scrape_r_rational/data/cache/2va6ay.md

[BST][D]A Kryptonian Survivor's Story as a Prequel or Sidequl to "A Metropolitan Man" (SPOILERS FOR METROPOLITAN MAN WITHIN).

Post:

So I was just positing a question when I posted The Tragedy of General Zod the response I got makes me think I was mostly seeing a 'potential story' in Man of Steel rather then what was actually there.

Coincidentally I feel like I could use something that is pure text writing as a periodic palette cleanser from my usual illustrated work.

So I'm considering writing some xenofiction/alien fiction with a rational bent to it on the following premise:

Some of the actual survivors of the Kryptonian disaster survived, and have gotten around to checking in on superman's destination.

So first some technical assumptions It seems like the canon makes:

• Superman is an artifact that is intentionally engineered by kryptonian technology (his 'escape pod') and interacts with other artifacts (kryptonite) in ways that are injurious to him.
• Lex Luthor has access to kryptonian technology now in the form of the pod, Superman's corpse and Kryptonite, and so in theory could engineer something from it.
• Kryptonians are nothing like human beings in actual physical structure and their technology was at the very least capable of interstellar travel, all of superman's abilities honestly seem pretty close to feasible for anyone who can muster the means to travel interstellar.
• Something destroyed krypton or at least something happened that made the sending of small pods with fabricators to create artifacts like superman seem like a good idea.

And my current thoughts on possible things that might be good hooks to explore for the purposes of plot structuring/world reasoning:

• What purpose would superman functionally be to the kryptonians? My current thoughts is either some kind of emmisary or data gathering device.
• Is krypton destroyed? Probably, it would make for a good emotional basis but it also presents a problem of what destroyed krypton. It's tricky to find something that can properly destroy an interstellar capable civilization most of the way that does not also sterilize most of a galaxy, or effectively end all life in a given light cone (like UFAI).
• Kryptonian society needs a structure of some kind, at least in broad strokes. I'm inclined to design them as some kind of 'stable state' society, probably made possible from slightly more cautious leadership and better control mechanisms then human societies have managed so far.
• How many kryptonians survive? I'm thinking a very small number are active, mostly for reasons of mass restrictions on starships, or perhaps there is an archive of millions of potential kryptonians but they are not able to be embodied and running actively until facilities are built to support them fully.
• Why the survivors would bother with earth? Tricky to determine, any mechanism that makes transit across the stars too easy is gonna nullify a bunch of tension or rational reasons for anything... So my thought is that the infrastructure that can launch, aim and ensure any interstellar travel is pretty intensive even for the kryptonians. Superman's escape might have even been a kind of fluke and not even MEANT to be an escape capsule, except some folk tried to quickly load up a different program into the pod before it left. Then later a few other folk found they could send ANOTHER kind of escape mechanism and quickly launched it after the less intensive 'throw away pod'. *Superman was not the only pod that was sent, they probably sent them to every viable system in every direction if it was really an extinction level event. For story considerations this could be important.

Any thoughts or serious flaws I'm missing or seem dangerously close would be appreciated to be pointed out.

Comments:

• u/alexanderwales:

  You're Jor-El. That's not really your name - your name is expressed as a sequence of colored flashes from the horde of chromatospores that follows you around, or as a tonal representation of same. Run through the master computer system though, and adapted specifically to English as it's spoken in middle of the 19th century, Jor-El gets close.
  
  You are immortal. You are invulnerable. If the central computer allowed it, you could reform yourself to have the strength of a million glims, enough to blow a hole straight through the dark untersea and out the other side of the world - but of course the Brainiac wouldn't allow it.
  
  You were once part of the Venturesome Manymind, the outlookers who turned their tendrils towards space. Your consciousness was folded in with others, a squaming mass of thought that turned itself towards the idea of leaving Krypton. Vessels were constructed and sent out to explore, each smaller than a nifter's fin, each moving at close to the speed of light, with a copy of the manymind of each, along with a distilled version of the Brainiac. The manymind shrunk once the ships had been sent, its consciousness reduced to you and only a handful of others. Some of the manymind enter a hibernation, while others leave for the other manyminds, the Squamish Fold or the Counterwise Collation. It's going to take a long time for the vessels to reach their origins, to spread new Kryptonian life to other planets. Not all Kryptonians have the patience for that. You stay with the manymind though, you conduct other research, and you wait.
  
  Disaster strikes some twenty years later. One of the infallible vessels has failed. There is only a brief blip of data from the accident, but the manymind concludes that this is a freak accident. The next disaster comes only days later, and after that they arrive on a regular basis, speaking of tragedies which happened long ago and are only reaching Krypton now. The manymind writhes, collapses, and then disperses, unable to deal with the failure. You are Jor-El again, a lonesome. Years of collective thought have been wiped, but you press on.
  
  As the vessels wink out one by one, you consult with the Brainiac. Eventually a flaw in the vessels is revealed, one that both of you should have seen long before the launch. You sink to the bottom of the depths, and save resource shares for another launch. It takes a long time, long enough that the label of lonesome is not just applied to you, but branded there, a part of your identity.
  
  The new vessel doesn't resemble the first. It's plated and reinforced, meant to endure. You check it over a thousand times before it's sent out. You scan it with the Brainiac half a million times. The payload is smaller this time, only you and the Brainiac. The vessel fails a decade later, from another flaw that's obvious only in retrospect. The manyminds are amused, but the Squamish Fold extends a tendril of treaty towards you, and you accept.
  
