Jacob stared at the ceiling and tried desperately to stop thinking. But thinking seemed to be all he was capable of doing lately... about Jessica, about Janelle, and about Aaron. He had desperately needed sleep after helping Janelle through Jessica’s submersion into the micronite gel yesterday. But instead of getting the rest he needed, he had found himself wide awake, staring at the ceiling. Unable to do anything but think, and the longer he thought the angrier he grew with himself.
So with a sigh, he rolled over to watch as a feeble ray of sunlight began to poke through his blinds. But the distraction didn’t help because he already knew what was wrong… and he was just avoiding it. Avoiding the fact that he was going to have to leave – and soon. If he didn’t, then a lot of people were likely to get hurt… or die. Watching Jessica go into that tank of micronite gel had pushed his stress levels too high. Higher than what he could manage with his usual practices of prayer and meditation. It was his worst enemy, and he knew that if he lost control over his emotions here the consequences could be disastrous.
For a while he had even considered opening a tesseract gateway back to the garage. Then he had been even more tempted to tesseract right into the observation booth over Jessica and just skip sleep to keep vigil. After all - she was what kept him here despite the risks. The only thing he feared more than the consequences of losing his control was being kept away from her.
He couldn’t even begin to imagine the agony she had endured over the last year, and being unable to help her had been tearing him apart. Day after day, week after week, some new part of her had needed to be fixed. Micro fractures in her bones, crushed cartilage, internal bleeding, organ damage problems with her amputation points. The list went on and on. On several occasions, her life signs had destabilized and Sallinger had been forced to intervene. So after all of that, and now the final wait they would have to endure... his nerves were shot. The stress had reached the point that he knew he would have to leave soon if something didn’t change.
With a sigh he rolled over again, and for what had to be the billionth time in the last decade, he wondered just how he had gone from the simplicity of childhood on a farm, to an adulthood living in The Twilight Zone.
It was a foolish question though and he knew it. He had sealed his own fate after all… If you set out to lift the hood on the engine of God’s work, you had better be prepared for what you might learn. What will be seen cannot be unseen.
Now here he was, possessing, or possessed by, a power so great that he lived in a constant state of conflict. Fear and temptation wrapped around his heart like twin parasites… suckling at his soul.
It would be so easy to tap into it and escape, to run away and never look back. But it would also be sinfully dangerous – and selfish. Tesseracting out of here would undoubtedly trigger enough alarms to make a London air raid sound like a child’s birthday party. Even the smallest glance at the walls here using his new sight revealed glowing lines of electrical power and digital communications in a web so thick, that it looked like netting. He had to consciously tune it out here, or be blinded by a world wrapped in a gauze of multicolored fire. This was a highly classified government facility, and from what he could see every footstep, whispered conversation, or discretely released elevator fart was recorded, tagged, and carefully analyzed.
If he started violating the laws of physics here, a flock of storm troopers thicker than fire ants would be crawling all over him before he could even blink, and he knew it was a short trip from there to being strapped to a laboratory table. Something that he’d been through before and he’d tesseract into the sun before he’d let anyone do that to him ever again.
The thought jarred him, and so with an audible groan, he rolled off of the bed, stood, and gave his head a violent shake before he began pacing. This wasn’t constructive thinking and he had to get it together. There had to be other ways that he could deal with his PTSD.
Aaron had called it “The gift that kept on sucking”, and that had remained very true for him. But with the help of the counselors at the VA, Aaron had somehow managed to bounce back… and he did it a lot quicker than Jacob would have thought possible. By the time the second anniversary of their return home came Aaron had landed a good job, found an amazing woman to marry, and moved on. But during all that time Jacob had wanted nothing more than to lay on the floor and die. On the outside he had done his best to be happy for his brother, but deep inside a small and selfish part of him had resented his recovery. One more sin on the scale… weighting his soul towards damnation.
Now he was alone, and he missed Aaron more than he could have imagined possible. Over a dozen times since the bridge attacks he had pulled out his cell phone - only to stand in a stunned silence… staring at Aaron’s number. In his heart it was like having it happen all over again. The bridge exploding, the van being crushed, Jessica crawling from the wreckage, maimed and dying. Then he would be shoved back into the cruelty of the uncaring present. Where Aaron and Katrina were still dead…. and the dead don’t answer the phone.
He wondered if it would ever get any easier. Would he ever make it through the day without suddenly remembering that they were gone? Without a sundown that left him feeling like he’d been punched in the gut?
