Charles was surprised when Dr. Kitty Faulkner burst into his
computer lab that Wednesday. She came in with no warning, but she was the head
of the facility in Metropolis; it was her right to come in. That wasn’t what
surprised him.

There were, in fact, two things about Kitty’s arrival in
Charles Cleveland’s lab that surprised him. One was her manner. She was usually
personable and friendly, letting the scientists do what they wanted within the
research approved for their labs. Faulkner’s work wasn’t in computers, software
or hardware, yet here she was, and seeming tense and intense.

But the bigger reason Charles was surprised was that Kitty
was bigger. Normally five-foot-two, Kitty now towered at about six-foot-nine.
There was a difference to her skin tone, which had a slight orange tint, and
her hair color, which seemed to be more red than its usual brown. She also was
built differently. Her skirt, too short, was showing off muscular legs, not the
slim limbs he associated with his cute boss. Her lab coat appeared to cover a
blouse that had torn in back, judging from the way it moved. That it was torn
wasn’t surprising. This woman’s shoulders were much broader than the Kitty he
knew, and her arms bulged noticeably against the lab coat.

Kitty rifled through a series of files, first on a computer,
then in a drawer. “Where is it?” she muttered. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?” Charles asked. “Kitty, what’s wrong?”

Kitty glanced at Charles, then started rifling in the drawer
again. “Charles,” she said without looking up, “I need some software fast. It’s
an emergency.”

Resisting the temptation to waste time asking what the need
was, Charles asked, “What software?”

“The RRDC protocol software,” Kitty said.

“RRDC protocol?” Charles said. “That’s one I’m not familiar with.”

“It’s from before you started here,” Kitty said. “It was
designed back in the early days of Superman, relatively speaking.”

“Oh, wow!” Charles said. “If it’s that far back, we may
still have it, but I don’t know if we can access it. It’ll be in here.”

Charles led Kitty into a storage room within the lab. There
was a pair of plastic cases, one larger than the other, that he moved to
immediately, and handed to Kitty. “If we’ve got it, it’s in one of these.”

Kitty opened the larger case and smaller simultaneously.
“The software should be newer than this,” she said, closing the larger case
again. She flipped through the labeled small-size floppy discs in the second
case. “This is it!”

Kitty held the disc to Charles. He read the label: Rampage
Regulator Drain Collar. He could feel the color run out of his face.

“Rampage?” Charles said. “Oh, God! That’s right! You’re
Rampage! But if you need this software –“

“Something’s gone wrong with my regulator collar,” Kitty
said. “The settings have gone wonky, and I need to reboot the system. It’s bad
enough I need to use the original software. That’s never happened before.”

“That’s why you’re so much bigger,” Charles said. “That’s
why all the other changes have happened to you.  You’re turning into Rampage!”

Kitty smiled down at her employee. “Relax, Charles. First of
all, Rampage isn’t a monster;  I‘m still
in control when I’m her, unless I experience a radical, out-of-control change.
Besides, this is more of a partial failure. I’m stuck in between Kitty and
Rampage at the moment. But, this isn’t something I can wait on. It’s got to be
fixed now.”

Charles followed as Kitty walked out into the computer lab.
“How big are you now?”

“According to the collar, I’m 200 cm tall exactly – just
under six-foot-nine,” she said. “But I can’t take a chance on a catastrophic
failure. Then I could become disoriented, especially if the regulator starts
feeding me energy instead of helping me drain it.”

“Couldn’t you just where one of the other collars?” Charles
asked.

Kitty looked around the lab. “I tried,” Kitty said.
“Apparently, this is a problem with all of them right now. A reboot from the
original software should do, though.” She looked at Charles. “Where’s a
computer with a floppy disk drive?”

“That’s why this is a problem,” Charles said. “We don’t have
one anymore.”

“What?” Kitty said. “Oh, hell. Didn’t they copy the software
onto a CD or flash drive or something?”

“You couldn’t find it in the files, so I think this is it,”
Charles said. “But you’d think they’d copy something this important.”

“It probably got lost in the shuffle, especially after I was
out west for a while and with things going so well,” Kitty said. “Have we got
any way to get at this data?”

