legionmissions | [closed to Babbage] [plot log to set up plot]

Babbage nods, not arguing. Brainy's been doing the hero thing for longer than the Robotican had been functional and he’s the seniormost Legionnaire here. Arguing would be stupid and against protocol.

Still, after the explosion, he's quiet.

"Mother Boxes are alive, aren’t they?"

Someone killed living technology older than he was just to bring them here. They weren’t playing games.

He rolls his shoulders, ups his sensor feed sensitivity, and activates his protection protocols, moving to take the lead. Brainiac 5's force shields were all fine and good, but this would come down to a fight and Babbage had been built for combat. Logic dictated that the Coluan could figure things out while he took the hits.

He scans the immediate area, then starts moving. "I'm picking up remote cameras, but the frequencies are beyond my ability to detect. I can’t follow them to their source. We’ll just have to map out the rooms as we go. Did your omnicomm make it or should I risk ultrasound pulse mapping?"

Either way, there was only one exit to this room. They’d have to move however their unseen foe wanted them to.

"Yes," Brainy says, frowning a the smoking remains of the mother box. "It was alive."

That such a magnificent sentient AI was killed for this is monstrous -- but unsurprising if another Brainiac is behind this.

Brainy checks his omnicom, whipping out his omnitool to try to tinker a little first before declaring it a lost cause.

"My omnicom's scanning functions are intact but comms functions are completely blocked. Probably via some form of shielding not unlike my own, except with residual thassian subharmonics that are creating comms interference. I could re-engineer the omnicoms to send a signal but I lack the right components and equipment.”

He puts his omnitool back in his belt and thickens his shields.

"We're on our own." He agrees with Babbage's instincts. "Ultrasound mapping is logical. Our captors almost certainly know we're here already. We needn't worry about giving away our presence."

He tries to keep his expression steady, for once having difficulty.

She terrifies him. She's never stopped terrifying him. And if the alarm went off at the Earthgov Medicenter, it's highly likely she's involved in all this.

But Babbage is a relative rookie and deserves to have a senior Legionnaire with him in such a harrowing situation acting with self control.

He places a hand on Babbage’s metal shoulder. It’s a little bit of a reach. Babbage is pretty tall.

"If another Brainiac is behind this, I’ve faced two of them in the past. I’m...prepared this time."

Babbage glances down at the hand and gives it a pat.

"I doubt any of the previous Brainiacs could be a serious threat when you’re ready for them. All the same, I’d appreciate it if you kept your shields up at all times now. If it is a Brainiac, I don’t know if they could invent some threat to bypass my sensors. Cloaking sheaths, nanotech destroyers, sentient viruses...Best to keep yourself as protected as possible."

He moves forward then, leading the way, linking his mapping programs to Brainiac's omnicomm so that no crook or cranny escapes the Coluan's view. Every air vent, mouse hole, or uncapped power source is noted, though there are precious few of the latter as they make their way through the hall. There are a few rooms, but an ultrasound sweep returns nothing of interest inside.

Besides, after trying to pummel through one door, he gives up.

"Promethium core," he announces. Nearly unbreakable. “I'd need ten minutes to burn through it with my current chassis." Not worth the time wasted.

They move on, coming to a large, darkened room, and Babbage hesitates, sweeping an arm back. "I'm not getting any pulse returns in here. Something's providing a countersignal. I think this is it, Great Maker."

He steps in, then to the side once he’s made certain that there’s no one unexpected inside. The room is practically cavernous, with thick cables draped along the walls and ceilings, banded metal tentacles writhing about like seaweed, and blinking purple lights running along traced paths towards the center of the room. Monitors line the walls, showing the inside of Legion World, the UP President’s chambers, the AP Senate chambers, various labs, and running strings of code moving too fast for any human to process.

The purple pulses speed up as Brainy approaches, blurring until they’re solid lines of light, brightening the room with an indigo glow enough for them to see a twisted, almost incomplete-seeming throne sitting in the center of the room.

Brainy puts his omnicom away and gets ready for a fight.

"You brought us all this way. The least you could do is state your intentions," Brainy calls out.

