[Disclaimer: This story is very dark and could be disturbing. Please be advised.]

Bruce shut down the supercomputer, backed himself away from the control panel, and wheeled across the gritty cave floor over to a narrow entryway cut into the rock face. He entered a string of numbers into the lock screen by the door. They flowed effortlessly from the crystallized portion of his memory and their significations swam briefly up out of the murk of his subconscious, like ancient, lost leviathans come to see if the old world had been restored — or mutants of a more modern epoch desperate to return to the light but unable to accept even the faintest glimpse of their own altered forms.

These creatures now lived in the darkest of depths but had spawned in the shallows — in open psychic sores, wounds never healed only carefully attended to, skillfully bandaged.

The door slid aside slowly. It was 5 inch reinforced steel, electrified by a generator on the inside and rigged with high-grade explosives — enough to disintegrate the entirety of the contents within. He wheeled past and heard the pneumatic hiss as it closed behind him. The passageway was damply lit but his eyes adjusted quickly. The corridor rose in a towering ribbed vault which disappeared into darkness. The austerity of it was broken sporadically by veins of quartz in the rock that seemed to glow with some bioluminescence of their own, faint simulacra of life in a barren womb.

Bruce rolled past doorway after doorway. They ran along on either side like the sockets of missing teeth, bilateral and symmetrical, each a tomb for a failed plan, an outdated gadget, or the memorabilia of a fellow, fallen vigilante. At the end of the hall stood a last door, its contents the only untested, the only undefeated.

He came upon it all too quickly and as he did he felt the great enemy’s presence inside, where he had banished it. As he reached for the small brass knob he felt the beast rear up and as he met its eyes it struck and he was flooded with its venom, all the more potent now for its dormancy had been little more than an incubation and it had patiently grown stronger knowing that when he finally came it would be in a state of unbearable weakness.

Bruce felt fear, absolute fear.

It engulfed him as he entered the room and shut the door. The darkness was almost complete, save for the scummy green, algae-bloom glow of the tanks. Closing his eyes he concentrated on his heart-rate, as with any enemy the fight was first and foremost an internal struggle. He drew inward, regaining a rhythmic, meditative pulse. Somewhere in his mind there sounded the distant drum of war and he hearkened to it.

Tom….Tom….

This was why he was here, in this room, because it was a war, had become a war, and the wrong side was winning. Tom… The righteous are being massacred, the corrupt crowned. Tom… I am needed. I am called. I see the signal and yet here I sit. The caped avenger can’t be a cripple. Tom.. But he must still be, he must exist. He has no choice. TOM.

He opened his eyes to the sight of his eyes, closed. There in the tanks were a dozen lifeless copies of the Bat, part-clone, part-mech. They repulsed him.

In his prime it had seemed pragmatic to have a last resort, something stowed away for desperate times. But now the desperate times were here and the last resort had the foul taste of a final solution.

Never had he been so aware of his own madness. Here he sat, Frankenstein emerged from fiction, contemplating his monstrous creations. How could he have ever considered this? His thoughts reflexively turned to the exo-suit prototype and he tinkered at it in his head as if he would not come to the same conclusion as always: well-armored but too slow. It would get him killed, fast.

But there were fates far worse than death and he was confronted with all of them as he surveyed the pseudo-Bats.

They were not human and they could not be governed by human laws, but that was true of the Bat as well. So perhaps the real concern was that they could not be governed by his own laws. How close had he come to violating them himself with his hands around the Joker’s neck, squeezing just a bit harder than he knew was necessary? How much pleasure had he received from the synesthetic crunch of Bane’s jaw that he heard with his fist and felt with his ear? The sadistic desire within him could not be denied, only justified.

And these? He thought. They too can be justified, but can they be reasoned with? I can program them but that doesn’t mean they’ll have principles. I can give them parameters but that doesn’t mean they’re capable of exhibiting restraint. And when I’m gone who will tend them?

The question hung over the room, unanswered and unanswerable. In the silence he felt temptation. Why ask the question at all? With these Bats he could effectively enact martial law over Gotham for as long as it took to get the crime-addicted city clean. A few years, if that. The Bat could become truly omnipresent, not a phantom of the night but an assured visitation. These dozen could make manifest his symbol so that no one could contest that which he knew to be true: the Bat was not a man.

And then what? You’ve created a city with a dependency on dangerous weapons. Weapons that could malfunction. Weapons that could be re-programmed. Weapons which do not stand for something, but rather ‘stand in’ for something. For a bat with broken wings.

Despondency crashed over and buried him like an avalanche. He looked down at his useless legs, already they had begun to lose their shape, their definition. Before if I was faced with choosing between the lesser of two evils I just beat the piss out of one and hoped I’d get the chance at the other sooner rather than later, but now…now I’m lost.

For some time he sat silently in the darkness with some vague hope that it would absorb him and he would be able to return into the consolatory bosom of mother night. When he finally left the room he did so slowly, limply. The door opened and closed once again and there in the darkness the replicants stayed, suspended and perfectly still.