Five Thoughts on Five Additional Mission: Impossible Episodes

1.) The Proctor

“The Frame” originally broadcast on January 26, 1967. Directed by Allen Miner and written by William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, the episode finds the IMF working to thwart a gangster organization. What makes this mission impossible is that these gangsters, known as the Syndicate, somehow exist outside the reach of the law. Therefore, the IMF must set it up, in a Rififi-style heist, in such a way they sabotage themselves from within.

She would secretly take the tests herself after they had finished. Every day, people, so many people, most of them men, passed through the administrative complex, forms in hand, needing to take an aptitude test, compensating for their nerves with a confidence that bordered on arrogance. They disappeared into the booth, sometimes for close to an hour, and when they emerged, they looked like they had just walked away from a car accident.

It took nothing to re-spool a film strip through one of the unused machines in the back before she returned it to the shelf. The other girls at the complex never noticed her absence. Originally, she told herself it was her duty to take these tests, it would help her better serve as a test coordinator if she understood what these people were going through. There were dozens of different tests for dozens of different jobs. The questions were easy, the answers self-evident. She thought about the people who requested these tests, how they filtered through the people barely on this side of competency. Eventually she stopped telling herself she was taking the tests for professional purposes; she just wanted to see how much faster and more accurate she was than the actual participants.

None of the other girls cared much about her. They were all too happy to allow her to work while they smoked cigarettes and flipped through magazines. She wanted to tell them they worked in a place full of knowledge and betterment, a place to make more of themselves, but, like the other city girls behind secretary desks and left deep in the typing pools, those girls who professed to be free and independent and modern, her co-workers’ dreams were of the suburbs.

“Leave her to her tests,” they would say after she left the room though still loud enough they knew she heard them. “Not like it will do her any good. Not like they’re going to come down and give her a job out of the blue.”

The other girls got together for drinks and dancing on Friday nights. She was never invited. This didn’t bother her since she preferred to spend the evenings in her small apartment where she wrote about the people who passed through the complex every day or tore her way through a paperback. Despite what the others thought about themselves, she knew she was the only one who had something that was near independence, an actual self-sufficiancy.

One day, a large man came into the complex. He wore a coat that was too heavy for the weather, the weight of it made his gait slow and methodical. He didn’t look like the usual slew of participants, seemed like he had stepped inside more out of curiosity than anything. Years were etched deep into his face and she noticed his eyes darted around the office, absorbing every detail.

“May I help you?” she asked. “Do you know what test you need to take?”

“I am not here to take a test,” he said.

“Oh. That’s fine.” She flipped pages on her clipboard. “Generally, companies will ship the tests to us. However, I should have the paperwork around here if you’re dropping something off. Please give me a moment.”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “I was hoping we would have a word together, miss. In private.”

Her first thought was that the other girls had been wrong, someone had noticed her aptitude. Yet, she never submitted any of her answers and threw away the papers when she finished with them. She knew there was no way anyone could have learned about her responses. For a brief moment, she thought she may have accidentally posted her own test rather than a participant’s, but she also knew she was too thorough and deliberate to do that. Then, she feared one of the other girls had talked to someone about her secrets attempts, ratted her out. Regardless of how much the others disliked her, she didn’t think there was any reason they would bother to go through with that. She took on a stoic, serious expression. “Of course,” she said. “If you would follow me.”

She took him to the archives. Huge, aluminum filing cabinets were stacked almost to the ceiling, labeled in careful code and painted a lackluster green. They absorbed the tap of her heels and the steps from the man’s shoes. She hoped he hadn’t noticed the exit in the back. They were far from anyone else and was was unsure if she would need to make a quick getaway. She directed him to the desk where they filled out paperwork and motioned for him to sit. He sunk into the chair with the weight of the world. He prepared a cigarette and she slipped out of her shoes when his attention drifted.

“There’s no reason to be so tense, miss,” he said. “I am here only for a conversation.” He beckoned her to take a seat. Smoke curled around his face.

He told her about how they had been watching her. He handed her a car and told her that he worked for the government. For months they had been watching and taking note and now his superiors decided she was exactly the person they had been after, someone they could trust.

“Trust to do what?” she asked.

“Observe,” he said.

He told her how the administrative complex gave her access to all kind of people, especially people from other places of the world, working to integrate. “And not for the American dream, either,” he explained. He wanted her to watch and write down her observations, then submit a report at a locked box at the end of every week.

“What am I supposed to be on the look out for?” she asked.

“Miss, I feel you, of all people, will know it exactly when you see it.”

And so, she dove into the job. It was hardly any different than how she went about her business already, except now she typed her writing and shoved it in a box down the street for the man’s operatives to pick up. She burned the typewriter ribbon at the end of every week. At first, she wasn’t entirely sure what to look for. The directive was so broad she found no focus. Soon, however, she began to notice people’s odd quirks and behaviors. She thought some of them tried too hard to be present. The other girls teased her about being out front so much more frequently of late and she told them since she already mastered all the tests, she needed to find something else to fill the days. She had nothing to prove. She knew they trusted her beyond all doubt.

Several weeks later, after she amassed a novel’s worth of material, she received a summons to meet the man, her handler, the phrase of it, the idea of it sent a shock through her system, in the park. Initially, she was somewhat disappointed: the scene felt too much like it had been pulled from the movies, but she assumed they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work.

She found him under a gazebo eating a sandwich. Dozens of people passed around them and none of them paid enough attention to what was going on to notice her approach. She had to fight to keep looking forward, to not get lost in trying to figure out all their lives. Her handler remained indifferent, almost passive. For a moment she thought he hadn’t noticed her, until she came closer and he reached into his coat and pulled out a paper-wrapped bundle.

“I brought you a sandwich,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “I already had my lunch, though.”

“Check it anyway. Make sure it is something you like.”

She took the sandwich and unwrapped the paper. Tucked inside between the bread slices was a film spool, itself wrapped in places. She quickly folded the paper over again.

“Yes. It does look good,” she said.

“Let’s take a walk.”

They went down a path by the river, when cyclists whizzed past and other strollers lingered. A jogger in short shorts and tall sneakers whipped around her. Her handler continued eating his lunch, wiped mustard from the corner of his mouth.

“In a short time,” he said, “a man is going to come in for a test. His name is Briggs. You’ll know it’s him because he will immediately pull water from the cooler. When you see the, load up that test.” He nodded, so imperceptible and subtle she almost missed it. “And then leave.”

“All right.”

“When he’s finished, dispense of the reel. You also need to make sure the machine he takes the test on is taken out of commission. We’ll be in contact again shortly afterward.”

“I can do that.”

“Good girl.”

“What does he look like?”

“Don’t worry about that. Pay attention to the name and behaviors only. It is imperative this is delivered to him and only him.”

She stood on the lookout for several days. She decided to hide the film strip in plain sight, in a white box nestled between several other infrequently used test strips. She paid extra attention to the men who came in, was in such a look out for codes and behaviors the other girls intensified their teasing, said if she was finally going after a husband, there were far better places away from these imbeciles.

