The Spy Chief Eats a Meal a Day

​Short Fiction ~ Edward Barnfield

Second Prize, Strands International Flash Fiction Competition - 20


The Spy Chief eats a meal a day. Two years ago, he read a study on longevity that suggested that mice that consumed their food in a single sitting evolved to have better use of fat stores than their peers, elongating their lifespans. He flew the author of the paper first-class from Wisconsin and spoke with her for seven hours, for which she was paid the equivalent of a month’s salary.
 
Since then, the single meal has become part of his daily routine, along with an hour in a flotation tank, extreme cardio sessions and prolonged exposure to UV light from a lamp developed by NASA. He consumes a precise number of calories and complex carbohydrates at daybreak, usually while digesting intelligence reports or sealed confessions from the night before, finding satisfaction in the way discipline has reshaped his biology. He no longer experiences hunger and is close to eliminating any physical response from consumption – no anticipatory salivation, no pleasure or memory triggers from specific combinations of salt, fat, and heat.
 
Today, he is sitting on the terrace of his villa picking at a combination of dark leaves, baked salmon and electrolyte supplements. The speakerphone is on, and a succession of lieutenants talk through current surveillance details, their voices drifting into the canyon below. The Spy Chief alternates between his pen and chopsticks, scribbling notes next to names and then stabbing into the bowl.
 
“What news of Kishorilal Sethi?” he asks, leveraging a small lump of protein from his teeth with his tongue.
 
Sethi is the son of Krishna Sethi, who was already under house arrest when the Chief was but a rising star in the National Safekeeping Authority, as it was known at the time. The reporting officer, who is new in the role, stumbles slightly over the details, but it seems as though the epigone’s movements are being documented satisfactorily. The younger Sethi has taken a quiet teaching role far from the city, seeking refuge among adolescents’ equations.
 
“Keep watching the boy but stay out of sight,” he tells the officer. “Whenever the rats in this family feel comfortable, their thoughts turn to sedition. Let him get fat and restless in his classroom, then we’ll take him.”
 
The briefing finishes shortly after. He takes the opportunity to smuggle a warning into his commentary. “Gentlemen, be sure to stay vigilant. Our job is to make sure that the unexpected always arrives.”
 
He clicks the ‘Off’ button with the base of a chopstick. His bowl is empty too, aside from a single strand of fish flesh. It is early, and the morning is creeping over the mountains.
 
The Spy Chief stands and examines his shadow on the terracotta floor. Still lean at 50. Barely out of puberty on his personal timetable, at a time when his contemporaries are collapsing into middle age, clogged arteries and cholesterol signalling the inevitability of their decline. And his enemies?
 
If the science is successful, he thinks, if the medical interventions, and calorie plans, and longevity therapies do what they are designed to do, then he will be able to remain in the job until he is 150 years old. He will have time to oversee lifelong surveillance for Krishna and Kishorilal Sethi, and whatever luckless grandchildren they bring into the world.
 
It will be possible to inflict three or maybe four generations of defeat upon a single family, something even his wiliest predecessors would have struggled to achieve.
 
The phone judders with messages, his lieutenants jostling to subtly denounce their colleague, the agent who spoke too little and stammered too often. They picked up on the Chief’s last comment and are trying to turn it to their professional advantage, suggesting that their colleague might be insufficiently committed to the cause, that his duties could be profitably reallocated. He selects his lieutenants for their ruthlessness, so expects no less.
 
This is the world we are building; he thinks. This is what time and technology make possible. We are giving seed money to technology start-ups, so that we will have access to the data generated from every device they produce. We are planting listening equipment in the foundations of new estates, to better learn a community’s daily intimacies from the day they move in.
 
The absurd whimsy of the situation delights him, the idea that no detail in this country or its neighbours will ever escape his attention again. His people have always been beset by troublemakers and freedom fighters, but the momentum of history is entirely on his side now. Absolute knowledge and absolute power for another century and beyond – all thanks to a meal a day.
 
He scoops the last sliver of baked salmon and flicks it into the air with a chopstick, his reactions and aim sharpened by daily isometric exercise. The Spy Chief leans his head back, opens wide, determined to catch it, to master every moment of his prolonged and pitiless life.
 
Inside the fish, an unnoticed shard of bone shifts, caught by the gravity of destiny. The Spy Chief’s throat, lean through extreme cardio and intermittent fasting, is not quite wide enough for the task.
 
The unexpected arrives.
 

~

​Edward Barnfield is a writer and researcher living in the Middle East. His stories have appeared in Triangulation, Third Flatiron, Galley Beggar Press, The Molotov Cocktail, Tenebrous Press, Leicester Writes, Strands Publishers, Cranked Anvil, and Shooter Literary, among others. He’s on X at @edbarnfield    

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