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Post by Babu Baboon on Nov 30, 2015 12:57:32 GMT -6
Once upon a time, in a little town named Indian Creek, there lived a man named Abe Danner. Abe was a small man with small aspirations. He was content with his position at the university and simply hoped to be there long enough to get tenure. His marriage was hardly passionate and his wife, Mattie, could be overbearing and she was fiercely religious … something that often conflicted with his position as a man of science. Still, he was content in their relationship and did not complain.
The one place where his passions did rise was the small lab on the first floor of their modest home. There, he allowed himself to dream.
Unfortunately, his wife was not someone he could talk to about any breakthroughs he made in the lab. She was no longer the open-minded woman he had married. He knew she was religious when he married her, but that simple faith had evolved into a staunch fundamentalism. She considered any research he did an abomination… an attempt to undo that which God had created.
If he was to have any intellectual conversation, it had to come from his colleagues at the university. To that end, he would invite them over from time to time for dinner. That was how he found himself, one evening, discussing his latest project with Professor Mudge, the department head.
For most of the night, Abe’s wife remained silent, only making the odd cough or snort when their conversation touched on topics of which she disapproved. Her attention focused on him, though, as he spoke of his theories, fixing him with an icy stare.
Abe pretended not to notice and continued his conversation. “… and these tiny, microscopic machines … I call them nanites… could cure society’s ills, rewriting man’s very genetic code and curing any infirmity.”
“It all sounds like science fiction to me,” Professor Mudge said. “but I suppose the same could be said about any major scientific breakthrough.”
“It sounds like an abomination to me,” Abe’s wife said. “You are going against God’s will. As if man could improve on God’s design.”
“Who is to say what is God’s will?” Mudge chuckled condescendingly. “Were doctors going against God’s will when they developed the polio vaccine? Was it his will that people continue to succumb to the disease? Or were these doctors instruments of his will so that man might be spared from this disease?”
Mattie was quiet. Silent but unconvinced.
Mudge took a sip of his wine and leaned back in his chair and his face took on a contemplative look. “Just think of the military applications of such a breakthrough. Soldiers who won’t succumb to any injury. Troops with unlimited endurance. Never tiring. Never slowing down…”
Mudge straightened up and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Yes … yes. Once you have developed your theories further, I should be happy to see any proposal you might submit. This could be a very profitable endeavor for the university.”
It was Abe Danner’s turn to look horrified. It was never his intention for his work to be used by the military to create an army of super soldiers. It was meant to be used for the benefit of mankind.
The truth was, his work was further along than he had let on. It was obvious it would have to remain within the confines of his modest home lab, lest it be exploited.
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Post by Babu Baboon on Nov 30, 2015 12:59:00 GMT -6
The next day, Abe decided his research was now at the testing stage. He moved one of his white lab mice to a separate habitat. For the purposes of documentation, he named the mouse Samson.
Abe took a syringe and filled it with a sterile fluid containing a sample of his nanites and injected it into Samson. He then took a cigarette break as he waited for the nanites to work their way through the mouse’s system. Upon returning, he took a scalpel and made an incision on its hindquarters. He watched with excitement as the wound began to close, the microscopic nanites busily knitting the flesh back together.
A few hours later, Abe was sitting in his living room smoking his pipe as he read the scientific journal. A loud crash jolted him out of his reading so he sat down his pipe and dashed to the lab.
His jaw dropped when he saw the state of Samson’s habitat. It looked as if someone had fired a gun at the thick glass wall, but from inside. Perhaps, something even faster than a speeding bullet.
Abe was frantic. His test subject was missing! He searched desperately for Samson for several hours before he finally found him in the kitchen behind the refrigerator.
Abe quickly dashed back to his lab, holding the mouse up with both hands. He was eager to get a blood sample under the microscope so he could observe the nanite activity. There were obviously some additional benefits he hadn’t anticipated.
