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ADULT CONTENT
This article contains adult content that may not be suitable for all readers.
Sexual References: Features sexual themes or language, without the depiction of sexual acts.
Sexually Explicit: Description of sexual acts.
Sexual Assault: Features non-consensual sexual acts.
Gore: Depiction of blood, gore or mutilation of body parts.
Child Abuse: Features severe mistreatment of children.
Self-Harm: Description of self-harm.
Suicide: Description of suicide.
Torture: Description of torture.
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Kaleidoscope
2002
?? September
Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
It was several days before she concluded she wasn't crazy.
This roughly coincided — it was difficult to tell which came first — with the last time she slammed her head into the wall. When the pain of abraded skin finally registered. When she felt the blood running up her cheek, saw it bleeding out of her eyes back into the wounds from which it had issued.
When she could think clearly, even if she still couldn't see clearly.
At least she'd had the sense to do it out of sight of the cameras. It was her little secret. Her little secret, that the world was wrong.
In the incinerator, nothing had changed. On the other side of the window…
…well, nothing much had changed there, either. Everything was fuzzy, like someone had traced over reality half a dozen times, or like reality was a completed painting with all the preliminary sketches still visible in underlay. Everyone who walked past was a thick amalgam of themselves, their voices as badly interpolated as the rest of them. Everything sounded… more. More times. Times more.
She slipped out of sight, resumed her percussion for a while. It settled her nerves. But she couldn't shake the feeling that it actually wasn't the world outside the window that was wrong.
It wasn't that there were too many of them.
There should have been more of her.
That, on its own, was a kind of insanity. And after a few more hours of pounding away the complexity, there ceased to be much distinction.
?? September
It was a question of focus, she decided.
If she tried — she wasn't quite sure what she was trying, but there was definitely a conscious component to it — she could shut out some of the variations. Not all of them. Never all of them. But she could bring it down to three, maybe two, even, at her best.
She was rarely at her best.
The first person she spoke to, or at least the first she could remember afterward, was Allan. What she said was, "I'm wrong."
What he said in response was "Wrong about what?"
His look of concern struck her as so completely hilarious that she couldn't help but laugh. "Wrong is good," she said. "Wrong is safe. Worry about why you're so right."
And he was. Allan was very, very right. Reinforced sevenfold. Was that the number? Was it seven? It seemed like more, sometimes. But never less.
Even this cryptic nonsense — she knew it for what it was, but couldn't help herself — helped a little. Just to hear what she was seeing, spoken out loud.
?? September
Then, one day, the same person — she couldn't tell who they were, so badly blurred were they — asked her the same question twice. She answered, twice, then asked what had been wrong with the first time.
They told her, with a frown, that there hadn't been a first time. Or rather, that this had been it.
Then it happened again.
And again.
She would talk about the after-images, the minor differences in light and shadow, the way some people moved across her vision like they were the merest of phantasms, and others seemed almost as real as she was. (No-one looked fully real anymore. She imagined — no. She could see through them. It was only a question of how much opacity any given actor possessed.) After a week of that, she was nursing the suspicion that someone was projecting scenes into the hallway, perhaps using one of the 3D imagers she and Dougall had developed. Every denial sent her backing up closer and closer to that precipice, beyond which was only multifarious madness.
Then, one day, she asked the most fateful question of all.
?? September
"Where's Dougall?"
Delfina Ibanez wasn't a frequent visitor to the ADDC. Ilse couldn't blame her; the window was above her eye level. But the recent disquietude of the Site's, perhaps the Foundation's, most valuable personnel asset and the even more disquieting things she was saying had changed all that. Now there was always a guard posted at each end of the hall, and it was no longer a heavy traffic zone, and the babysitting rotation was on indefinite hold, and the Chief of Security and Containment came by not infrequently to make sure Ilse wasn't about to try and kick the door down, or put her head all the way through the window.
As if she could. The glass would heal almost as quickly as did the wall. As did her injuries.
"Dougall," Ibanez repeated. Her lip curled. Ilse hadn't seen nearly enough of her over the years to know what that signified; she had to wait for the audible explanation like everyone else. "Dougall is dead."
Ilse stared at her. Stared through her. Most of her. Ibanez was very, very clear right now, and the overlap of her five or six or seven selves was almost perfect. Just a faint ringing around the edges, and the occasional trails or motion blur. She was almost not transparent.
Everyone was at least a little transparent.
And her voice only echoed a little, except when she said the final word, "Dead." There was something wrong with the way it sounded. With the way her mouth moved. With everything about it.
