CIA

Rifling through the pile of documents, June happened upon something that caused her to erupt in uproarious laughter, "The CIA? Are you fucking serious dude?" she cackled as she stomped through the hall, towards the living room, shaking the paper-thin sheetrock walls, bursting into the room like a neon quasar and rushing at her restrained, bloody-beaten prisoner with an abrutness that would startle a rock.

"Keith Reinbaum-- CIA, right?" she said, tossing a stack of papers at his face, which scattered and fluttered to the floor. "That CIA? The United States of America Central Intelligence Agency?"

"America?" Keith said, twisting his bruised and black eyebrows.

"Eh," June rolled her eyes and shifted her weight on her feet, "don't mind that. Old name. So that's why you've been following me huh?" June glared at her prisoner.

Keith smiled back a ghastly, swollen, bloody smile, "Yes. I'm with the USRR CIA. And you well know what we want. You're a well known terrorist-- a loose cannon, you already dest---" he suddenly lurched as she rammed her fist into the top of his skull, cutting him off mid-sentence.

"You mean to tell me you believe that shit? I never hurt anyone who didn't deserve it, I never enslaved anyone, I never blew up any..." June exhaled a long sigh, "I'm wasting my breath. You ain't never even thought about it, have ya?" She said, "You were trained not to question a damned thing... I'd be doin ya a favor now just putting you out of your misery. Did you ever stop to ask why they wanted to take me alive so badly if I'm such a threat?"

The Central Intelligence Agency still exists in the setting of Cranberry. Originating in the United States before The Eclosion, it still operates to the current day, albeit as an organ of the United States of the Reformed Republics, a rump state of the original Unites States.

While their power has increased dramatically since the Eclosure by moving into other human-inhabited realities and conquering or coopting them, many many more humans have left their umbrella of control, founding their own colonies in other realities, and growing into powers in their own right.

History

The history of the CIA up to the current day closely mirrors the real world.

In 2048, however, one of their projects, MKSIOL, suffered a catastrophic failure that resulted in The Eclosion. While this shattered the american state, and the world, and resulted in massive upheaval and loss of life, it also opened countless new worlds for the reformed portions of the east coast seize power in the aftermath, "restoring" the government under an oligarchical council. (still sketching the specifics of the american and world states in the immediate aftermath, point is they have administrative continuity with the previous order, and spread their doctrine of slavish (but unaware) worship of the demon of control to the multiverse).

Structure

Seemingly as an act of vanity, though the CIA serves at the pleasure of the United States of The Newfound Lands, they are the defacto power within it. While the delegate most of the day to day work of maintaining and running the empire to external departments made up of (intentionally) untalented functionaries, and this would, to a normal citizen, appear to make up the body of the government that controls them, it is not so. They are subservient, completely, to the original legacy power structure inherited from the original CIA.

While they're technically secret, the fact that their fingerprints are all over everything is a barely concealed secret, even as they have spawned several other agencies, some from the remains of agencies from the original power structure.

Technology and Power

The CIA and their associated state have access to few technological advancements over the modern (Earth 2025) age.

Projects

MKULTRA

Mind control project. The depths of the CIA's mastery over the human mind was extreme, but despite the fact they knew so much more than the people they were manipulating, there was always an ineffable factor they couldn't control or predict. This scared them, and drove them to ever more manically try to learn about and completely master humanity (but as it contains fragments of divinity this was impossible). Their experiments resulted in discoveries that led directly to the comissioning of MKSIOL.

MKSIOL

Individuals gaining seemingly supernatural powers have long been known to the authorities and principalities responsible for the CIA. Stories from as far back as antiquity, names like Zarathustra, Jesus, and Lao Tze. It was considered a holy grail to find some way to create and/or gain control over these people. Since so many of these spiritual teachers often spoke of contact with divine powers, much futile research was undertaken to find some way to reach and manipulate (or at least bargain with) this realm. It wasn't until the overwhelming success of MKULTRA in probing the human mind that they discovered this capacity existed in everyone, and didn't require sacrifices to gods foreign to this reality. The MKSIOL project was comissioned to investigate these individuals, their capabilities and limits, and the term "Siol" was coined to refer to them.

While the promise of this technology was literally unlimited, and the higher-ups were anxious to find a way to undergo the transformation themselves, the actual process was anything but straightforward. Initial results were extremely disappointing, to the point of leading them to question whether the theory could be real, or was just some erroneus quirk in the data that required more studying. At length, they had some minor successes, at least proving the concept, but they were still far below what could be considered useful.

The problem is that subjects who had the necessary attributes that the CIA's methods could reliably work with were difficult to control. The transformation had to be by the will of the subject, and any conditioned or engrammed system of control, no matter how subtle and elaborate interfered with that. External control measures were unreliable, as their overt presence disrupted the transformation and hidden ones were impossible to conceal: lines of causality and intention seemed to appear as primary objects in their new perceptive state, as obvious to them as a gun on a table would be to us. This made them EXTREMELY difficult to control.

It was found that Siol often destroyed themselves by some dumb misadventure, however, a miscalculation, not understanding quantum physics when trying to pick a lock etc, leading to comical deaths. Smarter Siol were able to avoid these kinds of outcomes, but, again, this poses a problem for control. It was finally decided to find individuals who were just barely smart enough to undertake the transformation, but who would likely be unable to mount any effective escape attempt, nor would they be much of a threat if they were pressed into further research or service.

This project culminated, but did not end, with the Eclosion. In the current era, the CIA does have access to a few Siol, and though they are not (as an ironclad rule) talented, they are extremely dangerous. They have access to engrams and external processors that allow them access to a set of "spells" that have very powerful effects, while negating most of the downsides. However, they lack creativity and will never be able to come up with new techniques on the fly, which limits their usefulness compared to natural Siol considerably.

CRANNBERY

Project to suppress physics, so that people do not realize that reality is not real. The field was seeded with misinformation (string theory) to prevent information about the nature of reality from becoming common knowledge. After the eclosion, they seeded the cover story that it was caused by ill-advised particle accelerator experiments (though they WERE doing those experiments, which led to the realization that reality isn't real, and communication with principles via laws of reality for very small particles being able to be predicted by, no only how they are first investigated, but the disposition of the people involved. Made it clear there was no safe distance to observe from, very much scared the elites who were possessed by the god of control. Control is contrllled by its need to control, so it was unavoidable driven to try and control the ineffable, which led to the eclosion. (actually turns out not to be a disaster, just disastrous in the way humans first tried to access it, but not strictly "wrong" by God's standards. Man is given free will, but as long as man strives, God is happy.

ELECTROZYNE

Project to investigate the lifeforms known as Zynemia.

Creative Notes

CONCEPT: Comical Twainian American corruption, hubris and folly taken to the utmost. I want them to be hilariously inept, but somehow able to pull off great feats of statesmanship seemingly by luck.

I might want their higher leaders, and the leaders in the USRR, to be members of a cult that worships Base Stasis, wishing for an end to all life, suffering and change, for all souls to be returned to their original disposition before any life existed. They are fundamentally anti-consciousness.