DC – I am Batman

Gotham University's political philosophy seminar met on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Howland Hall, Room 307, which had tiered seating and a projector that didn't work and windows that looked out on a courtyard where a maintenance crew had been repairing the same fountain since September. He sat in the back row because the back row was where you sat when you were auditing a course you didn't need for a degree you weren't actually getting.

The cover story was simple. Wayne heir enrolls at GU. Thomas was thrilled. Martha was cautiously optimistic. The Gazette ran a small item on page six. Bruce Wayne, twenty-one, seeking a degree in applied engineering with a minor in political science, because that was the kind of sentence that made sense if you didn't think about it too hard and nobody at GU was going to think about it too hard when Wayne money was involved.

The real reasons were the chemistry department and the engineering labs. GU had facilities he needed access to for materials he couldn't order through shell companies without leaving a trail even Julia's networks couldn't hide. A polymer lab, a metallurgy workshop, and a computing cluster that ran simulations he didn't have the processing power for in the cave. The seminar was the cover for the cover.

And then Alexis Kaye walked to the front of the room.

She was already there when he arrived. Third row, center seat, laptop open with notes organized by color. Black hair, straight, past her shoulders. Pale skin. She was wearing a dark blazer over a dark shirt and she had red nail polish that was the only color on her.

Professor Achebe called her up and she closed the laptop and walked to the front without notes. Shoulders back. Chin level.

"The Social Contract as Coercive Instrument: Hobbes, Locke, and the Architecture of Managed Consent."

She spoke for twenty minutes. No notes. No slides, because the projector was broken and she'd been told that morning and had restructured the presentation in the hallway. She stood at the front and laid out her argument with the precision of a surgeon and the composure of someone who'd rehearsed every pause until it was intentional.

The argument: social contracts don't emerge from rational consensus. They're imposed by people with power on people without it and then retroactively justified through philosophy. Hobbes was honest about this. Locke less so. Rousseau was performing. The entire tradition of consent-based political theory was, in her framing, a mechanism for making subjugation feel voluntary.

It was a good argument. Cleanly structured and deeply wrong in a way that was hard to articulate because the wrongness wasn't in the logic. The logic was airtight. The wrongness was in the assumption underneath: that people were reducible to incentive structures. That the world was a machine and the social contract was a user manual and the people who understood the machine could operate it.

He'd heard this argument before. In Nanda Parbat. Ra's al Ghul over dinner with silver cutlery and a view of the mountains, and the argument had been elegant and the man making it had been sincere and the conclusion had been genocide.

She finished. The room was quiet for a second and then it applauded. Professor Achebe nodded. Two students in the front row were writing fast.

He didn't clap.

Alexis Kaye looked at the room, accepting the response with a small nod, and then her eyes reached the back row and found him.

He was the one person not clapping. Sitting in the back with his arms on the desk and his eyes on her and his face giving her nothing to read. She held his gaze. Brown eyes, steady. She didn't blink.

He held it back. Two people in a lecture hall looking at each other across rows of desks and the heads of students who were already packing up.

She looked away first. Barely. She picked up her laptop and left the front of the room and he watched her walk between the rows with the controlled pace of someone who didn't hurry.

She found him in the hallway.

He was leaning against the wall near the vending machine, drinking coffee from a paper cup that tasted like the machine had been cleaned recently and not well. A guy with headphones walked past going the wrong direction and corrected halfway down the hall without looking up from his phone.

"You didn't clap."

She was standing in front of him with her laptop bag over one shoulder and her chin at the same level it had been during the presentation.

"I was thinking about your premise."

"What about it?"

"It assumes people are rational."

"It explicitly argues they're NOT rational. That's the entire-"

"It assumes the people designing the social contracts are rational. Hobbes, Locke, your coercive architects. You gave them perfect information and perfect self-interest and a coherent model of human behavior. Real people in power are just as irrational as the people they govern. The machine doesn't have competent operators. It doesn't have operators at all. It just runs."

Her mouth opened. Closed. The corner pulled into a smile that stopped at the mouth. Her eyes stayed flat.

"That's the point," she said.

"Is it?"

"If the machine runs without operators, then the question isn't who's in charge. It's whether the machine should exist at all." She shifted the laptop bag. "You're auditing."

"Yes."

"You're Bruce Wayne."

"Also yes."

"Bruce Wayne is auditing a political philosophy seminar at Gotham University." She looked at him with the same directness she'd used at the front of the room. "Why?"

"I'm interested in political philosophy."

"No you're not."

"I could be."

"You're not. You sat in the back row and you didn't take notes and you didn't clap and you waited until after the presentation to challenge my argument instead of during Q&A. You're not here for the class." The red nails tapped once on the strap. "So why are you here?"

"GU has good engineering facilities."

"And you signed up for political philosophy because..."

"Schedule conflict. This fit."

"You're a terrible liar."

"I get that a lot."

She almost smiled. A real one, quick, gone. Then she was back.

"Your critique was good," she said. "Incomplete, but good. The problem isn't operator competence. The problem is that the machine was built by people who thought they were building something else. Locke thought he was building freedom. He built a permission structure for property theft. The gap between intent and outcome is where ideology lives."

"You sound like you've thought about this."

"I think about everything." Flat. A fact about herself delivered with the same calm she'd used for Hobbes. "Do you want to get coffee? The real kind, not whatever that is."

She nodded at his paper cup. The coffee was terrible.

"Sure."

They walked across the courtyard. The fountain was still broken. Two pigeons were sitting on the dry basin's edge. A student was asleep on a bench with her face in a textbook, shoes off, feet tucked under her.

"You argue like someone who's seen these ideas fail," Alexis said. "In person. Not in a seminar."

"I've traveled."

"Where?"

"Everywhere a smart person can find bad answers."

She stopped walking. Looked at him. Brown eyes, flat and steady, and behind them was the emptiness that would one day fit a clown-shaped ideology if nobody filled it first. She was twenty years old and brilliant and looking for a framework that explained why the world was cruel.

"Buy me coffee," she said. "And tell me about the bad answers."

"Some of them."

"That's a start."

They walked. The campus smelled like cut grass and exhaust from the parking structure. A squirrel ran across the path carrying something in its mouth that was either an acorn or a bottle cap, moving too fast to tell, and Alexis didn't look at it and he did.

They got coffee. She drank hers black.

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