Harold poured a bag of frozen mozzarella sticks in the microwave and set the timer for three minutes. Laying back on his bed, he surveyed the simpler elegance of his prefab home.
Exposed pipes and wires, laundry and sketches for inventions, mail tacked on a notice board (both junk and the threatening kind), sci-fi memorabilia, game systems, and crap made overseas. No women had ever set foot inside except an exterminator once.
Harold devoured his breakfast off a paper plate. At this moment he was perfectly free.
It took a while to fully wake up. He had dreamt he was a dream character of the person he was dreaming about. Most dreams were technically nightmares, unending obstacle courses or tedious chores, always falling behind. He often woke briefly with his mind blank. His earliest memories were of bleak despair: an unbearable evening gloom at the end of everything.
When he heard rain falling on the roof of his trailer-like shack he cheered up. For desert, he poured coconut sprinkles on chocolate pudding. Death was still years away.
Time to go to work! He didn't know what day it was, but had a busy schedule. Harold would not get paid, but he claimed he was always working hard.
First, he adjusted his cutting-edge curving screen to fill his field of vision. Getting this prototype had been one of Harold's few extraordinary achievements, not counting the ones only he recognized. The official beta testers wouldn't get their screens for another month.
It projected a keyboard representation as his fingers moved in midair.
A minute to access his neighbor's wireless connection and go online. Then he checked his bank account.
The few people who knew him assumed he lived off disability, but he depended on a 1300-member law firm in Atlanta to send him bi-weekly settlement deposits.
Time for the showbiz news. Harold religiously followed several beautiful female celebrities. Had they known he existed, they would probably have held him in contempt, which would have been an improvement. However, masturbating had become more difficult after having gained thirty pounds.
He spent an hour on a board criticizing the spread of traditional Islam. Allah (or any other god) either needed to prove his existence to mankind, he claimed, or religion should be mocked as useless. He had participated in many epic online arguments.
He read about the unspeakable horrors in the Democratic Republic of Congo, making it to the eighth photograph.
The 5-meter Sagan Telescope (ironically cross-shaped) had just finished scanning ten thousand distant galaxies, looking for a glimmer of alien megastructures. Apparently there were no aliens.
Studying plans for a false vacuum bomb that could destroy the whole universe, he had no idea if it was pseudoscience.
Harold spent the rest of the evening composing a lengthy anti-government screed.
This time he targeted union rules preventing mass-produced housing (his own trailer was not in great shape). The bureaucratic opposition went as far back as the NTOP proposals during the Nixon Administration.
He completed another brilliant rant, but it wouldn't earn him any money. Fiendishly hard to make a living online. All his efforts so far had failed.
Harold's main effort had produced even less. He had invested six years in trying to design a framework for something he called Borgware. That software would learn everything about its user in an effort to take over their lives and their minds, and turn them into something completely different and better.
He needed someone with programming skills to help out. Crucial insights remained missing.
During that time he had considered joining a new religion, the Destiny Group. They tried to calculate the ultimate nature of reality and how to influence it all.
Members had to record every aspect of their daily lives so they could be digitally recreated in the future.
Harold had hoped to sell his services as a special consultant. That failed, but it had led to an accidental and completely unintended money making opportunity.
For two intense weeks last year, he had been in charge of a ten million-dollar investment fund. Somehow, his claim to be a world-class IPO expert had never been questioned.
Fortunately his position as 'cultural consultant' was so poorly defined they couldn't sue him for fraud. To avoid trouble and bad publicity, he had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Now he was involved in a campaign for a slew of hopeless candidates from the "Sane Party". Party members were only expected to not do things. Their platform was to ignore most people.
Some were slackers like him, active in various subcultures. Harold was an angry minority even in this group.
Every day he spent at least ten minutes scheming about new ways to make money.
Was there anything useful he could do that did not take intolerable effort? He appeared to be well and truly screwed in this lifetime (not literally).
Last week he had received a shockingly high property tax bill. His research had made him even angrier than usual.
Much of that money would go to defined-benefit bureaucrats and other government employees, who had worked hundreds of hours of overtime in their final year on the job to raise their base compensation and thus their pension. It was quite evil.
The politicians refused to cut the benefits of powerful interest groups. Everyone else would have to sacrifice first.
