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Redwood Bureau
"REDHIDE" - Redwood Bureau Phenomenon #2421
00:55:20
Something as simple as a moment of carelessnesssss that causes an an accident can change the lives of everyone involved in ways you could have never imagined.
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- [00:00]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [00:40]
Windows 11 / Microsoft Student Deal Announcer
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- [00:45]
Narrator - Survivor of the Incident
get the best of both worlds.
- [00:48]
Windows 11 / Microsoft Student Deal Announcer
Get the unreal college deal everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game. Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc.
- [01:12]
Agent Conroy / Redwood Bureau Announcer
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.
- [01:52]
Cipher - Story Narrator / Analyst
This is cipher. I want to start with a word you've heard the Bureau use countless times. Deployment. It sounds clean. It sounds like a decision made by serious people in a serious room, weighing options and making all the right choices. What it actually means in the files I'm about to share with you, is that somebody decided to take one of the worst things a normal person could imagine and use it for their own purposes. That was the operation. That's what was supposed to happen. There was a Bureau team responsible for moving it. There was a man who was just trying to get somewhere with his family. The two were never supposed to cross paths. The Bureau picked the road precisely because nobody uses it. No services, no traffic. The kind of nowhere you choose when you're moving something you can't afford anyone to see. They did everything right by their own cold arithmetic. And it didn't matter because you can plan for everything except the things you can't. And the Bureau has never shown us that innocent civilians are worth planning for. Listen and keep one question in your head the whole way through, because I'm going to Come back to it at the end. Which one of the things in these files is the monster?
- [03:29]
Narrator - Survivor of the Incident
The road was my idea. Everything that happened came out of that one decision, and it was mine. My dad was dying four hours away in a hospital with maybe a day or two left in him. Diana and I had thrown a bag in the car, grabbed Owen and Diana's sister Claire, and gotten on the highway by two in the afternoon. Somewhere around hour three, I turned us onto the road, a back route through the national forest that my dad used to take when I was a kid, the one he swore cut 40 minutes off the drive because it skipped the whole interstate loop around the mountains. I told Diana it would save us time. She didn't like it. The road wasn't on the main gps, just a thin gray line you had to zoom in to see, and there were no gas stations or towns anywhere on it. She said if something went wrong, we'd be a long way from help. I told her nothing was going to go wrong. I was trying to get to my father before he died. It was getting dark when we turned off that deep blue end of dusk. Were the skies still holding a little light? Owen was in the back with Claire, half asleep against the window. Diana had the map up on her phone, but it had stopped finding signal a few miles back, and the car's GPS only had part of the road loaded. She was telling me we were lost, and I was telling her that the road only went one way. I was trying to zoom the map out to show her the road ahead. I was looking at the screen for a few seconds. Maybe the headlights came around the bend, filling the whole windshield high and wide. A big vehicle taking up far more than its half of the road. I jerked the wheel right. So did they. The back end of the big vehicle clipped my rear quarter panel and my car went spinning around the bend. I remember the world turning, the sound of the windows shattering. The seatbelt was cutting into me, and the noise was deafening until it was silent. We had stopped lying on the passenger side in the ditch, and it was quiet and there was steam coming from somewhere, and the engine was ticking. I said Diana's name. She said something back. I could barely hear her, and I couldn't make it out, but she was there. I called out to Owen and he started crying, which meant he was alive, and that was the best sound I'd ever heard. I could hear Claire from the back swearing, which also meant alive. My left arm was broken. I knew it the second I tried to push myself up a Pain that whited out my vision for a second. I used the other arm and got myself unstuck. Getting them out took everything I had. The windshield was already mostly gone, so I kicked the rest of it free and brought Owen through first, then helped Diana climb out. Then Claire. Owen had a cut over his eyebrow, pouring blood down half his face. It looked worse than it was. Diana was holding her side and taking shallow, careful, short breaths. Claire's ankle had folded somewhere in the roll, and she was favoring it hard, but she could walk, and we climbed up out of the ditch and onto the road. I had to look for the other vehicle. It had gone off the road in the opposite direction, down a steep embankment and tore a path through the trees. On its way down, it left a trail of snapped saplings, gouged