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### Compound Incident Report B7002 ###
The following documents are a compilation of related reports, statements, and notable instances surrounding the failure of Ty Betteridge Duplicate 7002 (will now be referred to as ‘Red Ty’), previous Head of Psychological Studies within the Medical Department.
## Incident Summary
At 1800 Compound Time (approximately -1:23:17:22:08 local linear time) Red Ty had his usual session with Michael Compound Duplicate 158 (will now be referred to as ‘Michael C158’) as part of his duties in the study of the effects of compounded time on the human psyche. After finishing said session, whose contents are also included in this file, Red Ty was then reported to have been acting ‘slightly morose and withdrawn’ by personnel who regularly interacted with him. Relevant witness statements are included in this file.
At 2100 Compound Time, there was a security alert sourced from Building C, and Boots Responding to the alert reported a fire had broken out in an auxiliary server room used by the Medical Department for low-security excess storage. While steps were being taken to extinguish the fire and assess the damage (full details can be found in the Security Log under “I-B7002 A.3”) a second security alert sourced from Building F was triggered, necessitating a secondary response. As the fire had not yet been handled, there were less Security Personnel sent to investigate this second alert.
At 2110 Compound Time it was reported that Red Ty had broken Michael C158 out of his assigned room and was at that point trying to flee the compound with him. They were confronted in Building D, close to the disposal hatches used by Euthanasia, and assumedly was their planned escape route. In the ensuing fight (footage of which can be found tagged both as “I-B7002 A.2” and “BF-005-D”) both Red Ty and Michael 158 sustained fatal injuries. Following protocol, security disposed of Red Ty and Michael 158 was sent to Medical to be used in the Overnighter Program if deemed viable. Further information relating to Michael 158 can be found in his file.
By 2200 Compound Time the fire had been handled and the damage to the auxiliary server room had been successfully mitigated and restored (specifics can be found in the Correction Log under “I-B7002 A.4”) and all day-of reports had been filed. The following additional documents have been compiled via the subsequent investigation.
## I-B7002 A.1
The following document is the session transcript and notes from the last official meeting between Red Ty and Michael 158; notably, despite looking through the session notes of all meetings between the two, it was deemed that this was the only one necessary to be included in the official incident report. Footage of the meeting can be found under “PN-CM0158-S.46”.
## Transcript from Session 46
Ty B7002: Hello, Michael, your week’s gone well I hope?
- Michael 158: You know they never do, Ty.
B7002: Oh, come now, eventually you’ve got to get tired of being so dour- I heard they did a movie night for the majority of Medical yesterday, that must have been fun!
158: Didn’t bother goin’.
[Approximately 48 seconds of silence]
158: Can we just get this over with?
B7002: … Sure. You know I’m going to have to ask you why you didn’t go, though, right?
158: Was hopin’ you’d move past it but guess I’m not that lucky.
158: I didn’t go because I haven’t been really been sleepin’, even more than usual, and I know that’ll make me more grumpy and ‘aint no one that needs to deal with that.
B7002: Besides me, you mean?
158: Sure, Ty, besides you.
B7002: And why have you been sleeping less than usual? I assume it’s not something physical.
158: Nah, just been getting one particular nightmare more’n usual. I’d prefer not to talk about it.
B7002: And, of course, you know I can’t let you do that.
158: [a large sigh] I do, yup.
B7002: Well, in your own time…
[Approximately 2 minutes and 32 seconds of silence]
158: There’s sorta… well, you probably know, I dunno how many of us you see a day, but there’s the sort of…recurring dreams that we all get.
B7002: Like the dog one, with you and Edgar?
158: Yea, that’s about the only good one. The rest… not so much.
B7002: And you’ve been having a particularly bad one lately?
158: Yup.
[Approximately 1 minutes 57 seconds of silence]
158: I’d had it off and on before- before you split us up like it was going outta style, I mean, but also… Well, I started having it a lot more after the… Mustardseed incident. It- well, it drug up some stuff I’d been tryin’ real hard to bury, I guess you could say.
B7002: How so?
