I had to do something, and I had to do it right now. If Melanie was somehow a fake, that meant they must have sent her. And if they sent her, that meant they knew. They knew about the messages in her painting. They knew about me asking questions. And they knew I didn’t hit a button during any of it.
I felt panic and fear crawling up my chest, making it hard to breathe. Standing up, I started pacing, periodically glancing back at the monitor to see if Rachel could help me, tell me what I needed to do next. But she had laid down on her bed. It was hard to tell for sure with her back to the camera, but I think she was crying.
No, I needed to fix this. Get her out of there. And if I didn’t have a better plan, I’d just have to go with the one I already had.
Feeling the hard eye of the ceiling camera on me, I went to the door and stepped back into the locker room. My phone was in my locker, and after messing up the combination the first time, I got the door open and got it out. Gripping it tightly, I tried to hold it by my side casually, but I knew there was little point. If they knew everything, I wasn’t going to be able to hide anything. I just had to try and be fast, get some kind of message out to people that could help Rachel before they got to me.
I opened the camera on the phone as I re-entered the surveillance room and hit record. It made a small beeping noise and once I was sure it was recording, I turned the camera on myself.
“My name…my name is Tommy. Thomas Calhoun. And my job is watching a woman trapped in a room. This is not a joke or a movie or…whatever. This is real. For three years my job is to sit in this room…” I moved the camera slowly around the room, taking in the door to the bathroom, the water cooler, the desk with the monitors, keyboard, and button box, “…and watch a video feed of a woman locked up in a bedroom somewhere.” I stepped closer to the desk and made sure the monitor showing Rachel was clear and in focus. “I didn’t know this woman was a prisoner at first…or I tricked myself into thinking she wasn’t because the money was good. Either way, I know she is now. She is in danger and so am I.”
After lingering on video of her for a few more seconds to make sure every detail could be seen, I turned the camera back on myself. I had to hurry, or the video might be too big to send quickly. I was trying to stay calm, but I felt myself tearing up as I went on, and I did my best to keep my words clear. “Please help her. I don’t know where she is. I don’t know who has her, because I don’t know who I really work for. But they are bad people and she is not safe.”
“All I know is that I work at a building at [redacted] right outside of San Antonio. (Per Nosleep rules, to be clear this address is not real.) I only know the names of two other people connected to this place. The man who hired me, Mr. Solomon. And a man who might have a job like mine…Charlie Jeffers…no, Jefferies I think. I don’t know if they are real people…I mean, I don’t know if that is their real names. Please. I’m not crazy. I know how this sounds. Just come here, see the room. Figure out where she is and help her. And…”
I heard the muffled sound of the outer door opening into the locker room and I frantically fumbled with the phone to stop the recording. How do I send? Oh no, how do I…there it is. I hit the button to share, and felt a new panic rising. Who should I send it to? I had only a handful of contacts, and I just selected them all. Maybe at least one of them would take it seriously and get help. As I heard the door to the surveillance room opening behind me, I hit send.
Not connected to data service or WiFi. Please send again when connected.
What? No no no no…
I turned to see Mr. Solomon entering the room. He was flanked by two large men in dark suits that looked like bodyguards or something. Raising a finger, he wagged it at me.
“No service in here, Thomas. But then you should never need service in here, so long as you followed the rules.”
They took me easily. I tried to make it to the bathroom and close the door, but the two guards stopped me and pulled me down. They put the…what do you call them? Zipties on my hands and feet and pulled a black bag over my head. Then I was being carried out of the room and it felt like they must have put me in the back of a van that was pulled right up to the building. I was laying on what felt like thin, weird smelling carpet that covered a hard metal layer underneath.
I heard someone get into the van with me, and I asked where we were going. If they would just take me and let Rachel go. There was a short laugh overhead and then Mr. Solomon’s voice as he told me that he would explain everything when we got where we were going. For now, he said, I needed to relax. It was a long drive and I would need the rest.
I went to say more, but then I felt a sharp pain in my neck. They had stabbed me, or…no, they injected me with something. I was feeling so strange now, but I had to stay awake. I had to try and get away, I had to…
“Hello again, Thomas.”
I blinked as I began looking around. My mouth was dry and my head hurt, but otherwise I felt okay. I wasn’t tied up any more--Instead I was laying back on a padded table like I’d seen when I went to the doctor.
But this wasn’t a doctor’s office. The room was large, and aside from the padded table, it held a small bed, a desk with a computer monitor on it, and a couple of chairs. Sitting in one of those chairs was Mr. Solomon.
