Witchblade: Talons

by John Dechancie

  “It hasn’t been easy, Joe. It hasn’t been easy.”

  “Albert, I want to talk to you about my girl, here. Pezzini. She’s a fine officer, Albert. One of my best. Now, she’s a little what you call unorthodox. You know how these kids are today . . .”

  Seltzer and Morrison looked at each other, and in unison heaved a silent internal groan.

  The room hummed. It was a quiet sound, a soft electronic purr. The room was underground, and the location was secret.

  Mr. Irons’s car had picked Merlin up. Merlin had been blindfolded, as usual.

  He sat typing at a console that looked no different from a dozen similar in the room. Only the technician was extraordinary. He knew exactly what he was doing.

  The Macro-Economic Modeling and Simulation Array sat behind him, occupying the central space of the polyhedral room. MEMSA was a thing of polyhedrons itself, composed of wedding-cake tiers surmounted by a top-most hexagon. A few tiny lights shone on its surface here and there. It was a real, as opposed to a movie, supercomputer. No patterns of dancing lights, no odd screens showing flashy nonsense. Its color was black, and it loomed darkly efficient over its various workstations. It seemed demanding, unforgiving. Mercilessly precise.

  Merlin typed away. He understood the machine as did no other technician in the facility. Machines had individual personalities, he believed, just like people. You had to get to know a machine. It had to get to know you. That went double for this particular machine and its highly sophisticated architecture. It bestrode the demarcation between smart machine and true Artificial Intelligence. No one really knew where it stood exactly with respect to that line.

  It was of Japanese make, something so new that few engineers in the States had had a chance to take a look at it. Applications for the machine were largely nonexistent. It was in fact so new and so sophisticated that funds for the project that had produced it had gone dry, victim of recent Japanese economic doldrums. The programming for it had been relatively basic until Merlin had been given a chance to work with it.

  He was proud of his accomplishments. The screen was showing some very interesting stock data from European exchanges, of great potential interest to day traders, data that shouldn’t be available in real time. Or at all, really; not according to law.

  The entrance door slid open and Kenneth Irons walked into the room. There was a look of quiet satisfaction on his face. On his way over, he passed his left hand lovingly over a smooth surface or two. “Merlin. Good evening.”

  “Mr. Irons. You should see this.”

  Irons came up to the workstation and bent over slightly. “Interesting. Wherever did you get that Ultra-High Level day trading screen?”

  Merlin shrugged. “Cracked it, brought it in.”

  Irons chuckled. “Excellent. But we’re not going into the day trading business, are we? I assume you’re just flexing your muscles.”

  Merlin hit some keys, and the esoteric stock-trading tool disappeared. “Yeah, that’s all.”

  Irons straightened up. “Playing the market is fine and there’s money to be made. But we’re going to make money the old-fashioned way. We’re going to take it.”

  Merlin’s turn to chuckle.

  Irons stood and took in MEMSA. “Now, the machine’s modality is still purely passive at this point?”

  “It’s still lurking. No one knows it’s here. No one will ever know.”

  “No way for anyone to access, I take it?”

  “No chance. No way to log on.”

  “It’s complete isolated, yet infinitely sensitive to all the data conduits to which it is connected. Right?”

  “It’s a big sponge, soaking up the world’s economic data.”

  “And once we perfect its active functions, this great bird will be able to dip its beak into every single transaction in the economic universe.”

  Merlin laughed openly. “You have a way of slinging the . . . inflated rhetoric.”

  Irons turned his head slightly. He was not irked. He smiled. “I admit it. I’m excited by this project. There’s only one other lifetime ambition that could get my endorphins flowing this freely.”

  Merlin said, “I don’t know about every single transaction. The main ones, sure. We’ll be slicing baloney so fine . . . well, hell, Mr. Irons. There wouldn’t be more than a penny missing in any one account after a trillion transactions. That’s cutting it thin.”

