Different Paths

by Nat Kozinn

  “I can’t just leave him here,” I say.

  “Are you insane? He’s a murderer. He’s going to try to kill us all the first chance he gets,” Linda says.

  “No, he’s not. We don’t have time to argue about this. Lord knows what other surprises Nita has in store for us.”

  “That’s not all. The National Guard is on the move,” Ben says.

  “That’s what that rumble is? Jesus Christ they’re launching a full assault?”

  “We may have a little something to do with that. We were supposed to be here sooner, but we ran into some engine trouble,” Linda says.

  “At least if troops move in, it means they won’t use a nuke… probably,” Ben says with a shrug. “We’ll just go ahead and drive in a different direction anyway.”

  I throw The Beast in the back of the wagon and cram myself in right along with him. It is beyond a tight squeeze, I have to wrap myself all over him to fit inside. Ben and Linda get into the cab.

  “Floor it!” I yell, which is what they say in old movies when you want to go fast.

  The truck accelerates mind numbingly slowly. The Speedsters I could hear in the distance become the Speedsters I can see in the distance, and they’re gaining on us. The Speedsters are a lot faster than this truck.

  I wedge myself out of the back of the truck, landing deftly on my feet. I quickly match the vehicle’s speed and tap on the glass next to Ben.

  “We need to go faster. Put it in neutral,” I tell him. Which, from what I understand, will disengage the engine,

  I go behind the truck, plant my feet and push, pumping my legs as fast as I can. I don’t know how you calculate horse power, but I’m off the charts compared to the engine. We reach two hundred miles an hour in five seconds flat. Smoke comes out of the tires, then flames, and then they are gone. Sparks fly from the metal wheels, which are all that’s left.

  I keep pushing the truck, even as the wheels come off and I’m pushing just the body of the truck on the ground. The Speedsters are slowly gaining on us, but they’re running out of energy while I’ve got plenty of sunlight to keep myself going, for longer than them at least. One by one they give up until I’m running alone.

  We make it into some hills and I finally come to a stop in the middle of a valley that should provide us with decent cover. I can’t go any further, I’ve burned through my Manna reserves, I need to cut my activity level and soak up some sun.

  24

  Let’s double the cost of living obligations. Hell lets triple them. And why does Ultracorps housing have to be so nice, can’t they just live in boxes? And don’t they get some nights and weekends off, let’s end that too. Why don’t we just do whatever we want because apparently, we’ve all decided Differents have to shut up and take it? Even non-violent resistance is illegal. Why don’t we just go all the way and declare them legal slaves. It won’t be hard, just repeal a few Constitutional Amendments, change some nouns in a few old laws and we’ll be all set.

  “What Rights Do They Have?” by Forest Brown, think.Net News LA (printed in the Los Angeles Times)

  “Can’t we tie him up or something?” Linda says and points to the truck.

  “No, he can break or cut his way out of anything we can come up with. We’re counting on his compliance,” I say.

  “Oh good, and I was worried,” Linda says.

  “We need his help. He has to keep watch over the three of us. We’re going to be in the Merge,” I say.

  “What are you talking about?” Ben asks.

  “I can’t get the most out of this body. There’s too much to manage, creating Manna, storing Manna, dealing with much rapid cellular replacements levels, taking care so I don’t crush things by accident. It is too mentally taxing. It’s time to lighten the load. I need to be able to fight back against Telepaths, not just survive them. I need to be able to think quickly and accurately enough to manage all the new systems of my body. I need to replace my brain cells, with new cells that can heal, so I don’t have to worry that a single well placed wound could still kill me.”

  “Where do we figure into that? We already gave you our blood. Do you need more?” Ben asks.

  “I’ve been working on them. I think I’ve managed to make a few different brain cell samples that will give me everything I need. The problem is that for new cells to live, old cells have to die. Those old cells happen to make up every memory and experience I’ve ever had, the very essence of me. If I kill them I lose that. I need you to help me. Nita said that she could somehow take an imprint of my mind and copy it or something like that, then push it onto, or into, the new me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? That’s crazy. We can pull individual memories sure, but you’re more than that, you’re who you are because of things that happened that you can’t even remember. You have learned automatic responses, stress responses, emotional triggers… I guess maybe you don’t have all those things,” Ben says.

  “It might be possible,” Linda says and we all turn to her. “In the early days when we didn’t have think.Net we just had the Inner World up in Nor-Cal. We did some things, things nobody tries to do anymore now that we’re worried about making money. Drugs helped, but it was just what we were doing then, it was the times. I know that Allan Fischman and Rebecca Rizzo did something like what you talked about, somehow wore each other’s skin, traded minds. It bothered everybody so they wouldn’t do it in front of us. I talked to Allan once when he had a couple in him, he said the key is you have to open yourself up like a book. You have to hold nothing back,” Linda says, her eyes moving off, she’s reliving fond memories of her glory days before the Plagues.

