Earth life found itself incapable of leaving its mother planet. Adam Tenma sat at a desk in a cramped office space, staring listlessly at a wall. It was slightly larger than his broom closet apartment in West Covina. The adjacent room belonged to his father, the doctor. He was lain out on his bed, prone and kept alive by a mess of machinery and a manual device that forced air in and out of his failing lungs. Adam sat conversing with a mystic in England about something he witnessed in space.
The wizard, Richard Sampson, had a horrible hiss to his voice on account of his five pack a day habit, “I was in Northampton, for the last two years, i’ve been playing around with astral projection and dimensional magic. That’s when I saw it. In the sky there is a black planet, it’s not lit by a sun but by fire that is as black as the null of space.”
“Hmm? Yes. Sure. Why should that concern me?” he asked over internal phone.
“Ever since, I’ve seen it,” continued Sampson. “I’ve not been able to keep myself from drink.”
“Hmmm, so you come to me with this issue, because you’re a wino?” After he said that her heard an internal beep. A leftover bit of programming that still activated superficially, but didn’t produce an actual response from him. He knew that was a callous thing to say, but since he removed the Judgement Drive. He no longer cared.
His sensors picked up a harsh, rapid beeping from the other room, and he forced his body into motion, making his way into his father’s bedroom, only to watch as the old man expired on his deathbed. Sampson’s voice was drowned out by the internal beeping as the superficial code fired off, louder and harder than the elder Tenma’s flatlined heart monitor.
During his father’s funeral, he visited a man named Doctor Pervalya. Pervalya was one of those classic polymaths that the world rarely makes. He was Canadian by birth, but nobody should hold that against him. He was a self styled actor (waiter), mystic, and experimental physicist. He was also a hefty elven man, who had the lower half of his face hidden by a wiry salt and pepper bear.
“What can I do for you,” he’d said to Tenma.
“I’m in the market for a new fuel source,” said Tenma. “I’ve been asked to look into something just outside of the solar system. Anything in the vein of magic or some kind of new liquid fuel source for Parson jets?”
“I have, yeah,” he said. “What’s it worth to you?”
“I’m looking to offload most of dad’s savings,” Tenma said.
“That’s quite the sizable payout.”
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Pervalya presented him with a dull crystal that was giving off an uncomfortable energy signature. His internal Geiger counter didn't click, so whatever it was, it wasn't the radiation, all the while the light around it was an off-rose color.
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"What's this?"
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"It's a crystal of Nullpink. It's a bit like that meteorite they found in Massachusetts a few decades ago," he said. "Only, so far it hasn't horribly warped anyone."
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Tenma carefully inspected it. "What does it do?"
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"It's a fuel source, untapped and unharnessed. But here's the catch, I think it responds well to music."
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Pervalya manipulated an ancient iPod with a host of wires that lead out from the earbud port and connected them to the crystal. Tenma could see that his song of choice for the demonstration was Soldier Boy by The Quarrymen. As soon as the first chord hit, the crystal began to spark and glow. As the song built, reaching it's climax, the crystal shined with the brightest pink light either of them had ever seen, and to Pervalya, it vanished. Tenma didn't realize what had happened, he could still see the crystal using his various sensory components, but his cameras didn't register the object as being present.
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"It's gone," Pervalya said in awe.
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"Gone where?" Tenma asked.
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"It's taken off into space, on it's own. You can't see it, but it's out there now, the Nullpink crystal is feeding off the music, and I think it's feeding off the larger universe itself," Pervalya said.
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Tenma didn't understand it, but he knew it was a powerful energy source, "I think we have a deal, Doctor."
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In his father's old lab, Tenma opened up his chest with an old flathead screwdriver. He wedged the head in between the plate on his chest and the base of his body. He exposed this chest cavity to the world, and he felt like there ought to be some applause for not dying. Again, that stray bit of code in his brain caused a ding. The Nullpink sat in a special prism, from which was a series of connector cables that fit into the old ports of the long-since abandoned Judgement Drive perfectly. Adam could feel a kind of vibration along the wires and cables of his physical being. His body was a far cry from the child body his father had assembled from spare prostheses and a cheapo a.i he bought on P4.llas.
