JLA/Fembots Ch. I: Man Of Steel, Woman Of... Also Steel

[Korby]

Inspired vaguely by Rancid Insanity's Batman/Fembot piece from a while back, and a little exercise in doing something different to clear my head before delving back into my usual depravities. This is all I've got so far; if you like it, say so, and perhaps I'll pursue it a little further.

If you're the kind of pedantic comic book geek who might wonder where this is meant to fit into continuity, let's just say it's somewhere before Final Crisis.

-----

The subway platform was crowded, as such places will inevitably be during rush hour. Millions of people lived in Metropolis, each with their own places to go and their own things to do, tracing an unimaginable, unintelligible cluster of paths through the city. A very considerable proportion of these lines converged and ran together at bus stops and subway platforms, tracing the same path along a predetermined route before branching off again in every conceivable direction.

Most of these people took little enough notice of their travelling companions, being engrossed in newspapers or books or radio broadcasts or MP3s or text messages or just their own internal preoccupations. Even those who did glance around, observing the mass of humanity, could scarcely hope to see a face they'd seen before, or one they might hope to see again.

The sounds of the subway tunnels were not deafening, but were so many and varied that they blended into a particularly impenetrable orchestra of white noise. What little could still be heard of the sounds from the open street above, wafting down the stairwell to the platform, harmonized with the rest of the instruments. Only a singularly loud or unusual sound from above might reach the ears of those massed together down here awaiting the right train.

The sound of brakes screeching a block and a half away was not loud or unusual enough to attract very much attention. Really, only one individual down here could discern that one sound amidst so many others.

No one particularly noticed when that individual reacted to the sound, though. He was only one face among the dozens, scores, hundreds, and not an especially notable one. He was tall and heavily built, but his posture and body language somewhat mitigated the effect of his size on his personal presence. He appeared like one who might have been an impressive athlete in his youth but had gone a bit doughy as a result of age and a more sedentary lifestyle. Yes, that was likely--he looked like he might now be perhaps an accountant or a mid-level office drone of some description. His mode of dress was a tad formal for a world that had embraced the concept of 'business casual'--a respectable navy-blue suit, with a white shirt and dark tie (possibly black striped with red? Who knew? The tie was exactly that unexceptional). His dark hair, slicked back in a conservative style, and his horn-rimmed glasses (perhaps the most fashionable accessory he affected--though they gave the impression of having been worn so habitually for so long that they had accidentally coincided with the latest style) added to the effect, to the idea that he was no one in particular to be noticed.

This was just as well, since his fundemental unremarkability meant that no one took any special notice when he suddenly vanished.

He hadn't simply blinked out of existence, of course; he had moved. He had simply done so far more rapidly than the eye could possibly follow. Persistence of vision was nothing to the speeds at which he had suddenly moved. Something more capable than the human eye, some kind of ultra-high-speed surveillance camera, might have caught his departure. There was no such device present here, though, and so it went completely unnoticed when he ran from the midst of the crowd toward the stairwell.

At the base of the stairwell, he had flung himself upwards, catapulting over the heads of the commuter crowd, and he hadn't come back down. In the middle of his initial arc over the teeming masses, he had begun divesting himself of his clothes, compressing them with unimaginable force into a series of small, flat parcels and stuffing them rapidly into a pouch in the red cape that unfurled itself as he stripped away his slightly ill-fitting dress shirt.

Thus, a streak of red and blue speared upwards out of the stairwell and arced back down to street level. The streak resolved itself into the form of a tall, powerfully built man in blue tights and a red cape--which now insinuated itself underneath the chassis of the late-model luxury import that had imprudently wandered past a stoplight into the midst of a busy intersection and the path of a Metropolis Transit Authority bus.

The automobile was propelled upwards, balanced on the figure's neck and shoulders, safely out of--indeed, above--the bus' path. It then sailed over the intersection, where the blue-and-red clad figure alighted on a comfortably empty expanse of street. The man gingerly deposited the vehicle, front first, onto the pavement. He stepped back to gently lower the vehicle's rear wheels.

The driver of the vehicle--a fashionably dressed young professional type--sat dumbfounded, cellular phone to his ear. He had seen the bus rushing directly at him, aware only too late of his error, and now was sitting in the clear but with no inkling as to how that had come to pass. He blinked several times in rapid succession, trying to make sense of what had happened. A disembodied voice vied for his attention from the phone's speaker.

