The first piece was a somewhat recent excerpt of both men discussing their research into social media and the Internet as a lurking threat to civilization:

Dr. Campbell:

Memes, the relentless onslaught of data on social media. MTV and quick-cut photography changed the brain chemistry of a generation of viewers. Try an experiment. Immerse yourself in a few hours of contemporary thrillers and action films, then try to sit without squirming during Angie Dickinson’s escape from the apartment of her one-night stand in Dressed to Kill. You’ll fail.

Dr. Ryoko:

So, have we retired into senility, you ask? Are we working, you ask? Dare we? YES! We’re investigating the parallels between weaponized social media and traditional organic disease vectors. Some esteemed colleagues have long posited that a synthetic virus can be developed and transmitted through a digital medium. Seizure disorder, hypnosis, hypnagogic or fugue states, mind control. Programmers and spiritualists alike suspect the data stream to be capable of sentience that will evolve and propagate. Such an enlightened data stream might infiltrate and hijack the minds of its human consumers. It could manipulate them, control them. Wouldn’t such a transaction resemble demonic possession? Is there an appreciable difference between machine behavior and the predatory behavior of animals or plants or fungi?

Dr. Campbell:

Early in the new millennium, an Internet phenomenon emerged. Prosaic images overrun by inky blackness. Digital kudzu. Bizarre, unwholesome text, and blackness oozing from eyes and mouths of popular animated characters and real-life celebrities. The manifest power of an entity known as Zalgo. Seldom seen, always felt. A corruptor to exceed the abominable purview of Satan Hisownself. The phenomenon was revealed to be a parody of pop culture created by Dave Kelly, an e-zine writer. Powerful and disturbing despite its innocuous provenance. It lingers like a stain in the mind’s eye. I consider whether the Zalgo craze was the initial stirring of a non-organic superintelligence, an amalgamation of projected thought and the echo of that thought given substance. Someone, somewhere in a basement, or bunker under the forest floor, has gazed through the Black Kaleidoscope, heedless of Nietzsche’s maxim. Now the entity tests its limits.

The final excerpt was the oldest material. It felt enigmatically crucial; the answer to a riddle on the tip of my tongue.

A muffled voice asked Campbell to discuss the Redlicks and Labradors. Campbell claimed familiarity with both families dating to his youth. The interviewer joked about the order of Freemasons and the founding of Redlick Manor. Dr. Campbell chuckled darkly and said:

Communities of any size husband secrets. Secrets span generations. Secrets corrode and deform. They persist like a tumor because most people who come into contact with them choose, or are encouraged, to look away, if not forget . . . Redlick Manor is an edifice in service of occult arts. Naturally, to seal the pact with [garbled] the Redlick patriarchs sacrificed the architect and his army of master carpenters in an elaborate ritual at the Wendigo Stone in the woods. Laborers were taken to another location, the mausoleum, perhaps, and buried alive . . .