dirt, and branches hanging broken. It was big and black. Some kind of armored transport, maybe. No logo or markings. I could see it was sitting upside down against a tree trunk, 40ft below the road, with smoke coming from the engine block. I started toward it. My first thought was that somebody might be hurt down there. Hurt worse than us. Diana grabbed my arm and stopped me. She put her hand flat on my chest, and she didn't say anything. Her eyes were locked on the vehicle, and she tilted her head a little. She motioned for me to listen, so I listened. There was definitely a noise coming from it. Not settling or fluid dripping. It was coming from inside the box, from the cargo section. It had a rhythm to it, a heavy, slow, repeating sound, like something big shifting its weight from one side to the other. Then the rhythm broke, and there was a different sound, lower. Something that I didn't recognize, that froze my brain for a second. Then the metal started to tear. The groan and shriek of steel being bent and torn echoed through the forest from the inside. I stopped, thinking about whoever was driving a truck. I grabbed Owen's hand and I told everybody to move. We went into the trees on our side of the road, away from the truck, away from that sound. I had Diana's arm over my shoulders because her breathing was getting worse and she was slowing down. Claire had Owen. The sky was almost dark now, just enough to see the shapes of the trunks and the black spaces between them, and we picked our way through as fast as we could, which wasn't nearly fast enough. Behind us, the tearing and pounding stopped. The whole time the truck was making noise, I was scared, but the noise was a thing I could locate. It was back there, and we were going away from it. When it stopped, I went from Scared to fucking terrified. Then my worst impossible thoughts became reality. I heard something moving behind us in the dark, fast and heavy. It came through the brush, branches breaking, trees cracking like thunder, the ground thudding beneath my own feet. I turned around to look. I couldn't help myself. Fear had taken control. In that last gray light I saw it, and my brain just stuttered. It was tall. Its head cleared the low branches, which made it taller than a man by at least double. It stood on two legs, but the legs seemed to bend in extra places, driving it forward in a low, hard lean, like it was about to drop on all fours. The skin was dark, the color of dried blood. It was plated, overlapping in sections. No hair anywhere. The head was long and narrow, and it came to a kind of point at the front. The face was just a cluster of wet structures bunched at the front of the skull, opening and closing. Its arms hung low at its sides as it came. I could only see a few fingers, two, maybe three, but they were long and they ended in short, sharp points. I was frozen, staring at it. And Diana was right next to me because she couldn't run without me. It was between us. Before I could even get a word out. It took her by the shoulder, one hand closing over her shoulder and spinning her toward it. She made a sound, like a short, sharp sound of pure surprise, like that's all she could get out. And then it had her with both hands and it was on her. It pinned her and went to work. It wasn't just eating her. It was. This was slower. It was deliberate. The sounds it made were low and almost quiet. And Diana's sounds were not quiet at all. And then they were. And the silence after was worse than anything I've ever heard. It was mere feet away, and I could do nothing. I will never in my life be free of what I heard. It had Diana. It was occupied with her. And for those few moments we had stopped mattering to it. That's the only reason Owen still has a father. Claire grabbed me by the collar and hauled me backwards because I wasn't moving. I was standing there watching my wife, and at some point Claire got loud in my ear and got me turned around and I saw Owen. His face wore the same look of shocked horror that I felt. That's when I grabbed him and ran. It was the only decision I could make. Owen didn't make a sound. He was just limp in my arm. We ran until my legs wouldn't, and then we walked fast before Owen saw the cabin. He saw it Before I did, a shape through the trees with straight lines in corners. It was a little hunting cabin, one story, a sagging porch, windows boarded from the outside. The door had swollen in its frame and didn't want to open. I put my good shoulder into it twice, and it gave. Inside was a main room and a smaller bedroom in the back. A wood stove had gone to rust, and a table with a couple of chairs had been brought in quietly for years. It smelled like damp, mildew, and dust. There was no power, no water, nothing on the walls but a rusty hunting knife hanging from a nail by the door. A length of steel pipe lay on the floor by the stove, probably an improvised fire poker. I gave Claire the knife and took the pipe. Owen went into the back room without being told. 11 years old, was old enough to know that if something came through the front, the back room was more than one wall. A few more seconds, he sat on the floor against the far wall with his knees pulled up to his chest. Claire and I dragged the rotting furniture against the door, checked the rest of the windows, and then we waited. The thing