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Agent Bee hates her job.
Profoundly and deeply.
First and foremost, the coffee has been bad ever since the worms moved to work in Non-Human Resources. Then, to add insult to injury, last week Oh rumbled that a group of agents were using the dimensional trans-warp portal in the sub-basement as a smoking area and put a stop to that pretty sharpish. By result she’s trapped at her desk chewing nicotine gum since they can’t even vape right now given that generating smoke from one’s orifices is a grave insult on Klak’hool II and that’s where one of this summer’s interns is from. She doesn’t mind that she’s been promoted into obscurity - first and foremost, the pay is better as a threat analyst - but it’s still kind of rude that she had to go through the same action-packed and firearm-themed induction programme as all the field agents just for her to wind up packing nothing other than a remarkably robust knowledge of Fortran, which is actually the only technology that ancient aliens secretly bestowed upon humanity and is thus what most of the galaxy codes in.
Perhaps most personal are her particular issues with her name. They’re nuanced. She has it easy - she knows she has it easy, okay. She’s not unaware. She’s not rocking one of the battery names. Agent Double A gets drunk every year at the holiday party and she honestly thinks that’s why. It’s just that the name she was born with - the name on her birth certificate and the hard won driving-licence she sent through a shredder several years ago, that was proudly her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s before her - was Beatrice Williams. By result her nickname throughout most of her childhood and adolescence had been Bea. It was her name. At least when she was baptised in as Agent Bee it didn’t take any time to get used to responding to it, but it’s just that it's the same name, right. It sounds the same. It’s just spelled differently. What a difference a letter makes, she considers, filtering out the flecks of ground coffee between her teeth like a baleen whale. It’s literally the same name. She threw away a personalised gold necklace for this.
Mostly though she hates her job because she doesn’t hate it that much at all, really. She loves it.
She actually, truly loves it.
It’s a buzz. It’s a rush. It’s a perfectly commented code, mathematical proof, QED kind of rush. Every day she works her way through a galaxy’s worth of real-time data feeds and trend analyses and pattern tracking and it's like one giant newspaper puzzle double spread where, if she does it all correctly and puts all the numbers in the right boxes, the planet sleeps safe for one more rotation and she gets to rip another day off her Grumpy Cat-themed page-a-day calendar. This all has the unfortunate side effect, of course, of also being deeply anxiety inducing. It’s like a caffeine addiction, the sort of thing that gives her the jitters if she has it and a headache if she doesn’t. She’s really, really good at her job through equal parts natural talent and sheer force of will. So every day she clocks into her big world-saving sudoku of a job and vibrates care all over it. It keeps her on her toes and constantly tries to ruin her near-perfect threat-detecting track-record - which she refuses to allow, obviously, else she can’t remove today’s Grumpy Cat - which means that every four-alarm stressful event within her 9-to-5-plus-overtime isn’t necessarily motivation enough to make her quit but is rather just enough to make her pop an antacid, let it mingle with her gross gum, take a swift and calming circuit around their detestable open plan office, and get her nose back into her inbox.
It’s in there, then this happens.
Maybe she needs a new coping strategy.
“Ess,” she hisses. Then again, when he doesn’t respond. She slaps him on the bicep with the back of her palm. She does not look away from the screen as she does so. “Ess.”
He spins around to face her. They have swivel chairs, now. They’re new. Occupational Health are clearly getting bored dishing out ergonomic handles to the blaster guns and are moving on to really exciting things like wrist-friendly mouse mats and seats with lumbar support.
Brightly, he answers, with a broad white smile and no coffee between his teeth, “Yes, Agent Bee?”
Agent Ess does not hate his job even fleetingly. He’s actually irritatingly chipper about the whole thing. It goes with his oeuvre; bright eyed, overachieving and snapped up straight out of college, a recent graduate of the MIT astrophysics department that’s like a grocery store click-and-collect for the MiB recruitment team. But he’s shaping up to be a pretty great partner and it’s not his fault that he’s making her feel older by the day by direct comparison. He won’t even admit that he does also kind of dislike his name, maybe even more than she does her’s. He doesn’t let it show - that would be beneath his character - but the simple fact remains that he is Agent S and when spelling it out on forms or office birthday cards it doesn’t even start with an ‘s’.
