The city smells war-like. Waiting. Like you're standing on ground where a trench will soon be dug, and all the buildings must sense it in their foundations when they fruitlessly attempt to escape reality skyward. Imminent doom refracted prismatically by concrete into shapeless, unmitigated portend. You know the feeling intimately, but you’ll never get used to the smell. Most people can't tell it apart from normal soil, you've learned, and maybe that's not surprising. Next to all soil will give way to a trench at one point or another, so perhaps they just have keener noses than you. Unlikely but possible. You want to call it a shame for the modern architecture, but even the desire rings of insincerity when your eyes already make of the glass, steel, and concrete nothing but cover and watchtowers, staples of a war to come. Also rubble. Mostly rubble. Those sleek office towers serve other functions in their off-time, sure. They serve masters more at home on the accounting side of atrocity, but our jobs have a habit of predisposing us to certain perspectives more than others. Callings lead the impressionable by catching first their eyes and then the rest with different details. All just as resonant as they are arbitrary, but that’s the beauty of the whole thing, isn’t it? Farmers and cooks look at animals quite differently, you hear. Occupational hazard. It’s not that much harm has ever come around to befall you personally, but common wisdom would still seem to count soldiers amongst the ranks of more hazardous occupations, not just in terms of outlook-skew. Death captures the human imagination far more skillfully than the nuances of perception after all, which you think is tragic, probably. One often does result in the other, circles back into unfamiliar intensities and dissolves the internal dissonance. Perhaps you must admit to being slightly unusual as soldiers go, having never once stood in a trench after it was dug. You’ve also never had a job interview, likely in part due to being rather difficult to contact in Kultuk, Mbeya, Tarakan... The only calls you’ve ever heeded were those to the front lines, and excitingly it appears that for once someone beside you knows where those are going to be. Even knows it well enough to call for you before fate does, though you can’t claim to share their taste in interior design. KCDI’s branch office looks strangely voguish to you. Vacuous. Like every part of the layout and décor was chosen individually because it was on the cover of a magazine once. As though this weren’t bad enough, the magazines would have to have come from wildly different decades with wildly incongruous aesthetic sensibilities. You wonder what reason someone could have to build something so pointless in a future warzone. The receptionist doesn’t seem to know. If she did, she would have probably quit. Does know who you are though, which gives you the creeps more than any tacky office-curtains. Says you have an appointment with Liam. No last name, nothing, just Liam, though there’s some discomfort with the syllables in her eyes, where the customer service mask reaches its curb, and that tells you some things at least. Hold on a second, you say. They only even invited you to the city for next week and sure as shit not with any sort of specific appointment. You work on your own time by nature. A free spirit, just here to scout the place out, and who in the absolute fuck is Liam? She remains undeterred despite the verbal assault. “No.” Like people waltzing in here with firearms isn’t even a noteworthy occurrence to her “that’s your slot right here, isn’t it?” The blonde asks while showing you a timetable. “We tend to account for the idiosyncrasies of our contractors in order to reduce friction. It’s all part of our company policy. Now please, take a seat. Liam will be with you in a moment.” You can only conclude that someone way up high has decided to fuck with you, as you begrudgingly sit down on a bright orange bean bag overlooking the city. Shiny glass table, stylish indirect lighting, fucking beanbags exclusively. Like a joke proposal someone with cash in place of sense took seriously. Never thought you cared about dignity. Most good soldiers don’t, but this place is testing your limits in ways you would have never thought to encounter. Last straws where you realize that the needle has been lodged in your palm the entire time and relinquish the privilege of unmixed metaphors in favor of accuracy. Life is messy, but yours doesn’t tend to be, or at least not symbology wise. Just mess-wise. Trenches are often muddy even before they’re dug. “Oh this won’t do.” You want to respond, but the idea is unraveled halfway through your brain by the realization that this woman has somehow made it into the office and close enough to touch your rifle without you noticing. She’s not Liam, that’s