The Games by Ted Kosmatka

time and time again. Einstein used to forget his children in the park. Newton suffered debilitating depressions. Do you know how Gödel died?” Baskov prodded him with his finger again. “Do you?”
    “No.”
    “His death certificate listed inanition as cause. The father of incompleteness couldn’t be bothered to eat. He starved himself to death.
    “You’re not so special, Evan. You’re a story that history has retold many times. People like you rise from the fringes at regular intervals. Outside the cloisters of your respective fields, you’re helpless—like specialized worker ants born only to provide some benefit to the rest of us before your tragic little lives draw to a close, usually in poverty and madness. Tesla and Turing—do you remember how their stories end?”
    Evan kept his face turned away.
    “That your kind keeps rising at all shows some flaw in our species’ template. You’re a sport, a type of sacrificial defect, and it’s my burdento see to it that your sad existence is made use of. I take that burden very seriously, Evan. You believe me, don’t you?”
    Evan said nothing; the finger jabbed him again. He tried to speak then, but his voice gave out.
    “Oh, you have something to say?” Baskov said. “Speak up. I’m listening.” Baskov leaned closer.
    “You,” Evan said, pushing the word out, “are jealous … of us.”
    Baskov’s face went white. His hands fisted. Evan waited for the blow, but it didn’t come.
    “You wanted to be us, didn’t you?” Evan croaked. “As a child, in school. Like Gödel. You studied. But you weren’t smart enough.” Evan smiled.
    After several seconds, Baskov hissed, “I’m going to enjoy this, Evan. I’m going to enjoy making you talk.”
    “Probably you will,” Evan scraped. “But not so much as you think. Because I know. And now you know.”
    There was a strange sound. Then the faraway voices murmured.
    “Tell me why the computer didn’t answer the questions.”
    Evan saw no reason to lie. “Pea,” he said.
    “What the hell is Pea?”
    Evan swallowed again, and his throat clicked. “I wanted to talk with the profile core.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I wanted time alone with him.”
    “With who?”
    “With the profile core. With Pea.”
    “What is a profile core?”
    “I anthropomorphized a redundancy loop in the logic core. It was the one thing that is connected to everything inside. It touches on everything. I named him Pea.”
    “Him?”
    “Yes, the boy.”
    There was a long silence. Baskov’s voice was lower, turned awayfrom Evan, toward someone else in the room: “Will the drugs still work if he is insane?”
    “Not sure,” another voice answered.
    “This is the part I will enjoy, Evan. And the part that comes after.”
    A few seconds later, Evan felt a muffled sting as a needle penetrated his arm.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    S ilas sat alone, looking through the thick glass and into the nursery. He took notes on a clipboard as little Felix romped around in the new containment area.
    Benjamin was the one who originally came up with the suggestion about the cardboard boxes. It was such a simple thing, but the idea had worked better than they could have hoped, turning the sluggish and docile young organism into the shiny black rush of activity that Silas saw before him now. It had just been bored, apparently. Like any youngster, it wanted to play.
    As Silas watched, it busied itself at reducing the boxes to a random scatter of cardboard mulch. It had a talent for disassembly. Its true calling.
    Ever the cladistician, Silas unconsciously continued to assess the organism as it played. As much as he tried, the little thing defied classification. Although it was engineered, there should still be something that gave away the roots of its nature, some trait that would reveal itself and imply that, yes, Felix was a feline derivative, or a simian derivative, or an avian derivative. But Silas was left without this closure, and