mattmanganon
Eddie Brock
Captain Uni
Lord Wraith
Cyberlad
Candy Cane Elf
Love Dove
Oso
Azure Bubbles
Agunimon
S M A L L V I L L E
Kansas, United States of America
September 7, 1966
“...weather tomorrow, hold on. We’re getting word through Associated Press that there’s an incident in New York harbor. An ocean cruise liner, the Hanseatic, has caught fire. I say again, an ocean liner has caught fire in New York’s harbor. More on this story as it develops.”
The sound of the newspaper folding crackled, as Jonathan adjusted how he was seated in the recliner. Peering from over the top of the paper, the man glanced over at the television set. Were they going to get to the weather?
“Matrix,” the man uttered aloud.
There was a pause, silence following save for the round of rustling paper as the man folded the newspaper and set it aside. Glancing over at the sofa, the man asked, “Have you seen Matrix lately?”
Rolling her head to the side, Martha glanced over as she offered, “He’s probably in the Fortress of Solitude.”
The man’s head rolled forward. “The what?”
“The barn loft,” Martha said. “It’s where he goes to... I don’t know, re-charge maybe?”
“Huh,” the man uttered, as he folded his hands down into his. He just seemed to sit there for a moment, then, “He’s so good at just being invisible, I never even thought about where he went.”
Martha shifted on the sofa, so that she was turned on her side as she glanced over at her husband. “I threw that old cot we had up there, in case he ever wanted to lay down, but it doesn’t look like it’s ever been touched.”
“Huh,” Jonathan echoed softly, still in thought.
“I also told him he was welcome to use the bathroom in the house, but he never looks dirty,” Martha added, as she continued.
“I don’t think what we see is who he is,” Jonathan offered, glancing back over at his wife.
Propping her head up on one arm, the woman answered, “When you put it that way, it sounds ominous.”
Now that she said it, he supposed that it was. They were living with a disembodied alien thing in the house. Which had abilities that were simply not human. How wasn’t that ominous? “I just remember that purple orb, hanging in the air,” the man recalled, thinking back to the tractor accident. “I kind of feel like maybe that’s the real Matrix.”
“Makes sense,” Martha noted. When Jonathan looked back her way, she explained, “Well, he said his appearance was for interaction. Can you imagine having a conversation with a ball?”
With a soft grunt, Jonathan lifted himself from out of the chair.
As he stood, he heard Martha add, “It’s hard to believe that he isn’t... real.”
“I don’t know about those Kryptonians, but,” Jonathan remarked, shuffling around as he looked for his shoes. As he prepared to step outside, he finished the statement, “Sometimes I feel like Matrix is more real than some people we know.”
Exiting from out of the house, the man made his way over to the barn that was set off to one side of the property. Pushing the doors open, he could peer through the dim light to make out the outline of the tractor and other equipment that was in there. At one time, they’d thought about having horses. Or goats. But, it had become Jonathan’s workshop.
“Matrix?”
He paused in the doorway. No answer. Making his way inside, he felt around toward the back for the ladder that led up to the loft.
As he hauled himself up onto the partial second floor of the loft, he could see the outline of the boy. He had adopted a more human appearance, at least in terms of clothing. Now, he wore a red tank top with a pair of denim overalls. If one paid close attention to the details, the same strange S-in-a-triangle logo was still present, this time on the buttons.
From what Jonathan had gathered, it was something of a maker’s mark. “Matrix?” the man repeated.
The boy was staring out the open barn window, his arms resting on the ledge as he stared off into space.
After an awkward moment of silence, Jonathan hesitantly reached out a hand to tap the youth on the shoulder. He connected, so the boy wasn’t just a hologram, but there was still no response. Taking hold of the boy’s shoulder, the man slowly turned the youth to face him. “You there, son?”
What could Jonathan do if he wasn’t? He couldn’t exactly take his local Matrix to the Sears Roebuck for repair.
The boy’s eyes flickered. Then he blinked and moved his head, looking up at the man as he answered, “Yes, Mister Kent?”
