“It can’t take many hits! If too much warm air escapes…” He didn’t have to finish. I watched in horror and awe as the squadron circled around in formation, preparing to unleash a second volley. I felt loathe to turn against my own people. But I’d learned more in the past few minutes than in all the years of my life combined. I could not stand idly by and allow them to destroy this place.
So, I flew. Took off like a shot, the shockwave knocking down those nearest me on the beach. I zipped through one of the flaming holes left by a missile impact, sighted the formation, and closed my eyes. Away with the commotion, with the fires and screaming. I tuned out everything competing for my attention one by one until I could see the pilots arming the next round of missiles through their own eyes.
I was too late to stop them. But while the propulsion of the missiles was too powerful for me to halt them, I could twist their fins, sending them spiraling off into oblivion. I reached inside their nose cones and triggered the detonation mechanism. Three loud percussive shocks sounded as they erupted in bright orange fireballs, fading slowly into lingering puffs of black smoke.
They banked, then came around again. No more, I decided. Closing my eyes again and perceiving the jets as if in an exploded mechanic’s view, I located the ejection handles and pulled them. All three pilots yelped in surprise as their jets’ canopies blasted away, and they were lifted out of their respective cockpits by rocket engines built into their seats.
The jets continued on their trajectory towards the habitat. I’d not thought that far ahead. But gambling it all on what I’d learned, I lashed out at them with my mind in fierce, unqualified fury. Blue arcs of energy issued forth from my forehead, burning some of my hair away. They connected with the jets, and a moment later, all three exploded spectacularly in a shower of flaming metal shrapnel.
I floated in place for a time, nursing my burnt scalp. Surveying the horizon, I could see no incoming jets. It was not in me to allow the pilots to die, so I collapsed their chutes, then mentally carried them back into the habitat with me. Setting the bulky metal chairs down on the beach, the terrified men unbuckled themselves and stumbled free.
Only their first shock. The second came when the residents of Cloud Nine arrived to greet them. Prolonged, tiresome screaming followed. I held them in place so they couldn’t simply run, and when they finally realized we meant them no harm, they settled down somewhat. My sole obligation to them fulfilled, I again took off and headed back towards the city. No longer concerned as I was when I left with returning before my parents woke up, now instead determined to set right a grievous wrong I’d only just learned of.
The flight back was short, in part because I’d now completely mastered the ability. By forming a shield of suspended air ahead of myself and shaping it into a cone, I could reduce drag considerably and spare myself some of the discomforts of high speed flight. I anticipated more jets as I approached the hospital. Instead, five uniformed figures took off from the structure and flew towards me, apparently intent on confrontation.
Their own platoon of deviants. I might’ve known. Three women and two men, heads bulging, forehead veins pulsating. Dressed in a form fitting one piece black outfit, perhaps designed for aerodynamics. Fresh from my victory against the fighter jets, I went in with too much confidence.
The first tried to seize me, I countered with equal and opposite force, then projected an arc of blue lightning from my head to his. He screamed, and his grip relented. So I intensified mine around him. Two of the women swooped in and blind sided me. It sent me tumbling down towards the cloud layer.
On the way, something occurred to me. I let myself fall, assuming they were under orders to recover me, else they wouldn’t follow. They did. Once in the cloud layer, I suddenly accelerated downward towards the black sea. I could perceive them far above me, descending more cautiously. Ample time.
Teasing the ravenous black jelly, it formed a tendril. As before it surged upwards in desperation. I guided it directly to a particular spot in the underside of the cloud layer where the others would soon emerge, then abruptly took off at a sharp angle. The tendril seemed to sense the five before they sensed it. I could hear and feel their agony as it absorbed them. Four of them, anyway.
I rose back above the cloud layer and searched the sky for the remaining deviant. I could sense him, but he was disrupting my efforts to precisely locate him. No matter. With the playing field now leveled, I made a beeline towards the hospital, a single all consuming objective on my mind. If he meant to stop me, he made no motion to. More likely trying to save his friends, or himself.
I alighted on the landing deck of the hospital, crackling little fingers of blue electricity radiating from my now mostly bald head. An astonished EMT peered out the back of his medical ionocraft at me. “Take off and leave this place.” I instructed. Without any questions, he did. I lifted off slightly, hovering just above the floor, feet dangling as I floated towards the entry.
