It's called "pal7.pdf" and is a file over me. Penelope. The download screen had the same kind of shadow thing as Nashiko and Wyatt.
This one's eight pages long. There's the cover page, then 7 pages of text. Here's what it said:
PROJECT ASSEMBLY LINE
SUBJECT #7: PENELOPE ADAMS
Marionettes recreation of her last staff photo, circa March 26th, 2006.
"NAME: PENELOPE ADAMS
STATION: #85
POSITION: SERVER TECHNICIAN
Penelope Adams was hired on July 5th, 2003 to Station 85 of Upstaged Communications. She had graduated from university just a couple months prior, having gotten a bachelor's in computer science. She found the job listing just as she was starting her job search, and decided that she could apply. She was hired quickly.
Her job at Station 85 should have been simple enough. In concept, at least. On paper, she was hired to be a server technician, working to ensure the integrity of Marionettes, Upstaged's personal server network. She'd be responsible for running security scans, keeping it up-to-date, and performing regular maintenance if there were any bugs.
However, she wasn't allowed to do half of her job. She wasn't allowed to solve any problems she found. She would identify them, find cracks in the system, and report them to Edward Marion, who was the Marionettes manager. However, she wasn't allowed to attempt to fix anything, and she was not allowed any access to several pages, programs, and services in Marionettes. All she did was scan Marionettes, report when a certain page, archive item, connection, etc. was beginning to cause errors, and install whatever fix Edward managed to cook up. All the inner workings were coded and impossible to understand, leaving her entirely in the dark as to what was actually happening.
It frustrated her. She was hired as a technician, someone who was supposed to actually solve problems, but she was relegated to being a babysitter for a control freak's pet project. Half the things in the system appeared to do nothing at all, connecting to other things that did absolutely nothing, transmitting ungodly amounts of information that were complete gibberish. What was Edward thinking? What was Upstaged thinking, letting him do everything he did with Marionettes? Something had to be up. The company was hiding something.
Penelope, when she thought she wasn't being watched, went searching. Rumors had begun to flitter around the company--weird items in the archive, strange intrusions that the company refused to address, evidence of the board planning something--and it was driving her mad. She tried her best to figure out what was going on, diving into both the central network and the archives to attempt to understand what was happening. Unfortunately, almost everything was either encoded or password protected, leaving her with only scraps. Scraps like a strange symbol of a dead tree, of improbably constructed music, of dull chatter she couldn't understand. Mention of something scary. Something called SIGNAL.
During one of her deep dives, she was discovered by a fellow employee. Riley Donnelly was already in a poor mood when she found Penelope, so she gave her an earful when she stumbled across her, yelling at her to stop, while informing her that she was going to tell Edward. All this did was further Penelope's curiosity; Riley evidently knew more than she did. What did Riley know? What were Edward and the company doing?
Edward warned Penelope against digging further, but it fell on deaf ears. Penelope began to pester Riley, and continued her search through the archives for any evidence of what was happening. Surprisingly, however, her efforts soon ceased, as she became focused on something else. On someone else. She realized that she and Riley lived close to one another, and that they both went to the same diner every day, for breakfast. This gave her the opportunity to talk to Riley more, outside of work.
Riley was initially pissed off, not wanting to entertain the curious technician from her job. Soon, however, something between the two clicked. They began to talk about the world outside of work--television, movies, music, books, all of their shared interests, of which there were quite a few. Penelope stopped talking to Riley about the mystery at Upstaged, becoming more invested in Riley, and Riley felt her original annoyance at this coworker melt away faster than she had expected. The two grew quite close.
One evening, Penelope invited Riley over to her apartment, so they could watch a movie together. One thing led to another, and the next morning, the two decided that they would be together. They couldn't talk of it to anyone else; after all, it was Indiana in 2006. But they had each other. Neither had seen much luck in life, with both being isolated from their families and having few friends, so it was nice to have someone else they could trust in wholly.
Penelope's searching came to an end at Riley's insistence, telling her that it was too dangerous. Her curiosity burned within her, but she trusted Riley, and stopped. She buried whatever questions she had about the odd nature of her job and just did it, so that she could keep working with Riley. The two maintained a happy equilibrium until it happened.
On October 16th, 2006, Penelope and Riley were both nearing the end of their 12 hour shifts at the station, anxiously awaiting the time they could leave. Penelope was alone in the central server room, performing her standard scans of Marionettes, watching for any errors that might have popped up. As midnight drew closer, she was surprised when several errors appeared, all at the same time. It targeted multiple programs and connections, but there was one that caught her attention: a page named SIGNAL. She knew she shouldn't, but she couldn't help herself. She loaded the page, expecting to see a password login or encoded nonsense, like she had when she found the page before, when it was functioning.
To her surprise, the page loaded. It should've been protected, but she had managed to find an exploit. She could access protected pages if it were through an error message. It was such an obvious exploit, but she had never tried it before. The screen, meanwhile, told her that the transmitter was inactive, and it was unable to see how many receivers there were.
There was a message at the bottom, written in red. It asked her, begged her, to keep looking, because it could show her what was happening. Whoever was talking was trapped, apparently, and they wanted to show her how to let them free.
Penelope's mind instantly jumped back to everything she had heard. The symbol, the music, the strange intrusions that Upstaged refused to address. Did they trap somebody? If so, she needed to get whoever it was out. She had to.
