Life had made Alex a strange trade, one where he had both gained and lost. The thick towel Alex was gripping tore in half; he hadn’t realised that the pressure had been building within him.

His rehabilitation, if you could call it that, was complete. Two years ago on a clandestine search and rescue mission in northern Chechnya, Alex Hunter had been ambushed and shot in the head—a trauma that should have killed him. He had been in a death-like coma for two weeks and when he had emerged from hospital after another month he was different, somehow altered. The bullet was lodged deep within his cerebellum in the junction between his hypothalamus and thalamus, a position that made removal more manslaughter than surgery. However, instead of causing irreparable damage as it should have done, it had ignited a storm of both physical and mental changes that had astounded his doctors.

Alex remembered them trying to explain what had happened to him and their assumptions when some of his abilities had started to emerge. Even among the gathered specialists in his room there was debate on how the human midbrain functioned. Some argued that humans make use of less than half of their total brain functions, with the other significant portion locked away for evolution to make use of when environmental or chronological factors dictate they are ready. Others were just as adamant that the unused portions were an evolutionary remnant of no more use than the appendix or tonsils.

What the bullet had done was force a significant re-routing of blood to his midbrain, the area largely responsible for selecting, mapping and cataloguing information. Alex had also been told that it was the primary powerhouse of endocrine functions, where control of pain, adrenaline and natural steroids are monitored and distributed. What had disturbed Alex the most was that the midbrain was the part of the human brain that contained the largest areas with an “unknown uses” classification. The flush of extra blood into these areas of his brain triggered massive electrical activity as a new engine room powered up and switched on, waking new or long dormant abilities.

Alex’s agility, speed, strength and mental acuity had increased off the scale, and now in high intensity activities, the world around him seemed to slow to a crawl as he out-thought or out-moved reality. His doctors had been left in amazement that he could complete agility or strength tests at a speed that could sometimes only be further analysed with reduced motion camera equipment. It wasn’t all good news though; Alex had been left with bouts of rage that were sometimes barely controllable. During these outbursts his strength and speed peaked. To date he had been able to channel that aggression back into his exercises—but God help those around him if ever that control slipped.