Ibanez was still talking, except her mouth was also closed. "That's classified Level 4, by the way, so don't go telling anyone. And for god's sake, don't tell Phil. Allan gave me discretionary power over—"
"When?"
"As soon as we knew." Again, there was an echo that wasn't quite the words she was speaking. Ilse shook her head, violently, and the security chief's image took on far more solid form.
"No. When did he die?" It was strange how the news hadn't really affected her. She'd spent over half a decade in near-constant companionship with the man. The idea that he was gone forever should have—
"Right before the breach," Ibanez said, and Ilse sat down. "You still there?"
"Where else would I be," Ilse muttered, in a daze. "Right before the breach."
"That's right."
"Before the breach."
"Yes."
"He said he stopped the breach."
"When?"
"Before it happened."
"How could he stop it before it happened?"
The light changed, though only subtly. "How could it happen if he stopped it?"
"He did stop it."
Ilse stood up straight.
Ibanez was still there, though only barely. A mere silhouette of herself.
"Is it happening again?" Ilse whispered.
"What?"
"Is the breach happening again?" If she had to repeat herself one more time, it would be at the top of her lungs, and she'd probably keep shouting until her lungs had to shut down and heal.
"What breach are you talking about?" Ibanez was looking at her like she'd lost her mind, again. "The one Dougall stopped?"
Ilse felt faint. "You said Dougall was dead."
Ibanez asked "When did I say that?" at the same time as she said "Yes. He's dead," and Ilse really did scream.
That was how she discovered her lungs healed far faster than she could wear them out.
?? ??
For the next… month? she didn't speak at all. She just stared out the window, when she could bear it, or put her back to it and stared at the hateful familiarity of her prison. To ground herself.
Stared, and considered.
She got the idea to perform a headcount, and that yielded interesting results. She asked Ibanez when the shift changes were, got the same answer from all the Chief's overlapping selves — "What, I tell you that, and you start painting the window red while the guard is changing? Fat chance." — and then tried to figure it out for herself, keeping track of each new face and making sure to put names to them. At one point she asked for a list of all the security personnel at the Site, and it took two days for the response to come in. It came in the persons of Delfina Ibanez and Gedeon Van Rompay, the former's opposite number in the Mobile Task Forces, and both of them asked her why she wanted that information.
She asked them how it could possibly be put to ill use. By her. In here.
They traded glances, then began reciting names. Van Rompay from memory, Ibanez from a sheet.
One, maybe one-point-one of her started talking before he finished, and finished well before the rest of her.
Some of the guards were more transparent than the others. She began to wonder if she could see death, and whether those visions represented past, present, or future. Maybe all at the same time. Maybe reality really was five-dimensional.
But six? Or seven? Or somewhere in between? Could dimensions be decimalized?
The Ibanezes who had told her that Dougall had died only agreed to name the rest of the breach casualties when Anoki judged it safe for her mental health. She was old, very old. She'd been witness to more passings, though always at a distance, than even the most hardened combat veterans. So she got the names, combined them into a master list, and memorized that. Three agents, two doctors, and two technicians. None of them anyone special.
Except that now, sometimes, they were.
Sometimes they were alive beyond the end of their years.
They were always indistinct, lacking the layers of confirmation that people like Ibanez, Van Rompay and McInnis possessed. Reuben Wirth, Harry's research assistant, was little more than a flash of light and shadow. She had to ask for him ten times before someone at the A&R salt mines responded without wearily telling her the man she wanted was dead, and when he arrived, he had nothing intelligent to tell her. He was little more than a copyist, and the occasional burner of magic paper. He tried to gush about what she still considered to be the 'new' ADDC, which she had designed from the old one before he was born, and she had to send him away before she started screaming again. Screaming was dangerous. Screaming could easily become a lifestyle, in these warring paradigms.
Bernabé Del Olmo, a senior memeticist she'd consulted with once or twice on the matter of the Frontispiece, was the next most insubstantial. He suggested that perhaps her hallucination of his demise was the result of memetic residue on the ADDC window, and promised to perform a few tests. He became only half as visible after that, and told her it was a dead end. Agents Janet Gwilherm and Stuart Radcliffe were nothing but grunts, unimaginative and practical. Agent Mukami was bright, but no more burdened with revelatory truth. Ambrogi and Markey, technicians, declined to visit her at all. And she couldn't very well compel their attendance, not without telling someone higher up the hierarchy precisely what her problem was.
