The Ministry for the Future

sat there in the strange house feeling low. Something to celebrate, and no one to celebrate with. Even the beasts of the field had company of an evening. Ireland too; in the old days the men would go to the pub, the women gather in kitchens or hang out with the kids. A social species. Of course there were animals such as cats who were isolatoes most of the time. Some people were like that. But not her. She was like the marmots or the chamois. A group to chat with, or just to sit in a room with while reading or watching a screen; this was her preference. She wondered if she should move into something like Frank’s co-op. The bedrooms there were private, small and cozy, and then all the rest of it was communal— the big kitchen, the dining room, the common room with its books and piano. People moved into places like that to have that experience.

Well, but she would probably just sit in her room anyway. And here she was. They probably wouldn’t let her move. And she didn’t like to move. All the moves, all the years; she was tired of it.

That night she slept uneasily, and the next morning it was a relief to walk down to work. This group of people who worked for her were serving as her family, she realized. That was fine, a lot of people functioned that way, maybe, although it felt a little odd when you considered it. Work colleagues did not usually function as family. Family, what was the saying? When you had to go there, they had to take you in. Probably that meant not the people you happened to work with.

Or maybe not. Because when she went into the office she found everyone crying, or palely grim-faced, sitting on desks with their heads in their hands. News had come just seconds before: Tatiana had been found dead outside her apartment, which turned out to have been in Zug. Shot. Her security team said a drone strike of some sort. “Ah no!” she exclaimed, and went to the nearest chair and collapsed in it, getting down before she fell. “No.”

The police had put Tatiana in a safe house under full protection, including a big crew of bodyguards, but she had not been regular at following their instructions, they said. They had thought her gone to bed for the night, but she had stepped outside her door, no one knew why; they heard her fall to the ground, rushed out, there she was. Shot three times, no sound of gunfire. Bullets not yet recovered, they had gone right through her and had not yet been found.

Mary stopped asking questions when she heard that, feeling sick. The officers telling her regarded her warily. She would have to move again, they said. Go into better hiding, more complete.

“No!” she said instantly, wildly. “I’m not leaving! I won’t leave Zurich. I want to keep working here. We can’t cave to this kind of thing. You just do your jobs!”

They nodded, looking worried. Telecommuting, one suggested. For a while. From a secure location. Until they figured out more about how this had happened, and who might have done it.

They had some evidence already, of course. A little body camera that Tatiana had been wearing; Mary didn’t want to look at that. What an ugly job these people had. Someone had to do it. The cameras on the building apparently didn’t show anything. Shot from a distance. Little to go on. News came in while they were sitting there pondering her, remembering her. They had found two bullets nearby. American bullets. Not a definitive sign of anything. The investigation would continue. And so on.

Tatiana. Their tough one, their warrior. Her brother in arms. They kill the good ones, Mary thought bitterly, the leaders, the tough ones, and then dare the weaker ones to pick up the torch and carry on. Few would do it. The killers would prevail. This was how it always happened. This explained the world they lived in; the murderers were willing to kill to get their way. In a fight between sociopathic sick wounded angry fucked-up wicked people, and all the rest of them, not just the good and the brave but the ordinary and weak, the sheep who just wanted to get by, the fuckers always won. The few took power and wielded it like torturers, happy to tear the happiness away from the many. Oh sure everyone had their reasons. The killers always thought they were defending their race or their nation or their kids or their values. They looked through the mirror and threw their own ugliness onto the other, so they didn’t see it in themselves. Always the other!

And of course she was doing it now. So it was another way the bad could infect the good, by making it furious, making it join the general badness. Fuck them, kill them back, jail them, lock them in some room of mirrors where they had to see themselves for what they were. That would be the punishment she would concoct for them, if she could: they would have to live in a mirror box, look at themselves all day every day for the rest of their lives. See what they saw. Narcissists could not look in the mirror, the myth had it backwards.

She tried to focus on her helpers, weeping as she looked at them. Swiss police. Switzerland. Think about how this little city-state of a country had gotten by in the world. In part it had been by accepting each other despite their differences. Some clever rules and a few mountain passes, both now irrelevant to power in the world; really it was just a system, a method. An old hoard and a way of getting along. The faces watching her now, their strange fairness, their insistence on some kind of justice for all. Some kind of enlightened self-interest, the notion that