Harold knew he had to come up with the money no matter what. Property seizures and evictions were way up.
He feared homelessness more than death. New regulations made single-wide trailers much more expensive.
He tended to mutter curses throughout the day.
Since there was nothing he could do, he might as well think about the big picture. At least it made him feel important.
Lying on his creaking comfortable bed, he considered his few hard-won insights. Those simple facts denied by the establishment revealed the scope of the reality hoax.
Rule Number One: the world was more primitive than it appeared. Even the smallest breakthrough took decades of preparation.
People didn't get better. They just got better tools, like word processing and jet travel.
Harold had finally accepted that the world was crazy. Insane, deluded, hopelessly misinformed. There was no grand plan. The politicians pandered because the masses weren't all there. The public didn't care about the big picture, in the same way Harold didn't care about normal reality.
If the people were incorrigibly, unpersuadably wrong, at least he didn't have to feel sympathy for them.
His second insight was the exact opposite:
If human society was simplicity masquerading as complexity, physics was complexity masquerading as simplicity.
The least noticed truth was that the universe was immensely more elaborate than it needed to be, but this complexity was well-hidden.
Instead of getting simpler, the amount of events increased exponentially at the subatomic level. In the Many-Worlds interpretation, new universes were constantly being created at every point of reality, as particles spun and vibrated in all possible ways.
This could drive anyone insane. There was too much to think about.
Instead, Harold flashed back to yesterday's curious events, something he had been avoiding until now.
For only the second time in his life, he had heard a scream of absolute horror. It was terrifying, when a loved one suddenly appeared as a hideous alien . . .
Harold had been pushing his cart through an unfamiliar supermarket, looking for the hard liquor aisle, when he felt a hand on his neck. Twisting around, he had expected a devastating blow.
Instead, the beautiful woman's piercing shriek stopped everything. He literally thought he was dreaming.
Harold realized that from behind he somewhat resembled her partner, who was much better looking.
But the madness continued. She began sobbing hysterically as a stack of cans toppled nearby. A black man had glared at Harold as if he was Derek Chauvin, while the woman's partner rushed over to comfort her.
He had backed his cart toward the nearest register, people staring like in a surrealist movie. He noticed the background music was an instrumental version of "The day before you came".
Harold acted as if nothing had happened. He refused to produce his expired driver's license for the store manager who had somehow appeared. He simply turned his cart around into the check-out aisle.
He decided he had to be a true badass to evoke such a reaction.
A real man did not worry about meaningless mistakes. In fact, he never made mistakes. They were all learning events, and often performance art.
It was a liberating feeling, having nothing to lose.
In that moment, he realized it was time to face the ordeal he had postponed for so long.
It was time to fight back.
Harold's life had disintegrated in the past year. At the same time, he had developed a cancerous hatred for the authorities.
The core reason was that he couldn't produce the documents for the State to give him his new ID card. This was necessary to travel, get a bank account, be approved for utilities (including online access), and to keep a job.
His parents had been members of the counterculture before turning into yuppies, and they had lost his paperwork long ago. Without a RealID, Harold could not get a real job.
He might apply for a belated birth certificate if he traveled to New Mexico and did some detective work, and if he contacted people from his past to vouch for his integrity. He could write his Representatives. There were even support groups for people like him.
He just didn't have the patience for that.
There was some shit (a lot of shit) he would not put up with.
No one but Harold appeared willing to protest this injustice. No one paid attention to his online lamentations and complaints. His life was going exactly nowhere.
By itself, this particular government abuse wasn't as bad as ethnic cleansing, forced collectivization, or profiting off child labor. Compared to these things it was like throwing tomatoes at old ladies, but it was a symptom of deeper problems.
The world was worse than he could imagine. It was downright evil. The bad guys almost always won. (He limited his judgment to this world. The Omniverse was so far beyond evil it was beyond naming.)
A few months ago, he had reached the end of his old existence.
After another day of beseeching implacable enemy bureaucrats, he had felt a sudden orgasmic upsurge of hatred. If there was one thing Harold was good at, it was creating a scene. Few could throw tantrums or cause a commotion like him.
He had gone on a volcanic rampage of righteous fury, shouting and screaming obscenities for ten minutes. It wasn't very effective, since he had been alone in his trailer at the time.
