“Look until we get the divorce final, I can’t block him entirely. I’m doing the best I can. I don’t wanna hear a grown man cry. It’s…”

  “It’s pathetic,” said The Doctor, interrupting.

  Both were distracted, then, by the sound of a small girl weeping.

  “Oh shit,” said The Woman, realizing she had erred. “What’s wrong, darling?”

  Were she given just one word, The Girl might have said ‘everything’. Instead, with her mother’s attention firmly on her, The Girl started to cry; and between every sniffle, she mumbled something or other. The Woman couldn’t quite make out her words, but she was a sad little girl, she didn’t need to.

  “There’s no reason to cry,” said The Doctor.

  Only he could make consolation sound like criticism and feedback.

  “If you stop crying,” he said, sounding as if he had something to offer. “You’ll feel much better, I promise.”

  The premise was sound enough, yet The Girl kept weeping.

  “I want daddy,” she said.

  She was sulking heavily but still, the words were unmistakable. She might as well have stabbed The Doctor in the back with the sharp end of his own good nature and open heart. His rage and offense, like The Girl, was inaudible, but it too was completely unmistakable.

  “This is not easy for me either,” said The Doctor, looking pale and helpless to his lover.

  Were she a dog, he’d have her in a muzzle by now.

  “I’ll speak to her,” said The Woman, as if she had the solution all along. “She misses her father, it’s natural.”

  There were still some tiny specks of blood on The Doctor’s lapel, and beneath his nails.

  “Do you love me?” he asked, taking The Woman by her shoulders and pressing his nose lightly against hers so that her eyes were all that he could see. “Do you love me?” he said again.

  “Of course I do,” said The Woman.

  Her heart beat like a deer, staring at the tip of an arrow.

  “You know I do,” she said. “I did all of this so we could be together; just the three of us. I took all the risk. I did so because I love you; because our love is unique; and because we were meant to be together.”

  “Then fix this,” said The Doctor, obviously meaning the insolent, ungrateful girl.

  “I will,” said The Woman, kissing The Doctor’s chest.

  She turned back to her daughter with compassion in her eyes as if she knew that what had to be said, and what had to be done, were not at all what she wanted to do; but they were what she had to do, and so she felt despicable because of it.

  “Excuse me,” said The Doctor, looking over his shoulder and unhooking his lover’s firm tentacle-like grasp.

  The Assistant had been pressing for his attention this whole time. As he turned, so too did his expression, and once again he looked like a man capable of torture and tyranny. He looked like an open wound or a pair of bruised and bloodied knuckles.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Sorry to disrupt your….”

  Her silence was mocking.

  “Get on with it.”

  “I know where the robot is.”

  “Where?”

  “At a bar downtown. I’m sending out The Hyenas now. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “It’s an atom bomb with arms, legs, and a conscious, thinking mind. Assume the worst.”

  12.

  “You’re him, aren’t you?”

  The Man didn’t respond. It might have been the bag over his head or the pain from the ties that bound his hands; more than likely, though, it was because he was busy thinking about more pressing things. Regardless, he didn’t flinch and he didn’t twitch; he didn’t utter a single goddamned word.

  “Guys, it’s him. You do realize who this is right?”

  His captor was young and impressionable. Like the others in the van, he was wearing a costume or a disguise of some sort. It was nothing fancy, though; it looked like it had been put together at the last minute - a mix of spandex, duct tape, and durable garbage bags.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to, Ed,” said The Leader looking back.

  Her eyes were covered but the rest of her face was not. She wore brightly coloured lipstick, an indecent amount of blush, and anywhere that was visible above and around her eyes was smeared with shadow and mascara. Her hair was tied in a high ponytail and she wore short slutty athletic attire.

  “It’s not really my name. She calls me that sometimes. Ed. A lot really, but that’s ok. It’s only when my unconscious, oppressive, misogynistic tendencies rise to the surface. My hero name is The White Knight; my real name, though, is Phillip. You’re the reason I wanted to be a hero, you know?”

