We made a mistake.  A horrible, horrible mistake, and there’s no putting this particular blood-soaked genie back in its bottle.  Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that there’s no getting everything back out of that bottle.  That’s probably closer.  We shoved the world into the bottle and the genie is holding onto it for all its worth.

I’m not making any sense.  This is just senseless rambling.

That’s a good thing, right?  It’s good that I still recognize that I’m not making sense.  If I was all the way gone I’d just think that everything coming out of my mouth is rational.  Isn’t that how insanity works?

Come on, focus.  Have to focus.  There’s no time for this.  Get the message recorded so that others know what happened.  Only have a few minutes.

My name is Greg Roberts, and I’m a behavioral neuroscientist.  For the past six years I’ve been part of a government research project.  No, not one of those kinds of projects.  This isn’t tied to the military or anything nefarious.  At least I don’t think that it is.  Who really knows when you’re working for the government on something classified, right?

The team that I’m part of has been focused on using a combination of new therapies and evolving technology to help advance the field of mental health treatment.  The more that we’re able to connect with a patient, the more we can aid them.

What the hell was that?  I think…  No, okay.  Maybe not.

Um, I’m sorry, I don’t remember what I was saying.

Right, new treatments.  The project has essentially been built around one man, Albert Weissman.  He’s absolutely brilliant.  He’s technically an engineer, but his areas of expertise stretch so far into every field that he can’t really be defined by a single one.  His mind puts all of the rest of ours to shame.

The STP machine was his design.  Wait, I haven’t told you about the STP yet.  It’s…  It’s hard to keep things in order.  My thoughts aren’t in a straight line anymore.  They’re churning and writhing and changing order and no matter how hard I try I just can’t get them to stop swapping places.

STP is an acronym, the letters S, T, and P.  It stands for Subconscience Transmission and Projection.  We call it the STP because everything needs a fancy name when you are presenting it to people in charge that don’t understand a neurotransmitter from a xylophone.  The STP.  Short enough for even the most limited of minds to remember.

The machine itself doesn’t look that remarkable.  It’s built into one of those reclining beds that you find in hospitals.  There’s a series of wires and cables that connect into two small discs that are attached to a person’s temples on one side and a group of computers on the other.  In turn, those computers are linked to a ring of projectors drilled into the ceiling of the room.

While it doesn’t look like much, what the STP does is almost unbelievable.  I’ve seen it work countless times, and I still don’t believe it.  It feels more like…  like sorcery than science.

The STP interprets all the chemical and electrical information flowing throughout the human brain and converts it into computer data.  It then interprets that data to form images before sending those images to the projectors, which in turn produces three dimensional videos of them.  In short, the STP lets us see the thoughts of the subject.

Yeah, I know how that sounds.  It sounds like pure science fiction crap.  Whether you believe it or not, though, it exists.  Keep in mind that twenty years ago you would have been called a moron if you stated that you believed a portable phone would one day be more powerful than the most powerful computer systems of the time.

Weissman is a genius, but he’s also an idiot.  This is his damn fault.  How could he have been so wrong about what his own machine did?

Was he wrong?  Is it possible that he actually knew what he was doing?  Not an idiot.  A madman.  It’s possible.  Probable?  I don’t know.  Can’t think.  My thoughts are too big, getting too tight in my mind.  Makes it hard to think.

The STP tested so well on most people.  We were able to do good work with it.  It didn’t just project the active thoughts.  Just like its name implied, it could dig into the subconscious as well.  It could show us thoughts that even the patient didn’t know existed inside of them.  The process of treatment was so accelerated that we could do the work of years in the space of weeks.  Therapy sessions could be tailored to the individual so precisely that helping them through their various problems became laughably easy.

I don’t know when we put Ernest Carlisle into the STP.  It feels like it was earlier today, but I don’t think that’s right.  Time doesn’t matter here.  Days and hours and minutes are all the same thing.

This damn migraine.  It feels like it’s going to crush my brain.  So much pressure.  Like a broken boiler starting to swell and screech.

Maybe you’ve heard of Carlisle.  About a decade ago, he sent a series of bombs to daycares across the country.  When he was finally indentified and arrested by the FBI, he claimed that he had sent the bombs because children throughout the country had been replaced by demons summoned by the Illuminati.  In medical terms, he was a certified lunatic.

