Under Better Circumstances
001
Under better circumstances, Q’s life would have been easier. It would have been less build this, hack that, and more Earl Grey in the morning and late night, illegally downloaded movies.
As it stands, there’s nothing normal or better about his job, relationships, or life in general. The dying plants he’s not home enough to water are the closest ties he has to something average, something that’s acceptable to the people outside of secretly passed sticky notes and expensive fax machines that encrypt already coded messages.
In fact, he’s not even sure he remembers where home is anymore. The numbers 707 pass by his lips silently, but he’s too absorbed in his screens and buttons to really bother worrying about the address.
MI6, the glass walls, the bricked in gyms and shooting ranges; it’s all become a sort of prison in its own respect. He thinks he could slip out quietly, just not come in one day, and he makes plans to do just that as he drinks from a mug that isn’t his – he doesn’t know where his is and he’s about to start firing lower scientists until he does – and watches governments fall into panics under the soft pressure of his fingers on squared keys. They would miss him, but, really, what was there to the job but a single lettered title and an understanding of what plug goes where?
It’s a form of desertion, he decides after another pass of cooling tea. And MI6 could very well utilize the normal punishment for just a thing. Besides, he doesn’t really think these are bad circumstances. So he goes back to slipping into the CIA, because when he’s caught, M only ever gives him a stern look that says just stop getting caught. He’s nearly perfected the stealth of the thing.
Under better circumstances, he likes to think he would have a normal job in computers; a job that didn’t involve a pounding pulse and restless nights that overlapped into too-tired-to-speak mornings. There was always Google.
But keeping the country on her feet with a firewall wasn’t a job you left for smaller pay and a longer life.
He mused over the thought of those waver forms having small print that his eyesight couldn’t catch. Small captions about selling souls and debts of blood.
He supposed it was better than being a field agent.
The idea of something changing is one that pops up often and is, sometimes, on the rare holiday seasons, and the sunny Saturday mornings, achieved in the form of a breakfast five minutes longer and a new plant on the windowsill. He even got a cat once.
The flower died two days past Thanksgiving and he hasn’t been home enough to see if the cat has run away or left in a more unpleasant way.
He had never thought about changing the people in his life. Not seriously, anyway. There had been that time Amber or Analese or one of the A agents had given him coffee instead of tea late at night when Libya’s government was collapsing and his computer was running like dial-up, but that had passed with the rising sun and a new round of Q, we need a new gun.
He thought about it seriously only when the gallery bench depressed beneath his small weight and, for the first time, the bubbling sensation and downright giddiness of going from one John Doe to Q of Q branch was suddenly difficult to contain behind a smile that promised only professionalism.
He thought maybe he had been doing life wrong up until that point. Maybe he had been missing the key part of the puzzle that told him this was the wrong picture. Starting fresh sounded intensely exhausting for all of about two point five seconds until he realized that he could do it right this time. He could erase the messy handwriting and start the distribution of integers and imaginary numbers fresh.
Except for the missing eraser and the atrocious circumstance of it all.
As it stands, there’s nothing normal or better about his job, relationships, or life in general. The dying plants he’s not home enough to water are the closest ties he has to something average, something that’s acceptable to the people outside of secretly passed sticky notes and expensive fax machines that encrypt already coded messages.
In fact, he’s not even sure he remembers where home is anymore. The numbers 707 pass by his lips silently, but he’s too absorbed in his screens and buttons to really bother worrying about the address.
MI6, the glass walls, the bricked in gyms and shooting ranges; it’s all become a sort of prison in its own respect. He thinks he could slip out quietly, just not come in one day, and he makes plans to do just that as he drinks from a mug that isn’t his – he doesn’t know where his is and he’s about to start firing lower scientists until he does – and watches governments fall into panics under the soft pressure of his fingers on squared keys. They would miss him, but, really, what was there to the job but a single lettered title and an understanding of what plug goes where?
It’s a form of desertion, he decides after another pass of cooling tea. And MI6 could very well utilize the normal punishment for just a thing. Besides, he doesn’t really think these are bad circumstances. So he goes back to slipping into the CIA, because when he’s caught, M only ever gives him a stern look that says just stop getting caught. He’s nearly perfected the stealth of the thing.
Under better circumstances, he likes to think he would have a normal job in computers; a job that didn’t involve a pounding pulse and restless nights that overlapped into too-tired-to-speak mornings. There was always Google.
But keeping the country on her feet with a firewall wasn’t a job you left for smaller pay and a longer life.
He mused over the thought of those waver forms having small print that his eyesight couldn’t catch. Small captions about selling souls and debts of blood.
He supposed it was better than being a field agent.
• • •
The idea of something changing is one that pops up often and is, sometimes, on the rare holiday seasons, and the sunny Saturday mornings, achieved in the form of a breakfast five minutes longer and a new plant on the windowsill. He even got a cat once.
The flower died two days past Thanksgiving and he hasn’t been home enough to see if the cat has run away or left in a more unpleasant way.
He had never thought about changing the people in his life. Not seriously, anyway. There had been that time Amber or Analese or one of the A agents had given him coffee instead of tea late at night when Libya’s government was collapsing and his computer was running like dial-up, but that had passed with the rising sun and a new round of Q, we need a new gun.
He thought about it seriously only when the gallery bench depressed beneath his small weight and, for the first time, the bubbling sensation and downright giddiness of going from one John Doe to Q of Q branch was suddenly difficult to contain behind a smile that promised only professionalism.
He thought maybe he had been doing life wrong up until that point. Maybe he had been missing the key part of the puzzle that told him this was the wrong picture. Starting fresh sounded intensely exhausting for all of about two point five seconds until he realized that he could do it right this time. He could erase the messy handwriting and start the distribution of integers and imaginary numbers fresh.
Except for the missing eraser and the atrocious circumstance of it all.