Chapter 1: The Meteor's Gift
The airbag tasted like chemicals and blood.
My eyes snapped open. White powder everywhere—on my shirt, my hands, the cracked windshield. The steering wheel pressed against my chest at a wrong angle. Glass glittered across the dashboard like scattered diamonds.
What the—
Memory slammed into me. My apartment. The laptop screen. Season one, episode three. Smallville. I'd been watching Smallville.
And now I was here.
My hands found the door handle. The mechanism groaned, metal scraping metal, but it gave. I half-fell, half-crawled onto cracked asphalt. Kansas. The flat horizon stretched in every direction—cornfields, blue sky, a road that went on forever.
I touched my forehead. Fingers came back red.
[METEOR ADAPTATION SYSTEM INITIALIZING.]
The voice came from inside my skull. Cold. Clinical. Like a doctor reading test results.
[HOST INTEGRATION: 23% COMPLETE.]
[WARNING: PHYSICAL TRAUMA DETECTED. RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE STABILIZATION.]
"What—" My voice cracked. I stumbled to my feet, using the mangled car door for support. A sedan. Silver. The hood crumpled inward like tin foil. Steam hissed from somewhere underneath.
Ten feet away, a crater. Small, maybe three feet wide, but deep. And inside it—
Green light.
Meteor rock. Kryptonite. The real thing, glowing like radioactive candy, half-buried in Kansas dirt.
I'm inside the show.
The realization hit my gut like a physical blow. I bent over, hands on knees, breathing hard. This wasn't a dream. Dreams didn't hurt this much. Dreams didn't smell like smoke and corn and copper.
My hand went to my pocket automatically. A wallet. Leather, worn at the edges. I flipped it open.
The driver's license photo showed a face I didn't recognize. Dark hair, cut short. Eyes that looked older than the seventeen-year-old face they belonged to. The name read: COLE MICHAEL HARRISON.
Birth date put him—me—at seventeen.
Address: 412 Oak Street, Apt 3B, Smallville, Kansas.
Someone prepared this.
The System's voice cut through my spiraling thoughts:
[HOST PHYSICAL STATUS: STABLE. MINOR LACERATION TO CRANIAL REGION. BRUISING TO THORACIC AREA. NO CRITICAL DAMAGE DETECTED.]
I laughed. It came out wrong—too high, too sharp. The kryptonite in the crater pulsed, and I felt something stir in my chest. Like a second heartbeat trying to sync with the first.
[METEOR ENERGY INTEGRATION IN PROGRESS. PRIMARY POWER SLOT PREPARING FOR ACTIVATION: ENHANCED STRENGTH.]
[CURRENT SAFE OUTPUT: 0%. INTEGRATION REQUIRED BEFORE UTILIZATION.]
Enhanced strength. The System—whatever it was—planned to give me powers. Meteor powers. Like the freaks of the week that plagued Smallville in the early seasons.
Except I had a System. Structure. Control.
Or so it claims.
Sirens. Distant but growing closer. I straightened up, wiped the blood from my forehead with my sleeve. The EMTs would have questions. Questions I needed to answer correctly.
A pickup truck crested the hill before the ambulance arrived. The driver—a middle-aged man in overalls—pulled over and jogged toward me.
"Son, you alright? Saw the smoke from my property. Lord almighty, that car's totaled."
"I'm okay." The words came out steadier than expected. "Think a meteor hit me. Some kind of rock fell from the sky."
The man glanced at the crater, at the fading green glow. His face went pale.
"Meteor rock. We get those sometimes. Ever since the shower back in '89." He shook his head. "You're lucky to be alive, kid."
Lucky.
One word for it.
The ambulance arrived seven minutes later. Two EMTs—a woman with gray hair pulled back tight and a younger guy who looked fresh out of training. They checked my vitals, shined lights in my eyes, asked me questions I answered with half-truths.
"What's your name?"
"Cole Harrison."
"You know what day it is?"
I glanced at the dashboard of their rig. A small calendar hung from the rearview mirror. September 2001.
September. Two thousand and one.
Season one.
"September," I said. "2001."
The gray-haired EMT—her name tag read PATRICIA—nodded approvingly.
"Good. No concussion signs, but we'll take you in for observation. That head wound needs cleaning."
They loaded me onto a stretcher, even though I insisted I could walk. Hospital protocol, Patricia explained. Liability.
The ambulance smelled like antiseptic and old plastic. I lay back and stared at the ceiling, feeling every bump in the Kansas road.
[INTEGRATION PROGRESS: 24%.]
[PASSIVE HEALING BONUS DETECTED. MINOR WOUNDS WILL RECOVER 15% FASTER THAN BASELINE HUMAN.]
Passive healing. Good to know.
