Registry of the Evolved Database
File #24 Dec 2009 03:28
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 Jack Davenport |
Here is a snapshot of the life of Michael Rosco Chamberlain: He is 36 years old, he is divorced, he is a registered Evolved, he is an alcoholic, and he is happy about none of these things.
Now the question becomes, how the hell did he get here? It is a question he asks himself often. As to being 36 years old, there is nothing to blame but time. He was born on November 13th, 1973, in Queens, New York, to a general practitioner and his wife, a stay-at-home mom who spent most of her adult life trying to publish a book about sewing that nobody wanted to buy. He grew up reasonably healthy and generally unpopular as snarky kids often are who don't punk up enough to fit in and are too smart for their own good. In other words, too smart to recognize that sometimes you need to tame the vocabulary and just interact with people. So Michael was always lonely and restless even as a young boy, and he started to treat his being 'gifted' as a curse word decades before his next set of 'gifts' made themselves known.
As to the alcoholism, Michael typically blames law school. It's not an unusual story. After knocking his grades at St. John's Prep School out of the park, he majored majored in American and European History at Columbia University and went on to crash through Yale Law School somewhere in the middle of his class. He started drinking heavily during law school along with many other young men his age, and never really stopped. It would take drastic personal tragedy to drive him out of the nasty pattern and into the AA meeting. Michael's first job out of law school was an assistant deputy prosecutorship in Norfolk, Virginia. He passed the Virginia Bar by the skin of his teeth and plowed headlong into the work and into the local bar scene, where he met a young, unconventionally pretty young journalist with boy-cut hair and big ears named Keri Rome.
"Rome?" said Michael. "Really?"
"Whatever joke you are making," said Keri, "I've heard it."
Michael would later have a hard time explaining the connection he and Keri had. While drunk, he mostly described it in a bleary way as "Chemistry," but this is an understatement. At times it was almost like a bizarre telepathy. Finishing each other's sentences. Communicating entirely through eye contact and the use of their eyebrows. Touch was electric and addictive and comforting and inexplicable. They were married in six months and everyone thought that they were totally the whirlwind that would go the distance, except for the fact that Michael was drunk most of the time, and Keri never actually intended to get pregnant.
The fights over the abortion she wanted to have were vicious. Michael was intellectually pro-choice but emotionally every time she brought it up it was a kick in the balls. He spent most of the pregnancy drunk and Keri spent most of it miserable. At first, when little Daniel was born, it seemed like he was going to be the solution to all of their problems. Everyone said he was a beautiful baby. All babies look the same to Michael, then as now, but there is something about the way your son smells when you hold him that sticks in your heart like a thousand tiny knives.
They moved shortly after the baby was born. To Jersey. Of all places. Keri hated Jersey, but the money was a lot better as a deputy prosecutor in Trenton than it had been in Virginia, and their apartment was larger. Keri felt like she had lost all her friends and she was too depressed to get out and make more. She got a crappy job editing copy for an advertising firm part-time to give her some kind of interaction with adults, but spent most of the time locked away in a cubicle and barely speaking to people. Their marriage was on the rocks. Worse, Michael was finding it harder and harder to feel attracted to her anymore. She had lost the lean, whippet look she had when he married her, and the plush, fleshy femininity to which she had grown was starting to go to fat. He had to be drunk in order to sleep with her, and they barely touched anymore otherwise. But by this point, they needed to stay together because Keri couldn't deal with the idea of raising a son on her own that she hadn't been ready to give birth to in the first place.
Around the time Daniel turned 6, however, something had to break. It was time to move again. Michael's father had died of a stroke, very suddenly, and his mother was pining away in New York, living off his pension and the limited provision of his will. Michael got a job with a New York firm doing criminal defense work for about a year, the first time he had had lawyer work that involved anything other than prosecution since the schoolyear clerkships he worked during law school. The hours were crippling, but the money was excellent — enough that he could support his wife, his son, his mother, and comfortably drink the rest without breaking a sweat on meeting rent.
After about three months of never seeing her husband sober or in daylight, Keri had enough. She filed for divorce and got the vast majority of custody of Daniel. Although Michael was supposed to get partial custody and visitation as well as a weighty responsibility in child support money, Keri blithely circumvented this by taking the boy and moving to London. Michael could have stopped sending her the checks in the mail, of course, but they were for Daniel, and he somehow never did.
Michael moved to a smaller apartment and got a dog from the humane society. The dog didn't last long before he gave it to his mother to keep her company instead; he worked too many hours to take care of a pet. However, by freak accident, he lost his job shortly thereafter.
Pretty literally.
That is, his job exploded with the Bomb that hit New York. He happened to be up at Rikers that day talking with a client or else he would be dead right now. This kept him up at night for awhile. He was adrift for a little while after that. He started going back to church for the first time in a long time, confession and all, and he… intermittently stopped drinking, eventually managing to find an AA meeting in what was left of New York. He also found another prosecutorial job eventually, and hired on, proving himself with a solid win record and a sense of when to plea bargain pretty early on.
Then, just when his life started turning itself around like he was putting himself back together, Michael started noticing something unusual about himself. He was starting to leave a thin coating of ice behind occasionally when his fingers were in contact with an object for a more than usual amount of time. Usually, this meant pens. His pens were always getting frosted over.
Michael at first just thought he was going through some kind of alcoholic hallucination and told no one but his confessor about it. The ice would melt if he rolled the pen against both his palms long enough, or maybe if he popped them in the microwave. (Incidentally, don't microwave pens. It is a bad idea. Seriously. Don't do it.) Then, as the Evolved blasted onto the public scene, it became impossible to ignore the way he could blow cold air on cold days or shape icicles out of nothing whatsoever, or coat his hands in ice when he was punching the punching bag in his apartment and end up with shattered ice bits all over the floor (in retrospect, also a bad idea).
