Prime Identity

by Robert Schmitt

  Breaking my usual schedule, I hadn’t gone to the hub for training that day. The combination of cramping, bloating, pain, and other indignities, paired with the knowledge I would need to practice flying the next time I went in, didn’t make for strong motivation. I was more excited about my next dental checkup than I was about the next time I would have to enter that now familiar run-down store, with that happier-than-Richard-Simmons cleric and arbiters that were more handsy than a TSA agent. Okay, maybe I was letting the hormones get to me a bit, but I didn’t care.

  I didn’t have to go into the hub to practice using my powers. I thought I managed just fine at incorporating my powers into my daily chores around the house. Vacuuming around furniture was easier when the furniture lifted itself off the ground. Of course, maintaining a delicate field of micro-gravity around a couch to keep it stationary four feet off the ground was probably harder than just lifting the couch in the first place, but that was why I was practicing, right? I decided against the same exercise with the TV stand. I didn’t think anyone in the family would be willing to absolve me of damage done to the TV. I was certain they were going to be more forgiving of the newly acquired scratch down one of the legs of the coffee table.

  By the third day, I decided my excuses had all dried up. I still felt like I had been run over by a dump truck a few times, even though my flow was starting to ebb, but I had to accept that the world didn’t stop just because I was on my period. My decision certainly had nothing to do with Jake’s suggestion the previous night that, even though I was now a woman, I still felt entitled to having ‘man colds.’ Whatever that was supposed to mean.

  That morning found me striding purposefully through the store, my eyes fixed on the hallway in the back. I flashed an automatic smile at the cleric as I passed. Wouldn’t have looked right to growl, like I had wanted to.

  I passed through to the elevator, praying I wouldn’t bump into any other arbiters on my way down to the hub. Since my first encounter with Greg, I had met more than a dozen other arbiters, all of whom had been much more respectful to me than him. Thankfully, I hadn’t seen him other than a handful of times in passing, and after being caught by Kiara, he never seemed eager to chat with me. I had decided against telling Jake about my incident with him. I figured he would understand. I knew he had to have accumulated his fair share of harassment throughout his lifetime of being a woman. As I was learning more and more by the day, unwanted advances were the rule, not the exception, to life now. In any event, I wasn’t going to worry him about something he couldn’t control. Especially not when it was so embarrassing.

  Instead of making a beeline to the training rooms that day like I usually did, I headed off to the locker rooms. Only after I encountered women in various stages of undress did I realize I had entered the woman’s locker room on autopilot. There was something distressing in realizing that nearly forty years of ingrained experience had already been supplanted by only four weeks of habit.

  “Amber.” One of the women nodded to me as I passed, dabbing herself with a towel as she stepped out of the shower.

  “Sophie.” I walked past, my eyes on my locker.

  “Haven’t seen you on the beat lately.” She padded over to the locker next to me.

  “That fight with Doctor Quantum kind of put me through one,” I said, rehearsing the lie that Jake and I had decided on. We had picked it partially because it was as close to the truth as we were willing to go without revealing anything compromising.

  “Makes sense.” She rooted through her locker and pulled out a pile of clothes. “When do you think you’ll be back on your feet?”

  “Hopefully a week or so.” I wouldn’t mention that, when I was back on the street, I would be attached to the hip of some unfortunate arbiter I’d be interning under.

  “Good.” She smiled and dropped her towel to the floor to wrestle with an uncooperative bra she was trying to get on.

  For my own part, I dropped the duffle bag slung over my shoulder onto the bench in front of my locker. I unzipped it to reveal the white arbiter suit that had come to define Gravita. I had decided to leave the hub for my foray into flight, which meant I would have to suit up, no matter what reservations I might have had about how... revealing... my suit was. Flight was a somewhat uncommon power for primes, and that was doubly true for arbiters. Since primes only got one principle ability, be that augmented strength or intelligence, mastery of a particular force or element, or some other quirky ability, not many primes found themselves with a power that lent itself to both defying gravity and fighting crime. Regardless of that, flight was still rated as a Class B power due to the danger it presented both for the prime flying and those around them. In other words, primes couldn’t fly, under any circumstances, without risking severe penalties if they weren’t registered. Jake had been right, of course. It would just be easier for me to suit up if I wanted to try my hand at flying.

  As I had learned from him, Gravita’s—no—my suit was commissioned by one of the tech primes on Kiara’s team who specialized in exotic materials. He had gone on and on about all the features of the suit, and I had really tried to listen, but most of what I had gathered was that the suit was virtually bulletproof and puncture-proof, with some other useful features baked in. It all sounded impressive, but as I ran my fingers over the pearlescent white scales of the suit, I reminded myself that bullets and knives were some of the least threatening dangers arbiters faced. Still, it was better than nothing.

  I stripped down to suit up, trying to ignore the fact I was exposing my body to practical strangers. The fact this was a body I was only starting to get used to only made my embarrassment and unease that much more acute, but that couldn’t be helped.

