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CHAPTER FIVE: SNARED
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"Oh Bruce, Bruce, Bruce WAYNE! You always thought you were so clever, didn't you? Of course I have surveillance software installed on all my engineer's workstations! You didn't think that when your little..." Freeze flailed his arms wildly, "...kitty sexbot here plugged herself into Mr. Ottlar's computer that it wouldn't automatically take a snapshot of the connecting device?"
Forced in position on her knees in front of Freeze, Selina stammered with glitchy irregularity, "I-I-I-I-I-I..." She was cut off as Freeze smacked her across her face with a hollow 'THUNK' of his energized baton.
"Shut up you robotic bitch! I'll deal with you later."
Selina's voice morphed into a muffled digital garble and faded out as she struggled to regain control over her systems.
"AND! And and and...that connecting device was actually labeled at its root level as a WayneTech Pleasure Bot?! WHAT?!" Fries cackled, shaking his head, "That's just plain lousy coding work there Bruce. I'm frankly a little disappointed."
Bruce grimaced on the other end of the line, unable to respond, looking at Freeze through Selina's camera eyes.
"Combine that with the fact that Rico here..." He gestured over to the man standing up against a crate with his arm in a sling, "...Rico come here so Bruce can see you. Yeah, that's good."
Freeze looked Selina right in the eyes, "Combine that with the fact that Rico actually saw your stupid cat-bitch robot just the other night! You know what, at first I didn't believe him. I said he was crazy. But THEN, we ran the scan on Mr. Ottlar's computer and found that a WayneTech Pleasure Bot had accessed our files."
Freeze chuckled, "Well that settled it for me. I figured you'd probably try to send her here tonight..." He pointed to the man tied to the chair, eyes blindfolded, "...after all, Mr Ottlar here said that she was quite interested in our little meeting."
He twirled his baton enthusiastically, "So, I went out and bought every blackmarket Zero-Day exploit available for your little pleasure bots. Turns out, there's a lot of them!"
He laughed maniacally, "Again, sloppy, sloppy coding Bruce. Although I'll chalk this one up to your shortsighted engineers."
Bruce hit his desk violently. Nobody could hear him, "No! Come on Selina! Come on! You've got this, little cat!"
"I didn't know which of those exploits would work on your little custom robo-slut, so I just set them all up on this little tablet and broadcasted them one at a time the second she arrived."
He spun around, speaking to the other half-dozen or so men still in the warehouse, "And it was quite an arrival I'll say! I'll admit that coming in from the fucking air duct, took us all a bit by surprise! But, just a few seconds after watching her tear through the guards, I hit this little button..."
With a finger he gestured at the large red button on the tablet's screen, "...and well you saw the results. Again I will say she's a stubborn little bot though, isn't she? Took down eight of our best men before finally going down herself."
Victor walked up and squatted down so that he was eye level with Selina, his eyes only inches away from her plastic face.
Bruce saw him look at Selina up and down.
"She is quite an attractive little toy. Maybe I'll have some fun with her later like Mr. Ottlar here did."
He looked over to Jake who sat, gagged and nervously squirming in his restraints, "I'm still so disappointed Jake. All it takes for you to give away our secrets is what...some Chardonnay and a robot prostitute? What if we hadn't caught her? Then maybe our plan would have been all for naught and Mr. Francese here wouldn't be very happy, would he?"
He grinned at Francese, "And trust me...we don't want an unhappy Francese. Joseph, can you have one of your remaining goons see to him, please?"
With a digitized hum, Selina murmured, "Jake-Jake-Jake-Jake..."
She was again interrupted by Victor, who this time pressed the electrically charged tip of his baton right against the base of her neck.
She spasmed uncontrollably as the voltage ran through her electric internals unchecked.
Bruce could only hear now, Selina's eyes shook in their sockets, fixed gazing upwards, "Ahh now isn't that much better? Goodbye Bruce, thanks again for all the laughs. I'll see you in hell."
