You return to the desk. Everything is right where you left it, including the pack of Suprema 100s.

You return to the desk. Everything is right where you left it, including the pack of Suprema 100s.

Can I write poetry here?

A flat surface, a folder with some loose paper, there's even a pen that's been left behind. Yes, it seems suitable.

The real question is: Can you write poetry anywhere?

That pen has been rejected for a reason. That much fancier pen of yours will do a much better job.

Write a poem from the heart.

You plunge deep into the mirror of your past.

A gust of wind knifes through you. Operant HOLOCENE turns to you while walking through a street shadowed by soaring tenements:

"CASCADE, do you think you carry all your past lives with you? Or must the same life be broken and reassembled, time after time?"

This came out of nowhere, but stick with it. Do not get distracted by, say, a strange crack in the floor.

I wonder where this strange crack leads...

Do not claw for a rope. Face the page.

Every tangle of nerves in your being rebels against this. A sure sign you're On To Something.

This isn't the memory I want to start with...

Too late. The coffins have been kicked and the memories are waking now, one by one.

I told to him to focus on the target. No need to get morbid.

"I often think a controlled suicide under a litany of psychoactive substances might be illuminating. The shape memory of a life... versus a million deaths in a single soul."

What were we doing in that street again?

A Luzian asset had sent a series of cryptograms for you to decode his whereabouts. The man was almost comically paranoid -- later, you found him dead, symbols slashed into every part of him.

HOLOCENE's words haunt the air. A hypothetical that perhaps he would soon after be tempted to answer in the flesh, along with the rest of your Crew...

No, no, no. This file was supposed to be destroyed. Don't bring it back!

We're picking up mega-bad vibes here.

I bailed on them when I shouldn't have.

You're dimly aware of words being committed to paper as more memories crash the windows of your mind.

Real words? I'm actually doing it?

Stray phrases come alive in the space between your mind and the paper, glowing with prescience.

You pull on your learnings from the exercise papers to sharpen up your poetry. You read it back to yourself, outloud, and find a way to improve your metaphors.

Why would anyone do this to themselves on a regular basis?

Having chosen to expose your guts to the world you find yourself bleeding readily on the page. It pours out as if you're a sacrificial goat being drained for its lifeblood.

Relish in the art of bloodshed.

The past unspools itself -- you're merely its servant at the wrist.

"The terrible fate of all spies, CASCADE. Powerless to change the prophecy yet endlessly free to decipher its runes."

There are other terrible fates for your kind. You know of a few.

Keep carving away.

"Much like death itself -- a prophecy and its runes before a human race of spies."

It is done. The page is filled. All that's left is the dull bruise of guilt and the loose memory blowing around you like a slow storm.

Finally.

Time grinds along when you're revisiting old ghosts.

But is it good?

The raw materials are pristine. Any stylistic refinement needed is the editor's literal job.

So, technically: no.

I'm never doing that again.

Blood on the page aside, you have a good feeling about this one.

Believe it or not, there are people who do this for free.

That was awful. I think I'll try it again someday.

Agh, make it stop!

As you try to slam the coffin door on the memory, you realise it has already done its work.

Having chosen to keep your soul to yourself, you struggle to pull the most personal details out from beyond your armoured insides.

STATE SECRETS ARE NOT TO BE SHARED. THEIR DETAILS ARE NOT EVEN A PRIVILEGE EXTENDED TO INNERMOST COMRADES.

No thinking, just write.

Anyone of them could have been out to get me. I had to cut myself free.

I won't apologise for doing what I had to do.

HOLOCENE was half-right, in reality we were already dead.

HOLOCENE was half-right, in reality we were already wanged.

I don't want to think about this.

Tough. It's all you've got.

Nothing seems to have happened, poet.

Wait, I thought something happened there...

Wait a minute... you've done it! You've created a non-poem. There was one in the magazine's latest issue.

Perfect! Ultra-high concept, ultra-low effort.

You can see it now: a blank space, underneath which you are credited as author. Problem solved.

I can't do that. It's literally nothing.

Look, if you had any better ideas you would have written them down on that page in front of you.

That might be the problem. Thinking doesn't make it so. You actually need to write something.

But I hate writing!

No one is forcing you to do it. Most of all yourself.

Okay, yeah, I get it.

Evidence says otherwise. The page is still painfully blank.

This isn't right. Unseen enemies are blocking Good Poetry from entering my mind to demoralise me.

The pigeon of creativity has hit the window of limitations.

Poetry is bogus. I reject it on principle.

Cloaked in your ironclad principles, you look upon the paper-void and feel safe knowing it cannot stall you any longer.

Wait this out. No need to rush into things. Beat the muse at her own sacred game.

Tap your foot.

As you pretend to write, the river of time carries you inexorably toward death.

(Jump back in horror.) I didn't ask for this!

The service is provided free of charge, madam. You can tip your hat at old man Time for that.

