Wolf 3.0

Waiting

Mentor's ghost appears to Talleyrand with a telepathic message.

Joe, the technical CEO, has special training for me involving blind listening via wolf headphones styled differently than humans. I'm receiving blind programming into my brain and don't know what it is. It's a different language that I find myself practicing, as court rituals from another time, along with a scheme for another kind of "replacement," churn through my head. I feel like the past life of somebody else – a human – is stuffed into my head. Have kept Cassandra up to date on what I know, but that is not much.

I am in some sort of human-wolf training for something unknown to come. Every night I take the night shuttle back to the pack and beam down and materialize in the tree area outside the dens. The stars are bright and I must remember that this sky is artificial; that the huge face of Earth looms behind it.

There's a lot we wolves, particularly me and Cassandra, must pretend not to know, especially when I saw Joe snuffing out Mentor with his laying on of his hand. I also must pretend I'm not the new alpha, working with Cassandra as head of the pack. Yes, we are getting together and sleeping together, and we are in the center of the den that we all have been in with Mentor since "Just Joe" brought me here. The wolves are patiently training me, new to being an alpha wolf and not a house dog. Cassandra with all her powers and experience help. It's like a shadow play here and another shadow play at the intake site, awaiting and training for the mission to start. Only Joe knows what the mission is, and he's not telling.

The training went longer today. I've got ringing in my head again.

Joe had said offhandedly There will be more training while we're going there, realized he'd slipped, and changed the subject.

What trip? I had not asked the question.

My Plan is to gather more clues and figure it out.

Cassandra waits up for me. Her ears are alert and her eyes are bright. The wheels have been turning in her head. You've got to unlock him somehow, find out what's going on, Talleyrand.

How is that possible?

Find a way. You have experience with humans, you know how to read them.

I don't even know how to be a wolf, let alone an alpha.

This is tag, and you're it , in that phrase you used to use about being in your master's family when he was a child and you were a puppy. You got me, and that's very nice. She pauses to look at me with a big wolf grin, and I grin back at her. She continues, --and you got the rest of the pack here. We will support you and train you to be an alpha, but you have to use your human experience.

She pauses again. You have to break his code and find the secret.

There's something I haven't told her. When I fall asleep with Cassandra, curled up in the middle of the pack in our den, I dream, and Mentor is talking to me in my dreams, from the spirit world. He is the third-party planner, and, part of being a hunter is being a schemer, and he was a consummate one. He told me how to break the security seal on the training program.

This has included the Wolf 3.0 feature set, which is supposed to be embedded in my instincts already, but I've learned from Mentor how to bypass the credentials and hack my way in. The plan is to use us on Earth, working with the remaining humans after the Second Black Plague. We are dispensable and smarter than dogs, both of which makes us good to use in dangerous situations. We make good proxies.

A dog, when faced with a problem, goes to the human, puts on its dog face, and waits for the human to solve it. There is no dog-pack to confer with in the domestic state, like the wolves use the wolf-pack. In the human situation on Earth, it will be a flex situation, partly solo, partly working with the pack. Wolves puzzle it out. There are vicarious training programs including danger situations on Earth where you are graded and shocked if you do not get the correct message. Sometimes it makes the brain hurt too.

My Alpha training so far is clear: remind and try to charm and muscle and keep my fighting skills sharp; –I must be prepared to defend my position without inflicting serious injury. A lot of it is about scaring.

I'm starting to grow into it, learning the lessons, some of them shady, of alpha leadership. The surprise is that Mentor or Mentor's ghost is telepathically advising me on both kinds of lessons. It is a surprise, although I guess it shouldn't be, that Mentor is very familiar with the second kind. The relations with Cassandra and the two wolf cubs, is growing in, like they are now.

On the mission, we have managed to piece together a few bits of information, but don't know what they mean.

The language I am speed-learning is something called French.

The destination Joe and I will be travelling to is a place named Austerlitz.

Rehearsal scenes flash by with hints of what I am supposed to do and the context.. At the target situation, which is exotic, strange, and from a historical time, somebody will be ambushed, kidnapped, tied up and hidden. It will be with the assistance of someone close to the target who has been suborned already, a contact Joe has made on previous practice runs to wherever the strange place is.

That's all I know.

But working with Joe I see into his head. He has telepathy skills as part of the training on the shaman planet – and can shape-shift, and travel through time. The experience of his first trip to the planet has been wiped except for a few glimpses I can see – a pale red planet, wiped out blanks and blurs for the aliens themselves, and some kind of visceral mind-programming that goes on.

The waiting is taking a long time, and during days off I run through the forests with Cassandra and the two cubs.

They all know this is supposed to be a year, at least that's what Joe told me when he first fetched me from my master's apartment in New York. I'm being wound tighter and tighter like a spring with my training even though this family life is so nice now. Both of my stepsons are slowly opening up to me.

In my dream last night I talked to Mentor about the mission. He told me he doesn't know anything about it.

I heard Rory one time make an off-hand comment to Joe: "Sometimes I think this is a combination of the old 20th-century concept of Bell Labs and – with what has happened to Earth – something like Noah's Ark in space."