Batman is owned by DC and the Matrix and it's characters are owned by Larry and Andy Wachowski. This is set before the original Matrix film.

Hostile Takeover – Chapter Two

Arkham Asylum. A huge ugly concrete monstrosity of the sixties. Covered in the scars of failed and successful escape attempts. The guards were some of the best paid in the business but that was purely because the life expectancy was so low. It was even rumoured that any guards who applied for a mortgage were refused because they weren't expected to make the first payment let alone all 25 years of it. A black sedan with tinted windows cruised slowly up to the gates. It was lit by spotlights from two towers and covered by guards with heavy machine guns. For a space of 200 yards around the prison was nothing but bare earth. Anything that could be used as cover had been razed to the ground. The sedan parked in the visitor parking spot, one hundred yards from the gate and two men in dark suits and sunglasses got out. They each had a small secret service ear phones wrapped around one ears with a cord coiling back into their shirt collars.

The two men walked up to the gates of Arkham asylum and talked into an intercom.

"We are agents Smith…" said one.

"and Brown," finished the other. "We are expected."

With a juddering sound the heavy steel gates creaked open and the two men walked in. Inside was Jeremiah Arkham, his hands together in the best simpering form.

"Well hello gentlemen," said Jeremiah. "Your agency did not say why you were coming. It is not about the escapes is it? This establishment is quite capable of guarding prisoners. We don't need another review of our methods."

"No Mr Arkham, that is not why we are here," said Agent Brown.

"We are here to talk to the man known as Joker."

Music was blasting out of the computer speakers. The whole Batcave was reverberating to the noise. Bats have very sensitive hearing but Robin doesn't. He was doing a bit of background research for Batman whilst simultaneously chatting to some of his friends on the internet and downloading some new Nsync tunes. Ooh! A friend of his had the latest downloads of their "Schizophrenic" album. He was just trying to hack into a South American bank that Batman was convinced that Two face had taken over.

"Hi what's new?" Came a message over the system.

"Nada just banner grabbing," typed Robin. He checked out the profile. Aha, female and under eighteen!

"That sounds exciting!" she typed back.

Robin thought for a moment. He was trying to find out their operating system, versions and patch levels so he could focus his attack. This he thought he should not mention.

A beeping sound showed a new message had turned up. Timax. A fellow hacker. "Hey hotsexyyoungthing324," typed Timax. That was Robin's messaging alias.

"Hi. Can you send me a port redirection exe, I need to hijack a session?" He typed and clicked on send.

He also typed in to the other person. "Love your profile. Is that picture you or a super model? Fancy meeting up for coffee later?" and clicked on send.

The girl typed back. "You can hijack me anytime, but you are not redirecting my port!"

Timax typed back. "Glad you like my picture! I thought the photograph caught the sweep of my beard wonderfully. We could just skip the coffee and go straight to the hot sex?"

Ooops! Wrong person. "Sorry Timax, I thought you were someone else?" He went back to the company's web site. Good it is early morning there. They are looking for staff! He quickly e-mailed a bogus CV he had on the system. It looked like a .doc word document but three hundred spaces after that was its true title. .exe. An executable file. He waited five minutes then his screen beeped. They had opened it. The .exe unpacked a small kit and sent him port and firewall details. Even access to their network. In a final flourish it deleted itself to hide itself from the network. He had a hole in their firewall and their local admin rights. He took a screen dump and started analysing their network.

The computer beeped. "Do you want to know what the matrix is Robin?"

Tim nearly spilt his coffee. How did he know his name? He checked the profile. Morpheus. No further details. It couldn't be the Morpheus could it? Most of his friends talked about him as if he were a hacking super hero.

"How do you know my name? What is the Matrix? Is it a new brand of breakfast cereal?"

Batman was standing on the roof of a building in downtown Gotham. A vicious mugging had occurred here not fifteen minutes ago. Blue lights reflected around the buildings as the ambulance below stretchered off the victim. The police below were already sealing off the area as a crime scene. Batman was using a pair of night vision binoculars and scouring the crowds below being herded off by the police. Some criminals especially serial criminals, liked to see the fruits of their action. Psychopaths and the truly mad were often able to hide their body language since they believed so truly in their cause. Batman did not believe this crime was committed by one of their number. He was looking at one man who was wearing a baseball cap. Criminals often wore hats to hide their face from CCTV cameras. It was not that which had attracted the Batman's attention though. The man below took off his hat and wiped his brow. Batman zoomed in on him. His eyebrows were raised and drawn and his lips were stretched and pulled back. He was fixing the police with a hard stare and was paying a lot of attention to the victim. The man was scared. Good. Time to give him the fright of his life.

Batman watched the man scuttle into an alley. Batman carried on watching him. He was meeting up with three others in the alley and they all three-started running off. Batman leapt off the building, fired a grappling hook at the nearest fire escape and swung down the street. At the last second he let go of the line threw himself onto a flagpole that he spun around once and let go onto a fire escape. He attached a line to it and fast roped to the ground in front of the fleeing villains.