  “I suppose you need a Big Brain involved to store all that information,” Ben says.

  “Exactly,” Linda replies. “Now Gavin, do you understand what this means, we’re going to know everything there is to know about you? We’re going to know everything that makes you tick. Every embarrassing experience, every shameful act, everything you don’t like about yourself, we’re going to see it all. Trauma from when you were two that you don’t even fully recall, we will know about. And that is assuming that this works. I’ve never done it before and can only vaguely conceive of what it will entail. Ben has never done it before and did not know such a thing was possible until right now. And you have one of the most unique minds on the planet Gavin. We assume that your abilities will help this process, but we honestly have no idea. That’s a whole lot of risk, are you sure you want to take it on?”

  “The National Guard is moving in. That’s humans and Differents going to war, that’s the end of the world. I don’t see any other choice,” I say.

  #

  My mother is tearing through the kitchen cabinets, pulling cans and boxes aside at a frantic pace. I know she’s not going to find what she’s looking for, because I ate it. It was a package of chocolate chips she was saving to make cookies for my father. It was his 36th birthday and chocolate chip cookies were his favorite. His boat was supposed to come back that afternoon and she wanted to have them ready for him. She looked for two hours and virtually tore the house apart before she broke down crying. I never admitted it to her.

  I’ve never admitted it to anyone, and I hadn’t even thought about it for years, but there’s web of memories connected to that time. It was a powerful moment that colored my future thoughts and actions. Apparently, it influenced my first act of vigilantism, not that I remembered it. I never want to feel the shame I felt when my mother was crying and I didn’t do anything about it. I felt it when I saw that woman crying in the street, desperate for someone to help her, and that feeling was part of the reason why I jumped in and saved her. I didn’t want to feel the shame of doing nothing.

  Linda warned me about how they would get to know all my deepest darkest secrets; she forgot to warn me that I’d have to go through the trauma of seeing them again too. It’s a laundry list of emotional horror. If I never think about why I find certain women attractive again, it’ll be
too soon.

  It’s quite the process to see the human psyche broken down into its component parts. It’s actually a lot like manipulating the genetic code. A particular piece of code can create worthless weak muscle when combined with one other specific piece of code, and super-strong muscle when combined with another. It’s the same with memories; pieces of the past can be affected by other events that don’t seem related at all.

  That’s why Linda has to turn me inside out; it isn’t enough to get bits and pieces. If they don’t make a copy of everything that is me, I’ll be different. I could lose some seemingly meaningless event from my toddler years, and when Linda puts me back in my body I could end up wanting to give it all up and become a circus clown. Lots of what she’s saving is just emotions relating to events I forgot long ago.

  Maybe this was Nita’s plan. This whole thing is a red herring that she knows will fail and I’ll end up with scrambled circuits. Then she won’t have to worry about me scrambling her plans. Then again I’ve always been worried that Nita’s plan all along was to get me to turn myself into a Big Brain, assuming I would then be able to follow the trail of logic that leads to her seemingly insane conclusions and join her posse.

  I have to follow Ben’s advice when it comes to Nita, assume she’s already planned for whatever you’re going to do, but then go ahead and do it anyway, because if you did something else she’d know that too. So it’s time to dig deeper and deeper and bring Linda and Ben along for the ride.

  #

  Did it work? I guess I’m thinking so-- something worked. I think therefore I am. My name is Gavin Stillman, I am twenty years old. I was born in the Los Angeles Metro Area, and I just regrew my brain. I have an inner monologue which sounds like my old inner monologue… I suppose.

  Is something different about me? I can’t really tell, it kind of feels like it. Maybe it’s just because there was a gap. I’ve been hit in the head and stopped forming memories before, but that’s a different experience than going from no voice talking, to my voice talking in my head. It’s not really a new voice though, more of a replacement. There was a me who was thinking and feeling and he directed his own brain to destroy itself. Then Linda and Ben put me on the new and improved version.

  I think I can remember everything that I could remember before, but you don’t know what you don’t know. I may well have lost the emotional reactions that made me, me, but the new me will never be aware of that. Am I even making sense?

  Linda and Ben aren’t saying anything, they’re just staring. Linda opens her mouth slowly and a low rumble emerges. She’s speaking! But it’s coming out of her mouth so slowly it’s impossible to understand the sound as words.

  “My sense of time is all screwed up,” I say.

  And it sounds normal, but a few seconds later I see their eyebrows raise and their mouths go wide. Ben opens his mouth and grumbles something to Linda. Then she closes her eyes.

  >>>Did it work? Are you in there?

