It wasn't the bed’s fault. It was a good bed. Any number of placards, door hangers, and ad placements in the hotel’s elevator extolled the virtues of the bed. Teflon memory foam. Virgin wool topper. Organic and gluten-free Egyptian cotton. It was the kind of cotton wars had been fought over, maybe to this day.

He felt he knew this bed intimately, if not like a lover, then certainly like someone who he wished were.

Yet he still couldn't sleep. But it wasn't the bed’s fault. Nothing was.

He had forgotten his medicine. Without two of those chartreuse-colored pills a day, he couldn't sleep. With them, he developed a gnarly patch of back acne and bad bouts of road rage. But without it, he couldn't sleep.

Sullivan sighed and rolled over for the umpteenth time that night, though he knew it would do him little good. Left side. Right side. Didn’t make a difference so long as he hadn’t had his dose of Ascemdamcy.

Back in Flagstaff, that’s where he must have left them. They were long gone by now; either thrown away or, if the staff had mistaken them for some better, more rewarding drug, crushed and sniffed up by a wanting nose. Shame was that, as far as highs went, Ascemdamcy wasn’t very rewarding. Not much of a buzz. Sure could put a person to sleep, though, and that’s not without its own value.

For Sullivan it was invaluable.

He had only realized it was missing after he had completely unpacked again, and by then it was much too late to call the hotel in Flagstaff and inquire about getting it back, assuming it wasn’t already in a landfill or somewhere else less glamorous. No matter: Sullivan sent a message through to his superiors and, without hesitation, they assured him that a new bottle would be waiting for him at the front desk of this hotel in the morning. They made no fuss about it. This wasn’t the first time it had happened to him and, by how easily the transaction had been arranged, it must have happened with some frequency to others, too.

The message said how important he was to the Academy. Him and his health. It made Sullivan feel warm inside. He even blushed.

“I’ll be fine,” he murmured to the deafening silence, a smug grin on his face. He wasn’t convinced he would be, though.

Seven hours later, with just two more left before dawn, Sullivan was no closer to being fine. Fine was a low hurdle to clear, but it was a leap of faith at that hour, after this long without sleep.

His sole comfort was the knowledge that ASP did care about him. They needed him. They were sorry about the inconvenience. They would rush a fresh bottle of pills to him overnight because they needed him to be the best he could be. There was a hint of affection even in the way they asked him for his passcode or deposited his paycheck. He was their employee and they were a faceless, many-armed pseudo-government, quasi-military organization, so it wasn’t love that bound Sullivan and ASP. But sometimes, at least to him, it sure did feel that way.

That was one thing that separated the Milieu, those bastards, from ASP. There were plenty of things, of course. Innumerable things. So many things that Sullivan didn’t even know where to start…

Except that ASP acted out of love whereas the Milieu was driven purely by hate. Boil everything else down and that’s what it amounted to. Both groups destroyed; ASP out of love, the Milieu out of hate. Both groups sought power; ASP out of love, the Milieu out of hate. Both groups operated in a space outside the law; ASP out of love, Milieu out of hate.

And love bred loyalty. At least for Sullivan.

He believed wholeheartedly in the mission and would die for ASP. Heck, there wasn’t even a question in his mind when it came to dying or not. Whereas he was just one puny, insignificant human, ASP was out there trying to save the whole planet. They were the first and the last line of defense, fending off chaos and its welcoming party, the Milieu. He wasn’t just willing to give up his life for ASP, he would gladly turn it over, like a child handing over rolled-up balls of white bread to the neighborhood ducks.

ASP had discovered Sullivan. That day had been shaping up to be lousy otherwise. He was eighteen and, despite high marks in marksmanship, agility, speed, and even intelligence, his commanding officer let him know that he had failed boot camp. Sullivan hadn’t even known that was a possibility. Yet, here they were, escorting him off the premises like he were a criminal, except even criminals got the right to appeal, whereas all he got was two brutes hauling him to the base’s gate in cold silence.

Turned out that all the high marks don’t mean much when you are ‘uniquely unfit for service owing to atypically severe antisocial tendencies.’

The Academy had no gumption about such matters. That was how the man who met him on the other side of the gate put it. Exactly like that.

The Academy for Science & Progress. ASP. No one had ever bothered to explain the name to him. It was, he figured, above his pay grade. One day he might know. Insofar as he could tell, eighteen years on, no part of the name was true. They were neither an academy nor much concerned with science or progress.

What they were was a well-armed, well-trained battalion equipped with many of the skills of the military and police but with less baggage than both.

What they were concerned with was quashing those who sought to foment destruction.

Like the Milieu.

