My next emergency call was another late-nighter. Around 2 AM to Cruxham, the Lowlands again. This time I’m met by one of the two Inspectors for the region. His name is Wiley and he’s my favorite, I don’t know why they didn’t promote him to Overseer. Wiley grew up in the Lowlands and has all the scruffy charm that makes up one of the better features of the region. He’s well above his job in capability but the Directory doesn’t seem to want him to know that. His sense of the Lowlands is better than any of ours.

“Do your Cremorne job this week?” He asks, clapping my shoulder.

“I did. Nothing thrilling to report, besides the food.”

“Maybe you ain’t doing it right,” he laughed. He pulled out his cigarettes and offered. This cryptic command he had of our interactions. It was nice to be around someone so indifferently honest. I don’t really smoke but I take one of his anyway. Wiley makes me sad that I never had a brother and the nicotine sets my lights off. After the first buzz diffuses I ask for the story.

“Usher’s Dowager has been getting out again,” he said with a slight sadness. Magdalinda Usher became a public darling during the reformation. She was intelligent, and graceful in the face of the traumatic reformation that dragged off so many of her relatives before her eyes, but she took on the posture of atonement, rather than indignation like the bulk of her peers. Granted, she was one of the rural Ushers, not the original estate House in Cruxham. Her ilk was mostly untouched. In fact, they essentially benefitted from their relatives’ loss by gaining popularity, and the big house, when all their city relatives had to be replaced.

For a long time, I’d wondered why Magdalinda had shrunk to the background of what the Publics had found the be a thoroughly revolting family these days, til I realized how much of it had stemmed from her behavior. You see, Magdalinda Usher had decided to take up her efforts at another personal renaissance.

The House of Usher is odd. Like the rest of Cruxham, the estate is made from that kind of wood that looks like it was salvaged from a forest fire. But if there was any kind of accent or ornamentation it has long since been ripped away, however, it is kept to a level of tidiness I usually only see in staffed vacation homes. That is, it looks like no one lives here but that someone keeps up the dusting. I have no idea what their daily lives are like here and I likely never will. I’ve only ever seen the estate from the gates. Whatever Magdalinda’s activities in the estate, she’s already been walking out to greet us every time we've pulled up.

She is somehow unchanged since the era of her peak, the rare timeless woman. She comes out in what may be her best silken nightwear, widows black as is her habit. She’s unlatching the gate as we step out of the car. She shuts the gate behind her and turns to lock it, casting a playful stare over her shoulder at us. She pockets the key with a flourish and strolls over to where we’re waiting. “Boys…” she says with a voice like syrup and a raise to her eyebrows that stands for “I know why you’re here and I could care less.” I was still a teenager when she was making the news and back then she was in every paper, frequently front pages. I never would have thought I could have met her back then, but now here I am, grown and professional, I’ve known her for around two years and she’s been using speed intermittently. There’s a phone number of mine she has memorized and she used to call me when Wiley’s crew was called in because she thought it would put her ahead of the situation somehow. Now I had to come in-person every time there was a call to the Usher estate.

I gave her the proper acknowledgments. That kind of thing works well on her type. “We’re here to get your side for the Incident Report,” I tell her in a sympathetic tone.

“Which one of my sides exactly?” She said behind her eternal cigarette.

“Could you tell us about the man you were with?” Wiley asks, not bothering with any of the social delicacies that I had started.

“Don’t know him really,” she shrugged. “I went out for a lunch and met him at a bar. He said his name was Andre or something. That’s it.”

“That’s fine,” I say assuringly. Eye contact, softly nod. I need to handle this because Wiley is absolutely repulsing the old girl. “Why did he take you to the Cruxham Warrens?”

She slackens a bit. “Oh I don’t know, but it was just awful. I tried to get him to leave, you see. He’d told me he had a property for sale, and that it might be useful to the House. Who knows what he really had planned for me there.”

“Who bought the drugs?” A kept my tone gentle, but this could be the question that shuts her down completely.

“Are you really asking me that?” Her voice slightly rose.

“Only because I have to. The similarities to past Incident Reports… if I don’t ask you, or rather, if I don’t have an answer to turn into the Directory, they’re going to keep asking you until they get the answer they want. The more they have to ask you the worse they will want that answer to be for you. I don’t want that. I want to clear this up, with your help, I want this to be fair for you.” Talking to these old-era nobles is exhausting, but I wasn’t lying. Maybe it’s my youthful nostalgia, but I’ve always hoped for Magdalinda to get better, and somehow grow into one of those regal and beloved old dames that continue to wow the Publics with their enduring grace. Somehow. I should stop reading harlequins before bed.

“They were his of course. He clearly knew who I was and knew about my more…haunted times, and he meant to use it all against me in some horrific way.” She exhales furiously.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true, and it’s likely not. Her current tenuous position came from an incident involving Magdalinda assaulting another man she hardly knew in Cruxham Crossing after the two had been kicked off the trains because they wouldn’t stop screaming at each other. The drugs had been found on her at that time. This time it had only been “Andre”, and they were in his registered vehicle. A flashy thing, the car was what had caught the eye of the Street Inspectors. The car was out of place for the public housing quarter, and they obviously didn’t belong. It was also in Magdalinda’s favor that this Andre caused a scene pretty soon into his interactions with the Inspectors. She could say she had nothing to do with the drugs and as far as the records process goes it would pass.

So the guy’s car was towed and he was off to jail, and Magdalinda Usher was left on the side of a street in a quarter that her type should never be in. I lean in slightly with a nod, “Thank you for your help. Between us, it’s the report that we’re investigating. Trying to correct the inconsistencies, if you understand.”

