The New Superman
Arthur Rosch
-
Superman was awakened by the
buzzing of his iphone. It was still in the utility belt of his tights. Now it vibrated against his butt cheek,
bringing him out of a deep dreamless sleep.
The fact that the Iphone was in his tights, and his tights still on his
body, was due to his having fallen asleep after a hundred hour work-day. He had gotten back to the Fortress of
Solitude only long enough to collapse onto his bed, eyelids falling of their
own weight like leaded curtains.
“What the fu…” he cursed, but his
throat was too dry to create words.
There was a half full bottle of spring water on his bedside table. As he tried to reach it, he rolled to his
left, and the badly fitted contour sheet on the mattress snapped up in the
corner, so that all his bedding started to unravel. The bottle tipped and spilled into the Pandora’s box of junk at
the side of the bed. Superman slapped
at the buzzing pest in his belt. It
vibrated insistently.
He sat up, dragging blankets and
sheets with him. He rocked to one side
and fished the Iphone from its pouch.
There were only four people who had this iphone code. When he freed it
from the belt it expanded to the size of a small book. Superman squinted blearily at the rapidly
forming screen.
It was Piers Bloch, his Public
Relations Manager. For the last twenty
hours Piers had been voning, texting, emailing, over and over again. The message was always the same:“Whr R U?
MUST TALK!”
Superman had been dealing with
crisis upon crisis and there was no time to answer the ever-nervous Piers. He was flying supplies to the aftermath of
an immense Tsunami in Sri Lanka. There
had been an earthquake in Szechuan, a volcanic explosion in Colombia, a Sarin
attack in Odessa. What could Piers want
that could be more important?
The Man of Steel pushed the Clear
button. It would notify Piers that he
had finally come to rest in the Fortress Of Solitude. Superman couldn’t bring himself to answer these calls. He had nothing left, nothing to give. He was burnt out.
As he slept he had gotten his face
stuck to a napkin from KFC. The place
was full of such junk, empty bags and cardboard cups. He spit pieces of lint from his lower lip and picked the rest of
the material away from his mouth.
Pieces he didn’t see still adhered to his chin.
“Where would I be?”, he grumbled, “Moscow?
Alma-Ata? Minsk? I’m everywhere and nowhere.” He sat up, kicking his sheets and blankets
into a pile on the floor. The place was
a wreck. Outside, he could see the
mountains of Greenland, rising in range after range, deep in the interior. Wind kicked disdainfully at the peaks,
blowing off piles of snow. In this
remote wasteland, it was almost possible to make the world stop. Almost.
For Superman, the world could never
stop.
Sighing deeply, with a great effort
of will, he got up. He took three steps
to the left, and was in his bathroom.
Outwardly, to the visible world, the Fortress of Solitude was a 2006
Winnebago Adventurer. Superman didn’t
need much in the way of personal comfort.
The brown and white rectangular vehicle moved with the wind, it’s
springs squeaking. There was more of
the Fortress, much more, underground.
Next to the motorhome, four twelve foot satellite dishes shuddered in
the gusts. They were guyed to the
bedrock by inch-thick cables. As the
wind traversed this giant harp, the strings went “toing toing”. The perforations in the discs, designed to
prevent them from becoming sails and blowing away, added an eerie howling to
the already lambent sound of the strings.
When the wind was high, the installation made a music appropriate to the
landscape.
Superman looked at himself in the
mirror. He saw a man approaching middle
age with a four day growth of beard. He
gave himself a sloppy shave with yet another shaving gizmo, a Shick Seven Blade
Self Sharpening Ultra Trend. The self
sharpener didn’t work; it was just another shaving gimmick. He made a fist and ran it under the blades
at blurring speed. In a few seconds the
blades were sharp.
His gut hung over the elastic
waistband of his red and blue tights.
His arms and legs were packed with muscle, but he was subtly broadening
in girth. Lately his physique had begun
to resemble that of a Russian weight lifter.
He needed a Rejuvenation. His
body clock had run close to the age of fifty earth years.
Who has the time? he thought
plaintively. Wait. He stopped himself from pursuing that line
of thought. It was ridiculous. He could Rejuvenate any time he wanted. It took an hour. He could make the time.
It was the wanting. It was the
motivation that was missing. He was, as the expression went, “letting himself
go”. He was doing it on purpose.
Superman thought, with sudden and
unexpected longing, of the key to the Kryptonite Vault. It was hanging just out
of reach, in the towel shelf. He could
see it, hanging from a Bugs Bunny key chain.
