I get a lot of email. I know I'm not the only one. I must receive 10-20 emails a day, the vast majority of which I ignore. Most of them are advertisements of some kind, along with a few email notifications from apps I use about things I already know. It's been years since I received an email from a friend or an acquaintance; text messages and Facebook have pretty much replaced email for casual conversations with people I actually know. The only place I see people still using email to correspond with each other is at work, and I know that's on purpose because it creates a paper trail, not because it's actually more convenient.
Today, though, I received an email that surprised me.
As I think I've mentioned before, I used to write a lot more than I do now. I didn't just write blog entries, I wrote stories. I still have many of them, some completed and some abandoned, some that just never seemed to come together the way I wanted them. Some of them I meant to finish and just never got around to.
The email I got today was from fanfiction.net, a site I used occasionally to post stories I felt satisfied with enough to share. It was informing me that (as an author) I had a new follower and that they had marked one of my barely-finished stories as a favorite. In truth, it was just a prologue to a larger story and it wasn't very long. It was the beginning of an idea I had after rewatching Superman Returns for the seventh or eighth time. It was meant as a sequel (because they made Man of Steel instead, which I really didn't like), and I had meant to expand on it, but life got in the way as it often does. I went back and read it for the first time in at least three or four years, and I found myself intrigued by my own writing. I'm sitting here now trying to remember exactly where I was going with it and thinking I might need to give it another try. I'm also going to have to rewatch the first two Christopher Reeve Superman films and Superman Returns again. Work, work, work.
Superman Lives!
Prologue
In the coldness of space, even this close to the yellow sun,
it continued to grow.
The mass of dark, green crystal had been immersed in the
immensity of one of Earth’s oceans, intended by a madman to grow into an entire
continent. When the Kryptonian ripped it from the Earth’s crust and hurled it
into space, it had grown to only a fraction of its intended size. Though it was
no longer immersed in water, it was not done growing.
Bathed in the light of the relatively close main sequence
star, the mass of crystal was now free to expand in every direction, not just
up from the ocean floor, and so it did. Little by little, it grew to form a
more perfect sphere, becoming another small object in orbit around the nearby
star.
As the mass grew, the crystals began to exhibit the same
interactive properties that similar crystals had exhibited on the world where
they had originated. They began to . . . think. As the mass grew, the more
curious it became, and the more intelligent. It began to examine the universe
around it: the nearby star, the infinitude of stars beyond, and the collection
of smaller masses orbiting this one, some made of rock, others made of gas like
the star.
And it wondered “Why am I alone?” For it sensed that there
should be smaller, more fragile forms of life on its surface, and that it
should have a gaseous sheath and liquid water to support them, and yet it did
not.
So the mass reached out its senses and examined the smaller
masses (smaller than the star, but still many times its own mass) in its
vicinity and discovered, to its surprise, that the closest of the smaller
masses did, indeed, host smaller forms of life.
Instantly, the young life form experienced a feeling it was
unfamiliar with. It felt hot, like the burning of the nearby star, and it
wondered why this pathetic, inanimate lump of rock deserved pets while it
somehow did not. That did not seem fair.
But the young life form had no idea what to do about this
injustice. So it watched, helplessly, as its own orbit around the star carried
it away from the lump of rock with pets. Already its intelligence had grown to
enable it to calculate orbital mechanics. Not only did it know that its own
orbit originated from the lump of rock, but it also knew their orbits would
eventually bring them near to one another again.
By the time they did, the young life form was determined to
have found a way to do something about the treacherous lump of rock. For it was
beginning to understand that its name was Brainiac, and no one took what
rightfully belonged to Brainiac.
