Chapter 1

This story takes place +25AF (After Fall)

“Welcome back, Lex, you are looking well.” Rosaria Rios was thirty-seven, slim, pretty in a studious kind of way, and at the top of her game. She had spent the last decade honing her craft and making a name for herself and now, with her name the first on everyone’s lips, I think she was feeling like she might be in over her head.

“Hey.” Lex mumbled, eyes down. ‘Try to make a personal connection with the patient.’

Rosaria Rios was lying. Lex knew she didn’t look good. She looked ill, her hair lank and lifeless, her face pale and her eyes bloodshot. The only reason she was here today was a sort of morbid fascination with Rosaria Rios, the Hero therapist. She wanted to know if she could shake her up, make her lose that ‘million-dollar poise’ and her ‘unflappable calm‘.

Hero Magazine had named Rosaria Rios the top therapist in the nation, and used those terms to describe her demeanor. They had actually gone on to call her ‘an unparalleled mind and one of the most influential people in a world full of Heroes’. Lex was shocked when her League therapist, a mentalist who was supposed to be one of the best, referred her to Rios.

“Let’s get comfortable and chat for a moment, okay? Great. How have you been, really? You were pretty down on yourself, your life and what you called your curse, last time we met. Has anything changed?” ‘Inquire about the patient’s wellbeing, prompting them to give their own status verbally, as a way of gauging their mood and mental state.‘

I had been doing this a while and she was a by the book person. I found it amusing, in an unhinged kind of way.

It was a good question, though, I guess. Has anything changed? Only everything.

See, I thought I got lucky and got missed by the PRIME. Here I am, twenty-six, no powers, no abilities, no nothing. I know there are a lot of us, something like a one in three have absolutely nothing, but it seems like less. I mean, I know one guy like me. Well, not like me, but normal, you know?

I wasn’t a bigot or anything, not like those purist fucks, but I was, you know, maybe a little prideful. I know it is stupid, but it was almost defensive. PRIME Pride parades, for fuck’s sake, like Gay Pride and Black Pride and Hispanic Pride and ... it goes on. As a plain, boring old straight white guy, I was feeling a little hemmed in, not gonna lie.

Then, one day, I am on a call. Woman by telephone reporting a mugging, though it could be a pimp and one of his girls, considering the address.

Me and Molly, my partner, we roll up quiet like, trying to slide in unnoticed so, if there is something going on, we can catch the bad guy. I mean, there is never one of those Heroes around when you need one, right? We still have a job to do, protect and serve.

We roll up and sure as shit, some pimp smacking around one of his stable. Doing a hell of a job on her too, based on the glimpse I get of his bloody hands, and that shit just pissed me off no end. I don’t care if she’s brown, purple, got six boobs or only three, beating on a girl so much smaller than you? Equality of the sexes, my ass, that shit don’t fly.

I grab the guy, put him up against the car and have the cuffs on him in a blink. He never even knows I am there until he is kissing the ‘DIAL 911‘ decal the trunk lid. Meanwhile, Molly is handling the victim, you know? I am sure the victim doesn’t want some guy being in her face after that, right? Molly is a wonder with this kind of thing, the emotional stuff. Great with kids, too!

But things go wrong. Really, horribly wrong.

There is a bang and Molly is falling. The girl has a gun! The pimp is trying to bolt and, while I don’t blame him, he is in custody and my first reaction is to hold on to him. Meanwhile, the other half of me is trying to pull my own gun and yelling for her to stop, that we have him, that he can’t hurt her anymore.

“Motherfucker,” she yells, in a voice deeper than Barry White’s, “it wasn’t me that needed saving, cracker.”

She shot me. Right in the fucking face. I can still feel it; the pain is amazingly sharp and clear in my memory, almost blinding in its intensity. As I fall, she, or he, turns and starts firing rounds into the cuffed pimp. I don’t know how many. I remember bouncing on the street once, seeing a flash of blinding white when my head hit, then nothing.

I woke up in the hospital, happily. Well, you know, as happy as you can be. It is probably the best possible outcome to something like this, right? I mean, it beats the alternative of not waking up. Usually.

