By Joel Williams

Dan’s otherwise quiet, joyless office cubicle was set up on the Eighth Floor of DEA HQ. If you poked your head up from your work and looked around you wouldn’t be able to see anything other than more cubicles. But if you stood up and walked west, took two lefts and a right you could look down to South Fern Street and out for a view of the Potomac.

A mid-ranked agent working on the Eighth was walking past that same view the day the UFO sailed in and hovered to a stop on Pennsylvania Avenue. (For most people, the ‘U’ was stuck to the acronym. During the debates over whether the landing had been supported and arranged by big tech - often with the aliens present - a lot of air time was given to whether these flying objects should now be reclassified to start with an ‘I’.)

Old habits die in excruciating pain, disbelieving of reality. Bureaucracies die just as hard, just as slow, but are endlessly drawn back to something resembling life. Half-dead and hungry for brains, they surround us in swarms, pressing in and pushing reality’s pall away from the eyes and minds of those who would work within the real.

This was a fundamental teaching of the Town: bureaucratic institutions suck everything that is vital and authentic in humanity to leave it cold and dry, shivering under a cloak of cognitive dissonance and obscurantist jargon.

But tell that to the people who built and kept these institutions running. Tell it to the DEA. Tell it that it had lost the war it started.

Nearly 40 states have legalized and decriminalized almost all the known psychoactive substances. Michigan sold meth at dispensaries, but Detroit still had an office on Howard Street. Connecticut was cutting coke inside its universities’ most expensive pharmaceutical labs, but Rocky Hill still staffed its brown-brick building. Psilocybin, LSD, MDMA had made it out of the psychologists’ clinics and into the storefronts of well-vetted retail physicians in San Diego and Superior, Spokane and Savannah. In DC, the weed fumes that hit you when you stepped out of Dulles and Reagan National would grant even seasoned smokers a decent contact high. But Bob and Dan were still paid to sit in their cubicles and find ways of prosecuting laws old and new.

Individuals caught with quantities that were considered beyond recreational. Dispensaries that hadn’t paid their licenses. The easy targets were still people in poor neighborhoods, but the most prestigious busts came from lifting the lid on areas of the country that the DEA guessed had entire political systems built around the ideas that came about only through the use of psychoactive substances.

Dan had been to the Town, it was true. But that was as much as he knew: that at some point he had been inside. He knew the how, the why and the whens on either side of his entrance and exit, but  couldn’t say anything about what had happened, what he had learnt or done inside.

There was a gap in his memory that had been wiped expertly clean when the Town found out he was DEA and so nothing about the few days he spent inside could be accessed.

His body knew though. Lacking few interospective skills outside of hunger and pain — he barely knew where his thoughts came from — he had only had an idea that the heavy heartbeats and the tension he held in his legs and chest were related to the time he spent in the Town. A DEA psychologist had told him that his body had kept score but he had trouble believing it. He couldn’t say what it was — despite being told repeatedly — but bad feelings came up and hung around whenever Bob brought to him even the littlest clue.

The black block was not an innovation, but rather the adoption of one that was taken on as an idea to help the Town. In 2025 it was organized by a high-school kid who helped run one of the portals. He was in his geography class, bored, zooming in and out of Landsat images. Off of Vietnam in the South China Sea he noticed some tiny black patches. He zoomed in. Big black blocks that would have to be squared at tens of miles. Military islands. China didn’t need the world to see what they might be building. Neither did the Town need the world to know what it was piecing together.

The kid got it: Omerta means silence means honor. Important secrets are even more important to keep secret. Keep the world’s eyes out of your business and you can conduct your business within a strict code.

The town founders knew they were making important psychopolitcal progress through the discoveries in their grand experiment. The founders didn’t keep their ideas entirely from the population, they let the Town know what they felt was right for them to know. But they made it clear that the world outside wasn’t ready yet. And that the world outside should be kept from finding out anything about what was going on inside. So the kid came up with an idea that would strengthen the town’s secret.

The portals opened to allow citizens access to certain information flows, but only through a series of encryptions that sent search requests to trusted, private networks. Citizens could look out through search engines but they could not build a workable history that anyone outside could reliably access. The Town could look out, but no one could look in. Least of all the satellites run through collusion between private and government bureaucracies that had nothing to do with what the Town was created.