Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel

Old Jim is taken to a Central facility where he undergoes a months-long detoxification and rehabilitation program. Feeling broken and empty, he takes up playing the piano, a remnant of his former self, to cope with his psychological state. After five months, his boss, Jack Severance, meets with him to deliver a new mission brief.

Jack explains that Old Jim will be sent to the Forgotten Coast to investigate an “existential threat” connected to a secret Central project called “Serum Bliss,” a mind-control experiment. His official cover is to monitor a civilian paranormal research group, the Séance and Science Brigade (S&SB), which is already operating in the area. Jackie is already on-site and will be part of the operation. Jack cryptically describes a weapon that can change people’s minds without their knowledge; Old Jim, already deep in the Dead Town Disaster files before this meeting, connects this to the Rogue and the generator. As Old Jim leaves the conference room, Jack passes him a slip of paper in a handshake: “Top Priority: Find the Rogue. Eliminate the Rogue.” (93)

As he travels to the Forgotten Coast, Old Jim recalls disturbing details from the Dead Town Disaster files concerning the two expedition team leaders, Alexis Aguilar (Team Leader 1) and Kim Numi (Team Leader 2). After the disaster, Central operatives found Aguilar and Numi hiding in a motel room with two of the mysterious “rabbit cameras” from the expedition site.

During their interrogation, the traumatized biologists claimed they had fled to get help but could not adequately explain their actions or why they took the cameras. Central concluded they were not traitors but still considered them a security risk. As a result, Aguilar and Numi were permanently exiled to two separate, remote islands controlled by the agency. They receive supplies via airdrop every four months but are otherwise completely isolated. 

Old Jim is troubled by their fate, wondering if Central is using their exile to monitor them for any lingering effects from the cameras or the Rogue. The image of the two women holding hands before being separated forever haunts him as he begins his own assignment.

Three days after arriving at his new house on the Forgotten Coast, Old Jim finds a folder of files burning on his porch and an upright piano in the yard—messages from Jack. He is immediately contacted on a secure line by Jackie Severance, who establishes herself as his direct superior for the ground operation.

Jackie briefs Old Jim on his cover: He is a 61-year-old local returning to the area to manage the Village Bar, a Central front. She informs him that he is forbidden from visiting Failure Island, the headquarters of the Séance and Science Brigade (S&SB), and reveals that his predecessor died horrifically—his head popped at a depth of 400 meters and his bones liquified. She ends the call by telling him a “gift” will arrive the next day. 

Exploring his new home, Old Jim reflects on the old alligator tracking device from the Central archives that he brought with him. He plays Winter Journey on the piano, a musical suite that triggers fragmented memories of Genevieve, who had been gone 18 years.

The next morning, the “gift” from Jack arrives: a young Central operative who is a perfect physical double of Old Jim’s missing daughter, Cass. Old Jim is stunned and horrified by the psychological tactic. The operative, playing her role, calls him “Dad” and acts as though she has finally come home.

Old Jim decides to test her. He retrieves a box containing all the unaddressed letters he wrote to the real Cass after she vanished and dumps them at the operative’s feet. The sight of the letters elicits a genuine, unscripted reaction of shock and distress from her. She drops her cover, whispers that the situation is “so fucked up,” and tells him, “You don’t even know me” (119). Her raw emotion briefly makes Old Jim question if this could actually be his daughter. He tells her she doesn’t have to read them. Emotionally shattered by the encounter, he shuts the front door in her face.

Upset by the false Cass, Old Jim arranges a meeting with Jackie at a local bar, the Starlight Lounge, and demands that the operative be sent back to Central. Jackie refuses, explaining that this Cass is intended to be a “jolt” to get him functional again. She tells him that “Cass” is a former soldier whose entire team was killed in an ambush on her first mission for Central.

Old Jim asks what Jackie knows about the Rogue. She is skeptical of her father’s theories but gives him a thin file on the matter. Later, sitting alone after Jackie has left, he reads the account in the file: Two teenagers reported seeing a naked man resembling the descriptions of the Rogue that he read in the archive, walking alongside Tyrant, the massive alligator from the Dead Town experiments, which carried in its jaws a lifeless, “floppy” duplicate of the same man.

The false Cass arrives at Old Jim’s house for their first official briefing, but he is immediately hostile. He tests her with a pomelo, a fruit his real daughter loved, but the operative states she dislikes citrus. The meeting becomes confrontational as Old Jim angrily tells her not to call him “Dad” and questions her competence. She remains professional, calmly rebuking him for his behavior.

He cruelly brings up her disastrous first mission, but she is unfazed, retorting that he shouldn’t assume he knows her any better than he knew his own daughter. He orders her out of the house. Before leaving, she tells him there is a safe hidden under his living room rug. Old Jim is enraged that he never checked for one and tells her that he knows there is.

