Brinens and Things

It was, I think, that Monday of the week when the Masquerade, or I think as some now insist on calling it, the Masquerades, started to break down. I was sharing an apartment with Jeff, and Robert. Jeff was taking up the bathroom when we had to get ready for work. 

I knocked on the door. “One moment!” Jeff called. “You can’t even see what you’re doing in there, how can it take so long,” I muttered. The door opened, and Jeff stepped out, his dark hair perfectly immaculate as always, although I suspected part of that was his natural magic.

“My lack of reflection means it takes me more time,” he said. I was surprised he had heard me, and really should have been used to his heightened hearing by now.  I suspect some of my annoyance came down to our differences, especially as I had to put in so much work daily to hide my thinning hair, as well as the inevitable webbing. At least, I hadn’t yet developed the gill slits which would really be the time when I’d have to retreat from normal society. 

After I washed up, and gingerly tried to apply the various concoctions which I was using to try to resemble something like a normal human, I headed over where Robert was making eggs, over-easy just how I liked them. It was times like this that I appreciated having a part efreet as an apartment-mate; there had been some issue with the local gas main, and so the stove wasn’t functioning normally, but that wasn’t an issue for Robert. 

As I sat down, and gratefully took the eggs and sat down, Jeff said “So, Alan, what’s up with work now?”

“You know I’m not supposed to talk about that too much,” I said. 

“Yeah, but we all know what you do, so how are you going to pull the wool over Scully and Mulder today?” chimed in Robert as he started to clean the dishes pan by the simple expedient of heating the cast-iron until it was red-hot. 

“You really shouldn’t make that much fun of what Alan does,” said Jeff as he took a swig from his cup. I don’t remember what he was drinking that day, whether it was his usual blood with coffee morning mix, or if had instead thrown in some Red Bull for when he really needed a wakeup.  “All of us need people like him to keep an eye out. We’ll all have a problem if the government starts to pay serious attention to any of us.”  I nodded in agreement and appreciation. 

“Meh,” said Robert. “You two will both have serious issues. Me? Worst case, I’ll get some idiots begging me to grant wishes.”

This was an old argument, and so I didn’t bother giving a rejoinder. I knew that Jeff and Robert had been having versions of this argument probably at least a century before I was born. Of course, the fact that they had invited me to be the third roommate before they found out what I was, suggested that in practice neither of them was as careful about the Masquerade as I would care for.  I was firmly of the opinion that one could only rely on the natural human tendencies to ignore the supernatural so much. Of course that turned out not to be accurate, but for not any reasons that would have occurred to any of us at the time.

My commute to work that day was uneventful. I was grateful again that the FBI had finally added the major Boston office so I didn’t have to go all the way to Chelsea. Of course, taking the Red Line had its own headaches, including trying to ignore a pair of buskers. My own nature gave me enough to recognize the Siren heritage of the musicians, and I had some resistance to it, but that sort of blatant reckless use of abilities in public just to make a quick buck rankled me. Heck, they could have just moved to Korea to become one more K-pop duo, where there was a system in place to make what they were doing look natural. My grandmother would have said that this sort of carelessness scratched her scales, but I tried to avoid using phrases like that even in my head; made them less likely to be said aloud. 

Entry to the office was straightforward. Every day I had some worries that my own eyes would have changed enough that the retina scanner would have not recognized me, but so far that hadn’t happened. I made my way to the 14th floor, thankfully not the 13th. There were enough jokes about what our section did already. 

Marsha McDermott was waiting for me. She was a young woman with red hair, who had recently joined the section. She was clearly not completely happy with it, having joined the FBI hoping to do what she considered “more serious work,” but she was competent at what she did. In fact, I often considered her much too competent given what my real job was, and I was hoping to write a glowing efficiency report for her, letting her get wish and transfer over to homicides, or drug trafficking, or anything that would keep her from putting it all together.

