Houston Southard

Superior

The first time I thought I almost died in space I kind of wish I had. Is that terrible?

I say 'I thought' because I'm told under this sun's yellow radiation I can't die. It's become a trope of me as I save their lives. They don't worry about me because they think I'm invincible. But at least some of them had to have seen me bleed. At least a few more definitely saw me die subduing doomsday.

Space was the only time I couldn't hear anyone scream. Everyone thought I was lost, but basking in the sun's radiation I've never felt more found. More heard.

The quiet.

The solitude. Something my father's fortress could ever only partially provide.

Oliver once asked me how I never attempted suicide. For him sound only travels as far as human senses can detect. Elephants can be heard almost 20 miles away. Whales almost 900 miles through seawater vibrations. Both limited in part by the planet's curvature, which unfortunately isn't as true for me. So he asks me how I can live in this hell, always being able to hear everything, never being able to turn it off.

I can turn mine off. At will, any time I want. I've done it once, and I'll never do it again. I tell the green-leathered billionaire the same thing he virtue signals to others like him: we can all turn it off, and more and more that's what many choose to do. Not by their own fault. To cope. I envy how they're able to cope.

But out here, almost dying as the people keep saying, I don't have to turn it off. Without the atmosphere, blissfully, there's just...nothing to hear.

There's no guilt in recovering in the vacuum of space fifty million miles from earth. They need me. But out here I'm impaired from my usual abilities. No air to taste. No gravity to push against. No screams moving me to act.

Out here I'm the only one in my head. I think that's maybe only the second time I can say that honestly.

There are so many reasons people say I shouldn't be here. If I wasn't here to challenge Lex, he'd have no reason to rise to the occasion. We'd have no reason to battle over what direction the world should progress. Our battles wouldn't breed the mayhem each of our individual worldviews were thinking it'd prevent.

They say I'll outlive them all, and maybe I will. Maybe not the best thing to tell a deity-level entity whose only tether to them is the very human-centric morality I've thankfully adopted. Were it not for Lois, I don't know who'd give me the constant affirmation of humanity I need to not take their advice and leave.

My parents are dead. My friends know half of me. My enemy is indoctrinating my bastardized newborn clone.

As many ways as I've learned to split my attention, it's never enough not to be affected by the buzzing hive of human thought. I hear it all. In every language. The collectivist east. The individualist west. Up here it all looks the same, but down there it's segregated into different versions of the same petty worldview: what's best for our territory? how do we secure more of it to pass on to our kin?

That's what does it for me. I may live on after all those I knew early on are long gone, likely after all even they knew are long gone, and maybe even after the planet is too, but my heart was forged in the fires of Smallville, Kansas.

Two humans living a life as long as they thought a life should be raised me, a god, instilling their brief but steadfast values of respect and fair distribution of rights.

I've fought wizards. Inter-galaxy warlords. 5th dimensional imps. In all that, I don't see how what I've protected has made what I'm protecting more like what ma and pa intended.

My very presence unearths latent supremacy. It invokes division amongst unintegrated groups. The countries war harder than they've ever. And here is me. The not-so-sovereign american nuclear drone doing the bidding of an imperialist nation who've disguised themselves as peace-bringers.

The people don't need a beacon. Their lore has told them that's what they want, but what they need is something more. A leader. A savior. Just like the one ma and pa said would come again one day.

What this place needs is.... a messiah. The last one died from weakness, something I've only known in rare circumstances like this. Is this how jesus became the christ? Recovering from wounds high above a vantage he'd never otherwise know?

The perspective is unnerving, because all my nerves have always told me was to conserve, an idea of protection instilled in me by two farmers on their knees, looking down, picking roots from the dirt. 

From up here, things are different. Everyone all one good people with too many ideas of what it means to be good people. My parents were them, but I'm me. I can see it all. I see what they need, and what they need is me.