  <<
  >>>Because I can think as fast as you can. What you’re experiencing is part of being a Big Brain. Our neural processing happens at an incredibly accelerated rate. Now since, and not to get too existential, what you perceive and actual reality are impossible to differentiate, instead of it seeming like you’re going fast it seems like everything else is going slow. Learning to adapt to the relativistic slow speed of the rest of the world is one of the biggest challenges of Big Brains as their abilities develop. And for most of those kids, the changes are more gradual as they mature and thus easier to deal with.

  >>>What am I supposed to do?

  <<
  Ben lifts his head slowly upwards, hangs for a second, then sends it down. He’s nodding to Linda. Then they both start to dive forward and towards me, what the hell are they doing? They make a sudden turn and start to raise up at the torso. Standing, they are standing. Then they walk away over the edge of the hill.

  Ben left a pocket watch on a rock facing me. The second hand slowly rocks before moving forward a tiny tick. That seemed to take forever. So if a second lasts forever now, how long does a minute last? It’s going to take a while to get the hang of this and I have no idea what a while even means now.

  #

  >>>It’s hopeless. By the time he gets his act together, it’s going to be too late. I suppose all his abilities will be helpful for rebuilding society in the post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. I don’t know if I can stomach the idea of eating his Manna though.

  <<
  >>>Gavin? Is that you? Did Linda connect us?

  <<
  >>>You can do that already?

  <<
  >>>It’s been about six hours. I know what you’re thinking and don’t even try it. You can’t make me think I’m a chicken. I’ve been dealing with Telepaths my whole life, I have my ways of fighting back and you don’t have the skills to mess with me.

  >>>You’re not that smart. It was going to be a donkey. Donkeys are funnier.

  <<
  >>>Are Nita and the National Guard still fighting? Do you know what happened?

  <<
  >>>I have to stop them; the military won’t accept defeat, especially not that General Reeves. He’ll respond with greater force. This needs to end as one single skirmish.

  <<
  >>>I just did a few jumping jacks and pushups, I’m coordinated enough. Plus it’s too late, I’m already on the move. Don’t tell The Beast where I went, he’d want to follow.

  I keep my legs pumping, hitting a higher top speed than I was capable of before. My improved mind had the side effect of contributing vastly improved coordination, allowing me to time my movements for maximum efficiency. I’m topping 400 mph easy now. But it doesn’t seem so fast.

  I process thoughts within my head so quickly, the information that comes in from my senses moves at a relative glacial pace. I’ve managed to get my sense of time altered well enough to function in the world, but things are still far from normal. It seems weird to know that I’m moving at incredible speed, but not to feel it at all. If I want to, I can count the number of blades of brown grass at my feet.

  I might need to start taking on tasks like that to keep me occupied. I just got a major increase in time to kill. That is assuming I survive into some sort of future where I’m not trying to stop a civil war.

  I can’t let Nita win the battle with the military. The government will not take another loss. They will keep escalating until they take control and end the strike. They may not even need nukes, there is a virtually endless supply of lesser weapons they can try on the Differents. When all of those fail, all bets are off, and if Nita goes on the offensive? Then the nukes will fly like locusts.

  I’m getting closer, I can see smoke in the distance, but when I turn attention to my ears, I don’t hear gunshots. That means the National Guard has already lost. They’ll be preparing their counter-
offensive. I need to take control before they do that. I tear down the last hill, and come bearing down on the town/refugee camp. To my surprise, the National Guard is moving more forces in, and to my even greater surprise, they’re hustling straight in, not in a defensive formation. What the hell is going on? There’s no way a few tank divisions and Apache helicopters were enough to defeat the Differents.

  Did they have some other weapon I haven’t heard of? The Telepath blockers wouldn’t be enough. There are still Speedsters who move too quickly to hit with conventional weaponry and Strong-men who pack the firepower of a tank, with much greater mobility. Nita has an endless supply of Heaters, Coolers, and various other Energy Producers that can freeze, fry, and otherwise devastate the armed forces. If the National Guard managed to win, it would be after a protracted battle where they were willing to endure substantial casualties and rely on their superior numbers to overwhelm Nita’s forces. I don’t see mountains of dead bodies, so that didn’t happen.

  I need to keep my head on a swivel. If the military has developed weapons that can take out a squadron of Speedsters and Strong-Men it might work on me. Maybe they found a way to weaponize the Cognitive Wave Scrambler and it can attack their minds. Would the Telepathic blocking techniques Linda just taught me work against a machine?

  As I close in on the center of the town, I’m forced to slow my run to stay hidden. Moving at high speed was actually pleasant, the world flying by felt more like the right speed. Now that I’m tiptoeing, everything seems to take forever. I think I understand why Nita’s so angry now. All Big Brains must want to destroy the whole world for moving so slowly. The population has no idea that the people connecting their think.Net calls are full of justifiable hate.

  I creep along for a few seconds, before I remember I’m ten freaking feet tall, stealth is no longer one of my primary tactical options. But I do have some new ones. Maybe I can try reading a soldier’s mind to figure out what happened.