158: It’ll make sense if I just describe the nightmare to you, not that it’ll be fun.
158: [a deep breath] It starts out with me walking forward. It’s a little weird, because usually I can dream in color, but at the start I can barely see anything- not in a ‘I’m blind’ sorta way though, more like the movement is all encompassing and my surroundings don’t matter? I do have the impression of color though, enough to know it’s all grays and muted browns.
158: After a bit I can hear the ground crunching as I walk, and that’s when I become aware enough of my body to sorta see and have more ‘control’ of it- as much control as you can have in a nightmare when it’s not lucid. Anyway- I become more aware, right? An’ I realize I’m in something that’s…almost a junkyard. It’s a lot of rubble and half collapsed buildings, and it feels like there should be this dead, tough grass I’m walkin’ on, but I can’t turn my head to look down, I just keep walkin’. I don’t…know if there’s a sky; I never bother to look up an’ I never notice anything else, so there probably isn’t.
B7002: No sky? Is it dark then, night?
158: Nah, it’s a sorta…dusk, or twilight, one o’ them in between times. Not dawn though. Anyways, as I keep walkin’ I start to realize that it’s not just rubble around, but there’s also-
[Approximately 1 minutes 21 seconds of silence]
158: [strained] There’s bodies; all around. All the same.
B7002: Yours?
158: No, no… that sorta thing wouldn’t really phase me anymore, to be honest. No they’re… they’re Edgar’s.
158: I’m walkin, and the first one I see is him off to the side, on top of some lump of concrete, his body all… twisted up and charred. I don’t know if I’d be able to really identify it as anyone in particular if it weren’t part of a dream where I just know it’s him, that’s how bad it is. And there are more like that, too, once I look around again. It’s easiest to spot them at a distance, because they’re the only ones burnt up like that. I keep walking though- it feels like I can’t stop moving forward, but at that point in the nightmare it don’t feel all that horrible to see, so it just makes sense to keep on walkin’. Next few I see are usually gunshot wounds, some in the head, some at center mass. A few cut throats, too, blood dried all the way down their fronts. It…
[Approximately 32 seconds of 158 attempting to keep composure]
B7002: Take your time.
158: Thinking about it later, when I’m awake, it makes me feel sick- I did throw up, way back the first few times I had it. That was when he was still alive, too- my Edgar, I mean. Woke up without makin’ a sound, all creepy, then nearly breakin’ an ankle rushing out of bed to get to the bathroom before I lost my whole stomach as it replayed in my head.
158: [he clears his throat] But that’s not part of the nightmare.
158: At that point I still don’t feel too…weird about it, I guess. I’m just goin’ along, walking past all these corpses of my- of Edgar. Then I get to one standing stock still, right in front of me. He’s all… waterlogged, hair plastered to his face, clothes drenched, that kinda thing. I can hear the water dripping onto the ground too, but I’m stuck starin’ right at his face. His eyes are all… clear, and kinda bulging out a little. His skin is too pale and it looks…tight- taught, more like. Stretched in a way that isn’t natural. Then he opens his mouth and water starts pouring out of it, gallons, and it doesn’t stop. That’s when I start to feel uneasy in the nightmare, start to realize that what I’m experiencing isn’t…good, I guess? Being normal or not doesn’t matter to your sleepin’ brain, but something in the logic of it starts to break down at that point.
158: So I start getting anxious, like, the lead up to being scared. And I can finally turn back around, but while walking forward it just feels like I was walking on grass, when I look back it’s all brighter and I can see, with vivid clarity, that the entire space behind me is choked with corpses. It wasn’t what I walked through to get there and it was at the same time, don’t ask me how it makes sense. I feel deep in my bones that, despite having gotten to where I was easily, getting back is absolutely impossible.
[Approximately 2 minutes 39 seconds of silence]
158: So I have to keep going, and my feet get all wet from the water still pouring out of his mouth and that used to be the part that made me puke when I woke up.
B7002: Used to be?
158: Well, the nightmare also used to end there.
B7002: And now there’s more?
