27: Sparks, Terra-86

Mirai, Mirai #27. Serial fiction: multiverse family drama.

Feb 02, 2026

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Mirai, Mirai is a bite-sized speculative serial drama, posting weekly. This time, Lady Radiance and her friends must fend off the attacks of multiversal megalomaniac Mheksos the Mighty—with the help of their children from alternate futures far worse than their own.

Welcome back to Terra-32B! A general recap for those who’ve been reading live:

Previously, Christa discovered that The Matrix has had no qualms about bending the truth to get his allies’ cooperation, and that his motivations are far less selfless than she first assumed. She’s also learned that Mheksos—whom The Matrix has speculated to be his own grandson from the even more distant future—is intent on killing her brother, her future nephew, or both, allegedly in order to avert a terrible war in his own time. Lord Hades is helping her out under a truce, but with secret instructions from his dark Master to act as a spy. And meanwhile, Marissa’s noticed that her alternate selves seem to be, shall we say, morally challenged…and begun to worry that the true mastermind behind the plot to change the course of fate was not The Matrix, but her.

And now, some tragic backstory…

Terra-86, the home timeline of MM’s Cade Grimes (Ignis), is one of the closest timelines to Terra-32 that The Matrix found useful, next to his own. Rather than interacting peacefully with the Rigelian aliens during first contact in the late aughts, humanity’s efforts went so badly that war had been mutually declared by 2025. After orbital efforts to turn back the invaders failed, World War III became a ground war against shapeshifters whose silicon-based biology made them difficult to kill by ordinary methods. Ignis has already mentioned that Chained Lightning was killed fighting the aliens, and that with his lava powers, he was also on the front lines; however, he has yet to use his powers against the Mhekanites, or to disclose anything else, including his own identity…

Terra-86, year 2029.
Pimmit Hills, Virginia.
23 years before The Matrix recruits Ignis.

The stairs down to the basement seemed to get longer in his memory. They had never bothered Cade at the time, but through his older self’s eyes, standing at the top made him dizzy. A small, dim square of green light wavered at their impossibly distant conclusion.

Maybe this was a dream, or more likely a nightmare. Maybe the memories themselves were failing him—one too many blows to the head, or too long chasing ghosts through the wreckage of places he’d used to know. Everything was tangled up in his mind; the smell from an uncleaned toaster oven would trigger (age seven, playing Snap with his mother, peanut-butter oatmeal burning in the pot) as quickly as that recollection melted into (age four, her asbestos embrace, smothering a molten rage he doesn’t understand yet). There was no remembering (age three, the transcendent joy that comes past in flashes as Mom spins him in her office chair and he screams laughing) without (age fifteen, her voice bubbling like evaporating nitrogen, explaining how a retrovirus overwrites its victim’s DNA cell by cell). Which was what had brought him here, all at once adolescent and uncertain again, his feet dragging behind him.

He didn’t want to go down there. He hadn’t then, and he didn’t now.

“Don’t just stand there with the door open, Sparky,” Mom yelled from somewhere behind the light.

Ignis closed it behind him and took the inevitable first step on the descent into madness.

(age nine, his towering father kneeling beside him on the pavement with complete and misplaced confidence in this scrawny boy, the effect just as vertiginous. ‘Take care of your mama,’ he says—but he’s the only one she listens to. What was Cade supposed to do when he didn’t come back?)

(age twenty-eight, an ex-girlfriend…which one? Her face distrusting behind a chain bolt, telling him he can’t come in. ‘You’re too dangerous.’ Does she think he doesn’t know?)

(nine again. He never could tell what was really behind Daddy’s small fond smile when the man would look over to Mom and say, ‘that kid’s yours all right.’ Which one of them was the smile for? And what was that supposed to mean?)

Back to the basement. This used to be his father’s space, but over the last six years it had become Mom’s private laboratory. If she wasn’t at work, she was almost always down here now. “Are we eating dinner?” Cade was asking.

“Eating what now?” Dr. Grimes pushed back the frayed sleeve of her lab coat to check her smartwatch. “Oh, man, I didn’t even—wait, I thought you had chess club today.”

“It’s Saturday, Mom.”

“Saturday,” she repeated, distracted already by picking at the damaged skin on her fingers. She’d been flash-freezing tissue samples with her bare hands again, the nitrogen as corrosive as the cold, hard anger that never really left her face anymore. On the bench behind her, he could see brittle gray slivers mounted on slides: flesh, or the closest thing the aliens had to it. They could give a powerful illusion of softness and warmth, but an illusion was all it was.

(age twenty. The figure’s hands are dissolving, two pale smudges melting into a steaming gray stream of liquid minerals. He couldn’t do that to a person—there’s too much carbon in a human being. Scorch them, scald them, burn them up—sure. When you’re tracking an enemy that hides among friends, eventually somebody’s going to stand too close to the fire. But he can’t melt people. This is a shifter, a centipede wearing a stolen face.

