If You're Armed At the Glenmont Metro, Please Shoot Me | Creep Cast

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Isaiah, you got it.

You're doing the intro today.

You're doing the welcome back.

There's no will left after what we've been through this morning.

Which, mind you,

it's now been an hour.

A little over an hour.

Welcome back to Creep Cast.

There, did I do it right enough?

That's fine.

Today, we are going to be reading a story called If You're Armed and at the Glenmont Metro,

please shoot me.

Indicative of how I feel today for these recordings.

You want to tell the audience one?

I have no will.

You're going to have to spill the beans, and I just need to emotionally chime in when I can.

So we

went to...

We've been to five different stories.

We've recorded two of them.

We've started to record dialogue for two of them.

We started to record the first one, which is one you guys have recommended we read forever.

And Hunter hated it.

He, I have the recording that may eventually see the light of day.

He immediately began to crash out.

He got so upset.

And he's like, we have to change stories.

We have to go something else.

So we find another story he likes and we start reading it.

But then the author of the story has posted like in giant letters across their Reddit, like, I will take you down if you read this story.

Or like if you read the story without first getting permission.

So we had to ask for permission and now we're waiting to hear back on that.

And then we looked at all these other stories and they all had like individual problems.

It's been over an hour.

I've said this story twice now.

Or three or four,

an infinite amount of times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We are in the end of the year of doing the show.

We have some obligations we have to do as well.

And also just want to make sure that you guys feel like you got enough content for the month as well.

But I leave the country this week.

Gonna be gone on vacation doing

going to Japan.

And

my soul is there already.

I'm like, it's kind of like whenever you know something's coming up, you're kind of just checked out.

That's how it feels.

Now, here's the thing about the story we read earlier.

And I don't want to say the name because I don't want to,

I don't want to crash out again.

I don't want to freak out, but we could revisit it in the future, and maybe I'll, you know, better mindset or whatever.

But it has been, you know, we are, I am here to make sure that we deliver a nice show, but my God, is it pulling teeth?

So I'm here to be a good little boy during this recording, no matter what, to make sure that this gets fucking done and that we can end this year on a nice upbeat note.

And I will say that if you're armed at the Glenmont Metro, please shoot me.

It's a great title.

And I think we, and I think, I'm pretty sure that we're going to do something similar to the Whistler, which is, because this is a short story.

This is pretty short.

So I think we're going to try to read a couple

by this author.

Are there a couple from this guy?

But it also seems like there is, if we like this, there are two following

addendum parts to this story.

So we could just read those two.

Yeah, so we could just pick and choose how we go about this.

So the story is written by Reddit user

Sarcassanomicon.

Sarcasanomicon, I believe, is how it's said.

His name is Peter Frost David.

And he has an interesting website called A New Kind of Monster.

And across the entire website, it's like him theorizing like the best monsters that could be created for stories.

He has like a store.

He has

different stories based on abominations, different realities, and stuff like that.

And it also seems that he has a series

of books that you can get on Amazon.

He has one called Second Death, Do Not Speak the Names of the Dead, which I think is

part of a greater collection of what we're talking about today, like this story.

And then he has two others called Kubai Nicks and another one called Oonscaped.

And both of those, like one's called Oonscaped, a Medieval Cybersecurity Incident.

So a bunch of interesting titles and stuff seems like a cool author.

So check his workout.

Yeah.

Peter david cross it goes pretty hard this is uh probably the last episode of the year um for creepcast we might do a little uh just another little piece of content that we've been wanting to try for a bit um as well for this month but if you guys can to support the channel since i've been a good little boy this year go to

i've even said that line four times now um

listen to this on spotify listen to us on spotify or apple podcast and give us a rating there.

It sincerely does help us.

And when we do climb the podcast charts and stuff, it does help.

And, you know, just food for thought.

You know, if you want to give us any little cute Christmas gifts this year, maybe just listen to this episode

so you don't have to see my face get beat red with rage.

You know what?

I'm so mad.

I'm so happy with my outfit for audio listeners out there.

I have orange sunglasses on.

Look like porno sunglasses, my porno mustache.

I have a nice, beautiful Hooter shirt on.

I was like, I woke up this morning a a little tired, but I was like, I'm ready to get it.

Like, today's going to be a good day.

And immediately, immediately.

So funny because he was so happy about his outfit in the first recording.

Like, he was like, I've got my fit on.

I'm looking cool and stuff.

Like, he was so upbeat.

And now it's just like a child telling you he got like expelled from school today.

Not even expelled from school.

It's like, I feel like.

The fat, ugly kid who doesn't get invited to his friend's birthday party and everyone else is talking about the birthday party around me and I feel like a fucking Neanderthal.

That's what it feels like.

That's how I feel right now sitting here.

And this, this story, Isaiah, needs to reel me in.

So I say, let's do it.

Let's see if we can't turn the tides on today and get this recording going.

All right, so let's go.

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It means the most.

And now, a word from Hunter.

If you're armed and at the Glenmont Metro, please shoot me.

Make it a headshot.

Shoot me in the temple, aiming slightly downwards.

I need the bullet to travel the shortest possible distance from my brain before it hits my hippocampus.

If I'm lucky, the sensation of the gunshot ripping through my skull will only last a few decades.

This sounds like you right now.

Already.

That's what the perpetual hell I'm in already is that sitting down to open up Reddit slash R slash no sleep feels like a thousand years is what it feels like.

So good on you.

I do want to say that's a sick way to end it.

It will only last a few decades.

It's kind of fucked, right?

Yeah.

Look at that.

Look how quick this one hooked you.

You know what?

I'm trying to be a positive little

bear.

All right.

I'm proud of you, little bear.

As awful as this sounds, you'll be doing me an enormous favor.

Death by a headshot as soon as possible is vastly better than the alternative.

My ordeal started over 10,000 years ago at 10.15 this morning.

Okay, that's pretty cool.

That goes kind of hard, right?

Was he a caveman?

I earned, no, he's saying 10,000 years ago at 10.15 this morning, as in 10.15 this morning was 10,000 years ago.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

I earn extra money by participating in drug trials.

I'm a so-called healthy subject who takes experimental drugs to help assess side effects.

Once it was a kidney drug.

A few times it's been something for blood pressure, cholesterol.

This morning they told me the drug I took was a psychoactive substance intended to accelerate brain function.

Oh, that's kind of fun.

Like drug, not to get too sidetracked, but like drug testing, like pharmaceutical drug testing, I would never do it.

I don't care how much of an epinch I am.

I would be too afraid.

There's too much crazy shit that they make too.

You know what I mean?

I mean, logistically, yes, but some people...

yes, some people need the money, but even then, some people don't know like the level of like how much drugs can mess you up, right?

Well, yeah, we'll feel bad for a little bit and that's it.

Yeah, well, I'm like, I will just assume that everything's,

I don't know,

there's nothing where they're just like, well, it's just, you know, this is just a vitamin or what I would, wouldn't trust it with any, like any fiber of my being.

Absolutely not.

Yeah.

Also, here's another thing.

I would gladly shoot somebody in the head if they were saying yes like please do you were gonna i knew you were gonna go would you not

in a second um

if someone asked me to shoot them in the head yeah if somebody was just like hey by the way meet me at the mall tomorrow you don't let's here let's let's set it up let's meet me at the mall tomorrow i'm gonna i want you to just go there everyone else knows you're not gonna get arrested That's just the most convenient place for me to be.

I want you to put it in the back of my temple, point it down slightly and shoot it into my brain.

I think I should be doing me a big favor.

Thanks, buddy.

You want to get arrested?

Clean conscious, would you do it?

I don't think that makes it legal.

I think you're still wanted for murder.

Let's just say in this world it is.

No, I would not kill someone because they wanted me to.

It would have to be like a mercy kill.

It'd have to be like I would do that if say,

I don't know, we were in like a apocalyptic scenario and someone's like ripped in half, like they're not going to make it.

You know, I was down.

If I was on my farm and I was underneath a tractor,

would you, would you, no, would you kill me?

No, no, absolutely.

What do you mean?

If we, if you were on your farm, you're underneath a tractor, I'm calling an ambulance.

There's no time, Isaiah.

Just no, no,

that's not how that works.

Isaiah, we are,

it is 2024.

We have there's hospitals you can go to.

I'm not going to make it.

I think.

It's funny in my head because, like, your legs ran over.

Like, the rest of you is fine.

Yeah, no.

In my mind, it's the giant tires on my sternum.

It's like almost impossible for me to be talking, but I'm like,

I can't end it, please.

For me to shoot you in that scenario, it's got to be like your rib cage down is gone.

Let's say my it's not gone, but it's like you can kind of see my gutty works.

We can fix that.

I don't think I you can't people get like people get

there's a name for it.

I forget, but you can get

amputated from the hips down.

Like you can lose your pelvis and still be okay.

I wouldn't want that life, dude.

If I don't have my cocks and assholes, I'm not going to

kill you.

I'm going to say, Isaiah, I don't have my cock anymore or my balls or my asshole.

Shoot, kill me.

I'd be like, wow, I'd be like, wow, Hunter, kill me.

You know what?

I'm not going to lie to you.

If I got to live with no fucking cock, balls, or asshole, I would kill you.

That's what I would do.

I would say, are you fucking kidding me?

Here's a crazy idea.

What if you killed yourself?

Why do I have to be the one to do it?

Because here's the thing.

forcibly do it to yourself.

I don't think I have the gumption.

I would need someone to assist me.

Could I kill someone else out of pure rage probably but i don't think i could ever i don't think i could pull the knife or gun on myself

so you're saying you'd have no problem killing me i think if you left me in a state where

my cock and balls and asshole are squashed like a bug why do you need the the asshole why is that

oh i'm sorry have you do you not like a do you not like a nice morning shit

you can still okay i'm saying that like okay i get i'm not gonna

satisfied genitalia because you're young and that's fun and that's like what drives a lot of your thoughts and it'd be frustrating to live without it.

I'm saying like why does a colostomy bag decide the difference between life or death to you?

I didn't say it was just a colostomy bag.

I'm saying it's a collection.

If I had

if I'm under a tractor, right?

Right.

If I'm under a tractor and I'm like, oh, oh, I like lift up my neck a little bit and I see that my cock, my balls, and my asshole are squashed like a bug.

That would drive me to a place where I'm like, you need to put me down.

Okay.

Like a 16-year-old lab.

Like, I mean, like, there's no reason.

Okay.

Okay.

