{"sf1_id":2113472,"sf2_id":"Rnor9yYm","title":"Pokerface","author":"spacewastrel","words":1605,"posted_at":"2024-03-10T23:39:52.000Z","tags":["Atheism","BDSM","Chameleon","Character Development","Christian","Colorshifting","Covers","Desert","Fragmentation","Headmates","Identity","Lie lying","Masking","Noir","Paganism","Philosophy","Plural","Prism","Quicksilver","Reptile","SFW","Sea","Short Story","Sibyl","Transformation","Transgender","autistic","jungle","martial arts","mercury","polyamory","postmodern","psychology","spy","spying","trans","truth","tundra"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/2113472-pokerface","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/Rnor9yYm","image_url":"https://cdn.sofurryfiles.com/submissions/thumbnails/86/68/86682498-685f-4f15-ab7a-ede1f8252b2e","description":"\"The liar's curse is not that he can't be believed, but that he can't believe others.\"","content":"I still remember the first time I lied.\n\n \n\nI never lied as a child. I'm autistic – it's anathema. It's not that we can't or won't lie, if push comes to shove. It's that, for most of us, we'll always avoid it whenever we can and, when times force our hand, there's always a secret part of us that resents it. When you tell the truth it's easier – you don't have to keep track of all the lies you told, that's what I used to say.\n\n \n\nNow I'm a spy.\n\n \n\nI have to say that, over the course of my adult life, I've had to learn to keep track of quite a lot indeed. It kind of comes with the territory, working as a spy as I do. You don't last very long in the spy business without a serious knack for impression management and all it entails. And yet – to this day – part of me _does_ still resent it, all the way down.\n\n \n\nThe _easiest_ lies to remember are the ones with an _element_ of truth, of course. That's where it gets _interesting_. From birth, we mask. Oh, you might say it's not quite from birth, we're not _nearly_ as good at it for the first decade or two but we learn, we watch. We _watch and learn_. When what you feel isn't socially acceptable, it all comes down to your game face. Play it close.\n\n \n\nMasking isn't _quite_ lying, even though there's an element of _deception_ to it. It's considerably easier, for one thing, and we tend to have a lot more practice at it, for another. In some ways I have been training to be a spy all my life, even though I didn't think of it as this at the time. What does it mean to mask your identity when you don't even know who you are in the _first_ place?\n\n \n\nI'm plural.\n\n \n\nEvery spy has _covers_. You're Joe Bob in Jungle, Jane Doe in Desert, Dana in Tundra, whatever gets the job done, right? It's supposed to be like an outfit that you put on and take off. I mean, you remember your cover in case you use it next time you're in the area but, if you're using a different one anyway, that's it for that, right? Except not for me, not _really_.\n\n \n\nBy some standards, Sibyl _was_ making it up – but she acted consistently and in-character for every role she _had_. How many singlets can even say _that_? The thing is, in the back of your mind, your brain _can't_ tell the difference. If you pretend to be someone for long enough, it starts to think that _is_ who you _are_. A lot of those traits are universal on _paper_. It's a matter of _degree_.\n\n \n\nAll my covers are headmates, all my headmates, covers. On a very basic level, my brain _buys_ that I'm all those people I keep having to pretend to be just to stay ahead of those who are after me. It's as though the trauma of having to lie about being someone I'm not had spawned them itself, to make it easier to live with by _becoming_ the lie, by _making_ it the truth so it would no longer _be_ a lie.\n\n \n\nI'm a chameleon.\n\n \n\nWe're all different kinds of animals, but you can't buy better spy camo than _that_. I'm green in Jungle, yellow in Desert, white in Tundra, blue at sea _but_, beyond that, I have different colors for all my headmates, color-coded to help me keep track of who does what when. I will become exactly who you need me to be, for as long as it serves me.\n\n \n\nI'm trans.\n\n \n\nI've transitioned and detransitioned and retransitioned so many times that I have no sense of identity based on my parts whatsoever. How could this one part of my personality be iron-clad when everything else about me and my life is so fluid around it? The lovers I've taken over the course of my years of work as a spy don't care how I started out. I use it well. Life is short, I live it as fully as I can.