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?