Post by redsycorax on May 26, 2021 4:51:35 GMT
Luthor remembered. He recalled the rain-sodden terrain near the Lincoln Monument, where he'd met Dr Saul 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.
++
SAUL ERDEL: WASHINGTON DC:
Lex Luthor waited as the Audi drove up toward him. It was nearly midnight and around him, there was a fine, almost imperceptible crackle of energy. Almost imperceptible, but enough to prevent any surveillance camera audio or video scrutiny of what was about to unfold. The United States would not witness its President-Elect having to do what he did out of neccessity and ...vision. Yes, that was it, vision. At one point in his life, Lex Luthor might have blanched at doing this. He would have protested that he was no murderer, he was a scientist, a humanitarian, and head of a corporation. He did not have to condemn this man to death. But inside him, something cold and inhuman, not from this world, stilled any such preliminary doubts. Inside his pocket, a pistol lay, with a unique fusillade concealed within it. He smiled and waved to Saul Erdel as the scientist left his car:
"Ach! Alexander, how are you? And congratulations!"
"Thank you, Saul. Now, about the device that I inquired about on the phone.."
"Yes. Yes, here are the schematics and the results of my first experiment. As you can see, it was aimed at Mars, and made nexus about several million years ago. It retrieved a humanoid, but the poor creature choked in our planetary atmosphere and was dead within minutes. I took the proper precautions. It was then that I realised that the plans could only be entrusted to one person- the President of the United States. And now, you are that person." Grateful to be relieved of his responsibility, Saul Erdel placed the memory stick in the gloved hand of Alexander Luthor. The two men shook hands and Luthor pocketed the experimental teleport technology. As Saul Erdel walked to his car and started its engine, he didn't see Luthor take aim and fire his gun. No-one saw or heard anything before Saul Erdel jerked once, realising in a futile instant how he had been betrayed, but then his eyes glazed over as the deadly, undetectable chemicals coursed through his body and he slumped over the wheel. In the next instant, another bullet caused the fuel in his car to combust and it erupted into flame, destroying the last evidence of what might have been a revolutionary new technology, or which might have been a bridgehead for an alien invasion. Once he was back in his Oval Office, Luthor dropped the memory stick into a beaker of acid. It hissed and briefly flared as the data within it was consumed utterly.
VICE-PRESIDENT PETER ROSS: CORTO MALTESE:
On the radio, a Spanish language of Dire Straits' Romeo and Juliet played in the distance. Ruefully, Peter Ross, Vice President of the United States, mopped his brow in the equatorial heat. He was reminded of his relationship with Lana Lang, back in Smallville, before they'd both grown up and apart. Their lives had taken such different turns- Pete had worked in Jonathon and Martha Kent's corner store after school, which enabled him to save up enough money to eventually leave the town for Illinois and Metropolis. The Kents were a great couple- but they'd never been able to have any children. They cherished Pete as if he was their own son and he still missed them. One night, Jonathon had showed him a telescope, in which he saw a red star, alone in the night. He'd told him that it was a red dwarf, named LHS 2520, about twenty seven light years from Earth, and that astronomers had discovered five exoplanets in orbit around it. And then Pete saw it, a blinding green pinpoint of light. Twenty seven years ago, a civilisation had died, as did a species. But Pete Ross and Jonathon Kent didn't know that the obliterated planet had been named Krypton, about its people and its fate and never would. In this universe, it had no survivors.
As the phone rang in his apartment within the US Embassy, Pete Ross sighed in relief:
"Pete?"
"Lex. Hey, it worked. It looks like the Chinese have backed off their plan to station nuclear weapons here."
On the other end of the line, President Luthor nodded, his eyes intent on a laptop. He touched a button and the access codes to what had thought to be a decommissioned nuclear launch facility in Kansas were swiftly entered into it.
"Well done, Mr Vice President. Pete, it's been a privilege to have served with you. We've known each other since the Smallville days and we've both come far. I can even forgive you the affair with Lana."
