Amélie Dulay 4th may 2049

I slept horribly today. In my dream I was somebody else, running from the mansion, my uncle, a younger Helstrom and several other men and women after me. Buckshot whistling overhead, me falling towards the blackberry bushes, then nothing. After the kind of transition that is only possible in dreams, I, myself again, sat on my uncle’s lap long before our fight about his lost tenure. He told me stories of far-off worlds and the secrets of the universe, read me Clarke, Asimov and Dennis E. Taylor. I remember laughing at the story of Bob the spaceship. I wanted to be like him, meet alien civilizations, but the thought of immortality scared me. My uncle grinned and stroke my hair. “We aren’t immortal. Some people think we will be, one day, but I am not among them. But I too want to know the secrets of the universe and meet others.” Then he became serious and got a somewhat distant and pained look. “They got it wrong you know - SETI, and all these authors and scientists. We shouldn’t seek others out there, and we likely never will muster the spirit, the courage, and the resources to venture beyond the Sol system. But that is where we come in. Our family, this place, our…curse. Those dreamers are all the same; they do not ask the right questions, dare not dream the right dreams. You know what people fear most, what they dare not even consider?...”

I awoke with a slight fever. Not the dreams again. I had come back alright.

After sleeping in the guest house, as everybody did, or so I was told by Helstrom, I entered the mansion today. There was a putrid smell in the air, and I soon found the source in the defunct kitchenette. Something had been left standing out. What it had been I couldn’t tell. What it was is a writhing mass of maggots I didn’t dare touch. I was unwilling to open the refrigerator, nor the two additional refrigerators on the stair’s landing labeled “research specimens” and “reagents.” On this one, a note was pinned. Somebody had over and over scribbled the same binary sequence on it: 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01100001 01110010 01110011 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101100 01101101 01101111 01110011 01110100 00100000 01110010 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00101110 00101110 00101110 than a space and the same all over again. I noticed several guns and religious paraphernalia hanging on the walls. I took one of the weapons down and opened it. Loaded, and in excellent condition.

I steeled myself and went upstairs. Most of the original walls on the first floor had been removed, replaced by a single, circular room fully enclosed in windowed walls in the middle of the vast space. The windows began at the height of my hip and stretched to the ceiling. Before I entered, I took stock of my immediate surroundings. Outside of the inner room, there were several open desks with miscellaneous data, correspondence, and printouts. The outside wall was lined with ancient filing cabinets and pickled specimen jars of all manner of creatures, interspersed with scribbled-on whiteboards. There was a Frankenstein’s monster of a computer, with the core being a very old PC- from the 90’s I would think; and thus from my uncle’s childhood - spliced into several raspberry pies and a modern state of the art high-end computer. The monstrosity was on and displayed a Linux OS on a cathode-ray display. Several apparently self-developed programs, ranging from sensor logs to some form of expert systems were monitoring the inside of the room. I remember that as an adolescent, I had helped write some of the code. Cameras, both analog and digital were mounted on tripods and robotic arms, monitoring the room.

I picked up one of the sheets on one of the desks. Correspondence between one of my uncle’s erstwhile students with top universities discussing modified M-Theory dated 2032. It hadn’t been until five years ago that modified M-Theory had officially become the theory du jour amongst the scientific community, yet here was somebody discussing the specifics more than ten years before that on behest of my uncle. I looked at the filing cabinets. If I went back far enough, would I find correspondence between my uncle’s predecessors, my ancestors, and Einstein or Hawkins?

I went through some other papers on other workstations. Astronomical and Astrological calculations, Alchemy, esotericism. History and geography side by side with a book about lay lines. The student who had worked here had circled the mansion’s location several times. Another desk. Biological cladistics, including several philia not described by science, a picture of a tardigrade and several samples of the moths and what I assumed was the fungi found on the property. Another one. Logic trees and Algorithms, flowcharts for several complicated programs about signal analysis. Next, a homemade phonograph, and other forms of analog sensor equipment.

I opened the door to the room was greeted by a smell of incense, and the door to the Faraday cage within. There was a single bed on a rug inside. The restraints were not on it at the moment. I went over and touched it, remembering sleeping there after getting involved in the family business. Doing so, the sleeve of my dress slipped, revealing my self-inflicted scars. I angrily covered up again. The rug was new though. Maybe an effort to seem respectable to any visiting academic. I slung it back, revealing the brown circle and the glyphs underneath. Crazy. All of this was mad. I can’t; I simply can’t. I will go tour the property, get some fresh air, unpleasant as it may be, and clear my head.