[Report Details]
Time: "Present tense"
Year: 2025It had been a rough week for Katy King. On Monday she’d lost eight hours to the mysterious stranger and had to work the next day without having gone home at all or having taken a shower. Tuesday seemed intent on harassing her, making a bad thing significantly worse. Sleep deprived and half-delirious, she was confused when Alex showed up earlier-than-usual, badgering her with questions about the circles under her eyes and other things she simply could not answer without sounding looney or taking him deep into her confidence. It seemed everybody that came in on Tuesday had a question she wasn’t equipped to answer. She passed much of the day staring morosely out the tinted glass windows She drove home that night in a stupor, muttering “Fuck” under her breath and slapping the edge of the steering wheel of her old jalopy in irritation.
On Tuesday night, she got no sleep. When she closed her eyes, she kept hearing the sound of gunshots that she couldn’t quite place. She tossed and turned, but the restlessness would not abate. She got up and made an herbal tea for sleeplessness. This made her drowsy, but it did not have the intended effect. Her body got too heavy to leave the bed, but still the sounds and images played back into the blackness of her mind. She began to see strange people she didn’t recognize hovering over her and murmuring words that she could not make out or understand. It was almost like when she closed her eyes in her bed a different world began to phase into existence to replace it. She was unnerved by this and kept her eyes open for many hours, watching the ceiling. She still heard the voices.
Ultimately she got nothing more than an hour or so spotted by a weird hallucination that was almost a dream – one brief superficial trance that seemed to end as soon as it began, sucking an hour into the void which it blinked off into. Wednesday began like a nosebleed, tired and dizzy. By the time she’d arrived at Sept. Umbra Alex had already opened the store by himself. He hadn’t even bothered to call her and ask where she was; somehow his chipper attitude annoyed her even more than her own failure, which annoyed her greatly by itself.
The worst part of Wednesday niggled at her furiously throughout her shift. It had started as a phone call that she’d absently answered on her drive home Tuesday night, while she was lost in thought, and picked up the call without thinking twice.
“Hello, Katy?”
“Yes.”
“I’m just calling to confirm your appointment with Dr. Sanders tomorrow evening? Seven-thirty?”
“Uhm,” she thought about this for a moment. Because her court-mandated appointment with her psychiatrist/psychologist typically happened once every couple of months, she often forgot about them long before getting this call. It generally served as the only reminder that such appointments did in fact exist. Generally, also, she could not even remember that she’d set up the date of the appointment of her own volition, when that date was, or why she’d chosen it. However, there was not a lot she could say in this situation without seeming like an invalid or a crazy person, so she replied the only way a sane person could:
“yeah, right, I’ll be there.”
“Sounds great!” the annoyingly chipper secretary tweeted. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Ms. King.” Click.
Yeah. Sure. Great…
So tomorrow had come, albeit with little respite, and Wednesday became dusky, and seven-thirty encroached with a familiar dread, putting her in a terrible mood her whole shift, as if things weren’t gloomy and irritating enough already.
Her and Alex locked up the store at seven pm, and she waved him off irately without so much as a “have a good evening”. He skipped carefree down the sidewalk towards his car regardless, and she turned her back and walked in the opposite direction with her sweater’s sleeve pulled up over her mouth, a nervous habit she used to conceal biting her lip.
Not by accident, the office building where her court-appointed psychologist/psychiatrist practiced was within walking distance of Sept Umbra. If you left the double doors of the bookstore and turned left, and begun approaching the traffic light at the end of the block, before you reached the next intersection you would see a fairly tall office building blocking your view of the horizon. It had always struck Katy as an odd coincidence that her court-appointed mental-health practitioner was so close to her work, but she’d told herself that it might have been fate. After all, had she not been sentenced by the state to periodically see this woman, she never would have had the sporadic impulse that led to her job interview with old man Zahini.
Nothing about Dr. Sander’s private practice was specifically ostentatious, nor did it scream ‘court-mandated’ to the unwary. The office building where she worked had a posted a muscular Hispanic security guard who wore a fancy dress-suit and greeted everybody who entered, also doubling to keep out undesirables, Katy assumed. This bulky man had a shyness which peeked through his bouncer persona, mainly Katy could tell this by his eyes. He always nodded slightly to her in recognition, and despite herself she returned the reassuring smile. But it did little to warm the cold feeling she had today, even though she was unsure where this coiled ball of dread came from, and when it had been passed into the seat of her belly.
