Hi Lisa,
Thank’s for reaching out to me. I’m willing to help in any way that I can. Like many here, I had a tough time after the Luau attack. It seemed like there could be another bombing at any time, and all the investigators asking questions kept everyone nervous. I was on edge most days, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. You’ve done a remarkable job at piloting us through all the fear and chaos. We weren’t sure that the company would come out the other end of this intact. Not only have we made it through those troubled waters, we’ve never been stronger as an organization. I respect you and the work you’ve done, that’s why I agreed to report to you directly if Dr. Oeming did anything unusual.
To be honest, I was very uncomfortable with your request at first. This was Eric Oeming: the inventor of veil travel, one of the world’s richest men, CEO of the world’s largest company, brilliant scientist, survivor of a bombing attack. Reporting on his actions while working under a roof that he had built seemed wrong to me. With all the rumors swirling around after his return and the media lockdown, I worried that you might be dragging me into something above my paygrade. Everything seemed fine for a while, but then I found Dr. Oeming in my office one morning with a request.
He wanted to have all the data for 2 specific nights of transports. I told him that it would be no problem and I would make sure he had it by the afternoon. Then he said that he also wanted anything we had from customer’s ceremplants for those same nights. I started to explain that we’d need a court order to review that data, but before I could finish he became very agitated. He complained that he didn’t have time for paperwork, and that there was a time that “employees just did what they were told.” He must have seen the shock in my eyes because he calmed himself and said that any help I could provide would be appreciated.
I never worked with Dr. Oeming before but I had heard people say he was a different man after the attack. They said he hardly talked anymore and insisted on working alone. I didn’t think much of it to tell you the truth. I can’t imagine what losing my family would do to me. I don’t see how escaping a bomb attack couldn’t change who you are. He looked so earnest in my office, like some part of him really needed this information. So, I thought I’d look into it personally. I’m turning everything I found over to you because I don’t really understand what’s going on, but I think Dr. Oeming is involved somehow.
We get complaints about our veil ads all the time. Most are about some sort of technical issue: blurred images in the stream, ringing in the ears during the ads, that sort of thing. We take detailed reports from everyone who has an issue, but we get so many that they often get lost in the shuffle. I started looking at the two nights in question and didn’t see anything unusual at first. There was a slight uptick in complaints about ads but nothing that seemed notable until I started to read the customer narratives. This is going to sound strange, but a significant number of customers those nights report seeing things that aren’t ads in our inventory.
A number of travelers on the night of September 27th reported seeing an ad for an unknown war movie. A few complained that they didn’t recognize any of the actors and that they never saw a title. However, most of the complaints that night were about the graphic nature of the ad. In particular, a mother claimed that her children were traumatized by witnessing a soldier being hacked apart. I had assumed that another bad ad had slipped past our quality control team. Upon closer review, I discovered we didn’t have any movie ads in the rotation, let alone anything that graphic.
Then on the night of September 29th, there was a similar uptick in ad complaints. This time the issue wasn’t graphic violence but rather another question about messaging. The reports say that customers saw fields of plants as far as the eye could see. It was the description of the plants that caught my eye. Dozens say that they saw fields of short plants with reddish pods that looked like chicken wings. That reminded me of something. Do you remember last year when we lost that flat of Kükenroot seedlings? These reports seem to describe a field of Kükenroot. Then I noticed the dates.
Wasn’t Dr. Oeming’s daughter born on the 27th and his wife on the 29th? After some digging I found that we experienced numerous little power surges throughout those nights too. Nothing large enough to raise an alarm but big enough to show up in the daily reports. I went through employee records and discovered that according to his badge, Dr. Oeming never left the lab to go home those nights. I’m not really sure what all this means but thought it definitely met your criteria for “anything unusual”. I hope you don’t think I’ve been reading too many tabloids or running down a hole of conspiracy theories. There’ no doubt something odd is going on, and I’m hoping you can clear it up, whatever it is. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do.
