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Jesse: Fair warning. This is gonna be weirder than usual. Can’t be helped. You called me, so here I am. I know I shut you out sometimes. I’m always glad to hear from you. It’s just that I get my hopes up. So many times, it’s led to nothing. I found nothing. It’s like, we live in a room, and there’s a poster on the wall. We stare at it and we think that’s the whole world, the room and the poster. The picture’s something nice, a landscape, a famous person. Like in that movie, what is it called, the prison movie? The room’s a cell. And the picture, it’s different for each of us. It can be beautiful or terrible, but we’re all transfixed. But it’s all a lie. Something to distract us from the truth. They’re lying to us. We’re lying to ourselves. The room’s not the world, the world is much bigger and much stranger. There’s a hole hidden behind that poster that leads to the real world. We all feel safe in that room. But sometimes, sometimes, something crawls from behind the poster. And the ones that see it happen, freak out, and try to forget what they saw. I’m here. Why did you bring me here?
Jesse: Hello? Anyone here?
Jesse: This seal: I saw it a long time ago. I keep seeing it in my dream.
Jesse: Federal Bureau of Control. All these years, I’ve been looking for them and they were hiding in plain sight.
Jesse: Hello? Hey! Excuse me.
Ahti: There you are! You are here about the job. Janitor’s assistant. You need to go to the interview. Go that way to the elevator.
Jesse: Thanks. Elevator, that way. Got it.
Ahti: Very good. I’m Ahti, the janitor, by the way. You’ll work for me. You can say I sent you. If they don’t hire you, niin johan on helvetti. There be work for the axe, take them behind the sauna, jumalauta.
Jesse: (I’ve done enough nightshift loner jobs to know it makes us come off weird. Ahti the janitor is a friendly face in my book.)
Ahti: Better than somebody with no face at all. Think about it, no face.
Jesse: (But that said, I know what you’re thinking: if there’s an axe-murdered around, that’s him.)
Jesse: The cell and the poster. I was eleven years old the first time I saw behind the poster. They told me I imagined it. I’ve been trying to pull it down ever since. Will you help?