Subject 1A
Part 1: The DM With the Spiral
You’re halfway up a washed-out mountain road in northern Maine, the van’s suspension creaking with every dip. Beside you, your environmental specialist, Jonas, is scrolling through weather data. Behind you, two more crewmates, Rae and Del, argue over whether the old radar dome will even still be standing.
You were hired to film a documentary about Cold War surveillance architecture. Nothing paranormal. Just decaying towers, conspiracy leftovers, and maybe a few throwaway lines about MKUltra for flavor.
A few days after the contract was signed, a message appeared in your inbox on one of the research forums you monitor.
That part alone was unusual. You don’t interact much. You don’t post opinions. You read. You archive. You disappear.
The account that contacted you had no posting history. No followers. No identifiable metadata. Just a profile icon — a stamped symbol that looked like a V intersecting a spiral.
“It didn’t die when they shut it down. They just stopped looking.”
You didn’t reply.
At the time, it barely registered.
You’ve spent enough hours in fringe threads to recognize the cadence of paranoia. But you’re not entirely separate from that world either.
You actually run a faceless account.
One of those quiet, locked profiles that catalogs declassified programs and abandoned surveillance infrastructure. It’s gathered a modest following over time.
Still, there’s nothing personal attached to it.
No real name. No location tags. No cross-linked accounts.
You never log in from home. Not from your phone.
Burner laptop. Clean browser sessions. Private routing. You’re confident when you say you know what you’re doing.
So, when the message appeared, you filed it where you file most things like that…
Interesting. But irrelevant.
And now, here you are… as you find yourself bouncing around in this old van you start thinking about it.
Pine trees packed so tightly they seem to lean in over the gravel. The air is strangely still. Your equipment has been glitching since sunrise… batteries draining too fast, recorders picking up static where there should be silence.
The radar site finally comes into view.
What’s left of it, anyway.
The giant parabolic dish is rusted and cracked, its support structure half-eaten by time and wind. You step out of the van and feel a deep pressure in your ears, like the altitude just changed.
You turn to the crew. “We’ll set up here. . Just do a quick sweep and grab some interesting B-roll.”
Your cam op nods. “Should we get drone shots now or wait?”
Before you can answer, a device starts chirping in Jonas’ bag… loud and high-pitched. More like an energy surge, because you briefly feel it under your skin.
You look at him concerned.
“That’s not supposed to happen, right?”
Suddenly, your comms headset crackles to life. Completely unprompted.
A voice. Garbled. Distant. Female.
“Beacon… it opened the…”
Silence.
The air shifts. It’s cold enough this morning that your breath clouds around your face.
You glance toward the treeline.
And you swear that just for a second you see something watching.
As if waiting…
Jonas responds, “Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it. Who knows what old equipment is still sparking up here. Probably just some stray radio signals.”
***
Part 2: The Hatch in the Treeline
(You chose: Check the treeline.)
You nod back to him but decide you’re going to check the treeline anyway.
“Start setting up around the dome. I’ll get some footage along the ridge.”
They don’t argue, just scatter with gear in hand. You love the cadence of this team. They work hard and take their jobs seriously.
You make your way toward the treeline. It’s silent in that unnatural way, like the sound’s been drained out. Come to think of it, you hear no insects, no animals, nothing. You had a job in Sweden once that gave you a similar experience, but at least they had mosquitos. You found yourself missing them in this moment. Blood suckers.
Then you see it.
A rusted access hatch, half-swallowed by moss and needles. You clear the edge with your boot. No markings, except one etched crudely into the metal:
A V intersecting a spiral.
The same symbol from the forum message.
You hate to admit it, but you just don’t believe in coincidences anymore. And right now, you just hope that message was wrong.
You call out over comms, “I found something. Some kind of sealed hatch. Not on the blueprints.”
The walkie crackles. One of your crewmates responds, tense:
“Up here’s weird too. There’s power in the dome. Console lit up on its own.”
“What? That’s impossible. On my way.”
You jog back.
Inside, one of the old terminals is glowing. You find your crew already there. Staring at a nearby screen with pulsing static.
You go to say something, but before you can get the words out a file starts playing automatically.
Video log. Grainy. Time-stamped 1987.
A man in fatigues stares at the camera. Panicked. Blood on his collar.
“If anyone finds this… the experiment failed. It escaped. We tried to shut it down. We tried to jam the airwaves. But it followed the signal. It feeds on it.”