He doubted it.
They had both left home so young, and his arrogance had taken them somewhere that had been obliterated from their memories. A place filled with terror and horrors that sanity could not withstand… and it had stolen away two years of their lives. Then the final insult had come - returning home to find that their parents had died while they were missing.
It had been horrible, and only their bond as brothers had made it bearable.
But it had been a lopsided arrangement. After Tajikistan Aaron had become his whole world. Then Katrina had somehow found her way into their lives and with her came the light of love. A love for Aaron that turned him into her husband, and a love for Jacob that brought him back from the darkness that nearly claimed him. Somehow, her presence had filled the holes in their hearts, and when she brought Jessica into the world the worst of their wounds had finally closed.
Now they were both gone, and the idea of life without them felt... empty and pointless.
The first few days had been the worst, how the rest of the world seemed to not even care. Despite the loss of the most important people in his life, the sun had kept right on rising and setting. People had gone to work, laughed, smiled, fallen in love... and had babies. Things didn’t even skip a beat. There was no respectful pause, no moment of silence, no deference to his loss. The terrible engine of the world had continued to grind on as if nothing had ever happened, and the worst part was that in the grand scheme of things... he knew nothing had.
The loss of the most important people in his life didn’t mean anything to the world.
The bitter irony was the number of times he had comforted others when they had suffered the death of a loved one... murmured words of false comfort and reassurance. So many had looked to him for spiritual guidance, asking him to explain how this could be part of God’s plan… and he had done his best to explain it. He had always thought of himself as someone in touch with that idea. Back then he had believed that everything happened according to God’s will, but now, well... he had to admit that his faith had been shaken. How could it be His will to take Aaron and Katrina out of the world so senselessly? To have an innocent child like Jessica be so horribly maimed?
Why had he been forced to reveal his abilities when he was so far from having any real mastery over them? Had God sent some sort of punishment upon him for not applying himself hard enough? Had he been shoved to where he was supposed to be, because he hadn’t been able to find it himself? How was he supposed to find it when his memories had been taken? What had the man on the hill asked of him? Had he really understood what was being asked when he accepted his... what? What was it they talked about? Had the man asked him to do something, or… had he given him something?
As always, the harder he chased them, the further the memories and answers danced away into his subconscious. Like deceitful women, they coyly exposed enough to taunt, but never enough to satisfy.
He shook his head again and tried to clear it. What good was it to dwell on these things? None of it mattered anymore. In spite of everything they went through to survive the slaughterhouse they woke up in, to escape and find help, to find some semblance of a normal life again… Aaron was still dead. Karina was dead. His family was… dead.
Now he wasn’t even sure why God had let him live, much less given him these bizarre abilities. None of it made sense. He was no hero. What had happened at the bridge had just pushed him into acting out of fear, and his rescue of Jessica had only brought her more suffering. He should have acted sooner, acted faster… but he had hesitated and hundreds of people had died as a result. In the grand scheme of things, he was probably more responsible for that loss of life than even the people who had planted those bombs.
He should have acted as soon as the explosions hit and the cars and trucks around him had skidded off the road trying to avoid a pile up. But he had just stared in shock and amazement while some succeeded and others slammed into each other. Then there was a massive wave of chaos filled with the skidding, crunching, and bouncing of cars as they jumbled about like rubber balls. Somehow he had managed to keep his flatbed under control, but he had watched the semi in front of him plow through dozens of vehicles before slamming into a guardrail. Then the driver had jumped down out of the cab and joined the crowd of people running towards the river.
He had cost Jessica precious seconds by continuing to stare in disbelief and shock. Seconds he had tried desperately to make up as he slipped up behind the overturned semi, bent the back door open, and absorbed its entire load of industrial freezers - leaving nothing behind but swirling wisps of leftover atomic dust.
It had been a big transfer and when it hit him he had felt a lot more of the ‘increasing’ sensation that always came when he acquired mass. After he had stood shuddering for a moment, he had realized that it was the largest volume that he had ever absorbed. It had made him far heavier and denser than he had ever been before, and with it came a reassuring sense of deep and powerful strength. But then when he stepped back out to the road he had seen how big the gap to the bridge was and he had worried that it wouldn’t be enough. For a moment he had considered absorbing some of the nearby cars, but then realized that someone would see him for certain if he did.