“I got an alert.”
Ess perks up like a spaniel. “Oh!”
They deal in a few different kinds of alert. There’s the Boundary Proximity tracker, for flagging alien lifeforms approaching the limits of their pre-agreed containment radius. There’s the interesting sounding alarm with the remarkably jazzy tone for when somebody leaves the emergency exit door open and the one with the really boring beep for incoming ballistic missiles. The latter one goes off so regularly they sort of tune it out, like when the washer tells you your clothes are done. Not to mention there is the normal once-a-week fire alarm test or the alarm that lets them know if there’s a radiation leak. But there’s only one alert that she could realistically be talking about given that its been sent to her in an email roundup rather than the form of a giant blaring siren, and that’s that there’s been a hit on the Neuralysed Employee Remote Detection System, also known to their coterie of what are predominantly desk jockeys as the NERDS alarm, because, well, if you can’t beat ‘em.
Ess paddles his chain over. They blink together, side by side, at what transpires to be the back-end of the mass.gov website. The system has flagged a public Notice of Intention of Marriage as anomalous. She clicks through. She stares at the screen. Ess stares at the screen. They both stare at the screen, together, equally enraptured, so at least it's not just her hallucinating.
The NERDS system keeps track of the activity of ex-MiB agents, is the thing. Pings headquarters whenever something strange is occurring; that being the sort of something strange that might imply someone’s about to do something ill-advised or get kidnapped by an intergalactic force, or that the neuralisation process has shallow-fried their prefrontal cortex. It lets headquarters know if they start running for local office with a resume gap that’s going to raise some big questions, or if they’re making a habit of walking through their township naked but for a pair of clown shoes. You know - that sort of strange.
Kevin Brown and James Darrell Edwards III have applied for a marriage licence.
Bee carefully pages back to the NERDS alert summary. It presents all the information in a neat little table. She reviews the context. Analyses it. Attempts to absorb it into her brain matter. Datetime - yesterday morning, ten thirty-two AM. Location - 41°59′54″N 70°3′15″W, that being Truro, MA 02666, Earth, Sol System Beta. There’s supporting information bundled into a table, a neatly organised visual list of related sources, links and ephemera. She clicks around the page with a mounting, vague, and distant sense of despair. It is coming towards her quickly, but from far away, like an asteroid on a collision course. She can access a copy of the notice form. It pops up fullscreen on her second monitor and has the chewed-up quality of a scan made on a library photocopier. They both have quite nice handwriting. On his half, Kevin Brown has visibly used a fountain pen.
Bee pushes her chair back. She takes a deep breath. Then she bends at the waist and dangles her head between her knees and looks for answers in the grout between the floor tile. Her braids fall down around her and blessedly, briefly obscure the rest of the world. It’s like the beaded curtain of her childhood bedroom. She can see the wheels and underside of the chair in thin inverted vertical slices.
Above her, after a moment, she can hear the sound of tentative mouse-clicking resume.
“Hey, look. There’s a wedding registry. It’s Williams Sonoma.” Ess pauses. After a moment he continues. “They want a stand mixer.”
“How did this happen.” The grout doesn’t answer her. It offers only a thin line of dust and bewilderment. When a decommissioned Men in Black agent and another decommissioned Men in Black agent love each other very much, her brain offers, hysterically. She pops her head back up. Things tragically don’t make any more sense upright. “What does this mean.”
Ess makes a strange half-movement like he’s about to shrug but aborted the motion when he sensed her general tone. “It’s a small world?”
“Definitely the best ride at Magic Kingdom, Ess, but not a reason as to why these two lifeforms defied all statistical probability to come into close-enough proximity for what appears to be sufficiently long as to file paperwork about it. We’re not in fun coinky-dinky territory,” she says, for reasons she can’t fathom, then elaborates, “it’s not like -,” before pausing and trying, here, to put on what she hopes is a fun voice. “Hey, wow, they used to go to the same college.” She scooches closer again. Ess cedes to her elbows. She exports the NERDS alert to a .csv and starts joining it to anything else she can get her hands on. “They were both members of the same secret society. There’s gotta be something else going on.”
