Chapter 1

“I wanna be invulnerable like Captain Canada!” Chris Dunbar excitedly chimed in. He was the smallest of our group, the one who was most likely to be picked on at school. We tried to look out for him, but none of us were what you might consider big. Or in shape. Or tough, for that matter. We were just the nobodies.

You went to school; you know how it is. There were, basically, three major social groups. The Types, of course, tried to be the top dogs and they tended to be the most vocal about it too. Obviously, there were no Type 1s, but the 2s, 3s and 4s tended to be very open and in your face about the impact PRIME had on them.

The kids who claimed to be Type 4s like to call themselves heroes but, since very few of them had been tested yet, you were supposed to be eighteen unless you had something really major, it was mostly braggadocio. They had power, but was it enough to be a Type 4? Some were obvious, but not all by any means.

Then there were the Antis, those people who had rejected PRIME and everything about it, calling it divine retribution for sinners or, with one group, an alien invasion and genocide! Thankfully, they were a tiny minority in our schools.

The biggest ‘clique’ was, well, the rest of us and that big, amorphous mass was generally called The Nobodies. In eighth grade, that group was huge and there was some splintering into Jocks and nerds and band geeks, but as more kids went through puberty, the Nobodies got smaller and smaller.

“I want super vision, but I want what Vice President Martin has, plus the laser that Cyclops had in the comics.” Billy Granville was my best friend and my nearest neighbor of whole group. He was technically part of the Geeks clique, since he was the smartest kid in school, but he still mostly hung out with us dumbos.

“Man, I knew I was making a mistake hanging out with you crackers.” Milton Washington was a black kid, but also a huge nerd. We all tease him by calling him Steve Erkle when he pretends to be ghetto. The closest he has ever been to the projects is when his dad, the Deputy Mayor, drove him past one when they visited Disneyland. He likes to put on airs though, and tease kids at school by throwing fake gang signs and stuff. As if.

“Yeah, white bread mofos. I would ask for a strong pimp hand and mind control. Gotta keep the bitches in line.” He finished his thought, looking proud of himself.

“Yeah, then you could get a job at the pound, training rescues,” I said, getting laughs from Chris and Billy. Milt just rolled his eyes, but he grinned too.

“What about you, white boy?” Milt asked, elbowing me in the side. We were walking home from school on the last day, released for the summer at the end of our eighth-grade year. We had all hit the magic moment this year, hair growing where it should and girls getting much more interesting than in the past. We knew that if we were going to get hit by PRIME, it would be soon.

Naturally, it was the singular topic of conversation if nothing else held our attention at any given moment. I can’t say for sure about the guys, but it seemed like I slept, ate, dreamed and lived PRIME these days. The news, the forums, the stories ... it was all I could think about.

Me? I wanted gills. You know, like Prince Namor, The Submariner from the Marvel comics? I have been fascinated by the sea since I was old enough to know what a fishy was. Sharks, whales, sea turtles, coral, everything and anything about the ocean fascinated me. To be able to dive to the bottom of the sea, even into the Marianas Trench, it would be a dream come true.

“You guys know what I want ... I want to be Prince of Atlantis, the Submariner! I would lure you dorks out to sea and feed you to the sharks!” I said, laughing and dodging poorly aimed blows from my friends.

That started the same old argument all over again, about how Chris would laugh off the bite of a great white and Billy would slice them to ribbons and Milt would fight me for mental control and so on. It was no wonder the girls at school rarely gave us the time of day, they were right to call us dorks! But we were friends, and that was still more important than girls.

For now.

The first two weeks of summer flew by. Baseball games and pool visits and a trip to the beach, we were everywhere and nowhere and having a blast just being kids. Then Billy disappeared. Not, like, literally, but his Mom said he was sick and then, after a few days, said he was still recovering. That lasted two weeks! We spent a lot of time discussing it and, as we were wont to do, making up increasingly ridiculous scenarios to cover why he was not around.

