Chương 39: The Amber Comet

When they were children, Claire had taken special care to tell him about her visions, every single one of them. For a while, John hadn't cared enough to think about them in much detail. Then she'd started having visions of him, which was when John realized that they were impossibly specific. The details seemed far too easy to change. For example, Claire once told him that he was wearing a blue shirt in her vision. Couldn't he get around that, simply by not wearing blue shirts for the next few months?

Similarly, Claire once had a (pretty useless) vision that his hair would get soaked by the rain – but what was stopping him from wearing a waterproof hat for a while? And what about the vision Claire once described to him, of John standing on some random mountain that he'd never seen before? What if he simply refused to go there? Back then, he'd told her about his plans to circumvent her, thinking he was being funny or original. Claire had always protested.

Now that he'd gained some added perspective, he understood that his desire to nullify her ability had mostly come from his own insecurity. He'd wanted to bring her down to his level. In the truest sense, that was what it was: equalizing the field by reducing what was special about her, her predictive powers. And he'd wanted to make himself special in the process, by being the only one to slip out of fate's hands. But in the end it didn't matter - every single vision would always come true by force.

Not in the sense that some overbearing, godlike power would direct his limbs and choose his color of shirt in the morning. No, it was more that something always happened that made avoiding his 'fate' no longer worth it. An inconveniently timed laundry cycle, one that narrowed his choices to blue shirts and a flannel so ugly he'd get beaten for it. A sudden errand during heavy rain, so high-priority that he couldn't waste time on a hat, which ultimately left his hair soaked.

A Battle Event on the random mountain from Claire's vision - with a prize he couldn't miss out on. … Even now, John thought presently, as he strapped himself into the blood-drawing chair. If I wanted, I could just not smile. I could make Claire's vision completely wrong. But he was still smiling. Because the research was so closely linked to his mother, to everything he wanted to do, that it would feel wrong to pretend he didn't care.

"Are you ready, John?" Meili called. He'd just finished explaining the properties of Clairvoyance to her. She and Darren came in from the attached supply room, carrying two massive vacuum-sealed bags of unknown liquid.

"As long as you tell me what those are for." John pointed, only half-exaggerating his uncertainty. Meili held one of the bags up to the room's dim light, making it see-through.

"It's the special mix of compounds your mother mentioned last Sunday," she answered. She stopped next to his chair, lifted the top off of one of his big robotic handcuffs, and started pouring the liquid in.

"At a steady drip, it'll chemically induce your sleeping body into releasing aura into your bloodstream," she added.

"Only a small amount, of course, so you can automatically recover from the strain overnight. It works in tandem with the audiotherapy from the sound system around your headrest. Jane's already experienced all of this, and given the massive similarities in your aura channeling systems, we're reasonably confident that this should work." Darren was nodding along in agreement while tightening and adjusting the chair.

"Just so you know, John," the blue-haired man said, "it took NxGen a hundred trial rounds to figure out that this is the right mixture of compounds. Double that number to figure out that audiotherapy has a tangible effect." Darren grinned.

"So you should be grateful. Actually, it's fair to say we all got lucky. I didn't have to buy and prepare a bunch of versions to test, and you-""I don't have to lie here and experience all of them," John finished impatiently. He'd gotten more explanation than he'd really wanted.

"I get it. Great. So are we getting started?"

"I don't know…" Darren said, looking at Meili.

"Do you think he has a full appreciation of what it is we're doing tonight?" She laughed softly, shaking her head.

"Definitely not, not on a scientific level. John doesn't remotely understand how groundbreaking it is to have a method for consistently getting aura out of the channels and into the bloodstream. How much extraction harm that prevents. And just the fact that audio can have any influence at all-""It's really an incredible setup." Darren nodded mock-somberly.

"Which makes it so much more of a shame, that John finds this field so overintellectual and pretentious. Especially considering what the name of his ability is…" John rolled his eyes, more than used to their heckling. At first he'd been wary of dragging Darren into their research, since the man had seemed far too reluctant about joining to really trust.

But after two months, the science was apparently so captivating that Darren had gotten fully invested in its success – and now the group member whose level of commitment was under fire was actually John himself. More specifically, it was his lack of reading on the cutting-edge Aurology papers, while knowing that his ability would benefit from it. Meili and Darren took pleasure in constantly pointing this out. (Which was, you know, a fair criticism, save for the fact that he was a Sophomore in high school).

