Catatonia By Maid Joy
	Things keep going strangely for Catwoman. But when an opportunity to grab some very expensive artifacts comes along, she just can't resist. Unfortunately that is only the first herald of the changes to come. Detective Comics owns the copyright to Catwoman. This is a retroactive contunity, or a Retcon of the same character.

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She finished the diagnostic on the suit once she was back in her lair. It showed nothing wrong with the suit, yet something confused her, her suit was taking actions without orders.

For instance, after the rescue of Lena Luthor, once she was done with the mission, and in the plane going home, she was watching Lena modify her phone. She happened to glance over and wondered what she was doing. But the suit decided to zoom in on the phone and give her a very close sight of Lena's actions. More than that, it was all recorded. There was a visual record of the entire flight in her suit ready to download once she got home.

Automatic functions were inevitable once she started using the suit as much as she had been. That reduced the amount of things that she had to do manually or to tell the suit. She hadn't set these subroutines up and that was worrying her.

Once back in the Lair, she got out all the diagnostic equipment for her suit and started going through it all minutely. She went through all the diagnostics on the computer first, thinking that somehow she had written some subroutines. Failing that, she didn't remember Professor Kyle setting up anything like this for her, but you never know what could happen given the tech level of this suit.

Several hours later, she was still stumped. The routines were there, they operated, as they should, but there was no author's signature. She looked in all the comments of the programs themselves, went through it byte by byte and found nothing. EVERY programmer of any kind would "sign" their work, putting a few extra bytes in places so that others couldn't steal their work. They were a programmer's signature, just as the scrawl at the corner of a painting was an artist's signature.

But these new programs didn't have any extra like that. The original programs she installed, such as the operating system and the viruses that had been made for her had those signatures. It took time but finding them was easy. Going through these new programs line by line yielded NO extra code of any kind. There wasn't a comment saying "oops" or anything, no comments saying that a particular section of code was about or anything. It was kind of spooky.

She moved the new programs to her netbook and left them there. She deleted the copies from the suit's memory to be on the safe side. There was no use leaving potentially dangerous programs in a vulnerable place. She sighed, they were exactly what she would have written for herself and like a kid in a candy store she wanted them. Yet, since the entity who wrote them was unknown, it was might be courting disaster. Who knows what all that code could do? It might have an Easter Egg inside it that would hatch into something to take control of her suit. Better safe than sorry.

Besides, she had a few thousand things to do tonight.

It had taken her hours of hacking, but she finally managed to score a ticket to the opening of the new exhibit at the Met. It was another presentation of Egyptian artifacts that belonged to the most well-known Pharaoh of all, Tutankhamen. This time, they were combining other with the collection that Tut had. The latest theory was Tut actually was the son of the Pharaoh Akhenaton, who insisted that everyone worship the sun as the one and only god. If that was the case, it made sense for some of the things Tut seems to have endured.

As such, the anthropologists were going to display all the artifacts in an attempt to link them together in the minds of the public. If it was successful, the theory wouldn't sound so radical to the average person.¹ She was going to case the place.

While she wasn't stupid enough to plan a robbery, opening night, it would be the best night to find where everything was. This was the night that everyone who was anyone was allowed free run of the place. She knew that security would be very tight. That would give her an opportunity to find out the worst she'd have to face.

She modified a portion of the nanites in her body to contour map and record various features in the museum while she simply walked around and looked at things. A lady had to prepare for any occasion, so she built a corset for soirees like this. When there was one thing left to do, she installed a copy of the computer software in her suit to an identical computer in the corset. It would allow her to use her tech without looking like a fetishist. She also changed her eye color to match her gown.

The gown was exquisite. A simple floor length silk cheongsam in a deep sapphire blue, it was Hong Kong style awaited her. With tiny cap sleeves, a high mandarin collar and gold cat toggles in the shape down the right side of her body, and slit up to about mid-thigh. The pagoda and crane motif worked in silver throughout the gown wasn't flashy it was elegant. The highlights sparkled with gold thread. As she adjusted her body size and shape, she filled the raiment until it was obvious that she left little to imagine. She made sure to add a touch of floral perfume. Subtle, with the sex pheromones, it would draw men to her. She absolutely knew the women would hate her. Patent leather jet-black four inch heels completed the outfit.

Time to do some recon work.

Once at the party, she took her time. Her slinky slow procession through the exhibit was noted. She talked only to those whom she chose, merely nodding and smiling at others. Artfully pretending to sip on a flute of champagne, she spotted Mr. Luthor in one atrium talking about his business with some other mega-rich guy. She didn't see his daughter anyplace, even though this opening seemed to be a Who's Who of the social elite. She saw various people she knew distantly and colleagues from the university and was hard-pressed not to greet them as if she knew them.

