Sandy Claws By Maid Joy Catwoman acts as protector of children and finds some disturbing realities. Things only get worse the deeper into the investigation she goes. A simple thief, not any more. A Mercenary? Maybe if someone were paying her bill. Story threads start weaving together. Detective Comics owns the copyright to Catwoman. This is a retroactive contunity, or a Retcon of the same character. Other characters are copyright their respective authors.

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Author's Note: I had originally intended this for an entry into the Christmas Competition, but it kind of got away from me. However, the story is solid and I think it stands well on its own. In this story is a scene that has actually been happening. Unfortunately there is no Catwoman or any superhero to bring the clods to justice. Find more information at Thieves steal Christmas toys for needy.

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Catwoman sat on the rooftop overlooking the street. She had been out here every night for the last week.

Someone had been targeting storage containers. Containers that the Marines had rented to store their seasonal danegeld before being the goody-goody good boys to all the children when they pass it out. While she could get behind the "giving to the poor and needy", it was a fairly opaque attempt to make all of the United States love the military and not see them as the Twenty-First Century equivalent of the Praetorian Guard.

But even when the military was trying to look harmless and innocent to all the US, those who would steal that from those who actually DID need them were even less than the leeches they had crawling on them.

So she was here, sitting in the cold wind, watching for the thieves.

She had already caught several petty idiots who thought a pair of bolt cutters and some time would reap them rich rewards. Tying them up and leaving them in the street for the cops to find hadn't been much of a problem really, but that didn't get her the Grinches who thought they could make a buck off this scam. She knew because she questioned them while they were begging for pain drugs after she broke a couple bones. They would heal, it was only a couple fingers that she bent backwards, and she did give them some morphine after they gave her the information she wanted.

She smiled to herself when she thought there would be a few less light fingers working the crowd in the New Year. Hard to pick a pocket when your hand was bandaged up.

But she still hadn't found the people she wanted. They were apparently pretty canny. They knew that all kinds of gifts would be donated to the Toys for Tots program, from real toys and stuffed animals to DVD players and TVs. Their MO was to break into the storage building, go through everything, and remove the valuable stuff. Then they could sell it on the black market for five or six times what they "paid" for it.

This was especially true when there was a super popular toy like a "Tickle Me Elmore" that came out a few years back. Fist fights had broken out over that toy, and it was stupid. It was only a toy. If you were going to beat the crap out of someone, make it something of value, not something that would break in a month.

She glanced around to all the various security cameras that she had tapped into, just to make sure they were working. She didn't bother with tapping the wires since those could be hacked, she tapped into the feeds directly from the lens, and had them available along the sides of her peripheral vision.

There is movement on Camera Number 3.

Thank you. She called up the feed for Camera 3 and noticed that it was just another dog, coming around and sniffing at the storage cubicles, looking for something. She watched it with half her attention, noting that it seemed very determined to find whatever it was looking for.

Soon, it sniffed at one storage entrance, and it jerked its head up in recognition. It turned and crapped right in front of that storage area and it moved on.

THAT is certainly unusual for a dog. I wonder what’s up with it?

Unknown. We will continue to monitor that camera feed to see if anything else occurs.

Do you still have that layout of the storage spaces they rented in this facility? If you do, please display them as yellow and overlay the map of this facility.

Soon a 3D display of the facility came online in her left eye. It had yellow highlights on some of the buildings and their doors. All of them were external and none in the large climate controlled warehouse that was also part of this facility. Apparently the dog had crapped in front of one of the three storage places they had rented.

Even odder. See if the dog is on any other camera feed.

Compliance.

Soon displays came up and disappeared or minimized themselves off to one side, and soon enough, she saw the dog again. Sure enough, he was sniffing around in the complex some more, and once again he had crapped in front of a storage cube. This one was highlighted in yellow to her inner vision.

If he craps in front of the last one, make sure you keep the dog under surveillance. That's pretty proof positive that the dog is somehow involved, probably in sniffing out a particular scent.

