Aberrant: The Middle Children of History - More to Do

[Neil Preston]

Neil sat on the veranda of his house looking over his garden. It was more of a jungle than a garden, but he knew every plants’ location by memory. The garden resembled what the environs of Rio de Janeiro should have looked like without the press of humanity. In a word, it was gorgeous.

Neil felt the life each bug moving about. He felt the birds that fed on the bugs, and even the snake that had just fed on a bird. Such was the ebb and flow of life around him. It was this current that Neil immersed himself in. It was his comfort zone, feeling the pulse of life. It separated him from the pressing concerns of a mortal life. It was something special. It was also something that few others could do, and that was something that left the nova a bit sad. It was something he couldn’t share.

Telepaths had their gestalts and they were enough of them to form groups and societies all their own. He had been in a gestalt, but it wasn’t the same. Thoughts were like islands in a great delta. Life was the ocean, the rivers, the lakes, the streams, and the rain all combined. There was not a sharing though. One nova’s life was infinitesimal compared to the life force of say, his pond. It made him feel good to know that life would go on no matter what.

He wondered if that was true; could life carry on no matter what? Some things he had been witnessing in the war zones in the past few years gave him pause. There were novas out there with the force of a battlefield nuke – and they weren’t bashful about using them. It seemed that fewer and fewer novas were willing to take full measure of how much they could damage the world. Fewer still worried about being held to accounts for what they did.

Neil had talked to his father recently. Craig, his father, felt the world was sliding toward an Abyss. It was moving toward a race war, and a war between those with power and those who resisted that power. Humanity would be caught in the crossfire as their share of power on the world stage diminished. Neil’s father was very gloomy these days. The man, a powerful precog, had lost faith in the race of novas to police themselves and to act responsibly for the planet’s good. All he saw were the bitter, twisted, and selfish children each seeking out their own will and destiny.

He wished he could feel his father was being pessimistic, but he couldn’t. Neil had seen and talked to enough novas to know they were more concerned with themselves and their own agendas to consider were the rest of the planet was going.

What was he going to do?

Neil had sat on the sidelines for some time. To be more accurate, he had been going in after the fights and putting the pieces back together. He had been preaching peace and healing the hurts while the power inside him had slowly grown. Now he was adrift. Now his life up to this point seemed to be the coward’s way out and he wanted to do more, but what?

What was he going to do?

He reached in and touched the power within him. He felt it pulse out dozen’s of meters into the surrounding environment, waiting on his call … and then he felt it. He felt there could be so much more. He felt the ever-sweet call of the power to him; the need to push, expand, and to be more than it was. He reached out and touched it. It felt warm and vibrant to the touch. There would be more and then there would be more to do, more he could do.