RFOGIIIOA, Rooms Full Of Grossly Incompetent Idiots Incapable Of Action, was a secret cold war program that hid the president by constantly rotating his office among many identical offices staffed by decoys. The job of scrambling the offices was left to the decoys. In reality, the president was not in any of the offices, but instead in a secure secret remote location. Russia of course was aware of all this and ignored the whole mess. RFOGIIIOA was eventually exposed by the news and cancelled as a complete waste of taxpayer money. The best that could be said for it was, as huge wastes of taxpayer money go, it was smaller than most.
James Bond, or Jim, as he preferred, was a spy. Of sorts. A political decoy, to be precise. He worked for RFOGIIIOA. He hadn't uncovered what the acronym stood for, but he was aware of the ruse, he had figured out that he was one of the decoys, and he could tell from the daily ballots that his colleagues were of quite variable skill levels. He could deduce that the president wasn't placed among the decoys at all, since all the decoy slots were accounted for by actual decoys. He doubted the program was successfully fooling anyone, but he made a point at work to dress and walk like Ike, just in case. He knew of the famous fictional 007 with his same name. Yes they were both spies, sort of. But there was a world of difference between the worlds Bond James Bond and Jim experienced.
Unlike the rest of his unknown colleagues, Jim worked second shift. He was given the collected ballots from the other decoys and it was his job to produce the final schedule for the next day. He knew that his schedule was final, because what he produced always matched the next day's schedule, unless he made egregious errors like mapping multiple people to the same room. Which he had done twice so far by accident. He knew he was agent 7 because when 7 appeared twice in the same spot in the schedule, he'd be given the same room the next day. He suspected he'd been assigned slot 007 because someone higher up was having fun with his name. It's probably also why he was recruited into RFOGIIIOA in the first place. He could probably use that predeliction to figure out a tell to get them to reveal more about themselves, but hadn't figured out how yet.
At first he had filled in his schedule randomly like the others, but once he understood, he endeavored to sum the ballots of his colleagues and place them by the sum modulo 100. God knew these poor men had little enough effect on the real world already. The least he could do for them was allow them to at least affect their own office arrangements. (He could tell from their handwriting that they were all, in fact, men, past middle age like himself. Which makes sense since they were all decoys for Ike.) When there were collisions, he had a buffalo nickel he would flip to make the decision of which to move up to the next untaken slot. He was unwilling to use his power as finalizer to deny them what little influence they had.
He limited himself to filling out his own ballot, before doing the daily tally, and adding it to the sum along with all the other ballots. He found he preferred room 13 above all others. There were 100 decoys, so his ballot was a small influence. He had found, by backtracking what answer he should have given, that he was maybe best off ranking himself 97, except 14 on Tuesdays. Maybe. He had toyed occasionally with always giving a fixed schedule, or letting each colleague place their own number, so he and his colleagues could settle into permanent rooms if they wanted to. But maybe there was some good coming from the ruse. And the constantly changing rooms, he had to admit, did make it more fun.
Summing 100 boxes for 100 ballots by hand in an 8-hour day was challenging. When he first hit upon it, he'd tried it, but had only gone a third way through and had to forge an arbitrary schedule instead. The next several nights he lay in bed and thought it through. Then he went to the drug store, purchased 200 magnifying glasses, several boards, some bright lights, and rigged his "optigraph". The 100 ballots were placed in specific spots on a backboard, well lit, then a rigging of magnifying glasses and cardboards with holes punched cast the numbers for just one box from each ballot on a screen. Thereby eliminating all the manual effort of gathering the numbers. After that he could add them and doublecheck them in reasonable time. He was fairly good with numbers. Then he'd move the backboard slightly so the next box on each ballot showed, and do the next sum. What previously would have taken him twenty hours now took him six. He had to wheel the optigraph in and out of his truck every day, since his assigned office changed daily.
Many of his colleagues were lazy. 35 and 46 for example always turned in the same ballot. They should be fired. Or, maybe not. Maybe it was a service to the world, keeping them away from any position that really mattered. Jim was uncertain on this point. 69 hadn't turned in a ballot in a week. 21 had recently been replaced: they had been spotty about turning in their ballot, but now it was coming regularly, in a different handwriting, with more effort being done in the scrambling. Many of them — 4, 12, 18, 19, 89 for example — fancied themselves clever, but they were clearly humans trying to act unpredictable. Their ballots felt excitingly different each time.
Number 9 was truly random. 9's ballots were not exciting, they were just plain random. Jim had been keeping statistics, and he hadn't seen any flaws in it so far. Not even the biases you got from a coin, like his buffalo nickel. Handwriting was clean draftsman lettering. He thought number 9 would be an interesting person to meet one day. Or maybe not. Who could tell? That was the trouble with true randomness. It all felt the same. It didn't really tell you anything.
Jim would finish about 11pm each night, then put his feet up on the desk, lean back in his plush leather chair, and read a good book. Right now he was working through War and Peace. Did Ike do this too, after a long day in the office? Jim didn't know. He liked to believe that he did.
This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts.