The enormous display was divided into dozens of surveillance feeds. Batman sat before the Control Console, motionless, staring at the streams of data scrolling across the screen.
Just moments earlier, at 3:17 a.m., an alarm had suddenly sounded. It was not the piercing alarm that warned of an intrusion, but a sound he had never heard before. Like static from an old radio, or murmurs drifting through decades of dust.
He opened the alert. An unfamiliar waveform, intercepted moments ago, flickered on the spectrum analyzer.
Unknown information fragment.
Unknown...
He stared at the screen, utterly wary. The Batcave's monitoring system covered every known communications frequency on Earth, plus seventeen encrypted bands, plus the Watchtower's cosmic-scale listening equipment...
What kind of signal could slip past all of that and be classified as unknown?
Batman's fingers glided over the keyboard as he began constructing a tighter, independent firewall. Still uneasy, he opened a separate communications channel. A window immediately appeared in the corner of the main display, showing Victor Stone's bleary face.
"I need you to establish additional electronic defenses before I open an information fragment from an unknown source."
"Oh... Batman, you know it's the middle of the night..."
"You don't need sleep."
"Fine, I don't need sleep," Victor Stone sighed. "But I'm still trying to act like a human being. Couldn't you try being one too?"
Batman said nothing, only stared coldly at him from in front of the screen.
"Okay, okay. Additional firewalls."
Cyborg worked quickly. Complex code cascaded down the screen like a waterfall, every line constructing another defensive layer. Batman watched the scrolling characters, fingers hovering over the keyboard, ready to sever every connection at any moment.
"First firewall established."
Cyborg's voice came through the channel, still carrying the sluggishness of someone who had just been woken