She hit the “3” button on the elevator and it turned bright yellow/orange briefly. She didn’t have to wait long for her carriage to descend and the steely gates of the elevator to open for her.
The Third floor reeked of high society and Katy had never been able to figure out who else precisely worked here other than Dr. Sanders. It was a posh building with a fancy waiting room with expensive tables covered in glossy magazines about subjects like traveling and buying Rolex. She checked in early with the sole receptionist, whose desk was several feet longer than the papers and computer it was being used for.
Behind the receptionist’s counter there was a glass window dividing the hallway from a room with a long table and a flat screen monitor that had been mounted on the back wall. It was clearly used for meetings, but what use a sole psychologist could have for meeting with other practitioners, Katy had never been able to puzzle out. She often thought about it in a muddle of self-contained anxiety as she awaited her name to be called. She’d be made to wait her turn, they never received her early. She also had yet to see another patient waiting in this room, by some miracle of circumstance. Perhaps Dr Sanders arranged to be available for Katy only at odd times, perhaps because the entire practice felt embarrassed to host a court-mandated patient.
“Ms. King?” The secretary was addressing her. Katy pricked her head up from her musing and lifted her mouth from her sweater sleeve hesitantly. She was ready to get the appointment over with.
“Would you like a cup of water?” The woman asked her kindly. Katy found herself glancing at her watch. Five minutes too early, she remembered with quiet irritation. But she felt guilty about her annoyance at the receptionist’s kind gesture. She didn’t really want water, but partly her guilt made her feel inclined to accept.
“Sure,” Katy accepted, stumbling to sound lackadaisical.
She didn’t want to show the woman her nervousness. She got up and received the offering of the cup. Having nothing better to do, she drunk from it daintily until Dr. Sanders appeared in the hallway with a genuine grin plastered on her spotless, wrinkle-free face.
“Hi there Katy,” Dr. Sanders greeted her, warmly, looking up from her clipboard and clicking her pen. Katy looked up from the cup which was basically finished by now, and felt a mixture of enduring dread and relief.
Dr. Sanders had red lipstick which was somehow not obsequious, but served to subtly highlight her frothy red curls. They framed her face could turn any southern belle green with envy, and green was the dark leafy color of this woman’s eyes; it complemented her hair neatly. Yet the white lab coat and spectacles on her nose made it hard to discount Dr. Sanders as a woman of authority.
Katy got up slowly from the posh white leather couch and the secretary held out her hand to accept the nearly empty water cup, as if she was used to the routine somehow, but if that was strange Katy didn’t notice. She handed it over without a second thought, her legs slogging automatically to follow Dr. Sanders down the featureless and sparkling clean hallway towards her office. She felt fuzzy, sleepless, delirious…practically zombified.
Dr. Sanders had an interesting approach to meeting patients in her office, or at least she did with Katy. Instead of sitting behind a big desk like many other doctors did, she sat with her legs crossed facing Katy, the clipboard poised on her lap. Her desk was somewhere off to the side, as if irrelevant to their encounter. Katy sat on the other couch, across from Dr. Sanders. She slouched into its plush pillows and melted into her oversized sweater. Dr. Sanders was clicking her pen with an impenetrable and slight smile which may been genuine or calculating. Maybe both.
“Katy, you seem a little bit distant today. Is something bothering you?”
Katy shrugged obtusely.
“It looks like you haven’t been getting a lot of sleep,” Dr. Sanders pointed out gently. She began scrawling something on the notepad, an action that was completed with deft swiftness.
“I guess so, yeah.”
“Is there a reason for that?” Dr. Sanders addressed Katy with genuine interest, hunched over her clipboard, as if pulling her weight into the question.
“Uhm. I don’t know.”
Dr. Sanders made a sort of frown and clicked her pen again. She moved her body back, pressing it into the couch as she scribbled more notes onto her clipboard so that she was now positioned from a place of greater distance from Katy. She let a moment or two pass in pregnant silence before she spoke.
“Katy, part of the reason we’ve been able to put these meetings on a longer period of hiatus is because you committed to being honest with me when we spoke. I don’t think you’re being honest with me right now. It’s my job to help you, and that means if I think you’re a danger to yourself or others I’m going to have to report that to somebody. If you’re not honest with me, I can only go by what I see. And from what I see, you’re not doing very well, are you?”
Katy’s anxiety was compounded now by the looming implications of those words, the implied threat. But by far the most difficult part of talking to Dr. Sanders was the genuine emotion that she conveyed. Her sincerity, for all its clarity, was a little intimidating, almost like this woman could see straight through her. Even when she wasn’t looking at Katy, Katy felt her eyes upon her still, boring into her, pulling out the content of her thoughts.
