Unity 1: The Reality Drive - Chapter 1 (Patreon)

Okay! Sorry this is a bit later than I usually post things. Last week was kind of hellish from a writing PoV. Plus I really wanted to get this one right. I haven't done much 100% original fiction here, and there have been a few requests for it. I mean, I've done stuff - even stuff set in this 'verse' before - but this is my first genuine attempt at something that's a story first.

(As such, I'm really interested in feedback for this one - what works, what doesn't, what stood out, how readable it was, anything really! Let me know through comment or DM!)

All that said - I hope folks enjoy.

-

I reached into the flames, my hand carving down a straight path of clear air to cleave the heat in two, pushing the two new gouts apart. The fire split, fierce tongues of angry red parting grudgingly at my insistence. The gap wouldn’t last more than a fraction of a second, but it was long enough for me to hoist the unconscious lab assistants I was carrying out past the threshold and towards open, clean air.

The university building was on fire. The blaze was roaring, smoke was pouring out of the windows, alarms were blaring, people were scurrying about in a panic, and crowds were starting to watch with a mix of concern and awe. If you’ve ever attended a fire, you know the drill. And if you haven’t, well, lucky you. There was no one rushing in to save the people trapped inside – the fire department hadn’t arrived yet, and apparently there weren’t any other heroes around. Just me, then.

I dumped – well, I mean… I carefully put the unconscious victims I was carrying down on the grass, near where a group were hurrying out from the medical office. I didn’t have time to carry them inside with the fire still going – there were others still in there – but I was sure they could handle things from here. It wasn’t their first rodeo. This was the third fire that had broken out on campus this month. At least this time they didn’t have to deal with swarms of clockwork robot invaders, or giant monsters trying to chew on the atrium, on top of everything else.

They didn’t see me do it, obviously. I was moving way too fast to be seen by the human eye. If they were sharp, they might have caught a red blur, but with the light of the fire behind me I doubt they would have noticed. Speedsters like me don’t hang around unless there’s a good reason to – we have too much to get done. Like saving another two dozen people from getting killed in a growing inferno. Just for instance.

I am… I was… No, I am a superhero. My name is Lightning Strike, which might sound corny but I’ve been doing this stuff since I was an impressionable teen who thought the name sounded good, and honestly, you get used to it after a while. My friends and co-workers – the ones I know while I’m on the job – call me Strike. My enemies call me “Speed Bitch”, or sometimes “Glark” (because it’s hard to enunciate through a punch to the throat, I imagine). My teammates call me Boss, and the media calls me “The Leader of Unity”, which is a title I have a lot of problems with for a whole host of different reasons.

But that’s now. This story happened long before all… Well, most of that. I was still a rookie hero, only ‘on the job’ for two years, all of it solo. I’d never found my cool friend who could tech all of my problems away, or a fun sidekick to share my ‘dark journey’ with. I was, by other people’s standards, twenty years old, and by my own, a fucking idiot. And I was saving lives.

The building had been occupied – hell, it had been pretty full, as I recall. It was midday during the winter semester, class was in session, and It was cold outside, so most people were hanging out indoors. That was fine, for the most part. Despite what TV might tell you, people tend to react pretty calmly to the fire alarm. We all know the drill. There had been a generally quiet evacuation, with only a few mishaps… Except in places close to the fire itself. There had been more than a few mishaps there.

That was where I was focusing my attentions. I’d done a quick scan of everywhere else – caught a few people tripping up or put a stop to a few nasty accidents – but I’d quickly zeroed in on the main problem. The science lab on the third floor. It was definitely where the problem had started – and where the fire was at its worst. I pulled people out of the surrounding labs and classrooms – not everyone had been able to flee, or they’d been injured. Either way they were swiftly out on the lawn outside, where a temporary treatment centre was being set up. By the time I was done – I had to carry everyone carefully, I still wasn’t confident about taking anyone else up to my maximum speed back then – the fire department had shown up and they were working to contain the blaze. Apparently there was a problem – they were yelling at each other and pointing at the sprinkler system… Which hadn’t turned on.

