POV The Grand Tinkerer
In a crude clay hut in the land that would one day be known as Iraq, a pregnant woman lay trembling upon a bed of woven reeds.
Her water had broken earlier that morning, and she had sought the assistance of the wisest person she knew in all of Babylon: Thena.
The woman was locally famous for her wisdom, and fortunately for Zakiti, she was more than willing to help.
As Zakiti began to push, something strange happened.
It was as though her body had developed a consciousness of its own.
Her muscles moved with an unfamiliar precision, every contraction occurring at precisely the right moment.
The process seemed to operate on its own, without requiring Zakiti to understand what was happening or even consciously direct her body.
The birth proceeded with astonishing smoothness.
Less than thirty minutes after it began, the child had arrived.
Zakiti stared at the newborn in disbelief.
She had expected pain, exhaustion, and a long struggle.
Instead, she had experienced something almost miraculous.
She could think of only one explanation.
An act of God.
Thena, however, was not so easily satisfied with that answer.
The moment she approached the child, she felt it.
Something was fundamentally different about him.
It was not a sensation she could easily describe.
It was more like a frequency, an underlying note that existed beneath everything else in the world.
She could feel it, but she could not explain why.
It was as though the child resonated with something she had never encountered before.
And the strangeness did not end there.
When Zakiti gathered the newborn into her arms and began considering what to name him, a peculiar certainty settled over her.
She had already considered other names.
Yet, as she looked into the child’s eyes, every alternative seemed to fade away.
There was only one name she could give him.
Adam.
She could not explain why.
She simply knew.
And so the first Human Prime entered the world.
Adam’s peculiarities soon became impossible to ignore.
Within his first four months, many of Zakiti’s neighbors had noticed that the infant seemed to understand everything said around him.
At two months, it could have been dismissed as an overactive imagination.
By four, however, the way he followed conversations was unmistakable.
He listened with an attention that seemed almost adult, responding to the words around him as though he understood their meaning perfectly but lacked the physical means to answer.
By eighteen months, Adam could hold entire conversations with adults of his choosing.
A month later, he walked as naturally as anyone else.
These were not the ordinary achievements of an unusually gifted child.
His development was proceeding according to rules that appeared to exist for him alone.
Before the stories could spread far enough to attract the attention of Babylon’s king, Thena decided to act.
She contacted Ajak, the leader of the Eternals and their primary connection to the Celestials.
Whatever Adam was, Thena suspected that the answer lay beyond anything she could discover alone.
The Eternals gathered before a projection of a Celestial.
Ajak relayed everything they had learned about the child: his extraordinary development, his seemingly miraculous birth, and the inexplicable certainty with which his mother had named him.
The Celestial listened.
With a perception that extended far beyond ordinary physical senses, examining an infant in a small Babylonian kingdom should have been trivial.
It was not.
The moment the Celestial turned its attention toward Adam, it encountered something that left even its vast consciousness struggling to comprehend what it was seeing.
The child was there.
And yet, he was not alone.
Within him, the Celestial perceived humanity itself.
Every human who had ever lived seemed to overlap within the infant, layer upon layer, until the original child’ the physical canvas upon which everything else rested’ was almost impossible to distinguish.
The phenomenon was not merely symbolic.
The Celestial could perceive the individual presences of human beings, an incomprehensible multitude bound together through Adam.
Some of those humans had lived in eras when belief in the gods had been nearly universal.
According to the laws and traditions the Celestial understood, their souls should have passed into their respective afterlives.
Yet somehow, they were still there.
They were in their afterlives.
And they were in Adam.
The Celestial examined the connection more closely, searching for a mechanism, a point of origin, or some intermediary through which the phenomenon operated.
There was nothing.
No network of lesser beings.
No central consciousness directing the others.
No obvious system of relays through which the connection could be interrupted.
Adam was simultaneously himself and every human being who had ever existed.
The Celestial could not explain how.
And that was precisely what frightened it.
The Celestials had plans for Earth.
They had plans for humanity.
And they had plans for Tiamut, whose emergence would one day be tied to the fate of the planet itself.
A being capable of uniting humanity through a connection that even a Celestial could not comprehend represented an unknown variable in those plans.
And the Celestials had never been particularly comfortable with unknown variables.
So the Celestial did what gods and cosmic powers so often did when confronted with something they could neither understand nor control.
It attempted to destroy it.
Ikaris was the first to act.
He directed his heat vision toward the infant, unleashing a continuous beam of energy intended to erase Adam from existence.
Forty-five seconds passed.
Adam remained unharmed.
Not a mark appeared upon his skin.
Not a hair was singed.
The child did not even seem to notice what was happening.
Ikaris continued firing, unable to understand why his attack had accomplished nothing.
The Celestial, however, noticed something else.
Across Earth, humans were beginning to suffer from sunburns.
The pain spread across the population simultaneously.
People working beneath the open sky, farmers tending their fields, travelers crossing the desert, and families gathered outside their homes all experienced the same inexplicable injury.
Two people died from heatstroke.
The Celestial immediately understood that the damage inflicted upon Adam was being distributed throughout humanity.
The attack had not failed in the conventional sense.
It had reached its intended target, only for the consequences to be divided among an entire species.
Thena had already begun to fear that something terrible would happen.
She asked Gilgamesh to place Zakiti into a deep sleep while the attack continued, sparing the mother from witnessing the full extent of what was happening to her child.
Yet even Thena could not have anticipated what the Celestial would discover next.
