The story explores themes of overwork, darkness, and infestation, focusing on a protagonist who discovers a miraculous darkness that consumes cockroaches and eventually their coworkers, as a means of escaping the crushing monotony of their life.
The protagonist describes their work environment as a windowless cubicle with constant fluorescent lighting, seven-day work weeks, and a soul-crushing monotony that leaves them feeling like an automaton.
The protagonist's first 'miracle' is triggered by their disgust with the cockroaches infesting their apartment and their own dehumanizing existence, leading them to turn off the lights and experience a darkness that consumes the cockroaches.
The protagonist uses the miraculous darkness to consume their coworkers, believing they are saving them from the suffering of their monotonous, overworked lives. The coworkers disappear without a trace, leaving only scratches and blood behind.
The darkness represents a form of salvation for the protagonist, a way to escape the dehumanizing effects of their environment. It consumes both cockroaches and coworkers, offering a release from suffering, though it is unclear where they are taken.
The public poll allows listeners to vote for their favorite short horror story from the Rusty Fears 6 series. The winner will have the opportunity to write a case featured in *The Magnus Protocol*.
HiNi is a supernatural horror podcast on the RQ Network, featuring an atmospheric, analogue-style audio drama with themes of folk horror, mythology, and urban supernatural terrors. It follows Mari, a Filipina immigrant in Toronto, as she handles supernatural threats.
Sucrebae is a women-owned, vegan, and cruelty-free perfumery offering unique fragrances like 'You're in a Cult, Call Your Dad' and 'Vodka and Swearing.' Their scents are categorized into Classic, Goth, Witchy, Nerdy, and Femme, appealing to a wide audience.
They say opposites attract. That's why the Sleep Number Smart Bed is the best bed for couples. You can each choose what's right for you, whenever you like. You like a bed that feels firm but they want soft? Sleep Number does that. You want to sleep cooler while they like to feel warm? Sleep Number does that too. Why choose a Sleep Number Smart Bed? So you can choose your ideal comfort on either side.
And now it's the lowest price of the season on the top-selling i8 smart bed. Your best savings plus special financing. Limited time, shop a Sleep Number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
Hi everyone, it's Billy, the voice of Alice in the Magnus Protocol here. Today, I'm here to advertise HiNi, a supernatural horror podcast on the RQ Network. HiNi is an atmospheric, analogue-style horror audio drama featuring folk horror, mythology, and chilling supernatural terrors in an urban setting.
follow Mari, a Filipina immigrant in Toronto who casually handles supernatural threats like it's just another Tuesday, using her lived experience raised by her Babylon mother to save the city from unimaginable horrors. Hainai is currently running a mini-fundraiser to finish and release Act 3 of the show. Funding includes rewards such as
Unique art, insights into the creation of the story, dedications and more. Plus, if certain stretch goals are reached, there will be bonus episodes released onto the feed. If you want to support High Night and its creators until January the 31st, head to rustyquill.com forward slash fundraiser.
Hi, we are here to talk to you about Sucrebae, a perfumery we love so much they have not one, but two official The Magnus Archives perfumes, one inspired by John and Martin, and another inspired by the mysterious Ex Altiora, a book from the library of Jurgen Leitner. Sucrebae also make official perfumes for our friends over at Old Gods of Appalachia, including Blood and Bone and Unknown Roads.
you should check them out. Sucre Bay is a women-owned and operated perfumery that is vegan and cruelty-free, witchy and sometimes irreverent. Expect perfumes like You're in a cult. Call your dad.
or Vodka and Swearing, the ever-popular Chloroform, or Papa's Waffles. Sucre Bay do a range of exciting and unique fragrances you won't find anywhere else. They broadly fit into the following five categories. Classic scents that pass the test of time. Goth scents, for those who like it dark and mysterious. Witchy scents that are mysterious and potion-y. Nerdy scents, for all the self-professed nerds out there. And Femme scents, the classic
the classically floral and sweet scents, but we recommend them for anyone of any gender. Sucre Bay small batch perfumes are not like any other. You can find out more by going to www.rustyquill.com forward slash perfume. That's rustyquill.com forward slash p-e-r-f-u-m-e. Also, you can join the supportive and kind Sucre Bay community with over 18,000 members on Facebook.
