End: Glitch The Matrix

If Lois Lane's yeas as a reporter had taught her anything, it was that many people floated along with what they were supposed to do. Most never dreamed of questioning the rules. Disruption often exposed how fragile such systems were. Do something unexpected, and it would provoke a response.

The bathroom was a standard hospital bathroom...complete with drop ceiling. The pregnant reporter grinned as she stood up on the toilet and reached up on her tip-toes, to slide a ceiling panel aside. The reporter grabbed a handful of toilet paper, and with a grunt of effort, the reporter brace herself against the walls and climbed up, into the space.

She had heard about prisoners who had done this sort of thing. Mostly, such crawl spaces went nowhere...only contained air conditioning ducts, sprinkler systems, electrical wiring for lights. Which suited Lois perfectly. In the cramped but surprisingly dustless space, the reporter found what she was looking for: a light fixture not far from a sprinkler head. With a grunt of effort, she pulled some wires free.

Two live wires. A pile of dry toilet paper. A smoke censor. The reporter grinned devilishly as the wires sparked. The sparks kindled the paper. The smoke triggered the censor...

...and all throughout the ward, the sprinklers went on. The alarms sounded.

Lois Lane crawled through the ceiling-space, away from the merry little blaze. The alarms would bring guards, medics, firemen, something. That would give Lois a chance to escape, that would...

...the ceiling collapsed beneath Lois Lane's weight. For a brief moment, the reporter felt weightless. Then gravity tried to take hold, and the world dissolved into static.

She woke up with a gasp, strapped into a gynecology chair. Lex Luthor, in a white labcoat, stood at her side, as he injected something into an IV line that ran into a part on her arm.

Lois Lane looked around, at least as well as she could strapped to the chair with her legs in stirrups. There were four other chairs. Her fellow inmates were seated, eyes closed, apparently sleeping. She noted the electrodes taped their naked bodies, the swell of their abdomens more pronounced than when she had last seen them.

"What..." Lois said as she tried to struggle.

"You left the boundaries of the simulation," Luthor explained, not ungently as he reached out with a sponge to mop her brow. "Our first attempts at industrialized surrogacy revealed certain issues. Solitary pregnancies were traumatic to the mother-to-be. Group pregnancies, with the correct scenario...well, you saw. The ladies have adapted to it quite well. Of course, we didn't expect you to stumble across our little operation. Your inclusion has been quite disruptive, though it has allowed us to improve our simulation. This is the sixth scenario you've managed to jailbreak."

The reporter strained against her bonds, but her body felt oddly weak...and then she noticed something about the distension of her stomach. The way her nails were too long, her once carefully-trimmed pubes wildly overgrown.

"How long?" she asked.

"About ten weeks," Lex Luthor said...and now he smiled, coldly. "Superman has been flying around the world, worried out of his mind. Fortunately, this facility is guarded against his X-ray vision."

"No," Lois said as she renewed her struggles.

"Oh, by the way," Lex said as the sponge ran down over her swollen stomach. Lois could just see the dark line start to creep up toward her navel. "It's twins. Multiples are fairly common in IVF procedures. I'm sure Jimmy Olsen will be thrilled when we tell him he's now a daddy. I expect quite a lot of good press from him."

"No!" Lois panicked now. She felt the catheter hose in her urethra. A dull pain in the back of her head. The hair there had been shaved, and there was something...long and cold and metal...that pierced the back of her skull and into her brain.

"The technicians are already adjusting the parameters for the new scenario," Luthor said. "We'll have to wipe your memories again, of course. Don't worry, it won't hurt the babies. When you wake up, it'll be just a dream. You'll get to live your whole night out over again."

Something buzzed against the reporter's pussy. She saw a mechanical arm press a vibrating wand against her clit. The powerful shock was soothing. The whole chair began to rumble, to massage her muscles...and too late, Lois felt the drowsiness hit her.

"No..." Lois Lane's eyelids grew heavy as the lassitude encompassed her entire body. She could barely keep her eyes open. "You...you can't..."

Lex Luthor's smug smile would haunt the reporter's dreams...and then the dreams became fragments...vague feelings of unease...and Lois Lane stepped back through the door of the club, on her night out, eager to find out what happened to those missing women.