2013.05.24 - The Oracle and the Mysterious Doctor Zombie-Kong

The net has had a presence lurking on it for years now, it's a quiet little system of probes and programs that were operating quietly within the system like a hidden virus. As Oracle goes about her day to day hero activities she is going to be in a lot of the same virtual places as the subtle system of programs are working. The subroutines of various systems all over the city network all sharing the same command structure and code base. 
At first she might have blown it off as just company being hired to do work for many different aspects of the city's infrastructure and it wouldn't be that unbelievable. Most humans would never think twice about it but most humans are not Barbara Gordon and her detective instincts have left this itching feeling at the back of her mind. One morning all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place for her and she realizes all the programs, all those small, seemingly unrelated things are part of a larger system. she has a horrible realization that someone, somewhere, has access to most of the New York City and Gotham municipal systems.. someone who has been using them to do exactly what she does, to gather information and manipulate events. Some of the code goes back decades to even the old DMV systems. 
Who ever they are, they have had control for a long, long time. Being able to see the pattern for the first time she realizes she can trace the system back to it's source.. a private residence on Fire Island off the coast of New York. Doing more detective work she finds that the house is owned by a company, owned by a company, owned by a man named Mr. Simon Doors. Doing more research she finds that Doors has only a very surface existence, obviously an alias. The question is an Alias for who? 
Having gotten this far, Oracle's not about to be stymied by a thin file, now. She's faced lots of thin files before now. Aliases can be traced. Ultimately. One way to do it is a massive cross-reference. Another is to look at the code of these heretofore single looking pieces of code, to see if a coder was arrogant enough to leave a signature or calling card. A lot of the big hackers do. (Though, she's not one of them. Anonymity really does work best when you remain anonymous.) 
Of course, yet another way to find things out is to simply spy. And, Oracle has an impressive network of eyes-in-the-sky she can call upon. She's also no slouch at hacking, herself. Indeed, there aren't really any better. 
So, firing up her strongest defensive systems, in case of a trace-back, she flexes her fingers and starts working. "Let's find out what's behind Door Number One, shall we?" 
The surface of the "house" security is good, but nothing special. She cuts through it and finds all the things you would expect to find on a home computer network, pirated movies, adult entertainment, a large collection of eclectic music but behind that system, even a online phone number she could call, but more importantly, hidden away deep in the folder structure is a single file type she has never, ever heard of and her computer doesn't know how to read. It is a access portal to a very different system. The standard O.S. is just a shell hiding what can only be described as an alien operating system. Based on technology from a crashed space ship the actual core of the network is heavily encrypted with a password lock. 
Once her spy satellites get into the proper orbit she can see the house in question. It is somewhat odd to see from above. The structure and all of the surroundings have been enlarged using pym-particles to be comfortable for someone two humans tall so the image looks like there is some kind of lens distortion happening. The house looks like a perfectly normal house except for the fact it's huge. 
There doesn't seem to be any one home, at least not visible on the spy satellite. There is a nice big skylight built into the roof so she can see down into a large portion of the living room area and there are large open windows on three sides of the living room as well. Beach front properties, so little privacy. 
"What the hell?" 
Oracle tries adjusting the feed, at first, thinking the lensing is mistake. As her monitors register the pym particles, however, she realizes she's looking at something very, very different. Combine that with the alien mishmash scrolling up another display and... Well, as Peter Parker might say, her spidey senses start tingling. 
"Whomever you are, Mr. Doors, it seems you're not human." 
For a very brief moment, she considers calling Superman or Stark about what she's found. But, what can she tell them? There's a piece of beachfront property that's sending out weird vibes and that contains an alien computer system. Care to take a look? 
Actually, that probably would get their attention.
Still, for the moment, she refrains, wanting more information on just exactly what's there. It will take a little while for her interpolation programs to make sense of the alien code, but in the meantime she can scan for life forms and technological constructs, not to mention a full em/energy spectrum scan to find out just what other surprises might be lurking there. 
The oracle systems alert her that the target system is attempting to trace her location even while she decrypts it's language. The satellites thermal and electromagnetic systems detect that there is a top level which is, for the most part a normal house, if overly large. There are however, an extensive network of devices hidden under the building. Some kind of shielded lab facility which takes up the entire inside of the hill the house is sitting on. She can assume it's a lab facility of some kind from all the power and information cables running into it. Which brings up a question, just how much juice is that thing using? 
A quick check of the electrical system records shows that the house isn't using electricity at all, it's spilling surplus electricity into grid like a small nuclear power plant. There are lulls in the energy feed but most of the time the house is producing more energy than it uses which means someone has some pretty powerful energy technology in there that they are feeding into the grid when they have nothing to use the surplus on.. 
