The Puppeteer

Theory was pleasant. Gesbiek had learned, over roughly a month of being alive against expectation, that the gap between a thing that ought to work and a thing that did work was usually filled with pain and embarrassment, in that order.

So he needed something to practise on.

Not a 2-Green viper, which was strong enough to have opinions. Not anything blue, which would be an efficient way of finding out what happened when a superior will pushed back down the line.

What he wanted was something weak and complicated. Something with a spine and four limbs and enough nervous system to tell him whether this was a blunt instrument or a fine one.

A Razor-Rat was gnawing at an exposed root beside a patch of glowing mushrooms, about the size of a large cat, tail whipping back and forth in the manner of an animal that has never once relaxed.

[RAZOR-RAT | 1-GREEN]
[THREAT: LOW | SHARD DENSITY: 0.3]

Gesbiek got to within twenty feet behind a fern, which took him some time and no effort at all, because sneaking was the one skill he had brought with him from childhood.

He put the reticle on it.

It turned green and locked.

[TARGET ACQUIRED]
[RESISTANCE PROBABILITY: LOW]

He took a breath and executed.

* * * *

His consciousness did not leave. That would have left his own body sitting in the ferns unattended, which the System had evidently thought about even if he had not.

Instead it stretched.

Something came out of his chest as a thread of silver, visible only to him, and crossed twenty feet of forest in less time than it took to notice, and went into the rat.

The rat stopped with the root still in its teeth.

Gesbiek's vision divided. Not into two equal halves. His own remained in front of him, and a second smaller view opened at the corner of it, showing the world from four inches off the ground: ferns like towers, mushrooms the size of his head, everything enormous and pressing in.

And then, arriving underneath all of it, the thing the skill description had not mentioned.

Sound.

Not through his ears. Inside them.

A high frantic squealing that was not language and did not need to be, pure panic compressed down into noise and pushed straight into the middle of his skull.

WRONG. BODY. MOVE. CANNOT. HELP. HELP.

Gesbiek sat very still behind the fern for a moment.

Then he sent the command.

Stand.

The rat's muscles jumped. Its legs spasmed. It did not stand.

He could feel the resistance as weight, two intentions pushing at the same set of nerves from opposite ends, and the rat losing and continuing to try anyway.

The description had been precise, and he had read it three times, and he had still not understood it until now.

Override motor functions.

It said nothing at all about the mind, because it did not touch the mind. The rat was awake. The rat was going to stay awake for the entire duration, watching its own body from inside, hands on a wheel that had come away from the column.

Gesbiek was not becoming this animal. He was locking it in a room in its own skull and taking the controls.

He noted the observation, and its implications, and filed both under things to think about later. Preferably much later.

Then he pushed harder, because the alternative was to stop, and he could not afford to stop.

The tether thickened and went bright.

STAND.

The rat stood.

Its body came up onto its hind legs in a posture no rat has ever chosen, spine rigid, front paws hanging limp and shaking as something inside tried to lower them and found the joints locked.

It squealed. The sound came out of its throat without any part of it agreeing to make the sound.

Gesbiek could read the strain in the muscles as figures. Tension, fatigue, joint stress, all of it reported cleanly and none of it hurting anywhere.

He was operating a machine made of meat, and the machine had a pilot in it, and the pilot's opinion did not appear anywhere in the interface.

* * * *

Walk. Five steps.

The rat walked, and it was terrible.

The paws came up far too high and came down far too hard, each step landing like a decision rather than a movement, the whole thing stiff and stuttering and wrong to watch.

He adjusted. Loosened his grip slightly, found something closer to the frequency the body already wanted to move at, and tried again.

Better. Still not right. Still recognisably a thing being driven rather than a thing walking.

He turned it in a circle, testing how fast it answered and how tightly it could turn.

Then he walked it into a tree.

THUMP.

The rat squeaked, sharp and involuntary, and Gesbiek received a small clean notification about impact force and distribution, and felt precisely nothing.

He sat behind his fern and understood the tactical shape of what he was holding.

He could walk a body off a cliff. Into a fire. Onto a blade. The host would experience every part of that, and he would experience a series of figures, and then he would let go and find another one.

The forest was full of receivers.

He looked at that thought directly for about two seconds, and then away from it.

* * * *

Gross motor control was one thing. He needed to know about the other thing.

The rat had a tail. Two feet of it, hairless and flexible, currently held out stiff behind it because nobody was in charge of it.

Both paws. Take hold of your tail.

The resistance came up hard. Everything in the animal knew that this was wrong in some way it could not have articulated, and it fought.

Gesbiek held, and the paws came round against the animal's will and clamped onto the base of its own tail.

He was running three muscle groups at once now, and his own forehead had gone damp with it.

[ASSIST MODE: DEXTERITY]
[PRECISION: 87%]

The System was doing the small work: which tendon at what tension, what angle at each joint, all the arithmetic of a movement that a body normally performs without consulting anybody. All Gesbiek had to supply was intent, and it translated intent into biology.

Loop it. Around the wrist. Twice.

The tail went round once and then again.

Somewhere in the back of his head the screaming had changed. It was not screaming any more. It had gone down into something low and flat and hollow, an animal that had stopped asking for help because it had worked out that nothing was coming.

Gesbiek's jaw tightened.

Through the loop.

The tip went through.

Pull.

The knot came tight, and the Razor-Rat made a small broken noise, and then Gesbiek released the paws and let them fall.

The rat stood in the moss, shaking, with a clean overhand knot cinched around its own wrist.

