Free The Orphan Factory (The Orphan Trilogy, #2) by James Morcan, Lance Morcan Page A

substance.
    He recalled a classified military document Omega had allowed the orphans to read. It had mentioned experiments the US military had conducted using ORME. Apparently, the military had discovered an unexpected but useful side-effect of White Gold: when smothered on vehicles and planes, they became invisible to radar and satellite technologies, and all transmission devices failed to emit signals effectively.
    Although Nine already had the equivalent of a doctorate-level understanding of chemistry, biology and physics, the substance was off the charts and seemed to defy logical laws of science. Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements were in the realm of quantum physics, hyperdimensional theory and some would say the Twilight Zone. He didn’t fully understand it, and neither did the Omega scientists still testing it.
    Nine didn’t care about the exact nature of the powder though. His only interest in White Gold was that it had been observed to exhibit a cloak of invisibility and signals in its presence were corrupted. The military’s report had stated more testing needed to be done, but if the initial experiments were accurate then the substance made anything undetectable to radar. It certainly did not constitute complete evidence, but Nine suddenly felt hopeful that ORME would provide him with a way out of Omega’s maze.
    If he could coat the skin of his forearm in White Gold, he knew he had a chance at getting off-radar, literally. The substance would in theory interfere with the signal broadcast from his implanted microchip, just as it had in the military vehicles and planes. Effectively it would make him invisible to Omega’s vast satellite network.
    He was confident he could borrow some of the powder from Doctor Pedemont’s office. After all, he had successfully borrowed the doctor’s binoculars when he spied on Helen from the tree house.
    As the audacious escape plan crystallized in his mind, Nine found he relaxed all of a sudden. He floated without tension in the warm, saline water. Not even the brutal holographic images of operatives killing just inches from his face troubled him now. 
    For the first time in his in his life, he felt like he was evolving into an individual. It was a healthy, rebellious energy surging up within – the exact opposite to the group consciousness or hive mentality he had experienced since birth.
    An individual was something he was never meant to become. Indeed, it was something he could neverbecome, unless he somehow did the impossible and permanently severed his ties with Omega and the orphanage. Now I’m gonna attempt the impossible . He closed his eyes. I’ll use the skills they taught me and the White Gold they used to nurture me. 
    Nine laughed aloud. It seemed fitting he would be employing everything Omega had given him to escape their clutches.
    #
    Baroque music continued to play through the basement’s speakers later that afternoon as the orphans resumed their studies on couches in a library located slap bang in the middle of the basement. Book shelves took the place of partitions, and each shelf contained scores of books on all manner of subjects.
    Today, a hundred selected books had been placed on a coffee table in front of the orphans. Each orphan had to speed-read every single book. It usually took them only an hour or so to complete such a session. The sound of fluttering pages could be heard throughout the basement as they flipped the pages at a page per second or faster.
    The advanced reading technique that allowed them to mentally process books at this accelerated rate was known as mind photography. It was a method that employed peripheral vision and photographic memory to pick up entire pages at a time. As they did for most practices in the orphanage, the children performed mind photography in uncommon brainwaves for regular wakeful consciousness. In this case it was predominantly gamma waves, and it allowed them to tap into the genius of their