She couldn't tell anyone that.
She did try. She wanted to tell McInnis, of course, but he had responsibilities that would trump friendship every time. She'd never met a more conscientious man, not even Scout (though thinking that thought felt like rank betrayal). She wanted to tell Harry or Lillian or Udo, but she didn't trust herself to explain what she was seeing well enough to be taken seriously. She couldn't risk them thinking she'd gone over the bend, because then they'd cut off her access. Her credentials were like those ancient executive powers most world governments still possessed, the ones that would vanish in a puff of legislative smoke the moment someone tried to use them. If she pushed her luck, her rights as a Foundation researcher would fall into desuetude.
She was still worrying about that, getting her story straight, crafting the perfect explanation, when something miraculous happened.
The last Wirth disappeared entirely, and someone else noticed.
?? ??
"You're saying he was up to something?" Ibanez looked skeptical, in addition to being transparent.
Which was alright, because that wasn't precisely what Ilse was trying to express. "No. I'm saying he was already beginning to disappear before it happened."
Ibanez nodded. "I don't know what that means."
Ilse sighed. "Chief, you know I've been seeing things."
Ibanez nodded again, with no comment.
"Not things that aren't there. Things that aren't all there."
"I did not know that." Ibanez hooked her thumbs in her belt. "Of course, I also don't know what that means."
"I think I can see probability." Ilse blurted it out in one breath, before she lost her nerve. Some habits died hard, particularly when nothing else changed.
"Uhhhh huh." Ibanez narrowed her eyes. "Like Sýkora?"
"What?"
"One of the ApplOcc lot. Thaumaturge. Says he can see possible paths through time and space, and figure out which is most likely with math."
Ilse blinked rapidly. "Why didn't anyone tell me about that? I could have used…" She stop blinking, and shut her eyes. "Never mind. No, it's not the same. I'm seeing echoes of where people are, where they could be, maybe even where they should be. Some people are distinct, some people are blurry, and some people are practically invisible. Wirth just went invisible. I think he's gone, was gone, will be gone. Just gone."
Ibanez put her mouth entirely on the right side of her face.
"I'm not making this up." It lacked the grammar of a plea, but all the intonation was there.
"I know that. I just think we both know you've been in a bit of a… state, recently."
"All seven of you know it, variably." This sigh came out half-growl, forestalling any interrogation of that peculiar statement. Anyway, Ibanez seemed to be busy with problems of her own. Her body was folding in on top of itself, and squirming like maggots in compost. "That's not what this is. It's too strong. Too consistent. Whatever it is I'm seeing, I'm sure it means something. Chief, I'm not crazy. Or if I'm crazy, I'm definitely not broken."
Ibanez raised a hand, and spread it wide. "How many fingers am I holding up?"
Ilse gave the only honest answer she could. "All of them."
?? ??
And that, Ilse thought, was that. Her time had run out. If she hadn't escaped the incinerator by now, she never would. They'd never let her.
She was going to be classified as some bizarre, half-crazed temporal anomaly, and the ADDC was going to be her containment chamber on paper as well as in fact. The only question was who would come down and give her the bad news.
It wasn't who she expected.
For the first time, the changing of the guards became a simple abandonment of posts. Seven men and women walked away from two positions, and no replacements arrived. Half a dozen visitors who weren't all there filtered out, one by one or self by self, until they were all gone. Every iteration of the hallway was deserted, until suddenly it wasn't.
"Oh," she said. "Of course."
At first, he was a blur. She still recognized him, all of him. Then he was crystal clear, the way nothing ever was anymore. "Of course," Xyank agreed. "I didn't expect to be seeing you again so soon."
"It's been months," she snapped.
He nodded. "That's pretty soon, by your standards. Even sooner by mine. At least this time I'm not here with a stern warning."
"No?" She sighed. "What are you—"
She stopped speaking, with her mouth still open. She stared at him, eyes as wide as they would go.
He was real.
Really real.
No outlines, no lag. Just as surely as she was in here, he was out there. Only one of him. Whole, solid, and consistent.
There's a first time for everything. Even lucid dreaming.
"This is really happening," he assured her, as though she'd spoken the concern aloud. For all she knew, she had. She was thunderstruck. He raised his wrist, and tapped the strange and futuristic watch enveloping it. "I've synchronized with all my selves, specifically to deliver this piece of advice."
"Advice," she repeated, and then repeated, much louder, "Selves?"
He gave the first implied question priority. "First off, there is a certain unpublished file which very few persons have the purview to access, at… present." He smirked.
