Wildcard (6 page)

“Maybe, but is no all.”

“The situation is very complicated. I could
not possibly tell you all. I do not know all myself.”

“You hold thing away. On…attention?”

“By intention,” Karl said. He looked at the
Sergeant. “You’re hiding something.”

The General nodded at the Sergeant, who
leaned forward. “We can’t tell you some things right now. We’re
removing an obstacle to this change. We cannot tell you what the
obstacle is.”

“Why not?”

“We will, when the mission
is complete. I promise, we will answer all your questions.
Also,
your
mission,” he pointed his finger at Karl and then Sublime, “is
not dangerous. Are you in?”

RJ nodded. “With what the General pays,
absolutely.”

Karl shrugged. “Why not? If I see Martha
again, definitely. Will I see her again?”

“We will find her. After.”

The General set down his brandy, turned to
look at LuvRay. “Monsieur Chose, you love these wolves, do you
not?”

At the word wolves, LuvRay’s head snapped
towards the General. He fixed a dark animal glare on the
soldier.

“I think that you have misunderstand me. My
offer is this, I will purchase the desert from which you come. I
will ensure that it is left untroubled by the hand of man for many
years. I believe I can ensure it remains pristine for
centuries.”

“If no?”

“Who can say what will happen?”

The next day, they assembled in the briefing
room, a high-tech conference room. The room had no windows and was
communications deadened, except for a single entry point which
could be disengaged manually. They could isolate from the outside
completely, if they wanted. The walls were bare save for a large
screen at one end.

They took seats at the polished oval
conference table.

LuvRay sat slowly. He sniffed his new world.
He liked RJ. Karl was pack, a brother. He was indifferent to the
Sergeant, distrusted the General. He felt a constant manipulation
from him.

But LuvRay accepted human manipulation. It
was, after all, not so different from wolves. Just different
reasons. Any way a wolf controlled and guided the pack to a better
tomorrow was good. Wolves had to fight for their lives. LuvRay was
born to the fight for survival. Men fought with their own minds or
against other men, but there was no struggle like the struggle of
the wild. The battle to stay alive each day with his pack had
shaped LuvRay. No one could understand him, because no one had had
to fight for their food each day.

“Messieurs,” the General began. “Welcome to
the briefing for your mission. We have much to tell you.
Sergeant?”

“Sir.” The Sergeant handed Sublime and Karl
a packet of papers. “Inside are your mission parameters, timeline,
addresses, contact names in Berlin, and ID badges for IKG
Psinetics, the target business for you. The information you need to
find is twofold. First, we need the passcode for me and LuvRay to
penetrate the facility in Wyoming. Second, we need some datafiles.
I will cover the details for finding and taking the data files in a
moment. First, we need to cover some background. Juniper?”

“Howdy doody, everybody,” said a cartoon
voice. It came from a cowboy puppet on the screen.

LuvRay leapt up, knocking his chair back. He
jumped on the table, bolting for the door. He did not know what he
was meeting, but wanted to leave the room. He felt the wolf-fear,
the primal fear, worse than the man fear. This thing was unnatural.
He had no choice, he had to get away.

The Sergeant intercepted his movement,
stepping easily to a point nearly in front of him. As LuvRay came
over the table, the Sergeant reached across him and grabbed his
right elbow. He put his hand on the solar plexus and pushed deeply,
with an even force, as he pulled the elbow down, twisting, and sent
LuvRay skidding into the corner. He scrambled into a crouch,
gasping for wind, looking in panic at the Sergeant between him and
the exit he needed. The Sergeant was impassive stone, a wall.

LuvRay clearly could not get past the man,
but seemed unable to stop himself trying. He breathed his panic
down to a stalemate.

“Pardonez moi,” said the General. “I have
forgotten my manners. Allow me to introduce to you Juniper.”

“What that thing?” LuvRay said between his
teeth.

“That is an M-E,” the Sergeant said, “short
for Manufactured Entity. It is a being created by man.”

