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.)
XIV: EVIDENCE FILE EIGHT
(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.)
(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.
XV: EVIDENCE FILE NINE
[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?