  As I bent over to lock one of my boots into place on the leg of my suit, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirrors over the sinks a few feet away. Without meaning to, I paused to inspect myself. I had always known my wife was beautiful. Of course, looks weren’t everything, but as I turned to study myself in my arbiter suit, I appreciated the beauty of this body in a way I never quite had before. Despite what I had said during that first encounter when I had seen Gravita in person, it was plain to see that the suit I was wearing wasn’t meant to hide the fact I was a woman. Far from it. Its form-fitting shape, combined with the strategic placement of those magenta lines and patches, served to subtly heighten my feminine features while still presenting a declaration of undeniable power. It was unapologetically feminine, and unmistakably dangerous. For whatever reservations I might have had about wearing the suit before, there was something oddly empowering about finding myself in it now. Even the cape, which I had thought would look ridiculous and only get in my way, somehow completed the image that Jake had intended all those years before when he had first designed the suit. For the first time since I had changed bodies and lives with my wife, I felt intimidating.

  Walking a little straighter, I left the locker room with my helmet tucked under my arm. I was still nervous about attempting to fly. I could reliably tap into my power by that point, but with flying, I couldn’t afford any distracting thoughts. If I lost control, even for a second, it could spell disaster. Still, seeing myself in my suit had given me an unexpected boost of confidence. It was so easy in my daily grind of exercise and practice to forget I was working toward something important. Gravita was a well-known enough arbiter that she had a sizable devoted fan base that followed every public move she made. To a large portion of Chicago and even across the nation at large, she was who people thought of when they heard the word hero. That was what I was working toward—becoming a hero. I could handle this.

  The room I entered was one I hadn’t been in yet, though I had seen it a few times in passing. It was a hanger, equipped with an eclectic assortment of vehicles and equipment, ranging from barely modified cars, to tanks, helicopters, and even a rack of jetpacks against an adjacent wall. I wasn’t fooled by the strange and often comical appearance of these contraptions. Arbiters were sup
plied with the very best that tech primes could provide. If it was in this room, I had little doubt it was worth its weight in gold. Of all the strange things in the room, I found my gaze held by an imposing twelve-foot armor-plated mech suit that stood against the wall opposite me. The techie that designed, built, and operated that suit was someone I knew, oddly enough. We had been roommates in college my freshman year. I tried not to think about what Ethan would say if he ever found out what had happened to me.

  I rolled my shoulders back and focused my attention on the ramp on the far end of the room. It led out along a half-mile path up through the earth to the outside. I had the option of practicing flying in one of the training rooms in the hub, but I was butting against the deadline of my certification exam. I knew mastery of my powers would be a big part of my test, and while I had improved by leaps and bounds recently, I knew flight was going to be essential to proving I could take on Gravita’s name. Everyone knew she could fly. If I couldn’t master flight soon, I might as well hang up the cape and forget becoming an arbiter.

  I lowered my helmet over my head, careful to tuck my hair back so it wouldn’t get in the way of the locking mechanism between the collar of my suit and my helmet. I pressed in the buttons on the inside of the lip of my helmet under my ears, and it sealed into place with a satisfying hiss of pressurization.

  I found that, despite the shape and violet tint of the visor, my vision was somehow nearly the same wearing the helmet as it had been a moment before. With the last piece of my suit in place, my mind wandered back a few weeks to when I had missed the fact I was in a form-fitting catsuit for the first few minutes after having swapped bodies with my wife. Now, as I flexed my arms around, I realized how it had slipped my attention. The suit didn’t even feel like it was there.

  “Okay Amber.” I closed my eyes to center my thoughts. “Go time.”

  I opened my mind up to the lines of spacetime all around me. I didn’t have to have my eyes open to use my grav-sense. It was there. The mass—the vital, purple energy—it was all around me, deforming spacetime and creating the curvature that I normally thought of as gravity.

  Up to that point, most of the spacetime bending I had done was gentle. I had created localized fields that blended evenly back into the normal curvature of spacetime. While that was fine for lifting objects, creating the same effect now for the forces I would need for flight would cause some serious problems. If I just made a pocket of strong curvature in front of me, for instance, I would be able to fly by falling into it, but that would have the same effect for anything remotely close to me as well. To avoid attracting everything close to me into the gravity well I would be making, I was going to have to snap the spacetime around me more than bend it. It would take more energy and far more control, but it would mean that I would only be affecting me and nothing more. Considering how expensive everything in the room was, it made even more sense.

  To start, I focused on a field that covered my body and only an inch further. Within that field, I flattened out the spacetime curvature completely.

  “Whoa.”

  I flailed my arms around for a wild moment as my stomach dropped out. In an instant, the lines trailing from my body lost their uniform direction, becoming a hazy violet cloud of erratic strands of potential around me pointing in every conceivable direction now that they were no longer pulled down toward the deformation of the earth’s field. My boots lifted an inch off the ground as I floated into the air.

  With another thought, I twisted the hazy, ill-defined mist of energy around me so that the lines all pointed together ahead of me. The effect was instant. With one smooth motion, I began falling forward, though my sensation of weightlessness remained.

