Rebranding

[WP] You work for a secret agency that deals with the supernatural and you just shared a dumb idea with your boss, as a joke: "Instead of keeping everything under wraps, why don't we just release all info to the public, but pretend it's a work of fiction?" You got promoted on the spot.

*****

It was supposed to be a joke.

I thought my boss read Tom Clancy. After all, he wrote fiction that ended up being surprisingly close to reality. He was supposed to see the obvious pitfalls of my idea, and how quickly it could turn into “Haha just kidding… unless?”

Instead, I was pulled from my old department, and was given an empty suite in the office building, and provided a small staff. “To carry out disinformation in the guise of fiction.” Which when taken at face value is utterly laughable, but that was our mission. To take state secrets at risk of exposure and fictionalize them in order to discredit those who have legitimate suspicions of it occurring in real life. My first supervisory position, and I have to literally invent reasons to why we exist. Between my employees being leftovers from departments who don’t want them, the constant stress of ensuring we don’t make the news with a national security leak, and the fact I’ve never lead a department before, I feel like I’m in over my head. Let me tell you about my employees:

Melinda was an English major and was supposed to be a translator for an endangered language, but overseas human rights violations meant her services were no longer required. They sent her here as a consolation offer, and currently works as a novelist under my supervision. She’s got a few novels in production at the moment, and part of my job as supervisor is to help handle her numerous pen names and relationships with book producers, who aren’t told these books are state-sponsored, which makes it extremely rough when going head to head with them to convince them to print.

Anton was originally a programmer who worked in a site that may or may not exist. I officially can’t account for the last 8 months of his employment, but an off-record memo indicated he spent too much time fabricating stories on fringe message boards, and that he was lucky he could transfer to my department when his previous post wanted him fired. Now he gets paid to bullshit the same stories that he did for fun previously. I’m skeptical of his diction sometimes, but he does have a flair for the dramatic and comedic. I’ve gotten several redirects from federal law enforcement agencies to my desk, however, because each time he manages to craft a hit piece of fiction, I have to convince those agencies that no, he’s not a threat to national security, and that he gets paid by the government to do this.

“Shingles” was an army sergeant that got discharged after 2 combat tours. I asked once why he left, and he never answered. What I do know, however, is that he’s our consultant that the government points movie and video game producers to when they want to probe for obscured information to implement in their next story. He’s supposed to only use the approved materials given to us by the various branches and spin it in a way that points this at other entities, but lately I’ve had to restrain him from meetings discussing war. I don’t know what exactly went down during his time fighting, but the last couple pieces of media he’s consulted for has given some rather chilling ideas. I have to remind him to stick with what we’re allowed to release, things in danger of being discovered. The only way the world would know what happened over there would be because of him.

Gale is my other novelist, who probably has the best qualifications of the team. Dude was originally an counterintelligence agent, who almost got burned after the wrong materials got disseminated. The only reason he wasn’t fired was because he managed to clean up his mess, and he got transferred over here where his dissemination skills could come into play, and to help train the others on making sure it our stories weren’t taken at face value. He’s my second in command, and also my most problematic team member, and we’d often argue behind closed doors on how appropriate and effective our materials would be, and the risk they’d each and all take.

As for me, everything they write, talk about, and post, goes through me. I have to make sure it doesn’t come off as actually true, and whether that means making them sound more insane, changing some details, or simply improving the stories altogether, I make sure its proper disinformation. I make sure my people don’t go overboard, I have to deal with their issues with the media, I have to deflect their issues with the law on me. I’ve gotten desensitized to all the threats made to my department by the very entities giving us this information to release.

I’ve seen things you have probably already read about and wrote it off as fake or a compelling ‘what if’ scenario. I’ve approved things that would otherwise be in a news article, or on camera. I’ve released things that would normally throw me in jail. If I wasn’t doing this with a government paycheck, odds are I would be jailed or worse. The fact that this joke of a department is actually doing all this is… probably something I’d write about and release as a work of fiction.

*****

THE END

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