Telepath (Hive Mind Book 1) (4 page)

Somewhere on Teen Level,
Shanna would be looking up results just like me. I wondered what she was
thinking now. She’d always dismissed the hasties as stuffy prudes who were out
to spoil people’s fun.

The Level 20 next to
Forge’s name meant nothing. Everyone assigned to a branch of Law Enforcement,
whether high or low level, would live on Level 20, which had a mixture of accommodation
from simple to luxurious. If I’d understood the code ARU77139, it would presumably
have told me Forge’s true level, whether he’d have an important post in Law Enforcement
or not, but it was better not to know.

Forge was on the other
side of the great divide between hasties and citizens. I could picture him as
an anonymous figure dressed in blue, which would help me forget him.

Eventually, I rolled out
of the sleep field to eat and undress for the night. Tomorrow would be day four
of Lottery, when assessment finished for all but a handful of people. By the
end of it, I should know my future profession and level. I’d reached the point
where I could accept anything Lottery decreed for me, except a Level 99 Sewage
Technician, with gratitude.

I went to sleep expecting
the usual dream about Forge, but instead I dreamed about flowers, endless racks
of flowers in a huge hydroponics area. Bees hastened between them and their hives
at the end of the racks.

I knew these bees well.
Striped gold and blue, they flew busily round the parks as well as hydroponics.
I’d been fascinated by them as a child, and the way they lived in their own
little hives, just like we humans did in our much bigger one. I’d reach out a
finger and gently stroke their tiny furry bodies. My parents would watch me and
smile. They worked in genetics, and told me how the bees had been bred from
their wild ancestors to be good natured, hard working, and without stings.

In my dream, I was one of
the bees myself. I gathered the pollen and carried it back to my home hive,
crawling through the tunnels inside, listening to the reassuring hum of my companions
around me.

I woke up the next morning feeling
oddly disoriented, and a sense of unease clung to me all through breakfast, the
walk to the assessment centre, and more confusing hours of tests. By the
afternoon, I had a splitting headache, like a hammer pounding away inside my
skull. I blamed it on the light displays in the morning tests.

I fought to ignore the
headache, struggling on until there was yet another session with light
displays. The throbbing in my head reached a crescendo. I gave a moan of pain
and buried my head in my hands.

“What’s wrong, Amber?”
asked my tester, an elegant woman of about thirty who’d been giving me several
of my most recent tests.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve
got a terrible headache.”

“I’m a doctor,” she said.
“I’ll give you an injection that will help the pain, and then you can lie down
and rest for a while.”

I held out my arm, and she
gave me a shot with a pressure jet. I still felt awful, but I couldn’t stand
these tests dragging on into a fifth day. “I don’t need a rest.”

“You aren’t well enough to
continue at the moment.” She gave me the standard reassuring professional smile,
and uttered the words they all kept reciting. “Don’t worry.”

Her face seemed to blur
and sway in front of my eyes, and everything went black.

When I woke up, I opened my eyes, and
saw the ceiling above me curved down to meet the walls in a strange way I’d
never seen before. I studied it for a bewildered second, then remembered
getting ill during the test.

I sat up in panic, found
I’d been lying on some sort of couch, and looked around. I was in a long, thin room,
with a lot of cushioned chairs set formally in pairs on one side. My couch was
on the other. The walls had curious metal plates attached to them at intervals,
and the place felt odd. I felt odd too.

The doctor who’d treated
me was sitting in one of the chairs. She saw my movement, and turned to look at
me.

“How do you feel, Amber?
Headache gone?”

“Yes,” I said. “My head feels
…”

I broke off. I’d been
about to say my head felt totally normal now, but there was still something peculiar.
I frowned as I tried to pin it down.

“It seems very quiet
here.” That sounded silly, so I hurried on. “I’m sorry I fainted, but I’m
better now and can get back to doing the test.”

“You didn’t faint, Amber. I
sedated you. You’ve been asleep for twenty-seven hours.”

“What?” I shrieked the
word before I could stop myself. It was stupid to yell at assessment staff, so
I hastily apologized. “I’m very sorry. I was startled. Can I continue my tests
now?”

The woman took two drinks
from a dispenser, and brought one over to me. “My name is Megan.”

I took the drink and
sipped it. My favourite melon juice. My throat was dry, so I gulped the rest
down greedily.

Megan took the empty glass
from me, refilled it, and brought it back. “You aren’t at the centre any
longer, Amber.”

I looked round at the
weird room again. “I’m in a hospital?”

“You’re in an aircraft.
That’s a transport vehicle that …”

I knew what an aircraft
was. They were used to travel to outlying supply stations or the even longer
distances to other Hives. I dropped my glass, and it rolled across the floor
spilling a pool of juice. I didn’t care.

“I’m outside the Hive?”
Everyone knew the dangers of Outside. Truesun could blind you if you looked at
it.

“We’re not in our Hive any
longer, but we aren’t Outside either.” Megan sat down opposite me. “We travelled
while you were sleeping. This aircraft is now inside Hive Futura.”

