Michael's jaw went slack.
The moment froze.
The cup just… hung there, held up by that spider-webbing ice structure. Rime oozed off the woman's hands.
What in the—?
Then the heightened state snapped out of him and his legs immediately wobbled. They quit like they were clocking out after a bad day.
He started to go down. Before he even hit the floor, the woman moved—superhumanly fast, at least to him. One step, and the distance was gone. She scooped him up like she'd done it a thousand times, keeping his head from the floor.
The surreal was gone, and the "real" came back.
Exhaustion hit him like a truck. A sixteen-wheeler—full trailer, fully loaded, flirting with road capacity.
It felt like he flatlined. All of the capabilities he had, his supernatural mobility, the resilience, and the ability to stand turned off.
He fought the weight in his eyelids. The woman's face imprinted in his mind. She looked concerned. She whispered some gibberish in her tongue that he couldn't comprehend. But the actions he understood immediately.
She didn't hesitate. She inspected Michael with gentle care. Worry cracked in her face. Her touch was registered by his body, gentle, warm and kind. He felt secure, some part of his body had automatically registered something beyond words, it was beyond reason but something in him felt secure around her.
He closed his eyes giving in to the drowsiness. He felt warmth as he pressed her against his chest as she kept talking, low and fast at first, then slower—like she was trying to placate him. Her cadence sounded like a lullaby, but the worry struck thick in her tone. Maybe she thought he was going to cry? He didn't know, nonetheless it soothed him bypassing the part of him that was Michael, straight to the part of him that was biology.
His eyelids kept sinking. He fought them, because fighting was habit, because letting go was how bad things happened. But the weight won. The room went soft at the edges again.
He tried to recall the freezing phenomena, he wanted to think about it more, about what just happened. But his body just stopped like it slammed against an immovable object.
Then darkness swallowed him
***
When he woke up again, he was weak enough to almost call it paralysis. His muscles pulsed like he'd gone through a gym session that pushed every set past failure and then kept going anyway.
Slowly his faculties eased back into his body—motion, vision, hearing. It was slow, but at least it was there. When he finally had the strength to look around, he realized it was late at night. He sat up and stared into the dim room.
Minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks? He didn't have an answer.
The woman—his "mother"—was there, asleep beside the crib. She wore a different set of clothes now. Not the noble garment from before—something much more comfortable. Lighter. More like a sleep gown than courtwear. Pale fabric, loose and soft, draped instead of holding shape. The sleeves were simple and unflared, pushed up at the forearms like she'd done it without thinking. No jewelry. No sharp lines. No "noble uniform." Just cloth meant for warmth.
Even that didn't tell him how much time had passed. He tried to read the room by temperature—before and after the blackouts—but it came up empty. Nothing felt significantly different.
Do they have centralized temperature control here?
A blanket draped over her shoulders like someone had thrown it on without waking her. Her braid had slipped, hair going messy against the fabric. If she was his "mother," then whoever did that—blanket, not waking her—was his "father."
He pictured the red-haired man again. Thirties. Intimidating. Loud. And yet apparently the type to do things like this. Earlier they'd been bickering when Michael first came to. Now she looked wrecked. He didn't like what that implied.
He needed data. There was too much missing. Clothes and vibes weren't enough. If he went purely by what they wore, he'd guess late medieval to early renaissance. Which was, objectively, stupid. The wall-light still looked like a fluorescent panel pretending to be magic.
He closed his eyes to collect his thoughts.
From what he had now, most of his earlier explanations were dead. Only one conclusion kept crawling back in.
I have to look at this from a new perspective. My body is an infant's. The only conclusion I can come up with is reincarnation.
It was a headache.
The mechanics of it were… interesting. Potentially enthralling. But there were more pressing concerns. Survival. Understanding. Information.
He looked at his mother again. It was bizarre. He did not consider this human being his parent. No shared history. No memory of her voice.
He looked once again at his mother. It was bizarre. He did not consider this human being his parent. But then again he never had anyone on earth that would cleanly fit that description.
He had no shared history with her. No memory of her voice. Yet as he stared, something in him was moved—not him, not the part he identified as Michael. Something else, somewhere deeper, skipping the prefrontal cortex entirely and going straight for the limbic system. Something primal.
