Aberrant: Infinite Earth - Cosmos Nova - [CN] Nate's prison years[FIN]

[Mr Fox]

Nate sat staring at the walls of his cell for the last time. There was an inner calm now that he had not had when he first arrived. Despite the restrictions on his movements and access to materials, he had managed to accomplish quite a bit in five years. He glanced down at the floor in front of him, where his comm unit, and it's accessories sat, and at the open hole in the cement wall before him where he usually stored them. That hole would be closed up again come morning, and no one would ever know it had been there. Not that it was empty even now.

He smiled seeing the spare lightsabers that lay within. Each one had been the product of months of effort and meditation, but he was getting ahead of himself he thought. He had intended to meditate on his time in the prison to see if there were any last insights he might gain from his time paying for his crime.

He let his mind drift back to the beginning as he centered himself and let the world around him fade to the back of his mind.

How had it all begun? He had been vain, and insecure despite having many advantages in life that almost any of his fellow inmates would have killed for, quite literally. His parents were THE Chathams, his grandfather had started the gem company back in the fifties after the secret of creating synthetic gemstones had been discovered by one of his collegues at DuPont Chemical. Nathan Chatham, Nate's namesake, had the vision to turn that process into a successful business model. It had flourished over the years to a multi-billion dollar company, and Nate had been the only son in the family and his grandfather's favorite. Everyone knew that Nate would grow up to inherit the business after his own father retired. He'd been given the best education money could buy, and money was something his family had in spades.

There was a twinge in his heart as he sat meditating. Nate's grandfather had died shortly before the Refugee's had arrived, and his own parents had all but ignored him after that. He had always been small for his age and seemed frail despite the physical efforts he put into developing his muscles. His face had also been a pimple covered wreck, the classic pizza face, and he was under no illusions that he was not in the least bit attractive. To make matters worse his parents had kept him away from other kids growing up. They were doing it to protect him they said, but Nate thought it was more to do with their prejudices. They were a southern family, and had grown up rich in a South divided with racial tensions. He had heard his father say once, "They forced us to desegregate, and by god, I'll not have my son forced to go to some poor school filled with any old riff-raff! He'll be schooled at home!"

There was a flare of anger in his soul that he quashed as he remembered. It wasn’t a matter of maintaining Jedi calm, he didn't believe in any mystical force that had near sentient Light and Dark sides, it was that he knew that maintaining balance was key to not lashing out with his powers and doing damage he couldn't undo.

He calmed his breathing, taking several deep breaths and letting them out slowly, before refocusing his thoughts.

He had been an awkward 17 year old who looked more like 14 when he had gone to Dragon Con. His arch nemisis, or so he had thought of the boy at the time, had challenged him to defend his statement that Yoda could be the Emperor in a fight. They had sparred over various Star Wars discussions on the forums off and on for years, but the Con was the first time they had ever met in person. The confrontation had begun as expected with arguments back and forth over why each thought that their point was superior. Nate had been schooled by the best teacher's money could hire and he had been taught to think as well as pass tests. His IQ was almost at genius level and he made full use of it when it came to a subject he loved. Unfortunately, his opponent was every bit as smart as he was, and curse him, he was everything Nate wasn't in terms of looks. He was a jock, with a perfect complexion, and where Nate looked like a complete nerd, Joel was built like a brick wall, star of the varsity football team and was a year younger!

He had always thought the other boy was bragging and lying when the talked about this girlfriend and that, but here he was in person looking like some young black-haired godling, and he had a beautiful girl in a cosplay outfit on his arm.

Despite all of that Nate felt like he was winning the argument, and it was giving him great pleasure, that was until Joel hit below the belt. "Well, of the two of them, I'd rather be the emperor, he was a man, not a little green big-eared troll. The emperor could get laid any time he wanted, "yoda" on the other hand couldn't get a dog to lick his face if you covered it in pepperoni."