“You seemed like you were a million miles away,” Jonathan noted softly. Glancing around the loft, he spied the cot that Martha had mentioned. Shuffling over toward it, the man sat so that he was closer with the boy’s eye level -- as relative as that may or may not have been. “Everything okay?”
“I have been unable to detect any frequencies originating from the Krypton System,” the boy supplied in answer. Then seemed to change topics as he asked, “Was there something that you required?”
“Nothing that couldn’t wait,” the man admitted, before he clarified, “I was wondering what your thoughts were on tomorrow’s weather forecast.”
A swirl of light formed in front of the man, as a holographic depiction of Kansas appeared, with an overlay of clouds. “Present atmospheric conditions indicate precipitation with some fog in early morning. I estimate the high temperature will be seventy-two degrees. Relative humidity will be sixty-eight percent.”
Glancing at the projection a moment, the man shifted his attention back to the youth. “Should we hold off harvesting the south field?”
There was a pause, as the boy seemed to be calculating his response. “I do not believe that will be necessary,” the youth remarked finally.
The man gave a nod. He glanced around for a moment, then something caught his eye. Getting up from the cot, he stretched out as he bent down to pick up a pail. It was just an ordinary, if old, pail. He’d bought it off an old dairy farmer at a flea market. Except, this one was in better condition than he recalled.
Turning the pail over in his hands, the man turned back to the boy to ask, “Can you return to Krypton?”
“Krypton is approximately twenty-seven lightyears from your solar system,” Matrix supplied. Then, when the answer seemed to merely prompt a shrug from the main, explained, “Without assistance, the voyage to the edge of your solar system would take ten years, nine days, seventeen hours under ideal circumstances.”
He’d known that space was large, but ten years to get past Pluto? Obviously, he didn’t have a good concept of the size or scope of these things. “So ten years to get on the highway, then what?”
“At my top speed in interstellar space, seventy-three thousand of your years,” Matrix answered succinctly. “However, it is a statistical improbability that I would be able to operate continuously for that span of time.”
That statement made Jonathan switch topics for a moment. “What is your lifespan? Or... average lifespan”
“Your question presumes that I am alive,” the boy remarked. When the man merely gave a nod, the youth answered, “With proper upkeep and maintenance, indefinite. However, interstellar space is an environment of extremes.”
Well, that answered one mystery. Safe to say that Matrix hadn’t traveled to Earth on his own. “So you got here by a ship of some kind?”
“You think in three dimensions,” the boy stated. At the look of confusion, the boy held up his hands as a geometric diagram popped into view as he illustrated, “Travel involves a point of origin and a destination, with the distance involved being a static length between two points.”
“You say that like there’s more than three dimensions,” Jonathan observed wryly.
“Accepting for the sake of our conversation that there are,” Matrix responded, without dropping a beat, as the hologram seemed to fold in on itself. “Now, in an alternate dimension, or examining the dimensions along an alternate perspective, the origin and the destination may overlap another, in which case the travel between them is…”
“...like me walking through that door,” Jonathan surmised, eliciting a nod from the boy. “And that’s how Kryptonians travel?”
“No, that is how a matrix travels,” the boy responded frankly. Then, explained, “Passing beyond three dimensions inflicts stress that morphs and alters the structure of an object as it traverses the fold.”
It brought back to mind the conversation with Martha. “But you,” Jonathan began, pointing the pail toward the boy as he added, “The real you...”
“My physical structure is malleable, designed to both compress and expand,” the boy confirmed. Then, glanced back at the window before he said, “I was aware when I was provided my directive that it was a one-way trip.”
“You’re homesick,” Jonathan realized aloud.
The youth turned back to regard the man. If Jonathan wasn’t mistaken, he’d say that he’d just insulted the boy. “I am a machine. I am not capable of being homesick,” Matrix refuted simply. “However, I am... curious, regarding the loss of contact with Krypton.”
Jonathan couldn’t help a small level of amusement at the boy’s insistence he wasn’t homesick. It was very human. In fact, for a moment, it was easy to forget the child was an illusion. Probably a good time to switch topics again. “Is this the pail I tossed out the other day?” the man asked, turning the pail over in his hands.
