Time: 10:00 P.M.
Date: Dec 28, 1999
Place: Mercy General Hospital, Manhattan

     A tingling sensation.  A very rapid tingling sensation.  Adams mind and body buzzed as if it were alive. “You are.  We are,” it said to him.  Adam blinked, his eyes shifted colors in random patterns between red, green, and blue.  His body was perfectly toned, every nerve and cell completely perfect.  “We are.  You are,” again it said.  Adam blinked again, and began to think...
     I am, he thought.  I exist.  I… I can see colors and objects.  I can see the building blocks of the universe.  I see the atoms coursing through the air, through the doctors body, through the walls.  I can see everything, and yet…
     The doctor had moved to a steel tray and grabbed a scalpel.  He was speaking.  The words came to Adam but the meaning didn’t.  They were words certainly, he could see the sounds waves they created as they left the doctors mouth.  He could feel the apparatus of his ear vibrate as they reached him.  He could see the shaking unsteady hand of the nurse as she tried to comfort the woman on the bed.  Mother.  Mother.  The word came into his mind from his cerebellum to his frontal lobe he could feel the thought move in his mind as you would a grain of sand through your toes.
     He looked down at his body, at the hue of his skin, the reflection of himself in the polished surgical floor.  His hair was a contusion of colors.  His face was nearly indescribable in shape.  It featured perfect symmetry a strong jaw, but no jagged or jarring lines.  His eyes swirled in colorful pools and his mouth opened to reveal rows of perfect ivory teeth.  Adam looked again at the doctor, saw that he was speaking again.
     He went over the shape of the words in his mind.  The texture and preciseness of each syllable and pause.  He tried some of them out forcing them through his throat using his lungs as an energy source to push the air through the vocal chords. “I… don’t know.  What I’m not above?”  That didn’t seem right.  The doctor’s words still held no meaning to him.  They were merely wave patterns, beautiful and precise movements of molecules through other molecules.
     Adam studied the doctor closely, noting the oddity of his structure.  Why he wore an extra layer of molecules over his self.  What purpose did this covering serve?  He finished his observation finishing with the doctor’s eyes.  Adam stared in shock as he saw the doctors pain, the torment of his entire life the knowledge, the joy, the confusion and the understanding.  Adam felt something rise in him.  Felt a piece of him die at that moment. On his left arm Adam felt a piece of himself go dark, winking out of his perception.  He was startled, he shifted a micron to the left hoping to find it again.  His consciousness shot through the room as he searched the room over and over, checking each particle and object time and again.  He noticed in a detached fashion that his action was beginning to overexcite the metals the objects with the most strict and precise molecular structure.
     Adam noticed too late.  The metals in the room sublimed from solid to gas in a single bright and brief moment.  Every metallic thing in the surgery suddenly became gas.  The doctor yelled in horror and pain as the scalpel he was holding melted through his hand.  The nurse shrieked as the bed that Adam's unconscious mother was on suddenly disappeared in a flash of acrid smelling particles.
     Adam watched in silent contemplation as the woman identified as Mother dropped to the floor and struck her head.  He saw the brief and silent shift of her being as that which had been her life, her soul drifted upward.  He watched in awe as it moved through the ceiling.  He followed it as it traveled up floor after floor.  He reached the roof and watched as it became nearly lost in the sudden permeation of photons from the gigantic atom smashing machine of the sun.
     He drew close to the object, felt it touch his hand, and felt all that his mother had been.  Her joy, sorrows, pains, pleasures, her longing, her knowledge.  He felt these things and he noticed a particle of his left arm again go dark, but he felt it still, for what it was a void, a nothing, a lack.  He was not loosing pieces of himself.  They were growing more dense, they were combining so that they were no longer a part of him, but a part of the thing around him; the world.
     Adam drifted to the top of the building and stood there on his toes.  He looked around him at the thing he was becoming, at what he had already lost two very precious pieces of himself to.  He blinked a third time feeling the wetness of the tear duct as it replenished the fluids of his eye.  Adam stared at the world and Adam began to think.

