Class Reunion at the CIA
If the CIA can get their hands on a decent psychic, best believe, they will have them drugged and hooked up to electrodes as quick as you can say ‘Merica...
2025 | ep. 1.1
Initiating Transmission
The timelines are getting unstable, so I’ve started uploading to this version of my timeline directly–it’s the steadiest Alternate Earth I can find. I don’t have time to organize and index as I would like to. Sam says I’m too fastidious anyway, and that this version of me will organize it for me. She has the time, after all—she’s divorced, bored, and has no kids. And she won’t mind me saying so; she’s me.
You’ll have to forgive me for imposing, Kate. I know you had other timelines to tell, but on behalf of Us? It’s urgent; I need a relay to K that can’t be tracked. I promise to keep it short. Why don’t you share this with your readers online? They’ll probably get a kick out of it.
.-.
Trust me on this, you would rather be captured by the FBI. They’re a bunch of boy scouts compared to the CIA. Half of what the CIA actually does doesn’t even take place on this planet, and that’s why I never considered it any of my business. They like the Moon and Jupiter for some reason. I suspect Stanley Kubric told them stories about Jupiter to get them distracted from finding the entrance to the Moon. Personally, I think Stanley was from the Moon colony, but he was assassinated just after 2001 Space Odyssey in my timeline (about eleven years before I was born) so I didn’t get the chance to ask him. Poor guy; there is not one AE (Alternate Earth) I have found where he has survived. Sooner or later, they get him every time.
The CIA have no scruples whatsoever. If they can get their hands on a decent psychic, best believe, they will have them drugged and hooked up to electrodes as quick as you can say ‘Merica. This is not to say that they aren’t morons. They’re just highly-funded morons. We’ve been very careful to avoid them since our late teens. We’ve made our lives and dimensional travels as banal as possible to avoid attention up to this point. But after the goings on of late last year. I suppose it was foolhardy to expect this would not be the result.
Sam has been a housewife all these years, happily married to a white-hat hacker with a high US government clearance. Thankfully, he is very loyal and tight-lipped, which works to the advantage of his employers and his wife’s friends.
Liz swore there was no way she wasn’t at least going to be rich, so she’s hiding in plain sight in Hollywood. She’s made herself the star of a reality TV show pretending to talk to dead people. Her real business is under-the-table, administering psychedelics to wealthy people who lack clarity and purpose. If she was better at telling the future, she would be truly disgustingly wealthy on stocks and horse races. To her disappointment, she’s only the best at mind reading, subconscious suggestion, and Jedi mind tricks. Which was fun for a decade, but eventually left her emotionally-stranded. Turns out, relationships are only meaningful when minds are free and unfettered. She finds it frustrating; says a standard relationship is too much work, but also clearly craves it. She recently ended her third marriage. Oh, and she can talk to her cats.
And me? Well, I’ve been spending most of my time with friends off-dimension since K joined the police force six months ago. The house is too quiet, and everything reminds me of Doug. K still won’t talk to me anyway, and she’s practically an adult now, even at age 16. She takes herself to work and to her doctor appointments. So I just don’t bother her.
My ears are red and hot tears come to my eyes remembering Sam’s warning from months ago when she agreed to let K stay at her place while I was off-dimension. Of us three, Sam’s the one who gets the clearest signal of the near future (which is so much harder to parse). I told her K would be fine. We needed a break from each other anyway. Nevertheless, Sam really gave me a talking-to.
Just because our daughters are genetically fortified and enhanced physically doesn’t mean they don’t still need a mom.
“Just because she’s your clone doesn’t mean she’s not your daughter.”
No lie, that did sting. But I went off-dimension anyway, so what does that say about me? Knowing now the trouble K’s in… and that I was too far away to be there. How could I not have known? How did I miss this? How did this blindside me?
And now I’m in this fucking steel room with a mirrored window, and I can’t do a damn thing. Goddammit.
I wipe my whole face and neck.
Almost on cue, a sympathetic-looking female in a smart skirt and a collared shirt walks in with a box of tissues, setting them on the plain steel table amid two steel chairs, all bolted to the floor.
“How long do I have to stay here?” I snap at her. “Do I get a phone call or what?”
She lowers her head with a look, but says nothing and exits. Her mind, dead as a recording studio.
Shit; they’re onto us.
Sam is led into the room by one large, strong man wearing an ear wire and an ill-fitting suit.
“You can check all the databases you want,” Sam says. “If my husband doesn’t want to be found, you will not find him.”
With a feisty jerk of her elbow, Sam wrestles herself free from the guard.
