From the journal of Dr. Albert Eugene Socks, Chemist (part 8)

I entered the subjects living/dining area and took in the unbroken line of green lights above each door.  Nobody awake, nobody active, nobody even having a bad dream.  I opened Tom’s door and looked inside.

I hadn’t expected the few side effects that presented in the human subjects, especially the hair and skin changes.  Take Tom, blond and blue eyed with fair tones when he started, now his hair, eyes, and skin were rather intriguing shades of teal.  Frankly, I don’t know which aspect of the pigmentation changes caught me more by surprise: the fact that it happened at all, or the even more unrealistic fact that each subject was now color coordinated.

I remembered when I first explained the necessity for all of them to be totally immobile during the procedure.  I expected more of a fight.  I suppose the years that had passed since my own university days had dimmed the memories of how bloody tired I’d been most of the semesters.

It was only after I informed them that they’d be physically unable to move that any of them put up any real objections.  I showed them a slide of test subjects two through five.  They all looked at the picture of my old lab’s south wall for a few minutes, then started muttering between themselves.  Frank, head slightly tilted to one side in contemplation, finally asked what they were looking at?

I replied that, as I said, they were looking at test subjects two through five.  Frank frowned, squinted at the screen again, and asked where they were?  I pointed at the wall and told him that they were right there.  He frowned more, stared at the screen again, and said all he saw was a wall with a Jackson Pollock abstract on it.

I sighed and explained that the wall didn’t have any painting on it, abstract expressionism or otherwise, only four test subjects that possessed enhanced strength without invulnerability.  Barbara and Tom turned away, Frank and Brad looked from the screen to me, and Chuck nodded thoughtfully.

I then introduced them to test subject one and assured them that he was still alive.  I then took a ball peen hammer and smacked test subject one a few times with it to demonstrate that he was, indeed, invulnerable, just not strong enough to move now that he was.

Chuck surprised me by nodding again and stating that it was obvious that super-strength, minus invulnerability, was practically a death sentence, while invulnerability, minus super-strength, was obviously a case of a fate worse than death.

Given the graphic examples, they all agreed, signed the necessary releases, and permitted themselves to be secured.  In that I wanted them to be able to provide feedback as to any individual reactions to the process, they were kept awake at first.  When that proved to be almost disastrous, regardless of spinal blocks to inhibit motion, we had no choice but to render them unconscious and to keep them under for the duration of the process.

As a result, none of them were aware of the rather unusual and unique chromatic alterations of their pigmentation.  Wanda was ready to help them through adjustment as needed, but we’d added a few lines to their conditioning tapes to lessen the shock.  I walked into the room and glanced at Tom’s readouts.  I was pleased to see full neurological activity in both lobes.

Flight was a problem at first, given that there was no chemical way to defy gravity.  Originally, all my “superheroes” were going to be ground-bound, with only the occasional astonishing leap for any aerial activity, but then I accidentally stumbled across a solution.  A solution to a different problem, actually.

Enhanced speed was a combination of specialized strength, focused more on the fast-twitch muscles rather than on the more powerful slow-twitch ones, and of friction reduction.  Towards that end, I experimented with various costumes and so forth, but even the best of these were satisfactory (as well as damn stupid looking), so I explored a few alternative concepts (ie. I went back to the comics).  The most famous of the comic book speedsters utilized something like a bio-electric field, both to reduce friction and to serve as a sort of force field, protecting the speedster from minute airborne debris.  (For reasons only known to the original writer, the character was not invulnerable, hence the necessary protection.)

Well, there are many creatures that generate their own bio-electric fields (the elephantfish sprang to mind), so I started looking into the possibility of either adapting existing DNA to the need or, perhaps, building my own, when the solution was suggested by the self-same comic book.

The character was fighting a foe who, apparently, was a match for the most powerful of super-humans, with none of the weaknesses thereof.  A rather decisive mismatch, I thought, so I read the story through.  (I’d never seen this particular issue before and had no idea in advance as to how the hero would overcome the much more powerful foe.)

It turned out that the foe didn’t really have any enhanced physical powers, just an astonishing array of mental powers, the foremost of which was telekinesis, the ability to move objects with one’s mind.  By using his telekinesis, he was able to perform astonishing feats of apparent physical strength, including displaying invulnerability and a rudimentary bio-electric field, not as powerful as the hero’s but still permitting …

And that’s when it hit me.

Three years later, I had my answer to friction.  True test subjects with esp abilities were few and far between, but there were enough that several who specialized in telekinesis had been fully documented … and tested.  Not just observed under clinical conditions, but actually tested on while demonstrating their power.  More than one had even consented to EEG and computed tomography while demonstrating their abilities!

In short, studies showed what part of the brain was involved with telekinesis. I had perfected cellular growth of almost all human cells, primarily to increase density and strength, so it was a small step to come up with a way to increase cellular growth of neurons and glial cells and then to direct that growth into the proper areas of the brain.  My first telekinetic rat was astonishing.  He could actually move his food to him from across the cage or across the lab.  (Eventually, we had to place him somewhere he couldn’t see the rest of the cages.  He had been stealing others food and damn near killed a female rat when he tried to bring her to him for mating.)

The first time we caught him flying, however, was almost biblical.

He’d moved his cage closer to the door and right off the table, but – although his cage fell the six or so feet to the floor – he stayed suspended in the center of the cage and was uninjured.  I’d been looking for a way to decrease friction and, instead, found a solution to flight.  A mighty leap with enhanced legs to get into the air and then let the mind take over, making speed almost limitless.

So we gave our human test subjects strength, then telekinesis, and finally invulnerability.

But we also gave them carefully crafted limits and a way to control their powers … plus a way to be controlled.