282 Burning the SRC
282 Burning the SRC
[POV: Nick]
I closed my eyes and sank into his memories. They came in layers, not as a sequence but as a network. Every decision, every adjustment, every subtle push he had made to guide events into place.
It was not clean. It was not elegant.
It was a convergence of coincidence, providence, and something disturbingly close to inevitability that centered around me.
A timeline began to form.
Not a straight line, but a structure. Points of pressure. Moments that mattered. Places where the smallest influence created the largest shift.
I followed it, refining it, testing it against his own predictions. Guessing, adjusting, discarding, repeating. The process folded in on itself until the shape of it became undeniable.
When I finally understood, I moved.
I placed the pill in my mouth and let my body dissolve. Intangibility took hold, not as a defense but as a method. I let go of cohesion, let go of form, and stepped into the absence that followed.
There was a void.
Not empty, not silent, but stripped of everything that defined existence. Something like an afterlife, though the term felt insufficient. I moved through it, not with steps but with intent, pushing forward until I found what I was looking for.
Seams.
Thin, almost imperceptible boundaries where time folded against itself.
I forced my way through.
The weight of my existence pressed against everything. I could feel the resistance immediately, a kind of correction threatening to snap me back or tear everything apart if I pushed too hard.
I understood the limitation then.
I could not act directly. Not in any meaningful way. My presence was too heavy, too disruptive. Any significant interference risked unraveling not just my world, but others connected to it.
So I adjusted.
I followed Guesswork’s precognition, letting it guide what I should not do. The list was overwhelming. Almost everything fell into that category.
Which left only one viable method.
Whispers.
Subtle, precise, placed at the exact moment they would be accepted rather than rejected.
I moved along the timeline until I found the point I needed.
Griffin stood against the Entity, the battle already tipping toward collapse. The air itself felt strained, like reality was preparing to give way. I leaned close, careful not to push too much of myself into the moment, and spoke just enough.
Time unraveled around me in strands I could no longer hold together.
I remembered speaking to Cordelia, her voice sharp and grounded, insisting on something that had once mattered. I remembered Phasecrash, restless and defiant even in stillness. I remembered Two D, quiet in a way that always felt temporary. I remembered going to Tony or even the past me and Griffin again. Each memory surfaced with clarity, only to slip away moments later, dissolving before I could anchor them.
Forgetting was not natural. It was erosion.
The danger revealed itself not through violence, but through absence. A misplaced step, a careless whisper, and the consequences would not simply ripple outward. They would collapse inward, erasing entire threads. My son existed at the center of too many of them. One miscalculation and he would vanish as if he had never been.
I adjusted, forcing myself to move with restraint.
Fractures began to show.
Thin distortions in the structure of time, subtle but undeniable. I traced them carefully, following their pattern, their frequency, and their direction. They carried a signature I recognized.
Dr. Time.
Remnants of his interference spread across entire spans, scars left behind by whatever he had done to my world. Freezing it, hiding it, preserving it from something larger. Or perhaps breaking it in a way that only resembled preservation.
I could not tell.
I moved forward, gathering what I could. Information layered over Guesswork’s knowledge, filling gaps, refining assumptions, sharpening the outline of a man who had already accounted for most of this.
Eventually, I reached a point that felt wrong.
A radio crackled somewhere nearby, its signal uneven but persistent.
“The Monster of Markend has claimed another victory today, with reports confirming the utter slaughter of Vanguard. Authorities remain silent while independent analysts continue to debate whether this marks a turning point in cape hierarchy.”
The channel shifted abruptly.
“And let’s be honest, Eclipse is not just a cape, he’s something else entirely. You don’t just dismantle teams like Vanguard unless you’re operating on a level we barely understand.”
I followed the sound and found him.
Guesswork sat at a small outdoor table, eating a burger with slow, deliberate movements. His eyes were unfocused, blind as ever, yet his head tilted slightly in my direction.
“What the fuck?” he said.
I stepped closer, careful with the weight of my presence. His power guided me, filtering what I could say, what I had to avoid.
I told him enough.
Not everything. Never everything.
I shaped the truth into something usable, something that would not collapse under its own weight. I avoided my identity, redirected the implications, and let his own ability fill in the rest.
He listened in silence, tension building in the way his grip tightened around the wrapper.
When it was done, I moved on.
Further back.
