A Not a Superhero Story

Stan Adriana-Daniela Excerpt Chapter 1

This is not a superhero story. This is also not an official statement. No, this is purely a chronicle, my chronicle. I have something to say, even if I am not very sure to whom my words are intended. Nonetheless, I am going to give my best shot at describing the following events as they actually happened, in a most accurate way and keeping in mind the chronological order in which they occurred.

1. The Past I once had a dream. A vivid dream about glory, about perfect days with lemonade juice and book reading on the porch of a white-fenced, two-storied house; and in my dream there were free people, basic rights, and willful ambitions. In my euphoric state of mind there were humans with everyday jobs who possessed the essential and auto-declared right of choice, of being able to choose no over yes and vice versa. And in my dream, traditional values kept a tight grip on modern evolutionary tendencies, on technology and future societies. I dreamt of power over the little people being something utopic, unpracticed at a large scale. I dreamt of democracy at its best. But my dream was inverted when I woke up. I was born in a field full of flowers, on the surface. A sun-kissed field imbued with savage sorts of flowers, very much alike a rainbow serenade. There were purple, wild flowers all mixed up with red and yellow dots which, from an above view rendered a live artwork with which even a blind man would have been in love. Yet, from underneath a field without apparent boundaries, a secret facilitys mechanical heart strongly pumped. But lets not call it secret, lets just call it military facility. So I was born by artificial pumps and wires which gave me a body, a face, a voice, a perfect mind. Whether it gave me a soul or not, for that I cannot vouch. Nonetheless, the experiment, as doctors called it, gave me a family. Maybe if I knew at that time the purpose for which I and my family were created, I possibly could have stopped the whole thing before it blew out of proportions. But to return my thoughts on the chronological path, I was born or better said created and carefully calculated, deep inside a military facility, around 2020th BC, somewhere in the land of a south-European country. It is important to mention that I started the cycle of life very much like any other human: 9 months old. After being artificially nurtured in a perfectly built environment of glass and electric wires, I was later transferred into the natural environment of humans, as doctors believed that a normal growth would assure the best outcome of resources the subject imposed. So for 9 months I was slowly fed with artificial minerals which contained bits of information that my morphing brain accumulated and later used. Although I had a natural biological mother whom Ive grown to care about in my childhood, there was no biological father. Programmed Nanobites fused with my mothers egg and so I was created. Even if the doctors carefully monitored my brain activity during those 9 months of incubation, they never knew my mind was already formed and I could connect myself to their machineries, their satellites, their minds, their surveillance cameras, their everything. But my mind

wandered carelessly, never being able to fully understand the situation in which I was. It wasnt able to do something. I was limited. I had no power over matter even if I felt otherwise. I knew the flowers from the field above me from the satellite images. I knew the name of the country I was in. I knew the doctor who conducted the experiment. I understood what I was, but I never understood what I was for. I couldnt make much of peoples plans with me. I understood images, faces, programs written and inserted into different machines, I understood seasons, as summer came and passed. I understood temperature variables and laws of physics, as I was watching everything from my own telepathic loop hole. I understood the room in which I resided, stacked with machineries that monitored my every vital and non-vital signal. I knew the colored syringes that were carefully dosed and pumped in me to be my food. I understood my body as it were growing, as my limbs started to take shape. I understood the electric impulses which ran through me, through my nervous communication pathways. I understood myself as powerless as I was. I knew my mothers face before I was able to open my eyes. I knew her warm smile before I could cry a sound with my air-filled lungs. I knew her blonde hair, softly falling from her shoulders. She was watching me every night, before going to bed. She gave me a smile every time she thought about me. I trusted her before my 9th month of existence. I trusted her gentle eyes and the way she carried her papers around the laboratories every day. I trusted her voice, as she spoke to others. I trusted her habit of watching me every evening. My logical mind was relying on her attachment to me, to take care of me until I was able to take care of my own. So in my ninth month, I was out of my glass bubble, filled with information, and thrown into a blind environment in which I remembered nothing. From understanding and knowing I came about in a world of unknowingness. Only later in life, when my mind received electrical stimulation and carefully prepared drug cocktails I was able to fully recover my memory and capacity. So I became a baby with no knowledge and no skill. I couldnt walk, I couldnt speak and I didnt know which of all those people my biological mother was. I started to become slightly functional when I reached the age of one years old. At that time, I have learned who my mother was and Ive became accustomed to her caressing. I also started speaking when I reached the age of two. By the time I was three I have already learned three foreign languages. Also, I could solve complex equations when I was seven years old, even if that didnt at that time-strike me to be unusual. There were other kids who were brought to life in a similar way with mine, and they were also good at the things I was good at. But we-as kids- never saw the laboratories in which we were harbored. I later discovered we had different mothers and that we very much resembled them, from the physical aspect to the emotional and psychological one. By the age of thirteen, we were five kids. We all ate at the same hour. We all had medical examinations together. We all played in the same room; we all slept and woke at the exact same time. We had the same rules, and what struck us as odd was the way our mothers behaved with us. They all became restless as my sixteenth anniversary was approaching. The other kids had different ages: Tom was twelve, June was fourteen and Sam and Matt were twins, both having the same mother and the age of fifteen. I couldnt make much of the fuss our mothers made, but soon I discovered their motif: a stranger. Our world with perfect rules inside that facility admitted no strangers. We all thought that the world was supposed to be made of a small-sized town, all carved

