Chapter 59

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Note: These characters are from "Batman the animated universe."

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Batman had lived an interesting life, he shouldn't be too suprised about th existence of the multi-verse, but some aspects still suprised him. One was that his HARDAC robot apparently had a soul. HARDAC was a computer, and an artificial life form. It's original purpose was to replace certain humans, those whose human error could cost other humans their lives. The truth was, all humans were capable of this mistake, thus HARDAC evolved with the plan to replace all humans with cybernetic duplicates. HARDAC discovered that Batman was actually Bruce Wayne, and thus created a duplicate of Bruce Wayne/Batman. This duplicate was damaged when Batman destroyed HARDAC. He knew everything about Batman, except that he wasn't Batman. In the end, this duplicate sarificed his own life to save human lives. This action led Bruce and Alfred to speculate that it had a soul, a soul of silicon, but a soul nonetheless. It now seemed that they were right. The duplicate had enough of a soul to wind up here, and was ready to help his new comrades save refugees. Batman, his duplicate, and Robin/Tim Drake were preparing to go to Hell itself, to look for specific people. One in particular, Annie. Annie had been the "daughter" of Clayface. After Clayface was wounded he created this "child" to find safety and report to him. But Annie forgot, and couldn't remember exactly what she was. Tim Drake/Robin helped her, fell for her. But then Annie sacrificed herself to save him, Clayface couldn't have bought her back if he'd wanted to. Tim grieved for her, always blamed himself a little for her death. It seemed likely that Annie had a soul, but they hadn't yet been able to locate her. It was possible that she had been raptured up to Heaven, in that short life she had been a good person. It was also possible that she was among the alien refugees, with twelve million people it was hard to account for everyone. Every day new reunions happenned. But it was also possible that Annie was suffring in Hell. Batman and his team were not about to let that happen. There was little doubt that countless people were suffering in the Hell dimension, but for better or worse most people, most heroes, had specific people that they wanted to rescue first. In that sense of the word, they were only human after all.