The boy gave a nod. “I have repaired it.”
“Why? It’s just a pail. Easy to replace,” the man asked, more curious about the answer than anything else.
“It is for me,” the boy answered cryptically.
When Jonathan gave a quizzical look, the boy paused as he tried to compose an explanation.“I sleep in the pail,” he remarked finally. Not an entirely accurate description, but the best of the available translations.
“What?” Jonathan uttered, finding himself confused about what he was hearing.
“I produce a field that pushes or holds my physical form in a particular shape. When I want to...” the boy began, pausing there a moment to allow for a translation to process, “...restart my processes, or check that my function is operating normally, I need to shut off those fields.”
“And then you’re no longer solid,” Jonathan realized aloud, finding it odd to think of the boy as being a liquid. Semi-solid? A metal like mercury? He could recall the purple sand having a consistency like gelatin.
So that was why the pail. “Well, we can at least get you a better pail,” the man offered, holding up the beaten, weathered flea market buy.
At that offer, the boy just cocked his head to one side. Jonathan could see the question forming in his boy’s expression, though he hadn’t anticipated the ask.
“Is there something wrong with the one that I have?”
“Jonathan?”
Martha’s voice rose up from below. Lowering the pail back to the floor, the man called out, “Up here.” Then, when the woman’s head poked up at the top of the ladder asked, “Is everything all right?”
“You should come see the news,” Martha offered, giving Jonathan a hand as he helped her to her feet. “And Matrix. I think you’ll really get a kick out of it.”
The two males exchanged a look. “CBS?” the boy asked.
It was their usual evening broadcast. A wave of his hand signaled a flicker, as a holographic projection of the televised signal appeared in mid-air.
Through grainy, off-color resolution, they could make out a harbor. A large ship had smoking rolling off of it, as what looked like a tornado swirled around it.
“...what you are seeing is footage from hours ago, recorded by our affiliate in New York,” the narration supplied, from the disembodied projection.
The image then jumped to an interview with a young, bald man in a white lab coat. “Our hope is that the Red Tornado project will be of use, not only here for domestic emergencies, but also abroad. Maybe even in Vietnam.”
“It’s a robot,” Martha explained.
“That tornado thing. It’s a robot, like Matrix.”
The sound of the newspaper folding crackled, as Jonathan adjusted how he was seated in the recliner. Peering from over the top of the paper, the man glanced over at the television set. Were they going to get to the weather?
“Matrix,” the man uttered aloud.
There was a pause, silence following save for the round of rustling paper as the man folded the newspaper and set it aside. Glancing over at the sofa, the man asked, “Have you seen Matrix lately?”
Rolling her head to the side, Martha glanced over as she offered, “He’s probably in the Fortress of Solitude.”
The man’s head rolled forward. “The what?”
“The barn loft,” Martha said. “It’s where he goes to... I don’t know, re-charge maybe?”
“Huh,” the man uttered, as he folded his hands down into his. He just seemed to sit there for a moment, then, “He’s so good at just being invisible, I never even thought about where he went.”
Martha shifted on the sofa, so that she was turned on her side as she glanced over at her husband. “I threw that old cot we had up there, in case he ever wanted to lay down, but it doesn’t look like it’s ever been touched.”
“Huh,” Jonathan echoed softly, still in thought.
“I also told him he was welcome to use the bathroom in the house, but he never looks dirty,” Martha added, as she continued.
“I don’t think what we see is who he is,” Jonathan offered, glancing back over at his wife.
Propping her head up on one arm, the woman answered, “When you put it that way, it sounds ominous.”
Now that she said it, he supposed that it was. They were living with a disembodied alien thing in the house. Which had abilities that were simply not human. How wasn’t that ominous? “I just remember that purple orb, hanging in the air,” the man recalled, thinking back to the tractor accident. “I kind of feel like maybe that’s the real Matrix.”
“Makes sense,” Martha noted. When Jonathan looked back her way, she explained, “Well, he said his appearance was for interaction. Can you imagine having a conversation with a ball?”
