← Redwood Bureau
Redwood Bureau
Facility Containment Protocol: FLOOR_2
00:57:19
They've opened the door, now they must walk through.
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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.
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If.
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You'Ve been monitoring the feed and noticed a gap, that silence was necessary. You don't shout over an avalanche and call it reporting. You wait for the slope to settle, just enough to see which way the mountain has fallen. Lumpkins is no longer a diner with a secret underneath it. It's a floodlit wound in the Bureau's side Armored fencing surrounds the parking lot. Generators the size of cars power rusted elevators that only agree to drop one floor. They build these vaults like stacked coffins for a reason. Lose a level, lock a level. It worked. Right up until the day they lost it all. Yes. I'm the reason they found the facility. I don't say that for applause. I say it because accountability matters more than ever. The plan is exposure. The lesson is on greed and corruption. And the cost will be extraordinary. We all know they listen to these reports, find our sources, contain their leaks, try and triangulate our position. They think I'm being hyperbolic or bluffing. But when this facility is through with them, I guess we'll see if you work for them. If you're tasked with combing over every millisecond of these broadcasts in some communications facility. If you're listening to see what I know, hear this. It's not too late for you to do the right thing, to walk away. A 16th century quote comes to mind from philosophical fancies that describes your situation better than I could ever hope to. Some think that the rational spirits fly out of animals, or that animal we call man like a swarm of bees. When they like not their hives finding some inconvenience, seek about for another habitation or leave the body like rats when they find the house rotten and ready to fall. The Redwood Bureau's house is rotten and it will fall. Understand this before we begin. Floor two was never just a containment wing. It was a workshop. Proximity was policy. Curiosity outran caution. They collected too much power, stored it too close together, and trusted. Made up protocols rather than common sense. The ledger, for that kind of arrogance doesn't come due in a single night. It compounds in silence until the bill arrives in a stack you can't carry. What follows isn't a headline and it isn't a theory. It's what is currently happening beneath a diner where the Redwood Bureau long ago hid away things that should have been destroyed.
- [05:58]
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I've stood in briefing rooms before, watching mission parameters scroll by like eulogies played in advance. But this time no one said a word. There were no projections, no last minute adjustments. Just the dull thrum of generators kicking over and the faraway sounds of machinery and supplies moving about. The silence wasn't because we were scared, though I could tell some of us were. But rather because there was nothing to say, we extracted files from the first floor. Sure, they told us next to nothing about what Floor two really held. Not to mention that intel, if you could call it that, had expired well over 50 years ago. Ashcroft's voice over the comms sounded tired. There's a heaviness in his voice, the kind you get when you've seen too many men chewed up and spit out by things that shouldn't exist. They say the agents who live to regret are the lucky ones. Words that echo in my head as we prepare to descend. The elevator to floor two had been sealed for half a century. This facility hadn't just been shut down, it was entombed. Whatever was down there had even the current oversight committee scratching their heads. Some things, I guess, were beyond even the reach of the Bureau, which I find somewhat ironic considering the facility's origins. But everything sparked by the Lumpkins incident dragged this place into the light. Management doesn't want to talk about it, but we all know this is because of that fucking Conroy. Many agents nowadays don't even believe he's real. They think it's some sort of story used to subtly threaten the underlings. I know that isn't true. My old CO deployed with them a few times back then. He was just a low ranked agent. They both were. He said Conroy was reserved but had instincts he couldn't ignore. Almost like a sixth sense. And weapon handling skills that in another life could have put him on a list with Bob Munden. I don't know how much of that is true, but I do know the guy has been a thorn in our side for longer than would be expected. We deployed a portable generator to get the lift reactivated that connects floor one to the next layer. Though it looks almost massive enough to power the entire field base, it took an agonizing 12 hours and the expertise of three engineering specialists to circumvent the lockout protocol. I could smell the old power lines burning off years of dust, the gears finally grown to life. Ten of us were selected for the descent. Specialists with varied clearance histories, all with one thing in common. Survival experience inside anomalous zones I recognize too from the Floor one recontainment teams. These guys were deep cleaners, had been through more shit than a sewer technician. Our gear was more varied than usual. Enhanced biologically integrated armor, new gin heads up display masks with increased tankless oxygen, hybrid visibility optics, hardwired biometric feedback nodes. And that doesn't even open the door to the