Holding the mouse with one hand and the syringe with the other, he prepared to take the sample. When he went to inject the needle, though, it snapped in two. He attempted again with a larger needle and the same thing happened. He tried again with progressively larger needles and they continued to snap. He finally tried with his largest needle, one normally used for extracting bone marrow. It broke, as well.
He decided to try for a mouth swab, but the mouse bit through the swab stick. He sighed and put himself to the task of trying to contain the tiny titan. He placed the mouse in a heavy leaden box, flipped off the light switch, and went to bed.
When he awoke the next day and entered his lab, he was startled to see many lumps poking outward from the surface of the metal box. It was fortunate that the mouse had given up on trying to escape. If it hadn’t, it surely would have torn the box apart if his suspicions about the transformation taking place were true.
While he couldn’t perform any invasive tests, he still had other options. One was that he could still run tests on his subject’s new abilities.
The first thing he could utilize would be the old tried and true cheese maze. He put a piece of cheese at one end of the maze and then released Samson at the other end. His jaw dropped as the mouse crashed through the walls of the maze making a straight line to the cheese.
Abe continued to perform tests. Apparently, it did not need to breath. It was also impervious to flame, drowning, toxic gasses, blades, and projectiles of any kind.
His actions quickly ceased to register as a threat to Samson and the mouse began to see them as some sort of game. Their relationship began to move from scientist and subject to owner and pet.
Eventually, he ran out of tests he could perform on Samson. He was left with a perplexing dilemma. He was unable to derive any additional information from his current subject, but he dared not move on to a larger mammal such as a cat, dog, or monkey. He shuddered to think of the power the nanites endowed combined with their own predatory instincts. If he was unable to contain it, he would be unleashing a monster into the world.
Acquiring a human subject would be impossible without using the resources of the university. Once again, he dared not do such a thing for fear of his work being exploited.
One option began to creep forward in his mind. Dare he try such a thing? Would it make him no better than a mad scientist out of horror stories of old? It really seemed the only logical option left to him, he reasoned. And that was how he came to inject himself with the nanites from his own experiment.
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Post by Babu Baboon on Nov 30, 2015 12:59:37 GMT -6
The changes exhibited themselves slowly, at first. The next morning, when he went to reach for a mug to pour himself a cup of coffee, it shattered in his hand. He looked around to see if his wife was around to witness it and then quietly swept up the pieces. He would have to be more careful. He was not ready to reveal what he had done.
He felt more invigorated and energized than he had since childhood. It became a common occurrence to find himself reading or working into the night and then being surprised when the sun came up. It appeared he no longer required sleep.
Physical changes began to manifest themselves, as well. He began to stand straighter. His hair thickened. His musculature began to tighten. He even seemed taller.
One day, while leaving the campus, he rolled through a stop sign and the blue lights of a police car filled his rear view mirror. He pulled off to the side road followed by the police car.
A female police officer exited the police car, walked up to his car window, and asked to see his driver’s license and registration. She looked at his license and then at him, repeating those actions three times before handing it back to him.
“You’ve had some work done. Looks good. I think I’m just going to let you off with a warning this time,” she said smiling slyly.
Abe watched in his rear view mirror as she walked back to her patrol car. When he saw his own reflection in the mirror, he realized what she was talking about. In their efforts to push him to the pinnacle of humanity, the nanites were working to make his features more symmetrical. In short, they were making him more handsome.
These changes didn’t go completely unnoticed by his wife. While they had happened too subtly for her to suspect anything, she still reacted to them. She found herself attracted to him in a way she hadn’t been since they first started dating. Thus, she came to announce her pregnancy to him five months from the day he first injected himself with the nanites.
Abe was greatly alarmed when she told him about her pregnancy. He feared for her safety.
In the past few months, he had discovered more and more about the extent of the changes the nanites had made to him. He could uproot huge trees without breaking a sweat. He could crush bricks in his bare hands. Eventually, he could even bend steel girders like a cartoon strong man.
