To: Robert York
From: The Audio Revision Division
CC: The Severed Head of the Steam Tunnel Horror.
RE: hours of operation.
Hi! Audio Revision Division here. We've been working hard here to make sure your broadcasts are up to date with government's rules regarding the AM radio band. Well, policies from the before times, at least. We are still here doing our revising job, I'm not really sure why.
Anyway, we're working a floor below you and would like to ask you something. Stop? Please, maybe, just stop?
To: The Audio Revision Division
From: Robert York
CC: The Severed Head of the Steam Tunnel Horror.
RE: RE: hours of operation.
I am a little confused by how you are below my broadcast booth, considering my booth is a converted disused bathroom in the sub-basement off access shaft B. It's the one with the message "BEWARE OF THE LEOPARD" scrawled with a Sharpy on the pine door. There are two such bathrooms down here, so it's easy to make a mistake. If you see towels hanging up that are covered with images of human eyes, you're in the wrong one.
When I got assigned my own show, the only time slot available was during the aurora. I would like to note that I asked to use the broadcast booths at the tower, but apparently certain "big name stars" don't like sharing.
So, given that there isn't anything below me but the unyielding, uncaring earth, and the fact that everyone is dead, I am rather confused how you are even hearing me.
Also, maintenance also did a rather fine job sound proofing.
That said, I am still trying to figure out how they installed a window in a bathroom that is approximately four stories underground surrounded by steam pipes. At first I thought it was just a video projection, but I did manage to open it up and climb out. At which point I fell two stories and landed flat on my back sprawled across the rear loading dock.
Did you know we had a rear loading dock? Why do we even need one? Sorry. It just... I tried to find it later, but apparently you can't get there again once it leaves line of sight. Any chance you know where it is? I'd like to see my window from the outside, but I can't seem to locate it by walking around the building.
You know, I'm wondering if when they put in the window to the second floor something else got moved. Or maybe it has something to do with the sound proofing. I don't remember Styrofoam egg crates breathing quite so much. Then again, I've been hiding in the steam tunnels for the past twenty years. I'm sure they have all sorts of new materials. I'm still trying to figure out this cell phone plan. I send out one Verizon thought gram and it eats up all my minutes.
Maybe we should take this back to formula. Let's start with, what floor are you on?
PS, please don't eat garlic before sending me a memo. I am quite violently allergic to it and you clearly got some on your memo, judging by the way my hands are blistering. I really don't want to handle your memos with tongs going forward.
PPS, which printer handles sheets of shale?
To: Robert York
From: The Audio Revision Division
CC: The Severed Head of the Steam Tunnel Horror.
RE: RE: RE: hours of operation.
Your garlic allergies seem to be giving you hallucinations. There are many flaws with your statement. For one, garlic has been illegal after the vampire craze of 1988 following that Nicolas Cage movie. Secondly, there is no sound proofing. The building has been completely stripped of that after someone went on a murder spree last week. Someone who wasn't me. Finally, there are ten bathrooms, each labelled with an image of an animal carcass. You know, Doe, Buck, Lobster, Igneous rock. Makes it a bit confusing trying to figure out where to go. Personally I just hold it.
Do you know I used to have a pet rock? He died of cancer. I always get a little moody this time of year. Tomorrow is his angel-versary.
My floor number is √-1.
To: The Audio Revision Division
From: Robert York
CC: The Severed Head of the Steam Tunnel Horror.
RE: RE: RE: RE: hours of operation.
I can't find that floor on the elevator buttons. I'm wondering if it's in the same building.
Murder spree... murder spree... There was the colorless flesh dissolving miasma about a week ago. Is that what you were talking about? At least I assume it was flesh dissolving. Otherwise I have no idea what those three skeleton's outside of the break room were doing there.
Sorry to hear about your pet rock. You have my condolences. I lost someone recently. Hard to get over that sort of thing.
As for your request to "Just Stop". I'll check with my supervisor and relay your request. Let's see if we can't get this rectified.
But Seriously. How do you manage to print your memos on shale?
To: Robert York
From: The Audio Revision Division
CC: The Severed Head of the Steam Tunnel Horror.
RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: our operation.
Have you considered our grief counseling department? They helped me through the lost of my rock. I'm sure they can help you with your friend that hung himself.
To: The Audio Revision Division
From: Robert York
CC: The Severed Head of the Steam Tunnel Horror.
RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: hopeless operation.
I never told you it was about my friend who hung himself. Who are you? I mean... WHO ARE YOU???
To: Robert York
From: Trombley
CC: The Severed Head of the Steam Tunnel Horror.
RE: your soul.
Have you ever thought about your soul? What is its' purpose? What exactly does it do?
