Most of us were driven by the bigger picture. Some of us weren’t. I can’t tell you the difference between which, because we all worked fervently to bring together the organization’s goals. It was our mantra. It was our life. The big picture was delivered to us in the same way that all of our information was – in bits and pieces, in riddles and clues in plain sight. D-MISE became our religion, and we looked for signs of those who would play God in our daily life. In a restaurant, in a club, in a parking lot, or in a store, our eyes would be scanning for something just slightly out of place. Whether we found it or not, the search would continue. Our lives depended on it.

I suppose it’s very possible that there are some among us who never interpreted the bigger picture and what D-MISE was trying to mitigate, and they just worked for the smaller reward of being able to live from day to day. I work for the big picture. I share the vision of how the world is changing, and I want to be a part of it. I want to be able to survive in it, and the only way to do that is to stay ahead of it. Something big is building in our world, and I’m not sure how many of us are going to make it to other side of After. There’s always a chance that I won’t, especially if certain information is released.

It’s too late to stop it. It’s out of humanity’s control. The world isn’t a great place as it is, but it’s likely to become worse – much worse. D-MISE is only trying to prepare us. D-MISE and all its agents are the hero of this story. We know about the change, and we know we have to change with it. The mass of citizens in Prism City might not know it, maybe a few can guess. We are agents because we chose not to be oblivious, and we are willing to do what’s necessary.

I mentioned before that there are some in our organization that like to play God. Allow me to qualify that statement. The Star Dog technology is the turning point, the fulcrum, around which our world revolves. It is the technology that will help us to After, and I can tell you that Before isn’t going to last much longer. Complacency is the killer in the shadows, and it will decimate a large portion of the world’s population. Not D-MISE.

We have learned to change the biology of other creatures, and we have had many, many failures along the way. It’s not an easy process, and if we are well-funded somewhere farther up the invisible rungs of our organization, I can’t tell. We’ve made monsters that terrorize the citizens in the dead of night, but I have to assume there’s something special about Star Dog. We tried to recreate our own, but things went wrong. So very, very wrong.

Many of us didn’t know exactly what we were signing up for, but that doesn’t excuse us. Ignorance is the crutch of the weak, and by now, we’ve learned to become strong. I’m writing this now as a manifesto of the things we’ve been through, and things that I, personally, have encountered. During my time as a D-MISE agent, I’ve done some tremendous things, and equally terrible things. I wish I could say that I was ashamed of them, and on some level I must be to write this, but I can’t deny that it helped me live in an unlivable world, and I won’t apologize for that.

When this all started, I wasn’t much of anything. I had no direction in life, and Prism City wasn’t a very generous place. That hasn’t improved in recent years, and although I’ve had to face unthinkable consequences, I shudder to think where I could have ended up. Yes, I know about Paradise, and Utopia, and countless other squabbling communities that have popped up on Prism City’s streets. We have to know everything, including our fair city’s best kept secrets. We’ve made most of them. You’ll soon learn about a large quantity of them, but even I am not privy to all of them.

Our organization works best with decentralization. I don’t know who my superiors are. I don’t know who my inferiors are. I don’t know who my peers are. I only know who I know when I need to know them, and then I forget. I’ve become very good at forgetting, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I suppose that’s an occupational hazard I’ve been trained to accept, just like I’ve been trained to accept that my orders come when and where I least expect them. All I know is that I had better follow them, and failure is not an option.

There isn’t much else I would rather be doing, because before this I was lined up for death row. I wasn’t particularly a good person, but I can say with certainty that I didn’t belong there. I didn’t deserve to have my neck on the chopping block, but I had ended up there anyways. At the last second, I had received a pardon from an anonymous source, and before I knew what was happening, I was being loaded into an unmarked van like an animal and carted off to the unknown. I was dressed up like their doll and thrown into missions before I had even known the protocol. Looking back on it, I can see that was their test of my mettle, and I had passed. When I had, I came out the other side of their artificial adversity as a new man, with a new life, and even a new face.

This wasn’t a real face, but it passed for one. I remotely operated an android to do the dirty work while I stayed in the shadows where I belonged. It was through these electronic eyes that I had first encountered the being that irrevocably changed our world: Star Dog.