Supervisor Ken Adams was the kind of person to ask all the questions first and shoot you later, and, for some of his victims, this method was almost worse than doing the reverse.

There frankly isn’t a way you can hurt a corpse further, no matter how much incriminating information you could get out of them before you shoot. There is, however, a wonderful world of pain available to you in a living, breathing subject and in all the relevant knowledge extracted from them with the right questions.

Every day, Ken woke up and asked himself two crucial questions: what are my long-term goals, and what can I do today to move closer towards those goals. And every day, the first answer remained the same, and the second arrived to his mind quickly and with little effort.

The tasks were always set before breakfast and they were always completed before dinner. Supervisor Adams did not make mistakes; everything in his life was optimized and tailored to his one-track mind, every obstacle carefully removed until he could see his path as clearly as his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.

He had great things in him. Absolutely remarkable things. And as long as he could keep his eyes on those things, everything was possible - with enough time, effort, and possibly also some bribes, or blackmail, and just a pinch of coercion, perhaps. Supervisor Adams was versatile in his use of productivity tools.

The mornings were always the same. He would wake up, go through his fifteen minute meditation, then dress up for the day and head straight for his office. He kept his Black Wing facility room - with a thorough refurbishing which suited the Supervisor, of course - which eliminated a commute and gave him an extra hour of work time each day.

Always, in his office, his assistant was already waiting for him with his coffee (black, no sugar) and a single printed page of filtered, condensed information. He would read through it while drinking the coffee and decide which points he wanted clarification on, and which were outside his interest zone. It was the assistant’s job to deal with everything else.

The hours between 9am and noon where the most efficient for Ken. This is when he invented, contemplated and decided; when he signed off people’s lives with a brush of ink against paper and launched whole teams into action with a single click of his mouse. All his meetings were piled on just before lunch. This was strategic too, since no person in their right mind would stretch out a meeting beyond reason risking a cut out of their lunch time. So, in the end, it benefited everyone and left Ken minimally annoyed after such meetings.

But today was different.

“You are late, madam colonel,” were the first words to come out of Ken’s mouth as he invited her into his office. It was a throw-off, tongue-in-cheek comment - but it did not fly well with Jessica Wilson.

“I make the rules here, supervisor,” she responded with a cold smile, “the time of our meeting is whenever I arrive. So I am never late. Very convenient, you see.”

“As you wish,” Ken shrugged, taking his own seat after her. He knew that the less emotion he showed, the more confident he seemed. If he could just pretend not to care, it immediately gave him an upper hand no matter what happened. This is why, instead of being anxious about the sudden decision to visit him in his own facility, he decided to push on with cheeky confidence. “Are you here to congratulate me on my work with the Russians?”

“I would, if there was something to congratulate on,” she retorted coldly. “And why I’m here is very simple, Adams. I am a landlady and I come for my rent.”

“Complex metaphor, madam colonel,” Ken raised an eyebrow. “Are you implying I do not deliver with my program?”

“You do not deliver enough, Adams, or of the right quality, or both,” she said. “When I gave you this job, I had the impression that you’re the kind of person who gets things done. I thought you’d be the one to finally turn this wretched place into a functioning facility instead of a circus freak show for the CIA. And what happened next? You rebuilt everything in here according to your own unsubstantiated theories, you fired half the personnel, including one of our most respected veterans, Mr. Priest…”

“Priest was a liability, not an asset…”

“…and somehow formed the idea that you are the most important person in the entire investigative branch of the US government. And based on what? The Bersberg portal disappeared mysteriously before you managed to conduct any research, the boat that you commissioned to take apart bit by bit turned out to be a regular boat, and nothing came out of the supposedly magical metal alloys either!”

“Last time I checked,” Ken interrupted again, quickly losing his calm, “my facility was delivering results above the rates of any other CIA department. The Bolivian coup being the most recent example.”

“I am not saying you don’t get anything done,” she shook her head sternly, “but I am saying that it is disproportionate to the amount of money we are funneling into your facility. No other department is asking for the budgets as high as yours but churning out results at such low and unpredictable rates.”

“But we’re different, ma’am!” Ken had to physically stop himself from raising his voice. “You know better than anyone else who has ever worked in the Black Wing program that our assets are, by definition, highly unpredictable and hard to control. May I also remind that I am the only Black Wing Supervisor in the history of the department who has had no accidents, no escapes, and no unsuccessful captures on record?”

“I am not denying that either. I know you’ve come closest out of everyone to actually making this madhouse into a useful asset. But I’m afraid I have people above me who are starting to lose hope for the whole premise.”

“Well,” Ken muttered, deciding he no longer had anything to lose, “we’re on the verge of a major breakthrough. I believe we have a good chance of bringing in a project that has nearly unlimited commercial and strategic potential and will surely persuade people at the top in the viability of this operation.”

“Promises, promises, supervisor,” she said calmly. “I want evidence. I want results. You have until the end of this month to give me something to bargain with, or I’m afraid you will have to go directly to the higher-ups and argue your case for yourself. And remember, Adams,” she added, already getting up to leave, “you were a prisoner here once. No reason you can’t become a prisoner again.”

