This is another excellent part of a hugely fascinating story. It begins with what happened to Claude after he attacked Lois:
Emboldened by Lois’s willingness to testify against Claude, two other young women at the Planet - one in the billing department and one in distribution - came forward with their own experiences of Claude refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer. Both had kept silent out of fear that they wouldn’t be believed. Their tales were similar – too much alcohol and the belief – promoted, apparently, by Claude - that they were to blame by getting into a compromising situation.
Faced with assault charges in his attack on Lois, and with the threat, however thin, of possible further charges in relation to the other two women, Claude accepted a plea bargain that gave him some jail time with several years’ probation.
This is really interesting. Claude will apparently do a very short time in jail. I can imagine two reasons for that: one, you want to bring him back into the story, or two, you are simply pointing out that it's not uncommon for men who attack and exploit women to get off very lightly.
And even though Lois herself was blameless in the Claude business, she still became the object of office gossip:
The story of the set-up, Claude’s attack, and the resultant charges was told and retold around the newsroom for months, with varying degrees of accuracy. While the bulk of the staff felt Claude deserved everything he got, someone coined the title ‘Mad Dog Lane’ for Lois – and it stuck.
She heard the comments, of course, even when she tried not to. The gossip was not necessarily intended to be cruel, but it isolated her further from the casual gatherings around the coffee machine.
I love how you explain Lois's nickname, Mad Dog Lane, and how you show us that this makes her even lonelier.
This is extremely moving:
Sam and Ellen may have disagreed with Lois’s choice of careers, but they both showed grudging pride when she started winning awards.
They never really understood how much Lois loved it, though. She was living a Princess Elizabeth life, making a difference, fighting dragons and exposing corruption. Forcing change for the better.
It's so sad and poignant that Sam and Ellen are completely unable to understand Lois. But it's wonderful how you make us see that Lois's journalistic career is really about "living a Princess Elizabeth life, making a difference", taking on and fighting the dragons.
And then the entire Lane family is hopelessly drifting apart. This is so melancholy:
Gradually, the three of them drifted farther apart. Lois saw Ellen once a month or so, for what had increasingly felt like a duty lunch. Their ideas and goals were so different that it was hard to find any common ground. Ellen wanted to see her safe and settled in a good society marriage, while Lois wanted to keep fighting dragons.
Sam she saw rarely. He and Ellen had finally divorced when Lois was in her third year at the university, and he’d moved to New York. He sent her a card and a check at Christmas each year, and he usually called when he was in town. They would sometimes meet for lunch, but neither of them was good at small talk, so their meetings were uncomfortably stiff and formal.
And this is incredibly poignant and at the same time so beautiful:
She couldn’t afford to get close to anyone. She needed to accept that loneliness was just another of her… ‘gifts’ wasn’t the right word. But it was just another thing she did – unlimited speed and strength, fire vision, enhanced sight and hearing, flight, loneliness – all part of the package.
I completely love this. It's a wonderful, exquisite summary of your Lois. I love it that you come up with your own names for her superpowers - not heat vision but fire vision, for example. And it's incredibly moving that her loneliness is, indeed, just a "part of the package", an inevitable consequence of all those things that irreparably set her apart from other people.
Another thing that I love and deeply admire about this story is how you often seem so knowledgeable about what you are writing about. There is that explanation about how a small and slight person must approach self defence as a dance, for example. But this, your description of computer codes, was even better, so much so that I was almost gaping in awe:
Jimmy picked it up. “Yeah, it’s computer code… Oh, cool! It’s Lisp – that’s like, AI’s mother tongue, you know,” he said excitedly.
“Lisp? AI? What’s that?” Lois asked.
“It’s – Lisp is - a computer programming language,” Jimmy began, “It’s used in AI – artificial intelligence - programming, among other things. It’s been around a long time – since like the 1950s, I think. It’s almost as old as Fortran. It’s called Lisp ‘cause it’s a list-processing language – get it? L-I-S from ‘list’ and P from ‘processing’. It’s also popular with hackers. It’s better than C or C++, actually, because it’s extremely versatile…”
“Jimmy –“ Lois started.
“See,” he continued, warming to his subject, “it handles complex data structures more easily than other programming languages, using list processing, recursion, and character string manipulation…”
I have really no idea of what you are talking about here, but I know one thing - I believe you. And I like it when I can believe in people, when they seem to know their stuff.
But now you have brought the Space Station Prometheus into the story, and as most people know, it was when the Prometheus was about to crash that Clark revealed his powers for the first time. I feel, therefore, that we are approaching a critical juncture in your story. Something important must happen. Either Lois will have to reveal her powers to the world, or else Clark will come to her super-rescue. I wouldn't mind the second alternative, but at any rate, I'm so eager to find out what's going to happen next!
Ann
