“Impossible,” said Otis, loudly, before realizing that the microphone was on, and turning it off.
Katy jerked back to life, certain that this was in fact some alternative hell she had missed the first time around. All her muscle, her deep tissue, was in a freezing state of agony, deep bone aches like rigid knives. Her head ached somewhere between half-intoxication, hangover, and death. Tenaciously, cold blood started to flood her veins, and she didn't try to repress another scream.
“Told you it would work, right?” Johanna checked a monitor. “Okay, so her vitals aren't great, but if past results are anything to go by, they'll stabilize themselves anyways.”
“Thank you, Egg of God.” Otis nodded.
There was a doctor in the chamber with them. Following Johanna's instructions, he hurried out, and began attaching a bag of hot saline fluid to Katy Knight's arm. It would bring her a little farther out of hypothermia. Garrison and Fleming walked out, to look more closely at the woman. Her eyes tracked them, and she followed Otis' hand when he waved it in front of her. The pallid blue of her jaw quivered up and down.
“It'll take a day or so, a few hours at least, until she's conscious enough to be responsive,” Johanna noted, averting her eyes from the table. Otis, meanwhile, couldn't stop staring. He was privately struck by how much it looked like her. What if it wasn't actually her, if they had resurrected the wrong person in Katy's body?
Her eyes darted between them, and then her lips slowly started to move, in a series of barely-audible little breaths. “F- f… f-Fuck y-you.”
Fleming found himself suddenly less comfortable with the idea that anything had gone wrong.
Katy was dreaming: long fever dreams, where she was a river dolphin in the Amazon, a fish in the river Styx, a bodiless bystander watching a string of jellyfish trailing through the vast and empty ocean.
When she woke, she was still tied to her aching body like a stone, and felt like death warmed over. She noticed that her eyes were apparently permanently and irredeemably blurred, and that she was strapped to a table in a blindingly lit room. Nylon straps pressed into her hospital gown, and she had the sudden thought of being at an operating table. She strained and struggled, and an indistinct head-shape floated in front of her vision.
“SCP-1001-6,” someone said. “SCP-1001-6.” Katy closed her eyes and relaxed, listening to her rushing breath.
The voice sighed. “Doctor Katy Knight.”
At this, Katy's eyes opened uselessly, and she tried to sit up, but the straps held her back.
“Doctor Katy Knight, former Level 4 staff and Director of Research at Site 41, now classified as SCP-1001-6.” The voice stopped, then restarted. “You have residual cornea damage from the deep-freeze. Please remain calm and wait for the next researcher to address you.” The voice and bobbing head-shape left.
Deep freeze? Maybe that explained why her head and body still felt like slush, and maybe more importantly, why she was chained to a table in an experimentation ward somewhere. She couldn't think quite clearly. Thoughts ran away into fog.
“Dr. Knight,” said a different voice. It came from her side, where she couldn't even see a vague figure, but she knew the voice so well it didn't matter. “We are now conducting Interview 1001-6-A001.”
Her old assistant. Otis Fleming, clicked a digital recorder on. “Approximately four days ago, during the normal course of experimentation involving SCP-1006, we got this.” He waved a piece of paper in front of her eyes.
“Can't see,” she mumbled. Even her voice sounded distorted when she said it, high and weak. She hated herself.
Otis read the lines off, one by one. “Hello? This is Katy, can- SEND IT BACK TO THEM RAISE THE SEED OF CHAOS - anybody see this?”
It took a few seconds. Well… Part of it sounded familiar.
“I… don't know.”
“Really? You've never heard of it? Anywhere?”
“No, I…”
“Dr. Knight,” Otis continued, “What can you tell me about SCP-1001?”
Somehow, the number didn't quite ring any bells.
“The Egg of God, Dr. Knight. What can you tell me about it that the Foundation doesn't know?”
Of all the possible questions she was expecting- she nearly laughed. “What?”
“The Egg of God, doctor, don’t play games with me.”
“Look… I don’t know…” She really didn't. What did that have to do with why she was here? “I was a researcher, I wrote down everything…”
“Dr. Knight, what can you tell me about a small clan of humanoids with anomalous capabilities, indigenous to Southern Russia or Siberia?”
