Date: 2 May 2024
Location: BioDome Pharmaceuticals, Medical Division
Session Type: Post-Reactivation Technical Knowledge Recovery
Subject: Dr. Jothlin Burry
Primary Interviewer: Adrian M. Foster, Personnel Recovery & Reintegration Officer
Additional Personnel: Mausarbelin Hellsing, Associate Biochemical Researcher
Recording: Audio transcript

Session Six forms part of an ongoing post-reactivation debrief series concerning Dr. Burry’s employment at a classified corporate research facility between 2018 and 2022. Previous sessions addressed cognitive continuity, retained professional knowledge, personnel structure, and the partial reconstruction of technical systems for which surviving documentation is incomplete or unusable.

The transcript begins following identity verification and routine orientation assessment.

FOSTER: For the recording, Adrian Foster, Personnel Recovery and Reintegration. This is Dr. Burry’s sixth debrief. Also present is Mausarbelin Hellsing from Biochemical Research. She’s here because some of what we’re discussing today crosses into work her department may need to interpret later.

FOSTER: Yesterday you said the last mobility system you worked on used an interface that does not appear in the design package we recovered. We have most of the mechanical assembly, most of the control system, and references to something fitted between the patient’s peripheral nerves and the sensor array. The drawings call it three different things. You called it the wet interface. Start there. What was it?

BURRY: I can tell you what we did with it. I can’t tell you what it was.

FOSTER: Because you don’t remember, or because you were never told?

BURRY: Never told. Materials supplied it. We got sealed cartridges with batch numbers, handling instructions, and exactly enough information to keep us from ruining it. No source, no production notes, no composition beyond what mattered for installation.

What we did know was how easy it was to kill. Keep it warm, don’t freeze it, don’t let it dry out, don’t leave it exposed longer than you have to. Once it was in the housing, you watched whether it stayed healthy, whether the signal stayed clean, and whether it started growing somewhere it had no business growing. If it got past the edge of the housing, you stopped and called Medical. That was the rule.

HELLSING: Growing past the housing how?

BURRY: Like tissue.

HELLSING: That narrows it down beautifully.

BURRY: You’re Biochemical Research. Enjoy yourself.

FOSTER: You weren’t allowed to run your own work on it?

BURRY: Not on origin. I could test what I needed for the interface: whether it was alive, whether it carried properly, how it behaved after implantation, how fast it settled, whether it was dying. I could not keep a sample and start asking what animal it came from, who grew it, or why it did half the shit it did. That company was very generous about letting you know exactly enough not to ruin whatever they handed you.

FOSTER: All right. Then stay with what you could see. Why was it worth using?

BURRY: Because it connected. Too well, honestly. Normal nerve interfaces are a pain in the ass. Bad contact, scar tissue, movement, noise, somebody’s anatomy being just different enough to make the model wrong. You spend half your time getting the machine to understand what the patient is trying to do and the other half keeping the connection from getting worse.

This stuff settled against the nerve bundle and started behaving like it belonged there. Not instantly, but fast enough that the first time I saw the dates I thought somebody had fucked up the paperwork. Useful response inside forty-eight hours. Stable inside a week if things went well. Sometimes less. I had never seen anything else do that.

FOSTER: And that is where the surviving material becomes thin. We can see that performance improved. What we cannot tell is why your later notes start treating the improvement itself as a problem. You said yesterday that the patients kept changing after the interface had already settled. What did you mean?

FOSTER: What did the patients experience?

BURRY: At first, better control. Less delay, less training. They stopped having to think so hard about moving the device. That was the selling point internally. The problem was that the improvement didn’t stop where we expected it to.

FOSTER: Explain.

BURRY: Usually the patient learns the machine. With this, the machine was also giving the body something stable enough to learn back. After a while you couldn’t cleanly separate adaptation to the hardware from adaptation in the patient. Their timing changed. Their balance changed. Some of them started correcting for movement before the assist kicked in.

FOSTER: Is that harmful?

BURRY: Depends. If the device stays on, maybe not. If you take it off, now you’ve got a nervous system expecting a response that isn’t coming.

