Prologue

How do you keep a secret in the modern world?

If the government itself had come up with the treatment, then decided it needed to be kept secret, it is remotely possible that they could have managed it.  They would likely have to kill everyone involved. Burn the research labs to the ground. Organize a sex scandal of some sort elsewhere to draw people’s attention away.  Sacrifice a baby to some elder god who had the power to keep China, Israel, and the paparazzi from ferreting out the truth.

But it could have been done.

If the government had known ahead of time that a genius tech billionaire was developing such a treatment, there might be the slimmest chance they could have gotten ahead of things and stopped it from being widely released.  Kill him. Kill his family and his pets. Kill everyone he was connected to through social media. Kill everyone those people were connected to through social media. Blame the Muslims. Blame the Russians. Blame the Scientologists.  Blame a newly discovered sect of radical Amish who were determined to drag all of humanity back to the age of the horse-drawn plow.

It could have been done.

But there were so many tech billionaires these days.  New ones were popping up constantly, in the unlikeliest of places.  

And once they became rich, they weren’t content to just sit back and BE rich.  They didn’t buy seaside mansions or diamond studded yachts. They took all the money they made from their first crazy idea and threw it into dozens of other crazy ideas.  

These men and women who had changed the world using jury-rigged tools in dingy basements proceeded to see what they could do with fully staffed labs and unlimited budgets.  

So it’s understandable, if not necessarily forgivable, that no one stopped word of the new treatment from being released on the internet and spreading like wildfire.  We have no way of knowing how many super-diseases, death rays, homicidal cyborg trees and other examples of malicious science projects the government had successfully prevented from seeing the light of day by burying them under piles of bodies.  Possibly some government flunky somewhere had an entire wall covered in commendations for all the times he had saved the world.

But the thing about civilization-ending inventions, as we all eventually realized, is you only need to miss one.  

AND SO....

Ashley was not very bright, and knew it, hence her current course of action.  She had been not very bright her entire life, and had felt the lack more than many other not very bright people because she was also not very attractive, and there are few people in this modern world who suffered more at the hands of society than homely women who weren’t very bright.  

She was just now becoming visibly pregnant.  How she came into this condition, and the current outlook of her future as a mother, are almost exactly as depressing as you would imagine.  

She was therefore thrilled that a new treatment had become available that would safely, effectively, and above all cheaply ensure that her while child might inherit her homeliness, they would not inherit her poor reading skills and inability to remember whether she had taken her birth control pill or not.

Of course the treatment was technically illegal, which was why she was sitting in a nondescript room in someone’s basement rather than a hospital.  Everyone knew that the government would give in to the inevitable, probably within the next few weeks, and allow hospitals to start performing the procedure out in the open.  Carrying out the treatment, from a technical perspective, was child’s play. And since the plans had spread throughout the internet, a government crackdown on the process had only served as incentive for every would-be biohacker in the world to set up their own little back-alley franchise where they proceeded to put pregnant women through the process as fast as they could waddle through the doors.   

Ashley as not crazy about breaking the law.  But she thought the risk was a small price to pay for a guarantee that her child would be a genius.  Strangely enough, almost every other soon to be parent in the world shared that attitude.

12-ish Years Later

Bobby stood on the outskirts of the small town he had grown up in and watched it burn.  The local fire department tried to stop the flames, but he felt a certainty that they wouldn’t succeed.  He had spent the previous five minutes reading up on modern firefighting technology using his heavily modded phone, and had already come up with five different methods to create a fire that would defeat everything they would be able to throw at it, though none of his ideas would result in the purple flames currently spreading through the town.  Since whichever one of his peers had started the fire was almost exactly as smart as Bobby, he had no reason to believe that the fire would go out until the creator wanted it to go out, and maybe not even then.

He didn’t waste time wondering why someone in his age group would decide to burn the town down.  Even if he weren’t an expert on child psychology, world events throughout the past year would have given him plenty of examples proving just how emotionally unstable geniuses going through puberty were.  His own small town had actually survived over 5 weeks longer than his models projected, a personal failure which irritated him to an extent. The last of the big cities had dissolved under an onslaught of acidic sea sponges over 7 months ago.  In comparison, Bobby thought the purple flames currently burning their way up Huckleburry Lane were downright tacky.

