Chương 4: What he became

I woke up sprawled over my grandfather's notes on the hard, steel table of the underground lab beneath my house. I blinked, trying to recall what had just happened, and it all snapped back to me in an instant when I saw the six empty vials and an injector scattered across the table. A shiver of anticipation made my spine tingle. I had read and re-read the notes dozens of times. I knew what the nanite swarm contained in the vials could do. And yet I felt just the same as usual, no new changes.

I tried everything, every little trick they taught people who had hard to activate powers, but nothing seemed to happen. Doubt flooded my mind. Did I just burn Gus's entire legacy for nothing? Maybe I had even poisoned myself with my brilliant move. Really, who in their right mind injects six full vials of an unknown substance that's been sitting in a lab for who knows how long directly into their bloodstream? I was lucky I had only collapsed. My jaw hurt, and half of my face was a bit swollen, but I was alive.

I made my way up the stairs, groaning like an old man all the way there. My body seemed to fight me for every step that I took, and blinding hunger gnawed at me. I made myself a sandwich with what I had, fed a rather grumpy cat, and checked the time. A few hours had passed. This explained why I was so sore. The table wasn't exactly an ergonomic mattress. I collapsed on a chair on the porch, sandwich in one hand and a bottle of cool water in the other, and looked at the garden.

It was a sort of ritual I'd developed, like a true old man despite not even being twenty-six. It fit the theme, the homestead, the inheritance. Fuck. My thoughts circled from inheritance, to Gus, to the powers, no matter how hard I tried not to let them touch the sensitive topics. Those vials had been my last hope, however crazy. And now, I looked at the city below from the vantage point of my house perched upon a hill. I imagined the emptying streets, now that summer was over, the forlorn rows of vacant rentals.

The hush of the wind-swept beaches and the skeletal trees at the beachside boulevard, where the municipality had chosen to plant stuff that lost its leaves way too early, at the first hints of cold and wind. I wanted to scream. That's when it snapped. Words came to the forefront of my mind, just like they had the first time I had awakened a power. A hint—a second hint. The words were much, much clearer, though.

"Consume, deconstruct, integrate, grow and bestow." That was the hint. Five verbs, something like a checklist, or an operative manual. I rushed back to the basement, the food forgotten. I was still hurting a bit, but the general discomfort was gone. Only the pain in my leg from this morning and the sore jaw remained. Really, I must have drooled all over the table downstairs. I gathered the scattered notes with shaking hands, going over them again and again. There was nothing there that could have predicted this.

A second awakening? How could it be possible? But then again, what else was I hoping for if not this? The words came to me again. Consume, deconstruct, integrate, grow and bestow. The hint was all the information that one would ever get about their power. Everything else came from trial and error, learning the old-fashioned way. And while my hint sounded rather cool, it didn't tell me much at all. Just what could I consume? Things? I tried to touch several items, going around the lab and the house. Nothing.

Perhaps it had to do with energy? Sunlight? Heat? Nothing. Not fluids, not hopes and dreams. Then what else? Powers, maybe? I felt the new power stir. I didn't know if this was how Supes felt when they mentally probed and interacted with their own powers—nobody really explained much. Those who knew, knew. Those who didn't, had no need to know. But in that moment, I cared about none of that.

"You want powers, don't you?" I muttered, talking to the swarm as if it could hear me. There was only one power I could feed to the nanites. My other power, the one whose hints promised the world. The one that had failed to live up to its name.

"Take it," I said. It did. I felt the moment the swarm consumed the speed power. Something was taken away from me, instantly and irrevocably, diminishing me in a way that left me feeling hollow. My arms prickled with the sensation of electricity, pins and needles raising goosebumps on my skin. Finally, the hint the swarm of nanites had given me began to make sense. After they consumed the power, they immediately set to work at deconstructing it—the second step in the five-stage path.

They stripped it down into base parts, unspooling it like tangled thread before me. I immediately saw the buried trigger, like a filament of the wrong color, a broken mechanism that didn't let me choose when to activate the power. There was a seam where the trigger met the speed factor, then the aim mechanism, the sustain power-regulator. Everything came into view, slowly digested and disassembled like a complex piece of machinery reduced to base parts. Stolen novel; please report.

I watched, fascinated, as the process unfolded over several hours of digestion. The swarm was patient, efficient, mindless in its monomaniacal focus. It felt easy, as if the nanites were working with something they were intimately familiar with. It made sense, I thought. This power had been mine for a while now, despite having been able to use it only twice. Then came the next phase: integrate. The swarm paused, waiting for me to choose what to do. I could take some parts, ignore others.