I closed my eyes, covered
them with my hands, and listened to my breathing for a moment before looking at
Megan again.

“Hive Futura was our seed Hive,
founded in the Hive expansion phase, but it doesn’t exist any longer. The world
population dropped. Most seed Hives were reabsorbed by parent Hives, and now there
are only one hundred and seven Hive cities.” I recited the familiar facts I’d
learnt in school, trying to block off my terror, trying to make sense of
things. “We can’t be inside Hive Futura.”

“Hive Futura wasn’t
totally abandoned. If our Hive population increases, we may need it again, so basic
maintenance is still carried out here.”

I stared at her. “But why
am I here? I’m supposed to be in Lottery.” I was losing the battle against my
terror.

“Try to stay calm, Amber,”
said Megan. “Your Lottery assessment is finished. It finished on the second
day.”

Nobody ever finished their
assessment on the second day, and I’d been having tests for four days already.
“This is another silly nightmare, isn’t it?”

She ignored that. “On the
first day of your assessment, you scored an interesting result on a special test
that included questions with no genuine answers. As you reached each of those
questions, the tester was instructed to concentrate on thinking of one possible
answer. You almost always picked that answer, Amber.”

What was she talking about?
I remembered the test, but … I thought back to that bored looking tester. He’d
seemed to be half asleep.

“There were over a million
eighteen-year-olds in assessment,” Megan continued. “Thousands of candidates
had significantly high scores on that special test. You were all moved to
different assessment centres to increase the pressure to do well. You remember
the reaction speed test that came next?”

I nodded, still
bewildered.

“You chose your colour too
fast for human reflexes, Amber. On seven occasions, you chose the correct colour
before it even had time to light up. You were reading your tester’s mind to see
what colour he was going to touch.”

I shook my head. This
couldn’t be happening to me. I couldn’t read minds. Everyone knew that
telepaths had to wear masks because they weren’t quite human, and I was a
perfectly ordinary girl. Lottery had made a dreadful mistake.

Megan turned her face away
from me. “We knew then we’d found a true telepath. I took a specialist team
into the assessment centre to take over your whole testing process. Since
birth, you’d been protecting yourself from the hundred million minds around you
by blocking your telepathic abilities. Most of the tests we gave you were aimed
at lowering your mental barriers and bringing your ability to the surface. When
your headache started, we knew you were now hearing nearby minds, and it was
time to get you out of the Hive.”

“No!” I snapped the word
at her in flat denial. “You’ve made a mistake.”

She just kept talking as
if I hadn’t said a word. “We brought you to Hive Futura so you could learn to
control and filter the telepathic input without being overwhelmed by the number
of minds. Our pilot has already left in another aircraft, so there are only the
two of us in Hive Futura now. We’ll remain alone here until you complete the
first stage of your training.”

“It’s a mistake,” I
repeated. “I’m not a telepath.”

She turned to face me
again, and her lips weren’t moving. “I stopped talking two minutes ago, Amber.
You’ve been pulling the pre-vocalized words directly out of my mind.”

There was a moment of blank
disbelief before panic hit me. I was a telepath. I was a nosy. I’d spend my
days wearing a grey mask, walking through hostile crowds with my bodyguard of
watchful hasties surrounding me.

“I can’t do this,” I said.
“I can’t be this. I can’t be a nosy. Everyone will shout at me. Two ones are
two. Two twos are four. Two threes are six. Two fours are …”

“Amber!” Megan spoke aloud
this time, interrupting my hysterical chanting. “It won’t be like that. The
nosies dressed in grey aren’t telepaths. They’re fakes, decoys, ordinary hasties
dressed up to make them look alien and frightening.”

This didn’t make any sense.
“But why?”

“People working in Law Enforcement
know the nosies are fake, but everyone else in the Hive believes they are
genuine telepaths. They see the nosies everywhere they go, in the shopping
areas, the corridors, riding the belts, going through the park. Anyone considering
committing a crime is scared that a nosy will spot their guilty thoughts. In
most cases that’s enough to make potential criminals abandon their plans. The
deterrent value of the nosy patrols is massive, but it’s all bluff.”

I stared at her. She didn’t
seem to be joking, but she couldn’t be serious.

Megan studied my face for
a moment before she spoke again. “The bluff works because we do have genuine
telepaths, but painfully few of them. Lottery discovers almost a thousand
people each year with some level of telepathic ability, but virtually all of
them are only capable of random, intermittent glimpses into the minds of people
around them.”

She paused. “That’s enough
to make borderline telepaths highly valuable to the Hive in areas such as counselling.
The real treasure though is the incredibly rare exception capable of true,
consciously controlled telepathy. The exception like you, Amber.”

I tugged at my hair. “I’m
not exceptional.”

“We had four true telepaths
to watch over the hundred million people in our Hive and protect them from
danger. Now we’ve found you, so we have five. We won’t waste your precious time
by dressing you as a nosy and letting crowds of people chant at you.”

“Five true telepaths? How
can five people watch over a hundred million?”

