OTA

SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-PINK FINCH//NOFORN
Office for Theological Affairs
ABBREVIATION:	OTA
PARENT BODY:	DETR
COMMAND:	DIRCOM
MARKING:	SECRET // SAR-PINK FINCH
CLEARANCE:	Class-C
SECRET//HCS-P//SAR-PINK FINCH//NOFORN

The Office for Theological Affairs (OTA) is a directorate of DETR under Directorate Command.

The smallest body on the chart and the only one whose remit is a question rather than a function.

Every phenomenon the Department has contained arrives dressed in the vocabulary of one religion or another. Reliefs at Mount Qasioun in which Gnostic Christianity and Zoroastrian cosmology converge in a manner that is historically impossible. An officer who loses control of her speech centre and recites Revelation. Seven pulses beneath Antarctica arriving in the correct number.

OTA exists because a body had to be made responsible for the possibility that the vocabulary is not a coincidence, and because no other directorate would accept the remit.

Function

Reads, translates and models recovered material of religious character. Maintains liaison with the Holy See under SAR-GREY DOVE, an arrangement recorded as intelligence sharing and conducted as two organisations watching each other read.

The Office holds no anomalies, commands no personnel and cannot order anything. It advises the Security Council, which is free to disregard it.

Standing

Staffed at Class-C, which places the theological competence of the United States government two rungs below the personnel who determine the disposition of The Apple. This was not an oversight.

Standing assessment

OTA has filed the same finding every year since 1983 and it has never been actioned. The object is not an anomaly, a weapon or a resource. It is an offer. It has been made once before and the outcome of that occasion is a matter of public record in every bookshop in the country.

The Office recommends that no one accept it, and notes that its recommendation is not what it has been asked for.