INTERLUDE TWO: Cold War Blues

November the 18th, 1964

Jameson Shaw, Dr Jameson Shaw, had forgotten what he was supposed to be doing. This was not surprising. In fact, it was an occupational hazard of working where he was, with what he was working with. He absentmindedly patted himself down and had a brief fit of terror when he didn’t feel his wallet or his car keys before he remembered that he had, like he had every day, surrendered them to the guards at the security booth by the front desk when he came in to work.

Awfully silly of him to forget that but that’s just how the human brain works, isn’t it? The brain wants to do its routine, even when the circumstances are different. Even when the woman in the corner is watching you and smiling wider and wider.

Dr Shaw was a researcher working for the U.S military, though this particular department was a joint effort between the military and several other adjacent organisations, including the CIA. It was, after all, an important part of the war effort. It was 1964 and the war against the Soviets might not have been ‘hot’ but all that meant was that the struggle had shifted to higher, more esoteric planes. Realms of espionage and politics and puppet-nations. And the occult as well, of course. They didn’t call it that though. This place, where he was working, was instead called the Information Control Division. It had started out as a propaganda unit, though that’s rather cheeky language to describe something that is to propaganda as a nuclear weapon is to a toddler. This wasn’t a way to win the war of hearts and minds but rather a way to destroy those hearts and obliterate those minds. This is the Cold War, after all, and there is nothing so sacred that either of these two empires will hesitate before trampling it into the dust. All is grist in the mill.

Jameson had been there when they’d cracked the code. The exact details of it were foggy to him now and rightly so, for that was the very nature of the Information Control Division. This team of dedicated scientists, working from mostly first principles and a few indescribable experiences, had cracked the code of...not the human mind, exactly, but rather the superstructure of information that was both contained within it and exceeded it. Exceeded it and, with a bit of encouragement, superseded it as well. It had felt like a once-in-the-universe type of discovery, something singular and whole, like a pinnacle of an entire scientific discipline that had never existed. Like a Philosopher’s Stone.

And with it, they chanced upon the alchemy of forgetting, which could turn lead into nothing at all.

Dr Shaw aimlessly browsed through the files stacked before him, trying to remember what he’d been working on. This could have just been ordinary scatter-brains. He had never been a stranger to that. In fact, it was almost certainly that. He’d gotten jabbed just last week after all. His body was still full of Mnemosyne, an unofficial name that had been given to the cognitive serum that they were all vaccinated with regularly, a preventative measure from getting holes poked in his head by his own research. Before they had figured that one out, work had been a real crapshoot. They had done the same projects multiple times, sometimes even dozens of times. But now everyone in the Information Control Division was under the watchful eye of their chemical goddess of memory.

The filing room was full of cigarette smoke. He thought about this for a moment and then stopped.

He had found it. A thick manilla folder, one stuffed to overflowing and, scrawled in black ink on the front in what was indisputably his own handwriting, bearing the message DO NOT FORGET. Whoops. This must have been what he’d been working on this past week or so and Jameson could no longer pretend that his forgetfulness was natural. Had he been working on a project that exceeded his current Mnemosyne dose?

That wasn’t impossible. It had taken them a long time to get the kinks out of the whole vaccination process. By and large, remembrance was not the Information Control Division’s bailiwick. Their entire purpose, once some of the higher-ups had figured out what they had uncovered, was to wage war on the battlefield of ideas. The Cold War was dragging on and showed no signs of stopping but here, here was something that could be the answer. To defeat the enemy not on the physical plane but on the ideological, to demolish the ground upon which he stood.

The stated aim of the Division was simple: Destroy the concept of communism. Figure out a way to irradiate, poison or simply obliterate an idea. Render those ideas impossible to be thought of ever again. And with their keys to the conceptual super-structure, this seemed entirely possible. The final days of the Second World War had been marked by the birth of a nuclear god. Why couldn’t the Cold War end with a similar detonation? Why shouldn’t it?

If they could just create their own version of a nuke, a desolation in the ideatic space, the United States could render all other ideologies void. And, as far as the researchers of the ICD had figured out, this was not only possible but it had happened before.

