“W-what? No. It can’t be.” She turned to go and as she was making her escape she caught a glimpse of her new self in the mirror beside the door.
“What in the world has happened to me?” She touched her face and examined it up close. The crowd, still amazed, watched her in silence. She closed one eye and stuck out her tongue to see if it was really her.
“It’s really me…I…I’m…pretty!”
George and the Australian had been experimenting on each other for hours in the lab. They each were hooked up to rods and IV’s that were used for testing. They were trying to determine whether their new-found powers were in their DNA structure or if they were only environmental. Within only two hours, George had created a family of green rodents, a model-sized metal house, a pair of yellow shoes and a small tree with black leaves. It was becoming easier for him to create things just by thinking of them, but he was beginning to understand that he needed a broader imagination to create more things and to make sure the projection was strong enough to not fade like how the forest faded when he went to the surface. The Australian was also honing in on his skills. He discovered that with just a thought and strong belief he could teleport anywhere that his mind could imagine. He closed his eyes and teleported to the front of the testing facility where the security guard was sleeping inside his glass office. The Australian wanted to have a little fun. He teleported inside the glass office and with a loud “BOO!” woke the security guard from his peaceful slumber. The guard jumped up and immediately grabbed the gun from his side, but was too late; the phantom was gone.
“Amazing!” The Australian exclaimed as he appeared back in the lab.
“What?” George asked.
“I can go almost anywhere…even places where no one else can.”
“Yea well be careful not to get caught. We don’t know if we’re the only ones with powers yet. If we get found out they’ll use us like human Guinean pigs,” George said.
“They wouldn’t be able to catch us even if they knew. I’d just teleport somewhere and hide. You could tear them in half with just a thought.”
“I don’t think I’m able to control what already exists,” George said as he was taking his own blood.
“What do you mean?” the Australian asked.
“I mean I can’t manipulate things that are outside of my own creations. I’m not telepathic. I can only create and control my own creations.”
George was looking at a drop of his blood through a microscope. He didn’t notice anything abnormal. He wondered if their powers were more of a brain abnormality than a change in DNA structure.
“I need to scan your brain. Stick these on your temples and lay down here. I’m going to take a quick look at your brain to see if anything is strange,” George commanded the Australian.
Once he was lying down George pressed a button on the transparent screen near the MRI machine and the bed moved inside the white cave. The machine was taking digital images of the Australian’s brain as well as live video of the electric signals speeding back and forth through his brain. George was watching the screen in astonishment. The signals in his brain weren’t functioning like normal electric currents. Instead of traveling through the vessels the signals seemed to jump from one place to the other without moving through the course.
“What we have here is a legitimate source of power and it is innate. There has to be more like us.”
George released the Australian from his cave.
“You, my friend, should be good and dead right now, but you’re not. In fact, not only are you alive, but you’re super human! This is monumental!” George said ecstatically.
“We’ve got to do more testing, but we can’t push the limits of our powers inside this lab. We should go outside into more open space,” the Australian suggested.
“More open space?” George asked curiously.
“We need to take this up a notch.”
When they got to the lobby of the testing facility the security officer was watching the news from a transparent television that was propped up high on the wall in the corner next to the exit. What the woman news anchor was reporting on made George and the Australian stop in their tracks. The blonde anchor was talking about an incident that happened earlier that night involving a group of teens at a prom after-party in a hotel in Underground New York City.
“Several students told reporters that a fellow classmate of theirs allegedly morphed into another person right before their eyes. Students say that the transformation happened after the girl walked out of a room with her dress ripped apart exposing her undergarments. Some say that this prompted her transformation. Let’s take a look at what one student recalled from the incident…”
The scene changed to an African American boy standing in front of the Three Towers Hotel telling the camera what he remembered that night.
“All of a sudden she was standing there with her bra showing and the whole room started laughing hysterically. I wasn’t laughing…I kinda’ felt sorry for her. Ya’ know? But she started crying and trying to leave the room, but they kept getting in her way. Then she put her hands over her face…almost like she was trying to hide…and when she took them off her face she was a different person. She completely transformed within a matter of seconds. It was unreal, but it actually happened,” he told reporters.
The scene switched back to the blonde anchor.
“Investigators are saying that the search is still on for the girl chameleon. According to our sources she was last seen on 30 and Rockefeller Street. Updates will follow once more information comes in.”
The Australian and George looked at each other. Their minds were spinning with more possibilities.
“There’s another one! She can transform herself into someone else!” George was trying to contain his excitement.
“So we aren’t the only ones. Looks like there could be many of us, but how many different powers are there?”
“We’ve got to go find the girl and get some answers right away,” George said.
“But how do we find her? We don’t have her name and she’s got better disguises than Sherlock!” the Australian said.
