Free The Ninth Orphan by Lance Morcan, James Morcan

complex profession of espionage.
    It was a case of nature and nurture with the orphans. Nature, in that Omega had selected perfect genes for them before their births. Nurture, in that Kentbridge was always pushing them to be the best they could be. As soon as they could walk and talk, he gave them activities designed to open up as many neural pathways in their brains as possible.
    With the help of virtual reality and biofeedback technologies, the orphans were taught how to guide their minds to reach certain brain frequencies – like Alpha, Theta and Delta – at will. The purpose of slipping into these particular frequencies was to allow the right brain to take over, as opposed to the left-brained consciousness dominant in most people. Whenever the orphans needed to access their higher intelligences, they would enter a daydream and simply intuit the answers. That way, they could bypass thinking, and just know . Within the Omega family, intuition was favored over logical thought patterns.
    Wanting his charges to be able to take on various guises, and to become one with the people they were pretending to be, Kentbridge had them study the great character actors of film and theatre. He also taught the orphans the Method style of acting, stemming from Stanislavski’s teachings, as well as traditional British stage techniques incorporating vocal dexterity, body projection, foreign accents and make-up.
    To increase their physical prowess, the orphans were taught the martial art Teleiotes, which was an invention of Kentbridge ’ s. Derived from the Greek word telos , meaning to make perfect and to accomplish, it was a combination of all the Oriental martial arts as well as Western fighting arts like boxing, fencing and wrestling. Kentbridge and the other Omegans considered Teleiotes to be the ultimate martial art.
    Speed reading was another subject in this radical education program. In fact, it wasn’t so much speed reading as mind photography – a technique where the practitioner taps into the brain’s innate photographic memory.
    The orphans were taught how to use their eyes and open their peripheral vision to mentally photograph the page of a book, magazine or newspaper at the rate of a page per second. Then they’d consciously recall every detail as if they’d read the material at normal, everyday reading speed. Tens of thousands of books, on all manner of subjects, were sent to the Pedemont Orphanage to keep up with the children’s prolific reading habits.
    Even at night, their education continued through hypnopædia, or sleep learning. Audio courses played through headphones into their subconscious minds while they slept.
    The purpose of having the orphans study all these diverse fields was not for them to just become geniuses, but to become polymaths – meaning they would be geniuses in a wide variety of fields. Whether they were studying the sciences, languages, international finance, politics, the arts or martial arts, they would not stop until they’d achieved complete mastery of that subject. Kentbridge himself had encyclopedic knowledge about almost everything , and expected nothing less from his orphans.
    In the tradition of Leonardo da Vinci and history’s other great polymaths, the children were taught how to fully understand anything by using an advanced mental technique where they would simply life their minds into comprehension.
    * * *
    In the semi-dark of Isabelle’s dining room, as he’d done a million times before, Nine stared at the ruby he held as if it would help him make sense of his unusual upbringing. It never did. He silently cursed that he was a product of The Pedemont Project, for that’s how he thought of himself – a product, not a person.
    With the pistol still held to his head, more memories came flooding back to him.
    * * *
    Throughout his years of study at the Pedemont Orphanage, Nine was the standout student. He began polymathing at a very young age. The other kids had extraordinary