I covered the distance from Washington D.C. to the Blue Ridge Mountains in under a minute.
Under a minute.
I slowed as the treeline thickened below me and the city glow faded into the specific dark that only exists when you're far enough from people that their noise can't reach you anymore. The air up here was different. Colder. Cleaner. It smelled like pine and elevation and the complete absence of federal incidents.
I descended toward the coordinates on the card.
The ranger station emerged from the trees — low, sturdy, built from actual logs in the way that things used to be built when durability mattered more than aesthetics. Stone chimney. Covered porch. A structure that had been through weather and had opinions about it. Surrounding it, moving with the coordinated efficiency of people operating on a very compressed timeline, were six GDA agents finishing what looked like a complete operational setup.
Power lines checked. Perimeter sensors placed with the precision of people who'd done this before and cared about the angles. Firewood stacked by the door. A satellite dish being mounted on the roof by someone who had strong feelings about alignment.
I landed on the porch.
One agent looked up, registered me, and went back to what he was doing without breaking stride.
Professionals.
The White House incident had been less than three hours ago. In that window Cecil Stedman had cleared civilians from a crime scene, conducted a classified debrief in a destroyed coffee shop, arranged housing in another state, deployed a team to prepare it, and apparently sourced a satellite dish.
I didn't know whether to be impressed or alarmed.
Probably the answer was both. Probably that was the correct standing response to Cecil Stedman.
— Mr. Perfect Cell.
I turned.
The man coming around the side of the building was compact, organized, with the energy of someone who ran on competence and slightly too much coffee. He extended a hand with the efficiency of someone for whom introductions were a logistical step rather than a social one.
— Donald Ferguson. Aide to Director Stedman of the GDA.
I shook it.
— Mr. Perfect Cell — I said. — Pleasure.
— I'll show you around — he said, already moving toward the door.
---
The tour was brief because the space was brief.
One bedroom. A kitchen built for function — deep counters, industrial appliances, the kind of setup designed for people spending extended periods far from civilization. A modest living room with a couch that looked like it had survived several administrations and intended to survive several more. A bathroom at the end of the hall. Everything purposeful. Everything built to last.
The logs making up the walls were real. Thick. I ran a hand along one as we walked. The wood had the particular solidity of something that had been here long enough to stop being a building and start being part of the landscape.
— This facility operated as a GDA monitoring outpost for eleven years — Donald said. — Decommissioned four years ago. We've maintained it. Fully self-sufficient — generator, water filtration, six months of supplies minimum.
— Cecil keeps everything — I said.
— The director prefers prepared.
— He mentioned something similar.
Donald opened the refrigerator.
I looked at the contents and felt something I wasn't expecting — something that took me a moment to identify as genuine appreciation.
One half was stocked with what a normal person would recognize as food. Actual food. Vegetables, proteins, bread, dairy, and at the back, clearly visible and cold, a row of Coca-Cola cans. The other half was something else entirely — dense protein paste in labeled pouches, high-calorie supplement packs, the kind of nutritional engineering that cared about function and nothing else.
— We weren't certain whether your physiology could process standard human nutrition — Donald said. — So we prepared for both possibilities.
I looked at the contents. Looked at my hands.
— I think I can eat normal food — I said. — I'm fairly sure. I haven't actually tested it since — I gestured at myself — all of this became the situation.
Donald made a note on his tablet without expression.
— The paste will remain available as backup.
— The consideration is genuinely appreciated — I said.
He moved to the living room. Indicated the television. Placed a smartphone on the coffee table.
— Government-issued device. GDA secure line pre-loaded. Director Stedman will contact you through this number. Standard emergency frequencies are also accessible. And — he produced a small earpiece — this for field communication.
He looked at the earpiece.
Then he looked at the side of my head.
My ear. Which was not — it had to be said — a human ear. It was biomechanical, angular, designed by someone who had found human anatomy insufficiently dramatic.
Donald held the earpiece for a moment. The expression of a man quietly updating a procurement assessment.
— We'll revisit the earpiece — he said.
— Probably wise.
— The smartphone is on a GDA network. Standard data protocols apply. I should mention — every internet service provider retains user browsing data. Including activity in private or incognito modes. That data is accessible to government agencies through appropriate legal channels.
I looked at him.
— So the GDA can see my browser history.