“Well, we know where it happened, right? We can go there, take a small sample from the room and send it to forensics to pull up a match on the grid. Everyone has DNA on the grid that’s how they keep track of everyone in the underground. All we need is a strand of hair and we’ve got her,” George said.
The next day the duo was on their way to New York in pursuit of a strand of hair. They would find it and ship it to forensics the exact same day. The forensics team in Washington was one of the best in the country and had the name of their girl and her residence in a matter of hours. George and the Australian were at Cameron’s doorstep in just a handful of hours from when they first arrived in New York. Her mother answered the door and immediately demanded that they leave the premises.
“I won’t allow any reporters to harass my child!” She barked.
“Ma’am we aren’t with the media we promise. We’ve actually come to help your daughter. We know what happened to her and why she was able to change herself,” George said reassuringly.
“How could you know that?” her mother asked.
“Because we also have special abilities. We saw your daughter’s story on the news yesterday and we came here immediately. Before last night, we thought we were the only two people in the underground with special powers, but now we’re not so sure. Please let us talk to her,” the Australian asked.
The house was small inside with only a few pieces of furniture in the living room and a television that was propped up inside an antique bookshelf. To George and the Australian’s amazement there seemed to be hundreds of books inside the shelf; that was more than they’d ever seen at one time.
“Where did you find all of these books?” George asked her.
“I come from a family of book people. My grandfather’s mother was a librarian before libraries were a thing of the past
. She passed down these to her son in hopes that he would keep the memories of a simpler time and pass them on to his kids.”
“It looks like he did just that. Wow, these are in excellent condition!” The Australian exclaimed.
“We’ve taken good care of them over the years. Cameron!” She yelled to her daughter. “You have company! She’ll be out in a minute, boys. I’ll go get you guys a refreshment.”
As soon as she left the room a thin girl entered. She had long brown hair with curls that framed her face perfectly, flawless ivory skin that was radiant and big green eyes decorated with long thick eye lashes. When she spoke her plump lips puckered naturally.
“I’m not interested in answering any questions right now,” she stated sternly.
The men were enamored with the beauty standing before them.
“Oh, n-no no we um, we’re not with the press. We we’re here to talk about your strange ability. We think we know the s-source of your new-found power,” the Australian stammered. George was still in awe.
The Australian was starting to say something else when a picture on the wall caught his attention. He began to walk toward it.
“Is this you?”
“Was. It was me. Obviously I’ve had an image upgrade since then,” she said.
George finally snapped out of his trance.
“How did you do it? I mean these types of things don’t exactly happen every day,” George asked.
“I’m not sure I know,” she said as she sat on a burgundy couch. “One second I’m the real me and then the next, I’m a completely different person. I mean I’m not complaining or anything. This is something that I’ve day dreamed about for my entire life and now, well look at me.”
The men emphatically nodded in unison.
“I just don’t understand how I could do this. I’m still waiting to wake up and realize that this is all an elaborate dream,” she said.
Her mom entered the room with lemonade and orange slices that she placed on the coffee table before leaving again.
“Do you remember what it was like the moment you transformed?” George asked Cameron as he sat next to her.
“I remember feeling extremely humiliated. I’ve never felt so embarrassed. I put my hands over my face as if to shield myself from the relentless taunting,” she demonstrated for the men, “and then suddenly everything stopped. The room was silent for only a split second then it started back again. When I removed my hands I had already changed.”
“So what you’re saying is you had a natural instinct to protect yourself and that’s when you transformed?” George asked her.
“That sounds about right. It was as if my anxiety reached a peak and it had nowhere else to go. That’s when I changed,” she said.
George rocketed from his seat.
“That’s a lot like what happened to me on the surface!” He exclaimed.
“Wait. You went to the surface?” Cameron asked surprised.
“Yes and there was a giant mammoth that wanted to eat me, but in my desperate need to protect myself I closed my eyes and when I opened them a forest was there shielding me from the beast,” he said.
“It was just some random forest?” She asked.
“No. It was a forest from the book Tarzan that my father used to read to me at night. It was a source of security that I remember from my childhood,” he said looking nostalgic.
“My father used to read me the Cinderella story. I’d always imagine I’d be as beautiful as her someday. I used to draw pictures of myself as a dazzling princess,” she said joining the nostalgia.
“So are you…is this the face of one of your drawings?” The Australian asked with a mouth full of orange slices.
“Actually, yes! Yes it is. Hold on let me get something.” Cameron briskly walked out of the living room and after a few minutes, entered again carrying a wooden shoe box.
“My dad was always building something with his hands. He hated the idea of robots and machines taking over our humanity. This shoe box was one of his first creations underground. Anyway, I kept lots of pictures from the past inside here.” She sat next to George again.
She began looking through the collection of photographs in search of one particular picture. George was studying her childhood through happy snapshots from her past. One particular snapshot that caught his attention was of her and her young father laughing while kneeling on a small plot of soil planting turnips.
