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Redwood Bureau
"PROPAGATION" [Personal Operations Log S-3]
00:39:46
Sam and Conroy return to a derelict factory where a job needs finishing.
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Transcript143 lines
- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability various 18 plus
- [00:27]
B
this episode is brought to you by Prime. What if you had one more chance with the one that got away? Sam, you Came Home Based on the best selling novel from Carly Fortune Every Year after follows childhood friends Sam and Percy as they reunite in the dreamy, nostalgic lakeside town of Barry's Bay.
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C
Love can be hard to find. So if you're lucky enough to find that person, never let go.
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B
A second chance at first love. Every Year after Now streaming only on Prime.
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D
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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E
So
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this is Sam again.
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E
As you know, there's been a lot going on lately. I get lost somewhere between the cult that summoned an interdimensional being and a
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F
guy with an alien suit bolted to his spine.
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E
Which if you're new here.
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F
Yeah, those are real things that happened.
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E
If you've been keeping up, you might
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remember the factory second log, I think.
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E
The place with the cords and the
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F
bodies and the person in the wall
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E
who asked me to.
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F
Well, it's all in there. Recon only.
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E
Confirm and leave. And instead I came out the other
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side having done the worst thing I'd
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done up to that point. Which is a bar that has unfortunately
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kept getting raised ever since.
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I ended that log by sharing what
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the Eye said to me in the bathroom. One word.
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E
Propagation.
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F
That's all it said.
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It doesn't answer questions.
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It doesn't cooperate unless it feels like
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it or I'm about to die. I mean, what the fuck am I
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F
supposed to do with propagation for all that means to me? It wants me to chug a 2 liter of Visine and start shitting little eyeballs all over the place. Then those little bastards can roll all over town and embed themselves and other people. That way every person on the planet can be tortured within by some ocular asshole. And you know what else really pisses me off. Sorry. Sorry. I just. You don't know what it's like.
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E
This thing drives me insane sometimes and
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F
I. I don't really have any friends. Yeah, I know.
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E
Sam the loser.
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F
Just like in elementary school when my mom bribed the neighbor kid with candy bars to be my friend at school.
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E
Little did she know that kid ate
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his boogers and shit his pants on
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a field trip the year before.
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I definitely didn't have friends after that.
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G
Wow.
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F
This didn't start the way I was planning. Alright, well, before Conroy comes in and gives me another three hour introduction into tactical decision making, let's get back on track. The thing in the Factory. We know it's still in there. And we took some precautions to make sure nobody went near it before we had time to come back and deal with it. I can't really say what those are, but just know it works like 90% of the time. Conroy said, we'll handle it, you and me. And then we just didn't. Or hadn't. I guess it's not that any of us forgot. It just seems that lately there's always a bigger fire. There was the Retreat. There was Conroy getting his ribs rearranged by that thing the Bureau let escape from Lumpkins. There was Hail. There was so much more shit you can't even imagine. The Factory just sat in a queue that keeps getting filled up. And in this case, later, took about four months. Conroy set up the op the second he could walk across the room without needing something to hold him up. He acts like it was nothing, but the man took a beating that would have put a normal person in a box in the ground. And his idea of recovery was sitting on a couch pretending he wasn't working on the stack of intel next to him. By the time he decided he was
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E
good to go, he was moving like a guy who'd negotiated a fragile ceasefire
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with his own spine. Definitely not 100%, despite what he said. Maybe 70. But 70% of Conroy. Still more than most people have ever brought to anything. He pulled up the data we had.