— Within the appropriate legal framework, yes.
I cleared my throat.
— Thank you, Donald — I said. — For everything. The tour. The supplies. The information. Very thorough.
— Of course. If you need—
— I think I'm going to need a few minutes alone now — I said. — Just to settle in.
— Certainly. The perimeter sensors are calibrated to—
— Fantastic. Really appreciate it. All of it.
I was already moving toward the door. Holding it open. Smiling in the approximation of a smile that Cell's face could produce, which occupied the aesthetic territory between professional courtesy and mild geological event.
Donald looked at me for one measured moment. Then nodded, collected the remaining agents with a look, and led them around the side of the building to where a helicopter sat at the edge of the cleared ground.
I stood on the porch and watched them load.
The rotors started. The helicopter lifted. Banked south. Disappeared below the treeline.
The forest settled back into itself.
Silence.
I stood there longer than I needed to.
Then I went inside.
---
I opened the refrigerator.
Took out a Coca-Cola.
I opened it. Took a sip.
Hm.
Cold. Carbonated. Sweet in that specific way that was its own category of sweet, apparently universal across at least two versions of Earth.
Small mercies. I was keeping a list.
I crossed to the couch and sat down.
The couch expressed a structural opinion about this decision immediately and at volume. Something in the frame shifted. A leg scraped the floor. The cushions compressed to approximately half their former depth and stayed there. It didn't collapse — it was built solidly, old government furniture made to survive field conditions — but it was clear we had reached a negotiated settlement rather than a comfortable arrangement.
I found the remote.
Turned on the television.
Flipped through channels with the unconscious efficiency of someone who had been doing this since childhood and had developed strong internal criteria for when to stop.
I stopped.
The Muppets.
I had nothing else to do.
I stayed.
---
— One hour later —
— Kermit you absolute retard. — I said.
I was laughing in the way you laugh when you're alone and nobody is watching and there's no reason to perform composure — fully, completely, at a frog making objectively terrible decisions for reasons entirely consistent with his established character, which somehow made it worse.
The popcorn was in a bowl. I'd found it in a cabinet and operated the microwave without incident, which I was counting as the second successful calibration of the day after the flight. The first had been flight. The second was microwave popcorn. A reasonable Tuesday, all things considered. All things considered being that I had died earlier today.
The film ended the way it needed to end.
I sat with the credits.
Outside the windows, the mountains were fully dark now. Stars out properly — the way they get when there's no city competing with them, deep and clear and present in the way stars in a city never quite are. I hadn't seen stars like that since a camping trip when I was eleven that I'd complained about continuously and secretly loved.
I turned off the television.
Brought the bowl to the kitchen. Washed it. Put it away.
Stood in the kitchen of a former government outpost in the Blue Ridge Mountains, drying a popcorn bowl at eleven PM, in the body of a fictional bioweapon, in a universe I'd never heard of.
Thought about my mom.
Filed it. Somewhere I didn't have processing capacity for tonight.
Went to find the bathroom.
---
The bathtub and I regarded each other.
The bathtub was a normal human bathtub, sized for a normal human person of normal human dimensions. I was two meters tall, approximately two hundred kilograms, and built like something that had been engineered by someone who considered human proportions a starting point rather than a destination.
I got in anyway.
It required negotiation. My knees cleared the waterline by a significant margin. There were angles involved that no adult human would have chosen voluntarily and at least one that I was fairly sure had a name in geometry. But the water was hot, and after the day I'd had — the dying, the ROB, the portal, the White House, the Mauler Twins, the coffee shop, the Muppets — hot water covering whatever portion of me the geometry allowed was sufficient.
I lay there.
Stared at the ceiling.
Started thinking.
---
Okay.
Cell.
I was the Cell. Perfect Cell. The perfect lifeform — in the Dragon Ball universe, which was a universe where the power scale had at various points involved destroying planets with so much as a flick of a wrist.
I knew what Cell was capable of. I had watched the Cell Games arc more times than I was going to admit in any context.
The question was this universe.
Invincible — whatever that was. It had given me a Superman analog, a Wonder Woman, a Batman, a Flash, a Martian Manhunter, an Aquaman. A whole architecture with different names. Which meant it was probably tracking DC in some way. Probably.
