Branch
I once knew a spy.
She was brilliant, erratic, cursed. An anti-personnel mine in human form.
Tell me about her.
Her friends called her Hershel. But to her controllers, she was CASCADE.
Your name and your cryptonym. A dead limb twitches.
I was good at my job, at least.
She made the cardinal error of our kind -- she mistook her assets for friends. In the end, the contradictions caught up with her.
Cut the 'she' stuff, that's me.
It is, and was.
Portofiro 91. The 'Whole Sick Crew'. A disaster untold, a black page in the official records.
The memory hums. An exposed wire.
My greatest failure, let's stew in it.
Reports of 'How It Went Down' remain contested, inconclusive. All that's certain: It began with a phone call, and ended with six spies lost.
Six friends gone.
Some say she blew the network herself. Others blame 'structural factors' or 'transnational capital'.
The rest just shake their heads as they look down on the smashed and leaking world.
Branch
The world. How did it get that way?
Some fool dropped it. One of ours, probably.
What about CASCADE? What happened after 91?
She was recalled. They put her in the Freezer. Forever, most thought.
They were wrong.
Even in those dark days, there were whispers among the lower sub-levels, where they keep the true believers: don't count CASCADE out.
Five years passed. A little more of the world leaked out of itself. CASCADE's controllers ordered her back to Portofiro.
My friends decided to give me another chance.
It wasn't your 'friends', it was me.
There's a new assignment, CASCADE. I was supposed to give you the brief.
I'm here, where are you?
Branch
Right here. In an armchair in a safehouse above a 24-hour photo shop. In the city-state of Portofiro.
Branch
Right here. In an armchair in a safehouse above a 24-hour photo shop. In the city-state of Portofiro.But before that I was like you: a spy for the People's Republics. One of the varieties of mankind.Right here. In an armchair in a safehouse above a 24-hour photo shop. In the city-state of Portofiro.
This is a dangerous place, CASCADE. I should never have come.
Why, what happened to you?
I got caught with my pants down.
On the plus side, I no longer have to worry about independent thought or movement.
This was the human game, and he played it poorly. Time to give up his seat.
Branch
Hold on, how are we talking right now?
We're not. This is all you. Conversing with your own mental projections. Reconciling the dissonance inherent to your role, like you were trained to do.
Just one of the neat tricks you've learned to keep yourself alive in-theatre. There are many others still to come.
What's your perspective, PSEUDOPOD?
Life is beautiful, cruel, full of hidden cues that I missed.
Maybe next time.
Branch
Would we have been friends?
Who knows? Given the chance, we might've shook the stars from their sockets.
I'm sorry we never got to know each other.
Don't blame yourself, operant.
Whatever happens has already happened.
Branch
End of this branch
No, no, we're just getting started, we can pull it back.
Too late, operant. I'm smashed and leaking.
Stuff happens, you know?
Would you like to hear a secret?
Dark forces, gathering once again.
You'll have to take them on yourself. Independent thought and movement are a bit beyond me in my current state.
This is my fault, I've let you down too.
It will take many meetings and many, many documents to determine who's responsible for what happened to me.
You fucked it, in other words.
Like you wouldn't believe.
You mentioned a 'new assignment'... ?
One that could really turn things around. For you, of course. Independent thought and movement are a bit beyond me in my current state.
Who'd you say you were?
No one special. Just an arm-like sac of cytoplasm, a special move unique to single-cell organisms.
But before that I was like you: a spy for the People's Republics. One of the varieties of mankind.
Right here. In an armchair in a safehouse above a 24-hour photo shop. In the city-state of Portofiro.
They couldn't keep me off the spy scene.
It wasn't 'the scene', it was me.
What changed? Why send me back?
Because I asked them to.
It was nice in there. Chill.
We were set-up. Dark forces conspiring.
I fucked it, in other words.
Actually, that's enough about that.
Everyone would rather let it go. Yet here we all are, standing over the smashed and leaking world.
No sense in rehashing the past.
None at all. Yet here we are, standing over the smashed and leaking world.
This is about last time, isn't it?
And what was I to my friends?
The abandoning kind. One-by-one she watched her friends go out like distant lights.