Third fire that month, remember? I guess someone had forgotten to refill the tank. I took care of it – there were a few buckets in a storage shed, and the campus wasn’t too far from a river. Not a perfect solution, but beggars can’t be choosers. With any luck the system would start in time to stop the fire getting even worse.

So it was only after that that I took the time to investigate. And I don’t know if that wait made me miss something important. It’s definitely possible – knowing what I know now. The culprit might have still been there in those brief moments – I might have had the chance to stop her. But there’s no point in crying over spilled milk – when I did get in there, she was gone, and the place was a disaster.

The lab was trashed. It was like an explosion had gone off smack in the middle of it, trashing and burning everything in its path. If anyone had been in here when it happened, they were dead for sure – or that’s what I thought at the time. Whatever they had been working on was ruined, beyond any hope of repair. What had happened here?

I wasn’t exactly an investigator at the time. I was a rookie, even if I was coming to the end of my tenure in the position. I’d never had training or instruction on how to deal with a crime scene, so for the most part I tried to stay away from them. This time was different – this time I was looking for survivors, so I ended up in the heart of things. I’d be much more careful about something like that these days… But I got lucky. Aside from a few scuffed footprints, I didn’t leave much of a trace.

I did notice a few things, though. Like how the blast marks on the cracked tile floor spread outwards from the centre of the room, and how powerful the fire had been in there. I’ve run through a few in my time – flames don’t mean much to me – and these ones had been hot. They’d seared right through whatever protective measures had been in place – I could still see the charcoaled remains of padding and protection, melted puddles of metal that could only have been protective shielding – and burned a hole in the solid concrete roof. You didn’t get fire like that normally, not without a lot of work behind it. Had they been studying something dangerous here? Or could it have been a super villain attack?

The first option wasn’t as unlikely as it seemed. The university’s labs were some of the finest in the city, and they were often used by various companies, even ones you’d expect to have their own resources to pull on, for investigation and testing. They could definitely have been up to something that had gotten out of hand in here. And, by the same token, they might have been at work on something a supervillain might want to get their hands on.

I should have looked into it more. Who knows what else was there. If I’d paid attention, if I’d actually tried to be a hero instead of half assing everything… It might not have been the disaster that it almost was. Might not have been a problem that still keeps me up at night. But like I’ve said, I was an idiot back then. And when I searched through the rubble and found no one alive to rescue – and honestly, after I nearly lost my lunch at some of the remains I did find – I backed out, and left the room for the police.

Moron.

… Alright, yeah, anyway. I stopped by the first responders, helped out how I could. Ferried supplies, put out fires, the usual crisis management thing. I was pretty good at that stuff by then. I was a… Not a registered hero, no, I… Heroes where I’m from don’t register. We tried that once. It went badly. Never again. But I was a known hero. I had a profile, a name that had gotten around, I had ‘friends’ on the force who were happy to see me after I’d caught a few bullets for them.

Boy, those dried up quickly once things… Ah, nevermind. That’s a different story. Whatever, the point is, I worked with the emergency services as best I could, and got a few thanks for it. I even got mentioned on the news as a key part of why there were so few casualties. Oh, yeah, I mean, I was glowing from that. I was on my way to being one of the big-time heroes, like Miracle Maiden or Tempo! They were…

… They were the biggest thing…

I… Ah, y-yeah, sorry. Distracted again. Those two were members of… of Unity. It was – and, I guess, still is, our biggest super hero team. Those guys weren’t just your local friendly super, either, not like me. They were global, they responded to crises all over the world. Saviours that protected the entire planet. At the time they seemed larger than life to me – impossible idols. Hero celebrities. I dreamed of getting to meet them one day, or even maybe somehow becoming one of them.

Don’t have dreams, kids, they’re fucking dangerous.