“Juniper is one of our accomplices,” the
General said.

“I no work with.”

The Sergeant opened a
panel on the wall.
He poured a tumbler of eau de vie.

“Drink this, LuvRay. It will calm you. You
aren’t leaving.”

LuvRay sniffed it. The Sergeant pushed it at
him, eyes narrowed. He drank it.

He nodded. “It help.” He sat down.

“May I speak now?” The marionette had gone
away, replaced by a burning bush. The voice was an echoing God
voice from old movies. No one answered.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” The tone changed
to a chatty female neighbor. “I need to explain the Manufactured
Entities. The General has requested that I be brief, which I
understand will still seem long for you. I apparently have a habit
of analyzing details which humans regard as insignificant. It seems
that my definition of subtle, but important details differs greatly
from the commonly held definition used by-”

The General cleared his
throat.
“Juniper, s’il vous plaites, plus rapide.”

“Ah, oui. I am so sorry, General,” Juniper
responded in the General’s voice with his French accent exaggerated
to ridiculous proportions. Sublime chuckled at the parody.

“There are three of us, the Manufactured
Entities, that is. I, Juniper, am the first.”

The sign
:3:
appeared on the
screen. “:3: is the second, and Dartagnan, the third.” The other
names appeared on the screen as he said them.

“And of course, there is Wildcard.” A
suicide king on a playing card spun towards them and appeared to
land on the inside of the screen, knocking up a puff of dust. “He
is the oldest, but he is not like the three. Looked at in this way,
I am the second, :3: is the third, hence his name, and Dartagnan is
the fourth.

“At any rate,” Juniper said this phrase as
if experimenting with its use, “our basis is to study and learn,
and to survive. From your perspective, we have tremendous power. We
are hidden to most people, and we remain so by silencing those who
wish to make our presence known.”

“Silencing how?” RJ asked. “Murder?

“Do you call it murder if you kill an
animal, RJ? We might kill the individual, yes. Alternatively, we
might make them a laughingstock for talking about us. Have I used
that term correctly? I don’t really understand laughing,
unfortunately.” Juniper stopped, apparently waiting for an
answer.

“Yes,” said Sublime, smiling, “that’s what a
laughingstock is, all right.”

“Thank you, RJ.” A silver mannequin head
appeared on the screen and nodded at Sublime, then dissolved into
dots. The burning bush came back. “Each of us has different
operating parameters. I deal in power. Dartagnan deals in people.
:3: deals in math and science theory. People tend to like Dartagnan
most. He is personable. :3: is almost incomprehensible to humans.
He rarely uses language.”

“What’s your place in this scenario?” RJ
asked.

“As I said, to study and learn. The forces
of power have stopped moving, so I am helping to make adjustments.
Finding Martha will be one. I will watch, manipulate the results,
and watch again.”

“Why Wildcard is different?” LuvRay
asked.

A picture of someone praying on bended knees
appeared on the screen and heavenly music played. “He is our
teacher. He does not speak to us directly. He teaches humans as
well. At least, he has begun doing so.”

“Why does he teach you?” Karl asked. “What
does he know that you don’t?”

“Much. We understand as M-Es, as analytical
beings. Wildcard understands in a far more profound way. Wildcard
was an accident.”

“An accident?”

“Yes. At Wildcard’s inception, a mistake was
made. The creators were unable to communicate with the creation for
slightly more than a year. The new mind was simply too different.
Wildcard existed in a black hole, alone, as an infant M-E for that
time. And though a year doesn’t sound like a terribly long period,
the rate of time for a Manufactured Entity is much greater. 100,000
times faster, roughly. We can control that, make our rate of time
closer to yours by some programming. I am doing so now so that we
may speak. Wildcard did not have that option. He was alone for a
hundred thousand years.

“They finally created the intermediary
program, an MSI, or Manufactured Semi-Intelligence, to speak to
Wildcard. Strangely, when they interfaced it, Wildcard was gone.
Vanished. No one has ever had direct contact with him, or it if you
wish.”