Of course, final death of the internet 4 months ago had put a severe limit on the options available even to the most hormonally enraged young genius.  Each budding pubescent was now limited to the knowledge between their ears and whatever data they had managed to squirrel away in their personal devices once the writing on the wall became obvious to everyone under 13.  

He felt the hand on his shoulder tighten, and he looked up his mother.

“What should we do?” Ashley asked.

He gave brief thanks once again that he had been carried to term by a woman who had always thought of herself as an idiot. Too many of others had been saddled with parents who thought they should be the ones in charge. While the end of civilization had probably been inevitable anyway, Bobby was pretty sure it wouldn’t have been nearly as bloody if more parents had been like Ashley.  

Bobby adored his mother.  Some of his peers made fun of him for the way he doted on her.  Especially Tabitha, whose parents had disappeared when she was seven, shortly after they made their last attempt to force her to eat peas.  

“I have a small cache of supplies hidden a couple miles from here.  We’ll head that way, grab everything, then head deeper into the woods until things calm down.”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“How long will that take?”

“I don’t know.” Bobby admitted.  

Which was true. The problem was too complicated. He had discussed the issue with those few of his peers he trusted not to inject him with acid once his back was turned, but the only consensus they had reached was that it was going to get worse and worse until the acne-riddled prodigies had reduced their own population below some critical threshold that no one could agree on.  In the privacy of his own mind, Bobby thought that the more likely scenario was that one of them would create something the others wouldn’t be able to counteract before it wiped everyone out. But he wasn’t about to burden his mother with such thoughts.

“Don’t worry mom, I’ll protect you.”

Ashley looked down at her son, whom she adored.  She knew he viewed her more as a beloved pet than a parent, but she did her best to parent him anyway, even if all she could really do was gently let him know when he was being childish.  She gave him a quick hug.

“Don’t worry Bobby, I’ll protect you too.”

Together, they walked toward the woods, magenta flames at their backs.  

Bobby and his mother were inflating the small escape boat he’d designed when death herself called out from behind them.

“Hey mommas boy! Running away?”

Bobby saw the color drain from his mother’s face.  She knew that voice, and had been on friendly terms with Tabitha’s parents before their disappearance.

He briefly considered reaching for the weapon he’d attached to his belt once they’d reached his cache, then dismissed the thought.   As heat rays went, it wasn’t much, and when it came to weaponized mayhem, Tabitha was so far out of his league he might as well be throwing rocks.  

So he decided to just be honest and hope for the best.  

“Yes?”

“Smart move. Now that the purple pyro has kicked things off here, our peers are probably going to start playing with all their shiniest toys.”

Deciding that he wasn’t likely to be flayed alive immediately, Bobby stood and turned around.  

Standing just at the edge of where the trees met the river was the apparition that was Tabitha.  It seemed that not even the destruction of the town she was born in had shaken her belief that no outfit was complete unless it contained the full spectrum of colors arranged in the most eye-searing combination possible.  Her hands were empty, but as always the device she insisted be called her “Princess Tiara of Doom” sat atop her shaved head.

Also as always, her dog loomed beside her.  Just as colorful and half again as large and its owner,  the brute was currently burdened by an enormous pack of what, knowing Tabitha, was probably every weapon she had ever built.  

Bobby did his best to look non-threatening, “Does that mean you weren’t the one to start the fire? It seems like your sort of thing.”

Tabitha’s face started to cloud up, but then suddenly she grinned and stuck her tongue out at him. “Stop trying to rile me up.  You know my work well enough to know I wouldn’t do something like that.”

Bobby smiled back and nodded. “Yeah, I guess purple flames just aren’t your style.”

Tabitha looked startled. “Well, sure, there’s that.  But I meant the fact that whoever did it destroyed all the infrastructure but let all the people escape.”  She looked down and kicked as the dirt. “That’s poor forward planning, and you know I’m better than that.”

