King Investigation - Sat, Oct 26, 2019

• MASTICATE had driven out to Frosty Oaks, a trailer park outside Bangor, Maine, after tracing the hardware trail to Robert Wallace, a local man with apparent ties to the Picky Eater network.
• Frank Booth kept Robert Wallace’s father, Cordell Wallace, occupied on the porch while Justin and Philomena searched the trailer.
• The obvious lead in Robert Wallace’s bedroom, a burned-out PC, turned out to be a dead end.
• At the same time, Matthew McCarter had been pulled by Picky Eater into a mirror version of America.
• In that other reality, the trailer park was physically recognizable, but details were wrong. License plates read Global Caliphate, and the man inside Wallace’s trailer had a barcode on his neck.
• The Robert Wallace from that reality was a hardened partisan who casually shot unarmed men and called it mercy.
• McCarter played along long enough to get into Wallace’s truck and handed over his phone to buy time.
• At a checkpoint, McCarter shot Wallace’s phone, which attracted the attention of power-armored Antifa shock troopers.
• Wallace panicked, yelled about black helicopters and a safe house, and tried to flee at high speed.
• McCarter shot Wallace in the head while the truck was moving about 80 miles per hour.
• The truck vanished out from around them as they crossed back between realities.
• McCarter and Wallace then smashed onto the pavement back in their home reality, and neither survived the impact.
• While meditating in the Wallace trailer, Philomena sensed the local wrongness resolving toward a single point and discovered a hidden computer behind the television, with an Ethernet cable running through the floor.
• Plugged into that hidden computer was a USB thumb drive labeled “Wake Up Cuz.”
• The team pulled the plug, bagged the hidden computer, and took it with them.
• Cordell Wallace gave them one useful lead before they released him: the USB drive had come from his cousin Vicky King in Kick Springs, Pennsylvania.
• On the way back toward Bangor, the agents came across the roadside emergency scene where the truck had reappeared.
• There, they found two bodies on the pavement: Matthew McCarter and a man carrying identification from a country that did not exist.
• The recap ended with MASTICATE down an agent and preparing to head south toward Pennsylvania.

At the roadside scene in Maine

• The session picked up at the crash site on the side of the road, with Bangor police cars and an ambulance present and traffic being directed around the scene.
• There was a nearby farm with a farmhouse, barn, and standard rural outbuildings.
• The surviving version of McCarter, hiding nearby behind a shed on the property, decided to call Frank Booth.
• The phone that rang was Frank’s personal phone, not his burner or operation phone.
• Frank hesitated before answering because the number was not familiar.
• When he heard the voice on the other end say it was McCarter, Frank had to roll SAN and lost 1 SAN from a natural response, because it was unmistakably Matthew McCarter’s voice.
• The caller identified himself as McCarter and immediately said that, before anything else, Frank needed to remove all identification and sensitive material from the body out on the road.
• Frank, thinking pragmatically and professionally, told him they had already done that.
• Frank then asked where he was.
• McCarter said he was nearby but could not walk openly into the scene himself.
• Frank made a HUMINT roll on the voice and recognized that it had many of Matthew’s vocal habits and mannerisms, but it was different in important ways.
• This McCarter sounded more confident, more focused, more controlled, and colder than the Matthew they knew.
• Frank’s read was that, if this was an impersonation, it was being done by someone who had studied Matthew very closely.
• The caller proposed that they meet at a public place so everybody would be calmer.
• He specifically suggested IHOP, and the group instead settled on Denny’s on 120 Haskell Road in two hours.

Cleaning up the crash site and containing the bodies

• Frank and the others kept control of the crash scene by flashing their task-force credentials and presenting themselves as federal agents handling a terrorism-related matter.
• The local police accepted this explanation and were willing to let them direct what happened next.
• Frank handled the bureaucratic side, arranging for the bodies to be treated as John Does for the moment.
• He wanted the bodies held without autopsy until the matter could be properly taken over, and he specifically did not want them going through ordinary channels.
• Frank called Antonia Pitzerelli and told her they now had two bodies.
• He explained that one was apparently their Wallace contact, although the local authorities were not fully convinced it was the local Robert Wallace.
• He also told her that the second body was Matthew McCarter’s.
• Frank then added that, despite the body on the road, he had just received a phone call from someone who sounded exactly like McCarter.
• Pitzerelli immediately recognized that, given the nature of the case, this had to be taken seriously.
• Frank said he wanted McCarter’s death kept quiet for the moment and confirmed that he had already removed the identifying material from the body.
• Pitzerelli approved of the bodies being treated as John Does and agreed that removing them quietly would not be difficult.
• Frank told her they were going to meet the caller in public and would report back.

