[sub][h3][center]Nicholas[/center][/h3][/sub][hr]

Feeling the familiar heft in his hands, he couldn’t help but smile. If he didn’t like what he saw, all he had to do was point and click. Then, with the slightest adduction of his index finger, he could crop them right out of the frame. If he wanted to. Oh, God. He was writhing with pleasure as he imagined how many problems he could solve.

Now, he was having the slightest bit of trouble making friends. In fact, every time he had seemed to find it within himself to reach out socially, at least one person ended up dead. Who knew how many other corpses the kids were bumping into. He knew that death was a part of life but he had thought that the amount of decomposing bodies he ran into would, like, generally decrease after the militia had been disassembled.

He thought about Anderson. Apparently Anderson was the werecroc, presumably sent into a murderous frenzy by the spontaneous homicide served up to him. Nic could still recall the ambience. That was probably the most dead bodies he’d ever seen at once. Some of his friends, if they were his friends, were almost amongst them. You’d think that surviving something like that would have brought them together as a group. But that wasn’t the case. Amelia, the punky one, had tried to murder him after he tried to protect her.

He understood the logic in her actions but felt a massive twinge of regret when he considered that he was apprehended by the remainder of the guards before he got the chance to explain that he had been trying to protect her. And then there’s the fact that he improvised a bomb that he tossed to Anderson. Possibly could’ve killed his aspirational best friend. He’d never had a guy friend his own age, really. Never had a [I]bro[/I]. How fucked was that? And how fucked was it that, if it weren’t for The Cafeteria Colossus, he would’ve killed his angel by trying to protect her.

Aw, well. Life was too short for regrets. Better to just bottle that shit up and shove it deep down inside of you. All that heavy shit. All that densely ethically complicated shit. No use crying over spilled blood. He had to keep a move on. After all, if he stood still too long, all of his feelings would sort themselves out, just like blood. The only thing that kept them in the state of functional fluidity was the nonstop motion that they were always going through. [I]Shutupshutupshutup[/I], he thought to himself. Get your game face on.

And just like that, he felt his lips arch into a smile. One of uncommon intensity, radiating levels of sincerity so extreme that it was inhuman. He looked out across the freshly fascist-leaning fields of the fragile frontier.

“Go get ‘em son. Put all those freaks where they belong,” he heard the unflappable Nathan Adair whisper in his ear, almost feeling his dear old dad’s finger pressing on his own. There they were, pulling a trigger as father and son. He thought about it, as a juggernaut of a grin exploded through his skull and splattered across his face. He cackled as an electric crackle of “fuck it” flowed through him, jolting his muscles like a dead frog in a lab.

Nic recoiled.

[hr]

“Aaagggg[I]kk[/I]hhhhhhh!” Nic hucked, feeling his eyes open, he realized that he had no concept of how long he’d been screaming. His cheeks were hot and moist, like the condensation outside a cup of hot cocoa. And his throat was sore from screaming. The residual pain from the toll it took on his throat was almost enough to spark a whole new cycle of screaming. But this wasn’t the time or place for that. This was a new day. This was gonna be a good day.

“Do you know why it’s going to be a good day?” Nic asked himself as he unraveled across his carpet. “It’s going to be a good day because I’m going to make it a good day.” He crawled across his carpet with the same momentum as a man trying to find a handhold as he felt down a waterslide, only he felt the berber burn as his slithering scrubbed away at his skin. “I’m going to kill anyone who tries to make it a bad day. And if I find one more dead body, then whoever made it is going to find themselves playing the role of the second dead body I see today.”

He’d hardly left bed since the cafeteria incident. His part in casting an Area of Effect shrapnel spell in the cafeteria on a whim seemed dumber and dumber the longer he thought about it. [I]Maybe it could’ve killed Archie. Maybe not. Needs further study[/I].