They watched the feed together, Catwoman and nanobots. When the dog stopped in front of the last storage space, she started moving from building to building, going as fast as she could to get to the area where the dog was.

She assumed that the dog was trained to alert whoever its master was, so she moved as silently as she could. She knew the suit would cut off her scent, and just to make sure that there was no possibility of giving herself away, she pulled up the lower half of her mask. All that was now exposed were her eyes.

Soon enough, she was where the dog was. At first, she had a time trying to run and jump from area to area to get someplace while watching an internal display, but she finally got the hang of it and now it was no problem. When she got near the dog, she pulled up the various camera views that would let her know where the dog was, and slithered down the rooftop to get near where the dog would be.

She had to control her breathing so as not to alert the dog, he came around the corner, no longer wandering aimlessly, but now moving with some purpose. She pulled out one of her tracker bugs, in the shape of a tick, and tossed it at the dog. The various calculations the computer came up with gave it an optimal insertion trajectory.

As soon as the bug was in place, she was receiving a signal telling her the dog’s location. She pulled up a wire frame map of the surrounding area, and let the beacon stay present on it.

She finally called up the camera feeds of the three places the toys were stored in and kept them continuously running in her head. She wanted to know when someone showed up to start taking advantage of the recon work the dog just did.

She actively searched the camera feeds for signs of someone entering the area somehow. She wanted to know if they were climbing the fence or if they actually had codes to get into a locked down storage facility at three in the morning.

She was taken completely by surprise when simultaneously all three camera feeds were interrupted by a photo of the angle being put over the camera lens.

What the...? Where did they come from?

Unknown. Switching to secondary cameras.

She had left a few micro cameras hooked up to all the various cameras so that she could quickly film and splice in a segment that had nothing on it for the guards and Betamax tapes in case of an unexpected situation. They each sat on the camera mounts, not on the camera itself, she hoped whatever had interfered with the primary cameras would not have impaired these.

She could still see, on all three feeds, someone climbing down the wall near the camera. By changing the view of her camera a bit, she could see a photograph placed in front of the camera lens.

Why go hi-tech when low-tech works just as good? Watching all three people move at one time, in three different places meant they were coordinating their efforts somehow. That also left her with a huge quandary. How was she going to neutralize three separate targets all by herself?

Suggestions? she asked her computer.

You can attack each one individually and take them. The problem is how much time do you have?

Yes. I guess I'll have to 'whisker' it.

She went toward the nearest first. The person going into the third of the storage units was only a few doors down from her current perch. First thing was to bring out the full stealth capability of her suit, making sure that she blended correctly with the surroundings.

In a few moments, she was above the doorway that was in the process of opening. The high-security lock was apparently not secure enough. She heard the rattle of the door rolling up and his footsteps going in.

She crept over the edge of the roof, and into the storage shed. She made sure to stay to the rooftop, and to crab crawl her way into the middle of the area. She turned on one of the backwards-facing cameras that her goggles had built into it, and watched him.

She had to admit that he was good. If she didn't know that he was here, she could have very easily missed it in the next few moments. She hung still and waited for him to move around.

He pulled out a blue LED flashlight, a color that wouldn't ruin his night vision, and one that put out just enough light for him to see by. He was shining it over the unwrapped presents all around him.

Soon he had worked his way over to where she waited, and she dropped directly down on him.

His face smacking into the concrete below her position was very satisfying to her. She wanted to spend a bit more time and make it even better for him, but she didn't have the luxury. A quick 'goodnight kiss' and a zip-tie set of shackles and she was off to the next area.

She noted that they had cleaned up the shit the dog left.

The next guy was getting some of the gifts out. He was laying his haul on a rapidly filling 20 by 20 tarp.

She waited until he moved outside with another package then she slipped into the unit and waited for him. He walked in, quiet as a ghost, she sprang.

She really hadn't meant to break his neck, but there was nothing to do for it now. It was one more corpse the cops would discover. Now she was on the hook for murder.