  “Splendid. Very, very good. I’ll be able to drop all the middle-men, such as your former employer, Mr. Kontra.”

  “But for the moment you’ll still be dealing with the Organizatiya, along with all the other wiseguy groups?”

  “I’m negotiating with Kontra’s successor now,” Irons said. “No problems. He’s being very cooperative.”

  “You be the man, Mr. Irons, after we go online with this baby.”

  “When, Merlin? Can you give me a timetable when MEMSA can go completely operational?”

  “Oh, give me a few months more to sandpaper some stuff, get out some of the bugs. You know this is a thoroughbred computer. I love the way it interfaces easily with just about every platform known to man and Gates. Speaks every language, knows every protocol, and what it doesn’t know, it learns.”

  Walking around the big thing, Irons continued admiring it. “You think it’s sentient.”

  “I think it’s learning. It’s a baby. Well, a kid. An adolescent.”

  “Interesting. I wonder . . . isn’t there something called a Turing Test? Some rubric by which to ascertain true intelligence?”

  “Yeah, theoretical as hell. I don’t believe anything definite would come by such a test. You gauge intelligence as you would judge a work of art. I think intelligence is art, and vice versa.”

  “Interesting notion. Off the subject . . .”

  Merlin looked up. “Yes, sir?”

  “You mentioned meeting Sara Pezzini. The detective.”

  “Oh, was that her name? I don’t think she told me.”

  “From your description, there’s no one else it could have been. That was an extremely captivating story. From it we can assume that something paranormal has entered the picture.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Do you have any idea how it could have been introduced?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. I dabble in magic myself, but I don’t do dangerous stuff.”

  “You don’t strike me as the dangerous type. Nevertheless, your former boss is dead of something that crossed the barrier between the mundane and the phantasmagoric.”

  “It wasn’t me. I just put a mild curse on him. And his goons. They roughed me up one too many times. They think you can force a mind to think.”

  “They’re thugs,” Irons said. “And thugs run true to form. You were right to leave them without notice. They treated you abominably, judging by your reports.”

  “I appreciate your treatment of me, Mr. Irons. I’ll be forever grateful.”

  “It’s nothing. But let’s get back to this paranormal element. What sorts of magic do you dabble in?”

  “I’m about as eclectic as you can get. I have a CD of 5000 books on magic, the occult, mysticism, and hermetic tradition. It’s a lot of stuff. I’m a student, really, not an adept. At least not yet.”

  “We’re all still learning,” said Irons. “But you say you put a ‘mild curse’ on Kontra. On his henchmen as well?”

  “Well, yes, the ones who beat me up. But it wasn’t black magic. It wasn’t a death sentence. I messed with their karma. Their energy patterns, their material world lines.”

  “Well, it’s still all very strange, what you told me. The B-movie aspects, the improbability of it all. I’ll have to give it a great deal of thought.”

  “What does this detective have to do with anything?”

  Merlin said. When Irons’s hesitation became apparent, he added, “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “A complicated subject. Actually, her involvement piques my interest more than does the monster rall
y. All in the fullness of time, Merlin. All in the fullness of time.”

  Merlin went back to typing.

  The big machine hummed quietly as Irons walked out.

  “Now where did I put those directories?” Merlin said to the empty room as the door slid shut. He kept hitting keys, becoming increasingly frustrated.

  “Hey,” he suddenly said. “Where the hell did that come from? How did it get—?” He leaned back and gave the situation some thought.

  Presently, he said, “Uh-oh.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  The library’s catalogue computer was simple to operate, but that also meant it was next to useless. Sara had put in MAGIC as the subject key word, and the machine had spewed out hundreds of titles. Better to narrow the search. What had Merlin talked about? Kabbala? Spelled with a K or a Q? The latter yielded little, so she tried K, and got about two dozen titles. The public library system had a lot of books.

  She checked back to the call desk and found two titles she had previously requested. She picked them up, found an empty table, and sat down to read.

