Registry of the Evolved Database
File #14 Oct 2010 10:04
|
 James Spader |
Two people meet at a party. Two people who know nothing about one another find themselves talking all night long. They fall in love and against all probability, conceive a child in a one-night tryst that ends up binding them together for life. When Remy's mother showed up to talk to his father and tell him about her pregnancy, maybe he did the right thing. Marrying a girl you knock up and barely know could be considered the right thing in certain circumstances. In this one, it produced a stable, if somewhat distant family life. Remy grew up in Ottawa, his father an advertising executive at a major firm in the city. His mother eventually got her college degree, having paused in her collegiate career to give birth to their only child and became a journalist.
When Remy was eight years old, the family picked up and moved south to the States. His entire family went through the process of naturalization and became American citizens, holding their citizenship in Canada as well. They lived in Boston, Massachusetts, with his father heading the advertising department at his firm's United States branch. His mother got a job as an editor for the Boston Globe. The family was well-off enough to send Remy to a small private school in north Boston. He learned languages, various academic pursuits like history, science, math and the normal things most kids his age learned. He also figured out that he had a strange degree of luck. Remy was always small. He didn't have a growth spurt until he hit about thirteen. Fights always ended up with his opponents finding themselves tangled up in their own limbs, tripping over things and the like.
He hid the bullying from his parents until he came home with a black eye one day, covered in blood. A group of older boys ganged up on him and knocked him down. The fight ended up disastrous for all involved. When Remy got up and ran, he tried to climb over a fence and ended up on the other side of it. One of the boys climbed the fence after him and fell, impaled on a piece of steel that severed his spine and deflated one of his lungs. The other boys tried to say that Remy was the cause of it, but there was no evidence to support it. It fell through and Remy spent the rest of his time at school shunned.
After all, that piece of steel was caused by a sudden pipe breaking due to water pressure, putting it right in the path of the boy as he fell.
When 9/11 hit, Remy was 17 years old, about to turn eighteen. He enlisted in the military as soon as he was eighteen against the wishes of his parents. Taking his ASVAB, he was found less suited for infantry or the armored divisions and more for military intelligence. Basic training taught him how to fight, his Advanced Infantry Training taught him more about his job as an intelligence operative. He worked as a cryptographer, learning different languages - mostly focused on Arabic and the different dialects of the Middle East. Luckily, he already knew the basics of Arabic from some of his ancient studies back in his private schools. He was a good candidate for OCS, and was even offered the chance to be given candidacy by his staff sergeant, but he turned it up in favor of being an operative on the field. He signed up for NATO and UN Operations and was shipped overseas for active duty.
His first tour in Afghanistan was horrible. He spent time in the desert, sneaking into villages and searching for God only knows what. Orders were never clear, things were always disguised and intentions were hidden behind reams of red tape. He didn't find any weapons of mass destruction. He found nothing but villagers who, while supporting the Taliban as folk heroes fighting against a corrupt government, were otherwise kind to him. He was Canadian first, a citizen of the United States second. He made that clear when speaking with them, in case the rumors about American soldiers being killed on account of their nationality were true. Finally, he was given some clear indication of what he needed to do. There were bombings. He needed to find villages that could be likely targets.
Having befriended a great majority of the people that he met, he couldn't even allow himself to give the coordinates of their villages to his superiors - even if they were technically working with the enemy (though, by this point, the enemy's actual identity was fairly obscure to Remy). Following orders, he was forced to give the coordinates of the villages he had visited. Something changed in him, though. As he stood at a desert dune, watching the small Afghan village, he could see the flare of the rocket as it launched. It landed with a thump in the center of the village and did not explode. The second did the same. The third. The fourth. Artillery shells would not explode. Soldiers descended on the village; the guns they carried jammed. Everything that could possibly happen that was against the favor of the UN forces happened.
Strangely, it happened exactly the way Remy wanted it to.
Remy didn't have much time to explore his power. The first time he used it to kill someone was a profound experience. Traveling with a squad of soldiers back to a camp, the squad was attacked by a group of Taliban fighters that surrounded them. Trying to bargain with them in Arabic, they wouldn't take it. The first shot was fired by an American soldier, who was subsequently gunned down. The squad scattered for cover behind the vehicles and Remy found himself with only his service pistol, his rifle separated from him in the melee. He stood up from behind the truck and saw a member of his squad trying to desperately pull himself away from enemy gunfire. Remy ran out into the middle of the firefight; he reached his fallen comrade and fired two shots. Each one struck home, killing two members of the opposing force.
After pulling his compatriot away from gunfire, he fired off shot after shot until the gunfire stopped. The only wound Remy sustained was a small hole in his shoulder where a bullet grazed him. He killed three men and dropped to his knees and wept. His squad didn't know how to react to him. Silence descended on the group. Finally, the sergeant helped Remy up to his feet and ordered the squad back to base camp. Remy received the purple heart for his injury and the silver star for courage under enemy fire and bravery for defending his squad against enemy attack. He was sent home to serve in the reserves and promptly was promoted to sergeant.
He retired from the armed services after serving as a cryptographer in the reserves in 2005. In New York City, he attended NYU at the age of 22. He hid his power from anyone; he didn't even know if it was really a power, so much that it was just a weird twist of fate that seemed to happen all the time. When he wanted it to happen. After his freshman year of college, everything would change. He was back in Boston, visiting with his family for an extended weekend when it went off. Several of his friends were killed in the explosion. All over again, he was experiencing the same thing that happened with 9/11, only this had no real discernable cause. When he went back to New York, his life had been torn apart. He no longer felt the need to go to school. Part of him wondered if he'd been in the city, or if he'd known about it, whether or not it would have happened at all. Maybe he blamed himself a bit for the deaths of his friends. Where was his luck then?
