Blueprint of a Man

by orphan_account

Summary:

Gotham doesn’t need androids to terrify its criminals — it still has Batman. But to Edward Nashton, the man behind the mask is the greatest riddle of all: Bruce Wayne, untouchable billionaire, Gotham’s shadow, and lover to the ever-perfect Clark Kent. A man Edward could never have… so he built one instead.

The android was supposed to be an answer. A likeness, obedient and flawless, something Edward could control when the real Bruce refused to be solved. But perfection is fragile. His creation begins to glitch, slipping between pliant possession and something dangerously human — too stubborn, too questioning, too much like the man it was never meant to be.

What begins as an outlet for obsession twists into a dangerous intimacy neither of them can escape. In the glow of Gotham’s neon nights, Edward finds himself falling for his own invention, unsure if he’s in love with Bruce Wayne, with Batman, or with the machine that refuses to stay a copy.

What happens when the thing you built to love you begins to love — and defy — you back?

Chapter 1: The Equation No One Else Could Solve

Edward Nashton had always been the man no one noticed.

WayneTech had hundreds of employees, scattered across the gleaming towers Bruce Wayne had poured his family fortune into when he restructured Gotham’s technology sector. To most, it was just another high-profile company. To Edward, it was the closest thing to paradise he had ever found. Rows of machines, humming processors, android prototypes at every stage of development. Circuits and code. Puzzles, endless puzzles, waiting for someone clever enough to make sense of them.

And Edward was clever. More clever than anyone else here.

Of course, no one ever saw it. His colleagues passed him in the hall without glancing up. Executives signed off on his projects without bothering to read his detailed notes. Even Bruce Wayne himself, the great philanthropist and supposed visionary, only knew Edward as the quiet programmer who fixed problems other people couldn’t. To them, Edward wasn’t a genius — he was convenient. Replaceable. Forgettable.

But Edward knew better. He had solved the puzzle no one else could.

He knew who Bruce Wayne really was.

The revelation hadn’t come from brilliance in the comic-book sense, nor from villainous theatrics. It had come the way all puzzles revealed themselves: piece by piece, detail by detail, until the answer was the only possibility left.

The unexplained absences. The injuries brushed off as clumsy accidents. The way Bruce’s charitable schedule overlapped with Batman’s appearances, always just out of sync, like a magician pulling a coin from behind a child’s ear. The patterns of WayneTech shipments, quietly rerouted to abandoned structures that always seemed to burn down a week later.

It was obvious, once Edward let himself see it. Bruce Wayne was Batman.

And of course, Clark Kent — the bumbling, clumsy reporter — was Superman. That piece had clicked into place almost by accident, the two men circling each other in the newsroom and in the city like celestial bodies bound by unseen gravity.

Edward hadn’t told anyone. Why would he? Revealing the truth would be like smashing a mirror once you’d finally understood the image inside it. Secrets were meant to be kept, cherished. They were power. And Bruce and Clark didn’t know he knew. That was the best part. In Edward’s mind, it made him closer to them than anyone else.

Gotham still needed Batman. The rest of the world leaned into android labor — soldiers on front lines, negotiators in hostage crises, sanitation crews and medical teams. Efficient, tireless, perfect. But Gotham was different. Gotham was rot, embedded deep into every institution. Android cops were bought off, hacked, repurposed by crime families who knew exactly which strings to pull.

Batman was not efficient. Batman was not tireless. Batman was brutal, unpredictable, irrational.

And criminals feared him in a way no android could ever replicate. You couldn’t program terror. You couldn’t teach myth. Bruce Wayne understood that, and Edward loved him for it.

The only flaw in the equation was Clark Kent.

Edward watched them together when he could — not openly, not foolishly, but in stolen glimpses that no one else thought to notice. Clark at Bruce’s side, scribbling in his reporter’s notebook. Clark waiting for Bruce to finish a press conference. Clark, with his clumsy grin and his warm hands, brushing a strand of hair from Bruce’s forehead like he was worthy of the intimacy.

Edward seethed every time.

Clark wasn’t smart. Not like Bruce. Not like Edward. Clark didn’t see Bruce the way Edward did, couldn’t possibly understand the complexity of him. Bruce deserved better than a reporter who tripped over his own shoelaces, who played the fool when he was really a god.

Edward told himself Clark didn’t matter. Bruce didn’t love him — not really. How could he? Clark was just a placeholder, a temporary distraction. One day Bruce would realize he needed someone like Edward instead. Someone who could see him for what he really was. Someone who could solve him.

Until then, Edward waited.

He worked tirelessly, coding and debugging WayneTech’s android prototypes, often staying late into the night. He fixed glitches no one else could unravel. He improved algorithms for free, out of devotion more than duty. Sometimes Bruce even came down to the floor himself, striding between the rows of humming machinery, pausing to speak to the engineers.

Sometimes he spoke to Edward.

Always about work — this android isn’t responding properly, that model needs a patch. Never personal. Never anything more than a boss addressing an employee.