In your, okay, for one, how do I explain that to the cops?

Right.

I would write a note.

Oh, I thought he would, I thought he was dead.

I would write a note.

That does not how that works.

And I think it would.

If you shot yourself and wrote a note, that'd be fine.

If I shoot you and then you write, if you write a note and then I shoot you, that's not going to hold up in court.

I think, okay, well, then what about this?

What if you take out your phone and I say, I, Hunter Hancock, that is definitely not going to hold up in court.

That looks like an ISIS beheading video.

If I like pull out a phone and make you record on camera and then shoot you on your land under your tractor, absolutely not.

What if I sat there and I started the video by saying, are you recording?

Okay, good.

Okay, what if,

why do I, why do I need to be the one?

Just you can die yourself look if you could get injured so you would you'd rather

you are probably going to die you are going to you are going to

die

I think I am going to die my the thing I'm saying is I'm like please end my suffering

please I can't so you what what what I'm saying what I'm saying to you is like I know I'm gonna die so for you to call somebody would do nothing.

Like I'm I'm going to die.

Please end this for me.

That's what I mean.

This is a scenario where there's there's no chance of survival.

And even if there was, and I was a person with

no asshole balls or I would stay still.

Okay, look, okay, let's change this.

Let's say this is in a no, like, like an infrastructure breakdown, right?

Like, I can't call an ambulance, right?

Sure.

Because that, that would be the decision maker.

Because if, if, if there is a micro percentage of a chance you could live, I would not kill you, right?

Even if I was like, Isaiah, I have no point to live, I will resent you for the rest of my life.

No, just cause, just because a friend

wants to die doesn't mean I grant them that.

I would do you that favor.

No, no, no.

Look at this.

What if, like, this is a couple years from now?

Okay, what if, what if you, what if you had a child, right, during this scenario, and then, like, you, you abandoned the child?

Like, no, I'm not letting you do that just because you want to go in the second.

A band of the child with no cock balls or asshole.

What kind of father figure could I be?

I can't teach my boy.

Anybody's father figure, a teacher.

I'm blocking all my hands.

No, no, no.

I don't think so.

Your son is going to appreciate that I didn't shoot.

I would think that he doesn't even have to know.

This could be our secret.

He doesn't have to know that dad has a bullet in his forehead.

Okay, look, listen, back to what I was saying.

I can't patch you up if you're ripped up from like, you know, rip cage down.

And I doubt we would have the resources to do that if there was no ambulance police.

So if this was like an an apocalyptic scenario and you were ripped in half, I would shoot you.

Is that what you want?

That's a good enough for me.

Okay.

If I can call the police, I'm not doing it.

Okay.

Well, first off, if it's an apocalyptic scenario, then there probably is no police.

I'm saying that if

they,

if

I think that under the right circumstances and under the right pressure, I think I could get you to do it.

That's what I'm going to, that's what that's, that, that's where I'll end it.

I

I don't think it'd be easy.

I don't think that

if I think that,

like I said, if I had no means of getting you to a hospital or like an ambulance or something like that, then I would do it.

Yes.

I would sit there and I'd just be looking at you like this.

I'd put my hands up and I'd be like, oh,

Isaiah, please don't do it.

Go away, Isaiah.

Like that, I think he could get you.

I would sit there.

You can't, you're my angel.

So I'd say, you're my angel.

I would sit there.

I would sit there and I would cry with you and I would pray with you.

Be by your angel.

I would pray with you.

And then I would shoot.

Stop saying that.

Just killed me, Isaiah.

You're trying to talk and stuff.

I'm like, stop,

just put a bullet in my head.

Put a bullet in my head.

I'd say like that.

Please.

It hurts.

Oh, it hurts.

God.

And then for you to have the gumption to even like visit me in the hospital afterward, I'd be like, you don't, you never look at me again.

They'd say,

the only way that gets justified is if you buy me, if you buy me,

if you buy me robot legs, and then somehow I'm able to get my top balls and asshole back.

Okay, you're not getting those three things back, but

you can get prosthetics.

That's what I'm saying.

You can still exist.

You can still make art.

Not me.

Listen, I know people can.

People are braver and stronger than I am.

Not me.

I'm saying that I know myself enough to know that there's no way.

You, Hunter, you have a great life without your genitals.

No.

If I can't, it's not even like even remotely sexual.

It's like some of it, well,

it is partly, but I just mean that some of it is more so like a nice piss.

You're, I mean, like, if

there are, there are greater things to life than that.

I mean, there is.

I'm just saying that that's a, that's a large.

It'd be the same thing if I was blind.

I don't think I could, I don't think I could live as a blind man.

i'll be honest i do not think i could do it people that do that i'd like you could survive any amount of torture i feel like or being deaf even

i do not

i do not bode well with adversity i guess is what i'm saying i can see that clearly

okay look i've not i'm not shooting you i take it back even in the apocalypse you can bleed okay

that's my new new take.

Yeah, I will, I will pray with you, I will mourn with you, I will watch over, I will watch over Allison and any family you have, I will take care, I will make sure they are taken care of, but I will not kill you.

I think that's, I think that's extremely selfish, Isaiah.

I think that I would sit if I was sitting there and I was like, oh, oh,

you're, you're praying around me, and I was like, oh,

oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

it hurts!

Kill me!

Okay, let's flip the script.

What happens if I'm under the tractor?

Go ahead and ask me, like, however, you would ask me to do it.

Hunter, if you and I were out at my house and I had a tractor, piece of equipment, whatever, follow me, and I was like flattened from the

I would have done it already, see?

What if I'm like, no,

I think I can live?

I think they can cut me off.

Well, the gut, you'd be dead.

So I would just be like, he asked me to do it.

I'd say, look,

I think I can make it.

And then people would come up and they'd be like, well, how do we know?

I'd be like, well, what did I do?

Drive a tractor on top of him after I fucking shot him in the head?

I'm like, no, he's my buddy.

He's in pain.

I put him down.

There's no life to live.

Look at his asshole.

Then the camera would, like, people would look over.

And then people would look over.

They'd see your asshole prolapsed out, squashed like a bug and i'd be like what kind of life is that he doesn't want to live like that

okay and that's and you know how you're like i would make sure your family's taken care of then they'd sit there and i would hoard all of i would not give kayla any rights to anything oh and i'd be like i'd be like listen i had business with your husband but not particularly you

and i would keep the gun and i would keep the bullet casing that i killed you with and i would i would do like a broke back mountain thing and then the broke back mountain when he like has the shirt of the guy that he Uh-huh.

I'd look at it and I would like, you know, I'd be like, Isaiah, you son of a bitch, like that.

So you would, so you would kill me and leave Kayla to rot.

You would leave my family to just fend for themselves.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's a traumatic thing.

You know, I'm not thinking clearly.

Yeah.

Clearly.

So, okay, let me put it this way, Hunter.

Yeah.

I can still do this podcast if I lose my

waist down.

Right.

So if you shoot me underneath that tractor, your paycheck here is gone.

That's true.

I would not continue.

And I want to put this on record now.

I would not continue this show if you were gone.

So in that case, would you think twice before shooting me?

No, I mean, I'd figure it.

Oh, I'm thinking selflessly, Isaiah.

You know, I'm not thinking about the business.

I'm thinking about my friend suffering.

Because you're such a good friend.

Okay.

Well, I'd like to think so.

Okay.

All right.

I'm going to, can I read that?

I forgot that we're even reading a story.

I forgot.

yeah well i'm glad to know see i think people are gonna want to know that you know i think that's gonna help but emotionally tie in with whatever happens in this story that's what i gotta say none of the drugs i tested so far have ever done anything for me in the recreational sense in other words none of the drugs i've tested have given me a killer buzz or mellowed me out or anything maybe i've always ended up the placebo group but nothing i've tested had affected me at all Today's drug was different.

This shit worked.

They gave me a pill at 10.15 and told me to hang out in the waiting room until they called me back for some tests.

Only about 30 minutes, the research assistant told me.

I flopped onto the waiting room couch and read a few articles from a copy of Psychology Today that was sitting on the coffee table.

Then it called me back when I finished the psychology today, so I picked up a U.S.

News and read it cover to cover.

Then I read an old Scientific American.

What was taking them so damn long?

I sluggishly turned my head to look at the wall clock.

It was only 10.23 a.m.

I had read all three magazines in eight minutes.

I remember thinking this was going to be a long day.

I was right.

The waiting room had little bookshelf with some used hardcovers on it.

When I stood up to walk to the bookshelf, it felt like my legs barely worked.

It's not that they were weak.

They were just slow.

It took a full minute just to stand up off the couch and another minute to take two steps to the bookcase.

I scanned the old books on the shelf and picked out a copy of Moby Dick.

My arms had the same problems as my legs.

Just reaching one foot in front of me to grab the book took a long time.

Actually got bored just waiting for my hand to reach the spine of the book.

I slogged back to the couch and collapsed onto it in a slow-motion fall that reminded me of the low-gravity hops of astronauts on the moon.

I opened Moby Dick slowly and began reading.

I started with Call Me Ishmael and got as far as Ahab throwing his pipe into the sea, which was all the way to the freaking chapter 30 before they called me back.

How are you feeling?

The research assistant asked me.

I feel slow.

Actually, it's the other way around.

Everything seems slow because you're fast.

But my legs, my arms, they're moving in slow motion.

Your body seems like it's moving slowly because your brain is fast Your brain is running 10 or 20 times faster than normal You are thinking and perceiving reality as an as an at an accelerated pace, but your body is still constrained by the laws of biomechanics Frankly, you're moving much faster than a normal person

But your brain

But your brain is running so much faster right now that even your fast walk seems very slow to you

That just freaked me out.

That'd be fucked.

Can you imagine that?

Yeah, especially because it's a drug, so you're like, well, I guess I have to live with this now.

Yeah, I have, you know,

this is my reality for a bit.

Even the idea, though, of like that much time passing, it's weird.

It's kind of like a,

it seems like a monkey paw kind of operation, doesn't it?

Like a, you know, I wish time, like, I wish I had more time.

And then that's I had more hours in the day.

And it's like,

yeah, exactly.

I thought about my slow motion flop onto the waiting room couch.

Even if my muscles had slowed down, my body would still react to gravity the same way.

But in the waiting room, I even fell in slow motion.

Slow muscles couldn't explain why gravity seemed weaker.

My brain was going at warp 10.

That's how I managed to read three magazines and the first 30 chapters of Moby Dick in 15 minutes.

