Cat and Mouse Part 2
Selena sighed in contentment as she leaned back from her workbench. Her back was cramped and several vertebrae popped when she stretched slowly and sensuously. Being hunched over the table top for as long as she had been made her back sore.
She had been working on more upgrades to her system, one of them being a series of improvements that gave her a 3d image of the immediate environment in her head. It wasn’t a visual setup, it was more like echolocation. She found that using it, out to a radius of 300 meters in all directions, she could “see” the people she was fighting, how they were moving and what was going on. It gave her precise locations of who she was in the area with, and if they were enemy or friendly. Buildings, walls, floors and ceilings were “transparent”, and with this ability, she could see and “hear” in other rooms. The improvement was such that she could get rid of her camera rig, giving it instead to Black Canary. She kept a few small cameras, with the adherence package still attached, so she could spoof surveillance cameras she came across, but the “snooper rig” of optical cable, bracelet, and laser microphone, she passed on.
It cost her a small fortune, but she bought a laboratory building from Horizon, a scientific research company who had moved locations and abandoned the lab to be torn down. Into this location, she had delivered an electron microscope and the equipment necessary to construct nanobots. She got rid of all the other devices that were scattered all over the city, consolidating her work areas to this one location, and then she hacked every database in the world that had this location listed at all. She also went into those same databases and pulled out the information that was listed about her lairs. Her lab and the Lairs dropped off the face of the world.
She was getting very paranoid about her privacy.
The last thing she did was to search for a location that was not in an existent building, but part of the under-subway of the 1800’s. She did multiple searches for the plans and went investigating those locations, looking for some place that was out of the way enough to allow her to finally have a space that was inviolate. She abandoned the lairs that had been discovered by the League of Shadows. She would have to be more careful in the future.
Finally she found another location. Not in the sewers, but deep underground. It was a turn-around for the old subway system, buried underneath the main subway that most people traveled on every day. She found a few places where she had to spray her nanobots around to reinforce the surrounding areas with the titanium threads they had developed. Once the titanium had been infused into the walls and ceiling, she felt good enough to move in.
It took her days to complete the move. Days of crawling over the rooftops to make sure she had removed all the possessions she wished to keep, and to transport them to the new lair. Some of it was very interesting for her to move, like some of the custom furniture being disassembled and having the nanobots help her reassemble them at the destination. But she could have her scientific items moved and delivered to her new lab, and hoped these steps would be the last she would have to take.
This really sucks having to move every few months… I should learn to travel lighter.
She managed to purchase and then move a plasma television to put in her lair. She found a cable TV feed and had that connect into the TV, and added a wireless access point so she could still surf the internet whenever she wanted. Information was still king, and she decided to make sure she was still ruling, especially if everyone counted her out. No information was ever wasted.
She had been considering this when she realized that she now had near-photographic recall.
Did you and your microscopic counterparts do something to my memory?
Affirmative. I have taken many of your biological storage and long term memories and put them into the crystalline storage we are using for the operating system and so on. I reasoned that I could do a more efficient job of storing, indexing and retrieving information than your biological system could do. Currently you have 10^15 bytes of information in your biological memory that is being transferred over into the memory chips that were created, freeing up those sections for either deletion and replacement, or allowing you to have a biological and a crystalline storage system.
Let’s not monkey around with my brain just yet. If there are areas of the brain that are damaged and should be replaced, please take over those functions if you would. I have no problem replacing biological technology with mechanics, or even better yet, merging the two into one unit.
It is an area of investigation I am willing to work on with you. Biomechanical research is certainly a lucrative field. I have already enhanced your memory, your processing speed, your strength, flexibility and your endurance. I would like an opportunity to find how far the process can be taken before there is damage, and what forms those damages can take.
Don’t you DARE do that to me. I don’t want to be some sort of cyber-person, a Borg or something.
There are other test subjects that I can use. I will start with your cats. Then I can use your defeated opponents. I can test on them without fear of killing them since they are already dead.
Just so long as you only use proven improvements on me. I don’t want to be brain-dead because you “enhanced” the wrong neuron in my brain.
Understood. You are still my host and it is still my primary purpose to help you in any way you need.
Her practice area was set up and she was still practicing fighting against imaginary opponents. Now, however, she accessed various DVDs and videos of people fighting in different styles. With the processing power she had now she was able to break down their movements and work out strategies to defeat them as well as how to fight like them. She ordered the AI to download and analyze the videos so that when she awoke she would have even more processed. Learning like this started to take over her days and nights.
Her body began remembering how to move, how to flow. She learned from these private training sessions that there were only so many ways for a body to move when striking or evading, and if you could put the opponent into a situation where they had only a few, or better yet one, way to get their goal, then you could accurately anticipate what they were going to do.
She was coming back from another “job” of “liberating” some jewels from a safe when she ran into Bullseye again.