“He’s a girl, I’m telling you! My sister is friends with a girl on his sister’s bowling league, and she heard that Billy is now Billie-Jean.” Milt said, his grin so wide that it was about to split his face in half. I knew the joke was coming, but Chris, that dick, got it out first.

“Billy-Jean, is not my lover. She’s just a girl, who used to be my friend.” He sang out before dissolving into gales of laughter with the rest of us.

When Milt caught his breath first, he cuffed Chris upside the head. “I worked all day on that one, you jerk,” he complained good naturedly.

When we caught our breath, we all agreed to meet back at the pool after lunch and split up, riding our bikes from the ball field where we had been playing catch, back to our houses to eat.

My parents were typical for the area. Dad managed an auto parts store, part of a chain, and mom worked at the bank, something to do with home loans and mortgages. It meant they were not home during the day but, since I was going to turn fourteen on the fifth of July, they were letting me stay home alone! It was awesome, at first, roaming around the house in my underwear, watching television while eating breakfast on the couch (a definite no-no in our house!) and stuff like that.

It got old pretty darn quick though, with no one to make me lunch, or to ask about my day. I couldn’t have my friends over either, not without my folks being home, but I could go to their houses. Well, Milt’s and Billy’s anyway. Or just Milt’s since Billy got sick. Chris’s folks worked too, like mine, but he had an older sister to ‘watch him’, though she was rarely around enough to even qualify. Still, no kids in the house when adults were at work.

Today, I was having bologna on white bread with mustard. Big yawn, I know. I also grabbed an apple and a soda from the fridge and camped out in front of the TV to see what was on.

A news station caught my eye as I flipped through channels. “Channel Twelve, News at Noon!”

“Viewers, especially those of you in the coastal town of McAllen, and north along Highway sixty-nine, a battle is raging in the skies and the death toll is already over a hundred. A pair of Supers, tentatively identified as Malice and Mayhem, the same pair that practically leveled the port city of Nuevo Christi last month, are facing off against Mizz Miracle and her super team. We have positively identified Miracle Girl, Texas Star and Iso, all well-known members of the Texas division of the North American Hero League.

“The battle began about an hour ago, apparently at the top of the Wilmington Business Tower. The tower, now little more than a pile of rubble, housed almost two thousand people at the height of the business day. The fight has been moving northward, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake.”

There were helicopter shots that looked as though God had reached down with one finger and dug a trench straight across the city, wiping out buildings, roads, overpasses, and people without a thought. There were fires raging, columns of smoke and piles of scrap metal that might have been the elevated train.

The phone rang and, without taking my eyes off the television screen, I reached over and brought the handset to my ear.

“‘ello?”

“Mike? It’s Dad! Look, don’t panic or anything, okay? If you need to, go to one of your friends’ house, and you can take the emergency cell phone out of the kitchen and bring it with you. I am heading downtown to see ... to meet with your mother. I’ll call when I know more, but it is a mess and traffic is all fucked up. Just ... just behave and stay safe, I’ll call you later.”

Dad sounded half-panicked and that made me want to panic. I mean, dad was the most level-headed guy I know, even more than the other dads. When the river overran its banks this spring, who did the other dads call for advice? My dad.

Mom ... her bank was downtown, not too far from the Wilmington building. She was okay, right? I mean, it was a couple of blocks away, and I am sure the power and phones are probably down. Maybe even the cell towers. That’s a thing that happens, right? I took a deep breath, and then another one. Dad was on it. Dad would fix it if it could be fixed, it is what he does.

The rest of my sandwich went into the garbage and I snagged the cell phone from the drawer where it lived. Mom and dad didn’t want me to run around with my head down over a phone screen all the time, and most of the parents of kids in our school seemed to feel the same way. None of my friends had personal cell phones either.

Mom and dad did have one they called the Bat Phone when joking around, or the emergency phone when they were serious. If I was going someplace, other than around the neighborhood, I mean, I would take it. It was for emergencies only, no texting, no surfing the web ... no porn.

As I rode my bike towards Milt’s house, I couldn’t help but think about the battle going on in the skies over the highway. I kept looking up, hoping I would see something and fearing I would see something as well. The whole supers thing was a cool topic to joke around about, but this was the down side of having people with powers.