was out there, I knew it was. It was the only sound other than the ringing of my ears and the pounding of my heart. Off in the trees, that heavy movement through the brush, sometimes far and sometimes close enough that I'd hold my breath. Claire was beside me by the door, the knife in her hand as if it would actually do something, her hurt ankle stretched out in front of her. She asked me quietly what it was. I told her the truth. I didn't know. How could I? Then Owen from the back room asked if mom was coming. Something happened in my chest. I had my mouth open, and I was looking at the wall between me and my son. And I hide nothing. Not a word, not a lie, not even a sound. The dark and the thing moving in the trees filled the silence like a tidal wave. Then Clear answered for me. She said, not yet, buddy. She said it carefully, but she was setting something down that might break. Not yet. Owen didn't ask again. Something moved past the window while we sat there. The dim moonlight through the board's gaps winked out as a shadow slid across. We went, still, waiting for it to pass, but it didn't pass. It stood there, casting its shadow into the room like it was already there, the sound of its breathing growing more intense with each passing second. Then it came through the wall. The type of force and violence this thing possessed I can't even describe. It didn't break the boards and the window or kick down the door. It tore right through the fucking wall. The arm came through it with a crash like a car hitting a tree, splintering of the wood, filling the room like an explosion. The arm swept across the room, reaching for anything it could grab, and it found Claire. The hand closed around her arm and it started to pull her toward the hole in the wall. My good hand gripped onto the back of her jacket, my bad arm coming up uselessly to help and doing nothing. Claire still had the knife. She got it up in her free hand and she drove it into the arm again and again, three times, four. Burying the rusty blade into its dark hide. As hard as she could, the thing yanked her toward the hole that was nowhere near big enough for her to fit through the gap it had punched through the wall was maybe two feet across and her body did not fit through a two foot gap. It regripped her by the middle and her jacket tore out of my hand. Her hips and torso stopped against the wood and it kept pulling. With a loud crack she bent in half the wrong way. The back of her head came down against her heels. Her face was turned upside down now, her eyes wide open and locked onto mine. She didn't scream. I don't think she could. She just looked at me upside down and folded in half and still being pulled through a jagged hole too small for her to fit, her eyes on my eyes. And then she was gone. Outside the cabin the thing made a sound that was high and layered, like several sounds stacked on top of each other. The sound faded into the distance as I heard it move off into the trees. I stood there with my good hand still half closed around nothing, the shape of her jacket still in my fingers. From the back room I could hear Owen breathing fast and shallow, and I was grateful he had been behind a wall, grateful he hadn't seen it, even though I knew he knew what had just happened, or at least knew that his Aunt Claire was gone too. I got Owen out of the back room. I knew it could come through any wall at any time. I wanted him by me. The only thing I could hope to do was by him more time I stood between him and the wall with the pipe in my hand. I knew it wouldn't do anything, but what else could I do? The silence was filled only with dread and anticipation at the thing's inevitable return. Even the insects seemed to have decided to leave or stay quiet. After what felt like a lifetime, it came back, as I knew it would. I heard it coming through the trees at a dead run, and then it hit the wall where it had already made the hole. The wood split, and the whole corner of the cabin sagged as it forced its shoulders into the gap. It was halfway into the the room, and the whole structure groaned and cracked, warning us that it was about to give out. I hit it. I put everything I had into the pipe and I caught it across the side of the head. It turned toward me, and the cluster of structures on the front of it opened and pointed at me. I hit it again. It got an arm through, and the hand opened and came from me. I fell back, landing next to Owen as it grasped empty air. He had his hands over his ears and his eyes shut, and he was making a sound, a low, steady sound to drown everything out. I got up onto my knees in front of him, because if it came the rest the of of the way through, it was going to have to take me first. It was working its body into the room. The hole wasn't big enough yet, but it was tearing the whole place apart by the second. That's when the light hit the windows, white, blinding and sweeping across every gap in the boards at once, and a sound under it that was unmistakable. Rotor blades. A helicopter, low and close and getting closer. Then voices outside, several of them shouting over the noise and the boom of something amplified. The thing stopped. It was halfway into the cabin, with its chest through the wall and its hand feet from my face. It turned away from me, toward the wall, toward the light and the sounds