Part One:
Things were moving too fast for Clark to keep up with. The man was carrying him away from the device. Now he was placing him down on a workbench surrounded by boxes and wrapping paper and sellotape. Festive bows were being tied around him. The man's hands moved feverishly fast for his advanced age as if he was in a hurry. Now he was being stripped and dressed in new clothes. Clark plucked at the cheap, clinging fabric. They were like the clothes you might dress a doll in. He wasn't a doll. Was he?
Behind him, Clark could see his body slumped in the neural extractor, drooling, empty eyes staring, its head still festooned with electrodes. He missed it already. He felt safe in it.
"I changed my mind. I want to go back," Clark blurted.
"'Changed your mind' indeed, Superman!" the old man chortled as if Clark had said the funniest thing in the world. "Changed your mind! Hahaha!" He muted the ex-man of steel with a press of a remote and stuffed him in a box.
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Where is Lois? How long have I been in here?
Sealed within a cardboard box, entombed within packing peanuts, the gynoid that was Superman tried to get his thoughts in order, a difficult task with the hardware he had to work with. His mind moved like molasses, agonizingly slow, every thought a sheer act of will, forced across the overtaxed circuit board of his brain. Was this how it felt like to be a human? No. This was how it felt to be a toaster.
For a man who'd absorbed the Library of Congress in an evening of light bedtime reading, the diminishment of mental faculties shocked him more than the near-total loss of physical strength. The limitations of his mind pressed in, his mind palace now more like a prison, doors that had once led to familiar memories now opening on empty voids.
Concepts that had come as natural as breathing to his Kryptonian mind were now so far beyond this rudimentary computer to process that he could barely remember what they were. He set himself a puzzle. He tried to repeat the astronavigation formulae that he'd once solved to chart a course through space back to his destroyed homeworld of Krypton.
[PROCESSOR OVERHEAT. THROTTLING SOFTWARE. REPLACE YOUR AIR FILTERS] filled the center of his vision. His thoughts stuttered and froze, and it was all he could do to hold onto the thought of who he was, let alone where or why.
Slowly the workload on his system eased. It was fine. He just had to simplify his thinking, that was all. He calmed his racing mind, analyzing each thought in turn, even as a dozen others queued up behind it, demanding his attention.
First things first. Where was he? In a box. Good. This was progress. Where was the box? He could hear faint Christmas music, the sort Lois loved to play in the apartment. Oh, that made sense! He'd been delivered. He was meant to be Lois Lane's Christmas present. This was all going to plan after all.
He wasn't in peril... was he? He worked on that thought next. No, this was precisely what he'd asked for, had paid Make-A-Maid to do to him, and the nice old man at the store had been so helpful and attentive, tripping over himself to strap the neural extractor around his Kryptonian skull.
So why did he feel so uneasy?
Was it the loss of his powers that unsettled him? No, he'd been depowered before and always adapted just fine. What did worry him was the build quality of his body. It was self-evident now that the company had cut corners with the computer systems and he recalled now the shell they had put him in - the dents in the plastic chassis, the scuff marks, the sights of rough usage about the rubber lips. He was a doll that had seen too many owners and too little maintenance.
Even the kindly Make-A-Make technician, old and feeble as he was, had barely exerted anything as he popped his arms and legs out of their sockets to packaged Clark away in his festive cardboard coffin, resting in pieces.
Brittle plastic. Vulnerable circuitry. A hard knock on the package might be the end of him. Even a strong electromagnet held up against the computer chip holding his consciousness would erase him forever.
No. He had absolute faith in the US Postal Service. So that wasn't what worried him. Next thought.
Or was it the way the Make-A-Maid technician's heart had thumped so loudly with excitement as he strapped Clark into the mind extractor? Had it been the ecstatic gleam in the man's eyes as he stared hungrily into Clark's, as the superhero's mind was ripped out of his brain one agonizing neuron at a time? Had it been the distant sensation of the man's gnarled fingers tracing the contours of his rock-hard abdominals, the last thing he'd felt before his Kryptonian body was stripped away for good?
Wait. Yes. Yes, that seemed very pertinent to the current-
[PROCESSOR OVERHEAT. THROTTLING SOFTWARE]
The subroutine derailed that train of thought.
How long have I been in here? Where is Lois? He'd rescued her plenty of times; it was only fair that she come to him in his hour of need.
And then he heard her.
"Ohhh, Clark." Lois Lane's voice filtered through the packaging, low and breathy. "Oh, Claaark... your hands are.... Oooh!"