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“Rufus! Come in. We loved your latest piece on the migrant situation in the Mediterranean. You’re really broadening the horizons of the readers of the Post.”  

             “Our readers already have pretty broad horizons.”

             “Of course they do. They read the Post!”

             Rufus sat in a windowless room, empty apart from the plastic chair that he sat on, opposite a man in a white polo shirt and khaki pants. The man wore a lanyard with an empty transparent I.D. wallet and a pen hanging from it. Rufus lived for information, and had almost none. Introductions seemed to be the place to start.

             “I’m Rufus Kenton from the Washington Post, and you are?”

             “Yes! I am. And you are too, Rufus. Both of us present here today. Thank you for coming along. We love your work and we were very keen that it be you who got access to our facility.”

             “Ok. Who’s we? I’m going to assume you’re an agent. May I record this?”

             “Record away, Rufus.” The voice was avuncular Texan. The speaker, tightly bald and leather cheeked, leant forward to rest his elbows on his knees. His pen swung on its lanyard and clicked against the cheap plastic seat. Had muscle gone to fat, or was it just undercover? Either way, the man was two of Rufus.

             “C.I.A?” said Rufus, keeping his words to a minimum and letting his eyebrows do the heavy lifting.  

             “I used to be in the C.I.A.,” said the man. The crows feet at his eyes went up a shoe size. “Still am. But I used to be too!” he sat back in his chair grinning. It creaked as he folded livestock arms.

             “And you’ve invited me here to work on your tight five-minute stand-up set?” said Rufus, clicking his own pen and opening his note book.

             “Relax, Rufus. We love journalists these days, we brought you here so we can work together. We’re on the same side.”

             “I’m an independent journalist. I’m on the side of truth.”

             “And justice and the American way?” said the agent with a gentle frown of sincerity.

             “Sure, but truth comes first. So, what is this place?”

             “This, Rufus, is the most secure lab in the world. A football field of razor wire in every direction, anti-drone fields, automated sniper turrets. This place has its own F35 guard dog on round-the-clock standby. It has a bunker from the nineteen fifties which has been pimped with some tech which is still going to look pretty damned impressive in the twenty fifties.”

             “Why?”

             “Exactly! I knew we had the right man for the job. Anybody in their right mind would ask why, and you, Rufus, are going to tell them.”

             “I’m going to tell them the truth.”

             “Of course you are. That’s your job. Which theory of truth do you currently subscribe to?”

             “Truth, reality, I’m going to tell people what I find here today.”

             “Oh, we’re counting on it. Now, I’m a plain old correspondence theory man myself. The truth arises from the correspondence of language, thought and such like, to a mind-independent world. Seems like our world is more mind-independent than ever! Am I right? Ha! Nah, Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus - Truth is the adequation of things and intellect; Isaac Israeli via Aquinas.”

             “Nice to know they’re teaching Latin at Langley.”

             “Surprised? You don’t think they keep me round just ‘cos I can kill a guy with a pen, do you?”

             Against his better judgement, Rufus liked the guy. So what if he really could kill him without breaking a sweat? Rufus was not octagon material; it was not that impressive a boast. But Rufus was no coward, so it was not much use as a threat either, if that’s what it was, and not just another joke, not that the two things were mutually exclusive. In conclusion, Rufus just shifted uncomfortably in his chair and looked down at his notepad.

“Relax! I’m only joking,” said the man. “I wouldn’t need a pen. Are you ready to take a look around?”

Rufus had had a bag over his head since he got in a chopper of the roof of the building he’d been told to report to. It had not been removed until he stood outside the room he was now in and he had no idea how much time had elapsed, how far he had travelled or in what direction. He could have been in one of half a dozen states, maybe seven, maybe eight or nine if you counted irritation and confusion, states he seemed to visit with increasing regularity. He was ready to take a look around.

“Let’s go.”

The corridor outside the room was lit by a thin arboreal glow of emergency lighting. The agent walked ahead of him, fleetingly green as they passed under the long passage’s evenly spaced exit signs. After what Rufus judged to have been about a minute, time measured by his unacknowledged humming of The Fugs’ C.I.A. Man, they reached an unmarked door. To Rufus’s left a dark space with a tiny exit sign floating in it, marking the invisible length of a perpendicular corridor. The agent saw Rufus looking to his left at the tiny eye-test of an exit sign.

“No, it’s in here,” said the agent, opening the door and disappearing through it. Rufus followed him into a room which was industrially dark.

“So, you promise to write about what you find here?” asked the agent.

“Certainly,” said Rufus.

“Good! We need it out there. We need the internet full of it. We need…”

“You’re going to get the truth, whether it’s what you need or not. But I guess it would be easy enough for you to silence me if you wanted to? You could do it here and now, with your pen,” said Rufus to a black absence where he imagined the agent might be standing.

“No! No, no, no, Rufus.” The voice came from the opposite direction to the one in which Rufus had pointlessly turned his head. “It’s not like that at all. And anyway, like I said.” The voice now came from behind him. “I wouldn’t need a pen.”

Rufus peered into the black, trying to breathe steadily and control a heartrate that evolution was attempting to increase with every second spent in the vulnerability of sightlessness.

“Now, Rufus, write the truth if you want, but please try and appreciate that in my business it’s really the value of information that matters, regardless of whether it can be proven to be true or not.”

“Surely information is more valuable if it’s true? We have to confirm if things are true.”

“Well, ah, Rufus. So, y’know Socrates, right?”

“I know of him.”

“Well one day one of Socrates’ buddies runs up to him and…”

“Ah Jesus, come on, man.”

“One of his buddies runs up and says, ‘You’ll never guess what I heard about Diogenes.’”

“Just turn the lights on.”

"’Whoa!’ Socrates replies, ‘You gotta pass the Triple Filter Test first,’ and his buddy’s like ‘Triple filter?’ and Socrates is like, ‘I’m going to filter what you say. The first filter is truth. Are you absolutely sure that what you are about to say is true?’ and his buddy’s like, ‘Maybe, dunno, just heard it.’ And then Socrates is like, ‘Ok, possibly not true, so filter two, the goodness filter. Is what you are about to tell me something good?’ and his buddy gets a bit flustered and he’s like, ‘Nah, pretty bad actually.’ And so, Socrates is like ‘Mmhmm, third test; is this information going to be useful to me?’ and his buddy’s pretty embarrassed by now and he’s like, ‘Well, no, not really.’ So, Socrates is like, ‘So you were going to tell me something that might not have been true, good, or useful. Why tell me or anyone else such a thing?’ and the guy’s feeling pretty bad and he realises this must be how come they say Socrates is so wise…"

“And it also explains why Socrates never found out that Diogenes was banging his wife.”

“You heard it! Ha! You do understand.”

“Just turn the lights on.”

“If I do, you’ll see the truth, but not the value. We need you to create the value, Rufus. That’s what you’re here for. We need information out there. Lots of it. Generated from this beautiful big resource magnet of a lab. It doesn’t have to be true, it doesn’t have to be good, but whatever it is, it’ll be useful and it’ll be ours. And it’ll be a good reason for all of our less enthusiastic supporters to keep their eyes on this place, instead of anywhere less convenient.”

“Please just turn the lights on.”

“This room is completely empty, Rufus. I can leave the lights off so you can’t see anything, or I can turn them on, so you can see nothing. Either way, you’re reporting the same truth. You want ‘em on?”

“Please.”

“Happy writing, Rufus.”

An analogue clunk announced a staccato strobe and the room bounced in and out of existence before settling into its vast reality. Rufus stood alone in an echo-ready hall. It was completely empty.