“Kindly unhand me.”
She glares at me.
*Dare we?* she thinks.
*You’re joking, right?* I reply. *...in the home of MK Ultra?*
We immediately shut our psychic channels and shield.
Before I can even wonder if they’ve picked up the rest of us, we hear Liz being dragged down the hall. She is tossed into the room and the solid door automatically locks behind her. She immediately makes a comment about her feet and sets to removing her heels. She tries to bundle her purple-red buoyant waves into a ponytail, only to realize she has no hair tie. Her neck is hot, so she holds the hair up with one hand and fans her neck with the other.
“That was a quick flight from LA.” I mumble.
“Well, I was in town,” says Liz. “I was going to call.”
“No you weren’t,” says Sam.
Liz shifts her eyes back and forth between each of us, expecting us to reply in-mind. Exasperated, she finally speaks.
“Look, I know it’s been a couple years but you guys don’t need to be assholes,”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Sam scoffs, turning to face one of the cameras in the corner of the ceiling and sticking out her tongue.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Liz moans. “How many remote viewers you think they’ve got in here right now?”
“I counted three,”
“One just left through the back wall,” says Sam.
“Ope! One behind me,” says Liz, thumbing over her shoulder. She drops her hair, knocks on the mirrored window, and looks askance at her reflection, hollering to the agents on the other side. “Shift change I guess? One to one, huh?”
As soon as we’re done perceiving what we’re up against, our mental shields are engaged and we have to rely on words.
“There’s some potent energy in this room,” I grumble, sitting and rubbing my forehead in frustration.
“Bastards,” Liz punctuates with a hard sit in the chair across from me and drops her shoe on the table with disgust. “Wouldn’t even let me grab my Chucks.”
I smile. “Broke the first rule.”
We all recite it together wearily: “Never leave home without your Chucks.”
Liz looks into Sam’s eyes.
“I am sorry I didn’t call,” she admits.
“I know,” says Sam.
And we all know that’s that. Because here we are now, and none of our emotional drifting matters anymore. We all knew this day would probably come. We’ve known it for thirty years. It was just a matter of time. More specifically, a matter of timeline.
The door swings open suddenly and one more person is foisted in. A small, fit man with deep brown eyes, hazelnut hair, and a distressed motorcycle jacket is pressed against the wall by his face. The behemoth with the ear wire admonishes the man to remain still as his handcuffs are unlocked.
I stand with trepidation at this unexpected appearance. When the door closes, Sam addresses him.
“Beck, are you okay?”
Predictably, he rubs his wrists and comes straight for me. I stand and stumble back.
“What the hell have you done this time, Kate? I told you I wanted none of this!”
I back against the wall as his words hit my face.
“I told you I was OUT! Fully out! Does this look out to you?”
“I don’t know why they brought you in.”
“Don’t play stupid,” he brings his left eye closer to mine, military-style, and I turn my head as he whisper-yells. “My kids, Kate–they took my kids through the portal. What, you don’t already know the details?”
“There’s a lot of channels on the radio, Beck; I was a little distracted.”
“I bet you weren’t even here,” he stabs.
I am breathless with silence. Liz starts to pace, as she is without cigarettes. Then Sam interjects, as she often does, between me and Beck.
“They took K, too.”
Beck’s expression does not soften like it normally does when the daughter of his best friend is mentioned.
“Well, I’m crying tears,” says Beck, dryly. “While your military-grade teen soldier has been abducted by bad guys she can snap in half, my kids are in real peril. My youngest still believes in Santa Clause, Kate! My wife is beside herself!”
“Why would he take K and Beck’s kids, but not Sara?” I ask Sam, referring to her own cloned daughter.
“Well, whatever the reason, he’s got our attention,” Sam says, hesitates, then reluctantly speaks her mind. “I think we underestimated just how sinister this whole situation is.”
“Jesus,” says Beck, pacing in the opposite direction of Liz.
“Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?” she says. “Like, some Pinky and the Brain shit?”
The room is quiet, and Sam answers solemnly.
“We’re pretty sure it’s The Brain.”
Beck stops pacing. We exchange glances and head shakes. Bewildered and at a loss, the gravity of what we’re about to face falls heavy on our shoulders.