for fucking sure, but she’s not normal either. That, or a reconsideration of long-held beliefs about the superiority of your senses is in order. Not that you can make time for it, as gloved hands carefully probe the barrel for several full-blown moments until you can finally collect yourself and ask the lady whether she’s suffering from a death wish, cause you sure could help with that. “Do you have a permit for this, mister Ashford? Don’t answer, of course you don’t. Wait a second.” Even before she returns, you already know that she’s one of those people who say “a second” and mean it. Difficult enough to find folks who mean anything these days and those who go the extra mile to mean banalities are a few steps beyond comfort even for you. High strung enough for the snap to be lethal. The fact that these whack jobs know your name isn’t made less unnerving by repetition either. “Here’s your form. Please sign here for the firearm and here for any other weapons or weaponizable objects you might be carrying on your person.” “Can I at least get a name?” She seems to consider for a bit like this is a profoundly strategic decision capable of swaying the tide of battle any which way, and therefore finally gives you a chance to really look at her. Face isn’t all bad, though it would benefit from being more emotive. Less sedimental around the major zygomaticus. Unless tired counts as an emotion that is, in which case she’s nailing it. Perfectly unassuming with the mid-length side-parted hair and pantsuit, but she does appear to have read the style guide to this place, looking at the utterly incongruous novelty earrings that accompany her chosen uniform. Probably read the style guide before even showing up to her job interview. Seems the type. Maybe even wrote it. “Any additional information is unlikely to be a good idea and pointless beyond that. Have a pleasant stay mister Ashford.” “Have a pleasant-“ Too late. Whoever she was already dashed out the frosted sliding door like she has a note-taking appointment in the pencil pushing gym scheduled for three seconds from now exactly. “Will anyone please tell me what the fuck is going on?!” A Tibetan-monk-looking guy in a suit struts in as if on cue. His idiosyncratic existence sending ripples through reality with such intensity that you get slightly nauseous. “That’d be my job I believe. Sorry to keep you waiting. It’s rare enough that we get outside visitors in this city, much less ones of your stature. Truly, I would be understating the matter if I said that our organization is quite impressed with your work.” “Well, the honor goes both ways, I’m sure, mister…?” “Liam.” “Liam…” Repeating the name, you really chew on the syllables so as to convey to him your absolute state of seething disdain for the overwhelming paucity of names and answers provided in this place. “…But to properly get a feel for, and ascertain how, honored it is that I should be, Liam, it sure would be great if someone, you perhaps, told me what the shit it is that your company does and what it wants me for. Not that I don’t already have some ideas about the latter. My field of expertise is kinda specific, as you probably know, what with how you have creepily chosen to know things folks aren’t supposed to constantly, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to hear details, I hope you understand. Look as I might, Liam, I’m not a fool.” “You don’t look a fool, though I doubt you have come here for compliments. You look more like a… What is it you would describe yourself as?” Soldier, you tell him, and he goes through his papers skeptical looking, like he doesn't already know what they say. You wonder about that. Can't be all too much written about you, so maybe they're just for show. Most things are. “I am no expert, but soldiers are usually in the employ of a government, are they not?” “Yeah, but that’s not how jobs work. Most plumbers are probably employed by a plumbing company, but they’re not made plumbers by the nature of their employer. A soldier is someone who fights wars, a plumber is someone who works with plumbing. It’s all ground level. All atomic. You are what you do, and you do what you must. Anything beyond that is smoke screens with increasingly fancy labels slapped on to distract the idiots.” “And you don’t do smoke screens?” You tell him that if those files of his say anything, and you doubt they do, you’d imagine he’ll find you to be rather too direct for such tactics. Or more likely you’d imagine that he has already come to this conclusion and is only fussing with the papers for style guide’s sake. Something that, as you reiterate, annoys the ever-loving fuck out of you. “Indeed. I suppose it is only fair for me to be straightforward as well then. Mind if I take a seat?” You nod, distrusting the capacity of anyone in this city to refrain from being a cryptic