The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

All I want is the gun, Owen thinks.

Get rid of the gun, says his friend. Owen looks at it. The sculpted metal. A perfect play of cylinder and line. Bobby’s hand rests next to it, fingers on the handle gently, lovingly. Owen wants to touch it. Hold it.

He reaches out with the null. He forms it into a circle that devours the gun, a chunk of the desk underneath it, and two of Bobby’s fingers up to the first knuckles. Bobby draws his hand up in front of his face, staring at the lack, at the smooth edges where the fingers end. He screams. An animal sound. Outside there are more screams. Bobby slams his mutilated hand on the desk, and Owen can sense Bobby’s ability welling up, aimed at him.

“Fucking di—”

Owen is inside his head, rooting, looking for that glowing little bit where Bobby’s ability lives. He finds it in the middle of Bobby’s brain and feeds it to the null. It’s inelegant surgery. A baseball-size sphere of brain comes along with it, and the null growls appreciatively as blood spurts from Bobby’s nose and wells in his eyes like tears. Bobby pitches forward onto the desk, twitching.

Owen steps out of the RV. People run wildly around the patch of dead grass, their paths chaotic like those of flies. The Angel swoops overhead, tracing a figure eight against the night sky. The ticket collector is facedown in the mud, deep gashes on his back. Paul sprints to Owen, shirt torn open. His torso and the left side of his face are covered in perfectly circular red welts. Sucker marks.

“We gotta get out of here,” he screams.

Owen holds his shoulders as if he’s trying to calm him down. “Wait,” he says.

Can I? he asks his friend.

All of these are yours, his friend says.

Owen smiles, a wolf again at last.

Fahima and Patrick have a text chain of names for it. Kevin Bishop’s Victory Lap. The Peace and Unity Tour. Electric Kool-Aid Resonance Test. Fahima stopped following Bishop’s slate of lectures and media appearances because she has her own life to worry about and there aren’t enough hours in the day. Alyssa insists they go to his talk at Columbia, the first in a semester-long series on posthumanism. Along with colloquiums on issues of consent for sex robots and the potential barriers to diplomatic relations between humans and extraterrestrials with non-logic-based linguistics is Kevin Bishop, speaking on the shadow history of Resonants hiding in plain sight through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The lecture title is “The Nobody People.”

Alyssa works nearby, so she meets Fahima at the lecture hall still wearing her scrubs. They’re shuttled backstage, where Bishop is pacing in the wings, doing a series of verbal warm-ups Sarah taught him that contort his face into funny shapes.

“Nervous, Bishop?” says Fahima.

He smiles. “This is my alma mater,” he says. “I was one of Enrico Fermi’s first graduate students. I don’t want to let the old man down.”

“Name-dropper,” says Fahima. “Some day I’m going to get you so drunk, you’ll tell me your whole life story.”

Bishop smiles his frustrating, enigmatic smile, then turns his attention to Alyssa. “Doctor Pratt,” he says, extending his hand. “It’s so very good to meet you.”

“Alyssa, please,” she says.

“Then you should call me Kevin.”

“You should call him Bishop,” Fahima says. One of the organizers comes by and whispers something in Bishop’s ear. “Kevin doesn’t carry any weight.”

“We all do the best with what we’re given,” Bishop says.

“I’m looking forward to hearing you speak,” says Alyssa. “I feel like I don’t know how to think about all this.”

“None of us do,” Bishop says. “That’s a good thing. Our thinking should be constantly evolving. Always learning. Always—” He shakes his head as if a gnat has buzzed into his ear. “I’m sorry,” he says. He grabs Alyssa’s shoulder, leaning on her for support. A thin trickle of pink fluid dribbles from his left nostril.

“Mr. Bishop?” Alyssa says. She’s gone instantly into her doctor voice. Bishop’s eyes are distant for a second before coming back into focus.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, wiping the spot under his nose. “I’ve been having these headaches.”

On stage, someone is introducing him, using the kind of hyperbolic language deployed at academic lectures. Visionary. Revolutionary. No one man has had the impact. Only this time they’re accurate.

“How long?” Alyssa asks.

“Hmm?”

“How long have you been having headaches?”

“They’re occasional.”

“I think you just had a seizure.”

His hand on her shoulder gives her a patronizing pat. “You’re young. You don’t know how common little spells like that become at my age.”

“I’m a doctor,” Alyssa says. “I know a seizure when it’s in front of me. We need to get you to a hospital.”

Fahima feels the quiver in her mind that occurs whenever Bishop uses his ability. He’s so powerful, his ability has to be held in check. When even a little of it vents into the world, it rattles any mind nearby.

“We’ll go after the lecture,” Alyssa says. Her voice is flat and mechanical.

“Very good,” Bishop says. Fahima glares at him, sends the thought as loudly and clearly as she can: Don’t ever do that to her again. But the audience is cheering, the students still flush with the enthusiasm of a new school year beginning. Bishop steps out into the lights, waving energetically.

—

Alyssa goes over it with Fahima first. There are things in the results Alyssa can’t make sense of, things specific to Resonant biology. Fahima sends for a few items to be couriered over from her lab to fill in details. But they are all beside the point. The main issue is clear. There’s nothing special, nothing magical about it.

Fahima hands him their report, and he pages through it while she hooks up the contacts on the EEG helmet, a colander studded with nodes and strung with wires.

“Did you know?” she asks.

“I knew something was wrong,” Bishop