I don’t know how Weissman got him, but he did.  Carlisle was strapped into the STP as he was monitored by half a dozen armed guards.  Usually only a few of the project members were present each time the STP was run.  This time we were all there.  Each of us was fascinated by the idea of seeing into the mind of an insane man.

At first everything was fine.  The STP works in layers, you see.  Conscious thoughts are the most prominent in the mind, so it would project those images first.  The guards must have been surprised to see warped images of themselves appear in front of their faces.  It was how Carlisle saw them, not how they truly were.

There it is again.  The screams within the screams.  I thought locking myself in here woudl be enough to block them out, but I should have known better.  These aren’t voices that care about soundproofing and insulation.  The screams are free of life’s restrictions, free to flow into the ears of anyone they want.  I think the worst part is the echo.  It just bounces off the sides of your ears as it worms its way down the canals.

They’re worms made of voices that tunnel down down down into you.

When the STP reached Carlisle’s deeper thoughts, that’s when things went wrong.  I can’t describe the images that the projectors showed.  Twisted pictures of creatures beyond words.  Demonic entities that never held a single shape for more than a second, with each iteration worse than the last.

Carlisle kept laughing as the projections continued.  At one point he cried out that now we all saw the truth and that his words could no longer be suppressed by the weak minded.

Most of us could only stare in horror, but one of the scientists managed to snap out of it and shut down the STP.  When he did so, though, the projections continued.  That wasn’t possible.  Without the STP active, there was no power running to the projections.

That’s when one of the demonic images reached over and tore the throat out of one of the guards.

Weissman’s machine had somehow given form to Carlisle’s thoughts.  Or maybe it had drawn out things that were inside of him.  That’s what we all thought in that moment, anyway.  The demons started attacking the people closest to them, and the rest of us ran.  What else could we do?  We got the hell out of the STP chamber and sealed the doors behind us.

Somehow the demons had appeared beyond the chamber, however.  There were dozens of them lurking in the hallways, and the moment that they saw us they attacked.  Fellow scientists…  No, no detachment through disassociation.  Many of my closest friends were torn apart piece by piece by the nightmare creatures.  In the confusion I got separated, and I found myself here, in the security room.

Like I said, I don’t know how long I’ve been here.  I’ve heard someone or something bang on the door a few times, beggining for me to let them in.  It could be fellow survivors.  Probably not, though.  It’s more likely that it’s the demons trying to trick me into opening the door.  I’m no fool.  I’m not opening that door.

Oh, God, please stop this headache.  It’s pushing so hard against the inside of my skull.

Maybe it’s not a headache.  What if it’s the churning thoughts trying to push out of me?  Those worm screams are driving them on, spurring them to grow and search and squeeze.  The demons on the inside are more dangerous than those on the outside, you know.  Their claws are sharper and their teeth gnash louder.

Before I started recording this, I watched the security footage from the STP chamber.  For some reason the footage doesn’t show the demons.  Instead, it shows everyone in the room watching the images before some of them start to kill each other and others run from the room.

That’s not what happened.  I was there.  These demons are sneaky.  They’ve changed the footage so that anyone watching it later thinks everyone went insane from seeing the images projected from Carlisle’s mind.  I was there, though.  It was demons.  Sneaky, brutal, terrifying demons.

The voices from outside in the hall are trying to convince me otherwise.  They’re saying that our minds couldn’t what they were being shown and snapped.  They say they believe it’s only temporary, and that I need to open the door so that they can help.

One of them even sounds like Shawna.  I don’t know how the demons know what my wife sounds like.  The impersonator is talking about our children, about how they need me and how I have to come out for their sakes.  It even sounds like the speaker means it.

Even with my thoughts squirming, though, I’m not going to fall for that.  It’s a hell of a try, pardon the pun, but these demons aren’t going to fool me.

I have to find a way out, though, and to do that I need to be able to concentrate.  There’s only one way to do that.  I have to let out the worm scream thoughts.  Then there will be more space for thinking.

There are a number of guns in a cabinet here in the security office.  It’s locked, but it’s a pretty flimsy one.  This is an old building, and you don’t really need state of the art security for the type of work that we do, anyway.  I bet that I can use this chair to bash off the lock to get to one of the guns.

That will help me make a hole in my head for the worm scream thoughts to leave through.  Then I’ll be able to think straight again.  Yes, that’s what I need to do.  It’s the smart thing.

It’s the sane thing.