House of Cards: Chapter 3

The office of Mr. Jones is sparsely furnished this time.

Jones has learned many things as the head of the F.I.B. ‘Don’t drink the water’ barely begins to cover the myriad dangers of the work. The employee benefits of agents have the standard medical, dental, and life; they also include mystical, psychic, and temporal.

The biggest danger, in fact, comes not from the monsters of the unconscious collective but from one’s own workers, and thus Jones makes it a policy to randomly switch offices on a regular basis, and never use the same décor more than once a year; in other words, to always present a moving target.

In his moments of darkest humor, Jones reflects that this is only one aspect of his life which resembles trench warfare.

Currently the walls are bare, the desktop shows nothing but a small digital clock and two empty picture frames, and there are twelve different handheld weapons in the various desk drawers. ‘Aggressively seeking a promotion’ carries a whole different meaning in the F.I.B.

When the call came, Jones was filing his nails with a file which looked remarkably like a knife, which it was.

"Sir," said a voice from the speakers in the walls, "section three has just received new information on one of our hot groups."

"Which one?" Jones asked, still filing.

"The mountain group. A number of telephone calls have been made to them. Apparently their timeline’s been moved ahead."

Jones sighed and set aside the file. "How far ahead?"

"Bidding has reached twenty million. Section three says that their probable top bid will be twenty-five, assuming projected responses and costs."

"Meaning only a few days before they sell."

A light began flashing on the control panel of the desk. Jones frowned. "Give section three my compliments. I’ve got other matters." He tapped a key, and on the screen along the wall flashed the face of Mr. White.

"Hello, Jones," he said pleasantly, looking as dully cheerful as always. The agents of the F.I.B. cultivated a bland look, a simple and unthreatening look, and White had the look perfect, trim dark hair and thin high cheekbones, a pointless little smile on his lips.

Jones had, within days of first meeting him, come to hate White’s face.

White was, like most of the section chiefs, a former agent, someone who had once been on the front line and now was at the back. Profile said very aggressive, good with firearms and equipment, low marks in diplomacy, average in tactics, average reaction time, and very, very driven. History listed his father as being an agent himself, killed in the line of duty by what was probably a basilisk. Psych test said White joined out of a misplaced sense of duty, possibly even revenge, and carried a near-pathological desire for killing the supernatural.

Psych tests and histories, though, are not the man, as Jones has had to remind himself many times. All that matters, he tells himself, is that White is clawing his way to the top, and Jones is the top.

"White," Jones said without emotion. "Out of all the trials my day encompasses, tolerating your existence requires the highest pain threshold."

"Just as you contribute most to my chronic migraines, Jones."

"And yet you choose to communicate with me. Surprising." Empty threats, meaningless sentences. Each knows the other, and neither one will crack just yet.

"I just heard the news. The mountain group’s almost got its money." The smile broadened, just a millimeter. "I’m here just to offer the services of section five."

Jones stared, cold and hard, into the blankly staring glasses of Mr. White.

Why is he telling me this? Jones wondered. He knows I’ll need five to carry this out. Why call me? Why gloat?

Gloating means he knows something I don’t. Gloating means he’s got something on me. Gloating means he’s ahead of me.

It clicked, abruptly. White knows. The intel has just come through but White is already aware.

Section three. Intelligence gathering, threat assessment. Headed by Mr. Mason. Mason is on Jones’ side.

Was on Jones’ side, it appears.

White, courting favor for so long among the section chiefs, had finally drawn another one to his side. And section three was crucial.

White hadn’t stopped smiling. "Seven to six, Jones. The votes are turning. And there are no deadlocks."

"Remember that when the vote for your imprisonment goes through unanimously," Jones snarled, suddenly angry. He stabbed the key, and White’s smiling unsmiling face vanished.

So. Section three, too. Along with four, seven and nine. And the head of Personnel.

Intel is gone. Weaponry is gone. Tactics is gone. Budget is gone.

And Jones, as chief director of Operations, is feeling the ground shift beneath his feet.

The mountain group was known to be heavily armed, multiple guards, surveillance miles wide. It called for high threat response.

HTR was section five, White’s department.

Jones curses harshly. The intel he cannot trust advises him to call the department he cannot use.

But the threat is there.

Jones smiles suddenly, as the idea enters his head.

And he thinks: why not?

* * *

The phone rang suddenly, somewhere on the floor. Tim’s hand, without needing any prompting, jumped down and flailed about until it grabbed the receiver.

"Hll?" Tim mumbled, semi-coherently.

