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He was a child, sitting on the couch in his favorite Batman shirt and watching cartoons, holding his prized and newest action figure.
Then he heard it: the squeaking of hinges, the scraping of a door on too-high carpet, the shuffling of feet, and the click of a door closing, and finally the ca-lunk, of a key being turned, the hiissss of a chain being slid, and the scrape of a deadbolt being driven home.
His father had left his study, finally!
Chuck hopped up from the couch, abandoning the action figure to claim his spot on the sofa, ignoring the cartoons, eager only to speak to his father, finally, after hours of his father being locked in his study, where he was forbidden to be disturbed.
"Hey, Dad⏤ " Chuck began.
"Charles⏤ back in a second!" His Dad interrupted.
Chucked frowned, coming in sight of the hallway where wooden floor boards transitioned to large, cream colored paving stones and then further to dark carpet⏤
But his Father did not even look back, barely acknowledging him as he disappeared around the corner, the sunlight coming through the front window highlighting the large black and white schematic papers he carried, so they looked like dark batwings as he vanished.
Long-held curiosity, and just the smallest hint of spite had Chuck looking over to his Father's study, where the two dark wooden double doors were guarded by the original brass handles along with half a dozen locks and security chains added on by his father's steady hand.
Chuck looked down the hallway, but his father was nowhere in sight.
Chuck stepped forward, over the light grey paving stones, onto the dark carpet.
Chuck tried the handles⏤ but the study was locked up tighter than a safe.
Disappointed even though he knew he shouldn't be, Chuck dropped his hand from the doorknob and despondantly turned to go back towards the sofa.
"Charles! What are you doing in my study?" His father demanded, rounding the corner, streaming white-on-black bluprints in his wake.
Chuck jumped, startled and guilty. "Nothing!" He lied, "Nothing, I didn't do anything!"
His father looked at his suspiciously, and reached over his head to check the locks for himself, rattling the handle vigorously, but the door did not budge an inch.
Satisfied, his dad looked back down at Chuck and smiled tightly. "So, Chuck! What did you want to talk to me about?" He asked brightly.
Chuck shuffled his feet awkwardly, and fished his report card out of his pocket, crumpled and folded.
His father accepted the crumpled slip of paper with a quizzical look, opened it up, and spent a few moments going down the list.
"My boy has straight A's?" His dad breathed out, "My little Charles?"
His father sank down to one knee and put one of his big hands on Chuck's shoulder. "I told you that you could do it! You didn't believe me, but I told you, eh? You're special- no, you're aces, Charles!"
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Another time, and another place. Chuck was on his knees, cradling his father's shoulders, the long, curly dark brown hair he'd inhereted spread across his lap, the curls matted with blood.
"You're aces, Charles." His father said, the words gurgling up past his lips in the dark bubbles of arterial blood.
Those were the last words his father ever said to him.
"You're aces, Charles."
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"You're aces, Charles"
The words did not replay in his ears; the shape of his father's lips did not just silently shape the last words he would ever speak⏤ the very words⏤ the shape of the letters themselves?
They burned themselves into his retinas, as if he'd stared at big, bold text on a computer too long in a dark room and was now seeing afterimages.
The Intersect was overloading again, for the final time, burning out his mind⏤ no, his very brain, physically.
Human brains were simply not built to produce the sheer amount of processing power required for a bioelectical machine like the Intersect, let alone a mind that had already been damaged by a previous incarnation of the machine.
Chuck's head pounded, and his eyes ached as though his skull was shrinking, compressing his brain and all the information in it until it was ready to implode, sending jagged shards of random, nonsense data into his various senses as his shocked system struggled to make sense of it all.
"You're Aces, Charles..."
The words hid Shaw's face from his vision, the shape of the A and the C blocking out Shaw's face and the gun he held, respectively. The letters tasted like ranch dressing (he hated ranch) and in his ears he could hear the discordant, chaotic tones of 'Hero of a Hundred Fights', one Jeff's favored, obscure math rock bands, the mere thought of which he could taste would bring on even more Flashes if he dared to speak its name to trigger them, leaving the smell of peppermint in his nose, cold and remote as a warning.
"You're ACES Charles.. ..."
Shaw was saying something, moving closer, and when Chuck could see his face in the gap between the letters, he lunged at him⏤ but Shaw ducked effortlessly, and laughed, and something hard, and cold slammed into the back of Chuck's head.
His skull cracked, and fractured.
I just want to save Sarah.