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My body cam footage from that night,
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the sample I'd shaved off one of the cords and everything else our people had gathered. He told me we had a shrinking window, that whatever was happening in there was reaching a climax. And very soon it wouldn't be an abandoned factory problem anymore. It'd be a county problem. After going over it and over it and over it, we were finally ready, mostly to get the thing done. So we geared up and drove out in the dark hours before the sun was even thinking about making an appearance. Conroy drove. He doesn't really let anyone drive, which I used to take personally because it seems sometimes the noob can't do anything. But I think he's just been on his own for so long he doesn't know how to let other people take the wheel. Literally and figuratively. I sat in the passenger seat and tried to distract myself. I'm not like the other guys. I get nervous. My imagination runs wild with all the horrible possibilities. The eye was doing that thing where I can feel it pressing up against my chest like it's trying to work its way out. By the time the factory showed up on the horizon as a dead smear against the sky that was just a half shade lighter, it was pushing hard enough that I was breathing shallow. Does anything seem off?
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I asked.
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Conroy glanced over the eye.
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It's awake.
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Like full alert.
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Since when?
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Maybe an hour, but more so the closer we get. He looked back at the road and didn't say anything for a second.
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Then tell me if it changes.
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That's a Conroy answer. He doesn't tell you it's going to be fine or sugarcoat shit. He just makes decisions and lives with the consequences.
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G
Four months ago, Sam ran recon on a derelict industrial site connected to a string of disappearances and confirmed a hostile organism nesting inside. It wasn't just hunting, it was hollowing people out, trying to keep them alive in the process, using their bodies as material. He brought back a sample and footage, and circumstances kept us from going back to finish it. That was a mistake. Mine, not his. Entities like this don't just sit around and wait while you handle other things. There simply aren't enough of us. A predator denied food gets desperate and aggressive. A parasite interrupted mid process, gets careful, protective. It has an investment to defend. Everything Sam described told me we weren't walking in on a hungry animal. We were going in to interrupt something that had been building toward a goal, and it was going to defend that goal. So we brought demolition charges. We aren't the Bureau. I'm not going there to bring everything back. I'd prefer to bring the whole place down and burn whatever's left. We didn't have all the data. By most standards we had zilch. But I've been doing this long enough to know the tip of an iceberg when I see one.
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From the outside it looked exactly the same. Same dead brick, same busted windows like black teeth.
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Same loading bay doors hanging crooked. But it felt different. I don't really know how to describe it. Maybe the feeling was coming from the eye.
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Last time I was there it was
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like knowing there was a hidden danger.
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This time it was like a threat on my life and everyone I'd ever met.
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And those organic cords were on the
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outside now, just a few thin pale ones running along the base of the walls at the foundation line and disappearing down into the dirt. They hadn't been there before. Conroy crouched down next to one and put his light on it without touching it, and in the beam I could see it wasn't sitting still.
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It was pulsing, slow, steady, like it
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was connected to a beating heart. He stood back up. That's not good, he said, which, if you've spent any time around Conroy, is about the most alarmed I've ever heard him. We went in through the loading bay, same door I'd run out of four months ago, except now there was more cords inside running up the walls, and the smell hit me immediately and tried to drag my breakfast up, that warm, wet, sick, sweet rot layered over something almost chemical and burned.
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The eye flared. Last time I felt it do that. There was a black thing nearly the size of a house dragging itself out
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of a hole in reality.
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We found the thing from last time
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on the production floor, the one that came after me with the needle, the
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one that's been living rent free in
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the part of my brain that handles nightmares.
