Bureau of Anomalous Regulation
DOC-000-17 / Anomaly Regulation Case File
CASE-0205 - "FIRM OFFER"
Control Code-Modifiers
OBS-B/L
Hazard Types
A/C/D/M
Protocol
PALE HORSE
Lead Investigator
Dr. Ruth Calloway / BAR-OPM-27416
CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL
No physical containment of CASE-0205 is to be attempted. Bureau measures are limited to those set out below. The case record, including the Foundation-era papers from which the case was opened, is to be held at Bureau Facility-19.
Personnel. Personnel walking alone in fog, mist, or in other conditions of reduced visibility, on or off duty, are to carry a pencil and notebook. Following Incident CASE-0205-1, personnel who encounter CASE-0205 are to write an account at once, before speaking to anyone, and to submit it to the Lead Investigator without revision.
CRITICAL: Personnel who encounter CASE-0205 are to take the offered hand with a firm grip. No other response is permitted.
As per Note 1979-10-02, all personnel are to undergo annual grip assessment against the standard recorded for their region of posting. Personnel who fall below that standard, and personnel travelling to a region whose standard exceeds their assessed grip, are not to walk alone in conditions of reduced visibility until reassessed. Breaches, including those off duty, are to be self-reported to OBP.
Personnel are prohibited from seeking an encounter with CASE-0205. A deliberate attempt constitutes a Level II security violation. Following Incident CASE-0205-6, personnel are also prohibited from any action intended to prolong an encounter.
Program "STRONG SUIT". DAI is to maintain Program PG-0205-800-01 "STRONG SUIT" in regions where the handshake is the customary greeting. The Program is to promote the handshake's manners: that an offered hand is taken, that it is taken firmly, and that a glove is first removed where local custom requires it. Under the Program:
- Spring hand grippers are to be manufactured by commercial cover entities and sold below cost. Staff of the cover entities are not to be informed of CASE-0205.
- Grip-training apparatus is to be granted to gymnasia, boxing clubs, and school sports departments in regions of high incidence.
- Handshake guidance is to be placed in business-etiquette publications, careers advice, and protocol guidance for civil-service and diplomatic staff.
- Existing civilian outdoor-safety guidance advising against walking alone in poor visibility is to be supported where it is already under civilian consideration. The Program is not to originate such guidance.
Program material originated by DAI is to make no reference to fog, to walking alone, or to the phenomenon.
As per Note 1993-05-14, the Program is prohibited from promoting the handshake itself, as distinct from its manners, in any region where the handshake is not already customary.
Fixed observation sites. OPM is to maintain continuous automated recording at the following sites:
- 0205-S1: a disused railway path in Argyll, Scotland.
- 0205-J1: a forest path in Aomori Prefecture, Japan.
- 0205-N1: a coastal footpath on the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, Canada.
- 0205-R1: a footpath through a public geothermal park in Rotorua, New Zealand.
- 0205-C1: a fog-forest trail in the Coquimbo Region, Chile.
As per Note 1990-04-10, fixed sites are not to be closed to the public. The ACD field officers assigned to each site are to operate under the cover of the local ranger service.
A corrupted recording window that coincides with the passage of a lone person is to be logged as an encounter, and its outcome determined as follows:
- If the person leaves the covered stretch, the encounter is to be logged as an emergence. OPM is to identify the person through site car-park records, ranger-service records, or local inquiry under cover, and is to trace their next business or financial undertaking through public property, company, and planning registers. No contact is to be made with the person except under the flagged-window procedure below.
- If the person has not left the covered stretch within thirty minutes of the window closing, the site's ACD field officers are to search the stretch and the ground within 500 metres of it. Remains are to be handled as set out under The dead and the missing, and the encounter logged as a recovery.
- If the search finds nothing, the encounter is to be logged as a disappearance.
Any window exceeding ten minutes is to be flagged at once to the site's ACD field officers. While the window remains open, the officers are to walk the covered stretch and take no other action. When it closes, they are to meet the person leaving the stretch and record an interview at once.
