The hospital room had no personality.
That was the first thing he noticed once the pain settled into something dull and constant. White walls. Neutral lighting. Machines positioned with professional indifference. The kind of space designed to be occupied temporarily, even when everyone involved knew it wouldn't be.
He lay still most of the time. Not because he wanted to, but because movement had become expensive. Every shift of his body demanded negotiation how much pain he could afford, how much strength he still had, how much energy he was willing to waste on something that didn't matter.
Time behaved strangely there.
Minutes stretched. Hours collapsed. Days blurred into one another until only routine separated them: medication, vitals, silence.
Silence was the worst part.
At first, he tried to think the way he always had methodically, analytically, as if this were simply another failing system to be diagnosed. He reviewed data in his head. Replayed choices. Tested alternate paths he could no longer take.
But the mind, like the body, grows tired.
Eventually, thinking became exhausting.
So he watched.
The television mounted high on the wall became his only window out of the room. He watched everything documentaries, interviews, old films, new series. Not for entertainment, but to keep his thoughts from collapsing inward.
At some point, he stopped avoiding fiction.
He had always dismissed it before as inefficient, indulgent. Stories didn't solve problems. They distracted from them.
Now, distraction was all that remained.
He watched until his eyes burned, until his hands trembled too much to hold the remote steadily. He watched because when the screen was on, the machines felt quieter, and the room felt less like a waiting area for death.
That was how he returned to it.
Superman.
Not as a character.
As an idea.
He did not care about the cape. Or the symbol and certainly not about Morality plays wrapped around him. Those were narrative decorations necessary for stories, irrelevant for understanding.
What mattered was the biology.
An organism that did not merely survive damage, but adapted to it. Cells that grew stronger in response to stress. A body that did not degrade with time, but refined itself. A being for whom age was not decay, but accumulation.
Infinite biological evolution.
That was what Superman represented beneath the fantasy.
He lay there, eyes fixed on the screen, breathing shallowly, while his own body did the opposite failing, fragmenting, surrendering.
Superman did not age or weaken.
Did not lose muscle mass because his cells forgot how to repair themselves.
Each exposure to sun made him stronger.
Injury became data.
Each challenge became fuel.
It was everything he had tried to build.
And everything he had failed to become.
His fingers twitched weakly against the sheet.
"Of course," he thought, bitterly. "They had to give him weaknesses."
Kryptonite.
Red sunlight.
External constraints arbitrary, narrative necessities disguised as physics. Without them, the system would have been too perfect, too final.
But even those weaknesses fascinated him.
Kryptonite was not a disease. It was an environmental disruptor. Red sunlight did not destroy Superman's cells; it deprived them of the conditions they needed to function.
Remove the poison.
Change the environment.
And the system recovered.
He closed his eyes.
If only biology worked that way.
As his strength continued to fade, he found himself thinking less about what he had done and more about what he had missed.
Not people.
Possibilities.
He had always believed that relationships were distractions, that intimacy was a luxury he could afford later. He had imagined a future version of himself successful, immortal, finally free who would return to the world and live fully.
That version never arrived.
Now, lying in a bed that smelled of disinfectant and inevitability, he understood something too late:
He had postponed life in exchange for a promise that was never guaranteed.
The irony was cruel.
He had wanted infinite time.
What he got was a surplus of empty hours at the end.
Doctors came and went. Their voices were careful, rehearsed. Explained less now. There was no point. He understood enough from the silence, from the way no one met his eyes for too long.
Family visited once.
The conversation was short, strained, full of words that didn't know where to land. They spoke about memories. About pride. forgiveness.
He listened politely.
But his thoughts were elsewhere.
On evolution, adaptation.
What it would take to build a body that did not break when pushed.
The nights were the hardest.
Pain medication blurred his senses just enough to loosen control. Thoughts slipped free that he would have crushed years earlier. Regret surfaced not loud, not dramatic, but persistent.
What if he had gone slower?
Accepted limits instead of trying to annihilate them?
If he had treated biology as a partner rather than an enemy?
The questions had no answers now.
Only weight.
He watched Superman again, this time barely following the plot. The screen showed a body suspended above the Earth, invulnerable, eternal, calm.
A biological system without expiration.
Something inside him twisted not envy, but longing.
Not to be a hero.
Be unfinished again.
Have time.
To wake up in a body that could still adapt instead of collapse.
A ridiculous thought surfaced, born of exhaustion and medication:
What if consciousness were the only thing that mattered?
If the mind could carry forward even when the body failed?
He almost laughed at himself.
There was no evidence for that, mechanism. No data.
And yet, as the machines continued their quiet vigilance, as his heart labored to keep pace, the idea refused to disappear.
If life could not be extended…
Perhaps it could be continued.
Somewhere else.
Somehow.
The screen faded to black.
He stared at the reflection of himself in it sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, a body that had lost the war it was never meant to fight alone.
Superman would never look like that.
And that was the cruelest part of all.
The machines were quiet.
Not silent never silent but subdued, as if they already knew there was no point in trying anymore. Their rhythm slowed, stretched, hesitated. He felt it before he saw it, before anyone spoke,hands moved with sudden urgency.
His body was done.
Breathing became shallow, then irregular. Each inhale felt borrowed, each exhale final. Pain no longer flared it dulled, retreated, dissolved into something distant and heavy. His limbs no longer responded to intent. Even thought began to fracture, breaking apart into unfinished fragments.
