《The Organization》 The Apocalypse Commission Report Dr. Fenton, In the investigation into the causes of the unforseen apocalypse on the 21st of June, 2022, the commission has decided to focus on three individuals who have been deemed essential to the majority of versions of those events: John Iverson, Moira Thennson, and Alice Myung. Ms. Thennson and Ms. Myung''s accounts of events has been reconstructed from interviews, official records, and cognitive memory data extracted from them. Due to Mr. Iverson''s current status, and effective inaccessibility, we were unable to construct a narrative report, and in lieu of that, we have included a selection of his social media posts, which provide not just a record of his thoughts, but also represent one of the most inexplicable breaches of our security in recent history. We have reason to suspect that, rather than being an issue of mere oversight, the lack of prevention of Mr. Iverson''s actions and the consequences thereof was due to sabotage from within the Organization, possibly from an individual above the security clearance of our commission. If you find this to be the case, we are prepared to carry out an appropriate response. What follows is the data that we have collected, beginning with Mr. Iverson''s initial breach of security. Editorial oversight has been conducted by agent J-B of your personal staff, who we have otherwise been unable to contact, but we have been assured by your secretary that he is a trusted individual. Beginning of Tracking Data for Subject John_Iverson_0002b.isb: April 14th, 2021, old.*****.com/r/unsolvedmysteries, topic#115823/23: Original Post: "I saw something today, I think it''s related to /u/imperialstarfishdestroyer''s incident" Body Text: "Okay, so you know how there was a report of a fleshy mass consuming a block of [Town Name Redacted] last weekend? Only reported by one local news outlet, screenshotted by /u/imperialstarfishdestroyer, then rapidly deleted and given a full denial treatment? I live in the same town, and saw his post about four hours after the supposed time of the incident. There were men there. Well, men and women, but they were definite G-Men types. I didn''t see anything of what he reported, but they were guarding the scene. [Business Name Redacted] wasn''t up and running again, hell, I got a glimpse of the crater where it used to be, so I know it was there Sunday, was gone Monday, and was back and up like nothing ever happened by Tuesday, just like /u/AlfsIndifferencetoCats reported, and they were securing the perimeter. There were a couple of guys with guns... well, not exactly guns, probably some kind of particle beam weapon system, nozzles hooked up to backpacks with vents and glowing bits, patrolling the perimeter, occasionally blasting little bits of debris to test their weapons. I took a few pictures: [Link redacted, Imgur album deleted, copyright claim of United States Department of Defence (sic)] I didn''t see exactly what happened, but I''m pretty sure anyone who did met the business end of one of those. Anyone else got any info? I think this is big."If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Reply #39b, /u/MisterWongIDontFeelSoGood [Subject 0001A/B: John Iverson]: "Oh, come the fuck on, haven''t you seen Ghostbusters? That''s not a weapon, that''s a tool. We use them to clean up contaminated sites. Yeah, it can fire a jet of plasma, or a burst of gamma radiation (alpha and beta don''t quite get the same results, believe me, I''ve tried), but it''s not something you''d ever put in the hands of some soldier or secret agent. If my boss would let me, I''d use it on my kitchen floor. I''m pretty sure it''s the only thing that''d work on the glazed paprika stain I made from my last attempt at reinventing curry. Also, one of the people in that picture is a woman, and I''m pretty sure she''d be offended at you calling her a G-Man." Reply #39b.2 Timestamp +00h03m "Okay, she doesn''t care, but still, don''t just blunder through this shit, my dude." Post on old.*****.com/r/unsolvedmysteries by Subject John Iverson, April 18th, 2021: Subject: "So, it seems I''ve gotten pretty popular around here" Body Text: "First off, I''d like to say that I would have replied to some of the replies to my post - not all of you, wow, seriously, some of you are crazy - but frankly, responses were coming too fast. I''m no stranger to social media and how it works, and there''s no way anyone other than who I was directly responding to would have seen my responses. And I don''t want that. If people want to ask a question, the answer should be seen by everybody. So, here''s answers to the most common questions: Yes, I work for the United States of America, or at least that''s what it says on my paychecks. If you don''t think I can trust that, I don''t know what to tell you. No, I''m not full of shit, and no, I don''t think I''d be automatically censored if I wasn''t. I''m a fucking Janitor. My job is to clean up messes, and the only security clearances I''ve got are what I need to do my job. After all, somebody else made the initial post, right? It''s not like I''m pulling a Snowden and busting open a massive surveillance apparatus. We don''t give a shit what you do, where you do it, or who you do it with. Well, unless you start breaking the fabric of