CHAPTER SEVEN: Probably Unimportant

The door slammed shut behind her as Agent Z staggered forward. The sound of the gunshot was godlike in the small space and drowned out all other sound. It seemed less beautiful now. The culprit was a black semi-automatic rifle. It was not like Agent Z’s gun. It was a real weapon that shot regular bullets and could be recognised and categorized by any watcher with the knowledge.

Agent Z blinked. She was, of course, unharmed. Three bullets hung in the air in front of her face, less than an inch away from her eyes. What an inconvenient place to be shot in! But she certainly wasn't going to die. She knew this. We all knew this. The cliffhanger had been defused before it had even began.

Her first instinct was, of course:

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

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

+++Incorrect+++

But only as an instinct! Her Counter-Hostile Protocols were like a broken arm. Sure it might hang there, able to be accessed and witnessed, but it didn’t do anything anymore. She was restricted.

Her second instinct was to pull her pistol from its holster and return fire, destroying her assailant. But by the time her hand had reached it her third instinct had also fired. Third instinct: Look. She saw the situation and stopped. There would be no fighting, no shooting, no bullet-thoughts here, even if she wanted to. Nobody could shoot the Harjary.

Context! Agent Z was standing inside the Wayhouse, inside the entry hall, surrounded by musty green wallpaper and long perpendicular walls, the former cladding the latter. There were stairs and doors in the distance and it was, probably, a house. But other than those bare signifiers, the Killcutty Wayhouse was a desert of detail. It was a low-semiotic environment, where descriptors had all been drunk away as both part of its construction and as a hazard of its existence. The unprepared mind, struck by this paucity of names, would be forced to fill in the blanks and substitute all manner of nonsense to paper over the howling void in symbolic space. It’s not good for the brain. It’s stressful and alarming and causes permanent nerve damage.

Instead the mind tended to naturally focus on what did have detail and names and signifiers, the people inside who were more real than the space they were occupying. Like the barrel of the rifle. And the rifle. And the person who was holding it. It was someone that Agent Z had met before.

The Harjary cut an unusual and gaunt silhouette, very tall but very thin and in a permanent stoop. Corpse-pale skin stretched tight over a skeleton, giving way to dirty nails and long black hair and blood-shot baggy eyes. They were dressed differently from how they’d been in their last meeting (the last meeting Zed could remember) but that was not unexpected. They were dressed in a dark button-up military uniform that Agent Z didn’t recognise but someone who paid more attention to worldly matters and also military history specifically would know to be a German officer’s uniform from the end of the 19th century, epaulettes and all. The creature’s face, as pinched and as vaguely gremlin-like as ever, was trapped between that and a peaked cap that had been scavenged from a much later, much more russian source. A red-white-and-blue tricolour cockade was pinned to the right breast. The Harjary was a mishmash thing and belonged in that same ‘person-adjacent’ category as Zed herself, though from a wildly different origin.

“Oh! It’s you! My bad,” they said, as if shooting someone in the face was a minor slight. “You caught me by surprise. And I felt like taking this girl out for a spin!” A hand patted the rifle. “Have you seen it before? Probably have, though I don’t know if you spooks visit warzones much. It’s an L1A1. Semi-automatic, gas-operated, short-stroke gas-piston firearm. Shoots 7.62x51mm NATO, like most rifles and it’s pretty heavy, though at least it has a carry handle. Picked it up from a comrade who took it as spoils when they were in the ZIPRA. They didn’t need it anymore, not at the Front. Say, Agent...whatever you are. X? Have you ever been to Zimba-”

Agent Z made a very specific point of tilting her head up so that the Harjary was no longer contained in her field of vision. As a result of this, their voice cut out with a harsh mechanical squeal not unlike someone torturing a microphone. If you can’t see the Harjary, you can’t hear or smell or feel them either. Just one of those little quirks of a mostly unexplained entity.

Now, listen. The Agency was, is and will always be somewhat of a supreme power. It is the dead man’s hand. It is unaccountable. It is the watchman who cannot be watched. Wherever an Agent goes, they ride with jurisdiction. But they are not uncontested. Their control is not absolute. And the secret world has those who can do what they please. The phenomenon known as ‘The World Battalion’ was one of them.

Either an organization or a memetic infection or both, the World Battalion has been around for at least several centuries. It is, they say, a calling. Perhaps a shared hallucination. Certainly a shared dissolution, for those who are swallowed by it are removed from the world forever. It is an international dream, a kidnapping-idealogy, a military rapture. What Agent Z knew of it, what she remembered of it with her newfound low security clearance, was that it was a Grade-Eight threat and that it was somehow tied in deep with other non-anomalous ideatic structures like:

Nationalism Service Sacrifice Defensive wars

Hooked in the conceptual structure of them like a parasite. It almost only ever affected targets who were in the military of some nation or another and, as far as the Agency had determined, showed a marked preference for those who had either been citizen-soldiers, ideologically driven and motivated or those who had been conscripted. Essentially, if you are in the right demographic as described here, the World Battalion is only ever one transcendent thought away. Just what the thought is is hard to describe, since everyone who has it quickly vanishes from the world, sucked away or unmade by a higher power. But it is an act of enlightenment. You see the light shining through the shadows of the world. The causes or service you once had is shucked away by a single pure realisation. A beatific ideal that lets you comprehend that this is all just one world, one people and that it must be protected. All other things are pale and fleeting shadows before the light.

