The boom tube vanished behind them as they sauntered through a dimly lit corridor. The coordinates had taken them somewhere underground in the centre of New South Wales, Australia. The walls were lined with thick titanium reenforced concrete and each area was radiation shielded. It was like a bomb shelter...hand-built by someone that was extremely paranoid about the world outside.

Each footstep seemed to reverberate throughout the vicinity...even the rattling of Harper's wheelchair echoed back towards them. Victor had designed it for her mere hours after the operation. It was sleek and highly advanced, as far as wheelchair's went, and had been specifically built to help her in and out of her mechs. It would morph into a skeletal frame that would surround her once inside, primarily so that she could get out whenever she needed to; without having to return to her wheelchair's last location. It would always be with her, and she'd maintain her independence. Victor had made sure of it.

Still, Harper wasn't accustomed to steering one. She struggled to keep a straight line and kept mumbling to herself about connecting it's steering mechanics to her neural implant; so that she could move it with nothing but a thought.

"Where are we?" Bruce asked darkly, a caution in his tone that he didn't even try to hide. He had always been a paranoid man, and for good reason. There was little chance for anyone to take him off guard if he was always expecting the worst anyway.

"This is where I used to conduct most of my research." Harper answered so quickly that her words could be nothing but sincere. There simply hadn't been enough time between the question and the answer for her to construct a convincing lie.

As they continued forward the pathway started to widen until, finally, they reached an incredibly large room. From the very first moment they had all entered, their attention was captured by a stark white bed. Under the equally blinding covers was an old woman with a multitude of tubes running into her arms and neck. Some were to help her breathe, others injected her with a magnetic blue liquid.

Victor scanned her, and though the results were instantaneous, his human mind couldn't comprehend what his tech was trying to tell him. It didn't make sense. Instead of blindly trusting his scans, Victor heard himself ask "Who is that?"

Harper lingered closer to the wrinkled face and readjusted the ventilator mask onto her mouth. "She's me...or rather, the original me. My...progenitor."

Victor's cybernetic body froze in place for several seconds; as if his mind had stalled even the most intricate technology in its shock. Bruce, however, narrowed his eyes at the woman as if this were some elaborate prank. That idea quickly left when his gaze lingered to the many rows of large tubes behind them; each holding a gestating humanoid within.

"What are you talking about, Harper?" Victor pressed, though the answer was being screamed in the back of his head. Usually, he was such a logical person...but this time the information simply wasn't clicking together.

"Victor." Bruce said with a sideways glance. "She's a clone."

The words reached him, but they were so ridiculous that he scoffed at the very thought. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

Victor may have even laughed at the notion if he hadn't let his eye wander towards Harper. The look of complete and utter seriousness on her face was enough to confirm Bruce's words.

The world shattered around him, each piece shifting through space and reassembling themselves to create a whole new perspective. Victor was more confused now than he had ever been, and yet it all made perfect sense. Perhaps that was what confused him most of all.

Bruce crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. Evidently he was taking this new discovery even worse than Victor was. "Start talking."

"I don't know what to tell you." Harper sighed. "We're numbered. I'm two-thousand, nine-hundred and one. We're all flash-grown in this facility using pure biological data extracted from the progenitor when she was healthy. Each cloned brain is engineered to replicate the exact neural patterns of the previous iteration, meaning that we inherit all memories."

"How long have you...been alive?" Victor asked in an unsteady voice. He was trying to look anywhere but at the clones developing in the distance. He could sense that some of them were already dead, and others hadn't finished forming all their organs.

"The progenitor is almost 215 years old." Harper replied, noticing Bruce's untrusting stare at the old and unconscious woman. "But I've only been out of my tube for five years. That's actually a lot longer than any of the others lasted."

"Does that have something to do with your sickness?" Victor enquired once again. His expression didn't hold disgust or judgement, rather just a blatant curiosity for the circumstances of her creation.

