Prologue
By the time you wake a thousand years will have passed since the death of Rao
The light of our sun will still be visible in the night's sky but it no longer hangs there
Our lord god Rao's influence will have left this dimension
While our prayers may still reach the father and giver of warmth his final judgment is clear
You are our last hope at redemption you must take the light of Rao with you
We have been found wanting my child, take this message as the last missive from a lost people
Teach your new home the promise of life and let them not repeat the folly of Krypton
Conciseness is elusive and incomplete here in my current existence. My pod keeps me alive in a state of suspended animation. The teaching matrix of the life pod prods directly at my cerebral cortex. It's a crude manner of education but a necessary one given the circumstances. My world is gone, destroyed utterly.
I never really knew the world I was born into. The cortex had chosen a mate pairing for my mother shortly before the planet's destruction. Krypton had long ago left behind the barbarism of sexual intercourse and chemical attraction. The cortex was the repository of all the genetic information of krypton. It was the cortex that determined what combinations of mates would make the best offspring. This system chose not only the mated pairs but also the specific combinations of characteristics would be most beneficial. No one had defied the wisdom of the cortex in a thousand years.
Well almost.
My uncle and his wife, Jor-El and Lara Jor-el, had been mated by the cortex but they rebuked the notion that a computer could know better than nature how to pair individual chromosomes. Their son Kal-El is an anomaly and one that the ruling council sought to snuff out.
I am not Kal-EL, and his story is not mine.
Every detail of how I was born followed the cortex exactly. My mother had just reached the age where she could be paired and begin the process of transitioning into adulthood. The only oddity in my birth was its timing. My parents should have been given the choice of when to start their family.
The teaching matrix in my pod tells me that this anomaly is likely due to the destruction of my world. It can't give me any certainties only speculation. It wasn't designed to be anything other than a tool to expedite my education. The only detail it knows for sure is that my surname is Zor-El. My mother was a child of the house of El and so am I.
My name is Lin Zor-El, and unlike nearly other Kryptonian to ever be born, my first steps out of the life pod that conceived me will not be onto the red sands of my home world but an alien world called earth.