Penny had marked just over a hundred folders for perusal. Each one contained dozens, sometimes hundreds of other files. Sometimes, even those subfiles had subfiles of their own, and so on and so forth. It was to say the least, extremely time consuming and tedious.
A week into it, I came across a folder that piqued my personal interest, not because it had anything to do with my research, not truly anyways. The thing that had drawn my interest was that I had seen it before, in both of my lives.
A distant memory, sitting on the couch one Saturday morning watching the early morning cartoons, staring wide eyed at the TV as I watched the Justice League fight and lose to a monster. Child me tearing up as I watched Superman die.
And most recently when I had been undergoing the Sword of Raos inquisition it had shown me glimpses of what its past wielders had seen. A picture of a grayish hulking kryptonoid with wispy gray hair, blood red eyes glaring hatefully, and multiple bony protrusions all over its body. At the time it had just been one of the thousands of horrifying sights the Sword had shown.
I hadn't given it enough thought to make the connection with my last life, far too busy with other more pressing matters. It was irrelevant, not worth the time thinking about it, or so I had thought.
The file in front of me said otherwise.
Designation: Doomsday
Classification: Biological Weapon
Origin: Krypton
Number of Units Commissioned: Seven
Number of Units Serviced: Seven
Number of Units Decommissioned: Three
Number of Units Remaining: Four
According to the file, the Doomsday project was one of Krypton's many attempts at creating a weapon capable of destroying its enemies without risking any kryptonian lives. By splicing together the genes of all the deadliest creatures of Krypton into one perfectly optimized apex predator. They could just drop it onto any military installation or city and just walk away, come back and pick it up when the job was done. And it worked out rather well, for a time at least.
Then they made a mistake. A very critical and in hindsight stupid mistake. They dropped it on a world with a yellow sun. Seemingly drunk on how successful previous deployments of the weapon had gone, they had decided to drop seven of them on a single world. The goal was to cull the population a bit, using the weapons previous track record and the known technology available on that world, it was deemed that when they came back in a month's time, roughly sixteen percent of the planet's population would be dead. And as an added bonus their infrastructure would be damaged quite extensively which would keep them busy rebuilding for a while.
When the Kryptonian ship finally came back a month later, to the great surprise and horror of the crew, the entire population of the planet was dead. The once lush green world was now a blackened irradiated wasteland, with still glowing hot craters big enough to be seen from space littering its surface.
In the month that the Kryptonians had left, it seemed that the Doomsday units had exceeded the sixteen percent estimation by a very large margin. So large in fact that the natives had decided it was a better option to glass their own world in their attempt to kill the monsters hunting them.
Only two of the Doomsday units had died in the world ending conflagration. Putting the remaining five back in their stasis pods was an easy task with the use of the organic compliance chips grown into the weapons brains. The weapons would listen to and follow any command given by a Kryptonian, it was designed in such a way that even a random Kryptonian child could command the beasts, so in the unlikely event that something went wrong, no kryptonian would ever be in danger. With the reassurance that the compliance chips were still functioning they made their way back to Krypton.
The moment the first pod was opened in a lab, all hell broke loose. A month under a yellow sun had somehow enabled them to ignore the commands of the compliance chip, using intelligence the scientists had been unaware they possessed, the Doomsday Units had merely feigned obedience until that point. The first monster made short work of everything in the lab, quickly rousing its compatriots from their forced slumber.
Programmed literally since before birth to destroy, every strand of its DNA was meticulously designed with destruction in mind. The only emotion it was allowed to feel, if one could even call it that, was rage. They were meant to destroy everything in their sight, to kill, to sunder, to obliterate. So it shouldn't have come as a surprise when City after City was razed by the unstoppable and unfeeling yellow sun empowered monsters. Even with their might waning under the red sun, the beasts pushed ever onward in their quest to see their creators gone.
Five weeks.