I raised up slowly, blinking at him. “Where is she? Is Rachel okay?”
The man smiled. “You really are something, Thomas. Trying to be the hero, even if you don’t quite know how. I respect that.” Licking his lips, he leaned forward slightly. “In fact, I respect that so much that I’ve decided to start our new relationship with as much honesty as I’m allowed. Some of my colleagues disagree with this approach, but you know what? Fuck them. This is my project, and I think you deserve to know what’s going on.” Looking more serious, he stood up, lifting the gun he had been holding casually in his lap. “But before we get into the details, would you like to see Rachel?”
I slid off the table and nodded as I caught myself from falling. My legs were still wobbly from whatever they had given me, but I barely noticed. “Yes, please. Let me see her. The real her.”
Mr. Solomon gave a small laugh and gestured toward a nearby door. “Yes, reality is always best. She’s just there in the next room.”
I stumbled my way forward, my legs getting better as I walked, and when I grabbed the doorknob, it turned easily. I expected the door to lead to her bedroom, but instead it opened into another room a lot like the one I had been in, though the stuff in it was different. Strange machines filled the walls, and in the back of the room was a large…aquarium? I didn’t know. It was a big cylinder taller than I was, and it was filled with some kind of gray liquid. There was a shape in that liquid,
“Go ahead, Thomas. Feel free to go have a good look. You’ve earned it.” I felt my stomach clenching tighter at Mr. Solomon’s words and the meanness in them. My legs felt heavy again now, but it wasn’t from the drugs this time.
Shuffling forward, I could see the shape was a person. Oh no Or at least a body, because it was clear from just looking at it that the person was dead. It was very well-preserved, but I could see how the skin hung wrong and looked bloated in spots. Oh God, no no no Its hair, which had been floating like seaweed in front of its face, drifted away as I reached the glass, and I could see Rachel staring out at me.
“Murderer!” I turned on Solomon and started to run toward him when he shot me. Suddenly I was on the ground convulsing as he stepped closer.
“Don’t worry, Thomas. It won’t kill you. Just make you unable to move much for a bit.” I heard more footfalls as my body began to still. “Get him up, take him back to the other room.”
I could barely feel anything as I was carried back to the padded table and propped up into a sitting position. This time I was strapped down, but I guessed it was more so I didn’t fall off, because I couldn’t move anything other than my head, and even that just a little. I could hardly see at all for crying, but I recognized the blurry shape of Solomon sitting back down in front of me.
“Before you ask…well, when you are able to ask anything again, yes, that is Rachel. Not a fake Rachel, not a dummy, and not some kind of trick. As I said, the time for tricks is past. Now is the time for truth.”
Frowning slightly, he went on. “Thomas, I understand that showing you that, showing you her body that way, might seem very cruel. You may hate me for it right now. I would understand it if you did. But you called me a murderer, and at least in this specific context, I think that is unfair, because I didn’t kill Rachel. In truth, I’ve been with this aspect of the project for only seven years.”
He gestured back to the door behind him. “And Rachel has been dead for over eight.”
I felt my eyes widen as though they belonged to someone else’s body. It was more lies. More tricks. All of it. Oh God, it had to be.
“Do you know what remote viewing is?” He rolled his eyes. “Sorry, right, you can’t talk right now. I’ll just assume you don’t. Remote viewing is a broad term for the ability to see things that are far away from you physically, to know things you shouldn’t be able to know through your normal five senses. Some describe it as a psychic ability, though there are several schools of thought as to how and why it works.”
His eyes fixed on mine intently. “Because it does work, Thomas. Various governments and private organizations have studied it for a very long time, and while publicly it is always ridiculed as pseudoscience and foolish superstition, the reality is that some people have the innate ability…that means it comes naturally…to somehow see other places.”
“Rachel was one of those people. She came into the program when she was seventeen, having been identified via a front-facing screening process that was ran as a psychological test that paid subjects well at a time when Rachel was looking to make some money. Three months after being identified as a good candidate, she was taken, and after the initial adjustment period, she became a largely compliant asset that quickly rose to the top of our talent pool.”
Solomon folded his hands on his knee. “I know you cared for her, Thomas, so I think this is worth sharing. Rachel was never treated badly, other than her confinement and the occasional test that was mildly unpleasant. No, we all treasured her. She was enormously talented, not just as a remote viewer, but as an artist. That’s how she would convey what she saw, you understand. She would enter into an almost trancelike state when she painted, and when she was done, she would have given us a painting of images and words that provided…well, it was very valuable information.” He chuckled. “If you ever wondered, that’s why there was always such care that the paintings were never shown to the camera.”
