Twenty-seven-year-old Kyle Steiner, lanky at 5′ 11″ and 165 pounds, with wavy brown hair and blue eyes, was born 1 October 1990 to adventurous socialite parents Nico Steiner, Jr. and Lily Steiner of New York. Although the young Kyle loved and admired his dashing parents, and they certainly loved him, if in their own distracted, absent-minded way, it was his paternal grandmother, Ellie Steiner, who was closest to his heart. And he to hers.
Turning 71 the year her first and only grandchild was born, Ellie Steiner (neé Campbell) was always a free spirited and determined woman, following her own course no matter what “society” might think of it. At the age of 18 she decided to do the Grand Tour, a rite of passage still common in that day, but one usually restricted to the sons of the wealthy and upper middle class. An indulgent father and supportive mother, however, saw her off on 15 May 1937, sailing from New York aboard the SS Arandora Star for Southhampton.
Ellie enjoyed her months of touring the great cities and historical regions of Europe, but it was when she reached Austria that she fell in love. She had always intended to pursue an education in chemistry after her Grand Tour, but her fascination with Austria and its people, and the chance to study under the renowned chemist Hans Fischer, led her to apply to the University of Vienna. She was accepted as a chemistry major for the fall term of 1937, much to the surprise of her bemused parents.
During her first year at University Ellie met and fell in love with an Austrian philosophy major, Nico Steiner, and they were soon inseparable. Both of their courses of study went well that first year – in fact Ellie became a star pupil of Herr Professor Fischer. But storm clouds were beginning to gather over Austria and the world, beginning with the Anschluss, in March of 1938. The most immediate concern for Ellie after the German annexation of Austria was the takeover of the university administration by Nazi shill Dr. Gerhart von Richter. She took an instant dislike to the man, as did Herr Professor Fischer.
But their period of discomfort under von Richter’s rule was short-lived. Just before her second year at the university was to begin Ellie found herself, along with Fischer, Nico and hundreds of other students and teachers, dismissed and barred from the school. Aside from everything else, it enraged Ellie that all her notes on the work she had been pursuing under Prof. Fischer were confiscated by the Nazi von Richtor, apparently himself a chemist of some sort.
Watching the unfolding events in Europe, Nico and Ellie shared a growing unease. Although only half Jewish, on his mother’s side, Nico doubted the Nazis would appreciate such distinctions. Ellie’s own liberal leanings, as well as being a foreign woman, left her in a vulnerable position as well, and her family was urging her, quite strongly, to come home. For months they dithered, as Ellie and Dr. Fischer attempted to recreate their work in his private lab, but in the end the handwriting on the wall was too clear to ignore – it was time to get out.
Fischer returned to Munich, and Ellie prepared to sail for America. But she was not willing to leave Nico behind, and so she proposed to him. After his surprised but instant acceptance, the two arranged a hasty ceremony at St. Rupert’s Church. They sailed for America a month later, in March of 1939, as husband and wife. The Campbells were surprised to find they had a son-in-law, and a little dubious at first, but quickly came to appreciate Nico’s virtues. Being themselves indifferent Episcopalians, at best, they weren’t bothered in the least with Nico’s Semitic roots and quasi-agnosticism.
Ellie found a place at Cornell University, and in 1943 she graduated with a Doctorate in Organic Chemistry. Nico pursued his interests in philosophy and ethics, publishing papers in various academic and not-so-academic journals. In 1945 his first book, a collection of essays, was published by Signet Press. After several years learning the ropes at Houghton Chemical Corporation, Ellie went on to found her own company, Steiner Pharmaceuticals, and over the next seven years patented a number of her discoveries.
As time passed she and Nico had been worried that they would not be able to have children, since none had come to them, despite serious, if enjoyable, energy expended in the attempt. So when, at age 31, Ellie gave birth to a son the couple were overjoyed. The next year Ellie decided to finally sell her company to Sovereign Industries, who had been after her for years with increasingly tempting offers, and in December of 1951 they signed a deal that included both cash and Sovereign stock worth many, many millions.
The Steiners sold their Long Island home a few years later, and by 1958 had completed construction on their estate in upstate New York, on land bordering the Shindagin Hollow State Forest. The sprawling mansion and its outbuildings included a state-of-the-art laboratory for Ellie to continue her private chemical researches, and one of the most respected private libraries in the Northeast for Nico. Eventually Ellie took a faculty position at her alma mater, Cornell, while Nico continued to be published in numerous journals and to write books that sold moderately well.
Nico, Jr. grew up on the Steiner estate, and while he attended public school he also enjoyed private tutors. Having the run of the great state forest behind his home, he came to think of the Shindagin Hollow as his own private adventuring domain, at least until he moved to New York City to attend NYU. He had wanted to attend the Tesla Institute of Science in New Atlantis, but both his parents were opposed – not least because they found the dangers of metahuman activity in that city too great a risk for their only child.
