DC: All for One Chapter 29 — Ethan’s Bane (Patreon)

Robin sat at one of the folding tables near the edge of the atrium with his equipment spread out in front of him, and he was working his way through it piece by piece, checking the tension on his grapple line, counting his remaining batarangs, testing the charge on the two smoke pellets he had left. 

He had been running low on almost everything for weeks now, ever since the Saviours had locked down Wayne Manor and cut him off from the supply caches in the Batcave. So he had been forced to make do with whatever he could scavenge or fabricate himself, which meant rationing his gear and using it carefully and praying that he didn't run into a situation that required more than he was carrying.

Batgirl came over and dropped into the chair across from him, and Renee and Cyborg drifted over a moment later, all three of them carrying the same restless energy. 

"We've been here for hours," Renee said, lowering herself into a chair and rubbing the back of her neck. "And still nobody's told us a single thing about what the actual plan is. Chimp gives us the big speech about how he's found a way to neutralise Ethan and then he disappears into the back room with the doctor and we're just supposed to sit here and twiddle our thumbs."

Cyborg shrugged his massive shoulders and leaned against the edge of the table. "Look, I get the frustration, but Chimp hasn't steered us wrong yet. Every single thing that little guy has told us so far has checked out.  The man knows what he's doing, so I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and let him cook."

"Chimp I trust." Renee said as she looked across the room. "It's the doctor and that assistant of his I'm not sure about. We don't know anything about either of them, they just showed up, and now they're back there doing God knows what and we're supposed to bet everything on it."

"The doctor is the real deal," Batgirl said. "I looked into Eduardo Dorado. He's published more on the meta-gene than anyone else alive, his research is legitimate, the man knows his field better than anyone on the planet. If Chimp says he can help us then I believe it."

Robin set down the batarang he had been inspecting and finally joined the conversation. "It's not the doctor I have a problem with," he said. "It's the assistant. I've been watching her since we got here, and I'm telling you, she's nothing. She doesn't say anything, she doesn't do anything, she doesn't contribute, she has no idea about any of the science the doctor talks about, I watched her completely glaze over when he was explaining the gene work earlier. She's just a junkie who's been asleep on that couch more than she's been awake. I don't know why she's here and I don't know why we're supposed to trust her with our lives."

"He's right," Renee said. "What is she actually here for? What does she add? Because from where I'm sitting she's a liability, and thats the last thing we need right now."

"Come on, both of you, ease up," Batgirl said, glancing toward the couch on the far side of the room. "We don't know her situation. Maybe there's a reason she's—"

Robin's palm came down flat against the table hard enough to rattle the equipment laid across it. "Do you understand how dire this is!!?!?" he said, his voice rising. "Do you actually understand? Ethan killed Superman. He killed Green Lantern. He's got the entire Justice League locked up in a tower and he runs this city like a god damn king! We have exactly one shot at this, one, and if it fails we all die and who knows how many others. So no, I'm not going to ease up, because we cannot afford to carry some piece of shit druggy who's going to be asleep when we need her and make everything worse. We don't have the room for it."

He shoved his chair back and stood up and walked away from the table toward the corridor and disappeared through the doorway without looking back.

The three of them sat in the silence he left behind for a moment.

Then, from the couch across the room, the girl pushed herself up onto one elbow.

"You guys do realise that this room isn't that big, right? And that I can hear every single word you're saying about me. I'm a junkie, I'm not deaf." Mira rubbed one eye with the heel of her hand and squinted at them. "So if you could maybe keep the volume down a little while you're talking about what a worthless piece of garbage I am, I'd really appreciate it. Trying to sleep over here."

There was an awkward silence that stretched out across the atrium, nobody quite meeting anyone else's eyes, and then Batgirl pushed her chair back and stood. "I'm going to go check on Robin," she said, and she headed off down the corridor after him.

Cyborg watched her go, then turned and walked over to the couch, lowering himself onto the arm of it so that he wasn't looming over her. "Hey," he said. "Look, I'm sorry about that. That was out of line, all of it. We're all wound pretty tight right now and that's no excuse for talking about you like you weren't sitting right there."

