Ficool

Chapter 3 - 1.02​

"My lungs taste the air of Time,

Blown past falling sands…"

—GURNEY HALLECK​

Paul dreamed.

He dreamed of blood and desert wind, of arid sands stretching to the horizon, awash in the bluish haze of spice. He dreamed he stood again on Arrakis, immersed in a future half-seen—his limbs burning with the potency of the Spice Agony. Within that dream, he rose as Paul Muad'Dib, Fremen war-cry echoing across the dunes.

In the depths of that vision, he relived heartbreak: precious Leto's small heart falling silent beneath the Sardaukar blade. In his palm, he felt the final blow delivered to Vladimir Harkonnen; the contortions of his foul, gluttonous face. In the silence, he heard Feyd-Rautha's snarl giving way to wide-eyed terror as the blade of Kanly found his heart. And then Irulan—his prize—kneeling before him as he claimed the Emperor's throne.

By breath and heartbeat, he felt once more the immensity of a destiny beyond singular comprehension. He tasted tears of grief and heard the chorus of a jihad that numbered billions of casualties. So many atrocities committed in his name; a cosmos bowed at his feet—even as he recoiled from the thought of such dominion. Old regrets, old certainties. Then he saw his father, Leto Atreides, standing beside him in silent witness to the bloodshed.

Leto was silent for a time, gaze fixed upon the carnage. When Paul at last spoke, his voice rang with the uncertain tremor of prophecy unmoored:

"I don't know if I wish to return," he confessed, the words lingering in the void. "I see only devastation waiting to follow—an inevitable course to which I am eternally bound."

Still, Leto spoke not. He merely observed the endless horizon of quieted corpses and charred worlds. At length, he turned his level gaze upon his son and quietly asked: "Can you stomach the consequences of inaction?"

Paul felt the question carve through him. The void of inactivity—the unknown permutations of disaster—could well eclipse the horrors he already knew. To do nothing was also a choice, and that choice bore its own cataclysmic harvest. His silence answered the question first. Then, in a voice tinged with resignation, he gave the truth: "No."

Father and son regarded each other for a moment beyond time—two consciousnesses bound by blood, by prophecy, by the unstoppable tide of cosmic events. Paul sighed, turning away from the vision of horrors done in his name. There, amid the half-formed shadows of possibility, he confronted the paradox at his feet: By all the rules he knew, he had failed; his Spice Agony should have claimed him. The absence of a death-memory—so crucial to the profound transformation of an Ego Memory—however, proved otherwise. More troubling still was the retention of his genetic memory in a borrowed body—an inheritance with no ties to his Atreides line. He felt the incongruity of it, the unnatural splicing of heritage into flesh that was not his own.

The thought unsettled him. In that troubled corner of the dreamscape, Paul wrestled with the possibility that he was but an echo—a clone spawned and displaced by the swirl of Spice-laden energies. He considered the suspicious growth in his brain, wondering if it might have been the culprit, yet intuition steered him toward the former possibility. In his mind's eye, he then saw branching pathways splitting into the myriad permutations of causality.

If clones could be made of a Kwisatz Haderach, did that art extend to the sisterhood, those vile Bene Gesseri Reverend Mothers? Or was it exclusive only to him who could access the memories of both his male and female ancestors and bridge space and time with prescient ability? Anger coursed through Paul at the notion of those hidden hands at work, scattering seeds of manipulation in a soil as unguarded as this.

His musings circled back to the question of returning to his true home. Even if he was the genuine Paul Atreides, wrested from one universe to another, how could he ensure a path back? And if he was indeed a mere copy, should he risk returning at all, ushering in unknown consequences?

At last, he turned to the image of his father, the echo of Leto Atreides manifest in the shared tapestry of a multitude of Ego Memories. His concerns spilled forth, unguarded. Leto listened, inscrutable, then spoke across the silent gulfs.

"Are you willing to leave it to chance?"

Paul knew well the answer.

A sigh escaped him even as the dream around him dissolved into motes of darkness.

✥✥✥​

He awoke—Greg Veder once more—to the muffled rumble of an old bus. Evening sunlight slipped through scratched windows, illuminating the sagging seats and bored faces of other students. Paul closed his eyes in a brief moment of adjustment, still tasting dust and the bitterness of destiny on his tongue. The jolt of the bus stopping jarred him further from his musings.

He disembarked on the side of a stop sign, quietly noting every detail: chipped sidewalks, flickering street lamps, tired façades of row houses. From what Greg's memory told him, this was the southeastern fringe of downtown—a place that straddled the line between a struggling commercial sector and the older residential blocks. Posters of missing persons plastered a nearby fence; half-torn wanted posters for parahuman criminals clung to the walls of a corner store. A subtle undercurrent laced the streets, so familiar to anyone who had lived here. He walked a few blocks, boots scuffing the cracked pavement, ignoring the trio of boys donning E88 patches, to pause only at a crosswalk where an ad flickered on a digital screen, showcasing some new line of sponsor-labeled hero merch. Paul—uninterested—paced across the street and eventually came to a modest apartment building with chipped paint and a rickety set of steps. Keys rattled, and he let himself in.