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The cord network was even thicker here, ropes of pale tissue running floor to ceiling, cross braced in places like scaffolding, and the thing came out of it
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low and fast, exactly the way it had come after me before. But last time I was alone, under equipped, terrified and not ready. This time there were two of us,
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and you can probably guess who, but
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one of us is pretty much a one man army. The creature was on me, and the eye yanked me left before I'd made the decision to move, and I put two rounds into its side. On the way it pivoted, shifting to fold its mass inward, shielding its stinger, like it was aware of how we could hurt it. But Conroy was already there, putting rounds into the mass. It rearranged to protect itself. His accuracy was inhuman. It was like his rounds could read minds and sought his desires all on their own, shots buried into the stinger one after another with the kind of perfection that could hammer in nails. It went down thrashing and screeching. Conroy stepped in and rearranged its gray matter with his wireless hole puncher, and then it was just dead on the floor, leaking a black noxious fluid. I stood there for a second, waiting to feel something, closure, maybe some big cathartic release like in a movie where the main character faces the thing and beating it ties everything up with a neat bow. The monster that's been in my head for four months was a pile of dead meat, and it took us, what, maybe a minute. I mostly felt cheated, and underneath that
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something that wasn't relief at all because
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the eye hadn't settled even a little. We'd just killed the thing we came
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to kill, and the eye was pressing harder than ever, doing the thing it does when the actual threat is somewhere I'm not looking. I've learned to trust that feeling more than I trust my own instincts, because it's never been wrong yet. When the monster's dead on the floor and the eye still thinks you're in danger, it's because you are. I don't think that was it, I said.
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Conroy wasn't looking at the dead creature.
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He was looking at the cords, following them with his eyes.
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They all ran in the same direction,
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down, converging toward the far corner of the floor, where there was an old four men's office and where the concrete had been broken open from below. No, he said.
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That wasn't it.
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The hole in the office floor was new, roughly circular, maybe three feet across,
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and the concrete around it had been pushed up and out, cracked outward, like something had come up through it from
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underneath rather than digging down. The cords ran into it from every direction in the room. The eye was screaming at me. Not in words, in pressure, in that
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full body certainty that whatever was down
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there was a threat to our lives. Conroy looked at the hole, then at me. The hole was packed solid with cords when Conroy put his light on it. The whole shaft was full, floor to rim, a braided mass of pale tissue
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running down into the ground so dense you couldn't have fit an arm in,
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let alone a body. We weren't going down that way, which honestly, part of me was relieved about, because every alien freeloader I had was telling me not to go anywhere near that hole.
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The other part of me knew the
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eye wasn't going to let this go, and neither was Conroy, and that meant we were going down one way or another. I just got to enjoy a few extra minutes of being above ground. Conroy found it almost immediately, because of course he did. Some kind of old access hatch in
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the floor near the back of the production area, the kind of thing for getting at pipes or drainage or whatever
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A factory like this needed under it rusted to hell. He worked it open with a pry bar while I covered him and tried not to listen to the eye, which was absolutely fucking livid and cursing me to eternal suffering. The hatch opened into a maintenance shaft. We went down. Trying to describe what was down there will come out sounding like I'm making it up, and I'm not. If anything I'm underselling it. Whatever picture you're building in your head right now, it was worse. The shaft led out into a space that should not have been there.
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Factories have crawlspaces, drainage, maybe a basement. This was a chamber, 15ft of clearance at its lowest point.
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The walls were packed dirt, freshly dug and reinforced, and nearly every surface was layered in cords so thick in places that the walls looked like they were slowly breathing in and out. It was warm, wet, the air so thick and so alive that climbing into it felt like climbing down somebody's throat.
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The eye was so loud by then
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it had stopped being a feeling and become this high pressure whine behind my face. And that's when I saw what all the cordage was feeding into. It was in the middle of the chamber, held up off the ground in a cradle woven out of the cords themselves. Whatever this thing was, it would have worn the creature upstairs like a glove. It was massive, pale, and vast, a slow, heaving mound of overlapping membrane and knotted tissue, and unlike the one upstairs, it barely moved at all. It didn't stir or turn or track us. It pulsed, slow, even, and every cord in that chamber pulsed along with it, all at the same time. I guess it didn't have to move. The whole room moved for took me a second to understand what I was looking at around the edges of the room. People. What used to be people anyways, set into the cords in their own cradles, spaced out around the chamber, evenly opened down the front and scooped, hollow, the same way I'd seen upstairs four months back. I counted. I don't know why, but I counted. I just couldn't help but notice them.
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8.
