The Ninth Rolls

[Brackie]

It was amazing what government agencies decided to follow when put under the crunch. In the case of the SIS, one of the fintest intelligence agencies in the world, who hired some of the smartest, most innately intelligent agents the world over, it was simply removing a case of removing names from a flight path, then pushing that information into the aether of the internet like a paper boat. General chaos would always ensue, and that covered up what needed to stay covered.

Which was generally Prodigy’s modus operandi when it came to this. The simple stuff worked best. Kept them busy.

She was seated at her desk, feet on her chair, knees in her chest. Her main duty was nominally keeping an eye on the cameras, but that was easily delegated. Her actual main duty, self-assigned, was making sure nobody with a large set of guns found them. There were two levels to that - monitoring traffic, and planting leads to elsewhere. The former was, once again, delegated, to a room of fellow computer people, all sitting at their own desks, occupied. The latter was her own personal project. It soothed her, along with many other hobbies - all of them illegal.

As she clicked on the desktop and booted up her video editing software, she wondered if she’d done enough. She couldn’t check if all of her false leads had been found and chased, but she had enough attention for the SIS. It was as close to the place it all started as one could get, after all. She hoped she’d done enough for Overlord, a name so unfitting that she wondered why she still called him that. There was a reason they'd taken those names, and general conversation in her mind wasn't one of them. But still, Overlord? She’d known him ever since he shot at her. He’d known her ever since she saved his life, and the favour had been constantly returned in either direction, year after year. She wondered if those tags were still buried with the wrong body.

And he trusted her well enough that he could send her to gather people up. Especially when they were a group of four people who weren’t taking this whole thing seriously enough. Prodigy had her vices, of course, but they were vices she would indulge in once this was complete, the folder of fake NFTs and right-clicked images in her personal harddrive notwithstanding. Betting pools? Sex on the job? Gym? Sometimes she wondered where exactly they thought they'd be going with this.

They’d been in that room for nearly an hour now, she mused, looking over at the door from which occasional loud voices popped and rumbled. It wasn’t often they got caught with their arses in the air, but the pressure had been placed so tremendously on the people in the main room, that she wasn’t surprised things went down sooner rather than later. If things ever went completely wrong, she’d of course step in, but it wasn’t her official responsibility. She still had deepfakes to create, of wrong faces in different crowds.

Eventually, the door opened, and four stone-faced commanders stepped out, like zombies in a Russian march. They separated metres away from the door. None of them went to the break room, or their own dormitories. Prodigy met eyes with the blonde woman at the back of the line. One of them smiled. The other attempted murder with her pupils. They probably wouldn’t see each other again until the last one died.

She turned back to the video she’d created. Maybe she’d send this one to the ASIS, or CSIS; it seemed like something at their skill level.

If she could, she’d leave a little note with it.

With love,
Prodigy.

Wouldn’t that look great?