Zero Comments, Zero Traction

The brightness on the laptop was turned all the way up, screw the adaptive-brightness suggestion, it was way to dim. If Mitchell could see the shadow he cast on the wall behind him as he hunched over his computer, he would have said it looked as if a hunchback was manning the counter at Helscion Motel.

The air conditioning unit in the tiny excuse for a office/lobby was down. It'd been down the entire time that Mitchell had been there. He was somewhat used to the humid climate that he worked and lived in but he never thought that he'd ever be totally acclimated. When you get out of a cold shower and within seconds you can't tell the difference between the wetness from the shower and the sweat that immediately begins pouring out of you, you know deep down that you're just not meant for the heat. His skin was nicer than ever though, he'd give the humidity that at least.

Relative to his first few months working the roadside motel, the last few weeks had been positively action packed. The usual types were constants. The tired and frustrated roadtripping dad with his just as tired and even more frustrated wife. Straggling behind or running in front were kids that bounced off the walls running on energy afforded only to small children and the Sun. Another oft seen variety of customer was the red bull addled adults who had just earned the label adult, off to college or on the way home, maybe driving a few states over to see a friend, a love.

After that sort you've got the darker side of the roadside folks. Meth heads, heroin addicts, and transients who had panhandled, procured or pawned enough stolen goods to afford a room. The sex workers also provided a steady flow of income for the Helscion. Usually renting a room and setting up clients online, booking the room and a stream of clients for an entire day.

"It doesn't bother most of them one bit. John's exiting and entering all day, one right after the other." Mitchell shared with anyone who dared ask about how the prostitutes kept the clients from running into one another. "Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. In. Out. In. Out." He would say, his head moving back and forth with each word as if watching a closely contested tennis match.

"They never seem to make eye contact with each other." He was always sure to add with a fake look of confusion.

Those were the usual suspects. What they'd been seeing the last few weeks was what he'd taken this job to see. Odd out of place types, dressed like they were going to or coming from a different world. He and Rosa observed and logged their movements, protocol said that direct contact with them as an agent was to be made in only dire and extreme situations. So dire and extreme that it should never happen. The possibility of actual interaction with their observation subjects scared and excited him.

They all came from one place and it was a hundred or so miles to the south. It was one of the half dozen patches in the United States that belonged to a relatively unknown and spectacularly autonomous group known to the layman as 'The Culture'.

They didn't just own the land, they had been granted sovereignty by FDR just before World War II. Six random seeming parcels of land scattered all across the great and powerful U S of A and nobody knew exactly how that had happened or what went on inside of them.

There were a lot of rumors and guess work about how that had come about. The official line from the White House was that the details of the contract were lost in a warehouse fire, a line that not even that most easy going conspiracy minded person could take seriously. Whatever the initial deal and whatever had happened with the documentation of it, the United States government consistently stated that it would stand by the deal President Roosevelt had struck with Rodrik Wharl and the other founding members of what the government had officially named 'The Culture.' Why they settled on that name nobody knew.

What was going on inside of the tiny nation was almost as much a mystery as how they got their land or even their name. They were extremely wealthy and had revenue streams of an immense variety. There was a whole population of people around the world that dug into them, trying to untangle that rats nest of shell companies, investments and information. The government acquiesced to whatever suggestion that was put forth by The Culture and they steadfastly refused to place any regulations on them. The ground below them couldn't be touched, no mines within one hundred miles and no business of any kind within fifty. The air space above them was restricted air space, no traffic at all extending out to the thermosphere. On the other side of that equation they had a fleet of private aircraft! Despite the danger that a private country with it's own aircraft might present to the American people, the DOD only comment on the rare occasions that it was brought up was, "They are a trusted ally, no further comment."

People had tried spying with drones but they were, without fail, brought down every time. Whatever security they had it was impossibly perfect. Over the years a lot of people had supposedly flown over in their private aircraft, some had never come out the other side and the ones that had reported catastrophic electrical failures, coasting from one side of the boarder to the other, unable to do anything but look out the windows and try to glide to safety. If anyone had ever tried to parachute in, they had not come out to report their success, or failure. Any Information about those six bits of land existed in obscurity unknown to even the most backwoods not-acknowledged-by-NATO country in the entire world.

