For just slightly under zero-point-three milliseconds, Thomas Pilgrim was a superhero. Of course, that’s not nearly enough time for a human being to become aware of such mutations—let alone learn how to harness them—and so his gifts went completely and entirely unused. The tragedy being that, with those super-powers, not only could he have spared his own life, he could have saved all of humanity.

            Zero-point-three milliseconds, or just shy of it, was exactly the amount of time between when the bomb’s initial gamma rays first cut through Thomas’ body and when the subsequent fireball disintegrated his physical form. In the first one-hundredth of that zero-point-three milliseconds, radiation created by nuclear fission inside the blast knocked particles in his genetic code loose. Free radicals. Those free radicals mutated his DNA, and in so doing imbued him with abilities that could only be described as super-human—the things of comic book heroes.

            There had been no warning. More precisely, Thomas had been unaware of the many warnings that had been sent out through interruptions on radio frequencies and television broadcasts across the United States. His ignorance was due to the fact that he had been on a road trip at the time, and when he was on a road trip, he only listened to one thing—a cassette tape of the self-titled debut album by the Eagles. At the time of the blast, Thomas had been pulled over at a scenic vista on the way to Sonoma, just north of San Francisco, too far to hear the city’s air raid sirens blare, taking in what would have been an otherwise lovely sunset. This world being short no sense of irony, the cassette had just started playing one of his favorite easy-listening tunes: track nine, Peaceful Easy Feeling.

            This is not to say that the cataclysmic event had been completely unanticipated either. Most folks in the world had hoped that the doomsday clock would remain in its precarious state, one-minute-to-midnight, until cooler heads prevailed. Humans are tireless optimists at their core. But such is the inevitability of two men—grown-up children, really—heads of state with nuclear armaments at their disposals, whose proverbial dick measuring could end in no other conclusion than one of them eventually whipping it out.

            As with many a super-hero story, Thomas Pilgrim was, prior to his mutation, a simple cog in the wheel of life. He had been a claims adjuster for one of the big Bay-Area insurance companies. He lived modestly across the bridge in Oakland, in a small one-bedroom apartment that he shared with his girlfriend Rhonda and her three cats. Thomas was allergic to cats. There was Pickle, some kind of short-haired tabby; Max, a medium-haired black cat; and Christmas, a long-haired Siamese whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to shed.

            Christmas had learned how to open the drawers of their dresser and had taken to napping among Thomas’ sweaters. He had a sneaking suspicion that the cat did so vindictively, knowing full well the effect it had on his allergies. Indeed, had he been able to harness one of his newly acquired super-powers, he would have seen that his suspicions were not without merit.

            It was at the end of Q2 that he’d won the now-dubious prize. In an effort to boost morale, the insurance company raffled off several prizes at the end of each financial term. A testament to the sheer enormity of the conglomerate, it had been years since an adjuster had won anything—perhaps never during Thomas’ tenure there, which was going on twelve years. He and Rhonda fancied themselves amateur wine connoisseurs; they were quite fond of a weekly event in which people would go to a rented art space and paint still-lifes and drink wine. Paint-and-Sip Night, the promotional materials called it. So when a trip to Sonoma—wine country—came up in the company raffle, Thomas had decided to finally throw his name in the hat.

            There had been a bit of a hullaballoo over his victory. Though Thomas had been quite sure that he’d won, his less-than-stellar handwriting had caused a mix-up in the awarding process. They’d announced the winner to be Thomas Pickrum of the adjustment department. It was a simple clerical error. But when he went up to HR on the twenty-fourth floor to claim his prize, they had insisted that he was not in fact the winner, despite his many assurances that no such person existed in his department, and that, if there had been someone so similarly named, he would surely have made a point of meeting that person for a bit of light chitchat. It took almost two weeks for them to sort the whole thing out.

            When the weekend of the Sonoma trip finally arrived—the prize: hotel reservations and a complimentary tasting for two at a nearby vineyard—Rhonda expressed concern about how the cats would feel about the two of them just running off like that, and she had decided that it was better if she just stayed home. She encouraged him to go without her, and after a few unsuccessful attempts at persuasion on his part, he gave in. He was disappointed, sure, but also determined not to let a rare win go uncelebrated. And once he was out of the city, the windows of his eight-year-old Corolla rolled all the way down, the Eagles playing loud, he could almost have forgotten the dread he felt for having to awkwardly explain at the wine tasting that his plus-one would not be joining him.

