PARANOIA - A1 The Computer is Your Friend

CIT IZEN OF ALPHA COMPLEX! YOUR MANDATORY ORIENTATION STARTS HERE.

The Computer is happy. The Computer is crazy. The Computer wants citizens to be happy. This drives them crazy. Many traitors threaten the underground city of Alpha Complex. Who’s more dangerous—traitors or happy citizens?

THERE MAY BE A TEST, FOLLOWED BY POSSIBLE TERMINATION.

This all-new anthology introduces both new and returning citizens to the joys and rigors of PARANOIA. Five light-hearted stories feature backstabbing mutants, misprogrammed robots, and crazed firefights in the food vats.

THIS COLLECTION WILL HELP YOU BECOME LOYAL, INFORMED, AND LOYAL.

Several of these short, mayhem-filled tales feature characters from the PARANOIA novel line.- “Rule Zero”: Heroic Troubleshooters seeking a stolen helpbot

(from Stay Alert) find the legendary Bot Graveyard.- “Hay Fever”: CPU efficiency auditor Clarence-Y meets his

pet mouse, Ignatius (Traitor Hangout).- “Data Exhaust”: Watch the head of the Department of

Threat Obfuscation (Reality Optional) try to leave his suite.

STAY ALERT! TRUST NO ONE! KEEP YOUR LASER HANDY!

The Computer says so, and—

THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND

A PARANOIA anthology edited by Allen Varney

The Computer is Your Friend

Edited by Allen Varney

Ultraviolet Books

ultravioletbooks.com

The Computer is Your Friend and PARANOIA TM & copyright © 2012 by Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan. PARANOIA is a trademark of Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan. All Rights Reserved. Allen Varney, Authorized User.

Based on the PARANOIA roleplaying game. Original setting & game design by Dan Gelber, Greg Costikyan, and Eric Goldberg. Copyright © 1984, 1987, 2004, 2009 Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan. All Rights Reserved.

CONTENTS

Orientation 1

Rule Zero 2

Allen Varney

Orientation (Revised) 40

Market Research 41

Greg Ingber

Orientation (Re-revised) 55

Hay Fever 56

WJ MacGuffin

Orientation (4.0) 83

Action Request 84

Greg Ingber

Orientation (Final) 98

Data Exhaust 99

Gareth Hanrahan

About PARANOIA and Ultraviolet Books 123

Allen Varney

Backmatter 128

Contact

Acknowledgments

About the authors

More PARANOIA fiction

Changelog

FREE preview: Reality Optional 132

FREE preview: Stay Alert 167

FREE preview: Traitor Hangout 189

PARANOIA / A1 The Computer is Your Friend / 1

Orientation

Welcome to Alpha Complex, $NewCitizen_NAME!You are REQUIRED to read and understand the following

important data.

ALPHA COMPLEX

The Computer is happy. The Computer is crazy. The Computer will help you become happy. This will drive you crazy. Being a citizen of the underground city of Alpha Complex is fun. The Computer says so, and The Computer is your friend. The Computer wants you to have fun and be happy. Happiness is mandatory. If you are not happy, The Computer will use you as reactor shielding.

TRAITORS

Mutants and members of secret societies—threats to good order and good hygiene.

TROUBLESHOOTERS

The Computer’s elite agents, charged with hunting and apprehending traitors. Rumors the Troubleshooters themselves harbor traitors are treason.

“RULE ZERO”

Four Troubleshooters enter the wilds of the Underplex in search of the legendary Bot Graveyard. Wait, you’re not searching for the Bot Graveyard? Wait, who are you?

A prelude to PARANOIA novel T1 Stay Alert (Book 1 of The Troubleshooter Rules trilogy) by Allen Varney, available where you obtained this book.


Rule Zero

Allen Varney

Year of the Computer 214, Month 03, Day 27 (Sevenday), 07:44—JSV Sector FunFoods PLC Processing Plant JSV043 Access S014

“Get control of this situation or I’ll get control of you,” Fabian-O shouted up to Sheila-R. “Now stop hanging by your fingers and climb back onto that girder.”

“Will do.” Sheila-R-JSV-1 blew long black hair out of her eyes. Shoulder-length hair worn loose—not right for the fashionable Troubleshooter, and definitely not for hanging suspended ten meters over a bubbling 40-kiloliter vat.

Over Sheila’s headset, the Troubleshooter Dispatch bureaucrat at the other end of her call—Mabel, Melba, something like that—said, “Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” Sheila remembered to gasp away from, not into, the mike. “Talking to—Team Leader.” She tried to swing one leg up to the girder. She failed. “You said—I need—a form—”

“Three forms. First your Troubleshooter Active Duty application, of course, which technically you were supposed to complete before your first mission. Then, because you say you were recruited on an emergency basis, an Exigent Circumstances Orientation Waiver, signed by the party who recruited you—”

“Roscoe-R—our Happiness Officer.” She tried swinging back and forth to build momentum. She felt her grip loosening.

“Roscoe-R-JSV-3? The registered mutant?” Mabel (Melba?) sounded wary.

Sheila swung high. Her heel just reached the I-beam girder. “Yeahhh!” She wedged her foot between the beam’s upper and lower lips. “I mean—yes. Pulled me—out of my barracks—didn’t say why—never met him before—” He woke me from a sound sleep at 05:30, said “You’re a Troubleshooter now,” and two hours later I’m falling into a food vat.


“Well, if it’s a mutant, then you also need your Team Leader’s signature. And last, sign a Media Image Use Release, in case you do something heroic and they want to broadcast it on—Did you say something?”

“Just—strained a muscle.” Sheila spoke through gritted teeth as she hooked her chin over the beam. As she flung both arms over the far side, she felt glad she’d brought the hands-free headset.

Sheila had—umm—borrowed the headset from JSV Sector Troubleshooter Dispatch. She worked there as Deputy Assistant Logistics Coordinator, a title she liked more than “gofer.” Right now she took pride in this headset—a nice noise-canceling ergonomic unit from one of her favorite firms in Technical Services, HearMeNow Earscapes TS—lightweight, great battery life—as her only piece of mission equipment. Troubleshooter Team Adenoidal-352 had given her no armor, no weapons, and no time to prepare. She knew Troubleshooter teams lived and died by preparation.

As she scrambled onto the beam, the next thought struck hard: Troubleshooters mostly died. Every morning she saw dozens of teams leave Dispatch and head out across Alpha Complex. The Computer sent its elite service agents all over the underground city on important missions: protect this, escort that, recon over there, frontally assault those traitors—wherever there was trouble, they went to shoot it. Few teams returned intact. On his last mission, Team Leader Fabian-O had been the sole survivor.

Panting, Sheila glanced down at the bubbling, blupping vat of Intermediate Emulsion 14b, then back along the beam to the platform overlooking the vat. There stood Roscoe-R, a lanky, unshaven young man with black, straggling hair (not quite shoulder-length—that was good) and the drug-glazed expression of a dutiful Happiness Officer. Roscoe held out an upturned thumb. “You’re doin’ fine, man!” He popped another HappiPill.

Sheila remembered Roscoe had been the only survivor of his last mission, too.

Melba (Magda? Marla?) was still talking. “Submit the completed forms to the Dispatch manager-on-duty for preliminary inspection, then get approvals from the Dispatch commander and the Internal Security liaison, and copy any Central Processing Unit efficiency auditor who may be on assignment.”


“And then I’m officially a Troubleshooter?”“No, not then.”A crewcut head and thick neck pushed into view on the gangway

at Roscoe’s feet. Though short, even stubby, Loyalty Officer Thaddeus-O was a real widebody; his broad chest and steroidal biceps barely fit between the handrails. Sheila had already noticed how Thaddeus went through doors sideways. “Newbie!” he yelled. “Back on the beam? Then get after that thief.”

“Will—” (gasp) “—do.”“What?” said Marla (Marsha?).“Nothing.” Sheila was starting to wonder if Thaddeus had

her best interests at heart. There they were, he and Roscoe, two seasoned Troubleshooters, standing safely back on the walkway. Thaddeus had ordered her, a rank newcomer, to crawl out over this stinking vat.

Now that she thought about it—when he’d returned from his last mission, Thaddeus, too, had been the sole survivor.

Huh.“You’re not officially a Troubleshooter until you get your

license,” Marsha (Moira?) continued. “Licensing is automatic—during ordinary recruitment. But as an emergency recruit, you take care of it yourself.”

“Ah.” I seem to be taking care of lots of things.Sheila looked around. Beyond the churning expanse of pinkish-

gray murk, the FunFoods factory floor spread away as far as she could see: vat, vat-vat, vat-vat-vat.... endless lines of colossal steel megatubs like this one. They steeped, simmered, stewed, brewed, beat, blended, fermented, folded, mulled, mixed, and massaged the myriad chemical goops that would become Hot Fun, the food (well, food-ish nutrition) of the low-clearance multitudes. An all-encircling labyrinth of pipes, dense and complicated as an oil rig, stretched in all directions. The air smelled of sweat socks and perfumed garbage. She saw no workers; Fabian-O had gotten this part of the factory evacuated. But the hall still echoed with the churn of mighty machines. Somewhere nearby, tinny speakers blared a cryptic vatwork song: Can’t take time for pleasantries, / I’m pushing out my VSPs!

Between the vats ran wide concrete aisles laced with cracks. The floor’s weak. Great.


“Take your approved forms to the local Office of Troubleshooter Authorization in Central Processing Unit’s Licensing Division. Be careful. You don’t want the Department of Licensing in CPU’s Division of Troubleshooter Administration.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.” Crawling along the girder, Sheila finally reached a point directly above—far above—the vat’s center. Here a vertical cross-beam reached up into a shadowed webwork of support struts. Her target, a thief in yellow, was directly above.

Holding tight, she started to climb.“You’d be surprised how many new Troubleshooters make that

mistake,” said Moira (Maria?). “It can keep you off active duty, trapped behind a desk, for weeks.”

“Gosh, that would be awful.” Sheila looked up and saw, far up and receding, a thin yellow-jumpsuited butt receding fast. Where had this guy learned to climb? “So the steps are submission—approval—license?”

“That’s the procedure, except in nonstandard circumstances that probably don’t apply.”

Sheila stopped. “Friend Maria—”“Melba! And that’s Melba-O to you, RED.”“Sorry!” In the unbreakable hierarchy of color-coded security

clearances, Sheila-R had to respect and defer to any citizen ranked ORANGE or higher. “Sorry, Melba-O. Just a little—distracted—here—” At least her hair wasn’t falling in her eyes; sweat had plastered it to her forehead. “Melba-O, let me describe my nonstandard circumstances. Just yesterday, when I was restocking manila folders and binder clips, I remember wishing for a change—something new, anything. Now I’m climbing a girder over a food vat in FunFoods factory 43, herding a traitor who stole a docbot. Okay, yes: change. But—”

“Herding?”“Chasing. I mean I’m chasing some YELLOW-Clearance

thief I’ve never met, nor heard of, nor know anything about. Except—dang!—this guy is a serious climber.” She traced the thief’s progress. Parker-Y-JSV-1 was racing at speed straight up a lattice of support struts. Something in his movements—too strong, too sure—


But whatever Parker-Y was using for his spider-climb, it didn’t matter. With breathless excitement—she lacked breath to feel any other kind—she saw she’d corralled the thief.

Above him, barely visible in the shadows, was a small, inconspicuous ceiling hatch, blocked by welded iron bars. She’d managed to push him almost under the hatch. She started to climb again.

“FunFoods 0-4-3,” Melba-O repeated, as if musing. “That’s supposed to have a route into the Underplex.”

Again Sylvia stopped, dead. For one terrifying moment she wondered if Melba could see her seeing the hatch. “Ummm— You don’t say.”

“Some Troubleshooter mission teams have looked for it. They say that part of the Underplex holds some kind of treasure trove of valuable equipment.”

“Gosh.” Just to be safe, Sheila looked away in random directions. “Uh, did anyone find this hatch—this route, do you know?”

“Not that I heard. So many teams go into the Underplex, but not many get back.”

“Great.” Sheila saw, below her, Thaddeus and Roscoe running along the catwalk to get into position. Roscoe was squinting upward, tracking both thief and hatch with his superhumanly acute senses. As she watched, Roscoe swallowed another quick pill to dull them. Even in his fog of happiness drugs, the mutant lived in a storm of high-intensity sense overload. He seemed to be perpetually wincing.

Thaddeus pointed at Sheila, then up at the thief. Thaddeus pointed a lot, as if showing off his rings. He was in Armed Forces, and wore rings as mementos of many all-out combat rehearsals. “Quick, newbie, he’s going too far!”

The thief climbed onto a high gantry way and scampered along easily on all-fours. No—wait—

Sheila gasped. Parker was crawling on the underside of the walkway. He was barefoot, and his fingers and toes were sticking like glue.

Thaddeus gawked. “Mutant.”


Still looking up, Roscoe shrugged. “Sure, man. Didn’t you see the stripe?” He pointed to the yellow stripes on his own red jumpsuit’s legs—the stigmata of the registered mutant.

“His suit is yellow, and he’s way far away. How were we supposed—?” Thaddeus broke off. He pointed at Roscoe. “You’re a mutant too. Go get him, push him back to the right spot.”

“He’s got sticky skin. I’m hypersenses. What should I do, listen him to death?”

Thaddeus sputtered. He pointed up at Sheila. “You, RED. Put him—ah, where we want him.”

“Thaddeus-O, I wonder—excuse me, Melba-O, be right with you—I wonder if this is the right guy? Our guy stole a docbot, right? I don’t see a bot with him.”

“Troubleshooter Rule Number 1, Sheila-R—” With each phrase, Thaddeus-O pointed at her, rat-a-tat. He’d been pointing at her so often, she wondered if there was some other “Sheila” around, and he was just making sure. “Do what I tell you.”

“I thought you said Rule 1 was ‘Don’t annoy me.’”Roscoe looked confused—not a big change for Roscoe. “Wait,

on the transbot you said Rule 1 was ‘The Loyalty Officer gets the best seat.’”

“I heard that,” Melba said. “The real Troubleshooter rules are, ‘Stay alert, trust no one, keep your laser handy.’”

Sheila sighed, though it sounded like ragged gasping. “I don’t have a laser. I wasn’t issued one in my ‘emergency recruitment.’”

“A Troubleshooter without a laser pistol? Wow, that’s pretty—I mean—well, good luck.”

When one has climbed halfway up a tall girder above a 2.5-megaliter food vat, one inevitably feels, simply through circumstances, a certain unease. Melba’s tone stirred greater doubt. Sheila was chasing—herding—a mutant with unknown abilities and weaponry, and she carried nothing deadlier than a head full of hair that would somehow, some way, get her killed.

But she was game. Sheila resolved to try, at least until things got worse.

Immediately things got worse. The mutant started throwing blobs at her—gobs of sticky exudation from his adhesive skin. One gloppy bolus stuck on the cross-beam near Sheila’s head; it smelled like sweaty hair, though right now everything in Sheila’s


world smelled like that. Another batch landed in the vat below, blup-p-p.

Sheila watched it sink. “Melba-O, as Hygiene Officer, am I responsible for cleaning up—?”

A chime. The chime—the cheery handbell ring intended to induce calm and a sense of warm welcome. At the chime, everyone in the factory, from the cracked floor to the shadowed ceiling, froze in place and assumed a fixed grin. Many began to sweat.

From every speaker rose the honeyed voice of The Computer.

ATTENTION, TROUBLESHOOTER TEAM ADENOIDAL-352.

For an endless moment the Troubleshooters waited for their Team Leader to speak. Funereal silence. At some point in Sheila’s climb Fabian-O had vanished. This meant the second in command, the Loyalty Officer, was now in charge. Uh-oh.

“Yes, Friend Computer!” said Thaddeus. “Everything’s fine, Friend Computer!”

YOUR TEAM HAS ALLOWED A TRAITOR TO SPILL A CURRENTLY UNDEFINED AMOUNT OF INEDIBLE CONTAMINANT INTO FOOD VAT JSV043-255-J. EACH TEAM MEMBER IS FINED 5 CREDITS FOR FAILURE TO PREVENT UNHYGIENIC CONTAMINATION. PLEASE PREVENT FUTURE CONTAMINATION.

“Will do, Friend Computer!”

YOU MAY NOW RESUME APPREHENDING THE TRAITOR.

The speakers clicked off. Everyone breathed. Overhead, the contaminating traitor started crawling again.

“Yes,” said Melba.


Sheila waited. “Oh. Responsibility. Right, roger that. So it sounds like I have quite an adventure ahead, getting this emergency recruitment through.”

Parker-Y reached some kind of impasse, hesitated, then turned and retraced his crawl. Sheila watched him, meter by meter. Any moment....

Melba-O spoke with evident reluctance. “If you haven’t been issued proper equipment, technically you could be considered not a Troubleshooter at all. After this mission you’d go back to Dispatch and join in the usual way.”

“But if it’s easier to just join when I get back, can we just say this emergency recruitment never happened?”

“Well, obviously you want to follow the rules.”The traitor crossed just under the barred hatch. Beyond that

hatchway, the Underplex. Sheila signaled to Thaddeus.For the benefit of nearby microphones Thaddeus loudly

announced, “I’m targeting the thief!” He pulled his laser pistol. Then, to Sheila’s surprise, he popped the orange barrel off his pistol and attached a fresh barrel. She panicked as she saw the barrel’s color: vivid purple. The weapon was VIOLET Clearance, well above Thaddeus-O’s rank and lethally powerful. And by targeting the hatch, he was aiming right at the intervening mutant—and, by unhappy coincidence, at her.

“Gotta go, Melba-O.” As Thaddeus pulled the trigger, Sheila flung herself from the girder into empty space. Flaring past her ear, then past the thief, the purple beam hit the hatch dead on. In a blast of ozone and subatomic particles, the shot instantly vaporized bars, hatch, and a gaping circle of the ceiling.

As Sheila fell—don’t hit the beam don’t hit the beam—she flashed back, without connection or reason, to a moment

one morning at the bathroom mirror in the low-clearance barracks among the other proles, staring at pouchy eyes and puffy cheeks and her awful, awful hair, thinking, I’m on a track to nothing—doing today what I did yesterday and will do tomorrow, to the end of my life.

When was that? It could have been any morning—every morning. As she plummeted, she had nothing better to recall, from across her life, than tedium. Amazed at her life’s emptiness,


she resolved to do better—to rise higher in clearance, higher in The Computer’s esteem, higher in—

Sheila fell past the beam and into the vat. She hit custardy goo with a colossal splat. As she plunged deep, it closed over her with a sound like abplanalp.

Sheila thrashed to the surface and spewed a mouthful of warm emulsion. The morale song greeted her: My VSPs show everyone / I’m working hard and having fun!

Far overhead Thaddeus shouted, with careful elocution, “Oops. I missed!”

Blind, Sheila gasped for air. She pulled away strands of goopy hair and opened her eyes—just in time to see Parker-Y, still holding (or stuck to) a two-meter length of catwalk railing, hit the goo right in front of her.

A tacky wave drove her under. A rotator arm swept by, dragging a line of agitators, long hanging strips of rubberized canvas. The strips pulled over her and pushed her down; it felt like fighting a carpet. In high agitation herself, she grabbed one strip and pulled herself up. As she broke the surface again, viscous gruel clutched at her. Her hair—her dratted, blasted, traitorous hair—!

Sheila shook her head so hard her cheeks flapped. Her vision cleared—and she froze.

On the catwalk in front of her stood a stout black-haired woman in a goo-stained orange jumpsuit—Sheila’s sole ally on the team, Recording Officer Henriette-O-JSV-1. With short arms and small, manicured hands, Henriette wrestled the bulky multicorder to point down at her. “Smile, Sheila-R. What do you think about your first adventure as a Troubleshooter?”

I just almost died. I swallowed some of this I-don’t-know-what and I hope it doesn’t mutate me. I don’t have a laser so I don’t even count as a Troubleshooter. “It’s—” She groped for words. In Alpha Complex, one particular word almost always worked. “—fun! I hope I can be a good team member and make my teammates proud.”

Her own words took her by surprise: She really felt that, ardently—not the fun, but the team. Troubleshooters were heroes. She wanted to help them serve The Computer and Alpha Complex. She wanted a fuller life, something with meaning—excitement—and also, if possible, promotion.


Parker-Y grabbed her ankle from below. She yelped, then tried to turn the yelp into a simulation of enthusiastic cheer. “Whoooah! Yeah, fun!”

Pushing the YELLOW thief back down into the vat with a discreet out-of-frame kick, Sheila crawled onto the catwalk. She noticed she’d lost her HearMeNow Earscapes headset in the vat. She also noticed, acutely, none of the others were helping her. Though disgusted—not least with her hair, now plastered in random orientations across her face—she tried for enthusiasm. “I sure hope my actions are impressing Team Leader Fabian-O.”

But Henriette had stopped recording. She was listening to a call on her PDC—her Personal Digital Companion, the indispensable Alpha Complex smartfriend—and her brown eyes were bulging. “It’s Fabian-O. He left, along with Giles-R. He says they’re chasing the real thief.”

Sheila cried, “Real thief?” Thaddeus and Roscoe, running up, repeated, “Real thief?”

“This FunFoods facility is JSV043. We’re actually supposed to be in a Cold Fun plant near here, JSV034. Who took down the instructions from Dispatch?”

Thaddeus and Sheila looked at Roscoe, who looked at the writing on his sleeve. “Huh. I guess I swapped the digits. I’m a little dyslexic.”

Sheila asked, “Why didn’t you take notes on your PDC?”“Little spooky box tracks everything, man.”Thaddeus scowled. “Then why did Dispatch tell us to go after

Parker-Y?” He stabbed an angry finger at the man in the vat.Henriette was still listening. “Fabian-O says we’re looking for

a small-time Free Enterprise agent-for-hire—Palmer-Y.”Thaddeus and Sheila looked at Roscoe, who peered more

closely. He held out his sleeve. “Does that look like an ‘R’ or an ‘L’?”

Breaking the tense silence, Sheila spoke in sweet, friendly tones to the YELLOW mutant in the vat. “And who might you be, friend Parker-Y?”

He was clutching an agitator; apparently his glue-skin wouldn’t stick. He had dropped the length of handrail. “I work here! I was just doing my job, supervising this Hot Fun line, when for no reason you ran at me.”


Thaddeus sounded affronted: “Then why’d you make us chase you?”

“I’m a mutant. Of course I’m going to run.”No one could argue with that. On her PDC Henriette was

checking the factory’s staff records. She looked up and nodded.The Troubleshooters traded glances of wary contemplation.

The only one who seemed not to be ruminating—on vat contamination, property destruction, illegal VIOLET laser barrels, and (this was the killer) multiple counts of assault on an innocent citizen, and more to the point (this was really the killer) a citizen of higher clearance—was Roscoe. As if just waking, the Hygiene Officer looked around. In a nasal voice like a soprano saxophone he said, “These dirty uniforms are gonna get us an Official Reprimand.”

Henriette nodded with slow politeness. “Riiight—our uniforms will....”

Thaddeus snapped his fingers. “That’s it. Citizen Parker-Y!” He pointed at where the YELLOW had been, then tracked around in a circle to the man’s current position. “Your uniform betrays unacceptably poor hygiene. We’re taking you to Internal Security for correction.”

“What? You threw me in here, you bastards!”“Such language. It sure is lucky this Troubleshooter team

noticed your poor hygiene and bad attitude. Our friend The Computer can encourage you to do better.”

Now Parker’s attitude grew still worse, as he shouted imprecations that demonstrated, beyond any doubt, extreme unhappiness. Nodding with satisfaction (unhappiness = treason), Thaddeus raised his laser. (Sheila noticed he’d replaced the treasonous violet barrel with a legal orange one.) “Sorry, guy, just following orders.”

Sheila considered this idea of “orders” a stretch. She wondered what to do. But Thaddeus was ORANGE, and a Loyalty Officer; his report could send her to the Bright Vision Re-education Center, if not to a termination booth.

She got ready to wince. She looked away.—So she got a great view as a loose length of handrail snagged

an agitator arm and gouged a long sloping gash in the wall of the vat. And so she, of all the Troubleshooters, understood why


its thin metal wall suddenly sagged, shuddered, and collapsed; why 40 kiloliters of Intermediate Emulsion 14b cascaded forth like a tsunami of pudding; why the rotator mechanism snapped and landed on Parker-Y, killing him instantly; and why the agitator arm flew up and wide, showering Team Adenoidal with vitaminized pink swill.

In the brief silence, one thought rose uppermost in Sheila’s mind and, she guessed, in every other: Gonna be a fine....

Roscoe spoke first. “Like I said, man—our uniforms are really dirty.”

“We should change. Somewhere else.”—“Yes, right away.”—“Sounds good! Let’s—”

The chime.

ATTENTION, TROUBLESHOOTER TEAM ADENOIDAL-352.

They all looked at Thaddeus. He forced a smile, but his eyes showed despair. “Hellooo, Friend Computer!”

Sheila’s mouth went dry. Two minutes ago she had hoped to make her teammates proud. Now she thought, If Thaddeus blames me, VIOLET laser barrel. If it’s Roscoe, he’s a mutant anyway. Henriette won’t fink on me because I’ll fink on her.

LOYALTY OFFICER THADDEUS-O-JSV-2, YOUR MOST RECENT FORM TS-2952-445 EMERGENCY BATHROOM BREAK REQUISITION, DATED 214.03.27, 06:14, REQUIRES A SUPERVISOR’S SIGNATURE. PLEASE RETURN TO JSV SECTOR TROUBLESHOOTER DISPATCH AFTER YOUR MISSION TO CORRECT THE FORM.

Thaddeus seemed to grope for words. Down on the factory floor, bots were vacuuming up emulsion (and Parker’s body) and piping everything into the next vat.

“I—ah—I apologize, Friend Computer. I’ll correct that immediately on my return to JSV Sector Troubleshooter Dispatch.”


THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. YOU MAY RESUME YOUR MISSION.

The speakers clicked off. The Troubleshooters stared.Sheila’s PDC rang. It was Team Leader Fabian-O. “Are you

off the beam yet? —Good. I just wanted to check whether you smoothed things over with that YELLOW guy. I don’t trust Thaddeus-O.”

Good thought. Thaddeus-O was even now silently mouthing, Lie to him. Sheila shook her head. “We—uh—we resolved the situation.”

“I’m going to assume that means—” Fabian began, but Thaddeus grabbed the PDC and interrupted: “The thief escaped. We’re pursuing him.”

“Don’t! We—”But Thaddeus broke the connection. “I distinctly heard our

Team Leader say, ‘Don’t worry,’ and I applaud his vote of confidence. As for you, RED—” Thaddeus used Sheila’s PDC to point at her. “When I need you to back me up, you back up. Troubleshooter Rule 1: Do what I say.”

She took back her PDC. “At least this Rule 1 matches the previous Rule 1.”

Roscoe ticked off the various Rule 1s on his fingers. “So the score is, ‘Do what I say,’ 2; ‘Get out of my way,’ 1—”

Henriette had her own PDC ready. “Do we report Parker-Y’s death?”

Thaddeus waved her away. “Just a mutant.”“Hey!” Roscoe started to protest, but he trailed off—“heyyy....”

Maybe he’d forgotten what he was hey-ing about in mid-hey.Sheila disliked the team’s overall flakiness. If these were the

heroes of Alpha Complex.... “Won’t we get in trouble if we don’t report all this?”

Thaddeus frowned. “After the mission. I didn’t expect someone of your background to be so naive.”

Sheila bit back her next question. Background? As an admin in Troubleshooter Dispatch? Or—she felt a shiver—did Thaddeus know she belonged to a secret society?

No. Even that idea made no sense. Among all the dozen-plus major societies of Alpha Complex, few were considered more


naive, more harmless than hers. Pro Tech had no doctrines, no agendas—it was just a bunch of gadget-heads who gathered in informal, slightly illegal groups to study equipment they might or might not technically, legally own.

Yet this morning, ever since Roscoe had dragged her out of her barracks to join this bunch of strangers—well, and Henriette, a buddy from Pro Tech—Thaddeus had shown weird expectations about Sheila. He’d asked her to plan their assault on Parker-Y—rather, Palmer-Y—and he’d acted like she was some kind of combat expert. Huh?

“Now.” Thaddeus pointed at her, then to the ceiling. “It’s time for you to—”

With a tremendous crrrack the floor tilted. The Troubleshooters grabbed railings, or each other. They exchanged looks of panic. For one awful moment Sheila wondered what might be below this factory. Another FunFoods level? Offices? Caves?

Alarms rang. Bots raced back and forth. A clamor of distant footsteps.

Thaddeus broke his grip on Roscoe’s neck and pointed again. “As I was saying, RED. Lead the way.”

—————The Underplex stretched deep under, and over, and around all of Alpha Complex. It was a disjoint and chaotic network of abandoned rooms, dead-end tunnels, and lost accessways that interpenetrated every sector of the underground city. None of it existed—officially. Every part of it grew from calamity and misconception. A lab contaminated beyond purification; a corridor built at an unwise angle; a subsector infested with traitors; in each case, some official found it expedient to resolve his error with bold determination. And bulldozers.

With every record erased, and every citizen who remembered those records also erased, the errors compounded. Across the centuries, beyond awareness and memory, rooms and tunnels had metastasized into a jangled labyrinth. Now the Underplex harbored fugitives, refugees, mutants, secret society meeting halls, and relics of unhistory. Often only a wall panel or bulkhead separated them from the lighted world.


The four members of Team Adenoidal-352 crept along a corridor as dark, fractured, and weird as their relationships. They had to jump from one section of flooring to the next, and the walls were chokingly narrow, as if the whole corridor had been sliced lengthwise. The air smelled of dust and garbage. Along one side, slanting doorways opened on what looked like ordinary offices, now wrecked. The opposite wall looked temporary, makeshift, yet unknowably old. Who could tell what might lie on the other side?

Sheila felt tense. She’d lived every minute of her 23 years in sight of a camera or an Internal Security officer. Now, two minutes from the FunFoods hatch, she had already moved beyond PDC range, beyond surveillance, beyond even electricity. It was unbelievable, surreal, like ducking into a cafeteria for a quick snack, leaving, and discovering the whole city had been replaced by a mold colony.

Sheila was scouting in front with her flashlight; Henriette followed close. Thaddeus and Roscoe hung back, visible only as one bobbing flashlight beam; Roscoe could see in almost total darkness, and also sensed his surroundings by listening to air currents. The two men talked in low voices.

Glancing back at them, Sheila grew even more anxious. “Do these guys understand they’re supposed to be heroes?”

Henriette glanced back and shifted her multicorder. “If you’re pathologically unpleasant and like committing treason, but maybe you aren’t ready to face the termination center just yet—hey, Troubleshooter.”

“And now I’m one, too. Hope I can live up to their example.”“If you plan to follow their example, I won’t turn my back.”

Henriette sidled closer and whispered, “Why are you here, anyway?”

Sheila was dumbfounded. “Wait, didn’t you tell Roscoe-R to recruit me?”

“I didn’t know anything about it. I think it was Thaddeus-O.”Her mind reeling, Sheila nearly stumbled into a crack in the

hallway. She leaped, then helped Henriette over. The two men waited for the two women to move further on, then followed, still out of earshot.

Sheila couldn’t make sense of it. “How would Thaddeus-O know about me? Is he Pro Tech?”


“I don’t think so. He didn’t spot my signals. Nor Roscoe-R either. —Know what about you?”

Sheila halted and looked around. Darkness and silence. She leaned close to Henriette and whispered, “I know where it is.”

Henriette’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean—”“Yes.”“This sector’s Central CompNode?”“What? No, I mean—”“Or, no, Internal Security’s crowd-control armory? Omigosh,

I know, you found the Pro Tech INDIGO warehouse!”“No!”“Not—” Henriette’s voice was hushed. “—the formula for

Bouncy Bubble Beverage?”“I wish. Are you done?”“What do you know where it is?”With liturgical gravity, Sheila enunciated each syllable: “The

Bot Graveyard.”Silence. “The what?”“Oh, come on. You’re Pro Tech, you know this.”“I don’t keep up with all the mailing lists.”“Hey, RED!” Thaddeus shouted. They both jumped. “Keep

going.”Sheila and Henriette picked their way forward. Sheila kept

whispering: “I have a friend at a History Purifiers firm. Years ago he was scrubbing an old file, and it pointed to a really, really old file. He found it on the Gray Subnets.”

Henriette murmured, “Right.” On the illicit data networks maintained by the secret societies, you could find any contraband file, any shady secret, and every kind of illegal fun.

“He decrypted the file,” Sheila continued. “You know about the Pro Tech bot programmer from a hundred years ago, Marcellus-B? No? He pulled off a tremendous hack. Marcellus-B inserted his own custom code in every bot brain. When the bot suffered severe damage and would ordinarily head to Tech Services for recycling, his code redirected the bot to a hidden location.”

“That would be the—Graveyard?”“Right. Unfortunately for Marcellus-B, his aide in Pro Tech, a

woman named Annalise-B, was actually an infiltrator, a spy from


Free Enterprise. Annalise-B sold out Marcellus-B to Internal Security. They erased him.”

“Oog.”“Annalise-B stole the Graveyard’s coordinates and then went

searching. No one ever saw her again. So the bots kept going to the Graveyard, with nobody to salvage them. They’ve been stacking up for decades. By now all those parts are worth a fortune.”

Across tedious months and years of filing, with the precision of an architect, Sheila had imagined every detail of the Graveyard. In her vision, bots filed into a spacious factory-warehouse and solemnly mounted a conveyor belt that swept them forward. Solicitous automated systems disassembled the bots with finicky exactitude, polished the remains, stickered every piece with chips of metadata cryptic yet profound, then sorted them in glittering hoppers. Forkbots seized the bins and whirred down aisles, onto ramps, up cantilevered corkscrew spirals, careening millimeter-close by shadowed shelves in endless towers, to the foredestined spots where at last, with pinpoint care, they brought their charges to their designated rest.

Her fantasy always ended with the treasure of treasures, a doped diamond matrix in a boron-nitride case: the bot brain. A jackobot—or perhaps a guardbot with an escort of jackobots, moving with funereal ceremony—enshrined the cartridge in a wall niche. Above the niche, the bot’s name-code was affixed as a gesture of respect—and for convenient retrieval when she finally got there.

Henriette sounded skeptical. “I don’t know why we’d be looking for a Bot Graveyard. This ‘unscheduled side-trip’ was Thaddeus-O’s idea. He’s Armed Forces; why would he know or care about dead bots? Or Roscoe-R either. Did they talk about it?”

“They said they wanted me to lead them to ‘the big find’ in the Underplex.”

“Did they say ‘Graveyard’?”Sheila thought back. “Not as such. But why else would they

recruit me?”“I don’t know.” Henriette hoisted her multicorder. “But now

that you’re here, you can back me up when I finally report Thaddeus-O as a traitor.”


“Wait, I didn’t sign on for that.”“You haven’t signed on, period. But you still need to support

my story, a hundred and ten percent. Believe me, it’s him or us.”Henriette’s tone unsettled Sheila, a hundred and crazy percent.

“Why?”“This whole side-trip is secret, unauthorized. He’ll try to frame

us as traitors just in case we squeal on him. At debriefing he’ll confuse things by raising dumb side issues, probably about me trying to steal experimental equipment. You and I, together, can keep the focus where it belongs.”

“Uh-huh. You have proof?”Henriette’s pudgy hand thrust into the flashlight beam. It

held a pair of red earbuds. Sheila took them, and suddenly she was listening to Thaddeus talking to Roscoe. With a shock she understood this conversation was realtime, happening right now far behind her. Henriette was covertly tracking the two with her multicorder’s long-range mike.

“—doesn’t act much like a soldier.”“Yeah, man, and this morning, when I woke her up, she was

all, ‘I have to comb my hair.’ She has some hair-thing going on, kinda weird.”

“She’s got some connection with the fat one. Didn’t expect that. We’ll have to take them both out afterward.”

“Man, you do that taking-out thing, not me. Harshes my ears.”Sheila jerked out the earbuds. She heard the men’s conversation

continuing as she whispered to Henriette, “You were right! We should get away.”

“Stay on track.” Henriette leaned close. “Yeah, I’ll get away. Let me get away alone with Thaddeus-O for one minute, and I’ll solve the problem.”

“Are you sure—aah!”From the darkness ahead, a loud clank of metal. In a split-

second Sheila thought, It’ll get Henriette first / I can outrun her / run behind Thaddeus / VIOLET laser / he’ll shoot it. At no point did she wonder what “it” was.

Henriette turned her beam to max. They saw, ten meters down the corridor, a wastebin-sized metal canister on halftrack treads. Mop heads, brushes, and soapy nozzles stuck out in all directions. “Just a scrubot.”


Sheila felt faint with relief—then wild with fear as Thaddeus and Roscoe ran up. She flung her arms up and cried, “Don’t!”

They stopped. “Don’t what?”Accuse me of treason, strand me here, shoot me in cold blood.

“Uh—don’t mind me.” She tried to chuckle.Henriette was examining the cleaning bot. “Damaged. Looks

like something hit it, hard.”They looked around warily. Thaddeus drew his laser, and Sheila

tried to move unobtrusively out of his line of sight.When she saw he wasn’t targeting her, Sheila felt it safe to

look at the scrubot. Busted treads, broken sensors, a chassis that looked like something had bitten off half—the bot was a mess.

Automatically her heart went out to it. After a lifetime of conditioning by The Computer’s master propagandists—from the earliest Junior Creche shows with Happy Hilton-B and his lovable sidekick Foodvat, through countless episodes of Hard Tech, Botsense, and Jacko!, to lifestyle ads for everything from new PDCs to surge protectors—Sheila could commit emotionally to almost any mechanism. Her adoration of gadgetry had brought her to Pro Tech, where people could talk ecstatically for two hours about an inkjet print head. Nowadays if she saw a smiley face—just two dots and a curved line—she melted by reflex, even for a toaster.

Henriette said, “Bot, how were you damaged?”The bot spoke; its damaged speakers fuzzed its voice. “Autocar.

Wheelcaps very dirty-dirty. Rude autocar, didn’t want wheelcaps clean.”

Grunting, Thaddeus holstered his pistol. “Idiot bot had me thinking we were about to—” He hauled off and kicked the bot. It sagged and beeped plaintively.

Sheila stepped between them. Objectively she understood some Technical Services coder had programmed Plaintive Bot-Beep #1 just to rouse a human bystander’s sympathy. So what? She still wanted to nurture. “What’s your name, little guy?”

“Human-Interface Designation ‘Alkylbenzenesulfonate’—Alkyl.”

A scrubot named “All-Kill” didn’t fill her with confidence. “I’ll call you Alky, okay?”

Thaddeus stared. “What are you going to do, adopt it?”


Alky the scrubot ignored them both. “Must go-go to assigned destination. Go-go-go.”

Sheila gasped. The bot was following the secret imperative Marcellus-B programmed long ago—heading to the Graveyard. In her excitement she forgot the danger from Thaddeus and Roscoe. “Follow him!”

“Why?”“He’ll lead us right there.”“Hey man, do you always call bots ‘him’?”“Come on, come on!”Alky was already limping on, or the halftrack equivalent of

limping. The four Troubleshooters trailed it (or, as Sheila thought, “him”).

“We may need a few anti-bot weapons,” said Thaddeus. “You think this cache will have some?”

Sheila found the question odd. “I guess it’s possible. Maybe attached to a combot.”

In this dark, quiet corridor, Roscoe was acting almost normal. “Man, I hope this cache-thing has lots of good pills. Something to make me feel like a tunnel all the time. No more brain-burn.”

Thaddeus shook his head. “The only drugs in a weapons cache are bioweapons.”

Sheila repeated, “Weapons?” This she regretted. She wasn’t sure why.

Thaddeus stopped, so they all stopped. He spoke slowly and with suspicion. “We are—talking about—the same—“

Whunk! The scrubot vanished. “Down!” Henriette cried.As one, the other three fell to the ground. Henriette looked

around. “No, I mean Alky is down. He fell through that gap, see?”Shining their lights down a deep crack in the floor, they saw

the scrubot had fallen to another level, some ten meters below. Looking worse than ever, it said, “Not hurt. Not hurt-hurt-hurt. Dirty here, very-very dirty-dirty.” It dragged itself away, beyond the range of their lights.

“You go, little guy—” Sheila shouted, then noticed the bot was moving in a new direction. “He’s doubling back. We have to catch him.” Sheila jumped the gap and ran as fast as she dared down the corridor until she found a staircase. “Here!”


As the others ran to join her, she pried open the rusted door. Her beam showed a stairwell of concrete, stained and marred with a webwork of cracks. The stairs were mostly destroyed, but the steel railings were intact.

Thaddeus pointed at her, then pointed down. Sheila stole a glance at Henriette, who nodded significantly.

Sheila scrabbled and slid down two broken flights, sometimes crawling on twisted handrails across the gaps. Each flight ended in a landing, but the doors were blocked. After a tense climb down a third flight, she arrived at a landing that seemed more or less intact. The other Troubleshooters, still above, were moving more slowly.

Sheila’s flashlight was dying. She felt around in the darkness. As she found an exit door, she heard from above a muffled gurgle, then a snap, like shattering plastic. One flight up, something, or pieces of something, hit the landing. Silence.

Footsteps. A bobbing beam descended. It drew close to Sheila. A pointing finger thrust into the beam—Thaddeus. “Keep going,” he said calmly.

Roscoe was climbing down to join them. He, too, looked calm.Sheila waited, but she heard nothing. “Wait, where’s

Henriette-O?”Thaddeus stopped with his face a hand’s-breadth from hers. The

light shone up between them. He stared, his expression blank, his eyes dead. “I sent her back,” he said in a flat voice. “Let’s keep going.” He shouldered her aside and opened the door.

Roscoe moved past her. “Nice earbuds,” the mutant said in passing. “Kinda loud.”

Sheila trembled in darkness. Looking back, then up, then crazily in all directions, she tried to think. What could she do? Flee into the Underplex? Suicide. Turn back, try to find the Team Leader? Even if she got Fabian-O to believe her story, it would be her word against an ORANGE Loyalty Officer.

Desolate, she recognized the truth: She was alone.Poor Henriette.With hammering heart Sheila followed the others’ footsteps,

wondering if—no, when—she’d be next.

—————


They had emerged on the same level as the scrubot. As they followedAlky on its winding route, Sheila tried to keep well away from her teammates. With her attention divided (forward, aft, Alky, and Thaddeus), Sheila lost her bearings. She had no idea where they were in relation to the FunFoods factory.

This part of the Underplex seemed more industrial, or it might have been a warehouse area. The hall was wide, the concrete floor oil-stained but largely intact. Alky wheeled past deserted loading docks and gaping entryways large enough for a truckbot.

After long minutes, the bot rolled into a cavernous hallway where every sound echoed. Overhead, at the limit of their beams, the Troubleshooters saw concrete ceilings laced with cracks. On one wall Thaddeus’s flashlight picked out a sign: TARGETED ENFORCEMENT AREA. Sheila couldn’t tell what had been enforced, but she doubted it still was.

Alky moved directly toward one side of the hall. Following, they smelled—what?—gasoline? cordite? The bot led them to a steel door, dented but still hanging by one hinge. Beside the door they could see a huge loading port, unobstructed; but Alky ignored it and went in the smaller door. The door’s sign read AUTOMATONIC MFG TS.

Sheila’s heart leaped. This Technical Services firm was the location she’d found in the old file. But then her heart stopped leaping—in fact, it just about stopped. Taped below the AutomaTonic logo was another sign:

DANGER! RADIATION! KEEP OUT!

The Troubleshooters paused. “We didn’t bring a radiation counter.” Thaddeus pointed at Roscoe. “Can you see radiation?”

“Not the bad kind, man.”Sheila said, “I own—well, I borrowed—a good detector. But I

had no time to get it when Roscoe pulled me out of my barracks.”“So we have no way to be sure.” Thaddeus pointed at the sign.

“But now I do recall this place. My old sergeant talked about it once in a briefing. AutomaTonic Manufacturing was a big huge bot factory and repair depot. Some traitor ‘liberated’ the bots by taking out the hardware that make them obey orders.”

‘Their asimov circuits,” Sheila said.


“Right. The bots organized, killed everyone or drove them away, took over the place, and hollowed it out as a new—what would you call it?—nursery. Nobody could stop them, because the leaders were warbots and combots.”

Roscoe looked at the ruined doorway. “Man, I think they got stopped.”

“That they did. The Computer finally just pulled the plug. With no power at their recharge stations, the renegade bots eventually went inert, except a few.”

Sheila saw the connection. “So a few extra broken bots wouldn’t be noticed here among the renegades. That explains why Marcellus-B chose this as the Bot Graveyard.”

Thaddeus frowned. “What? What’s a ‘Bot Graveyard’?”“Uhh—it’s what you brought me along to find.” His blank stare

disconcerted her. “The biggest legend in Pro Tech.”“Pro Tech?” Thaddeus looked ready to explode. “You’re

supposed to be PURGE!”“PURGE?” Sheila was mortified. “Do I look like a homicidal

terrorist?”“No.” He spoke with withering contempt. “You look like a

lowdown gadget-scamming sneak thief.”“Well, all right then.” She felt relieved, if not flattered.“I thought it was your cover.” He pointed at Roscoe. “You were

supposed to bring the soldier who’d find the PURGE weapons cache! I gave you the barracks number.”

Roscoe squinted at his sleeve. He held it out. “Hey man, is that a 1 or a 7?”

Thaddeus slapped the arm away. “I’ll deal with you later. All right, newbie—” He pointed at Sheila. To her eye, his other arm seemed to drift closer to his laser pistol. “—Let’s get back to that stairwell.”

Struggling against panic, Sheila groped for an idea—anything. “Wait—I mean—what about—?” Inspiration struck. “What about Alky? We can reclaim his brain. It’s valuable.”

“Not when it’s radioactive. Let’s go.”“No, no, nonono. The sign must be a fake. You said yourself,

those renegade bots went inert.”“You know why this factory is a radiation hazard? A few of

those bots had nuclear batteries: the warbots and combots. Armed


Forces sent in troops to restore order. It was an all-out running battle. It spread nuclear fuel everywhere. That’s why they closed off this whole subsector. That kind of collateral effect is always a risk when you’re fighting the forces that would destroy Alpha Complex.”

Roscoe said, “Like by spreading nuclear fuel across a subsector?”

“Exactly. That’s the enemy—nothing is beneath them.”Sheila was still stairwell-stalling. “Listen, this place can’t

be—it isn’t radioactive. Factories like this are outfitted with, with anti-radiation—system—things.” No, wait, then he’ll follow me inside. “But—but only I know where to find them—how to switch them off. I mean, on!”

“Newbie, it’s lucky you’re not in PURGE after all. They would have killed you the first day. Though that would save time—you’re doomed anyway.” He pointed at her again. “Rule Number 1, little thief: Learn to lie.”

