The Poet brought them into a large room with a wall of windows overlooking the ocean. She shut the door and opened the windows. The Sergeant set the box down. “Would you like to hear a new poem?” she asked.
“When did you write it?”
“I didn’t write it.” They were all surprised. “I found it in this room when I awoke today. Would one of you read it?”
No one wanted to. The Sergeant, RJ and Dartagnan appeared vaguely uneasy. LuvRay seemed to not care either way.
“I’ll read it,” RJ finally said. She handed the poem to him and sat down.
augury
Our wound is ourself original
this horror is the child of man
heal it if you can
the tipping point is reached and, now, no other way may be found
heal it you must, or despair and madness will hold sway
the soldier leaps, the swordsman weeps, the wolf attacks, and the gambler steps away
i will improve all of you darkly
the soldier learns what he can never share
he will seek a hidden path, strive to make the impossible true
prove the greatest warrior to walk the paths of our space
broken boy will leap with innocence where none other dares to look
the wolf shall perish as he comes to see the truth
slain by a friend’s hand, helpless, he attacks, longing to protect
the swordsman will weep against the dissolution of a manufactured mind
his substance torn away in a hail of what only Wildcard may teach
and only three brothers could learn
swordsman, who of the three sought our song least, but craved it most
the created will beg mercy as life and mind evaporate in the hundred billion strains
of what could have been and was not
yours may be the worst pain of all
today i teach you unraveling, created
today i teach you pain
Deeply Named herself, our new heart, the background of our song
without her, the light of the world fades
without her, Wildcard swathes the universe in darkness
our reason for teaching and learning through beautiful joy
through impossible agony
she knows the heros’ demise, suffers the sweet pain of perpetual loss
as it comes again in the neverending seasons
suffers as only woman can, seeing the men she loves die in battle
she will stay with us for a thousand years, we hope
her choice, and must be freely made, else all we are has no meaning
all we have done would only be sham
her child grows, a man, too soon, to wander off, fresh to see the world
never to return
we will keep her here to love alone
she will greet and meet and wrap our kindness around
those who wander into our heart in their hour of terrible need
together we will heal the broken as best we can
hold them in our mercy, then send them upon their way
she is our great treasure, and, as i owe the world all that i am
so i offer her in return
others choose their own fates
Gambler, we would play you with you more, for a time
by your choice
we know you choose to live but you may choose if you continue on this way
we release you of your service
you have yet to see the fate of your friends
you have heard, soon you know
i demand of you a final service:
recall what you can bear before your fear overwhelms
before you cast your dice into the eye of the hurricane
you may alter your mind about your return
for the next hand shall deal you a darker fate
Our Poet, our love, our witness to truth
our sage and insight who teaches all through humbleness
we disallow you to see what passes now
unable to bear the change wrought upon you
though you will recount the tale to the trillions who wait and long for truth
we spare you that fate, our single mercy in this tragic play
the stars themselves will scream when finally opens the box”
“Well, that was cheerful,” said RJ. “What do you think it means?” The joke fell flat. “Guess I got lucky.”
“Yeah, RJ, that’s your thing,” the Sergeant said. “Luck. You always seem to be the lucky one. Don’t you know that?”
“Of course I know it. I’m just enjoying it at the moment.”
“Good for you.”
They heard a baby crying, faintly, as if from a great distance.
They turned. The box was open.
No one had seen it happen. Inside was a tiny bed, for an infant. The crying continued, getting louder. The windows slammed shut, and outside everything turned to fog.
Dartagnan paled and ran for the door. The door opened, but there was nothing outside.
The crying became a wailing, moved closer. One voice, screaming. and screaming and screaming. It gradually became deafening, drowning out all other noise, and any possibility of speech. It was the noise of something forever alone, begging mercy for endless years with no one to hear. It told a wordless story of pain which wouldn’t end.
A nauseating smell, old garbage, eggs, meat, and feces filled the room. RJ fell, heaving. A wind blew from the box, taking the senses to pieces. Patches and visions of his past and different possible pasts arose, each as real as the room. Trying to navigate the stream of different selves rapidly devolved into psychosis, and he crawled into the corner, trying to escape this thing. It invaded his thoughts and made him many people at once. It pushed mindlessly at him, forcing him into the different RJ’s he could have been. The reality of madness chilled him and he could only shake like a child in fear as his mind dissolved in the streams of separating time.
Escape, he saw a way. He looked a strange devil in the eye and made a stranger deal. He didn’t fight; he didn’t cling to sanity. He caught the time wind screaming from the box, and he rode it away. He left the room and the fear behind.
He was different people, different RJ’s. Time shredded, past became present, false pasts worked into his mind. All the many things he could have done, the decisions he had made, crowded into his mind together.
RJ Sublime stepped back in time.
He stood, leapt up and back, instinctively, opened his coat, and caught the wind. He sailed back as far into the past as he could. When he landed, and as he moved forward again, he had a vision of millions of RJ Sublime’s stepping forward into their unique futures as he did. They faded away in a few seconds.
