He was secretly exposed to an assassination drug that causes irresistible suicidal impulses in its victim, and had no better method of suicide nearby.
Someone has developed a gravity manipulation device, and is trying to refine its targeting and control. It’s random because he can’t control its area of effect yet.
The barriers between alternate universes are breaking down, and the duplicates are alternate-universe versions of the person. The presence of such a duplicate is deeply disturbing to all the duplicates, resulting in homicidal impulses. This is in fact the cause of the “illness”; it’s not a disease as such, what they feel is the barriers between their alternate selves beginning to break down and the growing nearness of their alternate selves.
The man has mastered the technique of directed reincarnation, and is involved in a centuries-long secret war with the Hidden Masters of the Earth. When their agents get too close to him, he suicides and reincarnates somewhere else, effectively going “underground” as an infant until he’s sufficiently grown to continue his insurrection. In this case, their agents were within moments of catching him, and he lacked any more convenient means of ending his current incarnation.
Humans have mastered faster than light travel using a an engine that manipulates the local gravity field. Unbeknownst to them, the drive also creates minor, but permanent, damage to the gravity field. After centuries of use, the gravity of the Sol system is starting to fail entirely - but there’s now a massive interplanetary human empire that relies on the gravity drive to maintain it’s cohesion, and thus, a strong institutional resistance to giving up the FTL system.
An alien spore comes to Earth, that reproduces by infecting a living host and gradually replacing all the cells in his body with spore-cells that largely function the same as the original, but can also undergo mitosis, allowing the spore to spread further than usual by cloning the host. In a shocking third-act twist, the cells are actual a benign symbiote - the murderous impulse is purely a function of human psychology that finds being presented with a duplicate of one’s self intolerable.
Why can people who are “out of phase” and unseen/unheard by others, can walk through walls and people walk through them, still manage to walk on the floor, lean on a filing cabinet, and ride in a car?
(Talking to you Stargate SG-1 though they partially lampshaded it.)
“Explain why is it that Outer space creatures just invade the USA.” - They were frightened of Godzilla, Mothra, and the other creatures who were invading Japan, and the Daleks who were invading England.
re the gravity failure - that reminds me of a short story I read wherein certain laws of the universe started failing, such as the law of averages. It didn’t come up with a fanwank for why, though.
For my OP, I like the “too hot and humid to wear clothes” idea, especially because it means that in my mind’s eye I’m picturing the nude gun babes all sweaty and glistening.
When “out of phase” your movement isn’t determined by physical interaction with things around you, it’s determined by your mind and how you want/expect to move. When they walk, they’re not really walking on the floor in the sense that they push against the floor to move, they’re simply willing themselves to move forward, and they’re only moving their legs in a way that looks like walking because that’s how they’re used to moving forward. They don’t fall out of a moving car for the same reason - they will themselves to move forward with the car.
It follows that a character in such a state would be able to fly if they wanted to.
Subconscious phase control. They have a limited amount of reflex control of the phasing effect, but no conscious control (which is why they can’t just pick things up). This is also why they can still breathe; they automatically phase incoming air and dephase outgoing air.
In the Star Trek episode, I’ve always fanwanked the out-of-phase thing with the gravity plating being able to interact with them, allowing them to stand. Doesn’t work for SG1, however.
Though an obvious generic answer would be that the floors are made of a different material that exists in multiple phases.
Future scientists come up with an implant that attaches itself to your brain. It rewires it so that your intelligence increases, but it’s at the expense of your emotions.
This does not explain why you now have the speed and strength to catch bullets, the ability to zap open locks, zap start cars, or the ability to phase between parallel universes.
Oops, sorry. I didn’t mean to crash this thread. I was just curious if anybody could come up with explanations for the as needed powers the Observers on Fringe had.
I’ll bow out and let this thread get back on track.
That’s pretty standard: Their intelligence increases to the point that it activates psionic powers. I’d say that’s almost a trope of the genre, by now.
Obviously this poor man has a parasite in his body which is causing him to do this. Something like that critter that makes mice walk up to cats and flip them off.
They and their world are actually a simulation, and their modifications allow them to hack into or partially override the system, consciously or unconsciously.
<or>
Their increased mental perception allows them through some kind of quantum mechanics observer effect handwave to access parallel universes; their other abilties come from this. They aren’t actually zapping locks open and starting cars, they are traveling to a universe where the lock was already open or the car already started. Even catching bullets is them moving to an extremely low probability parallel universe where enough of the randomly moving particles in the bullet just happened to all move in the same direction at once and stop the bullet.
