GIDEON-II

First:

Sue me. It's less than sporadically updated.

Second:

As some of you may be aware, I've started doing some work for DC Comics, specifically on the Greg Rucka-helmed superhero-spy series, Checkmate.

In August, my first whack at Checkmate came out, issue #17, which served the dual duty of giving Checkmate a new character (an old DC villain, in fact: Carl Draper, the "Master Jailer", aka "Deathtrap" aka "Locksmith) and for upgrading the security system, now codenamed GIDEON-II.

What is GIDEON-II?

In general terms, I've tried to absorb much of the cool/weird cutting edge computech that gets sprayed around The IntarWebs(tm), and then up the ante, since it's the goddamned DC universe. If you're going to have a defensive system against all known paranormal and metahuman threats in the DCU, then you need to mine existing tech from withing the DCU. Shield technology, teleportation devices, alien supercomputers, and so on.

So, in essence, GIDEON-II is a network hub for data being collected at ridiculous speeds, and then filtered through a threat assessment algorhythm. The results then dictate specific courses of action, in accordance with Checkmate procedures.

To that end, I posit that there's not one inch of space in the miles around the Castle, Checkmate's HQ, that isn't broadcasting some kind of data: RFID chips, offworld sensor suites, nanoclouds that send out signals when disturbed.

The data is then squirted back to the GIDEON-II threat assessment network, and is accessed -- in part by harnessing human brain power in a direct neural link -- by the system's operator, Carl.

In a millionith of a second, he gets the warning. "Incoming tachyon stream, indicates potential teleporter." A millionth of a second after that, he scans his files and comes up with the appropriate response, shunting the tachyon stream into an appropriate collector: the would-be teleporter 'ports into a cell and is stuck.

That's basically how it works, and it's all dependent on a tagged, searchable database that has been mined from the vast, bottomless Intelhub: the collected intelligence on every metahuman and conventional threat in the DCU.

That was the most interesting challenge in writing #17: figuring out the rules for GIDEON-II so it isn't a "magic button" for fixing problems in the Castle.

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I am also amused to learn that Carl has a blog. Heh.