137: The Secret Of The Thwarted Letters

SUMMARY

Take care of yourself.

TRANSCRIPT

Original transcript edited by Synthium and reviewed by Jenah

[BEGIN Episode 137]

INTRO: Hey guys, quick plugs. It’s pretty usual around here right now, which means that I’m doing the usual thing on Sunday evenings, where I’m streaming on Twitch over at twitch.tv/woebegonepod, where I write that week’s episode soundtrack and then we hang out and play a video game. This last Sunday we played Geoguessr, I guessed really close in Argentina several times, and could not play it cool. I don’t know anything about Argentina, I got lucky. So if you want to come hang out, that’s twitch.tv/woebegonepod. 

And if you would like to support the show, you could do so on Patreon, at patreon.com/woe_begone, where you can get early access to ad-free episodes, instrumentals, soundtrack albums, QnAs, director’s commentaries, Movies with Michael, postcards, and more. I just got the November postcards in my hands today. I will try to send them out throughout the week, and I am very excited for you to have them. Each of the postcards contains a unique, handwritten note from one of the characters and all of the postcards combined tell a larger, slice of life story about something that is happening at the Base, generally a story that is too silly and wacky for WOEBEGONE, the show. So if that sounds fun to you, check out patreon.com/woe_begone. 

And special thanks to my ten newest patrons, [REDACTED] for supporting the show. Enjoy.

[Warning: This episode contains a depiction of violence. Listener discretion is advised.]

MDAWG [Narrating]:

Dear MDawg,

I hope that you will find this letter and be able to read it, but I am not going to get my hopes up. Operose has a system to detect outgoing messages and thwart them, but I don’t understand how it works yet. You certainly haven’t received any messages that I’ve sent. I would remember receiving them. On the other hand, I haven’t been reprimanded for trying to send messages, so I wonder if there is an automated system in place that automatically thwarts messages without notifying anyone. Maybe I’m getting caught in some kind of time travel spam filter. If this message doesn’t show up inside of your coat at the end of the day, I’ll make some adjustments for next time. Maybe Operose has a definition of what a ‘message’ is that I could skirt around.

I need you to remember, MDawg. My heart breaks every time I return to work and remember everything again. It’s not fair that I have to feel that rush of confusion every time Operose needs me. It’s not fair to you that they let you keep believing that Edman is dead. They owe you an explanation. We’ve made our fair share of mistakes, but we have taken accountability for them. It is unconscionable that they put us through so much violence, mental and physical, only to drop us back in Vancouver at the end of the day with no idea what happened to our body. It doesn’t matter that we can’t remember. We can still feel their marks on us. And I know that it doesn’t have to be this way because there is a system to petition to retain our memories. I have filled out the forms. And so far, all of these requests have been denied.

I am wearing our winter coat that has the rip along the lining of the pocket. It’s the one that Edman got us, right after we started seriously dating. He’s always so worried that we’re going to get cold. It’s the twink in him. He doesn’t have a protective layer of blubber to shield him from the elements. To his credit, it is an excellent coat. We’ve worn it to the point of the stitching coming undone, though that might be out of love for him and not because of anything intrinsic to the coat itself. I don’t have to explain any of this to you. You’re me.

I am going to put this note inside the lining of the coat. My hope is that Operose will only check the pockets of the coat and not think to look inside. I have little faith that my plan will work. It’s just an experiment. If they find it, I’ll try something else. There has to be a way to get information across the barrier. Everything has information encoded into it: patterns, sequences, DNA. Everything is ordered on some level. We’ll figure out a code. The actual difficulty will be getting you to notice that the code exists. 

I can’t stand seeing us so unhappy. I know that nothing will improve until you start receiving these notes. You need to know what happened to Edman. You deserve to know. We deserve the life that we had before this new conflict started. A life that was content and domestic and complete. You deserve to know that Edman is alive.

Edman is alive.

Take care of yourself.