That was how long it had taken for the entirety of Krypton's Military to neutralize the threat. In that timeframe, half the population had been killed. And even in the end, after all that death and destruction they only managed to kill one of the monsters.
That one victory had cost the lives of no less than three different Sword of Rao wielders. Three of my ancestors had died just to kill one of them. The remaining four Units were sealed away into an empty parallel dimension. In fact, judging by the access logs it would seem like this was where Jor-El had gotten the idea of the Phantom Zone from.
I couldn't help the shudder that ran through me when I finished. Three wielders dead in the span of five weeks? After feeling the raw power the sword granted its wielder the thought of one, let alone three dying was unthinkable.
Somewhat ironically, if the beasts hadn't been so heavily overengineered, Rao would have stripped them of their strength long before they became a true threat. Krypton's brilliance had nearly damned them.
Taking a moment to center myself I closed the file and moved on. As interesting as that file was, It wasn't what I was looking for. Brainiac thought we were already doomed, so whatever kills Krypton must already be in motion. Those monsters were in a different plane of reality, they weren’t a threat.
I hoped.
///
None of the files Penny had marked held what I was looking for. It was rather maddening. I didn't even know what I was looking for, or what I was even doing. Just poking around and hoping something would jump out at me.
From the moment I got access to the Thinker database, I had allocated almost the entirety of Penny’s processing power to trying to figure out what was going to end Krypton. Months later and hundreds of Zettabytes of data later, she had found nothing. I could only conclude that whatever it was that was going to kill us was so obscure that it necessitated a more kryptonian touch. As life-like as Penny was, she was still a machine. Whatever leaps in logic that were required must have needed the illogical nature of a biological to make.
Even in my own head, it sounded stupid. We had AI whose sole purpose for existence was constantly monitoring and looking for threats to the planet. Some of them were running on hardware bigger than some skyscrapers, which considering the sheer efficiency and processing density involved in Kryptonian processors, that was a lot of processing power. No matter how inane or absurd the leaps in logic, they should have been able to spot such a threat to Krypton centuries in advance. Yet somehow, as ridiculous as it sounded, they couldn't.
Instead, Jor-El was supposed to be the one who uncovered Krypton's demise, and when he had gone public with his claims. No one believed him, a world full of scientists more brilliant than anyone to ever be born on Earth. And not one had believed him. Or at least no one with the power to do anything believed him. It was very much a possibility that some people had believed in his research but lacked the resources needed to escape or save Krypton.
They must have ran his calculation through the Sentinel AI’s and somehow they had concluded he was wrong.
Yet here I was, just over nine years old, trying to figure out what only the brightest mind of Krypton had caught. Everyone thought I was some prodigy, that I was an up and coming world mover. And maybe one day it would even be true. But at the moment?
I was just a very determined person. It was amazing what feats one could accomplish with sufficient motivation. After all, what could be more motivating than the destruction of your world? I wasn't a genius, or at least not a natural one. My adult mind combined with my feverish work ethic, meant that I was able to achieve similar results to one.
Unfortunately, while determination could get you places, it couldn't change facts. For all the knowledge I had absorbed over the past few years, I lacked an oceans worth more in knowledge and the experience to apply it. Any one of my family members had probably forgotten more about science than I had ever learned, which is saying something since Kryptonians had an almost eidetic memory, but that's besides the point. The point was that I had a long way to go before I could truly think of myself as in their league.
I had seen some of Jor-Els work before, and it always left me scratching my head. Everyone in my family was leaps and bounds ahead of me in the intellect department. It only made sense as all of them had nearly two centuries of scientific experience compared to my measly seven.
So with no choice left I forced myself to read through every file that popped up in response to the term 'World Destroyer'. It was somewhat nerve racking to see that the list of files was numbered in the thousands. Each file representing a viable way to destroy a world. Who would have thought worlds were so fragile? Thankfully a lot of the methods described were one offs and couldn't be repeated without a frankly ludicrous amount of circumstances aligning just right. Everytime I opened a file I had to compare it to the planetary survey data I had cataloged to see if they held any similarities.