After such a rage explosion, the world became infected. It could take days to calm down.
Meanwhile, all his neurotic fears and remaining shame had also been put on hold.
He finally realized that he was the resistance.
A few days after this outburst, after sending a final warning to his oppressors, he had tied a bandanna around his head, driven himself downtown, set up his neighbor's old Coleman grill in front of City Hall, and begun to barbecue a stack of Korans he had purchased that morning.
He called on everyone passing by to fight the authorities with him. They acted as if they couldn't quite perceive him.
He hoped a few dozen people in the USA might be angry enough to join his crusade for their own reasons.
Harold didn't know any Muslims. He simply knew the Islamic fury at the desecration of their holy book would inconvenience the same government that was ruining his life. Third-party attacks were a common method of revenge.
This was especially true since most Islamist militant groups had now been disarmed, or had agreed to give up terrorism voluntarily. That had taken years of secret negotiations. Now Harold was violating the terms of their informal truce.
He was arrested minutes later for disturbing the peace and violating a county pollution ordinance. A local blogger who had been notified in advance had watched his performance for a few minutes.
Half a dozen bystanders had filmed his protest, and two videos ended up online. Harold reposted as many copies as he could, taking care to send links to his tormentors.
The limited online response had mostly been to make fun of him. He did find some outraged discussions on a Pakistani forum, despite the mainstream media blackout.
Of course the bureaucrats never gave in. There was no possibility of easing the rules for his benefit.
The only thing Harold had achieved was a tiny measure of revenge.
Come to think of it, that was enough. He never expected anything good to come from his rage. He was on his own, perhaps the last sane individual in the world.
Against all odds, there had been a meaningful response to his protest the next day. It was as abrupt as falling in love or being in a serious car accident.
Driving back from the courthouse (he tossed the $379 fine out the window), the message arrived like a thunderclap, more shocking than the day's meaningless legal rituals.
His phone had been restricted to sending and receiving only emergency messages under Harris's Safe Data Act, yet now it appeared he was being contacted by a secret and immensely powerful organization.
He had pulled over to read the text. It was brief and to the point.
Calling themselves The Resistance, they claimed the world had become dangerously unstable. He could agree with that.
For that reason, it was vital that Harold immediately stop what he was doing. If he didn't, he and a few hundred other "Class-G" disruptive elements might just trigger the final world war.
That got his attention, if not his agreement.
There was however a better alternative, the message continued.
A few hundred ultra-wealthy and influential individuals worldwide were fighting back in ways that actually could make a difference.
It wasn't even a conspiracy. They had simply figured out the self-evident solution, and were creating their chosen future.
Incredibly, the group wasn't motivated by hate. They had moved beyond that.
It wasn't a hoax. A few days later, they had mailed him an experimental Lenovo 3-D ultra-resolution display screen. His court fine had also been paid in full.
In return for Harold's promise to delay his follow-up protest, the group had released a steady trickle of information to him.
They believed that if there was another world war, humanity would evolve into a non-technological species. Mankind's only hope was more technology, not less.
The primary goal of The Resistance was to accelerate microchip research and development. This was entirely hardware based: they funded research to arrange atoms in ever smaller patterns. The only thing that mattered was raw processing power, which would eventually translate into free intelligence. All other problems were easy by comparison.
This was the most important truth of Harold's lifetime. Now he knew the best thing any human could hope to accomplish.
He finally accepted he wouldn't live to see the Singularity, when all poverty would end, but the transition might begin sooner than expected. It already explained today's persistent unemployment rates.
The world was intolerable as it was, of no value for him. It had to become radically different.
In his case, that meant only one thing. He would like for a certain C-List actress to lie in his bed. The only way he could hope to experience something that awesome was through an immensely powerful computer simulation. This couldn't happen soon enough.
Harold wanted to reduce the interval as much as possible. Nothing else would make a real difference, not even charity.
He shouldn't give money to the survivors of that flood in Indonesia, or the Sahara refugees, or the persistent famines in the Central Asian Stans, or even to invest in education. That type of charity only made matters worse, he concluded.
Victims should receive charity only if they agreed to help transform the world in return.
