Microstory 1966: Safehouse School

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Reese: Sergeant?

Sachs: Sachs.

Reese: Sachs, right. You searched the safehouse?

Sachs: It’s secure. We can start setting up.

Reese: *into his radio* Bring the equipment on in, Sasho. *to Sachs* Sasho and Sachs. Those two names are uncomfortably close. Hey, what’s your middle name, Sasho?

Sasho: *lugging luggage down the hall* Risto.

Reese: Really?

Sachs: Reese and Risto. That’s better.

Micro: Oh, this room is fine, Sachs Reese—I mean Sasho Risto—you can just drop that stuff anywhere. I’ll sort it out.

Ophelia: What does all this stuff do?

Micro: Everythings. All the thing. Surveillance, tracking, ordering pizza.

Reese: You two set up the computers. Sasho, follow me. I need you for something. Grab that bag. No, not that one. Yes, that one. Sachs, you know which case to grab. *leads them up to the attic* Okay. There’s a lot of space up here, which is good, but you could technically do this in a bathroom. Sasho, if you’ll open that up, you’ll find a projector and screen. Go ahead and lay everything out on this table.

Sachs: Is that what I think it is?

Reese: State of the art.

Sasho: I don’t understand. What is all this stuff for?

Sachs: *picking up a small object* This goes on the trigger?

Reese: Yes. Sasho, this is a sniper training toolkit. It’s a highly advanced altered reality system, which simulates real-world conditions for targets in any environment, at a distance up to four kilometers. It’s basically a simulation game that teaches you how to shoot without firing any real bullets. We’re limited by resources and space here. We can’t teach you how to spot in the middle of downtown Memphis, Mississippi. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to learn everything in a few days, but you have to start somewhere. The training program is generally eight months, and if you would like to do that, we can discuss at a later date, but while others on the team are trying to locate our target, I figured you might as well get a taste.

Sasho: Yeah.

Reese: You did want this, right? You told me on the plane you wanted to branch out from your experience as a jailer.

Sasho: Yeah, I do. I just didn’t expect to start anything so soon. This all looks expensive. Is it all for me?

Sachs: It’s for me too. I’ve always wanted to learn with something like this. You can do it anywhere, anytime. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m out of practice, but I’ve not been in combat for a few years. This can reportedly simulate just about anything.

Reese: You wanna try it? The stakes are incredibly low. That’s why scientists and engineers designed it in the first place.

Sasho: Okay. Start at the beginning. What do I do?

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 20, 2411

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After their nemesis left them, probably trying to instill mysterious fear in their hearts, identityless stormtroopers kept guard over them for the entire day. If they were on the right side of things, they would be wearing red shirts. The fact that there were so many of them, and they were all armed, implied that there was some way to escape. At first, Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia let the bad guys hold onto their advantage. They had the numbers, this could not be denied, and they may have all been true believers in whatever cause this was, but they didn’t love each other like the three prisoners did. They seemed to be from different realities, and weren’t too terribly organized. Who was in charge was a big question, because while it seemed like the angry dude from the Fifth Division, the troopers didn’t give them the impression that they even knew anything about the guy. In fact, it was possible that no one was in charge, but this was a random collection of everyone who fought for the cause, and happened to be on main sequence Earth at the time.

After a while of sitting around, Mateo decided to take a risk. He and the girls didn’t ever speak out loud. They communicated with their feelings, doing their best to convey their intentions and thoughts through startling shifts in emotion, as well as a few sly macroexpressions. He teleported himself out of the room, directly on the other side of the guards standing in the entryway. They flipped out, but he was too fast for them. He teleported again, and again, and a few more times. Each time he landed, he took note of more information regarding the layout of this underground lair. It didn’t appear to be too large but he only stuck to one level. He was looking for an elevator, or even the stairs, but he didn’t really want to let on that all he was doing was building a map in his head. He wanted it to look like a genuine escape attempt. He mostly just wanted to be sure that he could teleport at all. The power suppressors were preventing them from leaving the lair, but they could evidently jump wherever they wanted within its walls. Before anyone caught him, he was back in the first chamber.

That was when the nemesis came back. “What exactly did that accomplish?”

“I may or may not have been counting your numbers,” Mateo lied. “And I may or may not have been checking to see how responsive they were to a threat. No comment.”

