
An ex-agent on the run could use a friend or two. No one knows this better than Conroy.
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Beware the Redwood Bureau. A secret organization which captures and researches creatures and objects that defy explanation. Their reckless procedures have led to countless innocent lives lost. I am Agent Conroy. I worked for the Redwood Bureau. But I have escaped them to leak their reports to the unsuspecting public. You have the right to know. Even snowflared, it wasn't a bit savannah. This is Cipher. Conroy's still recovering, healing, doing the unglamorous work of not dying from cleaning up the Bureau's mess. He'll be back. Until then, you've got me. I want to talk about people who walked into a Bureau operation as human beings and came out as something the Bureau files under a letter and a number. Calder, who took a relic to the chest, woke up classified as a phenomenon. The subjects, like the one from the Regalia file, who were injected and watched for 20 years before something tore its way out of them and into our world. And the man we're talking about now, who they bolted an artifact onto and sent through a door that should have never been opened. Then tried to put in a cage when he came back changed. That man's name is Hale. What you're about to hear is what the Bureau did to him, what he did about it, and what happened when we finally caught up to him. Listen closely. This one connects to more than it looks like.
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Redwood Bureau internal communication classification Restricted Oversight Directorate only.
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From Deputy Director asset recovery division 2
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recovery operations lead re operational failure subject hail date.
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You will read this immediately and you will then produce a corrective plan within 72 hours. The plan will not include any of the language, methodology or personnel that have characterized this operation to date. Your previous approaches have not only been comprehensively unsuccessful, but costly. And the patience of this office is no longer a resource available to you. It has been 271 days since subject Hale departed the parallax site in possession of artifact A71. In that period, your division has produced the three failed interception attempts. The first, in a transit corridor outside Roanoke, resulted in the loss of 12 field operators and the destruction of a fully loaded containment vehicle. Your after action report attributes this to, and I quote, anomalous spatial displacement consistent with artifact A71's post parallax capabilities. A phrase that means nothing to us other than you failed miserably. The second attempt, at the freight yard outside Wheeling was your most embarrassing attempt of all and produced no contact or anything that could even resemble a lead. Your surveillance assets reported visual confirmation of the subject for approximately four seconds before he was no longer present. The third attempt, in a private medical facility where the subject had sought minor wound care under a false identity resulted in three additional operator fatalities and the public exposure of the other seven Bureau personnel. The entire medical staff who witnessed the engagement have been subjected to fugue compound protocols at considerable expense to the Bureau. 22 non confirmed sightings of which your analysis team has been able to verify exactly 4 as actual contact with the subject. The remaining 18 represent either misidentification or, in my judgment, deliberate decoy work that your team failed to recognize for what it was. You have produced no actionable intelligence on his support network. I want to be specific about why this is unacceptable. The subject has been mobile for over nine months in possession of equipment with detectable energy signatures requiring food, shelter, medical attention and transportation through territory in which the Bureau maintains a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure. He cannot have done this alone. Someone is providing logistical support. Someone moved his wife before you could secure her. And they did it during the 72 hour window in which your team was responsible for ensuring the exact opposite outcome. That window was your responsibility. It was not Watson's responsibility. It was not the previous administrator's responsibility. It was yours. And you fail back just like you failed every other step of the way. The wife remains at large. This is not normal. Civilians do not disappear from our systems. Civilians do not have access to the methodologies required to disappear from our systems. The implication which you have failed to draw in any of your six interim reports is that the subject coordinated her removal using assets you do not have visibility on through channels you have not penetrated with the help of individuals or organizations you have not identified. My Time would be better served writing a list of things you do know as I could simply hand you a blank piece of paper. Some additional context. Since your reports suggest you have not been receiving the broader operational picture. Conroy's network has not been quiet during this period. We have lost a technical asset whose value I will not enumerate here. If Hale's continued evasion of our recovery efforts and the recent expansion of Conroy's logistical capabilities are not an unrelated phenomenon, then your failure to recover subject Hale will be understood not as an isolated operational failure, but as a contributing factor to the most significant erosion of Bureau operational security in two decades. Effective immediately, the recovery authority for this operation is being restructured. A parallel team, designed to be issued separately will be operating in your area of responsibility. You will provide them full access to your files, your intelligence, for whatever that's worth. Your personnel rosters and your operational history. You will not interfere with their work. You will, in fact, treat their requests as having priority over your own. It is unheard of that this level and frequency of failure is tolerated within this organization. If it wasn't for your father, you would have long since been reassigned to your last mission. Let me be clear that reassignment is not off the table. If the subject is not contained or confirmed, neutralized within 90 days of this memorandum. I will be forwarding a recommendation to the Oversight Directorate. That your tenure, your clearances, and your continued value to this organization be subjected to a comprehensive review. I suggest that you do everything within your inadequate capabilities to make sure hail is brought in within the next 90 days. Even nepotism will not be enough to spare you from your next failure. Deputy Director, Asset Recovery.
