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De Tijd Vliegt
Provisional Site-43: Lambton County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
Time started.
It was something like a slideshow. Here I am looking at the incinerator as it suddenly glows white-hot and explodes… next slide… and here I am looking at the ceiling, because I'm on the floor now. Only there was something not quite right about the view…
She stood up.
Halfway through that action, she saw what was wrong. It was almost enough to send her spiralling back to the floor. Suspended in the air perhaps three feet off the ground was a shimmering, reflective ball of something like molten metal, only that it was also a cool, chromatic silver. As she stared into the oily gleam of colour and light, she saw her reflection flex and distort, and then disappear, and then reappear again in a different position. That was interesting.
She walked cautiously around the ball, and that was when she saw what was left of the incinerator. That was also interesting. She knelt to examine the ruined husk, the top three-fifths of the machine entirely absent, gently tapped the ragged edges with her fingernails, and then took a deep breath and acknowledged the disarticulated remainder of its debris.
The rest of the incinerator was hanging in the air, just like the ball, fragments frozen mid-explosion. That at least explained why she hadn't been fried and then peppered with shrapnel, though the explanation seemed itself to demand another.
She returned to the rippling sphere, and considered it closely. A faint sound impinged on the edge of her consciousness, but she ignored it. This was something new. Very new, and very interesting. Perhaps the next phase of her research. Almost certainly.
You haven't finished the first phase.
She reached into her labcoat, and withdrew the envelope. She considered it for a moment, then glanced at the interrupted explosion, then lightly tossed the envelope into the air.
It rose a few centimetres from her fingertips, and froze in place. She frowned.
A thought occurred, and she glanced around the chamber. There was no light coming from beneath the ADDC's door, which meant it had been sealed. Of course it had; an explosion and a potentially hazardous materials breach had occurred. That meant she was stuck in here until she resolved whatever was happening. She took a deep breath…
…and nothing happened.
Don't panic.
She didn't panic. She wasn't suffocating, although the strange operation of her lungs suggested there had been no air to inhale. The room had been well and truly sealed, then. Why hadn't that been fatal? That was not only interesting, but probably very important to figure out. In case her aerobic homeostasis turned out to be only temporary. She glanced at the window…
…and saw Vivian Scout, hands pressed to the glass, an expression of mixed awe and horror etched on his face.
1944
12 October
On the other side of the glass, Vivian now looked calm. On the other side of the glass, Wynn also looked calm.
On her side of the glass, Ilse was calm. If they could do it, so could she. "Read it back to me." Her voice was… all things considered, her voice was fine. She had one hand pressed to the glass. On the other side, so did they.
Wynn glanced at his clipboard, opened his mouth… then his brows knit, and he turned the board so she could see it. "You read." His voice was muffled, but not too badly.
He just wants to hear my voice. The concern was touching, though hardly surprising given the first item on the list. "One," she recited. "I've been unconscious for almost a year."
She wondered how many of the new lines on Vivian's forehead were related to that fact.
"Two, time has essentially stopped in the ADDC." Essentially covered a whole range of strange quirks: she could still move, she could still speak, she could still interact with objects. But as soon as her motion ceased, so too did all related effects. More precisely, "Three, I'm the only source of agency in here."
Some agency. The ADDC was just a few dozen square metres, a lot of that space occupied by tables, chairs, cabinets, and various sundry pieces of abatement machinery. There was plenty of paper, and things to write with, and assorted bits and scientific bobs, but it wasn't a real laboratory, and it was certainly a very poor dormitory. This was no home; it was a charnel house.
"Four," and her voice broke a little — she immediately put it down to her disused vocal cords — "there is unabated, unclassified material in the ADDC, and we can't risk opening it up until we know what that is."
She felt a faint pang of irritation at their sympathetic looks. This was only a minor setback. An inconvenience. This wasn't the new normal.
"Five." She tapped the glass for emphasis, making sure to place her palm back flat before continuing. "I am able to transfer sound waves outside of the ADDC by touching the window, for unknown reasons. You are able to transfer sound waves inside through the same process." She had no idea why that might be the case, but she was glad of it just the same. This process would have been a lot more distressing if they'd had to engage in it at the tops of their lungs.
"Finally, six." If the first five items hadn't been enough to make her panic, this one was almost potent enough on its own. "Some of my own biological processes appear to be functioning… differently." Or not functioning at all. She had awoken from a coma of ten months to find her hair the same length, her fingernails still nubs, her clothes still clean. She'd been awake for more than a day now, and she still wasn't tired. Wasn't hungry. Didn't need to visit the washroom — which was good, since there wasn't one. Her agency might have been unaffected, but everything else about her seemed to follow the general rules of the incinerated kingdom: complete and total stasis.
Wynn pulled the clipboard back under his arm, and the three of them regarded each other carefully for a beat.
"So," she said at last. "Item four is the primary problem. Let's work it, gentlemen."
They were three of the finest minds in the Foundation. It would be the work of an afternoon, at most.
14 June
BEHIND THE MICROSCOPE:
A Personal Exploration of
Acroamatic Abatement
Dr. Ilse Reynders
Senior Researcher, Acroamatic Abatement Section, Site-43
I. BACKGROUND
Our model of time was wrong.
This wasn't what brought me into Acroamatic Abatement, of course. When my studies first began, there was no such thing as a Department of Temporal Anomalies. As far as anyone knew, time was just our subjective way of understanding causality and the progression of existence. There was no reason to suspect it was any less malleable than any other quality we can quantify and catalogue. No reason to suspect that in its raw state, it would prove any more resistant to science than our less abstract subjects of research and experimentation. It did seem an unlikely avenue for further exploring the techniques first pioneered in Vienna by Wynn Rydderech at the Acroamatic Abatement Group around the turn of the century, however.
But I have come to understand this strange science on a more profound level thanks to my experiences with time — examining it, interacting with it, and witnessing to a limited extent its abatement. This seed has grown into a functionally limitless tree of knowledge, and so I will begin this overview where my own understanding first began: with the shining ball of something expelled from the incinerator in the Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber on the last day of 1943, my last day on the other side of the microscope.
Spectrometric readings of the subject revealed it to be a globule of matter I now term anachronic. It affected the passage of local time in its vicinity. Its presence in a sealed environment resulted in a bleed effect whereby time functioned, and still functions, very differently within the ADDC — it does not stop, it does not move in different directions, it merely moves slower in certain subjective senses. Bodily processes (respiration, metabolism, senescence) evince the most striking responses. SCP-5616 (myself) has remained corporally static. Many natural processes unrelated to human biology are also arrested, most notably gravity, though the functions of light and sound remain relatively unchanged.
Tentative hypothesizing by the fledgling DTA suggested that material of this sort — only loosely theorized before now — would be capable of presenting a serious challenge to the linear nature of universal causality. In short, this globule of anachronic matter should have allowed the alteration of past events.
Months of rigorous study conclusively showed this not to be the case, and therefore a serious reconsideration of what was possible was undertaken. Using the admittedly limited materials and equipment available to me in the ADDC, I interacted in every conceivable way with the globule, to no apparent effect. Time continued to pass at the pace of an ideal-perfect snail, where it passed at all, but no amount of manipulation could induce it to reverse course entirely. Limited experimentation by my colleagues outside the ADDC confirmed this.
Everything is self-consistent and pre-destined. Everything leads to everything else happening the way it's supposed to happen. You can't abate time. Even now, the globule is shrinking away in front of my eyes. Time itself abates all things, and there is our first lesson.
You can't fix everything.
And you can't change the past.
But the future is another matter entirely.
It had to be.
Else what was even the point?
She sent the paper on its way to publication just seconds too soon to add one additional, fascinating tidbit about her present condition to the laundry list.
When her assistant exited the far frame, she felt a sudden trembling in her arms and legs which didn't stop until she'd reached up, grasped a thick lock of her own hair, and pulled with such force that her head struck the glass until she felt the strands separating at the scalp.
She stared at the clump of orange in her hand, then reached up to dab at the sore spot where it had once been connected to her. There was blood, of course, and there was a tingling.
The tingling outlasted the pain.
It also outlasted the blood, which receded on the tips of her fingers and in the palm of her hand so slowly she almost didn't notice when it was gone entirely.
Within an hour, she could see the follicles sprouting fresh from the wound.
By the next day, the torn hairs were dry as wheat, and the missing lock had regrown to its former length.
At which point it stopped growing entirely.
At which point she pulled it out again.
1945
12 October
Jackson lasted about a year.
He'd been finishing his PhD when they made him her assistant. He'd been a newly-minted Junior Researcher, doctorate in hand, when she woke up in the incinerator.
He'd put a brave face on, but it was a simple fact that he was well over-qualified for pressing book after book against the glass, and turning the pages for her when she asked.
After that, they took turns. Everyone in AcroAbate.
When she joked with Wynn that they ought to enlist the engineers, too, to ensure that one of them got fed up and designed a machine to automate the process, he told her a man named Bremmel from the construction team had already mocked up a prototype at the main facility.
She had never been in the main facility.
She was beginning to wonder if she ever would.
She didn't even notice when the war finally ended. For her, the distinction was entirely academic.
1946
19 February
Most days, both Vivian and Wynn put in an appearance. Even if it was just to do their paperwork where she could see them, they put in the time. For her.
She would have preferred they be out there, finding a solution, but it wasn't like she didn't appreciate the gesture.
