Fic: Ex Machina (2/9)
Fic: Ex Machina (2/9)
Series: Special Projects
Summary: After their experience with the Demon Meg, Chloe is broken. Dean is shattered. Somehow, they've got to find a way back, while at the same time figuring out how to stop a Demon-made Artificial Intelegence.
Author: pen37
Beta: Clarksmuse
Fandoms: Smallville/Supernatural/DCU
Characters: Chloe, Sam, Dean
Pairing:Chloe/Dean
Rating: Pg-13.
This is a part of the Special Projects series. You can find the rest of the series here.
Written for the Crossovers100 challenge. Prompt #67 Snow. The table is here.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9
The weather wasn’t getting any warmer. Which fit Dean’s mood appropriately. They were bunkered down for all-out war, and the news was grim.
Despite this, Chloe spent most of her time either in the swing on Bobby’s porch, or out in the barn. Or leaning through a window, like she was now.
Dean sat on a chair across the room from her so that he could steal occasional disapproving glances at her. He knew she saw him, but she was ignoring his frown in favor of talking with Sam, Isaac, and Bobby about the Demon AI problem.
It was slow going. Mainly because it was going in every direction. They’d been on the short wave radio with as many hunters as they could find. They’d consulted books. Chloe had even gotten on the wire with a few contacts that she had made in her short time as a foreign correspondent to find out news from the outside world.
They were facing an apocalypse. The rest of the world just didn’t know it yet.
“What did your friends in Rome have to say?” Sam asked Chloe. She’d been on the short-wave most of the morning - and it was a bitch to haul up to the window. But the one time that she’d tried to go to the radio, she’d stumbled over a pile of Bobby’s books, and then nearly hyperventilated to the point of passing out. So until she got past that, Chloe was stuck outside.
“The church in Rome knows about the demon issue. They’ve got their own sanctioned hunters and a handful of the best hackers that I know of on it.”
Dean chuckled. “I’m on a mission from God.”
They all frowned at him.
“The Blues Brothers?” Dean asked. “Come on guys! You’ve seen the movie.”
“Okay, so they’ve even recruited a few guys who are legally banned from touching a computer ever again,” Chloe soldiered on as if she’d never run into the speed bump of Dean’s sense of humor. “But hey, we’ll worry about the consequence of that tomorrow.”
“Assuming we live that long,” Dean said.
“It gets better,” Chloe said. “Because Mother Church? She’s been under fire, too.”
“How bad?” Bobby crossed his arms.
“Well, no one will go on record, so nothing’s official. They wouldn’t want to cause a panic. But my sources have heard rumors that the demons are slipping into the clergy in high places.”
“Demons in the church,” Dean rolled his eyes. “Marvelous.”
“It’s easy to lead the flock astray when the shepherd is corrupt,” Chloe shrugged.
“How are they managing that?” Isaac asked. “I mean with the services and the holy water?”
“And a lot of services haven’t used the original Latin in years. So flinching at the drop of a Christo is pretty easy to avoid. If the priest can manage to keep from getting splashed with Holy Water, he could fool a lot of people.”
“So what are they doing about it?” Bobby asked.
“According to my sources, the church has a special cadre of clergy to deal with demon infiltration. These are the kind of guys who make hunters look like nursery school teachers. You don’t ever want to meet these guys. The Witch burnings? The Spanish Inquisition? What they did to the Knight’s Templar? That was those guys.
“And so the war we’re seeing out here is going on inside the political structure there, too. As far as how it’s going . . .” Chloe shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Since the Vatican is trying to keep it hush-hush. You know as well as I do how something like that can cramp a hunter’s style.”
“It’s not just the church,” Sam said. “I’ve been watching C-Span, and I’ve caught at least one senator flash black eyes.”
Chloe frowned at that. “I’d better get in touch with Mrs. Kent, then. She needs to watch her back.”
“Maybe we could get her to hire on a couple of hunters as interns,” Sam suggested. “Ellen could recommend a few. Folks who are sneaky enough to keep an eye on them and think first, instead of trying a full-on exorcism on the senate floor.”
“Good idea,” Chloe nodded. “She could probably also point out a few other senators who might be willing to help.”
Something about all of this was bothering Dean. He felt like they’d missed something - yet he couldn’t figure out what.
“If we’re seeing this here and in the Catholic Church - what about other countries?” Bobby asked. “How easy would it be for a demon here and a demon there, with their fingers on the buttons to start a nuclear war?”