After almost four months of constant reading, it felt like my brain was about ready to dribble out of my ears. Even Kryptonians had limits it seemed.
I leaned back, the chair morphing into a bed, staring at the metallic ceiling in silence. My headache caused the entire room to ripple and pulsate in a rather mesmerizing if extremely nauseating fashion. I made a mental note to tweak the circlet to filter out headaches.
Briefly, I mourned the fact that I couldn't just use my nanites to get rid of my headache. Their workload was entirely taken up by their ceaseless efforts of keeping my damaged receptors stable. I could have used more traditional medicine to cure the headache, but ultimately I decided against it. Headaches were usually best left to run their course, they were the body's indicator that something was wrong up there. Once the headache abated I would resume my research. And besides, I really needed this break.
Penny floated up behind me and molded herself to my head, massaging my scalp, trying to relieve the built up tension.
I leaned back and sighed in appreciation. "Thanks Penny, don't know what I would do without you."
"Probably starve to death no doubt." Was her dry response.
"Probably." I agreed readily, more often than not it would be Penny who would remind me that I needed to eat. It was especially important these days, since my body needed a higher caloric intake as I didn't have as much solar energy as was recommended. I couldn't afford the distraction the burning would cause, so I limited my intake to only what was needed to keep my brain running at maximum efficiency.
I shuddered at the memory my thoughts conjured up. During the first month of research I had yet to get used to the constant full body ache caused by my damaged receptors, it had hampered my ability to concentrate on my work.
Unfortunately it would seem that my particular diagnosis was rare. Like, less than twelve recorded cases in the last 20,000 years kind of rare. As it turns out, Kryptonians who got exposed to other forms of solar radiation didn't tend to live long enough to require medical attention, let alone be physically functional enough for it to be of any use.
The rarity, religious stigma, and the legal hurdles around experimenting with solar radiation had all mixed to culminate in little progress being made on the subject. The few medications that had been developed to help manage the symptoms were rather crude and unrefined, at least by Krypton's usual perfectionist standards.
The medications Krypton had to offer for such cases like mine were less than optimal as they all had nasty side effects after prolonged use. Not willing to deal with those, I had decided to simply stop absorbing solar energy altogether, our nanites could be used to inhibit our solar receptors to a degree. Usually they could only be used to fine tune the receptors to absorb less or more radiation, but with them damaged as extensively as they were, my options were a bit different. I couldn't lower the amount of absorption, but I could turn it off entirely. Normally the nanites couldn't do such a thing due to the bodies natural defenses but with how damaged they were, the nanites could do it.
It had been a mistake. Oh at first it had actually been bliss, to finally be free of any pain after weeks of constant burning. But as the days went on and my body used up more and more of the stored solar energy, I began to notice something was off. I was progressively growing physically weaker, and I could practically feel my IQ dropping. Well perhaps that wasn't quite right, my intelligence was still the same, but my ability to process information had slowed dramatically. What should have only taken ten minutes to do had taken me almost an hour.
Realizing what was happening I quickly turned my receptors back on. The burning that had accompanied their activation was unpleasant, but the returning strength to my muscles and increased mental performance was worth it. Just recalling how sluggish and weak I had become was enough to make me frown, I never wanted to feel like that again.
A kryptonian could survive without any solar radiation, but it was far from optimal. All life on Krypton, from the smallest single celled organism to the largest animal, they had all evolved to take in solar radiation. Every cell in their bodies used it to supplement or enhance themselves in one form or another. The planet's harsh environment had made it all but necessary. Of course that was a long time ago, now the planet was much more hospitable after we had terraformed the planet into a lush garden world rather than the veritable ball of ice it had once been.
I groaned in satisfaction as Penny moved onto my shoulders, working the tense muscles perfectly.