Mainstream interest in the communities had waxed and waned over the years, articles here and there, a few TV pieces about it. Despite living in the Information Age when something like, 'The Culture' should have dozens of feature length documentaries about it, the press and people by and large seemed not to care. Conspiracy theorist put this on the press being in the pocket of the Wharl family. Well, some of them did. Others thought that The Culture was an invasion of aliens that used mass mind control. Some believed that they were government black sites where enemies of the state and aliens, the E.T. type, were being held. There were entire message boards, a bevy of Facebook pages and a now defunct podcast exploring the possibility that The Culture was made up of magical beings from a parallel reality and how they were stranded here, with aliens. Can't leave out the religious crazies, they imagined everything you'd imagine an insane religious person could ever imagine.

As far as he knew, most of that was way off. Mitchell knew they weren't government black sites. He worked for the government, on the down low, probably. The government would not monitor or investigate The Culture with anything above board, that's why the work fell to people like him. Not officially affiliated with Uncle Sam but he got his paychecks and orders from a pretty government like organization. Whatever they did was more than likely done with the tacit acknowledgement of some arm of the government, plausible deniability and all that.

Mitchell had been big into coverups and conspiracies in high school, devouring everything he could watch or read regarding them. He had gone to college to become a journalist, intent on being the one to expose big government secrets. After getting his degree, he learned quickly that it wasn't for him.

He worked for a small local news station and while nobody was out to get him, his attempts to expose the wrongdoings of the State and secrets of 'The Culture' were met mostly with eyerolls and complaints by corporate questioning his research and fact-finding thoroughness. He was afforded less and less time to broadcast his exposé pieces until he was finally relegated to the 6 am half hour Saturday morning "newscast" that was really just a condensed version of Friday nights evening broadcast. When he had decided to he'd had enough, he hijacked the 6 am broadcast and ran a 22 minute mini-documentary that he had put together about 'The Culture'. He locked the control room door and worked some keyboard magic to prevent anyone from trying to stop his story, but it wasn't needed. Nobody noticed. The next day at work, it was as if nothing had happened at all. He posted his documentary on youtube, reddit and anything else he could think of and nobody cared. Nothing more than a few likes, zero comments, zero traction. He knew that the editing could have been a bit better but people were not interested in what he had to say and it crushed him. He stopped showing up to work. They did not call.

He wanted to feel like he was on a path to something greater so he joined the Air Force. His career in the Air Force lasted three weeks, he broke his back in Basic and was medically discharged. He fell into a spiral of self-pity and spent months in his sisters basement, day and night he traversed the world wide web, collecting information and working to reveal hidden truths. He thought of himself as a truth teller. He believed that he was changing the world, until one evening he spent four hours chatting with a BAGba113rsix9. During their conversation, said mr.BAGba113rsix9 convinced Mitchell that the world was probably flat. His lifelong obsession with everything conspiracy found him at rock bottom and he finally had to admit to himself that he had a problem.

Physical and mental therapy helped him back onto his feet and membership to an MMA gym gave him a purpose for a time. He began taking night courses in law and working at the gym during the day, cleaning at first but eventually assisting in what training he could. After a year he switched to philosophy classes and the semester after that he changed his focus to secondary education. He was aimless and he was worried about how old he was getting , late 20s. He had no wife, no kids, a sister that was sick of him and no ambition that he could hone-in on. He needed consistency and he decided once again that maybe a government job could provide that. He could no longer join the military because of his back so he explored other avenues.

Blowing money on even more college courses that he didn't feel like he would use had to stop and he needed a steady job. Within days of searching he got a gig working security at a federal building, no exactly a government job but a contractor for the government was close enough for the time being.

Shortly after he began work, the government decided the building didn't need quite so much security and he was out of a job. Fortunately his boss on the job was able to find him other security work, just not with the government. He joined a private security firm and worked what jobs they had for him. On a good assignment, he worked backstage security for Metallica, on a bad assignment he followed around someone with an outsized sense of self-importance. He didn't half-ass his assignments, even the ones that ended up being more babysitting than security. He pushed himself to be disciplined, anything could happen at any time so he wanted to be ready.

He began putting in applications with the shady government agencies he once railed against. He garnered interest from all of them, none of the interviews went much better than his second interview with the CIA. After his meeting with the CIA, Mitchell felt like he was a shoe-in but they never called back. A few months later while working on a security detail for a "celebrity" that definitely did not need a security detail, he received a call.

"Hey there. This is Chuck Heton. I got a job for you."