Chapter 25

Stacy didn't join me for two weeks. I suspect one week was for the funeral and one week was to get her emotions under control. She thought the love of her life had died. I was sure she still cared for me, but spending two months with me after Celeste had just died was probably the last thing she wanted to do. After a week and a half, I was beginning to think she wouldn't be coming.

Leaving it two weeks meant I was the equivalent to five and a half months pregnant with only nine days to go before birth. There was no way I could hide that so she just looked at me in shock when she opened the door to the apartment.

She hadn't warned me that she was coming and it was hot so I was swanning around in a bra and panties, bare belly, clearly showing my pregnancy. The expression on her face tickled my funny bone and I burst into laughter. As sometimes happened when I was pregnant, my laughter turned into tears for no apparent reason.

Stacy dropped her bags and cautiously approached to give me a hug, confusion written large across her face.

“You're err... you're pregnant?” she half asked half stated.

“Sort of. Come and sit down and I will explain everything. Not that you will believe me.”

We sat together on the sofa, half-turned towards each other, holding hands.

“First of all. No, I have not been unfaithful. Remember when we first met and I said I had an ability that I needed to keep secret,” I started.

Stacy thought for a moment. “Yes. I think you said if Jordan found out you would have to run away, or something like that.”

“That's right. Well, now I am going to tell you my secret. I can create a clone and pull that person's soul into the clone that my body makes. It's not like a normal pregnancy. The whole process takes twenty-three days until the birth and then about the same to fast grow the baby to maturity using my breast milk. It is sort of like a quick reincarnation with memories kept intact.” I pointed to my belly. “Say hello to baby Celeste,” I told her.

Stacy was quiet while the penny dropped. “Celeste is alive, inside you? Why didn't you tell me?”

“Do you think you wouldn't have been thinking about it? I might as well have just told the telepath and government what I could do.”

“Why does that matter? If you can restore Celeste, you can do the same for all the ageing superheroes. Imagine the possibilities.”

“You're right,” I said with a sad smile. “I could just stay pregnant, reincarnate every superhero older than say, sixty. Of course, why stop there, the rich, actors, politicians, maybe the scientists who had won Nobel prizes. Hang on a second,” I said, bringing a finger to my mouth to pretend hard thinking. “What about spouses? If you do one, you have to do the other.”

“Now you are just being ridiculous.”

“Really? Imagine you aged at the same rate as Celeste and when you both reached sixty or maybe seventy, I offered to return one of you to your youth, but not both of you. How would you feel? You know what, let's not talk about this, I suspect we would have different opinions. In nine days time, I will give birth to baby Celeste. Let's enjoy our time together because after the baby is born, I will be breastfeeding every two to three hours for three weeks and it is exhausting.”

Our relationship for the next nine days was strained. Stacy felt my duty was to pop out babies that would enrich the world. I didn't agree and didn't want to talk about it. I had a feeling that Stacy had already told Derek or someone like that. Her belief had always been about the greater good, and I could do so much, that what I wanted was not important.

I used my domain and micro telekinesis to set a mind partition to look for suspicious items in my clothes and found what I presumed to be electronic bugs of some kind. I left them active since I didn't want to let them know I was on to them. You are only paranoid if they aren't out to get you.

The big day arrived, Celeste was ready to meet the world. I wanted another home birth but Stacy insisted on calling an ambulance when I told her I was in labour. This time they offered me pain relief, but now I was worried that they would dope me up so I refused. It was as bad as usual, but not worse. They kept us in for observation and we returned to the apartment the next day. This time was a little easier since Stacy helped as much as she could.

We had a health care visitor come to check on what should have been a baby only a week old, but we had to tell her that it was a superpower thing. I have no idea what she told her superiors, but my secret was not much of a secret anymore.

