THE WAR ROOM

Nadav Schul-Kutas '21

CRYPTOCRYSTALLINE, NICOLE ELLSWORTH '21

THE WAR ROOM

Nadav Schul-Kutas '21

Please speak slowly and clearly into the microphone.

My coworkers used to tell each other that the vents to the War Room pumped in small amounts of chlorine gas. It wasn’t true, obviously, but it would have explained why the air in there always weighed down on you like a heavy sheet. It would have explained why the room always felt so sterile, as if someone was wiping your fingerprints off the table whenever you lifted your hand. It would have explained why, whenever I saw scores of men in suits walk out of the War Room, their faces would sag and their eyes would sink as if they were being slowly poisoned.

There were a lot of rumors floating around at our unnamed government site. It seemed like the higher your clearance, the harder it was to distinguish fact from fiction. The memory of a woman with a thousand-yard stare and an antenna sticking out of her head would bubble up somewhere in my brain, and for a brief moment I wouldn’t be able to discern if it was just a story Jonah told me by the water cooler or if I was the one holding the remote control.

Sleeping pills were provided free of charge. So was anxiety medication. Benefits were scant back when I was working for the feds, but they knew what their employees needed to keep their heads on their shoulders.

The department heads seemed pretty calm about the whole operation. I never really understood how. They couldn’t have been hopped up on pills all day (workplace benefits are one thing, but the human body has its own limits). Maybe they were too far away from it all, the same way you don’t see the cow get slaughtered when you buy meat at the supermarket. As far as I know, all they did was assign projects and read reports. Well, they also talked to workers in the War Room.

The only times I was allowed in there was to meet with the head of my department—

What was their name?

The department heads never gave us their real names. The only name written in our documents was Mr. Glass.

Your testimony matches our records. Please continue.

Mr. Glass wanted to see me inside of the War Room. Guy was a bit of a hardass, making me pass half-a-dozen security checks like I was going to murder him. People who’ve worked at the site as long as I have never defected. We both knew that acting out was a young man’s game. Not showing up to work, refusing to do certain tests, giving anxiety medication to subjects, that sort of stuff. I understood what they were trying to do, but come on. You can pout as much as you want— the tests aren’t gonna change. There isn’t much disagreeing with the feds, but I digress...

Mr. Glass sits me down, says that he’s seen my work. You can never tell with these sorts of people, but apparently he was impressed. He said he was going to put me in charge of a team developing earwigs. Not the bugs, they’re more like— is this declassified?

All existing project records have been fully declassified to the public, Mr. Leeman. Please continue.

Alright. Earwigs are microphones that get embedded under the skin so that counter-espionage has a harder time finding them. Figuring out a way to get them in was easy enough. Drilling dimples in the skull, restitching the ear, fat carving, all the standard procedures worked initially. But then Glass wanted the earwigs to store more information, so we had to make the earwigs bigger while still keeping them discreet.

A larger skull dimple sounds like a safe bet until the subject falls over and hits the part of their head that we’d thinned out. Cerebrospinal fluid short-circuits the earwig and ruins any recordings it stored. The ear stitches were being pushed by the larger earwig and wouldn’t heal properly. Burying the earwig wherever the subject’s body had the most fat became our go-to. But for all the time we spent testing various prototypes, we never figured out how to easily extract the earwig and retrieve the recordings. Our agents ended up having to cut the earwigs out themselves, but we couldn’t send them anesthetics. Pills would make them woozy, and if the police saw a needle they’d throw our agents in jail thinking they were junkies. Soldiers were already being given Hoxidate, and two tabs of that stuff meant that you could step on a land mine and still not go into shock. Needless to say, our agents found their drug of choice. I heard that the earwigs were pretty helpful for the war effort once we had our spies sitting in on your secret meetings. Was that true?

Please continue, Mister Leeman.

...Have it your way. After a month or two I got called back to the War Room. After seeing our performance with the Earwigs, Glass was ready to assign my team and I to other projects. Psychedelic gas, bioweapons, artificially-induced heart attacks, that sort of stuff. I started getting more workplace benefits, had to take my extra doses during lunch just to keep up with it all.

One day I got called to the War Room and everything felt off. A few of the guards were missing. The whole site sounded quieter, like someone had rounded up noise of clicking heels, shuffling paper, and quiet typing and forced it into one of the test chambers. Mr. Glass sat at his end of the War Room table with a briefcase on his left and a pistol holstered on his right. Told me that I had done a great service to my country, and that I was one of the last people who was still working at the site and raising kids. He suggested that I spend more time with them and that I burn my files on the way out. The briefcase had 2 years worth of pills, my pension in cash, and a sheaf of papers starting with my name at the top and pictures of me from back when I joined. I took his advice.

2 months later we lost the war. Your tanks were probably doing victory laps in our streets when a few soldiers caught wind as to what was going on in the “Xerox building”. I watched through my apartment window as you threw my coworkers into vans.

And that was the end of it.

One of our governments razed the site and people built a parking garage on its grave. I never saw my coworkers again. The closest I ever got was years later when I tried to pirate a movie and instead got a video of Mr. Glass’ head situated on the end of a spike. His face was covered by a mutilated paper target, but was still as recognizable as an old friend.

I remember that one time a rat died in the ventilation shafts. No matter where you went, the smell of death leaked from the vents in the walls and was spread by the fans on the ceiling. And that’s the funny thing about the chlorine gas rumor: if it really was being pumped into the war room, then it was poisoning every room in the site. I think that site was slowly killing all of us. And as much as Glass might hate to hear it, I think the site has finally killed me.