Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 200: Interlude Alphabet Soup

The prisoner stared off into nothingness, seemingly unaware of anything and everything going on around him. Ever since he’d been arrested in Cornwall for trying to murder a whole lot of government agents raiding the so-called conference center that had turned into something straight out of a horror movie when corpses had started to come to life withing

The man didn’t have brain damage, but they only knew that because his captors had checked. Repeatedly.

[Profilers], [Medics], about a dozen different kinds of [Doctors], all had confirmed that the prisoner hadn’t died, or taken debilitating brain damage.

They knew at least one attempt to kill him had been made by way of a [Skill] designed to remotely remove captured assets, but it had failed because their prisoner was just that tough. And they’d managed to ensure that there wasn’t a second one on his body.

But the prisoner still wasn’t doing anything. Not looking around, not pacing as one might expect from someone stuck in a cell. In fact, the man wasn’t in a cell, but rather in the medical ward, being fed intravenously.

Agent Smith looked at the man through the one-way mirror, though it would likely have been just as safe to be in the room itself.

If her charge had been a soldier or an agent who could no longer deny that they were, in fact, a foreign intelligence agent, she might have at least gotten a name, rank, and serial number.

But no, it was almost as if nothing existed to the prisoner.

They’d asked questions. They’d offered deals, then asked questions. They’d offered to move the prisoner out of the medical wing and into a better place, though that wouldn’t work without some kind of proof that he wasn’t a vegetable. Their tests said he wasn’t, but the man himself was doing his level best to prove said tests wrong.

They’d even gone so far as to appeal to his humanity, which had been a damn long shot. After all, this was a man who’d worked to end the whole world. What kinds of better angels could he really have?

Yet that had gotten a reaction. A tiny one, flinch, but that was the most they’d ever gotten.

That should have been the start of getting to the bottom of the situation. Maybe there was someone whose opinion this man still cared about, someone whom they could make him confront. Or something else. Something.

That was how this was meant to go, wasn’t it? They figured out what made someone tick and eventually, that got turned into a way to get answers.

But they didn’t even know this guy’s name, let alone anything else save the fact that he was working with the people who’d tried to end the world. Ragnarök.

Such a simple name, drawn from Norse mythology as biblical comparisons were apparently off the table. But evocative. The end of the bloody world and this living enigma was their best clue.

Genetic sequencing had failed miserably if the swearing from the lab was any indication.

The PCR amplification that preceded traditional sequencing had failed miserably. A [Geneticist] had physicallychecked their samples to ensure that the DNA that should be amplified was present, but as far as the Polymerase that should have increased the number of DNA strands was concerned, it was floating in pure water.

Then, nanopore sequencing had been attempted, only for the machine to completely lock up and throw out the mother of all error codes. The machine was meant to read the DNA sequence of the strands as they passed through the narrow channel, the change in current showing what had just passed through. Except as far as the machine was concerned, the current had started jumping wildly for no reason, instead of the fact that a DNA strand was currently being sequenced.

Sure, the boffins had gotten the machine working again by way of a hard reset, but it still wouldn’t work with their prisoner.

Facial recognition hadn’t worked until they’d literally scanned his face from every possible angle … at which point every computer directly linked to the machine processing the images had promptly crashed.

Every investigation [Skill] belonging to a member of any allied intelligence or law enforcement agency had been thrown at the prisoner. They’d proven pretty conclusively that this guy belonged to the same organization that was responsible for Hamburg and that there were international connections to Ragnarök, but that was it.

And so on, and so forth.

Of course, her people were eventually going to be able to get past that. They were learning new tricks with everything they tried, their [Skill] Levels were steadily ticking up, and eventually, the constantly running into the wall that was this enemy organization’s information security apparatus was going to give them some solid Evolutions.

That was still a ways off, though. In the here and now, the situation was an exercise in constant frustration, coupled with a never-ending feeling of dread, as if every second they didn’t come up with results, the world was that much more likely to end.

That in the shadows, Ragnarök was winding up for the next blow, about to further destabilize society’s fragile equilibrium.

Smith was about to turn away and go find something more productive than glaring at their prisoner when the door to the viewing room opened.

“Agent Smith?” asked the new arrival. He was … odd, to say the least.

For one, he was wearing the single most stereotypical G-man outfit she’d ever seen outside of the cinema. A little over the top, sure, but still within the realms of “normal”.

The beard was a little weirder, though. It hadn’t just been removed with a shaver, but it looked like the man had waxed it away. Who the hell did that?

She also didn’t know him. That wouldn’t have been strange before the [System], after all, the SIS building was big and there were only so many faces one person could be expected to remember. Now though, she never forgot a face.

So why the blazes was a complete stranger wandering into one of the most secure parts of the building without an escort, a visitor’s badge, or having called ahead, hm?

“Tough day, huh?” the man asked holding up a file that certainly hadn’t been in his hand a second before. Or maybe she just hadn’t seen it …

He wasn’t tripping any of her [Skill]-based alarms, but something was still very much rubbing her the wrong way.