The tension is broken as an agent enters the room. Moderate height, late 40s, clean-shaven. Cheap blue suit. But a well-fitted cheap, blue suit. No wires, no tech. Just holding a ratty leather notepad the size of his palm. And a short, stainless steel, retractable ballpoint in the other hand, dangling casually as he crosses the crowded cell to the chair where I had been sitting. Liz moves herself to the wall by the door. The agent makes eye contact with each of us exactly once. He is slowly gnawing on a small piece of gum. This is the kind of man who can end any one of us with the pen in his hand. No psychic ability needed to understand this. He sits down, flips the notepad open and clicks his pen exactly once. Without looking up, he asks in a voice like tepid earl grey tea:
“Which one of you is in charge?”
He waits patiently for an answer as we exchange glances among each other. After some awkward silence, he capitulates.
“Okay,” he slaps his notebook closed, then points to his chest with his pen, still interlaced in his fingers. “I’m Hugo Watts, special agent assigned to this… situation.”
He catches Sam with an icy glance. Sam’s eyes fly to me, and then Liz, and back to me.
Beck holds out his hand and Watts receives a firm shake, not bothering to stand or remove the pen from his fingers.
“I’m Beck Waters, sir. It would be great if we could get whatever-this-is completed so I can see about my kids.”
“At ease, Waters,” says Watts.
For half a second, Beck stands straighter and relaxes his shoulders until he realizes the phrase triggered old muscle memory from his days in the military. At that, Beck awkwardly backs away from the table and shoves his hands into his jean pockets.
“Look,” says Liz. “No offence guys, but I don’t know why I’m here.”
“And none of us can understand why you wore a dress that tight on a first date, either, but here we all are,” says Watts, leaning back, crossing his legs and his hands over his belt. The pen hasn’t moved.
Liz incensed, she blurts “Are you shitheads following me?”
“Don’t call him,” says Watts with a stone cold stare. “He’s on the list for diddling his teenage niece. Your compass is broken. Close down the show in LA and open that witchy bookstore in Leawood you’ve been talking about. Oh, and stop dealing illegal substances. You’re welcome.”
Liz scoffs, then rubs her collar bone. Sam starts to giggle. She’s been telling Liz this for years.
“No, really—you’re welcome. You need a plumber or drywall guy or mechanic-type. The kind with tattoos and a motorcycle who loves the Ren Fest. And you can forget about it–I don’t have any tattoos, and… you’re not my type.”
Watts is very careful not to look at me or even gesture to me. He just bows his head like he’s remembering something unpleasant. Finally, Watts unwinds the pen from his fingers and retracts the point by clicking in exactly once. Awkward silence fills the room once again. Seeming indifferent, but definitely more tense than before, Watts grabs a tissue from the box on the table next to Liz’s aubergine stilettos. He wipes the gum from his mouth and sets the wad next to my neatly-folded tissue full of tears and snot. Even the sight of my tissue seems to pull him back into reverie.
“Look, we’re wasting time,” says Beck. “Ask your questions and let us go, or…”
“What, Mr. Waters?” Watts firmly interrupts. “You’re gonna bust outta here? You don’t even know where you are. You could be in the back of a random strip mall next to a subdivision of houses. However will you and these three women make it past two guards, four remote viewers, and a secretary?”
Beck squints his eyes and tilts his head. I get the impression that Watts isn’t totally facetious.
“Yeah,” says Beck. “I suppose you’re right. I definitely couldn’t do that on my own.”
Watts stands to leave and gives Beck one more stern look in the face while sliding the notepad and pen into his blazer pocket.
“Tell you what–my partner and I are gonna go get a burrito. When I see you again, I expect some answers.”
The door slams shut. There is no need for any of us to speak. We all know we need to get the hell out of here, and we can tell Beck is about to make it happen.
“When this is all over,” Beck says, pointing at my nose. “I don’t ever want to see your face again.”
I can’t tell if he means it.
“That’s fair.”
Beck takes a deep, cleansing breath to center himself and walks over to me. He taps on the back of my left arm with his fingers in a repeating morse code pattern sequence of three and whispers almost inaudibly in my ear: You’ll know what to do when the ice cream cone hits the floor.
After that, my eyelids get heavy, and when I open them, Beck is seated where Watts had been sitting. Hands on the table, eyes closed and fluttering. I feel confused as a huge wave of déjà vu coats my awareness.
*Clear channel; Beck to Kate, this is a clear channel, over?*
Swiftly, the grogginess lifts. Then, it’s like my thoughts are thinking me.
*Roger, Beck. ready now; confirm?*
Beck is an actual rocket scientist. But a number cruncher, mostly. A bit of an adrenaline junkie, Beck originally wanted to be an astronaut or fighter pilot. Unfortunately that was ruled out by a heart defect discovered late in his military training. After a few adventures dimension hopping with me and the girls in our teens, he discovered he had a special talent for covert telepathy and psyche battle. Since the late 90s, Beck has moonlighted as a powerful remote viewer for an independent black ops militia. His wife just thought he liked to meditate a lot and couldn’t understand why it took so much out of him. He taught us stuff.