The mind races. What if it is some kind of conspiracy. What if it is a cult? Or what if - what if the neuralysing has an unknown and unintended corollary that under the right circumstances it can be spontaneously undone, and there is a steadily increasing proportion of the global population all pinballing around waiting to meet and remember and revolt against the unjust tyranny and abuse of power to which the populace has too long been subjected and oh, my god, she is going to lose her job. She is going to lose her job and die alone or maybe have to sell hotdogs from a cart.
Bee takes a deep breath. The pixels of the monitor blur in her vision like an abstract pointillism painting. How impressionist. Perhaps she could interpret them like a star chart and craft her own constellations. Look - this one’s a scorpion, apparently. Instead she looks at her page-a-day calendar until it focuses her vision. Today’s current page reads Your luck ran out? Good. which is sort of unfairly if cosmically relevant. “Whatever made this happen is a risk, alright, and we’re threat analysts.” She starts aggressively tabbing through her housekeeping code. She is able to do this on autopilot, so she turns to look at Ess while she does so. The intensity of her gaze makes him physically recoil. The faux leather of his chair squeaks slightly. “We did very much not analyse this threat!”
Ess gives nothing away about his feelings on this suggestion other than that his voice takes on a somewhat gentle affectation, like what you’d use if you let an old lady go in front of you at the store. “Agent B, if I may speak out of turn - I think you may be…” He sucks in a sharp breath, between his teeth, then releases it slowly. “Jumping to a worse-case scenario?”
Personally she’d use the word ‘extrapolating’ but if the shoe fits. “Ess this, this is huge, and it happened on our watch.” She likes her job. Another deep breath and she hits enter. Her code loads, pauses for a second to install the packages requested, then starts running like a marathoner. It’s printing results - rows and rows of datetimes stream by, lines and lines of latitudes and longitudes. She also added a little completion percentage result, which is handy.
Scooting closer, Ess’ brow crumples. “What are you -,” he cuts himself off, eyes dancing across the screen. The lines of white-black reflect back onto them. He looks lost in concentration. The light flicks across the curved mirror of his pupils and, after a moment, short enough that she’ll consider giving him a good grade in his performance review, his eyes widen. “You’re cross referencing their movements.”
“Yup,” Bee says, popping the p. Then she drums her fingers, waiting. She dedicates a couple of moments to aimlessly flicking dirt out from the thin gap around where their Y2K-ass keyboards are set directly into the white gloss surface of the desk - a gap which exists only to collect crumbs and snag the buttons at the wrists of their compulsory dress shirts - when her counter prints COMPARISON 100% COMPLETE and up pops a table.
Ess scoots his chair over, the inelegant crab walk of the desk-chair dweller and several races of aliens alike. She takes him in, out the corner of her eye; eager, curious, and reminding her of herself about six years ago, when this whole universe was brand new and she loved exploring it like an astronaut stuck on land.
Sorting a column, she invites him in. “I’m going to send you some coordinates. Can you pull up any relevant footage from inside this polygon ?”
Ess snaps to attention. It’s like something in his spine hardens. Not, like, super hard, though. More like one of those Pound Puppy snap bracelets she had as a kid. His hands move confidently across his keyboard as she scoots over. “On it.”
They have their own satellites - have had, since the 60s, with some still going strong thanks to regular om-site maintenance - as well as access to just about anything internet connected. Bee had one of those smart printers when she took this job and when she got home after her first day in the office she dropped it out of her sixth-storey apartment window while swearing colourfully. She might have called it a pervert on the way down. A large part of Tracking & Risk Analytics’ role as, like, a department, is making sure all these different data sources talk to each other, share a sensible granularity and are tagged so they can be found in MiB’s labyrinthine file structure. All that to say it is frankly impressive how Ess flicks between the sources with ease until he pauses, pulls up the properties menu, and squints.
“I think,” he ventures, then squints a little further. “I think I found it? I’ll send it to your terminal.”
He does, and quickly, too. Good egg.
Nothing else for it. They bend their heads together towards Bee’s main monitor and hit play.
