CHAPTER SIX: Non-Esoteric Doldrums

There are few things as beautiful as a gunshot. Agent Z was thinking this again. And this time it wasn’t because of Counter-Hostile Protocols smoothing out her brain. This time it was because she was looking down the barrel of her pistol. The hole in the end, leading into a smooth machined void, seemed to fill the world. But don’t worry. Her finger wasn’t on the trigger.

Agent Z couldn’t imagine herself without the Agency. It was literally part of her name. It had been her whole life. She didn’t remember her time before it or even if she had ever had time before it. But here she was! Cut off and disarmed, for some fucking stupid reason. For something that must have happened in these two invisible days.

And really! Really! How bad could it be? Was she not a loyal tool? Had she not put her life and much more important things on the line for the cause? And now she had a bullet working its way through her body and a bunch of temporally displaced monster bites just waiting to crush her skull and arm and she couldn’t engage Requisition Protocols.

The Agency had a service for its employees, a time-siphon that helped free them from any postponed deaths. That was the whole point. But burned as she was, Agent Z no longer had the authorization to vent the frozen time that contained her own death.

Forget the gun. She didn’t need to have a trigger-assisted staring contest with it if she wanted to die. She would be dead soon enough if she didn’t do something.

She had told Jacob that she was going out on business and had left him in his apartment for the night. And she had meant it. But Agent Z says a lot of things that she meant at the time. That doesn’t mean that she goes out and does them. Instead she was slumped down in the Memorial Square outside the building, sat down on the steps with her back leaning up against the obelisk. She wasn’t in her Secrecy Protocols but she was invisible to the small crowds of people strolling through the nighttime Square regardless. She was under the Memorial’s protection, protected by the same vague effect that hid the monolith from mind after people had made their requisite salute.

Agent Z herself was not wholly immune to this, of course. She had made her salute when she had first passed this way, on her way to Jacob’s apartment. And she had done it again just before, when she had left. That part of the Memorials was universal, even for those who could remember it. It was a cosmic sacrament.

It wasn’t much to look at. Just a big stone obelisk, nearly identical to any number of non-supernatural counterparts throughout the world. Names were inscribed along each face. Even in the world of those in the know, it wasn’t very unique. There were capital-M Memorials in nearly every major city in the world, after all.

And nobody knew who put them there.

A great many people had made use of the Memorials in the past. They were a living record, always updated by those who needed to do it, recording the names of the nameless. They were the final stop, the only chance of many for any sort of resting place. A promise that even if you were classified and expunged from the world, that even if your former parents and friends would never remember that you had existed, even if it had been made so that you’d never been born at all…

Someone could carve your name here, on this stone oasis slightly outside the world and immune to conventional history. And it would stand forever.

The Agency made use of them, though Z hadn’t spotted any designations on this one. But there were a few of these obelisks around the world that carried service letters of fallen Agents, the only identities any of them would ever have. Z herself had done a bit of carving on occasion, out of a sense of obligation to those who she had completely censored from history. To etch the name of a fallen target on something that existed outside of herself made her feel like the world was real, if only for a little while.

But it was much bigger than just the Agency. All kinds of people who knew the truth of the world had recorded names here. The Memorials were indestructible in their sanctity and were an inviolable neutral ground, so it wasn’t uncommon to see the obelisks scrawled with the offerings of enemy organisations and Agency-recognised threats. The World Battalion, in particular, made heavy use of them and judging by the number of military designations following the most recent names here, this one was no different. There were always people dying in the Battalion.

You could trace the names on each obelisk as far back as you wanted and most of them were still legible, though some names had become completely indecipherable due to linguistic contamination. This got more common the further back you went. And the original names on each one, right at the top of each obelisk, the names of what we all presume to have been the Memorial creators, are impossible to read. It’s not a matter of classification either. You can see them. You can even try and sound some of them out, at least a little. But you won’t get them right. The correct phonemes don’t exist anymore and the cultural memeplex that produced them has long fallen outside of the set of all things that it is possible for humans to imagine. They’ve gone away.

The Memorials have long since failed at their original purpose. Much like, Agent Z supposed because she was feeling very sorry for herself, Agent Z.