            Somewhere just north of San Rafael, Thomas had decided to stop off for a candy bar. He was the type of person who rarely indulged in such things, but made a point to “live a little” whenever he was on the road. It was just about sunset when he pulled into the gravel rest area. The fuzzy grey interior of the Corolla had begun to itch his skin, so he hopped out and stood in front of the vending machines, weighing his options. After making his choice, he leaned against the side of the car, engine still idling, as he unwrapped his chocolate-and-nougat treat.

            The thing about unhinged despots is this: at times they have the tendency to bark a bit louder than their bite. That is to say, in this particular foreign dictator’s rush for status as a world nuclear power, his scientists had not yet perfected the whole thing. Still, he was hardly going to let the Americans know that his country wasn’t ready to duel with weapons of mass destruction, so he maintained publicly that their bomb was ready.  

            After months of name-calling and veiled threats, the dictator decided that enough was enough—and fired. Their intended target was San Francisco, a bastion of western liberalism—a target that was equally ideal as a symbol of American freedoms as it was a tactically suitable one in its proximity. However, in the dictator’s haste and hubris, he underestimated just how unready their bomb was for flight. And so, due to a small clerical error, the warhead landed north of San Francisco, somewhere along the route to Sonoma, not far from a gravel rest stop where Thomas Pilgrim stood listening to the Eagles and eating a candy bar.

            Out of pure coincidence, Thomas’ idle stare just happened to be in the very direction of the impact. As such, he saw the initial flash when the nuke exploded. It was in that flash, that shattering explosion of light, that the radiation which would mutate his genetic code was carried. In that instant, his cells bubbled and quaked, the very electrons of his DNA popping and spinning off in extraordinary trajectories, re-forming their own molecular structures as they gravitated toward different nuclei. In the next moment, one-hundredth of zero-point-three milliseconds later, they reconstituted, and the resulting mutations granted Thomas powers that people only dreamed of in the panels of super-hero fiction.

            And yet, Thomas Pilgrim remained tragically unaware. In his brain, the synapses that fired were still trying to register the flash that his eyes had just transmitted, to place its horrific implications among the set of news headlines it had stored in his short-term memory.

            His brain was too busy cross-referencing the flash with that morning’s story about how the dictator had reacted to the President’s latest provocation with an eerie, unprecedented silence.
            It was recalling an op-ed piece he’d read about how the dictator couldn’t be bullied into submission, that the childish egos of both leaders might never allow for a peaceful resolution to the heated conflict over nuclear armament.

            It was recalling spectacular footage he’d seen in his youth of atomic weapons tests, whose identical flashes had been followed by terrible fireballs that vaporized buildings in an instant, that melted steel objects together, that turned humans into dust.

            It was recalling a film he’d seen about Japanese families, the ones who had survived the bomb over Hiroshima. It was recalling how many people considered them unlucky to have survived, due to the horrible radiation poisoning they endured in the aftermath.

            Thomas’ mind did not have time to register the changes that his body had just undergone. To his brain’s credit, its synapses were quick to eject messages it had previously been transmitting that now seemed unimportant. Messages like—I’ve got to say, I sure do know how to pick a candy bar. I mean, there were at least ten different brands of candy bars in that machine. Five of them were even the same composition: chocolate, caramel, nuts, nougat. But this is definitely the superior candy bar. The ideal ratio and positioning of confectionery ingredients.

            It ejected messages like—God, I just know the front desk clerk is going to ask if I need a second room key. Why do they always need to ask that? As if I wouldn’t just request a second key if there was someone else staying with me. Not that it’s much better when they assume and give you the two keys anyway. That’s a subtle insult from the concierge, isn’t it? Because let’s be honest, they think someone like me is staying alone. Of course, you can’t just blurt out that you have a girlfriend, like some kind of idiot. Why would you say that, out of nowhere, if you actually had one?

            His brain was clearing all pathways to deal with the flash that his eyes had just seen. It was estimating the approximate distance from the flash to his location. It was measuring the relative luminosity of the flash. It was compiling lists of items that caused flashes of that nature. A camera. A nearby lightning strike. A bulb that burned out just as the switch on the wall was flipped on. An explosion.

            It had no time for thoughts, like—Did Rhonda know that I was allergic to cats when she moved in? She always says that I never do anything for her, but I let that damn cat sleep in my turtlenecks every night. Why didn’t she want to come with me this weekend? This trip was supposed to be for ‘us’. Does she think I don’t care about her anymore? God, when was the last time I told her how I feel about her? What if she left me, and I never had another chance?

