George, Thursday, January 22, 2009
All the local TV and radio stations were broadcasting an urgent message in the morning.
Small, hard, irregularly shaped pink bits are scattered all over town, but most concentrated in the area around the north end of Collins Street. They aren’t harmful, but you could slip on them. If you find any of these bits, please do not eat them or let your kids or pets eat them. It is safe to pick them up with your hands, but if you’d rather not, feel free to use plastic bags. NANA wants to recover these bits. There are red bins labeled for NANA to collect these bits at all schools, post offices, many major stores, and on street corners in the Collins Street area where the most bits appear. Please simply deposit them in the bins.
Accompanying the TV broadcast were images of street sweepers trying to collect the bits off the roads before dawn, and some close-up pictures of some of the bits in somebody’s hand. They were small, about fingertip-sized.
They intentionally didn’t say it in the message, but it was pretty clear to those who knew about powers that this was related to a new manifestation of a power. So everybody left their houses for school carrying sandwich bags, dog poop bags, and the like. Those who were riding the bus picked up their streets down to the stop; those who walked to school picked up along the whole way, and anybody who was a few minutes late for the first class was excused.
We saw volunteers out at other times in the day trying to locate bits in the grass and in other areas where they might be missed.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
I don’t think any of us were surprised to get summoned to NANA this morning. We were asked to show up at the testing entrance at 9, and I recognized some of the people, including the girl I helped last year who had to make her body out of geometric shapes. She actually did make a body that looked like a girl now, though the parts not covered by the simple dress she wore made me think she’d just added boobs to the body she was using before. I was pleased to hear, when she entered and checked in at the desk, that she was now speaking with the vocal parts I helped her design.
It was about 10 minutes past nine when a man who identified himself as Greg came into the room and called roll for our group, by code name even though he didn’t use one, and we then all followed him to a room with a big table in the middle covered in thousands of the little pink bits.
“Welcome, everybody. As I said, I’m Greg, and my usual role here is to be a powers tester. However, the person I am supposed to test is this pile of pieces you see on the table.”
There was only one shocked face. I think the rest of the group assembled here either knew already or had guessed we were picking up parts of a person.
“I don’t normally engage in non-powers-related work, but until we can get this person back together, this is non-testing NANA business, and I’ll be using my code name Kingsman. But I’m not a doctor, nor do I have relevant powers, so I’ll mostly be letting the rest of you run this effort and possibly bringing in additional help or supplies as needed.”
A woman I recognized then spoke up. “I’m Stephanie, but while we’re here today on official, non-testing business I’ll be using my code name Miss Tix. That’s M-I-S-S T-I-X. I have the power to see people’s souls, so I know that there is, beyond any expectation you might have, a living soul embedded in these little pieces. A boy named Jesse developed powers late Wednesday night, and spontaneously burst into these pieces when he did so. There aren’t any conventional life signs coming from them, but I identified the living soul still attached to the pieces, so we sent out the alert you may have seen Thursday morning. We believe we have recovered nearly all the pieces. There are at least enough pieces here that the soul can fit into the psychic cavity that the pieces represent.”
Then a man who came in with us said, “I’m Dr. Springfield, and like the others, while we are assembling this patient today I’ll be using my code name Illinois. My training as a medical doctor and understanding of anatomy make me suited to help out here, and I also have powers as a healer, so if we get this body together but he starts bleeding from the missing pieces, I can probably deal with that.”
A younger woman, the shocked face, introduced herself as, “Janice, code name Tech Wiz. If we have some idea how to use computers to solve this puzzle, I can probably do it.”
She invited me to introduce myself next, and I said, “I’m George, code name Samantha Quicksilver, and these days I am equally comfortable in male or female shapes. I’m a teenager who developed shapeshifting powers a couple years ago. I originally didn’t have any control of my shapeshifting powers, but then I was possessed by a ghost who did understand how to use my powers while she was in my body. Eventually, Miss Tix helped me and the ghost get along, and she showed me not only how to use my power, but also a great deal about the human body and the differences between male and female bodies, which are far more than those of you who have not studied anatomy might realize. And maybe that’s why I’m here. I also helped the last member of our crew with some of her problems.”
I gestured to her. In the slightly robotic but fully intelligible voice she now used, she said, “I am Petra, code name The Geometer. I am also a shapeshifter, but a very different one; I have to define my shape using geometry, so it’s actually quite involved for me to have this somewhat human-looking form. Samantha helped me figure out some of what I was doing wrong, and also showed me how the vocal cords work so that I could learn to speak. But I’m more comfortable as combinations of cubes and spheres and other such shapes, and if I don’t have a working vocal system, I sometimes write words in the air. I have a fixed amount of matter, so don’t be surprised if you see me floating on no legs today while I’m turning the legs part of my matter into tools to assist with reassembling our patient. So, Illinois, since you suggested we are attempting a reassembly, how exactly do we go about that?”
