Idiosynchrony
1997
2 January
Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
"He's the most interesting person I've met since 1943."
"I'm pleased to hear it." McInnis gave no outward sign of surprise, as that might be taken for impoliteness. She'd already pegged him as unflappable. But there was a query in his voice; she had long since learned how to tone read, given how little else she had to work with behind the glass.
"By which I mean," Ilse continued, "he's a… jackass." She was almost proud how little searching she needed to find a suitably vulgar noun.
"I'm even more pleased to learn those have been in short supply here over the past decades," McInnis smiled.
"At least as relates to me." She felt indignation rising in her chest as she laid out the schema. "Everyone else is some combination of sympathetic, empathetic, or faking one or the other. Poor little Ilse, stuck in the incinerator. Even if they're otherwise reasonable, or useful," and that was a poor choice of words, but it was too late to take it back, "they're always at least a bit solicitous. Not this gentleman. He simply does not care."
"Dr. Deering is a results-focused individual," McInnis murmured. "Indeed, I thought the two of you might find some common ground there."
She blinked. "I just called him a jackass, sir."
"I did not mean to imply a parallel of personalities. Merely that you might find him… functional."
She leaned on the window, not because she had to, but because standing in the same place too long was still boring, no matter whether or not her legs could get tired. If only boredom was more physical than mental… "I don't know about that. We talked for about ten minutes, and I came away with the impression that he's the kind of man who's only useful to himself."
"Objectively untrue." McInnis made a slight gesture to call her attention to a folder he was carrying in his other hand; she could see it was Deering's personnel file. He didn't actually open it, because of course he had memorized its contents. "Our new Chief of Applied Occultism, and Acroamatic Abatement by proxy, comes very highly recommended. One of those recommendations is from no less a personage than a member of the Overseer Council."
"Some of the worst people ever to work here came Overseer-recommended," she reminded him. "And wasn't one of the Overseers actually—"
McInnis raised a hand. "That was never proven."
She shrugged. "Point is, he's got lots of people vouching for him. Well, hooray. I already knew he could gladhand. What I don't know is that he's got the scientific chops to manage two different Sections, particularly when one of them is the most important at the Site."
"I offered that position to you," he reminded her softly. "You didn't seem so concerned about how it might be filled at the time."
"That was before I met your next choice," she snapped. "For God's sake, Allan, what do you know about this guy that I can't see?"
For a moment, he hesitated. She hadn't spoken to him often lately, but he'd never seemed like the sort plagued by indecision. "It is worth remembering that there is almost always information to which I am privy, but not permitted to disclose."
Which was another way of saying Dougall Deering had hidden depths.
For the first time, Ilse felt that Allan McInnis might have told her a lie.
3 January
I forgot that depth is also something you can sink to.
"The hierarchy is a mess," Deering was saying. "It's taken me a full day just to figure out who reports to who reports to me, what's my purview and what isn't, and how my responsibilities overlap between Sections. It's a nightmare."
"Mm hmm." Ilse did not look up from the sheet she was scribbling on. She didn't use the window whenever Deering was there, because she didn't want him seeing what she was working on. If he tried to help, she thought she just might have to find a way to murder him. Probably breaking the glass would do it. In case of asshole…
She flushed. She didn't typically use that sort of language even in the privacy of her own head. And when she did, it was typically in Dutch.
"And as for the subject matter…" He sighed, and then paused, as if waiting for her commiserate. Deep in formulae, she cheerfully let the moment pass. "I was assured that my expertise in practical thaumaturgy would be easily translated to the field of AcroAbate, but I honestly don't feel like I've been set up to succeed."
"Oh no." She frowned at her notepad, where an unflattering caricature of someone with a balloon-shaped head and a silly beard had somehow sprouted in amidst the field of numbers.
"By which I mean," he continued with a frown of his own, as though she really should have asked, "that they seem to require far more direction than I'm… comfortable providing. They ought to know their jobs already. They've been working without a Chief—"
She dropped the notebook, which drifted just beneath the lip of the sill and then hovered in place, and tapped the glass with the pencil's tip. He stopped talking, and stared at her. "Are you asking me to do your job for you?"
She'd only ever seen slow blinks like that on an animal. "What?"
"Are you telling me you're not up to the job you signed up for, and you'd like for me to replace you at it?"
He scoffed, cheeks rising red. "Of course not."
"Then what? You want me to—"
"You know what?" He was bristling enough to grow a second beard. "Forget I said anything. I thought we might have common ground in the Byzantine structure of this ridiculous system, or else the travails of collaborating with… colleagues of a more limited mindset." She wasn't sure what was more breathtaking, the implication that he was a mental giant among Lilliputians or his use of travails in informal speech. "I can see I was mistaken. I'll leave you to…" He glanced down, but couldn't quite make out the contents of her notepad at its angle and illumination level. "I'll leave you," he finished, and turned on his heel.
She knew he'd be back.
So she plucked up the notepad, turned the page, and started up a new project task list.
She labelled it "Operation: Idiot," then felt something like a pang in her stomach, and sent the pad wheeling away deep into her dim and dusty demesne.
10 January
It wasn't as though she hadn't made any progress.
She knew things about the nature of time that even the creator of the universe, whose work showed a significant imbalance between imagination and finesse, could not have suspected when they set the stars to wheeling. She knew more about physics than the entire collective set of physicists working outside the Veil. Before it had finally disappeared, she had plumbed the nature of the anachronic globule to a sufficient extent to say several things about it that cast devastating doubt on general relativity. There was a storehouse in Quantum Supermechanics absolutely littered with prototype machines she had designed to potentially enable an egress, which in their failures had produced such a voluminous literature of data that actual volumes had since been published on them.
The simple fact was that everything known about her situation had been first determined by her, alone.
When Wynn had gone underground, Vivian had opened his entire archive to her. Everything he'd written on the subject of her incarceration. All his rough notes, his speculations, the results of his own experiments. None of it amounted to more than she'd been able to surmise herself; every point of interest contained in that archive of panic had been spoken to her face in one or another of their weekly deliberations at the window. Scout had done even worse, because of course as he'd said, his fields of interest barely dovetailed at all with her ongoing crisis. A few researchers here and there — notably Qiang Du at QS and the Trevor Bremmels, senior and junior — had made valuable suggestions with regards to the physical mechanics of temporal alteration, but she knew in her heart that this wasn't an engineering problem.
She was going to have to alter the rules by which the universe operated in such a way that her existing outside of confinement was no longer illicit. Nobody was helping her with that. Many were intentionally obstructing her. She had long since internalized Vivian's faith that she would be the one to solve this problem, and had amended that optimistic forecast with a cynical codicil:
No-one else is going to help me.
Meeting Dougall Deering hadn't changed that obvious fact, though it had introduced an interesting nuance.
He wasn't intelligent enough to workshop the project with.
But he was stupid enough to make mistakes, vain enough to be bribed, and very likely stupid enough again to be effectively blackmailed. McInnis had called him a potentially profitable tool, and she was starting to see how that might in fact be the case.
As had several times recently been pointed out to her, she now had the credentials of a senior researcher. Very, very senior.
Perhaps it was time she put them to use, and then see what use might be made of her so-called superior.
13 January
Ilse stared into the space no longer occupied by her shimmering, mocking companion of one half-century, and mused on the theme of absence.
McInnis had obliged her with the Level 4 version of Deering's file — she recognized it as the same one he'd been carrying when she'd shotgunned her questions at him, and wondered if he'd been dangling that in her face for a reason — and she immediately saw it for what it was: incomplete. Not unfinished, but finished and then shot through with holes. Intentionally. They weren't redactions or expungements, but plain and simple omissions with no signposts to indicate that a conscious decision had been made to neither show nor tell. The man's childhood was an open book: he'd grown up middle class, received a top education (she had a sneaking suspicion that some sort of grant to his almae matres had been involved, though that was the least intriguing of the blank spaces), distanced himself from his family for unclear reasons, engaged in a frivolous tour of Europe… and then arrived at the SCP Foundation, apparently cherrypicked for his extensive expertise in the realm of thaumaturgy. The facts of how and where he'd acquired that knowledge lay behind a hollow at the core of his file. Either nobody knew, or it was some big secret only Overseers and their chosen ilk were cleared to see.
