Troubleshooting Unexpected Behavior to Identify a Root Cause (original) (raw)

Since it's doubtful that I'll ever finish Honesty, I've decided that I need to write out what Clark would have found out about his history over the course of the story.

He was from Krypton.

Well, that was easy. :dusts off hands:

Okay, there's more to it than that. For example, where do his powers come from, and what's up with the black flecks in the kryptonite?

Originally, Rao, Krypton's sun, was a yellow sun like ours. Almost exactly like ours, in fact, and after the Kryptonians completely failed to destroy their planet in the early phases of scientific discovery, Krypton went on to become a highly technological society. It became so technological, in fact, that when Rao entered the final phases of its life, slowly expanding and turning into an orange star, and then a red giant, the Kryptonians were able to ever-so-slowly, over the course of centuries, move Krypton into a new orbit.

Rao's new status as a red giant, and Krypton's new orbit, meant that less solar radiation was being given off, and less was reaching the surface. This led, of course, to less food being produced. The scientists had to decide whether to let a sizable portion of their population starve to death, or to find a new solution. After determining that there was no way to genetically engineer a high-enough calorie food source for their population, they decided to genetically engineer the population, and they added a new gene that causes every cell of a Kryptonian's body to contain little, tiny, photovoltaic cells. These cells provide most of the energy that a Kryptonian needs to survive, leaving food as just a source of pleasure and nutrients. This worked out so well, that eventually every life form on Krypton had these photovoltaic cells inside them.

The efficiency of these photovoltaic cells led Krypton to actually have more energy than it would have had otherwise, which led to new developments in science, including nanites that lived in everyone's home. The nanites derive their own energy from the photovoltaic cells and everything that you need done, from haircuts to cures for papercuts or cancer, are taken care of by your home's set of nanites, which are psychically attuned to the residents, so that if Lor-Van catches a mild virus, the nanites know to go immediately to fix it.

The massive engineering feat that was the movement of Krypton had a price. An infinitesimally small imperfection developed over the centuries that it took to move Krypton. And over the ensuing millennia, a sort of domino effect took place ever so slowly and just as Jor and Lara's time with the birthing matrix came up, Jor and Lara discovered that their entire planet was fracturing from the inside. Some of the science community agreed, but most trusted their ancestors' engineering skills too much and wouldn't even listen. Just as Kal was being born, Jor and his compatriots began a last-ditch intervention that they hoped would save the planet. Just in case, though, Jor put Kal in a pod and sent him towards a planet where Jor had lived for a time and which resembled Krypton in its early days -- Earth.*

So as Kal sped away, Jor and Lara and their team began the work, only it failed, and Kal was followed by chunks of the planet, with thousands of families' nanites clinging desperately to the rocks. When the rocks entered the atmosphere of Earth, any organic material burned off, leaving just the rocks, the photovoltaic cells, and the nanites.

So, the black substance is what is left of the lifeforms of Krypton. Some is Kryptonians, but a lot of it is the remnants of Kryptonian bugs, and plants, and Kryptonians' dead skin cells and things. Clark has such a nasty reaction to it because, deep down inside, he wants to be human. The only way he could even come close to that goal would be for the the nanites to dig the photovoltaic cells out of every fiber of his being, which is why he turns green and, of course, why it hurts. Because the nanites are digging around in his cells. It is likely that he wouldn't survive the process. And on some level he will want to be human for years, maybe even centuries, even after he finds the rewards to being himself, and even after he makes his peace with being himself, he will expect the rocks to hurt, so the rocks will cause him pain pretty much forever.

The photovoltaic cells are why Clark can do the things he does. They were designed to provide a baseline level of energy based on the output of a red star. Our sun produces a lot more radiation, which translates into more energy, which in turn translates into the muscles having more resilience, increases in red and white blood cells, and things along those lines. Clark doesn't feel pain, but otherwise has a relatively human-normal sense of touch because pain is a signal of tissue damage or inflammation, and the increase in strength and things prevents tissue damage and inflammation. So he's not numb, but does not experience pain.

As for the magic wishing rocks effect, the nanites are reading the minds of the humans, imperfectly because the humans aren't Kryptonians. Also, since the humans aren't Kryptonians, the nanites make mistakes in the body modifications, leading to unexpected consequences, like imbalances in the brain chemistry of the changed humans. One of the things that Clark will discover in medical school will be how to put the brain chemistry back into a healthy balance.

I think that's pretty much it. I'll probably remember a detail or two later, but if I do, I'll make another post on the subject.

*I actually ever-so-briefly considered actually making Krypton the future of Earth. But I couldn't figure out how Jor-El could have sent Clark back in time in a way that clearly looked like him arriving from another planet. Additionally, if the Kryptonians had that kind of time travel, there probably is a way that they could have fixed the imperfection earlier than when Jor discovered it, and they never would have needed to have sent Clark back at all.