  I steered myself out toward the tunnel, all the while focused on maintaining a perfectly even field around me. I wasn’t moving very fast just yet, but I knew the difference between practice and field work was immense. Even a small difference in the field between my head to my feet, when working with accelerations of tens or hundreds of times the force of gravity, could result in limbs being torn off, or more likely, ruptured internal organs. I had to be precise.

  I increased the strength of the field pulling me forward as I entered the tunnel. As the lights along the side of the tunnel zoomed past at an ever-quickening pace, I kept my eyes trained ahead. Before long, I had left the tunnel far behind, zipping out into the daylight beyond.

  The tunnel exit was disguised within an abandoned highway overpass, with a hologram projected over the hole to hide it from casual observation. It wasn’t one of those cheap holograms that had hit the market a few years before, either. For all the ways the government usually tried to cut corners, they didn’t seem to pull any punches when it came to acquiring prime tech for the arbiter program. For anyone watching, it would appear as though I just materialized out of the slanted concrete of the overpass wall.

  The wind whistled around me as I flew higher and higher into the air, my speed ever increasing. Even though I had been dreading trying to fly, and I was still acutely aware of what would happen if I let my concentration slip for even a second, I couldn’t deny that flying was incredible. I watched in complete awe as the roads below thinned until they were only etchings of a grid spanning out in every direction and the howl of the wind against my helmet became impossibly loud. I moved through the air with a precision and speed unrivaled by almost anything. I could accelerate instantly in any direction, all the while weightless in free fall. To test my control, I dropped the field around me back to micro gravity. I didn’t fall back to the earth, since I was still free of the earth’s field, but the wind buffeting against me dragged my speed gradually back to nothing.

  Within a minute, I had come to a stop floating on the gentle current of the air around me. I looked down to see the suburbs stretched out beneath me more than a mile away. I could see, nearly fifteen miles to the south, the Chicago skyscrapers silhouetted against the glittering sunlight reflected off Lake Michigan.

  In my old body, I knew just the aerial maneuvers I had done to that point would have left me feeling nauseous for hours. Before our body swap, Jake had taken every chance he could to drag us out onto Lake Michigan to go sailing, as he had grown up sailing around Southern California. It never took more than half an hour out on the water for me to start upchucking my lunch in my old body. Now, though, I didn’t seem to suffer the same problems. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. I felt great.

  Seized by an impulse, I twisted around and shot through the air on a direct course for downtown Chicago. Within seconds, I was travelling fast enough that the thick fabric of my suit hummed from the surging air around me. I flattened myself as much as I could, holding my hands down to my sides to reduce my drag as I fell faster and faster forward.

  A little more than a minute later, the skyscrapers loomed impossibly large around me, stretching up from the ground below to take up half of my view. I lowered my altitude so that I was only a few hundred feet above the higher ones. As I spotted my target, the building where Jake worked, I pushed my speed up and dipped down even closer to the ground.

  I knew Jake had asked for my suit to be able to withstand supersonic flight, meaning I must have been capable of at least that speed. As the wind roared deafeningly all around me, I wondered, too late, if there would be some way for me to tell when I broke the sound barrier.

  I slipped down close enough to the ground that the skyscrapers around me completely filled my view as Jake’s building came ever closer. The fabric along my front scorched my skin as it heated in wild protest of my speed. Still, I focused on the gravity around me and willed myself to go faster.

  The skyscrapers zipped past at a blistering speed, almost faster than I could see. I wasn’t certain of it, but I was willing to bet I had broken the sound barrier near the end of my run.

  Within a few seconds, I found myself over Lake Michigan. I allowed my speed to bleed away again, my fingers and hands numb and shaking from the thrill of what I had ju
st done. Somehow, through all the hushed reverence Jake had used when talking about his time flying, I hadn’t understood just how amazing it would be. This was the definition of freedom. As I zipped off into the sky, I knew it would be a long time before I could bring myself back to earth.

  “Mom!” Nicole’s voice broke through my thoughts later that day. I looked up from the sink-full of dishes I was working on to see her bound into the kitchen while waving her phone in the air. “They spotted Gravita today, flying over downtown!”

  “Oh?”

  I raised an eyebrow and looked down at her phone. She had helpfully thrust it under my nose so I could see it better. Playing across the screen was somewhat shaky footage of a white blur streaking by overhead, passing between the narrow gap between the two skyscrapers stretched out on either side of the frame. A split second after the blur passed, an explosion of sound drowned out the excited shouting on the video. The camera swiveled around to show the face of the person who had obviously captured the footage on her cellphone. A wild grin split her face before the clip cut out.

  “Isn’t that awesome?” she asked.

  “That’s great.” I frowned. “But, there are hundreds of arbiters in Chicago, aren’t there?”

  “Duh.” She rolled her eyes as she leaned against the counter a few feet away. “But, that wasn’t just another arbiter. It was Gravita. Didn’t you know? No one’s seen her for a month. I was starting to wonder...”

  “Well, you know...” I shrugged and turned my attention back to the dishes, afraid I might give something away if I held eye contact with her for too long. “It is a dangerous profession.”

  “I know that. It’s just... I know it’s kind of dumb, but Gravita’s my favorite arbiter.”