Small Wonder: The Loveless Clones
By Brett
Fawcett
In the late 19th century, one of
the greatest threats to mankind that came from America was the Loveless
family. They were maniacal, malevolent scientists with a twisted sense
of humour and a loathing of mankind because of it’s scorn against their
physical quirks. Arliss Loveless had lost both of his legs, and Miguelito
Loveless was a midget. Both of these appropriately named super-villains
gave agents using the aliases James West and Artemus Gordon runs for their
money.1
The latter of these two Loveless men, however, was obviously much more
dangerous. Although he was tiny, he was aggressive, strong, and was not
above biting his enemy’s groin to win a fight. He was also vastly more
intelligent, and performed some of the earliest known experiments in dimension
travel, as well as created one of the earliest examples of artificial intelligence.
However, his discovery which
concerns us here relates to a secret which he, like many other brilliant
minds in the Newtonverse, discovered: That of Immortality. Dr. Loveless’
associate, Dr. Maitland, discovered this particular formula for ever-lasting
life while studying Lubbock’s Disease, which causes rapid aging. His research
had showed him how to not only prevent fast growing, but stop it all together,
by eliminating cholesterol; strengthening and preserving healthy cells,
mainly blood cells. He shared this initial information with some of his
colleagues, with Loveless, of course, being the most notable. It appears
that he only gave him the skeletal information, however; if he ever intended
to tell him the whole formula, we shall never know, as he was arrested
shortly thereafter.
Loveless' genius, however,
was sufficient for him to develop a whole new drug based on Maitland's
research. It was successful, although it had a strange side effect. The
cells of his body after taking the drug became intricately linked, supporting
each-other to a point where they were dependant on each other. In other
words, if one organ system were to be destroyed, the rest of his body would
malfunction.
The discovery that he was immortal
delighted Loveless. He now had eternity to build a criminal organization
that would span across all the world and eventually envelop it. He would
work his way up from his current location, by taking over several small
towns and eventually larger ones, while his spies across the world formed
bands that would grow and eventually merge in an international army that
would startle an unprepared world. Without hesitation, he sent specific
amounts of agents across the globe, planning to send instructions to them
via telegram.
Unfortunately (or fortunately),
his arrogance got the better of him, and his plan was a complete and utter
failure. In England, his meager gangs were crushed by the already powerful
and on-going Moriarty and Si-Fan organizations, and in America, the Mafia
did the same thing. Although he did establish bases in the Middle East,
it was uncivilized and uncultured at the time, and most of his men were
killed by natives or succumbed to the rampant disease. He even failed to
take over a single hamlet, as his efforts kept being thwarted by a cold-blooded
wanderer with no fixed identity.2
I should take this time to mention
another side-effect of the drug. As previously stated, all of Loveless'
cells were connected. One of the strongest of these connections was between
the hormonal cells and the cerebral ones. The hormonal cells were also
closely connected to the testicles. In other words, any children he had
would be very similar to him, both physically and mentally. His offspring
would be criminally insane midgets. I believe I have identified three of
his children, fathered during his first and failed attempt at world domination.
One was John Macklin, fathered in England. Another was Anubis, born in
Asia.3
Finally, in India, Loveless sired blowgun-wielding Tonga.4
These children grew extremely quickly and, on arriving at the biological
age their father had been when they were born, nearly stopped aging altogether,
another effect of the drug.
Eventually, Loveless decided that,
instead of overthrowing the world from the underworld, he would take over
it's government and rule it from there. He moved to Bermondsey, England
and assumed a political position, probably under an alias. Slowly rising
through the ranks, he began cleverly and quietly exhausting government
money on illegal activities, causing the blame to fall on his superiors
and the loss of their position. Eventually, he began to murder those in
power above him, and his power only grew as he mastered the shady intrigue
of political powers, often blackmailing his opponents and eventually forming
a private political party which he intended to turn into a ruling class.
Of course, there were leaks in the plans, one of them draining so far as
to reach Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes investigated and learned of all
of Loveless' former crimes, eventually deducing his true identity. He contacted
his brother Mycroft Holmes, head of British Intelligence, to learn all
he could about Loveless from records of American spy work. Loveless' criminal
acts disgusted even Holmes, leading him to dub Loveless and his gang "the
most malevolent figures ever to cross my path, with the possible exceptions
of Professor Moriarty and Doctor Grimesby Roylott"5.
Summoning Scotland Yard, Holmes incriminated and apprehended Loveless'
gang, but their leader just barely managed to escape- with a gunshot wound.
