The flames that had ignited inside of him did so once more, but this time they were not fueled by anger. The sun’s raw energy fed into him and the flames inside of him grew into an inferno.
The sun spoke to him. It told him that everything was going to be ok. It said that he was following the right path. The warm comfort of the plasma running over his body eased his worries. His heart slowed until it beat only once per minute. The activity in his body winded down to a crawl, as if time itself were slowing down. All thoughts of Emma had completely disappeared. Neil closed his eyes and slept. The sun was his cocoon.
---
When Neil awoke, he had no idea how long he had been asleep. It could have been minutes, hours, days, or even years. His sense of time had been completely shattered by his metamorphosis. He no longer felt like he was contained inside of his body. His flesh and bones were just a small fragment of everything in his influence. The information that his five human senses provided him were negligible compared to the grand tapestry of matter and energy that fed his awareness of the universe around him.
The same sun that initially felt chaotic and random to Neil was now ordered and sequential. He collided hydrogen atoms together to create a fusion reaction, and the sun grew brighter for a moment. For as long as Neil continued the reaction, the heat from the sun was amplified and radiated in all directions.
Sometime during Neil’s slumber, his body had automatically resumed breathing. The hot plasma entered his lungs, where it separated itself from the limited amount of oxygen mixed within. He exhaled the remainder just as if he were breathing normal air.
Neil felt through the void of space for his home planet. From far away, it seemed so very small to him then. He could see all of the activity going on throughout every continent. People were driving to work or school, animals were hiding or hunting in the wilderness, and sea creatures miles beneath the surface were floating about in complete darkness.
Everything familiar about his past life had been erased. Even the sense of home he felt at the NSA building was now gone. The universe was his home, now.
There was one person in the world that Neil still felt some kind of attachment to; one person whose sorrow Neil felt responsible for. He was the father of the girl Neil had murdered, and the owner of the home Neil had destroyed.
He searched the faces around the world and analyzed their shapes. Neil could see images of the faces in his mind’s eye as he examined their features. Billions of images flashed through his mind until he found the man he was looking for.
Steele was sitting alone in an East Lansing coffee shop not far from the crater where his home used to be. Neil could sense that he bore a great burden based off the chemistry in his body. He seemed to have aged since Neil had last seen him. His heart was weaker, his face was more solemn, and his body was run down. Either a considerable amount of time had passed while Neil slept, or some large stress had put years of wear and tear on Steele.
Neil shifted his body. He felt like a stone statue coming to life. His bones and joints creaked as he moved them, and his blood began to flow normally, only after he had wiggled free every limb on his body. He launched himself out of the core of the sun and made his way towards earth.
When he burst through the final layer of his cocoon back to the emptiness outside, his senses returned to him. His eyes once again saw the light of the sun illuminate half of his body. He oriented himself towards Earth and began the journey back to the place that used to be his home.
Neil was able to travel faster on his way home than he had ever tried before. He stopped relying on his senses for direction and instead felt the environment around him. When he was close enough to Earth to see it as pale blue dot in the distance, he slowed his speed.
The continents distinguished themselves from the oceans as Neil got closer. Soon, he was able to see the diverse terrain that made up the landscape of North America. Honed in on the coffee shop where Steele sat, he continued forward and descended from the sky.
When Neil touched down onto the ground, he could tell that everything was different. The breeze was cool enough to cause goosebumps on Neil’s skin, and the trees carried leaves of many different colors. There was a certain smell to the air that only came about during the fall.
Neil stood outside the coffee shop window and looked inside. He could see several patrons wearing light jackets, and some had scarves. When he had left, it was May. Now he returned in what he guessed was late October.
As he looked back and forth between the people in the shop, he noticed an older man looking back up at him through the glass. It was Steele. He was the same person, but there was weariness to his eyes that made him look like a frail version of his past self.
When their gaze met, the realization manifested through Steele’s facial expression as shock, then anger, then fear.
Neil walked into the shop and sat at the chair across from him. For a while, the two stared at each other without saying a word. Steele looked as if many thoughts were racing through his tired mind. Finally, he spoke.
“Coffee?”
“Please.” Neil responded.
Neither made any verbal indication that there was hostility between them, but Neil knew what he had done was unforgivable. Steele likely would have strangled him by then if he were any other person.
Steele raised a hand with his index finger pointed up to get the attention of the barista.
“Large coffee please, for him.” He said, pointing to Neil.
He returned his gaze to match Neil’s.
“You killed my daughter.”
It was not a question.
“Yes.”
“If I could kill you, I would.”
He lowered his voice as one of the employees came by to drop off Neil’s coffee. He sipped from it and set it back down.
“I know.”
“So why have you come out of hiding after a year and a half? Just to antagonize me? Did you come to take something else from me?”
A year and a half? Had he really been gone that long?