Well, I can't answer those questions, but I can tell you what it's made of. A soul consists of experiences and memories. Back in my day, they would say it was made up of eidolons… individual nuggets of knowledge. A soul is made up of the many slivers of both thoughts and feelings that we experience. These are the very building blocks of who we are.
If a soul is made up of eidolons, is each eidolons alone a soul? In a word, yes. While the majority of what makes you… you… has a form of continuous continuity, individual bits and pieces of your soul are born, live, and die.
Ever had that eureka moment when a new idea was born? The cusp of creation? The realization of your concept as it crystallizes into usable and practical form… there's nothing quite like it, is there?
Think of it this way… Take a broom made of straw. Sweep a floor with it. Some of the straw will eventually fall off. You replace it. Eventually enough straw will have fallen off that there is no longer any original straw. As time passes, you eventually will need to change the binding that is holding the straw on the handle.
Now let us say you had an accident and broke the handle. The straw and binding are still good, so you get a new handle and switch it over.
At this point, not a single part of the original broom remains. So the question is, is it still your broom?
Of course it is. And like the broom, we replace eidolons all the time. Some are easier to exchange than others, but in the end, it's all us, even if at some point the soul we possess no longer has any of its original parts.
Has anyone ever told you that someone's career had died? Ever witness the end of an era? There is a point when you know… what you know… is not long for this world. The problem is we don't always understand when it's time to let go. The feeling of loss. The anxiety over change. It muddies the water and clouds one's judgment.
When that happens it's the job of people like me to make sure the expired idea finds its way to its final destination.
"Why?" you may ask?
Because when a person holds onto an idea long past its best before date, bad things occur. Oh, we all have a tolerance for a certain amount of grist, but over time, residue builds up and weighs one down.
Like grit in the gears. Like sand in a shoe.
Ever pined over someone long after the relationship ended? Have others told you that the party was over, yet you refused to leave? Have you ever met someone reliving his glory days? A man-child who never grew up? Never moved on?
Side note, we have a standing reward for any information leading to the capture of Peter Pan. Restrictions may apply. The Void is prohibited.
From time to time, when the life of an eidolon is over, we cling to its corpse. We hold on past the point of usefulness. Such an eidolon winds up pulling you down. A dying concept can, unfortunately, take its owner with it, dragging one out of the lands of the living into what we like to call in the business, the after-life.
Not to be confused with the after-death. They are two totally different states of being. Those who have achieved the state of "after-life" may still walk among the living. They simply are no longer experiencing life, but instead existing in a quasi-state of being. The unliving, as is the common parlance these day.
Which reminds me. I have some good news and some bad news.
Now the good news is…
There are those of us who have dedicated ourselves to assisting people in just such a situation. We encourage the unliving to let things go. With words, at first. More... forcefully... if the situation gets out of hand. Sometimes it's time to move on and that's what I do. I help people move on.
The bad news is...
well...
I'm sure you can figure that part out.
---
The Quonset Manager was a prolific author. The many, many stories he wrote and scattered around the island must have consumed much of his time. Most of those stories were discovered by other expeditions, so I won't be reprinting them here. However, it's important to bring them up because the sheer amount of writing this man did in very tiny script is absolutely astounding.
It is also very difficult to separate fact from fiction. It's difficult to date chronologically when the material was first created, because he was so inconsistent in dating his material that weren't log entries.
Also there is the matter of the blurring of fact and fiction. It is quite clear that at some point he became so detached from reality, that he must have had a hard time distinguishing his stories from reality. Humans are social creatures and isolation has a strange effect on us when we are alone for a long time.
Which brings up the question, is he making up a story to amuse himself, or is it some sort of hallucination or delusion that is compelling him. The truth of the matter, I suspect, is somewhere between the two.
Which brings us to these seven memos we uncovered on our expedition.
Now the seventh one was discovered on the first expedition and the first four were found on the second. We discovered all seven of these together, and in the current order. We believe they were a reprinting, like he was known to do from time to time. Perhaps it was a "best of" collection, or a recap. I don't believe that. I believe it is an original and the other two expeditions found partial reproductions created later.
The last memo and the first four have a very different implication without the fifth and sixth memos that we discovered on this expedition. It was assumed that the last memo was written first and the first four were written later. This reordering of these memos, along with the two new ones paints a different picture.
Most of the material written about Robert York is fanciful and down right impossible. I don't think that it was a separate personality of The Quonset Manager. I believe Robert was his version of entertainment. An on going story that he told himself in order to keep his spirits up. In later material he'd refer to "seasons" of Robert York, like one would have for an ordinary Ver drama that you can download. Personally, I find most of his Robert York material to be quite funny.
That said, it's clear sometimes the line got blurred. Nothing makes that more abundantly clear than these memos. Having studied his work extensively, I believe that he started off writing a story about Robert York. Maybe it was one of his many unused scripts. No matter what his original intentions were, obviously thoughts of EF's suicide intruded on his writings.
