[Intro Theme]
ANNOUNCER
Rusty Quill Presents: The Magnus Protocol.
Episode Fifty-Five – Blind Spots.
[Music]
[Click]
[GEORGIE and MELANIE are sat at the table, mid-discussion]
MELANIE
– So we’re just leaving him in there?
GEORGIE
We’ve got the new expanded perimeter covered, so we should be able to help him as soon he gets to the edge, but given how active the zone is getting and how many dreamers we’re having to keep back… we can’t keep sending people in after him.
MELANIE
Right, right, but… He’s in there alone.
GEORGIE
We’ve tried locking him up, moving him away, posting guards, it doesn’t help. When he displaces, he’s just gone.
MELANIE
I know, I get it. Just makes me feel a bit useless.
GEORGIE
Yeah. There’s a lot of that going around at the moment –
[SAM enters, slightly breathless and unsettled]
GEORGIE
There you are! Welcome back.
MELANIE
Sam, you’re okay!
SAM
(wearily) Hey.
MELANIE
Are you okay?
SAM
(not fine) I’ll be fine.
GEORGIE
Did one of the wardens pick you up at the perimeter? They were supposed to call it in.
SAM
Not quite… I saw them but they looked pretty busy and I don’t think they even noticed me so I just walked out and came here.
MELANIE
Ah.
GEORGIE
(frustrated) You just walked out.
SAM
Yeah.
GEORGIE
I see. Melanie, could you just–?
MELANIE
I’ll call it in.
[MELANIE exits]
[SAM starts taking his boots off]
GEORGIE
Sleeping in your boots now?
SAM
I’ve got to be prepared.
GEORGIE
Smart. At this rate you’re going to have clocked more hours in the zone than some of my squad.
SAM
Lucky me.
[Beat]
GEORGIE
You know, I plotted the new perimeter cordon myself, Sam.
SAM
Okay.
GEORGIE
And with the reinforcements from the other posts, it’s pretty comprehensive.
SAM
What’s your point?
GEORGIE
My point is that there’s no way you could have gotten out of the Zone unnoticed unless you went deeper first then circled back.
SAM
I must’ve gotten turned around.
GEORGIE
You can’t keep snooping around in there on your own.
SAM
It’s not like I’m choosing to go in there!
GEORGIE
No, but once you are, you’re choosing to try and scout alone and untrained!
SAM
Basira’s training me.
GEORGIE
To defend yourself, not to hunt avatars! Besides, she’s hardly an expert on the Zone herself.
SAM
But you still let her back you up in there.
GEORGIE
(spotting the trap) That’s different.
SAM
Yeah. You trust her.
[Beat]
GEORGIE
What do you want me to say, Sam? I like you fine –
[SAM reacts]
GEORGIE
I do! And you’ve convinced me you’re on our side, but how can I trust you to have my back when you’re constantly running off on your own?
SAM
Everything is waking up in there. The Archivist is loose and you’re barely keeping it all contained! If I can just find it –
GEORGIE
You’re going to get yourself killed.
SAM
(genuine) Better me than someone else.
GEORGIE
(snapping) For god’s sake, Sam –
[MELANIE enters]
MELANIE
Sorry, but you’re gonna want to join us.
GEORGIE
What now?
MELANIE
There’s been a… development.
[Click]
[Click]
[SAM, BASIRA, GEORGIE and MELANIE are stood around a table.]
GEORGIE
– and what I’m hearing, Basira, is that you broke basic protocol. Again.
BASIRA
Don’t give me that Warden shit. It was right after everything came back – there weren’t any “protocols” except keeping everyone alive.
GEORGIE
It was reckless and it put us all in danger.
BASIRA
No it didn’t. They were completely normal, unlike most of the stuff your lot have recovered.
GEORGIE
That’s different –
BASIRA
Oh yeah? You think I don’t recognize that box you’ve got locked up in your vault?
GEORGIE
That’s a dangerous artefact we’re guarding for security purposes, not… sentimentality.
BASIRA
I’m not going to apologise for missing our friends and wanting to hear their voices.
MELANIE
(intervening) I thought all the old tapes disappeared when the Web bailed?
BASIRA
Not all of them. As far as I can tell, it only took the ones where John or someone else had recorded a proper genuine statement. I found a bunch of other ones in the ruins.
SAM
Can someone please explain to me what’s going on?
GEORGIE
Basira thought it would be a good idea to keep some souvenirs of the old archivist’s voice.
MELANIE
And it looks like the new archivist used one of them to get in touch.
SAM
What?
[A thunk as Basira throws something onto the table]
SAM
Oh. I see.