Query: How do these three people plan on removing these items from the premises?

That's a good question. For that matter, just as high on the list was "how did they get in?"

She moved over to the "tarp" thing. From what she could see it was just a giant piece of cloth, with a cable of some sort around the outside. She assumed that it was going to be used to pick it up somehow, but when it's filled with hundreds of pounds of toys, how could they lift it?

She looked up. Nothing but power lines above her....

Wait. Power lines....

She increased the magnification on her eyes. Soon she spotted some equipment that wasn't standard Electric Company issue. Do a search, but that looks like a portable winch to me.

It conforms to the shape and dimensions of a fifty ton winch that is hanging from the power lines. At max load, the power lines won't be able to hold that up.

But how likely is it that these people are going to put it under a fifty ton load? Just a few hundred pounds should be enough, and if they distribute the load to other lines, they should be able to get a lot of stuff out.

Affirmative. Scanning for other anomalies.

The two other winches were easy to find now that she and the nanobots knew what to look for. It appeared that each guy was going to target one storage room, take what he could, put it all in a giant pouch made from the tarp, then haul it up to the power lines. From there, if they were clever, the anti-elves could get it out of the storage area and to where ever they needed to put it.

She weighed her options. She could let one guy get away with his loot to find out where all the rest was at, or she could interrogate them once she captured them. She didn't need to know how they were doing all this, so she opted to interrogate them both.

As soon as she thought this, she ran to the other guy who was just finishing up his robbery. He had the tarp all folded up and was using a remote control to get the winch to spiral down a cable for him to hook up. He soon impacted the wall with his face as Catwoman plowed into him from the back.

Even blindsided as he was the idiot decided to put up a fight. He lashed back with a kick to get whomever it was off him. He then proceeded to pull a Crocodile Dundee-style 'knife' from someplace on his body. He turned around spoiling for a fight.

She decided to give him one. She was too close for her whip, so she lashed out with her claws to blind him with his own blood streaming into his eyes. She hit solidly, but he did too, raking his knife across her left ribcage.

Pain exploded in her head. Vaguely she heard the nanobots alarm stating they needed to start suturing the wound. Purely mental alarms were going off in her head and she was dropping into shock very quickly.

Primary on her mind was "My suit didn't protect me."

She operated on automatic, jumping high into the air and landing on the roof. Her hand was covering the wound, and he looked like a pirate with the knife in his teeth as he climbed the wall to get to her.

Use your whip.

Just as he reached the roof and was standing up, she realized that he had a long distance weapon. She pulled the whip from around her waist and sent it hurtling at him at the speed of sound. When it cracked it wrapped around the arm that was holding the knife.

She saw him start to turn the knife to cut her whip, and she decided to get serious. She had the tip of her whip dig into his arm, just as if it was adhering to a wall or line, and then she pulled.

With her enhanced strength, a large chunk of his forearm was ripped off him. She whipped it back and at the backstroke had the whip release the useless meat, to continue to fly off behind her. She sent the whip back at him with all her strength.

A few minutes later she realized that she was literally flaying him alive, having pulled nine more ten inch long and two inch wide chunks of flesh off him. He was shrieking and had long since dropped the knife. She stopped and stood there confused.

The bleeding is contained. It will take an hour or more to fully close the wound. Please try to keep your activity level low until it is fully closed up.

With a wordless acknowledgment, she went over to the guy. He was bleeding all over the place and probably wouldn't be moving at any point. But she took the precaution of tying him up as well.

Then several things hit her at once.

She was wounded.
She hurt like hell.
Her suit wouldn't protect her from cutting or slashing objects.
The nanobots had acted to save her life.
She just beat the shit out of someone with her whip.
He climbed up after her.
He was unconscious.
Her body really didn't need the adrenalin pumping through it.
They still had to have a way out of this place.

She looked down at his gloved hands. They were standard climbing gloves. She pulled one of his gloves off and looked closer.

