Earth's Bureaucracy of Human Wishes

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. As an agent of Earth’s Bureaucracy of Human Wishes, otherwise known as EBHW, Yury knew the truth. You could hear so much more than just a scream.

Yury sat on the observation deck of EBHW, overlooking the slowly rotating earth, listening to the soft whirring of the engine, thousands of feet below. There were so many levels, so many departments pancaked on top of each other, it was hard to believe he could still feel the vibration of the thrusters, pulsing in a rhythmic, hypnotic pattern that re-boosted the space station into a higher orbit. The Bureaucracy had to continuously fight the gravitational pull of the earth, and he often found himself sinking his gaze into the planet, longing to fall through its atmosphere and walk its shores, taken by the physics of it all.

Yury liked taking things apart and seeing how they operated. He knew all about the Bureaucracy, how it was founded, the ins and outs of each department. Nothing got past him when it came to the place. Which was why, after a while, it got inexplicably boring. He often ended up on the observation deck, gazing at the earth, longing for a case that would once again pull him down into that mysterious world he knew so little about.

“Yury,” He flinched as someone tapped him pointedly on the shoulder. Glancing behind himself, Yury saw Noemi, his co-worker of several years. Except she wasn’t just any co-worker, she was a Genie.

Every time a person wished upon a star, their wish was sent to Earth’s Bureaucracy of Human Wishes, a space station orbiting the earth that intercepted and categorized the wishes of every human being. There were all kinds of wishes in its archives, but agents like Noemi tended to get assigned to the ones that made the Bureaucracy the most money: wars, for example, were a real breadwinner. The Bureaucracy played a hand in most historical events, including World War II and a couple of civil conflicts. If an agent managed to help a dictator rise to power, the commission they made off that wish was insane. Some agents became renowned in the Bureaucracy for their work, earning the illustrious title of Genie. Yury could scarcely believe Noemi was even talking to him.

She held a pale blue document that he immediately recognized as a case file.

“What’s that?” He asked her, and she shrugged.

“I found it on the Commissioner’s desk. It was assigned to you.”

Raising his brow at her, Yury peeled open the document and stole a glance at the first page:

Category: Unknown

Name: Daniel Belanger

Country of Origin: Canada

Age: 8 Years Old

Wish: I hope that wherever my sister is, she’s happy.

“It doesn’t have a category.” Yury mused, and Noemi nodded seriously.

“I want to work this one with you.”

Yury looked around. This case was far below the paygrade of a Genie. It was just so—mundane. The wish was so vague, it couldn’t even be categorized. The Bureaucracy gave each wish a code name, categorized under the seven deadly sins of man: Pride, Lust, Greed, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath and Sloth. Yury got assigned these kinds of cases all the time, of course, but Noemi should have been out there making the next Bon Jovi, not clowning around with an impossible case like this one. Whenever Yury got a wish like this, he usually threw it in the trash and pretended he lost the file.

A sane person would call Yury heartless, and they would be right. Yury Volkov’s heart was removed roughly nine years ago. They buried it on the moon, next to about a thousand other gravesites, and a thousand other children’s hearts. He didn’t miss it. If anything, he wished they had burned it, so he would stop thinking about it rotting away up there. Just imagining their hands sifting through his chest cavity like they were gutting a fish, or disemboweling a pumpkin—it gave him the jitters.

Some might have said that was a horrible thing to do to a child. Yury would argue it made him a better agent. He was able to take a rare, objectively closer look at things. Which was why he could immediately determine that this case was a flop. So why was Noemi so interested?

“Sure,” Yury said, slowly handing her back the file. “You can work it with me.”

“Perfect, thank you.” Noemi smiled, however faintly. “I’ll see you in the briefing room in ten minutes.”

-

As requested, ten minutes later, Yury found Noemi in the briefing room, sitting beneath the wings of the Pod; a pure white, bubble-shaped spaceship that took agents back and forth between Earth and the Bureaucracy. She was wearing a blue jumpsuit with suspenders. Her feet were up on the table, and she was engrossed in a tablet, blue-red light flickering across her face.

Standing next to the Pod was Boris, the Commissioner, a stout man with plump jowls, a perpetual glare and a serious sideburn. He turned as Yury entered, gesturing for him to approach.

“Now, as you know, we would normally ignore a wish like this,” Boris said, crossing his arms. “We can’t even lump it in with a bunch of similar ones and sell it off to some marketing firm. But Noemi here, our star, thinks there’s something special about it, and I trust her intuition as a Genie. I want the both of you to take the Pod and see if this case is worth pursuing.”

Noemi looked up at me, then flipped the tablet around.

“This is Daniel Belanger, our client.” She said, zooming in on the child’s profile picture. “Here’s the story: you’re an electrician who has come to inspect the house, and I’m a co-op student. You distract the parents while I talk to the kid.”

“As efficient as ever, Noemi.” Boris nodded, smiling to himself.

Even though this case sounded pointless, Yury shrugged. Who was he to argue with upper management? “Sounds good to me.”

There was some fuss as Boris fetched Yury’s electrician ensemble—Noemi fiddled with her blue jumpsuit, tightening the straps. Then, the doors to the Pod disengaged, yawning open like a dislocated jaw, and Boris wished them good luck as they entered.

