Quoted By:
>Witness protection
When the Manager looks around in you, when the skua pecks about at you, they will discover a juicy payload: your heart, pink and exposed, wriggling like a little fish. Your hopes and your secrets will be there for the eating. Your dreams and your portents. Your case and your agent and the number on your file. You will be plumbed deeply, your guts scraped clean, and it is your wish that the Manager will be so busy with this they forget to check the basics. They will know who you are, but not what you do. Or what you plan to do with their place of work.
You are disemboweled on the rocks, but if you are not that, then you are lying among a great many color-coded folders. Something is with you, but you cannot see it, only the shadow it casts on the folders. Only the glint of the whites of its eyes. The Manager is not God, and you know it is not God, because it cannot disassemble you, and it cannot apprehend you. It can kick you over and spill you out and read the contents swiftly. But swiftly is not 'instant'. Swiftly is not 'now.'
Meaning: it is preoccupied. Meaning: you can roll over and slide two cold folders against your stomach, and it will not notice. Meaning: there is time for something else.
>[1] Slip away. Retreat. You are not meant to go toe-to-toe with these things, not as you are. Find a safe place inside yourself and try to gather the appropriate strength.
>[2] Your belly split? Your heart exposed? The red stuff murmurs. Listen. [-1 SV, two times]
>[3] The Manager the color of void is not of here. It lies empty inside. The contents are stored somewhere else. If you can find the connection between there and here— if you can snap it— will it go? [Roll.]
>[4] Write-in.
