← Redwood Bureau
Redwood Bureau
"MANTLE SUPPRESSION HARNESS" - Redwood Bureau Phenomenon #0089_7
00:39:51
Deep beneath the city, in places most people never think about, something went wrong. What was supposed to be a field test ended in disaster. Some reports are buried for a reason.
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- [00:00]
Parent 1
Take the exit. Turn right into the drive thru.
- [00:03]
Parent 2 / Diver
Nope, I'm making dinner tonight.
- [00:05]
Parent 1
You don't have time. Josh has practice.
- [00:07]
Parent 2 / Diver
Oh, that's right.
- [00:08]
Parent 1
I'll just get a salad and fries.
- [00:10]
Parent 2 / Diver
No, just the salad.
- [00:11]
Parent 1
But salad cancels. Fries.
- [00:13]
Parent 2 / Diver
Salad only. Fries. Salad, fries.
- [00:15]
Parent 1
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- [00:22]
Parent 2 / Diver
Hey, can I get the fries? Salad.
- [00:24]
Narrator / Advertiser
Sorry.
- [00:25]
Parent 1
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- [00:33]
Narrator / Advertiser
Kids.
- [00:34]
Parent 1
They grow up so fast. One day they're taking their first steps, and the next they don't fit into the tiny sneakers they took them in. You blink your eyes and their princess dress is two sizes too small. And their dinosaur backpack isn't cool anymore. But don't cry because they're growing up. Smile because you can profit off of it for real. There are a bunch of parents on depop looking for the stuff your kid just grew out of. Download depop to start selling.
- [01:07]
Agent Conroy / Cypher
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 work for the Redwood Bureau. But I have escaped them to leak their reports to the unsuspecting public. You have the right to know. This is Cypher. While Conroy fights the Bureau on the outside, I'll do my part by exposing what they hide within. This file didn't come neatly out of any archives. It came out the way most ugly truths do from the Redwood Bureau. By following a trail of bodies. I found it in the aftermath of a wipe. Not a sloppy one either. This was a deliberate scrub. A research node got decommissioned. Somebody signed off on destruction. And then because the Bureau can't help itself, someone made a last minute image for verification. That image got cloned, tagged wrong, and pushed into a training cache. It sat there until a dumb automated scanner tripped over one word in the index mantle. That's the thing about organizations like this. They get exposed most often by a chain of tiny conveniences that nobody thinks will matter. RBP089. Colloquially known as flesh Jacket. We've only seen it once on record. And that single record was enough to prove two things. It's predatory and it's methodical. When it attaches to someone, it doesn't just kill them. It keeps them alive to use them. There's a civilian statement in the older packet. One of the only human lines in all that bureaucratic sludge. Where a man hears his friend screaming, calling for him, and realizes the scream sounds wrong. That detail matters because it tells you the Flesh Jacket doesn't just feed and move. It operates intelligently, it plans and it is self aware. Now rewind. Because the question you should be asking is the same question I asked when I saw the first transport note. How did something like that end up where it did in the first place? The earliest breadcrumb in the recovered material isn't a lab record. It's a logistics incident. A truck driver unloading his cargo. A plain cardboard box about the size of a microwave. Light enough to feel empty until it starts jittering. Like something within is sprinting from side to side. The tape peels and something pale drops out. Not an animal. A mound of skin colored mass that moves on its own. That's the first mention of what they later refer to as its unbound state. And here's the part that strongly implicates the phenomena don't usually arrive with shipping labels. Buried inside the older packet is a line from an internal note, almost a joke, that says it's interesting to get insight into how the Bureau introduced the Flesh Jacket into the town. Because phenomena appearances are rarely concrete. That sentence is doing a lot of work. It's the closest you get to the truth in a place built to bury truth. It didn't escape into that community. It was placed there, quite literally. Hand delivered. And after the town incident, they of course didn't destroy it. They kept it. You can see the program start to take shape in the little details. Copper becomes a reoccurring answer. Copper rounds, copper containment. A better box design. Not improvisation. Iteration. The same kind of incremental improvement you see in any tool that gets used often enough to justify upgrades. That's where the MSH enters. The mantle Suppression harness. The name alone tells you they aren't pretending it's safe. It's not a control harness. It's not a symbiosis platform. It's a suppression rig. Rings and bands designed to keep the organism from doing what it naturally tries to do once it finds a human body. There was a list attached to this packet. Not a story, not a timeline. A body count. They don't call it that, of course. They call it trial outcomes, operator failures, exposure events. It's a ledger of people reduced to numbers. And even then they didn't bother to name all of them. So when you ask what have they been doing with the flash jacket, here's the truth. They've been trying to weaponize an extraterrestrial force shocker. I know they've been building restraints that keep it hungry enough to cooperate and contained enough to pretend they're in control. They've been trading human bodies for data until the data proves the desired results. And the file we're about to get into, the one you're here for, is what happens when they decide they're ready to move from testing to field use. Programs like this don't stop because they're cruel. Cruelty is just background noise in an organization that calls people assets. They stop when they become too expensive to hide. And this one, judging by how hard they try to bury it, is already costing them more than they planned.
