All Too Human

by Mack Knopf

I'm eating a mouthful of sugar bombs drenched in Diet Pepsi when the call hits my mind, and I wake up seconds later facedown on the water bed, drenched in soda and spitting out cereal. It's high noon on the Carrier, not that earthbound time means much more than convenience on a spaceship fifty miles across, and I was barely conscious to start with. The ship can pick up electromagnetic transmissions from all around the dimensions, and I'd been watching the Wizard of Oz last night until I passed out. I'd seen it before, but I wanted a recording this time to play "The Dark Side of the Moon" to. I could have just bought a copy or summoned one, but I never remembered the first and I was too lazy for the second.

It's Jenny.

The Earth shoved a frantic distress call in my mind, and then stopped. I don't know what to be more scared of: what I just found out, or what I don't know. The spirit of the twenty-first century is in a maternity ward hospital in Singapore right now, and she's in danger. That's all I get, but I don't stop to ask more questions or even summon the others. I stumble to my feet, cursing myself for being so unsteady, so hung over, and I grab my goggles as I Door into the Singapore streets. I don't even have to use my own powers; all I have to do is just speak the words, and the ship sends me where I want to go.

It's night there, and I hate myself for the extra time it took, but the neon glare is so bad against my ultra sensitive eyes that without the protection I'd have a worse headache than I already do, and damn it, I can't afford to lose any more time with my problems. I'm running through the streets, gawky body knocking people out of the way, trying to get a bead on where she is. She's a newborn, it wouldn't take any effort to kill her, and I can feel the drumming in my bones that means something bad is going to happen. In my heart where the earth turns, there's a pain, and I can barely breathe. This century has just begun, and the Earth, like any good mother, is frantic with worry over its child.

I'm hyperventilating. I'm the global shaman, and what the earth feels, I feel. I didn't ask for this job, and that's why I got it. Someone always has to make a conscious decision when to intervene, over every time in history since humans first became something we could call "human" and not just a bunch of apes staring up at the stars. We first became human not when we discovered fire, or when we discovered tools, or when we discovered language. Chimpanzees can do the latter two to some degree, and fire just meant we were smarter chimps. No, we became human when we reached out and found the spirit world, found the mysteries. To be human is able to feel Spirit, whether you want to or not. So the world and the human race evolved shamans to be the caretakers of the tribe and one Shaman in particular, in a long unbroken chain, who the earth listened to more than anyone else. So who would you give a job like that to? Someone who hated the idea of being one, that's what.

More than that, I liked Jenny. She was my friend. When I was lying in my flat in Amsterdam drugging myself into oblivion, leaving the apartment only to get more material to masturbate to, she showed up and told me I could be something better. I didn't listen to her, of course - she had to kill herself first so I could bring her back.

There's not a whole lot of people who'll do that. And even less who'll be friends with you afterwards.

I stop in the middle of the street, cars swerving left and right around me as the road distorts with my need, asphalt melting and bending as the lanes divide to form a median that wasn't there before. But my need, great as it is, is just a drop in the need of the Earth's, and I orientate like a compass magnet, triangulating to feel where she hurts the most. I hear excited shouts all around me, but I ignore them. Fame is just a transitory phenomena, and it's in the way right now.

There. That corner of the window. Sixth floor, full of lights, straight up. I cast myself up to the sky without a second glance, leaving gravity and inertia and the laws of physics behind. The starlight caresses me like a kiss from a lover who I wish I had more time for, and I hover in front of the window. It turns into raindrops that then evaporate. I walk forward on the invisible floor of the air to stand on the tile of a maternity ward. Clown paintings brighten the walls, and clean hospital basinets hold what has to be thirty or forty babies. I head straight for the one whose glowing to the "eye" inside my forehead like a lamp, and grab her. In the corridor behind me, I hear glass breaking where the nurses station was. Let's be completely honest here - I panic, and forget all about my powers. All I can think of is the overwhelming need to get my friend out of here.