At this, Katy’s face must have changed. And Otis must have noticed, because a face suddenly loomed over her, and an arm was suddenly clamped very tightly around hers.
“How were you able to contact us?”
She could only shake her head and make a high-pitched noise.
“Is death permanent?”
She couldn’t think about what this meant, or what he wanted to hear. Well, she was here, so, obviously not, right? “No…”
“Where you were, were there other people?”
Katy inhaled shakily. “Look, I’m not supposed to be here. Otis, please don’t make me do this…”
Doctor Fleming snorted shortly, and leaned in so closely that his face nearly became clear to her fuzzy vision. “Katy, Katy, we will find out what you know. Did you think that Foundation employment terminated with death? You will tell us who you’ve been communicating with and how- if you refuse to cooperate as anything else, you will cooperate as a subject. In fact, we’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning for further questioning.” He clapped his hands, and an attendant emerged to take Katy away.
Simon trudged through the halls of the dead. The landscape seemed haunted, and the gray river lapped at his side- inviting, promising cold amnesia and something new and strange, where it flowed through the desert out to the seventh house. Not yet, he told it, and folded his arms against the cold as he continued walking.
First, he went to the fishing pool. It was on a yellowing dock where the river formed an eddy, and while he only saw twenty or so people on it, he could feel the presence of many more- thousands or maybe millions, who had decided to delay the natural order of things, living their lives on the Gray River's edge.
Simon walked out along the dock. “Hello?” He looked around. “…Hello?”
A small cabal of fishers, huddled at the end of the pier, turned to look at him- they were nearly identical, mostly men but with a few women. They were old and grizzled, in creased gray-green clothes, as if they had become offices or positions instead of humans.
“Look,” Simon said, scratching his arm in sudden nervousness, “I’m looking for…” he paused at noticing one of them, who had a fading red feather tucked into his hat, then found his voice again. “I’m looking for a group of people who might come around here sometimes- they’re called a tribe, or something like that, and they… sort of administrate things around here, I think… Listen, do you know what I’m talking about?” He looked around.
The fishermen conferred, in quiet growling voices. Simon glanced away towards the water. Shortly, the man with the red feather in his hat stand up and nod to him. “We know not, or little at least, of the folk you speak of, however, we say you should go ask in the house where you skip stones when it gets dark.”
“Thanks,” Simon said, and stole another look at the feathered man's hat, “…Dad.”
Then he turned away, quickly, and hurried back to the river's edge, perhaps not wanting to count familiar faces among those who were becoming a part of the landscape of Death. The second house, he thought. He would find what he was looking for in the second house, and then he would make them help Katy, and then the two of them would leave this world together.
Or not.
As Simon stepped into the long house with the pool of water underneath, he noticed that there was no one in sight- not, of course, that there usually was. But he had been in Death for a long time and knew a few tricks- he adjusted his vision; trying to see who he was looking for, who might be looking for him, different parameters and definitions that were natural in the fuzzy logic of death. Nothing.
He kicked the ground and sighed, then picked up one of the smooth black stones, and tossed it in. It skittered 18 times towards the other end of the pond, before he stopped counting and jumped back from the pool in shock. From below the water, he could see what was undoubtedly the face of a giant bird sitting under the water.
Well. He had never seen that before.
It looked vaguely skeletal- the beak long, crow-like, pallid, and the sunken, beady eyesockets- but maybe it was conscious somehow… which was what he was looking for, right? He gulped. “Hello?”
The massive bird's beak creaked open slightly. “Hello,” a tempered voice floated up from the pool.
And so Simon found himself recounting his entire story to the drowned bird's head, which nodded and listened intently to every word. When it spoke again, its tone was low and serious.
“I know the people of whom you speak. They are gathered now to discuss this very chain of events. Leave now for the Hall of Faces, and speak the name of Johann Bessier into it. If you wish to catch them, go now, and let nothing tarry you.”
“Thank you.”
“Go, now,” said the bird, but even as it spoke, Simon had turned and was running into the desert.