Beck is a very loyal, kind man. He taught me how to get fit in my early twenties. He introduced me to Doug. This, of course, was before the last dimensional journey that brought us to this impasse. The one that almost got him killed. He never liked dimension hopping; he thought it was irresponsible. He thought for sure it would break the space-time continuum. Or at the very least, come back to bite us in the ass one day. It’s funny how even parlor tricks and fortune-telling can’t seem to trump common sense.
The state I find myself in is a subconscious combat program I had allowed Beck to install for emergencies like this. It is faster than actually learning martial arts. It also happens to make me his mind-slave. Sounds dubious, but I trust Beck. Aside from Doug, no one has befriended me so well as Beck. Even his reprimands are full of love.
A female voice comes over the intercom.
“Is he in distress, Ma’am?”
“No,” says Sam. “He’s just meditating. He does that when he needs to calm down. You know, belly-breathing?”
Still under hypnosis, I can see what Beck is seeing transposed over my own field of vision. I see four light bodies huddling around my face, but they’re huddled around Beck, whose head is veiled in a blackish cloud. I take one of Liz’s high heels from the table. Liz picks up on what’s happening and takes the other one. My pupils fully-dilated, I lift my eyes to Liz.
Words come from my mouth:
“You wanna dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?”
She stares into my eyes like two magic eight balls. She smiles.
“You’re the best, Beck,” she mumbles before pounding the mirrored window again. “Hey! I gotta pee! Helloooo? Am I supposed to go here, or what?”
With that small distraction, Beck jumps out of his own body and engages the other four light bodies. In and out of walls they slip. Throttling each other with waves and punches, sizzles of electricity, chokeholds and colorful auric stabs.
My own vision narrows and I’m drawn to the sight of a ball of ice cream melting on the floor, a broken waffle cone beside it. My heart speeds, my lungs swell, and my back aches with a surge of adrenaline.
Liz makes her way to the door casually, but in my heightened state, I notice everything about her. The tendons in her forearm. Her knuckles turning white as she curls her fingers into a fist in the toe of her shoe.
Only one of the huge guards is at the door speaking to Liz. She bats her mascara-encrusted blue eyes while I get within range of the guard’s holster. One glance to Sam is all I need to let her know it’s about to go down, and that she should be ready to drag Beck’s body from the room.
“Expect a woman of my age to wait this long?” With flair, Liz gesticulates with the shoe into the air, and just as quickly, the heel of the stiletto is raked across the guard’s neck.
My hand is under his jacket. Swipe. Safety-off. BAM!-knee. BAM-BAM!-other knee-shoulder. WHAK!-on the occipital, out cold.
We’re in the hallway, and the other guard BAM!-dominant shoulder. I hand Liz my gun and try to wrench the gun from the weakened grip of this second guard. This big guy has me in a headlock with his left arm from behind. Head butt to the nose. Again. Again. Drop to my deadweight forward; my elbow to his groin, slam his head into the wall. Out cold. Gun secured. BAM!-on the knee, just in case. I shoot everything that looks like a camera. I accidentally trip the sprinklers.
Liz has the secretary secure in a headlock and a gun to her face. The hallways are void of noise at this point but due to the astral mayhem, our minds are full of din. Beck’s fighting groans and noises from the two remaining remote viewers. The secretary internally screaming over and over again about how she didn’t want to die, and her poor pet poodle at home. Sam saying she could use some help with Beck’s body, and had I found a way out yet?
“Just chill out, chill out,” says Liz to the secretary. “I know you’re not an agent, and you’re just assisting. We’ll let you go in a minute. Hang on.”
Arms extended with the gun secured fist over fist, I kick open two more doors, raising the gun as I scan the corners of the rooms. I’m panting and short of breath, though hardly even walking. A sharp pain pinches in my chest. Beck is reaching his limit.
“There’s no one else–please!” begs the secretary. Liz presses the gun into her cheek. “But I already pulled the alarm so backup is coming anyway. Just please, please let me go.”
“You mean that Watts guy told us the truth?” speaks Beck’s ambient words from my mouth. “What the hell is this?”
Beck is down to the last remote viewer, and rather than take another punch, the viewer shakes his head and hands. He looks up to the right and says to the person standing above his body (wherever that is):
“I dunno who this guy is, but he’s a goddamn pro.”
