Inviolate
Chapter 4
by Scriviner
All rights belong to owners, I make no claim to any of these chars.
Mercy stepped out of her bedroom, fully dressed and ready for the day. It was early, but she was used to it. She straightened out the tunic of her chauffeur's uniform, and picked an imaginary piece of lint off her sleeve. The statuesque woman should have expected it, but she was still surprised to find Lex was hard at work at the computer station nearest to the sliding panel. On a nearby desk a half dozen computer monitors flashed and scrolled text obviously waiting for more input, but he was ignoring them in favor of the circuit board he was sliding back into the computer cabinet.
She frowned down at him from the vantage of the mezzanine before calling down, "Have you been up all night again?"
Lex looked up, a screwdriver between his teeth and smudges of dust on his face. He mumbled something to her, then realized he wasn't making any sense and spat the screwdriver out before calling back. "Is it morning already?"
"Dawn was an hour ago." She replied, walking down the stairs to join him. She gave him a scowl full of mock fierceness, "Did you get any sleep at all?"
He replied airily, "Edison got by on catnaps. I had a few minutes of sleep here and there."
"You're no Edison, Mr. Luthor."
"Compared to me, Edison was a sub-literate moron," he scoffed, "I've got some of the quirks of the Panel sorted out. Given a location and elevation I can home in on anywhere on the planet."
"That's good. I thought you were busy peeking in on Ms. Tyler, though?"
"It wasn't peeking. I was performing information gathering." He sniffed. "It paid off, incidentally. I'm having dinner with Rebecca again tonight."
"So soon? Isn't that unusual, sir?"
"Haven't you heard, Mercy? Lex Luthor's turning over a new leaf." He declared grandiosely, waving a circuit board around.
She grinned cheekily at his back. "This is why you're perfecting your peeping machine? To score extra dates?"
"No." He said flatly, treating her to a scowl. "If you'd be so good as to start another pot of coffee, I'll be happy to show you our next step."
She moved smoothly over to the kitchen counter, turning on the LexCorp coffee maker with practiced ease, before slipping Lex's old "Super-genius" mug under the drip. "So what did you find?"
"That these men we're looking for are very, very good at hiding themselves. I've been making all sorts of inquiries all night with a great many, many government databases."
"Didn't they rescind your security clearance yet?"
"Nope. As long as that friendly little Korean fellow in the CIA's IT department keeps getting his monthly check, he will continue to forget to remove my access."
He walked to the counter, then took the now full mug. He winced just before taking a sip of the Blue Mountain goodness, and pulled open a drawer at the counter, pulling out a bottle of small red pills. Lex's own special blend of pain killers, vitamins, and caffeine. Between the lack of sleep, the kryptonite laced wine from the night before and the sweaty work he'd been engaged in, he was in that uncomfortable zone where one was still slightly drunk while suffering from sleep deprivation but now also nursing a hangover. He popped a handful of pills, washing it down with the strong, hot coffee. "Even with presidential level access... even with my less than legally procured Excelsior access gave me nothing. So I'm forced to follow up on the only clue I have on hand."
"Something you heard from Ms. Tyler?"
"Yes. Now that the Panel can home in on GPS coordinates and I have some coordinates to home in on, I think we can proceed." Lex said as he slid home the last circuit board. He stood up and flipped the switch back to on, letting the white cube take shape once more.
"What are you planning on doing?"
He walked over to the monitor and began tapping on the keys. "I want to look in on one of the men responsible for what they did to my brain. I have a phone number. With a phone number, I can find an address. With an address, I can pull up county records for floor plans and Google the coordinates. It turns out that dear Rebecca's aunt Wendi is living with someone she calls 'Uncle Rex', who seems rather suspiciously like Rex Tyler."
"Why suspiciously?"
