HOW CHARLES EVANS BECAME CHARLIE X!

by: Dan Bivens

AUTOMATED COMPUTER RECORDING, STARDATE: 1121.3. The science ship GLADIATOR had reached its predetermined exploration point pre-designated as Thasus. Unfortunately, severe vitiation of basic systems occurred, both those dealing with sublight propulsion, as well as structural integrity, due to an unknown collision preceding entry into high orbital status. GLADIATOR had quickly crashed, killing all crewpersons, including objective directors: Dr. Hayden Evans and his wife, Dr. Hayley Evans, who had given live birth during the first year of the three year, at Warp Two relativistic velocities, expedition. Thus a single survivor now exists in the embodiment of three-year-old Charles Evans. Distress signal has been set on automatic using pre-subspace radio, due to said extensive system damage and, now, rapidly dwindling power supply. End of automated computer report.

Charlie Evans was but a toddler of three. Entirely too young to truly realize exactly what had happened to his parents. Parents who now lay lifeless amidst the remainder of dead bodies comprising the crew compliment of the now-crashed science ship.

Fortunately, Charlie, being the progeny of genius stock, was an undeniably intelligent individual fully capable of not only learning how to utilize the still-accessible micro-computers, even though the primary computer was no longer fully functional, but essentially surviving against all odds.

Thus finishing what his parents started, in their off-time duty-hours during the three-year trip via Warp Two relativistic speeds, which slightly exceeded 8-billion kilometers per hour. Three years due to the indisputable certitude that there remained thousands of trillions of kilometers left for the GLADIATOR to ostensibly traverse in order to reach far-distant Thasus.

Such scientific things, however, were not of immediate interest to a three-year-old, so Charlie merely learned how to completely command that all-important, to flesh-and-bone sentiences, Human/humanoid vocally-conveyed "conversation".

"How are you today, Charlie?" said the computerized voice from unseen speakers in the somewhat still intact control area of the otherwise destroyed science ship.

"I am doing fine," replied a lonely little boy with a strained smile and bright blue eyes. "How are you today, computer?"

"I am still functional, thank you," the computer responded. "What would you like to learn today?"

Even though there was still a lot to learn regarding a great many areas of Human-to-Human interaction and emotional comprehension, especially dealing with one's Self, to this young boy, who'd so closed himself off in the passing year or so, only one particular point of information continued to nag his conscious considerations.

"Tell me about…Earth."

Such communicative activities would have to give way to the all-important aspect of learning how to properly operate the food distribution devices still somewhat serviceable in post-crash, for such was essential for the growing boy's physical survival.

At a specific point, Charlie Evans, as highly intelligent as ever, learned exactly what he could collect from his jungle-like surroundings that could be consumed without substantial sickness or potential poisoning. But even this had its limits.

Limits which, once reached by the lone adolescent who, at this point, had reached the ripe Human age of ten, would bring his brilliance and strength, considering his situation for the past seven years of absolute solitude, under the direct attention of noncorporeal entities who, mere centuries earlier, where physical masters of their pre-jungle planet.

Even though, unbeknownst to a Human youth not yet venturing very far from the crashed ship that had been his home, beneath the thick overgrowth and old-growth trees existed the crumbling ruins of vast cities once physically populated by the people of Thasus.

"What are you?"

That reverberant voice seemed to speak from ten thousand different directions at the same exact instant and also seemed to somehow reach into the very depths of Charlie's consciousness, if not into his singular soul.

"Wh-what?" stammered the ten-year-old, who, due to the immutable truth that he'd been reduced to sporadic vegetarian eating, just enough to simply stay alive, and had grown gaunt. The only clothing he was capable of draping about his gangly figure being a strange mixture of surviving articles of clothing worn initially by the male contingent of the crew, including his long-dead father.

"What are you?" the thunderous voice stated with even more emphasis and godliness than had initially been telepathically transmitted. "You are not native to our world! You are…similar…but still, somehow…different!"

"I," began the boy as curiosity canceled out irrational dread, "am a Human. My name is…Charlie. Charlie Evans. Who…what…are you?"

After a tension-inducing several seconds of very heavy silence, the cosmic collectivity of super-sentience existing in and around Thasus solidified, sort of, in a shimmering head the size of a boulder, but with nary a sign of true substance, with thick white hair, representative of their common physicality several centuries ago, seemingly spoke to the adolescent from scant meters away.

