The water slides over and under, bobbing me up and down, accelerating and decelerating my vertical movement to an almost regular rhythm. Trillions of molecules of dihydrogen monoxide, composed of atoms and subatomic particles and ultimately elementary interactions, hitting each other all in such a pattern to create this wave, this beautiful undulating structure that extends around me for miles….

A splash of especially cold water hits me and saps the surface of my face of 302 joules of energy in the first instant of contact, triggering a response by my brain to send cortisol hormone to in turn catalyze more active neurotransmission, and give me a rather abrupt jolt of energy. My aching eyes open to see a multicolored, red-spectrum sunrise forming over the horizon.

My mind is buzzing. Details and information enter through my heightened senses, enabling me to register everything. Literally. Every thing, from the miniscule spacetime vibrations to the billions of chemical reactions recreating and yielding products that build my ever-changing body and environment. The sheer amount of information is numbing -- my eyes water, I feel stomach acid rising up my esophagus, and my vision fades. But the sensory intake only increases as my brain shifts its neural patterns to unlock more and more information registers.

But over time, as my brain pulses and shifts its activity, my body adapts, and begins to calm its reaction to the information from this sort of...power. The senses are still registering, but I succeed in banishing them into secondary thought so as to make room for critical thinking, because I am incredibly confused.

I start small.

I am a 15.74 year old male human. That’s an easy one.

I am wearing clothes. And they are weighing me down like hell.

I have infinite knowledge. Well, it can’t be infinite, because I don’t know about anything beyond my horizons. To check, I close my eyes and focus. I reach as far as I can, with whatever sense I have, and my ESP or whatever you call it only works within a radius of about 10.23 feet. And it’s not perfect going that far. I can only feel beyond the molecular level in a 4.8 foot radius. Atomic, 2 feet Subatomic 1.3 feet. After that everything just breaks down into multiple fields that are much harder to model in my mind.

But how do I know these models? And the measurements? How do I even know this language?

“Can I even talk?” My voice’s echo from the water surface gives me a resounding yes.

As my mind continues to recover from the explosive information overdose, memories begin to recover. The first one to float back up is my family. A rush of longing comes into me, a need to be back home, back to my dry warm little apartment with my mother and sister, back to my cozy bed, back when my mind was normal.

That old life ended with a bang, I soon remember. A literal one. Breaking news on CNN, but it was actually breaking news. An atom bomb was flying to New York City. Deflection systems failed. We had minutes of life left. And I … hid?.

More comes back to me. I was an angsty little teenage boy. I was contemplating suicide at the time. I was smoking some crazy shit. I was never the same after Josh killed himself.

Ah, I remember Josh. Josh Simmons. Weird kid, but my best friend.

So, when I heard the bomb was coming, I thought it was a great chance at following in Josh’s footsteps and ending my less than ideal life, which, looking back, wasn’t really that bad. I mean, I’m in the middle of the ocean as far as I can tell. At least back then there was some crazy shit to smoke.

More memory: the bomb fell on a Thursday. I was coming back from school when the news hit and the hysteria began, and instead of following the crushing flow of people into petty bomb shelters, I ran. I ran through the people, down the endless blocks, to find some empty space. Since I lived in Bay Ridge, I had easy access to the river, and I jumped off one of the piers.

I remember now. I didn’t even feel scared. All I saw was water. My mind was broken. And when I fell into that freezing water I just started swimming. I wanted to be alone, and even the river wasn’t good enough where I was.

So I kept on swimming, and the last thing I remember there was a crash and a flash and a boom and I was gone. And now here I am.

But I know this just doesn’t make sense. The atom bomb was probably big enough to total the entire city and beyond. There is no way my puny body could survive the inital blast, even in water. I should be totally deaf right now, but my ears and all my senses are more than functional. Too functional, I would say.

And the radiation giving me this superpower kind of knowledge? The chances are pathetic that I even live (I calculate at best one in 11 trillion), but the thought of SUPER POWERS. I laugh hysterically at the thought. Am I some superhero or something? Me? I’m honored.

Looking at it realistically, could it be an illusion? A rogue brain tumor hijacking my senses and driving me insane. Is any of this really real?

I can weigh every possibility and probability in my head, with my absurd mathematical brainpower, but I know I won’t get any answers. I’ll still be stuck here, floating in the ocean, starving and dying of thirst.

But I’m not thirsty or hungry. My brain seems to transcend that, which only furthers the idea that this is all an illusion. I take a deep look at my body with my ESP, with a question: “How much longer can I live like this?” And to my surprise, my mind gives me an answer.

