“What’s the hypothesis?”
“Well, we’ve got an idea for the what, but not the how. Now, I’m no physicist, but to the best of my understanding, your ability works by manipulating the Higgs field around the particles in an object. Your mind is capable of tricking the molecules into believing that the folds in space caused by gravity are pulling them into a different direction from where they should actually go.”
Neil had no idea what he was talking about.
“Uhh, what?”
“Ok, it’s like this. Say you are standing there in your back yard cooking hot dogs on the grill, and then all of the sudden your 700 pound aunt waddles up to you and asks when the food will be done. You feel her gravitational pull towards you. Suddenly you are lifted off the ground and go careening towards your aunt, unable to escape from certain demise. You basically do that with your mind, except there’s no 700 pound aunt. It just feels like there is.”
Neil laughed.
“I see, it all makes sense now. What you’re saying is that I’m the fat guy in the family?” He joked.
“Yes, something like that. If we’re right, that means we have only begun to scratch the surface of your ability. Hypothetically, you could even affect gravity on a molecular level. You could split atoms if you wanted to. You could even repair damaged cellular structure in your own body. Whether or not you will be able to actually control it to its full potential is another story.”
“There’s only one way to find out.” Neil stated.
“I like the enthusiasm. I think we’ve had enough practice for one day, though. Taking the rest of the day off after nearly creating a singularity is well within reason. Let’s pick this back up tomorrow. We’ve got some ideas for how to test this hypothesis of ours.”
Carl stood up and left the room. Everyone else followed shortly after.
Neil returned to his living quarters and tried to spend a few minutes searching online for information regarding the ‘Higgs field’ that Carl was talking about. After trying for nearly an hour to make sense of it, he gave up and went to sleep.
---
Neil woke up floating above his bed as usual, and prepared himself for a new day of testing. He had managed not to destroy the entire facility that night, so he felt proud of the progress he had made.
He ate breakfast, showered, and entered the testing facility. General Steele, Carl, and Tanya were already waiting for him up in the observation room.
As he walked out into the middle of the room, Neil saw that there was nothing there besides a metal table with a clear jug of grape juice on it.
“What is this, some kind of joke?” He asked.
“Sort of.” Carl’s voice said over the loud speaker. “We’re going to do a little chemistry experiment today. It was inspired in part from the Bible.”
“What do you mean?” Neil asked, as he turned to face the observation deck.
“Jesus turned water into wine. We’re going to turn grape juice into wine. Fermentation is the process that turns sugars into a mixture of ethanol and carbon dioxide. Normally, yeast is used in the process, but we’re going to try to do things manually. You’re going to see if you can separate the sugar molecules into ethanol and carbon dioxide.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
“Beats me. Try thinking about it really hard.”
Neil had absolutely no clue how he was supposed to willfully pull apart a molecule. He could feel the juice in his influence. He tried to imagine what a molecule would look like. He pulled the two halves of it in two different directions.
The jug exploded, sending grape juice everywhere.
“Shit!” Neil exclaimed, licking a few drops of the juice that had landed on his face.
“I think you were pulling a little bit too hard there. Tanya will get you another jug.”
“No, there’s no need. I can fix it.”
Neil pulled all of the juice back into the shape of the jug, and re-formed the plastic shell around it.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Try thinking about it not as one object, but billions of smaller ones.” This time Steele spoke.
It was worth a shot. Neil concentrated on the juice again, but this time he zoomed in his perspective. Instead of imagining the juice as one object, he felt the billions of smaller molecules floating in a sea of mostly empty space. Each molecule had its own signature. He could sense that there were many different shapes and consistencies to them. Each had their own unique texture, and trying to determine the type of molecule was like trying to guess what something was by rubbing a hand across it with your eyes closed.
“I can feel them! There are thousands of different kinds of shapes in there. How do I figure out which one is the sugar?” Neil asked.
“Think back to high school chemistry. You’re looking for glucose. It’s a chain of oxygen and hydrogen atoms connected into a molecule. In total, there are six carbon, twelve hydrogen, and six oxygen atoms.” This time Tanya spoke. She must have been the chemistry guru.
Neil focused his perspective even smaller this time. He felt the different parts of each molecule. He could feel the different texture that each atom had. From what he remembered of chemistry, hydrogen just had one electron. He looked for an atom that had only one smaller particle circling the larger part in the center. He found it, and began to locate all of the hydrogen atoms using its signature as a reference.
After a few minutes of Tanya explaining the chemical structure of each of the molecules Neil was looking for, he had made his best guess at finding them all.
“Ok, I think I’m ready.”
He located all of the glucose and fructose molecules in the juice and slowly pulled apart their molecular bonds, rearranging them into the correct shapes. He started out with just a few molecules, and then moved on to a few hundred, then a few thousand. Eventually, a foam appeared over the top layer of the juice. Bubbles rose to the top.
“You’re doing it!” Tanya yelled. “That fizz is carbonation. It’s released from the reaction. It’s working! Oh, you might want to take the lid off.”
