Hester Wells

Artistic interpretation of Hester by MJ Alexander (@snartha on tumblr)

## Details

### AKA

Georgia, April Callins (while travelling with the pilot), Nell (while hiding from the IID), Unknown alias (while working at the Institute)

### Family

Oleta (wife), Nell (sister-in-law), unnamed older brother

### Occupation

Institute monitor (formerly), Art historian, Curator

### Affiliations

The Institute (formerly), Karikari Contemporary Gallery

### Known Physical Features

Blue eyesBrown hair (long enough for a ponytail)

### First Mentioned

(in abstract) Season 1, Cassette #1: Stress, Shoulders(by name) Season 1, Cassette #6: for Oleta

## Voice

### First Heard

Season 1, Cassette #1: Stress, Shoulders

**Hester** is the narrator of the first season of Within the Wires. She spoke through ten audio cassettes to a resident at the Institute, in order to help her find relaxation (and freedom) during her stay there.

> *"People are beautiful because of where they are placed, and where they are placed is beautiful because people are in it. Not everyone understands art. Not everyone needs to. But everyone foolishly thinks, if they just found the right words, they could. Just place the painting on a white wall in a large hall, and give them a pen and a pad."* **--Hester in *Cassette #6: for Oleta***
>
>

## Biography

### Early Life

Hester grew up in a Society-sanctioned collective home for children along with her unnamed older brother, Oleta, and Oleta's older sister Nell. She and Oleta often played together, in the sand sphere and around the facility. At night they would sometimes sneak out together to look at glow worms or the stars. She was 4 months and 27 days younger than Oleta, and had her childhood memories erased at age 10.

She went on to study art and traveled around the world. For some amount of time at some point, she lived in a cottage by the sea in Aotearoa, in the same town where Roimata Mangakāhia was born. She was a fan of Roimata's, and felt she did not get the recognition she deserved. Hester met with Roimata for an interview in 1978 while she was studying art, and asked her about her own work as well as Claudia Atieno's.

### Finding Oleta

On one autumn day, she saw Oleta again for the first time since before she was 10 and some of her memories returned. Hester watched Oleta run in the park for many days before they began smiling at each other in passing, and eventually started saying hello to each other. They met by "chance" in a coffee shop and talked, with Hester asking a lot of questions. She started reading *A Wizard of Earthsea* by Ursula K. Le Guin so that she could talk to Oleta about it, and she asked if Oleta remembered her, which she didn't.

Hester noticed that Oleta was paying particular attention to a woman who bore some resemblance to her, and was purposefully engineering a chance meeting in much the same way. She watched them become friends and go to dinner together, assuming they were on a date and feeling jealous. After Oleta was admitted to the Institute, she realised that the other woman had been Nell.

In 1980, Hester was working in the former United States along Chesapeake Bay. She described her profession as "research and technical writing" and presumably this was her work at the Institute. Hester began studying Oleta as one of her subjects for her work, although she said that this did not reveal who she really was, because people could not be removed from their natural environment and still be understood.

### Leaving the Institute

In 1982, Hester learned that Roimata had begun painting again and she wished to leave her job at the Institute. At some point later, Hester received a letter from one of her former professors saying that Roimata had died. Partly due to this, Hester decided to produce relaxation tapes as part of her program that could be used to give Oleta messages detailing how she could escape from the Institute. She claimed she did not manage to get Oleta out of the Institute until "a few years" after 1982. Later evidence suggests that the breakout was in late 1983/early 1984.

During her messages, she also asked Oleta to recall memories and eventually asked for a signal that she remembered what she was describing. Presumably she got it, and in Cassette #6 she expressed her impatience to enact the escape plan. This resulted in Oleta being sent to the Extensive Studies Lab and a more rushed, violent escape than she had planned.

With the help of Nell, Hester got Oleta away from the Institute and to the small town by the sea in Aotearoa. She mailed a final cassette to the cottage to explain the situation, and promised that she would join Oleta as soon as she could.

### Getting Home

After cleaning up any "mess" left behind by her and Oleta that may link back to her, Hester planned to quietly and innocuously quit her job at the Institute, citing a wish to go back into art studies. She would spend a few days in her apartment, being followed and watched. She would talk to friends about plans to relax and get some sun before looking for a new job and book a room at a lakeside hotel. After returning from her "vacation" she would begin applying to jobs with deliberately bad resumes until her tails dropped off and she could continue her life unscrutinised. She expected this to take some time, possibly months.

The following references content that was only released for paying members on Patreon. *Learn More*

After an amount of time had elapsed that Hester apparently deemed as safe, she got in touch with a woman named Paloma who vouched for her to a pilot friend and got her started on her journey across the globe. Under the name Georgia, Hester travelled as a passenger on a cargo plane from Philadelphia to Portland. The pilot said she would have to choose a new name, and she used this name while staying with their friends Leah, Callie, and Kara in Portland. They noted that she seemed distant while there, most likely wishing she were with Oleta, and also that she was overly nervous about people watching her.