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Selina reactivated with a sudden jolt. Ignoring the litany of alerts and errors scattered across her HUD, she performed a quick scan of her surroundings. She quickly realized that she was bound vertically, her legs, arms, and neck all fastened tightly to a cement wall against her back. The room she was in was unfamiliar; she was unable to determine if it was the same building or not. Her chronograph was a mess, unable to assign any time estimates for how long she'd been out.
She found that she had also been stripped of her clothes, although she sensed her cowl was still in position atop her head. In addition, her sternum access panel was hinged open just beneath the swell of her breasts.
She went to move her arms and legs, but no matter how much power she routed through her servo motors they couldn't budge the straps that held her tight. She just ended up wriggling cartoonishly against her restraints.
"Ahh you're awake, Catwoman! Or..." Mr. Freeze gave her a knowing wink, "...or should I just call you Selina? I think I'll do that. Catwoman is too formal."
Freeze was sitting in a chair right in front of Selina, the control tablet in his gloved hands. Two red cables stuck out of the tablet, snaking across the floor and up into her open panel.
"Do you know who I am, Selina?"
Selina stared at him, steadfast, "You're Victor Fries, also known as Mr. Freeze. Where's Bruce?"
"Very good Selina! You can call me Victor so that we'll both be on a first name basis." He chuckled and typed out something hurriedly on the tablet.
Selina felt the locks on her coital access panel release.
"Oh and Bruce can't help you now my little robotic vigilante. The first thing I did when I opened you up was to...permanently deactivate your ability to externally network with well...anything."
He gave the tablet another tap before gesturing to the ground to his right. Selina's eyelashes flickered as her coital access panel hinged open; she looked over and identified a small bundle of sliced wires and her hastily ripped out data-networking module.
She huffed at the idea of him so egregiously pulling out her delicate components. A quick internal query of her Comms-Link's status confirmed Freeze's actions, as it errored out under her attempt to make any network connection.
Turning her attention back to Freeze, Selina probed, "Where is Jake Ottlar?"
Freeze clenched his teeth together, "Oh I guess that's right, you missed that part! It's not your fault, I may have given you such a shock at the end of our little conversation with Bruce there that you shut down! It was quite cute, really."
He looked her directly in the eyes. "Jake's dead. Francese saw to that. He put everything at risk with his careless behavior, and I suggest you cooperate so we can keep the...err...body count down, okay?"
"Why am I active? Why not just terminate my systems and dispose-ose-ose-ose-ose of me?"
Selina's voice hiccuped as her systems struggled to adjust to the absence of dozens of critical processing arrays that had been destroyed during the multiple electrical baton charges her frame had endured.
Victor set his tablet down and leapt out of his chair, "Well, on top of being the most lifelike bot I've ever seen, you may just have something I need."
He began pacing in front of her. Selina scanned the room behind him and found nobody else there.
They were alone.
"You see I'm not really a BAD guy, Selina. I'm really a victim in all this! Years ago my wife Nora was very sick. Everyone said that what she had was incurable..."
He stopped pacing, running a finger down from the bottom of Selina's sternum access panel to her plasti-sculpted navel.
"...INCURABLE! Do you know what that's like? To know that the person you love most is going to die right in front of you and there's nothing you can do about it?"
He looked at her with two sorrow-filled eyes, before shaking his head in annoyance, "Of course you don't. You're just a stupid fucking bot."
He grabbed the chair, spinning it 180 degrees, and sat back down. He leaned into the chair's back support, facing Selina.
"Anyways, I didn't let that stop me. I loved...I LOVE Nora, so I put her in a homemade stasis chamber to keep her alive without her sickness progressing. Do you understand what I'm saying."
Selina blinked in affirmation, but in reality she was only able to partially process Freeze's words.
"Good! So, yes I had her in stasis for the better part of the last 25 years. I waited 25 years for a cure; a QUARTER CENTURY without my lovely Nora, and still, to this day...the prognosis for her condition hasn't improved one bit."
He took a labored breath, his eyes laser-focused behind his red tinted goggles, "Imagine that..."
"Well, it turns out that stasis itself has a shelf life of its own. A couple years ago we had a few scares with the process and I thought I'd lost her forever. But, I was lucky and she ended up pulling through."