158: And now there’s more. So I keep walking, and I start to notice all these bodies that are different variations of bloated- I’d looked up pictures, once, don’t know why I thought it would help, of what bodies looked like when they washed up after bein’ in the ocean. Do yourself a favor and never look it up; it ‘aint pretty.
158: So I have to keep walking but I’m…it’s not frantic but that’s the closest I can get to describing it; like I can’t stop moving but nothing in my pace changes, it just feels like I’m running out of something in my head. And I start to notice the bodies piled up around me more an’ more but I still can’t look down. Only now the crunching sounds less like dead grass and more like crushed bones. And now I can look around a little more, too, while I’m walking, and I start to see… horrible ones, even in the dream it’s horrible.
[Approximately 58 seconds of silence]
158: These ones are moving. But even the waterlogged one only moved to open his mouth, and that felt…weirdly logical, in the dream sort of way. These ones are dead, fully dead, but moving in a way even the nightmare doesn’t ‘want’, if that makes sense. They’re… they’re like what Alaska Mikey described, when y’all were doin’ the beginnings of your consolidation experiments. Someone that should be dead but isn’t, forever trapped in the process of dying and death. They writhe where they are, dotting the landscape and where I find them as I walk. It’s something… something no one should witness, or endure, and I ‘aint even technically the one that saw it. That’s all you guys and Mikeys.
B7002: I have to point out that technically no one saw it, as we’ve since made it so those particular experiments never happened.
158: If the memory is left of it, enough for Mikey to tell Mike and for you to have your results, then it happened. No matter how logical you try to be about it, it happened.
[Approximately 3 minutes 37 seconds of silence]
158: [a cough] That’s not the worst part, though, unfortunately. ‘Cause then I have to start climbing, and I’m scramblin’ up some weird barricade of rocks and debris and I have to move part of it to continue, and then inside there he is again. And I can- I can see the blood still slippin’ out the wound, and I know how deep it is because I put it there, and suddenly I’m soaked in it, head to toe, and it’s fallin’ into my eyes and the whole world is red and I can see his dead eyes staring straight at me and this is where I go from the steps before terror straight through into a bone deep fear that makes it feel like my whole body is being squeezed from the inside.
B7002: That’s… Mustardseed, then? Why it started increasing in frequency?
158: It would seem so, yes. And bein’ stuck in here since then hasn’t really
encouraged
my mind to move on from it, neither.
158: I still have to keep moving, though, even though my hands are slick with blood and he’s still starin’ at me. And remember I can still see all those charred Edgars among the debris, and there’s still some around flailing and writhing, and I can still see bloated bodies right in my periphery, and there are still more with bullet holes or stab wounds or any other of the hundreds of ways Edgar has died because I failed-
B7002: But you fixed it, remember? Those never happened , not really.
158: They did to me, isn’t that the whole point of these sessions? Finding out what happens to the mind when it experiences things over and over again and they keep never happening?
B7002: Well-
158: I’m almost at the end, Ty, just let me finish.
B7002: I- yes, of course, apologies.
[Approximate 23 seconds of silence]
158: So I- I make it past the pile I was climbin’, and sort of wade my way through… something. If I look back it’s bodies but when I’m walking it isn’t, and I get to the ‘end’. I know it’s the end because there’s this half-collapsed dumpster, sorta accordioned but up and down, not sideways? So the top of it is blown back and it's about the height of a table, and behind it the bodies just start stacking up higher and higher the further I look, and it feels like they’re lookin’ at me, straight at me, even when I can’t see their eyes. And the terror is still sinking into me and makin’ it feel like all my bones are just slightly to the left of where they should be, and I look down into the dumpster.
[Approximately 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence]
B7002: Michael? Still with me, big guy?
158: I- yeah, yeah.
B7002: What was in the dumpster, when you looked?
158: What?
B7002: In your nightmare, what’s there when you look in the dumpster?
158: Right- right, sorry.
