Fifty Two

Bird had been chewed out before. This was mostly a symptom of being a headstrong person with a stubborn streak that was a couple of kilometers wide. She was used to this treatment and she took it rather well. Solomon, being king, had dibs on the first round of chewing out, and Fyndraxis had to wait his turn.
Bird and Lange had marched into the village around mid morning and they had gone directly to the throne room to inform Solomon. The rain had continued through the night, so they had showed up soaked to the bone and a bit road weary.
Lange had been welcomed back with open arms. He told Solomon of his capture and subsequent rescue. When the subject of how many Cannibals Bird had slain came up, Solomon changed his feeling on the matter. He dismissed Lange and told him to go and get some rest. He asked for Bird to remain.
“What in the everloving shit was that?” The King raged, “fifty Cannibals? Number one, I have no idea how you would have pulled that off, and number two, this will mean all out war.”
“Don’t you want that Solomon?” She snapped back.
“I would have liked a little bit of a heads up so I could have a plan,” Solomon grumbled, angrily.
“I was rescuing Lange like I was asked to do. If I had come back for reinforcements, he would have been long dead. Also, How many summers have you been making a plan for? Twenty? They aren’t going to leave us alone. I think you’ve turned coward,” she admonished.
The rage that Solomon was displaying before quickly vanished and was replaced by a cool rational brand of wrath that looked as if it was going to end in violence. He looked her dead in the eye.
“Get the fuck out of my sight,” was all he said.
She did exactly that. She gathered up Fyndraxis and headed back to her yurt, preparing for round two of getting chewed out.
Once they were safely inside the yurt, Fyndraxis piped up.
“Well, I was going to bitch you out pretty extensively, but Solomon did most of the yelling that I wanted to do,” the Daemon Sword spoke, “but a full explanation as to what the fuck just happened would be pretty handy?”
“Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Mycellus,” she confessed, reluctantly, “mostly while you have been hanging out with Solomon. A couple of days after we arrived I started to feel sick from the radiation again. I didn’t want to tell you, so I took the pill that he left. He wasn’t lying about it purely being a radiation treatment. Well, I mean it did signal my intention to him, but the pill itself was purely to help with the radiation.”
“I thought we were going to be honest with each other,” Fyndraxis said, still a little bit hurt by the betrayal.
“Yeah, well, I was on mushrooms when we made that deal. This kind of seemed like it was outside the scope of that agreement,” Bird stated, as a justification of her chicanery.
“I’ve been nothing but honest with you since we had our talk,” Fyndraxis thought that the view might be nice from the moral high ground, so he gave it a shot.
“Yeah, that was the idea,” she might as well have thrown a dumbass in there, but didn’t. It was an implied dumbass, “I didn’t trust you. I do now.”
“Alright, fair enough,” Fyndraxis resigned himself to the new state of the universe, “tell me more about what you’ve been up to with Mycellus.”
“I believe I could be of service in that regard,” Mycellus himself chose that moment to waltz in through the door complete with an umbrella that he shook politely outside the door not wanting to get water on the floor of the yurt. He trailed thousands of porcelain white mycelium behind him, but they too did their best to keep the floor dry.
“My apologies for not calling on you earlier, Fyndraxis. It seemed that Liberty wanted to play this one a bit close to the chest, as it were. She and I have had sort of a clandestine relationship, and it’s just been loads of fun living the life of a spy. I’m afraid that you are the only person that I can make James Bond jokes with these days, so we had to bring you in on the team. You see, I can’t decide whether I am M or Q and Liberty has absolutely no Idea what I am talking about,” he quickly turned his pale white skin into a pretty good rendition of a tuxedo to sell the joke, and then brought it back to its normal shade.
“Well, I’m glad you guys are having such a blast,” this glibness was beginning to annoy Fyndraxis as he was just trying to get some information, and he still wasn’t done being mad at Bird.
“All jokes aside, I have chosen Liberty as my Champion,” Mycellus informed the Daemon Sword, “this is not something that I choose to do lightly and I haven’t had to do it in a very long time.”
Fyndraxis tried to think of what Mycellus would consider a very long time.
“Now, I’m sure you are worried about me taking over her mind and turning her into a puppet,” he displayed some of the mycelium that tied him to his global network to sell the point, “but I assure you she will retain all of her faculties and agency. Even when she chooses to engage in unsanctioned operations,” he gave Bird an admonishing look, and it seemed like that was all the chewing out she was going to receive from this walking deity.