"Tim?" Katherine said, at the other end.

"Gdmrnng."

Kath sighed. It was Tim. He was the only person she knew incapable of using vowels before noon. "Tim, something’s come up. The Club needs to meet. Head to the assembly room."

"Whn?"

"Right now."

"Oky."

"Was that an ‘o’ I just heard??"

"N."

Kath sighed again, and hung up.

Tim fell out of bed, rolling across the bare floor. Tim had recovered from the loss of his material possessions, but he had not, as of yet, actually recovered replacements for the possessions themselves. All that was in his room was his computer, the phone, two of his posters which had mostly survived the fire, and a relatively thin but rising layer of Twinklies wrappers and Pippu cans.

Tim pulled himself together and headed for the bathroom. He took a shower (Tim’s showers are highly private rituals, and no outsider has ever been permitted to see one), shaved (not that it did any good), applied a fresh layer of zit cream, and outfitted himself in comparatively washed clothes.

Thus cleansed and as presentable as he ever got, Tim went to the assembly room and found only Rumiko there, pad and pencil in hand but making no move towards drawing anything whatsoever.

Tim stopped dead in the doorway. Something was wrong. Rumiko always drew. Rumy’s drawings were corrective lenses—it was impossible for her to see anything unless she’d sketched it. The only possible way to stop her would be to break her fingers.

Tim approached Rumy, cautiously—the way one would approach a case of nitroglycerin in earthquake country. If Rumiko wasn’t drawing, there was no telling what else she might do. He sat down in the chair next to her.

"Hey, Rum’," he said, as casually as he could.

"Hello, Tim," she replied, quietly, and then Tim knew something was terribly wrong. Rumiko always talked quietly, but not… this…quietly.

Tim realized that a bit of tact was appropriate. Tact or outright evasion, anyway. "You, uh, got here first?"

"Yes…I was the only one in the dorms."

"Where’s Will? And Rikk ‘n Alisin?"

Rumiko paused, and it was here that the hairs on the back of Tim’s neck began standing up, in a phenomenon that has less to do with static electricity than with sheer emotional tension.

"Will is with Rikk," she said, carefully and precisely, "and they are both with Alisin."

After a moment Tim said, "Oh."

"They are…at the hospital."

"Hospital? What?" Tim recalled Will coming in last night, saying something about the hospital, but beyond that… "What happened?"

Rumiko swallowed. "There was an…" She shook her head. "Alisin…she experienced…an attack…"

"Someone beat up Alisin?" Tim said, slightly confused.

Rumiko blushed, darkly, and bit her lip. "No…that’s not the word. She had…a seizure…some kind of violent pain…I do not know the details."

"A seizure?" Tim knew about Alisin’s condition, of course; the whole campus knew about it, or at least those that knew about Alisin in the first place. But something like this…she hadn’t ever needed treatment. At least, not for this…

Tim looked at Rumy, and sudden memory flooded his brain. Not for her disease, no.

The doors burst open, and in came Kath, something angrily defiant in her stride (well, more angrily defiant), followed by Will and an unusually subdued Rikk.

"He’s finally come," she said loudly, thrusting her arms wide. Katherine adored grand entrances.

"Who’s come?" said Rumiko, setting aside the sketchpad.

"Jones has." Katherine grinned, a grin both satisfied and grimly stoic, a complete distillation of her current mood. "He’s decided to test us at last. Tim, get the projector."

Tim thumped over to the closet and began rooting amid the dust and trash. Jones had, at their last meeting, given them an A/V projector with a satellite link to F.I.B. headquarters. Words like ‘plasma dynamic visualization’ and ‘wide-print low-freq transception’ were used to make exciting what was, basically, the F.I.B. phone.

Rikk took a chair one away from Rumy, who did her level best not to look at him, nor he at her, though neither one really knew exactly why.

Kath knew exactly why and sat between the two.

Tim pulled out the unassumingly black box and steadied it on the podium. On its own the projector began beeping and focusing the lens. Tim hit the lights…

It was a thunderingly awesome special effect, to have a micron-accurate image of Jones’ face burst into reality in air, magnified to ten feet by four and glowing with its own unearthly light. It also gave them all the creeping shivers.

"You’re not all here," said Jones. The voice even seemed to come from his mouth.

"Shanna can’t make it," said Rikk, " and Alisin is—"

"—detained," said Kath. "But they’ll hear about it. Whatever ‘it’ is."