His dreams still gave him hope. In the long term, mankind could be replaced by unimaginably powerful software. All other technology would exist to support this simulation, a redundant network that would be constantly improved.
Then all the annoyances, limitations, shortcomings and decay of daily life would be overcome. It might even be possible to recreate people who had lived in the past!
Harold imagined grandiose schemes to move this day forward. A 20-year-plan to build a billion apartments and train two billion experts, a worldwide free enterprise zone, long-term and lifetime loans. An increasing fraction of the world economy would be dedicated to semiconductor and quantum-gate research.
Of course there was no worldwide Resistance network or conspiracy.
It was all an illusion created by a group known as the Progressive Underground, funded by left-wing media executives and tech entrepreneurs. Soros's heirs were in it too.
Their mission was to identify and defuse dangerous organizations and individuals like Harold, using highly creative methods.
When Harold had finally figured it out, he wasn't even angry. He understood their motives well enough.
Scrutinizing his own hatred, he sensed mankind would inevitably self-destruct. In the previous century, a very different type of nihilism had already led to two world wars and many totalitarian horrors.
Still, for one week, it had all been real. He had been connected to something bigger and better.
He missed feeling important.
At least the Underground/Resistance had given him his first real glimpse of the future. He knew what his purpose would be.
They thought they had fooled him, but he saw through their hopeful schemes.
In a few years, groups like The Resistance would really exist, and they wouldn't be nearly as benign.
He realized the first such group was probably forming right now. Something profound was starting. Could he hope to be part of it?
In the month after his improvised protest, Harold became obsessed with finding them.
He investigated wild tales about genuine conspiracies, claims about impossible infiltrations and heroic interventions . . .
Trillions of dollars changing hands at a top-secret Yakuza summit, shady executives dueling over evolved software entities, a beautiful female assassin stealing five grams of isomers from a Russian submarine, insanely violent ninjas disrupting a secret fundraiser for an immortality project.
These tales couldn't be true of course, but perhaps they were deliberately planted deceptions, designed to manipulate humanity by shattering conventional mindsets.
The mystery was too big. He needed outside help.
Using a chain of proxies and 4096-bit encryption that took days to set up, Harold finally managed to contact his online acquaintance NightWalker.
Unlike him, the entity known as "Jay" was a real recluse with a paranoid mind, who apparently lived off the grid.
After much online pleading, Jay agreed to put Harold in touch with the most interesting character he knew.
"Roger2176812" called himself a mad bomber, though he hadn't broken any laws yet. His icon was an LSD version of the androgynous cartoon alien.
He had managed to construct a sophisticated chemical lab in his basement for under $5000, where he synthesized small batches of high explosives. Someone had to know how to do it, just in case. Also painless suicide pills in case things got really bad.
He had agreed to cooperate with Harold so long as he stayed entertained.
"You're a coward," he had written during their first exchange. "I like that".
"Roger's" online connections ranged wide and far.
Within a week, he had contacted a rogue member of the group that had wanted to dissuade Harold, the Progressive Underground that had set up the fake Resistance. No journalist had accomplished as much.
The member agreed to help Roger and Harold find any rival groups that might exist on the political right. They monitored the world for activities with destructive potential, but that idea had never occurred to them.
Now, only two months later, Harold had a real result. Once again he felt the thrill of discovery, the presence of a genuine miracle.
He looked at the evidence of an exalted "X-Group", the ultimate elite. They were on a grand adventure: controlling the fates, manipulating human destiny, trying to steal the future. They defeated conformity by redefining it. It must be wonderful to make the rules.
Harold had found the first authentic supervillains.
The world was about power, the ability to punish for no reason. Unimportant individuals (like himself?) were beneath contempt.
He had seen them in action only once: an undeniable anomaly, not just a rumor.
The X-Group was removing obstacles to the Singularity. He thought they had a mind research lab, an island base, command/control facilities.
Funded by a billionaire, they manipulated ethnic groups, assassinated intractable disruptors, made psycho-historical predictions, operated elite agents, infiltrated religious governments, enticed opinion leaders, and accelerated progress. He had no idea who they were, but was inspired.
Harold had already written an online essay about them, begging for information, and received no reply. He had even offered to become their legal scapegoat.
Finally, he had threatened to reveal their existence to the world.