“Well, that is the problem. If you look at these pieces closely,” Illinois said, pulling down a camera I hadn’t noticed was mounted on the ceiling high above us almost all the way down to the table, and turning on a screen which provided a magnified view of the parts, the pieces have little tabs and holes which are irregularly shaped. So I think the body fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, but a three-dimensional one, with thousands of tiny pieces which are all essentially the same color. But we have some pairs of pieces we managed to find matches for by hand, which are over here, and I invite you to take these apart and look at both pieces of a pair closely and confirm how closely the shapes match.”
The paired pieces were passed among those of us who were seeing the collection for the first time, and we all agreed they looked like exact matches.
Geometer suggested, “The pieces seem basically cubical, except the faces of the cubes are very irregular. If we have a way to get 3-D photos of the faces, Tech Wiz, could you match them up?”
“I think I could, if someone could help me understand the image format.”
Kingsman spoke up, “We do have a 3-D camera. Let me go get it.”
While he was gone, Geometer continued her idea. “I can turn most of my body into a bunch of little boxes, just covering this whole tabletop with boxes maybe 1.5 cm square, which I think should hold even the biggest of these pieces in any orientation, and help to keep track of them, and rotate them for the camera. Tech Wiz can process the images and figure out which pieces go together. That should let us build a network of all the pieces, and you can basically call out pieces by number and orientation, and I can lift each one from its box in turn for you to add to the growing body framework.”
“I think that could work,” Tech Wiz said, and the others agreed.
Kingsman came back with a whole cart full of parts: the camera, a set of rails and a mechanism to move it in three dimensions, and the hardware to hang the rails from the ceiling, and the computer that had the software on it to interface with the camera, which wasn’t standard webcam software. We actually moved to another room because this one already had the other camera mounted on the ceiling and what we wanted was a completely different type of ceiling mount.
There was a document for Tech Wiz to study which explained the file format of the 3-D images, while the rest of us participated in varying degrees in the assembly of the camera and its rails, and in moving our patient’s pieces to this room. And then Geometer made his big grid of cells to hold the pieces. But at first we just put one piece in while Geometer and Tech Wiz planned the sequence to capture all these images quickly.
“OK, Geometer, please print a number on the bottom of each cell, small, at the top, where the camera will see it when you are holding up the piece.”
“I don’t really do colors, but what I can do is make the numbers be holes. The table is a different color from my body and it will show through.”
She did that to Tech Wiz’s satisfaction and then proceeded to number all the cells that way. And then they worked out exactly how Geometer was to hold and rotate each piece to photograph all its sides. Once they got going, they could do all six sides of a piece in 3 seconds, 4 seconds including the time to move to the next cell. That meant we did 15 pieces every minute, 900 an hour... but there were 5000 pieces, so it took five and a half hours, during which they sent some of us home. And then it was a couple hours for Tech Wiz to program a solution to match all the images and run it. So it was in the evening when we came back to assemble the body.
Tech Wiz was actually able to piece together the 3-D photos to give us an image of what Jesse looked like.
“Wait, didn’t you say this was a boy?” Illinois asked.
“That is what we were told,” Kingsman replied. “But it doesn’t take a medical degree to see that’s not true now.”
It looked like the girl we were building was in a standing position, so we decided to go from the feet up, assembling her layer by layer. Tech Wiz brought up a display of all the piece numbers in the layer and codes that explained how each one should be rotated, Geometer raised up those pieces from their boxes and put them in the right orientations, and all the rest of us grabbed the pieces and put them together. As the legs got taller, Geometer also helped by providing some supports to keep our work from toppling over. Still, we had 160 of those layers and it was taking us a couple minutes to assemble each layer.
After one of the layers, Miss Tix called out, “Stop, please. This is going to take all night. I need sleep.” There was a general consensus of agreement.
Kingsman asked, “Geometer, can you hold the shape of the bins overnight?”
“Yes, I actually don’t sleep. But it will help if I can get some more time on the tanning bed.. I can take care of that myself, though. I had a session this afternoon, and usually one session a day would be enough for me, but I’m working my power pretty hard today.”
With that, Geometer’s arms disappeared, leaving just a head and torso under her dress. Somehow none of us were surprised, given what we had seen from her already, that she could just teleport part of her body to another part of the building.
And we left Jessie’s legs standing there, assembled up to the thighs.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Sunday morning we gathered again and continued building. We skipped the arms when we first encountered them, and waited until we had the torso fully built to the shoulders before branching out on them. Unlike the straight legs, the arms were in a random position which wasn’t self-supporting.
