Valentine doesn’t remember his parents. The farthest back he can remember is the orphanage, but even then those memories are faint. Maybe it’s a side effect of DEXO’s done to him or maybe it’s just his mind’s way of trying to protect itself from things best left forgotten.

He was born during the final years of Tellus, before it became just another uninhabitable rock hurtling through space. He was one of many unwanted and forgotten children; they were liabilities in a time of great scarcity. It was a small miracle that he had a home at all, as social services had all but fallen by the wayside. Everyone was caught up in a mad scramble to find their way off planet. Children were no longer the future, space travel was.

The planet was dying, polluted and resources depleted from overpopulation which was sharply overcorrecting with an uptick in natural disasters. Tellus’ last defense was a desperate attempt to rid itself of the parasites that had sucked it dry and it was working.

Valentine lived at the orphanage until he was selected by the planetwide agency responsible for training and providing paranormal support on the Ark Project. The Ark Project was humanity’s last ditch effort to save the species, a plan for abandoning Tellus in search of planets that were within reach that could possibly sustain human life. All resources were being diverted to constructing and supplying the ships that would take them on this journey.

Paranormal support was the stuffy official term the government types had landed on to avoid using words like magic or ghosts or spirits or monsters or anything else that didn’t fit neatly into a scientifically quantifiable box. In the earliest days of the Ark Project there had been many challenges and humanity had come together to pool their resources to overcome them. Despite the original intent to keep things strictly scientific it had become harder and harder to deny one glaring oversight. Wherever there were people, there were spirits, ghosts and what some would even call gods. And so some of the best equipped ships, full of the best and brightest humanity had to offer were amongst some of the least successful at both selecting a decent planet and at establishing settlements. Some of these settlements were wiped out by immediate catastrophes while others struggled year after year to establish a foothold only to succumb at last to forces beyond their control.

Meanwhile some of the most meagerly outfitted, the most unlikely to succeed had flourished, because they had brought with them their spiritualists, their witches, their fortune tellers, their ghost hunters, their diviners and their alchemists.

The Department of the Extra Ordinary, DEXO for short, had been formed to study this phenomenon and it was an odd sort of collaboration between top scientists and the few spiritualists willing to work with them. “Spiritualist” being the catch all term for anyone who worked with paranormal forces in some capacity. It greatly rankled them to all be lumped together in such a shallow and ignorant way. Unfortunately nuance mattered little to the scientific community that had named them as such —they themselves were suffering from dissension within the ranks over the legitimacy of paranormal forces.

The idea of working hand in hand with a bunch of skeptics was grossly unpalatable to most spiritualists but a bit of guilt tripping and strategically applied arm twisting had convinced a handful of them to collaborate. The result of this collaboration was the development of a program for enhancing average people to become a sort of super spiritualist. They would be preternaturally hardy and intelligent and long lived. They would be trained in every spiritualist discipline to prepare them for their their role as problem solving prognosticators, capable of anticipating and handling any and all paranormal problems that arose that your average human could not.

Unsurprisingly there was a chronic shortage of volunteers willing to undergo this process. In the fledgeling days of the program DEXO was just barely able to keep up with demand by offering monetary compensation to participate. As the continued deterioration of the planet caused currencies to devalue to nothing and anything else of value was being directly funneled into the Ark Program they were eventually forced to come up with alternate solutions. One such solution was the commutation of sentences of nonviolent criminals in exchange for their participation. That worked quite well for a time but as the program ramped up the number of nonviolent criminals that hadn’t already been conscripted to one aspect or another of the Ark Program dwindled.

In those later, more desperate days the vast and growing numbers of unwanted and abandoned children had been brought up more and more frequently as a possible solution. Objectively speaking these children were a drain on society and legally speaking they were already wards of their respective states. If humanity was to be saved then all who were capable should ideally participate. The question of commuting the sentences of violent criminals was raised as a counter proposal several times but in the end children won out, by simple virtue of being more malleable and more widely available.

And so Valentine had been scooped up by bland faced government drones and whisked away to DEXO where he would undergo a series of surgeries and therapies and experimental procedures designed to enhance his senses and harden his body for the rigors of being a Paranormal Investigator.

It had been a confusing, uncertain time for him. The orphanage hadn’t been great, it was overcrowded and understaffed and undersupplied but he’d mostly been left to his own devices as long as he had behaved himself. He can’t remember being particularly happy there but he also doesn’t have any particularly painful memories of that time. He does remember the day they took him away, all the children rounded up and loaded onto busses, leaving their meager belongings behind. Some of the other children, the ones who had had lives before the orphanage that they could remember, were nervous, some cried.

The DEXO compound he had been taken to was a military facility. Soldiers guarded the gates, the walls were high and topped off with barbed wire. Intake was done in the medical wing, all cold steel surfaces and flimsy plastic curtain dividers and overworked, dead eyed staff in scrubs. They poked and prodded and measured and took samples. There were rounds of injections and inoculations. Valentine remembers wanting to make them stop but he’d already seen what had happened to the children that didn’t cooperate, strapped down to gurneys and if they continued to fuss, wheeled away to who knew where.

That first night he’d been handed a pillow and a thin blanket and there was no mattress only the concrete floor. He’d crammed in with all the rest of the children, some from his orphanage but most he didn’t know, piled in like sardines. The bunks were on backorder, the adults said. They’d be there in a week.

It had taken what had felt like an eternity to his younger self to get the bunks delivered and installed. There were more blankets scrounged up in the meantime, a motley assortment of handmade and store bought, some brand new and some worn through and frayed around the edges. The children made little nests and it had almost felt like the nights the air-conditioning had been on the fritz at the orphanage and they’d all slept out in the play yard, under the stars. They weren’t allowed to make noise past curfew but they had whispered to each other softly anyway, clutching each other’s hands for comfort.

He’d gone through rounds and rounds of testing. They wanted to know how well he could hear, how well he could see. They’d asked him if he knew his name, if he had more than just the one. Did he have parents, who were they. Where he was from. Did he know his numbers, his colors, his letters, did he know how to read. He did not. They frowned and asked him how old he was again. He didn’t know.

The children had been separated into groups. Those that were in markedly poor physical shape were sent on to other facilities. Those that had remained were sorted according to physical condition and the amount of schooling they’d received. Valentine had very nearly been one of the ones sent out but he made it into the last group by the skin of his teeth as he was uneducated and undersized for what in the end they’d had to estimate to be his age.

There is much the public does not know about DEXO, and those who run the organization would say that this information is withheld deliberately as a favor to them. DEXO provides something essential for the survival of humanity but knowledge of the specific processes involved is best left to those with strong constitutions and flexible morals.

The medical side of things has been refined considerably in the decade that the program has been running. The survival rate of participants was initially very low but that was only to be expected with something so experimental. The survival rate by the time Valentine was placed into the program had climbed to roughly 60% which while far from ideal fell within what was considered acceptable parameters for losses. There was hope that children would prove to be more resilient, as the process so far had only been performed upon adults.

Valentine’s group was chosen as the first to begin the initial round of medical procedures that would enhance their bodies and minds. Since they were the weakest of the lot losses would most likely be higher amongst this group but it would have minimal impact on the program as a whole. After all it would be best to discover any potential issues with the least valuable assets.