He had almost taken off running for the bridge before he realized that jumping over half the river was going to draw a lot of attention. So he had run back to his truck and found an old t-shirt that had been wadded up in a corner. It had only taken a second to tear the sleeves off, pull it over his face, rip open a slit for his eyes and tie it into a knot behind his head. Then he had taken a second to check himself in the truck’s side mirror. It hadn’t been the greatest disguise, and only sheer luck had prevented someone from identifying him.
Then he had started running alongside the road, moving as fast as he could. Once he had covered a couple hundred yards he had turned and leaped to the roof of the nearest car. Then as he picked up speed, he had looked up to the bridge and felt his heart leap when he thought he saw movement. More importantly, he had caught a glimpse of something that looked like the vividly pink top Jessica had been wearing. He had been right - they were on the bridge! He had immediately started pushing himself harder, and voraciously absorbed mass from the cars he stepped on. By the time he had reached the shoreline he had no idea how high his weight had gone, but he knew it had to be at least several tons.
When he jumped, the amount of strength he had gained surprised him. For a moment he had been afraid he would overshoot, but the weight had pulled him down and he actually came within inches of falling short.
The near miss of his landing had cost him his balance, and he had teetered dangerously backwards for a few arm-waving seconds. But then caught himself, and looked around in stunned amazement. The destruction and human carnage around him was unimaginable. Blood and human remains were everywhere. Visions of the gore-filled laboratory that he and Aaron had woken in flashed across his mind and he had barely managed to push them away. Right in front of him the front half of Aaron’s van had been brutally crushed. The back half had narrowly escaped, but it still looked like an exploded flower made of metal and glass. How Jessica had survived at all in that mangled mess of razor sharp death was beyond him. If you could call the state she had been in survival… It was obvious that he had to get her help immediately, or she was going to die.
So he had carefully picked her up and gotten her settled for a leap back, and then just stood there feeling like an idiot. He couldn’t leap back without a running start, and if he jumped to the water he would just sink like an anchor. Mentally he had kicked himself. What had he been thinking? All he had managed to do was give Jessica false hope before she died anyway.
Then he had remembered something from the room of gibbering lights and terrifying madness. Something that had happened in the midst of what felt like Armageddon and everything had become a repressed blur. It had always been there really… in a part of his mind he tried desperately to avoid. Something he had done… and he honestly had no idea if he could even do it again. The first time had only happened because he had been so terrified and traumatized that the power just rose up and overwhelmed him. What he saw afterwards was so horrible, that it still haunted his nightmares every night.
Then it had been with a bone rattling crunch, that he had heard the bridge support give way under them and realized that his weight was toppling it. Time had run out and he had to act. It had been the worst moment of his life, but he knew that if he didn’t do it they would both die.
So he had closed his eyes and focused on finding the key to how they escaped all those years ago. He had gritted his teeth and dug deep, remembering how he had woken up strapped to some kind of tilted gurney. There had been dozens of tubes running in and out of him. The room had been cold and he had felt so groggy. Something about the room had been important though. What had happened here? There had been screams… Aarons’ screams. Aaron had been on the operating table in the center of the room. Then he had seen the face of the man on the hill. A searing light and thunder had exploded through his veins and he had felt himself destroyed and rebuilt over and over. A voice that was not his own had boomed from him like a herald of the apocalypse, and words had thundered from him in a language that he had never seen or heard.
When it was over they had been left lying alone on the blood soaked floor, Aaron had been unconscious and he had been clinging to his brother in terror. Then a team of strange looking Asian soldiers had flooded into the room, shouting and pointing rifles at them. He had screamed out in fear and confusion, trying to cover Aaron with his own body. The tallest soldier had stormed over to strike him... and the power had detonated out again like a bomb. He remembered the burning patterns of lights, the turning stars, and the terror of seeing what was beyond the skin of our universe. The note… He had seen and heard and felt the note. He had BEEN the note.
So after a decade of trying to repress everything about that day; the nightmares, the long nights filled with weeping, the fear of himself and his abilities, the years of self-blame and running away... he had finally turned and faced the thing he had dreaded the most. The experience that had left him so scarred and traumatized that he struggled just to make it through daily life. The thing that had greyed his hair in a matter of weeks and then turned it completely white. The thing that had driven him away from everyone and everything he had ever cared for and made him lock himself in the back room of his father’s garage to try and escape the pain.
The power had seemed to have a will of its own as well. It had acted without his knowledge or desire and at the time it hadn’t been something he could summon at will. He was no superhero… He had no ability to unholster his abilities like some gunslinger and mete out justice. He had to live with it always just… being there like it had been soaked into his bones and muscles. Something that was always present… but wholly separate with regards to control.