Not in recent history, not as far as they could tell. But as their research continued and their mastery grew, as they devised Mnemosyne and her antithesis, the historicides, they had found a vast and unruly space within the realm of human perception. A place with its own geography, history and ecology. They had catalogued some of its creatures, most of whom were harmless beings that used forgetfulness as a cloak and were completely helpless before them when that camouflage was stripped away. They had charted it, as best as they were able to, sending out self-reporting memetic structures out to the furthest reaches of the cognitosphere and back. They had traced the Tree of Knowledge.

And they had seen that it had been pruned. That at some points in the distant past, entire complexes of ideas and concepts had fallen away, had become obsolete or unthinkable. The ‘nuke’ wasn’t just a potential reality; It possibly already existed.

And they had to find it before the Russians did. This was a battle for the very root of humanity and it was either claim total victory or be erased.

Dr Shaw chuckled as he worked his way through the large folder, skimming over the pages with remarkable velocity. Speak of the Devil...It would seem that his little personal project, this forgotten folder that he had evidently been working on for some time, had been a foray back into those ‘mapping’ experiments. No wonder it had eclipsed his mnestic protections! This was big picture stuff, far beyond the scope of what was theoretically necessary for the incredible atrocity that was the ICD’s main mission. They had stopped most of their research into this field because of this and also because it was maddeningly difficult, even with the aid of Mnemosyne, to hold the whole thing in your head at once.

Blood was slowly dripping off the edge of the table he was seated at.

But as he read on and on, his brow creased ever more. What had he been doing? He’d been mapping something but what? The folder was filled with non-sequiturs, from reports of perceptual entities to old progress reports to even odder things like excerpts of Shaw’s own personnel records or a cut-out newspaper obituary for a man named Heinrich Gormann. Jameson had never even heard of this guy. But once the idea of some sort of connection between all of his miscellania had been raised, he couldn’t help but follow it up. Whatever it was, he had seen it once. He should be able to see it again.

And he did.

It took him a few minutes more of incomprehension before the horrible thought dawned. And once it had, dead neural pathways sparked back to life and connections began to spring from subject to subject as if they were all pinned up on a nutjob’s conspiracy wall. These random reports were all tracing the fine edges of some sort of structure, a vast edifice within the cognitive realm. A massive hole in human thought that could only be seen, could only be conceived of, by gingerly poking around the borders of where it was not. And this invisible architecture was everywhere. If these reports were correct, if everything was indeed linked, it squatted atop the collective consciousness like some awful and invincible goblin.

And there were other, more personal, horrors that were starting to collect behind his eyeballs. Just some questions, some pretty ordinary questions. Ones that Dr Jameson Shaw, a founding member of the Information Control Division, should know the answers off the top of his head.

Who had founded the Division? And when? How long had he even been here?

And isn’t it strange, isn’t it at least a little unlikely, that nobody had ever built something like this before? You idiot. You stupid little man. But don’t worry. Dr Shaw is getting what he deserves soon enough.

“We meet again, Dr Shaw. I was hoping that we wouldn’t have to.”

Jameson looked up and saw properly for the first time in a while. The room was an abattoir. Blood was everywhere. It pooled beneath his feet, it had collected on his hands with a slow and sticky grip as he had walked through it all so innocently. There were ruined shapes of former humans all over, smears of meat and fecal matter and everything stank. He didn’t recognise the corpses and wouldn’t have even if they had not been impossibly desecrated due to the manner of their death. They were co-workers and friends and he could no longer recall anyone who had ever worked at the Division other than himself.

The woman who had been sitting in the corner of the room was the one who had spoken. She had gotten up and was standing over where he was seated now, a lit cigarette in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Shaw looked up at her and realised, no! Remembered! Remembered that he had been looking directly at her for almost the entire day. She had been there in the security booth when he had checked in, the security guard’s severed head sitting in her lap. She had taken his wallet and keys in the dead man’s place and he had thought nothing of it. And as he passed through the checkpoint, idly stepping over a corpse to do so, she had gotten up and followed him through the mass grave that had been called the Information Control Division just yesterday.

She had been a very strange figure, even for her circumstances. She wore a suit, a great oddity for a woman and, had Shaw been capable of holding more than a moment’s worth of thought about her without it being swept from his skull, that and her androgynous figure might have convinced him that she was just a slender and clean-shaven man.

She had sometimes followed him, sometimes led him, through the facility. She had ushered him away from the cafeteria, where the last few survivors screamed for help in words he could no longer understand. She had taken his hand and guided him through a corridor stuffed with fallen bodies of people who had never been born, making sure that he watched his step and didn’t fall. She had taken keys from the corpses clustered in the comms room, the radio’s all around still echoing with their desperate cries for help. Cries for help that would bounce forever up and down the airwaves in perpetuity, their very information crystallized and forbidden from ever transitioning back into sound.