Months later, something happened that set his world on its side.
Announcing to the world that people with superhuman abilities existed, Remy was torn. Evolution of the human genome was obviously going to happen some day. He didn't realize that it would happen in that way; he immediately went out and bought a copy of Chandra Suresh's book. He devoured it in one sitting. He realized that he fit the bill for the supposed ability of Probability Manipulation, though this was a heavily theorized topic in the book and really wasn't considered to be a potential ability - after all, how could probability and entropic manipulation fit into evolutionary traits? It didn't make any sense from a genetic point of view.
'Coming out' to his family was the hardest thing that Riley ever did. He felt sick; he felt like he didn't actually earn the medals that he got for his military service. He told them about what he could do. Since it wasn't an outward thing like telekinesis or anything else, he got his father's gun and put it to his own head and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. He pointed it at the window and blew it out with a bullet. Worse yet, his power, while able to be replicated, was hard to predict. Certain things were laws of physics. He couldn't affect things like that. He tried to test the limits of his power shortly after he figured it out. Jumping out of a third story building ended up with him in the hospital with a fractured elbow and broken rib.
Considering his skills with probability, he ended up engaging in extreme sports for fun, including skateboarding, free-running and BMX racing. Nervous about registering when the topic came up, Remy ended up on the Registry. He demonstrated his powers in a similar way as he did for his father. He took two members of the Department of Homeland Security out for a car ride. Highly unorthodox, but he explained that there was no other way for him to explain it.
He picked up speed, taking corners too hard. The car stayed on the road and he came to the place that he wanted - a set of train tracks. He stopped the car on the tracks and locked the doors. They wouldn't unlock despite the frantic efforts of the DHS officers. One of them drew his service pistol and pointed it at Remy's head, telling him to drive. When he pulled the trigger, the bullet blew in in the chamber, destroying the gun, part of the officer's finger and a piece of metal left a scar on the back of Remy's neck. The train, barreling down the tracks, caused the uninjured agent to start screaming at Remy, screaming that he'd proven his point. It wasn't enough for him. He concentrated and the train's wheels locked up, causing it to come within inches of the car.
Since he had technically used his ability to injure a member of the state, he was locked up briefly. When he pled his case, he explained that in Afghanistan, guns would often jam. He had no idea that the bullet would fire in the chamber. He thought the gun would simply jam like usual. It earned him a ninety day prison sentence, house arrest for six months and a GPS navigator tethered to him during a probationary period for four months following house arrest. He was classified as Tier 2. His power could be incredibly dangerous if provoked. Considering his early 'strokes of luck,' it was good that his childhood records were sealed and nothing legal had ever come up regarding his self-defense unconscious use of the ability.
It was around that time that Homeland Security showed up at his door again - this time for a different reason.
A new department was forming, the Department of Evolved Affairs. His skill as an intelligence officer and his military background made him a perfect candidate for the Office of Intelligence Analysis. While he was considered a minor threat, he was still given the opportunity to use his powers to help the Evolved. While it was something that wasn't quite set in stone, it was something that was being formulated. He would receive more information when given the chance. Until then, he continued his studies. By the time he was twenty-five (and after taking a great deal of summer classes, overloading himself with homework and living off of his parents' money), he had graduated with a Bachelor's of Arts in Linguistics. Knowledgeable in five separate languages, as well as a variety of different codes and still maintaining his military clearance, he was pulled into the DoEA when it was announced by President Petrelli in 2009.
Since then, he's been low-key, making sure to keep up with the Registry and analyzing data as it came in. His power had little to do with intelligence operation, except through finding random things now and again that would give the Department access to certain key facts and events that were happening throughout the world. He worked closely with other Evolved, including an Omnilinguist who he had a minor love-relationship with. When it didn't work out with her, he chalked that one up more to his near-obsessive interest in work rather than just bad luck. Now, after earning tenure at the Department, he's interested in expanding his knowledge to other areas of research, possibly even getting into research and development or trying to do some field work with Evolved in other nations.
Remy can affect the outcome of certain actions that have a certain measure of chance. He cannot affect things that are inevitable and are governed by the laws of physics. Therefore, while he could make a bullet hit its target a little easier, he could not prevent that same bullet from firing for miles and miles - eventually gravity would cause it to fall. Likewise, he could cause a car's breaks to suddenly engage, but if the car was traveling fast enough and with enough inertia, he could not prevent it from hitting another object.
Remy unconsciously uses his ability to protect himself. Unless actively concentrating on it, he can't protect himself from multiple combatants, meaning that if he's being attacked, he can't fight back and expect to win against a bunch of people. Also, see above. If he's thrown out of a window or if an explosive goes off right underfoot, he's going to get injured. There's no way around that. This only happens if something goes on that might cause harm to him that has SOME STATISTICAL OR PROBABLE CHANCE that is within 10 actual feet of his location. A sniper's bullet is not affected. A point blank pistol shot may be.
That stated, if he concentrates, he can prevent mechanical objects from not functioning correctly. Machines represent a physical manifestation of probability. If he concentrates, a gun may jam, a car may stop working, an explosive device will be a dud, a computer will suddenly blue screen and so on. These things are all things that could theoretically happen at random. He could not, for instance, make a knife dull out of nowhere. He could, however, make that same knife break if it hits something hard.
Sometimes Remy loses control over his abilities. If he's angry or provoked, it might cause someone to slip and fall or crash their car or any number of things. While he tries his hardest to prevent this from happening, sometimes accidents happen. While he's had most of his life to deal with his power, he still has problems controlling probable outcomes that happen around him. Because of this, he tries to refrain from drinking too much, doing any sort of illicit drugs or getting tied up in emotional relationships.