Neil unscrewed the lid and continued rearranging the molecules. There were so many of them, but after getting used to the process, it was no challenge to work his way through several million at a time. The bubbles overflowed out of the jug, and then the layer of foam receded. He was done.
He walked up and took a swig from the jug. It was still incredibly sweet, but also highly alcoholic.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Neil Hitchens winery.”
He took another sip as laughter came from the loudspeaker.
Neil brought the jug of wine up to the observation room and poured it into four glasses. They spent the next several hours getting drunk while listening as Carl explained what their plans were to further test Neil’s ‘micro-manipulation,’ as they called it.
“Making wine is just the first step,” Carl explained, “With sufficient understanding of molecular structure and biology, you could perform miracles! You could perform complicated surgeries, cure someone of disease, repair scars and burnt tissue. Think of all the good you could cause in the world!”
“You saying you want me to cure the itching that’s going on downstairs, there, Carl?” Neil joked, chuckling at his own humor. He was already half-way drunk by now.
“Sure, I could do all of those good things, but where’s the fun in that? No one ever made a difference in the world by fixing someone’s broken leg, or getting rid of some five year old kid’s tumor. Sure it makes people feel good, but I want to be remembered. I want the entire world to know my name. I want them to fear my POWER!”
As he spoke the last sentence, Neil slammed a pencil down into Tanya’s hand, pinning it to the table. Blood seeped out through the bottom of her palm. She screamed.
“NEIL! What the fuck did you do? You psychopath!” Carl stood up and yelled at him, but Neil just laughed.
“Oh, relax, Carl. It’s just a joke.�
� Neil pulled the pencil out of Tanya’s hand and reconnected the tissue in the wound. The bleeding stopped, and there was no evidence of any injury. “The lord giveth, and the lord taketh away.”
Neil made chuckling sounds as he covered his mouth to hide his amusement. The alcohol was starting to take effect, but he continued to drink more.
“That’s not funny you crazy son of a bitch! You hurt me! You made me bleed! I think you’ve had enough to drink.” Tanya said, with tears forming at her eyes.
“Yeah, so? I hurt you, and then I unhurt you. What’s the big deal? If it would make you feel better, I could make it up to you.”
Neil walked slowly towards her, scanning her body up and down. She backed away against the wall.
“I could satisfy you in ways your husband could never dream of, just by thinking about it.”
He had her pinned up against the wall. She tried to shrink away from him, but there was nowhere for her to go.
“You mother fucker, get away from my wife!”
Carl came at Neil with a fist, but Neil halted him in mid-air. He stepped away from Tanya and froze Carl exactly where he was. He was completely unable to move.
“You know, I could kill you right now.” Neil said, approaching Carl. “I am in complete control over your life. I decide who lives and who dies, and there is nothing you can do about it. How does that make you feel?”
Carl would have tried to speak, but Neil held his mouth shut.
“Speechless, just as I thought.” Neil laughed again. “Man, nobody has a sense of humor anymore. You have all managed to bore me. I’m going to bed.”
Neil released Carl and stumbled across the room, knocking over a chair. He fell onto his bed and passed out almost immediately, still fully clothed.
---
Neil woke up with a splitting headache and a painfully dry throat. He felt all the familiar symptoms of a hangover. He didn’t remember drinking too much of the wine, but the sugar in it might have disguised the alcohol content. Neil felt a little better after drinking a cold glass of water from the bathroom. He watched some TV in his room while he waited out his hangover.
There didn’t seem to be anything interesting on TV. The music channel had a reality show about pregnant teenagers who wanted a sex change operation. The history stations had shows about aliens and conspiracy theories. Even the news seemed to be filling the air time with everything except for actual news. They were showing interviews with people claiming to have seen Superman.
Neil reached out to the remote with his influence to turn off the TV. Just before he clicked it off, something caught his eye. They were showing a low quality cell phone video of the outside of a building. The letters on the outside of the building were fuzzy, and the image wasn’t stabilized very well, but Neil could make it out – ‘Augusta-Richmond County Public Library’.
Gunshots could be heard in the video through the cell phone’s low quality microphone. He already knew what was going to happen next. After a couple minutes of silence, the video was paused, and the reporter spoke.
“Watch closely, ladies and gentlemen. This is where things get interesting. For a split second, you can clearly see something burst out of the library doors.”
The library doors crashed open, and for just a brief moment, a human shaped figure could clearly be seen in the video feed. The person holding the camera tried to track the figure as it shot out of the library, but by the time they located Neil in the sky, he was just a speck.
“As our citizen filmer attempts to focus on the object in the sky, you can clearly see a second object fly across the upper-right corner of the video chasing the first object.” The reporter explained, “The internet is abuzz with theories. Could this obviously human figure be related to the photograph taken above Chicago last week?”
The picture that Neil had seen in the newspaper that morning was shown on the news channel again.
