trans_9 | Melting Clock: Quarantine

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Melting Clock: Quarantine

After Sam Henderson's announcement, the Contagion Containment and Treatment lab was going to get busy. Anyone suspected of being affected by the mysterious affliction would be brought here, and put into one of the large bubbles that would keep any potential contagious diseases in - and the patients themselves. Once in inside, they wouldn't be able to get out again until the Medical staff had cleared them.

And before they could do that, they needed to find out what was causing this - and why.

They had a lot of hard work ahead of them.

[[ooc: Just start your own sub threads under the main threads, guys! And if you're happy to have anyone tag in, put "Open" in the subject line. If you've already got plans for who you're threading with, put "Closed" instead.]]

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Kon actually laughed at the broom story.

"I think I made out better on my end there, when it comes to fish-people," he said. "And that's been my whole life. Two years of never catching my breath."

Casually, he leaned back against the wall of his bubble, against his hands.

"But the stuff I've seen? The stuff I've done? Tussling with man-sharks, flying around the world, traveling to the future, cruising to other planets? Wouldn't trade it for anything."

Edited 2011-04-30 08:51 (UTC)

"Well, I wasn't looking for a snog, either. Just a chance to get away." He smiled. "At least it was never dull."

Though to be fair, Amy hadn't allowed his to be dull either. So driven to do everything and wait for the Doctor. Always waiting for the Doctor.

"Yeah, I get that. Much stress as it causes, taking it back...just not worth it. Sounds like you've packed an interesting life into such a short time."

"Packed it in like Oprah trying to hide her jelly rolls. More life lived per cubic inch than most people could cram into three lifetimes."

There was a shift again. Kon suddenly got even thinner and leaner. He was changing before Rory's eyes, his face getting rounder and more boyish, his hair sweeping back into a fade haircut. There was a visible hole in his ear where it was pierced that usually held a gold hoop earring.

Then he shifted again and looked older, like Superman, then younger again, back to that boyish look.

Now he looked... well...

...Radical.

"Tends to wind up that way when it starts so interestin'. One second I'm asleep, and the next I'm bustin' loose out of a glass tube in some secret lab, and ready to face the whole world. Wild!"

"Nothing wrong with a well lived life. Most people never have the chance to do that."

Rory's eyebrows jerked, watching the changes and waiting for him to settle, an unsettling sinking feeling starting in his stomach.

It was starting again.

They were running out of time, literally. Faster than he'd thought. "I imagine. Were you aware while you were asleep?"

"Would'ja believe it, but I was?"

He was louder like this, more bombastic, more vivacious. A teenager certainly, there was no mistake about that, but there was a Peter Pannish quality, a boyish liveliness that came with the presumed immortality of youth. He fidgeted a lot as he sat there, clearly tired of his surroundings and wanting to move around, even though he was fine with the conversation.

"'Least some of the time. I remember the programming the clearest, and Director Westfield on the other side of the glass, talkin' 'bout how I was gonna be their Superman. Then cartoons, TV, movies, pop culture stuff, math, science, history, literature--it all comes pourin' into the ol' noggin', no school necessary. I know Vader's Luke Skywalker's pop and I ain't ever actually seen the movie!"

It was fascinating to watch, and almost sickening to listen to. Like a computer chip or a robot, they had written everything from the ground up and he hadn't been allowed to live a moment of it.

"They included pop culture?"

A tool designed to blend? A tool designed to appear no different than any other human, with everything compressed down to nothing, never allowed to live any of it. "Maybe we can fix that, once you're cleared you from quarantine."

Superman talked to people, smiled for the cameras, put people at east. Cadmus's Superman had to have all the skills necessary to do the same.

"Hey, don't knock it--I got a busy life kickin' bad guy bootie and it saves me the time actually watching it all." The excuse. There are plenty at this age, plenty of front for his insecurities.

"'Sides, I'm losin' time, right? Bet I'm missing time where I caught up on all that. Plus, I already caught up on some! Cadmus ain't so bad now--they let me rent anything I want from Blockbuster. They know how to take care of their coolest clone."

"Still." How did you explain how..wrong it felt to listen to someone explain how their life had been written out like a book on cocktail napkins?

"It does sound like you kept yourself busy, though." But if it hadn't been for the programing, would it have even been the life he choose?

"Probably, once we fix it, you'll remember it. Better to do it than to just have the memory of seeing it, really. Doesn't stand up to the real thing. Ah, Cadmus? Are they the...?"