They ran a series of tests on me.

The physical tests were fun.

They made me juggle three balls, then four,

then six.

I had no problem keeping six balls in the air because they seemed to be moving so slowly.

It was boring, frankly, waiting for each ball to move through its arc so I could catch it with my slow-motion hands and toss it back into the air.

They threw Cheerios in the air and I caught them with chopsticks.

They dropped a handful of coins and I counted the total value before they hit the ground.

It's kind of interesting that the fatigue as well makes it seem like because he's moving so fast and probably like going around that his muscles are actually still becoming physically exhausted you know yeah because he's moving so quickly this also seems like a kind of an interesting take on like the horrors of like getting super intelligence or something

you know like oh you becoming super strong and having it having that much access to your brain's functionality would actually just like be torture

I feel like it would be like uh I mean if you were stuck in it you would become like a great mind sure you could process a lot of information but it's like you're in a purgatory well it's the thing is that you would never even be able to enjoy the like advancements of what you're doing.

So it's like everybody else is probably impressed with what you're doing, but everything is so nonchalant and non-fun and like, or so nonchalant, non,

it's just not exciting in the least.

Like it would just be such a miserable existence.

Yeah.

I think

It's an interesting, I think you could do a lot of good for like humanity, the world, so to speak, but it's certainly a martyr position you would suffer yeah the cognitive tests were less fun very illuminating finish a 50 word word search three seconds solve an intricate maze drawn onto a poster-sized paper two seconds view a slideshow projected at 10 images per second and answer detailed questions about what i saw 95 correct

They told me I measured over 250 on the knop scale.

Apparently, that's deep into the superhuman range of thinking speeds.

Then they sent me home.

It'll wear off in a few hours, which will seem like days to you.

Try to use the residual effects to get some work done.

Catch up on work emails while you're still in high speed mode.

The ride home was horrible.

It was only three metro stops and in real world time it took about 35 minutes.

But in my drug-accelerated hypertime, it felt like days.

Days.

Just walking out of the medical research suite to the elevator seemed like it took an hour.

I sprinted sprinted out of the office, willing my legs to push me faster, but the laws of biomechanics held me prisoner.

As accelerated as my brain was, I couldn't do anything to make my legs work faster.

The huge disconnect between my body and mind made it extremely difficult to judge how and when to slow down, turn, or rotate my body.

I'd basically turned into giant slow-motion spas.

I misjudged my speed and rammed into the wall by the elevator button at a pretty good speed.

Even though I could see the wall coming at me, I couldn't make my finger outstretched to hit the elevator button move away fast enough and I jammed it against the wall.

Hard.

The pain was intense.

If my brain had been running at regular speed, it probably only would have hurt for 30 seconds or so.

But in my accelerated state, the intense pain seemed to last for half an hour.

45 minutes, maybe.

Fuck.

Oh, every feeling is like super intense.

Well, yeah.

Can you imagine like breaking a leg in this state how much that would hurt?

Well, also being able to hyper fix it, because I'm guessing he's able to, his brain is able to hyper fixate on like all of the neurons activating and like all of the pain receptors activating and stuff to where you'd almost feel like you'd be able to like feel and like understand like every crunch and like crack of your bone until it fully just like fully snaps but it's this excruciating process that's almost an hour long to sit in that painful thing for 45 minutes holy fuck

and it's just like the pain is only elevating for that time too like

yeah i uh

i'd wonder if the effects will get worse as time goes on that's kind of what i suspect well what's weird did the doctor say any um he didn't say how long it would last right he said it'll last a few hours be sure to do your work emails That's right.

Yeah, have fun doing your work emails.

And it's like, yeah, you just sent me into hell, dude.

Thanks.

Thanks, bud.

Appreciate it.

The elevator ride was horrible.

Felt like I spent four or five hours just descending seven floors.

Nothing to look at but the interior of the elevator car.

I spreaded to the metro station.

I have to admit, this part was almost fun.

Even though my body moved at what seemed to me super slow speed, I could still carefully choose how and where to place my feet, swing my arms, and turn my torso.

It only took a block or two

of getting used to having a brain that ran two dozen times faster than my body.

Then I basically sprint danced the rest of the way, twisting and juking people on the sidewalk and dodging moving cars with inches, aka minutes of clearance.

I spent an hour in my time frame descending into the subway and running to the platform.

Endless heeding and waiting the six minutes for the red line train to arrive.

Although there was no more to look at in the metro platform than inside the elevator, it was still intensely boring.

Should have stolen that copy of Moby Dick.

The red line train roared into the station in slow motion.

Normally, high-pitched squeal of its brakes was frequency shifted by my high-speed mind to a long, low tone, like a monotone tuba solo.

It wasn't just the squealing subway train that was three octaves lower than normal.

All sound was slowed to the point of near inaudibility.

Voices were gone, shifted below the threshold frequency of my hearing.

I did manage to hear a screaming baby on my subway car.

Her shrieks slowed to sound like whale songs.

Sharp sounds like a car horn and trucks bouncing over potholes were low, muddied roars like distant thunder.

Back at the research offices, I could still hear and communicate with the research staff, but now verbal communication with anyone would be impossible.

The effects of the drug were still intensifying.

I spent what seemed like days on that red line train, days, listening to the whale song of the screaming baby and the tuba solo of the brakes.

Where ordinary voices were frequency shifted out of my audio range, smells didn't seem to be affected.

I never became noseblind to the body odor, the stench of the train's brakes, the meleing of farts and other smells wafting through the metro car.

Let me ask, so is he perceiving all these things too?

Like when people, he's looking at other people and they look like they're in slow motion?

Yes.

Yeah, everything's making sure.

I'm trying to make sure I have like a, I'm trying to get it visualized in my head.

Yeah, the world's moving incredibly slow compared to him.

Right.

Even he feels like he's moving slow too.

Yeah, his body is just a perception of processing.

Okay.

Yeah.

Right.

I finally got back to my apartment.

Sprinting through my open door and into the front half at full speed was like a slow, relaxing drift down a lazy river.

I was relieved to be home.

At least I had stuff I could do there.

Picked up the book I was reading, 100 100 Years of Solitude, and finished it.

Despite turning the pages so quickly that I tore many of them, it seemed like most of the time I spent finishing the book was spent on page turning and not actually reading.

Three minutes have passed since I got home.

I tried to surf the internet.

My god, it takes a long time for computers to boot these days, but it was too frustratingly slow.

Hours, seemingly, to load each new page and a fraction of a second to read it.

100 articles in my news feed read and just three more minutes done.

So definitely time is slowing down even more.

As it goes on.

Yeah, it's getting worse.

I mean, like the thing of like an instantaneous thing like a page on a browser opening up is taking hours now.

Like that's fucking crazy.

And he says, I dipped into my pile of yet to be read books and finished two more.

Four more minutes had passed.

RIP.

I decided to try to sleep off the remaining effects of the drug.

Unfortunately, whatever part of my mind is responsible for perception, the part that's been accelerated to hyperspeeds by the drug isn't the same as the part that governs sleep.

Despite being awake for what I perceived as days, my physical brain still thought it was 1.25 p.m.

It was not ready for sleep.

Nevertheless, I tried to sleep.

Walked to my bedroom, slow 45-minute drift through my apartment, flung myself into bed, lazily falling like a feather under the mattress.

I closed my eyes and lay there for hours and hours, 10 minutes of reality time, before giving up.

Sleep would not come.

I was facing what was going to feel like days or maybe even weeks being trapped in a slow-motion prison.

So I took an ambient.

Oh, God.

That's not taking another drug on top of that.

That sounds like a horrible idea.

Wouldn't you take Coke instead?

I'm sure he doesn't have access to Coke, but wouldn't you want something that's like,

yeah, exactly.

You'd want an upper, something that's that's gonna like i guess perk you up but i guess the idea is that he's like well i'm just gonna try to sleep through this but even then i would almost assume that uh by sleeping i would sleep for half a second and my body would be fully rested like it'd be impossible to sleep yeah

yeah i don't think he's gonna be able to sleep through it uh this i'd be afraid to dream on this drug Yeah, that sounds even worse.

The sensation of the pill and the splash of water I used to swallow it sliding my throat was sickening.

A lump that blocked my breathing moving like a slug down my esophagus.

I read a book.

Ten minutes had passed.

I read another, 18 minutes since I took the ambient.

I threw the book across the room in disgust at my situation.

The book slowly

pureed and spun through the air, like a leaf blowing in a breeze.

It hit the wall with a long, faint rumble, the only sound I had.

I had heard for what seemed like hours.

Then drifted to the floor like a flip-flop sinking in a swimming pool.

The force of gravity hadn't changed since I took the pill.

The laws of physics were the same.

It was just my perception of time that has gone wackadoo.

This meant I could use the speed things

This meant I could use the speed things seem to fall as a way of judging the effects of the drug.

Based on how long it took the book to drift to the floor, I estimated the effects of the drug were still intensifying.

Read a magazine, turned on the television, I clearly saw each each frame of video like I was watching a slideshow.

Frustrated, I turned the television off.

I read some more.

First two books of Churchill's A History of the English Speaking Peoples.

Not exactly a light read.

Frankly, I hated it.

But given the hours of tedium it would take to get another book off my bookshelf, just sitting on the couch and reading Churchill was better, or at least less worse.

It had now been 35 minutes since I took the ambient.

I lay down on the couch, closed my eyes.

Time passed, I inhaled.

An hours-long process.

Time passed.

I excelled for more hours.

Sleep would not come.

I needed a new plan.

I decided to go back to the offices where they gave me the drug.

Maybe they would have something that could counteract its effects, or at least something to knock me out until it wore off.

Exited my apartment as fast as possible, taking hours in my timeframe to do so.

I didn't even bother locking the door.

It would have taken too long.

Down the stairs, it's faster than the elevator if you run, through the lobby, out the front door, and onto the street.

These few things felt like a long day at the office.

Sprinting down the street, dancing and weaving between pedestrians with what must have looked to them superhuman dexterity.

Down the first flight of stairs at the metro, across the landing, another hour.

Then onto the second flight of stairs.

That's when the ambient hit me.

The ambient didn't make me sleepy.

Not at all.

Instead, it must have had a severe cross reaction with the experimental drug I took this morning.

I was bouncing down the second flight of stairs, moving in slow motion, but still making perceptible progress.

Then, wham, everything stopped.

The dull roar of the street and metro noise ceased, replaced by the most perfect silence I've ever experienced.