He slapped himself. Thoughts like that coming in automatically were what he hated most about himself. The first thing he’d been taught to find out about someone when getting to know them was what their weakness was. His dad really loved all that Sun Tzu stuff. The Art of War. Every enemy has a weakness. That’s the problem with hating yourself, is you know exactly what to do to wage a war for the fucking ages.

Ironically, in his time with the counselors and psychiatrists back in Alabama, he never bothered reading anything like [I]How to Make Friends and Influence People{/I]. It was pretty much all Quentin Tarantino all the time. Drowning out his firsthand memories of violence with another man’s fantasy-fetish-violence.

He’d been escorted out of the cafeteria by a pair of guards who brought him in for questioning because he’d technically tried to kill a high ranking staff member. Which, under most circumstances would’ve seemed extremely reasonable. But this wasn’t most circumstances, this was [B}SPACE[/B], babe! And in space no one gives a fuck. They understood and let him on his way. Unfortunately, in inspecting his belongings, they had completely disheveled his first aid kit. It would actually be less work, at minimum wage, to save up for a new one and purchase it than it would to restore order to the mess that they’d made of his equipment. He didn’t even get the opportunity to help with triage since the entire space station entered martial law.

“Fuck the faculty and their food rationings. I haven’t eaten a bite since the first shot was fired. I don’t need their rations. I can just wait until things are back to normal,” he said, feeling resolved in his commitment to fast for the entirety of the next month. He’d never tried fasting before but it had no effect on his confidence.

“Actually, I could really go for a bagel right now,” so much as saying such an absurd sentiment summoned a symphony in his esophagus. “Maybe even two bagels. Yeah,” he thought as he looked in the mirror. “Actually, since food’s out of the question, maybe I can search for love.”

[I]Kk-ckk[/I], he clicked his tongue as he winked at his reflection.

Slipping on his yoga pants and a leotard underneath a leather jacket, Rolex in place, he picked up his satchel before stuffing a snowglobe into it. It was a snowglobe filled with specially treated rose petals that could be shaken about inside of it. And they shook violently over a painstakingly hand-painted recreation of the Promise. He spent ninety-three of the last 140 hours working on it. Looking at the literal cut corners within some of the architecture’s less obvious spots, he couldn’t tell if he was proud of that or not, but he did know that there was a very special girl out there that would probably tell him what she thought about it.

And like that, he was out the door. He was jogging along. He had no idea where he was going. He had no idea where to find her. He didn’t even know her last name, but he did know that her first was Eli. He couldn’t tell if he was being a hopeless romantic or an idiot anymore. He just knew that he had miraculously found the motivation to step outside. The oddest thing happened when he was jogging around the pseudo-urban dystopia. For the first time all week, he saw himself.

Not metaphorically. He literally saw himself. He saw the way that the spandex clung to his body, just how flattering it was on him. But, around himself, he saw leaves and tree limbs, so he turned around. And he looked for a tree. There was a slight rustling.

“Archie, is that you up there?” he asked, tenuously approaching the tree. Had he infected one of the guards? Were they running surveillance on him? He tip toed up, watching the perspective shift skyward, until they were on a branch so thin it would be impossible for a person to put their weight onto it. So this was some kind of parahuman, then. “Hey, it’s okay. My name is Nic. I’m not gonna hurt you. [s]Unless you hurt me or pretty much anyone else. In that case, I’ll kill you.[/s]”

Then, the perspective zigged. And zigged. Twisting around the wood, looping like a snake. Stopping. Starting. Turning. Then starting again. Until it was on the ground, in the grass.

It was a squirrel.

A squirrel with antennae just like Nic’s. It seemed preposterous. But there it was. It had Nic’s antennae. Now that he was looking at it, it seemed apparent that it was unusually large, to the extent that it seemed preposterous. Nic had to know what was up with this squirrel. That meant he would have to capture the squirrel. When he was a little boy, his father had assigned him the task of chasing a squirrel specifically in order to train his dexterity and reflexes. That said, he literally never succeeded in catching one.

