Subsection: Ontological Hygiene
1. THE MANDATE
It wasn’t the CIA. It wasn’t the NSA. It was the Kant-Reeves Protocol, buried so deep in the federal budget that it appeared as a line-item for “Agricultural Subsidies (Soy, Existential).” Their headquarters occupied the negative space between the fifth and sixth floors of a parking garage in Arlington, where the elevator buttons went from 4 directly to 6, and if you pressed the wall where 5 should be, your finger would sink in up to the knuckle and come back wet with possibility.
Special Agent Delia Cruz lit her cigarette—the only thing keeping her anchored in this timeline—and stared at the whiteboard.
The equation wouldn’t resolve.
Subject T + Location I = ERROR
Not a moral error. Not a legal error. A mathematical error. Like trying to calculate the square root of a scream.
“We’re not in the cover-up business,” said Director Hume, who technically didn’t exist in any government database but somehow collected a pension. “We’re in the conservation of reality business. If the populace downloads this information—if they grok the juxtaposition—the discharge will collapse the wavefunction.”
Cruz exhaled smoke that turned into tiny moths, then memories, then nothing. “You’re saying he was there.”
“I’m saying if he was there, and if they knew he was there, the cognitive dissonance would hit critical mass. You can’t have the designated Christ-figure dipping his toes in the Lake of Fire. The archetypes get jealous. They start throwing punches in the collective unconscious.”
“So we what? Delete the files?”
Hume laughed, and his laugh sounded like a filing cabinet falling down stairs. “You can’t delete a category error. You can only distract it. You think the moon landing was faked? No. We just needed something ridiculous enough to keep the math from balancing. Area 51? Same deal. The truth isn’t hidden—it’s unthinkable. The universe itself won’t allow the thought to complete.”
2. FIELD OPERATIONS: THE ABSURDITY WEAPON
Agent Park had been deployed to Marcus’s apartment building three hours ago. Not to kill him—killing was easy. Killing was rational. Park was there to introduce glitches.
He sat on the fire escape, smoking a cigarette that burned backwards (ash to tip), and watched Marcus try to open the PDF for the fourteenth time. Park adjusted the Paradox Dampener on his wrist—a device that looked like a Casio calculator duct-taped to a geiger counter—and pressed the button marked [SURREALISM/MAX].
Inside the apartment, Marcus’s refrigerator began singing opera.
Not metaphorically. A full-throated Puccini aria in high C, the freezer compartment vibrating with the tragedy of La Bohème. This was Phase 1: Ludicrous Interference. If Marcus tried to focus on the screen, the wallpaper would start arguing with him about Hegel. If he reached for his phone, it would turn into a lobster. If he tried to write notes, his pen would only produce the word “WHoa” in increasingly desperate fonts.
Park checked his watch. The Ontological Buffer was holding at 73%. Good. As long as the absurdity quotient stayed above the comprehension threshold, the information would remain in a state of quantum superposition—simultaneously true and false, real and myth, until observed by a mind strong enough to survive the observation.
Which, statistically, was no mind at all.
3. THE MATHEMATICS OF WHOLENESS
Cruz descended to Sublevel Δ, where they kept the Theorem. It wasn’t written on paper—paper would combust. It was inscribed in the air itself, held in place by magnetic fields and bad intentions, glowing with the pale blue light of broken logic.
She read it again, though reading it made her teeth hurt:
Let W = Wholesome Vector (Kindness, Motorcycle Donations, Sad Eyes)Let M = Monstrous Vector (Trafficking, Islands, Opportunistic Evil)
Theorem: If W ∩ M ≠ ∅, then Reality ⊭ Reality
Corollary: The human psyche functions as a resonant cavity. Introducing a standing wave of magnitude (W × M) will shatter the cavity, causing mass psychogenic illness, spontaneous localized gravity failures, and the immediate cessation of all narratives involving “good guys.”
Translation: If the world found out that Thomas—that specific vector of pure, unironic human decency—had been tangled up in the Island, the story would break. Not the story of Thomas. The Story. The entire script of civilization, the narrative that says “deep down, people are basically good” or “at least we have each other” or “look, he’s reading a book on the subway, how charming.”
The cognitive dissonance wouldn’t just cause riots. It would cause physics to renegotiate its terms. If the One Good Man was just another customer at the Abattoir, then the light-speed limit becomes a suggestion. Entropy runs backwards. Cats pet humans. The strong nuclear force gets depressed and stops holding atoms together.
The universe, in its infinite mercy, was protecting itself from being understood.