            But even with these thoughts gone, his brain was not ready to process the confusing messages it was receiving from his body. There was a message from his feet, telling his brain that they could move faster than before—faster than his brain had previously thought possible. There was a message from his biceps and his hands, telling his brain that he could bend steel. His legs, too, had a message: its muscles could recoil and spring forward with immeasurable force, allowing him to thrust himself over great distances. And his bones, they agreed, saying they were stronger and could withstand the impact of these incredible launches and landings.

            Even his brain itself was becoming subconsciously aware of its own mutation. It was able to sense microscopic particles in the air now. Electromagnetic forces. More than just that awareness, it could manipulate these energies, sending messages nearly instantaneously around the world. In some cases, it could even use those energies to manipulate the brainwaves of other living beings, to change their decisions.

            But the immediate instinct of his brain, the fight or flight response, told itself that these were matters to be concerned with later, that the flash was of preeminent importance. Protect the body, it told itself.

            So we are left to wonder: what would Thomas Pilgrim—now-former insurance claim adjuster, extraordinary candy bar chooser, Corolla driver, cat owner, super-human being—have done if he had realized his newfound powers within that zero-point-three milliseconds between the flash that gave him power and the fireball that took away his life?

            Would he have used his super-speed to run far from the blast radius? To find safety miles out of reach of the nuke’s residual, poisoning radiation? He could have fled to Toronto, a noncoastal city in a neutral country, one that he had always wanted to visit. He would have marveled at Toronto’s space needle, and he would have wondered if that’s what they called it—like the one he’d been to see in Seattle when he was a kid. He could have used his powers to take his Corolla with him. His soon-to-be-demolished Corolla, his Corolla that was just two payments away from being his, loan-free. In the Corolla, he could have taken a weekend trip from Toronto to see Niagara Falls. His father had once told him about a man who had gone over the falls in a wooden barrel, and he would have stood, arms rested safely on the railing, imagining that someone could probably survive such a feat if they had his powers.

            Would he have used his super-strength to bend steel and lead, to create a fall-out shelter for the young family that was parked nearby at the gravel rest stop? There were three of them. The father, a handsome, tall man in his early thirties, had nodded approvingly at Thomas’ candy bar selection. His wife had long, auburn hair, and her eyes were nestled between crow’s feet, and they squinted kindly when she smiled at him. Their daughter, just five years old, clutched a well-loved copy of a favorite book, Blueberries for Sal, which she’d received on her birthday and read every day since. Would he give the child the rest of his candy bar, reassure her that everything would be alright, let her know that he was unaffected by the radiation and that he would return with provisions for them to survive until the air was safe again?

            Would he have used his powers of telepathy to communicate with the President? Would he have made an impassioned plea for patience and restraint? If Pilgrim had realized his own abilities in that zero-point-three milliseconds, he could have reminded the President that mutually assured destruction was not the answer to what was really no more than a series of personal insults. He could have reminded the President that the power of his office was not just for making war, that he was responsible for the safety of his fellow citizens, that retribution would come at the cost of human lives and likely all of civilization. He could have used his powers to manipulate the pathways of the two heads-of-state’s synapses, channeling their actions through centers of the brain that produced empathy and worked in logic and reason.
            Could he have frozen the world completely in that moment? Could he have drawn back the tide of time and pushed the bomb out to sea? Would he have done this, creating a paradox by stopping the blast that gave him the power to stop the blast, in order to save all of humanity—and in so doing have all traces of his life wiped from the universe, becoming nothing but a faint echo of a memory—a recollection of something that had no longer ever existed? And if he had done this, would it have changed anything?

            Or would he have, with the omniscience of his newfound super-herodom, reflected on the smallness of human life in the great scale of the cosmos, and simply let the humans blink away their own existence?

            Maybe he would have just been content in the most basic of his powerful mutations; he was, most decidedly, for zero-point-three milliseconds, no longer allergic to cats.

            Sadly, Thomas was unable to do any of these things. Zero-point-three milliseconds is not enough time for a human being to realize their own mutation, to recognize their own newfound super-powers. And so the fireball came and finished him off, and there was nothing left of Thomas Pilgrim but free radicals scattered along the road to Sonoma.

            At the very moment the bomb went off, in a small one-bedroom apartment in Oakland, California, the hair on a Siamese cat’s back stood straight up—alert. As the pulse of a small electric shock passed from the carpet and through the cat, into the hand of the woman stroking the cat’s head, through the woman’s arm and into the middle of her back, up her spinal column causing her to shiver, and finally passing along the synapses of her brain—a message was transmitted. It was simple, and it was clear.

            I love you.