The most important nobody

"The Most Important Nobody"

It began, as these things do, with a man who bought a suspicious amount of hummus.

Gordon Wexler, age 33, unemployed, prone to quoting Wikipedia out loud, was designated a potential low-level agitator by the Department of Domestic Integrity (DoDI), a sub-subdivision of an intelligence agency so secret it didn’t officially exist outside of three Microsoft Excel files on an intern's USB drive.

DoDI decided to wiretap Gordon's entire body. Not just his phone. His skin. His teeth. His digestive processes. They installed a synaptic microphone in his cerebellum (via a Bluetooth-enabled dental checkup) and a passive location pinger in his left buttock (during a free massage promotion).

But then—inevitably—DoDI got hacked.

A Portuguese AI collective named “NOSEY,” a group of retired MI6 saboteurs with mild gambling problems, and a Dutch anarcho-pigeon cooperative all got access to the feed. Initially disappointed by Gordon’s daily routine—pacing, muttering, sniffing things in drugstores—they soon realized the wiretap was real, and therefore a colossal scandal waiting to happen.

Rather than publish the truth, the various groups saw opportunity. They began leaking Gordon’s GPS coordinates to select cults, rogue bureaucrats, and defense contractors desperate for relevance.

Within weeks, Gordon had become a human security project.

At any given moment, he was being covertly escorted by:

• A Mormon paramilitary unit convinced he was a divine decoy for the Antichrist.
• Three retired TSA agents performing random “vibe checks” in mall parking lots.
• A Norwegian biotech firm who believed his sweat contained encrypted anti-capitalist signals.
• An FBI informant driving around him and playing music loudly, mad that he won't let them pretend he was a cop. 
• A series of covert agent wannabees, convinced that the CIA trained cats and deer, for tactical communication purposes and that he was somehow an international secret agent capable of teaching them to be spies.
• A cabal of people on telephones performatively pretending to do investigative 'shopping work' around his location. 
• A series of scooter and electric bike riders, who believed their food delivery apps were tapped into a real time distributed network of 'Post Office' employees. 

Each group called their efforts things like Operation Perimeter Pickle or Ad Hoc Securitization Protocol Zeta. None of it made sense. But all of it felt important.

Gordon, meanwhile, assumed this was all part of a very long-delayed midlife crisis.

The worst part? Every time DoDI tried to shut down the nonsense, they had to stop just short of explaining why Gordon was important. To do so would mean confessing that a $94 million cybernetic surveillance initiative had been used on a man whose most seditious act was arguing about parking meters with a duck on Twitter.

Eventually, Gordon was invited to speak at a conference in Davos on "Mobile Sovereignty and the Quantum Body." He went because it included a free breakfast buffet.

The room gave him a standing ovation after he accidentally knocked over the mic stand and whispered, "What the hell is happening?"

A week later, the President was briefed on “Project Gordon.”

“Can we kill him?” she asked.

“No,” said her aide. “He’s... become infrastructure.”

DoDI now funds Gordon’s life in secret. He lives in a subsidized apartment flanked by rotating “security artists” and “tactical shamans.” He has no idea why.

And that's how one man became the most expensive random number in American intelligence history.