Matthew Gram aka Gamma

Matt’s origin doesn’t start with his birth. Its starts long before that…

In 1963, there was a meteor shower over New England. During the shower a rather large meteor touched down in upstate New York…at least that’s what nearby town was told. What hit wasn’t a meteor at all, but an alien life form. No ship, no sort of technology, the thing wasn’t even alive. It was just an alien corpse that fell from the sky, but in some ways that just made it worse.

It didn’t take long for the U.S. government to get there hands on the alien corpse, which they named Orion, and move him to one of there secure laboratories. There, they ran a battery of tests on the corpse to see what they could find out about the humanoid creature. They didn’t like what they found.

The first thing they learned was how durable the thing was. After running some more precise tests, they found that it wasn’t the vacuum of Space or its freezing temperatures that killed it, nor was it from entering the earth’s atmosphere and the blazingly high temperatures that came with that. Hell, it wasn’t even the fall that killed it apparently. Some other creature that was bigger and a lot stronger had fought and injured this thing, and considering the other factors barely left a scratch on the body, that was a frightening fact.

What if there where more of these things out there? What is they had decided to invade earth? What if whatever killed this thing decided to do that? It was these questions and the fear that went with them that lead to the start of Last-Line, a government funded project that’s purpose was to find a way to defend earth against these things and anything else that might pose a similar threat.

Years later, a new government project was started up called project Genesis. The projects purpose was to speed up human evolution threw gene-manipulation. It was headed by Dr. Nora Gram, one of the greatest minds of the time. The project was actually a branch off of the Last-Line project. This was a very closely guarded fact though because in resent years Last-Line had come under intense scrutiny for immoral practices and was in danger of being shut down.

The only people who knew this particular fact were the Secretary of Defense, Robert Orson, and Dr. Gram herself. Both had ties to the Project Last-Line and the Orion alien that started it all. Orson was the general in charge of moving and guarding the alien when it first landed and was later made to be one of the heads of Last-Line. As for Nora Gram, her mother was one of the original scientists who ran the initial experiments on Orion. After her mother retired, Nora took up the position and became part of Last-Line but was soon called to work on project Genesis.

By combining regular human DNA with genomes from various mutants and meta-humans, the scientists working in Genesis hoped to tap into the evolutionary potential and create a stronger, faster, all around better human. What many of the scientists didn’t know was that the genomes weren’t from mutants but the alien, Orion. Over the period of a year, they final managed to create 18 embryos that had the right sequence of genomes that allowed all the super-traits to exist in one organism.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite a success. Nine of the embryos where torn apart by there own genetic sequences as they started to divide, leaving only nine that managed to grow into fetuses. Another six died within the 3 trimester leaving only three that managed to make it to the “birth” stage. Even then, they were not perfect.

Alpha, the oldest of the “Son of Genesis” as the three children where called, was more monster than man. It acted more like a beast, living by instinct rather than thought. All it seemed to want to do was to destroy whatever came into its path, which it could do because of the powers it had. It didn’t even LOOK human. The beast was luckily contained though before it could do any real damage

Beta, the second son, was the closest to perfect of the three. He had the super-human qualities, yet still behaved and thought like a human being, unlike his older brother. Unfortunately though, upon conduction various medical tests on him, they found that Beta’s brainwaves where erratic to say the least. Upon further testing they found that Beta was developing various physiological problems that would only get worse if time went on.

Gamma, the third son, became known as “The Dud”. Despite having the genes in his cellular structure, Gamma was for all intents and purposes human. He had no powers, no abnormalities. He seemed to learn a bit faster than most, but it was nothing out of the ordinary.

After this latest failure, Genesis was shut down and “dismantled”. It’s unknown what happened to Alpha and Beta, but Gamma ended up being adopted by Nora Gram, who quit later quite working for the military and became a college professor in New York City. The lived a normal life together and Gamma, who was renamed Matthew Gram, got to experience a real childhood. Everything was great….for a while.

It was around the age of eleven when Matt started to develop his powers. When Nora found out she nearly had a panic attack. When she’s left Genesis and Last-Line with Matthew, General Orson had told her to contact him if he started to develop any abilities. At the time Nora agreed, but now, after raising him and becoming closer to him, she couldn’t do that to her child.

So she decided not to contact Orson and cover up Matt’s latent powers. When matt asked her why he had to hide them, she told him about Genesis, Last-Line, Orion, and General Orson. He took it pretty well. He was upset to be sure, but considering he could have literally brought the building down on top of them in a fit of anger, it was one of the better outcomes.

Things seemed to settle back to normal after that. Matt still went to school and acted like a normal kid, and Nora still went to work and taught. They were still a family. The only real difference was that Matt started to practice controlling his powers under the ever watchful eye of Nora. It went like this for a while, until a certain General somehow got wind of Gamma. It didn’t take long for Orson to organize a snatch and grab mission to take back Gamma.

The mission ended in a failure though as Gamma had managed to escape his men, but not before severely injuring a few of them and basically demolishing the building around them in a “berserk rage” as one of the men had put it. Apparently, the cause had been the death of Dr. Gram, which had been caused by a stray shot that was fired trying to hit Gamma.

For two years, there was no sign of Matthew Gram, or Gamma as some called him. He had simply dropped off the grid. After not finding so much as a trace of him, General Orson gave up on the hope of capturing Gamma and using him for Last-Line. Fortunately, Orson had other “options” set up for the situation he found himself in.

Now after two years of being on run, Matthew Gram has resurfaced and there’s a new hero in town. Using the name he was given to him by Genesis, Matt has decided to use his powers and training to do what he believes is the only thing he can do with them, help those who can’t help themselves.