Time: 10:00 A.M.
Date: Dec 29, 1999
Place: Helping Hands Office, Queens

    Lily Mauvais sat in her office and began to think.  Lily was an attractive yet plain woman of about 26.  She had shoulder length blonde hair, a small button nose and an oval shaped face.  She thought about all the things she needed to get done in her personal life, such as it was.  Really her personal life, social life, and private affairs were all lumped together in the guise of her job.  Lily was the assistant director of a social office outside of New York City.  Lily loved her job, just as she loved the people she helped.  Which is why the 90+ hours a week that she put into it were so very important to her.  She never left the mindset of work.  She was in full helping mode at every moment of the day.
    The phone rang.  Lily picked it up, “Hello?  Oh, hello Mrs. Ruseau I’m so glad to hear from you.  How is everything?  That’s nice.  Is Martin doing well today?  Oh, that’s so wonderful!  Tell him I’ll be by later today after I run to the bank.  Bye.”  Lily put the phone down and picked up an orange manila envelope on her desk.  It was about time she made the deposit for the local youth hostel before they started bouncing checks.  Lily chuckled to herself, best that that never happens she thought.
    Lily locked her office door and went outside to her car.  Lily drove an old but functional cream colored Volkswagen Jetta.  She unlocked the door and put her back beside her in the passenger seat.  As she righted herself to a sitting position she felt a sudden cold chill shoot through her just before a hand snatched her wrist from the steering wheel.  Lily turned and looked in shock that a young black man had grabbed her and was pulling her from the car.
    She recognized the youth as Jamal Winter a local boy who had just completed high school, six months late, but he was done and that was more important. She had helped him get a scholarship to NYU, which she had only recently graduated from the year before.
    “Jamal what are doing here, you startled me,” Lily said.  “Almost made my heart stop, oh my.” Lily placed her hand above her chest and tapped it a few times limply, exaggerating her relief.
    Jamal sneered at her.  “Shut up bitch, I came here for the money. Give it to me!”
    “What!  Jamal, what’s wrong with you.  This is no way to behave,” Lily gasped curtly slapping him.
    Jamal took the blow without flinching.  “So, the rough stuff eh?  I like it rough myself you stupid cunt.”  Jamal grabbed Lily’s other wrist and slammed her against the hood of the car.  He put her hands together over her head and started to rip open her blouse.  Lily was wearing an overcoat and blue blouse with a knee-high black skirt, her usual professional attire.  Right now I wish I was wearing her usual sweater over a T-shirt, then he’d have to waste time getting two shirts off of me, she thought.  Jamal got her blouse open and started to lick the upper curve of her breast.
    Lily made sure that Jamal was busy before she pushed the button on her key chain for the car alarm.  Jamal looked up momentarily letting go of her wrists.  Lily kicked Jamal in the groin and then smacked him on the top of the head with her fists.  She jumped in the car shutting and locking the door before she started it.  Jamal was up before she could drive off pounding on the windshield.  Lily started to scream as she gunned the engine and ran over him.  She saw in the rear view mirror that she had hurt his leg badly.  He was floundering around so she new he was alive.  But he couldn’t stand up.
    As she pulled up to the bank she remembered that her blouse was still open and ripped beyond simple repair.  She pulled a spare shirt out from under the seat and put that on over her blouse.  It was a plain, oatmeal colored shirt that she used to wear on the weekends when she was back home in Connecticut.
She checked her hair before getting grabbing the envelope from the passenger seat and getting out of the car.  Walking briskly up the steps so the chilly December air wouldn’t go up her skirt, she entered the bank.
    She took a stand near the radiator as soon as she got in the bank.   As she warmed up Lily began to notice something odd about the other patrons in the bank.  There wasn’t any.  Lily looked around, no tellers, no loan agents, even the security guard was missing.  She got up and walked around clutching the envelope to her chest as if she were trying to keep people from seeing what might be inside.  As she neared the presidents office she thought she could hear a noise.  It sounded like someone was talking.  Maybe the bank had closed early for New Years?  Lily walked into the office unannounced.  Her friend Carl Johnson ran the bank and they had dated a year or so ago when they were both trying to get through college.  Carl’s father owned the bank and had given it to him as part of the inheritance when he had died six months ago.  Lily had just moved into the social work office down the street that very week that he had passed away.
