New Markets - 02 (67 page)

I cried, "Nooo!"  Then an odd sound from my right hand made me realize I'd snapped my tool.  I tried to work with numerous pieces of metal, but my fingers just wouldn't work right.  I constantly bent the metal out of shape, and snapped several more tools.  I didn't have the sensitive touch I used to have, and my metal fingers were far more slippery as well.  After an hour I'd caused so much damage that I gave up.

I decided to try to make a new shirt then.  Something had to go right for me.  I went through my materials, running my fingers over them to pick out something soft.  Sadly, I apparently lost that sense of touch as well.  Rough wool felt as soft as silk or velvet to me.  Had I not known what each fabric was I wouldn't have been able to tell them apart via touch at all.  My day was just getting worse.

I picked out what looked like a soft cotton fabric anyway, carefully cut it out, and was pleased that things were getting back on track.  When I went to switch the thread I snapped off the metal rod.  A rage filled me, anger at myself, at supers, at life for treating me so unfairly.  I swatted at the sewing machine and it launched at the wall like a cannonball.

It knocked a hole right through the outside wall of the house and continued flying through the air.  A moment later I heard a very loud crash from across the street as the machine continued into the neighbor's house.  I banged my hand against my head out of frustration and shook my head.

I screamed and kicked the sewing table.  It flew across the room and smashed against the wall.  A shelving unit with supplies fell over with a loud crash and supplies flew all over the room.  I screamed again.

Chapter 3 – A Great Day

Gravitix’s Viewpoint

The hospital room had gotten boring by Friday morning, when the nurse finally stopped in and said I was being released.  I still thought about the strange situation that happened last Saturday afternoon.  I and some friends had all been hanging out in the mall food court watching the ladies and the news about the meteor shower about to hit.

I remember the sound of fireworks from the sky as meteor fragments exploded.  My recollection went fuzzy around that time, however.  My insides felt like they had lit on fire, and then it felt like my body tried to rip itself apart from the center.  It was an odd and nasty sensation.

I dimly recall standing up and screaming.  My arms were flung out to my sides from the odd tugging sensation my entire body felt from all over.

Something hit me and I felt this great … wave … of force, energy or who knows what came out of my entire body.  It was like all that pulling force had been flung away from me in an explosion.

The next thing I knew I’d woken in the hospital on Wednesday.  A pretty lady who could light her hands on fire came to see me.  She introduced herself as a super – although not someone in the H.E.R.O. program. 

She described how supers were classified – they thought I was a blaster or a psychic – and walked me through how to be cautious and responsible with my powers.  She was clear on the concept that a super could have a normal job and be part of society just like everyone else.

I thought she was crazy. 
Why would I want to be normal if I have super powers?

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I could pull objects to me – either everything nearby or a single object if I focused on it.

The big kicker came when I realized I was changing the gravity of objects.  The amount of gravity an object was subject to appeared to be in my control.  I made objects hover in the air – they seemed to stay there for perhaps an hour after I stopped concentrating on them.  Even better, I was able to make myself weightless as well – I could hover.

I held back on too much of that; I really didn’t want the hospital staff to have any information on my abilities.  By early morning on Friday I was tired of sitting around in my room waiting to be released.

I called my friend Nick to pick me up.  We both worked in the computer department at a manufacturing company, and I knew my boss would let him out mid morning.  It didn’t take him long to come get me, and he drove us to my place to drop me off.

When we got back to my apartment I said, “Nick, can you keep a secret?”

“Sure.  Wait, don’t tell me you are dying.”

“No, this is something good, not bad.”

I picked up a pillow, concentrated on it for a few seconds and let go.  It hovered in the air where I let go of it.  I tapped it on the side after a moment and it floated horizontally across the room, bumped into the far wall and stayed there.

Nick stared at the pillow for a moment, looked back at me, and then walked over to the pillow.

He said, “This isn’t a con, is it?”

“No, it’s real.”

He grabbed the pillow and smashed it in his hands a few times; it looked like he was trying to find something inside it.

“Bub, there’s nothing in it, it’s a normal pillow.  Well, not so normal right now, but it
was
normal.”

He gently tossed the pillow and it flew in a straight line slightly upward across the room, bumped into a wall and rebounded out into the air a short distance.”

“This is awesome.”

“I agree.  Now watch this.”  I held my hand out toward the pillow, and it flew directly back to my hand where I grabbed it.

“So … you can make stuff weightless?  Or are you a telekinetic?”

“Weightless, how do I describe this….  I ‘imbue’ the pillow with resistance to gravity, and it just floats, as if in space.”

“Okay, how did you get it back to you?”

“I think I’m causing some kind of local gravity effect between myself and the pillow.”

