DON'T WORRY

You wake up on the floor of a small windowless room. Disoriented, you sit up. You're not sure where you are or how you got there. In front of you is a desk. Hanging on the wall behind the desk is a tattered old poster under glass in a modern frame. The poster reminds you of something from some war you learned something about. In thick black type, the artefact reads:

DON'T WORRY

YOU'RE FAR TOO SAVVY

TO BE MANIPULATED

BY PROPAGANDA

The image accompanying those words is the head of a dog, maybe a bloodhound or a beagle, but in place of the dog's eyes are bold red swirls. The poster looks a hundred years old. But it also looks new, somehow.

You stand to get a closer look at the poster and notice a piece of paper on the desk. The paper, a small card, has something written in thin, soft handwriting that cannot be made out at a distance.

While walking to the desk you take in the rest of the room. The only other thing is a door, behind you, on the opposite wall to the poster.

At the desk, you see the page is facing the other direction and you still can't really make out the words. Without touching the page or reading what's on it, you notice each letter is wide and low, making each word appear to have been scrawled in single, subtle flourish. Maybe a woman's handwriting? Certainly nothing like your own.

Rather than lifting the page and presenting it to yourself, you round the desk to address the note. Bending over it, you find the note reads:

Do you believe that truth exists and in objective reporting?

If not, ask yourself when you stopped believing in those things.

If you can do so then you have a chance at nailing down how you stopped believing.

From there you may be able to sort out why.

With both of those questions resolved it then becomes possible to discern whose army you've enlisted yourself in.

To do so you'll have to figure out how many others you've enlisted and who those folks are.

And at that point the difficult work begins.

Only when you gather those folks and have them run through the same placefinding exercise you did to track them down can all of you together begin to formulate an accurate picture of where you stand, what all of you have been up to, and what operations you're running.

And from there, if you're lucky, that should give you the insights you need to learn who you've been working for.

As if in a movie, the moment you read the final word and flip the page over to see if there's anything on the other side, the door swings open.