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In our quest to drill for more and more oil, I think we finally went too deep. Part 1.

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I’ve worked in petroleum engineering for 35 years. Most of it has been in the Gulf of Mexico, though I’d done a bit of contract work in the Middle East and Canada. After the BP disaster, there’d been quite a bit of pressure on the major petroleum companies to use extra caution and increase their R&D budgets to design safer technologies to prevent another environmental catastrophe. For most of the people in my position, that meant more work and less pay. Of course.

My most recent employer has been one of the big American oil companies. I’ve been stationed on an experimental, semi-secret offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico. I say “semi-secret” because we’re using a lot of new, highly-proprietary technologies. If our competitors were to learn about them, we’d be set back a few years and countless billions of dollars. All outward appearances would suggest we’re a normal platform that’s outfitted for extreme-depth drilling. If only the competition knew how deep we were going.

The platform is right near the edge of the drop off leading to the Sigsbee Abyssal Plain. One of the new technologies we’ve employed involve our remotely-operated submersibles. They’re basically just submarine drones with lots of cameras and equipment on them that can go super deep. All the ones we’d used in the past needed to be tethered to the surface using a fiber optic connection.

The physical connection had its pros and cons. Fiber optic connections are speedy as all hell, which means commands and data can be sent back and forth to the drone with no meaningful lag. A major downside, though, is that a physical cable limits the maneuvering capabilities of the drone. At the depths we were hoping to reach, the topography was unknown. Previous attempts to send tethered drones ended in failure when the cables were severed by the terrain.

Even with our best satellite, sonar, and early-drone imagery, our knowledge of the area we wanted to drill was terrible. The resolution was too low for any meaningful data to be gleaned. We knew there was oil down there – lots and lots and lots of it – but until we could develop new ways to map the bottom, we were screwed.

A guy named Masaharu Ajibana changed everything for us. He’d been a materials scientist we’d brought on to work on some of the ceramics composites in our drill heads. When he saw the new, undisclosed materials we’d been wanting to employ in the future drills, he must’ve spent four straight days poring over their properties with an enthusiasm I’d never seen in a person over the age of five.

At the end of those four days, Masaharu not only understood the materials better than the team who invented them, but he’d gotten an idea about how to transmit data through miles and miles of murky saltwater using some bizarre form of piezoelectric resonance unique to the properties of the new ceramics. Essentially, a transceiver on the drone would resonate at the same frequency as one on the platform. Once the transceivers were locked in an oscillatory pattern, smaller, tighter waveforms from a second set of transceivers would traverse the oscillation “cable” linking the drone and the platform.

Nearly every scientist in every department in the company said this was entirely impossible. Still, there was enough support from a few key players in R&D that Masaharu’s claims were investigated. Investigation led to cursory confirmations. Cursory confirmations led to experiments. Experiments led to shocking successes. And shocking successes led to the fastest development and deployment of a new technology in the history of the company.

It’s that technology our company employed three weeks ago. We’d been using a fleet of nine drones to map the abyssal plain of Sigsbee Deep. There’s one “hub” drone and eight “mappers.” The hub has one main resonator which communicates with the platform, and eight smaller ones which communicate with the mappers. We were dumbfounded not only by the simplicity and ease of the data transmissions, but by the richness of the data we were seeing.

Another technology we’d deployed for this project was a small, cable-form drill mounted on the mappers. Its drill head was equipped with our new ceramics and could cut through the bottom of the plain with ease. The cables were 3000 feet long – not anything major – but they allowed the mappers to confirm the massive salt sheet we’d assumed was covering the oil deposits.

Once the drill cable maxes out, a tiny device gets deposited in the cavity. It’s mostly multilevel sonar with some seismographs and embedded communicators. Nothing too advanced. It measures minute seismic activity and sends it back to the hub. The data gets processed by our CPU cluster and is incorporated into our future drilling plans.

As I said, we’ve been mapping for three weeks. A week ago, the seismographs started picking up some bizarre activity. And something else happened. It’s something neither I nor the onboard medics can adequately explain.

Last Tuesday, Gervaso Zaragoza, a member of my team, went to the infirmary complaining of severe headaches. He had no history of migraines and until the headaches started, seemed to be in perfect health. The severity of the pain grew as the day went on. After a couple hours, he was screaming. When I stepped out of the infirmary, another team member came to me and casually mentioned the seismic activity of the plain had been rising all day. On a whim, I asked him to send a sleep command to the seismographs. A minute later, Gervaso was fine.

We resumed the operation of the seismographs later in the afternoon. Gervaso, who was resting but otherwise alert, was unaffected. I knew it had to be a coincidence and did my best to put the event out of my mind.

On Wednesday, the mappers were spread in a wide circle out from the hub. They were pinging the interior of the circle with extremely high-resolution sonar, as well as multi-laser topography measurements as the circle widened. The goal was to see if there had been any appreciable surface shifts since the last measurement three days earlier. With the seismic activity we’d experienced, I’d expected some shifts to be detected.

There were no shifts. Instead, there were a series of long, unbroken convexities lining the sea floor. The scan resolution was extremely sharp, and we could clearly see the digitized images of straight lines pushing nearly a meter above the plain. Even with the scans, I wanted to see a camera feed, so I directed the camera to send a raw feed to the platform. The light on the drone went on, and the screen displayed a long, perfectly-straight mound in the silt that stretched for miles. The other mappers displayed the same thing.

The onboard geologist wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a seismic event being the cause of the convexities. He said we knew very little about the seismological properties of the salt plate beneath the plain. The pressures of the silt and water above it and the oil and gas below made for an intensely complicated interaction model, and even though he’d never heard of the type of thing we were seeing, instances of symmetry in natural geology were well-known. He mentioned the basalt formations at Giant’s Causeway. And that’s how he left it.

I wasn’t convinced. Even though I’m not a geologist, it seemed odd that such obvious and large changes could occur with the comparatively-little seismic activity we’d seen. Even though the activity had increased as we’d observed it, it still hadn’t come close to reaching an intensity that would have moved such a large amount of rock and water.

