[DC] Rewiring
Title: Rewiring
Characters: Cass, Barbara, Bruce, minor cameos of others (Babs/Dick, implied Bruce/Jason)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: David Cain decided raising a cyborg was a better idea than having a daughter. (The inevitable “Man vs Robot War” AU.)
Notes: For au_bingo, theme 'Future: Cyberpunk'. This is a Christmas tale. I started writing it after Christmas, but it's still a Christmas tale, somewhere between Pinocchio and the Nut-Cracker, I think.
The bunker's door banged loudly against the wall, slammed open.
“The hell was that?” Hakim sounded angry, out of breath. His voice reverberated against the metal walls of the bunker.
Jason didn't look at him as he reloaded his guns, clicking loud. Just some guy reloading his weapons after coming back from the war zone, nothing to see here, folks. Especially since it was Jason, who was kind of famous for being a little trigger-happy. Not one for worrying about running out of ammo - but then, whenever Jason was, his current base somehow never seemed to run out of ammo.
He shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said, slinging his guns back into their holster. “I know a guy who knows a girl.”
“Yeah, but we don't all know girls who can dodge bullets at close range!”
That was attention-worthy. The wrench was still in Rena's hand when her fingers tightened. She looked up from the motor she was repairing.
“Girls who what?”
Hakim threw his rifle on the battered couch, and immediately started pacing. Usually she'd call him on it, first rule of gun safety and not helping anyone's temper and all. Right now, though, she was focused on watching Jason.
He was going at his business, putting his weapons in order like he could possibly downplay the fact that he knew a cyborg.
*
Life began in a white-walled room. Bright lights defining the angles and lines of lamps and limbs. There were crinkled eyes, a man's, looking and showing without words that for which she'd been born. Often, he would smile. Sometimes she would feel his smile even when his lips didn't move.
The world she lived in was a world of stillness: bright and white and lines, walls and light on the walls. It was inhabited by herself and the man who taught her. At times they were visited by other people, men who moved like beasts on the prowl like it could conceal the anxiousness after she put the first of their number on the floor in a matter of seconds. There was fear in their eyes and fear in their moves, and it filled her with bubbly joy to know that she was winning. Their winces didn't mean much; losing was painful, but it didn't last long. She remembered losing well enough to know that.
Several cycles passed before she heard something else than the grunts of the fight and the humming of the man stroking her back when she'd done well.
Her body had been changed as many times as there were fingers on a hand when she heard for the first time the language humans use to communicate; short, strange sounds that emphasized the meaning in their bodies, the tension or the falsehood with things she couldn't understand.
She watched the man and another move and utter those strange sounds at one another. The other was agitated, wild gestures of the arms and pacing from one side to the room to another. His voice resounded in unequal bursts. The man who'd raised her was simply watching. His smile was hidden, his arms crossed. When he glanced at her she tensed up, ready to throw herself at the newcomer and win, once again. But he just looked away and nodded. It was a gesture of assent, that much she knew.
The next day she was taken out for the first time. The world outside was different. Noisy. For one thing, all the people she saw seemed to make the same ever-stretching bubbles of noise with their mouth. The lights were different, as well.
He who'd taught her took her to a building, and a man sitting behind a desk. She knew what she had to do; he'd briefed her, with reminders and tiny corrections to her stance. She was excited, because it was the first time she would play in a different place, but she wasn't worried. She knew she was going to win. The man behind the desk was ill-prepared.
When he-who'd-given-her-shape pressed on her shoulder, she leaped lightly over the desk, and caught between her crooked fingers the soft, warm flesh of the man's neck. He was sweating a little.
And she tore, like she'd been taught.
She'd done it a thousand times on human-shaped playmates, revealing the circuitry underneath. They immediately went still and dark.
This time it was different.
Oh it was different.
It was wrong.
wrongwrongwrongwrong
wrong
Her hands were drenched in red liquid like what seeped warmly from the cuts on her mentor's body when she struck him, like hers, and she saw the light go out of his eyes. Even though they didn't seem to change. Even though they emitted no light, not like the make-believe machines she went against.
And she felt the strong muscle of her heart in her chest seize painfully, and she felt him die.
She malfunctioned.
*
Finally she was found.
The man was like the one who'd taught her, and he was the only one who spoke the way she knew how as well as the way other people did. Like her, he was never more himself than when he was doing what he was meant for, accomplishing the mission. If she hadn't seen him bleed, she'd have thought he was one of the robots.
