Borderless (Analog #2)

by Eliot Peper

Our secrets define us. Diana felt the truth of that in her gut. Secrets were the dark matter whose mysterious pull shaped people’s grandest dreams, deepest fears, and sense of self. Unspoken truths inspired visceral passion and brought down entire nations. They were the crux upon which the world turned. Diana knew that the only material worth reading lay between the lines.

Truth was always the best cover.

“What the fuck? How is it that you look so damn stunning every single time I see you? It’s like you have no regard for us regular humans who have mediocre genes, appalling style, and wake up with bedhead. Really it’s just rude how gorgeous you are.”

Journalism and espionage were sister professions. The only difference was that when they got their hands on something juicy, reporters ran wild like exhibitionists at the Folsom Street Fair while spies filed it away as leverage.

An enormous scarlet cocktail topped with a mountain of garnishes sat sweating in the middle of the table. A Caesar. Diana blew a kiss to Virginia, who saluted her from behind the bar. Sliding in, she took a sip and savored the powerful mix of house-distilled gin and Clamato. There were hints of basil and even a touch of passion fruit.

The avocado sapling in the front yard had benefited from a certain amount of benign neglect. Fussing over it too much yielded nothing but wilting foliage. Only when she left it alone for a while had it perked up. Maybe relationships could be the same way.

Like so many elite strivers, he was the kind of person who wanted to fill silence. Diana loved people like that.

Client work was all about up-management.

“I’m a professional,” she said. “And professionals need better reasons than money.”

immediately. It was hard to beat canine judgment for first impressions.

The easiest way to catch someone cheating was by knowing what cards they held.

“It’s amazing how many words they use to say so few things.”

As sea levels inched ever higher, people either abandoned low-lying cities after suffering storm surge after storm surge or went to extraordinary lengths and ever more expense to engineer safety measures. Washington, DC, would be a literal swamp without expensive Dutch hydrology firms, whose stock prices soared in concert with sea levels.

She had spent a few years stationed in Amsterdam, the Netherlands being one of the few nations to have survived the dissolution of the EU intact. The weird little country had always found a way to thrive on the edges of things, never big or powerful enough to have much gravity of its own. So the Dutch had cultivated an internationalist agenda that paired nicely with their age-old status as a world financial hub. Because their tiny nation was so exposed to the risks of climate change, they had become far and away the experts in finding ways to adapt. Ever pragmatic, they lost no time marketing that expertise to the world after securing their own home.

Remembering her time in the Netherlands, so often the little things stuck with her even when the details of grand operations faded. The buttery taste of raw herring fresh from a street vendor. The colorful narrow buildings crowding the banks of the canals. The angled bike-lane wastebaskets designed so that cyclists needn’t slow down to toss their trash. Holland delighted in its idiosyncrasies.

I’m a cat person, just like anyone with an ounce of class.

Love was beauty and pain and profound confusion.

Step one of any op, the older woman had said, is to figure out who the principals are and what they want. Her voice was always so light, so sweet, the dulcet tones belying the heavy implications of her words. Until you’ve sorted that out, nothing else matters.

It was easy to forget, but cars were just computers that drove you around. Houses were computers you lived in. Hospitals were computers that healed you. Factories were computers that made stuff. Farms were computers that grew food. Utilities were computers that delivered power and water. Everything and everyone was connected to the feed, which made everything and everyone dependent on it.

“The Dutch build parallel dikes for redundancy,” she said. “There are three kinds: watcher, sleeper, and dreamer. The watcher dike is right up against the water. If it fails, the sleeper is ready. If the sleeper fails, the dreamer is the last defense against disaster.”

Some people needed a reminder of debts owed, some needed a credible threat, others just needed a pep talk. Knowing the difference made you an intelligence officer.

Espionage was mostly logistics.

The feed was a tool. A useful one, to be sure. But the people who used tools were the ones in charge, not the people who made them. That’s why, from Washington’s perspective, Silicon Valley was the nation’s inventor, not its ruler.

There were discrete classes of secrets. There were the personal kind, secrets that orbited an individual life like moons, their gravity shifting behavior as easily as tides. And then there were the heftier kind, secrets that were stitched into the very fabric of world affairs, that directed the course of nations.

The opposite of being beautiful was being common, for it attracted nothing but indifference. And that indifference was invaluable armor to a spy. Of course, the flip side was that people mistook you for the archetypal “someone.”

Paranoia was a spy’s best friend. You kept it close, confided in it, watched it grow and mature with a certain measure of pride. But like a best friend, you couldn’t let paranoia get the better of you.

Good training made everyone else’s reactions in crisis situations look like slow motion.

“Everyone worries about the future.” His voice lost its affected madness. He was quiet now, incisive. “They freak out about technology. They obsess over how tomorrow might be different. But it’s the things that do not change that we should pay attention to. If you want to make sense of the world, focus on finding the constants.

death by a thousand small conveniences.

The problem was that data told you what people did and how they did it. But it revealed little as to why they did what they did.

You kept paranoia on a tight leash, but once it started barking loud enough, you loosened your grip because it might be onto something.

“You’re not interesting enough to inspire hatred.”

Step one of any op is to figure out who the principals are and what they want.

Anyone with a weak stomach either loses or outsources.

Knowing that you were being manipulated didn’t stop it from working.

Conflicting information was much more dangerous than straight-up failure. It didn’t just hurt, it paralyzed effective response.

Never hesitate. He who hesitates, dies.

True love meant loving a person for who they actually were, not an imperfect mental construct, just as true protection required empowering people to defend themselves, not pretending that the dark side of human nature didn’t exist.

Sometimes the only way to meet power was with power.

Dangerous questions have dangerous answers.”

Maybe knowing someone’s personal history, knowing their goals, their fears, their dreams, wasn’t really knowing them. Maybe there were secrets that ran deeper.

Did names hold some secret power, or were they nothing but random phonemes, convenient tags for easy reference? Sometimes a name was so banal as to be unmentionable, and sometimes it was a key that opened doors into forbidden realms.

My whole job is dealing with crises. The best way to speed up is to slow down. Panic doesn’t help.

At their core, infosec protocols balanced security against efficacy. If you never told anyone anything, you could keep your secrets safe, but you’d never get anything done.

When faced with an uncomfortable truth, people’s first instinct was to ignore it, justifying denial with the same assumptions that girded their obsolete mental model.

Staring into someone else’s eyes was far rarer than people assumed. In conversation most people let their gaze hover at a socially neutral point in space, flicking around to take in body language or facial expressions, letting peripheral vision do most of the work, maybe dipping in for a brief second of eye contact to accentuate a point. Lovers occasionally transgressed this norm in moments of intimacy, but even that was unusual. Even if you did look into someone’s eyes, doing so meant shifting your focus back and forth between them.

Mental acuity was most valuable when it was least accessible, and the best way to retain it was to treat every movement, every breath, every heartbeat, as a meditation. Either your monkey mind controlled you, or you controlled your monkey mind.

When you grew up in a world where rules were respected, where institutions mattered, where justice might arrive late but always came, how could you internalize the reality of impending chaos?

Facts might be facts, but truth was relative.

History didn’t end. It swung on its axis and came back to bite you in the ass.