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And that was just the ones I could see. Who knows how many more were spread around this place. The thing that did it had been down here in the dark, doing this every day that we hadn't come back. I stood at the bottom of the ladder and felt the floor of my stomach quietly give out. The mass in the cradle didn't have eyes. It didn't turn or shift, but I could feel it reach out, slow and deliberate, like a hand closing around the personal spaces in my mind. The Pressure behind my face spiked so hard the edges of my vision went to static, and for a second I wasn't sure my legs were going to keep holding me up.
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C C Connery.
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It came out wrong. Little more than a croak.
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I feel it.
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He was already moving, already had the charges in his hands, already running his eyes over the room, looking for every place that was necessary for holding the chamber together.
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Cover me. We plant these and go.
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That's when they came pouring out of the cords all at once, tearing free of the tissue with a wet, ripping sound that went all the way around the chamber, like the whole room split its skin. These weren't the thing we'd killed upstairs. They were smaller, faster. They were octopus mixed with cave cricket and turned inside out. They were all limb six, maybe more, folding out wide, scrambling down the walls and across the floor with a sound like wet sticks clattering. No faces, just a seam down the front of each one that opened and shut, hunting for something. The first one hit me before I'd finished turning the eye. Threw my arms up and I got the rifle into it and fired point blank. The rounds punched straight through and out the back, but it was already driving forward with mass and momentum and we went down hard onto the floor. It was on top of me, instantly, stronger than anything that thin should be, all those limbs working at once, pinning my gun arm, hooking my collar and that seam on the front of it pressing down wet against my vest, and started chewing this awful suction and grind right over my sternum, trying to open me up like the people in the cradles. I had my forearm pushed up under the front of it and it just kept folding closer, slow, patient, no rush at all, a constant, overwhelming pressure that felt like it could go forever. I rolled to the side, fast and explosive, causing it to slip slightly with me. I used that space I created and wrenched the muzzle up into the mass where all those limbs bunched together and pulled the trigger, full auto, probably half a magazine before I must have hit something vital. It came apart, buckling inward and going heavy and slack on top of me like a contractor's bag full of wet sand. I heaved it off and rolled up onto a knee, gun up. There were two more already coming and the rest were on Conroy.
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I put down one of the two
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with what remained in my mag, a tight string of rounds that I walked up its limbs and into the seam until it folded, the bolt locked back. I dropped the empty and had a fresh one seated before the spent mag hit the floor. All those nights of Reese making me run reloads until I wanted to scream had turned into something my body could just do. The second one was still coming. I got the rifle up and put four rounds into it. The eye lit up and I stepped, more of an instinct than a decision, A clean sidestep and the thing blew past where I'd been standing and slammed into the wall behind me hard. That half second was all I needed. I was already turning with it, putting rounds into it until it stopped moving. Conroy's rifle was going off somewhere to my right. I caught him in a strobe of muzzle flash, three of them on him at once, him moving and firing and moving. One was dead at his boots. He was good, but he was half a breath behind where he'd normally be, and I knew he wasn't as healed as he said he was. I could see the pain in his face with every movement. I sighted the nearest one to him and dropped it with a short burst, swung to the next one, finger taking up the slack, and the eye flared. A limb hit my waist, hard as rebar and wrenched. I didn't fight the pull. I spun into it the opposite direction and the grip broke off me and I came all the way around with the rifle already on it and emptied what was left into its body until it dropped off me and lay there twitching. Then one came down from the ceiling. I never saw it. The eye hadn't either. It was doing something like seizing, almost in pain inside me. The creature's weight took me straight to the floor, its full mass on the back of my shoulders and then slamming me into the ground. The chamber went white and started to spin, a high ring filling my ears, drowning everything else out before my world came back. Two more peeled out of the wall and got my arms and forced them down, pressing me flat into the floor. From where I lay, I could see Conroy through blurred vision. He was fighting like hell to get to me, and he couldn't. Every time he carved a path, another one slid out from between the cords and filled it. He had no room, no gap to break through to me. And then the thing in the cradle moved. It came up out of the nest of itself, unfolding and unfolding, limbs, the thickness of my torso unhooking from the cords one after another and bracing against the walls. When it stood, it nearly filled the entire chamber. It was a slick and pale mass riding on a sea of limbs, like a colony of cross crabs built out of skinned flesh. The legs spread until they touched both walls it reached down and plucked me from the ground by the arms like I weighed nothing. It held me out in front of it, spread wide, and it pulled, slow and even, no urgency, just force applied and then applied a little more, my shoulders tightening up as the sockets screamed against the strain, the pressure climbing so gradually I understood that it would just keep adding until I came apart. I found Conroy's eyes across the chamber while they swarmed him. He'd stopped looking like a man in a fight and started looking like something to fight was happening around, moving through all of it with this awful even calm, the rifle an extension of wherever his eyes went, dropping them one and two at a time with a precision that didn't look like aiming so much as decision. Every round found something, and every single thing he killed another slid out from the cords behind it to take its place. It wasn't nearly enough.