Assuming it wasn't classified even higher, or simply unknown to all.
She examined the possibilities. One lovely aspect of her time in the ADDC was that if she moved to either side of the window, there was no means known to science of determining what precisely she was doing. For a few years in the 1960s she'd filled both walls with caricatures of her coworkers, a practice she'd discontinued when the likenesses ceased to be comic and became merely cruel. A few times she'd written something like a novel, only to overwrite the pages with more prosaic characters of a more scientific bent. Then there was the year when she'd simply written "I HATE YOU" once per day until it filled an entire folio, and spent her supposed research time staring at that truth and taking it on-board.
Today she cleared the hidden spaces of their accumulated detritus, and dedicated them to Operation: Idiot. What were the major possibilities?
1. Dougall Deering is not capable of fulfilling his duties, and acquired his post via nepotism;
2. Dougall Deering is not capable of fulfilling his duties, and acquired them via deception;
3. Dougall Deering is not capable of fulfilling his duties, and acquired them via treachery;
4. Dougall Deering is capable of fulfilling his duties, and is attempting to mislead me.
She crossed out the fourth one as soon as she finished writing it. There was simply no way.
She sketched out possible pasts allowing for each of the other three avenues, considered them, then worked on iteration. Before long she had a complex forest of decision trees potentially accounting for the presence at this time and place of a man who had no business possessing anything like the power under his command.
A few hours of feverish cacography later, she realized she'd long since sailed past the point of the exercise.
It didn't matter, for her purposes, why Dougall was filling shoes that would be forever too big for his feet of clay.
It only mattered that she knew it, and so did he.
21 January
He made a habit of sidling up to her window every few days, the intervals studiously random, a look of affected surprise on his face each time, as though he had only just remembered that this particular goldfish could be found in this particular tank at all hours, every day. They would share brief pleasantries, of the stiff and sterile type you traded with people you'd screamed at in recent memory, and he would drop a few hints as to what he was working on, and she would keep her own work to herself, and they would both part none the wiser.
Except in one regard, on one side of the glass only. Every day she knew with greater certainty that she had been correct, and that her scheme could work.
She didn't choose a specific hour to spring it on him, just allowed it to occur naturally. Unlike him, she was a master at feigned spontaneity; it was one of the many social tricks she'd been able to practice in the long hours between visitations, the better to fob off the visitors and get back to her more productive alone-time. He was droning about the lack of good research assistants, how everyone in his Section and the one he'd stolen from under her seemed to have their own agendas and projects and no energy to spare on helping him out with his, and she casually responded: "So what you're saying is, you need some help with the cover-up."
He froze.
"Well?"
She'd seen this time and time again over the years. Usually when someone was trying to articulate something so upsetting, or so inappropriate, that the words refused to come out. Dougall looked to be in real danger of eating his own beard.
"I'll keep going," she offered. "Clarify for you, so you don't have to offer anything up yourself. You're in over your head, and not just a little. You have nearly no idea how to carry out the duties you've been assigned. You're not a leader, you're not a collaborator, and you're definitely not that much of a scientist."
His pride had taken one too many blows to remain submerged. She could see it before he spoke in the way he seemed to gain an inch of height; she kept her eyes on his face, so that he wouldn't see her staring at his affronted tippy-toes. "My qualifications are on record." He was snarling, but there was a note of petulance in it. "I had to pass examinations."
"There's more than one way to reach a single result," she reminded him. "That's one of the first principles of experimentation. However you managed to match up with our criteria, I'm guessing it wasn't one-to-one with what the Foundation expected. You're a thaumaturge, right?" Applied Occultism always had a mage in the centre seat, so she didn't bother waiting for confirmation. "That seems like the kind of speciality that's ripe for all sorts of abuse. Maybe you bewitched your examiners, maybe you changed the results, maybe you altered the test, I don't know. Maybe what you're an expert in is sideways of what's on your diploma — oh. That's it, isn't it?" His eyes had gone blank, just for a moment, as though he was a cat and she'd just tapped him on the nose. "Honestly, I don't need the details. Just knowing what I know is enough."
"Enough for what?" He managed to form the words without opening his mouth.
"For us to move forward."
His brows nearly met, so great was his consternation. He waited for her to explain. She waited for him to figure it out himself.
She was relieved when he didn't. "You really are just a pair of hands, aren't you?"
He was now both devastated and confused. She felt a slight pain on the left side of her rib cage when she noticed that his eyes were now brimming with tears. She didn't ignore it, but she didn't let it stop her from finishing the coup. "Well, that's fine. My hands have decades' more practice, but they're stuck in here with me. I could use another set, on the outside."
And with that, suddenly, he relaxed. The moment she'd been most concerned about — when he was almost certainly considering what would happen if he simply smashed the window — had passed. He knew she could be reasoned with, and that was probably better than being caught on camera murdering the Foundation's most valued research asset.
She had, of course, been counting on his inadequacies extending to the manipulation of security footage. A few gentle feelers about his technical aptitude in their earlier conversations had put that particular fear to rest already. They were both lucky that out of respect for her privacy, as a credentialed researcher, those cameras did not record sound.
"What did you have in mind?" he asked, resentment defining the sharp edges of every syllable.
"Something I've kept on the backburner for a long time." She smiled, and was surprised to find that not all of the warmth was forced. I've waited too long for this. Too long… "If we pull this off, you're going to have something to be genuinely proud of. Maybe even something that elevates you farther above your level of competency."
The implied insult did nothing to slow the sudden rise of his chest.
Sudden, but oh-so-predictable. If the target of their collaboration was even half as malleable as her arrogant new partner, they had nothing to fear.
She outlined the project in detail, reciting half of it from notes pressed against the blind spots beside the window, and the rest from memory. She ran him through the timeline, including the initial enthusiasm of Overwatch and the crushing, inexplicable denial from the TAD. His eyes widened several times at the scope of what she was suggesting, and before long he was fidgeting so badly that even an amateur at reading body language would have been able to tell from the camera footage that he was experiencing a most uncomfortable conversation. Luckily, this was perfectly in keeping with their recorded interactions so far.
When she was finished, she waited for him to comment. The first thing that came to mind would likely colour how she approached working with him going forward.
Except the first thing that came to mind visibly did not come out of his mouth. He swallowed it whole. And then he said: "I don't know anything about any of that."
She nodded, keeping her chin up to artificially raise her flagging spirits. She hadn't expected any better. But she had hoped. "That's fine. What you need to know, I can teach you. Or else tell you where to look. You can start by checking out all of my monographs. That will bring you up to the level of, let's say, research assistant."
To her surprise, he still had enough stomach left to sneer at her. "I continue to be your boss," he reminded her.
She shrugged. "I'm not bothered. You'd have to think of something for me to do, to boss me around. Something that isn't an obvious waste of talent. Do you have the requisite knowledge to even do that?"
The sneer turned sour, curdled, and rotted off his face. Beard replaced his visible mouth. He didn't say anything. What could he say? His inability to direct the other researchers was already a fact in evidence. Directing her, at this point, was probably beyond even Wynn Rydderech…
This time the pain in her chest was just shy of anguish. She could see Wynn's wide, red face in the glass just where Dougall was standing, just as she'd seen it hundreds of times. His desperate, helpless expression. The impotent desire to help, and the inability to even conceive of a way to try. She'd conjured up that memory before, and it had always filled her with bitter and sweet: bitter at the memory of her old friend's sad, ongoing fate, and sweet because up until the end, he had placed her rescue at least as high on his list of priorities as the salvation of all mankind from its own anomalous sick.
She reviewed her actions in the past few weeks, the words she was even now speaking, in the shadow of that grimace of agony and love.
For the first time in a long time, Ilse Reynders felt unworthy.
"I'm sorry," she said, before she had a chance to decide that she wasn't.
His eyes widened. "For what?"
"For…" She flipped both hands, and clapped them to her thighs. The universal signal for I don't know, but also Come on. "For what I said. For most of what I've said. To you."
He looked at the ceiling, then looked at the floor.
Then looked at her. "Most of what you've said is true. And I don't want it to be. Were all of your monographs done by the Site press?"