- [07:35]
Parent 2 / Diver
They never called it a suit in front of me. On all the documentation it was the MSH Mantle Suppression Harness, as if slapping an acronym on it could make it feel less like strapping an alien garbage disposal to your skin. They fitted me in the service building above the flood tunnel. A tech in a gray shirt cinched the last of the copper filaments around my upper arm and clipped the housing down like he was securing a tourniquet. He didn't look at me in the eyes once. It seems nobody wants to make eye contact with the guy carrying something that might eat him. Comfortable? He asked. No, I said, because it was the truth. He gave a quick, humorless breath through his nose and moved on to the next clamp. The harness wasn't one piece. It was a system of rings and bands and stops layered under the outer dry suit, designed to keep the organism from bridging the joints in my body. The collar ring was tight enough to leave a faint ache at the base of my throat, and the hip ring bit into my bones when I twisted. The wrist and ankle bands were tighter than any others, meant to keep it from taking control of my hands and feet. I could feel it under the thin interface layer where it was allowed to contact my skin, damp and slimy, like an eel trying to glue itself to me, and just a hint of electricity that caused small spasms in my muscle. Were it connected? A supervisor leaned in while they worked. An older guy, close cropped hair, the kind of face that looked to have a lifetime of regrets. He wasn't here for me. He was here to make sure all the tech was in working order. Listen, he said, low enough that it stayed between us. This harness is here to keep it from taking control of your body. You keep the bands intact, you keep yourself intact. You lose a band and let's just say there's going to be some parts of you we can't fix. I just nodded, because the truth was my mouth had gone dry the moment I felt the collar ring settle into place. It wasn't just a fear of water. I've done water. I've done tight spaces, low visibility, plenty of normal ways. The job could kill you if you got casual. But this. This was different. This was strapping a monster onto myself and plunging into the dark waters below the city. Right into the jaws of another monster. I don't know who the fuck I pissed off to pull this detail. They brought the breeding rig over last, a closed circuit rebreather with its thick hoses and scrubber canister. They mounted it to the backplate, checked the seals, ran the sensors, and clipped the bailout bottle where my hand could find it in an emergency. The full face helmet locked onto the neck ring. With a heavy clunk, the tech tapped the comm unit mounted at my left ear. Check, check. I inhaled and the air tasted faintly of plastic. Loud and clear. Good, the supervisor said. Your job is simple. You find it and kill it.
- [11:02]
Agent Conroy / Cypher
Copy?
