The Secretary of Defense
Washington, DC

Mr President,

With great regret I must inform you that I tender my resignation, with immediate effect. It has been my honor to serve the men and women who in turn serve our country every day, and it is to them I extend my most heartfelt thanks for their steadfast support over the years, their unwavering duty, and the depth of feeling many have personally extended to me. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are an indispensable group. To those reading this now, I wish you long and happy lives in freedom.

Thank you also for you support as well, Mister President. I wish you much success in the future.

Very Respectfully,

General Sam Lane

USAF

Lois and I were professional colleagues for years. Eventually we began courting. I still didn't meet him until I was about to marry Lois. Until she was almost no longer his little girl. If indeed she ever was. Lois always—she answered to no one. Not Perry when she published an especially salubrious exposé on Morgan Edge. Not the publishers when they tried to fire her—five times by now by my count, although she would say only four really counted. Certainly not her father, the intractable, incomparable General Lane.

Perhaps this is why they never got along.

Or perhaps he saw something in her which he hated in himself. I'm not a therapist. I don't pretend to understand the human mind. But as the years went by I watched their relationship stagnate. Watching from the sidelines it was a tense thing, to hear her clipped voice in telephone calls with him. The disagreements. The arguments. I can't imagine what it must have been like.

I think of a conversation she and I have. A long time ago. We're up late one night talking. She tells me about her time working for her college newspaper Nimbus. How the student editorial board is becoming, in her words, a gang of soft effetes afraid of the truth. She tells me she writes up a scathing resignation and sends it off to the student editor who she is also dating. He does not publish it and she finds that out, so she spends the dollar fifty in the library to make copies and pepper them about campus. She calls upon the student body to unite and seek out the truth. And although none of them answer her call at the time, she is eventually vindicated. Years later when she is fresh and young at the Planet the news breaks that her old editor-slash-boyfriend was helping the University cover up a host of violations in exchange for a sweet post-graduate sinecure. Or something. Small potatoes to some. But not Lois. She writes him a letter and promises to never let him forget. To date she hasn't. Every year in the spring. Dear Collin, she writes, are you still defrauding people? He never sends a response. But she knows. She enjoys needling him. And she carries that with her for the rest of her life. She carries it into a relationship—at first working then soonly romantic—with Lex Luthor as he builds his empire from a broom closet on the top floor of the Planet building. Eventually they move off and eventually I meet her years after that.

It is 1986. I am twenty-one years old and a Cub Scout of a reporter. I have just graduated from the University of Metropolis and its Wayne Boring School of Journalism. It is a top-ranked program: graduate from it and you write your own ticket. But I am listless. Something calls to me and I'm not sure what it is. So I leave Metropolis. I travel. I find myself in Paris contemplating the meaning of life. Soon I fall under the wing of Ed Wilson, a veteran of the Daily Planet who in his own words is rediscovering the virtue of Hemingway on a European sabbatical. In later years, as I age and I come to understand my universe, I am convinced meeting Ed is no accident. Following him for those long months—long months that now seem so small even in my memory—is meant to be.

We end up in Africa from Paris. Eventually, Mexico. Cuidad Juarez. He begins to instill another virtue in me, that of subjectivity. You can't report on a story until you become the story. By the time I am working for the Daily Planet, I believe what Ed has taught me as a matter of course. The feeling of a story. In your bones. I see it in Lois, too, once I meet her. Although her approach is more pugilistic—she cites Theodore Roosevelt often and speaks of the arena of journalism. Maybe she's right. It is in many ways a spectacle, reporting is. You put yourself and your work out there and the public, if they engage with you, debates and destroys and analyzes every last bit of it. Every bit except one. The bit that is still you. The secret heart you put into every story. And it is transitive: you carry each story with you, too.

We are the sum of our stories.

It is the summer of 1986. Ed and I are standing in Bryce Canyon National Park and he fires me after I tell him of my powers. I express my doubts, and fears. As always. He calls my existence a miracle. I'm not sure it is. He says he writes with the audacious hope that his words might effect change. That they might turn a light on the darkness. Inspire someone to seek a little justice. He says words are the only tools he has. But. Again. My existence measured against his is the real miracle. He fires me. Tells me: "time for you to fly."

I never see him again.

I can't bring myself to go home. If I do it will be Ma and Pa and Lana. And everything that can't give me the answers I am seeking.

