Untitled Paul Fischer Annecdote

There's a note in my mailbox informing yours, truly I'm to meet representatives of President Dance's this afternoon. It matches the usual criteria: sparse on details; suggestive of larger elements; delivered on the day of the meeting. You learn a cast of faces in your department, earn their names as appropriate, listen for rumors about them and listen to the rumors they share themselves. 

I won't pretend like I'm too good for this place. Nor will I play shoeshine-boy to some disgruntled egomaniac if he tries persuading me one of us is possessed by some practitioner of the dark arts hiding in another dimension. I do my job. And I am very good at it. 

I know they'll offer me work of some kind. It could be a single assignment or the dawn of a new career. The singles are generally safe to accept with practically zero vetting. I've been asked to review tribunal decisions made in Tequistan. I've been asked to make predictions on scores of renewable-futures. And most of these came to be as transparent as the contents of the South Carolina Daily Sun or the Cradivourist Science Journal. They are also the least likely strategies to be employed by terrorists, anarchists, pirates, democrats or undesirables of any other heading or description (at least according to the research or the most-current data it includes). That is, it's the latecomers who have no real longterm strategy or understanding of their own and they want to pull you onto their team quick, fast and in a hurry before you inspect the quality of the components of their deathmask and deduce you've been appropriated by the weaker association. Good luck, traitors: Persephone sends her regards. 

...Not that I haven't wondered if the Noble Confederacy hasn't dressed itself, from time to time, in this fashion. 

...The nature of governments and corporations is the nature of espionage. They are subject to miscommunication and their geography is impossible and unattainable without maps and mapmakers. The worlds that they seek and promise contain the paths of kings and the conquered in fossils that would fit with adroit asymmetry in the crevices of their palm. In those axes of the flesh nations conspire well beyond the reach of the dead and the devotees of deathcults and the hollow tombs they pretend or imagine are filled with enormous riches. For poets and playwrights, the world is a constant inspiration. For the rest of us, it's enough that the doors lock and the beds are soft. I haven't been shopping around for property in Florida, as they say. I haven't buried funds behind secret walls or in steel boxes. I couldn't tell you which of my two sons I love more. My wife hasn't done anything to bring shame on our family or threaten her status as a lady... But if I'm meant to be forthright in these pages, I ought to tell you now without procrastination that if these guys I'm meant to entertain at One O'clock can resize my obligations that I have eight hours less of seminars, dinners and various appointments next month: I'll be just so happy to sharpen my cutlass and polish all my spare third-eyes to meet their approval. 

God as my witness. 




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