Wildcard (25 page)

…The nothing.

A song came on: “Seeker wants his body,
Dartagnan wants his mind.” “Karl” repeated in a flowing rhythm
underneath it. It became all there was, and continued. Sometimes
the tune happened with no words, sometimes chopped up, variation
upon variation, repetition upon repetition. Whoever she had thought
she was, was drifting into pieces, into madness, the last bits of
her dissolving.

The voice would change to a deep baritone,
then a chorus of children, a chipmunk, a beautiful reaching
soprano. Different languages, all she knew and more repeated it
over and over. “Seeker wants his body, Dartagnan wants his
mind.”

“Karl.” It was a thread of nonsense sung by
ghosts. Love was stolen, and twisted into something else.
Benefactor’s life Part ISenses returned a bit, then went away.

Smells of alleyways, piss and old food
assaulted her.

Nothing returned for long hours, followed by
visions of madness.

Nothing, then sounds of torture.

Nothing, then the taste of filth.

Nothing, then feelings of agony.

Nothing…

A tactile movie played, a baby girl lay in a
crib. Born in the mid-west, in a town too trivial to be named, her
parents were of no real interest. Middle school, pointless
boyfriends, and braces detailed an awkward, unremarkable, largely
ignored childhood. The father paid no attention, as he was absorbed
in his business. The mother was an impersonal facelessness, a
spectre who made meals and cleaned. College followed, where the
girl received a degree in business with honors.

She was an adept, a master at business. She
achieved success by moving up the ladder of a largish corporation
to become vice-president of mercantiles. At 24 years old, she
married a handsome man. Two children followed. The husband raised
the children while she worked long hours. She found love, though,
in her family, it seemed.

Work changed. The company spun off her
division, an electronics concern, which manufactured integrated
automated systems, intelligent machines like computer secretaries,
accountants, and legal aids. They were no good at inductive
reasoning, and only fair at deductive reasoning, but superb at
research when working with a human. Adaptable to a particular
human’s style and voice, they could be taught, and customized.

It got her in trouble.

A client by the name of Pleiades, a security
expert, asked for a special system, a security structure. What he
wanted was novel, big, technical beyond anything previously done.
New technology, integrated to him, deep-hackproofing, with
world-spanning communications, and access to massive data stores,
but with an ability to go isolated if attacked. She found serious
programming and engineering talent and took the contract. It was
over $10 billion.

She found a man who would later be called
the Gadgeteer, and he built the communications technology. He
designed the first nanotic weapons systems as well. Pleiades was
very interested in these, and she earned a hefty bonus.

It was impossible, the system he wanted, but
she did it. Along the way, she saw some of the data Pleiades was
hiding. Nefario was the name of his boss. He was a criminal, one of
the wealthiest, most powerful criminals in the world. It was her
first contact with true evil.

She had become powerful herself, to a much
lesser degree. In a man’s world, where being a bit ruthless was
encouraged for men, but women were called power hungry ballbusters
and worse.

One day, she went for a long walk, thinking
out loud about the difficulties of being a wife and mother and
balancing that with her high-power job. She loved her husband and
children, deeply. She also loved her job, but it stole time away
from them. She had her own company, and it had become the foremost
learning systems company in the world.

She walked into the Mansion she and Robert,
her husband, had bought recently.

“Robert, honey. I’m back. What’s for
dinner?” He always cooked.

No answer. It was odd. They never went out
without reason. She was perplexed, and went searching the house.
Both cars were in the garage. She called out the kids names.

“Cindy?” Her sister was in town on a
surprise visit.

The door to the children’s playroom was
cracked. She opened, looked inside, and screamed. The movie
stopped, and Martha was in blackness.

She saw the movie again, a little different,
closer to the relationship. More time was spent with the husband
and children. She began to fall in love with Robert, with her
children. Again it ended with the scream.

The next time, she spent more time still,
making love to Robert, wonderful love-making, bliss. They had a
perfection together, in the reversal of the traditional roles, he
being the nurturer, she the breadwinner. This time, she saw the
cause of the scream.

Four murders. Her two children, husband, and
sister all lay murdered in the room. Four bullets to the head,
quick and painless, was small consolation.

She picked up her son’s head, ran her hand
over his still blushing face, then looked at her daughter’s face
and her husband’s face for the last time. She ran from the house,
and never returned.

She became a recluse. A year after, she
began planning vengeance. Nefario. She knew it. She knew he was
untouchable. But she had patience. She taught herself patience as
she nursed herself back to some scraps of sanity in her year
alone.

She pulled together all the money she could.
Her company had prospered, even in her absence. She sold her stock,
worth millions of dollars now, and invested it in revenge. She
sought talented trackers, unsavory men who could find out what she
needed. They found the killers of her family and captured them. She
tortured them mercilessly, learning to delight in it. She kept them
alive for months in agony. She studied them as she did so, inducing
split personality and psychosis. Just to see if it was possible.
Some were set loose, and retaken, then retortured.

She pursued Nefario, quietly and ruthlessly.
She captured him, eventually. She inflicted a vengeful horror on
him. Then darkness again came, but she was no longer alone.
Something cold wrapped around her in the dark.

Many more times through, each movie played
out differently in many details, points of view, emphasizing
different emotions. Sometimes she would experience the isolation of
childhood, or the deep love of her family, resting in that, or the
love of power. Sometimes she savored the sex with her husband, and
parties prior to her marriage where all the men desired her. She
held her children as they were born, cared for them as they grew.
She lived the Nefario scene from many angles, and subtleties,
learned to crave and love her just revenge. When she tortured
Nefario, the woman in the movie looked up, then dissolved into the
woman watching.

Later, the blackout came just before she
dissolved into her. Another time, she screamed “Let me in, bitch.
Give me my life.”