- [26:09]
G
Warning Signal interruption detected
- [26:13]
H
this episode is sponsored by Cargurus the worst part of car shopping for me has never been the cars. It's been trying to translate what I actually want into a filter on a website. You can't tell a dropdown that you need decent gas mileage and a trunk that fits a kayak, so you end up adjusting six sliders, getting nothing useful and giving up halfway through. Cargurus has a new feature called Guru that just lets you type what you want in plain English and it shows you listings that actually match with Guru. You describe what you're looking for in your own words, type what you want, and it shows you real available listings that match your exact needs. Dealership mode on the Cargurus app then puts you in control on the lot, letting you compare cars side by side, check pricing, and estimate your final cost before you sit down to talk numbers. With more than 4 million million listings, CarGurus has the biggest selection of cars, which makes finding the right one at the right price easier than ever. It's no wonder Cargurus is the number one most visited car shopping site according to SimilarWeb's estimated traffic data. The Guru search is the thing I would have killed for. The last time I went car shopping, I had a very specific combination of things I wanted, and trying to find that on any other site was like trying to fit a sentence through a vending machine. The fact I can just type what I'm thinking and get real listings back is a small thing that actually changes how the whole process feels. Buy or sell your next car today with CarGurus@CarGurus.com Go to CarGurus.com to make sure your big deal is the best deal. That's C-A-R-G-U R U S.com CarGurus.com
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I
Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney Plus. Let's go get ready for a new case.
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J
We're gonna crack this case and prove
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C
the greatest partners of all time. New friends you are Gary the Snake
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G
and your last name.
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C
The snake Dream team.
- [28:06]
G
Hit new habitats.
- [28:07]
C
Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [28:11]
I
You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home.
- [28:13]
G
You're clearly working at Zootopia 2.
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I
Now available on Disney Plus. Rated PG.
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C
I am one of Motunui.
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I
On July 10, Maui, you will board
- [28:25]
C
my boat and restore the heart of Te Fiti.
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I
And here we go. The journey begins.
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C
See her light up the night. In the sea she calls me.
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E
The ocean chose you.
- [28:37]
C
Let's go save the world.
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I got your back. Chosen 1.
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C
Disney's Moana boat's neck his name is Heihei.
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His name is Yum Yum when he goes in my tum tum. In theaters July 10. Rated PG.
- [28:49]
K
Parental guidance suggested Introducing Taco Bell's new Jalapeno Citrus Salsa. With bright citrus, real red jalapenos, guajillo chiles. Usually you add sauce to the food. But when the sauce is this good, the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth. That rolled quesadilla. Not a rolled quesadilla anymore. Now it's a sauce shovel. Taco Bell's Jalapeno Citrus Salsa. Get it with any item on the Cantina Chicken menu while it's here at participating US Taco Bell locations for a limited time only while supplies last contact
- [29:19]
H
store for availability
- [29:22]
E
Signal connection restored.