Using information on my vital signs, current nutritional state, age, immediate surroundings, and a host of seemingly extraneous factors, I discover that I will most likely die in 30 hours, 52 minutes, 43 seconds from thirst.

Make that 42 seconds. 41. 40.

Panic begins to set in. My heart beats quicker, my eyes widen, I breathe more and more. I even try to swim around and look at my surroundings. And the number of seconds begins to pare down faster. I am already down to 20 seconds on the 52nd minute. And the weight of the situation only grows, crushing hopes of survival.

But then it strikes me that my reaction to the information is hurting me. The fight or flight instinct against this looming death is using up my bodily resources quicker than needed.

Despite my brain’s seemingly infinite power of calculation, information gathering, and efficience, the system still has self destructive flaws of emotion. Flaws that I have to will. Flaws that I have to fix.

Calm down. It’s OK. If you want to live, use your brain.

Just repeating things I heard in that strange life I once had. A life with people that seems so detached now, compared to this endless sea of self I am now in. A life so blurry, one that lacks so much detail as for me to even consider it a life.

Except for Josh Simmons. I can’t forget that kid for some reason. The way he laughed, the way he smiled. I could never forget the last time I saw him, hours before the police say he overdosed in his bedroom. He seemed like the happiest kid in existence.

And then he just betrayed me.

And, come to think of it, his memory is still betraying me.

If I want to get out of this situation, I need to move. In some direction. That is my only hope. All I have is the piece of driftwood that I am holding onto to stay afloat, and the waves under me that are only moving me vertically.

I look deeper into the water molecules, and the general pattern shows me i am in a current moving northeast. Sadly, I cannot calculate where I am on earth with my limited radius -- I can certainly calculate past 30 feet (about 500 feet out efficiently), but those are only predictions based on what is around me, predictions that grow less and less accurate with distance.

What I can do, however, is move these particles, and follow this current to wherever it may lead me. Every water molecule’s position and velocity, every tiny factor, I can trace backwards, and know exactly which must I move, in order to have them push me forward.

The combinations are very exacting, and at first, when i begin to do my set of motions, yields incredibly minor increases in speed. I calculate to conserve bodily energy, so all I move is my right hand, but even that begins to tax my wrist, at minor benefit to me.

I take a breath. I have the key to faster movement in this water. This dance of my hand, the ins and outs and ups and downs and swirls which the particles move around, can speed me up by a whole 6 feet per second with perfect accuracy.

I have hands and feet and God’s mind, and a lot of kinetic energy around me. I can do this. This is just dance dance revolution. On ultra-extreme mode.

It takes a few minutes to physically feel any increases, but the speedometer is slowly rising in my head. And my eyes are closed this whole time. My body becomes totally focused on keeping this movement perfection. Every ounce of ESP, into this insane motor of intense body control. And since my body is not doing everything perfect, my hand must compensate for every movement accordingly.

I continue for a long time. I cannot say how long -- my mind has lost all function other than to control the water molecules. It could be anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours.

All I know is, within a certain period of time, a new factor, aside from the states of the water, the air, my body, and my piece of driftwood, begins to uncover. It is much larger factor, and it is throwing wrenches in my equations. I am able to catch these wrenches easily, but the problem still lies.

I decide against opening my eyes for a while, for fear that it is some false alarm that will kill my momentum upon falling for curiosity. And anyway, it takes a lot of mental energy to weigh opinions and make a decision.

As the factor increases in effect, temptation eats away at my efficiency, clocking back my inner speedometer and pushing me closer to opening my eyes.

That could be a ship. Or maybe a shark. Or maybe even land.

But I fight back. I do not want to be disappointed.

Is it worth the risk?

Opening my eyes threatens the delicately balanced motor boat structure I have going on.

But.

I put out my ESP to the foreign object, and to my surprise discover metal.

“Now what the hell are you!” I hear. I open my eyes and kick to a stop, and let my ESP explode back around me.

Time seems to slow as the information rushes into me. I see a man on a bright orange lifeboat, deeply tanned, about 20 feet away. By the wrinkles of his skin and weariness of his bodily systems I gauge his age at 36. He is in much better condition than I, probably with supplies on his lifeboat. His clothes are in terrible condition, weathered down, but at least dry. But his expression gives me chills. His wide eyes, the smile behind his question, the increase in saliva in his mouth. His look alone strikes me as that of a savage.