But things were different now. He was older. Faster. More powerful.

And better at throwing things. That was the important one. He waited for the creature to turn around. Then, like David lodging a stone into Goliath’s forehead, he slung his entire satchel at the squirrel, eliciting a frightened squeal as it realized that it was being preyed upon. Shocked by the sudden head trauma, it was sluggish enough for Nic to grab by the tail and stuff into the very satchel that had landed onto it a moment prior.

The Promise, being a space-faring vessel, didn’t exactly have a standing army of microbiologists on board, but fortunately, he knew exactly one. His name was Richard Edwin. He and Nic went back a ways.

[hr]

“So why does this squirrel have antennae like mine? I’ve never known anyone else to ever develop external antennae? Why can this affect a squirrel? My virus doesn’t do that. Does it?”

“Well, Nicholas, it kinda looks like it does. What we’ve got here is a bona fide specimen of Ratufa Astra, colloquially known as Trevor’s Flying Squirrel.”

“That’s a flying squirrel?”

“Nah. It’s a flying squirrel in the same sense that we’re flying humans. It was [I]’discovered’[/I] by Jason Trevor, who realized that some of the squirrels onboard the space station were biologically distinct from the ones back home that had been taken before launch. By all conventional metrics, it’s a bit too fast for evolution, so we suspect that the population of the various onboard wildlife may have been engineered to thrive in the rigid conditions offered onboard. But that’s just a theory. It’d seem that they are alarmingly bad at record keeping and it’s hard to convince the more senior faculty that dissecting the genome of the onboard squirrels should qualify as a primary concern regarding what projects are offered funding/time with the limited equipment available.”

“Ah. So… this squirrel doesn’t have parahuman powers?”

“No, Nicholas. Can’t say it does. Say, what do you think your ‘superpower’ is?”

“I can see through other people’s eyes by emitting a virus that convinces their body to construct the facilities to transmit their sight back to my brain.”

“Close. But nope. Your superpower is that you’re always sick and your immune system is just barely effective enough to keep the virus on the ropes. ‘Your’ virus, as you call it, is actually a constantly mutating lineage of viruses. Somewhere along the line, you constructed a strain that can spread amongst the squirrel population. That’s your superpower.”

“You’re supersick,” he continued. “One day it’ll probably kill you and we’ll call it old age. Just pray to God that you don’t ever get AIDS, or geesh, you are one fucked duck. Speaking of fucked ducks, though, did you know that we got AIDS from chimps. I’m reminded of that because you have introduced a pathogen into the squirrel population. We’ve actually gotten a lot of reports of these horny little critters,” he chuckled. “Now be honest, did you fuck a squirrel?”

“Excuse me,” Nic said, given pause.

“I’m just joshin’ you. But seriously, did you ever unload on a squirrel, point blank, with your antennae. This answer actually does matter. Not for anything concerning you. Just for my research.”

“Well, first thing: No. Second thing, I’m really uncomfortable now, Doctor Edwin.”

“If I were you, I would probably just wear a hat, or you know, something to stop you from spitting that stuff out everywhere. There’s no telling what this could mean for the ecosystem.”
[hr]
Setting the squirrel free upon walking back out the door of Doctor Edwin’s office, Nic realized that this was perfect. He had the perfect solution for finding Eli. He could just run laps around The Promise until he found her, cheating by piggybacking on the vision of the squirrels he’d infected, since evidently every human he’d ever infected had habitually drank enough to clean it right out of their systems.

There was that involuntary emission in the cafeteria before he threw the chair leg at Gennedy. So those people probably all had it now. Unless they drank which, knowing them, they almost certainly had. It only took three hours of running laps around the space station for him to [i]coincidentally bump into[/i] her.

“Hey, it’s Eli, right? Man, the last couple times we’ve bumped into each other have been some of the worse days I’ve had in recent memory. I choose to believe that there’s no correlation in that. How are you?”