Assassination

Mimi woke up with a crick in her neck. Why was her bed damp and hard and cold? Why was she aching all over? Her fingers were sticky as she rubbed her eyes open. Her hands were covered in red, as were her arms. Her ribs radiated sharp pain when she tried to move. A few feet from her, another body was lying on the floor, unmoving, battered, in a puddle of blood. OMG, what is going on? Mimi wanted to throw up, to scream. She passed out again.

* * *

A pulse of current seared Mimi's brain. A memory came into focus, then faded: She was driving to a motel in the middle of the night. Another burst of energy to her brain, another memory: a fire extinguisher being swung at her head. Then that image was gone too.

"Good, you're finally awake." The voice came from a man in a lab coat. He was aiming something that looked like an oversized supermarket barcode scanner at her head. "Hold still." He pulled the trigger. Mimi convulsed once, she felt the electricity through her brain, and suddenly she was Agent Mimi again.

She recognized the operating room, in the secret underground medical center. She noticed that she was strapped down to an operating table. The man in the lab coat was the Director of Neural Reprogramming: "You woke up as a civilian while you were on your mission. Now we have to get inside your head and tidy things up."

Mimi tried to inventory her injuries while the doctor worked. "Someone tipped Nikolas off. He was waiting for me when I got to his motel room."

The doctor nodded. "We're looking into that. But need to send you home for now. You're going to remember that you spent all weekend grading papers. And your scratches and bruises -- hmm ... those are going to come from your run-in with some comically misarranged furniture."

* * *

(Earlier that day) André hated desk duty. If Mimi had been a TA for an explosives class, or class on biological weapons, or even a foreign language class, they could have found plenty of agents to grade her papers for her. But André was their only available agent on the East Coast with an MBA, and Mimi needed to remember that she spent all weekend grading ...

A Scene of No Consequence

3:59:58 AM ... 3:59:59 ... 4:00:00 ... Mimi bolted upright in her bed. Her room felt a quarter of a degree too warm -- someone else was in here. She reflexively reached for her weapon under her pillow ... until she remembered that she had a guest staying over.

Agent Mimi listened in the dark. Amy was breathing slowly, asleep. Mimi wondered if she could check in without waking her friend. Mimi tiptoed across the room.

Unfortunately, Amy chose that exact moment to turn over, rousing slightly. "What are you doing, Mimi?" she mumbled half awake.

"I'm uh ... I just wanted to get some water. See?" Mimi unscrewed the bottle of water. Glug glug glug glug glug ... glug glug glug. "Go back to sleep."

My Inability to Write

5AM...9AM...Noon...5PM...9PM...Midnight...David IIV carefully lowered his middle finger and soldered the remaining resistor into place precisely and perfectly, finally finishing his wazzastic superschrumer, which was death to all pollen creating objects. A tendril of smoke rose from the finger as his metallic eyes blinked and rattled in satisfaction. David IIV was supremely happy for a Grade AVA robot. He clunked his hand on the lever and his circuits immediately went into overdrive. Outside of his metal grate, he saw trees folding into themselves and flowers growing back into the ground. David IIV ran through the wall in his panic to stop the chaos that he had unleashed.

Suddenly, a siren was nearly on top of him and lasers flooded the area. A loudspeaker announced, "David IIV. You are wanted for the destruction of plant life. Turn yourself off immediately." David IIV froze in mid-clunk and took a nanosecond to ponder his 12,347 possible options, of which 10,346 led to the same scenario with a 5% margin of error, 364 of which were plain awful, and the rest were somewhat in between. Something amazing happened just then. Instead of taking the rational option to turn himself off, David IIV shivered and teleported himself into the middle of a garbage heap on a large and gaseous purple planet.

See, I can write about you instead

4:02:09AM ... 4:02:10 ... 4:02:11 ... 4:02:12 ... Mimi bolted upright in her bed, instantly awake. Her Training had been thorough -- she could keep time without a watch, and will herself to wake up whenever she needed to. Mimi tilted her head toward the far wall -- before she became an Agent, she would've had trouble making out the clock there, but now, she did not even need to use her eyes: the distinctive pitch of the ticking told her where the hands were, told her that her own circadian clock was two minutes slow this morning. Time to get to work. Her fingers found the latch to the false bottom of her dresser. She pulled out the laptop and transmitter, and began reporting in.

By day, Mimi was a student at a university in Philadelphia. Student-Mimi needed an alarm clock to wake up, couldn't see without glasses, and had no idea what Agent-Mimi did at night. Student-Mimi occasionally mused that it might be cool to be a secret agent, but sighed that she probably wasn't cut out for it. Except for a subconscious aversion to ever looking in the bottom drawer of her dresser, student-Mimi was perfectly normal.

Agent-Mimi put her gear back into its hiding place and crawled back into her bed. Tonight, she wouldn't need to change out of her pajamas, to trudge outside. She instantly fell back to sleep.

...

Outside her building, a man in a dark coat packed something back into his bag, weaved through the shadows to his van, and drove off.