[Fateverse Side Story: NC Bundle] Accellerando
The Ringmaster: Chapter 8 of 13
Complacency gives rise to error; proper accellerando requires precision.
Warnings: Crossovers, fateverse, sci-fi, experimentation on prisoners, tertiary deaths, multiverse cameso, pervasive swearing.
Disclaimer: Recognizeable characters belong to DC/Marvel/Mutant Enemy/Andrzej Sapkowski.
Timeline: Six weeks after Non Troppo.
It is edifying, but not completely necessary, to have read the Dark Nights: Metal event.
Visit The Fateverse Glossary for important terms, concepts, and people.
Notes: See postscript; linked footnotes may open in a new tab.
Accellerando
Bruce wakes to an alert on his portable, scrambling to see what’s wrong.
Node disrupted
Medical alarm
His mind careens through a dozen disastrous scenarios as he pulls on a shirt and sprints out of his quarters without jacket or shoes.
The lab is in the science annex-any number of nearby experiments could have gone wrong, but it’s the only place with sufficient signal isolation capability. The theory wing should have been the safest place for his lab, short of the Nullres Facility itself.
The science annex is in lockdown when he arrives, absolutely swarming with warders and medics.
“That klaxon is the medical emergency alarm!” someone is shouting. “Let us in so we can provide care!”
“There has been a classified project breach,” a warder retorts. “No one without the appropriate access credentials can be allowed into the annex.”
“Senior Theorist!” one of the warders calls, flagging him down. “Emergency in Auxiliary Cartography, sir.”
“I know,” Bruce snaps. “Page my nurses, and get me a Senior Warder.”
They let him in.
Nothing is on fire, there are no strange smells. The klaxon would be loud enough to disrupt Jormungandr, if he weren’t already in the middle of some kind of catastrophic failure.
There are two dead warders outside the lab, and six live ones cordoning the area.
“Halt! Verify-”
“It’s my goddamn lab,” hisses Bruce, shoving his way to the control panel.
“S-sorry, sir, just doing my-” the man stammers when the door opens easily.
Bruce is already gone, dashing through the antechamber (and there is no sign of the four warders who should have been stationed there).
Two pods in the outer ring have been upended, one subject gibbering and insensate on the floor while the other is
gone
“Jay!” he shouts, foolishly hoping that his missing Joker is just hiding somewhere in the room.
The simulation is an explosion of nonsense, disconnected shapes and random letters. The clowns aren’t writing, only twitching a little. The comms device the Savant installed is silent.
“No!” Bruce rages in denial. “No, fuck!”
The door opens, and running feet approach. “Check all of them-do not disrupt the pacification hoods! Dr. Wayne, I’m Dr. Tam, Head Medic. Nurse Lawton is here, and Nurse Tompkins is en route. No response yet from Nurse Quinzel. The other medic with us now is Nurse Nenneke, a classified-level nurse.”
Bruce swallows his anger as the doctor checks the vitals of his fallen subject.
.\45:\ Jack Jolie GGF441
For his part, Bruce focuses on putting the pod back into its proper order. The restraints ensure that the subject couldn’t have fallen out by accident; the chair’s controls must have been hit when it was tipped over. He holds out the hood.
Dr. Tam glances at him only for a moment before settling the hood back into place. The gibbering quiets, but the simulation is still essentially static.
They need to verify the rest of the Node. At his work station, Bruce pulls his current list. “This is the subject catalogue for Node 251. Please check the subjects present against this list.” He overrides the room’s projector to show the list where it would normally show the cartography feed.
“Ring one, all present and correct,” Lawton says immediately. “Whoever did this wasn’t interested in the early recruits.”
“You’re sure it was an abduction and not an escape?” asks Nenneke.
“The clowns share a collective consciousness,” Lawton says. “And that consciousness happens to reeeeeally like it here.”
The door opens again, and Tompkins runs to the second ring, rapidly skimming each readout before going back more thoroughly. “Ring two, present and correct, Dr. Wayne.”
Lawton comes over to the empty pod just as Tam crosses the last remaining subject off the list. “You know I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ Boss…” [ 1]
There’s one unaccounted for.
.\44:\ Joker HDC779
Pretty, deceptively sweet-looking. Harmless-looking, to those who are ignorant or willing to be fooled. Nearly as bad as John Doe, in that regard. A biter, one warder can attest from his reattached thumb.
Lawton did, in fact, quietly protest the presence of a Harley in the lab. Too erratic. Too greedy and codependent, where Jokers are concerned. Only a matter of time before the guy got attached to a pretty one and decided to ‘save him.’
“You did tell me so,” Bruce concedes. “Lee, watch the rest of my Node. Lawton, into the corridor with me, please.”
Outside, he opens his portable and reports his missing Node to the CDB (the Senior Warder he requested tries to talk to him, but this is more important). Then he calls Wade.
~What.~
“Quinzel stole one.[ 2] Subject Forty-four is gone, and the two guards on duty outside the lab are dead. I want that bastard found, and I want my goddamn Node back.”
