The Federal Bureau of Control, almost always referred to as the FBC, is a secret United States government agency tasked with investigating and containing reality-violating phenomena. Introduced in Control (2019), it returns as the central authority structure of Control Resonant. The agency operates outside public knowledge and answers to its own leadership rather than ordinary chains of command. For wider context, see the Overview.
Mission
The Bureau's remit is narrow on paper and enormous in practice. It exists to investigate, classify, and contain three specific categories of paranatural occurrence:
Category | Description |
|---|---|
Altered World Events (AWEs) | Localized incidents in which the rules of reality break down at a particular place and time. AWEs are the source events that produce the rest of the catalog. |
Objects of Power | Ordinary-looking artifacts altered by an AWE that now carry significant supernatural force. They are catalogued, contained, and sometimes bound to authorized FBC personnel. |
Altered Items | Lower-tier paranatural objects that exhibit anomalous behavior without the world-shaping potency of an Object of Power. Tracking down rogue Altered Items loose in the city is one of the side-quest types in Resonant (see Altered Items and the Panopticon below). |
Containment is the operative word. The agency does not seek to neutralize these phenomena so much as to keep them sealed off from the public and out of the wrong hands.
Headquarters
The FBC's original headquarters is the Oldest House, a brutalist tower in New York City. The building is itself paranatural: it resists outside notice, is larger inside than outside, and rearranges its own architecture without warning. It is both administrative center and the agency's largest containment site.
Director Lineage
Leadership of the FBC passes through a sequence of Directors, each chosen under the influence of the agency's hidden patron, the Board. The three Directors below come from the first game's lore; in Resonant, Jesse Faden is the Director on paper but is missing during the campaign.
Director | Note |
|---|---|
Director Northmoor | An early Director from the agency's deeper backstory, remembered as having fallen under heavy Board influence during his tenure. |
Director Trench | Jesse Faden's immediate predecessor, whose fate set up the events that opened the first game. |
Director Jesse Faden | Chosen by the Board at the close of Control. Currently missing in the Resonant timeline. |
These are the only Directors with confirmed names. Any earlier figures in the line are not officially detailed.
FBC in Resonant
Control Resonant picks up roughly seven years after the events of Control, and the FBC the player meets is an agency in crisis. The Oldest House lockdown has failed, and paranatural forces that were meant to stay sealed inside the building have spilled out into the streets of Manhattan. The Director, Jesse Faden, is missing, and Emily Pope serves as acting Director in her absence (see Director Status below).
In response, the Bureau makes a choice it has spent years avoiding. It releases its longest-held containment subject, Dylan Faden, into the field. Dylan was previously classified as Prime Candidate 6 and held inside the Oldest House under continuous custody since childhood. Resonant's premise turns on the FBC deploying him as an active operative despite his prior status as a detained subject of paranatural research.
Field Operations
Once Dylan is operating outside the Oldest House, the agency does not cut him loose. His designated field handler is Zoe De Vera, an FBC Supervisory Special Agent introduced for Resonant who is in charge of the Bureau's field teams in the Manhattan area. She runs his operator side, coordinating deployments and feeding him agency intelligence as his point of contact with whatever remains of the FBC's command structure.
The Manhattan Crisis
Resonant opens with the FBC's containment posture in collapse. The Oldest House lockdown has failed, the entities once held inside have spilled into Manhattan, and the agency's internal name for the underlying cosmic force is the Pattern. The Bureau's immediate response, before any field operation, is to use temporary firebreaks to keep individual zones of the borough quarantined from each other, on the principle that the Pattern's influence can be contained from spreading even when it cannot be removed.
Field Office as Hub
The FBC's forward base inside Manhattan is its Field Office, which pre-release coverage described as an operations hub for missions and outfit changes. The Field Office is where Dylan returns between deployments, where his missions are dispatched, and where outfit and equipment changes are made. It also functions as the central administrative anchor for the agents stationed inside the quarantine.
In the released game the Field Office sits in the Central zone, the hub that links Manhattan's other zones, and Zoe De Vera works from a nearby Watchtower. Smaller FBC safe zones are set up elsewhere, such as the House of Mirrors base in the West Incursion Zone and a rooftop base in The Park. Clearance keycards gate parts of the Bureau's facilities; guides record Dylan receiving Level 1 clearance at the Field Office early in the story, with higher levels issued as it goes on.
Altered Items and the Panopticon
The released game confirms that the Bureau still keeps its Altered Items in the Panopticon, its containment facility, which in Manhattan is attached to the Field Office. One of the game's achievements, "Panopticon Intern", asks the player to "Contain Altered Items and help Langston." Side quests send Dylan after rogue Altered Items loose in the city, then back to the Panopticon to lock them away with Langston's help.
Guides give the World's Fair Radio as an example: in the side quest Panopticon Service Request, Dylan repairs the Panopticon's security terminal, works out the right containment cell and contains the radio. Because the Panopticon is named in this game's own achievement text, it is part of Resonant rather than a detail carried over only from the first game.
Director Status
Throughout Resonant, Jesse Faden is the FBC's Director on paper but is missing during the campaign. Her final act before disappearing was to drive the Aberrant into Dylan Faden's chest, which is how the Board, the entity at the heart of the agency, communicates with him in the field. In her absence, Emily Pope serves as the acting Director of the FBC and works closely with Dylan in the field. Pope is a returning character; material published before release established her as the agency figure steering the Manhattan operation and as the narrating voice of its paranatural Manhattan presentation.
Unconfirmed Details
The following were not covered by first-party material before release and have not yet been checked against the released game:
The full FBC organizational chart, including divisions, sections, and departments under the Director.
Named department leads or section chiefs operating during the Resonant timeline.
The agency's public-facing cover identity and how it explains itself to other arms of the U.S. government during the visible Manhattan crisis.
This page will be updated as more is revealed.