The most startling ability presented itself in the week before his wife gave him the news about her pregnancy. He had decided to test his jumping skills just to see how high he could go with his newfound powers. The distances grew progressively higher and farther. Then one day, he simply seemed to keep going, willing himself to go farther. He realized that if he never chose to land, he would simply keep going. When he finally made the decision to land, he went hurtling to the earth like a missile, leaving a small impact crater in the ground. His clothes were ragged but he was otherwise unharmed.
If he could do all this, what of the fetus growing inside of his wife? Would it kick its way out of her?
He watched her like a hawk, constantly doting on her. His wife chuckled indulgently. She thought his extra attention was simply that of a normal, anxious father-to-be.
Maddie began to exhibit a healthy glow that he attributed to her pregnancy. Then he began to notice other changes. Her once mousy brown hair was now a luxurious auburn. Her features began to change to become more symmetrical. The slight crook in her nose even began to straighten out.
The kicker was when Maddie came downstairs with a dumbfounded look on her face. She was holding her glasses in her hand.
“What is it?” he asked her.
“It’s the darndest thing,” she said. “When I went to put on my glasses, everything was blurry. Then when I took them off, everything was clear.”
“Perhaps your prescription was too strong. That’s been known to happen. You haven’t worn them for a couple of days, so your eyes have had a chance to recover,” he said, hoping she would buy such a ridiculous excuse.
“I suppose,” she said, giving him a suspicious look. “I’ll have my eyes retested the next time I’m in town.”
Abe sighed inwardly. He already knew what the optometrist would say… that she no longer needed glasses. He didn’t know how much longer he could hide the truth from her.
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Post by Babu Baboon on Nov 30, 2015 13:00:48 GMT -6
A few nights later, he was sitting in the living room reading the newspaper when he heard a banging noise coming from the kitchen. His wife was hammering a nail to hang something on the wall. Suddenly, there was a large crash and he saw his horrified wife staring at him through a two foot hole in the wall.
For a few seconds, she was too stunned to make a sound. Then she let out a scream of shock. “I… I … was trying to hang up the dream catcher Margie gave me and… and… somehow…”
She looked at Abe as if she was seeing him for the first time. “What have you done to us?” she shouted, smashing the hammer against the wall, creating another hole.
Abe quickly dashed into the kitchen where she was and held onto her shoulders. “I injected myself with my nanites. It was the only way I had to test them. I had run out of options. I never meant you to be affected by it.”
“You had to do it! You had to go and play God!” she exclaimed frantically. “You’ve damned us both! What about our baby?!!”
“He will be perfect,” Abe said soothingly. “He’ll never be sick. He can never be physically hurt. He might not even grow old or die. He’ll be superior in every way.”
“This… this isn’t right,” Maddie sniffed, holding herself to him. “We… we have to make this right. We… we need to go to church and pray. Promise me we can do that.”
“I promise,” Abe said, wrapping his arm around her. It was the least he could do after all he had put her through.
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Post by Babu Baboon on Nov 30, 2015 13:01:23 GMT -6
Abe and his wife walked up the aisle as the organ music filled the sanctuary. It had been some time since he last attended church. It had been a while for his religious wife, too, thanks to her morning sickness. Still, he was surprised by the blank stares of his neighbors and fellow parishioners.
“Look. There’s room near the front,” his wife said, tugging on his arm.
As he and his wife sat down, the man in front of him turned around and offered his hand in greeting. “Hi. Mike Rodgers. Good to have you join us.”
Abe was taken aback. Why was a man he had known for years introducing himself?
“Um, … hi. I’m Abe Danner and this is my wife, ma…”
“Hey!” Mike said as his face lit up. “We have a guy in town named Abe Danner. He’s a professor at the college. A bit older than you. You guys cousins or something? The music stopped, so he quickly said, “Looks like they’re getting started,” and quickly turned around.
The choir began to lead the parishioners in a hymn. Abe wasn’t comfortable singing in public so he just barely moved his lips, miming everyone else.
The pastor then began to lead everyone in a prayer of confession. Abe was puzzled when he saw his wife’s eyes light up.
As soon as it was over, Maddie whispered to her husband, “We arrived on the day of communion. This is just what we need.”