Picking at his pants, he went on. “Rachel was so talented, that she was selected for a new program that we thought might greatly enhance or alter her ability. We introduced something…foreign…into her body. At first, nothing seemed to change. If anything, the accuracy of her remote viewing was declining, which was a problem for us and for her.”
“But then we realized that we were reading the new paintings wrong. She was able to see more clearly than ever--she just was no longer bound to only current events. Now her sight transcended time.” He paused, and I realized he was enjoying telling the story. The bastard was having a good time, pausing to make it more dramatic. I would fucking kill him. “While this made some of her paintings less immediately useful, they became much more valuable as we were able to decipher them. For a time, it looked as though everything was working better than we had ever hoped.”
His lips thinned. “And then, one day, she showed a painting to the camera.”
“It said, ‘Please help me Thomas’. This immediately sent up all kinds of red flags. She knew not to show paintings to the camera, and now she was trying to communicate with someone? We didn’t disrupt her routine, but an intensive investigation began into who she was talking to. Was it one of her handlers? One of the technicians? Someone from her past life? But nothing checked out.”
Leaning back in his chair, a look of pride grew on Solomon’s face as he continued. “I was the one that first suggested the idea that she was, intentionally or not, knowingly or not, seeing and talking to someone in the future. I was still an outside consultant at the time, but by that point we had more strange behaviors from her, including the second message painting, ‘That girl isn’t me’. My theory made some sense, but it very quickly ran into a greater obstacle.”
“The introduction of the foreign material had not been as seamless as we had hoped, despite her having been stable for almost three years since it was implanted. Whether it was due to her increasing emotional upset and stress, or simply the passage of time, she suddenly began to deteriorate. Her work became more erratic and hard to understand as her body began to decline. We were monitoring her health closely, but it didn’t matter. Five days after she painted ‘That girl isn’t me’, she suddenly went into cardiac arrest and died. Somewhat inexplicably, we were unable to resuscitate her.”
The man sighed. “This was a great loss. And it required adjustments of my theory. Based on everything we knew, it still made sense that she was talking to someone. Someone with access to the camera feed, and very likely someone named Thomas. If Thomas was viewing that camera footage in the future, as I believed, then he must be working for us in the future.” He gave me a thin smile. “And whether you believe that the future is set in stone or not, I’m all for giving it a helping hand.”
“Seven years ago I began the Thomas Project. Over the course of that time I have overseen the screening and hiring of forty-three men named Thomas at several different sites, all with one very specific job. To watch the videos of Rachel from just before her implant to the time of her death.”
I tried to speak, but my mouth still wouldn’t work. I wanted to say he was lying, that it didn’t make sense, that it was another trick…but I think I wanted to hear it more for myself. Because I didn’t think he was lying. I didn’t think it was a trick. And I thought I was starting to understand.
“The point wasn’t really them watching the videos, of course. It was how they reacted to watching the videos. What they did, and how that matched up with what Rachel had done in response in the past.”
“Thirteen percent quit after the first day. Thirty-eight percent hit either the red or the green button after the first message asking for help and saying their name. Twenty-two percent attempted to contact the authorities before reaching the stage where ‘Melanie’ was introduced.” He shook his head slightly. “I wish I could take credit for her introduction, but it wasn’t my suggestion. We assumed from the ‘that girl isn’t me’ message that there was a double of Rachel introduced to you at some point, perhaps to kill you or dissuade you or find out what you knew. But it took a few tries until we felt it was well-refined, and as I’ve pointed out, only twenty-seven percent made it that far. And all of them failed the next test.” He pointed at me.
“Her name.”
“You see, the girl you’ve been watching, that talented, wonderful girl whose body is preserved in the next room? Her name was Rachel Donovan. I had always wondered if Rachel was merely seeing you, or if there was some kind of connection between the two of you. When you called ‘Melanie’ Rachel, I knew that we had finally found the right Thomas--the distant point of light that our Rachel was looking at across space and time.”
I swallowed thickly and found I could feel my tongue, if only a little. Slurring badly, I pushed out a single word.
“W-why?”
Solomon looked surprised. “I’d have thought that’d be clear by now. You’re our only remaining link to one of our greatest treasures. Perhaps you have a similar ability, or it may be that she forged the link purely though her own talent and will. But either way, you are important and you have more work to do.” He stood up and moved over to the table where he turned on the monitor. As it came to life, I saw it was a frozen image of Rachel’s room--a tape paused where I had left off watching. Turning back to me, the man looked solemn.
---
Credits
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