Everything Falls Apart

by Micah B. Edwards

  I sigh. “Fine. Thanks. Good talking to you.”

  “When I take a long road trip,” Peterson says in an apparent non sequitur, “I like to take upbeat music to keep my energy up.”

  “All right, but –”

  He talks over me. “My preference is to have someone accompany me, so they can take over as driver in case my energy flags. That way we can keep going in shifts through the night, if necessary.”

  Oh. Road trip as metaphor. This is a “can't officially condone your behavior” situation. Got it. I keep quiet and listen.

  “Anything that takes my eyes off of the road is bad. Anything that promotes general alertness, including live conversation or phone calls, is good.

  “And although a lot of people swear by it, I personally try to avoid coffee. The potential for having to pull off for a bathroom stop at an inopportune time is too high,” he concludes.

  “Thank you for the road trip tips. I appreciate them,” I tell him sincerely.

  “Don't mention it,” Peterson says, probably also very sincerely.

  - - -

  As it turns out, Peterson has nothing to worry about. The stakeout is a bust. On the bright side, I don't have to wait particularly long to be disappointed. It's less than half an hour before Dupont emerges from the building, gets into a red Subaru and drives off. I tail him for a few miles before he pulls into the parking lot of a hardware store and heads inside.

  Just as I'm starting to wonder if I should have followed him inside, he re-emerges with a plastic clamshell package in one hand. He tosses it onto the passenger seat as he gets back in his car, but it's not until I've tailed him back to his office and I see him walking inside with it that I realize that what he's bought is a new doorknob. Prosaic, but sensible. Honestly, I don't really know why I expected him to go anywhere else first.

  He's back outside only a few minutes later, and this time a slightly longer trip ends with him pulling into the driveway of a neatly-kept-up one-story house. He lets himself in the front door with the familiarity of home, and I reluctantly conclude after a little while that that's probably because he lives here. I'd been hoping that maybe it was a nondescript safehouse that he was meeting Ichabot at, but through the window I can see that he's on the couch with his socked feet on the coffee table, giving every appearance of settling in for a lazy evening.

  In fairness, once someone disintegrates parts of your office, maybe it's just time to call it a day and try again tomorrow. I was really hoping that he was part of Dr. A's conspiracy, but so far that seems to be a conspiracy of one.

  I jot down his address in my phone anyway, just in case, then drive back to my place for my own lazy evening. No one's written back to me with new ideas now that Dupont's gone nowhere, so I figure I'll give it a few days and see what else comes to light.

  If things go the way they have in the past, I can likely expect my nemesis to launch an attack on me at some point in the near future, which ought to provide a pretty definite idea of what to do next. So at least there's that to look forward to.

  That said, the next three days go by with perfect mundanity. By the time my weekend rolls around, I'm actually getting sort of paranoid about the fact that nothing has happened. I'm reading the local news religiously every morning, scouring it for anything weird or unexplained, but it seems that everything's normal except for me.

  I text Brian:

  dude

  I had a thought

  what if I'm my own nemesis?

  this is all a mind game until I get twisted & paranoid & disintegrate myself

  He replies:

  Not the worst assumption sand

  That you don't have a nemesis I mean

  If he's not showing you can go straight to icky bot sand sand

  “Why do you keep writing 'sand'?” I send back.

  I'm using voice to text

  The keyboard on this new phone is funky so I'm just tacking at it sand

  And it doesn't like the way I say

  Oh that's just fact ink great sand

  I snort with laughter, picturing Brian's frustration. He's a pretty laid back guy, but there's nothing like a new phone to really raise your irritation levels. In terms of “most likely to make a saint swear,” I'd put new phones on par with trying to start a lawn mower.

  “You want to get together to discuss a plan of attack?” I write.

