He entered this world through his mother and he will leave this world through his mother...
rough draft - short story version
Today's the day, I am finally going to capture the butcher. We have been tracking him for years. Always a step behind no matter how close we get. But today we finally have him! It's been a long journey leading up to this take-down. It all started 5 years ago. An anonymous tip from a squatter sent us to an abandoned building in mostly abandoned part of the city. Inside the building was one of the most gruesome and grotesque sights you can ever imagine. The best our coroners and investigators could put together. This madman appeared to be trying to crawl back into the womb. Several psychologists wrote papers and articles about some new mental disorder that this man must have. But none of it seemed right. It didn't fit what I was seeing at the crime scene completely. Sure it made sense, but something wasn't adding up. For starters there were multiple victims and each one was dissected and opened differently. It appeared as if the killer was experimenting, possibly refining some fantasy or technique.
months went by after the first set of killings. Was this a one time mad man or was he just getting started. it seemed as if he certainly must have grown to this degree that we witnessed. Surely there must be more killings linked with this same psycho. I started researching cold cases. Sure enough I began finding case after case that had similarities. After a while a pattern started to emerge. A string of cases seemed to form a literal staircase of escalations that lead directly to the events in the abandoned building. The killer was looking for something, he was researching something. What was it that his twisted deranged mind think he was going to find inside these women. And why are the doctors so convinced he's trying to return to the womb. These questions and more raced through my mind nightly as I found dozens more cases that seemed to fit our killer.
This is where people always ask me how I was able to put all these cold cases together. Well long and short of it is that I have had dreams since I was a child of another life in a similar yet different world. A parallel reality if you will. I later in life realized they weren't dreams and that somehow I was actually remembering my life in this alternate world in the form of my nightly dreams. I would use information I learned in one reality to solve unsolved cases in our reality and vice versa in what appeared as the dream world to me, but was clearly not a dream world.
The two realities were different but they seemed to be synchronized when it comes to large scale events and such. Small things would be different, the chain of events leading up to an event would be different, but the same overall things happened in both worlds. I of course have never told anyone this, and just utilize it as a tool at my disposal for crime solving. It does come in very handy especially when sometimes an arrest in one reality will echo another arrest in the other and it will sometimes ping pong into several take-downs. I'm known as a bit of a super sleuth in this regards. If they only knew why or how. They'd probably have me committed.
Finally months after following the connections I was able to track down a potential site of interest and when we went in we discovered a scene eerily similar to the first one except this time, it was different. The first time was pure barbaric butchery. This time there were wires, electronics, computers, TV screens.
Again months went by... I made no progress tracking down any further past victims that may be related to the case but we did finally get an emergency call from a hospital. A woman had called claiming that she was being held in an abandoned wing of the building on the 13th floor. She said she knocked out her captor and escaped her confinement. At first there was some confusion because the building didn't have a 13th floor just like most buildings. Finally after wasting 20 minutes a janitor informed the local PD that there was a 13th floor that was only accessible via service elevator and was used to store materials and house heating units and other such things. It was essentially an unused floor. By the time we got up there the killer had regained consciousnesses and fled. Several victims were actually still alive but were not able to be saved. It was gruesome and the memories of those women will haunt every officer in that room until the day they die. It was truly shocking and I think every single officer threw up pretty much immediately upon being scared half to death when some of the women woke up screaming for help and mercy. We thought they were all dead at first. It was straight up out of a horror film. One of our officers even had a heart attack, it was that terrifying.
But again, a new piece to the puzzle emerged and it seemed this time that all the victims were mothers. This was not the case in the past incidents. Like the last time though, there was all sorts of electronics, computer equipment, and such. What was this guy doing!?
After that the case went cold for years. It wasn't until there was a massive flood out in the desert that flooded an abandoned military bunker that we caught our next break in the case. Body parts were found floating in the flood waters and they were traced back to this abandoned bunker. The scene was starting to become normal for those involved in the case. it was the same as the hospital from what we could tell, although the water damage had destroyed much of the crime scene. But this time, there seemed to be a lot of equipment you would find in a doctors lab, specifically a doctor that deals with in vitro fertilization. And the biggest piece of the puzzle. that we hadn't found at any scene before. A notebook and a VR headset. The headset was damaged beyond repair but it added a new piece to the puzzle. And the notebook clearly was depicting some procedure using the VR headset. But it was unclear what exactly was being done. The notes we were able to retrieve from the waterlogged notebook were very cryptic.
