I often have the same dream.
In this dream, I fall through darkness.
I try to fight back, to fly using my powers, but it’s all useless.
All the might of my Viltrumite body and my ability to fly are completely useless against the power of this place.
It’s obviously not an ordinary gravity well.
For one thing, this planet isn’t massive enough to create such a strong spatial distortion.
There’s some other force pulling me through the darkness, down to where it waits.
At first it appears as a barely noticeable glimmer, a very biblical light at the end of the tunnel.
Then, as I fall, the contours of this being start to take shape.
Whatever it really is, it appears to me as a gigantic tree woven from countless intertwined bundles of light.
A divine cheese braid?
But what I see doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.
I’m not stupid or self-absorbed enough to think my perception of reality is objective.
I only see what my eyes can capture, and even less than that, only what my brain can process.
It speaks to me.
It tests me by sending me into the past to see how I’ll act, whether I can restore balance.
And it’s disappointed in me.
You don’t need to be a genius to understand that disappointing a being before which a mighty Viltrumite is no more than a grain of sand is a very bad idea.
Besides, this isn’t the first time this being has met Mark Grayson.
Now it’ll wave me off again and send me back where it took me from, to my time and my reality, as it’s done countless times before and will do countless times after…
or not.
Something has changed in its plans.
It no longer intends to search for a worthy version of me, or rather, not just me.
Looks like this time I’m really not going back to my own time.
At this point, I always wake up with the understanding that it wasn’t just a dream, and that it wasn’t me in the dream.
Well, technically it was me, but not all of me.
The current me didn’t exist yet.
And that’s not a joke about how I’m not the same person I was a second ago and won’t be the same person a second from now.
No, I’m not tomorrow’s Homer cleaning up the mess created by yesterday’s stupidity.
I’m literally a different Mark Grayson.
I was born the moment that thing, disappointed in the part of me that used to bear this name, decided I definitely needed a lobotomy, removing part of my brain and replacing it with a donor’s.
No, it all happened without surgical hammers and saws (I hope), but it’s a pretty accurate analogy.
Because part of Mark Grayson, specifically the memories of how he ended up the way he did after his father left the planet, were completely lost.
Their place was taken by something else.
Another me, with another set of memories.
On one hand, those memories were much more ordinary.
On the other hand, they were much more reasonable.
That me was also an Earth native, but a different Earth, possibly a parallel universe, more likely an entirely different reality where nothing called supernatural existed.
People there knew about superheroes only as stories in the genre of science fiction: comics, cartoons, movies, TV shows, sometimes even books.
But despite the lack of superheroes, monsters, and aliens, the planet’s fate was strikingly similar.
The same continents, climate, flora and fauna, even geopolitical structures, almost everything was analogous.
That me wasn’t much like Mark Grayson.
Except maybe that he also met the end of his independent existence in space.
I should probably explain how I got there.
Let’s start with the fact that I came from a completely different country.
The residents of my current homeland, thanks to relentless propaganda in movies and other mass culture, still think of its people as something like wild, bearded, perpetually drunk bear-riders dreaming of world domination.
And that’s not as much of a joke as you might think.
Just this week, the phrase “Russian trace” appeared in the news five times.
That always starts when Democrats come to power.
Republicans aren’t much different, they just have a different record and a Chinese trace.
As you might have guessed, that me was from Russia.
More precisely, from the USSR, though I didn’t experience the realities of that state at a conscious age, it collapsed shortly after my birth.
Unlike Mark, as a child I didn’t read comics about Science Dog.
I read encyclopedias, mostly biology.
The Great Soviet Biological Encyclopedia was my favorite childhood book.
I literally read it from cover to cover before my peers even said their first swear word.
But I wasn’t averse to other sciences either.
From paleontology to astronomy, everything interested me.
Dinosaurs, of course, were the absolute favorites.
So I was a very diligent and curious child, and my relatives always knew what to give me for my birthday: a new encyclopedia!