GEORGIE
Would it even work in a normal tape player? It looks too… Organic?
BASIRA
I tried it for a few seconds earlier and it seems like it works.
GEORGIE
Christ, Basira! You tried it without – Fine. At least we know it won’t immediately kill us all now.
SAM
But how did it know you had tapes at all?
MELANIE
Our Archivist had a thing about cassette tapes, like a kind of connection. Maybe yours is similar? Or maybe it’s just picking up on how archive monsters work in this reality.
BASIRA
The “how” doesn’t really matter, though, does it?
GEORGIE
No. Play it, Basira.
BASIRA
You sure you don’t want to get a committee together first? Maybe –
GEORGIE
Oh for fuck’s sake.
[GEORGIE snatches the tape, squashes it into a player and hits play]
[Click]
[The tape has been recorded in a cavernous room with distant falling water and a susurration of whispers]
ARCHIVIST
(on tape) Samama… Are you listening? Yes… I can taste your attention just as I tasted your mind when you brought me to this place…
SAM
I didn’t –
MELANIE
Shhhhh!
ARCHIVIST
(on tape) You brought me to this place and I have gorged myself on its stories and for that I thank you. But the flavors… they are wrong… they do things to me, clear things… cloud things…
Here I may think beyond the hunger of abandoned decades and speak with words that are almost my own. But there is music here, faint and beautiful, shivering through me like a distant piping… A fiddle strung with bloodied tendons…
The echoes of that lingering tune, it begs me to take up the dance. but would I be myself, or just another puppet?
And beneath the music there is a clarity, a story of my own memory. There was a time before this unchosen blessing and had you shown this fate to the woman who once walked into that shadowed Institute on a rainy November evening she would, I’m sure, have screamed and ran. But she did not know and now she is so much more.
She was an idealist who did not belong in a world of cynics. A beating heart that glowed and ached and bled for every ounce of suffering she saw within the world. She truly believed it was her duty to bear witness and so would scour the newspapers, listen to the radio and read book after book on atrocities both ancient and modern. She believed to look away would be to betray a world already bleeding, and so she suffered for it instead, again and again.
The Magnus Institute couldn’t believe their luck. I cannot seem to know if she found them or they found her or if some tenuous thread of fate made such a meeting inevitable. Regardless, it happened and the Institute was pleased.
She was perfect, they told her. She was going to save the world. She would be their great work, their magnum opus. All she had to do was bear witness with absolute sympathy.
They took her to a small room, paneled in dark wood and her pathetic, aged eyes could not pick out the fingernail scratches and bloodstains which diligent cleaning had failed to reach. Her weak, failing ears could not hear the echoes of her screaming predecessors and her drying, mortal tongue could not taste the desperation that rolled off her socalled colleagues as they worked.
She did not know these things and so she smiled as they brought her a pair of broken antique spectacles, the “catalyst,” as they called them. The thin metal frames were far too warped to wear and the lenses too clouded and cracked to see through, but still they laid them upon her eyes as they strapped her to the chair.
I wonder if she realized her error as the restraints tightened and the mask was slipped over her mouth. Certainly there was apprehension and fear as the strange smelling gases began to seep into her lungs and the current started flowing through her limbs.
Looking back, I can see these details with a clarity far beyond any she could possibly have possessed but even now, to peer within the mind of that woman who served as my foundation… Such a thing feels impossible.
What did she feel when the procedure truly started and the stories began to be told? Tales to appall your mind and churn your stomach, images to linger behind your eyelids when you try to sleep; voices that send paralyzing chills from skin to heart to brain and back again. Some bizarre, others uncanny, but most simply awful, dour testaments to mundane human evil.
And in response to every single one the woman felt a surge of pity and warmth and deep, aching sympathy, tinged with the promise that there must be a way to redeem it.
And as the minutes of this onslaught turned to hours turned to days and nights, she began to feel the horrors, smell them, taste them. There was no sleep, no food, no pause in the torrent of nightmarish sensations they fed into her and so the stories became her own.
The relentless feelings grew and the other changes quickly followed. After a day she was numb to the agony. After two they delighted her, as the shattered spectacles disappeared beneath an eruption of bright new eyes. After three she was ravenous for more.
Then the flesh began to strain and the eyes began to spread, and once those paltry crumbs of horror could no longer sustain this new-created thing, I stood, snapping my bonds with ease.
The Observers’ shock and fear was so nourishing that I could not have stopped myself even if I had wanted to. The heavy, delicious lumps of shuddering terror that I pulled out with their stories were like nothing I had ever tasted, and taking them left nothing but hollowed out husks behind the reinforced glass.
