Chapter 1: Catalyst

The thought I'd been chewing on for the last couple of miles was that the past didn't actually exist anymore. Not in any place a person could go visit. Every empire that had ever risen and fallen wasn't a real location now, just a story we'd all agreed had happened, held together by some broken pottery and a few writers who hadn't been lying too badly. Every century that ever was, was now just a rumor with sources.
That was the kind of thing that came out of your head when you'd been alone for four months hiking the Appalachian Trail. Or it could have been the hundreds of hours of audiobook going through my earbuds about the Roman Empire. Who's to say.
My shower thoughts got interrupted by a weird feeling running over me. No breeze, nothing I could point to. The air had gone heavy the way it did before a storm, except the sky through the canopy was clear. The woods had quieted with it, no birds, no bugs, nothing moving but me.
Abruptly the audiobook cut out.
A tap on the earbud got nothing back. My phone came out of my pocket dead, screen black even when I held the power button. Ninety-something percent when I'd left the shelter this morning. Now nothing.
Then the back of my left hand started to itch.
A black dot was spreading across it fast. From pen-tip to dime to quarter, perfectly round and clean-edged. It didn't hurt or sting or feel like anything at all. A blue ring lit up around the outside, then the inside filled in with the same color, bright and steady, like Iron Man's arc reactor sunk into my skin.
My hand went to it before I'd worked out whether touching it was a smart idea.
A panel of light snapped open in front of my face.

Catalyst has been installed.
You have been connected to the Catalyst System. The same is happening to every other sentient being on your world right now.
The System predates your world. It has been seeded across the universe to support the progression of sentient species once they reach a certain stage of development. Your world has now been granted a standard supply of mana, the energy that fuels every ability the System makes available.
On some worlds, including yours, mana is incompatible with most existing power generation methods.
This cannot be changed. Given time, every aspect of your civilization will adapt and grow stronger, ready for the many hazards that lie beyond your planet.
Good luck.

Before I could finish processing what that meant, the panel flickered and new text rolled down it.

Discovering appropriate innate ability...
Ability discovered...
Biological changes necessary...
Biological changes beginning. Please take a seat.

It stopped there. Waiting.
A chair was not going to appear on the trail no matter how long I stared at the dirt. Just roots and rocks and a leaning poplar a few feet off the path. The poplar was going to have to do.
I shrugged off my pack and slid down against the trunk, legs straightened out in the dirt.

Modifications beginning.

Everything went black.
Coming back was instant. One second nothing. The next, the same poplar at my back, the same light through the leaves, the same panel hanging in the air. The sun had shifted. Not by much.

Modifications complete.
Primary Ability: [Parallel Form] Creates a second body the user can shape into any appearance. The user can split or shift their awareness between both bodies, with each acting as part of the same mind. As long as one body survives, the user does not die.

A second screen pushed into view next to it.

Profile
Name: Nolan Locke
Age: 23
Rank: Initiate I
Primary Ability: Parallel Form
Abilities
None
Knowledge Points: 0
Tip: The System interface is controlled through mental commands.

Mental commands.
Right.
Close window.
The panel folded in on itself and vanished.
The back of my hand still tingled. The shirt against my back was damp.
"What's a rank?"
The panel flickered back.

Ranks determine your physical and magical capabilities and provide the host with knowledge points upon advancement.

"And knowledge points?"

Knowledge Points can be used to purchase a variety of information from the System, from the mundane to the magical.

"Are there other ways to get them?"
The panel sat there. Guess it only had a few pre-programmed responses.
If that first message was real, and there was no reason to believe a system that had just rewritten my biology was lying about the rest, then power was gone. Not flickering. Not coming back after a few hours. Gone.
Which made it an EMP scenario, basically, except this one was hitting the whole planet with no hope of repairing the damaged equipment. The Marines had made us watch a training video about that once, boring corporate animation, dull voiceover, the kind of thing that put half the room out within five minutes. The numbers stuck anyway. It would only take three days for grocery stores to empty. After that, no resupply, just people going hungry and society slipping into chaos.
It got worse from there. They'd shown us studies from several independent sources, all of them estimating that depending on when the EMP hit, the death toll after the first winter would land somewhere between seventy and ninety percent of the country.
That was the country. The personal picture was simpler. The people I cared about were three hundred and fifty miles south of me, on a small strawberry farm my mother and her sister ran out in east Tennessee. I'd come off contract a few months back and gone straight onto the trail instead of buying a house or settling anywhere. The farm sat far enough into the hills that you had to want to find it. That was good for now. But as people got more desperate, they'd spread out looking for food, and farms were going to be high on the list. I needed to get to my mother's house as fast as I could.
Unfortunately, if I wanted to make it there I was going to need more food. I'd resupplied at Harpers Ferry yesterday with a few days' worth of freeze-dried meals, but even pushing hard, the trip back south was going to take me a month or more. I'd been hiking north when this happened, so I had to head back south anyway, and I could stop in town and grab whatever else I could get my hands on. If I moved fast, most people would still be standing around nervously asking each other what just happened, not stocking up on food. But that window was closing fast.
But before any of that, I wanted to see if the magical ability this thing supposedly gave me actually worked. I pushed off the trunk and got to my feet. So let's see, it's mentally controlled, right? "Parallel Form." The holographic screen appeared again out of my fancy new tattoo.