Naturally, Loveless was beginning
to waste away, and had nothing left to do but wander for the rest of his
life. Somehow, he was discovered by a scientist named Dr. James Augustus
Winter. Winter was a (supposedly) former criminal and spy, who worked for
both Moriarty brothers.6
The second Moriarty brother was currently working for the British Secret
Service, and the first (whom Winter preferred) was currently the head of
KAOS.7
Winter had entered the field
of science, as he was still in the second Professor's employment (despite
keeping in close contact with the first), and had become an expert in the
field of cloning. However, he still needed a human test subject, and Loveless
conveniently arrived to serve as one. The first Professor caught wind of
this, and recalled Loveless' name from when he was a colleague of Dr. Maitland.
They discussed it, and decided that they would make a profit by spreading
Loveless' DNA amongst the underworld. Perhaps against his will, Loveless
was cloned- and killed in the process. The operation was otherwise a success,
and Moriarty was given the clone as a slave. He instructed Winter to make
multiple "copies" of the DNA, which he would advertise later. While making
these "copies", they noticed and examined the drug, which had since bonded
to his cells, and eventually learned that it made him immortal- and so
his clones would also be. So, now Moriarty planned to advertise immortal
genius dwarf slaves.
Winter secretly had other ideas.
He wanted to clone himself, mixing his own DNA with Loveless', and eventually
making an army of them. He would give them each names that were variations
on his own. To make sure the DNA had not gone defunct, Winter made a second
Loveless clone. The operation was successful, and Winter proceeded to make
clone of both Loveless and himself. The results were strange, but successful
nonetheless. The clone was as tall as Winter, as sadistic as Loveless,
and his face had features of them both. Winter named him Jack Napier (a
variant of James Winter) and stored him and the midget clone in tubes.
However, they escaped to New York together. Napier became a comedian and
later a villain, using aliases such as The Red Hood and The Joker, while
the dwarf lived by the name Migeulto Loveless until finally tricking Cass
R. Abbott, head of the Continental Air Network, into thinking that he was
his long-lost son, thus becoming Miguelto Abbott, or Mickey for short.
He did so in order to inherit Abbott's power and prestige, but this was
lost when Abbott's resignation from CAN was marked with murder. Over the
next thirty years, Mickey befriended the eccentric Cosmo Kramer, but when
Kramer was imprisoned in Washington and Mickey was forced to give a testimony,
he quickly changed his name to Arnoldo.8
Moriarty learned of this and was
displeased, but dismissed it when it gave him an idea: Instead of promoting
Loveless' clones, he promoted the DNA of a master criminal that could be
mixed with other DNA. He decided to show an example (since the first had
run away) and located a Japanese family called Mei, and took a DNA sample
from them. I do not know which member of the family supplied the DNA, or
if it was willingly or forcibly given, but I do know that Moriarty obtained
it and mixed it with Loveless' DNA, resulting in a fierce Oriental dwarf
who was dubbed Nick-Nack.9
Ironically, like most of Loveless' own operations, the idea was not successful,
and eventually Nick-Nack was sold to a tri-niped circus performer named
Nick Scaramanga, a crack shot who later became the world's best assasin,
until being defeated by the only hit he couldn't carry out- the world's
top spy, James Bond.10
Moriarty eventually got bored with the operation- and, in fact, crime in
general- and retired from KAOS, leaving the Loveless clone in charge as
the new Mr. Big. He continued advertising the DNA, but only got one buyer:
Frau Farbissina, an agent of Dr. Evil. When her employer was rocketed into
cryogenic freeze in outer space and she was instructed to clone him, she
decided to mix his DNA with Loveless', and the result was Mini-Me.
Several years later, when Winter
had been knighted Sir August DeWynter, his true employer, the second Professor
Moriarty (currently using the alias of Mother) learned of the Loveless
DNA, which he still had in his position, and decided it might be good for
something. He began making clones who would work for the government. Most
of them were set to work as janitors and "nurses" in the laboratories.
During the process of one cloning, however, there was a bug in the equipment,
causing the clone to be misshapen. Moriarty deftly handled the situation
by assigning that particular clone to the role of the butler in his makeshift
"village".11
Another was given as a secretary to Abraham Moth, the offspring of Sherlock
Holmes.12
. And, although DNA mixing was not approved of, it was performed once,
with an African-American agent known only as Agent J, real name James Douglas
Henry III, grandson of James Douglas Henry, aka James West II. The
result was a Gary Coleman look-alike, who was frozen until further use
could be found for him.13
As far as I can tell, the cloning
mission was aborted (perhaps considered cruel), and I have found no further
evidence of any further clones.
If any information has been
found to implicate any, please contact me with it. With thanks to Win Eckert,
Dennis Power, and Brad Mengel.
