Agent Orange - Inconsequential

Episode 9 - D'OCD

FROM THE JOURNALS OF AGENT ORANGE:

Although among all the departments under the DOAD (Department of All Data) there is not actually a DOCD (Department of Obsessive Compulsive Disorders) I believe there should be. Everyone needs a hobby after all. Some people “are” their profession. Others have a job. Either way, barring those who struggle just to survive, most people have a hobby or at least a subject of interest that they are obsessively, compulsively involved with. Some people love sports whether it’s beetle fighting, javelin catching, or even extreme ironing. Others love roller coasters or cemeteries or donut shops and wish to ride or visit as many as possible before they die. Some collect things, like bottle caps, skulls, Pez dispensers or used panties, they must have them all.

What it comes down to is this: Everyone likes to be an expert about something. Some people like to be unique so they try to make that “something”, something not a lot of other people are experts about. Me, I’d like to be an expert about everything but I’m not sure that’s something you can be an expert about.

CHAPTER 8

Orange spent the next day walking around the city, observing. The department didn’t keep him on a strict schedule but he was expected to move about collecting data for eight hours a day. Not a bad gig all-in-all, though he did have to wear a suit at all times. Early March wasn’t a problem but it got to be a bit much in the summer months.

The idea was that information was happening everywhere and much of it was going unrecorded. Crimes were being committed unnoticed, acts of heroism and great generosity were being isolated to those involved, society was changing, at a micro level, and the government needed to know how and why.

Shawn Cartwright and his coworkers in the DELVE used computers and the internet to find and evaluate information that had at one point been collected and added to “the network”. Agent Orange and his DORK team used their senses to find and evaluate information and then enter it into “the network”. It might sound like the DELVE couldn’t exist without the DORK, but since the DELVE used the internet, their knowledge base was constantly being updated by citizens outside of any department.

The hope was that the seemingly random information added by the DORK would help show patterns that wouldn’t be available without those DORK entries. Of course people like Shawn Cartwright thought that the information was useless. Maybe he was right.

The highlights of the day had included a man in a wheelchair with no legs below the knees assisting an elderly woman after a car accident; two lovers on a bench simultaneously confessing to cheating on each other; a teen-aged boy stealing a bike and then 100 yards down the street stopping to give a homeless man some change and a hug. There was also the man that walked around each tree he encountered exactly three times while repeating, “I am the sun, I am the moon, I am the universe.” But Orange had encountered him before so that was old news.

He arrived home, took off his shoes, set his backpack and gun on the end table and went directly into the bathroom. Washing up, he was relieved to see that he was still himself, at least on the outside. He ran a hand through his orange mop-top, checked for wrinkles around his eyes, as well as any sign of alien parasitic infestation in his irises. Teeth white and shiny – check. Five, or actually, a quick glance at his watch, six o’clock shadow, standard length – check. What’s this? A single eyebrow hair protruded out of the bushy mass atop his left eye. It was twice as long as the others. A mutant? He smoothed it down and it made sense. He had a scar in his eyebrow, left by a single, well-aimed 20-sided die. Where the scar was, no hair would grow. His body appeared to be attempting to cover up the blemish by growing longer hairs that would settle over the empty space. His eyebrows tended to draw attention away from the Lovecraftian length of his countenance, so he was glad that they were self-adjusting. Other than assuring he was a dashing secret agent, this fix would help keep sweat, rain, blood and any other substance that might find itself dripping down his forehead, out of his eyes.

He stepped out into the main room of his apartment. There was some wrong, something out of place. The room was a virtual labyrinth of books and bookshelves. Every flat surface held a Jenga-like leaning tower of books. It was the sort of ordered chaos that Orange thrived on. Some might say that the structure of this room mapped, at least philosophically, the structure of his brain.

There was a blank space on his bedside table. That was okay. It’s where his lamp went when he wasn't carrying it. Something was not where it was supposed to be but he wasn’t sure what it was. He took his lamp out of his backpack and placed it on the table. He plugged it in and turned it on.

The lamp was a relic of his childhood. Of course since then it had been upgraded to include some of the most modern technology available but the link to his youth was what made it special to him. His parents had bought the lamp for him at his request, so that he could read in bed at night. Even as a youth he had brought the lamp to sleepovers or any outing that might include him lying in the dark awake.

When the DORK took children into their care they insisted that each child bring one object that held special value to them. The theory was that the presence of this item would link them to their past and ground them in their identity. It was rumored that previous members of the DORK had sometimes “roamed too far” and lost themselves. It was a, slightly frightening, reminder that DORK members were “special” and specifically chosen for this “specialness”.

The result was that Orange was forced to carry around a table lamp wherever he went. As a child it was odd but excusable. As an adult, it tended to make people scared of him, so he mostly kept it in his backpack. It could have been worse. There were rumors of agents carrying around child-sized stuffed unicorns, Furbys and even Easy Bake ovens.

With the lamp in place, the room was complete and that made it easier to determine what was not right. Orange stood in the center of the room and turned, slowly taking in a scene he had become intimately familiar with over the years. He walked around the room letting his fingers touch the books. They were all encyclopedias.

Collecting encyclopedias was Orange’s hobby. It did overlap with his job but Orange didn’t collected encyclopedias for the information that was in them, he collected them for the information that wasn’t. Events like World War II, the invention of the printing press and the American Revolution had been documented many times over. Orange wasn’t interested in them, that was knowledge he already had and knowledge that was available to anyone else at the click of a button. Everyone knew what Jack the Ripper was about, very few knew the details surrounding the Servant Girl Annihilator. Everyone knows that the Hindenburg crashed and burned but most don’t know the USS-Akron blew up four years earlier killing twice as many people.

Orange studied the holes in history. He was an archivist of the inconsequential, or at least of what society had deemed inconsequential. The process with which the people of the world categorized the importance of events and their history-worthiness fascinated him. By collecting information on all these forgotten events Orange hoped to find a pattern that would be useful. He hoped that use would make the world a better place.

As he approached the set of three windows that were his only view onto the outside world, something nagged at the edge of his mind. On top of a dark cherry wood bookcase, next to the windows, there should have been three books. Orange could only see two.

He moved some books off a chair and dragged it beside the bookcase. Looking down upon the shelf he could see that the third book had perhaps slid down to lay flat upon the top of the shelf. This was perfectly reasonable considering the way the building vibrated when large trucks traversed the street outside. He calmed but then noticed that the dust the entire length of the case had been recently disturbed as if someone had reached up searching for something hidden there.

Someone had been in his apartment. They had been looking for something, and after a quick search of his bedroom Orange ascertained they hadn’t taken anything. He was sure it had happened today, he would have noticed the book yesterday.

It appeared that he had either been asking too many questions or perhaps that the woman in the wheelchair didn’t have a problem with steps.