I was standing on a street corner in some city in America. It was early evening, and as I stood, people flowed around me, heading home from their jobs. I had been walking for... as long as I could remember; this wasn’t the first time I’d stopped to take stock, but I was having trouble remember what conclusions, if any, I’d reached before.
My suit was a little rumpled, but it was a very good suit and seemed to have stood up to the day reasonably well. It didn’t have any monograms anywhere. I had a wallet with money and a set of identification and payment cards, a nice watch, a large phone with a touch-screen, and keys.
I had no idea what the keys went to. Some of them looked like house keys, some like car keys. There was a touch-access card in the wallet, the kind you see used in office buildings and garages, but it was blank white.
The ID -- a driver’s license for some American state -- had a picture on it that looked the same as reflections I saw in windows I had walked past, but it didn’t look all that familiar. The name on the card didn’t create any sort of sense of recognition; the address on it might be a good place to start, but I didn’t recognize it.
The phone, I thought, would have some sort of mapping program that would get me from here to that address. I looked around for somewhere to sit down and fiddle with the phone.
There was a sandwich shop in the middle of the block that featured outdoor tables. I walked inside and ordered a sandwich. None of the choices seemed... overly familiar. I recognized them all, but none of them evoked a feeling of ‘that one, that one there.’ I ordered one by number: thirteen.
It turned out to be a chicken pesto thing. It wasn’t bad, and the brightly-colored carbonated sugar drink complimented it well enough. I sat at the sidewalk table, eating my sandwich and getting the mapping application to show me the address on my driver’s license. It wasn’t all that far away, a couple of miles.
The phone, a sheet of thin paper, folded neatly and fit in the inside breast-pocket of the jacket. I tucked it away and sat for a moment, watching people go past, sipping the last bit of my carbonated sugar beverage.
On a hunch, I pulled the phone back out, spread it flat on the page. I looked up amnesia, then followed some links until I came to ‘induced amnesia.’ The memory trick.
The memory trick was not an uncommon way to build sleeper agents. You constructed a life for them, a house and a car and some money, and you stuck them in an aMRI and carefully adjusted the memory pathways in their long-term memories to feed all the pathways to their previous life through a particular code-phrase or image; as soon as someone said the code phrase, the brain would ‘find’ all its old memories...
But until then, your agent would stumble through the shell of a life, gradually creating for themselves a life, a community and possibly even a family, get a job and go to it, have barbecues...
And then one day a guy in a bar says ‘pineapple avocado strudel’ and they remember that they’re a sleeper agent for the CIA or Mossad or al-Qaeda or whatever and they go figure out what they’re supposed to be doing.
The brain trick means that in a week or so they drift back into their old lives, stop thinking about the parts of their brain that don’t...
I knew all this, actually. Had, I was pretty sure, read this article before. I wondered who I was an agent for.
I looked down at my suit, at the smart-paper phone, thought about my wallet. Thought about the grey hair I’d seen in the windows of shops I’d walked past. No, I thought, I was looking at a comfortable retirement, not an implantation. I’d find the house at the address on my driving license a pleasant place, with someone to sit in the morning sun and read. I’d want to stay and not do much of anything.
Thinking back to where I’d been today, I re-constructed a path through the city, then extrapolated back from the first thing I remembered, and I started to build circles around that point based on where I might have walked from before that. A medical building, I was looking for; probably near a hospital...
A young, street-gothy looking girl with facial piercings veered out of the passing throng of commuters and sat down at the table across from me.
“Green coelacanth picket-fence artesian,” she said. “Didn’t work, sir.”
“What do you mean, didn’t work?” I frowned across the table at Miss Feeney. I looked down at the smart phone; I was just starting... starting to... “Oh. Shit.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re not very good at going where you’re led.”
“No,” I said, “I suppose I’m not.” It was one of the traits that had allowed met to build a global criminal empire in the first place. I sighed. “Well,” I said, “I suppose we can take stock and try it again.”
“Yes sir,” said Feeney. “It often takes several tries.”
