Marc D's Infinite Abilities

Marc raised it over his head. “Visual recreation is the other one. I see something, I understand how it can exist, and I recreate it. Fiction, television, things people call fixed - doesn’t matter. If reality can support it, I can make it.”

He tossed the bottle aside. Before it hit the ground, it became a bright orange arcade token.

The token struck the pavement with a sharp metallic ping.

For one beautiful second, everyone went silent.

Then the district erupted.

People pushed forward. A woman climbed onto a newspaper box. Three teenagers shoved through the front line. The child in the silver jacket disappeared beneath elbows and shoulders.

Marc stepped down from the van.

He wanted one more demonstration. Something clean. Something undeniable. He wanted to recreate the pulse rifle from an old science-fiction show, not the weapon itself, not the impossible energy source, but the casing, the grip, the visible mechanisms. Something harmless enough to prove the point and dramatic enough to make every camera record him.

ASI showed him the outcomes.

In one, he made the rifle and the police arrived.

In another, he made a harmless shell and the crowd crushed two people against the arcade doors.

In another, a woman in a gray coat reached him before the object finished forming.

Marc’s smile thinned.

The gray-coated woman stood thirty feet away, perfectly still while everyone around her moved. No phone in her hand. No surprise on her face. Her eyes stayed locked on him.

“Marc!” a man yelled. “Do the flying suit!”

“Make a dragon!”

“Bring back a dead person!”

That last demand cut through the noise.

Marc’s foundation - new, vast, burning quietly inside his soul - opened across the street in a spread of impossible knowledge. The question behind the question. The hunger in the crowd. The watchers hidden among them. The woman in gray was not alone.

Sixteen routes. Fourteen traps. One route where nobody died.

He hated that route immediately.

The arcade district’s central pedestrian gate slammed shut.

Steel bars dropped from the overhead frame, sealing the street at both ends. The crowd screamed as the space tightened. Security shutters crashed down over storefronts. The music from the arcades kept playing, cheerful and stupid.

“Everybody stay calm!” someone shouted.

Nobody stayed calm.

The crowd turned into a living wall. Bodies shoved backward, sideways, forward. Marc felt a shoulder drive into his ribs. A hand grabbed his coat. The van rocked behind him.

The gray-coated woman moved.

Marc saw her hand disappear beneath her sleeve.

“Bad idea,” he muttered.

He reached for the nearest image his mind could hold. A thick glass barrier from a television courtroom drama, reinforced, transparent, physically plausible. Visual recreation answered before his fingers finished closing.

A clear wall burst into existence between him and the crowd.

People slammed against it.

The sound was ugly - palms, phones, knuckles, frightened cries. Marc flinched as the child in the silver jacket struck the barrier and fell backward. A stranger caught the child before the pavement did.

The woman in gray did not slam into the wall.

She had already stepped through the only gap.

Marc turned.

She held a small black device shaped like a tuning fork. Blue lines crawled across its surface.

“Marc D. Joiner,” she said.

His name landed harder than the bottle.

“Fans usually call me Marc.”

“We’re not fans.”

The device hummed.

Pain flashed behind Marc’s eyes. Not pain exactly. Recognition. The machine was sampling the residue of his recreation, reading the pattern left behind when reality accepted his thought.

ASI gave him the answer at once.

A tracker.

Not tracking his body. Tracking the signature of his visual recreation.

Marc laughed because the alternative was letting her see fear.

“You built that from watching me?”

“From watching you brag,” she said.

He looked past her. More gray coats appeared between the arcade machines. A man climbed over a shuttered ticket counter. Another stood on the roof of a claw-machine kiosk, holding a compact weapon against his thigh.

The woman raised the device.

“Rylan Kestrel wants you alive.”

“Who?”

“Rylan Kestrel.”

The name struck a thousand possible histories. None belonged to this world. That meant the group had hidden itself well, or had arrived from somewhere else.

Marc’s grin returned, sharper now.

“Tell Rylan I’m flattered.”

The device pulsed.

Every recreated object in the street flickered. The glass barrier shivered. The orange token on the pavement split down the middle. Screens across the district glitched, each one briefly displaying the same white symbol: a circle pierced by three black lines.

The crowd saw it.

The hunters saw it.

Marc saw the trap closing.

The black device was not merely locating him. It was forcing his signature to repeat, making every creation broadcast his position through the district’s electrical systems.

He needed to leave without creating anything else.

That eliminated most of the entertaining options.

The man on the kiosk lifted his weapon.

Marc moved first.

