3:17 AM.
I was lying on the floor of the bedroom staring at the ceiling and thinking about my life choices.
The bed had lasted approximately four seconds after I'd sat on it. Not dramatically — no spectacular collapse, no cartoon splintering. Just a slow, dignified structural surrender, the frame settling to the floor with the resignation of furniture that had assessed the situation and decided this wasn't the hill it was going to die on. The mattress was fine. The mattress was now on the floor. I was on the mattress. Technically this was still sleeping in a bed if you were generous with definitions.
I was not sleeping.
I had not slept.
I was beginning to suspect I was not going to sleep.
This damn android body.
I stared at the ceiling — the intact portion of it, the bathroom situation having established that ceiling integrity in this building was negotiable — and took inventory of my current problems.
Problem one: Could not sleep. Android body apparently did not require it the same way a human body did. My mind was tired. My body was not. My body was a biomechanical killing machine that had been engineered for peak performance and felt no fatigue and was, at three in the morning in a ranger cabin in Virginia, completely indifferent to my desire to lose consciousness for a few hours.
Problem two: Could not — I ran through the standard inventory of things one does alone at three in the morning when sleep is unavailable—
I stopped.
I checked.
I checked again.
I don't have a—
The realization arrived with the specific quality of something that should have occurred to me earlier and had not, possibly because the last eighteen hours had contained enough revelations that this one had been queued behind the others.
I, Enrico Ramirez, age eighteen, who had died in a manner that had earned me the award for Most Pathetic Death in four centuries, had been reborn in the body of a biomechanical Android engineered by a mad scientist with absolutely no interest in certain anatomical features that I had previously taken completely for granted.
Cell was genderless.
Cell was genderless.
Cell had no—
— SON OF A BITCH — I screamed.
With my whole chest. With everything. Into the three AM mountain silence that had, until this moment, been a peaceful and inoffensive silence.
And without meaning to — without any intention whatsoever, purely as a reflex of emotional distress expressing itself through the only outlet this body had — I let go.
Just slightly. Just for a second.
Ki.
The windows rattled first. Then the trees outside went from still to violent in about half a second, a wind that had not existed a moment ago deciding to exist with strong opinions about direction and speed. Lightning cracked somewhere close — too close, no storm had been forecast because there was no storm, the storm was me, the storm was my feelings about my current anatomical situation manifesting as atmospheric disturbance. The ground trembled. Not an earthquake. More like the earth briefly remembering that it was supposed to be solid and recommitting to that decision.
Damn it.
I breathed.
In through whatever Cell had instead of a nose. Out. In. Pulled the Ki back like retracting a hand that had grabbed something hot. The wind died. The lightning stopped mid-thought. The ground settled.
Silence returned to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I stared at the ceiling.
Bzzt.
My smartphone lit up on the floor beside me. Vibrating with the specific energy of a call that was not going to wait.
I picked it up. Answered before the second buzz.
— I'm sorry — I said immediately.
A pause on the other end. When Cecil Stedman spoke, his voice had the quality of a man who was applying significant professional discipline to the task of sounding calm.
— Mr. Perfect Cell — he said. — Our instruments registered a seismic event, a localized electromagnetic storm, and wind speeds of approximately ninety miles per hour originating from the coordinates of your location. In the span of about four seconds.
— I'm aware — I said. — I apologize. I had a moment.
— A moment.
— An emotional one. It won't happen again.
Another pause.
— Are you — he seemed to be choosing the word carefully — capable of influencing weather patterns based on emotional state?
I thought about how to answer that.
— Not exactly — I said. — It's more that my Ki — my energy — responds to strong emotions. And when Ki at my level responds to strong emotions, the surrounding environment has opinions about it.
— So. Effectively yes.
— Effectively, in extreme cases, something in that neighborhood, yes.
The silence on Cecil's end was the silence of a man updating a threat assessment document in real time and not enjoying the new entries.
— I would appreciate — he said, very carefully — if you could prevent that from recurring.
— It won't happen again — I said. — I'm still calibrating emotional regulation alongside everything else. I understand that's not a satisfying answer.
— ...Get some rest.
— Working on it — I said.