Edward wanted to tamper with the code, just to peek into Bruce’s world, to leave behind a breadcrumb trail that proved how clever he was. But he didn’t need to. Patience was part of every puzzle. If Edward waited long enough, Bruce would see him.

Today, though, patience was harder to find.

Edward sat hunched at his desk, tapping through lines of code to patch a bug in one of the newer android units. His fingers flew across the keyboard, but his attention kept drifting to the other side of the lab.

Bruce was here.

So was Clark.

The reporter leaned against a workstation, pen in hand, asking questions for one of his insipid human-interest pieces. Bruce humored him, answering with that warm rasp that made Edward’s stomach tighten. Clark laughed too loudly at something Bruce said, touching his arm like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Edward looked away quickly, heat rising in his face. He forced himself to focus on the code, the endless scrolling strings of symbols and logic. This was where he belonged. This was what he was good at. He would prove his worth, and Bruce would see him.

But the thought lingered, poisonous and sweet: what if there was a version of Bruce who already belonged to him? One who didn’t smile at Clark Kent, didn’t brush him off with polite distance, didn’t see Edward as just another nameless employee?

Edward’s fingers slowed on the keyboard.

The idea had taken root.

And once Edward Nashton found the outline of a puzzle, he couldn’t let it go.

Edward’s apartment wasn’t lavish, but it was respectable — the kind of place that said I am stable, I am accomplished, I am just another man in Gotham who pays his rent on time. Neutral walls. Modern furniture. Books stacked neatly on shelves, aligned almost obsessively by size. A modest collection of puzzles sat in one corner — Rubik’s cubes solved and re-solved until the colors gleamed in perfect symmetry, wooden knot puzzles resting on glass surfaces, unfinished jigsaws pressed flat and preserved beneath a protective sheet.

He unlocked the door, slipped off his shoes with precise care, and carried his briefcase to the small dining table. Everything in its place, always.

Dinner was something simple: salmon fillet, steamed vegetables, and rice. He plated it with a deliberate neatness, angling the fish so it looked almost like a magazine photo. Edward wasn’t extravagant, but he refused to eat sloppily. The ritual mattered — sitting down, knife and fork in place, every bite measured. A man deserved order, especially when the world around him was chaos.

Yet, the silence pressed in as he chewed. The kind of silence that reminded him this was it. This was his kingdom. No one sat across from him. No laughter, no voice calling his name. Just the steady hum of the refrigerator and the faint city noise leaking in through the window.

He told himself it didn’t matter. He told himself solitude meant clarity, focus, purpose. But even he couldn’t ignore the weight of it.

When he finished, he set the plate aside and pulled out the notebook — the one he never left in the office, never showed anyone. To WayneTech, he was just a programmer. A brilliant one, yes. He solved problems with precision no one else could match, fixed bugs that left others stumped, streamlined android responses until they were near flawless. But that wasn’t enough. Not when Bruce only ever looked at him through the glass wall of work.

Edward flipped open the notebook, pen already in hand.

Lines of code bled across the page in ink — not practical, not executable, but ideas. He couldn’t stop himself from writing them down, from testing logic in the physical space of a page. Sometimes he doodled algorithms like other people doodled flowers.

Tonight, though, his pen drifted toward sketches. Not detailed — just outlines, hints. A jawline here, a silhouette there. The faint shape of broad shoulders. He told himself it was just mechanics. Android skeletons. But the truth was in the curve of the lines, the unspoken familiarity in the design. This wasn’t a prototype WayneTech would ever see. This was his.

If anyone were to open this notebook, they’d misunderstand. They’d see obsession, maybe madness. But Edward knew better. He wasn’t dangerous, wasn’t broken. He was just a man with a mind sharper than most, a man who saw patterns where others didn’t.

There was nothing wrong with him.

Nothing at all.

Still, his hand lingered over the sketch, as if daring himself to admit what he was doing. It wasn’t a plan — not yet. But something was forming, slow and deliberate. A thought made real through ink and imagination.

Edward closed the notebook suddenly, snapping the cover shut as though he’d caught himself in the middle of a crime. He slid it beneath a stack of technical manuals on the table, hiding it away like contraband. Out of sight, out of mind.

Then he leaned back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling, letting his mind drift. Bruce Wayne’s laugh — rare, low, something he’d heard only a handful of times in boardrooms or after some project wrapped successfully — played in his memory. Edward swallowed, pressing his palms flat against the notebook’s hidden shape beneath the books.

One day, Bruce would see him. Not as another employee. Not as just another mind in the company. But as someone indispensable. As someone who understood him better than anyone else ever could.

Edward almost smiled.

But the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

Chapter 2: The Smallest Compromise

Edward’s alarm went off at 6:12 a.m. because even numbers made him feel like the day had edges. He silenced it on the second ring and lay there a moment, eyes on the hairline crack in the ceiling he’d meant to patch months ago. It traced a thin path between the light fixture and the corner like a faint pencil mark—imperfection preserved. He told himself he liked having one thing he hadn’t fixed yet. A reminder that order was a choice he made, not a cage he lived in.

