May, 2168 CE – Nevos
“You want to use a Batman to replace the Shadow Broker?”
The incredulity in Kara’s voice was thick enough to make her opinion on Rylia’s sanity clearly obvious. Which was super rude! Also probably fair, depending on what her Batman had been like. Rylia suspected she was missing some context.
“Nope! I want to use a Bruce Wayne. An older one, in his early seventies, who’s already long since passed on the mantle of Batman to someone else. His age is a bit of an issue, but his mind is perfectly sharp still, and even our current version of a regen treatment can bring him back down to his forties physically.”
Kara looked very much like that wasn’t the relevant point here, though it was Momo who asked a question.
“Ah, sorry? But who is this Bruce Wayne/Batman fellow? What makes him a good fit, or a bad one for that matter?”
The surprised expression on Kara’s face was pretty funny. Also sort of understandable, given how many worlds Batman existed in some form or another. Either as a real person or a fictional character. Still, Kara’s surprise was useful, as it let Rylia press forward with her arguments and context for Kara, while also getting Momo up to speed. It’s not like she hadn’t expected some debate, and she had thought her options through.
“He’s what you’d call a Quirkless hero in the multiverse Kara is from. No powers, no gene augmentation, no super solider serum. Just high-level martial arts, tech savvy, and extremely good detective skills. He’s got a high level of understanding of the underworld, unshakable morals, and experience helping run massive, sprawling organizations. Both corporations and, in this specific case, a large-scale hero organization.”
Momo was nodding along, as that was obviously ticking a number of boxes that made sense to her. Kara had recovered at this point, however, and took the moment Rylia paused to interject her problem with this.
“The unshakable morals bit is the problem! He’s a ‘no killing the evil psychopaths’ sort! Hell, he had more issue with me killing Luthor than almost anyone else in the Justice League! If not for Batgirl being my ex and going to bat for me, he might have tried to arrest me!”
Trying really hard not to giggle at the unintentional ‘Batgirl going to bat’ joke, knowing that it wouldn’t help at the moment, Rylia pushed forward a datapad with Bruce’s information on it. She used the moment where Kara and Momo both looked down at it to get control of herself before speaking.
“N-normally, Kara would be right. I suspect her particular Batman might have been one of the more extreme ones if he talked about arrest for that, but pretty much all of them, including this Bruce, had personal ‘no kill’ rules. The vast majority of them don’t extend that personal rule to everyone else, though. They regularly work with people like Jason Blood and John Constantine, or even versions of Wonder Woman who still freely uses a sword. For that matter, most versions of Aquaman are rulers with an army that doesn’t exactly stick to tasers and tickle batons.”
Kara was reluctantly nodding at that, indicating that even her Bruce Wayne worked with some of those people. Though not Wonder Woman from the brief look of surprise at that idea. As she picked up the datapad, still looking dubious, Rylia carried on.
“More importantly, this particular Bruce Wayne was from a world where he had to be a bit looser and less anal about that sort of thing a bit. It had worse luck with a few major threats, some before he was even born. Which did cause tech to advance faster, but did so at the cost of being a bit more…violently dystopian. Not quite as bad as the Cyberpunk world we pulled some of our medical tech from, but bad enough that he had to adjust a bit. He held fast to his personal no-kill rule, but didn’t complain when the rest of the League didn’t.”
Rylia pointed to the dataslate Kara was now reading his file from.
“He even taught his successor it was okay to kill if necessary, he just held them to an extremely high standard of necessary. He focused on making sure they never let it become about expediency, much like your own Hero System tended to emphasize, Momo. Which is sort of what we need. The Broker Network can’t abruptly shift to squeaky clean or someone will realize a major shift happened. We need someone who can create the justifications to slowly shift to a ‘kill only when you absolutely can’t do it clean’ reputation.”
Kara was still frowning a bit as she read through the dossier Rylia had painstakingly copied from the Marketplace. Her expression was losing the stubborn incredulity as she read, though, which Rylia took as a good sign. Having largely said her piece, she leaned back as Kara finished reading and passed the secure slate to Momo to read in turn. Expression visibly reluctant, she spoke again.
“Okay, this Bruce is…different, than the one I knew. I also wasn’t super close with my Earth’s version or anything, so it probably won’t cause friction. I’m still not sure even this version can bring himself to be pragmatic enough to run the Shadow Broker’s network immediately. Maybe he could handle it after the overhaul. But I don’t think he’d be able to stop himself from changing too much, too fast. Even at the cost of parts of the Network breaking off.”
Rylia’s own expression tugged down in a frown at that, as that…wasn’t an unreasonable concern. Personally, from the exhaustive list of options she’d gone through, she thought he was the best long-term solution. Power corrupts very easily, and Bruce Wayne was one of the very few people in the omniverse that typically managed to avoid that. At least for the most part. He was still mortal and some of it crept it, but it was usually minor and he usually caught it himself.
