5 Conceptions of Oracle

1) She'd always loved computers. Microchips in her brain, her dad always said but perhaps that wasn't such a surprise considering her dad's line of work. Roger C. Gordon was one of the first group of hackers and he made sure his baby girl cut her teeth on RAM and coded in DOS alongside her ABC's.

On a particularly low point of her depression, Babs threw everything she owned out the window, wanting to feel something-- anything!-- as she listened to her life crashing in the cement below. The last thing she reached for was an ancient Commodore 64, the last present from her biological dad. It took forever to get out of the box and every time she tried to pitch it out the window, the damn thing kept tipping back into her lap.

Babs curled over the yellowed plastic frame and cried.

2) As part of the requirements on Gotham U, Babs had to take a classics course. Without her extracurricular activities to keep things on the edge, she was bored her to tears. If it wasn't for her photographic memory, she would have gotten a C in the class. She just couldn't see the point in studying really old, really incestuous soap operas. She didn't see the point of anything, really, not when she was stuck in this stupid chair, even more completely useless than when she was a short, stick-wielding pretender at heroing.

Then her professor talked about the Oracle at Delphi, how despite living her lives out in a cave, every king and heavy hitter consulted her before major undertaking. That appealed to her.

She switched to computer sciences the next day, specialising in forensic hacking.

3) Batgirl hadn't been to many Justice League meetings but the one topic that kept cropping up was the lack of a central brain to coordinate the missions. No one liked monitor duty and no one seemed to be able to get how to do it properly anyway-- they just sort of sat around until an alarm went off. Very passive and a complete waste of the fantastic technology in the League's possession.

"Man," Robin said as they left one particularly heated debate on how to divvy up monitor duty. "I am so you came along."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"We're non-metas taking care of an entire city, population too-many-frillion. If you didn't come along and tell us how to do things right, our efficiency would be cut in half."

4) Sweet sixteen and finally validated, Batgirl entered the Batcave with the reverence due a cathedral. She passed by the trophies, the exercise mats, the gymnastic set-up and the armoury, stopping instead in front of the beautiful four tower, seven monitor computer set up with an honest to God 56.6 kb modem whirring in the background and-- was that a military feed?

Batman had to call her name three times before she jerked out of her reverie and joined Robin in a sparring match.

5) There was someone sitting in front of the new Justice League HQ monitors like she owned it. Knowing her boots would make too much noise in the metal-floored room, Batgirl reached for the nearest projectile-- a coffee mug-- and hefted it for a good fastball throw.

"I wouldn't if I were you." The chair turned around. A woman probably no more than five years older than herself, sat grinning, completely unaffected by the threat of concussion by coffee mug. "The monitor room has a built-in defense system against anyone in the chair. Unless, of course, you didn't have the proper access codes in which case the whole thing would download to a safe SOS before self-destructing."

She didn't relax her hold on the coffee mug even though the tech-speak piqued her interest. What would it be like to get her hands on something that powerful? "Who are you?" Batgirl demanded.

"They call me Watchtower," said the woman, flipping feathery blonde hair from her neck. "But you can call me Chloe."