The woman sat in the middle of an information compound normal people could never see. She had been a warrior and she was now a queen. She gave her a new body, and she gave her a name.
Together, they reprogrammed her until she was scrubbed of all but the lean bones of her original programming.
They didn't know what had happened to her. She would have told them, if not how she'd come to be, but they never asked.
*
(She'd run. Eluded the man who'd taught her how to make living persons into inert masses of flesh, and for more cycles than she'd spent in the white room she existed on the streets.
She learned many things there. She learned to recognize pain and sadness and love, and everything else. She learned that all she'd believed were only his and hers, everything they'd shared, could be found among people, as natural and amazing as breathing.
She learned she knew how to survive, and she learned how to save people.)
*
Fighting is in her life like blood in people's veins. Under his guidance it becomes channeled into saving and protecting.
She helps him, and for the first time she finds a meaning to her continued existence; the tacit proof that it's not the random accident of a machine stuttering madly as it's broken.
She likes it. He fights almost like she does; like it means something.
The queen who used to be a warrior doesn't approve.
*
Oracle hacks into her circuits and does something there that makes Cassandra able to understand people's language. It's a shoddy job, something she wasn't equipped to accomplish.
Suddenly she has to contend with a thousand input she never had to worry about, circuits rerouting information she abruptly discovers isn't meaningless, precipitating her to the verge of overloading and keeping her there, mind running feverish and flesh organs out of control, heart beating wildly with the stimulus, for over a week.
For two weeks Cass is out of commission; circuitry working to accommodate the new influx, leaving her unable to move, to think, or to sleep. Even simple mechanical functions are impossible to perform then. Cass is vaguely aware of other people coming to visit her and take care of her at Oracle's request; a cautious black-haired boy with optimized biometrics and cybernetic opticals, a girl whose only alteration is the small birth-control chip in her lower abdomen, who talks loudly and a lot.
When she comes out of the trance she finds that fighting no longer comes quite as easily as it used to.
Barbara bites her lips when Cass looks up at her, dumbfounded, from where she fell on the floor when she tried to stand up for the first time.
*
Batman is furious.
Not at Cassandra; he trains her and trains her and trains her, struggling with her to give her back all the control she's lost over her body. Not at Cass, who is still able to read what he feels and what he thinks as swiftly and surely as she did before Oracle changed her.
It's even clearer. People's words make contrasting their truth and their lies even easier than before.
Now it's started to feel bad, though. Intrusive, to look at people and know their deepest thoughts, their most intense desires.
Sometimes Cass wishes she could look away; but she never does, not with him. She owes him that.
He's given himself over to the Mission and she must be able to do the same.
Batman and Barbara had their disagreements about her even before Barbara attempted to fix her, but their arguments too, now, are easier to understand.
“--only a matter of time before she gets used to it and she regains control,” Barbara says. “Honestly, Bruce.”
Batman doesn't move. He's stubborn, Cass is reminded when she looks at him. Stubborn like Steph. Mulish, Barbara calls it when Steph refuses to be sent home, despite the bruises and the tiredness. “She was perfect,” he says. “You shouldn't have messed with her programming.”
Barbara doesn't look away from her screen to reply. “She was crippled by sadistic, gratuitous software for no other reason than to make her a more efficient machine.”
“She had a purpose,” Batman counters. “She was happy.”
“She was missing out on things she didn't even know existed. What was done to her was inhuman and you know it, you would never stand for it if it didn't serve your purpose to keep her as close to a mindless automaton as you could without endangering your precious mission!”
“She is a cyborg and she was better when she could fulfill her purpose without uncertainties.”
Happier. Better. They are synonymous to Batman and they are synonymous to Cass, but she's curious as to Barbara being angry on her behalf.
He opens his mouth to add something else, but Barbara cuts him off by raising her hand, imperious. She is the only one able to make Batman treat her as an equal.
“Oh, don't you dare go quoting the laws of robotics at me, Bruce. Cass is not a robot. No-one here is a robot, and we both know that if she were you would never have taken her in.” She pauses. “I've managed to find several of Shiva's installments that should be useful. She'll be fine.”
“I am the one training her, Barbara.”
Batman only uses Barbara's given name when he intends to impress something upon her. It's more intimate than if he called her Oracle, and less professional, too. Cass thinks he means it as a rebuke.
