Supervisor Adams strode down the corridor of the Black Wing Facility Gamma as if he was headed to his own presidential inauguration.
This was his usual manner of walking as of late, which contrasted sharply with how he used to walk a mere two years ago.
Back then - before Black Wing, before his promotion, even before he met Bart - Ken Adams walked as if he had been banned from every place on Earth, including his own bathroom. He walked like he had something to apologize for at all times; like was constantly breaking the law, like his every step and move was observed and recorded and judged.
Now he was the one to observe, record, and also judge.
His back was straight and his step was confident and firm. His jaw muscles were relaxed and his arms rested comfortably by his sides, fingers still, not fidgeting, not hidden in his pockets. He wore simple, almost casual black clothes. He didn’t need a suit and tie to enforce his authority, because he was the authority here, and every person, animal, and bacteria in the facility knew that perfectly.
Of course they did. There were dire consequences for not knowing it.
He reached the end of the corridor and ambled casually through a door labeled with a big scary sign proclaiming “restricted” in bold red letters. No one would question his actions or reasons - he was allowed everywhere. He smiled at a woman who passed him by on his way to cell number 42.
“Good evening, supervisor,” she greeted politely, and he greeted her back.
Everyone had to address him as supervisor here. Everyone. Even…
“Bart,” Ken said in his steady, authoritative voice. “I see you’re still discovering new ways to express your individuality.”
The door clicked open, he stepped in, the door thudded heavily behind him and locked itself shut. Now supervisor Adams found himself in a large rectangular room, with looming ceilings and polished floors and gleaming white walls. The room would have been unremarkable and spotless to the point of sterility if it wasn’t for one fact: it was Bart’s room.
Due to that fact, the standard, impersonal, clinical space had been transformed in all manners reasonable and unreasonable into a vibrant human habitat. It had stolen cactus plants and smuggled plastic mugs. It had decorations made out of paper napkins and junk food packages. It had a blanket fort around the bed. And, on the walls, it had countless drawings - in pencil, crayon, watercolour, and macaroni - depicting all manner of things.
Many were of people: of a scissor-wielding man with pink hair and his prince boyfriend, of a giant moon hanging in the sky and peculiar tress with hamburgers vines, of Dirk Gently running away screaming, and of Bart herself, usually covered in blood, sometimes wearing pretty dresses. There were no obvious trends in her paintings, except for one…
“Ken.” Bart was currently engaged in the process of making cardboard butterflies out of Oreo packages. Since she wasn’t allowed to have any sharp objects, Bart was using her bare hands and teeth for this purpose. “Come, sit down.”
“You know it’s supervisor, right?” he said, smiling, as he approached the plastic IKEA table at which she was sitting and pulled out a chair for himself.
“Sure, dickhead.” She smirked in response. “This one is for you.” And she handed him over a blue cardboard butterfly.
Ken pocketed it carefully.
“I’ve heard you had another fight in the canteen,” Ken said.
“And I’ve heard that guy call me crazy,” she replied. “As if.”
“As if what?”
“As if everyone else in this shithole’s not crazy.” She frowned.
“You know you get privileges here, Bart,” Ken continued. “You know I don’t treat you the same. You have your room, your art supplies… you get to go on trips with me.”
“I kill people for you,” Bart disagreed. “That’s what I do. You put me in a car and drive me a long time and then I shoot some guys and then we get McDonald's. It’s not a privilege. Sometimes I kill people for you that I don’t feel like killing. But I do that for you because you are my friend. So I am doing you a favor.”
“And I value that. Really.” Ken nodded. “But I have people above me, Bart! People who are keeping an eye on this facility. And if you keep having fights in the canteen and the garden and so on, I’ll have to revoke those privileges. Do you understand?”
Bart looked at him, frowning, with rather more vicious determination to bite off his ears than understanding. Ken’s body tensed up. He took a deep breath in and…
“I understand.” She grinned, suddenly sanguine again. “So, what have you been up to this week, in your big scary office place?”