“So, where exactly is your father?” George asked.
“He’s dead,” she said flatly still searching for the picture. “Ah! Here it is!” She lifted it up to the light. “It’s a little faded, but you can see where I drew squiggly lines for the hair.” She handed it to George.
“Wow this does look like you.” He gave it to the Australian.
“Do you think this proves that there is some correlation between the imagination and our abilities?” The Australian asked George.
“Our abilities? You guys can transform too!?”
“Well not exactly. Why don’t we give her a little demonstration?” George asked the Australian.
George flipped her old drawing over to the back and placed it on the table along with a pen from his pocket.
“Here. Draw a picture of your first pet.”
“My first pet was a hybrid poodle-gerbil that we got from the stem cell and animal cloning lab. I’ll see if I can remember how she looked.” She began to draw the face then the ears until all that was left was a fluffy tail. “Ok this looks about right.”
“And what color was she?”
“Baby pink with white in her inner ears.”
George studied the picture for a few seconds then closed his eyes and began to concentrate. Then he opened them and stared out into a void. Suddenly, a tiny pink poodle the size of a rat appeared in the middle of the floor. It was squeaking and jumping around in a circle.
Cameron gasped. “Cuddles! How in the world!? Did you…how did you?”
“I have the power to create things and make them appear out of nowhere. I discovered I had this ability just a week ago when I went up to the surface.”
“That’s amazing! And do you have the same power?” She asked the Australian.
“No. I can travel fast.”
“What do you mean travel fa-?“
Suddenly the Australian was gone.
“Where in the world did he go?” Cameron asked looking around the room.
“Over here guys!” The Australian was yelling from outside the house. “I’m up here!”
George and Cameron walked outside looking all around and then up. The Australian was waving at them from the roof of Cameron’s house. Cameron was overwhelmed and put both of her hands on her head.
“This is…I can’t believe this can be! How is this possible? We are human right? Or are we aliens from outer space who think we’re human?” Cameron asked sincerely wanting an answer.
“No we aren’t aliens, but we are more than human. Much more. You see after the apocalypse when the earth moved into alignment with the Milky Way there was an abundance of energy that was released from inside the black hole. This energy caused a cosmic boom and all of the universe shifted and transformed. The earth is now close to the other planets and nature has become almost celestial. The biggest change that occurred is the change within human consciousness. My theory is that every child who was born after the apocalypse has some sort of super-human power.”
“So only those born after the apocalypse have powers? That means my mom should be completely normal right?”
“Well we haven’t exactly tested our theory yet,” the Australian said then looked at George. “Maybe we should…”
“Oh no. We are not bringing Cameron’s mother into this. It’s much too dangerous.”
“Well as long as you don’t hurt her I think she’ll be fine. I have to know if this is something that I inherited.”
“But how can we find out for sure if she has powers without hooking her up to a bunc
h of medical equipment?” George brainstormed.
“Didn’t you both say that fear and the innate need to protect yourselves brought out your ability? I remember feeling the same way. Maybe we should scare her so badly that she has to use her power to save herself,” the Australian suggested.
George looked at Cameron.
“Let’s not give her a heart attack in the process,” she said.
“Okay let’s see. What can we do to scare her?”
“George why don’t you create something terrifying and show it to her,” the Australian suggested.
“I know she always talks about how lions scare her. Her worst fear is to be killed by one.”
“You want me to put a lion in your mother’s kitchen?” George asked skeptically.
“Just for a second or two. Long enough for her to get good and scared,” Cameron said.
“Well this is a conversation you don’t have every day. Shall we?” The Australian motioned for the door.
The trio entered the home and watched Cameron’s mother as she washed the dishes with her back toward them. The Australian and Cameron looked at George who was closing his eyes. He took a deep breath and opened them. Suddenly a large cluster of fur appeared in the center of the room and hovered there spinning. Then a tail sprouted from the cluster, then a leg, another leg, a head. In a minutes time there was a ferocious lion standing in front of them barely able to fit inside the condensed room. They were frozen in fear. Cameron looked over at George.
“Quick! Tell him to turn around!” She whispered sharply.
“T-turn around. P-please!” He pathetically commanded the animal while making a turn signal with his index finger. The beast just looked at him.
“He won’t listen to me!”
Suddenly a glass dropped to the floor and shattered. There was a gasp. Then a shriek. The lion turned around and roared thunderously at Cameron’s terrified mother. She was unable to move. The lion walked over to her coolly and she closed her eyes in fear. The trio looked at each other. Here was the moment where she would use her power. Then she opened her eyes and nothing happened. The lion’s breath was blowing her hair back. He began to open his gigantic mouth. Cameron looked at George.
Lovers of Babel Page 4