Two days later, on another mapping mission, I took manual control of one of the drones. I’d had the guys from robotics outfit another couple cameras and lights to the outside. I guided the sub along the tallest of the convexities and positioned it about a foot above its surface. All the cameras and lights traced along the convex surface. No visible change from the other day.

I extended the drill. The drill head sank into the convexity and stopped. It was stuck. The transceivers on the hub reported error transmissions from the mapper. I reversed the drill, backed it out, and tried again. Throughout the platform, I heard a number of sharp reports that sounded like gunshots. In the other room, shouts of surprise and screams of fear rang out. I ran from the control panel to see what was going on.

John Edmundson was lying on the floor. A hole had appeared in his belly. A sucking sound filled the room coupled with John screaming with an intensity I’ve never known to be possible. He moved his hands to the wound in an attempt to plug it, but with a series of horrible, wet cracks, his hands and arms were pulled into his belly. Above him, a hole exploded in the steel ceiling, its ragged edges pointing downward. I realized John was being pulled down to the deck below.

I ran down the steps and watched with profound horror as the man was pulled through a series of holes the size of dimes, all the way through every floor in the platform, down to the water. I ran down each floor, watching the column of gore disappear ever downward. Two minutes later, a foam of pulp and entrails floated in heap on the choppy surface of the water.

I slowly plodded back up the steps, unsure if what I’d just seen could possibly have been real. I was jolted out of my contemplation when I realized, behind the shrill voices of my coworkers, an alarm was screaming from the drone control room. I ran back upstairs, past my traumatized colleagues, and made it to the control room. The camera feed was gone.

I rewound to the moment I’d left from the room and started at the screen with disbelief. The convexity below the drone shook like an electric shock had coursed through its bulk. Then, the silt covering it began to fall away. It wasn’t a rock formation. Ripples of peristaltic convulsions seethed along a gray, scarred surface. A hole opened in the surface of it and the drill cable began to get sucked inside. As the 3000 feet were being consumed, the camera showed a vacant column the width of a dime pointing straight up. I realized that must’ve been what had killed John.

Once the drill cable disappeared, the screen went black. The drone, presumably, was gone. The other drones were still mapping away with mechanical obliviousness. I called up the real time sonar data. The convexities had disappeared from the sea floor. I pulled back on the sonar map and tried to figure out what I was seeing. The sonar feed was slow; around 2 frames per second. Still, there was no mistaking what was coming on screen.

The convexities had all lifted from the abyssal plain and were waving back and forth through the water. They were massive; easily 7000 feet long. I couldn’t figure out what was causing them to move. Then, as the reality of John’s death started to sink in and the strangeness of what the camera showed before it went out began to take hold in my mind, I came to a realization that was impossible to ignore. What I was seeing wasn’t an effect of bizarre, deep-sea geology. They were colossal, writhing tentacles.

Will be continued.

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Making Faces

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I was torn from my sleep by the sound of my daughter’s screams. I rushed across the hall and saw Jessie standing in front of her bedroom window. When I wrapped my arms around her, I noticed her pajamas were soaked with sweat. The screams tapered off and gasping sobs replaced them; her tiny body heaving as it attempted to take in more air than her lungs would allow.

I picked her up and carried her into my room. We sat on the bed and I held her until she’d calmed enough for me to ask what happened. She shook her head. Hot tears spilled down her cheeks.

“Please, sweetheart – I promise it’s okay. What happened?”

Jessie’s wide, blue eyes stared into mine, still leaking away the memory of whatever trauma she’d endured. She pulled my nightgown, beckoning me to come down to her level so she could whisper something in my ear. I obliged.

“There was a big girl in my window making faces at me.”

I lifted my head again to look at Jessie, still feeling the hot condensation from her breath in my ear.

“A big girl?,” I asked, puzzled. Jessie nodded and wiped her eyes on her sweaty pajamas.

“Come on,” I told her, forcing a smile. “Let’s get you in the tub. I’ll let you use my bath bomb.”

For the first time since the ordeal began, a smile flashed across her face. Finally.

As we waited for the tub to fill, Jessie held me around my waist. Her crying had stopped, but she still trembled. I stroked her hair and told her it was okay, over and over, while wondering what could have possibly scared her so badly. This type of episode was entirely unlike her. Quite the contrary; I’d always walk in on her sneaking peeks of scary movies on TV even though I’d told her, in no uncertain terms, that she wasn’t to watch them. But still, even though she’d seen some creepy monsters and murderers, they’d never given her nightmares.

When the tub was filled and the bath bomb was releasing bubbles and glitter and scents that delighted and relaxed Jessie, I helped her out of her pajamas and into the water. She sat there peacefully as her tiredness caught up with her again. Her eyes closed. I continued stroking her hair.

After a little while, knowing she needed to go back to bed, I shook her awake. She opened her eyes and saw me, prompting a smile. But then she stiffened, her eyes widening, and screamed again. I reached into the tub and grabbed her, trying to hold her close, but she pushed and clawed at me, trying to get away.

I cried out to her, “Jessie, what is hap –” and I stopped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something behind me. Something at the window.

I whirled around, yanking Jessie against my back as I shielded her from something I hadn’t even properly seen. But soon I had. And my own panicked shriek drowned out that of my daughter.

Peering in through the bathroom window was a round, wide face. Pale white with small, jaundiced eyes, it pushed against the window screen until it fell out and clattered on the floor. The face moved toward us on a dowel-thin, articulated neck connected directly to its chin.

“Get out!,” I shouted, mustering up as much violence in my voice as possible.

The neck was blocking our path to the door, and the hideous face turned and stared directly at me before opening its mouth and saying one word: “Jessie.”

A paralyzing wave of incomprehensible terror bloomed inside me. The voice was low and droning, like a normal woman’s voice slowed and pitched down an octave. I felt Jessie stiffen against my back and she pressed her face against my spine, as if trying to hide inside me.

More neck came through the window, the vertebrae bulging against its tight skin as it swayed in the space around us like a long finger with a hundred knuckles.