Finally, paperwork for a Mr. Briggs came across her desk. Briggs, a square-jawed man in a dark suit with a fluid, skipping gait, met her at the water cooler. She strung up the reels and tried not to watch him too closely.

“Are you Mr. Briggs for the aptitude test?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. Pleasant. Friendly.

“Right this way, please.”

She directed him to a room and then made herself scarce. Somewhat scared. Just around the corner. She wondered what was so special about his test, about what was being revealed to him. There were times over the past several days where she had to fight the urge to run the spool herself or thought about unwinding it and seeing what she could follow against the light. She was sure they would know when it had been played, so told herself she would check it only after this Briggs had finished. If she was involved with something, she figured it was at least her right to know about how deep it went.

Before she had a chance to settle down, Mr. Briggs emerged from the booth. He was about to head for the front door. She couldn’t believe that was it, all that work, all that waiting for a few quick minutes. Despite herself, her curiosity getting the better of her poise, she rushed up to him.

“Mr. Briggs, are you finished already?” she asked.

“Yes. I’ve decided to stay in my current line of work,” he said.

And then he was gone. She didn’t have time to process, he was simply gone.

She rushed into the booth. Thin whips of smoke billowed out of the testing machine, swirled and curled around the screen, the reels now melted plastic which had seeped between the spool and eroded the inner mechanics of the machines. The stench of burn plastic and hot metal weighed heavy in the booth. She could only stand staring at the busted machine for a few moments until she finally hung an Out of Order sign across it.

On her document, she noted what time Briggs had arrived and how long the test had taken him. It felt so empty and trivial when she wrote it, though she couldn’t shake the look on Briggs’s face as he left the administrative complex, his determination and vigor. She wasn’t sure what to do next, so he continued as she had been doing, observing and document and amassing files on the people who continued to drift in and out of the building, and she left her files in the usual pick up locations. They accumulated. She kept writing. At the end of every week, she fished out some of the envelopes she had dropped off earlier to make room for her new sports. She threw the old ones, the ones with outdated information into the furnace at her apartment. She looked everywhere for signs of her handler, thought she saw flashes of him in the crowd, along the side of the road, but, it appeared like she had finally been left out in the cold.

2.) The Proprietor

“The Diamond” originally broadcast on February 4, 1967. Directed by Robert Douglas and written by William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, the episode finds the IMF stopping a tyrannical dictator from expanding his reach. What makes this mission impossible is that the IMF must accomplish this by depriving him of his source of income, a giant diamond he commandeered from a local tribe, and returning the rock to its original owners.

Thomas Fergason had been in the game for a long time, long enough to watch former allies turn into current enemies, long enough to hold objects in his palm that used to take up rooms, long enough to know the mission was never truly completed. Once he had been a field agent, sussing out secrets, trailing shady individuals down dark avenues, holding clandestine rendezvous to trade information. Now he was stationed at the autograph offices, where he conveyed messages or shuttled agents. Days went by, weeks, months between visits, all of them triggered by a secret code phrase.

Such as what happened with the young man the other day. He was cool and confident, determined to serve his country, although Thomas suspected the young man had no clear definition of what service meant.

“I’m looking for an authentic Franklin Roosevelt,” he had said.

“I have several,” Thomas replied.

“I want just the initials F.D.R. in his own hand.”

“They are hard to get. I only have one. It’s on the fly leaf of a book. Would that be acceptable?”

“If it’s in ink.”

They watched each other intensely through the conversation, listening for the taps, the lifts, the phrasing in the conversation. The agency, it never mattered which one, went through all these elaborate ruses to deliver their messages. Thomas believed it wasn’t entirely in the interest of nation security; more so they could see how many hoops they could force the agents to jump.

“It is,” Thomas said. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do in the back.”

The young man waited until Thomas had closed the door before he pulled out the tape recorder hidden in the desk. The man’s superior launched into one of the usual debriefings, muffled and incomprehensible through the walls. Thomas tried to place the voice, concluded it must have been someone who joined up after his time. In the times he did actually contact HQ, when an emissary wouldn’t do, the offices were filled with so many fresh faces he didn’t recognize, all with so many new approaches to counter-espionage.

He was kept around partly out of respect for his legacy, in recognition of his years of service, of closed missions and partly out of a need to keep an eye on him. It didn’t happen often, but it seemed like the traitors were always former patriots who failed to grasp how the world they understood had changed and secretly hoped they could return it to something more palpable. Not that Thomas had ever been anything but loyal and efficient, not that he had ever given them a reason to doubt their trust. Still, that couldn’t prevent them from putting marks in his file, especially after one of his last major missions, one he wasn’t aware he was involved in until the very end.

*

It had started when agents began to turn up dead in the field or had been disappeared, agents deep undercover, so long gone only they remembered their agency. They had been shot in the streets. Throats slit in a back alley. Grabbed in broad daylight on their way home. Immolated in a fire bomb. The usual escape routes, hidden passages, and underground tunnels were flushed out and guarded by factions of secret police inept at keeping themselves secret. Everything about these deaths felt too convenient, too planed, and too organized, and an air of distrust permeated through the agency. At the same time, the higher ups decided that this strings of failures were a result of their division leader, Oldman’s, lack of direction, an overall incompetent authority. Oldman was dismissed while unseen directors handled the office operations until the desk could be filled again.

Shortly after his dismissal, Oldman invited Thomas to his house for dinner. The lived alone on the dying side of the city, the place filled with books and worn furniture used so much it lost any semblance of cushioning. They held their plates on their laps in the living room, the radio tuned to a standards station. Mostly, they talked about books and school memories.

“Something never sat right about the whole thing. With the office, I mean,” Oldman said abruptly. “Murky details all around.”

“Is there anything you’d like to do about it, sir?”

“Me? I’m certain I could, but I’m not going to do anything. I plan to enjoy my retirement, Thomas. Finally read all these books,” he said. He cut his meat, speared individual pieces of his vegetables. “But that doesn’t stop the fact that something doesn’t feel right about the whole thing. Perhaps you could help me find answers to some questions. For curiosity’s sake, of course.”

“Whatever you need.”

Following Oldman’s dismissal, a gap, a vacuum, a vortex had opened at the office, and there was no shortage of men who wanted to fill it. This included Thomas’s colleague, Voight, who had been a member on several teams for several operations, had moved up parallel through the agency. He was appearing far more frequently in the office those days, naked staring at the empty desk where Oldman used to sit.

“Field work is fine,” Voight told him. “Yet all this time, all we’ve done is assemble information. Imagine what we could do when it comes time to sort it all out, process it.”

“Most likely get bogged down in the details,” Thomas said.

*

Letters started to arrive at agent’s home from anonymous senders, addressed to their real names. Reports came in of missing agents’ bodies being thawed out of frozen lakes or found rotting in some far-off wood, naked tree limbs reaching toward them. The office grew quiet, worried. The receptionist kept a pistol loaded and hidden underneath her desk. She reached down and clutched it whenever she buzzed anyone in.