\n\n \n\nThere's an experimental school of thought that says things like, try to be an atheist on Monday, a Christian on Tuesday, a pagan on Wednesday. Try to be monogamous on Thursday, polyamorous on Friday, and single on Saturday, and so on and so forth. I wouldn't say that's what I set out to do, and the specifics may be different, but if the premise teaches something, I should know _what_.\n\n \n\nMy partners know I'm polyam, but not with who. I compartmentalize only as much I need to. I like puzzles, Rubik's cubes, structures you can take apart and put back together another way of all kinds. Things get assembled, they get fragmented, they get assembled again. A lot of us autistics like to eat our sandwich parts separately rather than together sometimes. Fragmentation is _morally neutral_.\n\n \n\nI analyze systems, I see what makes them work and, more importantly, their weak points.\n\n \n\nI've been loyal to the three nations of Jungle, Desert, and Tundra in turn, at different points in my life. Now I know that they're all corrupt, that none of them would lift a finger to help the common man, and that their scuffles are all informed by pure self-interest, not by principle. I help the person in front of me as much as I can, but my loyalty is to my principles and my trust, in myself.\n\n \n\nI have at least one best friend and one worst enemy in all three. I have my data banks, my outfits, my contacts, my gadgets, my maps, hacks, notes, tricks, and codes. Each nation's rivals would give a lot to get their hands on what I know about the other two, but I give that out sparingly, if at all. I may have given up my autistic predilection for the truth, but not for justice. That's still mine.\n\n \n\nMy color is prism, my blood the shifting quicksilver of Mercury. They say you can only see 1/10 of an iceberg when you see one on the surface. Part of me wishes more people thought about the 9/10 of my personality they don't see when they deal with me. The part of me that exploits this glitch to spy is glad they don't. Each lie is a deep truth, re-contextualized, that I couldn't say somewhere _else_.\n\n \n\nI can do almost anything.\n\n \n\nI know it sounds like I'm bragging, but I'm being very _literal_. When my mind settled on spying as my special interest, it was like it 'hacked' itself. Everything that can be used _for_ spying became _part_ of that interest. I learned how to track, pick locks, set traps, lose tails, dress wounds, defuse bombs, and escape cuffs in a couple of hours, because I was bored and had nothing else to do.\n\n \n\nThis made me a resource curse, and a hotly disputed commodity among the three nations.\n\n \n\nThe autistic empathy works for me and against me at different times for different reasons. For one thing, it makes it easier for me to slip into a new role to have the ability to completely imagine myself in the shoes of the character I'm inhabiting. For another, it makes it easier for me to understand and connect with my contacts. Empathy for those trying to kill me doesn't help, but I still can't help it.\n\n \n\nMartial arts are just another kind of puzzle game, it's just one where all of the pieces move really fast all the time. I have a photographic memory for every move and combination of moves I've ever seen, and an innate sense of where my body is in space at all times. I pick and choose moves from every style there is for what they throw at me. The body's just another thing that can be taken apart.\n\n \n\nThey say BDSM is just sex for autistics, and there's an element of truth to that. When no one _expects_ you to be public, you can finally be _real_. You can control, or let yourself get controlled. You can hurt, or let yourself get hurt. You can trap, get trapped, or make yourself free. You can create these little scenarios that let you sort shit out in ways you can't quite do anywhere else like it.\n\n \n\nThey say the truth shall set you free.\n\n \n\nWhen you die having said the truth all your life, as a _being_ of truth, people who knew you can add up everything you told them about your life and that's it, that's what you were like, that's _who you are_. When you become a creature of lies, no one knows where the truth ends and the lie begins. Your whole life may as _well_ be a lie from then on. You never come back from that.\n\n \n\nI may be the best spy I'll ever meet, but I can never be a creature of truth, not anymore. So what's this? This is finally what I really think, in the privacy of my own mind, behind everything I have to do to survive. The Rosetta Stone to the code-switching of my life. This is as close to being a creature of truth as I can ever be. This document is far too powerful to let fall into the wrong hands.\n\n \n\nIf you're reading this, you bet your ass I'm dead. I'm not sure what to make of my life, so I hope you can think of something yourself. _Someone_ may as well, right?"}