A few days after Halloween, on the third day of martial law, Earth experienced a worldwide blackout. More precisely, Brainiac went offline for over ten seconds.
This did have some impact, as global automated factories and the vast majority of factories on Nemesis were under his control. During those ten-odd seconds, many people also sought his help, but Brainiac gave no response.
However, the outage was far too brief. Brainiac reconnected quickly, so no panic broke out. Everyone simply assumed there was some issue with the network signal. Brainiac himself gave that explanation as well, and the matter never developed into anything significant.
Only a very small number of informed people knew what had happened. The one who understood the details best was Lex Luthor, who had been helping Brainiac maintain his programs.
"What the hell happened?" Lex muttered to himself. "It's a complete mess, impossible to describe. It looks like some kind of evil god."
Clark, who had just walked into the office, heard him rambling and thought he had finally gone mad from overworking. Setting down the coffee in his hand, he sighed. "Are you really not going to sleep for a while? You've been working for over thirty hours straight."
Lex responded with a massive eye roll.
"It's broken. It's all broken. It's turned into a complete mess." Lex stared at the computer screen. "This thing can't even be called a program anymore. Gibberish is more like it. Brainiac, Brainiac... dying on the road to evolution is perfectly normal. I'll bury this computer in your grave."
That gave Clark quite a fright. "What happened to Brainiac? Is something wrong with him?"
At that moment, Clark activated his super-hearing and caught some panicked voices. It seemed Brainiac had stopped responding. His expression immediately turned grave.
"What exactly is