* * * *
"A New Yorker, born and bred. I grew up the only kid of a couple who weren't exactly the most financially secure people around. When the time rolled around, I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do — so instead of going to college, I got into freelance writing right away. I did catalogue descriptions, local musician and band biographies, real estate flyers. It wasn't glamorous work, and it didn't even have my name on it a lot of the time, but hey. Writing at least made sure that I didn't starve. Instead of taking classes, I did my best to keep myself caught up on my own time. Hanging out in libraries, that kind of thing, making sure I wasn't totally out of the academic loop. I did have a personal standard to hold myself to, after all, if nobody else was expected to do it for me."
"And so life went. Until the bomb."
"Mom and dad both died. My old high school was gone, wiped off the map, on top of lots of the old friends I had made during those days. Me? Me, I was lucky just to have stayed alive, even though I lost just about everything else."
"To add insult to injury, the headaches started up afterwards. Ever had a migraine? Yeah, these beauties got nothing on your garden-varieties. These headaches, they're like somebody's literally got a knife jammed up into the mushy flabs of your brain. So— I found myself not only bumbling around grief-stricken, homeless, and living off government handouts, but physically unable to write, even if I had been able to find another job, which pfft. Out of the question at a time like that. For the better part of a year, then, what could I do? I kept to my lonesome is what I did, because even coming out from my craphole of a trailer for a minute meant walking into the equally crapholed crowds milling around outside, and thus, sharpening the scalpel in my head by that much. Crowds. Never my cup of tea to start with, but now… mm-hm. Yeah. Not only that, it wasn't long before it got worse yet: I started hearing voices on top of the mess of pain."
"Voices. Perfect, huh. I might as well have just made myself a reservation in a loony bin and saved myself the trouble."
"Not that I knew that I was a 'telepath', at the time. Even if I believed in that New-Age mishmash, which I didn't, as I said — one-way ticket to a mental institution, the logical antidote to all problems. It wasn't until Senator's Petrelli announcement in February, and then the passage of the Linderman Act, that made me pay attention to the fact that there were other weirdos out there. Not people bawling for attention in a robe from Ward 13, but everyday people, like me. They called themselves 'Evolved'."
"After a while, my headaches did gradually ease to a point where I could get my living situation reasonably sorted out again, which took a hell of a lot longer than I would've preferred. Still, though. I was able to get back to work, pick up my pen again — or more accurately in this day and age, my keyboard. Nobody had a right to treat even psychiatric patients like they were treating us. They wanted a vendetta? We'd give them one back. I took the liberty of setting up my own pro-Evolved blog; wrote opinion pieces, articles. Some magazines and e-zines took them, most didn't. But it was a start."
"Over the past months, my name as a pro-Evolved author has sort of been seeping out there. Mostly, I'd reckon, due to the controversiality of it all than any actual surplus of talent. It's New York, there's enough talent to go around in tankers. But now, even if they're still mostly restricted to literary circles, I think there are a few people out there who've actually heard of me. Isn't that exciting? And for the first time since the explosion, I've earned enough to move into my own apartment again. I'm no warrior, I'm no soldier, but I can fight the battle for our kind in a different way — through a war of words, where the stylus is still mightier than the sword."