He could go down into the underground world of the Fortress, unlock the
vault, walk in….and never walk out again.
He rubbed
his now-smooth chin, patted his belly, and ran a finger in a vertical line
along the Adaptex material of his tights.
It opened to the slit shape while he withdrew that part of his anatomy
he wryly called “The Dong of Steel.” He
stood over the lever-operated toilet and made a piss that poured from him like
Niagara, on and on. After three
minutes, it gradually rattled to a halt, squirted one last time, and was
done. He stepped on the flush lever and
the fluids disappeared. The super hero
replaced himself in his tights, ran his finger across the opening, which
instantly self-sealed. He went into the
main room of the motorhome, stepping over empty cans and papers. The lights were on…he had fallen asleep with
the lights on. They were beginning to
dim, and his computers had already kicked over to generator power.
Impervious to the cold, Superman
went outside, brushed snow off a stationary bicycle that was hooked up to a
bunch of cables and pedaled for two minutes with such force and speed that
smoke rose from the pedals’ sealed bearings.
The lights came back up. The
generators kicked off but the wind was so loud there was no difference in the
noise level.
He returned to the bus-like
vehicle’s interior. I should clean this
up, he told himself.
He could have asked one of his
clones do the cleaning, but any one of them would have laughed at him. Besides, the idea of watching himself
working for himself as a menial was absurd.
He couldn’t create a sweet plump girl named Rosita to do his
housework. He cloned himself, only
himself. That was his law, his
inflexible principle. He couldn’t
handle the work of serving Earth without help.
He heard a boom like distant
thunder. This was followed by another
sound, a sort of backward rendition of the noise a straw makes after emptying a
milk shake.
Superman looked out the window.
One of his clones had just landed and was heading towards the beat-up
looking cargo container behind the RV.
He wasn’t wearing “the costume”.
Briefly, the clone and its maker exchanged a glance. Superman nodded perfunctorily. It was Kal-el 17, alternate name Boon. Every Kal-el had a secret identity, a life,
sometimes a job. Boon wore his hair
long, shoulder length. He pulled a door
of the container and vanished down the ramp leading into the tunnels of the
Fortress.
Kal-el One registered hunger as the
quiet gurgling at the center of his abdomen and a slight dizziness due to
lowered blood sugar levels. It was
ridiculous, this need to eat, defecate, occasionally masturbate, blow his nose,
fart. Ridiculous. But that was where the central problem was
located, wasn’t it? He was Superman. He wasn’t
Super Super. He wasn’t Man
Man. He was Superman. He was, in fact, a goodly part human being,
even if his Kryptonian origins lent him unusual faculties. He had lived so long with humans that he
almost considered himself to be one of them.
He was a half- breed, with all a
half-breed’s identity confusion.
He called himself by his real name,
Kal-el. That was his given name. He was Clark Kent in the alternate world of
his secret identity. This Superman
business was a comic book. True, he
could leap tall buildings in a single bound, but there was a lot more to him
than what he could DO.
He waved his hand in front of his
face, as if to dispel a mirage. To get
to the half-sized refrigerator, he had to wade through the detritus of his
motor coach: bedding, old newspapers, empty CD jewel cases, bottles of
Calistoga water. He couldn’t even get
the fridge open. There was an empty
Costco box that had contained Top Ramen jammed between the door and the
pantry. Taking him by surprise, a fit
of pure rage filled him, and he kicked the box so that it exploded and filled
the place with cardboard confetti.
Frustrated, he decided to clean the
place, now, not later. NOW! He gathered cleaning supplies from under the
sink, brought out the vacuum cleaner.
He became a blur, and twenty seconds later the Winnebago was spotless,
immaculate.
“Why did I wait so long to do
that?” Kal-el wondered. He was beginning to worry about
himself. The brooding, the mess, the
overwork….all classic symptoms of depression.
“That won’t
do.” He thought with a puzzled
sigh. “We can’t have Superman on
Prozac.”
When he opened the little
refrigerator a noxious smell came lurching from it like an evil creature. Kal-el recoiled, covered his face, swung the
Winnebago door open and puked a perfect little pellet of the protein cake he
ate when he was too busy to eat anything better. Which was always.
He held his breath, leaned into the
fridge with a squirt bottle of Lysol.
His hands moved so fast they virtually disappeared. The little fridge was disinfected and
spotless in ten seconds. He sealed the
organic garbage into some empty cardboard containers. He was left with four parcels of junk and rotten sludge neatly
wrapped in biodegradable paper. He went
out into the full roar of the storm and tossed each package thirty miles , one
in each of the four cardinal directions.
