Project Kal-El
2. The Evolution
Subject: Unknown
Age: Four years
Dr. Hamilton smiled at the young boy staring at him coldly from across the room. It was a gray room, with no windows, just a door. It had taken a good bit of persuasion to get the boy there, but finally he agreed.
"You know," Hamilton said, leaning forward across the hard meal table between them. "You're causing a lot of problems for us. Nine of my best workers have been sent to the hospital because of injuries from your hand."
The boy remained silently pressed against the wall across from Hamilton. He hadn't said a word since arrival.
Hamilton sighed. "We'd like to help you, if you'll let us. I have some of the best scientists in the world studying that spacecraft. As soon as we…neutralize you, they will study you as well. Do you understand?"
The boy remained silent for several more minutes. Finally, Hamilton got up to leave, confident he would not try to escape. He went to open the door.
"I want to go home."
Hamilton turned around slowly. "What did you say?" he said, wondering if he'd heard correctly, if the boy had really spoken.
"I want to go home," he repeated, in a voice so unfeeling, so robotic, one would never imagine it was a four-year-old speaking.
Hamilton beamed as he strode over to the child. "So you do speak? I knew it! I knew if I talked to you long enough, you would."
"I learned."
"You learned? When? Who taught you?"
"Now. Everyone."
Hamilton stared at him in disbelief. "But you can't mean… you couldn't have possibly…you taught yourself the whole English language? Just now, from listening to others?"
The boy nodded.
"What language did you speak before this?" asked Wolf, who had just walked in, but had apparently been listening the whole time. Hamilton gave him a quizzical look, but he shook his head.
The boy looked up at him and showed the first sign of emotion since he'd come.
He frowned and furrowed his brow. "Mother and Father were teaching me before…"
Wolf came forward. "Before what? What happened to them?"
The boy clenched his fists. "I want to go home."
Wolf chuckled. "You are home."
"Let me talk to him for a bit," Hamilton said. He sat down in his original chair, across from the boy.
"Now, if you let us…what is the matter?" Hamilton asked, noticing that the boy had turned toward the wall. He had pressed his forehead against the cold steel and did not seem to be listening.
"I asked what the matter was. Don't let Wolf get to you; he's not very good with children. Did he upset you?"
The boy turned slowly to face Hamilton. His eyes were filled with tears.
"This is not my home."
Hamilton sighed and adjusted his glasses. "I understand you miss your parents…and I promise, if you help us, I'll do everything in my power to find them and reunite you with them. But we can't just let you go. You're a danger to everyone, including yourself. You must understand on some level that you are special. You could lead to revolutionary discoveries, you know. You could change the entire world as we know it."
Wolf reentered. "We need it to translate what's written on the spacecraft," he said, staring intensely at the boy.
The child ended up translating everything on the ship, for somehow he understood the language.
So it was not by his parents, but by this ship, surrounded by strangers, that he learned his name: Kal-El.
Subject: Project Kal-El, Sector 313
Age: Nine
"You're acting completely irrationally," Hamilton argued heatedly. "You've made Project Doomsday too powerful. If it ever escaped, nothing in the world could stop it."
"So we give it a weakness, a kill-switch. Everything has one," Wolf countered. "Hell, even Kal-El has an Achilles' heel."
"Um, doctors?" piped up a woman who'd just entered.
"What?" they snapped simultaneously.
"There has been an occurrence with Project Kal-El."
"What's happened?" Hamilton asked with concern.
"Well, I was delivering the weights you wanted given to him for his daily exercises, when he…he…"
"He what?" Hamilton asked, still rather irritated.
"He told me what the scientists were doing in the sector next to his."
"And?"
"And he was right."
"I don't see what the problem is," Wolf said exasperatedly.
The woman dug her toes into the floor. "Sir, there are no windows in his room…I think he…saw through the wall."
Subject: Project Ace, Sector 301
Age: Ten
"Kal, why do you think we're here?" Ace asked Kal-El while they each did individual exercises one day.
He looked up at her. "You are not supposed to call me that."
