I am a fighter, I have always been a fighter. My name is Jack Wolf, since the day I was born I've been fighting, first I was a stillborn but thanks to advanced technology I was brought back. At four I fell from our second story balcony whilst trying to catch a chipmunk, three breaks and a fracture later I got into a fight with a kindergartener who made fun of my casts. Eleven fights by grade five, thirty one by grade nine and finally one hundred sixteen in high school and counting. But the most startling news is, I have never won, not even in kindergarten.
I have always been short and thin, I am finally getting tall at a height of five foot eight inches. The reason for so many fights is, I hate bullies. It is fighting one of these bullies I begin. A six foot tall two hundred forty pound football player slams his fist into my gut, knocking the wind out of me, collapsing forward onto my knees gasping for air. I try to ignore the pain, breath in, breath out… nope, still painful as hell.
Getting back to my feet and holding my fists up, looking him in the eye I say, "if that's the best you got you should join cheerleading." Now I know it's childish but it feels really good to say, what comes after does not, he walks forward pissed and punches me right in the jaw, I'm as unprepared as possible and I'm knocked back onto the floor. With no energy left to fight I cannot get up, lucky for me the fight is over and the other guy walks away knowing he won. With no more excitement our student onlookers disperse and head to class, all but Tim, one of my two best and only friends.
"Jack, just because he picks on me does not mean you need to fight him. By the way, one hundred seventeen." Putting my arm over his shoulders he helps me to the nurses office as my lip is split and pouring blood.
The nurse Jenny Reed puts a bandaid meant for holding wounds together on it and tells me to chill for a while before heading to class. Tim on the other hand heads to fourth period physics, and after five minutes I go and join him, our teacher Mr. B does not even acknowledge my presence, as I head to my seat at the back of the class next to Tim. Tim is five foot one, a hundred twenty pounds and the biggest astronomy nerd ever, he is only supposed to be in grade eight yet he gets a hundred percent on any test quiz exam or homework in our grade twelve class.
I'm jabbed in the ribs by the girl to my right, Sarah Black the other best friend is also a nerd but in biomechanics, she is actually in grade twelve though. That is when I noticed Mr. B said something to me and I had zoned out.
"Well Mr. Wolf, what is the equation used to calculate the speed of a low density planet with low gravitational pull? No you don't know, well maybe you should pay attention to me instead of the clock." To be fair I was distracted by a fly on the clock, not the clock itself.
Leaning closer to Sarah I whisper my thanks and go back to not paying attention. It's not that I don't like physics it is just that I hate it, I needed one more science to graduate and both Sarah and Tim were in this one so hey it sounded like fun.
Scratching down the homework pages to do later, I listen in to a conversation over wormholes and spaghettification, when the bell goes at the end of class to signal the end of school we walk casually to our bikes. We live in a small town surrounded by mountains in southern Canada with nothing more to do than school, chill and break stuff. Holding doors for them is like clockwork so one of them does not walk into them, because when in these discussions they notice nothing even solid objects like doors, cars, people, ponds, lakes or even trees. I have learned to warn them so we don't have issues like the time they walked into a sulfuric pool high on the mountains and I had to dive in to save them, (Tims left shoe was a goner).
We all have parental problems as mine left on my sixteenth birthday, Sarah's are workaholics and never home, and Tim's dad is dead and mom is mentally ill, leaving him to take care of her. By law I live with Tim and his mom but I actually live in a cave high in the mountains and we have come to hang out there where it's more peaceful. It takes an hour and a half to bike to it and less than twenty to get back. The cave is hidden with the entrance being barely big enough for bikes on their sides, but the inside is massive. My "living room" is decked out in old sofas and recliners with a pool table missing the eight ball in the middle. The lighting is natural bioluminescent lighting from thousands of fireflies in a big tank that took us two months to fill.
Playing pool and creating small firecrackers to detonate in a nearby crevasse is how we spend our day and come nightfall we head to my room to watch the stars through a hole. My bedroom is small, a circular room with a pile of fur blankets in the middle. We were going to get a mattress and actual blankets but they couldn't come clean as easily and got way too many bugs. There is a two inch moat around my bed to stop bugs but occasionally I get a few and have to clean everything.
We talk about our lives and what we want to do when we grow up, when it comes my turn I say, "I will be a fighter, I will fight for the freedom of the people." It's not a detailed explanation but they understand nonetheless, but compared to Sarah's biomechanic researching cures for incurable diseases, and Tim's launching space probes in hopes of colonizing other planets, it is nothing.
