Off Track
Udo found it unsettlingly easy not to think about the mass grave she and Imrich were leaving far behind them. She had laughed away the stress of almost dying — her companion was still shooting her concerned glances over that — and the euphoria was still real to her in a way the increasingly-distant dismal scene was not. It hadn't happened in her lifetime, not the version she'd been living. She hadn't experienced it. She'd been late to the tragedy. If she stopped to think about it, it would overwhelm her, so…
…so she stopped to think about it. Metaphorically speaking; they kept on moving. They were almost to the AAF-A station, where an entire new set of problems would no doubt present themselves, so if she was going to reinforce her own humanity and properly face the import of the disaster she'd just walked away from she had better do it now.
"Who were they?" she asked, scratching idly at her chest. She could feel her heart beating faster already.
Imrich was staring at the rubble-strewn tracks, and he didn't look at her when he answered. "Who?"
"The people in the tunnel." She said it slowly, letting the words register in the mind from whence they'd come. People. Those were people. "Were they ours?"
He shook his head, wet black hair obscuring his features in the dim sandlight. "No. Civilians."
"From where?" Now that she'd started scratching, it was difficult to stop. She found she itched all over.
"Everywhere, by way of Grand Bend." He drew in a breath. He wasn't used to talking this much. "The shit upstairs didn't hit close to home so bad, so people from all over the province and some from the States were hiding out there when we called them in."
"Whose idea was that? Calling them in?" The Foundation didn't turn its Sites into fallout shelters unless the fallout was truly radioactive, and probably not even then.
"McInnis."
That made sense. She wanted to linger on the topic of the dead, since her pulse and anxiety were so avoidant, but this new tangent struck a new nerve. "He's still around? McInnis?"
"Not anymore." There was a sour note in his voice. "Disappeared after giving the order to bring the trains in."
"Who replaced him?"
"Falkirk."
She stopped walking. "Tell me that's a bad joke."
He didn't stop walking. "Nope."
"Christ." For a moment she almost wasn't sorry to be lost in the dark, so to speak. She hurried to keep up with him, the fire on her fingertips flickering kinetically. "What were you and I doing up here?"
"Calming the rabble. They got restless under the Tarantula. He's not a real people person."
"No shit."
"I was sent for threat assessment, and you were my anomalous muscle. Also my boss, because everyone likes you better." From anyone else this might have been jocularity, but not Imrich. The sour note had soured further.
"You're not a people person either," she reminded him.
"Right, because I can always see the shit they're about to do. You're an idealist because you don't have the skills to be fatalistic like me."
She decided to let that go. "Did you see it coming? Whatever happened?"
He shook his head again, and the greasy hair slid aside to reveal his face once more. "No."
"Could you tell me about it? It's okay if you don't want to."
"I don't want to." He pointed. "And we're here anyway."
The subway station wasn't anything special, modelled like the trains which served it on the TTC stops in Toronto. There was an open door on the sidewalk servicing a narrow corner stair, so they could leave track level without having to force their bodies onto the platform, which was both good because Udo wasn't sure she'd be able to swing it in her present state and a little bit sad because she'd briefly considered, in her post-traumatic exhilaration, using the vim harenae to help her vault the distance. She'd always wanted to fly.
The platform was eerily silent and empty of anything other than fallen ceiling plaster and dust. No poignant scenes of disaster had occurred here. It was a ghost town. "Why?" she thought, and then realized she'd actually said it out loud, and followed up: "Why isn't this place… why isn't there…?"
Imrich stalked toward the turnstiles. "Because F-A was at the edge of everything going to shit, so they locked it down early and fast, maybe? Bet it didn't help them any."
Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-A is five things. In descending order of importance, it is:
- a blind;
- a staging point;
- a water treatment plant;
- an acroamatic abatement facility;
- a prison.
As a blind: the construction of the main body of the Site was a long and labourious process, and there needed to be somewhere the work crews and early researchers and administrators could do their jobs and eat and sleep and fraternize on the down-low, away from prying public eyes. AAF-A was constructed to allow them to do this, and also to store their equipment, and also, when time permitted, to get a little experimental abatement done. It is still used as one of the main access points to the Site, one of two terminals for the Inter-Sectional Subway System (and the only one not located in a civilian area).
As a staging point: being already partly aboveground, AAF-A is the ideal location from which to deploy a mobile task force incognito. Black vans emblazoned with the heraldry of Lake Huron Supply, Control and Purification are the preferred mode of transportation for MTFs Alpha and Beta-43 ("Witch Hunters" and "Con-Trollers"), both prongs of the Site's anti-giftschreiber operations. A discreet pier into Lake Huron itself services MTF Gamma-43 ("Pond Scum"), and access to the caverns stretching beneath both AAF-A and the main facility allows Delta-43 ("Pit Bosses") to conduct training exercises therein. For these reasons the primary offices of the Pursuit and Suppression Section, and the barracks for the aforementioned teams, are located here.
As a water treatment plant: the Site's public-facing front provides free, clean water to the First Nations reserves in its immediate vicinity, the region of anomalous activity known as Nexus-94. This is the only action undertaken under the auspices of Site-43 which has no ulterior motive — save for the continued goodwill of the locals, and their mythological creatures. A small staff maintains the pipes and pumps, performing easily the most mundane tasks of any Foundation employee near Lake Huron.