"Because he's a dead man. Doubly so. He was missing, declared dead in 1986 just a little after the Crisis. He reappeared in '92, looking younger than he did when he disappeared in '86, which was way too young for a man in his sixties to begin with. Then, all of a sudden, he dies of acute organ failure in 1994, looking his correct age, which was when Rebecca inherited the company from him." He paused, raising an eyebrow at her. "Last night, she was having a pretty chummy conversation with a man supposedly ten years dead."
"Well, you've been declared dead a few times yourself, Mr. Luthor."
"Which is exactly why I'm suspicious. I wouldn't trust myself, so someone else with a history like mine makes me quite curious." He finished his coffee, "I think I have the slide set up properly."
"Then why bother with the slide? Why don't you just approach him directly or send someone?"
"We may yet go that route, but for now, we need more information." A few more key presses cleared the cube's display, sending it zooming down on a view of the eastern seaboard... closer in to upstate New York to an affluent suburb, before finally closing in on a pleasant house with a picket fence and a neatly mown lawn. The view passed through a wall, then up through the ceiling, rising up from the floor of a second story bedroom where an older couple were cuddled up in bed. They appeared to be in their fifties. The woman had a short bob of lightly colored hair and was dressed in a modest nightgown. The man was bare chested, dressed only in pajama bottoms and had graying dark hair. Lex would definitely need to work on getting color on the slide show display, but his view was clear enough. The woman certainly looked like the driver's license photo he'd found for Wendi Tyler, wife to Rex Tyler. They both wore matching wedding bands on. Thin and lightly colored. Probably platinum or white gold.
Lex zoomed his view in closer to the bed. The sleeping man looked like Rex Tyler's driver's license photo, which according to the DMV records he'd been able to find was taken back in 1978. Aside from the graying hair, the man looked almost exactly as he did in the nearly thirty year old photo. This man, this Rex, was in incredible shape for a man of any age. He had an athlete's build, with not a spare ounce of fat. There was some of the inevitable softening that came with age, but the man's body was that of a man in his early thirties.
Mercy raised an eyebrow.
"I can only hope I look that good when I'm in my eighties." Lex said with a smirk.
"There's no way he's in his eighties."
"I'm tempted to see if he's had work done."
"Well, why don't you? If he's an impostor, that would be a quick way to check."
"True." He replied, tweaking the trackball and zooming in closer, the view peeled away skin and facial muscle, exposing the bone beneath. A slight twitch of the control proved a little too strong, sending the image past the bone, which Lex noted idly showed no signs of surgery, but quite a few healed fractures here and there. Lex managed to stop the display finally, but the massive image had centered on the man's brain. Most specifically his amygdalla.
Mercy stared up at the extremely enlarged view of the interior of the man's brain. "Is that... what are those rough spots?"
"Scars." Lex spat out. His grip on the trackball tightened and he found his teeth bared in a snarl. His heart was hammering in his chest. It was almost exactly like him. Almost exactly, right down to details that he hadn't quite considered before. One thing was clear though. He forced his breath to slow and ground out to Mercy. "This poor sap isn't a co-conspirator. He's another victim."
"They exposed him too?"
"Yes. The scars look old. At least as old as mine, but given how young he looks, it would be difficult to pin down a date for his exposure." Lex ran a hand over his scalp in frustration. His eyes narrowed as he noted an odd reading on his display. He adjusted the cube slightly, everything began to show up sharper. Clearer. Better outlined.
Mercy raised an inquiring eyebrow at Lex's expression.
"Well, I think I can explain his disappearances and why he seems so young." He replied. "Chronoton radiation. He's saturated in the stuff and his wife is contaminated, but it looks like secondary transfer. He's the primary source. Either he's jumped back and forth multiple times, or he spent a long time... decades, maybe... outside of the natural flow of time." He waved his hand dismissively, "But that's neither here nor there. Do you realize what this means?"
"No."
"I've been looking at this whole thing as someone conspiring against me. I'd considered the possibility that a time traveler had gone back in time to alter my mind, specifically to control my behavior in the present day, but that's not the only explanation."
