His parents mourned the loss of their unborn child for two days, until suddenly his mother felt him kicking inside her womb. Another trip to the doctor revealed that not only was he there, he was as healthy as can be. A couple of months later he was born, and after a few years of living in constant confusion, Max’s parents realized they’d given birth to a hyper-being. At first they thought he was simply a teleporter, but after taking him to see Dr. Elizabeth St. Pierre and her staff at New Hero Hospital in Seattle, it was discovered that he was jumping into other people’s beings, and that whenever he did so, his natural self disappeared. It was also discovered that he was not simply embodying the minds, bodies and spirits of people nearby; but he was jumping to different points on the space-time continuum. It was like Quantum Leap… on steroids.

As he grew, he learned to control the power, and by the time he was an adult, he was able to keep the ability in check. He rarely used it, actually preferred not to, for whenever he embodied another individual, their feelings, thoughts, emotions and physical sensations would stay with him, and flood into his mind from time to time. In some cases it was like nightmares. It was something he preferred not to deal with.

So, when he was approached by the heroic Captain Infinity, and asked to use his powers for a very dangerous mission, he was very reluctant to do so. The Captain explained to him what was at stake, which was quite literally everything. You see, Captain Infinity, along with hundreds of other hyper-beings, had migrated from a doomed alternate timeline called the Infiniverse. The destruction of the Infiniverse took place when that timeline collided with the Core Reality timeline. The resulting metaphysical explosion had caused the Core timeline to rupture, and break into pieces.

Max did not understand. Captain Infinity explained that time is like a straight track, and reality is the train that runs on that track. The explosion had caused the track to break off into pieces, which of course is a problem, because a train cannot run without a track. In other words, reality and existence was going to be derailed. The good news was, the pieces of the timeline (the future) were still out there, but they needed to be found, and then reconnected. Captain Infinity needed Max to “find the future”.

Max finally understood the gravity of the situation, but he did not believe he was the best individual for the job. Captain Infinity said that he would do it himself, but he’d been separated from his Infinity Sabre, and thus no longer possessed the ability to control time. Furthermore, there were only two other known time-travelers in existence. The first – Ilyana Rankova – was nowhere to be found; and the second, Cynthia Quantic, had presumably been destroyed with the Infiniverse. As far as they knew, Max was the only one who could complete the job. With no other options, he agreed to do whatever it took.

Captain Infinity immediately prepared him for his mission, and explained that the only reason they even had a chance at succeeding was that, despite her demise in the alternate timeline, Cynthia’s original chrono-anchor still existed in the present day. Captain Infinity had used his own chronokinetic aura to access the metaphysical object, and now he could give Max access to it, so that once he found the future, he could use the chrono-anchor to quite literally pull the pieces of the timeline back together, thus recreating “the track” on which reality could continue to move along. Captain Infinity had actually found that the track was broken in three places, which meant Max would have to jump a few times, and into a few people, to complete the job.

With limited time to complete the mission he would have to leave immediately, so he harnessed a portion Captain Infinity’s chronokinetic aura, accessed Cynthia’s chrono-anchor, bid the leader of the Infinity Force adieu, and vanished!

He awoke in the body of the six-year-old you see in the profile pic. His life as this child would be the key to setting the timeline back in order, but it was going to take a little longer than he expected, and it was going to be much harder, and more painful, then he could have ever thought….

It was somewhere in the early 23rd century – which wasn’t far from where he’d jumped from, – and little Max was living a peaceful life with his parents on the tenth floor in a block of flats in Brighton, Great Britain. He was very bright for his age, and excelled in his primary school classes. His mother, Clarice, was studying to become a pediatrician, and his father, Lear, worked as a school teacher, which meant he got to stay home with Max during the summers.

On those summer days, Lear would play games with him, and tell him all types of fantastical stories. On one particularly rainy day, they got to a story about flying men. This story intrigued the young boy like no other story before. He listened intently, and began to imagine it in his mind. He was so caught up in the visions dancing around his head, that he didn’t even realize his father had stood up, walked over to the window, and attempted to fly. “Attempted” being the operative word, for Lear fell 10 stories to his death! When the officials called Clarice to tell her what had happened, she immediately left the hospital, jumped in her car, and began speeding home. In her frantic drive, however, she failed to take the slick roads into consideration and, while driving across a bridge, lost control of her vehicle, crashed through the barrier, and went into the river below. By the time the car was retrieved, it was too late – she had drowned.

At the moment of his mother’s death, Max suddenly unleashed a psionic blast, which knocked all of the officers and officials off their feet. For the next two hours, anyone who tried to come near him was hit with a psionic blast. It was clear they were dealing with a hyper-being. Finally, Officer Hamen – a fellow psionic hyper-being – showed up. He was able to calm Max down, and get in close enough to sit down and speak with him. Officer Hamen spent the next five hours with the boy in his room, then came out to speak to his chief.

Hamen told his boss that the child was traumatized to an extreme extent, for he was well aware of the fact that his own psionic mind was responsible for the deaths of his parents. He was also mumbling something about “finding the future”. Hamen determined that there was only one person who could help him – her name was Francine Fray, but people in the know knew her as “Placebo”. She was a powerful psionic hyper-being, who governed a group home in New Orleans, for children who had all accidentally destroyed their own parents with their powers.

A few days later, Max and Hamen arrived at The Home – a large, Victorian-style facility, beautifully landscaped, and filled with hyper-powered young people. As Young Max stood in the foyer, Older Max from the past could feel that this place was central to the success of his mission. He immediately began to use his psionic abilities to probe the minds of everyone in the building, looking for clues and any info that could help him. However, for the first time since the powers manifested a week prior, there was something blocking his mind from probing the minds of others. He looked around frantically for the source of the blockage. And it wasn’t long before he found it…

It was Placebo. The tall, effervescent governess of The Home stood before him. Her face exuded tenderness as she exchanged pleasantries with her old friend, Officer Hamen. But Max could detect an explosive psionic force surging through her mind, and extending throughout the whole facility. By the time Hamen left, Max had correctly deduced that Placebo had the entire place under the control of her immensely powerful mind – every student, every counselor, every plant, every insect, every room, every brick, every plank of wood, every piece of steel, every single particle. She controlled everything. She knew everything.

She also knew that Max was there for a specific reason, but in order to accomplish his goal, and find a metaphysical point to which he could attach Cynthia’s anchor, the mind of one of the other children in The Home would have to be set free. And that was something that Placebo was not willing to allow, as she was privy to a set of catastrophic results that would come from such an act.

The battle of greater minds was about to begin….

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