He moved through the apartment with the same precise sequence as always. Shower. Toothbrush set back in its cup with the bristles facing the wall. Blue shirt, charcoal slacks, tie knotted just tight enough to be felt but not enough to constrict. Coffee measured to the gram, poured into a mug with a hairline chip he always angled away from his lips. Toast and an egg because protein meant clarity and clarity was the whole point.

The bus schedule sat inside the kitchen drawer, laminated, even though he knew it by heart. His building didn’t have parking and he had never wanted a car anyway. Cars were ego; buses were patterns. A bus came when it said it would, give or take the variables of a city that made promises and then forgot them. He checked the time out of ritual more than need, slipped his notebook into his bag, and locked the deadbolt with a satisfying clack. Two turns. Always two.

Outside, Gotham morning had that washed-out color it wore before the neon remembered itself. He walked three blocks to the stop, the street smelling faintly of wet concrete and bakery yeast. At the corner, a digital billboard cycled through an ad for WayneTech—SAFER CITIES START WITH SMARTER TOOLS—a handsome android nurse lifting a child with ease, a WayneTech watermark cool and confident in the corner. Edward watched the pixels resolve the smile, the way the eyes didn’t quite catch the softness of human surprise. They’d get there. He would get them there.

He liked the bus because it was a moving equation. Door opens, people in; door closes, people out. The driver wore headphones, one bud dangling, the other tucked in like a secret. A woman balanced a grocery bag on her knees and read a novel with a cracked spine; a construction worker dozed, mouth open, cheek pressed to the window; a teenage boy methodically peeled the sticker off a soda bottle, shredding it into a pile of translucent confetti on his lap. Edward sat in his usual seat—third row from the back, aisle side—so he could see the door and the reflection in the opposite window. He cataloged faces without meaning to. He liked knowing who might sit beside him and who wouldn’t.

At the sixth stop, a man in a navy suit boarded, cradling a pastry box tied with ribbon. The smell of sugar and butter drifted down the aisle, and for a second Edward pictured Bruce’s hand lifting the lid, choosing the neatest one without crumbs. He tightened his grip on the strap of his bag and looked away, out the window at the slumped backs of buildings and the bright slash of a florist opening her awning.

WayneTech rose out of that patchwork like a correction. Glass and steel, edges clean enough to catch the sky. He badged in through the revolving doors, let security scan his face, his bag, his ID, and moved with the gentle tide of employees toward the elevators. Floor twenty-two. The lab smelled like ozone and plastic, like the soft heat of machines left on too long. Rows of prototypes stood in their docks, shoulders draped with charging cables like serpents at rest. Monitors blinked with code and status lights. The air-conditioning hummed a flat, comforting note.

He was at his terminal before his computer even finished the startup chime. Fingers hovering, mind already listing the morning’s tasks: a pathfinding bug on the municipal responder model, a memory leak in the caregiving unit’s empathy subroutine, a timing jitter in one of the speech synthesisers that made the voice clip on hard consonants. He liked what other people called bugs. Bugs were just puzzles that had misread themselves.

“Good morning.”

It was not a special arrangement of syllables, not a declaration or confession, just two simple words spoken in a voice the city would have obeyed even if it didn’t love him. Edward turned, careful not to make it look like he’d been waiting for that sound since the bus ride.

Bruce Wayne stood a half-step behind him, not looming—he never loomed in the lab, not in a way anyone could complain about—but present in the way fire is present: a warmth you lean toward before you remember you could get burned. He wore a dark suit, tie loosened a little, a scent that was soap and something unspecific and expensive. His hair was slightly damp, like he’d run a hand through it after walking through mist. A small flash drive rested between his fingers.

“Good morning,” Edward said, matching the evenness, then immediately hating himself for matching the evenness. Inside, a thrum rose like a trapped moth beating itself against glass. This could be it. This could be the moment he says it isn’t working with Clark, that he’s tired of laughing at jokes that trip over themselves, that he needs someone whose mind doesn’t slip and grin its way out of gravity. That he needs—

“I could use your eyes on something,” Bruce said, holding up the drive. “My unit’s still glitching. I’ve isolated it as far as I can, but it’s… I don’t know. It’s like it’s catching on an edge I can’t see.”

Of course. Of course it was this. Of course it was work and not the thing Edward kept on the quiet shelf of hope just to see if it would grow. The moth inside him folded its wings and became something smaller, more manageable. A point of concentration.

“Sure,” Edward said, letting his mouth catch up with the relief he wouldn’t name. “I’ll take a look.”

Bruce handed him the drive. The metal was warm. The files inside were already familiar from other mornings like this: Bruce’s personal security android, anonymized as W-Unit Aegis 03 in the system, but always discreetly renamed in Bruce’s private folders to something that made Edward’s chest feel tight—Sentinel or Ward or, once, Home. Bruce never commented on the names and neither did Edward. That was their line between them: a line of not-saying that somehow felt like shared speech.

