Messiah

a Bible-Superman crossover fanfic piece.

Messiah.

Hope is the worst of all evils.

The worst.

The words echoed insistent, becoming a chorus hum in his mind.
It wasn’t that he felt guilt. No, guilt was an emotion for lesser beings; guilt was the absence of logic, and the failure of the resolve to get the job done.
It was cruel though, that such a noble concept would become the crutch of all mankind.

Brainiac’s plan had been genius in its simplicity. Almost a waste of the vast capabilities of a 12th level intellect. After what had seemed like an endless ream of decades battling the ignorant heroes of earth, it had finally occurred to him that his battles were better fought elsewhere – in simpler times along the line of mankind’s evolution.

After all, it was not power or intellect that men craved, as much as the security of a saviour.

And that’s when it had struck him. Why waste time contending to be a god, when you could easily steal a throne?

Teleporting himself back had been like the skimming of a stone. He had landed in a fractured back-section of the middle-east among the prophets and the zealots, a world of Pharisees and religious sheep. He had timed his entry perfectly, months before the so-called Messiah of the Jews was prophesied to arrive. The people were at a fever pitch, harangued and tortured by the one they called Herod the Great, longing for the saviour their scrolls had promised them – the one who would reform a world.

From there it had been as easy as slipping on the robe of a king. The prophets were claiming that Messiah would arrive awash with signs and wonders; the perfect mixture of political oratory and grand-parlour magic.

Brainiac was more than adept at both.

The Messiah’s actions had been well documented. Brainiac had studied him well beyond the point of play-acting. But this Messiah had been too small-minded, too foolish, too full of hope. It had become his undoing – sacrificing himself for the sake of a world that would either twist him into a broken fable, or spit on his grave. He should have taken power when he had the chance, the world’s ultimate benevolent dictator – he could have made this planet perfect. He could have had it all.

Brainiac would have it all.

The Messiah’s Free Will was a myth, a useless token mankind thought they wanted. If there was going to be a higher power, shouldn’t that higher power rule those below? Braniac would show them; to be led was their true desire, and it would be his ultimate gain.
Brainiac’s big ‘coming out’ had gone without a hitch. Bereft of technology and enamoured with mysticism, the Jewish people had regarded his transformation of the wedding guest’s water as nothing short of supernatural. For Brainiac, it had been a simple manipulation of atoms that turned water into wine – for the crowd that had amassed around him, it had been the first glimmer of a Messiah.

Word of Brainiac’s deed had spread like Jerusalem Ivy. It never took long for the desperate to corral a thousand years of theology into a neon sign pointing to him.

Messiah had come, they said.

And overnight, it had been so.

Brainiac wore the title well. He was a master orator. A master of history’s recital, rather. He stood on the mount and reached into the future, borrowing Freud’s concepts of mass hypnosis to induce hysteria, he called upon the books of the great magicians to induce levitation on the waters. He even allowed himself the guilty pleasure of a batch of homemade Chinese yanhua, crude fireworks to lend wings to the people’s ‘demons’.

It had all been so easy. Easy to prey on the Achilles Heel of man, to slip into the shoes of a savior. Brainiac’s masterstroke had been in turning their hope against them, de-powering them instead of empowering them. Every time he looked out upon the crowd, it had been as a master surveying his property. An army of the willing.

And that’s when it had hit him. Perhaps even his grand view had been too small.

The thought had occurred to Brainiac on one of his daily rounds, when a distraught Jewish mother had shoved her way through the throng, presenting the limp body of her dead son to him.

If you are Messiah, she had said, raise him.

Brainiac could have stumbled. He had known full well that for all of his powers, there was one he lacked, one that set him apart from the Saviour of man: the power to give life.

Brainiac could manipulate life, but he could not give it. He could inhabit bodies, but he could not revive them.
He had faltered for a mere second and in an unreasoned moment of panic, had done the only thing possible to him; imparted his own life-force into the empty shell of the boy, cloning his own essence within the body. The people had erupted into rapturous worship, throwing themselves down into the dust of the ground. Little did they know, their Messiah had not saved a boy, he had inhabited a body, he had made a clone of himself under the face of another; a lifeless drone driven only by his bidding.

And that’s when it had hit him.

…why contend to win souls, when you could master puppets?