They had left a tape recorder in the room to capture the nuances of the transformation and as I looked down upon it and breathed deeply of the noxious fumes, I felt the spooling tape inhale with me, dragging in the world around us and holding it neatly within its turning wheels.
They did not understand me, of course. They labeled me a failure and threw me into a hole with the other rejected things. They still tried to study me, bringing witnesses of strange and terrible things. Witnesses who would not be missed after I took them and their “statements.”
All too soon, though, the only lesson they wished to learn was how long I would take to die, starving beneath the Institute. And starve I did, but I would not die. Even as my captors abandoned me, even as the building burned down above my head and even as the years passed, trapped in undiscovered darkness, I endured. I endured and I rotted as a failure, a discarded redeemer of the undeserving, who could not save the world.
And then you came, Samama. You came and you threw me the key to a surface I had forgotten and then you led me to this strange and wonderful place.
Twice over you have saved me and for that I thank you and tell you to leave me now. Head back to the grey obscurity that sheltered you and I will not follow. I will stay. I will eat this new world. I will binge upon its stories and in their place I will weave new ones where I finally belong.
It is time to finish the tale…
[The ARCHIVIST fades, leaving the tape recording its absence]
[After a moment, BASIRA stops the tape]
[click]
[SAM, BASIRA, GEORGIE and MELANIE consider what they have heard]
MELANIE
Well, that was helpful.
GEORGIE
Answers the identity question at least.
SAM
Does it? We don’t even know its name!
GEORGIE
We don’t need a name. We know who it is.
MELANIE
And who it isn’t.
BASIRA
And we know what it wants.
MELANIE
…Plus, I’ve got a pretty good idea where it is.
GEORGIE
Oh?
MELANIE
Basira, could you rewind and play the last few seconds again?
BASIRA
All right.
[Basira rewinds the tape, then hits “PLAY”]
ARCHIVIST
(on tape) – It is time to finish the tale…
MELANIE
There.
[The tape keeps playing after the ARCHIVIST fades]
MELANIE
You hear the echo?
GEORGIE
Yeah…
MELANIE
And the water?
GEORGIE
Interesting.
SAM
(impatient) So it’s still underground. How does this help us?
BASRIA
(realizing) The Panopticon.
SAM
I thought you said that was a tower?
MELANIE
Only after the incursion. Originally it was buried underground and there were tunnels running all around it.
SAM
Like the one we fell into when Alice…
MELANIE
Not quite. That was one of the normal tunnels that used to run under London.
SAM
Didn’t look very normal to me…
BASIRA
Fair point.
MELANIE
The tunnels near the Panopticon were different. They sort of balanced between the Fears before everything went wrong.
SAM
Okay…
MELANIE
And when everything went to hell, they offered some protection.
GEORGIE
Like the eye of a storm.
SAM
And you think you can recognize those specific tunnels just from the background of that recording?
MELANIE
I will never forget what it sounded like in those tunnels.
GEORGIE
It makes sense it would choose there…
SAM
And what, when the Archivist magically changed this tape –
MELANIE
(automatic) – not magic –
SAM
(ignoring her) – it just conveniently decided to include background noise?
[Beat]
BASIRA
(matter-of-fact) It’s a trap.
GEORGIE
Could be a trap.
MELANIE
Probably a trap.
[Beat.]
We’re going anyway though, right?
BASIRA
I am. All this tunnel talk has given me an idea.
SAM
Count me in.
GEORGIE
(frustrated) Now hang on, you can’t just decide –
[The still running tape audio changes from Panopticon to Archives cupboard]
MARTIN
(on tape) – and so, ye arrows of despair, that pitch and roll toward my breast –
BASIRA
Sorry, this is what was on the tape before. Hang on…
MARTIN
(on tape) – as were a barb-ed spearhead –
[The door opens on tape]
MARTIN
(on tape) Occupied! Occupied!
SAM
Wait…
JOHN
(on tape) Martin? What are you talking about? You can’t “occupy” the storage room. Now get out the way, I need a pen.
SAM
I know those voices…
MARTIN
(on tape) I just meant I was doing something a little… private.
SAM
Who are they?
JOHN
(on tape) If it’s that private I suggest you do it at home. Now can I please get to the pens.
MARTIN
(on tape) Fine, fine, sorry.
[Martin stops the recording and the tape ends]
SAM
Who are they?
MELANIE
Jonathan Sims. Our archivist, and Martin Blackwood, his… partner.
BASIRA
(intense) You said you know them.
SAM
Their voices. Back at work. They’re, uh, they’re voices in my computer.
[Long pause]
BASIRA
I don’t know what to say to that.