As an acroamatic abatement facility: the first research labs of AcroAbate pioneers Dr. Wynn Rydderech and Dr. Ilse Reynders were built here in the early 1940s, while more spacious and sophisticated accommodations were being constructed down south and down below. AAF-A has an open-air parking lot, and a belowground parking garage. It has windows, real windows, even if they are only one-way glass. It has access to sunlight. It is not, therefore, an unpopular place for offices, particularly for the more agoraphobic researchers. Until 1943, furthermore, AAF-A was the site of the Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber.
As a prison: The Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber exploded in 1943 with Dr. Ilse Reynders inside, suffusing both it and her with counterchronological material. She cannot leave the chamber without rapidly aging and expiring, an unacceptable result as she is at present the most learned and valuable employee at Site-43.
— Blank, Lines in a Muddle
The open stair doors had given Udo a flash of false hope. She'd thought, for a moment, that their way forward might not be too badly blocked. But the shutters to the stairs leading to the AAF-A undercroft were closed, and there was a glowing red sign above them flashing a single word: LOCKDOWN.
"Great," Imrich muttered. He walked over to a wall panel glowing yellow beside the shutter, and paused. "Do we dare?"
"Call ahead, you mean?" Udo frowned. "That seems like a terrible, terrible idea. I'm assuming there's nobody nice on the other side of that shutter."
"Fair assumption," he said, and then the panel glowed green. "I didn't touch it!" he shouted, stepping back, hands raised in a comical gesture of self-defence.
A voice rang out above them, strained and hoarse. "Hello? Who's there? What time are you?"
Udo sidled up to Imrich. Their stenches combined into something truly unique. "What should we say?" she hissed.
The voice apparently heard. "Just tell the truth. Make it easy on me. It's hard enough keeping track without all the lies."
"Guess the place is wired for sound," Imrich remarked.
"And a lot more besides," the voice replied, "so think very carefully before you answer my questions. Did I ask you my questions yet? Are you still the same people?"
It clicked. Udo knew that voice. "Dr. Reynders? Is that you?"
A moment of silence while Imrich raised a bushy, unplucked eyebrow at her.
"Of course it's me, who else would it be?" The voice sounded only half-certain. "Who else would still be here? Unless you're one of the ones who's still here. Is that when you are? OKAY. Stop talking. Stop talking. Speak only when spoken to, so we can get through this. Who. Are. You."
Oh boy. It was just her luck that this version of Reynders was even more frazzled than the one who'd been banging her head on the window back in baseline. "Udo Okorie and Imrich Sýkora, from Applied Occultism."
"I thought I recognized you under all that muck. The muck probably answers the when, but… no. You answer the when yourself. When are you?"
She looked at Imrich for help, and found none. This was her rodeo. "Are you asking what timeline we're from?" She spread her hands to indicate confusion, assuming Reynders was monitoring by video somehow. How would that even work, though?" "Because that's, uh, complicated."
"From? From?" Reynders was increasingly frantic. "You can't be from, you can only be in. But I guess… you wouldn't know, if you were only in, so why am I asking?" There then came the sound Udo had dreaded, the dull boomph of skull against glass. "It's so hard to concentrate, Izaak," Reynders whispered into her mic.
"Udo. Izaak was my grandfather, remember?"
"Of course I remember! My brain just moves faster than my mouth. And your brain. And everyone else's brains. And it's got a lot to keep up with right now, so give me a break." Heavy breathing. "Why did you say you were from instead of in?"
This wasn't working. "I think maybe we ought to talk about this in person?"
Imrich walked over to an empty bench, wiped off the dust, and sat down.
"You're not getting in here until I understand you better. Not that things are a lot better past the shutter… wait. You can't get past the shutter, right?"
"That's right. It's in lockdown."
"Good, okay. It's locked when you are. That settles that. It doesn't help me never mind who I'm talking to." She hissed this aside, as though addressing an unmentioned third party. "It doesn't help me figure out if I should let you in or not. There's a whole lot of crazy out there these days. That half of these days. Your half. You know?"
Udo nodded. "Whole lot of crazy. Yes."
It had been a mistake to say it that way. "I'm not insane. I know how I sound. Okay, I'm a little bit insane, but it's not my fault. I'll figure it out eventually. Can you prove to me you're not a p-zombie?"
There it was. Udo had been waiting for the polymath to zip ahead of her for the entire conversation, and it had finally occurred. "What?"
Udo was passingly aware of the concept of a philosophical zombie, a human-esque figure incapable of true experience but indistinguishable from the real deal. She had no idea why it would be relevant to anything in their present situation.
To her surprise, Imrich spoke up from the bench. "No. It's impossible to prove that you're not a p-zombie to another living person."
A pause. "That's true. I should be more specific. Can you prove that you're not… what did you say your name was?"
"Imrich."
"Can you prove that you're not Wirth in an Imrich suit?"
Udo walked over to the bench, leaned down and whispered in his ear: "Do you know what she's talking about?"
"Yes," he whispered back. "Why don't you?"
She glared at him.
"Wirth has been possessing people," he explained. "She's asking us to prove we're not being possessed, and also that we're not empty shells."
"I don't understand how you wouldn't know that," said Reynders, and Udo felt her stomach sink. What kind of mics do they have in here? Military grade? She slapped her forehead. Of course they did. Paramilitary grade, in point of fact. "You're dirty, but you're not that dirty. You can't have been in there since September. Unless… oh god, please don't let there be a third when. I couldn't possibly handle a third when. I can't even kill myself, and I'd have to try."