    “Hello Carl, sorry to intrude but… Oh, I see,” Lily stared into the face of a man in a black ski mask.  He was holding a phone in one hand pointing a gun at her with the other.  Next to him on the floor was Carl’s body.  “Oh, Carl.  I… I just… I’m sorry Carl.”
    “Yeah, the manager. If see even one person in uniform on this street in the next hour I’m going to shoot another one.  That’s right I have sixteen more hostages.  Seventeen counting the bitch that just walked in, guess the bank manager should have locked the door if he was expecting to be robbed today.  Ha, ha, ah, ha.”  The man in the mask hung up the phone and gestured to Lily with the gun.  “You look a little flushed there.  Been banging the manager on the side have you?”  He pulled a walkie-talkie from his hip.  This is Two, Three get up here and keep an eye on the door, we have more hostages walking in all the time.”  He placed the walkie-talkie back on his hip.
    Lily felt herself coming apart, she was attacked by Jamal less than ten minutes ago and now she was sitting in an office with the man who had just murdered her friend Carl.  She started to cry.
    “Oh, hey now babe,” said Two in a fake suave tone.  “No need to get all gooey eyed over the stiff.  Whatever he was to you, I can do better than him.  You just remember that.  Now take of you skirt bitch.  I haven’t gotten laid in a week.  And Pete and I really need it.  I might just get violent if I don’t get some soon, and you wouldn’t want that would you?”  He walked around the desk and shut the door behind Lily, gesturing for her to sit on the desk.
    Lily sobbed a couple of times pleading with him, “No, I don’t…*sob* I can’t… Please don’t do this, why did you kill *sob* Carl.  Please, don’t.”
Two backhanded her across the jaw.  “Now you listen here.  If you don’t start showing some skin in ten seconds I’m going to kill you.”
Lily sobbed again,” No, I’d rather die then have to do this.  Its sick I won’t!”
Two backhanded her again.  “You want to die, do you?  I tell you what, if you don’t let me do what I want, I’m going to kill a hostage for each time that you say no.  You want that do you.”
    “No, I don’t.  I want to go home,” Lily tried to stop crying but she couldn’t.
    Two nodded and grabbed the walkie-talkie again.  “Four, this is Two shoot one of the hostages, now.”  A shot is fired and a thud is heard.  Lily breaks into tears.  Two glared at her again.  “That’s one.  You want another to die, do you?
    Lily sat on the desk and grabbed the button on her skirt and began to lower the zipper.  She stopped.  Two’s started to reach for his walkie-talkie again.  “I’m more into the top myself,” she said.  How about I show you a little tit first eh?”  In the back of her mind Lily was screaming, how had today started going so very badly.  She stood up and took off her overcoat slowly, wiggling her hips and thrusting her pelvis forward as she lowered it off of her.  As she removed her last arm from the coat she flung it on Two’s head and jumped on him from the top of the desk.  She landed with both knees on his ribcage and she heard a crack as he hit the floor.  Feeling only slightly sorry for the man she grabbed for his gun which she found to be pointed directly in her face.
    Two pulled the trigger and Lily screamed.
 
 

Time: 10:00 P.M.
Date: Dec 28, 1999
Place: John’s Laboratory, Upper State New York

    John Normal began running.  The universes were collapsing behind him.  Lilith ran stalked after him slowly, migrating from universe to universe and as she walked she grew darker, and harder.  She became more real, more of the world.  Lilith stepped out of the portal onto the cold sterile floor of John’s laboratory.  She licked her lips in a delightful flirtatious smile.  Lilith was an absolutely ravishing woman.  Her hair was black, her face pail and heart shaped.  Her nose was delicate, and her eyes were piercing pools of green.  Her mouth, full lipped and provocative formed a little “O” as she gazed around John’s laboratory.  This was just too perfect.