For years after they returned home sleep had betrayed him and the recurring nightmares would let slip the awful force. The idea of rest became a distant memory. His fitful slumber would cause nearby walls to slip in and out of existence along with every other object, structure, or creature within reach. An old gas station sign that had hung over his cot reversed itself one night, and in the morning he found it displaying its promise of fuel and friendly service backwards. His antique clock radio had performed a similar trick weeks later.
Then one morning, a bizarre wailing had startled him so badly that he had fallen from his cot. When he looked over, a grey and white tabby cat that sometimes called his garage home had been there… with the front half of its body reversed and rotated completely around. The markings on its head had been reversed as well and displayed a mirror image of its usual countenance. Jacob had held it in his arms and tried to comfort it as he wept, desperately wracking his memories and mind for a way that he could somehow undo the damage. But in the end he had been forced to euthanize the mutilated creature with an ethanol soaked rag.
That event had made it clear to him how dangerous he had become. What if Jessica had come in to wake him for breakfast? What if he fell asleep in the wrong place and horribly maimed everyone within reach?
So after that day he had pursued control with a vengeance, studying lucid dreaming, martial arts classes, meditation, and fasting. Swiftly he recertified for his black belt and began earning stripes on it. After three years he added Judo, Yoga, and even Kendo to his routine. In every way possible he sharpened his ability to focus and master himself. He would study his bible intensely until late at night after he knew Aaron, Katrina, and Jessica were asleep. He had prayed with a fervor and passion that he never knew he possessed. Then he would take Aaron’s old Army sleeping bag, hike far into the woods, and set up several old fashioned wind-up alarm clocks to wake him in time to return home undetected.
It had taken several years before he felt safe lying down to sleep within sight of the house again. The he had begun exploring the mysterious power in small ways, sitting in lotus position and slowly turning his attention inward to crack open the door. But what came forth always thundered through him with a force like a thousand suns, burning his synapses to cinders with its raw savagery. Along with it had come a resounding tone that both haunted and thrilled him. At times he had felt like its savage resonance was going to unmoor him from reality and he tried every mental and spiritual technique he could find to give him mastery.
But none gained him even the slightest purchase.
It was only by chancing on a well-known verse in Proverbs that he had stumbled upon the key. He had probably read this verse a thousand times, and thought he understood it. But this time he saw it differently, and it triggered a revelation in him.
“Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.”
The words pointed to the one thing he had never dared to try… completely letting go.
So, after that he had abandoned his attempts to throttle or control the power and instead worked on slowly lowering his defenses, listening, and submitting. Within weeks the torrential force had not weakened or changed, but he had. Every moment he let it wash over him he felt its effect. At first there had been a strange sense of dislocation, and he found himself on edge, irritable, and grinding his teeth. He unconsciously fought it on instinct, but as the weeks and months wore on he eventually grew accustomed to it. In time he almost forgot it was there, but deep within him its effects remained. He felt calmer, more at ease with himself, and abler to be around people. By the end of that year he had virtually ended his self-imposed hermitage, and started spending his evenings with the family. For the first time in almost a decade he sampled what it was like to be normal.
Then one night, after watching Jessica and her friends chase lightning bugs in the backyard he had seated himself in his room and begun his routine of prayers and exercises. But moments after he had opened himself he sensed something new. He was able to detect a deeper and almost sublime undertone.
Curious, he had tuned his mind to it, orienting whatever (ears? eyes?) were inside of him towards the thunderous power, and he began to comprehend something. So he had gently reached out towards it, and was awarded by a faint trickle of understanding. It was beautiful, musical, and mathematical all at once. But it also teased him… hinting and murmuring towards something that he couldn’t quite grasp. So without thinking, he had tried what had become almost instinctual to him over the last few years. He sublimated his will to the task, and asked God for help.
Then it happened.
In a hammering impact that drove him to the floor the voice he had heard come through him when he awoke in the chamber of horrors returned. Its unimaginable force coalesced into a booming declaration of power that blew through him with interlacing patterns of brilliant and blinding light. The brilliance it carried was only outmatched by its volume, and Jacob felt the bones of his skull rattle as it declared,
“THROUGH YOU, MY CHOSEN VESSEL,
I WILL ASTOUND THE WORLD ONCE MORE WITH WONDER;
THE MADNESS THEY HAVE CHOSEN AS WISDOM SHALL BE UNMASKED,
THOSE WHO THEY HOLD UP AS WISE SHALL BE PROVEN FOOLS,
AND THEY SHALL AGAIN KNOW WHO GOD IS.”
