commentfic: DCU, The Bat Clan, In a world of high-tech cyber crime, the Bats are the ghosts in the machine, and Oracle is the vengeful god overseeing everything.
Oracle stretches her reach throughout the system, monitoring her personal operations and the ones she's claimed. She is nearly limitless in this form, in a world of numbers and sequences and codes. She is above the Grid, looking down on highways of circuitry and activity and information.
She is powerful here, almost infinite with every cyber command at her fingertips, and anything beyond only a thought away. In her time here, she's spread her influence throughout Gotham's Grid, and from there, she could access everything from traffic cameras and lights, train schedules, bank transactions, medical records, police records...
Oracle controls Gotham, protects it, though it's hardly worth it sometimes. It's more a stubbornness that won't allow her to let the city devour itself. That it's not really that great and powerful.
And the Oracle has allies now, it seems. They assisted in taking out an AI that had a malicious sense of humor and wreaked havoc on the city's Grid and threatened to spread further.
At first, she thought that they were Programs already inside the grid. It wasn't until later, when she went over the data that she realized that they were jacked in.
She didn't know who they were. They appeared suddenly and vanished, cleaning nearly trace of themselves from every system they touched. It was like they'd been absorbed into the Grid itself.
She didn't know, and Oracle did not like being uninformed. She's been looking for them, but they have been careful to handle their business quickly, taking out viruses targeting banking records, hackers trolling government contracts, internal hospital information, U.S Marshal records.
They're messy and stylish and vindictive, but highly efficient, and if not for the fact they they had invited themselves into her territory, she might be mildly impressed rather than very pissed off.
That blue one had called her babe.
Babe.
So for hours, she has searched the Grid, looking for the kind of power surges that would indicate several, usually four, people being Online for extended periods of times, how many people in the city with the money for the kind of tech necessary to even jack in, crossmatching the dates and times.
She finds a promising lead, and follows it, finds an ID, and doesn't allow herself to believe it until she's exhausted all possible lines of investigation.
In this form, Oracle has a limited range of facial expressions because that is the way she is designed. But were she capable, the smile on her face would warn certain people to flee to some remote, backwards island lacking anything more high tech than DSL.
In the real world, Barbara Gordon unjacks, removing the visor from her eyes and pressing a hand to her temple. The implant is just under her skin, and her head throbs, but she's still smiling.
"Bruce Wayne," she says to the quietly humming machines. The screens cast her in a pale, green light and reflect off of the glasses she slips onto her nose. "is the Batman. Now isn't that just a kick in the head."