"’It’ is a matter of international safety and security," Jones replied, his voice echoing slightly to match his otherwise gargantuan profile. "We have a situation on our hands—one which would tax even our organization, and thus demands your…special talents."

"Very flattering, Jones," Kath said, doing her damnedest to outstare Jones, "but it doesn’t tell us much."

Will tapped her on the shoulder. "You know," he whispered, "the whole ‘Dirty Larry’ routine isn’t really necessary here."

"I’ll be the judge of that," she whispered back.

"Six months ago, we became aware of a number of unregistered satlink transmissions coming from a site in the Rocky Mountains," Jones continued. His face vanished, to be replaced by a large-scale map of Colorado. "A few miles west of Denver, or thereabouts. The transmissions were scrambled, very low-power, and anything incoming was given a big enough footprint to cover several square miles. Outbounds were sent from multiple sources, each of which was burst-transmission, ambiguously directed, and changed from shot to shot—sometimes in town, sometimes five miles in the other direction. Even now, we’re not sure of their exact place of origin."

"What were the transmissions about?" asked Will.

Jones sighed, or at least exhaled loudly. "A weapon."

"A weapon?"

"A very large weapon. From their descriptions, a weapon ‘bigger than the Bomb’. Big enough to turn whole countries into puddles. And, specifically, the sale of this weapon."

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Tim whistled softly.

Rikk leaned forward. "And what is the connection to the F.I.B.?"

"Pardon?"

"From your description, this is just a classical weapon. Mass destruction and all that. Cut the green wire, leave the red alone. More of a job for the rest of the government."

Kath looked curiously at Rikk.

"I mean," he continued, "the F.I.B. handles the fantastic. The strange. The unexplainable. Not the Bomb."

"Early reports lead us to believe that this is a weapon of questionable reality," Jones said, a little gruffly. "A weapon which we are more suited to handle."

Will snorted at this.

"We believe that the sale will go through in days. We need to know where they are, who they’re with, and where the weapon is going. We need agents with experience in disguise and information gathering—agents who can blend in with the locals, get inside without ever having been outside. We need actors."

"You need us," said Will.

"Exactly. We can provide tickets, covers—whatever you need. There’s an F.I.B. storehouse in Denver; it’s got weapons, vehicles and other…accessories."

"Who do you want to go?" Kath asked in a knowing tone, remembering full well the bit about actors.

"I asked for your help because you have ingenuity. New ideas. Fresh perspectives. I’m not going to make any decisions for you. Decide yourselves, and call me." Jones formed, with difficulty, the faintest hint of a smile. "This is short notice. But then—" the smile became a smirk, "—we’re short-handed."

The image winked out.

Tim turned the lights back on. "Well, there ya go," he said. "He’s finally askin’ us fer help."

"Our first mission…" Rumy shook her head. "I can’t decide whether to be excited or dismayed."

"So who goes?" Tim asked.

Will raised a hand. "I’ll do it. I joined for the travel."

"I’ve decided to be excited," Rumy said, "and go with as well."

"Yeah. You’d fit in like a Clingon in a flower shop."

Rumy glared fiercely at Tim. Spoken by the world’s only mobile collection of trash, she thought, but did not say.

"Please don’t be offended, Rumy—but Tim’s right for once," Kath said. "We’ve got to be chameleons on this trip."

Rumy took a deep breath. Calm. Center. "You’re right." She ducked her head. "I…am not a chameleon. I shall stay behind."

Kath smiled apologetically. "I’ll go. And I’ll take lots of pictures."

There was a pause, during which everyone turned cautiously towards Rikk.

"I’m not going," he said slowly. "I can’t leave right now. Alisin needs someone. She needs me."

Kath patted him on the shoulder. "We understand. Will and I—we’ll be okay on our own."

"I know," Rikk said. "You’ll be fine. It’s just—"

He stared at his hands. "I just feel…helpless. I can’t—I have nothing to compare this to. This is—this is worse than last time. Last time it was just a bunch of bruises and a concussion—" Rikk stopped. His brain caught up with his mouth.

But Rumy was already running out the door.

Tim jumped up, grabbed her sketchpad and ran after her, because he saw the tears in Rumiko’s eyes.

Rikk could do nothing but watch him leave.

"Rumy—"

She was halfway down the hall, her hand tracing the walls, barely moving. She was sobbing, very quietly.

"Rumy, he didn’t mean it," Tim said. "Rikk was—he was a clod. But he ain’t always a clod."