The dead and the missing. Remains of persons who failed to give a firm grip are to be registered under Cover Story CC-0205-01 as death by a fall or by another cause consistent with the location. DAI is to liaise with the coroner or, in Scotland, the procurator fiscal, and is to substitute post-mortem findings wherever the actual findings (see Phenomenological Summary) cannot be reconciled with the registered cause. No Civilian Communication is to be issued in respect of persons who decline the hand, and civilian missing-person procedures are to proceed without Bureau intervention.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL SUMMARY
CASE-0205 is the offer of a handshake to a person walking alone in fog, mist, or steam. A hand and forearm are extended toward the person from within the fog, at about waist height, in the posture of a hand offered to be shaken. The offered hand matches the person's dominant hand, so that a left-handed person is offered a left hand, except where local etiquette prescribes the right hand for a handshake. The phenomenon has been recorded only where no other person is within sight or hearing, and only where the fog is dense enough to hide the point from which the arm extends. Most encounters occur on footpaths, in parkland and woodland, on moorland, and on shorelines. Urban encounters are rare because of the solitude condition, but they have been recorded at street-level steam vents during hours when the streets were empty.
The arm is human in appearance. Its length and angle are consistent with a person approximately 2.1 metres tall standing just inside the fog: within the human range, at its upper limit. The sleeve is that of formal business dress as currently worn in the region of the encounter. Foundation-era accounts describe the cuff of a dark coat. Recent accounts from Scotland and Japan describe a dark suit with a shirt cuff showing. Accounts from the Cordillera highlands of Luzon describe the sheer embroidered sleeve of a barong tagalog, and those from the Dieng Plateau in Central Java a long-sleeved batik shirt. The sleeve has changed over the documented period in step with regional business dress. No change has been observed in progress. Contemporaneous accounts agree that the hand is that of an adult, clean, dry, and of ordinary temperature. Nothing beyond the upper arm has been described. Searches of the fog immediately after the arm withdraws have found nothing.
The offer persists until the person recognizes it as an offered hand. A person who has not recognized it, whether through inattention, darkness, or impaired sight, continues along the route and soon finds that they are approaching the offer again from the same direction. Route records and footage show no turn. Re-presentation continues until recognition occurs, and physical contact alone does not constitute recognition. For as long as the offer stands, the person cannot be found by others: officers walking the same stretch during an encounter have reported it empty (see Incident CASE-0205-6). Before the offer is answered, the hand does not move toward the person, take hold of them, or withdraw.
The outcome depends on the grip with which the hand is taken. A firm grip is one that local etiquette at the place of the encounter would accept as a firm handshake: the full palm in contact, the fingers closed around the other hand, and pressure held for the length of an ordinary handshake at the strength the place expects. The standard is that of the place, not of the person's place of origin. For operational purposes, OPM expresses each regional standard as a minimum reading on a hand dynamometer gripped as one would grip a hand in greeting. The reading is a proxy, since duration, palm contact, and local convention also bear on the outcome. A grip that falls short of the standard in any of these respects is not accepted as firm. Where local custom requires a glove to be removed before a handshake, the hand remains extended until the glove is removed.
A person who takes the hand with a firm grip is released after a handshake of ordinary length, and the arm withdraws into the fog. Footage recorded after the window closes shows the person walking on at an ordinary pace. At the fixed sites, local visibility improves within ten minutes of the withdrawal more often than meteorological conditions predict.
The survivor begins to forget the encounter at once, in the manner of a dream on waking. Accounts written within ten minutes preserve the sequence of events. Accounts written within the hour preserve only the fact that something occurred. After a day, survivors describe having lost their way in fog. The loss is never complete - most survivors retain a conviction that they lost their way somewhere they knew well. Most also come to regard a firm handshake as a matter of particular importance, insisting on it in others and teaching it to their children, without connecting the view to any experience. Bureau personnel are not exempt, and Memetic Resistance Certification confers no protection.
The survivor's first business or financial undertaking after the encounter succeeds beyond reasonable expectation. Recorded instances range from property sales and export contracts to appointments and planning approvals (see Note 2026-09-28). The effect applies to the first such undertaking only. No financial, reputational or interpersonal cost to the survivor has been identified.
A person who takes the hand but fails to give a firm grip is drawn into the fog. Remains are recovered in every case, within hours, at distances of 20 to 400 metres from the point of encounter. Post-mortem examination records compression injuries over the whole body, with fractures of the ribs, pelvis, and long bones, in a pattern consistent with sustained pressure applied from multiple sides at once. The remains are found curled on one side. In every case, the hand with which the person took the offered hand is uninjured.
A person who recognizes the offer and does not take it, whether by walking on, stepping around the hand, or refusing aloud, disappears within minutes. At the fixed sites, recording windows in such cases close at a median of four minutes. No person who has declined the hand has been recovered. The only object ever recovered from such an encounter is a notebook found on the route (see Incident CASE-0205-1).