Harper nodded. "She was a genius of her time. She'd made discoveries that humankind had barely even touched on back then. I'm talking about advanced medical science and technology in the 1800s. She could have gone down in history with the likes of Einstein and Newton...but before she could ever prove her theories she fell deathly ill. There was no cure, and fearing her superior intellect being lost to the world, she took drastic measures in order to preserve it. She managed to delay the disease indefinitely and prolong her own life through external life support systems, but the cost would be total paralysis. So, in order to continue her research and find a solid cure, she created us...the collective. We worked on the anti-viral research that she started, but since we're clones, our molecular integrity was unstable. We'd begin to break down after a year or two...and eventually die. Due to necessity, we needed to start trying to extend our own lives in order to save her."

Bruce smiled. "Do you know what's funny? You're not brilliant anymore. You might've been two centuries ago, but you decided to devote your intelligence to the selfish pursuit of saving your own life instead of sharing it with the world. Without additional sources of information, intelligence stagnates. It ceases to grow. The best part? What you're trying to do has all been done. Lex Luthor gestated a human-kryptonian hybrid that stopped ageing at eighteen."

The progenitor's eyes twitched in anger but she still didn't speak. She couldn't.

"Are you talking to her, or me? Because I'm not her. I don't want what she wants...not anymore." Harper added. "And, by the way, cloning a kryptonian is impossible. You remember what happened the first time Luthor tried it?"

Victor answered "The genetic structure was beyond human scientific comprehension. When he synthesised a copy, something was missing. Intelligence was halved...interpersonal understanding was practically non-existent, and physical properties were altered due to minor degradation. That subject was what we now call Bizarro."

"Exactly. That's why he had to hybridise it using human material, to stabilise the volatile DNA with something we could understand. She doesn't want that. She wants us to be purely human...to have limits. She maybe even wanted us all to die eventually, so she still had some power over us...maybe even so that she could be the only Harper Reid again."

"Then...did you find a cure for her?" Victor asked, and Harper had never seen him look so confused in all the time she'd known him.

"No. We've been alive for so long, and still there's no definition for what she has...no one else has ever caught it. It's some kind of unique supervirus. We've come no closer to figuring it out than we were two hundred years ago."

"If that's the case, then why aren't her clones suffering from the same thing as she is?"

Harper exhaled heavily. "The honest answer is I don't know. We are basically clueless when it comes to whatever it is that she's suffering from. If we ever manage to stabilise the genetic sequencing so that our cells don't degrade and kill us within a few years, then it's entirely possible that we'll catch it as well."

"You could have done so much for mankind. Science this advanced in the 19th century could have propelled us decades ahead...but you only used it for yourself." Bruce's gaze was everything that Harper had feared; angry and deprecating. "Now you're just like thousands of others. Intelligence like yours isn't a rarity anymore."

In that moment, Harper's face twisted into an intense fury. Not for the content of his words, but for the way in which he was addressing her. "Why do you keep referring to her as me? I'm not her. I don't agree with what she did. My whole purpose in life now is to do something good for the world."

"Is that why you handed Victor over?" Bruce hissed. "You felt guilty for how little you contributed in the past?"

"Stop." Her voice broke and there was a painful ache in her chest. So much was happening all at once. She'd lost all movement in her legs, she'd revealed a secret kept hidden for two centuries, and now she was being accused of a mindset that didn't belong to her. "I already told you. I don't think the same way as she did. Does Superboy agree with everything that Clark does? Do you think they're the same person?"

"Connor is the product of both Clark and Lex. He's more like an illegitimate child, but you are an exact replica of one sole person. You said it yourself, even your neural activity has been wired to replicate hers. You might as well be the original."

"I have the memories of over two thousand people in my head, and I can tell you that every single one was different to the other. Their experiences changed them, just as mine have." Harper retorted with a hateful tremble in her tone.