It occurred to her in that moment that perhaps it was possible for a man to be both shallow and possessed of hidden depths.
29 January
He was, she had to admit, a very intelligent sort of idiot.
Ilse had published thirty-nine monographs, not including her various doctoral theses, and one hundred and seventy-eight papers in the years since entering the incinerator for the last time. (Once she got out, she was absolutely never setting foot in there again.) Dougall read them all in a week, and seemed to retain a lot of what he'd read. Enough for her to get on with, at least.
From time to time, he even managed to ask pertinent questions. For example: "How certain are you that the anachronic globule actually entered into your person? It doesn't seem like you experienced much change after that first year unconscious."
"That's true," she agreed. "It's mostly the fact that the globule is gone, and that nothing in this room besides me is still moving. Independently, that is."
"Sure," he nodded, "but it seems like a big leap to assume that you soaked it all up. And non-falsifiable. What, you've become… more immortal? Impossible to measure that."
"The alternative is to suggest that the energy and matter have been lost entirely, self-destructed." She shook her head. "I don't believe it just shrank down to nothing and disappeared. There has to be more to it than that. Sure, I've considered a few more… out there possibilities, but in the end it was never anything I could test."
"Because you couldn't think of a way to test them?" he prodded. "Or because nobody on the outside would help you with it, after the TAD told you off?"
That was the first time she smiled at him.
There weren't many more, at first. And even when the smiles came easier, he didn't become any worse at making her frown. Anyone walking past them on an average day would assume they were both so incensed with each other that their animal brains were triggering threat displays that merely looked like smiles.
On a bad day, she once mused with a shudder, any onlooker would have thought they were married.
At least until Stacey Laiken entered the picture.
Dr. Laiken was a slight, rosy-cheeked blonde with an affect so saccharine it was too much even for Ilse, who had once projected much the same aura of unworldly naïvete. She joined Applied Occultism as a senior researcher, having apparently been high on the totem pole of a facility that had literally sunk out of sight with only one survivor just months before. A speculative chat with Koda Anoki, the Chair of Psychology and Parapsychology, conveyed no sensitive information on the subject to Ilse but certainly confirmed her suspicion that the woman's Pollyanna-like personality had something to do with that classified tragedy.
What defied explanation was what she saw in Dougall Deering.
The first time Ilse saw them together, the chubby-cheeked woman came to collect him from one of their daily meetings. She looked mortified at having to break up the discussion, and stammered out apologies that Ilse felt moved to wave off out of sheer embarrassed sympathy. The second time she delivered him to her, suppressing giggles. Yesterday, she'd seen them holding hands.
Today, though. Today was much more interesting.
It had the quality of absolute data, though she still wasn't sure to which aspect of Operation: Idiot it properly belonged, that the squirrely little thaumaturge came bouncing past the window in obvious search of her beau, glanced around in apparent confusion, shrugged apologetically at Ilse, and then bounded away again in apparent defeat.
Whilst Dougall Deering stood at the window, his back to Ilse, watching her go.
He was smiling when he turned around, until he saw her staring. Then he was ashen-faced, and no amount of directed inquiry could impel him to explain what precisely on Earth had just transpired.
3 March
It had become obvious that Dougall did have at least some of the scientific foundations he'd claimed; he was more like Wettle, an imbecile with some undeniable areas of expertise, than he was like Falkirk, a man all ambition with no real substance. They spent months going over the old data she'd collected on the globule, herself, and the other contents of the ADDC, looking for anything that might have been missed. He had Eileen Veiksaar from Identity and Technocryptography electronically collate the more substantial statistics, and then give the two of them a crash course in computer modelling which set Dougall's head spinning and the wheels in Ilse's turning. He showed a definite aptitude for precision, if not imagination, and it wasn't long before she could trust him to transfer her designs from grease paint on a window to something the Bremmels could fabricate, when they weren't too busy screaming at each other.
"Do you ever feel like too many relationships around here are adversarial?" Dougall asked her one day, as he unfurled the latest blueprint and pressed it to the window for her review. It was the prototype for yet another new kind of microscope, the kind that might be applied to any number of legitimate approaches to her ultimate escape from the ADDC. No-one less canny than her could have guessed its real purpose, and luckily…
"No," she said flatly. When he frowned, she laughed, and then actually felt moved to wink.
He snorted, derisively, but she thought she sensed at least a hint of pleasure in the air. He even looked pained when Laiken arrived a moment later to whisk him away.
She hadn't failed to find him a single time since that first slip.
Ilse thought she had an idea about what had happened there, but it didn't seem like the right time to confront him over it. If he was really capable of what she now suspected, well. That camera might not provide her nearly so much protection as she'd thought.
16 March
They were on the verge of a breakthrough, one way or another.
"It's an echo," he said. He tapped the transparency on the projector. "Nothing more."
"Get your finger off it," she snapped. "You'll smudge it, or get prints. That's fresh off the printer."
"It's a laser printer," he sighed. "Toner dries faster than—"
"NOT ON TRANSPARENCIES!" she shouted, then slapped the nearest piece of floating paper. It sailed to the far end of the window, coming to rest against the sill. As they watched, the little wrinkles she'd left in its surface began to smoothen out. It was some sort of miracle that the pencils and pens didn't reclaim their lead or ink… well. It was the kind of miracle they'd have a paper out on next month, in all probability. They now understood virtually everything inside the ADDC, with only two notable exceptions.
Her, and the vanished globule.
The little burst of physical energy calmed her down. She'd found, over the years, that she only had about as much capacity for exclamation as she'd possessed on the day the incinerator exploded. She'd been a little tired, then, so she was always just a little tired now. She thought that was probably someone's idea of an existential horror.
Someone who wasn't already stuck in a box, arguing with an…
…arguing with a colleague, she grudgingly admitted, if only in her mind.
But as her rancour cooled, she realized Dougall was subject to no such limits. "You know what?" he said, then laughed shortly. "I'll bet you do. I'll bet you think you know what I'm about to say. I'm as predictable as your experiments. You're never surprised by me."
She took a deep breath, and kept enough of it in to reply. "Just say it. Say what you want to say."
"You're not half angry with me. You never were. If we'd met when you were outside the incinerator, you probably wouldn't have even raised your voice at me."
"If we'd met when we were—"
"Sure, sure," he was speaking faster and faster, cutting her off, "I wouldn't have even been born. Very clever. You're so much cleverer than everyone else, aren't you? And that's what's got you so pissed off all the time now."
She frowned. Not all the time, surely. "What? What is?"
"The fact that you're this unimpeachable genius, and yet you walked into that box and it blew up in your face."
Her joints locked.
"You were supposedly the world's number one expert in burning magic paper. I've read your every recorded statement on the matter. You didn't have any idea that something harmful might have been building up in there. You designed it specifically to prevent that from happening. A few years back, you designed the new ADDC so even if it did happen, it wouldn't put anyone in your situation. You know what that tells me?" He actually put both of his hands on his hips, so complete was his new sense of triumph. "It tells me you still have no idea what you did wrong. That's the bug that crawled up your nose, and you can never sneeze it out. That's what you're taking out on me."
She sat down.
There was no chair at the window. She simply sat down on the floor. From where he was standing, he couldn't see her. If he stepped forward, and looked down, he'd just be able to make out her timeless orange mop beneath the sill.
"Ilse?"
"Obviously that's correct," she said. And she leaned back, feeling her skull impact gently on the tile wall.
Then not so gently.
Then not gently at all.
"Ilse?" he repeated, more urgently. She realized she'd let go of the pencil, growled inarticulately, and snatched it from where it was still hanging in the air. "I said you're right, you s— you son of a bitch."
He didn't answer, and that was fine. She hammered the wall again, felt the welcome rush of pain, and that produced a response. "What are you doing in there?"
"Testing materials strength and density."
"Are you banging your head on the wall?"
She laughed. It sounded more than a little manic. "For over fifty years, Dougall. Since before you were even born."
A curious sort of sliding, scraping sound came through the glass, and she realized he must have slumped down on his side of the wall as well. "I know the feeling."
She frowned, though there was no-one there to see it. "Meaning?"
"I've spent most of my life… wasted it, really… trying to figure out what went wrong. And how I can fix it."
