Transcript
Monday.com Narrator (0:00)
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Agent Conroy (1:12)
Beware the Redwood Bureau. A secret organization which captures and researches creatures and objects that defy explanation. Their reckless procedures have led 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.
Agent Brady (1:51)
I remember sitting at the table. I remember a senior officer across from me reading questions off a clipboard. I remember that some of the answers I gave were lies. I know they were lies because they were not what I wanted to say. Beyond that, I cannot tell you what I said. The words came out of my mouth and I lost them as fast as I heard them. The four of us stood up at the same time. The interview officer thanked us. We walked out. Brady turned left in the corridor. Vega turned right. Nelson went straight and I ended up at a console in the operations center. My body sat down. My hands found the keyboard and brought up a feed and a comm channel. I sat there in the chair, watching the screen. The operations center was full. A dozen people at stations, two coordinators behind them, a senior officer at the back of the room with the tablet. The atmosphere was the routine alertness of a facility on standing watch. Something had happened on floor three that morning. My team had returned. Debrief was underway. Medical was preparing for follow up. Everything was on schedule. I watched my hands open a status board. I watched my hands log into the com grid using my own credentials. A message arrived from Ashcroft's office requesting That I report for additional questioning. At 1600, a coordinator passed by my station and clapped me on the shoulder. He said something good to have you back. Or words to that effect. My body said something warm and appropriate in return. The explosion came shortly after the feed I was watching wided out. The sound came a fraction later through the building itself. The lights flickered. Several monitors went black. People stood up at their stations. My body was already moving. My hands were already on the console pulling up alternative feeds, querying second cameras and opening backup channels. By the time the room had finished registering that something had happened, I was halfway through the response checklist. A voice over the general channel. We have detonation and comms. And then the channel cut. I watched myself stand up. I walked to the standing console at the back of the room. The one a senior agent could use in an emergency to coordinate response without needing full command authorization. I started issuing instructions. QRF2 to comms perimeter. QRF3, hold position. Medical to standby. All non essential personnel away from the surface entry. Each instruction made sense. Each one was the kind of thing a senior agent with my clearance would say in a moment like this. Each one was wrong. QRF should have gone to the elevator. Medical should have been moving toward the surface entry to receive casualties, not standing by. Holding QRF3 meant the mid tier response was sitting in a ready room while the breach window opened wider. I watched myself give the orders. I watched on camera as the teams follow them. There was nothing I could do. A new report came in over a line that was still working. Floor one reports activity in the lower vault sector. Request advisement. My voice, calm and professional, said, possible secondary detonation. Hold and assess the voice on the other end. Acknowledged. 60 seconds later, that connection was lost. Another report. Floor 1, ground sector 7 lost contact with patrol. My voice comms cascade from the surface incident attempt. Rerouting through alternative channels. The reply acknowledged. 60 seconds later, that connection was lost as well. The next report did not come from floor one. It came from Medical. Multiple staff casualties. Medical wing perpetrator unknown. Situation ongoing. I heard myself say, seal the wing. Contain the threat in place. The senior coordinator confirmed the order. I knew without being told that Nelson had just done what Nelson had been sent to do. The senior officer at the back of the room came forward and asked me what I was seeing. I gave him an analysis. The analysis was wrong in specific, deliberate ways. He nodded and went back to his tablet. By the time anyone else in the room began to suspect that the surface event had been a distraction, the constructs were coming up through the floor. One vault. The camera near the vault entry caught movement, and the operator across the room called out, what the hell is that? People started turning to look at his screen. The senior officer crossed the room in three strides. I remained at the standing console, calmly issuing routine status checks to sectors that I knew could no longer respond. The image was on the screen for maybe four seconds before it cut. Four seconds was enough. The senior officer was suddenly issuing his own orders. Coordinators were on multiple comms at once. Someone was on a hard line to surf its security. The fiction I had been handing out collapsed all at once, and within 30 seconds the operations center understood that the comms building had been merely the start of something, not the whole event. Then the implants let go. I looked down at my hands. They were mine. I tested a finger. It moved when I told it to move. My breath was mine. The next thought I formed went where I directed it. The breach was on the surface. The orders I had given for the last hour had been carried out. The personnel who would have responded were in the wrong places. The senior officer behind me, who could have made decisions, had been making them based on information I had given. None of it could be undone. I sat at the console. I did not stand up or speak. The implant did not resume with the connection. It had moved on. I was an asset that had served its purpose. The room moved around me. The senior officer was trying to raise anyone in floor one, but none of the channels were going through. The senior officer's voice cut across the room. He said my name, the way you say something when you are about to do something you do not want to do. I turned. He was looking at me from the doorway with two security agents flanking him, both with sidearms drawn. The senior officer had been adding it up the same way I had been watching it happen. He was not stupid. He said, hands on the console. Slowly. I put my hands on the console. Slowly the two security agents crossed the room. One of them pulled my sidearm from my holster while the other kept his weapon trained on the side of my head. The first one cuffed my wrists behind my back and pulled me out of the chair. As they walked me out, I looked at the senior officer. He met my eyes. I think he was trying to read whether I was the man he had been talking to all afternoon or someone else. They took me out of the operations center. Behind us, I heard the room start to organize a response. Late, stripped of every advantage, but a response nonetheless. I walked between the two security agents and I didn't resist. If there was anything I could have done to prevent this, to resist it, I would have. I tried. Every step of the way, I tried.