He couldn’t help but be amused by the situation. He was already generating media hype, and he hadn’t even done anything remarkable. If the news was excited now, they were going to explode once he was actually given a mission overseas somewhere.
The TV flipped off when Neil hit the remote. He made his way towards the conference room, where breakfast should have been waiting for him. A glass of cold orange juice would help cure what was still left of his hangover.
When he stepped inside, Tanya was sitting down eating her food.
“Good morning, Tanya.” Neil said, as cheerfully as he could muster in his current state of grogginess.
Tanya didn’t answer. Instead she got up from her chair and quickly pushed past him as she walked of the room. Her food had barely been touched. Neil couldn’t help but notice that she avoided eye contact as she sped past him. What was her problem? She was unable to put on even the fake smile she gave them when they first entered the department a few days ago.
Neil ate his oatmeal and bacon in silence. After a few minutes, General Steele walked in and sat across from Neil.
“Hitchens, we need to talk about last night.” He said, folding his hands on the table in front of him.
“What, you mean about the wine?”
That was all he remembered.
“No, I mean what happened after you drank the wine.”
“Well, you’ll have to remind me what happened first. I don’t remember a damn thing.” Neil said, munching on a slice of bacon.
“You…you don’t remember? How can you not remember what you did?”
Neil began to worry. What could he possibly have done?
“I drank a lot of wine, and that was some potent shit. What exactly did I do?”
General Steele told the entire story. Neil was disgusted with himself. He dropped his spoonful of oatmeal and completely lost his appetite. He could hardly believe what the General was telling him. What could have possibly compelled him to stab Tanya with a fucking pencil? Why did he threaten to kill Carl? It sounded like he was being framed for something he couldn’t possibly have done, but Steele had no reason to lie to him.
“I have to go apologize, right away. You have to understand, Sir, I didn’t mean any of that. I don’t know how I could have done those things. I hate to blame the alcohol, but I honestly don’t remember doing any of that.”
Neil felt panicked. He was actually afraid of what he had done. He had completely lost control of himself.
“I think it’s best to stay away from those two for a little while, Hitchens. Give them some time to forget about it. I’m not going to lie - you terrified me. I was more afraid of you in that moment than I have ever been of another person in my entire life. You weren’t just drunk on wine last night; you were drunk on power.”
Neil’s ability was consuming everything about his old life that he identified with. The person he used to be didn’t matter anymore. He was a new person, and he was starting not to like the new Neil. He had to find some way to hold on to himself. He didn’t like what he was becoming. He figured out exactly what he needed.
“Sir, I need to go to the surface. I’ve been down here for three days.”
“You do what you’ve got to do, son. Just be back before anyone misses you.”
Neil left the department and made his way to the elevator. He rode it all the way to the top floor, and headed out the double doors to the outside world. It had been so long since he had seen any kind of natural light that even the sunlight shining through the glass doors blinded him. After his vision adjusted, he stepped outside into the morning sun.
There was not a single cloud in the sky. He knew that it was just what he needed. He walked over to a corner of the building where he was sure nobody was watching and launched himself into the sky.
CHAPTER 15
It had been days since Neil had flown, and the exhilaration was just what he needed to lift his spirits. He no longer needed a snowsuit or a motorcycle helmet to keep him warm. He didn’t need to use a window to shield himself from the wind, either. He learned how to carry wit
h him a warm pocket of air from the ground as he flew that would protect him from the elements. There was no wind, and no biting cold.
Neil continued to fly himself straight up into the welcoming blue frontier. He went faster than he had ever traveled before. It didn’t take long for the sound of rushing wind around his pocket of air to cease completely. He had left Earth’s atmosphere. Neil entered the realm of the cosmos.
He looked at the horizon and saw the familiar blue of the sky beneath him, and the black void of space above him.
Admiring the breathtaking view before him, he slowed to a halt and remained still. He had seen pictures of the Earth from space before, but flying so far into the atmosphere that he could see an entire continent beneath him was an experience that could not be matched by a photograph.
As Neil floated above his home planet, he became aware of the uncomfortable silence that surrounded him. There was absolutely no noise. Even if a large bomb had gone off below, there would be no matter for the sound waves to reverberate off of all the way into space. For the first time in his life, Neil heard the sound of complete silence.
At first the eerie silence bothered him. It made him feel alien. After a few minutes, though, he began to appreciate it. He realized how much more peaceful the universe was without sound. There were no car horns, no police sirens, no wind, and no sounds of obnoxiously loud college kids.
Neil watched the world below him spin for several minutes. After what seemed like a lifetime, he realized that he was having trouble breathing. The oxygen in his protective shell of air was running out.
In keeping with his favorite tradition, Neil let go of the control he had over his body. He began his descent towards earth and closed his eyes to let the feeling of weightlessness during free fall consume him. It was incredibly relaxing. All of his worries disappeared, and he was lost within his own mind. He wondered if it would be possible to fall asleep while plummeting towards the earth at terminal velocity. It was.
Superhuman Nature Page 16