Charles turned away, then looked up at Kitty. “The parts
room,” he said. “I think we’ve got an old unit with a floppy drive down there.
We might even have a separate floppy drive unit we can connect to a machine.”

Kitty sprinted ahead of Charles, her long legs and powerful
physique giving her an advantage. When he got to the room, Kitty was already
there, her eyes darting around. “Where --?”

Charles pointed. “Over here,” he said. “We retired it due to
speed and memory limits, but it should still work.” He plugged it in.

From behind him, Charles heard an odd grinding noise.

“Oh, damn,” said Kitty quietly.

Charles pivoted and saw Kitty growing larger. Her shoulders
were broadening. Her hair had transformed into the red Mohawk and her skin had
turned orange. Her street clothes shredded, revealing the Rampage outfit.

“Get out, Charles!” Kitty thundered. “It’s feeding me
energy! I’m going to get bigger than I’ve ever been! I’ve got to take out this
wall and get outside, or everyone in here is dead!”

Charles scrambled for the door. Behind him he heard a
hellacious crash, followed by a cloud of concrete dust.

Once the smoke had cleared, Charles looked back in the parts
room. The outside wall was almost completely gone. There was no sign of Kitty
Faulkner.

Charles carefully made his way through the hole and looked
outside. There he saw Rampage. From what he knew of her history, her height of
25 feet tall already was the largest she’d ever been, and she still was growing
rapidly.

It felt to Charles like his heart stopped when he looked at
Kitty’s face. Her brow was furrowed, and her hand was touching her forehead as
if she had a headache. Now passing 50 feet tall with no end to her growth in
sight, he realized that Kitty was disoriented. Now Kitty Faulkner was gone, and
Rampage in control. If she was this big, how much destruction would she wreak,
and was there any way to bring her back to herself before she did something
Kitty couldn’t live with?

As his friend and boss cleared 100 feet tall, still expanding, Charles felt a chill run down his back. How could he—or anyone --
help Kitty now?

Charles watched as Rampage moved behind some buildings. She wasn’t visible now, but at the rate she was growing, he’d be able to see her over the rooftops again soon if she didn’t stop.

 

Several
thoughts struck Charles in rapid succession. Rampage had never been this big
before in part because, in theory, she shouldn’t be able to get this big. The
energies should have been too much for her body. Without her regulator collar,
they would have been; while the collar was still feeding her far too much
energy, it was performing its most basic function properly. It was keeping
Kitty Faulkner alive.

 

He heard
noises from behind him and realized the other STAR Labs staff had evacuated the
building. He was relieved to see everyone else appeared to be all right, but
not surprised. He had, after all, been the only one at the site of Rampage’s
release.

 

Charles’
eyes widened as he realized one other key piece of information. Before Rampage
was fully released, Kitty said all the collars had the same software problem.

 

Charles
spotted Kagome Mifune, a pretty lab assistant and intern. Of all the people he
saw at a glance, Kagome was the one most likely to both listen to him and be of
help.

 

As he ran
toward her, Kagome smiled at Charles. “Oh, Dr. Cleveland! Thank goodness you’re
all right!”

 

Charles
grabbed Kagome’s arm and tugged her toward the hole in the building from which
he had emerged.

 

“What are
you doing?” Kagome asked.

 

“We may be
able to help Dr. Faulkner,” Charles said, “but I need your help.

 

 

*****

 

 

Thinking in
the conventional sense was beyond Rampage at this point. Between the massive
influx of energies throwing her normal thought processes out of whack and the
rapid growth her brain was experiencing, she wasn’t able to think as much as
observe and respond. Still, she wasn’t rampaging either. She was simply trying
to understand what was happening.

 

As she
looked around her, the buildings grew lower and lower. Her head moved above
most, but not all of them. Then her shoulders did the same. Those shoulders
were still broadening as the influx of power fed into her musculature.

 

Rampage
tried to turn, but she was still growing. She lost her footing and fell
sideways. She reached out to lean on a building for support. It held her up,
but only barely; the structure groaned under her weight. She pushed off it to
stand back up, awkwardly regaining her balance. But the building couldn’t take
that final strain. It gave way, collapsing to the ground with a cloud of dust
and a thunder of falling rubble.