I nodded, looking down at the paper. I already didn’t really want to think about coelacanths. “Well,” I said, “Feel like a movie?”
My suit was a little rumpled, but it was a very good suit and seemed to have stood up to the day reasonably well. It didn’t have any monograms anywhere. I had a wallet with money and a set of identification and payment cards, a nice watch, a large phone with a touch-screen, and keys.
I had no idea what the keys went to. Some of them looked like house keys, some like car keys. There was a touch-access card in the wallet, the kind you see used in office buildings and garages, but it was blank white.
The ID -- a driver’s license for some American state -- had a picture on it that looked the same as reflections I saw in windows I had walked past, but it didn’t look all that familiar. The name on the card didn’t create any sort of sense of recognition; the address on it might be a good place to start, but I didn’t recognize it.
The phone, I thought, would have some sort of mapping program that would get me from here to that address. I looked around for somewhere to sit down and fiddle with the phone.
There was a sandwich shop in the middle of the block that featured outdoor tables. I walked inside and ordered a sandwich. None of the choices seemed... overly familiar. I recognized them all, but none of them evoked a feeling of ‘that one, that one there.’ I ordered one by number: thirteen.
It turned out to be a chicken pesto thing. It wasn’t bad, and the brightly-colored carbonated sugar drink complimented it well enough. I sat at the sidewalk table, eating my sandwich and getting the mapping application to show me the address on my driver’s license. It wasn’t all that far away, a couple of miles.
The phone, a sheet of thin paper, folded neatly and fit in the inside breast-pocket of the jacket. I tucked it away and sat for a moment, watching people go past, sipping the last bit of my carbonated sugar beverage.
On a hunch, I pulled the phone back out, spread it flat on the page. I looked up amnesia, then followed some links until I came to ‘induced amnesia.’ The memory trick.
The memory trick was not an uncommon way to build sleeper agents. You constructed a life for them, a house and a car and some money, and you stuck them in an aMRI and carefully adjusted the memory pathways in their long-term memories to feed all the pathways to their previous life through a particular code-phrase or image; as soon as someone said the code phrase, the brain would ‘find’ all its old memories...
But until then, your agent would stumble through the shell of a life, gradually creating for themselves a life, a community and possibly even a family, get a job and go to it, have barbecues...
And then one day a guy in a bar says ‘pineapple avocado strudel’ and they remember that they’re a sleeper agent for the CIA or Mossad or al-Qaeda or whatever and they go figure out what they’re supposed to be doing.
The brain trick means that in a week or so they drift back into their old lives, stop thinking about the parts of their brain that don’t...
I knew all this, actually. Had, I was pretty sure, read this article before. I wondered who I was an agent for.
I looked down at my suit, at the smart-paper phone, thought about my wallet. Thought about the grey hair I’d seen in the windows of shops I’d walked past. No, I thought, I was looking at a comfortable retirement, not an implantation. I’d find the house at the address on my driving license a pleasant place, with someone to sit in the morning sun and read. I’d want to stay and not do much of anything.
Thinking back to where I’d been today, I re-constructed a path through the city, then extrapolated back from the first thing I remembered, and I started to build circles around that point based on where I might have walked from before that. A medical building, I was looking for; probably near a hospital...
A young, street-gothy looking girl with facial piercings veered out of the passing throng of commuters and sat down at the table across from me.
“Green coelacanth picket-fence artesian,” she said. “Didn’t work, sir.”
“What do you mean, didn’t work?” I frowned across the table at Miss Feeney. I looked down at the smart phone; I was just starting... starting to... “Oh. Shit.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you’re not very good at going where you’re led.”
“No,” I said, “I suppose I’m not.” It was one of the traits that had allowed met to build a global criminal empire in the first place. I sighed. “Well,” I said, “I suppose we can take stock and try it again.”
“Yes sir,” said Feeney. “It often takes several tries.”
I nodded, looking down at the paper. I already didn’t really want to think about coelacanths. “Well,” I said, “Feel like a movie?”
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