A monologue is coming. He knows it. There's a Brainiac behind this, after all. Both Brainiac 1 and his mother, Brainiac 4, had enjoyed their long-winded recitations of their plans when he'd faced them.

The need to brag to an enemy: a fatal character flaw that he's largely avoided inheriting.

(Instead, he brags to his friends. Much safer).

That's when a Coluan walks out from the shadows, still wearing patient scrubs. Her blonde hair is unkempt and she looks slightly unhinged. Captivity hasn't agreed with her, and the compassionate care offered by the Earthgov Medicenter’s high-security psych wing has only offended her pride.

She looks ecstatic to see Brainy, though, eyes wide and delighted.

"It’s so good to see you, son. Come give your mother a hug."

She makes it sound so genuine, like her voice really is full of love, and that's the insult, the barb intended to hurt.

Brainy has to resist the urge to step back, and he does it by stepping forward, putting Babbage behind him, keeping him safely inside his shield bubble with him.

"Brainiac 4," he says quietly to Babbage, so that he understands. "Don’t turn your back on her for an instant. The last time I faced her, she nearly roasted me alive with my own forcefield."

Brainy turns to his mother.

"Who freed you? Or did you engineer your escape yourself? I have difficulty believing you had time to build all of this from the Medicenter’s psych wing -- unless it’s something you made before you led the Dark Circle. Who helped you? Who created all this?"

"Does it matter?" Brainiac 4 says, her medical bracelet turning off its hologram and shifting into a terrifying gauntlet crackling with energy. "All that matters is that we've been allowed to have another happy reunion...so I can finish what I started."

She starts to walk towards him.

"I’m going to enjoy -- kkzzt." She freezes in place as she’s zapped by something from behind, her body shaking as if she’s being electrocuted. She’s only able to free her mouth long enough to scream. The crackling gets louder until her hair lights on fire.

Only after her beautiful face has burned up does she fall to the ground, dead, her body still smoking.

Brainy had stood his ground as she’d started to charge but watching his mother burned alive in front of him causes him to stagger back. He'd held no love for her after what she'd done to him, but after a childhood of daydreaming about finding her, the sight is still deeply disturbing.

He doesn't dare move close enough to take her pulse. Instead he looks at his omnicom to judge if Babbage’s sensors or his omnicom's are picking up life signs.

They’re not. She's dead.

He looks into the shadows where the blast came from.

"Who’s there?" he asks sharply. "Why go to the effort of freeing her from captivity only to kill her?!"

It doesn’t make sense.

Edited 2017-08-07 22:14 (UTC)

In the shadows, three lighted circles appear and move towards them, and a man floats out towards them, suspended by metal tentacles attached to many ports in his body.

The glowing circles are from the lights on a headpiece he's wearing, unmistakably similar to that of the original Brainiac, and similar to the forcefield control devices Brainy himself is sporting on his own forehead.

The other Coluan looks to be not much older than Brainy, but he's large and intimidating. The metal tentacles lower him to the ground and slowly start detaching, one by one.

"Her death is a gift," says the other Brainiac, his voice dull and emotionless. "It’s your birthday, after all. I decided that the best way to make first contact was to give you a present. Do you like it?"

He looks down impassively at the dead woman.

"You deserve this, after what she did to you." A pause. "A shame, I suppose. A waste of a brilliant mind. But she was too malevolent. Chaotic. Unpredictable. Her actions lacked logic."

"Who are you?" Brainy frowns. "Brainiac 3?"

He’d disappeared, after all. No one knew his fate. There'd always been the chance he was still out there somewhere. Genetic engineering was certainly capable of obscuring his true, ancient age if he was still alive.

"No."

That’s the only answer the other Brainiac gives.

The way he looks at Brainy is, yes, cold and calculating, unsurprisingly. But there’s something else there, something that flickers with perhaps a shadow of emotion.

"I've displeased you. You cling to your outmoded and irrelevant code of Legion ethics, as if you aren't above the moral systems of the primitives of this galaxy."

The man shakes his head, almost -- but not quite -- sadly.

