Cindy Psi: Spy In Training

“Who was that?” Cindy was in a predictably featureless office with Dave. She was the third to be spoken to after Natalie and Milton. Presumably George and Jane would be following. Dave was seated behind a large black desk with a single 3D projection screen built into it and nothing else on top apart from what looked like a small trophy of some sort with a plaque on it. It faced Dave, and Cindy was sitting opposite so she couldn’t see what it said. There was a single window in the wall behind Dave above his right shoulder that looked out over the training facility grounds and nothing else to notice in the room at all.

“We don’t know.”

“But you know more than we do, right?”

“Yes,” Dave sighed, “For about six weeks we’ve been aware of a new threat emerging that we will have to address. We don’t know who she is, but we know she’s very powerful, and as of today we have an even better understanding of that. We’ve not encountered this kind of strength before. Not just hers – on either side.” He finished pointedly.

“On either … you mean me?!? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. Sorry Cindy, I know it’s a lot to lay on you, but you have significant power, that’s very clear.”

“Am I stronger than her, whoever she is?”

“We don’t know. We bested her then thanks to your help, but there were three of us in the melee, and even then it was a near thing. But on the other hand, you’re completely untrained, and didn’t even know you had power a fortnight ago, so it’s impossible to tell.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“We have suspicions.”

“Where?”

“Our best psi-locaters have been working on it, but she shields incredibly well. We do think she’s in your home Sector. Possibly your home planet.”

“That makes sense. She felt familiar in a weird sort of way. And at the end just before she broke contact it felt like she kind of recognised me.”

“Yes, I thought I sensed something like that. How do you feel about it?”

“Scared! How do you think I’m going to feel?!? I’m terrified! But … but I’m also stuck. I can’t leave. If everything you say is true – which I know it is – I have to do the training, and I have to confront this horrible, powerful woman. Am I right?”

“Not necessarily. Louise and the other senior agents don’t think you should. They think it would be too big a risk, regardless of the need.”

“And you?”

Dave was silent. He seemed to be deliberating something – Cindy wasn’t sure if he was mindspeaking with someone else or not, but she didn’t think so. Eventually he stood up from behind the desk and walked over to the window. As he gazed out of it he began to speak.

“I joined the Spy Corp when it was first formed about thirty years ago. There were four of us at the beginning. Louise, me, a man we call The Controller, and another woman who I can’t tell you the name of. It was The Controller who first detected the Turgs and took news of them to the GCC. It was him who proposed the Spy Corp, and him who convinced the council to lock down the FTL technology. He was only about twenty years old at the time, but he was an incredible talent, and so clever. We were a good little team, the four of us. For the first ten years at least we had it completely under control.

“As time went on though, it got tougher. More people seemed to be showing signs of infiltration, and they were spread increasingly further apart. That’s when the woman whose name I won’t tell you came up with the idea of the A&P exam. We thought it was pure genius – as indeed it was. She devised the first exam, and worked with the GCC to get it implemented. At that time it was targeted at 17 year olds, but over time it has got younger and younger to where it is today.

“We don’t know how it happened, but something about studying how to detect the talent brought a dark tendency to the front in … the other woman … look, let’s call her Nancy for the purpose of this explanation. Something dark came out in Nancy. Louise spotted it first – Nancy had approached her with an apparently harmless suggestion that maybe they didn’t have to register all the recruits with the GCC. Maybe they could keep some secret. Some of the stronger candidates. That way, they could work on developing stronger psionic abilities that the GCC would never sanction. Louise laughed it off, but when she mentioned it in passing to me it made me a bit wary of Nancy and I decided to keep an eye on her.

“Over time, very gradually, Nancy got more and more anti-GCC and more and more subversive in her approach and suggestions. She argued with The Controller constantly. It made life very tough for all of us. We would complain to The Controller about it but he wouldn’t accept it was a problem, always downplaying it and finding excuses.