Tip your headgear.

The room seems to warp around you, as if it was taking a bow. It's possible that this only happened in your mind.

Anthropomorphism is real. It is the human mind doing its best to interpret signals from beings that communicate in more estranged ways.

The scant words on the page before you constitute an exercise in unconscious word-association more than anything else.

Face it, operant -- sincerity and authenticity are not for you. Better to apply your talents for forgery and imitation.

Tip your imaginary hat.

Just write whatever comes to mind.

Aging doesn't bother me.

The average lifespan of an operant in-theatre is four years.

Look at your hands.

Somewhere along the way, without you being served notice, they have become the hands of a middle-aged woman.

Kind of feels like nothing's happening.

That's poetry, baby.

You can't force real poetry. It just sort of... happens. So why don't you hang around a while?

Firstly, gaze out the window with poetic intent.

You look out the smudged glass toward the Bazaar, the canal, the unfinished pylon. Unofortunately, none of it evokes any particular feelings in you.

Wait, is it working?

Objectively? No.

Gaze harder.

The outside world dissolves into abstract visualisations. You no longer recognise individual forms, only hazy impressions.

What is Melita doing right now? Is it in any way related to you? And if it's not related to you, is she maybe daydreaming of you a little bit?

The smell of cola floats through the open crack in the window. A passing aero-tram hums above, unseen.

It's possible you've over-gazed -- an all too common affliction among would-be poets.

Forget this urban melancholy shit. There's got to be another way.

The creeping sensation that you were supposed to pick up on something that eluded you gnaws at the back of your skull.

No need to overthink this. This task doesn't require actual poetic talent, only the skilful mimicry that is your stock-and-trade.

Okay, enough gazing.

The blank page awaits.

Manufacture a credible facsimile of a poem.

Your target has already given you a clue: Poetry is an extractive enterprise.

Something behind all the meticulous layers of professional politesse. A hunger. Not for food nor sex nor even, really, for beauty...

She wants my inner resources.

She wants to see the inside come outside, dark, writhing energies bound by the most delicate strictures of form and craft.

What you require is a sacrificial persona, a proxy for yourself that will allow you to perform the necessary procedures without risking actual spiritual harm.

A simple sock importer with a startlingly rich inner life.

With cold precision, you extrude lines onto the page and then subject them to the most meticulous stylistic torments.

Your character is a woman chronically obsessed with her own pain, a cripple, almost, but one who filters it all through an engine of language.

In a nearby office, a middle-aged woman lifts her glasses, focusing on a younger person sat behind a large desk. The woman's insides burn with a malice that is realised as rhyming couplets pieced together in her head.

In no time, it is finished.

But is it good?

It's exactly what it needs to be: Finely engineered, meticulously polished, a flawless vessel containing nothing.

Hold on, are you really going to submit this carbon-copy? There's neither blood nor truth on this page.

Hrrmm. I could have another go at it.

You tuck your cynical verses away.

Put the poem away.

There is no poet, just the shadow on the wall and the nocturnes of the Umbral Host.

A spy of the spirit, undercover within her own soul.

She wants to see blood on the page.

Almost. What she wants is the simulation of violence, glimpsed through the one-way mirror of form and craft.

She wants to see me.

No, she wants to think she sees you. Poetry is a dance of masks, alternatingly revealing and withholding.

Whatever she wants, it's not good.

Good and bad are categories that everyone fills with their own meaning. The Editor has clearly tried to do 'good' all her life -- and here she is.

THE VERY EMBODIMENT OF BOURGEOIS 'VALUES': PROFESSIONALISM AS ETHICS.

The only real question is: what does your target want to read?

You've switched four lines around and replaced a few words with their synonyms.

That's it?

That's it.

So no new poem?

None whatsoever.

You have been trained to identify and dismantle the enemy's rhetoric. Their poetry is only the most rarefied instance of this.

Easy. I can impersonate the enemy in my sleep.

Demonstrably untrue. You can barely impersonate the act of sleeping.

The fact that none of your dreams can be remembered is a sign of fragmented sleep.

Probable cause: high-stress.

How is this helpful?

It's not.

Now write. Deploy all your instruments of rhetorical manipulation!

Long words. The middle-class loves long words.

A polysyllabic trainwreck agglutinates across the page.

Planisphaerium. Transubstantiation.

DEMILITARISATION. FORTIFICATION.

Hysterectomy.

Good, good. What else?

It should rhyme?

Naturally.

Probably talking about consumerist topics, like... fabric softener.

The decadent luxuries of the so-called 'Developed World'. Their minds cannot resist the temptation.

Everything is a metaphor for me.

Yes. All bourgeois high art is solipsistic by definition. What else?

I think we're done. (Examine your work.)

The text before you reads more like parody than poetry.

It's shit.

Stop. I need to concentrate.

But what if the reactionary rhetoric contaminates my mind?

Your mind, like everyone else's, is at risk of contamination at every waking second.

THAT IS THE RISK YOU TOOK THE MOMENT YOU LEFT THE SUPERBLOC, AND THE REASON THE OPERA KEEPS A SPECIAL TAB ON YOU.

Not convinced it's actually that simple, but let's do it.

Examine the red folder.

A small label in the top-left corner is printed with one word, your cryptonym: 'CASCADE'.

The colour reminds you of pomegranate.

It screams: 'DANGER, NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.'

Your hand hesitates.

Open the red folder.

The folder opens with a whoosh. Before you, in neat monospace type, your life is condensed to its barest elements.

Name: Wilk, Hershel. Cryptonym: CASCADE. Born: Landau, former Republic of Mircea. Dependents: None. Pay-class: D2. Years of service: 14.

All true, none of it useful just now.

Raw facts cannot capture the totality of my being.

According to the Opera's Remembrancers, raw facts are the totality of your being.

This is me. But it doesn't feel like me.

Appropriate to one whose entire existence is a forgery.

What can't be forged: The surge of all-engulfing sadness you feel as your hand rests on the page.

Keep reading.

Childhood: Bourgeois, typical. History of student radicalism led to persecution by monotheist reactionaries. Fled to People's Republic of Kohila, embraced post-historical materialism.

In short: Born capitalist, reborn communist.

A party liner, that's me.

Medical Record: History of dissociative episodes and reckless action. Gunshot, chest, retained bullet (10mm, pre-service).

The bullet nuzzles your aorta. Your heartbeat flutters.

Sexuality: Homosexual tendencies (Unconfirmed).

Confirmed.

Suicide risk: Minimal (Ideation only).

AS OUR MORAL STATISTICIANS HAVE REPEATEDLY INSTRUCTED, 'SUICIDE' IS MERELY A COWARD'S WAY TO SPIT ONE LAST TIME UPON THE PARTY.

It's all 'ideation' until you commit.

End of list. According to this file, that's all there is to you.

Moving on...

Where do they come up with this stuff?

A vicious rumour started by my extremely horny detractors.

I only said that stuff so they'd let me in.

Anything else in here?

There's another page behind this one. It's labelled 'Service History'.

A tingle in your fingers. Your head grows lighter as you approach the crash site.

Examine the cigarettes again.

Secreted neatly against the inner wall of the pack, just as you were once taught to do yourself, a crisply folded sheet of A7 paper. It reads:

ZWS JMXVBTW AON TRRA KB ZQYMUSGS

The missing companion to the one-time key you recovered from the trousers.

CACSADE's still got it.

One-to-one correspondence between key and text: This is a Rezeda cipher. Your heart skips a beat.

PSEUDOPOD must've brought these with him.

There are a few mangled filters in the ash tray.

You can tell he cleared off space for his elbows here. Leaning on the counter, no chair to be found. To the left of his left hand -- the packet of cigarettes.

He's left-handed.

A stray ballpoint pen seems to confirm the hypothesis.

Examine the cigarettes again.

Examine the cigarettes.

There's nothing outwardly noteworthy about this pack of Suprema 100s. It's like any other found in commissaries and corner stores across the People's Republics.

Except.

Here we go.

Hold on...

Take the smokes.

The pack slides nicely into your pocket, as though it always belonged there.

Leave them.

You leave the cigarettes where you found them.

Now to make them kiss.

You've carried papers like this, folded up and hidden away in secret pockets and compartments.

This is ciphertext.

Short, uneven letter chains: likely a Rezeda cipher, the most basic kind used by the Operant Bureau. Designed to be decrypted by a one-time key.

Its mate. Somewhere nearby.

Am I having a stroke?

No. This is the secret language of your kind.

Rummage through the desk.

Amidst the crumpled sheets of copy paper and empty takeout containers, you find an opened pack of cigarettes, Suprema-mark.

Suprema 100s. Cheap Superbloc export.

Shit quality. Barely smokable. Emergency use only.

Take the smokes.

Examine PSEUDOPOD's cipher again.

ZWS JMXVBTW AON TRRA KB ZQYMUSGS

FOR CASCADE ALL WILL BE FORGIVEN

Memories of operant training, hours spent practicing modular addition. These mental muscles, long atrophied, begin to awaken.

I've done this before, this is nothing.

All it requires is patience and diligence.

Lame loser shit. (Give the ciphertext the finger.)

The perfectly ordered letters offer no response.

Leave it.

The sheet naturally curls itself into a little 'v' as you place it back on the desk.

Read your service history.

In just a few words, the worst failure of your life is reduced to bureaucratic shorthand:

Previous Assignment: Portofiro, 88-91. Network: 'Whole Sick Crew' Operants: CASCADE, ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ Assets: ▒▒▒▒▒▒, ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒, ▒▒▒▒▒▒, ▒▒▒▒▒▒, ▒▒▒▒▒