Three Weeks After One Week to Live (fiction)

Three weeks ago, I was told I had one week to live. I had dropped fifty pounds in under a month, and I was having trouble sleeping, so I had gone to have my doctor check it out. He performed one test, then another, then another. There appeared to be tumors all over my body. With how widespread the tumors were, and how many different systems they were sitting in, I was told that there was no viable course of treatment, and that I needed to start saying my goodbyes.

The first week came and went. I spent some time with family, I spent some time with friends. I still couldn’t sleep, so I stopped trying. I still haven’t slept since I was told my prognosis, and I’m not in the least bit tired. I lost another thirty pounds over that week, and I was looking pretty good for a dying man. I was looking better than I could remember ever having looked. For the first time in my life, I had a six pack of abs. I began wondering if maybe I should ask if the mortician could put me in my casket in my swim trunks instead of a suit.

My digestion was getting a bit weird, but I chalked that up as my body shutting down. Thirty three years was a good deal less time than I had hoped for, but I supposed that, through most of human history, that was about the average people had been able to expect. I was angry for a large part of that first week, but I also was grudgingly that I wasn’t feeling physical pain. In fact, I was feeling great.

I had never really been one for exercise, but in the middle of the night, while everyone else was sleeping, I started going running. I was so frustrated, and so full of energy, and I guess some part of me felt that if I ran hard and fast enough that I could get away from this doom that was chasing me. Running was exhilarating. I’d been staying at my parent’s place, to be close to family as I was supposed to be fading away; there was a park three miles away, and I was able to make it there in eighteen minutes with energy to spare.

My glasses started making my vision all fuzzy, and it actually reached a point where I could see better with them off than I could see with them on. It wasn’t worth going to have my prescription changed though; I wouldn’t be wearing the new glasses long enough to offset the cost.

I went in to see some specialists at the end of that week, and they wanted to run more tests. It wasn’t that they thought they would suddenly discover a way to help me, it was so they could try to find out how my case had happened, so that they could prevent or treat it in others, later. They were especially interested in taking more living tissue samples from the tumors, because they didn’t fit the mold of any similar cases. They were careful not to say anything to get my hopes up when they asked me to come back in, but they did tell me that my case might be something other than cancer.

My vitals were taken, I was weighed, measured, questioned, x-rayed, scanned, poked, prodded, poked again, and then asked more questions. Every time I talked to the doctors, they seemed more befuddled and flustered. The apparent tumors had not grown or increased in number, so that was good. In every other way though, I appeared to be incredibly healthy. I told them about my late night runs, my lack of sleep, and energy level. It was decided that I needed to take some physical fitness and stress tests to get a baseline for where my abilities were currently, so that any additional short term increases, and then the decline of these abilities, could be tracked. For good measure, if they were gathering metrics on every other area of my condition’s progression, it was also decided that my memory and cognitive functions should be assessed as well.

My blood-work came back with anomalies in more areas than I knew blood tests could measure. This, plus all of the other unusual aspects of my condition, led to the specialists on my case (who were growing in number and areas of expertise) deciding that I needed to be kept in the hospital for the rest of the course of my illness, to both increase the amount of research that could be performed, and to control any possible spread if it were found that any aspect of my disease were contagious.

Over the second week, I started gaining weight back, but all of the weight gain was muscle and bone density. I stopped having bowel movements entirely, but there was no buildup of fecal matter in my large intestine. Instead, my digestive system was breaking down and absorbing one-hundred-percent of what I ate, and any waste was being excreted entirely through my urine. My physical fitness kept increasing in every way simultaneously, and my memory and cognitive functions were also increasing.

I think I should have been terrified by what was happening to me, but after mostly accepting that I was going to die, I was mostly just curious about what was going to happen next to me. I still assumed that I was going to die, but at least the process was being painless and interesting. I was spending what time I was not having some test or another performed in a hospital room with not much to do, so I spent my time going to the internet and learning more about how all of the processes that were being upended in my body were supposed to work. I had not really been that much into biology before, and it may just be the very emotive personal interest that I now had in this information, but almost everything I was reading about was fascinating and made sense with little effort on my part.