Today, though, something other than her interminable incarceration seemed to be eating at Vivian. He was sipping at his coffee — nobody had eaten outside the incinerator until 1944, out of respect for her awkward condition, until finally she'd decided she wanted to at least see food if she couldn't enjoy it herself — and staring into space, sitting in one of the cluster of chairs they'd left for visitors, and she'd long since learned how to discern the difference between thoughtful Vivian and distressed. "Bad day?"
He started, and glanced at her sheepishly before pressing his free hand to the glass. "Yes, actually. Very bad day. I'm considering my options for being worse, in response."
She swayed back and forth, just for something to do. If she sat down, her eyes wouldn't make it over the sill. "You want to talk about it?"
He hesitated, and she suddenly remembered his furtive fugitive hunts and cryptic clue-hounding. He was wondering whether he ought to hide something from her. She was about to tell him to spit it out, when he did. "I met with an Overseer today."
She'd never met an Overseer. She hadn't known Vivian was entitled to that kind of attention, though of course it made a kind of sense. He and Wynn were co-Directors of what was shaping up to be one of the Foundation's largest and most important facilities, even if it was still only provisional. "What did they want?"
"They wanted me," and his jaw set into a solid square, "to stop allocating so many resources to my most important project."
She frowned. "The File?" Even now that she knew what it was, it was still prudent to refer to the thing in code.
He shook his head.
"Finishing the rest of the facility?"
He continued to shake his head.
She shrugged.
He waited.
She frowned.
He nodded.
She felt a little faint, gratitude and fury sapping the strength from her knees with the ferocity of their conflict in her breast. "What are you going to do?"
"I am going," he said slowly, deliberately, the way he did when he was circling back around to a decision he'd already made long ago, "to tell them to go to hell."
She smiled. "No, you aren't."
He smiled back. "No, I'm not. I am going to transfer your file to the AAG's purview." So far, her condition had been examined as a matter of unofficial Directorial prerogative. "That will free up Wynn to spend more of his time on our little conundrum." He pointed at the chrome ball whirling over Ilse's shoulder, slightly shrunken but only a little less mysterious than it had been the first time she'd seen it. "That is the most pressing unfinished abatement of which I am aware, and in any event it's inarguably the most promising avenue of research available to us."
She examined her distorted double-reflection, the gleaming ball visible in the glass of the ADDC window, and nodded. "I suppose it is," she agreed. "If it's what I think it is, it might just teach us how to literally kill time."
Separated by glass, in two different artificial climes — two different times, two different worlds — they both simultaneously shivered.
1947
Bremmel's apparatus took several iterations to work through the kinks, and in the end any book she wanted to read had to be effectively destroyed — the pages torn out and placed individually into a hopper, so she could call them out one by one by tapping a specific spot on the window which set off a crude sound monitor connected to the internals — but it did add a certain privacy to her research process which she initially found appealing.
After a week of doing nothing but consuming the extant literature on optics, with her only human contact the man who came by to supply each fresh pile of paper, she celebrated the acquisition of an entire new doctorate's worth of knowledge by gnawing down her already too-short fingernails until they bled, then regenerated past the quick, at which point she gnawed them again.
The next day, Jackson visited to talk excitedly about his new paper on novel abatement techniques in marine environments.
The day after that, Wynn shared the minutes of the most recent AAG conference.
The day after that, Vivian swung by to ask her opinion on a series of systems failures in the main facility's complex electrics.
Twelve days later, not one of them passing without some visitor or other interrupting her routine, she realized what was happening.
Part of her was angry.
Part of her was grateful.
Mostly, she was impressed.
If she'd been the one writing the containment procedures, she probably would have included something similar herself.
1957
There was no reason why it should have worked, just as there was no reason why they wouldn't have already tested it. But in the middle of her latest round of optics experiments, Ilse discovered that a blue light projector pointed at the ADDC window with a precise f-stop and the right filters could project words onto the glass without passing a blinding glare on to the chamber's occupant.
She kept using the mechanical reader, of course, whenever the production of transparencies was infeasible. But the projector had one extreme benefit of which she was pleased to avail herself.
It meant she could retreat to the back of the chamber, into the gloom, where her assigned visitors could barely see her and couldn't hear her at all, while she read the writing on the wall between herself and freedom.
When Wynn's new lab assistant entered the daily rotation, Ilse started wallpapering the window with de-supernatured sheets of paper until only the projector's slides were visible. It was like living inside of a book, only with the occasional concerned party banging on the back cover, demanding to see her face.
1960
January 9
Ilse had joined the Foundation with a doctoral degree in literary studies. Years of acquiring the knowledge required to profitably pore over classified files penned by niche field experts had entitled her to three further degrees in toxicology, history, and analytical chemistry. At that point she'd stopped bothering with accreditation. In the latter days of her second decade in the incinerator, however, she compiled her scattered hypotheses of work and combined them with what she'd learned about the material now keeping her company, producing a new thesis in esoteric chemistry which added a fifth doctorate to her credentials.
After that, she wrote almost every day. When the Site press asked if she had anything they could publish, she filled the window with raw theories and data breakdowns and waited patiently for them to be photographed.
"I've checked the records," Vivian told her with a smile. "You're the only person to achieve a postsecondary degree from within a single room."
"From within containment, you mean."
He didn't correct her.
1961
31 December
It was now only one ritual among many, but it was an important one. She looked into the mirror, the surface of the window more reflective with the pure blue light shining from the projector into the glass, and relaxed her expression and stance until she saw it. Just for a moment. Only when she squinted, and only with the benefit of inexorable memory drift.
She looked into the glass, and saw something very much like her sister.
From the look on Vivian's face, she suspected he saw it too.
1966
14 November
Site-43: Lambton County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada
Appearances had never had the least importance to Ilse. In her old life, she would have been thrilled at the prospect of being able to make herself presentable once, and having everything stay in place no matter what she did, no need for upkeep or revision. Now she saw it for what it was: a curse. When someone appeared at her window disheveled and hollow-eyed, she knew some terrible thought had been keeping them awake at night. When their skin was too pale, she knew they'd been overdoing it underground. She could tell when someone had been crying, when they'd been shouting, when they were at the end of their rope.
She was all of those things, all of the time, and absolutely none of it was visible on her person.
So when Wynn Rydderech walked into her narrow rectangle of view, looking like he'd just seen a man explode or a skyscraper collapse or something similarly staggering, his waistcoat undone and his sweater rumpled and his red bottlebrush hair… something was wrong with his hair, and he turned to look at her, she knew she looked emotionally available for the common decency of comfort and aid.
He couldn't even tell that maybe a third of the hair on her head was brand-new, ontologically locked to 1943 as it was.
"Ilse," he said, and he waited for a response. As though this were some sort of profound statement.
She took a deep breath, and let it out. "Wynn." Whatever this was, she didn't have…
Time? Were you going to say you don't have time for it?
"Why are you still in there?"
She furrowed her brow. "Someone seems to have locked the door."
He shook his head, then rested it against the glass. The lines on his forehead smoothed out with the pressure. "How have we not figured it out yet? You and I, and Vivian, and the others. It can't be that difficult."
"It can be." She pointed over his shoulder, at the row of diplomas displayed on the facing wall. He didn't turn to look. "I'm the world's foremost expert on half a dozen related fields, and not one of them has an answer to this. Don't take this the wrong way, but until I figure this out, it doesn't get figured out."
"I invented the science of destroying things like that." Wynn thumped his free fist, the one that wasn't already transmitting his voice to her, on the glass to indicate the now basketball-sized lump of anachronic material still idly lapping its invisible borders with waves of molten silver. "I'm still the best there is."
"It's not a question of abatement." She sighed. "It's practically abated itself. Abated into me, in all likelihood. I'm the problem, and I'm the answer. There's nothing you can do."
She couldn't tell if this was having any effect on his spirits. Wynn had always had a downcast, put-upon look, even when he was laughing out loud. He shook his head, or rather rotated it against the glass. His skin squeaked irritatingly. "I can do something. I know I can do something." He pressed the other hand to the glass, and made as if to push it out of its sill. He would have needed a bulldozer to manage it. He squinted, then closed his eyes, and muttered something under his breath that the glass failed to translate to her ears.
"Wynn?"
He opened his eyes, and looked straight through her. "I'm going to get you out of there," he said.
"You can't." God damn you for making me say it.
"I can." He flexed his fingers against the glass. "I'm going to. And then I'm going to get Lys out, too."
In that instant, the only moving thing inside the ADDC froze solid. Ilse couldn't move. She couldn't breathe, not that she needed to. She didn't know what he was saying. Didn't know what he could possibly mean. But it filled her with a dread she hadn't felt since first opening her front door on the existence of Vivian Scout, and all that his existence entailed.
"Lys is dead," she whispered.
It was too quiet for him to hear, but he nodded anyway. Thunking his head against the glass. "I can fix that, too."
She stared at him wide-eyed, horrified, confused, and she saw the same emotions snap into place in his deep brown irises. He staggered back, hands still held in front of him, and he turned the palms inward as though reading his future in the fold lines.
"I'm sorry," he said, and he turned and ran.
Ilse was thunderstruck.
They were the first words she'd heard from someone not touching the glass.
Behind the glass, she was invincible. No harm could come to her. She had no needs that could not be satisfied by a single daily visit, and that visit was mandated.
They'd never felt the need to give her some way of raising an alarm.