“It has to be coming from the inside,” Oldman told him. Thomas again found himself in Oldman’s study. He had been wandering the shelves, pulling books out at random and turning them to different pages. Oldman drifted over a map and a chart, tapped a pencil against his bottom lip. They were part of a massive board game he was playing against himself and he pushed the plastic figurines across the table. Thomas had found himself being invited to Oldman’s far more frequently of late and although Oldman told him they were not going to discuss the agency, the conversation always seemed to end back at it. Thomas knew he was being used for something, that Oldman wasn’t as retired as he wanted to let on, but he couldn’t figure out how he fit into all of it.

“You’re spending a lot of time over there,” Voight said once, trying so hard to be subtle he could not have been more obvious. “What do you talk about all the time?”

Thomas shrugged. “The books he’s been reading. His games. Recipes he’s  attempted.”

“Nothing about . . . the office?”

“No.”

Voight busied himself. “How’s the food? He getting any good?”

“He’s not setting the kitchen on fire. In any meaning of the phrase.”

*

Thomas noticed someone had started to follow him. The tail was good and for any other agent, they probably would have gone by unnoticed. But there was a flash of shadow to the side, a glint of alien movement that caught Thomas’s eye. Thomas wondered whether his tailer actually believed they were effectively following him or if he was being sent a message that he was being watched. It had been years since he had gone into the cold, yet his name undoubtedly had appeared on some list or another…. He considered bringing this up to Oldman, whose game Thomas still struggled to put together, but thought that maybe Oldman was behind it as well.

*

Rain came pouring down, falling in long, heavy, painful threads. Everyone paused for a few moments before they stepped outside, bracing for impact and pulling their collars up high. Thomas passed through the puddled avenues, crossed the streets where water free-flowed in long rivers. The rain’s assault was deafening and he lost sight of his tail on a few occasions. He backed off, gave the guy time to catch up. Over the last few days, he had tried several methods to learn the tail’s identity, and all of it turned up empty. He finally decided his best option was to lure him out.

Thomas led him through a park, paused to be certain the tail caught a glimpse of him, then turned into a tunnel. The tail ran through the heavy water when Thomas vanished out of sight and was about to sprint past the opening when Thomas leapt out, yanked him inside. He lay his palm across the tail’s mouth. Water flowed over their shoes, rushed from one end of the tunnel to the other.

“Ssh, ssh. There’s no one here but you and me,” he said. “Pull yourself together. I have questions.”

“Ferguson, you fool. It’s me.”

Thomas stood so close to the tail, had moved so quickly he never had a chance to distinguish his features. He stepped back to study the man he grabbed, lost his composure for an instant, for a second as he registered who it was.

“Voight?”

“Get off me.” He pushed Thomas away. “Yeah. It’s me.”

“What are you playing at here?” Thomas asked.

“They’re following me, Ferguson. They’re after me. You’re the only one who can help me.”

“Who’s after you?”

Voight adjusted his collar and fixed his coat. He pulled a cigarette out from a pocket and blew a thick plumage of smoke in the other direction. They almost had to shout to be heard over the drenching rain.

“How much have you told Oldman?”

“About what?”

“About anything.”For

“We talk about books. Food. Games. He doesn’t bring up the office.”

“Why are you covering for him?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Christ, Fergason. Haven’t you put the pieces together yet? Don’t you see what he’s been doing all this time? To you? Don’t you think it’s suspicious the names of people who keep getting killed?”

Thomas scrambled to figure out what to say next. Vought had started to rant and was losing his narrative thread. He paced back and forth in front of Thomas, kicking puddles of water in front of him.

“They’re the old guard, Fergason. The people who had been with the agency since . . . well, the beginning. Long enough they’ve had time to go truly undercover.”

“Are you suggesting Oldman had them . . . killed?”

“Exactly! Exactly! Now you’re starting to get it, Fergason. Now you’re starting to see the whole picture.”

“Why would Oldman want that? There’s no motive behind it.”

“Because they could identify him. Because they could see what he was doing in his missions for the enemy. How he was turning them in, making it so they would be set up to take  fall. With them out of the picture, no one would be at all wise to the other things he was doing. Traitorous things.”

For a minute, Thomas believed him. He had forgotten Voight’s almost envious desire to know what was happening around the office, he had forgotten how he had his eye on Oldman’s old desk, not caring who noticed him, he had forgotten how many days Voight had followed him down the street, actually thinking he was being clandestine and effective. Yet, as they stood there in the tunnel, the rain cascading down so thick it was opaque, everything came back to him.

“It was you,” he said.

All the questions. All the disappearances.

“You’ve been filtering information overseas.”

The fascination with intelligence. The constant lingering around the offices.

“You’ve been setting them up. You’ve been undermining them.”

Had he been followed to figure out his involvement with Oldman or was it that Voight was trying to get him out of the picture?

“Don’t be insane. I’m married to this job,” Voight said. “To this country.”

“And yet, you’ve been fickle, Mr. Voight,” someone said. The voice echoed down the tunnel’s stone structure.

At the other end of the tunnel, dressed in a soaked and heavy raincoat, surrounded by other agents, stood Oldman. He was not a tall man but he nonetheless filled the entire tunnel mouth. Thomas felt Voight’s poise drop in an instant.

“You’re far too predictable,” Oldman said. “Tell me. When you conducted your secret investigations, did you choose to follow the double-agent handbook or do you simply not have an original thought in your thoroughly unoriginal mind?”

“W-what do you mean by that?” Voight asked.

“Oh really, Teddy. You’re honestly going to make me go through all this? Do you delight in causing people inconvenience? Very well.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Ahh, but haven’t you?” Oldman said. “Haven’t you been sneaking into the files in my office when you thought no one was looking? Do you not have a secret P.O. box where you drop off the information you’ve thought you’ve found?”

“I haven’t done anything,” Voight said.

“And then trying to pass the blame to Mr. Fergason over here? To me? What a series of odd choices, Teddy. Honestly, I almost respect its lack of flourish, its failure of imagination.”

Voight’s mouth hung open, reaching for words, for a response. Thomas thought he was close to choking, but Voight didn’t seem capable of moving. Meanwhile, Thomas still tried to wrap his head around Oldman’s accusation, tried to picture Voight in conversations with foreign agents. They had done so much together, had been trained at the agency together, had gone on numerous missions together. Thomas never doubted Voight would step over him in an effort to garner a better position, but he couldn’t imagine him selling their agents out to the people they worked against.

“I asked you several questions, Mr. Voight. I have not heard a single response as of yet,” Oldman said.

Voight took off running. He yelled something but it was absorbed by the rain, though Thomas thought he heard “traitor” and “coward” being thrown backward, although he thought it was possible that was only him projecting. Oldman came to stand next to him, bored and drenched, wiping his face with a handkerchief. Together they watched Voight make it a few yards before other agents positioned across the park intercepted him. Everyone disappeared behind the cascading torrent of rain.

