Agent of Truth Page 2

  For the moment, all I could do was regain my strength and wait for the time to escape. But where was there to go?

  Daphne and Evelyn retreated toward the door, voices low. Every once in awhile one of them would gesture in my direction or their eyes would turn to me. I took the time to reach back and remember. There was the broadcast, so many of them tethered to me at once, like the contours of my experience with the singularity, but swelling outward. And then, just... nothing.

  Such soft, weak flesh. No tangle of wires inside me anymore, just the deteriorating matter that used to be Michael Render, whoever that may have been.

  MyRead/agent_of_truth: deep truth

  User: Agent_of_Truth

  “He changes the times and the seasons; He removes kings and sets up kings; He gives wisdom unto the wise and knowledge to those that understand; He reveals the deep and secret truth; He knows what is in the darkness and the light dwells within him.” Book of Daniel, 2:21-2:22

  Hello again, True Patriots.

  Today I want to talk to you about vanishings. You’ve probably heard rumblings in the deepest corners of the Knowledgebase—homes suddenly abandoned, neighbors arrested, families separated. Some online would have you believe that the government drags dissidents from their residences to secret prisons, places where they can be kept in solitude away from the general population for some heretofore-unknown purpose.

  But my sources have told me there’s something far more insidious going on.

  True Patriots, let me tell you the truth about those we’ll call “the erased.” You’ve heard me discuss the Deep State before—the deeply embedded infrastructure directed by a cabal of liberal elites bent on globalism on a scale we’ve never before seen—beholden to NATO and the United Nations, eager to take our individual freedoms in the name of their globalist conspiracy. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s certainly roaring to the fore. The Deep State wants our government overthrown. They want our President removed from power in order to install a new puppet regime controlled by the cabal. They’ve already infiltrated and consumed one political party from the inside out and now they want more.

  But what does it have to do with people disappearing? Everything.

  The people being ushered away by unidentified government agents, they’re the vanguard of this globalist revolution. They’re not being taken away and imprisoned. They’re soldiers on the forefront of the invasion. And it’s going to be up to us, True Patriots, to stop them.

  My sources have confirmed a few things the MSM does not want you to know. First, the opening salvo has already begun. Recently, an operations team from the Office of Strategic Services was sent to stop a group of these dissidents from beginning their charge on society at one of their secret camps—an unspecified location called “ Home. ” There are secret camps like this all over North America. My sources also confirm that this camp was destroyed by a small nuclear warhead!

  We. Are. Winning.

  I know it sounds hard to believe, especially because if we detonated a nuclear warhead on American soil, you’d think we’d know about it. After all, that’s a last resort. The operations team sent with the warhead was lost—glorious casualties whose sacrifice will not be forgotten. They must have discovered something that necessitated the detonation, something that could not be allowed to escape or survive. But what could that thing have been?

  My sources tell me that this particular secret camp may have been home to experiments. You’ve heard of the Millennial Kingdom or the Thousand Year Reign—well, these elite want to make sure their kingdom lasts for an eternity. Allow me to speculate for a moment, True Patriots, on what these scientists may have been attempting to perfect.

  You’ve heard of the Transhumans—the group of people who are looking to upload consciousness in a digital form to android bodies. What if they perfected it? The Transhumans are just another arm of the Deep State, attempting to ensure their global tyranny forevermore. I’ve been in contact with several members of the OSS who seem to believe some version of this to be true.

  We ’ve connected the dots in these posts before. NMAC, the National Mechanized Automation Corporation, is owned in part by James Burke , a known left wing billionaire and possible member of the Deep State. Members of his company have even gone missing, such as talented android engineer Ian Culp , whose entire family appears to have vanished from their home.

  They disappear under the guise of the Dissident Materials Act (DMA), a law that wouldn’t have been necessary if it weren’t for the liberal media. The DMA was a way for True Patriots like you and I to fight back against the damnable elites that have infested so many homes, that have snuck in through the eyes and ears of impressionable youths, turning them from the path of truth. I know that you and I open our doors proudly for the Dissident Inspector. You think they ever find anything in my home? Hell no! And I bet they never find anything in yours either. Because we know better. But the Deep State wants to use that act as a smokescreen to gather their vanguard. A war is coming, True Patriots, and we will be on the right side of it.

  N ow these Transhumans, hiding like vermin in their basements of sin, remote into android bodies to roam the streets and attack good, decent people. They assault and rape women and children. Well, True Patriots, you know I refuse to own an NMAC Talos. They will not look through those synthetic eyes into my home—they will not know how many weapons I have, as is my God given right. They will not take me unaware when the battle comes to my doorstep. Those machines are tools of the Transhumans, made for sin, and they serve sin. They think we are an inadequate species, but we are not. We must maintain our supremacy. They are not the ones who will transcend—we are.

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  2: what you’re going to hear (cassia)

  There was a riot in Denver that night. A political rally spilled out of the convention center, protesters clashing with counter-protesters in the streets. I watched from above, from my hotel room, my phone ringing.

  I had to answer the calls. It was part of the business model.