158: When I look down in the dumpster I see him how- how he looked the last day I saw him, every last day I saw him, no matter how much I tried to make it not the last day. He’s layin’ there, pale and dead for sure but somehow the least disturbing of them all. Except then he sits up, and his eyes open. And I look into them and they- and they look back. But then blood starts to seep out like tears, and out his nose too, ears, mouth, the whole thing. And then, somehow, I know that something inside his head is disconnecting it all- it doesn’t make anatomical sense but in the nightmare it does.
158: Something in his head is disconnecting it all from the skull, is how my mind decides to understand it, brain, eyes, everything. But they’re all still connected to each other, and they start… rotating. Inside his head. I can see it, because his eyes move with it too, going around in a circle so I see his brain through his eye sockets before the eyes come back around. And he’s still bleeding and it just keeps turning and that’s when the true wrongness of it all settles on me like someone tryn’a suffocate me with a pillow. It’s all I can feel as I watch and when I turn around the idea of trying to run back the way I came is sickening, because I’d have to go through all those dead Edgar’s again and there isn’t even anything like a path left from me making my way there. And I can’t keep going forward, because I can’t go past him, not this one, I can’t.
158: And then I wake up.
B7002: I- I see…And you’ve been having this nightmare relatively frequently since you came here?
158: Before that, too, but yea, and in the last few weeks it’s almost guaranteed it’ll pop up if I fall past a doze.
B7002: That’s… horrible.
158: I know that, but aren’t you supposed to be impartial, or somethin’? What, finally feeling sorry for the beat up old cowboy?
B7002: I don’t have it out for you, Michael, despite what you may think.
158: Yea, sure. Look, that took a lot outta me and I’m sure you’ve got plenty to read into with it, can we just end here? I’m sure any questions you wanna ask you can ask me next week. Not like the nightmare’s gonna go away.
B7002: [softer] Sure, Michael, I’ll have Fi take you back to your room.
158: Thanks, Ty.
## Notes from Session 46
[It should be noted that, when the notebook was found containing the in-session notes, there was a full page torn out, and, though the same as the submitted typed version, had many spaces that were vigorously erased. Attempts at finding what had been erased have not shown results as of this compilation.]
Session 46 with Compound Michael 158 (referred to going forward as M158) consisted mainly of him recounting a recurring nightmare he has been experiencing with increased frequency the past 4 weeks, according to him. Throughout the telling there were multiple times where M158 stopped to compose himself, and toward the end it seemed as though he were holding back tears. It would also seem that, based on cafeteria logs, M158 has been skipping meals when possible, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ate as little as he could when not.
Before addressing the contents of the dream itself, it should be noted that he also reiterated the view held by all duplicates and versions of Mike Walters re: ‘iterations’ and the veracity behind instances that have been ‘corrected’ to never have had happened. He continued to insist that it happened, citing the fact that there was memory of it and actions made because of it as proof that it did ‘exist’ or ‘happen’. Of course, this view is largely held as a minority viewpoint but it did help put M158’s actions and mannerisms into perspective.
On the subject of the nightmare, it would seem to point to the increased guilt that comes with not only experiencing many more instances of sections of concurrent time but also holding to the point of view that they all did happen and therefore still have weight. It is likely similar to the way any Mike Walters will insist that they are all individual to a greater extent that the compound holds as true, and so the actions and fates of any duplicate will hold greater weight in the minds of the others. Despite the reality of something having happened or not, the experience of it seems enough in their eyes. This nightmare, in particular, seems to illustrate the guilt M158 holds over every perceived ‘failure’, especially when resulting in Edgar’s death. Whether this could be considered common to any person that would experience the equivalent of multiple concurrent lifetimes or not cannot be determined yet when most of the research is done on different iterations of one person. Still, further questions would prove fruitful not only in gaining more insight into Mike Walters on the whole, but also as a way to start working backwards to more standard questions we could then ask others who have consolidated with a greater number of duplicates.
[This is where the session notes end, but in the physical notebook it is also the place where a full page had been torn out. Likely, whatever B7002 wrote set his thoughts too deeply into himself and/or M158, and the resulting train of thought results have already been witnessed.]