Path to Living 4

I know updating something in the middle of the night on Saturday is normally a bad sign, but Monday's update is already finished, don't worry about it.

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“It’s troubling.” Kurt agreed when Fortuna discussed her conclusions with him. “I wish I could provide more insight, but mathematical models do a poor job of psychoanalysis, and despite what I spent my time on before joining Cauldron, I claim no special insight into the minds of sadists.” He sighed, “Jacob would know better, I think.”

“Even though the deviation may be able to hide from his power-granted insight?” Fortuna asked rhetorically, not even touching the Path. 

Kurt waved off the retort. “Please. He psychoanalyzed and killed plenty of non-capes, that hidden power that was discovered couldn’t possibly supplant his decades of experience with all kinds of deviant psychologies.”

“Point.” Fortuna said, thinking. What if… Path to knowing what Jack Slash would say about the Deviation.

…Drat. Still nothing. She tried again more indirectly, manually feeding the information into an incredibly long-winded request for the path, and got a result. 

In her mind’s eye, she could picture the handsome serial killer leaning on a wall, blood splatter decorating it. “The question of why is not as simple as a single word.” Fantasy Jack Slash began, “Instead, you must section it off.” Fantasy Jack swung a knife and more blood splattered into the scene. “First, why is he stalking you? This is unknowable, but I think it’s not just his decision. If it was just the admiration of a fan, why bother you now, and not before? No, this mystery has an additional motive, one that requires that he be around you.”

That made sense. “The next question is,” Fantasy Jack continued, “Why does he continue to urge you to fight him? He should know by now that you aren’t much of a match for him, he could kill you at any time. Yet, he doesn’t. These actions positively glow with personality, it makes him very interesting.” Fantasy Jack’s eyes roamed up and down Fortuna’s body. “More interesting than you, anyway.” Sometimes Fortuna hated the Path. This was one of those times. Even if it was exactly what she asked for. “He’s waiting.” Jack concluded, “Even you’ve noticed that he seems to be teaching you, so once what he’s waiting for occurs? Final exam time. Do or die.” Fantasy Jack chuckled. “He’s a wolf after my own heart.”

Path complete. She forgot how arrogant and self-aggrandizing Jack Slash was. Still, it was a useful insight. 

Kurt looked away from his computer. “Did the Path manage to help?” He asked. 

“An additional layer of remove seems to stop the stranger effect.” Fortuna acknowledged, before sharing the Path’s conclusions. 

After a moment of thought, Kurt nodded to himself. “Yes, that does make sense. He wants entertainment while he waits for another objective.” He frowned. “Unfortunately, it’s not an actionable conclusion. All you can do is to continue what you’re already doing.”

Fortuna groaned. “Well, I suppose I’ve been putting off my daily gardening.” She muttered mostly to herself before re-establishing the Path she had been running most often lately. 

Path to preserving human society.

It was more than that, of course. Nuance was something the Path understood well, with hundreds and hundreds of decisions and elaborations that she had long since resolved. Measure in terms of lives, optimize for minimum time taken, weigh collateral damage against the benefit. But that was her purpose in life now, to run and kill and protect, because if she didn’t? It would all have been for nothing. 

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The deviation stepped up his stalking. Every so often, with no pattern she could discern, her work was interrupted by that bone-chilling whistling. Somehow, this alone was enough to paralyze The Path, and she was forced to manually finish whatever step she was on. Every time, she just had to look, and there the deviation was, his Stranger power making him invisible to everyone but her. 

Contessa knew what the deviation was trying to do. Every time he interrupted her Path with his presence, no matter which world she was in, it was before she was to commit to violence. Not during, not after, always right before. She had to either abandon her task or do so without the Path’s direct guidance, as diminished as that guidance was of late. 

A simple decision, of course. Her muscles, her brain, they knew the movements, how to kill. Her eyes have seen so much death, that tracking the last moments, the futile struggles of her prey, was child’s play. The Path had honed her body into a weapon, and momentary disruptions couldn’t deprive her of those advantages. 

Yet, the deviation refused to engage. Contessa had considered provoking the wolf man, firing a bullet in his direction perhaps, but each time she considered it, she discarded it as a waste of time. She had spent nearly forty years with the specter of Death, of total annihilation with only the barest scraps of hope, stalking her every step on the Path, something unknowable, invisible, that could decide to kill her at any moment. 

In that sense, the presence of the deviation was familiar, an almost comforting sense of powerlessness relaxing her as she continued the endless task of trimming away those that would send society spiraling into the abyss that it constantly tilted on the precipice of. 

Instead, every time she noticed the wolfman, the wordless voice of the Path silenced by that damned whistling, she merely looked the deviation straight in the eye and whispered one word in her native language. “Not today” was the best translation into English. “Later” wasn’t quite emphatic enough to fit. 

Then, as if the golden man never died, she went on with her grisly work. It was all she knew, at this point. But her life would be spent well, once her final accounting was tabulated. 

The deviation always slunk away after she finished the battle she had initially planned, stopping only to examine the bodies she left behind. It was getting annoying. 

