Jackal Among Snakes

Chapter 591: Elaborative Encoding Experiment

“You’re talking about losing limbs?” Argrave stared at Raven, stepping back cautiously within this mental landscape. “Why do I need to sacrifice anything? What’s going on?” Argrave braced himself.

Did Argrave even have limbs to lose? He wasn’t entirely sure. And if he did, was this man truly speaking in his best interests? He tried to think of Raven, and while there was a tidbit of him saying that he was a friend… there was another whispering that this man had committed a genocide. Then again, perhaps friend and genocider weren’t mutually exclusive, given the flashes of knowledge he’d seen.

“Your name is Argrave.” Raven slowly rose to his feet, then stood tall. He was both shorter and taller than Argrave—two forms, intermingling. “You’re the King of Vasquer. You were fighting a battle atop a mountain in the Great Chu against Erlebnis, god of knowledge.” Raven stayed still as he recited these details. “Sound familiar? We don’t have time for this.”

Argrave thought on it, straining his mind. It felt as though trying to remember something that he’d done half a century ago, not half a second. But as things fell into place, it was as though a great smog was lifted.

“Good lord… he hit me with something.” Argrave clutched his head, doing his best to remember.

“He’s not a good lord… but from what I can gather, Erlebnis gave you the sum total of his knowledge. He’s attempting to break you under its weight. My discretion, however, would mean he didn’t calculate I might be able to help you with it.” Raven moved closer. Every step he took, the floor changed—it was as though he was walking through tens of thousands of different memories.

“Erlebnis’ knowledge?” Argrave’s eyes brightened, and where there had been confusion, disbelieving desire poured over him, like he’d won the lottery off a gifted ticket. “All of it? You really mean all of it?”

“Yes. Your brain isn’t big enough to accommodate all of it, so it’ll be overwritten unless we do something.”

Argrave recalled that feeling that had come not a moment ago, where he’d thought he was Erlebnis. A grim, creeping horror set over him. It was like a parasite within, slowly eating him up… or an illness, an invisible enemy. As he wondered what would happen he suddenly knew, in such great detail that it shook him to his core. He would be rather like the Castro that Sophia had created—not understanding who or what he was, without proper use of even his limbs. He would totally lose his sense of self, concocting delusions to explain the world around his shattered mind.

“You seem to be appropriately terrified, now, so I’ll talk about what we’re going to do to stop it.” Raven rolled his shoulders. “We’re going to rewire your brain so that memories are buried in certain actions, sensations, et cetera.”

As he tried to imagine what that might entail, knowledge that wasn’t Argrave’s came to him. “Like a memory palace, or other mnemonic systems?” As soon as Argrave said it, he felt the need to clutch his head in pain.

Raven slapped him in the face, casting him to the ground. “Stop thinking so much! The more you think, you more you’ll destroy your mind.” Raven knelt down before Argrave, then said in a rare display of guilt, “But… yes, it’s a mnemonic method. We have to encode memories. When you see certain colors, for example, it’ll conjure a section of memories. Sounds, sights, even shapes—they’ll evoke memories, hopefully while retaining the form and structure of your mind. It’ll fuck with your head for a few months, but it should help you stay yourself. The key is, though…” Raven tapped Argrave’s chest. “Key is your work. Your effort determines how much spittle leaks from your mouth, and how well-functioning your limbs are. Because right now, you’re fated to spend the rest of your life praying to die.”

“What do I do?” Argrave asked Raven, afraid to call upon his own knowledge for fear it might corrode his brain.

“We need a foundation. We need something constant—something to which all other things lead,” Raven explained, helping Argrave up. “I need you to find something you can remember best of all. The place that you spent the most time. The place whose entire structure—bottom to top—you can remember. It needs to be big enough to explore, big enough to hold a lot of things, a lot of notions, a lot of clues.” Raven let the idea settle, then gave him examples. “Think of a childhood home. Think of the place that you grew up.”

“Place I grew up?” Argrave repeated. “We moved, all the time. Never stayed in one town for more than one or two years. The two places were never the same.”

“Damn it all…” Raven grabbed his forehead, striding through countless memories and knowings in a frantic pace. “Was there any location that you went to consistently for more than five years? A town hall, a university, a hospice, a pilgrimage, a large marker? Give me something, anything!” He shouted demandingly.

“I don’t…” Argrave wracked his brain. “I don’t know, my dad’s truck? We had it for seven or so years. Would that work?”