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L. If you're reading this, someone is there with you at the House. I can't tell you who they are or how I know them. What I can tell you is that I trust them. And right now, I need you to trust them, too. Do what they say. Don't pack. Don't bring your phone or anything from the House. And don't speak about anything you're reading right now. Not until you're far away from here. I'm going to tell you why, and I'm going to tell you the truth. But I don't have a lot of time and neither do you. I told you, I work for the government. That was close to the truth, but it's more complicated than that. I worked for an organization called Redwood Bureau. They're not a government agency. They're not military. Not Intelligence. Red, there's something else. A third Party with enough power and enough connections inside enough governments that they act with complete impunity. They operate in secret. People who go against that disappear. What they do is deal with things that aren't supposed to exist. Entities, organisms, artifacts, phenomena that fall so far outside accepted reality that the only options are to contain them or bury the evidence that they were ever there. My job was to go where those things were and put them in a box. I was good at it. That's the reason we're in this situation right now. Because I kept surviving. And every time I survived, they found something worse to send me into. I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. And I know you're reading this, thinking about every morning I kissed you goodbye and told you I had a meeting or a flight or a conference. And every one of those was a lie. I took away your ability to make real choices about your own life by hiding what mine actually was. I know that. I've known it for a long time. But the alternative was you knowing, and knowing then would have put you in danger. But that danger is here, now. So here's everything I have the time to tell you and why you need to be gone before tomorrow. A few months ago, they sent me and two other men into a small rural town, already dead by the time we got there. Something had escaped from a Bureau containment site. An entity, a thing you'd only recognize as a monster. It had been rebuilding itself underground, using the town's population as food and incubators for its eggs. Details don't matter right now. What matters is that three of us went down into that hole and I was the only one who walked out. I got accommodation and two weeks of recovery. And then they told me I'd been selected for a new assignment. They brought me into a room, strapped me to a table, and then the table folded onto the floor. I was hanging from restraints with my arms and legs spread while two people in surgical gear wheeled in a piece of equipment that looked like nothing I'd ever encountered in a career spent encountering things that looked like nothing anyone has ever encountered. It was a suit. An apparatus. Like armor, maybe, except the word makes it sound like something you put on and take off. They didn't put it on me. They attached it, bolted it to my torso, drilled mounting hardware into my spine, and ran conduits through my back that connected to my nervous system. The pain was the worst I've experienced, and I've experienced a lot. The suit is not human technology. The Bureau recovered it decades ago from Somewhere they can't fully explain. And they've been studying it without understanding what it actually is. I'll tell you what I know from wearing it. It's alive. Or something close to alive. It communicates with me in physical ways. It has preferences. It reacts to me and I react to it. They bolted it to me because they needed a body to wear it into a place that I can't explain. It reacted to an artifact. A sphere. It's black. Contained on a pedestal on an empty field. It was a doorway. I touched it and the world came apart. Everything dissolved. I was somewhere else. An absolute dark, where the concept of light feels like something you imagined once. The ground wasn't ground. The air wasn't air. Everything about it was wrong at a level that went deeper than senses into something fundamental about what reality is supposed to feel like. They sent a team with me. Good men. As far as I could tell, though, none of us had been properly briefed because the Bureau doesn't do proper briefings when they're not sure what they're sending you into. That place killed them. It pulled their worst thoughts to the surface and made them physical. And I'll leave it at that because. Because you don't need the image. The suit protected me, kept my head clear while the others fell apart. It guided me through that place with a pull on my chest, a direction or sense of where to go. We reached a structure, some kind of threshold, and the suit told me in, feeling that I needed to cut something out. A piece of equipment that the Bureau had installed. A monitoring device drilled through the suit and into me, constantly transmitting data back to them. The suit wanted it gone, so I cut it out of both of us. I didn't know how else to get back. Something happened after the suit healed. I healed. And something new opened up. A capability I didn't have before, that the suit didn't have before. I can move through space in a way that I can't fully explain. Short distances, step that covers 30ft. Or puts me behind someone who is in front of me or carries me to the other side of a wall. It comes at a