They were going to have to give a great deal of operational leeway and authority over to whoever replaced the Shadow Broker. There just wasn’t any practical way to be constantly looking over their shoulder, given the scope of operations. Even with Momo, Rylia was still somewhat giving oversight to what she was up to, despite the fact that she now trusted Momo completely. While she would most certainly be involved with whoever took over from the Broker, she couldn’t spare enough attention to seriously check their work. Not in any detail. She, as well as Momo and Kara for that matter, simply had too much else on their plates. Find the original chapter at g.com.
That meant they needed someone reliably moral and resistant to corruption, yet who could manage some pretty dark dealings on a galactic scale. Sure, the intention was to steadily get rid of the darkest bits of the Shadow Broker operations, but the ideal was to do it in a way that made it look like such was just ‘good business.’ Increasing profits and reducing risk to the network by modifying operating patterns.
Which was honestly true. Truly successful organized crime tended to avoid the really nasty stuff, as such were the sorts of crime that attracted the most dangerous attention. Information brokering, racketing, bribery, extortion, and drugs? Barely rated attention from more than local cops. Trafficking was iffy, depending on who you were trafficking. Kidnapping, assassination, and terrorism were right out for most sane organized crime. Getting a SPECTRE on your ass for manufacturing bioweapons was stupid. Which was part of why, so far as she knew, the current Shadow Broker actually didn’t mess with that sort of extremism. Though he did go into kidnapping, trafficking and assassination, which weren’t the best ideas.
“I believe you’re both overlooking the obvious solution here.”
Rylia and Kara both twitched, having been lost in their own heads, nearly having forgotten that Momo was still reading over the dossier. Curious, but knowing Momo almost always had good ideas, Rylia focused on her.
“How so?”
Momo set the secure dataslate into the equally secure holoprojector on the coffee table between them. Rylia hadn’t bothered with it, since there were no graphics to display, just a text file which she’d transcribed from the Marketplace. Momo brought it up anyway, displaying Bruce’s details, highlighting a specific section.
“It is obvious to me, looking over his history, that this ‘Batman’ is every bit as much a trainer as he is a detective or administrator. Even after he switched from being an active field hero to running the behind the scenes admin of both his own team and this ‘Justice League,’ he continued to mentor new heroes. Often ones with troubled histories.”
Momo looked over at Rylia, lips quirked into a grin.
“I know you, Rylia. You make huge lists, then pare them down systematically based on pros and cons as part of your decision making loop. I’d bet heavily that we can find someone on your final sets of short lists that we can pair with this Bruce Wayne. Someone who has a more dubious background and can handle the shadier stuff, yet is young enough that ‘Batman’ will want to mentor them away from that. Have them work together, splitting the massive load that the Broker Network is in the first place, with Bruce mentoring the second person. By the time they adopt his morality, if they do at all, they’ll have had time to adjust the network to something they can both live with.”
Kara was staring at Momo with her mouth a little agape, even as Rylia’s mind immediately called up those final short lists. Momo was right about her methodology, after all. No one came to mind off the very final list, since it had been filtered heavily for the unshakable moral stance thing, but the one before that…
“You want to trick Batman using his mentoring instincts?”
Ah, Kara had gotten over her surprise, though Momo was quick to deny her thoughts.
“No. Mr. Wayne is clearly the sort of man that would see right through that. We’ll be entirely up front about why we’re doing it, complete with our concerns that some of the initial work won’t be compatible with his morality. Possibly even with a file handed to him on the individual he’ll be working with.”
That comment instantly made the choice obvious. There was someone who’d made it at least close to Rylia’s final cuts, and whose background was exactly the sort of ‘tragic past’ that would likely pull on Batman’s mentoring/found family instincts hard.
“Lucyna Kushinada. Much better known as simply Lucy.”
Rylia reached around to remove the data slate, taking it in hand and quickly accessing a keyboard feature. This would be faster with an omni-tool, at least one of their omni-tools, since they’d modified them all to project keyboards out so you could type on them with both hands. You know, rather than leaving them on one arm like seemingly every other dumb fuck in this galaxy.
Yet, none of them trusted anything locally sourced with anything related to the Marketplace. The secure data slate was a military model purchased from a Star Wars universe. It didn’t use anything recognizable to local systems. Not the architecture, not the programming language, not even the keyboard language. Given it would thus take her a few minutes to move the basics of Lucy’s profile to the data slate, she spoke up to give them the basics verbally.
“Lucy is from the ‘Cyberpunk’ universe we’ve gotten some of our cybernetics and biosculpting tech from. She was, until she made a deal with the System, an Edgerunner. Essentially a mercenary that performed jobs for ‘Fixers,’ a combination of information broker and middleman for merc contracts. Lucy herself is an elite ‘netrunner,’ a cybernetically enhanced hacker capable of keeping up with an AI. She has a lot of underworld knowledge, originally a corporate family background, and her being a netrunner left her with more general knowledge of how large scale ‘corpo’ operations work.”
