Unity

by Carl Stubblefield

  “Healing and crafting? What’s that all about?” Gus questioned.

  “It’s a little complicated. Let me see if I can explain. Most of the other supers don’t know this, but my wife and I were doctors before I ever became a super. It’s how I discovered my powers, and I got mine late in life, relatively. How old do you think I am, Gus?”

  Gus assessed the man. “I’d say late twenties, early thirties.”

  “Try seventy-three years old.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, mate. Seriously. I started out as a healer and evolved to other specialties, but that’s what I am at my core. It does have some fringe benefits.”

  “Okay, you’ve got my attention,” Gus said as he followed BoJack’s lead and sat on his cot.

  “I got my powers in the early Nineties, when powers were fairly new to the world. At the time, I was still working at an internship while my wife was working full time at the same hospital. This was before supers were in control of most of the world’s governments, and it was a different time.

  “To handle the stress of my workload, I had taken to meditation and a lot of visualization. Whenever I did my rounds, I would try to visualize what processes were suboptimal and what needed to happen to make my patients healthy again. Somewhere along the line, patients under my care started having an unusually high recovery rate.”

  Gus leaned forward, listening intently—he loved origin stories.

  “After a while people began to notice and accompanied me on rounds, but no one noticed that I was doing anything that was out of the ordinary or special. Hell, I didn’t know what I was doing either. Things were going well for a while, then we had a series of challenges all at once. I won’t go into it, but it was an incredibly hard time for me and my wife. And it only got worse from there. Ultimately, the issues took over our whole lives and I left my internship and stopped practicing medicine altogether.”

  Gus sat up straight. “Were you indentured? I heard medical school was so expensive most people agreed to be conscripted to cover the cost.”

  “No, fortunately. But I was rolling in seas of debt. On top of that, I was in a really dark place for a long time, I had lost so much. I was never suicidal, but it was so difficult to find any reason to go on. For a while I just existed, taking no enjoyment from anything, yet refusing to give up for some reason.” BoJack sat there for a while, lost in thought, despair etched on his face. Gus wanted to know what had happened but felt embarrassed to pry. With a deep sigh, BoJack continued.

  “I was fortunate that I got another chance. I had really let myself go, and I sold everything my wife and I had owned. I now deeply regret losing all those things that I just gave away when I was in my funk. I long for just a single memento that she just had to have to turn our apartment into a home. She really got into the whole nesting thing. It was never really important to me at the time, but she made that space ours. When she was gone, I just let it go. Maybe they were just painful reminders, tokens that proclaimed that she was gone. Either way, I wish I had kept at least one.”

  The way he worded that sounded like she had died… Gus realized.

  “We lived in a lower rent area of town that was close to the hospital, so we wouldn’t need transportation. Student loans came due, and since I was not working, I was sliding down a slippery slope, avoiding the inevitable crash and loss of the little I had. Were it not for one of my neighbors, I’m sure I would have ended up homeless and probably would have died on the street a short time later.

  “An immigrant family that lived next door knew my wife well, and me as an acquaintance. They respected my wife, the doctor, and I could tell the mother wished her daughter could reach similar success in this land of opportunity. Well, one evening I heard a frantic pounding on my door.

  “I had fallen asleep on the couch and probably hadn’t showered in a couple of days. I had gained forty pounds and the apartment was a mess. Like college-days level of neglect. Food cartons and discarded clothing were everywhere. Had the knocking not been so insistent, I probably would have stayed on the couch and slept there the rest of the night. Have you ever felt like that, Gus?” He turned his cold blue eyes on Gus. They appeared to glow with feral intensity.

  “I’ve been down, but in comparison, nothing as extreme as that.”

  “Anyways, somehow I did manage to mosey over to the door and found the neighbor there, holding her daughter in her arms. There was blood everywhere, and I recognized the frantic, desperate eyes of a parent whose child may not make it. She pleaded with me to do something in her broken English, and I motioned her inside.

  “Kicking away garbage and debris, I ran to grab a clean blanket from a laundry basket. Fortunately, I had done some laundry the week before—even if I hadn’t put it away. The girl must have been around six or seven years old, and looked like a broken baby bird as her mother gently set her down. I distinctly remember hearing a voice in my head saying: ‘Now is your time.’ I shook it off and assessed her injuries.

  “Apparently, she had fallen off of something, but I couldn’t make out if it was the fire escape or some playground equipment. When I touched the girl, though, something was definitely different.” BoJack broke his gaze with Gus, eyes growing distant.

  “Unlike my time at the hospital, I felt like I could see what was wrong with her. Her femur was broken in multiple places, one very close to the growth plate. With her age, I knew that if things healed incorrectly, one leg would be much shorter than the other, affecting her for life. Like riding a bike, my mind fell into visualizing the system working perfectly.

  “I didn’t realize it then, but I was creating an ether structure to position and stabilize the broken shards of bone, gently guiding them to where they needed to be. Small probes of ether pulled apart the surrounding tissues under her skin so they wouldn’t be damaged by the movement of the sharp pieces of bone.

