Quantum wrath, p.1
Quantum Wrath, page 1
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Chapter 1
A wrenching, endless vortex had hold of me. I screamed, but I couldn’t tell if the sound actually made it past my lips. I could’ve been moving, or I could’ve been standing still. All I knew was that everything had changed in that moment.
This seemed to last an eternity.
More screaming, more feeling like the very fibers in my skin were being stripped apart bit by bit. At one point, I was pretty sure my brain was about to gush out of my nose like some primordial ooze.
No one ever said gaining power would be like this.
It was supposed to come on gradually over years and years of identifying the root of your zenith, seeking mentors, being officially assessed by the Bureau of Enhanced Management, and then finally growing fully into your unique brand of “super.”
I never took any of those steps, but that wasn’t too uncommon back then. Only about twenty percent of the worldwide population had awoken their zenith during my origin time. It was 2023, and I was twenty-eight and pretty much settled into life hauling iron ore for the Daze Quade mining company in Michigan. One moment, I was taking a shower before starting the long drive back to the city, and the next I was doubled over.
Like I said, it felt like an eternity passed after that, but I later learned differently.
I came to in the Axlier Dimension, which is not the sort of place to end up without any preparation. In places like Axlier, illegal underground fighting rings are for pitting humans against each other instead of dogs or chickens. In Axlier, we are no better than dogs and chickens.
So I showed up buck naked, reeling with pain and distorted senses, and drowning in a deep sense of fear that I didn’t shake for a long time after that. I had no idea what the hell had happened to me yet, but I managed to keep my naked ass out of the fighting rings and found a hostel of sorts to recover in.
It took me several days to realize I’d warped through time and space. It took me several weeks to be certain this was my own unique power– my awoken zenith, in Earth terms. And it took me several months to teach myself to activate this power on command.
But somehow, fifty-three years had passed when I made it back to Earth.
What I found waiting for me sent my brain into a tailspin.
I wandered into a world where real-time translation devices had made travel too easy for the idiots at large, so deep cultural divides and border restrictions swamped every news outlet I could find.
I just wanted to know where all the grocery stores and gas stations had gone. And why Nike now controlled what was left of the public school system.
The supers were the new Kardashians, and people thought we were heading in a good direction because petty crime was basically obsolete. They couldn’t even guess how enormous the scale of crime would get, though.
And I realized immediately that they didn’t really care. Things seemed too epically advanced for them to focus clearly.
Just five years later, people started hooking their actual brains up to Wi-Fi, and I stood back and watched as dumbasses dropped dead from computer viruses infecting their nervous systems.
I shit you not.
That was when I got terrified for my own future. For what I’d be forced to live through as I tried to assimilate.
The world just fifty-three years after I came into my power was the stuff of dreams and nightmares already, and I missed my origin time so bad I could rip my eyeballs out after just one warp.
But the worst part about that first trip to Axlier and back was that I returned to Earth to find everyone in my family had passed on. Granted, there weren’t many of us, and I was the youngest of the bunch, but they were all I ever had.
That was just as true after centuries had passed as it was the first time I returned.
I’ll never get any of that lost time back, either, I know that now. That’s what life in warp is like. What felt like an eternity of wrenching vortex torture was twenty-six Earth years in each direction. So how did not a damn one of those years show on my face, no matter how many times I warped the fuck out of a situation?
It was like I existed outside of time now, but that wasn’t as fantastic as it sounded on the surface.
I was a man constantly looking in from the outside.
The third time I warped to a new dimension and back, the Daze Quade mines were abandoned, Los Angeles had a new name, and the whole Wi-Fi brain trick had been shut down for causing mass suicides and night terrors due to forced ad content in dreams.
Oh, and all insemination was artificially done because everyone was romantically and sexually involved with AI bots.
I damn near puked.
People didn’t even remember what skin-on-skin contact could do for a libido. Male fertility had plummeted, too, but their bot partners had convinced most of them that they didn’t mind how infertile their deposits were. This meant getting them to take the proper drugs for the sake of the human race was surprisingly difficult to do.
Things were more of a blur after that.
Around my fifth time warping out of the craziness, I returned and went on a bit of a killing spree through the city of New York while trying to avoid getting locked up for a fourth time.
The majority of the casualties were AI, but that was still a life-sentence felony at the time.
Long story short, after my seventh warp, I finally stopped. The year was 2401. I’d lost too much and destroyed more than I liked to admit, so I managed to stay a little more under the radar.
By then, all of Earth was entirely beyond saving, in my not so humble opinion.
The world was dying, and not just because of the effects so many radioactive superpowers were having on the ozone. Regular humans had been overrun by their beloved fuck-bots a couple centuries ago, but the supers finally managed to wrangle the situation. Everyone on Earth had lost touch with each other too much by then, so most people lived a creepy, hoarding, bunker lifestyle. Supers prowled the planet like a zombie plague of beauty, power, and moral confusion to distract the masses.