“Okay. Well, I haven’t been sleeping too great lately. That’s all.”
“Hmm. Insomnia. Okay…” nodded Dr. Sanders, letting the sentence trail out expectantly, presumably leading her patient to continue talking.
“I’ve been having, well – my thoughts have been looping, running in circles, and I can’t make it stop…” said Katy, deciding right now that she better leave the appearance of Monday’s stranger out of the story.
“Looping? What have they been looping on?”
“Uhm. I uh, I don’t know. All kinds of things,” squirmed Katy, looking from side to side. But her head was starting to feel even more fuzzy, and she lost track of what she had been talking about. The room lost its focus, becoming blurrier. She shook it back into finer lines, knowing the eagle eyes across from her were sure to have noticed.
“I see.” Dr. Sanders clicked her pen, and tapped its nose against the clipboard for a few beats. “Katy, I think I know what’s going on. Tell me if I’m wrong. You’re hearing things again, aren’t you? Seeing visions?”
“No, no, it’s not exactly like that,” Katy shook her head, but it was really feeling odd now, light and clear kind of. It was difficult for her to smear her words in a clever way, it was difficult for her to think or speak past her most immediate thoughts, like some kind of liquor had been applied to the filter which allowed higher primates to contrive lies and prevent the truth from seeping out through the mind’s sieve.
“Then what is it like?”
“It’s…I’m seeing things that happened…I think they’re memories, things I did…people…it’s a hospital, I guess the one they took me to after the accident. But I can’t stop seeing dead bodies either, blood…I can’t stop hearing them telling me that I killed people, a lot of people, and then I can see myself doing it, but it’s like I’m not myself, it’s like I’m watching myself…from somewhere else…doing terrible things…very bad things” Katy shook herself. She’d been rocking back and forth, to the left and right while she’d spoken, as if entrained, entranced.
But she was too sleep deprived and confused to bring her thoughts into clarity. It was drowning in a pool of hazy word soup, with images and pictures pushing her underwater where they were all-present. The only way to stop the water from lapping up and choking her was to surrender to it and float in the pool, to stop trying so hard to swim through it. It took so much effort to doggie paddle. But she didn’t want to surrender. Something was telling her she had to stay afloat above the rapids. Katy, shaking her head, denying the impulse - some animal thing in her trying to alert her to the potential danger of playing dead. But it was hard with so much flooding her head, all of it clamoring to the surface and pushing her deep, deep under where she could not breathe or surface. And the more she struggled, the more she sensed, from the tension in the air of the room, that Dr. Sanders could see every bit of her struggle.
“Kathryn, are you there?”
It was all too much to keep track off. Kathryn, her name, was all should could make out in the jumble of senses and thoughts and memories. So she reached for it, the voice telling her name, and surrendered, and surfaced. It was so nice, not to struggle anymore.
“…yes.” Kathryn answered, finally, in a daze.
“Are you o-kay?” asked Dr. Sanders, holding up her fingers in a gesture in which her index finger touched her thumb. It was the OK symbol. Kathryn nodded.
“Can you tell me why you’re not sleeping?”
“Because I’m beginning to remember things,” said Kathryn in a monotone, robotically. “I’m starting to remember everything. The people I killed, the doctors, the strange place where they made me forget it all.”
“Kathryn, do you know what happened? Why you’re starting to remember these things now?” Dr. Sanders asked sweetly, as if speaking to a child. Without looking down at all, she was furiously scrawling on her notepad. It was a strange juxtaposition from the comfort of her lulling voice.
“I don’t know why. I don’t know, but it won’t stop. I can see their faces, dead faces. They’re just kids like me. I’m holding the guns. I don’t know why I’m holding them but I am,” says Kathryn. She had begun shaking, but her voice seemed divorced from the shaking and sickness that her body grappled with.
“Kathryn,” Dr. Sanders got up from the couch, slowly approaching Kathryn. She knelt on her knees, her black tight stockings rubbing against the carpeting, within arm’s distance from Kathryn, Dr. Sanders now studied her very closely.
If we were to guess, it seems likely to us that Dr. Sanders was examining Kathryn’s pupils to see whether or not they were focusing on anything. She also seemed to be gauging whether Katy had responded to hearing her name. No, and also no.