Another click, and this time Udo felt more than a little proud of herself. "Dr. Reynders," she said slowly, choosing her words very carefully, "are you seeing multiple timelines at once?"
Imrich stared at her.
"Dr. Reynders?" Udo prodded.
"Yes!" the woman shouted, peaking the speakers with a screech. "Of course I am! What the hell else could this be?! Of course I'm seeing double! And hearing double! AND THINKING DOUBLE! AND I'M DOING THE BEST I CAN WITH IT, BUT IT'S GETTING TO BE JUST A LITTLE BIT MUCH!" Her voice grew increasingly hoarse as it grew in volume, finally cracking on the last word.
"You've already talked to me today," Udo said gently.
"What?"
"You've already talked to me today. I was on my way to see you a few hours ago. Assuming you can see the old timeline somehow…"
She gasped.
"What?" said Imrich.
"Holy shit. Holy shit." Udo spun to lean on the wall beside the bench. "Give me a second."
"Explain what—" Reynders began.
Udo raised a hand. "No, please, give me a second." She felt like she was going to faint. She grinned like an idiot at the ceiling.
Baseline reality does still exist.
"Okay. Okay." She was okay. She was okay. She was better than okay. "I was saying, you've already seen me today. Right? In the other half of your double vision. I came to talk to you. So did the Director."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I'm in the bad reality, but I'm from the good one. I just got here. I don't understand how, or why, but that's what happened. I remember the normal course of events, and none of this new stuff. But I'm trapped in a subway in the middle of some kind of disaster, and I could really honestly use your help figuring out what it all means, and what I can do about it." She glanced down at Imrich. "We could, I mean."
Another pause, this one agonizing, and then: "You might as well come in. Because if you're telling the truth, that's the most fascinating thing I've ever heard, and if you're lying, you're a figment of my imagination, and I could still use the company."
The sign over the shutter switched off, and it began to grind upward.
The undercrofts of AAF-A are serviced by the ISSS station and represent the bulk of the original AcroAbate facilities, constructed underground while the premise of the upstairs water treatment facility was still new to the public. Many of these have since been deprecated, their functions replicated and excelled by newer systems installed on the first sublevel or even, in some cases, on the ground floor; once it became clear that nobody was going to barge in and demand proof that LHSCP was a real water company and not a false front for a globe-spanning conspiracy, since both the locals and the government were already in on the joke, the stifling secrecy of bedrock became far less vital. The MTF offices occupy the second floor of the building under the guise of administration, but they have training facilities in the undercrofts, and the logistics centre is there as well. It's not therefore an entirely obsolete set of levels, particularly as they provide the only access to the vast subterranean factory wherein dwells the Site's resident reality bender, but the beaten path only crosses here long enough to connect the subway to the stairs and elevator.
Naturally, to her great misfortune, this is also where Dr. Reynders is.
— Blank, Lines in a Muddle
"Dr. Reynders?" Udo called as they picked their way through the cramped corridor. "Are you there?"
"She might still be listening." Imrich was crouched down now, as though stealth were a possibility when their every move was likely being monitored. "Waiting to see if we say anything incriminating."
Udo shrugged. "Well, we don't have anything incriminating to say."
"I might. Udo, she's clearly off her rocker."
"So am I," she reminded him. "And so are you. We're all seeing things that aren't there to some extent. Maybe if we put our heads together…"
"What?" He glared up at her. "You think we can fix this? We can't fix this. It's unfixable. It was unfixable when we got cut off from the rest, and it's doubly so right now. Odds are good we're the only living people left at Site-43."
"I won't believe that." She couldn't. "My friends are survivors."
They were heading in a roundabout fashion for the ADDC, which luckily was located on the first level of the undercroft. The equivalent of a penthouse apartment in the subterranean stack, admittedly without windows. The tiles on the walls and floors felt old here, even though they were relatively clean. The lights were on — thank god for that, my thumb was getting hot — and even their sickly, antiquated glow was a relief after the endless dark. There were so many pipes in so many different configurations that it made Udo tired trying to think about them all, so she didn't. One foot in front of the other. In the break of conversation, she could only hear their paired set of footsteps…
"It occurs to me," she said, "that we never asked Reynders if there's anyone else in this building. In our timeline."
Imrich was still stealthing. "If there is, they didn't come through the subway. Not recently at least. But this is where most of the MTFs are staged from, so." He grimaced. "Bad news."
"I take it they're not on our side?"
"Most people aren't on our side. That was always the case with the Foundation, but now it's the case inside the Foundation as well. We lost more than half the Site before you and I got trapped in the tunnel. If there's anyone here, odds are they aren't friendly."
"They're decidedly unfriendly." Reynders' voice made them both jump, and Imrich didn't bother dropping back into his crouch after that. "If it makes you feel any better, right now there are several friendly people walking through that hallway you're in. Some of them are walking right through you. It gives me a headache to see it."
"No," said Udo. "That really doesn't make me feel better."
"I'd appreciate it if you could switch on the comms in each hall you pass through," said Reynders. "You're coming up on the end of my access. I've been looking for more people to talk to for a long while, and the ones I can see from where I am aren't very talkative at all."
"What does that mean?" Imrich demanded. "Are you talking about the other timeline, or—"
A ceiling tile above them cracked with a resounding explosion, and fell to the concrete floor. Imrich reached up to pull her down behind a bright red equipment cart, and she realized belatedly that someone had shot the ceiling.
