8/30/22: Groundhog Day Batman

By his reckoning, Wei had tried to kill Batman more than fifteen thousand times.

He had tried everything. Sniping him from a distance, poisoning the water supply to Wayne Manor, rigging a bridge with explosives, even hand-to-hand combat which admittedly wasn’t his forte. Every time, he failed, and he woke up with the same day starting again.

“The time loop is powered by Batman’s life force,” a floating voice told him at the beginning of every day. “The only way to leave is to kill him.”

In the beginning, he didn’t even try. He would drive down to the Penumbra River and sit there watching the geese. He sampled every class at Gotham community college. He learned to play the cello. He spent the equivalent of a lifetime or two as an alcoholic, then cultivated an opiate addiction, then spent another lifetime pulling himself together.

After those early days, he grew bored of existence. The lack of meaningful human connection gnawed at him. He spent years scheming, tracking Batman’s daily routine, trying to figure out how to kill him. It never worked. He reached the conclusion that there was no physical series of actions that he could take that could kill the man.

This realization gave him comfort. It was freeing to be able to give himself permission to stop trying, and the time loop felt like a blessing again.

At first he set himself goals. It took him twenty years of playing the cello to be able to successfully audition into the city orchestra. Ten years of studying chess to beat the best hustler in Gardener’s Park. Twenty years to become fluent in ten languages and call himself a polyglot. He took up mathematics, and after seven lifetimes solved Riemann’s hypothesis. He talked to every person in the city, twice over.

He grew bored with goals after that. He found meaning in the qualia of daily existence. In the feeling of wind on his face in the Catskill mountains, in the way his hands would part the water while swimming in the Penumbra River. He stopped feeling lonely. 

He started meditating on a park bench in Gardener’s Park. At first it was only for an hour or two each day. It felt endlessly interesting, this experience of feeling his mind be both empty and full at the same time. The hours turned into days turned into lifetimes, spent sitting at this bench.

Over time, he turned his thoughts inward, and imagined the whole of Gotham city within his mind. He had perfect knowledge of every spect of dust, every moving particle in the world, having spent infinity wandering through it. And after lifetimes of turning his mind’s eye inward, he was able to imagine it in its entirety. 

It was trivial after that to let the billiard balls keep moving, to continue simulating the world into the next day. 

One day, he imagined himself at the start of the day. And when the day ended, he simply kept on imagining its continuation. His mind was nothing but fidelity, and his mind became the map became the territory itself, until he opened his eyes, and it was past midnight, and he was living the next day already, his mind within his mind.

And so Wei lived the rest of his life, and he was content.