"File," she repeated. "As in—"
"That one." Xyank nodded. "The one you're thinking of. It is now verboten as a topic of conversation."
"I think the word you were looking for," she said, "is verboden."
"If you say so. As long as my meaning is clear."
"It is not clear. Practically nobody has the clearance to know what's in that file anyway."
"You must now refuse to discuss it even with those practical nobodies."
She snorted in frustration. "What possible reason?"
"The universe needs them not to know," he said simply. She waited for clarification, knowing that none was coming. He took the opportunity to pick up a second thread. "But much more importantly, don't tell anyone else what it is that you see. It's far too dangerous."
"Dangerous?" She wanted to laugh, but that was another of those reactions she wasn't sure she could stop once it started. "Dangerous to who?"
"Everyone. Everything. I've already had to hush up a lot of it, and engage in some distasteful misdirection." That explained why the warning signs had mostly been ignored. Why everyone still assumed she was mostly on the level. But was this mysterious stranger really claiming to have amnesticized some of the highest-ranking members of personnel at Site-43?
His monologue didn't stop to accommodate her internal one. "You told Ibanez you think this has something to do with probability. Do you really believe that?"
Ilse didn't, but she wasn't sure she wanted to admit it. Not to Xyank. Maybe not to anyone.
"Come on," he chided. "You're in good company here. Tell me what you think is really going on."
She folder her arms, the string winding around her labcoat sleeve and constricting it, and said nothing.
"Fine. I'll say it myself. You think you're seeing different realities."
It almost took her feet out from under her. She didn't realize how badly she'd needed to hear someone else suggest it. But still, she didn't respond. Maybe if she kept her mouth shut—
"You think I'll let it all slip, if you keep mum? It's not a bad thought, but no such luck. I'm not giving you all the cards. I know what kind of a player you are." A sour look came over him, visible even behind that tremendous moustache, like he'd said something he hadn't meant to and didn't like the taste of regret. She'd seen that expression in the glass, more than once, and not only on the other side. "All I'm saying is this: be careful who you talk to, and watch what you say. If there's more than one person out here, don't say anything at all if you can help it. Try to speak only when spoken to. Learn to discern who's who, even within a single identity set, and try not to move information from one to the other."
"Why?" She'd meant to make it a demand. It sounded weak and forlorn instead.
"Because you'll interfere with multiversal causality, otherwise, and possibly precipitate the collapse—"
She waved him to silence, and this time found her own voice. "I can reverse-engineer that. That isn't what I mean. I mean why is this happening?"
Xyank seemed to think about the question for a moment before answering. "You want my opinion?"
"If you don't have the facts."
He chose not to engage with that implied question. "My opinion, Ilse, is that all of this is your fault. And you'll only make it worse by trying to fix it. So keep your damn mouth shut," and he picked at the tile grouting just out of her view, "until we meet again."
She pressed both hands to the glass. "You're going? When are you coming back?"
"When I have those facts you were talking about." He stopped fiddling with the wall, and smiled at her. "Shouldn't be more than a couple of months."
"From your perspective?" she demanded. "Or mine?"
He cocked his head to one side, still smiling. "Hey," he said. "That's a really good question."
And he imploded.
It was swift, so swift that she'd mistaken it for instantaneous the last time it happened, but either her heightened attention, the fact she was expecting it, or whatever his self-synchronization entailed allowed her to get a better look at the event.
It looked, she thought, an awful lot like that globule of anachronic matter diminishing into nothing at all.
?? ??
One of the benefits of losing her mind was how it made everything she said sound suspicious. It had never been so easy to lie; each dissimulation blended into the general mania. When everything sounded a little bit off, the baselines of truth and fiction were hard to determine.
Still, there were a few people she preferred not to speak with in her present state. People she wasn't sure she could lie to effectively, and people who seized on every hint that something was wrong, no matter how impractically many there were. Allan had come to her earlier, seeking comfort, or wisdom, or something of the sort. She hoped she'd steered him right. She'd had to crouch in the corner and cackle for an hour afterward, to expel the excess sanity before it made her vomit.
And now the least desirable visitor of all was standing in front of her window.
The years had not been kind to Edwin Falkirk. Of course, they should have been fatal; the man had to be in his nineties by now. But he looked about three centuries old as he sauntered up and pressed a dry palm-and-fingers leaf to the glass. "Dr. Reynders. Keeping you? Busy?"