She almost turned her head in his direction, though of course she couldn't see through the wall either. "Fix what?"
"You had a sister, right?"
After twenty years, words to that effect could still bring her just to the edge of tears. After twenty-one, the hurt began the slow process of becoming more academic. Now it merely occluded her vocal cords a little. "Yes."
"Well, I have a brother."
Ilse was aware of this. Dougall, however, was not aware she had read his file. This was probably not the time to inform him.
"He's useless."
She stifled a laugh, then realized she could simply have released the pencil. "Yes?"
"Yes. He won't do anything. Anything. He just takes it as it comes. Expects the world to just, I don't know. Give him whatever he needs. He's never wanted to get out there and achieve something."
"My sister was a genius." Ilse was only half-listening.
"Of course she was. How could she not be?" If he sounded resentful, well. She couldn't really fault him for it. "But Phil? His head's practically empty, and there's no reason for it. No good excuse. He could be where I am today, if he tried."
She thought the spectre of Wynn Rydderech might look on her with more sympathy to see how she let that statement slide without comment.
"I always thought it was his fault. Or our parents'. But you know what?"
"It was yours?" she suggested.
He chuckled dryly. "You had that ready to go. But yeah. Yeah, I think maybe it was. Maybe still is. I'm his big brother, you know? It's my job to show him the way."
"Lys showed me the way," Ilse agreed. She thought about giving the tiles another cranial strike, then thought better of it. Wynn's broad smile had been replaced in her mind's eye with her sister's knowing grin. "I have it on good authority that it might pay off some day. But from where I'm sitting… no." She pulled her knees up against her chest, still clutching the pencil. "No, that's not fair. She didn't ask me to come here. I think maybe if she'd known, she would have asked me not to. I made this decision myself. I put myself in this box, and let it snap shut behind me. Just like you said."
He sighed. "I was angry."
"You were angry, but you weren't wrong."
"I was at least a little bit wrong. It was the god damn 1940s, Ilse. How could you have known?"
"We still don't know now. In the 1990s. I'm starting to wonder if we ever will."
He sat with that for a moment. It occurred to her that right now, they were in closer proximity than they'd ever been before. Closer, in fact, than she'd been to anyone.
She waited for him to ruin the moment.
Instead, he said: "Not with that attitude."
And it made her angry enough to stand up.
When he stood up, too, she silently thanked him for saying it.
He seemed to silently understand.
They didn't get anything else done that day. They parted company with a nod, and something like a smile.
17 March
The next day, she was waiting for him.
Actually waiting, specifically for him. Nothing on the window, no papers in hand, nothing on the projector, nothing in the reader. She made eye contact as soon as he strolled into view, and he actually stopped walking well before the window when he noticed.
"That's creepy," he said. She couldn't hear it, but she could read lips.
She nodded, by way of ignoring it. "Brass tacks."
He shrugged, and stepped up to the sill. Placed his hand on the glass. "Let's hear it."
"You're not happy." She'd thought of making it a question, of adding qualifiers, of otherwise softening the blow, but she didn't. Direct, and to the point. That was the best way to deal with someone like Dougall. Don't think about what kind of person that is right now.
His nose wrinkled, just for a moment, but he nodded. "I think that was the takeaway. Sure." He adjusted his glasses, as though he needed the clearest possible eyesight to make his next determination. "You're pretty much miserable, I would say?"
She nodded back at him, but left her glasses where they were. They'd find a way to reorient themselves if she adjusted them anyway. "Variously miserable since the day I moved in. The neighbours are quiet, and the rent is cheap, but by God is this a barren neighbourhood."
He acknowledged the levity with the slightest of smirks. "And that's not even getting into your co-workers."
"I've had better," she admitted. He didn't react. "But also worse. One of these days I'll tell you the story of Fred Banting and the Big Orange Worm."
He rolled his eyes. "Already heard it. I've been over Rydderech's bibliography, too. Where are we going with this?"
She gestured at an empty point in space just behind her, and to the left. "There."
He glanced at the nothing. "There?"
"There." She nodded in affirmation, and punctuation.
"So, we're going nowhere."
She rolled her eyes. "Do you know what that globule represented, Dougall? What it really was?"
"Not really. And neither do you."
"I'm not talking chemical composition. I'm not talking scientific specifics. That silver something was time, Dougall. Raw, angry, roiling time. A little ball of change. Do you see what I'm driving at?"
He narrowed his eyes. "I think we both know that the answer to that is usually—"
She raised a hand to stop him, then started rapping the pencil's eraser on the glass. Tick tick tick tick. She didn't stop. "Do you think you could have fixed him?"
"Fixed him?"
"Your brother. Do you think you could have fixed him, if you'd had another chance?"
He was staring at the eraser like she was hypnotizing him with a watch. "I've thought about it every day," he said. "I've dreamed about it."
"If you knew then what you know now—"
"Yes." He tore his eyes from the ticking pencil, and stared straight into hers. "Yes."
"I would never have turned that dial," she told him. She'd never told anyone precisely this. Of course they'd known, but she'd never said it out loud before. It had hardly ever seemed to need saying, but these were special circumstances. "If I could tell myself to stop, make myself stop—"
"No wonder the TAD came down on you," he said. The words carried condemnation that the tone did not translate. "If you're suggesting what I think you are."
"We can do it safely," she said. "We can do it right. We won't do anything if we aren't sure, absolutely, completely certain, that it's not going to blow up in our faces. We're not going to be selfish, or stupid, or careless. We're better than that."
"You're including me in this," he reminded her.
"Yes." She nodded. "We're in it together. You and me. I want you to promise."
"Promise," he repeated.
"Promise we're going to do this."
He sighed, and she knew that no matter what came next, he was going to agree. She could hear it in the weakness of his wind. "What are we going to do, Ilse?"
She stopped tapping the eraser, and grinned at him in the sudden silence.
When the moment had passed, she clarified that she simply meant changing the past.
Actually stopping time would be putting the rest of humanity into the incinerator, and she wasn't that desperate for company yet.
To his credit, he pointed out that she had once written a paper declaring that the very thing she wanted to attempt was completely impossible.
To her credit, she didn't lecture him on how the scientific process worked. "Maybe I was wrong," she said instead.
It felt strange to speak it aloud.
She'd known researchers who lost weeks, months, even years of work when their experiments went wrong. They always took it hard, but they always bounced back. If you could get it almost right once, then you could get it right the next time, or the next.
She'd never known anyone who'd lost a generation to false leads.
Just goes to show what a pioneering scientist I am, she thought, and ignored the growing chorus in the back of her head warning that some paths were closed off for a reason.
23 March
She didn't have access to every file.
The various Sections were allowed to keep some of their secrets private, at least from their colleagues. So Ilse didn't know, for example, that Psychology and Parapsychology liked to run all their new hires through a rotation of visiting the woman in the incinerator and taking her mental measure. It was simply a theory, albeit one with far too much evidence to discount.
Nhung Ngo was a friendly-faced woman half a head shorter than Ilse. The preliminaries had already been concluded, so the other woman was presently poking around at the various bits and bobs on the cart in front of the window — non-functional mockups she'd had Dougall assemble to test a few theories — clutching her clipboard to her chest with her free arm, and making little sounds of awe. If it was performative, it was a good performance. "You two have certainly been busy!"
There was nothing in that phrasing to take issue with, but something in Ilse's pride still felt a sting. "Idle hands," she grunted.
"Is it good to be working on practical things again?" Ngo smiled at her. She smiled at everything she was facing. "You haven't had side projects like this in a long time, have you?"
"Is that in my file?"
"Yes."
Ilse paused. "Why did you call them that? 'Side projects'?"
Ngo shrugged. "Well, obviously there's the primary one." Ilse gave her nothing, so she continued. "Getting out of there?"
"That's not what they pay me for," Ilse said more harshly than she'd intended. She paused again. "They are still paying me, right?"
"That's a question for HR." Ngo made the response, entirely fair though it was, sound impish. "But I'd be surprised if they weren't! You work day and night. The overtime alone should have made you a millionaire by now."
"Terrific. I can go on a shopping spree." She scowled at the beaming psychologist. "You know getting out of here isn't my job. This is technically my work space. Probably you know I do my job better because I'm stuck here."