coming from outside. Something else had its attention now, and I'd never felt more grateful. Then it was gone into the night, and I crawled to Owen and got my body around him, and we listened to what happened next, because that's all we could do. It started with gunfire, controlled, disciplined bursts. For a few seconds I thought it was over, that they'd put down whatever that thing was. Then the bursts got faster, closer together. I heard the deep, guttural sound it made close, and then a man screaming, and the scream moved like he was being carried away before it cut off. Unfortunately, I knew what that meant. More gunfire. Somebody was yelling commands I didn't understand. I heard the helicopter move to the other side of the cabin and a heavier gun opened up from above. A hammering that was nothing like the rifles. And still, under all the noise and chaos, I could hear that thing running, roaring, killing. It didn't go down. They hit it and hit it, and it didn't go down. I'd swung a pipe into that head as hard as I'd ever swung anything, and now I was hearing Trained men with real weapons failing to stop it. The pipe felt stupid in my hand. I dropped it and let it roll away. There was what sounded like an army outside. If they couldn't stop it, I'd spend my last few seconds holding my son instead of a pipe. Another scream, shorter. The crunch and snap of another terrible death. The fire scattered, individual shots now from all directions. The big gun from the helicopter spun again and sent a line of fire through the forest that I could feel through the floor. The thing made that high, layered sound that got behind my eyes, and this time it climbed higher than before and kept climbing. And right at the top of it, there was one more long burst of gunfire from everywhere at once. And then a sound like a tree coming down, a heavy, wet collapse, and everything went silent except for the whirring of the helicopter blades. Then a few last shots broke the night. Spaced out like someone just wanted to be sure. A voice, hoarse, calling something I couldn't make out, and another voice answering. They'd killed it. I held my son and I listened to them regroup, and I thought, finally, it's over. They called us out and we came out. There were more of them than I expected, dark gear and helmets and rifles. The helicopter sat down in the clearing behind the cabin with its blades still turning and its light bringing daylight to the night. Off past it in the trees, I could see shapes on the ground that didn't move and other men standing over them. The thing was out there, too, a darker heap at the edge of the light, being surrounded and wrapped up. A medic came to Owen and got down on his level and started checking him over gentle, talking low. Another came to me and asked where I was hurt, and I showed him the army. Somebody asked if there was anyone else, and I told them about Diana in the woods and Claire through the wall, and they listened and they wrote it down, and none of it seemed to surprise them. And I came apart. I'd been trying to hold it together for Owen, and now there were armed people and the helicopter and a medic with his hand on my son's shoulder. And I just let go. My legs went. One of them caught me. I couldn't stop the sounds coming out of me. I was sure it was over. I couldn't stop thinking about how Owen and I were supposed to return to our lives. My wife was gone. His mom and Ant were gone. Monsters are real, A fact that neither of us could deny or live anywhere without. Then the medic who'd been with Owen stood up and walked away and nobody took his place. And my son was sitting there alone with a clean bandage on his head. One of the men moved so he was standing between me and the trees. Two of them off to the side were talking, and one had a radio to his face, and he kept glancing at me while he listened to whatever was coming back through it. Then the questions started. They'd been asking where I was hurt and if there was anyone else. Now they wanted to know how close I'd gotten to the truck, whether Owen or I had touched or been touched by that thing or what my exposure to it was. I answered everything. They saved us. You answer people who save you. One of them crouched down in front of me, calm, almost kind, and said they were going to take care of everything. I believed them because why wouldn't I? Owen was across the clearing, sitting on the ground with that white bandage bright against his hair, and he was looking at me. And there was something on his face I'd never seen before. Not in the car, not in the road, not in the cabin. He was trying to tell me something he couldn't say out loud with all of them standing around us. Had I didn't understand it. The man who'd been on the radio was looking at me. He'd been looking at me for a while. I looked back at my boy and something turned over in my gut. The same thing I'd felt on the road when I heard that thing in the overturned vehicle. The stillness that comes right before everything goes to hell. That is a feeling you can never forget.
- [30:29]
Agent Conroy / Redwood Bureau Announcer
Warning Signal interruption detected
- [30:34]
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- [33:46]
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- [34:12]
Agent Conroy / Redwood Bureau Announcer
Signal connection restored.
