===INTERLUDE OGILVIE===

The office is large but windowless, which isn’t unusual as very few rooms in the entire building have windows.

The woman sits at her desk, filing yet another report. Her greying hair is pulled back into a stylish bun, and her sharply tailored suit looks good on her frame. She had been an athlete of some talent in college and maintained her fitness level just past her 40th birthday.

A knock at her door and she looks up at one of her subordinates. “Yes Malik?” Instead of replying he tilts his head toward the chair across from her desk and she nods. Not a casual chat then.

Malik is dressed in a button up shirt with a tie, as is the minimum for her department. The dress code is not as strict as it once was; the woman would prefer to retain the old standards but the younger generation bristles at dressing for a real job, and recruiting the sort of talent they require wins out over her personal preferences. And Malik, despite his occasionally relaxed attitude and crooked ties, is definitely talented. He closes the door and she presses a button built into her desk, starting an unseen device that generates white noise outside human hearing.

“Ma’am, uh, you know the Dead Letter Office?” He is clearly nervous, which is rather unlike him, and the department head stiffens. Of course she knows the DLO, the name being an old joke from a time when the staff made jokes. She had shown him the DLO and explained it all to him, watching carefully and gauging his reaction as he stared in disbelief at what he was shown and listened to her impossible instructions.

“What is it?” she demands, her heart pounding.

Only now does she see the sheen of perspiration on his face despite the constant chill of the office. His hands tremble as he pulls a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. Even as he unfolds it, she can see the alternating green and white bars and the circular perforations on the sides that give continuous form paper its name.

“T-t-this was on one of the printers. The old one. In Dead Letter.” His eyes wide, he reaches out, as if suddenly **** to get rid of the sheet of printer paper.

For a moment she stares at his hand. ‘Why me?’ a traitorous voice says in her mind. But no, she is in this chair for a moment like this. Her hand steady, she reaches across the desk to take the paper. The dot matrix letters form a handful of cryptic sentences.

“Ma’am? What are we going to do?”

Reading to the end, the department head feels her blood run cold. Clenching her jaw, she allows herself to panic, inside her mind. Counting backwards from 5, she lets the fear win, then she puts it away.

“We will do what we need to do Malik. Like we always do.”

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enrosadira (alpenglow)

"Trainees at the camp learned sabotage techniques, subversion, intelligence gathering, lock picking, explosives training, radio communications, encode/decode, recruiting techniques for partisans, the art of silent killing and unarmed combat."

Objective Bayesianism

Conformal cyclic cosmology

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