5 B
Section 5 B. Gabriel was looking at the low-profile sign at the entrance of the building. He was entering Section 5 B, the famous "school of geniuses" as it was known. In the morning, suddenly, men had come to pick him up from his classroom. They had spoken with the teacher in a low voice before taking Gabriel by the arm, without a word. Gabriel had been taken away like that, without an explanation. He had just had time to catch the gaze of one or two classmates, just as surprised as he was. He didn't react any more than that. The incubator taught him to obey, to bend to the wishes of the management, the supervisors, the teachers. The incubator prepared the children to become what they were expected to become. Recalcitrant individuals were removed or placed on medication to make them obey.
Since the beginning of his schooling, a few weeks after his birth, Gabriel had heard of three types of schools:
the school for the elite, the school for children whose parents could pay for the increase in physical and mental capacities;
the school for normal people, from which he came;
and the "school of geniuses" where the naturally gifted were sent.
In the incubator of Le Merlan's school, few children were sent to this section. And they were never seen to return.
The three schools were strictly separated. The children of the elite were educated separately, in the southern districts, above the Calanques de Cassis, in airy and sunny properties with large spaces full of trees. The improvement of intellectual and physical abilities was a long medical process. The children were tested, monitored, accompanied and optimized throughout their childhood and adolescence before entering higher education that would prepare them to become diplomats, engineers, senior executives of multinational companies. Among these children, some did not have the basic intellectual capacities or the minimum physical abilities to hope to become elite citizens. But they nevertheless remained in specialized classes where the conditions of supervision were comfortable and considerate. Elite adults with disabilities remained privileged.
Gabriel, like the mass of other students in the standard school, knew more or less what was going on in the elite schools through the kids who were demoted to the standard school, either because their parents could no longer afford the trans-human school or because their families were being punished for political or disciplinary reasons.
The children of punished families did not say anything because they were drugged and segregated. It was almost impossible to talk with them, even when they were not unconscious and sleeping. They never stayed very long anyway. They disappeared, no one knew what happened to them.
The children of impoverished parents were left to their own devices, free to move around as much as one could in the prison incubators. They told of school restaurants where the children of the elite were offered dishes unknown to the rest of the population. They described airy classrooms, colors on the walls, parks, and a very friendly teaching staff that provided fun and comprehensive classes. The ruling class was pampered since childhood. These demoted children were often deeply depressed, taller than average, without major health problems. They imposed them on the children of the standard school, subjugated by their intelligence and constructed reasoning. But they were depressed because of their material and social decline and could not stand the miserable decor, the bullying of teachers and everything that reminded them that they were now condemned to live a life of slavery, the same human larvae they had learned to despise. Most of them committed suicide after a few months. Suicide was quite common in the population, no one paid any attention to it.
Gabriel's father and mother would tell, when Gabriel spent the vacations with them, how distant, cold, contemptuous the directors were.
Gabriel's father and mother worked at the G 23 production plant in Madrague-Ville, at the bottom of the Crottes neighborhood. Gabriel didn't know much about their work. They worked in these large factories with pale green pissed walls, wearing production workers' uniforms. It was a rare profession. The workers had long since disappeared, replaced by robots. The workers and technicians remained only as controllers or in specific technical trades. Gabriel's parents earned a little better than the rest of the population, reduced to unemployment and universal income. But their standard of living was far behind that of the senior executives who could afford to pay for their children's luxury schools and live in comfortable, air-conditioned hilltop residences.
They had been able, however, to rent an apartment on Avenue de Saint-Louis and escape the hideous dormitory towns of Sainte-Marthe. They also lived in working-class neighborhoods and had no access to any privileges for clothing and food. Gabriel's parents were tired, worn out. They would probably not live to be very old. The average life expectancy was fifty years. They would probably be very proud to learn that their son was assigned to 5B, but they would only learn this in a few months, when their son would be off work for a few hours. 5B was almost a merit-based promotion.
Gabriel had the privilege of coming out of his Whiting incubator and being driven in a private car to his new posting. The men who were coaching him were all silent. He hadn't opened his mouth, used to not being answered.
He had watched the war-destroyed buildings framing the boulevards and expressways along the way. Marseilles was a huge field of ruins. Most of the buildings had burned down. Vegetation had grown in the ripped up courtyards, lifting roof tiles and causing sections of wall dislocated by the bombing to collapse.
