I’m fuming in her attic studio, waiting for her to get out of the shower. How big a deal should I make out of this? I don’t want to fight—that will only drive her away, and things are bad enough already. But if she gets a D, it’s my D too. Even if I ace everything else in Contentment all year, the best I could hope for would be a C. And that just doesn’t cut it when you’re the teacher’s kid.
Well, at least there’s a set of pictures—head shots—on the table beside her easel in her attic studio. That means she is working on faces—or at least she’s planning to. I leaf through them, curious to see who she’s planning to use. It’s a lot of kids, but plenty of adults too, especially people like Mom, Dr. Bruder, and Mr. Frieden, who are so prominent around town. There are a few Purple People Eater cards. She even has Bryan Delaney, who’s the closest one to a real human being, since at least we know he has a real human wife. Our original idea was to substitute magazine faces for the Purples, who don’t like to have their pictures taken. But that was before we knew about the cards.
Then I catch a glimpse of more photos. These aren’t in the main stack; they’re under the table in a small carton, half hidden under some tubes of oil paint. Did Tori forget these?
I fish them out and peer at the print on top. It isn’t a head shot—it looks kind of like one of the bulletin boards at school. I squint at it. The heading says Osiris 1: Eli Frieden. It’s dotted with pictures of Eli at all ages, including when he was a baby. There are other things too—papers and notes—but they’re too small to read. A few seem to be on school stationery.
How serious has this crush become? Has Tori started an Eli collection? I frown. If that was true, she’d have a collection, not a picture of a collection!
I probe further. It’s another bulletin board picture—this one’s Hector Amani! I know for a fact, even without asking, that Tori doesn’t have a crush on Hector!
And another one. It’s me!
I hear Tori’s footsteps on the attic stairs too late. “Okay, let’s get to work—” She swallows the rest of it. Seeing what I’m looking at turns her to stone right there in the doorway.
“What is this?” I breathe.
I’ve known the girl since birth. I can honestly say I’ve never seen her so freaked out. “You can’t tell anyone!” she begs. “Promise me, Amber!”
“Why do you have collages about people, with baby pictures, and information? Why do you have one about me?”
She enters the room, still white-faced. “I can’t tell you.”
“You have to tell me!” I exclaim.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she says lamely.
“Try me!” I insist. “We’re best friends! At least, we’re supposed to be!”
“We are!” she cries. “Of course we are!”
“Then why can’t you tell me what this is about?”
She fixes me with an intense stare. “Then promise you won’t tell anyone! Not even your parents! I could get into so much trouble over this! You can’t imagine how much!”
At this point, I’m pretty freaked out myself. It isn’t just what Tori’s saying, but the fact that she believes it a million percent. Whatever’s going on here, something about it has her scared to death. “Okay. Take it easy. I promise.”
She’s silent a moment, then says, “This isn’t going to be easy for you to hear, but the adults in this town have been—monitoring us.”
“That’s it?” I’m astounded. “That our parents keep an eye on us?”
“It’s not what you think,” she says emphatically. “They’re studying us the way a scientist studies the stuff in test tubes and on slides. When Randy said something’s screwy here—”
“Randy?” I explode. “Is that what this is all about? Randy is Randy! He’s never taken anything seriously since the day he was born, and you’ve let him ruin Serenity for you! Don’t you get it? We won the lottery, Tori! Only a handful of us get to grow up in the most wonderful, peaceful, amazing town there’s ever been! But thanks to Randy and that stupid note, you can’t even see it anymore!”
I want so much to reach her, but fear has made her completely close herself off.
“Remember,” she persists, “you promised you wouldn’t tell. Even if you think you’re helping me, you’re not.”
What has her so scared? She’s with me; her parents love her; our town looks after us 100 percent. How could she have found something wrong when everything’s so totally right?