That was why when Vivian arrived to give her the bad news, looking even more blasted and lost than Wynn had, she was already clawing at the glass and screaming.
17 November
"What happened to him?"
She hated having to touch the glass. She wanted to cry, to sit in the corner and hug her legs to her chest, to cast down her eyes and simply be miserable, but in order to be heard she had to reach out and make the effort. She hated that more than anything.
Vivian, on the other hand, was clearly only kept upright by pressing both hands to the window. His suit jacket and hat were discarded, as were his spectacles. It was like seeing a beloved backyard tree stripped of all its bark. "I don't know." He shook his head. "I do know. It was all those exposures. All those abatements gone wrong, over the years. That thing in the sixties…" He sighed helplessly. "It all caught up with him. It bio-accumulated."
Ilse had taught him that term. She wanted to slump in defeat, but keeping her arm ramrod-straight defeated the purpose. "If he'd absorbed any of that stuff, it would have killed him."
"Maybe it did." Vivian's voice was little more than a choke, now. "Maybe it killed him, and what we saw walking around was just the memory. Ilse, his hair turned red again."
She blinked. How had she not noticed that?
"It took him." Vivian cleared his throat. "It made him change. I think… I think it's still him. He's not dead. No, he's not dead. But he's different, and now he's alone."
"Did you send anyone to look for him?" Ilse had seen the caverns beneath the Site a few times in the early years, particularly during the construction of AAF-A. They were long and twisty and many, but they had been mapped.
He nodded, and he didn't say anything.
She waited.
"Do you remember the skyscrapers?" he finally rasped.
She nodded.
"That's what's down there now." Vivian's eyes shone almost as brightly as his spectacles usually did, reflecting the now almost imperceptible smudge of light that was the anachronic lump. "Tower on tower on tower of things, machinery, gantries, smoke stacks. The most hideously perfect factory you can imagine. He's gone to the depths to continue his work."
It was too much to consider all at once. She seized on the grammar and crafted a response to match, even without fully understanding the impossible implications. "He's built himself a containment chamber?"
A light of perverse mirth danced for just a moment on the edges of Vivian's eyes, the corners of his lips, before the despair took over again. "Two down, I suppose," he whispered. "I wonder how long it will be before all three of us are in boxes."
31 December
She no longer slept, so she couldn't dream. But from time to time, she had visions.
Perhaps it was just the stress of never being able to drift away. The horror of keeping it all inside of her, never refreshing the endless litany of concerns that ran through her mind at all hours. Enough to throw her mental chemistry off enough to hallucinate, before that damned effect put everything else back in order.
She had a very interesting daydream on the cusp of the new year.
She was wild magic in the shape of a woman, and she was shovelling papers into a massive furnace. Tendrils of light were streaming off of her, suffusing the fire, and it glowed white-hot.
"It was me," she laughed. "Unchanging, unaging, inalterable me. It was me all along." The fire was reflective now, molten silver at a mirror sheen, and she saw Wynn's face grinning back at her. "I really should have told someone."
1967
1 July
Vivian brought a projector with him, and they watched the reel in silence. She didn't know which of them saw it backward, not that it mattered; the starbursts over the harbour were symmetrical enough, the skyline abstract enough, that it was little more than the art of light and shadow.
Canada was now one hundred years old.
Vivian had eighteen years to go.
Given she hadn't slept for twenty years, Ilse supposed it wouldn't be long before she passed them both.
When he packed up the reel and retired for the night, she looked over the tremendous pile of open files and scribbled notes on her tables, counters, and even a substantial portion of the floor.
She picked one up, at random. Then another.
By midnight, she had it all packed up.
1968
12 June
She hadn't seen a new face since the last time she'd acquired a degree.
Izaak Okorie, she knew. He was that rarest class of Foundation employees, a thaumaturge. A wizard. Most of the secrets she'd mastered no longer had the same esoteric allure they'd once possessed for her, and she now possessed enough of them that even the ones she didn't had a certain mundane cast now. Not so, thaumaturgy. Magic was still magic, and magicians were fascinating. She'd spoken to Izaak a few times over the years, and he'd regaled her with stories of remote viewing and managing glimpses of planes beyond the material. It was that connection, that tenuous link between them, that had impelled him to bring the new face before her window.
Arik Euler was dark haired, serious-faced, and charming beyond all reason. He reminded her a little of Vivian in that regard, though if she was being honest Euler definitely had the edge. When he first approached the window he extended his hand as though to shake hers, seamlessly segueing to an open-handed press against the glass which she reciprocated. "Pleased to meet you, Dr. Reynders," he smiled. "Your reputation precedes you."
"For that to be true," she smiled back, "I would have to go somewhere first."
"That's what we'll be doing." Izaak was watching them both with an expression of mixed pleasure and anticipation. "Specifically, we'll be going where no man has before."
Euler crooked an eyebrow. "There's no way she recognizes that reference, Izaak."
This was true.
Izaak shrugged. "Not a problem. I'm our resident expert on outer space, and you know all about inner. Ilse can be the bridge between us."
22 June
For reasons they were still reticent to discuss, her two new colleagues considered AAF-A the ideal space for conducting their research. It was however her work in optics, she now understood, that had brought them to her window specifically. Izaak and Euler were looking for powerful microscopes, more powerful than presently existed, and her work using the anachronic material as a lens had yielded some interesting avenues not yet explored.
She hadn't yet explored them because they didn't seem likely to yield any answers to her most persistently pressing question.
"What do you need this for?" she asked, already scribbling notes and preliminary schematics on the window with grease paint. The incinerator was inexplicably stocked to the filters with melted tallow, but pencil erasers were a rare and prized commodity.
"Arik is a thaumaturge as well," Izaak explained. "His Talent is the breakdown of matter to its component elements."
"Given the right tools," Euler continued, "I suspect I could take things down to the level of particle physics."
Ilse whistled. "I might have a few dozen questions to ask you, at some point. For, you know." She gestured at the incinerator. "A personal project."
Euler nodded. She happened to be looking right at him, as his eyes overlapped with a stretch of window she was using to sketch out lens fittings, so she saw the flash of unease. "Did I say something wrong?"
Euler glanced at Izaak, who shrugged with obvious discomfort. The new thaumaturge sighed, and looked back to Ilse. "It's possible that our project may be of personal interest to you as well, Dr. Reynders."
She stopped painting, and waited.
It was Izaak who finally broke the ice. "What we're doing is breaking down cryptomancy."
She nearly dropped her brush. "For what reason?"
"To replicate it." Now Euler looked worse than uncomfortable. Embarrassed? Shades of shame?
Ilse rubbed away enough of her diagram to see them both clearly at the same time. "You want to… what? Construct word magic? For the Foundation? Why?"
"Ah," Euler scratched his chin, "you wouldn't happen to have been paying attention to anomalous geopolitics in the past few months, would you?"
Wordlessly, she shook her head.
"We're a few months from annihilation," Izaak announced flatly. "Someone's trying to wipe us out, or get the world governments to do it for them, and Ilse, they're winning."
She blinked. "I'm… surely someone would have mentioned this to me."
Izaak ground his teeth for a moment. "Maybe they thought you didn't need the extra worries."
She glared at him. "I think I can be the judge of my own anxiety threshold. Okay, so, fine. Now it's my worry. We're saving the Foundation by learning how cryptomancy works." She rolled that thought around in her head for a moment. Years ago, it would have seemed foolish. Improvident. Dangerous. Now it was just another problem to solve, and truth be told, she'd been looking for a distraction for months. "Probably I can help. The microscopes I can definitely help with, but that'll just be a start. You'll need half a dozen science and parascience foundations just to begin to understand something like this, assuming the magic really is in the materials, and not the words. I've got a lot of research on the latter, which should save us some time." Realization dawned. "Ah, okay. Copper-M. We can purify anything you break down, we can separate it all out… yes, this can definitely work. I understand the vision. And I see why you'd think I'd be interested. I did design most of the machinery."
The two men traded glances again, and she huffed in impatience. "That's it, right? This is personal for me, because I… no?" There was something else in both of their toothless expressions. "What? For the love of God, just tell me."
"The cryptomancy we're going to break down." Izaak's voice was almost mournful. "It was created by a man named Thilo Zwist."
17 July
There were days when the work was difficult. When the idea of advancing such a hideous study was repellent, even anathema, and only by shutting out her higher functions could she get anything done.
There were days when the work was easy. When it felt like a thumb in the eye of a man who so profoundly deserved it. When it felt like striking a blow in the name of the fallen.
Either way, her days were defined by the work. By the materials she and the others were studying, and the new uses to which they were attempting to bend them.
By the legacy of the man who had murdered her sister.
She hadn't come to that conclusion easily. Vivian's lackadaisical pursuit of the man made little sense if it was his words that had caused the disease he sought to cure. But no other party had come forward to take credit, and even Vivian himself seemed to have misgivings now. He didn't like talking about Zwist. He didn't like her talking about him. The pieces fit.
The window had become her chalkboard. She only transferred winning formulae to hard copy. Still, with such a wide canvas — it felt claustrophobic as a view on the world, but as a workspace it was massive — she found she could slip into something like tunnel vision.
That was why it took her several minutes to notice the little bald head and the tiny pair of eyes watching her as she worked.