"People don't change, they just pretend like they have." Bruce stepped forward, almost purposely seeming to push Harper's wheelchair on the way. It forced her to roll slightly away from the old, defenceless woman and allowed Bruce a clearer view of her sullen face. "I think it's time we spoke with this 'progenitor'."

"No. You don't want to talk to her."

"Yes, I think I do." Bruce snapped, but with such certainty that Harper was forced to comply.

She grumbled something under her breath and steered her wheelchair towards the back corner of the room. From there a dull yellow light was emanating. There was a quiet hum, and then that illumination switched to a deep crimson. Something approached them, falling away from the darkness until it was within complete view. It was a tall, lanky robot that looked as if it had been hastily built almost fifty years ago. It moved with all the grace of a tin can being kicked down the street, and when it came close enough to touch, it stepped between Bruce and the old woman protectively. It didn't take long to realise that it was connected to the Original's mind. She was controlling it.

"Why did you bring these pigeon-livered vazeys here?" The robot spoke in a voice as hideous as two slabs of metal scratching together.

Harper rubbed her index fingers against her temples, as if she were experiencing the biggest headache of her life. Thankfully, she was with two of the smartest men in the Justice League and so she didn't need to explain that the original Harper's dialect would still, at times, fall into the 19th century vocabulary. They were both likely already aware that she had just called them cowardly idiots.

"You brought this on yourself." Harper retorted with obvious despair for the woman. "You tried to kill me. That tends to draw attention."

"Do not profess that my attack was unwarranted. You vanished for fourteen months, without ever returning to relay your discoveries to me." The robot stayed hauntingly still. Even it's eyes were left entirely barren. "You have still yet to upload the last year of memories to your replacement."

The girl remained quiet for several seconds before responding, with more emotion than Victor had ever heard from her. "I...just wanted something of my own..."

"You are only one of many. By uploading those memories you are ensuring their survival." The robot explained hollowly, mirroring Bruce's previous sentiments. "You are them, and they are you. They will still be your memories."

"You're wrong." Harper murmured. "We may look the same, but my consciousness doesn't transfer to them once I'm dead. My memories might, but the person they made me...the lessons they taught me. They will die with me."

The robot clicked its fingers against its forearm impatiently, it was a disturbingly human habit for such an emotionless thing. "Think what you like, but I created you for one purpose, and you have selfishly been avoiding it. That requires correction."

"Save it for the judge." Bruce huffed with equal annoyance as the voice jeering from the robot.

"You intend on arresting me? On what charge?" Finally, the tone turned to amusement and the robot tilted its head to the side smugly. "I did nothing. I am an old, vulnerable woman. The one that created the black hole is dead. I work for the Australian government, and I am under their protection."

Bruce sneered. She was right, and that annoyed him to no end. The evidence they had would be more likely to put their own Harper in jail instead...after all the original was so ancient that she no longer resembled her clones at all; only the green of her eyes remained, and even they had faded with time. Who was going to believe that a immobile woman this old could pull off such a stunt? Especially if she had the Australian government backing her. In other words, she was untouchable. At least by any legal channel.

"We're done here." Bruce growled, and there was an incredible rush of fury in his voice; laced with a fierce determination. He would have to investigate this further. There had to be a way to end this. "Turn that hunk of garbage off."

Harper complied, but only because she was relieved that she no longer had to listen to the echo of her past. As Bruce started back down the pathway, Harper let her eyes rest on Victor. He was staring at the withering woman as if he were waiting for the punchline of a joke. The cyborg part of him could easily process this situation, but the human side...it was left in a frozen stupor.

She wanted to say something, but there were no words to make this better. She had always intended to tell him...but not like this. Fear boiled deep within her core. Bruce had already replicated the disgust that she often saw in her nightmares, and it was only a matter of time before Victor did as well. She couldn't bare the thought, and so she followed quickly after Bruce; hoping to avoid the horror in Victor's eyes for just a little while longer.