"Fuck back off where you came from!" a woman's low, scratchy voice rang out. "You only get one warning!"
"Who the hell is that?" Udo hissed.
"Don't know," said Imrich. They were pressed together very awkwardly behind the cart, Imrich wearing nothing but his filthy track pants, but that wasn't really the concern right now.
"There you are," said Reynders. "Please don't shoot at them. I think they might be fine."
"Nothing coming from that direction is fine!" the other woman screamed. She shot the ceiling again, and Udo realized she was probably aiming for the mercury vapour lamps.
And her aim is shit. She definitely wasn't with the MTFs.
"Who are you?" Udo called out.
"Go fuck yourself!"
"I'll tell you who I am if you tell me who you are!"
"Whichever one's left standing can check the corpse's ID! I'm not falling for your bullshit again!" This time the bullet struck the lamp, and it shattered. Their portion of the hall darkened, which of course gave them the tactical advantage. Definitely definitely not an agent.
"She's beyond reasoning with," Imrich muttered.
"She has her reasons." Reynders' voice jumped down the corridor a few metres. "Brenda, listen to me. They're here to help. They're not possessed, at least I don't think so. No more than we are. Maybe less than I am."
"I don't trust them, and I don't trust you either. Leave me the fuck alone!" There was a crackling sound in tune with the next gunshot, and Udo figured the woman had just shot out the speaker.
"We have to get to Dr. Reynders!" Udo shouted. "We're going to try to fix all this!"
"That's what they said!" Brenda hooted. "And boy howdy did they mean it, too!"
Udo was getting a headache, and her hands were getting sweaty on Imrich's chest, and she was rapidly losing patience for whatever any of this was. "I think this conversation would go a lot better at reduced volume," she called out.
"I've got smokes and snacks galore back here," Brenda answered. "I can fucking wait. You're all skin and bones, you wanna test me? Bet you don't last an hour. Slink back into your hole, and we'll call it a draw! I'm feeling generous this morning."
And she took a shot in the dark.
"You should conserve your bullets," Imrich growled. It probably didn't carry past Udo's ears. "Bet they're not still making more."
"Yeah," said Udo. "Yeah, this needs to stop."
She had the cover of darkness. This couldn't be easier. She pulled her reagents pouch open, dumped the contents on the floor, and began shaping the vim harenae into skin and muscles whilst simultaneously gathering dust to form the bones. There was a time when this would have required all of her concentration, and all of her skill. That time was long past; in a few seconds she was the spitting image of herself in red, and it walked into the light.
The sensation was curious. The bullet passed through her thigh, cleanly, severing the dust-bones and making the second self stumble for a moment before knitting the injury back together. It didn't hurt — she'd have needed an entire quarry's worth of sand for nociception — but she still felt the hole appear, still felt the tiny slug passing through, still felt the quivering impact and the explosive exit. She felt the next three as well, and then she was standing over a cowering woman in a black leather jacket and beanie with a look of complete and total bafflement on her face.
"You can have my food," Brenda managed, "but at least leave me a pack of cigs, alright?"
Udo didn't personally know Brenda Corbin, but did know of her. She worked in theological studies — not as a true believer, as she was in fact an atheist, but as a fan of the strange and wondrous. She was therefore a frequent collaborator on projects to abate anomalous objects of religious significance.
The Theology and Teleology Section is an outlier, even at a facility composed entirely of outliers. It has a lower staffing profile than any group outside of Wettle's much-maligned Replication Studies, but the most spacious offices by far. It would appear to directly replicate the functions of an extant Foundation-wide Department, Tactical Theology, except for the part where TactTheo studies practical applications of deific knowledge. TheoTelo is, in contrast, a religious think tank. Its haunts are so voluminous because they are, indeed, haunted; their main office block was constructed to the ancient specifications of Belarusian mystic Arciom of Sluck, a pentagram of power which both protects them from the malign influences they study and provides a boost to their occult practices. The Section started off as an offshoot of Applied Occultism, and many of their members boast mild thaumaturgic capabilities in addition to their expertise in psalms and the proper application of salt circles.
But some of them just like talking to the ceiling.
— Blank, Lines in a Muddle
Their paths had crossed a few times since Udo had come to Site-43 in 2001, enough for her to know that 1) the woman dressed like a punk, but behaved like a monk, and 2) she didn't take shit from anybody. They'd just had a practical demonstration of the latter fact.
Corbin's camp was nestled in the maze of pipes that sat beneath the six enormous filtration tanks which provided AAF-A its never-ending supply of fresh Lake Huron water. It was a warren of twists and turns and blind corners, it was damp, it was drafty, but it was undeniably a safe and defensible location. It made sense as a place to hunker down.
It was the hunkering down which didn't make sense to Udo.
"Sorry about the bullet storm," Corbin said as they approached her living quarters. "I'm a bit of a bet-hedger these days."
Udo ducked to avoid a low-hanging pipe. "We understand."
"Speak for yourself," Imrich groused. He was already hunched over enough to clear the pipe with ease, even being nearly a foot taller than her. "We could've been killed."
"Gotta mind the odds when you're minding the store," Corbin remarked dryly. She put Udo in mind of a beat poet. "Half of everybody's not who they look like."
Udo's entire body still itched. "We look like homeless people."
"And that's what we are," Imrich added.
