I'll Be Your Surrogate Mother

Things moved quickly.

Lois Lane signed the forms that Lex Luthor put in front of her. Nurses came in. The reporter found herself disrobing, putting on a paper shifts with a hole cut out to expose her abdomen. Weighing, taking blood. They gave her shots...hormones, to make the body think it was pregnant. Mercy was right there next to her, the focus of her own little swarm of medical technicians. They took out her nipple piercings, earrings. Intravenous IV. Bright yellow lights. Two medical beds, side by side.

One hour stretched into two. Maria was there, sweaty palm grasping Lois Lane's hand hard.

"Thank you," she whispered. Lois squeezed her palm in response.

They were wheeled into a surgery bay. Lex Luthor was there, in surgical garb, gloved and masked, holding a great chrome canister that looked like something out of Buck Rogers.

"There is some danger in the procedure," he said. "For both of you. We're going to anesthetize you Lois, but we cannot put you fully under. Then we will begin the irradiation of Maria. When she has regressed to twenty inches, we will begin the surgical procedure. Unlike a normal pregnancy, your womb has not yet stretched to accommodate a full-sized fetus. We have some **** which will help, but we may have to wait until she is further regressed to finish implantation. We have a synthetic placenta and umbilical cord to attach, and sterile amniotic fluid. We also have **** to lower the risk of tissue rejection..."

He took a breath. "...but even with every precaution, things can go wrong. Are you ready and willing to proceed?"

Lois Lane took a deep breath. She looked over at Maria, cracked a smile. "You didn't even buy me dinner, and here you're about to knock me up."

The young woman grinned, **** back tears. "Thank you...mommy."

They looked at Lex and nodded.

A gas mask slid over the reporter's head. A nurse swabbed her exposed stomach, a black line marked out where the incision would be. She breathed in the chemical smell as the gas began to flow, counting back slowly from ten. Her body seemed to grow very heavy. Lois shifted her head on the pillow to look at Maria.

Lex pressed a button. The end of the cartoon gun slid open, and a red light played out, over Maria's form.

For a moment, nothing happened. Maria blinked those hazel eyes. Lois felt herself breathing, eyes unfocused for a moment. When she focused again, Maria was...smaller. Skin a little smoother. She looked so young then, like women look who are girls just playing as women, raiding their mother's makeup cases.

The face grew puffy as baby fat shifted. The paper smock was loose on her body, the once-generous breasts flatter, just visible for a moment as twin little cones tipped with bright pink nipples. Steam seemed to be coming off of her, and Lois remembered that the human body was mostly water...as Maria grew smaller, she'd have to shed mass somehow...

Soon, Maria looked like a skinny little tomboy, the paper smock way too big for her. Lips moving, a brush of acne erupting across her face and then receding quickly. Lois Lane could feel her breasts rise and fall, heart pounding as she felt the process accelerate.

Visibly now, every minute seemed to regress Maria another year. She was a child of eight or nine, two feet shorter than she had been. Kids grew a couple inches a year, and now Maria was shedding that much height every minute. At the age of four she was a cherub, the pink-and-red dyed hair too big for her head, forty inches long.

An infant, wiggling in the red glow.

Lois felt the shadow of the doctor over her, felt the edge of the scalpel on her belly.

Maria was curled into a fetal position now, the hair had fallen off, barely able to keep her eyes open.

The pain was a distant thing as they stretched the wound open, nurses mopping up the blood with sponges.

Gloved hands lifted the tiny fetus out of the paper smock. Lex Luthor tracked it with the ray gun, keeping the crimson light on her as they brought her over to Lois Lane's stomach. The reporter couldn't turn her head to see. Something was happening in the reporter's womb, the doctor fishing around with hands and instruments, barking orders. The red light switched off. Lois saw the nurses wheel Maria's bed with the empty smock away, bring in an IV stand with pints of blood. Attached it to her arm.

A nurse placed her hands on either side of Lois Lane's head and shifted her until the back of it was against the pillow. They had set up a mirror so that she could see. Maria was small now, ten inches, maybe less. A bloody little blob of a thing. There was a long blue-pink tube from the fetus' swollen belly, trailing off into the gaping wound below. Lois felt something trickle out of her eye as the tiny form was slid inside her womb. Pale fluid began to fill it as the doctor quickly but methodically began to close the wound, using a little mechanical crab-like device. She had seen that before. Something LexCorp was working on. They said it healed without a scar.

A weird weight in her stomach. A strange heaviness and pressure that had nothing to do with the anesthesia.

Lois Lane stared at the swollen belly. Like a woman five months pregnant.

"Now," Lex Luthor said. "We wait."