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Meredith Rodney McKay was eight years old the night he almost killed his father. Some might argue it was a spur of the moment decision, an act of raw desperation triggered by circumstances a child so young should never have been exposed to, with consequences they could not be expected to understand.
But for Meredith, every thought was an eternity. He saw things that everyone missed, calculated parameters – made projections – wrote equations in his head. All in the blink of an eye. Any serious action he took was a series of chess moves calculated within the boundaries of a five dimensional map. He was surprised it had taken him so long to realize no one else could do this, but had decided it was the unfortunate consequence of a still-forming brain. Hope was a byproduct of immaturity and he learned to burn that out of him on the day he decided his father needed to go away.
It wasn’t concern for himself that drove his actions. At least, it wasn’t foremost in his mind at the time. He knew himself to be a selfish being, as eight-year-olds were, though he refused to compare himself with the other children who tormented him on the playground. They learned to leave him alone soon enough, but his father never heeded warnings, never saw them at all. His father only hungered, and had decided from the beginning his children only existed for him to consume.
Meredith had visited the hospital nine times by the time he was eight. He was prone to accidents, his mother told the doctors and nurses, who were too stupid or uncaring to investigate further. Two of those times had been allergy-related, one had truly been an accident. The others were marks left by a man who kicked small things out of his way, even when they pressed themselves into corners and behind furniture.
As brilliant as Meredith McKay was, even at the age of eight, he had not yet realized all families were not the same. Living with monsters was simply what you did, until you were old enough to plot your escape, and strong enough to carry it out. Prodigious intellect aside, being under four feet tall with only a jar of coins hidden under his bed, left him at a distinct disadvantage. So he endured, biding his time and hoarding his hiding places, until the day Jeannie came home from the hospital, wrapped carelessly in a thin blanket, tossed into the crib that had been shoved into his room.
She was ugly for those first few days. Meredith didn’t mind this, as he had long ago figured out outward appearance was no predictor of behaviour. His father was considered quite handsome, with bright blue eyes, and symmetrical features. Both women and men fawned over him, vying for his attention. Meredith was pretty sure he gave it freely, as he was seldom home before ten most nights.
His mother never said anything about it, curled up in her chair with a cocktail in one hand and a book in the other. Meredith had been making her drinks since he was six. He liked crafting them, it was a challenge to get the ratio of alcohol, to mixer, to ice just right. His mother would smile at him absently and tousle his hair when be brought her the glass. She was a quiet drunk, slipping further away with every sip. Her inattention gave him the freedom to do whatever he liked in the evenings so Meredith told himself he didn’t mind.
Meredith accepted Jeannie’s intrusion as another thing that happened to you when you were this age, and he learned to feed, and change, and bathe and rock her during the long nights alone in their room because no one else did. Rodney decided he was glad his parents paid so little attention to Jeannie’s cries, since he was fairly certain neither one of them would have liked the result if an adult had bothered to answer her calls.
But while Meredith Rodney McKay could intuitively grasp particle physics, mix a mean gin and tonic, or take apart a radio and put it back together improving its efficiency by a factor of ten in under fifteen minutes, even he could not control the wails of a teething infant in the middle of the night. When his father appeared in the door with a scream of his own, heading for the crib, all Meredith could do was latch onto his leg and bite down hard. The last thing he saw before he hit the wall was the flash of his mother’s pink nightgown as she rushed past her husband and for once in her life scooped up the baby and headed out the door.
When Meredith awoke the room was quiet again. Jeannie lay in her crib, mouthing on her teething ring, thankfully silent for the moment. Meredith was crumpled on the floor, a thread-bare blanket flung over the top of him. He ached all over, but taking a mental inventory, he decided he’d been lucky this time. Nothing was broken, just sore and bruised. He slowly climbed to his feet and went to his desk, pocketing the small knife he slipped from the topmost drawer. Creeping down the hallway towards the kitchen, he heard the murmer of his mother’s voice, apologizing for the disturbance of her husband’s rest, begging him to understand, swearing to do better, to keep the children in line. His father breathed an angry rumble and the heavy smack of an unforgiving hand connecting with flesh, led to a strangled sob.
