Different Paths

by Nat Kozinn

  “It’s not like they broadcast officers’ meetings on their walkies, but it doesn’t take a genius to realize the situation cannot be maintained as is. It’s been two days since Nita took control of the Fields, which means two days of no Manna coming out, which means no emergency rations for the nation. People were already hungry, once they realize no more tanker trucks are coming, the National Guard will have to move in before a mob from Los Angeles marches here and does it themselves. If troops don’t work, they’ll have to rely on artillery.”

  “If we know that, so does Nita. She knows the military has to make a counter-move and she knows that hungry people won’t care about whatever political point she’s making. We know what the government is going to do, we don’t know what she has planned to deal with it,” Linda says.

  “Did Larry spill the beans on anything?” Ben says flatly.

  “You knew it was him!” I yell.

  “I made an educated guess. We didn’t have any other lines on Nita, and we needed some pieces to shift in order to reveal our own next move,” Ben says and shrugs.

  “You let me go off with him, to God knows were, to what shake things up? How did you know it wasn’t a trap?” I yell.

  “You always seemed to trust Larry so I figured he wouldn’t hurt you. Another thing I was right about by the way, you don’t look any the worse for wear,” Ben says smugly.

  “What did he want with you?” Linda says, timing her comment well to cut off whatever nastiness I was about to unleash on Ben.

  “I don’t know for sure,” I say honestly. “The supply depot thing was real. I helped the National Guard recover the guns and fuel. But he said he was there for me, to check up on me and see if I’ve taken the next step.”

  “The next step?” Linda asks.

  “That’s what Nita is worried about, that I’d take the next step and become even more powerful. But then he gave me a clue to help make sure it happened so I don’t know what to think.”

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Linda says to Ben.

  “I think he finally remembered that he has Regenerator’s kidney in his side,” Ben says still smug.

  “You knew that too? What the hell Ben? I’ve been risking my life and you could have helped me?” I scream in his face.

  “Gavin, I’m going to tell you one of the truths of this world. You cannot teach anyone anything. People have to choose to learn for themselves. Besides, it was just a theory and all you do is complain about hearing my theories. It was an academic issue anyway. It would take regrowing virtually every cell in your body, which would require an insane amount of calories, not to mention vitamins and minerals, and you’re way too big a goody-two-shoes to take what you’d need,” Ben says dismissively.

  “You always want to share your big truths of the world, when all I want is the actual truth. And you were wrong about not being able to find the nutrients. I did.”

  “What!? You did it? How?” Ben says, his tone attitude changing from smug to excited curiosity in an instant.

  “The Differents at the supply depot got their hands on a Manna tanker truck. I helped myself before returning it to the authorities. They also had a sizable supply of multi-vitamins.”

  “You managed to integrate the Regenerator genetic sequencing while maintaining The Beast’s instructions for producing superior muscle and nervous tissue?” Ben asks.

  For effect, I walk over to a jagged edge of rebar sticking out from a crack in the concrete. I slice my palm open and turn it to face the pair. It heals like water running down hill.

  “Incredible!” Ben exclaims.

  “How is this possible?” Linda asks.

  “You know how I took The Beast’s cells to make Gavin 2.0? Well Gavin 3.0 used cells that were given to me when I received an organ transplant from a Regenerator. My body is now made up of cells that are essentially the offspring of those two Differents, mixing the best of each.”

  “It worked? You’re stable?” Ben asks.

  “Stable enough to defeat fourteen Differents, well a few less than that, but it didn’t matter if they were stronger than me or could burn me. I can heal from any of it. As long as I’ve got enough calories, I’ll just keep going. That’s a decent sized caveat though. I’ve got a few gallons of pure Manna left, after that I‘m going to need to eat a couple Manna bars an hour. How’s our supply?”

  “Enough to keep the two of us going for a few weeks, or you for a few hours I guess,” Linda says.

  “That’s something you’ll have to improve for Gavin 4.0,” Ben says.

  “There’s going to be more improvements?” Linda asks.

  “Of course,” Ben answers for me. “Integrating the Regenerator sequencing opened the doorway. Now he can rapidly produce cells, which will let him more quickly integrate other abilities into his body. All he needs are a few living cells and he can gain their abilities. Bone marrow would probably be best, but I bet anything with enough live cells could work, maybe even a blood transfusion. Right Gavin?” Ben asks.

  “I guess. It’d be a stretch to say I’m an expert.”

  “Start with us,” Ben says and starts rolling up his shirt sleeve. “Come on Linda, help the cause. Let’s make him a Physically Enhanced Regenerator with Big Brain and Telepathic capabilities. Or maybe you should just start with one at a time Gavin? What do you think?”

  I think I’m not ready to change my brain yet, but I don’t want to tell them that. My brain is still my Achilles heel and I don’t want anyone else to know. Achilles was lucky he had such an inconspicuous weakness. But I know Ben, and he’s not going to take ‘no’ for an answer, especially without an explanation.