Without realizing it, Harold might have become a conspiracy theorist. "I know I'm not crazy," he said aloud to his room.
It was shockingly easy to generate complex theories that also seemed profound, as millions of cranks had already discovered.
He just knew this was the real deal, the first hint of the coming Singularity, even if others called him nuts.
It felt too real.
At least the nature of the conflict was now clear. In his own way, Harold had been preparing his whole life.
The main human problem was social friction. It was also the least discussed problem. Its formal name was bureaucracy.
Mandates and regulations; diplomas, certificates and prerequisites; obtuse dialects and jargon; social grooming; insiders and outcasts; endless formalities.
It was worst in the Third World, where it took years of groveling to bureaucrats to start a legal business.
There might still be occasional efforts to simplify the world. Some people liked to ignore rules, or formed small groups that competed freely. Uncountable lifestyles were possible. It could be called 'free chaos'.
On the other side was centralized control, integration and subjugation, hierarchical oversight, the tyranny of order.
The bureaucrats were winning everywhere. That was why Harold couldn't find a job or a girlfriend. It also explained most wars, civil and otherwise.
The solution was less bureaucracy.
One way to achieve this goal would be to invent software that could handle all the annoyances and meaningless complexities of life.
He believed the X-Group had done just that. This was the source of their power. Their customized "life management software" was reserved for elite users. There would be no effort to make the software cheaper or simpler. A few wealthy pioneers used it to increase their influence by forming deep alliances.
The ultimate neutrals, believing even less in charity than he did, they would happily leave most of mankind behind. Only the elites would get to escape history.
Harold believed that last month, this unknown group had infiltrated the US government's secret dataserver, the CIA/NSA/XXX Omega Complex, nestled in the hills of eastern West Virginia.
While there was no evidence of tampering, they had had the opportunity to erase and add data on a massive scale. No doubt they made the most of it.
This type of attack was virtually impossible, possibly the hardest accomplishment ever.
He knew about it for only one reason.
The female assassin he had become obsessed with earlier (he was sure it was the same individual) had just been added to a secret government watchlist, tied to the Argus face recognition system that powered all OmniNet security cameras. Many disguises were also listed, but he could tell his E-girls apart. No Onlyfans account, unfortunately.
Somehow, this person had penetrated or bypassed layers of security, and entered the Blue Room itself, which shouldn't exist. The room's vast nitrogen-cooled server racks contained data that should never have been gathered.
Typical government arrogance. He suspected their security had been too advanced.
A virtual 'master terminal' had been activated. She could have caused catastrophic system damage, even randomized his files. All .gov data was backed up, but a few months delay would have been welcome.
The X-Group hadn't done anything of the sort. He hated them for that.
Instead, they had used the opportunity to advance their own selfishly inscrutable agenda. They had wasted a last chance to corrupt government data on a vast scale. Now it might never be possible.
Even more incredible, no one had noticed she was there! Had she planted clues so federal agents would discover the infiltration weeks later?
The rumors had spread slowly. It had taken the Progressive Underground weeks to piece them together. Then they simply decided to ignore the story. By their nature, they didn't like to rock the boat.
Roger later found independent confirmation of a heavily compartmentalized federal investigation. A dozen agencies were drawn in, but no investigator knew the full story. New security protocols, data filters, and firewalls were haphazardly erected.
Perhaps this exaggerated government response had been her real goal all along.
Finally, Harold knew what he had to do.
Yesterday's deafening scream in the supermarket had woken him up. It made him ready to take the next step.
He resolved the next incident of this sort would include him.
Roger said there was another government-controlled facility in southern Tennessee known as "mdc" (the name was not capitalized). Officially a 'multi-disciplinary conclave', it might be even more important than the Omega Complex. Think tanks didn't usually have nano and quantum fabrication units.
It was a research center that extended the insights of other research centers in dangerous combinations. Research that was allowed nowhere else. Allegedly, this was where the new 'uncrackable' iProtect CPU-standards had been devised last year.
Roger's Underground contact suggested no action, but had then provided him the tools to take action. There was about a one-week window of opportunity.
The next few days would be very, very strange.
Final preparations took only a few hours, or Harold might not have bothered.
