Inside the spartan cave, the first thing that caught the eye was a wall of over a dozen massive display screens, cables snaking downward into the floor. Beneath them, no doubt, sat Batman's supercomputer—possibly even an artificial intelligence.
Thea had no objections. Brainiac sounded formidable—and in practice, he was. A god who existed inside the digital world wasn't something she had an easy way to kill. But she wasn't afraid, either.
Artificial intelligence had long since stopped being a threat to her.
Batman pulled up footage. Every clip, without exception, featured Darkseid.
Blurry recordings from the Battle of the New Continent. Far more material from the fighting on Apokolips.
"I hit him. He'll come for payback—that's a given, isn't it?" Batman asked.
"Correct. Darkseid has conquered countless worlds and annihilated countless civilizations, but his defeats have been exceedingly rare. On that point, there's no question," Diana answered before Thea could.
"You'll still be defending Earth. That hasn't changed?"
"Of course. It's my mission." Diana's reply was iron-clad.
Thea smiled. "Don't put too much pressure on yourself. We've beaten Darkseid before. He'll invade Earth sooner or later—it has nothing to do with you or Damian."
"I'm far stronger than I was. Without a guaranteed advantage, he won't start a war lightly." She offered a reassurance, if only to keep Batman from stress-hammering tires all night.
Batman stared at her for a long time, brow furrowed. Ever since meeting Superman—meeting Thea—the world had changed faster than he could process. A sense of helplessness washed over him, especially after the battle on Apokolips. That overwhelming, invincible power haunted his dreams. Pinning his hopes on someone else... honestly, he despised the feeling of having his fate in another person's hands.
"This state you're both in—this is what being a god looks like? It's not what I imagined. Is Darkseid the same?" he finally asked the question that had been gnawing at him.
In Batman's eyes, these two goddesses laughed, bickered, and goofed off. Darkseid acted like a rabid dog, biting anyone in reach. None of them matched his image of divinity.
Thea turned it around. "What do you think a god should look like?"
As it happened, Batman had spent many a late night poring over every theological text he could find since meeting them. The answer came readily. "Omniscient, omnipotent. Genuinely real, yet invisible and imperceptible to ordinary people..."
Diana cut him off before he finished. "That's impossible. Bruce, we could never reach what you're describing. Right?" She turned to Thea, not entirely sure herself.
Thea smiled. "She's right—we can't. Your bar is too high. Next to true omniscience and omnipotence, even Darkseid is just a slightly muscular ant."
"Eternal, undying life. The ability to create and destroy universes at will. Meet those two criteria, and that's a god in the truest sense."
Batman felt some of the pressure lift. "Then what are you?"
Thea ticked off points on her fingers. "It depends on the frame of reference. From an ordinary person's perspective, we're gods. Stretch the definition a bit and even Superman qualifies."
Batman nodded, expression unchanged, and gestured for her to continue.
"From the vantage point of those supreme beings, we're still mortals. The difference between us and ordinary people is that we represent a particular attribute. Diana represents courage. I represent wealth."
"We only represent those things—we aren't identical to them. I'm not sure that distinction translates cleanly..." Thea chose her words carefully. Some concepts didn't map neatly onto English. She wove in bits of Mandarin and French—even a touch of Arabic—to fill the gaps.
The theology seminar was interrupted by a blaring alarm from the Batcave's systems.
The shrill, piercing wail made both goddesses wince. Prolonged exposure to that racket would fray anyone's nerves.
Father and son took it in stride. They flew through the interface, pulling up satellite feeds, running image searches and cross-references.
Batman wanted them to leave. Instead, both goddesses found chairs and sat down.
Unlike Diana, who was largely unfamiliar with modern electronics, Thea had caught enough in a single glance to get the picture. Batman's AI was no slouch—at least on par with Gideon.
The father-and-son team had only entered basic parameters. The bulk of the search work was already done.
"Impressive AI. What's it called?" Thea asked casually.
Batman's expression didn't change. A few seconds passed before he answered. "Brother Eye."
"Your naming sense is atrocious." Thea couldn't help herself. Nearby, Damian hid a snicker behind his hand.
"Be careful that your AI doesn't turn on you. I'd add a few extra locks." The remark was pointed.
Batman's guard went up instantly. He'd known Thea long enough to understand she never spoke without purpose. He turned around. "Why? What's going to happen?"
"Your AI will kill every superhero and destroy the world. Do you believe that?"
An ordinary person would have denied it outright—chest puffed up, waving it off, everything's under control. But Batman wasn't ordinary. He had his own framework for evaluating threats, and he didn't even trust himself, let alone an artificial intelligence—the kind of entity that showed up as the villain in every other science-fiction movie.
"I believe it's possible. But I've built in multiple fail-safes. The probability of it destroying the world is negligible."
Damian had overheard. He lowered his head further, eyes fixed on the computer as though it might sprout arms and launch a massacre at any second.
"Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. If you're worried about something happening, there's a very good chance it will."
"Murphy's Law. That's a psychological principle—it lacks empirical support. If we operated on that assumption, the number of potential threat sources would be unmanageable..." Batman's rebuttal trailed off, his conviction wavering.
Thea decided to drop a bombshell. "You've seen the Time Masters Council. They move freely through time. In one timeline—thirty-five years from now, to be precise—your AI triggers a lunar collision with Earth, wiping out all of humanity. Every superhero is killed and converted into machines."
Batman shook his head without hesitation. He glanced at his supercomputer. "Impossible. Even you couldn't beat a machine?"
If Thea nodded yes, Batman was fully prepared to pack the supercomputer into a crate and ship it to Apokolips. If his own computer was that powerful, he had absolutely no reason to lose sleep over Darkseid.
"I said possible. There's a possibility. The future is full of uncertainty. One tiny event could send the timeline veering into a dark apocalypse none of us saw coming."