How can I start this letter?

My name is Walter Cole. I lived at 25 Maple Avenue, Greenwood Town, Maine. I’m not a native American, I moved here from Europe.

Firstly, if you ever read this, go straight to the police. Of course, I know they won’t believe all this right away, but hopefully, they will start an investigation to reveal the truth. Down below, I tried to describe all that has happened to me as well as I could. It’s a horrid and terrible story.

Secondly, I would like you to find my wife and three kids. Go please to Greenwood Town and ask locals how to find Cole family. They will know. When you meet them, tell them that Walter loves them very much and if he ever gets out of the situation he is right now, he will return home. If you don’t believe me and haven’t gone to the police, please, please give this letter to my wife Clare. Oh, how much I wanna see my wife and kids again! I would like to tell them all sorts of kind words but I can’t. My space on this little piece of paper is limited, and I have to describe all the details of my story as well as I can. So here it is:

The economic situation in our area isn’t great. Unemployment levels are rising. People are getting hopeless. I was one of them too. Not long ago I had a good job and everything was great, but then our company, due to the bad economics, started downsizing. I was one of the people who got fired. At first, I wasn’t too worried about that. I have a good experience and I’m a professional in my field, but I didn’t know that everything was that bad. After a few months, the situation got really concerning. I had to find job. Without it, I would have lost my family house and I had to buy food too, you know.

By that time, this new factory opened in our area. It happened really unexpectedly. At first, I thought that it was some kind of a scam because it needed a lot of new employees. This didn’t quite fit with the overall situation, but then my neighbor got a job there, and after the first month, he got a paycheck too.

I also applied for the job. As I’m a specialist with the experience, I got a place in the office. My task was to gather the information and statistics about the numbers of products being manufactured. I was some sort of accounting assistant.

In the beginning, everything was going quite well. Salary wasn’t big, but I could live with that. It was better than nothing. The job itself wasn’t hard, I knew what to do very well from my previous experiences, but then I got curious.

Data I was processing was somehow weird. Numbers of products being made were very high and manufacturing costs low. It may sound good, but when you have the experience I have, you just know that something isn’t right. The numbers were too high for them to be true.

So, you may think that this company was a scam in the end. That was my first thought too, but I was getting paid always in time, every week. Money somehow came in. My second thought was that it was a money laundering system. I tried to find information about this company on the internet, but I couldn’t. It made me even more suspicious. It was a dead end.

Then I got an idea to ask my neighbor about what was going on there. He worked in the factory behind the workbench, but for me, it was prohibited to visit the factory itself. I had access only to my office. The security in this facility also seemed too excessive. Maybe my neighbor knew something more?

After talking to him, I found out that he was working in the sector A. It was considered the small one. There were also sectors B, C, D, and F, and building of new ones was in progress. For him also it was prohibited to visit all the other sectors. He didn’t know anyone who worked there.

There my initial investigation ended without even really starting. I calmed down and continued my work without any second thoughts until one day I heard a doorbell. It was a weekend, my wife wasn’t home so I got to the door myself.

Behind the door was standing my neighbor’s wife. She looked pretty bad. Blue bags under her eyes, face strained and adorned with wrinkles, for days uncombed hair. She wasn’t wearing any makeup too.

After the several cups of coffee and many soothing words, I found out that my neighbor hadn’t been home for two weeks. I didn’t know about that because we weren’t really friends, just familiars.

Although the woman seemed very concerned, her husband hadn’t disappeared without any trace. She showed me two letters she had gotten from her husband. The first letter said that he temporarily had a lot of work in the company. The company had offered him generous bonuses and a place to stay for a night. After that, he would get a raise. So he had accepted this offer.

The second letter said that he’d gotten the raise promised. This had made him think about his life and he’d made a decision to leave his wife and pursue his dreams and career.

Although I didn’t know my neighbor that well, his wife insisted that this wasn’t his writing style. She claimed that her husband was kidnapped or something else terrible had happened. Women thought that it might be somehow related to the company. That was why she came to me.

At first, I was quite confused. She could be imagining things from the heartache caused by her husband leaving her. But this company had me questioning it before, so I decided to look into this matter.

