Special Operation at the Faculty of Literature (Patreon)

"So then, gentlemen," General Pierre Morel said quietly, sweeping his gaze across the long conference table. "Let's begin."

The room immediately fell silent. Only the soft hum of the air conditioners and the occasional raspy wheeze from one of the oldest officers could be heard.

The large screen instantly switched from a map of France covered in red markers to a series of photographs. Men and women of different ages. Beneath each picture was a name, a date, and a brief summary.

The general picked up a thin folder.

"Madame Hélène Rousseau. Forty-seven years old. Fully recognizes her relatives, knows the address of her home, yet insists she is a former engineer named Paolo Bruni from Turin. Passed a polygraph and every other test."

The next photograph appeared.

"Captain Jean Morel. Twenty-eight years old. Found in Lyon three weeks ago. Claims he spent his entire life in Canada as a housewife named Nicole Smith and has never served in the French Army."

The next photograph.

"Monsieur Mathieu Lefèvre. Fifty-four years old. Former restaurant owner in Marseille. Claims that for the past twelve years he was a schoolteacher named Sophie Durand. Correctly identifies students, colleagues, class schedules, and lesson contents. Verification confirmed every piece of knowledge, despite the fact that someone with his background could not possibly possess it."

A quiet chuckle, barely audible, but still noticeable.

A brief silence settled over the room, almost immediately followed by General Morel's heavy sigh.

No one even imagined he would snap at Duvall. Morel was known for his gentle nature, and Duvall frequently allowed himself these small breaches of discipline.

So instead of reprimanding him, the general simply turned away, clasped his hands behind his back, stared off into the distance, and said,

"I understand your outrage perfectly well, gentlemen, but facts are facts. There have already been more than three hundred such cases in France alone. Forty-three have undergone full official testing. Only one turned out to be a fraud. Every single one of the others passed without flaw."

"General, permission to speak!"

Morel turned his head sharply toward the long table with practiced military precision, immediately recognizing Duvall's voice, and nodded.

"Go ahead, Colonel."

Colonel Henri Duvall slowly rose from his seat. Tall, with closely cropped hair, a square jaw, and the heavy gaze of a man accustomed to searching for an enemy even where everyone else saw coincidence, he placed both palms on the table.

"With all due respect, General," he said, resting one hand on the edge of the table, "this looks far more like mass psychosis driven by today's twisted ideological agenda."

Several officers exchanged subtle glances.

Colonel Henri Duvall continued, now with greater confidence.

"I've always said that all this modern nonsense, 'gender fluidity,' 'self-identification,' and the rest of that liberal garbage would crack sooner or later," Colonel Henri Duvall continued, his voice growing stronger like a man preparing to lead an assault. "For years we've allowed this propaganda to rot people's minds, especially the young. Universities, the media, social networks, all of it has become a factory producing weak, confused people. And now here's the result. Healthy men and women suddenly start insisting they're someone else. Women trapped in men's bodies, men trapped in women's bodies. A mass psychosis fueled by a passing trend!"

2

Several officers around the table nodded, but General Morel raised a hand, calling for restraint.

"Colonel, I must ask you to set aside your emotions and personal prejudices and explain yourself. How exactly did you put that puzzle together?"

Duvall snorted, making no effort to hide his contempt.

"A puzzle? Don't you see it, Morel? Not a single case where someone claimed they hadn't changed sex," Duvall said with an unconcealed smile. "It's always the same story. A man claims he used to be a woman. A woman claims she used to be a man. A coincidence? Please."

He swept his gaze across the room.

"Every one of these stories fits perfectly with what people have been having drilled into their heads over the past several years. Tell someone a hundred times that sex is nothing more than a matter of self-perception, and on the hundred and first they'll start believing it themselves."

Several approving chuckles echoed around the table.

Colonel Bernard Lacroix gave a brief nod.

"Henri's argument has logic."

"Exactly," Duvall continued. "We're not dealing with a physical phenomenon. We're dealing with mass suggestion. We need to declare war, yes, an actual war, on this entire ideological infection. Shut down these programs in universities, launch investigations, isolate the most active people spreading this nonsense. Begin an aggressive campaign promoting normal traditional values. And then, I assure you, within a couple of months this flood of these so-called 'memories' will disappear on its own."

He sat down, convinced he had settled the matter, and leaned back in his chair as though expecting applause, which surely would have come if protocol hadn't forbidden it. The approving nods from the other officers were enough.

Duvall was pleased. Very pleased. At last, he was back in his element. At last, he felt that this was his moment. The moment when, as far as he was concerned, common sense was finally beginning to prevail over what he had spent years calling "the age of collective madness." He could almost physically savor the sight of several officers nodding in agreement with every word he said. This was exactly how things were supposed to be. Order. Hierarchy. Discipline. Men should remain men, women should remain women, and the army should remain an army, not a place for discussing what he liked to call "fashionable social experiments."

Yes. The beginning of his rapid rise had been made. And it had begun right here.

He could allow himself a moment to catch his breath before that weak-willed old general tried to argue with him, only to receive a firm and decisive rebuttal.

He slowly exhaled, allowing himself to close his eyes for just a second.

Just to catch his breath.

...

"Mademoiselle Valmont?" a calm female voice called out, followed by silence.

'Must've imagined it,' Henri Duvall thought as he opened his eyes.