And I was still the twenty-eight-year-old guy looking in at all the insanity from the outside.
At this point, sixty percent of the population would awaken their zenith by the age of twenty. Thirty percent of them would prove too strong to contain within the first five years of their training. They either destroyed themselves, or got destroyed while taking down entire cities’ worth of innocents.
Another fifteen percent would be containable but classified as Risk Level V.
That’s where I was the last time they managed to capture and assess me, but when you break free as many times as I did, you get bumped up to the villain class immediately.
Oops.
Oh well, though. Every dimension needs their supervillains. That I knew from personal experience.
“Heath! You in there, man?” My buddy’s frantic voice echoed off the stone walls, and I sighed as I stood up to head toward the entrance of the mine shaft.
I could hear the rain hammering against the rockface outside, and the ground became slick and dark with the stuff as I neared the front of the mine. It was sometime in the evening, I could tell by the bluish tinge in the clouds, but I didn’t really give a shit what time it was exactly.
Time and I had had a bit of a falling out over the hundreds of years I’d lost thanks to my power, so the way I saw it, time could go ahead and kiss my ass. Hours, seasons, years… they meant nothing to me.
“I’m here, Dougy,” I said in warning before I emerged from the dank cave.
Dougy jumped about a foot in the air anyway.
He’d been a squirrely guy his whole life after a supervillain named Elvector decimated his childhood town in about seven minutes flat. She’d really left her mark on him, too. He still couldn’t be around women with black hair without fainting, but Elvector wasn’t really the worst this world had to offer. She just had a flair for the dramatic, and systematically electrocuting as many people as possible in a fifty-mile radius through their eyeballs specifically had been her thing at the time.
Nowadays, her thing was being buried six feet under, courtesy of the Bureau of Enhanced Management.
But Dougy never got over it. Zeniths as raw and powerful as that always shook him up to his very core. Even just seeing me left him shaken up, despite my lack of tits or black hair. I’d known him for years now, and he knew I’d never hurt him. But my general size and power made it impossible for him to hold my gaze longer than a few seconds at a time.
I’d noticed that most people on Earth and in other dimensions got uncomfortable looking at me. I could understand the inclination.
I hadn’t aged, sure, but that was mostly just weird to me. The whole “deadened eyes” thing that I had going on had started after that first time I warped and came home to nothing and no one left from my original life. But more importantly, one mortal body containing a zenith like mine seemed to come with its own side effects. I honestly couldn’t pinpoint when it had happened, but one day I was reasonably fit, and th
Seriously, no one needed this much muscle. I sure as hell didn’t.
“You good?” I asked as I came to a stop beside my wiry friend.
“Didn’t hear you coming,” Dougy stammered.
“What have you got for me?” I asked.
“T-two patrols,” he said and swiped rain from his eyes. “Ten miles east and fifteen miles west. They’re pretty confident they’re closing in on you.”
I furrowed my brow as I looked out at the massive pit ahead of us. Back when this place was still an operating Daze Quade mine, I could’ve seen Detroit on the horizon just beyond the slope. I couldn’t remember if it was Tazer or that fucking Halcyon Wench who burned Detroit to the ground and then folded it in on itself, but it was over two hundred years ago, and no one had bothered building it back up.
The residual radiation was the main reason at first. Now, it was just too shitty of a location. Most of the prime real estate available was either in heavily gated communities near the coasts or out on the oceans.
People were less likely to end up in the supers’ crosshairs like that.
“I don’t love the sound of ten miles,” I said as I glanced at Dougy.
He nodded vigorously. Then he eyed my biceps a little warily.
“Better head out, Heath,” he said. “I don’t like the look of this.”
“I’m not just jumping and running,” I sighed. “Come inside, you’re getting drenched.”
“B-better not,” he stammered and sent a shifty look around the jagged pit that surrounded us. “Might’ve been followed, so it’s better if I get going. But you should head out, Heath. Things aren’t looking good, and the patrols are getting too close. You’re emitting, even staying still. You… you gotta know you’re emitting.”
I ground my teeth together. Rain poured down my head and into my eyes, but I hardly noticed because the impatient buzzing in my limbs distracted me most of the time. So yes, I knew my zenith was emitting.
And I knew it was close to getting out of hand.
“It’s under control,” I muttered.
Dougy was silent for a long moment, but I could practically hear his nerves rattling in his veins as he worked up the courage to counter this point.
“N-not gonna work, though,” he finally managed. “It’s been too long since you warped. You gotta go. N-not good for anyone if you stay much longer.”
“Are you worried they’ll drag you in for questioning?” I asked with a cryptic grin.
