Only At Night Chapter 1

There are three things I know for sure about the world. Here they are, in case you’re worried it’ll be on a test later.

Keeping the world the same is impossible.

Changing the world isn’t easy.

And making the world stay how it is after you change it is damned hard.

They say nothing is set in stone, but in my experience, some things are more not set in stone than others. A government seems eternal until it’s brought down. And after the revolution, the new government is more precarious than ever. It can change. Over and over again, as often as there are days in the week, sometimes. So when the rich and powerful went and changed the world on us, I don’t know what they expected. That it couldn’t be changed back, perhaps. And it couldn’t. But it could be changed again. And that’s what I did.

I’m not very proud of it.

But, enough small talk. We could be here all day, and while Russians may have a taste for Dostoevsky, you Americans like short stories. YA novels. Comic books. 

I say ‘you Americans,’ but legally, I’m as American as Taylor Swift. My name is Ivan Dimitrov Grigorovich, second-generation Romanian immigrant. I came over with my parents and sisters when I was eight. They wanted a better life. I wanted to meet Mickey Mouse. I don’t know if they consider a house in the suburbs a better life. And I’ve never met Mickey Mouse.

I am not one of those immigrants who spend all their time waxing poetic about the old country. If you’ve read about Romania lately in the news, perhaps you know why. I love America, but I think not as… obsessively as some of the people who are born here. They seem to love the US of A so much that they cannot imagine it being better than it is. With respect, that doesn’t come off to me as loving as they seem to think.

I am digressing again. I’m sorry. I am not a writer. You would think telling you about things that really happened would be easy—all I have to do is write everything down from the beginning to the end, yes? But it’s like telling a joke. Timing is everything. You must know where to start, and my boyhood is not that place. It is not very interesting… it seems these days that Americans only find immigrants interesting, for better or worse, if they are brown, and my family literally hails from the Caucasus region.

I learned English well, to the point that now I am told I speak with barely an accent, but still did poorly in school. I had the normal interests for a child my age—first, boyish things, and then girlish things, if you take my drift. I most especially liked comic books and superheroes, which it seemed to me like the most fantastical and uniquely American thing I could touch. For a working-class immigrant boy, they were the closest thing I found to the riches I had always been told about in America; not richness of money, but richness of imagination.

I was sixteen when I became a superhero, but that is not a good place to start the story either. I was not a very good superhero.

In every superhero team, there are a few familiar figures that you always find, whether the company is Marvel, DC, Image, even Archie Comics. There’s a genius who can figure out a plan for everyone to carry out. A person without powers who is so skilled that he is still on the team. Someone with incredible speed. Someone with incredible strength, even for a superhero. 

Then there’s the people like me. Someone who seems to have an awesome power, but that tends to just scream as they’ve overwhelmed by the bad guys’ evil. Maybe they even have a healing factor or can be rebuilt like a kitchen appliance, so they get blown apart to show how intimidating the villains are. 

You see, my power is that I could upgrade things. Not just anything, but things I owned. If my toy car ran out of batteries, I could ‘fix it’ into being fully charged again. Or I could make it faster. I’ll get to that later; it’s not a very good place to start either. 

I could even use this power on my own body; healing a broken arm counted as ‘fixing it’ after all. 

And yes, being a teenager, I did upgrade myself in exactly the way you’re thinking. It’s not an experience I would care to repeat. If you’ve never had a portion of your anatomy growing and stretching out and pulling away from you, I would recommend against it. The pain was enough to make me wish I had simply cut the damn thing off. After that, I decided against giving myself a Schwarzenegger physique and fighting crime that way. Some things just aren’t worth the trouble. 

I did enhance my intellect, such as I could. There are limits on my alchemy. I cannot ‘upgrade’ a hat into a car, the raw ingredients need to be present for my power to cook them. And in the same way, I just do not think I had the makings of genius in me. But I increased sundry skills such as memory retention to a point just shy of discomfort, like overclocking a computer. From then on, I passed my classes with ease, earning a full-ride scholarship to a local college. 

There, I continued to do well, if not extraordinary, and not comfortably. I couldn’t ‘upgrade’ a blank paper into having an A+ essay on it. Though the work came easily to me when I was diligent, I soon set aside the idea of being Mr. Fantastic and settled for a simple bachelor’s degree. I found work in the IT field, my fixing coming in very handy for my purposes. With a touch, I could make veritably ancient printers work as if they were brand new, get routers to spread their internet to the most inaccessible locations, and make good money ‘fixing’ retired equipment and selling it on the side.

By this time, much of my extended family had made the crossing to America, and I was constantly being called upon for various favors by my cousins and uncles. Being introverted even by Slavic standards, I found this intolerable. When the company I worked for offered me a transfer to a more important location in a distant city, I jumped on the opportunity. There, I worked nights, doing more to keep the infrastructure of that ancient office building working than the superintendent ever did.

My new schedule left me little time for a social life: I slept days, worked evenings, and got off work in the morning. That was too much loneliness even for me. I began volunteering for the night shift at a local animal shelter and here, I think, is the perfect place to begin the story—though, really, it’s been going on for quite some time. Sorry. As I said, I’m no writer. I’ll try to do better as I go.