Suddenly, the answer is staring me right in the face via the images in my hand. Who else would have cradle-to-present-day photo records on a bunch of kids? This information could only belong to the school! Eli must have taken pictures of his father’s files. Or they’re Dr. Bruder’s files, and Malik got ahold of them. Either way, it’s private stuff that’s been stolen, or at least spied on. Nobody lucky enough to grow up here should even think about doing that!
I know violence is bad, but I could smack Randy Hardaway. His note has become like a virus spreading among the kids in this town. If it can affect Tori, it can affect anybody.
“I don’t even know you anymore, Tori. Can’t you see this Randy thing is poisoning everyone? It’s got people thinking so cockeyed that they don’t even know what’s right anymore! Life is perfect here, but how long will that last when there’s anger, and lying, and secrets? What’s next, huh? Murder?”
She’s blank. “What’s murder?”
I’m almost in tears. “Keep on like this and you’ll find out soon enough! I don’t want to do my Serenity Day project with you! I don’t want to be your friend at all!”
I storm out of the studio and stomp downstairs. I’m tempted to march in and tell her parents how confused she is, but she swore me to secrecy. I promised, and in Serenity, we always keep our word.
16
ELI FRIEDEN
You can take me out of the Plastics Works, but you can’t take the Plastics Works out of me.
That conference room is still with me. The whiteboards are burned onto my retinas so that I’m looking at them night and day regardless of whether my eyes are closed or open.
OSIRIS 1
ELI FRIEDEN
I’m not the only one still reeling from our mission to the factory. The simple process of describing it to Malik on the way home from the factory was almost as harrowing as living through it the first time. In a way, it was worse. What we found was so bizarre that it was almost like a movie plot. Telling it to another person made it real. And when we finally split up to go to our separate homes in that very early morning, we were in a daze. We discovered something momentous about ourselves, but what did it mean?
Even now that I’ve had time to think it over, I’m no closer to an answer. True, we learned a lot: the factory is a sham; the news and information we get is carefully screened and edited; the Purple People Eaters are spying on the town. Weirdest of all, eleven of us—but for some reason, not everybody—are being studied, and always have been.
I run my mind over the names. What’s different about us? Why me and not Randy? Why Hector and not Stanley? Why Tori and not Melissa? Special—that was the word Randy used. Okay, I’m special, but what’s so un-special about him?
Two observations:
1) The “special eleven” have no siblings; we’re only children.
2) All of us are between the ages of eleven and thirteen.
It doesn’t say much. Three of the un-special group are also only children, and nearly half of them fall into our age range. So my observations are probably worthless.
Every day after school, I meet with Malik, Tori, and Hector. We go over the pictures on my iPad in an attempt to understand what we saw in the conference room.
It’s hard to make out all of what’s on the whiteboards. We have to zoom in on one section at a time to blow up the writing. It’s not a perfect system, because the words get fuzzier as they get bigger, so there’s still a lot we can’t read.
Bottom line: We knew we were being watched, but we had n
o idea of the extent of it. Our whiteboards contain accounts of temper tantrums we threw as toddlers, and details of how pleased or disappointed we were with Christmas and birthday presents we received when we were barely older than that. The monitoring is even more intense at school, where hidden surveillance cameras record everything we do, even the desserts we take on the “honor system” after lunch.
“Aw, come on!” exclaims Malik, the undisputed dessert-boosting champion. “There’s no way I took five hundred and eighty-one cookies!”
“Cameras don’t lie, Malik,” grins Hector.
“You’re not so perfect yourself, man,” Malik retorts. “Or should I say ‘cheater.’ That’s what it says on your whiteboard.”
“I didn’t cheat,” Hector contends. “I didn’t stop you from cheating off me. It’s a totally different thing.”
“So what about this, huh? ‘Failure to report grade inflation.’ That’s all you, man.”
“It’s not my fault Mrs. Laska marked some of my tests wrong.” Hector defends himself.
“Yeah,” his best friend challenges, “but you didn’t exactly break your neck to tell her your score was too high.”
