Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Robots and world-dominating artificial intelligences are right in the post-apocalyptic wheelhouse of Daniel H. Wilson.

The robotics engineer and Robopocalypse author brings his love for tech and end-of-the-world scenarios to the DC Comics universe as the "showrunner" for the upcoming weekly series Earth 2: Worlds End beginning in October. But comic-book readers and his sci-fi following alike get a taste of what he can do with parallel worlds and superhuman characters in Earth 2: Futures End, a one-shot with a 3-D motion cover out Wednesday that's part of DC's month-long "Five Years Later" crossover.

In the future (seen weekly in The New 52: Futures End), the denizens of Earth 2 have ended up on Earth as illegal refugees following a war with Darkseid and his minions from Apokolips that's destroyed their world.

Scientific genius Michael Holt, aka Mr. Terrific, has been a man caught between both Earths, and now he hopes to use his power and know-how to put alien tech to good use with his u-Spheres and keep the planet safe from invaders.

However, other people such as fellow science guy Terry Sloan aren't quite as noble, and Terrific ends up on the run to protect his friends and his powerful inventions.

"It's exactly the kind of story I love to think about: pushing people to their limit, raising the stakes as high as they'll go, and seeing what shakes out and who survives and who doesn't," says Wilson, who's paired on the Futures End issue with artist Eddy Barrows.

The writer feels every human being has some part of their brain that's devoted to trying to figure out how they'd survive a disaster, and as much as Wilson digs thinking about A.I.s and alien intellect, he also gets to explore the racism situation that's developed on Earth with the hundreds of millions of people who've arrived from Earth 2.

"They're kind of angry about the resources that these people are taking up, even though they're in many cases almost exact duplicates of people who are on Earth," Wilson says.

His Futures End issue visits Cadmus Island, a prison that's holding all the superheroes from Earth 2 such as the android Red Tornado (the Lois Lane of that alt-world), but it's the logical and scientific mind-sets of both Holt and Sloan that really resonate with Wilson as a writer.

While he probably doesn't have the words "Fair" and "Play" tattooed on his upper body yet, Wilson enjoys writing scenes like one coming where Mr. Terrific watches Mr. Miracle running on little discs of light and grabs him by the leg because Terrific wants to know how he can do that.

"Being able to show up in this world with an inquisitive mind and really ask questions about how things are working and then use that to get out of really bad situations and solve problems within the mythology of the DC Universe, that's what I love," Wilson explains.

Wilson picks Terry Sloan as one of his favorites, too, though he obviously has fewer morals. Because Sloan's able to walk between worlds, Wilson has given him a new nickname, "The Traveler," bestowed upon him by those from Apokolips. Plus, Wilson admits, "I just like it better than Terry. It's kinda hard to be afraid of a guy named Terry."

Holt and Sloan "are a natural protagonist/antagonist pair because they're very similar but they use their gifts in different ways," Wilson adds. "It's been fun to play them off each other as allies and enemies and allies again. That's just how crafty Terry Sloan is."

Both of the characters also play a big part in Worlds End, the 26-issue series that fills in what happened in the five years between the current Earth 2 comic and the landscape of Futures End.

Wilson is building on the mythology of Motherboxes in Worlds End, which is also being written by Earth 2 scribe Tom Taylor and Marguerite Bennett, And another piece of Apokolips tech appears in Futures End with the "Boom Sphere," a tweaked version of teleporting boom tubes fashioned as weapons.

Plus, Worlds End readers are going to be taken to Apokolips proper, which acts as both a weapon and a habitat, according to Wilson.

"We're going to show some of the inner mechanisms," he says, "and there are some surprises about Apokolips and how it works and what it's ultimately designed to do."

In addition to exploring that hellish planet and who lives there, Worlds End ties up a lot of Futures End mysteries by following Red Tornado, Earth 2's new Superman Val-Zod, John Constantine, the parallel Batman Thomas Wayne, Dick Grayson and his wife Barbara, and the heroic duo of Power Girl and Huntress.

Villains such as Obsidian, Brainwave and Johnny Thunder come and go in the story line, and Wilson says he's keeping Worlds End as linear as possible with the various story lines. "We are walking through the final moments of this world and just going from beginning to end and dealing with the problems as they show up.

"By the time we're finished, a lot of our toys are broken."

Wilson is also finding ways to introduce characters with histories to each other who've never met in all the world building and world twisting.

"Having Huntress and Power Girl come back and meet Lois in her robot form and Thomas Wayne, they're meeting members of their family and it's heavy and it's emotional and it's great to be able to make those connections because you already have established characters with established relationships and then you expose them in new combinations," Wilson says.

"I do my best to honor the canon but I'm also in a new world where I have lots of freedom to experiment and come up with new things."