Selection

Sushil Mohanty was a RAW agent, meaning, he worked for the Indian counter-terrorism and information cell.

With the advent of gene warriors, the terrorism and espionage scene had transformed entirely. When your enemies were actually capable of super-human feats, to prevent them you had to be more than just human.

Therefore, RAW was one of the major recruiters of graduates of the Indian Institute of Eugenics.

Sushil Mohanty was one such recruit.

One of the duties of the genetic experts was to participate in the selection process of the next generation of students for their Alma mater.

Instruments advanced enough to replace them in evaluating worthy candidates did exist but they were too expensive to mass produce. So, around this time of the year, genetic experts got to take a week off to visit schools and identify talents.

The man closed his eyes for a moment and focused on his soul, when he opened them, the world in his line of sight had changed.

All inanimate objects still looked the same but any living thing lit up under his soul sight in colourful auras.

His soul sight identified nano-photon density as colours. Due to his modification of his eyes and the associated parts of his brain, he could perceive colours in a spectrum ranging from short-infrared to long-ultraviolet.

The higher up the spectrum the colours went, the greater the nano-photon density.

In his eyes, the grass on the ground, the ants carrying granules of food industriously back to their home, the birds in the skies, were all outlined in infrared.

In fact, anyone without a soul sensor would have his or her soul colour in the infrared to red border while anyone who had had their souls strengthened by their awareness of it via soul sensor would have their souls shine red in Sushil's eyes.

Taking a quick look at the four class teachers, he noticed that while three of them had bright red souls due to their long association with their sensors, Miss D'Souza had a borderline orange soul.

She had reached a greater soul density, younger than her colleagues under the same conditions. That meant that her talent was quite good. If she had gone down the path of a gene warrior, she would have done well.

Sushil didn't feel that it was a pity. After all, whatever India might lack, it didn't lack population and therefore talented personnel.

There were hundreds of thousands of people more talented than her and younger, therefore more suitable to be trained.

His eyes passed over his own body which was tinged a yellowish-green and then settled on the meditating students.

Their soul colours were a uniform red, with slightly varying brightness depending on the densities.

But, that wasn't what he was looking for. The meditation method basically involved sensing one's soul and then imagining the soul retreating from the extremities of the body and concentrating in the heart.

The density of the soul was basically irrelevant in this case. That could easily be increased with the consumption of some special resources.

The main thing was one's ability to control one's soul. That was inborn and immutable. At least, until now, none of the research labs working on nano-photons had come up with an explanation for why different individuals showed different levels of ability to control the particles.

As he watched, the souls of the students fluctuated with the colour of their soul becoming a brighter red near their hearts while the region near their extremities faded almost to infrared.

Running his eyes over the 200 students, he picked out seven promising candidates.

"Stop! You, you, you, you, you, you and…" he hesitated for a moment, then, "you."

The seven selected candidates stood out from their peers with excitement and elation on their faces while the rest devolved into depression. Some psychologically weak students even broke into tears and the teachers had to rush about and comfort their moods.

The seventh selected candidate was precisely Aman.