It was John Merkenheimer’s 20th anniversary at the NSA. No one mentioned it, but everyone knew.
The NSA knew everything. They even had an NSA agent in charge of monitoring NSA agent anniversaries. Not for celebratory purposes either. Just data collection.
The NSA did not do streamers, or party hats, or Hallmark cards. They did not do team dinners or happy hours. And they definitely did not go axe throwing or sip-and-painting.
What they NSA did do was defend the nation against domestic and foreign terrorists. And this immense responsibility demanded an unwavering seriousness. Any "Live, Laugh, Love"-esque attitudes were promptly identified and uprooted.
The NSA's most critical defense asset was its aura. It was of utmost importance to the survival of America that the NSA appeared cold and menacing at all times. And so the agency mandated shaved heads, black rectangular sunglasses which had to be kept on indoors, and black suits which had to be kept on in bed. Frivolous conversation was strictly forbidden and unnecessary smiles were grounds for termination.
The mandates were difficult, but they were necessary because they worked.
Some background: until 2019, the US suffered Chinese cyber-attacks at the rate of almost one a week. And for some reason, all of these attacks happened around midnight EST. It took extensive analysis, espionage, and interrogation, all compiled into the Comprehensive 2019 Report on Cyclical Chinese Cyber-attacks, to revealed the vulnerability.
The report revealed that Chinese Intelligence Agencies had biologically integrated spy cameras into DC-native cricket species and sent them to spy on high level US intelligence agents.
And every weekday, around midnight EST, when these intelligence agents returned home from work and got ready for bed, these cameras would broadcast these once menacing, suited, and sunglassed NSA agents taking off their suits, scratching their ass-cracks in patterned yellow boxer-briefs, then wearing satin sleep masks and snoring loudly and imbecile-like while being spooned by their wives in temper pedic ultra-soft memory foam mattresses.
The time difference was such that this scene would be broadcast to the Chinese intelligence groups around 1pm, deep into the workday, and far from their own bedtimes routines in a way that made the agents seem especially pathetic.
Most cyberattacks were launched shortly after.
But, after the NSA mandated suits and sunglasses in bed, and a strict sleep-on-back no-spooning policy, the attacks stopped! The Chinese were thoroughly intimidated by the near-cyborg like discipline of the US agents, who showed no signs of fallible humanity.
Now, could you imagine if the Chinese Intelligence Agency caught the NSA in party hats? With an anniversary cake? Sip-and-painting? The US would be decimated. Truth be told, America had no real defenses other than aura. How could a few thousand government employees possibly cover every possible attack vector into the national infrastructure? How could four million square miles of land ever be surveyed effectively? All defense was for show. Any motivated high schooler could assassinate the president.
Fortunately, John Merkenheimer had no issues with the NSA mandates. He did not care that his twenty year work anniversary was not celebrated. And he had already only been saying serious things long before he joined the NSA. And he'd never spooned anyone. Or been spooned, which was an important fact proudly featured on his government resume.
At the NSA, John worked on a team tasked with monitoring potential terrorists in New York City, a critical region surveilled by some of the NSA's most trusted and most senior members.
The NYC NSA team split up their task by dividing the city into broad population segments. Ahmed was in charge of the Russians. Sam, being the most senior, was in charge of the "Moslems" (which included Ahmed). Jack, being half-Chinese, was in charge of the "Orientals". Phillip was in charge of the "crazies", a multi-ethnic designation which included schizophrenics and radical political activists.
But John was in charge of a new population segment: the "broken male" segment. The broken male segment was created in response to the rise of seemingly senseless mass violence over the last few decades. The NSA wanted to see what patterns and causes of this mass violence could be identified and addressed.
The "broken male" segment included subpopulations that matched queries such as: "single & less than 200 facebook friends & no women in facebook photos", "owns gun & visits 4chan & has checked out 'Michel Holleqbueq' from the library", and "high school age range & averaging over six hours of screen time & parent has been hospitalized for mental health issues".
John tracked these subpopulations with an enormous monitoring system of twelve wide-screen monitors, all webbed together in a Bloomberg-Terminal-like interface of messages, photos, locations, webcam streams, and web-browsing activity of over ten-thousand POIs. Of course, John could not read every single notification himself. An essential component of the monitoring system was an AI anomaly detection model that drew John's attention only to activity that was especially suspicious. That way, John could focus his man-hours on carefully monitoring only those who the system flagged as 'ultra-high-risk'. The 'ultra-high-risk' POIs were the eight to ten people in NYC most likely to commit an act of domestic terrorism.
Most ultra high risk individuals came and went without any trouble. There were many, many frustrated souls that crafted elaborate plans, purchased explosive materials, and wrote manifestos-- but very few took the final step.
One man, for example, had hatched a plan to plant a bomb in the women's locker room of the Flatiron Equinox. He carefully thought out every detail and John firmly believed he would go through with it.
But, miraculously, just a few days before the bomb was to be planted, the suspect found a girlfriend. And one day after that, he scrapped the whole project.
It was a surprising, but common pattern (not that John would ever let himself feel the emotion of surprise, NSA agents were forbidden to feel surprise. Could you imagine if the Chinese Intelligence Agency ever caught John with his eyebrows up, mouth hanging open like an emoji? :O? Kentucky would be annexed the very next day).
The pacifying girlfriends, John noticed, were usually Japanese. And they usually met the suspect online. And always, the mutual romantic interest would change the POIs worldview so dramatically and so rapidly that they would never touch a weapon or manifesto again. These online girlfriends were such an effective de-escalator, that the NSA was working on creating fake Japanese e-wives to pre-empt domestic terrorism.
Other high risk POIs found an outlet in music. They started bands, usually in the "Neo-Pagan Black Metal" genre, and quickly let go of all their violent ideation.
Others found religion, usually in the Eastern Orthodox church. They joined seminaries or did ascetic spiritual penance in monastic communities.
And so, most of the time, high risk POIs came and went. But there was one character, one POI, who had stayed flagged as 'ultra-high-risk' for nearly twenty years.
Albert Melvinson.
The case of Albert Melvinson was inscrutable to John. Yes, Albert was lonely. Yes, Part 1. But so did many young men. Albert was lonely, but he didn't seem bitter about it. He was not succumb to any radical ideologies. In fact, Albert didn't seem to have any strong thoughts or opinions at all aside from his pornography preferences.
He never searched things like "how to make a bomb" or "how to get out of jail". Nearly all of his non-work related internet activity was simply porn.
And so John could never understand why the AI models were so concerned about Albert. It's decision-making methods were inscrutable. But John was under strict orders to trust the digital models, and so, for the last twenty years, John tracked Albert daily.