Recovered Audio Log 422-A-77-93 Location: BrayTech R&D Lab, Europa Speaker: Dr. Elise Abram, Lead Researcher [i]Recovered Audio Log Details:[/i] [b]Hidden beneath layers of encryption and marked for deletion, the log appears to have been recorded without official authorization. The metadata suggests this was part of a personal record, intended to be kept off the books. The speaker, Dr. Elise Abram, was the lead researcher on the classified temporal stabilization project. All formal documentation of the experiment has since been expunged from BrayTech’s records. This log is one of the only surviving pieces of evidence detailing what truly occurred.[/b] [i]Warning: Unauthorized access to this material is strictly prohibited. Extreme caution is advised while reviewing the contents.[/i] [i]Transcription begins[/i] “If you’ve accessed this log, it means the project has slipped through the cracks. I wish you hadn’t.” [i][Static][/i] “This is Dr. Elise Abram, lead researcher on Project Timelost. We weren’t making weapons, not in the traditional sense. We were trying to mend something far worse: time itself. It was falling apart, and we thought we could pull the strings back together. Maybe we were arrogant. No - we were arrogant.” “It started small. Localized temporal anomalies. We thought we could reverse entropy, stabilize spacetime distortions. Little glitches at first. A mug out of place. A clock showing the wrong time. We believed we could fix them, patch the gaps. We thought we understood. But time doesn’t want to be controlled. And what we didn’t understand… killed us.” [i][Static][/i] “The deeper we went, the more unstable everything became. People started forgetting days, sometimes whole weeks. At first, it was a slow bleed - minor losses, we thought. But then… it escalated. People disappeared. Not just from their lives, but from existence itself. They weren’t gone - they never were. That’s what made it worse.” “I could feel something was wrong. I’d walk into the lab, and it was quiet - too quiet. You notice things. Empty seats where you know someone used to sit. Conversations that suddenly had gaps in them, like we were all forgetting something… or someone. But there were no records, no proof. Just an absence, like a hole in reality.” “I read something in the Vanguard archives once. There was a fireteam that went into the Vault of Glass. When they emerged, they had no memory of one of their own. Worse than that - there were no records of him. It wasn’t that he had died. The archives said he had never existed. Just erased, like the Vex had reached into reality and plucked him out of time itself. Gone, and no one even noticed.” “That’s what was happening to us.” [i][Static][/i] “We thought we were different from the Vex. We thought we could manage the threads, stitch the gaps. But time doesn’t bend for anyone. It breaks. And when it does, people don’t just vanish - they’re erased. Just like in the Vault. If only it stopped there.” [i][Static][/i] “Some… some of them came back. Not all of them, and not as they were. I remember one of the lab techs, Samir. He was gone for days, and then one morning, he was back, sitting at his workstation as if he had never left. But something was off. He looked the same, mostly, But his speech was… slower, his eyes unfocused. It was like he was trapped in a version of himself that didn’t belong here.” “Others were even worse. You’d hear them muttering things, memories that didn’t align with the reality we knew - events that never happened, people they shouldn’t have known. One of them even said she had a family, children she described in vivid detail, but no one in our world remembered them. Not a single record. Like they were from a timeline that never crossed ours.” “And then there were those who came back… broken. Not just mentally, but physically. Parts of them flickered, like they were shifting in and out of existence. We couldn’t help them. No one could. We had torn them out of wherever they came from, and they were never the same again. Best thing we could do is put them out” [i][Static][/i] “By the time we understood what we’d done, the project had already taken too much. More than we could remember. Logs like this, scattered records - things I had my Ghost record in secret - are the only way I’ve been able to hold onto the truth. Yeah… they don’t know, especially Clovis; sometimes, to survive, you must become someone else. You must let them think you’re something you’re not.” [i][Static][/i] “I wanted to shut it down. I wanted to stop before we lost everything, but Clovis… he refused. He saw potential. He always did. Said this was just the beginning, that we were on the verge of something groundbreaking. ‘Progress demands sacrifice,’ he’d say. But he never understood what we were really sacrificing. He didn’t care because he only saw power.” “I tried to reason with him. Tried to make him see. But he doesn’t stop. Not when he’s convinced he’s right. And so, the project continued. More tests, more missing faces, more people we couldn’t save.” [i][Static][/i] “If you’ve found this log, you’ve found the remnants of a disaster. We tore reality apart, one thread at a time. And now, every time someone touches those threads, they risk unraveling more of it. You risk walking into the domain of the lost.” [i]Transcription ends.[/i]