In Corto Maltese, Pete swallowed: "Lex, what...?"
"It's all right, Pete. It was always a marriage of convenience. Lana's too far gone to be concerned about anyway. Except, the problem is, she might have told you about the end game and why she has her drinking problem. I can't risk that. Sorry" On the desk before him, on the laptop camera, a silo door slid open and a missile gradually cleared it, blazing away into the sky. It had all been planned beforehand, the cleared air corridor, the federal land requisition of surrounding land, the reactivation of the facility and the transfer and rearming of the solitary missile within it. As it soared into the sky, the US air traffic mainframe abruptly went offline for four or five minutes. In that time, Pete Ross ran with his mobile phone to Air Force Two and yelled at the pilots to take off immediately. But it was too late. High above the beauty and calm of the Carribean, he could now see a telltale arc of smoke from its contrail.
"Damn you, Lex," Pete Ross began to say at the very moment that a fifteen kiloton nuclear weapon detonated five hundred feet above him. He did not feel anything as the temperature around him and the cabin of Air Force Two rose to several million degrees in the space of microseconds. Anyone looking toward the detonation from on Corto Maltese itself would have been instantly blinded. receive fatal third degree burns and then be flung at high velocity against collapsing brick, masonry, flying glass and shards of metal. In respect, it was massive overkill. During the first use of a nuclear weapon against an inhabited metropolitan centre, fifty thousand people perished in instants. Three thousand died in the ensuing days from radiation poisoning and unsurvivable burns. All of the inhabitants of Corto Maltese died and so did fifteen Chinese Peoples Liberation Army military advisors.
From satellite surveillance, President Luthor leant back and observed the site of his latest homicide and the mass slaughter that he had just perpetrated. He nodded to himself, set his cat's cradle to a faster pace, reflecting the consequences of what he had just done. In her room, First Lady Lana Lang Luthor put down her bottle and stared at the hells cauldron that had consumed Corto Maltese and her lover. She straightened and rose from the bed and her expression became one of steely determination. In cold fury, she took the photograph of herself and her husband and smashed it against the wall.
FIRST LADY LANA LANG LUTHOR: METROPOLIS:
Several days later, international tension was at an all-time high as Lana Lang Luthor, estranged First Lady of the United States, walked steadily toward the WGBS interview studio. She respected Lois Lane. She was a diligent, professional investigative journalist and she could be trusted to fully tease out the consequences of what she had to relate. In her pocket, she carried a memory stick. She had not believed her husband capable of this level of atrocity and deception, but Pete's death had galvanised her to end the farce and reveal what exactly he was capable of. There had been children killed in Corto Maltese. She owed it to them to bring down her husband before he could destroy the United States and the world around them all. She crossed the studio and shook hands with Lois Lane before sitting down to begin the interview.
At that very moment, air raid sirens sounded over the city, throughout the United States, Europe, China, Northwest and South Asia, Canada and Australia. Lana Lang Luthor stayed where she was. She realised grimly that he had gone beyond humanity this time. No. This had to be done, whatever happened to her and whatever happened next. To her credit, so did Lois Lane. Three minutes later, a Chinese nuclear missile detonated high above WGBS Metropolis studios and a brave woman paid for her defiance with her life. High above the surface of a ravaged planet, nuclear missiles soared and impacted and the death toll of humanity rose past millions of the wretched world's inhabitants to one billion... then two....then four...then six...until finally, the human species was extinct in the flaming ruins of an irradiated planet.
EIGHT BILLION INHABITANTS OF EARTH:
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.
And because he was now utterly inhuman, Luthor ignored the blood, gore, skeletal debris and charred flesh around him. The irradiation would have instantly killed any human observer, were the human species not obliterated in an extinction level event. Indeed, he crushed skeletal remains and kicked skulls aside as he awaited his next stage of life.
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.