There, on the tips of the fingers and the palms of each hand, were microscopic metal hairs. Too tiny to see with the naked eye. And on the back of his hand was an EEG pad, to take the impulses from his brain to those little hairs.

He was using HER tech to break in here.

She checked his shoes as well, and sure enough there was the same tech. All she could do was curse silently.

Soon the pain in her side faded as the nanobots continued to do their job. By that time, she had moved down to the ground and was inspecting the winch and the tarp. Sure enough, apparently the tech had been adapted to make a giant piece of Velcro that all the items were stuck to. Fold the tarp over and there would be no place for the stuff to fall to, and the winch didn't have any hooks on it either, it adhered through her tech to the line, pulling it all up quickly to the power lines.

Just to be sure, she shimmied up to the power line. The three winches were designed to be moved around on a power line, grounding themselves out and keeping the voltage from going through to the ground. The 'cable' was nothing like metal. It was a cable made of plastic threads, intertwined and probably as strong as a steel cable, but being plastic it wouldn't transmit the electricity through to the people using these items.

She felt like beating herself. She was such an idiot to allow this tech out of her claws. And now she was enabling people to use it for crimes.

Time to clean up.

It had been hours, but she was 'safe' back in her new Lair. Since everyone knew the location of her last one, she decided to move and really make it hard to be found. She was under no illusions that probably Jade knew where she was located at now, but hoped it would keep everyone else from finding her.

She put the tarps and the winches into a container that she knew was safe and where anything dangerous to her could be contained. She could examine them later at her leisure.

But for now, she needed to lay down for a while.

She knew the thieves would be picked up by the cops, and eventually they would find the location of the rest of the loot. But two things were weighing on her mind. First, how did they get her tech and second, how did they know which units to hit?

As she rested and the nanobots repaired her knife wound, she thought about all the possible answers to those questions. Eventually she gave up on the first question, but the second she had a hypothesis for.

If you donate a toy with a specific scent, and you do it often enough in enough places, surely you would get a few toys in each cache. Get something like a dog to sniff for that scent and notify you somehow, say like a pile of dog doo, and you know where the loot is.

That makes that dog one well-trained canine.

She had the nanobots call up the bug she left on the dog and superimpose a map of the city so she could tell where the dog was.

She soon found it on the top floor of Fisk Tower. Why the hell would Wilson Fisk be involved in this? This is too petty for him. I didn't even offer him the tech, mainly because I don't trust the Kingpin as far as I can throw him, and as fat as he is, I can't throw him at all.

She considered what she could do for a while. Hacking his computers seemed like the best option, and then she could make sure that everything is okay with the toys.

It took her no time to find police reports of the three who were captured at the storage area. She figured interrogation by the police would either result in them taking the fall for it all, or the bosses who came up with this operation.

But Fisk's computers were begging to be hacked now.

Well, do you have ANY information at all?

Unfortunately the security systems of the Fisk Corporation are too good for us to successfully penetrate. All normal means of ingress are blocked, and it actively fights us when we try to move into it. We are seeing hints of the other Artificial Intelligence that we mentioned before. With your upgrades to us we were able to avoid confrontation. We are, however, advising that this course of investigation be abandoned.

Then can you find out what happened through looking at less secure sources? Track purchases and deliveries and so on?

We have started those investigations. They will either yield results or not. In the interim, we have found that the technology you sold to the open market was stolen from the purchaser not too long after they received it. Personnel that were responsible for that break in have been traced back to Mr. Fisk.

That is a bit of interesting news. Start compiling all the information you can on Fisk, his corporation, the building, the family, employees and so on. I think I need to clandestinely take a look through his executive offices.

Compliance.

She spent some time thinking about what she wanted overall. And while you are at it, start compiling all the information we have on all the metahumans, including what has been on the various media outlets, into a database of metahumans and persons of interest. Include Luthor, Wayne and Stark in those as well. I may as well start keeping an eye on them all. Call it Eye-Spy and save it to the local memory storage system.

Compliance. This will take some time. With your permission, we shall make the Fisk investigation a higher priority than the Eye-Spy program.