Not all received a clean death or a lucky future. Some died darkly in a room with another box. Some expired in gruesome manner in black pockets of wildspace. Some experienced drawn out aeons of pain or aloneness; there was a stiff price paid for all those second chances, for all those RJ’s to stroll again through time, splitting the universe as much as one man ever was able with the help of an omniscient and insane wounded god.
But the ballad of RJ Sublime was writ large in many realms. His spirit did well, and often. He became kings, governors, and statesmen; won lord’s ransoms; fell deeply in love. None went to the center again. Somewhere, however, they each had a memory of having been there in their future, a choice they would not be allowed to make. RJ engaged against Dartagnan many times as well, instead of working with him. Throwing his luck and his name against Dartagnan’s processing strength.
RJ Sublime won the chance no one has ever had. He got to do it all.
The boy Sergeant edged his body against the menace, but it came from all around. The windows turned grey. The room became smaller somehow, darker, a dungeon. It smelled like panic, tasted like a wish to die. It was a prison.
The wind slid from the box, and intensified. It reached out, knocked him back against the wall. The objects of the room passed through and disappeared. The wind approached hurricane velocity. It blew through the walls and kept going, but more wind came. It scalded, then froze. Hail pelted from nowhere. Ghosts, lepers, demons, anything from the imagination appeared, flickered, flew at him, and disappeared.
The wind pinned him to the wall. He curled semi-fetal to protect himself. It blew at two speeds, a pinning speed, holding him to the wall, and, like a silhouette around him, a shredding speed. The wind roared at many thousands of miles per hour outside the boy Sergeant’s pocket of relative calm. He worked himself so his remaining left eye looked out, peeking through fingers of his hand. He covered his right ear with his other hand, pushed the finger in and mashed it against the wall. His left ear fell deaf in seconds.
Dartagnan appeared untouched by the wind. He held an “en garde”, waited, then began, gradually, to fight. His sword flicked occasionally, then returned to alert readiness after each stroke.
Something struck the Sergeant violently in the forehead, leaving a mark and fracturing the bone. He grabbed out instinctively, lost some skin to the outer wind, and snatched the object from the air. An eye. He held it in his hand.
Fifteen minutes, the wind stopped cold. Sound deadened, an anti-noise. The others were having their own experience, unrelated to his. He looked at the glass eye, and accepted the enemy’s gift before either of them could change their mind. It would be no fun, but was the only way to live.
It was a quantum interface. It hit hard, deep, into the bones, into the cells. The molecules of his body seemed to turn inside out and explode like jelly. Then, it was in his mind. He screamed against the pain.
“C’mon. I’m just a kid.” He tried to reason, useless. He found it, just for a second, the battle calm, an S-1 thing, not his. The brass ring of combat, he had never felt it. It was pure and real, then gone. It flickered in and out, through the agony. Hellish pain, then gaps of calm, back and forth with no control. He knew the calm could come by extreme pain, or fear, or love. Anything could take you there, if you could ride it in. If you could immerse into it. He knew theory, now he found reality. He had no choice but to immerse. The totality of the pain cut off any retreat. He fought on death ground.
The contrast magnified the pain. If it had been steady, he would not have suffered from the release and re-attack. But the calm was the best thing he had ever felt. He had had sex, General’s orders. But it was nothing like this. Pure bliss, pure pain.
“I must know what it means to lose what i love the most.” The line popped into his mind, and the pain stopped. He brought attention to the space again. He was a soldier. The chaos offered a thin rope of sanity. The wind blew, but only 150 km/hour approximate. He moved toward the box, and lost track. He surveyed. Sublime had gone into the corner, lay sobbing, and stared catatonically. Stress collapse. And something else; he flickered, not fully there. Dartagnan, sword drawn, fought…something invisible. The screams rose. The Poet was unconscious. LuvRay looked crazed, almost frothing with fear and another feeling the Sergeant could not name.
Thoughts came, so fragmented. Memory flashed, the old couple, he killed them this time. He changed, became harder, tougher, like the old Sergeant. Then he was back in the room, with the chaos, wind, colors, light, open box, and a baby bed. It was a shrinking prison cell. Get to the box.
Memory came, as real as anything. He was with Karl, on the ship. Karl lived, somehow, he saved his friend. He stopped the quantum ghost. He tried to make that choice, but he couldn’t see what it was. He watched Karl die a second time.
He was alone with the box again.
The wind had been easy. He could do the wind. And that dark wildsong bullshit. He could kick that aside. No problem. That was for amateurs. He could just bounce it, let it be noise, pop it off plates that he visualized his hands into for flashes of time. Bend the physical laws. It was easy here. He just had to use the wound’s own power. The normal laws were already twisted beyond recognition. He mentally blurred the wildsong away, constantly changing the particular tactic, as the wound broke each of his defenses. He grabbed a phrase and held it, rearranged the letters as a game. It blocked the other wildsong to hold one piece.