  “I made patches from ether on her torn femoral artery and others that were leaking precious life blood out of her poor little body. When I say I did this, I only realize what I had done, now, in reflection. At the time, I just acted, pouring my whole self into making her healthy, imagining what I wanted to happen.

  “I didn’t care about myself but maybe I could help this one, who had her whole life ahead of her. Looking back, I must have pushed out all of my MP, using whatever I could to give her a chance at a normal life. In my mind, I saw little green specks that somehow I knew to be health. My health. I urged them to move from me to her. And they did! Not all of them, but a large portion. I kept going, and only stopped when I felt something like a blackjack hit the back of my head and I passed out.”

  “Someone attacked you while you were helping that girl?” Gus blurted in disgust.

  “No, I had bottomed out my MP, along with transferring almost all of my residual energy from my own cells, and the backlash feedback was brutal. I think I was out for a day and a half. Luckily, the little girl made it. The family took care of me until I woke up, even cleaned my apartment to my deep embarrassment.

  “When I saw the bags of trash, I realized how much I’d been living like an animal. That flipped a switch in me, and after that my Nth spoke to me more and more. So long story short, that’s how I came to realize that manipulating ether and making it guide the body to heal overlaps into support classes.”

  They sat there in silence, contemplating the story. BoJack rapt in memory and Gus still trying to sort out his thoughts. With the new information, ideas began to bombard him that BoJack could probably easily answer.

  “Not to change the subject, but what’s your Nth like?” Gus wondered if the more experienced super had some experience with a NIC that just didn’t mesh.

  “My Nth? He’s great. Even when he changes every ten levels or so.”

  “Yeah, how do you deal with that? Have you ever had a personality you didn’t get along with?”

  “I guess at first, but it’s all worked out in the end. I don’t know how the quantum server does
its analysis, but, as far as I can tell, it streamlines your progress so you can level the fastest possible. I don’t know if it tries to put you in difficult situations, but it definitely knows how to stretch your limits.”

  “Is that what makes quests and determines the Nth interface and all that? That never really was clear.”

  “Quests? I guess it amounts to the same. Mine are ‘objectives.’ From my understanding, the quantum server dictates what actions unlock access to information that your Nth can utilize. Apparently during REM sleep, the Nth take advantage and sync with the quantum server while the mind is otherwise occupied.”

  Crap, is that going to hold me back because I’ll get less frequent quest prompts?

  “I’ve heard of it also happening from deep meditation when theta brain waves are really prominent. Those mimic REM sleep, but I don’t think there’s a complete sync unless you actually sleep,” BoJack said almost as an afterthought.

  The information hit Gus like a slap to the face. Was that the answer to his whole sleep deprivation issues?

  “Does Ether Crafting use theta waves at all? Is that maybe why I felt rested after I was in deep with that construct?”

  “Maybe, I’ve never thought about it. You just kind of do it after a while and the individual steps become a little hazy. It’s definitely possible,” BoJack conceded, yawning. “Sorry, but since all’s good here, I’m going to get some more shuteye. I’m still pretty beat. Tomorrow we’ll see if we can make it out of the wops, and find the others.” He rolled over on his cot and was quickly asleep.

  The wops? Gus almost asked about the slang, but didn’t want to disturb the other super. He lay down on his cot, but his mind was on fire. He had a clarity he hadn’t felt in a while from his deep dive in Ether Construct. The constant low-grade headache he had come to live with had disappeared, and he just felt better. More hopeful.

  Even his awkward relationship with Nick lately seemed less daunting. As he looked up at the tent above, he thought about possibilities. Despite multiple series of poor, often desperate choices, he had a new way to progress and level again.

  A tiny pang of guilt hit him as he thought about BoJack’s story with the little girl. Would he make the world a better place? So far, he had to admit: not so much. Yet.

  He cast his mind to those damn pirates and wondered if he should have handled that any differently. At least he had helped the family, so there was that. But considering his abilities, he should really be able to make some changes for the better if he got his act together. And what would happen after they found his mother and the Crew went back to Purple Faction? What then?

  Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Instead of trying to compare himself to sometime in the future when he finally had everything mastered, he pulled his mind back to the next tasks at hand. Practice crafting, get to level 30, find his mother. Focus on that for the next little bit. He could tell his mental habits wanted him to escalate and ask harder questions, about what his future would be like, what would be the fallout from his next poor choices, but letting those go for a moment, he allowed his mind to think about what he wanted if everything went perfectly.

  Maybe like BoJack, he could visualize his life in perfect order and he would be just a skosh closer to making that his reality. The tension that threatened to build subsided and Gus sat there thinking, for the first time in a while allowing his mind to enjoy itself for a change.

  He imagined a much better version of himself, with things all falling into place. He imagined his family back together again, without the tension and dysfunction. Whether it did any good or not, Gus felt better than he had as the light outside the tent began to filter through the opaque material.

  Gus stood up and opened the seal on the tent, stepping outside. His senses were assaulted by the smell of burning and smoke that still lingered in the air, filtered so effectively by the tent and his ether constructs that he had not thought about how much they had been keeping away.

