Prime Identity

by Robert Schmitt

  It was subtle, but I found it. The mass was miniscule compared to all the concrete and earth around me, but I could feel it moving.

  I spun around to face the left, where I sensed the movement coming from. I jogged down the corridor, all the while trying to track the moving mass.

  I stopped at a sharp turn in the corridor. From what I could sense, there was someone or something twenty feet away. From the angle of the turn ahead, they would come into view as soon as I rounded the bend. I stole a glance past the corner, and what greeted me filled me with an odd mixture of dread and excitement.

  The corridor opened past the bend into a well-lit room that was roughly square, with twenty feet to each side. There were wooden, concrete, and metal barriers placed at regular intervals around the room, but other than that, the room was bare. But that wasn’t what had caught my attention. Standing in the middle of the room, facing away from me, was Greg.

  “Stormfront,” I announced as I stepped past the entrance to the room. For his part, he turned around, a thin smirk on his lips.

  “Have you come to challenge me?” he called as he turned toward me and planted his feet in a ready stance.

  “Yes.” I tried to infuse as much confidence into that single syllable as I could.

  “Do you need me to review the rules of the match?” he asked, even as a heavy metal door slid from the doorway behind him. I forced myself not to look behind me at the rumble from an identical door sliding into place behind me. I was locked in.

  I shook my head, not trusting myself to words.

  He grinned. “Good. Since you’re new to this, I’ll let you have the first move. Good luck.”

  I stared at him as I tried to think through a strategy that could work. Greg was a mattermancer, a prime able to bend matter to his will. In his case, it gave him a nearly perfect mastery of electricity. His favored attack was to conjure lightning bolts from the air around him into his hands to hurl at his enemies. I knew his lightning was too fast for me to reasonably dodge, but conjuring lightning took time. I could use that. I also knew that, once released, he couldn’t control the lightning he summoned. Those were my only two advantages.

  I tried to avoid broadcasting any tells as I tapped into my powers. For the first time, I was grateful for my ridiculous purple visor, as it would hide my glowing eyes. Greg’s greatest strength was speed, and I was preparing myself to try and outpace him. The irony of it wasn’t lost on me.

  He punched his hand forward as I ripped the nearest metal barrier from the ground and brought it in front of me. The rivets securing the thick metal to the ground shrieked in protest as they shredded apart, but I kept my focus on him. I could see the air between his fingers arc with energy as a brilliant ball of plasma formed in his palm. The thick plate swung between the two of us an instant before an explosion of sound ripped through the room.

  Even though I couldn’t see him anymore, I could tell through his mass that he was moving to the side to try and open a line of sight to me. I couldn’t give him that opening.

  I threw my hand forward to pull the metal barrier across the room toward where I guessed he was.

  With a satisfying thump, the metal slammed into him and bowled him to the ground. I knew it was too much to hope that a knock like that would put him down for long, but I was certain it had hurt.

  A bright flickering was the only warning I had that he had readied another bolt. Not sparing a second, I ripped the spacetime around me that send me flying haphazardly toward the wall. I knew that, if I had moved under any other force, the acceleration may have killed me. With a unified field around me, though, I didn’t feel anything other than disorientation as the tug of Earth’s gravity cut out for a second.

  Even being tossed to the ground, he threw his bolt with deadly precision. For a second, I thought he had hit me as an explosion split the air around me. But no—the bolt had hit the ground exactly where I had been standing less than a fraction of a second before. It was still close enough to deafen me for a moment.

  Reorienting myself, I felt a pang of gratitude to Jake for insisting that my workout regiment stress so much control of my powers in the face of exhaustion. I focused on the two barriers nearest Greg and ripped them from the ground. Meanwhile, he pushed himself to his feet and was careful to keep one hand free. I could already see electrical current surging to life between his fingers.

  With three free barriers in the room, I bent the spacetime around him to pull everything not bolted to the ground his way. As the three heavy barriers came careening toward him, an unexpected surge of glee filled my chest at the way his eyes went wide. To be fair, one of them was concrete, but I didn’t care. Petty or not, it just felt good to scare the bastard.