- [11:03]
Parent 2 / Diver
Copy, I said. The word came out muffled through the helmet. He held my gaze for a second and then looked away. We'll be right above you. That was super comforting for everyone not going down the hole. They led me to the axith shaft, a square mouth in the concrete floor with a steel ladder disappearing into the black water. A flood control tunnel isn't a cave and it isn't a sewer, but it has the worst parts of both. It's engineered so everything has hard edges and blind angles. The air down there was cooler, damp enough to bead on the outside of my helmet before I even stepped onto the ladder. My tether line ran from the harness to a reel at the top, a braided cord that could be a lifeline or a noose, depending on how the next hour went. The first rung was slimy, algae slick, and I set my boot carefully testing it. The water took me in stages, and the world compressed as it rose over my shoulders. Everything got quieter and closer at the same time, the way it does underwater. My own breathing in the CTR became the loudest thing in my universe, a steady, controlled loop that made me sound like a machine pretending to be calm. The beam of my helmet light hit a wall of suspended silt after a few feet and died. The water down here wasn't clear. It wasn't supposed to be. Storm runoff, tide backflow, and decades of grime all settled in this tunnel. I started down rung by rung, feeling the ladder vibrate faintly through my boots. Not a dramatic shake, just the constant low tremor of pumps and distant vibrations transmitted through concrete. My boots touched the bottom with a soft thud that sent a plume of silt dancing around my ankles. I stood, tested my balance, and immediately felt the current, gentle but insistent, pulling toward the tunnel's main run. Somewhere ahead was the tide gate, a massive steel frame that regulated the flow. Somewhere beyond that it opened into outfall channels and brackish water and the kind of open space you didn't get down here. I started forward, keeping one hand on the wall for reference. You can't move like a movie diver in a place like this. You move like a blind man in a hallway, slow enough that you don't stir up more silt than you have to. Otherwise you won't see shit when you need to. My light did little more than create an illuminated area of moving particles directly in front of me. Everything beyond that was shifting black. Might as well be in space. The tunnel widened and my light finally found the work area somewhere inside my suit. The organism shifted, a subtle redistribution of pressure along my ribs like a hand smoothing cloth. I could feel it press against the allowed interface where the harness permitted contact. The gate frame sat there like a mouth in the concrete, a dark rectangle with its edges swallowed by silt, and to the left of it was the service cutout that would lead me to the next tunnel. It was a maintenance recess that dropped into a side run just wide enough for a man to squeeze through. A steel grate had been bolted over it at some point, probably after the last storm, but it wasn't seated right. One corner bowed out into the tunnel, like something had pressed from the other side. I drifted closer, slow and careful. I shone the beam across the grate and the light caught on scraped metal. Fresh. This was bright, clean scarring. I needed it open. I needed to see what was back there. I didn't have my rifle, the one I'd bet my life on more times than I could count. It was useless underwater. I had a harpoon gun, or bolt gun, I guess. It was semi automatic, magazine fed, but still fucking harpoons. I had a knife and I had whatever the hell this thing was they'd attached to my body. Found recent damage on the access grate, I said through comms. Could have been maintenance. There was a beat of silence on the line, just long enough that I could picture him checking the records. Copy, he said finally.
- [16:14]
Agent Conroy / Cypher
No recorded maintenance in the last three months.
- [16:17]
Parent 2 / Diver
Continue objective. I thumbed the torch. Underwater sparks aren't fire. They're bright, violent bursts that bloom and vanish. The arc hissed, the tip bit into metal, and the sudden light turned the tunnel into a blizzard of drifting silt and silver particles. The grate shuddered under the cut. I got maybe three seconds of clean work before the silt cloud rolled up and swallowed everything below my knees. I kept going, because the longer I sat glowing in one spot, the more it felt like I was advertising myself as a free meal. That's when I saw movement, just a pale blur slipping past the edge of my beam on the far side of the gate frame, close enough to displace the water. I stared into the black beyond my light cone and tried to decide if I'd actually seen it or if my brain had invented a shape to justify the fresh scrapes, but the water answered for me when it shifted again. A pressure wave rolled through the tunnel like somebody had slapped a giant palm against the concrete, and the silt in my light cone lifted as if the entire floor had been exhaled on from the far side. For a second I could feel the vibration in the metal around the tide gate change, pitch going from that steady municipal hum to something strained and ugly, like the gate was flexing under a load it wasn't designed to hold. I swung my light toward