Blood gushed from the wound, dripping into his ears and he realized he was nearly face down on the floor, with Shaw holding him by a tight grip on the back of his shirt, cutting off his air.
Why can't I have been special? I thought I was special. I thought I could do anything, be anything.
Anguish squeezed his heart, making it stutter. Why couldn't I have been special? Why couldn't fate just be kinder? I just want to save Sarah….
Blood, fiery cold and icy warm at the same time, started trailing, ticklish, down the side of his face, tracing a path towards his eye.
His very thoughts were becoming scattered, lost in the chaos of the machine. They boomed as loud as thunder or whispered like frightened mice, and he found his awareness of Shaw, even his awareness of Sarah's presence fading.
My dad invented the Intersect. Why did it have to be my Dad If it doesn't mean anything? Why couldn't he have done something? Something that….. that would have prepared me, somehow, for becoming the Intersect? Why can't this be like a video game? Like a tv show? Like a book?
I don't want Sarah to die.
Why couldn't I have been special instead of always aces?
Why didn't dad warn me? Prepare me? Why can't this be like a video game, or a book? why couldn't I have some secret past ? Some big reveal? Some big secret origin story?
The blood trailing down his face from his cracked skull reached his eye and clung to his eyelashes, he could feel the cold, moist heaviness of it like the weight of his entire life was hanging there.
Chuck opened his eyes one last time, and saw the drop, magnified, taking up his entire vision.
He was sure, as he thought his final thought, that it looked as though a galaxy of stars was reflected in that single drop of blood.
The flashing emergency lights, the broken and crooked overhead incandescents – all of them were factured and scattered in that single drop of lifeblood.
Where's my deus ex machina when you need one?
The drop fell away from his vision.
And his entire lifetime shattered into golden energy.
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He was being pulled. A desire, a hunger, a wild abandon so deep he had no words to articulate it.
The world was fractured, spiraling out into infinite fractals, and he was being pulled, lured by threads that wove between the empty spaces, all anchored on a cental point and spiraling outward, weaving itself into a tapestry that was ever changing at its ends.
Chuck thought of his father, and he thought of the Intersect, and he thought,
Why didn't I have a cool origin story?
Why couldn't I have been special?
Why couldn't I save Sarah?
Why couldn't I save me?
Why?
He saw there were threads attatched to these thoughts, and his blood rushed with the desire to follow them. So he did. He followed them through the starscape, and knew, somehow, that time was passing him by.
No, that wasn't right.
He was passing time by.
He was bypassing time.
He landed, or maybe materialized, and looked around- he recognized this room, this scene, the cartoon on the screen, the action figure- and, he recognized himself.
The blood in his veins, singing, greedy, reached out and twined invisible threads around his younger self, even as Chuck strode passed himself on the couch and stood in front of the door to his father's study.
The stones under his feet were warm, baking in the molten core of the planet, or the friction of the titanic tectonic plates, and he thought if he wanted he could have shaped them into anything.
The door, solid wood, seemed as if it were breathing, thrumming with the life of the tree that formed it, as though if he reached out and tugged, new branches would sprout, and birds would peer out of hollows to take flight.
His father was sitting within, young and old at once, hair short and long, his shirt light plaid and unmarred or dark blue and soaked in blood.
Chuck watched him work, and looked around the room, full of old, advanced, primitive technology, and saw the scene shifting under the effects of his gaze.
The Observer Effect.
His blood, singing in his veins, curious, spiteful, and desiring above all to live, to awaken.
His father stood and grabbed papers from his desk. They were black.
Chuck watched.
Chuck observed.
And his blood, awakened, changed with the scene, interacting with small things, here and there, flapping its delicate, orange-red butterfly wings.
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He was a child, sitting on the couch in his favorite Superman shirt and watching cartoons, holding his prized and newest action figure.
Then he heard it: the squaking of hinges, the scraping of a door on too-high carpet, the shuffling of feet, and the flutter of paper.
His father had left his study, finally!
Chuck hopped up from the couch, abandoning the action figure to fall to the floor, ignoring the cartoons, eager only to speak to his father, finally, after hours of his father being locked in his study, where he was forbidden to be disturbed.
"Hey, Dad⏤ " Chuck began.
"Charles⏤ back in a second!" His Dad interuppted.
Chucked frowned, coming in sight of the hallway where wooden floor boards transitioned to large, dark colored paving stones and then further to cream-colored carpet⏤
But his Father did not even look back, barely acknowledging him as he disapeared around the corner, the sunlight coming through the front window shining through the large roll of unspooled white paper he carried, so they, briefly, looked like gossamer butterfly wings before he vanished.