literal armory we had strapped around us and attached to our kits. Normally, being hooked up with all this good shit would make me feel much more confident, but I knew Ashcroft had pulled some strings and we only had all this because our intel added up to about zilch. The elevator platform was wide and reinforced. It was big enough to carry containment rigs, new modular rooms, and even several models of specialized containment vehicles. It had no walls. It was just form fit. Metal on large gears that sat like a vault door and a recessed wall light system that flickered as we passed by the ancient bulbs. As the lift descended, the ambient noise faded out. No machinery, no hum of the generator. Just the creak of steel under tension and a groan, like something old waking up beneath us. I felt it in my teeth before anywhere else. Pressure, like everything bad, was piling on top of me until I was buried so far beneath the earth that there was no hope of ever coming back. No one spoke, not until the platform lurched to a stop and the mechanical gear slammed to a halt. The elevator wouldn't go any lower. They designed every floor here to connect only to the floor above it and below it. With a vault like platform. I'd have to assume the idea was to contain any breaches to the floor where they occurred. While it does make a certain kind of sense, our teams are in for hell and lucky me, on the front lines of Floor two. The moment we stepped out, it was clear. This place wasn't anything like Floor one. The lobby was large and symmetrical, lined with faded murals whose meaning had eroded with time. Marble tile cracked and shifted beneath our boots. A reception desk sat crooked on its foundation, half ready to collapse into the floor. A thin layer of dust coated everything, but with it a profound sense of absence. It was almost like nothing had been here since this place went dark. Greaves moved toward the desk and pried open a warped drawer. Inside, water damaged documents were fused together like a block of pulp, but beneath them was a laminated directory. Exorelic Containment Specimen Archive West Wing Live Testing and Application Labs restricted personnel only L1 L8 administration A1 A3 biological disposal authorized clearance required X17 most of the other Countless names and locations had been smudged away by moy moisture that had found its way into the seal. We swept the entry level, encountering no resistance. No bodies or signs of struggle. Just a long, wide hallway leading into the deeper facility, flanked by glass labs and sealed observation wings. Many remained intact, untouched since the lights went out. Others had been shattered inward. Who knows how long ago, but certainly not recently. Looking around this abandoned place through the lens of our team's shifting flashlights brought back the memory of some long forgotten nightmare. That's when we saw the first growth. It looked almost like a spongy moss green black veins creeping from A vent and spreading across the ceiling tiles. Organic, but not mold. It darkened slightly. Under infrared. Command noted it as they observed through our feed. One agent took a small sample and we moved on. The corridor ahead started to curve. Leading into what the map labeled as the exorelic wing. Once we got into that area, I started to get that feeling. The feeling only someone who's been in contact with things not of this world can understand. The air felt still, like it had been vacuum sealed. Everything felt dimmer, as if the shadows weren't cast by light at all. One of the labs we passed contained a suspended cube. Metallic, rotating in place, with no visible suspension. Not spinning freely, but moving. Like it was trying to escape some invisible containment. Which I'm pretty sure is exactly what it was doing. Reflections across its surface revealed impossible geometry that hurt to look at. Another room had walls covered in notes. Handwritten, repetitive, frantic. We couldn't make out the writing, but they covered nearly every surface. I noted, no pun intended, that the things stored down here were the kind that drove men to madness. Further on we found an alcove stacked with sealed canisters, rusted shut, but each labeled carefully in dry pressed tags. Some were tagged with single numbers. Others were strings of symbols we didn't recognize. Greaves gave an order to have them extracted on the return sweep. The last room before the corridor's end held a large containment cradle. Whatever it had housed was long gone. The restraints were melted and bent inward. As if something had superheated and burned its way out of containment. Whatever it was gave a silent prayer that it had burned itself out decades ago. Then we reached a new section marked by a broken seal and a vault sized bulkhead wedged partially open. Inside it became stranger. Blooming with filmy layers of something like calcified silk, translucent and fibrous. We passed glass walled labs, some intact, some ruptured. Each contained oddities unlike the last. An empty humanoid exosuit, yet something like a heartbeat pulsing through fluid filled tubing. Collection of rings, simple metal bands that heaved rhythmically like living breathing tissue. A suspended orb of what appeared to be frozen lightning. Held motionless in a lattice of bone white spires. Most disturbing was the black slab mounted inside one sealed lab. A sign affixed to the door read relic A147. Do not observe for more than 10 seconds. Even through the glass, it pulled at something behind our eyes. I have no idea what the hell that thing is, but I didn't look at it for more than a second. But the farther we went, the clearer it