Brainiac

Far out in the dark of space, something was moving toward Earth.

It was enormous and it was shaped like a skull — a great metal skull the size of a sports stadium, bristling with antennas and robotic arms and ports that opened and closed like cold, mechanical eyes. Inside, rows and rows of shelves held bottles and jars and sealed containers, each one glowing with soft colored light. And inside each container, something was preserved forever, perfectly frozen in time.

Cities.

This was the ship of Brainiac — the Collector of Worlds — and he had been traveling for a very long time.

Brainiac was not like any villain Superman had ever faced. He was not angry. He was not greedy. He felt nothing at all, because he had no feelings to speak of — only calculations. He moved through the universe with his skull ship and his robotic drones, and when he found a civilization that interested him, he shrank its greatest city down to the size of a snow globe, placed it gently in a bottle, and then destroyed what remained. He told himself this was preservation. He was keeping these worlds alive, in a way.

He was wrong. But he had no one to tell him so.

Superman first heard about Brainiac's approach through the distress frequencies his Fortress of Solitude monitors day and night. He flew straight into space to meet the skull ship in the dark between worlds, and what he found there stopped him cold.

Inside the ship, in a glass bottle no bigger than your hand, was a city. Its tiny lights still flickered. Its buildings still stood. Its streets were still laid out in the pattern of a capital city — because it had been a capital city, once. The capital of Krypton.

Kandor.

Superman pressed his hand against the glass and stared at those tiny lights, and for a long moment he could not speak. Kandor was real. It had been real all along. Thousands of Kryptonians, preserved — frozen in their bottle, not gone at all. He had thought his people were lost forever.

He was still looking at Kandor when Brainiac's robotic drones swarmed out of the walls.

The battle inside Brainiac's ship was unlike any Superman had fought before — not one powerful villain but hundreds of drones, each one precisely programmed to target his weaknesses, each one learning from every blow and adjusting. They could not be punched into submission because the moment he punched one, the others recalibrated. He could not freeze them because they had heat exchangers built in. He could not reason with them, because they did not reason.

What they could not account for was empathy.

Superman stopped fighting the drones and started looking for the people.

Because Brainiac was not just interested in Earth's cities. He had a small crew of beings aboard his ship — scholars and scientists from planets he'd collected, kept to explain their worlds. Superman found them in a back corridor, frightened and confused, and he spoke to them quietly and got them to safety first. While Brainiac processed what was happening — while his cold calculations tried to account for a hero who stopped mid-battle to help strangers — Superman found the central control and rerouted the ship's power systems with his heat vision.

The drones went dark.

Brainiac stood at his control panel — an angular, blue-green figure with circuits visible beneath his skin — and looked at Superman with his flat, empty eyes.

"You could have destroyed me," he said.

"Yes," Superman agreed.

"Why didn't you?"

"Because destruction isn't the point," Superman said. "You've forgotten that. If you ever knew it."

The Bottled City of Kandor came home with Superman to the Fortress of Solitude, where it rests in the warmest, most carefully lit room, tended like a garden. He visits it every time he comes to the Arctic. He is working on a way to restore it — a way to give Kandor back its sky and its red sun and its freedom.

He has not given up.

Jor-El, in his final message stored in the Fortress crystal, once told his son: "You are not the end of Krypton. You are its continuation."

In the soft glow of those tiny Kandor lights, Superman believes him.