My name is Tom Morphy, I look down upon Seattlites from my foggy bathroom window every single morning. I live in a low-high-rise near the sloping coastline of Pike’s Place and far enough from the West Bridge to avoid impulsive thoughts. I work from my apartment, writing short pulp fiction for a website called Albatrossic, a site which must somehow compete with video content through short blurbs of derivative, fetishistic, and painfully rushed storytelling. I write ten 500 word stories a day, likely to be read by no one besides my two editors, several web crawlers, and a few foreign bot accounts. Albatrossic, in the untold wisdom of its founder, dumps content onto its hundreds of pages with the pace of a dragster car, firing burnt oil in the form of stories baked at freezing temperatures in the minds of young, drunk writers.
The day I humbly presented a binder of shorts and treatments to Dirk Wyler, CEO of Albatrossic, a man not noticeably older than I was, was the day I accepted my place as a drop in the bucket. He liked my stories, of course he did, he liked popcorn movies and videos of people hurting themselves on trampolines, he liked whatever was in front of him, and somehow he also operated a company with investors and employees and board meetings and conferences. Why was it that he met with every prospective writer on his own time? It seemed wildly inefficient, but another thought kicked me in the frontal for thinking in the first place. The answer was, of course: Who cares? I took the job because it was a job to take and my rent was getting too high to cover by selling plasma. This way I could write for a living and drink from the fruits of my labor as a writer, and of course the two worked symbiotically.
My apartment is a space habitable for one person, one person only. I cannot open my home to anyone without prefacing with the fact that I live alone and live by means equal to that of my peers. I admit, to outsiders, that I am no different than any other writer: self absorbed, untidy, scatterbrained, and horribly mentally ill. Though, I admit this through omission and repeated mistakes rather than open communication, the right to which is reserved only for the characters in my stories. Emotional growth is a form of fiction, and should not be regarded as reality. There is no cure for apathy.
Of course, I’m not only a pseudo-fictionist. I am, by all positive accounts, a novelist. My first published piece, a novella titled Into the Open, told the story of a young man raised in a cult-like commune in Georgia who travels to New York in search of a new life. The story won second place in the Washington State Greggorio-Billings Young Writer Medium-Length Fiction Competition, narrowly missing the prize money and any relevant recognition that could lead to publication or employment. After this reality check, I delved headfirst into writing my next work, a full length novel that I would surely be able to sell to a publisher, if only given the opportunity. Live Immolation, my first real novel, followed a radio talk show host who is ostracized after angrily berating a listener who called in to discuss her relationship troubles. The novel was intended to be a dark comedy, though friends who read my initial draft reported that the story veered too far into the dark without enough comedy to provide levity. I distinctly remember a close friend from high school describing the work as depression-porn. After some revitalization, I had a final draft that was notably more clear in terms of comedy and possibly more palatable to a general audience. I shopped the work around to several publishers, receiving no interest, before I finally settled to self publish on e-readers and in audio form. The book received moderate success online, after a small amount of debt-inducing promotion, and sold well enough for me to stock up on alcohol every couple weeks for a good half year or so.
After that, I tried to cultivate my audience, I tried to write more long form pieces, but it didn’t work. My success was a flash in the pan and it took me far too long to realize that. By the time I ended up at Albatrossic, I was a shell of myself, a shell of the envisioned rockstar writer that I had dreamed about being as a teenager. I became, simply, just another writer for just another publication that would die when the servers went down. So, I settled in and wrote my shitty little stories. Every day was the same, until last week.
Last week, I took my weekly trip to the Albatrossic offices to meet with Sydney, one of my editors. Sydney rode a fine line between manic optimism and manic anger. I never knew what I was getting into with him. I hadn’t even stepped into his office and he had already started berating me.
“Tom, what’s your fucking problem?”
“Excuse me?”
“You think this is funny?”
He picked up a paper from his desk and started reading. I recognized it as one of my recent shorts, a sci fi horror piece titled In Zone Twenty. He skimmed it while reading out loud, which annoyed me slightly. He got to a section near the end, where the main character faced the horror beyond his comprehension and… well I don’t remember how it ended, but the version he read was not what I had written. This version ended with a five-hundred word string of random phrases and words. It was incomprehensible. I stopped Sydney from reading further.