became. This place should have never held these things so close together. Proximity itself was a risk that simple. Oversight could have very well been the downfall of this entire facility. This much power in one place is like wiring a warehouse of live explosives into the same grid. You get one failure, and the whole thing blows. As we neared the far end of the Relic Wing, the corridor stopped abruptly at a seamless wall of metal, not bureau alloy, something older and out of place. Scrawled across it, barely legible through layers of grime and dust, were three words. It's still open. I could tell by the confused looks and exchanged glances that no one had a clue what this was referring to, or why the barrier was there, but a sinking feeling in my gut told me this was connected to something bad. With no way forward, our only option was to backtrack and find an alternate route around. We soon found ourselves in a corridor that wasn't on the map, a narrow deviation from the main path. The walls extended ahead in eerie symmetry, perfectly smooth with no visible seams or doors. The further we went, the less it felt like part of the west wing. The floor beneath our boots changed gradually from bureau standard plating to a dark matte surface covered in tightly packed hexagonal ridges. These ridges shifted slightly under our weight, responding to pressure like a muscle reflex. Strange growth spread along the base of the walls, elegant in structure, branching in fine, symmetrical patterns, like frost creeping up glass. They glittered faintly under our helmet, lights translucent green with pulses of blue at the edges. Some pulsed faster when we passed, reacting to our proximity, their patterns shifting in response to something we couldn't understand. Then came the sounds. There were rhythms, slow, deliberate patterns that had the cadence of breathing, but with no discernible source. It wasn't auditory so much as felt like a current brushing the edge of perception. Whatever they were, they tugged gently at our sense of direction, a subtle nudge, moment to moment, a feeling of suggestion. No one mentioned it aloud, but based on some of our team's slowed movements, I could tell I wasn't the only one feeling it. We passed what looked like the remnant of a scanner embedded in the wall. Long dead, its housing was torn apart, wires fused into resin like strands that ran backward into the growths. The air changed again, no longer stale, but thick with something sweet and heavy, like overripe fruit and wet stone. A few men let out an involuntary cough. I felt it, too, a buzzing sensation in my molars, a growing pressure behind the eyes. But feeling weird and being comfortable has never been reason for Bureau agents to cut a mission short. In Fact, I'd say it's actually part of the job. Soon enough, we reached a chamber. It wasn't constructed like the rest of the facility. The walls had no visible joins, no rivets or anchor points. They flowed seamlessly upward in a gentle dome made of some chalky white material that shimmered faintly when viewed at an angle. Dust or spores floated lazily in the air, glowing softly like airborne plankton. The room was silent, and at the center was an object. It hovered effortlessly above a platform of woven bone, like matter. No sound, no movement, just suspended there like a thought held in place. It was a shape I couldn't quite grasp. Not a sphere, not a cube. It changed depending on where you stood. Edges collapsed in on themselves. Surfaces refracted light at impossible angles. The material was iridescent and opaque all at once, like a thick liquid trapped inside glass but refusing to settle. There were no markings, no interfaces, no protective casing. Whatever had once contained this thing had either completely failed or been removed. My fingers moved before I registered the thought. I reached toward it. I noticed as an afterthought that the agents around me were doing the same. Not one of us spoke. Our emotions were eerily synchronized, like puppets pulled by the same string. Before any of us could be stopped, a hand reached further than the others and touched it. The air collapsed inward, pulled violently, as if the whole facility was decompressing through the center of the object. The object unfolded. It unraveled outward in fractal spirals that curled through space and bypassed geometry. The room came apart as if every atom had belonged to something else. One moment we were in a chamber, the next, the idea of the chamber didn't apply. Time folded in half. We were falling through layers of light and motion that had no sequence. Shapes stretched into infinity. Colors that weren't colors, but concepts and realities bled through the spectrum. Sound became weight. Direction lost its meaning. Then impact. Physical. My back hit something soft but solid, something that accepted my shape without yielding. I gasped and looked around, struggling to find reference points. We were no longer in the facility, but in a place that defied all sense. The sky above pulsed like living tissue, colored in deep maroon and streaked with branching gold filaments that flickered with energy. Clouds drifted in geometric patterns, tessellating like mirrored glass. The atmosphere shimmered like heat on pavement despite no visible sun. The terrain was even worse. Whatever was under our feet was spongy and uneven, coated in thick moss like fibers that shimmered with oily hues. Some patches curled inward when stepped on. Others pulsed Beneath the weight of our feet, strange vegetation rose around us in grotesque variations. Tendril like stems twisted, opening and closing their sepals, revealing rows of