- [29:28]
G
I've put down a lot of things that shouldn't exist. I've seen people become things that shouldn't exist. But I've never seen anything like this. The thing had Sam off the ground by both arms, pulling him apart at a steady pace. And I had three on me and no way to get to him. I've made peace with a lot of possible bad endings. But the kid didn't deserve that. Then the light came on inside him. The eye lit up through his chest, white and hard. Bright enough that I could see his ribs in silhouette through the vest. And it didn't stop at the skin. The two limbs came out of his back, solid and bladed and made from the same light inside him. He was still Sam. Same face, same build. Nothing swapped out for a monster. Just Sam with a furnace in his chest and an extra pair of limbs made of hard light. His phantom arm ripped one of the limbs holding him clean apart. He dropped, turned over in the air, and hit the floor feet first, hard enough to crack the stone under him. In the next instant, he crossed 30ft of chamber in the time it takes to flinch, and the floor came apart where he pushed off it. And the three creatures on me were in pieces before I'd registered. He'd moved the limbs, took two and his rifle took the third. No shot or movement wasted. Faster than my eyes could keep up with, and some of the best shooting anyone has ever done. He eviscerated three more already at the big one. As their pieces reigned in his wake, his phantom limbs drove into its mass and threw him up the front of it. He climbed it, firing. Humans spend their whole lives learning to do one thing well at a time. He was doing four perfectly, the man and the limbs operating separate, yet in perfect harmony. It swatted at him with a leg the size of a truck axle. He kicked off it, hit the wall feet first. The wall cratered and he came off it like someone fired from a cannon. Snatched one of the small ones out of the air on the way and threw. Hit the big one and staggered it. Sam put a line of fire through the gap he created. His body followed, punching clean through the top of the entity and hitting the far wall. He shot off that wall and came back at it, spinning this time, limbs outstretched. He went through it like a blender and shredded every appendage that reached for it him before boring a hole through it. He came out the other side and dropped, having lost speed. Two holes in the entity now, one you could have driven through. Black pouring out of both. I've been in a lot of fights. I've never seen anything like that. Then the thing let out a low vibration through the floor. In response, a flood of creatures poured out of the walls and rained over the Sam. I knew this was the only window I was going to get and went to work. I placed the charges while Sam tore through the hoard. Through the bodies, I'd catch glimpses, lit up, firing in every direction, reloading, firing, arms slicing and tearing. And when he ran the rifle dry, he pulled two blades with his own hands. The pile of bodies around him got higher and the chamber kept feeding the pile more. I set every charge and one more I'd brought along as a just in case. Then I got to the shaft. He'd gone up the front of the big one again, taking it apart one piece at a time. But every piece he took seemed to be replaced from its center. I yelled his name, but he was in a state a name couldn't reach. So I made a choice. And I told him at the top of my voice that we'd both die in this hole if he didn't break off now. That the world needs him, and so do I. Then I hit the detonator that reached him. The words or the click, doesn't matter which. He broke off and crossed to me in one motion, and his own human arms locked around me as the limbs took us up the shaft. The factory came apart over us, fire first, then something that pulled the light and flames in after it. He carried us out, blurring through as it went. We came down in the mud hard enough to feel it in my teeth. The limbs folded back into him, and the furnace went dark. The whole factory folded into itself. And where it stood, there was a hole in the ground you could have lost a city block in. And then he was just Sam, out cold, heavier than he looks and still breathing.