Mira waved one hand in the air without much energy behind it. "It's fine. Don't worry about it. People have said worse, trust me."

Renee had stood up from the table and come over as well, she crossed her arms and looked down at the girl on the couch. "I'm not going to pretend Robin was wrong, though," she said. "We are in serious trouble, and bringing someone into an operation like this who's, no offence, high half the time and asleep the other half is a real risk. So I'm sorry he yelled, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't agree with it."

Mira looked at her for a moment and then she let out a breath and pushed herself further upright, swinging her legs around so she was sitting properly on the couch with her elbows on her knees. "Yeah," she said. "I get it... and you're not wrong to be worried about it, I'd be worried too if I were you." She paused and her mouth twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile. "It's just... I need to be high when I'm around people. Not because I want to be, but because if I'm not, I lose my mind."

Renee frowned and Cyborg tilted his head. "What does that mean," Renee asked. "Lose your mind how?"

Mira didn't answer right away. She looked down at her own hands, turning them over in her lap, "I don't really want to get into all of it. But the short version is that I've got a meta ability, and it's not a good one, it's not the kind you put on a costume for. It's the kind that makes being in a room with other people almost impossible. And the only thing, the only thing, I've ever found that turns the volume down enough that I can function is getting completely fucked. So that's why I'm with the doctor. He's not just my boss. He's been trying to help me. Trying to find a way to actually fix it instead of me having to drown it every single day."

The room went quiet.

Renee was silent for a long moment, her arms slowly uncrossing, and then she let out a breath. "I'm sorry," she said, and this time she meant it. "That was, I didn't know. I shouldn't have assumed."

"It's cool," Mira said, and she leaned back against the couch cushions and closed her eyes. "Honestly, I don't really know why the doc brought me along to all this either. I'm not exactly built for the whole resistance-fighter thing. But he asked me to come and he's the only person who's ever actually tried to help me so here I am."

Cyborg opened his mouth to say something, but before he could get the words out Detective Chimp came striding back into the atrium and he raised both hands to get everyone's attention.

"Everyone," he called out. "Could I have you all in the next room, please. All of you. It's time. Thank you for your patience, I know it's been a long wait, but we're finally ready."

The people scattered around the atrium pulled themselves up and began filing toward the side corridor, and Batgirl reappeared with Robin a step behind her, and they all moved together into the next room.

It was larger than the atrium, a wide space that had clearly been set up as a workshop, and Dr Eduardo was standing at the centre of it beside a long table, with the Atom standing at his shoulder.

"Thank you all for being so patient," Chimp said as he climbed up onto a stool so that he could be seen over the table. "I apologise for the length of the wait. The reason it took as long as it did is that we were putting the finishing touches on the one thing that makes everything else possible."

Dr Dorado reached down to the table and lifted something up and held it for the room to see.

It was a weapon, or something that was trying to be one, it looked like it had been cobbled together out of spare parts and salvage and pieces of technology that didn't belong in the same century, a rifle-shaped frame with a thick cylindrical core wrapped in copper coils and a series of glowing components with wires running between them in bundles that had been taped down by hand.

"What the hell is that thing," Green Arrow asked from the back of the room.

Dr Dorado set it back down on the table and Chimp gestured toward him. "I think it's best if the doctor explains it himself. Doctor, the floor is yours."

Dr Dorado cleared his throat and stepped forward. "Ethan Kane," he began, "is a singularly unique existence when it comes to meta-genealogy. I want you all to understand that before I say anything else. In all my years of studying the meta-gene I have never encountered anything like him. His DNA is so complex that it took me weeks of analysis to even begin to glimpse the full extent of what it's capable of. He is able to physically extract the meta-gene from another person and integrate it into his own DNA, taking their powers for himself, and he is similarly able to gift the meta-gene to people who never possessed it before, granting abilities to ordinary humans. It's extraordinary. It is, frankly, the single most remarkable piece of biology I have ever—"

"Doc," Green Arrow interrupted. "I'm gonna stop you there. Can we maybe skip the part where you get all sloppy over him and get to the part where you tell us how to beat him?"

