Chapter Text
When she started kindergarten, Camellia was classified as a prodigy child.
She learned to count to one hundred in a few days and could read up to the fourth grade level. She was important, the prodigal daughter, a child so smart and well-adjusted, her parents didn’t have to bother trying for a second in hopes of getting someone better.
Her parents moved to separate bedrooms and ate at opposite ends of a dining table large enough where they didn’t have to speak to each other, but small enough that both could speak to her in her spot in the middle.
Her parents were perfect for each other, she thought. Both were sex-averse socialites who wanted nothing to do with other people in anything closer than a hug, but they enjoyed the status and perks of the lifestyle. They had their money, their connections, their careers, and a child they can send to the best schools and brag about: someone to carry on their legacy. Her dad was a senator in the New York State Senate. Her mother was a big-shot lawyer. The not-so romantic story of their meeting went as follows.
Her dad was hosting a gala in a bid for re-election. My mother was attending said gala. They talked, and Camellia guessed they saw something in each other. Not love, or passion or anything else whimsical like that. They saw that same generally uncaring attitude and sat down at a table in the corner alone for a deal. Her father wanted a child and a wife in order to have a good-looking family for politics. Her mother wanted a wealthy husband who allowed her to focus on her career. They shook hands and were married half a year later in a small ceremony for both families in order to keep up appearances. They slept in the same bed for a few weeks until a pregnancy test was positive and thus ended the active phase of their partnership. A child was born and he had a mother, and a father, but not a mother and father. They returned home to the same house each day, ate the same food at the same dining room table, and had the same child.
They were a cardboard cut-out of a family.
They looked real enough, but the second someone looked around the edge, they’d see there was nothing behind the flat facade.
Camellia continued to grow up, quicker than she should have, she thought, but time marched on all the same. One benefit of her upbringing was that she never wanted for anything. As long as she continued to do well in school, something that took no effort, any toy she wanted, she could have, any food she wanted, she could have, anything she wanted was hers. By the time she was nine she really only wanted her parents' love.
She was smart enough that by ten, she realized that she was trying to make pigs fly. It was then she realized something else: it felt hollow. All the toys, all the game consoles, all the money.
It wasn’t hers.
Her parents owned everything around her, she didn’t have to do anything and it was hers. She didn’t have her parents' love, she didn’t have any goals of her own, or even dreams. She did things because her parents asked her to and because it was slightly gratifying in the moment. She was a member of the family on the cardboard cut-out: empty with nothing behind her.
It was a sobering realization to have at ten years old, that she was only a facade of a person. For the first time in her life, she stopped, and she thought about the problem.
She must have something to call her own. Her entire life has been given to her and dictated by her parents.
At 6:01:13 pm, she started thinking.
‘Wait, why do my parents own my life, own me. Who decided that? I can be my own person, live my own life. If I am going to have something to call my own it has to be that.’
Then came the next question: how?
‘How do I own my life? How do I make it my own? My parents have done everything for me, I glide through life and don’t challenge myself. Challenge myself. I need challenges in order to grow. Growth = change = filling up the empty parts. How do I challenge myself? Academics, physical activity, games of skill.’
She came to the conclusion that by challenging herself and growing her own skills, she would therefore grow as a person and hopefully make her life her own.
‘This,’ she thought, ‘this is where it all starts. Where I start to become my own person.’
At 6:01:15 pm, she ended her train of thought.
After she finished the fifth mile on the treadmill, she paused the audio version of a college history lecture and sat down on a bench. She considered how far she had come in only a few months. Asking her parents for the exercise room was a good idea. She spent a while considering if it would violate her ideals of being her own person, but settled on the fact that parents were meant to support their children and they weren’t doing the exercise for her so it was fine.
Today was different; Camellia was beginning to realize something.
She feels hot, sluggish, everything is moving in slow-motion. She sways side to side.
Her shirt feels wet with sweat, her right arm itches, her socks are very fuzzy, her left eye is slightly dry, her shorts are a little tight around the waistband, her shirt is red, her shorts are black, heart has beat two times in the last second, she has taken three breaths in the last second, the wall is white, the floor is gray tile, her dad has dark hair, she has dark brown hair, outlets usually have three holes, door handles push down to open, the American flag has 50 stars, Sacramento is the capital of California, Lima is the capital city of Peru, her room has dark gray paint on the walls, the Earth orbits the Sun, bite is a dark type move, fairy type beats dragon, air is 21% oxygen, the revolutionary war ended in 1783, the room is spinning, extension cords are used to extend the reach of an outlet, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, she first rode on a train at age 6, gas moves from high pressure environments to low pressure environments, entropy, silkworms make cocoons that humans harvest…
She opens her eyes that she didn’t remember closing to see what had happened.
