Chapter 2

The Emergence of a Genius

Jack had kept his promise over the next six years, taking Infinity with him wherever he went to live in the city of Gotham. He would keep them fed and keep up the rent for their apartment with money that was of dubious origin. Once he was well-known in the area he would simply move onto another part of town – after all, the police had the mob to deal with and hardly ever pursued the hundreds of cases of minor crimes.

He would buy her games, whatever she wanted—though she did not usually ask for anything at all. Though there was quite a strange development when Jack bought a computer: Infinity became obsessed and would hardly leave her place in front of the screen.

Normal parents would have given their children Leapfrog games to play on their computer, instead, Jack had any kind of virtual violent game imaginable. He would play it for a while, showing Infinity how to play, then let her take over, praising her for getting head-shots and merely referring to the virtual men she was slaughtering as 'bogies'. Just like the army, except for two crucial differences: it was all virtual killing, and Infinity was being taught that taking the lives of others was simply entertainment. Death was like everything else in her world now: fake. They would just re-spawn somewhere else and she could kill them again and again, Jack assured her. The fun would never end. Well, it would never end as long as Jack was there. Really it seemed that that was the real reason why Infinity stayed and why she loved him—though she really had no concept of what 'love' was, besides the 'love' her father had shown to her.

After the games became a usual and perhaps slightly boring amusement, she began to ask for books about computer coding. He did get the books she wanted, and she immediately began to read. If anything, that seemed to make her even more obsessed with this new and amazing virtual world. In most parental figures, this would have been quite an alarming sight, but Jack; now calling himself by his trademark card, "The Joker", saw it as an infinite resource to intended.

If Infinity was the genius that her budding obsession was promising to make her, he could utilize that in every single place in Gotham. He let her absorb everything and continued to nurture their playful bond over the years that she poured over those books and tinkered away with the computer.

At first it was just making little messages pop up on the screen like, "Hi! :3" or, "I 3 You!" instead of the usual warning or error message. Little by little, however, Infinity became more daring; she started hacking into private servers, relishing the thrill of having to cover her tracks so that no one could trace where her home-made virus was coming from. One seemingly dreary day, Infinity called Jack in to see what she was doing—and to Jack's delighted shock, she was showing him the open network of the FBI. He had no idea how she had managed to bypass all the encoded passwords and wormed her way through the supposedly air-tight system, but she had. It was rather clear by his expression that he was thrilled and quite proud of his charge. Now, of course, she was not quite as young as she used to be. By now she was almost seventeen and eager to help Jack, and now that she knew so much about the virtual world, she could easily do just that.

"Uhm, Jack?" she asked, turning to look at him with those precious emerald orbs of hers.

"Mhm?"

"I want to play your games with you, but I can't do much with the things I have right now. Just this computer isn't enough to help. I need at least a laptop, preferably the most recent model, a simple radio transceiver, audio and visual chords. Those are the chords that have the yellow, white and red ends to black cased wires. A wireless internet modem and wherever I work there has to be at least a phone jack if not a cable jack."

"That's fine," he told her, his characteristic grin on his face as he kissed her forehead with a dramatic and noisy smooch. "I'll have plenty of cash to buy you whatever you want after I win my next game."

He had planned a bank heist earlier that week and it would go down no matter what now because he had to get her everything. With her help he could do whatever he pleased, and have her be contented at the same moment. She had never been a worry for him, but then again after he simply let go of most of the 'normal' priorities in life, there wasn't much room in his footloose-and-fancy-free life for worry. And now it was especially true, she wasn't going to be a worry; she was going to be an asset, a very intelligent asset at that.

"Alright," Infinity conceded. "Just make sure you win."

"Of course," he replied, motioning wide with his arms to further enhance the point. "Have I ever lost?"

"No. But because of that I'm a really sore loser. That and I don't like the rules for the game I have to play if you are around police."

He tilted his head a bit, putting a hand to his chin and stroking it in a thespian pose of thinking. Finally he knelt down next to her and said, "well how about this: once you get all the equipment that you need, we'll come up with a better game. Alright?"

Infinity pursed her lips a little in an adorable imitation of a pout before finally replying. "Alright."

"That's my girl." Jack told her, quite happy with his handiwork in their relationship.

Even without her help, Jack didn't have to bother too much with the bank heist. His 'people' showed up promptly and filled the spaces they needed to fill. It didn't bother him at all that he turned his gun on each of them in turn- they were in it for their own cut. Jack was in it for Inifinity, and to show this city its' true colors. Show them Batman's true colors. Oh yes, he'd already had a few small brushes with the 'superhero' back in his minor crime days, but as he 'moved up in the ranks' he had yet to be caught by anyone again; unintentionally, at least. The joker was a force to be reckoned with; and even more so soon, when Infinity could officially help him. There would be nothing to hold them back- Jack could charm his way through anything, or simply blow it to smithereens with a menacing and yet still clown like laugh; Infinity, once he set her up with all the equipment she needed, would have no trouble making him an 'invisible man' as far as electronics go. From then on, heists and major operations would be easy.

Perhaps this was a good time to start putting money in the budget for cronies. Or building a massive evil lair- since his ultimate target was, after all, a 'superhero'; he had to be a 'supervillain' right? And all 'supervillains' had a massive, evil, secret lair. Ah but such thinking could wait: right now he had to go shopping. Goodness, he couldn't wait to see the smile on Infinity's face as he brought her all she wanted! Maybe this was what Santa felt like? Ah, but he was better than Santa, he was her everything.

Now, to the store!