FOSTER: Did you see that happen?

BURRY: Yes.

FOSTER: How many times?

BURRY: Three that I personally followed long enough to call it a pattern. More may have happened outside my group.

FOSTER: What happened when the devices were removed?

BURRY: Two had temporary gait problems.
One kept compensating for assistance that wasn’t there and fell twice during rehab. The third was worse.

FOSTER: Worse how?

BURRY: Her leg kept trying to use the interface after the hardware was gone.

FOSTER: I’m not sure what that means.

BURRY: Neither were we. The tissue was still there. We removed the external assembly, not everything that had integrated around the nerve. She could produce a repeatable signal against nothing. Medical called it residual adaptation for about a week because that sounded less alarming.

HELLSING: And after a week?

BURRY: They stopped calling it anything around us. She disappeared off our follow-up list.

HELLSING: Did you know they were moving her before they did it?

BURRY: No. I came in, asked for the latest rehab notes, and got told her care had been transferred.

HELLSING: Did that piss you off because you were worried about her, or because they’d taken your data?

BURRY: Those aren’t mutually exclusive.

I had somebody whose nervous system was still trying to use a device we’d removed, and Medical decided the people still installing the same interface didn’t need to know what happened next. Yeah, I was worried about her. I was also trying to keep the next patient from doing the same damn thing.

HELLSING: So you asked.

BURRY: Of course I asked.

HELLSING: And got?

BURRY: “Her care has been transferred.”

HELLSING: That exact sentence?

BURRY: Near enough.

FOSTER: Near enough from memory, or do you remember the wording?

BURRY: I remember the wording. They said it more than once.

FOSTER: All right.

HELLSING: Who were you asking?

BURRY: First Patel. Then his supervisor. Then somebody from Medical administration whose name I never bothered learning because she had nothing useful to say.

HELLSING: You didn’t try to go around them?

BURRY: I did go around them. That was going around them.

Medical had the patient. Materials had the tissue. We had the hardware. Everybody had one-third of the problem and apparently assembling all three pieces of information in the same room was considered a security risk.

HELLSING: Was that normal there?

BURRY: Constantly. You learned to work around it or you got nothing done.

Sometimes it was serious. Sometimes it was unbelievably stupid. We had one batch start failing after implantation—signal dropped, tissue looked bad, two patients got inflammation. Materials swore the batch was fine. Medical wanted to know if we’d changed our procedure. We hadn’t. So everybody spent three days checking everybody else’s work.

Then Security came down and collected every unused cartridge from the batch.

HELLSING: That sounds promising.

BURRY: It wasn’t. The fucking refrigerator broke.

HELLSING: [laughs]

BURRY: Mercer knew somebody in storage. Temperature control had failed during transfer. I found the maintenance ticket afterward, so yes, Foster, that part is verified.

FOSTER: Thank you for saving me the question.

HELLSING: You lost four days because nobody would tell you the refrigerator broke?

BURRY: Exactly. Materials couldn’t tell engineering the material had been warm too long, Medical didn’t know what Materials knew, and Security apparently thought “refrigerator” was sensitive information. No shit, Sherlocks.

HELLSING: Fine. You said people learned to work around the information rules. What did that actually mean? People trading favors? Knowing who to ask? Keeping your own records?

BURRY: All of the above.

You figured out who actually knew their job, who would answer a question without forwarding it to six managers, who had access to something you didn’t, who owed somebody lunch. Half the place ran on unofficial relationships because the official ones were too slow to be useful.

I kept my own notes because everybody’s recordkeeping sucked in a different way. Lee kept good technical notes and terrible meeting notes. Mercer remembered everything and wrote down nothing unless you threatened him. Davidson documented things after they went wrong, which is one way to approach history.

HELLSING: That sounds charitable.

BURRY: I’m dead. I’ve mellowed.

FOSTER: The notes you kept—were those separate from the formal project files?

BURRY: Some. Formal work got filed. My own cross-references stayed with me because otherwise I’d spend half the week finding out whether “rev C final,” “rev C final2,” and “USE THIS ONE” were the same file.

