Page 9 of Gifted & Talented

“What’s that?” came a newly panicked voice some rows ahead of Eilidh. “Look outside, whatarethose?”

The horde, such as it was, became identifiable, visible suddenly as if to finally find the subject in a Magic Eye painting with your eyes half-closed. First the suggestion of an image, then the actual presence. Individual, first, then in groups. Each one taking shape like a pearl of water dropped perilously into an empty metal bowl.

Not quite a drip—more like sharp stabs of parental disapproval.

Tsk.

Tsk.

Tsk.

“Oh my god,” came the voice of a teenage girl. “Oh my god, Mom, are thosebugs?”

Disapproval became rage, became the heightening sense of violence. No longer a tsk, now a smack. Smack. How dare you? Smack. Look what horrors you’ve wrought! Smack. The smack of an open hand for now, but how much longer? How soon before it was a closed fist, a shattered glass bottle, the schlick of a disabled safety? Such was the growing sensation, the tremulent dread, the pulsating fear.

Faster and faster, smacksmacksmacksmack—

Tiny bodies thwapped against the windows of the plane like skyward stones, like countless writhing opals. Their bellies wriggled fleshily; like a billion exposed, swallowing throats. They crushed against the glass—so thick was the swarm that each one seemed to be suffocating, undulating with a mix of hunger for entry and desperation for release.

The woman with the rosary let out a shriek, shout-whispering prayers with her head over her beads.

“It’s aplague of locusts,” gasped the weeping man to the mother of the baby.

Inside an eternity that must have been moments—Eilidh had counted eighty-eight pounding heartbeats; eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one—the purulent brightness had become disfigured by the presence of the plague, a different sort of darkness now enshrouding the unlucky plane. The hum of wings was unavoidable, deafening. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. One hundred.

Some bugs had been pulverized into the panes by the force of their own swarm, carcasses oozing thickly across the glass. A hundred and four. A hundred and five. Splintered wings and contorted hairline legs punctuated slathered softshell underbellies. A hundred and ten. A hundred eleven. Inside the plane, the dim sterility of emergency lighting flashed soullessly, a quiet signal for the end of days.

Abruptly, Eilidh lost count of her own pulse, succumbing to the wilds of arrhythmia. Her seatmate had finally closed the window, not that it mattered anymore. They could still hear the scratch and the crawl, the buzz of wings and the pelting of bodies, like the sound of the word infestation. The way the word pestilence felt on the tongue. Someday, assuming theysurvived this particular plague, it would hail and they would all sayHuh, sounds like locusts,all of them now one step closer to knowing how it ends.

“Fuck,” Eilidh whispered to nobody.

The thing in her chest seemed to chuckle, licking its lips, sated for the time being. Promises, promises. In Eilidh’s head she heard Wagner, Beethoven, the beauty of notes played by hate. Darkness you could taste, a chord you’re meant to suffer. Like if a miracle were ugly, or fate could only sing a grisly song.

A Brief Note from God

Here’s what you need to know about the Wren family: Aside from being assholes, they’re also fucking frauds.

And I don’t say that from a place of bias. I’m what the experts call a voice of God narration (God for short—who has the time for honorifics?) and I’m mostly here to observe and make the occasional comment as related to your understanding of the plot. So, like I said, the first thing to know about the Almighty House of Wren is that it’s a crumbling mess of conflict and lies, with the general obfuscation of reality as a treat.

Take, for example, the name Wren, which suggests an Anglo-Saxon origin, perhaps even a veritable and renowned one. False. Both sides of the family involve a wide variety of helter-skelter refuge-seeking immigrants concealed behind more dignified origins—Singaporean and Malaysian success stories emphasized on one side, conveniently making no public reference to the hodgepodge of Filipino and Cambodian mixed in, and on the other, a sprinkle of Old New York Dutch to narratively overshadow the Russian Jewish roots; altogether, a genetic smoothing tool that was not so much a lie as it was a contour light for a prettier, more dignified picture. (True, some might argue that it’s better to be a thirsty charlatan bitch than an actual blue-blooded colonizer, to which I say—yeah, sure, whatever. I am not an interventionist voice of God.)