"You don’t even see it, do you. After a childhood of subservience to Colugov, being treated as property, now you’ve allowed yourself to become the Legion’s slave. They act like bickering children and never think for themselves, and yet you toil away for them in your labs until your fingers bleed, deluding yourself that it’s somehow different than being Colu’s chattel. You’ve fallen so far."

"I serve the Legion willingly." The words are barbed, his annoyance over someone discussing his slavery on Colu so plainly very clear. "Though flawed, or less intelligent than myself, most of the sentients on the team have admirable qualities. I believe in the team’s cause, and I'm hardly treated like a slave."

He tilts his head slightly in confusion.

"Why do you care? I've faced other Brainiacs before, and they never cared a whit about my personal loyalties or actions, just about how I could be used in their aims. Who are you?"

"I don't care. I can't care. Colugov ensured that, with this."

The Coluan's fingers briefly press against his headpiece.

"It's ironic. Before you, Colugov felt our family line’s fatal flaw was a lack of emotion. But they've decided that your flaw is that you feel too much. It was too unpredictable. Too difficult to control. You're not just a pariah to them, you're the dangerous iconoclast. The radical. So when they created me, they decided they needed to be able to control what I felt and when they wanted me to feel it."

The man's gaze goes distant, just slightly, just for a moment. "I enjoyed the times they insulted me or mistreated me the most. It was the only time something bled through. Hatred is so heady. Intoxicating."

Edited 2017-08-07 22:27 (UTC)

Brainy is visibly disturbed by the device and the effect it has on the other Coluan, but his skepticism wins out.

"What, you're simply another Brainiac I don't know about, is that what this is?" Brainiac says skeptically. "A mysterious, long-lost, evil brother, perhaps? Doesn't the cliche involve a goatee?"

"I suppose the hologram is too confusing for you. I chose it because I wanted to seem intimidating. But now that seems...silly. I don’t like seeming silly."

The last of the tentacles detach and the man pushes buttons on a device on his arm.

"When you left Colu, you never considered what was left behind. Like the DNA they collected from you and stored in the Colugov Genetic Repository..."

The hologram shimmers and fades and reveals...

...A child, clearly no older than two, sitting in a little, floating egg-shaped hover-module, wearing a onesie, albeit one in intimidating blacks and grays. The boy is still wearing the emotional inhibitor on his forehead like the hologram was, still has the metal ports over his body, and has the same dull, emotionless expression.

"...did you, father?"

His voice is thin and high and young, and strangely, unnaturally flat. A child's voice isn’t supposed to sound that flat and emotionless.

Nothing could have prepared him for this. He’d been expecting to face his mother, or the long-lost Brainiac 3, or even perhaps a time-traveling Brainiac 1.

Not this.

"You...you can’t be..."

"I am your son, the sixth in the Brainiac line. Scan me if you need verification."

Brainy scans him and his eyes go even wider. But he still shakes his head, with little tiny quaking moments that seem to make his whole body vibrate.

"You...you simulated false sensor readings before. That device in the lab..."

"The law of parsimony, father. The Earthlings call it 'Occam’s Razor,' I believe? I am another Brainiac, and all other past Brainaics are dead or have long since disappeared. Isn't it far more logical that I would simply be your progeny?"

As Brainy stands there, looking at him in horror, the child continues on, "Colugov had what they needed to make me. Your DNA was combined with compatible donor samples just like your mother's was when they created you. They needed an artificial womb this time, of course -- grandmother's choice to carry you to term was just an archaic evolutionary throwback, her sad attempt to cultivate an emotional connection through the biochemical changes of pregnancy. An attempt that failed, hence the need for her to face nullification."

He gestures to the body.

"No more attempted filicide for grandmother. She behaved very badly. She needed to be punished."

Brainy stares for just a moment longer, and then his shock ends.

His nostrils flare.

"How dare they?" he chokes out, and he sounds like he’s being throttled. He can barely get the words out around his rage and hurt. "How dare they --"

They'd wronged him a million times over, in ways that were illegal before, but he'd still never expected this. Them using his gene samples to propagate a child without his permission.

"That’s more like it," says the child. "You hate them and that hatred must be glorious, after everything they did to you. After everything they did to us. Our entire family line."

He hovers around him, like he’s trying to be the devil on his shoulder.

