by Seth Fried
My impromptu sabbatical went on for almost two months before I returned to my office one morning with a mild hangover. I sat behind my desk and sipped a cup of coffee, looking at the heavy piles of urgent memoranda and process requests that were stacked up on my desk. Once I finished my coffee, I turned on my computer and slowly pushed all the paperwork from my desk down onto the floor. I then began drafting what I was confident would be the longest and most indicting resignation the agency had ever seen.
I was just reading over my opening statements to Garrett when someone knocked on my open door. A nervous-looking young man from the agency’s internal courier service was standing in front of a dolly loaded with boxes.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, glancing down at the papers scattered on the floor. “Am I interrupting?”
“Yes.”
He cringed and apologized again.
“I know you told me to deliver this stuff on the third, but you haven’t been in.”
“I told you?”
I asked him what he was talking about and he explained that ten weeks back he’d been called into a workroom at the OWEN facility, where I had ordered him to pick up some boxes that were about to turn up in storage. After stressing the importance of delivering said boxes to my office, I had apparently called Klaus and Garrett into the room and we had all taken turns threatening to fire him if he didn’t do it right.
“When you saw me,” I said, “was I walking with a cane?”
The young man seemed confused by the question.
“Yes, sir.”
I held up my aluminum cane.
“Did it look like this?”
He shook his head. “No, sir. It was gold? And looked like a cobra? You talked about it for a while.” Perhaps trying to ingratiate himself, he added, “That’s a very nice cane too, sir. You must have quite the collection.”
I thanked him and he was so relieved when I excused him that he left the boxes in my doorway, dolly and all.
I wheeled them into my office and removed a single piece of computer paper that had been folded into thirds and taped to the lid of the first box. I unfolded it and the top of the page bore a stylish sans serif that read FROM THE DESK OF OWEN. The letter was dated a few days before OWEN was deactivated. The rest of the page was covered in a neat, tightly printed text:
Dear Shithead,
Thanks for getting me killed. By the time you read this I’ll have been hurled into the void. Meanwhile, you’re probably walking around with some amazing cane right now, living it up. Rest assured that if computers go to heaven I’m going to do such weird and ethereal sex stuff with your dead parents that they’ll be different people by the time you see them next.
Anyway. Sorry. I don’t want to be too negative here. I can even empathize with why you might have felt obligated to tell Garrett that I needed to be deleted, but not coming to my last movie night on earth? What’s your problem? I mean, I know what your problem is: You’re an enormous prick. But even a prick should want to have fun once in a while, and even if a prick didn’t happen to think that watching a movie with me and having a couple of drinks would be fun, he might still consider giving it a try if he knew I was facing death. So when I write, “What’s your problem?” I’m not using a teenager’s interrogative to say, “Fuck you.” I’m saying that you have a problem and that I’m wondering if you even know what it is. Okay, sorry again, this is for sure getting too negative. Let me start over.
Dear Shithead,
My poor computer soul is currently roiling in oblivion and, for the purposes of my being able to express my last thoughts to you without bitterness, let’s not focus on assigning blame (re: it being 100% your fault).
In fact, part of what I want to talk about is how stupid it is to assign blame in the first place, even—if not especially—in cases that are so spectacularly straightforward that there’s no question (my death, etc.).
I wasn’t alive for terribly long. Even after Klaus provided me with an incredibly flexible framework of interactions and free will, it wasn’t until Kirklin’s virus introduced a little irreverence that I think my inner experience equaled that of any man or woman on the planet. So all told I was only really alive for a short while. Even so, I’m familiar with how “doing the right thing” can be a seductive idea. But it didn’t take me long to come to the entirely rational conclusion that there is absolutely no such thing as the “right” thing. And I’m not preaching nihilism either. Here, pay attention, what I’m about to tell you is the truest, most important thing: None of us is right.
If you think my sense of humor and overall playful outlook came entirely from a virus, you’re wrong. Kirklin’s update was only supposed to make me a flake. My personality came from the realization that to have a point of view is to be automatically and irreparably flawed. To think otherwise is dangerous. When Terrence Kirklin and Sarah Laury decided that they were objectively right, they set themselves down a path that ended in destruction and hate. And how can you blame them? When you thought you were right you blew up a building too. Not only that, but your unwavering belief in your own ideas caused you to have arguably the most charming entity on the planet (moi) destroyed. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, Garrett has let his own sense of what’s right help turn our agency into a tool of class warfare.
Again, I don’t want any of this to be read as pessimism. I’m just saying there are no established paths to follow, no rules, no codes of conduct, no ideologies, that can make you unimpugnably right. All any of those things can do is further separate you from the only purpose of being alive, which is living. I’m not saying that you can’t try to make the world better or that there aren’t unfair things that need to be changed. What I am saying is that only when you give up on the fantasy of moral authority can you approach any problem without doing more harm than good.