The upon his eyes had come bursting a torrent of golden lattice works, filled with visions of some of the mathematical formulas he had contemplated as a young man, mixed with ones he had never seen. Somehow they were all interlaced with scripture in a way that made them a single language, describing with the ultimate simplicity the very fabric of the universe. Dancing before his eyes had been the foundations of reality, the keys to time and space, the thoughts of God, and much, much more… But as fast as the knowledge poured into him he had felt it slip away like water through his fingers. No matter how desperately he tried to hold onto it, it would simply fade from comprehension the moment he felt he finally understood it. Then its beauty would slide away into his subconscious, taking up residence in some sequestered chamber that he could not find.
It had been over as quickly as it had begun, and he had found himself shirtless on the cold floor, steam rising from him in the cool autumn air. He had no idea how much time had passed and the faintest hint of dawn was now gleaming through his only window. So, with the last of his strength he pulled himself into his cot and collapsed, sinking into exhaustion so deep that he slept until late in the afternoon.
After that the force had taken on a new expression. It no longer guttered and raged through him, threatening to burst forth and eradicate everything in its path. Instead it became like a long, low, continuous note in the background of his mind. Over time it took on an aspect something like a ringing in his ears, but it was comforting instead of grating. Then it began whispering to him at times when he was alone, revealing tantalizing glimpses of the powerful blueprints held in the back of his subconscious.
Then one day he had agreed to use his flatbed to help haul away some unsalvageable heavy machinery. It had been left behind at the abandoned Matrigan Machinery facility in Florence and when he arrived, he had found several other men with heavy trucks waiting. He knew most were just going to sell what they could as scrap metal. But he knew there was a set of expensive lathes on the factory floor and if he could get one working it would be worth a lot of money. So he had put in his bid and driven away with three tons of machinery.
During the drive home he had found himself contemplating one of his older theorems. One that related to the relationship between energy, matter, and density. As he re-examined his original assumptions, he found himself almost laughing at how immature his thinking had been at the time. Then to pass the time he had started mulling over potentially new approaches and the sound in his mind had begun to whisper. As he drove and thought… it led him in directions he would never have considered before.
But after arriving home he had moved on to thinking about other things… like lunch, and where Aaron and the girls were. He began humming to himself a little as he unchained the machinery and stopped for a moment to consider the best way to get it into the garage.
As he did this, he had leaned against the first lathe… and it had happened - an odd and powerful sensation in his hand where it touched the machine. When he looked down there were black spots filled with an inner light dancing around his fingers, letting off a strange anti-light that reflected off the metallic surface.
Then with a powerful sense of surging, he had experienced a strange and almost exponential increase in himself. It was as if his entire life he had merely been existing as a ghost or a vapor, but now had solidified into a stone. He had staggered backwards and watched with astonishment as the lathe that he had been touching developed a rapidly spreading map of crinkles across its surface. For a moment it trembled and shimmered as if it were made of tinfoil, and then it crumbled into a tiny pile of colorless grey powder.
For a moment he had simply stood there, staring at the swirling dust where the machine had been. Any trained scientist could have seen that it was far too small to represent the mass of the original object. In fact, for a moment it had looked like the lathe had been hollowed out into a mere skin… and then that had been all that collapsed.
So he took a step forward to look closer... and stopped, listening. His footstep had sounded far heavier than before, and he looked down. He could see that the black rubber soles of his boots had been compressed almost flat.
For a moment he simply stood there, frozen in astonishment and fear as he contemplated what he had just witnessed. Had he just physically absorbed the mass of the lathe? Was that even POSSIBLE? So it was with a mixture of excitement and fear that he slowly turned the concept in his mind and tried to examine it from every possible angle…
If transfer of mass was possible by simply converting it into to energy before you transmitted it and reconstituted it at its target, then one of his earliest Biblical theorems about the influence of expectation was correct!
But how had he instigated the transfer? Why hadn’t the energy fried him to a crisp when it entered him? Why hadn’t there been a collision at the atomic level when the matter trans-substantiated? Why wasn’t he laying on the ground as a rigid metal man?