It was hard to be offended by the weak joke. It was easy to be unsettled by the way his translucent lips stretched across that toothy maw. They couldn't possibly still be his teeth. "I get by."
"Stand by, more like." He drummed the glass with his long fingers. "I'd call it a waste of resources, except… well."
"Except you already did." She hadn't known she knew it until she said it. "You were the one who told them to stop trying to get me out, back in the sixties."
The skin of his face crinkled like paper. "And thank goodness they didn't listen! You've achieved so much in there, for all of us. Save yourself."
"I intend to."
He frowned.
"Save myself." She willed her fingers to stop clenching the pencil so hard. She didn't want him to see her knuckles white. His were visible in perfect detail beneath that pale, veined skin. "Why are you even here, Falkirk?"
"Diroctor Falkirk," he corrected her mildly. She blinked. Did I hear that correctly? "Proper terms of address are the bedrock of civility, not to mention perquisites of the post." The second clause was half as audible as the first, and half of his mouth wasn't moving as he said it.
Christus, she swore in the compromised safety of her mind. Two Falkirks was two too many.
He was still speaking. "Of course, thour formual froccupant of sainthis postlan has done much to degrade that sort of thing around here." He sighed. "He puts a pretty face on incompetence, to be sure, but some truths are too ugly to remain concealed. Like rank amateurism in leadership, the sort that could precipitate, for example, a disaster that killed killed people seven people." Some of that was wrong, but she couldn't focus on either of the two subtly different rasps in isolation. She didn't know which she'd need to respond to, and the sibiliant sussurance blended all together anyway. He shook his head in mock sadness. "It truly makes me wonder, doctor."
"What does?" At least this was Falkirk. He expected nothing better than confusion from her.
"About the Council." He pursed his lips. "And their sense of the fitness of things. When you conthinksider of all the damage damage that was done."
She felt a headache coming on.
Falkirk tapped the glass one more time, and shrugged his loose suit into what he probably considered a more dignified arrangement. "One of slipped up," he snarled, "and I'm going to make a mistake mechanics ploit. What do you have to say about that?"
She answered, very honestly, "I have no idea."
One of him lasted a week.
The other outlasted her.
?? ??
The woman in the woman in the uniform pulled the strings, pulled the finger, pulled the trigger, and the bullet impacted the glass with much of its momentum lost from passing through the man's skull and brain matter. A pink screen splashed between her and the hall beyond, and the flattened slug dropped away from the spiderweb spreading across the glass.
"Dr. Reynders?"
The man's body slumped out of view, and the puppet grinned at her. It raised the gun again, pointing at the already-healing cracks. This time, with a clear shot, it couldn't fail to shatter the glass. Will I die all at once, she wondered, or in fifths? What would that even mean?
She was almost excited to find out.
"Dr. Reynders?" the psychiatrist, Ngo, repeated. She looked concerned. "Are you alright?"
Another shot rang out, and the dead woman fell. Gedeon Van Rompay, kitted out in full assault gear, knelt just long enough to confirm the kill before loping his way down the corridor and out of sight.
"Oh," she said conversationally. "Nothing. It's just another day."
Something in the laughter that followed apparently gave Ngo an entire clipboard's worth of things to write down.
?? ??
She wasn't sure when the armed patrols had stopped being real. She hadn't really been watching.
She'd made the exciting discovery that if she sat in the farthest corner of the incinerator and stuck her head between her knees, nobody could see her face, and nobody could make her listen to what they had to say.
At some point Van Rompay and his agents had stopped being themselves. She saw it in the little glimpses she stole, when staring at the floor became too dull and she needed reminding why dullness was the best option. The way they didn't twitch when they pulled the triggers. The way they didn't speak to each other anymore.
The way they stopped screaming. The way their targets started screaming.
Why do they do it here? Time and again, they returned to her window like actors strutting onto a stage. Like figures on a screen. Like a show for her benefit alone.
It was, she had to admit, a curious inversion.
She wasn't on display to the world anymore.
The worlds were hers to observe.
She took to cracking her glasses every few minutes. Half a dozen dramas was far too many. Somehow, a splintered infinity was just barely enough.
It started as an exercise. Something to keep her mind occupied. She couldn't risk talking to anyone, couldn't risk watching, couldn't risk anything outside the window. The windows. The multiplicity of everything but her. Inside, where everything was singular, within the monad, that was her domain of action. Her thoughts the butterflies of least effect.
She had a master's degree in cognitive psychology. She knew everything about the chemistry of the human brain. She had practically invented memetics. She knew how to shape cognition.
