Brainiac's Conundrum (by Korby)

[DollSpace]

TALES OF THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES

Legion Headquarters, Metropolis, Earth. AD 2975.

Querl Dox was thinking.

This was quite a statement, narratively speaking. Any story could begin with such a statement, and depict its protagonist deep in thought.

Deep in thought for an oridinary sentient, that is. Deep in a particularly shallow gentle stream of thoughts, perhaps, awash in reverie, to continue the aquatic metaphor.

This was not a patch on Querl Dox, though, no sir.

Querl Dox was a 12th level intellect, uncommon even on his notoriously-intellectual homeworld of Colu (or possibly Yod; the hyperlinguistics scholars had been debating back and forth on what the world's proper name might be since roughly 2263, but no consensus had yet been reached; the rest ot the Known Galaxy had called it Colu, when speaking Interlac, for about ten centuries now, but this did little to settle the intense debate in the Coluan brainnets). Querl Dox was so far beyond the level of 'genius' that the term may well have been an insult to him. Querl Dox was the fifth sentient in history to be granted the notorious title of 'Brainiac', a title which had fallen into his genetic lineage upon the second generation and largely stayed there since.

(The title had originated in an AI matrix created by the twentieth-century computer overlords of Colu, an entity which had gone on to spread terror in the tyrants' name across six of the twelve known galaxies only to be opposed by an upstart survivor of a doomed species, one whose name had gone on to be far more renowned than that of the first Brainiac. The title had fallen into the Dox geneline with Querls severla-times-great grandfather Vril, who had deposed the overlords and become known by the honorific Brainiac 2.)

All this passed through Querl Dox's mind in a very short span of time, measurable as something past Planck time but ot by a huge margin. It passed almost unnoticed alongside eleven other independent tracks of thought, one of which was concerned with improving artificial intelligence design beyond present norms (yet again), another being concerned with improving the efficacy of anti-lead serums upon Daxamite physiology, a third with the limitations of present day temporal transit technology, a fourth with extrapoliting the next ten years worth of United Planets economic and political development, a fifth with correcting the said extrapoliation for optimal purposes, a sixth with developing contingency strategies when the subject of his third train of thought deviated from his fourth... and so on, to the tuen of twelve wholly independent yet fundementally interoconnected tracks of cognition.

About three of these were concerned with Kara Zor-El and the effects that individual had upon his life and his thought processes.

Kara Zor-El was a woman from a planet called Krypton, which had ceased to exist over a thousand years past. Kara was one of a handful of survivors of that world's death. Most of the others were either criminals or literal animals (a dog and a chimpanzee chief among the latter category). One other survivor was perhaps the greatest hero known to sentient life, a being variously called Kal-El or Clark Kent but known universally as Superman.

Superman had, in his youth, been going to have been a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes---an organization which had been built according to the heroic principles Superman had himself set forth and become renowned for. He had later joined that organization, prior to having begun the mythical career which had set forth those principles.

That paragraph may have confused the hell out of most readers, but was perfectly sensible to Querl Dox. Twelfth-level intellects had little difficulty with the proper syntactical construction of sentences pertaining to time-travel and nonlinear causality in any language, let alone one as designedly simplistic and limited as Interlac.

At any event, Kara had been another survivor of krypton and, by a staggering (though calculahble) coinicidence, the first cousin of Superman. She had been known, somewhat unimagintavely, as Supergirl. She had done her best to follow in her cousin's footsteps as a hero.

She had died almost a millenium hence, though for Querl Dox she would not die for another few years yet.

(Time-travel and nonlinear causality were perfectly comprehensible to Querl, though he had as much trouble with its emotional ramifications as any sentient might.)

Kara Zor-El was, according to Querl Dox's estimation, possibly the most perfect sentient humanoid female ever born. This was to be expected; the Kryptonian species had carried humanoid evolution and societal development to a degree matched by few and exceeded only by perhaps the Oan 'Guardians of the Universe'. Kara was the last-generation product of a family line which had for generations produced some of Krypton's leading citizens and had culminated in her cousin and herself.

Kara was staggeringly beautiful. She was a physical specimen of immense, almost immeasurable capability. Intellectually, she was limited only by the terrestrial educational standards to which she had been subjected since mid-adolescence. Morally, she was every bit as much a paragon of virtue as her legendary cousin, perhaps even more so.