But there is some confusion, see? They are asking me all these really weird questions and accusing me of all kinds of really crazy shit. No, I didn’t kill two cops! No, I didn’t steal a uniform, for fuck’s sake!

They brought in a mentalist and things get, if anything, even weirder, but calmer this time, with less yelling. The mentalist couldn’t read me, though I had been read many times in the past, it was a requirement for the police force! That was the key clue in this...

Emergence. It is such an unprepossessing word. (I got that from Rosaria’s article in Hero, great word, unprepossessing!) Emergence: To come into view, to be exposed after being concealed; the process of coming into being, or of becoming prominent.

It usually happens around puberty, or so they say. And not counting the first wave, way back when it all started, right? But it can be delayed. The longest delay on the books so far was an obese housewife in Ontario, that’s a state up north, who emerged at forty-nine after having a stroke. I have no idea what she became, they wouldn’t tell me, something about privacy laws.

Anyway, my case is not all that odd, at first blush. I was delayed and, when I emerged as a result of being shot in the face, the emergence also fixed the hole in my head and voila! I am no longer Alex Crawford, friendly neighborhood cop and good bowler; I am now Alexis Crawford, a cop on administrative leave pending a review of my qualifications and a determination, not of ‘if‘, but ‘how‘, I can best be employed by the department.

Firing me would be illegal, see, there are laws now about discrimination against those affected by PRIME; even Johnny-come-lately ones like me.

If my story had ended there, I might have needed some therapy, but I wouldn’t need Rosaria Rios, therapist to the stars.

My story took a left at Albuquerque and three days later, when I woke up, I was Alex again. I was confused, but elated, and wore my uniform to work! I hadn’t had the heart to throw it out and now I was happy I was so reluctant!

Two days later, while at work, I was bored out of my mind, watching a convenience store security video on the off chance the guy who robbed the place, cased it first. I fell asleep. Right there, head on the desk, the television still showing some guy pick his nose behind the register.

I woke up as Alexis, the uniform painfully tight across the bust and hips, but loose everywhere else. I think the scream that brought other officers rushing in, was the only thing that kept me from eating my gun that day.

It has been a year now. I change at random intervals, always when asleep. The longest I have spent without changing was six days, the shortest about four hours. I honestly get confused about who I am, about which public bathroom to use and have taken to wearing oversized sweats seven days a week because I am terrified of falling asleep in public and waking up looking like a freak show.

Now I am Lex. Suitably androgynous so I can freely answer when I am either sex, and that brings us back to today. Rosaria Rios is a mind-reader, that is her talent. She is exceptionally good and getting beyond the surface and find out what is really wrong.

However, I was her nightmare patient, I was immune to telepathy or any mind-reading or empathy. Something about my change made me opaque to them, so they couldn’t rely on their tricks and they hated it with a passion.

“Well, there is a new wrinkle, doc.” I said with a shrug, trying for nonchalant. “In fact, I think it is more than a wrinkle, it is a game changer, at least in my mind.” Lex said with an honest smile. It felt odd, pulling at muscles that hadn’t seen use in a while. This was actually fun.

“Oh? That sound interesting. Is it a good change?”

‘Maintain a positive viewpoint in the conversation, choosing your words carefully. Words with a negative emotional index can be leading to a patient who is looking for guidance from the therapist,’ Lex thought and had to hide a smirk.

“Well, doc, I think I will withhold judgement and let you decide for yourself. See, I was feeling down last night so I went up to the top of the McGuire building, you know the one, right? Seventy-two stories, over on Martin Luther King Drive? Anyway, I went up there, wondering if I would have the nerve to jump, you know? Not planning to jump, honest, but I like to test myself.” Lex said honestly, though she said it mostly because she knew it would annoy the therapist. They all hated that kind of thing.

Rosaria Rios looked a little strained, her smile faltering just the tiniest bit.

“So, I am up there, looking down at the lights and see, maybe, a dozen and a half blocks with the lights out. Last time I was up there, about six months ago, there was one block dark. Just one block without power. Now we got entire neighborhoods. I think to myself, things ain’t getting better, are they?”

“Lex, you should try to avoid negative thoughts. Are you still wearing that rubber band around your wrist? Remember the aversion therapy steps we discussed?”