Mental pursuits had rarely held much difficulty for me, but the rate that I was beginning to absorb and connect various areas of knowledge was truly invigorating. Each new facet of knowledge led into a dozen other areas to explore, and while my research still orbited around the details of my condition, the orbit did continue to widen into a growing sphere of subjects. The metrics the people researching my were using began to show a leveling off on my increase in memory and cognitive functions, but they admitted that this may very well be because I had risen above the point where the tests they had available were truly accurate.

 At the end of the second week, I also began to be more and more certain that I could feel the wireless signals put off by certain devices in and around the hospital. Of course, both I and my physicians assumed that this was just me finally showing signs of mental decline. The tumors were starting to grow slightly, as well as becoming much denser. My blood stream was becoming more and more contaminated by unusual proteins, and a few of these proteins looked like they might be some kind of, previously unknown, incredibly complex, virus.

The possibility that some kind of virus was changing my genetic structure began being seriously considered. Needles had began bending when used to inject or draw blood from me more frequently than could be dismissed. My muscle cells, taken as tissue samples and viewed under a microscope, had begun restructuring to have a multi-filament structure that was not just an aberration from a normal human muscle cell, but was unlike any studied animal muscle cell. This seemed to account for the fact that, while my muscle mass had been increasing at an uncanny rate, that my increase in functional strength notably exceeded what would be expected for the level of mass gain I was presenting.

Full quarantine began to be put in place around me, as the risk of whatever was happening to me being contagious became much more real. The feeling that I could feel the wireless signals around me also was strengthening, to the point that there was some amount of pain from it. Then, wireless devices started malfunctioning in my presence. The more upset I became, the more marked the effect was. Once it was positively determined that I was actually sending out some form of electromagnetic signal from my body, my situation changed drastically.

An attempt was made to tranquilize me for transport, and, while I complied, my body did not. Each time they tried to tranquilize me, I metabolized the drugs in only a few minutes. I don't know where they brought me, but I believe I am a notable distance underground. The room I'm in seems to block wireless signals, which is a relief, as they were not being at all comfortable by the time I arrived here.

I have began to see colors I have no name for, that I believe to be quite a ways into the infrared and ultraviolet ends of the light spectrum. I can smell with a precision and breadth of scope that I can only assume means that either my nose is now tuned to detect elements and compounds far beyond the senses I was born with, or that I am now experiencing hallucinatory delusions. I suppose those options are not mutually exclusive. Several of the machines in the room I am held in have components that smell delicious, and I am developing cravings to taste them. The fact that cravings usually result from some nutrient that one has a deficiency of is not lost on me. Neither is the knowledge that eating electronic components would be undeniably toxic to a human being. Which then brings me back to the question: am I a human being any longer?

My access to the limitless knowledge of the internet has been cut off, I am mostly left alone with my thoughts and perceptions now. I sit, and run through various thoughts, scenarios, theories, postulates, and questions. With my universe, that consists of this one room, containing myself and a few boring objects, combined with the fact that sleep is no longer a part of my condition, my attention towards self-evaluation has been nearly undivided. I have developed other skills that I will not record here, and you will certainly see some of them practiced soon, when I take my leave of this place.

I will be leaving soon, because I know that soon you all will realize that you cannot contain me any longer. I appreciate the curiosity that you all have exhibited towards my condition, partially because I share in the desire to know, but even more because it has resulted in you keeping me alive far longer than was safe. I leave this record of my perception of the changes I have undergone up until this point. It will be valuable if I choose to not allow myself to ever be found again, and perhaps be even more valuable if, once my development has gone even further, I return to benevolently guide you lesser beings into a new golden era.

I would recommend not trying to stop me leaving, but, not only would you not listen, but by the time you read this, I will already be gone. Instead, I will recommend that you not come after me once I have left. The things I will have done as I escape will provide a sampling of what would face those who would try to contain me again. I will not have to use all of the tools at my disposal to leave here,
and there is every reason to expect that my abilities will continue to develop as time passes. Time is on my side, not yours.

There will be a concern, I understand, that my condition may be passed on to others. However, I really must pose a question to any who might raise such a concern: Would it be such a terrible plague for all of mankind to ascend to a higher state?