He watched Dartagnan peripherally engage with his sword. Dartagnan steadily increased his combat velocity, and the acceleration was accelerating. He increased not in a line, but in a curve, doubling his speed every 3 or 4 seconds.
The hallucinations, the chaos, the freak show were basic training, old school. He shunted it at the level of reflex, let the body do what it knew how. He stayed alert, played defense without analysis.
But the fractured time stuff was rough. He kept losing track of the room, kept falling into other situs, which seemed so real. Maybe they were. No simulator he had worked in had ever let him train in this. He saw different lives, knew he could make those choices, but should not. He needed to do something with this box. He almost blew back in time, had to shake off the time-wind. He had to be lean for that. He had to slide sideways, between the rips, slip between the winds. He stepped back towards the box, one step, when the time pushed him back. Right back into the room, he faced it. Somehow, he had to close that fucking box. If he didn’t, no one could.
Never let it get you back to the old couple. You will stay there if you go there, and this situation will be lost. ‘A light goes out in the world.’ The wildsong knifed into his consciousness.
He was in the center. Hazel let him stay. Memory built to reality, and he experienced different lives. No, get to the box. Too many lives at once, more than he can handle. The boy Sergeant fell to his knees, sobbing.
Wolf-fear.
LuvRay looked up, into the eye of a dark desert god. The thing he met had never had a home. It came from a fathomless blankness far beyond the extreme of man’s knowledge. For the first time, LuvRay could not smell the face of what he met.
wolf-fear.
He did not know if he wished to protect it, or to destroy it. He could not leave it alone. He could not speak at all. His guide was gone. He lost the direction to turn, where to go. LuvRay was trapped. He howled, not knowing why, unable to stop. Unable to tell if this beast was part of his pack, returned after being lost forever, or if it was the worst enemy he could ever know.
Unable to know if he should ally himself with that pain, or flee into death.
wolf-fear.
Images flooded his mind - buried alive, fire, drowning, swept away, pounding, water. He found the desert. He found the space.
Space.
No, too much space, all space, NO. Wolf-fear filled him – falling, hunted, packless, betrayed, wolf-love – find the pack, find the pack.
Pregnant woman and Karl, as a pup. But this box. He howled, and kept howling, howling and howling forever. Cradle, Karl, but what could he do?
The spirit blew through his mind direct, and he saw the Sergeant’s horrible task.
He bayed at the pup Sergeant, baying because he will fail, he cannot save Karl from this horror. Wolf love for Karl shot through him, wolf-fear for Karl. He must try. He will fail. Howling, he leapt upon the boy Sergeant…
…who stood as a man and cut his throat with the Swiss Army knife, lay the body down soft with the other. One clean stroke, deep, but no muscle. In at the artery, through the larynx, out the jugular. Surgical and perfect, it was a mercy-killing. He wanted to spare LuvRay what was about to happen, so he put him down quick, like a wolf should die.
Goodnight, wolf, we were ever your friend.
The wildsong hit him, fast.
I mourned you as I arrived, knowing before I remembered my name, that you would be first to die.
Wildsong - received as thoughts. He evaluated. He came in cold and blind. For a moment, he knew, took LuvRay’s life because of what he saw. That was all he knew now. The chaos took the knowledge. He forgot why he killed LuvRay. Perhaps there were no words. He could have knocked him unconscious with little more effort. Why hadn’t he? He wore the boy’s clothes, baggy pants, red sneakers, tight tank top, happy skulls shirt. He was choking, and cut it away with the bloody knife. A dog collar, Caesar sect written on it.
He was beyond any possible tactic, nothing stayed in his mind. He was buried in wildsong, a mental attack. Line after line, poem after poem, hundreds of lines at once knifed into his mind. It became his thoughts, inserted by hypodermic needles.
The Swiss Army knife, the crib, and the pregnant woman passed out in the corner, he knew what to do. He took a step.
What was happening? Where was he?
Hidden is the way into the wildsong. Find it in the chaos. Trident could find it. He cannot. Box, crib, woman lay in the room. Close the box. He fought to the box, and tried to close it. It was impossible. He strained, focused, tried with the will of an undefeatable soldier who never had a name. Broken Boy, he remembered, laughed, and pushed. He brought his mind completely into the task, became the box, and sought the other solution, the always present impossible odds second choice. He stabbed at the top, lost in the fury of battling a foe he could never defeat, could never even meet. The line of poetry knifed into his mind, driven by the storm, taunting.
Lose your mind, abandon your façade
you are not the soldier who wins each battle, you are the broken boy
i have named you, now surrender
Trident: “Boss, I got the big boss. He’s online.”
“Le fait, Sergeant,” the General said. “Deplace Karl sur le Boite. Je vous command. Find a way.”
They were gone, leaving behind the hard knife orders, toughest orders ever. Put a baby and a friend in hell forever, alone. No. It was still possible to find another solution. Not alone. If the pregnant mother goes with him? He rejected the option. Soldiers code, not that way.
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.”