Superhuman Nature

by Brandon Overall

  “Get up there Hitchens! We need you now!”

  The man looked familiar. Neil saw his nametape. ‘Steele’, the name of the Professor of Military Science in his ROTC program. That explained why the man looked familiar.

  However, this man did not have the black oak leaf of a Lieutenant Colonel on his chest. In its place was a single star.

  Neil ran outside of the mud hut he was sleeping in and found himself in an unfamiliar part of the world. He was not in Michigan. This was not his college town. The ground was covered in sandy dirt and rocks. The buildings around him were all made of mud or wood. He saw tan tents, generators, and giant four wheeled vehicles that he didn’t recognize.

  As his drowsiness faded, he began to recall the facts. He was somewhere in the desert in Afghanistan, and he was on a Forward Operating Base. Of course; this was his life now. Upon further reflection, the thought of being at a college seemed silly. It had been weeks since he was at college.

  He knew what the General woke him for. He had a job to do. It was a job that only he could do. He searched for the tower near his mud shelter that would give him vantage over the entire area surrounding the FOB. He didn’t search with his eyes. He didn’t need to. He searched with his mind. The whole FOB was his. His body and the base and everything inside of it were tools at his disposal.

  The tower was a short distance away. He climbed to the top and saw what the General was concerned about. Off in the distance, a little over 3 km away, were dozens of trucks and busses filled with people. The vehicles were headed towards the southern wall of the FOB. Rather, they would have been, except there wasn’t a southern wall anymore. It had just been blown up minutes before Neil had awoken. In its place was a smoking pile of rubble.

  The men in the trucks were carrying weapons. They were coming to break through the wall and try to overrun the FOB. With that many people, there was no doubt that they would be able to inflict heavy casualties. Neil wasn’t worried about that, though. He knew they would never even get close. That was why Neil was there – to stop them.

  Neil closed his eyes. He did not need them. He felt all around him. He could feel all of the beating hearts, all of the ancient stone and sand, and all of the dust particles in the air around him. He pushed his mind outwards to the south. He felt the snakes, the spiders, the scorpions, the struggling plant life, and finally the men in the trucks.

  They were his now. He could do anything he wanted with them. He knew there was only one thing that he wanted them to do. He wanted them to die. There were many ways to make them die. He decided it would be quick. These men were not evil, they were just misguided. They were defending their homeland against perceived aggressors. Neil was not concerned with the politics of war. He was only concerned with doing the job he was sent there to do, because he was the only one who could do it.

  Neil felt for the stem connecting the brain and the spine in each of these men. He held his open hand in front of his face and imagined the sensation of closing his fist around a Styrofoam cup. That’s all it would take to finish his job so he could go back to sleep. Neil closed his fist. The trucks in the distance slowed to a halt. His job was done.

  ---

  Neil awoke in a panic. He was covered in sweat, and smelled something foul. His heart was pounding, and he felt dizzy. He sat up, and realized that the foul smell was vomit. He sheets were covered in it. It was still warm, so Neil decided it must have just happened.

  As his mind struggled to boot up, Neil became more aware of the situation around him. He was definitely in his bedroom back at State. He could tell it was early by the orange light coming through the windows. His mouth was dry from a night of heavy drinking and the sweat currently pouring out of him.

  Neil calmed down when he remembered what was causing him to panic in the first place. He had been dreaming about something terrible. He dreamt something that felt familiar, but at the same time it couldn’t have been real.

  The memories of the dream began to flood back into his consciousness, where they mixed with his current reality. He could almost feel the sensation of the hot sun, the tightness of his boots around his ankles, the pressure of his thighs as he climbed the tower, and he could feel the satisfaction of closing his fist and at the same time causing the bodies of over two hundred people to go limp.

  The realization of what he had done and how good it felt was sickening. It all felt too vivid to be just a dream. It was just as real to him as any other memory. There was no way it could be a memory, because it hadn’t happened, at least not yet.

  What did he mean ‘not yet’?

  Neil’s mind was racing. He ran into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He didn’t wait for the water to warm up before stepping in. The water cooled him and washed the sweat off of his body. As he stood beneath the now warm water, the experience of that dream seemed to wash away from him. The memories became blurry, and it was easier to separate the dream from his real memories.

  By the end of his shower, Neil felt normal again. It was just a dream, after all, and the vivid nature of it seemed to be erased from his consciousness. It still troubled him, but it was nothing more than an exceptionally traumatic nightmare.

  Neil returned to his room to find Bryan standing in his doorway. His hair was messy, his eyes were squinted, and he still had beer breath. He looked like he had just woken up.

  While scratching his head and half yawning, Bryan said “Dude, why does your room smell like puke?”

  “Because I puked in it.” Neil said, as he pushed past Bryan to get into his room and bundle up his sheets.

  “Where the hell did you go last night? I saw you talking to some hot chick outside and then you disappeared. Did you bang her?”

  Obviously, man law states that if you meet a hot girl, your friends have to repeatedly ask if you banged her.

  “No, I didn’t bang her. We just talked a bit and went to get food. Her name’s Emma.” Neil replied, slightly embarrassed.