“You already had Jason”, Barbara says.
Cass looks away from Batman's back, sudden-betrayal-pain. The Mission isn't enough of a justification to keep watching.
*
She improves noticeably with the inclusion of the Shiva subroutines. Oracle makes such a fine job tweaking them that Cass is almost never aware that they were originally designed with a killer in mind. Sometimes, though, some snippet is rerouted to the surface. She has to consciously derail herself from it.
Batman catches on the second time it happens. He helps her through it, and with the incidents he lets her more and more freedom to regulate the urges the way she sees fit.
She doesn't hurt anyone badly, anyway, not permanently. The first time, she fooled the subroutine into restarting the heart of the guy she'd just been fighting, passing the experience off as a lesson he wouldn't forget. Batman didn't like that, but neither did he prevent fer from helping anymore.
He wouldn't mind if she were to hurt the people or the things she stops more roughly than she does.
Cass acknowledges it as one of the ways Batman is human. After a while the Shiva subroutines integrate into her main patterns without so much as a ripple. She feels the possibility of killing someone is always present, but turning it down is never even an effort.
*
His name is Dick. He makes Oracle laugh.
“Hey, O.”
She smiles behind her glasses. “What is it, baby?”
She watches him take a leap from the rooftop of a building on her screen. “Actually, nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice a moment.”
“Using my time for this? You remember some very important people are counting on me to be all-available to save people's lives, don't you?”
“You're beautiful,” he says, his somersault earnest like his voice. Dick's body always looks beautiful, but Cass knows that to Barbara it's most attractive when it's moving. She likes to watch Dick move. His body is all human; no transplants of any kind, no cybernetics, no tech.
Oracle laughs softly.
“Oh, I'm at my crime scene. Talk to you later,” Dick says, and logs off. The camera stays on him for several more seconds before Barbara wordlessly slinks off him.
He'll log back on in ten to fifteen minutes, when he's moved back closer to Oracle's tower, when his programming pings him again to call and talk to her, with no memory of having called her before. Then she will either send him on his wild goose chase, keep him turning in the city, or call him back home if she's done working for the night. Two days from now, when Cass reports in for her usual check up, he won't be there anymore. Oracle never keeps him out for long, and never often.
Cass is conflicted about how she feels about Dick. On the one hand, he makes Barbara happy, even just for a little while. On the other hand, the human bodies Oracle downloads him in can't hold up for extended periods of time, and after she puts him away she's sad for a long time.
Maybe Barbara could swap him from body to body, keep him up and running forever; but something always goes wrong in the end, and Barbara is picky about the bodies she chooses for him.
There's Batman, too. Barbara always wakes Dick up when Batman is away from Gotham, Cass doesn't know why.
She's not sure it's worth it and it wouldn't be better for Barbara to shelf her Dick-puppets forever.
*
There are only the sounds of Oracle tinkering and grumbling quietly to herself. She does that sometimes. Batman does too, but not in the same circumstances. When Barbara does it, it's like she's talking to someone, while Batman is-- narrating? Is it how he calls it? Cass finds it amusing that both of them have the same irrational habit. She's not really given to it, so it's all the more amusing to her, especially when either of them looks up and sees her. It must show.
Tonight it sounds like Barbara is fixing something. Something mechanical. This should be interesting, as most of the mechanical engineering Barbara does that Cass is aware of relates to either Cass or herself. Occasionally she gives pointers to Tim, but Tim doesn't like anyone working on his optics. Tim is weird like that.
“-- wouldn't happen so often if you weren't so hard on yourself. And on that body.” Noise of a switch turned on, half-covered by Barbara's groaning. It can take her a while to blow off steam. “This is the third spine in a year. Goddammit, Bruce.”
Cass goes very still. She feels her eyes have gone wide, the air cold against her corneas.
“This would be so much more efficient if I could just fix you for good. But no, you need the dysfunction to work properly...”
Batman doesn't answer.
Another noise, this one a beep signaling Oracle is also working on programming. It's not just bioware.
“And again with the goddamn knot on Jason. Been only two months since last time I had to undo it. Is this thing forming back faster or do you just enjoy messing with me?” Another beep has Barbara typing away for half a minute, and then she hums her disapproval. “At least the anti-gun lock is holding up this time. Swear to god this thing is even harder to deal with now than it was when you were alive.”
