The real antagonist in my ideal Superman story wouldn't be a super powered bad guy but rather the quiet banal evil of humanity itself. Our bottomless capacity for self harm. Even Superman would be challenged to overcome this and you can bet he isn't going to punch his way out of it.

Thanks, glad you liked it!

Thanks for sharing! To be honest, I've always wanted to write a real Superman story - one that makes me feel the things I could never quite get from the official versions. Because they all make the same mistake of focusing on his strength. So writing this little prompt was very cathartic. I'd love to do more of it!

Thanks!

Thanks! Glad you liked it. I love Superman as a character and it's really fun to write about him.

After months of encrypted email exchange, careful assurances, and a few false starts, Clark had finally met the source in a greasy back-alley Chinese joint and was now riding the train back uptown. He had hours of recordings to review. Incredibly, the man had been willing to go on record exposing the CIA's black program on behavior modification - a combination of low dose psychoactive drugs administered secretly in a target's food; modulated subliminal messaging through infiltrated social media, internet, and communication channels; and repeated near-field microwave irradiation of the brain to induce states of mania and suggestibility.

The most damning testimony was that the program had been running a test phase on American citizens for the last 2 years - some of them highly placed business and social personalities like Elon and Ye - and was now entering the Phase 3 trial targeting mid-level US political representatives.

All his travels, all the tragedies he had prevented with his godlike powers, the depravity of humanity he had witnessed again and again as Superman - but it was this program, which he had patiently and painstakingly uncovered as investigative journalist Clark Kent, which horrified him beyond words. His mind wandered darkly as the rhythmic sounds of the train carried him home.

He almost didn't notice the tiny pinprick of a needle trying and failing to enter his upper thigh. By the time he looked up in surprise, his neighbor had stood, discreetly dropped something on the floor, and was making his way to the just-opened exit at 42nd street.

Clark gave no response, but he let his senses follow the man as he left the train and walked down the platform and into a narrow stairwell, losing himself in the crowd. A quick look showed the man carried a wallet whose ID read Michael Johnson, no cell phone - strange - but he had a small radio in his pocket connected to a collar mic. And a concealed gun holstered on his right hip. As the train started to pull away, Clark heard the man talk into his mic: "Negative contact, negative contact. Equipment failure. Return site bravo."

Clark stood and started making his way toward the back of the train, gently but insistently shoving his way through the packed cars. His mind was racing. His heart would be too, if it could. He came to the back of the train, miraculously empty, and with a silent apology he removed his glasses, looked up, and let the unquenchable energies boiling within him briefly escape out through his eyes, where they instantly vaporized a section of the train's ceiling. He had flown up and out before the whistling sound of the hole reached the nearest passenger.

He took a short ballistic arc back downtown, topping out at 3,000 feet and descending meteorically over Chinatown. He scanned a 5 block radius around the restaurant, then 10, then 15 - and that was when he saw the contact. He was lying prone on the street, his arms and legs uselessly splayed, and a crowd was gathering around him. Is there a doctor here? What's wrong with him? Oh god. Someone call 911. Even from the sky Clark could see the man would be dead in seconds.

He landed softly in the middle of the crowd - they immediately withdrew to give him space - knelt and draped his cape over the dying man's torso. He saw a telltale pinprick in the man's upper thigh. He saw the man's heart spasming with each beat, laboring with each pulse of precious lifeblood, failing, fading. He died.

Clark closed his eyes and allowed himself one deep breath, one silent moment. He felt the roar of the energies inside him, the stored sunlight pleading for a purpose, roiling, insisting. He gathered his cape and stood and turned to a woman in the crowd and said, "Please call an ambulance. This man is dead, but he deserves to be seen by a doctor."

As the woman took out her phone she asked, "What about you? What are you going to do?"

He looked at her: a middle aged woman, worn down by the world but not broken, accustomed to loss, saddened by what she'd just seen but not shocked. Well acquainted with tragedy.

Truth, he almost replied. And justice. But he made no response and instead ascended slowly and gently into the air so as not to disturb the cooling corpse, accelerating as he rose, breaking the sound barrier before he'd cleared the 10th story of the nearby buildings, and flew a line as straight and true as a ray of light toward the 42nd street train station.