Thaddeus paused; she felt him sizing her up. “Okay, you know what? That’s a good idea. You go in there and fetch that bot brain. We’ll hang back here and wait.”

Sheila felt relief; she’d gotten her wish. Then she felt despair; she’d gotten her wish! He expects I’ll die. “It’s pitch black in there,” she said dully. “My flashlight is dead.”

“Just wait. Soon you’ll start to glow.”“Here, man. I don’t need mine.”With leaden fingers she took Roscoe’s flashlight. She thought,

Three hours ago—has it been three yet?—I was sleeping in my bunk. She couldn’t see where or how she’d gone wrong, nor how to put it right.

Her mind a blank—feeling already dead—Sheila entered the Bot Graveyard.

—————AutomaTonic was an abandoned factory—a straight copy of the FunFoods floor with the brightness and contrast turned way down. As in the hallway, the ceiling here was lost in shadow. Anything could be up there. At the thought, Sheila shivered. Then she thought, Better to be killed by a mutant or rogue bot than by skin lesions and coughing up lung tissue. Then again, radiation


sickness meant all her hair would fall out and she wouldn’t have to worry about it ever, ever again.

In the giant echoing room she saw, in place of food vats, long lines of machines. She knew them all: gun drills, jig borers, gear cutters, toolroom lathes, recipro saws, and dozens more. This place had been a major installation, once.

Though the air was dry and stale, the factory was spotless—no dust. One clue told Sheila it had been deserted a long time. The floor was marked with lines of tape in many colors—tracking tape.

Tracking tape not only showed clearance boundaries; it guided bots. The bots’ onboard guidance systems read the tape, so no manager need ever fear an errant scrubot might accidentally overturn his desk. Unfortunately (Sheila also knew) traitors tuned tracking tape to transform targets to terrifying troublemakers. By remagnetizing the tape, anyone could encode it with software instructions. A moving bot could be invisibly reprogrammed with illicit commands: “Overturn your manager’s desk.” Nobody made tracking tape any more.

But it looked like today’s bots could still read the tape. Alky the scrubot hadn’t moved far from the entrance, and was making awkward, drunken turns along a winding tape-route. She realized: He’s reprogramming himself.

Sheila needed that brain, altered or not. She ran after the bot. It led her on a winding chase, and soon she was out of sight of the entrance. If she died now, Thaddeus and Roscoe would have no idea what happened.

By the time she caught up with Alky, the bot had started talking to itself. Its voice had changed. “Clean damage—check. Scrub all surfaces—check. Dump irradiated debris—check.”

“Alky, stop. Did you say the radiation is gone?”“Yes,” said Alky. “Scrubots arrive at Bot Graveyard—get

one last assignment. Clean everything. Check. Radiation now, background levels.”

No radiation! With shock and hope, Sheila began to imagine a future free of weeping sores. If she could find an escape route....

“Alky, if there’s another way out of here, lead me to it.”


The scrubot wheeled ahead in a straight line—though, she noted, by coincidence this path still matched the tracking tape. She followed, uncertain. Did he hear me? Is he obeying?

She wasn’t worried, exactly. Whatever the tape was coding into Alky’s brain, it couldn’t revoke the bot’s hardwired asimov circuits. The original AutomaTonic bots that had revolted eight decades ago were destroyed; any new arrivals would have intact circuits. The Graveyard bots wouldn’t harm her—not that scrubots could do more than hit her with a mop.

Alky had passed the rows of machinery and was heading for a high wall of metal debris. As Sheila neared it, she realized the wall was made entirely of old bot parts—chassis, treads, limbs, circuit boards—all scarred and corroded beyond repair. Lights glowed beyond.

The scrubot led her to a gap in the wall. Sheila entered a narrow, angled passage, its walls made of broken bots. She paused to play her flashlight over the walls, looking for a brain. Should have looked for a brain before I took up with Troubleshooters.

All this salvage amazed her, and she wondered why no one had looted it. One chapter of Pro Tech scroungers could clean this place to the bare floor.

Alky had stopped in the passage, just short of its last bend. Sheila couldn’t see past the bot. “Alky, why have you stopped?”

“Afraid.”“Of what?”“J-10 Expunger.”At the name, light! Sheila yelped as the walls of the passage—

rather, the wall-full of eyes from countless bot heads, and dials from unnumbered chassis displays—flared into life. Red, green, yellow—the lights struck her from every angle. And at the same time, from a wall-full of dismantled and disembodied speakers, a chorus of mechanical voices:

“Jayyy Tennn! Ex-punnn-gerrr!”From the walls, many-jointed robotic arms unfolded from

detached torsos. The arms flailed like whips. The nearest grippers clutched at her with broken manipulators. They grabbed—oh no oh no—they grabbed her hair.


She screeched. She ran past Alky and out of the passage. She almost collided with a looming metallic wall—no. As she played the flashlight beam over it, she saw it was a carcass.

This was the titanium alloy chassis of a huge bot, broken and dismantled. Standing in its shadow, looking up at its gaping turret-holes and the remaining flinders of its treads, Sheila recognized it: an Armed Forces Onslaught-class warbot.

Fear grabbed her heart as the arms had tried to grab her hair. Bots built for the Armed Forces service group had no hardwired inhibitions; they killed to order. A name like “J-10 Expunger” had to mean a warbot or combot. Radiation or not, she was still in danger.

Alky wheeled out beside her. She asked the bot, “Why are you afraid of J-10 Expunger?”

“I run on batteries.”“What—?” Hearing a noise, an echoing boom, she motioned

for quiet.Brushing gloppy hair from her eyes, Sheila peered around the

warbot. Here beyond the wall of destroyed bots, she could see the full length of the long, long AutomaTonic factory. Dozens of steel chains, big enough to hold a suspension bridge, hung in arcs. She saw hooks the size of autocars, some bearing foundry buckets that could hold a barracks-full of INFRAREDs. She couldn’t tell what had boomed.

“No current in Underplex,” Alky said. “J-10 has electricity—thorium reactor—Mean Lifetime Between Failures, 14 million years. Battery bots like me need that charge.”

Sheila looked down. Much of the floor was sunken, descending by wide concrete steps to a depth of a dozen meters. She guessed it was an assembly bay for giant cargo transbots. Skeletal construction cranes stood like soldiers along the perimeter. Her hiding place, the dead warbot chassis, rested close to the edge.

Several crane towers were topped with spotlights—the lights she’d seen before. All the spotlights were tightly focused on the far end of the bay floor. She strained to see. “Won’t J-10 just give you electricity?”

“When we want recharge, J-10 makes us fight. Single combat, survival of fittest. Combot takes best parts from loser.”


Now she saw that the bay floor had been turned into a vast elliptical arena, walled on all sides by piles of debris. At the far end, spotlighted in front of a wide half-toppled wall that angled back into shadows, stood a tall gray combot, perhaps twice human height. Though it was built on a humanoid armature, the death machine’s head was a downthrust triangle; its outsized chest and arms were dented from many battles. Its odd, spidery legs looked new, unmatched to the rest—presumably the loot from combat. The bot’s weapons fit awkwardly, jerry-rigged.

She saw, at the edge of the spotlight, a crowd of damaged scrubots, jackobots, and smaller special-purpose automatons. From their careful, tentative motions, they seemed fearful of the big guy. They’re his servants, she thought. Slaves.

Disappointment crushed Sheila’s heart. With sad nostalgia she recalled her happy, efficient vision of precise disassembly, hoppers, bins, forkbots, and shelves. Now, instead—oh well. “What’s he doing—J-10, I mean?”

Alky said, “Eighty-two years ago, woman from FunFoods told J-10 ‘stay where you are.’ J-10 waiting ever since to be relieved of duty. Bots understand won’t happen—J-10 doesn’t believe. Want to leave—J-10 won’t let us. Thinks we’d bring back traitors. Any bot leaves, J-10 fries it with lasers.”

“Why did the FunFoods woman tell J-10 to stay where he is?”“Don’t know. You help? Tell J-10 to let bots leave? Is awful!”“You only just got here, Alky.”“Read data records on way in. Focus! Eyes on prize! For bots,

a living hell!”“A bot doesn’t even knew what “hell” means, let alone—” She

heard another boom. Now she recognized it—the voice of J-10. She strained to sort out the echoes.

“SUBMIT. BATTLE TO PLEASE ME, LEST YOUR BATTERIES DRAIN.”

“Ohhh-kay, I might go with ‘living hell.’ Wait, Alky, where are you going?”

With sluggish motions, the scrubot was sidling toward a ramp down to the arena. “Must—go—down. Programmed.”

She still needed the bot brain. “No, I order you to stay here. I’m human, so my orders override.”


“Oh, thank you, thank you! You are friend.” The bot extended a genial brush. “Hope I won’t get you trouble.”

“With the Troubleshooters? Don’t worry.”“No, with J-10. Already announced arrival before. By radio.”“You what?”Suddenly, high up on the cranes, the spotlights swerved. Discs

of bright light flickered across the arena floor, zooming straight toward her. In a second she was transfixed in the intersection of three blinding blue-white lights. She shielded her eyes—and so she had no warning.

Giant steel pincers closed on her, seized her, and lifted her high, high up. Terrified, she couldn’t flail her arms—could barely breathe. It felt like the grip of Alpha Complex itself.

Wind blinded her as the crane swung her down to the arena floor and dropped her squarely in front of the combot. Its rusted turret-head turned, crrreak-k-k!, to track the new arrival. From a speaker in its chest, the voice boomed:

“STATE THE PASS-PHRASE.”Sheila waved a hand weakly, trying to catch her breath. She had

no idea what to say. Non-military bots usually followed orders from any human, but combots only obeyed authorized personnel.

The combot gave her no time to think. One bulbous arm telescoped out, and a gripper seized her hair and pulled. She leaped to her feet, protesting from the depths of her lungs. “No, no, not the hair not the haaair!”

The combot let loose. It examined its fingers. “STATE THE NATURE OF THIS VISCOUS SUBSTANCE.”

“Food vat goop. Not that my hair is any better when it’s clean.”The bot raised an arm bristling with weapons. It pointed at

Sheila’s head. “IS YOUR HAIR A THREAT?”Sheila felt bitter beyond words. Right now, with her life on the

line—with a combot’s crackling electrode two centimeters from her left eye—even now, she was thinking about hair.

“I hate it.” As if she’d flipped a switch—like a bot—she poured forth her frustration. “I cut and cut and cut, but the stuff just—keeps—growing. You’d think cutting it would make it stop, but it grows back! Thicker than ever! I’m afraid if people touch it, they’ll feel it growing. It’s a mutation, has to be. Nobody else


has a problem. I wish someone could tell me what to do, but who can you talk to about disgusting mutant hair?”

The combot looked at her for a long moment. “YOU ARE NOT ONLY A TRAITOR, YOU ARE DERANGED. YOU MUST BE DISASSEMBLED.”

“Traitor? Why? Oww!”Suddenly, a new voice: “Ungrip the human!” Alky the scrubot

had dragged itself down the ramp and into the spotlight. “My friend! I protect!”

“Alky, stay back!”The combot’s other arm extended a few extra sections and

grabbed the scrubot. Pulling Alky toward it, the combot said, “HERE YOU MUST FIGHT TO SURVIVE.”

“No! I give up. Take me instead of friend.”“IT IS NOT EITHER-OR.” Dropping Sheila, the combot

pulled Alky close, lifted up its chassis, and began—slowly, systematically—to dismantle the scrubot. With each piece, Alky’s speakers screeched with feedback. For Sheila, the sight was wrenching; she turned away. She felt utterly helpless.

She thought to run. I’d rather face Thaddeus and Roscoe. But glancing down, she saw red targeting dots down her front. Looks like I’m not going anywhere. “J-10 Expunger, I’m not a bot. You can’t use my parts. Why kill me?”

“I PREVENT YOU FROM BRINGING THOSE PRO TECH TRAITORS.”

“Pro T– M-meee? Pro Tech? Why, that’s, that’s—” She cursed herself for the worst liar ever. At the thought, she spotted a sensor in a dorsal recess on the combot’s torso. She knew that logo—Veracity Systems RD—probably their Truth Sensor Model 3—a bio-monitor that tracked heartbeats and skin resistance like a polygraph. J-10 could use it to tell she was lying—

—And it was smashed. Wires hung free, bent at angles like shoulders shrugging, as if saying, Truth? Lies? Ehhh, who knows?

“—That’s preposterous!” She spoke with the courage of her lack of conviction. “So you should just let me go.”

“NO. YOU MUST BE DISASSEMBLED, AS THEY WERE.”“‘They’—?”The spotlight moved a short distance to shine on neat stacks

of white rods—no! Sheila gasped—human bones! No doubt


they’d been scrubbed clean and stacked as the final actions of dying scrubots.

She knew why no one had looted the place. It really was a graveyard—and not just for bots.

Her head spun. The “woman from FunFoods” must have been Annalise-B, the Free Enterprise lieutenant who betrayed Marcellus. Annalise took over the Graveyard and poisoned J-10 against Pro Tech. She must have laid down that tracking tape to ensure new arrivals would believe the same thing. When she vanished, J-10 just kept killing.

Sheila couldn’t tear her gaze from the bones. Through unforeseen interactions—a concatenation of decisions, each one singly sane, together a disaster—those people had died. Just like that YELLOW floundering in a vat, Parker-Y. (Palmer-Y?) And now, or soon, like her.

She shivered, but then she stopped. Instead, she gritted her teeth. High-clearance BLUEs had made this place a deathtrap, and her ORANGE leader had thrown her into it with casual contempt. It was worse than deadly—even she, a lowly RED, could see it was disgraceful. It was offensively stupid.

Sheila stopped feeling afraid. She started feeling angry. She resolved to avoid becoming one more victim of stupidity.

The decision seemed to clear her mind. Here and now, closer to death than she’d been in—well, in at least the last five minutes—Sheila felt alive and awake.

She tried to think. The scrubot had recorded all kinds of new data from that tracking tape.... “Alky, quick, tell me the authorization pass-phrase, and I can rescue you.”

“Not allowed!” Alky’s voice was fuzzing as the combot dismantled its chassis. “Can’t tell!”

Bingo. Alky’s default security meant it wouldn’t reveal the phrase, and everyone in Pro Tech knew dozens of additional systems—forbidding add-ons with names like Xenon-Stronghold and OverMaelstrom—that could lock down the phrase beyond recovery. But would a Free Enterpriser know those safeguards?

“Alky, if you replaced the first syllable’s first letter with ‘S,’ would that be a real word?”

A human might object to playing word games in mid-amputation. But Alky was eager to cooperate, even as the combot


snapped off its mops and brushes like sprigs of broccoli. “Not a word—part of a word, like ‘seven’ or—” The bot shook as its rotator arm snapped. “—‘severed.’”

The first syllable rhymed with sev. “And the second syllable, if you add an ‘S’?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”It took a few more seconds to piece together the first four

syllables: “sev-sir-sieve-sah.” Sheila dropped each initial “s,” got “ever ive a,” and groaned. Free Enterprisers—no imagination. “J-10 Expunger! ‘Never give a sucker an even break’!”

The combot, which at that moment was pulling at Alky’s head, froze in mid-pull. “YOU ONLY KNEW THAT BECAUSE THE SCRUBOT TOLD YOU.”

On the Gray Subnets, Sheila had read a dozen Pro Tech forum threads that advised on these situations. “J-10 Expunger, that inference is incorrect. Delete that inference.”

“STATE PASS-PHRASE TO AUTHORIZE INFERENCE DELETION.”

“’Never give a sucker an even break.’”“PASS-PHRASE ACCEPTED.”Bots can be so dumb. She sighed in relief, and Alky—now

reduced to a limbless chassis and one tread—sounded ecstatic. “Good-good-good! Just in time! Please save me!”

Sheila looked at the scrubot and thought of toasters with happy faces. She’d been dumb too. “Keep going,” she told the combot. “I need its brain.”

As the combot resumed, the scrubot began to shriek. “No! No-no, not-not-not!”

“Sorry.” Sheila looked on, pleasantly surprised at her own detachment, as the combot wrenched off Alky’s head. Did I really risk my life for a metal chassis and some circuits? Wow.

The combot tossed her the scrubot’s intact brain, a cartridge small enough to hold in one hand. “YOU CAN GO.”

“Not quite yet.” Trying to breathe calmly, Sheila spoke in her most authoritative voice. “J-10 Expunger, Friend Computer has sent me to tell you Annalise-B assigned you here by mistake, and her later correction got misrouted owing to traitorous sabotage. You’re in the wrong room. I’ll take you to my supervisor. Just


one thing: Be ready to overcome any traitors who might be out there. Shoot first, ask questions later. Okay, combot, follow me.”

Her heart filled with apprehension, exhilaration, and stark terror, she turned to leave. Would it follow? Was she smart to bring a combot? Maybe it would obey Thaddeus-O instead of her. A surprise attack, then....

The combot hadn’t moved. “Combot! Why aren’t you following?”

“ITS AUDIO SENSORS ARE BROKEN,” said the voice from the combot’s speaker. “THAT IS WHY IT RELOCATED HERE, PER ITS PROGRAMMING.”

“Why are you saying ‘it’ instead of ‘I’?”“I AM OPERATING THE COMBOT REMOTELY.”Suddenly Sheila felt a profound disquiet. “J-10 Expunger,

show yourself.”At J-10’s unspoken command, the crane spotlights moved to

point high up. Now Sheila saw.What she’d taken for a slanting wall was the sloping forward

armor of an immense cybertank. The warbot was as big as a building, perhaps 20 meters tall. Above the titanium skirt, a wheelhouse bristled with artillery barrels and missile tubes. And its upper chassis towered still higher, lost in shadow.

Sheila felt awestruck and honored. It was a privilege to witness one of the most audacious, if unintentional, stunts in the history of Pro Tech. Decades ago, with his single Bot Graveyard hack, Marcellus-B had managed to pull in a J-10 Expunger Mark L3 Warbot with Enhanced Broad-Spectrum Artillery, Multi-Warhead Variable-Target Missile Batteries, Crowd-Control Sonic Pacifier, and “PointBlast” Focused Anti-Personnel Ion Cannons. It was legendary.

And if she could deliver the bot to Pro Tech, she would become a legend to match.

“Why—” Her throat was tight. She tried again. “Why do you speak remotely?”

“MY SPEAKERS ARE BROKEN. THAT IS WHY I RELOCATED HERE, PER MY PROGRAMMING.”

“Okay.” She hoped any built-in truth sensors might also be busted. “Well, I’ll need you to follow me to—”


She stopped. The warbot’s chassis was covered with a bright liquid sheen. Something was dripping down on it. “J-10 Expunger, show me the ceiling.”

The spotlights moved higher. The roof was heavily damaged and covered with mold. J-10 Expunger’s uppermost gun turret rested directly beneath a wide crack, holding back collapse. With a shudder, Sheila understood why Annalise had told the bot to stay put.

As she watched, liquid oozed from the crack and dropped onto her hand. The droplet was pinkish-gray, opalescent. On a hunch, she tasted it, then nodded. She knew, too well, the flavor of Emulsion 14b.

She felt like she was back in the vat—as in, over her head, waaay over. Pro Tech would have to scam a construction rig or something. In any case, she couldn’t do anything alone. “J-10 Expunger, stay where you are. I’ll return in a few hours with my—uh, my supervisors.” Now to bypass Thaddeus and Roscoe. “How did you enter this room?”

“I ENTERED VIA THE DOCKING BAY ON THE FAR WALL. IT PROVED SLIGHTLY TOO SMALL.” The spotlights moved. The entire far end of the factory was an impassable pile of rubble. Well, there went that idea.

“Are there any other combots or warbots here? That I can command, I mean?”

“NO.”Great. After a moment she thought: Wait, that is great!

—————Sheila went back out to meet Thaddeus. She was half-surprised to find him. Maybe he’d waited to hear her dying screams.

They aimed their flashlights at each other. “Where’s Roscoe?” she asked in an innocent voice.

“I sent him back,” Thaddeus said, in the same flat tone he’d used for Henriette. Sheila assumed Roscoe and Henriette had been “sent back” to the same destination. Poor Roscoe? Hah. He’d deserved Thaddeus.

Thaddeus, in turn, seemed surprised to see Sheila healthy, with not a bloody cough to be heard. “No sores? Hair not falling out?”

“There’s no radiation. Here’s the bot brain. Let’s go.”


Thaddeus pointed, meaning stop. “Wait a minute. What’s in there?”

“Just an old factory. Guess I got the location wrong. That happens a lot, doesn’t it?”

“Never mind the smart mouth.” He fell silent. His eyes glittered in the flash beam. Then: “You’re lying.”

She made her voice quaver. “N-no! I’m, I’m not—”Suddenly his laser was in his hand, and at her throat. “What’s

in there? Now!”“Oh no, oh no,” she said, counting the seconds for a plausible

stalling action. “No, please! Okay, all right—you win. It’s—there’s a whole bunch of scrubots—”

“Talk!”She fenced with him a while longer, to convincing length, then

admitted it: “Th-there’s a—a combot.”“Reee-ally.”Just like that, he bought it. Thaddeus was like a human lie

detector. With his laser under her chin, she thought calmly, A mutant power?

Before, she’d been nervous—fearful of Thaddeus, apprehensive for her new Troubleshooting job. The fear—that’s why she couldn’t lie. But compared to a warbot, Thaddeus just looked puny. Her old notion of “heroic Troubleshooters” had gone away with “lovable scrubots.”

Of course, she wasn’t lying now—just omitting detail. She described the combot, but left out the warbot and the name “J-10 Expunger.” Thaddeus never noticed.

“And what was your little scheme, newbie?”“I—I was going to come back for it later.”“Not bad. You’re starting to think like a Troubleshooter. But

only starting.” He shoved her against the wall. “You and I are going in there together—you first—and we’re bringing out that combot. For the greater glory of Alpha Complex—or anyway, the glory of parties to be named later. Now, what’s the pass-phrase?”

Ooh, he is good. “P-pass—?”He leaned on her, hard. It hurt, so she cut short this stage of the

convincing-evasion act. She tried a couple of fakes, phrases any Pro Tech engineer would be proud of—“correct horse battery staple,” “insipid dolts won’t guess this”—but Thaddeus only


snarled until she finally gave Annalise’s lamebrain motto. That one he accepted immediately.

It had to be a hidden mutation. Thaddeus could infallibly spot the truth.

But—inwardly she relaxed—not the whole truth.“Learn to lie, newbie.”“Right,” she said. “Rule Number 1.”

—————“Never give a sucker an even break,” Thaddeus said triumphantly.

They were back on the arena floor. They had passed the bot passage without incident, because Sheila had already ordered the bots to shut up.

“PASS-PHRASE ACCEPTED,” said J-10 Expunger—or, as far as Thaddeus knew, the combot. Sheila had instructed J-10 not to reveal its presence. Thaddeus could countermand the order—but he’d have to be aware of it first.

Thaddeus looked on the combot with fierce satisfaction. Even a combot was a huge find. She was content to give it to him, knowing she’d keep the true prize. As she quietly retreated up the stairs, she wondered what he’d do with it.

She’d almost reached the lip of the arena, near the hulking carcass of the dead warbot, before Thaddeus noticed. “Where are you going?”

Truth-sense. “I expect you’re going to kill me now.”He chuckled. “Good guess. Nothing personal—it’s just good

Troubleshooter strategy.”She broke into a run, hoping he’d pull his laser. The combot

would interpret that as an attack.But Thaddeus was sharper than she thought. He turned to the

combot. “Shoot her.”Operated by J-10, the combot raised an arm and extruded a

submachine gun. Red targeting dots raced crazily across the steps ahead of her, then vanished; she knew they had converged on her back. The volley of bullets hit her like six fast hammer blows. She screamed and fell.

Thaddeus turned back to the combot. “Good. Now, tell me how you got here.”


While J-10 related the combot’s story, Sheila wished they would just leave. She’d instructed the combot to shoot her with rubber bullets; she was unharmed, save for bruises, but she hadn’t quite understood how much rubber bullets can hurt.

Thaddeus looked ready to go. She held her breath, and not only to play dead. She had instructed J-10 Expunger to make the combot follow Thaddeus.

But even now, Thaddeus was still sharper than she thought—and greedier. He asked the combot, “Are there other valuable bots here?”

“YES.”Thaddeus swept his finger in a wide arc around the arena, not

knowing or caring what he pointed at. “All of you bots, follow me.”

Uh-oh. Recalling his words—“When I need you to back me up, you back up”—Sheila backed up.

Thaddeus turned to go—and with a deafening creak from gears eight decades unused, J-10 Expunger wheeled behind.

Thaddeus jerked around so fast he almost fell. He gazed up, up at the warbot’s huge bulk. His jaw hung. He stood motionless for most of 20 seconds; then, breathing heavily, he pointed at J-10 Expunger. “Warbot,” he began, “Rule Number 1—”

With a thunderous roar, the concrete ceiling ripped wide. An entire 20-meter-wide, ten-meter-high food vat—by coincidence, the one immediately next to the one Sheila had seen destroyed earlier—dropped from above, followed by several shrieking FunFoods bots. Smashing onto the arena floor, the vat burst open, sending an unstoppable wave of 2.5 million liters of pink-gray goop surging across the floor. In moments the arena bay became a viscid lake of warm, cultured Emulsion 14b.

Sheila looked on, her arms folded, her eye appraising. J-10 Expunger was still intact, if drenched, but there was no sign of the combot or Thaddeus.

The calamity would draw Internal Security. She headed for the exit.

She’d lost the combot and the warbot, and that stung. But she was learning the ways of Troubleshooting—starting to see her way ahead. She had obeyed, and she meant to keep obeying, the rule that overruled all rules.


Survive.

—————Say, what happened to that stolen docbot the Troubleshooters were looking for? Where did Team Leader Fabian-O get to? To find out, check the PARANOIA novel T1 Stay Alert (Book 1 of The Troubleshooter Rules trilogy) by Allen Varney. Published by Ultraviolet Books, it’s available where you obtained this book. There’s a FREE preview chapter at the end of this book.

Also, what is up with Sheila’s hair? Find out more about her derangement in the free bonus story “Rules Lawyer,” available Summer 2012 on the Ultraviolet Books website (ultravioletbooks.com).


Orientation (Revised)

Attention, $NewCitizen_POTENTIALLYSUBVERTED! Owing to sabotage by traitors, you were previously given orientation materials that had not been officially approved by the relevant HPD&MC History Purification service firm. The Computer instructs you to forget all subversive, dubious, corrosive, or unhygienic content in the previous orientation and replace it with the following material, which you are REQUIRED to read and understand:

SERVICE GROUPS

Eight bureaucracies that administer municipal functions. Each service group outsources most of its duties to a multitude of competing service firms.

Housing Preservation and Development & Mind Control is the service group that builds and maintains structures, manages education and recreation, and produces the news and entertainment that keep citizens properly informed.

MUTANTS

Genetic impurities that represent an unpredictable threat to The Computer’s hard-won social order. Some innocent citizens unwittingly possess a treasonous mutant power; they patriotically register their mutation with Internal Security. As registered mutants, they may use their inhuman powers openly, for the good of Alpha Complex, in hopes of overcoming their unfortunate terrible stigma.

“MARKET RESEARCH”

Rayford-O’s simple trip to the Buyatorium turns into an exciting opportunity to share his opinions on oral hygiene products—though the excitement doesn’t start until the opportunity becomes an interrogation.


Market Research

Greg Ingber

“Mouthwash?” Rayford-O-GGA-1 leaned back into the beige folding chair.

“That’s right. Mouthwash.” The executive closed the door and peered at him from across the table.

Rayford hadn’t planned to spend his day in a conference room somewhere in an HPD&MC office complex. He’d just wanted to hit the Buyatorium. That was where they’d found him, at the Deep Discounts kiosk outside Approved Apparel.

Since The Computer had elevated him to Security Clearance ORANGE, Rayford had gained “promotion kilos,” the consequence of better food and less strenuous work. After weeks of squeezing himself into ill-fitting slacks, he concluded improving his diet and exercise would be less pleasant than shopping for new clothes. However, after ten minutes of haggling with an assistant sales manager over the price of a relaxed-fit tool belt, physical exercise was looking relatively less agonizing.

As he was threatening to take his business elsewhere—presumably to another Buyatorium in an adjacent subsector, where he’d find the same belt at the same price and possibly the same assistant manager—Rayford felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to find a pair of RED-Clearance Marketing Scouts, the relentlessly chipper grunt workers of HPD&MC. Lyle-R and Kyle-R (no doubt paired up by a supervisor with an adolescent sense of humor) informed Rayford he had been selected to participate in a market research study. They promised it would not take long. They also promised there would be “delicious refreshments” and “an amazing free gift” at the end.

Strictly speaking, Rayford was not obliged to cooperate with RED citizens. The O in his name outranked the R in theirs. But Rayford suspected these two worked for someone who outranked them all.


As a low-level voltage checker in Technical Services, Rayford had never before been in the same room as a BLUE-Clearance HPD&MC executive. If he had been asked to imagine what one might look like, he would have described someone like Evelyn-B-BEL-4. She was sharp-featured, taller than Rayford, with closely cropped blond hair and wearing a perfectly tailored navy suit. Her smile was dazzling. She looked the part of a big-shot marketing executive.

Rayford felt HPD&MC’s unofficial motto (“We Sell Everything”) raised the question why they were so obsessed with product marketing. HPD&MC advertised every product a citizen could want, and a great many products nobody wanted but were required to purchase anyway. They had no competition, save for internal competition between rival firms within the service group. Yet they still collected huge quantities of consumer data: tastes, trends, opinions.

And on this particular Sixday afternoon, Evelyn the BLUE executive wanted Rayford’s opinions. About mouthwash.

“I’m sorry. I don’t really use mouthwash.” Rayford crossed his legs and tried to look relaxed. “I don’t think I’d be much help here.”

“Of course, I understand.” Evelyn glanced briefly at her Personal Digital Companion, clearly a top-of-the-line model. “But you see, we’re looking to expand our market base, reach out to new people. People like you, Rayford-O. People who may have never considered using mouthwash.”

“I’ve considered it.”“Oh?”“I’ve simply chosen not to use such a product.”“I see. May I ask why?”“Don’t think it’s necessary. My mouth is pretty clean.” Rayford

tried to force out a causal chuckle, and instead produced a sound that resembled a dry heave.

“So, to be clear, Rayford-O, you feel your mouth is already clean?”

“Well, yeah.”She looked at him for a moment, tilting her head slightly.

“Interesting.” She began typing into her PDC.


Rayford had not excelled in school, but he always had a good sense of when he had given a superior the wrong answer. “I meant to say, my mouth—it’s clean enough.”

“How do you mean?”“I mean, I figure my mouth is as clean as anyone else’s mouth.

That is, I don’t believe my mouth is dirtier than the mouth of an average citizen. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I understand. And would you say you’re satisfied with that?”“With what?”“With having a mouth no cleaner than that of an average

citizen?”“I didn’t say that!”“Then you’re not satisfied?”Rayford didn’t like where this was going. He defaulted to his

natural instinct: to play dumb. Or, perhaps more accurately, to cease playing not dumb. “Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t much think about my mouth. I mostly use it for chewing. And talking. But mostly chewing.”

Evelyn grinned. “That’s perfectly all right. You know what? I think that’s great. It really helps us that you have no preconceived notions about existing product lines. In fact, your lack of attention to matters of oral hygiene makes you a perfect study. You’re really going to help us out today. Oh, I’m sorry, before we begin, would you like anything to drink?

“Um—” Before he could determine whether he was supposed to want a drink, she called out to an assistant. “Lyle-R!”

Lyle instantly popped his head through the door.“He can get you anything you’d like. Water?”“I’m fine, thanks.”“Are you sure? Bouncy Bubble Beverage, CoffeeLyke?”“No, thank you.”Evelyn waved two fingers in the direction of her assistant, and

Lyle disappeared, closing the door behind him.“So, Rayford-O. You’re probably wondering what you’re

doing here.”There was something strange about the fluorescent lighting.

Rayford felt the initial pulses of a headache.Evelyn continued. “Our marketing team has put together an

amazing campaign to introduce a new oral cleansing product


to the public. A big part of that will be a series of billboards, projected in high traffic areas: transbot routes, autocar tunnels, flybot pathways. I’m sure you’ve seen these kinds of promotional images around the complex.”

“I guess. I take the transbots to work every day, but I usually spend that time reading.” Rayford actually spent that time playing idiotic games on his PDC, but preferred not to say so. “So yeah, if I do see one of those billboards it’s only out the corner of my eye.”

She nodded understandingly. “You know, I hear that a lot! We live in a vivid, exciting complex that offers constant visual stimulation. As a marketing specialist, I realize I may only have a fleeting moment to present my product to a given citizen. I need to make that moment count. And that is why you’re here today.”

Evelyn reached behind her and pressed a silver button on the wall. A large vidscreen emerged from behind a recessed area in the wall.

“Here’s what we’re doing today. In a moment, I’m going to ask you to look closely at that vidscreen. When you are ready, I’ll press a button on my PDC and an image will flash on the vidscreen, very quickly. What you’ll be looking at is a scale mockup of a billboard advertisement for our new mouthwash product. You’re going to look at that image, then tell me what you see.”

“That’s it?” Rayford felt a rare surge of confidence.“That’s it!” Evelyn swiped a finger across her PDC display. It

made a faint clicking sound.“Well, okay then. I think I can probably manage that.”“Outstanding. Are you ready?”Rayford tilted his chair toward the vidscreen. “Sure. Go for it.”

He heard a soft chime sound out from Evelyn’s PDC as he stared at the black screen. The room lighting dimmed for a moment, then returned.

Evelyn clapped her hands together. “So. What did you see?”“Nothing yet.” Rayford remained fixated on the screen, still

waiting for an image.“Nothing at all?”“Well, the lights went out, but nothing came up on the screen.

Are you sure you hit the right button or whatever?”


“Of course. I assure you, Rayford-O, the image did display on the screen. For precisely one two-hundred-twentieth of a second.”

“That seems really quick. I mean—can a person even see that fast?”

“Generally, yes. Research has shown that 77 percent of citizens can at least partially discern an image displayed at that speed. It’s possible your visual acuity is below average. Are you certain you didn’t see anything?”

Rayford didn’t like being labeled “below average.” He was comfortable with actually being below average, just so long as nobody brought it up in conversation.

Evelyn tapped her PDC a few times. “Tell you what, I’ll show it to you again. This time, for twice the duration. That’s a full one-hundred-tenth of a second. Please focus on the vidscreen. Whenever you’re ready.”

Rayford leaned forward in his chair, forcing himself not to blink. “All right. Go.” Again, the PDC chimed and the lights dimmed.

“What did you see?”“I saw—” Rayford closed his eyes, hoping to find a lingering

after-image. “—Maybe there was a flicker?”“Ah. Can you describe the flicker?”“It flickered.”He turned around in his chair to find Evelyn looking mildly

disappointed. “But surely you saw something more than that? A shape, perhaps? There’s no right or wrong answer here.”

Rayford believed there was no right answer. But in his experience, there were always wrong answers, and they always carried consequences.

“Well, I saw the outline of—” Rayford gestured with intentional vagueness. He decided to make an educated guess. “A bottle, maybe? A bottle filled with liquid?”

“Yes. Yes!” She tapped some text into her PDC. “What else did you see?”

“That’s all I saw. Just that shape.”“Did that shape have a color?”“It was—green?”“Just green?”


“I’m not sure what you mean. It looked green to me. Green is green.”

“Of course, green is green. But how you perceive that particular shade of green is critically important. For instance, research shows that consumers associate a bluish green with freshness and mintiness, whereas a yellowish-green is more often associated with—”

“Toilet water in the INFRARED barracks?”“Yes. Among other things.” She peered at him for a moment.

“I’m curious, Rayford-O. I’d like to show you something different now. Please redirect your attention to the vidscreen.” She poked and swiped at her PDC for a while, until an image appeared on the vidscreen. “What you’re seeing right now are four distinct shades of green. Which of these four green tones most resembles the color you saw in the advertisement?”

Rayford looked at the screen. Then he rubbed his eyes vigorously with both hands, and looked at it again.

“I’m sorry, I don’t see the difference.”“Pardon me?”“Those are all the same color. Those are four identical patches

of green.”“Is that what you see? Interesting. Very interesting.” She

inspected him briefly before turning toward the door. “Kyle-R?” Before she was done speaking his name, the door flew open, Kyle thrusting his head into the room. “Kyle-R, look at that vidscreen. What color do you see in the upper left corner?

“That’s green-yellow, Evelyn-B.”“What about the upper right corner?”“Bluish green, Evelyn-B.”“How about the two on the bottom?”“To the left is greenish blue, to the right is more of a yellowish

green.”Evelyn tilted her head. Kyle took the cue and extracted his

head from the doorway.Rayford’s headache had matured. He got the sense the overhead

lights were pulsing at an unusual frequency. “I’m sorry, I don’t see it. Maybe I don’t have a marketing expert’s sense of color? This sorta creative stuff doesn’t really come up at Tech Services.”


Rayford tried to force another chuckle. This time it sounded more like an allergic reaction.

“Let me ask you, Rayford-O, have you had your vision tested recently?”

“Sure. Docbot gave me a physical last month. Had me stare at the chart, left eye, right eye, 20/20 in both. My vision is perfect.”

“Of course. But a standard physical wouldn’t test your capacity for color discernment. Have you ever been tested for that?”

“I don’t need to be tested for anything like that. I see colors! That wall is gray. This table is beige. My pants are orange. Your belt is brown.”

“My belt is alternating patches of tan and burnt sienna, actually, but thanks for noticing it. It’s new.”

“Look, I’m not color-blind.”“No, of course not. You clearly don’t suffer from monochromacy.

Rather, you suffer from partial color blindness. In fact, I believe you have a condition called tritanomaly. It’s a mutation of the X chromosome.”

Rayford froze. He swallowed hard and tried not to gasp.In Alpha Complex the word mutation was never used casually.

Decades of unchecked biological experimentation and higher-than-recommended radiation levels had taken a hard toll on the collective genome. Mutations were common. Even so, The Computer was disinclined to tolerate them. To The Computer, erasing a genetically compromised citizen was like correcting an error on a spreadsheet—except the correction tended to be violent.

“Mutation?” Rayford stammered. “No. No, listen to me. I’m no mutant.”

Evelyn’s PDC bleeped a new message alert. She scanned it as she spoke. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not a health concern. Just a quirk, most often found among Alpha Complex’s—less refined genetic lines. No offense.”

Rayford tried to think of a way not to take offense.She looked up from her PDC. “And in case you were wondering,

no, it’s not on the prohibited mutations list—though, technically, I believe you are obliged to register any known genetic mutation through the appropriate channels. But that’s between you and The Computer.”


Rayford unclenched. “So—you’re not going to tell anyone about this?”

“Your vision problems are way below my security clearance. However, I’m sorry to say we’ll have to cut this study short.”

“Why?”“The purpose of this study is to gauge the message penetration

of an advertisement on average citizens. With your rare visual deficiency, you are, frankly, not sufficiently average. You’ll skew our data. There’s simply no value in gearing a marketing strategy to citizens with your disability.”

“It’s not—!” Rayford took a moment to moderate his tone. “It’s not a disability. I am not disabled. I’m fully abled. I am just as capable of looking at a mouthwash ad as any other citizen. I’ll prove it. Show me again. Please.”

Evelyn glanced at her expensive analog wristwatch. She shrugged. “All right. At this point, we normally have the subject focus on the text at the bottom of the promotional image. For this, we flash the image four times, at decreasing time intervals. After each exposure, you’ll indicate what text you were able to discern. Are you ready?”

Rayford inched his chair toward the vidscreen and leaned forward. “Yeah, yeah. I got this.”

Evelyn pressed a button on her PDC and the room lighting dimmed. “Please look at the vidscreen. First exposure in 3, 2, 1—”

Flash.“Okay. I saw the words ‘fresh breath.’”“Is that all?”“Was it—‘frosty fresh breath’?”“Good. Look at the vidscreen again. Exposure two, in 3, 2, 1—”Flash.“I saw ‘anti’—”“Yes?”“—‘antibiotic oral solution’?”“Very good. Stay focused. Eyes on the vidscreen. Third

exposure in 3, 2, 1—”Flash.“At the bottom it says ‘Minty Morning Mandate.’”


“Yes. Surprising you didn’t find that earlier. It’s the most prominent text in the image; most subjects get it in the first exposure. You’ve got one exposure left. Whenever you’re ready.”

During the previous glimpses, Rayford had noticed something in the corner of the image. Something small, probably a single line of text. He almost made it out that last time, but got distracted by the larger text. Now that he knew where it was, he could focus on just the right spot before the image flashed. He would be ready; he would find those tiny words, and Evelyn would have to be impressed. Rayford leaned way forward. He opened his eyes wide; his bushy eyebrows shot upward. “I’m ready.”

Everything else in the room had dissolved; there was only the vidscreen. Evelyn’s voice sounded strangely distant. “Final exposure in 3, 2, 1—”

In that moment, Rayford felt something pop, or rip, just behind his eyes. In any other situation he would have assumed it was an aneurysm. Right now the pain was mere background noise. Rayford was focused elsewhere.

“Rayford-O? Are you all right?”He snapped back into focus. Evelyn was suddenly standing

right in front of him.“Sorry. I zoned out for a second.” The pain was now very much

in the foreground.“Did you see any text during that final exposure?”Rayford hadn’t been this pleased with himself since he figured

out how to scam free algae chips from the snack machine in his break room. He sat up straight and, for the first time, looked her straight in the eyes. “’Not recommended for citizens sensitive to synthetic protein n-acetyl gluconolactam.’”

“Well.” Evelyn swiped her PDC and the room lighting returned to normal. “That’s interesting.”

“Did I get it right?”“Let’s take a look and find out.”Evelyn tapped her PDC and the ad appeared on the screen.

“Please indicate where in this image you found that phrase about n-acetyl gluconolactam.”

Rayford looked the advertisement over. Something was missing. “Uhhh—”


“Here, show me where that text is.” She handed him a brushed chrome laser pointer engraved with her initials.

“I don’t—I know it was there. It was in the corner.”“Which corner? Point to the spot.”Rayford aimed a blue dot at the screen.“Perhaps I’m the one with a visual disability.” Evelyn laughed.

Unlike Rayford, she could make it sound natural. “I’m afraid I don’t see anything in that section of the image. Do you?”

“No.” Rayford deflated into his chair.“Lyle-R! Kyle-R!”The door flew open. Two RED-Clearance skulls collided as

both tried to be first in the room.“Gentlemen, do you see any words on the vidscreen in the spot

where Rayford-O is pointing?”“I don’t see anything!”“Me neither!”Evelyn twitched her wrist toward the door. Lyle and Kyle just

managed to avoid a second collision as their heads withdrew from the room.

“I’m sorry. I must have been mistaken. It’s not on there.”“Let’s not be hasty. Perhaps if we magnify the image?” Evelyn

poked at her PDC and the image on the screen expanded. “Hmm. Still nothing. I’ll zoom in again—annnd again. Now we’re at 100 times magnification.” A dark speck appeared in the center of vidscreen. “Well, now there’s something there. What does that look like to you?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t look like anything.”“Probably just a smudge on the vidscreen. But, just in case,

let’s blow it up to 1,000.”And there it was: “Not recommended for citizens sensitive to

synthetic protein n-acetyl gluconolactam.”“Well, there’s the missing text. It was hiding there the whole

time.” Evelyn zipped her PDC into its case. She unfolded a chair that had been leaning against the wall and sat down across the table from Rayford.

Rayford prided himself on his ability to gauge, in any given situation, exactly how screwed he was—and then figure out the optimal way to squirm out of trouble. This ability, more than any other, explained how he had achieved Clearance ORANGE


despite a total lack of personal ambition and an aversion to anything resembling hard work. Now, though, he was at a loss. He was screwed; that much was clear.

In Alpha Complex there was a word for citizens who could do or, in his case, see things they should not be able to. It was the same word Evelyn had used earlier to describe his inability to distinguish different shades of green. But that mutation had merely marked Rayford below average. The Computer considered such flaws a low priority. After all, a recent and well-publicized Central Processing survey suggested 73% of Alpha Complex citizens were below average.

In its relentless campaign against mutation, The Computer’s highest priority was to seek out and destroy mutations that rendered a citizen above average. Above-average citizens were unpredictable and a threat to good order.

And now, despite a lifetime spent avoiding notable achievements, Rayford was officially above average. And officially screwed.

Evelyn tapped a drum roll on the table. “So, here we sit.”Rayford avoided eye contact. “Uh-huh.”“Rayford-O, there are two questions we should probably address

before you leave here today. Firstly, you may be wondering why an advertisement would contain text written in letters a thousand times too small to be visible to any normal human being.” She took care to emphasize normal. “It’s a funny bit of bureaucracy, actually. HPD&MC requires that unappealing bit of text be added to any media promoting products that contain synthetic protein. But—they don’t say how large the text needs to be.”

She winked. He flinched.“So, with that question answered, we move on to the other one.

How did you see that text, Rayford-O?”Rayford looked up. “You don’t seem inclined to ask questions

you don’t already know the answer to. So why don’t you tell me.”Evelyn spoke quietly. “Earlier we talked about tritanomaly—

that genetic error that prevents you from correctly perceiving the color green. It’s a rare mutation. But among a small number of those who bear this condition, there is an even rarer abnormality. There’s no name for it—no official name, anyway. Unofficially, I’ve heard it referred to as Deep Vision. Or Freak Sight.”

“I suppose Internal Security has a name for it as well?”


“EVA—Enhanced Visual Acuity. IntSec lists it as a Class E mutation.”

The letter E, in this case, likely stood for Execution. Though Rayford suspected citizens found to possess Class A, B, C or D mutations could expect a similarly grim outcome: Asphyxiation. Burial. Cremation. Defenestration.

“You look flushed, Rayford-O. Can I get you something to drink? Lyle-R, bring Rayford-O some water.”

Within seconds, Lyle exploded through the door with a bottle of water in each hand. “Would you prefer Sparkling Springs, or Aqua Amazing?”

Rayford’s glare indicated he was not interested at that moment in participating in another marketing survey. Lyle got the message and placed both bottles on the table before scurrying back out of room.

The water was cold. He held it to his forehead. “So what now? One-way trip to the nearest confession booth? No, I suppose there’ll be an interrogation first. Or, I should say, another interrogation. Next one probably won’t include refreshments.”

Evelyn grabbed one of the water bottles and popped the top. “I’m a little insulted, Rayford-O.” She sipped. “That’s the second time you’ve assumed I was going to report you. Take a look at me. Do I look like Internal Security to you? Please. You think an IntSec officer could pull off these shoes?”

Rayford peeked under the table. “They’re, uh—they’re nice shoes.”

