The discs had been too tempting to pass up. The brightly colored pictures on the covers, the familiar insignia from his baby blanket…Clark had hesitated at first, but given the increased security around the city, he felt safest waiting in Lois’s apartment after she left carrying the box of listening devices and cameras.
The sheer numbers of the discs and the dates on the backs of them shocked him. This world had been telling stories of this superman since at least the nineteen fifties.
He’d picked the box that looked the most worn to start with. This one was made in the nineteen seventies.
From the moment the screen went dark, and the first view of a version of the familiar Daily Planet outline came on the screen, he found himself entranced.
The music was exciting. It called to something within him that he hadn’t known existed, just as the music to Star Wars had called to him when he was a child.
The image of a planet of white plains and crystalline angles thrilled him. He’d only heard a tiny fragment of his father’s message once, when he’d turned twenty five, and the message had cut off suddenly.
But he knew the name Krypton, and the symbols on the actors’ clothes were correct.
Was this what it had been like, this alien world of bright, blinding light?
The images of loving parents sending him away from a dying planet…those were difficult. He’d loved the Kents as much as he’d ever been able to love anyone, but he’d been forced to live in one household after another.
Everything would have been so different if even one of his parents could have come with him, if they could have explained what was happening to him.
His spaceship landing…it was how his parents had told him it had happened, shortly before they’d died. These actors were old, though…not young and vibrant as he remembered his own parents.
But after that, everything began to get more and more bizarre. If he’d had his powers as a toddler, he’d have been able to save his parents. He certainly wouldn’t have created a strange, masochistic identity for himself in which he was the butt of everyone’s jokes.
He’d had problems being accepted, but those were genuine problems that he hadn’t known how to deal with, not something he imposed on himself.
Watching further, he wished momentarily that his father had left some portion of himself behind. What he’d heard when he was younger indicated that his father had left some sort of recording, but the spaceship had been lost, and Clark had no idea what kind of legacy he’d been left.
The suit should have looked gaudy and silly, but somehow it didn’t. The actor wearing it made it almost seem majestic.
What followed was moments of sheer horror and embarrassment at the scenes with “Clark Kent” in them, and sneaking admiration at the scenes with “Superman.”
He could almost imagine himself in the costume, doing those things.
Clark imagined that the movie had had the same effect on an entire generation of kids, just as watching Star Wars had affected every kid in Smallville. For a time, everyone had wanted to be a Jedi.
The difference was that the kids in Smallville could never be Jedi knights, no matter how hard they tried.
Clark could be a Superman, if he really wanted to.
Oh, he couldn’t turn back time, no matter how much he fervently wished to, and he couldn’t lift the entire San Andreas Fault, but he could fly, and he was strong and as far as he was aware, there was nothing that could hurt him.
Kryptonite might not even exist in his world, although if he ever got back he’d watch for it.
Of course, reality had already shown him that he wasn’t in a movie. Lois Lane wasn’t infatuated with him in the least, and this one had already seen the movie. She was much more attractive than the woman in the movie, and less grating, yet Clark could see the similarities.
This Lois was determined, driven and obsessed. From the little he’d learned from cleaning her apartment, she had numerous awards that didn’t even exist in his world, and yet there was very little to connect her to family or friends.
Yet he suspected that like the woman in the movie, this Lois Lane had a softer inner core. It was too bad that he’d never have a chance to get to know it.
He had to go home to his own woman. It was funny that she’d even had a place in the movie, riding along with the football players mocking him.
No wonder she’d snickered when he’d tried to convince her he was Clark Kent. Not only was he a well-known fictional character, that character was a boob, an incompetent ass.
Not at all the sort of person a woman would take seriously, especially in a world where no one believed in Superman.
Clark stared for a long moment at the other discs scattered about. He couldn’t bring himself to watch any of the others, not now that he knew what he needed to know.
Seeing himself being mocked while the person wearing the suit was idolized was grating to say the least, no matter how uplifting the music was.
He tried watching television, but he found that nothing would hold his attention. Working the remote control took a little time, and then there was some sort of interactive menu that was confusing.
Was this world so lacking in imagination that it had to remake old shows like Battlestar Galactica, the Bionic Woman and Knight Rider, or was this the first time around for these shows?
A random sampling showed an incredible number of talk shows, most of which seemed to deal with sex and people who should have been in therapy instead of being exploited.
Flipping channels revealed very few of the old comforting shows from his childhood, the kind that had always been filler. Eventually Clark settled on the news.
Seeing Lois’s piece on the airplane landing playing again, he was surprised. Apparently, although there were news channels that claimed to have twenty four hour news, there really wasn’t that much more news out there than there had been in Clark’s world. They had to repeat the same stories over and over until something new came up.
Eventually the scrolling text along the bottom of the screen and the other information to the side began to give him a headache. It was distracting, and it made it hard to concentrate on the main story.
There were more channels and more flash and noise, but as far as Clark could see, television hadn’t added much in the way of substance.
He muted the television and sat on the couch with his head back and his eyes closed. This was a nightmare world and even if he found all of the passengers and somehow got them away from the government, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with them.