Recording equipment does not capture the phenomenon. For the duration of an encounter, film returns uniformly fogged frames, magnetic tape returns blank tape with intact timecode, and digital recorders write files of the correct length that cannot be decoded. The corruption extends to every device covering the encounter and begins and ends with it. With the exception of footage recovered during Incident CASE-0205-6, no recording of CASE-0205 exists.
CASE-0205 occurs only where the handshake is customary, whether as a greeting or, as for most of its history, as the means by which agreements are sealed. Where the handshake has newly taken hold, the phenomenon first appears roughly a generation later (see Note 1993-05-14). Before the eighteenth century, the record consists only of the dead (see Note 1986-11-03). Since the phenomenon has followed the handshake wherever the record allows the two to be compared, OPM's working estimate dates its origin to that of the handshake, which is first depicted in the ninth century BC (see Note 1974-06-20).
NOTES & OBSERVATIONS
18██-03-04 — Disposition, Foundation-era notation retained — Investigator E. ████████
I have now eleven papers, letters and diaries, the earliest of 1763. In each the writer begins to tell of a gentleman who offered him his hand in a fog, and does not finish, but turns in the next line to other business as though he had never begun. In all eleven the writer's affairs mended within the month, some of them wonderfully. I have put the question to the four writers still living, and none knows what I mean by it. Two of the roads named are known to their parishes for strangers found dead in fog. I do not know that it is the same thing. I have bound the papers together so that they may not be separated again.
1957-01-16 — Contemporaneous Account, transcribed — Investigator D. ████████ / BAR-OPM-08113
The following entry was found in the Investigator's notebook after a solitary walk in fog. It is transcribed without correction.
07:09 hand, from the fog by the gate. dark sleeve, good cloth. put mine out, it did not take it. still there. my glove. took glove off. it waited. shook, firm. it went back in. fog going
07:11 writing this down per standing instr. so that I do not
The entry ends there. Interviewed at 09:30, the Investigator described an uneventful walk. He did not recognize the entry and identified the handwriting as his own.
1964-05-11 — Memorandum: Constitution of Program "STRONG SUIT" — Supervisor ████████ / BAR-DAI-09417
TO: OPM, CASE-0205 file
FROM: DAI, Supervisor ████████
RE: Constitution of Program PG-0205-800-01 "STRONG SUIT"
No warning about CASE-0205 can enter civilian circulation in the ordinary way. A warning would have to come from the Bureau, since no survivor remembers anything to warn of. It would also be contradicted by every survivor, each of whom would say, truthfully, that nothing happened to them.
The Program will therefore teach manners, which require no explanation and are not questioned.
1974-06-20 — History of the Handshake — Archivist ████████ / BAR-OBP-02215
OPM has requested a history of the handshake, so that the search for earlier records of CASE-0205 can be directed to the places and periods in which the custom was practised. In summary:
- The earliest known depiction is on the throne base of Shalmaneser III at Nimrud, of the ninth century BC, where the kings of Assyria and Babylon clasp hands to seal an alliance.
- In the Greek and Roman world, the clasp of right hands sealed oaths, treaties, contracts, and marriages.
- In medieval and early modern Europe, bargains at market were struck by hand, as livestock sales still are in some regions.
- As an everyday greeting, the handshake spread from the seventeenth century, first among the Quakers of England, and was general across Europe and North America by the nineteenth.
Searches of the corresponding records have been opened.
1979-10-02 — Regional Standards — Dr. K. ████████ / BAR-OPM-17760
Of the 74 recovered cases recorded in Scotland since 1946 in which the decedent's place of origin is known, 29 were visitors. Most came from regions where the customary handshake is lighter than in Scotland. Firmness is evidently judged by the etiquette of the place, not of the person, and a grip adequate in one region has been fatal in another.
OPM now expresses each regional standard as a dynamometer proxy. Annual assessment of all personnel against the standard for their region of posting is recommended.
Addendum, 1980-03-17. Annual assessment adopted by OBP for all personnel.
1986-11-03 — Pre-Foundation Record — Archivist ████████ / BAR-OBP-02215
The searches opened under Note 1974-06-20 have identified 41 pre-Foundation deaths matching recovered CASE-0205 cases: persons found dead in fog or mist, crushed and curled on one side, with the right hand uninjured. The earliest is recorded on a third-century tombstone from the northern frontier of Roman Britain, raised for a merchant in nebula inventus, corpore contrito, dextra integra: found in the mist, his body crushed, his right hand whole. The remainder come from northern English coroners' rolls of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from Scottish burgh records, and from the papers of the Crown's Office of Esoteric Investigations, which recorded nine such deaths on Scottish drove roads between 1631 and 1668 without classifying them.
