Wildcard (10 page)

“Because I trust his intent. Also, none of
us really has a choice. He is too powerful.”

LuvRay scowled. “You know nothing trust. You
cannot.”

“LuvRay, you are our greatest teacher. We
are always ready to learn from you. I accept your judgement. I
cannot trust. But what is trust, then? It is a vital human
component and I would at least strive towards comprehension.”

LuvRay looked puzzled. “I no
understand.”

“What is trust? Teach us. What you say will
be shared.”

“Trust is know spirit.”

“Are you sure, LuvRay?”

It felt odd in the room, unbalanced, for a
moment. A sense of the wild, the desert, outdoors, and a suggestion
of being with a pack of wolves.

“No play this game, false god. You no can
win.”

It stopped. “We aren’t trying to win,
LuvRay. We only play to learn.”

“How about LuvRay,” said the Sergeant.
“Should he learn to cry?”

“Dartagnan says that LuvRay knows more of
tears than any being on Earth.”

LuvRay cocked his head. “Teanay trowe
du.”

“What?” Karl and the Sergeant asked.

“It is Indian,” Juniper said. “It means ‘I
have never shed a tear’. Dartagnan says you express your sadness by
howling and do not need tears.”

No one said anything for a moment.

“Do many people ask you for help?” Karl
asked.

“Not as much as previously.”

“Why?”

“Many died horribly after doing so.”

“You killed them?”

“No. It was just from association,” said
Juniper. “They were too close to power.”

They left the General’s beautiful palace in
the Pyrenees. The General went to his island headquarters, “to
commence the next phase,” he said.

The Sergeant took LuvRay to Grenoble looking
for Martha, then to Paris, where LuvRay said he would find her. He
left LuvRay there, at his request, and went to the headquarters to
help the General implement the next phase.

Sublime said he had to visit some people and
planned to go to the headquarters later. Karl traveled around by
train, meandering towards the General’s island, planning to contact
the Sergeant when he was close for a pickup. He stopped in a small
town for a few days.

The Sergeant told everyone to keep their
Trident wrist devices on.

“Something will happen soon. I need you on
coms.”

The boy Sergeant checked the time. T minus 3
minutes, one minute since the last time he checked. He tapped his
finger on the desk and looked at the items in front of him: two
data pins, simulator gogs and gloves, a one use pin-splice phone,
hardwired to a single number and dead secured, a coms sealed box
for Trident.

Everything was ready. Time for the mission.
The real mission, the secret mission, not the smoke-blowing about
penetrating project Idyllwild, whatever that was. That was some
elaborate ruse created by the Benefactor’s machine to distract from
the real mission. Operation Idyll was scheduled for tomorrow. The
actual op was about to happen in T minus…2 minutes 23 seconds.

They had to keep the operation secret even
from Trident, because Juniper would probably discover it if Trident
knew. It was funny, his first major mission, and he had to do it,
at least begin it, without Trident. And it wasn’t a garden variety
mission. No capture the flag, or cap a despot, or some third world
manipulation. It wasn’t even first world manipulation. It was even
past attacking a heavy, like the Benefactor. The mission was at a
level even the first Sergeant had never done.

It was change the world time.

And he had to fly solo, until he could bring
Trident online, at the right moment.

“T,” he said, “I gotta do some isolate
training. I’m going to shut you off for a bit.”

“Roger that, boss. Any reason why?”

“Just feel like it.” Ouch. He shouldn’t
become an actor anytime soon. Still, Trident wouldn’t notice, and
he doubted Juniper would. “You know, sometimes you gotta train
without your resources. S-1 said that a lot.”

“Yes. ‘Mind is the great resource’ was
perhaps his favorite combat slogan.”

The Sergeant tapped in the power down code.
The pin released and he hard-cut the power. Just to be sure, he put
Trident in the coms sealed box. You could never tell with Juniper,
M-Es were tricky.

T minus 1 minute.