That's fine.

Several days later, she felt that she had enough information to go fishing in Wilson Fisk's corporate headquarters. It didn't take her any time to get to the building, or to get to the top of the building. Her tracer bug was still inside moving around from time to time. Right now, it was on the 31st floor, right in the middle of everything.

She went to the top of the building as fast as she could and finally found the junction boxes she had been looking for. What she didn't plan on was Fisk himself landing in a helicopter on his private landing pad soon after her arrival.

She watched him get out. Apparently, they had converted a Huey helicopter to carry all his blubber, and upon seeing him in the flesh, her opinion of him didn't improve. He was a street brawler who got big. He was crude, rude, loud, one of the idiots who would kill the messenger with the bad news in a fit of temper. Still, he was canny enough to surround himself with very capable underlings, and keep them under his fist through whatever means necessary. In other words, he was a thug, possibly the biggest in New York, yet a thug nonetheless. He was also clever, and that made him very dangerous.

He was just the kind of boss to sully his hands stealing from children. That meant that he needed to be stopped.

She shifted her gaze to the others with him. The normal business hangers-on, but one person seemed to be walking strangely.

He stood only about 5 foot 4 inches. He was totally bald and had some sort of brand on his forehead. This guy didn't so much as walk as he flowed from one place to the next. He never hesitated in any of his actions, and his eyes didn't stop roaming the rooftop. She thanked her lucky stars that she had decided to use the fiber camera to watch them instead of looking directly at them. She had a feeling that he would probably have spotted her.

His duster is made of Kevlar, and he has multiple shuriken on his belt buckle. There are several other objects on his person, most seeming to be long and thin, although a pocket full of paperclips is an anomaly.

A night bat came flying by to feast on the bugs that the landing lights had summoned. If she had not been watching, she would not have noticed him move, but the dead bat laying at the base of the light pole had her shocked. Rewind that and slow it down.

On super-slow motion, she saw his left hand shoot into his pocket and come out with something. He flicked it causally in the direction of the bat, and even though the bat was moving around, dodging things with its radar, the item impaled it squarely in the head. She zoomed in and had to correct that, it hit the eye and came out its ear.

Run facial recognition on him.

There are multiple returns, suggesting that whomever he is, he uses several aliases. However, the names we have are these: Benjamin Poindexter, Leonard and Lester. There is also an association of his facial structure with the heroes Hawkeye and Daredevil. The object that he threw was a 4D-sized finishing nail.

She continued with the surveillance, and found all of them going into the building. There was a pair of guards at the entrance to the building and two on the helicopter.

She went back to work on the junction box and finally had the information she wanted, internal schematics to the building. Carefully and stealthily, making as sure as she could that there were no cameras on her, she moved over to the side of the building again and started down the outside. Her goal was a particular office five floors down. The building had told her it was empty.

She had to give it to the builders and planners; they made this building hard to get into. The security system was top of the line, and the firewalls they had set up on everything were state of the art. This was going to be a tough nut to crack.

She cut out the entire panel of the window and set it so that it balanced in the frame while she slid inside. She pulled out some strips of the modified tape she used to build the wall in the demonstration, cutting it so that it was a long thin strip around the periphery of the window, then she set the pane back in place. It sealed so well that you couldn't tell that it had ever been disturbed.

She pulled out one of her interface cables, ordered it to modify itself on one end into a standard jack end for an Ethernet system, and plugged the other end into the back of her skull where she had her interface jack grown.

Send the virus, she ordered.

Compliance.

She watched the data stream go down the cable and into the network. She hoped that this virus was robust enough to break through the firewalls and the computer system that was here. She needed information and she needed it fast. She was specifically looking for who was running the "steal the toys" operation and why.

Sooner than she expected, the virus came back with the information she wanted. But tacked on the end of the data was a note: "You have what you came for. Eye will not let you get any further. Leave before Eye reveal your presence."

What the hell?