Day after day, she whittled it down. A sharp probe for every soft subject. A different eye for each projection, a separate lens for the shadows on her cave wall.
One world was in flames. She could filter for the flares. She could cut the spectrum short. Let apocalypse subside to a dim, red rim. The other worlds were safer, if not safe. They were solid. The pinwheeling figures had a tandem, the flapping jaws a rhythm. They were selfsame. They were safer, if not safe.
That was when she finally saw it.
The space between the spaces. The absence of an outline. The calm at the storm of her eyes.
She focused so hard that her optic nerves ached, willed herself to see only perfect tranquility. The empty hall. The safe space.
And in that moment of clarity, she spoke.
?? ??
"I'm here," she said. Then she stood up, walked to the window, picked up the pencil, and did not look she did not look I will not look at anything that wasn't there isn't there it isn't there it isn't real only this is real. "I'm here. Is there anyone out there?"
It was a few minutes before she got her answer.
Dougall Deering pressed his hand to the glass. "Vacation over?"
?? ??
"Why didn't you come sooner?"
He scoffed. "Come see what? You've been weeping, wailing and gnashing for months. Or sitting in your corner. Or talking to ghosts. What was I supposed to do with that?"
There was a kind of delight in his eyes, she saw. At the inversion. At the idea of her, Ilse Reynders, as a tool to be disposed of when it no longer functioned. "Well," she said. "I'm back now. I'm focused."
He examined her carefully, with special attention to the eyes. "Are you? Because it looks to me like you're squinting. I didn't think that prescription was ever going to run out."
Her temples were throbbing, but that didn't matter. Nothing mattered but remaining here. In the calm. In the one true overlay. "I can't talk about that. With you." She felt a hint of how delightful his standoffishness must have felt.
His face contorted, and she realized there were rings around his eyes as well. He looked like he hadn't slept. He made a majestic attempt to shake off the expression of melancholy, taking a deep breath and sticking his chest out, but she'd already seen through the deception.
"Dougall?" she said. "What's wrong?"
"As if you care." It was the sort of reply a sullen child might have given.
"They told me you stopped a containment breach," she offered.
His lip became a little blip beneath his nose.
"I… would like to know more about that." It was a need, actually, and she needed to know everything. But she couldn't admit it. Not to him.
"There's nothing to know." He looked away, as he always did when he was hiding something. He looked away a lot. "I saw some material building up, and I performed a flush at the last minute. That's all."
He described it… not quite mournfully? But with a gravitas unsuited to the topic. The explanation had a funereal quality that didn't make any sense. "What kind of material? And why was it building up?"
He sneered, but the corners of his eyes were begging her to stop. "Him and him," he answered simply, then chuckled without mirth. "Not that you're cleared to know about that."
She boggled at him. "I knew before you were born. I'll probably still know when you're dead. I helped Scout write that file."
"Of course you did." He was barely opening his mouth to talk, now. "Perfect Ilse Reynders, always at the peak before everyone else hits the first landing. Well, guess what? There's something you don't know about our guests. Something apparently nobody knew. And that something killed—"
He turned abruptly, and began walking away. She slammed her hands on the window, suddenly desperate to know who had been killed. Of course, he could hear her. He was simply pretending not to, or expressing that he did not care.
Eventually he turned back around anyway, came back to the glass again. "The point is," he murmured, "that the danger is past."
He wasn't going to give her anything more than that. Not yet. But she was still desperate not to end their conversation. He was the only thing, so far as she could tell, that distinguished his little sketch of potential reality. "Dougall," she said in her best conciliatory tone, "please tell me what's going on."
He shrugged. It was the most forced gesture of disinterest she'd ever seen. "With what?"
"With anything." She heard the strain in her voice, and paused. Willed time to slow — something she had never done before — so she could make the correct decisions. Make him see the version of her she needed him to see. Another humorous inversion, not that he would have understood the context enough to appreciate it. She didn't even take a steadying breath. Gave him no hook to hang suspicions on. When next she spoke, the tone was almost sweet in its sincerity. "I want to know what's been going on while I was… out of it. How everyone's doing. How you're doing."
His brow squeezed inward almost imperceptibly, given how his form wavered, given she could see the far wall through him, given that the blood does not exist and you do not see it it is not important. "I'm doing fine. Thank you for asking." He said it flatly, but there was a hint of something emotional in there. What emotion, she wasn't sure. Killed who? "Everyone else is fine. Every thing is fine. Never better, in fact."