“You can’t say no comment after you make a comment, you idiot.”

“That’s why you’re over there, and I’m stuck in here.” Mateo has found that, even when someone thinks that they’re not susceptible to flattery, they are. Even when they know someone else is trying to stroke their ego, they’ll fall for it. They’ll fall for it every time. That doesn’t mean the manipulator will be able to turn their target into an obedient zombie, but it always moves the needle. It’s always worth a shot.

He scoffed. “We’ll double it—no, we’ll triple it.” He looked down at his wrist. “You’ll be gone in a few hours, and you won’t come back for a year. We’ll have that entire time to increase our numbers, and build the craziest prison you’ve ever seen. This entire place will be covered in monkey bars.”

“Monkey bars?” Leona questioned.

He chuckled. “Monkey bars. That is my design. Even if you teleport out of this chamber, you’ll be caught in a metal net, somewhere in the hallway. Sure, maybe you can start slithering your way through them like the snakes that you are, but you won’t get far before someone with a gun finds you. You could try to teleport again, but how confident are you that you won’t twist your ankle between two bars, or even rematerialize with one going through your neck?”

“Sounds like you have this all figured out,” Olimpia mused.

“I think of everything. You can’t get past me.” He sighed, and walked away. “Guns up at all times. If they disappear, and it’s not midnight...?” He looked back over his shoulder for dramatic effect. “Find them again, and shoot them in the kneecaps.”

“Sure,” one of the guards said. He didn’t say, yes sir. Yeah, he wasn’t really their boss. They were humoring more than anything. But the monkey bars. Those will be real.

Once he was gone, the prisoners stepped deeper into the room, and started exchanging emotions. Mateo slowly lifted his chin, and looked up. At the same time, he forced himself to express the feelings of being high, and elevated in the sense of euphoria. Then he shifted to boredom and fatigue while bouncing his head from side to side, like one might do while walking up the stairs. To the guards, these gestures meant nothing, but to the three of them, they were the first vocabulary of a new language.

Leona took a moment to interpret his meaning, then nodded slightly with her eyes shut. She echoed the boredom and fatigue with her own bounces. They would take the stairs. She added the feeling of falling, followed immediately by shock. They weren’t going to walk two kilometers up the stairs. They would teleport all the way up, using line of sight to better see where they were going, which wasn’t something they would be able to do in an elevator. Even in the shaft, they wouldn’t know where they could land.

The two of them looked to Olimpia, who nodded back. She understood the plan. There wasn’t really any to translate monkey bars into an emotion, so she carefully pantomimed grabbing onto objects one hand at a time, and also itched at her armpit.

Mateo nodded as he was tapping on his wrist. He held up five fingers, then dropped them one by one. After zero, he suddenly opened his hand again, and nodded more deliberately. This was a timing issue. The guards took their watches, and started lying about what time it was, hoping to stop them from using their jump to the future as an advantage, like they did with a past prison break. But it was futile. These bodies always knew how far midnight was. Now that the plan was set, they stepped farther from each other to wait out the day. As midnight approached, the guards became more agitated, checking their own watches more and more frequently, so if the team didn’t already know exactly when it was time to execute the plan, they could gauge by that.

Seconds before go-time, the guards tensed up their weapons, and drew nearer, terribly afraid of what they were about to do, and thinking that there was any way to stop it. There wasn’t. Mateo stood in the middle, and held hands with Leona and Olimpia on either side. He was the obvious navigator, so there was no reason to have communicated that beforehand. Five, four, three, two, one, jump. They were in the staircase. None of the guards was around, but they would have immediately noticed that the time jumpers never returned to the timestream. An alarm began to blare.

“Can you feel that?” Mateo asked.

“Yeah,” Leona said. “You got the timing right. We could have jumped just before midnight, or just after, but if we had waited until after, we wouldn’t have gotten through this wall.” Their time powers were gone. They were no longer able to teleport.

“I don’t know if it’s right. We’re still stuck,” Mateo reasoned.

“We can’t jump—can’t jump,” Olimpia said through her time echo affliction, which she was forced to revert to when they stole her Cassidy cuff, “but we can jump—we can jump.”

Leona did the math. “Two kilometers. Each flight is three meters tall, which means fifteen steps per. If we jump to each landing, that means skipping seven steps at a time, which is doable for us, but that’s still over thirteen hundred physical jumps.”