“You just wish there was more imagination with these moles,” Oldman said. “It’s all so . . . procedural.”

He clapped Thomas and the back, adjusted his coat, and stepped behind the rain curtain and out of sight.

*

More information came out over the next several days. Oldman, Thomas leaned, had never actually stepped down, had in face been put in charge of leading the mole hunt because the identities of the of the murdered and threatened agents were buried so deep they could only have been unearthed by someone digging from within. Someone without the highest clearance, maybe, but still had the ability to poke around where they didn’t belong. They set up Oldman’s old office as the bait, spread the rumors of its opening within certain channels, and simply waited for the mole to reveal themselves. Oldman used Thomas to gather information, to lay out the pieces, find a grasp on the inner-office politics.

“I was hoping it wasn’t Voight, actually,” Oldman told him later. “Not because I have any interest or compassion for the man, but he was far too obvious. I wanted a challenge with this operation. Instead, all I got was routine. Thus it goes sometimes. Thank you for your assistance, Thomas, my boy.”

Thomas nodded and stood back to watch the fallout of Voight’s actions play out over the next several weeks. Uproot one mole and a whole family of them emerge from the den. The arrests and dispositions passed by in a daze as Thomas worried both about what he ever told Voight and what Voight might be saying about him in an effort to save his own skin. He knew hold Oldman kept trust yet he had no idea if that trust actually extended to him, and the ultimate prospect of having to maintain that trust felt both exhausting and insulting to his tenure.

So, he requested a change. They moved him to the IMF, where he was set up in the autograph archives. It had been like that for years, away, removed, on the other end of the action. And, unlike so many of his contemporaries, Thomas Fergason was allowed to get old.

3.) The Custodian

“The Legend” originally broadcast on February 11, 1967. Directed by Richard Benedict and written by Mann Rubin, the episode finds the IMF thwarting yet another attempt by the fucking Nazis to re-launch the Reich. What makes this mission impossible is that the person claiming to organize this horde of trash, this force of frivolous individuals, this cluster of humanity’s waste products, has been dead for quite some time, leaving desperate individuals attempting to fill the stage and pull the strings. (Lucky for the IMF, all the people involved, everyone they’ve targeted, is an idiot.)

He used to be a pilot. Every night, he flew thousands of feet in the air, high over enemy territory, and sent sonar waves down toward the earth. They, a group of people he had never met who issued orders he never questioned, used the information to identify secret bases and hidden missile silos. As far as he knew, they did nothing with the information, merely marked it on a map and kept the area under surveillance. He preferred these missions to the ones where they rooted out enemy pilots who were attempting similar actions. Those got too wild, too chaotic. On some of those missions, he never fired a single round, too afraid he might accidentally hit one of his fellow pilots.

But this, the intelligence gathering, this he enjoyed. Alone in the highest reaches of the atmosphere, traveling so fast that sound couldn’t catch up to him. Here, the sun outlined the clouds with unimaginably vivid colors. Here, the aurora borealis wrapped around his plane, tendrils bringing him in for a tight embrace. Here, the moon beamed in the darkness, a beacon that kept him steady. Up here, he kept the radio off — it was too high a risk to communicate with the ground, too strong a chance messages might be intercepted, so when they needed to contact him, they did so in code, through basically a telegraph — and could zone out, lose himself in his thoughts, allow himself to let himself relax fully, here on the border between earth and space.

It shocked him, then, when the other plane appeared.

He was somewhere north, where the ice left crystal mosaics around the edge of the windows. Stars spread above him, so close he could pluck them from the sky. The machinery on the place ran automatically and he was about to ease into his meditative trance when he felt a shadow pass over him.

Immediately, he tensed up, took complete control of the aircraft. He strained in his seat, tried to locate where that strange motion had come from. He activated the weapons systems, which weren’t much on the stealth plane but at least offered him more than flying blind.

The sky seemed empty.

A cluster of clouds came together, churned and billowed and swirled, blocked out the rest of the world around him. The shadow crossed over the cockpit once again and he banked to the side just as the other aircraft rose from below. He swerved, tilted back and forth. His pursuer settled behind him, in an aircraft sleeker, faster, and more nimble than his own. It buzzed, a wasp. It fell into position and opened fire.

He tried to use his usual evasion tricks. He flung his plane through the sky, whipped the throttle back and forth. Bright bolts from the enemy’s guns lit up everything around him, curved away as he tilted in awkward angles. Despite his training, despite the maneuvers he had run so many times they were second nature, he could not find an advantage on his pursuer. The other pilot had him locked in sights and it was only a matter of time before one of those deadly bolts pierced his plane’s hull.

The clouds grew thicker, darker. Lightning flashed inside them. Turbulence rocked his plane, knocked loose items off the cockpit dashboard. The other plane remained latched to his tail, unleashed torrents of gunfire. Enormous globs of water sprayed against the glass and he had to fly by feeling, knowing his location only by the occasional lightning flashes.

He felt the other pilot almost reach him. He felt him get caught in his drift, closing in, inching in on his tail. He wasn’t sure what to do next when a lightning bolt severed the clouds, cracked and snaked through the sky. It connected directly with the fuselage of the other plane. The engine ignited and it blew into millions of pieces devoured by the storm. The lightning bolt ricocheted off the enemy plane and hit the wings of his own, with much less force and power, though the engine still sparked behind him and the controls lost their tension. His plane tipped forward and he plummeted toward the ground.

He burst out of the clouds over a dense forest. Trees whipped by underneath him, and he tried to keep the plane steady over them, tried to remain level but the engine strained against him and the tree tops knocked him askew. Two trunks ripped off the wings, putting his fuselage into a free fall glide, suspended in the air, covering several miles in panicked silence, scraping by those massive trees until it came crashing down in an open clearing. He could only brace himself in the cockpit, could only wait for that inevitable moment when he would be ripped from his seat.

The plane dragged for several dozen yards before it came to rest against another tree. A long scar traced its path through the woods, torn up and ripped apart by the landing.

He allowed himself a beat to let his head settle then pushed and shoved and punched his way out of the cockpit. He fell on his back, blinked a thousand times, until his vision stopped shaking and the world fell back into focus. The storm had already moved in the other direction, flashes of white light to remind him of its power, behind the smoke and debris from the accident that choked the sky.

Once he caught his breath, he managed to roll himself over and approach the cockpit. His legs didn’t work right and he tripped a couple times, pulled himself off the ground covered in cold mud and leaves. he pushed forward, found a wrench under his seat, and smashed the dashboard controls until they were unrecognizable. Then, he flipped a series of switches beneath the seat. Hidden electronics sparked and flared and popped. Smoke billowed from the melted systems. He took a ration bag and ran into the woods as well as his legs could carry him. He didn’t stop running until he saw nothing more of the plane.

*

Eventually, he came upon a small town built around a river. Only a few of the buildings stood more than a story tall, which made the houses and other structures look like quaint cottages from a distant age. A few streetlights jutted above everything, emitted a faint yellow glow through an oddly shaped lantern that barely reached the ground. He kept to the shadows, ducked between buildings until he found the phone booth behind the post office. An automatic light burst on inside, spotlight him in the dark.