shit for literally any length of time. Liam plops himself cross legged onto the floor with significantly less grace than you were expecting, but at least the fact that he’s willfully ignoring the godawful bean bags is sort of respectable, and you take what you can get at this point. “The communique you received implied that we were hiring. That much is true. It also implied that we sent multiple, which is not. You will find that this is a job interview only in the vaguest of senses, and even though I’m not in a position to tell you what exactly your assignment will be, I can tell you what sort of thing you are going to be doing. In fact, I will probably have to tell you what it is you have been doing so far.” “I know what I’ve been doing.” “Oh yes? And what would that be?” “My job.” “I see…” He goes through his papers again “…Irkutsk then. Tell me about it. What were you doing there?” Not much to tell. If he’s expecting some grand story, he better lower his expectations, cause there is none. The grand story started after you left and even that narrative shitshow isn’t all that impressive to folks who aren’t news-media or relatives of the victims. Combat is so very trite if you look at it from a distance through some LED-crescendo cinematized facsimile of human suffering. Numbers and explosions don’t do it justice, but you digress. You were travelling. Just travelling. You’re always travelling until you’re suddenly not, and Irkutsk isn’t even quite right with how he says it. You’ve never been to the city, though it was where you thought you were headed. “The Paris of Siberia” they call it, despite the Baikal around it being an ecological dead zone thanks to the stranglehold of over-aggressive tourism. Well not really “despite”, that’s just another parallel to Paris, but either way it’s supposedly beautiful but you never made it there. You only were in the Irkutsk oblast. Farther south near Kultuk, where the Baikal curves to a knife point while still being pure enough for shit to grow and thrive in its frosty bowels. Liam’s face doesn’t betray whether the name means anything to him, so you keep going. Might as well. The thing about Kultuk is that you don’t usually pass through it as a tourist on your way to the administrative center. People arrive in Irkutsk by plane or via the trans-siberian. Via the major arteries, while you were bubbling up through the capillaries that traverse the Mongolian steppe only to supply sparse, desultory settlements. Sometimes you do air travel, it’s not like you’re committed to the wandering, but you don’t like it. Always felt like people aren’t supposed to have that sort of perspective. Top down. Detachment is a terrible affliction that aviation all too willingly spreads, so you chose the slow, laborious path at least somewhat intentionally. Suppose it makes sense though; That you would have brought the dzud with you from the depths of the Gobi Desert. Calamity is the only kind of souvenir that suits you and Andrey accepted it graciously enough when he showed you that bottling plant. Nice fellow, though when Liam asks, you can’t tell him much about the guy aside from his hair being basalt, and his face mercilessly frost weathered to make him look far older than he probably was. That and that he hated the Chinese with a passion that must have been drained from all other fields of his life. Not really the people, not really the state, but something more abstract than that. Pure outside. Some unfathomable accreted evil that somehow found its physical manifestation, to him at least, in that factory you drove past. Liam would have hated it too, you tell him. It was the opposite of this place. Fitting. Boring. If you asked a random pedestrian here to draw a bottling plant in Siberia, they likely wouldn’t be too far off the mark. Just another dime a dozen steel-wrought monument to industrialization that you ignore on the drive-by if you happen to be looking out the window. Maybe that made it worse to Andrey: how it pretended to belong. You didn’t ask, but you can’t imagine there was any aspect of it he didn’t hate, so that was surely among them. All of this despite the fact that it sort of really did belong. Chinese investment is everywhere up there in the east. Not so much in the population centers, sure, but in all those places on the periphery, where the state can’t bring itself to give a shit for one solitary second and where the oxygen is slowly depleting. See the water’s still good up there, nice and natural and clear enough that the Chinese would even want to bottle the Baikal, but that doesn’t mean that ecological death hasn’t set in. It just isn’t in the water. It came from outside, came for the water, or that’s how Andrey spun it. He was a clever enough guy, he knew that the factory wasn’t so much greater a hell than any other one, the problem was just