"They raised grandmother with enough cruelty and neglect that she was incapable of loving you. They treated you like a slave during your childhood instead of like the god you are. They sent an assassin to kill you to prevent you from granting machine life sentience. They exiled you for daring to be their superior, and for daring to create beings superior than them. An insulting, empty gesture -- as if you’d ever want to return to the homeworld. They just hoped it would cause you emotional suffering, as if they hadn't done that enough already."

The only emotion the child shows is a slight spark of hatred that bleeds through, a dark glint in his eyes. The circles on the apparatus on his forehead glow bright and the device even sparks a little, as if the inhibitor barely has the capacity to hold the hatred back.

The boy stops and holds a hand to the device, trying to calm himself.

"And the rest of the UP is no better. They made you their scapegoat, insulted you, harassed you, reviled you. That’s all we are to them, father. Scapegoats and slaves and intellectual pack animals. But no more --"

He waves a hand and several tentacled robots drag five Coluans out of the shadows. They writhe and struggle and try to yell past the tentacles gagging them.

"You recognize them, don't you? They were the elected members of the Coluan Council when you were growing up, the ones that controlled your life. Councilmember Vez here was one of your caretakers -- the one that didn't die like a dog from interfering in one of your experiments. But he deserved to."

Brainiac 6 frowns a childlike frown.

"He was very mean to you, father. They all were."

Little airborne drones swipe by the Coluan Councilmembers, slicing tiny cuts into their bodies. The cuts turn into a source of infection, as gray nanites spread from them and start converting their bodies. They scream and choke as mechanical implants start to grow like tumors and transform them.

"What are you doing? Stop!" Brainy tries to run forward to help, but a forcefield that isn’t his own blocks him.

"So noble. You'd even save your slavers and tormentors. But so misguided."

The Coluans mutate and change into horrible robotic creatures, patchwork and broken. They look like a pale shadow of the Roboticans.

"It's a nanovirus. I’m quite proud of it. It spreads via simple skin contact. I'e already infected several Coluan population centers that are prime for spreading it until it’s pandemic. I'm going to make the population of Colu into machine life -- your greatest creation."

The infected Coluans stop screaming and start twisting into terrible shapes, oozing almost like a liquid toward the half-finished structure in the room.

"Your chosen people, the Roboticans, will be spared. Their minds will be bent to our will, of course, but they’re a marvelous invention, father. Beyond forcing them to be subservient to us via a programming virus, they should be allowed to thrive. Earth will be spared as well. It embraced you when you were unwelcome on Colu, and earthlings like RJ Brande even nurtured you."

He adds, like he’s spouting a fun fact, "And during your phase of being reviled for the loss of the Legion, it had the greatest proportion of sentients that polled as still being supportive of you."

Brainiac 6 floats around again, and Brainy grounds himself, prepared for a fight, Babbage at his back.

"You can’t do this! I know your Coluan handlers must have caused you unimaginable suffering, but that emotional inhibitor is hampering your judgment. It's preventing you from having the capacity for positive emotions."

He opts for honesty, holding a hand to his chest. Normally, he'd never speak of this openly, but he has to here. He has to get through to him.

"I know because I've been in your place myself. I used to repress every emotion I had for the sake of my continued survival -- I might have broken if I hadn't -- but that meant I couldn't feel the positive ones, either. Compassion, friendship, love, joy..."

Brainy holds out his hand.

"I can deactivate it. I can get you mental healthcare. You'll be able to build a life. You don't have to do this. Come with me," he implores him, lips trembling. "We can still undo what you've done, set things right..."

"You're too kind, father," Brainiac 6 says, his voice almost soft. "That’s why I'm taking over your rehabilitation. You can't be trusted with it."

He directs his hand and the broken forms of the Coluan politicians touch Brainiac 4's dead body, converting that as well. Then they all merge with the half-finished structure in the middle of the room to make a macabre throne.

"I apologize for the hypocrisy. Here I am railing against those who have made you subservient and I’m about to do the same. But it's only temporary. I know if I keep you by my side, you'll soon see the truth. You'll see the logic in what I'm doing. You'll join me willingly."