This was 11 AF, the eleventh year after the fall of Malkin’s asteroid. Us kids called it that, anyway, and on the web, it was what everyone seemed to call it, but the parents didn’t like it and made us use old-time dates.

The first year was brutal but the recovery after the billions of deaths was bound to be. It took years before life seemed to start getting sane again. As for the changes, well, after the initial rush, PRIME settled into our collective lives like it had always been there, becoming enmeshed in our very DNA. Puberty was the magic time for people not affected in the initial stage. Puberty, when the body begins changing anyway, and now it was a time of fear and hope and it proved to be a way to level the field. Rich, poor, handsome or ugly, there was no rhyme or reason, just PRIME.

The world was remade the day the asteroid fell to Earth, and so we counted from that day forward. Now the Supers were battling overhead in our city and Billy was hiding out at his house, not coming out even for his friends and we knew, all of us, that a third or more of our classmates would join us as high school students changed from how we remembered them.

A bunch would have attended eighth grade as girls, and become freshman boys just months later. Some would turn the other way and Mexican kids could look Chinese, or white kids turn black. Green hair, a third eye, more than a quarter of the population in our city had something different about them.

Even my parents were changed. Dad was freakishly strong but otherwise appeared normal. Mom glowed in the dark and had gone completely deaf. She even had to learn to use a special cell phone called a TTY phone that would convert incoming speech to text. She got lucky because she had just enough mind-reading, and geared towards the speech centers, bizarrely enough, to be able to talk to people face to face.

Mom’s condition was so unique and so typical at the same time. People said I was crazy, but I thought there was some intelligent design in the madness. Supers with flight and strength also got invulnerability. A person lost their eyes but got echo location powers or far sight, like our mailman. Mom lost her hearing but could read the speech centers of someone’s mind and do it so well, some people didn’t know she was deaf. With lip reading, and sensing what they were trying to vocalize, she could carry on a face-to-face conversation as if she was hearing them speak.

Milt’s mom, Maddy, was a precog, but only about a second ahead. It was awesome to see her reach out and catch something Milt dropped before he had even released it. She likes to joke that Milt is the clumsiest kid that no one knows. His dad is totally normal, which makes him abnormal these days. That’s another family joke they all seem to think is hilarious but the rest of us just nod about.

Maddy, never Mrs. Washington, was there at the door when I arrived. She was drying her hands on the dishtowel she always carried around, and watching me as I walked up. She was funny, and liked to say she was re-living her teen years vicariously through us, and she was a second mother to me, Billy and Chris.

“Hey Mike, Milt is upstairs, come on in.”

“Thanks, Maddy. Dad called; he’s headed downtown to check on mom. Phones are down, I think,” I told her, knowing she would want to know.

“You got your cell phone?” she asked, giving me a brief hug and ushering me into the house.

“Yes, Ma’am,” I replied, even as she shooed me towards the stairs with a nod.

I had barely made it to the top of the stairs when the doorbell rang and Maddy turned back to open it again.

“Come on in, Chris, you know where to go.” She said with a smile and I watched Chris come in, waving at him from the top of the stairs.

“Up here, shorty!”

“Up yours, Mike!”

We were hilarious, just ask us!

The whole thing started all over as soon as Chris put his foot on the top step and the doorbell rang. Maddy rolled her eyes but Chris and I high-fived each other, laughing at the coincidence.

This time, Maddy just stared out the door for a moment, not saying anything.

“It’s me, Mrs. Washington, I mean, Maddy. It’s Billie.” The voice we could just barely hear sounded nothing like bold, brash Billy Granville. And, it turns out, it wasn’t ... at least, it wasn’t the Billy we knew.

A girl stepped through the door, with boobs and hips and everything where it should be, and in good proportions as well, but the girl had a sort of slimmed down, softer version of Billy’s face.

She looked up the stairs at the two of us and frowned for a moment, then scowled. “One word. One stupid word and I will use my new pyrokinesis power to set fire to your underwear,” the girl growled, sounding more than ever like the old Billy.