HELLSING: Oh, that hurts.

BURRY: You’re enjoying this too much.

HELLSING: Did that habit start there?

BURRY: No. First company taught me to label everything because if you couldn’t trace a change, somebody could get hurt. Second company taught me to label everything because nobody else fucking would.

FOSTER: We’re getting ahead of ourselves. That second employer is outside today’s file.

HELLSING: You’re the one with friends waiting outside.

Brief pause.

BURRY: What friends?

FOSTER: Later.

BURRY: I hate when HR says “later.”

FOSTER: Coming back to 2021. I do need one thing before we leave this section. The surviving files make the interface look like a late addition, but you’ve said you were working with it from early 2021. Hellsing has established that the information flow was poor enough to explain some missing records. I need to know whether the material itself was being handled differently from ordinary project inventory.

BURRY: Yes.

FOSTER: How?

BURRY: Too many people cared where every cartridge was.

Materials normally cared if you damaged something. With this, they cared who had it, who opened it, how much was left, whether any had been cut away, whether the waste came back. Security got involved twice over inventory discrepancies that turned out to be paperwork errors. Kessler brought the first batch over herself instead of letting logistics handle it. We weren’t allowed to retain samples.

Nobody reacts like that because tissue is expensive.

HELLSING: What did you think they were afraid of?

BURRY: Theft. Replication. Somebody figuring out how to make it. Maybe it came from something they couldn’t replace. Hell, maybe they were buying it from somebody and didn’t want us knowing who. Pick a theory.

HELLSING: Which one did you believe?

BURRY: I didn’t care enough to marry one.

HELLSING: You really didn’t wonder?

BURRY: Of course I wondered. I just had a job.

There were locked doors all over that building. People doing work I was never going to see. You learned pretty quickly that curiosity and access were separate things. If something showed up in my lab, I cared whether it worked, whether it was going to hurt somebody, and whether the instructions were bullshit. I didn’t need to make every sealed room into a personal mystery.

FOSTER: And the interface?

BURRY: Worked better than it had any right to. That was my problem with it.

HELLSING: Not where it came from.

BURRY: No. I had patients walking on it and housings it kept trying to grow through. Origin was somebody else’s headache.

FOSTER: Which brings me to the last thing BioDome actually needs from this section. We have enough of the system around the interface to understand what it was doing. We do not have enough to reproduce the interface itself. If we put the surviving hardware and records in front of you, what can you realistically give us?

BURRY: Installation, most of it. Housing design, probably. Handling, yes. Test setup, enough to rebuild. I can tell you what healthy material looked like, what bad material looked like, when to stop using it, how we checked whether it was settling properly.

I cannot tell you how to make the tissue. I cannot tell you where it came from. I cannot tell you why it integrated the way it did. I never knew those things. Anybody who says they can recover them from my notes is guessing.

If you find more of it, I can probably tell you whether it’s the same stuff.

HELLSING: Based on what?

BURRY: Behavior.

BURRY: Put it against peripheral nerve tissue and watch what it does. Healthy batches organized along the signal path. Dead material just sat there looking expensive. If it’s the same thing, you’ll know enough to keep going inside a day.

FOSTER: If we found a viable sample, would you work with it again?

BURRY: That a medical question or an employment question?

FOSTER: Employment.

BURRY: Then pay me first.

FOSTER: I’ll mark that as negotiable.

BURRY: You HR people are shameless.

Hellsing laughs.

FOSTER: All right. That completes what I needed from the 2018–2022 file today. We have two drawings I want you to look at off-record, and Hellsing’s department may come back with more if they find anything resembling what you described.

BURRY: Wonderful. Freedom.

FOSTER: From my questions.

BURRY: There it is.

FOSTER: We have some friends who asked to use the room after us.

BURRY: “Friends of BioDome” sounds like something Legal should warn people about.