"Well, mi casa su casa," said Corbin as they rounded the final bend. They were standing in a cozy maintenance alcove with a sleeping roll on a memory foam mattress on the floor, a series of labelled duffel bags, a space heater and dehumidifier locked in eternal stalemate, a card table and two chairs, and a wide variety of bric-a-brac. There were safety and information posters on the walls, rips and creases showing that they'd been liberated from their original points of fixture. There were photographs mac-tac'd to conduits and concrete. There was even a sad little pot plant beneath a slowly leaking pipe — pot pot, Udo realized, and she almost smiled.
Corbin kicked at a pile of cardboard boxes in one corner, then leaned on the wall and said "I've got fuck all but smokes, joints, vending machine junk and running water. Fill your boots." She pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and rubbed it on her lips until it stuck.
Udo was thinking several things at once, but one of them had the urgency of life or death to boost its signal. "Did you say running water?"
Corbin nodded. "Yeah, but it's pay-as-you-go. As in, pay me with info before you go dunk."
"What do you want to know?" Udo was literally itching to go now, and from the corner of her eye she could see the anticipation in Imrich's tensed muscles.
"You roll in from the Site?"
He shook his head. "No, we haven't been rolling for months. We've been trapped in the tunnels until just now."
"How'd you get out?" Corbin closed her mouth and rolled the cigarette from corner to corner, expertly.
"She got up the nerve to do her thing." He pointed at Udo. "You saw."
"I did at that." The other woman turned her wide blue eyes on Udo. "Doppelganged up on me. Where'd you learn that trick?"
"Long and irrelevant story," Udo said. "The point is, we really are here to help."
Corbin was nonplussed. "Not much to help around here. I've been sneaking around for… guess I've lost track. Used to be a real bitch making a living down here, before the garrison moved out."
Udo didn't like the sound of that. "What garrison?"
"Task Forces of the Mobile kind. They had this dump tight as a drum until about a week ago, when they all started marching out the front door. Heard them from down low, then went up high as I could to check. Place doesn't go as high as it used to," she remarked as an aside. "Caught some chatter, figured they were off to beat the locals into submission again."
"Locals?" Imrich looked surprised, and he sounded surprised too. "As in topside? There's still people alive up there?"
"Yeah." Corbin grinned; the cigarette stayed put. "Guess who?"
"I have no idea," he said.
"I'll rephrase." She took a long drag, and exhaled away from them. Udo was glad; she despised the smell of cigarette smoke. "Guess who they couldn't quite wipe out, no matter how hard they tried."
Oh. "Are you saying there's still people alive on the res?"
"Most of 'em, I hear. Old myths die hard. Water panthers and thunderbirds and flying skeletons, oh my." Corbin pulled the cigarette out of her mouth, and brushed a lock of copper hair off her eyeglasses. "Don't know where they're holed up, but apparently they're making a real nuisance of themselves. Can't say I blame them."
"So we're clear now?" Udo found herself glancing at the entrances, listening to the soft plink plinking of water in the distance. "There's no hostiles in here?"
"Oh, there's still plenty." Corbin waved the cigarette, streaking the space in front of her with smoke. "We had over a hundred MTF agents before the breach, and I'd say there's still a few squads up there judging by the water flow and the sounds I've heard. I keep out of their way, you know, but you learn to see the signs when you're doing it bachelor-style in a waterlogged warehouse as long as I've been."
Udo remembered an earlier directive. The gunfight had rather pre-empted it. "Speaking of being alone, why don't you turn the comms on and let Dr. Reynders talk to you?"
Corbin grimaced, and looked up. There was a speaker mounted on the ceiling right above her meagre belongings. There was a panel on the wall; its light was orange. "Because she's as crazy as the rest of them, and I don't trust her. Is that where you're going? Because then I am not keen on coming with."
Imrich took another of the deep breaths Udo now associated with a concerted effort to act like a sane, normal person instead of a long-lost tunnel hobo. "You might be the only person here whose brain is mostly functioning, Dr. Corbin. We could really use that right now."
The other woman looked away, leather creaking. "Don't mean to disappoint you, buddy, but I'm strung out like an addict at this point. If I hadn't shot at you, I probably would have eaten those bullets as a midnight snack."
"Hey." Udo took a step towards her; Corbin eyed her suspiciously. "It's alright. Things are changing now. We're here, and we're going to find more people, and we're going to see what we can do. Yeah?"
Corbin turned her head and spat. "Where you been this last year? Nobody believes in fixing this shit. We're all just picking out seats to watch the end from." She gestured at Imrich. "He even said you'd given up. What happened to prompt this sudden burst of youthful optimism?"
The perfect answer came to her in a flash of inspiration.
"I changed my mind."
Corbin stared at her.
"And if you think I'm optimistic now, just wait until I've had that fucking shower."
Udo had expected a broken pipe she could turn on with a pipe wrench, or maybe some sort of jury-rigged contraption with a falling bucket of water. What she had not expected was a pair of industrial washrooms, occupancy one each, men's and women's. Toilet, sink, shower, the works. "You get stuff like that in an old facility," Corbin explained as she redistributed the toiletries so they could both take proper advantage simultaneously. "Functions shift, and there's leftovers. This level used to be a big deal, so there's all sorts of junk gone mostly out of use but still kept working, just in case."