  She read the introduction to one book. It made no sense whatsoever. She looked at the diagrams displayed. Groupings of little circles enclosing Hebrew script, all interconnected by lines. Clear as mud. She flipped through the other book. No help there. She read through a few pages of text and tried to divine the meaning. She was not sure there was any meaning to divine.

  No, no. This stuff was extremely interesting and imaginative, but was of no use to anyone interested in the merely rational. Her situation was curiously ironic. There she was, sitting around with a magic talisman (for lack of a better term) on her wrist, and she couldn’t make head or tail of any of this magic stuff.

  She tried other books purporting to treat of the subject of the occult. They were all of a piece. They seemed to assume the reader understood the terms used in the text; however, there were few if any definitions or explanations of what the terms could mean, and those few offered tended to be conveniently obscure.

  The historical books were interesting. She read through sections on magic in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Israel, Greece, and Rome. She surveyed books on Gnosticism, alchemy, and divination. After going though the Arab philosophers and other medieval figures such as Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, she leafed through tomes on witchcraft and black magic. Also interesting were Nostradamus, Paracelcus, and the Christian Kabbalists. But none of this yielded any understanding of what was going on in her life.

  A flicker of green hit her eye and she jerked her head up quickly. The computer screen at a nearby table glowed strangely. She watched it for a moment. It did nothing, but she could swear that it had flashed a green pattern. A familiar one, at that.

  She shifted her eyes back to a discussion of the Rosicrucians.

  Another flash of pale lime green. She didn’t like being flashed.

  She moved to another table, but after reading for a while, she became aware that a laptop was sitting directly behind her at the next table. It was open and whoever it belonged to had left it unattended, not a good idea in this city of petty pilferers. The owner was naïve or just carelessly absent-minded. Whatever the case, the damned thing was flashing green patterns at her, behind her back. At least she thought so. Maybe she was just getting para­noid. Yes, that was it. She was definitely getting paranoid.

  She moved anyway.

  By the time she had to go back to the catalogue computer, she had forgotten about it. She did another subject search on OCCULT, got mostly the same listings, and then tried PARANORMAL.

  ESP, UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness Monster. The strange thing was that most of the books seemed to assume, more or less as a starting point, some reality to the phenomena they presented. There existed a skeptical literature, but it was skimpy by comparison to the true believer corpus. She noticed that Atlantis figured into a lot of this stuff. She dumped out of the catalog and went on the Internet to get what was available on Atlantis, the lost continent.

  Faces.

  She hit the ESCAPE button repeatedly, but that action did not get rid of the faces, the bland, faceless faces she had seen that night her laptop had suffered a fit of the heebee-jeebies, faces that sat atop robed bodies, all standing in groups staring out from cyberspace at her. She wasn’t paranoid; there was no doubt it was her they were staring at her with those vacant eyes, jaws slack and loose. Rounded, moonlike pale faces that did not move, did not register emotion. They had an artificial cast. Perhaps they were not faces, but masks.

  “What do you want?” she asked of them, the beings on the screen. “What do you want of me?”

  She slammed the mouse until she got a conventional screen. Ye gods, could these creepy guys have their own web page? Why not? Everyone else in creation did.

  Maybe she should get her own web page, so anyone interested could log on and ogle the pictures she’d put up. Nude, maybe. She could charge by the download.

  Internal Affairs would love that. They’d get her for international soliciting.

  She took off for the open stacks to search the shelves for more books. The stacks seemed to go on forever. From the main aisle, she could not see their end in the shadows. Row upon row, shelf after shelf of dusty hardbacks. More books than anyone could read in ten lifetimes, perhaps more. Sometimes she got the idea that not only was there more knowledge than any one person could absorb, but that no one really knew how much knowledge actually existed. Not only are we ignorant, we are ignorant of how ignorant we are.

  Flicker.

  First flashes, now flickers. Well, she’d heard of hot flashes. Now these were hot flickers.

  Whoa, steady girl.