eye like growths. Shrubs of varying sizes dotted the landscape, looking more like piled shavings of peeled flesh rather than any type of plant. Dark blue stalks reach straight into the air, ending in tips of translucent white, pulsing root clusters. In the distance, imposing black monoliths emerged from the earth. Their surface is smooth and obsidian, their forms towering high above the landscape and twisted into branching structures of ancient and terrible geometry. Their foreboding presence could be felt by every one of us, almost as if the formations intended to rend the souls from our very bodies. And at the center of it all, impossibly far and yet somehow near, was an enigmatic object. It hovered above the chasm, teeming with a swirling dance of light and shadow where dark shapes writhed in constant motion. These patterns were locked in an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth, continuously tearing apart and reconstructing themselves. Greaves turned slowly, scanning the impossible horizon. The shapes in the distance weren't mountains, but more like arching ribs of some long dead behemoth. Something skittered across one too fast to track a shimmer of a shape before it disappeared behind them. Santos moved to my right side just as the first scream fractured the silence. It started as a shriek, but twisted mid sound into a low hollow groan that echoed without direction. We dropped to one knee, weapons raised, trying to locate the source. A pole like object rose from the ground, maybe 15 meters from us. It was thick at the base like a bowling pin. When it fully emerged, around the size of a standard door, I would have thought it was some kind of leafless tree if not for its pink and soft fleshy appearance. Not all of us had noticed it yet. Some of our team were still vomiting, trying to get their feet under them. Dozens of deep black lines appeared in the pink form, lengthening from top to bottom, and they opened into ovals horizontally. The holes started thrumming and producing a series of cascading noise frequencies I couldn't begin to describe. The effects were immediate. My world flipped upside down, literally. My feet and the ground were above me and the sky, maroon and endless below. The sense I was going to fall down into the sky had my stomach in my throat. I could tell by the sounds and actions of the other men around me that it was affecting all of us. When I tried to walk forward, my body went the opposite way. The sense of disconnection was so overwhelming that I vomited and fell to my knees, which was somehow Falling up. This only made things worse. My head pounded as the sounds rose in frequency and volume, causing cascading lines to run up and down my vision. Through some corner of my inverted perception, I saw Greaves stumbling like a drunk sailor, but up and moving, moving toward the thing causing all of this. One of my team members from behind me let out a yell, followed by a short burst of gunfire. A second later, someone else was screaming, presumably hit by at least one of the rounds. Cease fucking fire. Greaves voice cascaded through my headset in waves of increasing and decreasing volume. The effect pinned me to the ground. I watched him fight his way on the ground above, one step at a time, until he was standing before the oblong creature. I couldn't understand how he was even managing to do what he was doing. With his knife in hand. He slashed out, missing a few times before stumbling and falling into the creature. He plunged the knife into one of the black ovals and pulled down or up. A sound like a thunderclap split the air. The ovals all slammed shut at once, and the effect on reality collapsed with them. My world reversed itself, pain roaring back through my head as I crashed violently to my side. The pink thing spasmed, twisting away from Greaves in a desperate curling motion. Its soft pink outside started melting away in a golden fluid that steamed as it seeped into the ground. As it eroded, its insides were revealed as a charcoal black framework with sporadically placed organs of blues and greens. They melted into the golden puddles as well, and all that remained was the thin black skeletal structure. It crumbled into dust. I staggered to my feet, still fighting to align my own senses. Greaves was already retreating, blood pouring down his face from both nostrils. He ripped off his glove, pressed a hand to his nose, and scowled at the stains it left on his fingertips. We need to book a return trip yesterday. He spat through a mouthful of blood. The rest of the team was in shambles, one man bleeding from a gunshot to the shoulder, another crawling in circles, two more unconscious or close to it. Santos, teeth pink from biting his tongue, leaned over and pulled me upright. We checked each other, then scanned the surroundings. It lorded over us on the horizon, that shape hovering above the chasm. It felt even closer than before, not in distance but in resonance. It was like I could feel it breathing inside of me. I've got a pretty good idea that the only way out of here is the same way we came in, greaves said, voice hoarse words punctuated by the sticky click of congealing blood as he pointed toward the floating object that thing, touch it, repair it, destroy it, I don't give a shit. But that's our way out. Anyone who can walk, walk. Those who can't, help em or drag em. There wasn't even time to triage. Anyone not dead was dragged, slung or pushed upright. My left hand was numb, but I could still move my fingers, so I clamped them onto my rifle and followed the others, jaw clenched to keep from screaming aloud at the shrill piercing migraine.