He inserted a few coins into the slot and punched in a quick code. After hours spent running through the forest, trying find his way between those thick trees, the electric light was so blinding it split his head apart, its hum so bellowing it rattled into his bones. The telephone buzzed while the call connected and he was sure the entire town heard it.

“Operator,” the voice on the other end finally announced.

He identified himself  by his code name, his voice cracking and shaking as he tried to recall the call signs. He thought he saw a shadow move in the distance and pressed himself into the corner of the phone booth. The receiver buzzed with the hum of a thousand secured connecting wires, until at last a brisk, deep voice answered on the other end.

“Go,” it said.

He didn’t recognize the voice but there was so much turnaround in upper management it was easy to lose track of handlers or who was in charge of what. He tried to explain what happened, forced himself to remain calm while he recounted the attack and the crash, telling himself to take a breath, to pause for a moment. It got worse, his voice, the longer he went on without the person on the other end responding back. By the time he was finished, his face was wet and red, his throat clogged with phlegm.

“Quite a story you’ve got there,” the voice said. “Not to mention an interesting code you gave us. Are you aware the age of the code? How long it’s been discontinued?”

He told them that was impossible. He had received it when he disembarked. They had just given it to him.

“So you say.” The voice paused, dragged on a cigarette or took a sip of a drink. “Tell me, what did you do with our man? The one from whom you found the codes?”

He told them he was their man.

“Is he still alive? Do you have him locked up somewhere? Did you take him out back and put a bullet in his head? Let me explain to you that the United States does not tolerate aggression against our people, unless you are prepared to be met with further aggression.”

He almost screamed he was their people, he was from Nevada, he had been in the Air Force since he graduated high school, recruited after his deployments. He was dazed. Shaken. Nothing the voice on the other end of the phone said made any sense. He said he wanted extraction. He had been in an accident and had no idea where he was, except somewhere up north, though he’d been all turned around. He asked if they couldn’t trace the phone.

“You’re at least right about one thing, comrade.”

A hole appeared in the glass of the phone booth. He heard something whip by, fast and high pitched, a whistle. Another crack came a second later and the entire front panel of the booth collapsed and shattered. He ran out still holding the phone receiver. It yanked him backward, out of the way of another bullet which impacted the post office brick. He ripped the receiver from the call box and ran, not sure where to go, focused only on finding shelter in the trees.

He didn’t have time to think about what had happened. In the back of his mind, buried deep, questions about the debriefing from earlier, the unrecognizable voice on the other end of the telephone, the track he should have seen coming, kicked around. There was no time to explore them, his attention fixed on the tree line while the bullets continued to whistle past him.

*

They arrived in long, dark silent cars. They emerged from the wood-bordered roads and slipped into town. Their headlights had all been shut off. Their tires crunched on the ground. He watched them from atop a slope as they pulled into town.

Agents stepped out of the cars to better survey the area, square men in matching suits and wide-brimmed hats. Occasionally, the ambient light cast a glare off their pistols, flashed at him hidden behind the tree. He watched them approach the phone booth, inspect the damage, and make silent gestures to one another. They moved in a precise choreography, fanning throughout town, making their way down the narrow, car-lined streets. It wouldn’t take them long to look toward the woods, and she knew he had to keep going. Yet there was something about them, something about their cars and their suits that held him in place.

The cars resembled no car he had seen before. There were semblances of the usual machinery coming out of Detroit but the bodies were more angular, squared, and hard. No gentle curves or rounded edges, these were box on wheels. And while he couldn’t make out many details of their suits from his vantage, the cuts seemed wrong, the lengths were odd, and everything about them felt off.

He was so fixated, so caught up in these details, he missed the agents come together again and turn toward his direction. He watched them move yet didn’t register the motivation until one of them rose his arm and a tree nearby exploded in a fury of wood splinters. It shook him out. He ran, not sure of the direction as long as it was away from town. Silent shots punctured the air, the trunks around him, pummeled the trees, thudded into the ground, some far off and distant, others only inches away. He carved a wild and random path, anything to keep them from getting a firm lock on him.

He climbed a slope that turned into a hill that became a cliff face. He never noticed the change, carried forward by his momentum.

Up the cliffs, over the rocks. He didn’t look down, didn’t want to know how close they were to him, didn’t want to think about exposed he was up on the cliffside.

He pulled himself over the ledge where he met with the night’s wide expanse, the aurora borealis flickering and flinging uncomprehendingly blinding arrays of blues and reds and magentas. He almost could reach out and touch the individual beams. So bright they lit up the entire area. He knew he should keep running, knew that he needed to find a place where he could sit down and think for a minute. Figure out what to do without people shooting at him. But the lights were hypnotic; they made him forget everything that led him to that moment.

One step at a time, gradually, slowly, he walked forward. Into the light. He was sure up ahead he could see the source, a pure white beacon that held all the colors of the universe inside it. Ahead of him, a portion of the air shimmered and wrinkled. It was like shards of glass that had been glued together again. Through it, hazy and distorted, he saw the other side of the cliff face in an inverted image, a replica of the world he currently inhabited.

Behind him, the pursuing agents finally made it over the cliffs. They stopped, braced themselves against the lights. There was no other way but forward, he thought. Before they could figure out what to do, he approached the wrinkle and slipped through.

*

His life became a series of trips through laboratories. Doctors shone light into his eye that were pale imitations of what he saw on the mountain peak, connected him to massive machines that took up entire rooms, and pumped strange medicines into his system. Question after question came him way. They told him he had come out of the mountain, hypothermic and hysteric, claiming the code was good, the code was good. They told him they had searched the area for his downed aircraft, but had turned up empty-handed. This, although they found remnants of the plane on his person and the face his body suffered from trauma following a crash. He tried to give his report, but nothing he said, they said, added up.

More than that, teams had scoured the area and reported they had seen glimpses of a charred and destroyed area, the remnants of a fuselage under investigation by people in oddly-shaped suits. They went to look again and found nothing was there. A trick of the light.

He was questioned. He was berated. Someone deemed him unfit to fly any longer. He was reassigned, told to push the cart, to leave messages around, orders for other agents. He didn’t need to think for the job but could stay somewhere they could grab him if needed. He could move from place to place and let his mind return to the lights.

4.) The Photographer

“The Confession” originally broadcast on February 25, 1967. Directed by Hershall Daughtery and written by William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, the episode finds the IMF working to expose the assassin of a US senator, whose beliefs adhere to a sort of porto-Trump populism. What makes this mission impossible is that the IMF believe the senator wasn’t killed by the people authorities claim killed him, which means they must expose the assassin and root out a conspiracy before the United States feels guilted into turning up the heat on the Cold War.