  He was knocked to the ground again as one of the metal plates slammed into him. I held my hands in front of me and used some last-second maneuvering to slow the other two barriers so they nearly encompassed him.

  Without warning, a bolt seared across the room and slammed into my side. My vision clouded over from the intense light that washed over me, but as I blinked away the blinding flash in the aftermath of the lightning strike, I didn’t feel... anything. For a desperate moment, I wondered if I were in shock, but no, that couldn’t be right. The slight tension and ache in my muscles from the position I was holding was still there. Those sensations wouldn’t be present if I were in shock.

  I stared down at my side, my eyes focused on the shimmering scales of my suit.

  “How?” His voice was hoarse as he struggled to free himself from underneath the metal and concrete that pinned him to the ground. “Why didn’t that work?”

  “Graphene bi-layer,” I said, more to myself than to him.

  I rubbed the side of my suit where the bolt had struck me. It hit with enough energy that it had left a quarter-sized etching of ash on my side. Jake had mentioned something about an extremely exotic form of graphene being built into the suit. Graphene, under the right conditions, was an excellent conductor of electricity. My suit, it seemed, had acted as a lightning rod to conduct the electricity away from my body and into the ground instead.

  Not giving Greg more time to think through another plan of attack, I snapped the spacetime around him into a concentrated field of compressed spacetime thousands of times stronger than earth's gravity. The concrete barrier buckled under the extreme force, pulverized into a fine powder that spread in a thin dome around him. The metal, meanwhile, warped under the compressive force, heating enough that it melted. The molten metal ran down along the invisible dome I had crafted in thick globules, searing the concrete powder as it stretched into place. Through it all, I saw a horrified expression frozen on Greg’s face as the solid dome wrapped around where he lay. As I kept the field steady, I made sure the spacetime immediately outside the narrow band I was compressing was absolutely static. With the forces I was working with, if I hadn’t been careful to make sure the spacetime around him was normal, he could have been sucked up into the dome, which would have been fatal.

  I waited patiently for the minute to pass, confident there was enough oxygen under the dome that he wouldn’t suffocate. As I waited, I worried he might try attacking the metal dome around him with lightning, but I figured he was smart enough to know it wouldn’t work. The metal was grounded. The only thing he would accomplish would be to strip the oxygen from the air as the lightning ionized it away and to heat up the already searing metal. Luckily, it seemed he understood the futility of his situation as well. As the time ran out, the two doors to the room slid open to indicate the match was over.

  I stepped forward and pulled the dome away from him with a brief flicker of my power. I extended a hand while he blinked. To my relief, he accepted the gesture and let me help him to his feet.

  “Congratulations,” he said, a small, sardonic smile on his lips. “I didn’t expect your suit to completely negate my lightning, but regardless, you earned this victory.”

  “Thank you.” I tried not to frown at his back-han
ded compliment.

  “Good luck.” He smiled again and pointed toward the doorway behind him. “After the showing you put up here, though, I’m sure you won’t need it.”

  I nodded and ignored the barb in his words. Steeling myself for the challenges ahead, I strode through the doorway and into the corridor beyond.

  The rest of my practical exam was easier than I feared it might be. True, some of the obstacles in the maze tested my resolve (the wall of flame that shot up from the ground from stepping on a white tile down one of the corridors certainly did), but I found, with a little lateral thinking, I was able to get past everything I came across without much trouble. With that knowledge, I used my technique of seeking out movement to find the other arbiters spaced throughout the maze. It was slow going, since I often had to backtrack several junctures every time I focused on a different arbiter to challenge, but having a direction to follow was a marked improvement to blind guess work. It also helped that, after each victory, I had more time to travel through the maze.

