Copied
When had he changed? When had the world's evils become his job? No, his amusement. Once, these things sickened him. Now they brought forth nothing, held only emptiness. Someday, for he knew it would come someday, it would be fun. But even over that he couldn't bring himself to care. Countless experiments were crossed off an ever-growing list, each almost undoubtedly ending with bodies gliding towards the overflowing disposal chamber.
And oh how he thanked science for clones. Why bother scouring the ravaged, deserted land around them for unwilling test subjects when you could use the single one raising his hand in front of you over and over again. Never mind that that test subject was his dwarven best friend.
Could he even be considered his friend anymore? Nothing existed anymore of his original friend. Only endless copies, each modified for each new test. At first he had tried to forget it had all changed-been copied-but gradually he had fewer and fewer moments when he could zone out and forget entirely, although now he didn't care to even try. Now the pain and guilt had faded away, left him to float in a vacuum where he didn't have to.
He simply reset, replaced, redeveloped, remade. He clicked away on computers and machinery, planned new hideous deaths, and ignored the secret hidden deep within his new sterile metal home. The new him didn't want to even acknowledge its existence, the danger it held to his being.
He didn't want to go back. He didn't want to be one of the mortal heroes frozen in tubes. He didn't want to let go of the power he had been granted with a simple mistake, the simple error of a demigod and his own luck. The simple chemistry of two highly reactive substances reacting, and forming something new. Something better.
He found no problem in admitting things had changed. The new humming energy that ran through him, driving tingles through his fingertips and transforming his cold eyes into glowing shards of ice. No need for torches when your eyes lit the room. No need for crafting benches when you could create whole items from nothing. Flickers of thoughts, twitches of fingers could change things. No… change itself was not a problem. Only changing back.
Changing back. Devolving. Bright white walls fading back to warm wood and tall trees. Loud machines carefully organized throughout planned halls mixing and moving into crowded rooms stacked with mismatched blocks and jumbled piping. The soft pounding of footfalls returning to where there had only been the silence of continuous flight, primitive yellow torches replacing the searing white of electricity.
So, for securities sake, the heroic spaceman was locked away still instead of being disposed of properly. He could still die, and a master clone was still necessary. But with him frozen in time, all that truly remained was the demigod with ice in his soul to match the backlit ice of his glowing eyes. All that remained was the sheer power. Even so, he was only a copy.