reality or something, but really, is someone on [website redacted] going to be able to do that? Nah, son. Hell, if you go to someone and say "Oh, there''s some government agent posting on [website redacted], he''s got insider info on all your favorite up and coming conspiracy theories, let''s send this to CNN", you''ll get laughed out of the room. Especially if half the content is telling you what kind of cleaning agent it takes to wipe up after a nauseous Bigfoot. CLR, for the record. So none of this matters. That said... Y''all got any questions?" Number of Replies Received by Date of Compilation of Incident Report: 3,451,502. Janitors: Kind of a Big Deal Reply #000000003 to Original Post, /u/FranklinsFrenchFloozy: "Okay then, two questions: 1. Why should we believe you? And 2. Why the hell did you capitalize "Janitor"?" Response from Subject John Iverson, posting as /u/MisterWongIDontFeelSoGood: "To the first question: You shouldn''t. Trust no one. Not even yourself. To the second: Because Janitors are kind of a big fucking deal. Okay, we''re not that big of a deal in terms of say, making the choices that make the world run, but I''m going to speculate that we''re responsible, over the course of our history, for stopping some triple-digit amount of mass casualty events, and probably an apocalypse or two. For example, that incident with the "fleshy mass" in [town name redacted]? Y''all had two paths out of that where Michigan kept having an upper peninsula: One was a couple of nukes, and the other was us. I''m really going to have to explain everything to you, aren''t I? Okay, so me, Craig, and Jack were assigned to Incident 49858:11A, about a half hour after lunch, and honestly, all I knew about it at first was that it was far enough away that we''d be teleported over there through a pyramid, and close enough that we''d be fine speaking English. When we dropped in, around the outskirts of town, we met up with the outgoing Response Team. They''d neutralized the immediate threat, but complete DNA eradication, social mop-up, and informational decontamination was up to us. As usual - You see a group of people in anti-penetration armor and HUD-helms with a suitable compliment of firearms and you can safely assume that they''re just around for all the showy bits, just like a fighter pilot. They had dropped in, vaporized the Entity and a few people who had been compromised, all according to regulations, but of course, they hadn''t given three shits about the collateral damage. Three city blocks had been taken out. THREE. CITY. BLOCKS. Do you have any idea how many materials and infostamps comprise three city blocks? To be entirely fair, we deployed Reseters on two of them: Any damage incurred is pretty well fixed by a bit of temporal reversal, but for the precise reasons that that sort of thing works, it was completely ineffectual on the block of incident origin. In other words: If you try to clean something up by rewinding time, don''t rewind the source of the mess, or it''ll just make the mess all over again. Time shenanigans are great and all, and I''m more than willing to authorize their casual abuse, but they don''t fix everything. Anyway, I had set Craig on informational cleanup, and she was "debriefing" the local populace with some amnesiac agents, your typical visual code-insertion with a payload of generic small-town Americana, while Jack was scouting potential perimeter breeches. Personally, I was up in that one block that we couldn''t fix with brute force, fixing it with brute force. Elbow grease, particle beams, and Windex, not tachyons and universe-rending side-effects - I swear, time manipulation is like an SSRI with the sexual side effects dialed up to 11 - would surely fix whatever the fuck was up. While scrubbing out any material identified as "foreign to the native environment" (God, I hope that isn''t defined by conservatives), I perused the incident report that had been beamed over to our ClearoMats. I suppose you''d like a summary, wouldn''t you? Fifty-two hours prior to arrival of the response team, (name redacted for decency, you assholes), a Girl Scout and according to active records, potential future 33rd Degree member of the Eastern Star, entered a search on AskJeeves.com for "rare scout badges guide". Thirty-eight seconds later, (IP address redacted, because again, decency, she''s like, twelve), she accessed a since-blocked, deleted, and drone-striked-at-the-server-level bodybuilding forum thread, titled "Girl Scout Discovers How to Break Thermodynamics (Scientists Hate Her)", with seventeen replies. The obvious search-engine optimization employed should have been handled by our automated countermeasures, but evidently it was missed. This error has already been passed on to the Illicit Communications Division, and I can only assume that they''re handling it, since I haven''t been sent to clean up a mess in their headquarters. The body text of this post, and of the replies, has been obscured to me for obvious reasons, but twelve hours later, a credit card registered to said Girl Scout''s mother made several purchases at a local hardware store, alongside a purchase of restricted pharmaceutical products at a nearby convenience store. Post-incident reports indicate that this was accepted in contravention of federal laws due to