Dr Dorado blinked and cleared his throat again. "Yes. Of course. My apologies." He straightened his jacket. "In the course of studying his DNA I believe I have identified a weakness. You see, despite his ability to absorb multiple powers, there is a limit. Based on my calculations, the human genome, even one as malleable as his, should not be able to safely contain more than approximately ten meta-genes at once."

"Why ten and doesn't that guy have way more than ten," Wildcat asked. 

"It's complicated... but the meta-gene is not a purely physical thing," Dr Dorado said. "As the name suggests, it is in some sense metaphysical. It exists as a physical component of your DNA, yes, but there is an aspect of it that is metaphysical by nature, and that aspect is the key to everything."

"English, please," Renee said. "Some of us didn't go to meta-gene school."

Dr Dorado nodded patiently. "When Ethan takes a meta-gene from someone, a vestige of that person remains attached to it. An echo. A fragment of their consciousness, their thoughts, their feelings, their sense of self. On its own, a single vestige is nothing, barely a whisper. But the more genes he takes into himself, the more vestiges accumulate inside his mind, and the easier it becomes for him to be swept under, to drown in a sea of borrowed subconscious thoughts and emotions that are not his own." 

"The fact that Ethan is able to control these vestiges at all is beyond incredible. To hold dozens of foreign consciousnesses inside his own mind and remain functional, he would need to have a brain that operates like a supercomputer."

"That doesn't sound like a weakness," Robin said from where he was leaning against the wall. 

"By itself, it isn't," Dr Dorado agreed. "But consider this. His DNA is malleable, yes, but at this point it must be approaching the absolute physical limit of what it can hold. Every gene adds strain, adds complexity, adds vestiges. And I would remind you all of the checkpoints that Ethan has established across the city, the registration stations where every meta-human is being forced to come forward and identify themselves."

"He's using them as a front to steal powers," Batgirl said. "He's harvesting every meta in the city."

"Exactly," Dr Dorado said. "Which means he has been adding to his collection continuously, week after week, and given how many he must have taken by now, I find it very difficult to believe he isn't close to criticality. Close to the point where his genome simply cannot hold any more."

"So what does the gun do," Jim Gordon asked, stepping forward.

Dr Dorado picked the weapon back up and turned it over in his hands. "This device is designed to deliver a precisely calibrated disruption directly into the structure of his meta-gene. If my calculations are correct, and if he is as close to his limit as I believe he is, then the disruption will be enough to push him past criticality and trigger a cascade failure throughout his entire genome."

"Would it kill him," Robin asked a little eagerly. 

"I don't believe so," Dr Dorado said. "It would injure him, badly, and it would almost certainly cause him tremendous pain. But more importantly than that, it would strip him of every power he has ever taken. Permanently. He would lose all of it. Forever. He would be, once again, just a man."

"Then what the hell are we waiting for," Wildcat said, pushing off the wall. "We've got the gun, we've got the plan, let's go shoot the son of a bitch."

"There's one more thing," Dr Dorado said, and he set the weapon back down. "Before the device will work, I need one more piece. I need up to date data on Ethan's DNA. The only scans we have access to are old, from very early on, from a time when he possessed only a single power. To calibrate this weapon precisely enough to trigger the cascade, I need a current readout of his genome, as it exists right now, with everything he's accumulated."

A silence fell over the room, and Renee saw the energy go out of several of them at once, the heroes who had been leaning forward settling back, the hope that had been building draining away, because every one of them understood what that meant. 

Getting up to date DNA from Ethan Kane was as good as impossible.

Shazam, standing near the back with his arms crossed, was the one who tried to push back against the mood. "Hey, come on, don't everybody look like that all at once," he said. "Chimp's been three steps ahead this whole time, right? I'm sure he's already got a plan for this."

Detective Chimp coughed slightly. "I do have a plan," he said. "Although I'll be honest with you all, it isn't a very good one."

"Ooof," Shazam said, wincing.

"Yes, well," Chimp continued. "There is a very strong likelihood that Ethan keeps current data on his own DNA somewhere in Wayne Tower. A man as meticulous and as scientifically driven as he is would absolutely monitor his own genetic state, especially if he's as close to his limit as the doctor suspects, and Wayne Tower is almost certainly where his primary laboratory is located now. If the data exists anywhere, it exists there."