He sang a brief incantation with
each toss. The words were a chant to
the wind spirits that he had learned from the local indigenous tribe. He used small ceremonial gestures taken from
the Inktuktikut. He lived here on their
sacred land. The courtesy of using
their chants was his way of showing respect.
That was not the only reason he
used the shaman’s way. All he had to do
was look at the world around him, the wind, the snow, the mountain crags, the
great plateaus of ice. It was a place
of awesome and mysterious power. It had
to be taken seriously.
He wrapped his cape around himself
as he got into his RV. He closed both
doors, the screen and the outer door.
He opened various laminated plywood cabinets, looking for something to
eat. There wasn’t a crumb, not even a bar of his cursed protein cake, not an
egg, not a Trader Joe’s Carb 100.
Nothing.
Maybe one of the other Kal-els had
something to eat. By force of habit
Kal-el activated his comm gear and data streams. When his corneal implants flickered to life. information began to
whiz across his vision. He had turned
the damned thing off when he reached the Fortress. Enough! he had told himself.
I’m sick of being a data sieve. Now his feeds were back on. He was getting info from weather satellites,
military channels, web cams. He heard
chatter from intelligence agencies and radio calls from Metropolis cab
companies. A driver on 45th
Street was singing “Louie Louie,
Oh no, y’bettah go now.
Yah yah yah yah!” He was badly
out of tune. Unconsciously, Kalel
picked through the brontobytes of information, sorting them for relevance and
doing emergency triage. There was a lot
of chatter about Superman, which he automatically discarded from his attention. There was always chatter about
Superman. There was an endless flow of
tabloid trash: I’m having Superman’s
Baby! Superman Caught in Gay
Romance. There was that perennial
tabloid favorite: Superman Has Cloned
Himself Thousands of Times! He had to
laugh. There WERE clones of
Superman. He had made a hundred
replicas of himself. He didn’t deny,
didn’t confirm, he merely ignored.
People hallucinated all kinds of things. Let them work it out.
“There’s so much to be done,” he thought
desperately. “So much to be done.”
Then, as always, aware of his mental processes, he stopped thinking and
hurled his psyche a billion light years into space. From that
distance, he looked down upon the infinitesimal speck of this person, this
unfortunate hero the Earthlings called Superman, Kal-el, son of Jor-el.
This thought, he realized, was his nemesis: There’s so much to be
done. In those five words huddled a universe of misplaced responsibility,
guilt, neurotic over-achievement. He had that insight for a few seconds,
then his distance collapsed, his detachment gave way to a sucking rubber-band
sound, thwangggg! and he was pulled back into his personality. “Who am I
kidding?” he asked himself. “I’m the only person who stands between
these earthlings and utter self destruction. I can’t afford the
luxury of neurosis. I am doomed to be a workaholic because the
alternative is to be uncaring, unfeeling, and to let these people fight each
other to extinction.”
He had altered the political structure of the planet Earth until its stability
depended upon his intervention. He kept the peace by what he called
“The Balance of Astonishment”. Or, sometimes, “Mutually Assured
Incompetence.”
Meanwhile there was the real pain,
the real horror of earth in its emergency century: oceans rising, monster storms, mass death of man and animal. He couldn’t stand it. If he paid attention to his data stream for
another five seconds he would be engaged,
he would turn around and fly to the nearest tragedy and then his work
day would begin again, and last how long?
Fifty, sixty, a hundred hours? A week?
He turned his feeds off in something close to panic. He was seized with an overpowering need for
company. He decided to go down into the
subterranean tunnels to visit a few of his clones the old fashioned way, face
to face.
The Winnebago’s bedroom was a
discreet area. A slide-out extender
gave it extra roominess. Kal-el’s bed
faced towards the front of the motorhome.
There were mirrors all over the place, typical motorhome décor creating
the illusion of space. Opposite his bed
there was a large mirror that he had modified to make an interior door. It was his personal entrance into the
Fortress Of Solitude, with its miles of tunnels, its super computers, machine
shops and laboratories. Kal-el pushed
at the full length mirror. It clicked
and turned on a central axis. He slid
through the opening and pushed the mirror closed.
He was in a long corridor lit to
emulate sunlight. Cameras recorded his
movements, weapons tracked him. Grey
concrete walls and a black rubber floor went down, down, down, at a slope of
thirty five degrees. Kal-el ’s feet
were sore. He used them hard. He landed on them going a hundred miles an
hour. He ran on them, kicked down steel
walls, punted ticking hydrogen bombs into space. All in a day’s work.