A tap at the driver's side window cut through the young man's confusion. He glanced over, then almost automatically depressed the window control. The window whirred downwards.

"You know, City Council passed an ordinance outlawing the use of mobile phones while driving," said a clear, calm voice.

The voice belonged to the blue-and-red clad figure, who was hovering alongside the car.

"Don't worry. It's not like I can give you a ticket for it. Though a police officer could, and in all honesty should. I'm going to assume that you've learned your lesson, though, and leave it at that. Okay?"

The voice on the other end of the phone brayed for attention. The young man looked to the man hovering outside his car, then looked to the phone, then back again. He instantly snapped the phone shut and deposited it on the passenger seat. "Y-yes. Yeah, absolutely! You're right!"

The hovering figure smiled. "That's the spirit. Remember, it's not just dangerous for you--you're putting other people at risk, too."

"No, you're right! I won't answer the phone when I'm driving, I promise!"

"Glad to hear it. Drive safely now, all right?" The hovering figure winked at the driver, and then propelled himself forward and upward over the busy rush-hour traffic.

"I will, Superman! Thanks!"


Superman soared upwards to a safe altitude, then accelerated past the sound barrier. Counting off fractions of a second, he waited for the sound of the sonic boom to reach street level before moderating his speed to the barely subsonic and circling the block. With practiced ease, he dove back down into the subway--fast enough for people to be unable to focus, but slow enough to avoid kicking up too much of a disturbance.

He was ready to withdraw his street clothes from their pouch and change again, but he saw that the few seconds he'd spent aboveground were enough for the train to arrive, accept its influx of passengers, and start down the track once more. With a shrug, he launched himself down the tunnel. Mere moments later, he caught up with another train just arriving at his stop With one last burst of superspeed, he pulled his suit, shirt, and tie on once more and dropped into the midst of a crowd of disembarking passengers.

Thusly did Clark Kent emerge from the subway a half a block from his home, arriving (he had to admit) a bit earlier than common sense could account for but still seemingly in accord with the usual flow of commuter traffic. He made his way up Clinton Street to number 344, and favored the doorman with a nod and a smile. "Afternoon, Harry," he said.

"Hello, Mr. Kent. Long day?"

"Oh, about like you'd expect, you know."

"I hear you. Say hello to the missus for me."

"Will do, Harry," Clark nodded, and made his way to the elevator.

As the elevator crawled upwards, Clark leaned against the back wall and relaxed, enjoying thoroughly the mundane slowness. Even given his superfast shortcut through the subway tunnel, it had been a good ten minutes since he'd left the Planet building. He'd made very good time, but he was completely aware that he could have gone door-to-door in ten seconds without any special effort.

But apart from the fact that it did his dual identity a world of good for Clark Kent to be seen commuting like any other common Metropolitan, he honestly enjoyed the chance to take things slow. Too much of his time was spent rushing about at superspeed, lending a hand to those who needed it, and it was a genuine relief to take a few minutes and just be part of the human race now and then.

The elevator came to a halt, the doors opened, and Clark sauntered out and turned left toward his apartment. He whistled a snippet of "Roll Over, Beethoven" as he neared the door and pulled out his keys. He could hear movement within the apartment--good, Lois was home already. She'd been out of the office all day, ferreting out some leads on a story, and obviously must have decided not to bother going back to the Planet.

Clark opened the door. "Hi, honey, I'm home," he called out, fully aware of how corny it sounded. It was exactly the kind of thing people would expect Clark Kent to say, a bit cliched and clueless and out of touch--and the kind of thing that Lois would take in together with the mischievous twinkle in his eye that invariably accompanied it.

"Be out in a second, Smallville, just doing something in the kitchen," the reply came.

A little odd; Lois, for all her many and varied talents, was not much of a hand in the kitchen. But Clark sniffed at the air anyway, a reflex borne of a lifetime's habit of trying to anticipate what Ma might have been fixing for supper. The unmistakable aroma of Boeuf Bourguignon reached his nostrils. Had Lois gotten some takeout from somewhere, and popped it in the oven to reheat? The last time she'd tried to make Boeuf Bourguignon, she'd come within a hairsbreadth of burning down the whole building.

At that moment, Lois came around the corner from the kitchen. She smiled at her husband.

Clark froze.