  I was only in the city due to its proximity to the former home of my target. He’d allegedly murdered his wife and disappeared, but my client seemed to think there was evidence to suggest otherwise.

  Letting the call go to voicemail wasn’t an option. The call would continue, fill the inbox, playing for five or ten minutes—maybe even a half an hour. And I couldn’t just let the inbox fill up, because I still needed room for real messages to come through.

  Chaos below. Fistfights. SWAT teams deployed. Molotov cocktails. You know, typical. People had been fighting for so long they didn’t even remember what it was about. Just us vs. them. Tribalism at its finest.

  It was cold in Denver, but beautiful. And people could still get in each other’s faces and argue until they started knocking heads together, even this high up in thin air, snow drifting down around them like embers.

  My thumb hovered over the button to answer the call. The number wasn’t even masked—no need to mask it. The phone said the call was coming from Portland, Oregon, but don’t you believe it. I wondered what it would be this time.

  A fly buzzing. The ambient sound of car horns. A conversation about corn stalks. A story being narrated from an audiobook that probably should’ve been on the OSS blacklist. Pornography. You never knew what you would hear.

  The number was always different, and if I called back, the person who answered on the other end had no idea what I was talking about. The number was spoofed.

  But I always had to answer because sometimes the call would be a case. Like this one—a missing person cold case, the kind of thing I could crowdsource information from armchair sleuths on the KB forums. It wasn’t 1940s Los Angeles, but not exactly a bad time to be private investigator.

  Still, those fucking calls.

  That night, as Denver tore itself apart for some dumbfuck reason, I answered the phone to a creepy, modulating voice reading a Bible verse. “He changes the tim
es and the seasons; He removes kings and sets up kings; He gives wisdom unto the wise and knowledge to those that understand.” The voice sounded like metal scraping against metal, the kind of unsettling that unhinges your lower jaw. “He reveals the deep and secret truth…”

  I hung up.

  I’d previously posted on the forums about the calls to see if anyone knew about them. One user, h34th3n, claimed they’d heard a podcast about it once—said that the best explanation was a scammer making a mint off 800 numbers. Some loophole in how phone companies process money from calls. They had to get you to stay on the line in order to rack up charges, so they would use whatever weird audio they could find. Someone else asked if I’d ever heard of number stations, these radio frequencies that broadcast numbers for no discernible reason. The answer is always more mundane than you think it is—just look at the conspiracy theories around the Denver airport.

  Curious about the Bible verse from the grating metal voice, I typed the phrase into the KB on my phone—“He gives wisdom unto the wise.” The results said this was Daniel 2:21. The Book of Daniel was an Old Testament apocalyptic work, predating the Book of Revelations by three centuries. Near the top of the search results was some conspiracy blogger, “Agent_of_Truth.” The entry included the entire Bible passage from the call I received. Lower down, Agent_of_Truth claimed people who had been disappeared by the government were the vanguard for a full-scale invasion by Transhuman terrorists embedded deep within the state. What bullshit.

  My client was a family member of the missing suspect who didn’t think the guy, a reporter and author, had it in him to kill his wife. I was contacted to fly out and take a look at the author’s compound, which had been seized by the government after a brief investigation ruled the woman’s death a homicide. The property would be auctioned soon, and my client was desperate for a professional to examine the location before evidence might be destroyed. He flew me into that conspiracy-laden airport and put me up in this hotel. I hadn’t even made it out to the compound yet.

  Still with those calls. Another one rang through, a Las Vegas number.

  It sounded like a conversation between a man and a woman. The man said, “It wasn't just her voice. You spoke to me as though you were my wife. While we were talking, I blacked out. And I've had this goddamn headache ever since.”

  The woman responded, “So you think I'm...”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But it might've been a dream. Your dream. I dream myself. I dream of you sometimes, even. They can't dream, can they?”

  If there’s one thing I couldn’t stand, it was listening to people rant about their dreams. I hung up again, hoping that would be it for the night. I was willing to put the phone on silent to get some sleep—check the voicemail messages that would inevitably arrive in the morning.

  Below, overturned squad cars, burning buildings, tear gas. The melody changes but the song remains the same. My thoughts returned to my target. He made a name for himself reporting on the riots in Grant Park decades ago. He turned into a gonzo journalist, a living witness and party to the stories he wrote. He was an old bastard, a radical leftie (but loved his guns), and an unrepentant drug-user. Some theorized that he catalogued substances because of the anti-psychotics he was prescribed in the aftermath of those riots, due to exposure to the chemical MDRA.

  His nom de plume was T.H. Stockton. I was contacted by his son Julio, who lived with his mother Camila Morales and her husband Tito. Camila and Stockton were estranged shortly after Julio’s birth. Julio said that it had something to do with Stockton’s chemical proclivities, or so his mom said.

  Before you ask—yes, he was a high school student. Sure, it was ridiculous to take a case from a teenager, I know, but it wasn’t unheard of. Sometimes rich kids found my information and asked about a parent they thought was cheating, or they wanted to know the truth of their own parentage, or they thought their boyfriend or girlfriend was involved in the drug trade. I did have bills to pay, after all. Julio, however, was the recipient of some serious royalties from the work of his father. He was Thomas Horatio Stockton’s youngest son, and the oddball writer made sure to provide for him. Dickensian, in a way. That’s why Julio disagreed with his siblings about the official story.

