Three days had passed. I couldn't return to the library, lest the matronly keeper decided to be concerned again for my sake and ruin everything. Since I was not allowed to complete the studies I needed, I would have to go off what I already knew and what the cells would tell me. No more run-ins with Terrance could be afforded, no matter the doubts he had instilled. The plan had to go through.

Now, brought out into the woods, I put what little I had learned into action. The environment was not optimal but it would have to make do.

In order to monkey it up, the natural behavior associated with the physical form had to first take place. The two implied each other equally. That natural behavior was rooted in the particular environment itself as if waiting to be discovered. Like a rut in the earth destined to be a stream in the presence of water.

Seeking out a rainforest, however, was not going to be my first resort. I made do with the old-growth oaks of the backwoods. Climbing them for hours on end, I began to see my body change. Proportions shifted slightly, but that was not going to carry me the full way. It was mostly to correct the digits on my hands and feet.

The origin of any given adaptation was a tricky thing to reach consensus on. For all the reading I had done, there were serious limitations, I was learning. Not only in recreating the right stimulation, but in even knowing what that stimulation was.

Yet I tried to believe that my Power could bring me the rest of the way. Its subtlety might have, I hoped, go so far as to register my social exile as a kind of stressor. No such luck, by myself in the woods.

No matter what I did, subjecting myself to different temperatures and exercise; forcing myself to walk upright, it would not create the final product. I didn't care about perfection, I only needed safety at a critical glance. 

The process had, at last, brought me to something resembling what I desired. A neanderthal-like hairless biped. Scales had gone the way of the dinosaur in place of fur, which then fell away for a relatively small amount of blubber. This was achieved by alternating my time spent in and out of a fridge I had found and carried down to the local park at night. Boring, but my only choice.

The problem was, my Power reached a fundamental limitation. By the third day, it was becoming increasingly apparent to me. My Power made it so that I was not subject to the same reproductive constraints as other life. My design was happening at an entirely different level of selection. I could not simulate the tensions of sexual selection or neonatal evolution.

As a species of one, I was a lone predator, anchored to the primordial forms. The cells spoke of this fact indirectly. So much of their design was the product of conflicting genetic commands or their designs a play off of physics itself. There was no gene that coded for the placing of my blood vessels, for instance. Only a simple set of commands for the length before which they should bifurcate.

My mind existed as a matter of rootless fact, without any of the same history it naturally implied. I never had to overcome the obstetric dilemma. I never had to domesticate or balance the social complexity of appearing to be altruistic at all times. I had barely any excuse at all for it.

My mind was instead a tool of planning. Yet, it was becoming harder and harder to plan according to abstract ideals. I simply wanted freedom. Unowned space. Unknown growth. It was like a constant discouraging voice in my ear, trying to convince me to leave this foolish preference for the human form behind.

Out in the woods, I had begun taking what I could for myself. Using sticks and twine, I had built a hovel fit for a prehistoric missing link. I'd clothed myself in what scraps I could find in the trash at night. Nylon shorts and a graphic tee-shirt. Through all this, my discontent was not going away.

Progress slowed in my evolutionary attempts. Fed up enough after four days in the bush, I couldn't hide any longer. I went out under the clear noon sky for a walk into town, to test the work I had done.

With hair only on my head and the right human proportions, the one thing majorly holding me back was the facial abnormalities. One could take me for deformed, but my oversized jaw and teeth were picture perfect of an ape, not a man.

Some adaptions would not go away. Gains in absolute efficiency had remained permanent across mutations. Unlike something selected and produced by nature, I had no need to shed off the needlessly expensive in order to reproduce as effectively as possible. I was made to be a perfect survival machine. My bones were iron, and flesh kevlar, even now. 

I came out of the woods at the back of the local Walmart. There was a truck unloading there, but the workers paid no mind to the sasquatch going by. Everyone had their own business to attend to, and this worked in my favor monumentally.

When I had lived briefly in this town, years ago, I remembered that each time I came through to buy groceries, there was always a man in the shade at the very back of the parking lot. He rode his three-wheeled bike in, hauling something quite different from day to day. The employees would regularly come out to share lunch with him, but he never accepted any money. 

Though with a longer, frosty beard than before, I saw him in his same spot. Moving across the packed front of the lot, I had a series of strange glares from shoppers. But meeting him, I received no shock at all.

He was sitting in a lawn chair, rigged up into his haul-behind like a micro-house. I nearly thought he was asleep, staring off into space. But he raised a hand as it was clear that I had come to sit by him.

My thought was to use him as camouflage. No one questioned the deformed or seemingly inhuman... not if it was put in its proper place beside a homeless man.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I thought back to Maximal, who had said that no Hero would have Powers like mine. Ones that made you monstrous. No one could accept any other narrative, ultimately, and that was all that mattered to me, not whether he ought to be right. The Heroes were beautiful, strong, and gleaming, it was simply a fact. Not like the nightmare hoards of the Lich King.

"How are you doin', this fine day?" the man asked me. His deeply tanned and sun-dried face crinkled into a smile.

I much preferred this to being seen as a child, despite its limitations. "Pretty okay," I said.

"Pretty okay is... pretty good." His words were slow and certain. He nodded at his own judgment, content that he was speaking the truth.

I shrugged. "There's a lot of difference between getting by and flourishing if you know what I mean. I still don't really feel human."