Before lunch we finished assembling the statue we hoped would turn back into a person, but... it didn’t. We just had a statue of a girl. We were missing only 10 pieces, each of which was a smaller piece on the outside.
Miss Tix said, “Let me take a mental look at her.”
We all cleared out of the way to let her do her thing. After a couple minutes, she informed us, “Her soul’s there, but the psychic cavity is still fragmented and the soul can’t occupy it. She’s basically shut out of being able to connect with her body, though she’s still attached to it in a loose way. I think we need to physically fuse the pieces.”
“How would we do that?” Tech Wiz asked.
Kingsman responded, “Well, we tried applying pressure to the pairs of pieces we had joined at the start. They remained separate bits that we could pull apart by hand.”
“What are they made of, anyway?” I asked. “Could they fuse by heating them?”
Illinois answered me, “As odd as it seems, they are made of living matter, the flesh of a body, just transmuted somehow into this solid form. The striations we saw as we assembled the inner parts of her body correspond to the various organs and tissues. Transmuted by her powers, I guess, and because of that, anything might work. I would test it with two pieces first.”
We agreed that was a good strategy, and Illinois pried two adjacent pieces from her shoulder, then covered the rest of the naked body with one of those plastic gowns from a doctor’s office. We took them elsewhere, where Kingsman scrounged up something ceramic, I think, to hold the two bits together, and we put it in an oven, gradually increasing the temperature, while Miss Tix stared intently, looking for the two soul bits to merge. They finally did when the oven got to a temperature of 300 F, and after some cooling, the pieces seemed permanently fused but otherwise unchanged. Illinois snapped them back into the space they came from and closed up the other bits around them.
While we were discussing the plan to fuse her whole body the same way, Geometer asked, “If we heat her whole body to 300 degrees, won’t she be cooked alive when she comes back to life?”
Illinois answered, “Well, that’s possible. We will want a setup where we can pull her out quickly, and I can apply my power as a healer. But it’s likely that her body has permanently transformed into this material and won’t be harmed. Other people in Normal have powers that allow them to resist heat that would cook ordinary people’s bodies.”
So now we looked for an oven large enough to cook her entire body for long enough to get the temperature up to 300 degrees, and pull her out quickly. Once they determined NANA didn’t have one, they sent some of us home while they looked for a solution. We got the call later in the day that we were going to use a pizza oven in a restaurant after they closed at 9 PM, so the group of us, who were all emotionally invested in seeing this girl live now even though some of our powers were no longer relevant, all showed up at this restaurant, along with its owner.
At our direction to heat the oven to 300 degrees, the owner set it that way. “Normally it would be hotter than that for pizza, but I understand we are most certainly not making pizza tonight.”
Our group rigged up a device to hold her body in the oven but pull it out quickly, so in she went. She was in there for about 10 minutes when we saw her stir to life, and we pulled her out. She thanked us for saving her, and seemed normal for a bit, and didn’t bleed from the few missing pieces, but after a few minutes she froze solid and went still. We all looked disappointed. Then some of her pieces started popping out, one of them stinging Tech Wiz where it hit her.
“Put her back in!” Illinois exclaimed.
Most of her body was still in one piece on the movable rack, so we put her back in the oven, and soon she was alive again. It seemed that not only was she not harmed by being at high temperature, she could only live that way. The reason she was frozen and had shattered was that she was too cold being at normal room temperature.
The pizza shop owner produced an oven mitt, which one of the group used to hand the piece that had struck Tech Wiz back to our now very hot girl, and she put it into the right spot on her body, where it fused with the other pieces again.
“You know where it goes?” Tech Wiz asked.
“Yes, I know where all my parts go. And I know where they all are, sort of. Thank you for reassembling me. I was aware of what was going on that entire time, but a lot of it was hazy due to me being in too many places at once.”
So some of us went home again while they called in other people to build a large mobile oven that they could put her into, and get her safely out of the pizza shop before business the next morning.
We confirmed later that when her pieces popped out, if they had enough energy, they were able to phase through normal matter for a time. Some of the pieces that had popped out that night ended up in the street in front of the pizza shop and in the alley behind it, and one was three blocks away. She gave Kingsman a list of the approximate locations and other NANA helpers went looking for them.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
We all got to see her the next weekend via a video feed.
“Hi, everyone! You can call me Jessie. That’s spelled with an I-E now. I have a code name too, Some Like it Hot. I’m not sure there’s ever going to be a need for what I can do, but maybe they’ll have me pulling people out of a fire or something.”
Everybody laughed.
“I requested this call with you all to thank you for putting me together; I literally wouldn’t be able to live without your efforts!”
“You’re welcome,” a few said, and Miss Tix added “That’s what NANA is here for.”