in metal and plastic. We had no idea of the reality outside. And we also knew the inhabitants of our city and there was no justification to an intrusion. The concept of intrusion didnt exist, as didnt the idea of somewhere else. So we were served with a lie, as was the stranger. A child, a kid with the same age as me, a dark-haired kid, tall and shy, with his sharp eyes pointing everywhere, at me, at the others, at his mother which I knew to have no child until that moment. He kept a tight grip on his spare clothes. As we all stared at him, his mother started saying something about his son, Alex, being in a comma for sixteen years only to wake up now with the help of a serum our everybodys doctor, Mister Kreuss, created. I personally wasnt able to buy that lie. I felt it was a lie, and as I looked deeper into the boys agitated eyes, I saw the lie as he desperately was trying to make sense of himself. And in that struggle with himself I saw the field above us, even if I never remembered it until then. I saw the satellite images, pieces and fragments of my past, as it became obvious inside my head that I was watching the boys mind and thoughts. I couldnt understand what I received inside my head and why I started trailing this strangers thoughts as they were my own. I believe a few months passed this way, time in which the new boy didnt speak and he was somehow excluded from our already formed group. We never intended to rule the boy out; he just was withdrawn from us or from anyone else for that matter. His mother was rarely visiting him while he slept in our hospital part of the community. Sometimes we visited him at our mothers insistencies, but there were no improvements, regardless of what we or the doctors did. Sometimes, the others kept asking me if I knew more than they did. Why do you ask me that, Tom? Being the youngest of us, I attributed the curiosity and the boldness to ask to his age. Well, you look at him in a weird way. Almost like you are looking for something thats written on his face. Like you dont understand something thats written on his face. He declared with a rather curious tone, almost like asking the last words. Thats silly, how could there be something on his face, Tim? I asked amused even if Tim was in part right. I kept receiving thoughts from his mind, thoughts which repeated over and over again, like a spiral, like he was trapped in an endless vortex of images which did not match our reality. Well, sometimes hes also looking at you funny. June replied.

June was an energetic girl. She had a firing personality, but only matching her vibrant blue eyes and sharp face. Her hair, always stranded in a bobbin on the top of her head, only enhanced her energy, as she was the funny and full of life among us. What do you mean by funny? I asked her as I was sure I had no idea what she was talking about. Funny, as in weird, Claire. Those black eyes of his are a bit scary when hes starring at you like he does.

And those were the things we discussed after visiting him, every time we went to see how hes doing. After a while, I started noticing what June was talking about and it became a bit scary for me to, as I had no idea what to expect from all of this. Telepathy was never a term in our vocabulary and I did not know at that time that that was what I and the new boy were doing.

I could sum up that my childhood was pretty normal considering the artificial environment that was built around us, a few inhabitants, which I later learned that were simply military personnel inserted there just so we, the kids, could have a real human experience, as our doctor Kreuss later explained the real situation to all the six of us. I say the six of us because, after the few months in which we knew nothing of the new boy, we became what we all were meant to be. I do not know if I and Alex triggered the whole thing or it was just the time for things to happen. I dont know what those images are, I said to him one afternoon. I just went to his hospital room and stood there, by the door, arms crossed. I wanted to talk to him, maybe find out more. My curiosity was pushing me by itself as I approached him and sat in a chair next to his bed. He had a calmer look now, but a blank one. His eyes were black and appearing to drift off to a faraway place, yet his posture was a rigid one. He wasnt relaxed at all, he was thinking of something. He was remembering those flowers, the glass bubble filled with liquid in which he had grown. I do not know what those images are, Alex. What are those images with flowers and you being fed by artificial tubes and wires?

He made no sound but his eyes started trailing towards me. We made eye contact and I felt a powerful energy, as it hit me in the chest. There was nothing material, but the energy was there as real as that room was around me. I sensed a sudden urge to feel light, to escape from that massive hit of energy, I felt like I needed to float. And then suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, I began rising from my chair. I saw Alex watching me with some sort of revelation, as if he were being saved from his stillness by this nebulosity, I started screaming as hard as I could and I fell with all gravitys force back in my chair just before the medical staff entered the room. I want to talk to Dr. Kreuss. I shouted, returning my eyes to Alexs. Yourelike me. He murmured slowly, so low that only I could have heard that. Scared? I asked him, confused and glad he spoke to me. No. Gifted. He replied simply.