It was hell on the feet.
Kal-el rose into the air and adopted a lazy prone position, as if he
were on a couch watching T-Vid. He did
a few mock back strokes, turned on his stomach and flapped his arms raggedly,
doing the dance called the Funky Chicken.
He descended a mile this way. When he reached the blast doors he let
himself back to the ground. He winced
as his feet made contact.
There was a keypad, an iris scanner
and a DNA analyzer. When Kal-el had
satisfied these security devices, a deep sound vibrated beneath the ground and
the massive doors slid apart, only wide enough to admit a man before they
reversed on their tracks and shut behind him.
He entered a comfortable but
functional set of laboratories, computer banks, work benches and lounge spaces.
“Hey, look who’s here, still
wearing his monkey suit!” A Kal-el
clone came towards him, smiling with some irony. “K-1”, as he now called himself, recognized “K-47” or, as the
clone had named himself, “Zyle”.
KI and Zyle did an informal
handshake, fists closed, two taps, top and bottom. Zyle had chosen to treat his
skin with melanin and his hair was a great bun of dreadlocks. He weighed less than the original Kal-el . His body was wiry and strong but had none of
the bulk that had come upon Kal-el
One. He wore a sweater, green
with orange stripes, and a circular knit cap. His pants were worn jeans and his
feet were pushed into leather sandals.
He looked like an Ethiopian version of his maker.
There were usually twenty or thirty
of the clones on hand in the Fortress.
They were autonomous. When they
needed to communicate with one another, they activated
a special channel in their communications gear.
Heads began popping over the tops
of cubicles. Variously clad, colored,
adorned, each wore the features of Kal-el One, but each was subtly different.
Kal-el One knew all of their names,
numbers and interests.
A corridor divided the vast chamber
into two halves. Some areas were walled
off, some merely curtained.
“Hey mon, what bring you down here
into da bowels of de earth?” Zyle inquired.
He had a jeweler’s loupe raised to his forehead, resting there on its
elastic band. He had been making a
scarab of exquisite delicacy.
Kal-el 1 threw himself onto the nearest couch, a threadbare legless
piece of junk worthy of a college dorm room.
Its faded upholstery was a plaid pattern of blue and gold diamonds.
“You guys got anything to
eat?” Kal-el 1 fussed with his cape so that he didn’t sit on it. Every time he did so, he found that he
couldn’t move without dragging the cape along with himself. Sometimes he sat with legs crossed. Attempting to rise from furniture became a
wrestling match as the fabric stuck under him and prevented his legs from
getting free.
“Got some potato salad,” a voice
spoke up from a few rows down the cubicle complex.
“Punkteen?” Another voice issued from behind a curtain,
using the slang word for the ubiquitous protein cake.
“’Tato Salad will be just fine,”
Kal-el One said. There was a low coffee
table in front of the couch. There were
empty bottles, cans and other kinds of junk spread across its surface. Kal-el 20 emerged from a cubicle with a half
full container of potato salad. A
plastic fork stuck out from a chunk of potato.
K20 was dressed simply in a light blue shirt and belted slacks. He handed Kal-el One the container and sat
next to him on the couch. The furniture
sagged even further as the husky bulk of another Kal-el joined the first.
Kal-el One took a bite. After swallowing, he realized that he was
very hungry. “This is good. Any more?”
He finished the contents of the container, licked the spoon and looked
around.
A small crowd of Kal-el s had
gathered. They all bore the same basic
features. They were the same height, though their weights varied. They were different in physical age. Some were barely teenagers. Others looked forty. Kal-el
1 was the oldest looking “Superman” in the room. It wasn’t until he saw himself in the
context of the others that he realized how long it had been since he had
Rejuvenated.
One of the Kal-el s had vanished
from view and now returned with a new, very large, container of potato
salad. It was a twenty five pound
opaque plastic drum with a tightly sealed lid.
A stack of paper plates was underneath this large drum and a pack of
plastic utensils rode atop. This Kal-el
, who was number 8, Naftali, set the items down on the table with a dramatic
thud.
Using a perfect Elvis Presley
drawl, Kal-el One said, “Thank you very much.”
He leaned forward, sank the fingers of his right hand around the edge of
the vacuum sealed lid and pulled it away.
The seal hissed as it was broken, and the aroma of fresh delicatessen
potato salad wafted into the air.
