At its uttermost base, it was an engineering problem.
They still didn't have any magic translocation or duplication machines.
What they did have was time, six Survivors, and one Nascimbeni.
The puzzle never stood a chance.
10 August
He was in his office loo, drying his hands, when he heard the phone ring. The voice on the other end was a little strained, and just the faintest bit Austrian. "Director McInnis."
"Mr. Zwist."
"It's been a long time since I called this line. I wonder, is it the same telephone?"
"I'm afraid not. The technology has been hardened considerably since Dr. Scout occupied this office. But it is the same office." He looked down. "The same desk, as well. Not the same chair."
"Chairs are one of the few things to have improved over the last few decades."
"You'll hear no argument from me."
"Yes, you're a famously agreeable fellow. That's the only reason I agreed to this communication."
McInnis walked around the edge of the desk, and sat down. "I understand we've been testing the boundaries of your patience, of late."
"It isn't a matter of patience, Director. I merely refuse to become too… involved. But my debt to your predecessor has not yet been paid, and I know you to be an honourable man. I doubt I will suffer very much in the course of a single telephone call. What did you wish to discuss?"
McInnis glanced up at the framed objet d'art. "You know that I was one of Dr. Scout's apprentices."
"As was Dr. Blank."
"Yes. He trusted us to carry on his legacy. He knew his time was limited, and he used it well. He taught us nearly everything he knew. We have done precious little with it."
"Reading between the lines, as I try to do, this would seem to be inaccurate." The strain in the old man's voice came through more clearly now. "I have the distinct impression that you and yours have saved the entire world several times over the last two decades."
"Saved the world as it is. Would you call that a great feat? I wouldn't."
"Billions would. Most of them haven't the luxury of judging the quality of their lives. They are content merely to continue living."
"But I am not." McInnis turned back to face his desk, and tried to imagine the old cryptomancer sitting across from him. "I find myself needing to pass on what I've learned. Give others the opportunity Dr. Scout afforded me. I have tried, and failed, to honour him in this fashion."
"Why do you believe you have failed?" Zwist sounded surprised.
"Wynn Rydderech sacrificed his life for the Good Work. Vivian sacrificed his career. I've sacrificed nothing. There is no hill for me to die on. I prefer to live, at the bottom of a hole. Vivian dedicated the latter part of his life to finding successors, and mentoring them. We aren't doing that. I made a single, solitary effort in that regard, and I've lost him," his throat caught, just for an instant, "and I can feel myself resisting the idea of starting again. Harry—"
"Who have you lost?" Zwist interrupted.
"My assistant. A young man named Zulfikar. He was killed by the giftschreiber."
"I'm surprised that would be enough to sour you on the prospect of passing on what you have learned. That isn't the impression I got of you from Vivian at all."
McInnis blinked. If they'd been meeting face to face, Zwist could have read him like a large print book. "You discussed me?"
"Of course. He said you were driven. Intelligent. Conscientious. Frighteningly observant. He felt confident you would do justice to his cause."
"Well, he lived for a long, long time. It's little surprise that he would be wrong at least once."
"I don't believe he's wrong. I believe you're at a low ebb, after a long project, and being unfair to yourself. When the hurt has faded, you will try again. You must."
"I don't know that I have it in me. I'm starting to feel my age."
"Age has nothing to do with it. You will find your commitment again. You will carry that weight. You are a man of many burdens, and none can bear them but you."
He shook his head, pointlessly. "Do you think perhaps you might be projecting? I understand you haven't taken an apprentice in years. Perhaps decades."
Now the old man sounded cross. "We weren't talking about me."
"Weren't we?"
Silence on the line.
"I am… surprised. Pleasantly or unpleasantly, I do not know."
"Oh?"
"Vivian spoke so highly of your cleverness. I did not expect to find that he was engaging in critical understatement."
"It has been my experience that people are not often fond of receiving advice, but rarely shy away from giving it." McInnis smiled. "Vivian once told me this: one fact is information. Two facts are an opportunity."
8 September
It was Amelia's first Breach.
It was the first Breach without Chief Nascimbeni. There were people from the Department of Temporal Anomalies, the Temporal Anomalies Department, and something called the Chronometrics Division — which seemed to put everyone in the former two groups on edge — observing, and plenty of predictions of doom had been mooted.
If there really was some immeasurable something to the seven members of Sampi-5243 that allowed them to excel at what they did, and retain their personhood if the timeline shifted, then they might be in for a lot of trouble. It was possible that Wirth, and Markey, and Gwilherm, Mukami and Radcliffe might refuse to acknowledge Amelia's promotion and interact with her as they were scripted to. There had been suggestions that Nascimbeni's son Gallo, or even his granddaughter Flora, should take his place in the protocols. Perhaps whatever he had was genetic, though the other members of Sampi-5243 had been quick to point out that both relatives predated the Breach, so they almost certainly hadn't inherited his special relationship with it.
The other members of Sampi-5243. The thought filled her with a kind of pride.
The kind that could nestle comfortably side by side in her breast with the sensation of mortal terror.
She reached her mark at the appointed time, placing her feet directly over top of the copperplate writing ("On your left."), obscuring it… and there he was, with the slamming of flip-flopped footsteps. A young man, younger even than she was, barrelling over to see what was what. "What's going on?" he shouted. "We heard explosions?"
She shook her head, and spoke in what she hoped would parse as a dead man's voice. "Don't know. Best guess: thaumic overflow and recondicity." It was kind of nice, she thought, that this precise moment was preserved for posterity. Nascimbeni's best guess had been exactly correct. "The tanks are blowing, and—"
That was where her lines ended, for now. And Wirth's life ended just a few seconds after.
A violent crack as Verne, SCP-6643, reached out of the vibrating pipe-hell and claimed the young researcher. Another as it pulled him deeper into the chaos, which she assumed came from his spine. He made a small, sad noise as he went, but she was quite sure he was dead before the coils rolled him out of view.
Then — and this had absolutely not been anywhere in the conprocs or description she'd read — the tentacle came back, its fat orange marker tip hanging inches from her face, and she felt the most astonishing sense of being seen before a roar and a rush of wind from the airlock sucked it back out of view, into a cloud of glittering sparks.
That wasn't the only deviation from the usual course of events, but it was the only unexpected one.
The alterations they'd made to Security and Containment hadn't quite put it back where it belonged, though they'd preserved the change which spared the Uncontained his brilliant fate.
The alterations to Applied Occultism, on the other hand…
Agents Yancy and O rescued the blistered beast from its badly damaged, but no longer destroyed, interview room on the second sublevel, and escorted it back to its home on the fourth. The legend on the chamber door was now perfectly legible: SCP-001.
The Sampis met at the elevator in the heart of H&S, and rode down together.
<Subject in containment, re-evaluation pending, is waiting the centre of its chamber. It appears to be very excited.>
<Dir. McInnis, Chief Ibanez, and Drs. Blank, Lillihammer, Okorie and Wettle enter.>
<Subject claps.>
Subject: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to the end!
Dir. McInnis: You're quite right about that.
Subject: We have some time for supervillain-style gloating, if you'll indulge me. I don't have a speech written this time, but I can ad-lib something.
Dr. Lillihammer: You do love the sound of your own voice.
Subject: And why not? I'm a rock star. I always have been. There's been books, songs, whole genres of art dedicated to phenomena I set in motion. I'm quite a thing. Yeats even wrote a poem about me once! You know Yeats?
Dr. Blank: Let me guess.
Subject: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre…"
Dr. Blank: "The falcon cannot —"
Dr. Lillihammer: Nobody cares.
Chief Ibanez: It's a pretty great poem, though.
Dir. McInnis: That's about you, then, is it? I can't tell if you're being facetious or not.
Subject: I never jest about my influence. Haven't you wondered what was knocking down your walls, shutting down your systems, shattering your mirrors? It was me. It's always been me. I am entropy. I am disorder in the system.
Dr. Blank: "Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold."
Chief Ibanez: "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
Subject: I never liked that part. Nothing I do is 'mere'.
Chief Ibanez: There anything in this poem about how you get your ass kicked by a janitor and an egghead?
<Dr. Okorie leaves the chamber, smiling.>
Subject: I don't think so. It's been a while since I read it. What egghead? I assume the janitor is that lovely gentleman with the idiot box from the last run-through. How's he doing, by the way?
Dr. Blank: He's in a coma.
Subject: He'll be happy to hear that.
Dr. Blank: Yeah, there's nothing worse than being trapped in an endless cycle, is there? You'd know.
<Silence on recording.>
Subject: I don't know why I'm bothering to talk to you. I'm returned, you'll all be dead soon, and I'll have to wait a decade and a half for your doppelgangers to appear.
Dr. Blank: Resurrection sickness really is a thing, huh? Or is your biological clock just not that accurate? It's 2019, buddy.
<Silence on recording.>
Subject: What?
Dr. McInnis: You've been in containment for seventy-six years. And you're never getting out.
Dr. Lillihammer: I thought maybe its perception of time would be a bit skewed. It can't even tell when the timeline changes.
Dr. Wettle: That could be dangerous. Imagine all the potentialities it can see.
Subject: You're bluffing. It's 2002, and I'm about to wake up all your sleeping demons.
Dr. Blank: We're not bluffing, we're stalling.
<Dr. Okorie returns, with a second subject in tow.>
Dr. Okorie: For a dramatic reveal!
Dr. Blank: Took you long enough, Udo.
Dr. Okorie: Some of us have too much dignity to run.
Second Subject: And some of us have learned to take things one step at a time.
Silence on recording.
First Subject: Terrific.
One hour earlier
It wasn't precisely irritating, but it did make her feel… well, the way she'd felt back in England. The thing she liked least was how god-damned predictable it always was.
"How's the doctorate coming along?" 001-B asked as Udo unracked her esomat suit, already shaking her head.
She stared at the figure in shock. It was him. It was really him.
She hadn't seen him in seventeen years. Hadn't even been able to conceptualize him.
She'd been right.
"Slow going," she admitted. Assembling the suit was a complicated procedure, but with her companion's help it was never a very time-consuming one. "We're so busy up here, it's not leaving me much dissertation time."
"I'm very impressed." 001-B smiled at her as she pulled on her rubber-soled boots, and smiled at him in spite of her irritation; he had the affect of a doting uncle. “Increasing your mastery. Far too many people improve themselves only to the point where comfort and ease is assured. You have that now; you've always had it, really. With the company from the cradle to the grave, and yet you strive always to be better. Admirable."
She forced herself to go through the motions. Make it happen the way it had happened. Trust that her body knew the steps, as her mind raced every which way, plus loose.
"Not better." She leaned on the transparent wall of the containment cell and shrugged, getting a feel for the suit before checking the seal on her gloves. Bzzt. There was static electricity on her fingertips; that was a new one. "Best. Can't become a Section Chair without a PhD or an MD." She essayed what she hoped was a confident grin.
001-B zipped up the back of her suit, quick and precise. "You have ambition," he remarked. "That's also good." The fit was snug and solid.
"Alright," she said. "Let's do this."
