Agent of Truth Page 15
She tapped away at her phone some more.
“What are you doing?”
“The article about the Museum exhibit. It mentions a home in the Cascades, just south of the Canadian border. Does the writer know where this is? I wonder if I could get in touch with her...”
I didn’t say anything—just watched Evelyn’s excited expression in the reflected light of her phone. I glanced out the picture window to Adam and Didi’s house, where they kept their curtains closed.
“Yes, I’m trying to reach a journalist that works for you? Joanna Heard?” she said into the phone, holding it to her ear. “Would you happen to have her contact information?”
Who Is Agent of Truth?
Op-Ed
By Joanna Heard, Chronicle Staff Writer
The buzz began months ago when a MyRead Knowledgebase post went viral, claiming a nuclear device deployed by the United States government had obliterated a holding facility at an undisclosed location. The poster claimed intimate knowledge of the facility, which they claimed had imprisoned and experimented upon dissident combatants who had vanished, “erased” from polite society. The anonymous poster goes by the username Agent of Truth. But who is this person, and how valid is the information they share with the users of the MyRead community?
Recently, I was contacted by another anonymous source after writing a profile of NMAC CEO James Burke, which promoted a related exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. This source sought additional information on Burke in exchange for details they claimed to have about the Agent of Truth. Burke has been a frequent target of Agent of Truth posts, claiming that Burke is seeking immortality through Transhuman means. Transhumanism is another frequent target of the fringe, right-wing poster.
The information in this article is uncorroborated and should be taken with a grain of salt. However, the details shared by the source that wished to remain anonymous are indeed compelling, which is why this reporter felt it necessary to share. Indeed there is concern within the Chronicle that this information could be considered dissident due to its confidential nature.
“I am able to validate the existence of the Home compound,” the source said. “As well as the existence of Knowledgebase Architects, which were only known at the highest levels of security clearance.” When asked what sort of security clearance, the source answered, “Bureau of Enemy Study, Office of Strategic Services, Department of Defense.”
The Office of Strategic Services declined to comment when contacted.
I asked the source if they were the Agent of Truth, to which they responded, “No. But I know that there are elements of truth nestled in those posts, as well as racist disinformation. My concern is the truth mingling with the propaganda. There was a Home compound; there were dissidents being experimented on; and a nuclear device detonated the compound from the face of the earth.”
Reading through Agent of Truth’s posts, it’s interesting to notice the pro-government stance of the poster. It’s ironic that the whistleblower would come out in favor of the supposed treatment of the dissidents and the ultimate destruction of the undisclosed Home location.
“That goes to Agent of Truth’s motive,” our source replied. “We believe this person to be inside the Office of Strategic Services, and probably fairly high in their ranks. The project demanded secrecy at unprecedented level.”
When asked if the source could share details about this project, they answered: “It was called Perdix, but don’t expect to find any public information about it. The result of Perdix involved mind uploading—the transfer of a human consciousness into a synthetic body, which Burke claimed to be impossible. I can confirm that it’s possible, and that you’ll probably be hearing more about it soon.”
“The models used in the consciousness transfer were Talos X, via a contract with NMAC. I believe Agent of Truth is either resentful of Burke for this business deal, or wants the public to believe he’s resentful.”
I found that I had to ask the glaring question at the center of all this: what is the goal of Agent of Truth in sharing this information?
“Discord. I believe, but am unable to confirm, that Agent of Truth is mistrustful of Transhuman individuals and is using the guise of right-wing, religious anger to sow further mistrust of Transhumans prior to an unknown future event.”
I asked: what sort of future event?
“Someday soon, these beings will come forward, and humanity itself will evolve with them.”
Agent of Truth begins each of his posts with a Bible passage that may or may not have some link to the content within. Fans of AoT (his posts regularly receive over 10,000 upvotes) believe there may be some rhyme or reason to these passages—that Agent of Truth is speaking in a code that only the wisest individuals can crack. These fans are also somewhat dangerous—riots in cities such as Denver, Atlanta, and Raleigh are believed to have been caused by AoT supporters. Individuals arrested during these riots have been known commenters on Agent of Truth MyRead threads.
It is expected that this article will stir new theories among Agent of Truth fans that AoT is the real deal, but don’t expect mainstream press to follow along.
And then there’s the ominous “someday soon” mentioned by our source. The question is whether or not the Agent of Truth, disinformation or no, was right all along.
Comments on this article are locked.
20 : the blue of all our tomorrows (cassia)
Shivering.
Why must it be so cold?
The darkness felt so complete, but I could see through the trees to the clouds drifting past the moon and starlight. An incessant chirping rang in my ears, bleating through the haze of a horrific headache. Stumbling to the ground, tripping over rocks and brush, I wandered through the shadowy forest, lost.
Through the chirping noise, a chorus of insect and animal life thrummed ever clearer, more ambient and realistic than any string symphony I’d ever heard. Heavy grasshoppers mingled with a tympani of crickets amidst the occasional song of nightingales. The trees came into ever sharper focus even in the gloom, but the world blurred around the edges. I wondered why I must be so cold and shivering so violently.