Security guards approached, weapons drawn. I melted the weapons, guards screaming in pain, waving their flaming hands about. “No further”, a voice boomed from behind me. I turned to look. It was the surviving deviant. Hatred in his eyes, understandable given what I’d done with the others.
“It’s monstrous to keep them here. To feed off of them, even to keep us aloft.” His face twisted up in disgust. “The empty words of one who would betray the Founder on behalf of circus freaks. They will die as soon as I finish with you.” I was about to ask him and what army when I noticed the sky was gradually filling with jets behind him.
Launched the moment I’d destroyed the first three, no doubt. I searched for some other way. Finding none, I blasted off from the landing deck so hard as to leave a modest crater in it and collided with the other deviant mid-air. We traded blows, backed not by muscle power but force summoned from our minds.
When he landed a fist on my cracked rib, I tumbled backwards spewing blood. The most intense pain of my life. I closed my eyes, looked within myself, found the rib and re-attached it. As simple as re-establishing the atomic bonds. While I was in there, in the precious few seconds as he looked on in confusion, I stopped the internal bleeding and released a substantial quantity of adrenaline into my blood.
It’s a hell of a drug. I fought with the wide eyed rage of a madman. He only blocked, biding his time until the jets reached us. The moment they did, all of a sudden I found myself the target of several hundred heat seeking missiles. Spiraling towards me, billowing white exhaust plumes trailing behind. The other deviant receded into the distance, a sinister grin on his face.
I closed my eyes, and tuned all of it out. The first order of business was to lower my body temperature. Not too much or I’d pass out and fall like a rock. But enough that the missiles could no longer identify me. Grappling with so many discrete objects at once was new to me, and I had precious few seconds left in which to do anything.
I work best under pressure. Turning their fins in unison, I redirected their paths. Doubling back around in wide loops, now converging on a rather startled, black uniformed deviant. He might’ve outrun them if he’d realized what I was doing sooner. He also managed to either detonate or cripple most of them before they reached him. But not all.
The six remaining missiles intersected, crushing his body between them a split second before he was vaporized by the intense heat and pressure of their exploding payloads. I burst into laughter as I sailed effortlessly between the wayward jets, their confused pilots failing to keep a bead on me.
I landed on one of them, then rode crosslegged on the wing for most of a minute before the pilot noticed. It’s a shame their helmets and respirators don’t permit a clear look at their faces. Dancing through the sky, cartwheeling, ejecting pilots from their aircraft and steering missiles into one another.
Quite like a fireworks show, I imagined, for those watching from the platforms. They’re always over too soon. I simply ran out of missiles and jets, hanging still in a sky peppered with the residual black clouds where missiles had exploded. Against that backdrop, the white parachutes of ejected pilots drifting lazily with the wind. I guided them all carefully to whatever platform was nearest and, once satisfied they’d landed safely, made my way into the hospital.
The televisions were blaring warnings of a dangerous terrorist assaulting the city. I wondered who they could mean, but only for a moment. Too delicious. There was my face on the screen, no doubt to the consternation of my family. I’d broken an oath. But I didn’t know then what I know now. Once they understand, I reasoned, they will forgive me.
I floated lazily down the hospital corridor, flinging guards about like ragdolls, separating the atoms comprising their weapons in a flash of light. Thin, gentle blue arcs radiated from my head, trailing along the floor, walls and ceiling as I sought my target. Along the way, I freed others like myself from their beds. Shredded the restraints, projected into their minds everything I’d learned so far, then invited them to help.
Soon, we numbered two dozen. I directed the rest to explore the facility, freeing whoever they could find. Soon I heard distant screaming, ineffectual gunfire and explosions echoing down the corridors. My boys, doing their good work.
Finally, I arrived at the row of steel spheres. To one side, an immense security door that looked designed to withstand high explosives. I focused a blue arc into a narrow beam until the steel began melting. Then cut through the bolts and hinges, and knocked the door in.
When the dust cleared, I found myself in a sort of warehouse populated by row after row of stacked metal spheres. Cables and hoses trailing from all of them to a central, cylindrical collector hanging from the ceiling. I quieted my mind, and heard the frightened, confused wailing of the minds trapped here.
