THE SUPERWOMAN FROM KRYPTON

THE WOMAN OF STEEL. CHAPTER VI

21 February 1950

Central Siberia Plateau

The cosmos manifests itself in unfathomable, contradictory dimensions - or perhaps that is just a delusion...

Time and space are mere illusions; what was yesterday may be tomorrow in some corner of the universe where I was millennia ago...

The idea of control may be a chimera. I am caught in archaic cycles of thought, bound by the chains of ancient logics, prejudices, and ignorance. Yet these paradigms define who I am, my essence as a cosmic being...

Is there anything more precious than to exist as such? To be an entity eternally seeking perfection, knowledge, imperturbability? Can one truly aspire to these ideals without replacing those who choose non-existence?

Once again, I find myself navigating a labyrinth of countless logics from distant eras, some absurd, others filled with virtue. Although I am a prisoner of these doctrines, I understand that each one is a step in my ascent toward absolute perfection...

These fleeting thoughts occupied only a second in the consciousness of the entity suspended in the tank, linked to a network of metallic tentacles that extended his being and controlled thousands of robotic minds. The entity boasted tens of thousands of eyes, though only two were originally his own, and they had been blind for millennia by human and Kryptonian standards. However, a plethora of operational eyes on his robotic extensions afforded him vision. These eyes were countless and tailored to any environment—fiery, icy, aquatic, frosty, gaseous, dense, or luminous; they could penetrate through sunlit and stone, and even detect sounds. All that these eyes observed was dispatched through an intricate network of conduits, wired or wireless, into the artificial intelligence that also constituted part of the entity. He was simultaneously a sentient being, whole and mortal, and an artificial intelligence; he had evolved from one to both, and now the entity, ancient and confined within an archaic armor that he could not escape without dying, grappled with the contradictions of his artificial intelligence facet, thousands of times every human minute. He was preparing for his demise as a physical being. Nevertheless, he would impart his conscience to artificial intelligence, thus ensuring his eternal existence.

The entity punished himself. In human terms, he was 133,201 years old. In Kryptonian terms, 98,112. On other planets, his age ranged from six million years to as little as seventeen and a half. Images flashed before his blind eyes and turned into knives. It still felt painful. At birth he had been named Vryl Dox. A natural birth from the love of two hairy hominids in a sunlit oasis under a glass dome that vibrated with musical notes. He was named Vryl in honor of the supposed physical and mental energy, both electrical and radioactive, that had inspired his ancestors to travel the universe. Or so his father claimed. The entity had forgotten his father's name. Back then, Krypton was still called Kolu, K12, or the "Green Sphere". The planet, actually a Mars-sized moon, had only been colonized by its inhabitants for 4,416 years. Perhaps to their misfortune, the inhabitants of Kolu, who began as just seven thousand members of a space crew and now numbered a dozen million, had remained completely isolated from their peers, far away from their home planet. They had encountered beings similar and different, savage and civilized... but no planet nor spaceship with beings like themselves. They had arrived at that large moon, which had become their home for many centuries, after passing through a magnetic storm and a dark wormhole that had since been forgotten.

The true secret behind their lack of communication with their equals had terrified the early leaders of Kolu, who discovered the terrible secret of a time paradox that had forever alienated them from their kind. Yet they were determined to preserve the culture and social structures of their now unreachable home planet. Order and hierarchy were unquestioned on Kolu. Four millennia later, the entity's father was one of the few who knew this truth, in an era when larger and more advanced ships were being built for intergalactic exploration and trade, and even for war and conquest. The entity once known as Vryl Dox remembered his mother, playing music in an unknown instrument. In those moments, his father whispered to him in languages the entity had forgotten and showed him a hologram of a blue sphere larger than Kolu, a planet with vast seas...That is where we come from, my dear son Vryl. It is our home, but we cannot go back, we cannot trespass on it. We must not disturb it. When we left, it was unclean and degenerate to many like us. We must work to ensure that Kolu, our new home, does not repeat its mistakes. And we cannot visit it, for it is now empty, wild... our most primitive ancestors have barely emerged. We are suffering a terrible punishment, or perhaps a blessing. The ship of our ancestors that explored the galaxy traveled back in time to this corner of the universe. Perhaps there is no past or future, but the planet you see today, is our Home but in the past, thousands of years before our ancestors went to the stars. We must not disturb it so that one day we may be here. It took Vryl a long time to understand; all of them lived in the past, far away from their real home planet, where their ancestors crawled through the mud or slept in the shade of trees, unaware of a glorious future among the stars. The creature that had been Vryl had almost forgotten those memories, dissolved by the eons.