Katy shook, huddled into her sweater on the couch, staring somewhere distant. It was like she hadn’t even noticed that Dr. Sanders had moved. Dr. Sanders had left her notepad back on the couch, so she couldn’t scribble this part down. But she needed to get her back to reality.
“Kathryn. Katy. Katy. Katy.” Dr. Sanders intoned. Her patient had reached a stage of “acute dissociation” – as those in her profession referred to it. Her patient was completely regressed and non-responsive.
She shook her patient gently by the shoulders, saying, “Kathryn,” sternly, and snapping her fingers a few times in front of Katy’s face. The girl’s pupils seemed to focus slightly, barely gaining her attention. She shook uncontrollably. It almost resembled a seizure, but it was only the peripheral nervous system that was affected by it. Katy’s eyes still stared straight ahead.
“Can you hear me, Kathryn?”
Kathryn nodded meekly, coming slightly back into awareness from the deep. She couldn’t meet Dr. Sander’s eyes. She was looking down and she felt completely empty and devoid of sentience. She couldn’t understand why she felt torn between wanting to cry and wanting to throw up, because she had no idea what emotions she was feeling right then. She could no longer remember why she was in this office, or what she did for a living, or that this was Wednesday evening in a posh area of Los Angeles. Her mind had nothing in it but a blank emptiness blaring out like static noise and making everything else fade into noise with it.
Dr. Sanders was pushing something into Katy’s shaking hands. It was a cup. It looked like it had water in it. She took it and held it, trying to keep her hands steady enough to prevent the cup from spilling.
“Drink, Kathryn.”
Kathryn drank.
“Kathryn, I’m going to need you to stay here for just a minute okay? I’ll be right back.”
Something about this terrified Katy, even in her strange and frightened state of confusion.
“Why? Where are you going?” She asked Dr. Sanders, her eyes wide as saucers, like a little kid who didn’t want her mom to leave her in Bed, Bath & Beyond all alone.
Dr. Sanders had reacquired her clipboard and held it under her arm. She knelt down again in front of Katy so that they were at eye level. She met her patient’s gaze steadily and spoke at her with a very commanding cadence and rhythm in her steady voice, holding a finger up in front of her face, which she allowed Katy’s gaze to focus on.
“Kathryn, I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be right back. And you’re going to sit here and wait for me to get back, aren’t you?”
Dr. Sanders lowered her finger and waited. Kathryn her assent nodded slowly after a moment or two had gone by.
“Thank you Katy. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to help you. Drink your water, please. It’ll make you feel better.” She smiled at Katy, who sat staring straight ahead and waiting just like she’d been asked. She would have been motionless except for the tremor causing her to shake uncontrollably all over. The tremor lessened as she drank for the cup. It seemed to steady her body, which didn’t want to respond to commands anymore. It was like she wasn’t in control of her body right now. Emma Sanders gripped her patient’s shoulder tightly and gave her one more reassuring gentle grin.
Fuck, Emma Sanders thought, behind her plastered smile. She got up, scribbled something in her notebook, left her office, and locked it behind her.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
************** When Agent Emma Sanders left the containment room, she entered the kitchen boardroom where a few of her colleagues were speaking in hushed voices to one another. They stopped when they’d noticed she’d entered.
“Where is EL?” she asked them. There was no reason to conceal her voice here. No sound could ever penetrate the walls between rooms.
One of clean-shaven men shrugged. “Not here. And pray your cute little head he doesn’t come around anytime soon.” The voice belonged to a blondie with a buzz-cut and a handsome, chiseled, all-American face. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties, and unruffled as if horrors weren’t a part of his daily existence – or at least not a part that affected him deeply. He, too, wore a white lab coat and was studying his tablet with a furrowed brow.
“These scans are all over the place, Emma. There isn’t a single stasis variable here that hasn’t crossed too far out-of-bounds to be tracked. Cognition coefficients on the board aren’t even being charted or standardized anymore, our system doesn’t know what to do with them. It’s gone haywire. This is beyond fucked.”
Emma paced back and forth with her hand over her eyelids, rubbing her sockets as if trying to coax the light of an idea from her brain.
“We’re going to have to bring her back here and do everything over again…” continued the blonde man, scratching his stubble and putting his tablet on the table.
What was being currently displayed on the tablet’s surface was a difficult thing to comprehend, even if you understood the form of science and code these programmers practiced. Many intersecting lines seemed to tangle on it, like a badly conceived knot. The key to the charts, which usually held percentage values between zero and one-hundred had become strange symbols that obviously weren’t supposed to appear in the function under any circumstances.
