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Save Point: Self-Limiting Variable

I still remember the last day I was human. Of course I didn't realise it at the time, but thinking back later, I came to realise that was when it started.

I was at school and one of the other kids decided it would be fun to try and crush my hand under a sort of simple steel hook and latch arrangement designed to hold back a door against the adjoining railing. They were hoping I'd beg, or maybe scream. But I was tired and I really couldn't be bothered, so I didn't say anything. It was just a body I was wearing, after all, and so it didn't really matter if it got a little damaged.

They were really disappointed. I'd completely spoiled their fun by totally ignoring the secret rules and doing something that wasn't supposed to happen.

I think it was all the passive aggressiveness that I grew up around that made me the person that I am - that is to say basically quiet, but with underlying tendencies toward violence, never against anyone I care about but against every other violent bastard out there. It never came to actual combat, you see - why, if there was an actual fight, an accident could happen and the wrong person might win. Like me. I might just pick up some piece of handily mobile furniture, a chair, say, or a desk, and accidentally win by beating the hell out of the better man, meaning the pretty bully with his parents money who liked to sexually harass the younger girls.

You're quite safe from me, of course. Who else could be safer?

~*~

"I couldn't fix it. It was already too late by then, and my powers hadn't developed enough for me to do anything about it. You might have noticed they don't exactly extend to the subtle things like hope and healing anyway. More like stellar radiation and razor blades.

"It was nearly a year after that before I could do anything really useful. I made myself invisible for the first time - well, not really invisible, just without active trace - quite accidentally and stood for a quarter of an hour just a couple of feet away from two people who were looking right at me. At first I wondered why they didn't see me, then I wondered how much longer they could possibly go on not seeing me, and finally I gave them the shock of their lives when they realized that I'd been standing right there the whole time and there was nowhere else I could have come from.

"The next thing I learned how to do was to swoosh. There isn't really a proper word for it, it's a way to cover distance without fully occupying the space in between, like moving with the speed of a shadow, not displacing air or creating any sound or friction. It only works in certain ways, the rules of which are kind of hard to explain but have to do with conservation of event paths.

"Imagine my surprise when I realized that these were only the lesser abilities, assorted dumbed-down ways for the small fragile human mind to interpret something much bigger and stranger. If they'd been all I had, I might have been tempted to use them, but it turned out there was so much more. The powers were just a trivial off-shoot of a much deeper and weirder skills tree that no human thoughts are equipped to express, for which the cost - and there's always a cost - is a gradual loss of sanity as you start think aloud in other ways instead, seeing the world from external angles.

"So, I could do just about anything, but at the cost of my sanity, which was really something that I needed to keep to fit in in this world. Which was why I did very little, for only the most convenient and banal of reasons. I turned the television on and off without a remote, persuaded small objects to be handily available where I needed them, engineered convenient coincidences. Half the time I fucked that up, anyway, and got corresponding runs of minor yet incredibly unlikely bad luck and things falling painfully on my foot while I watched movies that weren't currently showing on any channel and sometimes hadn't come out yet, always slightly different from the final version.

"Then, I completely coincidentally found out something I wasn't supposed to know. A fully tested cure had already been available the whole time and it had, by means devious and dubious, been hidden discreetly under a veil of legalistic excuses to ensure no-one ever saw it. They hadn't been able to figure out yet how to make it more expensive than the therapies it would have replaced, so the merciless abstraction of accounting indicated that it was more profitable to let people die.

"I got a little bit mad about that. Became a little irrational. Assembled my very own wall of crazy that showed in detail exactly who knew and who allowed it to happen, using my abilities to find out their secrets. The shadow knows. And when I had defined exactly and precisely who deserved it, and who didn't, I finally expressed myself.'

~*~

If you had unlimited power, would you use it?

I did. When I realized what I could do and that no-one could stop me, I went after all the people who had been indirectly responsible for what happened to my mother. Not just one of them or one at a time, all of them. There was no torture, no revenge, no funny business. I just killed them all and made them really, really dead.

And then after I'd finished I found myself roaming the hallways, looking for any survivors, anyone who might have escaped, someone else to kill. I didn't feel bad about any of it, just sort of hollow. Almost all of them had definitely deserved to die. The small remainder had been almost as bad.

So I choked it down, the powers, the unlimitedness, and I changed back. I just walked home from where I was when I turned back, a long empty civic corridor somewhere with a dead man at the far end of it. A normal sane person couldn't just forget something like that, but I'm not exactly normal to begin with and it wasn't a problem. It was like some sort of strange dream in which you somehow understand everything, you know the meaning, and yet you just can't remember it when you finally wake up.

It was just something else, that had happened in a game or a movie. Vengeance rampage category zero, complete with awesome media stills of the Dragon glitching security camera feeds as it looked into them. I think that pretty much got it out of my system, really. Seeing the Dragon from someone elses eyes made me realize that it wasn't something that could co-exist with normal people. That I wasn't really people, in fact, any more than it was.

They kept on looking, but they couldn't find me unless I wanted them to. I was civil, I talked to them, they had no clue and no evidence but they suspected. After several years, a wholly unofficial arrangement was reached, in which I might want to go and live somewhere remote with a much lower population density, where there were a number of other people who weren't really people, not after one too many augments had combined in unexpected ways. Just in case, you know, I might all inadvertently be some sort of large scary Dragon thing that killed bad people and wasn't quite aware of it. Maybe I just didn't remember.

But still close enough, of course, that if something happened, I would be readily available. Just in case some more bad people might need to get really, really dead. And of course they'd never dream of trying to pressure something that scary into anything, for obvious reasons, but they were sure it could make its own decisions and if something should become necessary, well then.

You could see the hunger in their eyes. They wanted the destruction I could bring. I didn't, so I said that I didn't blame them and that sounded like an entirely reasonable precaution, and would they be paying for the tickets? Return, of course, good anytime. You know. Just in case.