Adam Powerhouse Episode 1: Birth of the Double Zero Read online

one day. Finding out you are pregnant, and twins to boot at that. I can’t believe I’m going to be a dad in 8 months! We need to beat this storm out of here and get you someplace warm.” Mr. P threw everything into the basket and ran down the grassy hill to the car. He dumped the basket and blanket in the trunk and turned to look back up the hill.

  The storm had moved much more quickly than either of them had guessed it would. As Mr. P watched, a bolt of lightning struck the oak tree sending sparks flying. Mrs. P grabbed her stomach, screamed, and began running down the hill.

  Mr. P yelled, “Lay down flat!” Mrs. P didn’t hear him or was too terrified to do anything but run. Mr. P began running toward Mrs. P, but he felt like he was running through syrup.

  As Mr. P watched, another bolt of lightning struck Mrs. P in the back. She arched her head back in a silent scream and electricity wrapped around her body in spirals and shot out of the ends of her fingers. Mr. P kept running toward her as she was thrown down the hill.

  When Mr. P got to Mrs. P, he threw himself down beside her, crying. He grabbed her hand and sobbed, “Please, please be alright.” Mr. P checked her for a pulse and found a faint throb in her neck. Her fingertips were red like she had run them under scalding water. Mrs. P’s hair and shoes were smoking. Mr. P gingerly lifted Mrs. P’s shirt up to look at her belly, afraid that the lives inside had been extinguished. Her belly had burn marks radiating out from the middle like the pattern in a cracked window. When he put his hand to her belly, Mr. P jerked it away from how hot the skin was.

  “No…No. No. No. NOOOOOOOO!” was all Mr. P could get out. Mrs. P groaned. Mr. P began crying and took her head in his arms. He took out his cell phone and dialed 911.

  Scene 2: Super what?

  “Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Powerhouse, you have the healthiest baby I’ve ever delivered.” Dr. Burnbum handed the lumpy bundle to Mrs. Powerhouse as Mr. Powerhouse brushed her damp, sweaty, black hair back out of her eyes. Both parents beamed at the pinkish baby boy wrapped in a soft blue blanket.

  Three hours before driving to the hospital, Mrs. Powerhouse had gone into labor. The last ten weeks of pregnancy had pretty much drained Mrs. Powerhouse. She was a petite woman with black hair and soft, fine skin. Smelling faintly of sunflowers and lip balm, she had arrived at the hospital insisting on walking down the brightly lit, sterilized halls to the delivery room on her own. A tall, blond-headed man, Mr. Powerhouse was a nervous wreck following in her footsteps. He kept wringing his hands and every few steps asked, “You okay honey?”

  Mrs. Powerhouse felt hungry the entire time she was carrying her son. Mr. Powerhouse constantly ran trips to the grocery store and the convenience store on the corner. Sometimes she paged him at work and he would have to run out to get a tub of ice cream, or a bag of stinky pickle-chips. If he was really unlucky, he found himself stumbling half asleep through the aisles of the QT grabbing bags of anything that looked sugary or salty.

  Mr. Powerhouse was an average guy who sometimes insisted on being called Mr. P. He worked a lot to make ends meet. On the tall side, average weight, with the corners of his blond hair starting to disappear, and a largish nose, Mr. P tended to be a bit nervous when things seemed to be getting out of control. He thought his wife about to give birth was a little out of his control.

  He finally calmed down as he and his wife began their breathing exercises, panting tiny breaths as they rounded their lips into O’s and made “hee” and “hoo” sounds. Eventually, it was all over, after some rather unpleasant screaming and yelling, and a short, ugly period where Mrs. P said some things about wishing she had never met Mr. P, which Mr. P figured she probably didn’t really mean, ending with an eight pound baby boy with lots of white-blond hair and a tenacious grip.

  A starched nurse reached over and gently tousled the shock of yellow hair on top of the baby’s head and asked, “What’s his name?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Powerhouse gazed at the newborn and said together, “Adam.” Adam opened his eyes and stared right into his mother’s causing her to gasp. Mom never could say for sure, but she thought she caught just a hint of a smile.

  “Well Adam, we need to get you cleaned up so you can look good for your picture,” the nurse told him as she took him from his mother’s arms. Adam gurgled and cooed.

