Airports

The best way to put them in limbo without alerting them is to put them in an airport.

If we intercept an agent and need to take him offline to dig through his secrets, we’ll put his conscious mind into The Airport. The Airport is a virtual reality structure as large as the continent of Europe. The hallways are long, the escalators are quiet, and it’s populated with constructs of stewards and passengers all rushing along to their destination.

The agent is given a boarding pass with a flight number that is posted on the direction boards. Through busses, terminals, elevators, hallways, check-in desks, security points, delays, re-scheduling, and loops, it’s possible to keep an agent’s mind walking with no suspicion for up to three days.

Something happens to a human mind in an airport. Time becomes meaningless. Connections to other people take on an abstract feel. Everyone feels like they are in the country of In Transit. They are uprooted from home and have become a traveling message, a shipment of themselves on their way to somewhere. They are on their way back or their way there but they are not 'here'.

It’s easy to keep their minds a little foggy about the details. It’s natural.

No alarms go off in their home country's head offices as long as they’re kept conscious. The Airport does the trick. We can go in and perform counter-espionage on their subconscious mind and memories while they blithely look for the proper gate for their flight.

Their mind wanders. They amuse themselves.

It’s only after a few days of delays that they start to suspect. That and trying to have anything resembling a deep conversation with fellow travelers. After they realize that the people in the fake world are about as deep as a puddle, the suspicion starts in and the illusion is generally discovered within a few hours.

It becomes as unstable as a dream at that point and we better be finished our work by then.

We can have them wake up with a hangover in a hotel room and be none the wiser.




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Paula

In her teens, Paula was a gymnast.

All of that practicing stunted her growth. The protein that should have gone towards her height went to the production of muscle. Her body was compact and sleek. Her sisters were all much taller than her.

Paula didn’t get her first period until she was eighteen.

In her twenties, she competed less, coached more, and drifted from man to man without much fervor or drama. The high points of emotion that washed over her friends eluded her. She couldn’t get worked up over almost anything other than the thrill of competing.

Her father died in fighting the Viet Cong when she was twenty-six. Her mother committed suicide one year later. One sister took up heroin and died not long after her mother. The other sister washed her hands of the family and moved to Akron and never looked back.

The year after that, while aimlessly looking for solace in the sudden drought of the only close emotional contacts she had ever had, one of Paula’s boyfriends tried to kill her, leaving a tidy scar across the front of her neck.

He went to jail. She was never the same after that.

It was around then that the long walks home became harder. Danger seemed prevalent in the world and protection scarce. A lot of the friends that she had from school got married and disappeared. Her students grew up and lost contact.

She became a memory to old friends, she didn’t make new friends, and she became distant from herself.

In her thirties, she became an exotic dancer. Her false mask of ambivalence greased the rails. The nudge into prostitution happened easily. She passed for twenty-one with her athleticism but the hard times were started to show in the brackets around her mouth and the lines around her eyes that had nothing to do with laughing.

A close-call overdose plus the death of a friend caused her to take the money she had saved and put it towards a course in accounting. She moved to Chicago.

Now here she was. Forty-two. Fake boobs hardening, jutting forth like she was nailed to the prow of a ship. Fashionable and still able to take home men half her age with her seething indifference, smiling worldliness and compact frame.

She made enough to support herself in relative comfort if she cut corners and resorted to the occasional trick.

She didn’t want companionship but she felt the pang of loneliness every second that she was alive. There was no end in sight.


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Another Post it Up on 365

Hey there everyone! That's another post up on 365 tomorrows. This one is about a disturbingly aquatic family tree. Or should I say 'branch of coral'? No, I probably shouldn't. It's all good. I hope you like it. Anyone have any creepy Grand parents out there? Not like this. Not like this.


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