“Jean Sato has an update for you on Project Archibald,” she said. “She’s still having some difficulties with some aspects of the software model, but thinks that at least some of the results are good enough to present before she talks to the real higher-ups. I’ve told her if she’s ready she can brief us at 11 AM.” I nodded. Marsha had taken it upon herself to organize a lot of the internal departmental scheduling when budget cuts had removed all the secretaries. I was uncomfortable with the gender dynamics of this, but Marsha said, “someone needs to do it,” and she was clearly very good at it. Indeed, under her, we seemed to always have everyone available for meetings, and no matter how long the meetings seemed to take, we always finished on time. And I had already found that if I told Marsha a time didn’t work for me, she would somehow find a way to make it work if she wanted to.

I of course had a lot to do before that meeting. The evening reports were a mess as usual, some clearly just in error, whether the witnesses were drunk, high or simply mistaken; no you didn’t see three grey aliens abduct a cow. 

And then there were the ones that were unmistakably real and definitely needed to be downplayed or misfiled; I had two of those today, including a report about three people killed by a possible serial killer upstate. I recognized  the reported M.O. as that of a creature that apparently killed every 36 years and then went into hibernation. I felt a little guilty about not connecting it to the last report, or the one prior to that, but it always vanished after three kills, so there wasn’t going to be anything to do about it. With luck, I would be able to brief my successor with enough detail that they’d be about to deal with it in a few decades. 

The other report was another body  found in the Charles River with apparent puncture marks in the neck. I would have to talk with Jeff about that, and I was sure his people would take care of one of their own being that uncautious they way they always did, and that would be the end of the Boston Fangler.

And then there were the bulk of the reports where even I didn’t know what to make of them. Two agents reported having cornered a suspect who disappeared in an alleyway with no apparent exits. There was a report about a fortune-telling phone app that was never wrong. I wasn’t even sure why that was important enough to be worth FBI attention, until I saw the note that the app was made in Russia. I didn’t know what to make of that, but I sincerely hoped that it didn’t mean that Baba Yaga had finally gotten out of her hut to help the regime. That could go very badly for everyone. 

And then of course there was all the usual work paperwork that extends to an office job. While I was wrestling with a particularly annoying piece of paperwork, which involved some changes mandated by congress to how exactly retirement benefits were handled, I got a knock on the door. I looked up, it was Marsha.

“Assistant Director Weaver is in the office today, and he wants to sit in on the meeting.”

“That’s great!” Weaver had been a supporter of Jean’s project from nearly the first day, for reasons I didn’t understand. In fact, I saw this as another potential headache, as almost everything in my job could be. But I didn’t see any obvious danger from the software, so it was probably fine. I suspected Jean would also be less than enthused, since for all her programming and related skills, she was less than thrilled with speaking in front of people. If Weaver was there, it would almost certainly be the case that others would find an excuse to be there, and Marsha would, with her skills, make sure they really could make it. Of course, I still didn’t understand how someone with Jean’s talent had decided to work for the FBI, much less to get assigned for such a low priority project. I had asked Jean about it once and she had joked about having hacked the personnel database, but I never got a clearer answer than that. My understanding was that after having been a highly successful programmer for a few years, she had decided to give back to society and this was how she was going to do it. 

When I got to the meeting I was pleasantly surprised at there only being six people there aside from Jean, Marsha and myself. There was of course the requisite coffee and donuts. I had to take the decaf; one of the side-effects of my ongoing changes was how my system had become less tolerant of caffeine, but there was nothing about Deep One physiology which had any problem with jelly donuts. 

As Jean went to start her presentation, three more people slid into the room in the back; that was unusual. If Marsha ran a meeting, almost always everyone was on time, and I wondered what could have been the cause. One of them was Lenny, who was also in the Boston Office and a fellow also touched by Dagon, and as far as I was aware the only other one in the Massachusetts FBI contingent. Lenny did a lot of work with issues on the docks; I didn’t know him that well, and didn’t know how much of his work was just regular FBI work and how much was making sure others didn’t look too closely at things on the sea. It seemed like mostly the first, but I was confident there was at least some of the second. The other two I didn’t know that well.