- [34:18]
Redwood Bureau Operative / Team Member
I noticed the specs were excessive before we left the yard. A restraint load. Rated for something that shouldn't be hauled in. A vehicle like this. Continuous sedation, 8 minute dose intervals. The containment class was 1 above, with the root risk justified. You read enough of these and you stop meeting the contents line. The protocol tells you what the danger is. Standard four man team. Marsh riding shotgun. Okafor and Davis on the rear station monitoring the unit. I'd ran with Marsh maybe a dozen times, Okafor twice, Davis I didn't know. Young transferred in from somewhere. Still ran his pre checks twice because he didn't trust his own hands yet. He'd learn to. Or he'd become a name on a wall. There are a lot of names on a lot of walls. The route took us into a two lane forest road with no services and no traffic. Which was the point. You move something like this where the fewest eyes are. I'd done the math on the route before we rolled. Fuel time. The dead zone stretch where standard comms dropped for 19 miles. You eliminate the variables you can and you accept the ones you can't. But the delivery coordinates weren't another facility. These were field coordinates. Open ground. The order said deployment prep, and I'd seen deployment prep. This fit the bill. So the thing in the back was going to be released. That was the plan. They were using it for something. Davis asked for what and Marsh told him it didn't matter, which was true. There was a target the Bureau couldn't reach by normal means. Could have been a network that had been hitting our ops. Could have been a single asset gone off the leash. The rumor changed depending on who you asked. The mechanism was the same either way. I didn't have an opinion on the target. Whatever or whoever that may be. Targets aren't my job. I had an operational concern, which concluded after deployment. Then it was somebody else's problem. Before that point, any issues would fall on everybody who'd touched the cargo. And I was currently holding the cargo. Okafor called out from the back. A sedation uptake running ahead of the model. The system shortening intervals to compensate. Not a fault. A trend. The unit was doing what it was designed to do, which was stay ahead of the metabolism and the metabolism was running faster than whoever wrote the model had planned for. The intervals kept tightening. Eight minutes became six. Six started ticking down to five. Then it started to move. It shouldn't have been able to do that. The unit's supposed to prevent that. Full immobilization, the whole point of the restraint load and the protocols. But there it was, shifting the whole vehicle under its weight. I told them to do whatever it takes to keep that thing sedated and punch the accelerator. A warning tone blared out. Catastrophic failure. The system just didn't push when it was supposed to. Okafor switched it to manual, and we all held our breaths, waiting for it to start breaking containment. The numbers climbed, and the motion sensors came up one zone at a time as the thing started answering the drop in dosage. Then the override took, the dose ceded, and the readings came back down. Davis had gone quiet. Now Marsh told him a story about an old run. Bad weather, a much worse situation than this one. And after a little while, the kids started breathing normal again. That was the thing Marsh was good at. No matter what the assignment is, it's always good to have a steady man on your team. We were maybe 40 minutes from the staging site, and I'd started doing the thing you do at the end of a bad haul, where you let yourself believe it's basically over. The road bent left around a dense thicket of trees. I could not have anticipated the car. It came around the bend in my lane. Low headlights. They'd taken a curve too wide because there was never anybody else out here. I had no time to think. I moved the wheel hard to the right, off toward the shoulder, away from them, and they did the same thing in the same instant. Cut back toward their own side. I felt the impact, but it was almost nothing. A bump. The kind of contact that ends with both drivers standing in the road, swearing at each other. The problem was I'd put my wheels into a soft shoulder where the dirt was already falling away and our truck was heavy. I felt it start to go, and I knew the right side dropped. The rest of the truck followed it over the edge. We went down the incline, and the world turned to noise and motion. We hit something hard enough to start the roll, and then we just rolled. Every alarm on the containment unit going off at the same time into one solid wall of sound. Then we hit something hard, and my head met the metal door frame, and everything went black. I came back, hanging upside down in my belt. I was bleeding into one eye, and my brain was trying to pound its way out of my skull. But I was breathing and I could hear the others doing the same. Marsh was trying to get signal beside me, Okafor's voice in the back, Davis after him, scared but talking. I got myself down and tried for the door, but it wouldn't open. The frame had crushed in against it, or it was buried in the dirt we were lying against. Marsh was fighting his and getting the same result. The windshield was a sheet of white cracks, but even so, that glass could probably withstand more than the steel frame supporting it. The truck was a sealed steel box with the four of us trapped inside. Then I heard the car go. It was moving back there like nothing was holding it. The sedation was the only thing that had ever actually held that thing down and had broken in the crash. The steel separating us and it was just there to keep it contained between doses. On the other side of the steel bulkhead, there was a thing the Biro kept asleep around the clock because of what it did when it was awake and it was waking up. It tore through the bulkhead one piece at a time. That was the strongest part of the whole truck, built heavier than the doors, and I could hear it ripping through the steel. There was nowhere to go. A truck cab is already small and ours had folded down even smaller, and the only way out was the hole it was making to come in. Davis was nearest the breach. It came through and had him in his hands in the next instant, and it started in on him. I was a mere arm's length away. Gunfire filled the cab, deafening us until it clicked dry. I managed to reload and empty another magazine before it grabbed Okafor next. There was nothing I could do. Marsh was working at his door, kicking and slamming, but it wouldn't budge. The only thing left to control was whether we met it moving or sitting still. And he chose moving. There was only a few moments before it ripped him from the seat next to me and started tearing him apart too. Then there was nothing in front of it but me. The long, narrow skull came forward out of the dark, the wet cluster at the front of it opening and closing, swinging slowly toward me until its face nearly rested against mine.