///
"Hey Mom." My hand resting on the cool glass. I stared down at her peaceful expression. "I know I haven't visited you in a while." I winced as I said it, in the six months since the invasion I had visited her only eight times, with the last one being just under two months ago. Considering she had been moved into our home on Argo after the first month, I really should have visited more often. "I've been...busy. I know that's really not a good excuse not to visit, but it's really important, I promise. Like stopping an apocalypse kind of important."
She didn't respond obviously, maintaining that same position throughout my entirely one sided conversation.
I sighed. "At this rate though I don't think I can figure it out." In the six months I had been researching, I had found many leads that looked like they were going to be the one. But every time I followed them, it turned out to be nothing but a waste of my precious time.
I spent the next hour or so just talking. No particular focus really, just trying to fill the silence with anything that crossed my mind. I was well aware that she couldn't hear me.
///
Seeing the futility of my own actions, I finally shelved my research. I wasn't giving up on it obviously, but I needed a viable back up plan to fall back on in case my research didn't pan out.
Throughout my nine years of life I had come up with a great many plans. Some were rather well thought out, some were not. This one was somewhere in the middle.
It essentially boiled down to calling for help. Kryptonians were an old race, we had interacted with hundreds of different races in varying capacities. Sometimes to their benefit, sometimes not. After reading through all the interactions and how they had ended, I had cherry picked fourteen different races to contact. Krypton didn't have any allies, in fact we had snubbed, or outright fought with almost every single race we had interacted with in some way. But crucially, not all of them
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Tamaran, Oa home of the self proclaimed guardians of the universe and the Green Lantern corp, the New Gods of New Genesis, even our estranged cousins on Daxam were on that list. Out of all of them I had the highest hope for Oa. After all, saving doomed planets is their whole shtick, right?
These fourteen had generally neutral interactions with us for the most part and were not allied or overly friendly with those races that we had particularly bad blood with. I had deemed them the most likely to help us.
I had decided on who, now I just needed to figure out the how. With the interference field I couldn't simply open up a comms channel, unless I was willing to use radio waves and wait a few thousand years for a reply.
My next thought was to send an FTL communicator far enough to exit the field's influence, but I quickly canned that idea as Krypton's military no doubt would detect the satellite, and even if they didn't, the races I contacted would have no way of confirming the authenticity of the transmission. Justifiably assuming it was some other race trying to trick them into entering Kryptonian space. Whatever method I used would need to be undeniably Kryptonian in origin.
So I went with the communication satellite idea and took it a step further. I would make drones that could travel to those planets and deliver the call for aid. The clearly kryptonian designed craft should be enough proof of the message's authenticity. And with each one of them fitted with communicators that were quantumly entangled with corresponding devices in my lab and tuned just right to be able to bypass the fields effects. With it I could receive and send transmissions without emitting any detectable signals, allowing me to talk with the races I was calling on. Unfortunately, the Link, while instantaneous and discrete, had the rather large drawback of only being able to transmit voices, anything more than that would require a much more complex and therefore bigger device than what I could currently transport.
The drones were ridiculously easy to procure, as all it took was a simple search through the database for an already existing design. I had taken a cursory look into the principle of FTL drives. Imagine my shock and confusion when I learned that I could print one out in a matter of minutes?
The confusion had been quick to fade however as I looked further into it. Yes, I could print one out in a matter of minutes, but it would only be stable enough to transport a singular grain of sand at best. FTL drives were actually ridiculously simple, at least on a conceptual level. The problem lay in the fact that the more mass was being transported the more unstable it became, leading to the need for more complicated designs with increasingly exotic materials to stabilize it. Unless of course your goal was to spread every atom of your cargo across the multiple light years between your entrance and exit points.
There was a reason it took most races centuries of effort to streamline their designs enough for commercial usage. Hell some races never actually manage to figure it out, only getting access to the stars due to the charity of other more technologically inclined races.
Getting it to transport something as heavy as a pebble took almost a month of solid work. It took me another month and a half longer to design one that would be able to carry the drones to their destinations...probably.
