He looked at me with the kind of patient curiosity usually reserved for a particularly puzzling bug. “I am a bio-controller. I have a very good idea of how your brain works and how it interacts with your body. I am well aware you were trying to lowball your potential, probably out of justified concern, because as a tinker, you could face a lot of pressure. Your original assessor was simply trying to assign you a class based on your demonstrated abilities, not your ability potential.”
My internal monologue, which had been running a comfortable betting pool on my own imminent doom, suddenly had to pay out on a long-shot bet I hadn’t even known was on the table. I’d been expecting a solid Class Four, maybe a whispered, ‘secret-handshake’ Class Five if the universe decided to throw me a bone for once. But Class Six? That was the big leagues. That was city-shaking, Kaiju-punching, headline-stealing territory. My power was meticulous, not meteoric. I could disassemble a car engine with a thought; I couldn’t throw the car into low Earth orbit. “That still doesn’t make any sense. Class six? What exactly is a tinker?”
He nodded, a man about to deliver a lecture he’d given a hundred times to a hundred bewildered newbies. “Do you know how alpha abilities work?”
I nodded. Might as well start with the simple, stupid answer. “Magic.”
He laughed, a dry, raspy sound. “That’s not actually far off the mark. A few super-intelligences figured out a part of it before they went off the deep end, but that’s a close approximation. Powers have always existed among humans, and all humans have powers.”
“Huh? I thought that the Q-bombs started them off.” My carefully curated, wiki-scraped understanding of the world was developing cracks, and expensive, government-mandated enlightenment was pouring through.
He shook his head. “Not at all. In the end, all powers are created by the human mind. It’s a sort of telekinesis that all humans possess. Before the Q-bombs, it was barely noticeable, but have you heard of the Mandela effect?”
I nodded, clinging to a shred of intellectual dignity. “False memories caused by the telephone effect.”
He shook his head. “Not always. When you have a huge number of people believing something, all of those kinetic effects added together seem to have the ability to modestly alter reality, just like ancient miracles or various confabulations. Heck, in the bible, Moses made a snake to show off his power to the Pharaoh, but most people forget that the two court magicians also made snakes that his snake ate! That’s why I said it’s a lot like magic.”
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“Okay…” I said, my voice dripping with enough doubt to drown a small island. My life was already a poorly written comic book; I didn’t need it to also be a bad theology seminar.
He nodded, either ignoring or enjoying my skepticism. “Right. Still, as far as we can tell, the Q-bomb created a link that added power to the system. So under the right circumstances, that link can become powered and developed. The fact that Heroes have always been a feature of human mythology, especially after the advent of comic books, reinforced this… a fact that many of the more powerful heroes take advantage of. In a very real way, the more powerful people believe a hero is, the more powerful they can actually become.”
At my expression, which had likely settled into a perfect mask of ‘you have got to be kidding me,’ he held up his hands in a placating gesture. “This is just what a couple of mega-brains came up with, and it fits the facts as we know them. That’s why we can’t isolate the factors or genes that make a human awaken. The reality is every human, under the right circumstances, has the potential to connect with the quantum reality unlocked by the Q-bomb. Every single one. But humans are, for the most part, unique… and the exact circumstances under which each will awaken is a complete mystery.”
“So those cults that promised to unlock powers?” I asked, thinking of the late-night infomercials that promised enlightenment for five easy payments of $99.99.
“They weren’t wrong, but it almost always requires an incident that, if you don’t unlock your abilities and they are not the CORRECT abilities to survive that unlock, will kill whoever tries it. And because there is such a broad variety of unlock factors, you can rarely, almost never, get it right intentionally.”
“But you are a weird case.”
I was getting really tired of being everyone’s fascinating anomaly. “What do you mean?”
“Your powers don’t come from your X chromosome. They come from your Y chromosome. That’s why you can’t link to the quantum reality.”
“What?” My vocabulary had apparently been reduced to a single, incredulous syllable. My life’s story, it seemed, was written in a genetic code I didn't have the right key for.
“Your power is linked to your Y chromosome’s potential unlocking instead of your X. The reason most males die when their Y chromosome is the unlock is that there is usually almost no limiter on an alpha ability. It can express in really disgusting ways, like teleporting into a wall the first time you experiment, because there’s no innate quantum-realm safety valve for you to access. In most cases, the male will have some powerful expression that draws off so much energy that they expire instantly because they don’t have a quantum realm energy back-channel.”
I looked around nervously, half-expecting men in black suits to rappel from the ceiling. My financial future was one thing; being a biological time bomb was another.
He laughed, a genuine one this time. “No. You aren’t going to wind up in some windowless black site while we try to figure out how it happened. The BSA is not as bad as people make it seem, because most of the crimes they are blamed for are flat-out suicidally stupid. If we went around locking people up who have the potential to turn every BSA employee into a pancake, giving them a reason to hate us would be a very bad move.”
