Clark awoke with a start when he heard the slam of a car door, instantly thankful to the intrusion on his dream, wherein something was slipping away from him, something he'd wanted, but couldn't keep. He couldn't identify the loss, only the pain of letting it go.

He heard the front door open, followed by cordial voices - the ones people adopt when barely-casual acquaintances drop by. Curiosity piqued, Clark listened intently as he rolled out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater. Dr. Crosby is here?

Clark clamored down the stairs, arriving on the landing just in time to hear his mother say "There he is now."

"Hello, Clark," Dr. Crosby greeted as Jonathan closed the door behind her.

"Hi, Dr. Crosby," he answered with a raised eyebrow, offering to take the box she held.

"I know you're wondering why I'm here." She was as composed as ever.

Clark nodded as he set the box on the table, but Dr. Crosby spoke again before he could answer her.

"Where is Marin?"

"She's asleep," Martha replied. "Just like you're supposed to be," she continued, turning to her son, and then again addressing Dr. Crosby. "He's only slept two hours since all of this started."

"She's up," Clark corrected, hearing light footsteps on the floor above.

"Good, I have some news that you both need to hear. But first, Clark, would you please help me unload the car?"

Clark glanced outside the conventional way - through a window. "Looks like a full load of really bad news."

"It's everything from the Metropolis lab. Everything the Foundation has that relates to you."

"Dr. Crosby?" Marin's voice slipped in to the conversation from where she'd appeared almost silently (to everyone but Clark) at the foot of the stairs. "I thought I heard your voice."

"Clark, let's get that car unloaded," Jonathan directed, clapping his son on the shoulder as opened the front door.

As there was nobody present from whom Clark had to hide his abilities, he used them to make quick work of unloading the car, and before long the whole group was again seated at the table, this time with Dr. Crosby at the head and a series of boxes laid before them.

Dr. Crosby found herself unexpectedly tongue-tied in the face of her predicament. She'd rarely been the type to be bound by emotions, but for the second time in less than a day she struggled with how to deliver such a heavy revelation. "I suppose I'll begin with what you already know," she commenced. "Marin is carrying a child resulting from an externally germinated embryo. Has she been able to tell you how this happened?"

"Uh… very briefly," Clark answered.

"It isn't necessary to go into much detail of the procedure, I think you can surmise that for yourselves if you must. The real news is how the embryo was created, which, if you don't mind my saying so, is quite extraordinary, despite the circumstances." She paused and was met with only silence, so she took a breath and moved on. "Dr. Ripley took most of his end-stage research with him, meaning the reports that stated his findings. What we've uncovered so far is largely his notes of the research as it progressed, but the limited study of these that we've managed to conduct so far has led us to some startling conclusions.

"As you know, Clark gave us a blood sample with which to begin our work nearly eight months ago. Analyzing a DNA sequence should take years to the degree that Ripley has taken it, but he somehow managed to make unprecedented discoveries - things as yet unaccomplished with human DNA - in only a few months."

"And what exactly did he discover?" interposed Jonathan, who was growing impatient with the doctor's diatribe despite his dread of the news.

"A very great deal, as it turns out. But in regard to the embryo, I must back up a little. Before we began this program for Clark, we had been developing some pharmaceuticals, one of which was a general anasthetic, given the working label 'EF-01' in its earliest formulation. It has been refined a number of times, into what we now have, EF-19. Has Clark informed you of its effects?"

Jonathan and Martha nodded mutely.

"Good. Now, in its earlier forms, its effects were more severe, more prolonged. The very first test subjects had to undergo extensive memory regression therapy, which was regrettably unsuccessful and left them with no memory of anywhere from one to three of the preceding months. We were only testing it as an anesthetic then, the side effects with memory were unexpected. But apparently Ripley found he could use them to his advantage. In a later trial, Marin was one of the test subjects - really only by default when a volunteer dropped out and she insisted for the sake of the trial's integrity. Ripley conducted the trial and supervised the subjects' recovery. It was then that he harvested her eggs."

All eyes turned sympathetically to Marin, who fixed her gaze once again on the wood grain of the table top.

"He developed a method to mature the eggs externally, which is why he was able to procure viable eggs without Marin being on a hormone protocol. This was just before we began studying Clark in depth - only Ripley had been on the project at that point, and he had already made a discovery about the blood. That was why he stole the eggs - he needed time to manipulate them."

"What discovery?" Clark asked.

"Manipulate them how?" Marin followed. "Just the maturing?"

