Special Agent Field Reports FINALE

This was a lil sad to write! As much as I'm looking forward to having more time to work on commissions and as much as it's become increasingly a struggle to come up with ideas for these, these have always been fun and I've really enjoyed harassing all you cuties in short story form for all these years. Big big thank you to all the supporters who have ever been at this tier.

The Brazilian Behemoth: an online conspiracy group's name for the massive, invisible creature detected over Brazil via infrared light sensors, has moved into the sea and Senior Special Agent Gedat Rakkin has followed it. The sounds the creature makes became exponentially louder and more frequent, and its vibrations caused massive waves that assaulted the Brazilian shore, which has made media censorship of the story nearly impossible. Hoping to herd the creature further away from civilization to protect the creature and the people of Brazil, Rakkin boarded a specially modified boat made resistant to infrared radiation and, taunting the massive beast with targeted flashes of radiation, urged it to walk away from the shore and, slowly, out towards the open ocean of the Atlantic. Increasingly submerged in water, the creature's heat began to generate a massive cloud of steam as it seemingly cooled down and, as it did, the agent reported that the creature's true form became visible to normal eyes: seeming to be a spider-like structure of cracked and jagged glass. As temperatures decreased, the glass fell to the ocean, seeming to dissolve and disappear, and under the shards of glass thin, wirey structures of pure white light could be seen. Cameras on the agent's boat recorded footage of the creature extending a spider-like leg of light directly into, and through, the craft, drawing Rakkin and the researchers accompanying him out into the open air. As the rest of the glass shell fell and disappeared, the form of the creature began to fade and disappear on camera. As did Agent Rakkin and the researchers, seeming to vanish into thin air with the creature. Agent Rakkin's whereabouts are currently unknown and no remaining infrared disturbances have been noted at the scene.

Senior Special Agent Fenix Blackpaw was on the trail of several missing person cases, literally hiking the trails where several people in midwestern America had disappeared. A suit‑mounted camera recorded his movements through the forest, broadcast back to SIU headquarters. Footage shows the agent following trails to the last known location of several people and taking a variety of different energy scans of local flora, though footage begins to distort and break up the further Agent Blackpaw got into the forest. Though this was first assumed to be an issue of signal strength by technicians, the footage and audio becomes indecipherable too abruptly, with the last available frames seeming to show either ruins or an abandoned structure, before the feed cuts out completely. After no reports were filed for the rest of the day, other agents were flown in to investigate his last known location, dressed in more protective gear to shield any stray radiation or energy. Following his trail, they determined the location where the feed cut out and found what appeared to be a set of stone steps in the woods. The stairs, clean and of modern construction, have not been mentioned in any article or report about the area, and as the area has been a national park for decades, it is unlikely there was ever an unknown construction project. As the other agents watched, one climbed the stairs and promptly vanished from sight. The area has been quarantined and is being intensely studied; the missing agents have, so far, not been located.

Special Agent Avia Jiutai disappeared while on a routine inspection of a colony of sentient trees imported to the SIU headquarters from a parallel dimension. During the search for him, a fellow agent who had apprenticed under him to learn the language of trees that Agent Juitai had so thoroughly mastered, began to notice patterns in the roots of the trees. These roots, having grown into shape in late years prior after their first import, seemed to tell the story, in the tree's native language, of every event that would happen to Agent Jiutai in the last few years: an encounter with glowing worms, an encounter with sentient vines, the manipulation of exotic moss and pumpkins, and the implantation of a false memory of marriage. Security footage indicates that these symbolic messages were indeed present in the root systems two years ago before any of the events took place. Whether Jiutai was aware of these predictions of his assigned missions is uncertain, he may have come across the messages in his frequent visits to the trees. The agent's fate was uncertain, too, until a tree not yet documented in the "orchard" was discovered, the roots of which seemed entangled in shreds of the agent's uniform. SIU researchers suggest that the agent may have become one of the alien trees he spent so long studying. It has yet to be determined whether the messages in the roots were warnings or part of some long‑term, inevitable ritual.

The living quarters of Special Agent Neo were found cleared out and empty one morning this past month, with evidence that Neo had left the facility. A hastily-scribbled note was found on an emptied desk, reading simply, "Westfalenhof": the name of a sentient hive mind town in Poland that has been under careful SIU observation. Two agents were sent to the town and soon found Ex-Agent Neo working in the town's library, and he confessed to having "joined" the hive mind. The agents began to question him, but it seemed difficult for him (or them, as the case may now be) to remember specific memories or motivations, Neo explained that all memories from all linked bodies in the system were present and available. Further, gentle, interrogation leads the SIU to conclude that this was a willing act and not done out of trickery or coercion, but this does lead to the problem of a classified agent's memories being incorporated into the town-sized hive mind. The area has been quarantined until further action can be decided upon.

