You were unemployed in '25 and the Benefits Office put you on an Employment: Special Projects training scheme in a former agricultural college in Kent: endless psychometric tests, cybertraining, subliminal audiovisual inputs, sleep learning, EEG scans and semi-military discipline. Your class knew that some candidates would be selected for higher level training but did not know for what. Because of the continuing emergency, security was tight.
The psychological side-effects were intense. Complete strangers became close friends very quickly but there were also inexplicable polarizations. The sounds of the discos that you did not attend seemed to echo in your room. The Happy Clappers and Stampers met in the room above yours. You heard, almost felt, their initiation ceremonies and conversion experiences, then something else, a warning, like a still small voice: Leave now before the next scan.
While signing for your weekend pass, you knew exactly what the uniformed perimeter guard thought of you as he looked you up and down: These unemployable dissident intellectuals!
In London, you went underground and contacted what was left of the Organization. They faked your ID and helped you to fly to Kapustin Yar where the Russian ESP program is located, where I, the first Russian telepath, wait.
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