Neil looked around the room and saw a book sitting on a desk in front of him. But it was not just a book. It was part of Neil’s body, just like his hand, and just like the pencil. He commanded the book to open itself and reveal its pages. It had no choice but to obey.
He continued to feel the other parts of himself around the room. The light switch that was now part of his body turned on and off at his will. The trash bin in the corner flipped upside down and emptied itself. The podium at the front of the room rose several feet off the ground and came smashing down onto the floor with such force that it sent splinters of wood in all directions.
The splinters of wood did not escape the command of Neil’s body. He told them to reassemble and form the shape of the podium once again. He commanded them to hold their position and he set the reconstructed podium back down onto the floor.
Neil realized that everyone else in the room was staring at him. They did not appear shocked, or confused, or angry. They were just staring with completely expressionless faces, as if they were awaiting his command. They were not actually people. Instead, they were part of Neil. He knew that if he told them to raise their arms they would. He knew that if he made them jump out the window, they would. He knew that if he told their skulls to collapse around their brains they would.
He wanted to make sure. He saw one of the people at the desk in front of him. There was a pretty girl with blonde hair and green eyes staring blankly back. He felt for the part of himself that was her skull, and he prepared to make the skull close in on itself like a deflating balloon – RING RING RING RING.
Neil was confused. He didn’t understand where this noise was coming from. It wasn’t under his control like everything else in the dream. His vision went black, and he heard the noise again. RING RING RING RING. He felt himself being pulled backwards out of the classroom. RING RING RING RING.
His vision returned, and he found himself awake in bed, looking up at the ceiling, with his alarm clock going off next to his ear. The annoying racket signaled the start of a new day. It told Neil that it was time to get ready for PT, despite his overwhelming urge to sleep for a few more hours. He turned off the alarm and glanced down at the display. 4:45 AM, as usual. The rest of the college world hadn’t even gone to bed yet, but he would soon be doing pushups and running in the downpour he could hear outside.
Neil wasn’t overly concerned with the rain. He had grown used to being occasionally cold, wet, and tired. He knew that if he was going to seek greatness, he would have to endure hardship. Pain was a construction of the mind, and over the years Neil had learned to separate some types of pain from his reality.
The pain of being tired from a long run was no longer a reality for Neil as it had once been. He was able to push it aside and run further. The pain of being cold during the winter could be pushed into a ball inside his chest and discarded, allowing the illusion of warmth to flow through him.
Neil knew that these minor instances of pain were small in comparison the types of things he would have to endure at some point in life. He felt that he must learn to conquer these types of pain if he would ever be able to conquer the pain of losing a friend in battle, or of wanting to cower and hide when he knew he must stand tall in the face of adversity.
Neil had matured much in his four years as a Cadet and as a college student, but he knew that he had a long way to go if he was going to truly make a difference in the world. To Neil, it sometimes felt as if his actions were not guided by choice, but by fate. He never felt that joining the Army was something he decided to do, but something that had been decided for him. He went along with the plan, and never saw an opportunity to stray from it.
In some ways, it disheartened him to feel that he had no choice, but it was also comforting to know that failure was impossible.
Even if Neil wanted to fail, he couldn’t. Everything always seemed to work itself out in his favor. There were a few times in his life when he was sure things were going to go wrong, but he was saved by dumb luck.
One time he had been pulled over after having a couple beers during his freshman year. The officer breathalyzed him once he smelled it on his breath. He wasn’t over the limit, but since he was a minor, he would have faced DUI charges, a minor in possession charge, and would have certainly been kicked out of ROTC. Before the officer was able to charge him, he got a call from his radio and sped off. Neil waited for a few minutes to see if he would return. When he never did, he drove straight home, dumbfounded by his luck.
Another time, he had driven to Detroit to go to a New Year’s Eve party with his friends. They were at a liquor store when two armed men ran in to rob it. They demanded Neil’s wallet and phone, but he was too drunk to be sensible, so he refused. The gunman gave him one last warning, then put the gun to his face and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked, but the gun didn’t fire. The robbers ran out of the store without getting his money.
He was sure that he was going to do something important with his life, and no force in the universe was capable of preventing it.
Neil made the walk home after a wet, but fulfilling session of PT. He always felt something rewarding knowing he had just run five miles while most people were still in their beds sleeping.
Neil’s workout uniform was soaked from the rain, so it was a relief to change out of it and get into the shower. The shower was another place that Neil enjoyed a chance to collect his thoughts. It was one of the few places he could go to be completely at peace. Sometimes he would get carried away and would be notified by the banging of his roommate’s fist on the door that an hour was too long for a shower.
Today, Neil thought about the strange dream he had before waking up for PT. Why did it feel so real? The most vivid of Neil’s dreams usually came after taking melatonin to help him sleep, but he hadn’t taken any the night before. It felt more like a memory than a dream.