cost. Headaches, nosebleeds. The feeling that my skeleton is trying to pull away from my muscles. Then something came over us in the dark place. Something enormous. I'm not going to describe it. I don't want you to have that in your head. The suit held me still while I wanted to run and it told me to focus. And I did. And I activated something that brought me back to the field where we'd started, just me. The rest of the team was still in there. There was no way for me to pull them out. I came back, and the Bureau agents surrounded me. Questions, demands. Weapons coming up. Someone noted the suit looked different. A voice on a radio I wasn't meant to hear said, contain him. Ellie, I want you to understand what that word means. It means a cell. It means disassembly. It means they would have taken the suit apart to study it. And taken me apart in the process. Because the suit is drilled into my spine and wired through my nervous system. And the line between where it ends and where I begin stopped being clear. Somewhere in that dark place, containment meant death. Just slower and more useful to them than a bullet. I didn't let them. I used what the suit gave me and I fought my way out. I killed people. Bureau personnel, operators. Just following orders. Same as I followed orders for years. Now they're after me. To get to me. They're going to come after you. When an agent goes rogue, the first call goes to their domestic monitoring unit. They pick up the spouse, the parents, the kids. They move them to a facility that looks like protective custody and functions as a holding cell. Then they send the agent photos of their family in a newspaper and a date stamp, like a proof of life shot for hostage negotiation. Because that's exactly what it is. I've been in the room when those photos were taken. I've watched it happen to other people's families. I will not let it happen to mine. Go with my acquaintance. Leave your phone on the kitchen counter. Leave your keys. Leave your car. Take nothing. What I can't tell you, and this is not because I don't trust you, it's because I need you to leave this letter for them to find, is how I arranged this. I can't name names. I can't describe routes. I can't tell you where you're going. What I can tell you is that the people helping you are not Bureau, and they are not in any system the Bureau has access to. I made sure of that. I can't come with you. Not yet. The suit puts out a signature. Faint, but detectable with the right equipment. If I'm near you, I'm a beacon. The safest place for you, as far from me as physically possible. I need you to understand that the thing keeping me alive is the same thing that makes me dangerous to be around. I can't protect you by being close. I can only protect you by being gone. Do you remember the night we sat on the Back porch during that storm. The power was out and you were mad because you'd been cooking something in the oven all day. And you said, this is the universe telling me to order pizza. And I laughed. And you looked at me like you'd been waiting for me to laugh for months. And I realized you were right. You had been waiting because I'd been coming home from places I couldn't talk about and carried things that I couldn't put down. And I'd forgotten how to be in a room with you without part of me still being somewhere else, reliving horrible shit. That night, I was all the way there. Just you and the rain and the pizza. We ate on the porch by candlelight because you wanted to listen to the storm. I carried that night every bad place. They sent me into the tunnels, under a dead town. Into the room where they bolted the suit on my back. Into the dark world filled with horrors that shouldn't exist. I stay in that night and they can't take it from me. I won't let them take you from me. I'm sorry I couldn't be that guy more often. I'm sorry the real version of my life made me into someone who had to ration how much of himself he brought home. You deserved all of me. But that night was real. That's the real me. That's who I want to be and why I'm doing everything I'm doing now. To the people reading this who aren't my wife, to whatever shitbag member of the board is holding this in their hand, I want to be clear. You will not find her. This letter is the closest you'll ever get. I know you. I know how you operate. You don't believe me yet, and I expect that. But you will. Every agent you send with a file that has my wife's name on it will come back as a red number on one of your post mission failure reports. Run your fiber analysis. Run your ink spectrometry. Pull prints off the paper and run them against your database. Check every camera within 50 miles. You'll find dead ends that I built for you to find. Because I know exactly how your forensic pipeline works. And I fed it exactly what it needs to waste the maximum amount of time. She's gone. She was long gone before you got this. And every hour you spend looking for her is an hour that I've spent looking for you. Add it to my file, stamp it classified. Send another team. I'll see you soon. L. One more thing. When this is over and I don't know when or how I'll find you. The suit can do things I can't even describe. One of these days, what it shows me will be the way back to you. Until then, be safe, be smart, and follow the instructions. I love you. I've always loved you. Even when I was lying about everything else, that part was always the truth. Warning Signal interruption detected.