Momo hummed, nodding and already putting two and two together.
“I take it you ended up eliminating her from the list both because she wasn’t quite solid enough on the moral side and didn’t have the same degree of high-level administration experience? Compared to someone like Mr. Wayne, that is.”
“Yes. Technically, Brucie boy actually falls short on the pure multitasking and admin side compared to a few others. Dragon, a full-blown AGI who acted for decades as a heroine, beat him like a drum in that respect. She lacked his familiarity with low-level crime operations, has the same moral issues only worse, and might be vulnerable to Reaper tech. So he beat her out. Our ex-Batman has the closest to the right combination of characteristics, yet Kara is right that he might have problems all on his own.”
Rylia finished her high-speed typing and slotted the data slate back into the table. It projected a much more basic file, since she hadn’t had time to transfer everything. Still, it held the highlights of her pros and cons for Lucy, along with some basic general info about her skills and experience. She could fill the rest out faster by talking.
“Lucy is actually pretty solidly moral by Edgerunner standards, but those standards are sometimes low enough that the devil uses the bar as a limbo pole in hell.”
That comment got a surprised snort out of Kara, causing Rylia to grin.
“Thing is though, Lucy hated it. Hated the corps, hated the way her world was. When she showed talent for netrunning, she was railroaded into working for a megacorp called Arasaka as a kid. Thrown into an extremely dangerous type of netrunning before she was even a teen. Their group of talented kids was literally put up against rogue AIs in the Deep Net, getting killed off one by one, before managing to rebel.”
Momo and Kara both looked appalled, as they should. They were getting the cliff notes version and it was so much worse the more you dug into it. Even the abbreviated version would give them a decent idea, though.
“Lucy’s own father was the one to throw her into the program. Something he did because a 7-year-old Lucy hacked his terminal and found out what sort of monster he’d been working for Arasaka. She was a genuinely good kid and turned rebellious after having that image of her father shattered. She tried to run away repeatedly, but kept getting brought back, until he threw her into the program. Thing is, even after everything that happened to her, she held onto a solid general decency pretty well, even after becoming an Edgerunner. Yet…”
Kara actually knew more about the particular world in question than Momo, since she’d been interested in where the advanced cybernetics came from. She grimaced as it was her turn to put two and two together.
“I remember that world. Casual murder and insanely low cultural value of life. Even if she’s fundamentally decent at the core, you’re afraid the very environment she was raised in, combined with the things she had to do, would make her prone to Slippery Slope Syndrome.”
Expression twitching at hearing the capitals in that name and really wondering how that had become official nomenclature for Kara, Rylia forced herself not to ask. Not now, at least. The descriptive name certainly got the concept across.
“Pretty much. I think she’d likely have been fine in the short term, but wasn’t so sure in the long term. Combined with her high-level management of groups being lacking, she got cut two rounds back. She made it that far on all her other skills, though. Hell, she’d probably even make an insanely good field operative if Bruce needed one, after some training by him.”
Mentally picturing Lucy in a tight-leather Batsuit both made Rylia grin and feel even better about this idea!
“Anyway, you understand Bats a bit better than me, do you think…?”
Kara snorted at having that question directed at her.
“Oh, she is 120% exactly the sort any hero-side Bruce wouldn’t be able to leave alone. Doubly so since it looks like she’s barely twenty and had to start running from the corps at fourteen. She’ll absolutely get folded into the BatFam, no matter how hard she protests. If you think she’ll work to cover the morality issues up front? Which, going by her kill count, I’d have to agree with I think. Than this…might actually work. Momo is right that Bruce will see right through it, but that doesn’t mean he’ll fight it. Particularly if we’re up front about it.”
Shaking her head, Kara’s face twisted into a wry smile.
“Actually, I suspect it will make him legitimately respect you for covering the bases and manipulating him in a way he’d agree with. Given that I can’t wait to see his expression when he finds out where our funding is coming from, that initial respect might just be important, too.”
As she tried to imagine that herself, Rylia couldn’t have stopped the laugh the mental image drew from her if she’d tried. She was going to get to tell Batman they were funding a plan to do galactic conquering for the good of the galaxy by selling sex toys! This was going to be awesome!
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A/N 1: Right. So, Older Bruce Wayne won a poll about who would replaced the Shadow Broker, but others brought up the legitimate issue that his morality would have...trouble, filling the role completely. This is the solution I came up with. Too many people forget that Batman is just as much a serial mentor as he is the Greatest Detective or Brooding McEmoman. Adding a second summon in Lucy, someone whose EVERYTHING basically screams 'Mentor Me Batman-senpai!' was a neat way to solve the morality conundrum. Just as Batman doesn't fight Jason Todd on his more questionable methods, he can tolerate Someone Else handling the darker bits for long enough to eliminate the need for those slowly. Particularly when the someone handling it is a person that fits really well into his mentor profile. More so since this version of Batman is from a slightly more dystopian/cyberpunk Earth.