An Excerpt From Boundless (Coming July 15th)

I'll keep this short and sweet today. This week, enjoy an excerpt from Boundless, a forthcoming novel about three people navigating life in Minneapolis after people with super powers start materializing among them. The story is set several years after the first of these beings shows up. The twist? The power system is based on Sigmund Freud's hypotheses about human psychological development. Lean far enough into that self-obsessed and feral side of your personality, get powers. Similarly, lean far enough into that people pleasing side that yearns to appease society's needs of you, and voila! Super powers!

Today's excerpt features a trip with Gregory (an Idling under the protection of a community of eugenicists), Jenny (one of those eugenicists who has been tasked with keeping him contained), and our narrator (a painfully average college student). Witness a miraculous event or two as Gregory creates a cozy scene through which to enjoy his regular, scheduled programming.

Courtesy of Nickelodean

Gregory occupies a white, leather sofa a little distance away. He finds the remote on an end table I found at an antique shop, and flips it on.

He flicks through several channels. Spongebob opens his mouth on screen and a green cloud flows from between his teeth. Patrick's eyebrows sparkle and burn, but he is otherwise unaffected.

I recognize the episode from my childhood. I haven't watched Spongebob in years.

"You're ugly!" Patrick says.

Gregory giggles.

"UGLY!" Spongebob shouts with perfect existential dread etched into every line of his face.

I turn my attention to Jenny.

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Let me guess." She says tiredly. "You want to know why I made my choice?"

I look surprised, but I am trying to obscure the fact that she has caught me out exactly.

"It's complicated." She shrugs.

"I don't mean to—"

"It's okay." She cuts in. "I'm used to it."

I await her explanation. My grandfather has taught me—us—about these people, these super humans, but I am not satisfied. I wonder if his explanation of how someone might wind up that way is accurate, or even relevant. I wonder what exactly propelled her to make her choice. Why she chose to abandon herself in the pursuit of power.

"When I look at my past, nothing jumps out." She says. "There's no big, traumatic event that I needed to run from. There's just a series of small injuries. I think about kneeling on rice as a child. Being stuck with the smart girl stereotype while I consistently underperformed in school. I think of endless weeks trying to convince myself to climb out of bed, trying to please everyone around me and hating myself for it. I chose this because I was tired."

I digest this information. She is surprisingly free with it.

We sit in the stillness for a time. I hear Spongebob and Patrick laughing in the background. In the windows, the sun is starting to go down.

I check my watch. It reads 2:30 pm, too early for a sunset in spring.

Gregory leers at me. He reclines against the couch, wriggles into a comfortable position.

"Spongebob is better at night." He says.

"What did you—"

"Time is a lie." Gregory interrupts before I can finish. "Space is a lie. Identity is a big, fat lie."

"So did you...speed up time or...?" I ask.

I contemplate the ramifications of his actions. Has time shifted as abruptly for the people outside; and if it hasn't, what are the ramifications like for them?

Have they lost time? Do they remember how their day went? Have they simply arrived at their present destinations, fully intact with memories filling their heads of events they didn't witness?

As I marvel at the level of control he has exerted over his environment, and ponder what it means, he leers at the screen in a way that suggests his amusement is not for Spongebob but for me.

I am suddenly aware of my limitations. I am aware of them in a way I never was before.

My window has become a ceiling, revealing a neutral darkness inside which physical law—which I have always thought of as concrete, inviolate—has become ephemeral. Outside that window is a kind of apathy toward the conventions of modern life that I have never considered possible before this moment.

One man, one will, has taken thousands of years of research and experimentation, and thrown it in the trash.

"If you liked that, you're really gonna like this." He says.

He holds his hands out in front of him. Spongebob is laughing hysterically on the screen. The first episode is over. We're on the cussing episode now. His laughter is chased by dolphin song. Patrick follows behind with a ripe, car horn blast.

His hands revolve, and after images form behind them.

"Space is a lie." He says. "Reality is what you make it."

Darkness forms between his palms. Pinpricks of light dance in and out of focus within the void. They spiral around each other, draw themselves into vast, spinning clumps. They range in color. Most are white, but some are red or green or yellow or blue.

I realize I am looking at galaxies. I can pick out the black holes at the hearts of some of them quite clearly, but these are not radio telescope readings. They aren't artist renderings either. They are vacuous chasms to my eyes.

The black holes in this starry void call me back to twenty-twelve, before CERN turned on its Hadron Collider for the first time. I recall they talked about the possibility it could produce a black hole, the possibility that they might not be able to contain it, that it might feed on the matter around it, grow larger. It was one likely end to the world as we know it. A threat to our existence, but a small one.

I remember thinking if the cost was that great—that this one act could end the world—why would anyone ever take the risk?

Here before me, I count dozens of those holes in the fabric of reality. I cannot count the stars, but I imagine millions are contained in that void.

He presses his hands together, one suspended below the void and the other above it. The void flattens into a disk. All of its prior dimensionality is gone. To my eyes, it is a two dimensional surface, a table, or a frisbee, or a map.

He draws his hands back and slaps them together with force. The disk scatters, dust in the wind.

Gregory descends into gales of laughter.

I can only stare.

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