Nico, Jr. soon found that New York suited him just fine after all, and he fell quickly into the lifestyle of the young, rich and good-looking that only New York can provide. It was in his junior year at NYU that he met Lily Chapman, a beautiful model and rising star. The two fell for one another, hard. But Lily’s career stalled at the age of 21 when she lost a million dollar Revlon Cosmetics contract to Lauren Hutton. It had been a close call, she later learned, and Hutton’s agent was rumored to have used chicanery to tip the scales. Lily never forgave Hutton for “stealing” what should have been hers – in later years Kyle never heard his mother refer to her former rival as anything other than “that gap-toothed hussy.” He was also never quite sure if her career had really stalled at that point, or if she had just given up in a petulant snit. As much as he loved his mother, even as a child he’d recognized the latter possibility was likely.
Whatever the truth, after Nico’s graduation she threw herself full force into the jet-setter lifestyle that they both loved. They were married in 1979 at St. Ruperts in Vienna, a nod to Nico’s parents and family history. That was the last time for many years that Ellie and Nico, Sr. were really happy with their son.
Despite desultory attempts at a few business ventures involving his Geology degree, Nico seemed content to live off his trust fund and travel the world seeking excitement and adventure. He had always been fascinated by Doc Savage’s many adventures back in the 30’s and 40’s. The one thing he did work hard at was ingratiating himself with Savage International, the foundation set up by Clark Savage in the mid-70’s, and he and Lily often traveled with SI missions around the world, especially to Africa.
By 1989 Nico, Sr. and Ellie were becoming concerned that they would never have grandchildren, and after a heated exchange and the threat of being cut off, the jet-setting couple agreed to settle down. They moved into the west wing of the upstate mansion, and less than a year later Kyle was born – Nico, Jr. was 40 and Lily was 37. He would be their only child.
Although they seemed to make a real effort, parenthood was not Nico and Lily’s strong suit. While they loved their son, they also loved the adventurous and glamorous lives they’d lived for so long. Having kept the condo in New York, they alternated between lavishing Kyle with gifts and sporadic bursts of attention, and disappearing for months at a time. Having Ellie and Nico, Sr., not to mention the mansion’s staff, on hand as replacement guardians probably made those choices easier for them.
But Kyle loved listening to his dad’s stories of his travels and adventures, and absorbed his fascination with the adventurers and “mystery men” of the early 20th Century. He would sit enthralled and quiet, so as not to be noticed and sent away, when his father’s exotic and exciting guests would visit, talking for hours about far-away places and mysterious events. He also loved the trips downstate to NYC with his mother and the time spent together at the condo there gave him both a love of live theater and a taste for fine clothes.
Sadly, this idyllic (at least in his memory) time came to an end just after the turn of the new century. The summer before his 11th birthday, Kyle’s father disappeared while traveling in Africa. He was to have met up with an SI group in Buranda, but apparently never arrived. SI itself instituted a search, but nothing was ever conclusively learned about Nico Steiner, Jr.’s disappearance. Lily, who had decided at the last minute not to go with her husband, so as to attend Kyle’s Little League playoff game, took the news poorly. She spent increasing amounts of time at the condo in NYC, and although Kyle would visit occasionally, the visits never seemed to go well. Lily’s drinking also seemed to increase, but this was something Kyle wouldn’t really understand until looking back years later.
The immediate result, however, was clear enough — the boy spent most of his time over the next year with his grandmother. She had always really been his primary maternal figure, and as he got older they had begun to find a shared a love of pure science. Ellie had encouraged him towards chemistry, which was her own main passion, and he liked it well enough. But when his passion for theoretical physics became obvious she was quick to help him grow in that direction as well. By the time he turned 12 he was spending almost all his free time in her lab, working on various projects in both chemistry and physics.
On the night of 21 June 2003 Kyle’s world again took a sharp turn into tragedy. He was awakened in the early hours of the morning by his grandfather, who was crying and obviously distraught. He was forced to tell the confused boy that his mother was dead, killed in a car crash somewhere between the city and Ithaca. Kyle was never able to get much in the way of details from his grandparents, but over time he began to suspect she had been drunk. He then began to worry that maybe she had killed someone else in the accident, forcing his grandparents to admit that it had been a single car accident.
Lily was buried in Ithaca, NY, her hometown, and a second marker was placed next to hers for Nico, Jr., although there was no body to bury in his case. Nico, Sr. passed away a little over a year later… of grief, his grandmother always insisted. She herself was devastated by the double loss – for all that Lily sometimes aggravated her, she had loved her like the daughter she’d never had, and her son had been her great love, if not her great joy. Kyle was that joy, however, and she had to go on for him, if for no other reason.