This didn’t seem like the sort of world that had many mad scientists; if it did, they were probably building bombs and weapons instead of advancing the frontiers of science. An examination of the telephone book had shown no listings for Star labs or Lex Labs.
He didn’t even have a clue as to how any of them had gotten here, much less an idea how to get them back. In the end, he might have to be forced to do the one thing he didn’t want to do.
Go public.
If he’d inadvertently trapped two hundred people in this world, he had to make sure that they were able to live some sort of normal lives. The only way to do that was to prove that they weren’t terrorists, that their stories were true.
It would be the only way to keep them from disappearing into the bowels of some foreign prison, never to emerge again.
It would mean sacrificing any sort of a normal life, giving up any chance that ordinary people would look at him as just one of the guys.
The only proof that what they were saying was true lay within Clark himself. He had power that scientists would not be able to explain, and if he was public enough about it, the government wouldn’t be able to cover it all up.
That would be the option of last resort. For all he knew, this world had people working on interdimensional travel at this very moment. Perhaps they already had it; Lois had mentioned some show dealing with multiple worlds.
The thought of revealing himself was one of Clark’s worst nightmares. His father had warned him repeatedly that if people found out what he was, they’d cut him open like a frog.
Of course, his father might have been so emphatic as a way to impress the importance of secrecy on his ten year old mind. If Lana hadn’t stumbled across the secret, he never would have revealed his secret.
Her initial revulsion had scarred him even further. Although she’d eventually come around to accepting him, those early days of waiting anxiously to see whether she was going to reveal his secret to the world had left a deep impression on him.
The easiest way to make Lois believe him was to show her what he was, what he could do. Yet the thought of the look in her eyes when she realized he wasn’t a human being was enough to make him hesitate.
Waiting for Lois to return, Clark found himself pacing the apartment. Eventually, he'd come across a series of videocassettes. He hadn't paid much attention to them before, but seeing that Lois had inexplicably moved them had piqued his interest.
Each was simply labeled with her name and a date. Clark popped the first video into the VCR. It was apparently a copy of an old newscast, one in which a young teenager stood giving a news report for a local news station.
She looked incredibly young and a little awkward, as though her face hadn’t grown into her features. There was something mesmerizing about her, even though she was just giving a report on a little bit of local color. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old.
This was apparently a compilation tape, a collection of all the reports she’d done as a rookie reporter. Clark could almost see her sitting and watching her reports obsessively, looking for mistakes she’d made and trying to think of ways to do better.
Although her initial reports were for this local station, they quickly improved. He could see a rapid progression from her first fumbling efforts and later, more polished reports.
By her third tape, she had transferred to a new network, CNN, which was apparently this world’s version of LNN. It seemed that there was no Lex Luthor in this world. Of course, given his depiction in the movie, no one would want their child to have that name.
It wasn’t until the third tape that everything changed. Unlike the other tapes, which were relatively short and recorded in good quality video, this video was slightly grainy, as though it had been recorded in long playing mode and then watched over and over again.
It wasn’t long before he saw why.
The images of planes hitting buildings were interspersed with images of a younger Lois Lane, face covered with soot and lungs laboring as she attempted to report on unimaginable horror.
It went on and on, her voice occasionally failing and the misery on her face a reflection of the misery of those around her. It was obvious that she could barely stand, but it never seemed to end, the stories of misery and death and destruction.
After a time, Clark found that he couldn’t watch it at all any more. He found himself staring numbly at the screen, his shock and horror more than he could face.
This was what had changed this world, turned it into a nightmarish police state. This was what had put the suspicion on every face, turned brother against brother and made the world into a grim dystopia.
The worst part was that this possibly lay in the future of his own world. People he cared about at home would have to go through this, live through it over and over again, and suffer as the oncoming storm overtook their world before they could stop it.
He had to go back. He had the power to change things before they happened to his world, whatever the cost to himself.
Whatever it took, he was going to try to stop this from happening in his own world.
Assuming he could ever go home again.
He was so lost in his own thoughts that he didn’t notice Lois until she put her hand on his shoulder.
“I see that you’ve made yourself at home.” Lois said dryly.
*********
The pain in his eyes surprised Lois, in part because it was the same pain she’d had to live with for the past six and a half years. She watched the video sometimes to remind her of why she was doing what she was doing. She needed that reminder of the pain that the people around her had gone through to keep her strong. She needed the reminder sometimes, during the nights when the bullets were flying overhead and she was wondering why she hadn’t settled for a political beat in Washington.
The world needed the stories she had to tell. If they didn’t know what was happening, they’d never be able to change things. The good, the bad and the ugly, it was her duty to report the news in hopes that people would look at some of the things that had been done and say "never again."
That being said, it had been years since Lois had seen the pain of the bombings so fresh on someone’s face.
It was almost as though he’d never seen them before, as though this was his first time being exposed to something that the rest of the world took for granted.
Short of a few tribesmen out of contact with the rest of civilization, there was hardly anyone in the world who didn’t know about the bombings.
It was subtle, a masterful piece of acting. If he’d planned on convincing her he was from another dimension, he couldn’t have done a better job.
Because despite her conviction that this was all a scam, a setup, Lois felt the tiniest seed of doubt.
He was getting to her.