Where the records give a cause, it is robbery, misadventure, or the judgment of God upon a man forsworn.
No survivor's account older than the Foundation-era papers has been found.
1990-04-10 — Proposed Closure of 0205-S1 — Supervisor ████████ / BAR-DLS-12207
Remains have been recovered from 0205-S1 on three occasions since fixed observation began in 1987. DLS proposes that the path be closed to the public.
Addendum, 1990-05-02. OPM objects. Solitary walkers would go to other paths in the same fog, where encounters would continue unobserved. The proposal is declined.
1993-05-14 — Distribution — Dr. S. ████████ / BAR-OPM-20334
Since the handshake began to spread as a general greeting, CASE-0205 has followed it into regions where it was not previously customary. In each such region, the first record follows the handshake's establishment by twenty to thirty-five years. No record has been located in any region where the handshake is not customary.
In Japan, the handshake entered business use after the Second World War, alongside the bow. The first Japanese record is from 1989, on a forest path in Aomori Prefecture. Between 1966 and 1971, Program "STRONG SUIT" distributed etiquette material for business use in Japan that included instruction in the handshake itself; the Program did not then distinguish between the handshake and its manners. OPM cannot determine what part, if any, the material played in the handshake's establishment there.
A prohibition on promoting the handshake, as distinct from its manners, is recommended.
Addendum, 1993-09-01. Prohibition issued. The 1966–1971 Japanese material has been withdrawn from circulation where recoverable.
2015-06-02 — Civilian Literature — Supervisor ████████ / BAR-DAI-31188
A civilian study of nearly 140,000 adults in seventeen countries, published this year, associates low grip strength with all-cause mortality. STRONG SUIT grant applications now cite the civilian literature in place of the Program's own.
OPM has not attempted to determine what share of the association, if any, is attributable to CASE-0205.
2026-09-28 — Fixed-Site Outcomes, 1987–2025 — Dr. Ruth Calloway / BAR-OPM-27416
The fixed sites logged 688 encounters between 1987 and 2025: 489 emergences, 83 recoveries, and 116 disappearances.
OPM has traced the next business or financial undertaking of 236 of those who emerged. All 236 succeeded. They include a hotel extension approved on first application, a sake brewery's first export contract, a salaried post offered after a single interview, and a croft sold within a week of listing.
OPM does not know what the arrangement provides to the other party.
DISCOVERY LOG
CASE-0205 reached the Bureau as a gap in other people's letters. In the winter of 18██, Investigator E. ████████, examining the papers of a ████ grain merchant in connection with an unrelated inquiry, found a letter of 1763 in which the merchant begins to tell his brother of a gentleman who offered him his hand on the Moss road in a haar, and turns in the next line to the price of oats. The Investigator had seen the same break once before, in a diary filed with miscellaneous correspondence among the papers of the Royal Paranormal Research Authority. Over the following two years he found it in nine further documents, some among the Authority's papers and the rest in private hands. His disposition (Note 18██-03-04) records the pattern on which the case still rests.
The papers were kept as he had bound them, and in 1913 the file was translated into the Modern Era framework and registered as CASE-0205. The Moorland Road trials of 1921 (Incident CASE-0205-1) were undertaken to establish what the papers could not: whether the deaths recorded on the roads they named belonged to the same phenomenon, and what determined the outcome of an encounter.
No folk tradition recognizing CASE-0205 has been located in any region. Program "STRONG SUIT" was constituted in 1964 in its place (Note 1964-05-11).
In 1974, OPM had a history of the handshake compiled so that the search for an earlier record could follow the custom (Note 1974-06-20). The search found no survivor's account older than the Foundation-era papers. It found the dead instead, from a Roman tombstone onward (Note 1986-11-03).
Fixed observation began in 1987 at 0205-S1, a site selected from Scottish death records whose post-mortem findings matched those of recovered CASE-0205 cases. Four further sites were added between 1991 and 2004.
Outside the fixed sites, the Bureau learns of an encounter only when remains are recovered. Those who decline the hand are recorded, if at all, as missing persons. Those who take it firmly do not know that they have.
INCIDENT LOG
1921-11-08 – Incident CASE-0205-1: Moorland Road Trials
The trials were conducted on a moorland road in ████, Scotland, on which four deaths by exposure in fog had been recorded since 1900. Each trial required a single investigator to walk a two-kilometre section of the road alone in fog. The supervising officer waited at the far end, out of sight.