She might also notice there is a car parked in the drive way but it looks like it hasn't been moved, or washed in a long time. A scan of the car shows that the trunk is loaded with weapons. High powered rocket launchers and heavy machine guns from the looks of them. There is also a bomb under the car so if you open it wrong kaboom! Someone takes home security very seriously.
"Holy shhhh..." Right. So, not sending the regular police in to investigate this place. 
But someone is going to need to investigate. Oracle keeps her eye on the trace-back's progress, occasionally tweaking her system's response to keep the predictability curve fluctuating, reinforcing her defenses that way. She wants the time to finish her analysis. 
The thermal and electromagnetic imaging is impressive, but inconclusive, since the bulk of what she'll really want to know will be inside that lab. The question then becomes: How to get a look at what's really going on in there.
She glances again to her cracking programs. "C'mon," she mutters, now. "By now, Jeff Goldblume would be in there three times over and he and Will Smith would be home smoking cigars with Bill Pullman and Judd Hirsch..."
Barb's systems start decrypting the file structure with the lowest security first. Books, magazines, technical papers, science journals, lots and lots of folders all sharing the same basic naming scheme of Project_ with a series of letters and numbers attached to them. There is a Applications folder and a massive file marked simply X. There is a large folder labeled Flash Projects, a set of folders designated Mutants, Meta-humans, Alien, Humans, and a text file called Brains.txt Lastly on the circular file dial structure is a folder marked LOD. 
Oracle shunts the information and files she discovers into a controlled partition, to minimize any danger to her own system, should there be any as she starts investigating further. She sets one of her indexers to scanning the content of the files, folders, and applications, to create a coherent summary for her, and turns her attention to the LOD folder, to see just what it may contain. 
Sparing her defense array another quick glance. She knows it will will alert her before a breech occurs -- or at least before too large of a breech occurs. But, it never hurts to be extra vigilant.
Opening the LOD folder Barbra is greeted with a voice, "Legion of Doom, project update. Construction of the base is almost complete. With the cloaking shields in place the construction is going unnoticed. By incorporating Stark's technology I decreased the manufacturing time of the MC-Gel relays. It was a productive day." It's the voice of Grodd, his rather distinctive deep base voice is hard to miss if she's ever heard it. The recording plays the next journal file, "The healing tank technology is integrating into the power matrix well enough now. I expect that it will keep the clients happy. They will be able to recuperate between battles more rapidly. The faster they heal, the more chances they have to make money, the more they need to heal. The humans will be too stupid to realize they are funding their own agony. I'm fairly sure I fixed that problem with the sonic shower that was turning the workers brains into mush. Waste not, want not! No reason to waste a tasty brain." then the next one, "I met Catwoman. She's actually fairly nice, for a human. A good head on her shoulders. I'm somewhat torn. I'm thinking of either using her for my amusement until her body breaks or making her a partner. I think our goals of protecting the earth and it's creatures from the corrupting influence of humans could mesh well together. I might actually have her as a friend if it works out, other wise I'll wipe her mind and make her a decoration. " then the next the same voice, "Finished a new version of the Brood elimination serum. From what limited information I have on the Brood I can only really guess at the effectiveness level. I'll need to steal their ship to be sure. Note to self: Find a way to trace the ship to it's home planet, destroy all life on target planet." and there are hundreds of files like this. It's the audio diary of a mad-man. 
Oracle sits back in her wheelchair, staring at the screen. 
"Great. Just great. It's a supervillain lair." A brain-eating supervillain lair. She doesn't immediately recognize Grodd's voice, though you can be sure she's running a recognizer trace on it. In the meantime, in her mind, she dubs him Dr. Zombie. (Because, really, who else would eat brains and work on world-ending science?) It's no worse a handle than any of the other villains she or Batman have faced. 
She's definitely going to be sharing this information with Stark and Superman, now. She's also going to be upping her surveillance of the Catwoman. Sure, she's always kept tabs on her -- for all that they're on opposite sides of the fight, there's something about Catwoman she admires. But, if she's hooking up with some sort of megalomaniacal madman... that actually somewhat breaks pattern for her.
Oh, not entirely, of course. Barbara's aware of Catwoman's attraction to the Bat. She does like power, that girl. But, she's also much more of a soloist than a team player. And the idea of anyone becoming a 'decoration' just because they refuse a job offer? That's not happening.
