In observing the mundane routines of Star City's citizens, Red Tornado had come to the conclusion that in order to understand the human experience one must also understand the complexities of human relationships. Kathy S. from the Cafeteria had told him that it was possible to know a man's character by observing that of his acquaintances, which set Red Tornado to configuring. Knowing an individual by the company that he or she kept was a phrase that bore numerous appearances in the category of literature referred to as folklore and "old wives' tales," a genre that, from Red Tornado's surface studies, seemed to be entirely non-cohesive with reality, featuring sentient animals, conniving witches, and children and grandmothers able to survive being swallowed whole by enormous wolves. Over all, he observed it being largely incomprehensible.
Red Tornado determined that in his own case, he must be an exception to the rule Kathy S. from the Cafeteria had shared with him. While he was certain that none of the company he "kept" in the sense of having peers, would be considered detrimentary to his character, it could not be ignored that they were not kept by a biological, free thinking human man. Since his programming dictated his actions, it could be deduced that the company he kept played no role at all in how his personality manifested in his behavior. Instead, the keeping of their friendships derived from a mutual interest in protecting the innocent of society, which for Red Tornado was the direct product of his creator's incentive, and begged the question of whether credit for his friends should not be attributed to the scientists who created him. Red Tornado could not attest to having gained any new traits directly from his interactions with Batman, nor any other confederates met through their acquaintanceship, and found the entire insinuation of the phrase perplexing, though it was hard to voice such concerns to Kathy S. from the Cafeteria without enlightening her to the dilemma that a sentient machine posed to her rustic wisdom.
Red Tornado was processing the question, sitting in his human guise in the cafeteria of the university where his human persona worked, holding a fork in his hand for affectation while a plate of Kathy S. from the Cafeteria's tuna surprise sat on a tray in front of him. Kathy S. from the Cafeteria had said it was her specialty when he passed her station on the service line earlier, and insisted that he try a free sample. Not knowing how to disengage her without causing offense and drawing attention from other faculty members, Red Tornado had opted to buy a plateful. And it was as he was sitting at his otherwise empty lunch room table, studying the seemingly gelatinous yellow-gray dish that by its very name had to have included fish in some form, that an alert came through on one of his remote scanners.
To maximize his efficiency as a protector of Star City, Red Tornado had tapped into a multitude of low level security broadcasts frequencies, one of which was reporting a cautionary alert to Star City's observatory about a foreign object of statistically unusual mass coming into proximity with Star City's airspace. Red Tornado took note as the broadcast supplied directly into his mechanical brain the extraterrestrial origin of the object, the speed of its approach, its radiating heat, and its current coordinates, but even as he did so the software crunching the data inside his head deduced that the object in question was actually in no danger of making impact anywhere near Star City itself, or its immediate neighbors. Only of passing by, too high to even impact the routes of planes travelling over the city. He pinpointed the estimated location of the object's landing using a digital map, and designated that it would be well off shore of the nearest coastline, on an island uninhabited by humans. While not big enough to cause a catastrophic event, Red Tornado estimated that the level of radiation accumulated by an object travelling through Earth's atmosphere at such a speed could be potentially harmful to the environment in which it landed. Within the span of twelve seconds, Red Tornado calculated that he could go to meet the foreign object at its point of impact within twenty minutes, travelling at moderate to top speed, depending on wind resistance.
But, his John Smith persona had a class to lecture in ten minutes.
He was configuring the conflict of interests relating to John Smith's responsibilities as an educator and university employee and Red Tornado's obligation to protect, when a second notification spilled into his head, announcing the progression of another flying object, this one of clear human origin and a design specifically unique to one with an affinity for flying mammals. It seemed that Batman had intercepted the same warning that Red Tornado had picked up, and managed to react accordingly in the same span of time that it had taken for Red Tornado to merely push aside his plate of conditioned tuna. The part of Red Tornado's programming that urged heroics issued a notification of laxitude that ought to be amended in the future, while that that managed John Smith's drive for human normalcy began to turn his attention, with some relief, to the class period ahead.
Batman was of the company that Red Tornado supposedly kept. He reasoned that Batman could theoretically tend to the meteorite just as deftly as he could himself, according to Kathy S. from the Cafeteria's "old wisdom." Red Tornado knew that Batman had, in fact, been effective in containing incidents pertaining to extraterrestrial incidents in the past. He concluded to himself that the matter was adequately handled, although his programming still diligently logged it as an unaddressed matter on his tasks list. Red Tornado would merely need to confer with Batman at a later point to close it out. And with such in mind, John Smith turned back to the perplexing practice that was "lunch."