“Nah… Meow Meow’s a fine name.”
No, it is not. That is like calling a dog Bark Bark.
“Actually, it would be more like Woof Woof, but I think Meow Meow sounds cuter.”
Your naming habits will get your kids beat up in the schoolyard.
“Well, Roen’s a pretty good name then. I got beat up quite a bit in grade school. In fact, I think I will go Freudian and blame my problems on my childhood. Was Freud a Quasing?”
No, just a con man. You should get some sleep. The briefing for the mission is tomorrow morning at the safe house.
Roen frowned as he finished reading the email, dropping Meow Meow unceremoniously off his lap. This seemed to be a more complicated mission, not like the typical low-level work he’d been doing the past year. He must be moving on up the ranks. He shrugged, went to the bathroom and stared at the mirror. His once chubby face had been replaced with a gaunt one, with dark bags under the eyes, and sunken cheeks. His hair had been cropped short months ago to keep it out of his eyes. Roen was unshaven, but not in the 5 o’clock-sexy way. He barely recognized himself. “What happened to me?” he muttered. “I don’t look so good. I go from cute and fat to ugly and skinny. Why can’t I just have the best of both worlds?”
You were not that good looking to begin with. Think of it as growing more distinguished with age.
With a sad little shake of his head, Roen finished cleaning up and went to bed.
The next morning, Roen walked into the safe house and looked around. He thought there would be others to meet him. The room was dark and no one was around. Immediately, he sensed that something was wrong. Over the past year, he’d learned to appreciate his spider senses when they were tingling. Now they were sending shivers up and down his spine. Roen pawed for the light switch. He caught a faint scent of citrus before someone else turned on the lights. Then he felt a soft breeze tickle his ear.
“Boo!”
Roen tried to draw his pistol but found his holster empty. He spun around, ready to fight, but instead came face to face with a grinning Sonya, now spinning his pistol around her finger.
“Sonya!” he cried, nearly fainting with relief.
She shook her other index finger at him and returned his pistol. “Tsk, tsk, Roen. I had you there. You have to be more careful in the future.”
“What’re you doing here?” he asked.
She walked over to a chair and sat down, putting her feet up on the table. “I am the tactical lead for your new mission, Mr Roen Tan. For the next week, you’ll be reporting to me. Command has deemed you ready for international man-of-mystery work, instead of just trolling around the Midwest.”
Roen looked skeptical. “Really? Command said that?”
“Well, I had to vouch for you,” she admitted. “This one is delicate. The Keeper has asked for Yol’s release.”
Out of the question. Tell her Yol’s release is not an option.
Tao’s quick retort startled Roen. “What? What does Yol’s release mean?”
“Tao can fill you in,” she said. “He’s been hiding a Quasing from us for years now, and it’s time Yol returns to us. I’m sorry, Tao, but recently, there’s been a rise in network attacks on our older legacy systems. There’s very few active Prophus who can manage those systems. Yol and Jeo designed most of them, and since Jeo’s playing for the other team, we need Yol.”
“But I thought Quasing couldn’t leave hosts unless the host dies.” Roen frowned.
“And who says you don’t have a sharp wit?” Sonya turned, walked to her bag, pulled out a manila packet, and handed it to him. “We leave for Dublin at 1500 hours.”
“Why me? Can’t we use our agents in Europe?” he asked.
Sonya shook her head. “We need you on this one. More specifically, we need Tao. Unfortunately for you, you’re him.”
Tao was being strangely quiet about the situation. Usually, he would at least give Roen a few comforting words or berate him for whining. The silence was awkward as Roen waited for some guidance.
“Tao, speak to me. What’s going on?”
There was a long pause before Tao finally spoke. By now, Roen had been with him long enough to know something was wrong. The briefing will tell you everything you need to know. You might as well open it and find out. Sonya said something about legacy systems being compromised. If that is true, then it is serious.
“What are these systems?”
Like most large companies, the Prophus invested heavily for several decades in mainframe and older technology. Updating those systems is quite an expensive and time-consuming endeavor, so we never did.
“What do you mean updating? Like we’re not Y2K compliant?”
Please. We’re infinitely old. We number our system with six digit dates. Y2K was a joke.
“How did we not protect ourselves from this sort of stuff?”
We are fallible like everyone else. Besides, the first thing to go during cuts is always the IT budget. We had a defection some time back: a Quasing named Jeo, a technical operations specialist. You met his host, Marc, at the club. We tried to eliminate his clearance after his defection, but he must have been planning this for a long time.
If there are still intrusions, then he has created a back door. Our network integrity could be compromised. If they can hit critical systems, it could be catastrophic. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. See if the documents in the packet shed any light on the situation.
Roen opened the contents and began to sift through the papers. He picked up several stacks of bound foreign currencies and put them to the side. He rifled through a thick stack of papers and sorted them into different piles. There were two packets labeled Biographies and a map of Dublin with specific areas marked in red. A separate clear bag contained several passports, plane tickets, and several false identifications.
Roen sat down and began reading through the biographies, hoping to glean the nature of his mission. Actually, he had no idea what he was looking for. The first biography recorded the background of a Gregory Blair, listing his education, accolades, and accomplishments. They were quite impressive: graduated from Oxford, three years as an officer and pilot in the Air Force, four as an Area 51 scientist, never married, honorably discharged, and a Prophus agent up until three years ago. His historical background ended abruptly with his current whereabouts unknown.
“What happened to him?”
Read on.
Roen pulled out the next biography about a Prophus named Yol. The biography dated back thousands of years to the beginning of recorded history, when Yol first joined the Quasing collective. Then it skipped a period during the Babylonian Empire where he was a minor official in the imperial court, and proceeded to run through his various hosts. Roen didn’t recognize most of the names, though a few did stand out.
“Wow, Yol was Galileo and Duke Ellington? That’s pretty cool. Why couldn’t you be anyone like that?”
What? Are you serious? You do not think Genghis Khan or inventing t’ai chi is significant?
“I guess so, but Galileo discovered that the Earth rotated around the sun. That was pretty revolutionary back in the day.”
That is such a load of crap! Galileo discovered that the Earth rotated around the sun because Yol told him! We are a spacefaring race. It is not a discovery if someone tells you! Yol’s hosts are always taking credit where credit is not due. Did you know that he once claimed to discover spaghetti?
“Well, did he?”
Of course not. The Chinese did. It is called noodles.
“Whatever. You sound jealous.”
Skipping the sections he thought irrelevant, Roen learned that Yol was a technology operations specialist. He had some tactical experience as a general in Napoleon’s Russian campaigns and as a Japanese colonel during World War II, but otherwise he primarily occupied hosts who were artists, philosophers, and scientists.