"That might be partly true, but..." Apollo glanced toward a couple of the nurses who were supervising the patients currently relaxing in the sun room. "You'd think at least some of them would be put off by all this. If my boss suddenly disappeared, and it was obvious some outdated robot was taking his place? I'd be more than a little concerned, but that's just me."

They already knew patients could be controlled and forced into attacking others at night -- at least, if the primers were anything to go by. If that was the case, who was to say they couldn't use those sorts of means to brainwash the staff into behaving?

Yeah, this was starting to sound like a really bad sci-fi novel all right. Apollo could scarcely believe it himself. Maybe Mr. Hanekoma was right, and they really were trained to follow orders right down to the letter, no matter what.

Either way, it meant the same thing: they were far from finding a way out of this place.

He had a point about the federal training thing, which took Apollo right back to what he'd been thinking about before Mr. Hanekoma had shown up in the first place. What could that possibly mean? It was referring to some sort of military project, apparently, but for whose army?

Apollo hoped that last crack wasn't meant to be a joke, because it wasn't a very funny one. "I heard a lot of people have special powers or something," he said. "It seems like they'd be prime specimens for some weird military project, right?"