Or perhaps, more accurately, everything else did. His superspeed had kicked in almost reflexively. His perceptions raced; the world around him, including Lois, had been effectively put on pause.

It was hard to say if it was something he'd heard that first put him on guard, or what he'd seen when he caught sight of Lois.

Clark's senses, of course, were enormously powerful, and as a result he perceived things in a way few others could. What he saw, what he heard when he was in his wife's presence went far beyond what ordinary humans might see and hear. As much as the mere external appearance or the sound of her voice, there were things that automatically stood out to Clark when he observed Lois Lane. There was a distinct 'aura' of body heat patterns, of electromagnetic emanations from her nervous system. There were the usual patterns of her respiration, of her heartbeat.

The woman who came around the corner into the living room was--in the merely mundane visible detalils--a perfect double for Lois Lane, her voice a perfectly accurate impersonation. Even the thermal and electromagnetic patterns were a reasonable approximation, as were breathing and pulse. But they weren't quite right, either--and there were other things. Little fluctuations in the electromagnetic patterns, for one; and more damning, subtle sounds. Clicks of relays, whirrs of actuators, the soft pulsing of hydraulic fluid.

He focused his x-ray vision on the thing that looked like his wife, although before he even did so he was completely convinced of what he'd see.

He was not disappointed.

Beneath the surface, this 'Lois Lane' had an endoskeleton of carbon-fiber composites rather than bone; 'muscles' of some kind of advanced polymer instead of organic tissue. And there were microhydraulics, electronics, and other advanced technology all through her body.

This was not the woman he'd kissed goodbye this morning when she'd left the office, not the woman with whom he'd chosen to share his life.

This was an android. An impossibly complex one, one that would have fooled almost anyone... anyone, perhaps, but the Man of Steel.

Still super-speeding, Clark's mind ran through a myriad of thoughts and scenarios. Foremost among them was instant, fully-formed determination that he would find his wife, his real wife, as soon as possible and that whoever had gone to the trouble of replacing her with this machine was going to regret their actions very bitterly.

Close behind that came the realization that whoever had sent this thing here clearly had no idea who Clark Kent really was. If they had, they would have known that the android hadn't the faintest chance of fooling him.

All right, then, he thought. Whoever sent this doesn't know I'm Superman. So, this thing doesn't know that I'm Superman, either. Is there some kind of communications link that someone could be watching?

He listened carefully, glanced around the android. He neither heard nor saw any abnormal activity in the radio-frequency band.

Fair enough--no communication at the moment. Still--gotta play it safe...

"Smells delicious, honey," he said, leaning in for a kiss as he slowed down to a more normal speed. Hopefully, the android wouldn't have taken notice of his pause--it had not been more than a few milliseconds in duration, after all.

"Well, I can't take too much credit for it," 'Lois' said. "All I did was call into Louis' Bistro and then stop by to pick it up. You remember what happened last time I tried to cook something."

Clark smiled, while inwardly taking note of the fact that someone had done their homework. Weird that someone can get that detailed in imitating Lois but still not manage to know my secret identity. He considered the situation for a few milliseconds, wondering if he should just play along with the scenario for the time being. It was at least a little tempting... Louis' Boeuf Bourguignon was easily the best in the city, after all. But every moment that he put up with this charade was a moment that the real Lois was in potential danger. Got to find an excuse to get out of here. A few dozen scenarios raced through his mind. Clark found it vaguely amusing to dredge up long-forgotten excuses from back in the day, from before he and Lois were married, from before Lois had any inkling of his dual identity. Finally he settled on a course of action.

Clark's heat vision was an odd ability. It was not exactly an expulsion of stored solar energy via his Kryptonian optic nerves and not exactly a sophisticated pyrokinetic excitation of molecular motion, but some odd combination of the two. In one important way, it hewed closer to the latter interpretation--he could wield it with almost surgical precision on any target he chose, without affecting any intervening material unless he so desired. This was a useful fact just now.

Through the expedient of his x-ray vision, Clark was able to focus precisely on the Boeuf Bourguignon in the oven and heat it to exactly the temperature he wanted. Wisps of black smoke began to curl around the oven door.

"Uh, Lois... maybe you should, ah, check on dinner..." he said, playing mild-mannered Clark to a degree he normally no longer affected in Lois' presence.

The android frowned a little (just exactly the way the real Lois would have done in this situation) and turned toward the kitchen.