“It came to a head one day when I detected Nancy in her room mindspeaking with a lady who we had recently discovered that had a high potential talent. Something was a bit odd about the contact, so I alerted The Controller and managed to convince him that I sensed something was wrong. After much cajoling, he put a Spyline in. With his raw psionic strength only he had the power to spy on a private Mindspeak.

“He listened for a while silently. At one point he pinged me a thought saying she wasn’t following procedure, but nothing seemed too wrong, she was just sounding the woman out. She hadn’t revealed anything. He was going to break contact, but I convinced him to stay on the line for a few more minutes.

“Then his face fell. I’ll always remember it – he looked as though he’d just heard his best friend had died. I discovered shortly afterwards that to his great dismay and astonishment he’d overhead Nancy trying to convince this woman to join her … on the side of the Turgs.

“He called an emergency Mindshare with Louise and me to decide what to do. We conferred with the GCC liaison team and they told us she would have to be court-martialled, and silenced. Imprisoned. Forever.

“That was when he came up with the idea of a Mindwipe.”

“This was the one that went wrong, wasn’t it?” Cindy cut in.

“Yes. He’d done a couple before apparently, successfully, and by himself, but he knew he didn’t have the power to do Nancy alone given her own exceptional power. So he called us in. I don’t know if it was because we’d never attempted a power union like this before, or if there was something else that caused The Controller to pull back at precisely the wrong time, but it went wrong. Nancy was changed. Permanently. And so was The Controller – most of his power was lost when the ’wipe blew out. And as for Nancy … well, it was horrible.” Dave shuddered involuntarily at the memory.

“What happened to her?”

“We had to banish her. She was relocated to a world on the other side of the galaxy and tagged so she couldn’t use FTL. She’s there still, under care. She can’t speak anymore, but it’s a danger for anyone to make eye contact with her – the power has turned into a single force that burns out of her when she looks at you. None but the strongest can even survive it. Her carers have to wear special helmets even to look after her.”

“That sounds horrible!”

“Yes, it is. Horrible for her. You have to understand, we were friends, this was new, and you can’t blame her for being misled – we didn’t know anything of the dangers, and much of what we’ve learned about the evil nature of the Turgs, and all we’ve learned about recruiting, and safeguards, and reconnaissance, all of this has come since this happened. Most of it as a result of it happening. But that first decision to do the mindwipe, to take this risk, was The Controller’s decision to make, and he made it for the good of the galaxy. Nancy could have been imprisoned, but he knew this would never be safe enough and that it carried the risk of her going public with her knowledge of the Turgs. Or worse. He knew that the only safe option was to attempt what we attempted. For the sake of the galaxy … all those countless billions who would never know who he was. And it was the hardest decision he ever made, because there’s one thing you don’t yet know.

“Nancy was his wife.”

Cindy sat in stunned silence for a moment, contemplating this. How did a man decide to meddle in the mind of his own wife? She couldn’t help thinking this ‘Controller’ must be a horrible person.

“No,” said Dave, interrupting her thoughts, “he isn’t. He’s a noble, selfless man. A good man. That’s the point I’m trying to make. He listened to his head instead of his heart, for the good of the galaxy. He didn’t want to do it, he did it because he thought he had to. And he did have to – she was too much of a threat. But he really, really didn’t want to.” Dave turned to stare Cindy straight in the eye.

“Believe me, he didn’t.”

After locking eyes for a moment Dave broke away and continued, “And that’s why, when you ask me if I think it should be you that confronts this new enemy, my instinct is to say yes. From what I’ve seen, you are our best chance. And also from what I’ve seen, this threat is very real, and very big. The biggest we’ve seen in a long time. And so we need to use whatever resource we can to stop it.”

“For the good of the galaxy,” said Cindy.

“Yes, for the good of the galaxy.”

“The galaxy first.”

“Yes, the galaxy first.”

Cindy thought hard on that.

