Protagonists#

• Short, Lance - Agent Myra - Foreign Service Officer (John)
• Tucker, Jamal - Agent Sentinel - U.S. Secret Service - Personal Protective Detail Division (Panagiotis)
• Veronica Mare - Agent Artemis - Professor of Anthropology (Tasos)
• Bennet, Wendy - Agent Locke - Criminal Intelligence Analyst / Assistant Professor of Criminology (Konstantina)
• Coniglio, Heath - Agent Blacktail - FBI Intelligence Case Officer (Istvan)

The Reaping World - Thursday, October 24th, 2019#

Agents Artemis, Blacktail and Sentinel#

The Agents go inside the house to find two identical 12-year-old twin girls that introduce themselves as Eryn and Shelia. They say that their mom is busy, then asleep and then sick. As already agreed, Agents Locke and Myra drove to Kick Springs to gather information about Vicki King at the local police station.

Agents Locke and Myra#

As already agreed, Agents Artemis, Blacktail and Sentinel drove to Kick Springs to investigate Vicki King.

The Agents enter the house from the back door. It’s kicked in and inexpertly reset on the hinges. The boot prints are still visible on the white paint. Exhaust pours out a pipe rigged through the basement window. An engine is heard humming inside.

The kitchen is in good repair, but everything else in the house is tossed as if in execution of a mean-spirited search warrant. Every cushion and wall has been sliced open with knives or crowbars.

Up the stairs a bedroom contains bunkbeds and clothing suggesting two young girls live there. Taylor Swift posters have been taped back together and replaced on the walls.

Country music and feet shuffling echo down the hallway, coming from behind the door to the master bedroom.

Agents Artemis, Blacktail and Sentinel#

The girls appear to have been living in the basement for weeks. Sleeping bags and pillows are spread across the floor, alongside the torn packaging and empty cans from a storm ration kit.

Upstairs there is the master with a single queen bed surrounded with half-unpacked moving boxes. Scattered books range from conspiracy theories to parenting manuals to journals of advanced mathematics.

The girls ask the Agents if they are “Reapers” but then answer the question themselves. Reapers would have killed them already.

When they realize their mother is not in the room, they break down in a catatonic state and stare blankly into space. Agent Blacktail attempts to comfort them and coax them out of it.

Agents Locke and Myra#

Vicki King is listening to country music on the radio. The master bedroom looks like a private detective’s office. Paperwork is strewn across the bed in messy piles. Newspaper articles and maps have been pinned to every available surface of the walls and connected with an intricate system of color-coded yarn. The monitor of a desktop PC blazes in the corner, web browser open on a worrisome number of tabs.

She immediately seeks to secure their cooperation in finding her daughters. They’ve been missing but can’t recall how long. She knows they are alive because she has trained them well. She is a good mom!

Agents Artemis, Blacktail and Sentinel#

The twins come back to their senses. Their behavior is odd. Periodically, one of their faces spontaneously loses all expression, and the other follows immediately behind.

They confess to the Agents that Like any tween, of “stealing screentime.” Mom told them Picky Eater protected them from the Reapers. It was the reason they could do school on her computer without getting found by the government. When the girls wanted a device of their own, they knew mom would never agree to the “unsupervised screentime.” But they still didn’t want to get caught by Reapers.

They took the software off Mom’s PC and put it all into an old cellphone. Shelia takes the device out and shows it to them. Both beg the Agents not to tell mom that they broke electronics prohibition. They just wanted to find their dad online. Agent Sentinel immediately snatches the Blackberry phone from the girl’s hand and destroys it.

Agents Locke and Myra#

Vicki tells the Agents about Picky Eater and Dr. Cool:

• She helped Dr. Cool invent it as a grad student. Though her programming isn’t good enough to quite understand how the formulas she inputted were implemented, “Wes” gave her a finished copy. She believes it to be a sophisticated search algorithm and browser privacy software
• Professor Wesley Cool began teaching at MIT’s Department of Mathematics in 2007. He taught philosophy before that. He always said his curiosity was too large to be contained by either field by itself.
• She admits having an affair with him which resulted in the birth of her twins. Wes disappeared in 2016 before she had a chance to tell him she was pregnant and soon discovered she was not the first of his dalliances with grad students.
• The pressure of the pregnancy forced her to drop out of the program. She gave birth to the girls the following year. She’d always wanted children, and she knew Cool’s genes carried brilliance, even if he wasn’t a good man.

The Reapers#

Agents Locke and Myra, as well as Vicki King, appear in the master bedroom where the other agents are. Vicki embraces her daughters, but their joy doesn’t last long. The sound of banging on the front door, followed by shattered wood and footsteps, climbs up the stairs.

The agents face doppelgangers of Artemis, Locke, and Sentinel, with hoods of human flesh worn atop their suits. Shoulder-length stoles sewn from hairless skin are covered in profane tattoos that shift under the eye.

Physical violence ensues. Guns are fired and daggers are swung.

Agent Myra wishes himself into Vicki’s reality and pulls the cables from the back of the computer before returning to where he was moments ago.

The Reapers have vanished.

The New Sky#

The Agents decide to hand Vicki and her daughters to Pitzerelli. Before the black van arrives to pick them up, Shelia tells Agent Blacktail about what happened to her and her sister, after activating PICKY EATER:

• The twins were no longer in their house.
• Everything was mist and clouds, and the sky was a funny color that has no name. There were big stone blocks.
• There was a sleeping man next to a weird machine without its skin. He woke up when the girls prodded him. He claimed he was waiting for someone.
• Then another man appeared from the mists. The newcomer was bigger. He was the tallest person the girls had ever seen and dressed like someone from a storybook.
• The sleeping man tried to say something, but the bigger man shushed him like Mommy does when she has a headache.
• The big man talked funny, but the girls understood he was asking why they were there. They said they wanted to know more about where they came from. Then, suddenly, they were back in the house. But not their house.

She draws a sketch of what they saw. The bigger man towered over them and the sleeping man. The machine without skin resembled a computer motherboard.

Googling Dr. Cool#

The Agents find information on Dr. Wesley cool on the internet:

• Began teaching at MIT’s Department of Mathematics in 2007. He taught philosophy before that at several state schools.
• He is regarded highly in mathematics for conquering two of the difficult Hilbert Problems, a list of 23 unsolved problems proposed by David Hilbert in 1900.
• His philosophy work is less well regarded, concerned with questions of phenomenology and simulation theory.
• Reviewers of his work online often criticize the writing as derivative of Deleuze and Guattari.
• His profile on the MIT faculty website boasts of academic publications in philosophy and mathematics.

Boston Bubble – Friday, October 25th, 2019#

The agents drive from Pennsylvania to Boston overnight, sharing shifts behind the wheel.

In the morning, Agent Myra spots a distortion in the air before the vehicle passes through it. He pulls over and alerts the rest of the agents. Something resembling a transparent soap bubble, with rainbow swirls dancing across its surface, encases Boston.

Agent Sentinel cannot see it and calls Pitzerelli to inform him.