The Electrifying Journey of Dr. Light

Dr. Marcus Light was a perfectly ordinary physicist right up until the moment he wasn't. It happened on a Thursday, which seemed wrong. Transformations should happen on more dramatic days — a stormy Friday, a charged midnight between one year and the next. Not a Thursday at 2:47 in the afternoon in the middle of a routine safety check on the university's particle accelerator. Marcus would later try to explain exactly what he had been thinking when the breach occurred, and the honest answer was: he had been thinking about lunch. Specifically, about whether the cafeteria still had any of those turkey wraps that were actually good. Then the containment field destabilized. Then there was light. Not ordinary light — not the fluorescent flicker of the lab overhead. Something fundamental. Something that tasted like electricity and smelled like ozone and pressed against his skin from the inside out. Then: nothing. For what felt like a very long time. When Marcus opened his eyes, he was on the floor of the lab. Every instrument in the room was dark. His grad student Priya was on the other side of the room, unhurt, staring at him with an expression he would come to think of as the face people make when they see impossible things. "Marcus," she said slowly. "Your hands." He looked down. His hands were glowing. Faintly — like the last of a sunset caught in skin. A hum ran up his arms and settled at the base of his skull. "That's —" He sat up. The glow brightened. "That's just —" He thought: off. The glow went off. He sat there in the dark lab with dead instruments and his very confused grad student and the distant smell of a cafeteria that was probably out of turkey wraps, and he understood, with the calm certainty of a man who has spent twenty years in science, that his life had just entered a phase that had no established protocols. "I need you to not tell anyone about this," he said. Priya blinked. "Are you insane?" "Probably. But still. Please." He stood. His legs were steady. His head was clear. He felt, more than anything, awake — as if he had been operating for years on the partial version of his senses and someone had just unlocked the rest. He raised his right hand and thought: light. A beam shot from his palm and blew a perfect circle through the cinder block wall at the end of the lab. Priya made a sound that was not a word. Marcus stared at the hole, then at his hand, then back at the hole. "Okay," he said. He kept his voice very level. This was a skill he had spent his career developing. "We're going to need a much bigger safety protocol." From outside — through the new hole in the wall, through the courtyard beyond it, from somewhere in the direction of the city center — they heard an explosion. Then another. Marcus looked at Priya. She looked at Marcus. "Go," she said. He went. And the city — the ordinary Thursday city with its traffic and its coffee shops and its people who had no idea how much was about to change — received its first glimpse of Dr. Light at 3:02 PM, streaking overhead in a column of impossible brightness, heading toward the smoke.