  “We don’t have enough calories on hand for me to grow all the cells I’ll need,” I say providing a perfect explanation because it’s also true.

  “Good point,” Ben says and rolls his shirt sleeve back down. “That’s the first thing you need to address. You’ll need to find some way to integrate the metabolic properties of an external powered Different. And they’ll have to be a capable one, because most external powereds have a much lower energy outputs than you’ll require. What you really need is a Fission powered sample. But I’d like to be in another time zone when you attempt to integrate that,” he says and mimes an explosion.

  “I know who to target. She’s nearby, Julia Chekov,” I tell them.

  “The Julia Chekov? As in the woman who feeds the nation?” Linda exclaims.

  “Gavin, I can appreciate your target from a purely scientific perspective. Her body is obviously able to extract extreme amounts of energy from sunlight. In fact she might even be the perfect target in that sense. But in the realities of life, you could not have picked a more difficult target. She’s at the heart of the Manna Fields, probably as closely guarded as Nita herself. If you’re going to take on all that risk, you should just go all the way and go after Nita and end this with as little bloodshed as possible.”

  “I don’t want any more bloodshed, and I certainly don’t want to kill a little girl. This isn’t just about getting Julia’s genetic information, I need to talk to her,” I say.

  “That isn’t going to work Gavin. Don’t you know, she can’t speak?” Linda says.

  “I know but you’re going to help me talk to her.”

  #

  The Manna Fields are a massive and sprawling plot of land. Manna is the product everyone focuses on and rightly so, but there is also an incredibly rich agricultural center here. Julia needs sunlight to produce Manna, which is why this spot in the desert was chosen. They upped the ante by adding Roberto Gomez. Roberto is an Energy Producer, more specifically light. And he’s Fission powered, which means he’s basically just a tiny star.

  They engineered the facility to maximize the amount of Roberto’s light that ends up shining on Julia, but even she has only so much surface area. The rest of the light flows out onto the endless rows of virtually any fruit or vegetable that can grow in this heat. In order to build this oasis in the desert,
fertile soil was needed. And that was provided by siphoning organic waste from the Seattle and Los Angeles Metro Areas. What goes into the Hoovers is sorted and anything compostable is sent here on a train. Food scraps and human waste are broken down and turned into nutrient rich soil, which sustains the crops in a horrifying and necessary process known as the circle of life.

  The crops may be bountiful, but the odor is ungodly. Thankfully, I can still turn off my sense of smell. I walk through rows of tall green stalks with just a few leaves. My target is easy to spot. It’s towards what looks like the sun on the horizon, but it’s not because the sun can’t be seen at 2 AM. The sun never sets at the Manna Fields. Instead, they use a complex mirror system to direct light at the various crops based on whatever light/dark cycles they need to flower or germinate or whatever it is. I could be worried that the crops will be lost, but really, Differents were already doing all the work in this facility. If anything, after Nita took over, they’re probably getting it back into working order after the government messed things up.

  Differents do a better job running this facility without Government interference. Thoughts like that have occurred to me more and more recently. It started when Maria asked me if I had truly considered what side I was on, got worse when Larry asked the same thing, and really came to a head with all those Differents at the supply depot calling me a traitor to my race. Being able to see what memories trigger what emotional reactions might help me understand my motivations better but it doesn’t give me clear answers to my moral qualms.

  Is Nita right? Is it time for Differents to run things separately from regular human society? What would a separate society even look like? Differents still come out of the normal population, would Differents become the ones running tests and taking away children? I don’t want that.

  But neither is it fair that some government bureaucrats get to decide Differents’ entire life story, where they live, their occupation, and how much they have to pay just to exist. Do we really have some sort of obligation to house, feed, and clothe the entire planet because of an accident of birth? But if we stop providing, people go hungry.

  I push these concerns out of my mind so I don’t accidentally let it seep into my conversation with Linda and Ben.

  >>>Any luck pinging her or whatever it is you guys would call it.

  <<
  >>>Sounds complicated.

  <<
  >>>Ask Ben if they had video surveillance at the site when he was the Head Librarian.

  <<
  >>>Oh, is that you Ben? I thought I was connected with Linda.

  <<
  >>>Excuse me?

  >>>We entered the Merge in order to handle that brain wave matching we were telling you about. We think as one now, or we both think at the same time. It is a difficult experience to describe to those who’ve never felt it. You’re still you, but you’re also someone else. It’s the key to the entire think.Net system. Telepaths can feel the thousands of minds in their range, but they can’t possibly keep track of who each one is, let alone deliver them information with any speed. By entering the Merge, Big Brains can remember all the various individual brain signatures, as well as which brain is trying to connect with which. Usually, it takes more than two to get a Merge going, but we’ve got raw talent and experience on our side.