With the design process out of the way, it took an additional three weeks before I managed to acquire enough of the more exotic materials. It wasn't even a matter of the materials being hard to aquire, not really at least. The problem in procuring it lay in doing so without raising any red flags on my file. It wasn't like there were all that many uses one could have for negative mass particles or estranged tachyons. Coming up with viable excuses for my need for them had been quite the circus act.
Finally after two months of work it was ready, drones hardly bigger than a tennis ball were neatly arranged on the floor. Taking a breath to calm my nerves, I backed out of the airlock, sealing the door as I went. A press of a button and the drones activated, floating smoothly into the air, another press and they all disappeared. Opening the airlock's outer doors allowed the now cloaked drones to make their way into space and towards their preprogrammed jump points.
Considering my FTL drives were less than optimal, it would take at least six months before I could expect the first drone to arrive at its destination. The farthest planet would take eight. It was a long time to wait, but considering the light years involved I couldn't really complain.
After studying the capabilities of Krypton's defensive network, I had managed to find a cloaking parameter that would hide the small drones as they made their way out of the field's range. Even then they would barely pass as being under the radar, only thanks to their diminutive size was it even possible for them to have a shot at slipping by undetected. At least that was the hope. On the bright side I wouldn't have to wonder if it worked or not. The military forces sent to bring me in for questioning would be a rather obvious answer.
Even if this gambit didn't end up paying off and no one helped us. The experience of working on an FTL drive alone would more than make up for the lost time.
///
Dinner that evening was awkward. Me and Dad had finally managed to wrangle our conflicting schedules into aligning.
“How goes your research Kara?” Dad spoke between bites.
“Good.” I grunted back.
“Hmm.” He chewed thoughtfully. “Have you already decided what you wish to specialize in? You have what, three more months of your grace period left?”
“Not yet, I'm still looking around seeing what clicks.” I wasn't even technically lying, until I figured out what branch of study would allow me to help save Krypton, I was just trying everything. “And it's five months actually. The Council decided to extend the time across all Castes due to the chaos of the Invasion.”
“I see, well do try to find something you enjoy.”
“I will.” I was startled when my utensil scraped off the plate without picking anything up. The food was almost gone, I had gotten so used to just cramming my face that I had apparently been doing it without noticing. Oops.
“So, Dad, what have you been doing recently? Do they still have you working on figuring out how Brainiac Jumped through the interference field?”
“No, the military took over that investigation months ago.”
“They took you off the case?” I furrowed my brow, why would they do that? Even if it was a military matter, they still needed a Thinker if they wanted to get anything done. And months ago? I really had been spending too much time in the lab if I hadn't even known that much.
“Sort of,” Dad shrugged. “They told me they wanted me to work with the team studying the cyberattack instead. Jor-El was given the mystery of figuring out how Brainiac Jumped. Jor-El was always better at grasping the intricacies of dimensional physics.” He just shrugged again. One would think he may be bitter about being passed up for his younger brother, but I was glad to note Dad honestly didn't seem to care.
I nodded. “Any progress?”
“Not as much as we would like.” He scowled. “We figured out how the virus co-opted our systems, but we have no idea what the initial infiltration method was. One moment our systems were clean, the next, the virus was just there.” He waved his utensil around vaguely to accentuate his point. “As far as our records go, our firewalls never even detected the intrusion.”
“Huh. What have you guys already done? Maybe talking it out might help?” I offered, my programming skills were decent, not nearly enough to be of any use in this case. But I knew enough that I could at least try to be a sounding board. Either way it felt like Dad needed to vent if nothing else.
“We thought perhaps it was some sort of Damarcus Cascade at first, but the signature was all wrong. So we moved onto-”
And so we spent the next hour talking shop.
It was nice.
///
I breathed deeply through my nose, doing my best to maintain steady breathing while holding the awkward position. The burn in my abdominals was a familiar one, but one I rather liked. It was a much more rewarding pain in comparison to the burn that constantly permeated my body.
