It was much easier than I'd expected to infiltrate the Friends of Humanity.
When i'd worked against the drug lords of Colombia and Mexico, I hadn't bothered to try deep infiltration after the first time I was offered a job as a prostitute. I'd used invisibility, bending light around myself, or torture, or the simple expedient of grievously wounding men to see who they'd run to for help. But I had imagined the Friends of Humanity to be difficult, imagined they would carefully protect themselves against mutant assailants. So I decided on true infiltration. Since the Friends of Humanity was a fully legal organization, it seemed unlikely they'd try to demand I be a prostitute-- and, if they did, I always did have the option of killing as many of them as I could find.
But it was much easier than I'd thought. At the rally, I asked about full-time employment opportunities with their organization, and was directed to an office building in downtown {town in whatever state it is.} They didn't question my faked driver's license or my faked social security card. They didn't question my story about living at home with my parents to explain why I didn't want to live in their "safe" compound. I had a bad moment when they decided to use a device to verify that I was human-- I thought I might have to fight my way out after all-- but I needn't have worried. The electronics to determine my state of mutation were very sophisticated, too complex for me to puzzle out instantly. But instead of a complex interface, such as a monitor screen, the output interface consisted of three lights, one red, one yellow and one green, each hooked to a soundmaker. For red and yellow the soundmakers were an unpleasant loud buzz, for green a cheerful beep. And yes, I could easily read that much from the electronics-- these were not sophisticated speakers. Apparently FOH members were considered too stupid by their own organization to read a complex output device. So I simply blocked the red light and buzzing noise that would otherwise have been triggered by the electronics' detecting my mutant power, and instead stimulated the green light and pleasant beep. They then, having assured themselves of my humanity, decided to see if I could type-- 70 wpm-- and if I could alphabetize and perform simple arithmetic. Once I had passed all these simplistic tests, they hired me as a secretary and data entrant.
The fools, I thought. If they hadn't been so hateful, I could almost have felt sorry for their carelessness.
In my new job, I laid low and observed. Particularly I watched the women, who seemed to me like an alien species I was trying to blend in with. I watched them giggle and simper and preen and talk about their weight and their boyfriends. I watched them flirt with the men, who never seemed to notice them for competence or intelligence, only beauty. I learned to smile inanely after two different men told me that a girl as pretty as I was should smile, because I didn't want to stand out or become known for being standoffish. I didn't flirt back-- only smiled and ducked my head demurely-- but that seemed to be enough for me to fit in. I tried to push aside the relentless proselytizing of my co-workers by claiming to be Catholic-- though it had the opposite effect of what I'd intended; I'd had no idea that American Protestants viewed Catholics as some strange sect, as if they were not even Christian. To me as a Jew, this seemed a ludicrous distinction, yet the weary resignation I felt told me that somehow, no stupidity and hatred in the name of religion could surprise me. I felt myself very fortunate that my instincts had told me to play at being Christian rather than admit my true faith, if it could be called a faith at all when you've forgotten everything you might have believed in except the tradition's name. After that, they were a bit more standoffish to me, which did no disservice to my purpose-- I heard less gossip, but got more work done. It also gave me an excellent excuse for refusing to date any of the men-- I simply claimed my parents wouldn't let me date outside my faith, and that was that.
The work of a spy fills one with a bizarre dislocation. I worked very long hours in my job-- I had no home or family to return to, no hobbies but this strange task I'd taken on as my own, and overtime was the only opportunity I had to do my real work. So I was spending all of my time being someone else, something else. My name was no concern-- Miriam LeBlanc was as close to, or as far away from, the true name I didn't know as anything else would be. But in every other matter I was maintaining a pretense. For ordinary spies this is probably hard; for an amnesiac with no other anchor, it was almost unbearable. I pretended to be a human hater of mutants rather than a mutant activist for the safety of her people, a Catholic instead of a Jew, an American instead of a rootless, homeless, stateless creature. A young girl with family, instead of an amnesiac orphan, older than time, older than her face could possibly indicate.
A woman, instead of a person who deep down inside knew that the woman-form was some sick masquerade, that he was truly a man.
They thought I was a fool, because I was a young woman to their eyes, and I obliged them ruthlessly. After I had thoroughly familiarized myself with their operating system, which seemed simultaneously more primitive than I was used to and more advanced than I expected, I deleted files on my computer and then claimed I didn't know why it didn't work, so a system administrator had to fix it. In front of me. I knew he couldn't block me from seeing his password because the keyboard wasn't Tempest-shielded, and so I could read the electromagnetic signals traveling over the cord, but he didn't know that, so I'd expected him to show at least a modicum of caution. But no. He simply signed in, in front of me, making no attempt to hide what letters he was typing. After that, I generated bad sectors on the hard drive, and complained, and when they gave me a new hard drive, I broke into the office of the tech who'd taken the old one and retrieved my hard drive from the junk pile, after hours. Since the lock was a magnetic badge-lock this was mindlessly simple. I repaired the drive, installed it, and configured the operating system not to know it was there unless I used a special password. This gave me an excellent place to store the data I stole, and with the sysadmin password to start with, I stole quite a bit of it.
