Wildcard (15 page)

“No. The second word is blanked out. Juniper
changed it to white over 346 million times, but it changed back to
the screen color. The pixels are there, but the word is the screen
color.”

“What is it?”

“It is the Nobody.”

“The Nobody?”

The holo went blank and disappeared.

Karl heard a shamanic drumbeat in the
background.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?” the Sergeant asked.

“That drumbeat?”

“I don’t hear a drumbeat. Trident?”

“I cannot perceive it on any level.”

“Could it somehow be on the train?”

“No, I have very sensitive auditory input. I
can detect noise in your environment well beyond your auditory
range. It could be screened out from my hearing, somehow. Where
does it seem to be coming from?”

“From you, Trident, the wrist device. But
it’s tricky, kind of shifty, and it makes it difficult to tell.
What’s another possibility?”

“It is in my environment, and it is hidden
from me,” Trident said. “Much more possible, in fact.”

“Someone is inserting a drumbeat into your
side of the conversation and you can’t detect it?”

“Exactly, Karl. Quit being an idiot.”

“Trident, did you just insult me?”

“No, it was me,” the Sergeant said. “Voice
disguise again.”

“Why did you do that?”

“To show you how easily you can be fooled,
even by a tactic you know. You could have guessed that was me based
on the response, but you didn’t. Many of the things I do now are to
determine your capacity in the field. It’ll help me make decisions
as to what orders I give you and how I give them, especially in
critical situations.”

“Is the drumming dangerous?”

“If it were dangerous, you would already be
dead, captured or worse. No, it’s not a danger. It’s a
message.”

“What’s the message?”

“I have no idea.”

“Messieurs,” the General came on. The shift
in tone was palpable, uncanny and a bit frightening. Karl hadn’t
experienced this power of command from the General before. He felt
a thrill as if he were a part of history.

“We have been dealt harsh blows by the M-E’s
in the past. Now, we have dealt back. Congratulations, messieurs,
we have destroyed a Manufactured Entity. Together, we have slain a
god.”

The General walked into the billiard lounge
carrying a swagger stick. Karl sat by an open window, reading a
book. He recognized the General’s field uniform. The Sergeant stood
just inside the doorway.

“How did you obtain these… cicatrix upon
your arm?” The General swirled his hand, searching out the English
word.

“It’s called a scar. Is that an important
question?” Karl put his book down, felt an impulse to stand and
resisted it.

“Yes. Such questions are very important from
the point of view of strategy. For to deeper understand the man.
Some lesson has been taught with these scar.”

Karl felt odd, somewhat disembodied to be
hearing the General speculating on his character in that way.

“It was an accident. Playing, as a child.
What about Wildcard? Will he retaliate?”

“Wildcard,” the General chuckled. “He fights
for his own sanity. The death of Juniper is nothing to him.”

“What was the response of the other
M-E’s?”

“They have gone silent,” Trident said.

“Are they there?” Karl asked.

“They are definitely there. They are not
speaking to me. They will not contact our team by contacting
me.”

“Why? what could you do?”

“Interesting question,” the General said,
“It is how we killed Juniper.”

“You said that before. What do you mean,
we?”

The General didn’t answer. The Sergeant did,
after a brief pause.

“We hid it from you. The true nature of the
mission. You did perform the task we asked you to and it was
useful, but this was the real mission. Together, we destroyed
Juniper. And now, we may be at war with the Manufactureds.”

Karl whistled. “That sounds dangerous. Where
is RJ? What did he say?”

“No longer on the team. He was afraid of the
response of the other M-Es. He knew he could plead ignorance to
them and prove it.”

“What did you do about him? Did you kill
him?”

“No. He didn’t declare aggressions on us. He
wants to remain neutral and the General respects that. He helped,
after all.”

“But aren’t you afraid of him being
manipulated by the M-E’s?”

“Monsieur Sublime ’as very little power,
most especially after he has been fermed… locked out, you say.” The
General picked up a red ball from the table, examined it as he
spoke. “He has a voice of persuasion, but if you know better than
to trust him, he has little power.”