The pilot next took her to Chicago, where they planned to have a friend, Jen, meet her and smuggle her home until she could get on the next flight. Unfortunately, Society agents were tailing her and she spent three weeks in Chicago evading them until the pilot could get her on a flight to Toronto, which they apologised for. They then planned to have her spend one day with a man named Gabriel under the name April Callins before moving on to Atlanta.

The plan was to eventually get to Houston, and from there San Jose or Tegucigalpa, and then to Buenos Aires or Santiago. However, things again did not go to plan. At some point during the week, they were involved in a car chase, where Hester drove. They escaped without any major injuries, which the Pilot credited to her excellent driving. Hester divulged her and Oleta's history to the Pilot and explained why she needed their help getting across the world, and why she was being pursued by smoking men with unpleasant dogs. The Pilot asked Hester what she'd do if Oleta wasn't in Aotearoa when she got there, but then disregarded the question as unnecessarily paranoid and cruel.

They projected that at four o clock, they would land in Atlanta, and there would be a cargo ship going to Sydney from Valparaíso that their friend could get her on. In order to get on it, the Pilot would help Hester get to Santiago with the aid of some "light fraud" and a friend who was willing to switch around some flight records for them. The Pilot volunteered ("selfishly") to help get Hester all the way to Valparaíso by catching a bus or hitchhiking as they had become invested in her wellbeing and enjoyed being part of the story.

They said they would be sad to say goodbye to Hester, as she had made for very interesting company. She inspired them with her very brave actions and her commitment to changing her life for the better. As they came in to land, they mused about how sometimes you just have to accept the limitations of what you're capable of. They felt like Hester would probably tell them they were wrong about that.

Unfortunately Robert, their contact in Atlanta, was not as reliable as they had been assured, and Hester was forced to flee without the Pilot. They thought she had ended up in Houston (specifically the west side of Houston, judging by the concentration of 'Missing Person' posters and men in sunglasses in that area), but this later turned out to be a misdirection on the agency's part. In reality, she had hitched a ride out of Atlanta, spent a couple of days in Birmingham, and then was in Jackson, before finding someone to take her to New Orleans.

When Paloma and the Pilot eventually tracked Hester down, she was working in a diner in Albuquerque under the name "Nell". It seemed dangerous to him for her to put herself in the public eye, but he supposed she was used to risk-taking. The Pilot intended to accompany Hester to Valparaíso where she would board a boat bound for Aotearoa, but when he received an urgent call, he made arrangements for his friend Alejandro to take her instead, assuring her he would meet her on the runway in Santiago and get her on her way. He apologised for her journey taking so long, but said that he was sure once she saw Oleta again, it would feel like no time at all.

End of Patreon-exclsuive content.

Despite the setbacks, Hester had reached Aotearoa by 1985. She convinced a former neighbour of Roimata's to let her into her house by explaining that she wanted to reopen the Karikari Contemporary and exhibit her paintings there. She attempted to feed Roimata's cat, but it lashed out at her, drawing blood, and ran away.

By 1986, she had got married (presumably to Oleta) and still lived in the cottage by the sea. She reopened the Karikari Contemporary as curator, as promised, and narrated an audio guide for an exhibit of her work. She indicated that she would continue to show the paintings there as a fixture, so that they didn't get damaged in her vacant house.

## Additional info

* The name "Hester" is derived from "Esther" and means "star"
* Hester's favourite artist, Georgia O Keefe, was born in 1887, which presumably means she lived through the Great Reckoning.
* In-universe, Hester is editing the relaxation tapes of Season 1 herself. She knows that none of her superiors are actively listening to them. The creator of the relaxation cassette programme claimed that they were to be recorded with as little background noise as possible for complete immersion, so Hester may have been deliberately adding distortion effects to keep Oleta from entering a meditative/trance state.

## References

1. ↑ Season 1, Cassette #2: Anxiety, Stomach
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Season 1, Cassette #6: for Oleta
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Season 2, Cassette #10: Karikari Contemporary Gallery (1986)
4. ↑ Season 1, Cassette #8: Awareness, Eyes
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Season 1, Cassette #5: Focus, Nose
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Black Box Cassette #5: HOU to LAX
7. ↑ Season 1, Cassette #7: Doubt, Head
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Season 1, Cassette #10: Horopito
9. ↑ Black Box Cassette #1: PHL to PWM
10. ↑ Black Box Cassette #2: PWM to MDW
11. ↑ Black Box Cassette #3: MDW to YYZ
12. ↑ Black Box Cassette #4: YYZ to ATL
13. ↑ Black Box Cassette #6: LAX to SEA, SEA to YUL, YUL to MSY
14. ↑ Black Box Cassette #10: ABQ to SCL, LIT to ???
15. ↑ Georgia O'Keeffe
16. ↑ Within the Wires (Jeffrey Cranor) on Twitter: ""some people care a great deal for you." we drop the music suddenly a few times during season 1 to accentuate important lines, which is to suggest that the narrator herself is actuall doing that since she is the one editing these tapes in this universe. -jc"
17. ↑ Within the Wires (Jeffrey Cranor) on Twitter: "it's very clear to me that the narrator knows none of her superiors are actively listening to her tapes. -jc"
18. ↑ You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, p.289