On the night it all began, I was regarding Mark Fluffalo. Mark—if that’s not overly familiar of me—was an exceptionally hairy Chow Chow dog, one of many I was charged with watching and tending to as part of my duties. Unfortunately for him, he had contracted a stomach infection. In addition to causing him a great deal of pain, it was slowly ending his life. Our veterinary technician, Julius Duchamp, had penciled him in to be put down that evening.

Julius was a good guy. He didn’t want to kill a perfectly lovable dog, but our perpetually underfunded organization couldn’t justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on an operation for a dog that might not even be adopted. And who, in this economy, could afford to adopt a dog with such an exorbitant price tag?

That left it up to me. I don’t know how my powers work, exactly, even now. As far as I can tell, the ownership proviso works along the same lines as how a vampire might be compelled to respect guest rights and not enter a home unless invited. What makes a home a home? Why can a simple gesture from a homeowner allow a vampire in when otherwise he might as well be bound in steel? Who knows—perhaps it’s all psychosomatic. But, as an employee of the pound, the dog technically belonged to me, and that was enough for me to upgrade little Mark Fluffalo.

This is what makes that night such a good beginning. You get to see how my power works right off the bat.

First off, the things that I can upgrade have a slight aura to them. They don’t shine or glow or turn gold or anything. My eye is simply drawn to them. It’s like, believe it or not, how an important object or character might be highlighted in a video game. (I surely don’t have to specify that part of my normal boyish upbringing was playing a great deal of video games.)

Now, I focused my attention on Mark. A menu jumped into being, like an RPG character sheet in Augmented Reality. Reflexively, I looked around. The ‘character sheet’ had shot into existence with a little chime and a flash of light, but not only was no one there with me on the night shift, but no one could see my character sheets. The most I got was some odd looks when I manipulated the sheets like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. I tried not do that in public. With a little effort, I could zip and scroll and flip through the pages with no more exertion than the blink of an eye.

The front page of the character sheet listed Mark’s vital statistics, complete with a picture of him. It was much the same information you might find if you were trying to adopt Mark. With a few gestures of my hand, I ran through Mark’s skills and attributes. I could make him better at digging, give him a more sensitive nose, even a louder bark. But I couldn’t just go turning every canine into Krypto the Superdog. Every fix and every upgrade cost points. I only had a thousand points to spend every day. They didn’t roll over. At midnight, the counter went back up to 1000.

Usually, in the course of my job, I would spend a couple hundred points on fixing glitches and bugs, which had earned me a lucrative reputation as a miracle worker. When I had points left over and nothing to spend them on, I would try to use them at the shelter, but only on essentials. As amusing as it might be to see what maxing out Mark’s ‘marking’ skill would do, it had been a hectic day in the office. I’d had to get the network back up and running after some genius had downloaded a virus. That had left me with only three hundred points.

Fortunately, all it would cost to fix Mark up was two hundred and eighty. I found his ailment, his ‘debuff’ if you will, on the relevant page. It was highlighted in red to underscore how critical it was. I selected the debuff, which flashed on and off as if asking for confirmation. Focusing my will again, I put the change through.

Mark Fluffalo was pretty doped up from the shot that Julius had given him to make him comfortable until his execution date, but even so, the relief was immediate. He got up all wobbly and trotted around his cage as if in shock that his pain had been relieved. I reached in to give him some celebratory pats. He basked in the attention before conking out again.

Taking a page from a nearby clipboard, I wrote down that during my shift, Mark had been in high spirits and showed no signs of pain and could Julius please check again that a trip down the Green Mile was really necessary for him? I ripped the paper off and fixed it to Mark’s information on his cage. In the morning, Julius would double-check his findings, discover that Mark had made a miraculous recovery, and give the dog a second chance to get adopted, living the good life as the family dog.

I’d done it so often that I was pretty sure Julius hated me now. Not that he knew about my power—no one knew—but I’d given so many dogs a reprieve from the needle that he must’ve looked like some doggy serial killer. But then, how mad could someone be over a sick dog pulling through and getting to live?

Well, that was it for me. I’d gotten off work at 5 AM, come into the shelter at five-thirty, and had the place to myself for two glorious hours. I was a reader and I could read as well at the shelter as anywhere else. Now, at seven-thirty, I packed it in as the morning shift showed up. It was winter, and the sun wouldn’t rise until nearly nine. That was fine by me. Seeing the big yellow ball would just do bad things to my circadian rhythm. I could make it to my apartment and back to bed before then; the blacked out windows would let me believe I was sleeping in accordance with natural law.

Like I said, it was dark out. The little pseudo-suburban shopping center where the shelter was located was mostly deserted, with many businesses closed or outright shuttered like missing teeth in a boxer’s smile. I walked out to my car under the haze of a glitching streetlight—not my property so there was nothing I could do to fix it. I drove a Honda Civic. I couldn’t upgrade it into a Mercedes-Benz and I couldn’t afford a Mercedes-Benz in the first place, but the Civic was so reliable that I virtually never had to spent points on it. I tried to minimize that, keep my points around two hundred, four hundred in case of emergency. But like I said, that day had been hectic. And predators had a way of ferreting out weakness.

One moment my car was there in the glow of the streetlight like an artifact in an Indiana Jones movie, just waiting to carry me away. The light blinked out. Came back a second later and vampires were lazing all over it like crows on a power line.

Here’s where I have to explain the vampires. This might’ve been a better place to start.