O5-1:
“Sit still. Don’t speak. You have been extracted from your previous life by Mobile Task Force Alpha-1. You will not be returned to it.”
That’s when the lights change.
And now there are thirteen silhouettes arranged around the room in a semicircle. You don’t know when they arrived. You don’t know if they were always there.
They don’t have faces. Not because they’re wearing masks — you can feel them looking at you. They simply don’t have faces you’re allowed to remember. Some anomalous property. Some memetic filter. Some thing that makes your brain slide off them like water off glass.
The O5 Council.
Thirteen individuals who could rewrite your memories, your identity, your entire consensus reality — and you’d thank them for it afterwards.
(No. No, you wouldn’t. You just wouldn’t know there was anything to be angry about.)
O5-7:
“You accessed a file you were not supposed to access. That file had a cognitohazardous tracking signature embedded in paragraph 6. You read paragraph six.”
(You didn’t even make it to paragraph 7.)
O5-4:
“We are not angry. Anger is an emotion for people who have the luxury of being surprised. We are never surprised.”
Silence. The kind of silence that costs billions of dollars to maintain.
Then a folder materializes on the table. It wasn’t placed there. It was always there & you are only now being permitted to perceive it. Your name is on it. Your real name. Not the one the Foundation gave you. Not the one on your badge. The one your mother whispered when you were born.
(How do they know that? She died before—)
(Oh.)
O5-1:
“We know things that haven’t happened yet. We know things that happened and were then unhappened. We know things that exist in conceptual states that your brain would hemorrhage attempting to process. Between the thirteen of us, we contain more classified information than every intelligence agency in human history combined — and most of those agencies work for us anyway, whether they know it or not.”
O5-9:
“You’re wondering about the water.”
You were.
“Don’t drink it. It’s a test. If you drink it without authorization, you will be incinerated per Procedure 006-Xi-12. If you don’t drink it — well. At least you’ve demonstrated the baseline intelligence required to continue this conversation.”
One of the silhouettes leans forward. You feel the temperature drop.
O5-1:
“The Foundation secures. It contains. It protects. That is the motto. But what it really does — what we really do — is decide. We decide what is anomalous and what is normal. We decide what the world is allowed to know. We decide which horrors get a cell number and which horrors get erased from history.
We have authorized the termination of entire populations to prevent a containment breach. We have rewritten the fundamental laws of causality to undo K-Class scenarios. We have negotiated with gods, imprisoned concepts, and fed living human beings to things that should not exist — because the alternative was worse.
We are not good people. We are not bad people. We are the people who make the decisions that good and bad people cannot.
And right now — we are deciding what to do with you.”
You feel it then. Not the red dots of a sniper scope. Nothing so crude. What you feel is the ambient awareness that somewhere in this facility — Protected Site-01, the nerve center of the entire Foundation, a location so classified that even its continent of origin is redacted — there is a squad of operatives designated MTF Alpha-1, “Red Right Hand.”
The Foundation’s best. The Foundation’s most loyal. They answer to no one except the thirteen figures in this room. They are not pointing weapons at you. That’s the terrifying part
The box has no doors. The box was built specifically for this conversation, and when the conversation is over, the box will not exist, and neither will your memory of it — unless they decide otherwise.