Silverius

Utterly Insane and Useless

The interesting bit of the concept of the UIU is that you have an organization that's limited in resources, unable to fight the big threats but still contributes to protecting the people and the Veil, in that order. The UIU, in my view is a police organization where the GOC and the Foundation are military organizations. There's a quote from Battlestar Galactica about that when the military becomes the police the people tend to become the enemy. The GOC and the Foundation certainly feel that way whereas the UIU is always still portrayed as caring more about collateral damage.

The UIU is also classically underfunded by law enforcement standards. This forces them, in my view, to be pragmatic. They can't hire the best. They can't get the coolest toys. And even if they by accident or luck get something really good it's unlikely the big boys in town will let them keep it. This leads to the classic insult of UIUseless.

The concept of Utterly Insane and Useless is to turn UIUseless on its head. To embrace downsides and to turn them around. The core of this story are the four people in Squad 11¹ which all have severe mental conditions that stretch into the anomalous.

Blurb / Greenlight bait

A woman who cannot forget. An old man who's forgetfulness is infectious. A young lady who censors the world around her. A man who sees things, some of them even true. They can't live among us, their issues too severe. But they can still protect us.

A killer who became immortal by becoming an idea struggles to gain infamy. His name, his presence, it cannot be remembered. Yet, he and his mortal tools still maim and murder, a killing spree that cannot be known and thus cannot be stopped.

Except by the least respected squad of the entire UIU: Squad 11.

More details

Squad 11 is a special team within the UIU comprised of people with anomalous abilities related to perception, thought and memory. They are deployed when cognitohazards or dangerous memes make sending in regular agents impossible but the threat isn't great enough to justify calling in the Foundation.

Most of the Squad 11 members affect others near to them. Jody grants Laurence the ability to remember, somewhat, while he lets her temporarily forget the trauma's of her past. Emily's inability to see anything but details makes her immune to most cognitohazards while her ability to ignore things she does not want to notice makes them invisible to her teammates as well. Only Rich cannot share his blessings and his burdens, he's stuck all alone seeing things that no man should.

The struggle of Squad 11 is living a halfway normal life and going beyond that in making a difference. Squad 11 is to the rest of the UIU what the UIU is to the Foundation and GOC: a joke, "Utterly Insane and Useless". Yet like how the UIU has a place in a world where the Foundation and GOC loom large so does Squad 11 fit and sometimes proof their critics wrong.

The main antagonist of Squad 11 is a killer who doesn't have a name. He somehow managed to transcend his death and become a meme. But somewhere along the line something went wrong and he became an antimeme, unable to be remembered even though he so desperately desires to be infamous. The antimemetic killer can manipulate some people and by whispering dark thoughts into their minds turn the weakest ones into his tools.

One of his tools is the main focus of the first story I have in mind. A killer who has cut off his own eyelids and through dark magics whispered into his mind by the antimemetic killer gained the ability to project cognitohazards onto everyone who looks at his eyes.

A small point of clarification: most of the characters actually don't necessarily have a real-world mental condition. Laurence may forget things but in the Foundation universe that doesn't necessarily imply dementia, Rich sees things but there are plenty of explanations for that behind the veil. I don't plan to feature any labels though, labels tend to cause associations that even in the real world are wildly inaccurate and I don't want to accidentally contribute to that.

Jody Lorre

Jody Lorre is a woman (42) who can't forget. You can hit her with the heaviest amnestics around, they still can only repress her memories for a limited time. Originally she was diagnosed with PTSD and while she does have some of the symptoms like a severe fight-or-flight reaction it's not clear whether PTSD is the fully correct diagnosis due to interaction with her anomalous abilities. She has the ability to read the memories of others when talking to them but she can't fully control this, she tends to get the most impactful memories and if those are traumatic they add to her own trauma's since she's subsequently unable to forget them. As a result she was mainly focused on finding ways to forget and avoiding people, leading to an alcohol addiction and an extended stay in the psych ward. When she was introduced to Laurence Coulbon she quickly took a liking to him, for his effect on her but also because she genuinely likes the old man.

Jody acts like the mother to the team. She's the only one who can somewhat connect emotionally with Emily and can usually calm down Rich when he's having an episode.

Laurence Coulbon

Laurence Coulbon (73) is a man who's in many ways the opposite of Jody Lorre. He can't remember. Obviously that led to a diagnosis of dementia. The odd thing was though that everyone who was close to him also started to be more forgetful as if his dementia was contagious. His "ability" interacts with that of Jody Lorre. If they're together her trauma becomes sufficiently suppressed for her to function halfway normally and he keeps his memory for long enough to do something. He's still likely to forget the mission but at least he remembers what the mission was.

Laurence likes to tell stories about his life journey, how he grew up in Africa (specific country varies) and emigrated to the United States even though he has lived in Detroit for all his life. This makes him a lighter figure in the story as he's prone to come up with an anecdote of "back in <some African country>".

While Laurence is a gentle and easygoing soul he has remarkable reflexes in combat situations that suggest he's more than he appears to be.

Rich Scarton

Rich Scarton sees and hears things, some of them even true. He has semi-frequent hallucinations and exhibits extreme paranoia regarding as harmless things as the number five. What his doctors did not realize is that Rich does not only hallucinate about things that aren't real but also about things that in some way are. In particular Rich is capable of observing memetic, conceptual, informational and deceased entities and their effects, in the form of terrifying hallucinations. The thing that scares him most though is knowing that he's losing his mind.

Emily Jones

Footnotes

1. In Dutch Carnaval 11 is a prominent number representing crazyness.