The warm water from the showerhead flowed over his body, calming him, as he thought about the pencil floating in the air in front of him during the dream. His eyes were closed with this image in his head as he reached out with his hand to grab the shampoo bottle. Before he could fully extend his arm out to grab the bottle, he heard a loud crashing sound that could only mean something from the shower must have fallen and created a noise on the decibel level of a car crash.
Neil opened his eyes and yelled “Shit!”, so that his friends that he had just woken up in the house would know that the noise was an accident.
He looked down and saw the shampoo bottle he was reaching for lying on the floor at his feet. His mind struggled to make sense of what just happened. How did he knock the bottle over? He was positive that he didn’t touch the bottle before it fell. Neil decided he was too tired to care and picked up the bottle anyways. The rest of the shower went as planned, and Neil went downstairs to grab breakfast before heading off to his first class of the day.
Neil had his first class with his roommate, Bryan. Bryan and Neil had known each other since High School. They intentionally scheduled as many of their classes together as they could to try to make the dull experience a little less so. They were both studying Computer Science, so they frequently helped each other out with the same projects and studied for the same exams together.
Bryan didn’t have ROTC to worry about though, so he usually ended up doing all of the hard work while Neil bugged him to share his solutions to the harder programming assignments. It was a pretty fair system. Bryan did all the work and Neil did absolutely nothing in return. It had worked for 4 years so far, and whenever Bryan would complain, Neil always replied “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Satisfied by this logic and unable to think of anything clever to say in return, Bryan would usually go back to doing whatever he was doing.
Neil and Bryan arrived to class a few minutes early, so they started chatting while waiting for the professor to show up. Bryan started telling Neil about his dream the previous night where he banged a hot chick with three tits, so Neil told him about the drea
m he had with the classroom where he was able to move everything in the room like it was part of his body.
“Dude, that’s awesome. You always have the coolest dreams. I wish I had dreams about having super powers, unless you count three tits as a super power.” Bryan was too excited for 9 o’clock in the morning.
“Three tits might be nothing special, but three tits and an eleven inch schlong? Now that’s impressive.” Neil and Alex never stopped making fun of Bryan for the one time he got drunk and said there was a period of time in High School where he thought he was gay. He now insists he’s not, but it provided a good opportunity for jokes, so they continued to make them. Neil and Bryan were still chatting when the professor came in to start class.
The class was especially boring that day. Half way through a lecture about the process by which a processor transfers information from the cache to RAM, Neil got an incredibly painful headache. He didn’t usually get headaches unless he was dehydrated, so he headed out of the class to find a water fountain.
He was starting to feel dizzy and nauseous as he headed for the drinking fountain. He increased his stride to try to get there faster, hoping the water would immediately soothe his headache. Neil reached his hand out to turn on the water, just a few feet from the fountain. Before he reached it, something startled him.
He saw the button of the water fountain depress for a quick moment, and a short stream of water shot out of the nozzle in the fountain. Neil stopped in his tracks and stood straight up, just out of arms reach from the button. There was confusion in Neil’s eyes. He held out his arm to double check that he could not have been the one to press the button. He was several inches away, and there was no way his hand was the culprit.
Neil became distinctly aware that his headache was completely and inexplicably gone, even though he didn’t drink any water. He reasoned that the pain from the headache must have distracted him to the point of hallucination, and that he had actually pressed the button. Or, he imagined that the fountain could have been malfunctioning and was prone to turning on from time to time on its own. Although he was not completely sure of what happened, he decided not to dwell on it for too long. He took in a few big gulps of water and returned to class.
For the rest of the class, Neil wasn’t paying attention to the professor’s lecture on the different types of caches in a CPU. He kept thinking back to that strangely vivid dream he had, and to the shampoo bottle, and to the water fountain. Neil began to suspect that he was just going crazy, until he remembered that crazy people didn’t suspect they were going crazy.
He wondered if it was all just some weird coincidence or a chain of perfectly explainable events. Tired of worrying about it, he decided that he was satisfied with that answer for the rest of the day.
Well, almost for the rest of the day.
Neil’s final class of the day was not an especially interesting one; Data Security. It wasn’t that the material lacked importance, since Neil expected to need to know a bit about data security if he was going to be a Military Intelligence Officer in the Army. The problem was that the professor sounded at least two-hundred years old and talked slower than most people could write with a pencil between their toes. Bryan often joked that the old coot hit the age of retirement before computers were even invented.
To pass the time, Neil would usually bring his laptop to chat on Facebook or to look up mildly interesting articles online for the whole class. Any important information from the lecture was posted by the TA to the class website.
Today, however, the wireless network was down, and Neil was forced to survive an hour and twenty minutes of mind-numbing boredom by pretending to listen while he watched the clock.
The good news was that the professor was always consistent when it came to letting the class out exactly on time. He was never more than a minute early or late. Neil spent the final few minutes of class staring at the clock intently, waiting for that minute hand to click to the next notch.