"We are…Thasians," said the less-vociferous voice now evidently emanating from the scintillating ghost-head, even as a wide-eyed Human child stared in abstract awe capped by all-consuming curiosity. "Once…we dominated this planet in a physical form similar to yourself. Once, like those we sense had died in the crashed vessel some half-a-kilometer distant, we lived. We loved. Now…we have evolved beyond such unnecessary emotionalism. Such psychological and physical fragility. Now…we are one with all that exists in this…or any other…universe. As we now, through my long lost substantially resized facial presentation, speak with you…we also visit ourselves upon more worlds in more galaxies in more universes than your kind could possibly conceive. Would you like to learn our ways, Charles Evans? Would you desire…supreme power? Such would make your continued physical existence here much more than merely…bearable."

What adult could say "no" to such a cosmic proposition? Who could truly turn their backs upon the Absolute? Certainly not a ten year old boy existing in such agonizing solitude upon a planet only recently, in Federation history, discovered by deep-space probes which, inevitably, brought the GLADIATOR and its crew of scientists and xeno-archeologists across the vast expanse of space-time.

Such prompted remembered tales, told and retold to him via the no-longer-accessible micro-computers when he was younger still, wherein some magical something offered unlimited personal power to its flesh-and-blood liberator.

Blue eyes were as wide as his healthily toothy smile, as the rangy sandy-haired kid was quick to say, "Yes! Yes!"

"So be it!" answered the vibrant voice of a veritable god who was actually about to bestow such cosmic omnipotence upon the Human child swallowed whole in clothes not even his. "You, Charles Evans, shall now share the same access to energies far beyond your mortal kin. Behold!"

Suddenly, even as the hovering head's ghostly outline began to gradually dissolve, blinding energy more brilliant, though not dangerously so, than the solar radiation being given off by Thasus' ancient sun.

Energies which painfully permeated both the mind and body of young Charles Evans in what he had not known would be so singularly agonizing…

"Gyyyyiiiiiiiii!"

Such should have been expected: the Thasian race achieved their passage into a noncorporeal condition of eternal existence after centuries of conclusive evolutionary accretion; for Charlie, however, such was taking place in the span of seconds that, to him, felt like half-an-eternity.

Finally, and not a moment too soon for a pain-racked Charles Evans, both the brilliance suffusing his slight physical form not only gratefully, gradually dissipated, but actually insinuated itself into the mind belonging to the boy. Not to mention the boy's body and, quite possibly, his personal soul.

Whatever had happened to him, Charles Evans now opened his eyes to see his surroundings, once so seemingly dismal, as the energy-rich world of jungle-growth that it, in fact, was. Replete with an innumerable amount of life-forms from the simplest insects to the highest animal form currently existing in the evolutionary wake of the Thasians.

Not only the present of the adopted planet that had become, like it or not, his home, but the past as well. Looking with eyes beyond eyes, Charles could actually "see" the vast super-scientific, verge-of-eternity flesh-and-bone humanoids that had once so filled the pre-forest surface of the extremely old Class-M world.

Beings who'd spread themselves throughout the surrounding cosmos in much the same manner as the Federation and Starfleet, at what would be, by way of actual comparison, at their infancy in regards to space exploration and planetary colonization.

A race who had spent several million years as supreme flesh-and-blood beings with at least a single million of that having been spent practicing sciences incomprehensible to Humans or even Vulcans.

Beings who, just as the shimmering energy representative of this super-race had said, as of a few short centuries earlier, completed their ultimate evolutionary rise that all sentient civilizations would, so long as they do not obliterate themselves over the long millennia, one day ultimately attain.

But Charlie's command of the cosmic energies infused within was nowhere near evolved enough to completely comprehend the daily lives of the once-physical Thasians. Not by a long shot.

Still, he did, at the most basic stage, understand enough to know that, even before they became eternal entities of energy…the Thasian civilization was incomparably great.

But enough of allowing freshly-endowed-with-peerless power senses "see" the past of those who believed themselves to have saved the young boy from certain, dismal demise. It was now time for Charlie X, as he would come to secretly call himself, to make more practical use of his supreme telepathic/telekinetic abilities.

First and foremost, Charlie X would materialize more than enough food, of all imaginable shapes, colors, and delectable tastes, so that he would never again experience the palpable pangs of hunger.