A few other Kal-el s had brought
beer and cups, pickles, several pounds of corned beef, loaves of French bread,
jars of mustard and mayonnaise. Tables
were pushed together, chairs and couches added to the original furniture. An impromptu picnic of Supermen was under
way.
The eating was fast and
ferocious. Twenty two Kal-el s walked
back and forth, fetching seconds.
Kal-el 1 simply sat on the couch
at the center of this activity and ate the way a steam locomotive eats
coal. He shoveled food into the furnace
of his mouth, he ate with a fiery hunger.
Now and again he would slow down long enough to drink a beer in a single
gulp.
From a hundred yards away he heard
the comments of two other Kal-el s, numbers 76 and 85. Philemon and Becket.
“Hey, One is here,” said K76.
“Don’t you mean ‘THE
One’?”responded his clone-brother.
“You know, if he’s paying
attention, he can hear you.”
“I don’t care. I doubt he cares, either.”
Their voices faded, and Kal-el 1 had an intuition that they had gone to
sign language, a common enough practice in an environment that was essentially
a hive of one hundred and one identical twins gifted with super hearing.
He also realized something else,
which should not have been a shock.
Kal-el s 76 and 85 were gay.
They weren’t gay with each other, but they were gay.
It should not have surprised Kal-el 1.
He’d just never thought of it.
The concept was interesting. It
forced him to think of himself as being gay.
He tried to stretch his fantasy in a new direction. It didn’t work. His mind kept drifting back to Allyson Followes. She worked for the Daily Planet writing a
column on pet behavior. He tried again
to think of attractive men. He knew
many such men. His mind returned to
Allyson Followes. It was not for him,
gayness or bisexuality. It was
just…interesting.
If he could find a free hour as
Clark Kent, he would like to get to know Allyson. The way things were going, that hour might be years in coming.
In the front assembly area, a party
was now in full swing. Bob Marley’s
voice was rasping from the speakers of the sound system.
“One loooove, one looove, let’s get
together and feel all right.”
Several Kal-els were dancing with
great jumps and twirls, writhes and sinuous turnings of the limbs.
The speakers went silent. Kal-el
1, who was finally feeling satiated, looked up to see standing before
him the two Kal-el s, 76 and 85.
Each was dressed in a standard set
of Superman tights. The tights on
Becket were ridiculously too large. The
sleeves hid his hands. The cape dragged
on the floor.
Philemon’s costume was absurdly
small. At his wrists, the ribbed
material designed to keep air from blowing up his sleeves was snugged around
his elbows. The cape rode at the height
of his utility belt. The legs were like
bike racers’ shorts; they gripped just below his knees. His thighs bulged and his protective cup no
longer blended with the whole but showed its contours through the speedo that
covered Kalel’s middle parts.
The two Kal-el s put their arms
about each other’s shoulders and a musical accompaniment sprang from the sound
system. It was the intro to an old and
famous comedy song.
At their cue, first Philemon sang,
then Beckett.
“Hello Muddah,” sang Philemon.
“Hello Faddah”, sang Beckett.
“Hello Bruddah”…with each line, the
singer did a splay kneed little dip.
“Hello Sistah”, Beckett dipped, a
trace of tremble beginning at his shoulders as he suppressed his laughter.
Together they sang, “Here we are
at…Camp Granada.”
That was as far as they could go
before cracking up, and the whole group of clones and their creator were awash
in tears of laughter.
It was an odd laughter. It had elements of genuine amusement, of
mania, of self contempt. There was also
a subtle element of madness, of the completely unhinged.
It was the type of laughter that
subsided and set itself off again, making waves that rose and fell, until
finally, reaching a beach where merriment was exhausted, it
ended in a few sighs and blown noses.
A new sound came from the
speakers. It was a gentle bonging that
sounded once each second.
It was a sound that meant
Emergency. The only possessors of the
code were the one hundred and one Kal-el s and the four executives in the
company doing business as “Superman LLC”.
Piers Bloch, as public relations director, was one of those four
executives.
Piers handled the public image of a
company worth more than forty billion dollars.
Kal-el 1 tapped in the keyboard on his iphone. When the keyboard came on screen, he tapped Enter and Piers’ face
filled every monitor in the Fortress.
It appeared deep in the lower levels, down in the genome labs. It appeared another three miles below where
a team of Kal-el s was doing research with Neutrino detectors.
It was a head-and-shoulders shot of
Piers’ gaunt visage. He was wet, his
long heavy hair lay flat against his skull.
His glasses were partially fogged. He spoke into a iphone that was
scrambled through a maze of encryptions.