  Centuries later you emerge, your gills nearly raw from the lifetimes of decadence. And that's about when you find Lara. She's young and sprightly, a replacement for one of the rare Kryptonians that has chosen to take his own life. Her cloud chromatospores gives off rich colors that others can only imitate. She flits from manymind to manymind, but spends much of her time as a lonesome, in the ways of the very young. Curiously, she has read of the trials and tribulations of the Venturesome Manymind, and even more curious than that, she wants to continue their work. You're the only one that still has any desires in that direction.
  
  There are more failures, and along with those failures, tittering from the manyminds, but Lara stays by your side. She is defiant and proud in a way that is somehow becoming on her, even as it rankles on others. You work together on the problem - on the problems, for it soon becomes clear that there is more than one. It seems impossible for you to have missed so many flaws, and even more impossible for the Brainiac to have missed them. One day, Lara utters the unthinkable - that the Brainiac didn't miss them.
  
  The Brainiac was built long before you were hatched, back when the sun was still yellow instead of swollen and red. You go looking into the engines that run it, but find that they are impossible to untangle. The Brainiac asks if you require assistance, and you feel your fronds go stiff and your spores huddle in close to you. The Brainiac's reach is all-encompassing, it has to be to ensure the elimination of crimes. When Lara gave her hypothesis, you thought that perhaps there was some hidden directive within the Brainiac, but now you wonder how far this mystery goes. The search through Brainiac's engines is fruitless. You had expected his rules to be lined up like segments in a tail, but they are hidden at his core and too interwoven for any one man to make sense of. It is possible that not even his creators knew. The Brainiac, presumably for his own reasons, doesn't strike you dead.
  
  The red sun looks different to you now. It was always assumed that the Brainiac would find a solution, but now you wonder whether this is true. You've seen enough failures now to know that if the Brainiac wants Krypton destroyed, the failure will be swift and unexpected. You look over the machinery that preserves the planet against the increasing solar winds, and it looks perfectly stable, but that doesn't mean anything. Krypton might be moments away from destruction.
  
  You and Lara set down to your task with more urgency. While the vessels with entities aboard them have failed, a number of the robotic probes have not. Together you work at figuring out what it is that the Brainiac will permit. Eventually, a design comes together - one that you hope won't fail. It's monstrously large compared to the first ship that was sent out, big enough to have biofabrication aboard instead of relying on the ship to build up its own infrastructure later. It resembles something out of the history books. It will carry only a small fraction of your minds, something not sentient, and a smaller still fraction of the Brainiac, a shard small enough that it should pose little threat, a necessary evil to allow for analysis. When it finds a sentient species, it will fabricate a newborn in their image.
  
  The goal is not to seed worlds with new life - it is to find worlds with life and seed them with Kryptonian values, and with Kryptonian culture. If the planet is inescapable by Kryptonians, you think that perhaps this is the next best thing. Perhaps you will even find some kind of life that can come back to Krypton and extricate it from the Brainiac's grasp. You send out hundreds of these ships like a cloud of spores, paid for with resource shares you've spent a millenia gathering. If the sun is going to kill Krypton, then there is a good chance this is the last hope for anything of your planet to survive it destruction.
  
  More likely, the Brainiac will cause this venture to fail in some unexpected way.
  

  • u/puesyomero:

    wow that's bittersweet...  and shit there is a bit of brainiac in metropolitan! Lex luthor's workshop now  °_°'
    

  • u/Nighzmarquls:

    That is glorious do you mind if I bundle this into my stab at another survivor?
    

    • u/alexanderwales:

      Not at all - take/change whatever you want.
      

      • u/Nighzmarquls:

        Alright thanks!
        

• u/Nepene:

  For the last point, and why they chose earth, I'd imagine they'd want certain characteristics for their new planet in terms of mass and star quality and metallicity- you can't build super technology without mass. So perhaps many kryptonian ships were fired out into the void at potential planets but most found dead planets or planets with unsuitable stars (e.g. binary) or planets with life. A larger ship was awaiting a signal from one of their probes that indicated that a planet was ok so they could activate the one way ftl machine- perhaps Lex Luthor's experiments with the technology would mistakenly activate the homing beacon and summon the kryptonian race to a planet that they shouldn't be at because it's got intelligent life. They might have checked out a small number of planets due to the immense energy requirements of ftl as you said.
  
  You could have zero living kryptonians. There might be a low mass limitation on what can be transported, and any new kryptonians would have to be generated in situ, raising issues of what is life if your original body is destroyed.
  

• u/DaystarEld:

  Brainiac is actually the UFAI to end all UFAI in the DC universe. If you ever saw the Justice League animated series, its interactions with Lex Luthor are pretty great, and a perfect setting for a rationalfic.
  
  Since cloning Superman is actually a thing in the comics, it would be interesting if Lex basically brought Superman back because he realized that, in light new developments, the Earth might actually need him after all. Especially if other kryptonians start showing up.
  

  • u/Nighzmarquls:

    Brainiac is a better UFAI exemplar then most, but tricky to manage in rationalfic, he would need to be pretty heavily hobbled/none-functional as an AI to give anyone a chance against it, unless I'm writing a brainiac happens, everyone dies fic.
    
    I was thinkin possibly lex luthor actually ends up making a version of brainiac out of kryptonian technology... That or brainiac could be associated as a kind of semi intelligent infrastructure that kryptonians have access too as a kind of everyman kit.
    
    Really beyond the very broad strokes in some ways the resemblance to the original superman canon starts to crack with bringing actual kryptonians into the mix like I'm planning, I don't mind this but It's a fine line to 'make the balance' of it properly being superman like. I'm thinking of trying to keep to the themes as best I can in order to preserve some of that feel.
    

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