“Come here, boy.” His raspy, dry voice startles me even further. I have to gather my voice back for a few seconds before I can respond. But, with my suspicions, I decide against even speaking. I slowly swim to the boat with my driftwood, feeling my aching muscles more and more as I come closer. I desire that boat beyond words.

But along that path an unusually large wave comes, bobbing me and then the boat up. As the boat falls down, I hear the sliding of metal against wood, along with a discrete shaking and sliding of another group of similarly dense objects. As I focus my ESP harder on the objects in the boat, I discover a near fully loaded gun, and a pile of human bones sitting next to the man.

I cannot let my surprise take over. I supress it with every piece of control I can because I know the man could easily shoot me dead if I decided to swim away now, only 12 feet from the boat.

No, I need to get my hands on that gun. I need to incapacitate him for just enough time to neutralize him, and only then would I have to make sure he does not call my bluff and wrestle it out of me. The man is much bigger than me, and I am certainly not in condition to fight.

I push the negative thought out. I can do this. I can splash his eyes, jump into the boat, and get the gun into my possession, if I execute it with the right accuracy and speed. I can calculate it all, predict every action I must take to do it right, even with gross overestimation of the man’s physical and mental condition.

When I am within 5 feet, the man begins to reach for the gun in his boat, and with that, I bolt into action. I sprint swim towards the boat, making sure to keep my manipulation of water molecules at a maximum. As his actions speed, as I would expect, I splash to aim right at his eyes, buying me a temporary invisibility cloak that I use to submerge myself under the boat. I splash too late to come straight onto the boat and steal it, so I go with plan B: Misdirection.

As I am under the lifeboat, and approach the other side, I turn underwater, and kick to make sure to appear as though I am coming up. I scramble back to the original side I approached, relying on every possibility that he turned and thought I was coming from the other side.

I propel out of the water with a breakstroke kick and an arm on the side of the boat, making a perfect landing just as he turns towards me. He scrambles to get his gun as i rush towards him and analyze his weak points. The man is much bigger than me, which limits a lot of my choices, but I am still able to take him down.

The gun is approaching me quick. But right before he can aim it properly at me in point blank range, I kick him in the crotch, and immediately dodge the free hand coming at me by ducking.

As he groans in pain and turns his gun towards me, he presses on the trigger. The gun shoots a bullet only inches away from the side of my head, temporarily deafening my right ear. No big deal, I can calculate the sound waves.

The kickback from the gun on such a weakened arm buys me enough time to elbow his stomach with all my body weight and punch the wrist with the gun simultaneously, weaking his grip to the point that I can snatch the gun from him by grasping the barrel and yanking it.

I quickly make a safe distance, as he falls to the ground and crawls toward me in utter desperation. I aim the gun right at him, unable to push away the excitement at how cool that just was. Low laughter oozes from me, at the thought of what I just did.

I’m a freaking blackbelt

But to be fair, I had the ability to analyze every fatal possibility and choose the best course of actions within milliseconds. I had a huge advantage .

“Give me my gun back,” he commands as he writhes in pain on red puddles of the plastic boat. That brings my attention back to the fact that I am on a boat with a man with a pistol and bones and dried blood on his ship.

I choose to ignore him for good reason. “Who the hell are you?”

“Who am I? I think you’re the more interesting one.”

“Who’s the one with a bone collection on his life boat?”

He wouldn’t say a word. He just looked at me, his bloodshot blue eyes telling me that I didn’t want to know. There was almost some shame in his expression. I could sense his heart rate picking up a bit more.

It throws me off. “I’m the one with a gun. Tell me what’s going on.” I could feel the nervousness, the bluff in my words.

Meanwhile, he regains his words. “What are you, an ocean policeman? Look here, kid, you don’t want to kill me”

His steadying signs shows what I would guess is a pick up in confidence. And now I am the one backing down in silence. But before he can continue, I give one more attempt at regaining my draining power. “I have every reason in the world to shoot you dead right now.”

“Do you? I can tell you, this boat has no food on it. I haven’t caught a fish in weeks. Killing me now would just put you in my already shitty position. But sparing me?” He laughs with a madman’s smile, but I suppose it could be attributed to the killer heat. He did not seem the least bit afraid.  “Hell, we both struck gold meeting each other out here. I’ve got two fishing rods, water evaporators for the both of us, and human contact. It’s within both of our interests if you don’t kill me. So you can lower the gun.”

But the question still remains. “Then why did you try to kill me?”