  The other arbiters presented about as much of a challenge as Greg had. By sheer coincidence, the next arbiter I faced was Daydream. As we stared across the room before beginning the match, I was struck by sudden inspiration. Seconds before beginning our bout, I squeezed my eyes shut. When the match began, I pushed myself into the air and floated in microgravity up to the ceiling. Below, I could hear him moving around, and I knew it would be a mistake to think that he was harmless without access to his powers, so I spared no time in creating a wide area of extra gravity across the entire room. As the gravity increased, I heard the satisfying sound of a body dropping to the ground. From there, it was just a matter of waiting out the clock. I didn’t dare open my eyes until I heard the room's doors slide open. It may not have been as flashy or impressive as my match with Greg, but I wasn’t about to underestimate any opponent, especially not a certified arbiter.

  The next arbiter I faced was one of the two which I didn’t know, which left me at a distinct disadvantage. I figured they had to have briefed anyone coming into the trial at a rudimentary level what my powers were. Even if they hadn’t, I doubted anyone in the United States would be unaware of my powerset at a basic level. Jake had built up quite a reputation for Gravita, after all. With my arbiter suit on, I figured most people would be able to recognize me on sight.

  I could guess, from the impressive mech suit the arbiter I was facing was harnessed into, that she was a techie. Through our introductions, I learned she went by the name Machina. She proved to be the longest match of the day, as her suit was armed with a versatile array of weapons that I didn’t dare let hit me. That battle had ended with my darting around the twenty-by-twenty room, almost too fast to see as I tried to rip apart the suit with concentrated points of gravity. My strategy worked, but it cost precious time. Still, I had finished the match in less than five minutes, meaning a net gain on the time I had left to finish my trial.

  I ran into my fourth arbiter with mere minutes left in the exam. She was an arbiter I recognized. Steelframe. A text-book bruiser, if there were such a thing. After being forcibly immersed into the world of primes, I had learned that the concept of anything standard between primes was something of a misnomer.

  Still, I took comfort in the concept of facing what amounted to an abnormally strong person as I squared off against her. I quickly learned that my assumption that the match would be straightforward, though, was wrong. I had to abandon my first strategy of pinning her down, in much the same way I had pinned down Greg, after she ripped through the half-inch metal plate I had wrapped around her as though it were made of paper. I jumped into the air to dodge the plate as she threw it toward me like a discus, then pulled myself against the ceiling in a vain attempt to give myself a moment to think. Not to be deterred, she sprinted forward and bounded into the air, easily clearing the twenty feet between us to come within striking distance of me.

  With only a split second to react, I twisted the spacetime around her to slow her down. To my surprise, it worked. She came to a stop floating five feet below me, suspended in a pit of gravity. There, without anything to leverage her strength off of, she was impotent. Or, that was what I had thought.

  As I touched back onto the ground, a rock slammed into my left shoulder with enough force that I felt my bone shatter. As pain raced through my body, I could only just maintain the field keeping her suspended in the air. It was a close thing. She nearly managed to heave herself free of my field in my momentary distraction.

  I rolled to a stop behind a metal barrier, all the while forcing myself to keep my concentration on holding on to her. Half a dozen rocks smashed into the barrier as I ran down the clock. They hit with enough force to dent the plate, and I thought I might go deaf from the ear-splitting noise, but the plate held together. A few seconds later, the barrage of rocks stopped. I wasn’t fool enough to look, though. Instead, I grit my teeth and pushed through the pain searing in my shoulder as I watched the seconds tick by. By the time I had won the match, I was on the verge of collapse from the energy I had to use to hold her in place for a minute, despite all her struggling, combined with the pain in my shoulder that was quickly growing intolerable. I immediately let go of the field surrounding her as the match ended, and she dropped to the ground.

  She bounded to her feet when she hit the ground and then came over to help pull my helmet off, since I found I couldn’t use my left arm. She winced as she looked down at my shoulder, though she reassured me there was equipment at the hub that would be able to heal me back to normal within the hour. All the same, she refused to let me walk out of the maze. Instead, she scooped me into her arms and carried me out. It was hard not to feel like a child as she cradled me in her surprisingly normal-sized arms, but with all the pain I was in, I was in no position to protest.

