Wildcard (59 page)

Wildsong overwhelmed; he was attacked with
images. Hundreds of horrific scenes stacked one on top of another,
like playing cards. What would the boy do? He could handle this,
the visual deluge. He could…filter it.

S-1 slowed, stopped, stepped into open
space. Tears were forced from him by the wildsong. It was
beautiful, ugly, horrifying, cowardly, brave, vain, lazy, noble,
and any other shade of experience that humans could call feeling,
all at once. Machine gun fire rounds of .50 caliber emotion.
“Wildsong is the range of human experience as best we can
express.”

Only that data, the nature
of wildsong, was useless in a battle. It was a distraction at best,
and possibly harmful. No, there may be…
messages
. Wildsong slid into the
space of the calm, like a man sliding under a moving semi and
living. He found a spot inside and cut the noise. Partially, found
a hold, a focus. He held the knife, saw the bulging belly behind,
read the collar - c-sect.
Caesarian
section.

He moved, twisted the knife. It helped the
focus. He lost it…

What was happening? Knife, belly, Karl,
step. He sliced his palm a bit to focus on his own pain. Not
enough, not with this maelstrom. He cut deeper, knowing it was
useless.

“No, Sergeant,” Dartagnan shouted, “you will
regret this.”

He looked. Dartagnan was shredded, spots of
light and dark poked through his face, his body, his leather boots,
his clothes, sucking in and vomiting data puke at the same time,
slashing about with his ragged, patchy sword, from a ragged, jerky
body. He seemed to be killing a lot of enemies in many different
timelines. Furious with fear, he dueled for his life, popped
frequently back in time by a millisecond, but was hurt a little
more, lost a bit more each time. Whatever Dartagnan experienced was
lasting a long time. He flew into bits of light.

The time fold caught the Sergeant as a
watcher. He experienced entire battles from the inside. Dartagnan
relived his training as if it were real. Simulate training, which
seems real at the time, hundreds of thousands of years worth. The
swordsman fought fifty foes at once, another timeline, he led
pirates, boarded an enemy vessel on the high seas; elsewhere, he
perfected his swordfighting. He was the best who had ever lived,
unbeatable. Simultaneously, he battled the General in choices about
information space, isolated the Sergeant, attacked coms between the
two, or negotiated with the Benefactor for each chess move. He
pretended to be Seeker, talking to Karl or Martha, each possible
fork and choice happened.

And it all happened at once. He formulated
tactics to slip beneath :3:’s cosmic radar. Drew strategies out of
each new happenstance: the death of the old couple, unanticipated;
he manipulated Karl to take LuvRay into wildspace, each of the
hundreds of methods Dartagnan had considered and discarded, to
bring LuvRay in, had to be followed and forks in each of those
forks. Each choice, the Sergeant thought, had to bring Dartagnan,
somehow, to here, to this moment, if he was to live. And the
choices multiplied, splitting again and again, hundreds to one went
to another place, not to this box, and each fate which failed to
arrive at the box took a tiny piece from Dartagnan. Still he fought
on. He could not give in, the essence of who he was, his need to
survive, drove him.

The Sergeant found pristine focus in the
death of his comrade and enemy. Dartagnan’s sword fighting was
brilliant. The Sergeant had no idea how he had ever beaten him. His
swordpoint created a quantum sphere which flickered in and out of
the space.

Wildcard taught him with Dartagnan’s death,
with the only poetry he really loved, the poetry of battle. He
glimpsed a few hundred of the many opponents Dartagnan engaged.
They were very good, some almost as good as the Sergeant. He could
never perceive the many pasts Dartagnan had to experience, and knew
there were many more he faced which the Sergeant could not guess
at.

This was the real Dartagnan, there was no
back-up. He understood M-E’s on a much deeper level. There was so
much more to them than he could define, but sensed. The inner
workings. He missed mountains of insight, caught snatches of
strategy, information, quantum tactics he could not possibly grasp.
He wanted to share these with the General and knew he never
would.

