wildcard

datablok, diamonds offline, the doctor

(author's note - my formatting is for speech in italics, but it did not come through. Speech is mostly marked by a dash, however.)


The General walked into the billiard lounge carrying a swagger stick. Karl was sitting 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 asked.

-It’s called a scar. Is that an important question? Karl.

-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 was the response of the other M-E’s to Juniper’s death?

-They have gone silent, Trident said.

-Are they there? Karl.

-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 did not 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 perform and it was useful, but this was the true mission. Together, we have destroyed this entity. We may be at war with the Manufactured Entities.

-Where is Sublime and what did he say to this?

-He is 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’s just what the M-E’s told me. Monsieur Sublime is a tool, a bit more, perhaps, but not much, the General admitted.

-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 could tap Trident, that 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 use; 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 did you kill Juniper?

-We created an instant M-E. We created an M-E that lived and died for one 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, said the General.

-The M-E’s call their home Information Space, said the Sergeant. Interesting, isn’t it?

-Obvious, said Karl. It’s just information for them.

-Some would say all of us are only information, the General said.

-I go now. I must do something.

-What do you have to do, LuvRay? Karl asked.

-Cannot explain.




The next day, Karl asked, How long can Trident hold them at bay?

-I wish to reveal some things to you that Juniper persuaded me to withhold from you, said the General.
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 me. Only the Sergeant and I know most of this.

-Does Trident know the things you’re telling me?

-Of course, said the General, 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 did not 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? said Karl. 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 an M-E. It is not a 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 Intelligence version of death, Trident said. It is difficult to explain from a human perspective.

Karl whistled softly. But there’s all those copies.

-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.

Karl said, Somehow, I doubt it.

-I believe I could battle wildcard, the General said. I have a means.

-How?

-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.





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. Only he said it in French.

Too stable a location, like the EU, and it was difficult to obtain a unilateral power structure. He could not play with power with impunity there. Money was much more difficult to make on the massive scales he needed as well.

Africa, with her diamonds, and South America, with her drugs, were excellent money makers. The power was fairly simple to take there as well. He had Trident monitor the news, report any signs of unrest or warlord activities and give an analysis of the economic potential. Trident was very good at finding possibilities for power takeovers at minimal resource cost. He excelled in Africa, the domain of shifting warlords.

Africa was relatively simple, also. The General waited, equating the historical diamond producing capacity against the expense of creating and maintaining a nation-state inside a region in turmoil. When the number had been right, a money maker, but not so big that they would be constantly fighting, and when the overall enterprise had enough slack to support it, he moved in.

Rather, he had sent the Sergeant in. Setting up a puppet warlord was easy. He and the Sergeant had set a baseline criteria personality for the man they wanted. No despots. The General wanted stability and despots were often overthrown in Africa. He wanted a no-nonsense man of the people. One who worked to make people’s lives better. Gradually. People with a steadily improving quality of life were much more loyal, and willing to fight.

If they needed to answer brutality with brutality, the Sergeant could visit. He had, to set up the President and to train the small army. He spent six weeks, training the officers and Sergeants. They hired a team of reliable mercenaries, older, proven soldiers. Ones they had worked with before.

Five good soldiers to make a battalion was the Sergeant’s rule of thumb.

They took a few from the local pool to cut through the idea that they were usurpers.
Of course, they were usurpers.

-The military is a tao of deception. One of the General’s favorite military principles from a translation of the Sun Tzu.

One of the local hires had made a deal with a nearby warlord to attack them. The Sergeant found out, captured the man. He wanted to make an example, so he did not execute the man. That would have gone unnoticed. He dug deep, into the tribal roots, the ethnic memory of the place, and ritually humiliated the man by having him tied upside down.

Anyone was allowed to urinate and defecate on him, and many did. Three days. He lived and the rumour spread much faster than an ordinary killing. The man was ostracized, and the lesson was deeply impressed on the people.

The Sergeant also did a night strike on the warlord, a solo operation. He penetrated the compound, killing only one person, the despot himself, who was found dead in the morning without a mark. Other would be dictators looked for less dangerous targets after that. Minimal brutality by Africa standards.

The General had a similar operation in South America with cocaine. More bribery, more government deals, more brutality were required. Lower creation cost, lower stability, and much higher profit margins. On paper, it was a better deal than Africa. It lacked the style of the African operation, however.

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.
The boy Sergeant had never been to Africa, either.

Before he left, the Sergeant insisted Karl and LuvRay stay on-coms 24-7, but not use coms unless necessary.

-I need to know where you are. Status fluid.

-What? Karl asked.

-Juniper’s death has created power vacuums everywhere. Most likely, you will be unaffected. The movement is at the power level, shifting governments and the like. Not at your level.

LuvRay was in the Bois de Boulogne, a small forest on the outskirts of Paris. Laying low, but sniffing for Martha. For the most part, he made friends with the forest. The animals were amazingly tame, and would come to him without hesitation, once he mastered their signals. A chipmunk slept with him, except when it rained and he slept in a tent. The chipmunk would not come inside the tent. He liked learning about the new place, talking to different animals and discovering new plants and insects. Finding things which were edible. He had money and often walked to a nearby store for food, too. On balance, however, the place was not wild enough for LuvRay.

Karl was in Biarritz , relaxing, waiting for something to happen, eating out and taking long walks. He made some friends, a couple named Pierre and Celeste who owned a sailboat. They invited him sailing and he accepted happily. They went for a two day trip in the Mediterranean. It was cramped, but they got along very well, so no one minded much.

Eight days after Juniper disappeared, LuvRay disappeared, too.

-Lockdown. Protocol 3. A system-wide command. Karl had heard the Sergeant say things like that before and was used to it. The way it bolted one to attention, to what was happening. Suddenly, he felt like a soldier. The command impacted everyone, by intent. The team was brought together, in spite of distance. Karl’s Trident link became encased in a gelatinous substance which began hardening. He could not remove it. What was protocol 2 or 1, if this was 3? Perhaps they increased in intensity as the numbers rose.

-Trident, what’s happening?

-LuvRay and the Sergeant are having a disagreement.

-I want to listen.

-I’ll check with the Sergeant.

Dead air for 2 seconds.
-What are you doing, Luvray? The Sergeant sounded like he had been sleeping. Karl wondered how he could possibly emerge from sleep and start barking orders.

-Get it off.

-No. You tried to clip out without approval. We are in yellow alert right now. I cannot have you disappear during fluid state. You are on-mission, to remind you.

-Don’t care. Get it off. Or I cut it off.

-You can’t. A knife won’t cut that material.

A pause.
-Then I cut off my hand.

-LuvRay, I think you’re overreacting, Karl said. Why do you want it off so badly?

-Talk to me, LuvRay, said the Sergeant. What’s the problem?

-I don’t explain. Get it off.

-Talk to me for 2 minutes first.

-I will do this.

-Trident, if he attempts it, immobilize him by electrical impulse. Trident will stop you, LuvRay, put you to sleep.

-I will wake up and try again.

-Why? Just tell me why.

-LuvRay, Karl said. Just talk to us. Please. Why do you want it off?

LuvRay calmed, a bit.
-Because I want.

-Something happened. The Sergeant said. You heard something. You found something out. What is it? I need it there for your safety.

-My safety? You don’t care of my safety.

-Personally, no, I don’t give a s*** whether you live or die, but my orders are to keep you alive, and I intend to. Professionally, I care about your safety. I need you to finish your mission. I need to know where you are and the mission status.

-Too bad. Get it off. If not, I work against you. I find your enemies.

-You won’t be able to. You’ll just go unconscious. Tell me what happened.

-Speaking to Seeker.

-What? You’re kidding. One, how did he find you? Two, how did he speak to you without our knowing? Three, how do you know it was really Seeker? Four, why do you trust him more than us? Five, -

-Shut up and get it off. Now. Why should I answer you?

-Why should I get Trident off you if I think you might betray us?

-Betray? No. I want you not following me. Want to be alone. No people.

-Tell me the information and I will let you go.

-Information? I don’t tell. I don’t want.

-I don’t want to let you go, then. Looks like we have a problem.

-No problem for me. I tell my solution. You make me sleep. When I sleep, I am alone.

-He is pulling out his knife, Trident said. Shall I immobilize?

-Wait. LuvRay, will you speak to Karl? Explain it to him?

Pause. -Yes. I do.

-OK. Answer my questions and I will take Trident off.

-Karl asks his questions, not yours. What do you want knowing, Karl?

-I trust the Sergeant’s questions. I do have one, though.
They waited for Karl.

-Did he smell right?

-No. Foreign.

-Like Juniper?

-No. Just wrong.

-What were your questions again, Sergeant?

-How did he find you?

-Found each other.

-Explain.

-I am looking for Martha. Finded Seeker.

-Found. You found Seeker.

-Yes, I found Seeker. I smelled a trail to a coffee…a coffee?

-A café, Karl said.

-A café. I waited. She came.

-She? Seeker is a she? Karl asked.

-How did she speak to you without Trident detecting? the Sergeant.

-Don’t know. Don’t care.

-How do you know it was Seeker?

-Don’t know.

-You don’t know it was Seeker or you don’t know how you know?

-Don’t understand question.

-Skip it. It wasn’t Seeker, anyway.

-You know this?

-Pretty sure of it. Now, if he smells wrong, why do you trust him more than you trust me?

-I don’t. But there is no Seeker chain to my hand, and there is Sergeant chain.

-How does Trident smell? Karl asked.

-No smell. No right or wrong smell, I mean. No friend or enemy smell.

-But some smell?

-Smells like Sergeant, but different. Like a rock Sergeant held, or clothes he wore.

-How long ago? Trident said. 2 hours, 37 minutes?

-Maybe. Close.

-I know how he did it, boss. In part.

-Go ahead. We were testing the weapons simulator then, right?

-Yes. The exercise was utilizing 98% of my resources. I have a record of LuvRay leaving the café one minute after our exercise began and sleeping in a park, but that did not happen, did it?

-No. I stayed in café, speaked to Seeker. Speaked?

-Spoke. The agent knew I was engaged in the exercise and used the opportunity to falsify the record. I show LuvRay leaving the park and walking past the café four minutes before the exercise ended. I would have detected the simulation, otherwise.

-How could they know that? Karl asked.

-Easy, said the Sergeant. We aren’t keeping our schedule secret over here. We weren’t, at least. They cracked it through the company. Very clever. The Mechanic, I bet.

-Where are you?

-Korea.

-What are you doing in Korea?

-Doesn’t matter. What allowed them to fool your recording? And how can you detect the fake?

-I have a simple rotating agent which monitors and performs basic analysis upon the activity of our field agents. It is always active, but it only detects crisis parameters, communication requests, and certain anomalies. Looking at the record, I detect two very subtle anomalies. As LuvRay left the café, the ambient noise subsided at a very sharp vector, dropping away in less than a microsecond. Listen.

Trident played it back. They heard the buzz of a crowd, then abruptly nothing.

-If we can hear it, how come you couldn’t? Karl.

-The agent was not programmed to detect it. I will do so now.

-Probably not worth it, said the Sergeant. They won’t use it again.

-It is a simple matter to add the detection capability to the agent.

-OK, do it, then. What was the other anomaly?

-LuvRay’s arm was in two places at once.

-I don’t get it.

-When the simulation ended, the simulated arm was not in the same place as LuvRay’s actual arm. It was off by several millimeters, in fact. Quite a large error.

-Oh, yeah, that’s huge. The Sergeant laughed.

-They wanted us to know? Karl.

-Mission was over, said the Sergeant. That part of it, anyway. They didn’t care anymore.

-What did he want?

-Not sure, LuvRay said.

-What did he say?

-He said the General makes disease. Wrote on paper. Hibrid…hibridiz…

-Hold it in front of me, said Trident. Hybridizing viral agent.

-Yes. It changes, this thing. Mutate, is the word he said. This is an awfulness. I am not with you now. He explained me this disease. It can kill everyone. Entire earth. Is it true? I don’t want. General is crazy. Not in my tribe. I want away from his machine.