“I’m not suggesting we skip seven steps. I’m suggesting we skip all of them. It’ll be less like jumping, and more like climbing.

They all looked up as far as their vision could see through the space between the flights of stairs. Mateo sighed. “These substrates are brand new. I have all the energy this body holds right now. I think we can do it.”

They started to hear people rush into the stairwell from other levels. “We better go now.” She took a few steps back on the landing, then ran forward and dove up to the railing. She swung herself around, and landed on the nex railing. But she never stopped. She held onto her momentum, and kept swinging around, and around, and around. Olimpia went next, followed by Mateo. They would occasionally lose their momentum to kick a guard in the face, so they would just start again, and get it back right away.

This didn’t last forever. The guards eventually wised up, and just took the elevator far enough above the team’s location. Then they packed themselves in like sardines, and created a blockade on level 345. There were countless mooks before them, all wearing black, and multiplying like Agent Smiths. The Fifth Divisioner walked up to them from below. “Did you really think that this would work? That’s why we chose somewhere so deep. You can’t get out. You should have given up on the first step.”

Olimpia looked at her friends, and conveyed the feeling of overwhelmingness while she massaged her throat. Another benefit to Ramses’ upgrades was the ability to simply switch off their hearing. Most animals never evolved the ability to do this, because it would be unadvantageous to not be able to detect danger when not looking at it, or sensing it in any other way. But that wasn’t a problem for them. Olimpia faced the Fifth Divisioner. “You should have let me keep my cuff,” she said rather quietly.

He couldn’t quite hear that. “What?”

“You should have let me keep my...” she repeated, increasing the volume with each word, but waiting for the last one until she could build up the energy that she needed. This was when Mateo and Leona shut off their hearing, but they could read her lips as she turned back to the blockade, and screamed, “cuff!” with enough force to knock them into each other, and burst their eardrums. They pawed at their ears, but there was no stopping the sound. It reverberated up and down the stairwell, hitting everyone not on the right side of a door. It bounced off the walls, and continued to attack, even when Olimpia was no longer expelling the syllable. They took this opportunity to turn, and head down one-half flight, knocking the Fifth Divisioner down the other half as he struggled against the sonic weapon as well.

Mateo opened the door, and shuffled the ladies inside. They ran down the hallway, pushed the button, and then took the elevator to the surface. From there, they teleported to one of the arcologies in Chile, which was a random location that none of them had any prior ties to. They found a courtesy phone in the atrium, and contacted the Dante. Ramses, Angela, Marie, and Constance were still in the middle of planning the rescue mission. They burst moded themselves away from Earth, then darkbursted themselves a little bit before making a stop on a random asteroid in the inner belt to regroup. Even with this inconvenient detour, they still needed to locate the second Earth Nexus. Constance thought that she may have that figured out.

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Extremus: Year 55

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The last two months have been hell. It turns out that the four-person mind blender machine did more than Tinaya first realized. She’s the only one who can function on her own. Lataran, Valencia, and Omega struggle with simple tasks, especially the latter, who can’t even feed himself. The entity formerly known as Lantaran does okay, which is why she helps him with things like that, but she makes mistakes, and can’t be seen in public. Tinaya can’t tell anyone what’s happened. Not only does their time in the Bridger section have to remain a secret, but either way, she doesn’t know who she can trust. Not her family, not the captain, and definitely not Avelino. Even Lataran herself doesn’t quite seem to understand that something strange is going on. To them, this all seems rather normal. So, really, she’s alone; forced to take care of all three of them all by herself. Which sucks, because it’s not like her life is perfect after all of this. She may have more knowledge than before, but practical application did not come with the package. She now knows everything that Omega, Valencia, Lataran, and probably other people knew and know, but she can’t organize the information properly. She’s learning, but it’s going to take time, and that’s been difficult, because again, no one is around to help.

There’s a knock at the door. Not a ping, or a cam notification. That’s quite troubling, because she’s relying heavily on a makeshift security system that she built herself. It’s entirely isolated from the ship, which is important, because of that trust issue. She and the others are staying in an isolated sector of the Extremus. It’s not totally hidden; she doesn’t have to climb through an air duct to get to it, but the population has not grown into this area yet, so no one comes down here, except occasionally on a walk/run to clear their heads, and get away from the madding crowd. She hears them pass by every once in a while, but they don’t knock on the door. Who is knocking in the door, and why the fuck?