"It wasn’t my fault!" she screamed. "It’s not me, it wasn’t ever me, I’m not to blame…"

Tim set his hand on her shoulder. "No," he said, "you’re not. He didn’t mean it, he’s just weirded out right now. It ain’t you. It ain’t anyone, ‘cept himself."

Rumy looked up at Tim. His big face was open, wide open, honest.

"Don’t get mad at him. I known him fer years; he’s never mean. The closest he gets ‘s tactfully annoyed. And he don’t even cuss then."

Rumy laughed, in spite of herself.

Tim held out her sketchpad. "Y’okay now?"

Rumy wiped her eyes. "I’m fine. I just needed…I needed someone to talk to, in plain English." She laughed again. "Or Japanese."

She reached for the sketchpad, and stopped. "Tim…why is your hand…red?"

Tim looked down, and then up.

Hovering above them, in a kind of subtraction of reality, was a brilliant red rectangle, two-dimensional from every angle, wearing only a pair of eyes, and glowing as fierce as the sun.

Rumy gasped. Tim could only stare.

The alien spoke then, in a voice that jumped into the brain without using any of the senses, a full-blown picture appearing in the mind, Athena in reverse. It was, very clearly, the idea of a question mark, but carrying with it metric tons of emotional weight, squeezing loss and love and rediscovery into its curves, a punctuation mark ten miles high.

"No…no," Rumy said, almost to herself. "Not now…not again…"

The alien swiveled its blank eyes to Rumy, and very distinctly spoke the image of an open door into both their heads.

A spray of reddish light began to fall on Rumy, and Tim grabbed her arm just before it grew too bright to see…

…and then they were on a mountaintop, a peak somewhere above fields and meadows of cotton-candy clouds, snow and cold flying everywhere about them but never actually touching any of the three.

And then the alien began to talk.

* * *

(

Editor’s note: this species of alien has contacted Earth before, and during their previous visit their peculiar mode of communication was remarked upon: they spoke, if one can call it speaking, entirely in pictographical representation. It was a true universal language, but mostly one-way, as people of any nation could understand them, but the only ones who could respond in the same fashion were artists, designers, and others who depend on pictures in their life.

Rumiko Tanaka is one of those few who speaks it fluently, and because of this she spoke to the alien in its own language. Tim Mitts, who witnessed the conversation, had the foresight to record the conversation on the pages of Rumiko’s sketchpad. However, since he was attempting to translate pure concepts into a more formalized language, in this case English, it was impossible for him to express all the layers of meaning and subtlety inherent in the ‘words’. His attempts are recorded below as the best—the only —substitute for the original.

It should also be noted that, without prompting, Tim gave the alien the name of ‘Frank’, a name which had been ascribed to it earlier by an unrelated observer. Whether this is merely a close approximation of its actual name or just simplifying things is unknown.)

FRANK: Greetings (friend/wife/mother).

RUMIKO: You…have returned (to us/to me).

F: Yes. I must (speak with you/warn you).

R: No. Time is (important). (Ambiguous: not enough time has passed? there is no time right now?)

F: I am (sorry/ashamed) (friend/wife/mother). But things (have/will) come to pass (here/everywhere)—

R: Where have you taken us?

F: Away. I must speak to you (in private/without distractions). (Please) hear me—

R: Why did you come back (to this world/to me)(implied: when I did not wish you to)?

F: It was not (my/our) choice. I was (selected/chosen/forced) to come.

R: I did not want to see you again (ambiguous: so soon? ever?).

F: What about your (son/daughter/child)?

(no answer)

F: (Ambiguous: what about us? why not us? what is between us?)

R: I have no wish to see (you/any of your race). These are (memories/experiences) which I (do not wish to/cannot) visit again (implied: because you have hurt me).

F: This is not about us. There are (matters/dangers) approaching. Things will happen (are happening? have happened?). There will come (combination/collision/convergence) to (you/your world) soon. (I/We)(have seen it/have feared it). (A final battle/the latest confrontation) between (ambiguous: ideas? beliefs? realities?)

R: Where? How?

F: Here.

Tim looked up from the pad. The mountain was gone, replaced by a parking lot, sparsely filled with vaguely expensive cars. A towering office building, probably over twenty stories, dominated the horizon. The corporate billboard out front read ‘QuanTech Industries—Where Reality Is A Buzzword’.

Before Tim could get anything more than this, the alien said something involving ‘inside’, and the world blurred like fog. When it reformed, they were in a room.

Half the floor was plain tile. Half the walls were simple white. Half the room was completely ordinary.

The other half was behind a glass wall and had featured prominently in Tim’s wildest dreams.