    John continued running.  He had gotten out of the house and was running along the roadside hoping someone would pick him up.  Why hadn’t he ever learned to drive?  His breathing was becoming labored and he was only about a mile away from the house.
    He heard the sound of a car coming up the darkened highway and stuck out his arm waving.  The car sped by.  John peered to see the driver as it drove by but couldn't make out if it was a man or a woman.
    He repeated his actions four or five times before giving up.  Nobody in New York is just stopping to pick you up in the middle of the night on a highway like this.  John wrapped his arms around himself and shivered.  It certainly was cold tonight.
    He began walking again, trying to move his arms and keep himself warm.  He really shouldn't have ran outside in just his lab coat.  He heard the sound of a truck horn and turned to wave, the teamsters were known to pick up all sorts of people.  The truck slowed as it approached, pulling over to the side of the road.  John stood on the step and peered in at the driver.  He pointed for John to go around to the other door.  John did so gladly.
    He shut the door behind him and greeted the driver warmly, "Oh, thanks sir.  I was getting really cold out there."
    The driver nodded and cranked the nob on the heater.  "No problem, boy.  Where you headed to?" he said in a smooth truckers drawl.  He pulled back onto the highway and started heading south again.
    "How long before we reach Manhattan?" John asked.
    "That where you're goin' that's the same place the woman wanted to go to," the trucker said pointing into the sleeper of the truck.
    "Woman?" John croaked.
    "That's right lover, its me.  Did you think that running out of the house like that, and leaving me all alone with little Suzy and Timmy was funny.  How sad," Lilith started to raise her voice, angry.  "You should take better care of your family."  Lilith grabbed the driver by the throat.  "Isn't that right Dave?"
    The driver coughed and choked as Lilith crushed his windpipe.  His eyes bulged and his body went slack.  The truck began to weave dangerously in the traffic.
John noticed the hazardous materials insignia on Dave's shirt and began to panic.  He grabbed the wheel and tried to kick Dave's foot off of the gas.  The man was just to big, John couldn't get his foot off and he couldn't reach the break!
    Lilith giggled at John's attempt to save them.  "Don't be silly lover.  We won't die.  I won't let that happen.  Yet."
    John looked in horror at Lilith's face as the truck drifted off of the highway and headed towards the trees.  Blacking out just before they hit.

Time: 10:38 A.M.
Date: Dec. 29, 1999
Place: Chemcial Bank, Queens

     Lily continued to scream even after the gun and bullet sublimed into elemental gasses before her.  Even as the body of Two also disappeared in a multicolored variety of smoke and gas.
     Adam looked quizzically at Lily.  Why was she still screaming?  The void in the man was gone.  Adam had released the mans pure vibrant particles back into the air where they would travel there way through the stratosphere.  He paused in his thought.  Where were the particles heading?  He created a thought and placed it in a section of his temporal lobe to remind him later to find the particles final destination.  Adam returned his attention to the woman.
     Lily stopped screaming.  The nude man who stood before her vaporized the fear and pain she felt.  Her mind cleared and she began to cry again.  Why had all these terrible things happened to her?  The man offered her his hand, as she took it she felt herself become weightless and she saw herself rise off of the floor standing, as she saw the man was, a few inches above the carpet of the office.  Lily gasped in shock.
     Adam contemplated why the woman was concerned.  Was it the presence of the dead man behind the desk?  Yes, that must be it.  Things that had lost their life essence often disturbed others of the species.  Adam felt an inspiration coming from his amigdyla.  He could remove the body.  Adam sent a piece of his consciousness into the corpse and quickly disassembled the body and clothing into free radicals and basic elements again.
     Lily watched as the body of Carl suddenly collapsed within itself and blew into gasses.  Lily couldn't take much more of this absurd shocking day.  She felt unconsciousness spreading in from the edge of her vision.  She gladly fell into it only to be jerked back into the world by a tingling sensation.
     "Why do you wish to be unaware?" Adam asked each word spoken in a different accent or voice.