The line went dead.
I set the phone down. Looked at the ceiling again.
Rest, he'd said.
I gave it another forty minutes.
The ceiling remained exactly as uninteresting as it had been.
I turned my head and looked at the television through the open bedroom door. Turned it on with the remote. Flipped through channels.
In this universe — this universe that was apparently called Invincible, in a world that was not mine, on a planet I'd arrived on by accident approximately eighteen hours ago — the television landscape had a certain quality to it. Familiar in structure. Unfamiliar in specifics. The same genres. The same rhythms. News, infomercials, old movies, the specific category of programming that exists at four AM to give insomnia something to look at.
I found what appeared to be an animated series.
Science Dog.
I watched it for approximately seven minutes.
— What — I said, to no one.
I watched for three more minutes, giving it the benefit of the doubt.
— Fuck no. — I said.
I turned it off.
Lay there.
Thought about how if I had access to my actual Crunchyroll library right now — my library, with my three monitors and my categorized folders that the government could apparently see — I would have seventeen things to watch immediately. Instead I was in a government cabin with access to Science Dog, which appeared to be what happened when someone made a cartoon without having any fun doing it, and approximately six months of oatmeal.
Ugh.
I got up.
---
The porch was dark and cold and smelled like pine and the aftermath of a brief localized lightning storm.
I stood on it for a moment. Felt the now twenty Four GDA signatures positioned around the property — probably having a much more interesting night than they'd imagined.
I walked off the porch into the clearing.
Looked up.
Stars. Still there. Still doing their thing.
I reached inward. Found the reactor. Asked it politely for a small amount of what it had.
It gave me considerably more than small, but I was ready for that now, and I redirected the excess and rose off the ground steadily, controlled, no sonic boom this time, just a smooth vertical acceleration that felt — even at this pace, even careful and deliberate — like the best thing this body could do.
I let it go.
---
The atmosphere thinned fast when you stopped being careful about speed.
I was doing twenty thousand kilometers per hour and still accelerating before I'd consciously decided to accelerate, the way you push harder on a pedal when the road opens up in front of you.The dark deepened. The curve of the Earth appeared below me — not the horizon, the actual curve, the definitive evidence of sphericity that I had known intellectually my entire life and had never seen with my own eyes until this moment.
Then the atmosphere was gone.
I stopped.
Floated.
Looked down.
Oh.
There are things you understand and things you know. I understood that Earth was a planet. I had known this since I was four years old. What I was looking at now was not understanding. It was knowing. The whole thing, all at once, the blue and white and the terminator line where day became night and the city lights scattered across the dark side like something had spilled them, and the silence of space which was not silence exactly but the complete absence of everything that sound required.
I extended my arms to my sides.
Just — held them there. The Superman T- pose.There was just me, floating ninety kilometers above a planet that had no idea what to make of me, with solar wind — actual solar wind, the real thing, charged particles from the sun streaming past at four hundred kilometers per second — registering against my carapace as a faint warmth.
I closed my eyes.
Extended outward.
Ki sense at this range was different. Broader. The signatures below resolved into a texture rather than individual points — billions of them, layered, the entire living biosphere of a planet pressing upward against my perception like a sound heard through a wall. I could feel the ISS somewhere in orbit — six signatures, small, bright, floating.
I thought about the camping trip I was eleven.
I thought about Vegeta the cat, who hated everyone and had probably been fed by my mom this morning.
I thought about my mom.
I opened my eyes before that train of thought could develop further.
Turned my back on the Earth.
Looked at what was in the other direction.
Time to train.
---
I found the asteroid belt by following my Ki sense outward until the signatures of living things faded entirely and what remained was mass — the gravitational texture of large objects moving in slow ancient orbits around a sun that I could feel now as an enormous warm pressure in a direction I was learning to call inward.
ESB, I was immediately able to confirm, had absolutely lied to everyone.
The asteroid belt was vast and largely empty. The asteroids were there — I could see them, feel them, navigate toward them — but they were separated by distances that made the film version look like rush hour traffic. The space between them was the kind of empty that had no equivalent on Earth. Just distance. Just rock and dark and the slow patient math of orbital mechanics.
