Batman Beyond: Duplicants .pdf download
Novels, Comics and Webcomics
Discover more from Novels, Comics and Webcomics
Sometimes I write essays, but I'm mainly here to share my urban fantasy comics and novels. Check out my original works, 1000 Years of War and Shatterrealm.
Batman Beyond: Duplicants .pdf download
I wrote a tribute to "Blade Runner" / Philip K. Dick
Feb 25, 2026
Batman Beyond is so heavily inspired by Blade Runner, yet there isn’t really a Blade Runner “episode”! This was my attempt at capturing the uncertainty in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s a shorter story with no fat. Free download after the following preview.
Rain drummed noisily onto the skyscrapers. It textured the air, almost causing the lights of Gotham City to shudder as they sliced across skyscrapers and hover traffic. As a billboard ad wiped away, a searing line of indigo outlined the jagged shadow of a winged man as he dropped from the sky.
Batman crouched at the edge of a building. His gliders folded in. He had come to patrol the neighborhood for the night, and now he paused, searching the crowd of umbrellas below for anything unusual. Rain water poured down the sharp ears of his cowl and dripped off the end of his nose and chin.
“What did you say these rumors were?” he whispered into his radio. “Even in the storm, this place is too crowded and well-lit to have much more action than, ah… maybe some pick-pocketing.”
“It was a 9-1-1 call from a tourist,” his mentor replied. “They thought it looked like a chase, possibly a kidnapping.”
A police copter was just touching down, possibly in response to that very call. A pair of uniformed officers wandered the sidewalk for a while, close enough that Batman could hear the crackle of their radios. Apparently seeing nothing unusual, they shrugged and turned around after just a few minutes.
Batman was about to leave himself. That was when he noticed a pair of heads poke up from behind a dumpster. They waited as the chop-chop-chop of the hover engine carried the cops away. Then two women in rain coats emerged from hiding, clasped hands, and started running on stiletto heels.
Their coats flapped open. They weren’t wearing much underneath — at least, nothing warm or practical. With a crack, a lightning bolt bleached the sky white. The women never looked up to see the dark shadow pursuing them along the rooftops.
Batman studied them. Of course, these women didn’t look like kidnappers. With no one immediately pursuing, they honestly didn’t look like the victims of a kidnapping, either. But they did seem to be hiding from the police. Batman figured he’d find out if they had a good reason.
It was when they turned into a narrow, unpopulated street that they drew more attention. A man on the crowded sidewalk pointed and shouted. Another man, dressed in a similar black T-shirt and gray khakis, joined the pursuit, combat boots sloshing through the puddles.
The women screamed. Letting go of one another’s hands, they took off down diverging alleys. Batman knew whose side he was on now. He dropped to the ground behind the nearest woman.
She whirled with a terrified shriek. As she slipped on the slick concrete, Batman punched her pursuer square in the chest. The pathetic squeak was supremely satisfying. The other woman wasn’t far from Batman’s mind, so he handcuffed the man while he was still bent double and hurriedly flew up the side of a building, hanging the man from a drainpipe by his cuffs.
“Ma’am, you okay?” Batman called. The woman who had slipped was still lying on the ground, but she rolled over and moaned a little. He turned back to his captive. “Hang tight.”
As he raced off to help the other victim, he thought he heard the man cough, “Wait…”
That probably wasn’t good.
The other pursuant was closing in on the other woman. Again, Batman dropped into the middle of the action. He swept his leg wide, tripping the pursuer before jumping onto him and delivering a few disorienting punches. That was when he looked up to see a few dozen other men closing in, all in black shirts and gray khakis. Some touting blasters.
Batman threw himself onto the woman. She gave a cry as his boosters shot them skyward. A few laser blasts chased after them, and he gritted his teeth, hoping the stray shots weren’t going through windows or otherwise hurting bystanders.
“What’s going on?” he shouted to the woman in his arms.
The neon signs illumined her mute, wild-eyed face as it tilted up at him. She was exquisitely good-looking. Having grown up in Gotham City, he thought he was pretty good at guessing a person’s ethnicity, but this woman could have told him she was anything – European, Latin American, Asian, northern African – and he would have believed her. There was also something curious about the way she looked at him. As if he or his actions baffled her. She seemed too stunned to answer his question. He could see her pulse racing in her slender neck.
He set her down on a roof. Under the shifting lights of a lucky Chinese dragon sign, he studied her more critically. “Why are those men chasing you?”
“They’re trying to hold us,” she sniffled.
“But why?”
