The Wizards 1: Combat Wizard

by Jack L Knapp

  At least he got that part right; my attitude would have to improve a lot before it reached 'bad'.

  Lack of military courtesy, said the colonel. REMF’s use that like a club; courtesy from you, a means of domination for them. He was just getting warmed up and he wanted the name of my immediate superior.

  Maybe he intended to threaten my career. Fat lot of good that would do him! Or send me a buck-slip requiring that I reply by endorsement, RBI. The junior writes, his immediate supervisor sees the report of the confession-of-sins and endorses it before sending it forward.

  Paper equals reward; it also equals punishment to REMF’s.

  I let the diatribe rolled off my back like so much water off a goose, but finally it began to get through to me. The colonel advanced from minor annoyance to irritant.

  While I’d been riding back in the HMMVW with Kaz and Santos, this asshole had been drinking coffee and peeking at the female soldiers in his office. Or maybe the males; it happened. I’d helped pick up broken bodies before I’d looked for Kasinsky’s missing leg, and I hadn’t found it.

  Now this REMF lectured me on my attitude and dirty uniform. Don’t like the bloody spots, colonel? I don’t blame you; I’m not very pleased with them either.

  I thought of killing the bastard. The thought was satisfying. I could do it. It would be easy; just reach out and feel for the heart, beating just beneath the ribs. I would only have to squeeze it a little bit. There would be no external bruises, just a heart attack that killed another desk warrior.

  I could do it, and an autopsy wouldn’t find a thing. Do it right, he would be unconscious first, dead in seconds; or I could just leave him in a condition to be medically retired. Heart attack or stroke, both were commonplace.

  I could choose either option, the medical-retirement part had a fair chance of working. I would have to take it slow, be careful, but I could do it. And if he died instead, well, no one would know. Probably the Army would be better off anyway.

  It wasn’t worth it, though. Killing this asshole wouldn’t bring my guys back. I knew that consciously, but it was a struggle not to let the other, darker, thoughts dominate.

  I answered an occasional question while all this was running through my mind.

  “I work for Convoy and Patrol Support, Colonel. Major Stevenson’s in charge.”

  Well, he is. At least he processes the paperwork and puts my name on the patrol roster; someone considerably more senior than a major detailed me to first to an infantry headquarters, eventually to this compound as an intelligence and security technician, read patrol leader. None of them really knows who or what I am.

  The colonel absorbed my answer while I thought about killing him.

  Maybe just change his attitude? There was something else, something less than lethal; I’d done it at the School when I was just learning my new capabilities. It was a way to control my abilities and at the same time play with the wonderful new toy my training had given me, this PK Talent.

  I could be calmly talking to someone and working on pranks at the same time. Start them itching; take control of a few hairs, slowly wiggle them, make the other guy itch and twitch and lose concentration. Anyone with even a small amount of PK could do that. I had discovered the ability when I became a victim of someone else’s minor, unreliable, Talent.

  I reached out to the Colonel.

  His nose twitched. I held my mouth straight with an effort; the little hairs inside the nostrils are very sensitive.

  The colonel sneezed.

  I slowly ramped up the itching. I caused the small muscles under the skin of his jaw to twitch. It's easy, just press on the nerves, then release. His mouth opened. He paused, trying to regain control.

  I pulled on his earlobes, gently, first the left one, then the right one. He brushed his ear with his hand, but found nothing there.

  His expression went from calculated anger to puzzlement. I kept my eyes focused over his head, suddenly the very model of a proper junior getting an ass-chewing. The glee I felt was internal.

  The other thing I’d done in school was locate the muscles and blood vessel structure of the anus. This one wasn’t quite so easy since he was sitting behind his desk, but I managed. I squeezed, constricted the muscles a bit and let the sphincter get used to the new tension, then relaxed the muscles suddenly.

  It could be funny to you but embarrassing for the victim, especially if the group included women.

  The Colonel farted, noisily. I wrinkled my nose, making the gesture obvious.

  He glowered, losing track of his verbal assault. I was feeling better; this was the best stress-buster I’d found in a long time, much better than alcohol. I would remember this incident and grin next time I tried to sleep. Maybe I’d dream of this instead of that little girl.

  Colonel Minot concentrated on the venom he’d not had a chance to release, getting back on track. Follow the script, colonel. I don’t mind waiting.

  “…impersonating an officer; hell, impersonating a soldier! If you can’t be one, at least you can try to fool the rest of the soldiers who work…”

  The colonel was back in fine form. This speech had been rehearsed; he’d practiced it often enough on hapless subordinates.

  I ramped up my counterattack. I hadn’t gone past making others fart before, but I was irritated now, even if I couldn’t show it. Those blood vessels that line the anus….

  The Colonel suddenly stopped talking, almost yelling truth be told; he got a pained look on his face. I had to really work at holding a neutral expression this time, while he squirmed in his chair.

  Ah, hemorrhoids…squeeze the veins, do it three or four times, they stretch. And itch, oh yes, they itch. Think three or four hemorrhoids all at once; the itch becomes pain. Squeeze, relax, let the blood pool in the newly enlarged cavity, then squeeze hard.