FOSTER: Holy Infant Mary Catholic Convent. They’re trying to establish the history of a body your former employer examined before you died. Two people. They know this was originally our session, and they’ve agreed to the recording conditions.
Foster leaves the room briefly. Approximately two minutes later he returns with two additional speakers.

FOSTER: Dr. Burry, Tomás Echeverri, Historical Provenance Investigator with Holy Infant Mary Catholic Convent, and Sister Lucía Ferreyra. Mr. Echeverri will be handling most of the historical questions.

BURRY: Jesus Christ. What is this, AA?

ECHEVERRI: I was told there would be coffee.

BURRY: There isn’t.

ECHEVERRI: Then I have also been misled.

FERREYRA: Hello, Dr. Burry.

BURRY: You actually brought a nun.

FERREYRA: Yes.

ECHEVERRI: I’ll save the institutional explanation unless we need it. We are trying to identify a set of human remains from Italy, probably mid-fourteenth century. The body had been altered extensively, and at least some of those alterations were done while it was still alive. Your former employer examined it. Most of that work is gone now, but your name survives in file histories, exported reports, and a number of notes. Usually as “Burgberry.”

BURRY: Yeah. That was me.

ECHEVERRI: Then I want to start with what you actually saw. Do you remember the body?

BURRY: Hard to forget.

I didn’t do intake. Pathology got it first. By the time engineering got dragged in, they already knew it had pieces from more than one donor. What they wanted from us was whether any of those joins could actually have worked when the body was alive.

There was remodeling around several grafts. Not pretty remodeling, either. Bone loading where you'd expect it if the limb had been used. Muscle crossing joins and pulling in ways you don't get from somebody stitching a corpse together for display. Tendons had been rerouted. A couple of them healed badly and still got used long enough for the body to adapt around the problem.

Whoever did it was working with shit they had no right to make functional, and some of it was functional anyway.

FERREYRA: Was it alive when it was made?

BURRY: Long enough to heal. Anything past that is somebody else’s theology.

Ferreyra accepts the answer without comment.

ECHEVERRI: Do you remember where it came from?

BURRY: Italy. Something church-related. Basement, crypt, storage room, hell if I know. The church name would’ve been in the transfer file. I didn’t memorize it because church geography had fuck-all to do with whether the shoulder could bear load.

ECHEVERRI: We don’t have the transfer file. We barely have agreement on what your company called the remains.

BURRY: Neither did we. Pathology used “Italian composite.” Intake had “church body” for a while. Inventory gave it a number nobody used because they changed the numbering system halfway through the year. Somebody saved a file as MEDIEVAL BODY FINAL, all caps, because apparently shame had left the building before I got there.

ECHEVERRI: Your own notes are much more consistent. You call it PCC-03.

BURRY: Mine. Not theirs.

PCC was just the prefix I started using when I cleaned up the files. We already had two cases that were obviously related and nobody could agree what to call either of them. By the time the corpse showed up, I was done searching six names every time I wanted the same report. So: one, two, three. Later four, five, six.

It wasn’t a company-wide classification system. It was me trying to keep a shithole searchable.

ECHEVERRI: There were six?

BURRY: By the time I died, yeah.

If there was a seventh after March, I didn’t exactly keep up with the mailing list.

ECHEVERRI: What is PCC actually referring to?

Burry looks at him.

BURRY: You don't know.

ECHEVERRI: No.

BURRY: Huh.

ECHEVERRI: Why was it in a set? Why 03?

Burry leans back.

BURRY: Because somebody thought it might be connected to two modern incidents we were already looking at.

Echeverri waits.

BURRY: Two births. Very different circumstances, very different aftermath. Same kind of figure reported around both of them. Wings, horn, religious-looking enough that everybody started calling it an angel before anybody had the sense to argue about terminology.

FERREYRA: Fair enough.

BURRY: We didn't know what it was.

ECHEVERRI: And the two births?

BURRY: First one was a delivery tied to a pregnancy from a bestiality shoot. Yeah, exactly what it sounds like with a porn star mom. Figure shows up around the birth, horn goes off, and people through that part of the hospital start losing pieces of themselves. Limbs, organs, tissue. What disappears gets replaced with animal tissue that doesn't belong there. Most of the bad hits died.