He noticed the little details. The crease between her brows that didn't smooth out even in sleep. Her hand left near the crib like she'd fallen asleep mid-vigil, close enough to touch him without waking. The blanket wasn't arranged—just thrown on. She hadn't gone to a bed. She'd stayed here.
That was data. Concrete. Unarguable.
And it did something to him anyway.
A stupid, unwanted warmth, like his body was trying to latch onto the first available narrative. Mother. Safe. Stay.
He dismissed it immediately. Oxytocin is one hell of a drug.
He swallowed trying of think of something else.
His mind went back to the freezing-cup-in mid air event. He replayed it in mind second by second. Trying to utilize his eidetic memory to the fullest extent.
Everything came off as instantaneous. The structural growth of the ice came off as something that would naturally occur, but the sudden ice spike running from the ground, was unnatural. That wasn't to say that the instantaneous freezing itself was not unnatural, it was, but the structure of the spike was too engineered.
So two things were wrong. The freezing and the spiking structure.
Freezing water requires energy extraction—latent heat removal. On Earth, you can do it with abnormally low temperature environments or with rapid heat transfer if you have a cold reservoir. Liquid nitrogen. Cryogenic surfaces. Vacuum tricks. Nucleation control. Plenty of ways.
But there had been no temperature drop that he could feel. No air chilling. No frost forming on him. If the local environment had actually dipped low enough to do that naturally, he would've been dead in the crib already. Infant skin doesn't negotiate with hypothermia.
The energy should have went somewhere or at least something.
The cup itself—what happened to it after he fell? Did it remain embedded? Did it crack? Did it thaw? He hadn't seen. He'd been too busy face planting into exhaustion.
Looking back, his "mother's" response had been a clue. She wasn't shocked at the instantaneous freezing, before he passed out. Her face wore concern over him. If he could factor in that mothers in general prioritized their children than anything else. Having zero reaction to the phenomenon didn't make sense. Her eyes were locked on him. He would even be bold enough to say that, it wasn't just normal for her but expected.
Was he hallucinating at the point in time? Michael didn't think so, in fact if he recalled there was some funny business going around the eerie light that his "mother" had. Besides what he had in his memory was a vivid, coherent, and detailed event. He could even focus on different detailed parts.
Plus hallucinations didn't usually come with coherent physical mechanics, at least not ones that matched external reactions. And his Mother had seen something. Her fingers had loosened; her body had reacted. That drop hadn't just slipped for fun.
He stared at the ceiling and let the conclusion settle, unpleasantly.
At minimum, he was not on Earth, or at least the Earth that he knew.
He'd assumed—despite the clothes, the language, the architecture—that maybe this was some experimental facility, some coma hallucination, some elaborate medical-procedure nightmare. Earth had always been his anchor because Earth had rules. The laws didn't care about your feelings; they didn't bend for narrative.
But freezing water in midair with no ambient change?
That is what tripped him. Literally, and figuratively.
That was a different universe problem.
Superstring theory had proposed multiple universes. Different vacua. Different constants. Different symmetry breakings. It had always been a theoretical playground—mathematically rich, experimentally starved.
If this was real—if he was real—then he'd accidentally become the kind of evidence that would make Earth physicists lose their minds. In fact he just lost his, and apparently got placed in a pudgy violet eyed exosuit.
Nobel prize? Sure. Posthumous, maybe? Assuming he could send a paper across universes, which, apparently possible?
He chuckled.
That is one hell of a reverse engineering challenge.
This bordered metaphysics in his book.
For now it stayed a hypothesis. He hadn't seen the sky here. No star systems. No constellations to compare. No way to anchor his location even if the rules were similar. He couldn't conclude anything cleanly.
But he could plan.
When this body is a little bit older, I can conduct basic experiments? First principles. Gravity, thermodynamics, optics, see what breaks, see what's good.
His heart raced, he was excited.
Maybe, somehow, if I change the metaphysics into physics, I can comeback, return to Earth?
His eyes went back to the woman gently whispering in her sleep, magnetized.
She had seen him walking, and standing. She had seen him outside the crib. She was shocked, that much was obvious. She was genuinely concerned, genuinely worried. She was not pretending.