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We march through a landscape that rebuilt itself around us us. The ground tracked our steps with a faint iridescence as if marking our path. The sky's gold filaments flickered in time with the pulses in my skull. As we neared the black monoliths, the ground became more uneven, studded with tall, brittle spines that snapped underfoot with a sound that was almost like a faint wail. We saw organic statuary, dishaped fungal growths, spires of yellow crystal that smelled like sulfur. An excrement. Everything put me on edge. At this point I was more than sure that pink thing wasn't the only hostile in this world. Ten meters ahead, a fissure cracked open between two fanged ridges. We nearly missed the body slumped in the moss. For all of our constant scanning of the horizons, Santos was the first to spot it, circling left while I flanked right and Greaves limped straight at it with a readiness that implied a longing for a problem to solve. We couldn't miss the insignia. It was wearing Bureau gear, a suit at least two or three generations before my time, draped with lichen and skin showing long, dried, bloodless black veins that pulsed with a dark light. The helmet had been left in tatters, and the head that remained was not entirely human. The features bled together, eyes too far apart, jaw unhinged, revealing a mouth twice the normal size. The hands were fused around a shattered relic container. Its contents were gone. There was a tag still on the uniform. Lamont 0413. Santos crouched and gently peeled it from the web of growths. This is one of ours, he said. But it's old. He trailed off, attention tugged away by the movement of the black motes. Suddenly we could see them. Bureau bodies all around us. Some were just bone, others half merged with the landscape, all wearing variations of the same dated kits and uniforms, all mutated or disfigured in some significant way, and all showing those ink blots under their skin, moving and shifting like a living Rorschach test. This is the employees from Floor two, right? What happened to them? I asked, voice thin. Don't care. Whoever they were, they're dead. We aren't. If we all want to keep it that way, we're getting to that. He pointed with a hand toward the object floating above the horizon. I looked again and realized the globular shifting mass was drawing closer, pulled by the arc of our path or drawing us by some logic we'd never hoped to understand. As we started to move on, I noticed something. A fragment, smooth, semi liquid reflective, embedded in the chest of one of Bureau corpses. It was a piece of the relic. I didn't mean to, but I reached for it. The Thing was the size of a marble, but with a grain to it, almost opalescent. My gloves trembled over the surface and it gave just a little, like pushing into dough. Then it popped free with a wet, bubbling sound that made my stomach clench. I turned it in my palm. It writhed like a slow worm, iridescent, refracting the other world's false sky in every shade of despair. There was something incised on the surface too, so small and intricate only a microscope could reveal it. But I didn't need a microscope. I just needed to look. The writing resolved itself in my mind all at once, like a memory I'd never had. Execution. Then the word vanished, replaced by another and another, cycles of meaning winding in and out of my mind, each leaving a residue of sickness and clarity. My knees buckled. I nearly fainted. I gripped the fragment tight and forced my gaze from it, stuffing it into a kit pouch with a groan. Grieved Saul? He didn't bother asking, just nodded once and kept moving. We pressed on, weaving through a forest of blue stalks and glassy spines. The air vibrated with new frequencies, the sky's filaments now strobing faster. A flock of fangs swarmed overhead, undulating ribbons the length of a man's arm, their bodies laced with flickering organs. Several dove down at us, opening up flaps to reveal sharp protrusions. A few short bursts of automatic rifle fire sent them fluttering off in the opposite direction, leaving behind a chemical stench that clung to the air and burned in my nostrils. At the edge of the glassy forest, the world changed again. The moss and stalks gave way to smooth plum plains of black stone tessellated together to form a sort of causeway. The stones weren't perfectly fitted, and gaps between them oozed a thick tar like fluid that shimmered with faint motes of gold. Ahead, the terrain sloped up toward the ridge of a chasm, and from that horizon the object hovered, immense, but only a hundred meters off. Each step closer was like standing next to a substation transformer. The air sang with static, and every hair on my arm stood up straight. My heart thudded so fast it was like drums inside my sternum. Part terror, part resonant pulse of that object. We reached the monoliths, which seemed to converge, leaning inward toward us with every step we took, but never seeming to move. They shaded our approach in a cold dusk as the maroon sky above seethed and flew, flashed. The causeway grew narrower, and we started to catch glimpses of something horrific in the monoliths, the effect I can best describe as A lenticular card that has different images depending on the angle you view it from. But this was different. It was connected to my mind, like it waited for the right moment and showed me the truth, the horrific nature of this place. Thousands of corpses slumped, splayed or amalgamated into the structures, all in various stages of unlife. Many squirmed, trying to free themselves or end their suffering. They were dead, but trapped in one moment of living that never ended. These glimpses