“I only brought out my gun when you jumped onto my boat like some gold gymnast. It was self defense in the moment.”

And for a second, I see things from his perspective. Stranded in the middle of the ocean, his boat stumbles upon someone alive in the water. Someone who suddenly sprints at him like a madman -- I initiated violence. His point is valid.

But he still has human bones on his ship. I can tell he will not spill how, at least not yet. So I decide to wait it out. Being honest, I know I also crave human contact. Being alone in that ocean was horrible.

The sun is setting. Everything has a red tint to it, making the scene seem almost surreal. A line of shine runs down the ocean, quivering and sparkling in the waves. I have to squint, but I make sure to keep my eye contact with the man, to beat him down with everything I have.  I lower my gun slowly.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Josh. Josh Simmons. Not like it matters any more.” A pause. “And who are you?”

Josh Simmons? The name gives me chills across my whole body. For a few miliseconds, I lose all sense of everything around me. My mind crashes like a computer, and it only recovers when I force it to accept the coincidence. And so I move on to his question.

Who am I? What even is my name? How did I not even think about that yet? It seems with all the knowledge in the world, I can still be a dumbass.

“I have no clue. I think I’ve got amnesia or something.” Maybe partially. “I just woke up somewhere out there in the ocean with a piece of driftwood. All I remember is some bomb hitting New York.” I decide not to tell him everything. I’ve got plenty of time and for all I know I could be crazy.

He sighs with some passive satisfaction, in knowing what I don’t. “You got that right. See, this lifeboat’s from an oil rig from the Gulf. We were coming back up to the East when we heard news of the bomb hitting New York. And well, we were headed straight for the city. And a lot of us had lives and family back there and things got - well, ugly.”

“Sounds like it.” I pinch myself, realizing a little too late that he may have had family there too. And then I pinch myself again for caring.

He coughs and goes on. “We tried to contact other places, but after the first message we got telling us NYC was down, all communication failed. Even the radio wouldn’t connect to anything.

“So, our captain decided we should land ship somewhere at the coast -- I would guess somewhere in Virginia, we lost our GPS signal. But at that point, everyone was losing their minds, worrying about the end of the world. Not too long after there was a riot on the boat, and the captain was murdered in cold blood.”

I am very invested in the story, but I just want him to get to the part about why I was stepping on bones and blood right now. I cut to the chase. “So how did you get here?”

He doesn’t answer for a few seconds, knowing he is at the turning point of his story. But he manages to go on. “Me and my closest friends decided to escape the madness and jump on a lifeboat one night. And that’s the lifeboat we’re sitting in now. That’s the reality of it.” And then he waits. He looks at me with the blankest, most innocent of looks. He knows what I am going to ask, and he is not the least bit daunted. He is ready.

“Where are your friends?” The question lingers. His eyes avert mine at first, but slowly come to me. The sun is already down, and we look at each other in dying leftover light.

I wait, and I wait, and I wait. And every ticking second tells me that this man is a murderer. But instead of waiting on him to answer, I give him another choice. I really want to catch him in the act, to see his true colors.

I crouch down, place the gun on the ground, and slide it to him. I stand back up, and I just give him a stare straight through his eyes, into his soul. I say nothing. He says nothing.

But after a while, yet another Josh Simmons emerges. His eyes shine a dark shade of crazy, and a smile begins to form on his lips. I just cornered a mad dog, and turned myself into a fresh T-Bone steak. And for a second, I’m scared that this man could really kill me. His aura just screams something different from before.

He reaches for the gun slowly. I stand perfectly still.

I have it all planned out, if he tries to attack me. I sprint, roll, sidestep, kick, pull. Every muscle to move is predetermined. I can’t fail. I beat him once, I can beat him again.

But it’s not needed. He picks up the gun, never aiming it at me, and tosses it into the ocean. The major splash is a straight tower of water peaking at about 5.234 cm. The little ripples are quickly eaten by the larger waves, which average around 30 cm from peak to trough.

“There. Now we’re on level playing field.”

I didn’t predict this.

“Where was I?”

Why did he...

“Oh yeah.”

Who is this man?

“Whatever remains of my friends are lying on the floor of this boat. But I’m sure you would have guessed that by now.”

“Did you….”

“Yeah, I’m a cannibal. I ate my men because I was the first to realize that we weren’t going anywhere.”

I try to calm myself, reassuring myself with less and less confidence I can take him down if he tries to kill me. Wicked curiousity pushes me to shakily ask, “Weren’t you going to find land see what happened out there?” .

