The documents referred to in this editorial are part of a trove of classified files provided to The Onion by an anonymous whistleblower in the White House. All of these documents can be found here.
While there is much to find concerning in the collection of White House files that The Onion has obtained—from the president’s struggles to comprehend the intelligence information provided to him, to the White House staff’s ineptitude at operating the West Wing rune portal, to the extremely thorough presentation the president received from the Fish and Wildlife Service on his first full day in office to familiarize him with all of the nation’s fish—no documents are more unnerving than those pertaining to a shadowy secret program known as the Theseus Protocol.
What is the Theseus Protocol? What does it aim to achieve? And how will it affect the citizens of this country? Even after reading through these documents multiple times, our analysts are still struggling to piece together answers to these questions, given the spectacular complexity and opacity of this unusual initiative. Among the few things we can report with a sufficient level of certainty is that enacting the Theseus Protocol appears to be the president’s foremost priority, as evidenced by his signing of a secret executive order on February 17 titled “Authorization to Enact the Theseus Protocol, Bringing About the Ninth Conjunction of Spheres and Shattering of the Crimson Veil.” While the executive order speaks cryptically of “enact[ing] the Smoldering-to-Come” and opening the “Ancient Door of m-Am-uuthua,” its ultimate objective, aside from a mysterious reference to “bring[ing] forth the reign everlasting and undying of the Many-Instanced One,” remains unclear.
More context, however, can be gleaned from the writings of an obscure figure known only as “The Director,” who despite having never been mentioned publicly by any member of the administration and going entirely unacknowledged in all official White House personnel records, appears to coordinate directly with top-level administration officials and maintain an office in the lowest sub-basement of the White House. Indeed, The Director issued a memo in March alerting administration officials and “all who dwell in or below the realms of the earth” that his massive tunneling operation underneath the White House was drawing “ever closer to the buried city of Nul’Kek” and that it was only a matter of time before the Many-Instanced One was “born anew unto this world in living flesh.”
Furthermore, The Director seems to maintain frequent contact with President Trump himself, having written a series of foreboding letters urging the commander in chief to complete the Theseus Protocol so that the pair may reign forever in “an eternity of dark bliss.”
Much like our own publication’s reporters, most West Wing staffers appear to have little understanding of the Theseus Protocol or any of the numerous steps involved in bringing it into being. Indeed, most White House email conversations pertaining to the Theseus Protocol consist entirely of baffled administration employees attempting to make sense of the Blood Purity Council they were charged with establishing, the preparations they were putting in place for the Grand Immolation, the bitterly cold winds that persistently blow throughout the West Wing, and the numerous other bizarre circumstances and complicated tasks they were enduring in an effort to bring about the “dissolution of the Veil of Crimson.”
Despite assigning every inmate in The Onion’s vast private prison network to the task of poring through these documents, the question of what the Theseus Protocol is and how it will affect the American people remains unsatisfyingly and ominously unresolved. In fact, the limited information in our possession has only led us to ask deeper, darker, and much more harrowing questions, such as: What will happen when the sheaths that protect our mortal realm from That Which Lies In The Beyond are penetrated? What are the 99 names and 77 titles of the Many-Instanced One that shall not be uttered? Will the Eastern Seaboard be incinerated instantaneously or over a period of time? What exactly is a “flesh shroud”? Will all of us be immolated, or will some of us be pulled away to serve as additional concubines for the gebbeths? And will the government follow through on its pledge to “suspend all laws—federal, state, local, and metaphysical—for the duration of the Theseus Protocol and, by extension, the current iteration of this universe”?
Unfortunately, it appears we may never receive adequate answers to these questions. What is certain, however, is that all of our lives, and indeed the very fate of our dimension, now rest with the decision-making abilities of President Donald J. Trump.
