It’s not easy pulling the strings.

Why doesn’t anyone say good things about shadow governments? I’ll have you know at least half of us work very hard. Even the puppetiest of puppet leaders need string-pulling and palm-greasing to keep them from spilling the beans. The bean unspillers get pretty grumpy when they have too much to do.

It’s far from a thankless job, I guess. The benefits are pretty good. We have the only dental office in the world that doesn’t put tracking devices in your teeth. If you’re Employee of the Month for a whole quarter, they let you drive the orbital mind control lasers for five minutes. Oh, and get this. Three casual days a week. Pretty sweet, right?

The real downside is that I can’t tell anyone where I work. At every party, I sound like an unhelpful jerk when I say I work “in the city”, because I can’t just tell them I work twenty miles underneath it. That’s the sort of thing that invites nosy questions or makes people think you’re a mole person.

That’s ridiculous, of course. The mole people live another ten miles up. We had to relocate a few years back when they kept digging through the floors.