Note: Been getting comments about this story being too confusing. Hope this chapter helps. If you're still confused, let me know what's confusing.

[0000]

I raised my hands in surrender as I stared at the woman. "Please don't shoot me. I promise not to attack you."

The redhead did not lower her weapon. "How?"

"I don't know," I stammered. "Nothing has made sense to me since I left my cell...who are you?"

"Jesse Faden, the Director. Who the hell are you? For that matter, what the hell are you?"

I shrugged, and she almost shot a hole through my brain. "I...believe I am named Subject 8310...Casper Darling called me `Cookie.'"

Jesse snickered, lowering the weapon slightly. "Cookie."

"Yes, ma'am. I don't know what I am." I thought about telling her how I was born in a dead human's body, but that would be counterproductive. "Could you please put your weapon down?"

"Not until you tell me how you found the secret entrance to my office."

"I...picked up a telephone, and...somehow sent myself through it."

The woman swallowed. "That telephone?"

I glanced back, but didn't move my head. "Which one?"

"The red one behind you."

"No, there was another phone. I was in a big white area filled with floating blocks."

"The Astral Plane! That's impossible!" Jesse backed away, but didn't lower the weapon. "Step into my office."

I did. Big solid oak desk and furnishings, antique green desk lamp, large leather swivel chair. A large painting showed Jesse sitting at the desk, across from it some serious looking guy that resembled Commissioner Gordon from Batman. A plaque below the picture said Jeremiah Trench. "You seem...unsurprised and unfrightened by my appearance."

The woman let out a barking laugh. "Very little can surprise me anymore, even if I'd actually had a full night's sleep. I've fought altered objects, zombies, flying Hiss men, giant astral monsters, and a giant shadow man who possessed people and threw things. You strike me as something that can be easily destroyed by bullets."

I gulped. "Please don't."

"Give me a good reason."

"I...was under the impression that you liked me to kill glowing red people."

Jesse furrowed her brow. "Well...until we can find a way to break the Hiss's hold over them..."

"What is The Hiss?"

"An evil force that possesses people and objects all over the building. I've spent a year trying to stop it, but it still keeps coming back. More soldiers. More altered objects, and they keep killing our people. I can barely sleep...I don't understand how you could travel through a telephone."

"I don't know either. I was dying, I picked it up, and then I seemed to gain the power of moving through telephones."

"I absorbed the power of an altered merry-go-round horse and it allowed me super speed. Maybe yours happened the same way."

"Have you also been able to travel through a phone?"

"No, but there are altered areas in this building called `Control Points' that I sometimes use to teleport from place to place."

"And you ask how I can travel through a phone."

She shook her head. "It's amazing I can still think. I've only caught about an hour's sleep in between fighting armies of possessed agents."

"What is this...Astral Plane?"

"You were just in it." She ordered me to sit in front of her desk. She kept the gun aimed at me as she took the leather chair, telling me her experience with the strange dimension.

It seemed she chased something called an `Altered Item' into one of those places, and it gave her the power to fly. Another one she found granted her telekinetic powers. Just like in the paperwork, the place served as a training ground for her, golden men running around and acting as practice targets for her newfound abilities.

She had to solve puzzles to escape that unearthly realm. Sometimes she flew across long distances and climbed towers of blocks higher than mountains. When she fell into the void, she'd black out and wake up at the beginning of the `astral training course'.

She nodded at my floating companion. "What's with the floating teddy bear?"

"It helps me see."

"Another altered item."

"Yes."

"I seem to remember it not being able to float before."

"It came with me to the...Astral Plane. something happened to it, I guess."

Jessie rubbed her forehead like she had a headache. "This place makes less and less sense the more I work here."

"What's Polaris?"

Jesse had been steadily lowering her weapon as we talked, but now she raised it again. "How do you know about Polaris!"

I told her about the voices in the Astral Plane.

She laid the gun on her desk, barrel still aimed in my direction. "I hear them on the phone. I see a vision of a black pyramid, and they give me instructions on how to stop the Hiss. Polaris is...possibly the source to all my power."

"You said that Altered Items also give you power. Are you certain Polaris isn't the Hiss?"

The question gave her pause.

"What is this place that we're in?"

"This...building? It's the FBC, Federal Bureau of Control. Some call it the Oldest House. Any weird shit that needs to be Secured and Contained for the Protection of the world, they keep it here."

