Per 
"We have one last assignment for you"
You have been judged, and found wanting.
This is how you remain alone in the presence of so many others. The silence is the first and last piece. Find eight guys with big guns and not a single word to say to you or each other. Call them your detail- a necessary one. Then stick yourself in a car. Then, the detail of the car you choose. Then, the thick walls of your grand marquise with quarter-inch steel panels secreted away on its insides to dissuade bullets. Then double-tinted windows that conceal the fact of your occupancy among so many other of your false "normals", the cars you travel with to provide the illusion that you are not, in fact, in a motorcade.
These and so many others not worth naming are the wrappings that shroud my precious self from the dangerous hands of outside. You'd almost think they gave a fuck about me. It's all theater. The windows are supposed to allow me to see out while letting no one else see in. They almost half-work- but for all their trouble they suck all the color out of what you can see so that even the most vibrant greens outside are just rumors of green seen from this side of the window. Yes, you'd almost think.
A fully-matured specimen of Foundation upper administration, I've mastered 'the look'-a particular intensity of gaze common to up-ads honed by harsh years of high-clearance research and field agent work that, like the blank glare of the sun at noon, conveys painful intensity from unfathomable distance. It is a tool to inspire confidence, ensure subordination, and scorch those that fail to meet expectations.But now I find more and more that I can no longer turn it off. Meeting the gaze of a passerby on the street, panic flashes across their faces, and they look away. Staring children is something I've gotten used to. It's best not to look at them. And under no circumstances should you try to smile.
Just this morning I looked at myself in the mirror. I have not gotten what I expected in old age. My face, once shapely and, though I never really cared, probably beautiful, has in old age refused to soften and droop, to form the gentle beginnings of jowls that I fondly remember in my grandma. Nor is any hint of warmth easily discernible emanating from within the eyes that stared back at me in the mirror- no, instead everything seems to have gone the other direction. Like something mummified, my cheeks have lost all trace of fullness, and so it looks like the skin- waxy, and with they yellow overtones of parchment- is drawn taught as a drumskin over my jaw bone. My forehead shines even when I'm not sweating. I have dessicated into something insectoid. I've never cared much about looks, but when I see myself I can't help being a little horrified. Is a 60 year old woman supposed to look like this?
I felt it then, the tirelessness that seemed to perserve me like a salt against time. I certainly wasn't grandma, and at this point could never be. And in the recognition of that contrast I could feel further distance drawn between my memory of a life so far from the one I lived now that it floated through my mind as light and insignificant and only vaguely pleasing as a moth in strong wind. It heightened the illusion I'd lived in for years now- that whatever past I thought I came from had nothing to do with who or where I was now; every second might be a microawakening, a coming-to dsiguised as simple continuity, an illusion of false-or-falisified memory.
I'd feel better if that were the case. It made me nauseous to imagine that the world that seemed so far away from the one I inhabited now had actually been real. Like something in a snowglobe. Insipid, contained. A bauble I could only watch as it played the same scenes, frozen in memory through my mind. With my face against the cold glass of the car window I imagine that one day I'll have the last of whatever is soft within myself sucked out. I'll leave behind a column of light and crumbly rock dust to take up its place out in the badlands as just another hoodoo amid hoodoos. One of that congregation stretched against the wind. Austere, dissolving secondwise into the wind, and spanning out far past the horizon.
Now I watch the trees go by, a smear shitgreen and risen up all around so that only a narrow slice of sky is ever visible, winding with the road, the only window through these connifers you'd ever see out here. I felt it then, the tirelessness that seemed to perserve me like salt against time. They follow. It comes with the territory- where there is the big dog, there too are its fleas. Ours have names like GOC and Serpent's Hand. I think we saw a few division P guys back at the gas station- an unplanned stop. And the measures we put in place are there not so much with the expectation that they'll actually work, but more like the tensabarriers at a gala. A formality that allow in only the ones that can do the work. Oh, and we will shoot you if you're caught. That's the contract.
Mine would be the rough work. That was true even for this, my final assignment, and the casket in which I'd rot for the final days before I'm let off as a pensioner, left to fight off these years' worth of demons alone and in pieces. There's a reason why the pensioner crowd's title, L.D. for "life distinction", is more informally, more properly, known as "the living dead". And without a doubt she'd be one of them soon. Not an O5, but an old L.D. From site director to head site consultant on this little mole hill upon which they've placed me to die.
I'd be okay. On the ride there I decided. They may put me out to pasture, literally. Decide that I was a thing unworthy of note and so shove me away in some far province. But that'd be just fine by me. Arbitrary and unimportant as its number suggested, this #19 would be the house that I built.
