Free Rook by Daniel O'Malley Page B

brought it up in as loving an environment as that sort of place will allow. It was with other children, children who were also strange. Little boys with tusks. Teenage girls who could talk with clouds and get intelligible answers. Some poor youth who possessed a psychic control over flamingos. Speaking as someone who lived at the Estate, I can tell you that it’s not a bad place to grow up, especially if you are different and have abilities beyond the ken of mortal men. But Gestalt did not make it work.
    To begin with, it made very few friends. You may be thinking,
Hey, there were three brothers and a sister, they didn’t need anyone else,
but you’d be wrong. You must always remember that Gestalt is one personwith eight eyes. It’s a common mistake to think of the four as different people. Gestalt takes advantage of that. The bodies have different voices, and somehow it has developed different mannerisms for each body. The bodies don’t move in unison or just sit still in some rigid way unless it decides it wants them to do that. It’s a brilliant actor to the extent that it can make its bodies have an argument or a conversation. So much so that you will forget that there is one mind controlling the puppets.
    The other children at the Estate forgot that Gestalt was one mind. They just thought that the Gestalt siblings were snobs. I know, because I was there. There was only one year when we were both at the Estate, and then Gestalt turned nineteen and graduated. Now, keep in mind that I was a painfully shy nine-year-old, and Gestalt was four stunningly beautiful blonds slated to be the next big thing in the Checquy. And I had a massive crush on one of the brothers—the one who wasn’t a twin. So I watched them, and it was brought home to me that Gestalt was very definitely not a normal person. Not even four slightly peculiar persons. But it was a spectacularly powerful person, and everybody knew it.
    I’ve read Gestalt’s files, and as a student, Gestalt excelled. It had an excellent memory, could think quickly (four brains to draw on, remember), and absorbed the instruction rapidly and easily. The normal education was sucked up by those four heads immediately, and under careful tutelage, it gained a brilliant control of its powers.
    By the time it was nine, Gestalt could control varying combinations of the bodies, could hold multiple conversations at once, and was coordinating bizarre tournaments in which its bodies would fight one another.
    By the time it was twelve, it was demonstrated that Gestalt could be continuously awake by letting one of its bodies sleep whenever the others stayed up. It did this for five months.
    By the time it was fifteen, the bodies had been carefully moved about the globe to investigate the distance that could safely exist among them. It was demonstrated that they could be placed on opposite sides of the planet without ill effect.
    Gestalt graduated from the Estate and immediately went into the field. It earned its Rook status through outstanding operations work. With four bodies, it constituted its own team. During its sixteen years in the field, it achieveda series of seemingly impossible tasks, culminating with the destruction of a 488-year-old vampire who had been secretly controlling the wheat industry for 252 of those years.
    Keep in mind that in an episode that occurred in 1980, it took forty-five soldiers to kill a sixty-four-year-old vampire.
    Gestalt is tough.
    It rose to the rank of Rook five years ago, and I’ve been obliged to work with it on many, many operations. I see it every day, and meet with it every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at nine in the morning. Generally, because of the whole multiple-bodies thing, Gestalt has at least two faces in the field overseeing operations. Normally, a Rook isn’t called out unless there is a particularly large problem, but Gestalt likes to kick arse, and I have to admit that it does a very good job of coordinating things on-site. On