Ken Poyner

The Particularly Able Agent

 

 

Heed well, my fellow contrarians.

 

This new agent has only been on the job for the last month and a half, and already he is doing as well as a year’s seasoned veteran.  He made quota for just his third week at the job, and exceeded the next week’s target by ten percent. Quite some doing, given the outrageous and unreachable quotas the Bureau intentionally sets.  His superiors are taking notice.  There is talk already of his being quietly moved to a more fertile district, one where he can spread his talents liberally into more dark corners and rounds.

 

No one likes to say it about so new a man, but he appears to be going places.  He seems to have the knack.

 

It is not that he works much harder than his mates.  Oh, he puts in a goodly amount of effort; but, like anyone, he wants to maximize his take-home prize while conserving his involvement.  The real danger lies in the principle angles of his imagination.

 

It was he who thought of swimming pools.  Yes, someone else would have come up with the idea sooner or later - but he hit on the find almost as soon as he had his dot-collection ledger.  Hotels that have an international clientele mark their swimming pools at the shallow and deep end in both English and metric depths, and seldom are both markings in whole numbers.  Three feet is zero point nine meters.  That stranded decimal is available to be harvested by the roving dot collectors.  Pull out the dot, scoot the nine a little to the left, and the zero point nine has become zero nine, and into the dot collector’s bin goes the dot.

 

Five feet is one point five meters, and so, if the pool is internationally marked, there is yet another dot.  One point five is rendered one five, and a captured dot.

 

For a while, only he was collecting these pool dots; but word of good hunting gets quickly around, and, for all he did to hold the lucrative secret, someone followed him or recognized the reason some of his dots were damp or simply imagined his method from his success, and the new class of collection got out.  Dot collectors showed up everywhere, a copy of the Dot Collection Ordinance folded into the gray, official Ordinance presentation leather case, and away with the dots they went.  From the large resort hotels, to roadside over-nights that had pools inelegantly jammed into their parking lots - all have been relieved of their dots, or are in the process of being inspected for non-whole number depth markings and the accompanying presence of dots.

 

It was, at first, surprising that it might be the relatively new worker who came up with this bumper unharvested location.  After the Ordinance was passed and the Bureau of Dot Removal was ruefully yet efficiently configured, new ideas were fast and direct.  One zero zero dot zero zero became one zero zero zero zero.  A hundred dollars could be mistaken for ten thousand, if one did not remember to adjust for the transmogrified ordinal spacing. St dot became mere St.  Sentences became distinguished not by their endings, but by the capitalization of their beginnings.  The many places where a dot might hide were catalogued, and soon after the more long-winded planning discussion of their effective collection began.

 

Yes, a new idea is comparatively rare – in part, no doubt, because there are so many known forests of available dots that prides of agent dot collectors concentrate on the details of gathering all the members in any one class, instead of moving from diverse target to diverse target – interested in the plenitude targets to event blindness, working towards the total extinguishment of some specific species of dot.

 

Given the agents’ laser-focus, it is surprising that the dots in this threat-notice yet survive.  They could be overlooked in a general, all-encompassing cull – but, with some collection agents purely focused on collecting the end of sentences, we have had to take our practiced Herculean evasive measures in order to keep our warning sentences properly ended.  We have to spirit our notices and effects, make invisible our charters and minutes, become ghosts when we faithfully document our resistance.

 

So, in this notice, we herewith raise the alarm for this new, chillingly effective, dot collector.  In even his short career, he has exceeded his quota too often.  He has plans and recognition and imagination, and his outcomes eventually are shared, willingly or not, with other practitioners of his ridiculous craft.  Given time, he will at least marginally improve the entire greedy workforce of dot collection agents, possibly think his way into the Means and Methods division, gain a warm place for the unabated breadth of his fancy.

 

Who knows?  Perhaps it might be he who finds a logic to seal the so far unaccepted argument that commas are simply lazy periods, thus ersatz dots, and thus should be gathered under the anti-dot ordinance.  Perhaps he will imagine a mathematical proof that a hyphen is a time-shifted dot, or a dot with a slur – who could suffer such coiled thinking? - but an imagination such as his might bend the matter of the logic around. We have cause to think he is special.  We have cause to think he is an evolution.

 

He must be stopped.  We must write of him a short and ended history. He must be the target of our efforts to maintain the dots remaining amongst us.  He must be done.

 

Period.

 

 

After years of impersonating a Systems Engineer, Ken Poyner has retired to watch his wife of forty+ years continue to break both Masters and Open world raw powerlifting records.  Ken’s two current poetry collections (“The Book of Robot”, “Victims of a Failed Civics”) and three short fiction collections (“Constant Animals”, “Avenging Cartography”, “The Revenge of the House Hurlers”) are available from Amazon and most book selling websites.  Visit him at www.kpoyner.com.