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11:19 pm - No Such Thing

We'd never been up to 17A before. At least, I'd never been up there. I don't think Rashid had either. 17A was bigtime stuff. But I didn't think we were in trouble. At least, I was pretty sure I wasn't. My latest quals were aces, my last test was clean. Rashid was on the up, too, so far as I knew. Never gave a hint of instability.



We cleared the door one at a time, in the personal airlock, as one does in security transition sections - by way of the trifecta: something you have, something you know, something you are. Personal card, issued anew each year by the Organization, the front end, carrying all clearances and relevant database keys. Personal password, chosen at the age of majority and revealed only to the System, the back end. And of course, the DNA sample, given to you by… well, by Nature, with a bit of help from your parents if they had access to grooming.



Beyond the airlock, we were met by an escort who tried to keep his hefty sidearm more or less out of sight. (Our own were small enough to always be discreet.) The hallway was dotted with a dozen identical looking doors; he led us to one that could have been interchanged easily with any other. But beyond it, behind a desk, was a familiar face.



"Jeanette! … I mean, Commander!"



She rose to greet us. "Welcome to Seventeen," she said, then gestured to a pair of seats. Our escort remained outside in the hall as the door closed. She took a casual perch on the desk (her desk? or just a desk?) as we sat down. The office was virtually devoid of content, other than the chairs and the desk and the panel floating above it.



I settled into my chair tentatively; Rashid, even moreso. Jeanette waved dismissively: "Why so timid? Congratulations are in order. You're both cleared for new Magnitude."



R and I looked at each other in surprise. "How… did that happen?" I ventured to ask.



The regional commander looked carefully from my face to Rashid's, back and forth a few times, as if trying to see through our faces into our minds. If only we could do that to each other, of course, the entire menace would have ended before it even really got started.



"You've demonstrated competence, discretion, and above all, flexibility," she finally said, and strangely relaxed air suddenly collected around her, in her body language. "We know about your resale market and the propaganda press, for example."



The nonchalant way she said it almost made me miss what she was saying. "You… what?" Rashid sputtered. I felt like I was about to crap myself as I tried to assemble a sufficiently casual-sound denial.



"Yes," she said dismissively. "Treasonous, yes, of course, but that's not the point. The point is, you're able to engage in these subversive activities without hampering or undermining your effectiveness in primary duties." She looked over the rim of her glasses at the pair of us, very seriously. "Believe me, we've been watching very close." She relaxed again: "You're each very good at playing a two-faced game as, effectively, two players. You compartmentalize appropriately. You are not mindless consumers of our military rhetoric nor are you mindless antagonists of our secure state. You clearly recognize that much about the world is bullshit, anymore, but you also understand that the alternative is likely worse."



It was hard to believe we were hearing such things. All through training and early promotion, even hinting at such disloyalty would have been grounds for court martial at the least, potentially execution!



"What… do you need from us, then?" I figured Jeanette must be crooked. It was the only thing that made sense. Surprising, but not so much so. Any cell of sufficient size is going to have graft within it. That's how Rashid and I were so successful with our resale market. Couldn't do that on our own, after all.



"I… We… need you to step up involvement in a very specific way that will require a rather surprising and significant disclosure," she informed us, rising from the desk. She silently walked back and forth across the width of the room, then, rubbing her brow and contemplating the floor as though still weighing some momentous decision, before stopping and looking right at us:



"We're not at war with the doppelgängers... because there's no such thing."



The impact of the revelations we'd already been exposed to had softened the blow, so I was actually able to assess what she said instead of simply having it move right through my head without registering.



"What do you mean… no such thing?"



Jeanette took a slow breath. "Do you know what the world was like before we were born?" She waved dismissively before either of us could attempt any answer. "Of course you don't. Every shred of history has been suppressed or re-written for the lower Magnitudes. But here is the truth: Not so long ago, no more than a century or so, humanity was divided into a couple hundred political-tribal affiliations known as 'nations'. It was a terrible mess. They were fragmented and differentiated enough that they were constantly at war with each other, and yet each one was so large that it had internal scaling problems with crime, fiscal policy, social fairness… The single largest blocks of their economies were squandered on fighting they didn't need to do and social welfare they couldn't actually keep accountable and honest. They actually escalated to the point that they were pointing mega-weapons at each other capable of killing millions of people at a time, even as their own populations withered from malnutrition and unemployment."



None of this sounded the least bit plausible, and a quick glance to Rashid showed he was thinking the same thing, but we didn't say anything. I wanted to hear where she was going with this.