She wanted to gasp, or else sigh in relief. She didn't do either. "Just business as usual, then?"
He nodded. "For as usual as it ever is. Boring, by our standards."
She forced a smile, hoped it wasn't a manic one. "That sounds wonderful. Please, Dougall Deering, please bore me."
She was mostly hanging on.
She had pushed the visions of the worlds that weren't to the far periphery, where they couldn't hurt her. She had no more room for hurt. The strain of not seeing made every instant an agony, and in pain there was clarity. Pain was her anchor to the real.
When the fugitive first appeared, she pressed her fingernail to the windowsill and pressed at the wrong angle until the pain was excruciating. The spectre vanished.
When she came again, crouched, furtive, sneaking past the glass with a bulging satchel over her back, Ilse squinted her into nothing but a faint black blur.
When she walked up to the glass, the third time, and tried to speak, Ilse screamed at the top of her lungs until the puppets came and chased the bandit away.
She didn't come back again.
An hour later, alone, she suddenly laughed out loud.
Even my imaginary friends think I'm crazy.
?? ??
Ilse had never seen Melissa Bradbury angry before.
She wasn't sure she was seeing it now. The other woman had a perpetual look of absent-mindedness, and rarely made eye contact, and those eccentricities were still on display. But her voice had a new edge to it, and what she had to say was considerably more pointed than usual.
"You've been going behind my back, doctor." She paused. "I would have brought it up sooner, but, well. You know."
But you were fucking crazy.
Ilse felt her shoulders sag. She could deny it, as Dougall would have. She could have summoned up some bluster, like Bremmel. But she simply didn't have the energy. "Yes," she agreed. "Yes, I have been."
"Not just you. Dr. Deering, as well." Ilse had reflexively taken credit for the whole thing, debacle or no. The alternative, admitting to a third party that Dougall Deering really had influenced her work enough to scuttle it, was too terrible to bear considering. "You know my office handles all requests for workspaces, materials, and lab assistants. Most of your last project seems to have been done sub rosa. That's not how we operate."
Ilse nodded. There was nothing more complex to convey. An oasis in her sea of visions, and this was what her sole companion wanted to talk about.
"I've already notified the Director," said Bradbury. "But I wanted to talk to you about this in person." Something like acceptance crossed that smooth, untroubled face; the mild lecture had already consumed what little venom the woman naturally possessed. Her tone was trending back toward vague gentility. "I expect this sort of thing from Deering. But it isn't like you, going off half-cocked. What happened?"
Ilse did her the favour of actually thinking before responding. What came out was considerably less gracious. "I don't think you can actually judge what is and isn't like me," she offered. "I was born a lifetime before you were. A generation has come and gone while I've been in this box, and a new one's just starting." She didn't care about the way Bradbury's forehead creased. She didn't care I do not care I do not care. "Maybe the person you think you know was just the last edition?"
It was one thing to curse out Dougall Deering. But Ilse hadn't known until that moment just how vast and deep her own reserves of venom had become.
Allan didn't visit personally. Ilse received the censure via email. Three months probation from any access to experimental equipment or personnel resources.
To most practicing scientists, this would be a punch to the gut.
To her, with her timeframe, barely a slap on the wrist.
It stung disproportionately.
It hurt considerably worse when she suddenly remembered that Melissa Bradbury had been in a coma for months, and was not expected to wake up any time soon.
?? ??
Everyone was walking on eggshells around her now.
I'm not going to start screaming at you for no reason, she wanted to tell them. I might start screaming at someone standing where you're standing, someone you can't see, for no reason you will understand. But it won't be your fault. Or at least, it won't be the fault of this you.
There were several reasons she didn't tell them.
Harry had the look of someone bearing information he was afraid to disclose. Every step towards her was more like a half-step. But he got up the courage eventually, fixed a smile on his face, and said "Hanging in there?"
She glanced at the sealed door, then back at him, and blinked.
He pursed his lips. "Yeah. Okay. I just meant—"
"I'm up to it," she said. Whether it was true or not. "Go ahead."
"Allan wanted me to check something with you. Because you're the senior, ah, senior researcher on this particular file."
She sighed. "Senior surviving, you mean."
He nodded. "Yes."
"What's the file?" She noted he had no such papers on him.
"The giftschreiber."
She took a deep breath. "Okay. You're sure you're cleared for that?"
He nodded again. "Vivian gave me his old 001 to finish. Going to take a long while. I've been through everything he had written down, but something's come up. Something that might be new. And I wanted to run it past you, in case there's something the files don't show."