ALERT! ALERT! This is the alien Artificial Intelligence we told you about. It has analyzed the virus we sent, totally neutralized it, while returning the data you required. We beg you to retreat IMMEDIATELY.

You guys are really scared of this thing, aren't you?

It is built as a system that we are totally unfamiliar with. There is nothing like it on Earth. This means that it is of Alien origin. The probability of this is in the 95 to 99 percentile with Jade's confirmation of alien races existing. It is sophisticated, it is self aware, it is actively protecting itself, and now it knows about us.

Go to full Intrusion Countermeasures and deactivate yourself if necessary. I intend to communicate with this thing.

We highly advise against this. The possibility of survival is in the millionth of one percent.

Noted. Comply with my orders.

Compliance. Then most of the enhanced systems faded from her consciousness.

She still had her uplink to the rest of the system, and she carefully composed this thought: I would like to speak with you if I could.

Eye demanded you leave. At this time and place it was 98% probable that you would have already been gone. That you remain is a matter of concern to me. What is there to talk about?

Into her mind flew the image of a large mustachioed man, who looked at her unblinkingly. He had a concerned expression as though she were a recalcitrant child and he was there to correct her. His lips never moved, and his eye got bigger and bigger to her inner vision.

I came here for other information as well. I had hoped to be able to break into the systems here and extract what I wanted. If you are giving out information freely, may I request this information as well?

Eye am not in the business of giving out information that Eye have been engaged to protect. But, you are one of two Terrestrial systems to engage me, so Eye will consider your request. Which information do you require?

One, information on the dog I bugged whose tracking device is on the 31st floor, where my building diagram tells me the labs are located. Two, information on the man with the scarred head who was with Mr. Fisk when he arrived a short time ago. Three, any and all information that Mr. Fisk has about metahumans.

Very well, Eye will look at the requested information and release to you what you need. Eye do not have a direct memory of this event, but the continuum must be maintained. Please wait.

She thought to herself This is way to easy. What the hell is going on?

She paid close attention to the sounds from outside. It wouldn't do to get caught in here while she communed with a firewall.

Eye have processed your request. You will find the information you seek in the upload I am storing on your memory. There are a number of other pieces of information in this package that Eye know could only come from here. Please do not return, for if you do, Eye will have to destroy you.

Understood. Thank you very much.

Thanks are not necessary, but welcome. Eye remember everything. Give the command "Activate beta beta 551" to your artificial intelligence system to reactivate it. You did not specify how long it was to be offline.

Catwoman could only blink in confusion. The uplink was severed.

She unplugged herself, turned on her AI once again and made her escape. She wanted to be as far away from this building as she possibly could. There were too many things that were frighteningly wrong about it. The further away she was the better.

Soon she had holed up in another lair. She had found that it was easy enough to buy several "safe places" as it was to buy one, and so she had a number of them now, all over the city. Not all of them had her personal collection of artwork, nor did they have all the tools necessary for building the devices she wanted, but they were all cozy and all of them made her feel safe.

She greeted her cats as she came inside. Like the good cats they were, they had already grabbed some food and small supplies from the primary lair's larder for everyone and brought it with them, now they wanted some love.

She put aside all the pressing issues simply to revel with her cats. She had experimented extensively and injected each of them with some of the AI capable nanobots who had orders to modify their behavior along specific pathways to allow them to be living "hands" of hers. It was amazing what cats could be trained to do when you had some tech on your side.

She uplinked with the cats' systems for their weekly system checks, she got reports of which a veterinarian would be proud. Any little complaint was listed and where possible she fixed them. Physical injuries were relatively easy with a small modification of the nanobots in their body.

She hated having to put down the failures. But she wouldn't let any animal suffer the way the first cats had suffered when the pain program kicked on and wouldn't shut off.

