Free Alex Armstrong: Awakening by Hayes Farley

periodically observed under the guise of some doctor’s visit.
    “But there was a problem. None of these babies ever showed any signs of telekinesis! So now you had a whole bunch of high-level government scientists trying to find a way to induce telekinetic ability. Do you still follow me?” he asked the class, his nasally voice getting higher.
    Alex nodded along with the other students, but he wasn’t really listening. He was still picturing that video of Chris making his toys float all over the room. Was it really that easy? There had to be limits. Weight limits, for sure. Luke Skywalker struggled the first time he tried to lift the X-Wing. It didn’t even look easy for Yoda. Alex was remembering that scene on Dagobah when he realized what was happening and shook his head. What an idiot. His brain was so filled with pop culture knowledge that he was struggling to think rationally. This wasn’t a movie. For all he knew, there could be people out there lifting buildings with their minds. Alex cut his eyes at Eva. He noticed her leaning a little bit toward his chair and it made him smile.
    “So, it was at this time that those government scientists split into two groups. The first kept trying to induce—and some would say exploit—the power of telekinesis in all those children. And then there was the second group of scientists, led by our own Christopher Joyce, who wanted nothing more than to determine the cause of all these babies developing telekinetic potential. Because by all accounts, they should not have found that many babies with the special genetic markers.
    “Let’s talk about Chris’s group first. They went straight to the source, interviewing the moms who gave birth to these special babies. They found—after a lot of digging and detective work—that every one of those moms was on Pregnacal, an over-the-counter migraine medication made specifically for pregnant women. It was the only common thread. Subsequent controlled tests proved this finding. They even determined the odds: If the mother was on Pregnacal, there was a one in twenty thousand chance that the baby would be a latent telekin. Better odds than winning the lottery,” he said, his thin smile returning.
    “But their work wasn’t done. Pregnacal had been on the market for nearly twenty years. So, they started searching through the past, poring through sales records and backlogs of information. Amazingly, they were able to track down almost every mom who took the drug while pregnant. And then they tested their kids,” he added. “They found hundreds of kids under the age of nineteen that had the potential for telekinesis.” He stopped pacing and a thoughtful frown came over his face. “Kind of scary, when you think about it,” he said, to no one in particular.
    “Now, back to that other group of scientists, the ones trying to create a telekin army. They piggy-backed on the findings of Chris’s team and developed a pill with a concentrated dose of Pregnacal’s active ingredients. And it worked! They tested it on a dozen high school students who were known to have the correct genetic code and it worked every time. Each of these kids started showing signs of telekinesis.
    “They had pediatricians across the country ready to prescribe these pills to the kids in their database. But at Chris’s urging, they reconsidered. He told them that instantly creating hundreds of young telekins would be dangerous. Chaotic. Plus, with that many telekins running around, how would the government keep the project a secret?
    “Thankfully, President Joyce can be a persuasive man. He developed the idea of a special college for telekins, and promised that he would create the curriculum, under one condition: that Pregnacal be removed from store shelves, immediately. Chris argued against artificial genetic manipulation because, really, that’s what was happening at this point. He said that not only was it morally wrong, but we didn’t know the long-term