The voice continues on as Barbara thinks, "I'm not sure what to do about the two Kryptonians. I mean, sure, they are evil and they could be useful to create chaos and destruction but the one I met, the female, she was just so crass and barbaric. I was really disappointed. I expect I'll end up having to save my planet from her too. Hopefully she will kill Superman for me before I have to kill her. There are a lot of Super-heroes running around lately. Someone needs to thin out the herd or we're not going to be able to make a dishonest living." then the ext audio file says, "Teleportation beacons are back up and running. Now by the time I finish this sentence any one listening to these files will have sent out a tracking signal to me and I'll be able to locate them anywhere in the world and teleport to them and break them in Ten.. Nine.. Eight.. Seven.. Six.." And Barbaras systems start to alarm everywhere. All the data she was downloading starts to mutate and erase itself. Some of the files become worms trying to destroy her network from within, her firewall is assaulted by the virus trying to knock it down from the inside with programs compressed and hidden away that suddenly appear. She can try to stop it or just yank the hard drive. The data will be lost but at least the rest of her system will be in tact and Dr. Zombie won't teleport into her tower. At least if she believes what the voice says... 
Like Dr. Zombie's, Oracle's systems aren't run-of-the-mill, either. There's a reason she took the precaution of the hardened partition and kept her eye on her defenses. Not the first trojan attack she's suffered. Probably won't be the last. So, she's not so much scrambling as she is keying in and voicing a series of well-practiced defensive backup that, like the metamorphing files that invade her system, metamorph themselves into additional defenses and kill-commands. 
Even as the first of the alarms trip, the most sensitive potions of her system disengage mechanically and over the network. The drive with the hardened petition is isolated, as are the summary and cross-indexing files she created. Even if she loses the original files, she won't lose all the information they contained.
None of that stops her from swearing, of course, as the data she's been examining starts to implode. By the time the countdown hits 5, she takes the precaution of her own EM countermeasures and, since she's been working, recently, with Tony on a detection and protection grid to deal with teleporters, quantum transporters, and cosmic portals, well... Time to test the prototype, huh?
Not going to run scared; but not going to make it easy, either. She pulls the drive with the partition on it, knowing she'll need to reinstall it into a fully closed and isolated system to see what's left to salvage -- and that she'll have to do a full purge of her normal system to ensure no other tunnelers or worms remain active. That'll be fun... (not). 
But, it may not be a total loss.
In his lab Grodd was all ready to go smash some heads for hacking into his system. He stands in the teleporter and waits for it to send him to the traced location and.. nothing happens. He looks confused and walks back over to the controls telling it to activate again but it's unable to lock it's target.. well, that was weird.. The tracing program narrowed it down to Gotham and a specific part of Gotham but not an exact location. "Must have been Batman." Grodd thinks and then shrugs, "I guess I'll find out when he shows up to make an ass of himself." then he shuts off the network connection to the upstairs and walks up to his kitchen to make a sandwich. On the spy satellite the house has been perfectly peaceful and empty until now but after he's had time to put together a nice thick BLT, Grodd walks under the skylight and plops down on the large couch turning on the television. Even super villains TiVo Dr. Who... She can see looking down through the skylight as the big gorilla sits and watches T.V. Eating, drinking bottled water, scratching himself inappropriately and so forth while he waits for the invasion of the super-heroes to happen. 
Oracle boggles some at the human-mimicking gorilla on her satfeed, once she's had time to reinitialize. So, either Dr. Zombie uses King Kong as his muscle (a step up, she notes, from a lot of the mooks the villains like to use), or... that comment about saving the animal world from humanity is far more telling than she first realized. 
"Dr. Zombie-Kong?"
She eyes her system for a moment and considers the risk. She does have his phone number. Of course, she was the one that first hacked into his system, not the other way around. Even if she does feel she had just cause -- what with his bugging of the government systems and the like. And it's a toss-up as to whether or not he registered her own spyware. 
She spends several long moments setting up her most sophisticated anti-tracking program, picks up her headset, and scrambles her voice as the computer puts through the call.
On the monitor in front of her she can see the giant Gorilla watching TV until the phone rings. He visibly sighs and reaches for the remote pausing his show and then reaches over and picks up the handset bringing it up to his head as he lays back on the couch resting his head on the arm and letting one leg dangle off the side of the couch. "Hello?" he asks not identifying himself. His voice is the same voice from the recording. He is the brain eating mad-man it seems... mad-gorilla? Mad-rilla? Anyway, he's on the phone looking over at the paused TV as if waiting for the phone call to end so he can get back to his show. 
"Nice trick," the androgynous technovoice says over the telephone. Oracle makes no effort to identify herself, either. "The teleporting." At least, she knows her prototype works. Tony will like that. "Why don't you tell me more about the Legion of Doom. It sounds fascinating." She doesn't feel the need to waste time with a lot of pleasantries.
