The Me and Me, (Prologue)
I often see the same dream. In this dream, I am falling through the darkness. I try to resist, to fly up using my powers, but it's all in vain. The entire might of the Viltrumite body and the ability to fly turn out to be absolutely useless against the power of this place. Obviously, this is no ordinary gravity well—at least because this planet is not massive enough to create such a strong spatial distortion—there is some other force guiding me through the darkness, down, to where it waits.
At first, it appears as a barely noticeable gleam—quite a biblical light at the end of the tunnel—then, as I fall, the contours of this creature begin to emerge. It, whatever it actually is, appears before me looking like an enormous—though I've seen bigger—tree woven from countless intertwined beams of light. A divine cheese string? However, what I see doesn't necessarily reflect reality. I am not so stupid and narcissistic to consider my vision of reality objective. I only see what my visual organs can catch, and I comprehend and visualize in my mind even less—a small fraction of what I saw, only what my brain is capable of perceiving.
It talks to me.
It tests me, sending me to the past to see how I will act, whether I can restore the balance.
And it is disappointed in me. And you don't have to be a genius to understand that disappointing a being before which a powerful Viltrumite is nothing more than a grain of sand is not the best idea.
Besides, this is not the first encounter of this being with Mark Grayson.
Now it will brush me off again and return me to where it took me from, to my time and my reality, as it has done countless times before, and will do countless times after... or not.
Something has changed in its plans.
It no longer intends to look for a worthy me... or more precisely, not just me...
It seems that this time I won't be returning to my time after all...
At this point, I always wake up with the understanding that it wasn't just a dream, and that the one in the dream wasn't me.
Well, more accurately, it was me, but not all of me. The current me didn't exist then. And this isn't a joke about how the me right now is not the me from a second ago and not the me a second from now. No, I am not tomorrow's Homer, sorting out the problems created by the dementia of yesterday's; I am literally a different Mark Grayson—I was born the moment that thing, disappointed in the part of me that used to bear this name, decided that this guy definitely needed a lobotomy, removing a part of his brain and replacing it with a donor's.
No, it all happened without surgical hammers and saws—I hope—but it's a pretty accurate analogy. For the part of Mark Grayson, namely the memories of how he ended up having such a life after his dad left the planet, was completely lost, but something else took its place. Another me, with another set of memories.
On the one hand, much more mundane, but on the other, much more rational.
This me was also a native of Earth, but a different one—possibly from a parallel universe, but more likely from a completely different reality where there was nothing that is customarily called supernatural. Such a phenomenon as superheroes was known there only as stories in the genre of unscientific fiction: comics, cartoons, movies, and TV series, sometimes even books. But at the same time, 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 identical.
That me bore little resemblance to Mark Grayson, except maybe that he also met the end of his independent existence in space. I should probably explain how I got there...
Let's start with the fact that I originally came from a completely different country, whose inhabitants in my current homeland, thanks to relentless propaganda in movies and other pop culture, are still considered to be something like wild, bearded, perpetually drunk bear riders dreaming of enslaving the whole world. And by the way, this is not as much of a joke as one might think. Just this week, the phrase "Russian trail" was heard on the news five times. This always starts when the Democrats come to power. Republicans, however, are not much different in this regard, they just have a different broken record and a Chinese trail. As you might guess, this me originally came from Russia, or more precisely, from the USSR—although I didn't get to experience the realities of that state at a conscious age, it collapsed shortly after my birth.
Unlike Mark, in my childhood, I didn't read comics about Science Dog, but encyclopedias, mostly on biology—the Great Soviet Biological Encyclopedia was my favorite childhood book, which I literally read "from cover to cover" even before my peers said the word "dick" for the first time. But I did not shy away from other sciences either. From paleontology to astronomy—everything interested me. Although dinosaurs, of course, were the undisputed favorites. In general, I was a very diligent and inquisitive child, and my relatives always knew what to get me for my birthday—a new encyclopedia!