As with his father, she insisted that he attend public high school, but she also tutored him herself and got him into science classes at Cornell in his junior and senior years. He took up the épée, as fencing had been the one sport his father had been both good at and enthusiastic about – Doc Savage had been a skilled swordsman, after all, he’d told his son. Kyle excelled in school, and that, along with his demonstrable aptitude for the sciences, got him admittance to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was pleased to learn that the school actually had a fencing team, and he went out for it his freshman year.
Kyle’s grandmother died quietly in her sleep in the spring of 2011, near the end of his junior year This proved a grief to him greater than any of the other deaths in his young life. With his mother dead and his father long ago declared legally dead, Kyle was the sole inheritor of the remaining Steiner fortune. Although now a multimillionaire, Kyle had little interest in the material aspects of his inheritance, in the way that only the truly privileged and young, who have never really wanted for anything, can be uninterested. The only thing that really excited him was the fact that his grandmother had bequeathed to him all of her personal journals and research notebooks, many of which he had never seen before.
He spent that summer poring over the books, many of which were written in Austrian German, apparently as an added layer of security to casual prying eyes. While a little rusty, he quickly brushed up on the German his grandfather had taught him as a child, and was able to decipher the notebooks. He was shocked to find that his grandmother had been working most of her adult life on attempting to create a chemical formula to “die Menschheit verbessern.“
At first horrified at what sounded like Nazi “übermensch” science, he was soon relieved to find that Ellie’s goals had been quite the opposite of the Axis mad-men who had unleashed such horrors on the world in their search for “Aryan perfection.” She had sought to truly improve the entire human race, to help it achieve its utmost potential, not to create super soldiers.
Kyle spent a feverish summer organizing the notebooks and attempting to continue and perhaps even complete his grandmothers work. In her final notes she had indicated she felt close to a breakthrough, and he longed to make it for her, in her memory. It was an expensive, and frustrating proposition, however, as failure after failure dogged him. With the beginning of the school year fast approaching, he began staying up for days at a time, only collapsing into an exhausted sleep when his mind and body refused to obey him anymore.
On the night of 16 August 2011 Kyle made his breakthrough. He had a non-toxic, non-quantifiable serum based on his grandmother’s organic chemistry and his own quantum mechanical inspiration. He was sure it would work, but he was out of lab monkeys, and he’d been awake for almost 70 straight hours… in retrospect, it’s the only explanation he could offer for what he did next. Kyle plunged the syringe into his own spinal cord, and collapsed at the searing pain, which thankfully faded quickly into unconsciousness…
When Kyle next opened his eyes he found himself in a private room at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, more than 200 miles from his lab and home. Confused and disoriented, he eventually learned that he had apparently knocked over a bunsen burner along with several flammable reagents in his spasms after injecting himself (that little bit of information he kept to himself – everyone seemed to think he had simply collapsed, again, from exhaustion) and started a fire. The servants, smelling the smoke, had rushed in to pull his unconscious body out, and extinguish the flames. Tobias, the estate’s elderly major domo, had called for an ambulance and, wise in the ways of the wealthy, the family’s lawyers.
The firm of Cooley, Breckinridge and Venn, LLP had served the Steiners for decades, and saw to having their client airlifted to the family’s preferred hospital (and the wing named for them) as soon as he had been stabilized. Doctors had initially been concerned about what he might have inhaled, but despite being in a coma for five days, they eventually had to agree that Kyle was now fine, and had suffered no lasting harm from his “accident.”
Nine days after injecting himself with his experimental serum, an event that had become terribly hazy and indistinct in his memory, Kyle returned to his mansion and the burned lab. As he had feared, it was a disaster. Tobias had had the experience and sense to not clean up, of course, knowing both Ellie’s and Kyle’s feelings about anyone intruding into the lab, but the fire had to be extinguished and the elderly servant hadn’t been able to do anything about the fire department or the police. Most of Ellie’s journals and notebooks were safe, of course, locked up securely as always. But the core notebooks and his own research were destroyed beyond recovery, and whatever mad inspiration had struck him in those last couple of days, it was also lost, in a haze of pain and fractured memories.
On top of the disaster, the experiment appeared to have been a failure. He was alive, which was good, but he didn’t feel in the least “enhanced,” much less like a superman. It seemed he wouldn’t be taking Ultra’s place in the pantheon of the country’s heroes after all. No call from the Liberty Alliance for young Kyle Steiner.
Emotionally exhausted and depressed, Kyle returned to school a week later, and attempted to put the whole disastrous summer behind him. He threw himself into his quantum physics studies, and as a stress-reliever pushed himself harder than ever at his fencing. And in doing so, surprised both himself and his coaches. Almost from the beginning of the term, he was practically unbeatable, and by Thanksgiving no one could touch him. He so impressed his coach that some strings were pulled, and he got a late tryout for the American Olympic fencing team.