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I want to be honest about how this AWP went, because the version that gets remembered is usually the version where it worked, and I don't really know if it did. Conroy was on some R and R. He took a beating from one of the entities that escaped during the breach, and even by his standards, the recovery was rough. He was at a safe house. Alive, of course. He's just not running ops. Not now at least, and not in person. That meant if we were going to make contact with Hale, and the consensus was that we needed to urgently, somebody other than Conroy had to do it. There were three people on the list of who could plausibly run this op, and I was the only one Conroy hadn't already deployed somewhere else, and I was the only one of the three who might be able to relate to Hale because, well, you know, the fuckin eye. Was I the best person for the job? Probably not. The location was rural, a backroad that climbed out of a valley into nothing. There was a property up there, an old hunting cabin that had been abandoned for years. The intel had come from one of our techs, a guy who'd done a lot of hard work for not a lot of pay. Actually, I don't think any of us are getting paid, are we? What the hell if the other guys are getting paid and I'm not, I'm gonna be pissed. I can hear Conroy now. You're getting paid in living days alive that you weren't living before. Well, anyway, I'm not going to tell you how we found him because you know, the Bureau and all. But we did. Conroy's read was that Hale's pattern across the nine months he'd been on the run was that he stayed in places longer. When they were defensible, we figured that's where he was. I drove up the access road in a civilian truck I'd borrowed from a contact. No tactical gear, just boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt. A pancake holster under the shirt at the small of my back. Conroy's standing instruction for first contact with potential recruits. Look like a person, not a threat. The eye was awake the whole drive. It had been awake since I left the safe house 12 hours earlier. I've gotten used to that. It doesn't sleep when I do. It doesn't take breaks when I'm in a normal day. It sits quietly in the back of my awareness like a low hum. When I'm near danger, it comes forward. By the time I parked the truck a quarter mile from the property and started walking, it was right behind my eyes. I'd thought a lot about Hale during the drive. I'd read everything we had on him. The brood mother report from Selby's run, the leaked materials from Parallax, the Bureau memo pulled from Recovery Division, the one where the deputy director was openly conceding that Hale was beating him at their own game. The picture I had built was of a man who'd been a good operator for a long time, who'd been pushed past every reasonable limit by an organization that viewed him as a resource, and who had finally decided to stop being pushed. He'd killed Bureau personnel during his escape. They'd forced that choice on him. He had access to capabilities the Bureau hadn't been able to reliably counter. He had every reason to believe that anyone who tracked him down was Bureau, and his default response to Buro was lethal. I knew all that walking up the road. It didn't make me less afraid. It made me more precise about what to be afraid of. The property came into view around a bend. A cabin set back in a clearing. Weathered old, bare wood with a metal roof that had rusted to a deep red. The driveway was overgrown but not unused. I could see the faint outline of tire tracks that had been deliberately driven over with leaves and dirt to make them look older than they were. I stopped at the edge of the clearing. I didn't see anyone. I didn't expect to. The eye spiked. It felt like recognition, the same kind of charged attention I'd felt at the so called retreat. When whatever was coming through the sphere had looked at me and seen something it knew, but this was smaller. The pressure behind my eyes shifted, sharpened, oriented, telling me without words that whatever we were sensing was within 30ft of me and I couldn't see it yet. I was almost at the cabin. I stopped walking. I put my hands out from my body, palms forward, fingers spread. I kept facing the cabin. I'm not Biro, I said. I kept my voice level. I came alone. I'm going to talk and I'm going to keep my hands where you can see them. You can verify everything I'm about to say. I didn't get a response, but I didn't expect one. My name is Sam. I'm part of a network fighting against the Bureau. We've been looking for you. Not to bring you in. We have intel that the Bureau can't recover you and we'd rather they didn't. The eye moved before I did, a pressure that snapped from my left to directly behind me, and I didn't turn, didn't react, didn't even shift my weight because doing so would have given away my edge. A voice behind me, close in a controlled flatness of a man whose entire body was set up to kill the next thing that threatened him.