"And now we're living the case," Udo remarked. She was standing in the middle of the men's washroom — it had been closest to her, and she hadn't seen any reason to discriminate between identical spaces. "Uh, is there any problem drawing the water? Something people might notice?"
"Bad people, you mean?" Corbin shook her head. "No way. The volume rushing through there, upstairs? Way too high for them to detect something like a shower. You'll use a ton of water, and they won't have a clue, if they're bothering to monitor. Trust me on that. The recycling circulation alone uses fifty times what you're about to."
"I might challenge that assertion." Udo smiled. "Thanks, Brenda."
Corbin nodded.
Udo waited.
"Mm. Alright." Corbin winked at her, and shut the door.
She's certainly something.
Udo looked at her reflection in the mirror, and was surprised when it didn't shatter. "Holy shit," she said out loud. She looked like she was wearing some unidentifiable Halloween costume. Like she was a zombie extra from an old exploitation flick, not the p-variety. She glanced at the tools and supplies Corbin had provided, and spied among them an electric razor and a pair of scissors.
She looked at her hair. It wasn't in dreadlocks, just knitted together by sweat and grime. If it had been properly matted or braided, then consistently maintained, there would be no problem. She'd worn dreads before, when she was a teenager, and she'd taken good care of her scalp and made sure to moisturize on a regular schedule. None of that had been happening here. What she had on her head was a filthy, health-threatening mess. She reached up to touch it, and in an instant she knew not a single strand could be salvaged. She glanced at Corbin's selection of combs, and shuddered at the thought of trying to pick apart that mass of tangled split ends.
The scissors, then.
Udo cut her hair regularly. She'd been growing it out since starting at 43, but that still required a frequent trim, because her hair grew at two or three times the going rate. She knew why — her thaumaturgical heritage, a remnant of the magic in her parents' DNA like her bright orange eyes — but she didn't want to advertise it, and so she'd become a fairly adept amateur self-styler.
This wasn't going to require nearly so much finesse.
It took about half an hour. Halfway through, she heard a faint buzzing from the other side, and realized Imrich was shaving off his beard. She picked up a safety razor and shaving crème, then performed a very delicate and entirely new operation on her scalp, and the feeling of freedom struck her like a hammer blow. She could move her head. She could turn her neck. She could even breathe easier. It was better. It was much better.
She still cried a little. Her mother would have cried with her.
She couldn't think about her parents right now.
Her clothes were next. Brenda had provided a woman's work shirt, basic underwear, socks and track pants. Udo was wearing a shirt and bra which in no way could be extricated from each other, and a pair of jeans containing a pair of panties which were likely a complete write-off. She didn't even want to know how she'd been going to the bathroom. She probably had a yeast infection that could raise bread.
She realized she had to go to the bathroom. Time to solve the wardrobe issue. Once more, there was only one thing for it; she picked up the scissors again, and started cutting.
What followed was a baptism. She'd never been particularly religious before, but she worshiped at the showerhead until her skin began to prune.
She felt like a new woman when she walked out of the washroom. This was often true after a shower, but rarely truer than in these unique circumstances.
Imrich was already standing in the utility corridor, making what was undoubtedly awkward small-talk with Corbin. He'd buzz-cut his hair and removed most of his beard, though there was still a thick layer of stubble around his mouth and jaw, and he'd also apparently engaged in a little manscaping since the carpet on his chest was notably thinner. She had an extremely good view of this situation, because apparently their host hadn't found the need to source any male clothes in her survival routine — he was wearing the same woman's work shirt she was. She chose not to comment on this.
Instead, she smiled encouragingly and said "You look better," in spite of the fact that she could now see how much more haunted and old his face looked than what she remembered.
He was looking at her strangely. "You look better than better."
She rubbed her smooth, bald head and tried to ignore the flush of pleasure. She'd only ever received a backhanded compliment from him before. She hadn't felt the lack, but it wasn't too terrible to have.
"Yeah, she's pretty hot," Corbin agreed. "Leave a nice looking corpse too, if that's what you're into. It's what you'll get if you try to go any further, only there won't be anyone around to admire it."
Udo blinked at her. "You're a bundle of joy, you know that?"
"Just stating facts. Novel thing in my line." The theologian stubbed out her cigarette on what appeared to be an antique ashtray. "Reynders is way off the beaten path on a good day, and we haven't had one of those in almost a year of days. With the damage done in the fighting—"
"What fighting?" Udo interrupted.
Corbin sighed. "This place went to pot separate from the main Site, obviously. And it went fast, with all those guns to kick around. Superstructure took a lot of hits. Only gets worse the deeper you get, and Reynders is in pretty deep."
Udo fingered her reagents pouch, tied to a hole she'd punched in the track pants' waistband. "Tell me something I can actually use. She's the smartest person for a thousand miles or more, and we need her on our side."
"We're long past the point where sides matter," said Corbin.
Udo found herself stabbing a finger across the narrow way. "Can we get one thing straight? You're not convincing me to back off on this. We're not gonna camp out with you in your waterpark, settle down in a nice titration tank and grow an algae lawn out front or whatever the fuck you've got planned. What you're living isn't life, and I'm not having it. If you want to stay here, that's more than fine with me. But I'm not giving up on this, so tell me whatever you know that's actually useful and I'll start walking until I'm out of your smoke."
Corbin closed the distance between them while she ranted, until they were standing face-to-face. "You're one to talk about smoking," she smirked.
Udo was speechless.
