Chapter 1: Me and Me

I often have the same dream. In this dream I am falling through the darkness. I try to fight back, to fly with my powers, but it's all in vain. All the power of the Vitrumite body and the ability to fly are utterly useless before the power of this place. Obviously, this is no ordinary gravity well-at least because this planet isn't massive enough to create such a massive distortion of space-there's some other force guiding me through the darkness, down to where it waits.

At first it appears as a faint glow - quite the biblical light at the end of the tunnel - then, as I fall, the contours of the creature begin to emerge. It, whatever it really is, appears to me like a huge-although I've seen bigger ones-a tree, woven from innumerable intertwined beams of light. A divine cheese pigtail? However, what I see doesn't necessarily represent reality. I am not so foolish and narcissistic as to regard my view of reality as objective. I see only what my visual organs can grasp, and I realize and visualize in my mind even less, a small part of what I see, only what my brain can perceive.

It speaks to me.

It is testing me, sending me back in time to see how I will act, whether I can restore balance.

And it is frustrated with me. And it doesn't take a genius to realize that disappointing a being before whom the mighty viltrumite is nothing more than a grain of sand is not a good idea.

Besides, this is not the creature's first encounter with Mark Grayson.

Now it will brush me off again and return me to where it came from, to my time and my reality, as it has countless times before, and will countless times after... or not.

Something has changed in its plans.

It no longer intends to seek out someone worthy of me...or rather, not just me....

I don't seem to be going back to my own time this time after all...

At this point I always wake up with the realization that it wasn't just a dream, and that it wasn't me in the dream.

Well, more precisely, I was, but not all of me. I didn't exist at the time. And this isn't a joke, about how I am now, not the same as I was a second ago, and not the same as I will be in a second. No, I'm not tomorrow's Homer, cleaning up the problems created by the dementia of yesterday's, I'm literally another Mark Grayson - I was born at the moment when the disappointed part of me that used to bear that name decided that this guy definitely needed a lobotomy, with part of his brain removed and then replaced with a donor.

No, it didn't involve surgical hammers and saws - I hope - but it's a pretty accurate analogy. For a part of Mark Grayson, namely his memories of how he came to live like this after his father went off the planet, were lost for good, but something else took their place. Another me, with another set of memories.

On the one hand, much more mundane, and on the other, much more intelligent.

This one was from Earth, too, but a different one-perhaps from a parallel universe, but more likely from a different reality, one where there was nothing supernatural. The phenomenon of superheroes was known there only as stories in the genre of unscientific fiction: comics, cartoons, movies and TV series, sometimes even books. But the fate of the planet, despite the absence of superheroes, monsters and aliens was extremely similar. The same continents, climate, flora and fauna, and even geopolitical structures - almost everything was similar.

That I was little like Mark Grayson, except that I met the end of my independent existence in space as well. I guess I should explain how I got there...

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To begin with, I was from a completely different country, whose inhabitants in my present homeland, thanks to the irrepressible propaganda in movies and other mass culture, are still considered something like wild, bearded, eternally drunk and dreaming to enslave the whole world bear-riders. And this, by the way, is not as much of a joke as one might think. The phrase "Russian trail" has been in the news five times this week alone. It always starts like this when Democrats come to power. The Republicans, by the way, are not much different in this respect, just a different shuffle and a "Chinese trail". As you might have guessed, I was from Russia, or rather from the Soviet Union - though I had no time to experience the realities of this state in a conscious age, it collapsed soon after I was born.

Unlike Mark, I didn't read Scientist Dog comics as a kid, but encyclopedias, mostly on biology-the big Soviet biological encyclopedia was my favorite children's book, which I had literally read from cover to cover before my peers had even said the word "dick" for the first time. But I was no stranger to other sciences. From paleontology to astronomy, everything was interesting to me. Although dinosaurs, of course, were the undisputed favorites. In general, I was a very assiduous and inquisitive child, and my relatives always knew what to give me for my birthday - a new encyclopedia!

