Taj's Early Years Read online

  I wanted to speak to her too, but I didn’t know how to reach her. There were so many questions I needed answers for, but I couldn’t ask them.

  I often dreamed of her too. Her message was always the same: to remember that she loved me, to be wary of the adults, and to love and comfort all my friends.

  So I did love the other children in the dormitory and tried to touch each of them at least once every day, and to comfort them whenever the adults hurt us.

  * * *

  There were originally over a hundred of us TY7s, some a little older, some younger, and our company was divided into platoons of 20 to 24 children.

  Only I had been named, and I was one of the oldest. Eventually the others too all chose names which we used among ourselves. The adults called us by the numbers we had tattooed high on our right upper arms.

  One girl was a natural leader. She was very intelligent, big and strong with a dominant personality and a certain way about her we all respected. The other kids in our platoon looked up to her. Ava became our platoon leader and eventually the Company Commander, and Evan was her second.

  I managed to tell Ava most of what my mother had told me. She put the ideas into effect, organizing our company into five platoons and then into small squads of four to eight persons specializing in certain functions. The cell idea caught on and the older companies reorganized themselves on the same principle.

  There were four boys and one other girl in my squadron. Our task was spying, mostly eavesdropping. There were also other squads of specialized spies with different tasks and talents in other platoons.

  Evan, who was big and stocky, was our squad leader and platoon strategist. He reported back to Ava. The three other boys, Vene and I were small and skinny.

  Lim excelled at being unobtrusive, somehow managing to disappear into any background. Even when I knew he was there I often forgot about him, so he was a natural for this work.

  Zade had a talent for finding the listening devices and soon learned to temporarily disable them to give us privacy.

  Cute looking Tam and Vene were our charmers. They both had big, liquid, long-lashed eyes and lovely dimpled smiles. And Tam had curls, even with a buzz cut.

  They managed to get around a few of the more amenable adults and get special favors, such as comics, and books and videos that weren’t part of our curriculum.

  Several mushy romance novels were a revelation for us.

  Despite our days being crammed with planned activities, we managed to organize an extensive internal spy network, not just in our company, but including the older companies too.

  We bugged some of the adults’ areas to discover what they might be planning for us, cobbling together the bugs from parts of their devices, which we sabotaged so they didn’t work properly, and by stealing others from stores.

  We small ones who could easily wriggle into tiny spaces, took shifts just hiding in closets adjoining the adults’ dining and rec. rooms. We listened in with the aid of paper cup megaphones and our heightened hearing.

  Vene and I did that a lot as we both had enhancements that let us function without much sleep. She and I were usually paired with one of the boys, all of whom were very light sleepers and could be awoken in an instant to listen in on anything either of us thought important.

  Two sets of ears were always better than one.

  Because we worked together and had to trust and depend on each other so much, I became great friends with each of the boys. Several times, they helped me evade discovery or provided me with an excuse to be caught out of bed.

  And many times, Evan would appear and move us out of where we could have been trapped just before some patrol would do a spot check of that area.

  Lim was especially good at sneaking around. He got into the kitchens and stole food from the carts prepared for late shifts. He’d fill his pockets, and give me some, so when one of us did get sprung, they could say they’d woken hungry and gone looking for something to eat.

  My most special friend was Vene. We were very close. Sometimes, we could read each other’s minds, like some identical twins are supposed to be able to do. We sent each other private messages, and passed on warnings.

  Yet we had been born to different mothers.

  Vene was about five months younger, with no memories of her mother. I wondered whether we may have been started from the same mother’s eggs and gestated separately.

  Physically, we were fairly similar, both small and dark-haired with dark brown eyes. Vene was prettier. Her hair was thicker, much more luxuriant, and grew faster than mine, even with our short buzz cuts.

  We were both careful never to reveal how little sleep we needed. And we always slept in whenever given the chance, enjoying the luxuries of being cozy and dreaming.

  Because we were almost always together, I easily loved everyone in our platoon and especially our squad. Whenever I had the chance, I also loved children in the other platoons that I could reach, making eye contact, smiling and touching them.

  A friendly smile, a touch in passing and a hard hug couldn’t be overheard and was rarely observed. Many of the other children adopted my methods to connect with each other. Soon this too spread throughout Typhon to the older companies.

  We all knew there were listening devices planted everywhere in the buildings and grounds. Whoever found a new one, showed it to others.

  Zade inspected each and decided whether to leave it alone, disable it permanently or use it occasionally. He even found some in tree cavities in the forest outside the wire where we learnt orienteering, tracking and to live off the land.

  We knew better than to attempt to run away during these times outside.

  So we learned to be wary and self-contained, not to talk idly about anything important. We passed messages soundlessly in a secret sign language we developed, (different to the one we were taught,) or spoke only after Zade had just checked and disabled the bugs, or where some loud noise covered our voices.