"And how exactly," Cyborg said, crossing his arms, "are we supposed to get into Wayne Tower? Every single person who's tried has either been captured or killed. That building is the most heavily guarded place in the entire city. There are a hundred Saviours on it at all times, drones, a fleet of Batmobiles, it's a fortress."

"We'll have a little help with that," Detective Chimp said.

The door at the far end of the workshop banged open.

"What's up, fuckers."

Hit-Girl stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips and a grin on her face and her rabbit ears twitching above her head.

Half the heroes in the room reached for their weapons, Green Arrow's hand going to his quiver, Wildcat dropping into a stance, Robin's hand snapping to the wingding at his hip.

"Whoa, whoa, easy, I come in peace," Hit-Girl said, raising both hands. "Mostly."

"What the hell is this," Robin said, rounding on Detective Chimp. "What were you thinking, letting her in here? She's one of Ethan's. She's been killing people across this city for him for over a yeae, and you bring her into our safe house?"

"Everyone, please, calm down," Detective Chimp said, hopping down off his stool and putting himself between Hit-Girl and the heroes. "Lower your weapons, all of you. Hit-Girl is not with Ethan, not anymore. Ever since the event, she defected from him, and brought a number of more hero-minded Saviours with her when she left."

"Yeah, that's the gist of it," Hit-Girl said, dropping her hands and strolling further into the room. "Look, here's the deal. Ethan told me he was gonna make the world a better place. Said he was gonna kill all the criminals, clean up the city, all that. And honestly? I was a hundred percent on board with that. Killing scumbags is kind of my whole thing, it's what my dad raised me to do." Her grin faded. "But then he killed Superman and went full psycho mode and started murdering every junkie and addict in the city, don't get me wrong I don't like drug users but even I'm not dumb enough to think they're all criminals."

So yeah that's where I got off the train. I'll put a bullet in a child trafficker all day long but that, what he's doing now is just slaughter."

The heroes still didn't lower their weapons all the way and Hit-Girl rolled her eyes at them.

"Look, you don't have to like me," she said. "But here's the thing you should think about. You've got no way into Wayne Tower without me. It's my contact on the inside we'd be using, somebody who can get a small team past the outer security. So you can keep pointing your little toys at me, or you can accept that I'm the only reason this plan has a snowball's chance in hell of working."

Robin looked at her for a long moment and then he turned to Detective Chimp. "This is pointless," he said. "Even if she's telling the truth, even if we somehow get into the tower, it doesn't matter. Ethan will find us. He'll track us down and he'll kill every single person in the tower. We're not fast enough or strong enough to do this without him noticing."

"You're right," Detective Chimp said.

Robin blinked.

"You're absolutely right," the chimp continued. "Which is precisely why the team going into the tower is only half of the plan. We cannot get in, retrieve the data, and get out if Ethan is anywhere near that building. He would likely sense the intrusion within minutes and the whole thing would collapse. So we need to get him away from the tower. Far away. And we need to keep him occupied for as long as it takes."

Renee let out a short disbelieving laugh. "And who exactly is going to do that? Who in this room is going to walk up to the man who beat the entire Justice League single-handed and say hey, come fight me?"

Detective Chimp turned and looked at Shazam.

Shazam looked behind himself, then looked back, then pointed at his own chest with both hands. "Me?!" he said, his voice cracking. "You want me to do it?"

"I'm sorry, my boy," Detective Chimp said, and he genuinely did look sorry. "But you're the only one who can. You're the only one with the raw power to engage Ethan directly and survive long enough to keep him distracted. Anyone else and he'd put them down in seconds. You can take a hit. You can give one back. You can keep him chasing you across the city for as long as we need, and that's exactly what we need."

Shazam swallowed hard, and for a moment the fear was plain on his face, the very young man underneath the powerful body suddenly visible in his eyes.

"I have to be honest with you," Detective Chimp said quietly. "I can't guarantee your safety. There's a very real chance you don't walk away from this."

Shazam was quiet for a second.

Then he nodded. "That's okay," he said. "If it gives everyone else a shot, then it's okay. I'll do it."

"He won't be doing it alone."

