This
is an Elseworlds tale. What if Clark Kent wasn't an only child? What
if the event which brought together the Kents and their little orphan
from the stars was repeated not once but several times? Would there
be a Superman?
Smallville,
the Luthors, Superman (created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster),
Power Girl, Supergirl, Jakita Wagner, John Cumberland, Apollo, Big
Barda, Mr. Majestic, etc are the property of DC Comics.
I
own nothing, except my imagination and how I use these fantastic
characters and locations.
Thanks
to Siegel and Shuster, those two young Jewish kids who wanted to
change the world, and to Phillip Noa Wylie who marked the way of the
modern comic book and graphic novel with his novel “Gladiator”.
Preface
The
universe is vast, unimaginably so and, contrary to popular belief, it
is almost always random and chaotic. This, would not be one of
those times.
1969
was a good year for the town of Smallville, Kansas. The harvest had
been exceptionally good and the local produce was being sold and
shipped all over the country fetching a higher than average price. If
that wasn't reason enough for its farmers and co-dependent residents
to feel good about themselves, Luthor Corp had inaugurated a brand
new agricultural research plant not ten months before and its
dividends, as well as the first results of the lines of research
being conducted there were beginning to be felt around both the
county and the state. Life was good.
Which
is why it should not have come as a surprise to all of those farming
folks so fond of popular wisdom something terrible would follow such
wealth and abundance. But abundance breeds complacency, and no one
did see it coming.
On
December 25th, 1969, Smallville's subsidiary of Luthor
Corp, its newfangled Agricultural Research Plant, was blown to
kingdom come by what was later reported to be a failure in its power
core, killing all 1500 employees and causing tremendous material
damages to the whole of the town and most of the county's surrounding
farms. No family was spared; everyone lost someone, however removed.
For
a good long time, Christmas Day would not be the same in the town of
Smallville, Kansas.
But,
that selfsame popular wisdom farming folk are so fond of also states
that every cloud has a silver lining. And for one family, hurt and
bloodied by both nature and the “Smallville Catastrophe” (as it
had been dubbed by the, oh so caring, people of the
media), the aftermath of the disaster would mean a new beginning and
the culmination of their yearnings for parenthood.
Chapter
1.
Everything
within the universe (one could argue the whole of the universe) is
constantly in motion. Every single item affects every other item
surrounding it, whether it be on a quantum level or on a cosmic one,
so one can imagine the effect an exotic explosion may have on the
world which surrounds it or even, the fabric of reality.
The
1969 destruction of the Smallville Agricultural Research Facility was
anything but ordinary. What everyone thought to be the United
States' leading facility in agricultural research was in fact the pet
project of Luthor Corp's CEO; Lionel Luthor's personal obsession.
Early
in Luthor's career, some nineteen years before, he had been
approached by three particularly eccentric yet brilliant scientists
bent on pushing past the boundaries of accepted knowledge in regards
to the world which surrounds us. Drs. Walter Bishop, William Bell and
Robert Dowling presented Mr. Luthor with an alternate understanding
of the reality within which we dwell. According to them, the universe
was in truth a multiverse,
"a
theoretical snowflake existing in 196,833 dimensional space." If
their theory proved to be correct, they posited the potential access
to an equal or higher amount of parallel realities which would be
available to be explored and from which unprecedented knowledge and
technology could be retrieved.
By 1954, 27 year old Lionel
Luthor had already established an economic empire worthy of the
greatest moguls of his time, and had done so by eschewing such
burdensome annoyances as morals or scruples. So when presented with
the possibility of groundbreaking technology available only to him
and those he chose to share it with if the purposed adventure into
science fiction produced the results promised, he jumped at the
chance, footing the bill for what would become the greatest
scientific miracle brought along by accident in human history:
Project Winter.
Allegedly a research facility
tasked with countering a projected global warming, Project Winter
sought to break the barriers which limited our reality in order to
access its mirror images. Surprisingly enough, their endeavor was met
with success, after a fashion. After managing to achieve a few
glimpses across the dividing veil, the stress put upon the membranes
between realms by the radically new supercomputer designed by the
driving intellects behind Project Winter (namely Bell, Bishop and
Dowling), caused a chain reaction of unforeseen proportions across
all pressure nodes and although finally piercing the universal walls
into the multiverse's circulatory system, it derived in a
catastrophic explosion of the computer core (which, incidentally, was
being powered by a new type of nuclear reactor), the result of which
was the complete and total destruction of the Smallville Agricultural
Research Facility and the demise of all personnel involved.
That was the end of Project
Winter as far as the world was concerned.
However, there were a few items
which were not reported as widely as the research facility's
destruction, or at all, whether by design or ignorance.
One, none of the lead scientists
involved in the project were actually in the facility at the time of
the explosion.
Two,
in one of those quirks which the universe seems to be so fond of, at
the time of its most abject failure, Project Winter achieved a
momentous breakthrough, quite different from the desired objective;
it did in fact manage to break through the
walls between realities but instead of opening a doorway into
those other, parallel universes, it created
a... nexus of sorts into our reality
turning Smallville, Kansas, into Parallel Grand Central. Of course,
amidst all the pain, chaos and mayhem caused by the fortuitous
destruction of the facility in question, no one was the wiser about
this teeny development.
That
is, until things started to come through.