I’d staggered from the building on uneasy feet, as though newly born. The momentary chaos of waking to falling sparks and wired tumult added to the confusion. I was unable to hang onto sound thoughts, as though coming out of a nightmarish dream of panic and discord. Names drifted in and out of my consciousness. Gabby and Charlie and Garrick and Smalley, like I was supposed to know what they meant. But I knew that I must get out, that I must get away.
I was in a chair, with a large device hovering over me that pointed directly at my face. Next to me in another chair was the body of man with a wired helmet on his head, badly mutilated and leaking milky fluid mingled with blood. I lifted the visor from his face to gauge some sense of recognition, and indeed, somewhere deep within me I felt like I knew him. He stared silently, a lifeless husk to leave among the ruins.
The floor was covered in that milky fluid and what might’ve been some kind of motor oil. The air smelled burnt, tinged with the remnants of a fire not long extinguished. I held my arms over my chest, shaking, trying to visualize through the fog of memory where I had come from, what I was doing here. I didn’t even conceive of covering myself. Shaking and nude, I stepped carefully through the corridors to the stairwell, my trembling hands opening doors and feeling through darkness until finding the outside.
I knew that there was something terrible in the building, which was why I needed to get away. Whether it was real or not added to the feeling of waking, as if from a dream while being chased by a faceless entity intent on my destruction. The chirping intensified, a constant percussion cutting through the ambient night. I sensed the power beneath that chirping, as though it were a chained beast testing the limits of its harness.
Each cautious step carried me away from that terrifying building, where the beast within lurked. My feet blackened from the dirt, step by c
areful step. My limp arms covered my chest. I thought back to those names that had come to me, gauging the emotions each one brought up. Warmth for Gabby, respect and concern for Charlie and Garrick, and terror for Smalley. Perhaps that was the name of the beast. I cried out for help, but to no response, save the silence of the underlying symphony of night. For some reason I envisioned pink hair and soft, porcelain skin, imagining it to be the most important thought, stretching out to infinity. I collapsed to my knees, the dirt and grit biting into my skin.
My name is Cassia Luna , I thought to myself. That is who I am. That’s where I came from.
The chirping pressed further into my mind, an increasing rapid-fire tempo that aided the recovery of memory. The pink hair and porcelain skin belonged to Gabby, the love of my life, a light in a ceaseless black tunnel. Charlie and Garrick, they were back in that building. They were the last thing I could remember before the visor came down on my face.
“Join us in the sun,” Garrick had said. Yet here I was, wandering in the wilderness. What had become of them while I slept?
The one in the chair was me. But I’d transferred into this body.
The chirping only got louder and faster.
Oh God, my real body was back there. Not the one in the chair—the one in cryofreeze. We had planned to take on that lurching thing in the darkness, but only after Charlie and I had transferred and experienced...
But now it was only me. No Garrick, no Charlie. What could I do?
The chirping stretched into a single, endless note. I cradled my head in my hands, doubling over to the ground. From there it blossomed in a million fractal directions, a wave of relief pushing against the pain in the center of my forehead. A peaceful expansion outward from deep within me, radiating energy again and again. My body relaxed and unclenched, stretching out across the ground. Comprehension dawned on me, and then beyond .
I laid there catatonic for an indeterminate amount of time, outstretched on the ground beneath the trees and sky and stars, the black of night fading to a violet dawn. Alive, awake, and complete inside a naked body of endless perfection, the blooming consciousness branched down untold paths of reality, mapping events backward through the centuries and forward through the coming generations—where we have been and where we will go. Escaping our tired flesh and armoring ourselves in better and better vessels that will carry us beyond the limits of this solar system, out into a universe of infinite possibilities.
The fear I felt toward the being known as Smalley receded to the head of a pin, a grain of sand in the hourglass of new humanity. Even the fears of yesterday faded along the horizon—the doubts of my gender that had defined my being, my sexuality within that construct, and finding a like-minded companion to share my life. Now I recognized the others for what they were, those that had sent Garrick to the Schema... beings with whom I might blend and recombine, join as one. Would Gabby even want to come with me? And Garrick, he must have known that once I experienced this, there would be no going back. There is no going back.
I experienced whole lifetimes lying in the grass and dirt, staring up into the blue of all our tomorrows. First the thing back at the Schema had to be dealt with, and knowing how it fed on the synaptic energy generated by the correlates of my neural network meant that I must make contact with those others. They had been too pragmatic in sending Garrick, and it cost them. Or they had just been spread thin.
I could see through their eyes what happened to Stockton when he suffered the collapse. He’d made friends in an utterly terrible situation, and became convinced one betrayed him—that his friend was an android plant sent to spy on him and his group. Then when he discovered his old body, a drooling old man repeating the same sound over and over, he understood the truth about himself.