“Why doesn’t it affect anything else?”

“No idea.  Want to help me go test this out?”

“Hell yeah.  Where to?”

“Let me grab some soda and munchies and we’ll head to the quarry up on the north side.  It’s not in use right now, so we can try with different rock sizes.”

“Good idea.  I’ve got my tablet in the car if we need to do any web research.”

“Awesome.”  I quickly changed clothes, collected the food items and we left the apartment.  In a half hour we arrived at the quarry.  No vehicles were in sight as we pulled up.  We were in luck.  Nick drove in closer to the giant pit and pulled off to the side.

After we got out and found a softball sized rock, I said, “Okay, I know I’ve got the ability to pull items to me, now let’s see if I can push something away.”

“Doesn’t gravity always pull?”

“To my knowledge it does.  It’s worth trying.”

He shrugged, “Go for it.”

I held up a rock, made it weightless so it floated in front of me, and concentrated on throwing it.  Nothing occurred.  It took some playing around to figure out that I could change the direction of gravity on a rock and touch it to something like a tree limb and it would stay there.  The power of the pull against the tree appeared to be configurable as well.  When I imbued it with a slight amount of gravity effect, the rock wouldn’t return to the tree if pulled away very far.  But after I increased the effect some more, it acted a lot like a strong magnet both to my hand as well as to the tree limb, and ‘fell’ over to the branch rather quickly.

Throwing weightless rocks was interesting for a while, but since the rocks appeared to move in a straight line slightly upward it got boring watching them fly off into the distance.  I wondered if they would end up crashing down into the city again at some point.

The same effect worked for throwing rocks directly up.  They simply kept the speed they had when leaving our hand and moved upward until we couldn’t see them anymore.

Nick asked, “Can you remove the weightless effect now?”

I closed my eyes and concentrated, but didn’t appear to have any tie to objects I had made weightless.

“No.  I can’t sense them or ‘feel’ them in any way or form.”

“I wonder how long they’ll fly for?”

“It seemed like stuff stayed floating for about an hour after I stopped concentrating on them.”

“So how fast of a fastball do you think I can throw upward?  Thirty miles an hour?”

“Possibly.  Major league pitchers can hit something like 100 mph, but that’s at a horizontal angle.  Throwing up will be harder, and we don’t have the arm of a pitcher.”

“Yeah.  So it’s possible I could get it up twenty or thirty miles before it would start falling again?”

“Whoa.  Yeah.  That’d be a hell of a throw in football.”

Nick asked, “How far is it to hit freefall?”

“A few hundred miles in the space station, but since it is moving it creates more freefall if I’m thinking right.”

“Oh.  So you can’t just get a hundred miles up and float away from the planet?”

“No.  But if something had a rocket on it and got to that height, it would only need enough fuel to move around once up there, not the massive amount to leave orbit in a heavy vehicle.”

“Okay.  So far you can make something weightless for an hour, and you can give it localized gravity.  You pulled the pillow to you, how far away can you do that?”

I looked about thirty feet out and tried pulling a rock to me.  I held my hand out to it and the rock flew over to me, slapping into my hand with quite a bit of force.  I rubbed my hand from the sting.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, just a sting, and it’s fading already.”

“Nice.  Try one double the distance.”

I focused again on another rock and it also flew to me.  This time I made sure to absorb the impact better by moving my arm with the rock’s motion.  Another try let me grab one perhaps one hundred feet away, but I failed to grab any further out.

I said, “They claimed that I’m a lot tougher than a normal person now.  I suppose I can try the John Carter of Mars thing.”

“You are going to reduce the gravity on yourself?”

“Yeah, but I’m not going to totally remove it, I don’t want to float off.”

“Good idea.”

“Oh, I suppose I should figure out how far I can jump first.”

“Go for it.”

I marked a line on the ground and tried jumping several times.  From a standing jump I was able leap about fifteen feet.

I looked at Nick, “What’s the world record on that?”

He did a search on his tablet and said, “For non supers it is just under twelve feet.”

“Nice.  Time to lighten the body.”  I concentrated on myself, and felt the change.  A tap down of my foot brought me up a foot, and I fell much slower than normal.

Nick said, “That looks right, try a tiny jump first, just in case.”

“Right.”  I stood behind my line and tried a half-hearted jump.  I tripled my previous jumps.

As I walked back Nick said, “That’s kick ass – you almost look like you are moon walking.  Now try a real one.”

I put real effort behind the next jump, and easily jumped fifty feet.  I believe a running jump took me about three hundred feet.  It was pretty cool seeing the ground slowly move away from me, and then slowly come back toward me as I jumped.

When I leapt back Nick asked, “Is that your limit?”