Old Jim goes outside and plays the piano violently. He later checks under the rug and finds no safe, realizing she was testing his vigilance with a mind game. Grudgingly impressed, he decides to read the report on the “House Centipede Incident” that she left for him.

Old Jim reads the report on the “House Centipede Incident.” It details how a Central psychic embedded in the S&SB, a woman named Helen, heard a disembodied voice after a bicycle accident. Later that night in her apartment on Failure Island, she stepped on a house centipede, fairly common in the area. She became convinced her foot was speaking to her and, in a fit of terror, amputated it with a fire ax. The psychic trauma spread through the complex, causing two other psychics in adjacent apartments to experience similar delusions and mutilate themselves.

The S&SB blames an “uncanny force,” but Old Jim suspects the Rogue is responsible for the psychic attack, which he dubs the “earwig.” As he finishes the report, he reflects on another disturbing fact he learned from the personnel files: The Medic from the original Dead Town expedition is currently a member of the S&SB. 

Old Jim activates the alligator tracker, but it registers no signal.

Old Jim settles into his cover at the Village Bar and calls a meeting with Cass, determined to be more professional. She arrives in her own cover as a real estate agent and shows him a brass belt buckle that belonged to his predecessor. The buckle mysteriously appeared in her parking space right after Old Jim arrived on the coast, and she believes it was a threat, but she doesn’t know from whom.

She tells him his predecessor died when one of the Brigade’s submersibles imploded for no good reason during a distance messaging attempt with two Central-trained psychics. Since the incident, Henry Kage, a charismatic and dangerous psychic recruited by Jack, has gained significant influence within the S&SB alongside his half-sister, Suzanne. Cass suspects Kage planted the buckle as a power play. Old Jim asks her to get him Kage’s file and to arrange a meeting with the Medic from Dead Town, whose name is David Sheers. They part on better terms, with Old Jim telling her that “[t]here was no safe under the floorboards, but there is now” (150), a joke that she appears to understand.

Old Jim reviews Henry Kage’s file. It reveals a history of violence, including animal cruelty and arson as a juvenile, and a paranoid personality. Jack recruited him directly into the S&SB without any formal Central training. His reclusive half-sister, Suzanne, acts as his aide.

Using a back channel, Old Jim calls Jack and requests permission to interview the two exiled team leaders from the Dead Town expedition, but Jack flatly refuses. Old Jim then demands all files and evidence from the disaster. Jack grows angry but agrees to send everything else, while denying that any cameras exist and refusing to provide the linguistics reports. He ends the call by pressuring Old Jim to make progress on finding the Rogue. 

Soon after, a package that Old Jim had mailed to himself from Central arrives at his house. It contains two guns and the journal written by the biologist known as “the Mudder,” which he stole from the archive.

Old Jim goes to the Village Bar, intending to confront a local named Man Boy Slim. However, before Man Boy Slim arrives, he sees Gloria, a local kid, who has gotten a fish hook in her foot. He brings her into the bar and removed the hook, then stitches up the wound after pouring whiskey on it. 

After Gloria leaves, he talks to Man Boy Slim, who confesses that 20 years ago, he found one of the rabbit cameras from the Dead Town expedition. He, his friend Drunk Boat, and a biologist named Samantha (the Mudder) all watched the footage, but it showed a different vision to each of them. Drunk Boat saw a prophecy of his own violent death.

Haunted by the vision, Drunk Boat and Man Boy Slim tried to destroy the camera with bleach, but it caused a chemical explosion. Man Boy Slim is explicit that the Tyrant did not kill Drunk Boat: “The camera did. I did” (167). Man Boy Slim was badly injured in the blast, and the camera survived in damaged form. 

Man Boy Slim also reveals that the strange piano music heard at Dead Town was Winter Journey, the same music Old Jim plays. Old Jim initially denies this and feels himself in retreat, not wanting to hear more. He orders Man Boy Slim to have Samantha contact him. Later, he reads the short story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” and sees parallels between the cursed artifact and Central’s own manipulative psychological operations.

Old Jim meets with the Medic, David Sheers, near the lighthouse. The Medic is a coarse, matter-of-fact man who casually admits to murdering a biologist during the Dead Town expedition because the man had discovered the generator’s secret subliminal messages. He justifies the killing as necessary for the mission. He also reveals there were 25 expedition members, not 24, as one was eaten by the alligators as they were being released and bled out.

The Medic claims not to know the identity of the Rogue, whom he refers to as a manifestation of the “foreign entity.” He says the S&SB’s purpose is to name and either control or destroy this force. Finding the Medic’s callousness and lack of curiosity repulsive, Old Jim grows frustrated. At the end of their conversation, as they stand on a rock outcropping, Old Jim impulsively shoves the Medic into the shallow water. The Medic simply stands up, covered in sand, and stares back at Old Jim without any reaction.