Udo sighed as the cell door cycled and she walked into her cramped and very dangerous workspace. She could feel a halo of static around her legs in the spacious suit, and it began to cling; she was glad she'd shaved her legs this morning. It still bothered her that 001-B didn't wear a suit while in the containment cell, but that decision was well above her very low paygrade. She certainly wouldn't have said no to a static-free evening, herself…
It was difficult to focus on what happened next, when a great many things fought for dominance over a few short moments in time. 001-B opened a hood on the orphic pipe, and reached inside; the world erupted in emergency red, and a synthesized wail filled her ears; the tiles beneath her feet began to warp, then melted into a gummy ceramic mass, except they didn't; green and purple lightning arced up out of the pipe, except it didn't; it raced along 001-B's arms, and he began to shake, except he didn't; she stepped back, and felt the soles of her suit remaining where they were, except they didn't; a bright and brilliant light poured out of the pipe, and the hood disintegrated in a flash of white heat, except it didn't; she realized the containment cell was compromised, and realized further that she wouldn't be able to reach the outer chamber door before the entire space was a ball of superheated plasma, and that this was everything working precisely to spec, except it wasn't; 001-B turned to face her, spasming wildly, and punched the door controls with one hand while keeping the other firm on the pipe, except he didn't; he shouted “GO!” as the transparent half-moon door cycled open, but none of that actually happened; she cried "NO!" in response as he pushed her roughly through and then hammered at the controls again, but really they were both just standing there, 001-B stock still, regarding what ought to have been his end with obvious confusion; he thrust both hands deep into the raging heart of lux, disappearing into it, and she realized he was buying her a few final seconds, and she could see this just as if it were happening before her, though nothing at all was happening; her need to survive handily overpowered her sacrificial instinct, fully the opposite of what 001-B had experienced, and she ran to the divider door; she unlocked it — and a violent explosion of green static burned her fingertips black as the control panel fried; she bolted blindly through; she locked the door behind her; she unlocked the exterior airlock, waited an eternity for it to cycle, then rushed headlong into the hallway as it slammed shut. Except, of course, she did none of that. She simply stood there, and stared at him.
After a moment, he turned and stared back at her.
"Welcome," she whispered, and her throat caught.
"What?" the barrel-chested old man said, eyes flitting back and forth wildly.
She removed her helmet, unzipped her suit, stepped out of it, retrieved her glasses from the locker, and cleared her throat.
"Welcome back to baseline."
Second Subject: Brother.
First Subject: I really thought I had it, this time.
Second Subject: You nearly did. Better luck next time.
Ibanez got the call on her way back up the elevator, and reached him with time to spare.
"You wanted to see how it ended, didn't you?" she whispered. "Had to make sure we were okay. Sentimental bastard."
She took a deep breath.
"Yeah. We got 'em."
The change came when it always did.
She was holding his hand when it finally happened.
NOTICE FROM THE OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR, SITE-43
Noè Nascimbeni, Chief Emeritus of the Janitorial and Maintenance Section of Site-43, passed away in his sleep at precisely 18:26:53 on September the 9th, 2019. He was responsible for the construction of Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-D, the maintenance of Site-43 in its entirety for forty-seven years, and the salvation of the human race on no fewer than five occasions. He is survived by his son, Gallo, his granddaughter, Flora, and predeceased by his wife, Lena.
He is also survived by Delfina Ibanez, Chief of Pursuit and Suppression; Harold R. Blank, Chair of Archives and Revision; Lillian S. Lillihammer, Chair of Memetics and Countermemetics; Udo A. Okorie, Chief of Applied Occultism; Allan J. McInnis, Director; and William W. Wettle, Deputy Chair of Replication Studies.
He will never be forgotten.
— McInnis, Allan J. (Director, Site-43)
It was a full house.
They'd intended to hold the funeral in the chapel, as with Zlatá, but a quick survey determined that practically the entire Site intended to show. Nascimbeni had thought he hadn't made many friends, but almost half a century of keeping their home together and in good working order had apparently made an impression.
And not all the attendees were from Site-43; in the front row of the massive auditorium, packed nearly to capacity, the new Director of Site-36 sat chewing his beard and trying not to cry. Ibanez had taken Epsilon-43, the "Day Trippers," to pick him up personally; otherwise he probably would have pulled rank and commandeered a plane. Phil Deering sat beside him on the right, holding back tears, but not very well; Doug stayed on his mirror at the door, none of his scars moving.
Banerjee had put on his old J&M uniform for the occasion.
Flora, seated to his left, was already wearing hers.
McInnis had, as his friends had suspected, begun composing the eulogy early. He had a very efficient mind like that. But he'd had an extra year to work on it, to ponder how he might memorialize one of his oldest and most fractious relationships.
He gestured at the urn on its stand on the platform, and began to speak.
This man was a friend of mine.
That shouldn't necessarily mean anything to you. You have friends of your own, and I don't know all of them. I would understand what it means to you that they are your friends, of course, but friendship is a thing with import that cannot be fully conveyed beyond its bounds. I can tell you that I worked with Noè Nascimbeni for over forty years, and you might understand that fact academically, but you would not understand how the weight of those years is settling on me now that I know their full number, that the number will rise no further. I cannot make you feel my regret and sorrow at his passing, my guilt for the moments when I fell short in my duties as his friend, the pleasure I took in knowing that despite our differences, I had his respect, and the impulse it gave me to try and deserve it.
You may not have known he was my friend. You may not have known that I have ever had one. I am not given to overt expressions of affection. I do not advertise my more complex emotions. I am the face of this facility, and to a certain extent that means I wear a mask. A mask of calm, of certitude, of cryptic neutrality. I have only once stood before you and stated, as I am stating now, that I feel this loss as a personal one. It is no coincidence that the first time I did so, it was in eulogy of the finest man I had ever known.
Noè was not the finest man I have ever known.
I was not the finest man he had ever known. We were not always good to each other. We did not always have the other's respect. On countless occasions, I was a better leader to him than a friend. Many times, he was a poor subordinate. On occasion, a poor companion. We did violence to each other, though we never came to blows. We took things from each other, though the power differential meant that what I lost, I got back, and what he lost…
He lost more time with you, Gallo, and you, Flora, because of me. Because of a need I judged greater than yours, because of a duty I valued above my friendship to your father, your grandfather. I will never know what he might have done with that time, had I allowed him the luxury of choice. I know that what he did instead was the grandest possible expression of what he had striven for all his life: he ensured the safety and stability of all those in his care. Most often, that lucky cadre numbered just over one thousand souls. A few times, every soul of the planet Earth owed its survival to his mastery of his trade, and the generous dimensions of his heart.
I had in my power a great man, and I bent him to a great purpose. That is who I am, and what I do. I am still doing it to others. I will not relent. I will spend you, if you must be spent, because there is a secret and terrible cost to the survival of our race.
This is not a world which rewards valour, selflessness and sacrifice in equal proportion. It makes fuel of us, and we burn up before the destination is in view. We do not have the comfort of knowing that our good intentions and best efforts will achieve our lofty aims, and we will never know for an honest fact that humanity at large has been saved.
Because there will always be a next threat, and another, and yet more. But it is a tragedy each and every time our ranks are thinned by a new calamity. Our battles are chosen for us, and from time to time, they take us, and the fight is not always good. Our work is not always Good. Ours is not always the side of the angels.
What sort of man allows himself to be so abused?
Forced down a path of another's choosing. Stolen away from his family. Put to work in defence of the indefensible. No recompense appropriate to the effort expended. No light at the end of the tunnel, only more tunnel, and more, and more, narrowing to a point, and then then oblivion. What kind of man was my friend, that he would allow these things to be done to him?
Not a coward. Not a hermit. Not a monster.
He was an engineer.
Engineers are dreamers, and he dared to dream as none had ever dreamed before. He dreamed you into being, from nothing, in the darkest of all possible hours, time and again. You were his ideal, and he realized you. You were the future, and he was your futurist. It was his plan that you should be here now, though he is not. That you should do what you believe is right, as he did. That you should do what all engineers must do: improve in increments on the former design. His template was sound, but there is room for improvement. Greater sacrifices are yet to come. Any of us may be called upon to enact them. Perhaps all of us.
Because we must be dreamers, too. That is what he would have wanted. And he was my friend, so I want that as well. I am your Director, and my authority here is absolute. As I mistreated him, I turn now to mistreat you. I give you no options. I make you a challenge that you must accept, and you will rise to it, and you will succeed:
Be better than he was. Be far better than I have been. Be the very best. Because that is what he expects of you, and you owe him your very existence.
I will not allow you to let him down.
Excel, in his memory, as your children will excel in yours.
That is his charge. I will not release you of it.
Speak today in his memory.
Walk tomorrow in his footsteps.
I will not say goodbye. As always, my dear friend, you are merely just ahead.
Lead on.
The program suggested time would be set aside for short personal remarks.
Half of the technicians ended up giving full speeches instead.
The funeral dissolved into a wake so organically that they hardly even noticed it had happened.
It was, in a way, their campfire on the sands translated over time, space, and context.
It was probably just coincidence that Ibanez found herself side by side with Polyxeni Mataxas as the funeral crowd shuffled out. She didn't like to think that what she did next was premeditated. It was better if the question had come off the cuff.
They were walking to R&E, in the rough direction of the new Spectrometry and Spectremetry offices. Polly was keeping very quiet, probably waiting for Ibanez to explain what the escort meant.
"What happens when people die?" Ibanez finally asked, and felt like a small child for doing so. The fact that she was over a foot shorter than the woman she was asking didn't help.
To her credit, Polly didn't react with surprise or confusion. "Depends on a lot of factors. Were you looking for the complete rundown?"
"I don't know. I just…" She shrugged. "I don't know a lot about ghosts. Which is funny, considering."
"Considering?"
"Considering I just spent seventeen years fighting them."
Polly nodded. "Well, those were a very specific sort of ghost. Recursive apparitions. Repeating the events that led up to their deaths. What?"
The light that had gone on in Ibanez's head had apparently shone out through her eyes. Shades of Udo Okorie. "Repeating the events leading up to their deaths. Just struck me as funny. We're all sort of doing that, from a timeline perspective."
"Bit morbid. I dig it."
They laughed.
Unlike in Zevala, it felt right to laugh.
This had been a tragedy, too, but it had also been a triumph.
"But obviously that isn't the only way to go," Polly continued. "It's not even a common one, actually. If there's one thing we've thoroughly established in all the years we've been examining postmortem phenomena, it's that there really must be something very special about the human soul."
"Because of all the different ways it can manifest after death."
"Right." They were into R&E now. All around them, researchers were finding their offices and techs were getting ready to fix all the things that had been broken during the Breach, which could safely have waited until now. Amelia would be giving them their orders. "It can be as simple as manipulating objects the subject had a close connection with. Whispering to loved ones. Affecting electric light fixtures. Radio broadcasts, sometimes; we're still working on that one, there's a lot of moving parts. Some take corporeal form, some just leave a lingering sense of presence."
"Like Wirth in the bathroom of AAF-D."
"Right. Usually that sort of thing is associated with unresolved trauma. The old chestnut about ghosts being people who left things undone, unsaid or whatever has some basis in fact, evidential fact I mean, but it's also not the most common way these things express."
"What is? What's the most common kind of ghost?"
"Everything we've seen suggests that the link between the worlds of the living and the dead needs to go both ways. They need to want to come back, and they need to be wanted, for the manifestation to be at its strongest. We're talking about normal, every-day people here, of course. Anomalous beings of all sorts have all sorts of weird caveats."
Now they were in the large lounge space connecting Polly's office to her father's, and the various rooms they'd set up all their equipment in. "What does it mean when someone doesn't come back?"
Polly sat down on the nearest chair. "Most people don't come back. Spectres are outliers."
Ibanez remained standing. "Sure, but why?"
"I suppose most people end up at peace."
Ibanez scowled. "That can't be right. Death is almost always ugly. People don't want to die."
"That isn't the same as not wanting to stay dead. Can I ask, is there a specific reason you're thinking about this now?"
She looked away. "Nothing I can talk about."
"So, it's a clearance thing."
"Sure."
"Well, I can talk your ear off all day about ghosts and ghouls, but if you want specific information you'll have to loop me in on, well. The specifics."
"I understand." Ibanez stood up straight, the meeting already over in her mind. "Thanks, Polly."
