The Lorel Experiment (Prequel to the Okal Rel Saga)

First Generation

Amanda O'Reilly Lorel walked out of school on a cloud. Peter Forest thought she was pretty and at the age of eleven she had won admittance into the first year of bioengineering at Harvard. She wasn't sure which she was happiest about. The only problem was how she was going to sustain Peter's interest when he lived in Seattle and Harvard was on the east coast. No problem had ever seemed as difficult.

The Harvard acceptance had been announced at assembly before class broke up for the summer. Three girls Amanda was friendly with broke away from a clutch of kids talking in whispers at the corner of the school yard to come offer their congratulations.

"So," one of the girls said shyly, scuffling her feet on the hard packed dirt of the playground. "Guess you'll be skipping high school."

"No lockers," said a second friend.

"No school dances," said the last one, with a giggle.

For a moment, Amanda thought that they were mocking her, but their mildly puzzled faces showed no malice and she couldn't begrudge them the experiences she would be skipping. She could not explain how excited she was, either. Damien Lorel-Fox himself was at Harvard, and already a full professor although he was only four years older than her. There were other so-called Lorels at Harvard, as well. She wanted to take her place alongside other children of Self-Evolved Limited to help them defend the world from the crop of less responsibly enhanced individuals, produced by rival companies, who were generating a lot of the bad feelings through their selfish behavior. Feelings bad enough to raise echoes in the corners of her school yard, in Seattle.

One of the students in the gossip cluster raised his head to stare at her where she stood making her farewells. Amanda smiled back. She felt so sorry for ordinary people. It helped her forgive them for their ignorance.

Amanda walked home daydreaming cheerfully about Peter, a high school student she met at last year's science fair. At first he had mistaken her for another entrant, which injured her pride. Naturally, she was a judge. She had imagined everyone in Seattle knew about Amanda O'Reilly Lorel, child prodigy, and personable super child. At least that was how she had been summarized in a news item that her mother had printed and clipped to the fridge door at home. It had always seemed a good thing, when she was little, and she was kind enough to take care that she competed in a class by herself, not against other children. Things were getting more complicated now. But not with Peter. Peter seemed pleased, and impressed, about who she was.

Peter Forest looked Asian, with a pair of liquid brown eyes so dark they were almost black. She liked his thoughtful good manners and his warm, dry skin just a shade darker than her own. Peter played the clarinet in a band that won state wide competitions, and had relatives in Vancouver who sometimes invited him up to ski at Whistler. Peter's relatives were doctors. Amanda believed they would be smart enough to understand the difference between other enhanced children and the ones of the Lorel Experiment, that people had taken to calling either "Lorels" or "Foxes" depending on whether it was Jean Fox or her French husband who they resented most. Some lame brains even drew foxy faces on the inner doors of bathroom stalls at school, or sent nasty little animated jokes to her computer workstation, showing a fox evolving into Canis Lorelite, a fictitious species of fox that ate regular foxes and excreted bricks of gold. Amanda could not imagine Peter or his parents harboring a mindless prejudice, and her fondest hope for the summer holidays was to be invited up to Whistler to visit with Peter's Canadian relatives, whether or not there was any snow for skiing at that time of year. Being very well read in the sciences, she wondered whether it made sense to be so serious about a boy when she was only eleven years old, but she had set her heart on marrying Peter and he had told her that he felt the same way. They just had to wait for her to grow up.