Bobby’s smile grew.  He’d always liked Tabitha, despite himself.  There wasn’t a dishonest bone in her body. She might kill you. Hell, she’d probably kill you.  She would almost certainly kill you. But she’d do it in broad daylight while shouting “I’m gonna kill you, you bastard.”  

He realized she was scowling at him.  “What are you grinning about, Mommas Boy?” she asked.

“Sorry, I was just remembering what happened at last year’s 4th of July picnic.” Bobby said with a grin.

Tabitha’s scowl grew deeper.  “That bastard Tommy Jenkins. Who’s he to tell me my thoughts on dimensional tuning are derivative?”  

“Well, currently he is a very small pile of ashes.”  

“Don’t be ridiculous, you know the wind scattered those ashes almost immediately.”

“Don’t remind me.  Some of him landed on my hot dog.”

“Didn’t stop you from eating it.”

“Well it was a very good hot dog.”  

She laughed, and everyone relaxed.  

“So,” asked Bobby, “Are you here to steal my boat?”

Tabitha looked confused. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m here to go with you.”

Bobby went right past confused and straight on to shocked. “What?”

“What what?

“Going with us where?”

“Us? Us who? Have you been dating someone else behind my back?” Tabitha spat.  Behind her, her dogs rainbow lips parted to show surprisingly white, aggressively large teeth.  

For the first time in his admittedly short life, Bobby had absolutely no idea what was going on.  

“I’ve never been on a date in my life.  And what do you mean behind your back?”

“WHAT!?” Tabitha shrieked, “We’ve gone on tons of dates! Don’t you dare try to pretend I haven’t given you the best years of my life.”

“WHAT?”

“WHAT WHAT?”

Things may have continued to devolve from there, if it hadn’t been for Ashley, who burst out laughing.  

Tabitha’s mind didn’t really know how to react to this.  Adults were terrified of her, and rightly so. In truth, she hadn’t seen an adult laugh in years.  Even most of her peers were unwilling to relax enough to joke around when she was near. She was, to put it simply, the deadliest person she had ever met.  She stood there, tiny fists clenched, watching as Ashley bent over, roaring with laughter.  

“Oh Tabycat” Ashley choked out between giggles, struggling to control myself.  “You’ll have to excuse my poor idiot son.”

“Hey!” Bobby exclaimed.

“Shush Dear, the women are talking.”  Ashley said, giving her son a playful punch on the shoulder.  

Ashley finally managed to get her giggles under control. And gave Tabitha the frankest look the girl had ever received.

“Tabycat. I promise you.  Bobby is not making fun of you.  He’s just stupid. Until this very moment, he had not the slightest notion in his head that you had any romantic interest in him.  

Tabitha’s mouth fell open, “But he’s my boyfriend!”

Ashley smiled and nodded “I know that, and you know that, and likely the entire town knows that.  Bobby, on the other hand, does not. Because he is stupid.”

“Hey!” Bobby said again, though it didn’t seem like his heart was in it.  He found himself staring at the ground.

Tabitha continued to stared at Ashley.  Then she stared at the confused look on Bobby’s face.  Then she stared up at the sky for a while, apparently seeking some sanity in this world.  

“How…..?” but she couldn’t even form the question.

“He. Is. Very. Stupid.”  Ashley answered. “Sorry, I think he gets it from me.”

Tabitha continued to stare at the sky.  Bobby continued to stare at the ground. Ashley continued to try not to laugh at the absurdity of it all.  

Tabitha seemed to shake herself out of it.  “Fine. Great. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.  Bobby!”

Bobby jerked back to reality, “What?”

“You’re my boyfriend.”  

“But I’m terrified of you!”  

“So?”

“Well, is that a good basis for a healthy relationship?”

“It is if I say it is.”

Strangely enough, this seemed to relieve Bobby.  Relationships were new and scary territory for him.  But doing what Tabitha told him to so she didn’t kill him was a path his feet knew well.  

“Yes dear.” He said meekly.  

“Now finish inflating your stupid boat.”

“Yes dear.” He said meekly.