“My visit today will be mostly informational and for your benefit,” the deity continued, “though I will have a few questions at the end if you would care to answer them. You will want to know what Liberty is capable of, of course. And I can tell you that for all intents and purposes she is my agent upon this earth. For the power that I have granted her, I have asked only one thing. She must defeat the Wendigo. How she goes about this is her own business, but I of course am here for guidance and council. I am interested primarily in results.”
“I have a friend who wants to use the Wendigo network to escape certain death,” Fyndraxis said, as Bird leaned him against the wall of the yurt.
“Yes, Terra,” Mycellus intoned, thoughtfully, “Liberty has told me of her. She seems to be a creature after my own heart. I will grant her a limited domain. The Wendigo are a global phenomenon, if she were to inhabit the entire thing, she would end up being competition, and I can’t abide that.”
“What about me?” Fyndraxis pushed back, ”I’ve hacked some Wendigo and I am slowly gaining units.”
“With what I will be asking of you, I am willing to look the other way for whatever technological dalliance you care to pursue,” Mycellus decreed, in an off-handed placation.
“What exactly will you be asking of me?” Fyndraxis asked, suspiciously.
“Trust,” Mycellus said this like he was delivering a bit of good news.
“That’s going to be a hard one, no offense man, but you give me the creeps,” the good news was taken with a heavy measure of salt.
“None taken,” Mycellus continued, undaunted, “let’s get technical for a second. Liberty is now part of my network. I’ve wired young lady Liberty up. Her nervous system is now part of mine. She is part of my global mycelial network and has access to every sort of chemical, kinetic, informational and energetic resource that I can provide. She has the keys to the kingdom, to put it mildly. If she needs the life force drained from a number of men that she has deemed unsavory, I provide that service. What I would like you to do is act as a bridge between our shared nervous system and the world at large.”
“I’m not following,” Fyndraxis confessed.
“Liberty, would you care to explain our plan?” Mycellus passed off the meeting to his Champion.
“Sure,” Bird took her cue, “okay, so Mycellus is really good at talking to plants. Plants speak a language of chemical signals. What he does with them is basically what you are doing with the Wendigo that you have turned into your hunters. He skips all the bullshit and plugs directly into their nervous system so he can talk to their brains or whatever. From there he trades in sugars and information and makes a tidy living for himself. What he isn’t good at is using electricity to communicate. That’s where you come in.”
Bird held up her right hand. On her palm was a row of three dots that seemed to have been tattooed there.
“These things on my hand can act as a bridge between us, Fyn. You can connect to me just like you connect to the Wendigo through the…” she hesitated, looking for the word.
“GPIO?” Fyndraxis guessed, recalling the General Purpose Input/Output hardware that he used to bypass the Wendigo’s security protocols.
“Sure,” she continued, “if you can hook up to this and give Mycellus all the information you have on the Wendigo, he can decrypt their network traffic. He is an enormous global computer that processes information all the time. It probably wouldn’t even take him that long to do. Then you can use your radio to pull off whatever solution he comes up with.”
“That would mean he would have access to my operating system at a fundamental level. That’s not something I am comfortable with,” Fyndraxis shot this one down rather comfortably.
“Like I said, trust,” Mycellus chimed in.
“There isn’t anything you can do to make yourself feel safe about this?” Bird asked.
“There are some basic security steps that I could take I guess,” he thought through the process of limiting the sort of bad acting that could happen to him through this sort of connection. When he was dealing with the Wendigo, it was kind of a one way street informationally speaking, so he wasn’t all that worried about them hijacking his brain. This was more of an (and he hated to admit it because the metaphor was not only outdated but extremely lame to begin with.) information superhighway.
One thing he could do was make damn sure that Mycellus didn’t get his grubby little hands onto something powerful like a root login or be able to pull Fyndraxis’ md hack. If he kept things limited to his metaphor like when he was dealing with Terra, things should be pretty safe. The Idea still made him wildly uncomfortable, but if this was pulled off correctly it could mean an end to the Wendigo for good.
“Okay, fine,” he said, after pondering the subject for a reasonable amount of time given the implications of a god of death possibly waltzing directly into his brain, “I’ll give it a shot, but everything happens in my metaphor in a strictly controlled sandbox. Bird will be the only one allowed to enter. I don’t want to give you access to my operating system.”
“That is a reasonable request,” Mycellus said, seemingly satisfied, “this is a two way street though, if I find you poking around in my network there will be consequences.”