Second one was nothing like that. Two married women, IVF, wanted pregnancy, boring as hell right up until delivery. Same kind of figure shows up, horn goes off, and this time nobody loses an arm. Everybody gets pregnant. Men, women, people without working reproductive anatomy, animals. Human fetuses, about twenty weeks along.

So now you've got two births that look nothing alike, two effects that look nothing alike, and the same asshole with a horn standing in the middle of both. Somebody eventually notices the kids weren't conceived the usual way. First one for obvious fucked-up reasons, second one because IVF. That's when people started asking whether pregnancy was even the right category.

ECHEVERRI: And a man assembled from several bodies would push that question even farther.

BURRY: Yeah. No pregnancy we knew about. No conception worth the word. Somebody made a person out of parts and the damn thing lived. That's why he went in my folder.

She pauses.

BURRY: Maybe.

Hellsing raises an eyebrow.

BURRY: Don't “maybe” me back. That was the whole problem.

He wasn't conceived as far as anybody could tell. Somebody built a person out of other people. If your working question is whether this thing gives a damn how a human being comes into existence, a stitched-together medieval man is gonna get somebody's attention.

So I threw him in the same index.

ECHEVERRI: As PCC-03.

BURRY: Yeah.

ECHEVERRI: Meaning you considered him the third occurrence.

BURRY: No.

The answer is immediate.

BURRY: Meaning I labeled the fucking file three.

Echeverri says nothing.

BURRY: That's exactly how bad records turn into bullshit twenty years later. Somebody sees “03,” decides that means third confirmed case, and next thing you know I've apparently established a taxonomy.

We did not know if he belonged there.

ECHEVERRI: What evidence was there that he did?

BURRY: The body itself was weird enough to fit the question. There were also old records somebody dug up from around the period he was supposed to have been made. Religious sightings. Noise. Panic. Something about a horn in one of them, I think.

ECHEVERRI: You think.

BURRY: Yeah, I think. Fourteenth-century material, later copies, translations, church records, people deciding after the fact that every bright light was Gabriel taking attendance. Take your pick.

I read summaries. I saw some reproductions. I was not about to swear in blood that a story copied two hundred years later proved the same thing we had on hospital cameras.

FERREYRA: Do you remember who found those records?

BURRY: No.

FERREYRA: Who evaluated them?

BURRY: Also no. Somebody who gave more of a shit about medieval Latin than I did.

ECHEVERRI: But you kept the body in the same group.

BURRY: Because I didn't have enough to throw it out either.

That's what the folder was for. Things that might belong together.

Y'all keep hearing “case.” I'm telling you we weren't that sure.

BURRY: Eventually. First everybody spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to prove the two incidents were unrelated because the alternative was stupid.

Then somebody noticed conception history.

That was where the project changed.

At first they were asking what was unusual about the pregnancies that produced the children. By the time we got deeper into it, the better question was what counted as an unusual way of making a person at all.

That’s where your corpse came in.

ECHEVERRI: Because he had been constructed from other bodies.

BURRY: Exactly.

No pregnancy we could establish. No conception in any normal sense. Somebody took pieces of people, assembled one body, and somehow kept it alive long enough for the joins to heal. If the angel cared about how somebody came into existence, the dead guy under the church was practically waving his hand.

So we folded him into the working set.

That’s 03.

FERREYRA: Did an angel appear when he was created?

BURRY: Maybe. Fourteenth century. We weren’t exactly swimming in security footage.

BURRY: We had a way of talking to it by then.

Sort of.

After the modern appearances, it had a habit of turning up again around consecrated angel statues. The figure would disappear after the horn, and then some poor church object nearby would start producing voices, headaches, fixation, bits of the same garbage people reported around the original event.

That gave us something that stayed put long enough to study.

Most people couldn’t get much out of it. Some heard noise. Some thought there were words under the noise. Then we figured out the really obnoxious part: it responded better to people who had unusual conception histories themselves.