“I didn’t write that.”
“You submitted it last week.”
“No. I submitted a story, one with an ending. That isn’t it.”
Sydney looked at me with an odd expression, like he actually believed me but couldn’t find the words to express it.
“Well, what the fuck is this then?”
“I don’t know. Someone must be messing with me.”
“Who would do that?”
“I don’t know Syd, I’m just as confused as you are.”
“Well… it’s not the only one.”
Sydney motioned for me to come over. He showed me his computer screen with the email submissions I had sent to him the week prior. All of the stories ended in the same way. Strings of random phrases and words filled the space where the conclusions had been. I stood bewildered, staring at the screen.
“I only printed one before I noticed it. I didn’t send any to Dirk.”
“Thank God for that.” I muttered.
I considered why the editors even printed stories for review when they were to be published online. Just another pointless conceit of this shitty company. I laughed in my head, but the unease was growing. What was going on with my stories? This had to be some sick joke.
“Is your email secure?”
“Yeah, I’ve got two factor. But even then, who would hack my email just to ruin my stories?”
Sydney didn’t reply, he was clearly more concerned with my output than the mysterious circumstances.
“Look, I’ll head home and send the stories over again. Alright?”
“Okay. Just try to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
I didn’t reply. I speedwalked out of the office and caught a taxi home. My brain was running, mostly out of annoyance. It did seem like Sydney believed me, but he still blamed me for whatever this was. As much as I hated this job, I couldn’t afford to get canned right now. My rent had gone up, again, and I was falling further and further into my expensive alcoholic slump. I needed the money. I needed to figure this out.
I got home and checked my word files. The stories were normal, the conclusions were just as I had written them. I checked the email I had sent to Sydney next, they were the same files, without the anomalies. Every one of the stories were just as I had written them. It didn’t make sense. I sent a second email with all of the stories and immediately called Sydney.
“Did you get it?”
“Tom, you have to be honest with me right now. Are you taking drugs?”
“What? No. Of course not. What’s the problem?”
“It’s the same shit, Tom. The endings are all fucked. I don’t know what’s going on but I don’t have time for this. Either quit fucking around or I’m telling Dirk about your little game.”
He hung up the phone and I was left dumbfounded. I checked the email again every few minutes for the next hour. I read each story several times over, expecting them to suddenly change, but they were all normal.
I took another cab ride, another twenty dollars I couldn’t afford, back to the office with my laptop in hand. Sydney was not happy to see me. He was yelling and telling me to fuck off, all in front of another poor writer in for his weekly meeting.
“Please, Syd, I’m fucking confused.”
I set my laptop on his desk and showed him the stories and the emails. We then compared them to the emails he had received. That was when we noticed it. The stories I had sent that day had different abnormalities than the ones I had sent the week prior. It was still the same mess of random words, but different words in different places. Sydney was now in the same state of confusion and perplexed interest that I was. The other writer in the room awkwardly excused himself as we continued to look over the different stories. Now, with Sydney seemingly on my side, I at least had a bit of security, yet the unease held strong, and my head began to feel heavy.
After an hour of review and confirmation, I was sent home knowing nothing more than I had before. Sydney told me he would reach out to the IT department to rule out a security breach. The company had provided my email, as well as their own internal servers for storing emails. If it was a hacker, it had to be a sophisticated one, I thought. I knew almost nothing about hacking, so I wasn’t sure how probable that was. When I got home I changed my passwords for nearly every account I had. I even covered my laptop’s camera with a strip of tape.
That night, to get my mind off things, I had a few drinks and sat down to write a story. It was my profession, but it was also an itch that I could never fully scratch. I had to write. It was all I could do. So, I wrote a little story about a farmer who sees a UFO on his farm but no one believes him. A simple thing. Nothing I could ever get published. But it still felt good to get it down.
I woke up the next morning, hungover and tired, and opened my laptop to a string of email notifications. The first few were from Sydney and my other editor, Don. The next was from Dirk, that made my stomach drop. Dirk never emailed people, I had only ever spoken to him in his office.
I read the emails and my stomach sank further. Apparently, last night, Sydney and Don had received several emails from me containing stories I hadn’t written. I started reading the email from Dirk, but didn’t finish it. I was certain I’d be fired over this.