Every once in awhile, these sharp-dressed, hyper-focused men appeared at the photo lab. They were quiet men with stern faces and rigid postures that got under Hersch’s skin. Rarely did they say hello. In fact, when he went out to greet them, these men who always seemed to want to go to the darkroom, they seemed uncomfortable he was there, in his own shop. Hersch wanted to ask them what they were doing, what brought them in — wasn’t it his store and therefore his right to ask questions? — but they were all so much bigger than him and their gazes were more intimidating and after all it wasn’t like they were hurting anything anyway. He assumed one of the assistants had set them up while he was at lunch or locked away in his office.

Truth be told, Hersch would have rather remained in his office anyway. The best part about running the photo lab was that all the latest gear and equipment passed across his desk. Nikons and Pentaxes and Canons and Minoltas. He wasn’t sure how they conjured such technological magic over in Japan but he dreamed of one day touring their facilities in order to find out. Hersch told himself it wasn’t like he could simply allow this stuff to go out on the floor without making sure he knew how it worked first, could he? How else would he describe the various equipments’ merits and abnormalities to his customers? Was it not his duty to be informed? He kept a doll house in the corner of his office, taken from a niece when she outgrew it. Here, Hersch staged model figurines in numerous poses and positions to test out the new gear. These figurines, he found, bore more patience and, let’s be honest, fortitude than actual models. They allowed Hersch the film to find the exact right exposures.

Earlier, a new batch of Rolleiflexes had arrived. Updated lens, more shutter speeds. Additional light stops. Hersch suddenly found the dollhouse too confined and limited for the pictures he wanted to take. He needed something wider, more expressive. Wild, even? This idea came to him of taking his equipment and his figurines, no . . . His models, to the pond in the park to see what images he could create there. He got anxious, excited, irritated that he let the girls go to lunch, leaving him alone in the shop. Hersch imagined people looking at the pictures he would create that day and say, “Gee, Hersch. You really have an eye for this stuff,” and he would only nod, allow them to keep talking as they processed his work.

So he packed his equipment and his figurines, no wait, his models and waited for his assistants to return so he could rush out. All for the better of the shop. All to show the customers what these cameras could do.

Hersch, at the front counter, flipping the latch on his case, watched people pass in front of the shop. They moved in a blur, their bodies smeared out behind them, the details and sharpness of their faces softened and distorted. He allowed himself to fall into the rhythm and sway of their movements, set a metronome by his case latch. In this way, Hersch barely registered the van pull up on the sidewalk across the street, a boxy lumbering thing with a faded paint job, smeared windows, and dirty wheels. Nor did he understand what the men were doing who poured out of it, three big men in bulky clothes that made them looking bigger and wide-brimmed hats pulled low over their eyes. Hersch didn’t understand what they were doing until they burst into the shop, fanned out, one of them pulling down the blinds, another sliding the door’s deadbolt into place, and the final one rushing toward the counter.

“Hey. We’re still open, gentlemen,” Hersch said.

The men said nothing. One of them was on him then and he pulled a hood over Hersch’s face. The world went dark. Hersch felt an abrupt jab of pain, a sting, and the rest of it dropped out.

*

Hersch came to in the back room. He was tied to a metal chair, cords wrapped around his chest, his arms pulled back and bound together. There was a throbbing sensation in his stomach, one he found more confusing than painful. One of the men, the one who rushed him behind the counter, sat across from him, leading his chair against the wall, rotating his hat in circles between his legs. The other two tore apart the backroom. Hersch winced at the sound of crashing shelves and dropped bottles and spilling liquids. There was the unmistakable shriek of film being yanked out of something and he hoped someone hadn’t just lost their precious memories. He didn’t think the store would survive if word got out they couldn’t develop a roll of film without an issue.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Grant,” the man across from his said. He had an odd accident Hersch couldn’t place, except to say it wasn’t local. “We’ve been wanting to talk to you for quite some time.”

One of the other men emerged from the back, trying to shake off a strip of film that had wrapped around his body. The third man wasn’t far behind. It looked like he managed to spill some chemicals on himself, the front of his jacket and his sleeves stained in an array of colors. Neither said a word, merely shook their heads as they continued to untangle themselves.

“Now, I am hoping we have a pleasant visit, Mr. Grant. We are only looking for information.”

“There are plenty of places that offer photography classes. I’m sure I can refer you to one of your liking,” Hersch said. “You’re not going to learn anything digging around back there. It’s only storage.”

“No, Mr. Grant. We are not looking to attend classes,” the man said. His voice had dropped an octave, turned chilly and short.

“I’m confused then,” Hersch said. “Was there a mistake on your order? Did some of your photographs not turn out how you expected? If it was a problem on our end, I’m happy to reimburse you. I’ll even throw in a couple extra rolls for free, with full apologies from the store, of course.”

“Very cute, Mr. Grant. But there’s no reason to maintain this act.” The man across from him started to flip his hat between his palms, spun it on its axis so quickly Hersch was almost hypnotized. In fact, he might have lost himself if he hadn’t been able to get over the ugliness of the hat, years out of fashion, uncared for, and light resistant. Not in the slightest bit photogenic. “For instance, the skip ahead, you should know that we have been watching your store for several weeks now and, during that time, we’ve noticed several known agents who regularly work against our country —”

“Ah! You’re foreigners. I couldn’t quite place your accents, you see. Obviously, you’re from out of town, but I was thinking something more like Tennessee. Foreigners. Yes. That makes much more sense,” Hersch said.

The man across from him froze, his face tightened and Hersch heard him grating his teeth together. The other two men exchanged looks Hersch couldn’t read at each other.

“Yes. Anyhow,” the man across from him said, deflated but not ready to give up. “Several agents, several known agents, have been seen coming into your shop, Mr. Grant —”

“Hersch.”

“What?”

“My name is Hersch. I have no idea who this Grant is you keep talking about, but it’s not me. Is it possible you’ve confused photo labs? If so, I think I would like to send this Grant an invoice to cover damages.” After all, Hersch thought, relieved, it wasn’t his fault something had happened to their pictures, nor was it fair that his store had to bear the brunt of the damages, all because some new camera shop whose proprietor clear didn’t know the first thing about what he was doing.

“Whatever you call yourself, we want the names of those people who visit your shop and we want the messages they’ve been sending through you.”

“Oh no. Nothing like that goes on here.”

“You don’t seem to understand. We’ve seen them, Mr. Grant —”

“Hersch,” said Hersch.

The man continued talking over Hersch’s interruption, all the while growing redder and redder, globs of sweat beginning to bead at his temples. “We’ve watched them come and go. They are enemies of our country and they must answer for actions they have taken against us.”

“If they’re enemies of your country, wouldn’t that make them friends of mine?”

“Do I look like I give a damn? I want answers, Grant —”

“Hersch.”

“Whatever the hell you’re calling yourself. The names!” He slapped Hersch across the face. The impact landed with a dull thud. Again, Hersch tried to process the sensation and found himself lacking.

“The only names I have are those of my assistants. I keep them in my office. But they are confidential, sirs. I could get in a lot of trouble showing them to you.”

