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Prodigy
By Dave Kalstein St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2006 Dave Kalstein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7964-5
CHAPTER 1
From a distance, Stansbury Tower seemed proud. Expensive and proud. It jutted up 125 stories — 1,353 feet — from the flat desert floor, a windowless, silvery monolith that glinted like jewlery when the sun hit it just right. Ask the school's prim, purse-lipped professors and they would have likened it to a glorious mirage, an oasis of knowledge and progress providing a beacon of hope in the wasteland of a spoiled world sown with the seeds of mediocrity.
But if you asked the kids — sorry, the specimens — they'd have told you the tower was a big, shiny penis. The kind you'd find in a Tiffany's catalog from Spring 2036, if they'd commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to craft the world's priciest dildo.
This observation was not childishly perverted. Childishly precocious, perhaps, but not perverted. They were specimens, after all. By the age of ten, they had all been conditioned to analyze the symbolic imagery — implicit or explicit — in any source of stimuli, including a glaringly obvious phallic substitute that even the non-Freudian would have spotted a mile away. But they'd never share this insight with an outsider. It would ruin their mystique. They were bred — all four thousand of the current student body, from the ages of six to eighteen — for top-of-the-line performance. Flagship editions of youth. And leaders, so they were taught, needed to maintain an aura about them, exist in a world where there were no vulgar temptations, curse words, or 125-story penises.
But the penis thing didn't come up very much, because the view from inside the school was much different. And since the specimens were only permitted to leave the tower's walls twice a year (two weeks for the winter holidays, two weeks for summer — with the rare exception of a daylong field trip), time spent viewing Stansbury from a distance was too precious to waste making dick jokes. It was a complex thing, observing the way a specimen treated his or her return to school after vacation. It always happened the same way: the long gyrobus floated smoothly on a bed of air high above the desert floor, carrying its load of one hundred specimens per trip (males on the right side, females on the left), and when the tower rose up on the horizon maybe twenty miles away, a hush fell. The younger ones stopped making wet farting noises with their lips and hands and wept silently, already missing Mom and Dad. The romantics mourned the end of brief affairs with carefree, nonuniformed outsiders. The academics unconsciously nodded with pride at their return to duty. And you could always count on one of the unbalanced specimens to make a crack.
"Looks like it's giving us the middle finger," said Mr. William Winston Cooley upon his return, following the winter holiday in 2036. "A bright, shiny fuck-off for coming back when we could've ran for the hills." He smirked at his roommate, Mr. Thaddeus Bunson. Bunson was preoccupied with his electric razor, shaving off the last of his Christmas stubble lest he get caught with it on campus and disciplined.
"They'd find us," he replied, his mouth angled to the side, stretching the skin on his cheek taut for the humming blade. "They always find the ones who run." Bunson brushed stray stubble spikes from the sterile white leather of the seat, resignation in the swipe of his hand.
Toward the end of each return trip, when the bus slowed down for its descent, all of the specimens would go silent. In a routine as reliable as it was instinctual, each boy and girl turned his or her head in the same direction at the same time for that final, lingering glance at the setting sun. They soaked up every detail: the seared orange it happened to be at that time of the day; whether it felt warm or cool on their faces through the windows; the way its reflection in the metal of the bus walls burned the corners of their squinting eyes. The specimens then deposited the information into a special part of their well-developed cerebrums, a specific area that was not perpetually firing with efficiency and goal-directed action. It was the secret brain compartment that each of them developed unwittingly, a place where they stored the imaginary postcards bearing memories taken from the world outside the tower's windowless walls: a sunset, a cartoon, the taste of melted caramel on the lips.
Mr. Thomas Oliver Goldsmith went through this ritual one final time in January 2036. The bus started its descent and the hush fell. As a senior, this was the twelfth time he had returned from winter holiday, so he made an effort to watch the other specimens that day rather than the sun itself. He wanted to understand the occurrence objectively, the way an outsider might. The desert was cloudy that day, the sun wrapped inside a hard, unyielding gray. Goldsmith noticed something: all of them still turned toward the direction where the sun should've been (displaying tropism like the plants stretching toward light he learned about in advanced biology so many years ago) and, as if by reflex, squinted despite the presence of the shadows. It was then that Goldsmith realized the specimens never took that final gaze at the sun out of some nostalgia for nature. They did it to keep themselves sane.