~Slow your roll. Is your Node operational?~
“No. All subjects have been checked over, all vitals read correct for our needs, but Jormungandr is not relaying intelligible data.”
~Fuck. All right, stay there. Demand the presence of the Ward Commissioner, and don’t leave your lab before I arrive. I’ll land at the Tower in forty seconds, your time.~
So Bruce calls up Network Law Enforcement and formally demands the presence of the Head Warder at the site of a Node theft.
Victoria Hand arrives from one direction just as the Savant arrives from the other.
“Not here,” Bruce says, scanning them back into the lab.
“Everything you are about to see and learn is classified,” the Savant tells Commissioner Hand. “No outbound signals, and zero data connection to the device at Keeper 193’s desk. Ragnarok, standalone mode. Get me a scan of Node 251.”
The medics are still performing some cursory checks-they look up like a pack of feral alley cats when Bruce and the others enter the Circus.
~Error,~ says the dark Node. ~Node 251 Jormungandr is not present. Query Central Database?~
“No. Show me the distributed wavelength and compare it to Node 251’s cached file.”
Whatever he sees must be bad news, because the furrow between his eyebrows deepens.
Lawton pulls up the brainwave readings at the nearest pod’s screen.[ 3] “Holy shit, he’s gone.”
Bruce feels sick and worried and fucking furious. “Harley actually managed to kidnap my goddamn Node. He’s a fucking distributed doppler construct, and Quinn got him by taking one of my clowns. How?”
Wade waves the question away. “How it happened is Hand’s problem. Do some forensic work on the empty pod and its neighbor, Hand-I’ll get you everything I have on the Node’s current body and the fucker who took it. This is top priority. In the wrong hands, Jormungandr can bring down the whole Network.”
“Someone besides its Keeper can control it?” Hand asks.
Lawton snickers. “Control, yeah, good luck with that. You know, I would love to meet someone who can actually control him. The Bat here is the closest there’s ever been.”
“He can be influenced,” Bruce says. “Steered. Make him believe something was his idea, he’ll probably do it…and possibly try to kill you. Honestly, he spends most of his time ‘listening’ to chronometric vibrations, utterly disinterested in the outside world.”
She looks at the empty pod. “Well, I’ll leave that to you. I’ll supply what evidence and information I can, and when you’ve apprehended your suspected thief, I’ll prosecute to the fullest extent-assuming he hasn’t violated stability, in which case no doubt the Sysadmin will deploy forces.”
“Lawton, mind the Circus,” Bruce says.
“You got it, Boss,” Lawton replies with a sardonic salute.
“Walk with me, Batboy,” Wade says, and sets a brisk pace out of the annex.
Bruce follows in mute dread. His greatest triumph could be his greatest downfall. If they can’t get Jay back, he’ll have made and destroyed his career in less than a year.
Wade leads him across pedways and auto-walks, a (rather rude and vocally protested) beeline to the geographical center of Lethbridge-Stewart Memorial Park in front of the Tower. “Ragnarok, engage localized counterintel suite.”
~Counterintelligence measures active.~
“It’s not a worst-case scenario,” says Bruce.
“It’s sure as fuck not best-case,” Wade retorts.
“Physically manifested, especially in a consolidated form, he can be checked thoroughly for-”
“Can you still kill him?”
Bruce pauses.
Can he?
do it…dooooo it
he can’t catch
his breath, can’t
t h i n k
he’s so angry, but
you want it, i want it
it’ll be easy, pumpkin…put your hand here, like this
and give me jussssst a little
push
laughter, all the way down
a sickening, wet sound
splat
like a dishrag thrown onto tile
“If I must,” he decides. “I don’t like killing…it’s beyond my last resort. But if he’s a real, credible threat to the Network or the Timestream…then yes. Fifty-one Jokers to set us back to zero with the DC052 is fair.”
Wade stares him down. Here, now, with Jay on the line, it’s as nerve-wracking as staring down Alfred after breaking a promise.
“I can do it,” he says firmly. I’ve done it before, he doesn’t say, because Jormungandr and Joker aren’t the same person, they aren’t.
Except when they are.
“Bullshit,” Wade scoffs, but relaxes his posture. “If it comes down to it, I’ll do it myself. But as far as I can sense, it won’t happen this time. Shouldn’t be an issue once we have a full panel supporting you-no one will ever be alone with him but you. You need him, and I need you two idiots to keep up the good work. Because the next time something like the Bat-bastard Who Collects Creepy Kids crops up, I wanna know if I can level his shit before he escapes his world. Last thing we need is another near-collapse that we can’t navigate to stop. You’re sure it’s Quinn?”
“The timing is too exact for it to be an outside job. The very day we remove the Anubis fragments?”
Wade grunts his agreement and nods.