The Information Control Division was dead and he was the only survivor. And it had been like this for at least a day.

The woman snatched the folder from his unresisting hands.

“Thank you,” she said, her manner of speech halting and stilted. Her voice was hoarse. “It was….annoying to have to poke and prod you, Dr Shaw, into finally wandering back around to this.”

“What is it?”

Something had settled within the researcher. Everything was putting itself back together in his mind’s eye. He was beginning to see. And now, now that he had seen it, he couldn’t help but be calm. He was calm like a corpse is calm.

“The death warrant of the Information Control Division,” Agent Z told him, wagging a bloody finger in front of his face. “And here I’d been hoping that I’d only have to see you folks every...I don’t know...five or ten years? For your pruning, ahaha.” She didn’t laugh, she just said ‘ahaha’ out loud phonetically.

“But you people really think too much! So it has come to me to make a Babel out of this place.”

Dr Shaw understood now. The horror was fully congealed inside his brain. “Babel…,” he slowly repeated. “So that’s it? We built too high?”

“In a manner of speaking! I have to say, Dr Shaw, you are taking this better than the last time we met. Last time you asked if I was Russian!”

She did not speak with a Russian accent. Or any accent.

“I am not Russian,” she said a second later, as if to reassure him. “We prune those people too, fairly regularly. And indeed, they may be due their own Babel with all this nonsense that they’ve been pulling lately. But that’s out of my hands! Out of my hands!”

He looked down again at the folder she was holding and thought back to the question. To the obituary. To his own personal records that some past iteration of him had been desperate to include. The gaps. He’d never questioned it before but...had he really done nothing of note for the better part of a decade before the ICD?

“So we’ve been here before.”

Of course. He thought back to those projects in the Division’s early days, back before they had made Mnemosyne, the vaccine that they thought protected them. They had repeated the same early projects many times over, caught in a loop as their burgeoning technology had made them forget its own completion. But why shouldn’t it be much bigger than that? Why would the ICD be the first American agency to stumble across this fairly simple technology?

Their own Philosopher’s Stone, that had seemed to occur to them fully formed…

“You’ve been in a loop for a good while now,” the murderer in front of him said. “Don’t feel bad. It happens to all your kind. You find it, you reach and…” She clapped her hands together.

And, whoever they were, wherever they were, they ran into this. Into the superstructure that Dr Shaw had uncovered, the dead man’s hand grasped tightly over history. And he knew without asking that this woman was a part of it, some sort of voluntary or involuntary extrusion or agent of its will. This was why this entire field of science, so fertile and apparently easy, had lain fallow for so long. It’s not that it had never been thought of before but that it always led here. No matter what. No matter what. A self-terminating self-censoring field of study.

“You always uncover us,” Agent Z told him. “And, you know, we’re pretty good at doing this business? So when one of you sees us, one of us sees you.” She stubbed her cigarette out on the table and raised her gun. “And we deal with it! It’s not nice. It’s not nice to have competition. Usually we try to be nice all the same, when we can afford it. That’s all the other times we met, all the other ICD’s before this one, it was very gentle. I just had a chat with you and all the others and we broke the whole thing up and it all got classified! But you people just keep fucking trying. Even when we took out Heinrich the rest of you just kept having the same ideas over and over again. So it’s done. It’s good now.”

Dr Shaw stared down the barrel. He didn’t recognise the gun. Nobody would. He could see the future and it ended in just a few seconds from now. “Why?”

Stupid question. Useless question. He thought this too, after he had said it. The thought entered his head just a few moments before the bullet did.

Some time later, years later but not many, Agent Z would find a dead animal on the side of the road that reminded her of Dr Jameson Shaw. It would be the first time she’d even thought about him for a while. It was some sort of bird, now rendered unrecognizable, fried and dead from touching an exposed electrical cable that had been downed in a storm.

One day, without any real way of knowing, while doing what it had always done, because of reasons it was entirely powerless to understand, it had been obliterated by a force far beyond anything it had ever been meant to face. And it was a perfectly ordinary event. Mundane.

At least Dr Shaw had gotten to speak to the lightning, if only for a day.