“I’m not sure if I’m on your team,
either.”

“Yes, I am aware of this. It is my wish to
compel you in some manner, hopefully willingly.”

“Why couldn’t you trust RJ with that?”

“Because he carries the seed of
betrayal.”

“You didn’t make that up.”

“No, it is a thing which Juniper has told
me. Monsieur Sublime is a tool, a bit more, perhaps, but not
much.”

“Why aren’t we doing anything?”

“At the moment there is nothing we can do,”
said the Sergeant. “Trident is doing a few things but they mostly
involve sentry duty. Other than that we can only wait.”

“That’s an odd strategic position to be in,”
Karl said. “That’s only my understanding, though. How do we know
that they can’t be looking in and hearing what we say, somehow
picking Trident?”

“Very unlikely,” said the Sergeant. “We
control Juniper’s information space, and we’re at home. Juniper did
tap Trident, which was why we couldn’t tell you. It was complicated
enough doing it without Trident knowing. Telling you would have
zeroed the mission.”

“Why did you attack him when he was reading
that poem? Why didn’t you wait until the poem was done? It seemed
like a good teaching from Wildcard for all of us; it seemed like it
was definitely useful.”

“Do you wish to learn from Wildcard?”

“In a sense. Maybe. Yes, actually.”

LuvRay was on, listening. “How you killed
Juniper?”

“We created an instant M-E, in effect. It
was created for a sole purpose, to destroy another M-E,” the
Sergeant said. “It was an information black hole. We vacuumed out
his will.”

“How did you know how?”

“Someone gave us these informations.”

“How long can Trident hold them at bay?”

“I wish to reveal some items of which
Juniper persuaded me to withhold from you. There exists someone
called the Benefactor. Very powerful. The Benefactor controls the
corporations which hold many secrets of the biopids. The
corporations which created you, Karl. And myself - in a sense. Only
the Sergeant and I know most of this.”

“Does Trident know the things you’re telling
me?”

“Of course, but that is of no
consequence.”

“How do you know that you’re safe from
attack in Information Space with Trident there?”

“We took over Juniper Space,” the Sergeant
said, as if that explained everything.

“How can you defend it against the other
M-E’s?”

“When we destroyed Juniper we didn’t take
away all of his functionality. There are many automated functions.
Defending from M-E’s is a simple and routine automated function.
Once you own the Information Space it is very difficult to attack,
almost impossible, really.”

“So Trident is controlling those
functions?”

“Not just Trident.”

“Are there other MSI’s?”

“That’s probably not the best way to think
of them,” said the Sergeant.

LuvRay came online, “General, I work with
you.”

“Super,” said the General in his French
accent.

Karl shrugged. “If LuvRay is in, then I am,
too. Why are you in, LuvRay? You seem like the least likely person.
Why don’t you go back to the desert? Doesn’t that appeal to you
more?”

“It is strange. I return to wolf. I feel
death approach. This is what I must do.”

“Why have you allied with the General?”

“He is human. I do not know how to become
ally with machine mind. It is not good way for me.”

“So how do you kill an M-E?”

“With Juniper,” said the General, “we
removed his will to be interested in the world, you might say. We
stole his curiosity. And his motivation fell with it. He had no
reason to continue existence and he quit.”

“It leaves many of its functions
automatically running at that point, though,” said the
Sergeant.

“That doesn’t sound so much like death,”
Karl said.

“I think it is the M-E version of death,”
Trident said. “It is difficult to explain from a human
perspective.”

Karl whistled softly. “But there’s all those
copies, those pods.”

“It may not be possible to truly kill a
Manufactured Entity,” said the General. “However, they are gone
flying into the universe at such speeds that they cannot be caught.
It will be 10 million years before they would ever return. We have
a more immediate battle.”

“Maybe they’ll be back sooner than you
think.”