Everyone turned to look at Cyborg, who had stepped forward from where he'd been standing.

"Cyborg, no," Robin said immediately, shaking his head. "We need you. You're the only person on this entire team who's better with technology than Ethan is, we can't afford to lose you on a distraction run, if something goes wrong with the tech side of this—"

"The tech is done, Robin," Cyborg said. "The gun's built. The plan's set. There's nothing left for me to do on the workbench. But out there, next to Shazam, helping him stay alive long enough to keep that monster busy, that's where I can actually make a difference now. That's the part I can play." He looked around the room.

Detective Chimp looked at the two of them and he removed his cap and held it against his chest for a moment.

"Thank you," he said quietly, then he looked around at all of them, at the heroes and the criminals, at every person who had gathered in this place to stand against Ethan. "All of you. What you're doing tonight is the bravest thing I have ever witnessed... I have lived a very long time. I want you to know that whatever happens tonight, I will not forget a single one of you for as long as I live."

He put his cap back on.

"Now," he said. "Let's go over the plan."

_____________________________________

Ethan's laboratory occupied the entire floor beneath the penthouse. He had rebuilt it from the ground up in the weeks since he had taken the tower, stripping out the office space that had been there before and replacing it with equipment that most research institutions in the world could not have afforded or even identified. 

The walls were lined with sealed cabinets and climate-controlled storage units, the central workspace was dominated by a series of stainless steel benches arranged in a U-shape around a holographic display array that he had designed and fabricated himself and at far end of the room which was separated from the rest by a thick glass partition was a massive machine and a person running on what looked like a treadmill. 

Barry Allen. 

The treadmill was not a treadmill in any conventional sense. Ethan had built it over the course of three days using blueprints he'd taken from both the Batcave and star labs and his own modifications. It was a circular track approximately forty feet in diameter enclosed within a containment field that channelled the Speed Force energy generated by Flash's movement into a series of capacitor banks lining the walls. The restraints on Barry's wrists were connected to the track itself through cables that retracted and extended with his stride, keeping him locked into the running motion without allowing him to build up enough velocity to phase through the containment.

Barry had been running for eleven days straight.

Ethan walked past the glass partition and paused for a moment to check the readout on the monitoring station beside it. The capacitor banks were at sixty-three percent charge, which was lower than he wanted but consistent with the rate of accumulation he had projected given Barry's current output. The Speed Force was not a battery that could be drained, it was a fundamental force that Barry channelled, and the energy that leaked off him during sustained exertion was functionally infinite as long as he kept moving, the problem was that the capture rate of the equipment could only absorb so much of it at any given moment without overloading.

He tapped the intercom button on the monitoring station. "How are you feeling, Barry?"

Flash's head snapped toward the glass and his eyes were raw and burning and full of something that had gone past anger a long time ago. "Go... fuck... yourself," he said between ragged breaths, his voice cracking on the words. "Don't you dare stand there and ask me how I'm feeling like I'm one of your employees, like we're colleagues, like you didn't MURDER my best friend right in front of me."

"Noted," Ethan said.

"Noted," Barry repeated, and the laugh that came out of him was ugly and broken. "Noted. That's what you say. You killed Clark. You killed Hal. You've got Diana chained up like an animal. You've got Arthur and J'onn locked in boxes somewhere and you've got me running on a hamster wheel to power your sick little experiments and all you have to say is NOTED. What's wrong with you? Do you even know? Have you ever once in your entire life looked in a mirror and seen what the rest of us see?"

"I need more power from you," Ethan said. "The capacitor banks need to be at full charge within the next forty-eight hours."

"GO TO HELL."

"If you increase your output willingly I won't need to use the motivational system. I would prefer not to use it. But I will."

Barry's jaw clenched so hard the tendons stood out in his neck and his stride faltered for a half second before the treadmill's feedback mechanism corrected it and forced his legs back into rhythm. "One day," he said, his voice dropping. "One day I'm going to get out of this thing. And when I do... you won't even see me coming."

Ethan switched off the intercom and turned back to the main workspace.