Raven crossed a thousand memories in long strides. “A truck…? Describe what that is to me. How large is it? How much could it store? How many compartments does it have?” The man’s insistence was overbearing.

“Could hold… I don’t know, maybe four, five people, if you cram ‘em in. More if we used the back, I guess.”

“Four or five people?” Raven leaned in. “We’re talking about all the learnings of the god of knowledge, Argrave, and you’re giving me something with four or five people?” Raven grabbed Argrave. “Think! A library, a place where you carried out your trade; think, damn it all, or you’re to be ruined.”

Argrave thought about places where large amounts of knowledge could be kept… and like it was obvious, it struck him on the head.

“The wiki,” Argrave said.

“The wiki.” Raven narrowed his eyes. “I want you to think about what we could fit in there. Think on it, very hard, because if it’s—"

“The wiki could hold all of the knowledge of this whole world, then have some left to spare.” Argrave started smiling, slowly. “How many words do think fits on one page of a book? Couple hundred? Well, one page of the wiki could have a million, if we wanted it to. And if a wiki’s got a good enough search feature, good enough hyperlinks in the text, you can find whatever the hell you want—go on a deep dive through thousands of hours a work. I’m talking a rabbit hole that starts as a description for one person, and leads to a creation myth about the universe itself.” Argrave laughed. “Honestly—the only limit to how much a wiki can hold is how much work someone is willing to put in to complete it. Raw text doesn’t use much data.”

“Text? It’s a book of some kind? Won’t work, then, we need—”

“No, wikis can have video. Audio, too. Both are rare, but they exist. The only thing that’s lacking in a wiki, I suppose, is sensation… but then, considering it’s the formless Erlebnis’ knowledge, we probably won’t need much actual sensation.” Argrave pried himself from Raven’s grasp and peered into his vast mindscape. “Good lord. I thought all those years working on that wiki was just me wasting my damned life… but god, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was sorely mistaken.”

Raven walked around to stand in front of Argrave. “It sounds too good to be true. I’ll say it again—the success of this depends on how good the foundation is. You need to have an extremely clear memory of this ‘wiki.’ If it’s not… I’ll leave you for dead.”

“Of course it’s clear. I basically made the damned thing,” Argrave looked at him. “And I can still picture working on it, right now. Hunched in my chair, one monitor with the wiki on the right, the other with Heroes of Berendar on the left, my fingers moving across my old keyboard with the paint on the WASD keys faded away. Had a… a crummy wireless headset. Bought a box of these headsets—they broke fast enough they were basically disposable. Day after day of doing the most mundane stuff—testing the way mechanics worked, reading in-game books and thinking about some fictional universe all too deeply. I’d wake up every morning, get a coffee, then do my best to ignore whatever college deadline I had coming up while I played Heroes of Berendar.” Argrave laughed. “If I put half the damned effort into college as I did that god-damned wiki, I’d be on the dean’s list.”

Raven looked at Argrave without saying a word for a long while, and he was happy enough to be lost in pleasant reminiscence. “Why’d you do it? For others?”

“Was on the spectrum, maybe,” Argrave joked, then shook his head. “Honestly? Just… just enjoyed it. Learning. Exploring. Categorizing. Every little detail… god.” Argrave looked up and laughed. “Been more than two years since I did, but I can say that I’d like nothing more than to do it again. Maybe it was a distraction. Maybe it was an escape. But… hell, what’s wrong with the way anyone has fun, so long as they’re not hurting anyone?”

Raven gave Argrave a glance. He took it as judgmental, but given the way Raven had no clue what a wiki was, he supposed that was merely his insecurity talking.

“Alright. Your memory of it is sharp. Let’s hope it suffices as a store for all of the knowledge that the god of knowledge possessed. Elsewise… hope you enjoy sucking on a straw and mistaking your wife for your mortal enemy. Because your brain will be amply destroyed, otherwise.”

Argrave pointed at Raven. “Worry about yourself, old man.”

Raven inhaled deeply, as if angered. “Once we get you sorted out, you need to get me sorted out. Elsewise… I might just eat you whole. Barely restrained as is. Feel that same call.”

“What?” Argrave looked at him, puzzled.

“Alright. I want you to conjure up a memory of this wiki,” Raven said, carrying on without answering. “As perfect as you can remember it. Every nook and cranny. I’ll work on isolating functions that we can tie up, then move onto categorizing the knowledge. We have the Annals of the Universe as a base, and I still have the information from the Lodestar I took in back in his realm.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s see how much we can salvage of the god of knowledge.”