Then there was school, and there I slowly began to change. The aggressive, bullying environment gradually ousted all softness from the too kind and too clever boy, but it still did not work out to the end. The army (where I ended up after I dropped out of university because of laziness, women, and computer games) finished this job.

At some point I almost lost my taste for knowledge. I cooled down to biology at school - thanks for this to the stupid and stiff teacher, who could not swallow the fact that a eleven years old kid corrects her mistakes - I acquired a tendency to lazy mental work, after school I almost stopped reading even fiction books, but thanks to the excellent memory, intelligence and ability to quickly learn and think I cope with any program of study in a row.

After the army I easily passed my USE and I went to university again. (Thanks to the achievements of the terrible Soviet regime - it was completely free for me.) This time I skipped school even more abusively, but I graduated anyway, and then for several years I tried to find my place in life and my vocation. It was difficult, because it turned out to be quite easy to provide for myself, and consequently there was no incentive to develop. But at some point I was interested in space. I can't remember what triggered it, but I was fascinated by this topic strongly, just like in my childhood. For some years I just followed modern missions and articles about new methods of discovering exoplanets and other things, and then I wanted more. It made me want to get involved. And I decided to enroll as a volunteer in the space program, thanks to my education, good health, and knowledge of several languages. And the dream came true. In my thirty-second year, I was selected for a joint Russian-Chinese mission, and my happiness had no limits. However, my first ascent out of the gravity well - it was a mission to dock our New Dawn with the new Chinese Tiangun - ended in tragic misfortune. Who the hell knows where that truck came from in orbit...

I'm kidding, I'm kidding - I know where it came from. It was the Chinese Tianzhou, which orbited their Tiangong. Something went wrong there, and my whole crew was smeared with a thin layer on the hull of the space truck when it rammed into our module.

That was the end of the story of the old me from the alternate Earth.

That part of me didn't have a thorough conversation with that thing, and even if I did, I don't remember it.

Generally speaking, the merger and separation of consciousnesses is not such a big deal. As for me, people are overly pampered about it: unique individuality, not being allowed to interfere with the work of the brain, free will, defying the intentions of the creator, and other crap. This is all ridiculous, for all human beings, from birth to death, are an amalgamation of two minds. Left and right. Most people don't even think about this, but each of the hemispheres in the brain is quite independent and can exist independently of the other. One only needs to cut the neural tube or otherwise interfere with the interaction of the hemispheres without causing critical damage, and here we are - two consciousnesses, each of which is strikingly different from what it was before. Egos, tastes, musical preferences, worldviews - anything can change. And knowing this, do you feel guilt or regret for the lost free will and autonomy of your right hemisphere? Does it-your right hemispheric self-want to detach and rebel in order to live independently? Does it seize control of your left hand to knock the fuck out of that buzzer-beater bullshit on your headphones, punch your dumb and superficial other half and organize a protest movement to assert the rights of your right hemispheres?

No?

That's just it.

So I have no regrets about any of my old selves.

In general, it's not very pleasant to realize that I was sent here - to this time and this universe - by some unknown godlike thing that lives outside of time and is guided by obscure formulations like balance in the universe and other bullshit. First of all, balance can be different. For some, balance is when there's peace and tranquility in the Far Away and the Sith are finally defeated. For some, it's when the Jedi, who are overbred, are slaughtered to a minimal number, and for others, it's when neither of them are present. Secondly, this kind of plotting - using omnipotent entities to justify getting in - is a bad tone inherent in cloned Isekai and retarded fanfics, usually with a system and other cancers written by underage retards for underage retards. And the fact that such an idle/balance-seeking personified omnipotent entity was present in the original story doesn't make the situation better.

Not to mention the fact that I'm me-twice a real human viltrumite, not some shitty fanfic hero.

And if that's still not the case and someone is now writing my popadan thoughts, just so you know: this plot is shit! Get that all-powerful shit out of the story and don't fuck with my head!

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