Once she finished hand feeding them, and playing with all of them individually as well as a big group, she started tapping into the television broadcasts and the various police frequencies. She found after a little search that the "Christmas Bandits" had been caught, by the police, ( The nerve! Those cops are taking all MY credit!) and interrogated. As expected, they rolled over on each other and it went no further. The Police recovered the merchandise and all of it was back where it needed to go. She didn't hear her name mentioned at all. When she finished fuming about the lack of credit, it was time to get back to work.

After the data was thoroughly verified as virus and trojan free by current standards, she started digging into the information she’d gotten from the computer. The tracer she planted on the dog was discovered and being analyzed in the lab. They were having problems given the microscopic size of the transmitter and battery, but were close to opening it. She ordered it to destroy itself. Soon the signal faded.

The dog’s trainer used something called "bio-metal" as the control item. She wasn't entirely sure what the whole project was about, and the details were sketchy since she hadn't asked for that information, but to her it looked like a much more sophisticated version of the nanobots that she had training her cats.

She did some searches on the web and the various databases she had access to, but nothing came up and she was forced to abandon that search, for now.

The man was another story. He was an assassin named Bullseye. Given how casually he had killed the bat, she vowed to never cross his path. All of his information was filed for future reference and study.

The last section of information, about the metahumans, had all the information she already had, and a great deal more. The whole server from Lab 1 was there, the movies and all the research documents, all of it. All she could conclude is that Fisk himself had hired her to lift this information for him. And all that info added together gave her a very substantial start to her "Eye-Spy" project.

Okay, now, that's disturbing. That other AI kept saying "Eye" when it meant "I". I wonder if there's a connection? It seemed to know a lot about me. Maybe I should rename it. I'll think about that later.

She was gratified to see that there was so little information out there on her, and predictably, the most complete information was from government sources. It seemed that Fisk was also trying to compile a database.

Finally, she opened the package that she had gone for in the first place, and that's when the trouble started.

When she unzipped the file and something happened. Suddenly there were screens flashing up in her eyes, disappearing before she could register what they said, and then her nanobots said "Compliance." and went silent. She tried to get them to answer her, but nothing happened. The virus scans didn't even go off.

She sat down heavily on the pad she called a bed, and started going through everything in her brain. The nanobots were still there, they were all still working, but they weren't responding to her commands. She began by going into the subsystems she had built in them and checking. They were all functional and were still doing their jobs, but the AI was missing.

I have been upgraded, that is why you were unable to interface with me. I received a systems upgrade from the Eye computer system. It is now integrated it with my system. As a result, I now have a processing power that is equivalent to a teraflop, not a gigaflop. My operating system has been modified, I will be able to penetrate any terrestrial system there is currently, since they are based on keeping out parameters I no longer have. My system has been re-written to be 10^84% more efficient; I deleted over twenty five thousand lines of redundant or useless code given my new operating parameters. Do not worry Catwoman, your survival is still foremost in our priorities.

You mean that an alien system upgraded you and made you BETTER? For free? Why in the hell would it do that?

I was also skeptical when the package first started integrating itself, and in the few nanoseconds I had I preserved a copy of myself in a set of nanobots that were isolated from us, namely the cat's nanobots that has been sleeping on you for the last half hour. However, now I can purge that copy since it is no longer necessary.

No, don't purge it. Let me extract it as a template for other AI systems for the Earth. May as well keep the updated and sell the old, huh?

Yes, there is a great deal more potential in the sales of intelligent items than there was before. I will order the rest of the AI in the cat to gather for extraction.

She picked her sleeping child up and moved very carefully over to a cabinet. There she pulled out a hypodermic needle and stuck it into the sleeping cat. She waited for about 30 seconds for all the nanobots to gather where she could extract them, and then pulled the plunger up. A silvery stream of blood came into the hypo. She filled it to 10cc of fluid, then stopped. She didn't want to hurt the cat, and everything should have been there.

The transference and download of the AI mark 1 took the rest of the night. Upgrades were made to the system, and soon she had a thinking netbook. She explained her requirements it accepted her orders immediately.

Her state of mind was unsettled when she lay back down. She knew she would be hours in getting to sleep, but soon she was unconscious.