This is what a quick flip through a few of Goldsmith's mental postcards would have revealed: natural, golden light poured into a home in perfect geometric shapes through a venetian blind while a young woman sang a lullaby with his name; the soft hands of that same woman, probably his mother, and they felt warm on his scalp. And then he remembered the stale sheets of the cot he slept in back at San Angeles Municipal Orphanage. Before Stansbury rescued him.
A shaft of white light hit Goldsmith squarely on the eyes, but he was already awake. How did the InterAct light alarm know that he was standing by his mirror tying on his navy blue silk tie and not lying in bed?
Good morning, Mr. Thomas Oliver Goldsmith! The time is now 6:30 A.M., said an automated voice. Some automated voices these days sound so natural you wouldn't know they're fake, but not Mrs. InterAct. The school kept her nice and robotic so you wouldn't forget everything was official, regimented, that there was a job that needed to be done.
Goldsmith finished with his tie and pulled a blazer on over a crisp white dress shirt. The gold on the blazer's emblem matched his hair, which matched the metal glint of the wire rims on his glasses. He was one of the academics — the kind that nodded in silent obligation when the tower approached on the horizon — but not just any straight-A specimen. Stansbury had plenty of those. He was valedictorian. There was a medal hanging on his wall that said so. Placed in between the certificate affirming his place as President of the Specimen Council and his acceptance letter to Harvard (which, incidentally, was a formality — the dean of admissions extended an under-the-table offer through Stansbury's president shortly after the first semester of Goldsmith's junior year) was a palm-sized medal of solid twenty-four karat gold with raised letters that read VALEDICTORIAN, CLASS OF 2036.
The school's philosophy on valedictorians went like this: Too many specimens got top marks to appoint just one. However, appointing several would have defeated the purpose of the position in the first place — to denote the top specimen in the senior class — and watered down a goal that required twelve years of rigorous schooling to accomplish. So the faculty devised a plan. Right before the beginning of the fall semester of their final year, all of the senior specimens with perfect grades over their careers (usually between ten and twelve out of roughly three hundred and fifty) underwent the Selmer-Dubonnet Aptitude Test.
Selmer and Dubonnet were part of the group of educators who founded Stansbury back in 2009 under the direction of Dr. Raymond Stansbury himself. These educators — mostly the top teachers from the country's best elementary, middle, and high schools, along with some administration types — were fed up with the control and power the nation's teachers' unions exerted over the world of schooling at the start of the twenty-first century. The state of public schooling had become increasingly dire. Reading and comprehension levels were at an all-time low, despite the fact that the flow of information and knowledge were more readily available than at any other time in history. The problem was not the students' access or social skills. It was the teachers. They were being paid more than ever before (a famous case in New York City was an eleventh-grade math teacher who earned $211,498 in salary and overtime in 2008 while his seventeen-year-old students were functioning at a fourth grade level) working without accountability for their students' performance.
Due to union labor laws, it had become virtually impossible to fire the teachers. Teachers who did not want to join the unions were physically assaulted and ostracized. The situation seemed hopeless until Dr. Raymond Stansbury, then a high school principal, organized a coalition of the best teachers from across the country — a select group of forty-five men and women from all disciplines — who promptly quit their jobs, all tendering their resignation letters on the same day. Using funds donated from private philanthropists, they founded the Charter School, based out of Dr. Stansbury's California ranch estate.
There were forty specimens (Dr. Stansbury himself coined the term) in the school's first graduating class in 2009. Seventy-eight percent of them were admitted to first-tier Ivy League universities. Word spread quickly. Any parent who could afford the formidable $100,000 tuition sent their children. The following year's senior class numbered one hundred. The year after that one hundred and fifty. The numbers kept increasing without a decline in attention to individual specimen needs. Dr. Stansbury — a world-renowned expert in the field of organic chemistry and pharmaceutical science — began to develop nutritional supplements that lengthened specimens' attention spans and increased their endurance.
