Somewhere in a filing cabinet that doesn't exist, in an office with no nameplate, paid for with money that never lands on a balance sheet, a committee you've never heard of is making a decision about your life. You don't believe that. Not really. But some part of you wants it to be true, and that wanting is worth pulling apart. Why are we fascinated by secret organisations that don't officially exist - the deniable ones, with no logo, no AGM, no press office you could ring for comment? I've come to think it's because the alternative is so much worse.
The alternative is that nobody's in charge at all.
I think in systems for a living, more or less, and the thing about systems is that they fail in two flavours. There's the failure somebody designed - a deliberate constraint, a rule with a reason, a decision made in a room by a person you could in principle name. And there's the failure that's just entropy: a cable worked loose, a number overflowed, the universe shrugged. The first kind is alarming but legible. The second kind is the one that keeps you up at night. A secret organisation is a way of insisting the world is the first kind. If there's a Department somewhere deciding which inventions we get to keep, then at least someone is deciding. Malice is more comforting than chaos. We will take a villain over a void every single time.
And the deniability is the whole trick. An organisation that admits it exists can be sued, audited, voted out, dragged into daylight by a paper trail. One that doesn't officially exist can do none of those things - which also means it can't be disproven. You can't get a "no comment" from a body with no comment line. That unfalsifiability is catnip to a brain like ours, because we are pattern-finding machines, and to us an absence of evidence reads suspiciously like evidence of an absence being covered up. Tell me a group definitely isn't watching and I'll quietly wonder who told you to say that.
Fiction worked all this out a long time ago. The deniable agency is the perfect antagonist: infinite reach, no paper trail, no jurisdiction it's obliged to respect. But the cheap version - the candles, the robes, the man stroking a white cat - has never frightened me. What frightens me is the plausible version. The one with a procurement process. The one where suppressing a world-changing invention is just another line item, signed off by someone reasonable who's home in time for dinner. Evil with an HR department. The banality is the point. Real power has never needed a cloak; it needs a budget and a non-disclosure agreement, and both of those are extremely, boringly real.
Because here's the deflating truth, and I say this as someone who would love to believe otherwise: most actual secrecy is tedious. It's redacted line items and meetings that achieve nothing and clauses you signed without reading. The real apparatus of "that wasn't for your eyes" is less Bond villain, more underwhelming bureaucracy with a good legal team. And yet the gap between that grey reality and the grand machine our imagination installs in its place is precisely where the best stories take root. We don't really fear the conspiracy. We fear that there is no conspiracy, and that all of this - the waste, the stupidity, the things that never get built - is just what happens when nobody's steering.
So when I catch myself enjoying a story about a shadowy body that runs everything from a building with no sign on the door, I try to be honest about what I'm actually enjoying. It isn't the threat. It's the order. It's the fantasy that somebody, somewhere, holds the full picture - even if they're the bad guys, even if the picture is grim. A secret organisation that doesn't officially exist is, weirdly, a hopeful idea. It means the lights are on behind the curtain. The genuinely frightening thought is that there's no curtain, and no one's home.
A novel about this
That's the engine under my Toby Steele series. Toby is night-shift IT support - quiet, overlooked, exactly the sort of person decisions get made about rather than by - until a dormant piece of code switches something on and he becomes a great deal more than that. What comes for him isn't a government. It's the Department for the Prevention of World-Changing Technology: privately funded, no official existence, going quietly about the business of ensuring certain inventions never reach the rest of us. They don't twirl moustaches. They file paperwork. They decide, on your behalf, what you're allowed to have.
I wrote them banal on purpose, because the banal version is the one that scares me. If you've ever suspected the best ideas get quietly shelved by people who were never elected to shelve them, 22:22:22 Frequency Shift is the book that takes the suspicion seriously - and then lets the overlooked nobody fight back. Sometimes the most satisfying thing a story can do is give the void a face, just so somebody can finally punch it.
FAQ
Why are we fascinated by secret organisations that don't officially exist?
Largely because the alternative frightens us more. A deniable agency running things from behind a curtain at least means someone is in charge - that the world has authors rather than just weather. We're pattern-finding creatures, and a hidden hand is a more bearable explanation than blind chance. The fascination isn't really with the menace. It's with the order the menace implies.
Are organisations like that actually real?
Real secrecy exists, but it's mostly dull - NDAs, redacted budgets, procurement nobody's allowed to discuss. The genuine machinery of 'you weren't meant to see that' looks less like a candlelit cabal and more like bad middle management with better lawyers. The gap between that drab reality and the cathedral our imagination builds in its place is exactly where the good stories live.
Why does deniability make a fictional organisation scarier?
Because you can't disprove it. A body that admits it exists can be sued, audited, voted out, or dragged into daylight by a freedom-of-information request. One with no official existence can't be any of those things - and to the human brain, the absence of evidence reads suspiciously like evidence being hidden. Unfalsifiability is catnip. Tell me a group definitely isn't watching and I'll wonder who told you to say that.
Which novel does the secret-organisation-that-doesn't-exist idea well?
22:22:22 Frequency Shift is built on one. Toby Steele, an overlooked night-shift IT worker, comes up against the Department for the Prevention of World-Changing Technology - privately funded, no official existence, quietly in the business of making sure certain inventions never reach the rest of us. They don't twirl moustaches. They file paperwork. That's what makes them frightening.
Where should I start with the Toby Steele series?
Start with 22:22:22 Frequency Shift, the first book. It introduces Toby, the augmentation he never asked for, and the deniable organisation that would rather both the technology and the unremarkable man carrying it quietly disappeared.