Time: 2:11 p.m. | Location: South Facility Annex, Ossuary Complex | Classification: Tier-2 Entry Candidates
The corridor smelled faintly of alcohol wipes and old wiring — sterile, but tired, like the building itself was holding its breath.
Dr. Efram Odell’s voice echoed down the observation wing, bouncing off dull concrete as he marched ahead, one hand gripping a clipboard, the other gesturing with the energy of a man who loved his own conclusions.
“You see, Evelyn, behavioral regression only manifests in the unprimed groups. That’s why the Ossuary sorts them here first — exposure timing is everything. Their resistance isn’t just biochemical — it’s philosophical.”
Evelyn Baeriss walked briskly beside him, her pace calculated to match his stride. Seventeen. Impeccably dressed. Dark hair pulled back into a neat ponytail. Glasses perched low on her nose. A stylus behind one ear. A clipboard hugged to her chest with surgical neatness.
She didn’t look at Efram. She was absorbing everything, mentally tallying the data.
“Observation Wing: South Annex. Too much natural light for the Ossuary. Inefficient.”
The ruckus below drew her attention, giving her pause to observe the children.
The observation wing opened to a sunlit atrium below, where a dozen pre-screened test subjects clustered in loose groups. Ages ranged from eight to twelve. Some sat on stools. Others paced or fidgeted or huddled in anxious circles. One was trying to eat a zip tie.
“This,” Efram continued, sweeping his stylus like a conductor’s baton, “is a pre-sorting cluster. Physical baseline aligned, cognitive thresholds under review. We’re looking for neural flexibility under supervised irregularity. Adaptive capacity. Conditioning markers. You understand?”
“I see,” Evelyn replied calmly.
She did not.
Efram saw potential clusters, biometric data points, thresholds to be logged.
Evelyn saw a mess.
Children darting between half-assembled stations. One boy appeared to be negotiating terms with a bench. A girl stood nose-to-bark with a tree, delivering what sounded like a closing argument. Another child had knotted both shoelaces into an impressive loop and was now hopping in frustrated spirals, as if motion alone might untangle the laws of physics.
Evelyn watched it all without flinching.
“Disorganized stimuli response,” she noted silently. “Poor task separation. No system of conflict resolution. Environmental variables: trees, benches, self-inflicted entrapment.”
She tilted her head, mentally adjusting half a dozen ways the scenario could be restructured with color-coded lanes, staggered pairing intervals, and maybe duct tape.
It was chaos.
Messy. Loud. Unstructured.
Wasted time.
Evelyn adjusted her glasses, the gesture more habit than need. Her clipboard stayed untouched, but inside, categories were forming — behaviors, patterns, flaws in the system — sorted, tagged, and quietly judged.
“Station rotation should be color-coded. No random paths. One child per task. Sensory rooms offset by social pairs. Bench girl needs structure. Zip tie boy needs supervision. All of this could be… better.”
She didn’t frown. She didn’t sigh.
She just calculated.
Because efficiency mattered. And this current chaos wasn’t it.
And then —
She saw her.
A girl, maybe ten. Alone — but not lost. Sitting still on the far edge of a concrete ledge as if the world had grown around her. Dark skin, sunlight catching her braids like wires strung in gold. A worn book in her lap. No fidgeting. No tapping. Just… stillness.
Evelyn adjusted her glasses, though they hadn’t slipped. The clipboard in her arms remained blank, but her brain was already halfway through a mental flowchart titled “How to Improve Child Containment Protocols Without Causing a Riot.”
From beside her, Efram cast a glance her way, lips twitching with disapproval.
“You could try writing this down,” he muttered, gesturing vaguely toward her empty clipboard.
“I will,” Evelyn replied, without looking at him.
Her eyes remained on the girl.
From a distance, her eyes looked brown... with a glint of something else.
Evelyn stopped walking.