Meeting the alternate McCarter at Denny’s

• After dealing with the bodies, the team drove to Denny’s.
• The alternate McCarter eventually arrived in a battered Ford Fiesta.
• When he stepped out, he was visibly McCarter, but not the McCarter they knew.
• He was somewhat less lean and more muscular than their Matthew.
• He had a few more gray hairs.
• He had a scar across one cheek that their McCarter did not have.
• He was dressed in a good suit and tie and looked very much like someone trying to play the part of a federal agent or intelligence officer.
• He walked into the Denny’s, gave Frank a genuinely warm smile, gave Justin and Philomena a more puzzled look, and sat down.
• He opened the conversation by asking whether they were aware of a piece of software called Picky Eater.

What the alternate McCarter explained about Picky Eater

• He said that, as he understood it, Picky Eater was effectively a ritual embedded in hardware.
• He described it as something that built a psychic or psychological profile of the user.
• It then fed that person information that reinforced what they already wanted to believe was true.
• Once the user accepted that worldview deeply enough, Picky Eater could draw them into the world that information came from.
• He emphasized that Picky Eater was highly infectious.
• According to him, any computing device used by an infected person became marked.
• It could then spread to devices the infected person later used.
• It could also spread to nearby devices in use around that person, even if those devices were being used by someone else.
• He said the only effective countermeasure his people had found was to destroy every affected general-purpose computing device that had been touched by the infected person.
• He also said that long-running Picky Eater instances weakened the barriers between realities in general, not just between one person and one alternate world.
• He stated plainly that this broad weakening of the walls between worlds was how he had been able to come here.
• He warned them there was no reason to assume he was the only traveler who had crossed over.

The alternate McCarter’s identity and organization

• He told them outright that he was not the Matthew McCarter they knew.
• He said he had been sent across during a moment of psychic intensity associated with their world’s McCarter.
• He asked what they called their own employers and referred to them as “the program” or “the conspiracy,” then said those names were outdated in his world.
• He explained that his side had reverse-engineered part of Picky Eater’s cross-world information function and had been able to gather at least some intelligence on this reality.
• He said that in his world the organization equivalent to Delta Green had become public in the mid-1990s.
• When asked about Audra Powell, he said the name sounded familiar, perhaps as another agent, but definitely not as the director of his organization.
• When asked what year it was in his reality, he answered 2021.
• He acknowledged that there was a time-dilation effect in how Picky Eater linked worlds.

Frank’s read on the alternate McCarter

• Frank remained cautious and kept checking him against his memory of the original McCarter.
• The alternate McCarter knew things he should not have known if he were merely an impostor.
• He knew Frank personally and claimed that in his world he and Frank had worked together extensively.
• Frank’s read was still that this man was different from their McCarter in a fundamental way: more agentic, more confident, more controlled, and more dangerous.
• Even so, nothing in his demeanor suggested obvious deception.
• Philomena also read him as earnest, though she remained uneasy.
• The group concluded that he at least believed what he was saying.

His theory about worlds and the origin of Picky Eater

• When Frank challenged the underlying logic and asked whose universe they were standing in if Picky Eater created realities based on people’s psyches, the alternate McCarter said he was not convinced Picky Eater actually created worlds.
• He said he remembered life before Picky Eater and believed it might instead be finding or connecting to existing worlds.
• He stressed that he was not part of the research team and did not have complete answers.
• He then explained that his people had interrogated a freelance reporter named George Allen.
• George Allen had previously been detained in that other world for similar activity years earlier.
• When they picked him up again during the current crisis, Allen seemed delighted that everything he had believed about the supernatural was true.
• Allen repeatedly said, “I knew it.”
• Allen worked for a site or brand called PhenomenX, which the alternate McCarter said existed in both worlds.
• From Allen and from other evidence, his people had become fairly certain that Picky Eater had originated in this world.
• He said some of the scientists in his organization were very worried about space-time interference and believed the source reality needed to be shut down immediately.
• He described his mission as aligned with MASTICATE’s mission: find the source, shut it down, and stop further incursions.

