Earth Time, Year 18,225 CE.
While drinking, Orsaga suddenly sensed something. His gaze shifted toward a particular region of Earth.
He could clearly feel it: humanity was approaching a turning point.
Their civilization was about to surge forward, to grow rapidly — and in doing so, face new trials and ordeals.
After a moment's glance, Orsaga withdrew his attention.
He returned to sipping his wine and watching his troupe of handmaidens perform.
The fate of humanity did not concern him.
His Abyssal Pact with Ra had less than four thousand years left to run. Whatever shape mankind assumed within that span was irrelevant to him — so long as they caused him no trouble.
---
Earth, European Administrative District.
Within an ordinary hospital of the Human Federation, a male infant was born.
Detailed examination revealed nothing unusual.
The only notable traits: he was healthier, stronger, and more alert than other babies. His brain activity was unusually high — a sign of superior intelligence.
No one considered it remarkable. Not even his parents suspected anything beyond natural talent.
But if a psyker had been present, they would have recognized the truth: this child radiated psychic potential.
Even as a newborn, a faint aura of warp-energy shimmered around his skin.
Such innate psionic strength was rare even among the Aeldari.
With proper training and sufficient resources, this boy could one day become a high-level psyker.
Yet no one realized it. The hospital's instruments could not detect warp signatures, registering only an exceptionally healthy physique.
Thus, the boy with extraordinary potential began to grow up like any other child.
By age three he had mastered primary school knowledge; by eight he grasped high-school level concepts.
His family was overjoyed. They believed him a genius, and the government, upon verifying the case, awarded a special education grant to cultivate him into a scholar who could advance humanity's progress.
But no one knew that by age three he could shatter a glass across the room with a thought, and by age eight he could blast a bird from the sky into bloody fragments from dozens of meters away.
And his power only continued to grow.
Early on, he realized he was different. He kept his abilities hidden.
At first, he simply noticed his playmates lacked such talents, so he refrained from showing them. Later, as he learned more, he understood that revelation would invite danger — laboratories, cloning programs, or worse. So he concealed it deliberately.
---
Time passed.
Ten years later, the boy had become a tall, handsome young man. Having skipped several grades, he entered the most prestigious special admissions program of the Federation's top academy.
Among his peers, he was without question the center of attention — a prodigy, a genius.
His parents, still youthful thanks to extended lifespans of nearly four centuries, remained loving and supportive. They even had more children: several younger siblings.
The family lived in harmony, free of worry or want.
Yet beneath his success, the young man carried unease.
He felt alienated, out of place among ordinary people.
Only his family, bound by blood and affection, felt truly close to him. Everyone else seemed like little more than clever apes. Their intelligence fell far short.
He could resolve problems in moments that took his peers hours of muddled debate.
And with such lethal power at his command — able to crush a man into pulp with a thought, or lift a hovercar with a wave — the sense of kinship with other humans eroded further.
He felt like an elephant hidden among sheep, forever afraid of crushing them by accident.
The feeling unsettled him deeply.
Fortunately, his upbringing had been warm and stable, his government supportive. His mind remained sound, his darker impulses restrained.
Otherwise, he might already have become a terrorist.
Is this just adolescence? he wondered once, watching classmates labor over problems he found trivial.
Thankfully, humanity of this era had undergone genetic enhancements. Their intelligence far outstripped that of ancient "natural" humans, giving him at least some peers to converse with.
Had he been born in antiquity, he could not imagine how he would have endured.
Would he be contemplating pi while teaching others that one plus one equals two?
The thought made him laugh aloud in class, drawing puzzled stares.
He did not know that, millennia earlier, Ra himself had faced something similar — calculating Earth's gravitational constants even as he taught his kin the basics of bronze-smelting. The disparity had been far greater.
---
Another decade passed.
By his late thirties, feeling little drive or purpose, the man surprised many by marrying his childhood sweetheart — now the owner of a modest noodle shop.
By then he was the CEO of a major corporation, admired by all.
Why her? Perhaps because, among the "low-intelligence" masses, she was the one to whom he felt most emotionally tied.
With her, he could at least pretend to be ordinary, restrain himself, and endure the tedious pace of human conversation.
Anyone else, he thought, he might have flung into orbit.
_____
T/N:
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