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Introductory Text

A Man Arrived To A Duel With Only A Pen And A Piece Of Paper
Ben's Narrative Part 09 78th Post Posted 5 June 2016 at 02:08:00 EDT Link to original

I sat Karen up in the electroconvulsive tub and wiped the warm gel from her face and detached the breathing tube. Her head rolled back, her face glistening in the glare of the LED. I could see the shape of the skull clearly through the wet skin. Slowly, she pulled her head upright, blinking the goo from her eye lashes. "Heh. Hi. Hello. Hello. Can you hear this?"

"Yeah, I can hear you," I said.

"Wow. OK. It worked. Good," she said. Her voice was completely flat and surprisingly deep for somebody so scrawny. "I am here," she said, baring her teeth in what might have been a smile.

"Can you see anything?" I asked.

She opened her eyes wider and moved them around. "Yes. Persistent shapes," she said, pronouncing the word 'persistent' like a child.

"Can you see how many fingers I'm holding up?"

"No."

"Try squinting."

"Oh, right. That changes things. Hmmm... Two?"

She was right, except she was looking at a completely different direction than my hand.

"Great," I said.

Slowly, her knobby knees emerged from the gel, and she grasped them with her hands. It was a good sign for somebody in her state. It also showed that she knew some of the standard tests for emergents. We went through a few more of the tests and found that the treatment had worked well. She might even be walking soon. I got her out of the tub and washed her off and put her into some scrubs. She managed to sit upright on the table without leaning on anything, her bony arms set stiffly at her sides.

"Can I ask you a question?" I asked.

"Sure," she said in her deep, childish monotone.

"What is Q?"

"You want the whole story?"

"Yeah."

She took a deep breath. "OK. So, approximately fifty thousand years ago..."

She told me the whole story of Q as she knew it, from the beginning in prehistory, when the "hyperspace code" was inserted into the human genome, and she went all the way to right now and the so-called plague of the flesh. Her description of the plague explained what happened to poor Zhenzhen in her hygiene bed. It also explained the red butterfly thing I found the other hygiene bed.

If you are "reading" this, I guess you have access to her story as well. Hopefully she wrote down the whole history of Q because I honestly didn't understand it all and couldn't do it justice. If I had heard it on any other day than the day Atlanta was destroyed, I wouldn't have believed any of it. As it was, I just took it all in in a calm detached way, as if I was just listening to another delusional. I guess you'll be reading her story before any of this even happens, so you'll be inclined to believe it even less.

So, at that point, I asked her how she knew so much about Q, like what its plans were and everything. She said Q had recently stopped hiding anything from her and the other Bred soldiers. It was fully confident in its ability to win against them in any scenario. It no longer felt the need for any secrecy. I asked her why it had tried to kill her, and she said that it hadn't. It was planning to destroy Atlanta anyways. She had arranged for the assassin herself, an improvisation to get her out of the city more quickly. I asked her if her ability to see all those extra dimensions allowed her to see into the future. She told me that she could only see extra dimensions in the feedrealm. It allowed her fight against Q more effectively because she can process information on a different level.

She explained, "When you look at a digital picture, you can process a huge matrix of color values all at once. If you tried to process the same picture by looking at a list of color codes for each point, like R:101, G:254, B:017, it would take forever and be incomprehensible. For certain problems, I have the same advantage over you that you have over a guy reading a list of color codes on a ticker. I can see many things all at once. But I can only see extra dimensions in the feedrealm. Here outside the realm, there seems to be only three dimensions plus one timeline. I can't see beyond that. But I can imagine beyond it."

"So you can't see the future?"

"No. I can only imagine the future. I can imagine a lot of futures."

"Then why did you hire an assassin for yourself? I mean, that just seems like a really risky move. Like, something that was unlikely to pan out."

"Oh? I couldn't imagine many scenarios where it wouldn't have worked."

"Really? What if I had just been like, 'Fuck this, I'm out of here.'"

"Oh, come now. Nobody would do that."

"Nobody would do that? Almost everybody would do that! He had a gun."

"Wrestling over firearms is quite common."

"Maybe in feed narratives, but not in real life."

"You see stories about that kind of thing all the time in the news."

We argued about this point for quite a while. It was like arguing with an intelligent child who has no clue about the real world. Her view of real life had been warped by seeing only the sensational parts of it that managed to leak into the feedrealm. She seemed completely unaware of that most basic and fundamental fact of human life: that most of it is boring, that most of it is just waiting around, that people go through large portions of their lives tired and sleepy and wanting to lie down. I tried to convince her of this, but in her short time in the real world, she had experienced a murder, a drone strike and nuclear holocaust, so I wasn't having much success until -- lo and behold -- she got tired and wanted to lie down.

I helped her onto a gurney, and we made plans to head toward Plattsburgh in upstate New York. She said that the key to defeating Q was somewhere near there. Of course, she was lying to me, but I didn't realize it at the time.