An hour! The suddenness of it all puzzled Jonte. His condition had been known from the moment he had been born when his parents − so he had been told − had handed him over for special care. But it also excited him. Apart from a short journey when he had been much younger to a medical centre, he could not remember ever having left the shelter. He didn't really have much to pack anyway.

"OK", he said.

*

The transporter that was to take him south was a large one, larger than anything he had been in before. Even so, there was only one other person in the closed seating section besides himself: the woman who had said she wanted to get to know him better. Looking at her in the dim lighting that came from a single small unit on the roof, he thought she must be quite old. Her slightly puffy silver-grey face was framed by precise waves of bronze hair. The tag on her suit said she was chief psychologist at the Regional Institute for Human Research.

"Are you all right?" she asked. "Not too upset at having to leave suddenly like this?"

Jonte shrugged. "I'm fine", he said. "Where are you taking me?"

Behind her blank eyes, the psychologist seemed to be thinking. Eventually she said: "I'm going to be open with you, Jonte. Something has come up which makes it very important for us to…to examine you, give you some tests, things like that. But don't worry. It'll all be quite painless. Even fun, perhaps," she added, smiling. "By the way, my name's Eden."

"But the medics from the centre come and test me all the time!" Jonte exclaimed, not responding to the offered name. "There can't be anything they don't know by now. Why don't you get what you want from them?" But at the same time the thought came to him that this suggestion was stupid: that wasn't at all what they really wanted. He should have known straightaway from the "being open" bit at the start.