- [43:14]
Agent Conroy / Redwood Bureau Announcer
Warning SIGNAL INTERRUPTION detected
- [43:19]
Prime Video Announcer
this episode is brought to you by prime. What if you had one more chance with the one that got away?
- [43:25]
Redwood Bureau Operative / Team Member
Sam, you CAME HOME.
- [43:26]
Prime Video Announcer
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- [43:50]
Windows 11 / Microsoft Student Deal Announcer
so good so good.
- [43:52]
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- [44:16]
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- [44:47]
Agent Conroy / Redwood Bureau Announcer
Signal connection restored.
- [44:53]
Narrator - Survivor of the Incident
They gave me a choice. A man in a perfect suit sat across a table from me and explained that my participation was voluntary. And then he explained to me what would happen to Owen if I chose not to volunteer. And then he asked me to sign and I signed. That's how choices work here. I've done a few of these now. I haven't been here long, but long enough to know that something always happens. This room had five chairs and they were full. Me and four other people who'd probably signed the same kind of form for the same kind of reason. I don't think anyone here is an actual volunteer. We all have somebody on a screen somewhere. There was a woman with her hands flat on her knees, focusing hard on holding them still. There was a big guy, real big, sitting calmly with his arms crossed. I couldn't tell if he was brave or trying to pretend like he was. There was a younger woman still looking around the room like someone was going to come explain everything. And there was an old man with glasses who kept taking them off and cleaning them and putting them back on, over and over. On the table in front of each of us was a paper cup. Inside was something that looked like water with a little color to it, the faintest yellow, like a sports drink somebody had watered all the way down. A staff member read to us from a card. He told us the procedure was simple. He told us about the consent we'd already Signed. He told us there were known risks, but what they were had been conveniently left out. He said to drink when ready. Then he stepped back behind the glass with the others. The cup had a logo printed on it. Under the logo and little letters it said, Contents MAY vary. Nobody drank for a few seconds. Then the woman with the still hands picked hers up and drank it down in one go, like she wanted it over with. She'd probably felt like most of us, that waiting just made things worse. That got the rest of us moving. I drank mine. It didn't taste like anything. A little warm, maybe, that was all. Then we sat there for a while. Nothing happened long enough that the new girl started to relax. The older man cleaned his glasses again, folded his hands in his lap, looking almost peaceful. I started to let myself think this was going to be one of the nothing ones, that I'd sit here, maybe feel a little sick, and go back to my room, and that would be the whole thing. Behind the glass they were writing things down. They hadn't seen anything yet, but apparently there was something to write anyway. Then the big guy made a sound like surprise. He was looking down at his hands. The skin on his hands was splitting. It wasn't cut or bleeding. It was splitting, opening up like an expandable suitcase. And under it there was more skin, a darker, purplish color, pulled tight. It went up his arms while he watched it, this look on his face like he wasn't scared, he he was just pissed. It went up his forearms and past his elbows and kept going. He didn't scream once. He just sat there, coming apart layer by layer, getting worse by the minute, watching it happen to his own body. Then the older man's face started to change. It started like an allergy, a swelling even, all over his features, going a little puffy. The swelling pushed forward into his face, and his face started to get bigger and smoother at the same time. The lines went out of it, the wrinkles filled in and kept filling in until the skin was smooth as a balloon. And it wasn't the right color anymore either. It was going gray, a flat, even gray, like primer. His features were getting bigger. His eyes spread apart and got round and wide and too far up, and his nose flattened back into the smoothness until it was barely a bump, and his mouth stretched wide and simple across the front of it. The glasses slid right off the front of his face and dropped on the table. By the time it stopped, he didn't have a face anymore. He had what I can only describe As a cartoon head. A big, smooth gray head with giant round eyes and a wide, simple line of a mouth. Like a mascot, like something a company paints on the side of a building to make you feel good about giving them your money. Smooth and friendly and completely, horribly wrong. Sitting on top of a normal man's body in a normal man's clothes. And he was trying to talk. The mouth was moving, this big, wide cartoon mouth that was nothing but black inside, like it had no depth. What came out was these odd high pitched squeaking sounds, like a