Post by redsycorax on Sept 10, 2018 22:27:21 GMT
Across the charnel house, wrack and ruin of the dead, irradiated planet that had once been known to the Greater Multiverse as Earth-718, a single man walked. Although radioactivity on the hellblasted world was now too high even for extremophile micro-organisms to survive, Lex Luthor paid no respect or notice to the seven billion corpses that were sprawled in agonised death throes across the obliterated grey-black landscape. None of the planets around Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Barnard's Star, Epsilon Eridani, Epsilon Indi, Sirius, Wolf 359 or Lallande 21185 in this universe harboured sapient life either, so it might be centuries or millenia before the sudden cessation of telecommunications from the desolation now evident here was investigated by interstellar travellers.
And Luthor remembered. He recalled the rain-sodden terrain near the Lincoln Monument, where he'd met Dr Erdel, exchanged the information and then shot him down, turned on his heel and stalked away from the area, with his bootleg technology recording only the collapse and sudden death of the celebrated if eccentric scientist. He remembered the confrontation with his former Vice President Pete Ross as the nuclear device in Corto Maltese counted down imperceptibly to chain reaction and ground zero. There was a screech and scraping sound from the other end of the line and then his satellite detected a nuclear pall rising over the suddenly aflame Carribean dictatorship. Thirty thousand people died, and so did the only man who could have disclosed his secret. One year later, it was the turn of his errant First Lady, Lana Lang Luthor, as she prepared for a media disclosure session that never came. The revelation was timed for 10.00.00 GMT that morning and Luthor had launched the entire US complement of nuclear missiles fifteen minutes earlier. She began to speak as the world ended around her, until one missile detonated several thousand feet above the WGBS studio facilities in Metropolis. But by then, he was in Colorado, inside Presidential Bunker One. After the missiles had stopped their courses of inexorable fire and slaughter around him, he waited until the ambient heat had diminished sufficiently to step outside, into a seething radioactive wasteland that would have killed any baseline human being immediately. But then, Lex Luthor was no longer human.
Luthor signalled to the skies above and an alien, saucer-shaped vessel descended to take him onboard. If anyone on this silent, lifeless Earth were still able to look at it, they would have noted an alien language across its hull and atop its internal guidance systems. In its turn, that would have been recognisable to other inhabitants of the Milky Way Galaxy as Coluan. In the saucer's laboratories. the dismantled components of the malignant artificial intelligence Brainiac were strewn across an examination table, except for its neurocircuitry and enhanced endoskeleton. Entry and egress point scans would have disclosed that they now resided as a neural net inside Luthor's brain, endoskeletal improvements within his body and modifications to what was no longer human skin. Luthor seated himself at the vessel's console and a blinding burst of heat, light and energies pulsed outward from its stardrive core, as the soulless post-human mass murderer of all life on Earth-718 accelerated away from the sepulchural silence of its exterminated homeworld, leaving it to its billions upon billions of ghosts. Forty three thousand years would pass before there would be other sapient presences on this Earth. There would be sporadic showers of meteors from a vanished,uninhabited superearth that had once orbited a red dwarf star several light years away, which was otherwise known in countless other alternate universes as Krypton. Without any "superman" to halt his downward spiral into murder, massacre and genocide, Luthor went unchallenged as he amassed wealth and political power, and Brainiac fell vulnerable to his depradations. When Luthor had modified himself, he set himself on the course of oblivion and annihilation that he had now adopted, with no checks or balances.
And Luthor remembered. He recalled the rain-sodden terrain near the Lincoln Monument, where he'd met Dr Erdel, exchanged the information and then shot him down, turned on his heel and stalked away from the area, with his bootleg technology recording only the collapse and sudden death of the celebrated if eccentric scientist. He remembered the confrontation with his former Vice President Pete Ross as the nuclear device in Corto Maltese counted down imperceptibly to chain reaction and ground zero. There was a screech and scraping sound from the other end of the line and then his satellite detected a nuclear pall rising over the suddenly aflame Carribean dictatorship. Thirty thousand people died, and so did the only man who could have disclosed his secret. One year later, it was the turn of his errant First Lady, Lana Lang Luthor, as she prepared for a media disclosure session that never came. The revelation was timed for 10.00.00 GMT that morning and Luthor had launched the entire US complement of nuclear missiles fifteen minutes earlier. She began to speak as the world ended around her, until one missile detonated several thousand feet above the WGBS studio facilities in Metropolis. But by then, he was in Colorado, inside Presidential Bunker One. After the missiles had stopped their courses of inexorable fire and slaughter around him, he waited until the ambient heat had diminished sufficiently to step outside, into a seething radioactive wasteland that would have killed any baseline human being immediately. But then, Lex Luthor was no longer human.
Luthor signalled to the skies above and an alien, saucer-shaped vessel descended to take him onboard. If anyone on this silent, lifeless Earth were still able to look at it, they would have noted an alien language across its hull and atop its internal guidance systems. In its turn, that would have been recognisable to other inhabitants of the Milky Way Galaxy as Coluan. In the saucer's laboratories. the dismantled components of the malignant artificial intelligence Brainiac were strewn across an examination table, except for its neurocircuitry and enhanced endoskeleton. Entry and egress point scans would have disclosed that they now resided as a neural net inside Luthor's brain, endoskeletal improvements within his body and modifications to what was no longer human skin. Luthor seated himself at the vessel's console and a blinding burst of heat, light and energies pulsed outward from its stardrive core, as the soulless post-human mass murderer of all life on Earth-718 accelerated away from the sepulchural silence of its exterminated homeworld, leaving it to its billions upon billions of ghosts. Forty three thousand years would pass before there would be other sapient presences on this Earth. There would be sporadic showers of meteors from a vanished,uninhabited superearth that had once orbited a red dwarf star several light years away, which was otherwise known in countless other alternate universes as Krypton. Without any "superman" to halt his downward spiral into murder, massacre and genocide, Luthor went unchallenged as he amassed wealth and political power, and Brainiac fell vulnerable to his depradations. When Luthor had modified himself, he set himself on the course of oblivion and annihilation that he had now adopted, with no checks or balances.