“Thanks. They’re new.” Evelyn took another sip. “My job title is Senior Brand Manager. Sounds impressive, right? Between you and me, that’s just a fancy way of saying my job is to sell mouthwash. But you learn a few things selling mouthwash. You learn Alpha Complex is a challenging marketplace. Citizens have a wide array of interests. Some work on vintage autocars, some cultivate exotic ornamental algae strains, some secretly harbor unregistered mutations. But what do all citizens in Alpha Complex have in common? They all have a mouth. And nobody’s mouth is clean. Not if you look close enough.”

She took another sip of Aqua Amazing. Then, with sudden energy, Evelyn thumped the table and leapt out of her chair. “Rayford-O, on behalf of the OraClean Marketing Group and the


Minty Morning Mandate brand, I thank you for your participation today. Lyle-R and Kyle-R will show you out.”

“So I can just—leave?”“Of course! Have a wonderful day.”Rayford heaved himself up and lurched toward the door.“Wait!”Rayford froze.“Almost forgot. Wait here.” She ran into an office across the

hall and puttered around for two minutes, while Rayford aged six years.

She returned with a small gray box, wrapped in a silver ribbon. “Your free gift.”

“Thank you.” He felt like a prisoner who expects a lethal injection and receives, instead, cologne and soap-on-a-rope. “Thank you, friend.”

—————Queasy and unsettled, Rayford stumbled to the transbot stop. The transbots were mostly empty in the afternoon, so he stretched out on a seat in back. A cheerfully indecipherable voice called out the next stop through a damaged speaker. As the bot rattled forward into the orange gloom of the tunnel, he stared out the rear window. Though he rode this route every day, he had never noticed all the advertisements projected along the tunnel walls. He wondered what secrets each might be hiding.

He fixed his gaze on the nearest billboard in the tunnel, an advertisement for Cold Fun Orange. There wasn’t much to the image: a cartoon of a gleeful citizen licking a frozen dessert bar, his comically long tongue taking on the color of the product. Below was the slogan: “ORANGE You Delicious?”

“I can do this.” He widened his eyes and felt a familiar pop in his sinuses. He stared into the image, scanning every detail—until he noticed something in the bottom left corner. He zoomed in: “Warning: tongue discoloration may be permanent.”

Rayford spent the ride spotting hidden disclaimers: “High-band data transmissions may cause brainfail.” “CoffeeLyke withdrawal symptoms may include lethargy and/or violent seizures.” “Rand-Y-ROK and the ROKbots music may cause transgressive


behavior, for which ROKbot Recordings cannot be held liable.” “Tella-O-MLY is not really your best friend.”

The transbot pulled into Rayford’s residential block. After a tiring hike through corridors and stairwells, he reached his assigned quarters, a narrow and airless quad-occupancy dorm. Rayford’s three roommates were still away on their work shifts. He swiped his ME Card across the door sensor, stepped into the room, and collapsed into his bed.

There was something lumpy in his pocket. He rolled onto his side and pulled out the gift package Evelyn had given him. Rayford tore through ribbon and cardboard.

A bottle of mouthwash. Sample—not intended for resale.Rayford almost flung it across the room—until he noticed the

card attached. On the front it read, “Thanks for your participation, Rayford-O-GGA-1.” He opened the card. She had signed it by hand at the bottom, “Sincerely, Evelyn-B,” but there was nothing written above the signature.

Rayford sat up and looked closely. It took him five seconds to find the microscopic text.

“You are one of us now. I’ll be in touch.”


Orientation (Re-revised)

Attention, $NewCitizen_TREASONPOSSIBLE! Previous iterations of the new-citizen orientation material have been withdrawn and deprecated in favor of revised documents developed according to new efficiency guidelines. You are instructed to IGNORE, REJECT, and FORGET previous versions and instead read and understand the following much-improved orientation:

SECURITY CLEARANCE

The measure of The Computer’s trust in a citizen. Clearance doesn’t measure competence, but strictly how much The Computer trusts you. The unbreakable hierarchy of color-coded security clearance starts with the lowly INFRARED proles and rises through RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, INDIGO, VIOLET, and the mighty ULTRAVIOLET High Programmers.

SECRET SOCIETIES

Covert traitorous organizations with wildly varying doctrines, goals, coherence, and sanity. Despite The Computer’s steadfast opposition, secret societies have infiltrated every service group and firm, including Internal Security, to the highest levels. For most citizens, society favors present the only practical way to advance.

“HAY FEVER”

A “Yellowpants” efficiency auditor in Central Processing Unit, the administrative and managerial service group, finds a laboratory mouse—or vice versa. Life immediately becomes more eventful.

A prequel to PARANOIA novel Y1 Traitor Hangout by WJ MacGuffin, available where you obtained this book.


Hay Fever

WJ MacGuffin

A job assigned is a job done, Clarence-Y-SKL-1 thought as he walked away from the intersection of Loyal Citizens Pedestrian Avenue and the Perpetual Happiness in the Face of Adversity Expressway. For Clarence-Y—one of the YELLOW-Clearance CPU efficiency auditors often rudely called “Yellowpants”—the motto was a way of life. And sometimes it took an unassigned job to get the assignment done.

Take the intersection. He’d needed to cross the PHITFOA Expressway to reach his assigned job, but there was no pedestrian walkway. Autocars zooming by at 100kph—citizens judging whether to risk death here, or be late to their job (and risk death there)—clearly the situation required expert attention.

So, as an unassigned job, Clarence solved the problem. He organized the crowd into teams of six, rotated one team as spotters to identify six-second Relative Safety Gaps in oncoming traffic, and sequenced the rest for sprints during identified RSG intervals. This adhered to the letter of Mandates HPPM 332.19/b, TSTM 994.39/a, and CPPM 338.21/f—and even, in the last case, arguably, its spirit. Even now, six RED-Clearance pedestrians were dashing across in the close formation he’d implemented. Their form was ragged, possibly because of wind shear from passing truckbots, but he had no time for fine tuning.

He arrived at the GHJ Sector Buyatorium and smiled. The trip from the Merit-N-Trust Work Assignment center had taken 9 minutes 14 seconds, an improvement of nearly 30 seconds over his estimate. A large atrium connected several corridors to the Buyatorium entrance. Several once-comfortable benches lined the walls, and a sculpture of “Big” Bob-Y himself dominated the center. (The sculptor, genuinely talented in the recycled-plastic medium, had really caught the weightiness of the jowls and extra chins.) Many citizens of YELLOW Clearance and lower wandered in and out of the store.


Troubleshooter Team Protozoan-228 had called Clarence here to help. He never liked helping Troubleshooters. It was like lecturing to citizens who overdosed on Helpful Citizen pills: You talk and talk, but nothing sinks in. Plus, Troubleshooters tended to shoot lots of things, sometimes even themselves.

Still, he had a job to do. His record was spotless so far. Every task ever assigned to him was complete, and he wasn’t about to let that record slip. It was a point of honor: A job assigned is a job done.

He had no trouble spotting them: three citizens in red jumpsuits, carrying red laser pistols, standing around with red faces arguing. Beside them, two ashy pairs of boots, still smoking. Troubleshooters, all right.

In these situations Clarence always considered it prudent to determine the situation prior to contact. He made sure his thin, wavy hair was neat, his small teeth were clean, and his nose was … well, there was nothing he could do about that. As for his regulation yellow jumpsuit, sagging on his tall, thin frame—at least it fit better than Troubleshooter reflec.

“Okay, when the guy arrives,” said the tall, skinny Hygiene Officer, “we spring the trap.”

“Why, man?” The Happiness Officer had a ponytail and a dazed look. “Why do we need to be all hostile and stuff?”

“Were you awake in there?” The Equipment Guy, stocky and unibrowed, waved the team’s requisition forms. “The Buyatorium needs a signature from a YELLOW citizen.”

“I thought our team leader was YELLOW, man?”“One or more of us shot him repeatedly, remember? And, thanks

to the laser shots, his suit is ruined. We can’t use it. So—pay attention—we requested this guy so we can steal his uniform, impersonate YELLOW Clearance, get our gear, and finally get started on our mission before Friend Computer has us all shot! Is any of that sinking in?”

Ponytail stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Oh, I get it!” Pause. “No I don’t. Man, I need to pop more mimomemezine! And maybe some focusol. Might as well take a tab of oxyflucocillin to keep the ride smooth.” He started rustling through his pockets and eating everything he found.


Tall & Skinny reached for his pistol, but froze as Clarence approached.

“Troubleshooters! You requested an efficiency auditor. I take it you’d like help to improve your trap?”

The Troubleshooters stared. No one moved. No one spoke.Clarence stifled a sigh. “Can you describe the trap?”Tall & Skinny looked at his team. “Our trap is for—a traitor,

of course, and not an innocent citizen we’re luring here for any nefarious reason, rest assured!”

“Yes, I know.” Clarence resorted to remedial education. “You find traitors—that’s your job. As an efficiency auditor for the Central Processing Unit service group, my job is to help you, and all citizens of Alpha Complex, become more efficient at your jobs.” Because he was ahead of schedule, he couldn’t resist a bit of boasting. “Why, just last week, I helped a team of Technical Services workers improve their walking efficiency by 17 percent! Naturally, pedometers that shock the user below a certain speed will be costly in the short run, but over time they’ll save hundreds of hours. Workers do their repairs more quickly, waste less time, and remain extremely alert. CPU is even considering making a new mandate based on my recommendation. Quite the honor!” He smiled modestly. “But to business. What’s your plan for entrapping the traitor?”

“It’s simple, man,” said Ponytail . “We call for a Yellowparrghmyface!”

“Oops,” said Tall & Skinny. “I must have had a muscle spasm that made me hit you. Sorry.” He pointed at the statue of “Big” Bob-Y. “Our trap was—is!—simple. Hide behind the statue, and when the traitor arrived—arrives!—we jump him.”

“Ah, but that’s not a trap. Mandate ISPM 294.55/b defines a ‘trap’ as an assemblage requiring a device. What you are planning is an ambush. Read Mandate ISPM 294.55/c. If you want to use a trap, you need a device of some kind.” Clarence looked around the atrium. “Well, we could use a bench, I suppose. Mandate HPPM 7493.12/a allows for repurposing of relaxation devices for Troubleshooter use, provided the device in question is not harmed or is replaced if harmed, and there are plenty of benches in this atrium.”


Tall and Skinny stared. “Why do you have those mandates memorized?”

“I memorize all mandates. They bring order to Alpha Complex. Can’t decide what to wear in the morning? There’s a mandate for that. Hot Fun or Cold Fun for dessert? There’s a mandate. No matter the situation, a mandate defines the legal choice, and the legal choice is always the best choice. Mandates practically make thinking obsolete!”

“But that would be— I mean—there must be thousands of mandates!”

“I never counted. Let’s use that bench.” Clarence walked over to a bench where two INFRARED citizens sat in docile bliss. “You two need to find another bench, please. We need this one.”

The INFRAREDs smiled. “We like to work!”“That’s good to hear. Just try another bench.”“We like to work!”INFRARED citizens: medicated, happy, pliable, and desperately

inefficient. “As a YELLOW-Clearance citizen, I am assigning you new work. Please stand and walk away from the bench.”

“We like to work!” They stood and walked in random directions.Clarence pushed the bench over to the fountain. “How about

this? Your team hides behind the statue, as before, only you get the traitor to sit down on this bench. Using the bench turns your ambush into a trap, meeting your stated requirements. Plus, it’s difficult for the target traitor to run while he or she is sitting. This means less effort on your team’s part, thereby improving trap efficiency.”

The Troubleshooter team stood in INFRARED-like bewilderment. Troubleshooters—you talk and talk, but nothing sinks in. “Attend, please. Now, we just need some bait; something to make the traitor want to sit with his back to the statue and your team. What would a traitor want?”

Ponytail raised his hand. “What about some illegal drugs like Purple Haze or Funky Lukewarm Medina? I even have some Fluffernut tabs.”

“Excellent idea, citizen. Very well, put the illegal drugs—”“Wait!” The Equipment Guy raised his laser. “How did he

get the illegal drugs? Isn’t that treason? Can I shoot him now?”


Clarence explained slowly and clearly: “Obviously he had them for the trap. Why else would he have them?”

Ponytail offered, “To take them so you can smell color and hear your hair growing and journey to the Lands of the Banana King?”

“Ha!” Clarence laughed dutifully. “An enjoyable joke. There’s a reason Mandate HPTM 332.18/e tells us to make jokes to lighten the mood. Ah, mandates! Is there anything you cannot do? Now, if you’ll please place the illegal drugs on the bench. —Fine. Well, everyone, go hide and wait for your traitor to arrive. Hurry now, before he or she gets here.”

After an awkward moment the team walked around the statue and crouched down.

Clarence inspected the trap with satisfaction. “Well, that’s done.” He pulled his Personal Digital Companion from a jumpsuit pocket and presented it to Tall & Skinny. “I just need your signature on this digital form here, here, and here, and initials here and here. Also, your name, clearance, height, any registered mutations, any unregistered mutations, and a tongue print. Be sure to dry your tongue thoroughly before applying the print or it won’t scan well.”

“Tongue print?”“Yes indeed.” Clarence held out the PDC.“Um … shouldn’t that be signed by the Team Leader?”“Absolutely.”“Well, I’m only acting Team Leader, you see. The real Team

Leader is over there.” He pointed to a YELLOW-Clearance figure lying prone on the other side of the atrium.

“Really? Very well, if you’ll excuse me. Good luck with your trap.” Clarence nodded and left them to their duty.

People walked past the unmoving figure without a glance. In Alpha Complex, curiosity about a body often draws suspicion, much like curiosity about anything else.

“Excuse me, Team Leader? I’m afraid sleeping on the floor of a public area is against Mandate HPPM 592.72/k, ‘No citizen of YELLOW Clearance or lower shall sleep, nap (power), nap (cat), nap (other), or rest his/her eyes on the floor of a public area so as to avoid becoming a tripping hazard or, in the case of autocar traffic, an undesignated speed bump.’”


The Team Leader moaned softly. His yellow jumpsuit showed charred circles on the back and side. He clutched a small brown box.

“And I don’t mean to be picky, but—your jumpsuit is burned, which is against Mandate PLPM 897.13/a, ‘Citizens shall maintain a standard-issue jumpsuit free from rips, tears, burns, mustard stains, and radiation, unless they have submitted PLC Form 10093-EZ or PLC Form 10093 Standard prior to receiving the mark in question.’ Do you need help getting into the store for a new jumpsuit?”

“You.” The man spoke in a whispery voice. “Take this.” He pushed the small box vaguely towards Clarence.

“Thank you, but I’d rather not. I just need you to sign my form so I can complete my job.”

The man pushed the box closer. “Deliver it to Escalator 13 in the Buyatorium. Door marked Hygiene Storage.”

Clarence looked at the box. It was a little larger than his hand, made of brown cardboard with a few holes poked in the sides, and wrapped with a yellow rubber band. On the lid were stenciled a Research & Design service firm logo—BrainBudz—and Lab 14B. “Please, just sign here.” He brought his PDC right in front of the team leader’s face. “And here and here, and initial here and here, and lick here, and I’ll be on my way.”

“Take the box.”“Sign the form.”The man did not respond, and Clarence worried he had

died. Getting a signature from a dead man, though not always impossible, was unpleasant.

But the Team Leader coughed and looked up. “If I sign your form, you deliver the box.”

Clarence sighed. I should have seen this coming. Always one more thing to be done. Still, it would finish the job. It would entail another job, but … If I do that, that’s two jobs done. My record gets longer. “Fine, as you like. Sign the form, and I’ll take the box to the Hygiene Storage room under Buyatorium Escalator 13.”

The team leader took the PDC. He entered the data while lying on his back, even pressing a dry tongue to the PDC for a scan. He handed it back to Clarence and died.


Clarence picked up the box and started walking towards the Buyatorium, but then he stopped and sat down on a nearby bench. He never considered throwing the box away; having agreed to a job, he would follow through. True, he was basically coerced, but a job is a job and that’s that.

However, nothing said he couldn’t look in the box.Clarence slid the yellow rubber band farther down the box,

lifted the lid, and squinted.Inside was a small white mouse. It stared back at him.He quickly shut the box and looked around. No one saw. He

looked again, just to make sure it wasn’t a dream or side effect of the mandatory drugs he took each morning.

The mouse squeaked.He shut the lid again. He looked around again. Miraculously,

no one seemed interested in a CPU efficiency auditor sitting on a bench with a small cardboard box. If only they knew it contained a creature from Outdoors—the infamous no-ceiling realm outside Alpha Complex filled with radiation, feral trees, and giant mutant cockroaches—right-thinking citizens would flee in terror.

“Then why am I not fleeing in terror?” he asked himself. This was the first nonhuman living thing he’d ever seen. Yet he felt curious, even excited. After making doubly sure no one was looking, he opened the lid again. He smiled as he watched the mouse smell the air. It was so cute you couldn’t help gazing at it....

The Equipment Guy said, “You’re sitting on the wrong bench!”“What?” Clarence quickly closed the box.“You’ve been here five minutes! You should be on the one

near the statue, the one with the illegal drugs on it. Now either sit there or give us time for a bathroom break!”

“Five minutes?”A voice over the atrium’s PA system: “Citizen Clarence-Y-

SKL-1! This is Internal Security. We’ve been monitoring you as you stared at that box. Are you okay?”

The Troubleshooter slowly backed away from Clarence, who hid the box behind his back and forced a smile. “Yes! Perfectly okay! Praise Friend Computer!”

“What is in that box?”Clarence began to sweat. “It’s—something given to me by a

Troubleshooter. To help finish my assigned job.”


“Is the gift treasonous?”His mouth had gone dry. He didn’t want to lie. He was bad at

lying. But he couldn’t tell about the little mouse. What would happen to it? “For RED Clearance and below, yes.” That was technically correct. It was also treasonous for all clearances through at least BLUE, if not INDIGO.

“Then you are loitering. You have been fined 10 credits. Go about your business. That is all.”

“Yes, friend! Thank The Computer!” He got up, so fast he almost collided with the Equipment Guy, and walked at speed into the Buyatorium. He passed the others on Team Protozoa; they were watching him rather than the trap. He sighed. Troubleshooters—you talk and talk....

The “Big” in “Big” Bob-Y’s Buyatorium refers to the founder’s nickname, but most people believe it indicates the size of the store. Buyatoria are larger than military bases and in certain respects deadlier, especially in the Sporting Goods department. Citizens don’t just shop there; they mount expeditions.

Clarence walked past the anti-shoplifting machine-gun nests, the heavily-drugged INFRARED greeter (“Welcome to the Buyatorium where everything is on sale except for the products that are on Super Sale please enjoy your stay remember the one-item purchase minimum”), and the myriad of registers and checkout lines to reach the Buyatorium Main Aisle. Wide as an autocar racetrack, it was packed with citizens (mostly REDs and ORANGEs) pushing carts, carrying items, or lying trampled underfoot.

Clarence asked loudly, “Does anyone know where I can find a directorybot?” The shoppers ignored him. They focused on staying upright, so their names wouldn’t be engraved on the Buyatorium Unknown Shopper Memorial Wall.

Then he spotted it. The bot, a long rectangular screen mounted on eight multi-jointed legs, clung upside-down above the Ice Rink.

Breathing deep and holding the box close, Clarence plunged into the Main Aisle. The current carried him toward the Mandatorywear department where, after stopping off and circling through Bot Modding, he joined a counter-current to the Self Defense Boutique. Ignoring the RED sales teams, who


all but demanded he purchase a polkadot pepper spray gun with matching carrying case, he made his way through Spywear, tacked left and joined another current up to the smaller Upper Equatorial Aisle, where he escaped into Malfeasance Control Devices. A quick lateral through Food Recycling, the Hair Salon, the Spleen Salon, and the Customer Service Waystation and First Aid Clinic brought him at last to the Ice Rink.

“Directorybot! I need assistance!”The directorybot detached from the ceiling, flipped in midair,

and landed atop a RED citizen taking off his skates. The RED panicked and ran onto the ice, where he fell and was fined for lacking skates per Mandate HPPM 772.34/m.

“Hello, citizen!” The directorybot’s screen flashed an image of a heroic plastic Troubleshooter. “Would you like to be directed to ehhhhnt! COLLECTIBLE TROUBLESHOOTER FIGURINES.”

“No.” Clarence winced. “Where is Escalator 13, please?”“Certainly! What is your security clearance?”“YELLOW.”“Yes, citizen! While I’m accessing those directions, would you

like to know about our incredible sale on ehhhhnt! URINARY TRACT INFECTION MEDICATION it’s great for citizens of YELLOW Clearance!”

“Just the directions to Escalator 13, thank you.”“How do you know you don’t need ehhhhnt! URINARY

TRACT INFECTION MEDICATION have you ever tried ehhhhnt! URINARY TRACT INFECTION MEDICATION maybe you’ll like it!”

Citizens on the ice rink were stopping to look at Clarence with pity and compassion. “Escalator 13, please.”

“If you buy some ehhhhnt! URINARY TRACT INFECTION MEDICATION you will receive a coupon good for 15% off the purchase of ehhhhnt! ANTIFUNGAL CROTCH CREAM on your next visit! Now that’s a great deal!”

Clarence tried to smile at the sympathetic passersby. “The directions? Now?”

The bot’s screen lit up with a map of the store. It looked like a map of the human digestive system, though perhaps that was just on Clarence’s mind. He saw a yellow YOU ARE HERE icon and a red YOUR DESTINATION star, with clearances


on the route marked in red, orange, and yellow. “Simply walk ehhhhnt! WEST-NORTH-UP towards ehhhhnt! AISLE G98 pass ehhhhnt! RECREATIONAL PHARMACEUTICALS turn ehhhhnt! LEFT at ehhhhnt! TOENAIL CLIPPING STORAGE and you’ll find ehhhhnt! ESCALATOR 13 ehhhhnt! STRAIGHT ehhhhnt! AHEAD!”

Clarence left as quickly as legally possible. (Mandate PLPM 539.44/c regulated shopper speeds.)

The door under Escalator 13 was labeled Hygiene Supplies—Do Not Enter—Authorized Personnel Only—Danger of Shock—Radiation Hazard—Typhoon Warning—No Egress—Beyond Lies the Wub. Clarence knocked.

The door opened a crack. A high-pitched voice: “What?”“Hello, I’m here to deliver a box, so if you could just take it,

I’ll be on my way.”“What’s the password?”“Password?”“Correct.” The door pushed open. A hand shot out, grabbed him

by the jumpsuit, and dragged him inside. The door slammed shut.The room was cramped and shadowy, lit by a single lantern

hanging from a nail. The floor was covered with a strange green carpet, and shelves along one wall held boxes like the one Clarence carried. Three ORANGE citizens stared at him.

“Welcome, initiate,” said the shortest one. “I am Sister Sunrise Seen Through Tall Green Things That Look Like Trees But Are Not, leader of this cell. You may call me Sister Sunrise. The short man behind me is Brother Biting Creature That Builds Paper Nests But Tastes Terrible. The tall man next to Brother Bite is Brother Dark Brown Dirt That Makes A Surprisingly Good Antifungal Crotch Cream. You have the box?”

Clarence nodded slowly, still taking it all in. He suspected this was a bad idea, but perhaps he was only confused. “This isn’t a secret society, is it?”

“Do not worry, brother. You are among fellow lovers of Nature, I assure you. Unfortunately, we must keep our operations confidential, lest Internal Security arrest us all.”

That clarified matters—only melodramatic traitors would use the word lest. “‘Nature’? You mean outside Alpha Complex? The Outdoors stuff?”


The three ORANGE citizens looked at one another. “Yes, Outdoors stuff,” said Brother Dark sarcastically. “Ignorant, but that is permitted. All ignorant at first. Then learn to love Nature.”

“Well, there’s no mandate saying you can’t love the Outdoors, but why would you? It’s not—it’s not indoors!”

Sister Sunrise frowned. “The box, initiate?”Clarence slowly—reluctantly—surrendered the box. He

watched her check the mouse inside, nod approvingly, and place it on the shelf. He felt—what was that emotion? Regret? No mandate covered the transfer of a non-sapient living creature, so Clarence felt—lost. He was sad not to have the creature any more, whatever it was.

“We were told to await a new initiate,” Sister Sunrise said, “a YELLOW citizen who would bring a test subject rescued from the cruel, anti-Nature service firm of BrainBudz. However, this was only a test, not a rite.”

“You mean I did something wrong?”“No, you did it right.”“But you said I didn’t do it right.”“No, I said you didn’t do a rite.”“So I did a wrong? Mandate CPTM 491.29/j defines the

opposite of ‘right’ as ‘wrong.’ Unless you’re referring to Mandate PSPM 229.27/p, which defines the opposite as ‘left.’”

Sister Sunrise sighed. “This has nothing to do with a left.”“So I did a right?”“Test, not rite! And you passed.”“If the test wasn’t right, how did I pass?”“The test was right, it just wasn’t a rite! Now you undertake

the rite to join our secret society.”“But joining a secret society isn’t a right. It’s not even—right!”The three Sierra Clubbers huddled. After a few strange hand

signs and the occasional stare at Clarence, Sister Sunrise spoke carefully and slowly. “You,” pointing at Clarence, “passed a test. Which means you are—are eligible to—participate? Yes, participate—in a—a ritual activity! yes!—that, upon successful completion, leads to acceptance into our secret society.”

Clarence kept looking at the box. He missed the creature already. “There’s been a mistake. You see, I’m only delivering the box.”


“Exactly.”“But it was given to me by another YELLOW citizen.”“As planned.”“No! I think he was supposed to give it to you.”“Then how would you have proven your loyalty to Mother

Nature?”“But I don’t want to prove my loyalty to—whatever you said.”“Then why did you deliver the box?”“To complete my job!”“And you have, brother. You have.” The others nodded sagely.

“Now to your mission.” She shoved a small case into Clarence’s hands. “Prepare for your rite—er—initiation-related activity—into—” (she paused) “—the Sierra Club!”

“Absolutely not!” said Clarence. “Listen, you received your box with the—well, you got your box. I’m done. The job is finished, I now return to CPU and, if I’m lucky, there’s still time to get an arm-movement measurement job or something. Thank you, it’s been unusual, I appreciate your time, enjoy your little club with your strange boxes and treasonous green carpeting, thank Friend Computer, goodbye.” He turned to leave.

Instantly there appeared, close before his face, a large knife. In the blade Clarence saw his own prominent nose. In the Junior Citizen creche, cruel schoolmates had sometimes taunted his nose as “knife-like,” but now he understood it was nothing like the real thing.

“You think we’re stupid?” asked Brother Bite. “Nature is red in tooth and claw. The Sierra Club isn’t all love and holding hands, dancing in circles to the rhythm of the seasons and weaving flowers in our hair. Although we do that. A lot, in fact. Probably more than we should. But we also know if Friend Computer gets wind of our existence, the minions of Civilization will end the flower weaving and circle dancing. So now this knife will demonstrate another of our skills, fortune-telling. Would you like it to tell your future, brother?”

Clarence tried to nod without bringing his face closer to the knife. He only made his head wobble.

“The knife says you will join the Sierra Club. But first, says the knife, you will take the case Sister Sunrise gave you to this sector’s We Breathe Together TS Atmospheric Recycling


Facility. You will enter the plant and open the case inside the Post-Filtration Recirculation room. You will take a picture of yourself doing this. Then you will return here with the empty case and the picture. Only then will you join our ranks.”

“Does the knife know a way I can do this job and, as payment, I get to not join your ranks?”

Brother Bite thought for a moment. The knife slowly drew away. “I can live with that. Besides, Sister Sunrise tells me I shouldn’t listen to knives so much. Remember, open the case very near the post-filtration fans.”

“Just out of idle curiosity, is this substance toxic, corrosive, infectious, narcotic, addictive, or otherwise dangerous as Mandate HPPM 048.48/a through /f defines those terms?”

“It is pollen!” Sister Sunrise spoke with rapturous joy. “Mother Nature’s additive, painstakingly collected from the Outdoors. By spreading it throughout the sector in the air vents, we return adulterated and purified air to its natural state. Citizens will realize the fresh smell of the Outdoors is superior to The Computer’s air. They will rise up as one and assert their natural right to gaze at stars, sleep on rocks, and play in mud. The doors will be flung wide, and Alpha Complex will enjoy visits from friendly animals like bears and spruces. Grass will grow in the corridors! Birds will nest in the security cameras! The natural utopia will be realized!”

Clarence had already counted over two dozen prospective mandate violations, but he was outnumbered in a cramped room without Internal Security surveillance. “Yes. Of course. Natural utopia in a box. Shall I go now?”

Brother Bite opened the door. “Be at peace with Nature, brother. If you fail, I will cut you.”

Clarence smiled weakly and left.This is getting out of hand. Still, a job assigned is a job to

be done. I’ll need a secret code of some sort to put this in my personal job log. Wait, that was against mandate ISPM 092.30/m. What about hinting instead of a secret code? No, against ISPM 092.30/h. Omitting it? Against ISPM 092.30/e. Confessing it? Not productive.

Clarence smiled. Of course! Mandate TSTM 773.54/b! “Any task subordinate to a more important task, completed after said important task but responsible in part for the success of


said important task, that did not require a credit expenditure of 50 credits or more, or a loss of life of four citizens or more of YELLOW Clearance or lower, or of one citizen of GREEN Clearance or higher, does not need to be recorded on a duty log or treason defense form as long as said subordinate task did not exceed two hours or cross sector boundaries.” Simple.

Satisfied, Clarence hurried out into the Northern Chapstick Aisle currents and, after buying an Almost Salmon-Flavored Yum-Yum bar so the store’s turrets wouldn’t open up on him, he left the store. He noted with approval Team Protozoa was still waiting efficiently behind the statue.

Using his PDC, he found directions to the service firm We Breathe Together TS and made his way there. The huge Technical Services recycling center (“Making lungs happy since a long time ago!”) had so many air ducts piercing the metal walls, it looked like a giant aluminum Mandatory Holiday Gift Exchange Festival tree, minus the real-like leaves.

Before the entrance doors stood one GREEN IntSec officer. He had the GREEN goon’s glassy stare, the usual result of too much time and too little gray matter. He held a laser rifle ready and had a neurowhip secure on his belt. The combination of powerful weaponry and weak mind always intimidated Clarence. Still, a job must be done.

“Greetings, citizen,” said Clarence, intending to project cheer and innocence but just sounding squeaky.

The GREEN goon stared into the undefined distance.“Yes, well. Um—I need to get inside, please. I’m an efficiency

auditor from CPU. I’m here to—check things? Efficiency-wise? See, that’s a question, so it’s not technically a lie under Mandate CPPM 1749.22/b.”

No response. Was this a sculpture? A mannequin? No, the guard was breathing.

“Is there anyone here I can talk to who will, you know, talk back?”

No response.“Very well, I’m just going to walk closer to the doors. If you

approve, friend citizen, don’t respond in any way.” Clarence sidled closer, keeping a wide gap between him and the goon. As he neared the double doors, this required more and stranger


contortions. “I’m almost at the door! I’m planning on opening it! If you have a problem, citizen, I’d really appreciate a nonviolent response.”

No response, violent or otherwise.Clarence took a door handle, gently pushed, and discovered

the doors opened outward.“Okay, I can’t open these doors without touching you, which I

really don’t want to do, but Mandate TSPM 083.94/a states that citizens wishing to stand in front, near, or behind doors must remain outside the Specified Door Clearance Radius or one meter, whichever is—”

Suddenly the doors flew open, knocking down Clarence and the GREEN guard. Out walked two YELLOW citizens, each tall, thin, groomed, polished, and jaunty.

“Yes, but won’t the Buyatorium complain?”“An insightful speculation, Irene-Y, but they’ll have no

standing. Remember last month how we mistakenly routed those mutagens into the Small Mammal Research Lab? And how the BrainBudz folks complained about emergent mutations? Those complaints, still current, are BLUE Clearance and therefore supercede any hypothetical Buyatorium complaint, which would be, at best, YELLOW. Perfect, is it not?”

“Oh, Irving-Y! Most perfect!”“Mind setting Greeny back up?”“Of course. Um—did we get a Yellowpantsy too?”The two looked at Clarence. He was sitting with the goon, still

rigid, lying across his lap.“Oh dear. Sorry about that,” said the man. “Didn’t expect

anyone to be there! No one comes to visit us, isn’t that right, Irene-Y?”

“We are perennially unvisited.”The man dragged the GREEN guard off Clarence, propped him

up before the doors, and posed his legs and arms. “I’m Irving-Y-LPD-3, by the by. This is my co-worker, Irene-Y-DNF-4.”

“A pleasure, to be sure!” Irene-Y said.Clarence rose and brushed himself off. “Hello! I’m here for

a—job. An inside job. Well, not an inside job, if you take my meaning, but rather a job on the inside. In other words, I need to go inside your air recycling plant.”


“Oh, it’s not ours, is it, Irene-Y?”“Indeed it is not. This is a Technical Services firm. Irving-Y

and I optimize the routing of airborne particulates on behalf of the Housing Preservation and Development & Mind Control firm Mist-Agog HPD.”

“Routing?”“We measure each area’s likely exposure to unwelcome

particulates, then ensure dangerous materials won’t accidentally pollute the air supply of high-clearance trusted citizens.”

“And you do this by—?”“Designating the particulates for lower-clearance areas.”Clarence decided to move on. “What’s wrong with your guard?”“Oh, Greeny?” Irving-Y sighed. “Regrettably, this firm cannot

afford a real GREEN guard. Tell him, Irene-Y, how much that would cost.”

“An unheard-of amount!”“Indeed! And the meager budget here cannot encompass that.

Yet the building is mandated to have security so terrorists don’t poison the air supply. Hence, Greeny—an INFRARED drugged to the eyeballs with Vigilant Worker pills. He’ll stand there for the next six hours before he even realizes he exists.”

“I see. But the mandate specifies a GREEN-Clearance citizen.”“Since he looks like a GREEN, people believe he’s a GREEN.

Therefore, people believe we are following the mandate. And if people believe we are following the mandate, then we are.”

“Belief is power,” said Irene-Y.Clarence found the words beyond comprehension. “I’m going

inside now,” he said, “to do my inside job. Have a nice day, praise Friend Computer, you understand I don’t really mean ‘inside job,’ goodbye.” With that, he opened the door (knocking down Greeny again) and went inside.

The We Breathe Together offices looked like any other service firm. INFRARED laborers shuffled along doing their unimportant but menial tasks; RED clerks toiled away on work that, while unimportant, could land them in big trouble; ORANGE supervisors did the same but felt more secure because they could always blame mistakes on a RED; and harried YELLOW middle managers ran from meeting to meeting to fix the mistakes ORANGEs blamed on REDs. Motivational posters covered the


walls (Wasting copy toner makes terrorists happy! Do YOU make terrorists happy?). Everyone watched each other to see who actually took the Completely Voluntary Mid-Shift Relaxation Break (Really Take It If You Need It).

After trying to get directions from a passing INFRARED citizen—“I like to work!”—Clarence got directions from a passing ORANGE citizen. He walked down six flights of stairs to the deepest recess of the air recycling center. He passed the air filters and found a door labeled Post-Filtration Recirculation.

The door was unlocked. Clarence opened the door and—NOISEWINDNOISENOISEMORENOISEWINDNOISE—slammed the door shut. After he caught his breath, he steadied

himself and opened the door again.Some would call the Post-Filtration Recirculation chamber

the heart of the air recycling center, but a better word would be “lungs.” A giant fan occupied most of the large circular room. It blasted hurricane winds straight up, making a deafening racket. A low plastic barrier circled the fan; it looked more likely to trip someone into the fan than to keep people out. Above the fan, two dozen child fans propelled air outward to the rest of the sector.

Clarence set the case on the ground next to the plastic barrier and carefully opened it. Inside lay twenty-odd clear plastic sandwich bags. Each held greenish-yellow powder.

He sighed. “A job assigned is a job done.” He pulled a baggie from the case and gingerly opened it. He brought it as close to the plastic barrier as he was comfortable with, then as close as he was uncomfortable with. To put his hand into the air flow would leave him unhanded, so he tossed the baggie over the edge. The bag tore in the 180kph winds, and greenish-yellow pollen quickly reached the upper fans and disappeared into the vents.

Clarence tossed baggies until he ran out. He closed the case, grabbed it, turned to leave, and almost collided with three GREEN Internal Security agents.

One agent trained a laser rifle on him while a second pointed a camera. He wasn’t sure which made him more nervous. The third simply gestured for Clarence to follow. He turned and left the room. Clarence followed quickly. The other two fell in behind him.


They reached the hallway and shut the door. “Yellowpants,” said one, “we are going to perform an impromptu interrogation right here in this hallway. Before we begin, are you familiar with the Good Cop-Bad Cop script? —Excellent! That will save some time. In the role of Bad Cop will be my colleague, Michael-G.”

Michael was pointing the laser rifle at Clarence’s head. “Looking forward to working with you.”

“Likewise,” said Clarence politely, as one does to those pointing laser rifles at one’s head.

“And in the role of Bad Cop is my other colleague, Georgina-G. She’s been recording you since you treasonously entered the air recycling chamber.”

“Great footage!” Georgina waved her camera.“Wait, they’re both Bad Cops?”“That’s correct.”“The Good Cop is you, then?”The officer leaned closer and grinned. “I’m Roberto-G, and

for today’s interrogation, I will be playing the part of Insanely Bad Cop.”

“Oh.”“Yes, ‘oh.’ Now, do you know your part?”“Innocent Victim Released Without Harm?”The officers laughed. “Good one!” said Roberto-G. “Everyone

ready? Good. Annnd—start scene.”Michael-G shoved the rifle barrel into Clarence’s face. “What

were you doing in there, traitor?”Clarence began to sweat. “I’m just trying to finish a job!”“Which job was that?” Georgina moved to capture the sheen of

Clarence’s forehead. “The job of sabotaging Alpha Complex?”“No! It’s—well—I had a job to help some Troubleshooters and

when I got there I helped them set a trap but then I needed the team leader’s signature but he was dying and badly dressed and he wouldn’t sign my form unless I took this strange box to an escalator and I agreed just to get his signature but when I went into the closet they told me I had to join their secret society but I didn’t want to join their secret society but they told me I had to put pollen in the air recycling system and I agreed just so I didn’t have to join and so I came here and-and-and I want to go home now please.”


The three officers were stunned. “That is some impressive vocal work!” said Roberto. “You said all of that in one breath! Do you have theater training? Because we’re looking for a fourth person to join our acting troupe.”

Georgina fretted. “How can we cast him if he’s locked up in a Joyful Liberation of Guilt cell?”

Michael frowned. “He would have made a perfect Traitor Who Recants His Disloyal Ways Upon His Deathbed.”

Roberto mused. “What if we asked Friend Computer to cut his tort- I mean, re-education—short? He’d be released just before our run of The Disloyal Loyalist!”

“Good idea!” Georgina started taking Clarence head shots, full-face and three-quarter profile.

Roberto looked up. “Friend Computer? Internal Security agent Roberto-G-IRK-3 reporting.”

A soft chime. The Computer was always readily available to Internal Security, sometimes more readily than citizens preferred.

GREETINGS, CITIZEN! HOW MAY I HELP MAKE YOUR DAY MORE HAPPY?

“Reporting from the We Breathe Together air recycling center in GHJ Sector. We have apprehended a traitor attempting to poison the air supply for this sector. Request permission to suspend termination, reduce his re-education to two weeks, and sequester his mandatory volunteer hours as part of our Amateur Loyalty Theater Troupe.”

PROCESSING. PLEASE STATE THE TRAITOR’S NAME.

Michael nudged Clarence with the laser rifle. “That’s your cue.”“Me? I’m Clarence-Y-SKL-1, Friend Computer! Please don’t

terminate me!”

PROCESSING. CITIZEN CLARENCE-Y-SKL-1 HAS NO RECORD OF CONFIRMED ACTS OF TREASON; 56 RECORDS OF POSSIBLE ACTS OF TREASON AS ADDUCED FROM STATISTICAL ANALYSIS


OF PURCHASING TRENDS AND TRASH; AND 1,183 RECORDS OF PURELY HYPOTHETICAL TREASON AS DEDUCED BY RANDOM NUMBER GENERATION. REQUEST GRANTED. PLEASE ESCORT CITIZEN CLARENCE-Y-SKL-1 TO THE JOYFUL LIBERATION OF GUILT FACILITY IN—PROCESSING. PLEASE WAIT.

Everyone looked confused. The Computer only tells you to wait when an Internal Security team is on the way to terminate you, and they were already here.

“Roberto-G?” asked Georgina. “Line, please?”The soft chime sounded a second time.

CITIZEN ROBERTO-G-IRK-3, YOU ARE HEREBY FINED 100 CREDITS FOR FALSE ARREST. A NOTATION HAS BEEN PLACED IN YOUR PERMANENT RECORD FOR TRYING TO ARREST A LOYAL CITIZEN WHO—PROCESSING—WHO HAS DONE NOTHING WRONG. PLEASE RELEASE CITIZEN CLARENCE-Y-SKL-1 IMMEDIATELY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

Frowning, Roberto leaned close to Clarence. He whispered, “I see you have friends in high places.”

Clarence was stunned. “No I don’t. I don’t have friends in any places!”

The officers shoved him against a wall, as if for luck, then left.Taking another way, Clarence sprinted out of the center,

stopping only to correct a passerby who was violating Mandate CPPM 492.00/e. Then he rushed back to the Buyatorium.

He arrived breathless and bedraggled. On his way to Escalator 13, he paused at a mirror in Loyalty Hats to straighten his jumpsuit. This will be fine. I did the job, I’ll show them the picture—

He reeled back. He’d forgotten to record himself releasing the pollen. He nearly spoke certain words that would have violated many HPD&MC Speech Control mandates. With sinking heart Clarence continued to Escalator 13—


—Where a dozen IntSec officers surrounded the closet door, and the Sierra Club members knelt on the floor with their hands behind their heads.

He ducked behind a mannequin dressed in the latest approved jumpsuit style (unchanged for over 100 years). This is bad. Very bad. Not ISPM 1095.32/b bad, but definitely worse than ISPM 229.56/c. What to do?

Mandates, mandates, find a mandate that applies. Mandates help. Mandates are our friends. Okay, what about ISTM 444.32/a? No. Even if he found the apple and bucket of industrial solvent in the Buyatorium, he’d have to buy them first, and he’d get nabbed as soon as he paid. PSPM 676.01/a? Does the Buyatorium even stock fissile materials? CPTM 2003.31/n? No! He didn’t even know what “a live chicken” meant.

A voice behind him. “Excuse me.”“Oh, sorry.” Clarence moved aside for the shopper. What about

PLPM 083.22/d? He’d need a tray of sticky buns. Which way to the Bakery department?

“Excuse me,” the voice repeated.“Sorry again.” The directorybot! Of course! He could use

TSTM 104.99/a to force the bot to escort him to Bakery, and the screen was tall enough to hide him! He’d get the buns, find a confession booth—

“Excuse me!” Now the voice was agitated.“What?” Clarence looked up——at a GREEN goon pointing a laser pistol. “I was going to ask

why you’re hiding, but given your attitude, I believe I’ll just arrest you first and ask questions later. Perhaps much later. Move.”

Clarence stood up and raised his hands. The goon marched him to Escalator 13 and the captive Sierra Clubbers. then pushed him to his knees before a BLUE IntSec officer. The goon said, “I found this traitor hiding nearby. I distinctly heard him plotting to blow up his comrades, and ourselves, to protect his dark, dirty secrets.”

“Well done,” the BLUE said. “Evidence?”“Give me a few minutes.”“Very good, carry on.”“Welcome back,” Brother Bite said. “My knife and I were just

talking about you.”


For some odd reason Clarence wondered what they’d done with the creature. “Excuse me? Officer? I don’t belong here with these traitors. Can anyone authorize my departure?”

The BLUE was tutoring the goons as they modified photos of the Foaming Cleanser Disaster of Year 209 to incorporate Clarence. “Really, Yellowpants? Are you saying a GREEN Internal Security agent, trained for over a week, has made a mistake?”

“Umm—yes?”“Then you are making—ah—” The agent sneezed. “Excuse me.

Then you are making an official complaint of Internal Security malfeasance under Mandate ISPM 061.11?”

“No, that mandate covers bake sales to raise funds for executions by lethal injection. You’re thinking of Mandate ISPM 051.11/a. I just mean I’ve been put here by mistake because I’m not part of the Sierra Club. Isn’t that right, Sister Sunrise?”

Sister Sunrise nodded. “Correct. This citizen, whom we had provisionally designated Thin Weed—” (Clarence wondered how to feel about being a Thin Weed.) “—just finished our rite—um, our ritual activity of initiation into the Sierra Club so as not to join us. And no, it doesn’t make sense to me either.”

More IntSec agents began sneezing. One had a visible rash. The BLUE agent’s PDC buzzed with multiple reports. “Something is wrong—two reporting illness—I cannot stop sneezahchoo—great prices on truncheons—itching all over—what do we do?”

The BLUE agent grabbed his PDC. “Attention all Interchoo! Attention ahchoo! All Internal Securahchoo! Fall back! Repeat, fall bahchoo! Attack by unknown mutant power causahchoo! Fall back!”

Wheezing and scratching, the IntSec agents forced their way down the aisles and out of the Buyatorium. Soon torrents of sneezing shoppers were stampeding for the exits. It looked like a Madhouse Holiday Sector-Wide Exclusive Sale on the season’s must-have gift item, Plush Scrubot with Working Soapy Scrubbers, except the buyers were heading out, not in, and no tankbots were working crowd control.

Clarence looked at the Sierra Clubbers, who were smiling. “This has something to do with that pollen stuff you forced on me,


right? Then why aren’t ahchoo!” He sneezed five times rapidly. His face turned bright red.

Brother Dark took a syringe from a shirt pocket and injected Clarence in the shoulder. He tried to protest but was having trouble breathing. Then the feeling went away. His eyes stopped watering and his nose stopped itching.

“Antihistamine,” said Brother Dark. “Easier to love nature when not dying from it.”

The other two Sierra Clubbers began emptying the closet’s boxes into a shopping cart. “You obviously did your job,” said Brother Bite, “so we don’t need a picture. And you went above and beyond what we asked. Although my knife hates to admit it, you saved us, Thin Weed.”

“Well—ah—don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t mean to.”

Sister Sunrise reached into the shopping cart for a familiar-looking box. “Regardless, Mother Nature has guided you to us. You are now a full member of the Sierra Club, and this is your new duty.” She held out the box to him.

“No no no! The whole point was to—wait, is that the box I brought you?”

“Yes,” Brother Bite said. “Caring for this mouse will remind you of your commitment to our secret society. And if you hurt Ignatius in any way, my knife will be very cross with you. Understood?”

Clarence carefully took the box and looked inside. The creature—the mouse—was still there, looking up at him. “Ignatius”—he liked the name. He closed the box and smiled. “I don’t think your knife has to worry.”

