Author: Meresger
Category: Alternate Universe
Keywords: Jor-El, Krypton, Kal-El
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Relic
Summary: Hello Kryptonite, Good-bye Krypton!
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Clark Kent, and my fic won't make a cent, All the credit must therefore go - to Jerry & Joe and Millar & Grough! (Kudos also to Warner Bro, the WB Network, the Cartoon Network, and DC Comics.)
Somewhere in the Milky way Galaxy fifty light years from the star Sol on the day 39 Ogtol of the year 10,000:
A red giant star called Rao pulsed, great flares of burning hydrogen hurtling outward toward the two planets trapped with the dying sun's immense gravitational field. The nearer and larger sphere took the brunt of the geomagnetic storm, the weather control machines that kept the harsh climate at bay unable to function. Krypton had already lost its moon Xenon to the flares, propelled out into the orbit of Thoron with its toxic clouds not much unlike those Krypton once swirled and now again threatened to block out the sun. The once beautiful land, full of vibrant colors was now covered in ash that smothered and burned the flora and fauna and clogged the weather control machines.
The last thousand years marked drastic changes in the life of the inhabitants. Out of an indulgent and scientifically stagnant society was born a new age of genetic science and cloning. This brought the Clone Wars, the beginning of Krypton's end a thousand years later in an age obsessed with science and artificial intelligence. It was one such machine that would fool them all, created to catalogue information and somehow twisted and evolved into an entity that sought only to covet and destroy. Few were aware even in the end that their own creation had been their destruction.
And so, while the change in weather patterns, death of crops, and other unusual geological events signaled Krypton's doom, the people believed the tampered-with readouts from their computer that these were normal occurrences due to a depletion in the sun's radiation.
Even on the lunar colony of Argo, the people went on about their lives as the AI covered up the increasing death toll from a strange illness connected to the recent volcanic activity. They thought little of the conditions beneath the gathering layer of burning ash from the most recent eruption of the 211,000 foot Mt. Mundru. All they needed was to improve the weather machines and Krypton's temper would be quelled.
There was one scientists, however, one man beneath the ashen clouds in the capital city who did not believe with the rest of them, who was not fooled by the clinical mind of artificial intelligence. On Krypton's final sunrise, when violent winds were blowing the ash across the Sea of Olo and in Southern Urrika and everyone else went about their lives, Jor-El was working in his home laboratory to modify a small spaceship, all he had left after a "mysterious" electromagnetic pulse wiped out everything in his lab, including the wormhole device invented by his distant ancestor and used by the famous interstellar explorer Num-An.
Despite the pleas of his family, Jor had invested all of his savings into this new project. They thought he was mad after disputing the Council and their artifical advisor. He had been dismissed from his position as a respected judge, disowned by the rest of his family, and all but ignored by his wife who was threatening to appeal to the Coucil for sole custody of their young son Kal-El.
Kal-El.
He might not be able to save himself or his younger brother (the only person on the planet who didn't think he was insane) but he still had the prototype vessel and with a few modifications to the wormhole matrix it might be able to reach Earth in two years before the life suspension system ran out of power in the absence of solar energy.
All day he worked, aggravated with the temperamental computer system that he worried was suffering from a similar glitch as his main computer. That blasted computer had probably infected every matrix on the planet with the way things were going! Jor cursed, "Nothing but idiotic bastards we elected." As an afterthought, he muttered an apology to Zor, glancing up where Mithen would be through the clouds. He had not been entirely abandoned by his family. There was still his little brother.
Jor-El didn't even realize he'd nodded off until someone shook him awake. "You were calling for her in your sleep again," accused the dark-haired woman standing over him, holding Kal who kept trying to put strands of it in his mouth. She spoke in a different language, but Jor-El had come to mentally translate conversations into English with his mind stuck on Earth of late as she had pointed out.
"I do not understand you, Jor," Lara sighed. "You are more obsessed with those primitive people than your eccetric grandfather Val. At least he was only interested in researching Num-An. You can't honestly believe we're all going to die! I won't let you send Kal off to some flawed race because you have gone and lost your mind!"
The infant started crying as he always did when his parents fought and Lara gave Jor a 'this is your fault' look before thrusting the child into his arms. "It is just a volcanic erruption, Jor and you are not a geologist. Now, make yourself useful and tend to our fussy son. You might want to get him to read already. One year is more than old enough! And stop speaking in that barbaric language!" With that she retreated into the house.
"I'm sorry, Kal," Jor-El appologized, ignoring her last order and bouncing the boy on his knee, "you should have parents who love each other."
