Fic: 623.1 (Oracle, PG18, Prompt #4: Inertia)
Title: 623.1
Fandom: DC Comics
Prompt: #4, Inertia
Word Count: About two hundred and fifty.
Rating: PG18
Disclaimer: DC Comics owns all characters involved. Not that Oracle pays too much attention to things like that.
Summary: Technically speaking, Barbara doesn't read everything. Oracle does.
Warnings: I hate that I came up with this story, and I hate that I could probably never come with a better one for this prompt. Disturbing and violent, but this is DC, so you knew that.
Oracle's systems monitor any number of communication channels. Intercepted messages matching statistically defined patterns are automatically decrypted, classified, and acted upon by an expert system of near-AI complexity. Very few of them are actually flagged for Barbara's personal attention.
There are seventy-five issues currently in her main workflow monitor. The one at the top is a message discovered on a routine sweep of FSB covert transmissions. It's not strange that the message's language isn't Russian; the Sluzhba Bezopasnosti is as pragmatically capitalist as any other branch of Putin's government, and will rent its encrypted channels to anybody who can pay for them. But not many messages are redacted in medieval Chinese.
That was the first factor that made the system tag it. There were soon others, as the automated heuristics cross-referenced its databases and hacked other communication systems, filling up details about the message as the minutes went by.
It's a murder contract, date unclear from the message's contents.
The system keeps accumulating contextual information, clarifying the message. As there are no operator inputs despite the high priority of the flagged message, priority routines take over. Operative status records are queried -location, skills, current level of access in Oracle's network- and matched against estimated mission profiles. An operative is selected, and an encrypted message with all the relevant information is routed to his systems.
The PDA in Nightwing's gauntlet acknowledges receipt half a second later.
Sitting in front of her monitor bank, Barbara's corpse is still cooling.
.finis.
Fandom: DC Comics
Prompt: #4, Inertia
Word Count: About two hundred and fifty.
Rating: PG18
Disclaimer: DC Comics owns all characters involved. Not that Oracle pays too much attention to things like that.
Summary: Technically speaking, Barbara doesn't read everything. Oracle does.
Warnings: I hate that I came up with this story, and I hate that I could probably never come with a better one for this prompt. Disturbing and violent, but this is DC, so you knew that.
Oracle's systems monitor any number of communication channels. Intercepted messages matching statistically defined patterns are automatically decrypted, classified, and acted upon by an expert system of near-AI complexity. Very few of them are actually flagged for Barbara's personal attention.
There are seventy-five issues currently in her main workflow monitor. The one at the top is a message discovered on a routine sweep of FSB covert transmissions. It's not strange that the message's language isn't Russian; the Sluzhba Bezopasnosti is as pragmatically capitalist as any other branch of Putin's government, and will rent its encrypted channels to anybody who can pay for them. But not many messages are redacted in medieval Chinese.
That was the first factor that made the system tag it. There were soon others, as the automated heuristics cross-referenced its databases and hacked other communication systems, filling up details about the message as the minutes went by.
It's a murder contract, date unclear from the message's contents.
The system keeps accumulating contextual information, clarifying the message. As there are no operator inputs despite the high priority of the flagged message, priority routines take over. Operative status records are queried -location, skills, current level of access in Oracle's network- and matched against estimated mission profiles. An operative is selected, and an encrypted message with all the relevant information is routed to his systems.
The PDA in Nightwing's gauntlet acknowledges receipt half a second later.
Sitting in front of her monitor bank, Barbara's corpse is still cooling.
.finis.