“I wasn’t hiding. I was sleeping.”
“Sleeping? You mean to tell me you were sleeping for 18 months?”
“Yes. In the sun.”
“Jesus Christ. You’re serious, aren’t you? Do you have any idea what has happened since you’ve been gone? The world has been in chaos. The Second Korean War started just after you disappeared.” He explained. “It started out as a ground invasion by the North. We helped out just with naval and air support initially, but when China started doing the same, we sent our ground force. Six months ago, China did too. Now there are over two million ground troops emplaced in the Korean Peninsula.”
“Who’s winning?”
“It’s been going back and forth. They pushed past the 38th parallel with the initial invasion, but we sent them packing when our troops got involved. Since China joined the fray, they have pushed south past Seoul. The city was nearly wiped out by air strikes and naval bombardments, and the White House is considering the possibility of using nukes.”
“Won’t China use them too, if the US does?”
“Most definitely. The majority of China and North Korea’s assets have set up shop in what remains of Seoul. They have set it up as a Forward Command Post. The city is impenetrable to any kind of ground or air attack. If we take back Seoul, they’ll be crippled.” Steele continued.
“We hope that if we hit Seoul with a nuke, it’ll be the beginning of the end to the war. The problem is that they might hit us back. We lost track of six Chinese nuclear submarines. They could be anywhere right now, waiting for the order to launch.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because I want you to know what you caused. I want you to know that millions of lives have been ruined, and hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost from something you created, and something you could have stopped. This is all your fault.”
Neil thought hard about what Steele told him. Could
he really be the one to blame for the war? He was there to set off the chain of events that started it, but was he any more to blame than the mother of a dictator? Did the moral implications of who was to blame really matter at that point? Neil decided he didn’t care who was responsible, because he would be the one to end it.
“Goodbye, Steele.” Neil said. He stood up from the chair after drinking the rest of his coffee and turned to walk out of the shop.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
“To finish what I started.”
“Neil.”
Steele called out to him before he reached the door. Neil turned around and looked saw Steele glaring at him.
“If I ever see you again, I’m going to find a way to kill you.”
It wasn’t an empty threat. Neil saw the conviction in his eyes. He left the coffee shop without responding.
The world was in turmoil, and Neil was partly responsible. He had thought his ability would change the world for the better, but all he had done so far was cause more violence and more wars. He wondered if there really was any hope for humanity. Did a world where violence only begets more violence have any possibility for peace?
If Neil was going to make a real difference, he would have to show the world how terrible war could be. Only once they saw the destruction of lives on a massive scale could they see that war was not a sustainable course of action. He had to unite them against a common enemy for them to have any chance of banding together. They needed to all experience love, fear, and hatred all for the same reasons at the same time. Only then could Neil hope to make the world a better place.
He had to be that enemy.
CHAPTER 23
Neil’s presence above the city of Seoul had not gone unnoticed by the Chinese and North Korean militaries. He was met at first with surface-to-air missiles, and then by strafing runs from Chinese modeled fighter jets. He stood perfectly still, a thousand feet above the city as they threw everything they had at him. All of their multi-million dollar equipment was turned into a heap of scrap and thrown back to the ground. Neil waited.
It took hours for them to realize he was a person, and not a bomb or some kind of drone. Neil examined the city below him while he waited. The city had suffered massive damage from shelling and bombing.
Smoke rose from smoldering wreckage on the ground. Families had vacated bombed out apartment complexes and lived in refugee centers scattered around the city. All of the streets were nearly devoid of the normal hustle and bustle of city life, and replaced with military vehicles that ran supplies to new command posts in the city.
Neil could see the compounds full of people surrounded by barbed wire. They lived in dirty tents and all wore dirty jumpsuits. These were the people that had resisted the occupation of the city.
Small pockets of gunfire could be heard from time to time throughout the metropolis. The gunshots were met with more gunshots, and then by silence. The city was at war with itself just as much as the military forces were at war with each other.
Neil eventually saw what he was waiting for. Several news helicopters flew in circles around him, keeping their distance. Within half an hour of the first chopper arriving, there were a half dozen all up in the sky pointing their cameras directly at him.
“Good.” He said aloud.
He wanted the cameras to see the event that was about to unfold. The world needed to watch what horrors war would bring if they continued to neglect their own wellbeing. They wouldn’t understand what the destruction of a city looked like until they witnessed it burning with their own eyes. The only way for Neil to prevent a nuclear holocaust was to create one.
He positioned himself over downtown Seoul near the largest cluster of buildings he could find. He could feel the presence of seven million people living below him. Many of the city’s former population had evacuated the city or been killed in the fighting, but a large portion still remained. They would have to be sacrificed.