It’s Rodari Stenger. She tries to shut it when she sees that, but he’s too strong. He’s desperate to get in, but the expression on his face is not what she would have expected. He doesn’t look menacing, or angry, or vile in any way. In fact, he looks rather kind. He looks...worried. “It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.”

Tinaya grabs the nearest weapon, which is a tiny screwdriver that she’s been using to engineer a new skeleton keycard of her own design, patent pending. “What did you do to us? Why?”

“I didn’t do anything to you except get you out of there,” Rodari claims.

She rolls her eyes and scoffs. “Really? You expect me to believe that?”

“Really, it’s true,” he answers, maybe sincerely. “I was trying to repair the memory absorptioner, but I ran out of time. I still don’t understand this stuff very well. Then Omega and Valencia ordered me to leave, and...this happened,” he says, gesturing towards her, and the other three behind her. They’re not as perturbed by this disturbance as she is. That’s probably for the best, or it would get real chaotic in here.

“What are you talking about? Please clarify.” The words are polite, the attitude is not.

Rodari sighs. “That thing was not going to do what you thought it was going to do, and not what it actually did.”

“Qué?”

“What Omega and Valencia told you was right. They would have been able to share their memories with you, and yours with them. But it could also delete all your memories, or it could turn you into a psychopathic killer, or it could make you think that you’re a grouse in Labrador.”

“What is a grouse? What’s Labrador”

“The point is that it was not programmed correctly. Someone tampered with it before I got into work that day last year. They were trying to dumbify Omega and Valencia, and almost completely incapacitate you two. Well, it was more about you. It’s all about you, Tinaya. They only programmed it to affect the two of them so they couldn’t fix the problem, and I think Lataran is just collateral damage.”

“You think?” she questions. “You seem to know a lot, but also kind of nothing?”

He sighs again, but this time out of frustration. “The point is, someone was trying to get you out of the way, and prevent anything from being able to get you back in the way eventually. I still don’t know who it was. I wasn’t supposed to be in that room that day, but I was curious to learn more, because I have a thirst for knowledge, and I noticed that it was reprogrammed. So I tried to fix it.”

“But you failed, and now this is us.”

“Yes, it didn’t even do what the bad guy wanted it to do. It made this tornado of synapses instead. I have been looking for you ever since, hoping that one of you was still smart enough to...help me figure this out. I guess it’s you.” He sounds quite apologetic.

“I don’t understand why you got us out. Why didn’t we all just stay in there to work through the problem?”

“I didn’t know what the endgame was. I still don’t. My thought was that the safest place for you was on the Extremus proper. I went back in to get supplies, and when I returned to the hallway, you were gone. You had shuffled them away. I had no idea where you had gone, and I couldn’t trust anyone enough to ask for help..”

Tinaya stares back at the poor saplings sitting at the table. “Is it possible that...?”

“Either Omega or Valencia, or both, are responsible for what happened with the machine. The thought crossed my mind.”

She turns back to him. “I don’t know if you’re lying,” she says as she’s shaking her head. She falls into a laugh, and not because it’s funny; ha-ha, but because it’s funny; goddammit. “I don’t know if you’re about to kill me. Or them. Or yourself. Or...a grouse! I don’t know anything anymore, which is ironic, because I know more right now than I ever thought I possibly could! I mean, did you know that all non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie in the critical line of the complex plane real part one-half? Because I do. I know that. I don’t know what it means, but it’s rattling around up here, along every line from a clearly very stupid movie called American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules, the number forty-two—for some reason—and how many dimples there are in a golf ball...which I assume is from a game?” She slaps her head demonstratively as she’s ranting. “There’s so much in my head right now, but I can’t do anything with it, because there’s no organization. It all just got randomly dumped in all at once, and mixed together like a blender. My brain is trying to sort it out, but it’s too much. It’s too much, Rodari! It’s too much!”

Something clicked in Rodari’s head when she said that. “That’s it! The Blender.”

“Are you making fun of me now?” she questions angrily. She has trouble tempering her anger these days, and it always frightens the little ones, setting any progress they’ve made back by at least half a day.” She takes a breath, and tries to calm herself down, if only to make the others feel safer.