Glancing out the window, he caught the last vestiges of blazing red sun dipping bellow a brief parting in the clouds and Jor felt a deep ache in his chest for the woman he still loved who had so tragically been taken from him. Perhaps, Jor thought now, he should have spent more time researching the caves with his grandfather than rolling in the hay with Louise, and he might know how to reconstruct the stargate. Poor Val. He had died in the explosion at the lab and even their own family believed it was the result of an accident instead of the tampering Jor knew it had to be.
"I love you, Kal, but this isn't the life I wanted," he sighed.
Kal bubbled, waving a chubby hand and his father smiled, thoughts drawn then to Hirem Kent and his pregnant wife and how the elder man had talked endlessly on the drive to the caves about his excitement and how he'd take his shotgun to any doctor that tried to kick him out of the room when his son was born. Kal's birth had been sterile, part of a necessary process to prolong the species and the knowledge of his ancestors which Lara continually nagged him to begin "uploading" into the child's brain. She was embarrassed that Kal had yet to speak when children his age were supposed to begin reading.
"I suppose I should put you to bed before your mother comes to harangue me again for being irresponsible," Jor remarked, standing up and carrying the boy inside.
Later that night as Jor-El slept he dreamed again of that other life, of flying above Smallville with Louise in his arms. And as he dreamed on oblivious, the final chapter for Krypton was drawing to a close. Beneath the surface at the vents in the floor of the vast oceans the deadly chemical reaction in the clear crystalline elements was nearly complete and Mt. Mundru exploded in one final violent eruption shattering the Glass Forest to dust. The polarity of the Magnetic Mountains reversed as did the flow of the Striped River. Massive plumes of black ash were propelled into the air from dormant volcanoes on all of the continents and islands began raining fire and deadly radioactive crystals upon the land.
The inhabitants of Krypton fled their homes, screaming in terror as buildings toppled and the already dim sky became black as night, save for the strange glow. On Lurvan the Golden Volcano rumbled and began spewing molten gold rock that solidified into pulsing yellow rocks. Those who tried to navigate their way to safety with the use of their x-ray vision found their eyes useless and the intense gravity of the planet suddenly slowing them to a crawl. Not that there was anywhere to go.
For the Lost Valley began to split.
Jor-El was be jolted awake and thrown out of bed by a violent quake. All around things fell from shelves and shattered. Some held fast but were simply vibrating to their breaking point. His heart thudding in terror as he ran through the halls of his home in search of his wife, finding her clutching Kal-El who now wailed at the top of his lungs, flailing his arms out of the mass of red, blue, and yellow blankets Lara had scooped up from his crib. Her face showed a mix of guilt and mortal fear as he took her by the arm.
"We haven't much time. We must go now!" he shouted over the roar. "We will save our son! He will live, the last survivor of a great civilization!" Or one that had once been great, Jor silently amended as they ran toward the lab. A people that had fallen into complacency, reliant upon machines and emotionally repressed had never seemed all that great to him. But there was yet hope, and perhaps in Kal-El would reawaken the greatness of the child's ancient namesake.
Jor-El clutched his key, hastily held it up the lock on the door. The symbols glowed and the door ripple and vanished allowing them passage. Thank Rao it hadn't been shorted out! Jor dashed to a bank of computers along one wall and grabbed a crystalline disk from a drawer, inserting it into a drive while laying the octagonal key into a slot. The computer beeped a second later, signaling that the two devices had been linked.
His long fingers then deftly tapped at a key pad marked with the geometric symbols, dots, and lines of the Kryptonian language, and finally Jor-El laid his right hand onto a scanner and a strange white light washed over his body. Removing the disk and key, Jor-El hurried back to the small ship and placed their son inside. The swaddled infant wailed, bewildered and frightened, reaching up to him and Lara.
"Hush, it will all right, Kal, please don't cry. They. . .they can be a great people, Kal-El - they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way." Jor-El spoke with a timber in his voice, recalling his journey to Earth, filled with both great passion and great despair. "For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I send you to them - my only son."
Then he put the crystalline disk into the ship's computer and the key into the indentation on the hull. The symbols on the octagonal disk lit up and the dark metal of the ship came alive, turning a lustrous silver. The dome closed with a hiss shutting Kal inside. Jor watched, his wife gripping his arm as the ship rose up from the floor and then tipped back, the nose angling toward the heavens. The back end erupted suddenly in a blue glow and with a great shockwave of energy it rocket up through the clouds leaving a swirling vortex in its wake.
"Find what I could not," Jor-El whispered and an in that moment it happened.
A natural nuclear bomb had been created and the detonation tore Krypton apart from its center. There was no time to feel pain or fear of death, or for life to flash before anyone's eyes. As a fiery green light blasted through the surface of the planet, tearing apart the crust and throwing it outward into the ash-filled clouds, Jor-El's last thought was of Louise's star-filled eyes....
~telos~