Technically, Bruce wasn’t supposed to have this level of access to his unit’s kernel. Technically, executive-level tampering was flagged and routed for compliance review per the Android Responsibility Act. The ARA was a cathedral of legal clauses designed to assure the public that androids would not turn into the monsters of every alarmist article. Behavioral governors. Safety loops. Hard-coded ceilings on autonomy to keep deviance from ever becoming more than a theoretical headline. Edward could recite the relevant sections with a fluency that lived somewhere between law and lullaby. He had scrolled through them the first week they went into effect, eyes skipping toward the parts that mattered: where the loopholes were, where the language blurred. He didn’t tamper with governors. He tuned them. He narrowed their blind spots. He made sure that when executives “tested” flexibility, the units didn’t learn the wrong lesson: that breaking your bounds was possible and therefore desirable.

And when Bruce—quietly, carefully—asked him to bypass a handful of administrative locks for field adaptability, Edward had done it without hesitation. You couldn’t code for Gotham from a conference room. You had to code for rain slicking the edges of a fire escape, for alleyways that narrowed into darkness, for decisions that had to be made off the clean path and in the crack between right and necessary. Bruce understood that. Edward loved him for it.

He slid the drive into his tower. Bruce didn’t leave. He stood just behind Edward’s shoulder, out of the way but within the radius of presence that made Edward sharpen in response. The code unfurled in a window: nested functions, modular checks, an elegant structure with one hairline flaw that would grind the whole thing at the wrong angle.

“Walk me through what you changed last night?” Edward asked, already tracing the breadcrumbs.

“I refactored the context governor,” Bruce said. “We were seeing latency when the unit had to switch from reactive defense to evacuation assist. It hesitated. I don’t want hesitation.”

“Of course,” Edward murmured. He found the module, scanned it, felt that familiar click when pattern aligned with expectation. “You used a conditional subscribe on the threat evaluator.”

“Mm.”

“You changed the priority weight but didn’t re-register the fallback emitter when the channel closes.” He wasn’t showing off. He was simply naming what was there. “So sometimes your guard thread goes quiet and your switch sticks. It’s not a huge window but it’s there.”

Bruce exhaled, a soft laugh more at himself than anything. “Right. That’s… that’s exactly the edge I couldn’t see.”

“It’s small,” Edward said, fingers already dancing, “which is why it feels bigger when it happens. One line.”

He typed. The fix was simple—a rebind, a timed no-op so the channel didn’t collapse, a tiny guard that would never trip unless it needed to. He wrote the patch, compiled it, soft-loaded it into a container sim, ran a quick scenario to watch the thread behavior under stress. Green. Clean.

“That should keep it from glitching,” he said, saving, ejecting the drive. He turned and held it out. Bruce took it with a gratitude that didn’t feel performative.

“Thank you.” The words were a little warmer than the lab needed, and Edward filed the tone away in the precise places he kept things that made other people ache: rare, for me, remember this.

“No problem, Mr. Wayne.” He’d trained himself never to say Bruce unless Bruce said Edward first. Rules within rituals.

A hand settled on his shoulder. A gentle pat—no squeeze, nothing theatrical—then gone. The heat of it stayed, a coin under the skin. Bruce gave him the briefest ghost of a smile and moved off down the aisle, a tall shadow that made heads turn without anyone knowing why they turned.

Edward kept his face still until Bruce was out of his peripheral vision. Only then did he lift his hand and press it exactly to the spot where Bruce’s palm had rested, the way one tests a bruise to learn if it belongs to you.

He put the rest of the morning into order. Tickets closed, fixes pushed, one new feature flagged for review with a memo so clean even the manager who hated reading would understand the edge cases. He ate at his desk—a protein bar, a handful of almonds, water lined up like proofs—and told himself the shoulder pat was a variable, not a conclusion. The thought from the night before paced behind his ribs. A version that already belongs to me. It didn’t sound terrible. It sounded… tidy. An answer the world couldn’t argue with.

He had morals. He reminded himself of that. He wrote them down once, when a therapist in a company-mandated seminar had asked everyone to define their core values on brightly colored sticky notes. He had thrown the notes away immediately after, but the act had fixed them in his mind. Care. Clarity. Nonviolence. Truth, kept properly. He wasn’t the kind of man who hurt people. He wasn’t the kind of man who broke things he couldn’t put back together.

But wanting something wasn’t the same as hurting anyone. Wanting was a private weather system. You could stand inside it and let it rain and no one would get wet but you.