He looks over his shoulder.
“It can mimic… voices, even people. Don’t trust what you hear out there.”
Then, just before the log ends, a sound in the background.
Low. Wet. Growling. Horrible screams unlike anything you’ve ever heard.
One of your crewmates, Del, swears. “What the hell was that?”
Rae backs away from the screen muttering “this is a joke, right?”
You just stare.
The facility wasn’t decommissioned.
It was abandoned.
***
Part 3: NOT ALONE UNDER THE PINES
(You chose: Search the Dome)
You try to calm everyone down, “Let’s not jump to any conclusions. I think we should stick together and just take a moment to look around.”
No one argues. Just quiet nods as everyone grabs gear. After watching the distressing tape, no one wants to split up. It’s probably best you stick together at this point.
You head towards a rusted steel door on the other side of the room. The air feels heavier as you push it open.
The inside of the dome is a shell of its former self: collapsed ceiling panels, broken terminals, cables like veins strung across the floor. It smells of mildew and rusted circuits. Old graffiti tags mix with fading stenciled warnings in red.
One tag, hastily scrawled in charcoal, catches your eye:
“NOT ALONE UNDER THE PINES.”
You don’t say it out loud. Just take a photo. Just in case.
Near the back, buried in a desk drawer, you find it: a small digital recorder covered in grime.
You power it on. You can’t even believe it still works. The battery icon blinks red. One file.
You press play.
A woman’s voice. Controlled but shaky fills the silence. The team stops what they are doing and gathers around you.
“Log 42. The subject’s energy field has grown erratic. Camouflage reflex is now near-perfect. We’ve lost two outside the perimeter. I’ve advised suspension, but Dr. Langley insists it’s still contained.”
A pause.
“If this is ever recovered. Terminate the project. It was never meant to adapt. We made a mistake. You may think it’s a man, it’s not. You may think it’s a beast, it’s not. You may think you hear yourselves on the radio, you don’t. You have-”
The recorder dies.
Rae exhales slowly. “They created it. Created what exactly?”
Del nods. “Well, whatever they created, they clearly lost control of it.”
You say it out loud, the thing that’s been circling in your mind since arrival:
“This place wasn’t shut down. It was evacuated.”
Rae confused, “Wait, we don’t even know if anyone got out!”
Jonas almost whispering, “If no one got out, where are they? Where are the bodies?”
The room goes silent. You can feel the weight of everyone’s thoughts in the room.
And just then a soft, deliberate sound emerges behind the dome.
Something… listening.
***
Part 4: Subject 1A
(You chose: Circle around the dome, stay together.)
You gesture silently toward the back exit. Everyone follows.
The wind picks up just slightly as you round the edge of the dome. The air here is cooler. Denser. Pines creak overhead, and the treeline seems to hold its breath.
You say to the team, I need to show you guys what I found earlier.
You step carefully through the debris… twisted fencing, scattered tools, and collapsed equipment crates long forgotten. Del swings the camera slowly across the treeline, keeping the lens steady. Rae’s eyes track movement - any movement - as her field recorder is going. And Jonas, quiet as ever, grips the environmental/EMF device in one hand. Everyone is on high alert.
You come up on the half-collapsed hatch camouflaged by brush and gravel. But now, there appears to be a faint heat shimmer pulsing just above it.Not optical, but almost electromagnetic.
Jonas’ face drops. “Getting interference again. Like it’s pulsing.”
Rae crouches, brushing away debris from the rusted handle. It takes both of you to wrench it open. The interior is pitch black, but colder like something is pulling the heat down.
Del’s voice is barely a whisper. “You feel that?”
You nod. Something is off… like standing in a pressure drop before a storm.
Carved into the metal of the hatch door, you notice it… subtle and almost invisible under the rust:
“Subject 1A - Breach Site”
No one says a word.
You scan the nearby trees. Just shadows.
And then the comm channel spikes in your earpiece – the van unit, the one you left powered on, suddenly pushing a signal.
Not static. Not the woman’s voice.
A man this time.
“It sees you.”
***
Part 5: Now It Hears Through You
(You chose: Return to the van and try to make contact with the voice)
You slam the door shut behind you, and the others pile in, breath ragged. Del powers up the radio equipment. Static floods the cabin.
You lean toward the mic and speak clearly:
“Who are you? We need to know what this is.”
A beat. Then…
Click.
The static cuts.