“Not sure how many of you were involved, but I also appreciate you returning my lost pieces to me. I was able to snap those into place, so I have fewer blemishes now. Just this one and one on my thigh. These are both out in large parks somewhere.”
She pointed to one notable gap on her left cheek where a small piece had never been found from the first time she exploded all over town. She had decided on calling those holes “blemishes.” Apparently they didn’t cause her any trouble beyond her appearance.
“So this is my new home, which other people from NANA helped build. Sorry, I can’t turn the camera, but I can step out of the way and let you see what’s here.”
All her furniture seemed to be made of enameled metal. She held up her bed to show it was a perforated metal sheet attached to a frame with springs all around, the kind of thing that substituted for a boxspring on some bunk beds where vertical space was tight, but for her it was the entire bed. It didn’t look comfortable for a normal person, but maybe it was fine for a person who is basically made of stone. There was a folding metal chair and we could just see the edge of what I assumed was a metal desk in front of the camera. She had a window, a mirror, and a closet of some sort.
“Everything here is made of materials that won’t burn or melt at temperatures in a standard household oven, which is basically what I need to live. You saw how I needed to get up to about 300 degrees to activate, but I actually like it hotter, around 450. I usually keep it around 350, though, because that’s all my special computer keyboard and mouse can take. I have an insulated box you can’t see below the camera that keeps them safe when I turn up the heat.”
“How does the computer operate at those temperatures?” Tech Wiz asked.
“It doesn’t. It’s in the next room at normal temperatures. There are hookups for the special keyboard and mouse, and my monitor and camera are behind an insulated window. Think of the oven window and you’ll have a good idea what this is like.”
“Do you eat?” I asked her, wondering if they just slid raw meat into her room and let it cook in there.
“No, it seems that I draw energy from the heat. I told you that I like it hotter, and part of that is that I get more energy from the heat at those higher temperatures. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, either, so I could put away the computer, turn up the heat, and lie down and take a nap, and get up a couple hours later full of energy.”
“What happened to the mobile oven?” Kingsman asked.
“Oh, I still have it. I had to live in it for three days while they were building this room. Then NANA didn’t have any other use for it, so it’s on a trailer in my family’s back yard and they can back it up to the outside door of this room if I need to go somewhere. We practiced that once to make sure we can do it in case of emergency, but we just went around the block once and then back here. You remember how I didn’t freeze immediately when I came out of the oven? I can take a step or two outside, and as long as the mobile oven is already heated up I’ll be fine.”
Miss Tix asked, “How are you feeling about being a girl now?”
“It doesn’t really bother me. The isolation is more of a bigger thing. Being able to connect over the computer is essential, because it’s impractical for me to meet with people face to face. If somebody’s rude, I can turn them off. If I don’t want people to know I’m a girl, I don’t have to have the camera on. I do have a window and an intercom in my house but it’s just used by my family members. Inviting someone over just to have them chat with you through a window is pretty pointless when we can chat online. I might be having a tutor over here though, since I can’t very well go to school and explode all over the other kids, and for that I will have the tutor here in person some of the time. And as for the other aspects of being a girl, I don’t go to the bathroom so I can’t complain about that sitting down thing, and it’s not likely I’m going to have anything resembling normal periods either. The doctors want to scan me eventually, if I don’t show any obvious sign, to see if I have an active reproductive system, but even if I do, I might not ever... use it.”
There were a lot of implications in that statement, but Geometer responded with, “I didn’t have a chance to mention it when we were busy putting you back together, but I’m a shapeshifter of a sort, and I was originally a boy. I didn’t originally want to be a girl either, but eventually I chose to make my standard body look like a girl.”
“Why did you do that, when you can make any shape?”
“Any shape, but not any size. I have a fixed amount of material. I have to make a huge portion of my insides hollow just to make a girl body that doesn’t look like a little kid. To make a man-sized body, it would be an absurdly thin shell. And I don’t grow; it seems like I have the same amount of matter forever. But like you, I don’t use the bathroom or have periods; I just look like a girl.”
“We can start a club! I’m sure there are others like us in Normal,” Jessie laughed, letting us know she wasn’t serious.
“Even if it’s not a club, I’ll keep in touch.”
I shared my story before we ended the call, or at least an abbreviated version of it, leaving out the awful fates of Samantha’s former host bodies.
Jessie responded, “So she innately had the ability you lacked, to control your shape? And in exchange for that, you showed her how to live a normal life again?”
“That’s a good summary of it.”
“Sounds like a pretty good deal for both of you.”
Samantha was mentally agreeing in my head, and I replied to Jessie, “It has been.”
When nobody else had more stories to tell, Jessie ended the call, promising to keep in touch with all of us.