"Why are there bottomless pits in this building?"

"I don't know. I got a better one: Why are there no windows? Why can I never find an exit out to the street? We have some theories, the building sometimes shifts around. It's got something to do with the Hiss."

She described a few instances where she'd destroyed glowing orange nodes, or soldiers, in elevators and hallways, and somehow the walls and ceiling retreated and moved around. "There's also a thing called `The Nail.' Giant obelisk. It seems like when people mess with it, it causes more of the building to collapse...or maybe it's the source of our problems. The jury's still out on that one...So you really don't know how you can teleport through a phone."

"I don't know. I was dying when I picked up the receiver. Maybe I'm a ghost?"

Jesse rubbed her eyes. "Maybe I'm a ghost too."

"Why is there a black pyramid in your visions and the Astral Plane?"

"I don't know. It could be a...symbol of power...or something. I don't know how much we see in the Astral Plane is actually real. There's a black pyramid attached to the ceiling in one of our research labs..."

"What of the whirling orbs I have found? What are they?"

"You'll have to be more specific. I see red Hiss Spheres all the time. They make possessed agents invulnerable to weapon fire until you destroy them."

"No, this one is like...a small tornado."

"I've seen those around the Black Rock Quarry and in the lab with the black pyramid. They throw debris everywhere, and it hurts like hell when they run into you."

"I've destroyed one."

She sat bolt upright in her chair. "Bullshit! I've fired every kind of ammunition at those things, and thrown debris into them, and it doesn't do squat!"

"I got pulled into the core of one. I...defused it."

"I think you're full of crap. Whenever I get a free moment, I'm going to have you show me."

I shuddered. "I'd prefer not to."

"Tough! If you're telling the truth, you've just discovered the only way we're going to fix all the shit around here!"

A door swung open behind me. "Excuse me, Director..."

I glanced back. A narrow blonde woman with a butch haircut had stepped in. White blouse, black slacks, an odd speaker-like device strapped to her chest.

The woman gasped in fright when she noticed me, dropping the folders of paperwork she'd been clutching against her bosom. "What the hell is that thing?"

"Long story," Jesse groaned. "Got out of the Panopticon somehow. Don't worry, if it attacks you, I'll blow its head off its shoulders before it even touches you. How can I help you, Emily?"

"Well," the woman stammered, quickly scooping the papers off the floor. "We got agents pinned down at the Power Plant again. Don't know how long they'll hold up."

Jesse rose from her chair, looking determined. "I'm on it."

But then she narrowed her eyes at me. "Come with me...Cookie."

She led me through a massive office, past rows of large boardrooms, cubicle farms and whatnot. People turned and stared at us, muttering comments about spacemen.

"Do you know why Langston made me watch Hannigan?"

Jesse laughed. "That old show? How do you even understand it? Who taught you English?"

"Casper Darling."

"Oh yeah. That guy. He's a real nut. He vanished mysteriously about the same time I became Director. I don't know why they do anything around here. Did they show it to you on a possessed TV that shoots laser beams or something?"

"Not...lasers. It seemed...very unusual, though."

I told her about how the television produced endless, often inconsistent episodes.

"So this TV...just plays weird episodes of that cop show? That's the lamest Altered Item yet!"

"I threw it into a bottomless pit."

"Sounds like nobody but a fan would miss it. It's basically a Columbo knockoff."

I thought Jesse intended to have me as her sidekick as she fought those Hiss things, but instead she led me to a room with a ballistic glass prison, ordering me inside the cell by gunpoint. "Be good and stay here until I get back."

With that, she closed and locked me in.

The woman actually could run fast and fly. She vanished in seconds.

Not much to look at in the room. The...FBC seemed to like parabolic reflectors. A lot. They surrounded my cell.

My cell mate: A neon rainbow jukebox. Not much for conversation, it just hummed and ticked quietly as the lights changed to different colors.

I had no money to play anything, so I just stared at the LP's and flipped through the playlist.

An odd assortment of songs from different eras. Pack up Your Troubles in an Old Kit Bag, Skitsofrantic by Insane Clown Posse, Tutti Frutti, Bulmoose Jackson, Joe Diffie, Fur Elise, Nirvana, Ragtime Swing...and I could almost swear that more songs appeared in the book the more I turned the pages.

All of a sudden, the jukebox played The Twist by Chubby Checker, multicolored lights flashing all around me like laser beams.