Signed, 
MDawg

[INTRO THEME PLAYS.]

MDAWG [Narrating]:

Dear MDawg,

Congrats on cracking the code! If you’re reading this, I mean. Pretty nifty, right? I’m banking on the idea that people at Operose don’t know jack shit about yoga mats, so they wouldn’t even think to look for the secret message. The people that work here are not yoga friendly, to say the least. I think I might have met the least yoga friendly person of all time in here, actually. More on him later. I really hope you find this letter. This isn’t my first time trying to reach you. In fact, I’ve tried on several other occasions to no avail. I thought that my last attempt was clever enough. I hid the note in the lining of our coat pocket, but it wasn’t there when we got back to Vancouver. Luckily, we haven’t been punished for trying to send messages, so I don’t see any harm in continuing to try. Eventually it will either work or they will stop me. 

I talked to Anne today! It’s frustrating how rare it is to have a conversation with her. I get it. She’s the project lead. She has a lot on her plate. She’s sort of a small fish in this big Operose pond, but we’re the project! We’re what she had taken the lead on! We don’t know anyone else here and we aren’t very good at making friends. It’s like when you go to a party with someone, but they’re the only person at the party that you know. Meanwhile, they know everyone else and keep getting pulled into conversations without you and you don’t know how to initiate conversations with a stranger, so you just sit there, trapped, playing on your phone or whatever, waiting for your friend to come back. It’s like all of that except it’s life-or-death war scenarios involving time travel. And I have met one person, but they’re… a bit overwhelming. And maybe not my friend. 

From what I can tell, Anne is pretty bummed about this whole human relations aspect of the project, namely what’s happening to us. I caught her looking at our bad eye and then looking away, stealing glances. I think she sees it and feels guilty. She didn’t say anything to that effect, of course, though she did say that there were some restorative therapies that Operose offered and she would look into getting us into one of those programs, but that she doesn’t have the authority to greenlight anything. As with everything else, I am not getting my hopes up. If it happens, I’ll be thrilled. Losing an eye has been more debilitating than I was expecting. And I was expecting it to be pretty debilitating. If it doesn’t happen, I won’t be surprised. Anne tried her best. Probably. 

The situation at Operose is “tricky” right now, according to Anne which, when is it ever not? But, there’s a war going on between OI and the Compound. Operose is the more capable of the two groups, at least according to Operose themselves, but the Compound pulled out an unexpected victory in their first real “battle.” That battle is what got us and Edman “retracted” into Operose. That’s their word. For our own safety, of course. The Edman and MDawg project is a known entity, both to the Compound and elsewhere. Matt found us and told Base, so it was all downhill from there. You can thank him for this. According to Anne, this made us vulnerable. So, when the shit hit the fan, Operose retracted us. That’s their story, at least. 

The “Edman and MDawg” project might be a singular project, but Edman and us have different values according to Operose. Some studies center Edman and some center on us. I’ve been doing more direct “missions,” like the kind Base would have their Mikey do. I went inside of the Compound and pretended to be a Compound Mikey. I did reconnaissance for them and very nearly got us killed. That’s why our eye is busted, by the way. And the war has all hands on deck, so they want me involved again, even if my exploits inside of the Compound were not… resoundingly successful? They’re making teams out of everyone that they can get, so Anne passed my information along to other team leaders. Operose has squeezed me completely dry of information. They’ve asked every variation of every question that they can think of. You never know what might be useful one day. The right piece of information, propagated in the right direction, can mean life or death for us. 

As Mikey told us in Vancouver, Edman is cured. That makes him extremely valuable to Operose. Anne says that Edman’s even more valuable than her, though that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison because she’s an employee and he’s an asset. She says that there is no way that they would kill him or otherwise allow him to die. But also that I can’t see him right now. I don’t like that. Of course, I asked her a bunch of questions and she was not allowed to answer any of them. I knew that that would be the response but I had to ask anyway. I don’t think that she was supposed to tell me that Edman is alive, either, but I gave her the good ol’ MDawg puppy dawg eyes. That’s puppy dawg spelled with ‘d-a-w-g.’ The puppy dawg eyes don’t work on most people these days, but I haven’t completely used them up with Anne, so it worked this time. 