PhenomenX and additional context

• Philomena looked up PhenomenX while they were talking.
• She found that in this reality it had begun as a late-night cable show in the early 1990s, heavily focused on UFO conspiracies.
• It later continued in other forms, including online and crowdsourced formats.
• It had become a broader supernatural and conspiracy-media brand, associated with streamers, citizen journalists, ghost-hunting material, and related paranormal content.
• This supported the alternate McCarter’s claim that the name existed in both realities.

Questions about what happens after the mission

• When asked whether shutting down the source would send him back to his own reality, the alternate McCarter said possibly.
• He suggested that if all instances in this reality were shut down, or if a central “prime” instance were destroyed, he might be pushed back.
• He speculated that something similar had probably happened to the original Matthew McCarter and Robert Wallace when they crossed back.
• He also said that the original McCarter’s public history in this world matched some of his own, including military service, but diverged at least by the time McCarter became a professor.

Philomena’s smell test

• Philomena brought up the old McCarter’s bizarre olfactory fixation.
• She deliberately checked whether this version of McCarter carried the familiar brown gravy smell associated with the original.
• He did not.
• Rather than making her feel safer, the absence of that smell made him feel even more wrong to her.

Questions about how Picky Eater hardware works

• The group pressed him on whether infected devices had to be running in order to matter.
• He said that powering a device down stopped its active reality-linking effects, but did not solve the problem permanently.
• If the device was powered back on, the threat resumed.
• He reiterated that hardware destruction was the only permanent answer.
• He did not know who originally developed the hardware or who had authored the first build.
• He said George Allen had built a chip from dark-web instructions, and that chip should not have worked, but it had.
• He urged them to tell their superiors to scrub the relevant instructions off the dark web if possible.

The modified chip he brought with him

• When asked how he crossed over, he admitted he was carrying a modified Picky Eater chip.
• He said it did not function exactly like the others and had been adapted to send him specifically to the source reality.
• He claimed his people had the contagious aspect under control and that his chip was not spreading Picky Eater to devices around him.
• He refused to surrender it.
• He said that if it were destroyed prematurely, he might be sent back before completing his mission.
• He also indicated that he had been told the chip needed to remain powered.

His credentials and the failed attempt to reach Pitzerelli

• To establish credibility, he produced a badge with his face and name on it from the Department of Terrestrial Security.
• The badge looked professionally made, but because the agency did not exist in this world, it did not convince the others on its own.
• He insisted he could prove himself to Pitzerelli and asked for a phone call with her.
• He tried the number he had for his world’s Pitzerelli.
• In this reality, that number connected to a Domino’s Pizza in Maryland.
• This failed attempt reinforced that cross-world correspondences were imperfect and that even shared contacts could diverge badly.

What he could offer operationally

• He said plainly that he was a highly skilled agent and that MASTICATE was now down one agent.
• He said he could use his modified device to send limited text messages back to his team across realities.
• He explained that the communication channel was slow and unreliable for real-time use, but that messages could sometimes get responses after minutes or hours.
• He did not have a direct lead to patient zero.
• He explained that, according to his scientists, once Picky Eater had spread widely, it became very difficult to trace because the hardware itself could be imported across realities.
• He believed the best chance was to work backward from an early node close to the beginning.

Frank’s private call with Pitzerelli after the Denny’s meeting

• Frank stepped outside and called Pitzerelli again.
• He told her the situation was getting even stranger and said he thought they were dealing with another Matthew.
• He reported that this version of McCarter believed he knew her alternate-world counterpart and was convinced he could prove himself.
• Pitzerelli did not focus on being personally convinced. Instead, she asked the practical question of whether Frank thought this man was useful.
• Frank answered honestly that, if he had to compare them as operatives, this version looked like a better agent than their normal Matthew.
• Pitzerelli reacted with a sharp, brief laugh and admitted that when Frank first told her Matthew was gone, part of her had wondered whether that might put an end to “the smelling thing.”
• Frank told her this version did not recognize any of that behavior and was extremely open, dangerously so.
• Pitzerelli said that if he was aligned with the operation, he might be “a pretty effective bullet in your gun.”
• Frank also relayed the new warning about dark-web instructions for building the chip.
• Pitzerelli said the Program was already doing some work in that direction and that she believed NSA assets could likely be used to locate and compartmentalize that kind of material.
• She left the field call to Frank’s judgment.
• Frank returned to the table and told the others that Pitzerelli was not taking a direct call right then, but that they were moving forward and the alternate McCarter was coming with them.