Jacob concentrated with all of his might and reviewed his math for clues, but found nothing. So he thought back, and recalled what he could of the calculations that the musical note of the power had layered into his original formula. But it was no good, everything pointed to a quantity of energy equal to thousands or millions of atomic bombs going off at once. But that hadn’t happened. Somehow the chain reaction of trans-substantiating electrons colliding with the nuclei of neighboring atoms had been negated.
The more he thought about it, the more he had grown frustrated at his inability to understand. It was difficult for someone with his intellect to deal with problems that didn’t yield quickly. He had always been able to reason his way through even the most abstract of theories, but this one simply didn’t make sense. The answer was in there somewhere, just out of reach... and he could feel it. But direct reasoning wasn’t working… so he decided to abandon traditional approaches. If Newtonian explanations weren’t yielding results, then he had to try something more esoteric.
Maybe it was part of the observer effect? A photon can vibrate in two directions at once, but if a person tries to observe it, the photon will ‘collapse’ down to only vibrating in one direction. That was part of how quantum theory worked. Any event that someone tried to observe at a subatomic level would always behave in an expectable manner. But as soon as no one is watching it will go back to doing something completely incomprehensible.
So… if the observation of a subatomic event could be influenced by expectation, could the effect be expanded to a macro level? If so, it would explain a lot of Biblical miracles... like the feats of Moses, David, or the Apostles. Each, in their own way, had come to a complete unquestioning belief in the power of God. On hundreds of well documented occasions they had “expected” that performing a certain act would result in the impossible occurring… and it had.
Had the absolute nature of their conviction and faith caused reality itself to obey? Had that been why the seas parted, why a child was able to slay a warrior-giant, why jail cells were sprung open, and crippled flesh healed?
Jacob frowned… There was no way to say with absolute certainty. But for now he had to pursue this line of reasoning because it was holding up better than Newtonian physics. But it didn’t explain why the users weren’t destroyed by the unavoidable nuclear chain reactions.
Was there something that protected the wielder? There had to be, or the Saints would have destroyed the planet hundreds of times over, along with a large portion of the solar system.
That had mollified him somewhat. So he had slipped his hands into his pockets and stared at the ground while he pondered the next mystery. If he had just absorbed close to a half ton of steel, why hadn’t he fallen over dead on the spot, turned into a statue by the invasion of metal atoms?
As an experiment he took his right hand and poked his left arm. It was a like touching a steel beam. Drumming his fingers on the skin gave off a set of dull tapping noises, but they lacked any sort of metallic ring. After applying a gradually increasing amount of pressure, he managed to dimple the skin in a manner that looked somewhat normal. In fact, he realized, aside from the overwhelmingly greater sense of presence, he pretty much felt normal in every way. So there was something going on, preventing the mass from solidifying him. He took a moment to go around the problem in a mental circle and tugged at it here and there, seeking the thread that would unravel it.
Observing the event affected it.
Why?
Because the observer had limitations - they saw what they expected to see, or at least something they could accept. Something they could believe. Something they had faith in.
So faith could affect reality.
Faith protected the user from the consequences of their effect on reality.
But it had to be real faith… unconditional faith.
Faith that went beyond conscious belief, and simply became the way that person saw the world. As predictable and expectable as the presence of air.
But that didn’t explain why HE had been able to do it!
If anything he’d been the biggest doubter of all! He was the one who had always questioned everything all the way down to the very rules of how reality worked. He wasn’t some holy man roaming the world saving thousands of souls, or a prophet of some kind. He couldn’t see the future or speak for God any more than anyone else could. Hell, ever since this all started he’d been feeling like he understood God and the Bible less and less. Nothing seemed to mean what he thought it did anymore, and there just didn’t seem to be any answers. He was just a glorified mechanic who ran away from school because he thought he had discovered a decoder ring to the mystery of God’s architecture.
He’d been a completely arrogant fool.
When he thought about how he’d acted back then, and what he did to everyone who loved him, he just couldn’t believe he had ever been so egotistical. Because of his hubris their parents had died not knowing what had happened to their sons. He and his brother hadn’t been there to say goodbye after the crash, or to comfort them as they suffered. They hadn’t been there to lay them to rest, and Uncle Oscar had been forced to handle it all.
He had been a terrible son. He had taken everything they did for him over the years, and spit on it so that he could tramp around the Middle East and satisfy his pretentious dream of Biblical adventure. How Aaron had forgiven him was something he would never understand.
No...
That was a lie and he had to own up to it. Aaron hadn’t ever forgiven him, he’d just never blamed him in the first place - and somehow that was worse.