“No playing with fire in the house, kids. Take it outside,” Maddy said sternly, surprising all of us by how normal it sounded. We all grinned and then laughed at each other, even Billy. Or, maybe, Billie?

She scampered up the stairs, and I don’t know about Chris, but my eyes were following the fascinating changes in his anatomy. She ... bounced quite a bit more than he used to!

“Eyes on my face, perves. Don’t make me regret coming over here, okay?” Billie said when she reached the top, socking me in the arm. Well, that proved one thing, anyway, Billie still hit like a girl!

When I made the mistake of saying that out loud, she chased me down the hall and into Milt’s room with a yell!

The look on Milt’s face ... I will treasure that forever. It was awesome and he was practically drooling over Billie’s new look!

The next hour was spent peppering her with questions. I mean, we had all learned about this in school. PRIME: Morphology, Taxonomy and Psychology was a required course in eighth grade. We had learned about the most common and most visible transformation, the sequentially hermaphroditic reaction. It turned men into women and women into men, but it had some really unfortunate side effects for that tiniest fraction of the population that was truly intersexed! Horrible, really.

The sex change was so common, that it was hardly even a thing, really. Sure, some people had mental and emotional issues afterwards, mostly folks who were older, but the kids seem to take it in stride these days. We all knew someone who had changed, and no one seemed to have an issue with them afterwards.

For us, the four dork-a-teers, we knew older kids who had changed, but this was the first time it got personal, in a very real way, so we had questions we had been afraid to ask in class for fear of being ridiculed.

Billie was really patient with us for a long while, answering our questions in plain language that boys could understand.

“Most of the time they are just ... there. They don’t feel good or bad, they just hang there making my back hurt. Bras suck, big time, but if you try to run without one, your boobs hurt even more. Besides, mom said they are big enough they would start to sag and someday cause me knee problems.” Billie actually managed that last bit with a straight face, then burst out laughing at our shocked expressions. We joined in as we got the joke, but it was also a good release of tension for us.

“And no, Milt, you can’t see my tits. Or my bits. No tits and bits for you.” Billie said, shaking his finger in Milt’s face. In her defense, Milt was a bit of a titty hound and hadn’t taken his eyes off her breasts since she got here.

“Okay, one more, Billie, and a serious one. What about dating?” I asked, afraid and fascinated and repelled and titillated, all at the same time. What if I changed too?

Billie looked a bit, I don’t know, ill? Haunted, maybe? This was obviously something that was bothering her.

“I don’t know, Mike. I mean, you guys are still butt ugly, and I am not suddenly attracted to male movie stars or anything, but I am also not all that entranced with boobs anymore either. Whether that is because I have some of my own or because of biology, I just don’t know yet. I haven’t been anywhere but home and a trip to the mall for shopping. I am more than a little freaked over it, but I hope it settles out and I am not going to be some mental case about it.”

There was no real stigma around preferences, either before or after a sex change. Hell, the terms gay and lesbian had all but disappeared as a non-issue anymore but, on a personal level, we were young, still going through puberty, and we were all still leery of the huge change it represented. The PRIME changes had done away with transexuals as a segment of society and gender reassignment surgeries too. The psychiatrists reversed their standings and treated body dysphoria of any other kind as a mental issue, not a physical one.

There had been a great deal of breast beating and crying by the fringe Tumblr groups (not really sure what that means, Wiki says it was a social media platform, whatever that is?)

There were strident calls for lynching of psychologists and psychiatrists, and later mentalists who agreed, but with literally a billion examples to work with, it was overwhelmingly obvious that real, biological transsexual transformations created very real biological changes to thoughts and emotions as well as bodies. Mind readers and empaths agreed, and all pointed out the same markers in the people whose ‘trans’ leanings were mental aberrations and had no real basis in physiology or biology.

It was just another nail in the coffin of that field anyway. It wasn’t totally discredited, even after the Repeatability Epidemic toppled so many sacred theories; but it was now more of a counseling field. Psychiatrists were now focused on workable (livable) solutions to problems that were not physical; and medical solutions to those that were. Psychologists were all but gone and splinter nutcase disciplines like Social Science was back to being a field for advertisers.