funny impression of an alien. The giant round eyes were wet, looking around the room, looking at me. The movement reminded me of an animatronic. He was still in there, behind those big stupid cartoon eyes. And he was trying to say something and he couldn't. The new girl had started crying. I looked over and. And her face was completely calm, no expression at all, but there were tears running down it in straight, even lines, but they weren't the right color. They had a faint shine to them, a glow almost. The woman with the still hands didn't change at all. She sat there through the whole thing with her hands flat on her knees. And nothing happened to her. I still don't know if she got lucky or if something happened to her that we just couldn't see. I felt something happening to me about then. A warmth across the top of my head, then my shoulders, then the back of my neck. It wasn't pain, it wasn't anything bad. It felt good, honestly. Like sitting in a patch of sun on a cold day. A nice even warmth soaking in. And my hair started to grow. I could feel it, this slow, steady push all over my scalp. And I watched it come down past my eyes, my hair getting longer by the second, an inch a minute maybe. My beard was filling in. I could feel it coming in thick on my jaw and my neck. And it kept going past stubble, past short, into a full beard that I watched grow down toward my chest. And that was it. That was the whole thing it did to me. The warmth faded and the hair stopped growing. I sat very still and waited for it to be something else. For the part where the nice warm feeling turned into what the big guy had or what the old man had. It didn't. It was just hair. I had long hair and a full beard and I was fine. When it was over, they came in and did the after part, the questionnaire. Somebody checked my eyes and my blood pressure and asked me to rate how I was feeling on a scale of 1 to 10. I said 6 and he checked a box. The big guy was in the corner with two people in gear working on him. He was still alive, but I didn't know how long that would last. The old man was sitting very still with his hands on his lap and those big cartoon eyes pointed at the ground. I didn't know what they were going to do with him. I didn't ask. You learn not to ask questions around here. There was a mirror in the corridor on the way back. I stopped in front of it and looked at myself. The long hair, the beard. I hadn't slept right in weeks. I looked like a post apocalyptic survivor. I kept walking. The video was waiting in my room, the way a new one always is when you do volunteer work. Owen holding a newspaper with a date on it and then an update from him on what he's been doing. How the school is with the other kids whose dads still have work to finish. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched it and then watched it again. And I watched it until a few minutes of sleep clawed the images from my eyes.
- [55:13]
Cipher - Story Narrator / Analyst
I told you we'd come back to the question. You heard what came out of that truck. You heard what it did to the crew sealed in with it. And what it did to a woman named Diana, who was a mother and a wife while her husband stood close enough to touch her and could do nothing. I'm not going to downplay any of that. It was horror, plain and simple. It killed everyone it could reach and it took its time doing it. But here's the thing about that creature. It didn't choose anything. It was just doing the thing it was built to do. The same way a fire doesn't think about destroying a house. It killed the crew because. Because they were in a box with killed Diana and her sister because they were there. It would have done the exact same thing to anyone. Now think about why it was there. The Bureau had it. They could have destroyed it anytime they wanted. Instead, they chose to play games with it, planned on releasing it, using it to harm others. Think about the other account. Think about the room with the paper cups. Every single thing that happened in that room was chosen in advance by people who knew that compound was capable of terrible things and wanted to force other people to test it out. They printed their logo on the side of those cups with a little joke under it. Rode up the conclusion. Consent forms, left out any of the parts that mattered and asked the victims to rate their experience from 1 to 10 afterwards. That's not instinct. That's not hunger. That's a Tuesday. That's people going to work in the morning and doing this on purpose and going home at night and doing it again the next day. That is evil. So which one is the real monster? That man is still in there, still being forced to undergo trials, still watching a video of his son until he falls asleep because it's the only thing they've left him. Somewhere in their files is a data point fit for continued use. They're not done with it. They've got more rooms and more cups and a list of names long enough that they'll never run short of volunteers. They've got a nice word for every evil thing they do. This is Cypher. Stay alert. Stay alive.
- [58:03]
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