Cradling Jenny in my arms, I head for the elevator. She burbles and spits up a little on my shirt. I can't let her die. What happens next is a blur that still seems to last an eternity as the elevator descends, and I shut out the screams in my head of the women being raped behind me. My heart rate is reaching toward triple digits as the door opens to the service exit, and I run, stomach churning, cursing the fact that the only exercise I do voluntarily is opening the refrigerator door to get my chilled chocolate chip cookies. Being shot at by alien invaders with the others in the Authority doesn't count - even there, my job's more metaphysical than physical. They run interference with all the people who'd like to hurt me and break my bones and generally do all sorts of unpleasant things I'd rather not experience. I may have the memories and inherited skills of all the Doctors before me, but I still have to access them first, and it doesn't mean my body knows anything on a reflex level about what to do in a fight.

 I jump over cars, using the body I've got to stand on hoods to cross traffic as the entire corner of the hospital, where the maternity ward was, explodes in a shower of lights, bricks and mortar. Thank all the powers that be that the children must have been vaporized instantly. I somehow don't think we'll be that lucky if they catch us. About that time I remember what I can do, and that I'm not limited to my five senses or four limbs. Unfortunately, while it doesn't take very long to teleport, it takes more time than I have to spare.

 "Door! Come on - Door!"

 The damn Carrier isn't listening to me.

 "Christ, of all the times for this thing to screw up!"

 And then something plummets through six floors of the building next to me, and a gray-skinned hulking monstrosity steps out. I stop running, as Jenny shifts in her little blanket in my arms. In front of me, someone is now hovering with a ball and chain in his hands, stupid winged helmet on his head, crackling with electricity. I reach out with my power to tell his heart to stop beating. Not terribly original, but I'm not feeling very creative right now.

 "The Carrier's teleport is working fine, Doctor," says the gray creature in a rumble like gears shifting.

 "You've just been disconnected from your team's radiotelepathy and your own quite considerable abilities," adds the Viking B-movie reject, smirking.

 Oh, wonderful.

 "Any last words before we tear out your goddamn intestines?" says an armored goon on my other side. I feel a sinking sensation in my chest where I should feel the pulse of the world resonate, and I'm all alone in my head without the millenias of data records or voices that should be there. This is what I was afraid of - the threat of pain, and the reality to come. The only thing that was altered about my body when I got this job was my brain, and thus my mind; I'm as physically human otherwise as the next person, unlike my teammates. If you prick me, I bleed little rivulets of red, not silver nanomachines, or alien biotech fluids, or electricity, and the only way my skin solar charges is when it makes Vitamin D because I've had to go out in the open air again. I'm terrified of pain. What's worse is that big databank of memory I have is quite clear on how some of the previous Doctors died, and all it takes is a casual moment of reflection at an unguarded moment to find myself experiencing their final sensations. I vastly prefer the sex records, mind you.

Is it any wonder I spend as much time high as I do? I don't just do heroin because I like it - I do it because it's the only way I consistently avoid the mind-crushing responsibility that comes with the job. I got given these powers precisely because I didn't want them, because no one who wanted the powers could possibly be trusted with them. All my calls are house calls, and they're usually life or death.

But despite my fear, my mouth keeps running along with my mind to reply to these people. It was the first wise-ass commentator I ever had and it looks like it's going to be the last.

"Actually, two spring to mind immediately... "

"Oh Shit."

There are superhumans, posthumans, metahumans, whatever flavor of ice cream you want to call them, all around me. One of them is taller than a skyscraper, and he's standing between two buildings casting a shadow over me as he steps on some poor soul's car, with the guy in it. There's not exactly any point in running right now. I try talking to them, trying to convince them that no matter what they've done before, killing the reincarnation of Jenny Sparks would doom a whole century to live on the leftovers of the last one.

 They don't care. They laugh, and tell me how they enjoy hurting people. They'd rather follow mindlessly the orders of whoever holds their leash than think for themselves. Their masters want to squeeze the last juices of the century as long as it'll last, and if that means there's not enough for everyone, and the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, well, what's wrong with that?