She triggered [Silent Alarm] without giving any outward signs of discomfort and looked at the file.

“What’s that?”

“Something I think you’ll be happy to receive.” The man handed over the file. She gave it a quick once-over to ensure there was nothing dangerous there, but it looked safe.

“That’s a complete breakdown of everything we know about your prisoner. Real name, age, date and location of birth, close family, potential motivations, initial point of contact with Ragnarök, and a lot more.” The man explained.

“This is … thank you, Mr. …” she trailed off, letting him introduce himself.

“Smith.” He said.

That feeling of unease in her gut solidified. “Smith” was such a standard boring cliché name for a government agent. God only knew how many jokes she’d heard about her being named it. So when that was how a random person who’d walked into a place they really should have been escorted into was named that … it set off some more alarms.

Keeping one eye on her visitor, she flipped through the file and while everything in it would have to be independently verified, it looked damn promising.

The door exploded open as a half-dozen members of building security entered, surrounding her visitor, guns drawn.

These weren’t normal guns, though. These had been hand-made by second and third Evolution craftsmen, enchanted to the nines, and now been placed in the hands of people pushing Level 70. Unless her visitor was an S-Ranker, he wasn’t getting out of here unscathed.

“You’re every bit as good as your file indicated, Ms. Smith.” Her visitor said and tipped a fedora that he certainly hadn’t been wearing before. His face was the same, but everything else had gone from the standard G-man look to the appearance of the standard traitor character as seen in movies. The kind that left people yelling at the screen that guy was an obvious traitor.

But he didn’t look concerned in the slightest.

What on Earth was going on here?

“Who are you? And why shouldn’t I toss you in the next cell over?” Smith asked.

He shrugged “I’ve been helpful? Tell me, how far have you gotten so far?”

“How did you get in here?” she countered.

“Just walked in.” He shrugged “If I intended anyone harm, the alarms against hostile intent would have triggered, those are pretty nifty, but I wanted to help.”

“If you wanted to help, why break in?” she challenged.

He shrugged again, seemingly not caring about any of the guns pointed at his head “I wanted to see the prisoner. And now, I can tell you a little more about him. For example, he’s taken great care to hide his past, beyond the cult’s infosec abilities. He had his right ring finger magically altered to hide his wedding ring’s tan line, for example.”

With that, the man plucked a notepad and pen from thin air and started to write out some notes.

One of the guns went off as its wielder was startled by the sudden appearance, but somehow, the visitor’s head had already started dodging before the trigger had been pulled.

“Kindly be careful with your weapon, Mr. Foster. Those things can kill, you know. Then again, someone who once got drunk and shaved ‘record D’ into his pubic hair is probably a bit too immature to hold the power of life and death, don’t you think?”

Foster spluttered denials just convinced everyone else that the story was, in fact, true.

Two security guards holstered their guns and took up position on either side of the visitor, gripping his upper arms, ensuring he wouldn’t be able to run.

“Who are you?” Smith asked again.

“Someone who’d prefer the world didn’t end.” The visitor said, tearing a page off the notepad and placing it on the room’s table “So I’m helping out.”

“And you couldn’t have done that through proper channels?” Smith asked. She’d sent another message to building security and outside, people were setting up defenses that should stop this guy even if he was an S-Ranker.

“Do you know why so many stories about young people gaining superpowers have government agents as the villains or at least tertiary bad guys? It’s because of what they do to people with strange powers or ones who could be useful. If you aren’t too famous to snatch up, you’re gonna get snatched up.” The visitor grinned “And I like my freedom. I like to uncover secrets that I find interesting, solving mysteries, not being leashed like a dog.”

His appearance shifted again, leaving him wearing a deerstalker cap. Oh, that was what was going on. As her mental image of the visitor shifted, he shifted alongside it, always taking on the single most cliché appearance attached to that mental image. Sheesh, facial recognition was going to be utterly useless, wasn’t it?

“Now, if you ever decide you need help, just mention that you’re looking for the public’s help in a speech and I’ll make sure the proper department gets some useful information.” The man said cheekily “Now, I hope you have a nice day, I’ll be taking my leave now.”

The man flickered and suddenly, he was no longer being restrained, instead simply marching out of the door and into the hallway. And he just kept going. Restraining [Skills] were dodged or broken, people lunging at him slipped on marbles or, in one case, a banana peel, precisely none of which had been visible before someone stepped on them, and the whole thing just turned into a comedy of errors.

Whenever someone fired their weapon, some extremely personal info was revealed.

One agent had wet the bed until he was twelve, another wore his badge and holster when he went to bed with his wife, and the way things were going, Smith wouldn’t be able to look at half her coworkers without laughing or feeling uncomfortable by the time this was over.

Somehow, that man managed to walk right out of one of the most secure buildings in the world, leaving behind nothing but bruised egos.

One would be right in calling this one of the biggest failures in the history of British intelligence. Yet with the information provided by the mysterious visitor, they finally managed to break their prisoner, and he spilled his guts. Finally, they had a lead.