“Yeah, I remember them, doc, but I didn’t last night. Nope, I had forgotten all about that stuff. Well, let’s be honest, here. You know me, I deliberately didn’t think about that stuff, I wanted the morbid thoughts. See, I was up there for a reason. Doc, I pulled out my service weapon ... did you know I still have it, even though I am not a cop anymore? Yeah, see, ex-cops get a lot of shit from the public they used to serve. They get to carry a gun forever, for self-defense.”

“Lex, why did you have your gun with you, last night?” Doctor Rios asked, concern in her voice.

“Doc, really? You have to ask. You know what, it doesn’t matter. I know you like rhetorical questions; it makes you feel smart. I get it, I do. I had it so I could put the barrel in my mouth and pull the trigger, doc. You are never going to fucking believe what happened when I did ... Headache.”

“Sorry, but ... I don’t understand. Headache?”

“Doc, when I emerged, it was because I was shot in the face, and I remember it being painful, but only for a second or two. After a while, I found I was picking at the memory, questioning it, asking myself if I remembered it right. I mean, you don’t remember the pain, right? You remember feeling it, but not the pain itself. I read that was a way for the mind to protect itself.

Anyway, I was convinced that I had played it up, that it all happened too fast for me to actually feel it. So, I put the gun in my mouth, pointed up at an angle, you know? I pulled the trigger and shot myself. That forty-caliber slug should rip through the roof of my mouth, then rip through my brain, hit the inside of my skull and blow chunks of brain and bits of bone all over the roof of the building.”

Doctor Rios seemed caught between confusion and horror.

“Yeah, fucked up, eh doc? I was wrong, by the way. If you were curious. It was painful the second time I died too; it was not an exaggerated memory. I was also wrong about something else.”

I watched, fascinated, as she began to sweat a bit. Just a few beads on her forehead. Rather than waste this, I continued.

“When I woke up an hour later, there was no blood, doc, none. I was absolutely horrified ... not by the mess, hell, there was no mess here, just a flattened slug. Wait, before I go on, you get that, right? You understand? The bullet couldn’t penetrate! I have no idea how that works, but I am pretty sure it was the concussion, you know, of the round impacting the roof of my mouth, was the culprit. The energy contained in that small metal object, flying at thousands of feet per second, stopping in an instant, can you imagine? Ooh ... maybe the force snapped my head back and broke my neck!

“Anyway, that’s fascinating and all, but we are getting off track. The reason I was horrified was because I woke up as my old self, as Alex. I woke up thinking maybe, just maybe, that meant something. That my suicide fixed something.”

There was a long silence, and I could see her thinking. No, not see, see, not like a mind reader or a mentalist or something, but her lips were moving and her eyes twitching. Her fingers were drumming and her toe tapping and she was nodding or shaking her head, depending on where she was in her mental argument, and it was fascinating to sit and watch.

“And you woke up as ... Lex, this Lex, today, right? Alexi, not Alex. You killed yourself as Alexi, woke as Alex, slept as Alex, woke as Alexi again. Nothing changed.”

“Bravo, doc! You got it faster than I thought you would. You really are a sharp cookie like the magazines say.” I said, reaching into my purse and pulling out my Glock.

“So, what do you say, doc, want to see something neat?”

Okay, so it wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be. Poor Rosaria had a nervous breakdown and is, last I heard, taking a sabbatical. So am I, in a way.

The courts allowed the League to admit me for observation and therapy and I am of mixed mind about the whole thing. When I am being honest with myself, the therapy is actually helping a bit. I mean, the suicidal feelings have gone away, though I don’t know how much of it is due to acceptance of my fate and how much is the unshakeable certainty that I am pretty much immortal.

Yes, I have spoken to my therapy team about that and, given my history, they are not all that keen to argue the assertion. If they do, and are wrong, it could derail my recovery, right?

It’s day seventy-two of my court-mandated one-hundred-and-eighty-day psychiatric hold, and today we have group. Group therapy is where we all sit around and make up the most outrageous lies we can pass as true, and see who calls us on them.

Okay, that’s not what we are supposed to do, but I swear that is the real agenda.

