A Christmas Tale

Internal Affairs was a thankless job, but Tinsel liked it, usually. Sure, they whined, they disliked him, they turned out to be acting out of stupidity rather than malice nine times out of ten — but that tenth time, oh! That tenth time, he got to be the hero. It made his ears tingle just to think about it.

He felt a twinge in them now, as he looked at the Joy Division books.

"There's something wrong here," he said to his partner, Cookie. Cookie was stout for an elf, tough and scarred, clearly the brawn to Tinsel's brain — or so it appeared at first glance. It was convenient when people assumed he was stupid.

"What kind of thing?"

"I'm not sure yet," said Tinsel, "but it just strikes me as wrong. Have they really met their quota every single year for the past, what, 400 years? That can't be right."

"Could be good at their jobs," said Cookie.

"I know, but — every year?"

Cookie scratched his chin thoughtfully. "We could ask for the itemized records."

"Yeah. I want to get to the bottom of this." Tinsel sighed. "Before Christmas, this time."

~~~

The itemized records were kept in an archive somewhere behind the Joy Division offices. It took a quarter-hour of searching and a small bribe of coffee to find out that much, but at length the two agents found the small, forgotten-looking door marked "RECORDS."

The room looked forgotten, too. It clearly wasn't designed to receive visitors; the lone occupant was a very old elf seated behind a solid oak desk, and his was the only seat in the room. Every flat surface, the floor included, was covered in stacks of files and books that a decent-sized colony of mice could have gotten lost in.

Behind the desk was another door; that, Tinsel felt sure, was where the real prizes were.

"We need your records, 1800 through 1840. Itemized."

The gnarled old elf glowered at Tinsel. "What? Why would you need reports from that far back?"

"1800 through 1840," he repeated, taking a seat on a stack of books. "And your recent ones for the past 30 years, too."

"No, it's too much trouble. It's awful enough getting in to the archive room to put away the new ones, much less tracking down—"

Tinsel flashed his badge. He hated doing that; it made him feel like a third-rate cop from a human movie. But it was effective in situations like this. "Internal Affairs, sir. Santa's Own."

The record-keeper sighed. "Bah. Wait here."

He fished an ancient-looking rusted key out from under his desk and used it to open the rear door. Tinsel caught a tantalizing glimpse of a vast chamber lined with shelves before the door slammed shut again.

"You think he's hiding something?" asked Cookie.

"Not sure yet," said Tinsel. "He caved pretty fast when I showed him the badge. But, well, he's had a lot of time to fiddle those older records if he wanted to cover up something incriminating."

"Hope this doesn't turn out like the Electronics case."

Tinsel massaged his temples. "Don't even say that. Ugh."

The door opened again — surprisingly fast, Tinsel thought, considering how hard the task supposedly was — and the old elf dumped a stack of folders on Cookie's lap.

"There you are," he spat, and went back to his work behind the desk, studiously ignoring the agents.

"Thanks," said Tinsel. "We'll show ourselves out."

~~~

Tinsel had always been somewhat hazy on the operation of the Joy Division. He had a pretty good grasp of what all the Manufacturing subdivisions were up to, and he steered clear of Animal Care on purpose — there were other Internal Affairs agents who didn't have reindeer allergies — but he hadn't ever worked a Joy case before, and they were less interconnected with the other departments than most.

As Cookie began poring over the records, Tinsel had a look at an official Joy Division orientation booklet he'd snagged on the way back.

"Spread joy to the world!" read the tag line. The cover depicted an elf looking in at a window on a cold December night somewhere in suburbia. A spray of magic issued from his hand and surrounded heaping plates of dinner at the humans' table. Tinsel's eyes skimmed over the goofy grins on the humans themselves; the whole illustration looked like it hadn't been updated since the 50s.

"As a member of the Joy Division," read the interior of the booklet, "you will be authorized to use reasonable amounts of magic* to reach your quota of spreading joy and happiness among mankind. (*Subject to approval by the Energy Division.)"

"I wonder if they'd ever authorize us using magic," Tinsel muttered.

"Not likely," said Cookie. "Stuff's expensive."

"Yeah, I know. Looks like these guys have it easy, though."