The background appeared to be some remote farm in Yorkshire. A few cows wandered through muddy fields,
tails swishing. A farm house looked to
be about half a mile away.
“Speak to me, Piers,” Kal-el 1 said gently. It was obvious that Piers was badly frightened.
The PR man wiped his face with a
dirty handkerchief. He wore a grey
Burberry with the collar turned up. A
black and somewhat shapeless Western-style hat kept the light rain from falling
onto his glasses. Piers had chosen this spot for signal strength. Otherwise, he’d be in his Jaguar. He was fastidious about his clothing
“I can’t believe it, so I’m just
going to show you, Kal. Er…I should say
Kals. I don’t think I’m ever going to
get over the confusion, there are so many of you. Sometimes I think, ‘what would happen if they were evil?’ a very scary thought. Well, we’re in trouble. At first I thought someone was having me on,
but I saw twenty, maybe twenty five videos, some of them very hi-res videos at
that, so I could have little doubt as to the veracity of the..the product. No green screen, no CGI. It couldn’t be done. I mean, the technical challenges would be….”
“Piers!” Superman spoke sharply.
“Just get on with it.”
Piers seemed to gain control of
himself. His breathing steadied.
“All right. It’s like this: You were…or I should say a Superman was seen ..uh…exposing
himself to rocketliners in flight.”
This brought immediate silent
attention to the room full of Kal-el s.
“I…wait a minute…” Superman
said. “He what??
“Here,” said Piers Bloch with a
helpless shrug. “The stuff’s spreading all over Youtube, Whotube, and Newtube, every where. uh,
fuck.” The image of the phone wobbled,
Piers’ face vanished, there was ground and sky, a copse of trees. His voice could be heard saying , “Where the
effing hell is the play button..”
The scene changed abruptly. A iphone camera was recording out the window
of a sub-orbital passenger transport.
It was descending towards an airport that looked like Heathrow. The camera was pointing towards the ground,
taking shots through the clouds of the approaching coast line and the city that
seemed to turn as the plane banked to find its approach to the runway. Then the phone’s angle changed abruptly. It
looked straight out the window to see, just a few feet away, a flying Superman,
matching the airplane’s speed so he seemed to be standing still. He smiled, then waved. The camera jiggled a
bit, as apparently its owner waved back.
Then, still smiling, Superman reached through the adaptex fiber of his
tights and let the Super Dong hang flapping in the wind.
The camera twitched with the shock
of its user. The exposed Superman
slowed a bit so that he could be seen, window by window, along the length of
the passenger jet. The iphone followed him until he could no longer be
seen. There was a moment of camera
looking at sky, then the lens shifted to the passengers inside the jet. There were piles of people atop one another,
looking out every inch of window. They
all had smartphones, vidcams, watchcorders.
They flowed like thick molasses towards the back of the plane until
Superman vanished behind the tail. Then
Superman reappeared on the other side of the airplane, smiling impishly,
waving, shaking his tool. The
passengers scurried to gain an inch of window space as the display was repeated
in reverse, with Superman seeming to swim forward towards the plane’s
cockpit. When he reached the wing, he
stopped, stood up, and did a little dance.
His cape was pointed straight back in a three hundred mile an hour
wind. His flaccid penis followed the
direction of the cape. It was long and
it seemed to be an accessory glued on to the costume. The camera showed passengers leaning in a pile, climbing over one
another to get a view of The Man of Steel’s Thing of Steel.
Superman pretended to be vulnerable
to the wind. He mugged for the
passengers, hung onto the wing and simulated terror, regained his footing,
imitated the pose of Rodin’s famous sculpture, “The Thinker”. There was, of course, no stool upon which to
sit. This particular version of
Superman sat in the air, chin resting in hand,
eyes drawn down in concentration.
The jet was making its descent
towards Heathrow. At about five hundred
feet, Superman ended the show. After
buzzing the cockpit a few times, he returned to the wing, crossed his arms,
squatted on his haunches and did the famous Russian kicking dance called the
Kazhatzka. He made a few turns while
kicking right left right left. He stood up, spread his arms wide and seemingly
let the wind blow him away. He quickly vanished into the distance, making wild gestures
until he was no longer visible.
There was a
long and very gelid silence. At last
someone said, simply “Uh oh.”
Every Kal-el in the Fortress was
now present. They sat on stools, chairs,
stood upright, floated in various positions.
They were loosely circled around Kal-el One. They were the same but different. They wore a variety of clothing.