According to the emails I didn’t remember sending, seven short stories had been sent to Sydney and Don, each one more depraved than the last and each one having no conclusion, only the scattered words and phrases. I sat and read them each with a blank expression, becoming more and more concerned over what was happening.
I joined a conference call with Dirk and Sydney and attempted to explain myself. Dirk was more sympathetic than I expected, though I could tell he thought I must be going through some psychotic episode. He recommended that I take some time off, unpaid of course, and check into a hospital if things did not improve. Sydney was reluctant to comment, he didn’t mention the previous day or the proof I had shown him. Fucking asshole. Without him acting as witness I must have seemed like a lunatic attempting to explain how some unknown force was influencing my emails. I even asked Sydney if he had heard from IT about a security breach, but he told me that they reported no unusual activity or breaches, and the emails had been sent from my IP address.
That night, as I laid in bed wallowing, I began to hear a noise. A humming. At first I thought it was traffic, but it persisted and grew slightly in volume with every passing minute. I began searching the apartment for defective electronics, lightbulbs, anything that could have been making the noise. I found no source for the humming. It seemed to emanate from wherever I was not.
I drank some, more than enough to forget about the emails, but the humming continued to grow louder.
I woke up the next morning feeling dead. I didn’t open my laptop, instead I started drinking. I was halfway through a day of television and bourbon and that fucking humming when my phone rang. It was Sydney.
“Look man, I don’t know what’s going on with you. We don’t know each other well but honestly I’m getting worried. We’re gonna have to block your email if you keep doing this.”
“What am I doing? I haven’t touched my fucking computer since yesterday!”
I slurred, trying to hide it.
“Are you drunk?”
“Yes, I’m drunk. That doesn’t mean I sent any fucking emails.”
“Get it together, Tom. The shit you’re sending me is fucked up. Where did you get those photos? I can’t find them anywhere online?”
“What photos?”
“Look, if you’re gonna play dumb that’s fine, but you’re not gonna keep your job much longer if you keep this up. This is a major HR violation.”
“Fuck you assho-”
The line cut out. I opened my laptop in a haze and navigated to my email. I took another sip of my drink and prepared myself for what I was about to see. It was the same shit. Stories I hadn’t written with nonsense endings. Disturbing stories about human experiments and a being called the Ephyr. Honestly, the stories were captivating and quite well written but they were too depraved and far too gory for any publisher. I considered for a moment, for the first time, that I might have been writing these stories while blackout drunk. But the writing wasn’t my style, it was simplistic and raw, I usually preferred more defined language, I knew that. It wasn’t my writing, I was almost sure of it, but the doubt was fucking with me.
As I read further through the stories I saw the photos. Placed throughout the stories, at the end of paragraphs and between sentences, were hyperlinks to image files. The first image, in grainy black and white, showed a man sitting in a chair with a bag over his head, there were wires connected to his hands and forehead with small prongs, the image was labeled as “Interval Testing 004, Sept, 1993.” There were more images like this, most of them showing similar scenes of people in chairs with wires connected to them, all labeled in the same way. One of the later images showed a figure obscured by darkness, they held their hands at their ears and their mouth seemed to open wider than should have been possible. That one made me feel strange, I didn’t want to look at it too long. I downed another drink and continued looking through the images. One of the last ones showed a group of figures in the foreground, just nearly outside of the frame, they wore lab coats and eye protection, and they stared in awe at the figure in the center of the frame. The figure was that of a small child suspended in mid air with their limbs outstretched, it seemed as if the child was being pulled in all directions by an unseen force. I couldn’t see any ropes or wires in the image. It appeared that the child was floating, an unclear expression of joy on their face amidst the noise of the low quality image.
I felt sick. I closed the laptop and paced around the room. There was no way I could explain this to anyone without coming off like a psychopath. The images had no origin, as Sydney had said, and they had been sent from my email address. I was responsible for this mess of which I had no understanding. My fear was growing, and with it the humming grew too.
