The Idea Agent

By CJ Knight

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

The file arrived on my desk in a thin ivory folder, as they always did. It was warm to the touch. Every idea held a temperature ranging from ice cold all the way to scorching hot. Warmth was the sign of a great idea. Too hot meant too volatile. Ice cold was nothing more than a shower thought bearing no fruit.

I opened the file to see a standard layout.

Client: David Rowe.

Idea Status: Assigned.

Classification: Historically Immersive.

Risk Level: Critical.

My brow furrowed. Our agency selected ideas for distribution. My job was to make sure the selected clients saw the great ones through. Critical designation wasn’t issued to great ideas that may die. It was assigned to ideas that would die without intervention. If one of these ideas dies before it’s written, something important leaves the world forever. They’re known as the Unborn Works.

The ink on the file page shifted and formed new words:

“The client is trapped in a world of their own imagination, unaware they are not a prisoner, but a creator.”

Client Condition: Comatose.

Cause: Motor Vehicle Crash.

Estimated Recovery Time: Indefinite.

I leaned back in my chair. “That complicates things.”

My agency existed in a narrow building between two ordinary shops that no one ever noticed. One sold watches, the other sold shoes. Time and journeys make appropriate neighbours.

The agency hallways stretched longer than the building should allow. Doors opened into cavernous rooms filled from top to bottom with manuscripts. Others were lined with sketches, melodies, and thoughts. Ideas waiting for distribution to clients.

I carried David’s file to the director’s office. I found Ms. Calder exactly where she always was. Behind her desk, carved of blackwood, in a room smelling of old pages. She didn’t look up from her desk. “You’ve come about the coma case.” Not a question, but a correct statement.

“Yes.”

“You want authorisation.”

“Yes.”

She turned a page in the ledger. “You understand the risks.”

“I do.”

She finally looked up. “You may not come back.”

“I know.”

Miss Calder’s eyes were like unwritten pages. Blank and endless. “Why this one?”

I held up the file. “This idea matters. This isn’t an idea people may like to read for enjoyment. There are those who will need to read this.”

She nodded once. “Approved.”

***

Ideas hated hospitals. A building full of waiting, uncertainty, and a mixed bag of endings. Some are happy, others not so much.

I found David lying alone in a private room. His battered body surrounded by beeping machines of whispered numbers and tubing forcing his lungs to work. He looked younger than his file photograph. Unfinished, like the idea assigned to him.

I pulled a chair beside David’s bed and opened my briefcase. Inside, a glass filled with silver liquid. Standard issue Dream Induction serum. I prepared two syringes. One for me, and the other for David.

Inside was a glass vial filled with a silver liquid. “David.” I injected him with the serum. “You were assigned an idea by my agency. You need to write it.” David remained still. “I need you to wake up.”

I injected myself and sat in the chair beside his bed. The room warped around me. Sounds from the street below stretched to impossible lengths. Sunlight filtering through the windows refracted. Everything dissolved.

I woke standing in a field of paper with the pages stretching to the horizon. The sky above hung low, filled with unfinished sentences of drafts long dead. I sighed. “Unstable dream structure.” This was worse than critical. I was out of time. Each step I took left footprints shaped like letters. After a few minutes, a house made of notebooks appeared. Notebook covers formed the walls. Spines formed the beams. Bookmarks hung from the porch like vines. This was where I’d find David.

The door was locked, so I did what I always do. I kicked the door open.

The voice was immediate. “Agent.” It carried the room somewhere between a whisper and a snake’s hiss. She stood in the centre of the room, eyes blazing red. Her body, black as shadow, faded in and out of existence. “He is mine, his idea sustains me.” David lay on the floor beneath her, unable to move. Light from his body faded as she absorbed it. Her body grew more corporeal as she fed. Many ideas were lost to the world in the fashion at the hands of a Shadow Thief. David was under the same illusion they all were. The illusion that the Shadow Thief held the power here.

I stepped forward. My body slammed hard into an unseen wall. The Thief laughed. “You will come no further, Agent.”

“David!” I wouldn’t be able to move until he took control. “Get up!”

His words were barely audible. “I can’t.”

“That’s what they all say!” I pushed, unable to move forward. “You hold the power of your own imagination.”

“What imagination?” Tears rolled from David’s eyes. “My ideas are terrible. I’m not good enough. I always fail.”

“Everyone fails.” I needed to tread carefully. “Until they don’t.”

The Shadow Thief chuckled. “See, David. Even the Agent knows you’re not good enough.”

“David! Look at me!” His head turned slightly. His eyes found mine. “You imagined this place. Imagined her. You’re trapped because you imagined it.”

“That’s not what’s happening.” David closed his eyes.

“No, David, that’s correct.” The Shadow Thief hissed. “I’ve trapped you here. I control this dominion.”

“It is what’s happening!” I pushed against the invisible wall. “Undo her. Undo this place!” The walls flickered. A good sign.

Something resembling fear crossed the Shadow Thief’s face. “No, David. Wait!”

“End her, David!” He rose from the ground. The Shadow Thief recoiled. “Unmake her! Imagine her burning!”

Flames consumed the Shadow Thief’s body. Her wild shriek unmade the house of notebooks around us. The invisible wall fell away. With a final shriek, the Shadow Thief burned to a pile of ash.

I walked to the middle of the room and placed my hand on David’s shoulder. “This is your imagination, David. You own it.”

He wiped the tears from his face. “I’m still trapped here in a coma.”

I smiled. “Imagine yourself waking up.”

A blinding light ripped through the dreamscape.

I woke in the hospital room in the chair beside David. The sound of the machines was different now. Faster. David stirred in the bed. He would wake soon enough. I pulled an empty notebook and a pen from my briefcase. On the first page I wrote, ‘An idea manifest starts with the first word. Write that word and give it life.’ I left the notebook and pen on the chair beside him and left the room.