Deeper.
I stayed in the margins, pressed into corners where light struggled to exist. Watching. Recording. Learning.
Dr. Time moved freely, untouched by the constraints that bound me. I saw the pattern of his work unfold not as isolated acts, but as a deliberate architecture.
He approached my father first.
A quiet meeting. Casual at a glance. A conversation that stretched longer than it should have. Subtle shifts in tone, in posture, in response. Hypnosis layered carefully, not rewriting but nudging, amplifying flaws that already existed.
I watched as discipline turned to irritation, irritation to anger, anger to dependence.
The man I had known became something else entirely.
A drunk. An abuser. A foundation reshaped to ensure everything built on top of it would crack.
I followed the next thread.
My mother, already strained, already vulnerable. Opportunities collapsed around her. Financial pressure tightened with unnatural precision. Debts stacked in ways that defied probability. Every attempt to stabilize failed just enough to push her further down.
Until running became the only option.
Markend was not chance.
It was placement.
Nicole came next.
I saw how she was guided, step by step, into the orbit of the Monarchy. Each decision framed as her own, each consequence narrowing her path. By the time she realized what she had stepped into, the structure had already closed around her.
She was turned into property.
Not abruptly. Not violently.
Systematically.
I followed him beyond my world.
Other iterations unfolded, variations on the same design. Worlds frozen at different points, suspended until he chose to engage with them. Some mirrored mine closely. Others diverged in ways that made them barely recognizable.
All of them under his control.
All of them part of something larger.
I kept going.
Further back.
Until I reached the beginning.
Earth, untouched. No powers. No fractures. No interference.
Just a man.
He stood hunched over a cluttered workspace, surrounded by crude components and half assembled devices. His hands moved with careful excitement, adjusting something small yet impossibly significant.
He laughed to himself, voice filled with pride.
“Finally, the fruits of my labor, my genius realized at last. They said it was impossible, said I stole it, but what do they know.”
He turned.
His eyes locked onto me.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
The name surfaced in my mind.
Einstein.
Except it wasn’t.
His nametag caught the light.
Charlemagne Lewis.
Janitorial.
The realization settled in with quiet clarity. This was the point. The origin before it became myth, before it became history.
I could end it here.
One action, one removal, and the chain would collapse before it ever formed.
“Stop.”
The voice came from behind me.
I turned.
Dr. Time stood there, exactly as I knew him.
The old man blinked, confusion spreading across his face. “I don’t understand what’s happening here.”
“Forget about it,” Dr. Time said.
The effect was immediate. Lewis’s expression went slack, his body going still as his mind shut down under the command.
Hypnosis, clean and absolute.
I reinforced my mental defenses, preparing to act, to take control of the situation before it slipped further.
Dr. Time snapped his fingers.
The world shifted.
New York unfolded around us in an instant, loud and immediate, the flow of traffic pressing in from all sides.
“Going for the origin like that is rather reckless,” he said. “You have no intention of killing him through time travel. You understand what that would do. Remove this, and you don’t just erase your world. You erase everything built on top of it.”
A car horn blared inches away.
“Move out of the damn road,” someone shouted. “What is wrong with you people?”
Dr. Time studied me with that same measured calm, as if every version of this encounter had already played out to his satisfaction.
“Why did I not just kill you when I could?” he asked, almost conversationally. “Do you know why?”
I reached for Guesswork’s power, expecting some flicker of probability, some fragment of guidance. There was nothing. I was blocked.
He noticed.
“It would have been a waste,” he said, his tone sharpening with quiet amusement. “I needed to extract the most value from your existence. I needed to know if the most recent iteration of my time travel technology would function as intended. I am pleased to see that it does.”
His smile widened, something unrestrained slipping through.
“And now you should die the most miserable death imaginable. You lack the vessel required to endure temporal displacement. You are not rated at the threshold needed. You do not even possess a sliver of the Source. You are an incomplete variable attempting to exist where you do not belong.”
He stepped closer, his voice lowering, savoring each word.
“Despair. In all my years, I have had so little entertainment. You will provide some before you are erased.”
His gaze lingered, almost expectant.
“Try your precognition if you wish. You will find it useless. In this era, the Source has yet to mature. There is nothing for you to draw from.”
He continued, piling mockery upon mockery, stretching the moment far beyond necessity. It lost its edge the longer it went, becoming something excessive, almost hollow in its persistence.
