Aveya | Bruce
That definitely sounds like a multiverse slippage problem. It must be weird having to deal with it in the macroverse and not just theoretically. Does he still seem like your colleague, though, and not a whole different person?
A superpower? Yeah, definitely not. For one thing I can't deal with all the pre-Lorentzen stuff here about 'powers' and 'magic.' It's all explicable. Maybe there are things we can't yet explain with the science we have now, or things that rely on the core constants and laws of physics being a bit different in the next universe over. But the limits of human knowledge aren't the limits of reality.
And now I'm sounding like my great-grandfather. Sorry. But I can't control the probability flash thing, not well. Remember I said I stopped school at twelve? It was because I got accepted into a Tradelines apprenticeship program - aboard a spaceship that used L-space tunnelling to visit faraway alien worlds. Of course I went. It was such an incredible opportunity.
Turns out they didn't really think training up smart kids was the best way to man the ships. They conducted L-space experiments on us. I don't know what they were trying to do, but I ended up with the hallucinations. It was two years before I got out, and back on Nammu I was a mess and didn't know anymore which things I was seeing were real and which weren't.
My great-grandfather helped. He didn't know anything more about it than I did but he tried to get me to focus and collapse it all down, or be intentional about the possibilities I was seeing. Sometimes it worked. I even helped a few people, warned them about probable outcomes they wouldn't have thought of. But it was still disruptive. I couldn't get a job doing anything other than routine robotics assembly.
Then I started getting flashes of a terrible future. Civilisation-destroying. And nobody would listen to my warnings, because I'd told everyone I just had space sickness so I wouldn't get picked up by Amitsec or another security company and experimented on more. They didn't believe me, disaster happened anyway, and now I'm here.
If superpowers were a real thing I'd be so angry with whoever gave me such a terrible one, you know? But I'm not a kid anymore so I've got to figure out something to do. Which is why I asked you.