The hospital room had no personality.
That was the first thing I noticed once the pain settled into something dull, constant, inseparable. White walls. Neutral lighting. Machines arranged with professional indifference. A space designed to be temporary only, in my case, "temporary" meant until my body was finally beaten by inexorable entropy. Everyone in the room understood that this time, temporary did not mean recovery.
Most of the time I lay still. Not because I wanted to, but because movement had become a luxury. Every shift required negotiation: how much pain I could afford, how much strength I still had, how much energy I was willing to waste on something that did not matter.
Time behaved strangely in 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, I tried to think the way I always had methodical, analytical as if this were simply another failing system to diagnose. I reviewed data in my head. Replayed choices. Tested alternate paths I could no longer take.
But the mind, like the body, grows tired.
Eventually, thinking itself became exhausting.
So I watched.
The television mounted high on the wall became my only window out of the room. I watched everything: documentaries, interviews, old films, new series. Not for entertainment, but to keep my thoughts from sliding toward the death that was approaching with mechanical certainty.
At some point, I stopped avoiding fiction.
I had always dismissed it as inefficient an indulgence. Stories didn't solve problems. They merely distracted you from them.
Now distraction was all I had left.
I watched until my eyes burned, until my hands trembled too much to hold the remote steady. I watched because when the screen was on, the machines felt quieter, and the room felt less like a waiting area for death.
And I wasn't completely alone.
For a while I lived beside strangers borrowed their adventures, their choices, their lives.
That was how I reached him.
Superman.
Not as a character.
As an idea.
I didn't care about the cape. Or the symbol. Certainly not the moral purity that restrained him. Those were narrative ornaments necessary for stories, irrelevant for understanding.
What mattered was the biology.
An organism that didn't 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 development.
Infinite biological evolution.
That was what Superman represented beneath the author's fantasy.
Staring at the screen, I could almost feel invincible while my own body did the exact opposite: failing, fragmenting, surrendering.
Superman did not age or weaken.
He didn't lose muscle mass because his cells "forgot" how to repair themselves.
Each exposure to sunlight made him stronger.
Every challenge became fuel.
It was everything I had tried to build.
And everything I had failed to become.
My fingers twitched weakly against the sheet.
"Of course," I 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.
And yet even those weaknesses fascinated me.
Kryptonite wasn't a disease. It was an environmental disruptor. Red sunlight didn't destroy Superman's cells it deprived them of the conditions they needed to function.
Remove the poison.
Change the environment.
And the system recovers.
I closed my eyes.
If only biology worked that way.
As I grew weaker, I thought less about what I had done and more about what I had missed.
People.
Possibilities.
I had always believed relationships were distractions, intimacy a luxury I could afford later. I imagined a future version of myself successful, immortal, finally free returning to the world to live fully.
That version never arrived.
Now, lying in a bed that smelled of disinfectant and inevitability, I understood something too late:
I had postponed life in exchange for a promise no one had ever guaranteed.
The irony was cruel.
I wanted infinite time.
What I got was a surplus of empty hours at the end.
Doctors came and went. Their voices were careful, rehearsed. They explained less now. There was no point. I understood enough from the silence, from the way no one held my gaze for too long.
My family visited once.
The conversation was short and strained, full of words that didn't know where to land. They spoke about memories. Pride. Forgiveness.
I listened politely.
But my thoughts were elsewhere.
Evolution. Adaptation.
What it would take to build a body that didn't break when pushed.
The nights were the hardest.
Pain medication blurred my senses just enough to loosen control. Thoughts slipped free thoughts I would have crushed years earlier. Regret surfaced, not loud, not dramatic, but persistent.
What if I had gone slower?
Accepted limits instead of trying to annihilate them?
Treated biology as a partner instead of an enemy?
The questions had no answers now.
Only weight.
I watched Superman again, barely following the plot. On the screen a body hung above the Earth invulnerable, eternal, calm.
A biological system without expiration.
Something inside me twisted not envy, but longing.
Not to be a hero.
Just to have time again. The chance to see another sunrise. To hear a stranger laugh and realize it mattered.
To wake up in a body that could still adapt instead of collapse.
Exhaustion and medication produced an absurd thought:
What if consciousness were the only thing that mattered?
What if the mind could continue even when the body failed?
I almost laughed at myself.
There was no evidence. No mechanism. No data.
And yet, as the machines continued their quiet duty and my heart labored to maintain its rhythm, the idea refused to vanish.
If life could not be extended…
Perhaps it could be continued.
Somewhere else.
Somehow.
The screen faded to black.
I stared at my reflection: sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, a body that had lost the war for one more breath.
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. I felt it before anyone spoke.
My breathing turned shallow, then irregular. Each inhale felt borrowed, each exhale final. Pain stopped ringing dully inside my skull it dulled, retreated, dissolved into something distant and heavy. My limbs no longer responded to intention. Even thought began to fracture, breaking into unfinished fragments.