After the ritual of preparing the "Package" and dressing in his most presentable outfit (a bit like Mohamed Atta on the last day of his life), he left his modest abode without looking back. Like someone intending suicide, he would meet his destiny unafraid. He expected to be back, though.
Driving down I-75 was exhilarating after being cooped up for so long.
His course was guided by a $39.95 GPS, based on principles so complex they seemed absurd. Certainly more complicated than what he intended to do tomorrow.
He remembered the first time in his life he had heard a scream of abject terror. It had been his own, unfortunately.
In high school, he had witnessed an act of utterly unexpected violence, when a scary bully was suddenly shot in the back.
Before the attack, the shooter (a scrawny kid wearing a Modern Talking T-shirt) had scurried out of the way in the hallway, hoping he wouldn't be punched. That time he had been ignored.
Then he turned around and fired four shots into the bully's back before running away.
After a few seconds of paralysis Harold had fled himself, exiting the building before the cops arrived. Later no one had even recalled he was there, though someone remembered an unidentified girl shrieking.
That had become the best week of his life. While normally quite neurotic, he had learned something important: anyone could be perfectly calm under extreme pressure.
It was like a buffer overload.
He navigated the Matrix-like interchanges around Atlanta like a dream, the GPS giving plenty of warning. He got off at dusk.
Fortunately, Motel 6 still accepted cash. Lying on his bed, he strongly felt he would never be bored again.
It didn't become real until the next day, when he passed the transparent entrance sculpture and saw the Philippe Stack-designed parking garage. The mdc complex had its own signage and winding road network with landscaping and concealed lighting. After parking in the top level, he didn't bother locking his car. He knew they would never let him leave again.
To his surprise, there was already a group of protesters outside the entrance. He had arrived just in time.
Mdc was mostly buried under an artificial hill cratered with irregular portholes and mushroom-like protuberances. It looked like a video game. No, like nothing he had imagined.
Originally set up by a group of Ivy League universities, it had become a high-level information exchange. Elite thinkers came here to brainstorm ways to "improve government" by making it smarter, stronger, and bigger. They actually planned and sometimes directed government activities.
Intelligence agencies ran simulations here to find new ways to corrupt popular encryption methods. Of course their schemes included nominal safeguards to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens. No spying or hacking without a court order.
Questions and procedures for the 2030 Census were also being composed. He had to admit it was a bold plan: to precisely record all social and legal arrangements in all parts of the country at once.
After being carefully measured and defined, these rights would then be enshrined forever. Established interest groups loved the plan.
He passed through an artfully concealed detector at one of the side entrances. Something buzzed around him, but he felt nothing. No security guards to be seen. Lost in thought, he appeared to be completely ignored.
Their long-term strategy was insidiously clever: they called it Amplified Interdependence. The goal was to maximize state control without all the past abuses.
Instead of attempting to seize as much power as possible, they planned to spread it out. Existing organizations would be encouraged to influence and control their areas in any way they could: from local law enforcement to security guards to banks to ISPs. All would gain official status.
These enhanced authorities would then be made to share their data at progressively higher levels, forming temporary alliances, protecting and preserving each others' ways of life.
The highest level of government would emerge organically, the network of all networks. It would have immense power and redundancy. Current politicians would naturally find a home there.
The ultimate democracy would become the ultimate tyranny.
It was a brilliant plan, but required careful preparation at every level. Interdependence could not be forced.
Harold intended to preempt that harmony.
It had to happen now. The emerging web wouldn't remain fragile much longer. Soon, resistance would not only become impossible but unthinkable.
All it took to disrupt this process was exposure: in this case, a single embarrassing revelation.
Knowing the dangers, the Interdependence working group had taken care not to violate anybody's rights or do anything controversial. But Harold knew better. They would have been unable to resist the temptation. Corruption was inevitable.
Somewhere in this building was undeniable evidence they had accessed existing databases on a vast scale, just to see how they worked. They would have illegally composed detailed profiles about certain persons and organizations from many different sources.
This data had to be made public.
The resulting online outrage, media storm, and eventual Congressional hearings would scuttle their careful plans. The scandal would also stimulate private encryption, and might even trigger a data protection arms race.
Of course, Harold had not the slightest hope of finding such evidence. He merely needed to plant the seeds of doubt.