Soon, Charter School specimens were requested on the research teams of major drug companies and world-class universities. They published novels before they were able to get behind the wheel of a car. Alumni were being elected to national office. Currently eight United States senators are former specimens, along with two cabinet members and the president's head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fifty-nine alumni are serving terms as judges in federal courts across the nation, including the two who are justices of the Supreme Court (one a strict constructionist, the other a loose constructionist, as the Senate successfully convinced the Executive branch that providing a former Stansbury specimen to only one side of the debate might permanently slant the ideology of the highest court in the land). Currently, twenty-two of the top thirty Forbes 500 corporations had CEOs who counted Stansbury as their alma mater. Five years ago, motion picture director Charles Packard (the Charles Packard — Class of '21) became the school's first Academy Award winner. Sure enough, civil rights groups, often with the support of teachers' unions, took to the media to protest the Charter School, calling it an elitist, racist institution, despite the fact that it boasted a population more ethnically diverse than most colleges and workplaces. In response, Dr. Stansbury and his new school president, Judith Lang — a politically shrewd young woman who looked great on television — announced the first official Charter School Lottery Fund in 2017: full-ride, twelve-year tuitions to be given to ten randomly selected orphans from across the United States each year. Goldsmith was one of the winners in 2024.
The Charter School's prestige went international in 2019, when Dr. Frederick Hester, a school professor, and a team of fifteen hand-picked specimens, constructed the chemical combinations that were the basis for the world's first affordable, effective AIDS vaccine. By the time Dr. Stansbury died of old age in 2020, he left behind a healthy private donor fund and a nearly-completed Stansbury Tower: a state-of-the-art educational complex designed by Rikka-Salvi & Partners, the famed architecture firm responsible for the postmodern-style high-rises that have come to define the skylines in megacities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur. It was intended to be a self-contained world made specifically for nurturing the elite young minds destined to be this nation's future. The Charter School was renamed for its founder in a memorial service following his funeral. The late doctor also left behind a mission statement of sorts, and what began as a short, idealistic pledge he had posted on the wall of each progression room in the school is now known as the Stansbury Oath: By virtue of the Gifts bestowed upon me, I swear my Eternal Duty to all those without such Gifts. For Power may point the way, but only Honor can lead it. Since the doctor's passing, the entire specimen body has recited this passage in unison — right hands placed over their hearts, many with their eyes closed, as if they are performing a mass séance to the spirit of Raymond Stansbury himself — as the opening ritual to the school's daily assembly held each morning in the coliseum.
Hence, with such an extraordinary pedigree, Stansbury School required an extraordinary valedictorian. Which is where Doctors Edwin Selmer and Francine Dubonnet came in. Selmer was an authority in the field of child and early adult psychology (his book, Discipline Without Guilt, was a national bestseller). Dubonnet was a mathematician-turned-behavioral sociologist who made a name for herself when she created the multimedia personal aptitude examination, colloquially referred to as "the Dub Test," that is now administered to all candidates up for promotion to the highest levels of authority in the fields of law enforcement and military intelligence.
From the outset, Dr. Stansbury realized that his school's valedictorian needed more than just top scores. He or she also required an inherent understanding of the philosophical principles upon which the school was based and, just as important, a value system in accordance with his own. In other words, he or she must understand that the success of the school — and, by extension, American society — depended on the specimens' acceptance of their elite status and the responsibilities entailed. The top specimen must be the very embodiment of the Stansbury Oath's principles. His valedictorian couldn't just be a showpiece to parade in a dog and pony show for the universities and the press. He or she had to be an active ally of the faculty in maintaining order and morale within the school's walls. After all, the doctor reasoned, who had more to gain from the status quo than the specimen whom it benefited most?
The Selmer-Dubonnet test was an examination wherein the select group of top senior specimens was confronted with situation upon situation, nonstop, over a grueling four-hour period. Some samples of these test situations: the specimens' physiological responses to video footage of violent behavior; lengthy essay questions on the nature of right and wrong; timed logic puzzles; and recordings of actual courtroom cross-examinations broadcast with critical sections missing so that the specimens were expected to argue the relevant point through intuition. The final stage? Goldsmith had been trying to forget that one since the moment it ended, but despite his wondrous intellectual gifts, he could not. Each year, the senior class's straight-A specimens had one shot at the test. Everything that occurred during the test was kept strictly confidential, except for the only thing that mattered: who won. Goldsmith was the first full-ride scholarship orphan to be appointed valedictorian. Captain Gibson, the school's head of security, observed Goldsmith's entire four-hour Selmer-Dubonnet session and promptly anointed him "the natural."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Prodigy by Dave Kalstein. Copyright © 2006 Dave Kalstein. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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