She jumped, reached up to clutch at her chest — purely on instinct, since her ticker kept perfect time now and forever — then snatched up the pencil she'd tied and tacked to the glass. It conveyed the sound just as well, since the effect was some kind of impenetrable nonsense anyway. "Who are you?"
"Why are you hiding in there?" the little boy asked, hints of an accent Ilse couldn't quite place behind the words.
"I'm not hiding. I'm working." She craned her neck to see the rest of the child, who was now pressing his nose against the glass. She'd have to ask someone to wipe the print off later.
"You look like you're hiding." The boy gestured at the writing on the glass. "This is what my dad does when he's hiding."
"Who's your dad?" Then the correct question occurred to her. "Where is your dad? Shouldn't you be with him?"
The boy shook his little egg-shaped head. "He's with the Director. He was a Director, too."
Ilse gave up trying to make sense of it. She was speaking to a child. "What's your name, little man?"
He stood up slightly taller, no doubt straining the toes of his shoes. "That's an advantage."
"What?"
"I don't know your name. If I tell you mine, you have an advantage."
Ilse stared at him. "Who taught you to think like that?"
The boy shrugged. "Nobody teaches you how to think. Not if you don't let 'em."
And he turned and walked away, looking for all the world like he knew exactly where he was going.
The strange sense of envy that washed over her nearly made her sick.
But, of course, only for a moment.
1969
By the time they figured it out, none of them were happy about it.
It wasn't Ilse's scientific expertise that ended up cracking the case. To be sure, her new lenses gave Arik an unprecedented control over his disintegrations, and they did the same for Izaak as he re-integrated the resulting particles. Of course, the high-tech abatement facilities she had developed did wonders for streamlining the disintegration and separation processes. But it was, of all things, her knowledge of language and literature, the only mastery she retained from her life in Groningen, that enabled them to travel the extra mile.
When it was done, when the rules were all in place, when they understood how each of the anomalous particles that remained after Zwist's cryptomancy was torn asunder, when they even had the capacity to create their own modest effects, Ilse allowed herself a small indulgence.
She granted herself the world's first degree in Quantum Linguaphysics, and submitted her brief to the Department of Accreditation.
The only response she got was the delivery of yet another framed diploma, hung at the end of a line so long she couldn't see the entire set without putting a fleeting little crick in her neck.
It wasn't a PhD, of course. The field had never existed before now. No-one could judge her work better than the author herself.
She was, for the time being, the Foundation's only living owner of a Philosophiae Auctor degree.
She was already considering moving it up on the wall, and starting a new row.
1 April
"It's the only way," Izaak sighed.
"It can't be the only way," Arik shot back. They were always an odd couple in an argument, one sanguine and the other choleric. "This is a bridge too far."
Ilse said nothing. Truth be told, she was wrestling with very much the same doubts. At first their work had been put to use for something almost objectively moral: the establishment of false fronts for the Foundation which, by virtue of their augmented heraldry, could not be detected by enemy actors. This allowed agents in the field the security to continue protecting the general public, without fear of being hounded back to their dens. The dozens of fronts they had already created had produced a marked reversal in what everyone was now calling the Panopticon, wherein all eyes in the world had been suddenly turned in the Foundation's direction. Their implacable enemy, Person of Interest 001, had prophesied their complete destruction within the year. Now, that outcome seemed unlikely at worst.
But this?
"Let's talk about what we're really proposing here," she said when Izaak's sulking and Arik's fuming left an obvious opening. "Say it all out loud, so we can address our arguments to the principles rather than…" She gestured at the two of them, visibly standing in for the concept of non-constructive emoting.
"We're talking about lobotomizing the human race," Arik snapped.
"We are talking," Izaak sighed again, "about changing how the human race perceives us. Only us."
"Not specific enough." She tapped the glass until they were both looking at her. "This is it, in bare bones: we're talking about identifying where the noösphere, the human realm of cognition, metaphysically exists, and inserting something new into it. Something that marks us as special. As not to be interfered with. That's neither changing people nor lobotomizing them. It's something different."
Something terrible. Desperate, and terrible. But in extreme situations…
Arik looked ready to punch a wall. "Not different enough. If we mess with the fabric of cognition, who knows what sort of damage we might do? It's like brain surgery, but we're talking about everyone's brains."
"We're not cutting anything out," Izaak reminded him. "We're putting something in. Like a hip replacement, or… I don't know. An animal tracker."
"This animal," and Euler pounded his chest hard enough for the ribs to ring, "is not for tracking."
"Oh, face facts," Izaak growled. "Every year we find a dozen new things ready and waiting to kill off humanity, and we're the only ones capable of addressing them. If we're gone—"
"—then maybe humanity will get to decide its own affairs." Arik glanced around the hall, finding the security camera they all knew was there and staring straight into it. "Would that be so bad?"
Ilse shifted on her feet, another now pointless habit she couldn't quite shake. "I don't know that I trust humanity to handle anything as serious as what we've hidden behind the Veil, even if they had the equipment and the know-how."
Arik turned to face her, ignoring Izaak for the moment. "Do you think the Nazis wouldn't have done this with the swastika, if they'd had the opportunity?"
"Do you think we wouldn't have done it with the Union Jack? Or the American Flag?"
He brushed the riposte aside. "Spot treatments are one thing. A necessary evil. This is an evil of convenience."
He had convinced her, in his way. She took a deep breath, and let it out as potentially the most important set of sentences she'd ever spoken. "And we have made it convenient, Arik. All our work is on file. The Foundation will figure out how to do this, whether the three of us are helping or not. The only difference, the only thing we can change, is whether or not it's being done by conscientious objectors in the full knowledge of how terrible it is to do this thing, as opposed to some happy-go-lucky mad scientist who's always wanted to meddle in humanity's collective grey. Which would you prefer?"
Arik had no answer for that, and Izaak was already long past convinced. The only entity still expressing doubts was Ilse's memory of the little bald boy and his beady little eyes, uttering that simple statement which still cut straight to her core:
Nobody teaches you how to think. Not if you don't let 'em.
9 July
She'd been right, of course. Everyone said so.
The fact that she had to participate in the final application remotely, via radio, did nothing to reduce the weight of her involvement. She had made the argument that dismantled the final obstacles, it was her equipment, her formulae, her vision. Just as much as it was Arik's, or Izaak's.
They knew it, too.
Because once it was done, she didn't see Arik again, and Izaak would only call her 'Dr. Reynders'.
She wondered what their children would call her. If anything.
31 December
It didn't matter how hard she squinted, nor how blue was the light. No matter how hard she forced herself to relax, to let go, to forget who she was and what she had done, to let the years melt away.
She couldn't see her sister's face in the glass.
So she picked up the pencil from the sill, pressed the tip into her wrist, kept pressing, and then drew it slowly down the length of her arm until it reached the crook of her elbow.
It was already halfway healed by the time she finished slitting the other one.
Vivian stayed with her all night. They talked about nothing, the way they never really had.
In the morning, a technician arrived to set up a new camera. Rather than sweeping the corridor, this one was focused solely on her window.
1972
15 April
The first thing she did when her official credentials were finally reactivated was demand to read her file. The second thing she did was revise it.
"I can't believe you put all of this in there." She wanted to glare at Vivian, but she knew the look he received expressed petulance at the worst. "Most of these were private conversations."
"It wasn't my idea." He didn't look precisely apologetic, though the empathy was obvious. "Humanoid anomalies must have all psychological aspects thoroughly documented. You know this."
"I appreciate you not pretending I'm anything other than an anomaly." She paged through the rest of the document by rapidly flicking the window with her right index fingernail.
"You're much more than that," he chided. "But the facts of your nature are rather in evidence… or, I suppose, absence, now."
The anachronic material was nearly gone. Given there was only one thing in the ADDC that exhibited the capacity for change, there could be little doubt as to where it was going.
She pointed at the containment procedures. "Who decides what goes in here?"
He glanced at the projection, squinted as he determined what the backward text meant, and grunted. "I do."
She laughed. "You're my file officer?"
He spread his hands wide. "Haven't I always been?"
That gave her pause. "Can I see my personnel file, too?"
"It hasn't been updated since 1943." He suddenly grinned, and a few of the years melted away. Not enough, but it helped. "What would you like the first new entry to be?"
She considered. "I don't know. I'm still focused on the conprocs. Anything you type in there becomes automatic policy, right?"
"Subject to review," he nodded. "Yes."
"Then how's this for a new update: SCP-5616 is allowed free run of Site-43, and may eat in the staff cafeteria."
His mouth moved all the way to one side of his face. "If you know how we can enforce that, by God am I willing to authorize."
1978
21 September
"This is not a failure. We must view each case as a victory for science not yet achieved, but absolutely within our grasp. It is therefore vital that we understand the minutiae of every element of every case under our purview. Lest we miss something. Lest the solution to a dilemma, a disaster, an injustice slip through our grasp."
She smiled, and nodded approvingly at the camera.
The fresh-faced intern switched it off, and gave her a thumbs-up gesture. "Thanks a ton. I'll show you the final edit some time next week."
The smile had only ever been a theatrical affectation, and it melted into a frown without resistance. "A week? It takes you that long to… wait. What are you editing?"
The man had a guileless face, which immediately put her on the lookout for dissimulation. "Nothing substantive. Just to punch up the pacing, you know? I think this will end up being one of our best remote lectures."
That wasn't entirely satisfying, but then, what was she going to do about it? She forced herself to shrug. "Okay. Still, seems like that's a long time to remove some pauses, or whatever."
