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Cypher is perfectly composed.
He is seated in a metal chair opposite Brimstone and Viper. The former has his arms crossed, eyes shut and brows furrowed. The latter is staring directly at him, fingers tapping the surface of the table rhythmically as the tension continues to weigh upon them.
Cypher sits with one leg over the other, hands folded over his knee, expression perfectly blank.
Just 16 hours ago, the scene was completely different: the broker had been given his mission briefing (as he was decently accustomed to by now), and he’d leafed through the contents as Brim rattled off the basics.
“We’ve noticed some strange radianite signatures in the area. We need you to investigate it.”
Cypher had nodded, closing the file—the readings were in Japan, specifically the Shinjuku district near one of Kingdom’s headquarters (aka, nothing new)—and then he had asked, “Is there anything else I should know?”
Brimstone had answered, “No.”
Cypher, the ever-so obedient soldier, had listened.
And so he’d gone about gathering his equipment and departed in the VLT/R—it was still strange to imagine this organization just had such expensive machinery lying around; their sponsors were generous, he supposed—and four hours had passed from then to Tokyo in relative quiet. He spent the flight analyzing the readings they’d already acquired and intercepting new ones to look over.
When he arrived, he went about setting up a covert location to monitor the source of the disturbance, using an abandoned mom-and-pop shop as the front of his little base. Cameras and tripwires were rigged and he connected his system to the network he’d been building over prerequisite visits, and for the next five hours, he’d done nothing but watch.
It was monotonous work, as always, but it was simple enough to enter a trance. His eyes drifted between screens as he clicked through his various feeds, watching the different main roads and back streets, commonplaces and secret hideouts; and then eventually, he noticed something. (He had clicked past at first in his lull but quickly went back to the old angle; and watching the feed, he saw a woman not too far from the source of the signatures.)
And not just any, but an American woman.
(A faintly familiar American woman.)
She didn’t stay for long though, traveling from one camera to the next before she reached the center, holding out a device and fidgeting with it for a moment. It whirs a bit and she looks over her shoulder—was that Viper he was seeing?—and then– Well, Cypher wasn’t really quite sure. Something appeared before her and when she stepped through, she was no longer visible. His scanner picks up a spike in radianite levels in the area.
That was strange, he had thought. What was Viper doing here? (Did they not trust he could handle this alone? Why didn’t they tell him he was receiving backup?)
And why did she look so suspicious?
So he quickly went to investigate, taking a hand-held reader and his tablet with him as he ducked out of the shop and towards the area he’d been watching. Every now and again, he would check his cameras—and still, she refused to reappear.
He arrived on the scene. Viper was truly gone.
(Something had happened, and he didn’t know what.)
He is perfectly calm, but that was only because he spent the flight back composing himself, carefully deciding how he would approach his contractors about the issue—that they were hiding something, and he couldn’t really afford to risk his life for work he didn’t know all the facts of. Viper stares him in the face like she hadn’t been there in Tokyo, and Cypher remains unmoving.
“Fine,” she exhales, closing her eyes and nodding. She opens them again. “You want to know everything? The whole truth of what we’re up against?”
“Of course,” he says, and he thinks he’s managed to hide all the desperation he feels. Viper nods again, and then she stands up.
It is an echoing twelve seconds that pass as she walks over to one of the various desks, opens up a drawer, and retrieves a file, tossing it into the empty space in front of the broker. It’s a plain-looking document, thickness implying no more than a few pages inside; Cypher takes it, opening it to the first page, and before he can ask, Viper answers:
“There are other worlds than this.”
He stops. (Slowly, he blinks.) Other worlds.
“What?”
“We weren’t sure how to break the news,” Brimstone finally says, “but we were going to tell you eventually. Just had to figure out how.” The revelation is startling—science fiction, it had to be, so he looks over the documents. (It is a scientific paper combined with its sources; and though he only skims the contents, it reads as all too believable.)
Cypher feels as though the world has been dragged out from beneath his feet. ‘Other worlds’ echoes in his skull. Other worlds than this.
“We still don’t know a lot of the specifics,” Viper continues, “but our understanding is every person here also exists in this alternate earth—or at least, every member of our Protocol does.” Other worlds.
“There’s only two as far as we can tell—their world and ours—but we’re still open to the possibility that–”
“ ‘There are other worlds than this.’ ”
The room falls silent, and Cypher realizes his sudden interruption. He tenses, eyes flicking up from the file and darting briefly between the two before him. Your composure, Amir. Be calm.
It’s hard. “You mean to say that there is a person out there who looks and acts and sounds like me; who’s lived my entire life and met all the same people and all the same hardship–” Pivot. You’re being too personal. “And that such a concept of a person exists for all of us, and that’s what we’re up against?”
The two of them stare at him. Viper shares a glance with Brimstone. He nods heavily. Viper speaks next.
“Yes. That is most probably the case.”
Calm, Amir. Calm. (But there’s something terrifying about the idea that his secrets were not his own; that someone else needed to keep them for him, even if that someone else was him too.) There was also the chance that that someone actually didn’t see the need to keep those secrets, or that whatever led them to act against his earth would also cause them to not realize the weight they were carrying. (What if his counterpart decided to just give them up to the Protocol, knowing the gravity of his actions, just to ruin him?) The revelation hits him harder than he would like: his secrets were not his own. Not anymore. Not ever.
He blinks, slow and measured, closing the file in front of him. “I see,” he says carefully. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Of course,” Brimstone nods, but he appears slightly on edge; Cypher must’ve been careless. “You taking this alright? It’s not an easy thing to take in.”
“Of course!” Cypher replies, hand to his chest in appall. “I mean, it’s a bit to unpack, but I’m used to unexpected scope changes. Don’t worry about me.”
“Sure, but still–”
“Is that all you have to tell me?” (Lively, but cold, mechanical.) Brimstone halts completely. He looks at Viper. Viper nods.
“…Yes.” (It is heavy.)
Cypher nods, and no one stops him when he takes the file with him. “Farewell,” is his only warning before he tips his hat and disappears into the hollow hallways of headquarters, far, far away from the office that had just changed everything.
There are other worlds than this. I exist at least twice, and I am fighting at least one of them.
(Cypher was quite literally fighting someone who knew all of his tricks.)
He hadn’t seen him yet at least, but that did little to ease his nerves; it just meant he was in the background, being this other VALORANT’s eyes on the field, orchestrating the Protocol’s demise from a cool and detached position. (Like this was any other job Cypher had taken before this place.)
Only that opposite Cypher was dismantling systems that no one else could ever dream to detangle; and if he was truly the broker’s counterpart, he might actually be able to do it.
(He didn’t know what it was like to be the target of his own mechanisms, and if Cypher were to be quite frank, he didn’t really want to find out.)
He reaches his room eventually, dragging the door open and slamming it shut behind him. He hopes no one heard him; he doesn’t bother to check.
The file is almost deadweight in his fingers—something he needed but couldn’t bring himself to truly comprehend. (The truth lay inside, and everything that it would entail; and Cypher was nothing if not a knower of the truth, so grim reality would have to settle in eventually–)
…But perhaps it could wait a while; if just until the adrenaline left his veins and his breathing calmed a bit. Your composure, Amir. Be calm.
(Everything is fine. They will only see your self-assurance.)