After this the case really heated up. Our killer stopped waiting year or even months, and was now active on a weekly or even daily bases. We were hot on his tail for months moving from location to location. If it weren't for my skill using cases from the other now, We would not have been so successful at tracking him so closely. But we were close! And apparently so was he! The obvious need to pursue his sick agenda was becoming more and more clear with every crime scene and victim. And he moved away from the laboratory setting with multiple victims and was now working with only one victim in whatever environment he could cobble together. He was clearly obsessed with something that he thought he was getting closer and closer to. Just as we thought we were getting closer and close to catching our killer.
This cat and mouse game continued for 6 more months until one day we had him! He was literally right there! I had tracked him to an old motel in a small run down town full of junkies. No one cared what anyone did here and it was the perfect place for him. Little did he know that I had the upper hand and had seen the signs of his operation in the other now watching a news report about junkies getting busted. How he got away I have no idea. There was nowhere to go, but I was able to get his notebook, fully intact this time.
It was then that we realized what he was trying to do...
The guy was obsessed with getting out. Back to Upworld where he came from so the journal proclaimed. After realizing he entered this world from a woman. He started kidnapping women to make them into attempted tunnels into Upworld. All of the gruesome crime scenes went flashing through my head and I saw them for what he was doing. What a demented delusion this killer has I thought to myself. I's some kind of simulation theory fantasy about returning to the Upworld... And he was using VR technology to make a digital connection with Upworld via a woman's womb. His theory as noted in the notebook was that at the moment of conception, a woman's womb must form a temporary link or portal into Upworld for the child's consciousness to enter the womb or to be uploaded.
The sudden shift in his gruesome slayings and transition into the more in vitro based VR killings were now starting to make sense. It would seem that he started off literally trying to crawl back up the womb as if it was a water-slide from the higher dimension that he could just crawl back up. Clearly after years of failure and many killings he shifted to thinking it could be done digitally instead. Clearly he was trying to re-upload his mind back to Upworld via a woman's womb, hence the in vitro equipment and such. He was looking for that brief moment of supposed connection to Upworld that he could exploit during the process of conception. His journal was filled with rants about how human cloning outside of the womb would never succeed because without the womb a true consciousness could not enter the body. It would be a soulless robot person at best. The journal went on for pages regarding such topics.
Which brings us to today. We finally have him at a medical clinic. He apparently broke in late last night and barricaded the place with his own mother!!! Which in the journal, was the very last thing he wrote, that he needed his mother. Connection unsuccessful he had written. Authorization denied...???? I wondered at the time what he meant by this, but it suddenly became clear to me, as to what he was thinking. He thinks he has cracked the process of returning to Upworld and that he can only gain authorized access back through the person that brought him here! His mother!
Which brings us up to speed to right now, this very moment. My backup is still 20 minutes out and I have to move fast, now or this woman will die if she's not already dead. As I make my way into the building it is eerily quiet except for the wailing of a woman in the background. A low soft sobbing. I slowly enter the room and the killer is gone. He got away again! How though, he must be hiding somewhere! And that's when I saw the woman, the killer's mother. IT WAS MY MOTHER!!! I asked her why she didn't tell me that I had a brother and she said "you don't have a brother you sick son of a bitch!"
I knew what I had to do. I finished hooking her up to the system, waited for the moment and I hit upload! Authorization Granted! And then the words “Activating Honey Pot Protocols” flashed on screen real fast as everything went dark.
When I came to I realized that not only was I the killer all along of course, but I was now in the other now! Not Upworld. The world I had been linked with via dreams my whole life. Now my old life appears to me via my dreams as me being in prison in my old real life and my new life in this other now is a permanent, forever and ever, hell simulation where I am doomed to keep repeating this same cycle, over and over, always forgetting until it's too late... The Fornever Simulation! Forever and Never!!