Even More Different, Continued Or Something...

In yesterday's posting, I wrote about -- among a lot of other rambling things -- Secret Love Among Secret Feds.

Now what?

---

To read yesterday's massive missive, you'd think that I know something about Feds, about Agency Lifestyles, and presumably the live and loves of people who are top-secret, secure, and probably spend a lot of time being compartmentalized, as in, shoved into tiny little boxes and worked like a Dilbert, only doing things that are actually interesting and for bosses who have no pointy hair, and who are so utterly pleased to be out of their cubicles that everyone they see prompts them to grin like Kzinti.

Well, it's not true. Here's everything I know about that sort of stuff. Astute analysts will quickly draw the conclusion that Yours Truly is disseminating fiction. Anyone with the skills to check will notice that this was written long before the creation of the popular TV show "Chuck", it was published on paper in a little fanzine called "Driver's Side Airbag". They've also published other stories of mine.

---

I am tempted to test people's willingness to suspend their disbelief, and to write here in all seriousness that I never would post anything other than verbatim truth in direct reporting, and have never harbored the slightest artistic leanings towards surrealism, and that I have no sense of irony nor humor.

You probably don't want to have your children read this to you at work.

---

Wilson Forbrush fortunately never had the experience of discovering that he was, in fact, a Secret Porn Star of widespread infamy and having a fan-following probably best described as "immense" only in proportion to the percentage of those who could access the underground network on which his body of work was distributed. That this network was part of a vast and octopodian network of shady backroom and dead-drop distributors of samizdat, was unknown to Wilson. That Wilson had ever been video-recorded engaging in sex -- epic or otherwise -- was unknown to Wilson. To be fair, it wasn't known to anyone associated with that sex.

Wilson had been doing his usual thing of wandering around town until he found a bar that was relatively empty and then sitting down to have a drink or three. Wilson, being the clueless if overeducated person that he was, didn't at all understand that the general reason a bar in the District is mostly empty is because the staff have run off all of the customers so as to establish grounds for a "meet". Anyone wandering in and not letting themselves get run off -- Wilson is as inept socially as he is clumsy -- clearly is part of the plot and doubtless the courier or someone assigned to observe that various transactions did or didn't take place.

Wilson's entourage never quite makes it into the bar as they normally would; they see Wilson withering under insults to traditional American sports and generic disdain of local institutions delivered in phrasing that would drive a Parisian waiter to ecstasies, and they realize that not only is Wilson a shameless wanker with no sense of team spirit, he is about to be sitting there when a deal goes down. and not a deal they had expected. Once again, Wilson has wandered the other agents of the Non-Existent Agency into new and uncharted -- and clearly interesting -- territory.

And who should arrive but the sinister but outrageously lovely person, a very elusive one, known only as Special Courier Nadia. Wilson's entourage makes a lot of phone calls and the people they call also make a lot of phone calls, and pretty soon the trap is set. There's only one hotel room left in town, once they're done, and it is at the Vista Motel, famously the site of Marion Barry's outraged utterance of "goddamn bitch set me up". But that hasn't happened yet, in Wilson's present, and he feels no misgivings -- but rather a deep and reasonable surprise -- when Special Courier Nadia drags him out of the bar only minutes after her arrival, and takes him in a cab to the only hotel room left in town... at the Vista Hotel.

Special Courier Nadia is there to deliver samples of a product of the clandestine chemistry labs of a private venture operating in a small Balkan nation not known for its scruples about human medical experimentation. Wilson, not being the actual agent to whom Nadia was to make her delivery and presentation -- that person is even at this moment being stalked for collection -- has no idea that the white powder is anything other than the ubiquitous nose-candy that saturated Washington DC. Like any gentleman, he insists that the lady go first. Special Courier Nadia knows that the product is safe when used as directed, snorts up a line, and hands a rolled-up ruble note to Wilson, who follows suit.

Wilson, unlike Nadia, just wasn't expecting the latest cocktail of something fairly close to a mixture of viagra(tm), ketamine, and a genuinely interesting mixture of amino acids and neurotransmitter and regulator peptides. Nadia, unlike Wilson, was expecting and rather anticipating spending the next 36 hours locked in the experience of a combination of mild hallucination, euphoria subjectively indistinguishable from falling in love with Someone Special, complete loss of verbal and most physical inhibitions, and recurrent intermittent episodes of profound near-priapism starting about every 3 hours.

Like Wilson, the technical surveillance team wasn't expecting it either, but boy did they have great camera angles on every last bit of it, endless miles of high-quality video tape, and quadrophonic sound.

After about the first six hours, the replacement shift arrived, along with the hastily-requested video mix team and studio director.

The audio musical dub track, they added that later.

---

As mentioned elsewhere, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Then again, there's magic, and there's magic, and then there's ... magic. Plus there's magic.

---

Wilson never found out about this little escapade, other than having had the experience of being there, which he never properly attributed to it being what it was: two people, and chemistry. Well, it was to that to which he attributed the experience, but for him the attribution was only a cliche.

For the people who managed to scrape up a few analyzable samples when the two passed out in utter exhaustion (not to mention dehydration and probably some nerve damage), those two people and their chemistry and the chemical all led to significant insights in neurochemistry, interrogation technique, and even marriage counseling.

All of this also led to significant increases in the balances of numbered Swiss bank accounts of various dealers in copies of the surveillance.

Surveillance video generally isn't particularly valuable in the aftermarket, unless perhaps the cinematographer is named Zapruder. For Wilson's tapes, "epic is epic" in the touting of the salesmen, and word of the product preceded its availability, driving up the price. Special Courier Nadia was more than a bit buff and for whatever he might have lacked in looks or talent, Wilson had made up in enthusiasm, endurance, and persistence, not to mention stiffness, or Nadia's moaning. The tapes circulated for the better part of a decade in the underground networks of the Eastern Bloc, where there were avid customers for anything that wasn't the broadcast propaganda. Passable porn, however plain-vanilla, was widely sought-after, and passable porn of a genuine KGB courier was worth its weight in gold. Anyplace east of Germany, Wilson was nothing but window-dressing, as it were, in the most widely-copied video pornography ever circulated behind the Iron Curtain.

To this very day, copies of this tape (or nowadays, DVD) surface. And here in the USA, in all cases, persons possessing it have always turned out to be no more than one degree of separation from semi-retired station chiefs left over from the Cold War.

Wilson Forbrush, the most famous Secret Porn Star you've never heard of, has long since retired to some godforsaken place such as Scranton or maybe Biloxi, and never has to worry -- which he couldn't do, because he doesn't know -- about whether or not he'll be running into his fans.

---