Now she looked tired enough that her body had given up and slept beside the crib. That tired didn't come from nothing.
If him walking was something shocking to her, then maybe there still had a sliver of what normal was here. He didn't have a baseline, and for anything important a baseline was important.
Him being caught walking put him at a precarious situation, from his "mother's" reaction it wasn't normal, at least that was something, he had something he could work with.
A silver lining with a cloud lurking. If that isn't normal, then I need to make them think I am a normal baby, they could probably rationalize the walking thing as some freak incident? If it were me I'd probably gaslight myself.
Now I need a plan.
First, lie low, act dumb. I just hope I have enough self control to face what is coming. Ugh.
Next, learn the language.
Easy enough. With his eidetic memory he did learn a few languages already from Earth. The thing with learning languages is, with enough languages under your belt it was easy enough to see patterns in languages. He had heard them speaking and it didn't seem too complicated.
Words weren't a problem. Sounds weren't a problem.
If his plans materialized, he could ask them about this place—slowly, in controlled questions. One question at a time. Feed them the illusion of gradual development.
Syntax. Idioms. Meaning. That was the work.
He needed input.
He needed them to talk around him, at him, to each other, and he needed to map patterns: repetition, context cues, emotional valence. He could brute-force it.
I'll try to get their attention and analyze the syntax. His gaze flicked to his Mother's mouth, to the way her lips sat even in sleep. The words are no problem. Eidetic memory. That part's cheating.
He considered testing vocal output—sounding out a phrase, watching reactions. That was dangerous but potentially efficient.
I'll sound out a whole phrase and observe how they react and plan for what I should do next.
The key was not to go too fast. If he spoke like an adult, fully coherent, it would be catastrophic. He'd go from "odd child" to "demonic possession" in whatever cultural framework existed here. He couldn't assume rationalism. Earth had barely managed rationalism and some new age hippies still worshipped crystals and essential oils.
Hm, maybe there was something there?
After all there is something obviously beyond the standard model?
Nah. Michael dismissed the thought. He was a rationalist afterall.
I need to pace it, asking a torrent of questions would be dangerous.
After that, what? Alphabet? Culture? Societal structure? Technology? Basic laws of physics? Why do things fall? What do they think gravity is? Do they have a formal model or just "things go down because they do"?
He forced himself to slow down. One problem at a time.
He had nowhere to go. He was an infant in a crib. Even if he could walk, what then? Crawl out into… what? Hallways? Guards? Cold stone? A door he couldn't open?
I might as well stay in this place.
His curiosity burned anyway. That hadn't died with his old body. If anything it was worse now because everything was new and nothing made sense.
But before he did anything, he needed to understand the capacity of this body.
He'd already done something impossible—walking—despite underdeveloped musculature and bone structure that shouldn't support it. Primary bones for upright walking shouldn't be fully solid yet. Infant bodies were tendons and cartilage and optimism.
And yet he'd stood. He'd moved. He'd balanced.
Why?
He replayed the sensation: that "something" he drove into his limbs, that heightened state. It had felt like he was operating an internal system he didn't understand.
Was it adrenaline? No. Too clean.
Was it some kind of… internal energy? Some mechanism native to this universe? Something his Mother used to freeze water?
He didn't have the vocabulary for it yet. But he had felt it. And when he used it, the world became clearer, more real in a different way.
Is it related to the altered state of consciousness I had?
Most probably. And the crash after—also probably related. There had been a cost. Big one.
He'd have to map that too. Inputs. Outputs. Limits. If he pushed it, he blacked out. That meant he could get himself killed accidentally by overexertion in a baby body.
Before I do anything, I'll have to inspect what I can do fully rested. Carefully.
He let his gaze drift back to his Mother again. Still asleep. Still worried even unconscious. Her hand was near the crib, close enough that if she stirred she could touch him without thinking.
He felt that unwanted internal movement again—the inconvenient softness.
He tried to smother it with humor, because humor was safer than admitting anything real.
I can't wait to experience this new world around me, he thought, then immediately undercut himself: Assuming it doesn't kill me first.
Again drowsiness burned. His eyes started to blink slowly as he made his final glance at his "mother"
Poor woman. Having a freak as a child.