By George Oliver

They throw them in there – never put nor place. Girls and boys like Taylor are thrown in the small, padded rooms by the Guardians. The Guardians follow orders at the Compound: line up the new children after they’ve got off the bus; find the matching number on their clipboard, after turning each child 180° to read the number on their back; and lead the children to whichever part of the Compound they’re assigned to, after waving their batons and prodding the children, particularly the less obedient ones, like Taylor.

          Taylor’s disobedience isn’t always a choice. She’s different to most children: this is the case at the Compound, but also where she arrived from. It’s why she was (un)lucky enough to be assigned to one of the padded rooms. It’s lucky because she gets this room to herself. She can be alone with her thoughts, able to reanimate memories of the Ma and Pa the Extractors stole her from, before throwing her on the bus that brought her to the Guardians. It’s unlucky that she’s in one of the padded rooms because it means she’ll probably be selected.

          The Compound desperately needs the different children, for selection. The parents Taylor involuntarily left behind knew this, hence their laboured efforts to hide and protect her, by changing from job to job and moving from town to town.

          The Compound’s government-run social experiment requires variety. Monetary rewards are offered to anyone willing to send their child to the Compound… or anyone willing to steal someone else’s child, to prevent their own from needing to go.

          The adults who steal other children are thieves in the day, armed with their own batons or worse, prepared to go to whatever lengths necessary to survive – fiscally, in the version of the world Taylor lives in, where, one day, there was a bigger crash than ever before and global money dried up; but also immortally, because everyone knows that if you keep your child, if that’s what you want, you’re maintaining the possibility of a future.

*

Taylor breathes the first bits of private air since she was thrown into the padded room by a Guardian named Ryan, whose possible motivations for doing this now cross her mind. As if her thoughts are mechanically steering events, Ryan’s face reappears behind the slidable hatch covering a windowpane in the door. Taylor makes a mental note of this potential. Could she weaponise her thoughts? Could she tap into this surely accidental superpower and use it to her advantage – to escape the room, then Compound, and return to Ma and Pa? Taylor hears herself thinking and stops. She does what Ma and Pa always tell her to do, crisis or not: not get ahead of herself. She remembers to prioritise the present rather than get excited about projected, impossible futures. She realises that this flawed process – which she’ll soon undo, like she always does, then circle back to – is a symptom of her condition. That unnamed way of being she’s not been supplied a label for but has been acutely aware of for years now, which she’d been raised to privately celebrate but publicly fear. The Extractors have eyes everywhere and they’re specifically searching for children with her condition. Not get ahead of yourself, Taylor reminds herselfvia thoughts, which she’s always considered her most productive method of communication.

          ‘What’s all this?’ Ryan asks, addressing what might have been classifiable as the elephant in the room if he hadn’t opened the conversation with it. For elephants, enough time between learning of their existence and externalising this awareness is required.

          ‘I got bored,’ Taylor answers, her affect as flat as possible, giving Ryan very little, as she’d been trained by Ma and Pa in the rehearsed versions of this set of events that had led to screaming fits and breaking things, which she’s now so grateful for.

          ‘What are they – lists of colours?’ Ryan adds, seeming to perform naivety, because to Taylor it’s clear that these are lists of everything she’s seen on her way from the bus, across the Compound, to her padded room.

          The lists are categorised by colour, with additional subheadings for “GROUND”, “WALLS”, and “CEILINGS.” Taylor’s not sure why the Guardians left a pencil and piece of paper in the padded room.

          Maybe it’s because there are limitations on what she can do with these items. They also need to keep her sane, otherwise she’ll not be much help in the experiment, after selection. But a pencil is all Taylor needs for her ideas to run riot.

          Another Guardian soon joins Taylor and Ryan. He introduces himself as Matt, gives her an empty cardboard box, then taps Ryan on the shoulder as if the gesture’s a coded message. Matt and Ryan leave, closing the padded door and slidable hatch behind them.

          Alone with her box, Taylor does what all children would do – at her age of 12 or otherwise, whether female or male, neurologically challenged or not. She strategically tears sections of box and folds others, creating a spaceship, which she eventually sits in. She closes her eyes and blasts out of the room and into the sky, breaking the earth’s atmosphere.

          The flight of fancy is a brief reprieve. Soon, Matt, Ryan, and various other Guardians will be back in the room to take the pencil, paper, and box away from Taylor. Later, they’ll fill her with drugs and take her to a new room – where she and the other selected children will participate in practice runs for a new civilisation.

          In their fugue states, the children will trial new possibilities for economic existence. Money will be completely reconsidered, redesigned, and redistributed until an agreement is reached on the best way forward, to prevent future global economic crashes. The children will be pawns – buying, selling, buying, selling. But Taylor will derail the experiment, her condition providing her with ammunition of rage and terror. She’ll escape by crashing spaceships, again and again.