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Deck The Halls
by Frito (Frito_KAL@yahoo.com)

***

Green, red and yellow flickering lights filled Barbara Gordon's apartment – much 
like every other inhabited apartment in Gotham. Once the city had begun
restoration, families had moved back in and started the process of restoring
their lives, and the city. Unlike every other inhabited apartment in Gotham,
however, these lights weren't festively strung from her windows, or wrapped
around a Christmas tree. Her lights were the blinking diodes of hardware.
Network cards, modems, monitors and motherboards twinkled coldly across
every room.

Barbara herself sat in her wheelchair, half-wrapped in a flannel blanket, in 
front of nearly a dozen monitors and screens. Some were linked to her 
surveillance system, some were filled with scrolling text -- linked to criminal 
databases and police labs across the globe. One monitor stood out like a 
Christmas Elf wearing a thong bikini.

Solid blue screen, white text -- the infamous "Blue Screen Of Death."

Barbara reached for the mug sitting to her right, and took a sip. Sighing 
heavily, she put the mug down on a nearby table, cluttered with similar mugs. 
She pushed herself away from her desk for a moment, and stretched her arms
above her head, shoulders and wrists popping with stress. Briefly rubbing
her temples, and pulling her auburn hair back into a loose bun, she then
returned to her screens.

Serves me right for not finishing this sooner... she thought to herself. The 
installation wasn't, in truth, an especially important one. Just a direct link 
to some backwater police files in Middle America. Barbara could have gotten the
information in a dozen other ways -- but the direct link was the most efficient
one. It should not have been a difficult job -- especially for a tech of
her level.

"I broke into Interpol. I cracked security for seventy-two separate law 
enforcement databases. I wrote the Justice League's operating system. Now, why 
is it that I can't install. One. Single. O-S!" Barbara complained to her 
computers.

Glancing at a small monitor to her left, she saw that she'd definitely spent 
much more time at this then she'd intended. It was nearly seven-thirty in the
evening, and according to the camera mounted on the roof of her building
the sun had just dropped below the horizon. A small beeping noise came
from yet another monitor, reminding her that her grocery delivery would
arrive in the morning. The same monitor showed a single line highlighted
in red, several days ahead. "Babs -- X-Mas dinner at Dad's. Dress nice,"
it said.

It was now the twenty-second of December -- only three days till Christmas,
and Barbara hadn't so much as browsed the several online catalogs she'd
intended to buy presents for her family and loved ones from. She sighed.
The blasted installation had taken days longer than she's expected -- and
the interruptions from numerous crime fighters wanting information on this-and-
such criminal, or that escaped convict hadn’t helped.

Not that she minded -- being Oracle was what Barbara Gordon did. It was who
she was.

She returned her attention to the single uncooperative screen -- not 
surprisingly it had not changed. Still blue. Still unresponsive, and still not 
making any sense.

Barbara muttered a few choice phrases under her breath. She wasn't one to be 
vulgar, typically -- but Curtains AD could drive even a nun to profanity. 
"Advanced Development my left toe," she muttered. "More like Asinine 
Developers." She reached over to the far right to reboot the stubborn machine, 
and in doing so, bumped the folding table gently. A collection of paper plates
and empty coffee mugs fell to the floor. Barbara swore again, this time,
loudly. Pushing against she desk angirily, she backed her wheelchair out
from the desk, and leaned forward to pick up the items.

Just as she was putting the last plate into her wastebasket, a shrill whistle
came from a speaker set on top of her primary monitor. Instinctively, Barbara
grabbed a keyboard, and with a single keystroke switched the picture on
the monitor in front of her from the nagging blue to a picture of grey
and white brick. Seeing nothing unusual on that particular monitor, she
cycled the screen through a series of surveillance cameras. Nothing more
dangerous than a few pieces of litter flying in the wind showed anywhere.

She ran a hand through her mass of auburn hair, and visibly slumped her 
shoulders. "Getting paranoid, Babs, That was just the level one proximity 
alarm." Still, she double-checked the rest of her equipment. Not a single 
camera, microphone or indicator showed anything out of place. Barbara shook her
head, shrugged, and returned to the daunting task of installing one simple
operating system.

A few minutes later -- with the main monitor informing het, yet again that
copying the files would take twenty-five minutes, Barbara turned to another,
smaller screen. She pulled up her news group reader, and searched 
alt.support.curtainsad and alt.sysadmin.curtainsad for threads on installation. 
While her search was running, she amused herself with a thread on 
alt.conspiracy.Lexscape.

The search completed, giving her over a hundred separate threads. Barbara 
separated out the spam, flames and trolls, and still found a solid fifty 
threads, all with the same complaint. "Curtains AD is impossible to install," 
they said. "It's written to drive people insane." "Maybe the Riddler is behind
this?" A loud laugh echoed through the apartment at the sight of the latter
message. She knew very well that for all his criminal genius, the Riddler
was by no means technologically oriented enough to pull off something of
this calibur. She chuckled quietly, and scrawled a note on a bright yellow
Post-It ("Ask Dick about computer-obsessed criminal madmen in Washington
State") and stuck it to the side of her screen.