- [34:41]
E
I woke up at the safe house. I don't remember the drive. I don't remember coming up out of that chamber or getting loaded into the truck, or however many hours between the factory going down and me opening my eyes on a cot with the worst headache of my entire life and both shoulders feeling like something had tried to take my arms off. Wait. No, I actually remember that one. Conroy was up when I came to. He'd already done his part of this, already laid it all out. The part you heard. The part where he tells you what he saw from the outside. He gave me the short version while I sat there trying to make my hands work. Told me flat, the way he tells you everything. We got it. It's gone. You did most of the work. And then we sat there with the implications, the what ifs, the questions neither of us asked because neither of us had the answers. I remember pieces. I remember the thing in the cradle pulling my arms, and the certainty, this total calm certainty that I was about to come apart in the middle of that chamber and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I remember Conroy across the room. And then I remember the eye. It was everywhere. It was in my hands and my legs and my teeth. I felt the eye take over before the tunnels, that first job, when the arms came out and did what I couldn't. That was a flicker. Seconds. And then it faded to quiet. This wasn't that. This went on. And I was awake for all of it. And I could Feel everything. It did and I did. I honestly don't know how much of it was the eye and how much of it was me. Because I was in there. I was making calls. Conroy saw it too. That I went for the ones attacking him first. That I was acting independently and cooperatively. So it wasn't just a passenger taking the wheel while I blacked out. It was both of us at the same time, running the same body harder than a body is supposed to go. And I cannot tell you where the line was. I don't know how many of those decisions were mine. I don't know if there's a difference anymore. And the few flashes I've got of it, of moving like that, of what it felt like to be that, to cross a room and have everything in it just come apart around me. I'm not going to tell you it felt bad. That's what I can't stop thinking about. Not that an alien passenger manipulates and shares my body, but that somewhere in the middle of it I didn't want to go back to being regular Sam. I was fucking Super Sam. I was unstoppable. And holy shit, it was awesome. Then I think about what it's going to cost me and where all this leads, and then I'm super depressed Sam. Anyway, the factory's a hole in the ground now. Two football fields across, like a meteor came down. There's going to be a story about it, I'm sure. Gas main or sinkhole or whatever the Bureau decides people get to believe this week. And people will never know what was actually down there or how many people went into those cords before we finally took it out. I think about the four months it was down there working while we kept putting it off. And I know we couldn't have been everywhere. I know there are unlimited fires and very limited us, but knowing that and feeling it are different things. I keep seeing that guy from the first time I was there. And it's like I want it to be for a reason, you know? I don't want to have done that just because it was the thing to do.
- [38:57]
F
I know.
- [38:58]
E
I know I'm in the shit now. There's no going back. And I've accepted that. It's pretty much a guarantee that I'll do much worse things before someone or something punches my ticket. But with what's in me, what's happening with me. And to me there's an idea I have of myself as a person, a good person that I want to hold onto. Sigh Fuck. I guess we'll see how this shit plays out. We killed the things in that factory. I'm sure of that. Nothing walks away from what Conroy detonated down there. I don't know exactly what it was. He won't tell me. But I saw the footage from the aftermath. I'm pretty sure that shit just ate a whole lot of reality and vaporized everything within it. Conroy is one crazy sob. I don't know what he was thinking. I'm actually afraid to ask him.
- [39:56]
F
I can't think of a logical answer
- [39:57]
E
that will make me feel better about any of it. It's been a few days now. The entity is gone. By every measure, this was a win. But the eye is still awake. It's quiet and stubborn. It's thinking. I can feel it. Thinking and thinking. It won't answer me. I know it's pissed. I also know that a part of it feels the way that I feel. A longing for that power we shared down there. It's like a drug. Well, I think so anyways. I don't do drugs.
- [40:36]
F
And no one should.
- [40:38]
E
Hey, you listening? This is Super Sam reminding you to say no and stay strong.
- [40:47]
F
Isn't that how it goes?
- [40:49]
E
I don't know. Anyways, there's a lot of bad out there. I hope you all stay safe. You have to keep a clear head, man. The Redwood Bureau is not coming to save you.
- [41:01]
F
The government won't do shit, the police can't do shit.
- [41:06]
E
And we're doing all we can. But. Well, we need your help. Everyone has to pitch in just a little. And then maybe we can make our world better by a lot. Sam signing off.
- [41:20]
L
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- [41:58]
J
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