EARTH-ONE:
"Damn you, Superman! Why must you always stand in my path? Do you realise what I might become if it weren't for your enmity and constraint?"
THE END
++
SAUL ERDEL: WASHINGTON DC:
Lex Luthor waited as the Audi drove up toward him. It was nearly midnight and around him, there was a fine, almost imperceptible crackle of energy. Almost imperceptible, but enough to prevent any surveillance camera audio or video scrutiny of what was about to unfold. The United States would not witness its President-Elect having to do what he did out of neccessity and ...vision. Yes, that was it, vision. At one point in his life, Lex Luthor might have blanched at doing this. He would have protested that he was no murderer, he was a scientist, a humanitarian, and head of a corporation. He did not have to condemn this man to death. But inside him, something cold and inhuman, not from this world, stilled any such preliminary doubts. Inside his pocket, a pistol lay, with a unique fusillade concealed within it. He smiled and waved to Saul Erdel as the scientist left his car:
"Ach! Alexander, how are you? And congratulations!"
"Thank you, Saul. Now, about the device that I inquired about on the phone.."
"Yes. Yes, here are the schematics and the results of my first experiment. As you can see, it was aimed at Mars, and made nexus about several million years ago. It retrieved a humanoid, but the poor creature choked in our planetary atmosphere and was dead within minutes. I took the proper precautions. It was then that I realised that the plans could only be entrusted to one person- the President of the United States. And now, you are that person." Grateful to be relieved of his responsibility, Saul Erdel placed the memory stick in the gloved hand of Alexander Luthor. The two men shook hands and Luthor pocketed the experimental teleport technology. As Saul Erdel walked to his car and started its engine, he didn't see Luthor take aim and fire his gun. No-one saw or heard anything before Saul Erdel jerked once, realising in a futile instant how he had been betrayed, but then his eyes glazed over as the deadly, undetectable chemicals coursed through his body and he slumped over the wheel. In the next instant, another bullet caused the fuel in his car to combust and it erupted into flame, destroying the last evidence of what might have been a revolutionary new technology, or which might have been a bridgehead for an alien invasion. Once he was back in his Oval Office, Luthor dropped the memory stick into a beaker of acid. It hissed and briefly flared as the data within it was consumed utterly.
VICE-PRESIDENT PETER ROSS: CORTO MALTESE:
On the radio, a Spanish language of Dire Straits' Romeo and Juliet played in the distance. Ruefully, Peter Ross, Vice President of the United States, mopped his brow in the equatorial heat. He was reminded of his relationship with Lana Lang, back in Smallville, before they'd both grown up and apart. Their lives had taken such different turns- Pete had worked in Jonathon and Martha Kent's corner store after school, which enabled him to save up enough money to eventually leave the town for Illinois and Metropolis. The Kents were a great couple- but they'd never been able to have any children. They cherished Pete as if he was their own son and he still missed them. One night, Jonathon had showed him a telescope, in which he saw a red star, alone in the night. He'd told him that it was a red dwarf, named LHS 2520, about twenty seven light years from Earth, and that astronomers had discovered five exoplanets in orbit around it. And then Pete saw it, a blinding green pinpoint of light. Twenty seven years ago, a civilisation had died, as did a species. But Pete Ross and Jonathon Kent didn't know that the obliterated planet had been named Krypton, about its people and its fate and never would. In this universe, it had no survivors.
As the phone rang in his apartment within the US Embassy, Pete Ross sighed in relief:
"Pete?"
"Lex. Hey, it worked. It looks like the Chinese have backed off their plan to station nuclear weapons here."
On the other end of the line, President Luthor nodded, his eyes intent on a laptop. He touched a button and the access codes to what had thought to be a decommissioned nuclear launch facility in Kansas were swiftly entered into it.
"Well done, Mr Vice President. Pete, it's been a privilege to have served with you. We've known each other since the Smallville days and we've both come far. I can even forgive you the affair with Lana."
In Corto Maltese, Pete swallowed: "Lex, what...?"