My muscles began to twitch in rebellion, threatening to give out entirely. Eventually I was forced to release the tension in my abdomen, slowly lowering myself until I hung limply. Now upside down, I willed the bar of liquid geo my legs were hooked around to lower itself until my hands could touch the ground. From there I briefly went into a handstand and flipped myself back onto my feet.
I was never much of a fitness nut in my last life. Hell, to be honest, I could probably have counted on one hand the amount of times I had gone into the gym, and maybe two hands the amount of times I had done a workout at home on my own accord.
In this life however, I exercised every morning. Nothing too strenuous as I was still a child, simple bodyweight exercises, pull ups, push ups, squats, crunches, etc. It was kind of embarrassing really, I was probably more physically fit now as a nine year old child than I was at any point in the twenty one years of my previous life.
Although to be fair, even if I had never exercised a day in this life, I would have still been more fit. Kryptonian genes were kind of bullshit like that, but I sure wasn't gonna complain. No matter what we ate, no matter how lazy we got, we would always maintain a spectacular physique. The Soldier caste had that trait enhanced even further, growing muscles and bones that were much harder and stronger than the other castes.
Though even with the cheatiness that was kryptonian physiology, exercising was still beneficial. The body could only do so much without help. Just like most races, exercising made our bodies even better, promoting stronger bones and muscle growth. As a Science Caste member it was kind of irrelevant for me, as my expected duties shouldn't require any physical activity. Most of my colleagues would have scoffed at me, saying it was a waste of my time. Time that could be better spent studying or working on my projects.
But I was working on my projects. As I exercised I would think, allowing my body to go through the motions while my mind would review and revise what I had learned thus far. Using the time to work out my next course of action, it was also a good way for me to decompress. I could only stare at a screen for so many consecutive days before needing a reprieve of some kind.
As I moved on to my next set of exercises, my mind wandered onto a topic that I had hardly touched in my rush to figure out what was going to cause the apocalypse. Kryptonians couldn't live outside of our solar system, our bodies rejected solar radiation not from our own sun. The constant burning and my comatose mother was proof enough of those claims.
What was I supposed to do if I couldn't save Krypton? Even if I managed to get everyone off-world somehow, what were we supposed to do? We couldn't leave the solar system, not unless we fixed whatever it was that caused such a visceral reaction in our cells.
And therein lay the crux of the problem. For all my studying, all my achievements. I was no biologist. In fact I had practically gone out of my way to only learn the bare minimum needed to pass the Trials. Almost all of my efforts had gone into engineering, physics, and geology. Things that would help me save Krypton, or failing that, help save more than a single baby and a teenage girl.
With all the other things on my plate, I didn't even know if I had the time to get caught up enough to figure out how to fix the problem. I was one person. No. I was one child. Even with taking my reincarnated status into account, I was still a child by kryptonian standards. What was thirty years of life compared to centuries? Saving an entire race shouldn't have even been on my list of things to do.
I felt genuinely overwhelmed, my breaths became more labored as I thought about just how much I still had to accomplish. I didn't even have a date for when the world would end. For all I knew it could happen in the next hour. Butterflies flew in my stomach as I tugged sharply on my hair. I felt clammy, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with my previous workout.
How did I ever convince myself I had a chance?
I was biting my lip now, hard enough that I could taste a bit of blood. My breath came out in harsh pants, as my thoughts raced faster and faster. My vision blurring slightly from the frustrated tears that came unbidden by the sudden and overwhelming influx of thoughts and emotions.
I laughed bitterly. Hubris. It was the only thing I could think of. Why else would I presume I could do anything about the situation? I wasn't some hero of prophecy, I wasn't destined for great things.
A fluke. That's all it was. I just had the extraordinarily good luck of being reincarnated as Kara Zor-El. It didn't mean anything, there was no script for me to follow, no guiding hand ensuring I succeeded. I was just dropped into the situation by pure happenstance.
