Dark Tapestry: Investigations Office
I remember, back in the bad old days, I used to pretend to smoke behind the Investigations Office's back side, under the wall that didn't have any windows. It was a big unpainted concrete cube of a building, and its big parallelogram shadow sheltered me on those summer afternoons as I squatted on the hot pavement. The story I told the other staff was that I was in the basement processing XR-COSMOPOLIS case files. The story I told my boss when he asked nosy questions was that I had just popped out for a cigarette. And the story I didn't tell anybody was that I barely smoked anymore, I didn't even bother to bring a lighter, I just rested my head against the Investigations building and thought about it. Thought about how it was built under a false deed in the blackout days of the last war, and how here once stood temporary bunkers to protect the crew from air raids during the construction.
The political zeal and self-delusion of the peoples who lived in XR-COSMOPOLIS was such that for some time our researchers thought they were a psychologically distinct subspecies of humanity. Neologisms, pidgins, and ideologically motivated terminology dominated most of the widely-spoken languages. Everywhere seemed to be a dizzying hybrid of disparate Earth cultures. One of the largest imperial powers in the zone, referred to by ourresearchers as the Pseudocommunists, seemed in many ways to be culturally rooted in some blend of Earth's Chinese and Vietnamese history. However, one inexplicable thorn confused this theory: the language of the Pseudocommunists was extremely similar to contemporary French, and from their historical documents they appeared to have been a Francophonic civilization for some centuries. Some government-sponsored revisionism seems a plausible explanation for this, supplementing French-sounding translations for everything which in our timeline is in, say, Chinese. In their literary canon, L'Art de la guerre is attributed to a Monsieur Sonnesous, and Cinq mille caractéres to a Louis Tseu.
It’s a old analyst’s trick. You don’t have to hate your boss. Just throw yourself into studying the documents of the enemy. Work hard enough and you will hate the enemy more.