Table of Contents

Welcome to UWIAEE
What We Are
Our History (Abridged)
Our Ethics — The Containment Code
Divisional Structure
On Field Offices
On Civilian Exposure
Your First Ninety Days
In Case of Field Emergency
On Documents and Materials of Unknown Origin
Acknowledgment
See Also (External / Athenaeum Cross-reference)

UWIAEE — New Personnel Onboarding Document

Document ID: ONB-001-7e (Onboarding, Level 1, Revision 7e) Classification: UWIAEE-INTERNAL // PERSONNEL // FOR NEW EMPLOYEES ONLY Last Revised: ██████████ Issued By: Office of Personnel Welfare Distribution: New hires only, via orientation handler.

Welcome to UWIAEE

Welcome.

If you are reading this document, you have been selected for employment at the United World Institution of Abnormal Entities and Events (UWIAEE; pronounced U-ie, in casual internal use). You have already passed the screening process, the security vetting, and the orientation interview. We will not ask you, in this document, to consent to anything; consent was inferred when you signed your employment paperwork.

We trust you. We hope, in time, that you will trust us.

This is an overview document. It is not the full picture. The full picture is, by design, not located in any one place.

What We Are

UWIAEE exists to identify, study, contain, and where possible mitigate the harm of abnormal entities, events, and phenomena operating outside the recognized natural order on Earth.

We are not a military organization. We do not hold territory. We do not answer to any single national government. We are funded through a rotating set of arrangements with several, and our charter expressly forbids us from acting on the operational interests of any one of them.

We exist because we are needed. We do not exist to be admired.

Our History (Abridged)

In 1961, a joint scientific mission to the lunar surface — convened under arrangements that, at the time, would have been politically inconceivable in any other domain — recovered a small translucent crystal of unknown composition, embedded approximately four meters below the regolith. The crystal exhibited properties that, by terrestrial standards, can best be described as faintly magical and paracausal:

It warmed slightly in the dead of the moon
It emitted a tone audible in a vacuum
On three separate occasions, it caused minor unexplained phenomena.

The crystal is not, by any external standard, a powerful object. Subsequent analysis has confirmed that magic, as a force, does not appear to operate on Earth in any meaningful sense. The crystal's residual effects are best understood as echoes of a property the object once carried more fully elsewhere.

The discovery, and the implications of it, prompted both governments involved in the recovery to convene a closed-door joint commission. The commission concluded the following:

The crystal could not plausibly be the only such object.
If there were others, they would not all be on the moon.
The matter required ongoing investigation by an organization that could outlive any single administration of any single nation — and that could be trusted to keep its findings from being weaponized.

UWIAEE was incorporated under joint charter in 1961. By 1974, the originating governments had transferred legal ownership to an independent trust. By 1989, even the trust's records of who had originally held shares were sealed by mutual agreement.

We have, since then, belonged only to ourselves and to the work.

Our Ethics — The Containment Code

This is the section of the onboarding document most new personnel skip. We ask you not to.

UWIAEE operates under a strict ethical framework. We have a Containment Code, and we hold to it.

No subject — entity, person, or anomaly — is to be harmed except where harm is the only available means of preventing greater harm to others. This is not a guideline. It is a rule.
Entities under our care are not test subjects. They are guests, prisoners, patients, or colleagues, depending on the case. The category is determined by what they are, not by what is convenient for us.
The work is not done in secret because we are ashamed of it. It is done in secret because public knowledge of the work would, with high confidence, cause greater harm than the work itself prevents. The day this calculus changes is the day we publish.
No member of UWIAEE answers to a national interest. If you are approached by a representative of any government — including one you personally identify with — and asked for information about your work, your answer is "I cannot discuss my employment." There are no exceptions. The penalty for violating this is termination of employment and, depending on severity, application of Section 11 procedures (see Personnel Handbook, vol. 2).
We do not lie to our own people. Information may be compartmentalized for security. It may not be falsified. If a colleague asks you a direct question and the answer is classified above their clearance, the correct response is "I cannot tell you," not a fabrication.