He looked at it for a while.

It was proof of concept, and the concept was not general control. It was surgical. He could make a guard's hand turn a key. He could make a warrior's fingers open around a sword hilt. He could make somebody's arm go somewhere their whole life had been arranged around never letting it go.

The tactical possibilities were, to put it one way, extensive.

To put it another way, he had just spent three minutes tying a knot in a terrified animal to see if he could, and he was going to have to be somebody who had done that for the rest of his life.

[MANA: 67%]

Ten percent for three minutes of control. He could not run an army. He could run one body, at the right moment, for as long as the moment lasted.

Release.

The thread snapped and came back into his chest so fast it stung.

The rat collapsed. It lay on its side panting for a moment, entirely still, apparently unwilling to test whether the freedom was real.

Then it understood, and it got up, and it went into the undergrowth at a speed Gesbiek had not known rats possessed, dragging a knotted tail behind it.

Running from the thing that had reached inside it and made it dance.

Gesbiek watched the ferns close, and his vision came back together into one piece, and the small vertigo of it passed.

He flexed his own hands and looked at them. Opened, closed. His.

* * * *

He sat down against the trunk of the Sequoia and let his breathing settle.

The power was extraordinary. There was no honest way around that. It was the single most useful thing that had ever happened to him, and he had a number in the corner of his eye telling him he needed eighty-eight more levels, and refusing to use it would not get him one of them.

It also left something in his mouth like biting metal.

He thought about Snarl's hand on the back of his neck, hauling him through the mud at ankle height, and how the whole of his childhood had been a larger creature moving his body to places he had not chosen while he was awake inside it.

Then he thought about a rat standing rigid on its hind legs with its paws locked, screaming inside a skull nobody could hear.

Not the same, he told himself. He had not chosen his. The rat had not chosen its either.

"It is not the same," he said out loud, to a forest, and the forest let that stand without comment, which was more generous than it needed to be.

He got up, and then stopped, because there was one more thing he wanted to know.

An Iron Shell Beetle was working its way along a root twelve feet off, cobalt and unhurried. He put the reticle on it.

[VALID TARGET: DENSITY < USER]

The thread went out and took hold, and the difference was immediate and instructive. There was almost nothing in there. No screaming, no resistance, no second will scrabbling for the controls. Something small and dim registered that its legs had stopped being its own, found no opinion about this anywhere in itself, and continued to exist.

He walked it six paces and turned it round and walked it back, and it moved better than the rat had, because there was nothing inside fighting the signal.

Then he backed away through the ferns, keeping the connection, counting his paces.

At about sixty feet the thread thinned. At sixty-five it went the way a rope goes when the last strands are deciding, and then it was gone, and the beetle carried on along its root without any indication that anything had happened to it at all.

[CONNECTION LOST: OUT OF RANGE]

Sixty feet, then, and considerably easier on something with nobody home. That was worth knowing. That was worth a great deal more than the knot had been.

The map he pulled up was not a System interface. It was memory, five years of it, walked daily and in detail. The bone pit and the outer huts. The 2-Greens on the perimeter with their three-minute sweep. The inner ring where the air went thick. The drake ribs over the mouth of the cavern.

Every one of those goblins was stronger than him. Some of them enormously so.

None of them had a density above 0.3 except the warriors, and the warriors were not the ones who carried keys and opened gates and stood watch in the small hours with nothing to do.

He did not need to be strong. He needed to be the one holding the wrong hand at the right moment.

He sat with that for a while, and then made himself do the other half of the work, which was asking what he actually wanted from the place.

Not Snarl. Snarl was a week of bone under an Iron-Fur Bear's floor and had stopped being a question the day the bear answered it. Gesbiek had gone looking for something to feel about that in a tent full of dust and had found nothing worth carrying.

So not revenge. He turned it over honestly and could not make revenge fit.

What he had instead were two things, and he laid them side by side.

The first was a question, and it had been in him since a claw traced the crack in his chest and pulled back fast.

Grolm had not killed him.

A chief who ate his own lieutenants, who had a throne made of skulls and a hall lined with them, had looked at a three-foot runt he could have opened with one hand and had gone to the trouble of a sentence instead. He had called it the Old Rot. He had said the word curse out loud in front of his Lieutenants and had wiped his claw on his loincloth afterward, twice.

Gesbiek had spent a month in a forest with that, and it had never once stopped being the strangest thing that had ever happened to him.

He wanted to know what Grolm had seen.

And he was not going to learn it from outside. Nobody in that camp would tell a Grey anything. But there was a version of walking into the Red-Tooth Clan and asking questions of goblins who would answer them freely, at length, without ever knowing they were being asked, and he had installed that version this morning for one point.

The second thing was simpler and he was less comfortable with how quickly it had arrived.

The Ancestral Totem stood in the Throne Room behind the chair. Twenty feet of ironwood with five Red Shards set into it in a line, burning, doing nothing, venerated by a clan that could no longer have built or repaired or explained it.

He had seen it exactly once, as a child, from the back of a crowd, through other people's legs.

He had not thought about it in eleven years, and had now thought about it three times since noon, and the third time had been in the same breath as the word food.

Gesbiek turned east, toward miles of Darkwood and, somewhere past it, a camp that had swept a goblin into a disposal trench and never learned his name.

Not yet. Walking back through that gate at Level 12 was not a plan, it was an ambition with a bad attitude.

But it was the first time since the gate closed behind him that he had thought about the Red-Tooth Clan as a place he might go rather than a place he had come from.