The Hidden Notebook of Adam Nash

by MmmCoffee

Adam Nash's Hidden Notebook uncovers chilling details of strange goings on at the isolated Martian facility.

From: Katrina Mitchell

Topic: Proposal for Investigation

Dear Mr Evans,

I am writing to formally request permission to begin research on a story that, at worst, be an interesting historical piece based around a space marine's story, or, at best, expose the biggest cover up the planet has ever seen.

On the eighth of December, 2146, Adam "Ash" Nash passed away in his sleep at the Florida Marine Infirmary. Nash had been there for four weeks after a massive explosion caused by a malfunction at the plasma plant ripped through the UAC's Martian facility. The explosion resulted in massive casualties, both civilian and military, and destroyed the UAC base. Or so history says.

On the eighth of January, 2209, a woman named Sarah Patricia Stevens passed away in her sleep at her home. At the reading of her will, the family was puzzled when a "Hidden Notebook of Adam Nash" was mentioned. The will gave very specific directions of where it was to be found. It turns out that 63 years earlier, Stevens was Nash's nurse, and was entrusted with a valuable document.

This document is reproduced here:

I wonder where this will end up. In a smoldering pile of ashes at the bottom of a fireplace is my guess. Still, I feel I need to write this to convey what I went through. And if you are reading this, then I obviously decided not to destroy it, and a few disclaimers apply. What follows are my recollections of the events leading up to my hospitalisation. Events are told as best as I can remember them, and conversations are reproduced how I remember them. I make no claim that my recollections are accurate, so do not treat this document as an "official history." The events are told from my perspective as a space marine, and do not reflect the opinions of the marine corps in any way. Finally, even the best poets and the most articulate writers of our time wouldn't be able to find words to describe what I have seen. That makes the words of this broken space marine particularly inadequate. But I'll do my best.

Introduction

I am in a black room with no walls and no floor. It is silent. Around me, a chill begins to swirl. It creeps up my spine, and wraps icy fingers around my neck. I blink and before me is a bone white apparition. Decaying flesh hangs loosely from its bones and steel-grey eyes stare out at me from within deep black hollows. It opens its mouth and a rotten wind exhales from deep within its decaying form ... I'm panicking, grasping at nothingness.

It is 10:13am, 6th December, 2146, and I have been lying in the infirmary at the Space division of the Florida Marine base for almost four weeks. I can sit up now, and I have a TV in my room. I'm watching the news, but there is no news from Mars. No news is good news. It means that Earth is in no immediate threat. They will keep this thing under wraps until Earth needs to know about it. Outside the rain is falling softly, and a sparrow is playing in a puddle.

My first week in the infirmary was spent slipping in and out of consciousness. Yesterday, a doctor told me during my first seven days, I was babbling nonsense and they were getting worried that the stress had caused permanent mental instability. No fear of that! I was awake during week two. Last week, they removed the braces that kept my body in a permanent rigid position. I have had major skin grafts and stitches lace my body. I look like a giant baseball, or some patchwork doll. But I am alive. I can't help but ask myself why I am alive when so many others are dead, including my best friend Jason "JJ" Johnson?

I held the pistol tightly in both hands, yelling at him to drop the shotgun. He kept advancing with intent in his eyes. I screamed for him to stop, but he wouldn't listen. I was backed into a wall. "Drop the gun!" I screamed. He stopped directly underneath an emergency light and slowly shook is head "no." The shotgun began to rise, and the cold barrel glinted under the fluorescent illumination. On instinct, I pulled my trigger, instantly blowing my best friend's head into a fountain of blood and brain. The body slumped at my feet, and I just stood there, shaking.

A Very Brief History

The Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) was formed when the under-funded NASA was bought off the United States government by a group of billionaire Texan space enthusiasts. The ultimate goal was to make commercial space travel a reality, but to achieve this, they had to turn a profit until the dream was realized. Thus, the UAC name became associated with such things as Diet Red and STER-X. Eventually, the first orbital airliner, the Armadillo, made its first flight the year I was born. The world was excited, and everybody watched the launch online.

Then a funny thing happened. The UAC won the contract to be the supplier of military hardware to the armed forces of the United States. The competition was tough, and the UAC knew it would have to deliver results to maintain the contract. Within a couple of years, Marines found their enormous arms wrapped around some damn impressive gear. Hand-held chainguns and rocket launchers made their way to front lines around the world. The development of "Team-net" gave US troops a huge battlefield advantage, and the use of stimpacks meant that soldiers who would have otherwise died, could get up and fight again.

