Author's Note 5/25/05: I've tacked the first chapter onto the end of the prologue here so that the numbers assigned to the chapters match up. If you've already read the prologue, just scroll down to get to the next bit (which is very short, I'm afraid). Many thanks to everyone who commented on the prologue. I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get the next part out, but...well, I guess you can see why I try to make sure I've finished a story before I post it. I'm terribly lazy and a very slow worker. I have a WIP blog set up if you're interested in spoilers for "Olympus" or a record of my frustrations with it. It's linked at the fanfic archive I recently set up for my silly stories. The link is available from my profile page. Enough babbling. Here's more story. I hope it's okay.
Author's Note: This story takes crazy poetic license with Superman's powers. Instead of telling a story about Superman's limitations, I've decided to tell a story about what it would be like if he had no limitations. I usually don't post stories unless they are finished, but this one is special. So I've posted a preview. Please tell me what you think.
Summary: Clark wakes from centuries of enslavement to find everything he loved obliterated.
The monitoring deck was silent, but it was a silence that gradually whelmed the ears, becoming a sound in itself, a sound from nowhere. She had come to believe that the mind created a kind of psychic white noise from the emptiness. Because it was too incredible that the most important and most sophisticated feat of engineering in human history should work its wonders without so much as a whisper. Mountains should make noise when they are moved. Even in the soundless cold of space.
On the floor below, where the energy from the extraction chamber was converted into usable forms, the technicians wore ear protection and the floor reverberated with the movement of the turbines. But on the upper level, vibration was kept to a minimum. The superconductors were fragile instruments, despite the horrendous energies they channeled. They formed a deadly, glittering web around the power core, radiating out from the center of the chamber to the conversion columns in the mirrored walls.
When she worked third shift, she would spend hours staring at that maze through the vid-linked observation window, imagining what it would be like to stand beside the power core itself and see with her own eyes the technology that made everything possible. In low-clearance documents, it was referred to as the "Helson" machine, after the twenty-second-century engineer who supposedly designed it. In classified docs, it was the "recovered alien technology". There were about a dozen people on the planet (or in orbit) who knew that the power core was actually organic. The high-level technicians who worked on the monitoring deck with her called it "he" because of its resemblance to a human male. To them, it was the latest in a long line of anthropomorphized molecular machines that had started in the twenty-first century with an organic AI named Dana.
And there was one person who knew that the body now being sucked dry by the Orbital Power Station had once belonged to a sentient creature who had walked among men as one of them, who had been adopted by the Terrans when his own world was destroyed, who had lived and laughed and grieved with Earth's people, who had led her heroes in battle, who had bled for her, and who had ultimately been betrayed by her.
When they had needed him most they had turned on him, enslaved him for their purposes. Over time the crime had been forgotten even by those in charge of perpetuating it. They had grown complacent with the belief that they held nothing more than a glorified solar cell, incapable of independent action. It hadn't occurred to them to wonder what would happen if he were given his freedom – or that such a thing was even possible. No one had even thought about it. No one but her. And even she couldn't imagine what the wrath of a god looked like.
She slipped a data disc into the main console and executed the virus that would bring the entire system crashing down. Then she stepped back to watch as the titan's chains were shattered.
When he opened his eyes, it was like being born. He was conscious of the past as a deep, insensate darkness. He had been nowhere, in a place that wasn't a place at all, that had no dimension or time. Now there was space around him, light in the darkness, and pain - pain everywhere.
His mouth was open, but he couldn't breathe because there was no air. Several moments of violent, soundless struggle passed before he grew accustomed to the fact that he couldn't asphyxiate. But the instinct to breathe was overwhelming and he felt as though he were somehow frozen in the moment of his death. The crushing emptiness of the space around him was somehow worse than the nowhere that had been before. And it was cold - so cold. There was ice under his skin, burning in his flesh.
When his new sight showed him the silvery threads snaking under his skin, his reaction was instinctive, violent.
He had no thought but escape, no emotion but desperation. Fatigue was nothing. The deep cold, nothing. There was only the animal instinct clawing at the inside of his skull. He acted without knowing what he did. The delicate metal melted and scattered, refreezing immediately into irregular, shiny globs. The mirrors shattered silently at his touch. He reeled away from the light, the movement, the cage. He could hear nothing, but he saw the large structure below him shudder with a crushing impact. The terrible bone-deep pain lessened and then disappeared altogether. He felt a great fire sweeping through the empty places it had left. He felt the cold but he was no longer cold. Though there was still no air to breathe he no longer felt like he was suffocating. The warmth spread through him, banishing some of his fear. It beat in irregular waves against him, a soothing current washing over his aching body.
He moved into that feeling of warm safety, riding the solar wind to its source. He couldn't tell that he was moving except that the frosted blue sphere before him grew larger, a tiny island of color in a shoreless sea of night. He recoiled from it violently, driven by a nameless compulsion through the darkness, to where the waves of sweet heat had their origin. He saw the radiance ahead blazing in a variety of spectra and drove himself toward it, the terrifying emptiness of the space around him urging him faster and faster. Again there was no sense of movement, but the small circle of light gradually grew until it filled his horizon, casting out miles-long whipping tendrils of flameless fire.
He raced forward until there was nothing in his vision but a blinding expanse of exploding energy. It filled him, burning insatiably, cocooning him in sheltering plasma at the same time it assaulted him with planet-shredding pressure. Here that tiny blue sphere would be consumed utterly, swallowed by the immensity of the nuclear forge. He pushed on through wave after wave of charged gas exploding outward with the force of fusing nuclei. At first the molten energies seemed to stretch forever, but finally he reached the core, where the sheer kinetic, atom-splitting force of it would have taken his breath away if his lungs weren't already full of 27 million-degree helium and hydrogen.
He balanced in the center of the violence, absorbing energy and redirecting it continuously, screaming soundlessly with the beautiful agony of it. He was dying over and over, he was being born over and over, it was torture, it was ecstasy, he couldn't stand it, he didn't want it to end, it was excruciatingly chaotic, it was the comforting, inevitable result of cause and effect. Everything that ever was, that would be, in a single obliterating eruption of power.
"The
Sun's output is 3.8 x 1033 ergs/second, or about 5 x 1023 horsepower.
How much is that? It is enough energy to melt a bridge of ice 2 miles
wide, 1 mile thick, and extending the entire way from the Earth to the
Sun, in one second."
-NASA's Cosmicopia