FERREYRA: Yourself included.

BURRY: IVF.

So yes, eventually I got volunteered in the sense that somebody asked and I was dumb enough to say yes.

HELLSING: You wanted to.

BURRY: I said I was dumb enough to say yes.

HELLSING: That isn’t a denial.

BURRY: No, it fucking isn’t. I wanted to know.

Once I was in the room, the difference was obvious. Other people had been fighting over whether they heard three syllables or a ventilation fan. I could understand whole sentences.

That made me very popular with people I didn’t like.

HELLSING: Did it tell you what it was doing?

BURRY: Sometimes it answered the question you asked. Sometimes it answered something close enough that three departments could spend a week arguing over whether that counted. Sometimes it said shit nobody understood until later, which was everybody’s favorite because then you could make it mean whatever you wanted.

ECHEVERRI: But you learned something from it.

BURRY: We learned it knew we were there. We learned it could understand us better than we understood it. We learned it had opinions.

That last part was worse.

Echeverri waits, but Burry does not elaborate immediately.

BURRY: Before we could talk to the thing, people were still hanging onto the idea that maybe the appearances were some kind of automatic response. Strange conception, strange birth, angel shows up, horn does whatever the hell it does. Like a reflex. Like stepping on a wire.

Once it started answering back, that got harder to believe.

FERREYRA: Because it understood the questions.

BURRY: Because it understood when we were wrong.

Burry shifts in her chair.

BURRY: You’d ask something based on a theory somebody had spent three weeks defending and it would answer like you’d said something stupid. Not angry. That would’ve been easier. More like—

She stops, searching for the comparison.

BURRY: You ever watch somebody explain a microwave to a dog?

Hellsing snorts.

FERREYRA: I can’t say I have.

BURRY: Well, that was the general fucking mood.

ECHEVERRI: Did it confirm that the first incidents were about conception?

BURRY: No. And anybody who tells you it did is cleaning up the story.

We asked about mothers. It didn’t care. Asked about pregnancy. Got answers that could’ve meant yes, no, or “you’re using the wrong word.” Asked about the children and got further, but not enough to make anybody happy.

Then four happened and saved us the trouble.

ECHEVERRI: Four.

BURRY: My folder. My number. We covered this. Four was a clone.

HELLSING: Human?

BURRY: Yeah. Human.

Private lab. I never went there and I never met the people who made it, so don’t ask me for the tour. What I got afterward was footage, medical records, whatever Security had managed to collect, and a pile of people arguing about timestamps because apparently if an impossible winged thing appears in your laboratory the first priority is making sure every camera agrees what second it happened.

The clone was viable. That matters. This wasn’t a dish of cells somebody got excited about. It was a person. Born isn’t even the right word, and that was exactly why everybody lost their minds over it.

ECHEVERRI: No pregnancy.

BURRY: No mother in any useful sense. No conception the way we’d been using the word. You can fight over whether nuclear transfer counts as conception if you enjoy ruining lunch, but by then even the people most attached to the pregnancy theory had to admit we were stretching it till it screamed.

The figure showed up anyway.

FERREYRA: At the point the clone became viable?

BURRY: We didn’t know what point mattered.

That was one of the arguments. Whether it showed up because the clone had been removed from whatever gestational system they were using, because somebody declared it medically independent, because it crossed some developmental threshold, because God keeps a clipboard—

She waves a hand.

BURRY: Pick your poison. I wasn’t there, and the footage doesn’t come with subtitles explaining metaphysics.

What we did know was that the figure matched the earlier descriptions close enough that nobody serious wanted to call coincidence. Same general body. Wings. Horn. Witnesses disagreed about the face again. Cameras got less than the people in the room claimed they saw.

Then it blew the horn.

ECHEVERRI: And what happened?

BURRY: The horn went off and everybody close enough started talking. Languages they knew, languages they didn’t, some nobody could identify. Then they started claiming they were the Messiah. All of them. At the same time. They were still lucid enough at first to argue about which one of them was the real one, which would be funny if the rest of it hadn’t been so bad. One guy tried to explain that the others were false claimants. Another thought they were fragments of him. Somebody else decided there could only be one and started getting violent before Medical restrained him.