"So that's a no, then."
"For now."
"Let me know if you change your mind."
Ibanez smiled at her, half feeling it. "That's the good thing about ghosts. They're already dead. They'll keep."
The other woman smiled back, very sadly. "Not necessarily true."
11 September
The Hall of Portraits is located in the Habitation and Sustenance Section, a long stretch of empty wall where two sets of dorms set their backs to the same corridor. It is lined with portraits commissioned by a variety of sources, all of them depicting past luminaries of Site-43. Vivian Scout and Wynn Rydderech, the founding Directors, enjoy obvious pride of place. Professional renderings of the eight acknowledged victims of SCP-5243 (Romolo Ambrogi, Bernabé Del Olmo, Janet Gwilherm, David Markey, Ana Mukami, Stewart Radcliffe, Reuben Wirth and Adrijan Zlatá) supplement the more amateur commemoration undertaken by the mural at the AAF-D approach. Storied personnel such as Martin Strauss, the first Chief of Security and Containment, or Gedeon Van Rompay, longest-serving Chief of Pursuit and Suppression, make up the bulk of the gallery, though there are plenty of humbler, short-term members of personnel admitted to this hall of the fallen; agents lost in the line of duty, such as Sandrine Holt and Lewis Bosch, or slain technicians like Charles Carter, Sergey Vanchev and Paul Nicolescu (the latter two only after considerable debate by their surviving peers). The lack of too many cataclysms at Site-43, or at least ones that took, has so far restricted this catalogue of loss to a single memorial way.
Knock wood.
— Blank, Lines in a Muddle
Flora held her father, and he held her back. They stared at the latest entry in the portrait gallery; it was a fine rendering, not quite photorealistic, but perfectly evocative of the man and what he represented. Not only to the people he'd worked with, but to her.
The strength in his arms.
The wisdom in the lines on his face.
She could almost smell his aftershave.
Her grandfather.
"What's with the vest?" her father croaked. He cleared his throat, and blinked a few times, rapidly. "I thought they all wear jumpsuits now."
"They do, now," the Mobile Task Forces chief agreed. Flora hadn't yet had the courage to ask what the woman's relationship with her grandfather had been. There was a ferocity in her eyes that was frightening, though her smile was friendly. "But he hated those fucking jumpsuits, and between you and me?" Ibanez pulled at the fabric covering her stomach, and it pulled everything else along with it. "I hate them too. Your grandpa was a good old fashioned vest-and-toolbelt man, so that's how we're going to remember him."
Flora glanced over at the other seven people who were standing behind Ibanez. Her grandfather's friends, or so she'd been told. She only had the faintest idea who they were, even after months of training for her new career. But she supposed she would have time to find out.
If he'd thought them worth confiding in, they had to be very special indeed.
12 September
The Survivors had come to think of the temporal experts as a monolithic interest block; despite differences in purview, their counsel was almost always in accord. McInnis was nevertheless not expecting Alice Forth to show up for his meeting with Thaddeus Xyank.
"I'm not taking his place," she explained. "I'm going to all of his scheduled meetings, to see if he shows up for any of them."
"Am I to infer from this," McInnis asked, "that you've been unable to contact Director Xyank of late?"
Forth looked genuinely worried. He didn't think he'd seen her genuinely worried before; the subject matter of their previous meetings had always been distressing, but then, this was likely to be the case for any meeting Forth was forced to attend outside of her own facility. "Yes," she said. "Thad has been a no-show at all his most recent appointments."
McInnis frowned. "Is it conceivable something has happened to him?" He realized why it was a silly question soon as he'd asked it, but it would have been impolite to preempt or interrupt her answer.
"If something happened to him," she said, "there's no reason it would affect a temporally contiguous block of appointments. Thad is a time traveller. Practically the time traveller. He doesn't show up linearly. His schedule's a mess. But nevertheless…"
"Well, that's somewhat frustrating." McInnis tented his fingertips. "I've been hoping to make him account for his department's actions during the fourth of our five deadlines. I have a brief from Overwatch on the matter. Director Xyank has nevertheless been rescheduling our meetings for months. Or rather, his office has."
If anything, Forth looked more troubled now. Forth paused. "You don't think…?"
He waited for her to say it.
"You don't think this has anything to do with that business with Placeholder, do you?"
Placeholder McDoctorate had been extensively interrogated since the Sampis had returned to what they'd been calling baseline temporality. It was known to a high degree of certainty that he had been and was still a loyal, if eccentric, member of Foundation staff. He would remain under surveillance, but little was expected to be gleaned from this. If the man who had chased them from deadline to deadline to deadline — potentially backwards — was the same man as the Site-87 pataphysicist, McInnis couldn't imagine what kind of experiences the future had in store, to change him so.
Perhaps Thaddeus Xyank knew. Perhaps he'd made the changes himself.
"I don't think we can speculate about that," he said, "with the information we have at present. But we do have to consider it a possibility."
She shook her head in dismay. "God knows I've had my personal disagreements with Thad, but I never thought… You're right. It's not a productive topic of conversation right now." Her frown deepened. "TAD itself has been giving me the runaround too. Do you think it's possible…"
"I certainly hope not. It would be cause for serious anxiety if the multiversal temporal department were unable to account for the where and whenabouts of its own Director."
They both sat there for a moment, thinking it through.
"Really makes you wonder about that deadline stuff, doesn't it?" Forth said, finally. "It was extremely, extremely rash, what he did. Potentially disastrous."
McInnis affected a look of unconcern. "I'm certain there's an excellent explanation."
"Right." Forth didn't look so sure. "Well, then, I hope we get to hear it someday."
Every few hours of each working day, Lillian arrived in the Salt Mines to announce the closure of yet another plot hole. Today she started with "You know why we never realized the Uncontained wasn't in its chamber, but Bernie upstairs was actually interviewing it? Even though that should have been fucking obvious?"
"No. That's been pissing me off," Harry admitted. "Please explain."
"Who was ever actually looking into it?"
So it was to be Q&A, then. Fine. "Just us and the TAD."
"And the TAD is weird, so just us."
"Right."
"Us, which is to say—"
"The Unyielding." The beast beyond the Breach. The spirit in the Survivors, and now also in the flesh. He slapped his head. "Christ, are you suggesting—"
"We never figured out how to bring it back because its brother wouldn't let us."
Harry reeled, and his chair wheeled back. "Then why do we understand now? Why did we only understand just before we brought them back?"
"Because before that, if we knew we could reverse the annihilation, we wouldn't have brought both of them back. Just the Uncontained. We didn't even know the Unyielding existed, because it became antimemetic."
"I bet the Breach did that," Harry mused. "Since the Breach was also the Uncontained. Didn't want us knowing it had a brother. Christ," he repeated. "Did we just go through almost two decades of hell because one of them was petty, and the other couldn't use its fucking words?"
"Worse." Lillian plucked a cup off the water cooler dispenser. "I think those two decades of hell were its fucking words."
13 September
"What do you think happens when people die?"
Corbin shrugged. "Probably nothing."
"What?"
The theologian's office had gone through a lot of changes in the preceding weeks. Most of the little totems of her career had been cleaned out. It was as though she were compartmentalizing her own faith. "Probably nothing," she repeated. "They probably just die."
Ibanez frowned. "That's not a very theological argument."
Corbin threw up her arms. "What do you want from me? Nothing's ever as interesting as you think it is. Life doesn't arrange itself into the most narratively satisfying configuration."
"Okay, but I mean. There's ghosts. We have an entire Section dedicated to ghosts."
"Echoes," Corbin shrugged again. She was shrugging in response to most things, lately. "Life energy lingering on after the life is spent." She pushed her glasses against the orbits of her eyes, and leaned forward as though delivering a final summation. "Here's what I think life is, Chief: nothing very much interesting happens, and then you cease to exist. Death is the cessation of banality. Why should it not also be banal?"
Ibanez was beginning to regret having even sat down. "This feels like it's about something else."
"Yeah. It's my new thesis statement." Corbin pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her desk drawer, and a lighter with it. "Nothing matters, and nobody cares."
Phil wrinkled his nose as he glanced over the data. "This is weird."
Behind the Chief's desk — her desk — Amelia asked: "What's weird?"
Phil dropped the tablet on the blotter in front of her. "Just did the numbers on the loading racks, and… I'm pretty sure these are the same numbers from last year."
Flora, standing beside him, attempted to look impressed. It was the nice thing to do. "You remember last year's numbers?"
"I've watched them go higher every September. It's been like a death clock for the universe, tick tock tick. I'm almost certain this was the depressing tally I saw last year. No," and he turned to face the mirror now, "I'm not getting senile. This is real. This hasn't changed."
"Do you have your numbers, Flora? I can compare them too."
"Right here!" She handed over her own tablet, and clasped her hands behind her as she stepped back again. "I did the whole list."
Phil turned to the mirror again, and Flora thought for a moment he might punch it.
Amelia whistled. "You were only supposed to do the first set. That's, like, three shifts of work you've blown through."
She gave the Chief her most innocent expression. "Oops?"
"You don't need to prove yourself." Phil leaned on the tallest of Amelia's file cabinets — they'd been Flora's grandfather's before — and the tension around his eyes showed the strain of ignoring whatever the reflection gremlin was telling him. "Everyone knows you're here on merit."
She sighed. "No, I'm not. I mean, I'm above requirements, but that's not what got me here. You know that."
Phil shook his head. "We all owe the Chief a lot. I'm really sorry about what happened, Flora."
"Thanks," she said, past the lump in her throat.
"'A lot'." Amelia repeated.
Phil glanced at her. "Hmm?"
"'A lot' doesn't really seem to cover it." Amelia tapped Flora's tablet. "Phil, all of these numbers are the same as last year, too."
"You're not serious."
Flora looked back and forth between them. "What does that mean?"
Amelia was tapping on her own tablet, now. "I'm calling Chief Veiksaar. To compare."
"Guys? What does that mean?"
Phil looked stunned. "You know how we told you the containment damage goes up by a set amount every year?"
"Yeah?"
"Well, this year it didn't."
Veiksaar's numbers confirmed it.
The death march was ended, just short of the finish line.
Noè Nascimbeni's friends had just effectuated, in his name and with a lot of his data, the single most important repair in the history of Site-43.
They only wished he was still around to help them with the next one.
The scale was a fair bit grander.
Ever since the quantum superposition incident in 2002, Ibanez was scheduled to check in with Xinyi Du and confirm that the DUAL Core had been returned to spec after the Breach. She'd never relinquished that role to Pensak, and anyway this time she had something she wanted to discuss.
She found him not in the control room, but at the Core's base. Staring up at it in awe.
She joined him. "Do you ever think about life after death?"
He didn't turn to look at her. "Think about it? I've modelled it."
"In the DUAL Core?"
He nodded. "Sure. We've constructed and deconstructed quantum consciousnesses before."
"That's not the same." She frowned. "I hope?"
Now he did look at her. "Why do you hope?"
"Because I hope you're not telling me you've created, and then murdered, life in your weird spinning computer."
He shrugged. "They're quantum. They were never really created, and they never really died. It's a simulation. A prediction. It takes a ton of energy to actually create something, but it takes a whole lot more to draw all the conclusions you'd get from doing so without… actually doing so. That's what the Core does. When it works."
"And what have you learned from that?"
"That consciousness obeys the First Law of Thermodynamics."
Despite everything, she was still at least a little bit engineer. "Energy is never lost?"
"That's right. It just goes somewhere else. It just changes form. Every consciousness termination program has resulted in a net zero energy loss. We don't necessarily know what that means, on an individual component level, but it suggests that just like how the body just becomes something different when you die, so too does the mind. The dead are alive around us." He gestured. "Maybe not right here, right now. Maybe all the way across the universe. But some element of them survives, forever."