Please visualize the appearance of the Parallel Form.

Simple seemed safest. I pictured myself cleaned up, no sweat, no miles, no beard.
The ground a few feet in front of me started moving. Feet appeared first, then legs, then the rest of a person growing up out of the dirt. It was like watching something get 3D printed into existence.
What the fuck.
A man was standing where the dirt had been a second ago. Clean clothes I didn't recognize. Hair combed. Eyes already open and looking right at me.
He looked like me. More or less. The version of me that showed up in recruiting posters instead of the one who actually showed up to formation. Sharper jaw, no sunburn, no shadows under the eyes. He probably smelled fine. The me standing in front of the poplar smelled like a goat that had given up on itself.

Please designate names for your primary body and your Parallel Form.

N1 for this one. N2 for the new one.
Then the world doubled. Two bodies, two streams of senses, both reporting at the same time. My own body in front of the poplar, dirty and sweaty. The Parallel Form on the trail a few feet away, clean and crisp. Both felt like me.
It should have made me dizzy. It didn't. The understanding came packaged with the ability, the way walking came packaged with legs.
I had three options. I could ride along in both bodies at once, the way I was now, with everything coming in double. I could sink fully into one and let the other run on smart autopilot, doing whatever I'd told it to do. Or I could swap which body I was driving, with the other slipping to autopilot the moment I left it.
Time to put the autopilot through its paces. We shared the same brain, so all I had to do was think the instructions.
Walk to that rock by the trail and come back.
The Parallel Form turned and walked, easy and natural, no hesitation. Hit the rock, turned, and came back, stopping in the same spot he'd started. Watching myself walk away from myself was going to take some getting used to.
Pick up a stone. Throw it into the woods.
He crouched, grabbed a fist-sized chunk off the trail, and chucked it sidearm into the trees. Same throwing motion I'd have used. Solid throw, thirty or forty feet out.
Stand watch. Tell me if anything moves.
He turned toward the trail and settled into a scanning posture, eyes alert, weight forward. Marine stance, drilled in deep enough that both of us still ran it on default.
This was going to be useful. Probably more useful than I could map out standing here.
Let me see what swapping feels like...
Switch.
The view jumped. I was the clean one now, looking back at my own actual body in front of the poplar, slack-faced, eyes open but nobody really home. Like someone caught mid-thought.
That body was the spare. The clean one was me.
I swapped back.
The world reset around me, easy as setting a coffee cup down. The Parallel Form straightened on the trail and settled into the same blank-faced autopilot my body had been in a second earlier.
Twins existed in the world, sure. But twins where one was recruiting-poster clean and the other was four months of trail filth would stand out a lot more than the normal kind. And right now I needed to be invisible, not memorable. Time to change it up a bit.
Change appearance.

Please visualize the new appearance of the Parallel Form.

Poppy came to mind first.
Poppy had been a corporal in my fire team. Half Mexican, half Greek, perfect teeth, the kind of guy who walked into a bar with a busted lip and walked out with someone's number written on his arm. The squad's running joke was that the recruiter had used him as bait and the rest of us were just the haul. We weren't in touch. He owed me sixty dollars.
The Parallel Form rippled. Blurred for half a second. Came back wearing Poppy's face and clothes I'd seen on him a few times when we'd hung out off base.
Hopefully Poppy was nowhere near the East Coast. That would be a hell of a conversation.
Could I change my own appearance while I was the primary?
Same thing I'd done to the Parallel Form, just on me this time. The change passed through me in a couple of seconds. I ran a hand over my jaw and felt skin smooth as a fresh shave. The patch of sunburn on the back of my neck I'd been picking at all week was gone. Pack still felt heavy. Feet still hurt. But I probably didn't smell anymore, and that was going to matter once I got into town. Not bad.
Hell yeah. Maybe I could even get a date in the upcoming apocalypse.
Now for Poppy. The autopilot was smart enough to adapt if my instructions ran into something they couldn't cover, but manually riding two bodies at once took real effort. The more I could let the Parallel Form run itself, the better. And since we shared the same brain, all I had to do was think it.
Stay quiet. Watch for danger. Respond naturally if anyone speaks directly to you. When we get into town, split off about a hundred feet so we don't both get caught up if something happens.
He had it the second I did. No need to say a word.
One more thing. N1 and N2 weren't going to hold up once we were both moving around town, especially if something happened fast. From here on, I was Nolan. He was Poppy.
Close.
The panel vanished. I shouldered my pack. The Parallel Form matched me move for move, the delay too small to catch.
Time to head back into town.