She remembers everything. Everything. Every second of the lectures she listens to, every face of every person she sees, every lyric in every song she hears, every taste of every piece of food she eats, the feeling of her clothes at any time, every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
She remembers.
She remembers a lecture she listened to a few days ago about the function of forgetting. Humans forget in order to keep the junk information we obtain at all times from clogging up our thought process. Remembering the color of clothes everyone was wearing every day ultimately would stop us from remembering more important information like if that person has ever harmed us or what their relation to us is. Function over retention has been the survival mechanism of the human brain’s evolution but for her that is no longer true.
She is beginning to remember all the information she gains from all sensory and thought inputs. All memories she had and are gaining have been cemented in her brain.
She remembers the speed of neurons which never really get above 300 mph, a lot slower than other forms of electricity. She considers how fast her brain must be processing neural impulses much faster than that in order to sift through the amount of information she is taking in and storing.
She isn’t suddenly a genius or inventor, but she is certainly much smarter than she was a few minutes ago due to the aggregated information she now could work with. The average human brain can already perform a staggering exaflop, a billion-billion, mathematical operations a second on only twenty watts of power. Her brain must far outstrip that.
She runs up to her room, sits down at her desk, and turns on her PC. She begins researching powers. Fantastic Four, cosmic radiation, unlikely. Hulk, normal radiation, unlikely. Thor, alien, unlikely. Spider-man, radioactive spider, probably not. Venom, alien symbiote, definitely not. Mutant, X-Gene, most likely.
Mutants are people with a special genetic difference that gives them superpowers like claws that grow out of the hands or telekinesis. Camellia didn’t have any special event happen to her, and her parents didn’t look anything like aliens. The so-called X-Gene, wasn’t always active despite being passed down genetically, but could also appear without being passed down genetically. The best explanation by far is that she is a mutant. Her mutation being a brain mutation that allowed her to remember and process vast amounts of information.
‘On the surface, it might not seem as cool as telekinesis or flight, but it has so much more potential,’ she thinks.
She reaches for her desk drawer and opens it to grab a deck of cards. She pulls them out of the box and shuffles them. She begins rifling through them, quickly memorizing each card’s position and then flips the deck over and spreads out the cards. She picks the first card up and before she flips it over knows that it is the three of clubs. The next is the ten of hearts, then the jack of diamonds, then the ace of spades. She remembers the position of all fifty one cards in the deck, the five of spades is missing.
Next, she looks up a multiplication table up to thirty. Simply reading each multiplication once ensures she memorizes the entire table. 30 x 16 = 480. 15 x 14 = 210. 17 x 5 = 85.
Camellia moves on to the periodic table, then a high school physics textbook, then a college physics textbook, then random wikipedia articles, then an english dictionary. By the time she looks up at the clock on her wall, she realizes it has been 12 hours and it is morning. She isn’t tired and considers the reason why.
At 8:12:23 am, she begins thinking.
‘The brain needs sleep because when the brain rests the body heals faster, the brain can prune unneeded synapses, and process memories from the day. My brain no longer needs to do two of those things meaning it doesn’t rest. Will this mean I heal injuries slower and am more susceptible to infections and diseases? The answer is that I need more data. It is entirely possible my body has also mutated a way for my body to heal while my brain is active.’
At 8:12:24 am, she stops her train of thought.
She has approximately three or four hours until some of the staff check up on her by her parents wishes, so she needs to plan on what to do with the remaining time. Aggregating knowledge, she thinks, is by far the best use of my time. With more knowledge in my database, I will be able to leverage my processing power the best.
With her path decided, she began memorizing basic mathematical operation charts up to the hundreds.
School swiftly became an exercise in futility. Memorizing all the school books took a single night of dedicated reading and homework took single digit numbers of minutes. She needed something to keep her occupied, quickly realizing that a non-constant stream of input becomes swiftly unsatisfying.
She begins printing enough paper to fill large binders full of information to read during lessons. Sheets of coding language functions, hexadecimal color codes, dictionaries in other languages, states of the board in a chess game. There are 10^50 states of the board so it takes up a lot of her time without being finished.
Information aggregation becomes her goal in life, what she lives for. This is something only she can do. She thinks that perhaps the human psyche isn’t really meant to process this amount of information.