“I can use my power just fine,” I said.
The shift was immediate.
Fear surfaced in his eyes, sharp and undeniable, as realization cut through whatever certainty he had been holding onto.
I moved.
Warp state took hold, my form slipping beyond solidity as I lunged forward, aiming to pass through him, to disrupt, to end something before it could stabilize.
I missed.
The miscalculation was small, but in this context, it was absolute.
I crashed through a hotdog cart, metal folding under the impact as the vendor stumbled back, eyes wide, hands raised in stunned disbelief.
“What the hell was that?” someone shouted nearby. “Was that the Flash or Quicksilver just now.”
The world lurched.
Control slipped.
The pill’s effect unraveled faster than I could compensate, the strain snapping whatever tenuous hold I had on that moment.
Everything collapsed inward.
I was pulled back.
Sky rushed up to meet me as I fell, wind tearing past, gravity reasserting itself with brutal clarity. Instinct took over before thought could catch up, and with a single decision, I displaced myself.
Mars.
The red expanse steadied beneath me as I reappeared.
Griffin circled above, her massive form cutting through the thin atmosphere with deliberate control. Cordelia, Abner, and Tony were secured against her, held carefully despite the scale of her current shape.
“It’s time,” I called up to her. “Let’s destroy the SRC. But first, we need to return the others somewhere safe.”
She descended without hesitation.
I gathered them all in a single motion and shifted us again.
Earth.
The safehouse came into view exactly as Guesswork had prepared it, hidden, reinforced, insulated from casual detection. We landed inside, the transition smooth despite the distance.
Information pressed against my mind from all sides. Layers upon layers of contingencies, fallback plans, hidden variables accounted for in ways that bordered on obsession. Guesswork had not simply prepared for failure. He had mapped it, dissected it, and built around it.
It was staggering.
Cordelia stepped closer, her eyes narrowing slightly as she looked at me.
“You look different,” she said.
“I am,” I replied, gesturing to the body I possessed. “This is Guesswork. A close friend.”
The body remained his. I had no intention of discarding it now. The utility alone justified the decision, and his power continued to feed me exactly what I needed.
I turned to Griffin who transformed into her human shape, clothes now ripped to pieces, showing her skin.
“The SRC has no idea you’re alive,” I said. “It looks like Dr. Time has no use for them anymore. But if he learns I’m still here, if he realizes I know what he intends to do to my son, he will act. He will preserve them, and he will use them against us.”
The pattern was clear now.
His arrogance had created an opening.
Guesswork had been a persistent problem for him, something that refused to align neatly with his expectations. That irritation had turned into indulgence the moment he believed it was resolved.
He had wanted to enjoy the outcome.
That delay had cost him.
I did not know every detail of his thinking, but I understood enough.
We were going to kill him.
If that was the last thing I ever did.
Abner crossed his arms, skepticism plain on his face. “You mean that, boss?” he asked. “Because I’m not convinced you can actually pull it off.”
“I can,” I answered.
Cordelia exhaled softly, tension easing just enough to show through.
“Good riddance,” she said.
“Wait,” said Tony. “If you’re going, you should at least look the part.”
Before I could respond, he grabbed both our wrists. Reality bent.
It did not twist violently or fracture. It flowed, reshaping itself around us with a quiet certainty that ignored resistance. The shift settled over Griffin first, her form tightening into red and white body armor, the emblem of the GDF resting cleanly on her shoulder, a stylized griffin spread across her chest.
Then it reached me.
The fabric formed with precision, a fitted black suit aligning perfectly to Guesswork’s frame. A fedora settled atop my head, the brim casting a measured shadow. A porcelain mask concealed my face, smooth and expressionless. Against my chest, an eclipse themed medallion rested, faintly cool against the fabric.
Griffin flexed slightly, adjusting to the new weight, then glanced down at Tony.
“Thank you,” she said, reaching out to rub his head.
I adjusted the brim of the fedora, feeling the unfamiliar weight settle into something functional.
“If we’re taking on a multiversal organization like this one,” I said, “it only makes sense we look the part.”
Griffin turned toward Abner and Cordelia, her tone shifting back into focus.
“Look after Tony,” she said.
I placed a hand on her shoulder, anchoring the point in space.
We moved, teleporting us with my Intangibility-30.