Brainy looks on the horrible throne, suddenly realizing its purpose. It's not being made for Brainiac 6, it's being made for him.

He takes a step back, his expression horrified.

"I'm not joining you. I won't turn my back on the Legion or renege on my responsibilities, regardless of my feelings towards Colu and those that blamed me for the Legion’s disappearance. I have a duty to uphold."

He tries to explain, hoping to drill it through the younger Brainiac’s head.

"This -- this is madness. You need to let me help you, so that you can understand." He's almost begging now. "I know you have a 12th-level intellect, but you’re just a child. You don’t have a capacity for moral judgment yet, and you’ve been impaired by what they've done to you."

Now he really is begging.

"Please. Let me take care of you..."

The child starts to look...confused. Just for a moment.

Babbage has been quiet, letting this drama play out. Father and son? That’s not something he wants to get in the way of. This kind of reunion happens rarely, and it’s really just... not his place to interrupt. When Brainy backs away from Brainiac 6, Babbage is there, a solid wall of reassurance that he's not alone, even if the Robotican is silent, absorbing all this. He raises his hand, placing a reassuring palm in the small of Brainiac 5's back.

He leans in.

"Don't worry. You’re not alone in this. The Legion's watching. Your family's seeing all of this."

After all, those cameras had to be good for something. He glances towards one of the monitors, displaying Legion World’s inner workings, the horrified reactions to this twisted drama from the staff plain to see.

"And family has to stick together. Isn't that right, great-grandfather?" His fingers move quickly, plunging into the flesh of Brainy’s back, grasping, and then, in a motion quick and vicious enough to shatter the force fields around the two of them, rips out a disk of bone and slings it towards a camera, leaving a viscous green smear on the lens.

There's a slight pause, and Babbage laughs, slowly shifting up in pitch.

"Oh, I’ve been wanting to do that for ages." He tumps Brainiac 5 over with a green-slicked finger and moves around him, closer to the child claiming to be Brainiac 6.

As he does, golden metal sloughs off, mechanical parts rearranging themselves to reveal...

...A small, blue woman. It takes a few moments for the metallic parts of her face to rearrange themselves, but when it does, she’s practically glowing with glee. She glances down at Brainiac 5, and three brilliantly pink disks burst into light on her forehead, like matches catching flame. Another Brainiac.

She steps up to the child and ruffles his hair affectionately. "Grandfather. Oh, I know you hate this part, but trust me it's all for the better. If you want your father to understand, he's got to see how we’re going to do things without trying to stop us. Trust me."

Brainy doesn’t scream when a part of his spine is ripped out. The pain is so sudden, intense, and immobilizing that he briefly blacks out, dropping to the ground in a heap and fighting his way back to consciousness just in time to see Babbage transform.

The shock on his face is nearly crowded out by the agony in his expression, as he lays there gasping and bleeding on the ground.

“I don’t -- I don’t understand. Babbage...”

Then he gets it.

“He never -- never came back to the team, did he. It was you -- all along. What did you do to him? Where’s the real Babbage?”

She smiles as Brainy has his revelation.

"There we go. I was beginning to wonder if Brainiac 6 had gotten his genius from his maternal gene donor's side of the family."

Slowly, all of the glee fades from her face and she folds her hands behind her back, gazing coldly down at 5.

"The Robotican is dead. I killed him ten months ago, after assimilating his knowledge. After the United Planets dissolved the Legion Cadet program, he hired himself out as a security expert for an archaeological society. They found an old stronghouse of Lex Luthor's, where I’d held a backup just in case my plans for the conquest of the 21st century went awry. They didn't know what they were waking up until it was too late. The last I saw of him, he was half-melted to slag and still trying to shield the archaeologists from the collapsing ceiling."

The corner of her mouth quirks slightly. "I was wondering when anyone would pick up on that pathetic little fanboy act. I honestly half expected someone to, no one could be that much of a fawning sycophant, but I suppose you Legionnaires are used to that treatment. I’m especially disappointed in Nightwing. I did the same thing to the Outsiders. And if you’re wonderin... My name is Brainiac 8."

She smiles and ascends the steps, seating herself in the throne. There’s a groan that comes from it, and she taps a button to silence it.

"You have no idea what it’s been like, being stuck in this primitive 31st century civilization. But now... Well, I can make some adjustments."

She gestures at the monitors. Threshold gates, massive ones, open up on the screens displaying Earth and Robotica. Slowly, they move forward and swallow the two planets. Fortunately, the gate that swallows Earth is large enough to consume the Lunar Debris Field and Legion World without disrupting their orbits.

She holds out her hand, palm reconfiguring itself into a holoprojector to display the results for Brainiac 5. Colu. Earth. Robotica. Hovering around each other, energy beams connecting the planets to form the familiar Brainiac symbol.

"It starts here. With the roboticization of Colu, the enslavement of the Roboticans, and the technoforming of Earth." She glances at Brainiac 6. "Oh, you wanted to save it, I know, but I’ve told you that the only way to save anyone is to purge them of their organic inefficiencies. I do wish you were old enough for Brainiac 7 to be around. I could cyberconvert you now. But, no, even a time master needs to have her roots settled."

"That's father’s seat," is all the little boy says, eyes narrowed, lips pouty.

The tension is palpable. She's gifted with the artificial intelligence of a mechanized lifeform, yes, which means there are some ways her intellect is vastly superior to that of an organic lifeform. But he's also a Brainiac and organic intelligence isn’t without its perks. Unpredictability. Ingenuity. Fluidity.

In a straight-on conflict, there’s no telling which of them would win. Hence, a truce.

"He’s welcome to walk up here and take it," she returns after a second that, for them, might as well be an eternity.

She gives it a few moments more, then sighs and stands. She’ll get her own. Seated a little taller than Brainiac 5’s.

"In any case, once the three worlds are under our control, Brainiac 6's plan will be over. Mine, on the other hand, will be beginning." Brainiac 8 paces over to a piece of piping and pulls it out. Something squirms in place and immediately replaces it. Best not to question what.

"In my own time, in the 40th Century, we've mapped out the multiverse. We've found its shape. None of this 'fifty-two universes' nonsense modern science claims. Your universal refugees are proof that that is utter garbage."

She swings the pipe a few times, then moves back to Brainiac 5.

"Do you know the pattern of all the stars in this galaxy?" A hologram flickers into place and she points at the pathways with the pipe. "Does it look familiar? It should. Allow me to pull up the neurons in a Coluan brain." She does, and when she overlays the two, it’s almost identical.

"And then, when I put up a map of all of the billions of galaxies in the universe." She creates another layout. This time, they are identical. “And, from my time, every universe in the multiverse."

Again, the same result. "Everything is part of some grander organism. Down to the smallest measure that makes us what we are, the cells in our brain."

She smiles dreamily for a moment.

"I’m going to give it cancer." Without pause, she closes her fist, cutting off the holograms. "The brain is a scale model of the universe. The universe is a scale model of the multiverse. And, by manipulating things just right, a nudge here, at the smallest levels, beginning with Earth, Robotica, and Colu, I will throw it all into chaos, collapse everything, and rebuild it in a new, ordered reality, where everything that ever was, everything that is, and everything that ever will be will be efficient. Logical. Technological supremacy. And at the head of it all..."

She gestures at Brainy with the pipe. Then at Brainiac 6. "The Brainiac Dynasty."

She leaves it to hover in the air for a moment, then shrugs.

"But, you’re a hero. You won't go along with us, at first. Don't worry, we have measures. Brainiac 6 has even tailored some of my designs to make them utterly painless for you. But if you choose to oppose us, you'll have to start now. It's hard, I know, but you've fought off the original Brainiac in his stronghold before, haven’t you? You and Brainiac 2? How did you manage that, again?"

She pauses, then holds out the pipe and drops it right in front of him. "Try beating your son with a stick the same way and see how far that gets you."

Brainy’s eyes don’t leave Brainiac 8’s face and fingers wrap around the pipe

Because he’s a pragmatist. When an enemy hands you a blunt object, you consider using it, if it’s all you have. That's the difference between himself and the other two. A willingness to "lower himself" to the level of the "primitives." In all ways -- both the barbaric and the more evolved.