“Is that possible?” Isaac asked with an uneasy look on his face.
Bobby looked at the four of them incredulously. “You guys ever study the Cuban Missile Crisis in school?”
“Kevin Costner was involved, wasn’t he?” Dean asked.
Bobby scowled, and Sam reached over and hit Dean over the back of the head.
“What?” Dean asked.
“The most likely candidates would be countries with missile capabilities, and hostilities toward the West,” Chloe said.
“That’s actually a pretty big list,” Bobby said with a low whistle. “And we know zero hunters in those places.”
“But we do have contacts,” Chloe countered. “Through the JLA and the JSA. We know Metas. They know Metas. We spread the word, and the folks who play hero can find the hunters for us.”
“Sounds like you get to see if the JLA has gotten Marilyn working by now,” Sam said.
Dean suddenly realized what was bothering him. “Guys?”
Everyone stopped talking to look at him.
“We just sent Meg back to hell. So in theory, the demons should be less organized, not more, shouldn’t they?”
Bobby let out a strangled curse. Sam turned white as a sheet. Chloe nodded slowly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Isaac said.
“It means that we’ve been played.” Dean said with a grim frown. “All this time we thought Meg was leading the demons. And since it was locked in Sam’s head, we thought the problem was halted. Instead, it was probably some kind of--”
“Puppet leader,” Sam supplied.
“Straw horse,” Chloe added.
“Those things,” Dean pointed to Sam and nodded. “So we got a little complacent. And whoever was really in charge consolidated their power base.”
“It’s strategy. Like Chess,” Sam explained. “You set up the pieces in advance, your opponent falls into the trap. Boom. Boom. Boom. You take them out.”
“And this is the endgame,” Dean said grimly.
“So who is in charge?” Isaac asked.
“If I had to bet?” Chloe raised an eyebrow. “I’d bet it was Laney.”
“The demon that inhabited your clone?” Dean asked.
“And who is probably now using Lex.” Chloe said. “Think about it. Having Lex puts it in a perfect spot to control things: money, power, political influence. What more could a demon want?”
“Hair,” Dean said.
“So when it’s done taking over the world, it buys hair club for men. Or Trump’s toupee. Whichever it wants.” Chloe shrugged. “Or it leaves everything to the Laney-clone, and then walks Lex right off a roof or something.”
“Well, we know how bad it is out there,” Dean said. “So - any ideas how to fight back?”
“This is why Batman should hear me out on the turning Lex into a rat idea,” Chloe ran frustrated hands through her hair. “I really wish we could just swoop in and grab Lex and exorcise him right there.” Her lips twisted in frustration. “But even before he was possessed, he had fail-safes to keep him protected. His bodyguards Hope and Mercy and that damned Kryptonite ring.”
“We could start by taking out this AI,” Sam said. “Right now we’re really hamstrung by it. If we can just get rid of it, maybe we stand a fighting chance.”
Dean stared thoughtfully into the middle-distance. They were making this up as they went along. That was nothing new. They’d defeated the Yellow Eyed Demon flying by the seat of their pants. And broken the crossroads deal, going into it without knowing quite how it was going to come out.
Dean figured that he should be scared out of his mind. But in a weird way, he felt proud. He was on the same front lines as the guys over on the steppes hunting Baba Yaga and up in the Carpathians hunting vampires. It was beyond saving people one at a time. It was a united front to save the world. And if they were going to go down, he was proud to go down fighting as a hunter.
That didn’t mean that the figuring it out part wasn’t boring as hell.
Dean hated research. He hated sitting around with his thumb up his ass, talking about this Einstein silly string theory bullshit. Give him a gun and point him at something to shoot, and he was happy. But this -- demons on the Internet garbage -- didn’t set right with him.
He absently drummed on his chair until Bobby glared at him. He shot the older hunter an apologetic look, and started twiddling his thumbs.
Across the room, Chloe shot him a sympathetic look.
Sam wasn’t as sympathetic. His mouth twisted in a full-on bitchface as he hauled out the chalkboard.
With his usual gift for thorough planning, Sam had set up the board to brainstorm ideas. It was now covered with spider web lines linking random ideas. Everything from firewalls written in Latin and Aramaic with protection spells coded into them to an AI hunter’s program.
“Any new ideas?” Sam asked once the chalkboard was set up.
“Call Sandra Bullock?” Dean asked.
Sam sighed and rolled his eyes.
“Dean?” Bobby asked with an exasperated expression on his face.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe you should sit down and listen for a change?”