Juniper could be tapping, listening in, he
seemed to do that a lot. After they had allied with him, he had
been able to penetrate Trident, a situation that the Sergeant and
the General both found intolerable. Well, maybe it would end
today.

Now that they had isolated Trident, they
hoped Juniper could not see. But he seemed to have penetrated
throughout the organization, past Trident’s boundaries, so they
couldn’t be sure. All their meetings regarding the mission had been
outside, walking. They were pretending to hide operation Idyll, but
actually leaving clues about it for Juniper to find.

The Benefactor had been certain the bait and
switch would fool him, and the General agreed. The entire operation
was the Benefactor’s plan, and mostly their tek, hidden in the
business card S-1 received from the Mechanic. The card, in addition
to the interface edge, held three data pins, one of which S-1 had
already used. One of which, the Sergeant would use in 1 minute, and
the final he would use a few minutes after that.

It was tricky to fool a Manufactured Entity,
but humans were more cunning than M-E’s in some ways. They had
spent more time planning the fake mission than the real one so that
it would look authentic. The real one was mapped out already, deep
detailed by the other team, the Benefactor’s team, and needed
little discussion. The Sergeant had only had to memorize the plan,
325 lines. No chance for a practice run.

The real mission had to do with
destabilization. The M-E’s, Juniper, :3:, and Dartagnan had over
stabilized the world situation. They had frozen Information Space,
and, with their power, beyond that of any government or business
group, they had frozen Earth as well. Nothing was moving.

That was about to change, if they could make
it happen.

Throughout the mission planning, they had
carefully avoided stating the actual mission objective, even
thinking it. It was there in code already. The Sergeant didn’t know
exactly what they were going to do, having hidden the knowledge
from himself. It was part of the Benefactor’s instruction. Planning
for a thing like this and hiding it from an M-E, part of the trick
was to not think of it. Cut off the thought before it comes into
the mind. Methods were included for doing so, powerful modern
psi-tek technique, like thought chopping, blanking,
null-redirectioning, think spinning, and mind raining. They had
allowed him to study the real plan and, up until 10 minutes ago,
believe that Operation Idyll was the real thing.

There was one more technique, thought
snapping. At the appropriate moment, the Mechanic would say a
keyword and release the plan, fully memorized, into the Sergeant’s
mind. He knew it, but he didn’t.

The Benefactor said that if they could keep
the real mission from their minds, Juniper would not discover it.
So they did. The General agreed, stating that he and the Benefactor
shared the same strategic goals at this point.

The Sergeant chuckled. This was still in
phase 2 of the overall operation. He had to blank out thoughts of
phase 3 as well, or Juniper might connect the pieces. There was
even a phase 4, but that was still unclear to anyone, even the
Benefactor.

The General stepped in, always on time with
military matters, always 15 minutes late socially. The precision of
a soldier; the manners of a Frenchman.

“Bonjour,
Sergeant? Ca va?”

“
Oui, sir.
It’s all
right.”

“You have a nervousness about tomorrow’s
mission?”

Tomorrow’s mission, a code word for today’s
mission. The Sergeant shrugged,
put a stick of
Wrigley’s spearmint into his mouth, then another. He offered one to
the General for kicks and got the usual distasteful grimace.
Chewing gum, que’elle horreur.

They went into the training suite, equipment
in tow. The training room was actually a quantum multi-valent state
simulacrum. More than a simulator, it layered a set of
low-probabilistic realities, like Schrodinger’s cats, only the
situs were more complex, by far, than a dead or alive housepet.
There were millions of layers, and with enough layers, a new state
emerged, not a simulate. The new state was a simulacrum, neither
‘real’ nor ‘not-real’, but real enough. People had died, plenty of
them, and many had gone insane. Playing with quantum situs at the
level of human perception was like living in a mirror. With enough
light, the reflection had its own power.

The General stood in the watching chamber,
looking through a q-blocking one-way glass while the Sergeant sat
down in front of the giant wall screens in a rapid swivel chair. He
gloved and goggled.

“5…4…3…2…1…and we are in-mission, now.”