He felt as if it was something like a scene from the movies. Whenever people would stare at the clock, the second hand always got louder and louder with every tick. Their vision always zoomed in to an almost microscopic level, getting closer with each second. The ticking sometimes slowed down, as if time slowed down when it knew you were paying attention to it.
Finally, the last minute of class was winding down. Neil was so focused on the clock that he couldn’t hear the professor speak anymore. He was mesmerized by the second hand counting down the time until he was released from his prison. He started to feel the rhythm of the clock. He felt as if he and the clock were one in the same - as if the clock was part of him and the passing of the second hand was no longer a surprise. Each time the second hand moved, Neil felt a part of himself move.
Neil was snapped out of his daze when he saw the plastic case in front of the clock shatter like glass. There was a huge crack running down the middle of it, like a lightning bolt.
With the crack came a distinct crunching sound; so loud that everyone in the room looked up at the clock immediately. Neil was stunned. Some weird shit had just happened.
Neil’s heart started beating harder as questions flowed through his mind. Why did weird things keep happening? What could all of this possibly mean? Was he going crazy? Was it possible that it was all some sort of weird coincidence?
There was silence in the room for a few seconds, until finally the professor spoke up.
“Well, I guess the clock is trying to tell us class is dismissed! I’ll have maintenance get a new one for us before the next class. These buildings are old; I wouldn’t be surprised if that clock has been up there for 30 years.”
Could that really be it? Could the clock just be so old that the plastic finally cracked under the pressure of the frame encasing it? It was possible, but what were the chances it would happen right when Neil was focused so intently on it, and after all of those other weird things that had been happening, and after that dream.
The dream…Neil didn’t know what it was, but something about that dream had been bothering him the whole day. Every time he thought about it, his head started to hurt, his whole body felt light, and he started to get dizzy. It would go away after a few seconds, but it came back whenever his thoughts drifted back to it.
Neil decided that maybe he was starting to come down with some sort of virus, so after class he headed home to check out his temperature. After his usual 20 minute walk, he arrived and bounded up the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor.
“Hey shit for dick, want to get your ass kicked in some Street Fighter tonight?” Bryan greeted him, but he ignored it.
He picked out the digital thermometer and stuck it under his tongue, waiting for the beep that signaled the reading was complete.
BEEP BEEP BEEP.
His temperature was 98.8, completely within the acceptable temperature range that told him he’s probably not sick. Even still, he put his hand on his forehead to double check, and it felt completely normal. His face wasn’t pale, and his hands weren’t sweaty. Using his limited medical knowledge, Neil had determined he was completely 100% healthy. So what the hell was going on?
Neil decided that whatever was wrong with him was nothing a few beers and games with Bryan couldn’t fix, so he head downstairs to get started. He could see that he had a little bit of catching up to do in the beer department, based on the three empty bottles sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch.
“I’m here to drink beer, kick your ass at some fighters, and get laid, but I lost your Mom’s number. I guess I’ll have to stick to the first two.” Neil said, as he went to the mini-fridge in the other room to grab a beer.
“Hilarious, but you didn’t lose her number, she changed it after last time when you cried yourself to sleep because your Soldier wouldn’t stand at attention.” Twenty-one years old, and Neil still got a chuckle out of yo-mama and erectile dysfunction jokes.
Neil and Bryan spent a couple hours playing games together, gloa
ting when they won, and calling the other a cheap bastard when they lost. It was about 8 o’clock by the time Alex came home and joined in on the beer drinking. It was only a Thursday evening, but no one had any classes until at least noon the next day, so Thursdays were officially changed to Thirsty Thursday. The rule was, if you didn’t go to bed without proving that you were drunk, you had to do the dishes for the whole weekend. No one had broken the rule in about two months.
The three enjoyed several beers and they each partially enjoyed a glass of cheap, pre-made Long Island Iced-tea out of a jug they bought at the store. As he drank, Neil’s tongue began to loosen. He told Bryan and Alex about the dream and about the weird things that happened to him that day.
“Holy shit Hitchenator, you’re turning into Spider-man!” Neil hated the name Hitchenator, but was too drunk to care.
“No, you idiot. Spider-man got bit by a radioactive spider.” Exclaimed Alex, as if Bryan’s comment was meant to be taken seriously, “I think Neil would have told us if that happened. Maybe you’re starting to get schizophrenia and you’re just imagining shit. You should get yourself checked out.”
“I’m not crazy, seriously. The shampoo bottle and the water fountain I was alone for, but the clock thing everyone saw. There’s no way that part was a coincidence. I almost felt like…like I made it happen.” Even as he said it, Neil realized how ridiculous it sounded. How could he possibly make something like that happen?
“Haven’t you seen “A Beautiful Mind”? It can seem perfectly real and still be a hallucination. Seriously man, that’s not a good sign. You should really talk to a doctor if you really think you somehow made all that stuff happen with your mind or something.” Alex said, and Bryan nodded in agreement.
Superhuman Nature Page 2