She never actually worked with Agent Kay. She was hired in the thin waxing moon between his departure and Agent Jay’s, the period of time wherein long-term residents of their little interplanetary equivalent of the DMV line watched a man undertake a perfect demonstration of why zoo cheetahs need those emotional support dogs. So she knows him, at least. She knows him; a tall man made of worry and love, love for the planet and for every person on it so strong that it fizzed, spilled out of him like an overshaken soda bottle or a racehorse suddenly stopped after running too fast. It is almost like he foamed with it. He moved through headquarters with familiarity - not like he owned it, per se, but like it owned some part of him - and - when he would come over to the banks of analyst desks, bouncing questions around, drilling down into the one detail that would make this case of his make sense and break wide open - like it was holding him hostage.
Bee can’t recognise him.
The man in the footage is made blurry by the video’s embarrassingly poor resolution but is undeniably and unrelated looser. He moves with ease, with a casual gait and hands in the pockets of his bomber jacket. He turns on one heel then the other from the right hand side of the frame moving left down the corridor, stopping briefly to look at each exhibit in turn. There are lots of plaques and he reads them all. There is information about physics and planetary bodies and for all intents and purposes it looks like he digests each one with reverent devotion. James Darrell Edwards III pauses at an interactive display, self consciously looks around, and then crouches down slightly to turn a wheel that releases a ball into a tube and in doing so demonstrates gravitational pull. His shoulders bunch - he’s chuckling - and then after a moment he carries on. Bee watches him move unhurried, tracked by the cameras as he walks down the display-lined corridor, and sees no trace of Agent J in the set of his shoulders. He moves like nothing more than a man curious about the big museum double doors he’s just ducked through.
“That’s not Agent J,” states Ess softly but firmly, like he’s gained the power to look inside her brain.
All Bee can do is feel herself nod.
Abruptly the filming angle changes. The lighting in the planetarium dome is actually worse, somehow, and the footage is snowstorm grainy but the security camera has a wide angle lens that captures him as he makes his way to the centre of the large room. He spins on the spot, takes a few steps back, head tilted and eyes pointed upwards and glued to a vaulted and curved ceiling high out of frame; mostly plaster, she presumes, and partially stars. So as he’s moving backwards the little greyscale figure on the screen can’t see what’s coming like she can, like she can extrapolate, like she can tell the inevitable that’s about to and has been, always, bound despite chance and reason to happen.
Two people bump into each other. It’s like two binary stars joining and forming one twin-souled solar system if the two binary stars were actually both kind of embarrassed during the whole thing. They jump and start, and spin to apologise to one another - the man who was once the formidable and galaxy-feared Agent K does an awkward white person wave about it, that is politely brushed off as the former interplanetary hero Agent J turns back around and sticks his hands into his pockets again. Neither of them moves away, though. They just stand there, shoulder to shoulder and near enough side by side with the two of them each, after a second, looking upwards to stare at the ceiling and a facsimile of a million, billion stars. They coexist. They float in space. The moment stretches.
In the background of the video a school field trip troops on past, a string of third graders in little orange hi-vis vests all holding hands.
Kevin Brown is still looking upwards when his mouth moves. “They really are something, aren’t they?”
CCTV footage doesn’t have audio - but MiB’s interpretation software is really, really good. It has to be to deal with over a quarter of a million non-human languages and dialects. In practice it is essentially the COMPUTER: ENHANCE button that all the police procedural crime dramas of her youth had access to that she was staggered to learn didn’t exist, until she was staggered to learn that it did. The captioning pops up with a half-second delay so there’s a moment without any distraction where they have the unfortunate privilege to clock the look of absolute delight that passes like a comet over James Edwards’ face. It honestly makes Bee feel a tad voyeuristic.
“Sure are,” Edwards offers, and looks over his shoulder. Then he does a double take and checks Brown out, and she definitely feels more than a mere tad. Brown is wearing a casual if nonetheless waistcoat-centric ensemble that makes him look like a recently divorced grandpa or potentially the anthropomorphised spirit of a campus library, so this says more about Edwards than it does about her.
Because this is her actual, personal hell, they keep making small talk.
“Ever wonder what’s out there?”
