Kent Kelly - The Girl Who Bled Forever

AM: (A sigh may demonstrate acquiescence.)

CR: Now that line, it exists. It has weight, substance in the primal sub-space continuum. When space-time curves, specifically I mean around one of two interconnected black holes, that line gets curved as well. Okay?

(Silence.)

CR: (Continuing, slowly.) Okay. Now think about that line falling into the first of the two black holes. Before it collapses entirely, it becomes completely and then infinitely curved. It becomes in-spiral, an endless circle.

AM: No.

CR: Yes. Cause and effect then get curved along their connecting line in that very moment, and for a nanosecond they are just two points sharing space on the same circle.

AM: That isn’t possible.

CR: So limited we are. So human . Now what if that circle gets annihilated by the first black hole it got sucked into, reconstructed according to sub-space tachyon “memory,” and spat out in reverse through the second un -black hole, into the other dimension beyond the second hole’s interior? The line is flipped, and cause is now effect, and vice versa.

AM: I can’t…

CR: Think , Anna. When an anomaly is used incorrectly, by a stupid race like human beings, cause and effect are reversed and a paradox is created. Instead of a raindrop making a splash, a splash makes a raindrop. Those two black holes, existing in two different sets of dimensions, are still connected through quantum entanglement. The echo of their shared line is still there between the points, but it’s in two places at once, flipped and fraying, decaying.

AM: You mean… you’re somehow implying there’s also smart use, instead of human use, of anomalies. By whom? Extra-terrestrial intelligences?

CR: Extra-dimensional. Not aliens, I don’t think it’s possible to break the speed of light. No. But through connections? And travelers from echoes of our own planet, but out of a different dimensional matrix? From a different anti-universal construct, a null -construct.

AM: Alan… I…

CR: Think about this. So many other races must be out there, and the one race who created us. The implementers of everything. I haven’t ever told anyone this. I’m telling you, right now. Anna, everything that ever is, was and will ever be is connected. Wormholes. Creatures die when they go through, yes, but creatures who understand what they’re doing get reconstructed negatively on the other side. Reincarnation of a sort, under the receiving atomic manifold’s “new” laws. Un-life, null life. When one young species, like we fools the hairless apes, gets stupid and tries to reverse something and threatens the entire continuum, everyone more advanced goes to war with them.

AM: What does all of this psychobabble have to do with the [redacted] aberration in the cornfield?

CR: Everything. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t know this. Before I ever tried, someone else smarter who first figured out what might be going on — someone high in Command, I’m almost certain — tried to prevent Josie from dying every twenty-four hours.

AM: How?

CR: Who the fuck knows? Maybe they entered the snicker-snack her reflections crawl out of, trying to find the original Josie, to put her out of her misery, her infinite deaths in agony. They realized that there was already an original causal violation, a cause-effect flip outside of our three dimensions, because after Josie died on the tape, she walked to the secret station in real life. Off the highway where her crazy and homicidal mother kicked her out of the car, and in the flesh. Asking for me by name. Can we talk about that yet?

AM: What? I haven’t heard anything about this.

CR: And that guy, whoever first figured it all out? Anna, he was the operator of the camera .

A DEEP VOICE: Captain, it’s time to sleep.

CR: You didn’t tell her the rest?

AM: What do you mean, Josie came and asked for you? As in, not a reflection? The real Josie was dead . Captain!

(Abrupt end of session.)

(The text scroll upon the trainees’ screen shall now continue. However, the following was originally transcription only, no video, no audio, recovered from an archaic 1980s dot matrix printer virtually ascertained to have belonged to [deleted])

…

[Deleted]

…

(“Interro” is believed to refer to Anna, “Subj” to Captain Ramsey.)

INTERRO: We don’t have much time. Tell me now about Lieutenant Chastain.

SUBJ: Joyce?

INTERRO: Having reviewed the black [file?], I prefer Chastain.

SUBJ: She was the only volunteer to my knowledge who was ever assigned to the snicker-snack.

INTERRO: Why was she assigned?

SUBJ: Thinking about it now, as opposed to then? To control me? Spy on me? Get inside my head? Another something I was hoping you could answer.

INTERRO: I cannot. But I can tell you, I’m fairly certain, that she requested the assignment because of you.

SUBJ: Me?

INTERRO: I know she read your paper on hypothetical telemetries in the—

SUBJ: I was regarded as something of a prodigy, back then. That was long before my time in the Air Force.

INTERRO: And after your legal name change, you just fell into the Air Force accidentally? You’ve kept things from me.

SUBJ: Maybe. To protect you.

INTERRO: Surely you don’t think the Air Force was just eager to procure some random suicidal recruit out of MIT based on the contents of three research papers? Some orphaned teenager off the Menominee Indian Reservation who immediately failed all his physicals… and then someone very high came in, digging out their deep NORAD connections, to promote him directly to brevet Captain in the name of satellite telemetry research for Space Command?

SUBJ: Are we here to discuss my classified career?

INTERRO: Classified. Really, now. After everything? I was simply establishing that I know who and where you—

SUBJ: Well, I think you have fucking established that fairly well. Anna.

INTERRO: I apologize. I’m angry. I’ve been lied to too many times. I’ll try to not to touch on personal matters prior to your assignment to the station. Can we continue?

(Silence.)

INTERRO: I’m going to try to get you out of here. I swear it.

SUBJ: It’s far too late for that, love. Just ask me. Ask me anything.

(The time indices appear to indicate the elapse of several silent minutes.)

INTERRO: Do you think Joyce was an acceptable replacement for the Corporal on instrument tracking?

SUBJ: By no means. She was the best. Undoubtedly. Which is why I moved her to screening as quickly as possible.

INTERRO: What? You assigned her to watching Josie coming out of the anomaly every morning? I thought that was always you. The files have done nothing to indicate—

SUBJ: The files probably don’t indicate a lot of things. I put her on screening, one night out of three, to monitor the emergence of the reflections and the dismemberment, but with no on/off crawler camera tests involved. Then after she started acting strangely, after I told her I was going to try to save Josie, I moved her back over to instruments.

INTERRO: Is that why on the morning of February 7, she—

(Many pages of the transcript are missing.)

(A full CIA-watermarked video file, with a great deal of digital recording information framed around the restrained Subject, who is masked and blinded but appearing otherwise unharmed. We continue in midstream, during a much later session after Captain’s suicide attempt and in the military/experimental section beneath the Supermax ADX facility in Florence, Colorado.)