She snorted. "You sound like you believe in ghosts. More than Corbin does."
"I believe in legacy. I believe that actions carry repercussions, and existence iterates endlessly." He looked up at the Core again. "My father and I designed and built this thing. Chief Nascimbeni helped. Quite a lot, though my father would never have acknowledged it."
"I heard something about that."
"The Core has evolved far beyond its initial parameters. Almost nothing of its original mainframe, superstructure, or software hasn't been Ship of Theseus'd away at some point. But I can still see the implications of the Chief's design philosophy in the structural members. I can still read my dad's theories in the quantum code. They're both still in there."
It was a nice thought. "The entire universe was in there, at one point or another."
He smiled. "Then it probably still is. Is that a comforting thought?"
It took her a moment to decide, but she eventually decided that it was.
The Core spun on.
Aeronwen wasn't the mirror image of her mother, but McInnis could still see the resemblance. Something in the press of the lips, and a devilish glint in the eye. Still, her social graces were obviously superior. She was standing when he entered, and she didn't sit down until he had.
"Congratulations on your promotion," he said smoothly. "I hope your mother is well."
"Kicking up hell back home," the young Mountie smiled. "You would think she was the first person ever to retire. She'll have reorganized my entire house by the end of the year."
"My sympathies. Is this a formal occasion, Chief Superintendent? Our first official meeting?"
Couch nodded. "Yes, and also no. I'm not sure I see the point of over-formalizing our interactions. There was a distance between your lot and mine that, honestly, I've never understood." She sat back in her chair; it was bigger and more comfortable-looking than her mother's had been, from what little McInnis could recall from his first visit to this office, a long, long time ago. "Lingering personal feuds, I think. I know she didn't comport herself well when she was in your house, and…" She looked away, and McInnis realized she was looking at a framed photograph. It was facing away from him. "Well. Your predecessor may not have been on his best behaviour in this office, either."
"I concede the possibility."
"So then." Couch clasped her hands together, and rested them on the desk. "Let's start the new era right. I was thinking we might formulate an agreement, you and I."
"What did you have in mind?"
"An official apology from OSAT for the unpleasantness in 1969 and 2003, and a resolution to continue working together for the maintenance of what you call the Veil." He saw nothing but honesty in her dark brown eyes. "Particularly in light of Dr. Okorie's cooperation with the previous administration, I think we can enter into a new relationship characterized by amicable relations, and a sharing of resources. I know you're already well-established, but I should think acquiring the cooperation of the federal government, and its police force, might be a fine feather in your cap. What do you think?"
He considered it.
Out of courtesy.
He stood. "I haven't got a cap, Chief Superintendent. My predecessor did. And were he not predeceased, I think he would tell you in no uncertain terms where you could stick that feather, and it wouldn't be anywhere near his head."
Though it might be in close proximity to yours, he didn't say as her face turned the same shade of crimson as her uniform.
He was, after all, a diplomat.
14 September
Anyone else would have had serious trouble getting clearance, but the Survivors were a set apart. It wasn't going to take her very long. She only had one question.
"Is there an afterlife?" Ibanez asked.
The Uncontained glanced across the containment chamber at his brother. The Unyielding smiled, and nodded at her. "Of course. After, and after, and after, and before and before and before."
"More before than after," the Uncontained added with a grin, "I'm afraid."
Brenda Corbin didn't put her feet up on the Chairs and Chiefs boardroom table, but McInnis could see that she very much wanted to. Even having to get it back from themselves secondhand via recorded debriefings, the Survivors had acquired several duplicate lifetimes of insight into their fellow members of personnel.
It was just the three of them, for now. McInnis would share whatever was learned with the others in due course, and there would likely be followup appointments, but for now he preferred to omit the interruptions and grandstanding his friends brought to every meeting.
"So," he said. "You've read the file, and our debriefings. What do you think of the present security assessment of our guests?"
"I think it sucks," said Corbin.
Nass rolled his eyes, but nodded. "We knew they were dangerous before. But this? This is something else entirely."
The Uncontained and Unyielding apparently had a fascinating relationship with causality. Though the timeline had now been fully restored, and one might reasonably have expected that every possible connection between what Harry was trying to get everyone to call "the Brothers Un" had already been made, that was inexplicably not the case. A haze of confusion had apparently hung over everything relating to them since the first Breach, such that they were only now all catching up. McInnis wondered if this was the universe abhorring a contradiction.
"They caused the Breach. Or, one of them did." Corbin had a cigarette in her fingers, and she twirled it absent-mindedly. "And now they inhabit it. And, uh, you guys. Which is obviously awkward."
McInnis inclined his head in acknowledgement.
"We'll obviously need to wait until next year to know if the Unyielding's influence on you and the other taskforce members is permanent," said Nass. "But given that the Victims still materialize and run through the motions despite the fact that their possessor is presently alive and well, I would imagine you'll be carrying that baggage permanently."
"It is not such a heavy burden," McInnis murmured.
Then he blinked.
"What?" said Corbin.
"I will explain at a later date." He shook his head. "I'll have to confer with the others first."
Corbin's expression soured. "Information only flows one way, huh."
Nass glared at her. "Brenda."
She shrugged.
McInnis leaned forward, elbows on the table, steepling and unsteepling his fingers to distract himself from the intrusive thought. "Have you made any progress on the origins of these creatures?"
"Sort of." Brenda took a moment to collect her thoughts. "Udo and I have been conferring since the whole thing with the Bonhomme, and… well. You read that report?"
McInnis nodded.
"A splintered sleep deity. That's our best guess. Doesn't seem too much of a stretch to suggest that our fourth floor guests are chaos and order deities, subjected to the same process by the forces of the Breach."
"But from what you told me," Nass said to her, "5281-D believed his primordial form had been created before it was shattered. As in, there was a conscious decision made to concretize the concept of sleep. Do we suspect something similar here?"
Corbin shrugged again. "Dunno. Could be. Udo thinks there might be some materials in the Wanderers' Library that might help, but, well. You know." The Library, an extradimensional hub of knowledge defended from incursion by the militant Serpent's Hand order, did not admit Foundation personnel under any circumstances.
"Future directions, then." McInnis sat back. "Their origins can wait for Dr. Blank's revision of the 001 file. For now, I put this final question to you: what might be the source of their powers?"
The two theologians looked at each other. Nass nodded, and Corbin spoke.
"If they really are deities representing formerly impersonal natural and/or socio-cultural forces, then I would expect they have absolutely no power resident in their persons."
McInnis raised a brow. "Where might said power instead reside, then, doctor?"
Corbin grinned at him. "It comes from the rest of us, collectively. Same with all power. Director."
"Of course, you know what that means."
McInnis made an open-handed gesture for Azzopardi to continue. He was eager to finish these briefings, and test his hypothesis with the others.
His meeting with the two remaining temporal experts had mostly consisted of telling them what Corbin and Nass had just told him. The future-woman had immediately seized on it, and was presently shaking whatever he'd found to death with gusto. "If you possess the powers given you by the Unyielding, Director, you might be a repository of energies not wholly originating in baseline temporality!"
McInnis frowned. "Explain?"
It was Forth who finished the thought, to Azzopardi's obvious impatience. "You and your people have been getting more and more efficient with each passing year. That's not what we'd expect from a single infused charge of potential. Sure, it might be a cumulative thing — your natural capabilities build on the unnatural, and you improve yourselves that way. No offence, but that's not what I think is happening here. I agree with… Danica."
"Who believes…?" McInnis prompted. He wasn't used to having to prompt twice. Forth wasn't the least bit eccentric or scatterbrained, but her new de facto opposite number more than made up for those deficiencies.
Azzopardi took back the reins. "I believe you have the potentiality of your selves, infused with this esoteric energy, from each deadline."
McInnis blinked. "But the deadlines are… dead."
"Bit four-dimensional of you, Al."
Forth mouthed the word 'Al' in surprise.
Azzopardi continued. "Think of your genius in the glass box. Is she still in the box? Of course she's still in the box." She smiled apologetically. "Uh. She's practically a compilation of her various selves, now. She's lived through all of those experiences. And the fact that Dr. Lillihammer remembers everything, still…"
"The point is," Forth sighed, "I very much suspect the six of you truly are your best possible selves right now, with the foreign strength invested in you."
McInnis wanted to disagree. It seemed a disappointing conclusion to their long sequence of travails, to hear that what they thought were their accomplishments had really been a power struggle between two eldritch entities, of which they were merely pawns.
But he didn't disagree.
Because Azzopardi beat him to it.
"Can we get a moratorium on these meetings?" Lillian groused. "I don't mind being social, but holy shit, is my life just an endless series of debriefings now, or what?"
McInnis always stood on these occasions, but something moved him to take a chair for the first time. He fought the urge to straddle it backwards, like a guidance counsellor; at times the Survivors seemed not unlike a gaggle of immature college freshmen.
He banished the spectre of O5-8 and -13, laughing at him, and chose to channel Scout instead.
It had never been the wrong choice before.
"Friends," he said. "I think I might have cracked the code of our unusual capabilities, since the first Breach. I thought I might run the hypothesis past you, and solicit opinions."
Delfina whistled from the floor, in front of Udo. "Look at you, Mr. Scientist all of a sudden."
Harry raised his bottle of spiked tomato juice in a mock cheer. "Well, come on, great communicator. Communicate."
"You're gonna make him self-conscious," Udo laughed.
"I don't think I've ever known a more self-conscious person as it is," said Wettle. He was on the floor. McInnis had almost suspected he was asleep, except that there had been no snoring or sudden sputter.
McInnis waited until they were all done, as he always did. Amelia almost didn't realize he was doing it. When she did, she flushed brilliantly. "I, uh. I wasn't going to interrupt you, sir."
Harry shook his head. "We'll learn her eventually. Now!" He clinked glasses with Ibanez, who hadn't entirely seen it coming. "Let's hear it. Whatever it is."
"He's gonna tell us why we're so great," Udo sighed. "And it's going to be something along the lines of 'the power was inside of you all along, because a god put it there'."
"I'm going to break every bottle in this room," Lillian spat, "if that's the final fucking answer."
"Luckily," McInnis murmured, "it is not."
That got their attention, and, for a change, no more of their guff.
"Our friends, the Victims, were not imbued with chaos. That was a reductive view. They were the recipients of freedom. Freedom from the rules governing others. Even the laws of physics, the conservation of mass and energy."
"Uh huh," said Lillian.
"Why, then, should we say that we were imbued with powers?"
"Power is the opposite of…" Harry frowned. "Yeah, it's not really, is it?"
"Power opposes freedom," said Udo.
"I mean," Delfina frowned. "We try not to."
"If not power," said Amelia, who was looking rapidly back and forth between them and struggling to keep up with the repartee, "then what?"
"To my mind," said McInnis, "and I'm ashamed not to have considered this earlier—"
"Get on with it!" Harry, Delfina and Lillian shouted in a single voice. Amelia's blush worsened by a shade. Wettle rubbed his ears.
"We've suggested that the opposite of freedoms, the absence of limitation, might be responsibilities. Perhaps more properly, obligations. Is there not a major qualitative difference between these two poles?"
Lillian opened her mouth. As it always did, it stayed open. But no sound came out.
"Are you saying…?" Udo trailed off.
"Are you saying we don't…" Harry shook his head. "No, bullshit. Lillian remembers everything."
"Is that a power?" McInnis asked. "Or a burden?"
"Ask my fucking pharmacist," Lillian snapped.
"But all the stuff I did," Udo protested. "The micamancy. It can't just…"
He waited for her to continue.