     "What?  I I just can't take today anymore.  I don't want to be here.  Everything is just so bleak and wrong.  Everybody is so very wrong and cruel today."
     "Wrong.  Cruel," he repeated in her voice.  "These words are bad?"
     Lily stopped herself from yelling at him.  Who is this naked floating man with multicolored hair?  How could he make guns and people vanish?  Why was he talking to her in so many odd voices?  "Who are you?"
     Adam slowly rotated in the air like an astronaut in zero gravity.  "My query was lodged before yours.  Thusly in order of effect you will have to answer my query first, then shall I respond to yours."
     Lily fought through a fog of anger, annoyance and laughter.  "I They're bad.  Nobody should have to live in a world that is cruel and wrong."
     Adam nodded.  "I am Adam Fuerst.  I am able to shift pieces of myself, what you might call molecules to do whatever I wish.  I took apart the bodies of Steven Phelps and Carl Johnson.  Steven Phelps was mostly composed of void, I wished to free his light particles from those that were consuming him.  Carl Johnson's body seemed to be disturbing you so I removed him.  His light particles were more numerous than those of Steven Phelps."
     Lily nodded.  "Where do the particles go?"
     Adam was nearly upside down and backwards to Lily but he continued to speak.  "I do not know.  I followed those of my mother into the stratosphere.  I have lodged a thought in my temporal lobe to find out later.  I will add a second to the list.  Would you like to be alerted when I have found the answer?"
     Lily tried to walk to the chair in the corner but found she couldn't move.  "Um, Adam?  I can't move."
     "Would you like your motor skills to be returned to you?  I suspended them for the purpose of keeping your consciousness intact.  I will give them back."
     Lily felt the air shift around her, her feet hit the floor and her stomach churned.  She threw-up when the acrid smells of the gasses in the room hit her.  She fell backwards and hit her head on the chair.  Her body spun to the left and fell to the floor.  Her face buried in the floor.  She could smell the bile rising up from her shirtfront and she again saw unconsciousness blurring the edges of her vision.  She gave into it again.  Hoping that when she awoke she would be anywhere but here, talking to the beautiful naked man that was splitting people into their base elements and talking in a thousand voices.
     Adam watched as the woman collapsed backwards and threw-up, as she hit her head and the ground and went unconscious.  He looked around the room and studied it carefully.  A large amount of positive particles were held within the walls.  As he touched them he could see what they were.  That each particle was a memory of times spent within the office.  Carl Johnson had been a happy man, particles of his wife and child were etched into the walls like the pens on the desk.  They were part of the office, tools useful to those who knew how to operate them.
     He saw several other particles in the room, or didn't see them, actually.  Pieces of void were strewn across the office in a virtual checkerboard.  Adam stared at them.  He stared at the office and saw that the pieces of void were much more proliferate than the particles of light.  Some of them were a hundred years old.  Others were only minutes old.
     Adams perception split following the path of each light particle taking in the thoughts and memories, the substance of each.  He reveled in them.  Their pureness that is the sweet taste of a strawberry.  The joy of seeing Mrs. Johnson walk in with lunch.  Adam was all of these things.  He experienced them through every angle possible and returned to himself.  "This is happiness," the voice within him said.  "This is what they want.  This is what we are."
     Adam took a purposefull breath.  He needed to do something about the void in the room.  The two pieces that he had lost to the void himself produced a pain within him.  The pain was a third piece, and he had since added two more.  Five pieces of him, five parts of himself had been lost.  The void was a consuming thing.  Could it be pushed back?
 Adam looked at the most recent of the void particles.  Most were the fear felt by Lily.  One was her anger born and cast off of her as she attacked Steven Phelps.  Another was the shame she felt to be taking off her skirt.  The guilt of letting a person die because she refused to dot the things that Phelps wanted.  The rage of Phelps as he murdered Carl.  The pride that he felt in ordering a hostage's death.  The disdain he felt for the police.