  We all were hurt by the frequent surgery and the chemicals they fed us. I found that in trying to comfort my platoon mates and those in the other platoons whom we saw occasionally in the halls, at meals and during various activities, I also was comforted and hurt less.

  So this became part of my strategy to survive at Typhon. The more I loved all my friends, the more they loved me back, and the stronger we all felt. Thus we all could cope better with the horrible life there.

  This was the only life we knew, but even so we had picked up enough information from movies, books and eavesdropping on the idle chat of the adults, to understand that they had more joy and kindness in their own lives.

  And . . . occasionally, I would receive a great avalanche of love.

  Instead of overwhelming, this filled me so my spirit expanded to take it all inside. I could feel the love flow through me, more potent than my blood, energizing me. It made me feel really great, and so strong, that I could give everybody else more love than before.

  This love felt quite different from my mother’s—it had a dissimilar flavor—but it was nice to know that there was someone else besides my mother who loved me so strongly.

  I always tried to send back some love to the source of the love fountain as a thank you, but at first didn’t know whether or not it was received.

  After a while, I sent love there just because I was grateful for the person’s affection and because he was within reach, whereas my mother wasn’t.

  I worried that he or she—he did feel male—might be all alone and lonely, as trapped as we were.

  A year later, I did receive an answering pulse to my sends, like a thank-you, not as strong as those he initiated, but still lovely. I was sure that was his receipt of my sending.

  I hoped he might be my dad as that idea gave me great comfort.

  * * *

  We TY7s weren’t the only group at Typhon. There were smaller companies of fully trained TY6s and TY5s, both groups older than us, which had started out as big but had suffered
casualties over time.

  The TY5s remembered TY4s and a very few TY3s who hadn’t lasted long. Both lots were gone by the time the oldest TY6s were 3-years-old. And later there were younger TY8s.

  All of us were being trained as special soldiers—a secret corps of elite, genetically-enhanced and later cybernetically-augmented cyborg assassins. We were indoctrinated to believe what our superiors told us and taught to kill our country’s enemies.

  But we were also taught to be flexible, to think creatively, to search for unconventional solutions and to make decisions quickly, so we could escape from tight situations.

  Most of us learned to think for ourselves and to trust only each other. To keep most of ourselves locked away from the adults and to present a façade of openness.

  We had classroom lessons in languages, sign, codes, world geography and history. We studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, anatomy, electronics, computer technology, hacking, mechanics and strategy.

  Our language lessons were intensive; we each spoke a minimum four or more tongues like a native. I had eight so far, not counting my five dialects of Spanish and four of French.

  We learned survival techniques, orienteering, tracking, infiltration and explosives.

  We mastered poisons, every possible way to kill, slowly or quickly, how to handle our various genetic and surgical enhancements, and anything else that might be associated with soldiering or killing.

  * * *

  The cybernetic enhancements would usually be put in later when we were close to our full growth. But we already knew a lot about them as two of the girls received theirs early. They had to seduce a fat old man and arrange a series of compromising photographs for future blackmail.

  Vene and I were fortunate that the special fittings were too large for us. Otherwise it would have been we who would have had to suck and fuck the disgusting pedophile.

  Dena and Lorne were changed when they returned from their assignment, quieter and sadder.

  I heard Dena crying softly their first night back and slipped into her bed to hold her as she wept. She pulled the covers over her head, buried her face in my chest and held on to me tightly to drown the sounds of her misery.

  I soothed, patted and comforted, radiating my love at her until she calmed and fell asleep.

  Then I had to return to my bed before the night patrol caught me. After the two guards had left, I went to Lorne, held her rigid little body and loved her. Lorne didn’t hold me, but she had become less stiff by the time I had to leave again before the next patrol.

  I kept up these nightly visits to comfort the two girls for months until they seemed better. They had been debriefed on return from their assignment. But they were never given any form of counseling by the adults, which I know now, should have been mandatory.

  Typhon didn’t look after their valuable properties very well.

  * * *

  We were drilled endlessly until all the movements and exercises were second nature and we could move like robots ruled by one mind. But we would never have a public marching-out parade to display our perfect synchronicity.

  I guess the drilling was just a carryover from regular army training, designed to condition us to learn basic responses without needing to think about them.

  We ran complex obstacle courses and spent weeks at a time living rough in the wilds, living off the land outside the wire.

  For recreation we played chess and every computer game ever devised.

  For sport, we swam, skated, and skied—mostly cross country, and hang-glided. We learned and gained proficiency in, various schools of yoga, martial arts of all kinds, and every form of recreational sport and game imaginable except dance and sumo.

  The violent sports were for letting off steam; the milder ones for fitting into characters when we were on a mission. The Eastern techniques were for personal development, self-discipline and fighting.

  All the TY7s concealed or minimized as many of our talents as possible.

  We had learned early not to stand out too much from the group, nor to lag behind, and never to volunteer anything about ourselves or anyone else.

  It was never good to draw personal attention of any kind. Most who had done so disappeared forever.