It was clear to everyone in the crowd that it wasn't the Star Wars characters that were being compared, and the cosplay girl laughed out loud before she could help herself and then blushed and looked pityingly at Nate. PITY! His rage had been like a furnace in his brain and it had erupted out of him in waves of Sith Lightening. He had lashed out not realizing that what he was doing was real at first. He had often had fantasies about blasting people who annoyed him, and with the incredible rage in him it was just another fantasy until he smelled the burning cotton and flesh from Joel's corpse. That was when he realized the lightening was real, and then it registered that the expressions of the crowd were horrified and afraid.

The arrest and trial that followed had been a haze that he had barely paid attention to, compared to his self-loathing. He had answered when spoken to, and had dressed as the lawyers had advised and done what they had said, but he had been uncaring of it all. He had snuffed the life from someone decent. They had just been kids arguing over something stupid and so what that Joel had taken a low shot, it had just been words. Now he would never spend his senior year being recruited by college football scouts, or grow up and accomplish who knew what?

He just hadn't cared, he knew he was guilty and needed to be punished, and couldn't imagine the jury deciding anything else. It wasn't until the final day of the trial and his lawyers made their final arguments that he realized they might actually win. He couldn't believe it. More importantly, he couldn't allow it. He didn't know how he could ever make up for what he had done, but he knew one thing in the core of his being and that was he should not be released with nothing but a hand-slap.

There was no satisfaction in his heart as he remembered the scene. He had stood and addressed the jury over his lawyers objections, and over his parents protests and threats of disowning him. He had declared his guilt and asked to be punished for what he had done. The jury had obliged, but the sentencing had been far more lenient than he had expected. Perhaps it had been due to the charges being manslaughter rather than murder, but he had received 5 years in a medium security detention center.

He hadn't realized it at the time, but throughout the trial his body had been undergoing changes, and he had gained almost fifty pounds in the month that the trial had taken, all of it muscle, he had grown at least four inches and his complexion had completely cleared up. He reflected that perhaps the physical changes had had as much to do with the sentence as anything else. At the end of the trial, he simply hadn't looked like the same evil zit covered troll that he had been a month earlier. Or maybe it was the distraction of the Refugees and that some people saw him as a victim of their arrival, not responsible for his own actions.

Regardless, he had had five years to grow and learn his new powers in relative peace and solitude away from the media and the tens of thousands of people who had sent him hate mail during the trial. To the media he had been a poster child for the negative side of the Refugee's arrival, but there was a quiet undercurrent of sympathy that built as the trial neared it's conclusion. Some might accuse him of declaring his guilt in order to earn sympathy, but he knew that not to be the case, they had been on the verge of finding him not guilty, he could see it in their eyes. He had chosen this, he had needed it.

Nor had it been a walk in the park serving five years in prison. From day one he had faced older harder men who would like nothing more than to kill him or abuse him for the fame it would earn them. He might have gone into prison looking to be punished, but becoming someone's 'bitch' was not what he had in mind….

His first day, he had sat down at an empty table in the dining room minding his own business and looking only to eat the food on his tray. He had only taken a couple bites when he 'saw' a group of men walk up behind him with trays in their hands. Even then he could see 360 degrees.

"You're in my seat boy". The man was big and brown, scarred and tattooed and looked every kind of mean.

Without looking around Nate gestured to the seat next to him. "Plenty of seats available." He had seen in the movies that you attacked the biggest baddest guy the first day in prison to establish that you wouldn't be easy meat. He didn't want to attack anyone however, he was here because he deserved punishment for what he had done, but he also wasn't going to cave to the first bully that tried to claim him.

The scarred man frowned as if he hadn't understood the answer. "Maybe you didn't hear me boy, I said you're in ma seat!" He said it quietly but with menace.

"No, I heard you fine. I'm just not moving, there's plenty of room for all of you at the table, no need for me to move." He was starting to get angry and a little frightened and was doing his best to control it knowing how dangerous that could be.