At this point Cass emerges from behind the door. Oracle's surveillance units don't register her as a menace. She's mostly cybernetics, after all, animated by programs designed by the tower's mistress. Batman was the one who insisted on her needing to enter passwords to enter to his caves, but Oracle never did the same.
It looks like how it does when Barbara does a full check-up on Cass. Except this time Cass isn't the one in the green light, needles and wires like a corona.
There's blood seeping from where the panels of flesh had to be cut open, momentarily removed, to grant Barbara access to the metal frame hidden underneath. And when Cass is in there, Barbara takes advantage of the position to get her talking. Cass' conversational skills still aren't up to speed, but she never fails to react to whatever Barbara is saying. It's often funny stuff; that's one of the reasons Cass doesn't mind the check-ups. Steph calls it quality time with Oracle, and though Cass is aware Steph uses the words as sarcasm, she tends to agree.
Batman's eyes are closed. They seem to be unmoving behind his pupils. She hasn't heard him react in any way to what Barbara has been saying since she came in either, not even a breath cut short.
Cass looks up and sees Barbara looking at her, mouth open like she's searching for words.
“You weren't expecting me,” Cass deduces aloud.
“Usually your patrols finish later on Mondays.”
Cass shrugs. “Steph was tired. Exam tomorrow.”
Barbara doesn't reply.
“He doesn't know,” Cass says. It's not a question. But she'd very much love to hear Barbara tell her she's wrong, she's been reading this all wrong; Batman knows, and this is just an agreement between them. One Cass has no part in, she doesn't care. She'd love that. But she knows she's right. “He wouldn't want that. He doesn't like cyborgs.” If Batman was the man Cass knows, if Oracle didn't fix that, he wouldn't.
“I know,” Barbara says. She's steeled herself, put walls up; nothing Cass can say will break through her. “But the city needs him. His tour of duty isn't over yet. You of all people can understand.”
Cass stands, unmoving. She can't look to Batman's serene face, calmer than the emotionless mask he takes. She can't look to Barbara's unapologetic expression, like Barbara's convinced herself that what she's doing is right. “You said, I'm a person. Do you lie to me too?”
“What? No, Cass, I don't. You are a person. I don't like lying about it anymore than you, but some things are bigger than what we want. Bruce knows that,” she says, like that makes it okay. Like it's okay that she's crossing the one limit Batman put to his devotion to the Mission.
“He didn't want that!”
Her scream echoes against the metal walls, startling Oracle into silence for a moment. But then she starts again, voice soft like it's a compromise they can reach, or like Cass is some child throwing a tantrum in a grocery store.
“If he were rational about this, he'd understand. But when I try to fix him, he's not the right Batman any more. So I have to lie to him, do you see?”
“You can't fix him,” Cass says loudly. “He's a person. People can't be fixed.”
She thinks of Arkham, and of Batman explaining how they can't simply take apart the maddest AI because they may have developed self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is the original principle upon which all human rights are founded. She didn't get a lot of it at the time, and she doesn't remember a lot of Batman's speech either, but maybe she's starting to understand.
Barbara takes a breath like she's about to say something, but Cass is too angry to listen. She's too angry to stay.
“You can't even fix me,” Cass says.
She doesn't look back when she leaves.
*
The Mission takes her all around the earth. She never stays any place long. Some places, they don't need her as much, and the places that do quickly turn hostile against the presence of a highly trained cyborg within their midst. Cass really can't blame them.
She stays in touch with Steph, and Tim. She doesn't think about how much Tim must know about the Gotham situation, because if she did she thinks she would get angry enough that she'd stop returning his calls. She misses them.
She's not sure how that's possible, but she's discovered that there are a lot of things about her where possible doesn't really apply.
She misses Batman, and she misses Gotham, and she misses Barbara, but she can't go back there. Not so soon. Not now. Maybe never.
Finally she hears about someone she might be interested to meet, a guy fighting in the guerilla.
Jason was Batman's until he got blown up. All she knows about him is that Batman rebuilt him and retired him.
It didn't work out so well.
Cass tracks him down. She's curious; she hasn't heard so much about him, his name came up rarely and only in relation with trying-too-hard. Batman called her that once. He called Steph that more.
She misses Steph, and Batman, and Gotham. She hopes he won't turn her down for being a cyborg, for something she can't help when there's so much to do and she's willing to help.