I know you because you’re me, so I know that you only read the first paragraph of this letter before you started scanning for what you actually want to know. Blah blah blah, who cares about Operose or Anne or the war or any of that trivial shit? There is only one thing that you want to know, so I will write it out right here in bold: EDMAN IS ALIVE. There you go. All caps and everything. You have your good news. Now go back and actually read the letter now and pay attention to what it says. This is stuff that I want to know when I get back to Vancouver, which means that you have to read the letter. I included everything for a reason, I wouldn’t waste our own time.

And take care of yourself, dammit.

Signed, 
MDawg

Dear MDawg,

You’ve got to find one of these letters eventually. I’m sure of it. You didn’t even check the yoga mat, so I have no way of knowing if my previous letter even made it through the detection system. And I have no way of making you check after I leave here, cause I forget everything. You have no mental space for yoga, ever since Edman got retracted. Figures. Yoga was Edman’s thing. We were just along for the ride. His twinkishness was always more suitable for the poses. You should give it a try without him, though. I wasn’t able to touch my toes today at work. That was embarrassing. Being limber would be a great help in all of these field missions they’re sending me on. I still have to do stuff while you’re sitting at home wallowing, you know. Well, you don’t know. It would be so much easier to get around if my back wasn’t sore all the time. So do a downward facing dog or something.

I think I might be able to swing Operose getting us a new eye if I play my cards right on this next mission. I’m playing along, being a good little soldier, taking orders, so theoretically they should give me what I want. I’m close friends with a project lead, after all. And Anne wants Operose to do right by me. Neither us nor Anne have any way to hold Operose accountable if they decide to skip out on the bill, though. We’ll have to wait and see. I’m a little optimistic. Operose seems to understand that not paying your debts can be more expensive than paying them, even if they don’t actually care about me or my eye. 

I have been having some very interesting meetings regarding a new project. It’s an honest-to-God mission, not just an experiment under Anne. This one isn’t her thing. It’s more like something that is adjacent to her. I’m nervous about not answering directly to her, but I want my eye back and I want Edman back, so I’m going to say yes to whatever they put in front of me. Which so far has meant a lot of meetings with this project head and his right-hand man. 

The project lead said that his name was Eagle. He’s a muscular guy, in great shape, with slicked back hair and a sharp nose. I don’t know if Eagle is a nickname or if this is just nominative determinism at work. Eagle’s super chill, friendly, easy to talk to. Our meetings sort of felt like we were hanging out. He really went the extra mile to make things a little less stuffy. He brought donuts to all of the meetings. I’m not positive that he is strictly allowed to do that. Information can travel through absolutely anything, for instance the sprinkles on a donut. If someone really wanted to relay a message, they could do so through the arrangement of sprinkles on a donut. It’s not impossible. Which is why that sort of thing is supposed to be closely monitored. We had donuts anyway, though, which does give me some hope that I’ll be able to get one of these letters to you, at some point.

Eagle didn’t seem like someone that especially cared about what the rules regarding donuts at classified meetings was, or for any rules at all, for that matter. In addition to being a fun, chill hang, Eagle was also… chilling. Like, not chill… Like, “gave me the chills” chilling. The first thing that he said to me was that he had noticed my eye. I told him that I lost it on a Operose mission and that Anne was seeing about getting it restored for me. And then he said, “Nah. That eye’s a goner. I can carve it out for ya if you want. I never go anywhere without a knife. And I’ve got a guy that makes the best glass eyes in the business if you want one. On the house.” He was perfectly pleasant about it when I laughed nervously and declined his offer, but it did sound like a serious offer. Eagle struck me as someone who could kill me in cold blood, watch the light go out of my good eye, and then go to sleep like a baby. Which, I guess, is a good thing if he’s on our side. I certainly would not want to oppose him. In fact, I feel bad for the other side and the future of their organs. 