"Well, we can't all burn the candle both ways without consequence." The intern was already packing up his equipment.
"I don't really understand the point of this," she mused aloud. While he was still there. While there was still someone there. "It was basically just recitation. The paper is on file. People could just read it."
The intern gave her a strange look. "Sure," he acknowledged, "but don't you think the human touch is worth something?"
She was glad the camera was off. His, at least.
Ilse had been a model prisoner for a quarter century, so she was owed a few perks for good behaviour.
It was no great hassle to film her audience as they listened to the lecture, and it didn't take much time out of her research schedule — she was essentially at loose ends now anyway — to watch the tape and see their wondering faces.
Well, most of them were expressing something like wonder. Some of them might have been asleep.
A few weeks later, she'd started running the tape on loop while she worked. If she didn't look up, it was almost like lecturing to a live audience.
1979
2 August
In all her years reviewing documents, she'd never found one she couldn't finish before.
"This is awful," she whispered, and she tapped out the rhythm that shut the projector off. "How long have you been dealing with this?"
Vivian leaned heavily on the glass. He'd been unwilling to touch it while the messages were being projected, as though the words might somehow burn him. "Since the beginning, more or less. The first computerized long-distance conversation ever carried on by man was between myself and Wynn."
Vivian had always been cagey about what precisely was going on with their former partner after his flight into the caverns below. That Wynn Rydderech was still alive, she was allowed to know. That he was not getting better, she could tell from the way Vivian's otherwise unaging face took on the expressions of an ancient and sorrowful sage. That there was something else going on was clear from the fact that his file was classified so strictly, only certain Site Directors and the Overseer Council had access to it.
The most recent digest of messages had been equal parts heartbreaking and perplexing. "The answer is polio," Wynn had sent in response to no query at all. "It's the wrong day for that question," he'd said when asked about a specific titration technique, "or else you're the wrong one of your selves to be asking." He sent an incomprehensible formula as a solution to a particularly thorny abatement, and when pressed on its meaning insisted it would make sense "sometime after the turn of the century, probably the next one." He peppered these non sequiturs with genuinely useful, often brilliant scientific commentary, and one other thing.
He asked for Vivian at least once per day.
"There has to be something we can do for him. He's suffering in there, we can't just sit back and watch, or take advantage of him like he's some kind of…" She realized he was staring at her. "What?"
1980
1 January
On the day Izaak Okorie died, murdered in his family home by the last symptom of a disease they had all inadequately treated with their aggressive panacea, Ilse received a telegram from Arik Euler.
She decided not to read it, and had Vivian put it in a safe in her never-used quarters at the main facility.
There would be time for considering the artifacts of her mistakes. Days now passed when she barely even noticed the thread-tied envelope floating behind her, between the incinerator and the glass.
When she finally faced her regrets, she was determined to burn them all to nothing at once.
5 July
She had once thought herself special.
A man had come an impossible distance — literally impossible, given the timeframe, and she'd never received a satisfactory answer as to how the deed had been done — to recruit her for an impossibly strange project. Only her. A literary studies major, a foreign national, and a woman in the most testosterone-charged years of the century.
But once they'd begun putting their new facility together, she began to see that she was merely the first of many. One of a kind, which didn't carry the connotations of uniqueness that many believed it did; she was still literary-minded at heart, and the misuse of words was an unsquashable bugbear. Vivian regularly approached promising students at universities across the globe, identifying them based on some nebulous metric which, like so many other things, he was at a loss to explain.
Case in point, his new expert in communications.
Ilse had expected that to be a technical speciality, but again other people's words failed her. Allan McInnis was an expert at talking to people. At first Ilse couldn't understand why that skillset was of any use to the Foundation. She pictured a gin and tonic professor in a tweed suit, expounding on the contents of some Who's Who book of blue-bloods and their tangled family trees.
He was quite different in person — though he was, as Vivian had not been, quite English — but still the choice confounded her. Perhaps even as much as she took vague offense.
McInnis put his hand on the glass like he'd done it a thousand times. He was dressed simply, and there was nothing remotely resembling guile on his face. Nothing to suggest this was anything like a strange sort of meeting. "Dr. Reynders," he said. "It's an honour."
She smiled at him, because why not. "Likewise."
He chuckled. Not many people could chuckle honestly, but he managed it. "That's kind of you to say, but I know there's little about me worth writing home over."
Vivian, who had lingered just out of frame during this introduction, made his appearance with a hearty slap on the other man's back. McInnis didn't so much as flinch. "Allan's here to keep us humble," he explained. "Make sure we don't get too big for our boots."
Oh, she realized. He's here because of Falkirk.
In the years since Wynn had gone to ground, his lab assistant had made a name for himself as the facility's bitterest pill. His nominal title was All-Sections Chief, Vivian's deputy, but in actuality he was a spy for Overwatch Command, if not the Overseer Council itself. He was biding his time, and hiding it poorly. Waiting for a slip-up. Waiting for his chance to strike. He'd never liked either of the founding Directors, for reasons she still only dimly understood. But, then, she'd chosen not to examine them too closely, hadn't she?
She wondered if Vivian had lied to him as many times as he'd lied to her, by omission.
When the introductions were concluded, Vivian sent his new prodigy on his way. He was barely out of earshot when Ilse said: "I get it."
"Oh?" As always, the Director gave her his undivided attention.
"He's your public relations man. He's going to help you drive circles around old spider-hands." Falkirk's hands did look like spiders. He was almost as old as she was, but unlike her, he looked it.
Vivian looked offended. "He's a genius, in his way. He's not some tool to be used. Ilse, you know I don't do that with my people."
The hurt seemed genuine. She felt instantly contrite. "I know. You know I know. But still, I mean…" She sighed. Might as well get it out in the open. "He's just another excited young man. They all get old eventually."
Vivian smirked. "Not all of them, mijn vriend."
She blushed. His pronunciation had improved over the years, but she'd never had the heart to tell him the additional baggage his choice of term carried. "Still. Time was, I thought I was unique. Not just the first."
He looked at her with astonished eyes. "Ilse, my dearest," he said, and again she wondered if he could hear himself, "you were the template."
1989
12 October
Exploring the chronological and counterchronological nature of reflections in the anachronic globule had required a crash course in high level photonics. This led naturally to new possibilities requiring a grounding in atomic physics, which of course opened up into particle physics and molecular physics. Combining her theoretical and practical experiments brought her into the realm of chemical physics, which led to a peculiar rabbit hole of physical chemistry, inorganic chemistry, organic chemistry, and finally medicinal chemistry as her focus shifted from the globule to the subject of its strange attraction, her own self.
She was in the midst of preliminary reading for a degree in polymer chemistry when she got the news, via Vivian, that Jackson had died of brain cancer.
"So young." She shook her head. "What a waste."
"It will be hard on his grandchildren," Vivian murmured diplomatically.
Ilse blinked.
Jackson had been maybe thirty when they made him her assistant. He must have been in his mid-eighties by now. She hadn't even seen him for at least a decade.
She had been imprisoned for over forty years, and what did she have to show for it? Two rows of framed paper she couldn't touch.
Lacking any other obvious course of action, she resumed her trek towards the third.
1991
11 November
McInnis, as it happened, was an excellent communicator.
He'd risen through the ranks very quickly, and Vivian soon had him slated for a Section Chairmanship of some sort. The Director ran all such appointments past her first, no matter how often she told him that Falkirk would see him shipped to Siberia for doing so. She wondered if McInnis knew, or even cared. If he had the slightest scrap of ambition, she couldn't discern its influence on his words or actions.
For instance, his fascination with dead-end subjects.
He came to visit her at least a few times every week.
"You've picked up some of his mannerisms, you know," she told him one evening. They were discussing the advent of Tim Berners-Lee's new computer program, and what it would mean to the dissemination of information and human socialization. She had great hopes for the former, and he was a champion of the latter.
"What do you mean?"
"You tip your bangs up when you're not sure what to say," she grinned. "The same as Viv does with his hat."
"Really?" McInnis looked thoughtful. "I've never seen him do that."
"Well, he only does it outside," she said, and then realized how old this memory had to be. She swallowed, hard. "He's too polite to wear his hat indoors."
"How old is that hat?" One of McInnis' many talents was knowing precisely when to change the subject.
"Oh, I don't know. He had it when I first met him. It's the same hat." She smirked. "I'll save you the embarrassment of deciding whether you can say this: yes, that makes it a very, very old hat."
"Older than I am," he agreed. "Twice as old."
She whistled. It wasn't that the words didn't hurt. It was that something else was keeping the hurt away from her attention, at the moment. He really, really did remind her of Vivian. Not the elder statesman he had become, but the determined and empathetic visitor of one of the worst nights of her life.
"And in such good condition, too," he remarked.
She stopped pretending. Her biology might have been frozen, but her mind had never been. Nor her heart. "Not nearly as good as yours," she said, and she flashed him what she hoped was a winning smile. Gulliver — where was he now? probably long dead — would have been stunned.
Allan pursed his lips, and chose his next words very carefully.
Later, alone, cursing herself and all her unsatisfiable needs, Ilse re-opened the closed case in the back of her mind pertaining to Vivian Scout and Wynn Rydderech.
McInnis' response had opened her eyes to possibilities she'd never before considered.
In the light of those possibilities…
…well. Hadn't she always known, really?
No.
Not always.
But long enough.
