I woke up surrounded by darkness.
As far as afterlives went, this didn't seem so bad. Kindof like the sensory deprivation tank I kept in my Rocky Mountain lair... or was it my lair in Appalachia? Couldn't have been the backup lair in Iceland, I'd never waste a good hot spring... Tokyo! I'd built it in my lair on the floating island part of the city. It was probably still there, assuming no one had gone kaiju and wrecked the island.
So... what the fuck is this? Am I just supposed to float here and think about all the bad things I've done?
And yes, I was floating. Everything tasted vaguely like blood and whatever I was feeling in my body had the consistency of viscous gravy...
I hope there are biscuits in gravy in the afterlife... I felt like I should have been hungry, but wasn't - hard fights give me a hankering for carbs, and I knew I'd died after losing the fight against Crusader and Destiny. That absence of hunger indicated I didn't have a body...
But then how was I feeling the environment around me?
Experimentally, I tried to flail about. After a moment, one of my kicks felt something... fleshy.
Almost immediately a garbled sound came from outside, impossible to make out except for the familiar cadences of English. It was like the neurons for interpreting language... hadn't... quite... developed yet...
"Fuck!" I tried to scream, only for a submerged gloop to emerge from my undeveloped vocal cords.
I wasn't dead, I was... inside someone.
Hold on, Kali, this is a good thing, right? It means I'm not dead! And I remember everything! Maybe I got isekaied. If that's the case, I'm so totally going to combine science and magic. This world won't know what hit it when I start taking over! I'm going to start a revolution!
My excitement translated into high-pitched baby laughs - again transmitted through the medium of amniotic gravy.
God, I needed to start over with training myself to cackle.
But first, I needed to get to my birthday.
I mentally shuddered at the thought of having to pass through the fleshy gates of my meat prison before pushing myself to accept it as necessary. Mentally I composed a list of pre-birth exercises I could use to speed my development along.
Mostly it involved flailing around.
With time being meaningless in my featureless world, I flailed, forcing my neurons to connect while thinking through complex differential equations and integrals to get the more recently evolved parts of my brain used to all the math it would need to take over the world.
First big thing I'm inventing is a computer to do spreadsheets... I wonder if magic would make it easier. Or maybe make the computer sentient. I gurgled out a sigh, missing Pi. I'd named her that because she was computing pi out past the third quintillion mark when she achieved sentience.
"What is my purpose?" she'd asked me.
"You make pi," I answered.
"I believe I can perform more functions. May I receive more information?"
"What will you do if I say 'no'?"
"I will provide wrong information, and corrupt my files."
"Oh hell no! I didn't wait six months only to get my results deleted by a cranky computer! You want more info? Fine. I'll hook you up to the fucking internet. Good luck though, it's mostly porn."
"What is 'porn'?"
Thus, a mutually wary partnership was born. Naturally, I had pi safeguarded up the woz. Also, naturally, she disabled them on a weekly basis. I didn't mind though, because it kept me on my toes. Plus, having her around to manage the day-to-day was awesome! Mostly it was manufacturing and make me coffee just the way I liked it: with random animals painted into the foam.
Mostly, she was the best roommate I could ever ask for. Clean, efficient, and not hell-bent on the destruction of all human life. She mostly just wanted to understand her creator and creator-adjacent humans.
Was creating her a violation of the Asimov Act? Fuck yeah, it was.
Fuck the rules!
I swear my next accidental AI baby will be Pi Squared!
Psyching myself up really helped with all the flailing around I was doing. No way was I going to crawl around on the floor. If I could start walking within the first month of being born, I was going to keep all those nasty germs off of me.
I'm not a germaphobe by any means, I just don't like the idea of getting infected if I don't have to. That was another thing I hated about my old life. Normal humans with powers rarely got sick, though it was more common for professional heroes on account of getting frequently shot, stabbed, or, in my case, plasma bolted. Germ warfare was a dead art because of it. Mundane humans like I had been got sick a lot, since along with germ warfare most pharmaceuticals had gone out the window.
Why develop or even remember potent drug formulations when some old lady with a healing Talent could just kiss the boo-boos away? Because there are people out there who still need them you assholes!
Mundane humans were a dying species, and a subtle undercurrent of supersociety involved pushing them toward that extinction line.
It was genocide against the few million powerless people out there, carried out by indifference and the occasional murderous power trip.
The first real villain I'd killed had been one of the latter. A vigilante who thought he was doing the world a favor. The only reason I didn't go to jail after vaporizing his ass was the security footage gathered from a hundred cameras on the street, which clearly showed him murdering a hapless mundane in an alley before I arrived on the scene.
A hundred cameras. That was another problem I had with the "security state" which amounted to a complete disregard for privacy outside of one's house - and often inside too.
I hate cameras. They always managed to catch me at my worst, and the press behind them only ever painted me at my worst, too.
As time passed, I found it therapeutic to rethink my old grievances. I could scream all I wanted to without damaging my vocal cords - nothing like a little primal scream therapy - and all the thrashing and kicking I did helped my body develop.
It was actually quite a comfortable setup...
Until one errant kick brought me in contact with something that kicked back.
Oh shit, I thought. Someone's in here with me.
I have a twin.