“So, choices aside, let’s talk methodology. Tell the truth, Billie, have you?” Chris asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.

Billie blushed! She had!

“How was it?” Chris asked, leaning forward even more and then having to scramble to keep from falling over, much to our delight.

“It was ... different. It is a different feeling. Slower ... it takes longer to get there, but it was just as ... you know, when you cum, it is ... as a guy, it is all in the dick, but as a girl, it is, um, like, everywhere, but also in the good parts? I don’t know how to describe it. Different.” Billie was beet red, but trying to meet our eyes. She knew that she would have wanted to ask too, if one of us had changed.

“The multiple thing?” I asked. I had to!

She shrugged. “It felt like I could, you know, keep going, but it took me a while to figure it all out and get there and things were getting sore,” she admitted, finally breaking and hiding her face. “No more! Stop, please, I just ... I can’t, okay?”

We all sat back with a sigh. Wow. Just ... wow.

“Thanks, Billie. Really. This was very cool of you. I know if I changed, I would be shocked if you guys weren’t asking me about this stuff. I don’t know if I would have handled it as well as you have.”

She looked up and had a grateful expression on her face, but she had to get the last word in ... I think that is a girl thing!

“Well, you are all still dorks.”

We never did get around to talking about her PK that day!

Mom was okay! It was almost midnight before dad got to a spot where there was cell coverage again. It had taken him three hours, on foot because of accidents and traffic congestion, to work his way to the bank where mom worked.

She was still there, sitting on the steps with her coworkers. The bank was all shut down and locked up tight, but the cops had told everyone to shelter in place until they said otherwise.

Dad had arrived and had a loud, tearful reunion with mom and then, with six of her coworkers trailing along, they began the long trek back out of the city again. Getting out had taken almost twice as long as getting in, with frequent breaks for the older ladies who were tagging along.

They were all okay though, and four of the six were coming home with mom and dad, staying for a day or two until family could come and fetch them. I had camped out at Milt’s, using the spare bed in his room and we were still up chatting when my cell phone rang. They said for me just to stay with Milt for tonight, rather than make my way home in the dark.

Milt was next.

Three days after the Super battle over McAllen, Texas, Milton Washington started growing.

I mean, like, two or three inches a day!

They hospitalized him on the third day when he physically could not eat enough food to feed the growth and he started looking skeletal. Instead, they gave him four IVs, each one pushing a nutrient-packed formula that had been designed, over time, for situations like this.

It was two solid weeks before the growth slowed down. He went from five foot, eleven inches tall to eight foot, eleven and a half inches tall! He started out weighing one hundred and thirty-five pounds, almost painfully thin for his height, and ended up weighing in at two hundred and ninety-eight pounds, but still painfully thin! He was a walking, talking slenderman.

Well, walking was a bit of an exaggeration. He was barely upright and shuffling at first, but while he stopped growing taller, he was still on the IVs because he was growing wider and thicker. By the time he was released from the hospital at the end of June, almost a full month after he started growing, he was up to four hundred and twenty-eight pounds and looked like Luke Cage, but much bigger.

He didn’t have Luke Cages super strength (beyond what a nine-foot-tall muscle man would have anyway!) or the unbreakable skin the comic book Hero had, but he cut a mean figure when we showed up at the community pool the first time! That was awesome!

Good thing his dad was Deputy Mayor, they would need all the graft a politician could pull in just for the custom clothes Milt needed! He did confide in me that things were not as expensive as you might think, a lot of companies had expanded the size ranges of their clothes due to PRIME. Besides, he had modeling agencies banging at his door and throwing money at him. He was going to be very popular in high school.

Chris and I were left wondering who was next and, on my birthday, we found out.

Since my birthday is July 5^th, it just made sense to celebrate it on July 4^th along with America’s Independence Day celebration. I loved the idea, always had, because who got to have fireworks shows on their birthday? Me, that’s who!