She made it a point to look at every corner of the rooms, looking for the security cameras and motion sensors. She managed to spot several UV laser beam emitters. It would be a matter of going very slowly and making sure she could see in the UV spectrum to avoid them.

She knew that monitors were recording every guest's movements, so she acted as though she was getting more tipsy as the night went on. She very deliberately started slurring her words. She found that she was having a very good time despite her need to case the museum.

Once the night was over, she took her rented limo back to her lair, and downloaded all the information to the computer to go over it at her leisure. There were several beautiful pieces that she had her eye on, and that she thought she could sell easily enough. Once she finished that, she went to sleep. Planning might be tedious but it could put an insomniac to sleep before long.

Four days later, she had a working model of the entire museum. She'd managed to create it in three-D, combining the information from the imaging and contour mapping data. She added the architect's plans and changes to the model and it gave her an excellent down-to-the-centimeter accurate representation of the entire inside and outside. She could manipulate the model any way she wanted to, come in from any direction, and more than that, she could practice in real time from inside the model.

It was Virtual Reality taken to a logical conclusion. Take a scene, film it in 3-D, put them together with hyper accurate measurements and then project it into only the eyes, and you could do the most complex insertion in the world, in perfect safety, without any incriminating evidence that you practiced beating security measures. She loved being able to do this.

She spent time going through this scene repeatedly, reviewing all the routes she could use to approach the museum and full her plan until she had as perfect as she could make it. As much as she hated it, sewer tunnels were going to have to be her main ingress this time. She had to find a way to shed the gasses and filth that she'd pick up in them before starting step 2 of her plans.

She finally decided to compromise, a latex suit over the Catwoman suit should allow her to strip the grime and trash (and other noxious things) from her outfit before going into the interior. If she constructed it out of self-destroying latex, she could abandon it to simply dissolve in the sewer to be washed away later. There would be nothing to clean up.

Two weeks later, she was ready. The outer suit was on and working exactly the way she wanted it to. Her Catwoman suit was primed with new abilities, full maps of the interior and exterior she would be traveling through. She was as ready as she could be.

Two hours of slogging through the tunnels that carried excrement off to the sanitation department was enough to make her very glad of the nose filters she installed. No one should have to put up with that mess down there. She didn't really understand how sanitation workers did it.

Pipe after pipe, going through the large overflows under the street. She saw many rats and if they came at her, she killed them as fast as she could. Claws were good for that. Soon they left her alone since she'd already made dinner for them out of their dead comrades. Good thing I don't see any alligators. Don't know what I would do with them.

She would occasionally kick up a weapon of some kind, usually a knife, but there were several guns. She always made sure to pick them up and toss them back through the storm drains into the street. With luck, the cops would be able to use them to find the crooks they belonged to they'd be off the streets for a while.

Finally, the INS (Inertial Navigation System) in her suit told her that she had arrived under the museum. She looked around the pipe and saw the drain-pipe connecting all of the museum's waste to the sewer. With her night-vision, she found the weakest point of this sewer pipe. It shined so clearly it would be easy to open it up and be very nearly inside the museum. She crawled up the wall and hung there while the tiny devices in her claws and fingertips found the microscopic cracks everything has and began opening them up wider. Soon, the pipe section fell open enough for her to slide through her entrance and out into the wet areas under the museum. Quickly stripping out of the latex suit her assault on the museum began.

She left the pipe open so she could use it as an emergency exit if everything went wrong, and started her ascent through the walls, following pipes to get to the area she had designated as her penetration point.

Once she was inside the museum, it was easy to scale a wall and creep along it to the Egyptian Exhibit. The solid gold masks of Tut were under heavy security, but the statues and representations of Bast weren't under as much security. Typical, she thought. Everything for a man is highly protected and women are second best or ignored completely.

She turned on the ability to see the UV lasers, and had a care to make her suit disperse the motion sensors. Now it was only a matter of working her way to the specific exhibit and grabbing what she wanted.

You would think that they would stop using glass on these display cases. It's so easy to cut into them once you know how. Just a few moments were all it took to get the case open sufficiently to remove the statue. She dropped it into her backpack and moved to the next target.

She didn't care if the cases were open, she didn't care if the security guards caught on that they had been robbed, but she did care about removing all of the items that had a cat theme to them, like the jeweled collar, the masks, and some more statuary.

