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By Til Eulenspiegel, 13 January 2001
Doc wrote in his office alone, with the curtains drawn against the bright sunlight. Half a dozen pen and ink drawings sat on the desk beside a battered laptop and a pocket tape recorder.. An empty keyboard box jutted up from the trash can like a stalagmite. Its former occupant lay beneath Doc's searching fingers. He referred to each drawing as he typed, and he occasionally paused to listen to the tape recording.
-----BEGIN SIGNED MESSAGE-----
ALPHONSE:
Our source produced new and atypical IMINT this morning. All
previous data from this source dealt with his former employer's
current operations, but these artworks show an obviously fantastic
setting. Also, our source produced this IMINT immediately after
awakening from sleep, instead of after a formal technical remote
viewing session. If I interpret the material correctly, it is
relevant to Library Police operations and very time-sensitive. Proper
encryption and steganography might take too long, so this précis must
suffice. Scans of these artwork and full transcripts of his last
session will arrive shortly by the usual methods.
Image one shows a long hall that holds sculptures of paper cranes. A weeping woman smashes the birds with a hammer. The woman's wears a fine black gown. Her face is shown in good detail and she strongly resembles our mutual friend Mr. Burroughs. Three people dressed as servants look on. All have very vague facial features. During the session, our source called the woman "Cordelia," and said she felt sad because "Edgar" had died.
Image two shows Cordelia talking to a fat man in front of a pair of ornate double doors. The man wears Victorian-era clothes, and his hands bleed. His also strongly resembles Mr. Burroughs. The same three servants look on, but they have all shrunk to half the size of Cordelia or the fat man. These three wear blank skin instead of faces. Our source did not comment on this drawing, and refused to any questions about it.
Image three presents the interior of a throne room. Atop the throne sits a four-legged, four-armed knight wearing red armor. The knight's helmet is open, and it is empty. The raised visor has Mr. Burroughs's features. The knight wears no gauntlets, and blood drips from each of his creased palms. The three servants from the previous images crawl across his legs and lap. They seem much smaller, though it is hard to tell from perspective whether the red knight is gigantic or whether they have shrunk more. Cordelia holds her head in her hands and weeps as she runs from the enthroned knight. During debriefing, our source insisted referred to throne's occupant as either "the monster," or "poor Thomas."
Image four shows Cordelia in a long tunnel. Numbers, Greek letters, integral signs, Boolean operators, and other mathematical symbols form the tunnel's walls, ceiling and floor. A finely dressed man stands mid-way down the tunnel. He reaches with one hand forCordelia, and points with the other to the tunnel's end. (This is the picture's vanishing point.) Cordelia regards him with a steady gaze. Unlike the other characters in the drawings, I have no idea who the man might be. Our source only said of him, "He makes the worse seem the wiser." This is a quote, I think-maybe Blake?
A gigantic suit of armor or statue
dominates image five. Like the
red knight, the figure has four arms and
its helmet's visor bears a
face: Ms. Roberta Peel's face, in fact. The
armor or statue closely
matches the nude human form, but it has both male
genitals and female
breasts. A chain-mail coif attaches to the helmet
and suggests both a
beard and long tresses. Cordelia disrobes at its left.
At its right
stands the finely dressed man from the previous image, offering
a
sword and gun to the Cordelia. Our source referred to the figure
as
"Hermaphroditus Rex." To the best of my knowledge, our
source's
education does not include alchemical symbols.
Image six shows Cordelia before the same double
doors as in the
second image. She now wears the Hermaphroditus Rex armor
and carries
a gun and a sword, all three from the previous drawing. Her
other two
arms grasp the handles of the same doors as in the second drawing.
A
black-red pool spreads from beneath the doors.
ALPHONSE, our source has never met Mr. Burroughs or Ms. Peel. I see no way for him to know of the former's multiple personalities nor the latter's gender identity. A spontaneous remote viewing seems most ikely, but no precedent in our history with him exists for this target. Some of these details would require him to read my notes about Mr. Burroughs' case. His track record with text has never been good.
This new variation of clairvoyance worries me. It is bad enough I must give our source ketamine as a sedative. If that drug no longer works, I don't know what to try next. The data he provides on MAJESTIC is valuable, but is it worth the cost? Don't answer that. Just think about it, please.
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-----END SIGNATURE-----
Doc sent the email through the usual arcane method. He gathered up the drawings and shut them away in his office safe. Once done, he opened the curtains, blinked against the sudden glare, and left the room. Behind the closed office door, a transparent film encoded and compressed what it saw. After it finished, it oscillated an electric field at gigahertz rates. It varied those billions of shakes according to a set of rules and its memory of past events. Miles away, this set up a sympathetic vibration in a super-cooled electrical circuit. Transformed into first into voltage, and then into bits, the witness's testimony finally became video on a screen.
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