The Agent

 Villains, don't we all love to hate them? I know I do, sometimes I like the villain over the protagonist, like the Joker, good guys can be boring sometimes. My prompt today was to write the perfect villain, a difficult topic because the perfect villain has to be the antithesis to the hero I believe. If you have a big buff hero like Superman, his antithesis has to be big and buff like Doomsday. If you have a powerful, intelligent and cunning meth cook like Walter White, then his villain has to be as cunning, smart and powerful as he is, if not more, like Gus Fring. 

For this assignment I give you a preview of a book I'm working on, currently called Project Fields [Working Title]. A space adventure novel about a cybernetically enhanced woman named Joan Fields on her quest to find the elusive ship known as the Arkamus. Her adversary, The Agent, is also on the same quest but how they intend to use the Arkamus differs. This is the beginning of the prologue of her story.

            It wore his skin. It knew his memories and knew how he felt about each and every one of them. His graduate research, STRESSFUL. Meeting Jamie, NERVOUS & JOYFUL. His first termination, SHAME. Marriage to Jamie, LOVE.  Earning his PhD, even though it took him two years longer than average, PRIDEFUL & CONFIDENT. Receiving an offer from the pristine Zeta Corp, EUPHORIC. It knew everything about the skin he wore, even all of its secrets from the one time he got drunk and slept with another woman, REGRET & DENIAL, a secret he kept to himself, to the location of the most confidential project the Corps ever worked on, surpassing awesome planetsidal force of the warp bomb, the Arkamus.

            It had no name, but was given the nickname The Agent by its employers, but presently it was known only by the skin it wore: Howard “Howie” Darren Gibson PhD, a junior physicist on the Arkamus project. This skin didn’t allow it to access the Arkamus directly, but was only another stepping stone on the long path to fulfill its purpose. The Agent had 5 days, fourteen hours, thirty-two minutes, and nine seconds until it could move onto another host, a limitation of its own hardware; fortunately it was built for patience. Before Howie it had spent a full 180 hours, seven-and-a-half days, inside Howie's beloved Jamie’s body, before that the body of her father, and before that a bell hop at the hotel he was staying at, and another body before that one, and another; each a stepping stone towards its ultimate goal, which was just one stone away.

            The Agent was making Howie’s routine walk of the MZ 324A station to his office. This was his first day back on the job after taking time off for Jamie and his much belated honeymoon, due to his busy life style and secrecy of the project he hadn’t been able to see Jamie in months. Now he was back in the station, and everything was going according to The Agent’s plan.

            “Welcome back Howard,” an older looking man said greeting him in the corridor outside his office, Dr. Moore. The Agent knew that Howe hated that name, and no matter how many times he told Dr. Moore, it was something only reserved for his parents. But more importantly Moore was the senior project manager for Howie’s team, and had the correct clearances needed to access the Arkamus directly, the final stone. “Enjoy your vacation?”

            “You bet I did,” The Agent said for Howie, “and I made sure double for my wife. If you know what I mean.”

            “Ah that’s right, it was your honeymoon wasn’t it? Where did you go?”

            “'Finally your honeymoon' you mean,” The Agent said swiping his ID into the slot, “three years is too long to wait. We went on an interstellar cruise across the Scorpio Sector.”

            “I remember my time in the Scorpio Sector,” Dr. Moore said. They both stepped through the door into the office.

            “You’ve been there before?”

            “Oh yes, it was many years ago. For a Mega Corp project actually, unfortunately I can’t tell you what it is still, and that was twenty-six years ago. Ha, maybe you can say the same thing about the Vespar Sector and this project twenty-five years from now when you’re a senior director like me.”

            “Yeah,” The Agent said, “and the stories I will tell.”

            Patience may have been a part of its design, but in less than a week Unity will be within its grasp, and nothing would be the same again.