Ngo made a face saying something like Maybe, maybe not. "You're the most prolific scientist in the history of the Foundation," she allowed. "But you do seem to have a preference for subjects relating to your own confinement."
Ilse felt a fever rising. "So you think I'm just using my position for personal gain?"
Ngo shook her head. "No. I know who trained you. I know what values they instilled. I do think it comforts you, though. Working on temporal anomalies, or particle physics, or the like."
"So… what?" Ilse spread her hands, the effect slightly undercut by the stringed pencil in one hand. "This is all just a coping mechanism?"
The psychiatrist's eyes twinkled. "Everything is a coping mechanism," she said. "That's how life works. Doesn't make it not worth doing."
1 April
Desolation.
8 April
Blank was becoming one of the regulars to her window. She didn't mind. It was easier to accept him for what he'd become; Vivian had long since ceased to be defined by the role he'd had when she met him, Director of Project CLIO, historian and archivist. It was merely a facet of his person, and it felt fair that it would take an entire other person to fill out that role on its own.
Today didn't have the look of a social call, however. Blank was dressed as slovenly as ever, but there was a sort of stilted formality in his greeting, an uncertainty in his eyes that told her he had something of import to impart.
"What's wrong?" she asked, when it became apparent he couldn't overcome his block without prompting.
He shuddered, as though she'd shook him, then took a deep breath and smiled. "I went to Viv's funeral."
The lights seemed a little dimmer. "Of course you did." She met his gaze, and waited to see which of them was meant to speak next. Eventually, she took the initiative. "My dress was at the cleaner's."
"That's not—"
"I know." She smiled with a warmth she didn't feel, to reassure him. "I know. What's wrong, Harry?"
"I met someone there." He said this like it was the prelude to a second funeral. "I think you ought to know about it."
For a moment, she thought he was going to tell her that Falkirk had delivered the eulogy, or maybe Wynn had burst out of the ground to join his lover in the coffin. Then she realized he wasn't going to tell her anything if she didn't pry it out of him. "Who?"
He looked away. "Thilo Zwist."
There was a time when just the name might have taken the wind out of her. That time was long past. "Really."
He met her gaze. "Really."
"What did he…" And then nothing else came out. Something was stuck in her throat.
"Dr. Reynders?" He stood up, a look of wild concern spreading across his face.
She raised her free hand to gesture that all was well, cleared her throat and tried again. "Did you already know about him? What he did?"
"Only what was in the files." Blank sat down again, slowly, like he was afraid he might need to reverse the motion in a hurry.
"Which files?"
"All of them?" he shrugged.
He was the only person who could make this claim and have it probably turn out to be true. "You were Vivian's apprentice," she stated.
"I still am," he chuckled dryly. "You should see all the papers he left behind." Now it was his turn to pause. "I can show you, if you like. He said you might like to see. Said it might… help."
"He was wrong."
"Oh."
She'd known that Blank and McInnis had visited with Vivian at his retirement home in Grand Bend a few times before the end. Picked up a few fragments from both of them about what had been discussed, though nothing important. Nothing she couldn't bear to hear. That might be about to change. It might be about time. "It won't help," she clarified. "But maybe I would like to see."
"Oh." He brightened. "Okay. Well, sure."
"But did he also say you could tell me about Zwist?"
Some of the usual playfulness crept into his expression. "No. He's supposed to be off-limits."
"Who said? Vivian, the Council, the…" She wasn't sure Blank was even cleared to know about the TAD. Then again, if the historians weren't…
"Viv," he answered before she could finish. "He said… he said you had other things to worry about. And you wouldn't want to know."
She nodded. "I see." She took a moment to gauge how this information felt. "And what gives you the right to second-guess him?"
He did stand up again, and collected himself as well as he could in a rumpled hoodie and jeans. "I'm sorry. I… yeah." He turned to walk away.
She thumped the glass. "Hey. Come back." Since the speakers were still transmitting, he heard her. He turned back around, still looking contrite. "I didn't say you shouldn't tell me. You can trust my judgement, too. Especially where I'm concerned."
Unexpectedly, he was smiling again. "He said you'd say that."
She found herself smiling back, even as the dread overtook her. "Of course he did."
It was a lot to take in. A lot to think about. Perhaps it would take years, or a lifetime. She cried, a little. To his credit, he didn't pause when she cried. He'd probably realized it wouldn't end until the story did.
When it was done, she nodded. Several times. It made sense. The pieces fit. He looked like the telling had taken almost as much out of him as the listening had her, and she decided to lighten the mood. "I guess that's one less person I need to shoot, when I get out of here."
He laughed, tears in his eyes. "I'll bet you've got a long, long list."
"What else did you guys talk about?"
Blank's expression was wistful. "He gave us advice," he said. "Because of course he did. And…" The tears were near to brimming. "He asked us to save Dr. Rydderech."
Ilse felt her throat closing up again. "What did you tell him?"
"I told him we would," said Blank, and his jaw jutted out just a little farther as he did.
"Good." She nodded. "Good. Did… did he ask you to do anything else?"
Blank's eyes were wide. "No."
She squinted at him. It hurt a little less that way. "Oh. Okay."
This time, he didn't smile. But she could hear it in his voice, choked up as it was. "He knew you wouldn't need it."
1997
31 December
She didn't look at the window all day.
It didn't matter.
In the incinerator, time had no meaning. In the incinerator, all days were the same.
In every way that counted, now was no different from then.
In every way that counted, death was just a data point.
1998
1 January
Eileen Veiksaar didn't visit very often.
The I&T techs had busy schedules, and programmers tended to cluster together in cabals for socializing. Besides that, this one was spending most of her spare time with Blank. Ilse had a vague sense that there was some tension there, but she wasn't sure what it was, and she didn't really care.
Veiksaar definitely looked tense right now. Perhaps, Ilse thought as the big dark bags beneath her eyes came into focus, it was actually exhaustion.
She was carrying a slim dossier under her arm. "I shouldn't be showing you this," she said, as she drew it out and opened it.
"Your boyfriend told me something similar," Ilse smiled, and then suddenly the smile died. "I don't mean it like that."
The other woman didn't really seem to hear. She simply took a single sheet of paper out of the folder, and showed it to Ilse. It was printed on old dot matrix stock, and the font was blocky and crude. She recognized it immediately.
Her voice sounded very small when she finally spoke. "Can I talk to him?"
Veiksaar shook her head. "No. They… We got…"
"The Temporal Anomalies Department," Ilse said with sudden certainty.
A nod. "Under no circumstances are we to cross-test SCP-5520 and 5616."
She'd known Wynn had a number, but there was still something sickening about hearing it out loud. Particularly under these circumstances. "They know he'd try to help me," she muttered bitterly.
"Can you help him?" Veiksaar's drawn face was getting longer by the second. "Tell me what I can say, or do?"
I&T put only its most trusted technicians on the Wynn-to-43 bridge, transcribing his rants and attempting to calm his raving. Regular amnesticizations were involved for most of them. From how haggard and sad Veiksaar looked, Ilse suspected she'd been trying to tough it out. Ilse scanned the sheet again, and sighed. "He sounds lonely. How often does he get human contact?"
"Only when we need something from him." Now it was Veiksaar's turn to be bitter. "Or when he asks questions."
"Rings his little bell," Ilse spat, and it seemed to strike the other woman like a mortar. "I'm sorry. I know this isn't your fault. But you really do need to get him someone he can talk to." She was no psychologist, but she decided to try a little morale-boosting despite the bleakness of their topic. "Maybe you could try cycling that keyboard between everyone at the Site."
Veiksaar snorted. "Yeah, I can just imagine how well that would go over." She sighed. "The main problem, outside the… well, the… you know, the main practical issue is all the classified stuff he spouts. I've got a dozen provisional clearances just from being on the dossier a month. And he keeps asking for the Dir—" Veiksaar swallowed. "For Director Scout. What do I tell him?"
It was the wrong thing to say, but she simply couldn't not. "Have you considered the truth?" She kept talking before the other woman could respond. "I know. He isn't cleared for that. There has to be a solution, though."