Brown huffs a little puff of air out his broad nose, like a horse. “All the time.” His voice is confident, rough and tough like stone, but then he pauses. He seems to consider something. The recording or MiB’s software overlay or some hellish and unforeseen combination of the two manages to render how Brown’s hands twitch nervously, worrying at the corner of the museum map he’s clutching in his fingers like a rope lifeline. “How ‘bout you - think we’re alone?”
Shaking his head, Edwards sort of laughs. His eyes crinkle at the corners into crows feet. His fade has grown out, his hair longer than he ever used to keep it. “No way, man. No way. It is not possible we just happened to end up on the only planet with both intelligent life and also coffee.”
“Guess not,” Brown shrugs with a smile. Unknowingly invoking a kind of comic, karmic force, he then offers, “Lightning doesn’t strike twice.”
A small, manic whine escapes the back of Bee’s throat while, on the screen, the two men gaze gently up at the vaulted planetarium ceiling. Space tilts and turns slowly above them. The lights aren’t a handful of lightyears away. They are the distance of a janitor’s ladder and some upper body strength. It doesn’t appear that the silence underneath them is anything awkward. Instead it seems to be a small pleasure shared. The two men stand side by side for several long and easy moments.
“Do you,” Brown starts, then breaks off. He drums the little pamphlet on his open palm. After a second’s percussion he appears to swallow his nerves, then continues. “I drove past a place on the way here.”
“The bakery?” Edwards looks away, his expression coming over all bashful. This sort of thing is now happening with intolerable frequency. Then, while Edwards’ is distracted, Brown gives him a particularly salacious look up then down. He channels his face back into neutrality when Edwards’ head comes back again. Bee wants to bludgeon herself into unconsciousness with her desk surface. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.” Then he smiles and like a quilt-top made of tiny black and white squares the patchwork pixelation of the screen renders clear as day an expression of genuine, incandescent joy. “I love pie.”
Abruptly the video reaches its end and the feed cuts out. When the screen goes black Bee and Ess’ slack-jawed faces stare back at them in the reflection. For a second all she can focus on are the ghostly, greasy fingerprints dotted around their heads. Damn, she thinks, absently. She really needs to stop touching her screen.
After that, all she can manage is to say, into the unfeeling silence, “Huh.”
Ess puffs his cheeks. Then he lets out a massive breath, slow, like they tell you to in yoga class or perhaps therapy.
“They really did just bump into each other.”
“This is some Fermi paradox sort of nonsense.” This isn’t her problem any more. No way. She’s going to send this whole case two desks over, to guys in Numbers & Probability who can tell her precisely just how unlikely this was. That’s their fun little puzzle for tomorrow. Two people met. That’s all. No big deal. Two people met and made awkward small talk. Must happen all the time. Two people met and made awkward small talk and realised that, oh, yeah and we both like the stars and it sure feels like maybe the black holes inside each of our hearts match up like a set of best-friend necklaces. All the universe, all those galaxies, and you bump into the person you don’t know that you shared a life with.
Like, what the actual fuck.
Ess scratches at the back of his neck, sheepish. “I’m feeling kind of inadequate about how I met my last girlfriend, actually.”
“Oh, yeah, for sure.” Because that’s the thing, right? They could have just waved it off. Been polite and then carried on with their own, unimaginable, retired days. Only Kay and Jay’s bond was - is - deep, and inexplicable, and real enough that it has seemingly transcended space, time and their very consciousness. It is past all of that. Even without memory there was a sense of comprehension and of rightness. Whatever made them join MiB and made them love their work, made them give their whole lives over to it day in day out, is within them, and within each other.
It is baked into their souls, into their bones and the very meat of them. Their atoms align, attuned to the same magnetic north. They are profoundly and unutterably connected. They are stars made of the same phosphorus. They are meeting your other half, the person who seems so perfect for you, and never knowing it is because they became that way for you, by you, over a lifetime of space dust clumping together into a planet. Bee’s most romantic encounter to date has been someone at a bar picking up the tab for her drink and also her order of beer-battered onion rings.
“What do we do about this?”