Some of the men with the big guy were taking seats around Nate, not wanting the guards to come investigate why they were all standing around. They seemed to be tense to Nate, as if they expected the big guy to get violent.

The man reached out and placed a big meaty hand on Nate's shoulder and began to squeeze. "I'm not gonna tell ya again boy, I'm gonna hurt ya good. It won't be here, either, wait till the shower's. You'll be picking up the soap."

Nate calmly reached up and touched the man's hand with one finger and sent electricty arching through the big man. His back arched and his muscles jerked spastically sending his tray and it's contents flying across the room. In no more than two seconds the man was on his knees screaming and jerking. Nate calmly brought his hand back down to his food and returned to eating.

The eyes of everyman at the table were as huge as plates, and recognition had come into more than one. "You! You're that jedi kid on the news, the one that killed the guy with lightening…."

Nate nodded sadly, but still never looked around.

The guard's had come rushing up to see what was going on and one of the other men at the table said "Bill just be trippin."

Bill was just getting himself under control and was still occasionally jerking in aftershock from the electricity. "Yeah, just slipped and fell. Hurt ma knees when I fell. Somethin wet on the floor, be lucky if I don't sue."

One of the guards hrumphed and walked off after saying, "Clean up that mess and then Jones will take you to the infirmary."

From that moment on Nate had been both a celebrity and a target. The dumber of the inmates had tried to sneak attack him and catch him off guard many times over the next couple years, but none ever succeeded in doing more than bruising the Jedi with a lucky swing of a tool in the machine shop. In every case he used his abilities to dissuade them from ever trying again in a non-lethal manner.

Over time he came to have quite a following among the prisoners. Some attached themselves to his "Jedi Order" out of hopes for protection, some because they had been beaten and like wolves they followed the strongest member of the pack, and some actually wanted to learn philosophy and become real jedi themselves. He did explain to them that the powers he had weren't really from "the force", but were quantum abilities and that it wasn't something that could be taught, it was something in the genes. That didn't seem to matter to most of the jedi wannabes. They soaked up everything he could teach them about his philosophy.

The irony was that he didn't really have a philosophy at first. Sure he meditated a lot, and outwardly seemed spiritual because of his desire to find balance, but inwardly he struggled to find his center. He read constantly, checking out books on philosophy, both Christian and Eastern and everything in between. In the end it was Zen that really held him. It seemed to harmonize with the Jedi way in a satisfying way although it was at odds with in in another. Jedi was all light, and Sith was all dark, and even at his young age Nate knew that wasn't how the world worked. He needed a middle ground and Zen was it. It taught balance, it taught calm, it stressed meditation and introspection, but it wasn't something that taught that you should separate yourself from life, it WAS life. Bodhidharma taught "Everything you do is Zen".

Dogen said, "When you leave the way to the way, you attain the way. At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way." It was one of those sayings that sound like gibberish until you "got it", but then it made perfect sense and you no longer struggled with it's meaning, because it didn't matter any more.

[Mr Fox]

Cliché as it might be in some ways it really did help. He had hours every day to meditate and contemplate his life and how he had come to this point, and seeing life in prison and how everything was melted down to the real basics of survival and the Self. Prison was a crucible, and all of his petty teenage issues of self-image and need for acceptance were burned away. Those things might matter to him again when he was out, but for now they were meaningless, for now he had learned 'stillness'.

From philosophy he began to branch out and study deeper on subjects he had enjoyed as a student, science and computers and engineering. He read voraciously exhausting the prison's library in a matter of months, by then he was trusted enough to access the library's computer and spent as many hours as they would allow going through subject after subject chasing down research and white-papers the way a dog might chase a rabbit.