“You don’t think EL is going to blame us, do you?” Asked another smaller voice from the table. His neck reached above the table only slightly. A young boy. He had ruffled brown hair, slicked up into a spiky hairdo. This particular child was a prodigy, and much older then he looked. In Facility 757, humans worked alongside… ‘others’ ….
“He’s going to want to know the fucking story, that much I can say for sure,” Emma replied.
She set her clipboard on the table. Now that they were out of the patient’s room, its true nature as an electronic implement was revealed. . The pen was real, but it didn’t have ink. Rather, it arranged the particles on the clipboard with a magnet, and the words that were written on the notepad were sent automatically to the numerous displays in the monitoring room, and copied to all assigned researcher’s database for archive retrieval at any time.
The last thing she’d written on the clipboard with her magnetic pen before leaving the office with Katy was
MEETING. NOW. Aside from El who occupied the role of head programmer on the team, Dr. Sanders was the second-highest in the chain of command as the lead psychologist/psychiatrist or 'Doctor'. Her team obeyed immediately.
This meant the monitoring room itself would be devoid of warm bodies for a short while, but this was too important, and besides – the kitchen boardroom doubled as a pseudo-monitoring room. There was an output which displayed the view of Katy’s simulation from a third-person perspective, as well as tablets which allowed for remote monitoring, like the one being looked at by the young blonde-haired man and the little boy.
“Yep, her cognitive scheme is in a state of complete fragmentation. I don’t think we can wait for direction on this. It could literally be dangerous for everyone, if somehow she begins bending or something…” remarked the little boy quietly, after glancing at the tablet.
All at once, the three of them looked up at the wall-mounted monitor which displayed a view of Katy. Katy hadn’t moved at all. She’d dropped the cup that Dr. Sanders gave her, but it looked like she’d drunk its contents first. It had been mixed with a muscle relaxant that made the tremors and shaking stop. But now Katy was just staring and completely motionless, which was somehow harder to watch.
“Matthew, feed diazepam in her IV drip. Enough to knock her out, please.” Blondie, the one named Matthew, nodded. He sauntered silently over to the supply cabinet at the edge of the room and began rummaging through it.
“Irk, could you trace the available memory process in the monitoring room and see exactly what she’s capable of accessing right now? And please send me the data as promptly as you find out.”
The little boy nodded. He propped himself into the air using the armrests on his seat and hopped onto his feet, starting toward the monitoring room.
Despite his appearance, the little boy practiced technical wizardry, with some kind of psychic affinity for the computer programs utilized in Facility 757. The child wore a black cape which trailed behind him. It was an odd sight for the un-initiated human, or even an initiated one from time-to-time. But not right now. Way too much other crap was on the table.
Matthew pulled sterile supplies out of the closet, arraying them haphazardly on a silver tray with wheels to cart it around. He spoke to Emma as he worked, grabbing everything he would need to sedate their dissociated subject.
“Emma, think for a minute. Has something out-of-the-ordinary happened to the girl lately? Some kind of unanticipated stimulus that could have triggered the fragmentation we’re seeing here?”
He began musing, slightly more frenetic than usual:
“Obviously something entered under the radar, and it’s had time to remain in her cognition without reconditioning. That must have meant we didn’t catch the source of the cue and remove the root before it broke down our partitioning.”
Emma’s head propped to the side as she thought. At first she was shaking her head, but then something stopped her stone cold in her tracks.
Celestial Defalcousse. Ennart Ta’mar. Aloud, for herself mostly, she said: “it’s them”.
“What? Who?”
But she felt there was no time to explain this now. The situation was urgent. “
Shit.” Emma hissed.
“Matt, I need to report this.
Now. The rogues are going to fuck it up permanently. For all of us.”
“No.” Matt said calmly, shaking his head. He had the cart in tow and was prepping his latex gloves, snapping them on his hands as he reasoned with her.
“You can’t go, Emma. Not till she’s stable. You’re the only one that can get her back to baseline. I mean we can do what we can on our end, but you’re the only one who knows the access codes...you’re the only one that she’s been conditioned to respond to….” His voice trailed off. Then he raised an eyebrow at Emma. “I mean, aside from El. Technically, I suppose we could call him…”
“NO. I mean - I know. Yes. I need to stay right now. We need to stabilize her. The report can wait.” Emma begun pacing again, her glorious red hair acquiring a serious tone in the florescent white light. “This is going to be a difficult night for us.”
“I made coffee,” Matthew said with ironic amusement. “Help yourself.”
******************