30. Bastien

Bastien


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Underfoot and out of sight is where we make our homes,
In the subterranean shadows like a pack of busy gnomes
Keeping up the nerve to dwell within demands an iron will,
But it helps to know that always there are deeper places still.

"Is this really necessary?"

Ibanez gave him a look that was six feet tall and surly. "Yes."

"He's not even awake."

"He murdered Allan."

And there was nothing he could say to that which she had not considered. Their little honour guard — him, her, and four dour agents in MTF riot gear — were waiting for the room to be prepared. On the stretcher, William Wettle was a picture of human suffering. Curled in a ball, eyes squeezed shut, breathing low. He hadn't said anything. Hadn't moved a muscle. Not since that most fatal twitch…

"S&C Actual to GIGO."

It was Ibanez's radio squawking, but it took him a moment to realize she was also the one being addressed. MTF Pi-43, "Garbage In, Garbage Out."

He suddenly wanted very much to cry.

"GIGO. Over."

"Ready for your package. Over."

"Affirmative. On our way. GIGO, out." She glared up at him with something between a challenge and a plea; even in a clean uniform, she looked pale and bedraggled. "Look. As far as we know, that thing is still inside him." All six of them were on monstrously carcinogenic mnemonic stabilizers to prevent further possession. "We've got a new Director now, but even Willie would say that's not a replication study we want to run."

It was a sad procession. Ibanez's people had cleared them a path from McInnis' office to AAF-D, and by her orders nobody came to see the parade. Even the best, safest path was strewn with rubble and water and dust and blood. Gabby joined them at Wettle's lab — she took his hand, and said nothing — and kept him company the rest of the way.

The telekill sump was a geomass of SCP-148, a metastasizing substance that derived its sustenance from psychic transmission. It was floating in a thick soup of irreducible esoteric effluence, the worst of the weirdest, which kept it from overgrowing its container. This was where they piped anything too problematic to be dealt with. Flush and forget.

That's what they were going to do to his best friend.

Wettle didn't react as the waiting S&C agents loaded him into the elevated chamber, while his pallbearers looked on uselessly. The loading room was nondescript; you wouldn't know where this homey elevator was headed unless someone told you. He wanted to tell Wettle. He wanted Wettle to comically misunderstand. He wanted this not to be happening.

When the chamber was sealed, the floor underneath opened up, and down it sank on its massive piston. The walls were lined with p-particles — 'mimic' consciousnesses, neither intelligent nor alive but by random anomalous coincidence possessing the most obvious features of both — which would absorb the dementia-causing radiation of the telekill before it reached the supine occupant. Hopefully.

One more replication study they didn't want to run.

When the doors had sealed over Wettle's temporary tomb, Ibanez left him with his wife. Gabby leaned on him, and he leaned on her. Mutual support.

It wasn't his fault, he was about to tell her, when she said: "It wasn't his fault."

He held her close. "What was he doing out there?"

She stared at the vacuum-sealed slices in the floor, beyond which their erstwhile supervisor was ensconced in the world's most dangerous deprivation tank. For a long moment, she didn't answer.

Then she said: "Trying something new."

He closed his eyes. "Trying to break the pattern."

They stood there a moment longer, listening to each other and the facility breathing softly. Finally, he sighed: "You're the boss now, you know."

She shivered. "I can't think of anything I want less." A beat, and then she added: "Just hope he's back by next September, or we'll have to decide which of us gets run over."

Finally, he did cry. The release of the floodgates was a final, unassuming reply: "We'll flip a coin."

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