“Jess……ie.” The voice was even deeper now; I felt it in my chest and bowels.

The face moved toward me and I struck it with my fist. My hand thudded uselessly against its forehead. Before my eyes, the face began to change. Its features elongated, then contracted. Its mouth stretched to its earlobes, then shrank down to a pinhole. The entire topography of its cheekbones and chin and jaw shattered, then reformed. A second later, I was looking at a terribly deformed version of my daughter.

“Jessie.” It exhaled heavily. Hot, stinking breath filled my nostrils.

The strength in my arms vanished. The stability in my legs evaporated. I dropped to the floor, helpless. Jessie was exposed.

“Jess…ie.” The long neck wrapped around my daughter like an anaconda and pulled her toward the window. Jessie, no longer screaming, struggled to breathe against its constricting grasp. Her face reddened. The terrible thing drooled black fluid onto the top of her head. Jessie stopped struggling. She, and the creature, disappeared into the night.

My body regained its strength and I bolted to the window. In the dim light of the crescent moon, I watched the long legs of the thing carry my daughter away into the woods.

I called 911. The police came. They investigated for days. I was the only suspect in her disappearance, but as days turned into weeks and weeks stretched into months, the trail had gone cold. Even if I was still a suspect, they had nothing to even hint at me being the reason for her disappearance. And, in fact, there was evidence to the contrary.

During the initial investigation, when every nook and cranny of the house was looked at, when every piece of furniture was upended, and when every inch of the property was examined, there were only two pieces of evidence; neither of which had anything to do with me, other than to help corroborate my story.

The first morning of the investigation, officers noticed a trail of glitter from the bath bomb stretching from the bathroom window all the way through the yard and high into the trees at the mouth of the forest. When an officer scaled one of the trees, he found glitter stuck to leaves 25 feet up. It was strange, they admitted, but in their words “glitter gets everywhere.”

While they were quick to dismiss that as direct evidence, they couldn’t explain the other thing they found. Smeared across the window in Jessie’s room was the greasy, distorted shape of a woman’s enormous face. When the lab analyzed the cells that’d been left behind, the results were “inconclusive.” The samples were deemed “non-viable.” To me, that meant they wanted to hide what they’d discovered. After a long while, the active investigation was closed.

It’s been six years since Jessie was taken. I live alone in the same house, and every night, I go to bed wishing my daughter would come back to me. Recently, I noticed my bedroom windows had started getting dirty faster than they usually did. I washed them and didn’t think much of it. Not until this morning.

This morning, I woke up to find the outside-facing side of every window covered in grayish, translucent grease. For a while, I struggled to understand what had happened. Then I got to the picture window in the living room. It, too, was filthy. But there was something in that filth. Outlined against the wide piece of glass was the impression of a large face and a thin, articulated neck. The same face I’d seen that night. And next to it, clear as day, was the print of another, smaller face.

Jessie’s face.

Supported by the same, terrible neck.

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My only experience with ASMR

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I’ve been dealing with anxiety my entire life. Whether in social situations, work situations, or even at home by myself, feelings of panic rise to the surface and consume me. Medications don’t work. Therapy doesn’t work. Each day, I wake up knowing at some point before I go back to bed, I will feel like the world is about to collapse around me.

I heard about ASMR online. For those who don’t know, it’s short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Basically, it’s an induced euphoric response that supposedly causes deep relaxation and a sense of wellbeing. I’ve never been relaxed. I’ve never been well.

Like all “natural” products designed to elicit a positive biological response, the ASMR space on the Internet is full of bullshit. Countless fraudsters and faux-experts tout extraordinary claims, and while scientists have found no direct correlation between ASMR and health, mental or otherwise, those who sell ASMR-related products will tell you it’s the next big thing. The thing “doctors don’t want you to know about.” Needless to say, I was skeptical.

Skepticism, however, in the face of daily panic, can often upshift into something resembling hope. I did my research. I sifted through claims and medical information with my untrained, but nonetheless determined, mind.

Another problem with something like ASMR is that people claim they know what they’re doing, when, in fact, they’re just trying to get hits on their website. YouTube, for example, is full of kids talking seductively into their microphones while dull synthpop plays in the background. Those are the top hits for ASMR. You need to dig deep before you find something you think is legit.

And I did.

Last year, I found an ASMR site run by a university in Ukraine. The cursory listen I gave seemed relaxing enough; a soft voice over gentle electronic pulses and the certain sounds from nature, like running water. The associated imagery was abstract and colorful, reminding me of Easter palates and springtime flowers. The samples were only five minutes long. To access the rest, they needed credit card and shipping information. At least the subscription came with a free Blu-Ray copy 8-10 weeks later.

I plugged in my payment information, name, and address, knowing American Express would cancel any fraudulent charges in the event the Ukrainians wanted to scam me. I wasn’t particularly concerned about that, though. The payment went through, and I was greeted by a “Members Only” page and libraries filled with various ASMR videos. I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, clicked the first video, and set it to fullscreen.

The world melted away. For the first time in my life, I felt relaxation overtake the omnipresent anxiety. Peace washed through my mind and passed in a wave down to my chest and throughout my limbs. My sensation of self vanished. Whatever this university had developed, it was a miracle. Enraptured by the sights and sounds and sensations, I remained in my chair for two straight days.

I awoke to the feeling of my headphones being torn off and a rough hand shaking my shoulder. Panic bloomed within my chest, but agony quickly overtook it. My legs and lower back were searing with hideous pain and I screamed, only to have the same hand clasp over my mouth.

“Shut up,” came a voice with a thick accent. A Ukrainian accent. “Scream again and we’ll take even more. Do you have any money in the house? Any jewelry?”

I tried to shake my head, which was pinned back against the computer chair from the man’s brute strength. “No,” I grumbled behind his hand, tears streaming down my face from the overwhelming pain.

“Good. Now sleep for another hour or so.” He strapped the headphones back on my ears and straightened me up so I was facing the monitor again. Before slipping back beneath the waves of bliss, I realized I’d been strapped in my chair. I didn’t know why.