Meredith slipped out the front door, standing at the edge of the concrete steps that led down off the porch. His father’s dark blue Buick Riviera stood proudly at the end of their driveway, gleaming in the moonlight. His father took great care of his car, spending hours washing and waxing her, vacuuming the interior, wiping away every speck of dust from windows and door handles. Everyone who rode with him knew to make sure to never leave marks on the ulphostery, to keep yourself tightly contained, to barely breathe, until released from the Buick’s spotless confines.
Meredith crept underneath and lay on his back, looking up at the mess of machinery and wiring. Then he rolled to his side and looked at the tires. He twirled the knife in his fingers, not even hissing when he knicked his tender skin, smearing the blood on the edge of the blade. He closed his eyes and watched the equations form behind his eyelids. Velocity, pressure, heat, surface tension and failure all circled around each other in his brain until he could see the structure of the problem clearly, know its purity and inevitably. Nodding his head once, he made vee shaped cuts in two precise spots within the rubber of the front tires, crawled out from beneath the car, and went back to bed. He slept deeply until morning.
At nine years old Meredith Rodney McKay built a nuclear bomb that was theoritically capable of taking a target three times the size of any design that had currently existed, with a targeting capability that could be narrowed down to the milimeter. It was a non-working model of course, his jar of coins not being quite enough to buy a cache of plutonium. He was pretty sure he could have scored himself some anyway, if he only plied himself hard enough to the problem, but there was no need to waste his brainpower on that. His goal was simply to achieve notice, and of course it worked just as he had planned.
When the Agency that held no offical designation came for him, he was ready with his demands. Yes, of course, he understood what he had done, did they think building the world’s strongest nuclear bomb was a fluke? Yes, of course, he could build a stronger one, it wasn’t his fault he was bounded by a nine year old’s limited resources. No, of course, he didn’t care if they took him away, did they think he enjoyed living in a backwater Canadian town that only got two channels on the television and whose claim to fame was the birth of a two headed calf at the Henderson Farm that only lived for two weeks?
He would go quietly, and happily, and only complain if everyone was being a moron, and give them what they wanted if they did a few things for him. The suits were satisfied, patting themselves on the back at how easy it was to remake these child prodigies into weapons, bundled him onto their helicopter, and left Canada far behind.
To their credit, the Agency kept up their end of the bargain as they saw little reason not to. It kept their acquisition happy, or at least grudgingly accepting, and that made their own lives a little easier. The mother went to rehab and lost all custodial rights, the baby was bundled off to a happy couple who wanted nothing more than a little girl to hold and cherish and spend time with, and a trust was set up to pay the expenses for the father’s care in a start of the art facility that catered to people who blew their minds out in a car and lived the rest of their lives in a persisting vegetative state.
The director of the Agency shrugged and went back to their plans to acquire an 11-year-old Chinese girl who was rumored to have built the prototype of a working ray gun mounted to the head of robot dog, when informed a few days later that every trace of a “Meredith” McKay in every database on the planet had somehow been replaced with the name “Rodney”. They didn’t care what the little brat chose to call himself, as long as he did what they told him to.
Rodney spent the majority of his days affiliated with this particular program doing what he wanted to, but most people he encountered were too much of a moron to understand the difference.
Years later, in a tiny narrow bed in an ancient outpost in another galaxy, encircled by strong muscular arms, tickled by strands of untamed hair, he would relate the story of the car, and his father, and that long ago night for the first time out loud. The man behind him would tighten his hold, anger merging into a fierce protectiveness, a living thing that sparked and shone and encircled them both. “Good”, he would whisper, into the sweaty skin at the nape of Rodney’s neck, “You did good.”
And for the first time in a very long time, Rodney would feel a tension he didn’t know he had held - in his joints, in his muscles, in every one of his cells - sliding away, and he would breathe out a word he had forgotten existed.