The drive back to the mansion was a blur of white-knuckle steering and a primal, physiological terror that Lex couldn't name. By the time he reached the gates of the estate, the vertigo had subsided into a throbbing, rhythmic ache behind his eyes, leaving him with a hollow, gnawing sensation in his gut—like a book with the middle chapters ripped out.
He burst through the heavy oak doors of his study, his breath coming in jagged hitches.
"Hamilton!" Lex roared, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings. "Get the logs up! Now!"
There was no answer. The house was silent, save for the hum of the cooling fans from his desk. Lex dove into his leather chair, his fingers flying across the keyboard with desperate, frantic energy. He needed to see the data. He needed to remember why he had gone to that bridge in the middle of the night.
The monitor flickered to life, but instead of the dense, cascading research he expected, a single, mocking string of text scrolled across the screen:
[SYSTEM CRITICAL ERROR: DATA SECTOR NOT FOUND] [LOGIC BOMB DETECTED: PERMANENT OVERWRITE COMPLETE]
Lex stared at the screen, his face pale in the blue light. He clicked again. Then again. He bypassed the primary OS, diving into the kernel-level backups he had hidden in a secondary partition.
[BACKUP_01: CORRUPTED] [BACKUP_02: NULL]
"No," Lex whispered, his voice trembling. "No, no, no..."
He tried to summon the memory. He knew he had been on the bridge. He knew Clark had been there. He remembered a confrontation—an argument about trust, about spying—but the substance of it was a fractured mess of static. Every time he tried to visualize what he had actually been investigating, his mind hit a wall of blinding white noise.
He knew Clark was special. He knew there was a "secret." But the images of the impossible—the speed, the strength, the miracles—were gone. They had been replaced by a vague, haunting impression of something wrong.
The realization hit him like a physical blow: He had been robbed. Not just of data, but of his own mind.
The calm, calculated Lex Luthor—the man who prided himself on being three steps ahead of the world—snapped.
With a guttural scream of pure, unadulterated rage, he swept his arm across the mahogany desk. The crystal decanter of scotch shattered against the floor, sending amber liquid and glass shards flying. He grabbed the high-resolution monitor—the one that had just told him he was powerless—and ripped it from its mount, slamming it into the floor until the plastic casing cracked and the LCD bled black ink.
"Who did this?!" he shrieked at the empty room.
He turned his fury on the bookshelves. First editions, historical treatises, the collective wisdom of centuries—he tore them from the shelves, heaving them into the darkness. He kicked over a heavy brass floor lamp, plunging half the room into shadow.
He was a Luthor. He was supposed to be the one who watched, the one who quantified, the one who controlled. And yet, he had been lured to a bridge like a common fool, his life's work deleted, and his memory turned into a playground for someone else's scalpel.
Lex stopped, chest heaving, standing in the wreckage of his sanctuary. His hands were bleeding from the glass, but he didn't feel the pain. He looked down at the floor and saw a single physical object that had survived the purge: a blurred photograph of Clark Kent standing by the river, a photo Lex had kept in a physical drawer rather than a digital drive.
He picked it up. His mind screamed that there was something hidden behind those blue eyes—something massive. But the evidence was gone. The physics were gone. He couldn't remember why he thought Clark was anything more than a remarkably lucky farm boy, yet the gap in his memory felt like an open wound.
"You did this," Lex hissed, his voice trembling with a new, much more dangerous kind of obsession. "I don't know what you're hiding anymore, Clark... but I know you took my mind to keep it."
He didn't need the files to know he was being played. The void where his memory used to be was proof enough. The friendship was dead, replaced by a cold, vacuum-sealed paranoia.
Lex walked to the wall and pressed a hidden button. A small, physical safe behind a painting clicked open. Inside sat the Crushed Flashlight—the only physical evidence that survived. He didn't remember seeing Clark crush it. He didn't remember the PSI calculations. He just saw the impossible shape of it.
Lex gripped the mangled metal until his knuckles turned white.
"I'm going to find out what you made me forget," Lex whispered into the dark. "And when I do, I'm going to make sure you never forget me."