Botnet for academic purposes

I want to make a botnet, maybe with virtual machines or something. I've heard that some botnets are IRC-based. Any ideas about where to start for making a botnet? I am less concerned with the getting-people-to-install-shit angle, and more interested in the concepts of stealth, steganography, command & control, and distributed systems stuff.

If I ever made malware, I'd make it stop whatever it's doing when the user has the task manager or system monitor open (depends on the OS). Or maybe on Linux it could detect if top or htop are running.

Basically, if the user notices high CPU usage, then uses a program to view what's using up their CPU cycles, you'd want it to chill out and lie low for a while. Or maybe just do resource limitation all the time, like limiting max CPU usage and network bandwidth usage too, so as to not alert the user.