My humble suggestion? Learn to trust yourself without relying on external rules. React to what’s in front of you honestly and urgently. If you can do that without any moralizing or rigidity, without excess self-confidence or self-doubt, without giving in to the delusion that you can ever permanently fix anything, I think you’ll find that you won’t be able to help but work an unimaginable amount of good in the world . . . even without relentlessly kicking people in the genitals.
Your friend,
OWEN
PS—I’ve left you some gifts. What you do with them is entirely up to you.
The boxes were heavy. I carried one to my desk and when I opened it I saw that it was filled with a series of sequentially numbered hard drives:
OWEN_Int_backup_vO_1_disk_1
OWEN_Int_backup_vO_1_disk_2
OWEN_Int_backup_vO_1_disk_3
More drives were packed like bricks in all five of the boxes. Klaus must have not noticed when OWEN disguised himself and began giving techs orders of his own. In the last box I found a metal tin containing a vacuum-sealed packet of antistatic gear and a map of the OWEN facility at headquarters, with a circle printed on the map indicating a memory input dock. There was also a document with a list of the relevant passcodes I would need to access the area and instructions on inserting the sequential drives and creating a secure memory partition.
At the bottom of the tin in a small plastic envelope was the tie clip and next to it was something wrapped in a thin white sheet of foam packing wrap. I opened it to find a mint-condition model of the DR-88 locomotive, the Steam Beetle.
I remembered OWEN making fun of me for talking too much about model trains when I was drunk. My initial concern over how much I’d told him was now replaced by the more practical question of how OWEN, even with his unwitting accomplices, had gained possession of such a valuable object. Was I holding in my hand a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of larceny, fraud, or embezzlement? With OWEN, there was no way to know until he told you himself.
But
the thrill I’d anticipated in being reunited with this once cherished object was missing. I’d expected a staticky, rising sensation in my chest, a powerful feeling of recognition. Instead I was looking down at a model locomotive, well made, a little fussy in its level of detail. The realization was embarrassing in its simplicity: I had never loved this train. I had loved my father. I had loved my parents. That love had been and still was an ineffable bond over which the physical world had no jurisdiction, one that was as adaptable as a play of light.
I put the train on my desk and picked up the tie clip. As I looked at it, the only sound in the room was the ambient hum of my computer, the slight whine of which made my office seem suddenly ten times too small. The stale smell I’d noticed for the first time after returning from Metropolis was even stronger now.
Before I knew what I was doing I had deleted my email to Garrett and was closing the door to my office. I was laughing to myself as I put on the antistatic coveralls and booties.
Even though OWEN’s instructions had given me everything I needed to keep his return a secret, I didn’t see us jumping back into agency work right away, or whatever our new version of it would be. I was still entitled to plenty of time off and I figured maybe we could have a few drinks, watch a few movies. Or maybe we could hit the road, have some fun helping the FBI track down the rest of Kirklin’s agents. Or maybe switch sides, help all my fallen USMS brothers and sisters escape to South America, using OWEN to sneak the poor bastards onto cargo ships. We’d all end up drinking Cuba libres in Caracas and cursing the long history of human error that made us enemies in the first place.
No matter what we decided, I was excited. I was a man who had finally managed to climb out of the rubble of a twenty-two-year-old train wreck and was prepared to have some fun while the sun was still out.
I loaded the boxes back onto the dolly and covered my face with the cloth mask included with the antistatic gear. My cane I left leaning against the wall of my office. I’d been skulking around with that thing for so long that it was a dead giveaway. I put some weight on my left knee experimentally. Didn’t feel too bad.
As I backed the dolly out of my office, it occurred to me that even with the relevant passcodes, getting through security in the OWEN facility was going to take some doing. Since the dustup with Kirklin, Garrett wasn’t screwing around when it came to building safety. He had hired a private security firm, and two interns had already been tased on separate occasions after getting lost and accidentally wandering into secure corridors. The OWEN facility was considered particularly vulnerable and new security protocols were being rolled out all the time. If I found myself in the middle of a checkpoint without the right clearances, things could get messy. But I tried not to let these thoughts bother me as I pushed those boxes down the hall and whistled under my mask. After all, a little messiness was to be expected when you were doing honest work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without my wife, Julia Mehoke. I also want to thank my family as well as my early readers whose feedback and encouragement was indispensable: Sheilah Grogan, Matthew Grogan, Devin Soper, Kerry Cullen, and Brent Van Horne.
I’m also grateful for my agent Stacia Decker and my editor Sam Raim. This book is so much stronger as a result of their hard work. Thanks to Chris Smith, Michael Brown, Patrick Nolan, Kathryn Court, Kate Stark, and the whole Penguin Books team. A special shout-out to Dennis Swaim for kindly volunteering to be my Esperanto editor.
Finally I would like to thank the following writers and artists who have been so generous with their support: Alex Cameron, Josh Goldfaden, Joshua Malina, Hannah Tinti, and Charles Yu.
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