"A black hole in his soul?"
"A self-reinforcing memetic attractor, if you prefer. Plot it in semiotic space and it looks pretty much like a Kerr–Newman metric. It twists space into time - it becomes your future. And our analysts report that mapping it feels like staring into an infinite abyss. Usually in their suicide notes."
"Self-contained then?" The woman's voice was full of emotion randomly overlaid by her vocoder.
"No. We had to kill some of our people before they passed it to others; it always ends in suicide but not before distribution. If it left containment..."
"Why not kill him then?"
"You know why."
The woman sighed. His AR glasses decided to hide the gesture from his view. "I agree with your assessment. This looks like a weapon. Did one of the foreign agencies finally catch up with us? I'm saying "catch up" to maintain some semblance of dignity."
"We did the forensics and tapped our moles. No. This comes from none of them. I wish it did. The implications would be terrifying but that was the sane scenario."
"What's the insane scenario?"
"He has reported daydreaming about... things. Entities. Human but not human. Semiotic space natives."
"Semiotic space natives."
"Imaginary people convincing enough to think on their own and want to - I don't know. Become real, maybe. Or revenge. I'm not trained to parse that sort of mind. In a hypothetical scenario in which they existed."
"Once again: semiotic space natives."
"I know how it sounds, I'm just telling you the little we dare to analyze of what he says, and that's even on the other side of long chains of linguistic filters. He says they built the black hole inside him."
"So he's insane. That doesn't get us closer to an attribution."
"Not unless we take him seriously."
"Are we? Taking him seriously?"
The man shrugged. "Somebody built that thing inside of him."
"Dan. Am I going to start daydreaming about those things?"
"We believe that part is just normal self-suggestion."
The woman looked at the locked cabinet where she kept the mandatory suicide pill. They were trained to use it if they believed they were under a successful attack. She knew he understood what she was thinking. That was their job, their skill, their problem.
"I don't know," said the man. "Tell me what you think after you have talked with them."
There were no guns in the building they weren't allowed to leave. Otherwise he wouldn't have said that.
She said nothing and pretended — pretended she could pretend — to not notice the subtle pull of his words.
(Originally posted on my blog.)