On 1921-11-08, Investigator T. ████████ / BAR-OPM-00412 walked the section under the guidance then standard for unclassified entities, which prohibited contact. He did not reach the far end. His notebook was found on the road surface 1.3 kilometres along the section. The final entry reads:
07:52. Hand from the fog at the roadside, gentleman's sleeve, offered as if to shake. Not engaging, per instruction. Walking on.
He has not been found.
On 1921-11-10, Investigator M. ████████ / BAR-OPM-00387 walked the section under revised instruction. Contact was permitted, but only as light and as brief as was needed to establish the nature of the object. She did not reach the far end. She was recovered at 11:40 the same day, 140 metres from the road on open moor. Post-mortem examination recorded compression injuries over the whole body. Her right hand was uninjured.
The supervising officer then withdrew all instruction. On 1921-11-14, Investigator R. ████████ / BAR-OPM-00455 was directed only to walk the section and to write down whatever occurred. He reached the far end at 08:21. His notebook held an entry made at the roadside:
08:04. Gentleman's hand at the roadside, offered. Took it as I would any man's. It went back. Fog lifting.
At debrief he described an uneventful walk. He could not account for the entry, though he did not dispute that it was his. His Form REQ-300-03 (Clearance Elevation Request), submitted on 1921-11-17, was approved within the week without the customary review.
The supervising officer's report concluded:
Two officers did as the Bureau told them, and one did as his mother told him. I recommend that the Bureau's instruction be brought into line with his mother's.
Supervising Officer ████████ / BAR-OPM-00201, 1921-11-21
The non-contact guidance was withdrawn for CASE-0205, and a standing instruction was issued requiring personnel to write down any encounter at once. No further trials have been authorized.
2020-03-23 – Incident CASE-0205-4: Handshake Abstention
From March 2020, public-health guidance issued during the COVID-19 pandemic advised against shaking hands in most regions where the handshake is the customary greeting. In the same period, solitary outdoor exercise increased.
Encounters at the fixed sites rose from a 2015–2019 mean of 22 a year to 39 in 2020. The proportion ending in disappearance rose from its long-run level of 17 percent to 44 percent. The proportion ending in recovery did not change. OPM assessed that walkers were declining the hand as they had been advised to decline any hand.
The Lead Investigator and the supervisor of Program "STRONG SUIT" submitted the following memorandum on 2020-05-06:
TO: Ministerial Subcommittee on Civilian Conduct
FROM: Dr. Ruth Calloway, Lead Investigator, CASE-0205; Supervisor ████████, DAI, Program "STRONG SUIT"
RE: Handshake abstention
The Program has no measure suited to present conditions. Its grants go to gymnasia, which are closed, and its guidance concerns a greeting that civilians are now advised not to give. The Bureau does not propose to oppose civilian public-health guidance.
The Subcommittee is asked to note one consequence. CASE-0205 is recorded only where the handshake is customary. If abstention persists, the handshake may cease to be customary in some regions, and the phenomenon may in time withdraw from them. The record contains no instance of the handshake lapsing anywhere, and OPM cannot estimate how long a withdrawal would take. If it takes as long as an arrival, it will take a generation, and most encounters in that period will end in refusal.
No decision is requested.
The Subcommittee's minutes record that the memorandum was received. No reply is recorded.
The handshake returned to customary use in most affected regions during 2021 and 2022. The proportion of disappearances returned to its long-run level in 2023. Whether the phenomenon would have withdrawn with the handshake has not been determined.
Sales of the Program's spring hand grippers rose by ███ percent in 2020. DAI attributes the rise to home exercise.
2023-11-21 – Incident CASE-0205-6: The Railway Path
At 07:38:12, all three cameras covering the 400-metre stretch of 0205-S1 between the road bridge and the old station platform began recording corrupted output. Before this date, the longest corrupted window recorded at the site had lasted 6 minutes 40 seconds. This window closed at 12:31:52, 4 hours 53 minutes and 40 seconds after it opened.
The subject was a 71-year-old resident of ████, registered blind since 2004, who walked the path most mornings using a long cane. Footage later showed him entering the stretch from the south at 07:37.
The window was flagged at 07:48. The two ACD field officers assigned to the site walked the stretch from opposite ends at 08:31, 09:24, and 10:15. Each time, they met at the platform bench and reported the path empty. The window remained open.