“Keep up,” Efram snapped. “We’ve got rotation in twenty minutes and I want your initial impressions on the — ”
“I’ll catch up,” Evelyn said quietly.
She turned and stepped off the walkway, down the sloped ramp toward the atrium floor.
“For the love of — ” Efram muttered behind her.
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The floor was in disarray. Children bouncing between stations. No uniforms. No order. Just the illusion of play covering battery scans and stress probes. Evelyn wove through the chaos like it wasn’t even there — arms tucked behind her back, clipboard in hand, her stride measured and smooth. Children darted past, bins clattered, shouts rang out — but she leaned into each turn with effortless grace, like a longboarder tracing a perfect line through a broken road. Nothing touched her. Nothing broke her focus. She moved like a ghost, eyes fixed on her target.
She approached the girl, softly like a whisper.
Time: 2:18 p.m. | Location: Child Cluster | Subject: Aerin
Kneeling down to her level, clipboard balanced against one knee, Evelyn tilted her head slightly, studying the girl with quiet curiosity.
“Hi,” she said gently. “What’s your name?”
The girl looked up. Her gaze met Evelyn’s — amber into near-black.
Evelyn’s eyes were so dark they could’ve been mistaken for pupils, wide and unreadable unless you looked too long.
Calm. Composed. Watching everything.
The girl’s, on the other hand…
Not brown.
Golden amber.
Like melted brass stirred with something alive.
“Aerin,” the girl said, voice soft but sure.
Evelyn smiled — genuine, a little tilted, like it came from somewhere deeper than politeness.
“I’m Evelyn.”
A pause stretched between them. The world went quiet for a breath.
“Do you always sit like this when it’s noisy?”
Aerin blinked. “Sometimes.”
“Does it help?” Evelyn asked, as if the question was obvious.
The girl gave a little shrug. “It makes the noise feel smaller.”
As if summoned by her words, a sudden shout split the air — two boys crashing into each other near a loose obstacle ring. A bin overturned with a clatter, scattering blocks and panic. Children shrieked. A third boy joined in, chasing the others toward the far bench.
The entire atrium stirred with movement.
Aerin didn’t.
Her eyes shifted, calm and deliberate, tracking the chaos as if watching it through glass. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t tighten. Just… watched.
And Evelyn watched her.
Still crouched. Still steady. Her clipboard forgotten against one knee.
It wasn’t apathy.
It was control.
“What’s the book?” Evelyn asked, voice unchanged.
Aerin held it up without a word. A worn children’s reader — half the pages dog-eared.
“Do you ever read the last page first?”
The girl shook her head. “That ruins it.”
Another nod. Another mental note.
Behind her, Efram’s voice rose — sharp, irritated. “Evelyn! Now!”
She stood slowly, still watching Aerin.
“Bye, Aerin,” she said softly, warmly. Not like someone walking away from a test subject.
Like someone walking away from a mystery she wanted to return to.
Aerin didn’t answer.
But she smiled.
Evelyn turned. Her clipboard still blank. Her mind absorbing everything.
“Miss Baeriss — now.”
Time: 2:22 p.m. | Location: Annex Classroom 4B
The lab smelled like chalk, copper, and a projector bulb that had been left on too long.
Efram was already writing — one hand sketching a complex inheritance map across the glass wall, the other gesturing in fluid arcs of intellectual superiority.
“ — now if we assume the phenotypic split emerges post-catalyst,” he was saying, “you’ll note that generation markers tend to express along secondary axis pairs, not in opposition, regardless of stress induction…”
Evelyn Baeriss was not watching him.
She was watching the lamp.
A mounted magnifying lens on a pivoting arm. Clean design. Adjustable tension. Precision glide. It hummed faintly when moved — barely audible, but she caught it. A friction pinch in the elbow joint. Not a flaw, exactly. Just a missed opportunity.