“Oh man.” Ken’s muscles relaxed and he leaned against the back of his seat comfortably. “I’ve had a crazy week. Do you remember about that thing I told you a couple months ago, about Project Prometheus?”
“Was I listening to you when you told me?”
Ken shrugged, smirking.
“I’ll tell you again then,” he said. “Well.”
When Ken Adams became the supervisor of Black Wing, a great many things were moved in the institution in all kinds of directions. A lot of those things were dead bodies, following the Wendimoor attacks. But not all were formerly alive persons. Some were just some really terrible decorations.
Another thing that got moved was an enormous pile of documents - printed, scribbled by hand, stored on USB drives, CDs, floppy disks and magnetic tape, and even arranged from coins on a piece of wood. All of these records previously resided in supervisor Friedkin’s office, where they remained utterly untouched. Supervisor Adams wanted the opposite result to his predecessor, so he took the opposite approach. Upon assuming his position, he locked himself in his new office and spent a whole week reading the entirety of the files.
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He came out on the other end of that experience thoroughly convinced that the United States of America was the most poorly managed country of all times and that it was frankly remarkable that it had managed to remain in existence for so long.
Only around 18 and a half percent of the files contained useful information; the rest were disposed of immediately through the method of burning in a metal barrel. It made a wonderful bonfire on which Bart - as a special privilege - was allowed to toast some marshmallows.
Out of the useful eighteen percent, Ken delegated the creation of a well-sorted, labeled and cataloged archive, and personally crafted a spreadsheet of all the holistic individuals that Black Wing had ever encountered. They were sorted gradually in one of several categories. Some were useless, some potentially useful but too dangerous to contain, and some were better off closely watched but free. The last, most unfortunate category, contained individuals that, from that day on, were systematically tracked, kidnapped, and imprisoned in the Black Wing facility.
So far he had collected 11 of them and was planning to get all 23. This was someone else’s job and Ken made sure that it was done swiftly and competently, and that those who failed at it were disposed of, sometimes with the same method as the useless files, if their mistakes were grave enough. The first goal of Black Wing as of now was to collect these assets; the second was to keep the first goal as secret as possible. And it was working out beautifully for them.
There was, however, one subject that was so intriguing and so mysterious to Ken that it quickly became his personal passion and obsession to get hold of through any means necessary.
Project Prometheus.
Very little remained of Project Prometheus in the records, since he was never an official considered asset of Black Wing. In fact, all Ken had was a single floppy disk with a thread-like account of the project’s history.
It noted that Prometheus was first discovered during the pre-Black Wing era of the program, in the seventies. He was never detained or held captive, though he was periodically brought in for briefings. All that was on record about Prometheus was his gender, which was male, and his age, which was noted as 37 in 1975. No photo, no description of his face, and no biographical information ever existed.
From Ken’s perspective, this hardly mattered, since he only cared about one thing:
Prometheus could fix anything. Quite literally anything. He was routinely tasked with repairs that seemed beyond any human range of ability, and yet he always delivered. Prometheus was brought in countless times to assist on countless projects. He took part in the Apollo missions. He prevented two disasters at nuclear power plants. He worked on top secret military developments and even fixed president Carter’s personal car.
Then, he disappeared. The program fell apart and had to be reassembled from scratch. All traces of Prometheus’s existence were erased, leaving only the single floppy disk. He was never contacted again and no attempts were made to find him.
And this was driving Ken insane.
Granted, now in 2019 the man could have been dead for a while, but just the possibility of finding him haunted Ken’s dreams, afternoon naps, and breakfast waffles. For if the man was still alive, and if he could bring him in…
“I could do anything!” Ken beamed. “If he can fix anything, imagine what kind of technology he can build!”
“That sounds very boring,” Bart replied honestly. “Why would you want a repair guy when we have like, a guy who speaks to dead people, and a girl who turns people into mind controlled zombies by kissing them. That’s the cool stuff. Not some stupid technician.”