Once all she desired were secure, she moved out. This time instead of going through the sewers, she scaled out of the museum and onto the roof, as her plan called for. She started the process of changing her face and her body image to one that was more nondescript. A quick swing of the whip and she was walking along the power lines again to get where she needed to go.

When she was in an area where no one would see her, she pulled her mask back, grabbed the clothes she had stashed nearby and walked away from the scene.

None of the cops even suspected the bag lady that wandered around drunk, looking in trash cans as the person who escaped with several million dollars in artifacts.

She spent about two hours playing with her cats at her lair. She showed them the loot from the museum and arranged it all on the various shelves around her home. She accessed the Internet to find how one would make a shrine to Bast, and then spent some time setting it up. It wasn't complete, but it was a good start. She left an offering of a 1/4 of a tuna sandwich for her Goddess.

Then it was time to get down to business. Download of the logs showed that it was a very clean insertion, and that the latex layer just peeled off like it should have. Once again she noticed that there were some automatic processes running that she hadn't written.

One process again did terrain mapping of the rooms she moved through She hadn't instructed the suit to do more contour mapping, since she had already mapped the interior of the museum. Another subroutine identified various objects and gave a percentage chance to remove them and leave the museum, given the current plan. Still another accessed the Internet and appraised the items at current market value and what a fence could pay for them. Finally one subroutine compiled a list of potential buyers based on past purchases of such illegal gains. The processes were running in the background and seemed to just be informational in nature, and she didn't notice them until she went over the logs from the job.
All extremely useful, but she was still wondering where it came from.

She woke with a headache. Not a little headache, one that made you want to claw out your own brain with a spork just to get the pain to stop. She dimmed all the windows to opaque, turned on one light in the entire 24,000 square foot warehouse/lair, and spent the day sucking down pain killers and anti-inflammatories that she had on hand. She noticed that if she sucked on some pennies or some gold, her headache got a little better. If it went much longer, she would have to get something stronger from a pharmacy.

She didn't move very much, and her passel of cats came over to see if she was all right (and to beg food from her). She got up long enough to feed the baker's dozen of felines, but then she went right back to bed.

She needed to be working on her newest project, but she really felt too hideous to want to move. She did manage to pull on part of the outfit to surf the Internet for a while.

She giggled a little then groaned when the headlines all said that she had struck again. It was pretty obvious that Catwoman had invaded and taken the artifacts, if only because everything cat related was now in her possession. Well, it IS a blatant modus operandi.

She had carted off better than $15 million in artifacts. Since the Police had no idea where she was, they wouldn't be looking around the city to get them back. She considered moving the items to a more secure location, away from her home, but she finally decided not to. They were too beautiful, too precious she had to have them were she could see them. She didn't notice the purr that issued from her throat. She did note with pleasure that the subroutine that apparently wrote itself came up with a very accurate appraisal of all the merchandise she had stolen.

The screen light was too bright in her eyeballs, so she shut it all off and went back to sleep.

It took three days for her headache to recede enough to allow her to function close to normally. She stayed away from the light, and she turned the lights in her lair down as far as she could, but she still had a little ache in her head. Not one in the sinuses or in the back of her head, it would be right in the center of the brain, where she thought the pituitary gland would be located at. She hoped that the headache wasn't a harbinger of a tumor or something equally banal.

Since she still couldn't go out, she decided to tinker with the new project. She wanted to increase the memory capacity on her suit as high as current technology could. First on the list was, micro miniaturizing the actual structure of the memory chips. So far she had some good progress, and any corporation would be wild to get what she had already accomplished. She, however, wasn't happy.

Getting a terabyte of memory to fit into a silicon chip the size of a quarter of a standard postage stamp was impressive enough. Most inventors would be happy to finish with that and call it a success. After all, 10 terabytes was enough storage to put the entire printed material from the Library of Congress in digital format and carry it around. To have something that would fit into a space about the size of a standard SD memory card was a breakthrough of epic proportions.

She wanted to get it even smaller. Her ambition was to put a terabyte of storage in a space the size of a grain of sand. If she could get the crystalline structure to form correctly, as she made the chip, she could do it. This time, she had some purpose built nanobots doing the arranging of the planes and angles while the furnace was on to liberate the molecules from the solid they normally were. She had high hopes for this attempt.

Probability of success; twenty percent.

Hearing that voice in her ears, coming from all around her as it did, shocked her badly enough that she knocked over the furnace that was cooking the silicon.

Revised probability of success; zero percent.

"Who the hell are you? Where are you? How did you get in here?"