The drive toward Pennsylvania and the first round of research

• The team left Maine for Kick Springs, Pennsylvania, intending to follow the Vicky King lead.

• They planned to research as they traveled.

• Frank tried to work the bureaucracy and official channels while Justin tried to do open-source and technical research.

• Both efforts initially failed badly.

• Justin’s computer was dead at the wrong moment, preventing a more immediate online search.

• Rather than drive all the way through the night exhausted, they stopped around 2:00 a.m. at a La Quinta, slept for several hours, and resumed in the morning.

• By morning, they at least had basic identifying information on Vicky King:

  • She was 34 years old.
  • She had worked for Penn State for several years.
  • She appeared to be currently unemployed.
  • She was from the local area.
  • They had a residential address for her.

Frank’s call into Penn State

• Frank decided not to go in blind and called Penn State administrative offices for more detail.
• He learned that Vicky had worked in the IT department, handling support tickets.
• Her employment ended in January 2018 because she stopped completing her work.
• He was transferred to her former manager, Dananjay Joshi (“Jay”).
• Jay remembered her clearly.
• He said she had worked remotely much of the time, which was acceptable for her role.
• Near the end of her employment, her ticket-completion rate essentially dropped to zero.
• She stopped responding to calls and texts.
• Jay was worried enough that, after a couple of weeks, he drove to her home.
• When he went by the house, he saw a foreclosure sign posted out front.
• He assumed she was in financial trouble and may have left the state.
• He never spoke to her again.
• Jay described her as extremely smart, overqualified for campus support work, and said she had been at MIT as a graduate student in a math/computers-related field before pregnancy interrupted that path.
• He said she was a single mother of twin girls and very protective of them.
• She had insisted on remote work because she did not want to leave the girls all day.
• He said she was deeply invested in parenting blogs, child-care advice, and data-driven opinions about what was safe or unsafe for children.
• Jay said he knew little about her social life outside of work, though he understood she had some family in the area.
• He confirmed that toward the end she had started missing even the every-other-week in-office days she was supposed to keep.

What Frank and the team worked out from the dates

• The girls had been newborns in 2017.
• Penn State records were consistent: Vicky was hired around spring 2017 and worked until January 2018.
• This meant her disappearance predated Bradley McKay’s acquisition of a Picky Eater copy in August 2018.
• Cordell Wallace’s memory placed Vicky giving him the USB around Christmas 2016.
• That meant Cordell had received the material long before Wallace or McKay became active with it.
• Frank specifically looked for signs that Penn State staff were unnaturally forgetting Vicky the way other people had forgotten other elements of the case, but the dates and recollections were consistent enough that he did not think that was happening here.

Foreclosure and eviction research

• Frank kept digging by calling the sheriff’s department, the bank, and the entities responsible for the foreclosure and eviction.

• A pattern emerged:

  • Vicky defaulted on her mortgage in late 2017.
  • The bank sent someone out and posted foreclosure notice after getting no answer.
  • The sheriff’s department only handled the notification side and outsourced actual evictions to private contractors.
  • The contractor in question had no clear record of having executed the eviction.
  • The sheriff’s office likewise had no clean confirmation that the house had ever actually been cleared.

• In practical terms, the paperwork had stalled in bureaucracy.

• The bank had seemingly been waiting an abnormally long time for confirmation of a completed eviction that never appeared to have happened.

• No one Frank spoke to could firmly say that Vicky had actually left the house.

Decision to approach the house in daylight

• After this research, the team decided there was no strong reason to wait for dark.
• They debated briefly whether talking to neighbors would help, but concluded that direct contact with the house was more important.
• Their mindset was cautious because their last similar approach to a neglected property had led to a torture-dungeon-style discovery and an explosion.
• Even so, they chose to go.