Notes
1- For more information see
"The
Wold Wold West" by Dennis Power.
2- Ric Bergquist has shown
that The
Man With No Name (and several other gun-slinging killers)
was, in fact, the immortal warrior Kane. It appears that Kane had no idea
that the various townspeople he killed were, in fact, working for a higher
power, and that he was preventing the conquer of the world.
3- Anubis encountered journalist Brian
Woodville, who related his account to Sax Rohmer. It was subsequently published
as "The Day the World Ended". Rohmer was the literary agent of Dr.
Flinders Petrie, assistant of Sir Denis Nayland Smith, enemy of Fu Manchu-
who was, ironically, one of the reasons Loveless didn't succeed in the
first place.
4- Tonga was seen in "The Sign
of Four", the second Sherlock Holmes novel published by Arthur Conan
Doyle. The Sherlock Holmes Museum of 221-B Baker Street has discovered
a rare photograph of Tonga, as seen on their website. I am still researching
Tonga's connection to the novel "Under the Andes" by Rex Stout (later the
literary agent of Sherlock Holmes' grandson, Archie Goodwin).
5- Roylott appeared in
the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Speckled Band".
As I shall demonstrate in a future article, Roylott was, in fact, a Rutherford,
and he had strong connections to the Mayans, which were later battled by
Doc Savage. In "Sussex Interview", by P. M. Stone (included in "The
Game is Afoot" by Marvin Kaye), Holmes told a reporter that he was including
"The Affair of the Bermondsey Dwarf" as the bookend story to his much sought-after
autobiography, "The Whole Art of Deduction".
6- For more information, see my
"Professor
Moriarty and the British Secret Service" and my upcoming
"Hell Freezes Over: A Brief Biography of James Winter".
7- For more information, see my
upcoming "KAOtic: The History of KAOS and CONTROL".
8- Mickey's history has close connections
to Nero Wolfe. When Cass R. Abbott was about to resign from CAN, Peter
J. Oddell, one of the candidates for the presidency, approached the drawer
of Amory Browning, the other candidate for the presidency, with a small
case of LSD, intending to dope his opponent's alcohol so that he would
act foolishly at the election. Someone had already planted a bomb in the
drawer, however, which exploded when it was opened, killing Oddell. Wolfe
considered it the toughest case of his career, and it was published by
his nephew, Archie Goodwin, as "Please Pass the Guilt". Also, the eccentric
Cosmo Kramer was the great-nephew of Lionel T. Kramer, a police detective
who frequently encountered Wolfe and actually investigated the Oddell murder
(although in Rex Stout's published accounts his name was spelled Cramer).
Cosmo's cousin, who shared his hairstyle, was a scientist, an agent of
MAD leader Dr. Claw (for more information see my upcoming "Bits and Pieces"
on cyborgs with government connections). For more information on Napier
and Wolfe, see Dennis Power's "Marvelous,
Fantastic Tales of the WNU: Batman".
9- The Mei family was strong, agile,
intelligent, and coordinated, but how did Moriarty know of them in the
first place, let alone know that their traits were genetic? His notorious
treatise "The Dynamics of an Asteroid" was, in fact, a study of the effect
of radiation from meteorite strikes on the human genes. He had traced his
own lineage, and that of several others, to the Wold Newton meteorite strike,
and was struck with the fact that the descendants of those present, including
himself, were remarkable, and sought out to prove that it's crash had somehow
affected those who witnessed it so that their offspring and descendants
were physically superior. As part of his campaign, he tried to prove that
the descendants of other meteor crashes had superior abilities. One of
these was the 616 Lu-Ming yeuh meteorite of China, from which the Mei family
was descended. Despite the failure of the book, he firmly believed in everything
in it, and never forgot any of it's contents, which is how he knew that
he should locate the Meis. For more information, see Dennis Power's "Marvelous,
Fantastic Tales of the WNU: Superman".
10- This was chronicled in the
007 novel and film adaption "The Man With the Golden Gun" by Ian Fleming.
For more information see Dennis Power's upcoming installment of "Shaken
But Not Stirred: Unblended Bonds".
11- See "The Prisoner". I intend
to write an article on the various observation programs of the second Professor.
12- For more information,
see "Son of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Woman in Red", and my
upcoming "Detectives Un-Watched", an expansion on Brad Mengel's excellent
"Watching
the Detectives".
13- Again, see the excellent
"Wold Wold West" by Dennis
Power, as well as the film adaption of "Wild Wild West". Agent J
was a member of the MIB. In "Austin Powers: International Man of
Mystery", Gary Coleman's name is printed on one of the cryo-chambers.
© 2003 Brett
Fawcett