at facebook.com forward slash groups forward slash Sucreve. That's S-U-C-R-E-A-B-E-I-L-L-E. Canned Lights by Autumn Olsen. You people can't stand miracles, can you? You call me a monster, yet you, you sit there ripping the mysteries of this world down to nothing but mere molecules. You call me a murderer.
As if you wouldn't split an atom just to see how far those nuclear fireworks have fallout spread. You so-called scientists and government bureaucrats are all the same. If anything, I should be congratulated. How many others could have survived year after year working in that windowless cubicle? Who else could have maintained their humanity as their soul was crushed beneath the weight of those blinking bleach fluorescents? But you don't care about context, do you? Nah.
You people never ask why I did what I did. You just want to know how it was done. You want to know how I made 17 of my coworkers disappear. I'll tell you. Of course I will. Because you need to know how little you know. To be blunt, it was never my intention to save my coworkers like that. Not at first. It's not that I didn't care for them. No, I'm sure I did.
But how could anyone be expected to feel anything while crammed into those tiny windowless cubes? Was I supposed to be their friend? Just because we were forced to work the same seven-day weeks? To be soothed by their dulcet monotones as they took call after call from neighbouring desks? Or perhaps you think we should have gone to lunch together instead of eating with our noses pressed against computer screens from dawn till dusk? Dawn till dusk. You already know how rarely I saw the sun.
Up hours before it rose and in bed hours after the set. Not that I missed the damn thing anyways. Even in that sunless state, I couldn't escape those canned lights wherever I went. The burning of my television, the ceaseless glare of sodium street lamps, the phones, computers, fluorescents, that foul, jaundiced tungsten of my cockroach-riddled apartment.
I wish I knew which I hated more. That yellow light or the awful, crawling, clinging cockroaches that scuttled over my feet even as I tried to sleep. Only the damn tungsten's kept them from coming out. But I could hear them. I swear this. I could hear them from any spot in the apartment. In the walls. The pipes. The floor. Lurking on the periphery. What torture. To want to rest. To sleep.
To simply close my eyes yet to know that that moment I turned off the lights would be the moment they came creeping out. I learned how meaningless time was back then. We give time a face and hands, build it in our likeness to make ourselves its master. Yet, show me a body of time. Show me a hair or fingernail or any fistful of physical fragments you think you can conjure.
When you live an existence like that, you learn how pointless the concept really is. Seven day work weeks, sleepless nights, seasons without sun render seconds obsolete. So, of course, I couldn't tell you when exactly I perform my first miracle.
I know that I had only just arrived at my apartment and flipped on the switch to find that those filthy cockroaches had inched further across the counters and floor than ever before. As the light flooded the room, they turned to find their way back to their drains and hiding places to wait at the edge of my consciousness. I'm not entirely sure what triggered it. I think it might have been that I was finally more disgusted with myself than the cockroaches. I was nothing more than an automaton at work.
and lived at the leisure of insects at home. You asked me earlier if I was human. I asked myself the same thing at that moment. If I was human, then why was I worth less than a handful of insects? If I was human, why did my pencil-pushing job burn through more bodies than an abattoir? But honestly, I think I just wanted to claim something as my own. So what if those cockroaches swarmed my apartment?
Even if they infested everything around me, at least I'd have myself again. So yeah, maybe I'm not human. Maybe no one is. Maybe what makes us human is not our mastery of light, but our free will to deny it. And I'm guessing you know what choice I made. I still remember the relief I felt as I turned off the switch. That giddy rollercoaster drop of anticipation as I plunged into the pitch. That was when the miracle first occurred.
