The Harp Incident-11

The first fallout was that a lot of heretofore secret information had to be revealed, warts and all, to the public. The Squids--The Order--were by no means a Johnny-Come-Lately organization. We had to screw the Establishment to get this out because public knowledge of Squid deeds would be good for the population and the Establishment in the long run, even though many Establishment players and institutions would get hit or destroyed in the short run for reasons both fair and foul alike. The technologies that they produced, kept secret by Squid agents in Establishment institutions, had to be released and spread far and wide so that other long-term threats both to the population and to the Establishment could be readily sorted.

We had to provide information, albeit through cutouts, to public inquiries such as various Congressional committees as well as to their many state-level counterparts and even to many media outlets. Interviews, presentations, and many books had to be rushed out the door; fortunately we had a lot of friends and assets in place to handle this, which meant that not only did we have the chance to vett what we released beforehand but that we also turned this into something that allowed us to generate the necessary revenue required to keep our operations going. All this technology, top talent, and so on doesn't pay for itself you know.

Our people watching for alerts from our other enemies--and we had more than the Squids--also put in their work as they watched distinct patterns of interference symbolizing actionable intelligence that we could investigate. We found out about the reality of many other enemy organizations in the Great Game by watching for these things; this would lead to Epyon's rising through the ranks, and also to the proliferation of super-soldiers as well as other augmentive technologies necessary for otherwise ordinary operatives to be able to compete with them. A new arms race in the shadow world, which would ripple outward into the mundane world, broke out as fallout from this incident.

This also meant that the Agency had to reorganize. We couldn't return Epyon truly to the shadows; like the comic-books that he resembled, and took cues from, we had to recognize that Epyon could be a covert operative but never truly secret and that meant forming an entire department around him and those would come in his wake. When we needed something done, and we could afford to be noisy about it, Department Epyon handled it here on out. Several agents I knew--but none of my team--would transfer over to this department because they were more like him in temperament and would be far better for the Agency there than where they were.

But the biggest change to come would be the revelation that there was a proven, ready-made power technology that made fossil fuels pointless; oil remained a thing due to plastics and other polymers, but Big Oil fell over and died overnight once the patents hit the Internet and immediately got spread throughout the world, especially in the Darknet where fools could not touch it. That was a hard call for Control, but it proved to be best; it screwed a lot of enemies out of key advantages. Those transmitters required power production and transmission far beyond what was heretofore allowed to be known; now that the real limits of such technologies were out there, the geopolitical game shifted away from the Middle-East and the oil-based global economy. Yeah, the Establishment was not happy with the end of the petrodollar, but the new technologies allowed that shift to be a soft landing and the new economic system relied on a balance of major currencies--U.S. Dollar, Euro, Pound, Yuan, and Yen--which held out for the rest of my days.