The man across from him motioned to his other associates and they approached Hersch from either side, hoisted him up by the armpits. This hurt more than the man’s slap but Hersch thought if he complained or said anything, they would make this experience far more unpleasant. They dropped him, chair and all, through the building, practically threw him on the ground inside his office, where they immediately spread out, closed the windows, and dug through his cabinets and drawers.

The man who interrogated him took a seat at Hersch’s desk. He yanked open the drawers, riffled through them, and tossed what he found in the middle of the room.Glass cracked, plastic snapped, and each time a jolt shot through Hersch, like they fractured part of his soul.

“For the longest time, Grant, I thought you were a formidable agent. A legend,” the man at his desk said. “Yet look how easily we have apprehended you. And only within a few minutes, we will possess everything, all the information you’ve guarded so closely. All that you’ve worked for will be for naught. Your legacy will mean nothing.”

“Well, how is that supposed to make me feel?” Hersch asked. “What am I supposed to do with that information?”

“For such a high-level opponent, you’ve proven remarkably easy to break, Grant.”

“I”m not this Grant fellow, fellows. At the risk of rising your ire further, I would like to point out you’ve been the only ones here to break anything. My things.”

“I’ve found it!” one of the men said. “I’ve found the list.”

The interrogator sat straight and rigid in Hersch’s chair and waved for his associate to bring the paper to hi. Hersch couldn’t think of what list of Ames he kept in his office and strained to see it, too. The man across from him seemed pleased with the names, however. He smirked and whipped the paper in front of him.

“You see? Our observations proved meticulous.”

Hersch had to adjust his glasses by bouncing them against the bridge of his nose. They had steamed up from the stress of the situation and it took a moment for the words to reform, come into focus.

“Why, that’s just a list of people who dropped off slide film,” Hersch said. “I don’t have the equipment to develop it here, so I send it off to a friend. It ought not to be too long now before those pictures come back.”

“You think we cannot see this is a code, Mr. Grant? Do you not think us capable of cracking an American code?” the interrogator said. He paused, considered. “While maybe none of us present are able to do so, rest assured or government has the best code breakers in their employ. It will only be a matter of time. Meanwhile, yes, I must thank you, Mr. Grant. You’ve helped point us in the direction of our next target.”

Carefully, methodically, the man across from him folded the note and tucked it into his pocket. Hersch realized, then, he had no idea what they planned to do with him next. Obviously if they were so quick to tear apart his storage room and office, they wouldn’t think twice about doing anything violent to him. He realized he probably should have tried to call for help, should have tried to do anything to keep him out of this predicament, although the truth of the matter was that he had no idea why he was in that predicament to begin with. He wondered what this Grant person had done to them to set them off. Hersch wondered how he might stage the scene. In their haste, the intruders had shuttered the windows and barricaded the doors. Would it not have been much more interesting if they left one of the windows open, allowed for a beam of light to pass through? And they should all have been smoking the entire time, cigarette smoke reacted so wonderfully to film, did so much to set the mood.

Hersch was so busy thinking about all this, he missed the interrogator’s instructions. One of the other men, the one with the stained clothes, waited for the man across from him to pass before following him out the door, leaving Hersch alone with the third intruder, who came to stand next to him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pistol. The sight of it immediately grounded Hersch in place. It was heavier, grittier than the prop ones he had seen. Louder, too, when the third man cocked back the hammer and leveled it at Hersch’s head….

Hersch waited. He closed his eyes and braced for the impact, wondered if he would feel a thing, wondered why he hadn’t seen his life flash before his eyes like they always said. Nothing came. Silence filled his office. Hersch opened his eyes to find the pistol still leveled at him, but the third man seemed to be thinking about something else. He studied his clothes, made gestures with his hands like he was taking measurements.

“Splatter,” he explained.

What could Hersch do but nod, as if it made perfect sense, as if he wasn’t staring down the end of his life?

The third man stepped back, leveled the pistol, and stepped back again. He couldn’t find the appropriate angle, the distant that would leave the least amount of mess. He kept going backward and backward, not paying attention. Hersch planned to warn him about the dollhouse, not because he suddenly grew concerned for the third man’s safety, but because he couldn’t stand to think how his niece would react if her dollhouse was crushed. The man stepped into it before Hersch formed the words. The wood split, splintered. It threw the man off his balance and he wanted caterwauling backward, arms spinning and desperate. He felt into Hersch’s office window, right through the glass. It shattered in sharp sheets, slit at his neck, lodged into his head. Blood shot out in a long jet stream, slashed the office walls in a clean stroke. The third man slumped in his seat, gurgling, choking, in pain and shock.

Blood had splattered across Hersch’s face. He felt it running over his skin, staining and coating him. He stared at the scene in front of him, his face open in disbelief. The third man slumped over, pale, cold, his blood soaking into the carpet, glass jutting out of his body in a series of mini spires.

“They’re going to blame me for that,” Hersch said.

He had to think of a way to let them know, the men outside, the authorities, whoever, that none of this was his fault, it was all out of his control. The evidence, however, was damning. Incontrovertible. No one would believe this wasn’t his fault, not without hard proof.

But Hersch, you fool, Hersch, you imbecile, he thought, you own a photo lab with plenty of equipment that would help you prove your innocence! The pictures would show that he had taken no part in all this, the pictures, he thought, would reveal everything. And wouldn’t you know, he had some cameras prepped and ready to go just outside, the ones he planned to take pictures with in the park.

“What a morning,” he said.

Of course, he remained strapped to the chair. Yet, the chair was not tied down and Hersch found if he hopped, bounced, he could actually move. This only worked when he went backward, so he had to keep staring at the third man’s body as it deflated and seeped out onto the office floor. The whole ordeal made him dizzy, though he managed to reach the door to his office.

Outside, the other two men waited, the interrogator and the one with the stained jacket. They smoked cigarettes and periodically checked their watches. They greeted Hersch with abject disbelief when he came hopping out, the chair legs scraping the concrete floor. The interrogator’s cigarette fell from the bottom of his lip. Hersch didn’t see them, at least not right away, too busy looking for where he left his bag. Once he was at the door, he hopped and spun the chair around. He froze when he faced the other two men: he had almost forgotten they were there.

“Son of a —” the stained jacket man said.

He reached into his pocket and yanked out his own pistol. Before Hersch had a chance to react, the man leveled it at him and pulled the trigger. The gun popped, the sound finally enough to snap Hersch into the moment and he ducked back, his chair toppled over, while the man continued to fire round after round. He missed how the residue and gunpowder caught the assassin’s sleeve, soaked, caused the chemicals that coated him to ignite, sending the man into a pyre of flames. Hersch did hear him yell and scream, saw the ceiling turn a bright orange blast, and felt the heat fill the room.

A moment later, the interrogator, the final man, appeared above him. With a quick slash, he severed Hersch’s bonds and hauled him upright by his shirt collar.

“Indeed, you are much more formidable than I gave you credit for, Grant. Maybe I should bring you in with me, see what else you’re capable of, no?”