Slam! A metal gate slammed down from the ceiling between the registers and the exit. Through the empty store a soft chime echoed.

ATTENTION, SHOPPERS. THIS IS THE COMPUTER. THERE IS NEED FOR ALARM. THIS STORE HAS BEEN CONTAMINATED BY COMMUNISM, MUTANTS, OR SIMILAR TRAITORS, AND IN NUMBER MINUTES A DEADLY GAS WILL FLOOD THE STORE. PLEASE FINISH YOUR SHOPPING


AND PROCEED TO THE REGISTERS IN AN ORDERLY MANNER. FRIENDLY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL WILL ASSIST YOU IN LEAVING THE STORE. THANK YOU FOR NOT RIOTING.

The Sierra Clubbers and Clarence ran towards the front of the store. Ahead, the metal gate blocked the exit. A lone RED Buyatorium cashier stood beyond, holding a wireless device.

Clarence dashed past the registers. “Citizen! Open the gate!”“Of course, friend,” said the RED cashier cheerfully. “I’ll

be happy to help, once I confirm you and your friends are not traitors. Because, if you are, then you should be dying from the poison gas. Am I right?”

NUMBER MINUTES REMAINING. IF PAYING BY CHECK, PLEASE USE REGISTER 61 ONLY.

Clarence and the Sierra Clubbers reached the metal gate. “RED citizen, I am YELLOW Clearance! Open this gate immediately or by Mandate CPPM 016.94/a-e, I will have you reassigned as reactor shielding!”

“Right away. Just need proof of loyalty from my new friends. Hope you understand. I’d lose my job if I didn’t follow temporary mandates from my boss, am I right?”

The simple words spoke to Clarence’s heart. “Blast! He’s got us.”

Brother Bite took out his knife. “Is this proof, you wretched little scrubot?”

“The knife cannot reach me, so no, friend.”“What about pyrokinesis?” Sister Sunrise’s eyes rolled back

until they were all white. A tiny spot on the RED agent’s jumpsuit turned brown and smoldered.

“Mutant powers are not proof of loyalty.” He patted the fire out. “In fact, unregistered powers are proof of treason. Am I right?”

Clarence grabbed the gate and pulled as hard as he could. It didn’t budge. He looked up and noticed a solid wall descending.

NUMBER SECONDS REMAINING. IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR SHOPPING AND YOU WISH


TO RETAIN YOUR CURRENT CLONE, PLEASE SPEAK TO AN INTERNAL SECURITY AGENT IMMEDIATELY. REMEMBER, CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION IS TRUE LOYALTY.

“That’s it!” Clarence ran to the shopping cart full of treasonous Sierra Club materials. “RED citizen! This shopping cart is full of stuff we are taking out of the Buyatorium.” By using “taking” instead of “buying,” he technically told the truth. “This is evidence of consumerism as defined by Mandate CPTM 303.28/b. Consumerism is a loyal way to aid the economy and Alpha Complex citizens as defined by Mandate PLPM 004.98/f. Therefore, we are loyal citizens. Now open the gate!”

The RED cashier paused to think through the logic. “Do you have a receipt?”

Clarence looked at the looming wall. Its stenciled letters read STORE CLOSED FOR TRAITOR FUMIGATION. “Everything in the cart is beyond your security clearance.” Since it’s all illegal, that’s also technically true. “If I showed you a receipt, you’d have to be terminated. I can do that if you like.”

The barrier was less than two meters from the floor.The RED cashier nodded and pressed a button on the wireless

device. The metal gate lifted.Clarence and the Sierra Clubbers scrambled through the

opening as the fumigation wall descended. They got the shopping cart through just in time. The wall slammed to the floor.

ERROR-NOT-A-NUMBER TIME REMAINING. DEADLY GAS NOW FLOODING THE STORE. PLEASE DO NOT USE THE SCUBA EQUIPMENT IN THE WATER FUN DEPARTMENT TO SURVIVE THE GAS. THANK YOU FOR DYING EFFICIENTLY.

His job done, the RED cashier smiled and walked away. Brother Bite watched him leave. “If you’ll excuse me, my knife wants a word with that RED citizen.” He followed the cashier.

Sister Sunrise put a hand on Clarence’s shoulder. “Welcome to the Sierra Club, Brother Thin Flowering Weed That Grows in


Neat Orderly Rows. We’ll be in touch.” With that, Sister Sunrise and Brother Dark went after Brother Bite.

Alone in the empty atrium, Clarence peeked in the box. The mouse seemed fine. Whistling a happiness hymn, the Yellowpants started to leave. Several jobs today. Now I have a new one—take care of my little furry friend.

Then, a mental avalanche. Keeping the mouse violated many, many mandates! ISPM 449.20/r—HPPM 028.11/v—CPPM 878.90/p! Even, in certain respects, TSPM 402.99/g!

Clarence sank to his knees. He couldn’t defy mandates! They exist to be obeyed! If people started selectively obeying mandates, society would crumble.

Clarence did what any loyal citizen would do in an ethical quandary. “Friend Computer! Citizen Clarence-Y-SKL-1 requesting guidance.”

A soft chime echoed through the empty atrium.

AT YOUR SERVICE.

“I have a problem. How to put it so I don’t get terminahhh I don’t want to say that. Um—well, I have a problem.”

YOU HAVE ALREADY SAID THAT. IS THE PROBLEM IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM?

“I have a—thing. I shouldn’t have this thing, but I do. I’m not even quite sure why. But now that I have it, I want to keep it. But keeping it would violate 42 separate mandates. What should I do?”

PROCESSING. CITIZEN CLARENCE-Y-SKL-1 IS FINED 35 CREDITS FOR BEING SUSPICIOUSLY VAGUE. PLEASE DEFINE THE OBJECT IN QUESTION.

Clarence’s throat went dry. “Well, it’s a—actually, it’s a mouse. Its name is Ignatius, and it comes from the Outdoors. And it’s extremely—ah—cute.”


THANK YOU, CITIZEN. CITIZEN CLARENCE-Y-SKL-1, PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE. AN INTERNAL SECURITY TEAM HAS BEEN—PROCESSING—PROCESSING—CANCEL. ERROR. CANNOT DEFINE OBJECT. CITIZEN, CAN YOU ASSURE ME ERROR-UNKNOWN-OBJECT WILL NOT THREATEN THE HEALTH, ORDERLY ENVIRONS, AND/OR MORAL FIBER OF THE CITIZENS OF ALPHA COMPLEX?

“Uh—yes?”

THANK YOU, CITIZEN. YOU ARE HEREBY CLEARED FOR OWNERSHIP OF ERROR-UNKNOWN-OBJECT. PLEASE ENJOY YOUR NEW ERROR-UNKNOWN-OBJECT. IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO TAKE PROPER CARE OF ERROR-UNKNOWN-OBJECT OR FACE POSSIBLE CHARGES OF INSUBORDINATION OR TREASON. ENJOY YOUR DAY.

A parting chime.Clarence had no idea what had happened, but he wasn’t going

to look a gift mouse in the mouth. Hadn’t The Computer said it was his job to take care of it? And a job assigned—

He said the words aloud. “I have a friend.” Even he sounded surprised.

—————Liberated from a lab researching mutation and its effects on probability, the mouse immediately makes Clarence’s life much more eventful. Find out how in the PARANOIA novel Y1 Traitor Hangout by WJ MacGuffin. Published by Ultraviolet Books, it’s available where you found this book. See the end of this book for a FREE preview from Traitor Hangout.


Orientation (4.0)

Attention, $NewCitizen_TREASONPROBABLE! The Computer’s loyal servants in Internal Security have discovered steganographic messages encoded in the previous briefing that, upon decryption, will doubtless prove treasonous. All previous orientation documents have been retro-de-extantuated (RDXed) per Internal Security protocols.

The Computer has noted your repeated scrutiny of orientation documents later proven to be subversive, seditious, treasonous, or unhygienic. Should you continue in this behavior, you too may be RDXed.

You are REQUIRED to forget all previous orientation documents and ignore all instructions therein (exception: instructions to forget earlier versions still apply), and to replace your understanding of that with your understanding of this.

SERVICE GROUP RIVALRIES

United by loyalty to Alpha Complex, The Computer’s servants in the eight service groups cooperate in good spirits. Service firms from different groups sometimes undertake brief affrays, in a spirit of friendly competition; outside observers, happening upon them, may mistake them for cutthroat, homicidal blood feuds.

In particular, disregard frequent misguided reports of heated rivalries between Armed Forces and Internal Security; and between Power Services (which controls generation and transmission of energy) and Technical Services (which maintains bots, vehicles, and electronic service systems).

“ACTION REQUEST”

Q: How many Troubleshooters does it take to change a light bulb? A: The same number it takes to end a promising career in middle management.


Action Request

Greg Ingber

FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Troubleshooter Action Request?

Hi Jed-Y,Haven’t networked with you in a while, hope they’re treating

you well back at CPU/Filing. Good work you guys are doing over there, as always!

Last month The Computer reassigned me to the UUF Sector branch of DataBasix Data Integration Systems. Big step up for me! Every day we’ve got a vatload of high-clearance 1s and 0s flowing through these servers, and I’m responsible for all of it. It’s an exciting job, but I do sometimes miss the nitty-gritty, boots-on-the-tile work we did back in the old Filing Pool. Don’t miss the paper cuts, though. Guess I wasn’t built for manual labor.

Anyway, got a couple of jokes for you.

Q: How many Tech Services workers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Zero. That’s a Power Services job.

Funny, right? And if you liked that one:

Q: How many Power Services workers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Zero. That’s a Tech Services job.

Hilarious. Except, not. Not when you spend every workday sitting in the dark. Like me.

Here’s my situation: The lighting system here at DataBasix keeps blinking out. All day long, the lights flicker off and on.


Mostly off. And when they go off, they stay off for hours. As Onsite Manager, I’m supposed to get someone to fix it. Except, as you might guess from the above, every service firm I’ve contacted tells me the maintenance and repair of our lighting system is somebody else’s problem. And as usual, “somebody else” means me. Honestly, I have to do everything around here. If our bathroom sanitation systems weren’t automated, I’d be called in for wiping duty.

Anyway, my assistant Gwen-O “knows a guy” in Tech Services, so she brought him by for an unofficial evaluation. After I paid him what he assured me was the going rate for unofficial evaluations (out of MY pocket), it took him all of 30 seconds to identify the issue: a blown D90x-001 Power Regulator Circuit. He said it was an easy fix, if I could get my hands on a replacement part. And, in case you were wondering: No, they don’t sell them in Hardware at my local Buyatorium. That would be too easy.

So, off I went to the local Production, Logistics & Commissary Components Depository. Yeah, yeah, I know—last place you expect to see a management type. But it’s not like I had a choice. Here’s a breakdown of my PLC experience:

20 minutes to find an actual human (if you can call him that) working there.

30 minutes for him to find his (even dumber) supervisor.

45 minutes for the supervisor to retrieve a circuit from the warehouse. (Because pulling one off a shelf is such a complex task.)

200cr bribe to walk out of there with the part. (Lazy plug-hoarders may be corrupt, but at least they’re reliably corrupt.)

After all that, I’ve got this power regulator thingy now, and all I need is somebody to install it. I’d ask one of the employees in the office to do it, but this place is full of data-entry monkeys who couldn’t Tech their way out of a broken swivel chair.


This is where I ask you for a favor, Jed-Y. Is there any way you could slip a Troubleshooter Action Request into the system for me? I know Troubleshooters aren’t generally activated for mundane repair jobs, but I can’t spend the next four months filling out the long version of the Request for Inter-Service Firm Conflict Resolution Arbitration form. (No offense. I know some of you CPU/Filing boys worked really hard designing that form. But it’s difficult to fill out all 87 pages, in triplicate, in the dark.) I’m pretty sure your standard-issue Troubleshooter team will have more than enough technical expertise to take care of this for me. If you can make this happen, I’ll owe you one. Big time.

Sincerely,Burl-Y

PS: Thanks again for that slick Pleatherette PDC keypad cover you sent last Compulsory Pleasantries Day. Using it even now as I type this message. It’s the envy of the office!

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Re: Troubleshooter Action Request?

Hi Jed-Y,Thanks much for putting that Troubleshooter Action Request

into the system—and for flagging it High Priority! The subsector dispatcher just buzzed me, said she’ll be sending a team over tomorrow afternoon to fix this lighting problem.

I’ll actually be out of the office tomorrow. The boss is sending a bunch of us to a management retreat facility, In-Charge Recharge. Databasix is strongly committed to Personal Personnel Professional Development (PPPD). Looking forward to learning some Advanced Management Enablement in “a relaxing yet professional environment.” And hey, if there’s time between sessions, maybe I can sneak in one of those full-body exfoliating algae wraps! My assistant Gwen-O got one done last time she was there and couldn’t stop talking about it. “Opens up the pores! Leaves skin feeling silky smooth! Cleanses radiation residue!”

(Funny side note: You can’t believe how often a biz secretary can find ways to bring up “radiation.” Ever since I had to move Gwen-O’s cubicle next to the copy room venting chamber, she’s


always whining about “irradiated toner particulates” or some such. I told her, hey, if you want me to me choose between keeping you or the Copytronics X444 Mass Duplication System, I’ll happily eliminate the expendable one. Those X444 machines units aren’t cheap, but they’re SO worth it—the direct opposite of some bitchy workers!)

Anyway, thanks again for your help with the request. Look forward to returning to a fully illuminated workplace.

Sincerely,Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Back from retreat

Hey Jed-Y,Got your message. It’s late, but I’m heading over to the

DataBasix office right now, after-hours, just to confirm the office lighting system has been repaired.

Also wanted to grab some of the gray market analgesics I keep in my desk for “special occasions.” I’m afraid my Recharge experience was sub-sub-luxurious. Turns out I’m allergic to that damn algae wrap. Turned my whole body a not very flattering shade of green. The company docbot’s antihistamine ointment soothed the itch a little, but I’m still greener than a tub of KiwiBlast Cold Fun. Never should have let Gwen-O talk me into it. And before you ask, no I will NOT be posting pics for your amusement.

Got you a little something at the gift shop. I’ll send it over to your office tomorrow via jackobot. Enjoy!

Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: What happened?

Hey Jed-Y,I’m at the office. No lights. Nothing got fixed. Not happy. Trying

to figure out what happened.


Okay, I heard a banging sound from a closet, opened it, and found my assistant, Gwen-O. She says the Troubleshooter team arrived this afternoon just before closing, then waited until everyone else left but her. She stayed to supervise them, so they threw her into the closet. This does not bode well.

Hey, sorry to do this, but I’m going to hand my PDC over to Gwen-O so she can take dictation while I take a look around. She types fast, so at least she serves SOME useful function. Handing it over now.

**BEGIN FASTKEYS TRANSCRIPTION MODE: CONFIGURATION GWEN-O/PREFS/32.3ff**

You taking this down, Gwen-O? Yeah. No. No, don’t type that. Just type what I’m saying now. No, now. Damn you, just type.

All right, Jed-Y. Now I’m wandering around the facility trying to figure out what these Troubleshooters got up to while they were so busy not fixing my lights.

So. I’m the only one here right now. Just our scrubots on their nightly rounds. Except they’re not really cleaning anything, just bumping into walls. Not designed for low-light operation. Not this model, anyway.

Lots of little messes around. Stains. Ick. I wonder if this bath soap would— This? Got it at the spa gift shop. It’s a six-pack of SoapyTime Bath Bombs in Lovely Lavender. Yeah, well, too bad, it’s for Jed-Y. Of course he’ll like it, why wouldn’t he? Wait, are you typing that? Don’t type that.

All right, I’m checking the utility cabinet now which contains the access panel for our lighting system. Hmm. Well, somebody’s been in here. There’s a half-dozen broken screwdrivers on the floor. Snapped in half, bent, stripped. And, for good measure, one of them has been jammed into the wall, in what appears to be a violent act of frustration. Oh, look—there’s a skull-shaped dent in the wall next to it.

So much for the utility cabinet. Checking the break room now. Ah. While one Troubleshooter failed to even access the lighting system, seems another Troubleshooter helped himself to snacks from the YELLOW-Clearance Executive Snack Cupboard. And didn’t bother cleaning up after. Treasonous AND rude.

Let’s check out the Copy Room. Oh no. Oh, no no no no no no no. This is a disaster. Some traitor put his dirty hands on my


Copytronics X444 Mass Duplication System! What did they do to you, you poor thing?

I need to run an emergency diagnostic. Well? That means I need my PDC, all right?

**begin input**COPYTRONICS X444 DIAGNOSTIC MODE INITIATED...PAPER JAM IN SPOOL MECHANISM 2PAPER JAM IN SPOOL MECHANISM 3PAPER FEED TRAY 5 EMPTYPAPER FEED TRAY 6 EMPTYTONER RESERVOIR @ 00.0% CAPACITYTHANKS FOR CHOOSING COPYTRONICS!END DIAGNOSTIC**end input**Okay, start typing again.So. Some malfeasant traitor rode my innocent X444 hard and

put it away jammed. I can’t comprehend it—not a drop of toner left in a 50-liter reservoir I filled just last week. How does that happen? The number of copies you’d have to make to drain the -

Hold on, I see something jammed inside spool 3. Just got to reach up in there and— Oww, stupid sharp metal pointy thing. All right, all right, I got it. Okay, scan this.

**begin document scan**ProletariTRONsof ALL sect0rsINTERFASE!U haVe n0thing 2 Loosebut Your 001110010001000111010110101010101010!!!**end document scan**Um. I don’t get it. Is this supposed to be Communist

propaganda? Or the ravings of some bot-hugging loony?Wonderful. Last thing Alpha Complex needs is a fringe society

of Commie bot-lovers. Especially on Troubleshooter teams who use my innocent copy machine to spread treasonous propaganda.

Ugh, now I got a headache. And oh, look, someone swiped the meds from my desk. Wonder who that could have been. Give me my PDC.


**FASTKEYS TRANSCRIPTION MODE: OFF**Have to follow up on this later, Jed-Y. Excuse me while I put

a few more skull-shaped dents in the wall.Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Action Request #2?

Hi Jed-Y,Sorry for my tone in that last message. Not your fault I got

assigned a substandard Troubleshooter team. These things happen. And I appreciate your advice: Next time I will personally supervise my assigned Troubleshooters. RED-Clearance personnel should never be allowed to operate without adult supervision.

You’d think I would have learned that lesson back when we were RED. I remember our shenanigans as file clerks. I’m sure you recall the paper ball fights, that rubber band hammock you snuck into the backroom, that jerk of an ORANGE supervisor who got reprimanded when we accused him of sleeping in that hammock during shifts. Fun times.

But some of us had to grow up and take on some real responsibility around here. I suppose ever since The Computer saw fit to promote me to YELLOW Clearance, I’ve been blissfully isolated from the sort of nonsense RED personnel get up to when nobody’s looking. Supervision, that’s the key. In the words of the famous Old Reckoning orator Renault Reagone: “Trustbot, verify!” But I don’t own a trustbot, so next time I’ll do the verification myself.

Speaking of next time, I guess I’m asking you for a favor, again. Please put another Troubleshooter Action Request into the system. The lighting outages are starting to affect office productivity, and I simply can’t have that. Part of our mission statement is, “At DataBasix, Productivity is the Product we Produce.” And as a member of the subcommittee that drafted sections of that statement, I’m fully committed to maximizing productivity. Studies show a fully illuminated office is more productive than one that, you know, isn’t. I NEED TO GET


THESE LIGHTS BACK ON. Having Gwen-O follow me around the office all day with a flashlight is really cramping my style.

Again, make this happen and I’ll owe you one!Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Action Request #2 in progress!

Hi Jed-Y,Things are certainly looking up over here!Troubleshooters arrived as scheduled, at the crack of 08:00. I

briefed them on the lighting malfunction and showed them the circuit that Tech Services guy said they’d need for the repair. But the Team Leader, a sturdy-looking guy called Mario-R, informed me this circuit was “totally last-gen” technology. He had a shiny new circuit—obtained directly, I’m told, from R&D’s Illumination Research Directorate! This circuit will fully restore our lighting system, while consuming only half the power of our old circuitry. They’re putting it in right now. This is excellent, not only because DataBasix is fully committed to energy conservation, but also because it means I can go back to the PLC Components Depository and trade in the old circuit. Maybe I can exchange it for something fun! I’ve had my eye on some plush new chairs for our conference room.

Thanks again for the help,Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Action Request #2 follow up

Hi Jed-Y,So, you remember that next-gen circuitry I was telling you

about? It’s a D90x-002a. The Troubleshooters installed it yesterday afternoon. I supervised. When they were done, I hit the switch. Lights came on. Handshakes and congratulations all around!


Everything looked fine. In fact, the lights seemed a little brighter than I’d remembered. Didn’t think anything of it.

Came back to the office this morning, turned on the lights and suddenly—SEARING EYE PAIN! followed by several hours of blotchy floating spots everywhere. Suffice to say, this circuit was generating a level of illumination inappropriate for an office environment. For a stadium, or an IntSec interrogation room. But not an office.

Oh, and once I turned them on, I couldn’t turn them off. So that was bad too.

On the (please forgive me) bright side, the circuit was now sucking so much power out of the grid, it drew the attention of Power Services. Turns out those people don’t have much sense of humor. Got a terse PDC call from a Power Allocation Analyst called Leona-G-UUF who wanted to know “what unlicensed and potentially illicit device I was using to siphon power from the network.” I tried to explain it was a technical glitch and DataBasix is fully committed to energy conservation, but she broke the call while I was talking. Minutes later, four YELLOW Power Services engineers landed on top of the office roof in a custom service flybot. They literally BLASTED OPEN the roof access hatch, and without so much as a “Greetings, citizen,” stomped in to the utility cabinet, where in under a minute they summarily disconnected and dismantled the D90x-002a. Leaving me in the dark. Again.

As they were marching back to their flybot, I asked the engineers if, perhaps, while they happened to be in the building, they might take a moment to replace the thingy they had removed with another thingy that drew appropriate power from the grid and provided appropriate illumination to the office.

They declined, informing me this was a matter for Technical Services.

Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Action Request #3

Hi Jed-Y,


Not really sure what to say. I guess I should thank you for assigning us another team. Again.

Five strapping young Troubleshooters arrived this morning, as scheduled. At the time, I was stuck in our weekly staff meeting, which had run late (as it has every single week, for as long as anyone can remember). I had Gwen-O show the Troubleshooters to a conference room where I could brief them for their assignment. Really REALLY didn’t think it would be too problematic asking these guys to sit and wait for a few minutes in a dark room. I promise you they weren’t alone in there longer than 10 minutes. 15, max. And I still don’t know what happened, because someone apparently tampered with our IntSec-monitored surveillance cameras. I found one Troubleshooter hiding under the table, while the rest of the team were smoldering in their chairs. I don’t mean “angry,” I mean “melting the upholstery off our nice new conference room chairs.” Which now have to be replaced, thank you very much.

So what happened? Good question!According to lone survivor Lydia-R-UUF-4: “During a routine

weapons check, everybody’s service pistol simultaneously malfunctioned,” and she avoided injury only because she “happened to be adjusting her boots at the time”—an explanation which, frankly, raises more questions than it answers. Specifically, “Why is everybody dead?” and “No, seriously, why is everybody dead?” and “How am I, Burl-Y, going to get blamed for the fact that everybody’s dead?”

And on top of that, there’s the paperwork. One hundred seventy-four; that’s the number of subsections of the Incident Report Form (Form ISIR488YB/a, which I recall was one of your favorites) a manager must fill out when a citizen expires in any Databasix facility. Four dead Troubleshooters means four Incident Reports means Burly Burl-Y won’t be leaving the office any time soon.

So look, Jed-Y, I appreciate all your help—I really do—but I think I’m going to find a way to take care of this issue that doesn’t involve Troubleshooters in any way. I’ll call in some favors or hire somebody or—if ALL else fails, I will personally download electronics training vids from the Power Services Instructional Service and fix this vat-forsaken lighting circuitry myself. I may


not be the handiest guy around, but surely I can’t screw things up any worse.

Thanks,Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Haha VICTORY FOR ME!

Hi Jed-Y,Let me tell you something: This techie stuff isn’t so hard after

all! Once I got my hands on the right tools and watched a few instructional videos, turns out installing this power regulator thingy was a breeze! The lighting system at DataBasix is now fully functional thanks to an all-night install job undertaken by Yours Truly. Actually, my assistant Gwen-O did some of the routine wiring and soldering, and all the busywork of screwing and unscrewing and plugging and unplugging. But I supervised her at the important points throughout.

Anyway, I think I learned an important lesson this week: If you want something done right, don’t ask Troubleshooters to do it.

Thanks again,Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: #4?!

Hey Jed-Y,Sorry to bug you again. It’s 08:00, I’m at the office. There’s

another Troubleshooter team in our lobby, claiming they were assigned to fix the office lighting system. But I’ve already fixed the lighting system. Did you not get that message I sent you earlier? I have no further use for a Troubleshooter team. So please don’t file any more Troubleshooter Action Requests into the system. We’re good over here.

Thanks,Burl-Y


—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Persistent?!

Hey Jed-Y,Thanks for your quick reply. I’m a little confused though—sorry,

I guess I’m not up to speed on the latest CPU Filing terminology. Making sure I didn’t misunderstand your previous message: You flagged that original Action Request “Persistent”? And in the case of a Persistent Action Request, the sector dispatcher will keep on sending Troubleshooter teams to the office until “the cause of the request has been satisfactorily addressed”?

But the matter has been addressed. By me. Lighting system is fixed. All is well. So, how do I let the dispatcher know the issue has been resolved? Do I need to file something? Or you? Please let me know ASAP, because I can’t get these Troubleshooters to go away. They claim they were ordered to fix the DataBasix lighting system and cannot leave until they have done so.

Thanks,Burl-Y

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: (no subject)

Jed-YTHIS IS REALY BAD. Anothr team of Troubleshooters jus

showed up at office. Heavily armed. WHY DO U NEED CONE RIFLES TO FIX A LIGHTING SYSMET??? Before I coud say a words to them they ran into that other team that arrived earlier and wouldn’tt leave.

So there’s 2 teams now, in the off ice . ANGRY TROPLESHOTERS!!! & they don’t like each other much.

1st team acursed the 2nd of being impostors. 2nd team accused 1st of saboteag. lot of poeple yeling TRAITOR and MUTANT and COMMIE and then guns drawn aaand I decided Id be better off supervising from a secure position under my desk. Where I am now. Situation is tense but at lest they not shooting at eafch tohres

No wait


shootnigjelp!!! I NEE D U TO PUT ACTOIN REQUST INTO SYSTEN

TO**Message unsent****Do you wish to save message to Drafts?**

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Re: (no subject)

This is an AUTOMATED RESPONSE MESSAGE. DO NOT REPLY.

Burl-Y-UUF-1 will be out of the office for a period beginning IMMEDIATELY until he returns to the office on UNSPECIFIED. In case of emergency Burl-Y-UUF-1 can be contacted via OUTSIDE COMMUNICATIONS PROHIBITED at the INTERNAL SECURITY HOLDING, LOCATION UNSPECIFIED.

For work-related inquiries, contact Acting Onsite Manager Gwen-Y-UUF-1.

This is an AUTOMATED RESPONSE MESSAGE. DO NOT REPLY.

—————FROM: [email protected]: [email protected]: Hello

**ENCRYPT: XENON-STRONGHOLD 4096**Greetings Jed-Y,As you know, I’m filling in for Burl-Y at DataBasix while

he’s busy talking to the nice people at Internal Security. At this very moment, I imagine they’re chatting about the commiebot propaganda leaflets bearing the distinct watermark of our DataBasix copy machine. Or the unauthorized use of prototype Power Services circuitry. Or the massive gun battle that destroyed half the office. Come to think of it, they might even ask what unregistered mutation turned Burl-Y’s flesh such a festive shade of green. I’ll admit, that last part was strictly for my own amusement. A pal at In-Charge Recharge owed me a favor.


Anyway, on to business. I’ve finally got the access mentioned in past discussions. Login info via the usual channels, as agreed.

Our data will be your data. Don’t know what your clients plan to do with it. Hope to keep it that way.

Cheers,Gwen-Y


Orientation (Final)

Attention, $NewCitizen_TREASONPROVEN! In advance of your upcoming termination, you may wish to pass the time in remorseful meditation on your previous misadventures reading traitorous orientations. Why not read instead this new, authorized, and entirely correct replacement? Perhaps your next clone will recall it and do better.

CLONING

In Old Reckoning times before The Computer, humans reproduced by rutting at random. Improved by mandatory hormone suppressants, citizens are no longer troubled by the bestial and undignified urges of the past. Because The Computer cares deeply for its citizens, it grows them in clone tanks. This is much less messy and disgusting than the old way. At decanting, each new citizen is assigned five clone backup bodies, in addition to his or her original body (the “Prime”), and may purchase more.

CITIZEN NAMES

The naming scheme is [Given name]—[Security clearance initial]—[Home sector]—[Clone number]. Clearance initials follow the ROYGBIV spectrum. INFRAREDs have no initial; ULTRAVIOLET High Programmers use U.

“DATA EXHAUST”

Threat Obfuscation executive Granville-B learns how to mine his boss’s past dealings to uncover his deepest fears. It’s a great rush—but who is mining Granville?

A prequel to PARANOIA novel S1 Reality Optional by Gareth Hanrahan, available where you obtained this book.


Data Exhaust

Gareth Hanrahan

The doorbell remained obstinate.“I don’t care who you are,” it chirped, “you’re not ringing me

until you sign my End User Licence Agreement.” It helpfully emailed a fourth copy of the 57-page document to Tanner-G.

He waved his Internal Security badge at the doorbell again. “Security override! Activate!”

“I’m a BLUE-Clearance doorbell. You’re only GREEN Clearance, citizen.”

Tanner’s fingers crawled towards the handle of his laser pistol.“And I outgun you, too.”The doorbell probably wasn’t bluffing—high-clearance

apartments had all sorts of anti-personnel weapons to discourage bothersome low-clearance types. He fought his temper back down again and put a smile back on his face. Mind on the job.

With the armored plastic knuckles of his gauntlet, Tanner rapped on the door.

“Hey! Stop that! You can’t cut me out of the loop like that! Hey! Hrmph!”

He put his meaty thumb over the doorbell’s speaker. In the sudden silence he heard movement inside. Muffled words—a woman’s voice. Footsteps. The whirr of cameras focusing. The distinctive click of a laser safety catch being switched to Extremely Unsafe.

The door opened.The man did not so much emerge as unfold from within.

Although Tanner was GREEN Clearance and knew about the Outdoors outside Alpha Complex, he’d never been there nor seen its strange mutant monsters. So he had no way to imagine a pinkish stick insect wearing an ill-fitting human mask and a blue bathrobe. His closest approach was, This guy looks really tall, with a suspicious number of knees and elbows. And a robe.


The executive blinked languidly and stared at a point several inches above Tanner’s head. “Yes?”

As an Internal Security agent, Tanner-G was used to citizens cowering when they saw his hulking, drug-enhanced form approaching, or collapsing into quivering heaps, or swallowing huge handfuls of Friendly Fun De-Stress Relaxomatic Happy Pills and then suffering the common reaction to an overdose of Friendly Fun De-Stress Relaxomatic Happy Pills (extreme happiness followed by joyful loss of bladder control and motor function). Even a BLUE would normally swallow nervously and maybe put on his biggest, happiest smile. This citizen hadn’t even blinked.

“Er—Granville-B, right?”The man glanced over his shoulder, sniffed the air, checked

something on his PDC, then nodded. “Yes.”“I’ve got some questions about Beatrice-Y.”“Well, I should think so.” Granville-B suddenly became

animated. It looked like the convulsions of someone who really wasn’t enthusiastic about being electrocuted, but was faking convulsions to be polite. “If Internal Security didn’t have questions about a recently-terminated traitor who managed to slip past all our security measures and infiltrate a highly sensitive department, why, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs at all. The fact you have questions about Beatrice-Y reflects very well on you, officer. Go forward, brave warrior, in the cause of truth! Goodbye.”

He tried to shut the door, but Tanner navigated the sentence quickly enough to put his boot across the threshold.

“I’ve got questions about Beatrice-Y for you, Granville-B. I’ve already tried to call you six times and sent you a dozen C-mails.”

“Ah.”“May I come in?” Tanner inclined his head towards Granville’s

quarters.Granville glanced back, scratched his nose, and appeared

to consider the request. “No,” he said finally, drawing the o. Noooooooooooooo.

By reflex, Tanner reached for his truncheon. Then he remembered the doorbell. He asked sourly, “What was your relationship with the traitor, Beatrice-Y?”


“She worked for me in the Department of Threat Obfuscation. Specifically, she was a Junior Assistant Provocation Analyst, specializing in Suggestive Rumor-Mongering and Seed Meme Cultivation.”

“And, um, what does the Department of Threat Obfuscation do? What service group are you in?”

“We’re an interdepartmental department, primarily reporting to CPU, but under the aegis of HPD&MC, and part of the ISCCMWTG.” Granville-B sniffed. “That’s the Internal Security Citizen Control & Monitoring Working Task Group. You probably haven’t heard of it. You’re only GREEN.”

“But what was Beatrice-Y’s actual job? What did she do? What secret information could she have passed on to her Commie Mutant Traitor allies? Failure to answer will be deemed complicity in treason!” Tanner felt a new spark of confidence. Finally, he was moving the conversation in the right direction. Even a BLUE couldn’t escape the piercing light of an Internal Security interrogation. (“Piercing light” is an approved euphemism for “laser.”)

“The secret information she had,” said Granville-B, “may or may not have been true.”

“Huh?”“Threat Obfuscation is predicated on the axiom that the veracity

of any fact is irrelevant. Only the actions that are taken based on that fact matter. At the Department, we take facts—usually, threats to the safety of Alpha Complex—and obfuscate them by generating multiple fraudulent variations that will prompt similar actions. This permits the higher clearances to interact with the lower clearances without revealing sensitive information to traitors.”

Tanner’s new spark of confidence flickered and went out.Granville-B went on. “Suppose it were of vital importance

you speak to me. If your superiors simply ordered you to speak to me at once, urgently, eavesdropping traitors would know our meeting is of vital importance, and would therefore—” He glanced around. “—Would therefore sabotage it or spy upon us. However, if those orders are properly obfuscated, then the end goal—you meeting me—is accomplished through a fraudulent premise no eavesdropper would find noteworthy.”


Tanner stepped back. His forehead wrinkled in deep thought. “Are you saying—Beatrice-Y never existed? And I was only told she did so I’d come down here and question you? And I’m actually here for—some other—?”

“No,” said the doorbell helpfully, “he’s saying it’s possible Beatrice-Y never existed and the story is just cover for the meeting, but it’s also possible she did exist and was a traitor, but you can never know which for security reasons.”

“My doorbell is correct,” said Granville.“I—but—” Tanner flailed. “Never mind. Come down to precinct

HQ, and you can explain all that to my supervisor.”Granville frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.” He glanced

over his shoulder again. “I have visitors.”All citizens in Alpha Complex are treated with mandatory

hormone suppressants, to keep their mind on their assigned duties and off thoughts of unhygienic recreation. Higher-clearance citizens are assigned smaller doses of suppressant; according to official reports (written by higher-clearance citizens), The Computer’s most trusted subordinates are so happy to serve that they don’t need suppressants and would never indulge in said unhygienic recreation.

As a new GREEN, Tanner was now slightly less suppressed. He was in the first flush of hormones, manifested as angst, acne, and a shameful fascination with unhygienic procreative practices. His instincts took Granville’s reticence, the bathrobe, and the muffled voice and got sex! (Lately, his instincts provided that answer to almost every question.)

“Ooh. I understand, sir.” He wiggled his eyebrows—a gesture lost beneath his battle helmet. “Well, I’m sure you’ll be free to visit the IntSec office in—” How long did it take? A few minutes? Hours? Weeks? “In the fullness of time. Once you’re done with, er, stuff.”

“Quite. In, as you say, the fullness of time.” Granville closed the door in Tanner’s face.

A moment later, the doorbell beeped. “Hoo-rah, safeties off. He just switched on my big guns. You’d better run, IntSec man!”

—————


It disgusted Granville to consort with the lower clearances. Tainted by the lies they swallowed so easily, their brains were muddied cesspits that swirled with pharmaceuticals and viral thought patterns. Having a conversation with a prole was like using well-chosen words to coax your PDC out of a sewer. It exhausted him.

And those vile insinuations! Physical contact was unhygienic. His stomach recoiled at the thought of touching another body. Bad enough he had to breathe the same air. Nnngh.

He padded down the corridor and paused outside the door to his office. He could hear them talking inside—Celeste-G and that other one, the twitchy one.

He still could hardly believe he’d let them in. If it had been anyone else, he’d have set the doorbell to Lethal and ignored them, but he needed Celeste. She was annoyingly brilliant, the architect of many of Threat Obfuscation’s new initiatives and computer models.

She was also, it seemed, oblivious to hints. And to subtle rebuffs. And multiple direct C-mails that said, sometimes in their entirety, “Do not, under any circumstances, visit my suite.”

You simply couldn’t get the staff, these days.He swallowed a handful of antibiotics to wipe out any lingering

germs, then a handful of probiotics to boost his immune system. Finally, he popped two tabs of a smart drug, just to help his stomach decide which side of the biotic issue to endorse. Then he stepped into his office.

The first thing anyone saw was the desk—big, brushed-steel, with inlaid silver stylings. A few weeks ago he’d moved it right in front of the door. He was the only person who used the room, so why have the desk in the middle? Putting it in front of the door maximized the working area behind. So really—looking at it from that vantage—just by sitting there on his favorite couch, these two Threat Obfuscation functionaries, Celeste-G and her little nebbish—Jerome-Y, that was it—were therefore invading his personal space. He resented them all the more.

Jerome—thin, balding, with a ratlike face that looked frozen in the precise moment of nitpicking about a misspelled answer on a survey form—was looking around goggle-eyed at the office. The room was probably eight times the size of the quarters he


shared with—what would it be, at YELLOW?—at least one other citizen. The chairs, optimized for ergonomics as opposed to speed of construction; the shelves lined with art objects; the drink dispenser that dispensed drinkable drinks; the complete absence of the smell of burning electrical insulation—the place was, by the standards of the lower clearances, palatial. And this was just one room of several.

By the standards of the higher clearances, of course, the whole BLUE suite was a cramped hellhole. Ascension to those levels would happen, Granville told himself. One clearance at a time.

Celeste waited patiently in another chair, with a large folder of papers in her lap. Granville could never shake the suspicion Celeste was an advanced android, dispatched by some mysterious alien intelligence to spy on Alpha Complex. Her black hair was too perfectly pinned, her breathing too regular, her frame and features trim but just a bit off. Her eyes, like her vast intellect, were icy and clinical.

Out of the corner of his eye, Granville checked his security camera. It wasn’t part of The Computer’s surveillance network; he’d installed it himself. He disliked leaving these intruders unwatched, even for a minute. The timing of that IntSec officer’s visit made him suspicious. Too convenient, too suggestive of conspiracy.

He smiled. “Let’s keep this exquisitely short, shall we? In fact, if you could just leave and send me your questions in the form of a memo, that would be ideal.” Eeeeeyedeeeeauuul.

“Firstly,” Celeste began, “something of a delicate matter regarding your physical location. Certain individuals raised the question of—”

Jerome interrupted her. “Are you ever visiting the office again?”Granville concealed his distaste. “Oh, certainly. In, um—the

fullness of time. However, I hardly need to breathe down your necks, do I? We can handle everything through C-mail and telepresence. Physicality is so—intrusive.” He gestured towards the bank of monitors and computer consoles on his desk.

Jerome examined the tangle of wires and cables that connected Granville’s computer system to the official complex-wide data network, AlphaNet. “If I may say so, friend Granville-B, that’s a fantastic telepresence set-up you’ve got there.” Jerome’s


bootlicking wasn’t perfunctory—he genuinely seemed to admire Granville’s console. “I can see why you’d stay here. It’s much nicer than the ThreatObs office—not that the Threat Obfuscation office is anything less than perfect, The Computer designed it so it must be perfect, all hail Friend Computer.”

“Hail The Computer!” Celeste and Granville repeated. At their clearances, they didn’t really worry about random loyalty sweeps, but old habits die hard.

“Yes, well, an executive needs a matching console. It’s got functions you’re not even cleared to know about. I can run my entire life through that system. Is there anything else?” Granville dared to hope they just wanted to gawp at his office.

“Yes,” said Celeste. “The Beatrice-Y situation.”“Still? Why is that still a problem? I assumed you dealt with it.

That is your job, dealing with—” He flapped his hand vaguely. “—Things.”

Granville had never even met Beatrice-Y. She’d worked in the ThreatObs office on something technical and boring he’d never bothered investigating. Her treason had nothing to do with the department—Internal Security discovered she was blackmailing some PLC drone to fund her addiction to happy pills. As far as Granville knew, they terminated the treasonous Beatrice, replacing her with a new clone that was guaranteed to be loyal and drug-free. Why did people keep digging up dead bodies and leaving them on his desk?

(Technically, since Beatrice was atomized in a termination booth, they’d be vacuuming up free-floating carbon molecules and putting a bag of them on his desk. It sounded even more unhygienic.)

“It seems an IntIntSec int-report—Internal Internal Security internal report—about Beatrice was accidentally CCed to CPU’s Department of Memetic Contagion Assessment, and they bumped it up to the Oversight Committee for all DUPES.” Celeste glanced at Jerome. “That’s Deceptive Undercover Procedures Ensuring Security.”

“How high has it gone?”Celeste hesitated for an instant, and Granville’s stomach turned.

“That’s the other issue. The office was working so hard on the new TraceRoute system—”


“A hundred ten percent!” Jerome flashed thumbs-up.“—that certain things were missed.”“They fell between the clones,” said Jerome.Granville was wondering if Jerome’s thumbs-up was a message

to some hidden accomplice who’d somehow planted a camera in his secure suite. No. Impossible. His suite was sacrosanct. “Certain—” He glared at his subordinates. “—Things.”

To his surprise, Celeste turned to Jerome. “That is all for now, Jerome-G. Please resume your duties.”

Jerome looked startled but pulled himself reluctantly out of the comfy chair’s embrace. “I suppose TraceRoute won’t write itself.” He nodded to Granville and left. Granville wondered why he’d been here in the first place. It looked like the little nonentity had scarfed down half a bowl of his good licorice pastilles.

Celeste proffered a thick stack of printouts. He brought out his pocket disinfectant spray, then paged through them. Requests for meetings. Requests for records. Increasingly strident demands for meetings to discuss the absence of records. Veiled threats. Explicit threats. Escalations.

“You missed an entire Internal Security inquiry into ThreatObs?” He revised his option of Celeste down, from “brilliant sociopath” to “idiot savant.” And here comes the finger-pointing, he thought.

“Yes. For security reasons,” said Celeste, “they were delivered by pneumatic tube to your office. We were unaware of the situation because no one was there to see them.” Celeste didn’t sound angry or defensive. Her tone was the auditory version of a little red warning light on an industrial machine ready to jam.

Granville’s grip on the papers tightened. If any sufficiently gross incompetence is indistinguishable from treason, he couldn’t tell who was being incompetent here. He micromanaged the entire department from his console. He could tell when employees logged on in the morning and when they logged off, he could correlate CoffeeLyke consumption and bathroom breaks, he could spy on them from any wall-mounted security camera or the dozens of spycams he’d planted—and he’d missed all this.

That, or he’d missed them hiding it from him.“If I may draw your attention to the last page—”He flipped to the end, then stopped breathing. Keywords

seemed to leap off the page into his optic nerve and assault his


motor centers. DELEVAN-I—MEETING—14:00—GRAVE CONCERN—BEATRICE-Y—COOPERATION ASSUMED.

Granville’s head whipped around to his console screen. 13:47. “I’m scheduled to meet Delevan-I? Department-of-Excision-head Delevan-I? In about 15 minutes? And this is the first I know about it?”

Delevan-I wanted to ask him questions about Beatrice-Y, the traitor in Threat Obfuscation. If Delevan-I didn’t like the answers to those questions, then Granville would be terminated. Not immediately, of course—Delevan might be INDIGO, but that didn’t mean he could just send a BLUE to a termination booth. No, it would be a slower death. First Delevan would take Threat Obfuscation away from Granville. They’d shunt him over to Rumor Monitoring or Dissatisfaction Factoring, something harmless where a traitor couldn’t do as much damage. Then, regretfully, they’d demote him to GREEN or YELLOW—then he’d no longer be cleared to enter the corridor to his suite, so they’d take that too. He’d end up in some filthy, germ-ridden barracks, surrounded by mutants and diseased traitors.

Intolerable. Unthinkable.13:48. In the fullness of time.He was still gazing blankly at the screen, where a text crawl

showed alerts and threats across Alpha Complex mixed with inspiring loyalty slogans.

+++ASH FROM TERRORIST BOMBING MAY CAUSE CANCER+++

+++SMILE CITIZEN++++++COMMIE FORCES ATTACK OUTER DEFENSES OF

ESA SECTOR++++++THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND+++But he read not a word. He needed something to stop Delevan-I

eviscerating him. He needed to shift the blame, or spin the whole debacle so he wound up looking like a hero. He needed to get inside Delevan’s head. He needed a miracle.

“I shall give you time to focus on the upcoming meeting,” said Celeste, rising. “Psychological experiments suggest optimum productivity in a meeting is achievable only if all participants have adequate time to prepare and visualize their goals.”


“Prepare visualize,” Granville muttered. A thought struck. “How close is TraceRoute to completion?”

“All the major subsystems are in place.” Even in casual conversation, Celeste spoke in bullet points. “The sniffer reads the target’s data exhaust—network presence, reading history, statistically significant words in surveillance files—and runs it all through the psych profiler to model the subject’s major fear-triggers and paranoid tendencies.

“If you brought more Mould-B-Gone Quik-Kleen Spray this month than last month, you probably have a fungus problem in your quarters. That makes you measurably more attentive to rumors and news about mutagenic spores, sentient boot fungus, vatslime spills—and we can use that. If we don’t want you to go down a corridor, but can’t order you not to go down that corridor without giving away sensitive information, we just let slip a targeted rumor about how that corridor is warm and moist and fungal.”

Miracle, miracle. “Problems?”Celeste crossed her arms. “We still have some security holes in

the current implementation, but they can be fixed. The major issue remaining is dealing with crossover, where the tailored threats for multiple individuals contradict each other. We’re working on automating ambiguity and procedurally-generated sinister inferences. And—other things,” she added darkly.

“But it works on individuals?”“Yes. The operator identifies a targets and specifies a desired

result. The system will extrapolate the target’s psychological levers from the trail left online, then automatically generate threats to push those levers in the appropriate direction. In testing, it almost always generates better-than-chance results, and effective changes in target behavior 69% of the time.”