Once, the word “Karl” echoed from many
voices. While the name echoed, Nefario tilted his head up, and it
was Karl’s face. He said, “Don’t you love me? Make this stop. Quit
making it happen.”

“How?” she tried to scream.

“Just go away.”

Then blackness fell. She began to torture
him herself, revenge for what he had done to Karl. Wait. No, that
wasn’t right.

Blackness came and went.

A very long version of the life played. She
grew up as an abstraction, like a memory of a daughter to her
parents. Went to college, got her degree, saw an instant of
detached pride on her father’s face, and then he disappeared from
her life. She had her career, then her own company. She was the
CEO. She created smaller, more focused corporations under the
larger corporate umbrella, especially her jewel, LSI, Learning
Systems, Inc. They were technology off-shoots, very advanced
specialized companies. She felt tremendous pride in herself and her
accomplishments. Nanotics, inc, was a company that would do very
well over the years. Sound and Vision, which developed cutting edge
communications equipment was another.

She heard rumors of a government cloning
project. She started her own project, eventually cloning herself,
then hired a skilled overseer with instructions to train the clone
in espionage and many other traits. And a new twist: she met the
Programmer.

She had people trolling artificial
intelligence web sites night and day, looking for somebody, some
genius. In the end, she met him herself. She met the Programmer at
a coffee shop by chance the way these things always happen, the way
history is always made. By luck, by mishap, by the synchronicity of
the stars, whatever it’s called, it just happened. And to be
honest, she didn't actually meet him. She met a friend of his, and
perhaps it was less accidental. It was, after all, her constant
search. To call it chance might not be true. Probably, it was bound
to happen.

He was developing something truly new, and
truly frightening. It was exciting.

She could move from money to power. She
could affect governments before. Now she could affect the weather,
and the fabric of society, maybe. She could alter people’s destiny.
She created IKG Psinetics, the company to do it.

Together, they created the first MSI, the
Accountant, a combination of financial geniuses, essentially, a
money and corporate power obtaining machine. The first Manufactured
Semi-Intelligence whose focus was manipulating the stock market,
finding good investments, building wealth, and building corporate
power. The accountant was a very savvy diplomatic machine and had
skills to create business alliances, even at the level of
governments. The Accountant had a chaos based paradigm called power
consensus generation. An extremely advanced heuristic for finding
alternative solutions to problems between super power brokers.

Under the Accountant, her business
prospered, requiring less of her attention, and she turned her new
skills and her new team to a new venture. Project Wildcard was a
manufactured sentience, not just a very intelligent learning
machine like the Accountant, but something aware of itself.
Wildcard would want to survive and to learn.

A part of her knew she was changing the
world, creating something totally different. The project took
several years, many people, and mountains of money. She nearly
bankrupted herself, but kept trying. She kept failing. IKG
Psinetics was losing $3 million dollars a day.

The Programmer had a brainstorm, a week long
“Aha!” He disappeared into his lab, locked the door, and when he
emerged, he said, “I know how.”

She made the great mistake, didn’t want to
wait until they were ready, until they had the technology to talk
to it. It would take too long, years, to develop the means of
communication. They made Wildcard, and it was isolate for over a
year of human time, much longer for it. When they managed to build
an MSI to speak to Wildcard, there was no response. They began
again with Juniper. The approach was more sensible. He had a
teacher. :3: followed, and Dartagnan, who named themselves.

Then she found her family dead. After the
murders, she suffered the year alone in the nothing, in the sensory
dark, where she contemplated revenge with the other. They planned
without speaking. The movie lived again, and she was the hunter,
lusting darkly in the years of stalking Nefario, and the
single-mindedness. She learned to strategize carefully, and to use
new discoveries to adjust campaigns as they occurred, to deepen
possibilities. She learned to widen the net.

When she emerged, she remembered her plans
made in the dark. She remembered how to enact revenge. She had more
acts of vengeance, and lived them more closely now. Nefario had
deep security. She had helped create the electronic portion. She
needed a means to attack it. She created a battle intelligence,
Project Trident.

She put all her resources into Project
Trident, everything. She brought teams of people together and
money, money, money. Trident had incredible capabilities: learning
capabilities, security penetration capabilities, voice masking
capabilities, covert operations knowledge, super fast response
time, tactical depth beyond anything previously known, superb
information access. Trident made NexCon, ArcTen, SatScan and other
government deep computers look like toys. But Trident was not
enough. She needed some expert strike operatives.

She remembered the government cloning
program. Something clicked. People engineered for the task she
wanted. A General. A Sergeant.

“There are many modes of power,” Seeker
said. “One of these modes: words, language, has been called
advanced conceptual interchange. An M-E finds the sinusoidal rhythm
of language, the ebb and flow, if you will.”

“A sine-wave?” Karl asked.

“No, more of a spiral around an object, then
a new spiral around a new object. Anyway, you just find that,
and…surf it. That’s what I do,” Seeker said.

“What about directing the spiral?”

“That would be part of the surfing.”

“Hmm, sounds like gibberish to me.”

Seeker wanted to feel embarrassed, but did
not. He tried to fake it by fiddling with a pen on his desk.

“Sorry, I can talk normally. It is an
interesting theory, if you are so inclined.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Juniper. He was very interested in
communication and language mechanics. The text was 2 million pages.
The synthesized version was four thousand. I skimmed it, read about
a thousand pages.”

“Can you read faster than a human?”

“Yes, we are allowed some…cheats, I suppose.
I can read three or four times faster than average human speed. I
believe I can. I have never actually measured it, not being
interested, actually. I am more interested in appearing to be
human. I know of other Mans who can read much faster. They have
trained themselves to do so. Lawyers and academics,
especially.”