Bruce takes a breath and looks up at the Core Tower. “Quinn is a neophyte in terms of chrononeurology and chronometric theory. I don’t understand how he knew which one would absorb Jay. Hell, I don’t even completely understand how Jay ended up consolidated like this in the first place. I could see one of the subjects having his own personality completely subsumed by a copy of him, but for Jormungandr’s consciousness to migrate altogether…”
“We’re hiking virgin wilderness here, remember? Everything about your job is firsts, so don’t go freaking out on me now. Without Anubis, it could take days to locate them with a Streamwide scan, but nobody knows the clowns like you do. So, how much does Batman know about Harley Quinn? Where would he take his very own ‘rescued’ Joker?”
Bruce thinks back to days long past. Jason at his elbow, Barbara at his shoulder, Alfred clucking over their terrible eating habits. “He’ll feel safest somewhere old and quiet. He likes nostalgia-even a certain degree of squalor, since it implies a lack of human traffic.”
Wade grunts. “Med-alert triggers within sixty millis of aberrant readings, transmits to you within another hundred. If his exit strat wasn’t set up ahead of time and he went on foot, that’s a max of ten minutes in the District. We’ll have to pull scans to verify whether any kind of time travel took place, though.”
“Quinn had access to Jay’s data, and slide modules are designed for ease-of-use. With a decent set of written instructions and a field agent’s module, he could’ve gone anywhere in the DC052, and we can’t follow effectively.”
“Would he have gone home?”
Bruce shakes his head. “DCF is too close to the outer edge. It’s the obvious choice for a vapid debutant, so of course we’d look there first. No, Quinns are meticulous, if impatient. He would have been looking for a place in advance. Probably asked Jay about ‘nice date spots’ or something. And Jokers have an unfortunate tendency to underestimate their sidekicks, so he probably didn’t think anything of it.”
“Unconsolidated subjects are fully aware and physically able within thirty seconds of breaking the trance. He was probably on his feet in half that. Was he fighting back when Forty-five’s chair got tipped?”
“Hard to say before the Commissioner gets us the forensics on both chairs, but that’s certainly the impression.”
“Got it. I’m gonna pull all the potentially helpful sensor data, you’re gonna brief the retrieval team.”
“What retrieval team?”
“That retrieval team,” Wade says, pointing over Bruce’s shoulder as he walks away.
The Auditor is approaching with a dour-faced man in a Field Agent jacket.
“So you’re a Keeper now, huh?” the redhead asks cheerfully. “Super-exciting!”
“You’re here because someone stole my Node,” he tells them. “Forgive me for not being particularly excited.”
She makes a face of confused alarm. “What, like…loaded them all up on a bus, or…?”
“Like somehow drew the aggregate mind into a single body and made off with it. The other fifty subjects are still at the lab, but the Node himself is somehow missing.”
“Holy cheeseballs. I’m assuming a brainslide is not the way the kidnapper accomplished that.”
Kidnapper.
Bruce appreciates that on a deep level, a sort of reassuring warmth in the pit of his stomach. Not ‘thief,’ but ‘kidnapper.’
“Impossible,” he tells her. “There is no memory source in the lab that can hold a comp-int, and the lab prevents outgoing transmission. The Savant has in his possession the only memory unit we’ve ever used to store even a part of Jormungandr-a dedicated iso-plate from the lower libraries.”
The Auditor nods. “Any other clues yet?”
“I know which doppled subject is missing, we have a time frame, we know he was taken by one of his nurses, and we’re ninety-nine percent certain that it was Nurse Quinzel. Which leads me to believe they’ve used a stolen or borrowed timeslide module to enter the DC052.”
“Wades are entropic loci, so going through a huge entropy phenomenon like the Maelstrom usually wouldn’t be on the table. Hence the Savant calling me ‘n Jack. Okay. Do we have any kind of triangulation data on file?”
Bruce flinches. “Not yet. We were going to do that next week-setting up Analysts in another room with visual-only observation of Jormungandr’s mapping so that it can be relayed third-hand to prevent contamination.”
But wait…
“Actually…a Wade came directly to us for mission briefing scans.[ 4] He was about to chase entropy shrapnel into the Maelstrom. Ffff…Forecaster? Whatever he did, he did it very well, because our trunk hit peak stability.”
“Well, all right,” says the Auditor, grinning. “We can work with that. Effcee and the Traveler are some quality dudes. So, we’ll get that scan data for Kali, and then we’ll see what evidence turns up. Meantime, you’re barefoot and you look hungry-let’s go to your place, and I’ll fix you up some breakfast.”
.End.
Notes:
1 Let’s be real: Deadshot totally doesn’t hate to say, “I told you so.”
2 The word choice here is intentionally contrasting: Bruce views the individual Jokers as things but Jormungandr as a person (despite the Network’s stance that Nodes are objects; they’re still working on that, since Eight-ball and Jormungandr are special cases).
3 Bruce is a scientist, not a medic; his nurses understand considerably more about neurology than he does. (He is still Batman, though-give him the right resources and motivation, and he could pick up a working knowledge of it pretty fast.)
4 See Be Yourself?, one of the Traveler’s shenanigans.
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