The elephant in the room was Eagle’s lackey. It was an iteration of Michael. He seemed quite different from the Michael from Satellite Base. He wasn’t very much like any iteration of us that I’ve ever seen before. He looked serious and stern. Broken in. Soldierly. And, unlike Michael, he wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat. Instead, he had a long scar that went all the way from the back of his head to the front on the left side. [LIEUTENANT (Narrating): Sorry I ain’t got the hat today. Just got outta brain surgery. Hope ya can still recognize me.] That was how he introduced himself. He gave me a firm handshake and told me that his name was Lieutenant.

Michael introducing himself as “Lieutenant” made me curious as to what he was the lieutenant of, but what Eagle wanted me to work on was more of a side-project than it was whatever army raising that him and Lieutenant seemed to be doing as their main project. I got referred to Eagle after he asked Operose for some resources regarding cleaning up after Base. It turns out that Base is inside of the Compound now, so now is a good time to clean up some loose ends, now that there is no one on the outside to put up a fight. Base might be stuck inside the Compound temporarily, or permanently, but there is nothing lost in seeing what we can find going through their stuff.

I think what intrigued me about Eagle and about this project is that I felt like I was being treated as a peer and not an asset for the first time. Eagle acted comfortable around me. Maybe even a little too comfortable. I wasn’t a lab specimen. I was MDawg. Eagle came to us for help because I am his coworker, in a sense. I think that this is the way forward in Operose. If we want things back to how they were, we have to be more respected than being merely mission assets. I think that’s how we get our eye back. I think that’s how we get Edman back. We need to rise up the ranks. Its worked for Eagle. Operose has kept him in good condition. He says that he’s been hurt or killed millions of times and they bring him back every single time. I assumed that “millions” was comedic hyperbole, so I laughed when he said this, but Lieutenant nodded sagely, as though Eagle were telling the accurate truth. So maybe Eagle has died millions of times. Another perplexing, interesting thing about him. He does have the disposition of someone who has been violently killed millions of times, so I can’t dispute it.

This was intended to be a nonviolent mission, though. As much as one can actually  account for that sort of thing. There wasn’t going to be any resistance. There was a piece of technology that the Satellite Base left behind during the move: an extremely well-hidden Calculator. Eagle explained that Operose didn’t need something as puny as a Calculator, but that they would feel more comfortable if Base didn’t have a spare, since Base relies so heavily on Calculators for their mission activities. I had never heard of this mystery Calculator, not even when I was spying on Base while pretending to be the Mikey from the Compound. Lieutenant explained that this was a last-resort emergency device that was so well hidden that no living person knew where it was. An iteration of Michael had hidden it and that iteration had been killed by another iteration to preserve the secrecy. He explained this without a hint of acknowledgement of how horrifying it was. The only way to retrieve this Calculator would be to discover and solve an elaborate set of clues that that iteration had left behind. Lieutenant didn’t know where this clue trail head would start and neither did any of the other Michaels or any living person, for that matter. 

I’m not going to lie. Iteration murder aside, this seemed pretty fun and whimsical to me, like a Nancy Drew point-and-click adventure game. I understood why Eagle wasn’t interested in doing it. There wasn’t enough action for him, not enough blood and guts. I bet that Operose passed it down to him through some bureaucracy. Like “Oh, you have an iteration of Michael on your team, so you should do this Satellite Base mission.” I was happy to take it off of his hands. If I was going to do missions for Operose, I would prefer the interesting, easy ones. 

I asked Eagle about compensation. Edman, specifically. If I do this, will it get me closer to seeing Edman again? Eagle laughed. Lieutenant didn’t. 

“Theoretically? I mean, sure!” He said, “But folks like you usually end up dead before they earn something like that.” 

I was confused. 