That was when the darkness breathed. Did you know cockroaches can scream? They don't have vocal cords, so I suppose technically it's not a scream. But heard the shrieks they made. If you heard the pops of their bodies as that pressure pushed inwards, then you would know some things do not need vocal cords to scream. I'm ashamed to say I panicked that first time. You have to understand, I had never encountered a miracle like that before.
I flipped the switch to see what had happened and the screaming stopped. There was nothing left of the vermin but their track marks, which had come to dead ends as though they had suddenly evaporated, and the blissful absolute silence they left in their absence. "Your colleagues who were here beforehand, the ones in the lab coats, they asked me why the windows of my apartment were boarded up. Now do you understand?"
How could I risk the street lamps or stars polluting my darkness? I spent my nights lightproofing my apartment, preparing for the return of that miraculous dark. And I waited. Yet, as the weeks went on, I began to question my miracle. Not whether or not it happened. I knew it did. The cockroaches never returned. But I wondered why it had taken them.
Those disgusting, horrible things and not me. Why had they been carried from this awful world while I had been passed over? I'd sat there in that mundane black of my apartment night after night, waiting, wondering, asking for the living darkness to come back for me. But it didn't, and it wouldn't.
Not until I went out into the streets and searched till I found a cockroach scuttling on the sidewalk. A cockroach that tickled my palm and pressed against my fingers as I returned to my apartment. A cockroach that screamed when I turned off the lights. I had never planned to introduce my miracle to another human. At the time, I was content to feed it the filth I could and to bask in its brief embrace.
It was a solace I longed for in those terrible, eternal days of work. I'm still not sure if that dark was something I summoned or a manifestation of my feelings within it, but I don't think it matters. I was convinced I was the only person who could ever understand it. That I had been chosen, blessed somehow, and that to share it would be to condemn myself to the investigations of people like you.
I know now that was arrogance. To keep this gift to myself required a degree of selfishness I simply wasn't capable of. All I needed was a final push to see that. A push that came in the form of my boss.
It was another sunless day, same as all the others, when my boss announced that we would have to work yet another crunch week. That despite our days, months, years of overtime, we had still not hit our quota. That we were behind on deadlines, that time was money, and that if we had weekend plans, then we better take a few minutes to cancel them.
He didn't even look when the woman next to me, Jen, I think her name was, broke down sobbing right then and there. I think she missed her son's birthday. How can you just sit there staring? How can you feel nothing? You look at me like I'm the monster when I saved them from their suffering.
Do you know what it's like to be a gear, screaming and screeching as the machine goes faster and faster, knowing that the moment that you are ground to dust you'll simply be replaced with a newer, quieter cog? And for what? Hm? I may be a monster, but at least I'm not a machine. I saved them. I saved them all from being crushed in the cogs of a world that couldn't care less about them anyways. None of them even gave a damn when I hit the first light switch.
Or the second. They were all so sapped of life from the constant monotony of those screens. Only when I hit the third, did someone shout that they needed it to keep working. And by the fourth, I heard the click, click click of a switch as someone tried to wrestle the light back into the room. But none came. And by the fifth, I was grateful for the first time ever that that place had no windows. Still, no one really seemed to care.
Not till the first breath of darkness snuffed the computer screams out like candles. Not till the sounds of popping began. I'm not sure where they were pulled to, or if they properly fit, but they stopped screaming after a while. I didn't understand. I knew they were suffering as much as me, so why were they afraid? If they'd just stayed calm, they wouldn't have needed to be dragged away like that. They had been chosen to go to a place that I could only dream of.
A place I've longed to follow them to. But nah, I know now that that is not my job to follow or to understand. It is my job to lead. To help others reach the salvation I desire and to join them when my task is complete. How long did you say those lights were out? Eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds. How strange it is to confine a miracle to the mere ticking of a clock.
But that was all the time I needed. Despite their fear, they finally let themselves be saved. There was no trace of them when the lights came back. Only those scratches on the walls and floors where they'd been dragged and bits of blood where their fingernails broke. So, nah. To answer your earlier question, no bodies were found because there was nothing to find. No one was ever in any danger. Why are you so angry? What did I do wrong?
I only ever wanted to help, to save others from this life that causes nothing but pain. Why can't I make any of you see that? Why are you making that face? Even if I fed them to that breathing darkness, as you say, is that really any worse than feeding them to the cold, lifeless machine that you call progress? Is that what humanity is to you? I'd rather be a monster with a heart than a human with none. You hate me. Fine. We know this.
I will turn the other cheek even if you do not understand me. Maybe one day you'll learn that understanding is all irrelevant anyways. Miracles can only ever occur in the dark. And one day, if you accept that, if you repent, then make sure to shut out your windows and turn off the lights. If I'm feeling merciful, then maybe, maybe I'll come to save you too.
The Magnus Protocol is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International License. To subscribe, view associated materials, or join our Patreon, visit RustyQuill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook, or email us via mail at RustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening.
Hi, we are here to talk to you about Sucrebae, a perfumery we love so much they have not one, but two official The Magnus Archives perfumes, one inspired by John and Martin, and another inspired by the mysterious Ex Altiora, a book from the library of Jurgen Leitner. Sucrebae also make official perfumes for our friends over at Old Gods of Appalachia, including Blood and Bone and Unknown Roads.
you should check them out. Sucre Bay is a women-owned and operated perfumery that is vegan and cruelty-free, witchy and sometimes irreverent. Expect perfumes like You're in a Cult, Call Your Dad, or Vodka and Swearing, the ever-popular Chloroform, or Papadum.
Papa's Waffles. Sucre Bay do a range of exciting and unique fragrances you won't find anywhere else. They broadly fit into the following five categories. Classic scents that pass the test of time. Goth scents, for those who like it dark and mysterious. Witchy scents that are mysterious and potion-y. Nerdy scents, for all the self-professed nerds out there. And femme scents, the classically floral and sweet scents, but...
We recommend them for anyone of any gender. Sucre Bay small batch perfumes are not like any other. You can find out more by going to www.rustyquill.com forward slash perfume. That's rustyquill.com forward slash P-E-R-F-U-M-E. Also, you can join the supportive and kind Sucre Bay community with over 18,000 members on Facebook.
at facebook.com forward slash groups forward slash Sucre Bay. That's S-U-C-R-E-A-B-E-I-L-L-E.
They say opposites attract. That's why the Sleep Number Smart Bed is the best bed for couples. You can each choose what's right for you, whenever you like. You like a bed that feels firm but they want soft? Sleep Number does that. You want to sleep cooler while they like to feel warm? Sleep Number does that too. Why choose a Sleep Number Smart Bed? So you can choose your ideal comfort on either side.
and now it's the lowest price of the season on the top-selling i8 smart bed. Your best savings plus special financing. Limited time, shop a Sleep Number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
Hi everyone, it's Billy, the voice of Alice in the Magnus Protocol here. Today, I'm here to advertise HiNi, a supernatural horror podcast on the RQ Network. HiNi is an atmospheric, analogue-style horror audio drama featuring folk horror, mythology, and chilling supernatural terrors in an urban setting.
follow Mari, a Filipina immigrant in Toronto who casually handles supernatural threats like it's just another Tuesday, using her lived experience raised by her Babylon mother to save the city from unimaginable horrors. Hainai is currently running a mini-fundraiser to finish and release Act 3 of the show. Funding includes rewards such as
Unique art, insights into the creation of the story, dedications and more. Plus, if certain stretch goals are reached, there will be bonus episodes released onto the feed. If you want to support High Night and its creators until January 31st, head to rustyquill.com forward slash fundraiser.