  My mother’s advice had proved prophetic.

  * * *

  We exchanged relevant information with the older soldiers too. They told us something of what the world was like outside and warned us of anything they heard that might pertain to us.

  A very important fact we picked up early was never to interfere with our tattoos.

  Several of the older soldiers decided one evening to enhance their tats with frames, enclosing them in fancy scrollwork, barbed wire, leafy vines or concentric ovals. They all had seizures hours later, were rushed away for treatment, and didn’t reappear for several weeks. Another soldier experimented by giving himself a hickey over the tat, with the exact same result.

  * * *

  Then, from various sources, we learned that there was to be another round of TY7-only surgery, because the adults didn’t think we were responding to the ‘indoctrination’ (read brainwashing) as well as we should.

  This time, instead of cutting and hurting our bodies some more, the medicos would be trying out new techniques in brain surgery on us.

  Somehow, brains feel more personal than all the other limbs and organs we’d had augmented and altered for no good reason.

  None of us wanted to have our heads messed up any more than they already were, so we became serious about the escape plans we had been working on for years.

  Some TY5s created a diversion, arranging several electrical fires in their barracks and near our dorms. They set off terrific staggered smoke bombs which continued billowing out black muck for 40 minutes.

  In the resultant confusion and noise of alarms, most of the TY7s and TY5s, even some opportunistic TY6s escaped. And now I was free, swimming away as fast as I could from everything I knew.

  Chapter 4

  Reaching Fermina

  Four days after the escape, near morning, I reached the far side of a small town, the first I had seen. I climbed out of the river under a large boatshed which was partially built over the water.

  I finger-dried my hair and body, dressed in track pants, the hoodie and sneakers. I packaged all my stuff but the sling and some stones in the inner bag, wrapped the others around it, and hid everything in a nearby corner.

  Then I had to hide too, as the heavy doors opened and a launch with its lights dimmed slid silently inside.

  An unusually large number of people disembarked, adults and children, who must have been squeezed in like dill pickles.

  Their whispered conversations showed they were wetbacks—illegal immigrants from Mexico and further south. A small middle-aged woman was in charge.

  I heard her answer a question about papers. She told the inquirers that they would all be photographed during the next week and get their papers a week later.

  That was most interesting to me as I now had no legal identity, so also needed a source of official papers.

  Small groups of the illegals slipped out a personnel door and were driven off to safe houses by people waiting outside, until only the woman remained to lock up.

  I slunk out the small door while her back was turned, found a place to hide where I could watch for her, and followed her home. Fortunately she walked, so must have lived nearby.

  * * *

  Still, this industrial wharf area was a bad place for a woman to walk at night, poorly lit too. As she drew abreast of an alley on her left, two men armed with knives, moved out.

  She heard them and turned, brandishing a gun, a Colt .45, she had kept hidden in her coat pocket.

  The damned things haunt me. But this one was plain gun metal all over.

  They backed off, and she moved away, walking backwards, not seeing the other two now sneaking up behind her.

  I moved up fast, calling: “Look out behind.”
<
br />   I quickly took care of the first two while she held the others at bay, then making a wide circle around her and getting behind them, I leapt up and knocked their heads together too.

  She held the weapon on me. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Your guardian angel. And there are at least four more of them around.” She turned the gun aside and I wrapped my leg around hers to bring her down to the pavement, as I slung a stone at the knife-thrower and another at the guy with him.

  Middle-aged women don’t fall well, though she didn’t complain. And she had the sense not to squeeze the trigger. I had to help her move into the slightly protective shelter of a recessed doorway, then scooted off and took care of three more pairs of hoods.

  They would all have severe concussion when they roused.

  I collected my stones and all the knives—the thrower had seven more, the others usually had only one spare—then escorted her home and was invited in.

  That was how I met Fermina.

  * * *

  Small, attractive, slender and bubbly, with short, naturally curly, dark brown hair, she had retained her youthful figure, vitality and enthusiasm for life, and looked great in fitted jeans. She told me her story with much eye-flashing and vigorous arm gestures.

  Fermina had been a hairdresser and worked throughout her childless marriage. She retired when her husband died seven years earlier and left her in a comfortable financial state.

  Fermina had had several discreet suitors since, but I didn’t meet any till later as she wanted to keep my presence secret. She was smart enough not to trust anyone with her important business.

  Most of these men had relatives and friends who were trying to escape the intolerable conditions of their part of South America in the hope of finding more freedom and opportunity for a better life in the USA.

  One of her previous suitors had sent money for the two children of his younger sister to come to America through one of the risky Coyote smuggling networks.

  Something had gone wrong.

  The two teenagers had been found locked inside a stolen refrigerated meat truck abandoned in the Arizona desert only a few miles over the USA-Mexico border along with 52 other illegals, all dead of dehydration.

  The uncle had learnt of this when police had rung his number which had been discovered on each of the children.