     Adam picked up Lily.  There was so much that he did not understand.  Lily was different then the people he had met thus far.  They were comprised of both light and void particles and they freely pulled both to them.  Lily was comprised mostly of light yet the void was there in the very center of her.  But instead of growing it was shrinking.
     He studied the particle of void cast off by Lily's attack of Phelps.  He let it become part of him.  He experienced it and was sorrowful as two parts of himself became void.  One because of the experience that Lily had, and one from his own sorrow.  How had Lily cast it off?  Why was this particle not a part of her?  Was it because she was attacking someone who was virtually composed of void?  Perhaps.  "Let us test this," said the voice.  Adam nodded.  There were three more of these masked men.  He would deal with them.
     One and Four were guarding the hostages.  They had guns trained upon the fourteen men and women huddled in the corner.  The hostages were kneeling with their faces to the wall.  They were gagged and their hands tied to their heads.  They were equal parts angry and scared.  One and Four just smirked at them behind their masks.  In another hour they would be gone, clean, with over 4 million in cash, bonds and options.
     Adam came through the floor between the two men and the hostages.  He wore an angry expression on his perfect face and his eyes blazed in their random flickering.
One was the first to react.  He opened fire with a hand held M6.  Four took an extra second to react firing blasts from his shotgun.
    Adam dissipated the bullets and vaporized the guns of the two men.  His face contorted with anger, tears streamed from his eyes.  He kicked Four in the chest, each molecule of his foot connecting squarely with the molecules of Four's torso.  They split.  The molecules of Four's torso erupted, spewing atoms across the room.  His chest imploded and exploded at the same time, his appendages hung limply in the hair for a second before falling with a wet thud to the floor.
    He contained the energy of the explosion and forced it into a conical shape at the ceiling, melting a hole nearly a meter square completely through.
He refocused on One who had already picked up Four's left arm and was swinging it at him like a club.  Adam sent his conscious structure to the other side of the man instantly appearing behind him.  He grabbed One's shoulder and squeezed again focusing each molecule to fall square with each other molecule.  One's arm ripped from the shoulder and he passed out from the sudden pain.
    Adam felt the particles of void form upon him.  Negative.  It didn't work.  I have done a positive thing though.  I have saved people from those who were mostly void.  Adam dissipated the bodies of the two bank robbers.  I have released their light essences into the world to go where they will.  Why do I lose pieces of myself?
    He dissipated the body of the dead hostage before removing the bindings of the other hostages.  "You are free," he told them.  "Wait here just a moment I have to remove one more downstairs."
    He separated his consciousness through the building appearing just behind Three.  "Do you wish to do this?" he asked.  Perhaps it is their resistance that causes the void within him.
Three turned around in shock at the nude man suddenly appearing behind him "Oh my god!  What are you!"  He swung his fully automatic rifle around to face Adam.
Adam reached forward and touched the Three's head.  "Void.  There is void growing within him."  He reeled back out of fear that he would gain more void by being in contact with Three.  A void formed upon him, born out of the fear.  He reversed his efforts charging the man and slapping him full in the face with his hand.  Adam shifted the blow, misaligning the molecules.  The force was still far too great, Three's head spun around like a tilt-a-whirl and his body went limp.
    He stared down at the now dead criminal as he quickly was taken apart by pieces of Adam's consciousness.  Another four voids.  Why did they not detach from me as they did the woman Lily?  Adam pondered this.  Lily seemed to be largely unaffected by void.  What things she did that would normally produce void in Adam and the others he had studied the night before had been cast off from her.  Why was Lily different?
    Adam separated and reformed upstairs.  You are free to go, the criminals are no more."  He turned to leave and gather Lily but something alerted him that the people were not prepared to leave.  They were standing in fear on the opposite side of the room huddled in the corner.  He looked at them, allowing himself to touch the voids within them as they formed.  Each was a mixture of confusion and utter terror.
    Adam stood, hovering, above the spot where the two criminals, One and Four, had stood, he could see the particles left by their presence.  Something about them troubled him.  They were growing at an alarming rate!  Adam gave a second nod to the hostages.  "Go.  I have business to attend to."  He left to collect Lily.