There’s footage of three people arguing theology at each other in languages none of them spoke twenty minutes earlier while a fourth one is crying because she thinks crucifixion is about to happen again. After that their cognition started falling apart. Memory first in some of them. Attention. Recognition. People stopped knowing where they were and kept speaking like they did. One patient could quote—or recite or whatever the hell it was—something for nearly an hour after he stopped recognizing his own name.

Then motor control went. Seizures in some cases. Most died. The survivors were badly impaired. The clone died too.

FERREYRA: The angel remained there through all of that?

BURRY: Yeah.

I think everybody would’ve preferred it if the thing behaved like a bomb—arrive, go off, disappear. Watching made it feel intentional, and once researchers start using the word intentional around something with wings, you can practically hear the theology department loading a gun.

ECHEVERRI: Five?

BURRY:The baby was conceived through rape. The mother goes into labor. Nobody gets a clean visual record of the angel that time, but there’s a horn on the audio and survivors later describe the same figure.

Then everybody close enough starts trying to kill and fuck anything they can reach. Whatever normally sits between an impulse and deciding whether you should act on it was mostly gone. They attacked each other, sexually too, and kept going through injuries that should’ve stopped them. Most survivors remembered little or nothing once it ended.

I spent more time with that case than I wanted because the documentation was a fucking disaster and somebody had to make the witness reports line up with the medical timeline. I watched some of the recordings. I don’t recommend it. I wasn’t physically there, so anything beyond the broad sequence belongs to the records, not me.

It stopped almost as suddenly as it started. Most survivors remembered nothing. Some of them were shown the recordings afterward.

I don’t recommend that.

BURRY: Six was the first one we actually saw coming. Embryo editing. Nothing especially exotic by then—heritable disease risk, viability, some other changes the parents had selected. We had five cases on the board already, so somebody finally decided monitoring the pregnancy before the angel showed up might be worth trying.

Everybody was ready. Security had plans. Medical had plans. There were barriers, evacuation routes, observation teams, people assigned to watch every entrance. Somebody had even made a chart showing where everyone was supposed to stand if the figure appeared, which was adorable.

It appeared anyway.

I was on the observation side for that one. I saw the feed live.

Horn goes off and people start healing. For maybe thirty seconds everybody thought we’d finally gotten the nice one. Cuts closed. Surgical scars improved. One guy had an old incision basically disappear while Medical was watching.

Then it kept going.

Mouths started closing. Nostrils. Eyes. Airways. Your fucking assholes. Anything the body could interpret as an opening apparently became something that needed repair. They cut tissue away so people could breathe and it grew back. Fast.

So, yes, healing can kill you. Put that on a fucking wellness poster.

By then that was one of the few things we were willing to call a pattern without immediately fighting about it. Whatever happened around these cases, the person at the center usually came through better than everyone nearby.

After six, everybody started talking about seven. You’ve got a winged thing, a horn, six events, and a building full of educated frightened people; eventually somebody rediscovers Revelation like they’re the first asshole in history to own a Bible. Then meetings turn into people counting trumpets and trying to make every detail fit.

Maybe they were right. Maybe there was going to be a seventh. Maybe there were fifty and we’d convinced ourselves seven mattered because Scripture gave people a number they could hold onto. I have no idea.

I died before there was another one.

And before you ask, no, I do not think my death was case seven. I did cocaine, my heart stopped, end of mystery. The angel already gets enough credit without giving it my bad decisions too.

FERREYRA: Did it make you believe in God?

Burry is quiet for a moment.

BURRY: No.

It made the question harder to dismiss, which annoyed me.

Before that, religion mostly bored me. I wasn’t hostile to it. I just didn’t see much reason to spend time deciding whether God existed when I had actual work to do. Then I spent months with people arguing about Revelation because a fucking angel kept showing up at births, and eventually I got tired of listening to people quote a book they clearly hadn’t read.

So I read it.