Do note the changes in memo five and six's subject line. It should have been "Subject:" then "RE:". It also starts off "RE:" implying there is an original memo that is in this series that we don't know about. This may have been an author error, however. His use of terminology and words becomes a bit muddled as time progresses. I think he mis-remembered how a subject line works on a memo, and maybe he thought RE: was the abbreviation that you used for a subject line. If that is the case, then the first memo is the first memo.
In the fifth memo the subject turns from "hours of operation" to "our operation". It may have been a topographical error, but I don't think so. Considering how faithfully the Quonset manager reproduced his faxes to include spelling errors, I don't think he would have changed the subject line by accident.
In the sixth memo, his reply, it becomes a hopeless operation.
What exactly does this mean? I believe, given the order that we discovered these memos, that he was attempting to write himself a story for his amusement, but as he wrote his story, the paranoid delusions of Trombley invaded his mind. This is a series of memos that went from fiction, devolving into insanity before our very eyes. The changes in the subject line were his mind fighting back, trying to tell himself that something was dreadfully wrong.
Or was this Trombley intruding on The Manager, attempting to make it "Our" operation, but the manager was telling him that the attempt was "hopeless"? We may never know.
Finally we come to the seventh memo itself. It doesn't have the same subject line. It also has the "RE:" which implies to me that my theory that over the years he forgot what "RE:" means, because unless there is an original memo to someone else with the subject "your soul", then this is the first memo.
And yet, it's inclusion in this series of memos, and the fact that all seven were written at the same time with the same paper with the same type of ink, indicates that this is indeed a reply to memo six. You can change a subject line in a memo. Since the origin is different as well, perhaps this implies that the conversation changed from the Audio Revision Division department, to a personal conversation with Trombley. Same over all topic, different source of the reply.
If that is the case, then every memo from the Audio Revision Division may have been from Trombley. He may have been "writing" to Robert York for unknown reasons. It is also possible that the conversation was never about Robert York, but the conversation was always directed at the Manager itself.
I know this gets convoluted, but it is hard to understand the mind of the insane without getting into mind set of the insane themselves. Nobody knows the mind of the Quonset Manager better than me, so trust me when I say this makes sense. I understand that Trombley was a delusion of the Manager, but if we are going to understand the context of the writings, we must look at it from the Manager's view point.
To me, the implications are that the delusion of Trombley was, over time, messing with the character Robert York, as well as the character Terry Brook who would be added in later "seasons" of Good Morning Great Bear Island.
It is also possible that Trombley delusion was messing with The Manager Directly. In effect, intruding in on his writings as he attempted to keep his mind occupied in the cold, long dark he endured. I have begun to suspect it is the later.
It is the subject line, "Our Operation" that tilts me in that direction. "Ours" As in, a joint operation. Not a complaint about the hours that the show is being broadcast, but a memo about "Our" operation. If it is a joint operation, who are the two working together? Robert and Trombley? Maybe.
I suspect that the Trombley character was just a character to begin with, but over time it, and it alone, make the leap to full alone paranoid delusion. While there are many examples that make you believe that the Quonset Manager is having a hard time understanding fact from fiction, in the end, while his grasp of reality was weak, it existed. It just waxed and waned in strength over time.
Not so with the Trombley character.
This series of memos confirms my belief that Trombley made the leap from fiction to paranoid delusion. The Quonset Manager's philosophical musings about the nature of memetic life became the foundational myth where upon he could frame Trombley.
These memos show the intrusion of Trombley into his mind. Originally I thought this Trombley memo was a pleasant side of Trombley. He was a benevolent spirit that over time became twisted as The Manager continued to live long after the death of Jennifer.
However, this changes the placement of the Trombley memo to some time during the first few months after Jennifer's arrival.
Furthermore, the memo, in the context of the other six seems much more... threatening. There seems to be a subtext there that wasn't easily understood until taken into the context of being connected to the other six.
Unlike the movies which portrays Trombley as a violent, insane sociopath, or a thoughtless, mindless beast of incoherent rage, The Quonset Manager's writings have always implied that the Trombley delusion was always a cultured, highly intelligent entity.
It also changes the relationship. In light of this evidence, Trombley was always evil in the Quonset Manager's mind. Trombley was just much more subtle at the beginning. In fact, I would go so far as to say this changes the context of all the other Trombley evidence. I think Trombley had been toying with the Quonset manager from the very beginning.
Instead of Trombley being a shepherd of what he termed "Eidolons", Trombley is actually threatening the Quonset Manager in the seventh memo. Trombley is making his intentions clear.
The Quonset Manager needs to kill himself, or Trombley will do it for him.