  “That’s cool, man. You should have banged her, though.”

  “Thanks Bryan, I’ll keep that in mind.” Bryan walked into the bathroom and shut the door, leaving Neil to clean up his mess.

  It was the Saturday before exam week, which would normally mean study time. In a way, that’s what Neil had planned. Instead of course work, Neil was intent on trying to figure out how to control whatever it was that had been happening to him.

  He took his Sunfire and drove it to the Supercenter down the road. Thanks to his monthly ROTC stipend, Neil had saved up a decent amount of money. He bought himself a 60 lb dumbbell, a set of Legos, and some ping pong balls. Throwing around cans and squashing bugs was one thing. Neil wanted to test the limits of what he was capable of.

  He loaded up his car with his new toys and headed back to the same woods he had visited the day before. He could have done enough experimentation in his room back at the house, but he wasn’t willing to risk someone seeing anything. For now, caution was the best course of action.

  Neil’s mind went back to the homeless man from the day before. He was the only one that had seen what Neil could do. Who would believe him, though? As long as the man thought Neil was just practicing YouTube magic tricks, there was nothing to be worried about.

  He parked his car in the same spot as the day before and carried his things into the woods. The dumbbell caused the straps of his backpack to dig into his shoulders. The trip was more tiresome than he anticipated, but being in decent shape made the trip doable.

  The first thing Neil wanted to test was if he could control more than one thing at a time. Logically, he couldn’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t be able to. After all, moving both arms or both legs at the same time was easy enough. Why shouldn’t he be able to do the same thing with ping pong balls? The absurdity of this thought made Neil chuckle. Somehow, this whole situation was still funny to him. Some of the humor came from disbelief, some was a response to his mind simply not knowing what to make of everything.

&n
bsp; Neil sat down on the ground in the woods and laid eight ping pong balls out in front of him. To warm up, Neil tried to get one of the balls to float. After a minute or so of red-faced staring and achieving nothing more than the ball wiggling around on the ground, he finally made it happen. The ball was levitating just inches from his nose, swaying back and forth as though it were hanging from a string.

  He focused on keeping the ball steady. He imagined holding out his hand and tried to capture the sensation of getting his fingers to stop twitching and his arm to stop shaking. The ball moved around less and less, until eventually it remained perfectly still in front of him. It was as motionless as if it were encased in ice.

  While focusing on keeping the ball perfectly still, Neil took one of his hands and smacked the side of the ball as hard as he could. It didn’t budge. Instead, it collapsed and remained motionless, as if he had smashed it down onto a table.

  Neil continued levitating the ping pong balls one at a time until all seven remained perfectly motionless in front of his face. It was starting to feel more natural to him. He oriented the balls into the shape of a circle and spun them around like a windmill. Soon the balls were spinning so fast that they began to blur.

  Neil could feel the wind from the balls being pushed towards his face. All at once, he commanded them to stop. They obeyed. They had no choice but to obey. Silence ensued. As the balls sat motionless in the air in front of Neil’s face, he imagined again what it felt like to order the brain stem of those men to collapse upon themselves in his dream. He ordered the seven ping pong balls to do the same. The balls crushed into the size of raisins in one instantaneous motion, and then fell to the ground.

  Neil was astonished at how effortless this all was. No matter how much more force he needed to use to perform each action, he never became exerted or tired. Newton’s third law was out the window. If scientists found out what he could do, they would have to rewrite everything they knew about physics.

  Neil racked his brain for what limited knowledge he had of physics. Was there some unknown method behind what Neil was doing that allowed it to fit in within the laws of physics? Was he manipulating some unknown mechanism like gravity that allowed conservation of energy to be maintained? Neil knew that the only way he could find out was by being studied in a lab somewhere, and he was definitely not willing to let that happen. He didn’t want to be some guinea pig for the rest of his life.

  Neil opened the package of Legos that be bought at the store. After practicing with the ping-pong balls, careful manipulation of the small pieces was easy. He was able to assemble and reassemble shapes over and over again almost instantly. He was not limited by what he could control with his two hands. He could directly move each piece, all simultaneously.

  He shot out each piece of the Lego set in different directions several feet away. He forced them all to come back in front of him at an incredible speed and connected them all into the shape of a little space ship. The whole process only took seconds, and was no more difficult than levitating the ping pong ball had been earlier.

  Once again, Neil began laughing. The power that he was able to wield was almost unbelievable. In this moment, Neil started to feel invincible. All of the possible things he could achieve with his new talents started running through his mind. He could build a house in a day, or clean up his room instantly. He could set world weightlifting records as an unimpressive looking hundred-sixty pound skinny kid.

  His mind started wandering to all of the dark applications of his new-found abilities. He thought of the dream and how easy it was to snap his fingers and end the lives of all of the people in those trucks. He wondered if he would be able to break open a bank vault, or topple a building, or slowly break every bone in someone’s body until they passed out from the pain.

  These thoughts he had started to frighten him. There was no way he was the type of person to ever do any of those things. Neil was not a bad person. He had never been in a fight. He had never wanted to hurt anyone. His new power was dangerous, and he decided that he would only use it to do good things. He would be the super hero rather than the super villain.