He walked to the central bench where three separate workstations had been set up, each one dedicated to a different branch of the research he had been conducting simultaneously over the past two weeks. The left station held the Kryptonian analysis, the centre held the Amazonian, and the right held the Atlantean, and each one was cluttered with vials and slides and readouts and handwritten notes that spread across the surface.

He sat down at the centre station and pulled the holographic display toward him and expanded it until the molecular model he had been working on before the meeting filled the air in front of his face, a rotating three-dimensional representation of a DNA strand that looked almost normal except for the sections he had highlighted in red, which were the points where the Amazonian genome diverged from baseline human architecture.

"Remarkable," he said quietly to himself as he rotated the model with his fingers and zoomed into one of the red sections.

The Amazonian genome was not simply human DNA with additions or mutations layered on top of it the way most meta-human genomes were. It was something fundamentally different at the structural level, a parallel architecture that shared enough surface similarity with human DNA to be compatible with it but that operated on principles he had never encountered before. The base pairs were the same, adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine, but the way they were arranged in the coding regions followed a pattern that was older than anything in the fossil record, as if the template for Amazonian biology had been laid down before humanity had even begun to diverge from its primate ancestors.

The strength was encoded everywhere. Not in a single gene or a cluster of genes but distributed across the entire genome in a redundancy pattern that meant you could knock out any single section and the others would compensate, which explained why Amazons were so durable, their biology had built-in failsafes at the genetic level that no human body possessed.

He pulled up the Kryptonian data on the left display and set it beside the Amazonian model and looked at them both side by side.

Kryptonian DNA was, if anything, even more alien. The base pairs were the same, which still amazed him, because it meant that somewhere in the deep history of the universe the same origins of life had arisen independently on two separate worlds, but the structure beyond the base pairs was completely foreign. 

Kryptonian cells didn't just store genetic information, they stored energy. Every cell in Superman's body had been a microscopic solar battery, absorbing and retaining yellow sun radiation at a rate that human cells couldn't even begin to replicate, and the genetic code that governed that absorption was woven through every chromosome like a second operating system running underneath the first.

The solar absorption was the key to everything. The strength, the speed, the flight, the invulnerability, all of it flowed from the cell's ability to convert solar energy into power at a ratio that was beyond anything Terran biology could produce.

Ethan leaned back in his chair and looked at both models floating in front of him and let his mind work.

The problem he had been circling for the past week was compatibility. The Kryptonian and Amazonian genomes were both extraordinary on their own, but they had evolved on different worlds under different conditions to serve different purposes, and combining them wasn't a matter of simply stitching sections together the way you might splice bacterial DNA. The regulatory systems would conflict. The cellular machinery would reject foreign code. The energy systems that powered Kryptonian abilities would interfere with the structural redundancies that made Amazonian biology so robust, and the result would be cellular collapse long before anything viable could develop.

Unless there was a bridge.

He pulled up his own genetic profile on the third display and expanded it until it hung in the air beside the other two.

His DNA was unlike anything else in the laboratory.

All for One had done something to him at the genetic level that he was still discovering the full extent of, the ability to absorb and integrate foreign abilities had fundamentally altered the architecture of his genome, making it malleable in a way that no other living organism on Earth could match. His DNA didn't just accept foreign genetic material, it actively restructured itself to accommodate it, rewriting its own regulatory systems in real time to integrate new information without rejecting it. Every ability he had ever taken had left its mark in his chromosomes, each one adding a new layer to a genome that had become a living library of biological potential.

That malleability was the bridge.

If he used his own DNA as the base, as the substrate that held everything together, then the Kryptonian and Amazonian code wouldn't need to be compatible with each other. 

They only needed to be compatible with him.

He sat forward and started building the model.

It took him four hours of uninterrupted work to construct the first theoretical framework, layering sections of Kryptonian code onto the Amazonian using his own genetic architecture as the scaffolding that held both systems in place. He tested each connection in simulation, running the molecular model through a programme he had written that predicted how the combined code would behave during cellular replication, and the first three attempts failed, the simulated cells tearing themselves apart within seconds as the conflicting energy systems fought for dominance.

On the fourth attempt he found the solution.

The Atlantean genome.