My downwards motion seemed to completely freeze.

Before the ambient kicked in, my perception of time was maybe a few hundred times slower than real time.

After the ambient took effect, time moved thousands of times slower.

Every second seemed like days to me.

Even just moving my eyes to focus on a new point was like an impossibly slow scroll across my visual field.

Over the course of the afternoon, I learned how to walk, run, and jump when my mind ran hundreds of times faster than my body.

With another four or five orders of magnitude of slowdown caused by the ambient, body control was almost impossible.

I fell on the stairs.

Even though I was all but frozen in midstep, controlling my muscles was impossible.

I commanded my foot forwards for hours, then backwards for hours more when it seemed like I would miss the next step.

Hours attempting to adjust the angle of my ankle, then readjusting when it felt wrong.

Despite these efforts, I rolled my ankle on the next step.

The pain wasn't at all mitigated by the slowness.

Hours of increasing strain on my bent ankle.

The nerve signals that send pain into the brain must work differently than the nerves in my ear.

Sonic energy was spread out over time, diluted until it was imperceptible.

Pain flowed into my brain, undiluted, by the change in my perception of time.

Hours and hours of increasing weight on my turned ankle turned into hours of increasing pain upon increasing pain.

I pitched forwards, my high-speed mind completely unable to control my low-speed body.

I drifted downwards for days, managing to rotate my torso enough to keep my head from impacting the ground first.

I eventually landed on my right shoulder.

At first, the impact wasn't even noticeable.

Then I felt a slight pressure in my shoulder as it came in contact with the ground.

The pressure grew, bringing increasing pain for hour upon hour.

My shoulder finally gave out, popping out of its socket with an endless, sickening tug.

Ugh, yeah, see, that's the kind of thing I was talking about with that bone, like breaking bone.

Like being able to feel your shoulder pop out of its socket would be so brutal.

For that, like that long, my god.

Every detail of it can't stop it.

I came to a stop days later, crumbled onto the ground, staring at the ceiling.

The pain in my shoulder still screaming with the intensity of a fresh, violent injury.

I had plenty of time to think during that fall.

If every second seemed like days to me, then each minute of real-world time felt like years.

Even if the drug cleared out of my system in the next two or three hours, this nightmare would seem to last centuries.

By the time I hit the ground, I had a plan.

I would somehow get to the platform and throw myself in front of a train.

I twisted onto my hands and knees.

days of my dislocated shoulder crying for relief.

I misjudged my rotation and rolled onto my back.

I tried again, collapsing onto my face as I tried to figure out how to control a body that moved slower than grass grew.

Weeks of effort were finally rewarded with success.

I stabilized on my hands and knees.

If just getting on all fours was this difficult, I figured that walking or running was completely out of the question.

So I crawled.

I crawled through the metro tunnel.

The dumb looks on the faces in the crowd lingered on me for weeks.

I crawled under the turnstile and onto the escalator.

I just want to say, really quick, the escalation of time is very seamless.

Like, I really enjoy how it hasn't been this thing of like, all of a sudden, weeks pass.

It's just kind of like

even his perception of how he's telling it, it's just kind of the way it is.

Their eyes fixed on me for weeks.

Yeah, for weeks.

There was no real buildup.

Like, at the beginning, when it was like.

It's kind of interesting because I wonder how intentional this is, not to

harp on it too long, but at the beginning, the guy had more time to kind of articulate his, like the time passage of, yeah, I mean, this only four minutes had passed and I had been reading for 30 minutes or, you know, that kind of thing.

Now, something that's as brief as him being like, I was finally able to get onto my hands and knees.

It took weeks.

Like

even that has sped up in a way, you know, like it's taking longer and longer, like the lapses of times of him even describing something to us that seems so short are now like like become like the the the bridge is becoming wider and wider basically or longer

it's becoming more direct more um

more rancid basically more direct but it's happening in a longer sense of time like the information we're given is shorter but it's perceptually longer to him yeah the escalator spilled the rush hour crowd onto the platform at the same speed a glacier spills ice into the sea i looked out over the crowded platform during my interminable downward ride.

The train status sign said the next train would arrive in 20 minutes.

20 minutes was like a year to me.

I'd have to spend a year on the metro platform waiting to die.

Oh, God.

I crawled off the escalator, enduring days of stupid expressions on the commuters' faces.

I crawled a few feet to a concrete bench and curled up next to it, trying to find a position to lessen the pain in my shoulder.

then my problem with time got worse impossibly worse god how can you imagine watching people look at you for a year it's only yeah and they're all just frozen in place yeah people like people are just like awkwardly looking at you for an entire year my god the massive slowdown on the stairs was just the beginning of the interaction between the experimental drug and the ambient it fully hit me while i was curled up by the bench i blinked years of darkness followed

Sound was already gone, and with my blink, sight was gone as well.

All that existed was the pain from my fall.

Oh my god, so he's in darkness with throbbing pain for years.

Yeah,

that's so.

I love that line.

I blinked.

Years of darkness followed.

That's so good.

My hyper-accelerated mind wasted no time compensating for the lack of sensory input.

Voices spoke to me.

They sung to me in languages that never existed.

Patterns and faces and colors came and went in my mind's eye.

I recalled my whole life and imagined living another.

I forgot English.

I settled into a profound despair.

I spoke to God.

I became God.

I imagined a new universe and brought it to life with my thoughts.

Then I did it all again.

And again.

My eyes opened with geological slowness.

A faint glow.

Weeks.

A slit of light.

Weeks.

A narrow view of the metro platform.

Ankles of the commuters near me and an advertisement on the opposite wall.

I extracted my phone from my pocket.

Project that spanned decades.

How can I even explain the boredom?

The pain in my shoulder is nothing compared to the boredom.

Every thought I can think, I have thought hundreds of times already.

The view of ankles and advertisements advertisements never changes.

Never.

The boredom is so intense it's tangible.

Like a solid object of metal and stone wedged into my skull.

Inescapable.

What are my options?

If I crawl and fall into the tracks without an oncoming train to crush me, I won't die.

I'll experience even more pain from the four-foot fall, but I'll most likely be rescued by some do-gooder on the platform and unable to act when the train finally does arrive.

My suffering in that scenario will be endless.

So I wait for the train so I can throw myself under it.

When it finally hits me, I will experience the pain of being ripped to pieces for centuries until finally the light of life leaves my brain and my experience ends.

I've lived hundreds of lifespans at the foot of this bench.

I'm far older in spirit than any human who has ever lived.

Most of my life experiences have been a snapshot of pain huddled on the floor of a subway platform with an unchanging view of angles and advertisements.

This post is my plan B, my Hell Mary, my long shot.

I've spent lifetimes typing and posting this message in the hope that someone will read it and become convinced that my suffering must end.

Someone on this platform right now.

Someone who will find the man curled under the bench, the man who crawled down the escalator and kill him as swiftly as possible, a bullet bullet to the temple if you're armed in epiclinmont metro please shoot me wonderful that was great i like that one that was a lot of fun absolutely wonderful i that by far out of all the things we've read this would be the most excruciating

this is the most horrific thing we've ever read in terms of incredible yeah pain actual like uh in terms of actual despair and horror this is by far the most horrifying thing we've ever read um

In just the theory of like actually living that thing.

Like, obviously, there's stories that instill a lot of fear in us as well.

But this one is just being a thing of actually trying to put yourself in those shoes of,

I mean,

10,000 years.

Like, can you even imagine the, you know what it reminded me a lot of?

Was the Junji Ito story, The Long Dream.

It's my favorite Junji Ito story, and it reminds me of that.

Yeah, yeah,

that is what it reminds me.

I was trying to think of something.

that and uh there was another story it reminded me of those similar though thing.

Maybe I was just thinking the long dream, yeah, it's very similar.

It's probably the long dream, and then it's like a movie and my brain was kind of uh trickling over into limitless.

Like after a while, I kept picturing the guy looking like Bradley Cooper from that movie.

Yep, there's just something horrifying about um messing with perception of reality,

like a very um

i guess uncanny, weird way to

pretty much, I mean,

pretty much it's this is hell.

I mean, I don't know any, like, it's an eternity of suffering, you know?

Um,

and I think

something that I just really love the monkey paul aspect of making almost like eternal life feel

like hell, you know, like someone who would wish, I want to live forever.

This would, this is what it would be, you know?

Maybe not everything slowed slowed down, but still, that idea, that boredom, like the, the most horrifying thing is the idea of for thousands of years laying there and just seeing ankles and nothing.

Like, you can't, I love the part too when he's like, I forgot the human language, I spoke to God, I became God, and I did it over again.

It's like the cycles of

not, I mean, there's probably not even a word for it.

Like, it's beyond insanity.

It's like, I don't even know.

Like, how would you even describe that?

I mean, it's like, it's like a hell, right?

If your brain perceives time that slowly, it's, I mean, like you said, like, uh, year when his eyes were opening, years of a glint of light, right?

Like, it's horrif, horrific.

And hypothetically, if he has to do that for hours, it would be millions of years, right?

I wonder if after a while, too, do you think that there would be a point ever that the brain would just like

because because that's like that, that was kind of the ending in the long dream: was that in his mind, each time he slept, millions of years had passed to the point where it physically was altering his body until he just like turns to dust.

Do you think that in this reality, in this thing, in this universe, do you think something would happen where your brain is moving so fast that like it rapidly ages?

Like, I wonder if there would be any kind of physical alteration

to be right.

brain moving that fast.

It would change so much about your body.

I mean, like, realistically, probably

the synapses in your body can only move so fast, right?

And at the speed his brain is processing, his synapses are moving faster than the speed of light, right?

But within reality, if your brain was moving that much that fast,

you would probably seize and die.

Like for your brain to process information that quickly, it would be like an overload, effectively.

Yeah.

You'd have an aneurysm or something.

Yeah.

What would be weird, though, is that even though, you know, what's kind of interesting to think about is that it might even be happening now,

but

the perception of time is just getting longer.

So it doesn't actually execute until.

Like it'd almost be something where you're having an aneurysm, but it takes millions of years to fully

go through through your perception or something

and that just is so brutal i mean even trying to actually wrap your head around the idea of like typing out that message um

or like this reddit post would be something that would just be like

i mean i don't even know i can't even describe just to see

Just to look at your days and you're like trying to type and trying to do that and like a T pops up.

Like if you're like, my, my long shot, you just typing my takes God knows how many years.

Pretty fucking brutal.