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Tell me how you really found me.
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I kept my voice steady. I'd be lying if I gave you a technical answer. I'm just the guy they sent out here to make contact. Someone much smarter than me tinkered with a bunch of shit I couldn't even describe. And here I am. We are hoping you will hear us out. A long pause, long enough that I started running the math on whether I could draw and turn before he ghosted me. You said we Conroy's network. The pause this time was different, Shorter, intense. I felt something cold and sharp touch the back of my neck. I knew instantly from the feeling of it on my skin that it was part of his artifact. I'd read about that capability. Reading about it didn't prepare me for the feeling of a piece of alien tissue against my spine.
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Conroy's dead. Bureau confirmed it a month ago. You picked a bad lie.
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The pressure on my neck increased, not breaking the skin yet, but one more twitch of his arm and it would be buried in my spine. The Bureau made that up. You think they don't lie about everything? That's the difference between us and them. We don't have to lie. I can prove everything I'm saying if you just let me show you. He spun me by the shoulder and pinned me against the side of the cabin with one hand, the alien blade against my throat, and I was finally looking at him. He was thinner than the photographs, like he'd been running for too long on too little. His eyes were present. There was no exhaustion in them, just the focused awareness of a man who hadn't dropped his guard in nine months and was trying to decide if dropping it now would kill him. The suit was visible under his collar, dark, oily looking. I'd read every report we had on it, but seeing it on a person was different. The eye was insisting. The pressure in my skull was the strongest I'd felt since the retreat, and for a second I had a flash of what it had felt like when the thing over the pit had looked at me. Two things that weren't supposed to be close to each other had become aware of each other. I moved not to escape, to demonstrate. I had one shot to show him what I was carrying before he made a final decision about my carotid. And I'd learned a long time ago that the eye doesn't show itself when you ask politely. It shows itself when you commit. So I committed. I dropped my weight, and the eye was in my mind, showing me where his balance sat, where the blade was anchored. I drove the heel of my hand into the inside of his wrist and turned my hips into it, taking the blade off the line of my throat. And in the same motion I hooked my other hand behind his elbow and pulled him into the wall where I'd just been. He was faster than me, but fast doesn't help when your momentum is already committed to a direction. He hit the cabin wall. In the next instant, he disappeared, and the eye opened up. We'd been waiting for this moment. I knew it was coming, and the eye could feel his energy slipping through space. It showed me with a warm vibration of energy that I could feel in my spatial awareness. My hand was already on my.45, and I pulled it from the small of my back as I spun, extending it to meet Hale's shocked face as he appeared behind me. The eye punctuated the tense moment with a surge of energy that emanated from my chest. Every hair on my arms stood up, and I felt the eye reach across the space between us and press against whatever was bolted to his spine, two passengers recognizing each other through the bodies that carried them. Hale staggered, and his free hand came up to the side of his head like something had reached inside it. The blade dissolved from his hand, the suit pulling it back into itself as he stumbled a step back. I let the eye settle. I'd made my point. We stood there, both of us breathing hard, three feet apart, in a clearing that was suddenly very quiet. His eyes had changed, the look of a man who'd been 100% certain he was about to kill a biro plant, and had just felt the floor of that certainty drop out from under him.
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What are you?