But probably was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Because if this was a full DC-scaled universe — if somewhere out there there was an Anti-Monitor, a Darkseid, something that operated at the level of multiversal destruction — then Cell's ceiling, which was Stellar on a very good day with a full charge and specific conditions, was not relevant at that scale. Not even close.
The thing was — I didn't actually know the ceiling here.
Maybe this universe topped out somewhere I could actually reach. Maybe the camera didn't pull back as far as I was imagining.
Or maybe it did and I'd find out the hard way.
Don't catastrophize, I told myself. *
You've been here less than a day. You don't know the ceiling. Focus on the floor.
The floor was: I was the most powerful thing I'd detected in my immediate vicinity. The floor was: I had an enormous ki reservoir and no real control over it yet. The floor was: I needed to train, properly, somewhere without a roof and without civilians, before this universe decided to show me something that required me to already know what I was doing.
Flying had been incredible. That was real and nothing took it back.
I needed to do more of that.
And I needed to understand what else this body could do before something showed up that made the question urgent.
I closed my eyes in the bath.
Ki sensing.
Reaching outward rather than inward. Opening rather than focusing.
I tried.
Oh.
Immediate. It bloomed from me like a pulse — not light, not sound, something without a sensory analogue in my previous experience. I could feel things. Living things. Animals in the forest — small, numerous, going about their business with complete indifference to whatever was in their bathtub. A fox somewhere to the north of the cabin. Deer further out. Birds settled for the night.
Closer — four signatures. Deliberate spacing. Professional positioning.
GDA agents.
I would have been disappointed if they weren't there.
I extended further.
To the west — a cluster. Multiple signatures, stronger than the agents outside, the difference between someone humming quietly and someone actually singing. Still there. Still the same location. The Guardians, probably, at whatever served as their base. I could feel the gap between them and ordinary humans clearly now.
Strong. By this world's standards.
Meh.
I extended further.
Northwest.
Something enormous.
It registered the way a very loud sound registers — not heard but felt, in the chest, below conscious processing. A Ki signature so far above everything else in my range that the Guardian cluster, for all their relative strength, became background noise.
Omni-Man.
Moving. Purposeful. Flying northwest at speed that was itself a statement.
Incomparable to anything else on this planet, I thought.
I reached inward.
The reactor. Patient. Enormous. The ki that had barely registered when I accidentally discharged a full blast into the dimensional void.
Incomparable to anything on this planet except me.
I sat with that for a moment longer than was probably healthy.
Then I noticed something else.
Smaller. Much smaller than Nolan. But distinct — not because of its size but because of its quality. To the east, somewhere in the direction of what I assumed was the D.C. suburbs. A signature that flickered. Uncertain. New, in the specific way that something is new when it's just started existing.
Like a light someone had just switched on and was still figuring out how bright it wanted to be.
I didn't know what that was.
I filed it. Moved on.
I opened my eyes.
Looked at the ceiling.
Decided to test something small.
Eye lasers.
I remembered the androids doing it in the show. Focused emission, controlled, directional. Small scale. The kind of thing that should be manageable if I was careful.
I concentrated. Drew what I thought was a small amount of ki — a thread, I told myself, just a thread — and focused it behind my eyes.
Felt it charge.
Released it.
The ceiling of the bathroom did not develop two neat holes.
The ceiling of the bathroom developed a significant structural opinion about what had just happened to it. Plaster, insulation, wood, and a section of roofing material that had not anticipated this evening relocated themselves into the bathtub, onto me, and into the surrounding area with the enthusiasm of material that had been asked to do something very quickly. Through the resulting gap, I could see a ragged irregular window of night sky. Stars. Clear and cold and now visible from my bathtub.
I looked at the damage.
Then at my hands.
A thread, I'd said.
A thread from an ocean was still an ocean's worth of thread.
— Sorry — I said. To the ceiling. To the cabin. To whatever GDA agent was going to have to write this up in a maintenance report and figure out how to categorize it.
I sank lower in the bath.
Small. Controlled. Every single time. This body is always loaded. Treat it like it's always loaded because it is always loaded.
I needed to train. Properly. Methodically. Not prod things and observe the results like I was doing science, because the results of my science were structural damage to government property.
But I was also — I looked at the stars through the hole — going to figure this out. Piece by piece. Carefully. Before whatever was coming from out there arrived and made careful a luxury I didn't have.
I was going to be ready for it.