They were also… Yeah, I think I have the timeframe right. They were also missing. All of Unity was. They’d just vanished one day, a couple of months earlier. The world was still kind of reeling. The whole of human civilisation waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even the villains were nervous. And us heroes… we were all trying to step up. Not to- not to take their place, I mean, just… We were trying to keep things together. Working harder than ever. So that the world would still be there when Unity got back. When our heroes got back.

It was the equivalent of a classroom full of children after the teacher has to step out suddenly, thinking back. It was never going to last forever.

I’m getting off topic. Where was I? Oh right, the news report. Yeah, that stuck in my mind, because… Well, half because it was my name up on the screen, or my hero name, anyway, and half because… Because it was wrong.

“Sources at the fire department say improperly stored chemicals in one of the storage rooms were the source of the blaze…”

I blinked as I watched the reporter deliver the line in front of the burned-out building – the building that was already being marked out for renovations and repair. The city was good at rebuilding after disasters. It wouldn’t have been standing otherwise. But I knew what she’d said hadn’t been true. I’d been in the middle of that inferno – I knew it had started in the lab. Honestly, I’d been pretty curious to hear what had actually gone down in there. And now…

… Now I was more curious. Someone was lying. Someone was covering something up. And I wanted to find out who.

That was when I actually decided to become an investigator, I guess. And I knew where I should start.

-

My powers woke up at midnight on my eighteenth birthday, on the dot. I know this, because when I woke up the following morning, it was still midnight. Yeah, I was the boring kind of kid who was in bed asleep at midnight on her 18th, I know, I know, whatever. The point is, I woke up to a dark, frozen, silent world cast in unending moonlight – and I had no idea what was going on. 

I’m not sure how long it took me to notice that I hadn’t just woken up way early. I remember I eventually got bored of trying to get back to sleep and went to make myself a snack. The fridge light didn’t turn on, that stands out. The TV wouldn’t turn on either, when I went to sit down and watch something. The clocks were all frozen at twelve. It eventually clicked that something was wrong.

And, I mean, ‘Oh wow I suddenly have super powers’ isn’t the first thing your mind jumps to when you realise the world is wrong. Hell, as soon as I realised I thought maybe it was some supervillain plot and ran to tell my parents. I was still living with them back then. Thing is, when you’re moving so fast that seconds become days… Uh. Other people don’t really… It’s hard to perceive that other people are… breathing. Or that they have a pulse. I had a dark few hours.

Sorry, I don’t mean to bring down the mood. No one was hurt or anything, luckily, and eventually I worked out that the problem wasn’t with the world, it was with me, and I managed to slow down. I’m just giving you an example so you can start to understand how fast I am. Which is pretty damn fast, for the record. I told you that I’d been on the job for two years at the start of this story, but you get that it’s a fair bit longer than that by my perspective, yeah? 

Anyway…

The university hadn’t paused. Most people didn’t even get the day off. Business went on as usual. Which meant I didn’t have much of a problem infiltrating the place. Someone might have noticed an odd breeze as I slid in past them through the front door, and then I was rushing through the halls, looking for my target. It was a bit tricky, those corridors were pretty narrow and I had to squeeze a few times to avoid accidentally knocking anyone as I ran past. I didn’t quite have the hang of running on the ceiling at the time (fun fact: At high enough speeds gravity becomes kinda optional) and, uh, I have pretty good control but getting a tap from someone running at just below the speed of sound can be preeetty painful, yeah?

Well anyway, I got in without much difficulty. A few moments on an unattended computer informed me of my destination: the office of Linda Hayel, Professor of Advanced Tech – and the Lab Supervisor for the day of the fire. She seemed like someone who should know a little something about what had actually happened. And if not, she’d surely know someone who did. That was my logic, anyway.

Her office was on the second floor, past an awkward spiral staircase with far too many people on it – because, well, today was a busy day for her. Her lab had burned down the day before, you know. All sorts of questions being asked, all sorts of schedules to rearrange, so, so many phonecalls to make. Which meant that she was more occupied with that than with using her computer. Her computer that was logged in with her account, and that had all of her email inboxes open.