14 November
The invitation surprised Vivian, but she could tell he was pleased as well. They spent the anniversary talking about Wynn, about what he'd meant to them, about what he had done, and left undone, and what they might yet do for him, or at least in his name.
Another tradition to bind up the progress of their lives with a sense of meaning, and of purpose.
"Won't your wife have something to say about that?"
"We don't have much to say to each other at all, these days."
It was proof positive that no matter how far advanced her studies were, some things would be long beyond her grasp.
But not forever.
Given forever, she could come to understand.
1992
8 May
She stared at the projection, unable to understand. Unwilling to understand. "Why?"
Qiang Du shrugged, and looked away. He was one of the least personable people she regularly spoke with. As Chair of Quantum Supermechanics, Du was responsible for allocating resources and personnel to any experiments she wanted to run outside of the incinerator — which was most experiments she wanted to run. He was the kind of scientist who never should have accepted promotion. The kind who hated to answer other people's questions.
Ilse empathized. Every moment she spent pursuing someone else's lead was a waste of energy she could be applying to her life's work. The distinctions Vivian had once made, between what they did and what they allowed the others to do, were harder and harder for her to grasp. There was now only Her Work, and the Busy Work.
"But… why?" She tapped the window, and the projector shut off. Du snatched up the printed letter, and flicked a few switches until the humming stopped. "How could they say no?"
Du bit his tongue.
She felt the bones of her hips through fabric. Her hands had found their positions naturally. "If you've got an opinion—"
"They think you're dangerous."
His tone and volume had no chance of cutting her off. But the contents of his speech left her speechless.
"They think you're trying to cheat in a dangerous game. And I get it. I really do."
"You get what?" she almost snarled. "Them, or me?"
"Both." Du slapped the letter back on the plate, and powered up the projector again. She was too furious to re-read, but the words loomed large over her anyway, and she couldn't avoid seeing some of them. REJECTED. Unwarranted risk. TEMPORAL ANOMALIES DEPARTMENT. "You've got the vision. You see what you want. You know the science. You know where the holes are."
"Right," she snapped. "Just like you, with your fancy computer."
Du's lip curled. His fancy computer, the DUAL Core, was a perennially dead-end project. Nobody but him, and his teenage son, even believed it was possible to build. "Yes. What I'm building is just shy of the complexity of a human brain. The Core will do more than just think, Dr. Reynders. The Core will dream. And you know how dreams have a way of becoming real? That's what they're afraid of. That's why my funding applications keep coming back negative. That's why they audit me every other week. They're afraid. But they're fools to be afraid." He paused. "Of me."
"But not of me?" She turned to look into the tiny, fist-sized ball of barely-gleaming anachronia. It produced nothing like a reflection now. She couldn't even see the red of her hair. "You think my experiments are that dangerous?"
"Yes." She didn't look back at him as he responded. "Not because you're wrong. Not because you don't have the talent. But because what you want to do is not what humanity needs. We need to know more. We need to do more. Your proposal is something lesser."
She wheeled on him. "Lesser? Lesser?! Qiang, QS has laser cages with micron-level accuracy. It would be the work of an afternoon to scan this thing, through the window, and really understand what sort of particles make it tick." She clicked her tongue, rhythmically. "Tick, tick, tick. And if we know how it ticks, we can make it talk. We can converse with the nature of time. If that's not something the Temporal Anomalies Department — whatever the hell that is! — is interested in, then maybe they ought to move over and let someone else lead the way."
"But you aren't a leader," Du reminded her. "Not any more than I am. You're an army of one, and you're fighting a battle that doesn't matter one whit to the rest of us."
She would not tremble. She would not cry.
"In the face of our changing times, our world crying out for a new direction, you propose only a wasteful, potentially calamitous rearguard action." He leaned closer to the glass. "But the way forward, Dr. Reynders, is always forward."
At first she thought it was the tears in her eyes. But the tears, like all change, gradually receded into the past. And she saw that it had been no trick of refraction.
Without so much as a pop or a hiss to mark its passage, the anachronic globule had vanished into stale air.
1995
24 June
Their home was alive with the squalling of infants.
It wasn't a fair assessment. She was sure that Vivian's new archival protégé and his apparent nemesis, the arrogant beanpole who looked like someone had taken Ilse and stretched her to over six feet tall, were good at what they did. Professionally. But what they were excellent at was making noise, and that was how they were introduced to her: voices first, shouting at each other as the Director propelled them to her window like a sheepish wife showing her husband the improvident purchases made.
It seemed he was doing this almost every day.
"The point is," Harold Blank protested from under the lip of a lopsided… well, she supposed she had to call it a haircut, despite her feelings on the matter, "the point is we're trying to make a good impression here!"
"Are we?" Lyle Lillihammer yawned halfway through the sentence, and scratched his armpits with long arms and long fingers like a string bean turned gorilla. "I've mostly been trying to have fun. This is basically frosh week, right?"
Vivian cleared his throat, and gestured at the window. Both of the new hires turned to look at her, and then to stare.
"This," said Vivian, very simply, as though they already knew enough to know why what he said next was important, "is Dr. Reynders."
"I thought she was dead," said Lyle, which rather broke the spell. Harry punched him in the arm, and the taller man looked for a moment like he might pull his… friend? into a chokehold. "What? You said Old Bones here always talked about her like some long-gone sainted sister."
Vivian's expression was a complex mix between aggrieved wince and apologetic smile. "We're keeping them separate," he said, as though that explained everything.
When they were gone, she checked their assignments. Blank in Archives and Revision, of course; essentially the job she'd had when the Simpson Centre was fronting for Project CLIO. Lillihammer in Identity and Technocryptography.
So, computers. She didn't know much about how the Site's infotech Section operated; she knew a lot about the still-nascent internet, had a working model of it mocked up with I&T Deputy Chief Nancy Briggs that was already making local data storage, retrieval and transfer a much more streamlined process, but the minutiae of desktop computing had never been very interesting to her. Computers weren't going to get her out of the incinerator, unless one counted the organic thinking machine inside her own head. On a whim, she glanced over the personnel working under Chief Marroquin. Nobody she recognized, except from the occasional window rotation, but that was to be expected.
She paused.
It's a bad idea.
She did it anyway.
She opened up the A&R filespace, and glanced over the duty roster. Then went over it again, at a scan. Then read it slowly, entry by entry.
Then went into the corner, picked up a cardboard box full of papers, and turned it upside-down. Then another. Then another. And when the floor was a sea of black-speckled white, she crawled under and disappeared.
Everyone she had ever worked with — minus Vivian, and maybe minus Wynn — was dead.
7 July
She'd seen him in the rotation schedule a few times, when looking ahead to decide how presentable she needed to be on any given day. But whenever his day came along, somehow a late substitution had occurred, and another took his place.
It passed for intriguing.
"The one who got away," she gasped. "Repeatedly!" It was almost a shock to see what he looked like. The top of his head was a blown-out white sheen, like a Slavic Yul Brynner.
Wait. Was Yul Brynner—
"He was Russian." Daniil Sokolsky slapped the window, and smeared his hand down with a sound like someone rubbing a balloon. His hands, apparently, were very clean.
She'd worked at the Foundation too long, and read too many Arsène Lupin stories, to be taken aback by a simple mind trick. "I take it people ask you all the time."
"Old people," he shrugged. He scratched the side of his prominent nose. "You're right where I left you, huh?"
She wasn't sure what that meant, but she nodded. "This real estate is going to be worth a mint, some day."
He grinned. Lord, but he has a lot of teeth. "Waterfront, more or less. Lake could be closer, but that's nitpicking."
There was something fascinating about the man's easy manner and casual menace. "What brings you to my dogleg of the woods?"
He shrugged. "I was having a chat with the Dus. You know the Dus?"
It took her a moment to understand what he meant. She'd heard 'the dooze'. "Oh. Yes. Of course."
"Had a few ideas I wanted to bounce off them. Turns out they're both made of plasticine."
She widened her eyes.
"Meaning—"
"Nothing bounces off?" she hazarded. "It just leaves dents."
He laughed. It was still a little frightening, but the mirth seemed unforced. "Exactly! Either that, or it sinks right in, and I get nothing back. You don't seem like the absorptive type."
"Oh," she smiled, "I don't know. If I hear something I can really use, maybe. But I don't tend to pick up useless tangents."
"The Herlock Sholmes type, eh?" he asked, smile now cockeyed, and she decided she actually might begin to like him. "I dig it. Right now my intellectual prospects are either you or Lillihammer, and I don't think I'm ready to have sex with him right now."
She took a step back before she knew what was happening. "Hè?"
"Too far? I go too far sometimes. I just mean, well. You mix certain things together, they're bound to explode." He tapped the glass. "Figure you understand that metaphor."
She shook her head. It was surprising how easily his cheerful profanity had shaken her. Everyone else, she suddenly realized, liked to treat her like a china doll. "I can see why you'd have trouble finding research partners," she told him. "You would seem to have a very unique way of thinking."
"Came up with it myself," he told her with an affected puffing-out of the chest. "Like most things worthwhile. I hear you're a lot the same. Nobody can teach you how to think, am I right?"
And he winked at her, as she suddenly realized just how long he'd managed to put off this meeting of minds.
29 July
It wasn't her birthday, but they were still throwing her a celebration.