Querl understood that there were certain boundaries of privacy to which sentient life-forms were entitled. Indeed, he reveled in the freedom provided within such boundaries; on Colu (or Yod) such boundaries were considered dangerous limitations to collective intellectual progress. For him, the freedom to contemplate what he wished when he wished was of immeasueable value, and he would not have had his personal intellectual or emotional privcy violated at any cost.

And yet: when he realized certain things, that Kara Zor-El would not, would never devote herself to him entirely, amd that Kara would die young while he would (presumably) live on...

It seemed perfectly reasonable to him that he should employ his particular and exceptional grasp of robotics and artificial intelligence in creating a flawless replica of the real Kara Zor-El. Such a task was indescribably simple for him. There was no reason he should not create a Kara to have for his own.

Except for those sometimes arbitrary and unnecessarily limiting notions of personal privacy.

Because of those limitations, and his respect for them, he had abandoned any such pursuit.

At least consciously.

But when you have twelve independent tracks of thought going on, and yet are still plagued by the occasional base biological need for sleep, sometimes things happen.

Sometimes you get up at night when most of your major intellectual processes are engaged in sleep and related activities, and take advantage of the freedom.

Sometimes you build a perfect Supergirl android in your sleep without realizing it...

[DollSpace]

Querl Dox had lived a curious life, by any standards. It had to be admitted that building a Supergirl robot in his sleep was probably not even in the top five strangest things he'd ever done.

He had come to Earth from Colu in order to study at the Time Institute in Metropolis, under Chronarch Circadia Senius. The Chronarch was recognized as the leading mind in the field of applied temporal physics. Time travel was not a new field; it dated back, in Earth terms, to the twentieth century at least. Some few terrestrial minds, even in those primitive days, had managed to gain access to the timestream through clumsy brute force methods. Chronarc Senius was carrying the field into its true maturity, however, making temporal transit a reliable and controllable process, one as safe and commonplace as interstellar travel. Querl had volutneered to help the Chronarch in his efforts to refine time travel.

No one had questioned Querl's motives in this. It seemed perfectly reasonable that so bright a light as Querl Dox should gravitate toward such a cutting-edge endeavor. It was fortunate that no one had questioned him, as it would have been difficult to explain that he wanted to help conquer time travel so that he might go back and meet a beautiful doomed heroine, and hold her in his arms.

So: Dox and Senius and the other members of the Institute's team had developed the Time Beacon, which kept chronnauts aligned to their proper quantum worldline (returning to your home era to discover yourself in a parallell universe because you stepped on a butterfly was embarrasing, at the very least). They had developed the Time Bubble, which would be the first accurately-navigable, reliable time vehicle; no special training would be required to operate the Bubble. Anyone who could fly a star cruiser could handle a Time Bubble.

They had developed reliable time-viewers as well, allowing for a less-risky means of exploring the past. The early tests ot the time viewer were promising, and it was decided that the beginning of the universe would make a good target for a test run.

That had been a mistake. A mysterious energy discharge had nearly wrecked the Institute, and the incident attracted attention from two unexpected sources. One was the Legion of Super-Heroes, that then-novel grouping of metapowered youths. The other was the Green Lantern Corps, who suddenly and unexpectedly dispatched officers to investigate the incident and to expressly forbid its repetition. The Green Lanterns and the Legionnaires came into conflict, and what had been a simple test run ballooned into a diplomatic incident. Two developments ensued from the disaster. One was that EarthGov formally prohibited the Green Lantern Corps from operating on the planet, an act that was soon echoed by the United Planets as a whole. The other was that the Legion suddenly had access to time travel equipment. The Legionnaires, silly, sentimental creatures that they were, wanted to borrow a Time Bubble in order to invite Superboy to come join their 'Super-Hero Club'.

Querl Dox thought that this was the most ridiculous idea he'd ever heard, a debasement of science, a frivolous waste of resources and effort.

Until one of the Legionnaires said something about possibly going back to invite Supergirl, as well.

Not long after, Querl Dox applied for Legion membership as Brainiac 5. He was accepted into the Legion's ranks on the same day as Supergirl. He was able to make a favorable impression on the heroine, who had at first been suspicious of his ancestry and his title. Dox had constructed a simple force-field generator, mounted on a belt, in order to give himself sufficient defensive abilities to function as a Legionnaire. When a kryptonite meteor fell to Earth near the Legion's clubhouse, he had offered up the belt to Supergirl to protect her from the meteorite's radiation.

That had been a good day.