After an hour, the video ended. The audio cut out. The pain returned. I screamed again, this time alone in my apartment. I was still strapped to the chair. I looked down at my legs, certain they were broken or slashed by the intruders. But my legs were gone. My screaming stopped and everything blurred. I reached for the phone on my desk and managed to dial 911 before passing out, my hand groping at the pain in my back where my left kidney had been.

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The Perils of Live TV

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One of the biggest misconceptions about live television is that it’s actually live. Let me tell you a secret: nothing is live. Everything has a built-in delay, just in case something unexpected happens. It’s not so much out of concern for the viewers, but for the advertisers. The last thing Pampers wants to deal with is some British actor saying “cunt” on a talk show or an NFL quarterback getting paralyzed after a big hit. It’s bad for the brand.

I work for the Food Network. Over the last ten years, we’ve moved from basic cooking instruction to a more “reality TV” style; lots of competitions, celebrity cameos, that whole thing. Lots of people didn’t like the change, but we got a big uptick in the younger demographics as a result.

One of the problems with capturing a younger demographic is holding onto them as they transition into an older one. Let’s say, for example, when we started with the reality TV shows, we got a viewer named Jenny. Jenny was 22 when she first saw Ace of Cakes and became a regular viewer of the network since then. She was fresh out of college, had few responsibilities, and was enjoying being a kid.

Fast-forward nine years. Jenny’s 31 and a stay-at-home mom. Her priorities are far different than they were when she was 22. She has two children, and, on weekdays, she babysits her brother’s twins as well. Instead of eating out all the time like she did at 22, Jenny’s responsible for feeding a household. She doesn’t have time for reality shows anymore and she wishes her cable company offered the Cooking Channel – the sister station to the Food Network that offers more how-to programming.

There are hundreds of thousands of Jennys across the country – first generation captures from the reality-TV era who yearn for more instructional programming. But it’s a balancing act. If the Food Network goes back to their original format, they lose the potential for new, younger viewers. If they stay with primarily reality-based programming, they lose all the Jennys out there.

Our goal, and by “our,” I mean: me and my team at the network, was to create a show to bridge that gap. After the success of The Kitchen, a Saturday morning program featuring four of the network’s biggest stars as they cook exciting recipes and give tips and techniques, we were tasked to make something for the weekday morning viewers.

We ended up creating a show that featured two of the network’s top chefs, a live studio audience, and Q&A from online viewers. It was going to be as interactive a show as we’d ever made, and the twist was, it would be “live.” Now, remember what I said about “live” TV. Sure, the audience would be there watching the chefs cook and asking them questions while they did, but the online questions would be from emails. The delay would be 30 minutes.

It was a huge success in the various test markets. We had one show to go with the stand-in chefs before the show went national, this time in Oklahoma, but there was a problem. There had been a tornado warning in the county. It had since expired, but the audience was about half of what it should’ve been. We decided to go with it anyway, since we figured a lot of the at-home audience would still be inside after the storms. They’d be watching.

Right away, there were technical issues. Even though the tornado warning had passed, there were still frequent lightning strikes and other atmospheric disturbances all around the station. Things still went on, however, and the chefs started cooking.

The first problem came when the cream wouldn’t whip. The chef made a show out of it, poking fun at the behind-the-scenes staff and trying it again with a new container of cream. Again, nothing. In my ear, one of the producers said it might have been because of the storm. He didn’t sound like he knew what he was talking about.

The chefs gave up on the whipped cream and decided to make a creme anglaise. Those require eggs. Two eggs were cracked into the mixing bowl without incident. The third, though, was bad. It was blood-red, clumpy, and smelled terrible. The odor permeated the studio quickly and I saw the audience members holding their noses. When I held my own, my fingers came back bloody. I hadn’t had a nosebleed since I was a kid. We cut to a commercial.

Neither chef was happy. They agreed to scrap the whole “dessert first” idea and just go directly to the entree. No one would complain about the basic steak-and-potatoes main course, especially in cow country. The kitchen was reset and the show resumed.

The downward spiral continued. As thunder boomed outside, loud enough to be picked up by studio microphones, the mixer for the potatoes started to smoke and emit sparks before the chef yanked the plug out of the wall and threw the whole thing in the sink. “Just goes to show you guys, disasters can happen in any kitchen,” he joked to the audience, still obviously irritated but trying to play it cool.

Potatoes got mixed and mashed by hand and the chefs fielded questions about whether or not milk or cream should be used. There was another thunderclap and the studio lights flickered. I’ve always hated working in these satellite studios – compared to the main studios in New York, these were like living in the dark ages.

The lights stayed on, thankfully, and the half-hour delay caught up to the beginning of the show. All over Oklahoma, people watching the Food Network were about to see the show for the first time.

Problems aside, the potatoes came out great. During a commercial, I had an intern get me a spoonful. I should’ve had him get me a bowl. Didn’t matter – after the broadcast, I’d be able to eat all I wanted.

The studio audience, to their credit, had taken all the technical problems in stride. I hoped the TV audience would do the same, and figured they would, as long as they didn’t turn the TV off in disgust at the sight of that egg.

The chefs moved on to the steak. Each discussed their favorite techniques; one preferring a sous-vide style followed by a blast in a hot pan, while the other advocated grilling it over hardwood charcoal. Both methods would be used and the lucky studio audience would get samples to taste and choose their favorite cooking method.

The cast-iron pan was hot and the grill, despite the powerful fans sucking away the smoke, filled the studio with the savory aroma of burning hardwood. I was starving.

Chef Bob cooked his steak first, then showed the audience the perfect edge-to-edge pinkness that only a sous-vide cooked steak can achieve. The crust on the outside was magnificent. Maillard would have been proud. Wind battered the studio walls and more thunder rolled by. The power went out.

Everyone in the studio groaned, but not as loud as the executive producer. We were in a time slot. Even with the delay, which we could shorten if we had to, there was a hard out a the top of the hour when Chopped! was scheduled to air. The last thing we wanted was to have the show just cut off entirely. If the power didn’t come back on before the delay was used up, it’d look awful. Plus, we’d have to issue refunds to the local advertisers who’d purchased that time.