persisted, more horrible with each showing, and more persistent the further we went. We were nearly up the slope when Santos staggered and fell, his arm jerking suddenly and so hard his bones snapped with a clean, wet pop. I lunged and caught him around the chest, grappling with him while he screamed. The arm bent in the wrong direction, stretching skin until it tore. A severed arm was pulled away instantly toward the nearest monolith. Greaves didn't even break stride, shouting over his shoulder, get a tourniquet on him and move now. I wanted to argue, to stop and care for Santos, but if these structures decided they wanted more, we were all fucked. So I did as Greaves said, tying his arm off above the elbow, and kept going, one blood slick hand under Santos armpit, dragging him as we moved. I kept my eyes forward. The gap was narrowing, the causeway drawing us inevitably toward the thing we had been trying to reach. Ahead, the shifting orb hung suspended over its fuming chasm. Its resonance drew a zigzag of agony down my spine. The sides of the monoliths gleamed wetly with animated agony, faces and limbs and torsos compressing, decompressing, rearranging in patterns that made my thoughts feel like beetles crawling under my skin. Santos was muttering, his remaining hand clutching my sleeve with feverish desperation. Maybe it was because of the pain, maybe it was because the further we advanced, the harder it was to hold onto ourselves. A scream erupted behind me, and before I could turn to look, another one of our team was missing a leg, blood pouring out as he crawled towards us, pleading. Another was slumped over on the ground, the top of his head gone from the nose up. I couldn't even tell who it was. The wet rip echoed in my ears as the shifting blur of motion gave away the monoliths responsible. Run. I yelled, dragging Santos as fast as I could imagine. Another scream, punctuated by the tearing of flesh behind me. I didn't look back. There was probably less than half the squad now, our numbers dropping every second. Every step closer to the object hurt more. It drew the blood from my ears, the marrow from my teeth. The air pounded with Hot electrical fire in my throat. Santos blacked out, going limp and dropping, almost pulling me down with him. I adjusted and I hooked him under both arms, dragging him backward. I had a full view of the chaos behind me, our team dead, dying, or missing pieces. Carson still crawled, his left leg having been taken, leaving a trail of red behind him on the obsidian stone that reflected in the sky, making the bloodstains look like a window to another, somehow more terrible world. His eyes were pleading as his right shoulder and arm tore free and flew off into the distance. I was unable to look away as my team was dismembered and pulled into the pylons. My legs and back screamed in protest. I couldn't do anything for them except for Santos and myself. I pulled as hard and as fast as I could. The causeway funneled into a needlepoint overpass, nothing but chasm on either side, the bottom lost to the vortex of unlight and the thrashing forms that moved inside it. The object hovered over the tip, density rippling in and out, edges refracting like oil on black ice. Its gravity was literal now, like I was fighting my way into an MRI magnet that hated me personally. Halfway across, something exploded from beneath the bridge, a column of meat and cartilage. No face or eyes, just a mouth stretched in a spiral. It screamed the noise all around and within us and slammed down on the path just three meters ahead. I barely raised my weapon before Greaves charged it, slicing upward through viscera and tendon with his knife, parting the spiral mouthed creature into a spray of gold and white. The thing came forward still, a barbed tongue separating and lashing out. Greaves fell back, narrowly avoiding being caught across the neck. With him out of my shot, I emptied the magazine into it, reloaded awkwardly with one hand, careful not to drop Santos into the void. By the time I resumed firing, the thing had already slumped halfway over the bridge, and a few more rounds sent it over into the vortex of forms that greedily consumed it. Greaves got to his feet and gave me a nod, quickly crossing the bridge with me, dragging Santos right behind him. It wasn't until I'd reached the other side that I realized no one was behind us. No one else had made it. Greaves stopped and stared up, helmet light strobing on the object's belly. There was a staircase, kind of a broken set of black steps, each one shaped and formed out of something different, climbing straight into the air to meet the object. There was nothing else to do but go up. The steps shrank and stretched. The object blossomed with facets, and we were standing together atop the structure, the surface quivering and hissing where our boots touched it. Santos was a dead weight, but I couldn't leave him. I wouldn't. The orb, or relic or whatever it was, hovered in place. Greaves dropped his rifle, which clattered off the platform in a lazy spiral, and reached his hand out with the expression of a man about to step into a volcano. I braced myself for the inevitable contact, for whatever this hellish object would do to us next, but nothing happened. It seemed to bend space in a way that he just couldn't make contact with. With it, even though it didn't move away in the slightest. He gave me a look that conveyed. Now what? With a chilling realization, I knew what to do. I could feel the fragment in my kit pouch heating up, a beacon for the thing in front of us. It was pulling, demanding to be made whole by a threat of complete and utter destruction. I pulled that piece out. The air around it