“If she’s such a good teacher, she should be able to add.”
“That’s not it,” Tori puts in thoughtfully. “Mrs. Laska must have known the grades were too high. Otherwise, how could she make a note that you didn’t come forward to correct your score?”
“That’s even stupider than counting people’s cookies,” Malik scoffs. “Why would a teacher give you the wrong grade on purpose?”
“They’re testing us,” I conclude. “Like when you get an extra-large horseshoe on Serenity Day, do you turn it in for a normal-sized one? They’re trying to see how honest we are—or how honest we aren’t,” I add with a pointed look at Malik.
“It’s just cookies!” Malik pleads. “It’s not like I tried to rip off their precious Serenity Cup!”
“But just in case, they’ve got a camera on that too,” Tori reminds us. “For all we know that’s another test.”
“But why should they care?” Hector wonders.
“When you think about it,” I muse, “all these things are tests of character. Are we honest or not? How do we react to disappointment? Look at the stuff on water polo—it isn’t who scores goals or wins games, who’s a good player and who’s so-so. It’s all about who’s aggressive, who uses the ball as a weapon, who’s willing to do anything to win.”
“Do all towns keep this kind of information on their kids?” Hector wonders.
“No way,” Malik says stoutly. “Even here they don’t keep tabs on everybody—just eleven of us. The Osiris people. That must be what makes us special.”
“Osiris is the Egyptian god of the afterlife,” I tell them. “Most of his stories are about dying or getting reborn or coming back from the underworld. I usually ask my dad or Mrs. Laska about this kind of stuff. I’m not asking this time.”
We pore over every inch of the whiteboards, and it’s just more of the same: details upon details, our whole lives broken down into hundreds of mini-tests. The pictures of the conference table are even less helpful. Glare from the fluorescent lighting and the glass surface make the papers almost unreadable. The clearest thing we can pull from it is more of a word puzzle than a sentence. The document looks important, with photographs, and headings in bold. The pictures are nothing but blobs, and after over an hour of trying to read the headline, the best we can come up with is:
ARTHOM W G EN
“Well, that explains everything,” Malik says bitterly.
“Could it be a code?” Hector muses.
“I doubt it,” I tell him. “Everything else is in plain English. We’re just missing too many letters.”
“There’s no Osiris in there,” Tori observes. “Or Serenity.”
“It could be a person’s name,” Hector suggests. “Arthur Somebody.”
“Or Martha,” Tori adds.
“That first word could also be earth,” Malik points out sarcastically. “That’s why we’re special. We’re aliens. Mystery solved. My dad wears those bow ties to communicate with the mother ship up there in orbit—”
“It’s no joke, Malik,” I cut him off. “We’re talking about our lives here, and this could be a big part of it.”
“Well, it would help if we knew what this paper was supposed to be,” Malik returns. “Why didn’t you bother to figure out what you were looking at instead of just snapping pictures of everything?”
Tori is patient. “We didn’t have time. There was a Purple coming down the stairs.”
I stare at the letters, expecting the blanks to fill in and reveal the truth about eleven special people.
Lying in bed that night, I’m still staring when my iPad runs out of power and goes dark.
After Tuesday night’s three-hour ordeal, I’m not relishing the thought of sneaking out to the Plastics Works just to hook up to their Wi-Fi. I remember the time we were able to connect just outside the gate at the base of the Fellowship hill. I can’t very well hang out there with my iPad—not without attracting attention from the Purples. But maybe there’s another spot, just beyond plant property, where I can look like I’m studying, yet still piggyback the signal leaking through the factory walls.
I head over there Friday after school, tracing the perimeter fence, watching my tablet for a Wi-Fi indicator. When I see it, I retreat a few paces to a place where I can sit on the grass and lean against a tree. The signal’s still there. Perfect. I’ve got my backpack with me, so I spread a few books around. If anybody sees me, they’ll think I’m doing homework.