We waited. And waited. And waited. We had less than a minute of delay left before the power went back on. The whole team was galvanized into action and, with only one second of delay left, we resumed filming.

For the first time in about 20 years, the broadcast was fully live. I thanked God we weren’t in front of a national audience, because if someone screwed up and said a bad word, the FCC fines we’d have to deal with would be crippling.

More thunder rumbled outside as the chef talked about how sous-vide was a nice novelty, but almost everyone, in reality, preferred a grilled steak. He seasoned as he talked, obviously comfortable with the cameras and the audience who hung on every word. The grill, which had to be refilled with more charcoal to bring it back up to temperature after the delay, was screaming hot again. The chef used his laser thermometer to take the temperature of the coals. 733 degrees. Perfect for the initial sear.

Another clap of thunder and the lights flickered again. I felt my stomach leap with panic, but the lights stayed on. We only had 11 minutes left before Chopped! came on.

With the seasoning complete and the audience dying to see the steak get cooked, the chef picked up the rib eye with his tongs and carefully placed it on the searing grill.

The other chef began to scream. Everyone, including the production crew, jumped. With expertise honed by years in television, the camera operators instinctively turned the cameras toward the screaming man. 31 studio audience members and 14,000 households across Oklahoma watched as the chef’s skin blistered and charred.

“What the fuck is going on?,” the executive producer shouted, his voice clearly audible over the screams of pain and panic. Before the cameras could pan away, the chef’s eyes burst in an explosion of boiling lachrymal fluid and blood. The skin on his nose, forehead, and cheeks bubbled and blackened.

As EMTs rushed toward the man, one of them knocked over a carton of eggs and sent the contents splattering across the floor. Behind me, with a sound I will never forget for as long as I live, Dave, the sound engineer, crumpled to the floor with his body in knots of hideously broken bones; his skull caved in and leaking brain matter onto my shoes.

The loudest thunderclap yet drowned out even the panicked shouting and screams of pain. And that was it. When all was said and done – whatever it was that had been said and done – Dave was dead. The chef was dead. The cameras had never stopped rolling. Not until Chopped! came on.

The Food Network settled lawsuits for the better part of a year. Needless to say, our show wasn’t picked up. No one could ever figure out what had happened, but the funerals I attended and the trauma endured by the audiences, both studio and remote, are proof enough that I didn’t imagine it. If you know anyone in Oklahoma who was watching the Food Network on April 11th, 2015 between 10 and 11am, ask them what they saw. They’ll tell you. I’ll bet they haven’t watched a single live broadcast of anything ever since.

And yes, the network got an FCC fine from the producer saying “fuck” on air. They were okay with the burning skin, for some reason.

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The Day I Started Believing in Ghosts

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Our family home is famously haunted. By famously, I mean it’s mentioned in the town’s historical records and kids under a certain age won’t ring the doorbell on Halloween. That kind of thing. I’m 24 and I’ve lived here all my life, aside from college. Over the course of those years, I’d never seen anything out of the ordinary. My mom lived here for almost 70, though, and Dad for 50, and they claimed they saw actual ghosts many times. Their parents, too. And so on.

The house was built in 1729. Like most houses nearing their 300th birthdays, it’s had its share of problems. Still does. Obviously, it’s undergone a ton of maintenance over the course of its life, but it was always patch ups rather than overhauls. Therefore, it’s drafty. Everything sags. The electrical system is awful. The plumbing system is even worse. To top it off, all those things make some type of noise: whistling, creaking, humming, groaning, etc. To a superstitious person, it would be easy for them to associate any number of those things with the paranormal. Members of my family, for example, simply think all those natural explanations aren’t good enough.

Unlike most hauntings, the “ghost” we have isn’t a single, recurring entity. The best Mom was able to explain from what she’d seen was this: she’d be doing stuff around the house and something would catch her eye. She’d turn and look, and there’d be the ghostly image of someone who used to live in the house. Sometimes she knew who it was, sometimes she didn’t. They’d be going about their daily routines, entirely oblivious to the fact Mom was watching. One time when Mom was getting out of the shower, she saw the ghost of her grandfather sitting on the toilet, reading the newspaper, while her grandmother brushed her teeth. The moment she yelped with surprise, they disappeared.

I was home during my summer break after my first year in college when Dad died. It was as devastating to Mom and me as anyone would expect. After I returned to school, I started getting emails from Mom talking about how she’d seen Dad around the house. All the sightings were in line with the kind of thing she’d told me about in the past, but I started to worry about the frequency of the reports from her. She was claiming to see him a couple times a week. Before his death, they’d only seen previous residents of the house once every few years. To make matters worse, it seemed like he was scaring her.

Over Christmas break, I convinced her to see a therapist. She began having weekly sessions, which did very little to help with her stress. Her sightings of Dad occurred as frequently as ever. This went on for years.

Following graduation, I moved back home. I got a job at a local accounting firm and started paying off my student loans. Living rent free with Mom was going to make that process go by much faster. I had another reason for living there, too. Mom’s health was in decline. She’d get sick often and spent most of her time wandering aimlessly around the house or sitting in Dad’s old recliner, watching television. I worried about her being alone, so when I wasn’t at work, I made it a point to stay at home. I figured it was the least I could do.

That said, I didn’t want to spend all my time sitting around. I figured since I’d be inheriting the house at some point, I could get some work done to make it feel a little less, well, ancient. There was plenty of old stuff in rooms no one visited that could be brought up to the attic and potentially sold, so I took my time after work and on weekends to deal with it. I hauled lamps and record players and shoeboxes filled with knickknacks up the narrow steps.

Ever since I was old enough to climb the stairs to reach the attic, I’d hated it. It was always hot and stuffy and incredibly dusty, and now that I was filling it with more and more junk, the stuffiness only intensified. I’d been claustrophobic for as long as I could remember. No one else in the family suffered from it, so it appeared to be my own special cross to bear. I did my best to ignore it during my frequent trips up there to drop stuff off, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t go as fast as I could to get back down those steps to the cool and spacious second floor.