Long-held curiosity, and just the smallest hint of spite had Chuck looking over to his Father's study, where the two dark wooden double-doors were guarded by the original brass handles along with half a dozen locks and security chains added on by his father's steady hand.
Chuck looked down the hallway, but his father was nowhere in sight.
Chuck stepped forward, over the dark paving stones, onto the cream carpet.
The door was open.
Chuck walked in, and knew he should be afraid, but as he stepped over the threshhold, he seemed to feel a surge of warmth, of courage, of determination, and ignored his first instinct to retreat, and instead continued on.
The entire room was full of shelves, and on those shelves were computers. Electronics, batteries, screens, switchboards, and video players, some of them dark and dead, others humming with the static of the universe in the space between channels.
Something seemed to pull him to one particular computer, and he listened , curiosity piqued. The computer was perched on a wooden desk, with a keyboard and mouse trailing from it, and a simple bar stool, scavanged, sat obediently in front of it.
Behind the computer – The Computer – were a wide variety of displays, showing graphs and fluctuating numbers. But only one display was important right now: the one built into The Computer itself.
It has one word on the screen.
Activate?
Chuck sat on the stool, pulled himself forward, and with the brashness of youth and something much older egging him on, pressed enter.
He froze, transfixed, as an entire 20 megabytes of pure data was uploaded to his brain over the course of eight seconds, and then the program was finished. It had run its course.
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Eight seconds.
Just eight seconds to change the world.
20 megabytes was a laughable number, for the Observer.
But babysteps had to start somewhere.
You had to crawl before you could walk.
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"Chuck." His father's voice called, cautious, stern. Then, "Chuck?"
His father appeared in his field of vision, and Chuck blinked, confused and disorientated.
"Chuck, are you all right?" His father demanded, putting his hands on Chuck's shoulders to hold him, "Are you all right? Did you—" Chuck's father glanced at the computer and then did a double-take, trailing off in confusion. "Did you…?"
Releasing his shoulders, Chuck's father turned away completely and began typing various commands into the computer with the keyboard. Chuck wiped at his suddenly burning eyes, and noticed his father had some cool chrome goggles resting around his neck.
"It was a complete transfer." Chuck's father breathed, as Chucked wiped his face and eyes with the hem of his shirt, "Empty files."
His eyes were burning even more now, and Chuck felt like crying for some reason. But equally strange, it didn't feel like he was sad. It felt like he was happy. Or like, he was going to be happy.
Big hands were on his shoulders again, his arms, and Chuck's father stared intently into his burning eyes and said "The whole system went into you- you're – you processed an incredible amount of information. But— but you're okay."
Scrunching up his nose, not understanding what his father was talking about, Chuck asked, "What does that mean?"
Chuck's father laughed incredulously, then took a deep breath and schooled his expression to be calm and serious.
"It means, you're special."
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Another time, and another place. Chuck was on his knees, cradling his father's shoulders, the long, curly dark brown hair he'd inhereted spread across his lap, the curls matted with blood.
"You're special, son." His father said, the words gurgling up past his lips in the dark bubbles of arterial blood.
Those were the last words his father ever said to him.
"You're special, son"
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"Shaw, stop it!" Sarah screamed.
And Chuck, awakened, woke up.
He was lying on the floor, and then, faster than the eye could see, he wasn't.
He was standing, blood coating his face, and he was looking directly at Shaw, who was staring at him like a deer in the headlights, weilding a large piece of metal, hung limply at his side in disbelief.
His blood was singing, coursing through his veins, painting his face, and desiring nothing more than to unmake the enemy who stood before him.
Chuck stretched his neck, and flexed his arms, loosening the stiff joints as he took a moment to breathe and rein in the new instinct that sang through his blood along with coldly commanded from the machine in his brain—he was not a killer.
He would not become like his enemy. He would not stoop to their level, no matter how much his blood wanted to tear Shaw apart into individual atoms and climb along his Biodata to unmake him entirely.
Chuck Bartowski was not a killer, no.
"Chuck?" Shaw ventured uncertainly, hefting the piece of metal higher in his hands defensively, obviously instinctively sensing the change, the shift, the entirely new kind of threat that stood before him.
But Charles Carmichael was an ass-kicker.
'Where's my deus ex machina when you need one?'
"Sorry," Chuck said, feeling a grim smile widening on his face, painted with the blood that sang through his veins, "Had to reboot."
Right here.