Do you know how many emails professors get a day? Holy crap. It might have been over four digits worth. I’m fast, and it even took me several careful trips around her room, ducking out of sight as she paced backwards and forwards across her carpet, to find enough time to read through them all. To be fair, I blame the computer. She didn’t have a mega processor that was fast enough to keep up with me – who would? And boy if you thought dealing with lag was difficult while living at normal speed…

Most of those emails were boring class stuff. Students asking for extensions, admin demanding stricter regulations for coursework, Professors bitching about students and admin… Standard workplace crap. Plenty about the fire, about how they were dealing with it, about various students using it as an excuse for being late for their deadlines despite those deadlines being the previous week, the occasional line of gossip… But not much useful.

Not until I found the email from King Industries.

I should explain. King Industries was… and is… a megacorp – one of the biggest entities in the business world. They had their fingers in every pie, from computing to agriculture to cruise ships. Led by their CEO Reginald King’s undeniable genius, they’d gone from a small tech start-up producing their custom company OS to the business behemoth of the entire world in less than two decades.

Annnd they were also involved in pretty much every kind of scam, swindle and crime you could imagine. Oh, nothing provable, nothing was ever proved about these guys, but they didn’t get to the top by writing a bunch of cheques, if you know what I mean. There were even rumours that they had their own corporate supervillain on the payroll. Their rep was… sketchy. Troubling, if you kept an eye on the news – but totally ignorable if you didn’t. For most people, King Industries was the ‘royal mark of quality’, or some stupid slogan like that.

I’d always been a bit of a news hound, though. Actually, at the time, I was… Ah, no, sorry, never mind. What I was doing in my secret identity – And yeah, I had one back then – isn’t really relevant to this story. Maybe if we get to know each other better. Not like it matters these days.

So yeah, finding an email from them addressed directly to Professor Hayle? That got my interest. Enough that I paid attention to the subtext of what it said.

“Professor Hayle,” It started, because it was professional like that. “We agree that, given the nature of the device and its potential ramifications, the research should be halted and moved to another, more secure facility. Obviously, safety is our highest concern, and the risk of an accident in the middle of the city, while minimal, is unacceptable. We believe we have an appropriate location where the device could be stored, and perhaps studied further, and will be moving preparing to move it as soon as possible.

Your expertise has been invaluable to this project, and your insights critical to our advancement of understanding. We would love to have you and your team continue your work with us, though we understand this would be difficult considering your positions at the university. As you know, we’re quite prepared to offer a competitive salary – one of our agents will be in touch to discuss details of the transfer. If you’re amenable, they’ll be happy to discuss your future with us as well.

With thanks,

S. Alexander, King Industries.”

It was dated about an hour before the explosion.

This was it. I was sure – whatever this ‘device’ was, whatever the research was about, this had been the key to it all. This had been what was in the lab when everything went nova. But what did it mean? Just knowing a few ambiguous words wasn’t going to answer any of my questions.

But I knew who would.

The Professor blinked as she sat down in her chair, seeing the King email pulled up and read through on her screen. “When did I…?”

And that’s when I spun her chair around, looming over her as I rested my hand on her armrest. I wouldn’t call myself particularly intimidating – my hero costume is rather classical, as in, literally some kind of ancient armour from a much, much warmer country than the climate of the northern united states – but when a hero shows up in your office looming over you, a lot of people tend to get nervous.

Wasn’t expecting her to burst into tears though. Uh, I didn’t do too well with that.

“W-woah, woah, hey, calm down!” I said, retreating back at least three paces. “No crying! I’m not here to hurt you!”

You can see why I don’t call myself intimidating.

“I’m sorry!” She cried. “I didn’t think anyone would get hurt! You have to believe me!”

Professor Hayle was a rather dumpy woman in her early forties, I think, and she could wail with the best of them. I was, as I’ve mentioned, a young idiot, so this was stupidly effective against me. I don’t think she was faking, honestly – one look at her and you could see the stress of something had been building up inside her head – but wow, dropping my guard just because a middle-aged lady started crying? Embarrassing, and more than a little dangerous. Those women pack a punch.