On the morning of Mom’s 70th birthday, I got up early to make her breakfast in bed. French toast, fried eggs, and spicy sausage. I tiptoed up the stairs with the tray, carefully opened the door, and walked in. She was staring at the ceiling with a look of terror on her face. Her breathing was labored. I left the tray on the dresser and rushed over, asking her what was wrong.

She didn’t answer. Her wide eyes locked on mine. I reached in my pocket for my phone to call 911, but she grabbed my arm in a grip tighter than I thought her frail body could produce.

“Jeanette, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. I stretched my other arm to get my phone from my jeans pocket, but Mom grabbed that one, too. I struggled to get loose while asking over and over what happened and what was wrong. She just kept talking over me.

“We needed money. He made me, Jeanette.”

The grip on my arms loosened and Mom’s labored breathing slowed. Then stopped. I finally dialled 911, but it was too late. I checked her pulse. Nothing. I performed what I knew was a useless attempt at CPR. I stared at her and cried until the ambulance arrived.

I went through the funeral preparations, service, and burial in a fog of misery and confusion. Months went by, and while my mourning period had tapered off, what Mom told me as she died hung like a low cloud over my day-to-day activities. Even though I’d started therapy to help cope with everything I was dealing with, those few sentences plagued me. I’d sit in the house alone while the words danced in my head. I realized I had to move away. I had to sell the house and go away if I wanted to get the closure I so desperately needed.

All the stuff I’d brought to the attic needed to go. When Mom was alive, I kept it because I thought we could have a tag sale at some point and she could tell me what to sell and what should be kept for sentimental purposes. Nothing had sentiment anymore. It all had to go. I rented a dumpster, had it delivered to the front yard, and I got to work bringing it all down.

It was an unbearably-hot August. The attic must have been 120 degrees and the process of moving all the junk was kicking up a lot of the dust. I cursed myself for not having a mask or anything, but I was on autopilot to get it all down and out as quickly as possible. I ignored my claustrophobia as best as I could, and in the space of three days, got the vast majority of the stuff from the attic into the dumpster.

Around noon on the fourth day, sweat was pouring down my dusty, filthy body as I worked to take the last few boxes out. I’d gotten into old stuff that’d been there for as long as I could remember. Lots of Dad’s winter clothes and high school yearbooks and stuff. It was by far the dustiest part of the attic. My chest burned and clumps of fuzz floated through the air like volcanic ash. I became acutely aware of my breathing and started to feel dizzy. I felt consumed by the dry heat and could swear the room was getting smaller as I stumbled toward the last of the boxes.

I lost my footing and fell face-first into a pile of boxes in the corner. They crashed to the floor and one split open, spilling its contents. My head hit the ground and I gasped, gulping dust into my throat. I coughed and hacked up gobs of dust-loaded snot. The walls felt like they were squeezing my shoulders and I felt the ceiling, despite being six feet above my head, pushing me into the dusty floor.

Something flashed in the corner of my eye. I whirled around, the thick string of saliva hanging from my lips whipping around and slapping the side of my face. The ghostly figure of a woman stood in the middle of the room with a camcorder on her shoulder. It looked like she was crying. I shrieked and scrambled like a crab to get away.

The figure didn’t respond to my noise and movements. It just kept sobbing and pointing the camcorder. I realized it was my young mother. While the walls and ceiling spun ever closer to me and dust furred my tongue and the back of my throat, I turned around and looked in the direction the camera was recording.

My young father was lying on his belly on the filthy floor. Pinned underneath him, open-mouthed, struggling with all her might, and gasping in lungful after lungful of dust, was a girl no older than four. I blinked three times in rapid succession as disbelief, horror, and revulsion swept through me. The images disappeared. In their place were the contents of the box that had split open. VHS tapes and a broken camcorder.

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Allison’s Loss

bridge

I am a nurse at the elementary school where my daughter, Allison, was a student. The route to school would take us over a wide river which bisects the town. By necessity, we must use one of two bridges. The main bridge is part of the highway, while the other is a smaller, narrower one for local traffic. We used to take the highway, but constant construction had narrowed the lanes by quite a bit which resulted in awful backups. The timetable for completion was another couple years, so we were stuck taking the local one until that whole mess got taken care of.

Allison was terrified of that bridge. The guardrails are quite low; maybe three feet. Also, there’s no physical divider between the inbound and outbound lanes. Years ago, there was a terrible accident involving a drunk driver who crossed into the other lane, struck another vehicle, and sent them both careening into the river below. Five people died – one of whom was May Dougherty – Allie’s best friend.

There was a bit of an uproar when the bridge was repaired and no new safety measures were implemented. The cost for upgrades, we were told, was simply too high for the town to bear. We were assured the bridge was safe and the accident, while tragic, didn’t indicate an inherent problem with that particular crossing. Basically, we were told to suck it up and take the highway if we didn’t like it.

Following the death of May, Allie changed. Her bubbly, outgoing attitude became sullen and brooding. We did everything we could to help her cope with the devastating loss, but little was accomplished. Her therapist said it would take time. We’d have to be patient and allow Allie to grieve on her own terms. Even Allie’s habit of talking to May over the course of the day was to be seen as a coping mechanism; a child’s way of saying goodbye.

Allie resumed school soon after her May’s funeral, and that was when the trouble started. To drive over that bridge with Allie in the car was to learn what it is like to be a torturer. My heart would break as she sobbed and pleaded with me not to take the bridge. If we were stopped at the light before the crossing, she’d fumble with the door handle and try to get out, only to be stopped by the safety locks. Each day she’d arrive at school a red-eyed, dishevelled mess. No one, especially an innocent and kind nine-year old, should have to start their days like that.

My indignation and dismay didn’t change anything. Those rides to school were some of the worst moments of my life. Allie would sob in the backseat and call out to May, begging her to come back and keep the bridge safe for us and everyone else. When we’d reach the other side, Allie would weep and mumble to May about what was going on at school and how everyone else in their class missed her. The only saving grace was that we could take the highway bridge on the way home; traffic was usually light at that time. I couldn’t imagine having to subject Allie to the local bridge more than once a day. I doubt she’d ever get anything done at school if she had that to look forward to when she left.

