Twenty-one years ago

After some doctors poked and prodded him, the boy was assigned the number eleven. This initially struck him as odd since there were fifteen kids in the program when he arrived, and he was the newest. However, once he learned that there was a kid called Seventeen, but no one called Fifteen or Sixteen, he figured something had happened to the people who originally had those numbers. Probably something permanent.

The children, or candidates as they were called by everyone who worked for the Program, lived in a single steel room lined with bunk beds. It sat toward the west side of the massive complex that housed the Program. Eleven wasn’t sure where in the country they were or if they were still in America at all. They had flown for what seemed like a long time in a private jet and then been driven in the back of a limo with windows he couldn’t see through. The landscape beyond the complex was rocky and barren, but Eleven didn’t know how long it would take to fly out of the country or how the countryside might look if they had.

A man led Eleven to the bunk room and told him he would begin training the next day. Then he left him there. None of the other candidates were there, so Eleven took what appeared to be an empty bunk and reclined to think about what the heck was happening to him.

The man called Oliver had told Eleven about the Program on their way there. He had spoken of the Program’s founding, of how someone with more ideals than sense had suggested that what the world needed was a real-life superhero, and of how someone with substantially more pragmatism had seen the wisdom in creating a multinational group of anonymous men and women who could operate in tumultuous regions without starting wars. He had told Eleven that he would be training his body and mind for the next decade and, if he survived, he would have to pass a series of tests to become one of the world’s first superheroes.

Eleven took a nearby bunk and relaxed, thinking on the weirdness of the day and his future. He found he liked the idea of being a superhero, and he dimly felt anticipation for the day ahead. Everything he felt was dim; it always was. He experienced the full range of human emotions, or at least he assumed he did, but it was like someone had turned the volume down on his feelings. When he put Francis in the hospital, he hadn’t snapped with anger. It had been more pragmatic than that. He had realized that Francis wouldn’t stop tormenting him without a good reason and had provided that reason. He figured the consequences, given his age, wouldn’t be as bad as constantly going without pudding and getting pushed over every other day, which was getting seriously annoying. He didn’t mean to put him in the hospital exactly, that was something of an accident, but he didn’t know how to win a fight with a kid who was bigger and stronger than him except to strike immediately and with all the ferocity he could bring to bear. Eventually, lying on his bunk, Eleven dozed off.

He was awoken by being thrown off the bed and onto the floor. His face hit the ground and he bit his tongue. He tasted blood, and the steel floor was cold against his cheek.

“That’s my bunk,” said a tall boy with blonde hair, staring down at him with contempt.

“Sorry,” Eleven muttered. He picked himself up and moved down a row of three bunks filled with boys who were unconvincingly pretending to read but were actually watching the altercation. He took the first empty bunk and lay down on his side facing away.

The blonde boy was there.

“That’s my bunk too,” he said, a small smile on his face.

Eleven got out of the bunk. He had only just gotten rid of Francis. He didn’t need another boy tormenting him, especially if it meant he wasn’t going to get any sleep.

Eleven went for the eyes. He struck out and the blonde boy’s hand came up to block, but it had been a feint and Eleven kicked at the taller boy’s kneecap.

The blonde boy moved his leg and the kick became a glancing blow, then his fist connected with Eleven’s jaw. Eleven stumbled, the boy’s foot hooked his leg and Eleven went down.

Stronger, faster. This isn’t a fight I can win, Eleven thought. Then his head hit the ground for the second time in a minute.

“You sleep on the floor tonight,” the blonde boy said. “If you try to take a bunk, I’ll break your arm. Understand?”

Eleven said nothing.

The boy drove a kick into his side.

“Understand?” he repeated.

“I understand.”

Eleven spent the night there. Cold steel for a bed and his arm for a pillow. A small part of him was furious, humiliated, and aching for revenge. But it was only a small part. Eleven couldn’t beat the other boy in a straight fight, that much was clear. He could strike back in some other, smaller way. Perhaps he could piss in the boy’s shoes, or procure some food coloring and put it in the boy’s shampoo. But what would any of that accomplish? Either the boy wouldn’t know it was him that did it and would continue to treat him identically, or he would know it was him and retaliate. Eleven got the feeling that the Program’s staff weren’t likely to intervene as long as the boy didn’t kill or cripple him, and maybe not even then. So, the only course of action was to ride out being the new kid. To take whatever abuse the boy dished out. And to wait. Eleven was nothing if not pragmatic.