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I lowered my gun. Someone with a friend like yours. Different backstory. Same problem. He was reading my face, locked onto my eyes, looking for the lie. I let him look. I didn't break eye contact, didn't flinch, didn't try to talk my way through the moment. Slowly, and I do mean slowly, Hale stepped back. He didn't lower his guard. He never lowered his guard the whole time I was there. But the immediate possibility that he was going to try and kill me in the next four seconds receded into something more like the standing possibility that he might kill me at some point in the future. I told him everything. I told him about Conroy, about how we've been operating and what we'd lost in the last six months and what we'd gained. I told him about the entities we'd tracked, the ones we'd put down the Retreat Lumpkins. I told him we needed help, the kind of help only someone with his background and his current toolkit could provide. I told him about the Eye, how it came out of me and how I don't fully understand it. How it saves my life on a regular basis, and how it terrifies me even more regularly, and how I've learned to work with it the way I imagine he's learned to work with what's been attached to him. I told him I understood what it was like to have something in you that has its own ideas about your autonomy. I didn't pretend our network was omniscient. I told him we had access to channels the Bureau hadn't penetrated, that we'd helped move people the Bureau couldn't find, that what we could offer was allies who knew what had been done to him and weren't trying to use him to do more of it. He listened. He didn't interrupt. When I finished, he was quiet for a long time. Then he asked a question I wasn't expecting.
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Does Conroy know what's in you?
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Yeah.
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Does he know what it is?
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No, we don't know what it is. But we do know I'm not the only one. He nodded once, slow. He didn't agree to anything. He didn't ask for time to think about it either. I knew he needed the time to sort everything out in his head. That was something I understood well. He was capable enough to give himself that time. Something I could not afford when Conroy found me.
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How do I reach you?
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I gave him the dead drop location and the fallback of the primary was compromised. No phones, no electronic signature of any kind. I told him what to leave and when to leave it.
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And if I don't?
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Then we never met. Nobody from our network will try to find you again. We wish you well against the Bureau, but I'm sure you know that saying about the enemy of your enemy. We need you as much as you need us. After all these months, I think you know that. He studied me for another long moment. Then he nodded. Without another word, I left. I didn't look back while walking down the road. I got to the truck and sat there for a minute with my hands on the wheel before I started the engine. The eye had gone quiet as we settled into the long drive back. When I walked into the safe house, Conroy was on the couch with a cup of coffee and a stack of intel he was pretending he wasn't working through. He looked up when I came in. The first thing he said was, you're alive. I said, yeah. He didn't ask any more questions. He just waited. It was a few seconds before I realized he was waiting for a yes or a no. I said, uh, maybe. Conroy nodded, took a sip of his coffee, and looked back down at his intel. Good, he said. That was it. Conroy seems to think it's as good as done. I'm not so sure. But he knows Bureau agents, ex Bureau agents better than anyone. I'm just a bit worried about what it means that the thing in me keeps recognizing other things. Like what the fuck does that even mean? What am I even supposed to do with that?
E
A few things the documents don't tell you. Things worth knowing. That memo, the one from the deputy director tearing strips off the recovery lead. I want to focus on the line about the father, about nepotism not being enough to save him next time. The Bureau likes to present itself as a meritocracy of competence, a machine that runs on results. It isn't. It's run by families, groups and bloodlines, by people who inherited their clearances like a lake house. The man who failed to catch hail for nine months is in that chair because of who his father is. Remember that the next time the Bureau makes the kind of mistakes that get people like you and me killed the parallel team the memo mentions. The one being brought in to take over Hale's capture. We don't know who they are yet, but parallel team is Bureau language. And in my experience, it means one specific thing. They're done trying to bring Hale in alive. A recovery team recovers. A parallel team cleans up after the recovery team reports that the asset can't be recovered. If Hale was a priority before, he's a liability now. And the Bureau prioritizes resolving liabilities. So if he's going to make a choice about that dead drop, he'd better make it soon. Because the clock he's been out running just started ticking a lot faster. Something else. The Bureau's artifacts are not a collection of unrelated objects. That's the assumption everyone operates on. That they found a relic here, a relic there. A sphere in a breach, a harness in a vault. Separate from finds, separate phenomena. But the hidden working theory inside the deepest part of the Bureau is that they are not separate at all. That every artifact they've ever recovered is a piece of something, a part of a larger whole that was scattered or broken or hidden. And that the pieces are aware of each other. That when two of them come into proximity, they don't just react, they communicate. They start finding their way back toward whatever they used to be. The Bureau has spent decades gathering these things into one organization, into shared facilities, into adjacent vaults. Lumpkins alone holds dozens. And if there's any merit to that theory whatsoever, then the Bureau hasn't simply been collecting artifacts. It's been reassembling something, one piece at a time, without knowing what the finished product is or what it can do. Perhaps Sam carries a piece of it and Hale carries a piece of it. We don't know what that means yet. But I do know the Bureau would burn an entire city to the ground to get those two pieces back. This is Cypher. Stay sharp, Stay free.
