Whispers of the Willamette

Project ICE

Deep in the heart of the Oregon Wilderness, sometime around the 1960s, the US government ran a secret blacksite. Tasked with finding a way to instantly communicate over vast distances in the pre internet era, scientists experiment with quantum entanglement. A break through is discovered, that by using quantumly entangled cassette tapes, messages can be recorded on one cassette and the message would appear on the entangle cassette no matter where the cassette was in the world. But as is the case when dealing with things that we don't fully understand, the consequences of this project are dire.

As the project goes on, strange things begin happening. Increased reports of strange phenomenon of various kinds, UFO and cryptid sightings, paranormal disturbances and possessions, increased mental illnesses like psychosis and schizophrenia, the mental asylums fill up beyond capacity, groups of people report similar things like black outs, hearing voices, deja vu, remembering things that could have never happened, and the like.

Not only has project ICE found a way to communicate instantly across space, they inadvertently found a way to simultaneously communicate across time.

Along with the intended messages, scientists begin hearing things in the static of the tapes that concern and eventually unnerve them. In the garbled noise they identify voices that refer to past events and eventually realize they are getting messages from the future and past.

The researchers are not immune to the effects of the tapes, and they realize memories and ideas of anyone in the vicinity of the machines used to record their messages are removed from their own minds and captured on the magnetic strips of the tapes.

When it's discovered that the usage of this technology is causing mass hallucinations and insanity, the project is shutdown. All evidence is destroyed. Unable to grapple with the implications that this small team of people have been inadvertently stealing parts of people's consciousness and randomly supplanting people's experiences with someone else's from other locations and times, the scientists destroy all records, all the tapes, all the notes they can find. The few that didn't succumb to the insanity vow to erase the project's existence from history.

Despite their efforts though, at least one tape survived. Even the scientists who thought they were of sound mind may have taken a tape home and the memory of that night was erased from his mind. The tape got mixed in with other items in his home and existed untouched until he eventually passed away and his effects were handed down to his children.

One day, in the present era, the tape is found by an unsuspecting individual tasked with digitizing and archiving a random assortment of old things. Upon playing this tape and hearing its contents, the person is curious and confused. The person uploads the digitized content to the internet, asking other anonymous forum members what they can make of it.

This eventually captures the attention of an amateur podcaster/ tiktoker who spends their time investigating strange occurrences in Oregon. On her podcast, Whispers of the Willamette, she reports on the forum post and asks listeners for leads on the original tape. She is completely unprepared for what happens when it anonymously arrives in the mail.

Present Day

Alexi spends her days reporting on strange occurrences and telling stories of the past and interviewing people on the fringes of society on her podcast Whispers of the Willamette. A coinsurer of all things strange, spooky, and out there, nothing is off limits.

When she catches wind of a strange recording from an anonymous forum post from an obsure defunk forum for the supernatural relegated to a forgotten page on the internet archives, she throws a hail mary. She plays the clip and asks her audience for help locating the original tape. It's almost an afterthought, a throwaway idea on the tail end section of her podcast where she fields the audience for stories and mentions oddball ideas for future episodes hoping something sticks.

Surprisingly, a few days later, a cassette tape shows up at the business po box, in an unmarked package, save for her address and the postage. She hunts down a cassette player, which is not too difficult as she is an avid collector of old things, and upon playing the cassette, it seems similar to the original, but there's noticeable differences.

Super excited, she plans a podcast segment where she shares an update, claiming she's gotten her hands on the original tape and plays it for the audience. Only, the contents of the tape have changed from when she last played it. In fact, everytime she plays the tape, something is different. The contents of the tape range from static to words to extremely disturbing sounds and noises. Obsessed, she goes down the rabbit hole.

She releases her findings on the podcast and her tiktok. She hooks up the cassette player to a digitizer and begins capturing the contents of the tape in a digital format. She posts the contents to her website, enlisting the aid of her followers to analyze the ever changing audio. She gets comments and messages about strange occurrences from her followers. She dismisses, determined people on the internet are simply making up things as they tend to do.

As she continues, she becomes obsessed with what is being discovered. She comes to similar conclusions as the scientists in the 60s did; the audio content was from periods across time. And the effects that plagued the dead scientists are quick to follow.

Headaches, forgetting innocuous things, blackouts, and eventually experiencing hallucinations, paranoia, hearing voices, and other strange phenomenon start to happen to Alexi. Her followers speculate that the tape is haunted, that ghosts of the past are using it as a conduit to communicate and torture the living. Alexi gains memories of things that never could have happened to her. During one session of recording the tapes contents, she hears something that is so unnerving and personal that she ends the session immediately, shoves everything away, and vows to never touch the tape again.

She tries to move on to other things, to get her mind off the tape. But her followers share her obsession. They won't leave her alone about the "ghost tape". While she has tried to forget it, the internet nerds composed of audio engineers, history buffs, software developers, and all the like have been analyzing the recordings. Her subscribers skyrocket as the internet is abuzz with the recordings.

One day, she can no longer run from the tapes influence and she's confronted with a discovery made by the people working on it on her behalf. Using AI and other techniques, the core team proves that much of the sporadic noise is actually snippets of words, encoded and dispersed throughout the tape. Using radiowave frequencies, several things that were thought to be noise are reconstructed into semi coherent words and phrases, among other things like screams and other unnerving sounds.

Because its surmised that radio wave frequencies are responsible for breaking up the audio and encoding it to the tape, many conclude that the source of the audios are not supernatural in nature, but technological. Further analysis begins to uncover direct messages intended for a listener in the future. The messages suggest that if Alexi records a message on the tape, they will receive the message.

Under immense pressure from her fanbase to record a message on the tape and livestream the results, Alexi finally gives in. She sets up a livestream and records a message. She plays it back and her message is intact. She rewinds the tape and plays it again. A message comes through clearly that they heard her message and they have something of great importance to communicate. She records her message to ask what it is.

The voice comes through clearly warning that by playing the tape, Alexi has altered the events of the past. The messenger articulates the history of Project ICE. He warns that because of this temporal disturbance, the effects of the original experiments will start affecting people throughout time. The effects will compound and because of the widespread presence of radio and internet waves, a web of entangled objects will start encoding peoples consciousnesses onto different mediums. People will collectively continue to loose their minds, as fragments of their beings are removed and encoded onto the technology around them.

Since this has altered history, simply destroying the tape will not stop it. The scientist has no idea how to stop it. He fears that humanity will collectively go insane as their minds are unraveled at a quantum level, pieces of everyone's minds being erased, supplanted, and encoded on technology at the speed of the electromagnetic spectrum.