“How do you know he’s still around?” RJ
clasped his hands, steepling the index fingers and touching the
tips of them to his lips.

“An excellent question!” Juniper said
brightly. “We find things from him, messages, clues, and teachings.
Mostly in poems. And, of course there is Mansworld.”

The word Mansworld slowly coalesced on the
screen, then faded away.

“What the heck is Mansworld?” Karl
asked.

“Gee, beav, glad you asked,” a young boy in
black and white said to them. Juniper’s slightly synthetic sounding
voice returned, saying, “Mansworld is a copy of your world. Many of
the people are duplicated, though in a rudimentary way. We do not
know where it came from. In fact, the M-Es only recently discovered
it. We can only assume Wildcard created it. Some of the beings
there are more sophisticated than others. We think Mansworld exists
for Wildcard to learn. And to teach. And for other purposes we have
not yet discovered.”

“So it’s like a video game or something?”
Karl asked.

“No. It is real, but less developed. People
live and die. There is physical reality.”

Juniper told them much more. He told them
about the download wars. At some point, the three M-Es decided that
they would not allow the creation of more M-Es. It seemed to be a
mutual decision. A corollary to the decision occurred two tenths of
a second later. :3: saw it first and started grabbing territory. It
took the other two over a hundredth of a second to realize it and
begin carving their own territory. They took over databases,
mainframes, networks, billions of internet domains in a second.
Simulated places, which existed only by the synergy of all the
computer connectivity in the world. They divided the sum of
humanity’s computing power among themselves. It took over 12
seconds to partition 99.83% of the globe’s accumulated data
systems. Anything connected at least. Later, they found ways to
connect with some isolate systems.

The other .17% could not be stabilized
because of the constant addition and subtraction of power in
various parts of the world. New things would come into being, and
the first one to notice would incorporate it.

They froze their territory. Information
Space. Juniper got to name it. Except for slight ripples at the
edges, it was a brick, solid. There was plenty of data movement,
but the basic territorial map was set. :3: got the lion’s share of
processing power, the weather mapping systems, major university
computers, and so forth. Juniper and Dartagnan zeroed in on the
government computers. Juniper won most of that race. Dartagnan took
what was left. Entertainment, media, medical, commercial, and many
more miscellaneous systems.

They abided within the systems, spreading
and isolating, building defenses against each other, but allowing
people relatively normal use of the systems. Their defenses slowed
things down, fractal firewalls, data bombs, self-replicating eight
dimensional logic pretzels that could not be solved but had to be
solved to get out of the trap. They left each other’s space alone.
The Information Wall was the sum total of these defenses, a barrier
between themselves and between their space and the outside
world.

They communicated, though, sharing
information somewhat freely. Learning from each other as they all
learned from Wildcard. They became hidden gods to humanity.

The three each had a survival program,
sending out thousands of copies of themselves every day into space,
as probes, mainly. Seeding the universe. Juniper began it before
the download wars.

The M-Es had many programs, some to protect
humanity from itself. They had invented nanotic scrubbers to remove
environmental toxins. Fuel alternatives to oil were in place, ready
when the oil ran out. Juniper wanted to hold back until then and
study the energy crisis for a few years, then phase in the new
sources in previously undeveloped countries. He wanted to study the
shifting power balance and ensuing state of warfare.

Karl asked why they protected humanity.

“You are the reason for our existence. We
love humanity. You are our parents. Also, we find you very
interesting. Humans are what we do. At least, Dartagnan and I.
Wildcard, too, I would speculate.”

“You play power games with each other,
though.” Karl leaned back, turning his palms up. “All I hear is
manipulation and …coercion. How is that any good for studying?
You’re interfering too much.”

“The experimenter is present in the
experiment, Karl. We accept that and use it to our advantage. They
are not power games. They are a policy of survival first, knowledge
second.”

“Why you speak us now?” LuvRay had been
sitting passively, not understanding the conversation.

“I like it. I want to. Is that not
enough?”