I wasn't born with superpowers. I was the slowest runner in P.E. The only way I could shoot lasers from my fingers was if I held a laser pointer. And the sun just felt nice on my skin. Didn't recharge anything, except my soul, maybe.

It was summer, a year after my high school graduation, and I was nineteen. Maybe not a teenager, but my mom argued that I still was a teenager because of the teen after nine. Technicality, but it didn't matter one way or the other. I was an adult, and so I was on the prowl for a job.

I had put my college plans on hold until I saved up enough to pay the tuition. Rolling hoagies, asking customers if they wanted fries with that. Anything, so long as it was cutting checks. Problem was, the pay wherever I worked was awful, and anything with a decent wage didn't want some inexperienced dweeb who had only dabbled in the restaurant industry. I was willing to jump into the sewers if need be, yet not one employer would take me on. It was even coming to the point where I considered joining the military. They paid your college tuition and all that, so it was quite appealing. But being deployed, not so. Plus, I heard there's a lot of asterisks attached to that tuition payment, to where only a fraction of recruits got it, so that turned me off. So, I applied at as many places as I could bear to find, and none of those places could bear to give me a call back. Still, I was optimistic that one of those days, my phone would ring, and it'd be some employer looking to give me a chance.

“Hello, Grant Peart speaking!”

“This call is to notify you of a charge agai—”

Spam. I hung up. “Always spam...”

Beside me, a girl laughed. “Those telemarketers sure want your money, don't they?”

“This time, it was someone wanting to sue me.”

“So, they want your money still?”

“I don't even have any money to give!” My goal was to get money, and the exact opposite was transpiring, because money was everybody's goal. Can't live with it, can't live without it.

“Don't worry about it too much. Soon, you'll get a great job, and then you'll have nothing but money to give to spam callers!”

The young lady speaking to me was Mercedes, my friend, my encouraging force, also my crush, but mostly my friend. How would I describe her? She was the doting type, very motherly in a sense, and spoke with a slight rasp. She hated her voice, but I thought it suited her sweet demeanor.

She was also a science geek, quite frequently checking her phone for new articles on the latest discoveries. It wasn't often when we hung out and she didn't have her eyeballs glued to her phone.

“Oh my god! Look, look, Grant, look! They brought in matter from another universe!”

I didn't think I'd had heard her correctly, so I asked her to repeat herself, and she replied by shoving her phone in my face so that I could get a look at the article for myself.

Scientists Pull Unknown Matter From Universe K0002

It was right there in the headline, and the body didn't pull its punches, either. Even had a picture of the substance, which I can only describe as a mutated potato growing alien fungi. The website was authentic. Wasn't click bait in the slightest.

This was a developing story she'd been following for a while. Scientists recently found evidence of another universe interacting with ours, and they were trying their damndest to find a way in. Neat, but nothing eye-catching. Then came the mutated potato, and people, including and especially Mercedes, lost their minds.

It was all she talked about for days. She scoured every corner of the internet in search of even the tiniest tidbit of new information, and I swear at one point she was ready to buy a plane ticket and fly out to the lab to see the mutated potato with her own two eyes.

“I think I chose the wrong field...” she lamented to me one day when we were hanging out at our usual spot, a hill overlooking the nicer part of the city. It faces west, so we always sat so we could watch the sunset.

“Biology's a field of science, isn't it?”

“Yeah, but you don't get to find cool stuff like this inside animal cells!” She loved animals, and she loved science, so she combined the two for a career, and those science articles were instilling a deep-seated regret in her. I was beginning to think she had gone off the deep end since this was another object pulled from that other universe.

Did I say object? I meant living thing. Or was living. Looked like one of the Headcrabs from Half-Life. I wondered if Universe K0002 was an alternate universe where Half-Life 3 had been released.

So, yeah, who could blame the girl? I once heard some scientist or whoever complain that this generation was born too late to explore the earth and too early to explore the cosmos, yet there we were, pulling mutated potatoes and Headcrabs from another universe. It was even making me contemplate getting into theoretical physics just so I could have a front row seat to the latest extradimensional discoveries.

That dream died in an instant when an article came out about some other creature, this one alive and a Facehugger from Alien, that attacked a scientist. He survived but was rushed to the hospital for treatment. Mad respect for the doctors for managing to treat a wound from an alien life form.

As though the headlines couldn't become more unbelievable, the guy went and developed superpowers not long after. Honest-to-god superpowers. The guy could collect moisture from the air and throw it around as he pleased. The nurses weren't happy having to clean up that mess, I bet, but this was huge. Like, all-anyone-anywhere-was-talking-about huge. Superpowers? Those mind-blowing abilities you could only catch in a comic book had developed in this one random scientist? Needless to say, more research was done, more Headcrabs and Facehuggers were pulled into our universe, and more experiments were conducted. Fictional superpowers became a thing of the past.

But in giving people superpowers, scientists overstepped their bounds and let in something that should've stayed in that other universe.

*

It was known as the Karraker Invasion, formally. Some called it the Psychic Wars because of the superpowered people making up the front lines. Others called it World War III, and some called it the War to End All Wars, though not with the optimistic cheer that past politicians called the first World War.