“Only 69%?” He looked at the clock. 13:51.“That’s four times the average success rates for same-stage

R&D projects.” She shrugged. “We’re still working on it. You can, of course, review the prototype from your console.”

A 69% chance. Better than nothing. He logged in to the TraceRoute server. “The psychological lever manipulation—in the lab, you do that with videos and subliminal messaging. What’s used in the field?”


“We’re experimenting with multiple vectors. For higher-clearance citizens, we can simply float faked news reports and citizen alerts through our usual channels, and count on sophisticated targets to pull them in unwittingly, via their usual data tools. We’re still working on solutions for the lower clearances. Individually targeted subliminals have proven problematic—assuming you don’t want to drive citizens into a psychotic fugue state.”

Could anyone tell the difference? Irrelevant—he cared about one vengeful INDIGO. “So, I specify the target, whatever the behavior I want, and TraceRoute automatically comes up with threats that’ll make him do what I want?”

“Yes.”13:53. “How long does it take to build a profile?”Celeste sounded distracted. “It depends on how much data

exhaust is available for sampling. On average, two to four hours.”No! Vatslime! Could he stall Delevan-I for two to four hours?

Impossible. Delevan was a stickler for punctuality. Missing a meeting by 15 minutes would be just as bad as harboring a traitor; missing a meeting by two hours was an express transbot to termination.

“But we’ve already started the profiling process,” Celeste added. “The TraceRoute database includes many high-clearance targets in this sector.”

Granville carefully angled one monitor away from Celeste and ran a search for Delevan-I.

MATCH FOUND.Miracle. “Celeste, you can go.”13:54.

—————The Computer, in its infinite electric wisdom, allocates six (6) clones to every citizen—a Prime body and five backups. In the unlikely event that a citizen is lasered, disintegrated, poisoned, squished, electrocuted, deep fried, terminally polarized, exposed to toxic waste, eaten by giant radioactive mutant cockroaches, or otherwise fatally inconvenienced, the citizen’s memories are transferred at the moment of death to the next vatgrown clone


in line. This procedure is entirely safe and never leaves lasting psychological scars.

Higher-clearance citizens are by definition even more valuable to Alpha Complex, so The Computer allocates them extra clones. Unfortunately, after the sixth clone, a mysterious phenomenon sets in—the technical term is replicative fading, colloquially called drift. Both genetic code and personality engrams degrade during the cloning procedure. When the replacement clone is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, the drift produces conspicuous genetic defects—a sign of potential deviance and danger.

On Granville’s main screen, Delevan-I-IYX-14 looked dissatisfied—or certain of his facial sections did. No one element of Delavan’s face was anything other than perfect, but they didn’t fit together. One eye fixed Granville with a basilisk glare; the other wandered and blinked at random. When he inhaled, his nose whistled perceptibly. His pearly white teeth were just a little too small for his mouth, giving the impression he was eternally sucking on something bitter.

“Granville-B!” he croaked. “So happy. I’m sure this will be a brief formality. Just a few ticks to box, you know.”

Granville, seated at the console, moved the keyboard out of the camera’s line of sight. “I’d like to start off by identifying areas of interdepartmental synergy so that this inquiry can ultimately be a learning experience,” said Granville’s mouth. His mouth went on to spout lots of other buzzwords and enthusiastic management code words. He didn’t listen. On another window, he was still elbow-deep in the TraceRoute interface, learning what was where. User-friendliness was not a hallmark of Celeste’s designs.

He had already selected Delevan-I as his target. After staring at a list of “desired actions” for five minutes, he’d figured out these were choices he himself, Granville, wanted Delevan to make. Now he was translating the options from Celeste-speak to Human: Aversion, Deprioritization, Intensification, Pursuit (“specify degree”), Suspicion, Trust (“not currently functional”), and something inscrutably christened Widgetization. He chose Aversion.

“So, this traitor, Beatrice-Y.” On the main screen, Delevan picked up a printout. Granville noticed Delevan had no


fingernails. His hand looked like an ill-fitting pink surgical glove. “Rather embarrassing she got a place in such a sensitive department, isn’t it? Questions are being asked, you know. How will this impact the sections you’re supposed to be concealing?” Delevan licked his lips, and a trail of drool ran down the corner of his mouth.

“In the absence of data,” Granville heard his own mouth saying, “our partners may assume this is simply one more false-flag story we planted.” Another dialog box popped up on his second screen, asking what topic he wanted to “sensitize” for Delevan.

>BEATRICE-Y, he typed.12,043 MATCHES FOUND.Every citizen has a unique identifier, name—clearance—sector

of origin—clone number. He hadn’t given the TraceRoute system Beatrice’s full identifier, so it threw up every “Beatrice.” He couldn’t recall Beatrice-Y’s sector of origin or number, so he typed >BEATRICE-Y-***-* and hit SENSITIZE.

The system whirred. An eyeball icon rolled around while the server thought about his request.

“I mean,” Delevan was saying, “what’s the point of a whole department set up to hide things behind scary fake threats if the Commies already have a mole in it? It’s simply not cost-effective.” His left eye beamed hate rays at Granville through the screen. The other eye blinked feverishly.

“Beatrice-Y was an isolated incident, she never had access to any information above YELLOW Clearance, and all obfuscations are GREEN or higher.” Granville checked his secondary monitor. The TraceRoute system was running, drawing on whatever horrors it inferred from Delevan’s data exhaust, wrapping them around Beatrice-Y, and using them to bludgeon Delevan.

Granville tapped into the data stream going to the Alpha Complex news feeds, and his screen filled with a litany of falsified news alerts and rumors.

+++CAPTURED TRAITOR HAD TIES TO CIRCULEX, SAYS INTSEC+++

+++IS INTSEC ALREADY AFTER CIRCULEX LEADERS?+++

+++YOUNG WOMEN BEING CORRUPTED IN GREATER NUMBERS+++


+++WHY IS CIRCULEX HUNTING PEOPLE NAMED “BEATRICE”?+++

He couldn’t see any connection to Delavan—he’d never heard the name “Circulex”—but the search must have unearthed some link deep in the data.

“Well—that—where there’s one traitor, there’s probably—treason—” Delevan trailed off as he looked offscreen, presumably at the same stream of alerts. Beads of sweat appeared in patches on his forehead.

“Very wise, sir.”“Treasonous—treason.” An expression of horror crossed

the sections of Delevan’s face that could express things. “One moment, please.” He leaned offscreen.

Granville thought this was all going rather well. A few more hints, a little more dark foreboding, and Delevan would be too terrified to cause trouble for ThreatObs. TraceRoute worked remarkably well. He’d have to keep an eye on Celeste. She was too valuable to lose, and too clever to be trusted.

A notification window popped up, informing him an IntSec InfoSec Officer wanted to talk to him. He’d never heard of “InfoSec,” but Internal Security reshuffled itself seemingly every few hours. Still, this was hardly the time. He clicked REJECT CALL.

Immediately the screen flashed blue: SECURITY OVERRIDE.A BLUE IntSec officer appeared on a third monitor. He had a

long face, hollow cheeks, high forehead, and black hair slicked back. His ice-blue eyes were striking, and a scar split one thin eyebrow. “I’m Amparo-B, IntSecInfoSecO First Class. Are you—” He checked a printout. “—Granville-B-GCH-3, head of Threat Obstruction?”

“Threat Obfuscation.”“Ah, yes. As part of Internal Security’s ongoing Information

Security Initiative, ‘Eve is a Commie Mutant Traitor and other cyberwar scenarios,’ we’re conducting random sweeps of high-level consoles.”

“This isn’t really a good time. I’m in a meeting.”Amparo-B learned forward. His knife-like nose seemed to split

the screen. “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sure the Commie Mutant Traitors will be equally respectful if you tell them that you’re busy. ‘Oh,


we’ll come back tomorrow to steal your data and conquer Alpha Complex,’ they’ll say. ‘When’s convenient for you?’ For shame, Granville-B! A citizen in your position should be ultra-vigilant when it comes to information security! I’ll just make a note here.” He picked up an ink stamp marked ESCALATE.

“Wait!” A second unwanted IntSec investigation would bury him. “What do you need from me?”

“I’ve got a few issues to discuss first. Let’s review standard security protocols.”

Delevan returned. His quavering voice echoed out of one set of speakers, while Amparo spoke out of another set. Granville muted the speakers and kept smiling as he groped around his desk for two sets of earbuds. He plugged one set into each audio channel, then listened to one bud from each set.

He tried to parse the stereo conversations. Delevan complained about the lack of information about Beatrice’s contacts and co-conspirators. He used phrases like “expanding corruption,” “circles of malign influence,” and “arrest everyone!” Meanwhile, Amparo droned on about information security and trust issues. Fortunately, neither caller actually wanted to interact with him. His main role in the conversations was occasionally saying “yes, I understand,” “of course,” or “that’s good” when it seemed plausible in both contexts at once.

TraceRoute beeped, and Delevan reacted with horror. “She knew about—! Granville-B, I don’t know what sort of spy operation you were running in there, but it ends now. I’m recommending Threat Obfuscation be suspended and all staff be referred to Internal Security for loyalty assessment and re-cognitive therapy.” His fury triggered a coughing fit. Delevan coughed through his nose.

It’s pushed him too far. Time to dial back. Granville muted the feed from Amparo-B and quickly shut down the TraceRoute stream. “Delevan-I, I, I—I think that’s an overreaction. Consider this from a Threat Obfuscation perspective. If we haul off everyone on the suspicion Beatrice-Y knew more than we know she knew, then any spies would realize she knew, or was close to knowing, something important. However, if we conduct a small-scale covert investigation—I could run my own investigation—then we can determine if there’s any real threat—to Circulex.”


Delevan caught his breath. “I—all right. I expect a full report within 24 hours, understand?” The connection cut out.

Granville exhaled with relief. He’d learned of the whole Delevan issue, come up with a plan, and handled it all within 30 minutes, and all without leaving his apartment. He flipped back to Amparo-B and unmuted the call. The officer was in mid-sentence. “—on CX-GLSI433—that’s Delevan-I’s console.”

“Indeed,” Granville said automatically. He paged his jackobot butler, intending to order a celebratory can of chilled Bouncy Bubble Beverage, suitably sterilized. Belatedly he realized the cop had said Delevan-I.

“I’m sorry,” Granville said smoothly, “I was momentarily consumed with ecstatic joy at how wonderful life is here in Alpha Complex, and missed what you just said. Please repeat.”

“Certainly. I was just observing we routinely monitor all high-level consoles, and we’re detecting a data tap on CX-GLSI433—that’s Delevan-I’s console.”

“A—data tap.” Celeste had said the TraceRoute system wasn’t secure.

“Yes. An illegal hacking attempt. I’m following it now.” Amparo-B stroked his chin. “Hmm—it’s bouncing from relay to relay. Give me a moment.”

If Delevan-I finds out I hacked his console, I’m finished. “Are you sure it’s not a data feed beyond your security clearance? Maybe you’re mistaking it for something else.”

“No, it’s definitely a hacking attempt. The sniffer says the tap originates from—let’s see—‘Threat Obfuscation.’ Wait, that’s your department, isn’t it?”

Granville swallowed hard. “Yes.” How sloppy were you, Celeste? “But are you sure it’s ours?”

“Hmm. It’s certainly going through Threat Obfuscation. It’s bouncing through a subnode. I can’t tell if the tap starts at the subnode and bounces into Threat Obfuscation, or vice versa. Oh well, I’ll forward this to Adjustment & Enforcement. It’ll give them a chance to field-test their new Suggestion Truncheons. Thank you for your cooperation, have a nice daycycle.”

“Wait! This could all be a glitch. Let me check the Threat Obfuscation systems—” and erase all the evidence “—before we jump to any conclusions.”


Amparo considered. “Someone would also have to investigate that subnode. It’s at Room 25, Corridor 54, Level 4C in this sector. Here, look.”

A BLUE-Clearance map window showed a routine corridor. Granville zoomed out. The subnode was close to his suite, and to Threat Obfuscation as well. “We can handle that.”

“And I’ll have to file a report within the hour.”“I’ll handle it right away.”Amparo nodded. “I’m hugging a reactor for you on this. I’m

not supposed to ignore protocol. Make sure you find that data tap. One hour.”

The connection closed, leaving Granville alone.He took a moment to breathe. Blissful, sterile solitude.Call Celeste, send her down to the subnode, ensure the data

tap can’t be traced back to Threat Obfuscation. Better yet, plant evidence framing someone else, maybe those bastards over at Memetic Cognition—

He froze. Celeste wants my job. If she knows I used TraceRoute on Delevan, she’ll report me. I’ll have to hide the evidence—

He pulled his knees to his chin. He hugged them tight.—myself.

—————The doorbell was supportive. He’d programmed it that way.

“You can do it, boss! One step at a time!”The door yawned open. Outside was Alpha Complex. Endless

corridors, cafeterias, fetid barracks crammed with disease-ridden clones. Drug-addled, brainless clones.

Granville checked his pockets: disinfectant spray, HappiKleen Wipes, hand sanitizer.

He took a step.He’d clawed his way up the ranks to escape his fellow citizens.

Endless years as an INFRARED in the food vats, pranks and bullying and incessant meaningless jabber. It spurred him to fight for advancement. By reporting a co-worker’s repeated breaches of hygiene regulations, he’d made RED. He wondered whether his complaint forms still existed somewhere—whether anyone could tell, now, he’d doctored them.

“You’re moving! Stay with it!”


A few more steps. Spray, wipes, sanitizer, still there.He’d reached ORANGE after a short tour of duty in the

Troubleshooters. Most tours of duty in the Troubleshooters were short, but Granville managed to get the rest of his team terminated before they left the briefing room. They’d forgotten to fill out Page 2 of the Experimental Equipment Combined Requisition Form and Rights Waiver—forgotten, because they never saw it. When they picked up their assigned experimental equipment, The Computer incinerated them.

Was there video, somewhere, that showed him pocketing that form?

“No, don’t back up, you were doing great!”Steps, steps. YELLOW Clearance—ah, his “YELLOW fever,”

when he realized every other citizen was a squelching, festering sac of flesh-eating microbes. He shared a small apartment with another YELLOW. He remembered long, sleepless nights, listening to the wheeze of the man’s breathing, to the slime shifting in his lungs, to the nigh-imperceptible pop of flaking skin cells. He’d paid an IntSec GREEN goon to plant evidence framing the guy as a traitor. Was that goon still alive? Had he ever told anyone, perhaps in an email?

“Go, go, go!”When they promoted him to GREEN Clearance and assigned

him his own apartment, he spent the first two days disinfecting every surface nonstop, until, in his bright haze of Wakey-Wakey pills, everything looked luminous. He’d felt so proud. Six years after that, he’d made BLUE and received this suite.

He hadn’t left it in eighteen months.“You know,” the doorbell observed, “you never turned my

safeties off. I’m still armed for lethal force. If that doesn’t motivate you—”

He jumped into the corridor and fumbled for the pills on his belt. Mixing happy pills and stress-relief helped, and also gave him a pleasant buzz. It relaxed his tongue so much he could barely speak, but he didn’t intend to speak to anyone. In an ideal Alpha Complex, he’d make it to the subnode without contact with any pestilent walking disease-bags.


He shuddered as a jet of hot air sprayed out of a nearby air vent. It stank of sweat from a million human petri dishes. His skin crawled. Billions of germs were moving into their new quarters.

Before leaving his suite, he’d memorized the route and watched a virtual walkthrough. Two corridors, a BLUE-Clearance elevator ride, and another corridor. His path took him past Threat Obfuscation, not that he intended to stop even to say hello.

It was the middle of a work-shift, so the corridors were relatively empty. He skirted past a knot of YELLOW technicians and a RED floor-polisher, sticking to the quieter high-clearance corridors. He held his breath as much as he could. Get to the subnode. Destroy the evidence. Go home and shower with bleach.

“Good afternoon, Granville-B.” Celeste-G stepped out into the corridor right in front of him. For her, that was the equivalent of waving; she had next to no body language of her own. “How did the meeting go with Delevan-I?”

“Exthellent.” His tongue really was relaxed. “Noth a thoblem athall.” He could feel her breath on his face. It disgusted him.

“Are you heading to the office? We can discuss work-related matters as we walk.”

“No! I’m gointh to—thomthing elth.” Lying with a dead tongue was tricky. “I’ll thalk to you thomorrowthycle. You’re dithmithed! Dithmithed, I thay!”

He hurried past her. Glancing back, he saw she wasn’t following him, but was instead making a call on her PDC. That could become a record of his presence.

Data exhaust (he thought, to distract himself from his rotting flesh) was basically poor hygiene. Just as a citizen exhales a trail of germ-ridden warm air—just as oily, bacteria-rich fingers leave a mark—just as skin cells flake off the decaying husk of the human form—any electronic transaction leaves forensic clues. Accessing a digital file smeared it with bits, just like handling a paper form without gloves covered it with invisible slime. Really, what TraceRoute did to Delevan was his own fault for not wiping down his digital presence.

The BLUE elevator was unusually crowded. Three other blue-jumpsuited citizens crammed into the capsule, looking worried and nervous. A chemical odor hung around them, a pungent toxic smell that made Granville’s eyes water. He did his best


to ignore them as they discussed something technical about biological compounds. This was even worse than he’d expected. Low-clearance citizens could be plague-ridden clones, but these BLUEs made plagues. Who knew what genetically engineered monstrosity might be wafting invisibly into Granville’s pores? Another handful of pills made the situation bearable.

The elevator disgorged all four of them into Corridor 54. As Granville left the elevator, he noticed his fingerprint on the control panel. He was leaving a physical trail, a biological exhaust some enemy could use to track him. He wiped it off with his sleeve, but that just transferred the grease to his uniform—and anyway, how many similar clues had he left? A plague tailored from the DNA in his exfoliated skin cells could target and destroy him from within. TraceRoute proved there was no digital secrecy—how long before someone created a biological equivalent? Every second he remained outside his sterile quarters brought his termination closer!

It took an eternity for the other three BLUEs to vanish around the corner. He swallowed the rest of his pills and licked the wrapper, then realized he’d impregnated the wrapper with salivary exhaust. He reluctantly shoved it in a pocket and, careful to hold his breath as much as possible, padded down the corridor in search of Room 25.

The blue door was propped open. Beyond, a chamber of horrors. Chemicals bubbled in vats; misshapen human corpses leered out of steel canisters; lumps of flesh sizzled on electric scanner-grids. Things with spikes and saws and syringes loomed over the entombed cadavers. Towering banks of computers lined the walls, blinkenlights blinking. Granville guessed the place was an R&D research facility, or maybe an IntSec torture chamber. Neither possibility cheered him.

In the distance, beyond the cloning tanks, he could hear muffled voices. He wasn’t alone. He drew his laser pistol and peered into the darkness of the laboratory. Sinister shapes lurked out there, illuminated by the sickly glow of the computer banks and the occasional flash of arc lighting from Tesla coils.

“Hi there!” One of the spiky syringe things—a docbot—rolled towards Granville. Its spindly arms were tipped with bloodstained surgical tools. It waved cheerily, splattering red droplets across


his suit. “I’m DocBot XC-543. You look like you need elective surgery!”

“Noth!” he whispered. “I mean, no!”“Oh.” Its mechanical arms drooped with disappointment. “Then

how can I help you?”“What ith thith plath?”“Are you sure you don’t want a new tongue? We’ve got loads

to spare.” The docbot gestured towards one cadaver. “That one’s pretty fresh.”

The cadaver looked oddly familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He certainly didn’t know anyone with a melted face. “No thank you.”

“I’ll wipe it off before I graft it. Come on. A new tongue means exciting new flavors.”

Granville raised his laser pistol.“Okay,” said the bot. “Welcome to Circulex Genetic Research.”The muffled voices got louder. It sounded like an argument.“Please ignore the mysterious meeting. There are absolutely

no secret societies meeting here. That’s just, er—a plausible explanation. Look, I’m not programmed for this sort of thing, all right? I’m strictly experimental surgeries and dismemberment. They told me to watch the door and make sure they weren’t disturbed.”

“Thtay back,” Granville said. “Or I’ll thoot.”The bot scooted back. “Technically, the Five Laws of Robotics

(Revised) state that a fifth-law threat like yours shouldn’t take precedence over a fourth-law order—but as long as you don’t disturb anyone, I guess there’s no need for anyone to shoot me.” It waggled its arms in a conciliatory fashion, quite a trick for an abattoir on wheels.

Granville’s PDC rang, and he dropped his laser pistol in surprise. He fumbled for the phone. The pistol skittered away across the floor under a table covered with organs.

It was Amparo-B. He wondered how the IntSec agent got his phone number. “Hello?”

“That data tap is active again.” The cop sounded panicky. “You’ve got to shut it down now!”

“What’th it doing?”“It’s grabbing the Threat Obfuscation database!”


But the data tap comes from Threat Obfuscation, thought Granville. Was Amparo-B misreading the computer readout? Or was—No! Oh no! Circulex was a terrorist cell! This room was a bioweapons research facility! They wanted the database to hide their terrorist schemes. If they had the database, they could turn the department—his department—into a weapon of terror. He wouldn’t know what was real and what was fake. Anything could become poisonous, tainted, diseased!

He wasn’t sure if it was the pills, the stress of being outside, or some misplaced devotion to duty, but he threw himself forward across that gore-laden table, scrabbling for his pistol. He twisted to aim the gun at the docbot again. “There’th a data tap in here! I need to thut it down!”

Wordlessly, the docbot pointed to one of the computers. A thick network cable snaked out of it and to the wall.

Granville noticed the chanting had stopped. They—whoever they were—were almost here.

His pistol spat six bolts of lethal blue light. The machine exploded. The lights flickered, and one by one, all the banks of computers whirred and slowed into silence.

“Why” asked the docbot, “did you just destroy all the boss’s medical data?”

An icy chill ran down Granville’s spine, then reversed course and raced up to his brain. At some point he’d bitten his tongue badly. “Medical data?”

“Yep. All our experiments in reversing genetic degradation and replicative fading—all gone. Personally, I’m happy about that, because I’m programmed to enjoy dissection and experimentation. Other people, though—I think they’re going to be annoyed.”

Delevan-I stepped out of the shadows. One eye blazed with fury. The other watered peevishly. Behind him, burly figures leveled big guns.

“I can explain thith,” Granville said, even as he realized he really, really couldn’t.

—————At an illegal INFRARED market in a parking garage two sectors away, Amparo-B dumped his stolen blue IntSec uniform. From


a locker he retrieved his yellow jumpsuit. A professionally uninquisitive evidence-disposal specialist used an atomic shredder to reduce his bootleg PDC to component atoms and spew the vapor into the air vents. With it went the only copy of his features, created by untraceable illicit facial-manipulation software. Just like that, Amparo vanished forever.

Celeste waited for Jerome in the cafe, six sectors over from the Threat Obfuscation office. The chances of encountering a snooping co-worker or spy were remote, but they still took precautions. They sat at different tables, glanced at each other sidelong, and communicated through their own system of coded gestures and finger taps.

“Granville terminated,” Celeste tapped. “New clone is ORANGE. Lucky he didn’t get erased.”

Another obstacle removed from their path—two, counting Delevan. Without Circulex, Delevan-I couldn’t reverse his genetic degradation. Celeste was already the obvious candidate to take over the BLUE role heading of Threat Obfuscation. By the time Delevan succumbed to his mutations, she’d be in position to replace him.

Celeste had allowed herself a celebratory mug of CoffeeLyke. “The system worked.”

Not TraceRoute—her own system of analysis and cross-referencing. She’d built TraceRoute with deliberate flaws. Neither Celeste nor Jerome had any intention of handing over such a weapon to the true powers in Alpha Complex.

Jerome tapped, “Granville demotion means security camera not urgent.” The security camera in Granville’s office had caught Jerome meddling with the console, but that was the only remaining evidence of their scheme—and they could delete that at their leisure. Granville now lacked the security clearance to get into his own apartment, and his doorbell was merciless.

“Shouldn’t wait.” Celeste was right. TraceRoute proved even after the deletion, traces might remain. And with every clearance level they climbed, they drew closer to those who could use the traces against them—the Conspiracy.

But Jerome, as he chewed one of Granville’s licorice pastille, felt confident. They’d pledged to each other to bring down the sinister master manipulators of Alpha Complex. It had taken


them months to devise an attack on the hermetic Granville, but Celeste’s fake TraceRoute brought him down. Celeste had figured it out. She always figured out everyone.

As he looked at his friend, Jerome felt a moment of unease.She sipped her CoffeeLyke inscrutably.

—————What is the Conspiracy, and how do Celeste and Jerome fight it? Follow their search, their struggles, and their final revelation in PARANOIA novel S1 Reality Optional by Gareth Hanrahan. Published by Ultraviolet Books, it’s available where you obtained this book. “Data Exhaust” was inspired by one line from a flashback in Chapter 5 of Reality Optional: “A week later, the manager of Threat Obfuscation joined Beatrice-Y in the Happy Daze Therapy Center.”

KEEP READING in this book for FREE previews of Reality Optional and the other Ultraviolet Books PARANOIA novels.


About PARANOIA and Ultraviolet Books

Allen Varney

In the early 1980s a New York City roleplaying gamer, Dan Gelber, conceived Alpha Complex as a setting for his tabletop RPG players. Game designers Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan encouraged Dan to detail the setting. From Dan’s pages of notes Eric and Greg created a game, and editor and developer Ken Rolston added a darkly humorous tone. West End Games published PARANOIA in (appropriately) 1984 to instant success.

PARANOIA inverted the traditional cooperative play of most games by casting the player characters as Troubleshooters in service to an insane Computer, charged with hunting traitors—mutants and members of secret societies. Each character was, unbeknownst to the other characters, both a mutant and a society member. It was a game of backstabbing and betrayal, where each player frantically tried to accumulate evidence and get the other traitors terminated before they did the same to him.

The game earned its greatest fame for its implementation of the color-coded security clearance system. Only the Gamemaster, Clearance ULTRAVIOLET, was permitted to know the rules. If a players, who was usually of lowly RED Clearance, ever displayed knowledge of the rules—as for instance by arguing with the GM—that was demonstrably treason, and the other players were therefore entitled to shoot his character on the spot.

PARANOIA revolutionized roleplaying. The first really successful comedic RPG (over 100,000 copies sold), it was among the earliest games to tailor its rules to achieve a specific emotional atmosphere—a tensely hilarious satire in the vein of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and the works of Philip K. Dick. Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil, which appeared later, conjures the same mood. As the support line’s inspired line editor, Ken Rolston guided to publication


almost a dozen brilliant supplements and adventures, along with the line’s high-water mark, the much-loved second edition (1987). In these works, ornamented by the quintessential PARANOIA artist, Jim Holloway, the game’s tone moved to slapstick, the fast-moving frenetic play that remains the beloved Classic style.

When Ken left West End to work in computer games—he later became lead designer on Bethesda’s Morrowind and Oblivion—the PARANOIA support line slid rapidly in sales and quality. Managed by—how to put this tactfully?—people with different views of the game, it succumbed to a cancerous meta-plot, the “Secret Society Wars,” that culminated in The Computer crashing. For years, with each new, painfully unfunny adventure, fans said, “Well, it can’t get any worse than this.” And yet—

Finally, like a traitor after an Internal Security brainscrub, the later PARANOIA support line dwindled and vanished. Eric and Greg eventually recaptured rights to PARANOIA and arranged with another game publisher, Mongoose Publishing (Swindon, UK), to revive it.

Because I had co-written an early adventure (Send in the Clones, with Warren Spector), I got the happy assignment to update and expand Alpha Complex for the more paranoid era of 2004. From the first moment of my involvement—Day 1, Hour 1, Minute 1—and that of the many talented people who helped me, we intended to redeem PARANOIA and expunge the memory of its long, harrowing decline.

—————As much a psychological exercise as a game, PARANOIA had become a legend in the hobby. Over a decade after the last edition (1992), the game retained a devoted fan following in various web communities, especially the remarkable Paranoia-Live.net. Hundreds of P-L.net forum members showed passionate love for, and strong opinions about, the game.

I organized dozens of these fans as collaborators. I used every Web tool I could find: Paranoia-Live.net; a Wiki; and a development blog started by Greg Costikyan. Fans vetted the playtest rules and contributed lots of material, like coders on an open-source software project. It wasn’t really open-source; everyone knowingly surrendered their material to PARANOIA’s


owners, without hope of compensation. (The blog disclaimer read, “All your rights are belong to us. No bloody Creative Commons here! Bwahahaha!”) But they pitched in anyway, hoping they would benefit by getting an improved game. And it worked; the fans made the new edition incomparably better. It was a labor of love for all concerned, like a lot of open-source software. The experience itself was the reward.

Like an industrious scrubot, the 2004 Mongoose edition of PARANOIA cleansed the old game of excruciating pop-cult wackiness. PARANOIA is not wacky. In appropriately Orwellian fashion, we excised all the wacky West End meta-plot adventures from the historical record. They never happened. They are now un-products. References to them are treason.

The new PARANOIA re-introduced The Computer to a new generation of potential traitors. It offered much for longtime fans, and it had lots of new stuff too: a revised clone system, illegal black (INFRARED) markets, the Underplex, and a more capitalistic complex. Fans who thought they understood Alpha Complex felt off-balance once again, as is entirely appropriate.

PARANOIA remains the leading comedic RPG—and now there’s three times as much of it. The three Mongoose Publishing 25th Anniversary rulebooks are all written by former Mongoose staff designer Gareth Hanrahan and published in 2009-10. Each is a standalone independent game. Troubleshooters makes players the familiar RED-Clearance agents from previous editions. Internal Security uses much the same rules for investigations by GREEN and BLUE IntSec troopers, and High Programmers is an all-new game about the mysterious ULTRAVIOLETs who run Alpha Complex.

—————The owners and original designers of the RPG—Dan Gelber, Greg Costikyan, and Eric Goldberg—have granted me an ebook fiction license. The books are inexpensive, free of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and have new covers by fan-favorite PARANOIA artist Jim Holloway. The authors are all longtime writers for the RPG; one of the first novels, Reality Optional, is by the designer of the current 25th Anniversary edition, Gareth Hanrahan.


Though the game’s original publisher, West End Games, published two novels based on the RPG, the UV Books license doesn’t include those books nor any other early material. Ultraviolet Books is publishing all-new novels that have never been published in any form. The line aims for a tone different from the older picaresque, parodic laugh-fests. Our authors aim to write not just good PARANOIA books but good, smart science-fictional satire, telling well-plotted, coherent, and compelling adventure stories about interesting characters and situations.

In these books we’re hoping to continue a tradition of smart science fiction satire in the mode of Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, John Sladek, and Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth. In my view that tradition has subsided in recent decades. The audience is relatively small, and for a publishing conglomerate the finances don’t make sense. But for a small, scrappy band of High Programmers—on our own! backs to the wall! fighting The Man!—the business case is more plausible.

But it’s not about the business case, and it never has been. It’s about doing right by PARANOIA—rescuing it from its past, but more important, letting the idea become what it wants to be. We’re all helping as best we can.

—————The 2004 edition of the RPG introduced “play styles”—different ways to play the game to emphasize various kinds of atmosphere. The play styles included Classic (the original comedic style that made the game famous), Straight (a darker style emphasizing fear and ignorance), and Zap (freewheeling slapstick). The Ultraviolet Books PARANOIA ebooks take the same varied approach.

Gareth Hanrahan’s S1 Reality Optional is a Classic adventure with high-spirited firefights, Augmented Reality infoburn, and Transtube Pirates. Jerome-G, a bureaucrat in the Threat Obfuscation office, charged with inventing fake dangers to disguise real ones, gets in trouble when his imagined threats somehow turn real. (For more about Jerome, see “Data Exhaust” in this book.)

My own “Troubleshooter Rules” trilogy, starting with T1 Stay Alert, tells a Straight satiric story of intricate Troubleshooter intrigue. The first book’s backdrop is a struggle between Free


Enterprise mafia gangs for control of the ultimate secret-society meeting space, the Clean Rooms. (This book’s “Rule Zero” is a prelude to Stay Alert.)

WJ MacGuffin’s Y1 Traitor Hangout is the most light-hearted of these three, a Wodehousean comedy with lots of laughs. The heroes are Clarence-Y, a “Yellowpants” efficiency auditor with encyclopedic knowledge of The Computer’s mandates, and his pet mouse, Ignatius. Too bad Clarence is oblivious to pretty much everything else, including the plot by two corrupt Internal Security officers to frame him as the notorious Death Leopard criminal, Superstar Pirate. (Clarence and the mouse debut in this book’s story “Hay Fever.”)

The roleplaying line has pushed PARANOIA in new directions and broadened the range of experiences players associate with the game. The Ultraviolet Books fiction line does the same. You’ll be amazed at all our different kinds of PARANOIA.

Still ahead: the second and third volumes of The Troubleshooter Rules trilogy (entitled Trust No One and Keep Your Laser Handy), new singleton books from other Famous Game Designers long associated with the RPG, and the further adventures of Clarence and his mouse. With any luck the PARANOIA line will continue for years before our eventual, inevitable termination.

—————Curious about those letter codes?

S = Singleton (a book unrelated to any others)T= The Troubleshooter RulesY = YellowpantsThis book, The Computer is Your Friend, is A for, of course,

“Anthology.”

—————KEEP READING in this book for FREE sample chapters from all the PARANOIA novels.


Backmatter

Published by Ultraviolet Books under Housing Preservation and Development & Mind Control Mandate HPPM 003.09/a, “Recruitment and Indoctrination of New Citizens Through Means Not Subject to Oversight or Review.”

Contact

Questions, comments? [email protected] up for our FREE (and spam-free) mailing list to get

discount codes, new fiction, and update notifications for your PARANOIA books: www.ultravioletbooks.com

You should also follow us on Twitter: @UVBooks and @Friend_Computer (don’t omit the underscore, citizen).

Twitter hashtag #uvbooksBecome a fan on Facebook: facebook.com/UVBooksJoin the PARANOIA fan community at Paranoia-Live.net:

www.paranoia-live.net

Acknowledgments

Cover by Michael Kerney: michaelkerney.comThanks to Lindsay Keay and Jim Hurley for text help.

About the authors

Gareth Hanrahan (“Data Exhaust”)I’m a writer and game designer based in Ireland. I’ve written more roleplaying game supplements than I can recall, including the new edition of the classic science fiction RPG Traveller. Licensed works include RPG adaptations of the Laundry Files novels, the Primeval TV show, Babylon 5, and Conan. While working for Mongoose Publishing, I contributed many books to the award-winning PARANOIA line and oversaw the three 25th Anniversary edition rulebooks: Troubleshooters, Internal Security, and High Programmers. Twitter: @Mytholder. Current projects: milkyfish.com


Greg Ingber (“Action Request,” “Market Research”)I contributed to several PARANOIA RPG supplements, starting with Extreme PARANOIA (2006). During my studies at Swarthmore College, I was once dragged into a shopping mall interrogation room and forced to evaluate mouthwash advertisements. This experience inspired the story “Market Research.” I write and perform comedy, record and edit audio, and generally try to keep myself out of trouble. Twitter: @joeyheadset.

WJ MacGuffin (“Hay Fever”)I’m a writer, game designer, educator, and nerdcore fan based in Illinois, USA. I’ve written for the PARANOIA RPG, including the supplements WMD, STUFF, and Criminal Histories, under my real name, Bill O’Dea. It was quite a shock to discover another educator in the US named Bill O’Dea—hence the new name. I’ve also written for Cubicle 7’s Laundry RPG. I founded my own game company, Happy Bishop Games, and released my first RPG, Triune, to great reviews and poor sales. Twitter: @wjmacguffin. Happy Bishop Games: happybishop.com.

Allen Varney (“Rule Zero”)I’m a writer and game designer based in Austin, Texas, USA. I’ve published seven books, including two previous gaming tie-in novels, as well as two dozen tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) supplements and nearly 300 articles, columns, and reviews. I’ve also written for many computer games, including the story and cutscenes for Disney’s Epic Mickey (2010). In 2004 I designed a new edition of PARANOIA for Mongoose Publishing, then packaged over a dozen books in its associated product line. Now the PARANOIA owners have licensed me to package the Ultraviolet Books fiction line. Twitter: @AllenVarney. Home page: www.allenvarney.com.

More PARANOIA fiction

Available from the same site where you found this book (assuming you aren’t a traitor who downloaded it illegally).


KEEP READING in this book for free preview chapters from all these novels.

S1 Reality Optional by Gareth Hanrahan

Conspiracy theorist Jerome-G can’t figure out why the fake dangers he’s been devising for the Threat Obfuscation office are suddenly turning real. Then he finds a pair of experimental Augmented Reality glasses that show him the truth behind everything—and leaves him more confused than ever.

T1 Stay Alert by Allen Varney

Book 1 of The Troubleshooter Rules. Fletcher-R-JSV-1 was thrilled when The Computer recruited him to become a Troubleshooter. But Troubleshooter Team Rotisserie-459’s first mission—to return a stolen helpbot, or “clippy”—is already going wrong. Aided only by the experimental alertness drug called Leery, Fletcher must complete his mission before Fletcher’s treacherous teammates find out he’s a traitor.

Y1 Traitor Hangout by WJ MacGuffin

On assignment for Internal Security, hyper-oblivious Central Processing Unit “Yellowpants” efficiency expert Clarence-Y must impersonate notorious criminal “Superstar Pirate” and infiltrate four secret societies in one day. Can he survive? Never mind that—can he possibly avoid violating Mandate ISTM 440.95/a?

Changelog

Original version 2012.02.07-01Version 2012.02.11: Minor corrections to “Rule Zero,” “Action Request,” and “Data Exhaust”; corrected Backmatter credits; font corrections.

This is version 2012.02.15: Corrected number of Emergency Bathroom Break Requisition form. (Hey, that’s important!)


Not sure if you have the latest version? Sign up for our FREE mailing list to get PARANOIA update notifications and discount codes: http://ultravioletbooks.com


FREE preview: Reality Optional

Chapters 1-4 from the full-length PARANOIA novel by Gareth Hanrahan

Jerome-G had a good job at the Threat Obfuscation Department in Alpha Complex. He invented false threats to cover up true dangers. It made perfect sense, once he understood The Computer’s idea of “true” is entirely false.

Suddenly Jerome’s fake menaces are turning real. Rogue robots are conspiring for independence. There’s a pirate ship in the transport tubes. And the real-est threat is the powerful executive Ellister-V, who means to dispose of Jerome permanently.

To evade a fatal reassignment as reactor shielding, Jerome volunteers for The Computer’s elite service unit. Troubleshooters heroically defend Alpha Complex from traitors. Too bad Troubleshooters are often traitors themselves.

If Jerome’s teammates knew the equipment they seek is right in his pocket, they’d kill him. His experimental Augmented Reality goggles reveal the truth behind everything—and he’s more confused than ever.

1: Jerome-G’s quarters

Jerome-G suspected his bed was plotting against him.As a GREEN-Clearance citizen, he was a junior executive,

with quarters to match. His rickety YELLOW-Clearance bunk bed had been upgraded to a sleeping tube, a plastic coffin built into the wall of his cramped apartment. The mattress squelched when he lay on it, supposedly reconfiguring itself to maximize his comfort and improve his posture. In fact it frisked him for concealed items as he slept, insinuating memory-foam cilia into every crack. Overhead, an aerosol drug dispenser fired Wakey-Wakey gas in the morningcycle and Sleepy-Sleep gas at 23:00. A camera watched as he slept. Jerome had little problem with that; if someone wanted to watch a short, spindle-thin, inconspicuous nebbish lying prone for seven hours, fine. What bothered him was the raised pillow—he suspected it hid a microphone so They could listen to him talking in his sleep.


Soon after Celeste-B promoted Jerome to GREEN, he’d discovered he could remove one of the plastic panels that lined the inner surface of the sleeping tube, revealing a convenient little hollow. Better, if he turned on his side and curled up like a fetus in a clone tank, he could shield the hollow from the camera. He used the hollow to store his notes. But in the last few weeks he’d been struck by a worrying thought—what if the bed’s designers knew he’d use the hollow to hide treasonous material? Had they deliberately created that space in the bed, an all-too-convenient hiding place that could be searched for contraband and seditious propaganda when the supposedly trusted GREEN official was away at work? Had he fallen into their trap?

Even if Internal Security broke in and found the notes, Jerome told himself, everything’s in code.

Well, almost everything—the earliest notes, the ones Jerome wrote to himself when he was a Junior Citizen or an INFRARED, were plaintext. Back then, his biggest worry wasn’t detection by Internal Security, but having his memories erased. The Computer dictated heavy medication for lower-clearance citizens, so everyone below ORANGE existed in a blissed-out haze. Back then, he wrote notes to himself to preserve those moments of blazing insight that seemed to come only to him.

“THE COMPUTER IS NOT MY FRIEND” was the very first note, written in childish block capitals on the back of a Combat Gum wrapper. Another was “Secret society agendas blind you to the true conspiracy,” scribbled in a panic after one of Jerome’s co-workers in the Food Vats tried to recruit him into the Sierra Club by showing him a cockroach. He’d refused—even back then, as an INFRARED, he’d worked out that Alpha Complex was not the entire world, that there was something outside the endless corridors, offices, factories, cafeterias, reactors, and confession booths of The Computer’s underground utopia. Alpha Complex was not the world, but the great secret had to be somewhere within these walls. Why else was everyone here?

“The Deluded seek to defy the System, but their Defiance is simply Compliance with the Metasystem.” That note dated from soon after he was promoted out of the Food Vats into an office job and RED Clearance. At each clearance, the drug regimen became more subtle, and you could think more


clearly. For Jerome—rather, Jerome-R—RED meant a series of pretentious, sonorous observations with Far Too Many Capitals. He’d realized pretty much everyone else was a believer in one deluded secret society or another—no one was perfectly loyal to The Computer’s regime—but everyone’s treasons, pulling this way and that, pulled the whole system into an equilibrium born of a hundred conflicting conspiracies—all designed, he was convinced, to distract people like him from the true manipulators behind the scenes. Or, as he started writing it at that time, the Great Conspiracy.

Celeste spotted his talent and pulled him up through the ranks. She would have told him keeping these notes, even coded notes, was an unacceptable risk. Sentimentality would get him killed.

He stuffed the notes back into the hollow and closed it tight. Perhaps, if they were found, he could claim someone broke into his quarters and planted the notes. Or maybe he should plant fake notes among the real ones, to throw them off the scent—but then, if he got brainscrubbed, would he be able to tell which were fake and which were real? Celeste would have told him to trust his instincts, but—

The alarm squealed on his Personal Digital Companion, jolting him out of his reverie. He opened the sleeping tube and padded four steps across the apartment to the Refresh-O-Matic. In its parabolic camera lens his nose looked even bigger, his weak chin weaker, his receding hairline recedier than reality. A tiny readout blinked 05:46. He thumbed the CoffeeLyke button.

ATTENTION, CITIZEN JEROME-G-NSO-1. THIS IS YOUR FRIEND, THE COMPUTER.

The Computer’s voice filled the whole room with electric-honey tones, precisely calibrated to reassure and to inspire.

“Friend Computer!” In the darkness Jerome-G snapped to attention. He looked up at the security camera above the door. The Computer controlled every aspect of life in Alpha Complex.

IT IS 05:47 HOURS, CITIZEN. YOUR ASSIGNED WAKE-UP TIME IS 06:00. WHY ARE YOU AWAKE?


Claiming insomnia meant a battery of psychological tests and medication. Telling the truth would get him killed. A lie bubbled up instinctively.

“Thank you for your concern, Friend Computer. I’m happy to report I had an idea related to my assigned work duties while sleeping, and wanted to write down the insight.”

YOUR SHIFT AT THREAT OBFUSCATION DOES NOT BEGIN UNTIL 07:30 HOURS, CITIZEN. IN THE FUTURE, RESTRICT SPONTANEOUS IDEAS TO YOUR ASSIGNED WORK SHIFT TIMES.

“Yes, Friend Computer.”

FAILURE TO DO SO IMPEDES WORKFLOW. UNREGISTERED CREATIVITY IS A CLEAR INDICATOR OF SEDITION. RISING BEFORE YOUR ASSIGNED WAKE-UP TIME RESULTS IN FATIGUE. YOUR WAKEY-WAKEY AND SLEEPY-SLEEP DOSAGES WILL BE ADJUSTED ACCORDINGLY.

“Thank you, Friend Computer.”

HAVE A GOOD DAYCYCLE, CITIZEN, STARTING IN 12 MINUTES.

The CoffeeLyke dispenser disgorged a brownish slurry of hot liquid and stringy half-dissolved nodules of freeze-dried chemical gunk. It tasted marginally worse than it looked, but it shook Jerome’s brain to full wakefulness. It also caused heart palpitations and liver scarring. Everyone in Alpha Complex was assigned five or more clone replacement bodies, and rumor claimed the unhealthy side effects of CoffeeLyke and other FunFoods accounted for a good 20% of all required replacements.

Citizen-on-citizen violence accounted for another 35%. That statistic wandered nervously around Jerome’s mind as the doorbell rang.

Outside, the corridor was still dark, lit only by green floor stripes and the flashing LEDs of scrubots as they swept for litter and


bloodstains. Three shadowy figures crammed into the doorway of Jerome’s apartment, out of sight of the hallway cameras. When Jerome opened the door, they tumbled in.

They called themselves RED Roy, ORANGE Roy, and YELLOW Roy—obviously fake names, although Jerome suspected ORANGE Roy was stupid enough to use his real name. They worked in some low-clearance manual labor section that required hulking muscles and limited social skills. Each of them wore a tool belt with pliers, vices, power drills, and spiky metal bits that would make an Internal Security Information Volunteering Enhancer jealous. All three belonged to the secret society Free Enterprise.

Jerome appreciated Free Enterprise. That conspiracy—that mafia—ran the underground economy of Alpha Complex. They could get you anything for the right price, or—if you let your guard down—they could get the right price for your possessions and internal organs. Though he suspected the secret masters of Free Enterprise had a higher purpose, low-rank thugs—like Roy-R, Roy-O and Roy-Y—were easily manipulated with the promise of cash. It was absurd—as if mere money meant anything in a controlled economy—but they were useful to Jerome, and GREEN Clearance conferred a good salary.

“Have you got it?” he asked.The Roys grinned at him. Something was wrong. They were

too confident. He wished he’d taken his Computer-issue laser pistol to bed with him, instead of leaving it hanging on the wall beside the door, on the wrong side of the three increasingly-intimidating thugs.

“We got it,” said Roy-R.“We’re reliable,” said Roy-O.“But the deal’s off,” said Roy-Y.To emphasize the point, Roy-R reached out and with one meaty

finger pushed Jerome’s CoffeeLyke cup off the countertop. The heatproof plastic cup bounced off the heatproof plastic floor and splashed hot liquid over Jerome’s distinctly non-heatproof shin. He yelped and fell back against the bed.