But she couldn’t stay here and mope forever, could she? She had to survive. She had to, at the very least, not die to this. And she had promised Jacob that she’d get him help and aid him in living in the new world. She had to solve this mystery too. She had to do all that. So let’s skip past the next hour or so that she spends sitting by the Memorial and bemoaning her fate. It’s not useful.

In the end, Agent Z made up her mind. It was deeply unfortunate but it was now time to exist in the world.

But before that happened, she badly needed a cigarette.

That was another minor mystery. She’d always made sure to keep at least one pack on her, tucked away in the interior pockets of her snug suit. But when she had exited Counter-Hostile Protocols earlier today, she’d been bereft. No smokes to be found! And worse yet, she couldn’t just acquire them with her Requisition Protocols like she had always done in the past. She was going to have to actually get them herself. From a human person. Just the thought of this was unbearable.

Ten minutes later, she staggered into a gas station, earning an odd look from the cashier standing behind the counter. She’d been getting odd looks this entire time and she hated it. She wanted to engage Secrecy Protocols. But she had to do it. She had to live in the world. Sure, she could go secret whenever she wanted. She could continue...continue carrying on as if she was an Agent. And she was! She was Agent Z. There was nothing else she could ever be. There was no such thing as Civilian Z.

And yet!

The Agency didn’t seem to agree. The Agency was revoking her privileges. And there was no point pretending that, unless she fixed this real quick, that it wouldn’t take everything else away as well. That she was still permitted Secrecy Protocols at this point was not a guarantee she’d continue to have them in the future. It wasn’t a guarantee that she’d have them tomorrow.

So Zed had to take part in this wicked world that she claimed to love so much. She had to get used to it, just in case the worst happened.

The cashier couldn’t see the small cloud of gore that was orbiting her head, thankfully. She’d classified that. And the bullet that was going to kill her soon was hidden away beneath her clothes. But she still drew the eye all the same. What else would you do, if you saw someone like her, but look? It wasn’t a good feeling. She fancied that she could feel their gazes crawling on her back, across her skin, up and down her body. She’d broken out in a cold sweat, one that made her hands feel slippery and her face feel chilly.

“Hello,” she said to the cashier. It wasn’t that Zed was socially inept. She wasn’t. She could be quite the talker for her missions. But it was about control. When she had her hand gripped tightly around the collective consciousness, permitting a person’s sensorium to contain her had a novel, almost thrilling feel. But when it was forced? When she had to do it and couldn’t stop it? It was a violation. It was just like Jacob and the shower again, a topic that they had gladly slid over without much comment. For now.

“Give me some cigarettes,” she said, pulling a wallet out of her coat pocket. She always carried a little money and it was money that was good anywhere. The cashier looked at them and saw American banknotes.

“What brand?”

What? Already feeling sorely tested, her skin rubbed thin by the stress of it all, Agent Z stared up at the wall of cigarettes behind the counter and behind the cashier who was also behind the counter. You see, Agent Z did not typically engage with brands. They were not the kinds of destructive ideas that fell under her jurisdiction. When she requisitioned cigarettes from the Agency they had always come in blank white packets. What brand was like that? What was she supposed to say?

She stood there in silence for a moment and then:

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Locked+++

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Unlocked+++

She gave up.

What a shameful thing to see. And for all the burdens it lifted off Agent Z’s shoulders, they were replaced with burning cheeks and a queasy sensation. With the world now censored, she sat on top of the counter right in front of the cashier, who looked right through her. The customer who’d been standing behind her now approached and started talking about gas pumps. She just sat in between the two of them, her arms around her legs.

This was unprofessional behaviour, she knew. Whenever she disengaged these Protocols, these guys were going to have some weird memories. But it felt right to her. In a small fit of pique, she classified all the donuts on the counter display. And when the cashier bustled off to replace the ‘missing’ foodstuffs, she hopped down and stole several cartons of cigarettes. Wasting no time, she lit one up in the middle of the store and just thought smoke-thoughts for a few minutes until she calmed down. Feh. These had an awful taste to them. Perhaps another brand would be better? (They would not. Though she has no idea, the events of Agent Z's blind two days had permanently altered her sense of taste)

She stubbed the cigarette out on the counter and sauntered out. Cigs acquired. Next stop: saving her life.