  Pretty swamped at work right now but I have an idea

  Set something up with dock and red Gina and I'll make it work

  I'll

  I'll deliver you more information when I have it

  Seriously its stupid that I can't say ess e and Dee sand fox sand

  At this point, I'm crying with laughter. I decide not to share this fact with Brian, though. Later on, he'll see the humor in the situation. Right now, that's the sort of admission that could end a friendship.

  Amusing though Brian's problems are, though, I've got problems of my own to deal with. Assuming I'm not my own nemesis, at some point I'm going to have to throw down with somebody, and the only weapon currently in my arsenal is unbelievably lethal. I'm not particularly okay with that. I sort of suspect that that's the point, really. I'm being backed into a corner where it'll be another kill-or-be-killed situation – only this time it'll be premeditated.

  Maybe not under the technical legal definition, I suppose, but since I'm sitting here thinking about the inevitability of it right now, it's close enough for me. Which means that I need to figure out a way to use my power of dissolution defensively.

  I take a moment to look back wistfully on the time when I thought using fire in a non-deadly fashion was difficult. At least that could be used to control and harry, even if it was a massively dangerous endeavor. With this, I'm really sort of stuck for ideas. If I use it on a person directly, they're dead. Flayed alive and devoured cell by cell, screaming all the while. Not an option.

  Maybe the environment around them? I picture a fight in a warehouse, with stacks of boxes and weird chains and pipes everywhere. Take out the bottom box of a stack, and the whole pile collapses. Or on a larger scale, I could eat away a few key structural supports to bring the building down.

  There are two major problems with this idea, though. One is that I don't have any sort of range or delay on this power, so I'd basically have to be in view of my nemesis when I sprung the trap. The other is that even if that worked, I think that dropping a large pile of hard materials onto someone tends to be fairly lethal, too. So this isn't really an improvement.

  I could dissolve the floor under their feet – as long as I don't mind dissolving the floor under my feet, too. I suppose that as long as I'm on a different surface, that could work. And as long as we're not outside, since Doc Simmons cautioned that that could potentially destroy the planet. That probably wouldn't happen as long as I targeted a road or something instead of just the ground, but I don't know if it would spread to all connected roads, or what. I could make myself a bit unpopular if I released something that ate the entire interstate system.

  How far can these things spread? Can they survive indefinitely outside of my system? They must replicate to disintegrate something so quickly, so clearly they're self-sustaining in at least that regard.

  I've been hanging around the doc too much. I'm actually contemplating running organized experiments.

  All right, fine. If I'm going to mimic the doc's thinking, I might as well do it right. I need to find the flaws in my thinking, the unchallenged assumptions. So, my basic problem here is that I need to take someone out non-lethally, and I have only a lethal tool with which do it.

  Breaking that down: I need to take someone out. Check, that's pretty straightforward. The hatred and disgust that my nemeses have been made to feel for me pretty clearly rules out any sort of peaceful conflict resolution, at least until they lose their powers.

  Non-lethally is, as stated before, pretty non-negotiable. I couldn't sit here and plan someone else's murder or maiming. Especially since
their minds have been warped by the nanos. At least when someone's on PCP or something like that, you can blame them for taking the drug in the first place, but the people I'm fighting didn't choose this.

  Except Tanger. That guy was a jerk, and deserved worse than he got. I still don't think I could have pulled a trigger on him, though, and definitely not with something as ugly as disintegration. I think again about the rat screaming as it died, and shudder.

  Wrenching my mind away from that particular image, I move on. Last clause of the proposition: I have only a lethal tool. This is pretty much where I need to do my work, since the first parts are inarguable. Of course, that's also where I started, so I seem to have come full circle.

  Still, there has to be a flaw somewhere. Where are the places I've said “I can't” or “I don't”? One of those assumptions might be holding me back.

  After a few minutes of self-examination, I find three that I think I might be wrong about: I can't use this at range, I can't delay the nanos' power, and I don't have control over how much they destroy. I mean, I'm obviously right about these assumptions so far, but with every other power, my control has grown the more I've used it. So it's possible that I'm doing myself a disservice by assuming that this works only by immediate touch and only on complete objects.