And he didn't plan on forever refusing to study them, anyway - it was just that he prioritized his mother's weekly ability advice.

"Seriously, Doc. Meili. I'm ready to start." John shut his eyes and tried to relax.

"Put me under already." They did.... He dreamed of a speck in a star-filled sky. There wasn't much to think about it, for a while. It was just the same as all the other stars in its curtain, only a bit brighter, a little larger. Until it was a lot larger, in a blink. A lot brighter. The color of its glow changed, from a star's golden-white to the purest orange – and this light pierced the clouds, emanating from a massive, shining sphere in the sky like a crystal moon.

-Then he was in a space station, where the object's details became clear. It was not a sphere but a close approximation, a die with ten thousand sides. It was a comet of amber gemstone, almost like a massive orange candy, gleaming not with the sun's borrowed rays but by some power of its own. For an asteroid, its flight through space seemed almost sluggish.

But when it pushed through debris, its path and speed remained perfectly, pristinely unchanging: like there was far more to its weight than implied by its already-tremendous volume. The shape was also unchanging, as not a single particle seemed to chip off in the whole of its path. It passed through thick layers of icy rock without a scratch.

And when the comet reached John's space station, it shredded the whole structure like nothing, like five hundred tons of glass and steel and human flesh were no greater than dust. -As John floated in the station's scattered remains, his distance to the comet was a few tiny inches. He stared at a single side of ten thousand faces. It was as reflective as a mirror - somehow he knew that as a fact. But his reflection didn't stare back.

Instead he sensed his mother inside the comet, legs brought tightly against her torso, head nestled between her arms, everything curled into herself. Silky, cloud-white hair splayed behind her in a curtain. It was the fetal position, he realized. As if she were a fetus, as if she were in the womb. A single side of the comet had a Jane's worth of patterns, of complexity. He felt a Jane's worth of aura in each face. Enough to decide all the outcomes in the world, every victory, every love, every defeat, every child.

In the comet, a man held a stone to another man's head, then a sword, a gun, a single piece of inked paper. Then the paper was gone, and the man held nothing in his hand, stood above his lesser with a clenched fist.

"Have you heard," Meili once said to him, "that fighters are all preserved in amber, forever young? They're thirteen, or ten, or eight, whatever age it was that they first won, whatever age they first stood above someone to stand a little higher. Their development forever replaced by a growing number, a list of fight victories. Their desires and dreams left stagnant, starting from that first extra bit of respect and praise." All the world's winners and losers, suspended in amber for eternity.

The amber comet took it all in as it crashed down to earth. Beautiful"How long now?" Meili asked, yawning. Darren blinked, a long, sticky blink that nearly ended midway with his eyelids shut together. He yawned as well.

"It's saying ten minutes." He was slouched in front of his desktop, resting his cheek in his palm. When the blood drawings ended at midnight, he and Meili had been excited enough to high-five something like a dozen times – only to remember that the analysis results on John's aura-enriched blood would take time to come. Now it was three AM. The software-generated loading bar that estimated their remaining wait time was beginning to annoy him. Hopefully the blood's aura-enriched. It was truly…

unfortunate, that detecting aura in a subject's channels took a quarter-second, while detecting it in blood took literally ten thousand times longer. Still, that just meant they were at the scientific frontier.

"So more like twenty minutes," Meili mumbled from her chair. She blinked a few times, yawned again, and slapped herself lightly on both cheeks.

"I guess I'll try to be a bit productive," she said, "if it's that long." He blinked at her.

"Productive now?"

"I've decided to try," she confirmed.

"Maybe this a stupid time to talk about this, but I wanted to tell you that I'm planning on recruiting someone to help us." Darren was functionally half-asleep.

"Who?" he asked, not really processing the words. Meili made full eye-contact with him.

"Seraphina." That fully woke him up.

"Genuinely?" He sat up; his elastic reclined chair snapped and straightened.

"Are you saying that she'll agree to work with us, or do you mean that in an aspirational way?"

"…Maybe half of each," she answered after a pause.

"I don't know if what I've planned, or really anything I thought of to convince her, will end up working out. It'll be a gradual process even if it does work. But you have to admit that Time Manipulation would be a big help." Darren nodded - it would be. Especially in the development phase, once they started iterating and experimenting with level-enhancing drugs.

