CHAPTER TWO: [Classified]

“What do you mean, you don’t know? I mean, I don’t intend to be rude but...that’s not something you can’t just not know.”

The once-dying-and-now-dead man was being uppity but Agent Z understood this as just one more penance that she must bear, having accepted this burden. This person. So she stepped closer and his blood stained the soles of her shoes.

“My name is above your clearance, civilian. I cannot tell you. You cannot even think of it. If you guess for a thousand years you will be wrong. The conception of it is classified.”

“My name is Jacob,” Jacob volunteered, lacking any proper response to Agent Z’s bizarritudes. He was a tall and well-muscled man, though he was currently too stooped over to truly demonstrate either. Fear sweat beaded his dark skin, much it from the shock of the gunfire and whatever else he has seen during the shootout and before it, during that two-day hole in Zed’s brain. But a little of that fear is from Agent Z herself, a deep part of his mind beginning to suspect that she is not so much a person as she is person-adjacent.

“Are you-,” He stopped himself for a moment and then continued. This question is also bad. “Are you a fed?”

Agent Z just blinked idly at this. Her movement, which you have been taking for granted all this time in its undescribed ambiguity, is like an insect. When she is still she is frozen. When she moves she does it in rapid bursts of motion that are too quick. A viewer who is looking, truly looking, might get the fleeting impression that her body is hinged in different ways than normal. She gives off a skittering-sensation, even when she is still.

What does that mean? Well, Agent Z is not full of spiders. But if you were to ever meet someone who was actually a person-shaped sack full of secret spiders, Agent Z would be a top candidate.

“Am I a fed?,” she asked, repeating his question back to him like a distant canyon wall. “A fed what? A fed-Ah. Of course. No. By which I mean ‘of course that’s what you meant’. And ‘no I am not’. I am not operating under the jurisdiction of THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I am Agent Z, Zed not Zee and I work for the Agency.”

She pulled a small leather wallet out of her jacket pocket and unfolded it before Jacob’s eyes. There’s a badge inside but it is blank. Just a silver shield, as reflective as a mirror and about as decorated with official spy insignia as your average mirror too. Which is to say, excessively so but you can never see it.

“The what Agency? This is blank. There’s nothing there.”

Jacob didn’t want to cause too much of a fuss. He owed this strange woman a lot, for things that she doesn’t even remember. She doesn’t know about that and he doesn’t know that she doesn’t know. The point is, he didn’t want to upset her. But he was getting increasingly nervous (and extremely confused but not increasingly so because he is already as confused as he can be) about this ‘Agent Z’ and her ‘Agency’ of nothing in particular and her very fake badge.

But his next futile question is preempted by perception. His focus, narrowed from panic and a bullet, has settled back out and he has seen the very dead things that were once people strewn across the concrete behind his saviour. And he is smelling them too.

Have you ever seen a person that’s gone through a woodchipper? Or a person who has been just kind of grated like a carrot? If you have, congratulations. But Jacob had not so this was a new experience for him and he was not reacting well.

He paled, as best as he was able, and he wasn’t able to stop himself from screaming. How had he not seen it before? There was blood everywhere and mince and chips of bone and so so many bullets, bullets that had been driven into human architectures of flesh and bone like wedges and chisels and had broken it all apart.

He didn’t stop screaming either, which is a perfectly reasonable reaction to suddenly becoming cognisant of a massacre. He didn’t stop screaming until Agent Z turned that cognisance off.

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Unlocked+++

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Locked+++

Agent Z sighed as she locked in her protocols once again but Jacob didn’t hear her. Didn’t see her. Didn’t remember her. As long as Agent Z was engaged in Secrecy activities, she had never existed.

Or rather, her existence was classified. She was only a Level 1 Clearance secret, something that annoyed her greatly and was a direct result of the hole in her brain. She doesn’t know that last part yet but now you do. Jacob was still panicking, on account of all the human meat but as far as he could remember, he had never met Agent Z. This had all happened some other way.

Made incomprehensible to the world, Agent Z made her way from corpse to corpse. For the last one, the man who had lost so much of his mass to creating a thick smear, this required a bit more attention from the others. Jacob did not see her, not even when she stepped right past him and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. The sight of her and the sound of her and the feel of her and everything else were still transmitting, out in the noumenal ‘real’ world that surely exists but none of us can ever directly witness. Her existence was arriving at all the relevant sensory organs. But there it stopped. No perception-objects, the data translations that we people our worlds with, ever arrived in Jacob’s brain as anything but junk slurry. No conception-objects, the things that we build and manipulate with our thoughts, of Agent Z currently existed. In anyone. Ever in the whole world. They were under lock and key, encrypted into the background radiation of the mind.

She could do just about anything like this, under the Secrecy Protocols. And she had.

But in this particular case, she was occupied wholly with classifying the human remains that littered the faux-river beneath the unfinished overpass. First one, then the next and so on.

From Jacob’s perspective-...isn’t that a foolish thing to say? From Jacob’s perspective? As Agent Z is effectively dismantling it? But even so. From Jacob’s perspective the corpses do not flicker out one by one. It is just that they were never there. He goes from remembering seven and seeing seven to remembering four and seeing four to remembering no deaths and seeing none, even as their blood creeps along the ground.