the opening beneath the gate and caught nothing but black, and then a pale shape hit the bars from the other side, hard enough to wring the whole frame. I saw it only in pieces at first, an edge of bone colored hide, a flash of ridged plating, a thick forelimb scrambling for purchase on steel. The gate bucked once, the bolts and brackets groaning, and something cracked with a sound that didn't belong underwater. It disappeared in a quick flurry that sent silt and debris covering its movement like a smokescreen, and then slammed again. The lower section of metal blew inward in a violent lurch as the hinge hardware failed and a chunk of grating tore free and cartwheeled past my head. The shock of it punched my chest through the suit, and the current that had been pulling me steadily deeper suddenly surged, rushing past me in the opposite direction. It launched, using the collapsed gate as a springboard, and it filled my light cone so fast that my brain didn't have time to classify it before my body started reacting. The mouth opened as it came. The bottom jaw dropped down and forward like a massive anchor, huge, blunt, and hinged so wide I was sure it could swallow me whole. Teeth crowded the opening in many jagged, broken rows, not clean and elegant but packed in like ceramic shards hammered into gum the impact hit a half second after the visual, a blunt, crushing shove that lifted me off my feet and drove me sideways, and the whole world jumped as if the tunnel itself had been yanked away. I felt the jaws settle around my legs and hips, and then the whole thing turned into motion so violent my brain couldn't keep up with didn't just shake me, it started swimming and wrenching at the same time, whipping my lower body side to side while it drove forward. The speed turned the water into drag that grabbed at me and pulled in the opposite direction, stretching me out in between its bite and the current until it felt like my hips were about to snap. My helmet light smeared across concrete and teeth and pale thick plates and broken flashes. The pressure built between its teeth, and I couldn't believe it hadn't torn me in half already. I felt the thing under my suit react with an immediate hungry urgency. It tightened around my ribs and abdomen like it was cinching itself down, and the pressure in my torso changed so fast it stole my breath. It was trying to hold me together because my rig kept it attached to me. I die. We both die. My core went rigid in a way no amount of training has ever made it. My spine braced, my shoulders locked, and that one change kept my lower body from tearing free in the first few seconds, even though the pain made the edges of my vision go dark. The creature whipped me again, and the tunnel spun until I couldn't tell which way was up and which was down. My body held rigid against the overwhelming force long enough for me to bring my weapon up. The mag fed harpoon gun bucked against my shoulder with a muffled punch. I don't aim so much as press the muzzle against the mass and start dumping bolts. The impacts came back through the creature in hard flinches, a brief loosening that told me I'd found the side of its head. It finally let go in a sudden, violent release that left me spinning in its wake, and for one blessed second there was space between us, just swirling grit and the fading echo of its movement as it recoiled out of my light's range. The relief lasted about as long as a blink. The water in front of me compressed again in a predatory snap. I felt more than I saw, and the pale shape was back in my beam, closing the distance so fast the silt hadn't even settled. It came in harder, jaws trying to catch me higher this time, where it could end me quicker. I jammed the gun in between us like a bar, felt the teeth rake it with a grinding scape and My left hand kept its death grip on it while my right grasped my knife. I drove the blade down into the mouth, hit something rubbery that convulsed, then something hard that rang up my wrist, and then the creature slammed me into the gate frame with a force that felt like my body had been broken into pieces, held together by the flesh jacket and my suit. Metal rang through the water like the tunnel itself had a voice, and it was screaming through my bones. The bolt gun clipped my helmet when I hit the frame, and my light flickered hard enough that the world dropped out for a split second, and in that blackout I couldn't see the mouth or the walls or my own hands. I could only feel the overwhelming pressure and the grinding teeth pushing against me and the growing panic when the beam returned. The bite was still there and the pressure was worse, and I realized my body had started to do stupid human things like holding my breath and losing control under the suit. The thing they'd strapped to me reacted before I could even get my bearings, and it did it the only way it ever did anything, by tightening. Pressure bloomed across my ribs and abdomen and the harness bands dug in as the organism surged against them, pushing towards my shoulders and hips in short, hungry waves, hitting copper stops and being forced back into my core. It wasn't helping in a way that I wanted, but it kept me from folding when the creature yanked again. That was what kept me in one piece.
- [24:28]
Agent Conroy / Cypher
Warning Signal interruption detected.
