Prologue
Captain Vincent Natter, or Vic to his friends, grumbled as he walked through the rain-slick streets of New Sierra with his collar turned up and his head low. The omnibus was late, canceled in all likelihood. The inconvenience annoyed him less than what it revealed. The timetable was one of the few reliable things in the city. When reliable things faltered, something had gone wrong.
He swept the street without moving his head, a hard-learned habit of years in his certain line of work. Two men, already drunk despite the early hour, huddled under an awning. A constable in the lee of a doorway fussed with a cigarette; his shoes were too polished for a beat cop. Vic made a mental note of the officer. No tails, though. Not yet.
He cut across the street to the nearest cafe to console himself with a cup of coffee. He was stopped by a young lady just outside the door. The blonde was thin and pretty, the sort of girl a recruitment officer might pick from a stack of files. Her shoes were spotless despite the wet pavement. No umbrella, and no rain on her hair. Vic’s stomach tightened. He knew she was bait, but she was the kind of bait he had a weakness for.
“May I borrow you for fifteen minutes?” she asked with a smile.
In her pale hands was a clipboard. Vic sighed. He hated surveys, no matter how cute the facilitator was. Still, the next omnibus was not due to arrive for another hour.
“Fifteen minutes, huh?” Vic asked warily. “Fine. What’s the pitch?”
“I only need you to do a quick survey,” the blonde replied. “The office is just across the street. It won’t take any longer than fifteen minutes. I’ll get you a cup of tea, and you’ll get ten golden ducats when you’re done.”
Vic feigned surprise. It was a generous offer for fifteen minutes of his time. It was too generous. However, his curiosity overwrote his suspicion.
“Ten ducats?” he asked. “Sure, lead the way.”
He followed the girl across the street, noting the small tells. She never checked for traffic, and did not flinch at the hiss of an automatic coach as it rumbled past. She was not careless. She was conditioned. He was almost impressed. The office was narrow, brightly lit, and had the stifling sterility of a doctor’s waiting room. The room hummed quietly like an oily machine. A handful of people were hunched over desks, pens scratching over identical survey packets. Another girl, this one a trim redhead, patrolled between them, checking their answers against the booklet she carried.
Vic shrugged his coat off and sat at an empty desk, his movements casual but precise. He noted the exits: the front door, an emergency door behind the counter, and a locked door at the rear. The redhead acknowledged him with a smile that did not reach her pale green eyes.
The blonde returned with a cup of tea. The steam curled upward, and there was no stray drop on the saucer. She set it down in front of Vic and gave him a smile that could warm the bones of a dead man. He returned it, though he kept his eyes on the tea. He did not drink.
The survey was not what Vic had expected. There was no brand, no product, and no consumer fluff. Instead, it was page after page of multiple choice questions. Geography, history, elemental symbols, and so on. The questions were simple enough. After breezing through the first few questions, Vic intentionally marked one answer wrong just to test the system. Within seconds, the redhead was at his side.
“Try again,” she said softly, pointing to the page.
“It’s the right answer,” he insisted.
She showed him the answer in her booklet. “Not according to the company.”
Vic relented and marked the correct answer. The redhead strolled away to check the next desk over. He marked the next few honestly, watching her reaction. When he marked another answer wrong, she corrected him again. Once or twice, she caught him off-guard when he marked one he was certain was correct, yet she showed him the book of answers and politely insisted he answer in the way which matched her book, as if her job was to shepherd him toward a preferred reality. Since she would not leave him be otherwise, he relented to her incorrect choice, yet he made a mental note of the pattern.
By the time he reached the last page, Vic had learned what he needed to. The girl was not after answers, she was after compliance. The wrong answers were instructions, not mistakes. The other test takers in the room moved their pens too easily, too fluidly. They were already conditioned.
The blonde returned when he finished the test. She slid him the ten ducats across the desk with another heart-melting smile. He pocketed the money, heavy, real, and still warm from the girl’s hand.
“I think your quiz is screwy,” Vic said flatly. “Some of the answers are wrong.”
The blonde’s smile wavered. “They’re the answers the company wants. They don’t have to be correct. Just give the answers they’re looking for, and all will be well.”
“All will be well,” Vic said with a forced laugh. “Sure.”
Vincent shrugged and took his leave, but his mind was already working. The wrong answers gnawed at him, but it was not worth arguing over ten ducats. Even so, he wanted to know more. He wanted to know what the company was, and what they had to gain by teaching people to believe lies.
