July 17^th, 1999

Case# 9991707

I need you to understand that this is not a confession. I have nothing to confess. You must listen to me. I need to warn someone, and maybe that someone isn’t you, but I think you may be the only one who will believe me.

I don’t know quite what lives inside that girl, but it is a living thing, and so I must believe that it can be made unliving. I know that splitting it open didn’t kill it, despite all the decaying black bile it left behind. I know it maimed several people in its escape. I know it can hide. But, it can feel hurt, as all things hurt, and so there must be some way to end it entirely. I don’t know if it’s truly sentient anymore, or just a mass of flesh that moves and destroys as it goes. It was constructed, so listen, please, someone must deconstruct it.

It is not coming for me. I have managed some small protection against it, with my resources. It’s not what is going to disappear me. It will be coming for someone else, in time. I am sure of it.

There may be more than the one. I realize now that there is no way to know.

I am getting ahead of myself. This creature came from somewhere, and I have the unfortunate distinction of knowing its exact source. I do not have the details of its construction. I suspect the process would fit more neatly into your collection than into my documentation. I have only had the misfortune of coming across it the once.

The source? Well. That would be a business partnership that I am coming to regret.

I believe at our last meeting I was less than charitable about your chosen occupation. You may recall that night, the museum gala that ended in a conflagration of fire. Such a loss of brilliant art, though I recall you were less enamored than I with the exhibition. I think you were rather bored with me, despite your politeness, as you spent our discussion preoccupied with your wristwatch.

If I’m entirely honest with you, I admit that my skepticism remains mostly in tact. It is a matter of science, of seeing, and I have a great deal of difficulty extending credence to anything beyond that. However, I imagine that that sky of London today looks much like it does in the Valley today, and this, this has opened my mind a bit more.

It its just-

My own resources have gone silent. I do not know what that means, but I suspect. Something will be coming for me as well, in time. It is no use to deny it, I made the mistake of picking the wrong side. I can’t stop what’s coming, despite everything supposedly at my disposal. It is no monster or horror that I face, merely an authority I previously was not aware of.

I must, unfortunately, leave the monster to you.

I am not a man of small means. You know this. But, I must belabor that there are few specifically like me. Most fortunes of the western world come from exploitation of an old resource. Things grown and mined and harvested. Oil, gold, lumber, fur, human. All these things that could be processed and sold for the purposes of empire. Things that require movement, and tangibility.

There is a certain romance to it, to the fantasy of sitting in the wilderness, scrabbling in the mud and rock for your chance at fortune. There is a fascination, is there not, with the stoic face of the frontiersman, persevering against all odds, against the will of nature itself. A fiction that did not, for most, pan out. You must excuse the pun.

There is a new frontier coming. We’re on the cusp of it now. A completely new age in which communication is instant and written correspondence like this one will be... well, quaint, I imagine. A telegraph or a wax tablet is intriguing, a slice of what was, and commerce today will appear much the same in a decade. Life is going to change, dramatically. Is already changing.

My contemporaries are obsessed with home computing. It’s infuriating, really. They dream that in every house sits a home office with a dedicated word processor. A little machine that plays video games and only video games for the den. Software, cartridges, printers, a mass of plastic and electricity and silicon chips, for everyone. All of it ruthlessly expensive when compared to the average income of their target consumer. Technology will go down in price, yes, all things do with iteration, but a waste of potential. A tiny market they’re all obsessed with cornering, that won’t be truly ready and affordable for another ten years. A fool’s errand.

No, the real money is where it has always been. Even when home computing finally breeches the barrier of affordability, the real money will always be with those in power. Selling a hundred personal computers, a hundred game consoles, a hundred joysticks, a hundred bundles of word processing software. All of it, overshadowed immediately by selling a single defense system to a government.

Vipertronics spent most of its first years as an unknown entity to the public. We made its name in the right circles by aiding the computing needs of NOAA, NIST, NORAD, NASA, and a few of the less public-facing organizations that would dislike being named. You understand. The technology that keeps order in this world. Computers that used to take up entire rooms, the most important rooms in the world. Developing for GPS before it was declassified in 1996 was an opportunity none of my peers could ever have.

Triangulating and locating any spot on the Earth while flying overhead at 100,000 miles an hour is the most advanced feat humankind has managed since the moon landing. But, yes, I suppose sending your mother an instant chain letter from the comfort of a home office is also impressive.