The worshippers began to file to the front. Since Maddie had led them to one of the front pews, they were one of the first in line.
Being a more traditional church, a single chalice of wine was used to represent the blood of Christ. An altar boy held it up to Abe’s lips to take a sip and then he moved over to the one holding the bread that represented the body of Christ.
Nearly the entire town was in attendance that day. The few that recognized Abe and Maddie commented on how good they looked, but Abe was surprised by how few they were.
Over the next few weeks, strange things began to happen. The town drunk reluctantly quit drinking when he found that alcohol no longer had an effect on him. The paperboy was hit by a speeding car and walked away unscathed, though his bike was mangled beyond repair. The butcher’s son scored a home run for his little league team by hitting a ball into the next county.
A sick feeling came over Abe as he continued to hear more stories like this. He had understood how he had spread the nanites to his wife, but he hadn’t counted on them being spread through saliva. The nanites must have been reproducing rapidly for them to begin affecting such a large group of people.
Similar stories began to come in from the surrounding counties. A group of children chased down the ice cream man and stopped his truck by force. A camper pinned a bear that had tried to maul him before releasing it back into the wild. A mother who had turned her back on her toddler while they were at the park was startled to discover that her son had built a pyramid out of the parked cars in the parking lot.
As the infected travelled, the infection spread with them. Stories began to come in from farther and farther away. A surfer in California carelessly flung a shark onto the shore when it tried to bite him. A Texas cowboy at a rodeo cold-cocked a bull that was about to gore him, knocking it unconscious. In Chicago, a man dodging out of the way of a reckless bus driver ended up leaping a building in a single bound.
The stories eventually began to come in from overseas. Each was more fantastic than the last.
A woman in Sweden slapped a potential rapist. The blow snapped his neck.
A man in Switzerland climbing the Swiss Alps had his guide rope snap. He fell several hundred feet and landed unscathed.
An angry group of protesters in East Germany burst through the Berlin Wall, shrugging off the hail of bullets fired down on them from the panicked guards attempting to stop them.
A man in England attempted to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of him, shoved his foot through the bottom of the car, and sent it flipping into traffic. The car exploded and he walked away without a scratch.
A suicide bomber in the middle east attempted to blow himself up. He was beside himself when he discovered he was still alive and would not be receiving his 72 virgins in Heaven. Most of the ones he had been attempting to take with him were unharmed, as well.
And so it went. The nanites spread far and wide, like a viral epidemic. The world was in chaos. As more stories came in of disasters caused by a world unprepared for their newfound abilities, Maddie could barely look at the husband she held responsible.
One morning after a night he had chosen to sleep to escape his guilt, Abe awoke to discover his wife and child were gone. All he had left to remember them by was the crib they had fashioned out of steel bed frames and the metal baby toys he had made for little Hugo that were covered with teething marks.
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Post by Babu Baboon on Nov 30, 2015 13:02:32 GMT -6
In the beginning, there were deaths. The uninfected found themselves caught in the crossfire as the infected tested the limits of their new powers upon one another.
Eventually, there were no uninfected. The world burned as titans clashed. Emboldened by their newfound abilities, nations went to war. Criminal impulses were released as those possessing them came to think of themselves as unstoppable.
The world eventually came to a calm. Tyrants could not oppress those could not be hurt. Nations could not fight soldiers on whom bullets had no effect. Criminals could not victimize those who could not be overpowered.
War was fruitless. Crime was fruitless. Once everyone came to this understanding, they were able to go about the business of rebuilding the civilization that had been flattened. Man had achieved world peace… not because of any greater enlightenment, but because violence against his fellow man was no longer possible.
Society rebuilt itself in the form of huge spires reaching far into the heavens. These were buildings built for beings no longer bound by the former limitations of man, possessing patios and entrances on every floor.
Unfazed by previously inhospitable environments, overpopulation became a thing of the past. Civilization spread to the coldest reaches of the Antarctic to the deepest depths of the ocean.