After several dozen minutes, punctuated by three stops at checkpoints, they had reached a renovated neighborhood. Gabriel could not see any houses, but the walls were new or repainted. There were trees on the sidewalks. It seemed to Gabriel that he had seen a sign with "Allauch" written on it, very faded. There was a hill on the left and across the road there were pavilions lost in the pines. It was pretty. We had to pass a new checkpoint to enter this area.
The car had entered a private driveway. The driver opened a gate guarded by several men before reaching a flat area where the car parked. The men took Gabriel to the building. he had time to see some trees and a concrete building with red bricks. he had time to decipher the words: "Electricity from the Mediterranean Coast" written in capital letters on the fa?ade which drew arcs around the windows. Gabriel had never seen such a beautiful building in his life. Could it be possible that he was considered a member of the elite, was it an unhoped-for promotion?
Upon entering the building, he was taken to the end of a long corridor. He could see laboratories on either side. An open door allowed him to see two boys lying on beds with electrodes on their temples and people in white coats working around them.
He was brought into a rather modest office, but lit by a large bay window. A man and a woman were seated. They motioned for him to come in and sit down in front of them.
The woman said, "Hello Gabriel, you are here because you have natural abilities that we are interested in. Your last aptitude test showed that you have brilliant results. Professor Steinman and I are working on the process of increasing cognitive abilities.
We bring you here to study your brain, to test the reasons why you function so well. You are now going to be part of this center. There is a team of researchers here who will work with you. "The woman didn't smile. She had kept a neutral tone.
The man next to her, Professor Steinman, had only looked up twice. Gabriel had met an empty look. The man did not look at him as a human, but as a guinea pig.
Gabriel had a bad feeling. The man didn't mean any good to him. Gabriel was used to the indifference of the incubator staff. But sometimes there were moments of inattention, jokes between colleagues, the smile of a cleaning lady.
The atmosphere here was cold. She seemed to hear crying and screaming. What were we going to do to her? But there was nothing he could do. The men on duty were probably waiting in the corridor. So he waited, looking at the floor.
"Do you have a question? "He thought quickly, he had to get a clue.
-Yes, when do I have class?
- Uh, that, I don't know... Uh, your guard, your instructor will have to tell you... Well, thank you, you can go out.
They hadn't planned to give him lessons, not even the semblance of an incubator. He had to find a way out of there. "I'm just... Ma'am, I have to tell you that I cheated... On the test."
-What, what are you saying?
-Yes, I saw the corrections. I memorized them. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't know it was...
-But how? How could you? The protocols are strict, you couldn't!
Gabriel kept his eyes downcast, but he could see the glances exchanged between the two adults facing him.
The man stood up suddenly, without a word. His energy was terrible, he could have killed. The woman shouted, "But do you realize what you have done? Do you think we have time to waste?"
Gabriel kept his eyes downcast. He was waiting for the moment, the only moment that would give him a chance.
Out of it, the woman got up and went out after the man. Gabriel had spotted that the window was opening from the inside. He jumped on the glass, opened it and went to the other side. He landed on the ground and ran toward the Garlaban Hill, toward the trees he had seen from the office.
Running through the hills, he spent the night in the Garlaban. Of course, he noticed that the drones of the territory surveillance were not looking for him. It was strange that they weren't looking for a runaway child.
Gabriel thought the case was strange. As a curious child, he had been interested in genetic enhancement. The process wasn't that simple, there were failures, suicidal kids, psychopaths.
What kind of experiments did he want to do on gifted people like him? How do you study the brain function of a living being? Did they cut out brain slices from the subject? We altered perceptions, compared treatments scientifically with test samples? Why were there no classes, as in any incubator? Were the kids sacrificed? Why keep a low profile on "school for geniuses"? Why so many secrets?
Professor Steinman's personality was disturbing. What could a guy like that do to children as experiments?
In short, the story alerted Gabriel. There was no question of going back to Professor Steinman's building.
But there was also no question of returning to the Whiting incubator? What to do?
It was therefore a rather brilliant analytical mind, given his young age, which was recovered the next day, thirsty and exhausted in the hills of Garlaban. Dr. Steinman's team had never lost track of the boy, who had been sprayed as soon as he left the incubator with a nanotechnical liquid to locate him on the GPS. They analyzed his reactions upon his arrival in Allauch and the escape strategies he employed before taking him back to the laboratory and conducting experiments on him that were so stressful that he died after nine days.
There was never any scandal linked to Professor Steinman's experiments. They were approved in high places and were agreed upon by the privileged classes where there was no room for empathy. Moreover, the chip implants in the brains of the low-level population made even words of reaction or indignation completely obsolete.