Megan smiled. “I realize
this news is a huge shock. You’ll need time to adjust to what I’ve told you
before I explain more details. I expect you’re feeling hungry. Shall we go to
your apartment so you can eat?”

“I’d rather get on with
the imprinting. When I understand what I’m supposed to do, this will … may … be
easier.”

“We never imprint
telepaths,” said Megan.

I’d always known that I’d
be imprinted during Lottery. As a child, I’d daydreamed about the day I’d be given
all the knowledge I needed for my new profession. As I approached Lottery, I’d had
last minute fears about the imprinting process, but the idea of not being imprinted
was shattering.

“But you have to imprint
me,” I said. “Everyone is imprinted. If you don’t imprint me, then I’ll never grow
up. I’ll be stuck as a teen forever.”

“That’s not true,” said
Megan. “Life experiences make you grow and mature as a person. Imprinting only
gives you a lot of information very quickly. In your case, it’s not worth the
risk.”

“There aren’t any risks.
The stories about minds being damaged by imprints are just myths.” I pleaded for
reassurance that some of the things I’d believed were still true. “They are
just myths, aren’t they?”

“Imprinting is perfectly
safe for other people, but not for you, Amber. There’s an obvious genetic
factor involved in people becoming borderline telepaths, but we don’t
understand what makes someone move beyond that and develop into a true telepath.
There’s a danger imprinting could adversely affect your ability, so we don’t
take the risk.”

Megan stood up. “I’ll take
you to your apartment now. We’ll be staying in Hive Futura until your training
is complete. By the time we return to the Hive, your unit will be ready for you.”

She opened a door. I
looked warily past her, and was relieved to see our aircraft was safely inside
a huge, featureless room. I followed her down a short and awkward flight of
steps to the ground, and we walked across to another doorway. My mind was still
struggling to absorb the fact I wouldn’t be imprinted, but I finally caught up
with her last words.

“Unit?” I asked. “What do
you mean by my unit?”

“You will have a Telepath Unit
to assist you with your work,” said Megan. “I’m your Senior Administrator, responsible
for staffing and the day to day running of your unit. Your Tactical Commander
will be in charge of the actual unit operations.”

“You told me you were a
doctor.”

She opened the door ahead
of us, and we went into a corridor. “I am a doctor. As your Senior Administrator,
I need both administrational and medical skills. Your training, health, and wellbeing
are my primary concerns.”

As we walked down the
corridor, I glanced sideways at the doors we were passing. “This looks like an ordinary
housing warren, except that it’s totally empty.”

“This section is where the
maintenance crews stay when they visit to do essential repairs.”

“Are we really the only
two people here?”

“Yes. When you’ve
completed your initial training, your other three team leaders will come to join
us. Remember that you’re in charge of your Telepath Unit, Amber. If you’re uncomfortable
with any of the staff I’ve selected, or with me, you just have to say so and replacements
will be found.”

I blinked. “You’d find
your own replacement?”

“Two alternate candidates
for my post are already on standby.”

Megan stepped off the belt.
I automatically followed her, and saw a door with my name on it. Megan opened it
and led the way inside. I looked round at a large hallway, with cream walls that
matched the thick carpet underfoot. Several doors led off it.

“Can I explore by myself?”
I asked. “I could use a bit of time alone to … adjust.”

“Of course.” Megan smiled.
“You’re in charge.”

I’d no idea what I was
doing, and I wouldn’t be imprinted with any information, but Megan said I was
in charge. I just had to say the word and she’d be replaced by someone else. This
was ridiculous.

“My apartment is next
door,” Megan continued. “Just use the comms system to call me when you’re ready.”

She went back out to the
corridor and closed the door behind her. I looked round the hall, and opened a
random door into what was clearly a bedroom. I wandered inside and touched the
wall to open the storage space. I saw a set of clothes. My clothes.

I’d left those clothes in
my temporary room back in our Hive. Some of them had been packed in my bag, others
discarded on the floor. The whole lot seemed to have been laundered before
being hung up here, and the bag itself was sitting on the floor underneath
them. I investigated and found it was empty.

I panicked, looked frantically
round the room, and then saw the small cube sitting on a table by the side of the
sleep field. I went across to touch it with my hand, needing the physical
reassurance that its precious holos were safe. These images were all I had left
of my life on Teen Level now. I’d never see Forge, Shanna, Linnette, Atticus,
Casper, or any of my other old friends again in real life.

Once I’d calmed down
again, I carried on exploring. The second room I entered was a dedicated bookette
room, an impressive luxury, but I was more interested in food right now. The
third room had a table, chairs, and a staggeringly large kitchen unit. I
eagerly called up the menu to see what was on offer. Dishes scrolled seemingly
endlessly down the front of the unit, and I selected half a dozen to see if
they really were all in storage.

Five minutes later, I was
sitting at the table with enough food for several people in front of me. I was
hungry, and everything tasted wonderful, but I had a host of worries nagging at
me. How could someone as ordinary as me be a telepath? What work would I be
doing? Why did I need a unit full of people to help me with it?