Sullivan tried not to ask questions. He did what he was told. They told him that the Milieu was the enemy and they told him where they needed him to go to help remedy that. That was all Sullivan needed. The details, well, they only got in the way. Details only complicated things for Sullivan. The way he looked at it, the world would be much simpler, much easier to operate in, with less color. Greyscale. Monochrome. Add in the color, add in the details, and things became much harder to sort out.

ASP didn’t bother him with details. ASP was on the side of truth and justice and all that was good. The Milieu, with its rickety combinations of eco-terrorism, anarcho-socialism, radical Boshlevism, and any number of different hyphenated creeds, was bad.

That was all Sullivan needed.

He tossed. And turned. It did no good. It never did.

Not everything he did for ASP was concerned with the Milieu. Especially early on, he had had assignments more quotidian. Threats came in all shapes and sizes, but most of them came bearing grenade launchers or anthrax samples. He couldn’t count how many times he had put down one of these run-of-the-mill operations. It was mindless. Not unsatisfying, by any means, but nothing that required any higher-level thinking. A trained monkey, equipped with night-vision goggles, infrared scanners, and top-notch intelligence, could deal with that kind of threat.

Increasingly, though, more and more of his cases concerned the Milieu, especially after they leaked that classified material from Project Bluebook. That was enough to get ASP’s attention.

What was their agenda?

The destruction of all that was good with the world.

What were their methods?

Any slimy, shape-shifting thing they could get their hands on. They weren’t hamstrung by their hifalutin ideals. They were willing to work dirty because they came from muck and, if it were up to them, would have all of us living in the muck, too.

This Project Bluebook stuff, it was only their latest, their slimiest tact yet.

Sullivan had never heard of Bluebook before the leak. And, now that he had been knee-deep in chasing after the leakers and their co-conspirators for months, he wished he hadn’t.

Aliens. Spacecraft.

He didn’t believe a lick of it. Not before he knew about Bluebook and certainly not after. Never mind what his own eyes told him. His own superiors, by way of memos, had made it very clear that there was no such thing as anything related to things that may or may not have been leaked by the criminal organization known at the Milieu. Were an agent of ASP to mistake something they saw in the course of their investigations that appeared to be something related to a thing mentioned in the leaked documents, they were to immediately report this mistake. Without delay.

That was good enough for Sullivan.

As for what he knew about the Milieu, it was all hearsay. Nothing official ever came down from on high. Not only was ASP not in the business of publishing history books, they also weren’t about to ascribe any kind of legitimacy to their enemy by glorifying what they did or who they were. What was expected from boots on the ground like Sullivan and Pacheco was to revile the Milleiu and to do everything in their power to destroy it. The story ended there.

Officially, at least.

Unofficially, it was said that the Milieu was not truly one group but a vast confederacy. There was no leader. No one creed. They didn’t all wear nifty polos like ASP did and there were no dues.

At the turn of the last century, when the thinking was that globalization was the world’s biggest threat, a group of disparate groups began to realize they had more in common than one might have thought. Some of these folks were fighting for the fish in the sea. Others waved indigenous flags. Still, others advocated only for anarchy.

What united them was a common enemy. The rich and the powerful had swallowed up all the wealth with nothing but antipathy to guide them. That these were two ends of the spectrum was obvious: in all sorts of protests in every corner of the world, the armed guards of the rich spilled the blood of the disenfranchised, the poor, and the angry.

Little by little, sometimes from one prison cell to another, these downtrodden got to talking. They often disagreed about the exact nature of the problem. They had different ideas about the solution. They might even have considered each other enemies if not for the bigger, scarier threat that loomed over all of them. But, by and by, they began to settle on, if not a common mission then a common goal.

The undoing of a world that had left them behind.

That all of this coincided with the rise of the internet was no coincidence. News spread faster than before and so did dissent. The pocket of anti-poachers in South Africa could suddenly trade tactics with redundant coal miners from Newcastle. Luddites in Vancouver took up arms on behalf of the Bedouin of the Negev. It was aggression too hot to contain, too swift to follow.

And, without a chief or a congress or even an advisory board, the Milieu was impossible to destroy. There was no head to chop off. The powers that could be never found an arrested member to parade in front of the press as a sign that the group had been defeated. Eliminate one sliver of the Milieu and two more would take its place -- more often than not, twice as angry to make up for it, too.

Make no mistake, these were not good guys. Certainly, not all amongst them were bloodthirsty. Just the same, few held purely selfless motivations and even fewer were above doing terrible things to achieve what seemed to them to be noble outcomes. They could find many ways to justify their deeds.

Most of the pitched battles the established order fought, whether they realized it or not, were against an arm of the Milieu. No battlefield could contain them; they would not sign any truce or agree to lay down their arms. Their biggest coup, by far, was leaking the pages of Project Bluebook.

By then, there was no other choice but to call in ASP.

At least, that’s what Sullivan had heard.