Where do I begin?  I’m Jamie.  I’m 22 years old.  I train horses for a living.  All my life I’ve lived in Maine, but in exactly two weeks from today, Jao Institute (they’re a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company that hired me) is sending me by ship to a small island somewhere between India and Indonesia.  They don’t tell us exactly where for security reasons, and this is very frustrating.

Jao hired about 20 people to conduct biological research on this island.  My job will be to train the horses that are indigenous to the island (so they don’t have to fund roads and ship jeeps).  There’s only a five-man research team there.  They’re the only ones involved in the biological testing.  The rest of us are doing other things — there’s a doctor and two nurses, an administration staff of three people, a computer expert who’s supposedly this super techno genius, two cooks, and two maintenance guys.  There’s even a three-man security team there… as if anything’s going to go wrong.