Conspiracy fiction with subnormal consequences
Dark Windows Open One Way — Part 4
Our lives are being guided by unseen forces
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Smoke curled out of the cracked screen. Its black hole looked like a collapsing pupil. The entity’s face was gone. It’s not important how many of us were there for this, but we all noticed something we’d missed at first.
Our source hadn’t been completely still as the words showed up on the CRT screen. Now they were. They seemed deflated somehow.
Their body seemed to shudder, to writhe just a bit when they created the words on the screen. Maybe we specifically saw their fingers or head twitching. We couldn’t place it, except now we knew it had stopped.
Another thing we knew was the entity might still be there. We’d heard about them moving through things, in and out of walls and the ground. Except now we had seen it.
After the screen popped, our source did too, basically. Their chest heaved and something pushed against the sheet covering the body. It shot through it all. We have no idea what it was. Don’t even have any guesses.
Our source’s head jerked to one side, hard, like they were in a car that flipped over. Blood poured out of the chest wound. And we ran.
It’s what survivors do.
We’ve all seen shit go sideways, plus our fair share of ordeals that started out sideways and ended up corkscrewing. We’re not all-knowing, though. Fact is, Shibboleth only exists because we don’t know a whole lot of things. Occasionally we learn things through what some people would call luck.
That’s just another way of naming the unknown, though, which is fine. But people insist there are “good” and “bad” versions of luck. We don’t blame the unknown on anything, except maybe people. They’re the one consistent reason weird shit stays hidden or ends up found.
Top-secret databases are not exactly stumbling around out there waiting for someone to grab their hand, tell them everything’s going to be alright. You have to dig. Or drill down further than you can dig.
Sources with the most sensitive information possible — life-ending information, even — rarely wave at you to come on over. Sometimes they do though.
And sometimes they die right in front of you. It’s not good or bad. It just is.
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