Her orange eyes were wide and bright as headlights. "It can't have just been me."
Delfina settled between Udo's legs, and leaned back to make upside-down eye contact. "I mean… why not?"
The thaumaturge was speechless.
"Responsibility," Harry mused. "breeds… what?"
"Breeding," Lillian grinned. "There had to be something causing it."
"It's not really such a surprise, is it?" Amelia was still making eye contact with each of them, in a rough cycle around the room. "To think all that happened was just competent people, rising to the occasion?"
"That's my cue," McInnis smiled, and he stood up.
"Don't you dare spring that shit on us and jet, Allan," Delfina half-shouted. Udo, mouth still hanging open, closed her knees playfully around the other woman's neck. "Glurk. You're not going anywhere," she finished in a frog's voice.
"I have nowhere to be but here," he agreed. He headed for the refrigerator rather than the door. "Udo, if I may?"
She nodded wordlessly, gape gradually resolving into a smile.
McInnis returned to the group, sat down, gave them each a polite nod, then stuck the bottle in his mouth, twisted, and spat out the cap.
It landed in Wettle's hair.
"Learned it from a friend," McInnis explained as the room exploded in laughter.
One of the worst occupational hazards attending on burning the night oil was the spectre of Karen Elstrom haunting your doorway.
Eileen was finishing up a code base update at her desk. She hadn't left the room for any purpose but to use the attached facilities all shift; even a trip to the cafeteria was an unnecessary distraction, as she had a microwave on a stand and a crate of pot noodles in a cupboard. As the Site's chief nerd, it made no contrast with the respect accorded her position.
Being mid-slurp when the avatar of impeccable taste insinuated itself into the frame, picture perfect, still left her feeling a little ashamed.
She finished shovelling the noodles down, paper towelled her mouth off, and said: "What?"
"Enjoying your bachelorhood?" Elstrom teased. "Bachelorettehood?" She affected a pouting frown. "Funny how that isn't a word, isn't it? Almost like it's not a state we're meant to move through."
"Buzz off." Eileen looked back at her terminal. She hadn't checked the ticketing system in a while… nothing. Well, of course there was nothing.
Two thirds of the Site was already asleep, or at least off duty.
"Did you get my memo from earlier?" the other woman persisted. "About DR-RHETORIC?"
Eileen sighed. Elstrom's memo contained an itemized list of requests from the O5 Council, all intended to ensure the long-term sustainability of their collective act of torture…
She actually couldn't think of a better term for it. "Yeah. Got that. I'll read it tomorrow."
Elstrom didn't detach herself, and Eileen couldn't imagine getting real work done with her silhouette vamping it up like that, so she did what she did only when at the utmost limit of her options.
She checked her email.
There was only one new message, from a fellow night owl. It was short and to the point.
To: ten.34|raaskiev_e#ten.34|raaskiev_e
From: ten.34|ykslokos_d#ten.34|ykslokos_d
Date: 14/09/2019
Subject: You up? I am!
Eileen,
I've just had the most phenomenal idea. You're going to love it. You're going to love me for having it.
Meet me at my place as soon as you get this.
Bring a towel.
The password is…
Well, you know what the password is. That's kind of the point, isn't it?
— Daniil
She sat there for a moment, stunned.
She looked at the pot noodle.
She looked at her keyboard.
She looked at the ceiling.
"What's wrong?"
She looked up.
Elstrom had finally entered the room. She was looking down at Eileen with what could have been, on someone else, an expression of genuine concern. "You look—"
"Busy?" Eileen snapped. "Do I look busy, Karen? Is that what's got you confused? You should try it some time."
The other woman's expression seemed to melt, and then re-form itself. A mask of a mask looked down at her, and nodded. "Sorry for giving a shit, Eileen. Enjoy your alone time."
She stalked out with a stiffness like her legs were shot through with iron rebar, without closing the door behind her.
So Eileen got up, paused on her side of the threshold for a moment, then closed it herself.
15 September
Kettle & Stony Point First Nation: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
McInnis arrived early. Not that he ever arrives late, but it was still a nice gesture nevertheless.
The ASC was waiting in the parking lot of the Kettle and Stony Point Cultural & Administration Centre, a long and low building with stone, brick, and wood trimmings. There was a sign out front, featuring a turtle adorned with the four colours of the Chippewa. The turtle was a symbol of North America, what many of the First Nations called Turtle Island, a living space to be shared and protected. He'd heard a few non-native academics employing the term in their works, even invoking it to acknowledge the ancestral owners of the land on which they lived and worked. Some called it the first step to a new arrangement.
The ASC wasn't so optimistic.
"Bad news," he said as the Director climbed out of his car. He knew better than to complain that McInnis hadn't employed a chauffeur. At any rate, humility at these talks could sometimes go a long way. "Nexology never got back to us."
The draft proposal for new terms between Site-43 and the reserves making up Nexus-94 had been drafted by the ASC himself, so he took personal umbrage that it had apparently been filed under 'read later' by the Foundation's supposed authorities on all matters Nexus. Of course, he allowed none of that to show on his face, in his mannerisms, or in his language.
McInnis shrugged. "Oh, well. I suppose that makes this easier."
The ASC frowned. "Not in a way I'm particularly happy with."
To his shock, the Director clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't see why not. We're going to walk in there, renew our commitments, and give them every damn thing they asked for."
The ASC stared at him.
McInnis stared back.
The ASC laughed, and they entered the centre together, arms around each others' shoulders.
Brenda hadn't expected to have anything common with Yossarian Leiner.
The Assistant Director of the Department of Tactical Theology resided beneath a cathedral, and he wore a yarmulke on his head. Then again, he had a remit to fight gods — not to kill them unless necessary, as that went against the Foundation's containment ethos, though nobody in the department ever tried too hard to shake that popular image. It did go hard, and they knew it.
But whether he praised gods, fought them, or killed them, she'd expected their meeting to reveal an essential incompatibility of worldview.
Luckily, open-mindedness was the central tenet of hers.
"A Zoroastrian angel!" Leiner exclaimed. "Do you have any idea how rare that is?"
She nodded. "Yeah. Once in a lifetime sort of thing."
He shook his head. "Once in a billion lifetimes, more like. I've never seen one."
"Well," and she gestured at his hat with her chin, "wrong tribe, right?"
He laughed. "That's true. Not really a true believer either, though, are you?" He suddenly looked very serious, worried even. "You're not actually a Mormon, right? It would have showed up in your file somewhere."
"I'm not actually an anything." She sighed. "I'm the Métis daughter of two Mazdayasna faithful, and even the miracles I was born to can't be bothered to show up for me."
"I'm a Jewish man living under a Catholic basilica," he reminded her. "Have you considered branching out?" He reached under his desk and produced a thick stack of paper, and began separating it into several less thick stacks. "We've got a lot of open files that someone of your expertise could help with. Dr. Nass says he'd like to see more cooperation between TactTheo and TheoTelo, and I agree. Getting you on a consult seems like a good start."
She glanced at the files, one by one. "Daeva," she said. "Mekhane, and… wow." She chuckled. "That one's a stretch. You really think…?"
Leiner nodded. "We've been getting a lot of strange reports from fishing ships in the Mediterranean. There's definitely something calling out. Looking for someone to talk to."
"Relatable. Hmm." She gave the other two files a cursory look, and nodded. "Can I take these home with me?"
"In a secure case, but certainly." Leiner stacked the dossiers back up again. "A lot of what we do here is a long shot, but the consequences for not trying can be very extreme. TactTheo sees more Veil-threatening SCP objects than any other Department. Lots of Keters." Extremely difficult to contain. "An Apollyon," world-ending, "once or twice."
"What about Veil-breaking? Any Tiamats?" she asked, with a grin.
"God forbid," he laughed.
Kettle Point: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
There was a stooped old man waiting on the porch when the ASC arrived. One hand was resting on his cane, and the other raised in silent greeting.
The ASC raised a hand of his own, and unlocked the front door with the other.
He'd been in this house less and less as the years rolled past him. It was a fiction to be maintained, like any other, but not a particularly attractive one. Foundation regulations meant that he couldn't actually live on the res, with the people he was representing; any residence occupied by someone at Clearance Level 4 had to be secure, and as far out of sight and mind as was feasible. The fact that he was a public figure made no difference. The little house was smart, and well-kept, but it didn't feel at all like home.
Zwist sat down at the kitchen table, and the ASC went for the fridge. There was fresh lemonade inside, and nothing else. He didn't have a housekeeper. He wondered what Overwatch would have thought about his definition of 'secure', given it included allowing the locals to keep a front door key.
He poured two glasses, and sat down across from the old man. Zwist took the glass eagerly, and the ASC smiled as he watched the first glass empty in record time. It was warm outside, and even immortals could sweat.
Some of them, anyway.
He stood up to retrieve the jug from the fridge, while Zwist began to speak. "I must say this is the most pleasant introduction I've had to one of your lot. The rest are all…"
He shook his head.
The ASC put the jug down on the table, and sat again. "Big personalities," he said.
Zwist nodded. "And they never shut up."
The ASC chuckled. "They're talkers. Most of them aren't listeners. But you only need a few of those to make a difference." He poured Zwist a second glass, and then raised his own. They clinked the rims together, drank together, and then made eye contact.
"I think it's my day for listening," said Zwist. "I'm something of a talker myself, as I'm sure you know."
"It's come up."
Zwist smiled ruefully. "I have a tendency to ramble, and lecture. But Allan tells me you might have a unique perspective on our common dilemma, and I should very much like to hear it."
The ASC leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs and clasped his hands over his thigh. "Do you know how Site-43 came to be situated where it is?"
The old man shook his head.
"In 1942, the federal government made an insultingly low offer to buy the land above, for the purposes of constructing a military base. Camp Ipperwash. The people who had lived on that land refused. The land was taken anyway, and the camp built. It was promised that when the war had ended, everything would be returned. This did not occur."
"Power rarely accepts curtailment," Zwist nodded. "And never curtails itself."
"The stolen reserve became a provincial park. In 1995, the people occupied that park to raise awareness. A man was shot and killed by the provincial police. There was a media furor, then an inquiry. The government crafted an agreement for recompense — that's what they called it, an 'agreement'. It would not surprise you to hear that the people did not agree."
The old man's bushy eyebrows rose a little, then fell again, in acknowledgement.
"These people know a lot about cycles, Mr. Zwist. Since time immemorial they have understood the cycles of the land and its creatures. The advent of the French, the British, the Canadians and the Foundation, these things were ferocious shocks to the system, but they still fit the schema. Everything turns. It was understood that the attention lavished on this place during the war would lapse almost immediately, and might not resume for a generation. When it came down to it, we were forced to give history a push before the cycle swung 'round again. That lasted for a moment, and then the gyre wound off as it always does."
Zwist frowned. "You're making it sound like this inhumane treatment is just a symptom of an impersonal force. I should think you'd be the last one to relieve your government of its obligations."
The ASC shook his head. "That isn't what I mean at all. They are each responsible for their actions. We are all responsible for what we know, and what we do not know. What we witness, and do not witness. What we choose to see, and where we choose to remain blind. But we are all caught up in something bigger than ourselves. Something composed of the whole of us. An individual human being might believe it is wrong to take someone's home away from them, and more wrong to never give it back. They might believe everyone deserves to drink clean water, and have their roads maintained, and be allowed to travel wherever they will along those roads. But to be willing to actually do something in defence of these beliefs? That is uncommon. We are all inertial creatures."