If he could cause a big enough disruption, outsiders would become interested enough to investigate.
For starters, he would precisely simulate the earlier Omega Complex attack at this location. Roger's source had provided all the necessary software and hardware, and Harold was willing to sacrifice himself. At least for a while.
The lobby had an indoor fountain that was actually a hologram. Soft background music played around him, seeming to change as he moved like an actual soundtrack. Nothing he hadn't read about.
He had an incredibly elaborate plan to bluff his way through the upcoming checkpoints.
For a moment, he wasn't exactly sure how he would accomplish this task. All he remembered was to enter a seven-digit code.
Then he was walking up a curving ramp.
Later, he would remember frustratingly few details about the building's interior. His memory replaced what he had seen with random sci-fi movie and game backgrounds.
He would recall tastefully minimalist design. Strangely austere, not-quite-alien patterns, like scenes from a previous lifetime or an alternate future. He often dreamt of visiting profound places with no clue why he was there. Apparently, his subconscious believed he had a mysterious purpose.
His original perception when encountering The Resistance had now been validated. For better or worse, this was the future.
There was no alarm, but everything changed at once.
Employees stopped what they were doing or reversed course, as doors shut around him and the light brightened.
This time he recognized the trick before anyone else. Somehow, Harold had been manipulated once again.
He was merely a diversion for the real attack, an expendable tool with delusions of grandeur, sent here to create a brief distraction.
The X-Group could just as easily have destroyed him, or worse ignored him. Instead, they had been able to use him.
What was inside that sealed metal case in his backpack that Roger and co. had so thoughtfully deposited on his porch last week?
An EMP device, gas, a LAN-transmitted supervirus? There might even be others here like him.
Things happened fast then.
He was effortlessly grabbed and shackled by what he assumed were security guards, marched down a side hall and briefly held in an empty office, then turned over to a group of what he assumed were federal marshals and whisked away to a basement detention area.
The world kept moving around him.
At some point during the transfer he found the time for an impromptu protest (almost half a minute, though he never resisted physically). It was a fine scene, even filmed by a visitor to the facility and posted online.
He remembered declaiming a long list of past injustices, including Smoot-Hawley and Hart-Celler, but the video only seemed to have screams about bastard politicians.
He was left by himself in a bare room, where he finally remembered to shut up. Then he began to wait.
A man in a suit entered the room and introduced himself, though Harold immediately forgot the name. A second smaller man sat down and only listened to the questions and Harold's replies. No one read him his rights.
"By coming here you've joined us, in a way," the man said. "All of us are outside the system. Nothing you say in this room can be used against you in a court of law."
The interrogation went on for long hours. Two bathroom breaks were allowed but no lunch or dinner. They did have diet soda.
Amazingly, there was not the slightest proof Harold had done anything wrong, or he would have been charged already. He had simply been the only unauthorized person in the building at the time. Well, not quite.
Searching the contents of his bag, investigators had found Roger's parcel which contained an ordinary iPhone21 which contained an encrypted app which would take mere eons to crack with current technology.
The agents suspected this device had somehow transmitted the right codes to get him through the lobby and then set off other alarms, creating the illusion of a systemwide security failure. Harold had wandered around in a most confusing way, as if he was being controlled almost. It had taken a lot of effort to triangulate him.
The agent informed him he could still be charged with felony hacking, theft of trade secrets and intellectual property, and espionage. Conviction was unlikely, but then again who knew?
Eventually, Harold began to talk anyway. After he accepted a can of Mountain Dew things went a lot smoother.
He had been fooled even worse this time. Roger's supposed contact at the Progressive Underground had actually been working for the X-Group. It was a subtle deception with many layers, designed to pull in very clever opponents. That was how they got him.
The real attack had been another brilliant infiltration event like a scene from Mission Impossible. This time the X-Group had only been looking for a few pieces of data, perhaps the locations of their most dangerous future opponents.
Harold only learned about this when his interrogators asked him how the attacker, who had been in the same building with him, had managed to drill through an inch-thick steel plate without making any noise.
It hardly mattered to Harold, as the questions became more penetrating and insistent.
He would never be able to tell them what he had planned to accomplish, only that it had seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.