  True to her word, once we left the maze, a swarm of technicians surrounded me and stripped away my suit to access my shoulder. They attached what looked like ordinary electrode pads onto the raw skin around my shoulder, which ran to a little cart they had wheeled over. My skin burned from contact with those pads, but I winced and tried to ignore the sensation. When they turned on the machine, though, I couldn’t stop the scream of agony that broke past my lips. A knife-blade of pain stabbed into my shoulder as the machine hummed away, and I fought to keep my cries inaudible for the minute that the machine was on. The pain eased a few minutes after they turned off the machine, and as I gingerly moved my arm, I found my shoulder was back to perfect working order, with no evidence of injury.

  Overall, I was glad to leave the hub a few hours later. On my way out of the changing room, I found a letter that had been slipped into my locker. With shaking hands, I ripped it open and read its contents. There wasn’t much to it. Just an invitation to a meeting the following Monday where they would review my exam and come to a decision about whether I would be continuing with an internship.

  “Great!” Kiara threw her arms around me as I finished the letter, having obviously read it over my shoulder.

  “Huh?” I stared at her.

  “Usually it takes them a week to have a decision ready. If they want to meet Monday, that means you must have impressed them.”

  I nodded and looked back at the paper without saying anything.

  “That, or you did so badly that they don’t really have much to think over.”

  I blinked as my stomach dropped out.

  “I’m sure you did great, though.” She smiled forcefully as I once again glanced her way.

  “Right,” I muttered, my stomach still twisted somewhere past my throat.

  7

  I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT to think as I drove home that day, though gratefully I had to pick Alan up from school that afternoon, only leaving me alone with my thoughts for a few minutes between the hub and his school. I had spent so much time and effort just trying to get to that point that, now finding myself with nothing to do but wait, I was at a loss for what to do.

  Alan had faced do
wn his bully the next time they saw each other, and to his surprise but not to mine, that had evidently been enough for the bully to stand down. I noticed a marked improvement in his mood after that. Considering he was a thirteen-year-old, though, that just meant when he moped around the house, he didn’t wear so many dark hoodies.

  Jake took the news that I had made it through my exam with about the same enthusiasm I had expected, which is to say, I had to remind him not to break one of my ribs from his hug. I was certain he had never been so physically affectionate with me when he was a woman, but then, I couldn’t really blame him for the change in behavior. I knew firsthand being forced to act out a gender role for others that you weren’t used to could lead to some overindulgence when you didn’t have to put up the act anymore. I couldn’t count the number of times Nicole and Sam had come home over the past few weeks to find me lounging on the couch in nothing more than my underwear and a tee shirt, scratching myself as I played on Alan’s Xbox.

  As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one with news. In the frenzy and stress of my approaching exam, I had forgotten that Jake’s company was having its annual company banquet that Saturday evening, less than a day away. The thought of seeing all my former co-workers, albeit from a different perspective, worried me, even though I knew my fear was absurd. No one there who saw me would see anything more than Jake’s wife, the woman they perhaps had occasionally seen before. But that was the problem with fears—they were almost never rational. I didn’t voice any of my doubts to Jake. It seemed silly to worry him with something so trivial when I had just completed one of the most grueling trials of my life. Besides, I couldn’t tell him. Not when it was so obvious he was really looking forward to the evening. I would just have to put on a brave face and weather my fears in silence.

  Before I knew it, I found myself descending the stairs down to our entryway, gripping the bannister as I balanced precariously in the modest high-heels I was wearing. Despite being a woman for just over a month, I had managed thus far to avoid the indecency of having to wear a dress or makeup. When I thought back on it, it wasn’t all that surprising. Most of the past month my free time had been used up in combat training and exercise. I hadn’t had time to put on much more than a shirt and pants most days. And while that had prolonged the time I could pretend I still had some semblance of my masculinity left, it had also left me woefully unprepared for what I had had to do earlier in the day. I always knew it had taken Jake much longer to get ready than it had ever taken me when he was a woman and I was a man, but up until then, I hadn’t fully understood why.