It had recently become considerably difficult to communicate with Batman by indirect means. Batman had announced that it was too risky for his associates to share sensitive information regarding issues of public safety over his answering machine, ever since an incident earlier that year, involving an evil doppelganger from a parallel world with a personal vendetta against Batman's good name. And so, upon returning to John Smith's residence off site from Star Labs' partnering university, Red Tornado found himself in the awkward position of trying to contact his colleague without upsetting the rule that had been set in place.
Red Tornado left a politely vague voice message with the Bat Video Answering Machine that did credit to Stuart Martha's chapter on humoring one's work friends and their eccentricities, staring into the lenses of a little camera that recorded his expressionless face and flat observations, and making a dull note of the pointlessness of a machine talking into a machine designed to capture the fidgeting nuances of humanity. Neurosis was a trait that he knew of by its symptoms, but did not understand. Contacting Batman and conferring with him on the happenings that had taken place on the island earlier that day was the most logical thing to do though, and so he had few appropriate alternatives.
Reaching Batman through his preferred channels, however greatly encouraged by Stuart Martha, proved to be an ineffective means of approaching the mystery however, and after some days passed without a response, Red Tornado's programming began biding him to attempt making progress in spite of the silence.
The next course of action his mechanical mind turned out as being the most logical was to see who else had been watching the space that the meteor had traveled through. But once again, his plans yielded unfavorable results due to variables beyond his control. While Red Tornado was able to compile a short list of observational satellites that would have been ideally located to observe the meteor's decent to the island, he found that the majority had been damaged or disabled just prior to the meteor's arrival.
"We don't know specifically what happened," an engineer in charge of one of the dismembered satellites, that happened to belong to Star Labs, shared when Red Tornado sought him out. "We received a remote feed from the cam, but we can't tell whether something hit it before the connection failed."
The engineer was kind enough to agree to let Red Tornado briefly view the footage that was broadcasted to the lab up until the point at which the camera ceased to work, and thus saved Red Tornado the trouble of hacking into the lab's secure files later to access it on his own. From what Red Tornado was able to see, there were no definite signs of a foreign object colliding with the lab's satellite, just as the engineer had said. It showed a view of the Earth far higher than would be credited to a bird's eye, and then a sudden abundance of static. Rewinding the footage he had recorded himself with a camera of his own located inside his eyes—which Red Tornado suspected the human engineer did not realize he'd be equipped with when granting him his brief screening—Red Tornado was able to view the transmission at various speeds. He thought that he could make out the spacecraft shaking ever so slightly for a moment before the feed was cut off, and that there may have even been a hint of a shadow just prior to the fateful end of reception, but he was unable to definitively conclude any foul play from so scant of evidence.
The owners of the other satellites declined to meet with Red Tornado, one vocally citing that his company would not breech their privacy protocols for the sake of a spying toaster posing as a superhero, likely poaching for his makers.
Possessing neither the capacity to heat bread nor the drive to hunt animals, Red Tornado did not fully understand the grounds for such slurs, but his programming instructed him not to care about receiving them.
During his meeting with the Star Labs engineer, Red Tornado received a call from Batman, but declined to answer it based upon the wisdom of Stuart Martha's Laws of Etiquette, which specifically specified it rude to engage in phone calls and all other types of digital communication when visiting with others. He reviewed the message Batman left on his voicemail later, which explained that Batman had missed Red Tornado's message and been delayed in answering it due to rendering a favor for the Green Lantern Corp at their distant intergalactic headquarters, the return trip of which had taken a day in and of itself due to the sheer distance traveled. Being aware of the time consuming nature of space travel, Red Tornado supposed that a mere two days being needed to return his call was reasonable enough.
"Now that invading forces are securely back in their place and sentient planets are free to enjoy their cognitive liberties, I'm available for calls. Feel free to get back to me whenever is convenient, Tornado."