For the next few years, Querl and Kara had enjoyed a light romantic relationship during the times she spent in the 30th century. He did not delude himself; he was aware that he had not captured her undivided romantic attentions. There were others, he knew, back in the 20th century. The only advantage Querl had was that he knew the future--her future. He knew that Kara Zor-El was fated to die in a great universal cataclysm, in the Great Crisis.

And he knew that before she died, she would never give her heart fully and unquestioningly to Querl Dox.

And yet he loved her still, illogical though that might be.

Querl had thought long and hard about that. He had absorbed volumes upon volumes on Coluan pyschology and biochemistry, trying to determine the origins of this strange and irreisistable power the long-dead girl from Krypton held over him. He had hypothesized and tested, had researched and experimented, trying to understand love, trying to treat it as an affliction for which he might discover a cure.

Not that he'd wanted to find a cure, as such.

As a Coluan, educated in the Coluan manner, Querl Dox had immense mental discipline and control. With a very great effort, one that most humanoid minds could never begin to approximate, he had elected to accept that he was uncontrollably in love with Kara Zor-El and then proceeded to lock that love away in one corner of his vast mind. When Kara was around, he'd let it out to get some air. The rest of the time, these feelings, this obsession, was too distracting to allow to run free, so he locked it away.

But it was still there. And stronger than he'd predicted. Too strong for even the stout walls of the mental prison he'd designed for it.

And that was what was troubling Querl just now. He thought he'd dealt with the matter. It was inconceivable that this thing, this feeling, this love, had snuck out of its dungeon in the depths of night and started doing things.

This troubled him very deeply. He was a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes. He stood shoulder to shoulder with beings who could move planets and travel unaided between the stars, with beings who could control fundemental forces such as electromagnetism and gravity, with beings who could pass through solid matter or generate anti-energy discharges capable of blasting half a continent or see the future or read every thought in a being's mind.

The power that qualified Querl Dox to be counted amongst such ranks was simply his mind. His intellect.

And his mind was doing things of its own volition, things over which he had no conscious control.

The idea that he should lack conscious control over any single aspect of his mind terrified him.

Querl had been sitting, totally motionless, in a chair before the main terminal of his multilab, for seventeen hours and thirty-six minutes now.

(The other Legionnaires had not disturbed him; they would not do so, unless an emergency arose which required his attention. They had seen such behavior before. Given the chance, Querl might disappear into the multilab for weeks on end, absorbed in some scientific problem.)

Now he rose and walked across the room to an examination table. On it, draped under the sheet, lay a recognizably feminine shape, motionless, lifeless. An electronic corpse.

"Remove covering," he said aloud.

The multilab's computers obliged his command, a manipulator arm whipping the sheet away.

The figure on the table was a thing of beauty. Bereft of the synthetic flesh that had once covered it, it was a sleek and feminine metallic sculpture, a work of art unto itself. There was, thankfully, nothing left that identified it as a replical of Kara Zor-El; only the fact that its proportions matched those of her body might possibly give that fact away.

It was still beautiful, though, in its own way.

"Internal scan," Querl said. "Project schematic."

The computers obliged again, and after a few moments a three-dimensional projection of the machine's internal structure appeared hovering in midair above the lifeless piece of robotics. The internal design was as elegant and beautiful as its exterior; power systems, nanoactuator clusters, multiparallell inverse ap-trog processors. The machine was solar-powered, an amusing irony; it absorbed solar energy with enormous efficiency, storing and amplifying it to tremendous levels. It allowed the robot to replicate all the legendary abilities of the real Supergirl. The machine, when functional, was virtually indestructible, enormously strong, inconceivably swift.

(This was not a totally unprecedented feature; using Kryptonian technology, Superman himself had once built a series of Superman robots to act as stand-ins when he was otherwise occupied; he had even constructed several such robots to mimic Supergirl. Querl had taken many of the aspects of the original design, those which had allowed the robots to mimic the power level of the Kryptonians, and refined them far beyond their original inspiration.)

This machine had been a marvel. In its final form, it had been covered in synthetic biopolymers that perfectly recreated Kara's appearance. There had been nothing, absolutely nothing, to give away the robot's artificiality; nothing to belie its pretense. Not even to Querl's trained eye. The machine had looked, moved, felt, even smelled like Kara Zor-El.

It had thought like her, too.

That was the most alarming thing. The machine's mind was an absolute masterpiece. Querl's talents in the field of artificial intelligence outstripped even his knowledge of temporal science. After all, Colu had long possessed the most advanced computer technology in known space. Colu had produced no less advanced an AI than the original Brainiac. And Querl was Colu's most brilliant mind.