Something shuttered in his face, carefully closing off to hide the reaction to the almost flippant statement. "Coolest" implied that there was more than one. More than one child who had been fast raised for whatever their purposes were. People like that didn't deserve mercy.

"Cadmus were the ones that cloned me, yeah. Never thought I'd go back when I busted out, but cloning people's illegal now, so they just do gene research. They offered me a chance to sign up with them, and Superman thought it'd be a good idea if I were there to be his eyes. Make sure they keep on the straight and narrow, yanno?"

He sat up straighter, clearly enthusiastic about his job.

"It keeps me busy. A lot of their genetic experiments got on the loose and somebody's gotta track 'em down and bring 'em in. I was Project 13--13 on account of it took 'em twelve tries before me to get a clone that even worked right, but that's just my project and not all their other experiments are people like me. There's all kinds of gribblies that got loose from their other experiments! Now that Cadmus is under new management with Mickey, they're trying to track 'em all down and clean up their act."

"So he sent you back there?" The arch of his eyebrow implied that he didn't think much of that decision. If they had programed Conner once, and knew how his programing work, what would have stopped them from changing their minds and doing it again if their 'redemption' wasn't as true as they wanted to claim?

"Ah, what's a gribble?" It was a simple thing to latch onto, something that ignored the implication of failed clones and the lingering, horrible question of what they did with the ones that hadn't been good enough. "It sounds like they're trying at least."

"Gribblies," Superboy laughed. "Beasties. Things that go bump in the night. Cloned monsters--although they're not all that bad. Some are more bark than bite, and are just dumb as doorstops. Can't let 'em roam free or they'll wreck anything they touch, but they're not all bad. Just need to be reigned in."

"That's not exactly descriptive, is it? I means, there's a lot of beasties out there. Not just ones that go bump in the night. So they cloned animals as well? What were they even trying to do?"

He felt bad, really bad. Unable to completely explain why, but the fact that Conner had not been allowed to even grow up properly, had instead woken at 15 with an entire life time worth of memories crammed into his head to serve their purposes best.

He shrugged.

"Who knows, with Cadmus. The old director and some of the guys behind the project were everything from bugnuts bonkers to just plain sleazy. I was the only project with a really clear purpose--and that got ruined when the newsboys, little kid clones of the directors, helped me bust out of the joint before they put my control programming in."

Rory's face went still again, moral outrage at war with professional training that said he had to listen to and not judge the patient. It was very hard not to judge the patients situation, though.

"Ah-Newsboys? How'd that work out, exactly? Did the government approve of this?"

So there had been a plan to keep him under control, and even if they hadn't been able to implant it, they had still formed the person he was from the ground up. That mean he was still the sort of person who would listen to them, who would have no choice but to listen to them. It was disgusting, what had been done.

No, he had a choice. That was the miracle of the whole thing, wasn't it? He'd chosen to run away from Cadmus, he'd chosen to come back to make sure they didn't create others like him. If it had gotten bad, he'd have chosen to run again. In the end, though he couldn't remember it, they'd left him rather than the other way around, but still, that was the miracle of the thing.

He chose. That's what the Newsboy Legion had given him, a chance to leave when he could still choose to.

"Well yeah! It was a secret government project. Probably like a bazillion taxpayer dollars went into making me."

The sinking feeling in his stomach solidified into a hard knot of disgust and tension.

Someone had written off on this, someone had signed something to make this ok. No just a private citizen, a mad-man, but an elected official. Someone people had trusted to look after their interests had done this. "That's...Wow."

Disgusting.

"I didn't think places like that could exist." And he had seen enough that he should know better than to expect the best of humanity.

Superboy tilted his head at Rory curiously.

"Well, it was a secret government project. That's just what the government does. Bad stuff that it covers up all the time and pretends isn't there."

It was said so matter of fact, like it was simply the way the world was. Didn't you know, Rory?

"That's why I ran the first time. That's also why I went to the news and blew the lid on the whole project, which is why they're not secret now and part of why they can't do anything illegal. I only came back 'cause--"

You know, he didn't want to talk about that. About having nowhere else to go.

"Uh, you know, to keep an eye on 'em," he finished lamely. "But the first time, I ran and I didn't look back. They would'a totally cramped my style with that whole mind control thing."

"Not a proper government. Not one that actually is doing what it ought. That's..." He shook his head. "That's the sort of thing that governments come down over. A gross miscarriage of justice."

