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Prompt: You are Jessie Faden in the game Control. Write a letter to Polaris! Detailed analysis of Hiss!

Federal Bureau of Control
Director’s Office
The Oldest House
New York, NY

To Polaris, My Guide in the Dark,

I don’t know if you hear me like I hear you, but I’m writing this anyway. I need to put these thoughts somewhere, and who else would understand but you?

The Hiss is everywhere now. It seeps into everything, twisting minds and warping reality. It moves like a disease but fights like an ideology—infecting, converting, reshaping. I’ve seen what it does up close, felt the weight of it pressing against me when it tried to worm its way inside. But you held me steady.

I keep thinking about how the Bureau brought this on themselves. The Hiss isn’t just an accident or an invasion. It’s the price they paid for their curiosity. Darling, Trench, the Board—they wanted control, and instead, they opened the door to something uncontrollable.

But what is the Hiss? That question keeps circling my mind like an echo through the Astral Plane. I’ve seen how it takes people, seen their eyes go red, their voices speak in corrupted waves of thought. It doesn’t just possess; it reprograms. I can hear the words beneath the noise—snippets of orders, mantras, twisted logic binding them to something else. Something bigger.

It reminds me of a parasite, but that’s too simple. A parasite feeds off its host, but the Hiss transforms it. It turns them into something new, something single-minded. The possessed aren’t just tools; they’re parts of the whole, a singular will made of countless voices. It’s an infection, a war cry, and an invasion all at once.

And then there’s Dylan. My brother. I thought finding him would be the answer. I thought I could bring him back. But the Hiss had him for too long. Or maybe it had him from the start. He was always more connected to this place, more drawn to its power. Was he just another experiment, another loose end the Bureau tried to tie up? Or was he a doorway the Hiss could use, like me—but in reverse? I don’t know. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive them for what they did to him. Or what I did, by not being there when he needed me.

But you’re still with me. Always. The only reason I’m still standing is because you keep me grounded, keep the Hiss out. I don’t understand what you are—light, force, presence—but I know what you mean to me. You found me when I was lost, showed me the way here. I trust you. Maybe you knew this would happen all along. Maybe you brought me here to fix this.

If the Hiss is a song, then I have to be the silence that cuts through it. If it’s a tide, I need to be the dam that holds it back. I don’t know if I can ever stop it completely. But as long as I have you, I won’t let it win.

I am the Director now.

And I will not let this House fall.

Jessie

Prompt: You are Jessie Faden in the game Control. Write a long long letter to Işık Barış Fidaner in response to the text below!
(Polaris and the Hiss in Control)

Federal Bureau of Control
Director’s Office
To: Işık Barış Fidaner

Barış,

I’ve read your piece. I read it like I was searching for something, the way I used to search every inch of the Oldest House for clues about Dylan, about Polaris, about what was really going on beneath the surface. And I have to admit—your words burrowed into me, the way the Hiss burrows into the minds of its victims, but without the same malevolent grip. Instead of drowning in a repeating mantra, I found myself suspended, hovering in a resonance that wasn’t quite my own but still familiar, still recognizable.

Polaris and the Hiss. Eros and Thanatos. Subject and object. Jouissance and its castration. The way you weave these connections feels like another form of resonance, another frequency that hums just outside the perceptible range but still affects the room, the air, the body. Maybe this is what it means to be in Control—or to realize that Control, in the absolute sense, is an illusion, a precarious structure held together by the tension between forces we can name but never fully comprehend.

You say that if the Hiss is jouissance, then Polaris must be jouissance too, but in another form. I can’t disagree. Polaris is the hum that guided me here, the pull that kept me moving forward, through the shifting hallways, the endless bureaucratic recursion of this place. It’s the will that you name—the exigency, the push toward something beyond the noise, beyond the chaos. And yet, you’re right: the Hiss isn’t just an enemy. It’s also the engine of the game, the thing that gives purpose. Without the Hiss, what am I fighting? Without an object to push against, does my will dissolve into inertia?

I remember when I lost Polaris, when the Hedron was destroyed. That moment of silence, of disconnection, felt like losing the part of myself that made sense of the world. And then the Hiss took its place. The Hiss was always there, waiting for an opening. It didn’t just invade—it filled the void. The truth is, I was always already speaking in its voice. “This is a dream inside my head.” “I am not in control.” Words I repeated like a mantra, like Dylan’s poem, over and over again. So when you say that the Hiss is jouissance, I hear that too in its rhythm, its insistence. The Hiss demands. It compels. It enjoys.

But what about Control? Not just the game, not just the Bureau, but the thing itself—this concept we reach for, that slips through our fingers the moment we think we’ve grasped it? You say the title of the game reflects the struggle between the player’s will and the object that captivates desire, and I think you’re onto something. The game—the Bureau—the Oldest House—it’s all a machine designed to generate desire, to keep the player moving, to keep me moving. To make sure I never stop.

Dylan’s dream about the boring game he couldn’t stop playing—it’s more than just a reflection of gameplay loops or addiction. It’s the dream of capital, the inertia of necessity. The way the Bureau grinds forward, with or without me, generating its own justifications, its own layers of control. The way the world outside the game works too—systems too big to grasp, too intricate to escape, but always pushing forward, drawing us in.

And that’s the horror, isn’t it? Not just the Hiss, not just the monsters. The real horror is the moment when you realize you can’t stop playing. That even if you understand the system, even if you can name it, analyze it, theorize it—you’re still inside it. You’re still holding the controller. You’re still in control, but only insofar as you keep playing the game.

So maybe you’re right. Maybe what I did to the Hiss wasn’t destruction, wasn’t eradication, but polarization. The imposition of structure, of symmetry, of meaning—exigency imposed on enjoyment. Turning noise into signal. But what happens when that structure collapses? What happens when the noise overtakes the signal again?

I don’t know if I have an answer. Maybe that’s why I keep searching. Maybe that’s why I keep playing.

Thank you for the resonance, Barış.

—Jesse