Today's #flashfiction Another Sense

 “It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno.”

Chuck E. Cheese* #quote

Today I got a moving test enemy working in my game. It's not animated and just a still picture. But it chases my character when it gets close enough. I did other cool stuff too so lots of progress is being made. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

Another Sense

          “You have to keep your power a secret! Otherwise the government will run experiments on you!” Young Steven heard this in a cartoon, where his favorite superhero was given this sage advice. This was the gritty reboot of the series, which his parents were unaware, so the captured hero did have experiments performed on him. Still largely done off camera for TV it still scared little Steven.

         So Steven took the advice. His hero possessed many, many abilities. Steven possessed one that allowed him to see some things through walls like his hero did. But only things like computers or power lines. Or people's brains. Steven could perceive the movement of electricity. Steven didn't know what kind of mutation allowed his body to do this. But it was a constant truth of life just as much as sight.

        In a world of electricity this ability became hard to censor. Hard to hide. He knew if someone left the lights on and where. For someone else it'd be like if no one could smell and if something rot they'd be the only ones to know. A good memory usually became people's explanation for these things. Steven developed a “knack” for electronics from a young age. They assumed it was intellectual intuition. He didn't tell them he could sense the problem. He knew the spark plug was broken because it was as obvious to him as a deflated tire on a car.

        His perception of electricity only became better and better. He began to be able to read computers a little, and people. These things went fast. Like trying to read words on pages falling on a waterfall. Patterns could be made though. In people some electrical patterns showed lies. If he spent long enough analyzing it he could make out some data on a computer, though decoding it fell beyond his ability. This was at his teenage years.

        During adulthood, when he didn't have to pretend he couldn't perceive electricity he could pick apart the world more closely without looking over his shoulder. He focused on computers and became a computer whisperer.

         Steven decided to test everything he knew after years. He walked into a bank. Everything on all the computers he could see. All the zeroes and ones. If only he knew how to decode it! He knew how to read things on computers normally, but encrypted things like the bank's information was beyond him. No! He thought to himself. He took this as a challenge to see if he could see all that information at once. Not to steal it.

         A woman then approached him. She, a police officer, prepared to tackle him because of the thick computer tablet he carried in his pocket. Steven didn't realize the odd way that he was standing there made him look strangely suspicious and the way he looked more and more nervous made him appear like a bank robber and the thick computer tablet was thick enough to be a gun until she got a better look at the shape.

        An awkward conversation later led to a date. A few more dates led to a relationship. That relationship led to marriage. That marriage led to a cemented love. Five years into the marriage Steven finally told his wife the secret of his perception of electricity.

        “Dear, I'm a detective. I figured it out a year after we started dating.”