I had been making a habit of slipping out for occasional walks when Celeste was sleeping, particularly in the late evening. When Celeste was mature with a DNA age of fifteen and a half, I told Stacy it would be just one more day, went for my usual walk with my bikini worn underneath a dress that had a tracking device on it. I went to the ground floor, then further to the sub-ground floor where the cars were parked, took off my dress and threw it on the ground just past the lift doors, changed my face to a random stranger and took the elevator up to my other apartment. The room key was a card that I had put in my bra, so I entered and locked the door behind me. I checked the apartment for electronic bugs and when it was clear I went to the bathroom, shaved my head bald, lay on the bed and did a whole-body reset.

This time I reduced my height from five feet eight inches to just five feet, used the beauty face that I had created in front of Talia, with sparkling green eyes and golden blonde hair. I had to grow the hair after I woke up but with the extra energy in my cells, the whole reset took half an hour and growing the hair was only another five minutes.

Now that my whole body was converted to the high energy cell version, my domain had grown to a little over twenty metres. Because I had reduced the size of my body and didn't use fat to make the conversion, my little body was a little overweight, but I would be able to burn that off within a week. I put on some black stretchy yoga pants and a black sports top, the rest of my supplies I put in a black backpack. It was dark outside but there were lights on. I stepped onto my balcony, used my telekinesis to shut and lock the door behind me and flew straight up into the night. At about three hundred metres above the tallest building, I felt pretty safe. I used my telekinesis to pull a compass out of my backpack and used the faintly glowing needle to find out the right direction to head towards the Bahamas. It was time for a holiday.

Chapter 26

I was an emotional mess and it took two weeks of doing almost nothing but relaxing to wind down and find some stability. I did a few experiments with my new powers and set up a few mind partitions to protect myself, but other than that, I lay on a beach, swam in the ocean, read a book or danced in a nightclub. I used holiday visa cards but didn't stay in any hotels.

Whilst Stacy was with me I hadn't wanted to give away any of my abilities, but I had plenty of time to think about what I might be able to do. One of my first experiments was whether I needed to breathe. According to my DNA, my mitochondria were producing massive amounts of energy, a tiny percentage of which was used to create ATP, which is the normal energy that the cell uses. ATP generation normally needs a combination of glucose and oxygen, but my mitochondria were producing energy by pulling it in from somewhere else. No idea where from. Anyway, that should mean, no oxygen requirement and that was true, but trying to convince my body that it didn't need to breathe was impossible.

The next question was what happened to my domain when I went underwater. The answer was whatever I wanted to happen. I could take the surrounding air with me, I could allow water to replace some or all of the air in my domain. I presumed that also meant I could travel into space and take my air with me. Then I wondered if the cold of the ocean or space would freeze me which led to my next experiments. Theoretically, my micro telekinesis should allow me to increase the vibration of atoms or molecules, which would heat them up and likewise, slow the vibration down which would cool them. Both were true but for my conscious mind to do it took great concentration and only affected a small area. However, with mind partitioning, I could set up the general principle and use my conscious mind for direction.

I dug out a hole in the sand, pulled water into it leaving the salt and other impurities behind, prevented the water from draining and then directed my mind partition to heat it up. I could boil it, freeze it or make it the perfect bath temperature. For safety, I set my mind partition to heat up anything that was dangerously cold and freeze anything that was dangerously hot. I did wonder about the electromagnetic spectrum and whether I could affect that with my micro telekinesis.

I remember reading about wave-particle duality. As I understood it mass was related to energy as Einstein had proven, so everything could be expressed as either energy or mass, which meant I should be able to affect light. I was thinking of becoming invisible by altering light. Maybe because I thought I should be able to, or maybe there was another reason that a physicist could work out, but I was able to either increase or decrease the energy of any elements of the electromagnet spectrum that was within my domain. However, it was too complicated to make myself invisible. I could alter the frequency, but couldn't bend it around myself. At least I didn't have to worry about the sun's rays being harmful, I just used a mind partition to alter any harmful rays to harmless. Funnily enough that could be done by either increasing the frequency so that it passed straight through without interaction, or only interacting in such a small way as to be negligible or decreasing the frequency until it had no effect.