The connection did not end with the people of Earth.
The Celestial followed the phenomenon beyond the planet, tracing the same connection through the vastness of space.
There were humans elsewhere in the universe.
Some traveled aboard distant vessels.
Others lived in settlements scattered across alien worlds.
Some inhabited the slums of Sakaar, while others journeyed through the stars, far removed from Earth and its ancient kingdoms.
Every one of them was connected to Adam.
And every one of them could receive the consequences of an attack against him.
The Celestial had encountered species with hive minds before.
Such connections were not unheard of among the countless civilizations scattered throughout existence.
But those systems generally relied upon intermediary connections, biological relays, or some other mechanism that allowed the collective to function.
Adam’s connection possessed none of those apparent limitations.
A human could stand on Earth or travel across the universe, and the connection remained intact.
There was no visible distance at which it weakened.
No apparent boundary beyond which it ceased to function.
And no obvious means by which it could be severed.
For the first time, the Celestial confronted a problem that could not be resolved by simply applying greater power.
It could not destroy Adam without affecting humanity.
It could not isolate Adam from humanity.
And it could not explain why the connection existed in the first place.
The implications were deeply troubling.
If the child represented a new law governing humanity, what else might that law permit?
What would happen when humanity evolved?
What would happen if the Prime grew stronger?
And what would happen to Tiamut when the time came for the Celestial’s plans to reach fruition?
The Celestial had no answers.
It therefore sought out every other Celestial it could reach, gathering them to discuss the discovery.
They examined the phenomenon from every perspective they could devise.
None could explain it.
None could offer a solution.
And none could find a way to sever the connection.
For all their cosmic knowledge and immeasurable power, the Celestials had encountered something that existed beyond their understanding.
A human infant.
POV, Adam
My name is Adam.
I do not know why I am called that, but for some reason, I find it amusing.
I am two years old, and my earliest memory is of the day I got a sunburn.
It was a strange experience.
I remember feeling that I should understand why it was happening, as though some part of me already possessed the answer.
Yet I could not quite reach it.
I remember wandering through a nearby forest outside Babylon that day.
I was curious about the world around me, and exploring it seemed far more interesting than remaining inside the house.
There were scorch marks on the ground wherever I went.
I found that rather strange.
I also found it strange that I could not find my mother.
I searched for her, but she was nowhere to be found.
Eventually, I asked Aunt Thena where she was.
She told me that my mother was taking a nap.
For some reason, I knew that was not true.
I did not know how I knew.
I simply did.
That was also the first day Thena held my hand.
The moment our skin touched, something inside me changed.
I suddenly understood the differences between us.
I knew she was immortal.
I could sense the energy that flowed through her, and I understood that this energy was responsible for some of the things that made her different from ordinary humans.
More importantly, I understood that I could become like her.
Not in the sense of copying her appearance, but in the sense of changing what I was.
I would later come to think of these differences as subspecies.
Thena was an Eternal.
I was human.
But I could become an Eternal if I wanted to.
The knowledge was as natural to me as knowing how to breathe.
Curious, I tried to channel the energy I had sensed within her.
I did not know what I expected to happen.
What happened was that I summoned an animal.
Then another.
And another.
A horse, a wolf, and an eagle appeared before me, each one possessing a strange quality that made it clear they were not ordinary living creatures.
They were spirits.
More specifically, they were companions of humans who had lived and died before me.
I did not know why this was the power I received from the Eternal form.
I only knew that it felt right, as though these creatures had always belonged to me in some way.
The strangest part was that I immediately recognized each animal.
I knew what they were.
I knew the names their former owners had given them.
The horse, for example, had been called Long Hair.
I somehow knew that the name had originally been spoken in another language, even though I could not explain how I understood it.
I spent the next two weeks experimenting with my newfound ability.
Eventually, I decided to show my mother.
I expected her to be frightened.
Perhaps she would think something was wrong with me.
Instead, she accepted it.
She did not seem to think there was anything terrible about her son summoning the spirits of animals that had belonged to people long dead.
I was relieved.
When I hugged her, I experienced the same sensation I had felt when touching Thena.
I understood the differences between us.
I knew what made my mother human, and I knew that I could change her.
I could make her immortal.
I did not fully understand what that meant at the time, but I understood enough to know that she would no longer be limited in the same way as other humans.
There was something else I knew about myself, too.
I was already immortal.
Not merely when I took on my Eternal form, but in my natural human state.
As long as even one human remained alive, I would continue to exist.
I could not explain how I knew this.
I simply understood it.
Having understood myself I naturally transformed my mother into a Eternal.
My mother, meanwhile, possessed an ability of her own.
She could mark another person.
Once she marked someone, she could sense their location.
The closer she was to that person, the stronger she became, as though the connection between them gave her access to their strength.
Naturally, she marked me immediately.
I did not mind.
In fact, I was rather happy about it.
For reasons I could not yet understand, the thought of my mother always being able to find me felt right.
And so, at two years old, I had learned three things about myself.
I could become something other than human.
I could summon the spirits of animals that had once accompanied humanity.
And I was connected to every human being in existence.
I did not yet understand the significance of any of it.
But I suspected I would learn.
After all, I had an eternity ahead of me.
😉
(this is for the guy you said where’s the rest.’also here’)
only Four abilities were shown in this chapter the damage sharing.
the subspecies recognization.
and some species transformation and species transfer as well.
[] yes I made his mom immortal and an eternal but if he’s going to be immortal I would like him to be at least happy[]