It is the fall of 1986. I am at the international airport, south of Metropolis. The Air Force is launching the first of a fleet of proto-shuttles. Inspired by and meant to be better than Challenger, which failed only months before. The first in the line is called the Constitution. I stand in a throng of people. I read through the press release. The next shuttle in the line is to be called Freedom. Independence. Liberty. And so on and so forth.

There is a sweet old woman by my side with grey hair under a translucent coverup. She is shorter than me, and tortoise shell glasses teeter at the edge of her upturned nose. She smells of Arpège and the countryside. I wonder if she and her dimutive husband have made the long drive from a far-off place. Kansas perhaps, maybe Missouri. She is sweet and reminds me of Ma. She asks me what I'm doing with the pen and notepad and I tell her I'm trying to break in as a reporter at the Daily Star. George Taylor is a well-known publisher, and the Star is a paper of impeccable reputation. Years later I find out that Luthor owns it, and has Taylor bought and paid for. And has for years. But at the time, when I am young, scrappy and hungry, I take what I think I can get.

Lois is aboard the Constitution. Part of the press pool. I can see her when I focus. I see her in my memory—

In mid-flight, the proto-shuttle fails. Veers toward the crowds. Smoke billows up and away from one wing. Blotting out the sky. As I lift into the sky and towards the Constitution's resonant yaw I hear the crowd screaming.

It all seems so perfunctory.

I save the Constitution. I land it safely and Lois finds me. I know her. I have never met her before this moment but I know her. And all these years later I feel like I still know her. Her story has become intertwined with mine. It's a miracle, in many ways. And I'm talking so clinically about it now. I hear her voice. In my memory. I see her face.

"Hold it right there."

I hear her over the chatter around us. The crowd is still rushing the shuttle there on the tarmac. For the moment she and I are alone in the eye of the storm. She asks me who I am. How did I save her life. Her voice shakes on the last sentence. "You saved my life…you saved my life…"

I say nothing. I am watching the atoms dance on her skin. Watching the chemical release in her brain that signals elation. Intrigue, too, perhaps. Watching the nerves in her brain, her heart, and her face light up. She says, "I should thank you for that before I interrogate you, shouldn't I? Sorry. Why are you staring at me like that."

I smile. "You're Lois Lane." Quieter: "You're a talented reporter. I like your stuff."

In my mind I have already decided against the Daily Star. I know I want to work with her instead. To learn from her. To spend more time with this woman who stokes my curiosity. I travelled the world with Ed and on my own looking for answers to a question I wasn't even sure needed asking.

I have so many questions.

Why am I here.

Why am I so different from them.

A hologrammatic version of my father, Jor-El, the greatest mind on my home planet, once gave me some anodyne response about my physiology. My powers. But something remains. Something ethereal.

I feel like I see the answer to these existential questions in this moment.

In her.

Jor-El tells me I will give these people something to aspire to. In time, I will help them accomplish wonders.

I want to accomplish something with Lois.

Something more meaningful to me in this youthful moment than the superheroic life I will end up leading.

A life.

Happiness.

We could—

She looks away. Glances briefly at the Constitution there on the tarmac and glances back. But I am gone. I am seeing her from orbit. And of course, from memory.

A week later I am drinking black coffee and a cold slice of cherry pie in a Ralli's Diner on the east end of Suicide Slum. I am hiding in plain sight. Denim coat, mud-caked jeans, a black toboggan and five day old scruff. Lois is sitting in the booth behind me having a conversation with someone named Jimmy. Lois thinks I am following her. I'm not. But again—I start to take stock of my life and the coincidences in it and I start to believe that nothing just happens.

That we are all in—

Here together and it's just—

—we are all we've got.

An imperfect haiku.

Jimmy asks her what's in the bag. She asks him if he ever worked with Ed Wilson. "Damn fine newspaperman. City beat, world, government, back to City before me. They buried him yesterday." She says Ed's sister gave Lois his blue fedora as a memento. Ed and Lois knew each other. "Ed loved Metropolis," Lois says. "He said Metropolis was a model for the very best and the very worst we had to offer. That guy was a bulldog when it came to cracking a story. The truth was his blood. He was a role model to me in a lot of ways." Jimmy tells her he is sorry. Lois hangs the blue fedora on a peg on the wall, just above the tabletop jukebox.

She and Jimmy get up to leave. She says a few words in Ed's honor. When I am sure they've gone, I twist back over the top of the booth and regard the hat.