His crazy scheme was fading like the memory of a dream too meaningful to put into words. The only way to return to that place was in other dreams.
How exactly had the X-Group hypnotized him so well?
Unfortunately, he suspected the various government programs he had come here to disrupt had not been weakened at all.
In fact, they had been strengthened. Future infiltrations would be even harder now.
The government could also claim that any damning evidence released from here had been planted by the intruder.
Less than three hours later, Harold was released at a local motel, where a room had been reserved for him (paid for by his own card). Once inside, he immediately fell into a black sleep.
After waking the next evening he spent minutes staring through the blinds.
His car was parked outside his room. Nothing moved in the parking lot.
Driving back on the dark highway, he expected to have a panic attack or freak out at last, but it didn't happen.
The unblinking lights of oncoming and passing traffic had a smoothly calming effect. He actually felt quite good.
Harold had fully opened up to his interrogators, yet somehow he had avoided telling them one thing.
That had saved him. Made him appear as uninformed as he really was.
Only minutes before he was grabbed in the hallway, he had passed the beautiful ninja girl of his dreams. There could be no doubt. It was the only thing he was really sure about.
This person was disguised as a high-paid consultant or lobbyist or agent of some sort, on a mission he couldn't hope to influence or comprehend.
Short hair with long bangs, a severe but form-fitting dark suit ('burnt sienna' actually), ice-gray eyes behind rectangular glasses. Also extremely beautiful of course.
The encounter, such as it was, had barely lasted a second. A turning point in his life.
She in no way acknowledged his existence, and could have doubtlessly killed him in seconds.
He was slightly less than nothing to them. It was almost painfully exhilarating.
His only consolation was that he had apparently influenced and then determined the timing of this raid.
At least he now had confirmation, even if he could never prove it: the world really was more complicated than he had dared to dream, even back when he believed in UFO abductions.
Normal people were insane or ignorant or irrelevant by comparison. At least he was willing to admit his impotence.
There was a grand plan, even if it would remain forever incomprehensible to him, not to mention absurd.
Could it be that the future was somehow reaching back to the present?
He barely noticed his memories of yesterday's bizarre attack had almost faded away.
What had been her goal?
It took Harold another month to come up with a first theory.
He eventually found an almost, but not quite incomprehensible explanation online. It was written by a self-proclaimed former X-Group member on the run, desperately trying to find others like himself.
His concerns were no longer fully human.
Apparently, Harold's mysterious ninja-idol had been targeting a rogue offshoot of the Group. Traitors were disposed of mercilessly.
All he would take away from the garbled text were a few names: RedList, the Prophets.
Such great forces could not be contained for long. Now he expected something big to happen.
In his mind, the world had already ended.
After a few weeks he began to notice his own life hadn't changed at all.
More important, the world news stayed as boring as it had been for most of the past decade.
He was never charged with any offense or ever questioned again. In fact, there were no records of him being detained.
No more adventures, discoveries, or amazing stories.
The final response to his fantastic mission took less than a week to form in his mind. He came to believe it had been a complete delusion.
Specifically, it had been one of Roger's delusions. He had the strange power to infect outsiders.
Harold's improvised disruption attempt hadn't even been an annoyance to the authorities: no real-world consequences whatsoever. His detention had only been a paranoid overreaction by government agents mistaking him for a domestic terrorist.
The absence of any news reports about an attack or any successful infiltration at mdc finally convinced him. There was no all-powerful group of insiders, good or evil.
The future depended only on people like him, outsiders with no real clue what they were doing, most of whom would fail.
He better get back to work, and try to forget about the whole embarrassing affair. At least he was good at forgetting.
Only one face would continue to appear in his dreams. In those dreams they didn't make love, but they took the same classes, had common friends, or were working together on some long-term goal. Anything was still possible.
Nothing was possible in reality. It became most unpleasant to wake up from those dreams.
A few months later, the secret government monitoring network and database known as TeraVore-2 noticed his porn habits had changed (a new preference for lithe but powerful, raven-haired heroines wearing strange costumes who were willing to have sex with overweight NEETs and Hikikomoris). Of course this bit of trivia was many levels too unimportant to be brought to human attention.
Nothing had happened.
Nothing at all.
Read Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
Original source of the Anonymous meme.
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