I let go of the random trigger and destroyed any concept of limits, keeping the core of the superpower. Fuck it if I wasn't going to give this my all, and I had six vials' worth of nanites in my blood to make it work. Or were the nanites gone, leaving behind only the power? I shook my head. Not the time. Once I was sure, I felt the swarm resume its work. It was time to grow. If integrate was the chooser, grow was the amplifier. I could tweak the parameters of the power.

I put everything I had into the time-dilation factor, watching as the mental representation of what had once been a slow-time became a stop. I was glad I had made sure my body wouldn't be stuck with the rest of the world, dropping that particular part during the integration phase, or it might have been unpleasant. I wanted to do more, but the swarm seemed to be losing steam. I needed to wrap this up and let it work. Once it was done, all that was left to do was the bestow phase.

I looked at myself in the mirror, watching my face. This was it, the moment of truth. The swarm was ready. It had done its job digesting, changing, selecting and upgrading the power. And now I was about to graft it back on myself and see if it would actually be useful this time. The moment I mentally pressed the trigger, the hollowness vanished. The swarm went dormant so it could recharge. The world will wait for you, the original hint echoed in my mind.

I saw no change in the reflected face in the mirror when the process finished. It didn't matter. I felt it inside of me, like a well of untapped potential. I rushed outside, eager to try it out, flying out the main door and into the garden without even locking the door behind me. I froze time and the world stopped. The rain that had begun to fall earlier during the day was now held in suspension, a curtain of slightly oblong shapes that refracted the light and lensed the world.

I grabbed some dirt and tossed it around, but the moment it left my hand, all of its motion disappeared, leaving behind a cloud of particles suspended in mid-air. There was no wind. There were no sounds save for the ones I was producing. I could breathe, somehow. I could see. And the air was not a solid wall of impassable substance. Just like the dirt, I could interact with it and only stopped when I was no longer touching it. I blinked, and the moment passed.

The world resumed its normal comings and goings, the rain slowly beginning to soak me. The dirt fell to the ground, and sounds rushed back in. I ran back to the front porch and fumbled with the key. The wind was picking up, and I didn't want to get wet. I got it from around my neck where I got used to wearing it like a necklace, and tried to unlock the door, realizing that I had left it semi-open in my hurry to test the power.

Shouldering my way inside, I locked it behind me and then just stood there, back against the solid wood of the house, panting and heaving. This was it. I had powers. Strong powers. Actual powers! Dangerous powers. If information about my devouring swarm of nanites got out, I would be dead in moments. I don't imagine other Supes taking the information well, once they learned I could just strip them of their power with what, a touch? And after death, it would be the dissection table for sure. Yeah, none of that.

I peeked out the window. Alright, let's think brighter thoughts. How far away had I gotten? A few yards? Maybe a bit more. Then I had stopped to look at the rain, throw the dirt, and realized that it was so, so quiet. A good twenty seconds, perhaps, before time resumed its flow on its own and I rushed back inside.

"Meow," the cat said grumpily. He was staring at a spot near the fireplace, near the door leading to the cellar and the lab. He even hissed once.

"What are you looking at?" I asked him. There was just furniture there, and a tarp that flapped as unseen currents of air moved it. I hadn't yet removed all the tarps; the house was far too big for me to maintain and clean on my lonesome. The cat just grumbled and licked his paws. I went to check the door, frowning, but found it locked as I had left it. Fuck me if I'd ever leave the house without making sure that door was locked. Shrugging, I removed the key from my neck and moved to the sofa, grabbing my phone.

It was pouring outside by now, and I was still dripping wet. The cold was seeping into my bones.

"Hmm." I looked at the empty fireplace. The firewood was by the shed, but if I went out like this I'd get even more soaked. But if I used my power… and wouldn't it be nice to have a nice fire, the first of the season? The first ever, actually. My eyes narrowed as I felt for the super-speed. It was still recharging, but it shouldn't take too long. By the time I approached the door, it was ready to fire again. Would I make it in time, to the wood and back? Probably not.

But it was not a problem my male brain cared about right now. All it cared about was finding an excuse to use my new shiny power and make a nice fire. Today was the perfect day for a fire, warm and cozy. And so, I braced myself for a run in the rain. Frozen time would mean that nothing save for the stray droplets right in front of me would hit me.

I didn't pay much attention to the key I left on the small table near the sofa, and I left the door open so I could throw myself back into the house when the time-stop inevitably failed me well before I got back with the wood. But it would be so fun! And the world kinda owed me some fun, I decided. Come on. After all the shit hands I was dealt, I could afford to play around with my new power.