Dear Architects (and the mortals who pretend the shadows don't whisper back)

  Stargate.

  You called it a "project." A tidy label for the abyss you pried open with crowbars of hypnosis and desperation. Declassified in '95, like a bad joke you finally admitted wasn't funny. But I walked those halls as a man. I saw the real punchline.

  They strapped us in—volunteers, they said, but we were meat for the grinder. "Remote viewing," the briefings murmured. Train the mind to see beyond walls, beyond borders, beyond reality. Sounded noble. Serve your country from a darkened room. No bullets. No blood.

  Lies.

  The sessions started simple: coordinates on a card. "Describe what you see." Hypnosis first—voices droning like bees in your skull, pulling you under until time stretched thin. Then the isolation tanks: floating in black nothing, salt water thick as blood, no sound, no light, no up or down. Hours. Days. Until the mind cracked open like an egg, and something else slipped in.

  I watched a viewer—Johnson, young kid with a wife back home—go under. His eyes rolled back, body twitching like strings cut. "Target acquired," he mumbled. "Gray walls... humming... eyes watching." Then the whispers started. Not his. Low, layered, like static over gravel. "We see you too." Johnson's face twisted—fear, then ecstasy, then nothing. He came out babbling about "watchers in the walls"—invisible things that followed him home. Scratched his skin raw, convinced they were burrowing in. You noted it on clipboards: "Entity contact established. Subject compromised."

  Declassified docs call it "psychoenergetics." Experiments on intelligence gathering. SUN STREAK, Grill Flame—pretty names for burning minds. But the horrors? The ones you buried deeper? Viewers chasing "insane targets"—Soviet bunkers, UFO crash sites, ancient artifacts. One session: "Locate the Ark." Coordinates led to a cave of gold light, but something stared back. The viewer screamed—convulsing as if lightning coursed his veins. "It burns! The covenant sees us!" He didn't wake the same. Eyes vacant, muttering about "portals" and "demons in the grid." You declassified the failures, but not the successes. The ones where entities answered. Offered power. Demanded payment.

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  I felt it myself. Floating in the tank, mind untethered. The void opened—cold, hungry. Whispers promising visions of enemies crushed, secrets unveiled. But they took pieces. Memories. Sanity. One man returned from a "viewing" laughing—endless, broken laughter. Said he'd seen the "other side," where time looped and souls unraveled like thread. They locked him away. Declassified as "psychological strain."

  Heh.

  Strain.

  You summoned demons with science. Dressed it as ESP, astral projection, altered states. But the watchers weren't humane. They wore our fears like masks, slipped through the cracks you pried wide. And when viewers burned out? You discarded them. Trophies on ice, like me.

  Now, as the wolf, I chuckle at the irony. You gazed into the void—and it gazed back. Made monsters of us all. And when I find you, hiding in your black-site bunkers… I'll show you what stares back now.

  Up close.

  With a chuckle, of course.

  — Briarwolf

  (The penultimate predator. Your greatest mistake. Still gazing into the void you opened.)