 

Rampage was
still simply experiencing, trying to grasp who she was and what her situation
was, although she lacked the words to articulate that concept. Dimly, she
realized she had stopped growing, but only a few of Metropolis’ tallest
buildings were bigger than her now.

 

She surveyed
the territory around her. She could see the river that ran along the city’s
edge, leading to the harbor. Thirsty, and dimly aware that the river would be
more viable drinking water than the ocean, Rampage walked there.

 

Metropolis police,
used to all sorts of menaces, had evacuated buildings near where Rampage had
been growing, including the one she accidentally collapsed, and were clearing
people off the streets along her path. They were vacant, but Rampage stepped on
parked cars and parking meters without even noticing them on this scale.

 

*****

 

“I don’t
understand,” Kagome said as she and Charles climbed over rubble to get into the
computer lab. “How can we help Dr. Faulkner from here?”

 

“All her
regulator collars’ software failed at the same time,” Charles said. “What does
that sound like to you?”

 

Kagome thought
only for a second. “They’re all linked?”

 

Charles got
back to the computer  he had been working
at when the software failed completely. “Exactly. The collars must run on some
sort of server or cloud. The machine you’re on is linked to the collar’s monitors,
but not the main operating system – yet. If we can feed a software reboot into
that system from here, we may be able to help Dr. Faulkner. We might be able to
get her back to normal; we certainly should be able to at least get her to
where Kitty Faulkner’s in control, and not Rampage.”

 

“Why do they
call her Rampage, anyway?” Kagome asked. “She’s really done very little
rampaging over the years.”

 

Charles
shrugged. “The name was applied to her by the Daily Planet when she first
appeared, and it stuck – kind of like Superman.” His fingers darted along a
keyboard. He pointed to a monitor several feet away. “Check to see if we’ve got
some data coming in on that monitor, please.”

 

Kagome
looked. “Got it.”

 

“What’s it
registering for height?” Charles asked. “Is she still growing?”

 

Kagome shook
her head. “No, she’s stable at … Oh, wow …”

 

Charles
looked back at Kagome. “What’s it say?”

 

Kagome
stared at the screen. “Twenty-thousand centimeters exactly.”

 

Charles
darted over and looked at the screen himself. “Oh, God,” he said quietly.
“She’s 200 meters tall.”

 

“A bit over
650 feet,” Kagome said.

 

Charles
darted back to the keyboard where he had been working. “At least she’s stable,”
he said.

 

“What do we
do?” Kagome asked.

 

“You work
from that terminal to get access to the collar’s software,” Charles said. “Hack
your way in if you have to. I’m working to get this ancient software working
properly from the source file on a floppy disk.”

 

Kagome
raised an eyebrow as she worked. “A floppy disk? Really?”

 

“Yeah,” said
Charles. “I just hope the source software isn’t corrupt, or we’re screwed and
somebody – maybe somebodies – could wind up dead.”

 

*****

 

Rampage had
walked to the river with relatively little carnage. She knelt beside it to
drink. She froze when she saw her reflection.

 

Things still
dimly registered only on Rampage, but the reflection looked wrong to her. The
shoulders were too broad, too mannish. The hair, with its odd Mohawk look,
wasn’t right at all. At a primitive level, Kitty Faulkner’s memories came
through. This wasn’t how she wanted to look. She wanted to look … pretty.

 

Still operating on instinct, Rampage willed her hair to grow longer, and to grow from the places where there was no hair in the Mohawk cut. She transferred energy being used for muscle size to her hair, making it longer and fuller, the way pretty hair was supposed to be in the dim recesses of her mind. When it stopped, Rampage had the body of a model (if a model were scaled up to 200 meters tall), and a full head of red hair that extended all the way to her ankles.

 

Satisfied
now with what she saw, she scooped knelt down to the river and slurped hundreds
of gallons of water from it.

 

*****

 

“Dr.
Cleveland,” said Kagome, “We’ve got a change in the data coming in.”

 

“Is it
because you’re able to input to the system?” he asked.

 

“Negative,”
said Kagome. “It’s weird. If I’m reading this right, Rampage has translated a
bunch of muscle mass into … long hair.”

 

“What?”

 

“Long hair,”
Kagome repeated. “Ankle-length, it looks like, so it’s more than 650 feet of
hair.”