"He is a time traveler, Mr. Luthor." Mercy pointed out patiently.
"Yes, but if I'd been affected at such a young age... then it's not inconceivable that it wasn't personal. If they did it to him as well, then there may be others. His life has enough parallels to mine that it could be a profile that our hidden conspirators are working through." He dismissed the image on the and began hurriedly programming at the console. "I need to know."
"Know what, sir?"
"How many others these people did this to. I'll need to run a search... but I need more computing power on hand to do it..." He mumbled to himself, turning his full focus back onto the monitor. Mercy shook her head. She knew he would probably be preoccupied for the rest of the day. Taking his distraction for a dismissal, she made her way to the vehicle bay. They were going to need something to eat after all, and the Big Belly Burger down the street would do just as well as pizza would to keep Lex going.
- - -
Rebecca Tyler never did get that second dinner with Lex. Mercy ended up calling her with some vague excuses, as Lex managed to bury himself in his laboratory work. There were occasional forays into the outdoors, but never very far. Lex hadn't needed much in the way of parts for this project beyond some equipment he could pick up for himself at a local Radio Shack. It was a week later when he informed Mercy that he had completed his search engine. On the seventh day, Lex rested and let the cobbled together equipment run. On that day, he unleashed a deluge of nuisance calls the likes of which had never been seen before, and likely never be seen again.
Men and women up and down the East coast received the calls. There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason in the pattern of calls, only that no phone was safe. The call would ring ten times. If no one picked up, or the call was picked up by voice mail or some other sort of phone service, it would hang up immediately. Otherwise, a short advertising jingle for WayneTech would play. To say that the backlash against Waynetech was significant, was to understate it.
Lex was still not completely over LexCorp getting sold to them and was quite happy to get his licks in where he could, even if it was the equivalent of juvenile pranking. A few engineered advertising budget tweaks would later indicate that WayneTech had paid for the mass phone spamming. The bad publicity, nuisance charges and punitive fines they would face for violating the National Do Not Call database was simply a happy extra as far as he was concerned.
The real point of the exercise was considerably more invasive. He'd started with a purloined customer database for phone carriers up and down the East Coast. He would have preferred to have had one for the entire country, but he'd been too busy working on the other details to get the rest of the list. The other details in this case included setting up the database and the GPS system to the Sliding Panel's targeting computer as well as setting up a camera feed with pattern recognition software of his own design. Programming the automated calling software and hijacking a telemarketing firm's auto-dialer equipment was almost an afterthought.
The auto-dialer pulled a name from the database and executed the call. While the call attempted to connect, a search would run concurrently, tracing the location of the call's destination. In the case of landlines, it was simple enough to trace the location from the billing address, otherwise, a complicated algorithm inserted into the cellular network allowed him to trace calls to individual cellphones with an accuracy of a few yards. Once the call was picked up, the sliding panel would center on the location so retrieved. The pattern recognition software would get into the act at that point. It would center itself first on the individual answering the call, cross-checking the face of the one answering the call against DMV photos and mugshots to confirm identity, before zooming in closer to take a snapshot of their brains. The pattern recognition software would check once more, looking for the distinct pattern of scars that phobaline tetrahydrochorate left behind. In the event of a positive match, it would flag the database entry, before running the whole against a statistical analysis linked to Luthor's various government databases to find significant patterns in those displaying the marks.
Even with the various tweaks and optimizations Lex had performed to the slide, it still needed three seconds to complete each individual scan. Running the search consecutively on the tens of millions of phone subscribers on the East Coast would have taken well over a year to complete. Seeking to cut down on that, Lex reprogrammed the panel to scan a thousand phones at a time. The autodialers could keep up, if only just barely. Lex had had to take over a the capacity of a large Indian firm as well as a half dozen Philippines customer service companies just to get everything to work all at once. The expanded search cut the time down considerably from a year to less than a day. It was also more of a strain on Lex's equipment. He only hoped the slide could keep up.