Characters: Cass, Barbara, Bruce, minor cameos of others (Babs/Dick, implied Bruce/Jason)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: David Cain decided raising a cyborg was a better idea than having a daughter. (The inevitable “Man vs Robot War” AU.)
Notes: For au_bingo, theme 'Future: Cyberpunk'. This is a Christmas tale. I started writing it after Christmas, but it's still a Christmas tale, somewhere between Pinocchio and the Nut-Cracker, I think.
The bunker's door banged loudly against the wall, slammed open.
“The hell was that?” Hakim sounded angry, out of breath. His voice reverberated against the metal walls of the bunker.
Jason didn't look at him as he reloaded his guns, clicking loud. Just some guy reloading his weapons after coming back from the war zone, nothing to see here, folks. Especially since it was Jason, who was kind of famous for being a little trigger-happy. Not one for worrying about running out of ammo - but then, whenever Jason was, his current base somehow never seemed to run out of ammo.
He shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said, slinging his guns back into their holster. “I know a guy who knows a girl.”
“Yeah, but we don't all know girls who can dodge bullets at close range!”
That was attention-worthy. The wrench was still in Rena's hand when her fingers tightened. She looked up from the motor she was repairing.
“Girls who what?”
Hakim threw his rifle on the battered couch, and immediately started pacing. Usually she'd call him on it, first rule of gun safety and not helping anyone's temper and all. Right now, though, she was focused on watching Jason.
He was going at his business, putting his weapons in order like he could possibly downplay the fact that he knew a cyborg.
*
Life began in a white-walled room. Bright lights defining the angles and lines of lamps and limbs. There were crinkled eyes, a man's, looking and showing without words that for which she'd been born. Often, he would smile. Sometimes she would feel his smile even when his lips didn't move.
The world she lived in was a world of stillness: bright and white and lines, walls and light on the walls. It was inhabited by herself and the man who taught her. At times they were visited by other people, men who moved like beasts on the prowl like it could conceal the anxiousness after she put the first of their number on the floor in a matter of seconds. There was fear in their eyes and fear in their moves, and it filled her with bubbly joy to know that she was winning. Their winces didn't mean much; losing was painful, but it didn't last long. She remembered losing well enough to know that.
Several cycles passed before she heard something else than the grunts of the fight and the humming of the man stroking her back when she'd done well.
Her body had been changed as many times as there were fingers on a hand when she heard for the first time the language humans use to communicate; short, strange sounds that emphasized the meaning in their bodies, the tension or the falsehood with things she couldn't understand.
She watched the man and another move and utter those strange sounds at one another. The other was agitated, wild gestures of the arms and pacing from one side to the room to another. His voice resounded in unequal bursts. The man who'd raised her was simply watching. His smile was hidden, his arms crossed. When he glanced at her she tensed up, ready to throw herself at the newcomer and win, once again. But he just looked away and nodded. It was a gesture of assent, that much she knew.
The next day she was taken out for the first time. The world outside was different. Noisy. For one thing, all the people she saw seemed to make the same ever-stretching bubbles of noise with their mouth. The lights were different, as well.
He who'd taught her took her to a building, and a man sitting behind a desk. She knew what she had to do; he'd briefed her, with reminders and tiny corrections to her stance. She was excited, because it was the first time she would play in a different place, but she wasn't worried. She knew she was going to win. The man behind the desk was ill-prepared.
When he-who'd-given-her-shape pressed on her shoulder, she leaped lightly over the desk, and caught between her crooked fingers the soft, warm flesh of the man's neck. He was sweating a little.
And she tore, like she'd been taught.
She'd done it a thousand times on human-shaped playmates, revealing the circuitry underneath. They immediately went still and dark.
This time it was different.
Oh it was different.
It was wrong.
wrongwrongwrongwrong
wrong
Her hands were drenched in red liquid like what seeped warmly from the cuts on her mentor's body when she struck him, like hers, and she saw the light go out of his eyes. Even though they didn't seem to change. Even though they emitted no light, not like the make-believe machines she went against.
And she felt the strong muscle of her heart in her chest seize painfully, and she felt him die.
She malfunctioned.
*
Finally she was found.
The man was like the one who'd taught her, and he was the only one who spoke the way she knew how as well as the way other people did. Like her, he was never more himself than when he was doing what he was meant for, accomplishing the mission. If she hadn't seen him bleed, she'd have thought he was one of the robots.