“Before I begin, a reminder that this is only a Level 3 SCIF,” said Jean. “We will touch upon classified topics, and have prior approval, but if you have questions, use your judgement accordingly.” Of course, I didn’t feel a need to let her know just how hopeless even the most secure SCIF would be against some of the prying eyes that truly existed in the world.

“Since there are some new faces in the room and also to make sure everyone is on the same page, let me go over what this project is about,” said Jean. “Our agency has become increasingly aware in the last few decades that there  have been some occurrences  which were shown to be not consistent with the known laws of science. We have been attempting to make a software model which can get a better handle on how common such events and people with associated non-standard abilities are.  That model, codenamed Archibald, is what I’ve spent most of the last year working on.”  No one commented on the name itself of the project; the FBI had long ago strived to have names which, if leaked, did not reveal anything about the project’s or investigation’s purpose. Gone were the days of things like “Varsity Blues,” as entertaining no doubt such names were. 

“ Before I go further though, I believe that Assistant Director Weaver wants to say something.”

Weaver stood up. He was a tall man, white-haired and balding  but his balding looked far more natural than my own. I remembered seeing a picture of him from about a decade ago where he looked nearly identical, as if he were frozen in his late fifties.

“I want to emphasize that Archibald is not a fishing expedition for people with unusual abilities,” he said in a stentorious voice that in another lifetime could have been a preacher. I only found out much later that had been exactly the case. “There is nothing illegal about strange or unusual abilities,” he continued. “And I have consulted directly with the General Counsel’s office. While I doubt they took the question very seriously, they’ve made clear that any dangerous powers or abilities would be almost certainly covered under the 2nd Amendment. While there may be some rare individuals who use strange abilities for ill, my office, and the office of the Director, will not countenance the labeling or persecution of a new minority. Is that understood?” He looked around the room at this point, and it felt almost impossible not to nod. He then motioned for Jean to continue.

“As I was saying, the model here has multiple purposes. But the primary purpose in the current iteration is just for now to get a clearer idea at how common people with unusual abilities are. The system used an advanced set of reasoning models along with high-dimensional Bayesian factor analysis to look at all public news reports and criminal files from around the United States. Since we have clearer data for DC and some other locations, those are used as baselines for further analysis. I’ve allowed the system to also give results under the assumption that some incidents have been deliberately covered up.” I blinked at that last sentence. She had not mentioned that to me earlier, and that was uncomfortably close to home.

The next few slides were about more technical aspects of the statistical modeling which I hadn’t followed in prior conversations and still didn’t really follow. 

“The next slide is a live report from Archibald. It has had the last day to process and give estimates.” For someone who didn’t seem to like public speaking, Jean certainly had the flair for the dramatic. “Any further questions before I go to that slide?” No one said a word, and it seemed like every single person in the room was trying to conceal a degree of tension that I could not understand. I obviously had a reason to be concerned about this entire project, but why did their body language suggest so much worry? And was I doing as bad a  job as they were all doing concealing my own apprehension?

Jean clicked through. The next slide had six numbers: “Estimated percentage of Americans with unusual abilities: 99% Confidence:  >82%. 99.9% Confidence: > 71%. 99.99% Confidence: > 48%. ” I saw Jean swallow in apparent confusion.  The room was silent. Director Weaver spoke first.

“Ms. Sato, am I understanding that your software is claiming that it is 99% certain that more than 80% of Americans are in some unusual category, and even more confident that more than 70% are?” 

“There has to be a mistake,” said Lenny. Jean went to say something but I surprised myself by speaking up first  before she did. “Jean is extremely good at what she does. There may be some issues with our incoming data, but she doesn’t write software with errors.” I resisted the urge to call Jean superhumanly good. 

“But,” said another agent, a fellow named Tyler Brown, “That’s ridiculous. That’s insanely high. Like if you had said one in every twenty Americans, I’d be surprised but I’d believe you, but even the majority, let alone the vast majority? Even if it is overestimating by a factor of three or so, and it were just twenty percent,  it would mean there are almost certainly some in this room right now, and we have potentially a major security breach.” 