  Hemorrhoids are us, colonel. Enjoy the lasting memory.

  “Dismissed!”

  I rendered a letter-perfect salute and this time I held the salute until he returned it. I executed an about-face and exited the room, closing the door gently behind me.

  Finally, I could let a grin cross my face. He was, and he got.

  Pain in the ass.

  Chapter Four

  I drifted after high school, no job, few prospects.

  I had a few friends I played video and role-play games with, and I did a little gambling to keep myself in pocket money. But I was essentially homeless, crashing on someone's couch when they hosted a game night, mooching a meal and a place to stay when no one was gaming.

  It was a poor excuse for a life, and I couldn't see a better future ahead.

  I had gained a reputation for being too lucky, so my friends soon refused to gamble with me. I figured it was skill; there was no need to cheat. We were playing with their dice and their cards, and even when they dealt or threw the dice, I won more often than I lost.

  It was simple; I'd learned to trust my hunches whenever I got one. As a result, even carefully-laid poker traps didn't work and I seemed to instinctively know when it was time to quit. I also instinctively knew when I was over my head, playing against professionals. You can lose your head if you play against the wrong guys and win.

  By the time the recruiter approached me, I was ready for a change.

  #

  The agency, one of those three-letter government entities, had received a lot of publicity over the last few years, very little of it good. As a result, they were under a lot of pressure and willing to try different approaches. They also had the money to fund the new and unusual methods that might lead to improvement, even some that might be considered wacky.

  Someone at the agency came across the work of an investigator named Joseph Banks Rhine.

  A biologist by training, Rhine had become fascinated by reports of abilities not explainable through ordinary science. He began investigating, established a lab at Duke University, and published books that dealt with his findings. He was arguably the first to put the attempt o
n a scientific footing, but he wasn't the last. Even today, the research continues. Some of the people involved are hucksters and frauds...but not all.

  That agency official wondered: was it possible, using methods that hadn't been available to Rhine, to take his research to the next level? Could such things as telepathy or precognition be made reliable enough that the ability would be useful to an agent?

  The agency decided to try.

  Records describing what Banks had found, the methods he'd used, and various documents describing similar efforts by other investigators had been collected. Building on this library, a program was designed that used new developments in artificial-intelligence programming of advanced computers as a basis for teaching what had never before been taught.

  The theoreticians came up a method that used positive reinforcement via direct computer interface, the 'helmet'. Contact points were placed in the helmet's plastic when it was fitted to the individual user; brain waves were sampled by the computer using those contacts, reinforced, then fed back to the user through the helmet. In addition to the contact points, the helmet had a faceplate screen where graphic symbols adapted from Rhine's original experiments were flashed. The computer sampled the student responses to the stimuli, then reinforced them.

  The direct flow of communication between the computer and the student, directed by programs that ‘learned’ while the student did, caused each program to morph during use until it was eventually suited to a single individual. Whatever path that person’s brain discovered, that was what the AI selectively emphasized.

  The program was ready; there was a School with banks of computers and helmet interfaces, an AI to direct the learning. But who should be the students?

  A few experienced agents were sent but they soon dropped out, not suited to this kind of learning. Abandoning the investment before it paid off seemed unwise; a lot of money had been spent, throwing it away could easily lead to Congressional investigations..

  The School's interim directors, so named because a permanent director hadn't yet been appointed, concluded they should try another approach. They would look for people who already showed promise in some special way, recruit them and see how they reacted to the curriculum. Instead of trained agents who might become paranormal communicators, the revised plan was to develop the telepathic ability first, then train the paranormals to be agents.

  The School’s recruiting department, really a sub-department of the Agency, had been busy, even while the first students were making a hash of their time under the helmet. They developed a net-search ‘bot and used it to look for the kind of people the new guidelines sought. Modified from the same search engines used by information providers, this ‘bot crawled the Web looking for anyone who was too successful. Whether video games, gambling, or any other result not explainable by skill alone, the ‘bot searched. I was one of the people it found.

  It all sounded wonderful, so I jumped at the chance. I would be one of the first to attend the School.

  The new group, pre-selected for aptitude, had immediate success. Not surprisingly, there was considerable variation in the results; some barely showed improvement, but others became Talents, people with the reliable paranormal abilities the program had been designed to create.

  Not all the Talents were what the School's directors wanted.

  #

  I enjoyed the challenge, at least in the beginning. The School's structured environment appealed to me, even though the headaches began as I finished my first session under the helmet. The pain was bad, but endurable, never enough to make me quit. I forced myself to keep going; the alternative was to go back to drifting along. The School offered me a chance to do something, maybe to be something more than I'd been. Not all pain is physical. I toughed my way through the headaches.

  I became a marginal telepath almost immediately but never progressed beyond that level; something seemed to be missing. I reached a plateau and for whatever reason, that was as far as I could go.

  But if my TP wasn’t improving, I had discovered another Talent so the directors kept me in the program. Even a partial success was welcome after the failures of the initial group.