It was called war because you had bombers in the air and GI on the ground, but what it was was an outbreak. Spatial tears opened up throughout the world, and in poured Karraker by the hundreds of thousands. Hostile beasts, attacked anything on sight. If it emitted heat, if it moved. They attacked indiscriminately and with extreme prejudice, and the death toll was unimaginable, as you might imagine, if you can at all. I can. After all, I'm the man who saved the world.

But before that, I was just a scared young man, still a teenager to my mom, whose first and foremost concern was protecting the girl I was in love with.

“I'm scared, Grant...I've never been more scared in my life...”

I had Mercedes in my arms, and she had her face buried in my chest. I'd dreamed of holding her like this for so long, but not under these circumstances. In the background was the clamor of hundreds, thousands of people evacuated from the city to a refugee camp set up swiftly by the National Guard. Somehow, I managed to find her in the crowd and was relieved when I had. The world might've been falling apart, but at least this one thing was right.

“It wasn't supposed to be like this...Science is supposed to help people, it's supposed to do good for the world! It—Ho—How are we supposed to move forward after this?”

To anyone's ears, it sounds like she was fearful that this was it for humanity. The fifth mass extinction.

But I knew her well enough and for long enough to know that she hadn't given up hope of survival. She was scared. Who wouldn't be? But she understood how resourceful and stupidly adamant humans are. She had a part-time addiction to shows and videos about the many things—often our own inventions—that put our ancestors in the hospital or six feet under, and she liked to joke that we should've killed ourselves eons ago, yet there we were at peak population.

So it wasn't the death of humanity she feared—it was death in the trust of science.

“Be careful of what science can engineer.” It's a common parable, and, sure, it's got some truth to it. Atomic bombs. Guns, those are science. Genetic printers that could create the next bubonic plague. Mercedes told me all about those.

But science—and she would preach this more passionately than I ever could—has made our lives infinitely better than our ancestors' were. Heaters, refrigerators, modern healthcare, the internet, smartphones. You really gonna be wary of an app that lets me order a pizza?

But this latest catastrophe, we were overstepping our bounds. Flying too close to the sun, playing with fire, playing god. Whatever idiom they wanted to use, they being those who write those parables or nod their heads to their messages. The people who fear science and whatever havoc it might bring.

But it's not science that those people are really afraid of. It's change. That the world they grew up with and always knew is leaving them behind. It's changing around them, and they don't want to put in the effort to change with it.

Know what, though? I was scared of change, too. I was scared that my whole life would change forever. That my best friend would change. That she would no longer be the Mercedes I knew and the Mercedes I fell in love with. I was scared that I would never again get to see her brilliant smile as we sat at our usual spot on the hill and chatted about this and that as the warm sun beat down on us.

“Mercedes,” I said in her ear.

She said nothing back, but her sobs had stopped. She was listening.

A lesson my dad drilled into me before he and Mom divorced was learning from and correcting your mistakes. He was all about making mistakes. “It's proof that you have room to grow!” Such a positive guy.

For as long as I can remember, he was prattling on about how mistakes were inevitable but what was important was that when you made a mistake, you did one of two things: you learned from it or you corrected it.

Science had made a mistake. A big mistake, a horrible one. But...

“It'll be okay.” I was channeling my dad as I said that, though he probably wasn't the best person to be quoting, since he always followed that up with “A mistake isn't the end of the world.”

It was a mistake that needed to be fixed. Simple as that. Science had let the Karraker in, and science would push them back out.

The world was calling for superheroes.

That was why I made up my mind on enlisting.

The world was a mess, and I had the ability to help clean it up. But mostly, I wanted to guarantee the happiness of the girl beside me. She loved this world so much and wanted to see how civilization progressed, and I couldn't see a future where she was smiling if the world fell apart as it was. I wanted to—I had to secure that future, whatever it took.

I told her I would join the military and help fight off the Karraker invasion, and she opposed me. She burst into tears and begged me to stay, told me she didn't want to lose me. Honestly, hearing that she cared for me so much, I was unbelievably happy, and also sad that it took putting my life on the line to hear that.

She didn't argue much, and mostly she cried, probably because she knew I had made up my mind and nothing could change it.

“Promise me you'll come back,” she said after however long, but it wasn't a promise I was ready to make. I don't like making promises, because they're so easy to break but worth so much. They hardly seem worth the commitment. More than death, I was afraid that she would never forgive me if I marched off for war and died.

Death. It was the first time I ever thought seriously about it. Before, it was just some strange, otherworldly thing I understood in concept but seemed like a worry I would never have. But I was going to war. I could very well die. Perhaps it was guaranteed that I would. I didn't want to think I wouldn't come back. I imagine every soldier thinks that way. That was why, in the event that I did meet my end on the battlefield, I wanted to die with no regrets. Including telling Mercedes how I felt.

“...Mercedes, I...”

The words stuck in my throat, just like that. I couldn't look her in the eye, I couldn't stop paying attention to how fast my heart was beating. I fought to get my confession out, even sloppily, haphazardly, but it wouldn't come. I wasn't able to tell her I loved her and walk away.

“Promise me this.” I countered with a promise of my own. I gathered up my courage and held her hands. Somehow, that was more nerve-wracking than going to war. “Once this is all said and done, and if we're both still alive, let's meet back at the hill.” That was the best I could do for her. A condition. If.

Just as I didn't accept her promise, she didn't accept mine. She just leaned forward and rested her head on my shoulder and wrapped her arms around my back, and I wrapped mine around hers. Despite the circumstances, it was the greatest hug of my life.