  Breaking down only part of something seems like the easiest place to start, so I fish a soda bottle out of my recycling and, holding it only a few inches from my face, concentrate fully on it. I let the loathing roll through me, but rather than focusing it on the entire bottle, I picture just the O in the label. I extend one finger to poke the bottle, only to have the entire bottle start to crumble apart before I can ever touch it.

  For one excited moment, I think I've accidentally stumbled on how to use the power at range, before I realize that in fact the bottle is being eaten away from the back, where I'm holding it in my right hand. I was completely focused on using my left as the deliverer of destruction. Note to self: I have two hands.

  Another bottle, another attempt. This one sits on the counter, away from my hands. I focus, I loathe, I thrust my finger accusingly at the bottle. The plastic around the O shrivels up and peels away...followed by the rest of the bottle. I sigh, blowing ashy dust across my countertop.

  The next few hours look a lot like this, but I feel like I'm seeing progress. It might just be in my mind, but I feel like the dissolution is slower outside of my target area, more hesitant. It's enough to encourage me to stick with it, at any rate.

  And finally, after I've emptied my recycling bin and most of the trash cans in the house, I manage it. I press my finger into the side of a waxed fast-food cup, causing a hole to appear right in the middle of the logo – and then stop.

  “Yes!” I cheer exultantly. I've done it! I can use the nanos with precision. This means that I'll be able to...actually, I have no idea what this will let me do that I couldn't do before, in terms of using this power in combat against a person. I was right that “can only destroy whole objects” was a flawed assumption I was holding, but I forgot to check whether it was in any way related to making this power less lethal.

  Still, I'm not going to let a minor thing like lack of usefulness put a damper on my mood. I've successfully improved my ability! I'm leveled up now. And if I can do that for one aspect of the power, I can do it for others. With confidence renewed, I set about figuring out how to make the nanos work on a delay.

  By mid-afternoon, this confidence has totally deserted me. I finally throw in the towel as I watch the very last crumpled page of a magazine flash into powder the instant I touch it. I've tried being in contact with the object both before and after loathing it. I've tried mildly disliking it. I've tried thinking of an upcoming time. I've tried loathing the memory of objects I've already touched. Everything has had one of two results: instant initiation of destruction, or nothing at all.

  I reach for an apple to munch on, and my fingers sink into it. I recoil, expecting it to be rotten, but it appears crisp and firm, just with holes where I touched it. I look at my hands, then rub my fingers together. Both hands feel slightly slick to the touch, even the hand that didn't just get apple juice on it.

  I poke the apple again, but nothing happens. I summon up general loathing, let it simmer for a moment, and then touch the apple. This time, it dissolves where my fingers come into contact with it, just like the first time. And as before, the destruction doesn't spread.

  This is a fantastic discovery. It's the first defensive use of this power I've discovered. If someone's coming at me with a knife, I can grab it and destroy it. Of course, I could do that before, but this way I won't have to think about the knife. I can just keep a generalized loathing up, and then all I have to do is grab whatever's threatening me. I'll probably still get cut with the knife, since these don't work quickly enough to stop the blade mid-swing, but at least I'll only get cut once. Or hit, or burned, or whatever. People have found a lot of ways to injure me in the last year. Now I can stop most of this with just a touch.

  For that matter, why does it have to be from my hands? The nanos are probably coming out through my pores – or maybe directly through my skin? I'm not really sure how things work at microscopic scales. Either way, there's no reason why they shouldn't work from anywhere on my body. And if I can make that work, then if someone hit me in the back with a baseball bat, bam! No more bat for them.

  I close my eyes and picture my body. In a weird reversal of standard meditation, I let a sense of loathing spread out from me, feel it pressing out in every direction. I feel a tingling all over, then a whisper of fabric sliding down my chest. I open my eyes and hurriedly leap up from my seat as all of my clothes disintegrate, falling to the floor in irregular scraps of cotton and denim.