On March 12th, 2014, Allie came to the breakfast table with a smile on her face. I almost dropped my coffee mug when I saw her; it was as if the daughter I’d lost had finally come home. She was chipper and talkative. She mentioned a spelling test her class was going to have and how her teacher promised a cupcake to the student with the highest grade. Her friend, Christina, was the best speller in the class and Allie was so excited for her to win the cupcake.

Allie talked and talked while she ate her eggs and I got ready for work. I could scarcely believe the improvement she was exhibiting. We finished up our morning routines and got in the car. Allie always insisted on sitting in the back after May’s accident, but that day she got up front with me. We pulled out of the driveway and headed for the school.

There were no signs of concern on Allie’s face as we got closer to the bridge. She chatted with me most of the time, but began informing May about the spelling test/cupcake event that she’d told me earlier. May had also been close with Christina, so apparently it was very important that Allie fill her in on their friend’s impending good fortune.

We stopped at the light at the intersection ahead of the bridge. The light turned green and I drove forward, waiting for Allie to realize where we were and start crying. The opposite happened. She began to giggle – the gleeful, musical sound I’d missed so much. As she laughed, she talked to May.

“May, look how blue the water is! I’m so glad it’s almost Spring and it feels a lot warmer now, doesn’t it? I bet the water’s still cold though. Is it cold? Does it bother you?”

I glanced over at Allie and saw her staring at the water on the other side of the guardrail. She kept talking.

“I don’t mind the cold too much as long as there’s no ice but I don’t see any ice. There’s no ice right?”

“No, there’s no ice.”

The reply came from the backseat. I whipped my head around and saw a figure in the seat behind Allie. It was gray and dripping, with a hideous indentation in its skull and a Y-incision in its chest. Green-blonde hair cascaded over its bruised, bony shoulders. May.

I gasped and turned back toward the road only to see a car stopped dead in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and swerved. Our car hit the guardrail and the vehicle in front of us, pushing the front of our car up onto the rail. Allie was still smiling, apparently unhurt, and whatever I’d seen in the back seat was gone. I reached out for Allie to make sure she was okay, but an impossibly powerful jolt slammed through the car as another vehicle hit us from behind at full speed.

The jarring sensation of the collision was replaced by a sickening, slow lurch as our position shifted from being half on the guardrail, half on the low sports car that’d been in front of us, to a gradual, helpless topple over the rail into a freefall. I couldn’t scream. I saw the water below rushing toward the windshield in a surreal, sunlit haze, and the moment before we hit the river, I glanced sideways at Allie.

Her eyes were closed and a smile was etched across her face. Nothing but the impossibility of the situation registered with me, so when I saw a gray hand reaching from the backseat and unlocking my daughter’s seat belt, I felt little more than acknowledgement.

Then we impacted. I felt my collar bone splinter behind my seat belt. Pain and shock blinked white in my vision and the breath was torn from my lungs. The car righted itself in the water and began to sink.

Allie was embedded up to her neck in the windshield and was dangling over the dashboard and the useless, flaccid airbag. A pile of skin and hair had been pushed down to her shoulders and the water rushing in around her was tinged with red. I have no words for what I felt upon seeing her like that.

I struggled to get out of the sinking car but knew I’d have to wait for it to fill before I could open the door. I wasn’t strong enough to break the window and my shattered collarbone made it impossible to try. We sank.

The car hit the river bottom right when it had filled enough to let me open the door. I gulped in the last bit of air, unlocked my seat belt, and swam out and around to Allie’s side. The devastation to her face and head, despite being blurred by the water, still haunts me to this day. When I reached her side and tried opening the locked door, I knew there was no way I could go back around, unlock it, and try to extricate her. My lungs burned. I felt hot tears leaking out of my eyes and I began to swim up, knowing if I didn’t move fast I’d succumb to hypothermia and die with my daughter. Part of me wished I had the courage to do so.

As I swam, I stared down at the wreck. Then I saw something that made me stop kicking. Another person was standing next to the car. I could see greenish-blonde hair floating in a cloud around her gray head. It was May. She wrenched open the door and with one powerful pull, removed Allie from the windshield. Blood bloomed from her head like the spores of a decapitated mushroom.

The girls looked up. My vision blurred and my feet automatically started kicking again as my body fought to bring me to the surface. I kept watching. My head breached a moment later, but not before I saw the something; something I’ve told my husband, my doctors, my minister, and everyone else who might listen: May and Allie joined hands and began to walk across the muddy bottom of the river in the direction of the lake it fed into. While they walked, Allie turned around to face me, and with her skull grinning, waved goodbye.

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The Blissful Insensate

There’s a reason we don’t know about the things sharing the same space we do. The most obvious one is we can’t see them. Nor can we hear, smell, touch, or taste them. But they exist. They float in and through us; in and through each other. Space, to them, is an infinite series of fields in what we’d consider single positions. If it sounds like nonsense, then you’re showing you can think. You’re showing you have an epistemology based in logic and reason. The problem for us, a group of great thinkers by anyone’s standards, was it meant we were utterly unprepared.

I worked at the Sandia National Laboratories on a project called the Z-Machine. We made the news back in 2006 when we were able to produce the highest temperature ever detected, at around 6.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit. Since then, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland has produced a higher temperature and gleaned loads more information than we were able to. That didn’t mean we decommissioned our Z-Machine and terminated the associated research. Far from it.

After 2006, we began to implement a series of upgrades to our power and containment infrastructure. The goal was to leapfrog the LHC temperature record and reach one quadrillion degrees Fahrenheit; a number nearly every scientist on the team believed would be unattainable for at least another 50 years. New computational models combined with advances in materials science and capacitor discharge timing, however, caused them to reconsider their doubts. Under a cover of secrecy, we continued our upgrades – and in late August of 2016, we were ready to test.

