Price of Divinity

Author : Connor Harbison

No name. Names were to distinguish one from another. Now there was only one. Only him. The vastness of space seemed to swallow him up. From his asteroid perch he could spot a few other bodies. No planets. Not anymore, at least.

He cast a mournful eye towards the center. Nothing showed in the visible spectrum, but he could see the palpitations in gravity. The hole was there, just where he’d left it eons ago.

He remembered when the abilities first manifested. There was no explanation; one day he was ordinary, the next extraordinary. First there were accusations of steroids. Then he did things that no steroid, or any drug known to man, could do. Flying. Redistribution of mass and energy. The scientists called him the closest thing to God. The religious people didn’t like that.

He drifted cooly towards the heart of the system, letting the natural gravity well do its work. Or rather, artificial. It was man made, after all. Even if it was made by the last man.

Wars had broken out, but all he had wanted was to be left alone. His country had convinced him to fight on their side. The horrors he committed still flashed in his memory. Flesh melted from bone, bodies incinerated in an instant. Before that he had no idea what he could do.

With a twitch of his fingers he atomized an incoming asteroid. Had it impacted before the Earth disappeared it would have caused an extinction event to rival the dinosaurs. Maybe that would have been cleaner, he contemplated.

His first act of rebellion had been minuscule. His military handlers gave him a target; a small town thought to be harboring enemy operatives. He refused. They got angry, and he vaporized them.

The black hole neared with increasing speed. He calmly compared it to floating along in the rivers and creeks of his youth. Instead of water it was gravity now.

From that altercation it escalated. Ground troops were called in and quickly dispatched. Armor tried to stop him, but they were no match. Airstrikes demolished the house, but he was unscathed. Finally, the high command authorized a nuclear strike, which only served to kill everyone he had ever cared about. That was the final straw.

He came to a stop. He could see the gravity ripple before him, pouring over the event horizon. He had the power to stop himself here, but once the horizon was crossed there was no going back.

As the radioactive dust had cleared from the nuclear strike he rose into the sky. He kept rising, through the atmosphere and into space. He pointed himself towards the sun and minutes later he was in the heart of the star. From there it was a simple thing to overwhelm the core and collapse the star into a black hole. He had watched from afar as the inner solar system was sucked in. Earth’s demise barely registered on his emotionless face.

That was ages ago. He could not number the time that had passed. He had thought and rethought his actions. It took millennia, but he found remorse. Condemning a whole planet to death, for the actions of a few. He was no better than the men who had condemned the town.

He looked again at the event horizon. One step and it would soon be over. The black singularity would pull him in and crush his atoms into oblivion. He had survived countless hardships, much more than the human body was meant to endure. He contemplated a moment, then took the step.