I started up a game and squirmed deeper into the couch. It was times like this that made me enjoy the comfort of video games. After something terrible, returning to something familiar.
So yes, let it be known that I do not hate video games, thank you very much.
But what happened that day pretty much shattered video games for me for the rest of my life. Not that it was a bad experience. Let me explain.
Response Hit: Planetary Aggression is a tactical game involving two teams. While a lot of people don’t see the mathematics involved in this game, knowing and being able to calculate everything that is going on gives a player a godlike advantage. The thing is, no one except for the world’s best mathematicians could operate on a level high enough to give them that advantage.
So you can imagine my surprise when, once the game started, my brain started taking in so much information from my eyes and ears (surround sound, baby!) that I could actually feel the heat emanating off of my head. But this time, it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt pretty good. I wish I could explain what having your brain process billions of numbers feels like, but I can at least explain the results to the gamers out there.
Effectively, I was playing in slow motion. My brain was operating so fast that although the human brain deliberates on decisions so fast that it is not noticeable already, it was calculating at least ten times faster. Response Hit was no longer a game to me. It was a problem, and it wasn’t waiting to be solved. It was being solved.
Everything in-game was a shape. Every single hitbox changed with movement. Every single pixel counted. I threw smoke grenades with immense precision. Everything became solvable. It was incredible. It was truly like being a god.
And then the game ended. We won, obviously, by a stunning margin. With nothing to pump up the adrenaline in my body, my brain settled back to a normal speed, and left me stunned.
I let my brain rest for a few minutes, and then fired up Firefox (no pun intended). I started intensely researching the brain, and as I did, I could feel it warming up again. Page after page I pulled from the web, and page after page my brain processed. Soon I knew all I ever could’ve imagined about the brain. It didn’t explain anything that I had not known before relating to my condition.
Intrigued, I moved onto the news. Were there reports of other people like me? What could have possibly happened to cause my brain to become this? And then I remembered the girl. Oh, yes, that poor girl. What was her name, Riley? I searched for news stories in the past day that involved the keywords “young”, or “girl” or “teenager”. Let’s see… Young woman talks down a potential suicide attempt… ah! Teenager destroys food court in an astounding fashion. I searched for any photos of the event. The search engine supplied nothing.
My brain was all-powerful now, right? I could finally try what I had been wanting to try since I started watching spy movies. After spending an hour learning about the vulnerabilities of systems, your digital footprint, and college-level C++, I had absorbed information that would have taken years to study. I hacked into the Boston Police Department mainframe, and found the surveillance camera footage of the incident. Additionally, I collected the police report.
What had been damaged? Let’s see, the neon signs that stores love so much to use, the tables that were bolted to the ground prior to the incident… What did all of these things have in common?
They were magnetic. Of course! The tables were bolted to the ground. The legs of the table also contained iron. The chairs, however, were wood. Riley had not even touched any of the chairs. And the neon signs… Why had they stopped working? Not only that, but footage shows the lights dimming over time, even after Riley had been led away. Why had they not just been torn off, thrown to the wind? The police reports say that the neon signs were not unplugged, or broken in any visible way. The storeowners had simply thrown them away and got them replaced.
All the tables in a two foot radius had been affected by Riley, but the closest set of lights had been over twenty feet away. Clearly, her field of influence extended beyond two feet, but perhaps weakened as it went on? If this was true, the force Riley exerted would not have been enough to unbolt tables from over two feet away, but it may have been strong enough to affect the neon signs.
I did some reading on how neon signs were manufactured. Then, everything became painfully obvious to me. Neon signs are bent glass filled with argon and, of course, neon. The glass tube is attached to an electrode, which directs electricity in, powering the sign’s luminescence. The electrode has many metallic parts to it, and it’s possible that the electrode could have been damaged from Riley’s outburst.
But the thing is, that would’ve left an obvious visible defect. So what were Riley’s powers, exactly? I think I have an answer now. I believe she can control magnetic fields at will. When I started this research, I assumed that Riley had an ability similar to mine in scope and cause. But these abilities seem completely unrelated. I have increased brain capacity and intelligence, and she seems to have control over magnetic fields.
Oh, yes, speaking of, I should explain my logic. I already found the pattern of the things that she can affect. They’re all magnetic. The thing with the neon signs is that they contain electrodes that are composed of wires. Riley’s magnetic burst left the wires vibrating so fast that they caused microscopic fractures in the glass. These fractures were still large enough for the Argon and Neon to escape, but slowly. Thus, the lights did not go out immediately, but gradually, as the Argon and Neon left the glass tube. Argon and Neon are not toxic enough to cause any harm unless the density is very high, so their release endangered no lives.
I was still amidst my research when Dad came home. I was glad that I could tell him, with a smile, that I had learned a lot today. I plan on sending out a web crawler to alert me if anyone searches for keywords relating to Riley’s incident. Maybe there are more people like Riley and me, and if there are, then they might be searching for answers. I could find them.
Carol
Wow, okay then. I’m feeling pretty good about myself right now.
Today, I basically just single-handedly saved someone’s life. I know, right?
For my birthday, Dad had brought me out to New York with him. Just him. No disapproving stepmother, and no half-siblings to watch over. No responsibilities, no itinerary, just a few days in New York.
Yesterday we went to listen to an opera sing, walk through the Metropolitan, and even visit Madison Square Garden. This morning, we went off to the Bronx zoo. It was exciting. I don’t get why some people don’t like spending time with their family. No matter what I do, as long as I’m doing it with friends or family, I enjoy it. Some things are too special not to enjoy.
After picking up lunch at the zoo, we went over to the Empire State Building, and went up to the 86th floor for the open-air main observation deck. The view was astounding! Although I hadn’t exactly been living in a rural area back at home, I had never really seen such a great view! There was a difference between standing up there, on top of the world, and being on an airplane, only seeing the world as a series of patchwork pieces of land.
My dad sighed beside me. “What a great view”, he said. I smiled and leaned into his shoulder, reveling in the time we had alone together. It was a comfortable moment, but life always finds a way to ruin those.
The way that I had snuggled into him combined with where we were standing meant that I could see the stairwell out of the corner of my eye. A man had walked up. I had spent years of caring for my step-siblings, and so I could tell immediately, without even talking to him, that this man was distressed. But it wasn’t because he was acting similarly to when my step-siblings were disturbed. It was because I recognized the way he was carrying himself, like he was lugging his life around him in a sack behind him, but there were