Kyle won a slot on the team with no trouble, if maybe a little resentment from his new teammates. A complete unknown to the crowds at the 2012 London Olympic Games, he soared through his matches to victory at every turn, amazing the (admittedly small) part of the sporting world that cared. In his semi-final match he beat Rubén Limardo (VEN), going on to beat Bartosz Piasecki (NOR) in the Men’s Épée final and win the gold medal.
It wasn’t until he heard Limardo grousing to another fencer about Kyle probably being a meta, that he made the connection. Although he had passed all the drug and metahuman tests to get into the Olympics, the fact was they could only test for what they knew to look for – and whatever breakthrough Kyle (and his grandmother) had made, it apparently didn’t show up on current tests.
He tried to deny it to himself at first, but under the pressure of sudden fame and a seemingly constant media onslaught on his return to New York, his resolve began to crumble. When the US Olympic Committee approached him about his plans for the 2016 Games in Rio, he cracked. Abandoning his NYC condo, he retreated to his upstate mansion to think and consider his options.
Whatever else the formula had done, it seemed to have increased his speed, strength and endurance… beyond that, it was still a mystery, however. He felt terribly guilty over the whole Olympic fiasco, as he now thought of it, and considered confessing and relinquishing his gold medal. But he quickly realized that he would become a target for forces both relatively benign and horribly malign – the search for ways to create metahumans was an ongoing quest for both ends of the moral spectrum, and his life would never be the same if it was known he’d succeeded at enhancement in even this mild fashion.
Kyle had previously applied to Stanford for graduate school, and he followed through on those plans with added zeal now. Getting away from the paparazzi, media and metahuman centers of the East Coast could only be for the good! He would drop this whole meta-enhancement idea, and go on about his life. But the best laid plans… while his body seemed to have stabilized at a near-superhuman level, his mind had apparently also been changed. Whatever had increased the impulse flow in his nervous system extended to his brain as well, and he found his mind both clearer and stronger than he’d ever believed possible.
Which meant that he could have completed his doctoral work at Stanford in a year, maybe less. But realizing that this would only draw more unwanted attention to himself, he forced himself to stretch it out to a more reasonable two years. Even so, by the time he graduated he had been linked to the gold medal fencer and reclusive millionaire, and was now apparently a rising star in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics.
Wanting to avoid any more public exposure, and finding that being rude and surly to the paparazzi only encouraged them, Kyle arranged to quietly buy a penthouse condo in Astoria, Oregon. In researching where to go to avoid the spotlight, it had seemed the perfect choice – very low crime rate, very little metahuman activity, out of the mainstream, but with a very good high-tech infrastructure. He could pursue his private researches there with, hopefully, minimal hassle.
For the next few years his choice seemed to have been proven wise. He spent his time developing his theories about the quantum foam that underlies reality, and in so doing found that he had developed a truly superhuman ability after all. Apparently by virtue of his improved mind, he could not only understand quantum processes clearly, he could actually manipulate the quantum foam directly. He could create actual physical items from virtual particles of almost any substance on the elemental chart, although some where more difficult and tiring than others. By far the easiest, he soon discovered, were carbon nanotubes (CNT).
He found that he could create crude but strong physical structures, as well as hurl “blasts” of “bucky balls” of various sizes a fair distance and with considerable force, even ricocheting them off other surfaces. He could also use entanglement and quantum tunneling to “teleport” himself and/or objects between two points in space without actually traversing the intervening distance. Not more than four miles, however, even if in line-of-sight, and even small distances left him exhausted and shaky for several minutes afterward. His ability to seemingly repulse gravity, and so fly, was at first a great joy to him, but he soon found that it was almost as tiring as quantum tunneling, took intense concentration, and he could never seem to travel faster than 30 miles per hour.
Still, he could fly!
His body remained extremely resilient and healthy – indeed, he’d never been sick, even with the common cold, since his “accident.” He did find that he needed to eat about twice as much as a normal human, and drink twice the amount of water each day to keep himself operating at peak efficiency. He also discovered that he could heal other people’s injuries by the laying on of hands and concentrating on their quantum structure. Only gross injuries or imperfections, so far, and not more subtle disease states, but he has hopes for the future in that area as he continues to practice and hone all his abilities.
And he has begun to think that it’s about time he steps up and begins to use his powers for something more than his own education. Maybe a move to New Atlantis and the world of superheroes? It’s very much on his mind as he sits outside a Starbucks Coffee on the Silver Mile with his mocha and cinnamon roll on a fateful, beautiful late spring day…