It suits me to not to be quite as… visible as consumer electronics. I get far fewer people demanding my time, attention, and money. Absolutely freeing. My peers find it humorous, in much the same way I find their interchangeability humorous. Boring men in sweater vests and glasses, befitting every stereotype of quintessential nerd. Even the one that claims to be a different caliber than the others. Especially him. He’s different you see, he gives press conferences in jeans. What a visionary!

Ah, but perhaps I am just as shallow and boring. Sunday mornings spent hunched over a bench with my father and his terrible soldering iron seems to be memories plucked from another life entirely. There is little left to me today beyond meetings. Ten floors below me is where the real work happens. I admit that it may be nothing but nostalgia, but I feel there is something that will always be more satisfying by doing the work yourself, rather than atop the spire looking down.

Not that I have time. Always the next thing, you understand. That is business. I am busy.

So, I can hardly be blamed for not noticing that there was a cellular phone on my desk that was not mine.

I saw that desk and really sat there so little, in between everything else. Everything on it was staged. Not mine. It was there to impress people, carefully manicured by someone else to be casually intimidating. To impress without appearing to be trying to. A magazine left open to an article I never read, awards that were either most recent or most relevant to the guest list. Someone watered the plants and kept them in the best of shape. Or perhaps they were always fake, I admit I never cared to check.

The collection of exotics in that office was impressive. Its still what every article leads with. Oh, the snakes, always the snakes. They’re not as impressive as my actual collection, of course, but they are what is suitable for a high-traffic setting. Pretty, calm reptiles that will not strangle or bite the guests. Well cared for, of that you can be sure, but hardly my prized possessions.

It was an afternoon where I had a brief few minutes of respite of coffee and contemplation.

The impostor phone rang. It was a cheap little device, barely more than buttons and a single line LCD screen that displayed the number. The ring was grating, from an era where they insisted the damn things imitate that bell of an antique handset, rather than embrace a product of the digital age. Insufferable.

It was reasonable to assume one of the office keepers had left their phone there. Fate would have it that I was more tickled than annoyed that day. Or, maybe I am too charitable to myself, and I fully intended to discover the owner of the device and hurl them from employment. You do not make a mistake twice, at Vipertronics.

The voice on the other end was British. I realize this is about as useful as if you told me that someone sounded ‘American’, but let me assure you that the careful distinction of region is entirely irrelevant. It was theatrical, carefully enunciated, and smug. That’s all that matters.

It forestalled me before I could say anything, as if, with all the people that could have passed through that office, it knew only I could have answered. Whatever carrier they had chosen for the conversation, it was perhaps the most clear audio I had ever heard on such a cheap device.

“Hello, Mr. Viper.”

Someone had intentionally left the phone there, on my desk, for me. That was far, far more infuriating and carelessness. You must understand that, even if I am more obscure than my peers, I am sought after. Money brings attention. That office was supposed to be a stage, sure, but part of that careful curation is safety, and what I held in my hand was a breech that could have been dangerous, rather than just annoying.

“Who is this?” was the obvious question.

The voice sidestepped me completely, “I would like you to humor me a moment. There is another item on your desk.”

This stopped me cold, and all that billowing rage that had been bubbling vanished. There were a million possibilities for what another smuggled item could have been, and my imagination did not summon anything good.

But when I looked to my desk, there was nothing upon it that seemed immediately threatening. Rather, there was a thin, black plastic rectangle, so small one could have mistaken it for an appointment book. It had a gloss on one of its larger faces, similar to a monitor, but was far too light for anything electronic within.It must have been an empty shell. I could not for the life of me determine what it was supposed to be.

“Turn it on,” the voice suggested.

It did have one obvious button.

It was full color, it was crisp, and it did not take time to load.

You cannot grasp how impossible that should have been. It was 1996. Everything comparable in every industry would have been five times the weight, with a display a quarter the size and barely legible. The display on something so lightweight should have been, at best, a small pallet of grays with childish resolution and definition, fit only for simplistic work and games.

I was holding science fiction.

It must have been a trick. In that moment I could not tell what the trick was, but it must have been. I chose not to be taken in. It simply could not exist, and thus it didn’t. I set it down on my desk with a scoff.

“You’ve put a lot of effort into wasting my time today,” I responded.

