That was the point that I shifted into a more efficient way of understanding this work. For I’d once again become exhausted by the sheer demand. Activity had increased yet my stamina had not.

One part wanted to do as much as possible but the other side of me was only able to work within the limits of my physical body. The dossier had indicated contacts I could reach out to when the going got tough, but I was frankly surprised that it had come upon me so quickly.

In only a few days of this assignment I found myself overtaxed. Now part of it was that I was unwilling to give up all that I had been doing in order to devote myself totally to this effort. Instead I tried to do everything and was not managing well. Now time management wasn’t the issue on a daily basis, the issue was time linked with emotion. Emotion management was the real key.

I arranged an appointment but nothing could be done until Thursday. All I could do was wait. During the wait time I explored past research and went to HQ library and database to find out all that i could about Project Wunderkabinett. There I found an earlier document that I myself had been involved in putting together. It was an outline for a proposal for PW but without the details I’d seen in the dossier. I wondered if any of this early proposal was reflected at all in the current mission, and looked closely at the earlier material. It looked like it had been warehoused right after it was submitted, datestamped and rejected. Why had they kept it? I knew that all sorts of research proposals were streaming in each year, and I’d seen them being shredded in the back. This one had been kept in the document archives warehouse. Someone must have been interested in it.

While waiting for my appointment, I looked into the past of the organization, to find who had been involved and who had been responsible for the work, particularly the archivist. I finally found her name in an old email list, of course the email address no longer was active as the whole group had moved into an encrypted privately managed message service.

It didn’t take long to find her whereabouts, and on a particularly cold and wintry day I just went to her row house on a tree-lined side street. The trees were bare, and the door had been painted and repainted many times over. Ringing the bell, I shifted from foot to foot, it had been a long walk from the subway.

Dyed red hair, open superblue eyes, glasses, she exuded a feeling of harrassed kindness as she let me in. Stepping over a large cat who was reluctant to move out my path, I followed her to the warmth of her kitchen.

“So what’s all this about?” she asked as she poured me a cup of coffee so strong that the cream sank to the bottom. Through the archway to the living room I had a glimpse of her own archives – the floor to ceiling shelving, stuffed with document files, vertical periodical holders, loose papers, yellowed edges peeking out, books piled on books. I turned away and tried to answer her.

“I’m working on a mission for Project Wunderkabinett,” I began.

She looked shocked. Her eyes brightened and she looked at me even more intently, so I continued. “It seems there was an earlier version of this project proposed by a team in the past. Normally these are shredded, but I saw that for some reason, that early proposal was preserved. Now, I was part of that early group, so I recogized the paper when I was in the archives. I,” and here I stumbled on my words,because I realized I actually had no idea why I had come to her, “I … just was wondering why this wasn’t shredded and thought you might be able to tell me.”

Putting my head down, I took a sip and waited for her to speak. There were no sounds coming into the room from outside, and it was as if we were the only two people in the entire world.

She nodded, then looked in my eyes intently again. “Back in those days, you might remember, things were very different for us all. I was one of the originals, you know, the main team. But after the investors realigned our direction the pure research was more or less abandoned.”

“I remember that time very well. I’d just started after finishing my training, and was looking forward to being deeply immersed in the work. That Wunderkabinett proposal was my first team project and we really believed it would go somewhere.”