As to any semblance of sane activities to help pass the time that would drag so agonizingly slow, while the boy continued to grow ever-closer to what, one day, would be a young man…

"Hello, mother…father," said the now thirteen year old youth still, secretly at least, calling himself Charlie X, to the fleeting forms his still-too-young-though-unbelievably-powerful mind made seemingly real via the telekinetic manipulation of molecular structures that were formerly inanimate articles such as trees or brush or rocks. "Today is my birthday…I think. I'm now officially a teenager…whatever that is."

The unreal-though-physical facsimiles of Hayden and Hayley Evans, both with ever-present, ever-vacuous smiles on their too-perfect faces, said exactly what their omnipotent, though not omniscient, son always anticipated.

"That is great, Charlie," said the seemingly solid specter of the thirteen-year-old's father, unable, via his own accord, to wrap actual physical arms about the always-lonely boy. "You deserve to be happy."

"Yes, Charlie," chimed in Hayley Evans, right on cue just as the telepathic/telekinetic thoughts of the cosmically empowered pubescent always expected. "You are the best boy any mother could want."

Too bad Charlie X was, at such a point and under such conditions, merely all-powerful and nowhere near all-knowing. Otherwise he would've been able to do what the collectively cosmic Thasians could've done, if they so desired: not only bodily bring long-dead parents back to illusive life, though their emotional/intellectual reactions and responses were all merely two-dimensional expressions of furtive recollection, but recreate them so completely that they would literally live once again.

For that matter, had Charlie X developed and sharpened his psionic powers enough, he would no longer experience emotional loneliness and, quite the contrary, could psychically visit and experience the entirety of not only his universal reality, but an innumerable amount of others.

"I hate it here," grumbled the thirteen-year-old even as he allowed the parental molecular constructs to return to their natural states. "No matter how powerful the Thasians made me…I'm still all alone in the middle of a jungle-planet."

For the next four years, from age thirteen to seventeen, Charles Evans a.k.a. Charlie X would undergo a dangerous deepening of dark emotional turmoil. So much so that by the time the automated distress radio continued out into normal space-time, rather than the much more readily receivable subspace transmission, had been picked up by a second science ship that happened to be passing close by, his potential for extending punishment had become far too anchored within his troubled thoughts.

So consumed was Charlie with self-generated supersensory creations-made-real, more or less, that when two slowly materialized, amidst a transporter's wailing whine, a few meters from his telekinetically-created lean-to…

"Hello," said the tan-tunic wearing man with rugged good looks whom a somber seventeen-year-old believed to be yet another tangible trick of his super-mind, "my name's Captain Ramart, commanding officer of the science ship ANTARES. We picked up your normal radio wave distress signal as we passed within a few dozen light-years on our way to…"

"You," began Charlie with a growing grin and widening eyes. "Are you…real?"

Glancing at his fellow officer, Tom Nellis, and sharing puzzled looks for all of six or seven seconds, Captain Ramart turned back toward the teen in the overly large wraparound patchwork coat, which he'd psychically created from existing materials, and said with a smile, "Uh, yes. We're as 'real' as you. What's your name?"

"Charlie," said the sandy-haired, blue-eyed, broadly smiling seventeen-year-old and, then, correcting himself slightly. "Uh, Charles Evans," he managed not to say, instead, his secret nomenclature of Charlie X. That was just for him.

Not fully understanding whether it was sheer coincidence which had brought them, by way of the previous signal sent, for a time, by surviving systems of the crashed GLADIATOR, or if, somehow, his own super-psychic Self had led them in from the depths of warp-traversed space-time.

To be honest, under the solitary circumstances, Charlie X could've cared less.

"Will you take me with you?" he asked so innocently any devilishly destructive inclinations could not be readily perceived by Ramart and Nellis.

Thus, both grinning graciously, Captain Ramart replied with a nod, "Yeah, kid. Go get your stuff and we'll see to it you get to wherever you may have any family."

"Thanks, Captain Ramart," said Charlie just as he was about to trot off to gather up his meager belongings, contained within a silvery duffel of his own psionic assemblage of native planetary particles. "You'll never know how much I appreciate this."

Unfortunately for the crew of the ANTARES, Charlie X would show such "appreciation" by causing their destruction soon after being beamed over to a starship Charlie had yet to even visualize.

END