Considering, Bee hits the X in the corner and rescues them from the pedestrian torture that is seeing their own gormless faces. She moves back to the list of recordings, scrolls, clicks through onto the next - when sorted descending time, ascending proximity - one down. It is footage from inside the infamous bakery from a CCTV camera above the door. The timestamp running away merrily in the corner shows that about a quarter of an hour has elapsed. Two now familiar figures walk in and both automatically go to sit at the bar, the two stools straight ahead. Then they seem to notice that they’ve both done so, and the nervous tension strung in their shoulders breaks into something bashful and they look towards one another and laugh, easy.
She scrolls a little down a way further and selects another at random. It’s the definitely creepy kind of video, one that might have been from a laptop left propped open in the corner. Kevin Brown in his blandly generic, WITSEC ass house with two place settings laid, the oven timer on, opening a bottle of wine to let it breathe. At the same timestamp, James Edwards caught in dashcam footage, in his car in the driveway outside, double checking his hair.
She starts clicking around. A driveway with a U-Haul and moving boxes. Doorbell security footage of two figures stargazing from a porch.
Edwards at a jewellery store, then a pawn shop, lingering over a ring that features an opalescent black pearl.
The bottom falls out of her heart, just a little bit.
At the end of her day Agent Bee is going to go back to her apartment, to her Mott Street tenement with the four flights of uneven stairs and the shower that’s in the actual, literal kitchen. It’s kinda shitty and she’s not allowed pets but she feeds a feral cat bits of ham on her fire escape and its hers, you know? It’s hers. And when she puts on her suit and catches the - hah! - J train or when she walks, gets her steps in, goes via her bagel place and buys the blueberry cream cheese rainbow one that only tourists get but that cheers up her monochrome existence she is doing all that for a reason. She knows who she is, how she got there. She knows what she sees in the stars. She loves her job. It is near impossible to imagine who she’ll be when it is all taken away but still inside her, aimless and without meaning. Her whole identity bouncing inside her skeleton around like the DVD Video screensaver. Only in her wildest dreams could she hope that another person would get it, or even a fraction of it. Ancient sailors looked at the night sky and joined the dots up like a kids’ picture book until they made constellations, made pictures, made sense of the world and where to go.
Imagine meeting someone who - somehow, you guess, because you can’t ever know why - can read you like a star map.
Jesus. She’d use a fountain pen too.
She flicks a finger at the screen, pointing. “There’s no rule against this.” Her head turns to Ess like an owl. “In the sense that - there’s no danger here, right? To MiB? They are two people, and they met. They still don’t remember.”
He blinks at her. “No-oo,” he says slowly, in two syllables, as if it’s a rhetorical question.
“And we can’t see any evidence of foul play?” she asks, then pauses, then carries on. She remembers the management training course she was sent on and resets her tone. She’s a good analyst. It doesn’t need to sound like a question when it is a statement of fact. “Nothing orchestrated this meeting.”
Ess’s expression clears. It’s like he grows three sizes. “Nope,” he nods confidently. “Just regular old chemistry.” Bee wants to snort. Understatement of the century. Chemistry like the Big Bang, and the hydrogen and helium and gold that keeps the universe glued together.
Still - things spring into existence when you really mean them, and when two random things collide together particularly hard. CERN could learn a thing or two about the building blocks of life from all of this. So when she moves to the action bar on top of the alert she takes a deep, meaningful breath.
“Then it's no one’s business but theirs. Alert acknowledged,” she nods. She slams her hand down on the space bar. The window resolves, tints green and minimises. The buzz of a job well-done buzzes in her hindbrain. “No threat.”
A pause. There aren’t many of them, here, with the constant chaos, the world-endangerment and the brain-breaking level of stress. By consequence they tend to read as foreboding, rather than relaxing, and generally speaking she’s not all that much of a fan, but maybe she should take the win, every now and again. Maybe the quiet sounds like possibility. Maybe it could sound like people just staring at the stars.
“Ess,” she instructs, with the air and grace of someone requesting the doomsday clock be reset, shooting for Idris Elba and probably landing somewhere near Bill Pullman. Her colleague looks at her solemnly but with a little smile on his face, the sort that means he’s coming to kind of like the pedestrian rush of being stuck here too. “Tear off today’s cat.”
Then she opens the Williams Sonoma website, and orders them the stand mixer.