“No deal means no money for you,” he said, “and my superiors won’t be happy with this.” The superiors were a lie; Jerome had hired the three Roys himself. For protection, he’d played the


middleman, hiring the trio on behalf of some sinister mastermind with significant firepower and anger management issues. If the three Roys were willing to break the deal, then either someone else was leaning on them or they’d found a way to make much more money than Jerome paid.

“There’s a new deal.” Roy-Y kicked the CoffeeLyke cup across the room.

“A better deal,” Roy-O added.“Hurry up,” said Roy-R, checking the time. “I wanna beat the

rush to the cafeteria.”Roy-Y loomed over Jerome. He smiled. “You work in Threat

Obfuscation.”Jerome made a noncommittal spasm of his shoulders and neck,

the nonverbal equivalent of you might very well think that but I couldn’t possibly comment.

“We want the files for any upcoming threats to public safety,” Roy-Y continued. “Radiation leaks, chemical spills, fungal blooms, mutie outbreaks—that kind of stuff.”

Roy-O added, “Also, any shortages, ration decreases, production shortfalls and stuff.”

Roy-R didn’t say anything. He’d found a packet of CruncheeTym Soy-Based Chips in Jerome’s locker and was munching them in a threatening fashion, as if to say See this chip? This chip is you if you don’t do what we say. We’re going to eat you messily and maybe choke on you, ahem, excuse me.

“And once you’ve got those files, let me guess.” Jerome tried to look calm, smug, protected. “You’ll start selling stuff on the black market that feeds into these fears. The Computer announces a chemical spill, and hey, you’ve already got ten thousand gasmasks and chem-resistant pairs of boots in a warehouse ready to sell. That sort of stuff?”

Roy-Y snapped “Never you mind!” at the same moment Roy-O said “Exactly!” They scowled at each other.

“Those files are kept in my boss’s office.” Jerome opted for a policy of cautious honesty. “Getting them won’t be easy. I might be able to get what you’re looking for, but it’ll take a couple of days. I—”

Suddenly he was on the floor. The back of his head smashed painfully into the tiles as Roy-R grabbed his ankles and pulled.


Roy-O knelt heavily on his left hand, crushing the fingers. Roy-Y put his foot on Jerome’s chest and leaned down, presenting an unpleasant close-up of his flaring nostrils.

“No. You’ll get those files today. We’ll be back here at lunch, hear me? And if those files ain’t here then, well -”

“He means we’ll hurt you with our power tools,” Roy-O said. “Like, we’ll cut toes off, or drill you with our drills. Or put bits of you in the vise.”

“And then close the vise,” Roy-R added. “I don’t think we should do the toe thing. It turns my stomach.”

Roy-O nodded. “Okay, then just the drills. We’ll drill you with the power drills, and we’ll hurt you with the vise, but—” He lowered his voice to a intimidating growl. “—we’ll leave your toes intact.”

Roy-Y stared. “Did you two miss the Threats and Intimidation seminar at the last general meeting? They did a whole section on letting the victim’s imagination fill in the details. Way more effective.”

Roy-O hurled himself at Jerome, grabbed his collar, and hissed, “Forget what I just said! We’re going to hurt you in extremely non-specific ways! They may—or may not—involve power tools!”

“But no toes!” Roy-R’s face turned a shade of green several levels about his clearance.

“Probably kneecaps then, if that works for everyone!” Roy-O showed murderous rage and a talent for consensus-building.

“And what if I just report you all to Internal Security?” Jerome asked—a question from the floor.

Roy-Y had obviously rehearsed his answer. “Then we’ll tell IntSec the high-and-mighty GREEN executive was looking for the secret location of the Humanist meeting. IntSec doesn’t bother us. We just do grievous bodily harm and smuggling and extortion. But wanting to join the Humanists? That’s treason, big treason. You report us—they just kick the Hot Fun out of us. We report you—you’re terminated.”

They kicked him once each, for emphasis, then stomped out.Jerome pulled himself onto the bed and slumped back on

his intrusive mattress. He had no intention of joining the Humanists; he needed that meeting location to keep tabs on


Celeste’s allies. But Internal Security wouldn’t buy that as an excuse. The Computer’s inquisitors were unlikely to be moved by a plea of I was only committing treason because I suspect Celeste’s Humanist allies are targeting me for assassination after I terminated her. Of course, The Computer’s inquisitors weren’t moved by any plea. They worked off an interrogation script derived from telemarketing, and it had no branches involving mercy or mitigating circumstances. Reporting the Roys to IntSec had been a bluff, and they’d called it.

He had to get the files.The files were in Peter-B’s office.And Peter-B was the one citizen Jerome could never beat.

—————

TWELVE YEARCYCLES AGO....

Jerome-NSO—INFRAREDs didn’t get clearance initials—sat in the best holding cell ever. He wasn’t quite sure why this particular cell was the most wonderful place in all Alpha Complex, but it sure was. The dim light, the decaying, crumbling walls, the hard bed, the security camera, and most of all the pungent stench—everything he saw or smelled flooded his brain with absolute happiness.

Or maybe that was the drugs. They had given him quite a lot of drugs.

He wracked his brains for memories that hadn’t turned to merry sludge. Something about a riot. He vaguely remembered a riot. He even remembered doing something to start it.

“You told your barracks-mates there was free Bouncy Bubble Beverage in the HPD&MC admin section,” said a wobbly hazy figure. Looking at wobbly hazy figures was fun! Fun made him happy. He giggled.

“And when they smashed the door down, you sneaked off and tried to break into the secure files,” Wobbly Hazy Figure continued. Concentrating really really hard, he thought Wobbly Hazy Figure might be a woman wearing orange. He reached back as far as he could in his memory, and remembered the last


thing Wobbly Hazy Figure said. It was an accusation! Wobbly Hazy Internal Security!

Somewhere under the fuzzy goop of the drugs was his cleverness. He could get out of this one. Getting out of things made him happy.

“I didn’t sneak off and try to break into the secure files.” There. That would do it. Being so happy made him clever. No, other way. Being so happy made him clever. Wait. One more time. Being so—clever! Made him clev- happy! That was it! He was happy that he was happy. He was so happy he shared his cleverness with Wobbly Hazy Figure.

“That was a lie! I did sneak off. I did break into the secure files.” He giggled again. Confession was fun.

“Why did you do that?” asked Wobbly Hazy Figure softly.He frowned. There was a Reason. A really big capital-letter

Reason. He’d arranged the riot, gotten his barracksmates hooked on Bouncy Bubble Beverage, spied on the higher-clearance citizens for weeks because of the Reason. The Reason made him more than happy, it was Important.

“To find out the truth,” he admitted. “Are you going to terminate me?”

Wobbly Hazy Figure wobbled. “I’m not Internal Security, Jerome. I’m a friend.”

He smiled again. Having a friend made him happy.

2: Conformity Is Fun Multifunctional Public Space

One of Jerome-G’s articles of faith, recorded on a scrap of paper hidden in his sleeping tube, was that the Great Conspiracy manipulated everyone in Alpha Complex by playing on their delusions. Everyone danced when it pulled their invisible strings. For years, Jerome had survived by pulling those strings himself, becoming a parasite on the vast organization whose existence he alone could perceive. Everyone else in Alpha Complex had bought into a false reality that blinded them to the Conspiracy. Innocent citizens loyal to The Computer’s regime believed Alpha Complex existed to protect them from the threat of Communism. Pull the strings marked ‘appeal to patriotism’


or ‘fear of Commies’ and they jumped. If he tried to speak the truth, the Conspiracy, through its Internal Security stooges, would brand him a traitor and terminate him. Yet he had to make people understand. He had to show them something they couldn’t ignore, some absolute proof.

Other secret societies and beliefs were just distractions. The Great Conspiracy hid behind a thousand masks, concealing itself with lesser false conspiracies. People like the Free Enterprisers believed the whole system was just a money-making scam; their metaphorical strings were labeled “greed” and “profit.” The religious nuts who thought The Computer was a god would never look to see who was really running The Computer. The ambitious lickspittles who thought the High Programmers were in charge dismissed the power and reach of the various secret societies that had infiltrated all of Alpha Complex. The rebels and anarchists who fought the system were really just puppets of a different kind, one hand of the great conspiracy rebelling against the other so that neither hand felt the strings connecting it to the third hand that actually pulled...

The metaphor, Jerome realized, was escaping him.But Jerome was smart enough to see the truth. Given time, he

was confident he could outwit the three Roys. They’d escalated to violence faster than anticipated, but that could be dealt with, although coming up with a cunning plan by lunch was pushing it. Getting the file from Peter-B’s office was a bigger issue.

Another article of faith, on a separate paper scrap, held that everyone could be manipulated. There was no hermetic traitor – even someone who secretly espoused a really out-there philosophy, like a Sierra Clubber who wanted to return to the Outdoors, must pretend to be a good citizen, and so could be motivated by appeals to patriotism. Often traitors were especially vulnerable to such appeals, as they try to cloak their treason in obsequious, cloying, overly enthusiastic loyalty. Jerome’s system depending on identifying the most effective levers and, well, levering them. Give him a place to spy, and he would blackmail the world.

Peter-B was the exception. After months of observing Peter, Jerome still found him a perfectly smooth sphere without the slightest hint of a lever. Everyone else had flaws, ambitions,


agendas, dark secrets, or just personal opinions Jerome could use, leverage, and finally turn against them. Peter had nothing. He lived his life in strict accord with regulations. He never took risks or missed deadlines. He never stuck his neck out for anything, never made a decision that wasn’t ratified by a dozen fact-finding committees. It wasn’t that he was noticeably loyal, either. Jerome could have applied his techniques to fervent patriotism, but Peter approached loyalty as he approached everything else: with a fixed determination to conform exactly to what was expected of him, and no more. With frustration and perhaps a little fear, Jerome acknowledged Peter’s astounding powers of deception. Behind that spongy, buffoonish exterior, his boss concealed a mind like a steel trap and the survival instincts of a mutant cockroach.

Threat Obfuscation was within walking distance of his quarters if he cut across the SMO Sector Conformity Is Fun Multifunctional Public Space. The huge, hangar-like room was crowded this morning, as INFRARED workers and their RED supervisors got the place ready for some kind of event. At one end, a scaffold for a screen stood half-finished, while overhead they’d strung steel cables for bunting and banners. Internal Security troopers in green armor—GREEN goons, IntSec’s all-purpose muscle—pushed through the crowd with bomb detectors and chem-sniffers.

Jerome stepped past an ORANGE technician who was arguing with a newly-installed vendobot. “You’ll go where I put you.” The technician wrestled the machine up against the wall.

“Everyone will be looking at the stage,” the machine whined. “I should be up at that end. You’re impeding my ability to sell Bouncy Bubble Beverage.” Almost every appliance in Alpha Complex had a bot brain in it, for the convenience and happiness of citizens. (At least, for the convenience and happiness of citizens working in the lucrative bot brain industry. If you just wanted to buy a can of Bouncy Bubble Beverage with a minimum of arguments and existential vending-machine angst, you were out of luck.)

ATTENTION CITIZENS, THIS IS A SECURITY ANNOUNCEMENT. THIS SECTOR MAY BE TARGETED BY COMMIE MUTANT TRAITOR


TERRORISTS. REPORT ANY SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR, SUSPECT PACKAGES, OR OTHER POTENTIAL THREATS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

The Computer’s announcement galvanized the IntSec goons into action. They started checking the credentials of every citizen trying to leave the Multifunctional Public Space. It was like putting a bar magnet into a tray of iron filings, if the filings spontaneously organized into a very, very long queue. Attempting to pull rank would only make Internal Security suspicious—only citizens of BLUE Clearance or higher could breeze through checkpoints. As Jerome crept towards the exit, he felt time ticking away.

To no one in particular, he said, “I like my kneecaps.”

—————

TEN YEARCYCLES AGO....

Celeste-O described her work as “data mine hygiene.” The lower clearances were denied virtually all information, but the higher clearances suffered the opposite problem: too much data coming at them from every direction. Millions of security cameras, hidden mikes, informants and spies and counter-spies, surveillance reports and rumors and traffic analyses, and on top of all that, a middle class of clerks, analysts, advisors and bureaucrats so desperate to justify their positions they could extract a 50-page threat report from a single word picked up by a surveillance bug. Sorting signals from noise was close to impossible.

Celeste worked with data miners who tried to identify patterns in the data. Too often they went insane, making connections seemingly at random. She explained it to Jerome-R at one of their clandestine meetings.

“Situation: You are a data miner. You have identified a group of traitors using a code to communicate.” Celeste spoke in a clipped monotone, and rarely looked directly at Jerome. When she did, she watched him as though from the far end of a telescope, like an explorer analyzing the strange natives of Alpha Complex.


She looked quite nice, with sculpted features, black hair pulled back in a tight bun, and a trim figure suited for much higher-clearance clothing than her baggy orange jumpsuit. When she first recruited him, Jerome assumed she had some scheme in mind. It took him several months before he realized she was, in some distant way, lonely.

“What’s the code?”“A simple color-based code. A limited number of words or

phrases are encoded as color-band pairs or triplets. Red/yellow might mean ‘meeting,’ red/red signifies ‘we are being watched,’ and so on. Yellow/yellow means ‘do not trust what I am saying to you.’ The traitors can transmit covert messages as color patterns in conversation, or post notices in some fashion—say, if they control a laundromat, they can fill different dryers with jumpsuits of the appropriate color. Any traitor passing the laundromat can see the message ‘bomb-making meeting next Twosday—high security,’ but everyone else just sees a row of dryers.”

Celeste pointed to the band of red paint along the cafeteria floor. “One of our analysts cracks this code. He can now read the traitors’ hidden messages. However, color pairs are everywhere in Alpha Complex. Look—the two of us form an orange/red color, signifying ‘Threesday.’ The data miner knows the code but not the context in which to apply it, so Alpha Complex becomes a cacophony of secret messages. Every time he sees a pair of colored objects, his mind instinctively ‘translates’ it.”

Jerome-R sipped his CoffeeLyke. He’d learned if you waited until it was no longer searing hot, then swallowed without tasting, you could get most of the caffeine without the lingering sensation of burnt plastic. “I can see how that would be distracting.”

“Distracting!” Celeste-O conveyed emotion not with the tone of her voice, but with her unnaturally mobile eyebrows. “It’s maddening. Rapidly, pareidolia sets in. With the sheer number of random color-pairs, it’s inevitable some will appear strangely significant. The analyst comes to believe someone is trying to communicate with him via, say, the arrangement of flavored CruncheeTym snack packets in a vending machine or the shoes worn by transbot commuters. The analyst becomes useless.”

“And then you come in.” He always enjoyed his conversations with Celeste. He never let his guard down completely, of course—


there was every possibility she was an IntSec provocateur—but if this strange creature was an actress sent to entrap him, they’d done a masterful if eccentric job.

Celeste nodded. “Precisely. My role is to debrief the deranged and extract any useful insights I can.”

“Ever get anything useful?”“Officially, no. However—” Celeste stole a sidelong glance at

Jerome. “I began to discern certain patterns in the data. I found I could draw parallels between techniques, match rumors—”

“Someone’s trying to communicate with you via insane data miners?”

“No, of course not,” she said hurriedly. “I haven’t thought that in months. No, I’ve developed—well, am developing—a set of techniques for identifying modes of treason and deception, for finding commonalities among conspiratorial structures.”

Jerome wasn’t sure if he was feinting to determine if she was an IntSec agent, or—for the first time in his life—expressing genuine trust. Regardless, he found himself confessing. “Ever since I was a Junior Citizen, I’ve always felt there was a big conspiracy out there, behind everything. I’ve never known where to start looking.”

Four citizens sat down nearby: red/yellow/red/orange. Celeste-O watched them through her telescope.

Then, for the first time, she looked directly at Jerome. “I think you’re right.”

3: Threat Obfuscation

Threat Obfuscation is a natural response to standard information-security protocols. Say you, a high-ranking Internal Security coordinator, have just found out those dastardly Communists are about to attack the main airlock in Sector XYZ. You send heavily armed agents down to the airlock to zap the Commies, right?

But wait—what if there’s a Commie spy in your employ? If you dispatch your agents to the airlock to arrest the Commies, the spy tips off the enemy and they’ll change their plans. But if you don’t order your agents down to the airlock, XYZ will be overrun by borscht-eating socialists and The Computer will start asking awkward questions like WHEN DID YOU FIRST


REALIZE YOU WERE CRIMINALLY INCOMPETENT? You’ve got to position your agents without—and this is the tricky bit—without your own agents knowing about it.

Enter the Department of Threat Obfuscation.Threat Obfuscation creates a new fake threat for your agents to

investigate that just happens to be right next door to the airlock. So you tell all your agents they’re investigating the Airlock Technician Drug Smuggling Ring, the Commie spy never realizes you’re onto their evil plot, the Commies get zapped, and you get promoted! Bonus Hot Fun rations for all, right?

But wait, wait! What if there’s also a Commie spy in Threat Obfuscation? One well-placed spy there could ruin everything by reporting which threats are real and which are fake. The only rational solution, obviously, is to feed everything produced by Threat Obfuscation back into Threat Obfuscation a few times, so no one knows if the real threat is the Airlock Technician Drug Smugglers or Dangerous Toxins Carried In From Outdoors or the Communists or Citizens Driven Mad By Airlocks Changing Their Inner Ear Pressure, It Can Happen You Know or....

—————“Your card, citizen.” Another IntSec guard was stationed at the door of Threat Obfuscation. That was unusual. The department didn’t normally rate a door guard.

Jerome-G swiped his ME Card through the scanner. It bleeped twice. The guard seemed satisfied with the first bleep and disconcerted by the second, but he let Jerome past without questions. Glancing around the office, Jerome instantly picked up on the tension. Frightened faces with fixed plastic smiles watched him as he walked to his cubicle. A half-dozen IntSec troopers guarded other exits, and another two stood at the entrance to Peter-B’s office. The last time there’d been this much security presence at Threat Obfuscation was when they came to arrest Celeste-B.

Betraying nothing, he kept his head down and went straight to his desk.

The office was a testament to the many threats its workers had imagined:


– The office light was dim and yellowish. The ceiling lights were low-power, low-mercury plastic tubing, because (as everybody knows) a random power surge can make fluorescent glass bulbs explode, driving glass shards into your eyes and mercury vapor into your lungs, blinding you, permanently damaging your nervous system, and causing lifelong chronic or recurrent tremors in your limbs, though this isn’t quite so much a nuisance as you might think because your life expectancy is quartered. Newly assigned workers suffered eyestrain and headaches until they started bringing in mini-flash handheld lights. You know, though, the batteries in those things can explode at any second.

– Each desk was bulletproof, of course, and a worker could, on ten seconds’ notice, simply pull down a sliding panel to reconfigure the desk’s underside as a fully enclosed bomb shelter. Unfortunately the panel mechanism tended to jam, trapping the worker until freed by some outside agency with (usually) a welding torch. Jerome-G had heard stories of workers trapped until death from thirst, which just proved anything could go wrong at any time.

– Under a pilot program coordinated with Research & Design service firm ChairBag Safety RD, many Threat Obfuscation desk chairs were equipped with experimental airbags. Though workers were unconvinced of the danger of Unpredictable Massive Seating-Product Wheel Failure, they liked the airbags for their quieting effect on office arguments. The jerk who used to pound the arm of his chair now merely tapped an irate finger on the desktop, though of course that only left said worker open to the non-negligible peril of bacterial contaminants under the fingernails, no really, you don’t know what cleansers the scrubots use, you could get that stuff under a nail, absently lick your finger or pick your nose, and next thing you know a docbot is transplanting your liver. Even desktop finger-tapping now merited a warning poster: DON’T BE A SAP, STOP THAT TAP! Really, it just made sense.

Jerome enjoyed his job. Unlike virtually every other assignment in Alpha Complex, Threat Obfuscation had a little creativity and a little power. When he heard The Computer make a security announcement about one of his invented threats, it gave him a conspiratorial thrill. For that single moment, he was on the


inside; if the conspiracy was invincible and omniscient, they’d never have let him rise to his current clearance. Every time they used one of his obfuscations, they revealed their vulnerability and foreshadowed their inevitable defeat.

When she was in charge, Celeste appreciated creative threats; they’d done great work together. Losing her was such a shame. All Peter wanted to do was repeat the same few standard threats over and over.

The morning’s C-mail cascaded across the screen. Trivial announcements about revised Fear Quotas, a proposal for a new Unspecified Free-Floating Anxiety Index, fiddling directives about proper capitalization, another round of employee hygiene mandates, and more security reminders about watching for Commie spies.

Next he scanned his actual work-related mail, looking for an excuse to visit Peter’s office. Maybe he could propose a bomb threat at a product launch? No, he’d done that one last week. Pitch a few rumors of sentient boot fungus? Mutants tunneling in from the Underplex?

A hand landed on his shoulder—a big, callused hand with a firm grip, the sort of grip that fits equally well around a truncheon or a suspect’s neck. This was an Internal Security hand and a “you’re a Citizen of Interest” grip.

He looked up. Three quarters of the way up the hand’s arm he saw a green armband with the motto SECURITY THROUGH VIGILANCE and the logo of a watchful eye. He skipped over the shoulder part of the tour to the helmeted head. Flat, much-broken nose—scarred lantern jaw with stubble—deep-set dead eyes—yes, that was an IntSec face. “Jerome-G?”

From his repertoire of mandatory smiles Jerome selected the most bland and inoffensive example. “Can I help you, officer?”

“This way.” The guard marched Jerome across the office to Peter’s door. It wasn’t really the way he’d wanted to meet with his boss, but as excuses went, this one was convincing.

Peter-B, a small fat black-haired man seated behind a big fat blue-painted desk, looked even more anxious than usual. His doughy cheeks glistened with cold sweat, and he was constantly licking his pale, pouted lips. Though he kept his posture exactly within regulated limits, he somehow managed to quiver.


Jerome looked up at a shelf behind Peter’s head. There sat the folder of threat data—the data that could save Jerome’s kneecaps.

On the couch in the corner sat another Internal Security officer, this one dressed in a snappy BLUE-clearance uniform instead of armor. The officer—his badge read Hayden-B—examined Jerome as one examines a stray hair in a bowl of soysoup.

On the far wall was a huge teleconferencing monitor, and onscreen was—uh-oh—a VIOLET executive. VIOLETs were unimaginably senior figures; to have one here, even virtually, implied a crisis. The youngish man had a long face, sculpted features, and hair that looked like every strand had been engineered to fit his head. Behind his thick-rimmed glasses, his eyes were inhumanly bright, his pupils the pinpricks of a man high on adrenaline, ambition, and a whole dispensary of high-clearance drugs. Every few seconds, his gaze flickered away from the camera to some other screen; he was watching a dozen similar teleconferencing feeds at once.

“Jerome-G reporting as ordered, friends, and may I say it is an honor to address such respected citizens.” Bootlicking wasn’t his forte, but it never hurt to try. The VIOLET glanced at Jerome and snorted.

Peter leaned forward. His voice quavered. “Look, Jerome-G, just answer their questions, and none of your nonsense. –He thinks he’s smarter than me.”

The last remark was directed at Hayden-B, who nodded. “He probably is. Traitors often display a high level of intelligence. Tell me, Jerome-G, what do you know about the League of Free Bots?”

“They’re a conspiracy of renegade bots who plot to overthrow The Computer’s glorious regime.”

“Is that all?”Jerome steeled himself. “That is all the information available

through standard channels, officer.”“Under Mandate ISPM 102.14/c, this matter is now a security

concern.”“In that case, friend Hayden-B, I can reveal that the League of

Free Bots is a threat obfuscation generated in this office.”“What about the Transtube Pirates?”“The same.”


“Sentient boot fungus.”“Er, yes.” Though that one hadn’t really flown. Not his best

work.“The Humanists.”“Traitors, sir. A genuine threat, not obfuscated.” The Humanists

were one of the oldest and most insidious conspiracies in Alpha Complex. They were dedicated to subjugating The Computer and establishing a new government of and by humans.

“Do you have any previous association with known Humanists?”

“Yes, sir. That’s a matter of record.”Hayden-B made a note on his PDC data tablet. Jerome felt a

bead of sweat well up on his right shoulder blade and run down his back.

The VIOLET executive grew visibly impatient. “Get on with it, Hayden-B. I’ve got a meeting in five.”

Hayden-B leapt to his feet and barked a series of questions: “Have you ever deliberately neglected to obfuscate known threats? Have you ever passed information to any person or persons not cleared to receive said information? Are you now or have you ever been a member of any illegal society, group, assembly, or conspiracy against The Computer’s regime? Have you ever received bribes, gifts, favors, or other considerations in exchange for deliberate manipulation or misuse of secure threat-related data, obfuscated or non-obfuscated? Are you loyal to The Computer? Have you ever embedded overt or subliminal signals in your obfuscated threats that could be interpreted as seditious propaganda and/or encoded messages? Have you ever deliberately substituted material from other sources for approved obfuscatory disinformation? Failure to answer any or all of these questions will result in termination.” Fragments of red-flecked spittle sprayed from Hayden’s mouth.

“No to all of them, apart from the one about being loyal to The Computer.” Jerome turned to Peter. “What’s going on?”

“We’re under suspicion of failure to obfuscate.”“Friends, I’ve always carried out my duties diligently. If you

check my record—”“We know your record,” said the VIOLET. Jerome felt more

sweat drops forming.


Peter mopped his unspacious brow. “Jerome-G, you haven’t done anything treasonous, have you? During work hours, that is—I don’t care if you’re treasonous on your own time.” He made a sickly smile at the teleconferencing monitor.

“No, Peter-B, I have not.”“Come on, Jerome-G, if you’ve done anything wrong, you

should confess. I’m sure it’ll only be a slap on the wrist or a fine or—”

“Termination,” said Hayden-B.“—Or a little termination, but it’ll be over quickly. They’re

really efficient about it these days.”Jerome understood. It’s not just me. The whole department is

up against the wall.“I’m sorry, friends, I can’t think of anything relevant.”The VIOLET executive scowled and made a signal. “I think we’ve heard enough,” Hayden-B said in the same tone

of voice one might use to say “Have you any last words?”“Wait!” said Peter. “Jerome-G, I—I order you to report to

the confession booth! Officer, I’m sure, given time to reflect, Jerome-G will think of something to confess to you.”

Hayden shrugged and tapped a button on his PDC.Jerome made a final plea. “Peter-B, naturally I love spending

time with our friend The Computer, but I insist I have no knowledge of treasonous activity. In fact, if you’d just let me borrow that threat data folder, I’m sure I can prove my diligent obfuscation.”

They ignored him. The door opened, and that same rough hand gripped Jerome’s shoulder.

“Escort Citizen Jerome-G to the nearest confession booth,” said Hayden-B, “and ensure he confesses.”

The GREEN goon yanked Jerome out of the office.

4: Confession booth

HELLO, CITIZEN. WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONFESS YOUR TREASON?


The confession booth was a lot smaller on the inside. It had room for just a single narrow wipe-clean seat and a huge monitor with The Computer’s staring eye. But Jerome-G knew the confessional concealed all sorts of probes and sensors. If The Computer detected your confession was not sufficiently heartfelt, it could encourage you with medication, or a gentle poking, or by vaporizing you so your future clones might feel more cooperative. The booths weren’t soundproof—they wanted people to hear the screams.

“Hello, Friend Computer. I was ordered to report to the confession booth.”

CITIZEN, PLEASE CONFESS YOUR TREASON NOW.

“I don’t actually have anything to confess right now.”

ARE YOU SURE?


THANK YOU, CITIZEN. YOU MAY NOW EXIT THE BOOTH.

The door hissed open. Jerome stepped out, and the GREEN goon shoved him back in. “Hayden-B ordered me to bring you to this booth and ensure you confess, so we’re here until you confess. Understand?” The guard thumbed the door button, and Jerome was once again sealed in darkness.

HELLO CITIZEN. WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONFESS YOUR TREASON?

“I don’t have anything to confess!”

ARE YOU SURE?

“Yes!”


THANK YOU, CITIZEN. YOU MAY NOW EXIT THE BOOTH.

The door opened. The goon brandished his laser pistol. Jerome-G reached over and pressed the button. The door closed.

HELLO CITIZEN. WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONFESS YOUR TREASON?

“Can I just sit here for a few minutes?”


“Er, I’m just marshalling my thoughts to present them in the most efficient manner.”

HERE IS A SUGGESTION: WASTING TIME IN A CONFESSION BOOTH.

“Computer, are there treasonous deeds on my record I am unaware of?”

THAT INFORMATION IS NOT AVAILABLE AT YOUR SECURITY CLEARANCE.

“So, the only thing I’m currently accused of is wasting time confessing?”

THAT INFORMATION IS NOT AVAILABLE AT YOUR SECURITY CLEARANCE. CITIZEN, THIS CONFESSION SESSION IS CURRENTLY RATED “POOR”. PLEASE IMPROVE THE QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF YOUR CONFESSION IMMEDIATELY OR YOU WILL BE FINED.

“If I say I’ve got nothing more to confess, you’ll just open the door again, right?”


CORRECT. CITIZEN, PLEASE CONFESS YOUR TREASON NOW.

“What’s the penalty for wasting time in a confession booth?”

THAT INFORMATION IS NOT AVAILABLE AT YOUR SECURITY CLEARANCE.

Jerome rubbed the bridge of his nose. The chair smelled like fried food, reminding him of his impending lunchtime kneecapping. Admittedly, the loss of his kneecaps paled beside whatever was going on back at Threat Obfuscation, which looked likely to lead to his termination. This day was not going well. He felt like screaming.

Outside, someone started screaming.Jerome listened intently. He heard the distinctive fzzzap of

laser fire, the distinctive hiss-bubble-pop of someone being shot by a laser, not-particularly-distinctive screams, and an alarming amount of carnage—in Jerome’s life, any carnage at all was automatically distinctive. And it was getting closer. He heard shouts of “Traitors!” and “Deviants!” and “For the committee!”


Fzzzap-pop-clunk-ssssshhhhhhlicck-thunk! Jerome correctly interpreted this as the security guard outside being shot by a laser, dying, falling back against the booth, sliding down the stainless-steel surface, then slumping to the ground. “Uh, Friend Computer, I’m hearing entirely too much laser fire for comfort. If you don’t mind, I’ll just wait it out.”

YOUR CONTINUED RETICENCE WILL BE TAKEN AS A NON-SPECIFIC ADMISSION OF GUILT.

“No! Just don’t open the door for a while!”



“I waste time in confession booths! I spilled some CoffeeLyke in my quarters!” The booth rocked back and forth as something exploded outside.

THANK YOU, CITIZEN. IS THAT EVERYTHING?

“Yes! No! I’m not sure.”

YOU APPEAR CONFUSED. MEDICATION WILL HELP.

A robot arm extended out of the darkness, tipped with a syringe.“I don’t need medication right now, Friend Computer.”

YOUR BELIEF IS NOTED.

Jerome dodged as best he could in the cramped confines, and the syringe buried itself in the arm of the chair.

THIS SESSION IS AT AN END.

“Computer! What are my options for atoning for my crimes?”

A FINE WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE LEVIED AGAINST YOUR PERSONAL ACCOUNT.

The booth rocked again. Outside, someone screamed, “They’ve got a flamethrower! They’ve got a flamethrower! I’m on fire!”

“What if I don’t want to pay the fine?”

OTHER REMEDIES INCLUDE PSYCHOLOGICAL THERAPY, VOLUNTEERING FOR TROUBLE-S H O O T I N G D U T Y, M E D I C AT I O N , O R REASSIGNMENT TO REACTOR SHIELDING DUTY.

Someone dealt with the flamethrower by throwing rather a lot of grenades. Debris spattered on the booth’s roof. More explosions echoed down the corridor.


“Therapy! Let’s have a therapy session right here, right now, in this nice safe booth.”

C E R T A I N LY, C I T I Z E N . I N I T I A T I N G PSYCHOLOGICAL THERAPY MODULE. THIS MODULE IS TAILORED TO YOUR SPECIFIC PERSONALITY TYPE AND BEHAVIORAL PROFILE, AND WILL PROBE DEEP INTO YOUR PSYCHE TO UNCOVER BURIED TRAUMA AND/OR CONCEALED TREASONOUS IMPULSES. MODULE BEGINS: HOW DO YOU FEEL?

“Happy!” Happiness was mandatory for all citizens of Alpha Complex.

WHY DO YOU THINK YOU FEEL HAPPY?

“Right now, I feel happy because I’m so safe inside your wonderful confession booth.”

WHY DO YOU THINK I’M SO SAFE INSIDE YOUR WONDERFUL CONFESSION BOOTH?

“Er—mainly because it’s blastproof.”

WHY DO YOU THINK IT’S BLASTPROOF?

Another explosion, bigger and closer. The screen died, and the speaker cracked with static. The door half-opened, then froze. Jerome-G poked the close button, but the booth had lost power. On the bright side, the explosion seemed to have ended the firefight.

He squeezed out of the battered booth, or what was left of it. The goon was now a charred corpse with a smoking hole in his chest. Jerome-G gingerly picked up the guard’s laser pistol. Four rings glowed on the barrel, showing it was still good for at least four lethal blasts.

Jerome thought he might need those shots, because firefights in Alpha Complex were cyclic. Right now, he knew, the Technical


Services clone tanks were busy decanting new clones of the recently killed. Copies of their personalities, constantly updated via the MemoMax implant in every citizen’s brain, would soon be imprinted onto the fresh clones. The replacements would then be shipped back to their last known location, the place where they’d died. Even known traitors would get the benefit of resurrection, for The Computer was convinced treason resulted from subversion and this time the fresh clones would be loyal. Decanting, imprinting, and shipping took only minutes. This was half-time in the carnage, a short breather for both teams.

Being sensible, Jerome wanted to head right out, which meant heading right. Right was the most direct route from the carnage. Right was only a short walk back to his quarters. The problem was, right was blocked by a big pile of rubble.

Left was his only option, but left would shortly be filled with troopers and traitors, all even more enthusiastic after their quick breather.

Left, he discovered, involved stepping over rather a lot of dismembered body parts. The mayhem was simultaneously gory, disturbing and ridiculous. He picked his way over the scattered, toasted remains of at least a dozen combatants. Some he could recognize as Internal Security guards; some wore the distinctive laser-reflective armor of Troubleshooters. Others, in civilian jumpsuits or home-made armor, must have been the traitors who attacked.

This short stretch of corridor appeared to be the epicenter of the firefight. There was no cover here, no strategic objectives, yet wave after wave had rushed in to die. Why?

Then Jerome saw the case. He stopped dead. Under his breath he muttered, “530.20/a.”

In Alpha Complex they don’t say ‘”curiosity killed the cat.” For one thing, they don’t have cats. For another, they don’t do metaphor well. The closest equivalent is Mandate ISPM 530.20/a, “Accessing information above your security clearance is treason and will result in summary termination.”

Lying in the middle of the corridor was a small grey plastic case, about the size of Jerome’s hand and shaped like a flattened cylinder. It was remarkably free of splatters, though the bloodied bodies of eight traitors and goons lay in a circle around it, all


with hands outstretched as if they’d died trying to grab it. The scene reminded Jerome of a FunBall match where both teams suffered massive casualties before they even reached the FunBall, until one team managed to successfully defend from behind the mound of bodies.

Had all these people died for that case? Why? What was the conspiracy trying to hide? He had to know.

Greatly daring, Jerome bent down and, without breaking stride, scooped up the case. As he trotted out of the warzone, the case weighed down his pocket like a lump of plutonium.

Jerome made it back to the Conformity Is Fun Multifunctional Public Space before the shooting started again behind him. The cries echoed down the corridor—“He’s got a flamethrower again! I’m on fire again!”—but this room was well clear of any fighting. He ducked into a side corridor and opened the case.

A pair of glasses.They were thick-rimmed clear glasses, lying in a foam-rubber

cut-out to protect them. At the end of each arm dangled a tiny in-ear headphone, and there was a little data port in the right arm. On the left arm, he found an on-off switch. Holding the lenses up to the light, he could see on their circumference an indescribably fine tracery of microcircuits.

He put on the glasses. He pressed the switch.He saw wonderful things.

—————

SIX YEARCYCLES AGO....

Every corridor in Alpha Complex is color-coded. Entering a corridor above your security clearance is treason. For lower-clearance workers, the sector becomes a minefield maze; if a jackobot redecoration crew unexpectedly repaints a hallway, you might walk into treachery.

For the last five years, Jerome-R’s route to work in the morning had required a 40-minute detour. Today, he strode out of his quarters and stepped proudly across the orange threshold. The corridor matched his crisp new jumpsuit. Jerome-O strolled down


the main thoroughfare, then ducked down a side corridor to an abandoned storeroom.

Celeste-Y was already waiting. In her freshly pressed yellow uniform, she looked new-minted like him, though she had made YELLOW some months back. In style as in most things, Celeste always set the example; Jerome was always proud to follow it.

As he entered the storeroom, she applauded politely. “I see the technique worked.”

“It was easy! I went into the interview, and I spotted burns and small cuts on the lead interviewer’s hands.” Jerome excitedly held out his own hands by way of (unneeded) demonstration. “I put that together with those anti-bot riots last night, and guessed he was one of those Frankenstein Destroyer bot-haters. Then I just dropped a few comments about how I hated those damn bots, and he rubber-stamped my promotion in two minutes flat.”

“Secret society corruption is endemic at the lower clearances. My models suggest more than 80% of all citizens are members of one society or another; their exposure to society propaganda and thought patterns makes them vulnerable to manipulation by signals that mimic their existing beliefs. The remaining 20% are loyal to The Computer; in fact, given they are in the minority, we can consider loyalists to be another society and manipulate them using the same techniques.”

Jerome-O opened a celebratory can of genuine orange juice—at ORANGE Clearance he was permitted a very limited amount of real food, instead of chemically-flavored yeast and soy FunFoods.

Celeste’s techniques worked. Citizens betrayed their conspiratorial leanings from the smallest tells, and Jerome could identify them. He buzzed with ambition. Together, they could go further. Celeste had the intelligence and the theory. He had—well, he had Celeste.

“Who’s in charge of Alpha Complex?” he asked her.“The Computer.”“But the High Programmers run The Computer.”“The best way to get promoted is to be a member of a secret

society—so the High Programmers owe their positions to the societies.”

“So, are the societies in charge?”


Celeste-Y considered. “No. All of them have, at core, a narrative of how they are oppressed and hunted. They either fight the system, like the Humanists, or one of its aspects, like the Frankenstein Destroyers; or they offer a temporary escape from control, like the Romantics or Mystics. None of the known conspiracies fit.”

“But it’s not chaos, is it? We both know there’s something out there. The question is, can your techniques find them?”

“I think so. We’ll need more information, more data. Allies.”His heart pounded. They were finally pushing back against—

against Them. “We’ll need our own conspiracy.”“A null conspiracy, then. No ideology, no delusions. Just the

goal of amassing data and finding the truth.”Jerome thought, A conspiracy against the conspiracy. Bring it

on! “If they find us, they’ll still terminate us for that.”Celeste sniffed. “Statistically, they terminate everyone.”

—————According to the little pop-up windows the glasses projected across Jerome-G’s field of view—his “Heads-Up Display,” he knew that term—behind this wall panel were a power junction relay box, a chemical feed pipe, and a sewer access line. Another window displayed the feed from the camera over his head. Anything he looked at through the glasses was surrounded with a halo of data. Holding up the gun he’d borrowed from the dead IntSec guard, he got another flood of pop-up boxes and overlaid captions—an animated video of the gun’s user manual, a repair guide, a note describing aftermarket adjustments to the gun’s grip, and a big glowing ammo counter. Intoxicated with sheer knowledge, Jerome stumbled down the corridor like a drugged Mystic, picking out random objects and just staring.

That light fitting? The glasses showed him the manufacturer, install date and last servicing, and a list of its hidden microphones. Another box popped up with a question—did he want to listen to highlights of recent recordings?

The stick of gum in Jerome’s pocket showed him a manufacturer, sales report, nutritional advisories, and—uhh—a list of known side effects. Oog.


A scrubot trundled down the corridor, followed (in Jerome’s sight) by a trail of glowing pop-up windows: operating manual, cleaning route, default instructions, a guide to the Five Laws of Robotics (Revised), and a dozen overlapping files. When Jerome moved his head, data windows in the rear rushed forward, as if the bot were surrounded by a lenticular hologram. When the bot turned a corner and moved out of sight, the windows vanished.

When he held up his Personal Digital Companion, the glasses showed Jerome the manual, then flashed a directory showing all his saved files. He could access the data from his PDC just by looking!

People had data haloes too! Jerome-G grabbed a passing RED.“You’re Ronald-R-OSR-2! Assignment: hygiene technician!

You have 143 credits in your bank account! You’re assigned to corpse cleanup duty in corridor 193! You only scored 43% on your Tech Services aptitude exam and you’re allergic to soy-based products!”

“Uhh—yes, friend—”“You’ve got three disciplinary notes on your personal record for

illegal theft of personal effects, tardiness, and failure to dispose of a corpse in an approved hygienic manner!”

“I– I can explain the tardiness—”“Hey! Here’s a note from Internal Security—you’re suspected

of being an informant for the Frankenstein Destroyers!”The technician yelped and bolted down the corridor.Suddenly Jerome realized his behavior might appear suspicious.

He took a deep breath. He needed to find out how to use these glasses properly.

A look at the grey glasses case brought up a single pop-window: “BLINDERs—Blended-Interface Data Expositors. Augmenting Reality To Make A Better You.” No user manual. Nothing else useful. “Expositors”—what an arcane word, like something Celeste would have used. And shouldn’t that make the acronym “blindors”?

Could he hold the glasses up to the glasses? No—the frame wasn’t that flexible. On the bright side, he’d proved they were really rugged. He saw no mirror around here, but he had one in his apartment. He started walking back home, overwhelmed by the flood of data. Every citizen who passed brought a halo of


information: name, work assignment, personal finance details, managerial assessments, security records, demerits, IntSec report, all popping out and hovering around the citizen’s face. Some people even had huge tags floating overhead: SMELLS BAD. WORKS FOR EUNICE-V. UNDERCOVER INTSEC. UNREGISTERED MUTANT.

He happened to glance at a vend–

!!! BOUNCY BUBBLE BEVERAGE !!! IT’S THE MANDATORY THING !!! CONTAINS E493 E319 E922 RHYOCHORDRAZINE-4 MACROCEPHALINE-9 !!!

NOW IN NEW PLUTONIUM FLAVOR !!!–obot, aaah! Jerome flailed as a storm of neon pop-ups blinded

him. B3, the most popular beverage in Alpha Complex, was, according to the glasses—his eyes darted crazily—caustic, poisonous, explosive when shaken, corrosive when heated, razor-sharp when frozen, prone to animate when stored for more than 20 days at room temperature, and contained engineered long-chain molecules that harmlessly targeted the taste centers of the customer’s brain and certainly weren’t mutagenic.

Averting his gaze from the vendobot, Jerome noticed a Tech Services technician named Marty-R maintaining the machine. A virtual tag above Marty’s head read MEDICATE FOR SECURITY REASONS. Intrigued, Jerome reached out and ‘touched’ the tag.

Suddenly a keyboard appeared before him. It was astonishingly realistic: other than the minor detail that it was floating unsupported, the keyboard looked perfectly solid. He wondered if they’d taken a hologram of a real keyboard to generate the virtual model. Typing on the virtual keys took a little practice, but he quickly got the hang of it. He typed TEST and hit Enter; Marty’s floating tag was replaced with TEST. Success!

“You there!”An IntSec guard—Olive-Y-UIS-3, 4,200 credits in personal

account, assigned to CruncheeTym Event Security, scored 93% accuracy on her last firing range test, merits for brutality and interrogation, demerits for excessive unwarranted terminations, medical record: addicted to asperquaint and visomorpain, subject of last C-mail: “FW: Fw: Top ten reasons to beat a suspect with a


rubber hose”—broke from the crowd and leveled her laser pistol at Jerome. Her brown hair was so short it was almost a crewcut, and her blue eyes stared with piercing intensity. The glasses helpfully informed him the laser pistol was fully loaded and at this range had a 84% chance to kill instantly.

“Yes, officer?”“That was twitchtalk, citizen! Admit it!”Jerome paled. Olive-Y must have misinterpreted his typing on

the virtual keyboard. Many conspirators in Alpha Complex used a code of subtle twitches and hand gestures, called twitchtalk. There were dozens of different dialects. Jerome had studied many of them, but new variants kept appearing and mutating to stay ahead of Internal Security.

“Twitchtalk, officer? I don’t know what that is.”“You were communicating with your treasonous conspirators.

Don’t try to deny it.” Her finger tightened on the trigger and her teeth clenched.

“I don’t need to deny anything, because I didn’t do anything. By the way, Olive-Y, accusing a higher-clearance citizen of treason without properly documented proof is an offense. Tell me, Olive-Y, is this the sort of unprofessional, ill-considered, and ultimately unwarranted accusation that got you all those demerits? Should we add spurious allegations to that list?”

“Uhh–” Olive backed off. “Then what was that strange gesture I saw you make?”

“This gesture?” Jerome pulled up the virtual keyboard again and spitefully added over Olive’s head the tag BAD ATTITUDE. She stared in confusion as her suspect waggled his fingers in the air.

“That gesture, yes.”“Finger calisthenics. I have to do them regularly, or my fingers

cramp up when I spend all day typing personnel assessment reports—often highly critical personnel assessment reports that get seen by influential citizens. Understand?”

Olive holstered her pistol and stalked off into the crowd.Jerome felt a thrill of happiness purer and more real than any

drug high. These glasses were a window into the secret world he’d always known existed. It felt like he’d lived in a flatscreen world all his life, and now reality had popped up into a third dimension of secret revelation. And only he, Jerome, could see it.


No wonder those traitors were after the glasses! No wonder Internal Security had fought and died to get them back! No wonder they’d be looking for them!

—No wonder they’d terminate him if they found he’d stolen them!

Well, he thought, that was a short-lived thrill of happiness.These glasses could expose the Great Conspiracy and free

Alpha Complex from its malevolent machinations—but he had to master the glasses before the conspirators tracked him down. Internal Security was probably already looking for a bespectacled interpretive dancer. The BLINDERs clearly had some sort of kinetic, gesture-driven interface; to figure it out, he needed privacy. His quarters were nearby.

He reached up to remove the glasses, but then he spotted a virtual object in the Multifunctional Public Space. A large green-blue-violet cube floated in the center of the hall, slowly rotating. Data pop-ups bubbled up from its green and blue facets, but the violet face was blank; Jerome deduced his glasses must be BLUE Clearance. The thought of higher-clearance glasses, with even more power, rocketed through his brain.