She begins aggregating data on brain anatomy in an attempt to diagnose her problems.
The issues with her brain are becoming difficult to deal with. Despite sorting through data only taking milliseconds, she is beginning to realize the sheer inefficiency of what she has created. Data in her brain is not being categorized, in order to remember information her brain sorts through all known data in order to find the correct piece of information. It took less than half a second to get any piece of information, but only because her brain was processing information so quickly.
Continuing to aggregate data without organizing will continue to slow down her brain. She needs to develop a system to best organize all aggregated data in her brain.
At 11:17:54 pm she begins to think.
‘The largest repositories of data in history are sorted by a few methods. Some are alphabetical, some are numerical, some are keyword based, and more recently some are relevance based. With the processing power available to me, my brain should be able to sort and resort based on multiple methods. I will start with the most efficient method keyword categorization. By attaching keywords to concepts and information in my brain, I should be able to search for information via multiple keywords like getting information on dogs by thinking about animals, mammals, dogs. Next I’ll sort it alphabetically via each keyword. Animals will start with aardvarks and go to zebras. Once all that is done, I can finally use both methods to sort by relevance to a specific topic. Knowing that the revolutionary war combines American and History keywords, I can search for all topics containing both.’
At 11:17:56 pm she stops her train of thought.
She decides on a final sorting method before lying on her bed which hadn’t seen much use in the past months and closing her eyes.
Over the next eight hours, she sorted through all knowledge and memories in her brain and attached keywords to all of them. The idea of a Sherlock-esque mind palace did occur to her, but she quickly rejected the idea. Navigating information in 3D space has been proven time and time again to be inefficient. This is why shopping websites aren’t 3D renders of stores as lists of products are much easier to navigate.
Instead she creates an imaginary computer terminal in her mind and turns it on. Opening a web page in her imagination she can search it by keyword to find the information she is looking for. The internet is the most efficient and largest collection of data on Earth, and replicating it in her mind helps cement the sorting functions. Now every time she aggregates new data, she will spend an extra few milliseconds adding relevant keywords before committing it to memory.
The day her life changes comes on a school day during a physical education class. The game was dodge ball and while Camellia is quite fit, dodging every ball is impossible. She is the last one standing on her side and a too strong throw from a boy on the opposite side comes hurtling at her head. She is pretty sure she isn’t dodging it and while it wouldn’t get her out, it would hurt. As it is a few feet from her head time begins to slow.
At 12:57:58 pm, she begins to think.
‘The ball is moving very slowly. Everyone else is moving in what seems to be slow motion. I am moving in slow motion.
Conclusion. I am perceiving time as slower than it actually is.
Hypothesis. This is a part of my mutation. Processing information very fast is my main power, eidetic memory is a side effect of the main mutation. This is the active part of my mutation, the ability to slow my perception of time to make seconds seem like minutes.
Conclusion. This is amazing.
Plan. I need to use this time to make a plan. I cannot dodge the ball, my body won’t move fast enough. The best solution is to allow the ball to hit my forehead and then catch it afterwards to get the thrower out.
Conclusion. I need to speed up my perception of time to about a quarter speed.’
The ball suddenly starts getting faster from the almost standstill position and slowly moves towards her head. She positions to face directly at the ball and uses her forehead to bounce it upwards. The pain takes a few seconds to reach her due to the slowed perception. She looks up to see the ball and positions her hands approximately where the ball will fall. She catches it and her perception of time speeds up again to normal speed.
At 12:58:03 pm, she stops her train of thought.
“You’re out!” the teacher calls out to the boy. Camellia’s team wins the match.
She begins experiments immediately as soon as she gets home and closes her bedroom door. Grabbing a pillow, she drops it which takes 745 milliseconds to reach the floor. Another benefit of increased processing power is being able to count to the thousands in less than a second and knowing the exact time of a millisecond.
She picks up the pillow and considers her power. She isn’t sure how to turn it on, so to speak. It is almost certainly a mind over matter thing. Most likely a mental trigger will turn her power on. She wants to start at an even 50% speed perception of normal time.
At 3:35:17 pm, she begins to think.
She turns her head and notices the slower motion than she is used to. About half, she guesses. Dropping the pillow she begins counting milliseconds. The pillow hits the floor and it has been 1,502 milliseconds by her count. A little more than double the previous count. While she tried to stay consistent on the exact height of the dropping, even perfect memory didn’t record the exact height causing the slight differential. She is most likely perceiving time at half speed.