"It's all right, Pete. It was always a marriage of convenience. Lana's too far gone to be concerned about anyway. Except, the problem is, she might have told you about the end game and why she has her drinking problem. I can't risk that. Sorry" On the desk before him, on the laptop camera, a silo door slid open and a missile gradually cleared it, blazing away into the sky. It had all been planned beforehand, the cleared air corridor, the federal land requisition of surrounding land, the reactivation of the facility and the transfer and rearming of the solitary missile within it. As it soared into the sky, the US air traffic mainframe abruptly went offline for four or five minutes. In that time, Pete Ross ran with his mobile phone to Air Force Two and yelled at the pilots to take off immediately. But it was too late. High above the beauty and calm of the Carribean, he could now see a telltale arc of smoke from its contrail.
"Damn you, Lex," Pete Ross began to say at the very moment that a fifteen kiloton nuclear weapon detonated five hundred feet above him. He did not feel anything as the temperature around him and the cabin of Air Force Two rose to several million degrees in the space of microseconds. Anyone looking toward the detonation from on Corto Maltese itself would have been instantly blinded. receive fatal third degree burns and then be flung at high velocity against collapsing brick, masonry, flying glass and shards of metal. In respect, it was massive overkill. During the first use of a nuclear weapon against an inhabited metropolitan centre, fifty thousand people perished in instants. Three thousand died in the ensuing days from radiation poisoning and unsurvivable burns. All of the inhabitants of Corto Maltese died and so did fifteen Chinese Peoples Liberation Army military advisors.
From satellite surveillance, President Luthor leant back and observed the site of his latest homicide and the mass slaughter that he had just perpetrated. He nodded to himself, set his cat's cradle to a faster pace, reflecting the consequences of what he had just done. In her room, First Lady Lana Lang Luthor put down her bottle and stared at the hells cauldron that had consumed Corto Maltese and her lover. She straightened and rose from the bed and her expression became one of steely determination. In cold fury, she took the photograph of herself and her husband and smashed it against the wall.
FIRST LADY LANA LANG LUTHOR: METROPOLIS:
Several days later, international tension was at an all-time high as Lana Lang Luthor, estranged First Lady of the United States, walked steadily toward the WGBS interview studio. She respected Lois Lane. She was a diligent, professional investigative journalist and she could be trusted to fully tease out the consequences of what she had to relate. In her pocket, she carried a memory stick. She had not believed her husband capable of this level of atrocity and deception, but Pete's death had galvanised her to end the farce and reveal what exactly he was capable of. There had been children killed in Corto Maltese. She owed it to them to bring down her husband before he could destroy the United States and the world around them all. She crossed the studio and shook hands with Lois Lane before sitting down to begin the interview.
At that very moment, air raid sirens sounded over the city, throughout the United States, Europe, China, Northwest and South Asia, Canada and Australia. Lana Lang Luthor stayed where she was. She realised grimly that he had gone beyond humanity this time. No. This had to be done, whatever happened to her and whatever happened next. To her credit, so did Lois Lane. Three minutes later, a Chinese nuclear missile detonated high above WGBS Metropolis studios and a brave woman paid for her defiance with her life. High above the surface of a ravaged planet, nuclear missiles soared and impacted and the death toll of humanity rose past millions of the wretched world's inhabitants to one billion... then two....then four...then six...until finally, the human species was extinct in the flaming ruins of an irradiated planet.
EIGHT BILLION INHABITANTS OF EARTH:
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.
And because he was now utterly inhuman, Luthor ignored the blood, gore, skeletal debris and charred flesh around him. The irradiation would have instantly killed any human observer, were the human species not obliterated in an extinction level event. Indeed, he crushed skeletal remains and kicked skulls aside as he awaited his next stage of life.
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.
EARTH-ONE:
"Damn you, Superman! Why must you always stand in my path? Do you realise what I might become if it weren't for your enmity and constraint?"
THE END