The house with the stone faces was, as most of the houses were, empty as he could see it, though he heard rocks grinding from far off. Quickly, he spoke the name that the bird-face had told him out loud, (hoping he was pronouncing it right) and the blocks started sliding immediately. Simon tapped on his knee in unabashed impatience. Soon, a plain, somewhat fat face with an old 16th-century white wig slid in front of him. Simon wasted little time finding a groove carved out of the edge of the block, pulling it open, and heading for the light that appeared in the darkened cavern on the other side.
When Simon was fourteen, he and his father had gone fishing on a friend's boat in the ocean, off the southwest coast. It was a bad day for sea fishing, and they dipped their lines into the water again and again only to pull up some disgusting-looking eels, and a confused rockfish. The sun was setting when young Simon's line gave a jerk so huge it nearly pulled it out of his hands, and soon father and son were engaged in an all-out war, that began with excitement and ended with exhaustion, dragging up whatever trophy they had surely won.
When it finally breached the surface, it wasn't the prize swordfish or marlin they had been looking for, but a massive Humboldt squid. At fourteen; seeing the leviathan from the dark parts of the world, thrashing and glimmering in the half-light, seven feet tall, more then human- giant eyes shuddering, throwing off orange reflections and bioluminescent drops- well, that squid looked like God.
It was the same now, he thought, once his eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he saw the looming figures standing amid the torches. The ceiling of the tiny cavern was tall, and ringed with frozen torches at its base- and the people were tall, willowy, ethereal. They moved like smoke, or shadow, or quicksilver. Katy had talked about seeing humans, but these were clearly human no longer- perhaps it was the way they looked like they were continuously being drawn upwards. When he saw them, all of them turned their heads with pallid eyes and looked directly at Simon.
A moment of abject terror passed, in which nothing happened at all.
Then, one of the tall human-figures turned to another, and burbled something unintelligible at the other, in a language that sounded like song.
“Wait,” said Simon, feeling his heart beating. Never had he been so aware of his own evolutionary status as a former prey animal. “You- um. Katy Knight. You knew her.”
None of the figures said anything.
“She's my girlfriend. Wife. Fiance. Whatever.”
One of them stepped forward. “I am the one who spoke to her,” it said. Simon looked closely, and saw the suggestion of hair, and something like a bow and arrow strapped onto its back.
“So you know what happened.”
The figures looked at each other. “Yes,” one of them said at last. “Yes, we do.”
“Then,” said Simon, “You know what happened. You're not supposed to be able to come back. You need to help her.”
“Why?” One asked. “Even assuming we were capable of doing that,” another said, in icy tones that recalled to mind glacial melt, “She will not be able to help them in any way that would be detrimental to us, and she, as all things will, will pass to here eventually.”
“Yeah- okay, fine.” Then he thought of Katy, and felt an instinctive, protective courage burn again. He faced the figures. “But you didn't tell her about the Egg. You know all about that. You knew they could/ bring her back, and you know they wanted to, and you still told her she didn't have anything to worry about. I don't know if that was laziness, or you thought you would stop it, or what, but the way I see it, you owe her. She's smart, and she did what you wanted, and you owe her more then to let her be tortured and left alone and then shot in a few years when they decide she's no longer of strategic importance.
“And besides, she's dead. She's done her time. You're supposed to be stopping this from happening.”
“If it is the fault of the Egg that she is back, then it could not be said to wrong…” The same figure seemed to consider, hesitantly.
Simon didn't know what this meant. “You owe her.”
The people- they must have been the Tribe that Katy had told him about- were quiet, and a seemingly thoughtful buzz in the air suggested that they were coming to a conclusion among themselves.
The tallest figure, who had spoken earlier- Simon got the impression it was a woman- looked at him again. “We cannot help you. What you say is true, and perhaps we were wrong not to warn her, but we, like you, are trapped here. The least we can do is possibly feed her information she has no way of acting on.”
Simon had anticipated this, but this still made his next statement a huge leap of faith. “It's funny that you mention that,” he said. “See, Katy didn't tell me much. She made the same mistake you are- I've been here for a very long time, much longer then she has, and I've been watching what she's done. I'm not an idiot. I figure if you really don't like it so much, you could have destroyed that engine a long time ago. At least this one, and that would have solved your problem. So why are you keeping it around?”
