Hydras, she remembers, are immortal. She has fond memories of the tiny, lacy, primordial freshwater anemones: catching them with a net in the pond behind her house as a young child, recreating experiments from the eighteenth century by pushing them through a sieve and watching them grow back together through a microscope in her junior year biology class, reading online one day that biologists found that hydras were immortal, and not really thinking any more about hydras after that.
Maybe it's ironic that as Katy Knight dies, the only thing she can think of is immortality.
Her assistant ran screaming from the room, from the device on the table. It was old and turning green, like copper pennies, although its true material had yet to be identified. Brown and steely gray teeth were fed by a belt, turning gears that rippled along the outside of its metal surface. The box made its own electricity, or so it seemed, yellowish sparks shooting out of it at intervals.
Katy was feeding a line of paper into the box, on which were written strings of mathematical equations. The engine, as far as they could tell, was an information processor: strings of numbers, or words, or books fed through it, would reappear through the other side, but with their contents somehow rearranged or rewritten.
It was first thought to be a younger edition of 914, but as it was tested, there were definite inconsistencies: the engine only worked on data, for one, and it was on all the time: even at night, grinding away, pausing only to accept new information. And the results were inconsistent: sometimes the machine would wipe all the ink from the pages of a book, or jumble the words in the center of the pages. One time it replaced every single letter in The Cat in the Hat with a question mark. The cat's face remained bright as always. “??????? ????? ??? ???????” he asked the two children and the goldfish, to no meaningful answer.
Of course, it wasn't the engine that killed her. A few minutes beforehand, it had started emitting light plumes of smoke or steam, convincing the assistant that something was wrong with it, so it was the machine he lept back from when Katy collapsed. In fact, several halls away and another floor down, D-Class test subject Erwin Markowitz had just touched his hand to SCP-1001 (“The Egg of God”), causing a thin line of fire to shoot out of the object, eject through the reinforced concrete walls, nearly scraping off a researcher's toupee as it went. It zipped through walls and past potential victims, and struck Dr. Katy Knight in the chest, for reasons that could only go unexplained on her death certificate.
It took longer to die then she expected, though maybe that was because everything seemed slower. Her life didn't flash before her eyes. First, she wondered what was happening, and why the ordinarily placid machine had now turned against her. Then she thought about how much her arms and chest hurt, and how the feeling was quickly fading. Her thoughts turned to her mother, her sister, her father, and a man with dark skin and darker eyes who had crossed to the other side himself years ago, without her.
Finally, she remembered the hydras, who flickered around her failing sight like sentinels, blindly waving their tentacles, showing her where it was safe to go. Promises of a safer, more peaceful world, with less pain and more light, shown up from a pool of water beneath her, and she allowed herself to fall into it, away from breath and pulse and the near-constant terror that had marked her last eight years of her life. She passed through the veil of water.
And woke up on the other side, choking.
Strong hands grabbed and braced her. Whereas everything before was soft, silky, transparent; the liquid here was real and cold, clinging to her skin like drops of glass. With a heave of motion, the river pulled away from her, leaving her on its banks, staring into the eyes of a man she had left behind eight years earlier.
“Simon?” Katy asked.
The man with the familiar face gave her a sort of half-smile. “It's been a while.”
She sat up, slowly, closing her eyes, although somehow still acutely conscious of the gray river flowing behind her. “I'm dead,” she stated.
“So am I,” Simon said, confirming her suspicions. Katy stared at her knees. “We never did get married,” she said, for lack of anything deeper. They hadn't, after all, they didn't have time, but they had moved in together, and had a green house by the sea. She hadn't thought about that house in years.
“No,” he said, “but we have all the time we want here. What else do you remember?”
She took her time with the question. The past was fuzzy, feathery, obscured, parts of it only slowly moving into clarity.
“There was… that girl. And all those people dying.” Swarms of bodies in orange uniforms assembled in her mind- bloody, bleeding, with her at fault. A certain three digit number flashed like a beacon, something that she had forced herself to forget. “Oh god, that poor girl-”
It hit her like a train wreck, everything she had done, all the bodies, everything she had pushed aside over the years, everything she had never asked forgiveness for. The world went black, and she slumped on the sandy banks.
Simon only smiled tolerantly, grabbed her under her arms, and pulled her on toward stable ground.
Otis Fleming was crying as he filled out the death certificate. He was, comparatively, new to the Foundation, and was still hit from time to time by how different the world here was from the world outside, where he had just gotten a technician's job at a hospital and had a couple of girlfriends to play around with and fall back on. The instability here still shocked him, like the fact that he was recording the death of a boss he had known for less then a year.
He wouldn't call it crying- just sort of sniffling, really- but he was terrified that anyone higher-up would see him like this, so he wiped his eyes with a Kleenex as he wrote out Katy Knight's name in careful capitals with a Bic pen. He looked up her year of birth, wrote a short account of the cause of her death, and the actions taken following it. Her clearance, Level 4. As he reread the short sheet that told everything and nothing, he thought about how little he honestly knew about her.
A sharp knock at the door interrupted Otis' introspection. He pawed quickly at his eyes and threw away the tissue. “Come in,” he called in a choked voice, standing up, trying to give the impression of strength, although he didn't dare turn around.
“Mr. Fleming?” He recognized it as one of the secretaries from the front desk. “In light of your work with SCP-1005-FT, the engine, which has recently been classified as high-priority, and Dr. Knight's death, you've been promoted. High Command wants to brief you immediately.”
The secretary left him, and he quickly gathered his papers and gave his tie a final tug to straighten it. Change, he thought, recalling something he'd heard before, only happens as fast as you can imagine it.