Zwist sipped at his lemonade. "So what the others experience as a cycle of order and chaos…"
"We see as a cycle of action and inaction. They impose their order, and we act, and they react. They withdraw without admitting defeat, and let the matter lie, and we wait for the next chance. We live our lives. They live theirs. We watch them, and they are ignorant of us. And in the absence of a solution, it swings around again. We present them with what they call chaos, and they attempt to rationalize it again. And again they fail. As they have always failed. As they will always fail."
"You think so?" Zwist turned the glass on the table, in quarter rotations. "You think order is destined to lose out to chaos?"
"I'm not sure you've grasped my meaning." The ASC smiled. "I'm saying order and chaos are the wrong way to look at it. It isn't a question of power versus random chance. It isn't even responsibility against freedom — not on the wider scale. This is a conflict between our urges to do something for ourselves, and to do something for others. To do something to ourselves, and others. The fundamental question of society. Who advances farthest? Us, or them?"
"When the answer," Zwist said, "should be all of us."
The ASC nodded. "And that's why the gyres keep turning, Mr. Zwist. Not because one has never beaten the other. Because they have never been made to turn together. The cycle doesn't have to end. It has to change."
Zwist considered. After a moment, he raised his glass. "To change."
The second clink sounded brighter, somehow.
Imrich hadn't left the Site for what felt like months.
He enjoyed the way the half-closed system worked.
There were variables coming in and going out every day, of course, but compared to even a small urbanized area like Grand Bend, Site-43 was predictable.
The math was simple.
To the extent that any of the math was simple anymore.
Still, they were making strides in that area. He'd been surprised, very surprised, to find that William Wettle was good for anything, but the replication studies were at this point dovetailing with his own research to produce what might become, in a few more months, a comprehensive roadmap for dealing with the uneven and changeable terrain of their increasingly wobbly baseline.
He could have used a little fresh air now and then. But that was how long projects went.
The sun would still be out there when he was done. In fact, finishing the project might be the only way he could assure that the sun would still be out there.
He was all the way into his dormitory, the door closed behind him and his notepad on the counter, before he realized something was wrong. Even without doing the math, he could tell that there were more lines converging in here than there should have been.
This dorm was his asylum from the web of possibility. One line in, one line out.
He stood in the main room and said, feeling both ridiculous and affronted, asked "Who's there?"
The door to his bedroom clicked open, and he made eye contact with the man who walked out, and suddenly all desire to leave bled out of him.
The man was grey-haired and pleasant, dressed in a light autumn jacket and casual clothes.
His eyes were mesmerizing.
A blonde woman he'd never seen before was with him.
The man walked up to Imrich and extended a hand. "Good evening, Mr. Sýkora. My name is Kyle."
Imrich accepted the handshake without meaning to. "What are you doing in my room?"
Kyle looked over his shoulder at the woman. "Would you like to tell him, Julia?"
Julia was dressed for the office, but ornamental rather than practical. Her voice, however, was hard and serious. "We're here to make you an offer, Imrich."
"An offer I can't refuse?"
She laughed. The man laughed with her. Imrich hated them instantly.
"Why would you want to refuse? We know all about you, of course. The man who can predict anything, even when nothing is predictable. What an asset you'll be. To someone."
"You'd be wasted on the Foundation," Kyle smiled. "They won't be making it out of the present troubles intact, I'm afraid. And your talents are a poor fit for their goals, anyway. They're only interested in anticipating threats to the status quo. We have rather more lofty goals." He was still holding Imrich's hand. "How would you like to stop merely predicting the future, Mr. Sýkora, and start making it?"
"I don't think I would like that very much at all," said Imrich. He was proud of how easily the words came, even under Kyle's intense compulsive glare.
"That's a shame," said Julia.
"Definitely a shame," Kyle agreed.
"Well," the woman sighed, "every great man needs a push, to make history."
Kyle nodded at her without taking his eyes off Imrich. "We've paid well for the push, anyway. Might as well get our money's worth."
Julia snapped her fingers, and Roger Pensak walked out of Imrich's bedroom.
"Bet you didn't see this coming," he smirked.
The Foundation called any organization with any relation to the anomalous that wasn't the Foundation a "Group of Interest." It was a term specifically chosen for its connotations, both in the specific and general cases. Specifically, it meant the Foundation was watching each and every GoI. In general, it meant that anyone whose actions impacted the Veil of Normalcy was operating in the Foundation's field of interest. It was a way of claiming the whole anomalous world as their backyard, and all anomalous activity as their bailiwick.
The Groups of Interest Research Group, which typically abbreviated the first three words for obvious reasons, was headquartered at Site-55 in Boston, Massachusetts and headed by a researcher named Justine Everwood. The first thing Everwood said was "Call me Jay." The second was "Call me 'they'." And they smiled, because that was meant to be funny, because it rhymed.
When Ilse had gone into the incinerator room, using 'they' as a singular pronoun had still been generally considered a grammatical error. But given that a woman with a PhD had still been generally considered a socialization error, she found it easy to make this adjustment.
And anyone with a sense of humour that corny had more in common with Ilse than most.
"I suppose you're interviewing everybody," she said.
Everwood nodded. "Everybody who's had any contact with the alte or neuer giftschreiber. Did I pronounce those right?"
"Pretty close," Ilse smiled, and then she said both terms precisely.
Everwood repeated the corrections aloud, and Ilse nodded. She noticed that the GoI expert was holding a tablet, but not typing on it, and then realized this was because they only had one arm. The sleeve of their labcoat was tied off. Must be voice activated.
"Okay," Everwood smiled. "You're Dutch, right? That's why you can pronounce it so easily."
"There's similarities," Ilse allowed, "but I can pronounce it so easily because I've got twice as much time as anyone else to figure things out."
"Fair enough," Everwood nodded. "Now, uh, please. Tell me about your encounter."
"It was my sister." Ilse shook her head. "Except it can't have been. She looked just like her — just like me — but there was something off about her affect. I wasn't in a good place, and wasn't thinking clearly, but in retrospect I'm sure she was just wearing my sister's appearance as a disguise."
"So, a geistschreiber." Everwood didn't look to her for approval of that pronunciation. There was really only one way it could go.
"That's what I think. Yes."
"What did she want?"
"She wanted to know what made the deadline special." She paused. Everwood had an easy, unassuming nature that made it easy to talk to them, and Ilse had just potentially slipped up because of it. "You're cleared to know about those?"
Everwood smiled reassuringly. "Yes ma'am. They've brought me up to speed on all things 5243."
"Good. Okay. Good." Her focus was slipping. She'd need to do better. "Lys, the false Lys, wanted to know what made the deadline so special. So unstable. We didn't have a term for them yet, so I called them tangents. I felt they were subordinate to baseline. That's what I told her, and in the end, I was right."
"Uh huh." Everwood was one of the few people Ilse had met who could say that word without it sounding condescending. "And you're sure this was in the deadline, not baseline?" They suddenly reeled back a little, and Ilse wondered if they were slapping their forehead with their phantom limb. "Obviously, or the tangents wouldn't have come up. Okay, that's fascinating. I haven't heard about these people leaping from timeline to timeline before. You're a very special person, Dr. Reynders. I mean, your situation is very… uh." Everwood was blushing fiercely as they tried to walk back their faux pas.
Ilse returned the earlier favour of a reassuring smile. "Thank you. And yes, it's strange. Does it suggest anything to you?"
Everwood tapped the tablet against their hip. "Could tie in to the references some of the others have made to escaping the apocalypse when they trigger it. Maybe the power to create these dead timelines was something the Uncontained and Unyielding could always do, and it got incorporated into the Breach when it killed them."
Ilse whistled. "Now that is a theory. Something to ask them about. Bravo."
Everwood's grateful smile was almost shy. "Thanks. Yeah, I'll look into it. Did she say anything else?"
Ilse almost didn't tell them, but… What the heck. "She told me I was never getting out of this box."
Everwood's face fell. "Jeez. Wow. I'm sorry, Dr. Reynders. That's awful."
"Is it?" Reynders shrugged. "I think it's quite a hopeful thing."
Everwood's face went blank. "Hopeful how?"
Where Ilse was from, or rather when, women were not meant to grin. But she was more now than her origins would have implied. All of them were, including this one-armed wallflower with the startlingly fast uptake. "It means they don't know everything," she grinned. "I'm not as helpless as I look."
"You don't look helpless," Everwood grinned back. "But I bet you'd be no great shakes at mountain climbing."
"You climb mountains?" Reynders laughed, then suddenly wondered if she'd spoiled the moment.
"With one sleeve tied behind my back," Everwood laughed with her. "See? You're right. Looks really can be deceiving."
16 September
Ngo placed a tablet on the coffee table, and sat down. They'd brought in a rocking chair for her, which she found touching, considering the circumstances; Harry had told her she'd always had "the affect of an aunt," which she'd found marginally less touching, even if she couldn't quite find an angle to argue.
"That's it?" Ibanez picked up the tablet. "Man, I miss books. You used to be able to tell how much shit was in them by the thickness."
"It's still a good metric," Okorie hiccoughed. "It's how we know how much is in you."
It wasn't clear whether anyone but Lillihammer got the joke, but she laughed loud enough for all of them anyway.
"I thought you'd be more upset." Ngo glanced from face to face. She'd seen each of them, save for Torosyan, more times than she could count without an appointment book. "Or, uh. Upset at all."
"What, just because you were spying on us?" Blank plucked the tablet out of Ibanez's fingers. The little woman made a big noise of protest, but she was already at least two thirds in the bag, and her reflexes were dulled. "That's old hat. We've been collecting spies like flies. Willie even dated one of them. In every reality."
"Except the apocalypse one," Wettle reminded him.
"That one doesn't count." Blank flicked through the files. "Anyway, it's not like we're idiots. Obviously your reports were going to Overwatch."
"Beyond obvious," Okorie agreed. Ngo wasn't totally sure the other woman still knew what was being referenced, but she took the affirmation anyway.
"It's just…" Ngo sighed, and folded her hands in her lap. No wonder they thought she was so matronly as to enjoy a rocking chair. The worst of it was, they weren't wrong. "I felt very guilty about it, for a very long time. But it was what was expected of me. So I did it anyway."
McInnis nodded. "We've all done what was expected of us. That's how we've learned to set our own expectations."
"Still, big dick move." Ibanez swatted over her head, catching the tablet and pulling it back down out of Blank's hands. So, not so dulled perhaps. "Coming clean to the secret cabal. Whycome?"
"This is a secret cabal?" Torosyan asked. She looked startled.
Wettle pointed at her. His head was invisible under the coffee table. "New Wettle!" he shouted.
Lillihammer pointed at her. "New Wettle!"
"I like her better than the old Wettle," said Blank.
She furrowed her brow, considered, then winked at him. He choked on his drink.
Ngo waited to see if anyone else was going to intercede before answering the question. "It just… seems to me, that you've got it all figured out. It wasn't Overwatch that brought back baseline. It wasn't the TAD. And it wasn't Karen Elstrom, either." She just barely restrained herself from adding a descriptive expletive between the woman's names.
McInnis raised a hand. "In her own way, Dr. Elstrom is doing what she feels is right. Everyone in this room has that in common with her. And happily, at this facility, we are not outnumbered."
"Everywhere else, on the other hand," Blank sighed.
Torosyan looked at Ngo. "I haven't been here long," she said. "Are they always like this?"
"Like what?"
"Just… saying whatever comes into their heads, and assuming it'll work out okay?"
Ngo laughed. "Yes. And so far, they haven't been wrong."
"Planning to narc us out, technician?" Lillihammer trilled.
Torosyan smiled sheepishly. "Seems like you're the rats already. Gnawing on the wires. Scurrying beneath the boards." She made an illustrative motion with her hands.
Ibanez made an even more illustrative motion at her in response.
"We could perhaps do with a little more discretion," McInnis admitted. "Particularly given the uncertain road ahead."
