The Art of Digital Ghosting

Barbara stretched her fingers, rolling her wrists as the green glow of cascading code flickered across her lenses. The digital cityscape of Gotham unfolded before her, lines of encrypted chatter weaving through the underbelly of the internet, a symphony of criminal activity humming just beneath the surface. She didn’t need a mask or a cape—her battlefield was fiber optics, and her weapons were algorithms sharper than any Batarang.

Her gaze flicked across multiple monitors, each one pulling from a different source. Bank transactions rerouted through dummy corporations. A darknet weapons sale creeping toward a final bid. Police radio chatter murmuring about a break-in at a supposedly abandoned warehouse. Three separate problems, three different pieces of the same puzzle.

She smirked. Amateurs.

Her fingers danced over the keyboard, a smooth and precise rhythm, hijacking signals, rerouting IP traces, injecting false data streams. A few strokes later, and every bidder on that weapons deal now had a fresh, very real warrant for their arrest. Another keystroke, and a fake emergency alert pinged every GCPD squad car in a five-mile radius toward the warehouse.

“You’re making it too easy,” she muttered to herself.

A soft chime in her earpiece made her pause. A direct line. Nightwing.

“Oracle.” His voice was sharp, low, and just a touch annoyed. “Tell me you didn’t just send half the cops in Gotham to my location.”

She tilted her head, lips quirking into a smile as she swiped another line of code into motion. The security feeds around his coordinates flickered, shifting to looped footage, making him invisible to prying eyes.

“Why, Dick,” she said smoothly, leaning back in her chair. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were getting sloppy.”

A low, irritated sigh crackled over the comm. “You’re lucky I needed an exit strategy.”

“Please. You needed me to clean up your mess before it made the news.”

“Just tell me where to go.”

She hummed thoughtfully, scrolling through a series of rapidly refreshing street cams before locking onto an empty rooftop two blocks east. A few more keystrokes, and the building’s security grid blacked out.

“Take the east alley, lose the wheels before you hit Seventh,” she instructed, her voice as smooth as if she were giving casual driving directions. “Your best exit is a rooftop on Linwood. I’ve already killed the cameras.”

“Sometimes I think you enjoy this too much,” Jason muttered, but she could hear the relief under the irritation.

Barbara smirked. “Oh, you have no idea.”

The line cut out, and she exhaled, the glow of the screens reflecting in her sharp green eyes. One less problem. One more move played.

And just like that, she disappeared into the data stream, a ghost in the machine, pulling the strings of Gotham’s digital shadows.