that it wasn’t theirs. That it stood there, draining them, positioning itself as the economic centerpiece of the community like they should be thankful for it, and that it wasn’t even theirs while everything that was theirs was unremittingly rotting and leaving and dying. Had been doing that for a while now. Since before he was born. The population of Kultuk halved between 1970 and now, and all those who stalwartly stayed behind knew that this trend wouldn’t stop until there were just enough bodies left to operate that fucking plant. Fate must have known it too. In its tendrils. In its rhythmic ticking. It knew, or it wouldn’t have called your name so softly. That’s the thing people don’t get: They call your MO unethical, in those instances at least where they even pretend to believe your stories. Like all you bring is cheap catharsis and death, but you don’t bring death. The death was already in Kultuk. Plainly. Infestation-like. What you’re doing is no more than pressing fast forward. Burning through the rot and the rut and out the other side. You’ve never been good with tension after all. Got a visceral distaste for how it tars up the neurons to a sticky, unnavigable mess of clogged pathways and tingles at the base of your skull. Any time you’ve tried to read a book or watch a movie, you’ve skipped to the end a tenth of the way through, cause it was so unbearable. “Resolution”, you say. That’s all that matters to you, regardless of what the path entails. There’s something divinely satisfying about opening a pressure valve or cutting through a stretched-out rubber band and even the ancients knew that ash is a wonderful fertilizer in the right circumstances. The whole area has been going through rebuilding efforts since that little civil war you started died down. People are moving back in. The ecosystem is recovering… but you’re skipping ahead. He probably wants to know about that Chinese guy you shot. No, you won’t try to deny it. His name was Li something-or-other, according to what the media later reported, but you didn’t know it at the time. For all you could tell, he was just an Asian man in a suit, not equipped with any signs he’d be affiliated with the plant beyond that, but it’s the way your stings were pulling you then. The evening was unsurprisingly cold. Siberia-cold, where you can feel the layer of moisture on your eyes freezing if you leave them open for too long, and you had just lost a horse. The one left over from your voyage through the steppes. You were looking to sell it since you arrived, hadn’t you mentioned? That’s how you met Andrey; First fuck curious to find out what the deal was with this unkempt foreigner on a horse. Not that he wanted it even if he had the money, but he offered you a shower and a tour through what little Kultuk had in terms of sights, both of which you accepted. You amend that you maybe should have mentioned how all of this happened over the course of a day, which Liam seems to make a note about, but doesn’t further comment upon. Only after you were clean and acquainted with the environs did Andrey suggest he might know some folks stupid enough to buy a horse after a bottle or two of vodka, and he ended up being mostly correct. They were an institution in what passed for a town center in Kultuk. A yet-living clump of booze, games and camaraderie, and that evening was no different. Astoundingly welcoming of your presence too, be that because their friend could vouch for you or because you were a weirdo with stories and a Mongolian workhorse, two qualities drunks tend to universally appreciate. Not to toot your own horn, but you certainly made good use of both these assets along the flow of talk and spirit, though in the end, it was your clarity of mind which you overestimated. The horse was lost over a game of Durak you never should have agreed to. To Fedor, you think, but he then swiftly lost it to someone else and so on, which you guess serves you right. It’s in the spirit of the game. Durak does mean fool after all, but none of the equine loss stopped you from having a good evening, especially since you didn’t have to pay for any of the vodka. They just kept handing it to you, which is nice, even if it wasn’t worth a horse. “I guess that catches us back up”, you tell your interviewer. At least you hope so. It’s all the context you can offer for why you stood plastered and horseless in a bumfuck nowhere Siberian town when a Chinese businessman walked by. You felt your strings pulling and by that time you had heard and seen enough of the place to know why, which is a luxury you aren’t always afforded. You weren’t gonna resist them. Usually when folks say that the universe guided their hand, it’s more a manner of speech than anything else, but this time it really must have. Fuck knows you were too wasted to hit the frozen ground beneath your