ALCHEMY UNDERGROUND

WHO IS BARRY KAMLET AND WHY IS HE STILL EMPLOYED BY EXCAL TRANSIT?

By Ferrari Audius, Senior Contributor, The Occam Observer

You’ve probably never heard of Barry Kamlet—unless you work the Elysium–Avalon subway line or live near the abandoned railyard off Crosskey and 12th. Even then, you likely just know him as a quiet, low-profile conductor who keeps to himself.

But what if there’s more to Barry than meets the eye?

Over the last two years, rumours have circulated in fringe forums and underground science blogs linking Kamlet to alchemical experimentation. Not metaphorical alchemy. Literal, transmutational, lead-into-gold-type alchemy. The claims, while unproven, are consistent, bizarrely detailed, and surprisingly difficult to discredit.

A 2009 white paper from a short-lived think tank known as The Reforge Circle listed “B. Kamlet” among its founding contributors. The document—originally published in Prima Materia Monthly—details a project on “mass-energy translation through harmonic geometry,” a term no reputable physicist has been able to fully explain, and one that does not appear in any scientific literature before or after that publication.

Kamlet vanished from all public records for nearly six years following that. When he re-emerged, it was as a train conductor working graveyard shifts beneath one of the oldest tunnel systems in the city. Why the sudden pivot from fringe science to mass transit? And why did multiple access tunnels near the Avalon hub get sealed off “for seismic safety reasons” shortly after Kamlet’s employment began?

A Freedom of Information request filed by The Occam Observer found that in 2017, Excal Transit quietly settled a claim involving subterranean lab equipment discovered beneath the Avalon terminal—equipment that “did not belong to any known department or contractor.” The name on the decommissioning order? β. Kamlet.

Co-workers describe Barry as “polite but odd,” a man who taps rhythms on his console “like he’s counting stars,” and who once had a nervous breakdown after someone changed the order of emergency lanterns in tunnel 7B. He’s known to avoid caffeine, refuses to wear digital watches, and allegedly carries a tattered paperback titled The Emerald Blueprint everywhere he goes.

One anonymous source swears they saw Kamlet handling a “dense, metallic brick” with bare hands and whispering to it in Latin.

Others point to Kamlet’s meticulous knowledge of underground schematics, including several no longer in use. “It’s like he memorized the entire system, including the parts that aren’t supposed to exist anymore,” said a technician who claims Kamlet once corrected a GPS reading by ear.

Of course, none of this confirms the wildest theory—that Barry Kamlet succeeded in creating the mythical Philosopher’s Stone and that his current job is a cover to continue experiments below the city.

But if even half the stories are true, we may be dealing with something much bigger than a reclusive conductor. We may be dealing with the last living alchemist.

And he has a key card.