4. THE INTERROGATION OF REALITY
Marcus wasn’t giving up. He had poured whiskey on his keyboard to “cleanse” it, wrapped his head in tinfoil to “block the interference,” and was now attempting to read the PDF by staring at it through a kaleidoscope made of broken mirror and tears.
He got three sentences in before his apartment became too Euclidean.
The angles of the room sharpened to 90.00001 degrees. The pain was unbearable—not physical, but existential. The corner of his coffee table achieved such perfect perpendicularity that it cut a hole in spacetime. A bird flew through the window, landed on his shoulder, and whispered: “The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but don’t think about why you know that.”
Then the bird exploded into vouchers for free McDonald’s coffee.
Agent Park checked his dampener. Buffer at 51%. Shit. The subject was persistent. Some humans had a tolerance for paradox—they were the ones who read Kafka for fun, who enjoyed Schrödinger’s cat memes, who could hold two contradictory ideas without their noses bleeding. Marcus was one of them. He was adapting.
Park called it in. “Requesting authorization for Phase 2: The Cosmic Banana Peel.”
Cruz’s voice crackled through the receiver, distorted by the weight of what she knew. “Authorized. But Park—if he gets to page three, we have to go to Phase Omega.”
“Christ,” Park whispered.
“No,” Cruz said. “That’s the problem. If we hit Phase Omega, there is no Christ. There never was. There’s only the Island, and the smoke, and the long drag of entropy.”
5. THE COLLAPSE
Marcus got to page three.
It happened because he stopped trying to read and started trying to feel. He let his eyes blur. He stopped looking for information and started accepting the vibe of the document. And in that fuzzy, pre-linguistic space, the truth slipped through.
Thomas. On the jet. On the island. Not participating—not that—but present. Smiling that smile. Existing in the same frame as the horror.
The photograph (if it was a photograph; if photographs can be made of guilt and light) showed him holding a water bottle. Just a water bottle. But his eyes. His eyes knew. They knew about the cameras. They knew about the math. They knew that some day, someone would see this, and the seeing would break them.
Marcus saw.
And the world slipped.
6. PHASE OMEGA: THE RETCON
Agent Park didn’t use the dampener. He used the Backup.
It was a small device, chrome and humming, that contained the total accumulated absurdity of human history—the library of Alexandria burning as a sitcom laugh track, the dinosaurs going extinct to a rimshot, every Holocaust museum simultaneously turning into a McDonald’s PlayPlace for 0.04 seconds.
He pressed the button.
The universe hiccuped.
Time rewound, but not cleanly. Marcus found himself standing in his kitchen, holding a banana (which he did not own), wearing a hat (which he had never bought), with no memory of the PDF, the apartment, or the last three days. The files on his computer had been replaced with a 47-hour loop of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, except Ross was painting pictures of Marcus’s childhood home, and crying.
The K.R. Protocol didn’t delete the files. They couldn’t. The files were true, and truth has inertia. Instead, they made the truth unstable. They salted the information with paradox. Now, if Marcus tried to remember what he’d seen, he’d remember a dream about talking dogs. If he tried to tell someone, his tongue would turn to cinnamon. If he tried to write it down, he’d only produce recipes for banana bread.
The world was safe. The equation remained unbalanced. Thomas remained Thomas—an undecidable proposition, a Schrödinger’s saint, neither guilty nor innocent because observation itself was forbidden.
7. THE CIGARETTE AT THE END OF TIME
Cruz met Park on the roof. They smoked. The cigarettes tasted like static and forgiveness.
“How many times,” Park asked, “have we done this?”
Cruz counted the stars that weren’t there. “Seven thousand, four hundred, and twelve. This week.”
“And the Buffer?”
“Holding. But barely.” She flicked ash into the void. “You know the worst part? He’s not even the only one. There’s a whole category of them. The Untouchables. The ones who have to stay clean because if they get dirty, we all drown in the bathwater. The universe has a vested interest in their innocence. So it cheats. It changes the rules. It makes the evidence into jokes, into dreams, into birds that explode into coupons.”
Park watched a car drive by on the street below. It was moving backwards, uphill, driven by a skeleton wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Phase 2 was still echoing. “It’s not fair,” he said. “To them, or to us.”
Cruz laughed, and this time her laugh sounded like Marcus’s refrigerator. “Fairness is a luxury of stable physics. We’re just the immune system. We’re the white blood cells producing fever dreams to kill the infection of knowledge.”
She stubbed out her cigarette on the ledge, where it screamed briefly and turned into a wedding ring.
“Go home, Park. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ve got the Sinatra files. Apparently he was actually a very nice guy, but if anyone finds out, democracy collapses.”
“Whoa,” said Park.
“Yeah,” said Cruz. “Whoa.”
Gnosis Under Fire 