He had been studying Aquaman's DNA as a separate project, cataloguing the adaptations that allowed Atlantean biology to function under crushing pressure at the bottom of the ocean, and he had noticed something in the cellular membrane structure that he hadn't fully appreciated until now. Atlantean cells had a regulatory mechanism that acted as a pressure valve, balancing the enormous forces acting on the cell from the outside with the energy systems operating on the inside, preventing the cell from either imploding or exploding under conditions that would destroy any other organism.

It was a stabiliser.

If he wove the Atlantean regulatory code into the hybrid genome alongside the Kryptonian and Amazonian material, it would act as a buffer between the two more powerful systems, mediating the energy flow, preventing the conflicts that had destroyed his earlier simulations.

He inserted the Atlantean sequences into the model and ran the simulation again.

The cells held.

They replicated once, then twice, then a dozen times, each division stable, the three genomes coexisting within the framework of his own DNA without conflict, and Ethan watched the simulation run through a hundred cycles and then a thousand and then ten thousand without a single failure and he pushed his chair back from the bench and stared at the display.

"My god," he said.

He had never used that phrase before in his life.

He stood up and paced the length of the laboratory twice, his mind racing ahead of itself, because the model was perfect, the theory was sound, the simulation confirmed it, but translating the blueprint from a digital model into actual biological material was a problem that no conventional laboratory equipment could solve. 

The individual base pairs needed to be assembled one at a time, in the correct order, in the correct orientation, billions of them, and a single error at any point in the sequence would cascade through every subsequent replication and destroy the entire project.

No machine on Earth could do it.

But he did have something that perhaps could. 

He opened the pouch on his belt and withdrew the crystal-encased power ring, the green glow still faintly visible through the mineral shell he had grown around it, and he set it down on the workstation and began carefully dissolving the crystal layer peeling back the mineral shell one layer at a time until the ring sat exposed on the surface of the bench. 

He didn't want to wear it. 

Every instinct he had rejected the idea of putting an alien device on his body and linking himself to an institution he neither trusted nor respected. But perhaps there was another way.

He spent the next three days trying to find one.

He built a conduit array first, a series of cables and converters designed to channel Speed Force energy from the capacitor banks into the ring without a biological intermediary, attempting to power it externally the way you would power any other device. The ring sat in the cradle and absorbed the energy and did absolutely nothing with it, the green light pulsing at the same rhythm regardless of how much power he fed through it.

He tried interfacing with it digitally, connecting the ring to the holographic display through a series of increasingly creative adapters, attempting to feed it his genetic blueprint as data. The ring ignored every input format he tried, every protocol, every encoding scheme. He tried electromagnetic, he tried optical, he tried feeding it raw binary through a jury-rigged laser array. Nothing. The ring sat on the bench and glowed and waited for the one thing he didn't want to give it.

A will.

He tried building a secondary AI to serve as a proxy, a digital mind that could wear the ring on his behalf and execute his instructions without requiring his direct connection to the Guardians' network. He spent eighteen hours programming it and when he placed the ring against the AI's housing the ring didn't even acknowledge its existence, the green light didn't flicker, didn't brighten, didn't dim, it simply continued pulsing as if nothing had happened. 

On the morning of the fourth day Ethan sat at the bench with the ring in front of him and his hands flat on the surface and he stared at it for a very long time.

He stood up and walked to the glass partition and pressed the intercom. "Barry."

Flash didn't look at him. He was still running his eyes fixed forward, "I told you not to talk to me."

"I need to know something about the ring. When lantern wore it, was the connection to the Guardians constant? Could they see through it at all times, monitor his location, read his thoughts?"

Barry was silent for a long moment, nothing but the sound of his feet hitting the track and the hum of the capacitors. "You want me to help you use my dead friend's ring," he said. 

"Yes."

"Absolutely not. Rot in hell."

"Speak or do I need to bring one of the others in here."

The silence that followed lasted nearly a full minute. "The connection isn't constant," he said. "Hal told me once that the Guardians can check in but they don't monitor in real time, there are thousands of Lanterns across the universe and they don't have the ability to watch all of them all the time."

"How long would I need to maintain contact to execute a single sustained construction?"

"I don't know."

Ethan switched off the intercom.

He walked back to the bench and looked at the ring for another long moment.