The very next day, when I arrived at the work, I immediately noticed that my neighbor’s Ford was standing in the parking lot. This is probably relevant information. The car was a gray color SUV, I think that model is called Explorer, one of the recent ones. The license plate started with 743.

I assumed my neighbor was at work. I didn’t go to my office but went to the entrance where sector A workers were gathering and asked security guard about John Humbert. He said that John didn’t work there anymore. It was weird because I had just seen his car in the parking lot. I told about that to the guard. The guard took a little pause. Then he answered that he didn’t know anything about this.

You can imagine that all this was really suspicious and my curiosity awoke again. But by then it wasn’t just a curiosity. It had developed shape and purpose to find out what had happened to my neighbor John.

When my working day ended, I went to the sector A exit. I wanted to meet some workers which I had noticed in the morning and ask them about John. Unfortunately, their working day usually ended two hours later than mine. I decided to wait.

While waiting, I was wandering through the parking lot when I noticed that John’s car was gone. Maybe he had been there and left, but maybe someone took his car away after my questions in the morning. I could only guess.

Finally, workers started to appear at the exit. I caught someone familiar who I’d seen in the morning and asked him about John. He knew my neighbor, but besides that, there was nothing more to it. I was also questioning him about the factory itself, but he said that everything was fine. It seemed completely normal place for him despite the high-security aspect. They were producing small electronic components for computers, phones, cars and other things. It coincided with what my neighbor had told me before and information I got from the superiors.

The only clue I got from this person was that John had gotten a raise. He had been transferred to sector B. It coincided with the letter John’s wife had shown me a few days ago. The worker couldn’t provide me with the information how to get to John or how to get into the sector B. It was a dead end once again, but this time I wasn’t ready to give up.

The next day, I examined all the other factory sectors from outside. I made a worrisome discovery. These sectors didn’t have the same entrances and exits as sector A or my office building. They were fenced. Although the whole territory was demarcated, around these sectors there were additional fences. These fences weren’t flashy or even noticeable, they were made to look as insignificant as possible. Even more startling was the fact that no workers left or entered these sectors, and they were much bigger than sector A!

I could have just asked my superiors about John, but by then my discoveries had gotten me so suspicious that I didn’t want to ask them anything. I wasn’t trusting them one bit. My task was to find out what was happening in these other sectors on my own.

Security around the whole territory was very good, but security between the sectors wasn’t as good. I had an advantage over someone who might want to break in from the outside as my office was already located in the territory. For me, it might be possible to get in, but then I started to think that such action could be too much. They would fire me immediately if they found out. I just had to stop.

In the evening on that day, my neighbor’s wife visited me again. She had gotten even worse since the last time I saw her. She’d stopped to eat normally and had become very skinny. Love problems are always hard to deal with. As my neighbor had brought her to the area, away from her family, she didn’t know anyone there very well, so that was why she always came to me. When I realized this, the case became even weirder. The house she lived in wasn’t hers. It was John’s house. Even if he wanted to divorce his wife, why would he leave his own house? I couldn’t stop investigating! Something wasn’t right for sure!

Then I made a decision to break in after all. I told John’s wife about my plans. That calmed her a bit. I was getting ready for my act the whole week. It had to be perfect, so I could get away with it, although I wasn’t a professional burglar.

Finally, the day had come. At the end of the working day, I beeped my card which registered the entering and exiting times and allowed me to pass into the office. But I didn’t exit this time. I just needed them to think that I had left. Fortunately, my office building didn’t have a security guard. After that, I hid in the thick bushes behind the office building and waited for the dark. Then I found my bag which I had hidden there the previous day and changed clothes. I looked like a real burglar dressed up in black track pants, black sweater and wearing a balaclava.

After that, I sneaked into the janitor’s closet and got a ladder from there. I needed it to reach the ventilation shaft in the sector B wall. I crawled through the hole in the sector B fence which I had made the other day. All the time I was counting seconds. I knew the order and exact times when security guards should pass by.

Finally, I was screwing open the ventilation shaft’s grill. When it was done, I had one last task before getting in. I pushed the ladder, and it fell into the bushes. I could only hope that no one heard the noise, and no one would find the ladder in the bushes. Then I was crawling through the shaft. No matter how well I had planned all this, I didn’t know what was waiting for me on the other side.