Dr. Crosby didn't answer them directly. She'd been rehearsing this monologue since she'd left Metropolis, and found the easiest way to get it all out was not to stray from her script. "You see, traditional fertilization wasn't possible, because the cell structures of a human ovum were unable to communicate with Clark's DNA, to put it in simple terms. Over the past several months, Ripley has been using extractions from Clark's blood to alter the genetic makeup of Marin's eggs. Otherwise, they wouldn't understand that they'd been fertilized, and cell division would never occur."

"I'm sorry, maybe I'm just not following, but I don't understand what that means." Jonathan said.

Dr. Crosby took a deep breath. It was time to drop the bomb. "It has two pretty drastic implications. The first, according to Ripley's findings as far as we can tell, is that Clark has ninety-eight chromosomes in forty-six pairs."

Marin gasped. "But then… how?"

Something from biology class clicked in Clark's mind. "Humans have forty-six chromosomes in twenty-three pairs, right?"

"Exactly," Dr. Crosby nodded. "Genetic incompatibility."

Clark quietly digested that information, and now, all eyes were on him. He looked up and the first face he saw was his mother's, a single tear trailing over her cheek. He turned to Dr. Crosby. "So… I can't…?"

"Father a child, no," Dr. Crosby answered quietly.

They were all silent again. Silence was becoming a recurrent affliction at the Kents' kitchen table.

"Clark?" Martha prodded.

"What?" Clark looked up sharply, forcing his dejected expression away. "I'm fine. No big deal. Dr. Crosby, please continue."

"We can take a break, Clark, if you need to," Dr. Crosby assured. She was no longer concerned with pressing through her monologue. She was almost at the part that she dreaded most.

"No, let's get this over with."

"Okay. I'm going to skip ahead a bit, and then I'll come back to the embryo. Dr. Ripley, as I said, accomplished a staggering feat in the analyzing of your blood, and it appears that he was able to take the known process of chromosome dye banding - which is one way that types of chromosomes can be categorized - a few steps further, and was actually able to determine what each of them is responsible for. We're missing a great deal of his research here, so we don't know how he was able to do this, but his notes indicate that it was a success.

"Concurrently, he postulated that, even if he were actually able to create this embryo, he had doubts as to whether Marin could be able to carry the child to term. He feared that she wouldn't be strong enough, even though the child wouldn't be exposed to direct sunlight, he decided to prepare for the possibility that it may absorb some solar energy through her, becoming too strong in utero and putting her in jeopardy. Having isolated your genes, he used the ones that he determined give you your strength invulnerability, and derived something from them - a self-replicating genetic mutation that he called GM093. We have virtually no notation on this, other than it needed to be administered only once, and would independently alter the subject's genetic makeup. We assume he gave it to Marin at some point, though we have no documentation of this."

Dr. Crosby turned to address Marin directly. "He worried that there might be a mild side effect in relation to the sun - since your DNA was modified to make you absorb solar energy and thereby make you stronger, he postulated that your human skin wouldn't hold up as well, and prolonged exposure to the sun might cause it to crack and bleed, beginning at the extremeties."

Marin looked down at her hands, which were indeed still cracked as she'd noticed before. "Is that serious?" She had a thousand other questions in the light of this news, but that one was the easiest to ask.

"Nothing a strong sun block and some shade won't prevent."

Marin nodded. "Okay." She waited, expecting someone else to speak, but realized that all eyes had once again turned back to her. "So… what, Ripley made me into some kind of quasi-Kryptonian?"

Dr. Crosby nodded. "It appears he was trying to, in some ways. But it wasn't enough."

"What do you mean?"

"He couldn't fertilize the egg as it was, so he modified it. But he still couldn't combine your genetic material with Clark's. So he replaced it."

"He replaced it?" Marin squeaked.

"Yes, he removed the egg's nucleus and replaced it with the nucleus of one of Clark's cells."

Marin's face fell. "So, it isn't a baby at all."

Dr. Ripley shook her head. "Not exactly, no."

"What is it then?" Jonathan and Martha both queried.

"It's a clone," Clark answered before Dr. Crosby could. "Isn't it?" His quiet disappointment was quickly turning to anger. "Isn't that what it is?"

Dr. Crosby hesitated for a moment before she answered. "…Yes… but there's something else."

"Of course there's something else!" Clark cried. "There's always something else! What is it this time?"

Time for that bomb to explode. Dr. Crosby closed her eyes. "He didn't create just one embryo."

Clark could only shake his head. "How many?"

"The rest are in cryopreservation, I don't know where."

"How many?"