  One of the first Talents to manifest itself was a form of PC, precognition; my hunches, a kind of feeling that a prospective choice was right or wrong, got stronger. The skill wasn't great, about the same level as my TP, but far better than most normal people have. I couldn't predict the future but the hunches were more reliable amd they came more often than before. I told no one about this, possibly because I had a hunch that said 'don't'; I just felt like I didn’t want to tell anyone at the School, so I didn’t.

  My strongest Talent, the one I told the School about, was PK, psychokinesis. Some call it telekinetics, but I think PK is more descriptive. That ability revealed itself early and unlike the other Talents, the PK kept on growing.

  I learned to move objects using mental power alone. It's a question of visualizing relationships, then changing them. The process requires energy but only a little of it comes from me; the rest appears to be ambient energy that my brain channels to change the relationship between objects. Words don't work very well to describe the process, and it takes longer to tell about it that it does to do it.

  I could barely move a pencil around in the beginning, but the ability was immediately reliable. It was always there when I wanted it and it soon became as automatic as moving an arm or grasping with fingers. It also got stronger with use. Soon I was moving larger, heavier things.

  The headaches got worse after every session but the results were so astonishing that I worked my way through the pain. I learned to relax after a practice session in a darkened room, a cool, wet towel across my eyes. The lack of visual and aural stimulation helped. Medications barely helped and their effect quickly wore off; I had no idea at the time why that was so, it just was.

  Mainly, I toughed it out when the headaches came and kept trying. I got stronger.

  There are still limits to what I can do but I’m stronger than anyone else the School produced. Unlike the others, my strength has kept on growing with practice. The School's administrators would probably be much more impressed with my abilities now! Not that I was going to tell them. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me.

  #

  Hunches, my version of precognition, made me wary; I realized that all this expensive computer time wasn’t being provided for me but for the benefit of the agency. At some point they would expect payback, and that return on investment might not appeal to me. I was as naive as anyone who just fell off the turnip truck, but I hid the PC ability, revealing only the PK and my limited telepathy. I didn't want to be dismissed from the School before I'd learned everything I could.

  I had no idea of what my limits might eventually become, but I worked my way through the pain and came back for more. Simply put, I was hooked; the new abilities were so marvelous that I would have endured far more pain rather than give them up. There might even be new, undreamed of, Talents!

  So I cooperated with the administration while they tried to find something I could do; after all, I had no better ideas than they did. What else would I do if I didn’t work for the agency after graduation, become a professional gambler? Boring, if you have a strong hunch about what cards the other guy’s holding, or if you can affect the fall of dice or a roulette ball. Do it to make pocket money if you must, but otherwise it’s a waste of your life.

  There was a permanent administrator by now, a former Army officer who liked to be addressed as 'General'. He decided to see whether I could use my abilities in a stressful environment. The Army in Afghanistan was expected to provide that.

  Some of this I figured out long after the fact, when my naiveté had been worn away by events.

  #

  If the colonel had ignored me, I’d have gone back into the woodwork after my third drink. But he hadn’t; ignoring junior officers wasn’t something Colonel Minot did.

  What with the nightmares, I’m ab
out six months behind on sleep. Had he not come in, I’d have headed back to my CHU in another few minutes.

  That's what I did after leaving his office; maybe I could sleep now. But I kept thinking, wondering, as I sought sleep.

  Maybe I’d gone on my last mission; had the office followed orders from someone more senior when they took me off the patrol roster? Was it simple SOP, standard operating procedures, to take someone with my time in-country off the list? But I had since dropped through the cracks; I now had no duties, and apparently the Army had no orders to send me home.

  A possible explanation occurred to me. It might have happened because the Army doesn’t maintain my records other than pay and a skimpy 201 personnel file. The School and that three-letter agency have the only records that really matter, and I couldn't ask them what they had in mind. There are three different layers of bureaucracy between the agency and me, and since I have no way to directly contact them, I was stuck in my own kind of purgatory.

  Maybe the agency didn't want to bring me home. Maybe they’d lost interest in me; I was, after all, a disappointment. Had they hoped I'd be killed over here, thereby tidying up a loose end? If so, my being taken off the patrol roster had interrupted that plan.

  I’d done what they sent me to do, served a year in combat and reported back kkkkon the effectiveness of my Talent. It would have been nice if they'd let me in on their thinking now, but maybe they had reasons to keep those thoughts secret.

  Did they intend to just leave me over here?

  Was this paranoia? Maybe so, but as the saying has it, even paranoids have enemies. Was this another side effect of the PTSD?

  In a sense I’d regret departing, whenever it happened. I’d be leaving guys behind who’d gone on patrol with me, plus a few thousand others I’d never met. Like me, they were stuck here a long way from home among people who hated us.

  The locals hated that we hadn’t been born here, hated that we didn’t believe the way they did, hated us for being here. If they had one overriding wish, it was for us to go home, and the sooner the better. I sensed that hatred even more than other soldiers did. My Talent for empathy wasn’t full blown, but even so I felt the wash of bad feelings surrounding me whenever I was around locals.