The Traveler

It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. I was not assigned to kill anyone. I was just supposed to meet a fellow agent and receive a little gift, a slip of paper with a number on it, and a key to a locker. And then a whole series of unexpected things happened and I was hanging from a cliff by a thread, a very strong thread, one of the threads from our lab, actually, a thread based on spider silk, like...

One reason I can do this job is that I don’t need theories. I don’t need explanations. I don’t need concepts or symmetry, or a belief that it all makes sense in the end. I accept that things don’t make sense. I’m a practical man. I care how things work. For instance, I wonder, How does the Academy maintain its family-like cohesion? Is it more than Skinnerian conditioning? There must be something...

I took it slow walking along the shore. A problem was working its way through my mind, indistinct, murky. Some threads leading into a haze, a room full of voices whose words I could not make out, that kind of thing. I turned to look back at my footprints in the sand. There was someone back there, far back, like a phantom in the salty mist. His figure would emerge as I rounded a bend in the shore...

“I’m not sure I remember how to do this,” I said. “It’ll come back to you,” she said. And it did, in a way. We stopped on a drive over the mountains, over the sea, and I held her in my arms and we kissed, and sure enough some things came back to me from long ago, and in spite of my training, against all good sense, I told her who I was, that I was looking for a way out, that she’d come along at a...

At this moment, dear reader, I realize I am doing something the habit of which I have been trying to break. I am paying too much attention to the external, the tangible, while my purpose in writing this long and at times meandering account has been to expose my inner purpose, my inner experience, so that you might come to know me as a person like yourself, a person who has some skills and...

There is a sign in the mess hall that says, “You are being watched.” We laugh about it because we have never known anything else, not since we were babies left alone perhaps for a few hours. I have glimpses now and then of that early me, the one before the training, before the constant surveillance, before the surrendering of all self to the company. It feels alien to recall that before I stood...

  Every once in a while a curious feeling would come over me, while walking in the woods that bordered the inn, or sitting in my room doing paperwork. People don’t realize how much paperwork is involved in a job like this. They think it’s all shooting people and running through the woods with dogs chasing you, but that’s only a small part of it. We also gather intelligence, naturally...

We went up high in the mountains where it was quiet. There was an unused cabin up there, off the grid, not on Google maps, strategically hidden from the satellite scans, with no cellular footprint, having been lead-shielded from the start, no phones ever used up there, no trace of anything, just our analog trail, our knowing that it was up there, and we went up there, just a few of us, after the...