ecru

ecru is an infohazard. yall ever notice the 80s-ish trend of everything being fucking beige? i mean they say it's the colour of unbleached linen, and like that's true, but even the french think it's a weird word and they supposedly invented it. they didn't, and "ecru" is so weird a word because it isn't just a word, but a word of power. let me explain lol

so words of power are words in spoken language that carry some inherent supernatural power in them. they're not used often, but it's occasional enough that someone is briefly cognisant it's an actual word - which is how it maintains its power. actually thats a whole thing in and of itself, it's why crosswords are one of the agency's recruitment tools, but yeah. a word of power is a word with power. ez

what exactly that power is is generally arbitrary, like "decompartmentalisation" causes like nanovolt-level fluctuations in the electrical grid, "unambiguousnesses" makes random book pages stick together - shit, remember books? lol - but ecru is a special one, bc it's an engineered word of power. like we made it. well, not we, the agency didn't do shit, the guys working on PES made it

turns out that ecru and the colours associated with it are fucking excellent at absorbing psionic flux. see when your brains on tape its extra sensitive to flux from other people thinking all the fucking time and boiling data off your shit. oh yeah also why we use brown paper for parcels and letters - in a macroscopic black box like that the properties of the thing can change and fuck up in transit, especially if the recipient's worrying about the condition. ofc now we have that weird patterning on the inside of envelopes to sort that out, it's better at reflecting the flux rather than absorbing it, which became a problem as ecru got more and more "popular"

so. ok. this is kinda gonna boggle you but the reason we stopped painting walls and colouring things in offices like that isn't just vibes, it's down to what actually happens when flux is absorbed like that. i mean for parcels it's not a problem, bigger benefit to just wrap it up for a few days, but when it's in an office where loads of people are continuously thinking all the time it gets bad. like this is how we discovered that flux absorbers tend to become anomalous in and of themselves over time. lots of weird shit happening to corpos then. like ppl hearing voices while at home bc their minds were no longer numb to natural levels of interference, or cardboard becoming animate and eating stationery lmfao. the cardboard thing is actually why the agency pushed for recycling programs, fat lot of good that did

biggest issue with it all is that it was so prominent, even after the brain sluice stopped being a thing, that this shit is everywhere. like environmental infohazard pollution on a scale u cannot even comprehend. old letters? infohazard. boxes in ur attic? infohazard. like the entire asbestos scare was partly the agency being like "ok we really need to clean this up" LOL. and there's so much still out there that just HASN'T been cleaned up, like fuck, literally everyone probably has a fucked up thing absorbing their thoughts in their house and we can't do shit

whatever tho. it's '58 and we haven't died or anything. shits gotten weirder but it hasnt got any more lethal i guess. ecru is fucked