The next morning found me headed for the airport.
I fully expected to be back by late in the day, but I talked to the Gordell sisters and told them I was heading out of town on business, and that they might have to look after Beth for a couple of hours after school. They've been doing this long enough that they didn't ask any questions, even though they knew my license was suspended and I wasn't on a case.
I didn't realize, until I was finally ensconced semi-comfortably in my economy seat on a 737 bound for Washington National Airport, just how much I wanted the last of that bottle of Jack Daniels with me.
** ** **
As part of the intensive recruitment and training regimen of the fresh field op, the Ministry installs a control block in the subconscious, sort of a psychological bookmark. When a Ministry field op has finally had enough of an occupation – of an entire lifestyle – that functions almost entirely beyond the borders of what most people consider "real," he or she has two retirement options.
The first one, which 99.9% retirees take, involves calling on that control block to "fog" the memories of their field experiences. Not erased completely, but dimmed, made distant so that these people can re-enter civilian life and not wake up repeatedly with the cold chills, staring at the prosaic lifestyle around them while being acutely aware of how tenuous our construction of reality is. It also protects the Ministry; when friends new and old ask the retiree where he was all these years, he can only answer in vague generalities, because that's all he really retains. The particulars of names, dates, facts and figures are all blurred.
I was a damned good field op, I enjoyed my work, and I had given nothing but cursory thoughts in passing to the idea of retirement.
Until I met Field Op Luminous.
I suppose our op names were a match made in heaven: Radiant and Luminous. He and I were assigned to an investigation centering on what may or may not have happened during a series of unorthodox radiation experiments at a federally-funded university lab in the late 1960's. We spent weeks poring over disorganized notes, meeting minutes, and researcher scribbles. And we fell in love.
Field ops are very strongly discouraged from having relationships. The recruitment regimen even includes specific conditioning against the possibility. But whatever it was that drew Luminous and me together, it was far more powerful than both our conscious awareness of regulations and the best of the Ministry's control psychologists. We were professional; we were focused on our duties; we were also maddeningly drunk with lust and attraction.
After four weeks of research, we turned in our findings and were reassigned to separate matters.
Three weeks later, I heard through official channels that Luminous was killed in the line of duty.
It was the same week I found out that I was pregnant.
The Director had explained my choices in my voluntary exit interview. I could take the normal option, the standard option, which would allow me to return to my family and friends with only vague recollections of having worked in a high-security government organization. But that also meant that I wouldn't remember Luminous' face. I wouldn't remember the time we had spent together in our work, completely absorbed in our duties while simultaneously completely immersed in each other's presence. I might not even remember the fact of his existence.
His death, his permanent abence, wasn't even an emotional reality for me yet. I couldn't bear to consider the option that would expunge him entirely from my memory.
So the Director presented the little-exercised Option #2. The control block would still be activated, but instead of working on the memories subsequent to its installation, it would fog those memories previous to my recruitment. My parents, my childhood memories, even my birth name would be blurred beyond recovery; I would instead remember only those events which had occurred since I had become Field Op Radiant. The Ministry would create a new identity for me with such a watertight and credible history that it made the Witness Protection Program look like a high school student trying to pass a forged ID.
I would be a completely new person. And I would never know again who I had once been.
I had only a few seconds in the Director's office to make my choice. I felt my stomach and, even though I knew it was only my imagination at that stage of pregnancy, I thought I could feel the little life inside me kick.
I wanted to remember her daddy. Even if I never knew his real name.
** ** **
Touchdown at the airport led to a taxi ride into Maryland. We rolled into an area evenly divided between offices and warehouse space, and I had the driver stop in front of a featureless brick building that could have been either. I paid him and waited until he had driven around the corner before approaching the building.
The small sign beside the door only read "Henderson Industries." Someone in the Ministry's administrative wing had the task (maybe it was a rare createive perk) of changing the sign every few years. When I had been recruited, it had been "Central Marketing Division." When I last read it, it had been "U.S.I. Satellite Office."
There was a set of intercom buttons beside the door, but they were non-functional window dressing. I waited for the hidden retinal scanner, wondering if my patterns had already been re-activated.
The almost silent click of the lock told me they were. I opened the door and started down the hallway.
I was met at the first fork in the corridor by a tallish man in his twenties, wearing a mid-priced suit. He didn't say anything to me; he simply turned as I approached and walked together down the left-hand corridor. We both knew where I was going.
He opened the sixth door on the left for me, and I stepped into what seemed like almost total darkness as he closed the door behind me. I knew that my eyes only needed a moment to adjust to the low level of light with which the Director was most comfortable.
The Director knew it too. Just as I could distinguish the man behind the desk from the background dimness, he spoke.
"Good morning, Radiant," he said.
"Good morning, sir."
"Welcome back."