  <<
  >>>The Telepathic network put up by all the Telepaths Nita has in place, is like a dense fog. We need you to be a mental lighthouse to lead…

  <<
  >>>You should be soaking up the information. You’re going to be a fellow Telepath and Big Brain soon enough. Maybe you can be a Merge on your own. We don’t even know what that would be like. Speaking of which, we have some questions about how you were able to integrate Sarah’s genetic sequencing into the cells in your brain while maintaining…

  <<
  Having to lie to Ben about changing my brain is a good reminder that I’m not quite as invulnerable as I’d like to be. I should pay more attention to my surroundings. There’s a figure moving among the foliage up ahead. He’s walking slowing and methodically, bending over each plant. It’s a Walter dutifully performing his task of watering the plants or picking off bugs or whatever. It’ll keep working even as the world burns. I keep moving past him, turning back once just to make sure he doesn’t start to follow a new set of orders.

  At the end of the agricultural section is the storage section. A mix of tall silos and long warehouses, all connected by a tiny little railroad system that carries the goods. It’s weird to see eating turned into an industrial process but here it is. All grown, picked, and transported by Different labor.

  In the morning, Speedsters will come out and pick whatever crop is ready with a level of care and speed that no man or machine could match. They will gather the crops in massive containers that will be transported by Strong-Men, a single one of whom provides the lifting power of a thousand men. Then it is distributed to warehouses made of materials created by Differents, rides on trains built and fueled by Differents, where it will be analyzed, sterilized, and prepared for transport, all by Differents. Yet last I checked, Ultracorps is a publically traded company, and it’s the shareholders who see most of the profits from this food.

  That’s one of the great ironies of Nita’s revolution. She’s doing it on the back of the corporation most directly responsible for the crimes drawing her outrage. It’s like if the Swiss banks had funded the Communist revolution. It calls motives into question. Maybe it’s a necessary evil, but it does impugn her moral righteousness. Somebody besides Walters is still keeping these plants green, and I doubt it’s because they woke up and loved the idea of being a farmer.

  The storage silos give way as the heat becomes more intense. The center of the Manna Fields is as barren as the desert around it. It is too hot for anything to grow. That’s because I’m closing in on a tiny star, at least that’s what I’d see if it didn’t fry my retinas to look directly up at Roberto.

  There’s a giant Maceo Steel structure that keeps Roberto raised off the ground so the light his body generates can be reflected down onto Julia Chekov and all of the other crops. There’ a roof overhead which looks like an umbrella. It is covered in mirrors to reflect down the light that radiates upwards. Can’t have that going to waste.

  My target is at the base of what kind of looks like a giant spotlight pointing down. That’s where Julia resides. She doesn’t need time in the dark to flower, or to practice crop cycling. Her body sucks down as much light as it can get and spits out as much Manna as it can make all day every day.

  The light brings an enormous amount of heat along with it. That’s why I’m going to have to solve my way through a maze of water pipes to get to Julia. It’s all part of a system where Cooler Differents absorb enough of the excess heat to keep Julia from burning alive. The pipes won’t protect me until I get to the center. I’m going to have to tough it out.

  I st
ep a few feet forward into the cone of light created by Roberto. The light is intense, like the sunniest beach day of my life multiplied by a thousand. It only takes a few seconds for my skin to go quickly through every degree of burn on the list. I respond by directing my skin cells to replicate, which they do at an incredibly fast rate. My rate of healing and rate of enduring serious burns settles on a point of equilibrium where my skin blisters, but the blisters don’t pop. As always, I’m thankful for not feeling pain. I am getting a little sick of relying on that feature.

  The air is hot enough to singe my lungs, but not enough to have much of an effect on my ability to absorb oxygen. It is calling to mind traumatic memories of almost dying less than a week ago. If I get caught here, there’s going to be a hundred times as many Differents after me.

  It takes me a few minutes to weave through the cobweb of pipes and reach the woman at the center. The trip takes its toll on my calorie reserves. I guzzled Manna before I came here, filling my belly and even creating some fat reserves to fuel me. It all added up to over 300,000 calories, which seemed like a ridiculous amount at the time, but I’ve already burned half of it. If I end up fighting my way out, I could be in trouble.

  But I need to talk to Julia, so I’m willing to take the risk. I reach the epicenter of the cone of light and see a raised platform. At the top there’s something that vaguely resembles human skin, but it’s stretched to a degree I did not know skin could stretch. I honestly have no idea which part of what used to be a human body I am near, but she’s lying down and she’s as thick as I am tall.

  They did this to Julia. She was always going to be physically deformed, her Differentiation ensured that, but she doesn’t have to be like this. In another life, she could be a relatively functional human being with a relatively normal life. Instead, she’s been turned into a human dairy cow. She only grew to such grotesque and horrific proportions because they bathed her in unnatural and impossible amounts of light and carbon dioxide in order to extract every drop of Manna they could from her body.