Then came school, and there I began to change little by little. An aggressive, boorish environment gradually squeezed every bit of softness out of a boy who was too kind and too smart, but it didn't manage to completely finish the job. The army finished this work, where I ended up after dropping out of the university due to laziness, women, and computer games.
At some point, I almost lost my thirst for knowledge. I grew cold toward biology back in school—thanks to a dull and rigid teacher who couldn't swallow the fact that a fifth-grader was correcting her mistakes on the very first lesson—and acquired a tendency to be lazy about mental work. After graduating from school, I almost stopped reading even fiction books, but thanks to a magnificent memory, intelligence, and the ability to learn and think quickly, I breezed through any educational program with ease.
After the army, I easily retook the Unified State Exam and went back to study. This time I skipped classes even more maliciously, but I still graduated, and then spent several years trying to find my place in life and my calling. It was difficult, since providing myself with everything necessary turned out to be quite easy, and, consequently, there was no incentive to develop. But at some point, I became passionate about space. I don't remember what served as the catalyst, but I got deeply into the topic, just like in childhood. For several years I just followed modern missions and articles about new methods for discovering exoplanets and so on, and then I wanted more. A desire for involvement arose within me. And I decided to volunteer for the space program, since my education, robust health, and knowledge of several languages were all there. And the dream came true. In my thirty-second year of life, I was selected for a joint Russian-Chinese mission, and my happiness knew no bounds. However, my very first ascent from the gravity well—it was a mission to dock our Novaya Zarya with the new Chinese Tiangong—ended in a tragic accident. Who the hell knows where that truck in orbit came from...
Just kidding, I'm kidding—I know where it came from. It was the Chinese Tianzhou, which was lifting their Tiangong into orbit. Those taikonauts messed something up, and my entire crew was smeared in a thin layer over the hull of the space cargo ship when it rammed our module.
Thus ended the story of the old me from an alternative Earth.
This part of me didn't have a thorough conversation with that thing, and if there was one, I don't remember it.
In general, the merging and separation of consciousnesses is not such a big deal. In my opinion, people worry too much about it: unique individuality, the impermissibility of interfering with the brain, free will, trampling the creator's designs, and other bullshit. It's all ridiculous, because all people, from birth to death, are a fusion of two consciousnesses. The left and the right. Most don't even think about it, but each of the hemispheres in the brain is quite independent and can exist independently of the other. You just need to sever the neural tube or somehow otherwise interfere with the interaction of the hemispheres without causing critical damage, and voila—we have two consciousnesses, each of which is strikingly different from what was there before. Ego, tastes, musical preferences, worldview—anything can change. And knowing this, do you feel guilt or regret over the lost free will and independence of your right hemisphere? Does it—your right-hemisphere self—want to separate and rebel to start living independently? Does it seize control over your left hand to turn off that Gen Z crap in the headphones, punch your stupid and superficial significant other, and organize a protest movement to defend the rights of right hemispheres?
"No?"
Exactly.
Therefore, I feel 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 an unknown god-like entity living outside of time and guided by vague concepts like balance in the universe and other bullshit. Firstly, balance can be different. For some, balance is when there is peace and quiet in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, and the Sith are finally defeated. For others, it's when the excessively multiplied Jedi are slaughtered down to a minimum number, and for some, it's when neither exist. Secondly, such a premise—using omnipotent entities to justify a transmigration—is bad taste, inherent in cloned isekais and moronic fanfics, usually with a game system and other cancer, written by juvenile morons for juvenile morons. And the fact that such a personified omnipotent entity, suffering from idleness or the search for balance, was present in the original story from the beginning does not make the situation any better. Not to mention the fact that I am me—a doubly real human-Viltrumite, and not some shitty fanfic hero.
And if this isn't the case and someone is currently writing my isekai thoughts, then know this: this premise is shit! Get this omnipotent crap the fuck out of the plot and don't fuck with my brain!
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