It seemed like practically everyone was filtering through her hall in the AAF-A undercroft this week, wanting to chat, hoping for some words of encouragement. Individually, it had never really struck her, but when they were assembled like this it really was astonishing.
She knew so many of them.
Most of the visitors today worked upstairs in F-A, of course. The ones manning the water company front could come and go, but the scientists in the sublevels were trapped. Natives had occupied Camp Ipperwash, and Site-43 was on lockdown to maintain disappearances. The subway came north and went south at regular intervals, but the schedule had been trimmed down significantly to avoid the possibility of detection from above. There was too much scrutiny on their lakefront property right now. Thus, the impromptu viewing party.
Some of them lingered, spoke with the others. Some just passed through to say hello. All of them were looking for a diversion, any diversion. And Vivian had apparently directed them all down here.
"It's not like I don't appreciate it," she said, "but komaan."
He shook his head, and accepted a bottle of water from a passing administrator with a grateful smile. "I don't know what you're talking about."
Ilse gestured at the window. At Janitorial and Maintenance Chief Nascimbeni pretending to check on the seal integrity of the water pipe running beneath her diplomas, but really just staying a little longer in Agent Mukami's welcoming company. At Blank and Lillihammer squabbling on the edge of her cone of vision. At McInnis, pacing back and forth like he had somewhere to be, but if he couldn't be there, he might as well be here. "This little partij." It wasn't quite the right word in Dutch, but she thought the connotations in Dutch were fun anyway.
Vivian looked at the others as though just now registering their presence. "Ilse," he chuckled. "Nobody organized this."
"Then why are they here?" She stabbed a finger at the largely silent vignette spread out before her. At Sokolsky, chatting up an I&T tech named Veiksaar with a salacious smirk. Then Gedeon Van Rompay, the second most unpleasant man she'd ever met, making small talk with an absolute wisp of a woman who looked like an overgrown water vole. Everywhere she pointed, there were conversations going on between people who… "They have nothing in common, Viv," she sighed.
He gave her a look of mixed sympathy and affection. "Ilse, they have you."
1996
8 February
It had long been apparent what would happen if they unsealed the ADDC, and Ilse tried to walk out the door to freedom. The laws governing anachronic material, laws she had laid down over decades of research, were clear. The rubberband effect would take place immediately, and she would shrivel into an ancient husk, and die. What else would occur, she didn't quite know. For practical purposes the question was even less than academic.
Harry had once wheedled her into watching a few adventure films with him, to pass the time. Archivists seemed to have more time these days than she'd ever had, though now, of course, she had more than anyone. She'd relented, even allowed them to temporarily relocate her diplomas, and he projected his movies on the wall. When they got to the one where the Nazi was suddenly aged to death, Ilse exclaimed out loud, pointed, and said "That! That's what it would be like!"
She had been very proud of herself for being surprised, and not bursting into tears.
But the truth was, she'd already seen something like it before. Arrested at the critical moment, just inches from death. In the person of Edwin Falkirk, the mummy that yet moved.
His hateful face was even more hateful today. He was angry, which did awkward things to his too-visible bone structure. "Again," he growled in his guttural brogue, "I object to not just the position you're taking, but where you're taking it." He elbowed the glass with contempt. "Consulting one anomaly on the fate of another. It's inappropriate."
She had always imagined that Falkirk's time at Site-43 would end with Vivian turning him out on his curled ear. Or maybe he'd be fed into one of the AcroAbate plants, quietly, everyone willingly turning a blind eye. Now it was starting to seem like the old fossil would outlast them both.
Vivian was choosing his words so carefully, Falkirk was almost certainly mere inches from disappearance. "I brought you here," he said, "so we can both give testimony. We're the only ones qualified. We knew him before, and we know him now."
"Him, him," Falkirk repeated in a mocking tone. He sounded like the Queen of England. Or Edwin, King of Scots. "5520 isn't a him, Scout. Object in containment. However loosely you've defined that." He threw up his hands in exaggerated disgust. "Honestly, you surprise me. His cognition isn't remotely linked to the present time. This one's papers have proven that ten times over." He barely gestured at Ilse when referencing her. "He's every version of himself, varying day by day. Everything he'll ever know, he knows any given Sunday. You could squeeze him for a millennium's worth of data in a month, and then maybe they'd consider your wasteful proposal."
"That," Vivian said, the air whistling through his teeth as he clamped them close, "is not an option."
"I knew you'd say that," his deputy sneered. "Always of the moment, you and your lot. What feels good over what's right. You could cure a million ills with what that lunatic knows, and then if he's still somehow standing, satisfy your precious conscience with the bullet. But because you won't take that step, won't take the obvious opportunity for the good of us all, you'll end up satisfying nobody."
"You," Ilse found herself saying, "have no conception of what good means. You're the worst person to ever darken these halls."
The old man pulled his tie up so high she thought he might throttle himself, as he condescended to look her in the eye. "I'm the most base individual here, 5616." He said each digit individually, as though spreading out the parts that made up her person on a dissection table for separate consideration. "Base practicality. People like me are why people like you still live. People like you are why your friend down below is left to suffer."
Vivian's lips were sealed tight, and his tongue wormed around behind them as though he was trying to scrub a bad taste from his teeth. "Thank you," he finally rasped, sounding suddenly like the very old man he was, like the fight had finally gone out of him, "Dr. Falkirk. I will see you in Operations Control."
"That's right," the deputy snorted. "As always. I'm the one enacting control. I don't know what you think you're bringing to the table."
He stormed off with more vigour than she would have expected, given his obviously weathered form.
And cloven hooves.
Vivian was staring after him, staring into space. If not for the window, she would have taken his hand. "What are you going to do?"
Her old friend looked down at her, smiled, and seemed to smooth away the press of years with sheer force of will. "Something impractical," he said. "It won't feel good, no matter what that…" He took a deep breath, and she saw it steady his shaking hands. "No matter what he thinks. It won't feel good, and it will be right."
Falkirk had been correct, to a certain degree, about one thing. Wynn Rydderech, if Ilse's limited studies — literary studies, irony of ironies — of his correspondence from the cavern was anything to go by, experienced a panoply of worlds every second of every day, with only the briefest interludes of local clarity. She couldn't begin to imagine how he survived that, but today, she was thankful for it.
She clung to the desperate hope that somewhere in his fractal of being, he inhabited — if only for an instant — a world where Vivian's solution had been allowed to run its course. Where the waters drained down, and the cavern cracked, and his beloved found peace at last.
Peace for both of them.
She wished she could live in that world, too.
Not for the first time, she cursed her limited horizon. It didn't seem too much to ask for some hint, some hope, that the way things were wasn't the way they would remain. Somewhere, she was sure, in that wide spread of possibility, there was solace to be found.
But it would not find her here.
The last few people Vivian brought into the fold — as the Council maintained the polite fiction that he still controlled access to the gates — Ilse simply had no idea what he saw in them.
One was a golden-haired secretary who seemed perpetually on the cusp between frivolity and arrogance.
One was a security agent smaller than Ilse, who seemed to swear every other word and picked fights just for fun.
"Take a guess," was the response he gave when she asked him about it. And he leaned on his cane — he had never needed a cane before, and she despised the thing for what it symbolized — and watched her carefully.
The first was a beautiful island. The second, a bottled tempest.
"We all have our constraints," she told him.
He nodded. "And something to constrain. And when we break free?"
Her eyes filled with tears.
"Anything can happen."
1996
19 March
"I still can't believe he tried it."
Ilse watched as Harry fidgeted, opening and closing the dossier in his lap. "It went on too long," she told him. Her voice was flat. She couldn't help it. "He's a man of principle. Some things…" She stared at the ceiling. "Some things can't be allowed to stand."
"And that fucker stopped him." The venom in his voice was something new. She'd hardly seen anything like real emotion out of the young archivist; mostly he was sardonic, or curmudgeonly.
"Do you know what it was he stopped?"
Harry frowned. "I heard it was a mercy killing. Something in containment that the Overseers want alive."
Ilse nodded. "Don't tell anyone you heard that much. That much is probably enough to get the last month of your memories taken away, if they don't just terminate you."
His eyes widened. "That serious? Jesus Christ."
"That serious. Who told you?"
"Lyle." Harry glanced at the dossier again, still not committed to exposing its contents to the light for good. "He likes a good mystery. He didn't see much, but it's easy to connect the dots. Anything Viv wants and Falkirk doesn't…"
"True."
She watched him wrestle with his emotions for a moment before continuing his rant. "Why do we even have someone like that here? Someone who just… doesn't care."
"Oh, he cares." Ilse smiled grimly. "It's just that to him, caring looks like an iron fist. Why do you think they put him here?"
"To spy on us," he answered immediately.
"Sure. That's definitely part of it. Anything else?"
He blinked, then shrugged. "What do you think?"
"I think Vivian put up with him for a long damn time," she told him. "You ever hear what happened to the Mountie who was going to get Wynn deported?"
It was a risk, even mentioning Wynn in the context of this conversation. But the point was worth making. Harry shook his head.
"SCP-6858. Look it up," she suggested. "But not on an empty stomach."
Harry smirked, though the pain was still evident.
"The point is, if Vivian wanted that man gone for good, I have no doubt he'd be gone. I think he thought there was value to keeping someone like that around. Where everyone could see him."
"What value? What possible value?"
"You can't have a moral compass," she smiled sadly, "when all you can see is north."
He mulled it over for a moment, then answered. "That's just wordplay."