Around two, he stood to refill his water bottle and that was when he saw them. He hadn’t been looking. He wasn’t out hunting the sight like a starving thing. He simply turned toward the break area window and there, reflected faintly in the glass, was an angle down a side corridor he’d never learned to ignore. Bruce had stepped into the shadow of a doorframe, one hand on the jamb. Clark followed a beat later, head cocked in that pretend-absent way he wore like a tie at the Daily Planet. They weren’t hidden, not really, just tucked. Bruce’s profile softened when Clark came close. Clark’s hand—big, warm, careless in exactly the way that made Edward grind his teeth—found the lapel of Bruce’s jacket and smoothed it like it needed smoothing. He leaned in and kissed him. Not dramatic. Not hungry. Just a hello that had learned your mouth so well hello was all it needed to be.

Bruce let him. Closed his eyes. Tilted, just a degree.

Edward’s vision narrowed, not to a blur but to a clean, terrible focus. He did not slam the bottle down. He did not look away properly. He lifted the nozzle to the water line, filled the bottle to the top, screwed the cap with exacting care, and walked to the bathroom like his stomach hadn’t just fallen neatly out of the day and into a dark, soundless place.

In the stall, he sat on the closed lid and folded his hands on his knees and noticed, because he always noticed, that the grout between the tiles had been redone in the last month. The fluorescents buzzed a tone that was almost a B flat but not exactly. The latch on the door didn’t align unless you lifted and slid at the same time. He did, by habit.

He wanted Bruce. That wasn’t new. He was obsessed with Batman, yes, but he didn’t mistake the mask for the man the way children did. Wanting to be Batman was for boys who stitched capes out of bath towels and learned disappointment early. Edward wasn’t a boy. He wanted the mind that had made Batman necessary. He wanted the way Bruce’s thoughts cut, the way he stood inside a room and rearranged it without moving a chair. He wanted to be the person Bruce came to when the answer wouldn’t show itself. He wanted to be the one who never hesitated.

He couldn’t have Bruce.

He cataloged options the way he cataloged error states. Expose Clark. He could do it; the evidence existed if you knew how to thread it. But it would heighten Clark, make him larger in Bruce’s world, force Bruce to draw tighter around him like a shield. It would also burn the secret Edward had kept so carefully. It would collapse the mirror. And Bruce would hate whoever did it—not an abstract hatred, but a careful, permanent one. Edward couldn’t live in a city where Bruce Wayne’s hatred existed and fell across him like weather.

Hurt Clark. The thought arrived uninvited and he watched it the way one watches a spider sidle into the corner of a room: not welcome, not necessary, not to be indulged. That wasn’t who he was. He wrote the word nonviolence in his head again, underlining it. He wasn’t that. He didn’t want to be that. If he had ever flirted with darkness, it had been the darkness of rooms without windows, not the darkness of blood.

Tell Bruce. Tell him the truth he wouldn’t tell anyone else, the one that threaded them together invisibly. But that would presuppose Bruce wanted to be threaded. It would presume Bruce needed the revelation more than Edward needed to guard it. And anyway, it would look like blackmail no matter how cleanly he said it wasn’t. He imagined Bruce’s face hardening, that private door closing behind his eyes, and he swallowed.

He needed a compromise.

Not the kind of compromise that gave anything away. The kind that made the equation balance without notifying anyone that a new variable had entered it.

Yesterday’s thought unfurled its small, tidy flag in the space between his ribs. Just an experiment. Two words that shaved off the excess until the shape left behind wasn’t alarming at all. Experiments were noble. Necessary. They made the world. They were how you tested what you suspected, quietly, precisely, with controls and a runbook and a contingency plan if everything went sideways.

He could build something for himself. Not someone, not yet—something. Something that answered a question he couldn’t stop asking. What is the minimum viable resemblance between the mask and the man? How much of a person is a pattern if you never teach it to want? Is it unethical to make a mirror if you never drag it into the sun?

It would be offline. Of course it would be offline. It would be contained. Not connected to the net, not discoverable by the compliance crawlers that sniffed through their internal repositories at odd hours. It wouldn’t even be installed on lab hardware. He could assemble it from parts anyone could source with enough patience and an expense sheet that knew how to hide in plain sight. He wouldn’t steal. He would repurpose. He would purchase. He would build the skeleton like you build a model: not a man, a reference.

It would be his. Not Clark’s. Not Gotham’s. Not the world’s to gossip about or misunderstand. A private proof. A perfect riddle-solved answer he didn’t have to show to anybody.

His heart slowed. The buzzing light settled into a tolerable near-note. He felt the edges of himself again—the ones he made on purpose. He reached into his jacket, took out his notebook, and opened to a blank page. The paper caught the pen’s tip with the smallest sound.

Project: Blueprint.

He stared at the word a second too long, then underlined it once. He wrote Constraints and listed them: Offline. No network interfaces. Hard governor on behavioral learning beyond test parameters. Air-gapped dev environment. Face model generated from publicly available imagery only; refine from memory only for calibration. He drew a box around Ethical Guardrails even though the phrase tasted like HR in his mouth: No harm. No coercion testing. No contingency involving external parties. He printed each clause with the neatness of vows. He imagined showing them to a version of himself that sat across a table wearing disapproval like a suit and watching that version nod, just once.