I want to vomit. I want to spit in their faces. I want to be like my friends Jack and Apollo and just reach out and tear them apart with my bare hands. But I can't do any of that. It's just like school all over again, back before I became a dot-com millionaire and then went nuts with the pressure; I'd spend all day in class knowing that the jocks were going to put me up against a wall and pound bruises all over me.

But I'm not a god or a superhero. I'm not a demon, daemon, angel, saint, devi, savior, djinn, or any other flavor of nonhuman spirit. I'm just a man with a job, and what I am is merely all too human. I'm Johnny-on-the-spot who makes the tough decisions because somebody has to, and if I mess up, we all know whose fault it was. And I've messed up now. I haven't only screwed the pooch, I've gotten it pregnant and sent it to a Nazi rape camp. I should have called the rest of the Authority before I left; I should have teleported Jenny out with my own powers or a Door as soon as I found her; and I should have put up shields up soon as I hit the street otherwise. Three chances to get it right and I muffed them all, and my perfect hindsight is going to let me watch the oncoming car full of pain run over us like road kill on the Autobahn.

The goon in the metal suit picks me up and dangles me like a kitten. His metal jaw plate leers at me.

"We know you're not a brave man, doctor. You're not a born-killer like the rest of us. You're just an ex-junkie Jenny Sparks found lying in an Amsterdam gutter who tried to kill himself when his cat died. All that was special about you were the post-human abilities you lucked into. Take them away and you're just a hippy in a bad place."

 "But it doesn't have to end like this," says the military fascist with the fetish gear. "Titan blocking the parts of your brain which make you the shaman of the global village or whatever you want to call yourself, doesn't mean you have to die like that stupid cat. All those black ops in Kosovo and Iraq have given us a very strange sense of humor, Doctor."

 An insect-sized goon whispers in my ear. "Kill the baby and we swear to gosh we'll let you go."

 They're lying, of course. They have no more intention of letting me go than they do of turning themselves into the authorities and working as peace troops for the United Nations. They just want to see me squirm and see if I'll degrade myself. I don't need my shamanic powers to see that. I'm tempted for a fraction of a second, which sickens me, but even if they were willing to let me go there's no way I could do it. I'm not a hero. I'm not a villain. But I'm human, and that's my strength as well as my weakness. I'd rather die than become like the killers in front of me. And realizing that, I clutch Jenny to me, tears coming from under the goggles, and make my decision.

 "Go screw yourself."

 I look up then to watch my death coming down as the oversize superhuman reaches up, grabs an airplane from the sky that was trying to get past from the nearby runway to a safe altitude, and stops it in midair, presumably killing everybody aboard from the shock. He aims it at me then, and I prepare to die, unwilling to look away. At least Jenny's too young to understand what's happening.

 And then Jenny glows with a light that's so bright it should blind me forever, but it only warms me, and the energies spread outward from the epicenter to smash my executioners like some tidal wave. The glow could probably be seen from space, and I have a feeling the entire city lit up for a minute. Then I blink, and without any afterimages, I can see that the only thing hurt is one of the posthumans who wasn't able to shield in time. The titanic one got his legs blown off and has tumbled to the street, moaning and complaining.

 I start to grin.

 The team gets and starts to encircle me again. They've apparently had a communication from their masters, and they now want to take Jenny alive, because she's shown superhuman powers that they might be able to control and manipulate.

 "I don't know why you're smiling, Doctor. The fact that we're not allowed to hurt the baby anymore means we're only going to spend twice as long dismembering you."

 "Actually, I'm smiling because the trauma of having his feet blown off must have screwed up the big guy's concentration. I'm not disconnected from my powers anymore...

 The earth turns in my innermost center again, and I hear the advice, formerly merely maddening but now also somehow comforting, of my predecessor's voices in my mind.

 "...And I've just telepathically told the brutal, brutal people standing behind you everything they need to know to kick your head in."

 It's good to have friends. Three of the Authority are coming out of a Door, cracking their knuckles, and I can feel the other two nearby. It looks like we might pull this out after all - who would have thought it? I might be only human, but being human doesn't mean we have to be alone all the time. And it also means that sometimes, just sometimes, we get a chance to learn from our mistakes.

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