"It is." She gestured at the dossier. "And those are just words. But they still mean something."
He opened the folder fully, and took out the sheaf of paper inside. Everything he needed to know to run Archives and Revision, without the man who had taught him everything he already knew. The words that meant a torch had been passed.
He obviously still didn't believe it, didn't believe he was up to the task, and she respected him for that.
She didn't believe it either.
1996
1 April
She drew the string loose, and let the paper float free of its manilla prison. It hadn't changed since the last time she'd seen it, a generation prior. It might never change.
"And neither will I."
Vivian leaned heavily on his cane, but kept the other hand planted firmly on the glass. "That isn't true. Not many truths still hold, at my age, but that's one of them. Ilse Reynders will find a way out of the incinerator. Practically an axiom."
The paper was slowly rotating, crossing the terminator from night to day. The hallway was well-lit, but she'd shut off the lights within the ADDC. She still didn't know where they were drawing power from; the conduits had been cut out at the same time as the door and filters had sealed. "I always thought we'd figure it out together. You, me, and Wynn."
He laughed. He could still laugh like a young man, though all the years seemed to be rushing to catch up with him now. "No, you didn't. You're smarter than that. I was a damn good chemist in my time, Ilse, but it wasn't a long time, and it was a long, long time ago. And history was never getting you out of there. You know what I think?"
She shook her head.
"I think you've got the future cooped up behind those eyes. I think you're going to bring it out here with you, when you finally cross that threshold."
She reached up to match his fingers on the glass, as they'd always done. It had to be giving his arthritis hell to bend the joints like that. "Just make sure you're still out there when I do. I've got a lot of catching up to do."
He took off his glasses, and looked down at her with bleary eyes — bleary, but still with a hint of that old excitement in them. "But that's what I've been trying to tell you, Ilse. When you're on this side of the glass, it's everyone else who'll be playing catch-up."
2 April
It was the first time she'd met the man who would replace Vivian.
She'd known Allan for years, of course. But he'd never been what he was now: the heir apparent. The next Director of Site-43. She met him now with the understanding that he was that, that Vivian would actually be replaced, and that made all the difference.
Allan McInnis was perhaps half a head under six feet tall, and he carried himself with an ease that suggested this wasn't the sort of thing that bothered him. He dressed well, but simply, and in marked contrast to Vivian's endless layers of coats, jackets, and vests. Today he was essaying a dark purple sweater over a dress shirt with the collar open, as though he had no reason to dress to impress on the day he became the most powerful man in the country.
"On your victory tour?" She knew it was out of line before she said it. She could have simply not said it. But she simply didn't care.
"Hardly a victory," McInnis murmured. Her little jab hadn't landed; she wasn't sure a person existed who could hurt the new Director with mere words. "Vivian gone, the entire operation has suffered a setback. It will take years to find ways to replace all the functions he served here."
"More than years." She looked away from him, though of course she couldn't take her hand off the glass. That damned glass. "You'll never be finished filling the gaps."
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see he was nodding. "I quite agree. Not that you require my agreement. If anyone can speak to the periodicity of this place, it's got to be Dr. Ilse Reynders. Which brings me to a somewhat awkward question I'd like to pose."
She sighed, and looked at him again. God, but she wanted to like him. In spite of what had passed between them before. He had such a likeable face. "I'm not at my best today," she warned him.
He inclined his head in acknowledgement. "None of us are. Which is why some matters need to be settled. Are you aware that Vivian never replaced Dr. Rydderech?"
Ilse frowned. "Replaced how?"
"As Chief of Acroamatic Abatement."
The frown made its way to her brows and forehead. "I thought… are you sure…?"
"The Chief of Applied Occultism has been performing double duty," McInnis explained. Ilse had no idea how she could have missed this fact, working with the AcroAbate people as often as she had. For crying out loud, Izaak had been the Chief of AO at one point. Then again, internal politics were much more suited to McInnis' mien than hers. "It seems clear that the only reason no successor was named for Dr. Rydderech was the matter of credentials."
Ilse threw up her hands in defeat. "What credentials?"
"Whose, actually," McInnis purred. "Yours."
She stared at him.
"Since that matter is long since resolved—"
"Are you asking me to replace Wynn?"
He nodded. "It feels more a formality than anything. In actual fact, you contribute—"
She found herself pointing at him, fingernail rapping the glass as the hand shook. "You need to get one thing straight here, Allan. It's not a formality. Not everything stands on ceremony. Wynn Rydderech was irreplaceable. Nobody else can do the things he did. The things he's still doing. I know you know what I mean."
Again, the placid tilt of the head. It did nothing to reduce her ire.
"Next to him, what he sacrificed, still sacrifices every day? I've done nothing. I'm no substitute for him, and I never will be. Just like you will never…"
The rest of it stopped on the way out, as though it had physically struck the window and would travel no farther. She couldn't say it. She'd said too much.
And judging from the look on his face, before he swept it away with another conciliatory simper, she knew he'd heard every word not spoken.
31 December
She couldn't believe how weak he sounded.
"I can see it, you know," Vivian croaked over the receiver. The setup required to transfer calls through her window was a messy array of wires, suction cups and computer servers. One more degree of removal from the human on the other side.
"See what?" she asked, as if she didn't know.
"That sour look on your face." The old man grunted, and she imagined him shifting in some tremendous leather armchair that dwarfed his withering form. "Tonight is for the dead, and I'm still kicking."
"I'm sorry." She was sorry. She hadn't expected the dismay to be so audible, but then she hadn't expected him to decline so quickly, either. "Are they taking proper care of you?"
Vivian's scoff was somehow wet and hoarse at the same time. "Hells no. They've left me here to rot. Oh, the boys come 'round from time to time," by which he presumably meant McInnis and the chief archivist, Blank, "with their own sad faces and such, but the Foundation's leaving well enough alone now. Probably a betting pool at Overwatch for when I'll finally bite the dust."
"Don't say that," she whispered.
"It's coming, Ilse. I'm one hundred and eleven years old. You and I both know that's pushing it."
"I never did figure out what."
"Hmm?"
"What you were pushing."
"Oh." This time his chuckle sounded a little less phlegmy. "Old Thilo stole a bottle of water from the fountain of youth, and he sent it to me once as a birthday present. Wynn and I polished it off at the waterfront, one fine evening."
She ran a finger around the glass between her and the receiver, and stared into it.
"Would've saved you a few drops," he chortled, "if you'd needed them. But."
"Are you being serious right now?"
"Serious as death." He cleared his throat, away from the phone, and when he came back his voice had some of the old strength backing it. "You can't always play by their rules. Don't even let them decide what game you're playing. Life's too short…" He sighed. "Life's too precious to waste dancing to someone else's tune."
"What if you like the tune?"
"Then just remember, Ilse, every song eventually ends. The record stops spinning. Then it's your choice what to listen to next."
She glanced around the darkened incinerator. She'd long since pushed all the floating fragments out of the way, and they only drifted glacially back to their initial place. She kept one of the tables free of debris with a daily brushing, and the dust mostly stayed where she put it, since it hadn't been deposited by the incinerator exploding. But for the most part, her surroundings had remained alarmingly constant over the decades. "This feels more like a loop," she sighed.
"No," he cautioned her. "Don't ever think that way. Don't let anyone tell you the world is following some cycle, or that what goes around, comes 'round again. That's defeatist. That's as bad as dying. Maybe some things must be, and some must not, but we can't know which. Take every step like you know it's going somewhere."
"Did you give that advice to Lys, too?"
He was silent for a long time. Only the rasping of his unsteady breathing told her he was still there.
"I did," he said finally. "I would have given anything to put her on a different path. But what she did brought you to me, and some day I know you'll make the difference. All the difference. If she could have seen you then, Ilse, as you are now… I don't think she would have hesitated. No matter what she saw at the end of her road."
She wanted to argue. She wanted to cry. She wanted to haul herself up on the windowsill, kick through the glass, and go out there to find him before it was too late.
Instead, all she said was "I love you, Vivian."
This time, there was no hesitation. No coughs, no rasps, no intercession of old age. "I love you too, Ilse."
"Was the work good? Do you think?"
"The work was good," he whispered. "But my God, you were better."
They would speak one more time, Ilse and Vivian, on the day that he died. A conversation meant for their ears only.
But she'd long since resigned herself to the fact that nothing ever quite went to plan.
1997
1 January
By this point they were cycling virtually everyone at the Site into her orbit. Sometimes she resented it, though with so many experts in so many diverse fields at the ever-expanding facility, at least some the conversations proved stimulating or generative.
Today, though, something in the man's bearing… or was it his grooming… or was it his face, or the expression on it? Something told her she was going to add this conversation to her lengthening list of regrets.
"Didn't think I was due for another hour," she offered lightly. "I'm still going over yesterday's… what?"
The man was scowling at her beneath his tidily-trimmed beard and expensive-looking glasses. "I'm not your scheduled babysitter, Dr. Reynders. I'm here to tell you I'm your boss."
She recoiled from the glass. "My what? I don't know who you think you are, mister, or who you think I am," except of course he'd called her by her name, "but my boss is the Site Director, and you look nothing like him."
"I appreciate you saying so," the man smirked, running a hand through his slicked-back hair. "But I'm afraid you're otherwise mistaken. Let me introduce myself."
And that was how she met the new Chief of Applied Occultism, one Dougall Alton Deering.
