Simple Talents

Chapter Ten

Sara had slowly picked through Ami's diary in her mind, searching for info she could use to escape, and hadn't come across much; Ami obviously hadn't gotten too many chances to write. The lady with the dead eye and severe scarring appeared on the screen across from where she sat mid-thought.

"Hello Sara. I usually use last names, but you don't appear to have one. I am Ms. Parce, I am the one who will be tutoring you as well as studying you. We know that you are scared, but we want to lessen that a little by explaining why you're here.

We hope to study you through our new C.S.F. program, and after about six months of this, we hope to enter you into the R.A.W. program, once you have run with the R.A.W. program for ten years, we take you off and do other various studies including the way your race reacts to different situations.

You will be released when we have no need for you anymore. T.E.A.R.S. labs, despite its name, is actually a decent place."

"Why do you do this to us? Study us? Torture us?" She paused a moment, looking down into her hands, she knew that her future was grim, and that she was speaking only what would become of her in ten-and-a-half years.

"...Kill us?" She looked back up at the screen with tears in her eyes.

"You are all abominations..." She spoke as if this were obvious; obvious that the Talented shouldn't exist and that they should all die and be tortured and just take it, because it was a gift to live on the 'Perfect Planet Earth', even if they didn't deserve it.

"... Have you ever read The Chrysalids?" Sara shook her head no, simply too morose over her future if she couldn't get out.

"Basically, a nuclear war broke out, leaving few survivors in a mangled and mutated world. Out of this horror, few things made it out. One of the few things that did was the catholic bible and the revelations which demanded that only that of god's image was holy, any mutations were abominations sent from Satan. People feared the mutations, they could do things they could not." Sara sniveled, unable to understand her insinuation during her distress,

"What does that have to do with the talents?" All she knew was that she was human once, and that by definition, she was not always an evil monster... so how could she have been sent by Satan?

"We are not so stupid or blinded by our religious beliefs to believe that Talents are descended or sent to Earth by Satan; we believe in science. But, like in the Chrysalids, the 'Talented' population does in fact scare the populace... and that includes the government...

"A long time ago, a wealthy man who will remain unnamed had his son taken by a Kripte and later became one. When he found his son, the son tried to kill him and those around him, so he killed his son. And over time, he began noticing more and more people around him being abnormal. Hearing of witches somewhere, he began the Salem witch trials, hoping to rid the world of these beasts. When he realized that they weren't actually getting many talents, he created the labs and hired people to study ways to find them and capture them.

"When the money started running dry a couple hundred years later, his descendants went to the government with what they had collected. They agreed to pay for T.E.A.R.S labs and it's programs, knowing that they could use the captured talents to their advantage and protect the populace from an unknown menace at the same time. Due to funding and curiosity, they later started the R.A.W., a program based for controlled talented reproduction.

"And that's how you talents fit in. By breeding more talents, refining and adding qualities, the U.S. government could easily become the world government. Or, they could easily protect it anyways." Ms. Parce smiled almost sinisterly, knowing deep inside that such a creation as a super-soldier could ultimately be an end to civilization.