We are aware that organizations of our size and resources have, historically, drifted from their ethics. We have built our internal structures specifically to make such drift difficult. Internal audit is constant. External audit, by an independent panel of retired members drawn from each major division, occurs every five years. The reports are published in unredacted form to all employees above clearance level 2.

In the sixty-five years of our continuous operation, we have terminated thirty-one personnel for ethical violations of the Code. We are proud of every one of those terminations. We hope we will never need to be proud of another.

Divisional Structure

UWIAEE operates under a divisional structure, with regional field offices coordinating through a central administrative committee.

Research Division — Identification, classification, and study of abnormal entities and phenomena.
Containment Division — Long-term care, secure housing, and ethical management of contained subjects.
Field Operations — Initial response, on-site assessment, and recovery work.
Linguistics & Translation — Decipherment of unknown scripts, languages, and communication systems. Significant overlap with Research.
Personnel Welfare — Mental health support, family liaison, post-incident care, and long-term wellness for staff. This is the largest division by headcount. This is not an accident.
Internal Audit — Independent oversight of all of the above. Reports directly to the external audit panel.

Your office assignment will indicate your division, your reporting line, and your clearance level. If any of these is unclear, your orientation handler will resolve the question before you begin independent work.

On Field Offices

UWIAEE maintains regional field offices in approximately one hundred and ten cities worldwide. Most of them are unmarked. Most of them maintain the appearance of mundane occupancy — a small accounting firm, a freight company, a quiet university research office, a property management group. This is intentional, and it works.

If you are stationed at a field office:

Do not discuss your work with the apparent neighbors.
Do not, except in operational necessity, identify the building as UWIAEE-affiliated to anyone outside the organization.
If asked who you work for, the approved response is: "I work in records management for a small private firm. I'd rather not get into specifics." This response has been calibrated through long use to discourage follow-up. It does so with high reliability.
If you are followed home, contact your handler. We will investigate. If the investigation indicates no threat, the matter ends there. If it indicates a threat, we will protect you.

We take your safety personally. Please take ours seriously in return.

On Civilian Exposure

In the course of field operations, members of the public will occasionally observe events they were not intended to observe. UWIAEE policy on civilian exposure is, like the rest of our work, calibrated to minimize harm to the civilian.

Operational Attire

Field operatives are issued standard attire: dark-toned suit, button-up shirt, non-patterned tie, polarized eyewear (preferably black or clear). This is not aesthetic preference. The attire is selected for two functional reasons.

The first is that it reads, in nearly every region in which we operate, as generic authority. Most civilians who encounter a person in this attire do not ask questions. Most who do ask questions accept "federal" as a sufficient answer and do not pursue the matter further.

The second is that the attire is forgettable. Among the most consistent findings of our internal review of civilian interactions is that witnesses, asked to describe a UWIAEE operative they encountered, will produce a description that matches roughly fifteen percent of the adult population. This is by design.

You will receive five suits at intake. They will be replaced as needed at no cost to you.

Vehicles

Field vehicles are unmarked. The current fleet standard is a mid-size dark sedan with locally-appropriate municipal plates. No emblems. No light bars. Departing operatives do not, except in genuine emergency, exceed local speed limits.

If a civilian asks who you are, the vehicle reinforces the answer the suit has already provided.

Civilian Welfare Protocol

Where civilian exposure has occurred and cannot be adequately mitigated by routine reassurance, UWIAEE invokes the Civilian Welfare Protocol.

This protocol is, as a matter of standing policy, not a memory-modification procedure of the kind depicted in certain popular media. The Containment Code prohibits the involuntary alteration of a civilian mind. We have no neuralizer. We do not want one.

What the protocol does involve:

A respectful conversation, conducted by a Personnel Welfare specialist, in which the witness is given an accurate account of what they observed, within the limits of what we are able to share.
An explanation of why the matter cannot be discussed publicly, and an honest request that they not do so.
An offer of follow-up support, including counseling at our expense, for any lasting distress the encounter may have caused.
A contact card with a number the witness can call, at any time, indefinitely, for any concern related to what they saw.

