Act 1

The bags of groceries start to get heavy by the time I make it home. It's nearly three in the afternoon then, and the sun is beating me down from overhead. The cool air conditioning of our house is rejuvenating as I step inside. I don't see anyone around, so I put the bags on the entryway floor and rest for a moment. The potatoes in particular are killer. It doesn't seem like much until after you have to carry it for three-quarters of a mile. After a few moments, I pick them back up and carry the groceries over to the kitchen, before dropping them again onto the counter. I turn as I hear footsteps behind me.

"Oh, back already?" Mom says, turning the corner from our stairwell into the living room. "I didn't expect you for another half hour."

"What can I say," I answer, "Maybe I am good at something for once."

She rolls her eyes, but I know the meaning is different than usual. "Dom, you're good at plenty of things. All you have to do is apply yourself. You could do so much more, if only you wanted to."

"Yeah, maybe," I say, and sigh. Always the same conversation, always. I help Mom put the groceries away, then head upstairs and into my room. I shut the door behind me and sink into my computer chair. "Shit," I murmur to myself.

I sit there for a few minutes, just recovering from the grocery store hike. When I finally feel back to normal, I turn to face my computer and jiggle the mouse. A dull lock screen blinks on, and I enter my password. Twenty-seven characters, randomized alphanumeric with at least ten symbols. I don't take much seriously, except for my passwords.

Not that I really have a reason to, of course. The only thing on my computer is Steam, which I promptly open and use to launch a game of CSGO.

I spend the next three hours rushing left and doing the knife flippy animation. My gaming is only interrupted when I hear a knock on my door. "Hey, bro, dinner is ready." Kelly, my younger sister.

"Coming," I say. I exit the game and stand up from my chair, but I hear something brush the floor as I do. The bag with the pill had fallen out of my pocket, onto the hardwood floor that covers my room and most of our house. "Oh, yeah," I murmur, as I pick the bag up. I open it and pull the pill out, feeling it in my fingers. Feels like a pill, for sure. It's probably just a sugar pill, though, I think. Brad was trying to game me. For a moment, I think of throwing it away.

But then I remember what my mom said earlier. What if this pill does do something? Anything? Even a placebo effect would be better than nothing.

"Fuck it," I say, and pop the pill into my mouth. It tastes like blueberries.

A moment later, it hits. I feel as though my mind is a train, barreling through a tunnel in pitch-black darkness, and now that tunnel is ending as I propel forward into the open air. My eyes ache as they suddenly see more: more hue, saturation, detail, everything. I smell the food downstairs, hear Kelly talking to my mom about her day at school. Every sense is heightened to a degree I've never felt before, but it is nothing. Nothing compared to my mind. My thoughts flow like water, and I realize before they were like molasses. I feel the power lurking in my brain, eager to solve, act, think, do. Eager to be. I look around my room with newfound perception, finally seeing the disgusting pigsty my mom always saw. Seeing the chain of decisions that led me here. Seeing the chain of decisions that led all of us here. To my mom's love of exercise, Kelly's adoration of cheerleading, and Ashley's determination at work. Everything makes sense, as clear as though someone wrote it out on a piece of paper, step by step, in a way that even a three-year-old could understand.

And, I realize, I see the steps leading beyond it. The decisions I could make and how they would affect my life. Everyone's lives. A hundred things flow through my mind, eager to take precedence, and I struggle to focus. My senses become overwhelmed, and I stumble to my bed. "Ah!" I grunt, grasping my forehead with my hands. "Shit, shit," I whisper, closing my eyes and covering my ears. I lay there for some time, before I hear footsteps from below. A moment later, a knock on my door. "Dear, are you coming? Your food is getting cold."

"No, Mom, I don't feel well. I'm sorry," I grunt out, my voice strained. "I'm going to stay in bed."

"Okay, can I get you anything? Medicine?"

"No, just rest I think," I manage before another streak of pain overwhelms me.

Her footsteps fade away as she goes back downstairs, and I try to tune them out. Think, think, what can I do? As I consider different options, I realize that the pain has dissipated. Perhaps thinking helps me to overcome the sensitivity; narrowing my focus lets me use that "thought power," as Brad put it. I go back to my computer, open up an empty word document, and quickly jot down ideas. How to leverage this state of mind before it dissipates. Exercise takes too long. I don't want to risk talking to people. I shouldn't leave the house. One of Brad's comments earlier comes to mind. Programming! I was never quite smart enough to teach it to myself despite a few half-hearted attempts, and college was not an option. Programming is as good a test as any.

I quickly fire up google and begin to tear through programming tutorials. I start with a video, first, but it's too slow. Then a quick start guide. Too high-level. After a few minutes, I find myself blitzing through the technical manuals for three programming languages, concurrently. My eyes roam across all three, split into three panels across the screen, connecting ideas and concepts from each into a growing mental database of programming concepts and design.

I was never a slow reader, but I find myself absorbing the words at an astonishing rate. I can hardly scroll through the documents fast enough. After only a couple of hours, I master the introductory concepts of computer science, nearly a semester of content at an Ivy League curriculum I found online. By midnight, I've learned an entire year of content and have built a polymorphic data scraping tool in Python to apply my knowledge. By three in the morning, I've expanded it into a novel product for scraping nearly any kind of website and storing the data in a graph database. It isn't perfect or fully fleshed out, but it works. It fucking works!

And at four in the morning, as I think about how I can leverage my new product idea to generate some income, I collapse onto my desk from exhaustion.