Grodd isn't one for wasting time either. He sits up a little and scratches his chest, "Oh, you're not who I was expecting!" he sounds pleased. A new challenger has entered the ring! "Well, it's just a little pet project of mine. You see, unlike Batman or Superman, I am a man of logic and forethought. I realize that you can't *stop* crime. You can however, focus it and channel it into the least destructive and most profitable avenues. To this end I am creating an organization which will allow villains to work together. I will train them, teach them, make them see the importance of choosing your battles wisely and not just running around like rabid animals, butting heads or seeing who has the biggest power pack." he explains, "Minimize casualties, Maximize profits, Minimize collateral damage, and you'll have fewer want to be Super-mans on your case. I want to teach them to be smarter criminals, for a price of course." 
"Of course," Oracle replies, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. "And what sort of prices do you charge for such a ground-breaking and unique service? Is it a tiered service offering, or a one price fits all shop?"
Might as well hear the whole sales pitch, right? If he doesn't know she's a superhero, herself -- or has been, and is, still, after a fashion -- she may be able to use that to her advantage. For a little while, at least. (Maybe a very little while.)
Grodd says, "Prices are negotiable. It's hard times for everyone these days, a base 10% but we also offer troops, weapons, technology upgrades, medical facilities more advanced than anything you'll find created by humans, and we sell incarceration insurance." he lists off, "Once we have enough members I'm thinking of buying a small town somewhere nice and setting up housing. After all, at the end of a long day of robbing banks you don't want a long drive home to your wife. I think the world would be a better place if people were less stressed and having your loved ones in a nice, safe, heavily protected city might help some of the older villains feel more secure. " he makes it sound nice but it's a trap. Once your family lives there he will have a tool to black mail them. Of course it only works on the stupid but there are a lot of stupid villains. 
Oracle arches a brow at that. "Nice..." she says, now. It's hard to suppress her chuckle. "Family housing. How... innovative. That certainly provides its own form of insurance, doesn't it?" No. She doesn't qualify as a stupid supervillain. The idea of all those hostages? Wow. Well, yes. One might expect that a talking gorilla has King Kong sized balls.
The casual, if glossy, arrogance in his sales pitch is telling, too. 
"Tell me Mr... or is that Doctor? I'm sorry. I actually don't have your name. Do you offer tours of your facility? A suitable demonstration of your technology?" A beat. "Aside from the friendly contest we just had, I mean."
"Grodd, just Grodd is fine. " the voice on the phone says as he looks down at his hand opening and closing the massive appendage and shifting in his seat again. He doesn't know she can see him but she can read from his body language he's nervous about something or something is bothering him. 
"No tours yet. We are putting the finishing touches on the main facility now then we will fly it out to one of it's rotating locations. Thanks to the teleportation system we can move the base anywhere and it really won't matter. By keeping it moving we lessen the risk of it coming under attack. If it works for S.H.I.E.L.D. why not us?" he says to make the point, "However, before we go any further, there is one rule that I like to make clear." and here comes the other shoe, "I will not have anti-mutant radicals in my organization. I wish to found an organization about helping each other, not hating each other. Hate never helps anyone. " Dun dun daaah..?? Yes, Grodd, the Gorilla who turned everyone into Gorillas about five years ago, for a few minutes, is preaching anti-hate messages.. What is the world coming to?
Grodd! Yes. Barbara actually remembers something about that. (And being a gorilla was no fun, as she recalls, no matter how much she likes swinging from rooftops.) 
"No fear there," she assures the gorilla, now. Her eyes flick to the screen. She can see he's getting nervous. "Interspecies hatred isn't really part of my arsenal." She decides it might be time to wrap up. 
"Well, Grodd, I must say, you have a very ambitious enterprise ahead of you. I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure we'll speak again, soon. Enjoy the rest of your evening."
Grodd says, "I look forward to hearing from you." then he takes the phone away from his face and presses the end call button. Laying the phone down he reaches up and rubs his temples like he has a headache or something. Then he reaches for the remote control and turns the TV back on.. it's a remote control which might look familiar to Barbara if she has ever visited a friend in New York. It might not dawn on her right away but he's using the regular cable TV network which also offers video calling service.. if his TV has a camera and microphone, which is most likely will if it's as state of the art as everything else, she might be able to spy on his living room. 
It's not likely something Barbara would register immediately. But, soon enough, she will... because, she's going to spend the next several hours reinforcing her own system, finishing the recovery process from his counter-attack, and sending anonymous tips to various cyber-security agents to flag his code in their systems (along with the recommendation that attach false feeds to it, rather than disrupt it outright). 
He might just be the most interesting cyber challenge she's had since the Calculator...
Category:Log