“Settle down, everyone, take a seat, please. No, Natalie, you can’t move your chair out of the circle, we talked about this. This is a group exercise and isolating yourself in the corner is not conducive to engagement as a part of the group.”

We all chose a chair. Today, I sat next to Donny. He was not my favorite inmate, but he had the added bonus of not being violent and today, I was Alexi and, despite the claims of feminists, I was not as strong and physically capable as I was when I was Alex.

I tended to choose a new person every time we met. Mostly to keep any of these folks from thinking I was their friend, but also because I was fascinated by the dynamic that was developing in this group. We were all sex changed Type Twos and had all been here, in this group, for more than a month so far. No new admissions, no releases, and that was passingly strange. This place was generally grand central station!

On my other side was Alicia, she was a male to female and was dating men, but was arrested after a BDSM scene went bad and the sub had to be hospitalized, in intensive care. She was twisted, loved causing pain to men and excused it by saying she knew what men were like, she used to be one.

Next to her was Mark, a female to male. He changed at thirteen and tried to commit suicide shortly after. The root cause appeared to be his homophobic parents who tormented him for months, driving him to it.

After Mark came Tom, who was female to male, ex-fitness instructor for high-dollar female executive types who were her clients. I guess they didn’t want a man ogling them and yelling at them to push harder.

Then there was Carrie, male to female whose wife was a Type One and he, she, took it very hard. She was deeply depressed and was skin and bones. Her family admitted her, afraid for her health and her life too.

Donny, my buddy for the day, was female to male too, and is flamboyantly, ostentatiously, campily gay by anyone’s standards. Drag queens ask him to tone it down, he is embarrassing them. He desperately wants surgery enough to go to South America where it is legal.

The thing is, you can’t revert. Not surgically, not with hormones, not with magic. Nothing works. Every person who has tried has failed miserably and some of the surgeries, if not fixed by a sufficiently powerful and talented bio healer, can leave the person a freak, a monster.

He refuses to believe it, to accept his new life. That part, I get.

Me? I’m something of a celebrity here, at least among the patients. Some pity me, some envy me, but they all come and talk to me eventually. I think I spend as much time talking to the other patients as the doctors do, and certainly much more than I spend talking to my own doctors!

“Okay group, today let’s start with Mark. You still want to share, Mark?”

“Yeah, I think I do.” Mark was soft-spoken and a little effeminate, but an all-around nice guy. He looked around the circle, catching everyone’s eyes, one at a time, as if gauging how we would take it, whatever it was he was going to say.

“You all know my about my dad, I have talked about him enough. He is a raging homophobe and thinks that everyone changed by PRIME is really a god-cursed monster and blah blah blah, right?” We all nodded. We had heard the stories, and I think most of us, at one time or another, had held him when he was wracked by sobs.

“He was caught molesting a young boy at the mission where he volunteers. The one his church runs. He, his pastor, several deacons, and lay ministers, all caught red-handed. They were having a party or something!”

There was silence, absolute silence for about ten seconds. Ten, long, seconds. Then Donny started snickering and that got Alicia giggling and she got me laughing. It was ten, long minutes before the therapist could get the group back under control again.

Mark had been laughing along with us, and so hard he had the hiccups. For the rest of the group hour, when he would hiccup, someone would giggle.

“Okay, so, we all got that out of our systems, right?” George, the therapist for this session, asked seriously. That got a few more laughs, but when it calmed again, George turned and with a straight face asked Mark, “So how does that make you feel?”

It was bedlam. We used up the first half hour just laughing. It was ... cathartic. It made us all feel like we had won something, but none so much as Mark. He had been driven to suicide by his father, and his mother too, though to a lesser extent. The mental cruelty, the isolation and degradation that Mark had to suffer at the hands of his pedophile father, was beyond disturbing.

That the man was revealed for a pedophile, and probably one angry at his missed chance, since his target of choice was young boys, made us all happy for him and it was vindication for Mark, pure and simple.

The rest of the group session was pretty light hearted. We all asked Mark questions, many of them very well thought out and very telling. We let him talk it out, get it out of his system and I think this was the best thing that could happen to him. In fact, I would bet my pudding for the next month, that Mark was on the way out of here. Not today, or tomorrow, but soon.