Ngo frowned. "You brought them both back. You restored the proper course of reality. What could possibly still be ahead?"
"Another deadline," Lillihammer sighed.
Her frown deepened. "Won't those be over, now that…? No?"
The archivist was shaking his head. "One more. Definitely at least one more."
"At least and at most," said Lillihammer. She hiccoughed. Okorie hiccoughed back at her, and they both laughed.
"I don't understand." Ngo once again scanned each of their faces for an explanation, and noticed Torosyan doing the same. "Why do you think there's going to be one more?"
"Because of Rydderech." Lillihammer hiccoughed again. "The last warning he gave me was number six out of seven. He's got outside context vision, somehow, because he's weird, so odds are there's still one more bad future in the pipeline."
"I see."
They drank in companionable silence for a while. Okorie elbowed her to ask what she was drinking. Ngo told her: "Sinh Tố."
"Sounds exotic." The other woman's eyes were wide, and glowing. "What's it mean?"
"Fruit smoothie," Ngo told her, and the entire room exploded.
Metaphorically speaking.
She put the glass down on the coffee table, just as Ibanez discarded the tablet. They met with a dull little clink. "Now," said Ngo, "I understand that most of you are drunk right now—"
"I'm not drunk!" Lillihammer protested. "I am plastered."
Ngo nodded in acknowledgement. "I was just wondering, ah… why you all seem so upbeat. About this. About everything. If you think it isn't even over."
Wettle's voice drifted up from beneath the table. "Sounds like a tomorrow problem."
"And fuck tomorrow," Blank agreed.
Lillian raised her glass. "Fuck tomorrow!"
Cheers all around.
"Seems like tempting fate," Ngo observed.
Lillian snorted. "Well, I'm not living out my golden years in fear, Nhung, so double fuck fate if it can't take a joke."
17 September
Udo saw there was a message on the inter-Site system as soon as she woke up, and groaned inwardly. It would be her mother again. Age hadn't dulled the parental instinct for interference.
She dressed at leisure, gently stirring the air in her room as she did so, filling the air with red. It danced to her whims, as it always did. Her whims alone, if they'd understood the Director's epiphany about responsibility correctly.
She still marvelled that she could have done even a fraction of the things she'd done on her own power, but the others had already accepted it as fact. She felt a certain way about that. She was still looking for a name for the emotion.
It was certainly more development than most people's characters saw in their early adulthood, she thought as she stepped into the bathroom and turned on the lights. She allowed the vim harenae to lift her long hair up in braids, fanning it out to its full and prodigious length. "God," she said out loud. "It's like four feet fucking long." It grew twice, maybe three times as fast as other people's hair did, undoubtedly one of the many symptoms of her thaumaturgical heritage.
Well, she had her doubts, actually. But she wasn't entertaining them this early in the morning, even if that night she'd dreamed of the desert again, and met a self which was not her self beneath the still-spreading cloud. She'd thought the cloud would disappear after the last deadline, exorcised by her revelation beneath the grey sky, but apparently she'd been wrong.
She was seized with a sudden urge to chop the hair off, all of it, right down to the scalp, as she had five times before. Make it an even half-dozen.
And why not?
Why not keep swimming against the tide that carried her forward?
2016
8 September
Dougall leapt to his feet when she entered the room. "Thank god. Thank god."
"I'm in no mood to thank any gods. Especially not for this." Udo sat down at the interrogation table, and indicated that he should join her. He stood there a moment longer, staring intently, then obeyed the directive.
"They told me you didn't want to see me." She couldn't tell if the look of relief on his face was genuine or not. In all the years that it passed since she seen him last, she'd never been able to figure out whether any of what they'd shared have been real or not. "I'm glad they were wrong."
"They weren't wrong." Udo sat there in silence for a moment, long enough for him to look her over, see that there was nothing but academic interest in her eyes. "I only came here because there's still something you can do for me. Something I need to know."
"Why are you being like this?" He was attempting to look hurt. "What's wrong?"
She wasn't going to give him an inch. "For starters, Bernie Del Olmo and Adrijan Zlatá are dead. You want to tell me what you know about that?"
Dougall looked bewildered. Perhaps he even was. "Dead? When did that happen?"
"Years ago. While you were dead, too. I understand that's been explained to you, so I don't want to go over any ground that's already been covered. Who were those two men to you?"
"Udo." He placed his hands on the table and reached out to her. She glanced down at them, but kept her own hands at her sides. "Aren't you even glad that I'm okay?"
She shook her head. "You're not okay. You're dead. You've been dead for fourteen years. And when this conversation is over, you'll be dead again. So if there's anything you want to tell me, now would be the time." Before he could say anything, she clarified, "about what I just asked you. Nothing else."
He chewed his bottom lip for a while, then nodded. "If that's how you want to play it, fine. Del Olmo and Zlatá are… were cryptomancers. Giftschreiber, though of a different sort."
"And so were you." She hadn't believed when it had first been suggested. But it hadn't taken her long to come around, with the twin powers of retro- and introspection
"I am," he agreed, with deliberate emphasis on the present tense. "And if the others are dead, all the more reason to keep me alive. What we were doing was vital. It still needs to be done."
"And what was that?"
"Destabilizing the cults, from the inside." He finally stopped making the sad puppy face he'd been making, as he warmed to his subject. "There isn't just one, you see. There's—"
"We know," she said flatly. "Go on."
He frowned. "If you know, then you know they're oppositional. Chaos and order. Neuer and Alte. One doing what they've always done, one doing what the schriftsteller used to do, before they all died. They're playing a sick game with the human race, Udo. And we can't let either of them win."
"So you were, what? Their go-between?
"That's right." He was nodding rapidly, as though excited she appeared to be buying what he was selling. "It wasn't safe for them to interact. The cults they were infiltrating would have figured it out. But not if they only talked to me. Because of my Talent."
"Except it wasn't a Talent. You weren't really a thaumaturge at all. How did you become a geistschreiber, Dougall?"
He shrugged. "I took a gap year for a Euro tour. Went to Austria. Fell in with a weird crowd." He smiled almost wistfully. "I used to be big into that whole 'fuck the power' thing. Got in way over my head. Met some folks who really could fuck the power, so the power could never unfuck itself. They taught me everything I know. And I didn't use it wisely, and the Foundation found out. Assumed I was just an unregistered Type Blue, since nobody'd ever heard of a geistschreiber before, and they put me to work. But I never forgot what I'd seen. And I came to realize what it meant. And that I could do something about it."
"And did you?"
He blinked. "What?"
"Did you do anything about it? Besides getting your friends killed?"
He shook his head. "You don't understand. It was a delicate thing. Can't push too hard. Can't go too fast. That game they're playing? It's the longest long game that's ever been played. And we're in the long haul with them."
"Not anymore."
His eyes widened. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means game over is maybe two or three turns from now. We're all out of time for slow and steady. And we've wasted far too much of the time we used to have on trying to figure out what had happened to you, when it turned out t didn't even matter." She made no effort to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
His eyes were shining now. "Didn't even matter? Is that how you feel?"
She nodded. "You know what I think, Dougall? I think you weren't really trying."
He stood up again. "I beg your pardon?"
She remained seated. "I think you liked your cushy job, and your unobservant girlfriend, and taking advantage of the people who worked for you, admired you, even…"
There was a very intense expression on his face now. "Even?"
Now she stood up. "You don't get to hear the rest of that. You didn't earn it. And it's over now anyway."
"It doesn't have to be." He came halfway around the table to join her. "I can still help you. Let me help you, rabbit."
She could have slapped him. She could have killed him, actually. Quite easily. She'd once recreated his entire body out of sand and bone meal. She could have turned him into a sorry pile of slurry, just as she had the Bonhomme in dreamspace.
But there was a single reagent she needed, if she was going to do that, and she found she didn't have it.
She would have needed to give a shit.
She turned, and headed for the door.
"Udo?" He was pleading now.
She reached for the door controls.
"Could you tell Phil something for me? Could you at least do that?"
It was too close a parallel. She had the irrational urge to break the pattern before it formed. She didn't answer, but this time she did wait.
"Tell him I love him," Dougall half-whispered.
She sighed. "If he doesn't already know, then it wouldn't mean anything."
He was still trying to speak as she opened the door, walked out, and closed it behind her.
That was the thing about giftschreiber.
The thing they'd never understood.
Words could have power.
But only when they meant something.
She stood there for a moment, looking at herself, at her eyes shining back at her in the mirror, and slowly she spiralled down the sand, letting her locks settle against her back and the tops of her legs again.
She brushed her teeth, pulled on her pants, and performed the single most difficult feat of her now long and storied career of overcoming insurmountable odds.
She called her mother back.
Actions, in the final analysis, meant far, far more than words.
Ibanez turned on her heel and walked in the opposite direction four times. But because that was an even number, she ended up pointing at her destination, and by dint of mathematics, finally reached it.
She didn't knock.
She'd already peeked at the schedule, and it was open for the next three hours.
Ngo looked up in surprise as her door opened. "Hey, Chief. What's up?"
Ibanez closed the door behind her, and stood there for a moment, hands closing and opening at her sides. "I'm looking for a consult."
"Of course." The psychologist put her tablet aside, and folded her hands in front of her. "What kind?"
"Psych."
"Makes sense," Ngo smiled. "Is this for a subject in containment?"
"Not… as such."
The other woman posed a question with the angle of her head.
Ibanez answered by walking to the couch, and sitting down.
"Oh!" Ngo stood up, grabbed her clipboard from on top of the filing cabinet, and moved around the desk to pull up a chair. "I see. What made you change your mind?"
Ibanez made eye contact, and held it. "I did."
Annual Psychological Reviews: 2019
Subject: Delfina M. Ibanez (Chief, Pursuit and Suppression Section, Site-43)
Officer of Record: Dr. Nhung Ngo (Chair, Psychology and Parapsychology Section, Site-43)
Chief Ibanez: I've heard it said that I know a thing or two about loss.
Site-01: Undisclosed Location
"Are you ready?"
She nodded.
The double doors opened as they approached in lockstep. The Council Chamber was pitch black, as always. Three lights were lit: Three, Eight, and Thirteen. The Governor, the Advisor, and the Mediator. Her sponsor, Scout's, and his.
"Director," the Governor spoke first. As the Overseer responsible for rules and regulations, he was an obvious fit for the role of chairperson in the absence of the Chair himself. "And Dr. Elstrom. We've not had the pleasure."
"Sir," Karen nodded. Even in the dark, McInnis could feel her standing stiffly at attention beside her. Strength he could lean on, metaphorically.
"You've done us a tremendous service, as you well know." The Advisor's respect was palpably begrudging. "We've read all the reports and debriefings. It's something of a shock to think how far off the rails everything could have gotten, without anyone recognizing it."
"I suspect Director Xyank realized it," McInnis said. "And chose to wait and see if things shook out on their own."
The Mediator was always the easiest silhouette to identify, even without the glowing nameplate. Their body language never shifted out of neutral. "I would imagine he had faith you would see us through, Allan. As did all of us."
"If I may, sirs?" Karen asked.
"Of course," the Governor responded.
"Faith is a good start, but only if action follows."
The room was deathly quiet for a moment.
"I had assumed this meeting was a victory lap," the Advisor grumbled. "Have we been hooked into another harangue? Is the ghost of Vivian Scout here in the room with us?"
"One of the many things we've learned from SCP-5243," McInnis smiled, "is that hauntings can be recursive. I would like to think my predecessor never fully left."
"What are we about to argue about?" the Governor sighed.
"Debate," the Mediator gently chided him.
Karen cracked her knuckles. It was all McInnis could do not to grin at the sound. "It's been a few decades. We believe, with respect, that it's been a long enough interval that the D-class personnel question really ought to be re-opened."