  His other children, Terrence and Corina (each from different mothers), bought the story, hook, line, and sinker. They lived in other parts of the country and had no reason not to believe. They had only rare contact with their father and seemed to live banal, ordinary lives, at least according to Julio. I hadn’t contacted them yet.

  Did I feel bad about billing a teenager for a flight to Denver and a hotel room? Like I said—I did have bills to pay and debts to manage.

  Gabby thought me crazy for this. “ Colorado? ” she had said. “Why does this kid need you? Why are you the one that fits the bill?” Her soft pink hair practically glowed in the California sun—the color of sunset. She had a perfect voice, the kind that people paid to listen to because it helped them fall asleep.

  “I’m the one that answered,” I told her. “It’s my weakness.” Like I said—it was the business model.

  “You stay up all night with these message boards. Cold cases, researchers. Couldn’t someone else do it? Can’t you just stay local?” She wore a big white beach hat and round black sunglasses. Her skin had an almost porcelain quality.

  I explained to her how the kid was paying me—how it was important not to turn down cases and treat every client with dignity. Again, part of the business model. Word of mouth was helpful for private investigators, especially for someone with my specific circumstances.

  “But I want you to stay here. With me,” she’d said, adjusting my glasses.

  “Be careful,” I whispered. “ We ’re in public. We shouldn’t.”

  The sky faded from gold to turquoise to glittering violet night, and the phone rang again, pulling me away from her. This time, a dead, mechanical voice recited the words, “The more we know about the enemy mind, what causes them to betray life and country, and makes them willing to forfeit the rights and privileges extended to free citizens, causes us to understand and prevent further hostile development.”

  I watched Gabby walk down the beach admiring the surf, her porcelain skin glowing in the evening light. The voice continued, “Such data collection is a logical step in this war—the war on the enemy mind. In essence, understanding the hostile mind is a way to help prevent hostile minds.” It was some letter from a bureaucrat, probably spoken by a text-to-voice converter.

  But that was back in California, and I was high above Denver, watching the city riot. It was just going to happen again and again and again. Half of those people would disappear. They couldn’t contain themselves. Why was it happening now? I thought they had quelled the violent protests before they even passed the DMA. But it just seemed to happen more and more. These urban centers weren’t safe anymore.

  The phone rang again.

  Again, that voice like scraping metal. “I am the glitch,” it whispered coldly. “I am the grain of sand in the microchip. I am the flaw.”

  I hung up.

  3: dead pixel (regina)

  James Burke towered above the crowd of NMAC employees, speaking to us from the screen.

  “The world set free,” he murmured, his hands clasped together as he spoke. He talked in a slow cadence, every word measured for the audience of stakeholders—the executive board, high-level management, investors. “That’s our slogan. It’s an extension of our vision—to make life easier for our customers through our products. We set them free from the toil of taking care of their homes, their family, their lives through constant attention. Our models make our customers’ lives easier; they help families. They assist.”

  Mid-level employees were asked to attend this meeting via auditoriums and watched on giant movie screens. Rumor had been that Burke was reflective in the wake of bad PR centering on blackouts. The normally reclusive CEO wanted to reaffirm the purpose of his company and reas
sure investors.

  In the upper left-center of the screen was a single dead pixel. I had no idea if anyone else noticed it, but I couldn’t stop staring at it. With the way Burke’s face filled the screen, the dead pixel was a single black dot on his temple as he spoke.

  “Our Talos models are number one in the industry, changing the world. Making lives easier. That’s been our vision since I founded this company. I remember the days when it was just me and a few of my friends in a garage trying to build little battle robots. Figuring out the voice commands, the AI interface, or proper Knowledgebase connection. When my first humanoid model, the Talos I, woke up and began to support our requests, it was a flashpoint for the entire world, like the first desktop computer or the smartphone. We knew then we would set the world free.”

  You could expect t his kind of lofty speech at nearly any corporate town hall in America. Setting down a company’s ideals in the language of the corporation. It wasn’t exactly brainwashing, but it was close.

  That dead pixel kept drawing my eye, no matter how close I tried to pay attention to what he said.

  This sort of speech was supposed to reassure the stakeholders, but it pulled people off the phones. It took people like me away from the office, where I was supposed to be handling the training materials for those support staff ahead of the patch install that would fix the blackout problem. And then we needed to worry about downstream impacts.

  I twitched at the static that briefly hit my hearing implant. Sometimes the damn thing glitched and picked up some random atonal noise—speaking of things that needed firmware updates. I had an infection that resulted in hearing loss in my left ear when I was a kid, so I’d dealt with this all my life. The fact that they were broadcasting this speech to auditoriums around the country didn’t help—the interference messed with the hearing implant. I rubbed the spot behind my ear where I could feel the edge of the implant protruding under the skin. The static cut out and clarity returned.