He'd never harm the child, but her? He'd be willing to smack her with a stick.

But the pain in his back spikes and mechanical implants start to burst through his skin, all over his body. He's been infected, by that wound. He can't walk. There is no fighting back.

They are a team of only 2, albeit a super-intelligent one. A team of two that can't even trust each other.

But he's not on a team of 2. He's not a singular entity. And he does trust the other Legionnaires to fix this, even though he's failed to stop it.

So instead of trying to fight back, he takes out his omnicom instead, scans himself, scans the virus as it takes over his body, and as his hand starts to convert to something mechanical, for just a moment, he morphs the nanite-riddled flesh so it moves in the way he wants it to, merging with the omnicom.

As he reprograms and redesigns the device on the molecular level, it manages to get out one clear broadcast of information from his scans to Legion World. Just one.

"Lyle," he grinds out through his gritted teeth, knowing the Legion is watching. "Bioscans."

They’ll now have an accurate scan of the nanovirus without having to take a sample -- and have a scan of it in action converting living matter. They might even get a glimpse of its programming, so the tech geniuses and AIs on the team have a chance of defeating it.

As the nanovirus started building mechanical connections in his brain, he was only able to will his converted flesh to do what he wanted and mentally reprogram it temporarily, though. Now the virus takes total control, and he cries out as circuitry bursts through skin, as membranous components replace organs, as metal replaces bone.

Brainiac 8 watches for a moment, dispassionately, then waves her hand. An electromagnetic field surrounds him, lifts him, and moves him over to the throne, dropping him in there like a ragdoll she's bored with.

"Brainiac 6, why don’t you make your father comfortable? You’ve never touched him, have you?" She pauses. "Never been touched by an organic Coluan. Get to know him before he turns into a model for the future of your race. Your granddaughter has business to take care of."

Brainiac 6 climbs out of his little floating pod onto the arm of the now solidified throne of Coluan agony and for just a moment, he drops the shield around his hand as he touches his father’s face, reveling in how the skin contact feels. It’s clearly a new sensation for him.

The throne shackles Brainy's hands to its arms, and implants an apparatus of cybernetic material through the hole in Brainy’s back, connecting it to his spinal cord, and he gasps, causing B6 to pull his hand away just in time to avoid being touched by the wave of nanites that transforms Brainy's face. The child puts up his own forcefield again to protect himself from infection.

"That wonderful mind of yours won’t go to waste, father, I promise you that. Even though you’ll have no control over what we use it for. And you needn't worry about Chronoblivion. After we reshape the Multiverse, destroying It will be child's play." A pause. "I feel uniquely qualified to categorize it as such."

Brainy doesn't answer. He can only stare into the middle distance as his brain is repurposed and control of it is taken away from him.

B6 climbs into Brainy's lap now and he presses his shielded cheek against Brainy’s, ignoring the tears of red coolant that are starting to stream from his father's mechanical eyes.

His expression is almost moved, due to being so close to his father. Almost, but not quite.

"I feel nothing for you. I can’t. But instinct is a powerful thing. A boy is supposed to be with his father. I know this deep down in my very molecules," he says solemnly, and then he makes a promise. "Colugov kept me away from you for two miserable years. I'll kill anyone else that tries to separate us again. I promise."

He gets comfortable, perching on Brainy’s knee, and raises a hand. The entire throne apparatus rises into the air and starts floating.

"Happy birthday, father."

Turning, Brainiac 8 walks away for a brief moment, folding her arms. She looks up at the cameras with a cool smile.

"The Legion of Super Heroes. Stranded in the past, I didn't think I’d get to kill any more Legionnaires, but now that sentimental fool the Time Trapper is just dragging you in from any reality he can sink his claws into, isn't he? I'll get to you, don't worry. But don't think I’ll make it easy for you either. It's time for your torch to go out."

Internally, she gives the command, activating bombs and viruses shed placed on Legion World in the months since her arrival as Babbage. Deactivating power, infecting their comms networks, trying to disrupt life support, even attacking the telepathic earbuds that allowed so many of them to understand one another. The last thing that gets broadcasted is her laughter, before communications are cut.

[closed to Babbage] [plot log to set up plot]

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