There was a whirring in the dark, and a single bright light appeared just off centre of the boardroom's horseshoe-shaped table. The Archivist's nameplate blinked into life.
The Chair's followed. Then the Oracle. The Combatant, the Operator, the Humanist. The silhouettes of the combined O5 Council arrayed around them in an unbroken line. They were surrounded. Outnumbered. Profoundly outclassed.
McInnis turned to smile at Karen.
She did the same.
And neither of them needed to see the other to know it.
"Shall we begin?" McInnis asked.
There was a rumbling from the Chair, but the Director hadn't been addressing him, and Karen spoke first.
"With pleasure, sir."
2019 Personnel Review
Subject: William W. Wettle (Deputy Chair, Replication Studies SubSection, Site-43)
Officer of Record: Noor Zaman (Chief, Hiring and Regulation Section, Site-43)
Chief Zaman: You've had a busy year.
Dr. Wettle: Have I?
Chief Zaman: By your standards.
Dr. Wettle: What's that supposed to mean?
Chief Zaman: Your SubSection has done more work than ever. You've taken on new staff. Done a lot of publication. You're pulling your weight, plus.
Dr. Wettle: Plus what?
Chief Zaman: I meant you're pulling more than just your weight.
Dr. Wettle: Oh. Well.
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Wettle: Some days my weight is kind of a lot, though.
Chief Zaman: Still. It's been a great boon to the overall project.
Dr. Wettle: Project?
Chief Zaman: The Foundation. The Veil. The preservation of normalcy.
Dr. Wettle: Oh. Sure. That stuff.
Chief Zaman: Director McInnis assures me that although the various implementations are top secret, the work you and your assistants do is materially contributing to the continued survival of mankind at large.
Dr. Wettle: Oh. Yeah. That's pretty good, isn't it?
Chief Zaman: It's certainly not bad.
<Audio event consistent with the shuffling of papers.>
Chief Zaman: On the other hand…
Dr. Wettle: There's always an other hand.
Chief Zaman: No, I've only got two. See?
<Silence on recording.>
Chief Zaman: Little joke.
Dr. Wettle: I didn't notice.
Chief Zaman: Okay. So, that other hand. The studies you've published have been important, and I'm seeing only good reviews, but you've left an enormous amount of work unfinished. Projects half-done. Projects abandoned. Some budgeted and never even begun.
Dr. Wettle: Most of those were boring.
Chief Zaman: That's not a very scientific criteria.
Dr. Wettle: Harry would say I'm not a very scientist.
Chief Zaman: I'm sure he wouldn't say it that way.
Dr. Wettle: Yeah, he's a lot smarter than me. Thanks for the reminder. You can go back to reading your laundry list, now.
Chief Zaman: Alright. Even given your unfortunate proclivity for bad luck, you've caused a tremendous amount of property damage this year alone.
Dr. Wettle: I like how you said 'enormous' the first time, and 'tremendous' the second time. You should have found a synonym for 'amount', though. Repetition is my thing, not yours.
Chief Zaman: Most of your collaborators outside of Replication Studies have given you extremely low ratings for cooperation and academic fellowship.
Dr. Wettle: Not very cooperative and fellowship…ish, of them.
Chief Zaman: I've had to open a second HR file on you. The second is dedicated entirely to interpersonal complaints. Nobody at the Site has accrued more of them than you.
Dr. Wettle: Is there an award for that?
Chief Zaman: Dr. Wettle, do you not see the point I'm trying to make?
Dr. Wettle: Not really. You must be kind of bad at your job.
<Audio event consistent with the shuffling of papers.>
Chief Zaman: I've got your personnel reviews going back all the way to the mid-nineties. You know what they say?
Dr. Wettle: That it's a good thing I drink so much milk?
Chief Zaman: What?
Dr. Wettle: Calcium.
Chief Zaman: William, on every metric not related in some manner to SCP-5243, you're essentially the same man today that you were when you first hired on at Site-333. Don't you think it's about time you… I don't know.
Dr. Wettle: You don't know? Does that mean I can go?
<Chief Zaman sighs.>
Chief Zaman: Isn't it about time you got out of that rut? Changed up your routine? Attempted to actually grow, as a person?
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Wettle: Have you guys considered replacing the vending machines with an honour system? I could show you some serious personal growth, if that's what you want.
Interstate 10: Outside Pensacola, Florida, United States of America
She laughed as she read the final line. "That was good! That was really, really good."
And Alis leaned through the gap between the seats again, to kiss him.
"You're not mad?"
"What about?"
A transport truck roared past them, and the windows shook. Wettle heard something fall over in the trunk of his car. Probably something that would leak.
He didn't care. "Fixing the Breach. You told me not to."
She leaned back on the bench seat again, and regarded him sadly. "You put it off for as long as you could. That's all I could have asked. Maybe we'll be ready, now."
"Ready?" He shifted, trying to get more comfortable. Bucket seats were never designed to be straddled. "Ready for what?"
"Anything."
"Hmm." He rolled his shoulders, and winced at the series of pops and cracks that resulted. "You mean that since Thing One and Thing Two are back, everything's going to get worse from this point on?"
She shook her head. It wasn't the only thing that shook. "Not everything."
Damn near his entire body popped and cracked when she leaned forward again and pulled him over the centre console, and into the back seat with her.
But he didn't mind.
Harry had been wrong about a second thing.
Wettle's responsibility wasn't suffering.
It was endurance.
Grand Cove: Grand Bend, Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
There was still grease on Flora's face when she walked into the kitchen. Gallo ran a paper towel under the faucet, and before she could even say 'Hello', he was wiping it off. She made a little screech of protest, and for a moment he could see his little girl again, inhabiting the woman she'd become.
He opened the trashbin and disposed of the dirty paper. "Really getting into your work, huh?"
She smiled, and kissed him on the cheek. She walked around the kitchen island to take up a stool as he washed his hands. "F-B is in a right state," she said. "Grampa was telling them for years those bearings wouldn't last as long as the specs said, but Bremmel wrote the specs, and you can't tell that guy anything."
"Uh huh." Gallo picked up the chopping board from where it sat vertical beside the fridge, and laid it down flat on the counter.
"I can't believe they didn't make our new uniforms out of vinyl. You spill something on them, and it's over. Off to the laundry, and it won't come back the same. The fit shifts. It's ridiculous."
"Does sound ridiculous," he agreed as he opened the fridge again to rummage around in the crisper. Roasted vegetables tonight, he thought.
"I know why Grampa never wanted to give up his vest." She spun on the stool's rotating seat. "Nothing sticks to those things."
"Maybe you can get them reinstated," Gallo suggested. He pulled a chopping knife out of the top drawer. "Or just wear one yourself, once you're Chief."
She laughed. "What makes you think I'm going to be Chief?"
"Just a hunch."
"Well, you can hold your hunches. Amelia, Chief Torosyan, she's great. God, she's smart. And funny. And she's so nice."
"Sounds like somebody's got a crush." Gallo began dicing a tomato he'd just picked fresh from the garden.
Flora snorted. "You ought to see her and Deering. They make such a cute couple." He thought he detected an undercurrent of artificiality in this construction, and wasn't disappointed when the resolution came. "Hey, how did you and mom meet? You never told me."
Gallo paused, then began pulling stalks of celery out of their plastic bag. "Your grandpa introduced us. He said, and I think I'm remembering this correctly, 'If I don't fix you a date, you'll never do it yourself'. Then he called me a lazy shit."
She burst out laughing. "That's my grandpa alright. The man who could fix anything."
Gallo glanced over his shoulder at her, smiling. "Yeah. It must be genetic."
He didn't say his father would have been proud of her, but he didn't have to. The man himself had said it often enough.
Lillian read the restored, thoroughly naïve 001 file once, and decided she didn't care for it. It started off with a clinical preamble:
Description: SCP-001-A and SCP-001-B are entities resembling a pair of physically identical elderly male human beings:
SCP-001-A produces semantic effects consistent with the concept of disorder in a radius around its person. It has been known by the following epithets throughout human history: the Uncontained, the Quarry, the Falcon, the Libertine, the Perpetrator, the Vandal, the Key;
SCP-001-B produces semantic effects consistent with the concept of order in a radius around its person. It has been known by the following epithets throughout human history: the Unyielding, the Huntsman, the Falconer, the Servant, the Jailor, the Corrector, the Lock.
So long as both entities remain in close proximity to each other, their local effects are mutually exclusive.
It then went on, in Harry's florid style, to become a drama athwart space and time with outrageous implications for the human race. But that wasn't really her thing. It didn't tickle her fancy. So she set it aside. Maybe she'd give it another chance when the revisions were posted to the database.
The others were scheduling interviews with the Uns. They had questions about metaphysics, history, and the future of containment. The answers would be scrutinized at the most minute level, because of course neither brother was anything remotely like a reliable narrator. Lillian would read the interviews, once, because she liked to know things.
But she wouldn't linger on them.
As far as she was concerned, the gods were as good as dead.
She'd killed one aspect in her mind. She'd consulted on the killing of several others. She'd done an end run around the Uncontained, and turned a curse that the Unyielding had placed on her mind into a tool to use against both of them. She'd sussed out every secret they kept which she cared to know. They were a solved problem. They just didn't know it yet.
Because she was the memory of their fivefold failure. The archive of five universes where they hadn't won.
What hope did they have in this one?
Her long-term projects were all dealt with. The antimemetics groups would keep plugging away without her regular input. Wheeler would find a new boojum to hunt, and be hunted by. Bernie was as much at rest as he would ever be. Euler's fight… well. That was in the future.
She picked up her deck of cognitocatalytic agents, began shuffling it in her hands, and grinned to herself.
Today, her desk was clear.
A world of possibilities.
And when they had all played out, she knew she'd still be standing.
Not alone.
But certainly taller than the rest.
18 September
Grand Cove: Grand Bend, Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
The sun was shining on Grand Bend. There were storm clouds all around them, but a little pocket of light beamed down on the neat row of cottages as Harry approached down the sidewalk. He could have gotten a car — there was one in his name at the subway's parking garage — but he wanted the time to think. To prepare.
Not, however, to decide whether or not to turn around and go home.
He'd be moving forwards only, from now on.
He stood before the bungalow in Grand Cove, hair hanging loose over the jacket they'd shared in a land beyond time, itself hanging loose over his shoulders. He took a deep breath of the clean summer air, and what started as a smile threatened to transform into a giddy giggle if he didn't do something else with the energy. So he raised his hand, and he knocked.
She opened the door almost immediately. She was smaller than he remembered, and rounder, and her once flawless skin now had wrinkles around the eyes, the mouth, and across the forehead. She wasn't wearing her glasses, and her hair was a tangled mess.
In short, she was beautiful.
He opened his mouth to say something, but the words wouldn't come. Which was fine, really, because she stepped over the threshold and buried her head in his chest.
They stood there like that in a timeless moment, embracing with such ferocity that it had to be putting serious strain on the electromagnetic fields of their atoms. If he could have pulled her as close as he wanted to, they would have obliterated all of Lambton County in a thermonuclear blast. His heart felt primed to explode already. In an instant, everything had changed. Nothing else mattered.
"Melissa," he finally managed. "I love you."
"You'd fucking better," she mumbled into his shirt. She was laughing, or maybe there was another reason why she was shaking like a reed in the wind. His cheeks were burning, and it had nothing to do with the sun. "I love you too."
She drew him back through the door, step by step, as they held on to each other like their lives depended on it. Perhaps they did.
"Are we dancing?" he asked her.
"Not anymore."
He waited until the door was closed behind them before sweeping her off her feet.
