The Book of Knots - Jags

Llamed Infection
There’s a pirate radio station
that plays out of Cleveland.
The FCC is looking for them
hard but they use a clever
series of re-broadcasters and
some people say a “mobile
unit” like a van with a
transmitter in it. You’ve read
(on private Internet message
boards) that if you listen to
it a lot you’ll start having
disturbing visions. Some
“long- time listeners” have
posted frantic, disjointed
messages warning people off.
Others say it changed their
lives.
There’s an old guy you met
in a diner near Pittsburgh off
I-279 who told you he was
there at Altamont Speedway
when the Stones concert got
out of hand. His story includes
government agents with
some kind of sonic “agitation
generator” and silenced pistols
with special subsonic bullets.
“They shut it down, man,” he
told you through a beard with
food stuck in it. “They knew
The Operator
He’s a short guy with thick glasses and tousled brown hair. He runs the
only reliable communications network that spans several Chessboards of
reality. He came to a Support Group in the late 90’s as a telecommunications
specialist who had begun experiencing nightmares and hallucinations after
troubleshooting (and listening in on) calls that were routed through a small
Southeastern Telco. After eight months of not-getting-better he moved to
one of the enclaves out off I-95 that farmed its own food, grew its own pot,
and promised its members a safe-place in the insane new world they were
sinking into.
The Operator, however, wasn’t willing to wait and fi nd out what “eternal
interconnected brotherhood” actually meant (he says, today, it turned out to
be something like a terrifying jigsaw puzzle—just what it sounds like) but
he used the resources and the experiences there to experiment.
And slowly he created the bathysphone—a device that, when “dropped”
down through layers of reality could still, somehow, communicate with
others of its type. It is said the Queen of Hearts has a listening room where
a servant stands over what looks like a vacuum-tube-phonograph machine
listening for messages and will run (or crawl, since the servant looks like a
massive human ear with a small globe from which eight-spider-legs extend)
to her side with a message, should it be sent.
The Operator isn’t public and he isn’t cheap—but he is connected. Many
people from multi-billion dollar heads of pharmaceutical companies to
members of the four-star-club of the armed forces call on him for a few
minutes of static, awful sounds, and a whispered message from out of the
depths.
what’d happen if it kept on going. It’d have been the end of the world.”
You read about a mass-suicide up in Vermont by a bunch of tech-literate
cultists who were publishing encrypted books about magic on the web.
You’ve got a friend who works for a local paper near there. She says
a story came across her desk saying that the fi rst investigators into the
house have been having “experiences” and some of them have vanished.
One went nuts before the psychiatric facility lost track of him. It all
sounds too weird to be believed.
They are talking about Llamed Infection—even if they don’t know it.
The Caretaker’s fi rst response to the discovery of the really appalling
nature of humanity was to simply try to attack the Department of Works,
shut it down, and then crack reality open like an eggshell. Humanity
would be Infected, plunged into Wonderland, and the resulting chaos
would get rid of most of them and, well, reshape the rest.
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Book of Knots - The Symposium