For all I knew, my actions so far had damned krypton. Perhaps something I had done caused a ripple effect? Perhaps now Jor-El would never even figure out the world was ending, and if that happened, then it would just be me trying, and no doubt failing.
I punched the wall in front of me, my fist just sank into the liquid geo. The lack of pain just served to make me angrier. This time when I reared my arm back, I forced the wall to remain solid, punching it full force. The pain that shot up my arm was lovely. I punched it again and again, reveling in the sensation. All the while, I screamed myself hoarse at the wall, the tears streaming down my face had nothing to do with my bleeding knuckles. Years of building stress finally having an outlet.
Finally when I stopped, I could hardly feel my arms after all the jarring impacts. I breathed harshly, my tense shoulders rising and falling. The wall had taken on a mirror sheen as I had punched it, red smudges marred the reflective surface.
I sank to my knees, watching as the blonde girl in front of me did the same. She looked horrible, blonde hair a mess, sticking up in all sorts of angles despite the sweat that weighed it down, shiny tracks marred her face where tears had run down it. Her blue eyes were puffy and red, her nose even more so.
The girl in the mirror looked lost. The girl in the mirror looked tired. The girl in the mirror looked defeated.
Not willing to look at my reflection anymore I closed my eyes, allowing myself to slump forward. Enough so that I could feel the cool metal press against my still hot forehead. I exhaled slowly through my nose.
Why?
I didn't even know what I meant by that at this point. Why was I trying to save everyone? Why was I having a meltdown? Why wasn't I able to figure it out? So many "why's" in my life, yet I seemed to have an answer for none of them.
No, that wasn't right. I knew why I wanted to save this world. I had grown to love it. This world, its people, the culture, my family. I loved it all. But most importantly I felt guilty. I knew it was stupid. I had thought I had gotten over it, or at least I had gotten very good at convincing myself. But now with the darkness closing in, old doubts and insecurities were suddenly bubbling to the surface.
I sat back, studying my reflection once more. The reflection of the little girl who had never breathed air looked back at me, a damning light in her blue eyes. I had killed her, whatever life she would have led, whatever hopes and dreams she would have held. Gone, like they had never even existed. She had never had a chance.
Reincarnation had made sure of that. Forcing my soul into this body before its true owner could even draw her first breath. I hadn't been given a choice in the matter, never once consulted, or even given options. I had no control over what had happened. I couldn't even apologize to her.
I had lived my life already, sure, it had been cut short rather abruptly, but that was life wasn't it? You lived and you died. The blonde girl staring back at me had never even lived, yet she had still died.
The only thing I could do was try to make it up to her. I had no way of knowing if I could do right by the girl who had never been, but saving her homeworld seemed like as good a place to start as any.
And yet, despite all my determination, I didn't think I could do it.
Finally, my volatile emotions overwhelmed the circlet. The mirror began to distort. Now instead of a perfect copy, the girl looked like she was made of stretched taffy. The sight sparked some memory inside my head. Of something I had seen years ago. My kryptonian brain did what it was practically designed to do, and it followed that spark until it found the distant memory.
My eyes widened as the memory played behind my eyes.
I sprinted out of the room and towards the lab, the liquid geo under my feet worked in tandem to get me there faster. Hurtling into the room I began furiously typing on the nearest keyboard, completely ignoring the pain from my bleeding knuckles.
It seemed that my little tantrum was good for something. It had opened my eyes to a new possibility. Something that most likely would never have occurred to me before.
///
In the early days of cloning, the results had been less than optimal. Most clones coming out warped in some way. I had seen images of such failures in our history lessons. It had been a short anecdote, hardly even a few sentences and a picture or two. It was only meant to lead up to the real meat of the lesson.
The Clone War.
It was an event that had literally reshaped Krypton. Both culturally, and physically. Leaving actual scars on the planet. Patches of land that even today could not support life.