Then I read more because Revelation without context is a terrible way to understand anything. Bible, commentary, church history, theology. Some of it was useful. Some of it was people arguing with dead men through footnotes for eight hundred pages, which I respected more than I expected.

I prayed too.

A few times.

I felt stupid the first time and did it again anyway. I still couldn’t tell you exactly why. Curiosity, probably. Fear, maybe. After you’ve spent enough time trying to have a conversation with something that looks like a birdman, talking to an empty room stops feeling like the stupidest thing you did that week.

Ferreyra leaves the answer alone. Echeverri waits until Burry has settled back in her chair before returning to the reason HMC came.

ECHEVERRI: All right. Then I want to come back to the body itself. We came here because we are trying to recover it. The trail we have becomes unreliable once it reaches your former employer, and you are the first person we have found who can tell us what was physically done with the remains rather than what a later inventory says happened. When you last saw them, where were they kept, who could move them, and was there any reason they would have left the site before your death?

BURRY: Main body stayed in cold storage under Pathology. Samples were split because apparently one corpse wasn’t enough paperwork. Bone went one way, soft tissue another, DNA had its own material, imaging lived on the project drive until somebody duplicated it into three other places and made version control everybody’s problem.

I had access because I was doing the mechanical review and cleaning up half the project documentation. Pathology had access, obviously. Medical had some. Security could get into anything if somebody high enough signed off. Management could move it if they wanted. Whether they did after I died, I don’t know. I was dead. That tends to interrupt follow-up.

I never saw a planned transfer for the whole body. If you’re asking whether the company was competent enough that the absence of a transfer record means it never moved, no. Absolutely not. They could lose equipment while somebody was using it.

ECHEVERRI: Was the body intact when you last examined it?

BURRY: As intact as a man made out of several other people gets. Why?

Echeverri does not answer immediately.

ECHEVERRI: HMC has records from the same period in which the body appears to have been made. They concern work performed on a reconstructed human figure. The records are incomplete, some survive only in later copies, and there are reasons we have not been eager to discuss them outside the institution. The physical description is close enough to what survives of your company’s examination that we began to suspect we were looking for the same remains.

ECHEVERRI: Clementi von der Leyen.

BURRY: Never heard of her.

Foster reacts before anyone else can continue.

FOSTER: Sorry. Clemens von der Leyen?

ECHEVERRI: Yes. If you want to refer as that.

FOSTER: You mean our von der Leyen.

BURRY: Your what?

FOSTER: Okay. I want to slow this down for a second. When you say you believe the body may be connected to Clemens von der Leyen, how certain are you, and what is that based on?

ECHEVERRI: Certain enough to pursue the remains. Not certain enough to publish the claim. Date, location, the description of the body, several surgical details, and records placing Clementi in direct contact with HMC during the relevant period. That is as much as I am prepared to say without the material in front of us.

FOSTER: Did Dr. Burry’s former employer know that name?

BURRY: Not from anything I saw. And before you ask me three versions of the same question, I cannot be certain about files I never had access to. I am certain I never saw the name, never heard it from anybody on the project, and never saw a document identifying who made the body.

FOSTER: Fine. That distinction matters.

He turns back to Echeverri.

FOSTER: How much does HMC understand to need von der Leyen’s work?

ECHEVERRI: That is not quite the question I would ask.

FOSTER: Go ahead.

ECHEVERRI: How does BioDome understand its relationship to von der Leyen’s work?

BURRY: Oh, good. Now y’all are biting each other.

FOSTER: Historically, BioDome traces part of its research lineage through the organizations founded by von der Leyen. That is the answer I can give without opening an archive I have not reviewed for this purpose. If you are asking what BioDome believes it inherited from her scientifically, legally, or materially, I am not answering that from memory.

ECHEVERRI: Good.

FOSTER: Good?

All right. That is outside this session. Dr. Burry had never heard that name before you said it, and this interview was not authorized or prepared for a discussion involving another name. We’ll continue separately after BioDome reviews the relevant material. Session Six concluded at 16:38.

Recording terminated.