Literature / Paranoia Retardant

Paranoia Retardant is a humorous Short Story (more accurately a Flash Fic, which is a short short story) written by Aza Smith that can be read on Flash Fiction Magazine here.

It tells the story of Agents Saturday and Sunday who, after spying on a civilian for months at a time, butt heads over the fact that they have no real evidence to justify their excessive espionage.

This short story has examples of:

• Facepalm: Sunday does this when Jesse returns all of their conspicuously placed spy gear to them in-person and Saturday uses this to justify his paranoid delusions.
• Faux Horrific: Saturday seems to think that Jesse liking Estelle instead of Beyoncé is "diabolical."
• General Ripper: It's implied that the only reason why Saturday is able to get away with wasting agency resources stalking Jesse to the extent that he has is because their boss is just as crazy as he is.
  Saturday: Head Agent Black Friday believes in me. He said this investigation could save a lot of lives down the line.
  Sunday: Head Agent Black Friday thinks the Soviet Union dissolving was faked by the KGB!
• Has a Type: Saturday and Sunday's notes mention that Jesse has a thing for men with facial hair, her last boyfriend having been a hipster from Berkeley.
• Improperly Paranoid: Agents Saturday and Black Friday are this about Jesse Dunbar. When the story starts, Saturday has already wasted several months and an unknown amount of his agency's budget on a relentless network of constant surveillance (up to and including have an agent date Jesse) and has gained absolutely nothing, but won't give up the chase. The whole thing is Played for Laughs.
• Incredibly Obvious Bug: The agents had bugged an excessive number of Jesse's personal objects, have installed various security cameras in the hallway of her apartment, have agents scope out her place of work, and even have Surveillance Drones follow her around on her walks. The Last Straw for their antics for Jesse was when Morgan had somehow planted a red, blinking bug into her cervical cap.
• Insane Troll Logic: Saturday thinks that Jesse putting on her bra before her panties means she knows they're onto her. When Jesse returns all of their incredibly conspicuous spy tech to them, he acts likes this proves his paranoid accusations towards her as correct.
• Inspector Javert: Agent Saturday is irrationally driven to find something, anything, that is absolute proof Jesse Dunbar is some kind of criminal enemy agent. His superior Agent Black Friday is implied to be worse, with a greater web of targets (current and former) he has destroyed since the end of the Cold War.
• Irrational Hatred: Saturday does not have a reason to think Jesse Dunbar is an enemy of the state. He is almost literally tossing ideas at the wall and hoping one of them sticks. The implication Sunday can best theorize is that it is a personal slight of some type that made the ball begin to roll, but he never figures any specifics.
• The Mole: Morgan is an agent working for Saturday and Sunday sent in to date Jesse as a form of Intel gathering. Not only does the bug he planted on her get discovered, but it's implied that they had assigned him the role without proper training.
• Only Sane Man: While Saturday is The Paranoiac, Sunday has long-since come to the conclusion that his partner is crazy and that they've wasted months stalking an innocent woman.
• The Paranoiac: To say that Saturday's methods are a tad excessive in their attempts to spy on poor Jesse Dunbar is underplaying it.
  Sunday: We've wasted department funds on three apartments in the building and over eighty bugs. We've bugged all of her lamps, her makeup, her shampoo bottle, her pillows, her wallet, her cell phone, the back of her fridge, every vending machine in the car dealership she works at, and we even had to bribe her dentist to install one in one of her teeth.
• The Peeping Tom: Sunday calls Saturday a creep for not only watching Jesse and Morgan having sex the previous night, but he then fed Morgan tips on how to sexually satisfy her more effectively. Saturday justifies this decision in that Morgan isn't a specialist in infiltration and he wanted to be sure that he wouldn't blow their cover.
• Room Full of Crazy: Saturday has taken the typical "use string to connect the facts glued to the wall" spy trope and turned the apartment used as base for the Dunbar stakeout into this out of sheer Theory Tunnelvision.
• Sinister Spy Agency: Played for Laughs. The whole situation is a nightmarish conspiracy thriller made real, but most of the people behind the surveillance are overly paranoid idiots wasting too much time and money on an overkill operation.
• Surveillance Drone: Saturday and Sunday have dozens of them follow Jesse on her walks to and from work.
• Temporal Theme Naming: With the exception of Morgan, all of the other agents are named after days of the week. Those Two Guys are named Agent Saturday and Agent Sunday, while their boss is named Head Agent Black Friday.
• Theory Tunnel Vision: For whatever reason, Agent Saturday is so convinced that Jesse is guilty of something — anything — that he takes every innocuous little action of her day as in some way linked to some Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy. It's implied that he doesn't have an actual real reason to suspect Jesse of wrongdoing; he just assumes she's guilty of something and he's fishing for evidence after the fact.
  He stood up and surveyed one of the walls in the apartment. It was covered floor-to-ceiling in photographs of Jesse taken from traffic cameras, security cameras, drones, and the cameras in her phone, laptop, and workplace computer. There were strands of red string connecting these pictures to receipts, bills, coupons, and pamphlets they fished out of her garbage. There were also sticky notes with phrases like "Hoboken Bombing" on a picture of Jesse standing in line at the grocery store, and "Possible Counterfeiting Front?" with a picture of Jesse walking into a laundromat.