You needed to separate the extracted aura from the host body (Jane or John) for two weeks or so before you could safely start working with it, according to NxGen's research reports. Two weeks of waiting could become two hours under time acceleration. And that wasn't even mentioning the eye-raisingly common time travel hypotheticals Meili and John kept throwing around.

"No disagreement there," Darren replied.

"So what, do you want a second opinion or something? I think it's been made pretty clear you have a far better mind for this kind of tricky maneuvering than I do." Better than anyone at Wellston, he finished mentally. Even better than Vaughn. It still surprised him, somehow: the immenseness of what she'd managed, in such a short period of time, all before she'd even learned to drive a car. Nobody else could have done the same.

He could hardly even remember what sorts of dumb things he'd been hung up on as a second-year. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Not a second opinion," she answered. She fidgeted very slightly.

"Okay - this is definitely an odd thing to ask, but I want to know how I did with convincing you to help us, Darren. Feedback straight from the source. I think I can still improve.

""Wait," he said.

"Is this to help you with Seraphina specifically? Or is this to help you get better at recruitment in general, so you can attract an army of help in the future?"

"If that's what it takes." Darren stared at her silently, and Meili added: "Obviously, targeting a few important people super precisely will probably work out better. I think hearing about it from your perspective would help either way." I guess, he thought. Still a little bit off-putting, but I suppose it makes sense… He ultimately nodded his acceptance. He started thinking about the process, from around two months ago, that had taken him from being completely opposed to staying up to three AM for no pay.

"You said something like this, Meili," Darren began.

"That if you or John were to end up getting caught, then The Authorities would use Memory Crawling or Lie Detection to see if you had told anyone else… which would lead back to me. Making it in my best interest, by that logic, to work with you two as much as I can."

"Right." Meili smiled awkwardly.

"I thought that was pretty convincing, too, until you got angry and told me to get out of your face."

"There's nothing logically wrong with it," he replied.

"Not as an argument. Only I was annoyed… and stressed, and panicking slightly about this massive conspiracy you'd just dumped in my lap. I wasn't in a mood to be told whether something was in my best interest or not. Even though you were totally correct."

"But because you're Meili Strauss, you started appealing to other things," Darren kept going.

"Like the fact that when I applied to NxGen, they rejected me without a single interview. The fact that I'm more than intelligent enough, compared to the researchers you met over the summer - and if my level were 6. 2 instead of 4. 2, they would have invited me to work with them at the first opportunity. Is it really something I want to accept, that the difference between unfair research theft and legitimate work is my ability level alone?"

Darren took his massive book of paper notes from beside his monitor and handed it to her.

"We wrote these in two months," he said, "but there are already enough powerful, fascinating things in there to spend a lifetime looking deeper in. And you told me as much. That I would be missing out on my life's work if I didn't help. So really, how could I possibly call myself a scientist and researcher, if I were to refuse a chance like this one? Do I have no ambition? Don't I still take pride in myself, for my knowledge, for the amount of studying and work I've done to call myself 'doctor' at 4. 2?

Haven't I told you myself that I'm constantly denied chances - if I truly feel that way, what better chance will I get, until the day I die, better than this moment right now?" Meili smiled at him.

"I don't remember being that inflammatory."

"Some of that is… artistic license," he admitted, feeling tiredly amused at himself.

"But that's about how I started feeling, so I think the point is that your second approach should have been your first. Appealing to my emotions. My sense of what I deserve, my ambition." She audibly breathed out, which Darren counted as an admittance that he was right. Right about myself, he thought. And really, if I'm not right about myself compared to Meili, then who is she, God? Why does she seem disappointed with herself?

"I guess," Meili agreed.

"I don't know. With super well-educated, mature-seeming adults I tend to lean toward selfish and rational rhetoric. That just makes sense to me." Darren faintly felt that, if he weren't being a total nighttime degenerate, he might have gotten more hung up on the surreal mess of a conversation he was having - the fact that he was actively helping Meili get better at manipulating him, or at least people similar to him. Instead he just barked a laugh.

"Mature?" he said rhetorically.

"Look, they can hold as many doctorates or professorships as they can grab - in the end, they want to satisfy their pride and sense of deservingness just as much as anyone. You saw it yourself at the ability research conference last year." Meili nodded. Oddly, she muttered something that sounded like: 'again, suspended in amber.' He was about to ask her to repeat it. But before he got the chance, his desktop computer let out a harshly celebratory jingle.

