While I was going over my notes, I felt unsure about where to go next. They were all over the map and I didn’t find any clear directive to open the mission.

It wasn’t okay that I was so scattered, and I had doubt about just who it was in the organization that had sent me the dossier and I began to wonder if it all actually even existed. I was aware that there was a very good chance it wasn’t at all the organization I’d trained in, and I was wondering if the dossier was legitimate. Yet I’d visited the warehouse, spoken immediately with the archivists there, and also had a tour of the new HQ. Nothing to raise my suspicions. Yet a paranoid persistent doubt came into my mind whenever I tried to pin down just what this thing was about. And why was I involved?

The identity test the rogue archivist had given me, if she really was a rogue archivist, or perhaps an actress or a plant of some sort – well that test seemed to come back positive because I had another knock at my door.

A courier, with another dossier. I signed for it and took it easily into the kitchen and laid it out on the table, beside the first one. The package had the same official insignia, and the same stamp and seal. Addressed to the old name, Noala Naomay, the one I’d worked under. The name used in the first dossier was another cover name: Donna Wardell. Okay, that’s a start, I thought to myself. I’m being addressed as I was back in the day, when I was an active agent.

Memory flooded my mind, as I recalled the agents for the outpouring of love. I remembered it all so clearly, the last meeting when we were all together.

“You are going out into the field for the last time, and it can be a poignant moment for us to pause and reflect on our sacred mission.”

We glanced at one another, for no one had been prepared for this talk at all. We were under the illusory impression that this was to be our graduation prep. meeting, and we were planning the party together. Instead it was a stern lecture, with a dark undertone. Our main instructor was flanked on either side by her two best assistants, and the twelve of us were sitting in a semicircle on those ubiquitous uncomfortable but affordable folding chairs.

They turned off the lights to show a projected video. Like an airline instruction before takeoff, the film was called Welcome to Deep Cover, and our roles were outlined almost like cartoons. At first we snickered to ourselves but then became more sober as we realized this was dead serious.

We were all to go into deep cover and forget we had ever been at HQ. In fact, they were no longer offering backup or any support. According to them we didn’t exist. Their last act was to provide us with iron-clad cover identities, destinations, homes, jobs, roles, and background.

After the meeting we ate cake together, a large sheet cake with the words “Best Wishes Graduates” written in pink gel, and we stood like fools holding paper plates and eating cake with plastic forks. Bewildered and shocked. I put my cake down onto a chair and went to the washroom where I promptly threw up, wiped my face,and returned to the gathering room as people were getting their coats and saying their goodbyes. The team leader, our instructor and the assistants had already left, and I knew I’d never see them again, except in my memory or imagination. Our class had been efficiently dispersed with instructions that we not tell one another our new cover names, or our destinations or really anything at all. Hugging, crying, looking into each others’ eyes, we were being kicked out and sent away.

There was something in the cake, a kind of forgetting drug, that by the time we left the room we really had no idea what we were doing there. Everyone looked into their backpacks and bags, finding phones and other stuff related to the new selves, and bonding to it immediately. Somehow there had been a suggestion, a strong influential suggestion that we were to immediately take on that new identity, without memory of the old one. And we all did. The other suggestion was that we had never met before, and found ourselves in the wrong hallway with strangers. And we all did.

But because I’d so nervously thrown up a lot of my cake, I wasn’t quite as dazzled by the situation, and my own actual memories were battling with the suggestions. I had to give in to the suggestions, but in dreams and other times of emotional intensity I would flash onto the earlier identity – like a recurring dream of a past life perhaps.

So seeing the package with my original working name of Noala Naomay on it was a profound deja vu that I immediately recognized as a buried truth. The clues would come in faster now, I sensed them waiting for their moment. It came as an exhausting flood of the entire being, my childhood, not the false childhood, my teen years, not the false teen years, my friends and family, not the false substitutes.

All came into my mind through my heart in waves so breathtaking that I was gasping, choking and shaking, breathing as best I could through the waves, as if I were giving birth. Why had I been brought into the mission, and removed from the deep cover? I had an emotional stake in this operation now, and they knew it. They knew me. Who were they? I felt that if I followed my intuition and brought out all the clues to the Project Wunderkabinett, I would find out exactly who they were, and what their purpose was.

I speculated of course. They were the secret second of the old HQ and were rogue and renegade, which is why they survived the purge. They were from another planet and were observing and gathering information. They were time travellers from the past or future who were helping to save the world. Whatever they were, I felt they were good and benign and I wanted to find them, work for them, be their person who perhaps even alone is the hero to their unspoken story.