part 3: levitation, telekinesis, pyrokinesis

One more thing about the superpowers is that it was like deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) —— no two persons can exercise the exact same capability, everyone from the same superpower Gang practises their power to various degrees and magnitudes; but they do share a main “genetic trait.” 

The top three most common superpowers were levitation (69.9%), telekinesis (22.8%) and pyrokinesis (6.6%), leaving another 0.7% with more rare “skills”. Actually, it was so normal to have a superpower that not having one was also considered as a superpower…these people’s slogan was, appropriately: “our superpower lies therein, that we are human beings”. They accounted for 0.17% of the population and that leaves us with the remaining 0.53% who had rarer skills^{1 2}. 

In our Perfect Germany with exactly 80 million inhabitants at all times, that were still 424 000 people with other superhuman potentials. If all of these people chose to live together, that could be our Perfect Germany’s sixteenth most populous city³. 

These statistics could only serve as a general reference, since we cannot expect that everyone registered their powers on superkraftkodex.de (because of everyone’s right to their data privacy⁴). We can however safely assume that most people signed up for an account and unconfirmed sources even claimed that there were more users on SKK⁵ than on the Corona-Warn-App⁶ during the coronavirus pandemic. I guess we all now know what would spark more fear amongst the Germans. 

Some people believed that it just proved that many people do not trust the government, as SKK was open source and crowdfunded. So we have a paradox of Germans who have more faith in ordinary Germans and not trusting Germans who are jurisdictional. What is the point? You all share the same passport⁷. 

Back to our main topic of today, the major superpowers. More than half of the people could levitate, but we all know what would happen when too many people are involved —— dramas. There were two main Gangs for the Levitators, and more sub-Gangs between them. One that honoured Dua Lipa’s Levitating as their anthem, and those who were very very not in favour of it. Sub-Gangs included things like: being able to only move vertically and horizontally (strictly not diagonally), shifting speeds of above 37km/h (it went up to 211km/h), ability to reach a certain altitude (about 10000km, but some lost their lives attempting it because they forgot to wear a compression suit and bring an oxygen tank), etc. They were so prominent that they had their own dedicated quiz on SKK! The quiz was called: “Which specific-specific Levitator are you?” I tried to follow the developments as closely as I could. Someone even started drawing a tree map but in the end, only professional taxonomists could keep up with the Levitators. I was but just a humble worker at a Kolinski’s. 

The second major superpower was telekinesis, which was quite unsettling at the beginning for the self-proclaimed “Psychos” (because another word for telekinesis is psychokinesis). Some car crashes happened in traffic jams when the Psychos hoped that the vehicles would move, and then they did. Oops. Some perverts tried to undress their targets, but thankfully physical intervention almost always proved to be strong enough to deter the psychic power. Some Psychos could manoeuvre objects up to 41kg with the power of their mind, but they were outliers. 

There were a lot of mischievous actions initially, especially by slightly diabolical people. In an effort to curb these sometimes borderline not-so-legal activities, the government teamed up with SKK to start issuing official superpower certificates to the citizens. Standardised tests were even developed to properly categorise the superpower, it was all very rigorous and proper —— something the Germans excel at. One of my coworkers who was a Psycho had this on her Superkraftkarte⁸: 

Of course, it was voluntary to get a Superkraftkarte but there were incentives if you decided to get your skill notarised. Some big corporations offered benefits to Superkraftkarte holders; for example, at Kolinski’s, you were entitled to a 20% discount on everything for a month if you presented your Superkraftkarte at the checkout. 

Pyrokinesis is the ability to start and control fires, a very dangerous superpower that many people were cursed with. Only frequent campers were delighted to be able to start a campfire instantly. As for criminals who were committing arson, it did not take long for the authorities to crack the cases too, because i)of the Superkraftkarten ii)after eliminating people with other superpowers, who remained must be the culprit. Some were so frustrated that they actually declared their superpower as “no superpower.”

1. please also note that the numbers used in this paragraph are all in decimals, not base-40 ↩︎
2. unless specifically stated, all numbers are normal numbers ↩︎
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Germany_by_population ↩︎
4. one of Germany’s favourite words: Datenschutz  ↩︎
5. Superkraftkodex or superpower codex ↩︎
6. contact tracing app made in Germany ↩︎
7. this extends to all countries ↩︎
8. since SKK was already in use, people started calling it Superkarte  ↩︎

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to be continued…