Veiksaar looked at the floor. "The Chief was working on one." The Chief generally meant my Chief when someone at Site-43 said it. So, Rudolph Marroquin. The traitor. "Overseers are pushing it hard. It's… technical."
Ilse put a mental pin in that. Maybe Dougall would be able to dig something up. Or perhaps Allan? "Well, if I can help in any way…"
Veiksaar seemed to pull herself together. "No, it's fine. I… we've got this."
It wasn't the other woman's fault, but this was beyond frustrating. "Why involve me in the first place, breaking protocol, if I can't even be involved?
Veiksaar's eyes bored into hers. "Because he was asking for you, last night."
Ilse's throat dried up.
"He said you were lonely, and I should go to you. Because…" The other woman was about to start weeping. "Because I was late for our appointment, and you missed me so very much."
1998
21 December
All of the things she was designing, and Dougall was seeing constructed, required constant checking and double-checking. Stress testing, efficiency testing, et cetera. Early on, he did most of that himself.
Now, they were encountering what they euphemistically called the union problem.
"I'm not being unreasonable," the very tall beard whined at her, precisely the tone and phrasing one used when one was being unreasonable and hadn't admitted it to oneself yet. "You think I'm taking part of your job. Well, you're doing my entire job."
And doing it better, she didn't say. After all, it wasn't her honour she'd be defending. "Dougall knows the specs better than anyone else," besides me, "and he's already familiar with everything that happened in the manufacturing process. He's perfectly well-suited to overseeing these tests."
"Studies." Dr. William Wettle pulled himself up to his full height, partially obscuring the spiky hair that partially obscured his chin. "Replication studies. It's an entire branch of science, Dr. Reynders. My branch."
She wasn't sure where they'd picked this one up. She hadn't yet looked into his personnel file. Every time she did that, it made her feel a little worse. Like she was doing something she shouldn't, instead of merely preparing to. "I understand that," she allowed.
"No," he said. "I don't think you do. I saw the guy you're working with. I know that kind of guy. I've been shoved—" He burped. "I'm well acquainted with how their minds work. He hasn't got the discipline. If something breaks, he'll throw it out and see if the next one does. He won't note the numbers. He won't make sure the environment is the same next time. He'll just blunder his way through it. You need to do this right if you want actual data."
"And if all we want is results?" she asked.
He blinked. "Then are you even really scientists?"
They reached a compromise. She promised to talk to Dougall about it, and let Wettle leave her some literature to peruse. She told him to put it in the mail slot for her personal quarters.
The next time he saw her, his eyes were full of something she didn't want to think about, and was quite sure she deserved.
1999
18 May
The pile of paper made an audible thump on the cart, even through the ADDC window. "Here you go."
Ilse looked down at it, then up at the unkempt, greasy programmer towering over her. "What is this, Lyle?"
"Just Dr. Lillihammer," the young man grunted. "Well, I guess that's not good phrasing. Dr. Lillihammer is longer. Dr. Lillihammer instead. I just like the ring, you know?"
She nodded, slowly. "Okay… but what is this, Dr. Lillihammer?"
He patted the papers with nothing like fondness. "The code you wanted."
"The…?" She stared at the top sheet, where she could see variables defined and terms set. "You wrote the code out by hand? On paper?"
Lillihammer shrugged. "Easier sometimes. Sometimes I get sick of computers."
"You're a programmer."
"And you're an incinerator jockey. That never get old?" There was fire in the man's blue eyes.
She frowned. "The devices we need this code for are high-precision instruments. You don't even know that this will compile, if you did it all by hand."
"It'll compile," Lillihammer yawned.
"I…" She shook her head, exasperated. "You don't even look like you've slept. Your clothes—"
"Slept in them," the young man assured her. "A few times."
"You're not taking very good care of yourself."
Lillihammer gave her a critical eye. "When was the last time you took a shower?"
Ilse blinked.
"Yeah. That's what I thought." Lillihammer looked up at the ceiling. "You ever think about what you want to do be when you grow out?"
Ilse laughed. "Grow out? What does that mean?"
Lillihammer tapped the glass.
Ilse frowned again. "I'm not sure I take your meaning."
"What were you like when you first walked in there? I'm picturing a flapper."
"A flapper?" Ilse shook her head. "I don't even know what that is."
"Not a flapper, then. Alright. What I mean is, you've been in there fifty-odd years."
"Very odd years."
"Nice. Are you still the person who walked through that door?"
She hadn't considered this before. "Almost certainly not."
"So when you get out, what do you do? Go back to your old life? All your old people are gone." Lillihammer had already made a reputation for bluntness, enough that Ilse had caught wind in her isolated corner. "What I'm asking is, did you get to call the shots before? Or were you just doing what other people told you to do?"
"I…" Ilse bit her lip, looking for the right words. "There were other people's expectations, I suppose. But I think I was mostly making my own decisions. I think it was actually quite important to a few people that I was."
Lillihammer grinned. "Good old fedora-man. Nobody's got anything bad to say about him. I'll bet he plugged a guy once or twice, right here," and he tapped his high forehead, "to offset all that saintliness." Ilse, faintly alarmed, allowed him to go on. "Still, you were a woman in, what, the forties? Things are a little different now. Mostly. You could set some terms that were off-limits before. And in our line, the limits are even looser. What would you do with total freedom?"
It was a strange thing. Ilse had been so fixated on escape, it had never really occurred to her what might come after. It occurred to her now, of course, almost immediately. "I would visit an old friend," she said.
Lillihammer raised a brow. "You've still got one? Or is that an old-timey metaphor for visiting a grave?"
She scowled at him. "What are you going to be when you grow out, doctor?"
That won a brief chuckle. "Sorry, lady. This perfection is forever." He ran his hands down his flanks, and she tried not to notice if it left streaks of sweat. "But I think I'm going to grow out of being a programmer pretty soon. That, or they'll drum me out."
"I thought your girlfriend was the Chief of I&T?" This was a way of putting out feelers. She still didn't understand the relationship between Lillihammer, Blank and Veiksaar. Wasn't even sure why she cared.
"I thought she was my girlfriend," Lillihammer shrugged. He didn't seem the least bit bothered. "I'm considering other options."
"For careers? Or girlfriends?"
"Why, you auditioning?" Lillihammer tapped the glass again. "I don't do long-distance, unless it's my choice."
Ilse sighed. "I'm starting to see why nobody likes talking with you."
"That sounds like something I would say. I'm being a bad influence." He paused. "Hey, you know some stuff about memetics, right?"
Ilse gave him a cockeyed look. "Some stuff. Sure."
"What's it like?"
This time, she didn't have to consider. "I hate it."
"Uh huh." She wasn't sure, from the way he said it or the look on his face, that he'd even heard her. "That's one of the offers I'm considering. You know Del Olmo? He's fuckin' weird."
"I do not know Dr. Del Olmo, no." It stuck in her craw, just a little. The Chairs and Chiefs were exempted from the window-cycle, but most of them still turned up occasionally anyway. The Chair of Memetics and Countermemetics, however, had never once darkened her sill. She wasn't sure why.
"Mm. Maybe he doesn't like you."
"I can't imagine why," she said, honestly. "But people do form opinions about other people that don't always make sense."
"Tell me about it," he replied cryptically. He tapped the code sheets idly. "So, what is all this really for, anyway? What are you working on?"
"I can't tell you." The words came so easily at this point. She'd said them so often. "But I might need more help from you, later on. What other projects are you attached to?"
For the first time, she saw a glint of dissimulation in the programmer's eyes. "Can't tell you either. Anyway." He recovered his mask with practiced ease, and thumped the papers for emphasis. "Signed, and delivered. Didn't seal them. Couldn't find a big enough envelope." Something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he smirked. "It's your code, now. And here comes the monkey!"
He left the frame at the same moment Dougall entered it, from the other direction. Her partner stared at the departing stick figure, then looked down at the cart. "What is this?"
Ilse tried on a friendly smile. "How are you at transcription?"
Doing other things while he typed up the code was bliss.
Going through the results on the projector, and spotting all the transcription errors he'd made, not so much.
Wettle would have been interested in this particular study in replication, though she would have had to tell him why, first. And considering it proved him right, she certainly wouldn't have done so.