the high social standing of said Girl Scout.The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. Cross-referencing of seismic data at EYMN station circa minus 38 hours and temperature data from satellite [redacted] during its flyover circa minus 37 hours and 48 minutes indicate that an anomalous incident occurred sometime in the following two hours. Nothing of note was reported by local social or traditional media at this time. Over the next twelve hours, seventeen separate error reports were received by technical support offices in the greater Midwest region originating in ZIP 49858, indicating anomalous spikes in (1) radiation (2)graviton presence (3) heat (4) chlorine trifluoride parts per million, along with various drops in internet, television, and cellular coverage, all triangulated to [address redacted]. This is all a matter of public record, though it is explained as caused by a grad student experiment resulting in a localized gamma-ray burst. This could not be further from the truth. Outside of the public record, our Clearomats reported that a Crisis Response Team was dispatched to the area at minus 23 hours. This team failed to issue an incident report, and a second Crisis Response Team was dispatched at minus 12 minutes. This team, eleven minutes and forty-five seconds later, issued a request to the Janitorial Division, requesting incident clean-up and memory wipe operations, along with three service deletion requests, which were passed along to the Temporal Repair Division, who apparently fulfilled these requests, judging by the fact that I can hardly remember these requests. T-Zero is indicated by the activation of tele-pyramid devices by three Janitorial Division personnel, namely: Craig: my coworker and friend, Jack: my coworker and not friend, and John: my self. When we arrived on the scene, our first visual indicator that something abnormal had occurred was, well, that the scene was the exploded and charred remains of a two-story hours and garage with all present metals melted and cast into the form of... well, I used the term "non-Euclidean orb" in the official report, but that''s pretty generic, so uh, how about this? It was a cocoon with the purpose thereof written in unintelligible runes across the surface, woven in double-helii, as if information encoded in DNA was something everyone was fluent in. Something was obviously inside, but that wasn''t the concern of the response team. Judging by the few words they said to me, and the sticky residue left on the nearby streets, and the lumps of meat pulsing on the ground, the concern had been stopping the exponential spread of some organic entity, which had been accomplished with judicious application of bases, stripping the hydrogen ions from damn near everything nearby - for you not so chemically-educated, imagine seeing a room full of mold, and then painting it in bleach. It had worked fairly well to contain the incident, but there were some... leftovers. And that''s what we were there for. Using latent temporal data along with records pulled from the Organization database, I reconstructed what we could, purged anomalous materials, and took stock of any local fatalities. Craig''s informational and memory injection package ended up relying on the notion that a small meteor had impacted the town, along with a compulsion to write this off as a normal occurrence. I assigned Jack to deal with the ominous orb-thing. Once Craig and I completed our respective duties, she and I returned back to ground zero, where we notably did not find Jack. Instead, there was a coating of blood and viscera on the orb that appeared to be roughly equal in mass to Jack. At this point, Craig fielded a suggestion that we abandon the site and refer the incident clean-up to a more militarized Division, or at least call in some kind of orbital strike. I judged that the situation was within the capabilities of what we had at hand. Craig disagreed, but followed my lead, and after liberal application of the mixed-radiation emission mode of the Clearomat, all organic material was purged from the vicinity, and Craig took it upon herself to throw her telepyramid anchor at the orb, transporting it to a secure storage room in our main facility. This apparent moment of selflessness was undercut by Craig using my anchor to return to base, which she justified by explaining that a new expansion to her favorite MMO had just come out the previous day, and she''d be damned if she was going to put a few extra hours on the clock traveling, and therefore missing out on some leveling time. I ended up taking an Uber back." ------- Reply #000004108 to original post, /u/steve1986: "Wait, your coworker just died and you still work there? How much are they paying you?" Reply to the above, /u/MisterWongIDontFeelSoGood: "Yeah, death is just kind of a thing that happens here, but frankly, seeing what we deal with, I don''t know if I''d have a greater life expectancy out in the rest of the world. Most people just don''t hear about it when something we handle gets someone killed out there. And there''s a payscale, but I''ve been there about half a year, and I''m making $25/hr, with a benefits package." Reply to the above, /u/uwutangclan: "Seriously? AND there''s a chance I could die? I don''t see a downside. Where do I sign up?"