"Can you guys do this when we're safe?" Imrich suggested.
"We're not doing anything," said Udo. We're not doing anything.
"And we're not ever going to be safe," Corbin added. "But fine, have it your way. I know how to get to where she is, and I'll show you the way."
She headed down the hall.
"You could just tell us," Udo found herself saying. "Save yourself the trip."
The other woman waved a hand over her shoulder without turning around. "I think I'd rather piss you off some more. Been a long time since I had any entertainment down here."
"What are they doing?" Udo whispered.
"All they can do." Corbin wasn't whispering. "Nothing."
"What's wrong with them?"
"They're spent," said Imrich. He wasn't whispering either. "Wirth's possession wears people out. They think maybe it's linked to people's CRV."
They were looking through the observation glass on the first undercroft level at the offices down on the second, where perhaps two dozen mindless zombies were milling about. Some were dressed as MTF agents, some as security agents. Most were either technicians or researchers; there were also a few civilians sprinkled in. They were sitting at the cubicles, or slumped on the floor against them, or walking the aisles in random patterns. One of them was slowly stripping off his clothing in the corner, and Udo had a feeling she knew what he was about to do.
"Which is why these ones took so long to use up," Corbin continued. "They had a lot of work to do, fucking up F-A. Extrajudicial execution, terrorizing the locals, setting up their comms. Unpaid labour. They dump them here when they're no good for anything. This is as far as I go, normally."
"Why?" said Udo.
"Because they're still usable."
"By Wirth?"
"Yeah. And I think they act as a kind of alarm system. I think he gets a little tingle when they see or hear something. Early warning."
Imrich placed a hand on the window, and leaned in until his forehead was almost touching. "Which is why they're walking around in there."
Udo frowned. "Is there another way around?"
Corbin shook her head. "Nope. All the other corridors are filled with toxic sludge. I don't think you want to go sticking your sand fingers in there. It's through that room, or not through at all."
Imrich turned away from the glass. "Any ideas?"
"Maybe." Udo picked up her reagents pouch again. "Can you track their likely movements?"
"If you give me an hour, and don't pull your mutual shrew-taming routine in front of me while I'm doing the math, we'll see." He walked to the monitoring station and picked up an old work tablet with obvious distaste; he did prefer his notepads. He flicked the switch. It was still working. He grunted in near-satisfaction.
Corbin was staring at her expectantly, almost hungrily. "What's your plan?"
Udo weighed the pouch in her hand. It wasn't much, but it would have to be enough. "You said it. Sandfingers."
While Imrich and Corbin filled the makeshift sandbox — really just four light girders kicked into a roughly rectangular configuration — with bottles of colloidal silver and bags of drywall powder and crumbling particle board, Udo looked for something more substantial to wear. After the stifling heat of the tunnels, the cool of AAF-A felt positively hypothermic. The monitoring room was connected to a break room was connected to a manager's office with a wardrobe, and she opened that up, and what she found inside gave her pause. She looked at the nameplate on the desk: "Bianca Warshawsky, Treatment Manager." Warshawsky handled the front company, and had some sort of degree in groundwater management as Udo recalled. She and her husband Fred were honourary members of the Acroamatic Abatement Group which governed the Foundation's recycling efforts, and that explained the contents of her closet.
Udo considered leaving the labcoats where they were, then sighed and brought them out instead.
Imrich was, of all the things, running a broken piece of ceiling tile across a cheese grater when she returned. "Oh, hey," he said. "Not bad."
She laid the two AAG labcoats, white with green lapels, on the monitoring station. "Feels a bit weird."
"Why?" Corbin returned from her smoke break, and stared uncomprehendingly at what Imrich was doing.
"Because we're not in the AAG." Imrich finished grating and downed the tool. "Outfits are proprietary, membership is selective."
"Well," said Udo. "I actually got an invitation back in April." She paused. "Back back in April."
"Hold up." Corbin slid into view, draping herself over the console. "There was no AAG in April."
"Here we go," said Imrich.
"No, we don't." Udo's cold shoulders outweighed her misgivings, and she shrugged Bianca's labcoat on. "I can't explain it, but Reynders might be able to. The sooner we get there, the better."
"It's not smart to have secrets." Corbin followed her over to the jury-rigged frame. "Especially with so few keepers to go around."
"You can wait an hour or two." Udo dumped the contents of her reagents pouch into the frame. "You're a theologian. Waiting for answers is your whole deal."
"I don't make theological deals," said Corbin, but she wasn't really paying attention to the conversation anymore. She was entranced, the swirling sands reflected in her widening eyes and the lenses of her glasses. Udo was stirring, and when she put the heat on, the show was going to become genuinely interesting.
"You're sure this will work?" said Imrich, at a great distance. With the polyglot grains she was pulling apart and bringing into herself all tumbling about, novel neurons in a new steel frame, it was difficult to focus on the frame she'd walked in with.
"I'm sure about the magic," she muttered. "Just not the science."
"Feels like it should be the other way around." Corbin's voice was an awed whisper. The frame was glowing orange.
"Nah." Imrich was less hushed, but the note of envy was unmistakable. "The thing about science is, science has rules. She doesn't like rules."
The alchemy was achieved. There was a frame of transmuted grey-blue glass in the steel frame. That was half the job done.
"She fuckin' rules," said Corbin, and Udo decided to start thinking of her as Brenda.
It was an interesting little trip.