“There’s a little hitch in this plan,” Fyndraxis informed everyone in the yurt.
“And what would that be?” Mycellus asked.
“I have no idea how to bring Bird in over a GPIO connection,” Fyndraxis confessed.
“It sounds to me like you are in the market for a hallucination,” Mycellus observed, in wry amusement, “I can handle that. The translation of nerve impulses in Liberty’s hand into sensory information she can understand should be a breeze with some chemical encouragement.”
“She is less than trustworthy when she is on mushrooms. Sorry Bird,” Bird rolled her eyes in protest.
“What are you a DARE kid now?” Mycellus continued to be amused, “Ronald and Nancy would be so proud. I can induce a hallucinatory state without any sort of euphoria if you are so intent on being a narc.”
“Yeah. Fine. I’m a narc,” Fyndraxis said, sullenly, “I just don’t want her brain to be over easy while we are doing this.”
“Fair enough, Fyndraxis. Now, before we figure this out, I have a couple of questions for you. I am a true believer in free market economics, in fact I believe I started the whole thing. That means that goods and services are to be paid for at a fair market value. I have compensated Liberty handsomely for our arrangement. I would like to arrive at a reasonable benefit package for you as well. In other words, for this, your wish is my command,” Mycellus had knelt down before Fyndraxis like he was speaking to a small child. He had a way of actually making eye contact with the Daemon Blade that Fyndraxis found to be unsettling. Staring into Mycellus’ glossy onyx eyes, was like looking into the event horizon of a black hole. Behind those eyes was a hidden infinity that could never be revealed to the greater universe, forever shrouded in mystery.
“I want a body,” Fyndraxis snapped out of his reverie.
“Oh ho! I’m to be your Geppetto,” Mycellus chuckled, “this is a very tall order Fyndraxis. Making a body like the one I inhabit is quite expensive, and has a very limited window of use. I’m not sure that it would suit your needs.”
“Then make me one that doesn’t burn out so fast,” Fyndraxis negotiated.
“You’d give up immortality?” Mycellus asked through another chuckle.
“What? No. Immortal body. Do I look stupid?” Fyndraxis didn’t see this as a binary situation, if he were negotiating here, he might as well start high.
“I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t guarantee such a lofty goal,” Mycellus seemed to be lost in thought, “as powerful as I am, some things are beyond my control. Although, I am generally good at coming up with creative solutions. I’ll see what the boys down in R&D can cook up. I have done some experimentation along these lines to limited success, but have found the results a bit repugnant. It would be nice to have somebody to watch the sun swallow the earth with though.”
“You don’t have any immortal pals?” Fyndraxis asked.
“Sadly, no,” He exhaled, more as an expression than an actual biological function, “all my relationships end in tragedy.”
“What about the trees?” Fyndraxis wanted to peek behind those black eyes and get a glimpse of the vastness that they stared out from.
“They are individualists. I am a diversified collective. Similar beings to myself have cropped up a few times over the ages, but they all fell victim to market forces,” Mycellus continued his unsettling stare.
“Would these market forces be your champions by any chance?” Fyndraxis asked the growing blackness that loomed before him.
“Yes, most of the time,” Mycellus remarked, wistfully, “it’s just business though. The last one I had to deal with was rather nasty. A hitchhiker on a meteor took a shine to our planet, but our atmosphere wasn’t quite to their liking. They almost wrecked the whole show.”
“Was that about 65 million years ago?” Fyndraxis gave an attempt at understanding.
“Oh, heavens no,” Mycellus finally broke his double barreled infinity stare with a languid blink, “that one was a breeze. It was about 250 million years back. I believe your scientists called it the great dying, or the Permian extinction event. That was a close one.”
“Shit,” was all that Fyndraxis could manage.
“Shit indeed,” Mycellus stood up, “you’ve got me rambling about old times. I had a second question. What do you think of this Terra character?”
“I thought you said she was a lady after your own heart?” Fyndraxis asked, still trying to shake off this yawning feeling of proximity to the depths of an unknown sea.
“Yes, which immediately makes me question her trustworthiness,” Mycellus observed in wry amusement.
“Hard to tell,” Fyndraxis was finally getting himself back together, “she seems very earnest and honest. Her motivation seems pretty straightforward. I’d say on a scale of one to ten, I trust her about a seven.”
“Well, C’s get degrees, as the saying goes,” Mycellus quipped.