Kent Kelly - The Girl Who Bled Forever

(Anna Morgenstern, deceased, is of course no longer involved in the interrogations.)

[ Sub-Archon Sakai:I hereby lodge a respectful disagreement with the format of the record below Archonate clearance level Onyx. Indoctrinators, at least above Sapphire, deserve to know what transpired that led to her [deleted]]

UNKNOWN MALE INTERROGATOR [MI]: — stand what you’re saying, Captain. How did she arrive at the station?

CAPTAIN RAMSEY [CR]: Exactly?

MI: Yes, exactly.

CR: Long after midnight that night, precisely three hours before the next scheduled reflection appearance, Josie Presper herself appeared on the cameras.

MI: What exactly do you mean?

CR: I mean I was sitting there watching the nothing on the screens, watching the crows wheel on the winds over the meadow, when a little girl in a plaid nightdress limped into the frame. She was barefoot and freezing. Her hair spun in front of her face like a black and tangling cloud. She was shivering, she was wearing one slipper. She was holding a teddy bear. I remember that very clearly.

MI: So she wandered past security, through seven concentric rings of barbed wire and electrical fencing, and onto ground zero of the militarized zone.

CR: Yes. She faded in from the highway.

MI: Faded. Who was she?

CR: I told you. She was Josie Presper.

MI: Not credible. Josie died on [redacted], year [redacted]. This incident occurred on… (shuffling of papers)…

[Video deleted, transcript retained in Onyx archives. Need to know basis only.]

(Transcript only.)

CR: Yes. On that night of observation, two days after Joyce went… when she became unfit for duty.

MI: I am telling you once again and for the last time, that is not possible.

CR: In an uncorrupted and unified Prime time-stream, it’s certainly not. Josie was already dead. But you must admit, if the reflections are real, and they are, that stranger things can and did happen. She walked into frame. I saw her out there, looking up at where she was going to crawl out of, a few hours later.

MI: And so, three other people at least must have seen her as well.

CR: Yes. And then some, as the alarms went off. It was getting chaotic in the control room.

MI: How did she walk from the highway to the site, past all of the machine gun towers? Through a minefield? That section of highway is closed to all citizen traffic, and there are no indications that anyone official sighted—

CR: She didn’t walk. I said she faded.

MI: Meaning?

CR: Meaning she walked in a line straight from the gravel side of the road where her bat-shit crazy mother abandoned her and drove off, all the way to the place where she knew that she had died. She was waiting for herself, you see. I think, to try to make herself whole again.

MI: You’re testing my patience, Captain.

CR: I don’t mean to. I’m saying she walked straight there, but she wasn’t always there.

MI: She… faded.

CR: Yes. Exactly. She was sometimes translucent, non-corporeal, like the reflections. To the point where she was even less there than a reflection, wouldn’t show up on the seismic sensors or anything else. Might not even be visible to the naked eye.

MI: She drifted like a ghost from the highway to the place she had already died, but she was alive, and she had never before been there.

CR: And she had also simultaneously been there, when she had died already. Yes.

MI: When did the intruding subject who you assumed to be Josie Presper appear on camera?

CR: Exactly three hours before the reflection, as I told you.

MI: And by some miracle she wasn’t shot when she… appeared?

CR: I don’t think anyone understood what they were seeing. But I began to. I was the first.

MI: Is that why you rose in the confusion, went to the hallway on threat of being fired upon, hit the emergency elevator release and simultaneously keyed the panel that opened the surface airlock?

CR: Yes.

MI: What about the background radiation, however weak it might have been by that time?

CR: That was not a foremost consideration. I was in the moment.

MI: I might even understand that. What happened next?

CR: I don’t exactly know. Captain Chou rushed through the tapestry and butted his rifle into my skull and I woke up in the infirmary a little under three hours later. I woke staring at one of the digital readings from the atomic clock. Counting the minutes.

MI: And the girl claiming to be Josie Presper had by that time already been taken into the station?

CR: I was told she had asked for me by name. And she was strapped to another gurney, with the teddy bear no less. And she was being questioned by your own trustworthy colleagues, I believe. Men in black suits, regardless. Yes.

MI: A seven year old frostbitten girl was taken into one of the most secret facilities in the nation, more secret in actual purpose than Groom, for improvisational questioning.

CR: Well, keep in mind she had managed to come within ten yards of the crawler cameras and was in the middle of a decisive action, which caused me to open the airlock. I acted without thinking because she did that.

MI: What was this action? What was she doing?

CR: She was dangling her teddy bear, lifting one hand up, and trying to climb into the hole in the sky.

[ For the Instructor:For reasons which shall become readily apparent by the end of this file, this final recording of Captain Ramsey speaking intimately with Anna Morgenstern appears out of chronological sequence. Be ready to immediately obey the ranking Commandant if any viewing trainees exhibit violent behavior as a result of hearing and seeing the Captain’s final outburst.]

(Audio only. Scroll.)

ANNA MORGENSTERN [AM]: So because she would only speak to you, you were allowed to question her in the infirmary.

CAPTAIN RAMSEY [CR}: For awhile, yes. By then I was under heavy guard.

AM: Can I ask you something personal?

CR: Of course.

AM: What was she like?

CR: (Through tears.)… She seemed a lot like you. Smart, incisive. Her teddy bear was her guardian, protecting her from her mother’s beatings when her brother could not. His name, the bear, was Mister Binkles. She was so very sweet. Very afraid and very bold. Certain she wanted to understand me, be like me. She was beautiful.

AM: The others, I know, got nothing while you were unconscious. What did you ask her to cause her to open up?

CR: I asked her if she had ever dreamed that she had died.

AM: And?

CR: She nodded and said her first word to me, which was “Always.”

AM: And then?

CR: I remember it word by word. She said, the dream was always the same. She said, “It made me scream. I was in the back of the car. Mommy was shouting for me to get out of her head, to stop singing her the future that kept coming true, that she couldn’t take it anymore. That I was driving her insane, and that was the reason why she beated me. When I couldn’t stop screaming, and Joey unbuckled and tried to hold me down, to cover me in the back seat and take her hits on his back and head for me? While mommy was pulling over, I bit him on the face. Didn’t mean to. Really sorry. I love Joey almost as much as Binkles, he’s my big. But Joey is gone now. And that’s when mommy pulled over and dragged me out of the car and drove off.” I replay that conversation every night in memory.

AM: What did she… oh, fuck it.

CR: Ask me a real question, Anna. Your question.

AM: Did you ask her if she really died every night, instead of only dreaming it?