The things you should know about the world, assuming you don’t already know them, mostly have to do with the magitech industry, the basis of which is Magic—the elegant architectural system of transporting electromagnetic waves as trademarked by one Upland M. Carmichael as of approximately 1890, shortly after Nikola Tesla bounced from Edison Machine Works. (I know you don’t care about any of this, but what can I say? One hobbyist to another, I get a little overexcited when it comes to the subject of creation.) Anyway, the long and short of it is that MagicTMis essentially thechanneling of unusually potent electromagnetic waves en masse—a primitive form of supercomputing, essentially, and not unlike the work of Tesla’s induction motor—allowing open communication where there would otherwise be one-way traffic.

Normal electromagnetic waves send energy from one place to another, but thanks to the infrastructure of Magic, information can be sent, received,andinterpreted, and at extraordinary speed, too. You can see why someone would call it magic, though despite all its eventual applications, its patent simply sat dormant for multiple decades, waiting for someone more enterprising and less dorky to put it to meaningful use.

Which leads us, with some hops, skips, and jumps, to Wrenfare Magitech, the brainchild of the late Thayer Wren—may he rest in, you know, peace.

From my position of sublime omniscience, Thayer was both myth and man, almost interchangeably. Impressive in his quest for innovation, visionary in his sense of progress, but also, fortunate by circumstance, as all billionaires ultimately are. Had he never met his late cofounder, Marike Fransson, or the financier Merritt Foster, who would ultimately prove Thayer’s most lethal betrayer until his daughter Meredith took the crown—had Thayer simply been born to a village with no computer or literacy—he would not have been the Thayer Wren who was both adored and despised, nor the Thayer Wren who drove all three of his children to varying extremes of success and, unavoidably, madness. (More on that later. I promised you enlightenment on the House of Wren, and I’m nothing if not divinely reliable.)

While the telecommunications systems underpinning today’s technomancy began in the early twentieth century, and the development of Magic as a harnessable source of electromagnetic waves even earlier than that, it was actually war that produced the necessary conditions for the Wren children. Firstly, in that the need for instant, encrypted, far-reaching intelligence systems around the Second World War led to an unprecedented outpouring of military spending into the formerly dormant use of Magic as a power source for a new, rapid communications network—such that by the time Thayer Wren was of an age to reasonably connect two dots and implement the first viable deep neural network, the infrastructure for a Magic-based tech company was already in place. More efficient superconductors were already in development, quantum computing was already ideologically in play, and all that remained was an ability to produce parallel, complete internets running on individual devices—all sharing and informing each other to adapt by the billions every nanosecond—at an appreciable scale.

Genius, right? But also, importantly, inevitable.

The second war-related condition leading to a generation of tiny geniuses involved Persephone Liang, the mother of Meredith, Arthur, and Eilidh Wren, and the daughter of two luxury hoteliers who technically made the early part of their wealth in pharmaceuticals. It was Persephone’s father’s father who invented an alternative to penicillin, an extremely lucrative product that launched one of the most prominent pharmaceutical chains throughout emerging Asian markets. After sending Persephone to the finest Western boarding schools and impressing upon her the significance of an Oxbridge degree and general upper crust acceptance, the Liangs’ wonderfully clever and breathtakingly attractive daughter (and the trust fund she had newly aged into) eventually found her way to a college dropout with long hair and a cloying tendency to wax poetic about the qubit, prompting both her parents to die spontaneously of shame.

But Persephone was cleverer than she seemed, depending on whether it is clever to throw your own fortune and accomplishments into the support of a man whose ambitions bordered on zealotry. Because yes, knowing what you now know, perhaps it doesn’t look so problematic to choose the future CEO of Wrenfare over a life of predictable sameness (even if that sameness looks very suspiciously like creature comforts in other, more flattering lights). At the time Persephone Liang met Thayer Wren, she was in dire need of inspiration; of something Persephone called motion that other people might call spontaneity, or perhaps a hypomanic episode.

As for Thayer, he had been dragged to London, having been told by various industry mentors—most notably Merritt Foster, then a young Harvard graduate whose spare $250,000 would provide the first angel investment for Wrenfare and eventually yield the fortune to cofound rival magitech giant Tyche Inc. after Foster and Thayer publicly cut ties—that he might find investors there. Thayer, the father of both magitech and the three assholes in this book, was three years Persephone’s junior, and had recently dropped out of Stanford University with an idea so consuming he could no longer focus on the drudgery of his studies, particularly not his calculus prerequisite or the asinine general education requirements (both of which he’d failed). Thayer had a mind that needed to work quickly, to be constantly engagedwith a single complex, ever-changing, Sisyphean-seeming but ultimately conquerable toy.

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