"Speaking of that," said Cookie, "they've been using just about the same amount of magic every year that I've seen so far in these old books."

Tinsel's ears perked up. "Really? That's interesting."

"They didn't record what exactly they're doing with it, though."

Tinsel doffed his hat and scratched his head. "Any notes on the humans that might give a clue?"

"No, it just lists names. Nothing that..." Cookie trailed off. A puzzled look crept over his face, followed by utter bewilderment.

"What's wrong?"

"They're the same," he said. "It's the same names, over and over again, for years — just in a different order, so it's not obvious."

Tinsel grabbed two of the recent folders and skimmed through them until he found the names. Cookie was right: both lists were almost identical. Five units of joy from some name one year, five units of joy the next, and on and on.

"Rotten as year-old candy," said Tinsel.

"It goes on until the human dies, I think, and they switch to a new one," said Cookie. "What do you think they're doing?"

"I'm not sure yet," said Tinsel, "but we're going to tail the next Joy agent who goes out and see."

His ears were tingling again. This, he felt sure, was it.

~~~

The agent they elected to spy on was a veteran Joy Division elf. He went out in a small elf-sleigh that evening; Tinsel and Cookie followed in a low-profile, neutrally-colored stealth model of their own, drawn by a well-trained tracking reindeer.

To their surprise, the mark didn't travel far. The sleigh started its descent while over a pine forest, still well in the snowy upper reaches of the globe.

"Northern Canada?" murmured Cookie. "I don't see any buildings."

They kept well back as they descended, being careful not to let themselves be silhouetted too prominently against the sky. The Joy Division elf showed no sign of noticing their presence and disembarked at a small copse.

Now that their attention was drawn to it, they saw that there was something there, amid the trees: a well-disguised building, set low into the ground.

"This is big, Cookie," said Tinsel. "They're not supposed to have a facility like that out here."

"Want to go in?"

Tinsel smiled. "If I were smart, I'd say no. And I wouldn't have asked for this job."

They set their sleigh down behind a snowdrift near the copse and padded lightly to the building on foot. It was old, but well-maintained; the thick pine walls put one in mind of an old Scandinavian church. Tinsel tried the door and found it unlocked.

He nodded at Cookie, got a nod back, and then they both burst into the building.

The Joy Division elf was a quick thinker and spun on his heel to try to block their view, but they muscled past him. The interior of the building was simple; along each wall there was a set of beds separated by curtains, each containing a single human. The effect was hospital-like. All the humans appeared to be sleeping.

"I don't suppose," said Tinsel, flashing his badge at the elf, "you'd like to tell us about what you do here?"

~~~

In the end, all it took was a mug of hot cider (and a promise of some leniency) to get the elf to calm down and speak with them.

"Look, I didn't come up with this racket," he muttered darkly. "But here's how it goes.

"We have to spread joy, okay? And the eggheads back home track it somehow, how much joy we've created. But creating joy is really, really hard! So some people in my division started looking for ways to make it, uh, a little easier to meet quota.

"Then somebody noticed that sleep and amnesia magics are cheap and well-tested, since they're used so often for disguising the Workshop's operations.

"So we capture some humans and engineer a situation where they'll each be happy due to some simple event, one that we know of — like meeting a long-lost relative. We bring them here. We have the joyful event happen — at last, reunited! or whatever — and then after the joy starts to taper off, we put them to sleep and wipe their memories. And then rinse and repeat, over and over again, until we meet quota. It's by far the most efficient way to generate the required amount of joy."

They all fell silent. At length, Cookie said, "Did you perhaps consider, at some point, how monstrous this was?"

The elf coughed and shrugged.

"This is against the entire spirit of what your division is for," said Tinsel. "The boss is going to have a fit."

"I dunno about that," said the elf. "See, the funny thing about the sleep and amnesia magic is, it works on elves, too."

Tinsel belatedly became aware of the lethargy that had been creeping over him for the past minutes. He struggled to run toward the door, but his body felt leaden. He tumbled to the floor and sunk into the warm darkness.

The last thing he heard was, "So nice of you to drop by each year.

"Merry Christmas!"

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