Seven years after the first orbital space flight, it became known that our enemies were frantically building military space vehicles with the intent of claiming Mars. This was obviously a last-ditch effort to gain some military advantage back over us. This panicked the United States, who contracted the UAC to design their own space vehicles for taking Mars. The US poured billions of dollars into the UAC, with the further incentive that if USA got Mars, the UAC could use it unrestrictedly for research and development of military hardware, and the US Marine Corps would provide the defense for the UAC's extra terrestrial operations. This was a perfect opportunity for the UAC, who had recently been looking into plasma-based weaponry. The only problem being that there was nowhere on Earth they could build these things. Preliminary testing had indicated that should a plasma plant fail, the explosion would vapourise anything within a 100km radius, and the shockwave would destroy everything for thousands of kilometers more. There was nowhere on Earth remote enough to put a plasma plant. Fortunately for everybody involved, USA didn't really want Mars; they just didn't want anyone else getting it.

Five years later, on the 18th September 2118, the first UAC/USA space vehicle landed on the surface of Mars, and the first Space Marines stepped out onto Martian soil. Within days, construction began on the Alpha and Beta Labs, and on the Martian military outpost.

Mars: The Roman god of war.

Mars: Home of the largest weapons manufacturer in history.

You have to smile.

The Gateway to Nowhere

The experiments had continued for several months. The scientists could not eliminate the side effect of the deliriousness though. It was hypothesized that the time difference between sending the subject, and retrieving him again was too soon. Perhaps there was a latency period that had to pass before the subject could be retrieved. The current "volunteer" had been sent into the teleporter exactly 24 hours ago.

The scientist keyed in the unique matter profile of prisoner 10121993. The accelerators whirled into action, and the computer displayed a positive lock. The Gateway began glowing red. I raised my rifle at the gate in anticipation of the prisoner appearing. He would have to be subdued, one way or another, if he came through maniacally insane. It was widely accepted that a bullet through the brain was the most effective tranquilizer. The red globes started to appear: the Gateway was ready to expel its cargo. Suddenly, we were showered with blood, bones, and brain. Bits of flesh flew around the room, and spattered against the sterile steel walls. A chewed up hand whizzed past my visor, narrowly missing me. The teleporter went quiet again, and the five of us were left standing there, dripping with blood, and standing in gore.

"Shit, eh? I preferred it when they only went insane," JJ said eventually, shaking what looked like a piece of liver off his arm.

There was another pregnant pause. "That was...unexpected," the shaken scientist finally whispered.

When I was finally promoted to head security on Mars, UAC scientists were beginning to experiment with teleportation technology; the stuff of child-hood science fiction. I remember the feeling at the time was one of immense excitement, the kind of feeling when you're on the cusp of a breakthrough. This technology would have given us a major military advantage over our enemies, and the possibility to profit commercially from the technology was staggering. They had been working on it for years, and when I finally got 'in the loop', so to speak, they were very near a working prototype. I received the weekly updates every Tuesday, until finally they were ready to show me what they had down in the Delta Labs.

I remember getting off the tram, and a very excited, and very nervous, young scientist meeting me at the depot. He shook my hand, and led me through the complex. It had been a while since I'd been down here; the new job meant I was cooped up in an office most of the time. After countless corridors, and a thousand Hello-Sirs I found myself standing outside the door to "Teleporter One." I was rather excited to see what they had been working on all this time, and to see how far they had come.

The device they had developed looked like a metal doorway like the kind found on ships. A small set of stairs led up to the doorway to nowhere, and flanking it were what looked like two giant coils encased in a metallic shell. The scientist grabbed an empty STER-X box he had conveniently left for the demonstration, and put it on the table next to me. He then pulled a pen out from his coat pocket, and handed it to me. "Write anything you want on the box." I must have looked quite confused for he continued, "that way we know it's the same box!" I thought this was being a bit dramatic, but considering the circumstances, you could forgive anyone for getting caught up in the excitement. I scribbled my signature on the cardboard, and handed the box, and the pen back to the scientist. He pocketed the pen, snatched the box, and scuttled up the stairs with it. He placed it in the middle of the doorway and scurried back down.

"I'll show you what we do now." The scientist stood at the control console and pressed this and that. "The first thing we do is scan it and that gives us a unique matter profile. Basically, that tells the computer that every bit of matter matching this profile is what we want to receive at the gate at the other end, or in this case, next door."

I nodded.

Then we basically hit send.

I nodded again.

click tap tap

The generators whirled into life, and the gateway became to glow a translucent red. I stared at the box. Small red globes began to circle the box. They whirled around it then swallowed it into what looked like a tear in the air. The tear closed, and the generators wound down. And where there was a box, was only empty space.

I nodded. "Very impressive. So the box is now in the next room?"

"No, we have to receive it. We can receive it here, or we can receive it in the next room."

"Like receiving mail on WorldNet?"

"Yeah, sorta."

"So where's the box now?"