  She forced herself to focus and analyze what she was experiencing. It was as if someone were switching between two TV monitors, each with a shot of the same thing but in two different locations. One, the stacks as she saw them now. The other, stacks in a library somewhere else, some eldritch and unheard-of depository where books were huge, dusty ancient tomes with intricately tooled leather covers.

  Flicker. Flicker.

  She walked on despite her uneasiness, watching somebody riffle the deck of reality. The alternate tableaux began to acquire some duration. The musty books flickered, disappeared, and flickered back. She reached to touch one. It disappeared, replaced by a conventional book. Again, a flickering. She reached once more and ran her hand over . . . it was not leather but the skin of some infinitely soft, infinitely alien thing. She shuddered and rubbed her fingers.

  Masks appeared in the shadowed aisles. Groups of masks. The faces, the mask/faces, staring vacantly. They moved like ghosts, drifting over the quartz floor slabs.

  She was no longer in New York. She was in another city, and this city’s library had stacks as high as skyscrapers. They towered above, packed with artifacts all the way: scrolls, ledgers, tablets, steles, notebooks, parchments, stones, and boards, all bearing writing of some kind. And books, endless volumes in intricately crafted bindings.

  She moved through the stacks, avoiding the advancing forms that confronted her. She turned corners and ran, stopped, cast a look behind. Ran again. She found an aisle and scurried down it, expecting hands to reach out from the shelves and drag her into their depths.

  The flickering had stopped. She was in the alternate reality, and the reality of her experience was only an occasional flashback.

  She saw an end to the stacks, an open area, and sprinted for it, and when she ran out into its vastness was shocked that the ceiling was lost in mists above. The place must have been seventy stories high, a vast atrium. Her footsteps echoed in droves, endless reverberations that bounced off lofty groined vaults and flying buttresses. She felt like an ant skittering through a medieval cathedral.

  Sara Pezzini.

  She did not know where the voice originated and did not want to look.

  Sara Pezzini.

  It was a voice that could not be human, its quality alien and remote and impr
obable. It could have been a synthesized voice; if so, was a synthesis of something that should not have existed in the first place. But there were human contours to it, and an underlying sense of something resembling emotion. The emotion was . . . urgency? Desperation?

  Sara . . .

  They knew her name, these specters, these eidolons, and she wished mightily that they did not. She didn’t want them in possession of something so vital a part of her. Her name was something sacred. Their very knowledge of it was a violation of some kind.

  She was overcome with a revulsion at these creatures, a gut-felt repugnance. She did not have a sense of evil so much as a sense of the complete absence of all that was human and natural. If any being could be unnatural, these creatures were.

  Demons?

  Why not? It was as good a word as any to describe them. But she thought it very strange that she got no im­pression of malevolence. Not like the Bird.

  Screeeeeeeee . . .

  Had she summoned the bird merely by thinking of it? She stopped and looked up. Something was flying in the place’s upper reaches, lost in gray fog of distance, a dark something flapping and fluttering, a vague shape, a blur of motion, a click of talons, and what emanated from this was a longing to swoop, to snare, to clutch, to rend.

  “Hi, there,” Sara said to it.

  Flicker.

  She was running through the lobby of the public library. She skidded to a stop. A few people were looking at her. She felt like an idiot.

  “You okay?” asked a tall black guy in passing.

  She nodded. Sheepish and not wanting to be taken for a schizophrenic on the loose, she walked as calmly as she could through the revolving doors and out onto the street.

  Sanity, always an issue with her. Perhaps the Witchblade was a huge bloc of symptoms, plain and simple, symptoms of a pathology that existed only in her mind.

  Why, why had she been picked to bear the Witchblade? Maybe she could discover the reason if she knew what the Witchblade itself was all about. Down through the ages, it had chosen its champions, and they had all been women.

  But perhaps that was all in her mind. Perhaps these transformations only existed in her perception, and everything that happened during them could be explained rationally. Maybe Kontra had been killed by a marauding bear instead of a werewolf.