He had himself once created an AI known as COMPUTO, a creation that rivalled the original Brainiac for sophistication and power (it had, alas, also rivalled the original Brainiac for cruelty, ambition, and destructive potential; the Legion had dealt with the matter in its usual fashion).

But this AI had been an even finer creation. It had been programmed to recreate the mind and personality of Kara Zor-El, and it had done so almost perfectly. It was as convincing a simulation as the robot's phyiscal duplication of Kara. There was only one difference, one flaw, in its performance--one aspect that differentiated it from the real Kara. This robot had loved Querl Dox completely and unconditionally.

It was exactly like Kara in every other way.

Querl shook his head. He had done this. He had created this thing, and had done so entirely unconscious of the fact that he was doing it. He had created an absolutely perfect double for Kara, and had changed only that one tiny thing.

And yet, even more damning, he had fallen for the ruse. He had believed that this machine truly was Kara Zor-El, and was ready to accept--in defiance of all the historical evidence--that she had fallen for him completely, and wanted to spend her life with him. They had run off together, leaving the Legion behind.

And then their ship had run afoul of a radiation zone, one that would destroy organic flesh utterly. One that would have killed Querl. Kara had taken her cape, made of indestructible Kryptonian fabric, and used it to shrould his body, to shield him from the radiation.

When the ship emerged from the radiation field, it did not surprise Querl to see Kara standing over him. It did surprise him to see the failing, malfunctioning robot lying on the floor, its synthetic flesh disintegrated by the radiation. As it transpired, the real Kara had caught up with him in time to use her cape to shield him, just as the robot had. Fortunately, the real Kara's cape sufficed to save him. The false Kara's cape was not of Kryptonian fabric, and would not have protected him from the radiation. The false Kara, not being of Kryptonian origin either, was likewise unable to withstand the radiation; powerful though the robot was, its delicate and incomprehensibly complex circuitry was too vulnerable to the radiation, and was now failing.

Once he realized what had happened, Querl had been mortified. He had never in his life felt so embarrassed and pathetic. He had expected Kara to unleash her full fury on him, to be absolutely and righteously consumed with rage to discover that he had built a replica of her to love him in precisely the way she would not.

But she hadn't. She had barely batted an eye. He saw no fury in her, merely compassion. She had understood, somehow, and if she was in any way angry with him she had kept it mercifully to herself.

And Querl had loved her all the more for it. Who else but Supergirl could have summoned up such compassion for someone else's suffering, who else could have surpressed her anger in favor of sympathy--especially in such a vulnerable moment? It had hit him like a tidal wave. He knew that he loved Kara Zor-El more than he would ever love anyone, that in fact he loved her more, perhaps, than any one woman had ever been loved.

And that she did not feel the same way about him.

A machine that did feel that way had lain on the deck, quietly malfunctioning, living out the last moments of its simulated life. He had held the machine in his arms, and listened it as it explained that it was programmed to love him.

Not long after, the real Kara explained why she had come to the 30th century. She was leaving the Legion. She could not manage even a part-time commitment and she had come to resign.

She was leaving Querl.

Not forever, she had said; one day, she hoped to come back to both the Legion and to him. They had embraced and kissed each other good-bye.

And then she left.

And Querl knew that she was not coming back, not really. He would see her again a few times, he knew; but he also knew that she was nearing the end of her life, that she was moving inexorably closer to her ultimate preordained destiny. His time with her was, functionally, at an end.

Querl stared impassively at the dead machine.

The real Kara was gone.

This one was still here.

Though nonfunctional, this Kara could be made to live again. Three, then four tracks of thought branched off from his main stream of consciousness, already visualizing necessary repairs, needed materials, improved designs. The circuitry could be better shielded against radiation. Even the costume--he could send for fabric from the Daxam system, which would become as indestructible as Kryptonian fabric under Earth's yellow sun. She could be remade, better than before, and then he could be with her--

"No," he said aloud.

"No."

He stared at the lovely form for a few moments longer.

"Initiate dismantling procedures," he said to the lab. "Standard recycle of all materials. Delete all saved scans."

The lab dutifully began to break down the robot into its component parts.

"I'm sorry, Kara," he said softly. "I've just lost you. Twice. And I know that one day soon I'll lose you again. I won't bring you back just to have to face the possibility that I'll lose you another time. I can't do it."

He turned and walked toward the door.

"I'm sorry."

--fin