But it is more than just a weird memetic internationalism. It has to be, because everyone who ever thinks out the proper details of this forbidden thought is raptured from the Earth, gone to join the World Battalion. Their concept-objects bound into the World Battalion, their conscription into it means their purge from the memory of all who had known them while they were deployed on Earth, cradle to grave. There, in a place outside reality, they fight the Only Good War. The only war free of soldier-sins and where everyone is a hero. Against...they don’t say, they never have time to say before they leave, never to say what the Enemy is. But there, in the Front’s eternal battlefield, there is an eternal army that lives and dies to protect all the world. There, where the drums beat forever, they shall not grow old and they shall not be remembered.

Or so they said. The Agency was much less trusting. And barring a few odd exceptions, nobody who ever got spirited away by this living ideology ever returned as anything save as a name scrawled on a Memorial. But there was also little the Agency was willing to do about it, at least right now. After all, even if they succeeded in subduing and classifying the idea of the World Battalion...what if it was true? What if there truly was, in some esoteric place within the cognitosphere, a battlefield forever in need of dying heroes? And what would happen if the fight was lost?

And suffering the existence of the World Battalion also meant suffering the existence of the Harjary, a Myrddin-class threat who had to be handled with care. The Harjary claimed to be the only person, if they were a person, to have returned from the Front for good. Some sort of perpetual deserter or recruiter or disgrace, who the fuck knows? They might have never been recruited at all. But interacting with them was dangerous. It was an excellent way to never return home ever again. There were a few rules that Agent Z knew.

Don’t acknowledge the Harjary. If you have to acknowledge the Harjary, don’t look at the Harjary. (Whatever the Harjary is, they operate mostly on the visual spectrum. You cannot sense them if they are not within your sight and they cannot sense you in return). If you have to look at the Harjary, be polite but non-committal. Do not attempt to harm the Harjary under any circumstances. Do not agree to any kind of binding deal with the Harjary. Do not sign anything the Harjary gives you. If the Harjary offers you a gift, you must take it as long as it doesn’t contradict any other rule. That said, if they give you food or drink, you should take it but you shouldn’t consume it. Not because it’ll do anything bad to you but just because it’ll always taste terrible.

In a sense it wasn’t that different from interacting with any sort of recruitment officer.

Unfortunately, Agent Z was going to have to look at the Harjary. Last she checked, they had been standing in the corridor right in front of her. So unless they’d moved she wasn’t gonna be able to move deeper into the Wayhouse until the matter was dealt with. She’d mostly looked away just to avoid listening to their gun ramblings. Agent Z wasn’t interested in guns.

“Well congrats, you shot me. Good! Great! I love it when you do that! Did you have anything else you wanted?”

“Sorry ma’am,” the Harjary said, apparently chagrined. “But I didn’t shoot through your time vortex so you know I meant no harm.” The tone of their voice implied that they believed they could pierce Agent Z’s absolute auto-defence if they really wanted to. Zed had no interest in testing that out.

“Don’t call me ma’am. Call me Zed. Or call me nothing.”

“That’s right!” The Harjary snapped their fingers. “You were Agent Z, that’s the one. Z.”

“Zed. It’s pronounced Zed.”

“Only if we’re talking English right now. Are we?”

Agent Z stopped to think on this for a moment. The bullets hovering right in front of her eyes were a bit of a distraction. She decided she didn’t want to think about it. “Who cares? Doesn’t matter! Especially not here.”

The Harjary nodded. A little bit of understanding, from one weird estranged-from-the-world person(?) to another. From one extrusion to another. From one tool to another. “Here. I have a gift. For you.”

The quasi-soldier took hold of Agent Z’s jacket and pulled it open, a gloved hand (still holding the rifle, do not focus on how many hands the Harjary has) slipping a piece of stiff paper into one of her internal pockets. Unfortunately she caught a pretty good glimpse of what it was before she pulled away.

“That’s a draft card. I’m not signing that.” You can’t be rude. But you can be firm.

“But you’ll take it?”

“I will,” she conceded. “But it doesn’t mean anything. I’m not going to put my name on it. I’m going to acknowledge it.”

“What’s wrong, Zed? You aren’t interested in becoming a hero? In fighting the good fight?”

“The fight is already plenty good where I’m at.” She had to be careful with her wording. Agent Z’s mindset, which was like a pile of broken cog-wheels at the best of time, was frozen. Right now, when she was at her deepest and lowest ebb, without the Agency behind her, she couldn’t afford to offend the Harjary. “Fighting to keep the world for you people, you know? So that there’s a world at all for you to return to when the War is over.”

“That’s not how it works.” But they seemed pleased with the response. “You don’t have to sign it. You know I would never force anyone to do anything. But keep it. Maybe you’ll find someone else who needs it.”

“Sure.” As if. “Were you coming or going, by the way?”

“Going. I was a-walking out the door when you startled me.”

“Good.” She slid to the side of the corridor, leaning up against a wall that she could not describe as either hard or soft or anything besides green. More than enough room for the Harjary to pass. “I’m going to close my eyes and count to sixty. Keep on keeping on, alright? Alright?”

“I will! I don’t have a choice! But first…” Outstretched hands. “An obol for Belisarius?”

“...I might have some spare change.”

Zed knocked on the door. She had been walking through the Wayhouse for some time. Time was a little strange here, a little fluid but so was Agent Z so she knew the exact amount of time anyway. Twelve minutes.

The Wayhouses, in addition to all the various little transportation services they offered, also let you pay for room and board. Not in money, typically in a much more bullshit cost but still. It was a fantastic refuge for those who could not survive in the prosaic reality, who would beat their hands to stubs against the walls of the world if they were outside. It was also a great place for people who wanted to offer certains goods and/or services to those in the know. The man Agent Z was visiting was a little of column A and a little of column B.

His name was Stijn and he was Dutch and he was a clock-doctor and he did not, technically speaking, exist.

In that order.