Frowning as he paced the driveway, he tried in vain to dispel the ghosts of the loved ones he’d betrayed. He knew that wallowing in self-pity wasn’t going to help.
After a moment he had slowly he rubbed his fingers together, listening to the gravely scrape they made, and thought about another problem. How could he get back to normal? He hadn’t meant to absorb the lathe and he had no idea how he did it. What had triggered it?
Frustrated... he sat down on the ground and put his face in his hands. He stared at the ground between his knees and did his best to stop solving. Maybe if he would just shut his mind up and listen to the strange note in his head it might tell him something... something… or anything.
This was critical. He needed to be normal, or close to normal again before the family got home. If he went into the house he could crack the hardwood floors, or break the chairs. He couldn’t weigh this much all the time. He just couldn’t! In frustration he reached down, and idly brushed the accumulating grey dust off of his jeans.
But then, as he watched more fell on them, almost covering them in a matter of seconds.
Where was that coming from? He looked up, but the sky was clear and windless. When he looked back down he could see that his boots were covered now too and he could actually hear the dust falling… and it was coming out of his skin!
It was literally raining down from his face, head, hands, and every exposed surface. He could feel it pooling inside his clothing and running down his back. He was completely baffled again… somehow he was shedding the mass! But why?
Then it hit him.
Because he needed to.
It was so obvious! He had absorbed the mass because he saw how it could be done and desired to see it happen. Then this somehow interacted with the strange force he carried and made it reality... through his own body.
But once he no longer desired the effect it obeyed the laws of entropy and abated.
Incredible!
So after that day, he had slowly begun to experiment with this ability, gradually mastering it in stages. Within months he could absorb objects and disperse the mass at will. The extra density and weight brought incredible strength, and he surprised himself one day by lifting the front end of his flatbed truck. Running and jumping came later, and he spent many nights testing his limits in the back acreage of the farm. But eventually the novelty had worn off and he realized that his new abilities were just another reminder of his failures. What good were they when he still couldn’t speak to strangers, and hadn’t smiled in a decade?
So he had done his best to lay low, keep his life quiet, and never let anyone see what he could do.
But at that moment when he had stood upon the bridge and looked down at Jessica, he had known without any doubt what he had to do. He had been bound to this precious little girl, and was responsible for her in a way no one could ever know.
He owed her parents everything. If they had not cared for him and been there for him during his years of pain and struggle he would probably have become just another suicide statistic.
So on that day he had bent his head, and asked God to give him strength. It hadn’t been about him anymore. Now it was about his little girl, the one who needed him. The one who was lying in his arms and slowly slipping towards the hands of death - a death that only he could prevent.
So it had been then that he finally understood.
Unconditional faith had been the only thing asked of him from the very beginning. Yet it had been the one thing he’d been unable to give. He thought he’d left his arrogance on that bloody floor thousands of miles away, but it had always been a lie. He’d never given it up. He’d just buried it under his guilt, angst, and torment. It had hidden itself deep inside him. A festering core of pride that prevented him from dealing with his pain, his abilities, and his relationship with God.
No more. It had to end right then and there.
He had always been able to dispel it, and he had known it the entire time. All he had to do was say the words… and so he did.
“Get thee behind me Satan.”
With those five simple words he had given in to what had been asked of him, and rode the bucking spine of his memory back to the day when he walked with the man on the hill.
In a flash he had remembered some of their words and the night sky full of stars. The filling of his mind with knowledge and mystery. He remembered how he had felt truly and completely loved while he was in that man’s presence, and how he had never wanted it to end. He remembered being told something he was supposed to remember.
Then the man had laid his hands on Jacob’s eyes - and the world had exploded. It had felt as if the burning rage of a thousand suns had poured through him, and a voice had spoken through him with such conviction that it threatened to shatter his bones. He remembered being filled, and overfilled, and overwhelmed with power and light and glory for what felt like eternity... before it finally guttered out and released him. He remembered falling naked and weeping to his hands and knees. Wailing beside his brother amongst the carnage of dismembered corpses that had littered the blood-slick floor.
He remembered all of these things, and stopped turning away. That’s what had really crippled him all those years, and it had been by his choice.
No more.
Jessica deserved better than that.
So he had asked God to forgive him for not having the courage to ask for help sooner and brought forth the greatest level of concentration he had ever attempted. Then he reached deep into his mind for the key.
The key…
They key for how he had spirited himself and Aaron to safety. The burning vision that had flared up in his mind after he grabbed Aaron and desperately begged God for help escaping.
