I have been spending all Tuesday morning on this crap. I have been reinstalling my OS, wiping the drive, and even swapping out drives. Every time I install this hard drive into my computer, I am greeted with the same display.

//:: IT HAS BEGUN ::\\

I’ve at least localized it to the hard drive itself and not the computer, thankfully. But that concerns me even more now; whatever is on the computer is stuck, even after some insane deletion algorithms. In theory, this drive should be cleaner than my spotless driving record but this damned virus is still there.

At this point, I’m just pounding my head on my desk. Why is this happening? What is this? What has ‘begun’? I wouldn’t have minded if this was a simple virus that would go away but since it’s this stubborn, there has to be some reason for this.

“Hey Michael,” a voice woke me up from my trance. I jump and look over to the doorway of my office and there’s James, our monitoring center manager.

“You alright, bud?” he asked me, obviously concerned.

“Yeah, just a lot on my mind,” I answered, looking back at my monitor that still had the cryptic message displayed.

“When were you planning on heading home?” he asked me, arms crossed in the doorway.

“I just started, James,” I answered him, turning off the desktop again. “I’ll probably leave around 5:30.”

James just chuckled. “It’s 6 right now,” he told me.

6pm? No way. Did I really just spend my entire shift working on this damn drive?

“Have you gotten anywhere with the network?” James suddenly asked. I guess he saw that I was startled by knowing I was staying late.

“The network is updated and running fine,” I reported to him, “the only thing left is this corrupted drive. No matter what I do, I can’t get this virus off of it.”

James thought for a moment as I began removing the hard drive again for yet another swap. “Michael, stop thinking about it,” he told me. “You’re going to burn yourself out over this. Nothing’s broken and the outage is resolved so there’s no use worrying about it.”

I groaned as I stared at the corrupted hard drive in my hand. “That’s the problem, James,” I told him, “something is broken. There’s a problem I can’t solve and I’m staring right at it. I can’t explain what happened during the breach and I can’t explain this damn virus. I’m not used to not knowing something.”

James sighed and thought for a moment. “Then why not take some time off so you can focus on it?” he suggested. “Everything is fine and we’re all caught up. Sean and I can handle things while you’re gone. Take a little personal leave and solve that problem of yours.”

I thought about what he was suggesting for a minute. I would think he was suspending me, but he’s right; everything is functional and no equipment was damaged besides this corrupted drive. There are no problems right now besides this mysterious virus. I haven’t had any time off recently so maybe it’s for the best. Maybe I’m overthinking something and my overworked brain is trying too hard to solve a quadratic equation when really the problem is what is 2 + 2?

“If you’ll be fine, then okay,” I told him, getting up from my chair.

James smiled and came over to me, giving me a solid pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about us,” he told me. “We’ll be fine; just focus on your personal matters and come back with a clear head.”

He’s right. I should not think about work for now. I set up my voicemail and email auto-responders as well as a department wide email and locked up my office for the night. With the broken drive in hand, I headed down to my car and drove the whole way home. I couldn’t play any music, a rare occurrence for me; I just needed to think.

Once home, I set the drive on my home workstation desk and stared at it. I had all of the equipment here to figure this drive out short of disassembling the drive chassis itself. I decided to hook it into the test bench near my workstation PC and begin my testing.

//:: IT HAS BEGUN ::\\

Sure enough, that damned message displayed on the monitor once it was hooked up. I hit the spacebar and the display once again showed a bunch of symbols and static for a few moments before reverting to the distorted white text. There had to be something more to this.

I attempted a risky setup by slaving the corrupted drive to my workstation computer. Maybe this way, I can have the drive run normally but still access the file system in the OS so I can see just what this virus was.

Once the hookup was complete, I booted the test bench with the corrupted drive. Sure enough, the test bench displayed the ominous text. My workstation, however, showed the drive in the OS and showed no signs of corruption. Progress! However, the 5 terabyte drive was shown to be 100% full somehow.

I looked at the files on the drive and could find 8 video files, each about 3 minutes long.

ENDEAVOR

MANIFEST

TRIAL

RISE

INFECT

FALL

UNBECOMING

SUFFER

I recognized the videos. They were the 8 office cameras moments before they disconnected and showed static and symbols. The distortion from the breach was shown in the video feeds. Did my computer make a backup of the cameras? And why the ominous file names?

I checked the encoding and they looked weird and corrupted, but nothing that would explain the strange ‘it has begun’ warning and nothing like the image that’s displayed when I hit the spacebar and nothing that would explain the drive being full.

I need to go deeper.

I dug up some drive tree software to examine the heart of the drive; the raw data encoded on it. I found myself a safe area of the drive and reviewed the raw data. The binary data that it contained was weird and couldn’t be decoded, but had some kind of pattern to it. Just to sanity check myself, I ran the same search in the same sector to see if the data was corrupted.

The returned data was completely different.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

This is the same drive sector; it should return the same data, not an entirely different string. I ran the same query multiple times, each time the data was different. Was the drive writing to itself repeatedly? Rewriting old data?

I abandoned that train of thought; it’s got to be the corruption. The drive might not be reporting the correct data or sector location. I give up and look at the video footage. I start with the ENDEAVOR.mpeg file.

I don’t know what I was expecting. All I saw was a brief moment of the camera and then a bunch of static with a strange symbol overlaid on the camera feed. I put on my headphones and listened to the static; maybe the white noise can calm me down a bit.

“...Fo—w m-...nto…”

What?

A voice could be heard among the static. Just barely. I threw off my gaming headset and threw on my Empyrean hifi headset and cranked up the amp. There’s no way I imagined that.

“...Fo-l-w me -n-o -he b—ch…”

No, there’s definitely a voice. Flow me no? Fowl meno? What is it saying?