The house seemed empty—his parents and brother most likely absent. Upstairs, Greg's room revealed itself exactly as Paul recalled from the memory-scans: scattered electronics, half-finished projects, mismatched furniture, stale snack wrappers in corners, and posters pinned at haphazard angles. A life built around momentary passions, never fully realized.

Paul stood in the doorway, eyes roving across the messy bed, the battered desk, and the tangle of cords beneath, before panning to a wall covered in hero memorabilia: Printouts of PHO forum threads or cape profiles pinned to the wall, posters of famous heroines and some cheap souvenirs— pins, patches, and knockoff merch. On the wall opposite that was a chalkboard overlain with printed articles, notes, something of an evidence board layered with a collage of media from different sources pinned to a pinboard and frequently interconnected with string to mark connections—possible cape identities, Brockton Bay news, villain activities. If there was an aesthetic sense to any of this, it was purely accidental.

Paul eased the bedroom door shut, tossed his backpack aside and let his body sink into the lumpy mattress. Instantly, his mind slid into the semi-meditative state of prana-bindu introspection: a meticulous assessment of every muscle fiber, nerve impulse, and cell. In his original body, such an exercise would have been instant and as natural as breathing. Now, he felt the rebellious sluggishness of untrained flesh, the mental static of underdeveloped neural pathways.

The difference between this new flesh and his old, bloodline-bred form was maddening. Yet he saw at once that this deficiency, while vexing, was not beyond remedy. One by one, he delineated, as a Mentat might, the steps needed to mould this adolescent body into a worthy instrument of his will.

First would come the stabilization of mind and body: a deliberate meshing of alien flesh with ancient memory. His consciousness, burdened with the weight of myriad lives, must not drown in the turbulence of an untempered psyche. Accordingly, he would sift through each cell of this body—cataloging the spasmodic reflexes, the thresholds of pain and pleasure—until its every response lay defined in the matrix of his understanding. Then he would undertake a careful grafting of memory into this genetic code, hence, reducing the burden on the brain and sealing away the tumult of Ego Memories that threatened to diffuse his identity.

Next would be a ritual of neural enhancement—deliberately administering mild cognitive overloads to the nervous system, leveraging the body's residual neuroplasticity to rewire the synaptic connections. Only then could he hope to reclaim the rapid computation, "naïve mind" pattern analysis, and supralogical hypothesizing at which Mentats excel.

With the mind stabilized, he would retrain musculature and nervous responses to more optimally respond to his prana-bindu control, until even involuntary responses return under his conscious regulation. Following this would be the heightened production of testosterone and other essential hormones required for physical development. Then the final regimen: deliberate physical conditioning and a reintroduction to the rigors of the Weirding Way. In these steps lay the promise of restoring a fraction of his former competence.

None of it would be instantaneous, but he estimated about seven weeks to regain a semblance of his old competence—provided he secured sufficient nutrients and rest.

He flicked through Greg's memories of his scrounged savings: a mere two hundred forty-three dollars. Even at the most conservative estimates from the teen's ragged knowledge of supplement prices, it remained insufficient. Thus, Paul resolved to liquidate any extraneous possessions in pursuit of his goal. His attention flickered to the old gaming console beneath the table by his feet—it was worth some not-insignificant amount and would be the first to go. At the thought, the faint rebel voice of Greg's Ego-Memory protested, but Paul silenced it, consigning that plaintive voice to the tumult of countless lesser memories within him.

Yet even the most focused mind is not impervious to interruption. Before he could begin the first, delicate phase of his plan, a soft knock came at the door. The glow of late dusk stained the window. On the threshold stood Greg's mother, Martha. The woman wore the easy concern of motherhood as she inquired about his well-being, mentioning a call from the school nurse.

Paul allowed a benign smile to cross Greg's features. "It was just a headache," he said lightly. "I'm alright now."

She nodded, relieved, before instructing him to fetch his older brother—Tom—for dinner. Then she withdrew, footsteps trailing away down the hall. Exhaling, Paul rose after her and emerged from his room.

He stepped into the corridor and knocked on Tom's door. No response came, only the faint clack of a keyboard. Paul turned the knob and found the older boy—tall, lanky—hunched over a computer, headphones on. His attention was thoroughly claimed by the text on-screen.

On the bed beside him, on top of a stack of other books, was a novel titled "Arabian Sands". Intrigued, Paul picked it up. His gaze flicked to the first page, drawn by the lines of a poem inscribed there in printed ink:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley—an apt meditation on impermanence and hubris. Before Paul could consider the text further, the novel was snatched from his grasp. He looked up to meet Tom's stern glare. "Told you to keep out of my stuff," the older boy snapped, pulling off his headphones.

Paul offered no retort. He only turned away. "Dinner," he said simply, voice mild.

"Mom wants us both."

More Chapters