  Greasy ash coated his boots in just a few steps, tiny plumes of ash puffing into the air with each step. Gus marveled that the tent stood there behind him, stained but untouched by the destruction around it. The early morning light filtered in through the jagged spires of burned wood. He activated Advanced Flight and flew up above the area, surprised to see the expanse of the devastation. The swath of forest that was burned was much larger than expected, but that was not what caught his eye as he looked over the scene.

  Chapter Twenty

  Night Swim

  Yuki hit with a mind-jarring slam. The air was knocked out of her, bursting on impact resulting in a spew of bubbles. A split second after, the shock of cold hit her. She spasmodically gasped for breath, but she could pull nothing in. This, however, was fortunate since she was underwater. Faster than she thought possible, the icy water swallowed her, draining away feeling in her hands and feet as they succumbed to numbness in seconds. Panic was quickly muffled by a dark fog of obscurity as everything went dark.

  Above the lake, Aurora managed to slow her descent and hover as Yuki fell from her grasp, barely stopping before crashing into the lake herself. Yuki sank below the surface quickly and Aurora thrust her hands under the water where she saw her friend disappear. Rather than trying to dive into the inky black water, she stretched the extent of her power to the limit. She focused on forcing it as deep as she could to avoid hitting Yuki in the process.

  The waters began to roil and bubble as ions shifted and tiny bubbles began to rise and pop. Encouraged, she forced more MP deep into the water, trying to widen the base of the area she was affecting, hoping that it was below where Yuki was. She had never attempted this before; she had thought about it, but never got to test the idea. In her mind, it felt right so she doubled down and pushed more power into the water. The flow of energy managed to counteract the icy chill of the water and it began to churn as more and more bubbles flooded the surface. At long last, a limp figure bobbed to the surface, face down.

  Aurora grabbed the back of her outfit and flipped Yuki onto her back, skimming along the surface as she flew to the shore. The sodden woman looked up weakly, gasping like a fish. She reached up with a trembling hand, and Aurora gripped it with both hands, pulling her totally out of the lake.

  Surprised by how cold Yuki was, she tried to wipe off as much water as possible from Yuki’s outfit and waved hands over her. Activating a controlled burst of Ion Storm, she carefully evaporated the water clinging to the trembling super, hoping that the heated water would warm her up a bit.

  Yuki’s gasps became stronger and she pulled in rough breaths, sucking in the air as much as her body would allow. When Aurora had finished drying the water, they held each other, shaking from cold and the fading effects of adrenaline.

  “T-t-that s-sucked,” Yuki said flatly when she had regained enough of her faculties to talk.

  Aurora burst out with a laugh, eyes wet with tears that had not fallen, grateful that she was alright.

  “Yes, it did,” she said, hugging Yuki tightly.

  Yuki looked above at the flickering clouds.

  “It looks like we’re safe. I don’t think the fire will spread down here. What did you do? The last thing I remember was tons of bubbles that lifted me out of the water.”

  “I didn’t know it would work. It was just basic electrolysis. I separated hydrogen and oxygen in the water with a little ionization and I grabbed you as soon as I could.”

  “Maybe I’m kidding myself that I can be out in the field.” Yuki flopped onto her back, squashing the plants lining the bank of the lake. Aurora joined her and they both looked up at the combination of smoke and clouds drifting above.

  “I’m totally unprepared for anything out of my wheelhouse. If there’s tech, I’m golden. Out here, I’m just as good as a reg.”

  “So develop some new skills. Or have Gus give you one…”

  Yuki rolled over onto her side and stared at Aurora intently.

  “What do you mean?�
�

  “Never mind! Not my place to say.” She covered her mouth with her hands.

  “Ah, no. You’re not getting off that easy. Spill it, sister. What do you know about our fearless leader’s son? Besides that he’s got the angsty superhero act down pat.”

  “Really, you should ask him. But don’t tell anyone else, please?”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone giving away powers. Is it like a legacy super? I didn’t think that worked if a person already had abilities.” Yuki waggled a forefinger as she tried to puzzle out the ramifications.

  Aurora shrugged, but this didn’t deter Yuki from rapidly talking to herself.

  “But maybe it’s an ability of his. The only thing is the implication I could choose what ability I wanted…” Yuki peered at Aurora, eyebrow arching comically as she continued her mock interrogation.

  When Aurora only bit her lower lip in reply, Yuki went on. “I’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about that. What would I choose though?” She tapped her lip as she thought. “Something that would go along with my prime abilities. Maybe an electrical attack? No—it can’t only be offensive. I would need something I could adapt and use like you did with the electrolysis thing. But what?”

  Aurora rubbed her eyes as the other super mused.

  Yuki got to her feet, and brushed herself off. She began to talk to herself in lower and lower tones until Aurora couldn’t make out the mutterings as she paced up and down the side of the lake, lost in thought.

  Aurora rubbed her eyes again. I’m sorry, Gus, she said to herself. She knew Yuki would not be letting this go. As the yellow pinpoints of light subsided from pressing on her eyelids, she jolted suddenly in surprise.