He speaks with much more conviction now. “Why would I bother?” He stops as though he expects an answer. “For all I know the entire country could have been nuked. Everyone I knew could be gone. And if they weren’t, even if nothing was struck and everything was perfect and shiny, why do I want to go back to that shit hole?”

“What do you mean?” To be frank, his point is shining clear to me, but I can’t help but argue. Argue with him, and to the me that ran away when the bomb went off. It all feels wrong. “Don’t you have a life back at home?”

“I never found much pleasure in humans, to be honest. They don’t even taste that good.” He chuckles at his own morbid joke. “For all I know I might not even be a human. I just like this wide open ocean, I like feeling every little thing and just living. Because back home, that’s not living. That’s just working, working, working for a bunch of walking meatsacks. And I have to pretend to love or hate certain meatsacks. But I just don’t care. No one sees life the way I do, so why bother dealing with them all.”

He starts to stand up and wipe off some of the bones stuck to him. I back away, intimidated by his size, and start looking at possibilities. The man is shining a very different aura than before, a more knowledgable, powerful one. The old one was a fake. I miscalculated everything from the way he was acting. He was never nervous, even after I took him down. It was something else…

I still manage to say with disgust, “So you left the boat and brought your friends as food?”

He considers my words. “I guess you can say that. But I didn’t just leave the oil rig after hearing the captain died. I killed the captain, and I planned to from the day I heard the country was bombed. It was the best chance I had at escaping everything.”

“Wow, aren’t you a badass?”

He chuckles. “Sure am. A badass who likes to stargaze.”

I just look at him in utter fear for a few seconds. I’m not so sure I can take him anymore, even with every plan I have now. “So, are you gonna kill me?”

He takes a good look at me, looking as though he is now considering the idea.

“Well, at first I was going to. You were a meal swimming right to me. But when you managed to take me down, when I had a fully loaded gun, a vantage point, size, and bodily condition on my side I knew there was something a little different about you. So I gave you a chance ”

I know I’m different. But how does he know?

“I think you are a bit too valuable to kill for food. I would spare you and have our mental capacities combined over killing you and sitting here alone. Which might come as a surprise from a guy who left society and brought his friends as snack. It even surprises me. I just feel like we’re .… similar.”

A rush of understanding comes to me. I get it now.

I smile. “Well, judging from your condition and the water available from your filters, you have approximately 49 hours, 52 minutes, 8.43 seconds left to live. Tell me more.”

“Aren’t you thorough, Mister 54-hours. Looks like you’re gonna outlive me by a bit. Might wanna go fetch that gun.”

I test him again for good luck. “How far away is the gun?”

“32 feet under and sinking.”

“Did you always have this power?”

“I wouldn’t call it a power, but yes, I’ve had it for as long as I can remember.”

“It just doesn’t make sense though.”

“Our brains know a hell of a lot of whats., but not a lot of whys. I can live with leaving some questions unanswered.”

“But I know I shouldn’t have lived though that bomb, or survived in the water for however long I did, or have even found this boat with you on it. My memories just make no sense.”

“Just accept it, kid. The past doesn’t exist. Memories are just variable synapse structures built in your brain that will one day go. Life is just a cry into the void, but right now nobody is listening or will probably ever listen to that cry. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not, because to be honest, you’re right, a lot of things don’t make a lot of sense. Right now, the most I’m living for is some pleasure in peace and quiet and facts, and maybe company with someone who can understand me. You get me?”

I slowly nod in the pitch black darkness..

There’s some silence for a while. The light has now totally died, and the moon is covered by clouds. The void is staring at me from every direction. The gun is now 48.436 feet under the water, tossing and turning in the inner waves.

And then the burning memories of the past come back to me. And I just have to ask him.

“Is Josh Simmon’s your real name.”

“No. I read your neurons, and they seemed to be bouncing that name around. A lot. Is he your long lost boyfriend or something, kid?”

Crafty son of a bitch, reading my mind. Gotta give him some credit, though.

“Funny. So what’s your actual name.”

He blinks hard, opens his eyes, and smiles. That smile looks awfully familiar, even if he isn’t Josh.

“You know, your name back on the oil rig?”

“The past doesn’t exist, right?” And then he bursts into a laugh. A laugh so pure, so innocent, coming from the mouth of a heartless cannibal, a monster by any standard.

And yet, for whatever reason, all I can hear is the laughter of my dead friend bouncing around the darkness of the ocean.