“Sure, sure,” I said, waving my hands and trying very desperately to get her to calm down. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m not here to, you know, throw accusations or blame people or whatever.” Obviously, I’d quickly turned to flat out lies. “I just want to know what happened.”

“You… You do?” She rubbed at her glasses, looking up at me sadly. She looked thoroughly miserable.

“Yeah.” I nodded, and then looked over at the open email. “That project… This ‘device’. It was in the lab that caught fire, wasn’t it?”

The good Professor nodded, her shoulders drooping. “Yes. It was. You have to understand, when King came to us with the artifact he’d found I had no idea we were dealing with something so… so dangerous. So powerful. It looked harmless. Just a bunch of metal scrap, really.”

“Reginald King brought you a pile of scrap metal and you gave it an entire lab?”

She shrugged half-heartedly. “He said his company had found it in some temple buried up in Alaska or… Alabama or somewhere. One of the archaeological expeditions he sponsored. It seemed unlikely – even for scrap, the metalwork indicated far more sophistication than we expected for that time period… but he was convincing. And he had a very big chequebook. We took it on for easy money… and then things got… strange.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Strange? Strange how? Did things start mysteriously catching fire?”

Because I was a smartass, you know?

She went pale, but shook her head. “No. No, the, ah. The device – the artifact. It started reacting to our tests. Exposure to any kind of power source made it react in ways we couldn’t explain. It was like it was drawing in any kind of energy it could find…”

It didn’t sound particularly impressive to me, and that must have shown on my face, because she quickly tried to move on to the convincing stuff. “Well, when we noticed that, we decided to see what happened when we introduced greater and greater amounts of energy into its environment. And the result was always the same – it would all vanish, gone to – to nowhere! Until finally… Finally, I guess it had absorbed enough.”

“Enough?” I tilted my head. “What do you mean enough? What happened?”

“It turned on.” In my life, I don’t think I’ve ever heard quite as much weight put into three little words. “The device, it… it activated. It started glowing, and floating, and…”

“And catching fire?” Still a smartass.

“No!” She shook her head furiously. “The fire wasn’t- it wasn’t because of an experiment! Someone did that- did that deliberately, they had to have. They… They must have wanted to steal it, oh god…”

I still didn’t have a clear picture. “Steal what? This device, what was it?”

“It was…” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, his is going to be hard to believe. We didn’t either, not without significant testing! But it… It…” Her face scrunched up, as though she was trying to force the words out despite herself. “It… rewrites reality.”

The room was silent for a long moment. I weighed up the many ways I could respond to that statement. In the end, I went with the classic. “What?”

Hayel hung her head. “I know. We don’t understand how it functions. But if you possess it, hold it in your hands while it’s active… It gives you the power of a god. Any wish, and desire, it’s yours. We were moving it about the lab while Riley was talking about getting takeout after work. Suddenly there was a fresh pizza on the counter. She joked about wasting her wish on food instead of getting a million dollars, and then there was a briefcase full of cash there too. She, ah. She dropped it after that.”

She seemed serious. Dead serious. Everything about her, her face, her position, her eyes, all of it begged me to believe her. “We only conducted a few tests after that. Tried to see how powerful it was. Made sure it wasn’t just a… a dream summoner or whatever, but no. We changed the makeup of our lab, got all the latest equipment. We… We changed the past, just a little, made it so Riley came in to work with a different tie. She didn’t even remember coming in with the old one.” Her voice cracked, and then croaked “We moved a star constellation…”

She took a breath, a calm coming to her, in direct contrast to the increasingly forceful hammering in my heart. “We ended up calling it the Reality Drive. It was that or God Machine, and we really didn’t want to get too religious about it. That was what Johnson said. Obviously, power like that is dangerous. We all agreed. All of us are… were good people, once we realised what we were dealing with we were horrified. The device could be the most deadly weapon ever devised, capable of erasing humanity like it had never been! We had to contain it, maybe even find a way to destroy it!”