With a soft grunt, Jonathan lifted himself from out of the chair.
As he stood, he heard Martha add, “It’s hard to believe that he isn’t... real.”
“I don’t know about those Kryptonians, but,” Jonathan remarked, shuffling around as he looked for his shoes. As he prepared to step outside, he finished the statement, “Sometimes I feel like Matrix is more real than some people we know.”
Exiting from out of the house, the man made his way over to the barn that was set off to one side of the property. Pushing the doors open, he could peer through the dim light to make out the outline of the tractor and other equipment that was in there. At one time, they’d thought about having horses. Or goats. But, it had become Jonathan’s workshop.
“Matrix?”
He paused in the doorway. No answer. Making his way inside, he felt around toward the back for the ladder that led up to the loft.
As he hauled himself up onto the partial second floor of the loft, he could see the outline of the boy. He had adopted a more human appearance, at least in terms of clothing. Now, he wore a red tank top with a pair of denim overalls. If one paid close attention to the details, the same strange S-in-a-triangle logo was still present, this time on the buttons.
From what Jonathan had gathered, it was something of a maker’s mark. “Matrix?” the man repeated.
The boy was staring out the open barn window, his arms resting on the ledge as he stared off into space.
After an awkward moment of silence, Jonathan hesitantly reached out a hand to tap the youth on the shoulder. He connected, so the boy wasn’t just a hologram, but there was still no response. Taking hold of the boy’s shoulder, the man slowly turned the youth to face him. “You there, son?”
What could Jonathan do if he wasn’t? He couldn’t exactly take his local Matrix to the Sears Roebuck for repair.
The boy’s eyes flickered. Then he blinked and moved his head, looking up at the man as he answered, “Yes, Mister Kent?”
“You seemed like you were a million miles away,” Jonathan noted softly. Glancing around the loft, he spied the cot that Martha had mentioned. Shuffling over toward it, the man sat so that he was closer with the boy’s eye level -- as relative as that may or may not have been. “Everything okay?”
“I have been unable to detect any frequencies originating from the Krypton System,” the boy supplied in answer. Then seemed to change topics as he asked, “Was there something that you required?”
“Nothing that couldn’t wait,” the man admitted, before he clarified, “I was wondering what your thoughts were on tomorrow’s weather forecast.”
A swirl of light formed in front of the man, as a holographic depiction of Kansas appeared, with an overlay of clouds. “Present atmospheric conditions indicate precipitation with some fog in early morning. I estimate the high temperature will be seventy-two degrees. Relative humidity will be sixty-eight percent.”
Glancing at the projection a moment, the man shifted his attention back to the youth. “Should we hold off harvesting the south field?”
There was a pause, as the boy seemed to be calculating his response. “I do not believe that will be necessary,” the youth remarked finally.
The man gave a nod. He glanced around for a moment, then something caught his eye. Getting up from the cot, he stretched out as he bent down to pick up a pail. It was just an ordinary, if old, pail. He’d bought it off an old dairy farmer at a flea market. Except, this one was in better condition than he recalled.
Turning the pail over in his hands, the man turned back to the boy to ask, “Can you return to Krypton?”
“Krypton is approximately twenty-seven lightyears from your solar system,” Matrix supplied. Then, when the answer seemed to merely prompt a shrug from the main, explained, “Without assistance, the voyage to the edge of your solar system would take ten years, nine days, seventeen hours under ideal circumstances.”
He’d known that space was large, but ten years to get past Pluto? Obviously, he didn’t have a good concept of the size or scope of these things. “So ten years to get on the highway, then what?”
“At my top speed in interstellar space, seventy-three thousand of your years,” Matrix answered succinctly. “However, it is a statistical improbability that I would be able to operate continuously for that span of time.”
That statement made Jonathan switch topics for a moment. “What is your lifespan? Or... average lifespan”
“Your question presumes that I am alive,” the boy remarked. When the man merely gave a nod, the youth answered, “With proper upkeep and maintenance, indefinite. However, interstellar space is an environment of extremes.”