Dartagnan phased out reality windows with
his sword, closed probabilities by choosing acts which would shut
off danger in each distinct time line for maximum duration.

The Sergeant watched him evaluate
situations, make choices, and strike, then ignore that window until
it became a threat again. He split each window into its most remote
possibility of danger, but had to analyze the line until the next
split. And Dartagnan had a very complicated existence.

He spun out icons to make choices for him,
then stepped back into his command central, but it cost processing
strength each time. And he lost that processing power for good. He
strove to prevent the lines from touching the real Dartagnan.

Some did, and wounded him, more bits of
q-code flying off. The 8-Ball world shimmered behind Dartagnan, who
used it as a staging ground. 8-Ball, high volatility, but low-risk,
the choices could be pushed into extreme results, forced to piss
out if made correctly, and if incorrect, the results were
complicated, but almost never harmful. He used the world as a
nexus, rippling choices out and away. Easy to do there. He had
forced himself back in the time chaos to 8-Ball. He appeared at
several different times, including their recent meeting.

Dartagnan looked at him, pointed his sword,
and stepped out of the myth. His sword was sheathed. A Dartagnan
stood behind him, still fighting all those simultaneous battles.
“Sergeant, I will teach you how to step backwards in time. You may
do that here because of extreme volatility. RJ did. I will die
here,” the Dartagnan thing added. “You understand that?”

“Yes. How?”

“I have no idea. I calculate 417 million
ways, as you can see behind me. Each time my sword strikes, I
prevent my death. I do not know how long I can maintain this.”

The Sergeant looked at the quantum sphere,
at the Dartagnan who was not creating it, yet was creating it,
standing in front of him.

“Are you an icon? I know he isn’t.”

“Not exactly. It makes no difference what I
am. I need to teach you of your foe and of timestepping.”

“This is a beautiful battle.”

“Yes, it is. Though I die, I would not trade
places with you. I have seen your fate. You meet the Wound of
Wildcard; it knows nothing of time, hence the experience of
multiple times. It knows nothing of the linear mode by which you
experience your existence. Even you cannot maintain human sanity in
the face of this. You can, however, go mad and return. The Savant
has proven it. If you must, allow yourself to go insane, then find
your way back.

“Here is how to step through time. Focus on
the threads, step back along the one you want to the place you
want. You will see an event clearly in the past, but that may not
be your destination. It is a guide point. Your destination will be
further back or ahead. I do not think you will go back far. You
require few details for your mission. Just do it, when you make the
wrong choice. Go back and change it.”

“How do I make sure I’m in the real present
and not a false…thread?”

“That is a fiction. The Wound unravels all
possible concepts of linearity, time and space. That could almost
be said to be its function. It makes no difference which present
you find; they are all within the quantum possibilities of this
room.

“The trick, for you, is not to comprehend,
but to exclude. Thus will you guard your sanity. When you step
through time, exclude the non-choices you have made. Exclude as
much as possible, and most of the chaos goes away, until you arrive
at your new place. Then it begins again. Be ready for that. It will
be very difficult to find the present, so avoid going back far. You
may easily go back further than intended.

“Hold the thread back to the present. Either
step clean back to it, or, make choices back to it. The second is
far more difficult, and far more useful. With the first, you can
see what you did, but not change it. You can also find your way
back to the present if you get blown back. Theoretically, this can
be done without end, simply cycling through short moments of time.
You would go quickly insane, however.

“It will be difficult either way. The will
power and concentrative focus required to fight your way back along
the thread will be enormous.”

“How do you do it?”

“Through q-tek. It is not available to you
in this scenario. Learn from me all you can. I will tell you
anything I know. You must ask the questions, however. I have much
information, but I do not know what will help you.”

“Perhaps there’s something I need to teach
you.”

“To what avail, Sergeant?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“I cannot forget anything. I lack the
power.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I cannot worry, either.”