As the search ran, Lex lounged on his large, overstuffed sofa. He had a cold beer in hand. His eyes were closed and his head leaned back, letting his mind drift. The privacy implications his sliding panel introduced were terrifying. While similar setups could be done with traditional teleportation equipment, the power requirements were prohibitive. There was no way to make sure a broad search be energy efficient. With the panel, however he could do these things with easily affordable equipment and low power consumption. Most importantly, nothing could keep it out or keep it from peeking in on you. He was running a search real time human engine on people. If he wished, he could just as easily have changed the parameters to find him every single redhead in lingerie within a fifty mile radius. Or every criminal with an outstanding warrant currently in violation of his or her parole. Or every husband cheating on his wife within a single block.
Lex mused that it was good fortune that he'd been the one to develop it. After all, he would be able to use it responsibly. The laugh that escaped his lips was genuinely amused.
Mercy eyed him from her desk. She'd just gotten off the phone with Miss Teschmacher. The woman handled the day to day running of Lex's remaining legal business interests. Eve Teschmacher's mother had needed a complex and expensive medical procedure that Lex had paid for and in so doing had bought the woman's undying loyalty. The woman was once the head of LexCorp's secretarial pool, but she turned out to be so spectacularly loyal to Lex personally that she'd quit LexCorp during the buyout and had ended up becoming Lex's personal assistant, albeit at a remove. Lately, his attention had not been on his money, and it was only Mercy and Miss Teschmacher's industrious work that kept Lex in beer and electronics.
"Tess says everything's going well. Also, those bio-engineered rice shares that were picked up in Taiwan are finally starting to turn a profit. She just thought you might want to know."
"Her judgment, as always, is impeccable."
"Are you almost done with this?"
"This, what?"
"Your vendetta. You haven't really done much but putter around since you used your peeping device on Ms. Tyler's uncle."
"I'm still working on it. As I told you before, there's far too much we don't know. I'm trying to remedy that." Lex was about to say more when a chime from his equipment signaled the completion of the panel search. He got up smoothly and made his way across the lab. As he got to the monitors, he watched the scrolling data for a long moment. His expression became more and more grave, the longer he stared.
"What's wrong?"
"This... this is monstrous." His voice was filled with raw, painful anger. She knew he'd been angry when he'd found out about how his brain had been tampered with. That had been nothing. That was a campfire. Now he was a blazing conflagration. That hard, cold light in his eyes had been lit. The rage he'd once reserved for Superman was now being turned on these people, whoever they might have been. His voice had dropped, tightly controlled now, but aching to unleash hell on someone. The mad, terrible expression of a man seeking to tear down heaven itself.
"What is it?"
He pointed to the screen, specifically at a list of names that completely filled the screen. At the top, written in bold text it said, '28,452 entries flagged.' "Even with false positives, that's a terrifyingly large number." He scrolled lower, looking over every point of correlation between the names as they came up. The pattern was there. Clear and unmistakeable.
"Men, women, teens, children, the elderly... victims from every demographic. This is huge. This goes beyond--" he paused. A clear picture forming from the sample, finally large enough for him to see true patterns. "Genius. Crippling genius."
Mercy slid into nod and grunt mode. Lex needed to vent and she knew that accommodating him was just part of the job.
"A statistically significant portion of our sample have standardized IQ's in the genius end of the scale, but I don't think that's the only indicator. It's not just superior intelligence, it's... I'm not sure how to describe it. I didn't realize at the time, but some of these tests that measure that can also be used to check for indicators of mental flexibility." He shook his head, looking for words that fit better, but his anger had robbed him of his eloquence. "The new. New things. That's the factor these people all share. On standardized psychological tests in their permanent records, all of them showed unusually high levels of adaptive thinking. Tendencies towards innovation, at least before their exposure. The other correlation is truly disturbing."
"That is?"