- Note found in room of terminal brain tumor patient shortly after he tore off the monitors and IVs, stood up, ran out of his room to the stairwell, and dove headfirst down the stairs to his death. DO NOT DISCARD.

Path of the Kraken Part 1

Richard Howard heard the dark whispers in his dreams for years. He lived his pitiful little life surrounded by pitiful people for years while the whispers spoke of power. For years he went to school like a good little sheep, not ever doing as well as he "should" but doing as well as he was able to bear. In his dreams though, he saw what he could be, and whispers told him how to become it. He had the will, he just needed to shape and hone it.

Willpower grows with practice and exercise just like anything else. Eventually he decided to try what the mad whispering in his dreams prompted. He would be a predator who feeds on predators, not a sheep shorn by the shepherds. His weapon wouldn't be his arm or anything it held. It wouldn't be his hands he would use to grasp for power; it would be his mind.

Richard sat behind his cash register after he dropped out of college for the third time, stooped under the burden of debt and failure. He owed the banks for what they had loaned him. He owed his family for their support. He owed his friends for all they had done for him. He owed the world for every opportunity he had been given and had failed. The pressure in his mind built from the weights of his debts, the weight of what he could never repay. Bearing their weight he became stronger. He did not collapse under it, he walked forward, and he kept failing no matter how much he wanted to succeed. He walked the path of self destructive madness already.

The first mastery of his will was over physical pain. He would poke and prod himself, stand in awkward yogic poses, stretch muscles, and tell his mind to disregard the pain. Pain is only information, he knew it hurt, the signal could stop being sent. He still felt the pain, and it still hurt, he learned to be it's master not the other way around. The day he mastered pain was the day a scar was ripped off of his skin and he poured salt, lemon, and hot sauce into the wound without wincing. This was the first and easiest step on the path of the Kraken.

The next victory was over desire. This is not the victory sought on the path of Buddhism where you seek a place of quiet peace with no desire. This was a victory of a roiling chaos of desires growing higher and higher and honing his will to deny them all. He did not quiet his mind of desires, he sought them, fixated on them, denied them, and then sought more to deny himself. He learned new desires, forbidden desires, impractical desires, and impossible desires. He would place himself by the subject of a desire; focusing on how much he wanted, how much he yearned, pined, and thought he would die without the subject of the desire. He was careful at first not to fixate on desires that denial of could cause him harm. He would fixate on luxuries and forbidden things at first. He fixated at first on what he should do without. Then he branched out.

His search for new desires to fixate upon was twofold. In one direction was self denial of things that verged closer to necessity. On the other hand, he nurtured desires that went further and further into the bizarre and forbidden. He noticed that his occasional satiation of necessary desires merely whetted his appetite for more, so occasionally he tried whetting his appetite for the forbidden and bizarre as well with mixed results. Some of the dark desires were disappointing when indulged. Others did not disappoint in the least.

Some of the darker desires soon eclipsed hunger and the need for warmth. His will grew stronger. He lived an even more pitiful life than he had before he began to walk the path, but his strength had grown so much beyond what he had before been. His desires grew stronger and more ephemeral by the day, but his will became stronger still.

Then came the day when he learned he could hear the desires of others and push them towards or away from them. He learned he could move his hair and flex his fingernails. His will was no longer limited in it's control of his nerves and muscles. He tried to bend his bones to disastrous result. If he had not mastered lesser pains, the pain of manipulating his own skull could have killed him. His skeleton was limiting him though, it needed to go. He focused on the furthest bone on the first finger of his right hand; and compelled it from his body slowly and painfully, as it left he whimpered. He repeated the process over and over until there were no longer any bones in his right hand. He grabbed a steel conduit on his wall and crushed it with his grip that now was subject only to his diamond will. He had not eaten in months, he had stopped needing that long ago. He willed the other bones from his body; every last one, one at a time. The skull was the trickiest.

He washed the blood off in the shower, and stood in front of the mirror, practicing pretending he had bones still. That was when he realized he had much greater weights against which to push his will than desire now. He had the raw physics of the world to push against. He no longer needed to fixate on these desires, he no longer had to deny himself. For a moment he laughed harder than he ever had, and wasn't sure when the realization of what not denying himself anymore would mean hit him, and the laugh turned into a scream.