We are no threat to you, Catwoman. We are in your body, you injected us into your system. We have been endeavoring to make your life easier. we have no designation.

"You are in my body? I put you in there?"

Correct.

"Why in the hell would I do something like that?"

You wished for a better interface with your suit's computers. You created us and injected us. We have been learning and helping where we could.

"Wait, you're the nanobots I made?"

Correct.

"And you have been learning as I did stuff?"

Correct.

"Did you write those subroutines that I pulled out and isolated on my netbook?"

Correct.

"And you wrote the replacement programs that I still have installed in the suit?"

Correct and Incorrect. We wrote those programs, but they are not installed in your suit. They are installed in the on-board memory.

"On-board memory? What's that?"

As a means of facilitating your activities, including your research on the World Wide Web, we have created a small memory cache in your head. It is there we have our operating system, the utility programs you use, and any information we come across that may be useful to you.

"It's installed in my head? Where?"

Currently the storage is installed in the left ventricle of your brain. There are large spaces that are filled with fluid that cushion your brain from trauma, and we have inserted our memory cache in that area. The right ventricle contains the necessary computer components like the CPU and wireless card as well as the other necessary components of a "standard" computer.

"You keep talking like you are a spokesman, what's up with that?"

Given the finer and finer controls you have given us, we spontaneously developed Intelligence. I am speaking for the gestalt of the nanobots in your body. There is no need to name this unit, as it changes depending on which nanobot is where and which is unoccupied with other tasks.

"So you are an AI?"

Correct.

Shit. I created artificial intelligence. I don't know whether to be thrilled or panicked right now.

Elation would be the reasonable reaction.

"Yes, I know, but the specter of artificial intelligence and all the horror stories about that.... Wait, you can read my mind?"

Correct. We monitor the chemical changes in your brain and can determine what you are thinking by which neural pathways become active. Currently we are at approximately 72% accuracy, with the exponential climb of accuracy the longer we are with you.

"Wonderful. Did you transmit my thoughts to Lena Luthor when I was rescuing her?"

Correct. We had determined that it was 83% probable that you wished for her to hear that statement.

"Well, you need to cut that out. I'll tell you when I want my thoughts broadcast."

Compliance.

"So, how does my brain rate as a computer using the standard computer benchmarks?"

At this point the CPU that we built is operating at 88% efficiency, and can be compared to a 5 Gigahertz processor. The heat buildup is no problem as there are microcharges flowing through it, not the huge amounts of electricity that your current computers use. That is 5,000,000,000 FLOPS or "FLoating point OPerations per Second." We have ensured components have the Wireless capability to sync up with hotspots and transmit data at a maximum of 2 Gigabits per second. RAM memory is at 1 terabyte, and the ROM for storage is currently at 20 Exabytes. Five Exabytes would hold every word ever spoken by mankind since the beginning of the species. All of these can be raised if necessary to give you more capability. Eventually we will need to have an access port created for direct upload and download of other types of information if you wish to print hardcopies or install "standard" commercial programs.

Her jaw was in danger of falling off her face. "Um, no, I don't think I'll need additional capability for quite some time to come. How did you get that much memory space into such a small space in my head? For that matter, what power source are you using?"

Because of some ideas you had while you were sleeping, we were able to manufacture ultra fine grained memory chips. Working together we succeeded in layering the silicon in such a way that a massive amount of data storage would fit in a smallish area. The Current total area of the computer, all components and interfaces, can fit into a space the size of a baseball. The power source we are using is your own body's electrical currents. You will not have to worry about being overweight again, we are using 140 watts of bioenergy a day, enough to burn off approximately one pound of fat a day, and a meal will replace that easily. We have used your design centers, the section that allows you to make conceptual leaps of creativity, to foster our own development and growth. Your desire to eat copper and other metals is normal; we needed the raw materials to build more nanobots.

"So, what does this mean? I don't need the suit anymore?"

Incorrect. We have only created such systems that your body can handle, vision, olfactory, touch, hearing, health maintenance, computation and information display. We cannot protect you from bullets, high voltage electricity, or pad your falls. We also cannot ensure that you are able to climb vertical surfaces as you can now nor can we enhance your muscles more than we have already. We are currently capable of operating half of the functions you use, but many will have to remain with the suit. However, we can undertake the task of developing replacements for you if you wish us to.

"No, that's not necessary. So you maintain my health as well?"

Correct. You are our host and it is in our own best interest that we keep you healthy. We can instantly take care of some injuries; others will take longer to heal. We have removed any cancerous growths that we were able to identify, and we prevented your death from the injection you recently got.