- I don’t know where the Seeker obtained this data. The Sergeant was off-balance. This was an unexpected attack, and not in his list of specialties. The General has no plans to wipe out everyone. You have been misinformed.

-Misinformed?

-Lied to. This false Seeker was lying to divide you from our team. Trident, isolate coms-General, are you listening? I have cut them out and they cannot hear. How do I proceed? Trident, anything between me and the General is not heard by them.

-Tenez votre equipe, Sergeant. Hold your team together. It will pass badly if I enter the conversation a ce point.

-Does this disease exist? LuvRay.

-Not exactly.

-Did he make them or not?

-No.

-Then why this lie?

-They are in process, said Karl. He’s still working on them. Isn’t he?

Pause.
-Yes.

-Why does he want them if he doesn’t want to wipe everything out, then?

-Defense.

-Defense? But that’s insane. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

-Not to you, but you don’t operate at the world power level. The General’s enemies will not kill him because, if they do, the weapons will be triggered.

-Jesus Christ! I’m with LuvRay. I don’t want to work for him, either.

-The weapons can only be triggered by his full and complete death.

-Full and complete? What the hell does that mean?

-Ne dites pas ce projet, Sergeant. Don’t tell them this project.

-It means he has to really be dead. Not just out of commission for life. Or captured.

-It means no clones, doesn’t it? No biopids of him left?
He didn’t answer.

-He only wants to destroy the world if he dies first?

-Pretty much.

-Won’t be on team. Get it off.

-LuvRay, Karl said. What else did Seeker say? There is more, isn’t there?
Pause.

-Yes. La Rumeuse. I must speak to this person.

-Who is it?

-I don’t know. Sergeant?

-Yeah. OK. We don’t know much about La Rumeuse. It could be a man pretending to be a woman, even. Anyway, she leaves clues, diversions, disinformation, all sorts of things, by confessing to a network of priests, by making false news stories, planting it underground somehow. It’s conflated with truth, so no one knows what or where the rumours are spreading.

-Why?

-We have no idea. La Rumeuse is very deeply hidden. Perhaps the Benefactor knows more.

-What rumours?

-Well, that’s the thing. We don’t know. La Rumeuse may not even exist. Nothing can be pinned to her. We don’t pursue that line of the game. The General thinks it’s a false lead. Perhaps one of the M-Es is doing it.

-Wildcard?

-Wildcard does not do things. He creates, but then the creations act independently. The General phrases it that way, and I agree with his analysis.

-So maybe he created La Rumeuse and let her do whatever it is she’s doing.

-Possible.

-What about these art installations? The endless poems.

-What do you mean?

-They seem active. Like something wildcard does.

-Yes. I see what you mean. I think that wildcard has some part, some spinoff, that is doing that. Something was created to make the poems.

-I will look for her. By finding Martha first. I do nothing until I am free. I want that you cannot follow me.

-All right, LuvRay. Fine. Promise me one thing.

-What?

-Hide Trident where you can find it. You will need it again. And let me know when you find her. Karl’s life may depend on it.





The Doctor was a mans who specialized in brain surgery on mans and on humans. Mind surgery and reconditioning, more precisely.

His experiment record was ghastly. He had transplanted brains, trained people to believe they were animals, induced schizophrenia in healthy individuals, and cured it in others. He had created new mental illnesses and chemicals for inducing them.

He always shared his findings openly. His main motive, he said, was to advance the field of human-mans interpenetrating mind/brain analogous medicine. A phrase he invented. If someone else advanced the field, that was good. He had implanted the nanotic eye in the first Sergeant, and invented the nerve linkages to make it possible.

He worked at :3: labs, one of the few places with a reliable humanspace-mansworld phone link.

The phone rang one day. A man asking him questions. About his work. He answered them gladly. They concerned memory recovery and transfer in clones, an odd topic. The Doctor talked about quantum technology which was set for a breakthrough. A link between minds was possible. He had linked two minds in mansworld, and was anxious to try it on humans. The scenario would require extensive resources.

-My name is the Mechanic, the voice said. Would you like to do business?