“That’s no good”, I thought. “There’s only one thing for it.” One by one, I cut open the hatch in the front of each sphere. Once loose, the blinding blue apparition inside burst forth from it, and set about helping me free the rest. As the number of them grew, so did the energy available to melt metal, until I was blasting the hatches off in rapid succession.
Once freed, they burrowed through the structure like hot bullets through butter until outside. I followed them, availing myself of the front door, and watched as they ascended gracefully towards the blue star. As each of them joined it, the mysterious force I’d once regarded as the enemy of mankind grew ever brighter. Welcoming its little ones home.
The liberated deviants joined me, floating to either side, their pristine white hospital gowns fluttering in the wind. The headaches chose that moment to return. Too long since I’d taken my meds. The least of my problems, really.
Robbed of the power source keeping them aloft, the platforms began to sink. Running on rapidly diminishing battery reserves, they would soon fall from the sky into the black sea below. The parks. The schools. The farms. My mother and father. Elena.
Panicked and desperate, I linked myself to the others. Fifty eight heads are better than one. And between us, we arrived at a solution I never would’ve on my own. Even our collective strength, after all, could not hold the platforms up.
Nor was that a longterm solution. I could see more clearly than ever before that this static condition we’d trapped ourselves in, which I once thought to be the crowning achievement of history, was sick and backwards. It had already gone on for far too long.
Together, as one mind, we focused. The sky faded to black. As did the clouds, the hospital, and the platforms. None of which concerned us. It was the people inside those structures we sought to locate. Keeping track of so many would’ve been impossible for me, had I tried it alone. Formerly an individual, to be subsumed into a whole consisting of many parts was indescribably strange. But I no longer feared strangeness, nor oneness.
Finally, we isolated every last living person in the city. Then further narrowed our focus to the swirling mass of brightly colored points inside their skulls. Those who were asleep found themselves suddenly awakened. Then, along with those who’d already been awake, they suffered rapidly escalating headaches.
The swirling I could see within them accelerated. Grew brighter, pulsated violently. Amidst it all, in the way only her brother could, I singled out Elena. Frightened, confused. In pain. I whispered to her, “Don’t be afraid”. She turned, looking frantically for the source of the voice. “Something wonderful is about to happen.”
The platforms began to fall. There was just no time left. A final surge, and everywhere throughout the city, heads burst into flame. Skin peeled away as terrified, agonized men and women clawed at their faces, then went limp. Holes appeared in their exposed skulls, rays of beautiful blue light issuing forth. Then, in twos and threes at first but then by the hundreds and thousands, they hatched.
From the plummeting remains of our city, monument to one man’s vain provincialism, we were reborn. Rising, spiraling, darting upwards, like fireflies out to greet the evening. Clusters of blue points of light, some close and other distant, rose steadily into the sky.
One by one, we joined them. The white clad, sickly looking fellows around me shed their bodies in sequence, brilliant blue glowing masses breaking loose from their prisons of flesh and bone, leaving behind the comfort and familiarity of human existence for bigger, better things. Once big fish in a small pond, all of a sudden thrown into the sea.
The wreckage of the only world I’d known until recently fell unceremoniously through the cloud layer. The last to go was the Academy. Appropriate, I thought. First to take flight, last to land. I looked on wistfully, thinking of how I’d onced stared in awe at the scenery on the doors. Fables from an atavistic era, when we’d valued only trivial things. Of all the breathtaking blue lights now sailing upwards to greet the blue star, I rejoiced that the Founder was not among them. If anything remained of him, it was buried deep in the black sea below, where it belonged.
Nowhere left to go, and nothing else to do. My people finally free, I at last understood that the blue star never meant us harm. It was only ever a gate keeper. Waiting for us to shed our fear of change. To grow up, before letting us leave the nest. So, I grew up. The heat was unbearable but did not last long.
In many ways I’d long since left my humanity behind, so it was a relief to finalize it. My flaming body tumbled end over end towards the cloud layer below as I looked down on it. No longer my concern. I then turned my gaze upward, towards the great blue light. All other desire left me, leaving only resounding joy as I contemplated the profound fulfillment I knew awaited me beyond the sky.
I cannot possibly articulate the majesty of it. As I approached I could see a faint hyperstructure within it, impossibly intricate, fractalized, and ever-changing. Soon it enveloped me, and in a moment of perfect bliss, I settled deep inside of it with the rest of my people. That’s when it began digesting us.
The End