I knew what was happening.
There was no fear.
Only clarity.
So this is the end.
Thirty-five years of obsession. Decades of sacrifice. A life spent arguing with death lost not with drama, but with quiet inevitability.
The ceiling above me blurred. The edges of the room softened. The machines began to scream.
My last conscious thought wasn't scientific.
It was bitterly human.
I never really lived.
Then the sound stopped.
Darkness didn't come.
There was no tunnel. No light. No sensation of falling or rising. No continuity at all.
Existence simply… skipped.
Pain returned first.
Not sharp or localized diffuse, overwhelming. Awareness snapped back violently, flooded by sensations I didn't recognize. Air burned my lungs. Muscles contracted without permission. Something small and weak screamed, and only after several horrifying seconds did I realize the sound was coming from me.
I couldn't move or speak.
I couldn't even focus my vision.
The world was enormous, bright, and unbearably loud.
Hands touched me 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 I knew.
But not my hospital.
This was wrong.
My thoughts raced, colliding into one another. My mind still sharp, still structured was trapped behind a body that could not obey. Signals misfired. Muscles lacked coordination. Sensory input overwhelmed processing capacity.
This body is undeveloped.
The realization hit harder than the pain.
I'm… small.
No.
Not small.
New.
Understanding arrived slowly, with terrifying certainty.
I died.
And now
A cry tore from my throat again, uncontrolled, primal. The sound horrified me more than the pain ever could. I tried to stop it. Failed.
This body did not answer to reason.
Time fractured again.
Hours passed, or days I couldn't tell. Consciousness faded in and out. The world became a cycle of light, touch, noise, and exhaustion. Each time awareness returned, the same truth waited for me.
I was a child.
A newborn.
And yet…
My mind remained intact.
Not perfectly memory came in waves, blurred at the edges but the core was there. Thoughts were slower, compressed by biological limitation, but still structured, still analytical.
Still me.
Still Ethan.
That should have terrified me.
Instead it filled me with quiet, growing disbelief.
This is impossible.
Biology doesn't work this way.
And yet here I was.
During one of the longer stretches of awareness lying still, swaddled in soft fabric, the world finally quiet something changed.
The air shifted.
Not physically, but perceptually.
A presence neither external nor internal asserted itself into my awareness with impossible precision. My thoughts froze, pinned by something that did not belong to this reality.
And then
An interface appeared.
Not projected into space or hovering above me. It existed directly in my perception.
Clean. Silent. Absolute.
There was no explanation.
Information simply… was.
BIOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK: ACTIVE
The words were not language as much as understanding compressed into symbols my mind could interpret instantly.
A structure unfolded before me no text, but visualization. Layers of tissue. Cellular lattices. Energy pathways glowing faintly gold. My body rendered in impossible detail.
And it was… wrong.
No
It was perfect.
My 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.
My bones weren't merely strong they were alive, constantly restructuring at the molecular level. Muscle fibers layered in recursive patterns, capable of generating force that scaled with energy input.
My nervous system was… horrifying.
Signals moved at speeds that made synaptic delay meaningless. Neural density far exceeded human limits, folding inward like a living supercomputer.
My brain was not static.
It was growing.
Intelligence wasn't fixed or capped by age.
It scaled.
With time.
Experience.
Energy.
The realization hit so hard my awareness nearly fractured.
This isn't just a system.
It's a reflection.
The interface wasn't code it was an instrument, displaying my biology with impossible precision. It didn't assign quests or objectives.
It simply showed truth.
What I was.
Another visualization appeared.
A star.
The Sun.
Energy poured from it in vast, invisible streams, and my body responded instinctivel passive, greedy. Absorption was effortless. Automatic.
With every unit of solar energy, cellular efficiency increased.
Efficiency became strength.
Strength became durability.
There was no ceiling.
No final form.
Evolution without limit the thing I had always dreamed of.
Infinite biological ascent.
And then I understood.
Not emotionally.
Scientifically.
I hadn't become Superman.
I had become the concept of pefected Superman.
There was no kryptonite registered in the model.
No fatal weakness to red sunlight, just reduced growth efficiency.
Remove the energy input, and growth slows.
Restore it, and evolution resumes.
My body was not invincible.
It was unfinished by design.
Final evolution would come slowly, over time.
This body wasn't human.
And the world I was in
wasn't mine.
A name surfaced in my mind unbidden, drawn from words my brain must have absorbed from the voices around me.
Compound V.
Supes.
The Boys.
The interface dimmed.
It didn't shut down.
It simply… withdrew to the edge of my perception.
I 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 my controlled awareness.
Not fear.
Euphoria.
I argued with death my entire life, I thought.
And now
I was so close to defeating her