"Indeed," says Luthor. "It's a mad world. Worlds. The hardest thing I've ever had to admit was realizing that I've just learned enough to grasp how little I know about how the universe works. Incarnations of Death and Dream, New Gods, elementals, superheroes, Supermen ... the human incarnation of a century ...

He trails off for a second, lost in thought.

"I know this," he says, after a moment. "If there's a defense system, there's a designer. And if someone -- be they human, alien or god -- designed a defense system that gets exponentially more power with each century, the more powerful the greater human understanding of science grows, that means someone predicted a commensurate threat."