Erickson Conspiracy

The Erickson Conspiracy, also called Erickson's Opening Season, follows a government project bent on seizing and exploiting a powerful experiment, the girl who grows into Atom Eve. Its central thread is Dr. Elias Brandyworth's effort to keep the infant hidden from Steven Erickson and the authorities pursuing her.

During the Lizard League's raid on the facility, an event Brandyworth himself arranged, he and Polly escape, but Polly goes into early labor as the baby's energy surges begin to kill her. Defying Erickson's order to return, Brandyworth rushes Polly to Valley Hospital, where she dies and he is left to save the newborn. He swaps the child for a stillborn one before his capture, and the girl is adopted by Adam and Betsy Wilkins, who name her Eve. Brandyworth goes into hiding but watches over her from afar, while the government tasks another scientist with recreating his work, yielding only unstable failures. Once Eve discovers her powers and begins fighting crime as Atom Eve, Brandyworth warns her that using them risks revealing her to the government. She ignores him, and the authorities learn she survived.

The government dispatches its flawed replicas, effectively Eve's siblings, to retrieve her. She fights them, and their unstable nature causes them to perish one by one. Weakened and distraught, Eve is captured alongside Brandyworth, and the scheme carries into the events of Steven's Judgement, where the government pressures Brandyworth to hand her over as their weapon.