From here he couldn’t make out all the pop-ups, but a few words were readable. One, above the green facet, said CRUNCHEETYM LAUNCH EVENT PLAN. Beside it, another seemingly unfinished caption read NEW PRODUCT:— after the colon, the rest was blank. Interesting coincidence; he’d recently created a fictitious CruncheeTym product launch as a terrorist target.

The blue facet rotated into view, and the pop-up read BOMB THREAT. Well, that explained why the Multifunctional Public Space was crawling with IntSec sniffers. The CruncheeTym product launch, whatever it was, must be a terrorist target—

Deja vu is illegal in Alpha Complex. Experiencing deja vu is taken as proof you are a precognitive mutant, and mutants are genetic traitors. Jerome had always prided himself on being genetically pure and had never seen any mutant signs in his own DNA, but this deja vu was like a simultaneous double-punch to the brain and the groin.

Last week at Threat Obfuscation he’d invented the CruncheeTym event and the bomb threat in order to obfuscate a suspected


anarchist cell. Neither the product launch nor the bomb were real. They’d never been real. He’d made it all up!

Yet there they were, on the floating cube right in front of him.Jerome pulled off the glasses, and reality snapped back to

normal. No one had haloes of their innermost secrets, and no multicolored cube raised perplexing mysteries. Everything was once again concealed. He stuck the glasses back in their case. It was all too much; he needed time to think.

He stumbled through the crowd to the blissful solitude of his quarters. Distantly he knew he should get back at the office, but even Peter would accept “my confession booth got blown up with me inside it” as an excuse for a long lunch break.

Lunch. Kneecaps.The doorbell rang.

—————You’ve just read Chapters 1-4 (about the first one-sixth) of the PARANOIA novel Reality Optional by Gareth Hanrahan. In the full-length ebook—available for download where you bought this book—Jerome-G faces threats from Free Enterprise goons, his teammates in the Troubleshooters, visits to the Underplex, and the CruncheeTym Snack Revelation. While he uses the Augmented Reality glasses to understand why IntSec and the VIOLET executive are interested in him, the makers of those glasses are hunting him.

Who built the BLINDERs glasses, and for what purpose?

What happened to Celeste-B, and where is she now?

Why are the imagined threats Jerome invented for Threat Obfuscation becoming real?

The answers are all here:

Reality Optionalby Gareth Hanrahan


FREE preview: Stay Alert

Chapter 1 from the full-length PARANOIA novel by Allen Varney

EVERYONE SHOULD BE HAPPY. IMMEDIATELY.

In the underground city of Alpha Complex, The Computer wants every citizen to have fun. If you’re not having fun, The Computer will turn you into reactor shielding.

ATTENTION, TROUBLESHOOTERS. PLEASE RETURN THIS STOLEN HELPBOT TO ITS OWNER. THIS MISSION INVOLVES NO DEADLY WARFARE BETWEEN RIVAL CRIMINAL GANGS AND WILL BE LOTS OF FUN.

The Computer’s elite service agents, the Troubleshooters, have fun delivering the helpbot to a sequence of murderous gangsters. It’s not annoying or repetitious at all, no siree. (“You look like you’re about to shoot your teammate! Would you like help?”)

IF YOU MEET DIFFICULTIES, SEEK HELP FROM YOUR FELLOW TROUBLESHOOTERS.

Team Leader Fletcher-R is about to have lots of fun learning about his teammates. He’ll learn they’re criminals themselves. Or they belong to traitorous secret societies. Or they’re betraying illegal mutant powers, usually while betraying illegal mutant teammates. Fun, fun, fun.

BEWARE! TRAITORS ARE EVERYWHERE!

High on an experimental alertness drug called Leery, Fletcher must complete his mission before the treacherous Troubleshooters discover his own mutation—or his ever-changing criminal affiliations—or his membership in the First Church of Christ Computer-Programmer—in short, before Fletcher’s teammates


find out he’s a traitor. Fletcher is about to have more fun than anyone can stand.

STAY ALERT! TRUST NO ONE! KEEP YOUR LASER HANDY!

1: Briefing Room JSV-27-15

Year of the Computer 214, Month 03, Day 29 (Twosday), 08:00

The older, cannier, and more treasonous supervisors at JSV Troubleshooter Dispatch believed Briefing Room 27-15 held a curse. A Troubleshooter team would assemble in 27-15, just back from the latest mess hall riot, reactor leak repair, Food Vat guard hitch, or delivery of Research & Design’s new batch of high-performance industrial fusion-powered aerodynamic pencil sharpeners. The Team Leader would start to report, the Loyalty Officer piped up with a correction—as they do—the Recording Officer proved they were both wrong, and of course the Happiness Officer wouldn’t shut up.

Dispatch would try to forestall a firefight by confiscating their lasers and cone rifles beforehand—but some Troubleshooters hid knives or poison darts or sonics. And they were mandated to hold onto their assigned R&D experimental equipment, the spacetime grenades, personal steamrollers, flesh-eating bacterial swabs, lesnerizers, Nefandis Devices, and chromium antimatter-powered brass knuckles, which one of these days, by golly, they’ll finally get right. Somehow, in two minutes, the whole team wound up shot, burned, maimed, flattened, dismembered, crushed into a singularity, or outright vaporized, amalgamated into walls and ceiling as a penetrating pink spray.

Going by the Central Processing Unit service group’s latest actuarial figures, that kind of totally unexpected event was to be expected a certain percentage of the time. What percentage? Sorry, that information is not available at your security clearance.

It became a self-validating superstition. If a team checking in from a mission looked glum or furtive, said nothing, cast twitchy


sidelong looks at the team multicorder, and smelled of flop sweat, dispatchers nodded judicious nods and popped them in 27-15. Sometimes they stationed a cleanup crew outside, to save time.

This morning, for the debriefing of Troubleshooter Team Rotisserie-459, Mission JSV874029 (Team Leader Fletcher-R-JSV-1), the cleanup crew was standing by. Also a hazmat team. Also six GREEN goons, beat cops from Internal Security.

Inside 27-15, the six members of Team Rotisserie stood alone in lethal silence. Lit by interrogation lamps, in view of six visible surveillance cameras and unknowable others hidden, they stared straight ahead, their expressions as blank as the “Secret society affiliation (if any)” space on a Treasonous Action Authorization Form 33A.

At the left end of the line, from the viewpoint of the (currently vacant) officer’s lectern, stood Fletcher-R-JSV-1. Short, stocky, bright-eyed, thin-haired, jut-jawed, broad-forehead-ed, and wearing loose-fitting red reflec-armor coveralls, Fletcher-R—the R meant Clearance RED—could, with a decent pair of elevator boots, answer a Catch That Traitor! casting call for “Second-Lead Heroic Troubleshooter Who Dies in Act 2.”

In the floor-to-ceiling mirror behind the lectern Fletcher saw his skin, usually the healthy pink of an NCR form’s second undercopy, had become sallow, jaundiced, close to buff (copy 4) if not actually gold (copy 7). That was the Leery, a side effect his supplier hadn’t thought to mention. He wondered what other effects might erupt and, given his luck, in what untimely hour.

He noticed his team watching his reflection: His Loyalty Officer, Yvonne-R-JSV-2, glanced at him and narrowed her eyes. He took this as a death threat, against him (mainly) and the whole team (a bonus).

With dismay Fletcher realized everyone on his team had reason to want him dead. That could well happen today. This was the mission’s debriefing, its culmination. A debriefing officer could censure, demote, brainscrub, terminate, and worse. Fletcher could walk out of here with commendations and a promotion, or he might not walk out at all. The next few hours would determine whether he could gull The Computer into overlooking his many treasons, whether he could pin discrepancies and problems on his teammates, and whether they would betray him as thoroughly


as they doubtless wished. His life, all their lives, were like forms bundled for the recycler.

He sighed. As their leader, all he’d ever wanted was to eat better.

—————

48 hours earlier—214.03.27 (Sevenday), 08:00

FunFoods PLC Cold Fun Processing Plant JSV034 Access S014

If the INFRARED multitudes, enjoying in their tranquilized way their nightly Cold Fun dessert, understood the many processing steps in that frozen concoction’s synthesis—the parade of component chemical reactions—the immense stainless-steel machineries that funneled and mixed and stored organic precursors, reactants, and by-products in quantities that could float an aircraft carrier—well, they’d be terminated for knowledge above their clearance. But the point is, they’d understand why this refrigerated manufacturing hangar was filled with walkways and gantries, catwalks and cranes, struts and stanchions, all threading around and among endless rows of behemoth five-zillion-liter anodized aluminum storage tanks marked EXPLOSIVE.

Fletcher-JSV-1—INFRAREDs didn’t get clearance initials—shivered. He didn’t know or care anything about Cold Fun manufacturing. He only knew the ragged black coveralls of the INFRAREDs, the no-clearance scutworking proles of Alpha Complex, were no good for this freezing Funhole. Vapor rose like smoke from his frosted boots. He disliked smoking boots.

But to complain was to be unhappy. That would make The Computer unhappy. The Computer might ask its loyal servants in Internal Security to send Fletcher to a Bright Vision Re-education Center. There Attitude Adjusters would re-happify him with vigor and verve, at the cost of certain troublesome brain cells. Fletcher liked his higher motor functions, so he kept quiet. He shivered—but with a smile.

Stanton-JSV-1, his co-worker, looked cold too. Stanton was tall, rangy, black-haired (crewcut), weak-chinned, wide-mouthed,


and currently turning blue. “Why would a docbot get stuck here? Is someone injured back there?”

Fletcher peered down the foggy concrete walkway between coolant tanks. “If there is, he won’t need an ice pack.”

Fletcher and Stanton worked as Patient Transport & Repair Personnel—haulers, that’s all—for the Technical Services firm Doc-in-a-Box TS, authorized therapist for medical bots. Tech Services—one of the eight sprawling service group bureaucracies that administered the living daylights out of every person, place, thing, and abstract entity in Alpha Complex—handled bots. Some bots were crazy.

They were after one of the worst: a bugbrain docbot.Workers in the rival Power Services group said Techs lacked

brains. In a way, it was true. Tech always lacked for bot brains—photonic diamond CPUs in titanium cartridges—and often repurposed them for new roles. Sometimes faulty re-coding produced bugbrains: scrubots that taught loyalty songs to passersby; transbots that tried to jump the rails and infiltrate the front lines of an imaginary enemy; guardbots that grabbed and disarmed a rioter but then, retracting their dum-dum slugthrowers and crowd-control gas canisters, asked m’sieu what he desired to drink, and might the bot recommend a pleasant Beaujolais?

Bugbrain docbots—urgh!—left a trail of patients: amputees whose arms were now rifle stocks, or burn victims coated with four layers of furniture polish. These bots were the Doc-in-a-Box stock in trade, soylent for its table.

A thief had stolen some BLUE bigwig’s personal docbot. Troubleshooters had supposedly cornered both thief and bot somewhere in this giant FunFoods factory. Standard Tech Services protocol for [Category: BOTS :: Sub-cat: MEDICAL :: Condition-Prior: STOLEN :: Condition-Current: RETRIEVAL] called for a therapy team on-scene in the event of damage to brain or peripherals.

So Fletcher and Stanton were waiting for the mission team to locate the bot—the bot Fletcher and Stanton, armed with BotAway beacon trackers, had already found. Ten minutes ago. In this really cold hangar.

Stanton blew on his fingers. “Should we let them know we’ve found it?”


Fletcher had skipped this morning’s visomorpain pill due to a sore throat; he was thinking more clearly than usual. He looked down the narrow walkway. At the far end waited the bot—and presumably its thief. “Let’s leave that honor for them.”

“Heard about that big shareholder meeting tomorrow night?”“Yeah.” Fletcher looked around for cameras. He made the

Church gesture for silence. “Later.”“Right.” Stanton jumped in place. “Hey, let’s report some

trouble. That brings them to shoot it, and then we heard something down the walkway.”

Fletcher said through chattering teeth, “That works. Where’s Timon-O?”

No one liked to send INFRAREDs on a job unsupervised. Their boss, Timon-O-JSV-1, had dropped them here in this low-clearance packing bay and gone with the Troubleshooters. Fletcher figured he was trying to shine with their reflected glory.

But no—here he was now, shuttling back quick as a rejected Form Return Form 9999-C. Squat and broad with stubby legs, Timon-O wore an orange padded parka and overpants that made him look like a giant packing peanut. “Here,” the pasty ORANGE said in a nasal voice. He threw two black low-temp suits at Fletcher and Stanton. “Try to stay alive. More than those Troubleshooters seem to want.”

Fletcher zipped the parka. “Why, what’s up?”Timon spoke fast, with maximum fidgeting. “First, I think there

were already a couple of fatalities before I even met them. Then they were waving their laser pistols around, until I mentioned, ‘Oh by the way, these tanks can blow us all through our next three lives.’ Then they split up to search through this—this maze. Not a minute later, one of them spots another, mistakes him for a traitor, and belts him with a blackjack. I didn’t know they were even issued blackjacks. The team leader sent them off to the med center.”

“You could use the docbot,” Fletcher said. “It’s back there.”Timon-O gasped and grabbed Fletcher’s BotAway. He read

the screen and laughed. “I found it before they did. Call it in, Stanton.”

Fletcher noticed Timon, after months of management experience, could now teleport instantaneously past “Fletcher


and Stanton found the bot” and straight to “I succeeded.” Before he earned his clearance initial, Timon had quartered in the same barracks as Fletcher; he’d been a friendly, even generous fellow. Promotion and power changed him; now it was always, “What can you do for me, and how can I steal the credit?” Now he didn’t seem to like anyone.

Fletcher didn’t care. He liked everyone—or anyway, he didn’t think hard enough to dislike them. He led an INFRARED life. He went where They told him, did what They said, and They expected nothing from him but a smile. Thus had The Computer ordained it, and thus would it ever be.

Timon took him aside. “By the way, Fletcher, while I have you here—I just got back this 445. Improper completion, it says. I’m not sure how- I mean, I’m jammed with work right now—so could you, umm...?” He quickly passed Fletcher a clipboard with a six-ply NCR stack.

Fletcher glanced at it—a rejected Form TS-2952-445 Emergency Bathroom Break Requisition dated two days earlier.

Automatically he looked around for surveillance cameras. It wouldn’t do to black out here.

Fletcher had a problem—if it was a problem—with blackouts. He spent most evenings at his Elective Activity & Pursuit clubhouse supporting Alpha Complex as part of an approved Volunteer Form Checkers group. They helped overburdened Central Processing Unit service firms check submitted forms for rectitude, grammar, and signs of subconscious treason.

Fletcher was his club’s reigning champion. He was considered unbeatable in requisitions and transfers, but he walked on firm ground even with tricky rarities like Accidental Termination of Innocent Victim Justifications and Loyalty Re-Evaluation Speed Tests. But sometimes—no one knew this, or at least Fletcher hoped not—sometimes, when he was confronting a stack of challenging Security Clearance Demotions or Personality Stabilizer Requests, where you really had to know the rules—sometimes he kind of, well, went away. He didn’t faint or pass out; no, something just reached into his cortex and pressed a pause button. He saw black for a moment, blinked, and suddenly minutes had passed and all the forms sat stacked before him, checked and collated.


Sometimes he spotted new corrections he’d supposedly made, in small, precise handwriting he didn’t recognize.

Fletcher had never told anyone about his blackouts. It was nobody’s business, especially because it had a certain odor of—he didn’t even want to think the word—mutation.

He shook his head; he must have drifted off a moment. He started to tell Timon, “Sure,” when he noticed a pen had appeared in his hand. He checked the clipboard; the Bathroom Break Requisition was already corrected. Timon-O and Stanton were staring at him.

“Uh—” he began. Timon shook his head, took back the clipboard, and glared at Stanton. “I think you were calling in the find?”

Stanton gulped and returned to clawing at his pocket PDC—his Personal Digital Companion, the indispensable Alpha Complex aid. “I can’t push the buttons right. My fingers are frozen.”

From the walkway fog a low-fi voice chirped, “You look like you’re making a call! Would you like help?”

Without looking, Fletcher knew. It wasn’t a docbot—it was a clippy.

—————Unlike the doomsday devices and sector-eating plagues on the evening vidshows, the helpbots of Alpha Complex were not a mad inspiration of a single demented traitor, but The Computer’s own authorized initiative, undertaken by its purportedly loyal servants in several service groups. Perhaps the responsible parties had expunged their identities from public records, or possibly they’d faked their deaths and now lived in distant sectors under assumed names.

Whatever the reason, no one had been punished—a fact every traitor must have taken as a hopeful sign he might get away with anything. For in a society where complaining about a candy bar could get you brainscrubbed, helpbots (“clippies”) were silently, universally loathed.

Helpbots worked like The Computer’s ubiquitous context-sensitive help system. Programmed to locate citizens in need, they wandered the corridors, wedging their cheery counsel into any situation. “You look like you’re forcing open that vendobot door.


I can tell you about anger management!”—“Talking to Internal Security? Don’t forget to mention that mutation!”

While the INFRAREDs stared, Timon took control. “Bot! Your name and number.”

The clippy wheeled forward with programmed enthusiasm. Its voice seemed to echo from the bottom of a CoffeeLyke can. “Helpbot TSHB41566-212.11.09-788 at your service, Human-Interaction Designation ‘Drammel’!”

“Drammel” was a thin gunmetal-gray plank perched on end, about a meter high, with a rounded top like a paperclip—hence the nickname. Like all helpbots, it had a carbon-fiber exterior; by many informal experiments citizens had learned the stuff was nearly indestructible. In twin holes near the top—its head—stereo cameras rotated freely inside plastic housings, looking now forward, now behind. Intersecting the body’s midpoint, a jutting horizontal disk bore two manipulators, grippers that spun in independent tracks to front and rear. Another disk at the base mounted six polyurethane wheels. Speaker grilles on the front and back of Drammel’s head were shaped like grinning mouths, doubtless on the advice of some sociopathic marketing expert who thought it looked friendly.

“I’m assigned to Reuben-B-GHP-14, Sector JSV Cerulean Suites, Corridor 12,” said Drammel. “You look like you’re curious about the traitorous thief who brought me here. Would you like help locating him?”

“We would!” An ORANGE Troubleshooter strode into the area like he owned it.

Gazing at the man with fascination, Fletcher felt a vidshow fan’s excitement. A real Troubleshooter! He looked just like a hero of Alpha Complex should look: tall, broad-shouldered, with curling blond hair, gleaming blue eyes, and a rack of teeth that shone like transbot chrome. His orange reflec coveralls seemed to glitter. On an HPD&MC Catch That Traitor! casting call, he would win “Series Lead.” His chest badge read FABIAN-O-JSV-3—TEAM LEADER.

Several paces behind Fabian-O walked another Troubleshooter. Fletcher tried gamely to feel the same thrill at this weak-chinned, straw-haired, potbellied RED. His red coveralls, with the badge


GILES-R-JSV-4, were torn and stained. He carried a multicorder and, strapped to his back, a sledgehammer.

“Bot!” Fabian began, then paused to nod quickly to Timon and the INFRAREDs. “Fabian-O, pleasedtomeetyou—this is my Equipment Guy—anyway. Bot! Who stole you, and why?”

“I can answer that!” said Drammel. “It was a treasonous human male criminal. A bandit, cheat, crook, defalcator, heister, larcenist -”

“What is the thief’s name?”“I can help with that! I can take you to him, and you can search

his body.”The humans exchanged looks. Fabian asked, “He’s dead?”“I know that answer! It’s possible the body parts not yet

absorbed may still harbor living cells.”“Absorbed?”Timon broke in. “If he got into an intake hopper—”“Giles-R,” Fabian said. “Go and pry the thief out of the

machinery.”“Ohhh no!” The other Troubleshooter shied back. “You got rid

of the others, but I’m not about to—”Fabian’s smile showed his gritted teeth. “Civilians.” He

gestured at the INFRAREDs. “Of course I appreciate your due caution in this hazardous situation. I know The Computer will assess your hesitation fairly.” He raised his PDC.

“Okay, okay. But I want that bot to lead the way.”“I can help you there!” Drammel rolled down the walkway

and into the fog between the giant tanks. After looking in all directions, as if for escape routes, Giles-R trudged after it.

Suddenly Timon-O seemed to perceive his own glory slipping away into the same fog. He pointed at the INFRAREDs. “Go after them.” Then, to the puzzled Fabian: “I should have my people there too. For, um, consultation.”

Fletcher was about to ask for an Emergency Bathroom Break, but Stanton spoke sooner and faster: “Fletcher has experience with helpbots, don’t you, Fletcher? Wish I did, but it’s all docbots with me.”

Timon pointed. “Fletcher, go.”


Fletcher silently wished on Stanton the attentions of many docbots. Then, seeing no good excuse, and hoping he might impress the Troubleshooter, he ventured into the fog.

Gray chemical tanks loomed all around. A black stripe on the concrete floor showed Fletcher was still in a low-clearance area. Condensation trickled into steel floor grilles, and his low-temp suit grew damp. In a grid of walkways receding in all directions into white vapor, he felt a sensation rare in an INFRARED’s anthill life: isolation.

Noises sounded oddly close here. Fletcher moved toward the bot’s echoing chatter—then stopped. He was standing beside a sheet-metal shed or cabinet that thrummed with power. On principle, Fletcher avoided thrumming. Thrumming meant mistuned equipment, loose fittings, or unseated housings. Thrum = threat.

In this case, he discovered, thrum = human body stuffed in organic-chemical loading hopper. In the floor chute he could see only one protruding arm and a leg, each still clad in tattered yellow. Behind the chute, clear plastic pipes filled with chemicals reached into the fog overhead. Fletcher noted their current tinge of red.

He considered. Anyone hiding in this cabinet, say for instance from pursuing Troubleshooters, could easily slip backward and fall into the chute. It almost seemed designed to encourage such accidents. He could imagine the CPU cost-benefit analysis: one less traitor, plus that night’s Cold Fun would offer extra savor. Win-win.

But where was the Troubleshooter? Further down the walkway Fletcher heard the helpbot’s echoing voice, then thudding blows.

He ran to the next intersection. Around the corner stood the Equipment Guy, Giles-R, bringing up his sledgehammer for another swing. The helpbot had toppled, and its grippers were beating a tattoo on the cement. “You look like you’re trying to destroy me! Do you want to know about my carbon-fiber frame?”

Fletcher had no idea what to do. “Uhh—hey?”Giles turned, dropped his hammer, and pulled his laser pistol.

The red barrel had six concentric rings; five of them were black, and Fletcher had seen enough vidshows to know what that meant: One shot remained. He tried to run, slipped, fell, and the shot


hit a coolant pipe. White vapor shot out and struck Giles. The Troubleshooter reeled back, fell, hit his head on a steel pipe, and lay still.

Through a cloud of ammoniac ozone Fletcher crawled on his knees to the helpbot and pulled it upright. “Come on.” Not knowing or caring whether the bot followed, he scrambled to his feet and ran for the light.

- - - - -Back in the packing bay, while Stanton and Timon looked on in envy, Troubleshooter Fabian-O was thanking Fletcher—“Quick thinking, my good man”—when from the walkway they heard a muted whump!

“What was that?” Timon’s tone suggested he was worried the damage would somehow hit his budget.

“I can answer that! That was an explosion!”“Giles-R had a neurowhip,” Fabian said. “Maybe the fight

damaged its power supply. I hope the explosion doesn’t trigger something else.”

“Don’t worry,” said Timon. “He’d have to be carrying, I don’t know, volatile chemicals—”

BOOMPH! An alarm rang.“That would be his corrosion gas grenade,” Fabian observed.“Corrosion? Fletcher, you said you left him leaning against a

pipe made of—”WHOOOOSH! A geyser of vapor shot to the ceiling. A warning

klaxon blared.“It looks like you’re having an industrial accident! Would you

like to know which FunFoods chemical reagents are flammable?”Timon looked wary. “Would he have carried anything

incend—?”BA-BA-BAOOOOM! The geyser burst into a column of flame.

Sirens shrieked.Fabian-O said brightly, “Let’s adjourn to the lobby.”The FunFoods lobby was well appointed, cheery, and

ORANGE-Clearance, which made Fletcher nervous. But the security personnel and fire teams running to the warehouse floor paid the INFRAREDs no notice.


Timon was on the phone with Doc-in-a-Box HQ. Fabian seemed unexpectedly happy to talk with the INFRAREDs, perhaps because Stanton was gushing like his biggest fan. Fletcher wondered if he’d get in trouble for Giles-R’s death, but Fabian never mentioned it. He sure didn’t seem broken up.

Fabian took charge of the helpbot: “I’ll bring it to Dispatch, and they’ll decide what to do.”

“Why was Giles-R trying to destroy it?” Stanton asked.“No way to know. I suspect he belonged to a secret society, the

Frankenstein Destroyers—you know, the bot haters.”Fletcher tried not to sound suspicious. “Considering you’re the

last one alive from your team, you’re bearing up well.”Fabian chuckled. “Troubleshooters say the ideal debriefing

report begins, ‘I speak without fear of contradiction.’”Stanton laughed a subservient laugh. In terror Fletcher foresaw

Stanton (who hadn’t recently been targeted by Troubleshooter laser fire, and who could seldom shut up anyway) was about to say something rash, if not aggressively stupid.

Sure enough: “Deliver us from traitors,” Stanton said. Then he started and stammered, as he recalled secret society recognition code phrases don’t make polite conversation.

Fabian’s eyes widened. He seized both INFRAREDs by their black jackets and slammed them against the lobby wall. “What did you say?”

“Nothing nothing nooothing!” Stanton babbled. “I was just praying, I mean wishing, WISHinnng you good luck!”

Fabian looked around. Timon, still on his PDC, hadn’t noticed anything. The Troubleshooter’s broad back hid both INFRAREDs from the nearest security camera. Fletcher realized an ORANGE Troubleshooter could do whatever he wanted to them here—even kill them—and, if anything, get a commendation.

Fabian sized them up like slimes on a FunFoods vat. “Have you—” He paused. “Have you both heard the Good Data?” He touched four points on his chest, tracing the shape of the Holy Monitor.

Fletcher and Stanton tensed, goggled, then just about dissolved in relief. Fabian, like both of them, belonged to the largest and loyal-est of the many secret societies in Alpha Complex, First Church of Christ Computer-Programmer. The FCCC-P covertly


worshipped The Computer as a god. Membership in any secret society was treason—but as treason went, the church was pretty harmless, though The Computer officially prohibited religion as a threat to good order.

“Praise The Computer,” the INFRAREDs murmured.“The Computer is my friend, I shall not want,” Fabian

responded catechetically, with a quick look over his shoulder. “Are you Lasers of the Faithful?”

Fletcher’s wariness returned. “No, Church of the Impending Reboot.”

Fabian frowned, then shrugged. “Always room for improvement. You two heard about the big meeting tomorrow night? —Good. Who knows, maybe you’ll help out.”

“Us?” Stanton almost giggled. “We’re INFRAREDs.”The Troubleshooter grinned, winked, then called to Drammel.

“Bot!”“It looks like you’re about to travel!” said Drammel. “Would

you like—?”“No. Let’s go.” He nodded to Timon, and in a moment

Troubleshooter and bot were gone.Timon pocketed his PDC. He groaned. “No docbot, no therapy,

no payment. This entire episode has been a useless timesink. Let’s get back to the office.”

That afternoon Timon drank deeply from his desk bottle of E-Z-DUZ-IT. To Fletcher and Stanton it was all the same. One INFRARED day was like another.

—Until the next morning, in their barracks.

—————Promptly at 05:00, beefy GREEN-Clearance Internal Security officers in plexi helmets and pentramid vests—GREEN goons, IntSec’s all-purpose dumb thugs—seized Fletcher and Stanton as they slept in their bunks. Rather, the goons seized the bunks themselves—bedding, pillows, and all, with startled occupants still in place—snapped them free of their frames, and hauled away both beds and their beddees.

Even in their panic, the two INFRAREDs were too well trained to protest, though Fletcher did fretfully pull up his covers. Despite


the commotion, their barracks-mates never woke—or rather, diligently avoided waking.

The goons manhandled the beds into the wide black-striped corridor and over to a low-slung autocar. The strange vehicle seemed hardly more than a transparent capsule on wheels, like an airtight crash-cart for a hard-vacuum hospital. The goons popped the bubble-top hood and locked the beds, with their wide-eyed INFRAREDs, into twin frames of PVC tubing. The goons clamped, they strapped, they slammed down the hood, they shouted orders to the car, and at once Fletcher and Stanton were hurtling down the corridor.

The entire operation had so far taken, from barracks to car, 17 seconds, which meant they were already two seconds behind.

This was R&D service firm CrashCourse RD’s paradigm-shattering innovation in strong-signal, high-bandwidth training-in-place—the long-planned, much-anticipated “Instant Agent” training program: New Experimental Accelerated Troubleshooter Orientation (NEATO). Stupid acronym, sure, but this clunker actually improved on the original name, Heuristic Experimental Mandatory Accelerated Troubleshooter Orientation Metrics, which only showed how a grant-hungry R&D scientist will even, if sufficiently desperate, aim for HEMATOMA.

NEATO pioneered CrashCourse’s proprietary ThruFlood immersive high-bandwidth high-stimulus sensory-maximization instruction system. Passengers in CrashCourse’s custom-built BedSpeed autocar, still reclining in their own bunks to foster relaxed openness to new ideas, viewed six to eight simultaneous video feeds of Troubleshooter duties and obligations. To promote maximum info-retention, EyeMinder lasers in the autocar roof beamed each video directly onto a demarcated non-overlapping portion of one retina.

In the case of new Troubleshooters fresh from the INFRARED ranks, and thus likely to exhibit murky thought processes, in-car QuickShot hypodermics injected oxyflucocillin (Overdose Helper) to instantly cancel routine drug effects. The consequent withdrawal symptoms—migraine with aura, dystonic tremors, hysteria, giant hairy purple spiders—were easily forestalled by forced oral administration, via OpenWide robotic arm, of pyroxidine-2 (Wider Awake) tablets with a spray of aerosolized


thiahexedrine (Focusol), as well as the usual cocktail of sex-hormone suppressants.

Phase 2 began when the BedSpeed reached its destination transbot platform. Docking in a bay at the rear of CrashCourse’s custom-built HowWeRoll train car, the autocar played a recorded fanfare and disgorged its occupants. As the transbot started moving, HandsUp mechanical arms (actually just rebranded OpenWide models) stood the subjects upright, stripped off their existing garments, and re-dressed them in red Troubleshooter reflec coveralls.

Robotic dressers are of course an extremely well-understood technology; CrashCourse attributed early injury reports to incorrectly calibrated heat-based limb sensors. The company easily resolved the issue by preheating each subject’s arms and legs.

Now, on multiple video monitors, the subjects viewed efficient instruction in proper use of laser weaponry, then were propelled (via HandsUp) forward to the main section of the transbot car, the ShootForBrains target range. Armed with harmless but realistic light-guns, subjects faced a variety of harmless but realistic hologram opponents while being encouraged to improve their aim by harmless but realistic electric shocks. Opponents increased in frequency and difficulty until either the transbot arrived at its destination or the subjects collapsed and begged for sweet release in death, whichever occurred first.

An optimistic R&D projection—is there another kind?—predicted NEATO could compress Troubleshooter orientation and training from 4.4 days (median) to 24 minutes. Such unheard-of efficiencies pleased The Computer and made Troubleshooter Dispatch positively buoyant. Despite a few early kinks in the system (BedSpeed and HowWeRoll crashes, EyeMinder blindings, OpenWide jaw dislocations, QuickShot overdoses, ShootForBrains-induced psychotic episodes, and a couple of unfortunate HandsUp decapitations), hopes ran high for NEATO.

Then Dispatch realized each CrashCourse run generated a tsunami of paperwork.

Transbot track permits, autocar corridor passage waivers, maintenance requests, personnel requests, medication requisitions, power consumption authorizations, inter-group IntSec


cooperation requests (those were a killer)—all told, according to a CPU Yellowpants efficiency auditor, the additional overhead of a single NEATO orientation increased the Troubleshooter Dispatch workload by an irreducible minimum of 92 person-days at a cost of 7.8 million credits.

For a time Dispatch ignored these findings, partly because of prior sunk costs and partly because at least 6.8 million of those credits were flowing straight into senior administrators’ accounts. But inevitably The Computer, whose processors sometimes grind slowly yet they grind exceeding fine, noticed CrashCourse RD’s high incidence of traitorous sabotage, fatalities, slow paperwork, and poor hygiene. It canceled the NEATO program, disbanded CrashCourse, and imposed on its senior personnel varying judgments of censure, re-education, brainscrub, and/or promotion.

The last CrashCourse transbot on its last run pulled into Sector JSV Troubleshooter Dispatch Platform 1 on 214.03.28 at 05:25, 19 seconds behind schedule, bearing the NEATO program’s last new recruits, Stanton-JSV-1 and Fletcher-JSV-1.

Robot arms threw them from the car. They collapsed onto the platform, thrashing in fitful combat with phantom enemies. Waiting GREEN goons let them exhaust themselves, then hauled them into separate orientation rooms.

Alone in darkness save for two guards, Fletcher lay curled and twitching on the floor.

A light. A voice:

FLETCHER-JSV-1, ATTENTION.

No other voice could bring him to his feet so fast. No voice but that one could focus his mind to pinpoint alertness. By that command, Fletcher understood at once the promise and danger of this moment—the most important of his life so far.

He stood bolt upright, shoulders back, head high, heart pounding. He gazed straight ahead, where one entire wall of this long room glowed bright.

It was a monitor, taller than himself and too wide to see in one glance.

On the monitor, a single staring eye.


Fletcher struggled to speak. “Hello, Friend Computer!”The Computer spoke:

FLETCHER-JSV-1, FOR MANY YEARS THE TROUBLESHOOTERS HAVE LOYALLY SERVED ALPHA COMPLEX. IN RECOGNITION OF YOUR RECENT COMMENDABLE ACTION OR ACTIONS AT OR IN INSERT-LOCATION-HERE DETECTING THE PRESENCE AND/OR FIGHTING THE MENACE OF INSERT-TREASON-HERE, IT IS NOW YOUR PRIVILEGE AND/OR DUTY TO JOIN THE RANKS OF THIS ELITE SERVICE UNIT.

“Thank you, Friend Computer!”

F L E T C H E R - J S V- 1 , W H AT A R E T H E THREE UNBREAKABLE RULES OF THE TROUBLESHOOTERS?

From the bottom of his lungs Fletcher shouted, “Stay alert! Trust no one! Keep your laser handy!”

FLETCHER-JSV-1, YOU WILL FOLLOW IN THE TROUBLESHOOTERS’ GLORIOUS STRUGGLE—STAINED WITH BLOOD BUT NEVER DISHONOR!—TO HELP ALPHA COMPLEX ACHIEVE ITS IMMINENT AND INEVITABLE VICTORY OVER TREASON.

“Thank you, Friend Computer!”

BUT BEWARE! TREASON IS EVERYWHERE; AT ANY MOMENT TRAITORS MAY SUBVERT, OVERWHELM, AND DESTROY ALPHA COMPLEX.

“Yes, Friend Computer!”

IN SERVICE TO THE GOAL OF IMMINENT VICTORY OVER ONRUSHING COLLAPSE, YOU MUST NOW


REPORT ANY TREASON OR INSUBORDINATION BY YOUR COMPANION, STANTON-JSV-1.

Fletcher’s thoughts whirled. If he reported Stanton’s membership in FCCC-P, that would implicate Fletcher as well, but his cooperation might exculpate him. The choice was sharpened because he knew, with mortal sureness, Stanton was even now being ordered to report on him. Prisoner’s dilemma.

But the church taught betrayal was the sin of sins; it was odious to distract the all-wise and compassionate Computer with such trivia. Fletcher spoke with only a mild quaver, “To my knowledge, Stanton is a loyal friend of The Computer and Alpha Complex.”

A long, dreadful silence. A lidless, baleful eye. Fletcher waited in despair for the termination order.

F L E T C H E R - J S V- 1 , Y O U A R E H E R E B Y PROMOTED TO SECURITY CLEARANCE RED. YOUR NAME WILL NOW INCORPORATE THE CLEARANCE INITIAL R, AS SPECIFIED IN CENTRAL PROCESSING UNIT’S NOMENCLATURE PROTOCOL PROTOCOL-ID-NOT-AVAILABLE, AVAILABLE AT YELLOW CLEARANCE. YOUR NEW SECURITY CLEARANCE SIGNIFIES THE COMPUTER’S BENEVOLENT TRUST IN YOU. THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND.

“The Computer is my friend!”

IF YOU SERVE ALPHA COMPLEX WELL, FLETCHER-R, YOU WILL EARN GREATER TRUST AND THEREBY ADVANCE IN SECURITY CLEARANCE. ASPIRE TO ADVANCE! SEEK TO SERVE ALPHA COMPLEX IN EVER GREATER WAYS! FAILURE TO ASPIRE MAY BE CONSIDERED INSUBORDINATION.

“Yes, Friend Computer!”


AS A TOKEN OF RECOGNITION AND WELCOME, FLETCHER-R, YOU NOW RECEIVE A SPECIAL REWARD. THIS IS ONE OF MANY PERQUISITES FOR CITIZENS WHO EARN THE COMPUTER’S TRUST AND SERVE ALPHA COMPLEX TO THEIR FULLEST ABILITY. PLEASE ACCEPT THIS FRUIT FROM THE SECTOR’S HYDROPONIC GARDENS, ORDINARILY AVAILABLE ONLY AT CLEARANCE GREEN AND HIGHER.

A guard walked forward and solemnly placed in Fletcher-R’s palm a red, globular thing.

He looked with suspicion at the fruit. Round and heavy, it felt like a grenade. He knew about real food from vidshows—people onscreen seemed to like it—but he’d heard, around the mess hall, it was somehow made from dirt. He wished for his usual soylents or a rope of Cold Fun.

But this was The Computer’s gift, and The Computer, as always, was watching.

With hesitation bordering on fear, he nibbled at the skin. Moisture flowed, a sweetness unsurpassed. He froze. He could not think. Something in him, older than thought, took over. He bit deep. Tight skin curled on his teeth; crisp, tart flesh yielded forth its juice; a cascade of flavors raced wild on his tongue. Misting droplets rose—a piquant scent, astringent, a zest as bracing as a sudden breeze.

Drugs had fogged his mind before, but this was different. This was trance. He stared unblinking, his eyes crossing and uncrossing. He fell to his knees. Each cell of his body had been starved; he had not known. Now he knew, in every artery, a quickened pulse; in every limb, electric jolts; and in his throat, constriction, as if his mouth would not give up the unimagined rapture. The pleasure felt more than visceral—cellular—no, primal—a strike into the buried past, a linkage to ten billion ancestors, all born of just this bliss.

Yet for history he cared nothing. His reeling thoughts converged on one idea: High-clearance people eat like this all the time.

Now, he saw, he had a future. He saw, in truth, a vision new to him—a scene of opportunity, of endless open ways, where


all the labyrinths of corridors and halls stretched clearance-free, with every door thrown back and Alpha Complex in its tentacular mazery mapped clear. And in his clarity of sight he knew, and now despised, the flat thin paper-chase he had taken for his life—his little, barren, petty life—an abject round, a program run on hardware much too slow.

The insight roused in him a yearning, close to pain, for the years of chances he had missed, and for strength and will to capture those ahead. The insight roused in him an appetite, fierce and unsubdued, for fresh food, better thoughts, high clearance, and life, life, life. The insight roused him to his feet, so that he stood, first faltering and breathless, then firm—if not quite human yet, then ready to step forward on that path.

He groped for words. “What—what is it?”

IT IS A POMACEOUS FRUIT CALLED AN APPLE. ITS SCIENTIFIC DESIGNATION IS NOT AVAILABLE AT YOUR CLEARANCE. ONLY THE COMMON NAME OF THIS VARIETY IS AVAILABLE.

“What is the name?”

RED DELICIOUS.

—————You’ve just read Chapter 1 (about the first one-sixth) of the PARANOIA novel Stay Alert by Allen Varney. In the full-length novel—available where you bought this book—Fletcher-R meets the Troubleshooters of Team Rotisserie-459, and almost immediately gets into such trouble with them they want to shoot him. The helpbot returns, too, and why are all these gangsters trying to grab it? Which of Fletcher’s teammates support which gang?

For that matter, which one does he support? His allegiance seems to change by the hour.

What is going on with Fletcher’s blackouts, and will anyone notice? (Spoiler: Yes, they notice.)


What is the mind-control technology called CIRCE, and why has it fallen into the hands of the cutting-edge Computer Phreak gangsters, the Flash Mob?

Who is the mysterious ‘M’ who seems to mentally control some of the most powerful people in the sector?

Read Stay Alert to find (some of) the answers. Well, a few of the answers. Anyway, it should pique your curiosity.

Stay AlertBook 1 of The Troubleshooter Rules

by Allen Varney



FREE preview: Traitor Hangout

Chapters 1-3 from the full-length PARANOIA novel by WJ MacGuffin

In Alpha Complex, the underground city of the future, The Computer’s loyal Central Processing managers issue mandates to ensure everything works ferpectly. Pecfertly. Crefpetly! Well, you know.

Efficiency auditor (“Yellowpants”) Clarence-Y lives to enforce mandates—and he knows them all. By owning a pet mouse, Ignatius, Clarence has already broken 22 mandates. And it’s not even lunch.

On assignment for Internal Security, Clarence-Y impersonates notorious criminal “Superstar Pirate” and infiltrates four treasonous secret societies in one day. Can he and Ignatius survive?

Never mind that—can they possibly avoid violating Mandate ISTM 440.95/a?

1: All’s well that ends with the other guy in trouble

Mandate HPPM 722.20/a: Any citizen who spots a creature from the Outdoors within Alpha Complex must immediately report said creature to Internal Security as a threat to hygiene and good order. Said creature may be diseased and contagious, mutated and radioactive, easily angered and oversensitive about its appearance, Communist, or otherwise part of a larger scheme to infect, infest, pollute, malign, subvert, subjugate, or destroy Alpha Complex.

Clarence-Y-SKL-1 was an efficiency auditor for Central Processing Unit—a Yellowpants. He loved his work—most days. Not today.

Having accompanied Troubleshooter Team Mandrake-945 into the field—specifically, the field of fire—Clarence-Y crouched behind an overturned vendobot in a black-walled mess hall. The black walls meant the room was INFRARED Security Clearance,


suited only for drugged prole workers, the lowest of the low. Just now the lowest of the low, being the sensiblest of the sensible, had cleared out.

Team Leader Ryan-O-GTT-2 crouched beside Clarence. Where Clarence was tall, Ryan was stocky; Clarence’s short, wavy white hair and prominent nose contrasted with Ryan’s lank dirt-brown combover and stubby pug. Ryan was O-for-ORANGE, one step below Clarence-Y on the clearance spectrum. In one respect the two men were alike: They didn’t want to be here.

Laser shots fizzed overhead. Ryan shot back in a manner Clarence judged sub-optimally casual. “You must be aware intra-team firefighting goes against the spirit of all my efficiency recommendations, and explicitly against my Directive 17.”

“Really?” Ryan ducked a laser shot. A brilliant red line flashed through the smoke. “I’m concerned.”

Troubleshooters were supposedly an elite service unit, not unlike the Yellowpants, but (in Clarence’s view) lacking in focus and rigor. “Look.” He pointed at the screen of the PDC, his Personal Digital Companion—the phone-browser-media player-video recorder-tracking device indispensable to every fieldworker’s workflow. “If I could just get your signature here, here, and here, and your initials here and here, and your tongue print there, that completes my report and we can all get on with our work.” He offered a stylus.

Another laser shot burned a circle in the wall behind them, leaving a smell of vaporized plastic. “Sorry.” The Team Leader ejected his laser pistol’s spent orange barrel and popped on a fresh one. “My former teammates have introduced new concerns.”

Clarence peeked over the vendobot. At the room’s far end, behind a barricade of half-slagged plastic tables, Team Mandrake-945’s Equipment Guy and Hygiene Officer were asserting their concerns via vigorous laser fire. Amid overturned chairs lay three RED-Clearance Troubleshooters, cut down in the first seconds of the firefight.

Clarence understood, down to his thin bones, the importance of prioritization. Yet even so: “My SETBE is complete, and I really must have your signature or I can’t finish this project.”

“Your what?”“My Surprise Efficiency and Team Building Exercise.”


“Oh.” Ryan shot blind over the vendobot. “I thought you were just here to make our lives miserable.”

At the sound of one of its assigned keywords, the vendobot’s red plastic front sparked into life. The bot was badly damaged but still game. “Miserable? Why not stop shooting each other, and me while you’re at it, and share a Yum-Yum Processed Algae Bar? Mmm, tasty. Try Choco-Shrimp! Try Very Berry Jerky! Ten percent off if you pull me upright.”

Clarence ignored the bot. “You shouldn’t say that. Mandate HPPM 002.73/f states, ‘Citizens shall remain happy, because The Computer has provided everything needed for a joyful existence.’”

Ryan looked Clarence in his brown, bulging eyes. “Listen, the cameras and microphones are broken, so knock off the happiness crap. Alpha Complex sucks and everyone knows it. We choke down happiness pills, watch videos with subliminal messages, and listen to those awful Happiness Hymns, because if we don’t, Friend Computer will lock us up in a Joyful Liberation of Guilt re-education hostel.”

Clarence was flabbergasted. “But I’m happy!”Ryan sneered. “You would be. Hey! You traitors ready to give

up?”“Nyet! You are beink traitor!” The Equipment Guy was a large

RED citizen with short black hair and a handlebar moustache. “You have shot Loyalty Officer!”

“That’s because he shot our Happiness Officer.”“She was a mutant.” The Hygiene Officer was also RED,

but she had longer hair and a shorter moustache. “She had a suspicious wart.”

While the Troubleshooters argued, Clarence felt a familiar stirring over his chest, in the secret pocket of his jumpsuit. He turned away in alarm. The squirming passed.

He cleared his throat and tried to sound authoritative. “Team Leader Ryan-O, I am YELLOW Clearance. By the power granted to me by Mandates TCPM 006.03/a, CPPM 100.14/a, and ISTM 008.31/a through /e, I order you to sign my SETBE form to conclude this exercise.”


Ryan chuckled. “Right. Like I give a bot’s tread about your clearance. I have a gun. You don’t. That means I set this meeting’s agenda. Understood?”

Clarence gawped. Could these walls dissolve, the floor dissipate, all Alpha Complex vanish like a dream? “You must follow my orders. It’s a mandate. Mandates are, are—for following.”

The vendobot beeped. “Maybe he’s too hungry to think straight. Buy him a Pistachio-Basil flavored Yum-Yum Processed Algae Bar.”

A grenade labeled “R&D” landed near them. Ryan pulled Clarence to him as a shield. But the grenade only wheeped and puffed smoke, then lay inert.

