The Last Drag Show at the Globe; from Dr Hagenstein, the U.K. Files

The Last Drag Show at the Globe; from Dr Hagenstein, the U.K. Files

Dr Hagenstein scanned the crowd nervously, his super sensitive secret agent nerves, honed and crafted by years of death match level mental combat with Russians and Atheists, spasming alarms all over his nervous system at the sight of any suspicious character, the majority of the London population of which apparently swarmed to this very spot every evening for the outrageous yet strangely antiseptic performances at this pseudohistoric place.  He sat in the upper upper deck, about forty vertical feet above the stage of the new rebuilt exactly as before Globe Theatre, the neo-Globe, the focal point of that gigantic theme park called London, where all the historically violent impulses of the Anglo Saxon peoples have been sublimated into tame homoerotic deconstruction of the most mind numbingly overperformed plays in western culture. 

Dr Hagenstein actually loved Shakespeare, some of it. The plays with daggers, anyway. Not so much the comedies, because of some childhood stuff that confusing speech and loud laughter tended to trigger. 

The enemy agent had tried to offer him a beer before the play, but he'd refused. "Our seats are high enough to kill," he said cryptically. She knew his secret weakness; his massive skull size, it's heft and mass, the catch 22 for any highly intelligent person, his body was basically a big shuttlecock. All it would take was a nudge, and the thought machine that had generated some of the most incredible secret assassination plans and code break ideas in dark web history would plummet the two stories to the stage like a cannon ball, dragging his hapless body with it. He didn't dare lean even a little forward, even during the most hilarious onstage hijinks, where the big drag queen with the beard was singing to the tiny lesbian trapped in the clothes rack and the audience roared with appreciation, relieved that it didn't matter if they understood the words or not. 

At some point he realized that everyone in the upper deck reserved seating was American, while the locals were all standing in the plebe seating below. Did they know something? The English resentments of Americans were well known. Had they chosen now, at the height of summer, when half the population of the US was wandering drunk and stoned through London, Paris, and Edinburgh, and the other half was trapped in Disneyland, to spring their trap? Wait, who was running the ship back home? Of course it wasn't the English. They hadn't been able to muster a real plot for more than 150 years - it was the White Ward all along! Drones filling the sky! They swarm the stage, playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic on their tiny speakers, chasing the screaming actors through the sophisticated series of stage doors and secret passages that Shakespeare had once used to weave his magic. The laughing audience does not understand. Drones? Hymns? Outrageous, what next?  The drones focus high intensity strobe lights on the audience, transmitting signal bursts at a blink rate syncopated with the refresh screen rate of the human nervous system, a technique proven by years of research to send the human brain into a semi trance state similar to REM stage sleep. The crowd stops laughing and begin to hum the Battle Hymn in a horrible chorus while Dr Hagenstein in one incredibly fluid motion draws his secret pen weapon and fires a burst of micro toner particles into the nearest drone's forward flight controller module. The drone careens into the standing room section, awakening several screaming audience members with a fiery crash. The other drones orient quickly on the threat, but their strobes do not seem to affect Dr Hagenstein, why?

Flashback to a rustic cabin in a secluded wood where the unnamed master of uncomfortable motions used a blinking flashlight to insert a destroy light source program in Dr Hagenstein's subconscious and set it to activate upon trance inducement, losing several flashlights to Dr Hagenstein's trip wire reflexes and nodding his ancient grey haired head in satisfaction as the final flashlight exited his grip in several pieces, impelled by a lightning fast karate kick launched by his subject. End of flashback, Dr Hagenstein firing his secret pen weapon at drones...

Dr Hagenstein started awake just as his gigantic head swayed perilously forward, giving him a brief view of a man in a leather jacket waving a fish onstage. It had been close. He peered closely at the delicious candied almonds that the other agents had suspiciously offered to him. Sedatives? Or had he lost track of the plot again