stretched, distorting light like a lens, and noise tumbled in dull, low, the sound promising to tear my head apart if only I were to keep listening. The shard wriggled in my palm, wanting out, and for one dumb, reflexive moment, I squeezed it tight. I felt it bite through the glove and into the palm of my hand, slick and cold as mercury. The pain slammed into my mind. My senses electrocuted, I stumbled forward in the relic fragment, dragging my body even as my legs buckled beneath me. Greaves lunged to support my weight. A second too late, I pitched face first toward the hovering object. It should have been impossible to touch it, the way it bent the air, but the instant the sliver in my palm aligned with the hollowness at the orb's heart, the world turned inside out. Reality itself, with all its lazy metaphors and crutches, folded in on itself, bent, broke, fractured, and tore apart. I became the inside of the relic, a fractal maze of tunnels in every spectrum, every geometry, every time I rattled through corridors of raw sensation, colors so sharp they split me into copies of myself, shapes so alien they altered my mind. I felt every lost Bureau agent who had ever bled in here, their pain and dilution, their final moments of horrific clarity and continued agony. I watched as the facility's original employees fiddled with the relic. I watched as one of their experiments caused the relic to fracture. I watched as this fracture destroyed time and space, and every faculty member within that wing was pulled, pulled into the relic. I saw Lamont, his helmet splitting open, his skull yawning. His ideas bled out in light and dark until all that was left was his pain and suffering. I saw, felt, and experienced every one of them. I saw through every camera and fiber wire the Bureau had ever trailed into here. I saw a hundred alternate versions of today's mission, most of them ending in pure death and failure. And I saw, finally, why the relic's hole was left unfilled. I was waiting not for a piece, but for a person. Some bastard unlucky enough to survive every other filter and walk himself up the steps. I screamed as the shell pressed the fragment into the writhing hollow at the core, and the effect was instantaneous. The orb yawned open. The chasm beneath us didn't collapse. Instead, the worlds above and the worlds below folded toward each other like a book closing and melting into something else entirely. Greaves, Santos, and me. We were pulled through the seam, compressed into a wire of single point consciousness, then spat out on the other side. My knees hit tile. My arms dropped dead at my sides. My vision blipped between afterimages of where I'd been and the almost unfamiliar white blue glow of this world. I was suddenly reminded of a time I'd been stuck on the floor, staring up at a decaying ceiling after getting knocked over and impaled on a rebar spike in Hunt Valley. This was worse. My bones didn't work. My heart skipped and jittered, couldn't get a rhythm going, like my blood was trying to force its way out of me. I rolled over to see Greaves hunched on all fours, retching onto the floor. Santos was curled fetal, clutching his missing arm while rocking and whispering to himself. Greaves looked up at me, foam on his lips and eyes gone bloodshot, but he was grinning. He did it, he said, a voice almost childlike. We did it. He staggered up and slapped me on the back, then nearly collapsed again. Where's the rest of his words trailed off. The memory of the other's screams faded into the darkness of that place. I nodded slowly. It was just us. That old pressure had begun to build in my chest, like my lungs had folded in on themselves, like I was breathing around something that shouldn't be there. I took a shaky step forward, then another. My balance felt off, weight pulling unevenly across my center line. I froze. Greaves noticed. You good? He asked, but his voice sounded distant, like it was being dragged through static. I didn't answer. I couldn't. The pressure turned a vibration, subtle at first, like the tension of a high voltage line humming and building a charge. I reached for my vest, unfastening the clasps with trembling hands. My fingers fumbled across buckles sticky with blood and sweat as I pulled the chest plate free and let it clatter to the floor. The pulsing grew stronger inside me. I gritted my teeth and tore open the zip of my undersuit the second the fabric parted. I saw it. Felt it before my eyes could even make sense. The shape. A bulge dead center of my chest, just below the clavicle. The skin there was slick and semi translucent, stretched taut around a dark glassy shape embedded beneath. It shifted with the rhythm of my heartbeat. Not beating with it, controlling it. The relic. It wasn't just attached. It had fused with me, becoming part of me. Filaments extended outward from the core like roots or veins, spider webbing beneath my skin, pulsing with faint iridescence. My entire torso radiated at low grade heat, just under fever. The air around me shimmering faintly with distortion. It didn't feel like it was trying to kill me. It felt like it had claimed me. No. No. No no no. No. No. My voice cracked as I stumbled backward. I clawed at the thing with both hands, trying to dig it out, but the pain was instant and electric. My fingers barely grazed its surface before my arm seized. My vision narrowed to a single jagged line. And then I was gone.
- [51:11]
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You can't escape the past.
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- [51:45]
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- [51:50]
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No. I need a vacation.