"There was only one way out of the trap that humanity had built for itself," the Commander said. "We had to fixate our aggression on any enemy that wasn't ourselves, and break down the scale on which human operations needed to be managed, without completely losing the millions of people whose livelihood required those dysfunctional systems. So… we 'discovered' the doppelgängers. A non-human enemy who was among us, who were experts at infiltrating bureaucracies and other large social systems. Rare enough that we didn't have to be in a 'hot' war with them, but not so rare that we could just ignore them. And over the course of a couple of generations, the world made the shift to the superior way we know it today, with humanity organized on the cell-by-cell level, infrastructure managed through independent autonomous and anonymous software agents, and an entire ecosystem of military-industrial technology that is able to grow or shrink to any level of economic need."



She paused at this point, as if to look us over and assess what we were thinking.



"So…" I began hesitantly, "we fight the doppelgängers so that we don't fight each other so much?"



"That's right," Jeanette affirmed. "But the only way it works is if the enemy is un-defeatable, you see? Any problem that could actually be solved was not going to be a big enough problem to break our species out of its millennia-old instincts. But a shape-changing pseudo-telepathic alien species that secretly walks among us…?"



"Why are we being told all this?" Rashid asked warily. "You wouldn't promote us to learn such a thing for no reason. I mean… right? There's an angle here."



"That's right," Jeanette said with sudden focus, slapping her hands together as if getting on with business. "The thing about fighting an undetectable enemy, you see, is that eventually people get complacent if the threat never really materializes. So occasionally, someone needs to face the so-called 'enemy', to act as witnesses. Understand?"



"We're supposed to pretend that we've encountered a doppelgänger in real life?" Rashid asked. Worldwide estimates were that only about three percent of humanity had ever had a recognized encounter with a doppler… but if there were no dopplers, three percent of the human race was an enormous conspiracy!



Jeanette could see it on my face. "That's right. Almost one person in thirty knows what you now know. And they know it because they are helping sustain the lie, by pretending to have direct experience of our Faceless Enemy. Now you will help maintain it, too."



I felt like the walls and the world were crushing in on me. One person in thirty? No actual enemy? A lie that had been building for over a century?



"Can you handle it?" my former camp instructor and (briefly) lover said, leaning in close.



Could I actually do this? … What if I couldn't? What if I couldn't help them with this massive conspiracy? Would they kill me? No, not they. Would… would WE kill me?



My reeling mind suddenly snapped back into focus at the sound of weapon discharge. Jeanette flung back as Rashid's sidearm burst in her face.



"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" I shouted.



"THE DOOR!" he shouted back. I turned as the escort, waiting outside, came through with his own piece drawn. WIthout thinking, I shot him twice in the chest. He flew back against the wall in a spray of gore. I ran to him as he slumped to the ground, already dead.



I turned back to Rashid, my face contorted. "You stupid fuck! I just killed this guy!"



Rashid, breathing fast and heavy, system clearly taxed with adrenaline, pointed wordlessly where Jeanette lay on the ground.



Her head was not a burst melon of blood and brain, as I expected. It was a ropy spatter of blue-green goo.



The interior of her head had not been human. She… had not been human.



"Doppler," I choked.



""No such thing MY ASS," he whispered, getting his breathing under control.



Suddenly, the hall outside began to echo with a chilling sound, an alarm like nothing I'd ever heard. It sounded like dogs howling.



Rashid looked all around, wild eyes: "Maybe our whole cell is infiltrated!"



I found I couldn't tear my eyes off the "corpse". A thought tickled there, refused to let go. "What if," I said, "she was telling the truth?"



"Are you kidding me? Look at it! That's the real fucking thing!"



I wanted to tear at my own face, slap and punch myself, just to make sure I was myself still. "What if that's just some sort of… automaton? Didn't she just say we were designated to join the one-in-thirty who could claim that they'd encountered the Enemy? And then she turned out to be the Enemy? Doesn't that seem a bit too fucking convenient, that timing?"



Rashid paused for a moment, looked at me with the most conflicted expression I've ever seen. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and when his eyes opened again he was frighteningly calm.



"Either the doppelgängers are real and one of them just tried to deceive us with some sort of propaganda," he said, "or the doppelgängers are *not* real and we've just been inducted into some sort of conspiracy that manufactures evidence that they are. Either way," he concluded, recharging his pistol, "is the next ten minutes, or ten days, or ten years, or rest of our lives going to operate any differently?"



I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and when I opened them again, I was frighteningly calm.



"No," I said, and recharged my pistol. It was a long way back to the Ground.



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For consideration: more processing of REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN