- Polite Fictions

In the room, in that room, it always seemed like a dream.

When was it you decided that you could no longer do this? The woman’s voice cold, metallic. At least she had come away from her training with something that allowed her inside of people without having to put a bullet or blade in them first. This insight elicited a giggle from something deep within Charlie’s brain. It was the sort of something that is best left to slumber.

“I dunno,” Charlie intoned, edge starting to creep up on reason, “One day or one-thousand….the when of it doesn’t especially matter, does it?”

The room, so white, everything in its sparseness blending near-seamlessly, soft around the edges. The old Vaseline-on-the-lens trick, smudged there by a trickster divine being looking for some laughs.

The ruffling of pages. Let’s see…

Yes, here were are. Your recruitment interview.

“It wasn’t a recruitment interview. It was two guys throwing back a fair bit of Sheep Dip Scotch and trying to get over.”

The silences often stretched on into huge caverns that she could fall into were she not paying close attention. Charlie knew the woman would be carefully instructed on the observation of those changes in breathing, of the slightest movement by a fingertip; it was in these places that a shift in thought patterns was betrayed and a careful(ly prepared) stranger might be able to step into their stream.

Charlie, then, had learned a phenomenal awareness of her thoughts and every conscious movement her body offered. She had her own flavor of conditioning altogether.