- [24:33]
Narrator / Advertiser
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- [26:20]
Parent 1
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- [26:44]
Parent 2 / Diver
This episode is brought to you by FX's Love Story John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette join host Evan Ross Katz on the official podcast for FX's new series Love Story, John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bassette and go behind the scenes with cast and special guests featuring Sarah Pigeon, Paul Anthony Kelly, Grace Gummer and Naomi Watts. FX's love story John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bassette wherever you listen to podcasts. Signal connection restored My left hand found the wall and clawed into a seam while the other hand fought to keep the bolt gun up and between us. The creature hauled, my fingers tore free and I slid left in a sick lurch, boots scraping concrete. I got just enough purchase to jam a boot against the bowed edge of the grate, turning my leg into a brace between steel and teeth. The grate groaned on its bolts. My ankle band bit deep and the organism under my suit cinched down harder, turning my torso into something stiff and unyielding. The creature whipped its head again and slammed me shoulder first into the gate frame. That hit landed exactly where the left shoulder ring sat, and I felt the hardware take it, a dull pop and a sudden pressure change inside the suit that told me something had shifted where it wasn't supposed to. The organism found that gap instantly cold and slick under my left shoulder, and then my arm burned through every nerve. The joint rolled forward and down with a grinding torque that made something tear inside me, and the pain came so sharp it erased everything else for a moment. But my arm didn't stop when it hit the limit. It kept going because the thing using it didn't have a concept of limit and didn't care what it wrecked to get leverage. My left palm slapped flat to the wall, fingers spread like a brace being set, and then the arm pulled hard, using my body like a lever, forcing rotation. I wasn't choosing. I felt the creature thrash to regain its angle, and the silt cloud burst apart as the huge lower jaw dropped forward, snapping frantically. I understood in that instant that the fight had changed. I was still in it, still feeling every ounce of it. But the mantle was in now, exactly what I didn't want. My left hand was still pinned to the wall, and instead of letting it slip, it locked that palm down harder and turned the rest of me in a way that let the teeth slide to the side of me. I snapped my right hand up with the bolt gun and started dumping rounds into the side of the thing's head. The recoil hammered through my shoulder in a rapid series of punches that made dark clouds of blood balloon out into the silt where the bolts needled along the jaw hinge and behind the eye ridge. It tried to pull away and reset its angle, but my left hand was on it, fingers opening and spreading as the hand flattened against the creature's face. That should have been useless, a human palm against a predator's skull, but the flesh jacket drove it in with all the weight of my torso behind it, not with nails, but with a raw friction and pressure, like it had turned the whole hand into a vibrating suction to clamp. I felt the skin on my palm compress until it burned, and then I felt the creature recoil, because something about that contact hurt or confused it. And the mantle used that recoil to yank me sideways through the water. The movement was violent and sudden, and it changed the whole geometry of the fight. One second I was pinned against the gate, the next I was swinging around the creature's head. The mantle rode that momentum, dragging me around the head and forcing the bolt gun back into line. The thing was all teeth, claws, muscle, scar tissue, and hunger. It snapped at me, surging in a tight turn. My left arm responded by snapping sideways and filling its mouth with several bolts. My body didn't have time to keep up with what was happening, and my coherent thoughts were giving way to unrelenting pain being done to my arm. The creature shook its head and surged forward, overshooting. And in that overshoot, the mantle tracked and kept firing into the side of its head as it passed. The turn came back on me like a collapsing wall. The water tightened first, and then the mouth showing up in the beam with that lowered jaw, swinging forward under the gun, trying to hook me the way it had from the beginning. The mantle shifted me instead of retreating, and the shift felt intentional, deliberate. It rotated my right shoulder forward into the bite path, a short, controlled movement through the water that pulled the Harness hardware where the teeth wanted to land. And then it let the mouth close there, right on the ring in the housings they'd warned me about. The crunch came through my collarbone, copper and polymer giving way under teeth like brittle bone, and cold slid under my right shoulder that turned into fire running through my veins. Pressure flooded down my upper arm, tightening my grip until my fingers hurt, rolling my shoulder forward with torque that tore something inside me. It used both arms then, and the fight accelerated. The bolt gun jammed into the corner of the gnashing jaws while my left palm slapped flat against the wall, anchoring me as the mantle twisted my torso, keeping the muzzle planted through the thrashing. It fired and burst through, timed to the hinge opening. When it bit down and held, my knife punched into the same wound, then ripped sideways, tearing