But tell that to his stupid shrieking monkey brain.)

Ignis had yet to fully appreciate that at the time.

“Come look at this,” his mother said abruptly. “I think I finally have the sequence worked out.”

She made him squint through various scopes at cells that looked like shattered mica, their spasming organelles trickling in confusion from one to the next. “I’ve been putting together a retrovirus, with a common Rigelian immunodeficiency virus as a base,” she said. “You took Bio last year, right?—so, yeah, a virus is a free-floating piece of genetic information that parasitizes living cells, and a retrovirus is a virus that specifically targets its victim’s DNA. It translates its own RNA into DNA and inserts it into the germline…”

“Permanently changing the genome of the host cell and its descendants, while forcing all of them to churn out copies of the virus.” He’d done very well in Bio, not that she had noticed. “But they’re prone to mutate, right?”

“Right. That’s why they’re the ideal bioweapon. Once a retrovirus is out in the wild, that’s it, you’ll never be able to fight every strain at once.” She paused, searching his expression. “Oh, you’re worried…no, no. It biologically can’t attack humans. I mean, the bad guys don’t even have DNA, they have something called mSNA. We’re just the carriers.”

“Oh,” Cade said, trusting that she was right. “So what’s it do?”

“It breaks their illusionary abilities. As the infection spreads through their system, they lose control over the shape they take on, until they’re completely unable to disguise themselves anymore,” Mom said. “’Course, by then they won’t have much of an immune system left, either. That’ll kill them if one of us doesn’t.”

(age twenty-three, boiling gravel in the palm of his hand, staring up into the blacked-out sky. He imagines the gray crystalline stalkers huddled around a table in their soulless starship, consulting their files, hissing among themselves: “What will frighten the Ig-nisss as much as it frightens us?”

The second Clarevoyante, Nicky’s sister, says they’re not telepathic; so they must have studied him. With everyone else, they use their mimicry for deception and confusion, taking on allies’ faces to infiltrate any human group they can. But him, he’s their Grendel. Their nightmare. The primeval alien horror they didn’t know they were digging up, who won’t go quietly back into the dark.

Once he starts to kill one of them, it’ll do anything to try to make him stop.)

Her hazel eyes had turned to iron as she reached up to stroke his cheek with the side of her frostbitten hand. “Did I ever tell you what they did to your father?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good.” She studied his face, softening just for a moment at the sight of the way he used to look. “I won’t let them get you, too.”

(Remembering his old face hurts worse at twenty-three than it will in later years. A lot of the damage has already been done now, his hardest hits taken early, when they first figured out whose son he was. He wasn’t prepared then to push past the shock when the half-melted creature in front of him became his mother, crying, or the limp form of a broken man.

But he kept going. Somebody has to fight them. And it’s the only thing that lets him imagine his father proud.)

His memory telescoped again, the room off-kilter. He was still in the basement with Mom, but she had an unmarked brown glass vial in her hand. Liquid sloshed inside as she held it up.

“How’re you going to test it?” Cade asked.

“Oh, so, this is an aerosolizer. Right now I have the virus suspended in an inert carrier solution, see? The most efficient method of administration is as a nasal spray.”

“I meant, uh…do you already have volunteers?”

“This has always been a one-woman project,” she said, mouth twitching towards a tired smile. “It only seems right to start with myself.”

He looked straight at her, knowing what his duty was. “Let me go first.”

His mother squeezed his hand. “No, it should be me. Besides, your powers might skew the results.”

They’d never realized she had any powers of her own. It should have been obvious, in retrospect, but she’d always just said that innovators stay lucky. Would it have made a difference if she’d known she was the perfect incubator for a plague that could attack humans, after all?

As angry as she was, would she have cared?

(age four, Mom’s arms tight around him as he howls and scratches to get free. Something is wrong, wrong, WRONG, and the only way to exorcize the feeling is to grab something else and destroy it. He wants everything to get out of his way. He wants to melt down the world— ‘I know,’ she says, ‘I know, baby. But you can’t.’)

(age sixteen, he’s holding her by the shoulders as she tries to push him off. ‘What did you do?’ he says. ‘People are dying, Mom, WHAT DID YOU DO?’

‘‘It’s a war,’ she spits at him, her fury like shards of ice. ‘Of course people are going to die! Get over it!’)

The world agreed with her, for a while. As long as the threat remained, and especially as they finally began to win, the casualties caused by Earth’s defenders seemed a small price to pay. For a while, it was all almost sustainable. Wars end, though, and the monsters are put back on the shelf…Ignis discovered soon enough that every war hero eventually becomes a war criminal. With that shift in judgement, the hammer fell: trials—containment measures—

Assassinations—

Somewhere outside his memories, a searing pain shot deep into the side of Ignis’ neck, shattering his recollections and jolting him awake.

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