§-i: Initial Overview
§-0i
SUBJECT ENTRY: Initial Overview
RECORDER: REDACTED, PhD; Lead Researcher
DATE LOGGED: REDACTED, 2028
STATUS: Ongoing
CLASSIFICATION: Administrative log; origin record
CROSS-REFERENCE: All current and future entries
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Notes:
For the record, my name is REDACTED. I lead a small research team at REDACTED, reporting to REDACTED, cofounder of REDACTED,. This log exists because I no longer trust my own account to survive contact with an editor, a lawyer, or anyone who would believe my work. So I am releasing it myself, in staggered drops here on my personal server, to ensure I remain undetected.
This initial summary will bring you up to speed on my work and hopefully provide the context needed for further research. I am not the end of this study and I am beginning to think I am not the only one conducting one for the journal.
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Summary:
First a brief overview. The material brought to my lab was unlike any I had seen before. Appearing to be an ordinary piece of paper at first. It came to us first as a single torn piece, no larger than a palm. Dr. REDACTED— the founder, not the cofounder who I report my findings directly to— acquired it through channels he never disclosed to the organization.
The material at first observation was that of paper. Under further observation it was confirmed that the material was consistent with unknown organics. Further testing revealed more questions than answers. As a team we found the material quite interesting and our first tests were to see its durability as a material, to better understand best use cases. We tried to cut it. It would not cut. We tried to burn it. It would not burn (only kept fanning the flame in an endless loop). Every method we had for destroying paper failed against it, and yet something had torn it, cleanly, along one edge. No one on the team could explain the obvious. Where was the original piece it was torn from.
The theories turned to deaf ears and quickly forgotten once a purpose was finalized. The paper, as I will refer to it within this full series of reports, became the foundation of the company's newest processing chip. Quickly this material turned out to be the exact piece the company needed to fully operate and run their newest protocols for The REDACTED Machine. I did not work on the chip past the initial finding of the material, nor did I help adjust the weights of the protocols or build the chip's housing. If I was, then the report would end here. No, I was pulled onto a smaller track after a second sample surfaced: one fully intact page, handed to me and my freshly graduated assistant instead of into fabrication and development. Ours was Dr. REDACTED pet project. Find other uses. Report only to REDACTED. Keep it quiet.
Progress was slow. Days of tests, logged and cross-checked, produced nothing new from the torn piece analyzed and into production. Then one morning the single page was not a single page. It grew to multiple, all bound in leather, stitched spine, the appearance of a worn journal. Testing confirmed the material identical down to the atoms. No new sample had been logged as being found. No delivery had been recorded. The pages had arrived in mystery overnight.
REDACTED and I were assigned to keep testing. Days passed with nothing worth logging further. Until one morning my assistant revealed that she had been seeing the pages fill with writing. I asked what she meant by that. She hesitated—the kind of pause a person uses right before they tell you something they've already decided you won't believe.
She said it had started the week before. Said she'd assumed it was her own mind filling in detail that wasn't on the page. Then she said she was certain, and something in how she said it closed the question before I could ask it. I had no reason left to disbelieve her. Not once we were back at the office and she showed me why.
We had placed the journal in a box made of five inches of glass. Two holes cut into the front of the housing, gloves fixed on the inside, so a hand could reach in and touch the pages without anything of the room ever touching them back.
I looked at the same page she was reading from and saw nothing. What she read back to me was too specific, too consistent across multiple days and recordings, to be invented. So we built a protocol. She read aloud. I typed as she spoke, not after, not from notes, in the same breath she spoke it, so nothing had time to sit in the gap between the page and the record and become something else.
What follows in this series are those transcriptions, verified against each other where duplicates exist, alongside my own working theory of what the object is, what the stories inside it document, and what—I am no longer comfortable beating around the bush with—the entities are that those stories keep returning to.
This entry is complete. It is also the least important one within this report, and I am placing it as the prefix to my research. I do not know anymore whether I am the sole individual who is caught up in this chaos. I fear that I may have been exposed to more than reality is letting me understand.
Dr. REDACTED, PHD; Lead Researcher
