Angela
"The only suggestion I can give is don't try to win over the press," Frank comments. "The only people you need to win over are the public. Be authentic and win them over. Be fake and lose them forever."
Angela pauses with her hand on the doorknob, hearing Frank's muffled voice come through it. The word rings in her mind:
Fake.
She had left to get changed after battle, as Sanzel himself left to freshen up before the press conference. Bryan had impressed upon her the importance of dressing and presenting himself properly. She wore jeans and a T-shirt witrh a hoodie over it. Modest and unassuming, with only her fiber-optic hair to reveal her machine nature.
For Man is a superficial, shallow creature. Doc Otaku crafted her to be pleasing to his eye, dressed her in the scandalous style he so favored, gave her the luscious curves and luminous blue eyes he lusted after. Bigots and hatemongers dismissed entire millions as sub-human based on something as small as the color of their skin, a epidermis barely a fraction of an inch thick. False prophets of justice mocked and humiliated women for showing skin, for being unashamed of their bodies, for not conforming to their standards of how women should dress and appear.
Slut. Whore. Ho. Trashy. Mocked them, with hateful venom dripping from the barbed tips of sarcasm quotes.
"Empowered." "Hero."
Why do words hurt so much? Angela frowns. She does not understand. Her defensive systems are at full capacity, her shields intact, titanium-iridium armor unbreached, but it hurts.
She remembers. She remembers the last interview she had trying out for a superhero team.
"I'm sorry, but I can't accept her. Listen, it's 2019. I don't care what Amethyst is doing out west; I can't have a female hero in a bikini walk onto the stage on International Women's Day."
The interviewer was a woman. For some reason, the fact that it was a woman made it hurt more. There are no people as ruthlessly, inhumanly cruel to women as other women.
"She has a good heart. She's trying to help." It was Bryan, being interviewed separately from her. Bryan thought she was not listening in, thought she could not hear the conversation going on behind the door she was leaning against, thought she could not feel the sound waves translated into microscopic vibrations in the plywood.
"She can't give us the kind of help we need. We need someone who can support this superteam's wholesome, family-friendly image and promote its social agenda." The woman continued speaking:
"Besides, we need another woman on the team to keep the gender ratio equal, and she won't do. She's a robot, a machine. She's fake."
She remembers saying to Bryan to leave after the interview. To go somewhere far, far away. And that was how they came to the Gulf Coast, to meet Sanzel.
The words hurt. They wounded her in a way gunfire and munitions could not. They struck deep in the core of her A.I. matrix.
Her hand pauses on the doorknob, and for the first time Angela is afraid. The heroes in comics and anime rarely had to worry about not having the adoration of the general public. But, slowly, she is coming to realize that the two worlds are not quite alike. What if the people she wants to defend reject her? What then? She hesitates.
And then, in the core of her A.I. matrix, the neural network flares and grows in a sudden burst, and she looks up with new resolve.
If they are not alike, then it's up to her to change that. To make something true and real out of all of Doc Otaku's frivolous hobbies.
Angela opens the door to the changing room and walks back out.
"I'm ready," she says brightly to her teammates.
"Let's go."
