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Checkmate

2024-01-13

Johnny was hiking in the Colorado Rockies with his father and brother. They were climbing a steep trail carving up the edge of a valley and the sun was beating down.

"You guys go on ahead," said Johnny, "I need some water. I'll catch up with you later."

Without waiting for a response he turned onto a side trail going down a steep embankment and descended into the heart of the valley.

Some time later he came upon the Park Ranger's building.

Stepping inside, Johnny encountered the ranger herself, a severe looking woman with short-cropped blonde hair and a fat face. But "fat" was a poor first impression—as she stood from her desk, Johnny realized how much taller and more muscular this woman was than he.

"How can I help you?" asked the Ranger with a fake smile.

Fake. It wouldn't do any good to ask for water, Johnny realized at the same moment a solid steel door slammed shut behind him. He was trapped—this was a trap. But now it was Johnny's turn to smile.

It had been many years since that night in the parking lot when he received the gift of speed. Johnny was an adult now and he had picked up many new abilities. A steel door was nothing to him; the whole building could have been made of steel and it wouldn't have mattered. No one and nothing could stop him. "This should be fun," Johnny thought.

With a twitch of his mind the steel door was gone and the entire side of the building was blown to rubble. Wasting no time Johnny dashed back outside, picking up more and more speed until he was blasting forward and faster away from the ill-fated Ranger station. It had been too long since he had felt like this, power rushing through him, truly alive, and faster than was humanly possible. But when Johnny glanced back over his shoulder he saw the boss woman and her tribe of park ranger goons keeping pace with him. Clearly he was going to have to be a bit more creative.

Johnny whipped back around, his feet carving trenches into the earth and dust blasting behind him as he explosively halted to face his pursuers. They could keep pace, but Johnny could alter space. Raising his hand in front of him, Johnny stretched time-space itself, creating a large gulf between him and his foes. Now they must know how pointless it was to try to catch him, how vainly they struggled.

Stretching his fingers out towards the hapless hoard, his palm facing up, Johnny had them in his mind's grip and with a tossing motion he threw them far up into the sky until they could be barely seen. Johnny rotated his palm towards the ground, and as he whipped his arm back down so came crashing down his doomed tormentors with a boom, deep into the rocky earth. They were gone, dead at the bottom of a crater of Johnny's creation.

Perhaps this wasn't such fun, after all, Johnny thought wistfully as he turned back to walk the path whence he came. With great power comes great boredom; when all threats are trivial there's no hope for volition to rile the soul towards victory, no challenge. Or whatever. Johny's mind idled off as he walked the path, stepping over a large bone. A stegosaurus skeleton riding a beach cruiser bicycle passed him from behind and stopped just ahead, peering back.

Johnny looked up, walked forward three steps and stopped, face-to-face with the stegosaurus skeleton, bemused. "What do you want?" Johnny asked.

The skeleton did not reply. Johnny broke off one of its teeth and let go, dropping it to the ground with an unsettling "clack."

Johnny looked down and noticed there were dinosaur bones everywhere. Rib cages, fractured skulls, teeth, pelvises, bones covering the earth for as far as the eye could see. How did he not notice this before? He glanced back towards the stegosaurus but it was gone, the bike was gone, and a larger pile of bones blocked the path ahead. Johnny turned back towards his crater and saw he was now blocked on both sides by the bones. Panicked, he looked up and saw piles of bones stretching higher than the mountains. It was then he realized this entire universe was filling with bones and soon he'd be entombed. Not good.

But Johnny remembered he had an ace up his sleeve. That night in the parking lot, his gift of speed; he could use it to escape this universe, a one way trip. Even without much space left to build up momentum he was sure it would work.

Johnny focused his mind and ripped his way into a new universe, but quickly he realized this one was worse. There were still bones and they were denser. There wasn't even a hint of earth or sky, the bones were all around him. He ripped again into yet another universe and found himself completely enclosed. Punching holes in the bone matter with his mind wouldn't work, he knew. The universe was lost, the bones were pressing down on him, crushing him, and he had little time.

Johnny ripped again and again, through universe after universe, but it was all the same, because all possible universes had been completely filled by the infinite dinosaur bones—a deterministic fate that shouldn't have been. Johnny was out of moves.

"Checkmate," Johnny heard in his mind as he woke up.