“I’m sorry. I did this to you. It wasn’t intentional, but I’m still at fault. If I thought that I could trust that it wasn’t either of them who messed up the machine, then I would have alerted them to it. But I got scared, and I ran away. Let me make it up to. You’ve given me an idea, but in order to implement it, I’m going to need help. You know this vessel better than anyone. How do I get into the mirror room?”

“The mirror room?” she asks, not out of not knowing what that is, but not understanding how it’s going to help them. The mirror has the ability to summon and extract anyone from any point in space and time. It’s generally used to pull people out just before they’re about to die, but that’s not a requirement. It can’t extract whole past consciousnesses, though. The mirror room is unguarded, but heavily fortified. Almost no one has access to it, and not many more even know that it exists. Tinaya only does because she’s a nosy hacker. The question is who does Rodari want to summon with it?

Hoping against all hope that this is not all an elaborate trick, the five of them sneak up to the mirror room in the middle of the night. It’s nice to finally have someone to help wrangle the saplings. Truly, unambiguously, hopefully he’s not lying to them. She uses her still-not-quite-finished skeleton keycard to break in, and they shut the door behind them. “Do you really think she can help us...and will be willing to? According to my temporal history classes, she’s not always good people.”

Rodari starts to slowly step around the mirror in the middle of the room, admiring its craftsmanship, and again, hopefully not planning something evil and twisted with it. It could be that all of this was to get Tinaya to let him into this room. “Nerakali Preston is a good person at heart. We will make sure to extract her later in her timeline, after she’s become friends with Team Matic. This will work; she can do this. It’s her whole thing.” He shrugs excitedly. “She’s The Blender.”

“Okay,” Tinaya agrees, still unsure. “But I’ll do it myself.” Rodari could hypothetically suddenly call upon Adolf Hitler or Elon Musk instead, and by the time the sound of his words hit her ears, it would be too late to stop him. She positions herself before the mirror and clears her throat. “I stand at the gate of life and death. Come forward, spirit, come forward. Here is life. Smell blood, smell life; I summon thee, Nerakali Preston of The Gallery Prestons,” she rattles off. The words are in her head because someone whose knowledge she absorbed knew them. Nothing happens, though.

“Once more with feeling,” Rodari encourages.

She repeats the words, but puts more umph into them, using dramatic pauses whenever necessary, and exclamation points where not necessarily necessary. Now it works. The glass shimmers, and shifts to a different place and time. A woman is standing on the other side, hovering over the body of another, who appears to be in a simulation of some kind. The supposed caretaker looks over when she realizes the mirror there. “Oh, hey. What’s up?”

“Are you Nerakali Preston?”

“I am,” she replies. She doesn’t seem evil, so it would appear that they have indeed summoned her at the right point in time.

“My name is Tinaya Leithe of the VMS Extremus. We have some people here whose brains would sure be better if you could blend them with their proper memories.”

Nerakali frowns. “Sorry, I can’t do that. I died. I don’t have my powers anymore.”

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Microstory 1965: Aggression

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Leonard: Hey. This is a nice jet. How did you swing this? To be honest, I don’t know where our department gets any of its money, full stop.

Reese: The government didn’t have a black budget in your version of the U.S.?

Leonard: Yeah, I guess it did; I just didn’t give it any thought, because I didn’t work for any entity that would use it. So the public doesn’t know how much we spend?

Reese: They don’t know how much we spend, but they know the current pot for the entirety of the black budget, which is eight hundred billion dollars this year.

Leonard: Jesus, that’s a lot.

Reese: Yeah, so that pretty much makes the cost of this jet a rounding error. You don’t ever need to worry about our funding. National Command takes the largest portion, and we’re a part of that. The Office of Special Investigations enjoys both a transparent, and a black budget, because the Director reports directly to the National Commander.

Leonard: I see. Well, anyway, that’s not why I came over here. I wanted to learn about Mississippi before we landed. Everybody groaned when you told them that that’s where the mission would be. Where I’m from, the state suffers from a lot of racism, but it’s certainly not universally despised, like it seems to be here.

Reese: Did your version of the country have legal slavery until the eighteenth century?

Leonard: It actually lasted through the nineteenth century. About halfway through.