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Podcast: Redwood Bureau
Air Date: May 23, 2026
Host: Eeriecast Network (Primary voices: Conroy, Cypher, Sam, Hale)
This episode dives into the harrowing story of “Hale,” a former Redwood Bureau operative who became the subject of obsessive Bureau pursuit after surviving a mission that left him changed—physically and existentially. The episode weaves together classified reports, a desperate letter to a loved one, field correspondence, and the fraught, high-stakes first meeting between two survivors of Bureau artifact experimentation. Through these stories, listeners gain greater insight into the moral rot within the Bureau, the toll of its operations, and hints of something deeper and stranger connecting its “assets.”
“Your previous approaches have not only been comprehensively unsuccessful, but costly. And the patience of this office is no longer a resource available to you.” [03:25]
“If it wasn't for your father, you would have long since been reassigned to your last mission… Even nepotism will not be enough to spare you from your next failure.” [08:15]
“They’re not a government agency. They act with complete impunity. What they do is deal with things that aren’t supposed to exist.” [09:45]
“The line between where it ends and where I begin stopped being clear somewhere in that dark place.” [13:20]
“She’s gone. She was long gone before you got this. Every hour you spend looking for her is an hour that I’ve spent looking for you.” [22:33]
“That night, I was all the way there. Just you and the rain and the pizza. … I carry that night every bad place they sent me…”
“The eye was awake the whole drive… It sits quietly in the back of my awareness like a low hum. When I’m near danger, it comes forward.” [27:00]
Hale: “What are you?”
Sam: “Someone with a friend like yours. Different backstory. Same problem.” [37:48]
“We need you as much as you need us. After all these months, I think you know that.” [40:57]
“A parallel team cleans up after the recovery team reports that the asset can't be recovered. … The Bureau prioritizes resolving liabilities.” [43:30]
“The hidden working theory... is that they are not separate at all. That every artifact they’ve ever recovered is a piece of something, a part of a larger whole… And that the pieces are aware of each other.” [44:36]
Memo ruthlessness:
“My time would be better served writing a list of things you do know, as I could simply hand you a blank piece of paper.” — Deputy Director [07:20]
Hale’s warning to the Bureau:
“To whatever shitbag member of the board is holding this in their hand, I want to be clear. You will not find her. This letter is the closest you’ll ever get.” [21:48]
Artifact entities connect:
“The eye reached across the space between us and pressed against whatever was bolted to his spine… two passengers recognizing each other through the bodies that carried them.” — Sam [36:32]
Artifacts as puzzle-pieces:
“Perhaps Sam carries a piece of it and Hale carries a piece of it. We don’t know what that means yet. But I do know the Bureau would burn an entire city to the ground to get those two pieces back.” — Cypher [45:17]
“We need you as much as you need us. … I’m just a bit worried about what it means that the thing in me keeps recognizing other things. Like what the fuck does that even mean? What am I even supposed to do with that?” — Sam [42:08]
This episode is one of Redwood Bureau’s most revealing and tense, blending visceral human drama with institutional critique and cosmic horror. It explores what is left after organizations like the Bureau have used someone up, and whether new identities—or connections—can be forged among those marked as dangerous or expendable.
Cypher’s final warnings make plain: the Bureau’s enemies are becoming aware not only of the Bureau’s operations but of a deeper pattern underlying all of its supernatural collections—a pattern that could threaten everyone, on both sides of the line.