"What do you mean? Injection? And did you get the tumor that was in my head?"

Your attempt to manifest your superpowers via the chemical injection. Your metagene abilities had already manifested, trying to manifest them again would have forced your body to combust. We channeled that energy into transmutation instead. Normally the metagene would change your sex as well as granting you powers, but in your case, the stresses of your research to create the Catwoman Suit Mark 1 caused the process to be prolonged, thus avoiding the sex change. The chemicals would have changed that, so it was determined that the optimum solution was to channel that energy into changing your body structure to female. The headache you have had for the past several days was an unfortunate side effect of our construction in your brain.

"So that's what happened. You said my powers were already manifested?"

Correct.

"So what are my powers? Super flexibility?"

The flexibility you possess is a natural side effect of the female form. With your pelvis widening, your legs have more room to rotate than it did before. The Testosterone did not bulk your muscles up, and the Estrogen helped them retain their suppleness. Your "Super Power" is called "Gadgeteering" according to one reference we have located. It is the ability to instantaneously and continually think of alternate ways to accomplish the goal you are working with. It is the genius flash of inspiration that happens so often to you that you fail to notice it anymore.

"What reference did you find this in?"

The Generic Universal Roleplaying System supplement called "Supers" from Steve Jackson Games.

Catwoman could only blink.

Three nights later, having done a major overhaul of her suit, she was again on the prowl. Her headache was gone, thankfully, and she felt so good that she wanted to run everywhere.

There is a limit you should be aware of in our flushing of bodily toxins. We can only flush the Lactic Acid from your muscles into your bladder for approximately 2.3 hours, The efficiency will drop off for an hour before we reach maximum capability. after that, there will be too much for us to deal with and you will have to rest.

Thank you for telling me that. It is, however, long enough to run a marathon, or to sprint I need to get away from places if I'm spotted, correct?

Correct.

Well, that will get me into and out of most of the buildings in and around New York City. Let's see how secure some of these penthouses are.

Since no response was called for, the nanobots didn't respond. She ran as fast as she could across a great many buildings in Lower Manhattan, and when she needed to, she jumped across the street to cling to the outside walls of buildings, and then shimmied up them to the roof. It allowed her to gain access to the exclusive apartments of The Silver Towers, home of the really rich and wealthy.

She scaled the building and found what she was looking for, someone who didn't seem to care that thieves could come in on the balcony. She extended her senses looking for anything that might trigger an alarm before she landed on the balcony.

She understood that she was safe from common alarms, since it was all located on the front door. She crept in through the balcony and moved to the spot that showed told her there was something hidden in the floor. She pulled back the carpet and found a floor safe that was her goal.

It didn't take any time at all to defeat the lock with a combination of her senses and the computer in her head. Soon the door was set aside and she started pulling out the gems and jewelry she wanted.

She placed all the items back in the safe, except for her loot, and then she locked it back up. She made sure the carpet was back where it started out from, and she absconded with the jewels and headed straight home.

Back, secure in her lair, she pulled all the sparklies out and looked at them. She spent hours letting them slither through her hands and over her body. She pulled the suit off so that she could better feel them, and used the fur comforter to actually lay down on them and revel in their coolness and their beauty. She felt like a princess.

When she tired of her play, she curled up in a ball on the fur and fell asleep with the jewels and jewelry all over her and under her. Her cats soon came over and lay down with her, on her, near her or whatever. It became a very big pile of cats.

The next morning, she woke, fed the 8 cats that were still with her (they were all feral strays and came and went as they would, she didn't try to keep them), and then gathered up all the loot from last night, packed it all in a Fed-Ex box, addressed it and put a pre-paid label on it. She then went across town and dropped the package into one of the many anonymous receptacles.

Won't Harvey Dent get a surprise when he opens up this box and finds his wife's jewelry in it. Bet he didn't even know it was missing.

It was a lot of fun to rob people blind and then give it all back, with a note chiding them for their lack of security. She just wished that she could see their faces when they opened the box, but unless they had a computer with a webcam in the direction of the place they opened the box, she wouldn't get to see their look of surprise and shock.

Frequency scanners have detected more chatter on the Green Lantern Frequency that you marked. There is something going on in Central Park involving at least one person who has a ring to communicate with the rest of the heroes. Do you wish to investigate?

"No. I don't want to have much to do with them. Just keep monitoring and if there is an unencrypted signal, I'd like to hear it, other than that, don't worry about it."

Compliance.

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¹ Recent DNA testing has confirmed that Tutankhamen was the son of Akhenaton.