Christmas Eve, about 20 years ago.
I’m standing in the room, alone. I can see snowflakes outside the window. It is very cold in the street, and it is quite chilly in the room. At that time, we had only an old kiln to heat the place we lived at. And it took some time for the temperature to reach a comfortable level. My parents must have been in the other room preparing more firewood. Nevertheless, it was always cozy inside. It is always people who make any place comfortable and not some expensive and useless things people tend to buy to compensate for their problems.
So, there I stood, in the room, alone. It was snowing. It was Christmas Eve. I was watching and enjoying the view of our wonderful Christmas tree, which my parents got us yesterday. I always love Christmas, and I still do. Then there is a gap in my memory, and I cannot recall the next several minutes, and when I get my memory back, I am standing with scissors in my hands, crying out loud, and my mom comforting me saying that everything is going to be alright. I take a look at the Christmas tree and see that the Christmas tree lights I was enjoying several minutes ago are gone, they are cut into pieces. That was my first experience with electricity. That was me who cut the light’s wires.
Suddenly I wake up. I am still in the clinic. I was dreaming again. Same dream about the Christmas Eve accident. I haven’t seen this dream for a while. And I wonder why I dreamed it again. The lights are out, and I start to recall the events of the past days. All seem to be a dream, some horrible nightmare. I take a look at the lamps in my room, and there are none. They are broken into pieces as if there was a huge power network overload.
I start to look around and see that I am connected to a dropper, and there are also some wires connected to my palms. Still can’t move, and any attempts make me feel a huge pain in my body. I hear something start beeping, hear the steps approaching my room. It is dark, but I think that I recognize Professor Silicon. I start to fall asleep again.
Winter, about 2 years ago.
I am in my parents’ garage, looking for some of my old books. There are some long wires in the wall, which I never liked, and now I am definitely going to cut them off. I check that the main fuse is off, and there is no electricity in the circuit. I take the scissors and cut the wires. For a moment I feel a charge running through me. It feels strange, I feel strange. As if for a moment I was given huge power to lift a car or something. And in the next second, I feel normal again.
I continue to look for my books. I found some of my old tapes with various kinds of rock, and decide to go for the one with Scorpions Best Hits. While listening to the Wind of Change I could not even realize how much of a change my life will be in 2 years. Right in the middle of a song I hear a sudden explosion behind my back. I turn around and see that the fluorescent lamp is broken. Its capacitor exploded, and then the same thing happened to the second lamp. The explosion of the capacitor. The capacitor. I start to recall something connected with the capacitor. It makes me feel bad, I feel pain again. I wake up again.
I see Professor sitting beside my bed. He is smiling the way he did when we first met. It means that everything is fine, or at least is going to be so. He says something about the broken accelerator, the chaos in the Ultralab, something extraordinary, something connected with me, something that … And I fall asleep again.
Summertime, about 12 years ago.
I love summer for its weather, its colors, and my birthday. Though we were very poor at that time, my parents always made their best to make me happy. And for my birthday they bought me a film camera. There was no digital yet back then. Here is a fun fact. When I was a kid, about 2-8 years, I was so afraid of the camera. I could not stand it. Could not stand somebody taking a photo of me. I started to cry, shout, ask for my parents.
That is why I have very few pictures of my childhood. And then somehow everything changed and I started to love photography, taking photos myself, and not afraid of photographers at all. And the day I got my first camera was wonderful. I remember taking it to the Zoo, and remember how I dropped it when I was trying to take a shot of a tiger. That day the camera stopped counting the number of shots left.
And one summer afternoon I decided to fix it. So, I started to disassemble the body, removed several parts, and was about to fix the counter, when I accidentally touched the flash capacitor with my whole left palm. For a few seconds, I could barely move, it was like something was going through my whole body. I could not take my hand off the camera like it was glued to it. The world was spinning around, and I was standing still. Finally, I managed to get my hand free, and started to get my feelings back. Still, I was in shock since I never felt anything like that. I was shaking, it was difficult to breathe. I looked at my hand, and couldn’t believe it. Then I woke up again, and now I was feeling much better.
There was nobody around, still dark. But I could see some light beside my bed. It was coming from my hands. And then the light suddenly disappeared. What was that?! Or am I hallucinating after the accident and probably all the medicine I was treated with? I could not stop thinking about this light. For a moment I thought that it wasn’t even a light, but some sort of lightning-like discharge. And what was even more intriguing is the way I felt. I felt like I could run a marathon, climb up a mountain, or pick up the truck. I never felt so good and healthy in my whole life. It was like I had some incredible powers that wanted to be unleashed.
Right at that moment, I heard familiar steps approaching my room. It was Professor Silicon with candles in his hands. He was smiling again. I actually never saw him being in a bad mood at all. From the first day we met and throughout all our adventures Professor was always smiling. It seemed that nothing could bring this genius down.
So, there he was smiling in the candlelight. He looked like he was eager to share some big news and could not wait to do so. Then he asked that I probably had a lot of questions about what happened in the Ultralab, why I was lying in bed unconscious for several days, what was going on with TSemics, my parents. He said that there was nothing to worry about. Since the Ultralab was his own project, no one knew about the accident, and no one will. This is the hidden city after all. The only news that leaves this territory is the news they let to leave.
And as it turned out, while I was unconscious, Professor Silicon arranged several things including notifying TSemics staff and my parents that the irradiation process of thyristor elements will take another week and he needed my help with that. So, officially I was helping Professor, and no one knew about what really happened in the Ultralab that day.
Back to what happened, Professor told me that there indeed was something wrong with the accelerator, and it caused a massive explosion in the lab. Those lab employees managed to leave the building long before the explosion, so they were not aware of the consequences. And the consequences were that the Ultralab was completely destroyed. And it was nothing but a miracle that I could survive such a blast. Or something even more than a miracle.
Lextor Anderson explained why I was previously wired to the lab equipment. As it turned out, the explosion of the accelerator and particles discharge somehow caused changes in my body. And he wanted to make sure that I was ok since when he first found me in the ruins of the lab, he couldn’t believe his eyes to see any scratch on me. And later he learned why.
The explosion seemed to accelerate my body particles in the way I was literally charged like a huge battery or a capacitor, and in the last several days all the electronic devices, lights, etc., just stopped working when they were close to me. But now everything seemed to be normal and under control.
Professor mentioned that I had some huge power within, and he thought he knew how to control it.