Red Tornado attempted to call Batman back immediately, but found that he was put through to voice mail after the first ring, and did not hear from Batman again throughout the night.
Red Tornado had sat staring into the insentient lenses of the camera for a moment after completing his return message.
"Observation. . . " he said aloud, either to himself or the idle machine in front of him, "It is highly unlikely that multiple surveillance systems would simultaneously break within the same time period with no forewarning."
Stuart Martha's rules on the subject of phone tag were tersely written and cautioned extreme patience, particularly in regards to work colleagues, and allowed Red Tornado few options within the confinements of polite conduct.
Kathy S. from the Cafeteria was less adamant.
"Sometimes it's better to just drop by and check in," she said to him on the day she inquired about his wellbeing, and he in turn relayed his concerns in a censored version, of simply wanting to hear back from a friend. "Act casual about it. If they're really too busy to call, maybe they could use a hand themselves."
This logic did not seem unreasonable, but in relating it to Stuart Martha's Laws of Etiquette, which the part of his programming that managed his John Smith persona was inclined to, under the reasoning that while Stuart Martha did not specifically cater to the superhero ilk, Stuart Martha did cover humanity on the whole, and superheroes were by and large human, Red Tornado could not condone barging into Batman's routines unannounced. Red Tornado processed the idea in conjunction with several different variables, reasoning in favor of Batman's busy schedule, his own hours of superhero conduct, and the likelihood of whatever came down to earth being completely harmless.
There was a small paragraph on the page of Stuart Martha's Laws, starred and written in a smaller text to specify it as an unnecessary extension of a rule more clearly outline in the main text, referring to unanswered calls, stating that when dealing with acquaintances belonging to high stress career paths it was fundamentally important to bear greatest patience in mind, as they likely needed their rest.
To make the matter more perplexing, Red Tornado began to monitor solar activity over Star City. The rising rate of meteorites since the island incident was hardly gradual, and unmistakable to Red Tornado as he crunched the data. All were of smaller sizes than the one that had landed the day he met the hero known as B'Wanna Beast, but he found them worthy of concern nonetheless. At the urging of the same mechanism that made him travel doggedly to the island before, Red Tornado cleared time to visit several of the impact locations closest to Star City. But he found the errands to be largely difficult. For one thing, they all seemed to be landing in the sea.
Observations suggested that these meteors were different, dissolvable as well as smaller. Often, Red Tornado was not even able to get a residue sample to compare with the one that he took from the cracked-egg-like shell he'd seen on the island. He was left with only being able to look for signs of radiation, scan the bottom of the ocean for meteor remains, which were often dissembled by the current by the time he arrived at the site of those that fell in shallow water. Other times, the water was too deep for his probing to be successful.
Through it all, the phone tag continued. Three days following his call on the day he looked in on Star Labs, Red Tornado had received another voice mail from Batman, citing that he had been kidnapped by a dictator from another world who forced him and several other champions of both the right and wrong side of the law to race to the death for the amusement of his god-like peers and that he was very sorry for the delay in reaching out to him. To this, Red Tornado attempted to call Batman back during daylight hours to catch him outside of his normal patrol patterns, but heard back only after more two nights transpired, Batman relating a story about a visit he had had from an eccentric magical being from another dimension, imbued with the ability to alter the fabric of reality and with no inkling of the responsibility that ought to have gone with it, all via the patented Bat Video Answer Phone Service.
Upon the last, Red Tornado managed to call Batman back within minutes of his nocturnal message, but once again Batman did not pick up the phone. Instead, Red Tornado received his answer in the form of three messages on his own answering machine that respectively asked him to come over and "hang out", to deal with his own needy problems, and to please excuse the first two messages, as Batman had recently been spilt into thirds by a mysterious and powerful force.
Red Tornado had to admit that his colleague led a very interesting life.
Batman ended his last message: "Call back if you still want to talk, Tornado."
Naturally, when Red Tornado did so, he got the machine.