Jack hates white rooms.

It’s some cosmic joke that Jack’s job is to sit in a white room and connect dots.

The door to Jack’s room opens and Irving Sandler waddles in carrying a stack of paper balanced in the crook of one arm while he tries to shut the door with the other. Jack side-eyes him from behind the already massive stack of papers on his white deck.

“Ah Jesus, Irv,” Jack spits out, frustrated. “What in the fuck is going on out there?”

Sandler’s not going to make it to the desk with that load. “Level Five entanglement. Shit’s hitting jet engines, Jack. I was just over at Section Twelve and—”

“Jesus fuck,” Jack is moving out of his chair, but there’s a white desk between him and the massive stack now teetering in Irving Sandler’s arm. The metal legs of the desk shriek against the sterile white tile.

“Shit!” Sandler is also teetering now. His belt loop has caught the handle of the door and it’s knocked him off balance.

The desk shrieks again and Jack’s already massive stack of paper teeters now. Jack slaps a hand on his own stack and angles around the desk, kicking his chair back and away. “Fuck!”

“Fuck!” Sandler’s going down.

Jack dives—what for? Who fucking knows, but soon they’re both on the floor and two previously meticulously sorted stacks of paper are now scattered on the floor in addition to the two Temporal Agents.

“It took me four hours to sort those,” Jack says rolling on to his back, looking up at the white ceiling.

Irving Sandler is only groaning. He cracked his head on the tile going down.

“Fuck man, you’re bleeding!” Jack realizes. He’s on his knees quickly and crawling to help the older agent.

Just then a clerk comes in with another stack of papers. Unfortunately, it’s Pederson, the new guy. He’s oblivious.

In short order, there are three employees on the floor of Jack’s office, and more unsorted sheets of paper.

***

They’re all in the big white room now. The main assembly room. Big. Everything is white. High ceilings. Circular. This is the same place where Morton Weaver reads out the month’s birthdays, or marriages, or death. There is cake for all three.

There is no cake today.

“As most of you legacy employees know, this is the first time we’ve had a Level Five incident in about twenty-five years,” Morton says in preamble. “We’re now at Level Eight… something unprecedented.”

There’s a woman’s scream from somewhere behind one of the doors leading into the assembly room, but it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from. There are sixteen doors leading in. Everyone in attendance jerks their heads around like birds looking for the source of the sound. It’s a sorrowful scream, not of terror, just of grim acceptance of a fallen stack of once-sorted papers, probably.

“Is this the end?” a sorrowful voice says from the seated crowd. Jack can’t see who said it, but security suddenly pounces on a section of seated agents and hauls about half a dozen agents away. Better safe than sorry.

Morton clears his throat. “It’s come to my attention that we seem to be wasting an inordinate amount of time resorting papers that have already been meticulously sorted and stacked by sorting personnel. I don’t need to tell you that this is an egregious impediment to the forward progress of the investigations that are central to deescalating the entanglement. From this moment forward, unless otherwise directed by myself or Director Cassady, no one is to—”

“There’s blood on this one!” a voice cries from the periphery of the room. Chairs squeak and scream as dozens of people in the room turn toward the voice. Jack can see only a hand gripping a blood-stained page and waving it emphatically from a sea of heads.

“That’s Irving Sandler’s!” Jack cries out in explanation. Now, dozens of faces are looking at him.

“Why does Irving Sandler’s paper have blood on it?” Morton queries, his important announcement completely derailed now.

“It’s his blood,” Jack continues. “He cracked his skull.”

“Irving Sandler’s cracked someone’s skull?” another voice asks, this one tainted with a bit of fear.

Head down, shaking it, Jack sighs. “For fuck’s sake, no. Irving Sandler fell down in my office and cracked his skull on the ground and got blood on the paper.”

“Is he still bleeding?”

“What does the paper say?”

“Was he pushed?”

A woman’s scream again.

***

Another white room. Jack’s in this one as well, with some douchebag named Greg that spends more time screaming at his family over the office phone than actually investigating entangelments. Jack’s wandered over to a corner because he doesn’t like what he sees there.

“—first Level Ten. The higher ups are all shook to hell. And, I hear it’s cascading. They lost something like seventy-five printers down in C Level in the last fifteen hours. Morgan has resigned… I know, I know. I know. I know. Listen, just.. Fuck, okay, well I can’t get them right now, I’m at work. No. Get the fucking—”

Jack scratches a fingernail against it. What the fuck is this? he asks himself to himself in the white room that is also his mind.

“—to fucking God, Tina, I will fucking belt you. I cannot leave work! Do you understand! Level fucking ten! It doesn’t fucking matter what I said I’d do! The fucking universe is—”

It’s fucking dirty. It’s a blemish. A smudge. Jack frantically scrapes his fingernail against it until the nail gets hot and he feels like its bending into his nail bed.

Greg is bashing the office phone receiver into his monitor screen.

Every single day. Every single room. White. Pristine. No dirt. No dust. Jack is mostly just thinking to himself now. He senses something violent happening nearby, but can’t quite focus on it.