I should give a little background before continuing. In the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you a little something about myself: I was born blind. I endured my share of hardships, which, when compared to some less-privileged children, were paltry, but still unpleasant. Despite my disability, my love of learning was obvious. It became clear fairly early in my life that I was unusually good at mathematics, and thanks to the resources of my parents and a few generous people in my school, I was allowed to continually test and hone my mathematical abilities over the course of my educational career. I ended up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and, eventually, at the Sandia National Laboratories. Whether or not this will help lend credence to my story is entirely up to the reader, but I think it is important to include.

Now, at the end of this past August, the days leading up to the test were fraught with difficulty. Small parts were breaking down, simple things that’d worked perfectly for the last test were failing in the models, and our capacitor banks kept refusing to synchronize. Some of us were reminded of the hardships prior to the first test of the LHC, when conspiracy theorists were claiming visitors from the future were sabotaging the components to prevent a catastrophe from occurring when the machine was activated.

Thankfully for our project and the stress levels of the engineers and physicists I worked with, the problems were ironed out. On August 29th, Dr. Wang Lin and Dr. Alasdair Greenberg were alongside me in the control room as countless people in all branches of the military and scientific establishment watched remotely.

We’d begun charging the capacitors a few hours prior to the test. Our onsite nuclear plant was chugging along and providing the power we needed, despite redlining once or twice as the capacitors absorbed every electron they were fed. I felt out the various readouts on my braille terminal and listened for any audio cues that were programmed to indicate any anomalies. There were none. We were ready to test.

At 11:10am, we started the countdown. The smell of ozone from all the nearby electricity was pervasive and mildly intoxicating. Dr. Lin’s voice was steady and tinged with controlled excitement as he read the last numbers: 4…3…2…1.

I heard a loud, clapping sound as the power was shunted from the capacitors into Marx generators, followed by a pop as the generators fed the Z-Machine. The test was over. All we needed to do was wait for the flood of data.

Before any data could pour in, though, I heard some commotion behind me. Drs. Lin and Greenberg were talking, but not to one another nor anyone observing remotely. It was as if they were talking to themselves, under their breath, but not in words I could understand. Then Dr. Lin said, “hello there,” as if speaking to a cat or other small animal. Similarly, Dr. Greenberg muttered, “what in the world are you, little guy?”

I asked them who they were talking to, but they wouldn’t reply. I felt some pressure in my chest and against my skin that reminded me of blankets rich with static electricity were being pressed and rubbed all over me.

“What are all these things?,” asked Dr. Greenberg. Someone viewing remotely asked him to clarify; they weren’t seeing anything on the monitors.

“Jerry,” said Dr. Lin, speaking to me, “do you feel them?”

“Feel who?,” I asked. “Feel what?”

“They’re all over us,” Dr. Greenberg told me. “Floating in and out and around like little squid or jellyfish.”

“What the hell is that?,” Dr. Lin asked.

“Jesus, what is…,” started Dr. Greenberg.

The two doctors gasped and shouted. I felt them pushing up against the control panel next to me, which was the furthest spot from the observation deck overlooking the Z-Machine.

“Guys, what’s going on?” I felt moderate fear starting to nibble at my spine, growing in severity as the doctors refused to answer me and only kept gasping and shouting.

I clicked my headset over to the observation channel and tried to get one of the remote parties to fill me in on what was happening. They were equally in the dark and wanted me to tell them what was wrong with the doctors. Other members of the labs were banging on the door of our control room, trying to get it open. It was locked.

“It’s huge…,” choked out Dr. Greenberg.

“Why is it here?,” whispered Dr. Lin. He was sobbing.

“I can’t look at it anymore,” Dr. Greenberg announced, matter-of-factly.

I heard something metallic, then the sound of Dr. Greenberg screaming. “I can feel it in my head – I can taste it – it’s in every part of me.”

Dr. Lin called out, “let me help you.” There were wet noises mixed in with the pounding on the door and the commotion on the radio as the remote observers saw what the doctors were doing in the control room.

All I could focus on was the feeling of static and pressure on my skin. It was suffocating and terrible, like those blankets were sliding in and out of my lungs and mouth and leaving little arcs of electricity with every move.

I heard the door slam open and the feeling dissipated. I sat slumped in my chair, trying to catch my breath, as security and other scientists rushed into the control room.

“What the fuck is going on?,” I yelled, and felt someone pushing me and my chair out of the room, down the long hallway, and into another lab.

And that was it.

I was sedated against my will and woke up in the hospital three days later. I was forced to sign documents making me promise, under penalty of treason, that I wouldn’t divulge what happened during that test. But I didn’t know what happened. I still don’t. Regardless, I need to tell you that something happened. Something monstrous.

As I waited in the hospital, a friend of mine from the labs, Dr. Marie Lenzetti, sat with me and said what happened to Drs. Lin and Greenberg. Both were dead. Dr. Lin had killed Dr. Greenberg and inflicted terrible injuries on himself. But Dr. Lin spoke to the other scientists before he died. He told them what it was he saw; what he saw, then as a consequence heard and felt and heard and smelled and tasted. It was something entirely beyond his comprehension; something entirely beyond anything he could have dreamt.

The doctors got a glimpse of what occupied the space we thought was our own. The Z-Machine experiment created conditions that allowed them to see how wrong we were. That moment, he said, lasted an eternity. As soon as its shape registered in his eyes, he experienced it in all his senses. Every sense was dominated. Cutting away Dr. Greenberg’s eyes, tongue, nose, ears, and as much skin as possible was the only act of mercy and relief he could give his friend. And when he was done, he tried to do the same to himself, only to be stopped before he could excise his own tongue and skin. He died of a massive stroke an hour later.

I’m writing this to let you know there are things outside the realm of our senses which pervade everything we do. Everything we are. Things that can prove, and in fact have now proven, that we are not the dominant actors in the space we occupy. The Z-Machine experiment last month showed my friends the atrocious nature of true reality: something too hideous for our senses to endure. I will never consider my blindness to be anything other than a gift for as long as I continue to live.

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