It's uh, it's, it's heavy.

I really love that story.

I love the way that ended too.

It was, um,

I feel like it's weird.

I feel like it, it,

I don't know if it was just the amount of time that goes into

how slow time went, but for such a short story, it felt so full.

Like, if I, it felt much longer than I expected.

When we kind of were looking at this at first, I was like, oh, I wonder if this is going to be enough, but it really kind of fucks with you.

I really wonder mentally if I was like,

like, slowing down in my own, in like my head, like talking about it so much, you know?

I don't know.

Pretty crazy.

Great story.

Big, big fan.

I like that one.

That one was a banger, I feel like.

An absolute Madlad banger.

So from there, we have some other stories for him.

There are other stories within this universe, kind of, within like the storyline of the Glenmont Metro.

There is a three-part one called,

this is why I didn't want to give away the title.

My patient spent 8 million years under a bench at the Glenmont Metro.

So that's its own three-part story.

We may not want to read that one or at least give it a while just because it feels like

my prediction is it probably gives

too much.

Yeah, I would like to explain this story, I think, just for like let it sink and let me like live with it for a bit, you know.

Another one from the same author.

As a matter of fact, if you go to his website, A New Kind of Monster, he has some of his stories grouped

by different

like

styles.

So there's ones for

called Notes from the Laboratory.

There's one about cosmopathology, which is a really cool term.

And then he has one for Glenmont and the Second Death Universe.

So obviously, the first story in that series is the one reread.

If you're armed and at the Glenmont Metro, please shoot me.

And then the second one is this story called My Daughter Wants to Eat a Woman Who Shares Her Birthday, which is another banger title, by the way.

Then after that, there seems to be a three-part stories that is about the person from the Glenmot Metro story.

Uh, we may get into that one day.

And then it seems that Peter Frost David has made an entire book kind of built in this universe called Second Death.

So

if the Glenmot Metro thing sounds cool to you and you want to see more, well, check out the Second Death.

Yeah.

But this is the second short story he has written, at least according to his website, within this universe.

So we're going to get into that and see how we like it now.

Yeah, I love these titles.

Oh yeah, they're good.

They're great.

From that first story, I'm hooked.

The guy's cooking.

Yeah.

Cooking up a storm.

So, my daughter wants to eat a woman who shares her birthday.

The only way this is going to make sense is if I start at the beginning.

August 21st, 1982.

A baby girl was born shortly after midnight.

I wasn't the mother's doctor, but I was the attending on the same labor and delivering floor.

Even though the new board's ab

apgar apgar i'm sure that my sister's a nurse she could probably tell me what that is even though editor put in a apgar definition because i don't know

thing

i assume it's something to do with the baby stats or whatever

yeah the baby's baseball card pretty much she was clearly in great distress the on-call pediatrician raced the child to the niku 20 minutes later i was called to consult you want me to check on the mother i'm an obstetrician.

I care for pregnant women and deliver their babies.

Once they're born, the infants become pediatric patients.

Why was I being called into the neonatal unit?

No, Dr.

Kaisen, it's the child.

Please, come to the NICU.

I heard panic creeping into my colleague's voice.

The baby lay in an ICU incubator, screaming.

The nursing staff stood at a distance.

None of them were looking at the child.

They stared at the floor or the far wall or at me.

They were experienced neonatal ICU nurses.

They had dealt with every horrible condition that could possibly result from birth, but whatever was in the incubator had rattled them.

How is this an obstruct case?

The pediatrician gestured to the incubator.

Please examine the patient, Dr.

Kaisen, and tell me what you think.

The baby girl looked like a healthy birthweight baby, eight pounds or so, but her abdomen was terribly distended.

She certainly had a good reason for screaming.

I gently palpated the girl's bulging belly, expecting to feel signs of fluid or gas.

I didn't.

Instead, I felt an enlarged uterus.

The fundus was near the infant's sternum.

I gently squeezed the sides of the child's belly, feeling with my fingertips a miniature version of what I feel with my whole hands in adult patients.

I placed my palm on her tiny belly.

There was an almost imperceptible flutter.

Something gently pushed against my hand.

So, is this saying that the baby is pregnant?

Pretty much is what they're saying.

The baby's like a little Russian nesting doll or something.

Yeah, yeah, there's a baby inside the baby.

I turned to the NICU staff.

Their eyes were locked on me, hands holding their mouths or touching their foreheads.

I said,

This infant is pregnant, and she's in labor.

Good fucking Lord.

Oh, man.

Disgusting.

I did my best to remain calm, but I heard my voice crack as I spoke.

Something was inside this newborn.

Something had grown inside her as she developed in the womb, and it wanted to get out.

I have as much experience as the NICU nurses with the terrible effects of abnormal pregnancies.

No matter what condition my patients and their fetuses had suffered from, I never felt what I felt in that moment.

Fear.

Fear of what was inside of this baby.

I delivered the infant's baby

by cesarean section.

The operation, normally performed on an adult to deliver a normal-sized child, was difficult and time-consuming due to the mother being an infant herself.

When I was done, I felt the infant's own baby in my hand.

A tiny, two-inch-long, but fully developed and very much alive baby girl.

My fear dissipated and was replaced with a more ordinary sense of concern.

This impossible little baby who only two hours earlier filled me with fear was in the end still a baby.

She needed to be cared for.

Premature babies, children born months too soon, require extreme interventions to keep them alive.

Lungs, for example, require nearly nine months to mature.

Premature babies, as small as the child I delivered, always require breathing support.

But this baby had no breathing problems.

Her color was good.

She cried normally.

Her lungs had the full nine months of development.

Somehow, this child had been conceived at nearly the same time as her mother and gested for nine months inside her simultaneously gestating parent.

This, of course, is impossible.

How did you get here?

I asked her after I gently laid her in her own NICU incubator.

Don't answer that.

I think I'll be better off if I don't know.

What an interesting,

hmm.

This is an interesting body horror setup.

Yeah, it's weird.

The idea of like

a baby that's like a Russian nesting doll, pretty much, where it's like, there's no rhyme or reason, almost like,

what is it?

Divine...

What is it called when it's

Immaculate Conception?

Yeah, almost like an Immaculate Conception thing, like a really fucked version of that.

Yeah.

It's pretty messed up.

The grandmother, the 22 year old woman who delivered a pregnant baby wanted nothing to do with the miraculous daughter her new child delivered she referred to her granddaughter as the excess tissue you removed from my baby i mean yeah i mean honestly what else would you say right well i guess it's just the idea the it's it's a healthy it's a tiny you know

maybe don't get me wrong but The only thing I would think is like, well, maybe it was like a twin, like it was twins and then one of them like tried to absorb the other twin because that happens maybe it wasn't absorbed or kept developing by something I guess that'd be the only prime or reason you could give it

yeah well I just it's crazy that it's a healthy it's completely healthy it's just small and it's weird too that the baby's like ovaries were working and like you know it's just so fucking crazy

But I guess too, I would probably be living in denial as well.

Well, yeah, be like, okay, absolutely not.

Right.

Yeah.

The NICU nurses never warmed up to the grandchild.

They did the minimum necessary to keep her healthy, but they didn't dote affection and attention onto her as they did with the other tiny patients.

I'm not religious, but I do believe in the idea of universal balance, cosmically and individually.

Three years earlier, my life was thrown into imbalance when my wife died of an aneurysm.

This tiny girl born to an infant mother, the girl referred to as excess tissue, filled me with a sense of direction.

I sensed in her a path towards the equilibrium that I lost.

I adopted her.

I named her Helen.

The grandmother's reaction and the impersonal way the NICU nurses treated Helen told me that I needed to hide the circumstances of her birth.

If her grandmother and the nursing staff couldn't find a way to see Helen as a person, then how would the rest of the world treat her?

From the perspective of the adoption papers, Helen was born premature to a mother who was not competent to raise her.

This is true.

How could her mother, an infant, raise another infant?

The family, the paperwork we recorded, did not want anything to do with the child.

Also true.

The fact that Helen's mother was only 90 minutes older than Helen was omitted.

Man, okay,

what I really like about this author is he pushes these scenarios where sentences like that exist, right?

Because there were a couple times in the last story, it was like that.

It was like, I blinked years past, right?

What a cool, what a cool like predicament we've got ourselves into.

And then that line, the mother was only 90 minutes older than Helen.

Like, you know, stuff like that's just so cool.

I think it shows, too, that with confidence in writing, um,

in any sense, like it very Cronenberg.

One thing I love about like Cronenberg stories is there's really no explaining the world.

It's just kind of showing.

Like, it's just like, this is just, it is what it is.

And by doing so, too, you immediately get bought in.

And like, there's so many times where people would try to justify this or like they would do a whole lap around to have this make sense versus just being like, I mean, it's just, it is what it is.

90 minutes older baby.

It makes no sense, but you're fully

engrossed in the story.

Yeah, it's like, it doesn't matter how we got here.

We're here now.

What do we do with it?

Yeah, this is the reality you're in.

Buckle up.

Yeah.

The adoption process required a maternity and a paternity test.

Both parents must approve the adoption.

Given Helen's strange background, we tested her mother, the infant, and her grandmother, the 22-year-old new mom, and her husband.

The DNA analysis proved that the infant who bore Helen was indeed Helen's mother.

The 22-year-old mom and her husband were Helen's grandparents.

The implication is astounding.

Nine months before Helen was born, some unknown male DNA entered her mother, who had had yet to be born.

The DNA somehow combined with the mothers and Helen began to exist.

Well, weird.

Pretty weird.

So do you think that do you think this is going into Immaculate?

I think that's what it's saying.

Or it's going to be like some...

This author, I mean, we've only read one of his stories, so I don't know.

But off the one we read, it was very sci-fi, right?

So maybe it's more of a sci-fi thing, you know, like maybe this child was like

created by like a non-human entity.

Like maybe the father or the mother isn't human or something like that.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that there's an interest, like as soon as the

narrator said, I'm not a religious person, I figured that it was going to go into a place that is going to test the person's belief system.

Yeah.

Right.

Probably.

I mean, this certainly was.

This is insane.

Yeah.

I raised Helen and she grew up.

She was a normal kid, mostly.

I hate to gloss over or trivialize our happy years together.

Please try to picture a single dad happily raising a beautiful, brilliant, and energetic daughter.

The incidents I recount here only stand out now that I see what Helen became.

Were these warnings that I ignored or that I rationalized away as evidence of Helen's fantastic imagination?

