The Prodigies [First Draft]

Thirty

Once the final period of the school day was over, Kenny made her way to the library to finish her homework. The room was empty and quiet, as it always was. She found a table near the corner of the room and pulled her books out of her backpack. However, while removing her textbooks from her bag, Kenny noticed something odd beneath all of her books. She pulled the object out from of her backpack and examined it.

It was a cardboard binder with the words "DECODED PAPERS" written on the front.

Kenny frowned as she looked upon the binder. She remembered keeping the files she had worked inside of the folder, but she didn't recall labeling it. The young girl opened the binder and flipped through the pages she had worked on. She thought about what Einstein had told her that morning in their physical education class as she looked over all of the papers in the folder. The files seemed to be written in proper English, and the only word that didn't still seemed like balderdash was "lacumemine."

Kenny tried to think of what had happened with Einstein the night before, but she was unable to remember anything but the feeling of peacefulness she had felt when she woke up. Frustrated, she turned to the first page in the binder and read what she had decoded:

The information in this folder is owned by the School for Gifted Children and the International World Affairs Bureau. This information can only be viewed by authorized personnel. Authorized personnel include: Gifted iWAB agents, iWAB agents who work and research in the Gifted division, staff members of the School for Gifted Children, radiologist Dr. Connor Kane, and any and all workers who participate in the Nursery program. If any unauthorized personnel views this information, they are to either be sent to the detention room or terminated.

Kenny took a moment to process what she had just read. She was worried about the threat in the final sentence of the paragraph, but curiosity burned inside of her like a fire. Einstein had told her there was nothing about Black Outs in the files, but he had also said that he'd had an interest in the intelligence inside of them. He had to have asked Kenny to decode the files for a reason, and the young girl wanted to figure out what that reason was. She skipped the rest of the first page, as it only described who should and should not be reading the documents in her hands. The second page started immediately with the hidden intelligence:

09-19-50

Group A was in the Nursery last night. Testing included assessing the children's limitations on their Gift and finding symptoms of Gift overexertion. Several of the children passed out before their tests had finished, which did not help with the research. However, we found common symptoms in all of the children: exhaustion, headache at the back of head near Z-area, dizziness, high blood pressure, and uncontrollable bouts of Gift usage. With this information, we can see that it would be impossible for a Gifted child to continuously use their Gift for eight hours without injuring themselves.

We found that the new version of the lacumemine drug (or the LM for short) works much better than the previous one. Not only are the children unable to recall what happens during their stay at the Nursery, but the anti-anxiety effects of the drug cause them to feel as though their loss of memory is nothing to worry about. With the new addition to the drug, the children should feel untroubled whenever they bring their memory loss to mind. However, we are still prepared to send children to the detention room if they become suspicious of the program.

We will continue our study of Gift overexertion throughout this school year. Today, we will conduct the same study as last night on Group B and see how their symptoms compare with those of the members of Group A.

Kenny closed the folder and took a moment to breathe before starting her homework. This was what Einstein had to have meant when he said she'd translated the files wrong. The files seemed to be describing experiments on the students of AGC, which couldn't be possible. There had to be another reason why she couldn't remember what had happened the previous night.