own feet if you tried, but whatever it is that pulls you had no trouble pulling the trigger either. The man fell, and then it was very briefly quiet. You ask Liam if he knows that Trotsky quote: “Revolution is impossible until it's inevitable”. You don’t much care about politics, and you’re pretty sure this wasn’t a revolution, but it’s the sentiment that counts. The momentary silence that gives way to cheers and screaming. That’s the sound of the switch, you’re goddamn certain of it. That’s impossibility flipping into inevitability and exploding around you. Two hours in, the bottling plant was burning and Kultuk was in full pandemonium. That’s what you call the first stage of civil war, where everything is incredibly fast and incredibly decentralized. No one knows what’s going on, but they know it’s big, so they do something until a leader or at least a charismatic speaker emerges. There’s no right or wrong in those moments. Whether what you do will be celebrated or condemned later, when some fuck moves into a position to forge the narrative, is up to chance, so everyone just acts on undiluted adrenaline while the chaos roars around them. Phone lines did just as much to spread the unrest as the enormous twenty first century smoke signal they had made, and soon choler reached Irkutsk, where it would find its organizers and media people to spin the demands into coherence. From there, all of eastern Russia was in active revolt within weeks. The calls were for economic aid first and foremost, but also for protection of local cultures, for more localized governance and (unspoken of course) for someone outside the region to finally give a shit. “…We’ll see how the first few pan out in the long run, but the latter has certainly been accomplished.” “Quite the tale.” “Well do you believe it?” “Oh certainly, but tell me mister Ashford; this thing that is pulling you, and I imagine you have avoided terms like god or such on purpose, do you think it is only acting on you specifically?” “What do you mean?” “There’s video of you, yes? In all of those places. American intelligence interrogated you twice, and you seem to make no secret of the crimes you have committed… So how are you here?” “You want to hand me over to the states?” “Not at all. The Rasten Autonomous Region has neither part nor interest in international politics. We are the Enclave, and bringing you here was risky enough as is, so no. I’m simply asking about your explanation for why you’re still free.” You’ve thought about that. Of course you have. It’s not like you’re so delusional as to take luck like this for granted. Your first experience with the impulse is what got you interrogated, you tell him. Absolutely thought you were fucked for life. Hell, you thought you were fucked for eternity back then, since you were still at least vestigially religious. When the man you assumed to be an agent entered your cramped, white-walled holding chamber, you didn’t even try to hide anything. Maybe honesty could save some fraction of your soul, you thought, worth a shot at least, but the interrogator smilingly interrupted only a few sentences in. In truth, you learned, he was a politician, and a particularly corrupt one at that. Not only had he profited from the conflict; he stood to gain even more from the uncertainty that a lack of suspects tends to foster. Your ass just sat and listened while he explained it. Maybe that man too was trying to save a sliver of his essence by laying it all out for you. You doubt it, but it’s possible. In all likelihood he was just a massive piece of shit who enjoyed the sound of his own voice too much, but who can really tell? Either way he opened the door and let you go. He let you go, and your pulling persisted. Every once in a while, it’d rear its head and you’d be at the center of pandemonium again. Mostly you just slipped through the cracks, but if not, the person in charge would always have a convenient reason to let you go, so you stopped questioning it. Stopped worrying. Pull’s pretty weak nowadays. You could resist it if you wanted to, but you sense that if you did, the consequences would start to come due. One by one ‘till it’s deluge. Of course you don’t know that, but you know it. You’re covered to the neck in fate’s detritus. There is no other place for you now, and you don’t want one. You like this job. “Covered?” “Covered in blood and shit.” Can't wash that off you say. It's like borders, doesn't go away if you dig up the dirt where it's drawn, doesn't go away if you dig to the core of the earth. It's all blood all the way down always. Borders shift they say, but they're wrong. We only make new ones. border stays for as long as people remember where it used to be. Has an effect on how folks treat the space. It's drawn in their minds more than on paper, and you can't get rid of that unless you blow out