She smiles coyly, “Oh I understand. If I were still allowed my say the entire Directory would be investigated and culled, just like they did us. That Inspector of yours ripped up my heirloom purse looking for things I didn’t have and left me to the wolves.

“I assure you that I resent these Inspectors’ lack of regard as much as you do. Believe it or not, there are protocols meant to be followed in cases involving a name of your stature. If there’s anything else you’d like to tell me I promise it will heavily inform my final decisions on the case.” This is my last squeeze.

“You flatter me, but I’ve told you all I know and I’d like to go to bed now.”

“Of course, and thank you again for your graciousness.” She had whipped back to the estate well before I finished.

This situation just shows how fucked up this place is and how desperate people are for publicity and to get their name back to where it was and somehow they’ll get all their Old Ways back and all the mansions and fineries they’d grown up expecting. Again, nothing of what I said to Magdalinda was a lie. We hadn’t even had an identity for the woman of the Incident Report, we found out because she’d had her tabloidist son screaming for justice on the cover of all his rags, cultivating a story of the Directory leaving old women to be murdered on purpose. It does bother me that she wasn’t identified in the Street Inspector’s report. It means that he either never looked at it despite searching her, or that she was able to barter with the officer in one of few ways. That is not uncommon and I’ve been approached myself, unfortunately. Either way, I’ll say this much, the Directory is very lucky that the House of Usher is so unpopular, otherwise, Magdalinda’s story would have exploded beyond the tabloids.

For her part, Magdalinda is thinking to herself that she will get her name in the legitimate papers if my report backs her version of the traumatic affair, and if that takes she may even fake a clinic stay to put weight on the narrative of commitment to getting her life on track while being the primary burden bearer of her House. That is all Possible, but in reality, what would have happened is there would have been an investigation into why her name wasn’t in the Report and why she was let off when she was on the watchlist. The Inspectors will not simply be fired in this but imprisoned if we were to indeed follow protocol.

Later in the car again with Wiley, we’re having a conversation that we have every time we’ve gone in a circle and now have to both write our reports on it as if it was resolved.

“Give me a day to talk to these guys, will ya?” Wiley says.

“Sure. What’ll you do?”

“I don’t know yet. I do know we can only contain so much. I also know that what the street guys did ain’t anything they hadn’t heard of someone else doing. Something like this seems bound to come up eventually. Directory heads only want numbers and they all know it, so they work for numbers and don’t worry about the, uh…spills, I guess.”

“I can give you a day, but we won’t have more than that. If they really went too far then they have to go. Maybe not fired, but you have to relocate them somewhere far away that doesn’t matter. Make their liaisons in tourist hotels for a year or something. But if anything is wrong with their conduct you have to start moving them tomorrow. I will follow up on this the following day so please, handle it, for both our sakes.”

“You got it, boss.”

“Stop.” He gives me another cigarette and I take it, not caring how sick it makes me.

I said I’d release things slowly so I can take care. Here’s the next bit of my old orientation correspondence, AKA letters I wish I’d never read.

D - 1961

DEPT. OF INTERIOR

FOR

DIRECTOR, INTELLIGENCE [redacted]

POLITICAL INTRODUCTION

TO

INTERNAL SECURITY PROGRAMS

You are receiving this memo because you have been selected for Internal Security Projects. If you recall the previous memo, this is a follow-up to officially inform you that we are to begin the program after the turn of the year. This is the first of your orientation materials.

In the First Era, it was well recognized by those in positions of authority that it was only a matter of time, only a few decades before the general public would tire of the New Direction and grow nostalgic for the Old Family System, allowing the subdued regime to grasp and upset the cradle of power.

The issue of primary concern, that of dominance, is solved by the work of social energy science.

SOCIAL ENERGY

Social Energy is recognized as the key to all activity within our system. It is the study of the sources and control of consumption energy. It is an accounting system, and the accountant can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the accounting.

All science is merely a means to an end. The means is knowledge. The end controls. Beyond this remains only one issue, “Who will be the beneficiary?”.

In the First Era, this was an issue of primary concern. Although the so-called “moral issues” were raised, in view of the law of natural selection it was agreed that a nation of people who will not use their intelligence are no different than animals who do not have intelligence. Such people are beasts of burden by choice and consent.

Consequently, in the interest of the future world, order, peace, and tranquility, it was decided that quiet defenses had to be established against the very public we liberated with an ultimate objective of permanently shifting the natural and social energy of the undisciplined and irresponsible into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible and worthy.

In order to implement this objective, it was necessary to create, secure, and apply new weapons which, as it turned out, were a class of weapons so subtle and sophisticated in their principle of operation and public appearance as to earn for themselves the name “silent defenses”.

In conclusion, the objective of economic research, as conducted by the Dept. of Capital and the Dept. of Commodities, is the establishment of an economy that is totally predictable and manipulatable.

In order to achieve a totally predictable economy, the old regime elements of our society must be brought under full control, I.e. these elements must be house-broken, trained, and assigned a yoke and long-term social duties from a very early age, before they have an opportunity for questioning the matter. In order to achieve such conformity, the Old Family Houses and their customs must be disintegrated by a process of increasing preoccupation of the parents and the establishment of Directory-funded daycare centers for the occupationally orphaned children.

The quality of education given to the Commons class must be of the poorest sort so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the Directory is and remains incomprehensible to that class. With such starting developmental foundation even the brighter individuals will either extricate themselves from their lot in life singly or they will lack the inertia to resist their lot in life. This form of socializing is essential for maintaining some measure of social order, peace, and tranquility for the land and the Directory.

[CONCLUDED]