Udo had gotten the idea from a bad movie she'd seen back in 2002, which presumably the version of her native to this timeline had never gotten to watch; odds were it hadn't even come out, since the disasters were likely already underway by the time November rolled around. Her alternate self hadn't missed much, save for this scrap of vital inspiration. James Bond had driven an invisible car with little cameras and projectors on all exposed surfaces which made it effectively disappear from sight, which was pretty stupid even by the standards of the rapidly-declining franchise. She was no optical scientist — she was really less a scientist than a witch — but she'd been pretty sure that wouldn't work. Harry, who had optics training, had laughed out loud when she'd mentioned it a few months later.
She was now demonstrating the effect herself. Lillian had once told her that both idiots and geniuses immediately dismissed silly concepts out of hand, but the difference between them was that geniuses eventually came back around. She wondered if Harry had reconsidered since it had come up back in May; if he had, he hadn't mentioned it.
They kept to the walls as they moved through the office space, the makeshift mirror surrounding them projecting the image of dull drywall out towards the milling crowds, dragging itself grain by grain across the carpet. It was seven feet tall and seven feet long and just a few centimetres wide, and it was connected by a thin strand of dust to a much larger pile of sediment still sitting in the monitoring room, up the stairs, for extra processing power. She found it far simpler than she'd thought to reflect the wall out past their creeping forms; she had perfect control over the angles and shine of each grain, as she inhabited them with her own essence.
Mirror neurons, she thought, and she stifled a laugh. They couldn't make a sound, and she didn't want to blow the sands away.
The far door was closed, and it was an awkward thing to position the mirror in front of it, reflect it outward, open it without changing the reflection, then pass through without bringing the mirror with. When they closed the door, Udo dispersed the particles as best she could and retrieved the vim harenae before feeling the connection snap. She sagged back, and Brenda caught her.
"Whoah," said Udo. She felt nauseous. "That always sucks." She let the other woman lower her to the corridor floor. "Lost a lot of brain just now."
Imrich hunched down beside her. "I've never seen you do anything like that before."
"I've never done anything like it before."
"No, but I mean…" He looked baffled, maybe a little frightened. He could have looked like that the entire time, since back at the tunnel, and she would never have known with the mass of hair obscuring and softening his features. "You've never even come close."
"It was pretty fucking hot, won't lie." Brenda was grinning.
Imrich frowned up at her. "That's not what I mean."
"Sure it isn't." The theologian moved cautiously down the hallway, away from them.
Imrich wasn't satisfied. "What the hell happened to you last year?"
Udo shrugged. "A whole lot of shit." She felt a grin to mirror Brenda's coming on. "My resolution this year is to be the happening myself."
There were plenty more opportunities for Udo to flex her magical muscles on the road ahead, as the undercroft was badly damaged beyond the office block. For an Acroamatic Abatement facility, however, the damage was surprisingly mundane: fallen masonry, bent metal doors that wouldn't open, ragged gaps in the floorplan. There was a simple reason for this. AAF-A was the oldest part of Site-43's AcroAbate array, and therefore performed the least esoteric work — and the least work in general. It was still one of the premier esoteric waste disposal centers in the world, of course, but its relative disuse meant that they only occasionally had to avoid rooms completely packed solid from floor to rafters with bright pink goo or hallways where the walking surfaces were illusory.
It still took almost three hours. Shoving rocks aside with sand magic was a time-consuming process, particularly when one had to make sure one's amendments didn't cause the ceiling to cave in.
And then they were there. Udo recognized the road ahead. They were approaching the Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber, prison of Ilse Reynders. Their goal.
Udo reached for the handle of the final door, and Imrich's hand fell suddenly on hers. "Hold up. What are you going to tell her?"
"Anything she wants to know." She didn't let go of the handle.
"Are you sure that's a good idea? The woman's not exactly firing on all cylinders right now."
"She's also got a few dozen times the number of cylinders the rest of us have," she reminded him.
"He's not wrong, though." Brenda sidled up and leaned on the wall the door was set into. "If she was in any state to be useful to anyone, don't you think one side or the other would have tried to pick her up by now?"
"Obviously they couldn't," said Udo.
Imrich grunted. "Or they didn't want to."
"This is a pointless conversation." Udo turned the handle. "If anyone can get us out of this mess, it's her. I'm not ditching our best chance just because she's a bit under the weather!" She wasn't looking to see if they were convinced. She was essentially talking to the door. "Reynders has spent our entire lives and then some stuck in that cage. Her life is just one big bad day that never ends. She's handled worse than this before. She'll be fine, and we'll be glad we found her!"
She yanked the door open with a force that surprised her, and walked boldly toward salvation.
"Come back! COME BACK!" a woman's voice hollered from a distant speaker. "They're not even real! I need you! I need you to be real! COME BACK!"
They rounded the final corner to see a corridor filled with complex projection and computer equipment facing the broad window looking in on the ADDC, and a bedraggled shape in a very old labcoat slumped forward against it on the inside, arms pressed to the glass, face buried in elbow crooks. The woman shuddered and screeched.
"I say we figure out where the natives are hiding," said Imrich, "and go hide with them."
"I say we go back to the titration chambers," said Brenda.
"I say you stay here until I clear my mind," said the woman in the incinerator, "no not you, please leave, and then we'll see what we can do about saving the rest of the world."
She lowered her hands, and offered them a tentative wave.
"Also hello. Glad you made it. I'm fine."