The first incidents happened when Helen was eight years old.

We were eating lunch at the mall food court.

I was talking to her and I paused for her to respond.

She didn't.

Her attention was laser focused on something on the other side of the seating area.

I turned and followed her gaze.

Another girl, about the same age as Helen, stood in line with her mother to get pizza.

Got a sick feeling in my gut when I realized who the mother was.

I'd only met Helen's grandmother a few times, but I remember what she looked like.

The little girl ordering pizza was Helen's mother.

The woman was Helen's grandmother.

At that time, Helen had no idea that she was adopted.

Why are you looking at those people, Helen?

I'm looking at the girl.

I want to eat her.

Why do you want to eat another person?

Not any person, Dad, just her.

Helen, that's not an appropriate thing to say.

I know,

but it might help me get out one day.

Get out what?

What?

Out of what?

She never answered.

Bro.

I like that.

That's fun.

See what I mean?

We're in such a weird scenario.

There's like a little child that's like, shouldn't exist and wants to eat her mother who's the same age as her.

One thing with people that

do this kind of stuff and they just go full force with this.

Like just full steam head with these weird ideas is that you're then able, like, then there's no boundary.

Like the absurdity of things are all

believable and like you treat them seriously you know versus if you had it so grounded and then all of a sudden someone said something absurd well then you're just like you're dancing around the idea of like well what why would they do you know you know what i mean so yeah i love this i think it's great yeah it's like it's like we're gonna pick one really weird thing and i'm gonna commit to it It's gonna be weird.

The opening lines, like the baby's pregnant, right?

And now it's like, we're just, we keep following that.

It's not pulling from other places to be strange.

It is strange in its own unique sense, and I like that.

The second strange event occurred when Helen was 10 during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

We wandered the galleries together.

I paid more attention to what Helen found interesting than to the art itself.

I wanted to know what she found boring and what inspired her.

We found ourselves in front of a 19th century oil painting depicting Christ's descent into hell.

The gloomy painting featured a desolate landscape, a burning city filled with the dead, monsters, demons, the river sticks, and of course, Jesus himself breaking down the gate to gain entry into hell to rescue the souls of the just.

Helen stopped abruptly in front of the painting.

She stepped towards it, studying the painting so closely her nose almost brushed the canvas.

She examined each detail carefully, moving deliberately from each figure to feature to the next so she wouldn't overlook anything.

Finally, she scrutinized the depiction of Christ breaking down the gate to hell.

She started giggling, then laughing loudly.

What's so funny?

I wasn't worried at that point, just curious.

The picture's so silly.

Christ is sitting to hell is silly.

The gate is silly.

The gate is the way out of hell, not into it.

You don't need to break in.

You need to break out.

It's just so funny.

Plus, the door isn't big enough.

Yo!

Fuck that.

I'm like, yeah, this is a good time where I do.

I do, I do, mm-hmm.

Sounds good, Helen.

I'm going to go get some dippin' dots, and I would leave that little bitch there forever.

No way.

You know for a fact it would know how to find its way home.

Oh, God, easily.

I had cab fare.

Helen, how did you get cab fare?

Yeah, I'm going to eat you now.

Like a little monster.

Daddy, I'm hungry.

I want your toes.

Yeah.

I hope, I hope, you know what?

I hope your kid bites.

God, no no shit.

Well, it's going to happen now.

That would fit.

That would be so fitting if you had to bite her.

Oh, man.

Dude, that is so...

Well, that's not what the gate to hell looks like.

Oh, it's great.

Now I was worried.

The image of Helen's mother screaming in the NICU incubator with Helen squirming inside of her flashed into my mind's eye.

The fear that I experienced when I felt Helen kicking in her mother's miniature womb flooded me.

Helen, what are you talking about?

When I go to hell, I'm going to eat my way out through my bloodline.

Good fucking God.

My word.

Oh, Helen, why do you think you're going to hell?

That's a very sad thing for a little girl to believe.

It's just something I know.

I remember it, even though it hasn't happened yet.

Oh, wow.

Oh, that's so sick.

That is so fucking sick.

I love it.

Oh my gosh.

That's so cool.

I think the dad's just like, I remember, even though it hasn't happened yet.

The dad, like, looking at her, kind of like a little confused, but like almost emotionalist.

And he's like, mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Ooh, Jesus.

And also, thank God it didn't go a weird route, right?

Like with like the pregnant child or whatever.

It's like her soul was taken from hell and just thrown somewhere to be like.

Dude, you know what?

I would be so pissed if I was that dad where I'm like,

I took home the fucking keychain baby and everyone was giving me odd looks and I thought I was being a good guy.

Turns out that they were like fully right to be so serious.

Turns out they were completely right.

Turns out I'm the one who didn't recognize yeah I'm apparently the fucking asshole here.

Cool.

Well, I guess I'm the bad guy.

Man.

Gosh, that's so cool.

Then she skipped away to the next gallery of paintings.

See, here's the thing.

People always like, they try to be absurdist

and they'll recreate it and it always comes out as nonsensical, right?

It's always like, oh, well, everything's just random.

And it's like, no, this isn't random.

Sure, it's an absurdist concept, but it follows, it has a track of logic that it's sticking with, at least so far, right?

Of like, the child was weird, it was strange, and now it wants to eat her, and now it's a thing from hell.

Like, you're developing off the same idea in a pattern of logic.

It's just a very weird one you've pulled out of.

I think it works well.

It works well because of the absurdity of how the child came to be, right?

Yeah.

So now you're starting to unweave or you're starting to weave this web of the backstory or kind of like more of the demented side.

So the, the, even the way that the child is born in this immaculate conception kind of thing is interesting because you believe it's going to be a religious, but it's, you know, kind of the negative side of that religious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, like

it's just, it's fun.

I really like it.

It bangs.

I like it so far.

Final incident that stands out in hindsight, some kind of red flag, happened seven years ago.

Helen was doing post-doctoral work at Lawrence Livermore, but was home for leave during the Christmas holiday.

Helen was a workaholic.

She might have been on vacation, but she never stopped working.

This is fun, too, just the idea that, like, for like 20, 30 years, she was a perfectly normal girl, except he can only think of three times she was weird, right?

Yeah.

Also, I guarantee you, I guarantee you, this kind of woman.

Would absolutely decimate half of the men watching this video.

Oh,

100%.

Could you imagine like an actual demon lady who like limbs hell and stuff?

Cleaning up shop.

Cleaning up shop.

Several men in these comments would falter.

I fear.

El Diablo.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Just fall over themselves to give their soul away.

Yeah.

Oh, absolutely.

Not saying I haven't been there before, but

I have been picked from the vine, so to speak, as since.

So I'm safe.

I can judge you all from the safety of my basket as you all hang on the vine willing to be eaten up by the foxes of the field, so to speak.

During the time she was home that year, she worked even more intensely than usual.

And that's ain't a lot.

She earned a physics PhD from Caltech in just three years.

I don't think she worked fewer than 12 hours a day, even once during those three years.

I was happy she was home, but she was so focused on a lab-related problem that it was more like having a cardboard cut out of my daughter visiting me than an actual person.

For nearly a week, all my attempts to start a conversation failed.

She'd respond with one-syllable answers to my questions and immediately curl back around her notebook.

Finally, I asked her what she was working on.

She stared at me, blinking for a minute.

Her mind slowly descended from the world of

high-energy physics to the world of normal human interaction.

Oh,

sure.

She handed me her notebook, Hardcover journal with the word record stenciled on the front.

Or record, I should say, stenciled on the front.

I opened the book to the page she had been writing on.

The only way I can describe what I saw there was that it was satanic.

A pentagram.

An upside-down star inscribed in a circle filled half the page.

The rest was filled with intricately drawn symbols.

Strange, curving shapes drawn from an alphabet I had never never seen.

Decorative lines linked constellations of symbols.

Lines with loops, curves with arrows, arcs with circles and triangles drawn on top of them.

Helen,

what is this?

Dad, it's math.

It looks like you're, I don't know, worshiping the devil.

The devil, really?

She started laughing.

It was the first time I heard her laugh since she arrived five days earlier.

Lucifer, the Lord of Lies, or is it flies?

One of those.

I'm not trying to be like, I don't know, Tipper Gore.

I'm just saying it looks a little wacko.

She laughed so hard she fell out of the chair.

She finally recovered and climbed back into it.

It's a problem for work.

I'm trying to design a thermal stabilization system.

These devil words or whatever you think they are, they're just stochastic tensors.

The whole thing is just a huge stochastic differential equational problem.

God, I'm too fucking stupid to read this shit.

What about this demon summoning thing?

The pentagram?

She turned off the hilarity.

Now that's interesting.

When you do the math, as I've clearly done here, it turns out a star inside of a circle is the

epitome shape.

Jesus Christ.

Inside a circle is the optimum shape of the thermal elements we need to stabilize the.

She cut herself off, paused, and chose her neck words carefully

to stabilize the thing that needs that needs stabilizing

that's an interesting idea that demonic images pop up in because that's the the kind of the joke about uh circuit boards right that the circuitry uh outlining looks like old uh demonic and angel sigils like their their names printed so like uh technology rots forth these forgotten like names and ideas of you know spirituality and stuff like that the way demons can speak without speaking so to speak um that it's just a fun element for like uh religious horror uh and it's cool that kind of pops up here i'm sure she's expressly demonic and no she's demonic from what we've seen um but her being like oh well coincidentally a star an upside-down star inside of a circle is the best way to thermal stabilize.

So it's like,

I don't know, it's a fun, it's a fun like loop back of like cultural demonology mixed into like the science and this girl being a demon and stuff like that.

It's just, I'm completely sold.

Everything, I love everything about this so far.

I was going to press her.

I know she works on classified projects at the lab and isn't free to say much about them, but I thought I could tease out a little more information about why she was, what she was actually doing with her life.

But then she changed the topic to the subject I've been dreading since the terrible and wonderful night that she was born.

Dad,

when you adopted me, do you remember if you came across any information about my biological family?

Specifically about my biological father?

Oh, Helen.

I flopped onto the couch.

Why do you want to know about your father?

It's not like I want to meet my birth family and try to get all my kumbaya.

Believe it or not, I have a professional interest in the subject.

Helen, nobody knows who your father is.

That's what I thought.

And she dropped the subject.

My daughter, who pursues everything she's ever been interested in with a relentless, white-hot intensity, simply dropped her questions about her own father.

Do you know why?

Because she knows her father's the devil.