*

“Promises…” Ken muttered, marching through the corridor after a skipped lunch and three hours of intense work without a single break. “Things to bargain with,” he added, heading for the Black Wing Facility Gamma with a large paper bag in his hand. “Who does she think she is?” he asked no-one in particular while fumbling for the access card with his left hand. “I’ll never be a prisoner again,” he whispered to himself, and unlocked the door to Bart’s cell.

“Hey Bart!” he beamed from the threshold. “I brought McDonald's!”

He decided even before he came in that he would not, under any circumstances, mention Project Prometheus, or his own investigation on it, or the remarkably unpleasant conversation he’s had just a few hours prior. He lasted for approximately seventeen minutes before he brought all of those things up in that exact order.

He wasn’t quite sure how it had happened; first, Bart was explaining to him how you can create at least a hundred new french fry sauces by combining already existing sauces, and the next he was talking about leads and scrapped evidence and how much he wanted to drill a hole in colonel Wilson’s head and peer inside in search of the hell engine that was running her thought process and personality.

Bart listened carefully, chewing on her cherry pie, and did not say anything until he was almost done.

“…and I know I’m grasping at straws,” Ken carried on, “but then I have three separate sources confirming the Californian location on top of like a dozen witness reports so there must be something there, right?” He was looking at her, mad vigor in his eyes, genuinely expecting her to weigh in and give her opinion.

And she realized this, strangely, that he wasn’t talking to the wall or using her as an unhinged psychotherapist with questionable methods. He actually wanted her opinion. He actually cared. At least one part of Ken, Bart realized, still actively cared about her and what she thought about Black Wing and his work and the exciting research field of inventing sauces for french fries.

“Ken, I was thinking,” she began, watching every muscle in his face for any indication of pure emotion, “your apartment… do you think you still have one?”

“I’m sorry, what?” he chuckled. “You’re into real estate now?”

“It doesn’t have to be your old apartment,” she continued, hand rubbing her sleeve nervously, “can be a new house. We could run away from here, and buy a house, and live there, maybe? In Miami. Or New Jersey. Or one of those stupid-sounding towns…”

“Bart, wait,” he was now half-smiling, half-frowning, several different feelings mixing on his face like week-old ingredients at the back of a fridge, forming a perplexing salad of various emotions, “…what are you saying, exactly?”

“I’m saying that you don’t need all this bullshit,” she lost her patience, “I’m saying we could live in a house and be friends and travel around and have McDonald's and be happy. And I could work in a shop selling dresses and you could have a not madeup girlfriend and it would be different. Better. Not like this.”

“Bart…” he smiled sadly, and shook his head. “But this, this is my life now. I am about to do such great things and I am so close!” he laughed in excitement, expecting her to laugh with him, but her face was blank. “Hey, cheer up,” he pleaded with her, “we’ll be friends anyway, yes?”

She looked away, one foot scratching the floor, and thought. The thought was “well, that was worth a shot.”

“I’m sorry,” she muttered.

“Sorry for what?”

“I wanted to kill you and then I didn’t and it felt right,” she explained, “like the universe wanted me to, so I didn’t kill you, but I think I did kill you, just not how I usually kill people. And I’m sorry. I’m trying to be better.”

“You didn’t kill me,” Ken chuckled, slight shade of puzzlement on his face, “you’ve made me better! I’ve learned so much from you, Bart. And anyway, since when are you all into personal reflection? Is that clairvoyant friend of yours teaching you Freud or something?”

“Forget it,” Bart dismissed. “Your project whatever… you should go. I think you’re onto something there.”

“You really think that?”

“Yeah I really think that. And you should go and check it out yourself. Don’t let anyone else mess it up. It’s your thing. Get your thing.”

“Thanks,” he smiled warmly, stealing the last fry from the paper bag, “for believing in me. Really. I appreciate it.”

“Sure, fine,” she smirked. “Go do your thing and stop stealing my fries!”

They kept smiling at each other up until the door clicked behind him. Then both became grim and stern at once.

“Get me a car,” Ken yelled at the nearest passing by employee. “I want to leave immediately.”

“Where to, Supervisor, sir?”

“Not sure yet. Some place in the Californian desert.”

She didn’t wait long after he left. Having finished her cherry pie and pocketed the toy, Bart got up from the table and went straight for her bathroom, where she reached for the ventilation shaft. She removed the cover, stuck her hand inside, and grabbed a spoon that was hidden in it. With the spoon, she banged on the metal pipes until she got the reply back.

The banging pipe code was very simple and contained only about a dozen of phrases, but on this occasion, she only needed one word. Three hits, a pause, another hit.

“Today.”

Soon, back came the other message, which made Bart smile ear to ear and forget, at least for a moment, the stinging sensation of loss from that puzzled look she got from Ken a few minutes ago. He made his choice; her new friends made theirs.

On the other end of the pipe system, every single one of them was bashing a different signal, same word over and over reverberating across the shiny pipes.

The sound was hideous, but also full of joy, and the word was “revolution”.