He looked me over with a little more scrutiny, after that comment. "I don't know what that means," he said, "but all anybody needs is a little shade. Look." He would toss out bread crumbs when he finished reducing a stale slice from his bag. This brought in a new flock of birds and recaptured the interest of those that had never left. While wary of me, the little animals seemed well at-home with him. "It's all taken care of. You just keep your eyes on the light, and everything else falls in."

"What's your name?" I asked, grimacing.

"Rusty," he answered. "At least, that's what people call me."

"My name is Walter," I nodded, giving a little wave. "Nice to meet you."

"Pleasure is mine."

After waiting long enough, I asked what was really on my mind. It was bound to go sideways, but much like pain, social anxiety was unreal to me now. "Do I look... normal to you, Rusty?" I couldn't think of a better way to phrase it. Nor, a better person to set a minimum bar for an honest answer.

He was practically thrilled to give his thoughts. "You look just like I'm sure God intended! We're all beautiful in our own way, ya know? That's what the good book says."

"I've never seen that verse," I admitted, mulling over his sage wisdom. Looking between the two of us, so rough and hewn from craggy stone, I wondered what else I expected but blind affirmation. Beauty was synonymous with refinement; smooth skin and well-proportioned features. The ugliest things were brutalist, like us. Inelegant.

But just like a sclerotic empire now a bickering shell of its former pride, we had to see ourselves a certain way to avoid confronting reality. No matter how bad it got, everyone was their own perfect in-group. Warm and competent in spirit and vision.

I had been so filled with self-righteousness, faced by the system and Maximal. Even without my nose or ears, I had still had the vestiges of a fine human face and body. I fancied myself in front of Fortitude like the same old human, horny bastard. I could have held on to that image. I could have believed that I was the virtuous loner against a corrupt world. But, after Tulpa turned me to paste on the beach for refusing to be a 'Hero', that vision of myself had been bleeding out.

If Hickory had never walked through those doors... I could have remained ignorant. Now I was seeing a terrible choice form clearly ahead of me. Accept myself as the villain, or change what it means to be beautiful.

Rusty was curious while I brooded. "You moving into these parts, then?" He wanted to know if he had a new neighbor.

I looked at him, reclining so happily in his homemade buggy. He was a lot like what I had envisioned for myself. I was a rent-seeker because it was my gateway to a life without work. I wanted to create art, but for myself, not to be recognized by history. I wanted no children or empire, only to feel good about my life without need for the world's approval.

What was the difference between us? 

"I'm not sure," was all the answer I gave. "I thought I knew where I belonged, but I'm not so sure that the place I'm homesick for exists anymore... or maybe ever. Nobody can keep themselves from changing, you know? And some people are more chaotic than others. It's just harder and harder for me to see how anybody keeps themselves from becoming... something foreign."

Not getting caught up on what he didn't understand, Rusty nodded knowingly. "You gotta be in the world, but not of it, brother. It's a fallen place out there, and the good man can never really belong. People don't wanna hear about a happy life. They want to own and control everything, Walter. But the world ain't theirs to take."

Always waiting, never arriving. I pensively thought on what he said, offering a short "yeah." The old man looked happy, that I could give him, but his form of satisfaction made me uneasy. It was quiet. As he said, there was no ownership out here, just acceptance.

If I wanted to be like you, I thought, I was happier in the ocean. I could still remember the sounds of the whales which punctuated the abyssal loneliness. Screaming.

Here, the birds chirped for seed. They hopped around us in waiting for the next piece of charity.

Standing up, I went to shake Rust's hand. "Thanks for the advice, man. I'll see you around."

He thanked me for the company and with that, I headed off, certain I would never meet him again. Through the open air I walked freely, but directionless. Perhaps it was time to move on to a different town? But where would I ever go to make a life?

It was a short mile walk to the beach, past a catholic school and expensive, waterfront houses; the kind I imagined myself coming back to after my sailing trips through the south seas.

The horizon stretched out over the ocean in front of me while I squeezed sand between my new toes. It brought me back to the moment I had decided to leave the Heroes behind me, no matter the costs.

Ironbolt had set a perfect trap between his own virtuous idea of my future and the implicit threat of death at someone else's hands. At that moment, I overcame the trap, and it was like I could see heaven itself in the sea. It was the most beautiful, open vista I'd ever known.

But now? It was a brown and uninviting wasteland. It was a step backward, towards a life broken by one bad day. My romantic vision of the solo sailor was one tossed in stormy seas, fighting for his life at the bleeding edge of his skill. My vision of the intellectual, one reading to discover the great unknowns. No one idolized boring hours in the doldrums or the reading of cheap novels. 

The cells in my body had been aching since the moment I first set out to go back to the beliefs which had led me to pain. I determined that I would do what I wanted and let no one control me, but that want was a matter of who I was. The cells screamed at me to keep going. They threatened me, "We will rip apart and turn cancerous."

"Who do you want me to be?" I asked them. "Just tell me what the fucking serotonin wants, then?!"

I needed to forget everything and be the exact same person I was before. But everything he envisioned was a path to suffering. I couldn't convince myself to value real-estate and old books anymore, not without a reason. And I saw no more reason to pretend I was the same person than to pretend I was human.

Failure sunk heavily into my body. There was no way I could be a normal Human Being again or my old self. The choice was clear and grim. I would not be driven by humanity back into the ocean. Yet, I could no longer identify with them, either. If we were opposed, I could not survive and view myself as the evil one.

The cells answered my question at last, and it reverbed up and out of the deepest pit. Their voice was a beautiful chorus. "Become more."