Because she didn’t, I was painstakingly able to swing the cabinet door open from across the room and move the contents, bit by bit, towards my bed. I really couldn’t lift most of the weights, but the smaller ones soon sat on my chest and the cards hovered an inch or so above them.
I found the cards were good for nothing as I couldn’t discern what was on them without the nurse present. But extended practice with the smaller weights soon enabled me to lift the larger ones. I found the darkness was no impediment: I could perceive the weights directly, as if touching them with my thoughts.
In this way, I rapidly improved my abilities in secret. Each afternoon when the nurse came, she found the kit in the cabinet where she now routinely left it, applied her tests, and I’d pretend to be considerably more feeble than I really am. Initially, this troubled her. “Your development’s slowing down.” So as not to arouse further suspicion, I showed a little more strength than I might’ve otherwise, but still far short of my performance the night before.
Why did she sound disappointed, if all of this amounted to deterioration of some kind? Today’s test proved even stranger than the last few. I was presented with a number of objects made out of different materials, then asked to determine which was placed in front of me while blindfolded. There was no sense to it. How could I see which object it was with the blindfold on?
But, seemingly knowing more about what I could do than I did, the nurse urged me to clear my mind, and listen. Not in the sense of waiting for sounds, but inviting stimuli normally drowned out by a noisy mind to register. Sure enough, it slowly began to trickle in. A dim outline of the room, at first. Which was progressively filled in by faint points of light until I could resolve shapes.
The nurse before me, a mass of moving points, some more energetic than the rest. I realized I was seeing her heart beating inside of her, as well as her lungs inflating and deflating. Within her head, the most dazzlingly complex dance of points yet. Throbbing with energy, as if struggling to burst free from its cage.
“What do you see?” she inquired, breaking my immersion. All of it vanished due to the sudden disruption. “Nothing” I murmured, not technically a lie. “Hrm. It seems to be winding down. Lucky you, very few come back from the brink. You may yet be able to go home.”
My heart soared. The clear reinforcement left no doubt as to what I had to do in order to secure my release. Simply continue developing these strange abilities in secret, while pretending for the nurse that they were fading away. In this manner, before long I was back in the care of my parents, but under orders to remain in bed for three days and take medication I was sent home with.
“I knew your head was big, I didn’t think it could kill you.” Elena quipped. Mom hushed her, perhaps better understanding the severity of it. “I almost lost you”, she cried, covering my face with lipstick and slobber. I wiped it away and assured her I felt completely recovered. Nonetheless she saw to it that I remained in bed all three days, during which time I privately practiced moving toys around my room and peering through walls.
The greatest surprise came on the third night when I discovered I could levitate myself. By focusing on moving my bed or some patch of the floor in relation to myself, I could lift my body clear of it and hover in place. It was exhilarating. The fantasy of flight, realized. Not the weightlessness that we were promised would accompany space travel, I could still very much feel my own weight. Just.....propped up by some invisible support.
Initially I hung by my neck when I did this, a painful mistake I only made once. Whatever invisible forces held me up seemed to emanate from my head. So I made a point to lift my body as well, moving it together with my head as one unit. Managing two focal points proved to require much more concentration than a single one. Managing three or four at once, nearly impossible.
A remarkable idea occurred to me. Was it possible? Only if there's no distance limitation to the effect. However dangerous, I could not resist attempting it. I put on some layers, climbed the stairs to the roof, and looked out over the city. It is especially stunning at night, so many geometric crystal wafers floating as if on the surface of a soap bubble, glittering as they refract moonlight.
Carefully, I felt around with my mind. My target wasn’t difficult to locate. The feeling of gripping the planet itself was truly bizarre. We are not normally equipped to comprehend very large scales. But I was directly feeling the size of such an object. It only did not paralyze me if I made a point to ignore it.
Sure enough, pushing against it lifted me up off the roof. My feet dangled a foot or so above the spot where we’d watched the most recent assault on the blue star not so long ago. The same blue star which hung overhead, as if spectating my subversive experiment. I tried moving the Earth, which of course I had not the energy to budge, but instead flung myself horizontally relative to the surface.
I panicked, now fully over the edge, and fell because of it. Absolute terror seized my mind and I plummeted the better part of a mile before I regained my senses. Gripping the Earth suddenly did not immediately arrest my fall. It was elastic, such that I slowed down over the span of a hundred feet. I found that the tighter my grip was, the less elastic the bond.
Only by chance did I not kill myself that night. Had I grabbed it as tightly as possible, I expect it would’ve been like impacting a platform. Even if I survived, the pain would’ve prevented the concentration necessary to stay aloft. It was sobering, and gave me cause to hang quietly in the air for a time, simply catching my breath and collecting my thoughts.
The serenity of it. Clouds rolling past below, ionically driven wind tossing my hair to one side. Looking out over a world now completely accessible to me, where before the city had been the full extent of it. That’s when I heard the voices. Distant and muffled, I strained to understand any of it. Quieting my mind as before amplified it somewhat. A chorus, beckoning me. To where?
It was all too frightening. So many new sensations. Such a radical departure from what I believed possible. Overloaded by it, I retreated to the comfort and safety of home. It was a lengthy, strenuous ascent, then the work of some minutes to pick out which of the identical looking abodes I’d taken off from. I set down gently on the roof, shivering, and headed downstairs to the kitchen.
I froze when I saw Dad digging through the fridge. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be in bed, mister?” I confessed that I was. He smirked. “What your mother doesn’t know won’t kill her. How ‘bout a midnight snack with your old man?” I obliged, somehow exhausted by the flight even though I’d used no muscles that I know of.
“What were you up to on the roof?” He asked with his mouth full of sandwich, barely comprehensible. I thought quickly. “Looking at the blue star. Thinking.” He nodded somberly, swallowed, then continued. “Some say it’s a blessing. Having a single enemy has united mankind like nothing else could. Perhaps that’s the point of it. Somebody sent it to us so that we’d stop fighting amongst ourselves, and unify against it.”
As good a guess as any, I supposed. “I dunno if they’ve taught you about the war yet. I forget what grade they start at now.” I’d never heard him mention this before, leaning in and inviting him to elaborate. “It got real bad. Like, so bad it looked like we were gonna wipe ourselves out. That's happened before, long ago, when our ancestors first split the atom. But stability was arrived at when everybody had the technology. This time, it was different.”
Stay Tuned for Part 5!