The first thing Ethan Cole learned was that his father would not stay.
He did not understand words yet language would come later but tone carried meaning long before syntax.
Sharp voices. Controlled anger. The kind of restraint that cracked at the edges. Something was wrong, and everyone in the room knew it.
There was a man who stood near the hospital bed only once.
Tall. Well dressed. Expensive shoes that never crossed the invisible boundary drawn by the nurses. He did not touch the child. Did not smile. He looked down at Ethan the way one looks at a result that exists but was never part of the plan.
The argument happened outside the room.
Muted. Measured. Adult voices pretending they were still reasonable.
"I'm not ready"
"You don't get to decide that"
"I won't take responsibility"
Footsteps followed.
Then absence.
Door closed.
The man never returned.
Ethan cried not from grief, not yet but from instinct. From disruption. From the sudden loss of a presence his mind had already registered.
Later, when cognition matured, he would give it a name.
For now, it was stored as fact.
Father: absent.
His mother stayed.
Her name was Margaret Cole.
She moved through the hospital with quiet efficiency, the kind that came from education, money, and the refusal to fall apart in public. She asked precise questions. Signed papers without hesitation. Corrected nurses politely when needed.
Private room.
Extended stay.
No concern about cost.
The hospital was one of Manhattan's better ones. New equipment. Controlled access. Windows overlooking a city that never slowed down.
It was 1995.
Outside, New York moved at its usual pace sirens, traffic, helicopters cutting across the sky. Supes already existed, though they were still something people watched from a distance. Homelander had been on television for years by then, already framed as America's protector, already untouchable.
Vought International was powerful, but careful.
Compound V was not public knowledge. Not yet. Officially, it didn't exist.
Margaret did not speak about any of that.
But Ethan listened.
Weeks passed.
Then months.
Time inside an infant's body moved strangely. Awareness came and went in waves, interrupted by sleep, feeding, sensation. His thoughts were compressed by physical limitation, but they remained structured, patient, intact.
And always, quietly, the interface existed.
It did not announce itself.
Dont intrude.
It simply remained anchored to perception itself.
When Ethan slept, it dimmed.
When sunlight touched his skin filtered through glass, reflected from white hospital walls it responded.
Not with words.
With structure.
A digital reflection of growth unfolded in his awareness.
Human infants developed in stages.
Ethan did not.
Bone density increased along smooth, accelerating curves. Muscle fibers layered recursively, reinforcing instead of replacing. Cellular efficiency climbed with every exposure to light.
His nervous system was the most disturbing part.
Neural density exceeded human norms almost immediately. Synaptic pathways reorganized continuously, folding inward, compressing delay until reaction time became nearly instantaneous.
His brain was not simply growing.
It was optimizing.
By three months, his cognitive capacity already exceeded adult human baselines limited only by an undeveloped body. Memory retention sharpened. Pattern recognition accelerated. Emotional processing lagged behind logic.
That imbalance felt familiar.
Apartment came later.
A high-rise near Central Park. Glass, steel, clean lines. Floor-to-ceiling windows that flooded the space with light. Chosen deliberately, though Margaret never said why.
Bookshelves lined the walls.
Not children's books.
Economics. Medicine. Corporate law. Political history.
Margaret worked from home when she could. When she couldn't, a nanny arrived professional, observant, discreet. No chaos. No shouting. Stability enforced by money and planning.
Upper middle class.
Resources available.
That mattered.
Ethan absorbed everything.
Language came early. Faces resolved faster than they should have. Sound separated into layers traffic patterns, footsteps, heartbeats.
At six months, he could distinguish individual voices in adjacent rooms.
At eight, he recognized stress before it surfaced in speech.
At ten, sunlight stopped feeling warm.
It felt active.
One afternoon, held near the window, the interface reacted sharply.
Solar intake spiked.
Not dangerously.
Eagerly.
Energy flowed inward, redistributed with ruthless efficiency. Cellular structures reinforced themselves in real time, adapting faster than any human biology could tolerate.
Strength increased.
Not explosively.
Silently.
Ethan's fingers tightened around the nanny's hand.
She laughed, assuming infant reflex.
He loosened his grip immediately.
Restraint came naturally.
Gradually, he began to understand when he was.
Television played in the background. News cycles repeated familiar names. Vought International appeared often, always framed positively. Supes were celebrities now symbols, brands.
A young girl from Iowa appeared briefly in a local segment. Blonde. Smiling. Nothing remarkable yet.
Annie January.
The name settled into place.
Taiming aligned.
She had been born a year earlier.
Same generation.
And era.
That meant Homelander was already the ceiling everyone believed in.
The interface did not react.
It simply continued displaying growth curves that refused to flatten.
By the time the world's story truly began
Ethan Cole would already be standing at the same starting line.
And then
He would move past it.
Cradled in a quiet apartment high above New York, sunlight spilling across white walls, Ethan lay awake in his crib.
The interface hovered silently at the edge of perception, displaying trajectories with no upper bound.
Homelander was a corporate product.
Ethan was an evolutionary consequence.
And this time
This time, he had been born in 1995.
With time on his side.