The woman sat in the middle of an information compound normal people could never see. She had been a warrior and she was now a queen. She gave her a new body, and she gave her a name.
Together, they reprogrammed her until she was scrubbed of all but the lean bones of her original programming.
They didn't know what had happened to her. She would have told them, if not how she'd come to be, but they never asked.
*
(She'd run. Eluded the man who'd taught her how to make living persons into inert masses of flesh, and for more cycles than she'd spent in the white room she existed on the streets.
She learned many things there. She learned to recognize pain and sadness and love, and everything else. She learned that all she'd believed were only his and hers, everything they'd shared, could be found among people, as natural and amazing as breathing.
She learned she knew how to survive, and she learned how to save people.)
*
Fighting is in her life like blood in people's veins. Under his guidance it becomes channeled into saving and protecting.
She helps him, and for the first time she finds a meaning to her continued existence; the tacit proof that it's not the random accident of a machine stuttering madly as it's broken.
She likes it. He fights almost like she does; like it means something.
The queen who used to be a warrior doesn't approve.
*
Oracle hacks into her circuits and does something there that makes Cassandra able to understand people's language. It's a shoddy job, something she wasn't equipped to accomplish.
Suddenly she has to contend with a thousand input she never had to worry about, circuits rerouting information she abruptly discovers isn't meaningless, precipitating her to the verge of overloading and keeping her there, mind running feverish and flesh organs out of control, heart beating wildly with the stimulus, for over a week.
For two weeks Cass is out of commission; circuitry working to accommodate the new influx, leaving her unable to move, to think, or to sleep. Even simple mechanical functions are impossible to perform then. Cass is vaguely aware of other people coming to visit her and take care of her at Oracle's request; a cautious black-haired boy with optimized biometrics and cybernetic opticals, a girl whose only alteration is the small birth-control chip in her lower abdomen, who talks loudly and a lot.
When she comes out of the trance she finds that fighting no longer comes quite as easily as it used to.
Barbara bites her lips when Cass looks up at her, dumbfounded, from where she fell on the floor when she tried to stand up for the first time.
*
Batman is furious.
Not at Cassandra; he trains her and trains her and trains her, struggling with her to give her back all the control she's lost over her body. Not at Cass, who is still able to read what he feels and what he thinks as swiftly and surely as she did before Oracle changed her.
It's even clearer. People's words make contrasting their truth and their lies even easier than before.
Now it's started to feel bad, though. Intrusive, to look at people and know their deepest thoughts, their most intense desires.
Sometimes Cass wishes she could look away; but she never does, not with him. She owes him that.
He's given himself over to the Mission and she must be able to do the same.
Batman and Barbara had their disagreements about her even before Barbara attempted to fix her, but their arguments too, now, are easier to understand.
“--only a matter of time before she gets used to it and she regains control,” Barbara says. “Honestly, Bruce.”
Batman doesn't move. He's stubborn, Cass is reminded when she looks at him. Stubborn like Steph. Mulish, Barbara calls it when Steph refuses to be sent home, despite the bruises and the tiredness. “She was perfect,” he says. “You shouldn't have messed with her programming.”
Barbara doesn't look away from her screen to reply. “She was crippled by sadistic, gratuitous software for no other reason than to make her a more efficient machine.”
“She had a purpose,” Batman counters. “She was happy.”
“She was missing out on things she didn't even know existed. What was done to her was inhuman and you know it, you would never stand for it if it didn't serve your purpose to keep her as close to a mindless automaton as you could without endangering your precious mission!”
“She is a cyborg and she was better when she could fulfill her purpose without uncertainties.”
Happier. Better. They are synonymous to Batman and they are synonymous to Cass, but she's curious as to Barbara being angry on her behalf.
He opens his mouth to add something else, but Barbara cuts him off by raising her hand, imperious. She is the only one able to make Batman treat her as an equal.
“Oh, don't you dare go quoting the laws of robotics at me, Bruce. Cass is not a robot. No-one here is a robot, and we both know that if she were you would never have taken her in.” She pauses. “I've managed to find several of Shiva's installments that should be useful. She'll be fine.”
“I am the one training her, Barbara.”
Batman only uses Barbara's given name when he intends to impress something upon her. It's more intimate than if he called her Oracle, and less professional, too. Cass thinks he means it as a rebuke.