I start with the page on the Boston Tea Party just to make sure I’ve got the real web. Then I carefully type the letters in the Google search box.
ARTHOM W G EN
There’s nothing. Actually, there’s quite a lot, but all the results are based on keyword “arthritis.”
In other words, Google can’t figure this out any better than we can.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Undaunted, I do a search for “Osiris.” It churns up millions of hits, not just for the Egyptian god, but for a shoe company, a health club, a hotel, a rock band, and hundreds of other businesses with Osiris in their name. There’s even a New York City delicatessen with a specialty sandwich called the Osiris—roast lamb on a pita topped with hummus in the shape of a pyramid. But when I add the parameter “Serenity, NM,” the results go from all that to zero. Which means the worlds of Serenity and Osiris never intersect.
Except in that one conference room even Google doesn’t know about.
Frustrated, I delete Osiris and search for Serenity on its own. That’s when I make an astonishing discovery.
There is no such company as the Serenity Plastics Works.
How is that possible? I mean, the traffic cone thing is obviously a sham. But how can you overlook a giant building? What does Google think that is—a speed bump? Real or not, that factory is the center of the whole town!
I’m typing faster now, propelled by the liquid nitrogen pumping through my veins. There’s also no Serenity Cable Company, no Serenity Channel One, no daily Pax newspaper.
I set down my iPad. I don’t want to continue. I sense that something is coming at me like a runaway train. And whatever it is, I’m not going to have the strength to handle it. I’m tempted to sprint home and throw what I’ve just learned in my father’s face, but of course, that’s not an option.
What then? The answer is to push forward and try to find an explanation for this.
I rerun my Google search for “Osiris.” There are so many hits—more than six million—I feel like I’m swimming in web links, struggling to stay afloat. There’s no way I could ever go through all these sites in one lifetime. Not even with the others to help me.
There must be some way to narrow this down. I add other keywords: Kids. Study. There’s no question that we’re being studied. Behavior. That’s part of it somehow. This pares the s
ix million options down to a mere eighty thousand. To say I’m discouraged doesn’t begin to describe it.
I’ll never sift through it all, but I jump in, hoping something will catch my eye. Most of the links fall into two categories: study guides for kids learning about Egyptian mythology and podiatrists’ studies on Osiris-brand shoes.
And then a word jumps out at me that has nothing to do with either mythology or shoes. It’s instantly familiar, yet at first I have trouble placing it.
Hammerstrom.
That guy from the Purple People Eaters? Why would he come up? And then my heart begins to beat a little faster. A connection between Osiris and the Purples is a connection between Osiris and Serenity! This has to be important.
I click on the link, and a long document appears on my screen in a font that reminds me of an old-fashioned typewriter.
PROJECT OSIRIS
Project Osiris was a top secret experiment in human behavior proposed by social scientist Dr. Felix Hammerstrom and internet billionaire Tamara Dunleavy in the late 1990s . . .
Felix Hammerstrom? Dr. Felix Hammerstrom, the social scientist? My mind races back to the moment when the Surety took me off the chopper. “Yes, Mr. Hammerstrom.” Those words weren’t directed at the Purples; they were meant for my father! It was Dad who told me the name belonged to one of the rescue team. I believed him because, well, why would he lie?
Between then and now, though, he’s lied at least twenty times. He’s tried to wipe the truth out of my memory using brainwashing and pills. And now I’m staring at proof positive that he’s one of the people behind this Project Osiris, whatever it is. I want to say I can’t believe it, but I believe it all too easily.
My own father, and I didn’t even know his real name!
I turn my attention back to the screen.
Osiris was designed to explore the concept of criminality from the perspective of nature versus nurture, i.e., is an individual born evil, or does he or she become evil through the influence of environment and experience? The results were expected to revolutionize our thinking with regard to the court and penal systems, and change crime and punishment as we know it.