On his way out, Vic spotted a familiar face hunched over one of the desks. Lieutenant Troy Sunderland, his best friend from work, was just finishing up the quiz. The young man had joined the RSA straight out of university and trained under Vic.
“Troy,” Vincent said sharply.
The young man looked up, surprised. “Vic! I didn’t know you came here.”
“Did you notice some of the answers were incorrect?” Vic asked, leaning in close.
“No, I didn’t,” Troy replied. “To be honest, I’ve been doing this for months.”
“Months?” Vic questioned.
“Yeah!” Troy said with a grin. “They pay you every time you show up. I’ve got all the girls’ answers memorized by now. Fill it in, sip some tea, and pocket the ducats. Some scheme, eh?”
Vic clapped him on the shoulder and forced a smile. “Some scheme indeed.”
However, the agent’s smile did not reach his eyes. He filed Troy’s words away. Conditioning. Incentive tied to compliance. Classic behavioral ops. Yet something was off about it. Troy might have been a rookie, but he was still a trained RSA operative. Vincent had taught him personally. Troy should have known better.
Over the next few days, Vic returned with Troy to the little office. It was always the same test, the same wrong answers, and the same smiles. The blonde’s gaze lingered on him a little longer each time. He never drank her tea, though.
After two weeks of this routine, a fever hit Vic like a knife in the skull. He woke with a gasp in the dead of night, blood running from his nose. His hands trembled, but he could not remember his nightmare. He staggered to the ice chest, cracked open a bottle of beer, and sat on the foot of his bed until the shakes subsided.
The inconsistencies up in his mind like cards in a rigged deck. Who were the girls? What was the company? Why had Troy never noticed the wrong answers?
Vic could not tolerate it anymore. The only way to get questions was to dig, and digging for intel was what he did best. He finished his beer, got dressed, and rode his motorcycle to the familiar survey office. The night was dark. Perfect for breaking in.
The office was dark when he arrived. One look at the lock told him everything he needed to know. It was civilian grade, cheap, and with no secondary alarm. He picked it within seconds, stepped inside, and eased it shut behind him. He ignited his lantern, the dim glow just bright enough to navigate. He moved like a shadow, avoiding creaks in the floorboard as he traced the room’s edge. He crept to the door at the back of the room and found it unlocked. Whatever the company was, its security was amateur.
The back room smelled of dust, oil, and copper. The room was cluttered with old typewriters, telegraph machines, and long-outdated security monitors. Vic flipped the switches on. Old screens crackled to life, showing identical survey offices in other cities. Each one was a mirror of the next; the same sort of desks, the same smiling girls, and the same blank-eyed participants.
Vic forced open a locked drawer with a flex of his muscles. Paperwork spilled out. Graphs, statistics, and notes written in a precise hand. The trend was undeniable. More and more people were agreeing that the false answers were true.
The weight of it crept into Vincent’s mind. It was not simple information warfare. It was a war on reality itself. Doubt reared its ugly head. Were the answers incorrect? Was he incorrect? He shut it down as he stuffed the papers back into the drawer. Truth did not bend itself just because someone paid it to.
He turned to leave, and froze. The blonde girl stood in the doorway, clipboard cradles in one hand, a cup of tea in the other. Her smile was the same as it always was. Too much the same. She licked her red lips.
“I’m sorry, Vincent,” she said softly. “I can’t let you leave.”
“Lady, I don’t think you can stop me,” Vic retorted.
He straightened up and squared his shoulders. His hand slipped to the service revolver under his coat. He never went anywhere without it.
“Your curiosity isn’t what the company is after,” she said, her eyes flicking down.
“What the hell do they want, then?” he demanded.
“Compliance,” she answered. “Perhaps you would like to take the survey again.”
Vic’s revolver cleared its leather holster. “I’m done playing games. Move.”
The door behind her slammed shut with a metallic crash. The monitors snapped to black. His lantern hissed out. Her eyes glowed in the dark like tiny screens filled with static. He fired his revolver. The shot lit up the room for a split second. No body fell.
Something shrieked like steel tearing apart. Cold metal wrapped around his boots, coiling upward like serpents. Wires, live, writhing, biting into Vincent’s flesh. He fought with all his strength, tore one free, drove the butt of his revolver against another. For every one he broke, two more slithered up, cold and strong. The wires reached his face, pressing against his eyelids. His screams echoed in the dark.
“Stop struggling, Vincent,” the blonde said, her voice buzzing like an old radio. “All will be well.”