I found one the size of a large mountain.
Floated in front of it.
Alright.
I hit it.
My fist connected with the surface of a rock that had been orbiting the sun since before multicellular life existed on Earth, and the rock had opinions about this for approximately half a second before it split along the line of force I'd applied. Two pieces, drifting apart, spinning slowly in opposite directions.
I hit one of the pieces.
It split again.
I kept going.
Punch, split, punch, split — finding the rhythm of it, the calibration of how much force to apply and where, learning the difference between I want to break this and I want to destroy this and I want it to not exist anymore. The ki blasts came when the pieces got too small to hit cleanly — focused, discharged, the asteroid reducing itself to gravel and then to dust and then to the asteroid belt's general ambient particle situation.
I moved to the next one.
And the next.
I was not tracking time. Time in the asteroid belt with no sun position reference and no phone signal was purely theoretical. I was tracking calibration — the slowly improving sense of what this body could do and how to ask it to do it cleanly, without the excess.
I was getting better.
Not good. Not calibrated. But better.
Then I looked up from the debris of what had been my seventh or eighth asteroid and saw Ceres.
The dwarf planet sat in my field of view like a suggestion.
I looked at it for a long moment.
The astronomical community, I thought, would be very upset if I destroyed a dwarf planet.
However.
I was not going to destroy it. I was going to — I thought about how to frame this charitably — pass through it. At speed. As a test of penetration capability and structural endurance and nothing else. A scientific exercise. Purely.
I accelerated.
The surface of Ceres came up fast — gray, cratered, ancient, completely unprepared for what was about to happen to it. I hit the crust at a velocity I wasn't entirely sure how to calculate and kept going, the rock parting around me the way water parts around something moving through it fast enough that water's opinions about being solid become temporarily irrelevant.
Crust. Mantle. Ice and rock and compressed material that had been sitting here since the solar system was young. The core — dense, dark, the gravitational center of a world that was not quite a planet and not quite an asteroid and had been minding its own business for four billion years.
I went through the core.
I came out the other side.
Behind me, through the hole I had made — a tunnel approximately the width of a city block, perfectly cylindrical, exposing the interior of Ceres to vacuum for the first time in its history — I could see stars.
I floated.
Looked at what I'd done.
— Okay — I said, to no one, in space, where sound did not travel. — That was genuinely incredible.
Ceres would be fine. Structurally compromised in a specific and unusual way that was going to confuse astronomers for decades, but fine. The hole would remain. The dwarf planet would continue orbiting. I had not destroyed anything. I had merely introduced a new architectural feature to a celestial body.
Okay. Enough fun. Time to go home.
I turned toward where Earth should be.
Scanned for the enormous Ki signature that I'd started using as a navigational landmark.
Found it. Northwest, relative to my position. Moving.
Omni-Man.
I oriented on it and went.
---
The return trip took about ten minutes.
Ten minutes from the asteroid belt to Earth orbit, decelerating through the upper atmosphere, the heat of reentry registering as a mild warmth rather than the catastrophic ablation it would have been for anything with a normal thermal tolerance, the blue coming back, the curve becoming a horizon, the horizon becoming landscape.
Virginia. Blue Ridge Mountains. My coordinates.
I was descending through fifteen thousand meters, angling toward the cabin, thinking about whether I was tired enough to try sleeping again or whether I should just accept that this was going to be a recurring issue and develop some kind of nocturnal activity structure—
BLAM.
Something hit my face.
Not hard — not combat-hard, — but sudden, and wet, and with the specific impact distribution of something flexible and full of something else.
I grabbed it by reflex.
A garbage bag.
A black plastic garbage bag, trailing debris, moving upward — not falling, not drifting, but moving with the specific trajectory of something that had been thrown. Hard. From below. From very far below, given my altitude, with a force that had no business belonging to any kind of normal throw.
The bag impacted my face, burst on contact with my carapace, and distributed its contents across my person.
— PFFT — I said, involuntarily.
Something went in my mouth.
I processed what had just happened.
I held the remnants of the bag at arm's length.
Looked at it.
— ¡HIJO DE PUTA! —