Determined to conquer the obstinate program, Barbara slipped a CD in the drive 
of yet another computer, and launched a program that quickly filled a side-
monitor with scrolling lines of text. The CD was a decompiler -- it took 
"finished" programs and broke down their code into the language they had been 
written in, allowing, on the more legal end of its uses, debugging. Barbara 
quickly immersed herself in the lines of code, making occasional changes and 
comments as she read along. She was so deep into the programming that when the 
shrill whistle from the speaker above went off once again, it took her until the
main monitor automatically switched to the security information realize
what it was. The motion detectors in her apartment had detected something
in her kitchen -- but the maze of infrared beams had not gone off, meaning
that whatever had invaded her home was either intangible -- or too short
to set them off. She hit the electronic lock control for the kitchen door
with one hand, and at the same time, switched the monitor to the set of
cameras in the kitchen.

Barbara scrutinized the screen closely, and then burst out into laughter. All 
three cameras showed the same picture, from different angles. Sitting on her
counter, nibbling a piece of stale English Muffin, was an average, ordinary
field mouse. "Not a creature was stirring," she chuckled to herself. The
mouse must have heard the movement of the doorlock -- because just as Barbara
finished speaking, it hopped down from the counter, and scampered between
the refrigerator and the wall. Ever the cautious woman, all the security
devices were checked, and re-checked. Still, nothing showed on any device.
No footprints, no unusual chemicals in the air, no odd energy signatures.
She blew a piece of hair away from her face in annoyance, and returned
her monitors to the now entirely too familiar blue screen.

"If I hadn't needed this for one feature..." she muttered. The small police
department she was connecting a direct line to had, by either sheer luck
or some superhuman power that no one knew about, managed to get an entire
network of machines working with Curtains AD. "And, if some over-paid desk
jockey in Mayberry can do it..." Unfortunately for her, the "over-paid
desk jockey" had set the machines to not accept incoming connections unless
they were from another computer using Curtains AD. So, Barbara Gordon,
the former Batgirl and currently Oracle, who had managed to get herself
a solid, undetected connection to every major law enforcement agency, found
herself installing the software. "For the thirty-seventh time," she sighed.

Barbara turned once again to the extensively long module she was currently 
reading over, and began reading it over slowly. Hours later, eyes weary, and 
head throbbing, she forced herself to pull attention away from the text. She
pushed her glasses onto her forehead, and rubbed at the bridge of her nose
with her thumb and forefinger. Taking several deep breaths, she began the
mental exercises Bruce had taught her many years before, to calm her annoyed
nerves, and regain her clarity of thought. After stretching her tired arms
and over-worked fingers, she arched her back, and listened to the pop of
vertrabrae she could not feel.

Shaking her head, Barbara punched the power button on the non-functional 
machine. "It can wait," she told herself. Just as the screen finished fading 
from nuclear blue to dull grey, the proximity alarm whistle went off once again.
Barbara covered her face with her hand, and sighed. She looked at the security
information that had appeared on the screen, and set her jaw. Something
was in the living room. Something heavy, humanoid, and moving. Immediately,
all fatigue left her thoughts. Without conscious thought, she switched
the picture to the camera mounted in the living room -- only to find a
black picture. Someone had disabled the camera. It hadn’t been damaged,
or removed, alarms would have gone off if the wires were cut, or the camera
moved more than a millimeter in any direction, but still, the screen showed
nothing but a solid black.

Hitting a few keys sharply, she activated the locks on the doors and windows. 
Whatever was inside her apartment was trapped there now. She grabbed at the 
phone lying on her desk -- only to find White Christmas playing in the earpiece,
instead of a dial tone. As she hung the phone up, a loud crash came from
the outer room.

Barbara tossed her blanket on the floor, reached over and grabbed the 
tranquilizer gun she'd stashed under the desk, and stabbed at the keys to 
release the lock on the door. The door slid open, and as it did, Barbara dropped 
the pistol into her lap.

Her jaw fell open at the sight of her living room. A ceiling-height Christmas
tree was in one corner of the room, complete with twinkling lights, tinsel,
and instead of an angel -- at the top of the tree, sat a figure of a woman
in classical Greek garb. An oracle. Under the tree sat wrapped presents
of every shape and size and color. From her walls hung garlands of pine
and holly, and a wreath had been put on the inside of her door. She slowly
wheeled herself out of the computer room, and shook her head in shock.
A fire burned merrily in the fireplace, and above it, on the mantle --
a Nativity. Two stockings hung to the side of the fireplace, and bows,
candles, and holiday decorations covered every feasible open space on tables,
walls and doors. Even her sofa had been covered with a red-and-green afghan.
The scents of cinnamon and cranberry filled the house, and Barbara could
swear she smelled turkey somewhere in the mix.

And, standing in the middle of this explosion of Christmas chaos was one Dick
Grayson, dressed in his Nightwing outfit -- with two exceptions. His mask
had been removed, dropped carelessly on a table, and a bright red Santa
hat -- complete with white fur trim and pom-pom -- rested on his head.
Barbara burst into laughter, arms and head shaking. Standing outside on
the balcony were two other figures -- one, a green-haired young man in
red and white -- and the other, a blur of red.

Dick walked over to Barbara's chair, and lifted her up into his arms. He looked
up; Barbara followed his gaze. Hanging from the ceiling, just outside the
doorway, above their heads was mistletoe. "Of course, it would be mistletoe,"
she chuckled, and then was silenced by a long, slow kiss.

The End