I split the audio track from the video track and threw it into my audio mixing program. I spend a good few hours adjusting the various dials, trying to get the voice to be audible for me. I finally finished my mixing hell and restarted the segment where I heard the voice and hit play.

“...follow me into the breach…”

No.

“...follow me into the breach…”

No way.

“...follow me into the breach…”

It’s my voice.

Have you ever had that moment where you thought you heard a voice and when you think about it, it sounds like your dearly departed grandmother? That’s exactly how I felt. It was my voice in the recording, but I don’t remember saying anything like that in the IT closet. I sounded like I was shouting, like a guy with a scratchy microphone yelling too loudly in a film from the 50’s.

Follow me into the breach.

What does that mean? Why is there a recording of my voice on this? What if I showed others? It would look like I recorded it myself in some stupid prank.

I extracted the full audio and put it into the program with the same settings. Hopefully the profile works across the whole recording. Going over the recording timeline, there were portions that were still static, but I could make out some segments of speech; of my speech.

- Are we alive? - Are we dreaming? - Follow me into the breach - see our destiny? - stop this -

What is all of this? My heart can’t help but sink into my chest, my stomach turned. I wrote all of this down, trying to make sense of this. Is this a cry for help? A warning? A rally call? And why the hell is it my voice on the recording? Who can I ask for help? Who will believe me? The voice was incomplete in places but there was enough context to figure out that whatever I was talking about, it can’t be good.

I took out more of the recording and put it through the program and continued tweaking but I could get precious little more. Either my methods are flawed or there’s more to this data.

I panicked.

I dug out my phone and looked through my contacts. Ortiz and Satoru are the only ones who know about this, but Satoru still knows precious little. So I could only call one other person; I needed to know if I was hearing things.

The phone rang a few times before a familiar voice answered. “What’s going on, Mike?”

“Ortiz, how quickly can you get to my place?” I asked, in a frantic voice.

“Bro, I live like half an hour away,” Ortiz answered, “can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

“I don’t think it can; I need to know if I’m going insane,” I answer. I realized I was calling a lieutenant who works 12 hour shifts and it was close to midnight on her off day when she works in the morning. But I can’t let that sway me.

“Is this about the virus?” Ortiz asked.

“It is,” I answered her, trying to figure out how to explain this whole situation. “But I don’t think it’s a virus. It will make sense if you see it.”

I could hear her groan and think for a minute. “If I do this, you owe me,” she told me. “You’ve been saying you would build a new computer for my girl and I.”

“Done!” I said with no hesitation. I was waiting for Ortiz to pay me for a graphics card but screw this; I’ll pay it myself or just give her one of my good cards.

“Fine,” she answered. “Give me like an hour so I can get ready.”

“Thank you very much,” I told her; I couldn’t contain just how appreciative I am of this. If it wasn’t important like this, I would really have not called her. But I needed to know if I was going insane.

I spent the hour pacing in my room, going over the recording again and again and comparing it to my notes; I needed to make sure my transcription was flawless.

BANG BANG BANG.

Even though I know that three-pronged cop knock by heart, it made me jump; spacing out made me forget Ortiz was even coming here. I went to the door and opened it, part of me thinking that she just called the police for my insanity.

I was relieved to see it was just Ortiz.

“This better be good,” she told me, obviously still tired.

I let her in and brought her to my room. I explained to her what I did in simple terms; that I found video files from the cameras on the drive but the rest was weirdly corrupted. I showed her the video stream and the unprocessed audio. I then gave her my Empyreans and queued up the processed audio.

“Please don’t think of me as insane when you hear this,” I explained, remembering that she’ll hear my voice.

“I don’t know man,” Ortiz joked with me, “part of me thinks you were crazy way before this happened.”

She put on the headset and I reluctantly hit the spacebar so the audio track played. Very slowly, I saw her light smile slowly turn into a frown and her eyes widen. It was like looking into a mirror from when I first listened to the audio.

I saw the audio track reach the end and Ortiz just stared at the monitor, trying to process what she heard. She then reached out and hit the spacebar to replay the track, her brow furrowing further. I guess I wasn’t as insane as I thought.

Ortiz did this three more times before she finally took off the headset. “That was in the video?” she asked in a shaking voice.

I panicked a little in my explanation. “It was. I can show you how I got it from the video so you can see I didn’t doctor it or anything.”

Ortiz shook her head and set the headset on the desk and sat in my desk chair. “‘Follow me into the breach’? What does that even mean? Why would I have said that?” she asked under her breath.

I decided to explain my findings. “I’ve been double checking to make sure my– wait, what did you just say?”

She looked up to me with sorrowful eyes. “How could I have said any of that?”

Realization hit me at that moment. “You heard yourself in the recording?” I asked.

Ortiz nodded. “I was speaking Spanish, but I don’t remember saying any of that.”

I picked up the headset and listened to the audio track and could only hear myself in English. How? I took the headset off and tried explaining myself. “I heard myself speaking English in the recording, but I don’t remember making such a recording. How could you hear yourself in another language in the same audio track that I heard myself?”

“I don’t know, bro,” Ortiz lamented, shaking her head in disbelief. “At first I thought you were going crazy over a virus, but this is different.”

“What did you say in the recording?” I asked. She then repeated roughly what I heard. I showed her my notes of what I heard and I could see her losing her mind just as much as I am.

“What the hell, man?” Ortiz asked while rubbing her temples. “How the hell do we hear different words that all mean the same? And how do we hear our own voices? This is some evil shit; I tell you.”

Evil or not, I was definitely knees deep in some shit. None of this is making any sense. In any case, I need to figure this out, and I have a few more people I can call.