  Dr. Burnbum tapped his lips with a pencil while he glanced over Adam’s chart once more. He finally looked up and told mom and dad, “We have to do his blood workup and other usual newborn testing. But I would like to ask you for permission to run some further testing on Adam…nothing that will hurt him, but just to see why he is so extremely healthy. It might be important for science to understand why your baby is so perfect. I must say, after your…accident…we were not expecting this.”

  Mom and dad looked at each other. “Well, sure,” stammered dad, “If it’s for the sake of science.”

  The next day, as they prepared to take Adam home, Dr. Burnbum returned. He came into the room, sat down in a chair next to the bed, arranged his white coat, and scratched his head. The sounds of the hospital came into the room: machines beeping, nurses paging doctors over the intercom, and the squeaking of wheels on carts. The doctor cleared his voice, “I have some interesting news.”

  “Is it bad?” mom and dad exclaimed with dad jumping up from the edge of the bed.

  “No, nothing like that,” the doctor brushed the question aside. “No, the blood tests we ran had an unusually high red and white blood cell count which could signal several disorders or diseases, but we could find no evidence of anything wrong.”

  Mom and dad sighed, letting go of the breath they had been holding and dad sank back to his seat on the pink and blue bedspread.

  “So I ordered some further testing, and then some more, until finally, we ran a DNA analysis on the samples we had.” The doctor paused and gathered his thoughts. Mom and dad leaned in for the next thing he was going to say. “We have never seen anything like this before. DNA strands are put together like a ladder and then twirled like a spiral to make what is called a double helix.” The doctor took pause again causing mom and dad to lean in even closer. “Your son appears to have a double-double helix. His DNA strand is twisted with a second strand of exactly identical DNA.”

  Dad had been leaning in closer and closer with every word until he fell off the edge of the bed landing on the tile floor of the hospital with a ‘WOMP’. “What does it mean?” mom puzzled.

  “We aren’t sure,” said the doctor. “Several hypotheses have been formed including one that involves the bolt of lightning that struck you. When the electricity ran through your body, it may have fused the two embryos back together into one with both identical strands of DNA wrapping together, but not completely reassembling into a single strand.

  “But everyone who is aware of this so far agrees that there could be several things that become apparent right away. Adam is different from other babies. He is very alert. He looks around at people when they talk and seems to recognize faces he’s seen before. We expect that his intelligence will be extremely high.

  “For a baby, he seems to be very strong. He has a good grip. He can manipulate the sheets in his crib, And he’s picked up that toy football that dad put in his crib and tossed it out onto the floor already.”

  Mom leaned back and closed her eyes, “But he’s healthy?”

  “As healthy as anyone is ever likely to be,” the doctor answered.

  “How smart could Adam be?” dad asked from the floor.

  “Adam will be very smart, healthy, maybe never sick. He will be coordinated, high energy, curious, and probably very, very strong.”

  “How strong?” dad asked, seemingly dazed and Dr. Burnbum wasn’t even sure if Mr. P was hearing his answers. The doctor continued anyway.

  “Well, with two strands of DNA one would guess twice as much of everything as a normal person. But my theory is that Adam will be like a math problem. When you multiply something by itself, it isn’t merely doubled, but is squared. Four plus
four is eight, but four squared is sixteen.”

  “So what are you saying?” mom demanded.

  Burnbum breathed in deeply, “Honestly? Adam seems to be superhuman.”

  Dad asked, “How superhuman?” Then dad fainted.

  Scene 3: They Grow Up Too Fast!

  As time went on, Adam’s ability became more and more evident. He had such good balance that he could roll over at one week. At two months he was sitting up. At five months, Adam was walking around with the toy football tucked under his arm. At Adam’s first birthday party, he astounded his parents by asking a question as a complete sentence.

  “Can I hava dink peas?” Apparently the cake was a little dry. From there more and more questions came. At two, mom and dad found out that Adam had taught himself to read. By five years old, mom was almost at her wits end because Adam only needed about four hours of sleep a night. He had taught himself to fall into deep sleep immediately so that he could wake up four hours later completely refreshed.

  Just when mom thought she couldn’t take it anymore, Adam seemed to begin sleeping through the night. What mom didn’t know is that Adam noticed mom’s frustration and began spending early morning after he woke up converting his bedroom into a laboratory.

  The first thing Adam did was to increase the power on the computer his