The Omega Point

of glyphs, hundreds of them.

“It’s entirely in… what is this? Is it Mayan? Toltec?”

She looked at it. “You’ll have access to scholars.”

“Where?”

“Here. Among your class.”

His only choice, he saw, was to just roll with this. There was no question in his mind that, as a child, he’d been to this house. Certainly, he had seen the downstairs. But what this class was all about, and why the security, he could not imagine—or rather, he supposed, remember.

Or could he? There might be vague memories in the back of his mind of the names of the old gods. But it was also true that their names were everywhere these days. And yet, he recalled other children, and being happy here.

He remembered, also, that there had been an enormous security issue.

“We need to discuss Marian Hunt.”

“Yes. She’s been assistant director here for what, ten years?”

“Since it opened.”

“Then surely she was the ideal choice for director.”

“She wasn’t part of the class. But she doesn’t know that and cannot know it; so as far as she’s concerned, she’s been passed over for a mere boy.”

“If the board doesn’t have faith in her, perhaps she would’ve been better off leaving.”

“Where would she go?”

A question without an answer. Or no, it did have an answer: she would go nowhere.

“Let me show you the surveillance toys,” Mrs. Denman said. “Every patient is available to total monitoring.” She pressed her finger against a discreet fingerprint reader embedded in the bookcase beside his desk. Two more shelves of fake books slid away to reveal a very large screen populated by dozens of small video images revealing what he felt sure would turn out to be every inch of the public spaces in the facility, indoors and out.

She touched a button and new rows of images appeared.

“These are the patient social areas,” she said. She tapped one of the images, which expanded to fill the screen.

For a moment, David did not understand what he was seeing. Then he did, and he was so shocked that he must have gasped aloud, because Aubrey Denman’s bird head snapped toward him, and the expression of fear on her face was almost as appalling as the straitjacket confining the patient.

At Manhattan Central, he’d seen patients under restraint, of course, but not being kept in one of these things. If not illegal, it was certainly a spectacular medical failure.

“I can’t allow that,” he said.

There were three patients in a sunny, pleasant room. Each one had a nurse in attendance, not surprising in a facility that offered the extreme level of care found at the Acton Clinic. But one of them was in this primitive restraint.

“He’s unable to bear… anything. At any moment he’ll just lose himself.”

“Do you know him?”

Her eyes closed, she gave a slow nod, one that communicated a sense of the anguish that her work clearly caused her. “There has been a great deal of sacrifice here, David. Lives sacrificed—the happiness of youth, David —all for the mission.”

“Which is what?”

“David,” she said, “the future. The future!”

She took his hand—snatched it—grasping it as if it was a lifeline in a storm. And suddenly, there came a memory.

He was trying urgently to explain something to a tall man, and to emphasize his point, he had grabbed this man’s hand.

“I told him I couldn’t do it. I told him!”

“But you can, David.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m out of time.”

He would have to keep his questions and his considerable doubts to himself. But he did not agree with her optimism, not at all. How could anybody save anything, given what was coming?

Well, perhaps he had a mentor in her. She was hardly the wealthy old fool she had initially seemed.

“You’ll be back,” he said. It was not a question, and not intended to be one.

“Of course. And I’m always available on my cell.”

“I need to get to know my staff,” he said, “and the class. Who are my classmates?”

“There will be somebody coming to help you. Until they arrive, don’t breathe a word about the class, not a single word.”

“I’m sitting on top of an institution full of people who’ve been spectacularly abused and I’m not supposed to even say anything about it? I don’t think so.” He gestured toward the screen. “What about them, are they members of the class?”

“Two of them. The other is genuinely disturbed.”

“And you did this. It’s appalling.”

“David, we did what we had to. Without security this deep the class would have been found. That must not happen, David, it must not.”

“What’s so important about them? I’m sorry if I sound callous, but I really need to know why, in a world where billions are dying, a small group of people would need to be so carefully protected?”

She closed the control center. “Call a staff meeting, but I’d advise you to move carefully. After Marian, your next order of business will be to meet Katrina Starnes. Katie. She’s your assistant.”

“Isn’t it rather odd that she’s not here now?”

She gestured toward the book backs that concealed the electronic wonders. “She’s not a member of the class. She isn’t allowed access to this system or to know anything about the inner meaning of this place.”

“Which is what? I still don’t understand.”

“No, of course not.”

The moment he had experienced the deja vu that had convinced him that he had been in this house before, he had made the decision to let this play out. These vague, amnesia-stifled memories he was experiencing were really very strange, and, if they were true, then he was potentially looking at a whole hidden life, and he had no intention of not exploring it.

“I need to know more. A lot more. Are there any records of what we studied in the class? Video? Even just a syllabus. What did we study?”

“I need to leave.”

“Oh, wonderful! Leave me with an insoluble mystery and an institution to run during the worst social collapse since the fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Your memories will come back to you.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Oh, they must! Young man, you see the stakes. They must!”

A moment later, she was heading toward the door of the office. He was appalled.

“What about Dr. Ullman? Was the fire really an accident? Am I in danger?”

For a long moment, she was silent. Then she said, “David, we don’t know. Maybe it was a fire set by resentful townies. Could be. Or it could be something worse.”

“I need to know more!”

“You have your security force and Glen MacNamara is very, very good at what he does. Start there.”

As she spoke, she hurried away across the large room.

“Wait! The fingerprint reader? How do I get programmed into it?”

“You’re already in it.”

“Nobody took my fingerprints.”

“Of course they did—in class. Your fingerprints, your DNA, we have it all.”

She neither spoke again, nor wished him well, smiled—any of it. She simply went stalking off down the hall.