Drive-by at Vicky King’s house in the primary reality

• The house was a small, older, single-story rural residence on a side road.

• The lawn was overgrown.

• A faded foreclosure sign stood in the yard with weeds and tall grass around it.

• The mail slot was packed and overflowing, and additional mail had accumulated on the front step.

• A privacy fence enclosed the backyard.

• The neighboring houses were somewhat spread apart, but close enough that people might notice movement in the yard if they were watching.

• There was a car in the driveway covered in old leaves and pollen, suggesting it had not moved in a long time.

• There were no obvious toys in the front yard.

• The team decided to check utilities before forcing entry:

  • Water was still on.
  • The electric meter was in the backyard.

• They moved toward that next.

The first split: Justin and the alternate McCarter at the real house

• At this point, the session began cutting between realities and groups.
• Justin and the alternate McCarter were at the front of the actual house without Frank and Philomena present.
• Justin felt distinctly uneasy that it was just the two of them.
• The backyard gate was locked, but low enough that one could see or climb over it.
• Before going around the house, they decided to try the front door.
• The alternate McCarter did not knock first. He simply tried the knob.
• The door was locked and bolted.

Raccoon attack at the front door

• As the alternate McCarter focused on the locked door, a raccoon launched itself from the roof onto his head.
• It bit the top of his head hard enough to draw blood.
• He tore it off and threw it into the yard.
• The raccoon vanished through tall grass, then sat upright at the edge of the next yard and stared back at them.
• Even after being bitten and rattled, the alternate McCarter immediately shifted back toward entry.

Someone is inside

• Justin considered the options and had his lockpicks available.
• Both men checked their surroundings.
• Justin successfully realized that someone was moving on the other side of the door.
• The alternate McCarter, still amped and distracted, did not pick up on that.
• Justin shouted that federal agents were outside and told the occupant to open up.

The second split: Frank and Philomena outside a different version of the house

• As the car was pulling into the driveway, Frank and Philomena suddenly found themselves in a different reality.
• They were standing outside a two-story Victorian version of the property instead of the single-story rural house.
• There was no vehicle where there should have been one.
• The windows and doors of the house were boarded over with plywood.
• A laminated notice had been stapled onto the boards.
• The notice declared that the property had been excommunicated for failure to facilitate right of harvest.
• Additional text said there was enforced social death for Vicky King and any cohabitants until “the fruit” was returned for rightful custodial conscription to lawful authorities.
• The notice was attributed to the National Child and Family Services Office.
• The surrounding neighborhood otherwise looked disturbingly normal and lived-in.
• Other houses had cars in their drives.
• Philomena checked her phone and discovered that Picky Eater was present on it.
• Frank checked his phone and found the same thing.
• Philomena proposed shutting their phones off to stop any active connection.
• She powered hers down.
• Frank powered his down as well.
• Doing so changed nothing about where they were.
• Frank then tried to interact with Picky Eater more directly, but got only a useless response likening it to a VPN.
• A further search on Philomena’s side produced a message that read “restricted topic search noted.”
• Frank’s phone in this reality showed the date March 4, 2023.

Frank and Philomena begin investigating the alternate-reality house

• They climbed over the backyard fence.

• The yard contained neglected children’s toys, including balls, jump ropes, and a broken trampoline, all half-swallowed by leaves and overgrowth.

• They came around to the back of the house and found cinder-block steps leading to a rear door.

• The white-painted back door showed boot prints and the frame was visibly cracked, suggesting previous forced entry.

• A pipe ran out of a basement window and vented what smelled like gasoline exhaust.

• When they listened closely, they could hear what sounded like a generator running below.

• Philomena suggested that blocking the exhaust might quietly disable whoever was down there by filling the space with fumes.

• Frank did not want to escalate that way yet and was not convinced they were dealing with an immediate hostile target rather than a victim.

• They checked the basement window, but it was frosted and gave them no visual.

• Frank tried the back door.

• It opened because the bolt had never been properly repaired.

• Inside was a clean kitchen, not an abandoned shell.

• Power was on; the microwave clock was lit.

