Kent Kelly - The Girl Who Bled Forever

CR: After that first year, I decided I was not a scientific observer for the Air Force Command or anyone else. I was going to try to save Josie from her eternal torture.

AM: I see. And then… the Lieutenant, I mean, not Pete… (She trails off.)

CR: Right. Lieutenant Joyce Chastain, until then my best friend. I confided in her the next night when we got a few seconds alone, during shift change. She decided, I didn’t know it right then, that she was going to be a good little obedient soldier trapped with me in our little cage. That she was going to betray me and stop me from saving Josie.

AM: Which led to the first… firearms incident, I think you called it.

CR: No. A bit after that, check your memory. The first was the attempted suicide of Pete’s briefly-assisting instruments coordinator, Corporal Macey.

AM: But quite soon after that, before the new security protocols were enforced and extra armed personnel you had never before seen? Then?

CR: Yes. And I’m assuming that your record shows that after the night the Corporal tried to take his own head off after looking at the ever-dying Josie over my shoulder, vomiting all over me… while he only succeeded in blinding himself because he was shaking so badly, he was killed still standing over me by four of seven shots to the back, by…

[Session remnant deleted from all training copies below Onyx by Executive Order.]

[ For the Instructor:Do not move. Prior to providing a listening for Evidence File Six, defer to the ranking Commandant, who may or may not have one or more viewers further restrained and removed at this time for reassignment in Facility 17. Do not ever question present security personnel on this matter in front of the students.]

(More damage to the original file. Audio only, again with scrolling text for the Indoctrinator’s class. This is believed to have been derived from the same session as before, but much later, and perhaps (due to acoustic analysis) with fewer silent parties present. Hours of questioning may have transpired.)

(Sound of swallowed water, the microphone is quite close.)

ATTRIBUTED TO ANNA MORGENSTERN [AM]: I’m sorry, I keep going back to this because I’ve never seen one. I believe you. Explain some more about the reactive nature of these… reflections to me.

ATTRIBUTED TO CAPTAIN RAMSEY [CR]: I’m afraid I can’t. they’re semi-autonomous, slaved puppets like. But aware , as if… as if they’re pieces of Josie’s mind. Her being. As far as I know, they’re still appearing out there every “twenty-four” hours and dying in agony, their arms sliced off. Monitored by a team in a maximum security militarized zone, sky-camouflaged now with air cover, and many more guards and even tanks along the perimeter, am I right?

AM: I’m afraid that’s classified.

CR: The anomaly, I know it’s only the first detected. Paris. Sahara. Tikrit. Off Fiji, South Pacific. Damascus. The original, the snicker-snack, it’s getting bigger, isn’t it?

AM: The reflections, Captain.

CR: Fine. It’s like… I’ve looked in their eyes… her eyes… more than anyone else in existence. And I know her now, because even though she always screams for mommy, she screamed every night to me. It’s like you can see behind her ancient, her cataract-clouded eyes, that horrible knowing , trapped in there. Like she knows what’s going to happen, but she can’t stop herself.

AM: Why can’t she stop herself, Alan?

CR: Because even with a temporal and causal violation, trying to change the past, the future, whatever, reality fights back when you try to change it. It crushes individuals under the wheels of atomic physics, the programmed laws of each different and interconnected universe, to make sure events happen exactly the way they did the first time. The damaged wheel’s gyroscope, if you will, rebalances itself so it doesn’t fly off and crash the car.

AM: What is a temporal and causal violation?

CR: Seriously? You must have been cleared for all of this.

AM: Presume that I—

CR: “Presume that I don’t know anything, Captain.” Yes, I remember you saying just that, the very first day. Cunning and naïveté, so vulnerable, sharp and guarded, all in one. That’s when I decided that I adored you.

AM:… The violation, please. Explain it to me.

CR: It’s a continuum paradox, a pebble thrown into a stream and simultaneously not thrown in a stream, caused whenever a sentient lifeform tries to change a singular event in any time slipstream which has already occurred.

AM: You’re talking about time travel. Or probability travel, I think.

CR: Kind of. Much more complex than that. I’m talking about slipstream travel, travel on synchronous tangents of a moment, the possibility cascades which infinitely stream off of each moment in infinite directions. Each moment from our isolated perspective is like a dandelion seed, you know. The center is Reality Prime, the fuzzies radiating off are all the possible connectors to the next yet-undecided moment in Prime’s curving trajectory along the Arrow of Time. Until the next inviolate thing occurs, of course.

AM: A simplified context to that concept, please?

CR: You know Schrödinger’s cat?

AM: Yes and no. Not personally.

CR: (Dry, exhausted laughter.) Hey, all of this insanity and you’re still funny. Good one. But you’re aware of the concept, yes?

AM: I think so. A hypothetical cat trapped in a poisoned box. Until the box is opened, it can be either living or dead. After the box is opened, the cat is either definitely alive or definitely dead, and the universe as we understand it moves on in one direction.

CR: Nice. That’s one theoretical interpretation. Or?

AM: Or the universe splits along the radioactive decay of that fulcrum probability as it is being determined. Quantum decoherence. But I don’t agree with it at all.

CR: And why not?

AM: Because I can’t wrap my mind around the concept of infinite simultaneous universes, each slightly different.

CR: Why?

AM: Because it doesn’t make sense to a sane human brain. Because I’m me , the one me. Because everything either is something, or it isn’t.

CR: Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. But the universe, our own ancient and designed universe, tries its very best at the sub-molecular level to agree with you. Tachyons, the invisible but omnipresent damage control system.

AM: Meaning?

CR: Meaning that when we try to change events which have already transpired, however minor, the universe destroys as many natal continuum tangents as it must to prevent irrevocable damage to itself. Almost as if… as if the universe is a living thing, one organism, fighting off a rapidly-mutating infection.

AM: Infection?

CR: Do you understand cause and effect? Scientifically?

AM: Of course. Something happens, then something else happens later in direct response.

CR: Right. Now think for a moment about cause and effect as two physical points of matter, with a line drawn between them.

AM: No.

CR: No?

AM: Time, cause and effect, that isn’t made of matter. It’s not even energy, really. It’s our simplified measure of entropy, the Real, of lots of different things happening simultaneously.

CR: Very bright of you. But observable matter and energy are just two different and transient phases of the same thing. Being .

AM: No, they’re not.

CR: Pretend that they are. You have a line, okay? The anchor point of that line is a cause, the end point of that same line is that cause’s later effect. Is that okay?