  There was one more thing Neil wanted to try. He wanted to see if there was a limit to the amount of weight that he could manipulate. He picked up the sixty pound dumbbell that he bought from the store and set it down in front of him. He closed his eyes and made it a part of him, just like the ping pong balls and the Legos. He raised it up off the ground as easily as raising his leg to climb a flight of stairs. The dumbbell obeyed. It felt as light as everything else Neil had tried to control. Its movement felt fluid and effortless. He couldn’t tell that he was lifting a sixty pound weight any more than he could feel the weight of his clothing over his back.

  Neil opened his eyes and saw an old tree a few meters in front of him. Its trunk was almost three feet in diameter. He decided to perform an experiment. With the force of a cannonball, Neil launched the dumbbell towards the tree. As soon as the weight made contact, the base of the tree exploded in splinters, and the weight moved through it as if it were passing through a sheet of paper.

  Neil heard the cracking and moaning of the tree as its anchor to the ground was severed. The top of the tree began to sway, and Neil realized it was going to fall. It was falling straight towards him. He panicked as soon as he saw the direction the towering giant began to move. As the tree fell, it cast a growing shadow over Neil. The ancient tree was heading directly towards him as if it sought revenge against its killer.

  Neil was frozen in place with shock. He instantly and instinctively knew there was only one thing he could do to prevent the tree from crushing him. He reached outside of his mind and searched for the quickly approaching object. He felt the wind, the soil, the pine needles on the forest floor, but he could not feel the tree. It was moving too fast for his mind to locate.

  There was no time to locate the tree and make it a part of him. He would die before he would be able to stop it. Neil did the only thing he could have done, and he used the part of him that he knew he had control over. Neil raised his arm above his head and commanded it to stay perfectly in place. It felt different than just moving his arm. He wasn’t using his muscular structure or nervous system to move it. He used his mind.

  The tree came crashing down, and as it made contact with Neil’s outstretched hand, he focused on the bone, the muscle, the skin, and all the tendons in his arm and told them to not falter. Not a single cell in his outstretched arm was allowed to move. The tree crashed into his hand with such a force that it snapped in half where it made contact. The halves of the tree fell in front of and behind Neil. He was completely safe.

  After Neil realized what had happened, he freed his body from the defensive posture he forced it to take and examined his hand. There was not a single scratch on it. He had used his own outstretched hand to prevent a several thousand pound tree from crushing him.

  CHAPTER 6

  Neil stood for a moment in awe of what he had just done. If it was possible for him to move his own body the same way he controlled the objects outside of himself, was there any limit to what he could do? Neil let both of his arms go limp at his sides and thought back to how he felt as the tree was coming down. He had to separate the sensation of moving his arm by contracting his muscles, and moving his arm with the raw energy of his mind.

  Without contracting the muscles in his arms, Neil commanded them to raise up and stretch out to his sides. The feeling was bizarre. He felt weightless. He could rotate all of his joints in ways that he couldn’t through the use of his nervous system. He could apply force in any direction he wanted with any part of his body.

  Neil crouched down into a ball, as if he were about to jump. Instead of pushing off the ground with his thighs, Neil pushed his bone structure with his mind with a greater force than his legs would have been capable of. He leaped almost ten feet into the air.

  While falling back towards the ground, he realized that the impact from such a height could break
a bone or dislocate an ankle. He lifted up on his body and slowed his descent to a soft cushioned landing. He felt almost no force as he touched back down onto the soft earth. He considered that if he could apply force to make himself jump that high, could he simply lift himself off the ground? Could Neil actually make himself fly?

  The thought of this idea was incredible. His heart started pounding at the mere possibility of it. There was only one way to find out. Neil stood straight up and glanced up towards the sky. He put his entire body under the influence of his mind all at once. He slowly commanded it to lift off the ground just like the dumbbell, and Neil felt himself getting lighter as the force holding him to the earth slowly dissipated.

  Neil felt the sensation that his feet were dangling. He looked down, and was astonished by what he saw. He was almost six inches off the ground with absolutely nothing supporting his weight other than the power of his mind.

  Neil started laughing again. He was living everyone’s childhood dream. He was actually flying. Everything about that moment felt incredible. Just as Neil was about to raise himself up even further, he heard a familiar sounding voice.

  “Whoa, far out, man. You really are a magician.”

  It was the same homeless man from before. He was watching Neil as he hung in midair six inches off the ground. The sudden surprise caused him to lose his concentration, and he collapsed to the ground after losing control over his body.

  “Shit, you scared the hell out of me. What are you doing out here?!”

  Neil’s heart rate started to rise. He was out of breath. The situation had gone from unimaginably awesome to terrible in a matter of seconds. Neil couldn’t allow anyone to see what he was capable of doing - not if he wanted to keep a normal life.

  “I heard that tree fall and I came over to check it out. I was sleeping a little ways away in my hut. This is my area, man.” Said the man. “That was some cool trick. I’ve heard of people using illusions and camera tricks to levitate before, but that ain’t no illusion and there ain’t no cameras out here.”