Then came school, and I started to change a little.
The aggressive, thuggish environment gradually pushed out all the softness from the overly kind and overly smart boy, but it never completely succeeded.
The army finished the job.
I ended up there after dropping out of university because of laziness, a woman, and video games.
At some point, I almost lost my thirst for knowledge.
I cooled off on biology back in school, thanks to a dim-witted and ossified teacher who couldn’t swallow the fact that a fifth grader corrected her mistakes on the very first lesson.
I developed a tendency to be lazy about mental work.
After finishing school, I almost stopped reading fiction altogether.
But thanks to my excellent memory, intellect, and ability to learn quickly and think, I breezed through any curriculum.
After the army, I easily retook my exams and went back to school.
This time I skipped even more, but still graduated.
Then I spent several years trying to find my place in life and my calling.
It was hard because providing for myself turned out to be pretty easy, so there was no incentive to develop.
But at some point, I got fired up about space.
I don’t remember what the trigger was, but I got seriously into it, just like in childhood.
For a few years, I just followed current missions and articles about new methods of discovering exoplanets and such.
Then I wanted more.
I felt a desire to be involved.
So I decided to sign up as a volunteer for the space program.
I had the education, the ridiculous health, and knowledge of several languages.
And my dream came true.
In my thirty-second year, I was selected for a joint Russian-Chinese mission.
I was overjoyed.
But my very first trip out of the gravity well, a mission to dock our New Dawn with the new Chinese Tiangong, ended in tragic disaster.
Who knows where that space truck came from on orbit?
Just kidding.
I know where it came from.
It was the Chinese Tianzhou that was lifting their Tiangong into orbit.
Those taikonauts messed something up, and my entire crew got smeared in a thin layer across the hull of the space truck when it rammed our module.
That was the end of the story of old me from the alternative Earth.
That thing didn’t have a thorough conversation with this part of me.
If it did, I don’t remember it.
Honestly, the merging and splitting of consciousness isn’t that big a deal.
People get way too worked up about it: unique individuality, the inadmissibility of interfering with the brain, free will, defiling the creator’s plan, and other bullshit.
It’s all laughable, because from birth to death, all people are the fusion of two consciousnesses: left and right.
Most don’t even think about it, but each hemisphere in the brain is quite independent and can exist separately from the other.
You just need to cut the neural bridge or otherwise disrupt the interaction between the hemispheres without causing critical damage, and voila, you have two consciousnesses, each radically different from what was before.
Ego, tastes, musical preferences, worldview, anything can change.
And knowing this, do you feel guilt or regret over the lost free will and autonomy of your right hemisphere?
Does your right hemisphere self want to separate and rebel to start living on its own?
Does it seize control of your left hand to knock out that stupid Zoomer crap in your headphones, punch your dumb, shallow other half, and organize a protest movement to defend the rights of right hemispheres?
No?
That’s what I thought.
So I don’t feel regret for any of my old selves.
It’s not very pleasant to realize that I was sent here, to this time and this universe, by an unknown godlike thing that lives outside of time and operates by vague principles like “balance in the universe” and other bullshit.
First, balance can mean different things.
To some, balance is when the galaxy is at peace and the Sith are finally defeated.
To others, it’s when overly proliferating Jedi are culled to a minimum.
To still others, it’s when there are neither.
Second, a setup like this, using an all-powerful entity to justify a self-insert, is in poor taste.
It’s typical of cloned isekais and shitty fanfics, usually with systems and other cancers, written by little shitheads for little shitheads.
And the fact that such a bored, balance-seeking personified all-powerful entity was present in the original story from the beginning doesn’t make it any better.
Not to mention that I, me, am twice a real human-Viltrumite hybrid, not some fucking fanfic hero.
And if that’s not the case and someone is writing my isekai thoughts right now, know this: this setup is shit!
Get rid of that all-powerful thing from the plot and stop fucking with my brain!