He concentrated on the structure of every building, every street lamp, every newspaper stand, and every vehicle parked on every street of the city. Neil appreciated the history of the city that had been inhabited for thousands of years. Humanity had taken a part of the earth and turned it into something unnatural, like a mechanical heart inside of an otherwise biological patient.
The air was replaced with a black cloud of swirling debris as pieces of the city broke apart and flew towards a centralized point beneath Neil. Glass panes, bricks, twisted scraps of metal, and office supplies all filled the air. The sound of a never ending car wreck echoed throughout the city.
People poured into the streets to watch the spectacle. Neil saw a man and a woman hit by a soaring car that was wretched out of its parking spot into the air like it was weightless. After people began to understand the danger they were in, most of them sought cover. Several were still too mesmerized by the cyclone of flying debris to care about their personal safety.
Buildings crumbled as their support structures were slowly stripped away to join the sphere floating below Neil. The wreckage was compressed into a smooth ball of metal, glass, and every other kind of material found in the city. As more debris flew to the center, the sphere grew to the size of a football stadium. After it had reached that point, it stopped growing in size. Instead, it grew in density as Neil pushed around the sides like he had done with the steel cube in the PRECINCT facility.
The helicopters floating overhead were transfixed by the scene below them. They shifted their focus from Neil and aimed their cameras at the destruction of the city.
A circular area of the city around the sphere had been completely leveled. All that remained of the tall buildings that once scraped the sky was a heap of rubble on the ground. The residents of the buildings and the streets below them were not exempt from the force that pulled everything to the sphere.
An orange glow emanated from the sphere as more matter added to the density. Before long, the heat radiating from the sphere was enough for Neil to feel it, floating several hundred feet above.
Neil heard the faint echo of screams from the sections of the city that he stripped away to add to his collection. They were silenced once the surface they stood on was sucked into the unstoppable vortex of debris. The sphere glowed brighter until it resembled the tempered steel of a blacksmith hammering away at a medieval longsword. The comforting warmth had turned into a blistering heat, and Neil had to shield himself and the news choppers from it.
By the time Neil had stopped collapsing the city into his sphere, an entire mile in all directions had been turned to a barren wasteland. The pavement and foundations from the buildings were all ripped up from the ground, and all that showed beneath was the disturbed earth.
The sphere was white hot now, and looking into it was like looking into the bulb of a flashlight at night. Where Neil was positioned, the heat would have burnt his body to a crisp had he not protected himself from it.
He compressed the sphere further until it was no larger than an oversized beach ball. The ground caught fire and rocks embedded in the dirt became molten. The buildings on the outskirts of the destruction began to heat their occupants like a sauna.
The air around the sphere was wavy and distorted. The light being cast now outshone the sun. The matter inside was now completely molten and blended together into one conglomerate substance.
For one brief moment, there was a flash, and then everything was gone.
The atoms inside the sphere had been ripped apart. The energy released from the reaction was like nothing that had ever taken place on Earth. A mushroom cloud that could be seen for a hundred miles rose over the former city, and the landscape was completely decimated.
The resulting shockwave vaporized every structure left standing in the city. The occupants staring out of their windows didn’t even have time to see the end coming towards them. The dust that was kicked up from the blast blanketed the sky, and the red gloom of Armageddon encompassed the entire Korean peninsula.
After the smoke settled, the helicopters floated above the city to film the destruction. People all around the world were glued to their TV sets. They watched as an entire city was wiped out in front of their eyes.
Neil flew to the nearest news chopper and positioned himself directly in front of the camera. The pilot hovered the chopper, and the crew inside stared at him in awe. He took the headset that was broadcasting the microphone feed.
“This is what war looks like. If you continue down this path of destruction, the human race will fall. Let this serve as a warning to you all: Throw down your weapons and end this war, or I will end it for you.”
With that, he took off into the sky and let the weight of his message sink in to the rest of the world.
---
For the next several days, Neil watched the political shitstorm that ensued after what he had done in Korea. The fighting in the Second Korean War had ceased, at least temporarily. Each side blamed the other for the attack. Both sides denied any involvement.
Neil’s message played over and over again to the world’s news stations, translated to different languages depending on the region. He was immediately recognized as the same man that caused a media frenzy a year and a half earlier. They were even referring to him by his real name now, instead of just ‘the flying man’. Theories sprouted up to explain his long absence, but none of them were as farfetched as the true reason he was gone for so long.
To Neil’s disappointment, his actions did not scare the world into ending the war. Instead, he had only succeeded in adding fuel to the fire. Both sides hated each other more than ever after believing that their opposition was responsible for the annihilation of an entire city.
Neil couldn’t understand how they could be so dense. How could the US possibly think that Neil was working for the North Koreans and Chinese? Why would they want to destroy their own city after capturing it? Did they even really think Neil was working for the enemy, or were they just using it as an excuse to further fuel the public’s support for the war?
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