Arkham Asylum interview room was made of bulletproof glass. Standing outside the only door into the room was a squad of ten guards. All armed with shotguns. A gas pipe fed into the roof so they could instantly flood the room with knockout gas. Two guards led a chained joker to the room. One gave him a final warning.

"Behave yourself, Joker, or we'll be putting you in solitary."

"If it means I don't have to look at your joyous countenance all day it would be a pleasure, William. Or is Willy to your friends?"

The Joker sat down and grinned at the two men in front of him. They had the smell of government men about them. Oooh goody, he must have seriously annoyed someone in power for them to pay him a visit.

"Well gentlemen, what can I help you with?" The Joker grinned at the two men. They remained expressionless. "Give me a smile."

Agent Smith said. "We need your assistance Mr Joker."

"Please less of the formalities, I'm just Joker to my friends. What can I help you with? I'm a wicked after dinner speaker. Need some punch lines for a funeral? Some of mine are positively evil." He fixed them with one of his best malevolent stares. They didn't back away. Curiouser and curiouser. He could normally make even the statue of liberty blink

"I'm going to be as forthcoming as I can be, Mr. Joker. You are here because we need your help. We are currently fighting a terrorist group, that despite our specialist skills keep evading us. We need someone that can operate outside the law."

The Joker grinned. "At the moment, I can't operate outside the prison, let alone outside the law." He rattled his chains at them. "Loosen these bracelets darling, they clash something terrible with my jacket, and we might be able to talk."

Agent Smith took off his sunglasses to reveal some unnaturally cold and blue eyes. "Before we do that Mr Joker, we need certain assurances from you."

"If you are offering my freedom, sir, I would quite happily swear that the moon is made of butter and the world is a great big jam sandwich."

"In your reality, that might just be true."

Batman leapt to the ground in front of the villains. The alleyway was piled high with rubbish bags, the flotsam and jetsam of civilisation. The three men, turned to face Batman. One of them reached into his jacket and Batman threw a batarang that knocked him out. The other one picked up a baseball bat and swung it at Batman. Batman ducked under it got inside the swing of the bat and elbowed the man in the stomach. He went down like a punctured balloon. The man Batman had originally followed pulled a gun out of his jacket and shot at Batman. The shot hit Batman on the chest, pushing him backwards into the rubbish bags. Damn. He was too slow. The man fired again. This shot just missing him. Batman threw a rubbish bag at the man, unclipped another batarang from his belt and knocked him out with it.

Batman looked down at his chest. His body armour had protected him from the bullets lethal force but he was going to have a bruise on his chest soon. He took a couple of deep breaths. Nothing broken. He quickly tied the three unconscious men to a nearby lamp post and leapt up to the line he had fast roped down originally. Without using his feet he swiftly climbed the five stories to the roof again.

Agent Smith got a hypodermic syringe from his pocket.

"With your permission Mr Joker, I would like to remove you from this reality."

The Joker paled. This sounded like they wanted to murder him. You don't kill hundreds of citizens without rubbing a few people up the wrong way. It wouldn't be the first time the relatives of one of his victims had tried to have him killed. These weren't government agents. They were contract killers. The Joker tried to stand up, but his chains stopped him moving too quickly. Agent Smith grabbed him by the neck and agent Brown, grabbed his arm. The Joker tried to struggle but it was like being held in a steel vice. The syringe went in and his arm went numb. He looked at his other arm. It looked like mercury. He could see his face reflected in his arm.

"Relax Mr Joker. Do not resist. It is inevitable."

Batman climbed down the building when a voice crackled into his earpiece. It was Alfred.

"I've just been listening to the police band, sir. It appears that two men have killed the Joker inside Arkham and they have taken a guard prisoner and want to speak to you!"

Batman jumped the remaining twenty feet to the ground, bending his legs and rolling to lessen the impact. His car was thirty feet away. He ran towards it whilst pressing a button on his belt. With a hissing sound the door opened and Batman leapt into the car. This night was just getting more and more interesting!

Batman pressed his foot on the accelerator and roared away down the street. He pressed the communicator button and said two words. "Arkham Asylum." There was a ringing sound and then a voice.

"Jeremiah Arkham speaking."

"This is Batman, what is happening?"

"Batman, thank God! Two men, they said they were from the CIA, are with the Joker right now. They injected the Joker with something! We thought they had killed him but he seems to be standing up again now?"

"I thought you had new security measures in place?"

"We do! We flooded the interview room with knockout gas as soon as we saw the hypodermic but they are all three just standing there, it had no effect on them! I sent in a guard with a shotgun and a gas mask to apprehend them but they disarmed him and knocked him out. They are asking to speak to you."

"I'll be there in ten minutes."

"Something else is strange as well?"

"What is that?"

"The Joker is now wearing sun glasses, although I could swear he didn't have them before he went in?"