  He could have spoken in a dozen tongues and not a single word would have made sense. Beneath his hood, The Man was lost in delusion, dreaming about the love he once had. He couldn’t hear the young lad speaking or even the other heroes conspiring; he couldn’t even hear the nursery rhyme lightly playing through one of Mr. Robot’s speakers. He was trapped in his own horrible fantasy, thinking about long embraces and midnight conversations; and all the other sweet things he would never experience again.

  And all he could think was, “I don’t want to die alone.”

  “So what’s it like? It must be awesome. I’m nothing like you, but I wanna be one day. I mean when I was a kid, you were everything. Me and my friends – everyone - we all wanted to be you. And now here I am sitting beside you. I can’t believe it. Nobody would believe me. I wouldn’t believe me. What was that thing you used to say? A punch in the head…”

  “The face,” said The Man.

  “Holy shit, that’s it. A punch in the face makes the world great. You are him! I knew it. I knew it. Hey guys, it is him. It’s him; just like I said. It’s…”

  “Shut up, Ed?” screamed The Leader.

  “I told you, don’t call me that. My name is…”

  “Don’t you talk back.”

  “I’m sorry,” said The White Knight.

  Had he a tail it would have been pinned to his belly at this point. They could be cruel; quite often actually. There was very little to say. He was at the bottom of every hierarchy there was; he didn’t have a voice or an opinion – at least one that was taken into account anyway. This didn’t deter him, though. On any ordinary day, he would have sulked for an hour or two before even daring to say another word, but this was no ordinary day.

  “You’re not gonna take that are you?” said The Man.

  His voice was muffled, sure, but you could hear every syllable of derision.

  “Don’t answer him, Ed.”

  The White Knight lowered his head.

  “That’s a bit rough, miss. So what’s your issue then?” asked The Man.

  “You,” said The Leader decisively.

  ‘Me specifically, or…?”

  It was hard to tell if he was mocking.

  “You, Ed, dad,” said The Leader before exalting; “All men!”

  The angrier she got, the more it sounded like she was about to cry.

  “Did something actually happen or are you just carrying on like everyone else? I don’t want to be a dick about this, it’s just these days, it’s hard to tell if someone is genuinely upset or if they read something upsetting. You know what I mean?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Don’t get me wrong; if something did happen…”

  “You’d what? Save the day? Feminism is an affirmation. It is a state of being; a fish, monkey, human, and then feminist. I am evolved,” shouted The Leader as if her words were the chorus of a song. “I am a woman superhero. Pretty soon women will be leading in government, politics, business; in everything; Women can do anything men can do; except better, because now we’re finally getting our chance.”

  “I mean no disrespect here, miss, but why is it that feminists only want the nice cushy jobs? Why aren’t any of you fighting to dig trenches and re-tile rooves in the summer; or pick up trash in the pouring rain? There are plenty of fellas in those jobs who, like you, also don’t have a shot in hell at being a CEO, a president, a well-paid athlete either, or anyone significant for that matter. You’ll probably have a lot in common, and you might even see that it’s not only sex that holds people back in this world. Most of the time it just boils down to shitty DNA.”

  “Asshole.”

  “All I’m saying is, you want equality as long as it pays well and you don’t get a callous on your hands. Your plight seems a little insincere is what I’m getting at, and your reaction is just a tad exaggerated.”

  “What would you know about being a woman?”

  “As much as you’d know about being a man. We’re just two blind fools arguing over the hue of a colour that neither one of us can see.”

  He almost sounded like his old self, as if some spark were almost igniting.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “He’s Justice Man,” said The White Knight, spellbound.

  The other heroes all grunted.