The shaft ended in the dark corridor, and no one was there. I silently jumped down and began my investigation.

I could see a light coming from the left and went there. After a short walk, I came out into the main manufacturing room. They were working night shifts there. It was nothing uncommon, a lot of factories work 24/7, but something malicious and sinister was in the air.

The lightning wasn’t sufficient, the air was stale and I sensed the odor of sweat. The surroundings were dirty and dusty. This wasn’t a modern factory. This was something you would see some 100 years in the past. No way was sector A the same. John and the other worker wouldn’t have said that it was fine. But all this wasn’t the worse.

The complete silence was prevailing there, if not counting the noise of work. These people weren’t talking to each other, they were just mechanically repeating their moves to continue the work. Almost no robots were helping them. Everything that could be done by hands was made by hands of these people. This was terrible! It really was like 100 years ago! I had to find my neighbor and get him out of there.

As a miracle, I noticed John. He was working not far away from me. I ran to him, grabbed his shoulder and pulled him around. I shouted to him that we had to go, that I would get him out of here, but he wasn’t reacting to me in any way. His eyes seemed blank and dead. My neighbor had become like a robot himself, like his body was still here, but the soul had left it a long time ago.

As I was more in the middle of the room than when I arrived, I noticed the surrounding walls above us. Along these walls, small rooms were arranged. They had many floors. I saw that some workers left their places and ascended to these rooms, while others were waking up and going to now unoccupied workbenches. They made their switch almost instantly. Work didn’t cease in this place even for a moment.

People who were laying on the beds had pipes inserted into their mouths and butts. That was some kind of life-supporting feeding system. The ones who just had finished working undressed and inserted these pipes by themselves.

I didn’t get to inspect this room more closely because then I got knocked out. I didn’t see who was the perpetrator because he had sneaked behind my back.

Now I am sitting in almost identical room as workers in sector B, only mine has bars. I can see feeding pipes hanging from the ceiling. I am really scared. It may sound too simply put for you, my reader, but I really can’t describe my fear by words. I can only tell you what I saw yesterday.

I had a neighbor in the cell right next to mine. He told me everything he knew about this place. Now there is some other person whom I told everything I know.

Yesterday workers with the dead eyes from the sector B came here and dragged the first person in my neighboring cell out of there. Among them was also John. While the victim was screaming hysterically, John’s face was completely expressionless and like petrified. No muscles were moving to show some feelings, only indifference and deadly obedience to the orders.

A hospital bed with straps is located in the middle of this room. I don’t know why they have this bed with the equipment here. Maybe to generate even more fear in their victims.

So, they strapped the man to the bed, their hands clutching him like robot ones, without giving any chance of getting away. Then happened the worst – an operation somehow similar to lobotomy. It was performed by medical robot, while workers were standing and watching.

I guess this operation was really painful because victim was screaming frantically, and robot didn’t use any sedatives. With the long awl, it inserted some sort of probe into the man’s brain through his nose. After a few seconds, the man became silent. Workers unstrapped him and now he was just like them – dead, emotionless eyes without any spark in them. After that, they all left, probably to continue their factory work.

I think the probe is some kind of device which controls human brain and emotions. It makes you a slave. All this explains the super high production numbers and low costs which I noticed when I started to work for this company. They don’t have to pay for the expensive equipment, salaries, and insurances. They are enslaving people in probably the most terrible way humanity has ever experienced. In ancient times, they did this by harsh punishment to disobedient slaves. Now they can use technology, which makes all the enslaving process much easier, and once you become slave there is no going back. Then they write some fake letter to your wife and friends that you have decided to pursue your career and leave them. They even don’t have to use bars, chains, and punishments because now they have gotten to your brain.

Today, as some sort of a miracle I found this scrap of paper in my cell. With my bare hands, I scratched a little shard of concrete out of the wall, with which I’ve managed to write this letter. I also have a small ventilation hole in the wall. I think this hole leads out of the factory territory, so I can only hope you will find this letter before they perform that crazy operation on me…

Now, and this is probably the most important part of this letter, I will give all the information and numbers about this company. The company is called… the letters are smudged here and following is unreadable If you still don’t believe me, please never ever apply for a job to… note is smudged again...