Interface
Ethan became aware of it gradually.
Not as something new, but as something that had always been there, waiting for the moment his mind became capable of fully reading it. The interface did not appear with light or sound. It did not announce itself. It simply sharpened, resolving into clarity as his cognition crossed an invisible threshold.
He was lying in his crib, awake, staring at the pale ceiling, when the data aligned.
The world dimmed not visually, but cognitively as if his perception had been layered with something deeper. A second framework unfolded beneath reality, clean and precise, occupying the same mental space as thought itself.
The interface was not symbolic.
It was anatomical.
A full-body schematic rendered in impossible resolution filled his awareness. Not an image, but a living model every layer visible at once, selectable by intent alone.
SUBJECT: Ethan Cole
SPECIES: Non-human (Kryptonian-derived framework)
AGE: 0.8 years
DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE: Infant (Physical) / Adult+ (Cognitive)
The numbers did not shock him.
They satisfied him.
PHYSICAL STRUCTURE
Height: 72 cm
Mass: 8.9 kg
The figures were ordinary only at a glance.
Beneath them, comparative overlays activated automatically.
Bone Density:
Human infant average: 1.0×
Ethan Cole: 37.4×
The visualization expanded. Bone lattice structures glowed softly, layered in repeating micro-patterns that reinforced stress points continuously. There were no static bones in his body only systems in constant adaptation.
Muscle Fiber Density:
Human baseline: 1.0×
Ethan Cole: 18.2× (and rising)
Fibers did not simply contract. They stored kinetic potential, releasing it only when necessary. Force output scaled logarithmically with energy availability.
Tissue Resilience:
Blunt force resistance: Class A (Homelander-equivalent, projected)
Penetration resistance: Class A− (immature)
The notation immature did not bother him.
It implied growth.
ENERGY ABSORPTION
A solar model unfolded next.
The Sun rendered not as a sphere of fire, but as a vast data source. Streams of radiation intersected with his body, most filtered by atmosphere, glass, distance.
Even so
Solar Energy Intake (Passive):
Current rate: 0.03% optimal
Conversion efficiency: 99.97%
His cells did not waste energy.
They remembered it.
Every photon absorbed permanently improved cellular efficiency. No decay. loss or plateau.
A line of text appeared beneath the model.
EVOLUTIONARY TRAJECTORY:
Unlimited growth under sustained solar exposure.
Ethan felt something stir that had nothing to do with instinct.
Awe.
Not emotional awe.
Intellectual
NEURAL ARCHITECTURE
This was where his attention locked.
Schematic zoomed inward, collapsing from organs to systems to networks, until his brain filled the entirety of perception.
It was… beautiful.
Neural density far exceeded human maximums, layers folded inward like a fractal. Signals moved without delay. Memory encoding occurred simultaneously with perception.
There was no distinction between seeing and storing.
Cognitive Processing Speed:
Human peak: 1×
Ethan Cole: 412× (increasing)
Memory Retention:
Short-term: Absolute
Long-term: Absolute
Loss rate: 0%
A live demonstration triggered automatically.
He glanced toward a book resting on a nearby shelf just a single moment of visual contact as the nanny turned a page while reading.
The interface updated instantly.
DATA ACQUIRED:
Page layout
Font type
Ink density
Full semantic content
Marginal imperfections
He did not remember the page.
He had it.
Perfectly.
Forever.
The realization hit him harder than any physical revelation so far.
I don't forget.
Anything.
His mind did not merely store information it indexed it, cross-referenced it, and optimized retrieval paths in real time.
His brain was not approaching a supercomputer.
It already was one.
And it was still growing.
SENSORY SYSTEMS
Additional panels unfolded.
Vision:
Spectrum: Expanded (Infrared / Ultraviolet latent)
Resolution: Adaptive (No fixed limit)
Hearing:
Frequency range: Far beyond human norms
Directional isolation: Absolute
Perception:
Micro-expression recognition: Active
Heartbeat differentiation: Active
Stress hormone detection (indirect): Active
He could already feel it.
The room was not a single space, but a collection of systems air movement, muscle tension, electrical hums inside walls. Reality had depth now.
POWER COMPARISON
One final overlay appeared.
REFERENCE ENTITY: Homelander
Silhouettes aligned again.
Bars stabilized.
CURRENT STATUS:
Physical Output: Comparable (suppressed by immaturity)
Durability: Comparable (passive)
Growth Potential: Superior
A note appeared beneath it.
LIMITATION:
Developmental restraint (age-related)
Intentional suppression (cognitive control)
He focused on the last line.
Intentional.
That was him.
Even now.
The interface did not congratulate him.
It did not assign purpose.
Simply displayed truth.
Ethan lay still in his crib, eyes open, breathing slow, while his mind raced freely for the first time since cancer.
No decay. Xorgetting , Ceiling.
Every book he would ever see was already his.
Every equation, every face, pattern stored, indexed, waiting.
He had spent his previous life trying to outthink death.
Now, armed with an infinite memory and a body designed for endless evolution, he felt something dangerously close to joy.
Not the loud kind.
The quiet, precise kind that comes from finally knowing
This time, the experiment would not end early.