  Standing naked in my kitchen, I shake my head slowly at myself. Technically speaking, that worked exactly as I'd hoped it would. I just hadn't really thought through all of the implications. It's probably best not to try to deploy this particular trick in a fight.

  At least I didn't have my shoes on. I have other jeans and shirts, but those are my only pair of steel-toed boots. And unlike superheroes in the comics, I don't have unlimited money for costumes. Those boots are expensive!

  - Chapter Seven -

  The rest of the day passes in a less spectacular fashion. This might sound like a bad thing, since “spectacular” is often used as a synonym for “great,” but in this case I mean it in its more literal sense: I manage to avoid making a spectacle of myself. So that's definitely good.

  Can you still make a spectacle of yourself if there's no one around to see it? I suppose this is an “if a tree falls in the woods” sort of question. I'll save it as a point to reflect upon the next time I need to meditate.

  In any case, even had there been an observer for the remainder of the day, all that they would have seen was me making and eating more tacos than is objectively reasonable. I work in construction and I host a colony of impossibly advanced machines. I can afford a few extra calories.

  Stuffed and happy, I head to the couch to sprawl out and waste the remainder of my day. As I'm about to sit down, a thought strikes me. What if I start leaking nanobots? I'm fully clothed again, but the nanos reduced my other clothes to scrap faster than I think I could roll off of the couch. This couch is still new, bought to replace the one that Vince built a clone out of. I don't want to dissolve a hole in it.

  I've got to sit somewhere, though, so after a few minutes of waffling, I grab a blanket from the bedroom and drape it over the couch. It's not much protection, but the extra layer might buy me the seconds of reaction time I need.

  Hours later, I fall asleep to the soothing sounds of a werewolf movie. When I open my eyes again, the grey light of dawn is sifting through the windows. For me these days, this counts as sleeping in. My clothes, blanket and couch are all still happily undisintegrated. Or just integrated, if you like. The important thing is that I haven't destroyed anything in my sleep.

  I send a text to
Regina and an email to Doc Simmons saying essentially the same thing: Brian wants to meet up to discuss nanos, so how's tomorrow afternoon at the hospital? Then I go about my morning and wait for the rest of the world to wake up. Quick tip: if you add an egg to the previous night's leftovers, it counts as a breakfast scramble. I am well-trained in the art of lazy cooking.

  Eventually I hear back from both Regina and the doc, who are both on board with meeting at 5 PM tomorrow, so I text that information to Brian and get on with my day. It's a household chore kind of day: laundry, vacuuming, general straightening up, fixing the sink that's been dripping, and so on. I've put most of it off for a long time, so it occupies my day pretty solidly.

  This is my excuse for why I don't notice until the middle of the next day at work that Brian never texted me back. I'm halfway up a scaffold when this strikes me, but I can't exactly check my phone for missed messages at that point, so I just frown briefly and continue on up. By the time I could check my texts, I've forgotten again. In my defense, on a construction site there are a lot of things that require your full attention, and thinking about your phone is a good way to find out exactly how protective your helmet really is.

  In any case, it's not until I'm getting an early dinner after work that I remember again that I haven't heard from Brian. I check my phone, but there definitely haven't been any messages. I fire off a quick text to confirm that he'll be there at 5, but if he's not, it's not like I don't know where to find him. He works in the same hospital as the doc, so even if he's out on a call, he'll be back sooner or later, and we can go snag him.

  That's my thinking right up until five o'clock rolls around, and I walk into the doc's lab to see just her and Regina.

  “No Brian?” I ask, checking the time.

  “No,” says Simmons. “In fact, I haven't seen him in a couple of days. Did he say he'd be here?”

  “I mean, basically! This was his idea.” I'm pulling out my phone to text Brian when it buzzes with a message from him.