With that, the last remote viewer dissolves from sight and Beck returns to his own body. I give the all clear. Gun pointed at the secretary’s head, I order her into the interrogation room and she’s locked in. Liz then to helps Sam carry Beck down the sloshy-wet hall toward a set of stairs. We leave the guns.
At the top of the stairs, we exit through a set of warehouse doors. There we find ourselves hobbling across the pavement in the back of a strip mall, adjacent to a subdivision. We enter a thin, private woodland which quickly becomes a row of backyards.
The sun set maybe ten minutes ago. I peek around the corner of someone’s garage. Beck’s influence is wearing off, but I still have access to some hypervigilance and the mental acuity makes it easier to activate the telephoto setting in my ocular implants.
“Five houses down,” I whisper. “There’s a house for sale. It should have a basement.”
We rush along the ditch lawn behind tall wooden fences. The fence latch of the empty house is easy to weasel open with telekinesis. The lock on the sliding basement door is difficult. I’m no good at puzzles. Beck is the locksmith, but he’s so tired. He’s slipping out of my consciousness like slime through a child’s fingers. The distant sound of sirens and a helicopter draws closer and closer.
Liz? She’s no good at this. Sam? I told you, I don’t pick locks. Well, I’ve only practiced once or twice, I can’t–can’t get it! Shut up! Just let me focus!
Deeply sick of our bullshit, Beck steadies himself on his feet and with great effort yanks his arms from the shoulders of Liz and Sam. He falls forward onto his wet hands, on the glass door. With a slicing motion of his hand, he opens a psychic portal just beyond the glass. Spacetime parted like a membrane of skin. Embarrassed at this obvious shortcut, we quietly pile into the basement and close the portal, sealing it up with a gesture and will.
We’re in a finished basement with an old pink couch and a broken TV from the 90s. The space is like every liminal space horror game you’ve ever seen.
I open my own personal closet, a pocket in spacetime that responds only to the personal code of an individual psychic. (Sort of like if you could take an attic with you everywhere.) We pile into that, I zip the entrance up in a rush and we’re finally at liberty to yell at each other verbally.
Regrettably, we fight all of the same fights we’ve been fighting since the day Doug was shot. Beck is outraged that it happened at all. I am appalled that he can infer that I intended for it to happen. Meanwhile Liz is urging us to come back to the here and now, reminding us that we just shot up and assaulted some federal agents and helicopters are after us. Sam is literally between me and Beck, begging us to let it go; that we’ll never fully work this out. What none of us notice is the hole in the closet door, leaking quantum light, our psychic signatures, and our voices into the dusky basement.
At this point, the guilt and grief is too hard for me to bear. I’m flushed and bawling.
“What do you want, Beck?” I scream, shaking my fists with every syllable. “I can’t undo it! I can’t go back and make different choices!”
“Oh, Kate–grow up!” he says, exhausted.
“What do you want from me?”
“Responsibility!”
This exclamation causes him to wince in pain, and Sam helps him to his knees on the gravitational substrate beneath us. Nevertheless, he finds the grace to clarify.
“Who cares whose fault it is? Take responsibility anyway. I do it every day.”
Beck must have said that to me hundreds of times in the months since Doug died and it never stuck until now. Our minds open to each other in this vulnerable state, they all know it, and I feel naked.
“Now you see,” says Beck.
Before anyone can move or speak another word, the distinct CLICK of a gun hammer sounds in the space. The small hole I’d neglected to close widened to reveal the enigmatic Agent Watts. Police lights were refracting through the glass doors and panned the walls of the dark basement. Police chatter and static came from the radio in Watts’ hand. It was my turn for eye contact. No clever chit-chat for me; just the slim barrel of a handgun. Without breaking his stance, he brings the radio to his mouth.
“All clear down here, Sergeant,” he says.
The Sergeant objects, and asks again to confirm.
“I was wrong; it’s a total no-go. Lets double check the woods and the highway underpass. I’ll catch up with you later.”
Ten-Four. Watts smashes the radio on the tv.
“Now let’s try this again,” he says. “Who’s in charge.”
I straighten my shoulders and swallow.
“I am.”
2025 © 2025 kmCarter (Krista M. Carter) all rights reserved. Properly-attributed quotes of less than 200 words (print, digital, etc.) may be used for criticism, reporting, or sharing to social media. Click Here for media, publication, or collaboration inquiries.
I was sucked in right from the start. I love the little tidbits like Chucks and Animaniacs. I'm confused but totally understand at the same time. Well done, ma'am. Well done.