Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

I stumbled into an office that I thought was going to be a door to a stairwell or something, and then heard sounds of men talking and searching, but I didn’t know where they were coming from, and I said, Fuck it, and burst out of the office at a screaming charge, though how I charged anywhere with that gash in my leg, I couldn’t have said, but there was no one there and I stumbled down the next hallway.

I could hear them behind me. I could hear their voices and their footsteps behind me. Closer and closer. I was just so tired, though. I just wanted to stop and say, Okay, guys, you got me. I wanted to stop with my hands up over my head if only so I could take a minute or two to not move any piece of me anymore. Just when I was about to do that, when I had stopped running and was simply walking quickly and then not so quickly, had slowed myself down like you sometimes will at the end of a long run, and was waiting for them to catch up to me, I turned one final corner and there I saw a door, an emergency exit door, and I shoved myself through it because at that moment I could not think of anything I would have described as an emergency moment more than that moment right then. And through the door was an elevator, and in that elevator was one button, just one, and the door closed, and I sank to the floor, and the elevator didn’t seem to move, and I waited, and then the doors opened, and on the other side there could have been a huddle of them, masked and armed and waiting for me, but it wasn’t them. It was the outside world, and it had never looked so fucking beautiful as it did right then, and then I ran and I didn’t look back.

I never looked back.

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

When other scholars try to pin onto the first Oracle the blame for the fall of the Regional Office, these scholars often point to a moment that occurred early into her tenure as Oracle. Or they try to trace a link from the discovery of the first Oracle to the discovery of that first Oracle’s daughter to the fall of the Regional Office, a specious argument, at best.

Anyone foolish enough to assign blame for either the rise or the fall of an organization as complex as the Regional Office to one source proves himself little able to understand the nuance of history, an understanding of nuance necessary for strong scholarship. History and complex systems cannot be boiled down to mere sound bites or taglines, but sadly recent published (and peer-reviewed) research demonstrates the current and dangerous trend of encapsulation that this paper hopes to speak against. The very people who will lay blame at the feet of the Oracle once known as Nell are no better than those who make illogical and obstreperous claims that Mr. Niles might be blamed for the spectacular failings of the overall Regional Office.

After her transformation, the Oracle in question, the first Oracle, once known as Nell, remained in the office. She sat out front. She stared out the windows. She didn’t speak. She didn’t sleep, either. If she ate, Mr. Niles had never been a witness to that spectacle.

Slowly, Oyemi gathered the materials she needed to build the Oracle a space where she could prognosticate in the time-honored manner of oracles littered all over B movies and pulp science-fiction and fantasy novels. A shallow pool of milky-blue water (check), a darkly lit room imbued with an eerie, sourceless blue-white glow (check), a bald and trembling and ageless woman connected by hoses or cables to a futuristic melding of computer and man (eh, more or less, if that’s what you’d call a few orange first-generation iMacs Oyemi bought secondhand and jerry-rigged herself). She gave up her office for the Oracle, set the turtle-shaped kiddie pool on a platform in the middle of the room so that the Oracle would still be able to look out the window at the traffic on the street and the buildings on the other side. The computers — there were four in all — were attached to a couple of printers. It was all still a trial-and-error sort of game, as far as Niles could tell. The few times he walked in on Oyemi, she was digging into the back of one of the computers or testing the cables out on other computers and the Oracle was seated quietly in a chair at the window.

Mr. Niles did little to hide how little he thought of all this.

He asked Oyemi if the Oracle had given them the Powerball numbers yet. He once walked into the office wearing gauze wrapped around his head and over his eyes, gauze he’d made to look cheaply bloody with red Magic Marker. When Oyemi didn’t notice, or noticed but ignored him, he pretended to stumble around the office blind and said, “Could you give me a hand here? I’ve stabbed my eyes out because I killed my father and fucked my mother.” And then, “Oh, if only I’d been warned of my horrific fate!”

He knew he wasn’t being helpful or a good friend or a good business partner. He knew that he was slowly sabotaging their plans of saving the world, of rescuing and training at-risk but powerful, oh so powerful, young women, everything they had talked about, but he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t want an Oracle. He didn’t want to believe in or rely on the Oracle, didn’t trust her or whatever machinations Oyemi had performed on her. And if he had been more honest with himself maybe he would have understood that what he had been against wasn’t the Oracle herself, but anyone or anything stepping in between him and Oyemi. Instead, he latched on to a lingering sense of unease about the fact that they had abducted the Oracle, though this had become dulled by the quiet, unsettling presence of her sitting unvaryingly at that window, and to this, he attributed his distaste for what was going on.

Not that she seemed unhappy — or happy, for that matter — nor that she seemed to harbor any intentions of escape, and he was sure that no one who had known her would recognize her, or her them, and truth be told, the people who had once laid claim to her probably wouldn’t want her back, not anymore. Regardless, he felt that they — he and Oyemi — had moved too far afield from their original intentions. They’d made plans. After they had understood more fully the scope of Oyemi’s transformation, they had conjured together beautiful, brilliant plans. The world was in need of their help — it was clear — and they wouldn’t let the world down. They would build an army of superwomen. (There had been an unspoken agreement that they would only seek out women.) They would recruit and train these women to fight the evil forces of darkness. Together, they would root out evil, become an all-knowing and all-powerful force. And maybe, if they made some money along the way, what was the harm in that?

They had all of this to do. They had a world — or worlds, even — to explore and exploit and make their own, and none of this Oracle business, none of this kidnapping rigmarole, seemed to fit in with any of that.

But mostly, he felt jealous. Jealous of the attention Oyemi was devoting to this woman. Jealous of this strange, wordless connection they shared. And this jealousy needed an outlet. The fact that Oyemi had brought this person into their plans needed some reckoning. That she had done so without consulting him needed some reckoning. He needed to remind her, for his own cruel purposes, that this Oracle had once been a woman, had once had a life that Oyemi had diverted to her own agenda.

To get back at Oyemi, then, he went in search of the girl in the photograph, the photograph he had found in Nell’s wallet the day they’d abducted her. He didn’t know who she was or where she might be, but he knew her name.