Note: I forgot the locations of most the altered items in the Panopticon. I can't find a good inventory of all the rooms online, just really bad maps of Containment Sector. I'd have to play the game again, and I already beat it.
Anyway, I don't even know if people are reading this, so this might be the last chapter I write.
{0000]
My earliest memory: A cavern, after I burst from a victim's chest cavity.
An excavation site near Research Site Delta. A geologist in a hardhat and vest lay dead on the rocky dirt. Near his pickaxe, a bloated creature lay belly up, legs curled up like a dead spider. Slime and blood pooled around the carcass.
Birthed sightless, I picked all this up by sonar.
Nobody knows how I got there. From what I heard, an egg materialized out of nowhere while researchers studied a monolith.
The bear first appeared to me as a faint blip in a darkened void, like a candle in the shadows.
As I padded closer to investigate, the blip expanded, the vision beautiful and ugly all at once: An immense gray wall of some unknown mineral standing among the natural red iron formations, surrounded by yellow aluminum buildings, white tents, computer equipment, drills, monitors, parabolic reflectors. Labcoated figures in hardhats marched around with clipboards and radios, talking to each other.
I picked up the bear and took it all in, awestruck.
That's when they caught me.
Having previous experience with capturing rogue otherworldly entities, they only needed to set up a perimeter of electrical devices to immobilize my small body.
I probably could have escaped, but the novelty of gaining sight for the first time proved too much of a distraction. I got placed in a little glass box. I think the acid proof nature of the container hadn't been planned, it just worked out great for them.
A scraggily bearded man in a labcoat came by to examine me. Red circular glasses, bushy mustache, crazy argyle sweater vest.
He seemed cheery enough, and happy to see me. "Hello, little fellow! I'm Casper Darling! What's your name?"
I only shrieked and hissed at him. Probably would have burrowed into his face if he'd left the box open.
"My, my," he scoffed. "That's some temper! Let's see what we can do to make you a little more agreeable, shall we?"
He moved me to a lab, fed me a steady diet of meat, exposed me to interesting human things, music, books, entertainment products...and his dancing. I think I enjoyed the dancing the most.
I learned a lot, but then his stylish black hair turned gray. He got obsessed with some project, and mysteriously disappeared, forever.
As I lay dying in the wrong cell, with the gurgling, whispering telephone, I wondered what my life could have been outside, in freedom. What worlds had I been barred from exploring? Would I ever know them?
And what ever happened to Casper Darling?
I hallucinated, a vision of a rippling gray thing, patterned like a grid, but swirling ocean-like. It changed to the color of blood.
Then everything turned blinding white.
[0000]
Item 38053563824: "The Death Collector."
Class: Euclid
Security Level: 2
Containment: Lock up. Do not allow access.
Description: Black Avaya conference phone with telephone headset and associated monitor and tower. Object was acquired from the offices of Sunbank Private Label Credit Cards, now protected under bankruptcy, with name changed to (REDACTED). Equipment uses telephone autodialing system to conduct collections calls with the deceased. These business transactions sound completely mundane, often involving payments with real bank account numbers, but the person has recently died, and often the volume never rises above a whisper. Customer audio can only be recorded with special equipment. Only the operator's voice registers on standard recording devices.
First recorded incident: Grant Billington, 28, reported fraud on his grandfather's debit card two days after the man died from Hodgkins Lymphoma. Telephone operator was subjected to disciplinary action, but management could not explain how the OP could consistently hold 5-10 minute conversations with someone they could never hear on recordings, and somehow acquire payment information, nor could they understand why their automated dialing system always appeared to send OP calls from a pool of live accounts, yet only record conversations between OP and seemingly nothing.
Upon firing three OPS, Sunbank management decided the phone to be at fault, though no official apologies or reimbursements were sent to dismissed agents.
[0000]
The phone receiver seemed to throb beneath my claws.
Although I had no vision, I saw white light all around me, traveling into my skeleton.
My pulse increased to an unbearably high rate, matching the dialtone that entered my auditory receptors and filled my body like its very cells.
Angry beeping, like a phone left off the hook, struck my heart in waves.
The phone noises slowed to match my heart rhythm.
My heart sped up to match the phone.
Both sounds became identical.
My claws dissolved into light.
My arms and legs melted.
Somehow...I entered the phone.
Not sure what happened afterwards. I did not think the same inside the phone. I thought...phone thoughts. I only knew that I awoke next to a yellow emergency phone on a lower level of the Panopticon, now knowing how I got there.
My exoskeleton had been healed, the damage from all those bullets mysteriously removed.
Yes, I saw color. The bear dangled precariously on a concrete railing. Below I could see nothing but a bottomless chasm. How humans could create a building with a bottomless chasm did not compute in my brain.