  The Man didn’t respond, though. Just hearing those words was enough to remind not only of whom he once was, but worse, of the person that he would never again be. Beneath his hood, he thought of daughter and how cute it was whenever she had said goodbye; cute because all those times, he had never once assumed she would never come back. Were it not for his breath lightly pushing the nylon bag, The Man could easily be mistaken for a mannequin or a well-perfumed cadaver.

  “You suck,” shouted The Leader; as articulate as she could be in such dire rage.

  The White Knight, on the other hand, was struck with awe.

  “I knew the first second I saw you, man.”

  Though he wore a mask, it was patently obvious that he was grinning like a buffoon. If words were colours, his sounded as if they were painted with the stroke of a hyperactive child.

  “Man, you were the best. They don’t make heroes like you anymore.”

  “You guys, you don’t get it; he’s Justice Man. He’s old school.”

  The three women huddled together at the front of the van. Their dire whispering was loud enough to be overheard, but not clear enough to be understood. Their eyes, though, could be read like the contents of a book. And what was clear was that this was not going to be good for either man or robot.

  “I bet you got lots of girls,” said The White Knight.

  He said so in an excited yet hushed tone, so the other heroes wouldn’t know. You could tell, though, that he was almost jumping out of his skin.

  “I need to make a call,” said The Man, his voice muffled by the hood.

  “You have no rights, oppressor.”

  “Oppressor? You kidnapped my friend and me from a bar. We’re bound and gagged without even so much as a kiss or a first drink.”

  “Friend?” said Mr. Robot.

  Instantly the panel on his chest lit up with three bright green bars.

  “This is so typical,” said The Leader, almost climbing over her seat to throttle The Man. “Boiling everything down to some sexual perversion where the woman has to kiss the man. Why? Because she is desperate and needy for a man’s validation. Or worse yet, where the woman has to be kissed. Why? Because she is weak and directionless; and she hasn’t the gall to take on any great feat herself. All you want is to control the woman. To subvert her. If you give her power, it’s to remind her that, in a heartbeat, you can take it away. And so by giving her freedom, you imprison her. All you really want is to bring her to her knees so she can neither stand nor crawl; so you copulate in her mouth with your repression and your own self-loathing so that she stays below you – so there’s always someone below you.”

  “I really just need to make a call,” said The Man.

  He sounded as if his patience had worn thin as if he had tired of this charade.

  “What should we do with him?” said one of the heroes. “We only need the robot.”

  “Maybe we could use him. Ever since you-know-who left, we’ve been one member short. You know we won’t be taken seriously unless we’re a prime number.”

  She was right, and everyone knew it, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

  “You wanna live, oppressor?” asked The Leader in her most threatening tone.

  The Man thought of life without his daughter, and his whole existence felt black and vacuous. “No,” he replied.

  Mr. Robot laughed. It was the first time he had ever done so, spontaneously anyway. It sounded nothing like a human, and instead, more like a computer unable to properly boot. There was just a series of high pitched beeps of various tones, all strung together in a drunken fashion.

  “What do you mean no?”

  “We are looking for the station with the overhanging bridge,” said Mr. Robot, though nobody was listening. “It doesn’t appear on any of my maps.”

  “Just bloody do it,” said The Man. “Kill me. I couldn’t care less.”

  The Man was clearly disturbed. His thoughts had turned against him. Fuelled by surging anger, fear, loneliness, and shame, The Man imagined all sorts of absurd and grandiose delusions. And when he felt rage, he thought about the very worst kind of violence a person can do to another. And when he felt shame, he thought about the whole world pointing and laughing. And when he thought about never seeing his daughter again, he wept. It felt like he would never feel what was like to have a family again.

  “Kill me,” he shouted, spitting beneath his hood. “I won’t put up a fight, I promise. Just shoot me or stab me or whatever. I don’t wanna live anymore.”

  The women huddled together again.

  “Well, what the hell do we do now? You can’t leverage a man on something he neither has nor bloody well wants.”

  “Up to an hour ago everything was fine, right?”

