I had terminal cancer. Two months to live - six, on chemotherapy. No surgery was possible.
My name was Steven Winters. I was not a rich man, I had no secret fortune to spend on rare chemicals or state of the art therapies to miraculously cure myself. I was not willing to die quietly. I was forced to turn to alternative treatments.
I found a theory that seemed interesting. in 1936, a psychiatrist named Wilhelm Reich believed he had found the cause of cancer in a mysterious energy he called orgone. This 'orgone' was a universal 'life energy' responsible for antientropic effects in nature, such as clouds, life, and the formation of galaxies.
Crazy, yeah? It gets better. His experiments led him to believe that all single-celled life could be divided in to life-destroying and life-promoting organisms. These life-destroying organisms, called T-bacilli, were found in high concentrations in cancer, and when injected in to healthy mice, caused inflamations and cancer. T-bacilli were caused by the dimishing of orgone levels in healthy cells. Death from cancer was caused by an overwhelming growth of T-baccilli.
I know, I know. It contradicts almost everything else in science, and it's coming from a psychiatrist who, himself, was later diagnosed as insane, and had his books burned by the government. He wasn't always crazy, he had a bit of breakdown in the early 1940's, that's when he had his strangest ideas.
He believed, now, that orgone was a type of primordial cosmic energy - perhaps not too unlike that wielded by the Skyturion, I'd guess, though he didn't live to see him. Orgone was supposedly blue, omnipresent, responsible for the weather, the color of the sky, gravity, the formation of galaxies, and the biological expressions of emotion and sexuality. In the 1940's, he built 'orgone accumulators' to concentrate ambient atmospheric orgone. Some of them were large enough for people to sit inside. They worked by using alternating layers of organic insulators and ferrous metals to channel the orgone. He thought that sitting inside such a box might provide a treatment for cancer and other illnesses.
He also thought he saw a UFO in Arizona, and that it flew on an orgone-engine.
Still. What did I have to lose? Building one of these boxes would cost me $2000, $3000 at most. Enough to live maybe a year more than I needed to.
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Cancer pain is like a knife that takes you right under the ribs and turns, very slowly. It comes out of nowhere, hard and fast. It doesn't go away for long. I was getting it once or twice a day, just like clockwork.
When I was building the box, the pain started to go away. I got excited, I started building it faster and faster. I could swore I felt the orgone building up, I saw blue, every sky looked more vivid. I stopped going out, and my family thought I had finally lost my mind to the cancer.
When the box was finished, and I stepped in, I proved them all wrong.
Instantly, for miles around, every cloud in the sky busted up. The sky above the accumulator glowed blue well in to the evening.
I didn't notice. I felt too good. Instantly I felt alive from my head to my toes, every breath an orgasm, every motion a lover's caress. I floated in the air, curled fetal, and my cancer boiled away like butter under a torch as my Zeta-Gene activated.
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Officially, Steven Winters is dead - suicide by explosive electrocution. Eventually, the accumulator ruptured under the strain, and exploded in a flash of blue light brighter than the noon-day sun.
I woke up miles away. My new powers were simple - I could draw orgone in, or push it out, and I could store a seemingly endless amount. Everything about my Primal powers were impossible, they violated not just the laws of physics but all human understanding of the nature of the universe. I still don't know if my power over orgone isn't just some mental trick I've used to hide the true nature of my powers from myself, but they work. Oh, how they work...
I can project blue bolts of concentrated orgone from by body, and where they strike, life blooms, thick mats of primeval protozoans erupt in being from local matter. I can fire black bolts of anti-orgone in order to draw more power in to my body, causing sudden eruptions of cancer. I can heal - I can soothe negative emotion, I can cure illness and disease. When I wear my armored accumulator suit, I can even fly, with a speed rivalling the fastest planes in the world and a maneuverability a hummingbird would envy, without any effort at all.
I'm Cloudbuster. I'm here to help.