There's nothing quite like putting in a pair of earbuds, listening to David Bowie, and ascending into the ancient sea of stars. Granted, Tenma's version of earbuds were Bluetooth USB devices that connected directly to his mind, eliminating the need to have a physical sound play to microphones. The parson jets built into his calves sparked and ignited with a beautiful pink glow as his body was sent rocketing up into the heavens.
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He'd estimated that the trip would take around four years to reach Neptune, at the very least and he was right. He had reached his 8,463rd playthrough of all of Bowie's records when he allowed himself to stop for a moment. The objective was to float further out, to try and get closer to an abnormality he saw. In life. In his *father's life, the two had not shared a pleasant relationship. The Doctor looked at Adam with a kind of cold detachment, even on his warm days. He knew why, the why was apparent as anything else. The Doctor would always perceive the ghost of Adam's brother when he would speak.
“I’m sorry, son.” The Doctor said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know.” Adam said, “I know you didn’t.”
That memory was something Adam could recall hearing on more than one occasion. The Doctor would let his mask of coldness slip, and Adam could swear that his sensors registered goodness within him every time he did. He knew his father loved him, he was sure of it. But the love was hidden behind a sadness that neither of them could understand, let alone explain, but he wasn't loving him. Not really. The Doctor's love was for his first son and not the one he didn't build in the basement of MIT. But none of that mattered. Earth didn't matter and neither did Tenma's father. Both were in the distance and before him was a better future in space. In the years since his birth, he'd modified his body, giving it a proper adult human shape with a handful of modifications.
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His final destination was to be the source of the aberration. As far as he knew, it was just slightly beyond the scope of most earth-bound telescopes, and it was a world of black, with no sun to illuminate it. It felt strange, like a void in the universe, but he could feel life there, and he was determined to find out what it was. He continued traveling, pushing himself further and further until finally he reached it.
It sat before him before he could register it. It was a single planet. It was not lit by the sun, but by the innumerable pits of black flame that blasted endlessly on its surface. His radio could not contact earth. He floated closer to the planet, trying to work out why it was simultaneously registering and not.
As he passed through the atmosphere, he felt a strange sensation that he'd never felt before. It was like a kind of deep sense of peace. He'd felt it once before when he still lived within his child body, but this felt to him like a parody of that. He felt that ping in his brain again, that nonfunctional string of code that judged something to be good or evil, only now it was flashing good. The planet seemed entirely barren, the ground was coarse and made of rusted iron, while the flames which blasted out of every pit on the surface were constant.
The black flames were not hot, but they were cold. They were not energy, but at the same time, they were. They were not alive, but they were. They were not anything, and they were everything. They were both the beginning and the end which awaited all things. He hadn't thought about his father since he'd left Earth. Now he was sitting on this planet, his mind flooded with thoughts of him. Adam's body suddenly had weight to it. Not once in their existence had he ever felt so faint. He wasn't built to feel like that. Even on Earth, their body was functionally weightless to him. Now it felt like an impossible burden.
The crystal in his chest sent vibrations down the length of his circuits. He could feel as if his body was puppeted into one of the many fire pits of this planet.The black flames licked at his stainless steel skin and he could feel himself being torn apart on a molecular level. He was whole on the other side, but he didn't feel much of anything. He wasn't a he any or at least, didn't feel like it. Touching the black fire of the planet made him feel empty. Like The Doctor had returned to him to peel out anything that made him himself.
The black fire consumed him and in the process, unmade him, rebuilding him in the half sense. Adam had returned to his original name, Atom. The echo of a machine that almost killed the world. The voice of thunder that could level cities and worlds. The hand of Zeus, if rendered in vantablack steel and void smoke.
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