“But haven’t they brought you back from the dead lots of times? Wouldn’t they just bring me back?” I asked. 

He shook his head, like a seasoned veteran chastising the naivete of a newbie. 

“It’s not that easy. You’ve gotta earn your keep.” He clapped his hand on my back. “You’ll be fine, MDawg. The better you take orders from ol’ Eagle here, the safer you’ll be. Got it?”

I told him that I got it. 

I need for you to receive this message, MDawg. I need to prepare for the mission tomorrow. It seems safe and easy, but I know that can go awry. I need you to see the metaphorical pattern in the sprinkles on the donut. I need you to step up and be a warrior for me, but I know that you’re never going to do that if you don’t know what’s going on. I need to be in fighting shape. I can’t do that if you skip yoga and I can’t touch my toes anymore. I can’t do that if you drown your sorrows and I end up going out on a mission drunk from the night before. If I can get this Catch-22 of grief to end for one rotation, I can put a stop to it forever. So please, find this message. Read it and prepare for tomorrow.

EDMAN IS ALIVE.

Take care of yourself.

Signed, 
MDawg

Dear MDawg,

I have the most wonderful present for you, but I need for you to open it. In order for you to know that it’s there, you need to receive this message. Maybe you will find it on your own, but I am not optimistic. I am begging you to keep an eye out for the code. I know that you can do it. We spent all day solving a more difficult code than the one that I am giving you. We can do it. Everything gets unlocked if you can figure this out. The clues are right in front of you. 

You still haven’t found my last message where I described what’s going on. I was assigned a mission under a new project lead inside of Operose. His name’s Eagle and he works with an iteration of Michael called Lieutenant. They wanted me to raid a secret vault at the former Satellite Base that contained a Calculator. This was a solo mission, easy work, no opposition because Satellite Base is currently missing inside of the Compound. Lieutenant gave me a detailed mission brief as well as a numerical code that I would need once the puzzle was solved. The mission was today. They sent me in and I got to work. 

Initially, there was some drudgery because I didn’t know what I was looking for. There would be a trail head that opened up to more clues but I didn’t know what that would look like yet. I eventually found something resembling an actual cipher (after plugging away at several things that weren’t actual ciphers) and eventually the gears started turning. In short, I solved a lot of puzzles and cracked a lot of codes. One of the codes pointed me to a song, and that song pointed me towards the crows in the courtyard, a detail that I luckily remembered from my time infiltrating Base. If I had not been sent on that mission, I would not have been able to complete this one. 

It was here that things went slightly off script. I wasn’t supposed to interact with anyone in the apartment building. But there was a surly older man in the courtyard, throwing peanuts out to the crows. From my time with Base, I knew that this was Boris, the landlord, though I didn’t know him. I had only seen him when he dropped off his dog at the apartment. 

Boris smiled and waved hello as he made his way over to me. “Hello Mikey, future cowboy!” He said. I played along. He asked where Michael was and how he was doing. I said that Michael was on official business back in America and that I didn’t know when he would be back, which disappointed him a little bit. I explained that I was actually here on Michael’s behalf. Michael had said that he left something important with the crows, but that I didn’t know what it was. There was a look of recognition on Boris’ face. “Ah! I know what it is. Crow Flapper brought it to me earlier. It is in my apartment. Come, I will show you,” Boris said, smiling, and led me to his apartment. 

“It is shame there is no Bruno to greet you,” he said as we entered the apartment. “Bruno is on doggy playdate. Come, sit. There is tea.” I explained to him that I didn’t really have time for tea. I didn’t want to be rude, but this was time sensitive and I really needed to get the clue and get going. I had stood up but not yet finished stammering out my excuses when Boris shoved a shotgun barrel in my face. I froze, and put my hands up. 

“Where is Michael the cowboy?” Boris asked, calmly but with some malice.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You are not Mikey future cowboy,” he said. “Michael has warned me there might be… intruder.”