He understood what was happening.
There was no fear.
Only clarity.
So this is the end.
Thirty-five years of obsession. Decades of sacrifice. A lifetime spent arguing with death lost, not with drama, but with quiet inevitability.
The ceiling above him blurred. The edges of the room softened. The machines continued their vigil, indifferent witnesses to a process older than thought itself.
His last conscious thought was not scientific.
It was painfully human.
I never even lived long enough to test the right hypothesis.
Then the sound stopped.
Darkness did not come.
There was no tunnel. No light ir sense of falling or rising. No continuity at all.
Existence simply… skipped.
Pain returned first.
Not sharp and no localized diffuse, overwhelming, wrong. His awareness snapped back violently, flooded by sensations he did not recognize. Air burned his lungs. Muscles contracted without permission. Something small and weak screamed, and it took him several horrifying seconds to realize the sound was coming from him.
He could not move or speak.
he couldn't even focus his vision.
The world was enormous, bright, and unbearably loud.
Hands touched him too large, rough. Voices echoed above, distorted, stretched by panic and urgency. Lights flared overhead, stabbing at eyes that could barely process them.
A hospital.
That much, somehow, he knew.
But not his hospital.
This was wrong.
His thoughts raced, colliding into one another. His mind still sharp, structured was trapped behind a body that could not obey. Signals misfired. Muscles lacked coordination. Sensory input overwhelmed processing capacity.
This body is undeveloped.
Realization hit him harder than the pain.
I'm… small.
No.
Not small.
New.
Understanding arrived slowly, with terrifying certainty.
He had died.
And now
A cry tore from his throat again, uncontrolled, primal. The sound horrified him more than the pain ever could. He tried to stop it. Failed.
This body did not answer to reason.
Time fractured again.
Hours passed, or days he could not tell. Consciousness faded in and out. The world became a cycle of light, touch, noise, and exhaustion. Each time awareness returned, the same truth awaited him.
He was a child.
A newborn.
And yet
His mind remained intact.
Not perfectly memory came in waves, sometimes blurred at the edges but the core was there. His thoughts were slower, compressed by biological limitation, but still structured, still analytical.
Still him.
That alone should have terrified him.
Instead, it filled him with a quiet, growing disbelief.
This is impossible.
Biology did not work this way.
And yet here he was.
It was during one of the longer stretches of awareness lying still, swaddled, the world finally quiet that something changed.
The air shifted.
Not physically, but perceptually.
A presence not external, not internal asserted itself into his awareness with impossible precision. His thoughts froze, pinned in place by something that did not belong to this reality.
And then
An interface appeared.
Not projected into space or hovering above him.
It existed directly in his perception.
Clean. Silent. Absolute.
No voice spoke.
And no explanation followed.
Information simply was.
BIOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK: ACTIVE
The words were not language as much as understanding compressed into symbols his mind could interpret instantly.
A structure unfolded before him not text, but visualization. Layers of tissue. Cellular lattices. Energy pathways glowing faintly gold. His body, rendered in impossible detail.
And it was wrong.
No
It was perfect.
His cells were dense beyond any human standard. Not rigid, but adaptive each one a micro-system designed to absorb, store, and redistribute energy with ruthless efficiency.
Solar radiation.
Not as heat.
As fuel.
His bones were not merely strong they were alive, constantly restructuring themselves at the molecular level. Muscle fibers layered upon one another in recursive patterns, capable of generating force that scaled with energy input.
His nervous system was… horrifying.
Signals moved at speeds that made synaptic delay meaningless. Neural density far exceeded human limits, folding inward on itself like a living supercomputer.
His brain was not static.
It was growing.
Intelligence was not capped. Not fixed or limited by age.
It scaled.
With time. experience and energy.
A realization struck him so hard his awareness nearly fractured.
This isn't a system.
It's a mirror.
The interface did not command him. Did not assign quests or objectives. It simply displayed truth.
What he was.
Another visualization appeared.
A star.
The Sun.
Energy flowed from it in vast, invisible streams, and his body responded instinctively, passively, greedily. Absorption was effortless. Automatic.
With every unit of solar energy, cellular efficiency increased.
Increased efficiency came with strength.
strength came with durability.
There was no ceiling.
Final form.
Evolution without termination.
Infinite biological ascent.
He understood then.
Not emotionally.
Scientifically.
He had not become a Superman.
Become the concept of Superman perfected.
No kryptonite registered in the model.
Not Red sun dependency existed as a fatal weakness only as a reduction in efficiency.
Remove energy input, and growth slowed.
Restore it, and evolution resumed.
His body was not invincible.
It was unfinished by design.
The final realization arrived last.
Slowly.
Quietly.
This body was not human.
And the world he was in
was not his.
A name surfaced in his mind, unbidden, drawn from memory, from countless hours of observation and analysis.
Vought.
Compound V.
Supes.
The Boys.
The interface faded.
Not shut down.
Simply… withdrew.
He was left alone in the body of an infant, lying in a hospital bed in a world where gods were manufactured and where monsters wore capes.
For the first time since waking, something like emotion pierced through his controlled awareness.
Not fear.
joy.
Purpose.
I argued with death my entire life, he thought.
And now
Now I get to test the right hypothesis.