1999
3 July
The first time he walked past her window, she didn't recognize him. There were entire classes of person at Site-43 — and classes was certainly the right word — who nobody ever thought twice about, and he was a member of one of them. The second time, though, she happened to be looking up while he happened to be looking down, at a particular angle, and she saw it.
His chin was weaker, and his build was slighter. He had none of the confidence, but all of the insecurity. And he didn't seem to know his way around a mop worth a damn.
She could see why his brother despaired. In more ways than one.
He looked up, saw her, and visibly started. The mop clattered to the floor. Oh shit, he mouthed. Hi. And he waved.
She waved back.
Didn't see you there, he was saying. She nodded. He stared at her for a moment, then turned to look at the door, then shrugged, and to her great surprise, snapped an awkward salute and shuffled off down the hall.
Then came back, a moment later, to collect his mop. He made sheepish eye contact before slipping out of frame again.
He hadn't known she was there, she realized. Had no idea who she was.
She found it the most endearing thing in the world.
1999
31 December
She wasn't even counting the years anymore. There was nothing to commemorate their passing.
Somewhere out there, in a little cemetery she'd never visited, surrounded by their friends and co-workers in humble little graves, was a man whose vigil was over. She was remembering him, tonight. The beloved dead were multiplying.
The undercroft was too deep down for the sounds of celebration above to penetrate. She watched the clock crawl closer to the meaningless moment, and sighed. It would honour them just as much, she decided, if she simply went back to work.
And then there were footsteps, and Dougall appeared. He was carrying two flutes of champagne, which he set down on top of the projector. "I don't like parties," he said, as though explaining something.
She nodded. "I'm not going to be able to drink that."
He glanced at his watch, and nodded. "That's fine. I will."
It was the kind of not-good-enough that had its own sort of ragged virtue.
2000
18 April
There was technically nothing dishonest about it.
Every component they designed did what it was supposed to do. High-tech measurement apparatus. High-efficiency rotors. Processors with better clock speeds. A whole raft of devices that made marked improvements on the machinery presently in use by the rest of the Foundation. Several of her prototypes were slated for mass production at Sites across the world, already. No-one could say they were squandering resources on matters of personal interest.
The fact that each of these fully functional pieces of tech could also be one component of a test she'd desperately wanted to try for decades, well. It wasn't like anyone had asked her about that.
"Du said something funny today," Dougall was saying. At some point 'Du' had ceased to refer to the father, and now referred to the son. Ilse hadn't noticed the transition, not that it made much difference. They did much the same work, though the junior did it with considerably greater grace.
"Oh?" She knew an answer was required to move the conversation along, even though he knew she was brain-deep in calculations for their next fabrication.
"He said him and his dad built the Core piece by piece. One component at a time. And when funding for the project dried up, they took side projects to prove their worth. Picked and chose, so they could fold the results back into the Core when they were done. Made it up modular."
"Uh huh," she said, and then she actually looked at him. "Oh."
"Yeah. Offered that up apropos of jack shit." He looked grim. "You think he's going to tell anyone?"
She pictured Qiang Du, confident that what Ilse was doing was potentially a giant leap in the wrong direction for mankind. She imagined him telling his son. She pictured Xinyi Du, daily subjected to a withering torrent of just-barely-passive aggressions as he learned the ropes from his father. "No," she said finally. "I don't think he is."
"Good enough for me." Dougall was always happy to outsource anxiety to others. He glanced down at his work tablet, and grunted. "They'll have the fabbers back up to speed in an hour. How're those numbers crunching?"
"Not as loudly as you talk," she snapped.
"You both talk real loud," a tiny voice said from behind Dougall.
He practically fell over as he turned around, catching himself with a palm outstretched to the glass, THUMP. It would take a tank to break through, of course, but she still hated him a little for it anyway.
There was a little girl leaning against the wall, beneath her diplomas. Very little. A wiry little lens-smudge of a person, maybe seven or eight years old. Her first thought was we really are hiring them young, now, and her second thought was about Sokolsky.
"Who the hell are you?" Dougall snapped, and Ilse learned something new, though not particularly surprising, about her partner.
"I'm Billie." Billie looked back and forth between them. "Who are you?"
"I'm Ilse," said Ilse, at the same moment as Dougall said "How did you get in here?"
The slip of a girl shrugged. Her shoulders were very bony. "I live here."
"Me too," said Ilse, at the same moment Dougall snapped his fingers and said "Forsythe's kid."
"Eh?" said Ilse.
Dougall turned his back on the child, blotting her out. "One of the nurses. Her kid is sick, so she stays here."
Ilse motioned for Dougall to move aside. It took him several moments to realize what was being mimed, and to comply. Ilse leaned forward, nose almost touching the glass. "Are you sick, kid?"
Billie shrugged again. "That's what mom says."
"What's the matter?"
"I can't go outside."
Dougall glanced at Ilse. "Immune disorder," he murmured.
Ilse nodded. "That's no fun. I can't go outside, either."
Billie's brows closed in on the bridge of her nose. She had a nose like a pig. "You're sick, too?"
"Sort of." Ilse looked at Dougall, who rolled his eyes. "Yes, I think that's fair."
"I'll get better some day," Billie declared with absolute confidence.
Dougall smirked, and Ilse smirked back at him. "Me too."
"That's not what my mom says."
Ilse's eyes snapped back to the child, and she was momentarily without words.
"That's not what she says about you, either," Dougall grunted. Ilse suddenly noticed his shoulders were bunched up under the labcoat and silk shirt.
The little girl stared at him, eyes like little brown planetoids, and then she turned and ran away.
Ilse had never been so touched and furious at the same time before. She was thankful for the glass between them.
She wasn't sure what she might have done without it.
2001
19 August
She didn't recognize the statuesque woman for several minutes.
It wasn't the dazzle coat, though that didn't help. All it did was tell Ilse she was looking at one of the memeticists, and this wasn't one she recognized. It wasn't the face, though it should have been, even changed though it was in many ways. It wasn't the height. It wasn't the colour of her hair.
In the end, it was the attitude that made her realize.
"Wait a minute," she said. The consult was entirely forgotten. "Are you… Lillihammer?"
The other woman laughed. It was loud. There were a lot of bright white teeth. Her entire body shook with mirth. "Nothing gets past you, does it? Even if it's six and a half feet tall and every damn colour in the rainbow."
It was Lillihammer. The proportions were right, even if the shape was unfamiliar. The blue eyes and coral hair. The arrogant set of the jaw. That prominent nose. The way she'd breezed through the technical consult like it was nothing. "What, ah…"
"What happened?" Lillihammer beamed at her. "Me, obviously." She tapped the window with long fingernails on the ends of long fingers. "Your turn."
"What?"
"Lose the cocoon," the memeticist grinned. "You've been cooking long enough."
2001
12 December
With a more precise goal in mind, it became easier to see the steps. To map out a course from here to there. To fully compass the extent of what they still had yet to do.
Most of it was impossible. But she had done impossible things before, was herself an impossible thing.
And so was he.
When he reflexively avoided certain strategies for exploring the nature of Zwist's archived cryptomancy, she took note. When he deflected her queries on the nature of antimemetic camouflage and compulsive speech, she started checking off a mental list. When he flat out refused to consider the abatement of certain occult artifacts in containment, claiming there were security concerns to which she wasn't privy but which he was unwilling to divulge, their understanding notwithstanding, she considered the question settled.
It was only a bonus when a very young researcher in Applied Occultism gear passed them by chance on her way to who knew where, and her dark cheeks flushed burgundy, and Dougall looked away, and Stacey Laiken waiting patiently at the wall didn't seem to notice anything at all.
It was already obvious.
Dougall Deering was no wizard.
He was a giftschreiber.
She considered telling Allan. She wrestled with it for several days.
The realization came as a relief, of sorts.
It is worth remembering that there is almost always information to which I am privy, but not permitted to disclose.
The Director already knew.
It wasn't exactly comforting, but it did more or less clarify her obligations, and that was all she really needed.
2002
8 February
They needed a subject for a dry run.
They were nowhere near ready to move to experimentation — maybe half the equipment was built, very little of the data was fully sifted-through, and she was coming up with new and vital variables every day — but they were at the point where very little of value could be achieved without having at least a few solid integers in hand.