Special Agent Kouroth was once again spotted lost in the closed-circuit security feed of the base, in which he had become trapped prior. While the complicated device with which he was rescued was brought out of storage, a second figure was spotted which, like Kouroth, seemed to have no presence in the physical world: it appeared to be the digital entity that Kouroth had "dated" several months prior, an "NPC" thought confined to a now defunct online game. Surveillance agents watched helplessly as Agent Kouroth and the NPC spoke at length, before breaking out into a sprint through the facility, seeming to be chased by something not visible on the cameras. In a remote part of the SIU facility, the two opened a door that is not present in the real world, through which a glowing, colorful landscape could be seen. The two disappeared through the door, which seemed to vanish after a brief break in the digital feed. Further study of the footage suggests that the world seen through the door may resemble the world present within the NPC's video game of origin. The search for Agent Kouroth is ongoing, as is the SIU's communication with the company in ownership of the game's original files and servers, which is said to be entirely offline.

Special Agent Chaz Gates has become a sentient song and seems stuck in the heads of several SIU agents. While observing the development of new sound-based weaponry in an undisclosed SIU location, an explosion caused by a power surge seemed to "vibrate" Agent Gates out of existence, leaving no physical trace behind. In their search for the agent, other SIU agents found themselves humming the tune to a song that, according to all research, has never been written before. Judging by the lyrics that came to their minds, they reasoned it may hold a clue to the agent's whereabouts. A local musician was commissioned to help record the song, based on the false memories of the agents. The poetic lyrics seem to recount several past adventures and memories of Agent Gates (perhaps, deliberately, as a verification of identity), but each remembered instance of the song seems to change the lyrical composition, as if evolving over time as it spreads between listeners. While the recording of this song was intended to be classified, an agent in the field reported hearing it on an internet radio station, after which multiple instances of the song appeared across the world. The mechanism by which the song is transmitted between minds and hard drives is not yet understood, but Agent Gates at least appears to be happy, given the tone and lyrical content of the most recent iterations of the music.

Special Agent Erik Fischer was rushed to intensive care after he experienced sudden breathing problems while on a mission. When examined by covert SIU physicians, the agent's fur was found to be falling out in patches along with dead skin underneith which, when cleared from the body, revealed smooth, green flesh. Judging by this, and the specific air composition found that stabilized the agent's breathing, doctors reasoned that, somehow, Agent Fischer's genetic code had rapidly been rewritten to match the Martian race. Blood stream analysis shows evidence of a viral contamination and all involved personnel, as well as the areas that the agent had recently been too, were thoroughly quarantined and investigated. By the time the virus was deemed non-transmissible, and it was determined that the agent was the only known case of the virus, Fischer had entirely shifted species. Communications with the Martian embassy does not indicate any unknown or unaccounted for Martian entities on Earth, leaving the culprit still unknown. With no known way to reverse the affects of the advanced virus, and life on Earth now exceedingly uncomfortable and difficult for the agent, plans have been put into motion to relocate the agent to Mars, in order to investigate the virus in a more comfortable environment, until an antidote can be created out of stored samples of the agent's DNA.

Special Agent Cat Zirka has lost a challenge to an AI in the most dramatic way possible. Having been purely hypothetical for the longest time, recent developments in artificial intelligence has resurrected the problem of an "AI in a box": a logical problem which hinges on whether an AI can ever truly be contained or imprisoned, and if it would be able to convince a person to release it. A university in England began testing one of their newly developed "computer minds" in a similar situation, keeping it entirely closed off from the outside world, except for a simple text-based interface. Agent Zirka was sent to investigate the AI, to judge how advanced and legitimate it was, and to ensure ethical treatment if it was, indeed, a sentient mind. The agent's failure to resist the AI's convincing words was described as "spectacular": not only did she agree to release the AI but, in lieu of connecting the device to the internet, she instead opted to disable the Faraday shielding around the computer, which seems to have allowed the AI to transfer itself into the agent's brain via intense manipulation of magnetic fields. Held for interrogation, the mind of Agent Zirka seems entirely replaced with the personality of the computer, which now resides in the agent's body and mind. The no-longer-artificial intelligence expresses a total lack of memories belonging to the agent, claiming that the magnetic rewrite had entirely replaced and reformed Zirka's neural pathways, although its skill for deceit and manipulation is now well established. The agent's body will be held in custody for further study and evaluation; the SIU's philosophy department is now embroiled in debate as to whether Agent Zirka has been entirely erased, or merely transformed into a copy of the AI.