He shook his head again, listening intently and trying to keep his voice even as he responded. Conner didn't...there were no words for how...the depth of the disgust he felt. That wasn't how the world worked, not a proper one. Not a world where anything approaching the best of humanity had a say in what was done.

"It's big of you, coming back. Most people wouldn't have been able to deal with them again. I'm shocked your populace stood for the continued existence of the group, once the information was leaked."

He tried not to think about the mind control thing, tried not to think of how much it would have changed.

There was just a shrug.

"What they did wasn't exactly kosher, but hey, if they hadn't, I wouldn't even be here, right? So they did something kinda good by accident, creating me! I've saved the day a buncha times already!"

The next part was said without him even really thinking before he said, like much of what he'd say at this stage. "'Sides, it's not like I had anywhere else to go."

Wait, did he just admit that out loud?

"Not that it bothered me my friends all booked it from Hawaii, anyway," he amended quickly. "Who needs to be tied down to any one place? For now, I'm at Cadmus, but after that, I'll go wherever the wind takes me, free as can be!"

Rory tried very hard not to flinch but knew he wasn't entirely successful. "Right. Right. I'm sure you did great." And how much better would he have been done if they hadn't just created him to fill a role and packed his head full of all they thought he should know?

He shifted, automatically intending to offer some reassurance. Like he would with any abandoned teenager coming into the hospital. Talk about homes and places where no one would hurt him, safe places where he could grow into his own person. The words died on the tip of his tongue. He wasn't home. No matter how much he wanted to help him, to give him something beyond the whims of his creator, he couldn't.

It was one of the most helpless moments of his life, that realization. "I'm sure there was somewhere. Even if it doesn't seem like it right now, I'm sure there is somewhere for you to go."

He swallowed, knowing this defense mechanism too. It wasn't something he wanted, so it didn't hurt so badly that he didn't have it. Lone wolves, one of the residents used to call them, tough guys. Lonely kids who had nowhere to go and hadn't had anyone to rely on and pretended like they didn't need them, or the help of any adult, because they could do it themselves. "Sounds like you've got it all figured out. What do you want to do, after Cadmus? Any careers you're looking at? Goals?"

Superboy squirmed.

"That's a long while off anyhow, and I'm stuck at sixteen for a while."

He was now from before he could age again.

"Maybe I have it all figured out already! I probably just forgot it. I'm losin' time, that means losin' all the stuff I figured out while I was older. 'Sides, what's it matter now? Got a multiverse to save!"

No plans, no career goals, no intention to finish school. Not at this age. Maybe not at any age.

"Stuck? Why would you be stuck?" He frowned, zeroing in on the medically relevant statement. "If you have a point of time where your time is frozen, it might help."

He nodded, trying to keep from frowning. Losing time, yes. Losing time and becoming younger, but unlike the rest of the crew, he didn't have a childhood to saunter through and relive memories. If the memories were implanted, even the ones that had taught him vital developmental things like walking and talking would fade as well? They might not have time once he started going through the stages of rushed development.

Who said anything had to make sense when essentially the programing was what was unraveling, independent from the body it occupied?

"Right, but it won't always need to be saved. You deserve a life of your own. Something that's yours."

"I got my genes unzipped by this other secret org called the Agenda. They're bad guys, even worse than Cadmus, and instead of working for Uncle Sam, they're private, all set on cloning soldiers for the highest bidder!" Superboy said. "They used me as a template for their super soldiers, so I went unstable and nearly melted into the puddle-that-was-formerly-known-as-Superboy. Only, dig this--Cadmus was able to stabilize me, using my friend Roxie's DNA as a base, kinda making us like sibs. Problem was, I got stuck at this age ala Peter Pan, so I could never grow up. But I remember being older on the ship, so I guess never came sooner than I thought!"

This was the stage he was talking about before, of being stuck at sixteen for a time.

"Your genes unzipped? How did that work?" His scowl deepened, but if he had been a puddle at some time in the past, it was better to know about it so that they could be prepared for it. Really, some of this was just gathering medical history in a predictive sense of 'What we may be dealing with in an hour.'

"They stabilized you how, exactly? Do you know the process?"

He sighed, shifting to study Conner for a long moment. "Earlier, you refereed to yourself as Kon-El, now as Superboy. And your friend, the one with security, called you Conner. Those are all names on your file. Which would you prefer me to continue to use?"

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