My fingers found the wallet again. $127 in cash. An apartment key. The driver's license of a boy who apparently didn't exist until I arrived.
The System had planned this. Or something had. I'd been dropped into Smallville with a cover identity, resources, and powers that were slowly coming online.
The question was: why?
[HOST QUERY NOTED. INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR RESPONSE. RECOMMEND: FOCUS ON IMMEDIATE SURVIVAL AND INTEGRATION.]
Helpful.
The hospital was small. Smallville Medical Center, according to the sign. Two stories, brick exterior, parking lot half-full. They wheeled me inside, and a young doctor cleaned my head wound while asking the same questions the EMTs had.
Name. Date. What happened.
I gave the same answers. The meteor explanation earned me sympathetic nods.
"We see this more than you'd think," the doctor said. He couldn't have been older than thirty. "Meteor fragments. Most are harmless, but some..." He trailed off, focused on threading stitches through my skin.
"Some what?"
"Nothing. Local superstition." He forced a smile. "You're going to be fine, Mr. Harrison. Three stitches, some bruising. Come back in a week to get them removed."
They kept me for two hours. Observation period. I spent it staring at the ceiling, listening to the System's occasional updates.
[INTEGRATION: 26%.]
[INTEGRATION: 27%.]
Each percentage point came with a warmth that spread through my muscles. Like stretching after a long sleep.
When they finally discharged me, the sun was setting.
I walked out of the hospital and stopped.
Kansas sunsets were absurd. Orange and pink streaking across a sky so big it made everything else seem small. The horizon went on forever, painted in colors that shouldn't exist outside of movies.
I sat down on a bench outside the entrance. The blanket the EMTs had given me was still around my shoulders. The air smelled like corn and rain and something green.
I'm not going home.
The thought came quiet and certain.
This is home now.
A laugh escaped me. Then something else—something wet on my cheeks. I wiped at it, confused. Crying? I was crying?
The laugh came again. Then another sob. Then both at once.
A passing nurse glanced at me with concern. Probably thought it was shock from the accident. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was the absurdity of dying in one world and waking up in a TV show I'd watched as a kid.
Does my family know? Do they think I'm dead?
[HOST EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY DETECTED. RECOMMEND: DEEP BREATHING EXERCISES. ELEVATED CORTISOL COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO INTEGRATION PROCESS.]
"Shut up," I muttered.
[ACKNOWLEDGED. ENTERING PASSIVE MONITORING MODE.]
The sunset deepened. Orange turned to red, red to purple. Stars began emerging, unfamiliar constellations in an unfamiliar sky.
I had a wallet. An address. A System slowly rewriting my DNA into something stronger. And knowledge—twenty-one years of Smallville lore crammed into my head, waiting to be useful.
Clark Kent was out there. Probably on his farm, doing chores, completely unaware that an alien ship had carried him to Earth as a baby.
And Kara... the outline in my head whispered Kara might already be here. Shouldn't be, according to canon. But the blonde I'd glimpsed in my research—
Research? No. Memory. Meta-knowledge. Whatever this is.
An ambulance pulled into the hospital lot. I watched the EMTs unload a stretcher, some other poor soul having a bad night.
The System chimed:
[ARRIVAL AT PRIMARY LOCATION CONFIRMED. RECOMMEND: ESTABLISH COVER IDENTITY WITHIN 24 HOURS. INTEGRATION WILL PROCEED MORE EFFICIENTLY WITH STABLE HOUSING AND NUTRITION.]
Stable housing. Nutrition. Like I'm a houseplant.
I stood. The blanket slipped from my shoulders. I caught it, folded it neatly, and left it on the bench.
The address on my license was Oak Street. According to the hospital's wall map, that was eight blocks west. Walkable.
I started walking.
Smallville at dusk was quiet. Shops closing up. A few cars on Main Street. The Talon—future coffee shop, current something else—sat dark on the corner. The water tower loomed in the distance, painted with the town's name.
Meteor Capital of the World. The sign said it.
I passed the Beanery, still operational. A barbershop. A hardware store with a CLOSED sign swinging in the breeze.
[INTEGRATION: 31%.]
The warmth spread deeper. Into my bones now. Into something fundamental.
I flexed my hand. The strength wasn't there yet—not really—but I could feel it building. Like pressure behind a dam.
Tomorrow I'd find the apartment. Figure out what life Cole Harrison was supposed to be living. Monday, apparently, I'd start school. Smallville High. Where Clark Kent walked the halls with no idea what he really was.
And where a blonde girl who shouldn't exist yet hangs laundry at the Kent farm.
The System had dropped me here for a reason. I was going to find out why.
And if the universe thought I'd go down easy?
I touched the stitches on my forehead. Still tender. Still real.
It picked the wrong guy.
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