With the advent of the Linderman Act, Michael knew immediately that he would have to register. There was no question that he could violate the law. As a career prosecutor, his moral and ethical code were inextricably intertwined with the legal code. So he did, and remained a fierce proponent of registration ever since. REGISTER. What he is most uncomfortable with is not his own registered status so much but what it represents: that he is weird, that he is different, that he is once again 'gifted' in a way that threatens to ostracize him permanently. He clings to his job and his efficiency ratings with viselike intensity and works himself to the bone as a result. Being a prosecutor has become too much a part of his identity for him to let it go ever.
Michael Chamberlain is a man with a crusty exterior. He is snarky to the point of bitchery on occasion and he lives very strongly in his own intellect. He likes words and wordplay and plays around with them a lot. He is inclined to bitterness as well as a sort of general grouch. That's not to say he doesn't have a sense of humor, because he does. It is very dry, sometimes a little mean, and occasionally just like really perverse, if not flat-out dorky as hell.
He is a creature of internal struggle and doubt as well as restlessness. He is curious about other people and their problems, to the point of being pointlessly nosy sometimes. He has cause to question everything about himself, and most of his questions don't really have answers, only more general uncertainty shading to a sort of continual self-loathing. This is why he used to drink so much. Now that he does not drink, he wanders between coping mechanisms. Most recently he has been clinging to religion, which sort of works except that it reinforces his guilt/self-loathing cycle because he is still not a very good Catholic and sometimes he worries that he might actually be a little bit gay on top of everything else. Goddamnit.
That said, Michael is also a man of innate decency with a solid personal code of behavior. He has a strong sense of what is right he will go the extra mile to make sure it happens. Especially now that he is not drunk anymore. He just might bitch about it or pretend he's not doing it or, you know, fluff up like a pissy cat if you point out to him that he is doing it. He'd like to be hardboiled — but he's probably closer to softboiled. The shell looks like it could be hard, but inside underneath that firm meaty white, it's all gooey.
Michael is cold, cold, cold. He has the power to generate ice and shape and manipulate it. Essentially, he draws condensation in the air in towards his skin and it becomes ice, frosting on himself or on things he is touching. This also happens with sweat his body generates: it beads into ice. He can work much more quickly when he has water to deal with, because then he can just freeze what is already there and liquid. He can shape ice with focus, using his hands and his concentration — he can force ice into shapes without shaping it with his hands, but this takes considerably more effort.
Since his powers came to be, Michael has developed an immunity to cold temperatures. His breath never steams no matter how cold it is, and on hot days, he can cool himself and others with his breath. When it is really hot, he is basically debilitated (and extremely whiny) and is quick to dehydrate. He has no power to turn what is frozen back to liquid again, and he cannot freeze liquids that are more than approximately two feet from him.
He is not limited by the container of the water he is freezing. For example, he has the potential to freeze ice crystals inside your milk carton. More sinisterly, this may be extrapolated to mean that he has the capacity to partly freeze the water in the internal organs, although it is extremely unlikely that he would do so (see also: moral code and prosecutorial obsession with justice), and also unlikely that he could do so without establishing skin-to-skin contact first.
The efficiency of Michael's freezing process is dependent on several factors: whether he is creating ice by drawing moisture from the air and skin, or whether he is freezing ice from existing liquid. There are other factors that affect this as well: for example, extreme humidity is easier to work with than extreme desert, and a pot of boiling water would present significantly more challenge than a pot of water that was sitting for whatever reason in a refrigerator. At his most efficient, cool water may freeze very rapidly, up to ten gallons of water frozen into a solid block of ice in approximately ten seconds. At most, he could freeze up to three times that at once: say thirty gallons of water (that would be a little over four cubic feet of water). At which point, he would be tapped out and at risk of turning hypothermic. The hotter it gets, the less capable he is of freezing anything; conversely, in temperatures beneath 32 degrees Farenheit, he can freeze a little more before reaching his exhaustion point (bump that up to forty gallons), and he can work a little faster (bring that down to five seconds instead of ten).
It takes longer to work when he is not freezing liquid water. To ice up his fists, say, to throw a punch, would take up to fifteen seconds. To armor himself in ice completely would take almost half a minute. These are not things he can do when not prepared, essentially. Further, once his ice armor shatters, there is melting ice all over the place and he has to start over again. His freezing limits are also reached more quickly when he is not freezing liquid water. Ice shaped from the air and from his own bodily moisture, his exhaustion point would be reached after, say, armoring himself in ice approximately one inch thick and then making three or four ice darts to throw at people. It would be silly of him to push himself to this extreme because he would then be dizzy and sick and those ice darts would probably go to waste. Uhm. An example of smartness instead would be to carry a water bottle around and throw water from it and freeze it midair while it is flying: instant projectile, much less effort. Maybe Michael will figure this out on his own. I am not going to tell him — are you?
Also, the further away his target is from him, the less capable and precise he will be able to get with his ice-making. If he is not touching it, and it is more than about ten feet away from him, no dice.
Finally, the terms of exhaustion come in a couple of flavors: extreme metabolic exhaustion, including dizziness and possible fainting, is the extreme when he is working with liquid water. When he is freezing something from nothing, essentially, there is also the added risk of extremes of dehydration, which would require replenishing water and electrolytes in order to fight against the symptoms of nausea, headache, et cetera.