  “Well, yeah, kind of I guess.”

  “So we stick to the plan. We take the robot to The Doctor. We claim our reward. We dump this chauvinistic asshole, and then we get famous.”

  “What if…” said one of the heroes, implying something clandestine and nefarious.

  “No. I know exactly what you’re thinking, and the answer is no. We need to be legitimised. It’s one thing saving the world, and it’s another saving the world whilst be recognised as Hyenas. We’re Justice Heroes, right?”

  “Right,” said the other two women.

  “Then we do what we have to do. We play by the rules this one time. We hand over the robot. We get our accreditation. And then nobody fucks with us anymore,” said The Leader.

  “And nobody will laugh at us, too,” said The Empath.

  “What are you on about? Nobody laughs at us,” said The Driver.

  “Not once we’re accredited they won’t; not anymore.”

  “Ladies,” shouted The Leader. “Focus.”

  As they argued, The White Knight looked at The Man with big disappointed eyes. It must have been terrible for him to see his hero like this; broken and down on his knees.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  “Life,” thought The Man. “Life, love, and compromise.”

  He said nothing. Beneath his hood, though, he reflected on his past; on a city in a different time, in a different age. Just as he was a different man, this city was a far different place. It was one of mistrust and deception; one of callous lies and endless conspiracy. It was a place of violence. It was one of corruption, greed, and fear - where good folk made prisons of their homes, kept safe from the criminals who stalked their yards like shaven hyenas. What a contrast then, where today, the hyena was a symbol of virtue, strength, and insurance.

  No, it was a different age altogether. It wasn’t, in any way, a time for good men, nor was it a time for the thin-skinned or the kind-hearted; their graves were shallow and many. It was a time for wicked, uncivilised savages; where the quality of a man’s violence defined his culture. It was a time for hardened bastards for honest and kind men made no difference in a place like this; they could do no good. Just as, it seemed, that the lawless could do no wrong.

  But just as it was an age of villains, so too was it, an age of heroes. And The Man hadn’t forgotten his past glory. He remembered his every exploit and each of his conquests. He remembered every villain, crook, and henchman. He remembered every goddamned despicable lout. He remembered every fistfight, knife fight, and every bloodstained shootout. He remembered every broken rib and perforated lung. He remembered every stab wound and bullet hole. They were fond memories, but they were old memories. For the most part, they were vague and transparent. It’s not like the life he had lived could be so easily forgotten but still, they were only memories, and he was hardly that man anymore.

  What was vivid in his thoughts, though, was the memory of his wife closing the gate behind her, and more so, how she didn’t look back, not for a second. He felt the saddest a person could possibly feel until, of course, he remembered a song that his daughter had sung about rainbows and rocket ships. And then, he was the saddest a person had ever been.

  How the hell was he ever going to get back on his feet?

  “’I’m calling The Assistant,” said The Leader.

  On one hand, she sounded stern and decisive; like a leader should. On the other, she sounded petrified, terrified and full of dread.

  “What are you going to say?”

  The doubt within her team only made things worse.

  “I’m going to tell her we have the robot; simple.”

  “And legitimacy. Ask about legitimacy. Ask her to…”

  “Everyone just shut up, ok?”

  The Leader was nervous. Inside she shook tremendously, but outside, she was frozen with fear. To the others, she looked cool and complacent but to herself…

  She had never spoken to The Assistant before. They had met once or twice at university rallies, but they had never been formally introduced. She wanted more than anything to make an impeccable impression. All she really wanted was to belong.

  “Ok, it’s calling.”

  She had never been this nervous before. She had never felt so sick with fear. With every ring, she felt more and more unprepared. Her stomach felt like this great swirling black hole that was pulling her every organ apart, atom by atom. She wanted to vomit or to smash the phone into a thousand pieces. Better yet, she wanted the sun to explode and for all human life to be extinct in the very next second, so as not to have to make this call.