Some wore their hair long, some had shaven skulls. Some wore earrings, piercings, tattoos, arm
bands, bracelets, scarves, facial hair.
It was a concentration of immense
power in a single location.
One of their kind was waving his
dick at the passengers of high speed sub-orbital transport jets.
. Kal-el One
did a quick count. There were thirty
one other Kal-el s on hand. That meant sixty nine Kal-el s at large. All of them knew that it was Kal-el seventeen who had done the naughty prank. He was the Kal-el who worked as an actor in
Lithuania and called himself Tab Winklerius
Now, thirty one Supermen were
looking at Kal-el One, whose earth name
was Clark Kent.
“If I send two of you to go get
him,” said Kalel One, “I’d have to send
four to keep an eye on the first two and that would be futile because I have a
dreadful sense that we’re all getting a little screwy.”. He looked as if there should be a spear
thrust through the center of his body.
His shoulders were thrown back and his eyes were unfocused.
His gaze returned to the
present. “Can anyone tell me
different?
Kal-el One turned to the Kal-el
who sat next to him on his left.
He addressed him by his earth-name, as was the custom amongst
themselves. “Ricardo, How have you been
doing, lately?”
Ricardo, who worked in the Mexican
zone, had been preparing to leave on a mission. He was Kal-el 29. He wore a full head-mask. His boots were deep purple and studded with
jewels. The “S” on his chest was
sculpted with a drop-shadow made of emeralds.
He looked like a Mexican wrestling hero, absurd, comic, yet mysterious
and dignified.
“Fragile,” he said. “I feel like one little kick can push me
over the edge. Lately I’ve just been
down, tired…depressed. I want to sleep. I don’t want to do this Superman shit. But I keep going. My sense of duty won’t let me stop.”
He looked at Kal-el One and his gaze took on a blade-like
quality. The anger in his eyes came
with a blast of heat that started very hot and drew back until it was gone.
This lasted a fraction of a second.
“Tell you the truth,” said Ricardo,
“I’ve wanted to kill you a few times.
Just for causing me to exist.
Not a serious thought, you know; more like a fantasy a kid has when he’s
mad at his mom or dad.”
Kal-el One felt a keen sense of
sorrow. It was followed by fear. He, who was able to control his body, who
could tell his heart how fast and when to beat, had lost control of that
heartbeat. It began to race with fear.
“Then it’s even worse than I
thought,” he said in a quiet voice. He
was afraid. The more he thought about
the situation, the more frightened he became.
He asked a question, simply, with
little inflection. “Can anyone here
honestly say they completely trust themselves?”
There was silence. A faint trembling was beginning at Kal-el
One’s fingertips. He had faced so many
enemies in his life. He had defeated
villains and megalomaniacs. He had
battled grandiose figures with the power to rip apart reality itself. Those enemies hadn’t really frightened
him. There was only one enemy who
terrified him. It was his one
inescapable and permanent foe: himself.
Chapter Two
“Does
anyone know a good therapist who gives group discounts?” It was Gurmeet Singh, number 89, who uttered
this quip. No one laughed. Gurmeet didn’t expect a laugh. He had identified the central problem. They were suffering a collective and
possibly progressive breakdown.
“What
shrink treats a hundred and one Supermen?”
Kalel One said. “We need someone of the utmost wisdom. The Sixteenth Dalai Lama? I mean, the real one, not that Chinese
pawn. No. He’s a sweet man but this isn't his domain.”
“What about
the Third Oprah?” Number 42,Gregor
Semyatski, uttered this suggestion.
“Have you
MET her?” another Kalel replied. “She’s
four foot six and boy is she cranky. No
no no no.”
“Hey, she’s
only twelve, give the kid a break” said another Kalel. “Maybe she’s just going through a bratty
phase.”
“Do we ever
stop fucking around?” Kalel One’s voice gained volume.
“NO!”
Several Kal els sounded off. One of
them voiced their thoughts. “We have to
be clowns. If we don’t laugh and be
goofy we’re in big trouble. Of
course…it kind of looks like we ARE in big trouble. How can we deal with all this tragedy and suffering day after day
and not flip out? Yesterday I took
pieces of a toddler out of a threshing machine. Then I went to the Florida Coast. You know what that’s like!
Refugees from the rising water, Haitians, Cubans, people from all over
trying to squeeze onto higher ground.
How can we deal with this stuff?