Well, that answered one mystery. Safe to say that Matrix hadn’t traveled to Earth on his own. “So you got here by a ship of some kind?”
“You think in three dimensions,” the boy stated. At the look of confusion, the boy held up his hands as a geometric diagram popped into view as he illustrated, “Travel involves a point of origin and a destination, with the distance involved being a static length between two points.”
“You say that like there’s more than three dimensions,” Jonathan observed wryly.
“Accepting for the sake of our conversation that there are,” Matrix responded, without dropping a beat, as the hologram seemed to fold in on itself. “Now, in an alternate dimension, or examining the dimensions along an alternate perspective, the origin and the destination may overlap another, in which case the travel between them is…”
“...like me walking through that door,” Jonathan surmised, eliciting a nod from the boy. “And that’s how Kryptonians travel?”
“No, that is how a matrix travels,” the boy responded frankly. Then, explained, “Passing beyond three dimensions inflicts stress that morphs and alters the structure of an object as it traverses the fold.”
It brought back to mind the conversation with Martha. “But you,” Jonathan began, pointing the pail toward the boy as he added, “The real you...”
“My physical structure is malleable, designed to both compress and expand,” the boy confirmed. Then, glanced back at the window before he said, “I was aware when I was provided my directive that it was a one-way trip.”
“You’re homesick,” Jonathan realized aloud.
The youth turned back to regard the man. If Jonathan wasn’t mistaken, he’d say that he’d just insulted the boy. “I am a machine. I am not capable of being homesick,” Matrix refuted simply. “However, I am... curious, regarding the loss of contact with Krypton.”
Jonathan couldn’t help a small level of amusement at the boy’s insistence he wasn’t homesick. It was very human. In fact, for a moment, it was easy to forget the child was an illusion. Probably a good time to switch topics again. “Is this the pail I tossed out the other day?” the man asked, turning the pail over in his hands.
The boy gave a nod. “I have repaired it.”
“Why? It’s just a pail. Easy to replace,” the man asked, more curious about the answer than anything else.
“It is for me,” the boy answered cryptically.
When Jonathan gave a quizzical look, the boy paused as he tried to compose an explanation.“I sleep in the pail,” he remarked finally. Not an entirely accurate description, but the best of the available translations.
“What?” Jonathan uttered, finding himself confused about what he was hearing.
“I produce a field that pushes or holds my physical form in a particular shape. When I want to...” the boy began, pausing there a moment to allow for a translation to process, “...restart my processes, or check that my function is operating normally, I need to shut off those fields.”
“And then you’re no longer solid,” Jonathan realized aloud, finding it odd to think of the boy as being a liquid. Semi-solid? A metal like mercury? He could recall the purple sand having a consistency like gelatin.
So that was why the pail. “Well, we can at least get you a better pail,” the man offered, holding up the beaten, weathered flea market buy.
At that offer, the boy just cocked his head to one side. Jonathan could see the question forming in his boy’s expression, though he hadn’t anticipated the ask.
“Is there something wrong with the one that I have?”
“Jonathan?”
Martha’s voice rose up from below. Lowering the pail back to the floor, the man called out, “Up here.” Then, when the woman’s head poked up at the top of the ladder asked, “Is everything all right?”
“You should come see the news,” Martha offered, giving Jonathan a hand as he helped her to her feet. “And Matrix. I think you’ll really get a kick out of it.”
The two males exchanged a look. “CBS?” the boy asked.
It was their usual evening broadcast. A wave of his hand signaled a flicker, as a holographic projection of the televised signal appeared in mid-air.
Through grainy, off-color resolution, they could make out a harbor. A large ship had smoking rolling off of it, as what looked like a tornado swirled around it.
“...what you are seeing is footage from hours ago, recorded by our affiliate in New York,” the narration supplied, from the disembodied projection.
The image then jumped to an interview with a young, bald man in a white lab coat. “Our hope is that the Red Tornado project will be of use, not only here for domestic emergencies, but also abroad. Maybe even in Vietnam.”
“It’s a robot,” Martha explained.
“That tornado thing. It’s a robot, like Matrix.”