No frame was legible for the first 2 hours and 19 minutes. From 09:57, legible frames appeared intermittently and with increasing frequency, and from 11:46 until the window closed the record is continuous at reduced resolution. Legible material totals 74 minutes. The cameras do not record sound. Legible frames at 10:16 show the subject at the platform bench. Frames from the same camera at 10:17 show one of the officers passing the bench. No frame shows both.
In the legible material, the arm extends from the fog at the far edge of the path from the track, at about the height of the subject's waist. The subject's cane, swept low across the path, passes beneath it on every approach. He walks into the hand or forearm, stops, steps back, and makes gestures consistent with apology. He then steps around it and walks on. He next appears at the south end of the stretch, walking north again. No turn is visible on any camera. OPM estimates from his walking pace that the offer was re-presented to him 55 to 60 times. In the legible material he touches the sleeve on six occasions and the back of the hand on one. At no point does the hand move toward him.
From 10:38 the subject sits on the platform bench for eleven minutes and repeatedly turns his head, as if calling out. After he rises, his approaches become faster. On several occasions he strikes the ground with his cane.
From 10:51 the hand is visibly unsteady. The tremor increases in amplitude through the remainder of the window. The hand is not lowered at any point.
At 12:31:40, after a further collision, the subject moves his cane to his left hand and swings his right arm outward in the manner of a person pushing past an obstruction. His palm meets the palm of the offered hand, and his fingers close on it. The grip is held for approximately two seconds. The arm withdraws into the fog, and the window closes twelve seconds later. Visibility on the stretch cleared within six minutes. The subject left the stretch at its north end at 12:38, where the officers met him.
The officers interviewed the subject in their vehicle between 12:44 and 13:06. The interview was recorded on a portable recorder without incident. Excerpts follow.
12:44. There's a man on that path. Stood right in the middle of it, by the old platform. I must have walked into him fifty times. I said sorry, I said excuse me, I asked was he all right. Not a word out of him. Tall fellow, I had his arm in my middle every time. I'd go round him and keep on, and I'd be back at the bridge, and I'd come up again and there he'd be. In the end I shoved at him and I got his hand instead, and I suppose I shook it. Then he wasn't there. I know that path. I've walked it nine years.
12:52. Somebody on the path, I think. I got turned round. I don't know how I got turned round. I know that path.
13:05. I'm sorry you've had to come out for me. Got lost in the fog. Daft. I know that path.
The following memorandum was received from the analyst assigned to the footage:
TO: Dr. Ruth Calloway, Lead Investigator, CASE-0205
FROM: Analyst P. ████████ / BAR-OPM-51290
RE: Movement of the hand, 0205-S1, 2023-11-21
The hand is steady in the first legible frames. The tremor starts at 10:51, two minutes after the subject gets up from the bench, and grows with each collision after that. It is not fatigue: the hand does not drop at any point in nearly five hours. It is not the camera: the bench, the fence, and the subject are steady in the same frames.
In every written account we hold, the hand waits. Nobody has made it wait this long before. I believe that by the end it was frustrated. I know that is not a finding. I ask that it go in the file as my assessment, since I have no better one to offer.
Recorded as the analyst's assessment, 2023-12-04. — R.C.
The question of why the footage survived was taken up at the case conference of 2023-12-05. An excerpt from the transcript follows.
Engineer ████████ (DPC): Every window at S1 before this one was under seven minutes, and every one was spoiled end to end on all three cameras. This one is spoiled for two hours and twenty minutes, and then it starts coming back. Whatever does the spoiling, there's only so much of it per encounter. It ran out.
Analyst P. ████████ (OPM): Or it doesn't run out, and this encounter was different in some other way.
Engineer ████████: One more long window would settle it.
Dr. Calloway: A long window is someone who can't see the hand.
[Eleven seconds without speech.]
Dr. Calloway: The duration explanation goes in the file as the working one. Nobody is to test it.
The prohibition on any action intended to prolong an encounter was added to the Containment Protocol on 2023-12-11.
The subject had advertised a static caravan for sale in August 2023 and had received no offer. It sold on 2023-12-02 to the first person who viewed it, at the asking price.
He has not walked the path since. Asked in a ranger-service survey in 2024 why he had stopped, he said that he had once got lost on it and could not understand how.
EVIDENTIARY ATTACHMENTS
PG-0205-800-01 "STRONG SUIT"
Recovered notebook, Moorland Road trials, 1921-11-08
Post-mortem diagram of injuries, 1921-11-10
STRONG SUIT gripper, first production run, 1965
Tombstone, northern frontier of Roman Britain, third century
CAM 2 frame, 0205-S1, 2023-11-21 11:52:14
End of file.