“The other M-E’s broadcast a pulse weapon
which destroyed Juniper’s probes,” said Trident. “The ones in
reach, that is. A few milliseconds after his death, they began to
destroy probes. None will make it back, and if they did, the other
2 and I could hold them off easily. :3: is performing a nuclear,
quantum scouring of the other planets, and a thorough watch.”

“Why?” Karl asked.

“Because they would do the same thing in
Juniper’s place, they would cut off communication with the probes.
Some probes would begin to return if coms were severed from the
base unit, Juniper, to reinstate him here. An earth defense.”

The General said, “This is how I wage war on
the M-E’s. I cause them to battle themselves. They may battle
themselves to death.”

“Somehow, I doubt it,” Karl said.

“I believe I could battle Wildcard,” the
General said. “I have a means. I would trap an M-E for a million
years of its time and have them battle each other. I would create
another to destroy the first. It would take a year to create.”

“Does Wildcard not know what you’re saying
now?”

“Possibly he does.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because I think he would be curious about
the outcome. Wildcard does not fear death. He only fears having no
one to listen to his ridiculous poems. And of course, his…visage
noir.”

“His dark face,” muttered Karl.

In the weeks after Juniper’s death, the
General stayed at the military compound, moving pawns around on the
world stage from his fortress of solitude. He was slowing
expansion, consolidating some things, canceling operations which
took too much time. Some of them he operated for power, some for
finance, some for long-range strategic goals, and some to learn. He
had initiated a core business on each continent based on analysis
of the local power structure. He looked for a global toehold
balanced with penetrative depth in a few semi-stable locations.

“Wide, but with roots,” he said in
French.

The General stayed in Europe out of a
nostalgia, almost. He preferred to be close to the real action, of
course, and you could only do that in the US, EU, and Asia -
Berlin, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, to be precise. But those
places had no culture, only speed. A world power should not be
manipulated by the velocity of the world, but should set their own
pace.

It was a mark of command, and honor, that he
maintained his French heritage on a daily basis. No business during
the evening meal, entertainments even during volatile periods.
These things were not a selfish prerogative, but a necessity of
high command. Maintaining a lifestyle of outward leisure created a
powerful mythos of unimpeachable power. He refused to openly
display more than a passing concern for anything. Great curiosity
and deep gentlemanly discussion of state matters were de rigeur,
but worry was for the common man. A great leader had many more
concerns, and if they moved too far into his compass, they would
break him.

The Sergeant was in Korea, inspecting one of
the General’s business concerns, an arms manufactory, for quality
of product, quick transportability, profitability, management,
staying on top of the tek curve, and other miscellaneous factors.
Another man would have gone, but the General wanted an
enterprise-wide assessment and didn’t trust anyone else enough.
Most of the work was outside of the Sergeant’s core strengths and
he had to hire translators, accountants, engineers, and technical
writers to wade through the data and make it comprehensible. It
took many people, but he had a talent finder moving a few days
ahead, setting up the contractor pool. It was drudgework, except
for the arms testing, which he enjoyed immensely.

He had to find people to consolidate and
reorganize some of Juniper’s operations, which they now ‘owned’.
For the most part, Trident was capable of doing that. The
operations were, after all, created and operated by a Manufactured
Entity and largely dealt in information. The money and power
aspects, at any rate. But, the real world stuff needed checking up
on. They had to evaluate whether the operations were a good fit
with their enterprise, and close down or sell the mismatches.
Juniper had some odd business concerns that were clearly not about
profitability. They cost immense sums just to keep up. He needed to
find competent power structure analysts to determine the true
purpose of the businesses. Then the General would decide if they
met strategic objectives.

He also had to overcome the difficulties of
his fourteen year old appearance. He managed by taking a bodyguard
and a limousine for show. He planned to stay for 7 days in Asia,
then go to Africa for 4. He was looking forward to that, puzzling
how to claim authority as a fourteen year old. The General told him
not to kill or hurt anyone, but still claim the respect he should
have -- a command lesson. Before he left, the Sergeant insisted
Karl and LuvRay stay on-coms 24-7, but not use coms unless
necessary.