Then he picked it up and put it on his finger.

The green light flared and washed up his arm and across his chest and the connection opened inside his mind like a door being blown off its hinges, and for a fraction of a second he felt the vastness of what was on the other side of it. He slammed every mental wall he had into the connection and narrowed it to a pinhole, blocking everything except the ring's core function, the ability to construct.

The clock was running now.

He sat down at the bench and placed his hands on the surface and closed his eyes and began feeding the ring his blueprint.

This was the hardest part, because the ring was designed to respond to willpower and imagination, not to instructions, and Ethan had to translate his genetic blueprint into a visualisation clear enough and detailed enough that the ring could interpret it as a construction order. 

He held each sequence in his mind with absolute clarity, every base pair, every bond angle, every regulatory marker, feeding them to the ring one section at a time, and the ring responded to his will.

A small platform of green light materialised on the bench beside the ring.

The construction surface.

He stood up and walked to the climate-controlled cabinet on the far wall and opened it and withdrew the container that held the Amazonian eggs he had harvested from Diana, each one sealed in its own suspension vial, and he carried them back to the bench and set them down beside the ring.

He selected one.

The egg was microscopic, invisible to the naked eye, suspended in a nutrient solution that kept it viable, and he placed the vial on the green platform and watched as the ring's light enveloped it. Using the holographic display as a guide he began the process, directing the ring to open the egg's outer membrane and access the nucleus, then to strip out half the Amazonian DNA and replace it with his own genetic material, the hybrid code, the scaffolding that would hold together the Kryptonian, the Amazonian, and the Atlantean DNA in a single unified genome.

He could've added the Martians DNA but a weakness to fire was something he didn't want to be risked carrying over. 

Ethan guided the ring through each step, and on the display beside him the molecular model updated in real time showing the changes as they were made, each new base pair clicking into place in the correct position in the correct orientation.

It took twelve hours.

Twelve hours of sustained concentration during which Ethan did not eat or drink or sit down or look away from the display, his mind holding the entire blueprint in perfect clarity while the ring translated his will into molecular reality.

When it was finished he pulled the ring off his finger and dropped it on the bench and the green light died and the connection severed and Ethan let out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. His hands were shaking slightly, not from exhaustion but from the effort of holding his mind in that state of absolute focus for that long.

He picked up the crystal and encased the ring again immediately, sealing it back inside its mineral prison.

Then he sat down.

The vial on the bench contained something that had not existed in the universe until that moment. A fertilised egg. A single cell that carried within it the combined genetic legacy of four different species bound together by a genome that used Ethan Kane's own DNA as the thread that held the whole thing together.

He picked it up and held it to the light and looked at it.

Inside the suspension fluid the cell had already begun to divide. One became two as he watched, the membrane pinching inward and splitting cleanly, and then two became four, and the process was underway, and it was stable, the monitoring equipment on the bench confirming that every division was healthy, every daughter cell identical to the blueprint, no mutations, no errors, no cascading failures.

He carried the vial across the lab to the artificial womb he had prepared, a sealed chamber approximately the size of a large fish tank filled with a synthetic amniotic fluid that he had spent a week formulating to match the nutritional and thermal requirements of the hybrid genome. He placed the vial into the intake port and watched through the glass as the mechanism drew the dividing cells out of the suspension fluid and deposited them into the warm solution, where they settled against the nutrient membrane at the bottom of the chamber and continued to divide.

Four became eight. Eight became sixteen.

The monitoring screen beside the chamber showed the readings in real time, temperature, pH, nutrient levels, cellular replication rate, and every number was exactly where it needed to be.

Ethan stood in front of the chamber and watched the cells multiply, his hands behind his back and for the first time in as long as he could remember something moved in his chest. 

He placed his hand against the glass of the chamber.

"Hello," he said quietly.

The cells divided again. Thirty-two became sixty-four.

He stood there for a long time watching them grow.

(AN: Ethan has created what is technically an artificially created child between himself and Diana as they are the majority DNA providers, you could argue there are three dads though. Idk it's complicated. Anyway why is Ethan creating what appears to be an incredibly powerful super? Will she inherit anything from Ethan?) 

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