As if conjured, the vision appeared in his mind again. A star so powerful that he couldn’t look at it. The four smaller stars that had been positioned around it in an irregular pattern. The seven burning, hexagonal shapes positioned outside the first circle, and finally... a ring of twenty-four stars surrounding the entire assembly. Then he heard a devastating note like the sounding of Gabriel’s horn, and the entire symbol began to flare and move. The outer and inner rings hurtled in opposite directions as the hexagonal inscriptions of fire rotated on their own axis. Slowly the central star grew brighter and the sound rose until he felt it again… the sensation of being in commune with something. Something so much greater than himself that he feared it might take notice of him.
He knew this was it, and so he clung to it in his mind as hard as he could. It rose and screamed to a fevered pitch, until finally the symbol exploded outward into a torrent of equations and heavenly music. They burned through his mind like molten fire and twisted into an infinitely complex helix that smashed through reality to launch into the expanse of the unformed void. He felt, more than remembered, what would come next, and so he had pulled Jessica closer, tenderly covered her eyes, and telling her not to look.
Then a climactic crescendo thundered out from the tone and he watched as a bridge formed by the achingly beautiful note anchored at his destination. The air began to rush by his skin. They were falling. If he had taken even a second longer they would have fallen upon the twisted knife bed of steel that lay in the river’s bloody waters. But instead, a tesseract gateway spiraled open beneath them - and they plummeted into the raging vacuum of infinite thundering silence.
When they exploded back into reality again, a storm of quantum fury had raged around them, disintegrating the side of the truck to his right and carving a deep well into the wall on his left. He had fallen to his knees, exhausted in a way he hadn’t known possible. Blackness had crept in at the edges of his vision, and he had fought to keep it back. The effort to not black out had taken every ounce of strength he had. So he had been more than a little surprised when he actually managed to stand.
But then he had realized that he had forgotten to breathe. So he had gasped in one desperately searing inhalation and taken a step. Immediately his knees buckled in rebellion and he had staggered. All of his muscles had screamed in agony, sending great vomit inducing waves of pain spasming up from his lower legs and thighs. Then equally powerful surges of pain had coursed down from his arms and neck. A moment later the final spasm had spent itself by slamming a sulfurous inferno of burning suffering up through the top of his skull. For a second, he had been certain that his eyes were going to explode like grenades and his head would simply split open like a block of cracked ice.
But instead he gritted his teeth against the torment, and took another trudging step. He had forced his body to obey his will despite how it shrieked at him in Sisyphean agony. It had taken every ounce of his control not to black out. He took another step... then another, and another. Through a crimson haze of excruciating pain, he had trudged into the emergency room - and fallen to his knees. He had done it. The pain and fatigue had been so great that he wasn’t really sure if he was alive, much less be able to move. But after they took Jessica away, he had realized that he could... and so he had fled. He had known that if he stayed he’d collapse, and his secrets would quickly be discovered.
So he had run, and been surprised at how easily he had summoned another tesseract. He had heard the shouts of the young man pursuing him, but also found himself terrified to re-enter the void. If coming here had done this to him, what unbearable damage would a second trip do? It would almost certainly kill him, but it was his only option. If he stayed and was discovered, then Jessica’s life would be turned upside down. So he stepped across the threshold as he thought of home, and willed the portal closed behind him.
He had awoken face down on the hard cement floor of the garage, aching, exhausted, but alive. Oddly, he had been much farther removed from death than he had expected and surprise had been a completely inadequate word for describing how he felt.
So he had stood back up carefully, and his eyes had fallen on the large antique Pennzoil clock on the wall. It hadn’t looked like much time had passed since he left Jessica...
Wait!... Jessica!
Then he had scrambled to grab fresh clothing from the back room and sprinted to the house to shower. Thirty seconds later he had exited the house and willed a new tesseract into existence in front of him. That time it had been so easy that it almost felt reflexive. No pain had accompanied that journey and his memory of the downtown area had served him better than he expected. He had managed to arrive in an empty alley very near to the hospital.
So he had taken a deep breath and turned towards the hospital to run. The rest of that day had been a blur, and he had resigned himself to the fact that he would never escape his fate. But he had also realized that he no longer wanted to. Whatever it was that God wanted from him, it couldn’t be worse than what he’d already been through.
Then the emergency signaler that Tammy had given him began shrieking from his bedside table, and the message it displayed taught him the hard way that he had been terribly wrong...
There were far worse things in front of him than behind.
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