His memory of the gunfight now, which he witnessed, is extremely incoherent but he will not realise this until he specifically probes it later with his consciousness and discovers that the world doesn’t make sense.

Incidentally, you might be wondering something like...when does something de-classify? It doesn’t. Which might make you wonder: How many corpses are out there that have been classified or died during classification? How blood-stained are the streets I walk? Is there a gruesome flayed man nailed to the ceiling of my bedroom, dripping blood down upon me as I sleep, that I simply cannot know? And that even if I were, that I would never remember?

The Answer: Maybe. Don’t worry about it.

Out in the world, where neither Jacob and Agent Z can see, the loved ones of these former people have just been spared the huge burden of grieving for their deaths. Most of them will never remember the husband, the son, the lover, the friend and if afterwards their life feels a little empty? Well, it’s the 21st century, baby! Everyone feels that way.

It is estimated, though few can ever know for sure, that at least two million people have never existed at all. And that number is always rising.

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Locked+++

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Unlocked+++

“Well? How’s that?”

Jacob doesn’t know what Agent Z is talking about. To him, she has always been there now. That brief period, where he was alone with the corpses and he had never met or known her, that is gone. The encryption-lock is off his steadily growing conception-object of her and with that returns everything. To him, she had just walked around a little bit, stopping and kneeling by empty patches of concrete. Oh and she’d also stopped to pat him on the shoulder and for some reason he’d done nothing about it? He didn’t know why.

“I-,” he said and then stops, keeling back over with his head in his hands. All of a sudden a terrible migraine was laying siege to his mind, like a knife going in right through his eye socket. His speech faded into a grunt.

“Brain problems, eh?,” Agent Z asked, her tone conversational and chipper. She was starting to feel better, having found a modicum of peace through work. “I know how that feels. Even before today, I think.”

“It’s just a headache,” he protested. “It fades with-”

He stopped talking because Agent Z had stopped. She was a still creature. Still save her eyes, green-irised and pupil-less with sclera that is tinged a faint and dirty yellow. Her gaze slowly slid to her left, as if looking at something just past her shoulder. At something that is, perhaps, drifting past her. Jacob’s head really really really hurts.

He followed her gaze but saw nothing. His eyes slip past it, off it, around it. There was a creature here, that Zed knows and Jacob doesn’t, that would break your eyes before they’d fix upon it.

“Look away! Avert! Avert! Run!”

Agent Z shouted to Jacob and he looked down automatically, surprised by the steel in her scratchy voice. As soon as he did, the pain in his head fades immediately. He was cured! And so, he looked up accidentally, straight at the creature that cannot be seen and the migraine immediately returned.

This is too much. This is all too much. He twists his head around, climbs to his feet, ignorant of the blood spilling through his torn-up shirt and starts to run in the other direction. This is a good idea. It is also a futile idea. The events of this day are going to follow him home.

Behind him, Agent Z readied her pistol and fired off several shots. They all go wide. Not because they are deflected. Not because they are misdirected once they have left the barrel. Every time the agent tries to shoot, her arm twitches and she fires wide. There was a foreign conceptual-object in her head, having entered through the eyes. The creature and the concept-in-her-head are the same thing, an indivisible perceptual nemesis for whom signifier and signified are one and the same.

It could not be touched by vectors. Not by your vectors, not by Agent Z’s vectors, not by that of anyone who sees or knows of it. Just by knowing it, a concept of it begins to germinate in the darkness behind your eyes. A saboteur. And that canny saboteur ensures that you cannot see it or rather, your eyes will turn in every direction but it. The light that refracts off of it is incognito, a forbidden vector with a bad passport that your eyes will not allow past the security gates. You cannot point at it, not with a finger and certainly not with a gun. It bent straight-lined intentions into circles.

But, unlike many of Agent Z’s enemies, it probably exists in a physical sense. Or, at the very least, you can receive the sensory data that indicate physicality. It can touch you and you can feel it and it can wrap your arms in its jaws and pull you apart.

And Agent Z had just the answer for physicality:

+++COUNTER-HOSTILE PROTOCOL: Unlocked+++

+++COUNTER-HOSTILE PROTOCOL: Locked+++

+++Incorrect+++

+++COUNTER-HOSTILE PROTOCOL: Locked pretty please?+++

+++Incorrect+++

+++COUNTER-HOSTILE PROTOCOL: Debug+++

+++Protocol offline+++

Agent Z’s head involuntarily turned to the side, to avoid looking at the thing as it grabbed hold of her. She could feel the heat of its steamy breath on her face like a sunburn. A maw latched onto her arm, furry teeth scrabbling across flesh and well-tailored wool. It can’t find purchase and pulled back a moment later. Pulls back and leaves parts of itself behind, pieces of tooth and gum and jawbone that were now cemented to Agent Z’s orbit as pieces of postponed violence. It yowled, a sound we can all hear from somewhere just behind our heads and Agent Z is splattered with a flood of something warm and sticky, an almost arterial flow of blood. She screwed up her eyes.

She staggered back and tried to open her eyes and could not. Her face was slick with blood. No matter where she might turn or where she might look, she could not train her eyes in a direction that the creature, that some liquid part of it, was not. Her eyes would not open.

To be blunt, this was perfect. And it was exactly what she’d been hoping for. She raised her pistol and fired.