The U.S.O.U.S. field-operative and his humiliating field-personae

pivotal · UNDATED (pre-YDAU)

• When: UNDATED (Steeply's operative career before the YDAU assignment)
• What: Hugh Steeply is a field-operative of the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services (U.S.O.U.S.), which the Québecois Séparatiste Left calls always B.S.S. ("Bureau des Services sans Spécificité"); a large, soft man, "some type of brutal-U.S.-contact-sport athlete now become fat." The received A.F.R. wisdom is that B.S.S. assigns deliberately sadistic, humiliating fictional personae — men as women, Caucasians as Haitians/"Negroes," the healthy as deformed — and that something in Steeply needs the mortification and uses it as fuel: he was "Haitian" for almost a year, and once spent the better part of a year in magenta robes, his head shaved and teeth removed, to infiltrate a cult-fronted drug-import ring in Seattle. His craft under the personae: he made his early career at Unspecified Services conducting "technical interviews" and "used silent pauses as integral parts of his techniques of interface" (scene 035); and the YDAU desert meetings are not the pair's first field-interface — Steeply once met Marathe "on a rickety-feeling Louisiana oil platform 50-plus clicks out of Caillou Bay, covered the whole time by armed Cajun sympathizers" (scene 088). He carries an unsafetied Taurus PT9 taped to a shaved inner thigh, and never turns his back fully to Marathe. Two institutional footnotes fill in the career: in U.S.O. technical-interview training (Vienna / Falls Church VA) he "barely got an 'Acceptable'" in Québecois French — a dialect "about on a par with Basque in terms of difficulty" (n222 p. 1036); and his latest field-assignment is paid by the A.A.O.A.A., "Unspecified Services' most elite and least specific division," "though his checks and alimony's garnishment are routed through something called the 'Foundation for Continental Freedom,' which one fervently hopes is a shell/dummy" (n229 p. 1037; the garnished alimony sits under event 3's divorce).