It was very frustrating for me to play the fool. When the co-worker across from me needed a help desk minion to talk her through reinstalling her fonts for three whole hours, I decided to take ten coffee breaks in a row rather than scream with frustration or fling her, her computer and her thrice-damned fonts out the window. The techs behaved as if I were a complete moron, which, of course, anyone who deleted random system files would ordinarily be, and it made a good cover, but it made me want them painfully dead. I kept myself from going mad and killing them all by fantasizing constantly about the destruction of their organization, how these poor pathetic fools had allowed a powerful mutant into their midst to destroy all they'd built, and my inane smile turned genuine. Whenever my co-workers frustrated me, I only had to remember that I was here to destroy them, and every stupidity, every failure to recognize that I was worth something as a person, every patronizing sexist remark I endured, was only furthering my plan. Meanwhile I deflected any discussion of myself or my past by asking about the questioner's history instead. This usually worked beautifully.
I gained a reputation for great dedication, since I worked late nearly every night and came in most weekends. It wasn't hard to get the work-- I was the only one of the secretaries willing to work late, and I was one of the fastest and best workers they had, and I was on salary, so I wasn't paid for any of my overtime. This was probably illegal, or so one of my co-workers whose brother was a lawyer frequently complained, but I didn't care. My funds mostly came from what I'd stolen from drug lords; I didn't need the money from this job. All I needed was the opportunity to destroy the Friends of Humanity, and their stupidity gave it to me in spades.
Every night and weekend, I had free reign to remain behind and prowl through the network, using the sysadmin password, copying data to my hidden extra hard drive. Databases, containing names and addresses of known mutants, suspected mutants, mutant sympathizers. Other databases containing donors to or members of the FOH, or the mailing lists of other mutant-hating organizations. Databases of all the politicians in the US with elaborate cataloguing of their stance on mutants. It was wonderfully rich stuff. Add to that legal databases of all the case law pertaining to mutants, email and typed correspondence with supporters and detractors, contracts with suppliers, and financial data enumerating where the FOH got its funds and what they went to. I was delighted. It wasn't as easy as it sounds in the telling-- many of the databases were locked to different passwords, so I had to do a good bit of cracking-- but many of the databases had their passwords stored in the hex values of various compiled programs for database access, virtually transparent to one with a hex editor. Also, I was inspired by virus warnings I read to create delicious Trojan horses. I programmed a rainbow to burst across a screen, embedded it in an email full of bathetic Christian pap of the kind my co-workers always forwarded to me, and emailed it from my home computer to the biggest offenders of multiple forwards in the office. As I expected, they all ran the program to paint the pretty rainbow on their screen, and incidentally start capturing all the passwords they used for everything and logging them to an innocuous-looking file I could look up on the network.
Once my hard drive was nearly full of data, I took it home, backed it up to CD-ROM-- sadly I didn't have a CD-ROM creator at work, which would both have made my life easier and run less risk of damaging my data with my own magnetic fields when I transported the drive-- and returned it. Then I turned my attention to sabotage. Another foolish Trojan I created and emailed from my home account was actually a screensaver that displayed the sun shining through clouds that would move across the screen. It was very popular. It also unleashed a process that randomly altered numerical strings in the databases following an algorithm based on the Hebrew alphabet, mangling addresses, phone numbers, financial data. I brought cookies to the network techs and magnetized half the backup tapes in the tape library. I created bad sectors on the mail server and brought the email system to its knees for a week. I broke the pipes below the men's room on the second floor and caused raw sewage to pour through the ceiling of the first floor, making it impossible for the FOH to bring donors or supporters to the building for another week.
All of this was petty sabotage. I knew that, for all the richness of the data I held, I was only one woman. Without an organization to back me, I couldn't use this data to bring down the FOH through legal or even quasi-legal means. The next step was going to have to be assassination, and I was reluctant. Not because it bothered me to kill mutant-haters, but because it bothered me that it didn't bother me. Actually, I should be even more accurate-- I was very eager to go out and kill the enemies of my people, and that was what bothered me. It had been great fun to fantasize about, but as I was approaching the moment that I should make my fantasies into actual plans, I kept seeing the faces of the children. I kept remembering the moment that I realized I was a monster.
I'd thought I could escape it. I couldn't even remember what it was, when I was with Sister Maria and the children, only that it existed. I knew I had committed terrible crimes, crimes that should not be forgiven. But without any way to remember them, I had no way to directly atone for them, and so I thought that my atonement should be simply not to do them again. To live a quiet blameless life of virtue, helping the Sister care for the children and pretending whatever truth lurked in my hidden past could be safely ignored. I should have known it couldn't be done. But even when I slaughtered the rapists who thought to do me harm, I thought I could control it; I thought I was controlling it, thought I had killed those men because it would ensure the safety of other women and not because they had dared to lay hands on me. I had justifications for that, and for torturing the man who told me that the children and Sister Maria had been kidnapped so that I'd serve the drug lords, and for killing the men who stood between me and the children's safety. I thought so little of the horrific acts I was committing, I didn't even think to shield the children from the violence I'd done until it was too late, until they saw, and wept with horror. And in their fearful cries, in their turning away from me, I saw at last what I was.
I didn't want to be this way. I didn't want to be a killer, a monster, a dark thing in the sight of all creation. But I didn't see that I had a choice. It was my nature, and I was alone, fighting a war with only the resources of my own powers. I could gather information, but without anyone to give it to who could work with it, it was almost useless. The primary use it had is that it gave me the names and addresses of targets to assassinate, because that was the only way I could fight this war. And I knew, if I went down that path, if I started killing people because of their beliefs, I would never be able to turn away. I would never have the redemption I occasionally dreamed of having; I would be the monster that lurked in my hidden memories, the shadow self I feared. So I hesitated. I knew this war would claim my soul, and though I suspected myself already claimed by darkness, I wanted to put off the final descent as long as I could. Even though, in the end, I knew it would all come to the same thing.
But that was before I met the X-Men, and my life changed completely.