She nudged the arm sideways. Click. Tilt. Recoil. She tested the spring return with a finger, adjusted the lens focus to watch the sharp ring of clarity narrow like an iris. Almost perfect. Almost.
Her pencil danced in the margins:
Friction-heavy elbow. Replace bearings.
Extend secondary axis?
Surgical crossover potential: high.
Missing: tension lock for vertical axis.
Behind her, Efram continued — his voice rising with conviction, unaware he’d already lost her.
“ — and that’s why the Y-series modifications failed in trial seven. Not due to improper calibration, as some less educated personnel claimed, but because they neglected to account for tertiary ferric variance in subjects with active neural threading — ”
“Miss Baeriss,” he snapped suddenly, spinning from the board like a stage magician short on patience. “Am I boring you?”
Evelyn blinked.
Then looked up — almost surprised to find him still there.
“No,” she said plainly. “You were just explaining the tertiary variances in neural-threaded subjects and misattributing the trial failure to calibration error when it was actually a data mapping oversight — specifically the exclusion of ferric bleed metrics in the second wave.”
Efram opened his mouth. Closed it.
Evelyn kept going.
“Also,” she added, tapping the lamp, “this elbow joint is misaligned. The rotation axis is friction-heavy. That’s what’s causing the drift when you reposition it. If you extend the arm and add a tension lock here” — she pointed — “you could cross-apply it for surgical usage, or at least reduce fatigue in microscope studies.”
A beat of silence.
Then she offered a polite blink, as if she hadn’t just delivered an anatomical autopsy on his lecture and his favorite equipment.
Efram stared at her.
“…Are you — are you even taking notes?”
Evelyn flipped her page.
The margins were full.
“So many,” she said.
Efram set the stylus down with a sharp clack. His jaw twitched.
“You may be clever, Miss Baeriss, but clever is not the same as qualified. Focus less on lamps and more on the discipline if you intend to stay in this program.”
“Understood,” she replied evenly.
Efram returned to the board, muttering something about wasted potential and institutional patience as he picked up the stylus and resumed his monologue.
Behind him, Evelyn adjusted the lamp again — just slightly — testing its range. The hum was still there. So was the drift.
She scribbled another line in the margin:
Still not centered.
And kept listening.
Just… not to him.
001–Alpha: Initial Viability Notes / Secondary Assessment Begins — 2:29 p.m.
She wrote without urgency. Without flourish.
Like cataloging a memory she’d already reviewed.
Subject: 001–Alpha
Name: Aerin
Approx. Age: 10
Observation Start Time: 2:18 p.m.
Initial Note:
- Calm under scrutiny.
- Direct eye contact.
- Minimal environmental reaction.
- Low noise tolerance → high internal processing.
- Reads linearly. Resists shortcuts.
- Stable under pressure.
Incident Note:
- Atrium disturbance during observation.
- Two subjects engaged in unprovoked aggression.
- No response from Aerin beyond visual tracking.
- Emotional state unaffected.
- Maintained posture. No startle reflex.
Eye Color: Amber-gold hybrid. Not standard. Possibly reactive.
Interaction: Friendly. Voluntary. No anxiety response.
Response to Approach: Maintained stillness. Allowed proximity.
Behavioral Potential: High
Genetic Profile: Pending
Recommendation:
Flag for priority compatibility testing.
Early-stage tracking advised.
Evelyn circled the name again.
Then smiled.
A small, private smile — like a child who’d found something shiny and wasn’t quite ready to share it yet.
She flipped the page. Continued writing.
Ferric Viability: Favorable
Designation Proposal: Alpha Series Candidate — 001
Final Note (non-subject):
Lamp mechanics adaptable for suspended precision work.
Range good. Needs vertical lock.
Potential application: Long-term solo ops, fixed-station procedures.
Above her, the magnifying lamp clicked softly as it pivoted back into place.
Evelyn didn’t look up.
She was still writing.
She knew better than to get attached.
And wrote the name again anyway.
~End~