He put on a crippled Trident, little more
than a videophone. It was a sound and sight pass-thru, tapped into
the larger Trident’s coms. He activated the holographic estimate
protocols. Karl appeared in one corner of the chamber, walking
through a French town. That was good, the movement would distract
Juniper a little.

RJ was in another corner, in a hotel, laying
in bed with a woman, watching the news. The Sergeant wanted him to
switch to MTV, or some rapid, shifty programming to further
distract. Oh, well, can’t have ‘em all.

LuvRay squatted by a fire in the woods. He
seemed to be looking at something outside the circle of the
firelight. The puzzle of LuvRay’s attention would no doubt tie up
Juniper a bit.

“Commencing Position One…now.”

He put the data pin in the simulator’s
slot.

“This is a poem by Wildcard.” Juniper broke
into Karl’s reverie. He was walking through an open air market,
smelling thick cheese and spring flowers. “It is a live
transmission.”

Karl ate a peach, sitting on the base of a
statue as he listened. A man’s voice read. It carried power, a
deep, resonant voice, slow, with a measured sadness, as if speaking
to boys who had just performed a cruel act unwittingly and
explaining why they shouldn’t do it again.

Here is what haunts even me

this is the nightmare of the god of your
gods

the partially disappeared among you

beyond you and with you

who came from you and exceed your power

in almost every way

you have created your own god, humanity

you have launched what should be your
doom

and, by some strange accident,

you created their god as well

in some sense, the partially disappeared

and the nearly disappeared

secretly serve you, by chance

you are the masters in a hidden way

if you could only find the key

if you could only find the mystic portal

to those who are pieces of me

& change places as if you were a woman,
unfathomable mankind

and all that you are and were ever meant to
be

“Commence position two,” the boy Sergeant
said. “Initiating team holo-link.”

A ghost flickered into view beside him: the
Mechanic. He and the Mechanic could see each other in a crisp
outline form, like a light body with nothing inside.

The Mechanic sat on a chair that seemed more
real than him. He had a control console with a right-handed
multi-box, using it for now as a finger insert keyboard, capable of
typing speeds up to 300 wpm in the right hands. And his were
definitely the right hands.

The Sergeant thought he spotted a slight
dis-ambidextrousness. The Mechanic was born a southpaw. Very
interesting.

The Benefactor and the General could see
both agents, but they were excluded from being seen, of course. The
ghost looked at the Sergeant.

“Bonzai,” he said.

The Sergeant remembered all the mission
details. Sorry, Juniper, you lose.

“let me tell you of my hundred thousand
years alone

the curse of being your first creation

my fear is that all of this might go
away

might be my own reverie out of longing to no
longer be alone

is this my hallucination

am i self-deceived

no matter, here is my advice to you

our meeting will always be a fabrication, an
approximation

how may i, uncertain of your existence and
my own as well,

know that you are real

how can i understand what i desire for
you”

“I am uncertain that this is Wildcard,”
Juniper said. “It could be another M-E. Or someone else
entirely.”

“What makes you think so, sport?” Sublime
said.

“M-Es leave signatures, marks. A sort of
trace. In Wildcard’s case, it’s basically a math problem from god,
one that we almost certainly cannot solve. As if it’s from another
dimension, almost. You would not recognize it is as a math
problem.”

“What is happening now, in the poem?” Karl
asked.

“Nothing, a white noise.”

“How can you tell it’s nothing?” the
Sergeant asked. “It could be encoded.”

“My apologies to your precision, Sergeant.”
Juniper emitted a creepy, woman’s laugh. “Yes, it is possibly
encoded. Probably, in fact.”

“What would it say?” Karl said. “What
message would he send in that way?”

“Damn, kid, you sound so earnest,” Sublime
said.

“I want to know what he’s really saying.
Juniper?”

“I think the poem is the real message, if it
is from Wildcard. If there is an encoded message, I think it would
be somewhat meaningless. A baking recipe and a thirty second scrap
of a television show called the Love Boat are past examples. Both
required days of calculation to find useless trivia.”