"Imagine that the universe is a 2D piece of paper. Now image that there are two pieces of paper, one containing our universe, and one containing some alternative dimension. Now try to imagine that every point of our piece of paper is touching every point of the other piece of paper. When we teleport something, we send it over onto the other piece of paper, then send it back onto ours. Since every point of our paper is touching every point of the other piece of paper, it comes back instantly somewhere else."

It took a while to visualize, but the scientist was eager to draw diagrams, and eventually I had a basic grasp of the concepts involved.

After a bit, I realized that our box was still out in the ether. "Shall we bring back the box?" I asked.

We moved next door into a room identical to the first. The scientist tap-tap-tapped again, the gateway glowed, the red globes appeared, and out of a black tear came the box.

The same box with my signature on the side.

This was exciting stuff. "Have any Humans traveled through the teleporter yet?" I asked.

"Well, no. It's hard finding volunteers, as you can imagine."

"I think I can source some 'volunteers' for you," I suggested. I had a whole cell block brimming with volunteers.

That evening I was standing out on one of the observation decks, watching the sunset. The Martian horizon was glowing a brilliant blue, and the red rocks cast long shadows on the landscape. I was thinking about how amazing this technology was.

Instantly traveling anywhere in the universe...It would change mankind.

I looked at the ring on my finger, and the way it glistened in the waning sunlight. I thought to myself that if this technology had been around 20 years ago, I may still be married, and still have a daughter that loves her Daddy.

Daddy Daddy! A weight thumped on my chest. I slowly opened one eye, and light poured through the sliver of my eyelid, flooding my senses. I reached out and felt the soft hair of my daughter, Katie. "Daddy, wake up! It's my birthday!"

"Happy Birthday darling," I said, as I held her close to my body, feeling her warm rosy cheek next to mine.

I took in a deep breath smelling the fresh fragrance of her hair.

Then the phone rang. A vehicle was being sent for me.

Then I was getting dressed, getting ready to ship out.

As I pulled away in the vehicle, Katie waved at me, and with tears rolling down her cheeks she said, "Come back soon. I love you."

The Anomalies

And so the weeks and months went by and the experiments continued. Countless boxes and crates went backwards and forwards through the teleporters, and any anomalous events were documented and eventually landed on my desk. Three bottles went in; only two came back etc. Experiments using Humans had begun by this time too, which had the added side-benefit of clearing out our over-crowded prison. I have to admit I loved having an excuse to blow the brains out of those sick fuckers, as they came out babbling and possessed. After the famous prisoner 10121993 incident, experiments with Humans was postponed, and experiments using boxes and crates continued.

It was bright pink morning, and I was preparing my notes for a presentation to the new marines. I was deep in concentration when the phone buzzed loudly. It was one of the scientists. "Sir, we have an anomalous event to report."

"OK," I replied, slightly annoyed at the lapse in standard procedure. "Fill out the AEF and send it up."

"Yes Sir, I will, but I think you ought to see this. This is....very....strange...and slightly worrying."

"Yes?"

"There seem to be teeth and claw marks on the second box that came through."

I was there in an instant. The box was in the sterile quarantine chamber, undergoing analysis. Sure enough, across the side of the Diet Red box were four parallel tears in the cardboard. The corner had puncture marks in it not much unlike teeth marks.

"Where on Earth did those come from?"

"We have no idea. The box went in at 0628, and retrieved at 0630. When it came back, it had those on it."

I had a very bad feeling about this, and a meeting was called.

"What could have caused this?"

"We always assumed that what we were sending out was just an energy field immersed in the fabric of the universe. We have to look at the possibility that these materials are actually physically manifesting themselves on the other side."

"What do we know about this other dimension? Could it be that there is alien life in that realm?"

A silence befell the room like a fog.

"I think I know what caused those marks." It was a younger scientist, about 22, or so. His face was gaunt, and he looked like he hadn't slept in a month. His hands were slightly trembling. He looked a little embarrassed. All eyes were on him now, and he spoke again. "I've been having visions." He pulled a sleeve up, and we could all see the lines crisscrossing his wrists and arms caused by self-inflicted slicing. The young man unbuttoned his shirt. The room let out a collective gasp. There, emblazoned on his chest, was a pentagram carved into his flesh. The red lines were very deep.

"The pain is too much. The Beast is preparing. Our doom is upon us."

The Visions

I called the medics, and the scientist was taken to Ward Eight. He was babbling about demons and "The Beast." In hindsight, we should have listened to what he had to say, but at the time, as far as we knew, that kid had flipped his lid. Needless to say, the young scientist was sent back to Earth, and probably to this day is hospitalised in some institution, somewhere. More meetings were held, and it was decided to keep research going, albeit a little more cautiously. I decided to have an increased military presence at the Delta Labs, should any anomalous event require a rapid response.

Meanwhile, the investors back home were told that the project had suffered several delays, but the research was "on track."