“Now, now,” the voice said, patronizing. The tone of speaking to a small child. “There’s no reason to be rude.”

“Sneaking into my office is rude. Who did you put up to it? Was it that little blond one, or the one with crooked teeth?”

As I berated the voice on the other side of the phone, my free hand brushed the glass screen of the device on the desk. It reacted.

I stopped mid-thought, and stared at it. It responded to touch, but only those given by skin. It ignored taps with a pen or sleeve. I was dumbfounded, now, because there was no trick so elaborate that it could have simulated such behavior. I wasn’t sure what commands I was giving it—it responded with dialogue in a language I cannot read—but it was clearly responding, just the same.

I realize that this is a mundane thing. Such a simple idea, that it seems odd that I would belabor it. Understand. Nothing on Earth could do this. Absolutely nothing made by humankind approached that level of sophistication. Technology could not be that small, and that powerful. Not even with what I had access to, at the cutting edge.

This little device that a stranger had left on my desk, was the most valuable thing I would ever touch.

“Impossible,” was simplistic, but the only word I could come up with.

“You are welcome to open it up and examine any piece of it, in as much detail as you wish,” the voice answered.

I sat with this little screen, troubled. I said, very carefully, “Why?”

“A gift,” he replied. “If you can reverse engineer it, and make your own, I believe it will make you a very powerful man indeed.”

“And what do you get, for such generosity?” I asked.

“I would be interested in an agreement. Consider this proof of my veracity – and generosity. I can hand you more trinkets like it, if you wish. In exchange to access to a production facility, with no questions asked.”

I scoffed. “Nothing in my holdings could make anything like this. The retooling alone will be its own small fortune. If you can make something like this, you don’t need anything of mine.”

The voice gave me a belabored sigh. “Alas, that was true, but I no longerpossess the space or workforce. Not at any… useful scale.”

I will not waste my time pretending at ignorance. There is only one reason someone puts a burner phone and your desk, and does not give their name in the subsequent phone call. Whatever they were looking to manufacture on my property would have been troublesome. Processing power strong enough for the little device certainly would be impressive if used in more controversial applications.

I would find out later my assumption was correct. He was not kidding, when he said ‘scale’, because what I imagined was the sort of thing one uses in a conflict over a patch of desert, and what he imagined was far, far more ambitious.

Anyone with my expertise would have told you it was worth the risk. It was worth billions. It would be money enough, no matter how messy, to walk out of any legal proceedings that followed. If the US government came knocking at my door, I could offer them a gift basket and send them on their way.

Though, as I mentioned before, my notion of jurisdiction and culpability was… somewhat smaller than reality.

“Why are you bringing this to me?” I asked.

That this would fall so neatly into my lap was concerning. There were many ways in which a bad deal could have ended me. Again, my imagination is too small.

“Your peers are boring, weak men obsessed with money,” he laughed, much too long for the simple observation. “Money is a catalyst, but only gets you so far. The rest is ambition.”

“That’s not an answer,” I said.

“I suspect that your friends would demand to know the full detail of my business, and I suspect, based on your resume, that you would know better than to ask.”

It was true enough that I was not a stranger to plausible deniability.

“I think you see what I see – humanity is on the brink of becoming something much more. A real species that controls its environment instead of fearing it. Limitless. All you have to do is lend me a facility.”

“Quite a promise.”

“That little tablet is a toy, compared to everything else I can give you,” he said. “And yet, I suspect you’re already thinking of what you could do with it.”

True enough. A functional touch screen that worked in real time, so lightweight, could have applications in every setting where a person interacted with a machine. More, if you considered those that simply didn’t exist yet, and would be able to with the technology. And that was all ignoring the processor that must have been running it. The grandiose statement about elevating humanity would play well at a press conference, to be sure, but what was more important was that it may actually have been true.

“Give me time then, to look at your toy.”

“Of course. Take the time you need, but no more. Do not stall,” he said. “I am not someone you keep waiting.”

“No, I imagine not.”

And he hung up, without any further instruction. He never gave his name.

Needless to say, the footage retrieved from the security cameras in my office was useless. I’m sure that, in your field of work, you have been handed many tapes over the years that were just as blurry and indecisive.

