Birth Name

Jack Connor Fullerton

Born

August 9, 1978

Abilities

Jack has the ability to remove energy from a system. For example, he can drain an opponent’s energy to the point of passing out. He has minor healing abilities and can trigger adrenaline surges in individuals.

Zero-Point has a number of robotic arms that serve different purposes. All are controlled by his own nerves. In addition to a human-looking arm, he has an arm built for strength, allowing him to lift 500 pounds or more. (His body has been reinforced structurally to deal with the extra loads.) This arm also has a jackhammer ability and a grappling hook with a winch. (This arm requires an external power source, worn on his back.) His weapon arm contains a flame thrower, single-use rocket launcher, fire extinguisher, taser, 12-shot .45 mm gun, and a zero-point beam (which amplifies his own meta abilities and projects them).

Affiliations

The Bay Scouts (2002-2006)

The Pariah Project (2009-present)

Biography

Jack Fullerton’s abilities manifested in his early teens, but it took years before he began to understand them. He became a physicist largely in order to better comprehend what he was actually doing when he used them.

He joined the Bay Scouts in 2002 and was with the group until it disbanded. After this, he turned his attention back to science. In early 2009, while assisting the Gatekeepers in a mission at the request of Dynamistress, Jack lost an arm in the line of duty.

Outfitted with a variety of robotic arms, Jack was a founding member of the Pariah Project. He works part-time at Wonderland Robotics and volunteers at UC San Francisco’s Amputee Support Group.

Personality

Jack is quiet and reserved, almost to the point of being shy. He is a gentleman, always taking others’ feelings into account. He has a droll sense of humor and is okay with being the straight man to other’s jokes.

Excerpt from Reckoning

Like anything else, healing abilities come in a range of effectiveness, from the ability to impart a sense of general well-being to bringing someone back from the brink of death. There have always been rumors of those who could even reverse death itself, though I still regard them as apocryphal.

Jack’s abilities were toward the middle. He couldn’t knit bones back together, but he could heal most soft tissue damage: lacerations, punctures, and so on, and limited organ damage. Nerve damage was typically beyond his abilities. One of his more useful tricks, though, was that he could trigger adrenaline surges in others, allowing them to continue the fight even when they’d felt spent only moments earlier.

We spent a lot of my downtime together, mainly sitting in the base lounge, drinking tea and talking about science. “Zero-point energy,” he replied to my eventual inquiry, “is the energy remaining after you’ve removed all the other energy from a system.”

“But… if you remove all the energy, there’s no energy left,” I said, stating the obvious.

“Except that zero-point energy can’t be removed.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a quantum mechanics/Heisenberg uncertainty sort of thing,” he said with a smile.

“Which means you don’t understand it, either.”

“Basically.” He chuckled, then said, “Okay. What happens when you take, say, helium and lower its temperature to absolute zero?”

I frowned. Helium. “It… stays liquid. It doesn’t freeze. At normal pressure, anyway.”

“Right,” Jack nodded. “And it stays liquid because of the zero-point energy that remains in it.”

“You’re talking about the weak forces between the atoms.”

“Exactly.”

I sipped my tea. “And you’ve found a way to harness that energy?”

Jack stirred his cup absently. “Not exactly. Not yet, anyway, though obviously that’s my ultimate goal. But as well as I can determine, I’m able to reduce things to their ground state.”

“Sorry?”

“The lowest energy state that something has. Like something at absolute zero will have less energy than something in an excited state.”

“So… you freeze things?”

“Well… no. As you experienced, it’s quite cold, but not absolute zero cold.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I can’t harness it, exactly, but I seem to have the ability to tap into it, transfer it, extract it, and so on. That sounds a lot cooler than it actually is, though.”

“Oh, come on. It’s plenty cool!”

“Thanks.” He smiled at me, almost shyly, to my surprise. Then I saw a hint of a blush in his cheek and my stomach dropped.

Jack had a crush on me.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Zero-Point was co-created by Miguel Tarrats.