Eleven never got his chance at revenge. The boy, named Two, died eight months later when Four kicked him in the head during martial arts training and broke his neck. His body was quietly cremated on-site and forgotten soon after.

Eleven woke early the next morning to the piercing sound of an alarm. He lurched to his feet, convinced there was a fire or something, only to be laughed at by the boys nearest him.

“That’s just the morning alarm,” a tall boy with shaggy brown hair said. “You get used to it.”

The others were making their way into a pair of adjoining locker rooms. Eleven followed the boys—who made up the vast majority of the candidates at the Program—into the male locker room, where they were brushing their teeth or getting undressed outside a row of showers.

“Come on,” the boy with the brown hair said, grabbing a toothbrush with ‘Fourteen’ written on the side of it. “We have to be outside for the morning run in fifteen minutes.”

Eleven found a toothbrush with his number on it, scrubbed his teeth vigorously with the particularly foul-tasting toothpaste provided, and then stripped off and got in one of the showers. Some of the other boys were already getting out as he was getting in, so he did his best to clean himself quickly, but he was still the last one out. He pulled on a pair of loose-fitting pants and a t-shirt that sat on a shelf with his number on it. He was still wet from the shower as he hurried after the others, but it couldn’t be helped. He didn’t know where he was supposed to go for this morning run, so his only option was to follow the others. If he took the time to dry himself properly, they would leave him behind. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself on his first day if he could avoid it, that would only make his life more difficult.

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Just getting to the start of the morning run was more exercise than Eleven was used to. It wasn’t that he was particularly unfit, but the compound was so large and the others ran so fast through the seemingly endless corridors that it was all he could do to keep up with the slowest of them.

Eleven made it to the field where the morning run took place and found a man holding a clipboard with a series of stopwatches around his neck. The man took one of the stopwatches and clicked it on. Eleven could see the others in the distance, running clockwise around the massive field. He was already sweating and short of breath, but the clock was apparently running, so Eleven figured he should be too. He set off at a jog to give himself a chance to breathe, but the others were so damn fast. The gap between Eleven and the closest boy was widening every moment. A feeling of hopelessness flickered within him, but it was weak and he smothered it easily. Now that he was here, Eleven found that he wanted to do well. In particular, he wanted to do better than the boy with the blonde hair that had forced him to sleep on the floor.

Eleven felt a grim determination settle into his belly. It wasn’t an emotion, not really; it was simpler than that. He picked up speed.

Eleven rarely saw beauty in things. Whatever was different about his brain that made his emotions feel distant and ephemeral also led to him missing the aesthetic appeal of a sunset or field of wildflowers that seemed so obvious to most people. However, in the case of the field which Eleven and the other candidates ran around every morning, there wasn’t much beauty to see. The field was one of short grass, wet with dew, and worn around the outside from constant use. A high wall with barbed wire running along the top surrounded it, not unlike the kind you might find around a prison. All of this was visible under the weak light of a cloud-covered sun on a gray, chilly morning.

Eleven eventually caught up with the slowest of the other candidates, a large girl that he would learn was named Eight. Eight wasn’t fat—it would be almost impossible to remain fat at the Program—but she looked like she was built to be a lumberjack or a professional linebacker. She was almost a head taller than Eleven and had the broadest shoulders of any child he had ever met. Her limbs looked almost as thick as his torso, and there wasn’t any part of her that couldn’t be described as ‘hefty’.

Eight may have been large, but it was also apparent she was in far better physical shape than Eleven. While she trundled along on trunk-like legs, her simian jaw set and her breath coming in steady puffs, Eleven’s own breath was coming in ragged wheezes, and his legs felt leaden. He could barely keep up with her.

They ran for what seemed like an extremely long time, and were lapped by most of the other candidates, some of them more than once. Eleven stayed on his feet and moving for the whole time, but his pace dropped off to something like a quick jog after a time and Eight left him behind.

After a subjective eternity, the man with the stopwatches blew a whistle, and everyone started heading back inside. Eleven noted a flicker of relief that was quickly dispelled by the realization that he didn’t know where they were supposed to go next, so he would have to keep up with the others or be completely lost. He didn’t even remember how to get back to the bunks. Anger, frustration, and despair all passed through him, but he took no notice of them. He had to run or be left behind, and being left behind was not an option, so he followed the others at a near-sprint, trying to memorize the path they took so he could go at his own pace in the future.