He dropped flat as a bolt of blue light tore through the glass barrier. The wall exploded into glittering fragments. The crowd screamed and scattered. Arcade cabinets toppled. Plastic tokens sprayed across the pavement like hard little teeth.

Marc rolled beneath a racing machine as another bolt punched through its screen.

“Stop shooting!” the gray-coated woman shouted.

The hunter fired again.

The machine above Marc sparked. Heat crawled across his back. He kicked through the cabinet’s lower panel and emerged behind it, scraping his palm on broken plastic.

ASI unfolded the district.

The alleys. The locked gates. The service corridors under the arcades. The rooftops. The civilians caught between hunters. Every plausible escape opened in his mind at once, then collapsed into consequences.

He could vanish through the crowd and leave the hunters firing.

He could recreate a doorway and expose himself again.

He could fight.

He could save the people trapped nearest the eastern gate, but that would turn his signature into a beacon.

Marc looked at the child in the silver jacket. The child’s mother had fallen beside a toppled rhythm-game cabinet. A gray-coated hunter stepped over them, weapon raised toward the panic.

Marc cursed.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll save the idiots.”

He slapped both hands against the floor.

The visual recreation did not give him a weapon. It gave him structure.

A steel emergency ramp unfolded from the pavement, modeled from the loading bridges beneath the district. It rose beneath the fallen cabinet, levering it aside without crushing the mother. At the same instant, a row of heavy fire doors recreated themselves along the eastern gate, forcing open a passage through the crowd.

People poured through.

The tracker screamed.

Blue light erupted from every screen.

“There!” the gray-coated woman shouted. “That’s him! The signature is active!”

Marc grabbed the child by the silver jacket and pulled the mother upright.

“Run east!”

The woman stared at him. “Who are you?”

“Busy!”

A bolt struck the ramp beside his foot. Metal buckled. The child cried out.

Marc shoved them toward the opening, then turned back.

The gray-coated woman stood amid falling glass, her device glowing brighter. Behind her, the hunters advanced with disciplined steps while the crowd fled around them.

“Rylan says you want someone to take your abilities,” she called.

Marc’s mouth went dry.

He had said it. Too many times. On camera, in alleys, outside coffee shops, laughing at strangers who asked whether he was afraid. Take them, he had bragged. Try. I’ll take yours right back.

He had wanted the challenge.

He had not imagined an organization listening.

“I do,” Marc said.

“Then stop running.”

Marc glanced at the open passage. More people escaped through it. The mother dragged the child along. The last hunter lifted his weapon.

“Not today.”

He reached toward the nearest arcade screen.

The screen showed an old platform game: a bright red door beneath a painted moon.

Marc saw the hinges. The frame. The weight-bearing wall behind the fiction. He saw what could exist, what could not, and the narrow bridge between them.

Visual recreation tore open the side of the arcade.

A red door appeared where solid brick had been.

The hunters fired.

Marc threw himself through.

The door slammed behind him, and the bolts struck its surface with a thunderous metallic crash. He landed in a service corridor that smelled of hot wiring and dust. Pipes rattled overhead. Somewhere behind the walls, thousands of arcade machines continued laughing and screaming.

For half a breath, he stood still.

Then the tracker pulsed through the door.

The symbol appeared in the darkness ahead, projected in pale blue across the concrete.

Rylan’s group had followed the signature.

Marc ran.

His shoes slapped through shallow water. He vaulted a stack of crates, clipped his shoulder against a pipe, and kept moving. ASI gave him every turn, every dead end, every hunter entering the corridor behind him.

He could hear them now.

“South passage!”

“He’s moving!”

“Follow the recreation residue!”

Marc reached a maintenance ladder and climbed hard. His palms burned. He shoved open the hatch and burst onto a rooftop above the downtown district.

Neon washed the buildings in violent colors. Sirens began below. The crowd had spilled into the streets, carrying his face on hundreds of glowing screens.

Marc bent over, breathing through his teeth.

He had gotten what he wanted. The crowd had seen the abilities. The cameras had captured the impossible. The trapped civilians had escaped.

Yes.

But every demonstration had become a thread, and someone had learned how to pull them.

The rooftop door crashed open.

Marc straightened.

A voice rose from the stairwell, calm and close.

“Marc D. Joiner,” Rylan Kestrel said. “We know you by the brag.”

Marc looked across the rooftops. No clean route. No private escape. No version where the hunters forgot his name.

His confidence finally broke into motion.

He sprinted into the neon, carrying the knowledge of every possible path and the certainty that one group had marked him as prey.

End of chapter one. 7 more chapters in the full book.