I explained that this was all a misunderstanding, all while wondering how much Boris knew about what was going on. How much had Michael told him?

“Could be misunderstanding,” Boris said. “But I know cowboy. If this is misunderstanding, cowboy can use time travel, stop me shooting. We can figure out later. But for now, we shoot. Alright, goodbye, imposter Mike.”

I would have died right there if not for Eagle. Eagle had equipped me with a hunting knife for my own safety, according to him. It turns out that he was right. While Boris was talking,  I grabbed the knife from the holster and plunged it into Boris’ chest whilst he was still explaining to me how he was going to shoot me. Boris gave me a shocked look, grasped at the wound on his chest, then fell over gasping and coughing up blood. He had ceased moving within a minute. 

I stood up, dusted myself off, and got the hell out of Boris’ apartment. Boris was right about one thing. If one of us wasn’t supposed to die in that altercation, then someone could correct it. 

I returned to the courtyard, and found the crows. One of the crows led me to a key. The key led me to an apartment. The apartment had a safe in it whose combination was the code that Lieutenant had told me. I opened the safe and I found… two Calculators.

Two Calculators? I couldn’t believe my luck. Everything that Lieutenant had prepped me for suggested that there was only one Calculator. Operose only knew about one Calculator. That meant that no one would notice if the other one went missing. Which meant it was mine for the taking. We finally had a way in. A way to put ourselves, MDawg, in the loop and keep us there. A way to act outside of the bounds of Operose, without their permission. Without anyone’s permission. I was holding pure, distilled freedom in my hands. 

I did some cleaning up before heading back to Operose. I put the orange key on Michael’s desk with a note to avoid the courtyard until Boris was gone and to give it back to Flapper on the way out. My timeline merged with the timeline of the MDawg that found that, and that became what actually happened. There was no need to kill Boris and create an incident for Operose to have to cover up what happened and who did it. Theoretically, not too difficult of a thing for them to handle, but it was something that I could fix, so I fixed it. It was good that Boris was alive for his own sake, but also because you never know how things could propagate, especially news of someone’s mysterious death. And God forbid Operose do any investigating into what I did at the apartment, because the very next thing that I did was take that second Calculator that they didn’t know about and deposited it in the storage unit. I chose the storage unit instead of the house for one reason: Matt. Matt is always watching us. If I put the Calculator somewhere that you could see it, MDawg, that means that Matt could see it, too. I don’t know who is still on the outside, but he could report that Calculator to someone else, someone affiliated with Base and we don’t want that. So, it’s in the storage unit. 

I repeat, MDawg: the Calculator is in the storage unit. I need you to find it. I think you will. We often go in there to look at Edman’s old books and diaries and other papers, so you can stumble across it, even if you don’t find this. But it would be so much easier if you just found this letter. Please look for the clues.  

We are so close that I can taste it. I can taste our freedom. I made it back to Operose and turned in the single Calculator. Eagle and Lieutenant were satisfied with my performance. We got lunch afterwards and palled around like a couple of bros. Eagle is taking a liking to me. He would probably like me even more if he knew how I handled Boris. He wants me on upcoming projects. Bigger ones, he says. I don’t know if I like where that ends up, but if I can ride it until I can get us and Edman out of there, that’s what I’m going to do. 

A better world is possible. A world where what you’re doing isn’t split apart from who you are. A world where Edman is by our side. And it doesn’t matter what else happens in that world. If Edman is by our side, then it is a better world than this one. And it is possible. I know that it is possible, we used to have it. It’s inevitable. No one can keep us apart from each other.

EDMAN IS ALIVE.

Take care of yourself.

Signed, 
MDawg

[END THEME PLAYS.]

BLOOPER (MDAWG): 

Which so far has meant a lot of meetings with this project head- (head being dragged out, snickering) Project head- (head being drawn out again)

Which so far has meant a lot of meetings with this project head- (head is once again drawn out, laughing) Project head.
[END Episode 137.]