He was watching another gentleman, someone in red leather, and she startled him. He turned with blinding speed and threw the nail he had in his hand at her.
Her time sense slowed. She saw the nail coming at her in slow motion and knew just how much she had to move to be able to dodge it. Vectors and momentum were all calculated out and she found her head move fractionally, and the nail passed by harmlessly.
“I missed…” hissed out of Bullseye’s mouth. “I never miss….”
Oh shit. I think I just really pissed him off.
He leapt at her. While her mind was still on him, she saw his movement and once again, figures were calculated out of his flight and where he would land. Turned out that he was about to land on her. So she moved to allow him to land on her, but made sure she had the advantage in doing so.
She arched backwards and planted her hands behind her. Since Bullseye had figured on her moving backwards, his feet came down on her chest, just as he had planned. But Catwoman had already turned the momentum to her advantage.
Her feet left the ground just before Bullseye landed on her ribcage. Her momentum going in an arc countered his momentum going straight down, and she swept his feet away from what would have been a killing blow to her chest into a sweep of his legs, sending him toward the rooftop. Meanwhile her feet came up and impacted squarely with the back of his head, sending his whole body’s momentum sideways where just seconds before it had been going downward.
The abrupt change of direction had stunned him apparently, as he impacted one of the machines on the roof. But at the same time as she was in a handstand, she started shifting it to finish her flip, something hit her right in the small of her back. It hit with such force that it added momentum to her flip, causing her to over-rotate and land on her buttocks.
What was that?
Bullseye launched a rock at you just before he leaped. He had been aiming for your throat, but your flip caused it to impact your lower back instead. It is incredible how quickly he moved and the force he added to that rock while he was leaping for you. I need you to hit him.
I’m gonna do my best.
She rolled backward and leapt up to her feet, turning and crouching to wait for him to come at her again. She had rolled out of the way of another launched missile, saving her life once again. She started scampering at him, dodging and twisting so the barrage of hurled objects missed her, but only by fractions of an inch.
Bullseye was getting more and more furious the longer the confrontation went on. Apparently he wasn’t used to missing anything he decided to hit. The near misses were driving him crazy. He started with small things, nails and ball bearings, and went to larger throwables, such as the shuriken on his belt and finally he launched a large hard ball attached to a rope.
He was scarily accurate with his weapons. The only thing that saved her was the nanite enhancements that she had received. They allowed her to anticipate where the missiles were coming from based on where his hands were at.
What took her by surprise was the chunk of asphalt he kicked at her.
It impacted right between her eyes. There was no way to anticipate it nor to dodge it since she was not paying attention to his feet. It was all she could do to retain her consciousness after it hit. She knew that her brain had been rattled around, and she felt her body go on automatic, deflecting and dodging attacks thrown at her by Bullseye.
When she finally came back to full consciousness, she was in a vicious hand-to-hand combat with Bullseye, her body moving on its own.
WHAT????
Remain calm. My prime directive is still to keep you safe. I have utilized the knowledge you have been aquiring to animate you while you were dazed. I calculated the chances of what would happen had I not acted, and came to the conclusion that Bullseye would have killed you while you were helpless, so I exerted control over your suit to put it in automatic mode and to, quote, save your bacon, unquote.
Okay then, my gratitude, but let me take back over.
Control cut off in mid strike, and that threw off the tempo of the combat. Bullseye had moved to dodge an attack that never even was launched. So Catwoman used that break to bound backwards and over the edge of the roof, plummeting toward the ground almost 8 stories below.
She threw her whip at anything that it could attach to in an effort to arrest her fall, and it managed to catch on a protrusion on the face of the building. The whip turned her fall into a swing, with a heck of a lot of momentum. It took a lot of strength to hang on to the whip while she went from near-terminal velocity vertically to near-terminal velocity horizontally, and the momentum swung her up into the air, nearly 70 feet and across a four lane road.
Oh, god, this is going to HURT..!
She saw the wall coming up very fast, but her body twisted and at the last moment, she went feet first through someone’s window, and into some kind of atrium. She slid to a stop and lightly bumped the far wall.
She lay there for a few seconds catching her breath. She heard the alarms in the distance and knew that she had to get out fast. She raced up the wall, pushed aside the drop ceiling tiles, crawled into the space beyond them and slid the tile back into place.
It took only a thought to activate the echo-locater and to watch as the guards came up the stairs and the elevator to see what the ruckus was. She also noticed that Bullseye was still on the other rooftop, and apparently from the vibrations coming off his body, he was pissed as hell.
She also noticed another person a few buildings away, also on the rooftop. He whipped some kind of stick out of his thigh pouch and threw it at another building near him, and swung away on the rope it left. Soon he was out of her ‘sight’.
She resigned herself to a long night of waiting for the whole world to finish their fascination with her unexpected entrance.
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