Walking down the street while classified was a surprisingly easy procedure. She wasn’t invisible, after all, People just forgot her very quickly. So for the most part people moved out of the way to let her pass, even if they didn’t know why or even that they were doing it. She strode down the sidewalk, substandard cigarette clenched between two lips, contemplating medicine. Normally she’d be able to rely on Agency resources to clean out her automatic defense system and to de-sync the postponed harm before it could hurt her. But that was not to be! Not anymore. So now she had to make use of local resources. Fellow seers, people in the know, who were not Agency members. Every city had a few.

And for that, she was going to need payment. The money she had on her wasn’t going to cut it, oh no. Fortunately this was not her first day in this town. She had contacts. And some of those contacts had very peculiar tastes when it came to gifts and wages.

She spotted a good gift on her walk over. It was currently sitting in the eye-socket of a local policeman, one who was idling on the pavement near a motorcycle. There. That’ll do. She stopped by a local kebab stall to appropriate a two-tined metal fork from the man’s cooking tools before she walked over to the cop.

“I need this,” she said to absolutely nobody, before pulling the policeman’s handcuffs free from his belt and using them to cuff one of his wrists to a stretch of safety railing bordering the curb. He didn’t notice, of course. As a non-classified object that had been acted upon by a classified entity, the cuffs were now ambiguous. You saw of them what you expected to see.

The policeman, whose mind was now busy rationalising away why he didn’t feel like moving much right now, stood there still as Agent Z embraced him. And by ‘embraced’ we mean ‘held him still by wrapping one arm around his torso while she readied the fork’.

Have you ever seen someone lose an eye? Because nobody here was seeing it. Not even when Zed inserted the fork into the policeman’s left eye-socket, driving it carefully between the eyeball and the lower rim of the orbital bone. She jimmied it in, wriggling it back and forth until the tines of the fork were behind the eyeball. From there it just took a bit of gouging and dragging until his eyeball was resting in the palm of her hand and not at all in his eye-socket where it belonged, which was now just a ragged and bloody hole from which cords of optic nerve still dangled. It was a little squished but all the vitreous humour should still be in one place. It was still good.

She left the policeman to his own devices, after making sure to classify the wound and his cuffs. Now neither he nor anyone else will ever know that he was missing an eye. Hell, he’ll still see out of it, though what he sees might not line up exactly with what everyone else thought they saw. Once the Secrecy Protocols go down, all he’ll remember (if he bothers to think back on his day at all) is that a weird lady gave him a hug and he didn’t do anything about it.

Zed walked off, prize in hand. She was going to have an appointment soon and she needed to be at her best.

Every city of major import has an esoteric underground of sorts. Statistically, one is very likely to be near you. All you need is the right way of looking. Not just in the classified sense either. Plenty of people in the know have more public ways of getting the message out to one another. So keep an eye out, if you have the interest, for strange ads in the newspaper, seemingly pointless posts in your local social media that have a cluster of replies all the same and decrepit lifeless houses that are, for some godawful reason, still meticulously maintained. It was to one of the latter that Agent Z journeyed to. Her gift was safe in her trouser pocket, wrapped up in a stolen handkerchief.

She’d washed her hands of all the assorted bodily fluids.

The house she was standing in front of was a dilapidated townhouse in what had once been a good part of town but had never quite survived the collapse of modern American industry. The result was a lot of places like this one. A freshly-painted green door stood out like a sore thumb amidst decaying brickwork, the stairs leading up to stripped down to bare concrete and iron. The door was no doubt locked and secured on the inside with bars and deadbolts but that was far from the only line of defence the Kilcutty Wayhouse had.

Before climbing the steps, Agent Z rubbed the palm of her left hand against the little brass owl still sitting atop the railing. That was important. Even if she managed to get the door open through brutal means, it would never open the correct way without the recognition of the owl. She’d find herself in an empty house. As she raised her hand from the owl, she took a quick glance all around the street. All she saw were the backs of heads. Every single bystander had stopped and turned to face the other way. Good. That was good! It meant that the Wayhouse was open for her.

Zed had used the Wayhouses before, even if they were amateur constructions that would never be condoned by the Agency. So when she opened the door, she was expecting several things. In no particular order they could be:

Old green wallpaper. A perpetual musty smell No windows Too many doors An ever-expanding nightmare labyrinth that ate your brain.

She was not expecting:

A rifle. A loaded rifle. A loaded rifle pointed right at her.

She acted on instinct and as a result got shot right in the face.