Caeli Widger - Mother of Invention

Xavey: np.

VivversOC: so yr dad raised u?

Xavey: no, my aunt and uncle. my dad was in the car too

2021

After sitting in the stubborn remnants of rush hour traffic between Logan Airport and Cambridge for nearly an hour, rain sluicing his windshield, Wayne Bridger finally arrived at his apartment on Chauncey Street, a few blocks from the Charles River. His apartment was sparse and tidy, a railroad flat with hardly anything on the walls, a blue couch in the living room, an IKEA coffee table, his desk against a wall in the bedroom. His employer, the Internal Stability Agency, encouraged its field agents to “personalize” their apartments according to the tastes of their aliases. They even offered to send an “aesthetic specialist” to assist, if interior decorating wasn’t your thing, but Wayne had never bothered. The ISA hovered over his life enough as it was; he didn’t need their grunts hanging bad art on his walls, too.

He opened a can of tuna and a diet ginger ale and sat at his desk, leaving the bedroom dark but for the glow of his laptop, the drizzle outside streaking his dark window. He clicked to his latest report, yet another spreadsheet dense with stats and notes on Viv. For the first time in his career, the reports made him feel slightly sick, how they reduced a person to a clutter of numbers and shorthand. How many had he submitted over his nineteen-plus years with the ISA? Thousands? He sipped his ginger ale and did the math: in his two decades with the Agency, he’d imported dozens of PITs—panic instigation threats. Viv would be the last, his final assignment before he could retire.

Some of his Imports had been rough, but not until now had his job begun to feel unbearable.

He’d hung a Post-it on the right corner of his computer with 8/15written on it in thick black ink. He kept it to remind himself, in moments when his doubt immobilized him—like now—what his goal was. Retirement. On August 15, he would hit his twenty-year mark of service with the ISA, and assuming he’d fulfilled the terms of contract, he would be a free man. No more importations. No more quarterly treks to the Colony, to be scrutinized by the goons of the Inner Panel. No more trailing, no more stories to keep straight, no more calculated “friendly” conversations with “strangers,” like the one he’d just had on the plane with Tessa Callahan. No more reports. No more shitty, anonymous apartments. No more lies.

He had to stay focused. To keep a clear head, his eyes fastened like bolts to his goal: Retirement. Freedom.

On some level, it had always been a struggle. Deep down, he knew his job wasn’t entirely honorable. But he’d been so young when the ISA had approached him, a teenage kid on the high plains of Montana, desperate to get out of the double-wide trailer with its threadbare carpet and fridge containing nothing but Natty Light and ketchup, his father permanently splayed in front of the TV. The situation had made him ripe for recruitment—Wayne’s own, and the larger situation in the country: a fresh assassination attempt on the president, Dewey Falk, a Washington outsider, a “rogue” who teemed with rage and bravado, newly reelected by a razor-thin margin. The attempt was handily thwarted and Falk got away without so much as a bullet graze, but the country was shaken to its core. Falk, on the other hand, seemed galvanized by the attempt on his life. Almost gleeful, as it had granted him the all-access pass he’d craved. When the dust from the would-be assassination—allegedly the work of a lone wolf—settled, the president announced the formation of the Internal Stability Agency. Its mission: to anticipate, prevent, and correct situations that trigger undue, harmful, or potentially threatening anxiety among American citizens . The president insisted that his goal was to “quiet the storm of vitriol poisoning the American air.”

Wayne hadn’t known the meaning of vitriol when he’d heard President Falk say it on TV, but he’d sure as hell known poison . His entire life had felt poisoned: with poverty and bad weather, a school full of pocketknives and OxyContin, parents who drank and fought, drank and fought, their anger shuddering the aluminum walls of the trailer.

Has America become no different from the deplorable Muslim states we’ve tried so righteously to defeat? the president had asked from his protected podium, which encased him in a pod of bulletproof plexiglass during all public addresses, a new standard after the incident. Wayne had watched the speech from the living room of the double-wide, where he sat on a brown couch scarred with cigarette burns. Beside him, his father snored in a Natty Light–induced coma, the hard hill of his gut rising and falling.

Wayne listened as the president insisted that the United States had reached such an apex of rampant misinformation , had become so angry, so accusatory, so divided , that the formation of the ISA was a no-brainer . We are living in a toxic fog of anxiety, said the president. This is not the America you deserve. He thrust a balled fist toward the clear wall of his impenetrable enclosure. You. Deserve. To. Feel. Safe.

At the time, Falk’s words had rung true and brave to Wayne. At the time, they were a comfort.

Ha. What a child he’d been, a boy so rudderless he’d found comfort in the promise of surveillance.

Wayne’s plan had been to join the Marines right out of high school and get the hell out of Harlem, Montana. He’d just turned eighteen and was set to head to Basic in San Diego when a recruiter emailed him out of the blue, claiming Wayne had been identified, via a national database, as a potential job candidate for an “exclusive” new opportunity with the Internal Stability Agency. The Marines were aware of his eligibility and would be happy to save his spot in Basic, should he choose not to pursue this other prospect. Would Wayne be willing to meet for a preliminary interview, that very week, in Billings? The invitation was essentially coming from President Falk himself, the recruiter added.

Wayne had been willing.

Eight months later, he’d emerged from training as a member of the ISA’s first team of field agents, with a new chunk of money in his new bank account—more than he’d ever had in his life—and his first alias: Henry Duarte. He’d hated that name— Duarte Fart-ay , his colleagues ribbed—but the Inner Panel had pinned it on him, and he had no say in the matter. He learned to turn his head, to look up, to snap to attention at the sound of it. Eventually he thought of himself as Henry Duarte.

Just as now, nineteen-plus years later, he thought of himself as Wayne Bridger. All the names he’d had before were inert. Dead to him.

As a field agent, his task was always the same: to access individuals identified as panic instigation threats—people engaged in the widespread dissemination of harmful misinformation —and relocate them to a contained but comfortable facility. There, at the Colony, they’d be given the opportunity to “revise” their lies and rejoin public life with proper self-restraint. If all went smoothly, they could be in and out in under two weeks.

Wayne and his team did all they could to avoid coercion of their PITs. The Colony was not jail. It was a thoughtfully constructed community, complete with landscaping and recreational options, for those requiring extended stays. The PITs were not criminals; no probable cause had been established. Only, as the president phrased it, probable propensity to cause harm . Once imported, the PITs had a chance to redeem themselves. The Colony, Wayne had been taught during his initiation, was a place of second chances.