"Mademoiselle Claire Valmont?" the woman repeated, this time more firmly while looking directly at Duvall. She was seated about twenty-five meters away behind the instructor's desk beside a large wooden chalkboard, where the words "Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary. Nineteenth-Century Realism. The Narrator and Free Indirect Discourse" had been written in white chalk, while arrows connected the names of Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola.

3

Henri Duvall blinked.

The military headquarters was gone.

Not gradually, not fading away, but as if it had never existed.

Instead of the long conference table, there were rows of wooden desks. Instead of officers in dress uniforms, there were dozens of young people with laptops, notebooks, and paper cups of coffee. Instead of screens covered with maps, there were tall windows pouring warm daylight into the room.

"Mademoiselle Valmont," the professor repeated, noticeably more sternly this time, "when an instructor addresses you, it is customary to answer."

Quiet laughter rippled through the lecture hall, and almost instantly dozens of students turned their heads in the same direction.

Straight at him.

Henri instinctively tried to stand the way he would before a general, but the movement came out strangely awkward. His knees, tightly confined by a long pencil skirt, resisted with unexpected force, immediately striking the edge of the wooden desk and knocking a pen onto the floor. At the same moment, something shifted strangely on his chest, and the fabric of his bra tightened against his skin, making Henri completely lose track of what was happening for a fraction of a second.

"Stay seated," the professor said calmly, though without the slightest hint of indulgence now, adjusting her glasses. "I can see perfectly well that you've only just woken up, Mademoiselle Valmont. There's no need to pretend you've been paying close attention to the lecture."

Another wave of chuckles swept through the room.

"I'm sorry, Madame Lefèvre..." slipped out automatically before he even realized he'd spoken.

He cut himself off abruptly.

What?

Why had he called the professor that?

And why had she called him Mademoiselle?

Despite the temptation and instinct to look down, Henri, with his disciplined soldier's training, kept his eyes fixed on Madame Lefèvre. At the same time, he instantly recognized her and knew she was one of the strictest professors at the university, someone who couldn't stand lateness, talking during lectures, and especially students who fell asleep in her classes. The knowledge surfaced in his mind effortlessly, as naturally as he had addressed her by name only moments earlier.

A chill ran down his spine.

"Mademoiselle Valmont," Madame Lefèvre said, slowly removing her glasses, wiping them clean, and carefully putting them back on. "Since sleep was apparently more interesting than my course, be so kind as to come see me after class."

Then, as though the incident had never happened, Madame Lefèvre turned back to the chalkboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and resumed her lecture in the same steady voice, as if she had only been interrupted for a second.

Henri, or perhaps Claire Valmont now, slowly lowered her head, and her eyes immediately widened as though she wasn't looking at the ordinary curves beneath her sweater created by her own C-cup breasts, she already knew they were a C cup, but rather at secret plans for a shadow government to conquer the world, with transcripts of negotiations between Martians and Plutonians lying right beside them.

4

Her slender hand instantly flew to her throat, her elbow brushing against those very curves and lightly pressing them, sending such an unfamiliar wave of sensation through her body that Claire, who still stubbornly thought of herself as Henri, instinctively froze. Beneath her fingers was the smooth skin of her neck, while a pair of small earrings swayed gently against her ears. She knew with absolute certainty that those earrings matched nearly every outfit she owned and that she had been wearing them for almost three years. And in that same instant she also knew she had never worn jewelry in her life, because real men didn't wear earrings.

"What..."

she whispered so quietly it was barely audible, slowly, very slowly lifting her hand away from her neck before lowering it farther and farther.

Her gaze lingered on her slender wrists and smooth hairless skin before drifting upward to her hands, which by then had already turned palm-up, fingers spread wide.

They were her hands and yet they weren't.

Beyond her long fingers she could see the thin extensions of her fingernails, painted only a few days earlier at the nail salon near her dormitory. Julie, a sweet girl about Claire's age, wasn't exactly a professional, but Claire liked her. They always found things to talk about: boys, books, and above all, literature. Around Julie, Claire always felt as though she had already graduated from the Victor Hugo Higher Institute of Literature in Lyon and was no longer a student but a young lecturer whose opinions people genuinely respected.

"Hey, Claire, quit staring at your hands," a female voice whispered from beside her. "Lefèvre's definitely going to throw you out if she notices..."

Claire immediately flinched, instinctively dropping her hands into her lap and shrinking into herself as though she'd been caught doing something shameful. Heat rushed into her cheeks as she turned toward the whisper.

"Yeah, thanks, Marie, I..." she began, only to stop herself at once and turn away, fixing her eyes on the chalkboard, where Madame Lefèvre was already carefully sketching another diagram illustrating the relationship between the author's voice and Emma Bovary's inner speech, calmly explaining why that particular narrative technique had become one of the defining characteristics of nineteenth-century French realism.

Claire took a deep breath, forcing herself to stop staring at her own hands.

A deep breath. A heavy swallow against the panic lodged in her throat.

'Pull yourself together and think this through. No panic. Tactics only.'

She decided she would deal with this after class. For now, she needed to do what Henri had done better than anything else throughout his life: collect herself, cast aside emotion, and treat everything that was happening as yet another extraordinarily difficult military operation, one that demanded above all else a cool head, sharp observation, and unwavering discipline.