I snatched up the stuffed toy before it could fall over, waved it around to get my `bearings,' no pun intended.
I stood on a gray platform above the abyss. Scaffolds and staircases led higher, through the various floors. Construction debris surrounded me, a beat-up yellow forklift, stacks of plywood, tool crates, portable lighting rigs...
An open concrete tunnel ran the circumference of the prison, intersected by the platform. At one end lay the electric fan in its prison. At the side in the far opposite distance, a huge chrome door reading `FIREBREAK', and between a circular arrangement of parabolic reflectors. The humans sure loved those things.
I recalled seeing lab techs and workers emerging from the big door with equipment, and being carried through it during the onset of my imprisonment. I doubted other exits existed.
A glowing red man flitted down from the air like Peter Pan, throwing rocks at me. Heavy boots stomped down the currugated steel staircases, assault rifles roaring as they took pot shots at me.
Although fully restored, I'd taken enough abuse, and didn't want to stand around and get more holes punched in me. As quick as I could, I rushed across the long concrete bridge to the big chrome door.
The ones that imprisoned me had made good on their strategy of not allowing me out of the chamber. The door didn't open. I found a keypad to one side, but had never been told any codes.
Since the flying man relentlessly pursued me, throwing rocks, and the men with guns now trailed hot on my heels, blasting off rounds of ammunition, I rushed along the corridor, searching for a place to hide.
I passed a restroom. Although a good possible hiding spot, I would only end up being cornered and shot to pieces.
I neared a prison cell, this one containing a large wooden mallet-esque sledgehammer from some old carnival.
As I paused to examine it, the door to the cell popped open.
Very well. I'd take any weapon I could get my claws on.
I rushed in, snatched up the mallet, swung at a man following me with a gun.
He let out an uncharacteristic shriek as boils emerged all over his body. The hand holding the assault rifle rotted and fell away.
I shoved him over the railing into the abyss, but before he fell I traded his gun for the mallet.
Not quite as easy as they make it look on TV.
Guns, I learned, tend to kick back when fired. When aiming at the flying man, my shots strayed and pockmarked the scaffolding above him.
Since the men shooting me stood a lot closer, I tried my luck with them.
I emptied the whole clip before vaporizing even one of them.
Again, very weird to not have blood or guts or cartilage explode from the victim - the man just dissipated into a shimmering purple gas, taking weapons and tactical gear with him.
I reverted back to the mallet to dispatch the other ones, including the ones rushing up from the other end of the corridor. How to eliminate my aerial pest, however, I had no easy solution.
The weapon I pried from the next gunman jammed the instant I pulled the trigger. These weapons, it would appear, were not my friend. When not jammed, too easily running out of ammunition, unlike that levitating man, who always seemed to have mystical access to random bits of debris to hurl in my direction.
The prison cell adjacent contained a Continental Express Dry by Girbau Incorporated, an industrial clothes drier with a door like a Do Not Enter sign. Perforated aluminum surfaces gleamed through its glass window, its triangular speed bumps stationary.
"And what are you in for?" I jokingly asked.
I hadn't intended to visit this prisoner, but the foes I'd dispatched had reinforcements with guns, so I had to make a hasty retreat.
My intent, at first, had been to merely hide behind the wall next to the door and lash out with the mallet when anyone came close, but when I entered, the drier came on by itself, the metal things of its interior spinning rapidly.
The door popped open all by itself, the machine sucking air out of the room. Random papers and bits of dirt from the floor flew past me, zipping into the machine.
It tugged at me like a black hole, like an open airlock in a space station. My feet slipped, body sliding closer. I clutched my bear tightly.
The gunmen rushed to the cell door, opening fire, but their bullets bent in the air, disappearing into the drier.
I threw the mallet at one of them.
Upon impact, his gun flew from his hands, which, in turn, hurtled my way.
I shot the men surrounding me point blank. The machine sucked up their purple fog.
Curling the bear in my tail, I grabbed the next soldier by the Kevlar and threw him into the room. For a moment he aimed his gun and tried to shoot me, but the bullets got pulled back in his face, and the drier sucked him in. I didn't have to worry about him again.
Suddenly, a giant gray musclebound figure stomped up to me. I fired burst of ammunition into his chest and face, but it didn't appear to phase him.
A massive fist smashed into my face, and I sailed through the air.
The drier, with its powerful suction, pulled my body all the way across the room.
My feet struck against the lint trap, and I tumbled headfirst through the opening.
The back end of the contraption had somehow vanished. Beyond lay only a white void.
After being struck by the speedbump things a few times, I entered that void.