Let's go.

Yeah, I'm curious to see

where they're going with this.

I hardly saw or even talked to Helen after that Christmas.

Her visits home became infrequent.

We would go six months or more between phone calls.

Then she died.

Damn.

She was working on a project for the army.

Not at Livermore, they said, somewhere else.

There was an accident involving a high-energy experiment.

She was killed along with 12 other scientists.

Her bodies were vaporized.

There were no remains.

Losing a wife and a daughter is too much for one lifetime.

I couldn't work after that.

I had to retire.

I grieved.

I tried to kill myself.

Damn.

I spent three weeks in an institution.

I somehow inched my way back up to something that looks like a functional person.

Then the mail started showing up.

The Army, apparently, never stopped sending her paychecks.

Six months after Helen died, a rubber band-bound bundle of paystubs with her name, but my address arrived in my mailbox.

W-2 forms showed up next.

Paperwork for benefits enrollment.

Retirement account statements showing ongoing contributions.

The paperwork that modern life produces kept coming.

I called her HR office dozens of times.

Their answer was always the same.

We're sorry for the confusion.

We'll look into it.

Then an envelope from a company named Parental DNA Analysis appeared in my mailbox.

It was addressed to Helen.

I tore it open with.

I tore it open while standing in the driveway.

It contained the results of a paternity test.

Ooh.

Child, Helen Kaisen.

Father, hair sample supplied by client.

Probability of paternity, 99.9% repeating percent.

Somehow, before she died, Helen found her father.

She had found the person whose DNA entered her mother's embryo and, contrary to everything known about human development, produced a child.

or she had at least produced a hair sample from the man who contributed half her genome.

Interesting.

So I would say we have a break there.

If I would guess, in these high-energy experiments that require setting up a pentagram and stuff like that, she did like a demon summoning ritual, right?

Yeah, that's what I was assuming as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, she got hair from the devil.

Yeah, that got so hard.

I saw Helen.

She's changed.

I was returning from running errands when she arrived at my house.

I knew something was happening when I turned into my neighborhood.

The streets were full of dogs.

What looked to be every neighborhood dog, Labradors, Chihuahuas, and everything in between, were running around like crazy.

They were barking, growling, crying, jumping, and nipping at the air.

Their owners were futilely running after them.

I pulled into my driveway.

There was a package next to the door.

It was addressed to Helen.

I lugged the heavy cardboard box into the living room.

The package was only the size of a banker's box, but it was as heavy as a box of rocks.

I sighed.

Why was Helen's death nearly as strange as her birth?

I wondered what I would be doing at that moment if the aneurysm hadn't taken my wife two decades earlier.

Would I be happier?

I opened the box.

Inside was a steel case.

The kind of case you'd use to ship something expensive and fragile.

A post-it was stuck to the top of the steel case.

On it, someone had written.

Dad, open this ASAP.

I pulled the steel case out of the cardboard shipping box and thunked it down in the dining room table.

I undid the heavy-duty latches and opened it.

Inside was a tablet computer.

Underneath that was a hard plastic case.

Another post-it note was stuck to the tablet screen.

Turn me on.

I did.

It booted into a heavily customized version of the regular operating system and automatically started a messaging app.

I typed a message.

Hello?

I waited a minute.

Another minute.

Someone finally typed a response.

Dad, what is my mother's name?

It's crazy.

I started to cry.

This was probably a joke or a crazily complicated scam, but the thought that maybe I was messaging Helen was too irresistible.

I never saw her body.

Her paychecks keep showing up in my mailbox.

Why couldn't I be talking to her?

Helen,

where are you?

Another long pause.

Dad,

I know who my father is.

I met him.

I need to find my mother.

I know how I was born.

I know you know who my mother is.

Tell me her name, and I'll tell you where I am.

Does that not feel like a trick from the devil or something like that?

It does.

Well, I imagine.

That's what I mean.

Like, I do not believe that's her.

I guess

that's her.

It is her.

Well, I say it could be her because I think she's been a demon or, like, uh, uh, what's the name of the kid from the Omen?

Damien.

I feel like she could be like an Antichrist figure or something like that.

And now she's communicating through hell, effectively.

Right.

I truly didn't know her mother's name.

The infant I've performed the cesarean section on was less than half an hour old when I operated.

She hadn't even been given a name yet.

I don't know your mother's name, Helen,

but I know your grandmother's name.

Then I typed in the name of the woman who said my daughter was just excess tissue.

A minute passed, then five.

Was Helen gone?

Open the smaller case.

Turn the camera on.

I pulled the black plastic case out of the steel box and opened it.

Inside was a video camera nestled in a custom cut foam insert.

A sticker on the camera said, LL FLIR calibrated.

And the date, less than two weeks earlier.

It was an infrared camera from Lawrence Livermore.

I found the power switch and waited for it to come to life.

I typed into the tablet.

It's on.

I stared at the screen without blinking.

She finally wrote.

I'm in the backyard.

I ran through the kitchen and flung open the back door.

The yard was empty.

I collapsed on the threshold and wept.

Whoever I'd been messaging to was not Helen.

It was a joke.

I heard a growl.

The beagle who lived next door was standing by my backyard gate.

The dog bared its teeth and snarled at my empty backyard.

The dog thought something was there.

Whoever I was messaging on the tablet said they were in my backyard.

I'm slow sometimes.

I realized the camera in my hand was there for a reason.

I lifted the camera and scanned it across the yard.

Something was there.

Something huge, rendered in the infrared camera's garish shades of yellow, pink, and red, was standing directly in front of me.

It was too close and too big to see all at once through the camera's narrow field of view.

This is so cool.

I started by aiming the camera at the grass.

I saw four huge feet with long

five jointed

uh with long five

toes protruding at odd angles.

It was hard to get a sense of their size on the infrared, but my guess was that each foot was the size of a yoga ball.

Went inside the house and slammed the door.

Bro,

let's go.

It's described as almost like the Leviathan of Revelation, like the seven-headed beast with the wings and the

lion.

Yeah, that's so cool.

I caught my breath and peered out the back window.

To my naked eye, the backyard was still empty.

I am the camera out the window.

The same feet were visible in the infrared spectrum.

So not to be pedantic, because I know the author doesn't know this and I know he's trying.

But infrared cameras cannot see through glass.

Just so you know.

What if it's a demonic one, though, that Helen gave him?

Well, I thought it says it's from the laboratory.

I thought the idea is you can only pick up infrared signals.

It's like it's on the visible direction.

What if it's a demonic lab camera?

Well, no, because the way infrared works is it picks up heat signatures, right?

So if there's a window,

but what if it's demonic heat signatures, Isaiah?

You know what?

You're right.

Maybe there is a perfect imprint of the world

and the thing on the window from heat.

Sure.

Sure, Hunter.

Okay.

There we go.

We're just making sure.

The same feet were visible on the infrared spectrum.

I raised the camera.

The thing had a body like...

I don't know what.

An upside-down dog merged with an octopus?

It made no sense.

Appendages with a dozen elbows sprouted irregularly from the body.

The arms or tentacles or whatever you'd call them ended in hooves, bird feet, and human-like hands.

One of the hands held a tablet computer identical to the one I left in the living room table.

A face was senselessly placed on the side of the thing's body.

There was no neck, nothing to even suggest a head.

Just a face stuck on the body like an afterthought.

I I aimed the camera at the face.

The autofocus worked for a moment, and the face became clear.

It was Helen.

She smiled.

It reminds me of

those old 18th century depictions of demons where they're like these little balls of faces and feet crawl around.

Almost like weird-looking animals, like the old Renaissance paintings of what demons are.

It's like they all got mushed together, you know?

Just like a weird fuck surrealist animal depiction, basically.

Yeah.

I flash back to that moment decades earlier when I put my hand on the screaming baby's belly and felt Helen kick.

My first reaction had been fear.

I'd felt terror and revulsion at the idea that somehow a baby had been born pregnant, that someone, something,

had put its seed into an embryo, produced a creature.

That same terror and revulsion filled me when I saw Helen's face on the side of that monster.

Years ago, I was able to put my fear aside and do my job as a doctor to deliver Helen into the world.

I had to do the same thing today.

I had to put my fear aside, do my job as a father.

I flung the kitchen door open and shouted into the backyard.

Helen!

A pause, the new text on the tablet.

Goodbye, dad.

I needed the conversation to keep going.

I couldn't let this, this insane situation, be the last time I saw my daughter.

I yelled,

I got the paternity test results.

The hair sample was your father.

I know.

Who is he?

A man who died a long time ago.

Then she typed one last message to me.

Thank you, Dad.

This is what I need to be doing now.

There's only a 37.9% chance that I'll see you again.

Sorry.

I looked into the yard with the camera.

She was gone.

So she, so what it seems like so far, if she consciously did that decision, then it makes it seem like when she quote unquote died, she did an experiment where she was able to like go into a different dimension.

She went to hell.

Pursue.

Yeah, she basically went to hell.

I think she was like an Antichrist or some kind of like seed of the devil or something like that that was put on earth.

And then she dedicated all her times to studies, which was sciences, which was effectively the way she used it, like a modern wish a witchcraft, a way to use technology to open a teleport to hell, her and 12 other people, right?

Those 12 other people might as well be human sacrifices, right?

Or other people in her similar condition.

12, the number 12 is interesting.

That number shows up a lot in the Bible.

12 disciples, 12 tribes of Israel.

So like saying she took 12 people with her is saying that like, either 12 or counting her 13, she would be the, you know, evil 13th one or whatever.

13 people around the world were either these demons or she created a sacrifice of 12 people to open the gateway into hell.

I'm guessing it's the sacrifice is kind of where my gut was going when I was.

Probably the sacrifice because it makes her more special as like a Antichrist figure, right?

Like the one and only.

Well, it seems more like the key.

Like that's the key she needed to than buy and product go to hell.

Yeah, yeah.

So she goes to hell and now she's become this demon.

I don't know what the 37.9% thing is.

I'm sure we'll see that in a second.

Could it not just be something where she understands some kind of like anomaly?

Because she was a math major before.

So maybe she just understands the like probability is low and she's like maybe like also shown like how well she's prepared for this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It definitely could be.

I don't know.

We're all, I am excited to see.

Like we, this is the last section.

This is the last little section coming up here.

So curious.

I'm so interested.

This is so good.

I began this post by saying that it wouldn't make sense unless I started at the beginning.

Well, I did start at the beginning, and it probably still doesn't make any sense.