Reese: Oh. Well, it didn’t take us quite that long to end it, and preserve the union, though we did not come out of it unscathed. I am no historian, but what I do know is that it came at a cost, and that cost was the state of Mississippi. Even after the U.S. Internal Conflict of the 1790s was declared over, the southern National Commander would not let go. He chose Memphis as his capital, because it was at the border of the three most steadfast secessionists during the war, and the years leading up to it. Because of this, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi refused to accept that the south had lost. They continued to enslave people, and fight against anyone who attempted to put a stop to them. They lost eventually, but the post-war is considered by some to be bloodier than the main conflict. Arkansas and Tennessee finally admitted defeat, and started getting with the program. The southern NatCo and Mississippi did not. They held all of Memphis hostage, and—long story short—the union ultimately gave up and gave in. The city, and some surrounding lands, were absorbed into the half-state, half-independent nation. Again, long story short, it currently exists more as a territory than a state, and did later abolish slavery. You noticed that we crossed over into Colorado and Wyoming on our first mission without issue. Mississippi’s borders have only recently opened up. Until a few years ago, it was no one in, no one out. Now we can move back and forth, but we have to register. This team is technically on a diplomatic mission, which means that only the jet and the pilot registered—they don’t know that you and I specifically are on it—but we’ll have to be careful while there. If anyone we run into finds out that we’re not Mississippians, they may have some feels about it. It’s not illegal, but...

Leonard: Wow. This is a strange world. We had slavery for longer, but we kept the union intact. Though racism has lasted for the better part of two centuries after that.

Reese: I wouldn’t say we have all that much racism. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Microstory 1964: Assignment

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Sergeant Hyram Sachs: [...] So while I may look old—and I may be old—it’s only because I have twenty-seven years of experience in the army, and nearly as much as a sniper. I’m still lively and wiry, and I know what I’m doing. If you’re sitting next to me, I’ll do everything I can to keep you alive. If you’re on the other end of scope...I can’t promise you’ll see the next sun rise. Anyway, I appreciate you letting me join you a little early, even though I’ve technically not yet completed the specialized training. I know that this is a pretty tight-knit group, so I’ll remember to respect that, and be humble, and a good team-player. I’ll ask you to be patient with me while I find my place here.

Reese: This isn’t a tight-knit group. Besides me and Leonard, no one here has known anyone else for more than a few days. And even then, he and I measure our friendship in weeks. *exhales* We’re all starting something new today. Sergeant, you actually have an advantage, because only one of us has been on a tactical team before.

Anaïs: Oh, me? I’ve never been on a seven-star. I mostly work alone. I’ve been on teams, of course, but never like this. No, this is all you. We’ll follow you’re lead.

Reese: Okay. Well, like I was saying, this is new. I’ve spoken to each of you individually, but now we all need re-reintroductions, because no one mentioned their new role. I’m the leader, which makes sense. While I’m in the field, Myka Tennison will be running the facility. You probably won’t need to know that, but if we call in, it might be important. Leonard is my lieutenant out there. If I’m ever indisposed, or dead, you do what he says. Next in line is Agent Altimari. She’s the tactician. She has the heaviest background in hand-to-hand combat, and strategy. Hopefully we won’t need it, because a tactician is usually responsible for generating maneuvers for the whole team, but most of us aren’t properly trained in such tactics, and we certainly haven’t built a rapport. Obviously Sergeant Sachs is our sniper.

Hyram Sachs: Oh, that reminds me. Everyone just calls me Sachs. Especially here, I don’t think my army rank matters much.

Reese: All right, Sachs it is. Your spotter is Sasho Dreyer. Sasho, I’ve told you what that is, but for everyone else, a spotter usually works close with the sniper, and helps him find his targets. Of course, you don’t know how to do that, so for now, we’ll just kind of need you to be available to help the team in a more general sense. If you would like to continue in this role, you’ll need some of that specialized training that Sachs was talking about. For now, he was the only one who the boss felt was ready to go to field. Anyway, our engineer is Micro. She’ll handle the tech. Ophelia knows her way around a logic board too, so she’ll assist as the technician. Any questions so far?

Anaïs: Yeah. What exactly is this mission? What are we doing?