a jagged line down the jaw. Pain became a continuous roar as the flesh jacket bent my joints past their limit for mere inches of leverage. I felt tendons and ligaments tearing, but I couldn't stop it. I had no control over my arms, and it didn't care what I felt. The creature snapped sideways and caught my left forearm, teeth punching through the suit and then deeper. The flesh jacket didn't value the limb the way I did and receded up my arm, leaving my unprotected limb in a wall of teeth. With a short, brutal whip of its head, my hand stopped answering, and red poured out into the murk in a thick bloom that the current grabbed and spread. The mantle flowed over the stump, immediately stopping the bleed and driving the severed end forward like a club, while my right arm kept the bolt gun jammed into the mouth and kept firing, forcing the jaw to jerk and stutter as it tried to bite through steel and pain at the same time. For a brief moment, it looked like it might work because the damage was adding up. It was slowing down, and the creature's jawline was opening and closing unevenly. The mantle kept cutting it off every time it tried to reset, using the gate, frame and wall like anchor points to whip my torso around faster than I could ever move underwater. Then the creature dropped low and surged under the gun, pulling itself forward with clawed hands, and its jaws clamped on my right thigh. Teeth bit down through the soup material and into my flesh. The sound I made stayed trapped in the helmet and came back warped because there was nowhere for it to go. The mantle squeezed my core hard enough that several of my ribs cracked, bracing my torso while the creature shoved forward into the wall. It drove down and right and pinned me into that uneven lip on the floor. The jaw stayed clamped, not just biting, but twisting me. And when it shook its head, the force didn't go into tearing flesh right away. It went into twisting my whole lower half. For a moment, everything held. The harness held, the suit held, the mantle held. Then I felt something in my pelvis shift with a wet, grinding slip of agony. Heat flooded a suit at my waist, suddenly and wrong. I tried to kick and there was nothing. No resistance, no weight, no return signal from the legs, just blank space beneath me. A second later, the pain caught up, spreading upward in a bright ripping wave. The water in front of my light turned thick and red as blood rolled out in plumes, grabbed by the tunnel's flow and pulled into long ribbons that wrapped around me and streamed away. My scream stayed trapped in the helmet vibrating in my ears, and all I could do was watch my own life unwind from my waist and spiral downstream while the creature thrashed in the murk with the other half of my body. The mantle tightened around my torso one last time, keeping what was left of my body together long enough to spend drove me forward in a final violent push, knife punching into the monster's head, and I felt the creature convulse as the blade hit something deep and sensitive. The jaws snapped and scraped, tearing through my right arm, trying to finish what they started. And in that mess of motion, the pressure inside my suit shifted in a way I understood immediately, because it felt like a hand letting go. The mantle left me. It flowed out through the crushed shoulder ring and torn seams in a cold surge that made my stomach drop, sliding off my skin and onto the creature's head and jawline like wet muscle. The creature went wild, snapping and grinding and ramming itself into concrete to scrape it off, and my light caught the coating, pulling tight across pale hide, sealing in patches, gripping, turning glossy and pinkish in the beam as it spread into the mouth and down the throat. The thrashing tightened into sharper bursts. I drifted back in the wake, nothing but a severed torso leaking life into the black water, my helmet light jerking in wild spastic arcs with each convulsion of what remained of my body. The rebreather kept hissing as I struggled to breathe, steady and indifferent. And the last thing I saw clearly through the red haze was the creature launching down the tunnel with a speed that sent a shock wave through the.
- [38:53]
Agent Conroy / Cypher
Water.
- [38:56]
Parent 2 / Diver
Slipping through the half open gap and vanishing toward the open channels with the flesh jacket covering its mass. And then there was only the weak circle of my beam and the slow hiss of the rebreather fading into a welcoming black abyss.
- [39:38]
Agent Conroy / Cypher
The MSH failed because of a simple, predictable bit of damage. A gap in the rings, a torn seam, one clean joint it could use without being shocked back into a cage. From that point on, the operator wasn't a person in the equation. He was a platform that was bleeding out and breaking down. And 089 treats a failing platform the same way it treats the any used body it moves on. The transfer was the simplest survival choice available in that moment. Discard the dying host and take the more suitable living one. And then it was gone, pushed through the tide gates and outfall channels straight into open ocean. What it means is worse than the Bureau lost it. Now it's out in the wild on a non human host. Which means it isn't just loose, it's mobile. And it's already proven it can take from other anomalies and come back altered. They didn't create a suit, they created a way for a predator to learn what else it can do. And as far as I can tell, they have no way to track it. Stay vigilant. Stay Stay alive.
- [41:04]
Parent 2 / Diver
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