• Through the kitchen, the living room was visibly ransacked:

  • couch cushions slashed open,
  • stuffing pulled out,
  • items overturned,
  • the unmistakable look of a methodical search for hidden material.

• The generator was loud enough under the floor that anyone near it probably would not hear much happening elsewhere in the house.

• The house clearly had both an upper floor and a basement.

• Frank and Philomena began moving deeper inside, looking for access to the generator and the people likely living there.

Back to the real house: the front door opens

• After Justin’s callout, the locks on the actual-world front door began to open.
• They heard a bolt undo and a chain slide.
• The door opened partway and a girl who looked to be about ten years old cautiously peered out.
• This apparent age did not match the earlier timeline from Penn State, which had put Vicky’s twins as newborns in 2017.
• The alternate McCarter immediately tried to de-escalate.
• He apologized for the noise, mentioned that a raccoon had bitten him, and asked if her parents were home.
• The girl said, “Mommy is upstairs and she’s working.”
• She then contradicted herself and said her mother was asleep and could not come down.
• She began trying to close the door.

Forced entry into the actual house

• The alternate McCarter put his foot in the doorway and prevented the girl from shutting it.
• He told her they were with the police and wanted to make sure her mother was okay.
• Justin asked whether Vicky was upstairs.
• Both men badly failed their HUMINT checks on the child.
• The girl’s eyes went wide and she ran away from the door.
• The alternate McCarter immediately escalated.
• He pulled out his pistol, attached a silencer to it, and began clearing the house.
• In the far side of the living room, he and Justin found two nearly identical girls.
• One girl was backed into the corner, cowering.
• The other stood in front of her, gripping a kitchen knife in both hands and shaking.

Conversation with the girls in the actual house

• The alternate McCarter tried to calm them, told them they were not there to hurt them, and showed his FBI credentials.
• He asked them to put the knife down and said they needed to see their mother to make sure she was all right.
• One of the girls asked what FBI meant and whether they were Reapers.
• He told them no, that they were just special police and had been sent because they were worried about their mother.
• One of the girls asked whether they were there to take them.
• He said no.
• He succeeded on a Persuade roll.
• The girl with the knife lowered it somewhat, although she did not let it go.
• The other girl said that if they had really been Reapers, they would have killed them already.
• The alternate McCarter holstered his gun at that point.
• He asked what the Reapers were and whether their mother was hiding them from those people.
• The girls said their mother was hiding them so they could be safe.
• When Justin asked about computers in the house, the girls said they did not touch the computers.
• When pressed on where the computers were, they became uncomfortable.
• The transcript cut away from this thread at that point, leaving the actual-world house exploration unresolved.

Back to Frank and Philomena in the alternate-reality house

• Frank and Philomena continued from the rear entry in the alternate reality.

• They now knew:

  • the house was occupied,
  • power was on,
  • a generator was running in the basement,
  • the living room had been torn apart in a search,
  • and the boarded-up exterior and state warning suggested official persecution centered on children or “fruit.”

• Philomena had her pistol holstered but available.

• Frank led the way cautiously.

• They advanced into the house, following the sound of the generator and looking for the route to the basement.

• The session ended there, with Frank and Philomena exploring the occupied alternate-world house while Justin and the alternate McCarter had already made contact with the two girls inside the actual-world house.

State of the investigation at session end

• MASTICATE had accepted the cooperation of an alternate-reality version of Matthew McCarter, though they had not fully trusted him.

• The team had confirmed several critical facts from him:

  • Picky Eater actively links realities while powered,
  • it spreads through computing devices,
  • destroying hardware is the permanent countermeasure,
  • and prolonged activity weakens barriers between worlds generally.

• Their Vicky King lead had deepened substantially:

  • Vicky was a highly intelligent former MIT graduate student,
  • a Penn State IT employee,
  • a single mother of twin girls,
  • deeply focused on child safety,
  • and she disappeared from normal life in early 2018 without a clean eviction ever being completed.

• By the end of the session, the investigation had split across two versions of Vicky King’s property:

  • the actual-world house, where two older-than-expected girls were inside and afraid of “Reapers,”
  • and the alternate-world house, where Frank and Philomena had just entered a boarded, ransacked, generator-powered home under official child-harvest sanctions.