After a long description of how other planets work, Tim and Sarah head home leaving me to my solitude. I don't miss my parents as they were both druggies, but there are times when I wish I had someone else to talk to. Tomorrow is Saturday and Tim and Sarah are coming to look at some planets or something, either way I actually have to get up in the morning, so lying my head down and throwing the blankets over myself I get some shut eye.
At like five in the morning I wake to Sarah throwing my clothes at me while Tim yanks the blankets off me. I sleep in pj's to clarify but holy crap is the cave cold in the mornings. I get dressed quickly and meet Tim and Sarah outside on their bikes, and we start biking, two hours later we reach a plateau at the top and quickly start to set up a telescope and Sarah's briefcase of chemicals and Machine parts. Then we wait, and to kill time I turn to Sarah, "so how does some planetary junk relate to biomechanics?"
She is shocked that I don't understand and quickly informs me, "when the planets align there is a chance radiation will leak onto our planet and because I was denied plutonium this is the only way I can get my hands on some radiation for my experiments. So unless you got some in your back pocket somewhere, this is what I gotta do."
I turn to Tim for help but he only gives me a shrug of confusion, huh women. For the next little while I played with a wolf's tooth my father had given me, he said it was to remind me of who I was on the inside, now it rests on a twine hoop around my neck as it has been since I got it.
With a few minutes to the alignment I talk with Sarah about what she's doing, "so what are you doing?" I mean it is way less creepier than it sounds but she does not notice and explains.
"I'm trying to synthesize 'living metal' . It will essentially be used for enhancing strength, speed and hopefully make people uncuttable." She seems unfazed by what she said but Tim and I look baffled by her idea.
"You are making a weapon, don't you understand how dangerous that is? How can you ensure it doesn't get into the wrong hands?" I probably should not be so harsh but it caught me off guard.
She goes to reply but Tim ends it, "guys, we can argue later it's almost here." He sets an electric clock on a rock and instead of the time it displays a countdown to the alignment. Thirty seconds before, Tim stares intently through his telescope while Sarah mixes chemical after chemical. At the final three seconds we hold our breaths in excitement, but as anticlimactic as possible nothing happens.
"Well I'm glad I woke up so early to see that." I turn to walk back to my bike but as I do Tim's phone goes bananas while Sarah's gadgets beep uncontrollably, something is happening. Sarah looks through her microscope and Tim jumps up and down whooping, and checking his telescope. Excited, I take a look as well and see four or five planets but instead of a line they form a 'c' shape moving it very slowly I notice five others completing the 'c' I pull my eye away and notice Tim has gone silent.
He stares intently at a black sphere hovering above the ground twenty feet from us, it's nothing like I've ever seen before, almost like it's out of a movie. "Tim what is that?"
He does not respond right away and when he does I start to get freaked out, "I don't know. It looks like some sort of black hole, but spherical. It could very well be a rip in space, kind of like a portal to god knows where." We are quiet for a few seconds before we hear a cheer from Sarah, she is holding a vial of silver metallic liquid.
My curiosity gets the better of me and I walk over to her, forgetting the big black sphere behind me, "What is that? Did it work?"
She holds up a dish, it's frosting on the outside,a liquid swirls within, it glimmers like silver. What is most surprising is that it is moving slowly like syrup trying to get through the glass to get to me, it wants me. I am knocked to the ground as a thunderous crack explodes through the air, the mountain is cracking, splitting into two leaving a big crevasse in its place.
I hit the ground hard spilling the viscous liquid on myself, oh crap. Getting quickly to my feet I try to tell Sarah but she sees before I can utter a word, but instead of anger she displays only fear. Her hands are over her mouth, tears forming in her eyes, "Jack I… I am so sorry I should have listened to you, it was dangerous and I did it anyway. I…" her words are muffled by her cries and she collapses to her knees in a fit of tears.
It is only by the shocked expression on Tim's face that I understand what is truly going on, the metal is eating away at me, no not eating, absorbing. "Tim, what is going on?" He stays silent, his jaw wide open, "Tim! Please! What is happening?"
"The metal, it is reacting the same way all living things do, eats and repopulates. It will feed on any and all carbon based matter until it runs out of food. But instead of absorbing nutrients from the food it absorbs the food itself becoming one with the food."
"Well how do we remove its food?" Seconds go by and Tim does not reply, instead he stares at his shoes, Sarah answers me between sniffles.
"Jack. I am so sorry. To remove the food you would need to remove you from the metal. But we can't without killing you, but it's much worse than that, there is nowhere for hundreds of miles that could house the metal. The metal feeds of plants and animals Jack, it will eat everything. I am so sorry." The news is like the drop of a guillotine blade, it is worse than me who will die, everyone will.