CURRENT DATE CORRELATION: 1921–1932 AD
LOCATION: NEW YORK SECTOR / SOUTH BROTHER ISLAND
DEVELOPMENT PHASE: DUAL HORIZON EXPANSION
The Roaring Twenties swept across the American continent in a haze of cheap gin, soaring stock speculation, and mechanical vanity, but beneath the East River, time was treated as a measured industrial compound.
In the subterranean glasshouses stretching beneath the riverbed, the soil was black, rich, and humming with a faint, engineered vitality. Crops harvested from this secluded biome were laced with microscopic mineral traces that systematically purged cellular damage, optimized bone density, and elevated human stamina to the absolute ceiling of mortal biology.
On the training decks above, that biological advantage was forged into raw steel.
Diana had proven to be both a relentless student and an uncompromising teacher. Down in the kinetic amphitheater, the Princess of Themyscira sparred barehanded against squads of the Agency's top recruits. The women, selected by Selene from the Bater Ltd shelters and orphanages, did not possess super-soldier serums or divine bloodlines. But they possessed the sharpest tactical instincts in the city, reinforced by nanite-guided muscle-memory implants that accelerated their learning curves.
Under Selene's watchful, predatory guidance, the training did not focus on brute force, which was a fool's errand against gods and monsters. It focused on geometry, blind spots, silent breathing, and the exact physical leverage required to sever an artery or slip past an armored guard without displacing a speck of dust.
When Clara's first generation of graduates went up against Diana, they did not fight with classical Athenian honor. They fought like ghosts. They deflected kinetic strikes with specialized carbon-tempered bucklers, moved in silent, synchronized hunting pairs, and learned to read the minute twitches of a superhuman shoulder before a blow was even thrown.
"They move well, Administrator," Selene noted one evening from the gallery, a lazy, purring warmth in her voice as she watched Clara smoothly evade a sweeping strike from Diana's practice staff, answering with a lightning-fast wooden dagger press against the demigoddess's flank. "For creatures made of mortal dust, they sting like vipers."
"Their biological threshold is near optimal for unenhanced Homo sapiens," David replied, standing beside her in his tailored human form, reviewing the biometric feeds streaming across his HUD. "Reaction latency: down forty percent. Toxin resistance: elevated. They are prepared for field deployment."
"Then it is time to unleash my little birds on Europe," Selene smiled, her dark eyes flashing with sharp amusement.
By 1930, the Weimar Republic in Germany was beginning to fracture, sliding into economic ruin and political radicalization. Through Bater Labs' commercial pharmaceutical subsidiaries, Selene dispatched three elite infiltration cells to Berlin and Munich.
Their primary directive was not political sabotage; it was scientific asset surveillance.
A quiet, brilliant biochemist named Dr. Abraham Erskine had begun publishing foundational academic papers on cellular restoration and human genetic potential. Posing as wealthy private research fellows, administrative secretaries, and lab assistants, Selene's operatives systematically infiltrated the university departments surrounding Erskine. They copied every discarded draft, every chemical dead-end, and every early, imperfect calculation regarding his prototype formula before the rising fascist factions or the shadowy cults of HYDRA even knew his name.
The early German trials were deeply flawed, burning out test subjects with severe metabolic collapse, but to David's processing banks, those flaws were pure data. By filtering Erskine's early failures through his own benign Techno-Organic nanite models, David had already begun reverse-engineering a stable, low-tier chemical baseline, a true longevity and peak-health catalyst ready for the Agency vanguard long before the guns of the next war were drawn.
Yet, David's most profound long-term play of the decade did not involve flesh or blood. It involved mathematics.
Inside the sterile, automated engineering hubs on North Brother Island, David worked late into the nights drafting what appeared to be mundane commercial hardware patents.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the human world's concept of computation was monstrous, crude, and mechanical. Banks, census bureaus, and early military logistics offices relied on massive, clattering punch-card tabulators and clumsy electromechanical relay switches that filled entire basements.
David did not build a microchip; introducing silicon microprocessors decades ahead of time would have provoked global suspicion and ruined the natural timeline.
Instead, Bater Engineering patented the foundational logic that would govern all machines to come.
David introduced the Bater Dual-State Switching Matrix, a standardized, exquisitely reliable mechanical relay layout paired with a revolutionary system of mathematical indexing based on pure binary Boolean logic. It didn't look alien. To the early engineers and patent clerks, it simply looked like a brilliantly optimized way to make telephone exchanges, tabulating punch-card sorters, and early military cryptography systems run thirty percent faster with zero jam rates.
Within six years, Bater Engineering's logic frameworks were licensed by every major industrial manufacturing firm, telecommunications monopoly, and university laboratory across the United States and Britain.
And buried deep within the standard mechanical relay wiring, encoded directly into the foundational binary instruction sets that all future computing languages would inherit, David wove the Bedrock Rootkit.
It was not a virus sitting in an active memory bank; in an era without digital software, a virus was useless. It was an intrinsic mathematical bias hard-wired into the mechanical logic itself. When a relay closed under a specific algorithmic sequence, it bypassed the standard recording registers entirely, creating an invisible, non-reporting data stream.
Because Bater Engineering wrote the very alphabet that automated computing would use to evolve, David's backdoor became an invisible law of digital physics.
When future decades brought vacuum-tube mainframes, transistor arrays, and eventually modern neural artificial intelligences, the engineers would simply build on top of these standard historical libraries. They would never search for an intruder in the foundation, because to the machine, David's administrative authority was not an infection.
It was the bedrock upon which the machine was born.
By 1932, the long decade of compounding had reached its zenith.
Diana's reflexes had adapted to the terrifying rhythm of modern kinetic weapons. The girls of the shadow vanguard had quietly woven themselves into the key scientific corridors of Europe. Bater Engineering had laid the invisible digital cables that would wire the twentieth century. And deep beneath Gotham, the Wayne anchor hummed silently in the dark, filtering the ancient judgment stone with mechanical perfection.