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The Path was acting odd. The deviation’s behavior had forced Contessa to get more information up front, so she could weather potential interruptions, and that included adjusting her parameters; she had to start weighing potential hazards. No more dramatic infiltrations of tinkertech fortresses, no more inputting hundred-character passwords to attack them in their most relaxed moments, she had to simplify. 

Furthermore, the Wardens were gaining. In power, in reach, and in grip. One of the first adjustments she made was to make sure that she didn’t attack anything the Wardens could handle instead, even if it was less efficient, so she merely dropped the intelligence to one of the many Wardens that both knew her enough to know the information was legitimate and feared her enough to not ignore her. 

The number of lives saved by her actions had been steadily declining as she continued to work; this was only natural. While Contessa didn’t pretend to understand much of anything about the scientific method, even she knew that culling the largest disasters meant that the remaining problems would be smaller, and while there were the occasional spikes in disaster potential when someone new triggered with a dangerous power, by and large society was starting to look more and more like it wouldn’t explode without her to prune the tree, metaphorically. 

What was strange, however, was how less precise the Path was being. The information it presented her had fewer and fewer significant digits, saying ‘214,000’ where before it would count each and every life. The time horizons it gave on those reports became shorter and shorter, as well. She had habitually used a figure of twenty years during the years before the golden man’s removal, but shortly afterwards paths extending that long just failed, which usually meant that she had requested an untenable path, but after lowering it to ten years it started working again. 

She wasn’t a fool, of course, and ran a few paths that deliberately lasted longer that were less expansive than her usual ‘preserve society’ objective, to see if it was some kind of inevitable doom, and found that the ‘path to living to eighty years old’ worked well, and indicated that humanity would continue to exist for that long, as far as the Path could tell. So it was something else that was causing her ‘preserve society’ paths to fail unless she narrowed it to a shorter time horizon. 

Since then, she’s narrowed her focus further, running ten year paths only once a week while running one year paths on the other days, and even put a minimum number of lives saved before she’ll intervene, as Kurt indicated that the situation had mostly stabilized, according to his analytics. They could slow down and let Ciara and the other Wardens handle the smaller crises, and working every day to save small slices of the population would not drastically affect society at large. 

In fact, one day, after that narrowing of focus, one day Contessa found… that there was nothing for her to do. The Path saw no opportunity for her to avert some large disaster. She could relax her parameters and spend the day on smaller problems, but… 

“I’m taking the day off.” Fortuna announced. 

Kurt’s eyebrow raised, as he chewed and swallowed his breakfast bagel. “I suppose that’s good news.” He acknowledged, “Do you have any plans?” 

Fortuna frowned. What should she do? It was a serious question. “I think… I’ll take a stroll down memory lane.” She rather liked that English phrase. 

“Have fun.” 

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Her original Earth had been found years ago, but she had never really visited. Everyone she knew was dead, and monsters still roamed. She wasn’t terribly concerned about those. Fortuna made sure to query the Path for any dangers along her planned route, but it quietly confirmed that there was to be no trouble, so she came rather thoroughly armed anyway. 

Fortuna never told Dr. Mother that this was her original Earth when the Clairvoyant relocated it and catalogued it. It wasn’t on the list of Earths known to the Wardens, so they had labeled it Earth Resh-Aleph-Dalet. Formerly Earth Aleph-Dalet, of course. 

She now knew that the mutagenic pools that had transformed the wildlife into monsters was something that had been emulated by tinkers over the years, and they had theorized that the initial outbreak was part of the parasite’s plans, creating pressures that would provoke trigger events in the smaller and more distributed populations of her pre-industrial world. 

They had also speculated that the first parasite was unable to implement the full breadth of those plans. 

In the distance, wolves howled, a sound that no longer forced the hairs on the back of her neck to rise in fear. She had grown beyond that instinctive fear. 

Still, her feet carried her to the site of her old village, the actual structures long since broken down and the land reclaimed by nature. But there were some subtle signs, if you paid attention. 

The least subtle of which was the stone well, a subtle illumination visible even without looking directly inside the tainted water provider. The substance was rather thoroughly studied, naturally they had used it in their formulas to understand its properties, but Fortuna never really bothered with that. The secrets of the vials were not… completely impenetrable to the Path, but they were close. 

Still, it was considered a dead end, especially after they discovered Balance, and the usage of this material, which they had dubbed ‘Catalyst’, was abandoned shortly before Hero’s death. 

As expected, there were signs of someone having extracted this tainted well water; a safety orange plastic bucket attached to a steel pulley system, something Hero fabbed out in an afternoon. Dr. Manton was usually the one to retrieve the Catalyst, or one of his assistants…

Still, she had one more place to visit. Walking the path she did at such a young age didn’t take nearly as much time as her memory said it should, but her legs were longer now, and she was able to relax as she walked instead of desperately putting faith in the Path to guide her steps. 

The flesh garden of the first parasite did not survive the golden man’s tantrum, of course. But the crater where it used to be was still worth visiting, at least in her opinion. 

Whistling. The deviation had decided to visit once more.