She followed the instructions written in red when it told her to go down a rabbit hole of pages. She saw a chat thread archive, a station monitor system, a room tracker, and finally a page simply named CLOSED. It had a single option: Open? Yes/No.
She picked yes as the clock struck midnight.
The next few seconds were a blur, impossible to fully comprehend. She heard music blaring from all the speakers in the room, then all the speakers in the station, as she felt something worm through her ear into her skull. She knew she shouldn't have been able to feel her brain, but it felt like something was worming around in the back of it. Although she didn't know how she knew, she knew it was implanting itself into her cerebellum, and wrapping itself around her hippocampus and amygdala. A sudden, extreme, insatiable hunger came over her, forcing her to double over in pain. The sensations, the music, the hunger... it was too much. She passed out.
In her dream, she was on a blank path. Dead trees surrounded her on all sides, with a rusted metal fence falling apart, the wreckage lining the left and right. The sky was a dull grey, clouds of ash and dirt thrown up into the heavens, while she felt something inside of her. The hunger. She needed to eat.
She wandered for what felt like days, but must've been only minutes. Along the path, she saw a shadow. A humanoid shadow, but just a shadow. Her conscious thought was suppressed by her instincts, and she lunged at it, trying desperately to quench the desert of famine inside her. The shadow fell, and she was able to consume it, tearing it to shreds with her nails and teeth as she tried to fill her empty stomach. It tempered her, but only for a moment. She was still hungry.
She kept searching in the dream, finding more and more, until she eventually began to feel herself grow full. She knew how many shadows there were on this path, and by the time she paused to catch her breath, she only counted seven. Seven shadows left.
The seven shadows were Thomas, Joshua, Lily, Nashiko, Wyatt, Riley, and Edward. The rest had been ended by the pendant, transformed into dead abominations of remembrance, the pendant spread from one to another like a virus every time Penelope devoured a shadow. Her body had remained trapped in the central server room, exhaustion winning the war over consciousness, but the Signal had still found a way to control her. To use her. To propagate its desires through the station.
To escape the station, however, it would need Edward. Edward crafted its restrictions, and made sure that it would never see freedom without him. That it would never be able to bring the abominable future he had seen without him.
It couldn't find him because he was clever, and was hiding within the fluctuations of Station 85. The Signal caused them, its trapped presence reflecting through the walls of the stations with increasing frequency, so he used its own presence against it. The other six remained hidden, detesting the unstable nature of the stations, until they could isolate a receiver, at which point they went to work.
Edward and his followers systematically slaughtered all the receivers, one by one, until there were none left. They destroyed the proof of the Signal's spread. Meanwhile, Riley amalgamated history together, tying all loose threads into a ratking of contemplation. When all the Signal's marionettes were ended, Edward grabbed the necessary information from Riley, retook Marionettes from the now-weakened Signal, and found Penelope in the server room. He fed her the product of the assembly line, and then used Marionettes to rewrite and erase it.
If the Signal was to be stopped, it couldn't be left awake in her mind. If it was to become dormant, its history would have to be erased. Penelope's memories were altered, with all of the ones relating to the Signal deleted. Put in their stead were memories of simply finding an exploit in Marionettes, only to find that the company had been closed a few days later. Her memories had been changed by his system, and the end of its spread weighed down onto the Signal until it collapsed. It became dormant, loosening her hippocampus and amygdala, as Penelope was rewritten on midnight of the 20th. She was one of the eight that survived the events that began October 17th, 2006.
Just like Thomas, Joshua, Lily, Nashiko, Wyatt, and Riley, she was free once the Signal was trapped. She quickly forgot her old job, the only lingering disappointment being the sudden end of her relationship with Riley. She quickly moved on, not burdened by all the death and suffering the Signal had used her to cause. Meanwhile, the Signal was asleep within her, unable to start once again without something to kickstart it.
Edward's plan worked until 2016. He had tried to separate Penelope from everyone she had known in order to prevent any risk of the Signal reawakening. However, for some strange reason, she felt a sudden compulsion to visit a place she hadn't been to for almost exactly a decade. A local diner that she went to with Riley. It had left her mind until that moment, and she decided to go.
When she arrived, she ordered her food, and ate. It wasn't anything special. Right as she was about to leave, however, she ran into someone in the entrance. She did not recognize who it was, but the person immediately lit up upon seeing her, asking her how she was, and even hugging her. Penelope felt rather awkward, and had a sudden, sharp pain in the back of her head. She informed the strange woman she had no idea who she was, and left. She had nightmares that night.
Years passed, until October 20th, 2018. On that day, she received a remote access key, which allowed her to access Marionettes. It was not sent by Edward. The Signal was now awake, and used its new receivers to send it to her, so that it could further its plan for freedom and propagation.
One chance. One solution."
That's the end of the file.
I've been writing this down because I don't want to forget again. Now, though, I wonder if that was really me who didn't want to forget, because I don't like knowing this. I don't like knowing any of this. At the same time, Edward knows what I'm doing, so I'm guessing he has a reason for allowing it. Maybe it's a part of his plan.
There isn't a way out for Thomas, Joshua, or Lily. I feel sick. I've been holding in my stomach all morning, actually. It's been hard not to vomit over all of this. It's been hard to think about this. I just want to sleep forever. I can't, though. There's work to be done.
Whatever it takes to end this, I'm doing it. I'm ready.
I do want to know one thing, though. The thing said: "Edward crafted its restrictions, and made sure that it would never see freedom without him." How did he do that? What is his history with the Signal? Did he create it?
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