The retention rate of civilians who have been through Civilian Welfare and have not subsequently disclosed UWIAEE activity to others is, by our most recent figures, approximately ninety-seven percent. The retention rate is not maintained by intimidation. It is maintained by trust, and by the genuine care of the specialists who deliver the protocol. Keep this standard.

In sixty-five years of operation, we have never erased a memory of a civilian against its owner's will. We do not intend to start.

When You Are the One Who Was Seen

It is permitted, in most regional jurisdictions, for you to identify yourself to a curious civilian using one of the following approved cover identities, all of which are documented and backstopped by Personnel Welfare:

Tax-revenue auditor
Records management contractor
Insurance adjuster (commercial)
Environmental compliance inspector
Federal research analyst (deliberately vague)

The cover identity matched to your field placement will be on the back of your credential card. Memorize it before your first assignment.

If the civilian asks for a business card, you have one. The phone number on it rings to a real desk staffed by a real person whose job is to answer that line in character. Their job is also, if the caller seems distressed or wishes to talk further, to gently route them to Personnel Welfare without ever indicating that any routing has occurred.

We do not lie to civilians where it is avoidable. Where it is unavoidable, we lie gently and clean up afterward.

Your First Ninety Days

You will spend your first ninety days in supervised orientation. You will not be assigned independent casework. You will not be given access to sensitive material above your clearance. You will receive your full salary, full benefits, mental health resources on demand, and a direct contact at Personnel Welfare whose only job is to make sure your transition into this work is humane.

Many new hires find the first ninety days difficult. The work you are about to do does not, in many cases, conform to what you were taught about the structure of reality. Some of what you will learn cannot be unlearned. We know this. We have built our systems around this.

You may, at any time during your first ninety days, request reassignment to a non-field role or termination of your employment without penalty. Termination at that stage includes a non-disclosure briefing, generous severance, lifetime mental-health coverage, and a permanent listing as a friend of the institution. We do not punish people for not being suited to the work. We thank them for trying.

In Case of Field Emergency

If you encounter, during the course of your work, anything you do not understand and that may pose immediate danger:

Do not engage. You are not, regardless of your training, equipped to handle uncategorized phenomena alone.
Withdraw to a safe distance. Safety is defined by the entity in question; consult your division's field reference card before assuming a number of meters.
Contact your handler. The emergency line is staffed at all hours, year-round.
Document what you observed as soon as you are safe to do so. Even a partial account is useful. Especially a partial account is useful.

You will not be blamed for retreating. You will be blamed for not reporting.

On Documents and Materials of Unknown Origin

A subset of personnel — primarily in Research and in Linguistics & Translation — will, in the course of their careers, be assigned materials whose provenance cannot be established. These may include written documents in unknown scripts, fragments of physical objects that resist standard analysis, biological samples that do not appear in any catalog, and recordings the source of which cannot be traced.

Standing policy on such materials:

Do not handle the material without protective equipment appropriate to your division. "Appropriate" varies by case; consult your handler before opening any sealed container.
Do not test the material on yourself. This includes touching it with bare skin, ingesting it, breathing near it without filtration, or — in the case of written material — reading it aloud.
Report any sensory or perceptual anomaly immediately. Visual, auditory, or olfactory experiences not shared by other personnel in the room are a Class-2 reporting event. Do not wait to see if they resolve.
If the material has caused you injury, however minor, leave the room. Notify your handler from the corridor. Do not return to the material until cleared by Personnel Welfare.

Most such materials are eventually classified, archived, and forgotten. A small minority are not. The reporting protocols exist for the small minority.

Acknowledgment

At the conclusion of orientation, you will be asked to sign the following:

I, [name], understand the nature of my employment with UWIAEE. I understand that the work is important. I understand that the secrecy is necessary. I understand that I am free to leave at any time, without penalty, and that the organization will continue to support my well-being should I do so. I agree, while employed, to act in accordance with the Containment Code.

We do not require your signature today. We require it before your first independent assignment. Take the time you need.