Jackie informs Old Jim that the evidence from the Dead Town Disaster has been delivered to a storage facility. He and Cass drive to the location, a dilapidated business called “Hank’s Premium Memories” (183). As they approach a strange stone silo in the back lot, three men arrive in a pickup truck. Old Jim and Cass hide nearby as the men fire rifles at the building before speeding away. Old Jim suspects they were sent to intimidate them but not harm them, but he doesn’t know who sent them.

Inside the silo, they are hit with an overpowering chemical stench. The space is filled with thousands of decaying biological specimens—animals, insects, and plants—collected by the original expedition 20 years ago. In the center of the room is a note that reads “HAPPY JACK,” a sarcastic message from Jack indicating this is all the “evidence” he is willing to provide. Realizing Jack has given them the raw, unprocessed materials instead of useful files, they decide to search for anything of value. After nearly 30 minutes in the putrid conditions, Cass manages to retrieve a small red object from high up in the pile: a tracking bobber from one of Central’s alligator experiments.

Old Jim and Cass stop at a truck-stop bar to recover from the ordeal at the silo. As Cass methodically dissects her hamburger, Old Jim tells her everything he has learned about the Dead Town Disaster, the rabbit cameras, and the Rogue.

Cass listens intently and proposes a new theory: The Rogue is not just a destructive force; he is driven by a purpose so deep that he has endured a mission lasting at least 20 years. She suggests this motive is something beyond loyalty to a country or a god. She also raises a disturbing question, wondering if the rabbit cameras were not technology but were somehow biological—“living cameras”—and asks if anyone at Central ever performed an autopsy on them. Old Jim is unsettled by the idea. As they drive home through a downpour, Cass expresses her frustration, feeling “shipwrecked” and ill-equipped for their impossible mission. Old Jim concedes that if they fail, she will suffer alongside him.

A few days after the silo incident, Old Jim receives a call on his unsecured phone. He realizes that the caller, who is using a voice distorter, is Samantha, the Mudder. She is panicked and angry that he has drawn her back into the events of the past. She tells him that during the expedition, the alligators’ behavior grew stranger the more rabbits, and therefore rabbit cameras, they consumed. She confirms that the Rogue whispered something to her once in the Village Bar: “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It should be different already. But it isn’t, so I’m doing my best” (203). At the time, she had thought he was drunk and had mistaken her for someone else.

She and Man Boy Slim later saw the Rogue from a distance across a lagoon. He appeared to be “shucking” the cameras—breathing or drooling on them, causing them to dissolve, and then feeding the remains to the Tyrant. Samantha qualifies that it was long-distance and she is uncertain of what she saw. She becomes upset, describing the apocalyptic footage she saw on a camera, and ends the call by playing a recording of a gunshot, trying to convince him that she died by suicide. Old Jim, recognizing the sound is fake, tells her he knows she’s still there, and she screams at him before he hangs up. 

Shortly after, a local kid named Gloria, a 10-year-old who he often sees exploring nearby, stops by with cookies from her mother, a brief, strange moment of normalcy. Back inside, Old Jim discovers the Mudder’s journal, which he had hidden in his safe (the safe he put in the floor after discovering that there wasn’t one), has been shredded. That night, his alligator tracker activates for the first time, showing a signal moving rapidly from Dead Town directly toward his house. He shuts it off and throws it off his deck.

Old Jim is overwhelmed and avoids Cass’s calls. On Friday night, he works at the Village Bar during a packed concert by a local band, Monkey’s Elbow. The band has a tradition where a masked local, called “Commander Thistle,” joins as a guest singer. The current Commander Thistle performs a song with lyrics about “shining out,” which feel unnervingly familiar to Old Jim. During a break, Man Boy Slim drunkenly babbles to Old Jim about caterpillars with “fake legs.” 

Old Jim then steps outside and is confronted by Henry and Suzanne. Henry reveals he knows about Old Jim’s “Night Commander” role (his connection to Central) and his insomnia, suggesting that he has Old Jim under surveillance. He demands to know who Old Jim’s boss is and why S&SB resources are being withheld. Before Old Jim can react, Henry and Suzanne retreat into the darkness. 

Shaken, Old Jim goes out to a small bridge behind the bar to clear his head. A silhouetted figure appears at the other end. He knows it is the Rogue. As the Rogue whispers, Old Jim feels himself being psychically attacked, but then his own mouth opens, and he screams words he doesn’t know, which seem to injure the Rogue. Overwhelmed, Old Jim collapses into darkness.