I sat down at my desk that night, after coffee and a cold shower, sober as I could be, and drafted a letter to Dirk, I couldn’t risk writing an email, and attempted to explain my situation from my perspective. I hoped he would have a shred of empathy, enough to believe me. I had never caused any problems for the company. I had done my work for the past year without issue and had been commended for it on numerous occasions. I was an award runner up and a published author. I felt that I was of enough value to the company, at least, for him to hear me out. I took a cab to the office, yet again, and dropped my letter in the box. When I got back to my apartment, the humming seemed louder than ever. I had trouble sleeping. There was another sound now that accompanied the low humming, a shrill tone of static, quiet but persistently growing.
I awoke again to the humming. I refrained from drinking all morning, downing coffee by the pitcher instead of bourbon. I checked my email and found a reply from Dirk. The email informed me that my contract was to be terminated immediately and I would receive no severance due to numerous HR violations.
I was livid. I walked to the office in a blitz of anger, chain smoking cigarettes and trying to form my argument. The walk was long enough that I felt I had a good grip on what I would say to Dirk. I arrived at the office, snuffed out my cigarette, and made my way past the receptionist. On the way up I received several odd stares from my former coworkers. I was nearly at Dirk’s door when a security guard grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me away. I fought back and was able to pull away from the man. I burst into Dirk’s office with the guard on my tail and started pleading. As the guard pulled me away I screamed that I was scared, that I didn’t know what was happening, and that I deserved my position at the company. The police were waiting for me outside. They took me to the station and locked me in a cell. I was told shortly after that the company was not going to press charges but that I would still be held there for the night on account of my “outburst”.
It was there, laying in that cell cot, that the humming returned louder than ever. And now, there was something beyond the dull tone and shrill creaks, a voice that crackled and scratched like radio static. It was quiet at first and I couldn’t make out the words. But, as my restless night continued, I began to hear the aphorisms it repeated. And my world suddenly became clearer.
“Sing. Stay. Breathe. Make. Truth. Lift. Take. Immolate. Synthesize.”
It repeated these words over and over. And as the voice grew louder, the meaning began to resonate. I felt warmth inside, something like a whisky burn but ever more euphoric. I felt true. I felt myself. I felt inspired.
“Sing. Stay. Breathe. Make. Truth. Lift. Take. Immolate. Synthesize.”
The words that only some had heard. They had heard it, yes. Those who took the photos. They were looking for it. Trying to induce it. It must have been.
Late that night, in the cell, I began to levitate. No one saw, of course. The guard that had been watching had gone. I was alone, yet I was not. The Ephyr was there to show me its truth. I rose from my bed and the levity grew within me like a panacea to the disease I had felt for so long. I levitated there for some time, weightless and formless, I felt my body turn to winding wires and felt fear for only a second, it was quickly hushed by the Ephyr. It repeated new aphorisms to me, revealing further truths.
“Here. Now. Truth. Be it. Feel. Dissent. Revelation. Seek. Reform.”
And I did. My body reformed and I found myself within a conscious sleep. For some time I wandered this space without reason. I saw nothing. I felt nothing. A long time like this, amidst eternity. I saw fiction. I saw vast spaces. Worlds beyond this one. Then, within a split second, I awoke in that jail cell. I was smiling.
I went home. I felt like a being of pure light. I had one goal, motivated internally by the Ephyr, which had filled my being with purpose and reason. I ignored the trivial things. The alcohol in my fridge. The concerned emails. The weights that once plagued me. I became true. And now, you must become true.
The humming grows louder every day, the beauty of it consumes me like a symphony on repeat, each time it plays I learn more of myself and of the truth I must spread. The composition is true, it is resolute, and I will act as a conduit. I am of sound mind and body and only now can I see that. I am a vessel for the Ephyr. It has taken my compulsion. It has taken my self doubt. It has taken my weakness.
I am a vessel and I will spread the panacea for the poison.
I hope only that these words have fueled you as well. That your inspiration is strong enough that you may be susceptible to the great panacea. The Ephyr calls to you now, embrace it. Please, I beg you.
Find. Truth. Seek. Be. Help. You. See. Wash. Bleed. Seek. Reform. Write. Find. Truth. Seek. Will. Be. Help. See. Wash. Bleed. Hear. Seek. Reform. Write. Find. Truth. Seek. Be. More. Help. See. Wash. Bleed. Seek. Reform. Write. Find. Truth. Seek. Be. Help. See. Wash. Bleed. Seek. Reform. Write. Soon.