We stood anxiously waiting for the retrieval of the STER-X crate. It was one week after the "Diet Red Box Event." The glowing red globes swirled. Suddenly, cardboard exploded from the center of the teleporter along with an icy chill.

We all stood there in bits of cardboard. Disappointment, anger, and frustration was painted on every scientist's face. The research was going backwards, and fast. Time was being lost, and millions of dollars were on the line.

Another meeting. It was decided a total overhaul of the teleporters was in order. Perhaps all this heavy use had taken its toll on the new technology. Nobody knew how often these things needed servicing; no-one had ever built one before. The estimated time to overhaul the two teleporters was two months.

I will eat your soul! I spun around. The doorway was empty. I stepped out into the hallway. Empty. I assumed the lack of sleep was what caused my auditory hallucination. I had been having severe nightmares, and getting little more than a couple of hours sleep a night.

The Revenant is emitting a deafening scream as it extends its boney arm toward me. My sweaty palms are clutching a plasma rifle, but I am paralysed. I am willing myself to pull the trigger, but my fingers defy me. The whispering sands at my feet burn through my boots. A sea of lost souls is wailing and weeping, and the pain of the thousand tortured souls punctures and pierces my Being. The Revenant's skeletal fingers enclose around my neck, crushing it. It wrests my head away from my torso, and my body slumps lifelessly on the sand. I cannot breath, and I have no body, but I am alive. I am starved of air, and where my lungs should be, feels like a crushed paper bag. I look into the Revenant's green glowing eyes. He brings a hand to my face, and quickly plucks out my left eye. I desire the breath to scream ---

I jerked bolt upright in bed. My worst nightmare yet. This time my vision had a name: The Revenant. I wasn't the only one having nightmares and visions. In fact, almost everyone was having them. Demons, Revenants, ArchViles, Cherubs. All plaguing the workers of Mars base. We should have pulled the plug. It is so obvious now. But when millions of dollars, not to mention pride, is at stake, bad decisions are made. The overhaul was complete. The decision was made to continue the experiments.

I wasn't there. The Martian morning sun hung in the sky, a distant dust storm gave the sky a deep orange, almost autumnal colour. I was now on drugs for the hallucinations, and was just swilling one back when the emergency comm channel burst into life. "We require immediate military support. Something fraggin' evil is coming out of the Gateways! Computer systems have gone berserk!" FZZZZZT

The Explanation

Now I didn't realize it at the time, but science and religion had just spectacularly collided, and total annihilation was upon us. In hindsight, I can explain what was going on. It turns out that the other dimension that we were sending boxes, crates, and even the odd prisoner to, was what was traditionally known as Hell. However, the traditional concepts of Heaven and Hell were a little out. Heaven is the place of Good, and Hell is the place of Evil. But the concept of Good and Evil is always in relation to Mankind. What's beneficial for Mankind is good, what's detrimental for Mankind is evil. And so there exist two realms: God's realm, and Satan's realm. Heaven and Hell. But does God exist? Does Satan exist? The concept of God is iconic of all that is Good and of Mankind's realm. The concept of Satan is iconic of all that is Evil and of the Demon's realm. And there we were, the ignorant scientists, tearing into the very fabric of existence, and sending "holy" items into the unholy darkness. As far the Other Side were concerned, holy artifacts began materializing, exuding its influence. The demons began to gather. Just as anything Evil is detrimental to Mankind, anything Good is detrimental to the Demons. When our volunteers came back to us babbling and possessed, they had literally been sent to Hell and back. And it seems as though prisoner 10121993 probably wandered off, and was found by an imp or demon, and torn to shreds before we retrieved him. The scientists and marines working on, and near, the teleporters were unknowingly subjected to Hell's presence as the gateways opened. This exposure to pure evil manifested itself as visions and hallucinations. Our presence in Hell was being felt too, and as time went by, and the experiments continued, the Demons began to close in on the position of the Holy invasion. In the two minutes that box of Diet Red lay on the shores of Hell, it was found by a wandering Demon. They knew where we were. The next box was torn apart by some wicked creature lying in wait. The two month hiatus after that was plenty of time for The Beast to amass a huge army of the damned. And there they lay in wait for the gate to open once more.

We had just opened that gate once more.

FZZZZT! I reached out for the baby and loaded. Damn, why wouldn't the magazine go in the baby? The baby started

This story is very intriguing to say the least. It is obvious that the document wasn't finished before it was entrusted to Stevens. We can conclude then that Nash knew he was about to die. It is easy to dismiss this as fantasy, yet why did Nash give it to Stevens before he died? Did Nash think it would be confiscated? While parts of the "story" are pretty "out there", I think this document can provide the basis for a very interesting piece of investigative journalism. I look forward to scheduling an interview with you to discuss this further.

Yours faithfully,

Katrina Mitchell.