Reese: I meant about the team. We’re about to have the mission briefing, but I wanted to go over this first, so everybody understands the group dynamics. [...] Okay, then let’s go right on into it. We’ll be heading to Mississippi—

Group: *groans*

Leonard: Wait, what? What’s wrong with Mississippi?

Reese: I’ll explain later.

Microstory 1963: Activated

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Reese: Myka, could you step into my office, please?

Myka: Yeah, I’ll be there in a second.

Reese: The Director wants to speak with all of us, so it’s gotta be right now.

Myka: Oh, right. Sorry. Stopping now.

Reese: *walks down the hall* Leonard, could you—

Leonard: I see her. Coming.

Reese: Oh, and grab one of your chairs. I only have three.

Leonard: Okay.

Reese: Madam Director, you can sit in my chair. It’s nicer than my guest chairs.

Director Washington: This one is fine, thank you.

Reese: All right. *sitting down*

Director Washington: As you’ll recall, yours was not the only team we sent to Wyoming to investigate the Ochivari intrusion. We dispatched a shadow team to follow you. In addition to this, you discovered friends and allies who followed you as well. They are now working in these offices in various capacities. What you may not remember is that there was yet another interested third party in the area. An extra set of footprints was spotted that could not be matched to the fifteen people and aliens we know to have been out there. Obviously, despite the fact that the aliens we have in custody do not seem to wear shoes, we were most worried that there was a fourth one running around out there somewhere. As it turns out, that may not be our greatest threat. To be honest, the aliens have been very well-behaved and cooperative. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean we’re going to start trusting them, and release them into the wild, but they’re presently in pocket. The entity I’m here to talk with you about today...is not.

Reese: Entity?

Director Washington: Clarification: unknown subject. It has become evident, after the investigative team completed their...investigation, that we have some competition, folks. Ours is not the only agency that is aware of these aliens. We do not know who they are, or how much they know. It could be more, it could be less. It could be another department within our own government, or a foreign actor. We have yet to exorcize enough information from our prisoner.

Reese: You have someone in custody? How did you find them if we don’t know who they may or may not work for?

Director Washington: We found text messages between this individual, and someone else. It’s the scientist who helped us find the aliens in the first place. He first discovered the arrivals incidentally, and we thought that he was working for us, but apparently not.

Reese: Yes, I met him. He seemed a bit sketchy, but not a traitor. What do you want us to do? No one here is any better trained for interrogation than whoever is doing it now.

Director Washington: *shakes her head* That’s not what we need. His whereabouts at the time of the Wyoming trip have been confirmed. The mysterious footprints could not have possibly been his. We’re sending you to find his contact.

Reese: Why us? We’re neither trained, nor ready for this at all?

Director Washington: You and yours are the only people that I can trust right now.

Microstory 1962: Arrival

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OSI Director Lotte Washington: Hello, I’m OSI Director—

Henley: Lotte Washington. You’re early. Agent Flynn was meant to escort you from the parking garage.

Director Washington: Yes, my schedule changed. I have too much to do this afternoon, so I decided to come before lunch. I hope that’s okay.

Henley: That’s quite all right. My name is Henley Grahame; receptionist. We would normally print out a badge for you, but we don’t have a machine yet. I have created this check-in list, though, so we’ll be able to keep track of who comes in and out. I don’t want you to worry about our security.

Director Washington: It’s fine. Just point me in the direction of Agent Parsons. We have some urgent business to take care of.

Henley: Yes, of course. Right away. Uhh... *fumbling with the phone* No, that’s not it. Let’s see...page, zero—no, wait. First it’s star, then page.

Director Washington: You don’t have to make an announcement. I’ve taken a cursory glance at the floor plans. I’ll just go up to his office.

Henley: No, wait. That’s not part of our procedures. I swear we’ve come up with them, I just need to find the binder I’ve started. Anaïs! Your name is Anaïs, right?

Anaïs Altimari: *sees Director Washington* Oh, it’s Agent Altimari, Miss Grahame.

Henley: Right. Of course. Would you please take the Director to Agent Parsons’ office?

Anaïs: Certainly. Right this way, sir.

Director Washington: I really can find him myself. But very well, lead the way.

Anaïs: *runs into Timotei* Oh, pardon. Mr. Barber, this is OSI Director Washington.

