1
I’m Tess. But that’s not my real name. My real name is lost to personal history and I haven’t heard it in years. My job is to be a shadow. I hide in plain sight. I am your lunch lady. I am the woman who offered you the extra three-year service plan on your new shuttle. I was handing out free samples at the academy fair. I helped you find your lost dog. I sent you a fine for a library book you never checked out. I came for the holidays at your grandma’s house with your uncle, but I didn’t stay for dessert. You know me. But you also don’t know me. Not even a little.
I am good at my job. Some might say I’m the best. If there were someone better, you wouldn’t know who they were either. There could be dozens of us or none of us. The idea is we never know and nor do you.
“And that’s how I obtained intelligence that saved over a million human and Kitari lives,” I finish my little speech of half-truths and minor inaccuracies.
There’s a round of applause. I’m here recruiting for the Secret Service as part of my final tour. The secrecy around my identity has been removed and I am being hailed as the hero it is now convenient for me to be. At twenty-six, science tells me that my fertility will soon begin to decline. I have decided to take early retirement and pursue something more wholesome: family.
Half the students at the Authority Academy want to be Secret Service. We take maybe three applicants a year and most years all of them are rejected. It’s not for want of intelligence or work ethic, it’s because this job involves becoming disconnected from everyone and everything, and most psychologically healthy people cannot do that without going absolutely mad.
“Any questions?”
A virtual forest of hands shoots up around me. I nod in the direction of an eager young man who looks as though he stepped out of an Authority recruitment commercial. He’s a plant.
“What’s the best mission you ever did?”
Obviously, I can’t answer that question, but I have an answer prepared anyway. I tell them the time I infiltrated the planet of our greatest enemies, the Dinavri, while dressed as a post box. It’s not actually accurate to what happened, but it’s also not inaccurate. Humans are not tolerated on the Dinavri homeworld, and females are regarded as less than second class citizens. They are objects for use or display.
“So, I made myself an object and hid in plain view,” I say with a smile, pleased with my word play and the irony of the tale.
They laugh, amused that the Authority’s greatest enemies are stupid enough to fall for a person pretending to be an object.
I’m not personally convinced I ever deceived them. Perhaps I did, for a time, but in the end, I was caught and traded. What truly saved me was the fact that I had a disguise beneath my disguise. When the post box was removed, I appeared to be a human male, complete with beard, mustache, and prosthetics to bulk out my build. If they’d had any idea I was a woman… What would have happened to me would have been absolutely unspeakable.
That question is the first of many seemingly endless inquiries covering everything from how bad torture really is (quite bad) to what do you eat while on a mission (whatever you can.)