What you can see in my tapes is a light, tinged green at the sides, so bright it overwhelms the camera’s simple sensor. It produces a shape that appears to be a child, or a person the size of one anyway. It places the two items on my desk, and vanishes the same way. The entire sequence takes less than ten seconds, and the footage is so poor it can only be described as the worst special effects budget one has ever seen. But the items that weren’t on my desk before were certainly there after, so regardless of how implausible the sequence is, that's the only explanation I have.

I have since invested in better cameras.

Just as well I had permission to open the damn device, because for all that smugness, my benefactor had not provided a power supply. In the end, we drained the power source it ran on, prodding at it and watching it respond as if we were toddlers. We could not even find where the battery was, at first, when we had to investigate how to feed it power. None of the ports matched any configuration I have even seen. We ended up getting a pair of alligator clips and a voltmeter feeding it directly. It was the most stressful power-up of my life.

I thought that it was going to be easy. Parts are traceable. Everything within a system is clearly labeled, standardized, right on the part itself, so it can be replaced. Once open, it should have been a simple matter to read the stamps and look them up. What manufacturer had possibly contributed the hardware for this thing? I had theories. Even if the tech was proprietary and not available to the public, just knowing where it came from would have been invaluable.

There were no stamps. There was certainly a tiny chip that every circuit lead through, but it carried no mark, but more importantly, it was too small. It broke the laws of physics it was so small. Electrons begin acting unpredictably at small enough scales. You cannot direct them reliably. Probability takes over. This object should not have been able to operate, not reliably. And yet it did.

There was a point where I had to sit alone at the workbench in the clean room, having sent a team of supposed experts away, and stare into the little pile of components with increasing concern.

I was confident that I could crack it, with enough time. It defied known physics, but that was a limitation of knowledge, not a trick of magic. Being shown a breakthrough rather than having to come upon it yourself is a massive hint, and I had been given all the permission I needed to study it, to assemble and disassemble and test. Perhaps I could even request a second or third unit, if they were so worthless to the voice, and completely deconstruct this one down to its very atoms.

It would be worth it, even if it took years to understand.

If we could be the first to market with this knowledge, before anyone else even thought to give it a meaningful try, it meant that Vipertronics was no longer in tech, we were tech.

I spent hours –days–in that clean room, somewhere in the bowels of the highest security company lab I could clear of other duties. I had a few people with me, those that I trusted the most, and every other person was turned away, reassigned elsewhere, to give us the space. I spent so many months, working out who I could trust and who I couldn’t. To this day, I’m not entirely sure all my choices were perfect, but they were good enough.

In the end, I should have been more surprised, or perhaps afraid, when the answer came to me. But I had spent enough days hunched over that workbench, staring into components that should not exist, and eventually it became obvious what I was looking at.

Every other possibility I had had been eliminated. There was no manufacturer on Earth that could make it, and this was not exaggeration. This was literal. Some of the alloys were complete unknowns. The battery was a strange thing in itself, not a gradient of ions but a solid crystalline form we could never coax back into activation.

And the language on the screen, despite throwing the best I could find at it, remained inscrutable. It wasn’t their fault. I had made an assumption that the best human minds could crack it, that its structure would be in some way similar to the thousands of languages and millions of dialects that exist. But humanity, despite its diversity and complexity, has shared experience and shared biology and shared necessities, that echo within our very speech. To step outside those requirements nullifies every assumption we naturally make about communication.

It was so hopeless a task, because, once more, my imagination was too small.

When the voice called again, I had realized the truth, because I had exhausted all other possibilities.

What called me was not terrestrial.

NOTE:

Statement abruptly ends.

If there was more to this letter then it have been lost to time or carelessness. Unfortunate.

I am inclined to say that this falls outside my jurisdiction, if such a thing exists. The brief mention of ‘the girl’ is intriguing, and for that reason alone I will likely keep this in the archive. There is sparingly little useful information, but the vague description given could relevant.

Beyond that, I admit a certain appreciation for the content. I am the wrong recipient, but even if I do not know entirely what to do with the letteror who the right recipient might be, it’s hard to argue that it does not belong in an archive, even if it isn’t mine.

True to his suspicions, Phineas P. Viper was reported missing in December of 2003. I suppose whoever he thought was chasing him finally caught up. Vipertronics showcased their touch-screen technology at a press conference in early 2003, causing a massive disruption in the industry that apparently entirely passed me by. The next generation of cell phone, featuring this functionality, will be available by the end of this year.

-Gertrude Robinson