I think we’re all just overloaded, you know? Compassion fatigue jammed into Survivor’s Guilt.” The speaker was Kalel 72, Occam Rosen. He wore a yarmulke with his tights. His long curly sideburns framed his tragic
face. His voice broke and tears began
to flow down his face. “I can’t do it
any more….not for a while. I have to stop or I don’t know what will happen. I’ll throw The Dome of The Rock to Mars.
The
temperature in the lounge seemed to drop forty degrees.
Swallowing
hard, Kal-el One asked the other Kal-el
s. “Have all of you been experiencing
odd mental or emotional states?”
There was a
grumbling of affirmation in the lounge, and Kal-el One understood that the terror was universal. They were alike. He was mother/father/god/creator. He had needed the help of his clones. He had expended enormous effort figuring out how to make them so
that they had all the same powers he possessed. It had finally become a matter of taking a laboratory back to the
region of the Andromeda Galaxy where Krypton had once existed. He had purchased an almost-new 2019
Fleetwood Explorer, a forty two foot diesel quad motorhome. He filled it with everything he might need
and proceeded to toss and tow the big coach at near light speed. He found a distorted region of space that
contained a Lamech Gateway. He used it
to transport himself and his RV to the area where Krypton’s home star Rao had
once existed.
The neighborhood was still
cluttered with bits of the old Krypton.
Carefully encased in lead armor, Superman gathered enough of
this-Kryptonite to make an asteroid. He
took the asteroid to the closest analogue of the star Rao, a G class star with
the identical surface temperature and density.
This star
had an inhabited planet. He gave it a
wide berth, keeping his asteroid always in opposition, hidden behind t he star,
invisible to the planet that was called, by its inhabitants, Uberjo.
The beings
of this planet were monopedal. Their
bodies tapered to a single graceful foot, out of which emerged a spherical
roller. This allowed them to move
about. Their foot resembled the
workings of a ball point pen. They
rolled themselves in all directions with great speed and agility. They could compress their bodies like
springs and leap hundreds of feet into the air. They could roll up steep grades without rolling backwards. Their language had thousands of words for
the concepts of balance and stability.
They mated
in threes, leaning together to form a stable tripod. Their genitals were in their upper bodies.
After a
brief survey, Kal-el One determined that
the Uberjoni were a relatively peaceful species. They were beginning to colonize the bodies of their star system
but they were nowhere near the area of his motorhome/laboratory.
Kal-el One replicated the conditions of his birth planet as nearly as
possible. He enhanced the asteroid’s
gravity with a thimble of neutron star material. He built a dome that was shielded from the kryptonite beneath his
feet. He removed his lead armor and
proceeded to clone five copies of himself. He took these infants to earth and
tested them meticulously.
None
displayed anything beyond ordinary human capacity. There were a few deviations in their so-called “junk DNA”, and
those must have had a crucial impact.
They were not supposed to, but they did.
Kal-el found loving homes for the infants and
returned to his laboratory near the star that the Uberjoni called Tspheeris.
There was a
risk he had to take. He put on his lead
armor, went outside the dome and collected a fist-sized piece of
Kryptonite. According to the radiation
detector, it was inert. There was no
beta decay.
He returned to the place he had
created as his bedroom. He placed the
Kryptonite rock on his reading table and removed his lead armor. Then he lay down.
He
waited. Nothing happened. The detritus of Krypton had lost its
poisonous radiation. He didn’t know
why. He had traveled a couple million
light years through a Lamech Gateway.
It was possible that the half life of the Kryptonite’s radioactive
elements had simply run out. The
material was now harmless. Back on
earth, it was still lethal, but in this part of the space-time continuum, it
posed no threat.
He
reconstructed the dome without shielding and proceeded to live and work on
his asteroid, which was now called Kryptonino.
He cloned five
more infants, this time paying special attention to the details of their junk
DNA. The deviations were no longer
present. Perhaps they needed contact
with the original material of Krypton.
He took
these infants to earth.
They had
all the powers that he possessed.
He purchased a twenty eight foot
Airstream Travel Trailer and made it into a crèche. He returned with the babies to the asteroid.
He proceeded to clone another
ninety five embryos.
He took these embryos back to earth and put them into artificial
wombs in the Fortress of Solitude.
The first
group of clones helped him raise and train the next group. Their accelerated growth and learning made
the work easier as it went along. The
Kal-el clones expanded the Fortress of
Solitude, gave it more living quarters.
In five years Kal-el One had a
hundred clones taking responsibility for missions. The work was allocated in an organic fasion. Some of the Kal-el s had affinities for
different parts of the world, different peoples. Kal-el One encouraged
difference, let them shape their own personalities.
“