A report popped up on his screen; the computer analysis on John's enriched blood was finally, at last finished. After three hours and thirty minutes. But he could accept that, as long as the results were favorable… Darren leaned in close to read the most important report figures, his sight blurry from late-night strain. Aura concentration, potency, malleability- The corresponding numbers made his eyebrows shoot up. Meili had just started standing over his shoulder to read, so he looked up at her and shook his head.

"Concentration and potency are extremely favorable," he started.

"But malleability-" Meili huffed.

"We already suspected it," she reminded him, "so it's fine, you don't have to sugarcoat."

"Well," he said.

"I just hope you know what you're doing with Seraphina." Beautiful A fter I worked through the mixed results in John's blood, it was far too late to return to the dorms. So I spent the night in an infirmary cot, in a return to unhappy freshman-year tradition, and changed into a spare uniform once I woke up. It was ten, Wednesday morning.

The lack of biology and chemistry on my schedule (both morning classes) meant that I hadn't missed anything, but John was less fortunate - he would need some excused absences from Darren. He was still asleep in the chair when I entered the dimly lit lab. John's head was bent downward, resting on a shoulder that was wetted slightly with drool, and his breath came in steady beats, his chest rising and falling to a peaceful rhythm. A gentle piano melody played from Darren's automated music speaker.

A thin stream of morning sun snuck through a small opening, lighting a speck of floor under our feet. He almost seemed content. Happy. His mother wrote to him for an hour every Sunday. And yes, a lot of the hour was spent on ability development, research, the world's most fundamental secrets. Not much of it was directly familial or loving. It was still an hour that he'd never gotten before. Continually, in cycles, he let out a gentle snore. I'd begun to feel overcome with a sorrowful pleasure, at times like these.

Not when we found new helpful research files, not when I recalled my promise to his father, and not even when John freely spoke to mid-tiers and elite-tiers and low-tiers without issue. I didn't get this strange and creeping feeling, either, when he seemed particularly joyful. Instead it was these quiet moments, when I felt it, when he seemed untroubled and at peace. I hoped it was somewhat true. Because the outcome of his life was in some sense my responsibility.

Because I had exerted such immense, amazing, horrifying influence on him to get this far. And wasn't he better off now? Wasn't it better that he and his mother could communicate, that I'd kept him from brutalizing his whole school in a single night? Didn't it seem like I'd done the right thing, when my actions were left in the past, when it was only the results that remained? Wasn't the world better off, better off with a chance of change instead of none, better off with me instead of Meili Strauss?

After returning to Wellston, that was where my chains of thought often terminated. The fact that my body belonged to a little girl whom I'd killed by existing. Some days the knowledge was light, but some days it pressed down on my spine like heavy water. I hated this world, wanted on the basest level to see it change – but how much of my desperation was an effort at redemption, for the girl who'd had to die to make room for me? I turned on the lights in the room. John was so mundane but so beautiful.

I could just as easily surprise him awake, slap him on the arm, as I could kneel down and pray to him like a religious idol. Almost as though I was infected by the world's level-worship… but no, it was more that John was a god-tier in the way that I would never be, in the capital sense. If I truly needed redemption, it would be through him. With him I could transform the world. I halted these thoughts, feeling slightly incredulous about their grandiosity, and went to poke him awake as a normal friend would.

I didn't get the chance. He woke up on his own, and with the rise of his eyelids I saw an amber fire within his eyes, like the overripe autumn leaves that dotted our campus. It burned more intensely and in a different magnitude than his normal ability glow. My own ability activated, as a surprised instinct, slowing the moment down to help me study him. When the fire faded to the normal light of ability activation, John yawned and smiled at me. Then he grew a confused look.

"Morning… Meili - Why are your claws active?"

"Ah-" I stumbled verbally, stalled by my confusion at what I'd just seen. If he thinks there's a fight and tries to get into fighting stance, then he could break the equipment and-"No emergency, just check your eyes." I quickly unbuckled and deactivated all his limb restraints. John brought two delayed fingers to his pupils, as if he needed to touch them to sense their activation.

"Oh," he murmured. Then his face scrunched in confusion, as it seemed to hit him that he must have used his ability in his sleep.

"That doesn't make any sense," he stated factually, in a way that sounded more like a question.

"I mean, right?"

"Your ability shouldn't activate subconsciously," I agreed dumbly.