 

Charles
thought for a moment. “That’s good.”

 

Kagome was
still working the keyboard of her terminal. “Why is that good?” she asked.

 

“It means
Kitty’s asserting herself in there,” Charles 
said.

 

“How can you
tell that by this?” Kagome said.

 

“Rampage
used to be slimmer, less of a female bodybuilder, until her mind was taken over
by a villain at one point. Then she beefed up,” Charles said. “If enough energy
is in her system, her mind – or whatever consciousness is controlling her body
– can manipulate it. If she’s manipulating the energy to look more like someone
Kitty Faulkner would want to look like –“

 

“It means
Dr. Faulkner is trying to work her way out,” Kagome said.

 

“Right,”
Charles said.

 

*****

 

Rampage was
curious about the running water. She followed the stream down to the harbor.
The water looked good to her. She walked toward it, intending to wade in.

 

The corner
of Kitty that was dimly getting through screamed at Rampage to stop. Normally,
getting wet probably wouldn’t hurt the collar, but it was scaled so far up now
that seams that normally would be watertight might fail. That could lead to
untold turmoil. But Rampage, operating like a small child, ignored Kitty’s
mental cries.

 

Police had
held off, knowing it was best not to provoke Rampage if they wanted to avoid
her living up to her name. But the Coast Guard never had dealt with her before,
especially not on this scale. They had mobilized into Metropolis Bay, and now
were shouting into a megaphone for her to stand down.

 

The problem was, Rampage couldn’t understand them.  It wasn’t a function of her thinking; she
simply was too big. Human voices were inaudible to her now; even with the
megaphone, all she could hear was a slight, high-pitched buzzing sound.

 

Hoping to get Rampage to stop, the Coast Guard fired off a warning
flare into the air above her. As it exploded, she looked up in wonder. She
reached up, hoping to grab it, but it dissipated. She smiled. Hoping to get the
boat – to her, the size of a large bug – to fire another flare, she started
moving toward the boat. Kitty’s mental screams no longer penetrated into the
childlike thought processes of the 200-meter woman at all.

 

*****

 

“I’m in,” Kagome said.

 

“The software looks good,” Charles said. “Let’s do this.” He hit a
key to transmit the codes to Kagome, who sent them into the network for the
collars.

 

The computer beeped. “We’re in,” Kagome said.

 

“Yes!”

 

Kagome looked at Charles. “Should I reverse the growth all at
once?”        

 

Charles shook his head. “No. We don’t know what her situation
is right now. Shrinking her all at once – especially this much – could put
Kitty in more danger. We need to take her down slowly. Let’s reduce her height
by … 10 percent per minute until she’s down to normal.”

 

*****

 

While the shrinking was gradual, one aspect of the change in
Rampage was instantaneous. As soon as she started to shrink, Kitty Faulkner
regained control.

 

Kitty looked around as her situation registered. “What the
hell am I doing?” she whispered in a voice that sounded like a tornado to the
Coast Guard crew. She started to back out of the water, raising her hands
defensively to indicate she intended no threat or harm to anyone.

 

The Coast Guard stood down.

 

Kitty caught a glimpse of her reflection in the water and
paused to look. She smiled. Looks like my appearance changed again during this
transformation, she thought. She liked it. There was a little more bounce to
her movements as she continued to move toward the shore – but not so much
bounce as to put anyone or anything at risk.

 

As she shrank, Kitty saw a STAR Labs ambulance coming to the
scene. By this time, she knew the drill for these situations. Protocol said she
would be taken to a lab facility to be monitored, but that would only be for a
short time.

 

Kitty smiled as she realized what must have happened. Well
done, Charles, she thought. She’d have to thank him the next time she saw him.

 

*****

 

“It’s working,” Kagome said. “Well done, Dr. Cleveland.”

 

Charles smiled. “I couldn’t have done it without you, Kagome
– and please, call me Charles.”

 

Kagome blushed. She flipped her hair back over her left ear.
“All right, Charles.”

 

Charles tilted his head slightly. Kagome really was a lovely
woman, he thought. “I’d like to thank you in a better way, if I could,” he
said. “Could I take you to dinner sometime?”

 

Kagome smiled. “I’d like that,” she said.