Daisy laid the whole thing out for Nick Fury through the lens of myth and legend, and judging by the picture she painted, the situation was serious.
Washington had too many eyes in too many places, which made doing business there a headache, so the two of them had come to talk about the World Serpent here, at Skye Pictures in New York.
"From the way you describe it, the less upheaval the fight stirs up, the better, and the fewer people who know about this, the better. So what's your plan?" Baldy asked.
Daisy's answer was as bold and hair-raising as ever. "I'm going to hack the root servers."
Nick Fury broke out in a cold sweat. Half-illiterate as he was, even he understood what that meant.
"The government will never sign off on that. So the plan is to slip in and plant a Trojan?"
Daisy shook her head. "Not me slipping in. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents do the slipping in. This is exactly the kind of moment agents are for."
Baldy shot her a thoroughly sour look. Easy for her to make it sound noble; when it blew up, S.H.I.E.L.D. would be the one left holding the bag.
Hack the root servers, plant a Trojan, seize control of the world's internet. Once a thing like that got out, S.H.I.E.L.D. would be no better than al-Qaeda.
There were thirteen root servers in the whole world. Ten sat in the United States, with one each in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Japan. The American side was the heart of it all; the primary root server lived here, and the other twelve were secondary.
The servers were scattered across the Department of Defense, NASA, university research institutes, and the Internet Systems Consortium. S.H.I.E.L.D. had the distribution maps and address files for every one of them. The only difference was that before, the job had been to protect them. Now it was to break into them.
Nick Fury rubbed his bald head and reckoned that if this ever came to light, the best outcome he could hope for was a firing squad.
Daisy, for her part, couldn't have cared less. For all Baldy's show of reluctance, the mission really wasn't that hard.
Hacking the root servers was a near-impossible mountain for some basement-bound hacker collective with soft hands and no field training. For an agency of trained operatives, though, it was nothing. A few labs, a few research institutes, an underground facility or two: none of those places posed any real obstacle to seasoned agents. She didn't even need top-tier people; a level four or five agent could pull it off without breaking a sweat.
But this was different from a straight intelligence break-in. A hacker crew could fire one shot and bolt; she needed to hold her ground for a stretch of time.
The broadcast signals of the television networks had to be commandeered as well. The instant the World Serpent surfaced, everything would cut over to her network feed.
So the work of planting the Trojans and slipping moles into the TV stations all fell to Baldy to arrange.
Daisy, meanwhile, marched the people of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Network Division into overtime, writing a filtering program meant to buy her at least a full day once the Serpent woke. The thing was monstrously complex; no way she could manage it alone, so she sealed the entire Network Division in a windowless room and set them to writing code.
Using the trade secret she'd quietly lifted off Baldy, she split the work into fragments and parceled it out: each person handled one small piece, and nobody knew what the whole added up to. All she needed was for Danger to design the framework around it.
Controlling the internet was only half of it. The real key was wiping out the public's fear, and the best way to do that was to put something in front of ordinary people that was wildly exciting, wildly fun. That would not only banish the terror but turn it back on the World Serpent like a blade.
The way Daisy saw it, the World Serpent drew strength from the emotional swings of ordinary people, much the way a god feeds on worship. Crude and simple. Easy to absorb, which meant just as easy to spoil and defile.
And she'd picked the crudest method of them all. When the moment came, she would seize the entire network and broadcast adult films to the whole planet.
On the surface it sounded appalling. In truth it was a far gentler thing than the Security Council dropping a nuke on New York. If the Council could do that, she could do this.
She had no adult-film sources of her own, though, which meant turning to the household's resident connoisseur for help.
"Huh? Elektra, you're still here?" She teleported home, pushed open the door, and was startled to find Elektra still in her maid's outfit, working away in the villa.
By all rights, after fighting shoulder to shoulder with Stick, what was this wild beauty still doing in her house?
Elektra herself was honestly just as baffled. At first she'd figured the gig was good for a few days, and she'd tossed off some flimsy excuse about taking the job to get in a bit of housekeeping practice before her wedding. Three months later, her cover was a thousand percent blown, and yet Stick wouldn't let her leave, while nobody at the villa moved to throw her out. So, at a loss, she simply went on working.
While Elektra helped change her shoes and fetch a fresh set of clothes, Daisy asked, almost in passing, whether she happened to have any film sources. To her surprise, the woman actually did. And a great many of them, at that.
Staring at the hard drive, crammed full of folders, Daisy gaped at maid number two.
"What's so strange about that? It's perfectly normal," Elektra said, expression unruffled, not the least bit bothered.
Daisy sighed. The poor child. That blind man Matt, Daredevil, surely had no sense of romance, so Elektra could only seek comfort in films. Pitiful. Truly pitiful.
She skimmed through the collection. The variety was staggering, every category covered, every taste imaginable catered to, enough to satisfy the needs of every demographic. She was quite pleased.
But there was far too much of it. She really didn't have time to comb through it all, and a good deal of the content would leave the average viewer mildly queasy. She needed to cull only the batch best suited to mainstream tastes.
"All right, drop the maid duties for now. Be my assistant these next few days."
She'd reassigned the woman on the spot. Elektra couldn't have asked for better; she'd been sick of this wretched maid job for ages.
But when she heard what her new task actually was, her face went strange.
And what a request it was.
Daisy wanted her to dig out films suited to as broad an audience as possible, ideally something the whole family could watch together.
After a moment's thought, Daisy, whose conscience wasn't entirely dead, struck the second half of that line and revised it to: tasteful in style, refined in its visuals, with lasting rewatch value.
"What's the point of this? Say I pick them out, then what?" Elektra asked, utterly mystified.
Daisy naturally wasn't about to spell out the whole scheme, but she sketched part of the plan.
"You're going to broadcast this stuff across the entire world? For a full day?!" For a moment Elektra was thunderstruck, staring at her employer the way one might stare at a being from another planet. "This... this..." She couldn't find the words to describe it. Call it terrorism? That didn't fit. Call her a pacifist? That didn't quite land either.
Daisy lowered her voice. "You'll approach those companies as a private individual. They won't pass up a worldwide advertising opportunity like this, and neither will the actors' agents. Out of the ad fees, you can keep thirty percent."
The companies down in the San Fernando Valley were, in fact, sitting on plenty of money: low production costs, steady sales, and no real downside beyond the steep taxes.
Daisy might be doing this for the sake of world peace, but it amounted to advertising for them all the same. They would pay. She even went so far as to rough out a schedule of time slots and set a ballpark rate card.
At the mention of money, Elektra's spirits lifted. As an assassin of the Chaste, she wasn't permitted to take private contracts; her finances were nothing to brag about. And the ad fee Daisy had floated looked like a very large number indeed. There was no way she wasn't tempted.