“You already had Jason”, Barbara says.
Cass looks away from Batman's back, sudden-betrayal-pain. The Mission isn't enough of a justification to keep watching.
*
She improves noticeably with the inclusion of the Shiva subroutines. Oracle makes such a fine job tweaking them that Cass is almost never aware that they were originally designed with a killer in mind. Sometimes, though, some snippet is rerouted to the surface. She has to consciously derail herself from it.
Batman catches on the second time it happens. He helps her through it, and with the incidents he lets her more and more freedom to regulate the urges the way she sees fit.
She doesn't hurt anyone badly, anyway, not permanently. The first time, she fooled the subroutine into restarting the heart of the guy she'd just been fighting, passing the experience off as a lesson he wouldn't forget. Batman didn't like that, but neither did he prevent fer from helping anymore.
He wouldn't mind if she were to hurt the people or the things she stops more roughly than she does.
Cass acknowledges it as one of the ways Batman is human. After a while the Shiva subroutines integrate into her main patterns without so much as a ripple. She feels the possibility of killing someone is always present, but turning it down is never even an effort.
*
His name is Dick. He makes Oracle laugh.
“Hey, O.”
She smiles behind her glasses. “What is it, baby?”
She watches him take a leap from the rooftop of a building on her screen. “Actually, nothing. Just wanted to hear your voice a moment.”
“Using my time for this? You remember some very important people are counting on me to be all-available to save people's lives, don't you?”
“You're beautiful,” he says, his somersault earnest like his voice. Dick's body always looks beautiful, but Cass knows that to Barbara it's most attractive when it's moving. She likes to watch Dick move. His body is all human; no transplants of any kind, no cybernetics, no tech.
Oracle laughs softly.
“Oh, I'm at my crime scene. Talk to you later,” Dick says, and logs off. The camera stays on him for several more seconds before Barbara wordlessly slinks off him.
He'll log back on in ten to fifteen minutes, when he's moved back closer to Oracle's tower, when his programming pings him again to call and talk to her, with no memory of having called her before. Then she will either send him on his wild goose chase, keep him turning in the city, or call him back home if she's done working for the night. Two days from now, when Cass reports in for her usual check up, he won't be there anymore. Oracle never keeps him out for long, and never often.
Cass is conflicted about how she feels about Dick. On the one hand, he makes Barbara happy, even just for a little while. On the other hand, the human bodies Oracle downloads him in can't hold up for extended periods of time, and after she puts him away she's sad for a long time.
Maybe Barbara could swap him from body to body, keep him up and running forever; but something always goes wrong in the end, and Barbara is picky about the bodies she chooses for him.
There's Batman, too. Barbara always wakes Dick up when Batman is away from Gotham, Cass doesn't know why.
She's not sure it's worth it and it wouldn't be better for Barbara to shelf her Dick-puppets forever.
*
There are only the sounds of Oracle tinkering and grumbling quietly to herself. She does that sometimes. Batman does too, but not in the same circumstances. When Barbara does it, it's like she's talking to someone, while Batman is-- narrating? Is it how he calls it? Cass finds it amusing that both of them have the same irrational habit. She's not really given to it, so it's all the more amusing to her, especially when either of them looks up and sees her. It must show.
Tonight it sounds like Barbara is fixing something. Something mechanical. This should be interesting, as most of the mechanical engineering Barbara does that Cass is aware of relates to either Cass or herself. Occasionally she gives pointers to Tim, but Tim doesn't like anyone working on his optics. Tim is weird like that.
“-- wouldn't happen so often if you weren't so hard on yourself. And on that body.” Noise of a switch turned on, half-covered by Barbara's groaning. It can take her a while to blow off steam. “This is the third spine in a year. Goddammit, Bruce.”
Cass goes very still. She feels her eyes have gone wide, the air cold against her corneas.
“This would be so much more efficient if I could just fix you for good. But no, you need the dysfunction to work properly...”
Batman doesn't answer.
Another noise, this one a beep signaling Oracle is also working on programming. It's not just bioware.
“And again with the goddamn knot on Jason. Been only two months since last time I had to undo it. Is this thing forming back faster or do you just enjoy messing with me?” Another beep has Barbara typing away for half a minute, and then she hums her disapproval. “At least the anti-gun lock is holding up this time. Swear to god this thing is even harder to deal with now than it was when you were alive.”