When the gun goes off, Jack jumps. There’s red on the wall now, too. A splatter of it has covered the smudge.

Jack scrapes furiously at it as other people shuffle into the room behind him.

***

“It’s a Taggart. It’s a fucking Taggart.”

Jack is in the war room now. It has been painted black recently.

The paint is still wet, and several of the high level personnel currently bent over the central table staring at reams of paper have black paint on their clothes, their bodies, their faces.

“Subsection V?” Jack asks desperately.

An intern that has jumped several levels up in the organization in the span of minutes furiously thumbs through a stack of paper stained and streaked with black paint. He finds Subsection V’s table of contents, and furiously rifles through a secondary stack of paper next to it. Desperately, he grabs at a particular sheet of paper and rips it away from the others.

Before he can find the name he’s looking for, two other interns grab at the paper and a short brawl ensues.

Jack inserts himself and takes a thumb to the eye before he manages to get the sheet of paper under him as he sprawls across the desk. “Fuck off!” he screams, or tries to… it comes out as a hoarse honk as several bodies pile on top of him.

He manages to pull the sheet out from under his chest and slams his head down on it to keep it in place as the mass grows on his back.

It’s a blur, and Jack quickly realizes he’s trying to read through the eye that just met the thumb, and switches.

“Taggart!” he cries triumphantly. “It’s a Taggart!”

A woman screams in the distance, possibly something unrelated.

As the bodies slowly slide off his back, the room turns red from the emergency lights.

It’s Level Twenty now.

***

The skip jump is brutal.

Jack saw some shit in transit this time, and that’s normally a day’s recovery at least, but Jack doesn’t have the luxury of recovery time to erase visions of dimensions where giant bones are constantly macheteing through flesh and a chorus of death-gurgle screams echo through canyons of mangled corpses rising over rivers of blood. He saw himself pressed among the flesh there.

Jack’s got a piece of paper with one man’s name on it.

And he’s damn sure going to—

Vomiting now. Another side effect.

He’s damn sure going to—

The paper is useless. The name is Taggart. He doesn’t need a piece of paper to tell him, so he wads it up and throws it away.

“That’s littering, young man,” a wrinkled old woman at the bus stop says. He realizes he’s thrown up on her, but she apparently hasn’t.

He’s damn sure going to—

There’s the VrrBBBrrIPGH! of another Temporal Agent skip jumping in next to him. It’s one of Morgan’s clones, and he also vomits.

“Jesus Christ!” Jack screams in mortal terror, dodging chunks of what looks like half-eaten tomato like he’s in the Matrix. “I’m on this one! Tangle! Fucking tangle!” Morgan’s clone also sees what’s happened and manages to jerk himself away from the proximity of Jack.

“What the fuck is going on!” Morgan’s clone cries, bits of tomato shooting out from his mouth. “We almost tangled!”

Jack, careful to avoid coming within a few feet of the other Temporal Agent, snags the paper from where he dropped it and opens it up. Looking at his skip jump band, he verifies the sector: “17546!” Holding the paper up where the other agent can see it, he points at the numbers on the paper that match: 17546.

Morgan’s mouth hangs open as he slips his own paper from a pocket and looks at it.

“Shit, sorry… ” Morgan apologizes. “17548.” He skip jumps away in short order.

At some point the woman has fainted or died, and Jack sprints away, headed for a bar.

***

“—standing in the flower bed. It was like two in the morning, and I’d been at work until around midnight, so I was beat.”

He had three of them hanging on his words, and Jack despised him for it. Jack just knew he was the Taggart, but this was Level Twenty shit. He had to be absolutely sure.

“That’s so shitty,” one of the girls says to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “She didn’t even have the decency to come in and tell you to your face?”

Nemesis. That’s the word that is going through Jack’s head. This guy is now his fucking nemesis. Right now, this moment, born in jealousy. Not because he is the catalyst in the now seemingly inevitable collapse of the multiverse, but because he has effortlessly wooed about two and a half Zima-drunk twenty-somethings in the one bar in town they still sell PBR for a dollar in the can.

Two buck Chuck and… what the fuck, man.

VrrBBBrrIPGH!

“Jesus fuck,” Jack sputters. It’s another Taggart. This one has skip jumped in. This one has a braided beard wagging down past his belt line. Jack barely sees the katana in time to get in between it and the other Taggart.

The bites into Jack’s shoulder and through some bones, Jack surmises. It hurts, it bleeds a lot. But, the other Taggart is running now, and Samurai Taggart is having trouble freeing his blade from Jack’s shoulder.

So this is it. This is the entanglement. A Taggart skip jumped.

***

Jack is back in his white room, but some other Greg is there, too. His white desk. His white bandages.

“—say anything to get you riled up, you dumb bitch. She’s riding you! She’s riding you! I wouldn’t touch that bitch with a deep-space robocrane. What?! I didn’t! I fucking didn’t! Why won’t you believe me? I would never do that. Maybe this is just you projecting because you’re really screwing Bob down on Fifteen! Yeah! I fucking saw you and h—”

There’s only one sheet of paper on Jack’s desk.

Phone receiver against monitor.

The paper is pink.

Gunshot.