Jean finally spoke up, “That does not follow Agent Brown. I believe Director Weaver was very explicit that there is no presumption that anyone with unusual abilities had any presumption of any form of guilt or suspicion whatsoever.” Weaver nodded, although I wondered how comfortable he really was with that statement compared to when he had actually made it . At that moment, I realized I was softly drumming my hands on the table in a way I hadn’t since I had been called into the principal's office in elementary school, and willed myself to stop.

Everyone was silent. The only reason you could  not hear the ticking of the clock on the wall was that it was a digital clock.  

Then Marsha raised her hand, in a surprisingly polite move in what was obviously a tense environment. “Yes, Agent McDermott?” said Weaver.

“That number cannot possibly be correct, but yeah, one’s in the room right now. “ She took a deep breath, and had an expression on her face that showed she knew she was likely going to kill her career with what she was going to say next. “It’s me. I’m a time mage.” 

“Well,” I said, as lightly as I could, “That explains at least a few things about how this office functions.”

Jean then smiled, “Huh, I had sensed something but had guessed you were some sort of fire sorcerer or elemental or something,”

“Was that just because I’ve got red hair?” asked Marsha. And then it took us all a few seconds to realize what was implied by what Jean had said. 

“Ms. Sato, are you saying…?” said Weaver. 

“Ok, yeah, you got me,” said Jean. “I’m descended from what you might call a lightning spirit.”

We all looked around the room. I sighed, and raised my hand, “I’m touched by Dagon. Some humans who have known about my kind call us Deep Ones.”

Lenny spoke up, “I’m in that category too.”

One by one every single person in the room except the director identified themselves, we all looked at the director. He nodded. “I’m what we call an Actinite, we have vastly extended lifespans from normal humans but are otherwise pretty close to typical.”

“Wait a moment,” I said. “So, every single person in this room is some sort of non-human?” 

Marsha shook her head, “I’m human enough. I mean, I got my powers from my dad, but I’ve never called myself anything else.”

“Ok,” I said. “Point remains. There’s not a single baseline human in this room. So how common are they? Archibald is confident that the majority of people are actually unusual, or peculiar, or whatever term we should be using or not using. And if it were on the lower end of its estimate with nine of us, we’d expect at least a baseline human, right?”

Everyone nodded. “So as a rough estimate, it’s correct.” I said. “So, if baseline humans are so rare, how has no one realized this?”

Jean commented, “This isn’t my expertise, but I think I can explain it in part. How often if you are atypical, and you see something atypical or someone atypical will you either downplay it or just not report it, to avoid drawing attention, right?” We all agreed. “And since we’re all government agents, let’s be honest: How many of you are actually in your jobs in part to help cover up signs of the supernatural from your own group?”

Weaver said, “So Ms. Sato, what you are suggesting is that most people have been covering things up trying to keep their own groups or evidence of the supernatural hidden, while not realizing how common all of them are?”

“Exactly, Director.”

I startled at the use of the title, and then realized why: Somewhere in the conversation Weaver had changed persona from being an FBI Assistant Director to a member of the grand conspiracy of strange beings.  

After that, things moved quickly. We decided as a next step to find out how many baseline humans were actually in our office. I have to say I was less than surprised when the answer was none at all. And we spread out from there. It was only four days later when the US President made her now famous announcement about the nature of intelligent life currently on this planet. Of course, as you know, it did later turn out there were a few baseline humans, or at least people whose peculiarities were small enough for them to be functionally baseline. But after that initial meeting everything else felt almost inevitable and anticlimactic. 

Now we’re nearing the 50th anniversary of that announcement, and you aren’t the first interview request I’ve gotten. But you were the first willing to actually come down here to get the interview. What’s that? Yes, I can still breathe air and go up there, but it isn’t easy or convenient, so I’m down here with my friends. I hope you’ve had a good stay down here. Please remember to be careful when you go back up, I don’t know if werewolves are protected from the bends.