Chapter 1

I was 19 when they figured out I was more than a low-tier meta. Wait, that’s not a good start. These stories always really begin with the origin. Should I start with my first drone? Or my first wife? No, I guess that wouldn’t give you enough background. I suppose the best place to start would be a week before the mandatory testing we all get at 13? Hmm, that still leaves out a lot of things. Very well, I shall do what my father always told me. Start at the beginning, go to the end.

I was born August 1st, 1982 as David Augustus Tanaka; which might be a decidedly odd last name for someone of primarily spaniard-russian descent. My grand-pere always blamed that on the poorly-educated court official who settled a dispute some 40 years before the civil war. But I digress. I was one of four children born to Charles and Rebecca Tanaka, but with all the extended family living together, it was not uncommon to see a few dozen kids of around the same age wandering around the Clan’s holdings in Eastern Tennessee.

Our clan has owned four mountains, and everything between them, since we bought it from the Natives way back in the early 1700’s. We were some of the only whites that stayed out of the Anglo-Cherokee war. That, and pretty much every other Indian war. Frankly, the only reason we could keep them all this time is the remoteness, combined with the usefulness of the terrain. Well, that and trading with the natives while not being utter dicks to them.

While it may be almost 50 miles in diameter, there was only a couple hundred arable acres. What wasn’t forest or swamp, was solid stone or cliff. Three of the mountains were more cliff than anything else, and the fourth, well, that was the other reason we could afford it. Gold. Granted, the deposit wasn’t anything worth a huge mining operation, but it was enough to ensure we could keep the taxman and the banks happy.

Sadly, when I was nine, my father’s job required we moved away to Baltimore County, less than 3 miles from the state fairgrounds. To say the four of us were upset to move away from all our cousins, and the closest thing to Heaven we had ever known, would be a drastic understatement. It didn’t help that our new place was a small rowhouse with a backyard the size of a postage stamp. The fact that our clan was always a just a wee bit insular didn’t do us any favors when it came to dealing with outsiders either.

If I hadn’t found the few square miles of something approaching a forest within biking distance, I wouldn’t have stayed sane that first year. The inanity of the public school system that wouldn’t let us test out of subjects my seven year old sister Tanya had already taken seemed like the cherry topping on my frustration sundae. (They were learning multiplication and division while we had already covered quadratic equations.)

Of course, kids can bounce back from a lot more than adults think, so within a year my sisters had already started acclimating to the new situation, and I was on my way.

It was probably the not acclimating that saved my life back then. It was summertime and I had been hanging around the school grounds at Timonium Elementary when the older brother of our class bully decided no-one was going to beat up his kid brother. Ignoring of course, that even the kid brother had four inches and at least ten pounds on me. By the time that little dust-up was over, I had a black eye and bruised ribs, but the older bully had a broken nose while the younger one was puking his lunch from a gut punch. I called it a win, but knew I was going to get worse from my dad when he found out. Of everything that has happened since, I dearly wished that was the case.

A lot of people remember the Villain Z-Day in the late 80’s. Granted, he was never going to be a top-tier meta, but his ability allowed him to modify viral structures to create horrific results. Which he used to terrify people into doing what he wanted. On July 7th, 1991 in Los Angeles, he was finally cornered by a M-SWAT team after dosing 43 women with a tailored virus that essentially turned them into willing sex slaves not much smarter than your average rock. Before he died, he told them that if they didn’t back off and let him have his fun, within a month, millions would die and the US would cease to exist. Unfortunately, they decided to call his bluff.

As a result, he was almost right. I suppose most would say God was on our side, as the vast majority of the 122 devices each he had set up in practically every major US city had malfunctioned, causing what should have been a massive release of a heavily modified rabies virus, to be merely horrific, instead of apocalyptic. If it wasn’t that the majority of the virus was no longer viable due to poor storage conditions, then the release was screwed up with only hundreds infected, instead of tens of thousands. Still, the final death count was around 3.7 million people, and there are still isolated outbreaks occurring today. Sadly for me, he really disliked DC. They’ve found over a thousand of those devices all over the Baltimore/DC region, Many of them along the Beltway, the major highway that encircles Baltimore. Including three surrounding the fairgrounds.