I've gotten used to the idea that I'm not going to ever fully understand Helen's life, death, and whatever you call what came after.

Given the few fragments of information I have, any decision I make about what I should do next is going to be half-baked.

But baked or not, Choosing a course of action will at least feel like forward motion.

If I move forward long enough, then maybe I'll escape the despair despair that Helen left me with.

There's one more thing I want to document here.

If there's anyone that cares about what I've done and what I'm about to do, maybe it will help them understand my reasons.

I stayed in bed for three or four days after I saw Helen, or the thing that wore her face.

I got up a few times to trash the house, throw plates and glassware around, and knock over furniture.

Eventually, I had to clean up.

The last thing I put away was the steel steel box that held the tablet and the camera.

As I was putting the items back in the box, I discovered something at the bottom of the steel container.

The notebook Helen brought home for our last Christmas together.

The notebook that I said looked like it belonged to a devil worshiper.

Found the page that Helen was working on during that Christmas vacation.

I know she said it was math.

Stochastic differential equations and tensors.

But it still looked satanic to me.

The rest of the journal was filled with her research work.

Most of the remaining 50 pages held nothing but math.

Some of it looked like the satanic runes on the page with the pentagram, and some held the standard curvy integral signs and Greek letters that I remembered from my college calculus classes.

Something on the last page caught my eye.

A mess of computations that started 12 pages earlier ended with this line:

selection ratio equals 0.379.

Hmm.

The last thing Helen wrote to me included the same number.

There's only a 37.9% chance I'll see you again.

I've spent the last three months studying those 12 pages of calculations.

The main thing I've learned was that Helen was far more brilliant than I realized.

Whatever problems she worked out on those last 12 pages drew from the fields of probability, statistics, game theory, population dynamics, Bayesian analysis, and non-Euclidean geometry.

Oh, my heart, whenever I hear that phrase.

I went over the notebook again and again.

What was 37.9%?

What was she calculating?

As far as I can tell, which isn't very far, she was studying some attribute of people who have died.

There's nothing conclusive in her notebooks, so I have to guess.

Based on data gathered in higher energy physics experts at Lawrence Livermore, Helen calculated that a 37.9% of people who die continue to experience some form of existence after death.

With one exception, I don't regret anything that I've done in Helen's impossible life.

I would do it all over again, from performing a cesarean section on a pregnant infant to adopting the child I delivered to saying goodbye to whatever it is that she became.

The only regret I have is that I didn't learn her mother's name.

I often think back to the day in the mall when Helen was eight years old.

She had no idea that the girl on the other side of the food court was her mother, but Helen sensed something.

Not a maternal bond or a vague sense of familiarity.

Whatever eight-year-old Helen sensed in that child activated something dark inside of her.

Helen said, I want to eat her.

I think she meant it literally.

Eight-year-old Helen said that eating her mother might

help her get out one day.

I don't know what she thought she needed to get out of, but if helping Helen out of something she's stuck in can return me to her, then I'm going to help.

I went online.

I went to the courthouse and dug through moldering adoption paperwork.

I hired a private investigator.

I dug into the past and discovered the name of the infant who was my surgical patient on that terrible and wonderful night in 1982.

That baby's an adult now.

I found her address, her employer, her credit history.

I didn't care about HIPAA regulations, privacy agreements, or anything like that.

I gathered, bought, and stole all the information I could find about the family that I adopted Helen from.

The box that contained the tablet, camera, and her notebook had a return address label on it, a PO box in Livermore, California.

Put everything I learned about Helen's mother into an envelope and sent it to that PO box.

One more task remains.

A task that has a 37.9% chance of success.

I need to see my daughter again.

I need to exist in a universe where she also exists.

I've decided to kill myself.

Wasn't an easy decision.

It was based on imperfect information and guesswork about Helen's research.

But death feels like forward motion.

Motion towards an existence where I can be with my daughter.

Posting the strange memoir is my final living act.

I have no family left to say goodbye to.

My close friendships were there decades ago.

Perhaps the information I've written here will be useful to investigators or to people related to the woman who referred to my daughter as excess tissue.

Hopefully the information I sent to the P.O.

box will make its way to Helen.

She will finally eat the woman who shares her birthday.

Goodbye.

If my daughter's calculations are correct, my plan succeeds.

There's a 37.9% chance I'll meet you one day.

I love how he ends his stories.

Yeah.

Oh, it's like just a nice little cherry on top.

Yeah.

That one was great too.

I like the religious aspect that ties in with just the science nature of it as well.

Like it'd be interesting to

if this was like a longer story.

Because once again, this one was pretty tight, like pretty short.

But it's very effective.

Yeah, that hits pretty hard.

I mean, like, going through, it would have been nice to, you know, really live with these characters a little bit longer.

Because I really, in terms of like actual actual character building, I really enjoyed the dynamic of the dad here.

It's such a brutal place, too, to be like, um, well, my daughter's the devil, but I have to kill myself to go see her.

You know, like the, the sort of desperation to that, it's very violent.

Yeah, the conclusion to that is so harrowing in a weird way.

It's also, it's kind of like a psychotic break in a weird way.

You can't tell if this guy is really rationally there and he's kind of making conclusions about her work and all that kind of stuff.

Not to say that he's wrong, but I'm just saying you could read it in a way where this man's just like, Well, I'm going to kill myself and see my daughter.

I can see that being uh,

I don't know.

I could also see that just being someone who's just emotionally distraught, and that's their kind of uh emotional reaction in response to that thing.

Um,

but really enjoyed it, really enjoyed that.

It just like this author, Peter

Peter, right?

Yeah, uh, Peter

Something Dark.

Let me make sure I got this right.

David Peter Cross, I think.

Let me look.

David Peter Cross.

Where's the...

I clicked on it about a second ago.

Am I stupid?

Peter Frost David.

Peter Frost David.

Peter Frost David, I really enjoy the commitment to the initial idea, starting with a very absurdist hook.

and then really kind of like rationalizing it in a fun way while not deviating and trying to give it too much grounded realism.

Like, I think the rationale isn't necessarily something that's like, it's rational in the sense of it makes sense in terms of reality, but more so

it rationalizes it in the story with having characters interact and like continuously reaffirm the hook of the story, you know, with the guy basically adopting a key chain-sized baby.

She gets raised and like then introducing these new kind of weird, absurdist things, but never revealing its hand too much.

Kind of just like,

in a a way,

it becomes an answer to why

to her, her abrupt, like, you know, pregnancy and delivery of this baby, but it doesn't fully say this is the answer.

It kind of just dangles a carrot in front of your face and leads you down this little trail, which is just a lot of fun.

I really enjoyed both of these stories from him.

It goes really hard.

What do you think that means that like

Helen has to eat her mother to get out?

What do you think that means?

Well, there's a couple of things.

One, I didn't know if, because the whole thing she says, well, I saw it one day.

It's not like it's happened yet, but I've seen it happen.

So my whole thing is, does she have to quote unquote eat, I'm guessing either possess or kill her mother to return from hell, is what I'm wondering.

If that's what that means.

There's a lot of,

especially with

biblical and demon shit, there's a lot of stuff about like devouring or consuming, you know?

And I think that's always open for interpretation.

So whenever she says, I need to eat this person, is it an actual, is it an actual, you know, consuming or is it more just like metaphorical translation of what that means?

One line they said when they went to look at the paintings where he said,

what was that?

Skipped all the way.

I'm going to eat my, when I go to hell, I'm going to eat my way out through my bloodline.

Yeah.

I mean, it sounds like she's legitimately going to have to kill her mother is the big thing.

Almost like it seems like a,

I don't know.

Like.

It's like her soul is some ancient demon that's existed in hell for generations that's mad and found a way out.

And now it's finding a way to like take revenge on like its bloodline, the people who made it exist, the demons of hell that made it exist, you know?

Yeah.

And I don't know.

maybe a demon there's a lot of ways to think about the devil even or something like that like you could take it so many different directions yeah there's so many ways to hypothesize what is happening in this story because there's a lot of things too where it's like well you were already out and living in the world so

where exactly like going to hell and finding your true form and then re re uh rekindling into the world is it something that's supposed to be a sign of the end times or something is it somebody bringing hell with them you know it's just there's a lot of different ways, like you said, that I think you can interpret this.

Um,

but once again, as always, which I don't know if people feel the same way, I think I just really love don't reveal your full hand.

Like, this is the funnest part of these stories: is being able to talk with your buddies about it and being able to speculate on it.

Because the whole thing is, you could read this again in the future and you'd take it a completely different way.

And I think that's just such a powerful thing with these stories.

And it doesn't feel like a cop-out either.

Like, I think that the story has a definitive enough end to where

there's a finite end to this character, but the results of those things are different.

But I don't think I need to necessarily know the results.

More so the

closure of our main character, the dad.

So I thought it was very interesting.

And I think it's a great way to round out the episode.

It is.

I'll say one more time.

Check out, we'll link it in the description.

On Amazon, you can get paperback or Kindle.

Second Death, Do Not Speak the Names of the Dead, Do Not Pray is the full title of it by Peter Frost David.

Brutal.

It seems to somehow link together the story we just read about the daughter, as well as the Glenmont Metro story.

Because there is another story, a three-parter called My Patient Has Spent Eight Months or has spent eight million years under a bench in the Glenmont Metro.

That story seems to combine the elements from both, and then the Second Death is like a full novel about it.

interestingly so check out the second death if you're interested in seeing this story continue further we certainly enjoyed it and he seems to be a great author so show some love yeah no seriously go pick up a book give the guy some love be sure to get a physical copy of these books as well you never know what might happen where these things just disappear one day so i am always an adamant I always recommend getting physical copies of anything that we read if you enjoy it.

You just never know.

And also, thank you for everyone who's listening on Spotify or Apple Podcast right now and has rated the podcast

with a nice rating, I guess, whatever.

But thank you.

The audio side of the things help us a lot.

And this year has been an insane year of growth and just the community coming together.

The amount of memes and like fun and camaraderie has been so explosive and so awesome.

And just so looking forward to next year and what we can do

with reading stories and just introducing more stories and more authors to our audience.

And just wanted to say thank you as well.

It's been awesome.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you all very much for everything.

It means the world.

This year has been incredible.

And I'm excited to just keep on, keep it on, right?

But thank you all for the blessing.

It means the world.

You all have a good rest of your day.

We will catch you in the next one.

See you all later in the next one.

And be sure to

not go to hell.