Clark waited until he was sure he was safely out of the android's line of sight. He couldn't be certain how good the machine's visual faculties were, but he didn't want to take any chances that it might be able to track his movements at superspeed. In literally the very instant it was safe to do so, Clark dashed across the living room to the old roll-top writing desk he'd brought with him from Smallville. He found the current month's electric bill, tore off the payment stub, and stuffed it into the return envelope. He then dashed off a check and placed it in the envelope. He sealed the envelope, affixed a stamp, and then slipped the whole affair into the inner pocket of his suit jacket before returning to his original position.

Now dropping back to normal speed, Clark took a few steps into the kitchen. The android Lois had flung the oven door open, grabbed a pot holder, and pulled the foil take-out tray to safety. "Dammit! I must have lost track of how long I put it in for..."

"Oh... uh, well, I'm sure it'll still be okay..." Clark said. "Won't it?" He played his part to the hilt, exactly balancing the supportive optimism Clark Kent's wife should reasonably expect with just enough emerging disappointment at the fact that his favorite dish had been burned beyond recognition.

"I don't know," the android said doubtfully. "Looks like I torched it pretty good. Maybe I should throw in the towel, give up journalism for culinary arson... I could probably make a fortune fixing county fair bake-offs..."

Clark's assumed optimistic expression flickered for the briefest of moments as he noted how carefully this machine's creator had recreated Lois' sense of humor. The thought of Lois--the real Lois--in some unknown but presumably mortal peril was exquisite torture. It was all he could do to keep from rocketing straight ahead, right through the android and the wall beyond, and flying off in search of his wife.

Instead, Clark waited precisely seven seconds before suddenly 'noticing' the electric bill payment in his pocket. "Oh! Uh, gosh, Lois... I forgot to drop the electric bill in the mailbox," he said, sheepishly withdrawing the envelope. He fidgeted briefly, looking from the bill to Lois to the smoking ruins of dinner and back again. "I'm just going to run downstairs and mail it before I forget again... I think there might be a few minutes before the last mail pickup..."

The android smiled, and it was Lois' long-suffering but affectionate I-love-my-husband-even-though-he-has-to-run-off-all-of-a-sudden smile exactly. Normally she smiled like that because Clark had to fly off to save someone or to avert some horrible disaster, and she knew and understood. Clark was deeply unnerved. It was one of Lois' unmistakable mannerisms. Was this machine, and whoever had programmed it, really ignorant of Clark's secret?

Clark leaned in and gave the simulation of his wife an awkward peck on the cheek before turning and nearly stumbling out of the apartment.

Once the door clicked shut, no more than twenty-three milliseconds elapsed before Clark was down the hall, into the stairwell, and up onto the roof. It was Superman, in full costume, who stepped out of the rooftop access door and then flung himself up, up and away on a desperate and utterly indefatigable quest to find his wife and--God help them--her abductors.

[Gorgo]

Dude, it'd be really appreciated (by me at least) if you don't blow them up. I rather hate stories like that.

[Teknophile]

I foresee an awkward moment when Lois and her double come face-to-face.

Does the robot know she's a robot?

Well, anyhow, your writing is wonderful - I love your detailed description of the split-second subway scene.

Please keep it up, and I look forward to reading the rest of this story.

[Korby]

Dude, it'd be really appreciated (by me at least) if you don't blow them up. I rather hate stories like that.

No worries. Though I don't have things plotted out in detail by any means, bot-destruction is not something I have in mind. (Clark's brief, abandoned impulse notwithstanding).

--k

[DukeNukem 2417]

Nice....is there any chance that the major female members of the JLA get replaced by gynoids somewhere along the line? I'm thinking Superman vs. fembot Wonder Woman or something like that...

[RancidInsanity]

Bravo! Thanks for giving me a mention, have you considered using the "Brainiac" virus/character? You could easily have it invade fembots.

[DollSpace]

Very nice - it has lots of potential and is very well written. I hope we get more of this story to read, and soon, too! It's at least a bit different than our usual fare here, so I hope it finds its audience (even if I'm not *exactly* sure what I mean by that ^^;; ). Anyway, it's got me intrigued and I look forward to reading more!

Catie

P.S. I'd also like to loudly echo the opinion a few of the others seem to have: please don't blow her up, or seriously damage/destroy her! Unless you get around to repairing or rebuilding her, which could be done very well