Where they were going, it turned out, was to a small dining hall filled with a long table flanked by two long benches. A woman on one side of the room was standing behind a simple metal counter and serving bowls of muesli. Eleven had never been particularly fond of muesli, but he hadn’t eaten since lunch the previous day and that, combined with the morning’s exercise, left him feeling half-starved. He gratefully—which is to say he felt a brief glimmer of gratitude that passed a moment later—accepted his bowl and began swallowing it down immediately. He ate so quickly that when Two passed by him and slapped the bowl out of his hands, there was barely anything left in it to spill. Which of course, had been the point.

Eleven settled down on a bench seat as far away from Two as he could get. The other candidates seemed to be talking and joking, but they were all speaking a language that Eleven didn’t know.

Japanese? Eleven couldn’t be sure, but he had seen a Japanese ad one time, and it had sounded similar.

Eleven sat and listened. There were multiple conversations going on at once, all in what Eleven assumed was Japanese. There were two candidates who looked like they could have been from Japan, but they were both engaged in the same conversation, so it couldn’t be an issue of trying to be understood. Was everyone trying to exclude him from the conversation? It was possible, but it didn’t seem very likely. If everyone had decided they didn’t like him, then why had Fourteen helped him that morning? Also, while his own emotions might be muted, he had never had trouble reading emotions in others. And he didn’t sense the haughty contempt usually associated with large groups intentionally excluding someone. More likely it was some kind of rule at the Program. Perhaps that meant they were in Japan. Eleven was still considering this when breakfast finished and the others started filing out of the dining hall.

“Eleven,” a man with a small moustache and a brown suit said as Eleven was leaving the room. “You’re to come with me. I’m supposed to get you up to speed on your training. You can call me Jacobs.” He had a slight accent from somewhere in the American South.

“Okay,” Eleven said, unsure of how he should talk to the people here. Jacobs sounded like a last name, but he hadn’t said Mr. Jacobs, so it wasn’t like a teacher at school. In some military movies he had seen, people called each other by their last names. They also called the people in charge sir. Maybe he should be doing that.

“Sir,” he added belatedly.

Jacobs chuckled. “This ain’t the military, kid. We got no sirs here. We got a lot of doctors, a few sensei, even a duchess, but no sirs.”

Eleven didn’t even feel a twinge of embarrassment at being laughed at. That would require a much greater degree of emotional investment in Jacobs’ opinion of him. Instead he simply nodded, followed him down a hallway, and listened to him explain the schedule at the Program.

“Six o’clock wake up, followed by six-fifteen morning run, and then breakfast at seven,” Jacobs said. “But you probably figured that out already. At seven-thirty, you have an hour of that day’s language. Monday it's Mandarin, Tuesday is English, and so on with a different language for each day. Today is Friday, so we would normally be speaking Japanese but, since I’m assuming you don’t speak Japanese?” He looked at Eleven to confirm.

Eleven shook his head.

“Then I’ll be easing you into things,” he continued. “You are meant to speak the language of the day everywhere but the living quarters, but the seven-thirty class is so you can learn new words and all that. I ain’t got time to teach you six languages in the next two weeks, but I’ll teach you enough to get by in the other classes, and the rest you’ll pick up quick enough. You’re young after all. After language, it’s martial arts for an hour and a half. You will need to pick that up fast, so we’re going to start working on that right now. Then at ten there’s two hours of basic knowledge, that’s your math and writing, and that. Can’t have a bunch of illiterate superheroes now, can we?”

He waited a moment for Eleven to respond.

“No,” Eleven said, figuring that’s what he wanted to hear.

“Exactly. So that’s on till midday, then there’s a half-hour break for lunch. At twelve-thirty, there is computing for an hour and a half, followed by psychology, then chemistry, anatomy, engineering, vehicles training, half-hour break for dinner, then weapons training for an hour and a half, and we finish the day at nine. After that, you will have some time to yourself before lights out at ten-thirty. I strongly recommend you use that time for further study. The newest kid before you has been here six months, and the first batch of kids we brought in have been here just over two years, so you got a lot of catching up to do. I’ll do my best to get you there, kid, but you’re going to have to work a lot harder than the others, and they already work damn hard.”

Eleven nodded his understanding, thinking over the schedule Jacobs had just rattled off. He had definitely said ‘vehicles training’. Did that mean he would get to drive a car? He felt a feeble excitement stirring in his chest at that.

“Good,” Jacobs said as they reached a room with thick mats covering the floor. “Now get ready, kid. We’re gonna have ourselves a fight.”