"Mental problems. Over seventy percent of these people have a record of some sort of mental disease or other anti-social behaviors bad enough to need diagnosis. Did you know that there are all sorts of studies relating schizophrenia with creativity and intelligence? If I'm reading this data right... the reason why they're schizophrenics is because they're so bright. They were made schizophrenic."
"With the fear toxin?"
"Scare anyone badly enough and you can break their mind. These... these animals have been doing this for generations now. Systematically crippling us in our thousands."
The anger in Lex's voice was getting to her. Mercy was finding it more and more difficult to keep her own composure in the face of it. Lex wasn't beyond mad, she could tell this whole thing offended him on a profoundly personal level. "But, why?" She asked.
He looked away, the anger slowly starting to drain from his expression. There was a shift as the question echoed in his mind. "Why?" Why would anyone go through the trouble. Who benefits? Why would anyone do such a thing? Where was the profit? The whole enterprise was far too widespread and organized to be someone's random psychotic inflicting damage on people. There was a reason for this, perhaps one that a sane man could not accept, but... and here, Lex allowed a cold smile touch his lips, his discovery had left him with serious doubts about his own sanity.
Lex did not know his own mind as well as he'd hoped. There were places in there that he was not only unfamiliar with, but there were places in his head that he was outright terrified of. Places that thought taking kryptonite laced super steroids were a good idea. Places that insisted that a Kryptonian needed to die. Places that made him budget billions of dollars a year towards killing a man whose only fault was in being better than Lex. He'd covered these parts over, piled on justifications and rationalizations so thickly that he almost believed them, but the past few months, with the violent detox and the discovery of how his mind had been tampered with had forced him to reevaluate everything.
The knowledge that he was not alone hit harder. The anger had gone past white hot, pushed to the extreme of cold, brutal logic, that was no less horrific for the fury that fueled it. Detached from his emotions, he analyzed the data once more. The analysis was clear. Separated from the human element, the "why" leapt out at him.
Lex turned to face her. He stepped closer, the cold that he'd dipped himself in cracked and he did something he never thought he would. He reached a hand out, staggering slightly as the blood drained from his face. It was so clear. Mercy reached out to catch him before he fell. His arms encircled her without warning, and he clung to her, seeking some warmth desperately as the implications filtered through his mind.
A faint blush threatened to rise to her cheeks, but she beat that down mercilessly. She cleared her throat, looking down on his bald head as he held her tightly.
He looked up, staring into her eyes. For a moment it was his detox all over again. The eyes of a broken man. One battered to his limits and reduced to animal's panic and irrationality. He was at his lowest ebb once more, the cusp just before he struggled to pull himself back together.
He whispered to her, his fists bunching up the material of her uniform. "They want us crippled. And limited. They want the human race stupid and obedient. They're trying to keep us ground down to our lowest common denominator. Take away mankind's inventors, its leaders, its innovators before they even have a chance to come forward. It makes sense... how do you keep someone from causing you trouble? Get to him and deal with him before he gets a chance to. They couldn't kill all of these people. That would make too obvious a pattern. But make them unstable... Make them anti-social, asocial, arrogant and completely unable to cooperate with others through insanity and they'll isolate themselves for you. More efficient. It takes less manpower since your prisoner guards himself. The few who slip through the cracks, either because they were strong enough to resist or were missed in the sweeps aren't enough to stem the tide. Not enough of us to make the difference that they can't control." Lex's eyes were shining. "They turned me into a selfish, self-centered, amoral monster so that I wouldn't make trouble for them. Because I'd be easier to deal with. So that I'd keep everything I'd created for myself instead of using it to change the world."
"Are... are you alright?"
He straightened up slowly, still holding onto Mercy for support, but no longer weak, no longer needing her. Now he held her just... for the warmth of human contact. "No, I don't think I'm going to be alright until I see every one of these animals bleeding and kneeling at my feet. We still don't have the 'who', but with this 'why', I've just figured out a 'how'."
"How what?"
"How to fight back. Call Miss Teschmacher, Mercy, my dear." His eyes were hard once more. "We're going to war."