Most of my experiments were done at night, where no one could see me and I slept underwater about thirty metres deep but set my telepathic mind partition to warn me if any person came with a hundred metres. Most hotels, even the backpacker's hostels wanted some kind of identification, which I didn't have, but I didn't really mind, it was so peaceful under water. I could choose to let the sounds of the ocean pass into my air bubble or cancel out the vibrations. I usually kept about five metres of air around myself as that seemed to deter the marine life and a small percentage of the sound through to give a nice ambience.

The one thing I did miss because I didn't have a room to stay in, was a way to have a proper wash. Hotels didn't really check if you were a guest, and there were some outside showers available, mainly there to rinse off before entering the swimming pool. I felt too embarrassed to have a proper wash there, and I had to keep my bikini on anyway. I tried to use a bath at night, by digging a hole in the sand in a deserted area, filling it with water, removing all the non-water elements and heating it. I could even use my telepathic mind division to make sure I stayed private, but I didn't have any soap. That was when I discovered how micro telekinesis can be used to clean yourself. I could also use it to clean a room which would come in handy when I had one again. The next day I bought some soap and had a lovely bath. Micro telekinesis gets you cleaner, but a hot bath with soap fulfils some other pampering need I seemed to have.

Hair length had been an issue with me. Originally, I had it long to help myself to feel feminine, and when I found it was a pain in the ass, Talia's love of playing with it while she was so distressed about Kalie, prevented me from cutting it. When I was in a relationship with Stacy, she insisted that I kept it long and then I was shot in the head and had to cut it short to make it even. I liked the shorter length and didn't mind using wigs. It certainly made using different disguises easier because growing real hair to any length used to take me a week. Since my DNA upgrade in terms of energy, I could grow my hair in under a minute. The energy required was not an issue, and since I wasn't using much of the food I ate for energy, I had usually had plenty of resources so that wasn't an issue. However, caring for long hair was tiresome until I discovered micro telekinesis cleaning and micro telekinesis styling. It wasn't quite as simple as it sounds as if you remove everything from the hair, the hair looks dry, but the body naturally produced oils that we usually remove and replace with conditioner. I'm not against that as how else do you clean your hair? Well, the answer is micro telekinesis where you can leave the oil behind, and even better, you can leave the right amount behind so it never looks dry or greasy, but just right.

I'm sure if you practised for long enough putting your hair in all kinds of different styles can be time-consuming but easy. I had never got the hang of it, probably because I was spoilt with either Talia or Jordan helping me. Stacy liked my long hair, but kept hers short and was useless at styling mine. Fortunately, styling hair is what a hair salon was for. I told them I wanted to try lots of different styles and used a partitioned mind to remember and be able to copy each style.

The only other issue I had was getting rid of my excess fat. I had reduced in size fairly substantially without using fat reserves as the energy to do it which meant I now had excess that didn't look good and there was no great reason to keep it for emergencies because my cells produced more energy than I could use. My normal methods for getting rid of excess fat was increasing my metabolism or making my body less efficient in absorbing food. Neither of those techniques were going to work when my body didn't need the energy from food and just wanted a few elements to replace what was naturally lost. Celeste didn't have a weight problem and there was nothing in her DNA that I could see that would allow her to eat normally and not put on weight. My guess was that she ate very rarely.

I loved food, so I didn't want to use that method. Initially, I used my micro telekinesis to move the excess fat into my gut to get rid of it normally. I didn't really enjoy that process. I wouldn't have to do it every day and I could set my gut to be very inefficient but that usually meant the gut bacteria ate more which resulted in bloating and gas. Option three, using my micro telekinesis to break apart the chemical structure of fat, join the carbon atoms together to make diamond, attach the hydrogen to oxygen that I wasn't using for anything else to make water. So fat to diamonds and water. Thank god for partitioned minds so I didn't have to think about it and could just act normally.