This year would be different, though we didn’t know that starting out. The day began normally, with a pancake breakfast like mom made me every year. Being an only child was kinda cool. Then, we got things ready for the picnic we always had as well, and this year it would be down at the beach. We would hang out there all afternoon and watch the fireworks after dark, it was going to be awesome.

Except it lasted about an hour before things went wrong. We were playing volleyball on the beach, with Chris, Billie (in a one-piece, damn it) and me on one side, and Milt all alone on his side! He towered over the net and his arm span could cover from one side to the other, so it was as fair as we could make it.

We, I mean Chris, Billie and me, were losing by three points when Milt flicked the ball with his finger tip and it took a weird bounce, hitting Chris square in the face. It knocked him down and his nose started spurting blood like mad!

We were used to minor stuff, scrapes and cuts and sprains, so no one panicked at first. When Chris didn’t sit up or reach for his face and, instead, seemed to be sinking into the sand, we all freaked a bit.

He was literally melting! He was melting and sinking into the loose sand and his eyes looked terrified for a moment, then went all still and glassy. It took about three minutes before he was just a pile of goo and I ran for the water, puking my guts up.

Billie ran for the adults, but poor Milt just stood there, tears streaming down his face and his huge arms hanging at his side.

We talked, me and Milt, later on, and he knew it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t cause the adverse PRIME reaction in Chris, but knowing it and believing it were two different things. I felt guilty too, about running away and puking, but poor Milt was a mess. His mom and dad took him home and I know he saw a counselor, we all did, but Milt was a lot more careful around us after that. No more roughhousing and no sports or contact activities at all.

(I still believe that is what made him accept that full-time modeling contract mid-way through the fall semester at school. He took off for New York and I didn’t see him again until years later. Well, except for magazine ads and the odd billboard.)

Chris was gone. His body rejected the changes PRIME forced on him and his cellular structure just broke apart, refused to work together in whatever novel way that PRIME had dictated. Aside from the manner of his death, just that he was gone, that we couldn’t call him up on the phone, that he couldn’t hang out and just be with us, was difficult for all of us.

Billie and I seemed to be drawn together, while Milt seemed to pull away a bit. He never ignored us, and was usually around to hang out, but he seemed to find more and more reasons to be apart when we wanted to do things.

And don’t get the wrong idea, Billie in his new incarnation was cute, but she was still Billy, my old friend and buddy. We got closer as friends, becoming sounding boards as we started school, but it was never romantic. Maybe that is why she was the only person at school I told about my change. I wanted her help to fly!

Wait, that is, well, that’s not right, exactly. I mean, yes, I did learn to fly, eventually, but to start with it was more a floating thing, and I had no idea how to do it.

About a week after my ninth-grade year started, I woke up one morning and when I turned to get out of bed, I couldn’t. I wasn’t in bed, not really, I was floating above the bed and the act of ‘sitting up’ made my hair brush the ceiling.

Okay, try to imagine this. Close your eyes. You are sitting on your bed, at the edge, your legs dangling with your feet touching the floor. Your hands are planted on the mattress edge next to your thighs and your eyes are half-open as you try to wake up. All very familiar, right? You can actually feel it if you close your eyes.

Well, hanging there in mid-air, I did too. I could feel pressure against the bottoms of my feet, and against my palms and my thighs and butt, just like there was an invisible mattress in the air over my bed. I could feel it.

My eyes, however, gave me an entirely different story and I admit it, I freaked a bit, scrambling around on my invisible mattress while I tried to figure out how I got up here and how the hell I was going to get down!

After a minute, or maybe ten, of freaking out, I settled down and tried to think it out logically. While I was doing that, I was slowly sinking until I was sitting on my real mattress again and the problem was solved. For now.

The whole day, I was in a bit of a fog, my mind on the events of the morning. I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened in class, just that I had attended. During the day, I kept fearing I would start floating again, and then fearing that I never would float again. I even feared that I would, but that I would just float away and die from lack of oxygen when I got too high, or lack of food and water when I drifted out over the ocean or something.