A man’s voice, weak and distorted, breaks through:
“This is Dr. Elijah Rourke. Former project lead on Subject 1A. If you’re hearing this, I don’t know how long I have.”
You glance at the others. Rae looks stunned. Jonas starts recording the audio.
“We were working on cloaking bioenergy manipulation. Cold War tech. The subject… volunteered. He didn’t stay human for long.”
“It adapted. Faster than we modeled. Could bend light, bend sound. Eventually… it learned to mimic electrical fields. Could trick our sensors. Killed half the camp before we realized it had learned the perimeter patterns.”
“We tried to send a signal, you know, some kind of warning, but it always knew. It heard what we heard. It WAS the signal.”
“I’m the last. I got out… barely. I’ve been off-grid ever since. If you’re there… you need to leave. Burn everything.”
Jonas looks at you, “I think the question was… what if a human could disappear from radar, sound… even sight? And they got thier answer.”
The radio crackles again, then silence. And then…
Another voice.
Maybe Dr. Rourke?
Or something else.
“Too late.”
The van jolts. The lights flicker.
Outside movement. Rapid. Impossible. A shape skimming just beneath the treeline.
You watch as it approaches the van. Morphing between a figure of a man and an electric black storm clouds
It picks up speed. Nearly doubling in size.
You don’t wait. “We must go!! NOW!”
You slam the van into gear and tear down the gravel road, fishtailing around corners as trees blur past. Something slams against the back door once… twice…and then nothing.
Eventually… only silence.
You don’t stop until the road finally levels out.
You pull the van to the shoulder and keep the engine running.
No one moves.
No one speaks.
For a moment, you just stare straight ahead, your hands still tight on the steering wheel. Your chest feels too tight. Your breath a little too fast.
In the side mirror, Jonas keeps his eyes on the treeline, even though you’re miles away from the dome now. As if distance alone isn’t enough to convince him it’s over.
“Are we…” Rae starts, then hesitates. “Are we not going to talk about what just happened?”
No one answers right away.
Del breaks the silence first. “You know what? I would really just like to go home. ”
Jonas exhales, slow and controlled—too controlled. “I think it’s pretty obvious we just experienced something completely impossible.”
Silence again.
You look through the windshield. The road ahead looks normal. Empty. Safe.
For a moment, the symbol flashes in your mind—the V intersecting the spiral. The message claiming they just stopped looking.
You don’t believe that anymore.
They know exactly what they left behind.
And you can’t help but wonder if this documentary was ever meant to be finished at all.
“Suicide mission,” you mutter under your breath.
The words sit heavy in the van.
Guilt creeps in next. Then anger. You push both aside. Whatever just happened up there, you have a responsibility to the people sitting beside you.
“The only reason things are labeled impossible,” you say slowly, “is because no one’s proven them possible yet.”
You turn to look at them.
“And I think it’s best we don’t discuss what happened here. With anyone.”
Rae opens her mouth to argue—then stops. Whatever she was about to say doesn’t feel worth it.
“I’ll tell the client we can’t continue on this project,” you add. “That’s if they even respond.”
You watch confusion flicker across their faces. Then anger. Then something closer to defeat.
No one disagrees.
Seatbelts click. The engine turns over.
And as the van pulls back onto the road, no one looks back.
/:: Three Months Later ::/
You’re filming a documentary series for a new client, major television network, at an abandoned broadcast relay in Utah.
You miss the old team, but they weren’t too keen on continuing another project on another abandoned base. Jonas is the only one that has stuck with you.
With the credibility of the network, you feel better about this job. It’s historical. Harmless.
You haven’t been the same since, but find work is the only way to keep yourself sane.
You’re ready to start your film day. Jonas comes up behind you and hits you on the shoulder. You flinch.
“You ready for round two?”
You pause briefly and are reminded of yesterday. The truth is last night, in the motel, your comms headset crackled while you were sleeping. Just for a moment.
You laugh off his question.
“I think we will be okay this time around.”
You look at the shot through the monitor the camera operators set up.
It briefly glitches.
You step back from the screen. Your headset buzzes, faint and clear… a voice.
“Now it hears through you.”
You attempt to call out to Jonas but can’t get the words out. He’s already turning away, heading back toward the crew.
The wind pushes against his jacket as he walks. That’s when you see it.
The emblem stitched onto the back of the fabric.
A V intersecting a spiral.
He pauses.
Slowly, he turns back over his shoulder.
And smiles ever so slightly.
End of Story 4.
