DCU: Untitled Identity Porn
2. Still Water, Running Deep
Officially, the whole thing had been about mining. A two-hour frenzy of marketing and back-patting — PowerPoint and 3D simulations and all — and at the end of the day Clark had walked out with nothing more substantial than a single page of notes. He rather suspected that had been the point; Luthor and Wayne had even been extremely cagey on the subject of what the mining was for, exactly. Clark’s notes said: Previously undiscovered minerals, possibly of extraterrestrial origin. The marketing line was that said ‘undiscovered minerals’ were believed to possess properties that may lead to advances in everything from power generation to medicine via the route of fuzzy feel-good puppy-petting, but the look in Luthor’s eyes…
Clark knew. And worse, he knew that Luthor knew he knew, too; knew Superman would find out sooner rather than later and would… do what, exactly? Interfere in what essentially amounted to a legitimate private business venture? Clark could see the headlines — could write the headlines — and none of them were complimentary. So, no direct approach.
Luthor’s ultimate goal might have been timeless, but the man didn’t have the resources on his own to pull off the massive investment in infrastructure required on his own. Hence the need for the backing of Wayne Enterprises, and that meant going through its scion. Everything Clark had seen and read seemed to indicate Luthor’s plans were, this time, flawless; he’d executed the wooing of one of the most powerful men in the country with almost laughable ease. Wayne, it seemed, was painfully conscious of his company’s reputation without quite having the savvy to pull off truly heartfelt philanthropy. Almost as if someone had told him once investing in ‘feel good’ projects like clean energy development and miracle cures for cancer was good PR, without actually bothering to explain how to separate what was actually worthwhile from the charlatans like Luthor who knew, equally, how to dress up a wolf.
That was the official line, anyway. A part of Clark — a big part, really — had wanted to believe the man’s reputation was more gossip than truth, and he’d thought that maybe if he’d only—
Well, never mind now what he’d thought. Bruce Wayne, it seemed, was not a man who took unsolicited advice from unknown reporters. Imagine that. So maybe the man was as vapid and as arrogant as the stage-whispers made out, except…
Except there was that little voice again, the one that always held out hope that everybody was decent, underneath, somewhere. And what it was saying, over and over again in Clark’s head, was; Now Lex, you know the Planet would never give its own owner bad press.
It was exactly the sort of thing Wayne’s reputation would have him saying, except…
It was a rumour, Clark knew, and nothing but. Because Wayne had gone AWOL for years — carousing Europe and Asia was the official line, shirking responsibility like any spoilt, damaged orphan — and they’d been bad years for the Planet. Somewhere in that time, investigative journalism had been deemed as being so last century; not at all in line with the interests of the modern media conglomerate and its political and economic interests. Besides, people didn’t want news; they wanted ‘newstainment’. Fluff stories about panda cubs and celebrity binge drinking and killer bees and Superman. And the newspapers got lazy — the ones that didn’t get shut down, that was — because why bother to station someone overseas when pre-packaged reports from Reuters were so much cheaper? And why bother sending anyone to Washington when every Congressman had a PR agent willing to hand out pre-formatted press-releases like candy? Politics was dull and foreign countries were too far away; but Brangelina? Now that sold papers.
And in the midst of it all, the Planet had held out; one of the last old-fashioned broadsheets left in the country. It had been tough.
And then Wayne had — for no apparent reason at all — resurfaced. And — seemingly through nothing other than sheer, dumb luck — had regained a kind of control over his family company; the kind of control no-one questioned, because everyone knew Wayne was an idiot who couldn’t buy his own coffee, let alone run a multinational megacorp (how, exactly, everyone knew this seemed to be something of a mystery; but no-one questioned that, either).
And then, quite inexplicably, the Planet had been… released. It had never been anything explicit — because editorial interference by parent companies never was — and no-one ever said anything about It, lest the mere mention of It cause It to cease… but everyone had known. Even Clark — who’d been absent during most of the worst of It — had been fed drips of hushed words and aborted conversations.
But no-one ever said anything. Because Bruce Wayne was an idiot, right?
Right.
And if he wasn’t? If he really was the kind of man who’d play at public stupidity for his own benefit, who’d deliberately aggravate a journalist… why, exactly? So that Clark would look extra-hard into Wayne’s business looking for some scrap of dirt…
Wayne’s… or Luthor’s.
“Argh!” Clark threw himself back against the hotel room’s cheap, uncomfortable lounge in frustration, trying to convince himself he wasn’t simply being unreasonably paranoid. Bruce Wayne was either the stupidest man on the planet or the most devious, and the puzzle was going to drive him crazy. Although not for much longer, it seemed; the envelope had been waiting for him when he’d come back from dinner, an invitation for a soirée the Wayne Foundation was holding the night after next. Fund-raising and PR weren’t exactly his usual stock-in-trade, but a call back to Perry had suggested attendance was not optional. Not that he’d said so in as many words, of course, because no-one ever did, when it came to editorial interference.
The invitation said ‘white tie’. That was worrying; Clark had to admit he hadn’t even know there was such a thing. Google’s helpful suggestions on appropriate dress had not filled him with confidence.
He’d been worrying about that when he’d seen it; the huge spotlight stretched out grotesquely across the Gotham sky. The ‘Batsignal’, he’d heard it called, thrown in amidst heated conversations over the alleged existence or not of the man — or creature, depending on who you asked — it was supposed to herald. Clark had met Batman exactly once, professionally speaking, and the encounter had been… disappointing. The man had made it abundantly clear that Superman was neither welcome in Gotham, nor was any kind of alliance on the cards. It wasn’t that he thought Batman was an enemy, per se, simply… not an ally. Their similarities could not overcome their differences, it seemed, and to be perfectly honest that bothered Clark more than he might have liked to admit.
Nothing was ever easy.
He sighed; a deeply-etched weariness that didn’t touch him physically but left him drained all the same. Because the signal was a call to him, too. Gotham might have been off the cards but the rest of the world wasn’t. And the rest of the world needed help.
He went to work.