the brains of every last border-head and even that's not enough. People then ask why all those suckers died and soon enough they'll learn about the old border. Shit bubbles up from inside itself. Tar like. Death like. "Demonic" you want to say, but you don't believe in demons anymore, you believe in borders. In blood and borders. The shit on your boots. “I see” “Good, now are you gonna tell me why I’m here?” “Yes, of course. Without going into too much detail, I can say that we are quite familiar with the craft of tapping into social feedback loops and redirecting the energy trapped therein. It’s how KCDI created this little bubble, politically speaking. Back in the day, we dealt in simple coincidence engineering, bread-crumbing, pseudo-turbulence, network psychology, but… well… these sorts of projects tend to get more and more ambitious after a point. For now, we call it eschalative telo-dynamics, though that's only a placeholder until it invents a name for itself. Consider us the more potent, synthetic analogue of your trade if you will. Not quite accurate, but it scrapes the core. A cybernetic actuator is what we’d call you. Someone naturally attuned to these types of mass-social convergences…” You feel the slight tugging of a string. Less insistent than usual. More like an offer. Maybe these fuckers don’t know so much after all. “…There’s this quaint little sci-fi story by Keleçek, perhaps you’ve heard of it. Well I suppose you wouldn’t have. It’s about a man who goes into the doctor’s office to get his brain upgraded with an external processor unit. They take off half of his skull, chuck the tech in and close him up, before turning it on. Now, all goes normal for a while. The man answers various calibration questions in his mind, until he gets the feeling, very slowly, very scraping, that the unit is altering him. That it’s taking him over instead of the other way round, and every time he stops thinking for a bit, he feels like the program overrides him a little. He panics, he claws at his scalp and tries desperately to continue thinking because he has become convinced that the moment he stops, he will be gone forever. This schizophrenic battle goes on for a few paragraphs of partially corrupted text, so it’s fair to say that his effort is valiant, hopping from one train of frantic psychosis to the next until reaching the neuro-biological limit of human anatomy. There’s a pause, a Kleist-ian dash that obscures its own existence, and after the pause everything is finished. The man gets up from his hospital bed and the doctor is smiling at him, but he doesn’t smile back. He feels normal, but that could just as easily be the program’s doing. Some dark, screeching bit of his mind wants the hellish battle in his cranium back, because while he was waging that war, he was at least sure that he hadn’t lost yet. Now the man will never be able to trust his thoughts again. He wonders if the doctor has an implant. If that’s why they did this to him. There’s no sign that anything abnormal happened, of course. Just vague feelings he had during the procedure. He’s always been paranoid- Has he always been paranoid? How do we know we’ve been overwritten if the code is subtle enough? To what extent is advertising or media or society or an ominous feeling of pull controlling us? Is the answer we give to that question our own? How do we know we’re not sleeper soldiers for a thing that buried its way through our brainstem? If you can never be sure, why not give in to the demon? Maybe try to steer it a little. See every glove has resistance. It always -maybe imperceptibly- curls the fingers a certain way. If you don’t know whether the pulling controls you, whether you’re the glove or the wearer, it’s best to pretend like you’re both and curl a little.” “I’m sorry”, you say. “What for?” You already told him that you suck with tension. It’s so much easier to just give in fully. Maybe others are wired different, but he obviously never felt it before, or he’d know. His whole little story is testament to how little he gets it. So you’re sorry. You’re still sorry when you pull the trigger and Liam goes wall-ways. Brief silence. In your head, you count the microseconds before pandemonium: one, two, three, four, five, nothing. Still nothing. You hadn’t noticed before, but the entire building is a lot quieter than when you entered. Corridor’s empty. Reception area’s empty. The only hint that you weren’t alone with Liam from the start is a pink post-it on the entrance: “Thank you, mister Ashford”, and a smiley face. Lettering so neat it looks printed, and you don’t have to have seen her writing to recognize the hand. Man, do you wonder what her play is. Someone way up high has decided to fuck with you. Unpleasant but not exactly worrying either. Your job in Rasten is done, and you doubt you’ll see the consequences.