"Should it be something value-neutral?" Dougall wondered aloud. "Something small?" Something neither of us care about, he actually meant.
She shook her head. "It needs to be something we can measure. Something with numbers of its own involved. Numbers we know. Known quantities that can be measured before and after."
"Well, that's another problem." She was almost proud at how clearly he was able to articulate it. She'd brought him a long, long way. On my back, she thought, and then flushed at the accidental innuendo. "If we change the past, how will we know it's changed? Won't our old data match the new?"
"We've resolved the paradox issue," she reminded him. "And established that the ADDC doesn't respond to the outside flow of time."
He blinked. "We did? That second one?"
"Oh." She pursed her lips. "I guess I did that on my own. Uh." Under his withering glare, she explained how she'd sent a request to the Site-17 Deepwell for five high-profile reality shifts in the last fifty years; their systems were hardened so that even if the entire Earth moved ontologically, the Deepwell would stay put. She then compared the results with her memory, and confirmed what she'd already known to be logically true: she was a Deepwell of one, an elephant who never forgot.
"Alright." She could tell he was offended at being kept out of the loop; she faintly remembered not wanting him focused on that side study, since he had so little capacity for multitasking. And he needs to eat and sleep and cheat on his fiancé, too. Everyone should get on the incinerator retreat program. "Is that it?"
"Well." She wasn't looking forward to this part of the explanation. She knew what she would say, if someone told her this. "I actually remember a few things the Deepwells don't. It's possible my memory is considerably better than metastable."
It was to his credit, really, that he happened upon the obvious objection. "How do you know those extra memories weren't created by a reality shift?"
He'd done what she would have. She returned the favour. She shrugged. "I just know."
He narrowed his eyes, but didn't protest. "Okay, I guess."
"So," she said with well-mocked cheerfulness, "what's it going to be? You have any targets in mind?"
He thought for a moment, then visibly gave up. "No. Nothing I care about matters that much to anyone else."
It was almost poignant, and she found a little sympathy rising in her in spite of who she was talking to. "Well. Okay. I did have something in mind, myself."
"Of course you did." All judgement, no surprise.
| INCIDENT AA-2890 |
|---|
| Date: 18 June 1960 Officer of Record: Falkirk, Researcher Edwin T. |
| Summary: At 18:21 hours on the 18th of June, 1960, whilst conducting an unspecified (and potentially unsanctioned) experiment involving orphic material with the assistance of [EXPUNGED], Dr. Wynn Rydderech was exposed to a potentially lethal spectroclastic burst. [EXPUNGED] was able to shield Dr. Rydderech from the worst of the exposure, but both subjects required significant subsequent medical care and permanent knock-on effects cannot be ruled out at this time. |
| Recommendation: I recommend the immediate censure of Dr. Rydderech, a cessation in the involvement of [EXPUNGED] in SCP Foundation business, and a review of all operations at Site-43 to be conducted by my own person as liaison with Site-01 and the Overseer Council. |
Dougall stared at the printout. "You're sure this is the one you wanted?"
"If it's the one I told you to get." By now they sniped at each other like this out of habit. There was no malice in it, at least not on her end. It kept them honest and on their toes, if nothing else. "Wynn's most concentrated exposure."
Dougall considered. "You're thinking this is what turned him?"
"It might be. It certainly can't have helped. And we've already seen the likelihood of a correlation between orphic exposure and late-onset ontokinesis." She hated the implied plea in this pitch. Please see it my way. But for all her threats and cajoling, she did still need him on her side of his own relatively free will. "Even if this wasn't what drove him over the edge, it is a measurable event. If this record changes, in any particular, we'll know we were right."
The interval between his head beginning to move and that motion resolving into a nod was like an eternity, even as she measured such things. "Okay," he allowed. "This does make sense. I guess you miss the guy a lot, huh?" He returned the printout to its folder. Everything printed out had a folder, at the Foundation. It was both symbolic and practical. "If you're still bothered by what happened, thirty years later."
Her neck craned back, and she refocused on him. "Has it been thirty years?" She scoffed in surprise. "Jezus. Going on forty."
"I'll bet it feels like just yesterday you were walking through that door." Dougall gestured.
"No." She looked away. "That feels exactly as long ago as it was."
Which, of course, was a lie. He knew her, by now, so he probably knew it.
Just not which direction the truth was in.
5 May
It was simple enough, in the end.
Before that, they had to design a combination microscope/macroscope capable of measuring not only bosons, quarks and wavelengths, but also antiparticles, antiwaves and q-motes. They had to develop three-dimensional imaging technology that functioned in four dimensions, and interfaced with software originally designed to track the performance of air filters in order to create a perfect map over time of every inch of the ADDC, where everything was only a constant so long as she didn't interact with it. Every fit, every flight of fancy, every breath had imparted a change they needed to quantify and qualify by strangeness, vector and impact. And when the anti-mass of the anachronic globule was finally visible, when they had proven that what looked like absence was actually just inversion to a new and even less comprehensible state, they had to figure out how to reverse-engineer the original mass by running everything backward using a wholly different set of criteria developed by running weeks of simulations through Qiang and Xinyi Du's absurdly powerful and much-coveted supercomputer. Then they had to design, effectively, a 3D ranging laser cage that could function with only a single, rectangular point of entry, and then they needed to design a spectremeter that could visualize the globule as orphic energy, back-translate that to radio energy, and run it through a virtual spectrometer. Then they needed to find precisely the right combination of existing esoteric effluence in the Acroamatic Abatement systems to catalyze into something similar, and repurpose half a dozen of ApplOcc's monitoring and filtration systems to precisely distill that into something similar enough to the globule that they could measure it, analyze it, and really, truly understand what precisely it had been. Then they had to create a test chamber with the precise dimensions and material composition of the ADDC in 1942.
And then they needed to build a reaction engine capable of sending it backward through the process the original had undergone when it bloomed in the heart of the incinerator, so that it shrank away into nothing — real, actual nothing, this time. Though only in the present, as their DUAL Core simulations allowed them to precisely target the point in the past where they wanted it to reappear, or rather, to have originated, carrying a precisely-formulated payload nestled in its heart that would neutralize the outflow that had nearly killed Wynn Rydderech.
They also had to account for the rotation of the Earth around the sun, and the sun around the galactic core. And universal expansion. And continental drift, and erosion, and temperature, and five hundred and eleven more variables to boot.
And in every case but the most practical, "they" denoted actually Ilse, herself. In secret, and sometimes even in her head. Much of it she'd been preparing to do for decades, or else it would have been impossible under such a constricted timeframe, but still it was nothing short of miraculous that it all worked out. Everything they did had to appear, at first blush, like just one more attempt to free her from her prison. It all had to be explainable. They had to develop a whole other logic for what it was, and what it would do, and why they were doing it. In case anyone asked.
Which no-one did.
But in the end, really, it was quite simple.
Just the press of a button.
The final thing — if she was very lucky, one of the final things ever — that Ilse couldn't do without Dougall Alton Deering.
She would only hear how it went second-hand, yet again. This time she didn't even have the grace of a radio link to allow her to feel physically involved. She simply had to trust the process, and pray that the man sufficed.
Dougall pressed the button.
In the transparisteel cage, the globule shrank to nothing, less an implosion than an explosion run in reverse. Exactly as they'd hoped. Exactly as she'd said it would happen.
He practically skipped on his way to Archives and Revision, and he still had that energy in him when he showed up with the Rydderech breach report in hand. He'd already read it on the way, of course, but of course he wasn't qualified to know how brilliantly they'd just succeeded.
There was no time for transparencies. He knew that if Ilse Reynders could die, she'd be dying to see these results. He could be a vain man, to be sure. He could be arrogant. He could even be callous, though he rarely intended to be. But like the Foundation itself, he was never cruel. Not if he could help it, anyway.
Perhaps he was thinking about that, when his energy faltered for just a moment. Thinking of the things he told himself he couldn't help. Telling Stacey, or his pet researcher, in his imagination, that it was the case. That it wasn't his fault.
Certainly his mind was elsewhere, because it apparently didn't occur to him until he slapped the report on the glass triumphantly, and waited for Ilse to read it, that it was possible to be cruel by sheer mistake.