“No!” he blurted out, but then backtracked. “Well… it’s crossed my mind. I’d never give you up, though, Heath. You know I wouldn’t. I just–”
“I know,” I sighed and patted him on the shoulder. He flinched at first, but then he took a deep breath and actually met my gaze. “I don’t want you getting dragged in to the Bureau, Dougy. You’re a good guy. So you’re gonna head out of here, and you’re not gonna come back, alright?”
“B-but–”
“I mean it,” I said. “There’s no version of this friendship that ends with you keeping your life if you keep coming back here. I’ll be fine. You go home. Live your life.”
Dougy swallowed so loud, I could hear it over the slamming of raindrops all around us. He didn’t move to leave.
I couldn’t blame him.
I’d saved his life a total of four times now. In all honesty, there was a good chance he’d end up dead within five years even if he left this mine and never came back. But there was a much better chance that in the next two days, he’d be dead or dragged in for questioning if he didn’t listen to me now.
Getting dragged in and interrogated by the Bureau over a super “villain” like me was worse than death.
And I knew he was right. I was emitting more and more of my zenith the longer I restrained myself from using my power. It happened every time I found a place to hide out, and it was what kept me at the top of the Wanted Supers List for nearly four hundred years. The government knew how my power worked by now, and they knew I wouldn’t age. So they’d never let me escape my criminal record.
The Bureau would never stop hunting me.
Which meant anyone I knew would become a target if they knew me too long.
“Dougy,” I said more firmly. “I’ll handle it, alright? But you’re gonna get the fuck out of here, do you understand? Don’t scan the cameras around here, don’t hack their computers, don’t bug the trackers, nothing. Your work for me is done. You act like you never knew me, and you stay the hell away from these mines.”
“No.” He shook his head so vigorously that his stringy brown hair whipped out and sent rain scattering around him. “Not g-gonna abandon you like that, you’re–”
“As big as a house,” I chuckled darkly. “Armed to the teeth. More powerful than any super they can throw against me, last I checked. Don’t take pity on me, Dougy, you know my track record.”
“You’ve done what needed to be done, is all,” he defended me a little weakly.
I arched an eyebrow. “Sometimes.”
The word hung in the cold, wet air between us, and a haunted expression came over the squirrely guy as he looked anywhere but at me.
“Never forget, I may not have asked for this power, but I’ve earned these trackers they keep sending after me,” I said firmly. “Don’t make me out to be some hero. You know my classification. And the fact of the matter is, in the next few days, they’ll zero in on me. Again. I might be here when they do. I might not be. But either way, it’ll be none of your concern, and no one will ever know you’ve been helping me out all this time. Understood?”
Dougy nodded shakily as he stared into the pit ahead of us. We didn’t talk for a long time, but the night was coming on faster now, and the rain got a few degrees colder while I stood beside the only person I’d actually gotten to know at all in the last seventeen years.
That’s how long I’d been back on Earth after my last warp, and they were tracking me faster and easier each time I returned.
To tell the truth, I didn’t really know why I kept coming back anymore. Maybe it was just that traveling to so many dimensions so easily, and seeing so many societies, corruptions, powers, all of it… It made a guy like me lose a lot of connection to life in general. Nothing felt important. Nothing felt like it belonged to me, not even my own existence.
My Earth was something I sort of knew, though.
Sort of.
It didn’t look the same or function the same anymore. It changed too fast, and shit was only getting worse as everyone scrambled to control the superheroes and villains that were spreading like a damn plague here. But some of the cities still had the same names. Most humans looked like humans. Politics were still more important than they ought to be, given the circumstances.
It was a fucked-up place, but it was the place I came from.
Even if every life I lived here was either one of rampage or hiding.
“Think you’ll come back?” Dougy croaked after who knew how long.
“I don’t know,” I said, and I meant it. “Not sure why I would.”
Dougy turned to look at me, so I met his gaze since it was so rare that he was able to hold mine.
“Find you a place with lots of sunshine,” he said with a shaky grin. “Like that one you told me about. With the purple trees? The women had glittery skin or something like that?”
“The Laylix Dimension,” I chuckled.
“That’s the one,” he agreed. “Get yourself a villa out there. Settle down a bit, meet a nice glittery girl, and–”
“Watch her slowly age and die?” I interrupted, and his grin immediately faltered.
I felt bad for dousing his spirits, but I couldn’t help it. I’d kind of lost my emotional touch over the decades, and daydreaming never helped anything.
“M-maybe just the villa, then,” Dougy mumbled and shuffled his boots in the puddle beneath us.
I looked at him for a second. He was just as wiry as he’d always been ever since that day I pulled him out of a gravitational pit when he was seventeen. Some super was trying to prove their worth and ended up sending all of Flynt into some sort of black-hole hell. Dougy was already a nervous wreck before that, but he’d only gotten worse over the years.
Earth just wasn’t a place to live a peaceful life anymore. Not unless some government intel classified you as a top-tier hero, sponsored your bullshit way of life, and plastered your face on every fucking billboard across the country.
