[B]Gotham City 
11:34 AM[/B] 

"Good morning, Mr. Wayne," Lucius Fox said as he walked through my office. "You know I can get one of the cleaners to come help you with your clutter if you'd like that." 

I pushed a stack of files and drafting paper aside to make eye contact with Lucius. "What clutter?" 

I converted the back two offices of Wayne Tech into my personal R&D workspace when Lucius and I moved into the small office building last year. Lucius and I make up a quarter of all Wayne Tech employees. Besides us there's a receptionist out front, two salespeople who work with Lucius to sell Wayne Tech security systems, a lawyer kept on retainer for any business deals, a janitor that comes in part-time, and my own part-time R&D assistant. It's a small business, but it's leaps and bounds ahead of where it was two years ago when I started Wayne Tech out of my basement. Lucius was my first employee, an actual businessman to help me grow the company. 

"I have a client in my office that would love to meet you, wants to hear from the creator of this miracle security system that can stop any and all break ins." 

I looked down at my work scribbled on drafting paper in pencil. An early design of a singled person aircraft roughly the size of a Cessna with a Preadtor drone engine refitted and souped-up to jet levels. A pipe dream at the moment, but so was everything else I've accomplished so far. I pushed the paper away and stood. Lucius stared at my jeans and t-shirt as I stepped out of my office. 

"Something wrong, Mr. Fox?" 

"No, sir. The jeans and t-shirt sell the boy genius Zuckerberg look. Let's go with that." 

I followed Lucius down the halls to his office. A heavyset man in a black three-piece suit stood as we entered and thrust a hand out for me to shake. 

"Mr. Wayne, this is Johnny Roselli, manager of the Gotham First Financial. Mr. Roselli, Bruce Wayne." 

I pretended to get flustered and a bit surprised at the notion of the manager of one of Gotham's oldest banks showing up at my place of business. The fact of the matter is that I knew Johnny Roselli and his business very well. GFF is a mob bank, and Roselli gets ten cents on the dollar for washing all their dirty cash. The climb from junkie to dealer to supplier had been a steady one. The thing I needed most now was a way into the money laundering side of things. You follow drugs, you'll find drug dealers. You follow the money, there's no telling where you end up. Taking down Carmine Falcone was just a flesh wound to the mob. Bosses come and go, smaller criminal organizations change them like some people change clothes, but to hit them in the pocketbook would be a shot to the heart.

"What can I help you with, Mr. Roselli?"

"Well, I've been hearing people rave about this security network you're setting up. How does it work?"

"For starters," I said with a smile. "I'm going to do my best to not weigh you down with technobabble. Our equipment is standard protection equipment, alarms and cameras along with embedded pin hole cameras wherever you may need them. What you really pay for with Wayne Tech is the algorithm and facial recognition software. Our cameras use facial recognition software that's some of the best on the planet, the computer systems identifying and assigning people who pass by them random designation identification numbers. The systems then hold those numbers in a database, marking things like frequency of appearance and other factors. All those factors are ran through my custom algorithm to create a full-scale crime prediction model. Example: say a man comes to your bank three times over the course of a week only to wait in line and get a dollar converted into quarters. After that, he goes outside and lingers by the building for nearly an entire hour. What would you say he's doing?"

"Casing the joint for a robbery."

I nodded. "That's very possible. And our algorithm would agree with you and warn you an impending robbery is likely, allowing you to heighten your security in preparation for a robbery that may or may not ever happen. Better to be vigilant and not need it than sloppy and robbed."

Roselli looked towards Fox. "And this works? And it's all legally above board?"

"Yes, sir. We've had several civil liberties lawyers look over our data systems. Each business or home has its own operating system with its own individual database. We can't pull ID's from a shared database of another business or home, or hand that data over to an organization like the police or government for obvious reasons."

What Lucius was saying is all true, except for the backdoor I plant in all security operating systems. Each individual one siphons off its data to a master database in my basement, creating a network of surveillance identified people both civilian and criminal. My own private operating system takes the data from GCPD and other law agencies to create profiles to go with the faces. While only Mr. Roselli knows a suspicious 5'11 man with brown hair and brown eyes is hanging around his bank, only I will know the man is actually James Hawkins, a thirty-three year old ex-con with a love of strongarm robbery, along with Hawkins' home address and other spots the network has tagged him as hanging around. Along with the regular violent crimes algorithm, my own custom algorithm searches for things like fraud, embezzling, and general racketeering crime that's deemed non-important to the regular algorithm. The information of an entire city's citizens at the tips of my fingers. It's Orwellian and reeks of Big Brother, but it's all for good reasons. In lesser hands I wouldn't trust anyone, but I know myself. I know that while the temptation to do something with that data is great, as long as nobody commits a crime they will be safe under my watchful eye.

[b]Purple Hue Inc.
2:12 PM[/b]

Anto Radic climbed out of his semi and walked into the squat sheet metal building advertising itself as Purple Hue Inc. I sat across the street at a bus stop, pretending to be invested in that day's paper with my coat turned up. I called it a day after one, feeling content that Lucius and I managed to talk Roselli into buying a system for his bank. Any other research or organization could be handled by Barbara when she came in from school. Fifteen minutes went by before Radic walked back out and headed for his truck. I made my move, dashing across the street to intercept him before he made it.

"Excuse me," I called to him.

"What you want?" he asked in a thick accent. 

"I've been waiting for the bus over there for nearly a half hour, you wouldn't know the schedule they run, do you?"

"No, I don't," he said dismissively. "Keep waiting. Bus always come."

He turned away from me and towards his truck. With his back turned to me I pulled out my phone and activated the cloning app. My phone sent out a small signal to any mobile devices within a thirty meter radius and copied the device's embedded file system, shooting back to me the electronic serial number and mobile equipment identifier that can mask over my phone any time I want it to. In mere microseconds, I placed a wireless wiretap into Radic's phone. The phone log and text message data I could have gotten while sitting on my computer, but the important part is the ability to listen live to Radic's phone calls. I can also use Radic's phone to eavesdrop, remotely activating his phone's microphone and listening to any conversations he's having off the phone. In the blink of an eye, Anto Radic has just become my unwilling informant.

Radic's truck starts up and I headed back to the bus stop with phone in hand. The cloning of his phone also lets me track the GPS chip in his device. The bus finally showed up ten minutes after Radic left. By that time, he was already headed across town to 2765 Finger Street, the same address someone in his contacts named "PM" texted to him after pulling out of the factory. I tucked the phone into my pocket and climbed up on to the bus, my agenda for that night already set.