She wrinkled her nose. "You think because you're three years older, you can tell me what to do like everyone else in this godforsaken?"
Kal-El ignored her and returned to his drills, which consisted of seeing through various materials to answer questions embedded in them.
Ace picked up her pamphlet of mind drills. She ripped out a page, slowly so as to make sure Ka-El noticed. She twisted it and stared intensely at it, her pupils growing larger and smaller rapidly. The next moment, it was no longer a piece of paper; it was a white rose.
Kal-El stared at it. "It is still paper, isn't it? It just looks like a flower."
His voice was hollow and dead; he hadn't slept in days due to constant drilling. Ace decided to put some emotion back into him.
Her pupils grew once again, like ink spreading across her eyes. The lights flickered on and off, faster and faster. Kal-El looked around; the walls began to crack. Black liquid seeped out.
"Stop it," he said, glaring at her. Ace smiled as she made clusters of green crystals emerge from the floor. Kal-El's hands shook until his exercises fell to the floor.
"Stop it!" he yelled, as the papers were carried away in the strong wind that'd picked up in the small cell of a room.
"What's wrong?" Ace asked innocently. "Is the fantastic Project Kal-El scared? You don't like the meteor rocks, do you? What'd they call it…oh yeah. Kryptonite. Does kryptonite scare you, Kal?"
"I could kill you," he whispered, covering his ears as the wind and screams got louder. His hands were bleeding, yet they were not. There was a monsoon above, but that couldn't be. Where was the ceiling? Where was the door? The entire room seemed to be falling apart. Flames and rain and kryptonite and blood were merging before Kal-El's eyes.
"Stop it now or I'll kill you!" he screamed as the illusions invaded his mind. Outside, scientists struggled to get into the room, but to no avail.
Ace laughed, out of madness, out of rebellion, out of some delusional satisfaction.
Her laughter was cut off short. Ka-El had opened his eyes and in less time than it takes to blink, he'd gone across the room and grabbed Ace by the throat.
She choked and gasped for breath. In fact, Kal-El was holding back so much he felt like she would slip through his fingers. He did not understand that he was crushing her throat.
"Make it stop," he ordered, too angry to let go or even loosen his grip. Ace shook as she saw his blue eyes turn an intense red.
Corpses' hands burst from the walls as the rain turned into hail and Ace struggled to breath. The ground shook beneath them, but Kal-El was unaffected. He continued telling his 'classmate' to make the visions stop. He could feel them altering his mind.
"Kal," she choked out. "Kal, I can't breath."
"You're not supposed to call me that!" he screamed.
The entire room burst into flames and kryptonite spears impaled Kal-El's torso, blood pouring from the wound, and the ground collapsed and his parents were calling for him to come home and he had killed Ace. He had killed everyone; everyone was dead and he was happy; they were humans, they deserved to die, they'd taken him and broken him. Now they were dead like him.
But they were not. Ace was being carried from the room, sedated but very much alive. Hamilton had rushed over to Kal-El, who was still standing there, perfectly still.
"Are you all right? Project Kal-El, Sector 313, respond!"
"Is he all right?" repeated a nearby worker, John Peters as it so happened. "Are you kidding? He almost snapped that girl's neck and you're asking if he's all right?"
"Ace should never have been put in the same sector as Kal-El," Hamilton said. Several workers nodded in agreement. The girl was obviously psychotic. He turned back to Kal-El. "This is not your fault. She was completely disturbed. You acted on impulse."
He started to leave, when Kal-El spoke up, in the original hollow voice.
"What will happen to Ace?"
"She will have to be terminated," Hamilton said softly, without looking back.
Later that night Kal-El would experience nightmares for the first time.
Author's Note: So this chapter and the next few are just to give you a sense of how Kal's growing up. Um, sorry for making Ace evil and crazy…and anyone who doesn't know that Ace is an illusionist is probably very confused. Hope you enjoy this. Please review! :) (For the record, I didn't know Firestorm was actually a superhero until a few days ago after I'd already written the first two chapters of this story. So, I didn't copy the name on purpose, but I'm not changing it.)