“I don’t know.” She spread her arms, looking down at her scanty clothing. “We don’t have anything. We aren’t even useful anymore.”
“Looks like you did something they don’t like.” But though Batman doubted it was as simple as she said, he wasn’t detecting insincerity in her tone or the way her breath trembled. Setting the mystery aside for now, he said, “I gotta go back for your friend.”
A hover vehicle swung around the corner. It was one of those sarcophagus-shaped ones that made the pilot stand upright and, sure enough, the pilot was another man in gray khakis. Batman shoved the woman down and hurled a few batarangs. When they were sniped right out of the air like skeet, he abandoned the fight, scooping up the woman and plunging over the side of the building. He left an explosive in his wake to obscure their trail.
Neo Gotham was a sprawling behemoth of high-tech levels built over the original city. Here the level dropped off. They were plummeting straight down to the shadows at the base of the island.
Batman clapped a hand over the woman’s screaming mouth. “He can’t see us,” he hissed over the wind. “That guy has no visor, no infrared. Just stay quiet. I got you.”
Tears spilled from her eyes. Then she hugged his neck more tightly, hiding her face against him. Pity twisted his heart as if it would wring him dry, but he tried not to show it.
Though it was a long drop, they weren’t far from the Gotham harbor, which meant they weren’t far from the secret cave where Batman kept all his tech. He used the controls in his cowl, sensitive to synapses in his brain, to call the submarine to them on autopilot. It was waiting when they came to a rolling stop at the edge of the sea. The woman sprawled out, trembling. She looked at the sea in bewilderment.
“This will take you to a safe location,” Batman murmured, hurriedly opening the hatch before someone could find them again. He helped the woman into the sub.
On her way down the ladder, she kissed the side of his mask. “You’re the nicest person I’ve ever met. What’s your name?”
He cocked his head incredulously. Was she asking for his real name? “…Batman.”
“Bat- man?” she repeated, as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. Now her eyes were flicking from his ears to the red bat emblem on his chest.
He was scrutinizing her more closely, too. “You’ve, uh… you’ve heard of me, right?”
“…Right, of course I have. Ha. My name is Min.”
He kept his doubts to himself as he closed the hatch. “Watch your head, Min.”
As the submarine ferried her away, the Batmobile roared overhead, a black hover car of aerodynamic curves. Batman jumped up through the bottom hatch. As he fell back into the seat, automated restraints closing around him, his hands slid into the familiar controls. Red light flowed up the circuits in his arms.
Then another blast from the engines. The Batmobile reared up, streaking along the side of the city to return Batman to the level where he’d left the other girl. Surely, the man he’d strung up had been able to call for help by now, and his buddies had surely found him. Desperate as Batman was to arrive in time, he was also uneasy about how little he understood here. There was something very off about the situation.
As he’d expected, the first pursuant Batman had handcuffed was being helped down by his buddies. The first woman struggled in vain against the men who held her by the arms. The rest of the men, more annoyed than afraid, raised their hands in surrender when they saw the Batmobile descending into their midst. He couldn’t very well attack them now…
Batman opened the top hatch. He stood up in the rain. “Someone wanna tell me what the frag is going on?”
“We’re private security for Shimano Industries.” The man who stepped forward, probably the leader, held up the ID on his lanyard before putting his hands back into the air. “The women you’re trying to rescue aren’t women. They’re company property. Duplicants.”
He snapped his fingers. The struggling lady was dragged forward, the sleeve of her raincoat pushed back. When head of security shone a black light over her inner wrist, it illuminated a bar code.
Batman looked down at the lifelike thing that stared up at him with pleading, brown eyes. His stomach sank. Still, he pushed back. “And the pulse, the breath, the tears…?”
“Like it says in the ad: Just like the real thing. You should take more time to watch vids, freak. I don’t suppose you know where the other one ran off to?”
Instinctively, he felt he should lie. He caught himself before he could say she. “It got away.”
Another police radio crackled. Batman turned to see cops chatting with Shimano security. One was undoing Batman’s handcuffs.
Knowing he couldn’t go up against the entire GCPD (again), and also uncertain that he even should, Batman grudgingly turned back to the head of security. “Sorry about the misunderstanding.”
“Please,” the woman cried, distraught, but a guard laid a device over her eyes. A bar glowed blue. Then her body went limp.
“God, these things are creepy,” someone complained as they hauled her away. “Why are they programmed to cry like that?”
Duplicants
1.39MB ∙ PDF file
Get this .pdf and all my other fics in a bundle, included free with Essays on Batman Beyond.