- [51:53]
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- [52:02]
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You're right about that. They're coming after our family. Go fix this.
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- [52:16]
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You say you'll never join the Navy, Never climb Mount Fuji on a port visit or break the sound barrier. Joining the Navy sounds crazy. Saying never actually is. Learn why@navy.com America's Navy forged by the sea. I came to in silence. Not the silence of wilderness or a dead comm link. This was engineered silence. Sanitized, controlled. The kind of quiet that only exists inside an over engineered containment unit. My eyes opened to a dim sterile glow. Frosted lights embedded in a polished ceiling. A Faint electric hum in the floor beneath me. Glass walls surrounded the room, reinforced with anti temporal filament and etched with Bureau containment glyphs. A high security observation unit. Ashcroft's stood beyond the barrier. His arms were crossed, jaw clenched so tightly that the muscles in his temple twitched. Behind him, three Bureau researchers watched me with unreadable expressions. One of them tapped a screen, whispering something to another. I couldn't hear what they said. Ashcroft didn't look at them. He just stared at me. Not with fear. Not with relief. With regret. He's stable, one of the techs said, nodding at a monitor. Signal pattern is fluctuating but consistent. The relic is fully integrated. No sign of rejection. It's alive in him. A second researcher leaned forward and broadcasting. Not in any spectrum we're familiar with. Ashcroft's lips curled into something between a sneer and a sigh. So according to the board, he's not an agent anymore. Is that right? He's a phenomenon. We'll assign a number, codename his file, and lock him away for experimentation. There was a pause, then the lead tech turned to him. Sir, I understand your concerns, but he's the only point of contact to a fully active Tier three dimensional breach. We can't afford to lose this opportunity. Ashcroft looked at me again, eyes hard for a moment. Something flickered behind them. Pity, maybe, or contempt. It was hard to tell through the glass. He didn't say a word. He just turned and walked away.
- [55:07]
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Generators, scrubbers, sealed corridors, men with clipboards talking over the sound of their own machinery. None of that means the control. They think it does. It means exposure. It highlights vulnerabilities. What went wrong is not mysterious. They are measuring with instruments that compress what they don't understand into numbers that fit on a briefing file to present in a room full of corrupt bureaucrats. They are renaming reckless abandon as containment and dangerous proximity as access. The cost has been paid by everyone except those who have been pulling the strings for too long. There are still men and women in this organization who can see the edge. You can hear it in the silence of these reports when a commander orders a team on a suicide run just because the board has sent down orders. Some keep their heads down and perform. Others refuse and are made an example of, usually in the worst ways possible. A project titled HARP comes to mind. And yes, that is still very much active. But some agents within the Bureau, the most dangerous kind, have drunk the Kool Aid. On the surface, the Bureau calls the Lumpkins site Stable. Below the picture is much clearer. Stable is A word for procurement reports, not a condition of reality. It means the generators are holding, the lifts haven't ceased, the instruments are agreeing with each other long enough to file a summary, and the rate of accidents is briefly acceptable to people who won't be in the room when the next one happens. It means loss of life has resulted in inventory, assets in crates, metrics on screens so that liability reads like progress. It says more about them than anything on any of the floors, that they believe procedures can domesticate causes they don't understand, that proximity can be managed by policy language, that anything you can weigh belongs to you. And for the public, it means decisions with consequences are being made without consent, danger is being normalized as an operating expense, and the only promise on offer is indefinite. Management, not resolution. Stable isn't assurance. It's a mask worn between disasters. As for Calder, they didn't discharge him or hospitalize him. They reclassified him. On paper, he's no longer an agent or even a human. He's a live interface under procedural containment with a chain of custody. His badge traded for an RBP designation. His consent became a checkbox pre filled by protocol. They built a containment procedure around him instead of a treatment. Pharmacology to hold a baseline, a magnetically shielded cell to keep the perimeter quiet. Exposure windows measured in minutes, questions preloaded and answers harvested as waveform. Ashcroft argued for treatment and quarantine off site and lost. The Bureau has no intent to help him, but they will use him as a key for doors that don't take keys. That is the policy line now. A person becomes property the moment the Bureau finds a use for them. And once you accept that, anyone can be next. I don't need people to believe the evidence speaks for itself. I'll continue exposing the truth until they silence me. If you worked for the Bureau and still have a conscience, decide now where you draw the line. What orders will you refuse when consequences arrive? There are deeper levels beneath floor two. The Bureau faces a simple choice. Acknowledge some boundaries should never be crossed, or keep pushing until those boundaries swallow them whole.
- [59:40]
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- [60:40]
C
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