the monitor booth. He walked back into her room. "I thought you said you needed someone to see the pictures."

"You see, I read you." He blinked and smiled approvingly. The control room was over 50 feet and three rooms away, clearly he was going to have to design better-controlled test conditions to deal with this one. Just as her file indicated, she had extraordinary range and skill.

******

After a week of testing at a distance, Sydney couldn't resist trying her out with personal contact. With himself of course, he was incredibly curious about what she could and could not see. Her file indicated that she could sense images, emotions and memories with vastly greater detail when she was actually touching a subject. He had determined that from a distance she detected visual images and thought speech fairly well, but only what the person was actively thinking about it at the time. For passive information retrieval -- the holy grail from an intelligence perspective -- touch was required.

However, he worried that language was finally going to be a significant barrier. He needed her to be able to communicate better than a preschooler to really describe what she could see. So Sydney sent a req up to SIS for a skilled Hebrew translator. He knew this would tip his hand that he was aware of her true origins, but they clearly hadn't gone to too much trouble to hide it, so he sent his request in without comment. They in turn sent down a fellow named Clausen, a dour ex-state department official with extensive expertise in the Middle East. He knew both Hebrew and Arabic, and clearly thought translating a teenager was waste of his time and skills.

"Let's get this over with. I'm giving you two hours of translation a day, then I've got better things to do. Make the most of it."

Sydney sat across a small table from her in one of the larger rooms in his lab space. He thought he had gained some trust with her over the past week, but now was asking for much more intimate contact. It was possible she could see everything in his mind, every memory, every doubt and worry and self-reflection. And of course, she might be able to access information about his other projects, a massive breach of security clearance. He didn't care. He wanted to see what she could do.

He took her by the hands gently. "What can you see? As much as you want to say. B'Ivrit."

She frowned, not sure if she should really switch to her native language. "I see ..." Clausen cut her off with a rapid fire of cleanly spoken Hebrew. It sounded like military orders to Sydney. Michal jumped, straightened up, and tipped her head to the side, concentrating. Then she began to speak in long melodic sentences, her voice beautiful, flowing, fluent. Sydney realized that he hadn't really heard her before now. He wondered how much of her intelligence he was missing from this one critical factor.

"She says you're thinking mostly about her right now, wondering how deep in your mind she can go. Now you're thinking about her voice, that it is beautiful like a song, and you wish you had brought in a translator before now. You want to get to know her, but feel that language may be a insurmountable barrier unless she becomes more fluent in English. Now you're a little dismayed at how well she is reading your thoughts, it's disconcerting, exciting from a scientific perspective but frightening from a personal one. Now you're thinking that a translator from SIS wasn't such a great idea, as he might spy on your conversations and report unapproved thoughts to your superiors ..."

Sydney suddenly let go of her hands. Clausen crossed his arms and grinned. This little assignment was going to be more interesting than he thought, worth trekking down to this godforsaken sublevel.

Sydney glanced at Clausen. "Ask her what she can see from my past, not what I'm thinking at this very moment." She understood the instructions even before the translation, and took his hands and began to speak again.

"She says she mostly sees a man in your past and present, a boy first then a man, whom you have raised, with whom you have acted out an enormous number of different lives. She says you love him as a son although you refuse to admit it to him, and his name is Jarod ..."

As soon as he heard "Jarod" come out of her lips, Sydney let go of her hands in an attempt to stop her, but Clausen finished the damning words. He was grinning even wider now. It wasn't every day you witnessed someone practically commit career suicide.

"Tell her we'll continue this with someone who doesn't have access to such sensitive project information."

"Best idea you've had all day."

******

Three weeks later, Sydney had gleaned an impressive amount of information from the girl. It wasn't easy to design an experiment to test the outer reaches of telepathy. The contents of any given mind, particularly of the past, were not replicable or often verifiable, so you were working with the potentially subjective memories of those being probed. But he believed she could accurately see deep and wide into a mind, even without the active cooperation of the subject. Her abilities were exactly what intelligence services wanted: Someone who could walk up to a stranger, touch them, and retrieve information without their knowledge.

The question was, what was the Centre going to do with her?

Along with the psychogenic tests, he had run a standard set of psychological and physical exams to create a full profile of Michal's potential. While she possessed superior intelligence and analytic ability for a person her age, emotionally and physically he deemed her unfit for field work. She was in the bottom tenth percentile, even among girls, for physical strength, flexibility and endurance. Emotionally he suspected she had a history of depression and anxiety, although she hid it well. That may simply have been a response to unknown previous experiences or even the Centre's controlling environment, but either way it did not bode well for shipping her off to an Indoctrination facility.

A month after his report, word finally came down: They wanted an evaluation of Michal's potential as a Pretender. And they wanted Jarod to do it. At the same time he was evaluating her, she could validate some of the newer holographic sims he had been producing. They also wanted to know how accurately the holograms matched the sims as Jarod experienced them in his mind. Two birds with one stone, the memo noted.

Horrified, Sydney called an emergency session of the Scientific Advisory Board. He had never seen a more foolish or reckless proposal in his life. He had already evaluated the girl, and although her intelligence was above normal, there was no indication she possessed the stratospheric talent necessary to be a Pretender. Additionally, it was questionable whether a child of her age could be successfully trained, even if she had the raw ability. There was also the delicate matter of her seeing classified material in Jarod's mind.

Mostly, though, he was concerned about the effect the plan would have on Jarod. Sydney was convinced he would form an immediate emotional attachment to the girl. She had an unknown, potentially traumatic background, and possessed abilities that would be fascinating to Jarod. He could sim many emotions, but real people would always have a potentially devastating hold over his psyche. Furthermore, they were proposing to train the girl possibly against her will, which could trigger Jarod's ambivalent feelings over his own training and isolation. Finally, he was barely aware the opposite sex existed except in the abstract, and they wanted to drop an adolescent female into the dome?

Twenty-seven years of careful training and research down the drain. That's what Sydney was afraid of, were Jarod to develop feelings for someone and then have her taken away. No level of technology would be sufficient to control him under such circumstances.

Sydney argued his case passionately to the SAB. They sat back dispassionately with their counter-arguments. Yes, the genomics people reported the girl was homozygous with "similar" allele to the Pretender gene, and had massive expression of the ptd4613 protein. No, they didn't expect her to be up and running sims anytime soon, they just wanted a comprehensive evaluation and Jarod's opinion on the matter. Yes, they heard his concerns about Jarod forming some sort of bond with her, but they were confident in Sydney's abilities to manage the situation as he always did. Furthermore Jarod was over thirty years old and had demonstrated superlative self-control for over a decade, so they were also confident in his ability to remain professional in the presence of a girl half his age.

Sydney had been overruled. He was dumbstruck. Professional? Jarod's emotions and curiosity about the outside world had been in delicate homeostasis since he was a teenager. And now they were throwing a live grenade in there and expecting everything to remain professional?

He did the only thing he could do. He went down to the dome and informed Jarod that he would be getting a visitor the next day, and gave him a Hebrew dictionary and Michal's file.