Lex Luthor

In Metropolis, the tallest building was not a skyscraper full of apartments or offices or window-washers on little platforms. The tallest building was LexCorp Tower, and at the very top of it, in an office with windows on every side, sat Lex Luthor.

From up there, Lex could see everything. He could see the Daily Planet building with its great spinning globe. He could see the river. He could see the parks and the bridges and the streets full of tiny, moving people. And very often, he could see a red and blue streak arcing over the city below.

Lex's jaw tightened every time.

He was, by almost any measure, a remarkable man. His mind was as sharp and precise as a diamond — he had built LexCorp from nothing into the most powerful company in Metropolis, with laboratories and factories and research divisions working on everything from medicine to satellites. He had more degrees than most universities have departments. He had shaken hands with world leaders and walked the halls of power in a hundred countries.

And still — somehow — he was not the most important person in Metropolis. Somehow, an alien in a cape was.

This, to Lex Luthor, was completely unacceptable.

He did not understand Superman. He turned the problem over in his mind the way a scientist turns a specimen under a microscope — looking for the flaw, looking for the hidden agenda, looking for the thing that made sense. No one used power purely to help others. That was not how power worked. There had to be something underneath it. There had to be a plan.

Lex spent enormous amounts of time, money, and brainpower trying to expose that plan.

In his private laboratory on the forty-seventh floor of LexCorp Tower, he built machines that would have made most engineers weep with amazement — and pointed them all at Superman. He funded research programs with names that sounded charitable but were really designed to manufacture weakness. He called press conferences and stood at a microphone with his handsome, open face and said reasonable-sounding things about the danger of depending on an alien.

He was very convincing.

And people listened. Some of them, anyway. Some of Metropolis began to wonder. Wasn't it strange? An alien, in their city, with the power to do anything? Shouldn't they be nervous?

Superman heard these words, because Superman hears everything. And he did not get angry. He did not fly to LexCorp Tower and argue. He went to the burned-out apartment building on the east side and helped move families to safety, and then he went to the collapsing pedestrian bridge and held it steady while engineers reinforced it, and then he listened very carefully to a child named Maria who was telling him about a stray dog she was worried about.

He understood something about Lex Luthor that Lex could not see in himself: that Lex was afraid. Not of Superman's power — of his own irrelevance. Lex had built everything he had with his mind, and that was genuinely extraordinary. But he had forgotten the most important thing his intelligence could be used for.

Other people.

The chess match between them went on across boardrooms and laboratories and the sky above Metropolis — Lex in his power suits and his corporate towers, Superman in his cape and his steady, patient kindness. Every scheme Lex constructed was careful and brilliant. Every scheme failed, eventually, because somewhere in the middle of it, Superman simply did the thing that was needed without asking for anything in return.

One evening, Clark Kent sat at his desk at the Daily Planet, writing up his notes on a story about community gardens in Suicide Slum — the neighborhood at the edge of Metropolis that LexCorp's new development plan was threatening to bulldoze. He had interviewed fourteen families who had gardens there. Their names were in his notebook.

He filed the story. It ran on the front page. Three days later, the development plan was changed.

Lex Luthor read the story in his tower with his morning coffee. He set it down. He looked out at Metropolis spread below him.

He still didn't understand. He probably never would.

But somewhere in the city, fourteen families were outside in their gardens, and the morning light was warm on the tomato plants, and a red and blue shape passed quietly overhead like a kind thought.