As man became accustomed to his immortality, the drive to procreate faded away. Hugo Danner was among the last of the new generations of man.
Untroubled by the drives that had formerly ruled him, a new cultural renaissance occurred. Over the next thousand years, man turned to pursuits such as art, literature, science and philosophy.
Eventually, even these pursuits grew tiresome as the years passed. A general ennui began to set upon the populace as mankind found itself faced with an endless expanse of years and no new challenges left upon earth.
The last avenue left was exploration. One by one, men and women began to soar into the heavens by the power of their own flight, never to be seen again. Some said they went on to become the gods of new worlds.
That was how Abe Danner came to find himself standing on the patio of a high tower, peering out at a seemingly desolate world. He was surprised when a beautiful visage floated into view. One he hadn’t seen in centuries. Her flowing white gown whipped in the winds of their high altitude.
“Maddie…” he gasped.
“Hello, Abe.”
“Maddie, I’ve missed you so much,” Abe said in a voice choked with emotion. “Our son…”
“He grew into a fine man.,” Maddie said, smiling as she floated before him. “You would be proud of him. He and his wife left some time ago.”
“Maddie, I’m so sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she said, smiling a beatific smile. “I’ve come to tell you I understand now… the gift you’ve given us. You were the instrument of God so that he might lift us up. We’re all angels now. Each and every one of us. Angels.” With that, she flew into the air, disappearing into the distance. That was the last he saw of his former wife.
Samson picked that moment to poke his head out of Abe’s shirt pocket. He stroked the small creature’s head as he mused that it had ended the same way it had begun: just a man and his mouse.
The End.
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Post by mh on Nov 30, 2015 22:05:55 GMT -6
damn!! that was a very good read baboon! i'll tell you, if you had lived back in the time when magazines published fiction you might have made a handsome living at it
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Post by Babu Baboon on Nov 30, 2015 22:13:12 GMT -6
Thanks, MH! It's loosely based on the novel "Gladiator" by Philip Wylie.
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Post by mh on Nov 30, 2015 23:00:53 GMT -6
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Post by Babu Baboon on Dec 1, 2015 10:38:21 GMT -6
Gladiator is the book that inspired Siegal and Schuster to create Superman. In the story, Abnego Daner creates a serum that he uses on his unborn son, Hugo Danner, into a Superman. Hugo struggles for the rest of his life to find his place in the world.
Of course, in my story, it's Abe instead of Abnego and he nanites of himself instead of a serum on his son and it's contagious..
After Crisis on Infinite Earths, Roy Thomas had to create replacements for Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, so he created a son of Hugo Danner named Iron Munro.
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Post by mh on Dec 1, 2015 15:09:58 GMT -6
Gladiator is the book that inspired Siegal and Schuster to create Superman. In the story, Abnego Daner creates a serum that he uses on his unborn son, Hugo Danner, into a Superman. Hugo struggles for the rest of his life to find his place in the world. Of course, in my story, it's Abe instead of Abnego and he nanites of himself instead of a serum on his son and it's contagious.. After Crisis on Infinite Earths, Roy Thomas had to create replacements for Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, so he created a son of Hugo Danner named Iron Munro.
wow, i don't remember hearing this before. i found a pretty good (long) piece about it.
www.popmatters.com/feature/184221-secret-origin-of-the-superhero-on-philip-wylies-gladiator/
he said, If you have ever wondered what a superhero novel written by Ernest Hemingway would have been like, then Gladiator is your answer. (I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence.) lol
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Post by Babu Baboon on Dec 1, 2015 20:59:36 GMT -6
I didn't realize that Snyder might have been inspired by Gladiator until that article pointed it out. The thing Snyder misses, though, is that Seigle and Schuster might've been inspired by it, but the character they created is way different than Hugh Danner. Superman is not supposed to be an angsty troubled soul. He managed to do the impossible and make a depressing Superman movie!
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Post by Babu Baboon on Dec 3, 2015 10:47:25 GMT -6
Here's a cover I did for the story for the Five Earths Project
 Attachments:
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