Noemi plopped down in the captain’s seat. She typed their coordinates into the computer, and Yury grabbed for the handles fixed to the roof as the Pod separated from the Bureaucracy, lowering them into the vacuum of space with the grace of a ship, sliding into water. Absentmindedly, Yury turned on the radio. The wishes of earth suddenly buzzed around them, a beehive of whispers and yearnings and desires, young and old, healthy and dying.

That was how the Bureaucracy's technology worked: in 1971, on the Salyut 1—the world's first space station—a three-man crew reported hearing voices on the radio when it was tuned to a specific frequency. The USSR said they were going mad and ordered they come back to earth. But for the next hundred or so years, every international space station reported hearing the voices. An engineer known as Vladimir Chelomey took it upon himself to investigate the strange frequency. He deployed a Salyut of his own into space equipped with a unique technology based on the sonar technology of boats; while normal sonar technology communicated with or detected objects on or under the surface of the water, such as other vessels, Vladimir’s technology did the same thing—but through radio waves. After discovering that the rumours were true, and there were wishes from earth being broadcasted from the radio, the incident was deemed the “Chelomey Phenomenon.”

The Pod sputtered as the engine rumbled. Noemi, her brow twitching, reached forward and turned off the radio. Moments later, they were sailing the stars.

Noemi leaned back, relaxing into her seat and tapping her armrest. She gazed out the window.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the earth. Yury followed her gaze, watching the planet tilt disproportionately toward them. It was massive, filling the entire window with a mosaic of blue and green.

“I see it.” Yury said. He considered their landing, how the planet would suck them up inside itself, transforming them into a spitball of fire. There were so many mathematical nuances that equated their survival, he found it fascinating.

“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?” Noemi breathed. Yury glanced sideways at her.

“Um… I don’t know. Not really.”

Noemi glared at him. A moment later, she closed the blinds.

When the Pod broke through the earth’s atmosphere, Yury closed his eyes, feeling the turbulence bounce him around in his seat. When the shaking finally stopped, he looked out the window, watching as the Pod descended upon the fresh, dark soil of a farm. Noemi nodded once at him. She adjusted her suspenders, shifted the hair out her eyes, and locked Yury inside the spaceship.

Yury stared out at her, blinking. Noemi stood beneath the wing of the Pod, shielding her eyes against a ray of sunlight. Clouds of dirt billowed around her.

“Noemi?” Yury knocked on the window.

Noemi dug in her pocket, retrieving a thin white remote. She pressed a button and the Pod shimmered away, camouflaging Yury with the sky. She turned on her heel, walking in the direction of a big ramshackle farmhouse, several yards away.

Yury shifted on his feet. Noemi was his superior; if she wanted him to stay in the Pod, then he should probably do as was asked of him. Still, he’d been itching for a case that would send him to earth for ages, and now here he was, one button away from freedom.

Trying his best to ignore how wrong it felt, Yury walked over to the computer, where he typed in a sequence that overrode the door. It wasn’t hard; numbers were his thing. The door sighed open. He walked down the ramp, now invisible, gasping at the warmth that flooded his skin. It was mid-summer, and the sun bore down on him like a scolding mother. He stepped onto mounds of overturned earth. Far ahead, Noemi disappeared beneath the eaves of the house. She didn’t even knock; she simply walked in, as if she owned it.

Yury tensed. He approached the farmhouse warily, like it would reach out and grab him. When he reached the porch, a breeze whispered past him, rattling the hanging windchimes. The house seemed to resonate its emptiness. He listened, nearly pressing his ear against the old wood, but heard nothing.

Yury opened the door. Noemi stood in the centre of a cramped living room. Attached to her leg was a small child with the same black, curly hair as her. An older man held Naomi beneath the wing of his arm, and a woman, her face stained with tears, had fallen at Noemi’s feet. Everyone seemed to be quietly crying.

Including Noemi.

The woman looked up at Yury. “You’ve brought her home to us! Oh, bless you! Bless you!”

Noemi wheeled around to look at Yury. He stared plainly back at her. Noemi’s eyes were wide now, like a startled deer. She bent and helped her brother to her feet.

“Mother, father, I need some time alone with Yury.” She said, and the parents stayed a moment longer before begrudgingly moving to the kitchen. They took the child with them.

Noemi sat on the couch, offering Yury the space next to her.

He did not take it.

“I suppose you’re wondering what all this is about,” Noemi sighed. “The answer is simple, really. I wasn’t born on the Bureaucracy. I was raised here, on earth. It happens sometimes; it’s not that crazy. The wish was conceived by my brother, who missed me, and wanted me to come home.” She shrugged easily. “So there’s nothing to fuss about. We’ll just keep this between us, okay? Sorry for dragging you along, but it was your case, and I couldn’t just take it from you.”

Yury continued to watch her. He stared at her for so long, Noemi began to shift back and forth in her seat.

“You thought the earth was beautiful,” Yury finally said, standing as still as a statue. “And now you’re crying.”

Noemi went to speak, but it was like her voice got caught in her throat, and she pressed her lips together mutely.

“You still have your heart. The Bureaucracy never removed it.” Yury stated. He watched the fear blossom on her face; the slight tremble of her jaw, the subtle raise of her eyelids. A purely chemical reaction to his words. Fascinating.

But then her eyes darkened. “And they never will,” she assured him.

Yury backed up to the wall as Noemi reached for the knife.