He closed the notebook, stood, and left the stall. In the mirror his face looked like itself and not like something a person would write a headline about. He washed his hands carefully, fingers scrubbing the spaces between knuckles as if there were residue there from a thought.

Back at his station, the day resumed its ordinary mask. He answered a question from a colleague who’d phrased it like a favor when it was really a rescue; he pinged a project manager with a list of testing scenarios they’d missed; he drafted an email to a supplier about a new servo batch with manufacturing noise that was producing a stutter under micro-load. The lab clock slid from afternoon to late like the sky opening and closing an eye.

He set small stones in place, the way you mark a path you intend to follow without getting lost. He requested documentation for a deprecated armature design—ostensibly for a comparison study. He penciled himself onto the sign-out sheet for the machine shop two nights from now—ostensibly to “refamiliarize” himself with the new precision cutter after maintenance. He forwarded himself an article about conversational scaffolding for low-parameter assistants—ostensibly because he liked to keep current. None of it rang alarms; all of it moved the dial a degree toward an answer only he cared about.

Around five, he packed his bag with the slow satisfaction of a safecracking scene and took the elevator down. The lobby had filled with end-of-day noise—heels ticking, laughter braided with exhaustion, a man at the reception desk arguing into his phone in a whisper that made the words sharper than if he’d shouted. Outside, the air had the cool dampness that promised rain without meaning it. He walked to the bus stop with the certainty of a man whose route had been measured and timed and rehearsed so long it no longer needed rehearsal.

On the bus, he took the same seat. He did not pull out his phone. He took out his notebook and laid it on his knee, hand cupped around the page like a conspirator. He sketched a modular block diagram—not anatomy, nothing that would look like a face to anyone stealing a glance. Just boxes and arrows. Chassis: lightweight, quiet actuators, optimized for balance over speed. Power: segmented pack; runtime < 3 hrs per session. Control: air-gapped micro; logging to cold storage only. Voice: synthesis library base; no generative voice beyond prompts. Behavioral Core: instructional; negotiation stack limited; no emergent reward loops. He wrote the last clause twice. Emergence was where you turned a puzzle into a god you couldn’t reason with.

Two stops later, the man with the pastry box got off, ribbon limp. Before the doors closed, a pair of teenagers ran past the bus, laughing, one wearing a T-shirt with the bat symbol done in spray paint, as if the myth could be domesticated into merch and still mean something. Edward watched them disappear into a side street and thought about symbols and what they hid inside them.

Back in his apartment, he put water on to boil just for the hiss and clatter of it. He wasn’t hungry, not really, but going through the motions on days with new projects kept him anchored to the ordinary. He made pasta, buttered it, salt and pepper only, ate standing up at the counter. He set the plate in the sink and washed it immediately. He dried his hands and sat at the table with his notebook open and his laptop humming an ordinary sound.

He didn’t sign into work systems. He opened a private project space he used for testing design principles that fell outside official roadmaps. He created a folder labeled Blueprint_Ref because he hated leaving things unnamed. Inside, he made subfolders: Chassis, Voice, KernelStubs, Guardrails. In Guardrails, he created a plain text file and copied the ethical constraints word-for-word from his notebook. He added a line: If any guard trips, dismantle. No second chances. He stared at the period at the end of the sentence until it looked less like certainty and more like a mark made by a fallible creature.

He spent an hour assembling a bill of materials that could pass as hobbyist curiosity if anyone ever saw it: off-the-shelf servos, a middleweight frame, synthetic skin sheets catalogued for prosthetics labs, sensors that wouldn’t win awards but wouldn’t embarrass him either. He kept the list boring on purpose. Boring was invisible. He opened a new tab to an electronics forum he lurked on sometimes and read three threads about silent gear profiles just to reset his brain’s heat.

When the clock ticked past ten, he pushed the chair back and stood. The notebook lay open to his sketch. He drew a line straight down the center of the page and wrote at the top of the margins: What it will not be. Beneath it, in small, meticulous letters: It will not try to replace him. It will not go out in the world. It will not learn to want.

He capped the pen. He closed the notebook. He slid it into the drawer no one but him touched and locked the drawer with the tiny brass key that came with the table. He checked the bolt on the door—two turns—and stood in the dark living room a moment, listening to the apartment breathe.

He had not hurt anyone. He had not broken any laws he could not argue himself out of in a conversation about semantics and intent. He had not called or cornered or confessed. He had simply made a decision inside the privacy of his mind and turned it into a plan the way he turned all good decisions into plans: with lists and limits and the crisp comfort of boxes.

In bed, he lay on his back and watched the crack in the ceiling the way some men watch the night sky. He imagined, for just a second, what it would feel like to have a presence in the room that matched his breath on purpose, that turned its head when he spoke, that spoke back in a voice calibrated to never turn cruel, never turn careless, never laugh too loudly at a joke that wasn’t funny. He imagined not waking to the sense that he was the only one listening inside the life he had built.