Every last inch of the floor, walls and ceiling was the stark white only possible through extreme decontamination and sterilization procedures—what could be seen of the floor, walls and ceiling, that is, as every conceivable piece of computer hardware filled the room, each bit elegantly simple in the way that says, "This is worth ten of you". They were hooked up in an astonishingly intricate network that, as best Tim could tell, ran every datum through every processor three times over, as fast as possible.

In the very center of the room was a pedestal from which every one of those wires sprung, and a single cord wound up to the top, where a squat box, the general size of a Rubik’s cube but only about half as tall, sat unassumingly, the cord running into one of a number of jacks on its side.

The alien spoke again, forcing an image of the box into their heads. Rumiko responded with the pictoral version of "that?"

The alien nodded, or came close enough. It gave Tim a headache every time it moved, as it was two-dimensional from every angle, and the slightest motion made the fabric of space and time bend in ways it was never meant to.

"He says that this is part of it," Rumiko said hesitantly. "At least, I think it is. It’s not very clear…"

"Why’d he take us here?" Tim asked. "I mean, I know ‘bout QuanTech; they been on the Foible 500 fer years—but all that stuff about realities ‘n convergence…what’s that got to do with it?"

Another short conversation followed between Rumy and the alien, but it moved too quickly and confusingly for Tim.

"He can’t be very clear about it," she said. "His people—they still kept an eye on us, even after they’d left. They saw something, something about to happen, something approaching…he mentioned patterns in reality, spirals, things rising to a point. Something like that is coming." Rumy waved a hand at the glass. "He says this is part of it."

Tim looked away, pressing his nose to the glass. The computers inside hummed softly to themselves, a veritable chorus, a symphony that had only two notes. It was like a testing setup, trying to check the work of that box in the center…probably a processor, from its size. But why would a processor have a shell like that? Or that many jacks? There was power, network, modem, plus a host of other, more specialized ones that Tim could only guess at.

And why hook up that many machines just to this one little box? That one room represented several million dollars’ worth of computer hardware, probably more. Probably billions. Enough gigaflops in that room to create whole new galaxies. In fact, by the very setup, it was as if the external machines were as powerful as just the box…

The alien noticed Tim’s stare and said something very specific. Tim blinked, more than a little surprised.

"You can do that?" he said, Rumiko translating.

The alien nodded again, and grew bright. Rumy drew behind Tim as best she could.

Beyond the glass, the box glowed for a moment, then vanished from the pedestal and popped into Tim’s hand. The sudden weight was a bit of a shock, and Tim nearly dropped it.

He almost dropped it again a second later, as the alarms went off.

"Whoops," he said. The alien said its own equivalent of Tim’s statement, and then the world went blank once more, clearing back on the mountaintop.

Tim held up the box to the light. The shell was just plain plastic, with exposed segment breaks for deconstruction. No labels, no vents, no brands or serials. The cord had been cut a bit raggedly near the jack in transport, exposing a thick bundle of fiberoptics. It was heavier than it looked, surprisingly so. Whatever was on the inside, it was densely packed.

Tim rubbed his fingers over the jacks. They came away slightly oily. It’d been recently repaired—or altered. Some of the jacks were for older protocols, obsolete by now, and the plastic edges of the newer ones looked like they had been rather quickly shaved. So it looked like it was several years old, and made more compatible with the addition of new system ports…

Tim looked up. Rumy was about to speak.

R: (Implied: I should) thank you.

F: I cannot stay long. I am only able to help you with this. There are many more (facets/problems/dangers) I (cannot/should not/must not) tell you about. (Ambiguous: can you forgive me?)

R: I understand.

(pause)

R: (Where is/how is) my child?

F: Look.

Rumiko looked.

For just a moment, space bent itself double and a world showed itself—a world of the aliens and their children, half-human—like gods, they were, luminous and tall—they walked, they floated, like both their parents—it was a crystal, looking only once but seeing a billion shards—one of the children looked back at Rumy—it raised its hand and spoke—spoke of love and recognition, of tranquility, of knowledge—the language was pictures, but—pictures with words—the final combination—

The window closed again, in the same instant it was open, and Rumy closed her eyes.

"Thank you," she whispered, and she did not know what language it was. She did not care.

The alien blinked its liquid eyes at her, and repeated the words, delicately tasting them, a connoisseur, sampling them.

It said them again, and this time it meant them.

The world was gray again, for another fraction of time and space, and then they were back. In the real world.

And Rumy was crying again. But smiling as well.

Chapter 2 Chapter 4