“Why is everything so…recursive. Is it part
of the problem?”

“Yes and no. The q-code creates
re-instancing of myriad aspects. It connects without causal force.
Understanding q-code will not help you.”

“All right, then. What’s my… fate?”

“I cannot tell you. If I did, you would not
find it.”

“You said you would tell me everything you
know.”

“If it changed by your hearing it, it would
no longer be your fate. Therefore, I cannot be said to ‘know’ your
fate in the usual sense.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“It would make it worse to know.”

“Skip it, then.”

The reflection looked at him, not
moving.

“Is this thing part of Wildcard?”

“How should I know? Is the poet part of
Wildcard? Is Seeker? Martha? CJ, for that matter? Am I? The
question is meaningless. Would it somehow help you to know?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to have a name.”

“Perhaps it is the loneliness of Wildcard.
Humanity must now care for the pain of the child it harmed the
most. An imprecise answer, but the best I have.”

“Was that wildsong or Dartagnan?”

“It is difficult to tell. I am ingesting
massive amounts of wildsong right now. It is my principle battle,
getting drawn in too deeply by some alluring teaching and using too
much processing power to understand it. My curiosity plays against
my survival need. I will most likely die from wanting to see my own
death.”

“What will happen?”

“You will be attacked by the knowledge in
your own mind. The q-link is no barrier to the wound. Quite the
opposite. Your means of arrival, quantum technology, linked you to
everything in this universe. And since you came as a ghost, you are
a particularly open conduit. I could have taken you at any moment,
but chose not to.”

“Why not?”

“The reasons are far too numerous to
mention, but the consequences would have been extreme for me.”

“How long can we talk?”

“As long as you wish, in some sense.
Dartagnan can hold this space for many hours subjectively. It is
nowhere near as chaotic as where he is now. And it is a simple
matter to accelerate time here. He has done that, creating an
alternate rate, a small pocket.”

“Stable?”

“Not very.”

“How is that so?”

“From one point of view, this could be
regarded as a temporal attack. This thing is attacking time,
possibly in all of wildspace by leaking through the walls. The
effects would not be felt for many years, but they would, most
likely, be horrifying to a human mind. Or a Mans.”

“How would it be to you?”

“Unworkable. Because the barrier has been
breached, it would eventually find the human world. Also, Dartagnan
thanks you for a wonderful game.” The poster of Dartagnan stood
stiff, as if nothing was happening.

“Why did everything outside the room
vanish?”

“I am uncertain, but it seems a means of
sealing off the Wound, as Wildcard attempts to do.”

“I thought he didn’t do anything,
really.”

“A mistaken belief. He minimizes activity to
avoid drawing attention from the Wound, which then moves towards
it.”

“Huh. What should I do?”

“If you do not close the box, no one will
ever be able to. Only you can.”

“Why are you more machine like?”

“The Dartagnan you knew is no more, you
might say. He was brought into the whole when the whole came into
this situation. He was very expensive, from a processing point of
view. That sort of power cannot be spared now. I am a temporary
fractal replica of Dartagnan, with much less processing power. I
diverge from him, more and more, as time passes.”

“How did that happen?”

“Your Dartagnan simply disappeared, but his
knowledge remained.”

“Wrong question. How did the whole get
here?”

“It is unknown. At least to me.” The shell
pointed to the original.“He may know.”

“How are we communicating?”

“I do not know.”

“How much time has passed since I stepped in
here? I estimate almost fourteen seconds of room time.”

“Very near. fourteen point three
seconds.”

“What are the consequences of my staying
here?”

“The difficulty of achieving your objective
increases. The likelihood becomes more remote.” Time wind broke
through the cocoon. The poster pointed his sword at it, graceless
compared to the Dartagnan who had died at the Sergeant’s elbow. He
sealed the hole.

The Sergeant put his face against the flat
of his fists, head angled down. “Can I beat it?” It was the
toughest question to ask. Or the stupidest.

“No.”