Like injecting yourself with cancer

Absolute crap. That was how he saw this business at the moment. He drummed his fingers on the table. For being an intelligence agency these people were pretty stupid. On the other hand they said that about him all the time. The truth is he was obstinate and they were looking to misdirect him or waste him time--just so long as they never actually paid him. And until they handed over a hunk of money he was not, under any circumstances, going to lift a finger to advance any of the projects they held dear. And until he advanced the projects they held dear, they were never going to let him do anything else.

Here is how Big Brother likes to operate. Imagine, if you will, The Hand of Horace Greeley falling heavily on your shoulder.

"Go West, Young Man."

"Bu..bu..but sir," you reply. "I'm doing just fine here in suburban Philadelphia. I have a future in the book manufacturing trade."

"It's manifest destiny," says Horace. "And besides, you'll find out tomorrow, when you trot off to your little job in publishing, that you've been fired. Your options have narrowed considerably." He leans closer. "I'm trying to help you out."

"But sir, I think there are like, people, living out there in the Western lands." You lean closer to him, until you two are almost kissin'. You whisper: "Indians. Or native Americas as they will undoubtedly like to call themselves sometime in the future."

"Fuck 'em," replies Horace. "Now get out there because all of the land west of the Mississippi will soon be yours for the taking."

You wipe Horace's spittle from your face. "You mean pillaging sir."

And so on. You ask for not unreasonable tools, like a budget, and what you are given is a vague opportunity to make money if a number of unlikely conditions are ever met. You are to toil, in a journey of discovery, to get the money to get to first base.

In short, it's no way to run a project of any kind, much less one in intelligence. You see, in intelligence, you can't talk to anybody and they can't talk to you. Imagine a bunch of middle aged gay boys sitting naked in a darkened sauna. Well adjusted gay men who have accepted their homosexuality don't need to sit in saunas to get lucky: they go to gay bars and receptions for the openings of design centers. No, these gay boys are of the Larry Craig stripe. They sit in the darkened sauna, tell themselves they are straight, and engage in acts that would suggest otherwise. But as long as no words are spoken between the other straight-men-on-holiday they can get each other off and then go watch the football together. In intelligence you are always saying one thing but doing another. The problem is both things usually get done badly.

That said, these parameters could be worked out if he had the money to do so. All Big Brother had to do was to invest a few million in Alfie's company, with the observation that, "Your idiotic plan to sell ice cubes to eskimos sounds like a winner to us. A wise investment in the future of global warming. Those Inuit are fat with blubber and once the temperature starts going up they'll be sweatin' like pigs and begging for them ice cubes!"

Or something.

But no. What Big Bruv likes to do is to send you some guy who probably is also feeling around in the dark, and who doesn't have any money, but who thinks that you're the connection sent by Control to fund his operation. You waste six months talking about nothing important and nothing ever gets done.

Alfie had approached this situation from a number of different positions. First, when they came to him for the very first time, he walked down the garden path and then when it became clear there was no money, he gave them the big finger. The next time, he felt guilty about having not having completed his first mission and so went the whole way down the garden path, and blew his entire family fortune. The big guy sent him another parade of partners, both worthy and criminal. None of them had money, and all of them had an obligation in their pockets. He either ignored them, or attempted to streamline the process of getting rid of them when it became clear that they were 3 dollar bills incarnated in human flesh.

Another reason he wouldn't jump was that during the nightmare, where he blew every last penny he had, he got gang-raped, informationally speaking, by a bunch of red necks. He became the target of another series of government agencies: DHS and of course these wankers from MI. Given that he couldn't talk,he had to take his beating. And these rednecks helpfully obliged. When they discovered that they had fucked over a very rare operative--rare for his stupidity, rather than any special ability--they decided to put the genie back in the bottle by stopping him from making money in any other way than what he had been doing before. Emails with job resumes were never delivered, or where altered with Man in the Middle Attacks to be injected with spam, so they could be safely forwarded to the spam folder. Calls to prospective employers or publsihers were rerouted through military servers in Ohio, where a young soldier would pick up and assure him that he had no chance of getting a job with them. Not to mention that 10 years of secret work meant he had no references and little to put on the resume anyway.

This whole experience left him embittered and depressed. While he didn't think all that much of the people who ruined his life they were, after all, rednecks, so what could you expect? The people he really blamed were from external organizations because they didn't give him the money, nor the tools, nor the training to do the job that had landed in his lap. Like Horace Greeley, they just looked imperiously off into the distance, when he would present them with some obvious problems and challenges. They they would go back to their beers or tea, only poking their heads in on his project to say "Is it done yet? Where is it?"

Everything being compartmentalized, new people had little idea of this history, the original perps had either moved on or been rotated. The new people couldn't figure out ust what Alfie's problem was, and why he couldn't show just a little faith and put his house against a huge mortgage and waste another six months of his time. These projects may be doomed to failure, but maybe it was just his bad attitude. He imagined slamming their G&Ts on the table and cursing him, prior to heading out for the night, courtesy of the taxpayer, or some other sucker like him.