Time for you to fly.

A week later I am standing on Fifth Avenue and the city hums around me. it sings. I think of the article Lois has by now published in the Planet about me.

Superman.

She called me Superman.

I look up in the sky. It's a beautiful day and the sun is streaming through the skyscrapers.

I think of that time in my life often. When I need reorienting. When I need to be reminded why I'm here and what I'm doing. Willpower, as Hal Jordan once told me, is not just the ability to keep going. It's the ability to get up when you get knocked down. To strive, to seek, to find. And not to yield.

And of course, other things happen.

A storied career.

Meeting true friends and neighbors. Saving the world so many times, and yet I challenge myself to keep count. Always keeping the words of my parents in mind, may they rest in peace. Always keeping Ed Wilson in my mind too. Time for you to fly. And so I did. And I have. And I'll continue to do. As long as this planet, so beautiful, so flawed and so deserving of love, will have me.

Meeting Lois.

Meeting and fighting all my enemies. Corben and Maxwell Jensen and Winslow Schott and Oswald Loomis. And other things.

An alien super intelligence calling itself Brainiac.

The god of evil and the hordes of Anti-Life.

And Lex.

Among all the others and over the long years these men become my most persistent foes. Over the years these men give themselves codenames and some of them develop amazing abilities. But I tell them all, and none more repeatedly than Corben who seems to be the most intransigent, that their names mean nothing to me. They are still men, and criminals. Even poor Winslow, who I still hope gets the help he needs. They are men and men commit the worst atrocities. And I tell them every time I throw them in to Stryker's that I will not play the game by their rules.

But I do.

Day after day. Year after year.

It's like cat and mouse.

Luthor at least seems to understand.

Perhaps this is why he hates me so.

I died fighting Doomsday in the year nineteen ninety-two. I find out in later years that in my death, Luthor visits Centennial Park, my symbolic burial site. In a fit of rage he kicks and screams at the statue. He barks that it's not fair. That it should have been him that killed me. That he should have gotten some finality.

Perhaps he's right.

Perhaps he'll get the chance one day.

Life is long after all, and things change.

After my death and resurrection, I finally meet Sam Lane.

He is cold and polite. We visit him in Tacoma, where he is on assignment at McChord Air Force Base. Lois tells me he is here on some top secret project and I am sure it has something to do with me, because certain buildings on-base are coated in lead. I try my best to see through them—to push that particular limit—as we are allowed entrance to the base and admission to the central building. His adjutant is a tall and polite young man who I only know by the name Harrison on his uniform. He leads us into Lane's office.

"Hi, Dad."

"Lois."

"This is Clark Kent."

"Ah." He shakes my hand and it is the firm grab of a man asserting his power. I'm not interested in it. And it tells me more or less what I need to know about him. He is powerful, controlling, and getting old. He fears losing what he considers permanent power in the process of aging. There is something in me that does not like him, and something that recriminates me for thinking that. But I smile and tell him it is a pleasure, a genuine pleasure. He creates a stern expression for himself. A wall.

A fortress of solitude.

And as I am here in Washington, DC now, reliving these memories on my slow walk up to the White House, it occurs to me that Sam Lane has spent the last twenty years finding ways to fight me. With Cadmus. With Luthor.

And none of them worked.

They must not have.

Otherwise—

He or Luthor would have unleashed Stryker's finest upon me. The Parasite and poor Winslow. Loomis and his toys. Doomsday, if he was desperate. He and Luthor would have made a spectacle. Blamed me for it. Created a narrative that I'm dangerous and must be eliminated.

The truth—

Is that he has already done this.

I see the world burning, far away from here. Luthor and his conspirators trying to create a narrative. Eliminate their enemies, or competitors who would destroy the world that much faster. Or remake it in an image untenable to Luthor.

Because in the final analysis—

He has always imagined himself as a supreme arbiter. He makes the choices. He calls the shots.

Clark.

The voice of Pa in my head. One day, in elementary school when an argument with Whitney overheats and he punches me in the face and I punch him back and send him flying against the wall.

Pa in the truck with me. Driving me home.

I am angry and there is a bruise thickening up under one eye.

"You know you can't just do this kind of thing, Clark."

"I know," I say and I look away.

"What if you hurt him worse? Hm?"

"I know," I say. "I'm sorry. I told Whitney I was."

"I know that too, son. So what did you learn?"

"Pa, he's a bully. I don't like it."