"A tiny fraction do, but definitely not yours."

"Then do you think the glow's just a leftover reaction? Maybe from having aura in my blood for a while?" I shook my head.

"I didn't see unconscious ability activation as a noted reaction in the files. I can go digging again, but after reading through them as much as I have…" We both thought silently for a while. I wondered if it was simply a result of John's biological differences from his mother, although it seemed too convenient as an explanation. Just a small detail like this one seemed unimportant on the surface, but in aurology, tiny details were often the difference between ultimate success and failure.

Eventually, John shook his head and headed for the door.

"I give up," he said.

"I have to change and head to class. You can fill me in on the procedure results and everything later tonight, Meili."

"... Alright." I nodded my agreement, but I was hesitant to let him go. In my mind, I kept retracing the events of the night before, and suddenly started to feel like I was hitting something. A suspicion struck me.

"John," I asked before he could leave, "before you fell asleep, were you thinking about any ability in particular?"

"Not really?" he answered.

"I guess you could say Clairvoyance was on my mind. Because I was giving you the explanation of how I knew about the chair and blood-drawing procedure." Confirmation number one.

"Okay, and did you dream about something that you wouldn't normally dream or think about?" He blinked at me in clear surprise.

"Actually, yeah," he said.

"It was about this massive asteroid, like the size of Wellston City or something… And it's weird, because the details are pretty clear. The thing was all orange crystal. I remember it breaking through a space station and crashing down through the atmosphere." What the fuck, I thought. The size of Wellston City? I started staring at him, wide-eyed, and John paused.

"Wait a second - are you saying that I somehow copied clairvoyance last night, and everything I saw was a vision of the future?" He shook his head rapidly - like, 'no no no, no way.'

"I was in the space station, Meili. I was literally free-floating in space. There was a huge amount of aura in the asteroid, way more than my mom, and it felt alive. It was a classic abstract dream sequence. There's no chance any of it ends up happening."

"It sounds like you can remember it all perfectly," I pointed out, shaken.

"John - don't you normally forget most of your dreams?"

"...... Look, I was stranded in outer space."

"If not Clairvoyance, then have you encountered any other abilities that activate subconsciously?" John opened his mouth, closed it, and said nothing. He started rubbing his temples. My own mind spun into violent overdrive. I knew that Clairvoyance essentially never saw more than a year into the future. Wouldn't a massive asteroid impact deserve a mention, if it had occurred during the time of the original webcomic? A meteor made entirely of crystal… I don't think that's even something that can happen.

Claire's not even here for him to copy. I guess it's safer to say it's a fluke?

"If a massive asteroid is going to land on the planet soon, then we would have already known about it," I eventually concluded.

"I just read an article about a small one they expect to land a few years from now. We have astronomers studying the routes of space objects every day. I think it's more likely that the release of aura in your bloodstream produced some odd effects: so we should probably not trust it, John." He didn't respond. He was staring at his hands like he was seriously contemplating something.

"John?" I repeated. He looked up from his hands at me.

"I heard you, Meili. I was just thinking… if you time-travel back in time, like we've been talking about, then doesn't that mean that Clairvoyance starts to give you visions of the past?" He quickly explained: "I mean, let's say that a year from now, we manage to go twenty years in the past. But whatever we see there will technically be happening a year into the future, at least to us. Doesn't that mean that Clairvoyance can start having 'future visions' of what happened twenty years ago?" I froze.

Things in the past count as Clairvoyance future visions, John has a Clairvoyance vision of a massive aura-filled asteroid crashing into Earth, And we've already been planning on trying to go six hundred years in the past. If you combine everything together- I almost felt like I was going to faint. My knees went weak underneath me, forcing me to lean against the chair.

It felt like my theory whiteboard and planning whiteboard were screaming out for my attention - then I remembered, belatedly, that we'd finally decided to switch to notebooks as a safer option. The bell rang, right then, as I was preparing to sit on the floor and think for multiple consecutive hours. It signalled that third period was about to start, or my first class of the day - to which John gave me a helpless look. I choked on my simultaneous desires.

Attempt to understand what the hell was going on, or keep my cover as a mostly inconspicuous honor student?... I sat in English class ten minutes later, making my lips-pursed concentrating face as the teacher gave a lecture on basic fictional worldbuilding. Not that the lecture was what deserved contemplation. I was trying to determine the origin story of our universe.