“Well he is very cool to me,” Ken retorted. “And today I wanted to share my progress because I think we finally have a lead on him!” he exclaimed. “That sounds exciting, right?”
“Eh.” Bart shrugged and bit into a cardboard butterfly with her canines. “But if it’s important to you, I am listening,” she added, spitting out chewed cardboard on the floor.
“I have a lead. I think,” Ken repeated. “And my agents are tracking him down, as well as investigating some other leads related to the case. Oh, Bart.” He took a deep breath in. “So many weeks, months of work, and I finally feel like I am doing something great with this place. That it is becoming a force for good.”
“You are killing people and lying to people and keeping people prisoner,” Bart said quietly. “I don’t know much about good, but you ain’t it Ken.”
“Well you know how people say, the ends…”
“Always suck and I wish things never ended.”
“…justify the means,” Ken finished for her. “I am creating something wonderful here, okay?” he continued. “A power that can be used to fix so many things! And I am in charge, and I am good at it. Can’t you be happy for me?”
Bart didn’t reply.
“Visit over,” Ken said coldly, and got up from the table. “I have things to do. I’m busy.”
“Yes, you are a busy man, bla bla.” Bart nodded. “Go do your important business stuff.”
“I will.”
“Whatever.”
He turned the lights off just before he closed the door, the Oreo packaging butterfly held gently between his fingers.
*
Despite the chaotic, reality-shattering nature of the reality backstage, Friedkin had so far managed to construct a rather orderly and serene life for himself. For example, today was a Tuesday, and on Tuesdays Friedkin held bookclub meetings with his own projections - unless the weather was particularly sunny, which constituted a solid enough reason to switch the bookclub and the picnic places in the weekly schedule.
This was quite a feat on Friedkin’s part, since the backstage did not have linear time to begin with, let alone arbitrary assigned points such as Tuesdays and Octobers and Christmases. In fact, Friedkin’s conviction that he was currently experiencing a Tuesday was entirely belief-based. It is worth noting that, in the backstage, weather as such did not exist either. All of it was the product of Friedkin’s impressive (if a bit inconsistent) imagination.
On that day, Friedkin’s imagination dictated that the book he picked for himself to discuss was far too boring, and was therefore quickly abandoned in favor of universe TV. As a result, he now sat in his bookclub room wearing a lovely knitted sweater, surrounded by his projected copies all wearing lovely knitted sweaters, and watched the conversation between Ken and Bart unfold before his very multiple pairs of eyes.
“I don’t think this new guy is good at his job at all,” Friedkin proclaimed, popping an imaginary chocolate-covered raisin into his mouth.
“Wellllll,” a different Friedkin said. “He is better than we’ve been.”
“That is not much of a compliment,” a third Friedkin said.
“Guys,” the original Friedkin interrupted. “I thought we agreed that we should, like, be kinder to ourselves and stuff?”
All Friedkins nodded, apologizing for the self-deprecating slip.
“I agree though,” Original Friedkin said. “We weren’t very good at my job.”
“Yeah, but,” Another Friedkin said. “We like, did less harm while we were at it? Mostly cause we didn’t accomplish much but, you know. We definitely did less harm.”
“Maybe it is better to be a terrible good person than it is to be a very competent evil person,” one of the Friedkins said, and the rest stared at him like one remembers a particularly impressive moment of their lives that they aren’t quite sure had really happened.
“I don’t think he considers himself evil,” original Friedkin said.
“They never do,” said Friedkin to Friedkin.
Friedkin, who had spent many exhausting hours watching various real, aspiring, and failed dictators ruin very many lives for one supposedly great cause or another, whole-heartedly agreed.
“Switch the channels,” one of the Friedkin’s demanded, and then immediately realized that no one could possibly protest, and did it himself. “That’s better. It’s the weird professor again!”
“Ooh.” Original Friedkin moved closer to the gaping hole in the very fabric of reality to get a closer look. “Is it just me guys, or is he like, in trouble or something?”