The Tribe didn't move. Simon took a breath. “I think you're keeping it for yourselves. I know it's supposed to just move data, or something, but I 'd say you think you can put yourselves through the machine. …Or parts of yourselves, anyways. You can do your work better alive then dead, and this is the only link you can trust to reliably move things backwards.” He looked around, then held his breath. “So I bet you can help me.”
It was a very long time before one of the man-shapes broke the following silence. “The science and true logic here is far beyond you. Conservation of information- a concept your species is only barely beginning to touch, that which moves knowledge from there to here to the next world and so on.”
“We wish to walk the earth as much as any of the newly dead to,” the woman said quietly, and there was a muttering of agreement.
“We cannot let her out ourselves,” said another, the one with the bow on his back, “But we can move shadows of ourselves through. And we may be able to move things that would help you.”
“So you'll do it,” Simon glowed.
“Mm.” The woman made a thoughtful noise. “Mm. Perhaps we do owe her, or you. But the Egg you have mentioned of chief interest to my people. We do not like to see it in the hands of this Foundation- at the least, we have tried to stop them from using it excessively. It is why we were placed upon the earth. If your woman were to bring it somewhere safe, using our help, then we would be obligated to help her arrive here again. Can you agree to this?”
“…Alright. Yes. That sounds good.” And Simon sealed the deal.
Katy sat on top of her bed, a foamy mattress on four posts that she had been moved to after two days. The rest of the cell contained a stainless-steel toilet and a counter. She had explored it on her own time, using her hands, and found it absolutely barren. Today, there was an experiment going on, but she barely heard the soft thrumming of the rusted engine, being monitored by some member of research staff who she couldn't see, and who hadn't told her his name.
The testing, as Fleming had put it, had taken what little strength she had from her. It was an effort to sit up- her muscles were still useless and weak, and she still couldn't see. She hadn't spoken for several days now.
She had tried to kill herself. The food and water brought to her cell twice daily came with no silverware, and she couldn't rip the blanket she was given, so she had tried holding her breath- she had walked on the other side before, surely it wouldn't be hard just to let go now? As it happened, just when her vision was starting to go dark, her mouth opened on its own and gasped in air.
She had nearly cried when it didn't work.
Now, she sat as instructed and counted her breaths. The man had been working at this for some time now, and while she had no idea how much time had passed, surely he would leave soon. In fact, he seemed to be putting the last piece of paper he held through the machine. A cloud of steam emerged from the other end, along with the expected piece of paper. The researcher's posture seemed surprised, then he grabbed the paper and read it. He looked disappointed, and started to pack up his materials.
He didn't seem to notice that the cloud of steam was lingering much longer then a cloud of steam should before dissipating.
At last, he stacked the engine on a rolling cart and left. Katy breathed a sigh of relief. That hadn't been too bad.
The mist cloud was still there- it flowed, and moved and settled down in front of her. Slowly, it seemed to form into a ghostly human, then a very pale human, and then slowly a foggy figure, but undeniably human. It was clothed in red furs.
“Katy,” said a voice with a familiar accent, and Katy's heart leapt.
“They can- oh, god, they can see you,” she whispered in a cracked voice.
“No, nor can they hear us, for the time being. Katy, you can escape, but for us to help you, you must steal the Egg of God and return it to the place where it was found.”
“…What? I can't do that.”
“We will distract the eye of your captors, and show you the way there.”
“No, I mean…” She sighed. “Look, I can hardly see…”
The presence- Inok- leaned close to her, studying her eyes. “Yes. mm.” A hand moved in front of her. “Ice crystals have formed here, and left hollows where they melted. Let me see.”
A pause, then Katy felt warm air blow into her eyes, and squeezed them shut instinctively. When she opened them, her vision had cleared, and she felt a little strength return to her body.
She looked up- it wasn't actually Inok, but a different man with the same accent and the same dress. She felt a little disappointed.
“The other question,” the man said, looking at her intensely, “Is whether you will be willing to undergo the last step of what our plan requires.”
“Which is?”
“Killing yourself.”
Katy sat up. “Tell me what I have to do.”