At this point Cass emerges from behind the door. Oracle's surveillance units don't register her as a menace. She's mostly cybernetics, after all, animated by programs designed by the tower's mistress. Batman was the one who insisted on her needing to enter passwords to enter to his caves, but Oracle never did the same.
It looks like how it does when Barbara does a full check-up on Cass. Except this time Cass isn't the one in the green light, needles and wires like a corona.
There's blood seeping from where the panels of flesh had to be cut open, momentarily removed, to grant Barbara access to the metal frame hidden underneath. And when Cass is in there, Barbara takes advantage of the position to get her talking. Cass' conversational skills still aren't up to speed, but she never fails to react to whatever Barbara is saying. It's often funny stuff; that's one of the reasons Cass doesn't mind the check-ups. Steph calls it quality time with Oracle, and though Cass is aware Steph uses the words as sarcasm, she tends to agree.
Batman's eyes are closed. They seem to be unmoving behind his pupils. She hasn't heard him react in any way to what Barbara has been saying since she came in either, not even a breath cut short.
Cass looks up and sees Barbara looking at her, mouth open like she's searching for words.
“You weren't expecting me,” Cass deduces aloud.
“Usually your patrols finish later on Mondays.”
Cass shrugs. “Steph was tired. Exam tomorrow.”
Barbara doesn't reply.
“He doesn't know,” Cass says. It's not a question. But she'd very much love to hear Barbara tell her she's wrong, she's been reading this all wrong; Batman knows, and this is just an agreement between them. One Cass has no part in, she doesn't care. She'd love that. But she knows she's right. “He wouldn't want that. He doesn't like cyborgs.” If Batman was the man Cass knows, if Oracle didn't fix that, he wouldn't.
“I know,” Barbara says. She's steeled herself, put walls up; nothing Cass can say will break through her. “But the city needs him. His tour of duty isn't over yet. You of all people can understand.”
Cass stands, unmoving. She can't look to Batman's serene face, calmer than the emotionless mask he takes. She can't look to Barbara's unapologetic expression, like Barbara's convinced herself that what she's doing is right. “You said, I'm a person. Do you lie to me too?”
“What? No, Cass, I don't. You are a person. I don't like lying about it anymore than you, but some things are bigger than what we want. Bruce knows that,” she says, like that makes it okay. Like it's okay that she's crossing the one limit Batman put to his devotion to the Mission.
“He didn't want that!”
Her scream echoes against the metal walls, startling Oracle into silence for a moment. But then she starts again, voice soft like it's a compromise they can reach, or like Cass is some child throwing a tantrum in a grocery store.
“If he were rational about this, he'd understand. But when I try to fix him, he's not the right Batman any more. So I have to lie to him, do you see?”
“You can't fix him,” Cass says loudly. “He's a person. People can't be fixed.”
She thinks of Arkham, and of Batman explaining how they can't simply take apart the maddest AI because they may have developed self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is the original principle upon which all human rights are founded. She didn't get a lot of it at the time, and she doesn't remember a lot of Batman's speech either, but maybe she's starting to understand.
Barbara takes a breath like she's about to say something, but Cass is too angry to listen. She's too angry to stay.
“You can't even fix me,” Cass says.
She doesn't look back when she leaves.
*
The Mission takes her all around the earth. She never stays any place long. Some places, they don't need her as much, and the places that do quickly turn hostile against the presence of a highly trained cyborg within their midst. Cass really can't blame them.
She stays in touch with Steph, and Tim. She doesn't think about how much Tim must know about the Gotham situation, because if she did she thinks she would get angry enough that she'd stop returning his calls. She misses them.
She's not sure how that's possible, but she's discovered that there are a lot of things about her where possible doesn't really apply.
She misses Batman, and she misses Gotham, and she misses Barbara, but she can't go back there. Not so soon. Not now. Maybe never.
Finally she hears about someone she might be interested to meet, a guy fighting in the guerilla.
Jason was Batman's until he got blown up. All she knows about him is that Batman rebuilt him and retired him.
It didn't work out so well.
Cass tracks him down. She's curious; she hasn't heard so much about him, his name came up rarely and only in relation with trying-too-hard. Batman called her that once. He called Steph that more.
She misses Steph, and Batman, and Gotham. She hopes he won't turn her down for being a cyborg, for something she can't help when there's so much to do and she's willing to help.