She was a smart woman. Maybe not all that creative, thinking back – she was looking to King to hide the thing safely -  but she was smart. If anything, she understood the danger of what we were dealing with far, far better than I did.

Well, to be fair, I didn’t understand much at the time. “I don’t… I don’t get it. How can some ancient pile of metal do all of that? It’s impossible!”

And she looked at me with the most understanding eyes I had ever seen. “I know. I know. But it does it anyway. However it works, whatever it does, it functions to turn your will into reality. Whatever you decide while holding it, whatever you want, just think it while holding the device and… and…”

She trailed off, blinking. Her brow wrinkled, and she put a hand to her head as if she was nursing a headache. “Sorry, I… Look, we all decided, we all agreed, the Drive had to be dealt with. But someone in the lab – I don’t know who, but they were the only ones who knew – someone must have decided they wanted it for themselves. I don’t know who – I was the only one not in the lab when everything exploded, but… But…” She paused again, the wrinkle on her brow becoming a furrow. “I’m sorry… What was I saying?” She flicked a lock of blonde hair out of her face.

Her hair was brown.

I stepped back, my eyes widening as I realised what I was witnessing. A yellow wave was shooting through the Professor’s hair – no, more than that, her hair was growing longer, too. It had been a rather short pageboy cut, but now it was starting to creep down past her shoulders. She looked at me, confused. “W-what are you looking at?”

“I… Your hair…” I waved vaguely, unsure how to explain what I was seeing. It was my first time witnessing such a transformation – and I didn’t realise how serious it would become until it was far too late. 

“My hair? What do you…” Worried, she pulled a lock of hair forward and then stared. “Wait, what?”

But I’d noticed something else. While she was staring, her eyes had swirled from brown to blue. Her glasses had even completely disappeared. And as I watched her clothes were starting to shift as well – her reasonable flowery shirt and black pants combo morphing into a rather ill-fitting pink crop top and micro-skirt. 

The change didn’t go unnoticed. She shot out of her chair, panic written all over her face. “It’s the Drive! The reality drive, it has to be! Someone’s using it to… to…” And then her expression clouded over again, hand clutching her temples. “I… Hard to think…”

“Professor?” I reached out to try to steady her, but she slapped me away.

“Listen to me!” She snapped, her hair reaching down to her hips and shimmering like a golden wave. Her body was starting to change now, her chest pushing out to fill her pink top, and her hips growing out to pull her skirt tight against her skin. “You… You have to find the Reality Drive – you have to stop whoever’s using it to… To, like…” She blinked and shook herself. Years seemed to fall away from her by the second, her skin clearing up and losing any sign of wear and tear. She was starting to look like a teenager instead of a middle aged professional. “To like, do all this totally lame stuff! You gotta, like… gotta…”

She groaned, and a shudder ran through her. The light in her eyes dimmed, and her determined expression died. She stood there, confused and staring at me blankly. “Like, what was I saying?”

My jaw was hanging open. I didn’t know how to process what I’d just seen. A middle aged, overweight mousy professor had just been turned into a young blonde bombshell right before my eyes. “Professor?” I sounded like a broken record. “Are you… okay?”

Dumb question, but I mean I’ve already told you I was an idiot.

“Okay?” She blinked, and then smiled at me with white, sparkling teeth. “I’m, like, way better than okay, I am fine! Look at this bod!” She reached up and gave her breasts a squeeze, nearly popping them out of her top. “I’m fuckin’ hot and hot for fuckin’! Wanna take a tumble?” Then she wiggled her hips suggestively and blew me a kiss.

My young and naïve self probably blew a fuse. She’d never been confronted with overt sexuality like that. I mean, I grew up really sheltered, what can I say? Either way, by the time I’d managed to fumble my way towards some kind of response she’d jumped me, and I spent the next five minutes trying to extract myself from a bimbo grapple without hurting her while she spent the same time smothering me with kisses and trying to hump me. Professor Hayel was gone.

And my hunt for the Reality Drive had just begun.