Soon the idea of making his own computer formed and no sooner had he had the idea than he began to plan out to accomplish it. He had already learned Sith Alchemy, the ability to manipulate matter at the molecular level and rearrange the atoms and reshape materials, even gather material from unusual sources. He began by opening a hole in his cell's back wall and hollowed out a space for his project. Each day he would spend time planning out every computer search in order to maximize the little time he had online. Each search brought him new bits of knowledge to commit to memory on how each part of the computer interacted with each other and how they were traditionally constructed.

Material's came from sources all over the prison, but mostly from the shop. He requested and was given permission to 'learn a trade' in the prison shop, focusing mostly on machining since that gave him access to more various materials than anything else. The guards were very careful about checking prisoners to make sure none ever tried to get out of the shop with metal or anything else that could be made into a weapon, so instead Nate gathered his materials from the waste that was created from the machining. Sanding and polishing produced fine metal dust which he drew to himself. The guards thought he was messy, but the 'dirt' that covered him at the end of every shift was actually the raw materials he needed to build his computer.

It took almost a year before his first prototype was complete, and it was just a plain computer, with nothing fancy about it, and it had no internet access, but it was a start. For a monitor he used a pair of shop glasses that he turned into HUD style displays. The thing that stymied him the most was getting internet access. He was able to easily enough create a standard wifi receiver to pick up signal, but the metal in the prison's construction basically made the building one huge faraday cage blocking any signal he might have been able to receive. His big break through came when he realized that by tying into the metal of the building and charging it with a little quantum energy he could turn that faraday cage into one massive prison shaped satellite dish.

From there his productive time went from a couple hours a day to most of his every evening. After that he was able to search the net anytime a thought occurred to him without having to worry about time limits. Each successive prototype computer became smaller and more powerful until he moved entirely away from copper and silicone to actual quantum computing. It wasn't just the computer that benefited from his growing skills and experience, each of his devices became more compact and more reliable. The HUD glasses became ultra high def video and added high quality sound as well. They communicated with the computer via special frequency bluetooth that he built in. They also incorporated light reactive lenses that would darken almost instantly in reaction to bright light. They could even be used as welding glasses in a pinch. He also figured a way to make his trick with the prison structure into a portable device that he could connect to any metal to turn it into a broadcasting and receiving antenna capable of picking up a wide spectrum of frequencies.

Last but not least he created his lightsabers. Their construction was almost a spiritual experience. He gathered his materials the same way as he had the materials for his other gadgets, using the raw materials available in the shop. The hardest thing was collecting the corrundum to make the focusing crystals. It took months of swiping the material out of the sand paper belts in the shop. Not because the task was difficult, but because it took time for the prison to order new belts when the old ones wore out. The man responsible for the shop was downright perplexed at how they kept going through the grinding belts so quickly, but even watching he could see nothing wrong except that they just didn't seemed to work well. Nate was the only one who knew why and he just urged the foreman to order more belts as quickly as he could. Even Nate was amazed at how his Sith Alchemy could turn corundum dust into large beautiful perfect gemstones, one Ruby and one Sapphire. Then came the diamond based power crystals, but the raw material for those was easy to come by since carbon was everywhere.

When he had finished his first lightsaber he had been amazed at how beautiful the glowing blade was. He was just sad that it would only work in his own hands. He suspected his other devices would work in the hands of anyone that could power them with quantum energy, but the lightsabers were special and only he could make them work. With all of his devices he had felt pride on completing them, pride that he had done something all on his own with no help from some high paid tutor that his parents had hired. Pride that he had taken one more step toward becoming someone other than that pimple faced teen who had such low self-esteem that he had lashed out in rage over a verbal slight and killed another human being.

***

Coming back to the present he stared at the lightsabers before him and at the jedi robes he had fashioned out of blankets, sheets, towels and other fabric he could leech material from, and at his other gadgets. He understood now that balance wasn't a destination, but a journey and that he was unfinished still, but he was a long ways down the road from where he had started. He could never totally forgive himself for what had happened, but he was ready to rejoin society.