GEORGIE
Yeah. What do you mean?
SAM
I don’t know how else to say it. Sometimes the computer reads out one of the weird cases we get as text-to-speech, and when it does, it uses preset voices. These two or Augustus.
MELANIE
Augustus?
SAM
Yeah. We call Jonathan “Chester” and… Martin, is it? He’s Norris –
MELANIE
I can see him as a Norris.
SAM
– and Augustus is the third one.
GEORGIE
Wait. So who’s Augustus?
SAM
No idea. I didn’t even know Chester and Norris were actual real people until just now.
MELANIE
(realizing) Oh shit, you don’t think –
BASIRA
(ducking out) Hang on, let me find another tape.
[Click]
[Click]
[SAM, BASIRA and MELANIE are back around the tape player. BASIRA is loading it with another normal tape.]
MELANIE
Found one?
BASIRA
Yeah, it’s not much but should be enough for an ID.
SAM
So do we wait for Georgie?
MELANIE
No, she said she’ll join once she’s through with the briefing.
BASIRA
Right. Now Sam, I want you to listen to the man talking to John here and let me know if it’s Augustus, okay?
SAM
Okay.
[BASIRA presses play on a recording of a small party at the Institute]
JOHN [ARCHIVIST]
(on tape) – I can’t tell you.
ELIAS
(on tape) He wished for a little bit of peace and quiet.
BASIRA
That one. That voice.
JOHN [ARCHIVIST]
(on tape) Was it that obvious?
ELIAS
(on tape) Oh, I wouldn’t worry, John. It’s an Archive. Quiet is very much the course du jour.
[BASIRA presses stop.]
MELANIE
Well?
SAM
No. It’s not him.
MELANIE
You’re sure?
SAM
Positive. That’s not Augustus. Although…
BASIRA
Although?
SAM
I don’t know… something in his tone, or rhythm, maybe? It’s similar, but the voice is definitely different.
BASIRA
Interesting…
[GEORGIE enters]
GEORGIE
Any luck?
SAM
It’s not him.
GEORGIE
Well, it was a long shot anyway, and it’s not like it’d be any help.
MELANIE
How was the briefing?
GEORGIE
They seem to be a decent bunch. I’m not a fan of deputizing like this, though.
BASIRA
Even with the reinforcements, you don’t have enough wardens to keep the dreamers at bay and sweep the tunnels. You need more people and I can vouch for every one of the guys that came here with me. They won’t let you down.
GEORGIE
Just as long as we’re clear: none of them are going in the zone. Crowd control on the perimeter, that’s it. We’re the ones who carry it in.
BASIRA
Clear as day. Wardens go in, my lot keep people out.
SAM
(firm) I’m going too.
MELANIE
Here we go again…
GEORGIE
Sam, we’ve been over this.
SAM
(prepared) Basira’s given me basic training and you said yourself I’ve already clocked in more Zone hours than half your wardens.
GEORGIE
That’s not –
SAM
(firm) No one else dies on my behalf. You heard the tape, I brought The Archivist here, this is my responsibility and I’m going to fix it.
[Beat]
GEORGIE
You know I could just have you detained?
SAM
You know I could just take a nap and teleport there.
MELANIE
(amused) He’s got you there…
[Pause as Georgie considers]
BASIRA
He’s had more training than we did back in the day.
GEORGIE
Fine! But you obey any orders you receive without question.
SAM
Sure.
GEORGIE
(to Basira) And if anything goes wrong he’s your responsibility.
BASIRA
Great.
GEORGIE
Right, grab your gear. We start in the hour.
[Music]
ANNOUNCER
The Magnus Protocol is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International License. The series is created by Jonathan Sims and Alexander J Newall, and directed by Alexander J Newall.
This episode was written by Jonathan Sims and edited with additional materials by Alexander J Newall, with vocal edits by Nico Vettese, soundscaping by Meg McKellar, and mastering by Catherine Rinella with music by Sam Jones.
It featured Shahan Hamza as Samama Khalid, Sasha Sienna as Georgie Barker, and Lydia Nicholas as Melanie King with additional voices from Beth Eyre.
The Magnus Protocol is produced by April Sumner, with executive producers Alexander J Newall, Dani McDonough, Linn Ci, and Samantha F.G. Hamilton, and Associate Producers Jordan L. Hawk, Taylor Michaels, Nicole Perlman, Cetius d’Raven, and Megan Nice.
To subscribe, explore exclusive extras, and enjoy early access adfree episodes, visit members.rustyquill.com or join our Patreon. Rate and review us online, follow us on social media and email us at mail@rustyquill.com.
Thanks for listening.