I feel his hand on my shoulder then. It's warm and firm. He is trying to comfort me and I'm an angry kid who's just not having it. Pa says he understands. He's been there. I believe him. "But you can't hit them back," he says. "You play by their rules, you're bound to lose. Try thinking about different ways to win."

I look out the window. After a minute: "I can take the hits."

"It's not about that either, Clark."

"Then what am I supposed to do."

He says nothing. We keep driving.

By the time we get home and pull into the barn, he just says, "You'll know. When the time comes."

And here now—

In Washington, DC—

In the threshold of the White House, the People's House—

Staring General Sam Lane in the eye—

I think I finally know what to do.

He points the gun, the silly little thing, right at me. He says, "That's far enough, Kent."

"You figured it out."

"That and more, you diseased maniac. Turn your happy ass around right now while you still can. Walk away."

It's an empty threat and he knows it. We both do.

"It's nice to see you, General."

"Oh spare me."

"I mean it. You're an important part of Lois' life and mine as well."

"Don't do that. She's not part of this."

"But she is. We are all part of this. And I am here to ask you to reconsider things."

"I said that's enough!"

I see his heart again. Racing. Fearful, as ever. He tells me he should have killed me a long time ago. That he figured it all out a long time ago.

I shake my head. "Why are you doing this? Taking orders from Luthor? While he institutes a reign of terror around the world and sets himself up as the savior? General, please think clearly."

A moment comes and goes.

"I am thinking clearly."

"If that were true, I wouldn't be here. Neither would Lex."

That got him. He sinks as soon as I say Luthor's name. He stands there silent, blindly aghast, looking away. Down at himself. But trying to control himself. All the years of his life, his fundamental makeup, all his schemes have been about control.

"Sam."

The tightening of his fingers around the world he's created. Perhaps. Or the world he controls. In the silent eternity between us, he seems to understand. He looks up at me. His face is blanched and has that bewildered look. The onset of great truth. At great cost.

"Please. Help me fix this."

He looks down at himself.

Behind me I hear engines rumbling. Cars and vans coming up the street.

I turn to see them.

CNN. GCN. NBC. ABC. All of them. Followed swiftly by Capitol Police trying to cordon them off.

I see Lois and Jimmy climbing out of the WGBS van. Jimmy appropriates a camera and looks at it in a panic. Lois tells him to just hit the button and roll.

General Lane is looking at her too.

I look back at him but he's still looking beyond me. Down at the fence. His face—

Kind of—

Cracks.

When he speaks, it's a small wet croak from the back of his mouth. "Is that…"

I am still looking down the lawn. The DEO guards and armed soldiers have moved off. The view is clear and beautiful. It has to be. It's Lois. And—

As much as I am looking at my wife down there among her friends and colleagues, watching as she sets up her equipment and calms her breathing and smoothes her pantsuit and gets into position with the White House framed behind her—

He is seeing this too. He is seeing his little girl do the same things. In refutation of him.

I think of Pa and Ma and how I'll never see them again.

I think of Jor-El who I never even really met.

What I'd give—

To have even a minute with them again.

I look back at him. "She brought them here to tell the truth, Sam."

And then I realize it.

He has not seen her since that day in Tacoma.

It was six years ago.

Six years and they haven't seen each other.

He looks at me.

"Is she happy?"

"Yes."

He breathes. The stillness, the rigidity of him just fades. In the moment that follows I feel like I see the real Sam Lane. The Sam Lane no one knows. The one that sees his daughter finding belonging and love. The things he could never give her. And his cold hard realization of that.

He steps aside.

"Go."

I wait.

Look at him. And back down at the gathering press pool there at the fence.

He glances up at me. He nods.

I return it.

In the moment before I walk inside, I look to the east. Focus my gaze.

Far away lies Bialya.

She burns.

Inside—

It's the end.

He knew that there were other worlds. A multiverse of options out there that for one or two superficialities were exactly the same as ours. He knew, Superman did, that in one universe, he and Luthor fought to the death. Man to Man. Under a red sun and so on equal footing.

He knew that on another, Lex Luthor became President and with Brainiac took over the world.

He knew that on another, Luthor became President and killed the Flash. Doing so kicked off the Super War and turned the Justice League into tyrants.

And yet.

In this moment, Superman found himself overcome by memory. And pain. Humility, alongside hope. It is a strange sensation but in some respect it was his default state. Curiosity at the affairs of Man, and a willingness to help them achieve positive ends.