Their noses a finger-breadth apart, Ryan-O glared. “Forget your stupid form. There are more important things to worry about.”

Twin laser shots drowned Clarence’s strenuous tut-tutting. This was so typical. In the field, non-assigned jobs always popped up, and he couldn’t finish the real job until he tackled those first. A job assigned in a job done, he thought. And there’s only one way to finish this job—start and finish another one. Besides, in his personal job log he could add “Improved Troubleshooter team efficiency by stopping Troubleshooters shooting each other.”

He looked across the room and sighed. “Fine.” Gathering himself, he jumped over the fallen vendobot—just as it launched a Yum-Yum bar at 70kph. The processed algae snack hit his stomach, knocking him to one side. A laser shot flashed through the point where he’d been standing.

He gasped for breath. “That hurt!”The vendobot beeped. “One credit, please.”“I didn’t order anything!”“I heard you say ‘Fine,’ which I logically took to mean an order

for one Mostly Salmon-Flavored Yum-Yum bar.”Clarence stood up, ran, tripped over his own feet, and fell.

Another laser shot struck harmlessly nearby. He scrambled to his feet and, under heavy fire, danced—or arhythmically bungled—across the bodies. Reaching the far barricade, he clambered over and landed, breathless, beside the Equipment Guy hiding there. “Excuse me,” Clarence said between breaths. “You are in violation of many mandates. Would you like me to list them?”

The big man stared. “How vere you to be dodgink all my shots?”


“Pardon me?”“Is no pardonink! Glorious comrades instruct me to be killink

everyone in room! YELLOW capitalist pigdog is, by definink, more of ‘everyone’ than RED capitalist pigdogs!”

“Leaving that aside, and taking these violations as read, you are required to stop this mayhem and turn yourself in to Internal Security, by reason of Mandate—”

The Equipment Guy roused himself. “Nyet, comrade. This to be derailink Troubleshooter mission as part of Glorious Five-Year Plan to be destroyink Computer and turnink Alpha Complex into vorker’s paradise!”

Something underneath Clarence’s shirt squirmed, poking the yellow fabric. “Shhh,” Clarence whispered. The squirm grew stronger.

The Equipment Guy pointed with his pistol. “Uhh—vhat is beink that?”

From the neck of Clarence’s yellow jumpsuit popped a small white mouse.

“AAAAAaaaaaaa!” The Equipment Guy leaped to his feet and backed away. “Monster mutant beastie what comink from Outdoors!”

Jumping up during a firefight is usually unwise, as Team Leader Ryan-O promptly proved. The Equipment Guy pondered the smoking hole in his chest, then fell over dead.

“Bad, Ignatius! Bad mouse!” Clarence grabbed for the mouse, but it slipped between his hands and scampered down his leg. It ran to the Hygiene Officer, who was busy aiming her pistol at Clarence.

“You little punk, I don’t know how you killed aaaARGH! Mutant creature attack!” She stood up to stomp the mouse. Continuing his tutorial in Why Jumpy Firefighting is Unwise, Ryan shot her in the head.

When the mouse stopped to smell the dead traitor’s boots, Clarence scooped up the mouse and put it back in the pocket under his jumpsuit’s neckline. “There, there. Who’s a good citizen, who?”

Ryan kicked the vendobot and walked over to the barricade to confirm his kills. “That could have been worse. Then again, I still don’t know what my mission is about. Probably should


have waited for the briefing to begin before shooting. Hey, Yellowpants?”

Clarence hated that term. Supposedly it originated after several CPU efficiency auditors, while following Troubleshooter teams into heavy action, wet themselves. The worst part? It was technically more efficient to say “Yellowpants” than “CPU efficiency auditor”—fewer syllables. “Yes, friend?”

“Good work back there. Thanks for distracting them so I could take them out.”

Clarence-Y looked horrified. “Me? But I— I mean— I just wanted to stop the fight so you’d sign my SETBE form.” He held out his PDC. “Can you sign now?”

“I need to kill you first.” Ryan aimed his pistol square at Clarence’s narrow chest. “Not only are you a filthy mutant, just like all my late teammates—you’re a witness.”

“Me? I’m not a mutant!”“For the love of Friend Computer, you scuttled across that kill

zone without a scratch. How else would you explain such luck? It must be a strange mutant power. But if it’s any consolation, you’re my hundredth kill. That means a medal in the Anti-Mutant Society. Bye, mutie!” Ryan pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. He pulled the trigger again, and again. Still nothing. The gun’s barrel was out of shots. Snarling, Ryan raised his fists—

Then: the chime.The chime is a pleasant, harmonious tone, not overly loud. The

chime plays throughout a demarcated area, over all speakers, PA systems, PDCs, undercover Internal Security transceivers, and hearing aids. Optimized through extensive CPU-run multi-target, cross-clearance focus groups across multiple sectors, the chime is designed to connote happiness and tranquility. The chime may cause adrenaline spikes, outbreaks of mass accusation and confession, and, in certain circumstances, heart attacks.

Clarence and Ryan stood silent, outwardly calm and not at all guilty-looking. Even the wisps of smoke seemed to pause.

In a pleasant, measured tone, somewhere between an avuncular tenor, resonant with years of experience, and a young teacher on the verge of screaming, The Computer spoke:


ATTENTION, CITIZENS CLARENCE-Y-SKL-1 AND RYAN-O-GTT-2.

“Hello, Friend Computer!” they said in unison.

MY RECORDS INDICATE SURPRISE EFFICIENCY AND TEAM BUILDING EXERCISE SEVEN-SEVEN-STROKE-ALPHA-SIGMA-EN-DASH-FIVE IS NOW 20 MINUTES AND FIVE SECONDS LATE. PLEASE EXPLAIN THE TARDINESS.

Clarence and Ryan looked at each other like two hungry INFRAREDs with only one bowl of Hot Fun.

Ryan cleared his throat. “Friend Computer, Troubleshooter Team Mandrake-945 has nothing to do with any efficiency exercise. I’m on a mission of vital importance. Request permission to continue my mission.”

DENIED. YOUR MISSION HAS 18 HOURS, 34 MINUTES, AND 54 SECONDS REMAINING. THE SETBE IS 20 MINUTES, 35 SECONDS LATE. THE SETBE IS CURRENTLY PRIORITIZED. PLEASE EXPLAIN THE TARDINESS.

Clarence stepped away from Ryan. “Friend Computer, according to Mandate CPPM 387.66/c, all SETBEs conducted in the field with Troubleshooter teams require a signature from the team’s leader, or closest equivalent should the leader in question be unable to sign due to loss of life, loyalty, or hands. I have been awaiting the signature for approximately 25 minutes.”

IS THE SETBE COMPLETE AND READY FOR A SIGNATURE, CITIZEN CLARENCE-Y?


DID YOU REMEMBER TO ASK FOR A SIGNATURE?



HAVE YOU PROVIDED A PEN, STYLUS, OR OTHER SUITABLE WRITING IMPLEMENT?


PROCESSING. PLEASE WAIT.

Ryan and Clarence stared at each other. Hard.

CITIZEN RYAN-O-GTT-2, YOU ARE GUILTY OF INSUBORDINATION FOR REFUSING TO PROMPTLY SIGN A COMPLETED SETBE FORM, LEADING TO AN UNACCEPTABLE INEFFICIENCY IN EFFICIENCY IMPROVEMENT. YOU ARE HEREBY FINED 50 CREDITS. PLEASE SIGN THE FORM IMMEDIATELY.

IN ADDITION, YOU ARE GUILTY OF TREASON FOR FAILING TO COMPLY WITH THE WISHES OF A HIGHER-CLEARANCE CITIZEN IN THE COURSE OF THAT CITIZEN’S DUTIES. YOU ARE HEREBY SENTENCED TO PUBLIC CENSURE IN THE FORM OF A TATTOO READING “DISLOYAL” ON YOUR FOREHEAD, TO REMAIN FOR 90 DAYS. A DOCBOT HAS BEEN DISPATCHED TO PROVIDE THE TATTOO. PLEASE WAIT FOR THE DOCBOT AT YOUR CURRENT LOCATION. STANDARD TATTOO FEES AND OPTIONAL FRESH NEEDLE COSTS APPLY.

Clarence held out the PDC and stylus. Ryan signed, initialed, and tongue-printed the form. “If I’d had any shots left, this would have gone down differently.”

Clarence looked puzzled. “But that would violate another mandate.”

Through the open door rolled a docbot with attached ink gun and buzzsaw. “Bing! Are you the double amputation you must be or I am in the wrong room and I am sure I am in the right room


stay still please this will only hurt a lot bing!” As Clarence shut the door and walked away, he heard the saw spin up.

———— The War Against Treason, like the typical CPU procedure, takes many forms. Terminating traitors, arresting suspected traitors, and surveilling everyone else as potential traitors—these are obvious. More insidious is inefficiency. As The Computer can objectively prove—and nobody argues with The Computer—the waste of time, energy, supplies, or even thoughts is one step away from the murder of innocent Junior Citizens with a dull knife. Efficiency is happiness; waste is tantamount to treason.

That’s why, after only 24 years of exploratory meetings, ad-hoc committees, fact-finding missions to vacation resorts, and a comprehensive 3,550-page INDIGO-Clearance report printed in a limited run of 255,000 copies and promptly shredded before it could be leaked, CPU created the Efficiency Improvement Task Force Agency Department Group Auditor Subgroup, the squadron of YELLOW-Clearance efficiency auditors colloquially known as Yellowpants.

Yellowpants audit, assess, anatomize, repattern, perfect, and promulgate processes of every kind across Alpha Complex. Like white blood cells—well, yellow blood cells—they flock to the infection of inefficiency and destroy it, always with an absolute minimum of time, energy, supplies, and thought. This protects Alpha Complex from the triple threat of Communism, mutants, and traitors.

How efficiency protects Alpha Complex, exactly, is hotly debated—though, if The Computer hears the debate, not for long.

———— In a side corridor halfway back to the CPU Merit-N-Work center, Clarence stopped at an Anne-G’s Fried Dough Hut and purchased three Yummy Yeasty Yammies with Almost-Real Cheese Dust. Many empty tables surrounded the hut, and Clarence sat down at one near a wall. Then he bent over and quickly tied a knot in his shoelaces.

“Oh, bother, a knot. Mandate PLPM 755.92/g says I need to take care of that immediately—and Mandate PLPM 775.92/h


says I can take up to five minutes and 20 seconds to remedy the situation.”

He carefully positioned himself between the table and the security camera in the ceiling, spilled three Yammies on the floor, and let out the mouse. It sniffed, then dug in.

“Now you listen to me,” Clarence said as he undid the knot. “When I take you out walkies, you stay in the pocket. If Friend Computer sees you, it’ll probably terminate me. Worse, it might take you away.”

The mouse quickly finished Yammie One and started nibbling on Two.

“Well, yes, it must know about you already. Friend Computer tends to know everything. But if it knows, wouldn’t it have taken action already? Keeping you is in direct violation of Mandates ISPM 449.20/r, HPPM 028.11/v, CPPM 878.90/p, TSPM 402.99/g, and maybe even AFPM 1033.21/c, depending on your definition of the term ‘hallucination.’ Which really should be codified, don’t you think?”

The mouse sniffed the air.“Good question. Inasmuch as Friend Computer knows and

hasn’t taken action, does that mean it must support the idea of me keeping you? Well, Mandate CPPM 002.07/a says orders from The Computer trump all mandates, which only makes sense. What kind of leadership could The Computer provide if it had to follow its own laws?” For a moment Clarence wondered if The Computer could issue an order that trumped CPPM 002.07/a. He brushed away the thought. “Still, we have to be careful. Some citizens may not follow mandates as closely as we do. And that means staying in the pocket when we go for walkies! Agreed?”

Finished with Yammie Two, the mouse crept toward Three.“Good. I’m sorry I yelled at you. Still friends?”The mouse ate Yammie Three.“Great! I’d hate to lose my only friend. Now finish your lunch

and it’s back in the pocket. This was our last job today, so we head back to CPU, change into our civilian clothes, and study today’s mandate updates. And there’s a documentary tonight on Forced Algae Growth. I hear it improves food supply 200 percent.”

Clarence tied his shoelace in a mandate-approved knot, carefully pocketed the mouse, and ate the last Yammies. My,


he thought, it really does taste almost like real cheese. Or so he assumed.

2: Just when you think you’re screwed, you really are

Mandate ISPM 008.57/c: A sector’s Security Efficiency Rating (SER) shall be computed by dividing the number of solved cases by the total number of reported treasons (excluding reports designated “Minor, Inexplicable,” “Minor, Silly,” or “Minor, Affected Low-Clearance Citizen” as defined by Mandate ISPM 0014/a).

Mandate ISPM 008.57/d: If a sector’s SER falls below 0.64, Internal Affairs shall conduct a thorough review of the sector’s leadership to remove contamination by Communists, mutants, terrorists, moles, voles, secret society agents, and other traitors and/or small mammals. Incompetence is not a source of contamination and may be ignored.

The sweating, nervous citizen sat in a metal chair specifically designed to be uncomfortable. The nylon rope tying her tightly to the chair didn’t help, nor the duct tape over her mouth. Neither did the sunlamp shining in her face for the past hour.

This morning, Veronica-R-MRM-1 was a RED-Clearance Internal Security Parking Meter Auditor giving tickets to autocars parked illegally in the Conspicuous Consumption Is Patriotic Shopping Promenade. She liked her job—although the autocars she ticketed always argued too much—and she was proud to be RED. Sure, she wasn’t an ORANGE surveillance camera repairperson, a YELLOW forms checker, a GREEN goon, or a higher-clearance Internal Security agent, but at least she wasn’t INFRARED. Yes, Friend Computer had surely smiled on her, virtually speaking.

Earlier this morning, while ticketing a luxury EJ-type autocar for parking on two INFRARED-Clearance pedestrians, Veronica had been forcibly detained by GREEN-Clearance IntSec goons, beaten up for their protection, rendered offsite in a traitor wagon,


beaten again because they couldn’t remember if they’d beat her before, and dragged to Floor 4 of YFG Sector Internal Security Central Station.

Officially, the fourth floor was where people were taught “communication skills.” Everyone knew what really happened on the fourth floor, and because they knew, everyone denied they knew. Though it was the busiest floor in the building, no one admitted visiting. People went to the fourth floor in groups and returned in smaller groups. Usually one or two from each group never returned.

Now Veronica sat tied to a chair bolted to the concrete floor of Communication Skills room 46. Panic was not the word; wetting oneself while screaming oneself hoarse behind the duct tape was—though technically that’s a phrase.

She heard the door open but couldn’t turn around. Footsteps drew near; the door shut; still she saw no one. Sweat rolled down her forehead and stung her eyes. She tried to say, “I’ll confess to anything you want! I’m loyal!” She actually said, “Uhhuhmumph umumumh uhhunnph! Ummurmm!”

A tall, heavily muscled man strode into view. He wore a tailored deep-blue jumpsuit with a blue badge pinned to the front pocket. His hair was somewhere between blonde and white, cut so short the difference didn’t matter.

Veronica froze—easy, given she couldn’t move anyway. Like every worker of every clearance at Central, she knew this man, and like every worker, she feared him: the BLUE-Clearance station commander, Ben-B-HTY-4.

Ben-B took his Personal Digital Companion from a padded pocket and set it on Veronica’s lap. He pressed a button. The PDC played back an interrogation he’d conducted the previous week.

“This is an interview,” said his recorded voice, “with a citizen of interest in Case Number X-Ray-Foxtrot-Spam-Wiener one-seven-six-stroke-eleven. This citizen was volunteered to compete against others for a chance at answering our questions about Most Wanted Traitor Number One, Superstar Pirate. Answers will be elicited from the lucky winner using standard enhanced-interrogation techniques, which—” Strange buzzing and gurgling noises rolled over the rest of his words, followed quickly by screams.


Veronica stared with wide eyes at the PDC, then up at Ben-B’s smiling face. She had no idea what to say, or in her case to mmmrrmmph.

Her heart sank further as she saw Regina-G-AFD-5. Ben-B’s GREEN-Clearance second in command wore an identical jumpsuit, a bit more full along the waist, colored pale green with a deep green badge. Her black hair was cut short in typical Alpha Complex fashion—i.e., avoiding a particular fashion so as not to stand out. Though not technically forbidden, individuality often meant treason, and treason always meant trouble.

The two officers retreated to a far corner. Veronica, to no one’s surprise, stayed where she was.

She wondered what was going on. The recorded interrogation covered Ben and Regina’s voices so she couldn’t hear them. She took a long while to realize the corollary: Neither would any bugs. To anyone listening in Internal Affairs, nothing was going on except a routine tutorial in communication skills.

———— Ben asked Regina, “Where do we stand on Operation Site-N-Sleight?”

Regina knew the cameras were broken. Regina knew Ben’s PDC recording masked her voice. Even so, Regina was nervous. She was already up to her neck in fines and couldn’t afford further debt. Yet here she was, discussing treason. “We hacked the Report Treason For Valuable Prizes site. We stole the identities of 32 citizens before Internal Affairs noticed. We pulled in a known hacker and taught him some communication skills until he confessed. We brainscrubbed him and re-educated him as a line cook.”

“Good,” said Ben. “Send me the list of IDs. I’ll recruit those citizens to a contest—something about seeing who’s the most loyal. Standard reward, credits; standard penalty, termination. Being more loyal will raise their loyalty ratings, which will improve their credit ratings. I’ll max out their credit. When I send you the word, arrest them for suspicious financial activity and have them all brainscrubbed. I’ll funnel the credits to the usual accounts.”


In the background, the recorded screaming gave way to a rambling confession of rolling blackouts, fluoridated water, and a quintuple kidnapping.

“What about the winner?” Regina asked.“It’s not about winning or losing, but the competition. That’s

what creates the best results. So brainscrub the winner too. Next, what about Lien-N-Clean?”

“After we took out a million-credit insurance policy on the old Central Station building, a Troubleshooter team showed up to investigate why we wanted the policy. We gave the Troubleshooters free grenades for their investigation; I’m told pieces of the team are still being scrubbed from the briefing room. Since the building was originally a Research and Design lab, we’ve declared a three-block radius—” (Regina checked her notes) “—‘Unsafe Due To Runaway Experiment Into Things Humanity Was Never Meant To Know.’ We can’t use the budget line for the building to launder credits any more, but the 500,000 credits we previously assigned for renovations are clean. My report is ready to go.”

“You’re blaming Pirate for the building’s loss?”“Right. Give the word and I’ll demolish it in a flashy explosion,

then file both the report and the claim.”The recorded confession devolved into crying and gibbering

over a background of mechanical noises—grinding, buzzing, and a high-pitched drill. For a moment Ben seemed to be daydreaming. Then he returned to the matter at hand. “Consider the word given. And Operation Smash-N-Cash?”

“Yesterday Armed Forces discovered last week’s theft from Weapon Supply Cache SECDEF-332 and reported it to The Computer. The Computer told us to investigate. This morning we blamed a traitor working with the infamous Superstar Pirate. I created eyewitness reports and images that put both Pirate and the traitor at the scene. I matched the Pirate description we previously established.”

Now Ben was paying full attention, which always unnerved Regina. “A co-conspirator? Why?”

“I thought we should have someone to arrest. Superstar Pirate obviously isn’t available, so I grabbed some poor sap—just a


RED meter maid. I sent her to 4 for communication skills, and—” Regina broke off. She turned to look at the chair.

“I suppose that will do. And the weapons?”“Um, is she—? Never mind, I don’t need to know. We got 9,000

credits on the INFRARED Market. I’ll launder them through a shell firm tomorrow.”

———— Ben’s attention drifted to the audio recording, where he was demanding information about Superstar Pirate. He’d arrested, questioned, and terminated many, many people for aiding this sector’s Public Enemy #1. Enhanced interrogation had revealed many, many leads to the racketeer’s base of operations.

It testified to the effectiveness of IntSec interrogations that so many citizens would squeal in such detail on a traitor who didn’t exist.

Superstar Pirate—as only Ben and Regina knew—was a bogey, a strawman. Ben had created him whole to take the blame for his own traitorous schemes. And the whole plan was working brilliantly.

Ben-B was rich even by the lofty standards of BLUE Clearance. All his enemies across the clearance spectrum, from drug-happy INFRARED drones to rival BLUE officers, had been successfully and permanently dispatched. These days even his INDIGO boss left him alone. He had arrived. Sure, he’d left behind a pile of innocent bodies—though then again, was anyone truly innocent?—but that was the way to climb high.

As for the officers and low-clearance idlers working under him, he looked on them with a magnanimous heart. His contests brought out their best; by Ben’s standards, few management techniques worked so well. His competitors, pitted against each other for advancement or self-preservation, unearthed skills and internal resources they’d never known they had. Some competitors even survived.

Regina, for one. “Ben, I was wondering if I could—well, if I could have more than my usual cut this time.”

Uh-oh. Regina might need to be encouraged with another contest. “Why? Twenty percent isn’t good enough?”


“IntSec has started charging interest on my old fines. If I don’t pay them soon—well, you know how interest rates work.”

Regina was useful, no doubt about that—but this was sounding like trouble. “I’d like to help you.” Ben reached out and rested his hands heavily on her shoulders. “You’ve been loyal to me, and trustworthy as well. Trust is important, Regina-G. An extra hundred credits.”

Regina looked away. “That’s better than nothing, I suppose, but—”

“Agreed, then. Anything else?”She showed Ben her PDC. “We have a potential problem.

One of my packet sniffers in the Internal Affairs server found this C-mail.”

He read. He frowned, chuckled—a tense chuckle—then raised his eyebrows. “Forty-eight percent? When did our Security Efficiency Rating fall to 48%?”

“Every time we have Superstar Pirate get away with something, that’s a crime we don’t solve. Internal Affairs probably thinks we’re working with him. Keep reading—you’ll see they want to investigate. What should we do?”

Ben stared. “Why didn’t you hack the SER to raise it above 64? You have the skills.”

Regina just looked away.“Sloppy. I shouldn’t have to tell you everything. Consider that

hundred-credit bonus rescinded.” He thrust her PDC back into her hands. “But—but—not a problem! We just need to arrest, convict, and terminate the notorious traitor Superstar Pirate. That will bring our SER above 80 at least.”

“Eighty-seven. I checked. But how do we arrest someone who doesn’t exist? Wait—you don’t mean—?” She backed away.

“Relax. You’re more important to me alive. Besides, that would raise questions about my competence. My number two, Superstar Pirate all along? No, we need someone completely ignorant.” Ben mused aloud. “He fails to confess even under interrogation—we say ‘Only someone as strong-willed as Superstar Pirate could maintain his innocence’—the lack of evidence is all the evidence we need! I’m brilliant! What have we said Superstar Pirate looks like?”


Regina thumbed through her PDC. “Tall, skinny, short wavy hair, prominent nose, traitorous gleam in his eye, traitorous laugh, traitorous gait, traitorous—”

“I get it. Find a patsy who matches the description. Make sure his record is suspiciously clean. Update the Superstar Pirate description with more features that match his. Then send a squad of goons to arrest him. Today! I’ll take it from there.”

The PDC’s recording turned from harsh words to manic screaming. Regina agreed and left quickly, avoiding the RED in the chair.

Ben listened to the recording, daydreaming again. He walked to the chair and leaned over Veronica. Her eyes were red and puffy. Ben couldn’t tell where the sweat ended and the tears began. “I do love a good questioning. There’s such a competitive element. I ask, they dodge—I feint, they parry—I drill, they faint—good stuff.”

She nodded.“Know why I used this recording? We disabled the cameras but

not the microphones. Disabling both would be too suspicious.” He pulled two cables from his jumpsuit’s pocket and plugged them into a battery pack on his belt. The cables ended in alligator clips, one black, one red.

“Hrmph mrr mrphr!”“Sort of.” Red clip on one earlobe, black on the other.

“Operation Smash-N-Cash. I know you’d confess to it. Am I right?”

She nodded violently.“Good, because you already did. Your confession is ready to

go. But I can’t take the risk of Internal Affairs teaching you to communicate. You might tell them about this private meeting. And—you know, I wouldn’t tell this to just anybody—Internal Affairs frightens me. No, really. Internal Affairs—that would be bad.”

She just looked at him.“But you—you’re helping to prevent that.” Ben stepped back.

“Be proud—you’re raising this precinct’s SER.” He pressed a button on his belt.

On the recording, the interrogation was ending as the subject had an unfortunate heart attack.


Ben-B murmured, “It’s all a competition.” When the recording stopped, he removed the wires and called for cleanup.

3: Locker rooms are rarely this interesting

Mandate CPPM 349.62/e: All CPU workers on duty are encouraged to keep a small edible snack on their person, so that in food-deficit-related emergencies (including but not limited to low blood sugar or obvious stomachal borborygmus) they can quickly eat said snack and remain on duty without breaks as defined by Efficiency Improvement Directive $UPDATED_EID_NUM.

Mandate CPTM 449.89/a: In Mandate CPTM 349.62/e, the word “encouraged” is redefined as “mandatory” and the word “snack” is redefined as “FunFoods brand soylent-based edible product.” This mandate is sponsored by FunFoods. “Buy FunFoods today and avoid arrest!”

Clarence-Y—tall, skinny, short wavy hair, prominent nose, no gleam of any kind in either eye—reached the Merit-N-Trust Work Center with Ignatius quietly asleep in his hidden pocket. Merit-N-Trust CPU was a service firm that organized work assignments for CPU. The loyal workers at Merit-N-Trust took pride in their job, mostly because they didn’t have to do it themselves; they told parties of the second part to do jobs dreamt up by remote and anonymous parties of the third part. Some called it lazy; Merit-N-Trust called it workflow management.

The building itself towered ominously in the popular Alpha Complex architectural style of Built Cheap And Budget Surplus Pocketed. The dark gray asbestos-crete walls, once smooth, showed an efficient space-filling network of spidery cracks and shallow holes. A lack of windows—or, more positively, a vigorous abolition of anything windowlike—kept workers inside from losing efficiency by looking out and remembering a life beyond their cubicle.

Merit-N-Trust had awarded the contract for the Work Center to the bidder with the largest “voluntary monetary display of gratitude for inclusion in the bidding process.” Build ‘Em Now


HPD, a licensed construction firm, won the contract and quickly subcontracted to whomever could cover the costs of their previous display of gratitude plus a little something extra. This process was iterated seven times until Merit-N-Trust inadvertently subsubsubsubsubsubsubsubcontracted their own contract. They promptly bought, for 1 credit, a foreclosed property scheduled for demolition and, with minor renovations (such as bricking up the windows) and not-as-minor gratitude payments to the local building inspector, the facility was declared safe for citizens of YELLOW Clearance or lower. Merit-N-Trust paid itself the two million credits allotted for construction and used the profits to pay for a management seminar in the pleasure domes of VDF Sector.

Passing a scrubot in valiant battle against graffiti (“People called Yellowpants, they go, the house”), Clarence presented his ID to the guardbot in the crumbling archway. “Clarence-Y-SKL-1,” he said cheerfully, “currently assigned to this Merit-N-Trust Work Center as a CPU efficiency auditor. I am returning from a successful field assignment. I am not a Communist, mutant, nor traitor of any kind. I request permission to enter.”

Guardbot LAR/E 0058466975, a tall metal monster with more weapons than most people have teeth, looked down at Clarence with six eyes. “Welcome citizen please present your identification ten seconds until indiscriminate weapons fire.”

Clarence looked at the laminated card in his hand, then back at the bot. He waved the card frantically. “Here! ID here! Right here!”

One of the bot’s eyes glowed red and a stuttering red line ran over Clarence-Y’s card. “Error scanning identification possible traitor six seconds remaining.”

Clarence jumped up as high as he could, bringing the card to the guardbot’s bristle of lenses. The bot counted down to one, then beeped. “Identification accepted welcome you may enter this facility.”

Clarence sighed and put his ID away. “See you tomorrow, Larry,” he said as he walked past.

“Citizen Clarence-Y-SKL-1,” guardbot LAR/E said, “this unit appreciates being allowed to simulate scanning failure to test security parameters guard duty can be uneventful and the


occasional simulations maintain integrity of software routines should a real emergency occur.”

“Not a problem, Larry. TSPM 331.71/c says citizens should help bots feel appreciated. Besides, with all your guns on safety, what could happen?”

“Safety.” Guardbot LAR/E fell silent. Its weapons clicked softly, once each. “Affirmative weapons were on safety all along nothing irrecoverable could happen have a nice day.”

Clarence entered the center and began the improved Merit-N-Trust employee return procedures:1. He logged in at a CPU work station with his assigned name

and password;2. wrote his name and return time on the paper sheet hanging

on the wall above the terminal;3. waved at the RED-Clearance citizen behind a circular desk

who wrote his name and ID down on another sheet;4. rubbed his face with SPF 75 anti-melanoma cream;5. put his head in the Safe But Accurate Retina, Tongue, Teeth,

and Widow’s Peak Scanner;6. signed his name on another sheet indicating he had read

health warnings about the scanner;7. recited Happiness Hymn #44 (“The YELLOW Mellow

Fellow”) into a voice analyzer;8. signed the form permitting CPU to sell the recording of his

recitation to other firms for use in commercials and jingles;9. signed another form stating he had signed the four previous

forms;10. signed the Form Revision Form stating it was three

previous forms, not four;11. slid his identification card through a reader;12. verified the ID card he currently possessed had the correct

name, picture, current residence, three former residences, signature, fingerprint, tongueprint, voiceprint, and urine pH level;

13. signed a form verifying he was correct when verifying the ID card was correct;

14. signed a form agreeing he was free from mutation, treason, unhappy thought, or weird dreams involving crisp apples;


15. and completed a brief five-page survey about the preceding employee return procedures.

Clarence felt proud he himself had cut three minutes off these procedures. Citizens spent less time waiting once the health warning was placed after scanner use.

Now officially returned from the field, he went straight to the locker room to change into civilian clothes. Although both outfits comprised identical yellow jumpsuits and black shirts, Mandate PLPM 100.45/p required citizens to own (and therefore purchase) backup clothes.

In the locker room, Merit-N-Trust had gone for a bright and cheerful design plan. Studies showed “bright and cheerful” improved worker efficiency and decreased the chances of a disgruntled maniac killing co-workers. After 20 years without maintenance, the room still technically qualified as “bright and cheerful” as defined by several recent mandates with grandfather clauses. Faded yellow paint covered the walls and lockers with legally-defined cheer; the myriad rusted dents in the lockers doors were defined as lending character (HPPM 620.80/a) and showcasing their utility (PLPM 335.63/e). The original steel-slat benches had been scheduled for replacement with expensive upholstered seats, but at the last minute had been preserved as “designated historic seating technology” (RDPM 888.38/t).

A dozen efficiency auditors filled the space, efficiently changing out of their yellow work jumpsuits and efficiently chatting about the day’s assignments, pausing at each change of subject to assess, according to Mandate CPPM 640.91/f, whether discussion of a given assignment was treason. This lent a strange staccato to the conversations.

Clarence proceeded to his locker at the far end of the room. He paused mid-step. The locker door was covered with blobs of wet toilet paper.

He ignored the snickering from the other Yellowpants. When he reached his locker, the snickering erupted into outright laughter.

“What’s the matter, Clarence-Y?” said Geraldine-Y-PRI-4. “Something wrong with your locker?”

Clarence didn’t turn around. “Wasting toilet paper is against Mandate PLPM 208.99/a.”


A large, heavyset Yellowpants named Joe-Y-GGT-3 pushed forward. “And being a boring vat-head is against Mandate YOU SUCK!” He sought high-fives from the others, who complied mostly because they feared what Joe’s meaty hands could do to them should they be left un-high fived.

Clarence turned in confusion. “But there is no mandate named ‘YOU SUCK.’ Mandate names follow established nomenclature: The first two initials of the service group issuing the mandate, followed by ‘PM’ for permanent mandate or ‘TM’ for temporary mandate, then a three-number designation based on—”

A wad of toilet paper hit him in the face. Above the laughter someone shouted, “What’s the mandate for getting wet toilet paper off your face?”

“PLPM 208.99/k and ISTM 1092.44/a, although HPPM 776.72/a technically applies given that the paper is stuck to my forehead.”

The laughter petered out, and someone even checked the mandates on his PDC. “Not true! That’s not a hat.”

“HPPM776.72/b defines a hat as anything worn above the nose but below the top of the head. This is especially true given that PLPM 502.67/c requires hats and toilet paper be made from the same material, and that CPPM 287.70/h allows use of hats as toilet paper if the stall currently being used has no paper and no INFRARED citizen is within earshot.”

While everyone checked his or her PDC, a meek silence fell.Joe moved a step closer to Clarence. “Must be easy to memorize

all them mandates, what with having no friends.”“Although it would be nice to have friends—I suppose—I have

used my free time productively, as Friend Computer expects. Besides, memorizing mandates isn’t hard. You can memorize every mandate applying to Junior Citizens before you leave Mandatory Training, Education, and Obedience School. And of course it’s a pleasure to read every issue of MandateToday to keep up. Did you see the last issue? CPU is talking about merging CPPM 410.23/b and AFPM 981.11/c! Can you believe it? What would we do with all those grenades and lubricants?”

Joe took another step closer. “I can think of something.”Clarence belatedly realized Joe was presenting the prospect of

violence. He backed up against his locker. “Remember, Joe-Y.


Intra-team violence is only allowed in Troubleshooter teams, and then only in cases of real, somewhat real, or reasonably imaginary treason.”

“Oh yeah? What about Mandate CPPM 443.11/p?”Clarence’s high brow wrinkled. “‘Petbot owners may not name

their pet “Sit” and play the “Come-Here-Sit” joke until its loyalty processor burns out’?”

“I meant five-forty-three!”“‘Though the existence of Things Humanity Was Not Meant

To Know shall not be disputed, this does not apply to Research & Design personnel’?”

“Argh!” Joe clawed the air. “It was—wait—four-fifty-three! CPPM 453.11/p!”

“‘A citizen acting like a smug know-it-all may be given an emergency unscheduled beating by local citizens of equal or higher clearance if at least ten citizens present and of equal or higher clearance agree it is necessary or at least a fun way to pass the time’?”

“That. All in favor—”A new voice: “The camera is on.”In Alpha Complex, few other statements can so arrest the

attention. As one, every face turned to the far corner of the ceiling, where a security camera’s red light, dark for months, now glowed bright.

The newbie, a tall, athletic, brown-haired, red-cheeked woman, smiled a helpful smile. “I noticed it was broken, so I fixed it under Mandate TSTM 073.33/b.”

Clarence shook his head. “That would have required a completed form TS5040-EZ signed by our supervisor, a Power Services supervisor, and a random Technical Services worker present at the location of said broken surveillance machinery. And Tech Serv workers are not allowed in here, which is why that camera has been broken for years.” He smiled at the newcomer with indulgent sympathy, as to a wayward Junior Citizen. “A common mistake.”

The new woman stood firm. “But this location counts as ‘important to the safety and security of all life as we know it’ under Mandate AFPM 293.96/v.”


Clarence’s eyes widened. “Which allows bypassing Technical Services forms for repairs of items defined under PSPM 221.60/s. Yes! You can fix the camera yourself. Brilliant.” He gazed with admiration on the new Yellowpants. She was short, barely 1.5 meters, and her Perfect-Fit brand regulation jumpsuit was rolled at the wrists and ankles. (“Disclaimer: Perfect-Fit fits all citizens perfectly but may fit some citizens more perfectly than others.”) Rich brown hair framed her face in ungraceful curves—haircuts by jackobots reprogrammed from active military duty to hair salons were rarely attractive but always efficient—and her green eyes looked large and clear. Clarence-Y would have found her attractive, were he not on a steady diet of drugs designed to suppress such feelings.

Joe-Y walked up to the camera, straining his neck to look directly at it. “In the spirit of loyalty and friendship, I shall forgive you, Clarence-Y, of your—um—stupidity and stuff.” He turned away from the camera and mouthed the words “You’re dead,” though his poor elocution made it possible he was saying “You’re wet,” “Our fed,” “Ker-ped!” or conceivably even “You’re RED,” which would have been rude even for Joe. He made a complicated and possibly rude hand gesture. Then everyone turned back to his or her locker.

Clarence began taking down the toilet paper blobs. “Thank you, Citizen—?”

“Jenny-Y-TOV-1. I just transferred from a BVC Sector surveillance systems firm.”

“BVC Sector? Didn’t their reactor go critical last week, flooding the entire sector with radiation?”

“Why do you think I was transferred? They told me I received a nice, healthy dose of radiation for my security clearance. There’s an empty locker next to yours. Would you mind if I took it as my own?

“No.”“I can’t?”“No, I mean, yes, you can.”“No means yes in this sector?”“No, no means no.”“So you have to use no twice to mean no? Then a single no

means yes?”


“No!”“Ah, I get it. You just agreed that a single no means yes. What

does yes mean, then?”“Wait.”“Yes means wait? This is a strange sector.”Clarence collected the last toilet paper blob from his locker.

“This is a misunderstanding. No means no, yes means yes, and yes, you can have this locker.”

Jenny appeared to think about it for a moment before opening up her locker. “Probably best to let that drop. I’ve never worked as an efficiency auditor before. Um, I hope you don’t mind this question but—why are we called Yellowpants?”

Returning from the trash bin in the corner, Clarence shrugged. “Not sure, really. Some say it’s because only YELLOW-Clearance CPU citizens can become efficiency auditors. Others believe it’s due to our bright yellow work jumpsuits. Troubleshooters think it comes from—ah, an unscheduled urination event in the face of danger. But that’s Troubleshooters for you.”

Jenny nodded. “Aren’t you going to change?”Clarence-Y looked around. Most of the others had already

changed and left. “In a minute. No need to rush.”Jenny-Y shrugged her shoulders and put some personal effects

in the locker—her PDC, an Official Teela O’Malley Fan Club Calendar—Year of The Computer 214, and a small motivational poster (cute scrubot looking at giant wall covered with graffiti; caption: “GET STARTED ALREADY! The job isn’t going to finish itself”).

Clarence watched the other Yellowpants until they left. “Aren’t you going too?” he asked Jenny.

“Yes, but—to be honest, I’m a little nervous about working here. Those other efficiency auditors seemed a bit intense, if you follow me. I was hoping we could get a cup of HappyKaff or TeaSir. My treat! You can tell me all about being a Yellowpa—er, an efficiency auditor.”

Clarence looked confused. “You want to spend time—with me?”

“Yes. You don’t seem like the others, that bunch of—perfectly normal and loyal citizens, by which I mean you are normal and loyal too, only more so.”


Ignatius began to squirm in his pocket.Clarence quickly opened his locker so the door would hide his

chest. “Well, that’s good. Great. Fine. Why don’t you meet me at the Rejuvenated Citizen Drink Shop on the corner of Armed Forces Parade Trail and Loyalty In the Face of Temptation Boulevard? It’s just around the corner.”

“Sounds good.” She closed her locker and started to leave. “What’s that?”

He looked down and froze. Ignatius had crawled halfway out of his pocket and rested its front paws on the top of the locker door. It sniffed the air and looked around.

“Nothing!” Lurching around like a scrubot with a bad gyro, Clarence grabbed Ignatius and pushed him back down. “There’s nothing. Absolutely, one hundred percent nothing. In fact, there’s such a lack of thing there, Mandate RDPM 767.90/g would permit R&D scientists to study how one segment of spacetime could have so little there.”

Jenny smiled. “Don’t worry, I didn’t really fix the security camera. I just turned on the little red light. I didn’t have the tools to connect it to the Internal Security network. Can I see it?”

“You—you aren’t horrified? Scared out of your mind? Ready to turn and run for the nearest confession booth to report a violation of nearly two dozen separate mandates?”

“Why would I?”Ignatius was squirming harder. Clarence was having trouble

keeping his pocket stuffed. “Well, it’s—will you stay down! It’s just that when other people—stop it—when others see—bad mouse—see Ignatius, they’re terrified.”

The mouse squeezed through Clarence’s hands and jumped atop the locker door. It stared at Jenny and sniffed the air.

Jenny bent closer to look. She gingerly reached out with a finger and carefully rubbed the mouse’s back. The mouse sniffed the finger and, deciding it wasn’t edible or dangerous, ignored it.

“His name is Ignatius?”“Yes, but I can’t tell if it’s male or female.”Putting two tiny paws on Jenny’s finger, the mouse pulled

itself up on its hind legs. Then it hopped into Jenny’s hand. “I think it likes me.”


“Yes? Yes!” Clarence hardly knew what to be amazed at. Himself (still not arrested and/or terminated) topped the list, but not much higher than finding a citizen who liked Ignatius instead of cowering in fear from the Dangerous Creature from the Outdoors.

The mouse ran up Jenny’s arm and sniffed her chest. “What are you doing, little guy? That’s right, I’ve got a snack in there, don’t I?” From her jumpsuit pocket she pulled a Soylent Yellow Protein Crunch Bar. “Would you like a bite?” She opened the wrapping. Without even sniffing, the mouse bit deep.

Clarence managed a smile. “Soylent is his favorite snack, although he likes Yummy Yeasty Yammies too.” Feeling uncomfortable, he took the protein bar and used it to lure the mouse back to his pocket. “I need to get him home. We only go for walkies every now and then.”

“He’s so cute! Can I see him again sometime?”“Umm. I’m not sure when that would be, but—you’re not a

member of the Sierra Club, are you?”She frowned—was she being evasive? “I don’t think—”The locker room doors exploded.Dust and smoke billowed into the room. GREEN Internal

Security goons swept into the room single-file, winding between benches like a giant laser-armed snake. They all wore standard IntSec uniforms: shiny, domed helmet with one large optical lens and a rigid chinstrap, greasy-looking reflective armor, black aramid vests, GREEN-Clearance laser rifles, black elbow and knee pads, and dark green combat boots. However, they lacked shin guards. The first goon slammed his shin into a bench. “Oww!” he said, holding his shin and jumping on one foot in pain. Behind him, the rest of the goons yelled, “Oww!” and hoped on one foot too.

The lead goon noticed. “Stop! You’re supposed to follow the person in front of you, not copy him!”

The goons chorused, “Stop! You’re supposed to follow the person in front of you, not copy him!”

“No! Follow is not the same as copy, you idiots!”“No! Follow is not the same as copy, you idiots!”“Argh! Just secure the room.”“Argh! Just secure the room.” The goons stood there, watching.


“Oh, you want to play that game?”“Oh, you want to play that game?”“I’m a vat-headed, smelly traitor who hates The Computer!”The other goons shot him dead.The second goon stepped over the body. “Citizen Clarence-

Y-SKL-1?”Clarence moved his head as little as possible while still

technically nodding. He felt glad—fervently glad—the mouse was deep in his secret pocket.

“I am Internal Security officer Donovan-G-MCN-5. Under new policies aimed at improving community relations, I am to ask how your day is going before striking you repeatedly about the head with my titanium truncheon.” He pulled a dull metal pipe from his belt.

“Wait!” Jenny stepped between them. “Is the beating necessary?”

“Well— It’s more of a tradition. IntSec is very tradition-minded.”

Clarence raised his hands. “If you don’t ask me how my day is going, that means you don’t have to start the traditional beating, right? The tradition follows the greeting. Skip the greeting and the beating is also skipped.”

Donovan-G paused thoughtfully. “I never thought about that. But I like the beating!”

“But you hate asking how the target’s day is going, right?”“That’s true.” Donovan-G rubbed his chin, or rather the

chinstrap holding his monocular helmet on his head. “Aha! What if I replaced the nice greeting with shouting and accusations of treason? That’s an even older IntSec tradition!”

“It sounds better than the beating.”“Says you. Okay, ready? Ahem. On the ground, traitors! Now!

Now! Now!”Clarence and Jenny dropped to the floor. Clarence tried not to

crush Ignatius.“Citizen Clarence-Y-SKL-1, you are hereby designated a

Citizen of Interest. Consider our storming of your location an invitation to accompany us to Internal Security Central Station for questioning, TeaSir, cookies, and truth drugs. This invitation


is mandatory. Please allow us to escort you immediately, or we will reclassify you as a Former Citizen of Interest.”

“Can I get up?”“No! Stay down! Stay down!”“Well, I would move much more efficiently if allowed to walk.

Under Mandate ISPM 222.08/e crawling, unless you are a Junior Citizen, is limited to escaping fires, fitting through crawlspaces, or groveling. I’m not sure taking a trip to Central Station qualifies as any of the three.”

Donovan-G looked at the IntSec goon holding the flamethrower. He almost said something, but decided against it. “Okay, stand up. We don’t have all day. Get moving, you.”

Clarence-Y stood, straightened his work suit—he’d never gotten to change—and smiled at Jenny. “A request for professional services—how exciting! I always wanted to work on IntSec efficiency. No offense to the citizens with high-powered weaponry here, but everyone knows IntSec could be more efficient.”

Every weapon safety clicked off, but Donovan-G held up a hand. “Why do you say that?”

“Why else would you want a CPU efficiency auditor?”Donovan-G looked confused. “A what?”“A, uh—” Clarence-Y sighed. “You may perhaps know the

term ‘Yellowpants.’”“Oh, them. Stuck-up rules lawyers, right?” The other IntSec

goons nodded enthusiastically, except the dead one, who seemed generally unenthused.

Clarence let the slight pass, per HPPM 144.01/d. “Jenny-Y, maybe we can get that drink when I come back?”

Jenny tried to smile.Clarence walked past the goons. “Let’s start with travel

efficiency. How did you get here? Because if you took Intersector Highway 98, then you wasted at least ten minutes in traffic around Exit 101-Delta. Maintenance Route 44 is much more efficient, as long as you filed a form TS9000 at least a day in advance per Mandate TSTM 1055.62/r—” The IntSec goons hurried to keep up.


Jenny went to her open locker and grabbed her PDC. She started an unpublicized gray-market application and entered a password. The screen flashed bright blue.

She punched a number. A mark shimmered onscreen—a question mark.

She whispered, “We have a problem.”

————You’ve just read Chapters 1-3 (about the first one-sixth) of the PARANOIA novel Traitor Hangout by WJ MacGuffin. In the full-length novel—available where you bought this book—after an efficient stop at IntSec Central Station, Clarence-Y (in the guise of Superstar Pirate) is dispatched to an official Elective Activity or Pursuit clubhouse. His mission: infiltrate the notorious gang of vandals, Death Leopard.

Who knew the EAP clubhouse is a notorious meeting place for nearly every secret society in Alpha Complex?

Who knew an oblivious Yellowpants could somehow manage to infiltrate—more or less by accident—not only Death Leopard, but also Corpore Metal, the Frankenstein Destroyers, and the ultimate terrorist army, PURGE?

Who could imagine one white mouse could survive all that, let alone possibly (not to spoil anything) be its cause?

Now you know. Read Traitor Hangout to know more!

Traitor Hangoutby WJ MacGuffin


PARANOIA - A1 The Computer is Your Friend

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