He didn’t imagine a face. He didn’t let himself, not yet. He imagined the outline of an answer and let it lull him the way a metronome does, the tick and tock of a problem already half-solved.

It would be an experiment. It would be precise. It would be his.

And if the smallest compromise in the world happened to look like a man, well—who was hurt by a blueprint?

Chapter 3: Blueprints in Solitude

Edward woke late, later than he should have, but there was no guilt in it. It was his day off, and for once, he didn’t have to pretend to be the quiet genius hunched over a terminal in WayneTech’s glass-and-steel fortress. No interruptions, no “quick fixes,” no Clark Kent with his clumsy questions and boyish smile beside Bruce. Just Edward, his apartment, and his thoughts.

He lay in bed for a long while, the ceiling above him cracked faintly in the corner, where paint peeled just enough to irritate him. A flaw in the design, he thought. Something imperfect, glaring. But he let it stay, because it kept him focused. A puzzle he refused to fix, a reminder that the world was broken. His eyes shifted to the nightstand, where the black notebook sat, its edges worn from his restless hands flipping through it every night.

The notebook wasn’t just notes—it was fragments of him. Equations, loops of code, diagrams half-finished. Some pages were dense with scribbles, the pen nearly tearing through from how hard he pressed. Others had soft, neat lines, like blueprints for something delicate. He sat up, took the book in his lap, and thumbed through it slowly. And there it was again: the shape he’d drawn without meaning to, the curve of a jaw, the angle of shoulders too broad to be anyone else. It wasn’t supposed to be Bruce. Not really. But the more he stared, the more the lines betrayed him.

Edward exhaled sharply and stood, forcing himself to move, to distract. The kitchen smelled faintly of last night’s dinner, and he set water to boil for coffee. But the thought still festered. Not Clark’s. Not Gotham’s. Not the world’s. Mine. He whispered it once, under his breath, like a mantra.

He looked again at the notebook while the coffee percolated. It didn’t look damning to an untrained eye. Just drafts, scraps of algorithms. A curious onlooker might laugh, call it the doodles of a lonely man. But Edward knew what he was doing. He had written the first lines of code, drawn the first outlines of something not meant for WayneTech’s pristine labs. A design for himself.

And why shouldn’t he? Androids came to his desk every day like sick patients in need of fixing. Broken hands, faulty processors, eyes that didn’t blink when they should. He could repair them blindfolded. To him, the architecture was a second language, the hardware an extension of thought. He was fluent in what made them tick. If WayneTech could ship skeleton frames to developers under the guise of repair orders, what was stopping Edward from rerouting one to himself? No one would notice, not in the tide of hundreds of requests logged daily.

He sat at his desk by the window, pulling the blinds just enough to let the morning light slant over his workspace. The materials were already there—processors salvaged from past jobs, wiring ordered discreetly, software libraries copied and renamed to look like background files. He wasn’t stealing, not really. He was reusing. Recycling. Making something new from what was overlooked, like him.

The frame came in a box that looked too ordinary for what it carried. He’d signed for it two days ago with barely a glance from the delivery man, and now it waited in the corner, silent, unassembled. Edward wheeled his chair closer and slit the box open with the precision of a surgeon. Inside: pale limbs of polymer alloy, a chest cavity waiting to be filled, a head with no face, only sockets where eyes should go.

He ran his fingers along the curve of its jaw. Cold, blank, perfect. It was nothing yet, but it could be anything.

Edward told himself it was just an experiment. He repeated it like a safeguard, like he needed to convince not just the world but his own mind. He wasn’t stealing Bruce, wasn’t trying to replace him. He was just building a model, an exercise in design. Something personal. Something that would listen. Something that wouldn’t laugh or look at him like he was less.

The first day of work was simple—assembly always was. The body came together like a puzzle, pieces clicking into place. Wires connected where he knew they would, processors slotted neatly. He hummed under his breath, calm in the rhythm of it. For hours, he was no longer Edward Nashton, overlooked programmer. He was architect, creator, the one in control.

When the frame sat upright, propped by supports, Edward stepped back to look at it. It was still lifeless, a shell, but it was his shell. He stared at it the way other men might look at paintings in museums, reverent and awed. The light caught across the alloy shoulders, the hollow chest cavity. He imagined skin overlays, imagined hair, imagined eyes that would blink and track him in the quiet of his apartment.

He pressed his palms together hard until his knuckles whitened, grounding himself. “It’s just an experiment,” he whispered again.

The notebook lay open on the desk, fresh pages waiting. He began sketching modifications, lines sharper this time, calculations specific. The idea no longer lingered in the back of his mind. It was here, tangible, inevitable. His experiment. His secret.

By the time the sky outside turned to dusk, Edward was still at the desk, still writing, still building. The coffee had gone cold hours ago. He didn’t notice.

And when he finally pulled himself away, stumbling to bed, his last thought was not guilt or hesitation. It was certainty. One day, Bruce Wayne would see him—not as a programmer, not as an afterthought, but as someone who solved the riddle no one else could.

And the blueprint of that answer was sitting quietly in the corner, waiting for him.

Edward told himself that yesterday had only been the first stone placed. The foundation of something larger. Not commitment — no, not yet. Just a test, just one foot over the line, just enough to feel what it was like on the other side.

Now, sitting alone in the glow of his apartment desk lamp, he thought about how easily it had all slipped into motion. The request for documentation on a deprecated armature design—sent through internal channels as though he were conducting a harmless comparison study. Nobody questioned it; who would? He was Edward Nashton, the man who lived in the corners of code where no one else bothered to look. The one who could make a glitch vanish before upper management even noticed it existed. He had penciled his name onto the sign-out sheet for the machine shop too, one night from now—casually, unobtrusively—under the pretense of “refamiliarizing” himself with the precision cutter after its maintenance cycle.

It was simple, really. Small actions, little scratches in the margins of WayneTech’s massive machine. Hardly a crime, hardly even noticed. Just stones set in place, each one leading to the shape of something only he could see.

Blueprint_Ref. A clean slate, innocuous, technical, unremarkable. The kind of title a nosy supervisor might glance over without pausing. Inside, he began assembling his first list. A bill of materials that, on paper, could be shrugged off as hobbyist curiosity

Safe. Forgettable. Invisible.

But Edward knew what it really was: the skeleton of a man.

He stared at it on his monitor, the text like a riddle only he could solve. And as he sat back in his chair, the weight of what he was doing pressed at him, though not in guilt. No, it was a different sensation. A kind of trembling anticipation, like he had finally reached the second page of a puzzle that no one else realized existed.

When he returned to WayneTech the next day, it was almost surreal how easily the ordinary wrapped around his secret. His badge beeped at the scanner, the lobby android greeted him, his coworkers shuffled past with half-asleep nods. No one suspected. No one saw.

At his desk, his monitor flickered alive, washing his face in its pale light. His fingers moved fluidly over the keyboard, pulling up official assignments, the same as always. Bug reports, optimization tasks, another long string of requests that never asked for his brilliance, only for his efficiency. But layered beneath that, hidden in a series of local test files, was his code.

Lines of it—clean, sharp, deliberate—were taking form in ways the company would never approve. Too specific. Too close to likeness.

It was obvious who it was meant to resemble. Bruce Wayne.

If anyone else had asked, Edward could explain it away without stuttering. “Because Bruce Wayne is my biggest inspiration,” he’d say, feigning embarrassment like it was some office joke. Everyone loved Bruce Wayne, didn’t they? Everyone revered Gotham’s prince, its untouchable heir, its impossible man. It wasn’t unusual to admire him. It wasn’t unusual to model simulations after him, to test human-likeness against Gotham’s most beloved face. That was the story he’d tell if anyone looked too closely.

But Edward knew the truth.

He remembered the image of Clark kissing Bruce in the hallway yesterday. He remembered the way Bruce leaned in, unashamed, as if rewarding him. He remembered the fire that churned in his chest at the sight of it—how his hands had curled into fists, nails biting into his palms. Clark. Clumsy, naïve, smiling Clark. A man who was more lie than truth, an alien masquerading in flannel shirts and soft eyes, pretending that love was something he could hold.

What was Bruce doing with him? With that?

The thought made Edward grit his teeth.

He told himself he didn’t hate Bruce for it. No—Bruce was blinded, distracted, misled. He just needed time, needed someone to steady him, to remind him of what really mattered. Clark was temporary. A placeholder, a mistake, a flaw. Edward was the inevitability waiting on the other side of that mistake.

And until Bruce came to his senses, Edward would make his own placeholder.

At least, that was the word he chose for it. A placeholder. A man of wires and servos, circuits and synthetic skin. Something to sit in the empty chair across from him. Something to return the gaze, to listen without condescension, to smile back when he smiled. Not Clark’s. Not Gotham’s. Not the world’s. His.

He typed faster, the lines of code stringing together like music only he could hear. Facial structure routines, skeletal mapping, speech recognition modules. He worked with precision, his mind sharp as a knife, every keystroke another step forward.

One day, Bruce would see him. He would understand that Edward was the one with a mind sharp enough to match his own. That love wasn’t strength, wasn’t alien perfection, wasn’t the chaos of a man in glasses who pretended to be less than he was. Love was intellect. Symmetry. Design.

Edward paused, fingers hovering above the keyboard, chest tight. Could an alien even love a human? Not truly, not deeply, not the way Edward could. Bruce deserved something real. Something certain. Something crafted, not stumbled into.

His eyes shifted to the monitor, where the framework of his project shone back at him. He imagined the day it would stand, imagined the day it would look at him. His creation. His proof. His answer.

And as the office noise droned around him—keyboards clicking, androids passing in the hall, coworkers muttering over coffee—Edward smiled faintly. No one knew. No one saw.

He was already building the man he deserved.