And—

Bialya. Kahndaq.

Children.

Father.

What have I done.

He closes his eyes, walking down the hall. He tuned out the electromagnetic chatter outside. He turned his attention from Jimmy and Lois and the rest. Away from the nation tuning into this. He hears Lois broadcasting. Superman has just entered the White House, she tells the nation. We are not sure why.

And this place is empty. He didn't bother to wonder why. But he suspected perhaps that Luthor sent them all home. Like he used to do at the LexTower when he was sure Superman was coming to kill him.

His flaw.

I don't kill.

Not even you, Lex.

He knew there were universes out there in the multitude where he has killed. Or does kill. He knew there were worlds out there where he asserted his will and became something terrible. Where the legacy of Krypton, it's awe and splendor, became twisted and ugly. A malformed thing in service to anti-life and the forces of darkness. He did not suppose he would ever visit those universes. Meet those versions of himself. Or what those versions must be like. If they were him, in some way.

Those versions of Lex.

Perhaps...

This was his plan all along. Not just become President and lord accomplishments over me.

But to remake the world. Into the ugly thing he always imagined it was.

My god.

He pushed the door open and went inside.

"Hello."

An eternity passed between them in the sepulchral gloom of this place. This Oval Office.

He never hated anyone before. Clark Kent. Never. Even Whitney and their childhood fights. Even Pete Ross and what Clark came to understand was a failure of friends to realize their divergent paths in life.

"I came to talk."

The shadow spoke. "You never want to talk."

"You never want to listen."

"And yet. Here we are."

Superman stepped forward. He seemed to glow in the darkness.

"You know something about where I am, though, don't you, Kent."

"I've proven what you've done."

"Have you, now?"

"Don't lie to me," he said.

His eyes—

Started burning.

"I was prepared to ask you nicely to fix this all. To go on television, make a speech for peace. I was going to appeal to your better nature."

The shadow stood. Out of the blackness came Lex Luthor.

"But," Superman said and his eyes dimmed. "I don't think you have one."

Luthor frowned.

Superman said, "I was supposed to inspire good. I started out wanting that. So many years ago when the Constitution malfunctioned and Lois almost died. Perhaps aspiration was the problem. I dreamed too big. Or maybe—"

His eyes sparked to life again.

"Maybe I should do what you always imagined I should. Assert my will. What then, Lex?"

He walked up to the desk. A foot away from him. This man. This monster.

This super-villain. This—

No.

A man. Just a man.

Powerless. Human. Afraid.

"Maybe you were right," the god in the blue suit said. "They wanted a messiah. Perhaps I gave them that. And you, Lex. When they look at you they see what they are."

Or so he thought. Good, alongside bad. The baseline venality of man, but you've made something of yourself. We both have.

"Perhaps we are both miracles. We come from nothing and to nothing we will eventually return. You know this. One day. I'm going to die. And you are too."

They shared a moment. Two sets of eyes, two lives, two histories. Shared over the years. But now so far apart. He thought of Jor-El, and Dru-Zod. Jor-El was Krypton's chief science officer, Zod it's chief military commander. The only thing they agreed on was that their world was doomed.

Jor-El and Zod. Doomed together. Alone together.

Father.

Is that—

Is that me. Is that us.

Luthor leaned forward and set his gaze upon the Man of Steel.

"Is that it?"

"Resign."

Luthor rolled his eyes.

"I can make it happen."

"You can't. And you won't."

"Try me."

"I've been trying your patience for fifteen years. If you could have, you would have. On the Sea Queen, no less. I saw it in your eyes then. I see it now."

Superman waited. He folded his arms over his chest. "You think you know me so well."

"Fifteen years," Luthor said. "I've earned it."

"Tell me you earned this office, then."

Luthor smiled. "The system is corrupt."

"You are the system."

Luthor thought about it and nodded.

Then he said: "You have played the game for years, Kent, as much as I have. Been party to it. And benefitted by it. And you loved it. If it meant acceptance for an awkward farm boy who grew up different. If it meant fighting injustice. Fighting me. We've created a mythography, you and I, but the party's over. We've become too big. So I will not be part of this anymore. Tired of trying to fight you. Tired of pointless contests with people that are beneath me. It's gone on far too long, and I am tired of giving you the pleasure."

Superman looked at him.

"I resign," Luthor said.

Concluded…