He shoved Hersch forward, through the store, over the smoldering embers of his compatriot, and into the daylight outside. No one turned to them, no one said anything although here was this man shoving Hersch across the street, toward the van they had arrived in earlier. This was life in the city, unless it directly impacted them, no one cared.

The final man ripped open the van door and practically threw Hersch inside. The seats had all been removed and the back was littered with various junk and debris and exposed vires. They had covered the floor with a worn mat. The final man slammed the door before Hersch could protest.

He hurried around the side of the van, quaking, angry. The final man paused to light a new cigarette, his hands trembling so violently the flame kept blinking out.

Hersch heard tires squeal and an engine rev, but thought it nothing more than another layer of the city’s sound, some hot shot teenager in a car too fast for them. He noticed a car come screeching around a corner through the rear window, saw it weave in and out of the rest of the traffic. People leapt out of the way as it banked suddenly to the side. It collided with the van. The world spun. Hersch toppled head over heels, wishing he had a seatbelt or something else he might grab. Ambient light strobed and flashed through the windows, continued to spin even after everything settled and went still. Hersch couldn’t begin to describe the position he ended up in, but at least nothing felt broken.

Slowly he untangled himself. He heard a great deal of commotion outside, sirens and people screaming, chaos and confusion. The door to the van open and a sharp-dressed, hyper-focused man appeared at the threshold. He smiled at Hersch, nodded at him like they went way back. Behind him, Hersch thought he saw one of his assistants, but with everything double-exposed and dropping out of focus, he couldn’t say for sure.

“Mr. Hersch,” the sharp-dressed, hyper-focused man said. “Allow me to help you out of there.”

They carried Hersch to an ambulance, pushing through a crowd of people surrounding the scene and the store. He thought it would be good for business if the business wasn’t currently in the process of going up in smoke. Maybe when it was all said and done, when the insurance checks were cashed, he could cash in with a grand re-opening, if people’s memories stretched that long. He saw the final man pinned between the van and the speeding car.

His assistant appeared at his side — it was her!, he thought — as he was loaded into the ambulance.

“Sorry it took us so long, Mr. Hersch. They really did a number on you, huh?”

The sharp-dressed, hyper-focused man stood next to her. “Don’t worry, Hersch. We’ll take care of everything.”

“Focus on getting better, Mr. Hersch. We’ll have it back to normal by the time you get out. You won’t even know anything happened.”

She looked like she was going to say something else, but the medics slammed the ambulance doors closed. The siren wailed and they took off. Hersch hoped no one thought he had done any of that. He wished he had taken those pictures.

5.) The Shopgirl

“A Cube of Sugar” originally broadcast on April 1, 1967. Directed by Joseph Pevny and written by William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter, this episode finds the IMF rescuing a secret agent from enemy clutches. What makes this mission impossible it that the agent’s been carrying a microchip. He memorized its contents before he was arrested and now the enemy operatives are torturing him, breaking down his mind until he gives up the answers. And they are getting dangerously close to succeeding.

She could see colors beyond comprehension. These hues and shades of various intensities no one else understood. As a child, she tried to recreate these colors, with all their vibrancy, with all their saturation, for her parents. In the days when the nightmares wouldn’t stop. In the days when she couldn’t walk outside without being bombarded by this invisible array of light. Her parents were never able to see what she was talking about: they thought she had developed a mutation, like in a comic book. Instead of finding themselves in a high adventure or blessed with a sudden special life, they were only scared — scared for her, scared of her. When she got accepted into that New England boarding school, they were too happy to see her go.

At school, they embraced her. They helped train her eye, focus her senses, filter through and compartmentalize all those colors. First there were the glasses, followed by the contacts. Eventually, her mind reoriented itself, and for the first time in her life, she saw things in balance.

They trained her to find messages, instructions. She never knew how they wrote them or how they were able to create the color, but the instructions appeared throughout the city. Initially, she followed them because that was everything available to her. Deliver this. Find that. They put her into the real world, stationed behind shop counters, seated at park benches. Move here. Trust that man. Give him that recording. She found it easier to follow the instructions than question them. Interactions with other, with normal people, came off weird and awkward; she saw the same look in their faces that she had seen in her parents’. So she followed along, not knowing what else she could do.

There were gaps in her memory. Long gaps. Deep gaps. She spent a lot of time waiting around and she tried to piece her life together. Memories dropped off, faded out and dissolved like she was watching a movie. She would be walking down the hallway at school, then suddenly be at a diner, eating with her classmates. She might be walking along the river at dusk then come to in a bus riding downtown. She attempted to make sense of all this, got so caught up in trying to fit the pieces together she sometimes missed seeing the messages.

And then, one day, on the wall of an alley behind a deli, written in a color different from her usual missives, she saw a message: You have questions. She looked around for any sign of the writer, looked around in vain. It had never occurred to her that she questions, but now, with it declared so boldly in front of her, they took form at the front of mind. A few days later, in a different part of the city, she saw another message in the new color. We have answers. A tease. A taunt.

She was called into the central office, she remembered going, but not much after that. She resumed roaming the city, looking for the usual directions, all the while searching out that new color, not sure why she was keyed into it, but drawn toward it regardless. Eventually, she came upon a message in the new color scrawled across a bathroom door. Find us, it said.

Tell no one.

She knew there was more than that one message. She knew she had encountered more than that one message. She tried to piece memories together and her mind was hazy. She set out across the city, following any hint, any shine or glint or indication of that hue. People follow her. No one she saw, but people she nonetheless felt. She moved fast, didn’t stop. Ate from street vendors. Slept under bridges. The messages appeared with far more frequency, although they were no longer words, now mostly symbols, sometimes obvious ones such as arrows pointing her into underground taverns decoration in luscious red curtains with jagged yellow accents, sometimes abstract clues that led her to the darkest parts of the city. Occasionally, she came across messages from her school. Report back. You will be labeled an enemy agent. No mercy. The further she got along, the easier these were to ignore.

She had been following patterns in a tunnel when some of her old handlers caught up to her. They appeared at either opening, boxed her in, contained her. They said nothing but one pulled out a pistol while another snapped a long binding cord. It had been so long since she had directly encountered another person, she wasn’t sure they existed. Questions overwhelmed her mind, flashed in an array of colors. Once the handlers approached, however, the world went red.

Crimson red, powerfully bright. She lost sight of everything around her. This red hummed. It buzzed. She felt it vibrate and quake as if it attacked. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t form coherent thoughts. The world cracked and shattered and her handlers were dead all around her.

She threw up in the gutter. She braced herself against the concrete to keep from collapsing. Gradually, the colors dropped out, became normal shapes and figures, and she saw there, at the other end of the bridge, a new group of people, a different group of people. At their head was a woman with red hair that touched her shoulders. That new color backlit her, surrounded her, spotlit her.

This woman held her hands up in peach. Slowly, cautiously, the woman approached her, the colors around her excited and erratic but not malevolent. The woman bent down and pushed the hair out of her eyes.

“We have a place for you, too,” she said.