Thirty thousand years ago, long before the use of even the genesis pods. We didn't have the organic nanites in our bodies to keep us young and healthy. Yet we still managed to live for centuries regardless. We had found and utilized a much simpler, but much more horrendous method.
Clones.
Every single Kryptonian on the planet had clones of themselves grown and held in vast facilities. Whenever the person had a disease or injury that wouldn't heal without complications, they would simply cut out whatever ailed them and replace it with the healthy and still young parts of their cloned counterparts.
This practice went without any noticeable hitches for nearly ten thousand years. But that all changed when a woman smuggled one of her clones out of a facility. For some reason she had decided that nobody was good enough for her son, so she set it up so that her son fell in love with her younger clone. Of course she did it without letting him know the girl he was falling in love with was a younger clone of herself.
It ended in tragedy as eventually as time passed and the clone aged, he couldn't miss the clear resemblance to his mother. Realizing what she was and what his mother had done. He had killed them both, not even sparing the child he had sired with her. He then killed himself.
For years a political faction had been growing in power, trying to push for the clones to have rights and be treated more Kryptonianley. This event was all they needed to push them to more drastic actions. They freed and armed the clones, leading to a war that ravaged the planet.
Superweapons were being developed and pumped out by both sides, and just as quickly countermeasures were being developed to neutralize the advantage. Both sides locked in what was essentially a technological stalemate. The government though had access to far more resources and were slowly but surely winning, if only through sheer numbers.
The clone faction seeing that they were losing decided that if they couldn't win, no one would. In the last battle they used a new weapon. A beam of pure nuclear energy shot directly into the planet's core, its intention was to set off some sort of self-sustaining reaction and blow up the planet.
Someone must have carried the wrong zero, because after firing for only a few moments the weapon had promptly exploded. The war ended, and Krypton's government was left to pick up the pieces.
In its weakened state Krypton couldn't afford to spread its defenses so thin. So to ensure its safety they issued a mass exodus of all the colony worlds, and the abandonment of any on going projects outside Krypton's solar system. From then on all interstellar travel was banned, even after Krypton recovered and got back on its feet. The council saw no reason to lift the ban, and so it remained in place.
Now lacking their method for staying healthy and young, new research was put onto the task. Eventually the genesis pods and their ability to make drastic but stable changes to our genome was settled on. With the organic nanites, Kryptonians could still enjoy the idyllic nigh immortal lifestyle it had grown so accustomed to.
The thing that had me running into the lab though was the tidbit about the nuclear beam. It had failed. Kryptonian scientists had never figured out what had gone wrong with the device as it had blown up rather spectacularly leaving very little to extrapolate on, and none of the scientists that had created it had survived the blast. The fact that it had been deemed as a failure meant it wasn’t in the database when I searched for “world destroyers” earlier.
It had been over twenty thousand years ago, and to be frank it should have been irrelevant. But I had looked at everything I could think of over the past few months and turned up with nothing. So I figured it was about time I tried to look at things a little less conventionally.
Using a formula derived from the few scraps of data they had recovered from the wreckage, I set the computers to work forming a detailed physics simulation of what would have happened if the machine hadn't blown up.
It would have taken four hours for the reaction in the core to reach the levels needed to blow up. A graph of the planet's internal radiation levels showed a steep incline. A very steep staircase going upwards.
"Penny?” My heart thundered in my ears. “Change the formula so that it happens over the course of twenty thousand years instead of four hours."
A secondary graph appeared next to the first, it was obviously much more stretched out, but side by side the resemblance was clear. "Bring up a graph of the planet's internal radiation levels over the past twenty thousand years."
I nearly stumbled as the new graph superimposed itself over the second, only the smallest of differences could be seen. My mouth going dry. The eclectic mix of fear, excitement, and a cocktail of other unnamed emotions running through me made me feel vaguely dizzy.
I had found it.
I had finally found what was going to kill everyone, and it was twenty thousand years in the making.