Timotei: *shaking her hand* Nice to meet you. Timotei Barber, formerly incarcerated, now Head of Procurement. Let me know if you need anything.

Anaïs: *scowling at him* Thank you. You can get back to work now.

Timotei: I’m on lunch. I just can’t take it in the break room, because Navin is sleeping in the other room, and I like to watch my stories while I eat my beans.

Anaïs: *horrified* Oh, he—

Director Washington: ...has anemia. Yes, I’m aware. It’s quite all right. I just need to speak with Agent Parsons. It’s becoming rather urgent.

Timotei: Aren’t you here to take a look at the building? I could show you around. There’s a stall in the restroom that doesn’t quite close.

Anaïs: That’s not why she’s here, Mr. Barber. We’re looking for Parsons.

Timotei: Perfect! I just saw him in the bathroom.

Reese: I’m here, I’m here! Director Washington, welcome to the Department for Exogenic Affairs Headquarters. I trust that everything has gone okay so far?

Director Washington: It’s been fine. You appear to have a good team. You’ll need that soon. Is there somewhere you and I can talk, with Miss Tennison and Mr. Miazga?

Reese: Yes, of course. Please follow me to my office. Thank you Agent Altimari, and Mr. Barber. You can get back to work.

Timotei: I’m on lunch!

Reese: *dismissively* Okay, bye!

Microstory 1961: Alignment

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Reese: Is that everyone? Let’s see; one, two, three... Okay, we’re good. I understand that we all have a lot of work to do, but I think it’ll be worth it to take a few minutes for an alignment meeting to talk about what’s happening tomorrow. Some of you may have already heard that Director for the Office of Special Investigations, Lotte Washington is coming tomorrow for an inspection. I don’t want to scare you, but this is kind of a big deal. I’ve been told that she is here to inspect the remodel of our office space, and that it has nothing to do with us, but I think we all know that it’s not that simple, even if that really is the prime motivation. We will all be under a microscope tomorrow.

Yanna: Even you?

Reese: Especially me, as well as the other two main leaders here. Your behavior will reflect on us. Now, I’m not saying that any of you are behaving badly, but I do want to make sure that you’re extra careful in the hours leading up to her arrival, and obviously, while she’s here. Navin, I know that your naps have been cleared by medical, but is there any way that you could avoid them while she’s in the building?

Navin: If I can get a good idea of when she’ll come, I can be awake and alert for a sufficient amount of time. If there’s a lead team coming before her, that may be an issue.

Reese: There should be no lead team. She does not travel with a security contingency.

Celandine Robles: She may for this, though. Right or wrong, she may be uncomfortable around the freepersons, and feel compelled to take extra precautions.

Reese: That may be the case, but if it is, they’ll come with her, rather than ahead of time. Navin, we’ll make sure you get your rest, and take your medication, so you can be presentable with the time comes. That goes for all of you, you need to be presentable. We’ve been lax on the dress code, because I personally do not care, but when we have guests, you’ll need to be wearing nice clothes. Myka has agreed to visit your homes to take a look at your respective wardrobes. If need be, we’ll purchase one set of business casual for you. But only if you need it, and it will be a one time thing. Paychecks will start rolling in, and you should be good to go from then on out. Any other questions?

Henley Grahame: *raising her hand* Yes, I’ve been assigned to reception and switchboard, but we haven’t nailed down the procedures yet. I assume that mine will be the first face the Director sees tomorrow. I mean, I know how to greet people politely, but I’m worried there is some nuance that I’m going to miss, since it’ll be my first time.

Inge Flynn: Yours will not be the first face she sees. I’ve just been assigned internal security, and will be working with you at the front, at least for now. When Director Washington gets here, I’ll greet her in the parking garage, and escort her in. I’ll introduce you, but you won’t have to sign her in, or anything. If there’s blowback for us not having a badge printer yet, or really anything of that nature, I’ll take the heat.

Henley: Okay, I appreciate it.

Reese: Good questions, good answers. Anything else? [...] No? Cool. Like I said, this is a big deal. For most of you, there should be no reason to speak unless she or I ask you to. If she does indicate that you need to interact with her, of course do so respectfully, but don’t talk her ear off. Hopefully it will be quick and painless, and over quickly, and she’ll be pleased with what she sees. Until then, go on home early. We’ll see you tomorrow.