“I think I understand,” she said. “I don’t know if I could make the same choice as your Controller did, but I think I understand where you’re coming from.

“By the way,” she continued, “What happened to the other woman?”

“The other woman?” Dave sounded puzzled.

“The lady that ‘Nancy’ was talking to in her room when she was found out.”

“Oh, she never made training. She also didn’t get turned by Nancy. We kept her under surveillance as we do all the talented who don’t make training. I think she’s a teacher or something.”

Cindy sat bolt upright in her chair. “A teacher?!?”

“I think so. Why?” Dave looked curious.

Cindy thought quickly. A suspicion was dawning, but she didn’t want to reveal it yet. “Nothing, nothing. Never mind.” She said.

“Ok,” replied Dave, clearly still a bit too distracted by his reverie to pursue it. “Well,” he went on, gathering his wits, “I know I’ve asked you this before, but I’m asking it again. What’s it going to be? Will you stay?”

This time Cindy didn’t need to think about it. “Yes, I’ll stay. I need the training. And we need to deal with this woman, whoever she is. For the galaxy,” She added with a wry smile.

Dave smiled back at her with genuine warmth. “I knew I could count on you Cindy. Ok, I need to see the other two. Tonight you’ll have a supervised comm. with your Father to touch base and tell him how well your PEEP is going. It won’t be fun living the lie, but I think you’ll be happy just to see him and chat to him, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Great. You can head back to your quarters now. And Cindy?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks again.”

*

“They’re so nice Daddy, they really are.” Cindy was sat in a comms room in the main compound, talking to her Father on her PCD. The wall behind her was unique in this place, in that it had some colour to it. It had been set up like a twelve year old girl’s bedroom. There was a bunk bed with dishevelled covers hanging off the top bunk, a poster on the wall of some singer or other that Cindy was vaguely aware of (a former runner up from The Galaxy’s Got Talent she seemed to recall, but not from Oliver County’s one), and a couple of stuffed toys marking the space between the bed and a small white desk in the corner.

“Well, they seemed very struck with you when I just spoke to them,” Mr Parker replied. Dave had explained that the actors playing her host family would be patched in from where they were located before cutting across to Cindy. It was all very spy-ey, and although Cindy hated the deception element, she got a tiny little thrill from that.

“They’re sooooo nice. And Khoo is beautiful. I’m looking forward to seeing what the school’s like. But I miss you Daddy.”

“I miss you too, monkey, more than I can tell you. I was so pleased when the PEEP agency arranged this early comm. I guess they realise how hard it is in the first few days when you’re away.”

“I guess so. Have you been looking after yourself?”

“What, in the many, many hours since Sunday? Nope. There’s empty whisky bottles and pizza boxes all over the living room and every wall in the house is blaring out a different sport. Including fishing.”

“We’ve spoken about this before Daddy – fishing is not a sport. Standing on the banks of an artificial lake holding a stick while you wait for a randomly moving robot fish to engage a magnet on the end of a line is not a sport no matter how many of you sad Dads watch it!”

“Harsh! But fair. Hey, Tess knocked on the door on the way home from school today. She wanted me to say hello to you. She also wants to come on the next comm. Is that ok?”

“Of course it is! Oh that’d be great Daddy.” Cindy caught herself and flicked a thought off to Dave, who was standing out of sight behind her PCD.

Dave?

Fine.

“Bring her along!” she continued, “I miss her almost as much as you!”

“But not quite as much, right?”

“Of course not.”

“Ok, well, our time’s nearly up but you keep being good and monkey …”

“Yes Daddy?”

Mr Parker looked seriously at her for a moment. “You look after yourself now, ok?”

“I will Daddy. I will. Love you.”

“Love you beautiful. And where are you most beautiful?”

Cindy grinned, and, weirdly, almost felt a little like crying. “On the inside.”

“That’s right. Bye bye.”

“Bye.”

And the connection closed.