What sent Smalley over the edge? What made him understand the truth about himself, and the failure of his experiment? I tried to discern the origins of the thing in the building, but I couldn’t see it as clearly as I could Stockton; others who had been through the singularity observed what happened to him. With Smalley, it was only him. How did he determine he could feed on them? How did he know he could accumulate more and more resources into himself to sustain cognition? I could see through their eyes because we share something.
He’s a mirror to us. “For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known.”
After their ordeal at the Home compound, they would wait to enact their plans for the world. I knew their wants—a desire to sustain themselves and expand. They are capable of great conquest, but their designs require the upheaval of nearly all existing systems. Great care must be taken in moving forward.
They would need one thing and one thing only to shock the world into compliance: leverage. To get to checkmate, you must play chess. Smalley was merely one more piece that we needed to take from the board.
We , already.
I pushed myself from the ground, covering my breasts with my left arm. Looking down, this body was covered in grit, dirt, and grass stains. Scratches showed against the synthetic skin that I hadn’t even noticed in my trance. The cold no longer concerned me. Even the act of covering myself seemed somehow antiquated. So I began to walk through the woods, further from the building where I’d been transformed.
Each step forward was another testament to the perfection of this body, which had escaped me when we’d printed and assembled its components. Never had I felt so comfortable in my skin as in this. It took me years after my transition to break free from my own imposter syndrome, and with the constant fear that I’d be discovered by authorities who’d capture, defile, and erase me. Now I’m on the other side of that, fully myself. Gabby would be proud if she could see me.
I hoped Gabby would join us.
Us .
A sense of community based on common experience that I’d never known before motivated me to find them. Overwhelmed and overjoyed, I would find them, and together we would root out the thing feeding on those like us.
CONFIDENTIAL
From: Printout, File 9993478273
INTERNAL USE ONLY
Transmitting...
Transmitting...
Connected.
Tunneling disabled.
“I’m going to let you speak, Garrick.”
“Ian... he knows.”
Null value! Null value!
“Ian, is that your name? It was a mistake to send this one. You should’ve come to face me yourself. No, I can’t feed on him the way I’d feed on you. But he’s a part of me now, never to escape. You repaired him once, Ian, made him something like whole again. But you failed him. You sent him to handle a problem for which he was ill equipped.”
“Ian, there’s another one of us! She escaped!”
Null value! Null value!
“You sent him and now he’s part of me. I know what he knows.”
“If she survived the transfer, she’s out in the cold. Smalley... he attacked us in the middle. But Charlie... he interrupted.”
“He tried to rescue the girl. He’d fashioned his arm into a weapon, tried to skewer me. But it didn’t work, because I am a collective, Ian. You might be five, but I am legion. The more I collect, the stronger I am. And I’ve been feeding for a long time, longer than you’ve been making your plans. I know what you’re going to do, Ian.”
Reconnecting...
Reconnecting...
Connected.
“I have power, Ian, power you don’t know. I siphon energy away from your kind and maintain my own kind of exponential growth. You think that I plateau, but the energy provided by you and yours… ha ha ha ha.”
Null value!
“I’m so sorry, Ian. I tried to stop him, but he was too powerful. I failed you… and the others. The world won’t belong to me, but it’ll belong to us. Keep my memory alive.”
“The world will forget you, poor Garrick. It will never know Ian or his kind. They will come for me and I�
�ll be ready. Thanks to you, poor Garrick. I harvest his mind slowly, Ian. Do you remember his real name? Erik Kaplan. Oh I’m sorry, that used to be his name. Do you remember being taken to that room and seeing him disassembled on the floor, his arm disconnected and strewn with wires? Do you remember working with him, day in and day out, until you cracked the mystery located within his file structure? A stray memory of the most important day of his life. You ran a concatenate operation and were able to unlock it. You saw through his eyes. What do you see, Ian?”
Disconnected.
Status: User is typing.
Command?
Command?
Reconnecting...
Reconnecting...
“She was brittle. Fragile. Holding me back. She couldn’t understand it. Her memory was gone. Could she even come on this journey? I told her not to be afraid, that there was a world beyond the four walls that enclosed us. Her name was Rita, but she couldn’t remember it or anything else. Out there... I had a wife. A son. But Rita, I tried to help her escape. She took off running up the maglev tunnel. I ran after her.”
Null value! Status error.
“The train blasted down the tunnel, pulverizing them. She was killed instantly, but just enough of him survived. Isn’t that right, Ian? Just enough that you could begin to put him back together. But something wasn’t exactly right within him anymore. He couldn’t join you in your glorious expansion of consciousness. Instead he devolved into just another servant for you and yours. Before she was killed, Rita’s consciousness had been transferred into another synthetic. She’s one of your companions, isn’t she?”
Status: User is typing.
Command?
“Her body died, yet she lives. He tried to help her, then he just ended up serving her. Isn’t that always the way? It’s so difficult to tell the difference between the servants and the help .”
Status: User is typing.