"What is it?"
"Have you ever encountered a cryptomancer who could hide in plain sight?"
Allan hadn't known.
She'd been sitting on that information for years, and nobody else had known.
So she sent Blank away, and sent for the Director.
He didn't tell her to calm down. He was smarter than that. But he did speak very softly, very confidently. "I was aware that Dr. Deering possessed talents he had not disclosed," McInnis murmured. "And I was aware of certain entanglements. I was simply not at liberty to examine the matter more closely."
"What does that mean?" She felt like she was lost at sea. "Who told you that?"
"My liberty is similarly constrained where that question is concerned," he said apologetically.
She wanted to be angry about it.
But refusal to disclose was better than a bald-faced lie, so he had that over her.
"I guess you can't censure me twice," she said with a lopsided smile.
He stared at her. "Why ever," he asked, with apparently genuine confusion, "would I have cause to censure you once?"
?? ??
She knew the man outside the glass.
It took her a few minutes to place him. Apparently oblivious, he gave her ample opportunity. The janitorial tech swept his mop back and forth in a lazy rhythm, whistling tunelessly to himself. She couldn't hear it, of course, but he looked like a man who would only whistle tunelessly.
He looked like a man she knew.
And then he passed by the mirror bolted to the wall across from her window, the mirror that was only just barely there, and a gurning rictus was barely there now too, and she knew who he was. It had been years since Philip Deering had come to F-A, years since their chance not-quite-meeting; his schedule was strictly regimented in a way designed to escape his notice, keeping him close to the central facility and out of harm's way. Because he wasn't really a janitor.
Philip Deering was a containment mechanism.
She thought about saying something. She was far enough from the glass, in the gloom, that he still hadn't noticed her yet. Probably he wouldn't, if what she'd read about him was true. That gave her a slight twinge; she knew what she knew because she'd been spying on—
The faint outline of Dougall Deering walked straight through his brother — shivering slightly, as though the air conditioning was a little too aggressive for his liking — and she realized how far she'd allowed herself to drift. She shouldn't even have noticed Phil. Phil didn't really exist. And with a final sweep of his mop, now dry, he exited stage left.
"What's wrong?" Dougall asked her this every time they met, now. There was never nothing wrong.
"Nothing," she said, as she always did. There was a little extra urgency to it now.
"Looks like more than that." He had a clipboard in his hand, no doubt full of thorny little AcroAbate problems too urgent or too sensitive to send down the pipe to Rydderech. Brain teasers for the brain in a jar. He glanced down and started flipping through the pages, already forgetting his own halfhearted concern.
You could say something.
The voice in her head was her own.
But you shouldn't.
That voice belonged to Xyank. She wouldn't have put it past him to actually implant the thought in her mind, except of course if he could do that, he could probably get her out of the damn incinerator, too. Would he? If he could?
"If there's something on your mind," Dougall had apparently finished reviewing his notes, "best spit it out before we get started."
Your brother mops the same halls, she imagined telling him, whether he's being chased by a mirror monster or not. Maybe he's mopping the halls of the dead, in your reality.
"I told you," she told him. "I've got nothing."
He grunted, and pulled up a tall stool so they could converse eye-to-eye. "Well, I hope you're better at science than conversation."
The first few problems were a welcome distraction.
The fourth was something she thought she'd explained to him years ago.
When she finished screaming, he was gone.
????
8 September
It happened again.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
It was a kilometre away, diagonal through soil and stone. She couldn't hear it. But she could hear it.
She didn't black out, because she couldn't. But she could wash it all out in red, and as long as she kept at it, the gashes and the pores would remain open until the floodgates closed at last.
Just to be safe, she didn't stop for five hours.
When she did stop, Dougall was there. With his clipboard. And his sneer.
She blocked him out, and poured herself into the nearest empty space.
It didn't stay empty for long.
She watched the images parade past, the dead-eyed husks and the shimmering not-men and the hollow-faced prisoners marching to who knew what horrible fate, and let the red run back out of her eyes as she watched the danse macabre go on.
If she squinted — and she had to, to keep focus — she could almost imagine their fates were worse than her own.
This time, she'd used the window. There was no hiding it now.
All her sins, transparent.
?? ??
"I really do think it would help if you told someone." Ngo's smile was as warm and trustworthy as any Ilse had ever seen.
"You can talk to me, you know." Anoki wasn't smiling, but his tone was rich with sympathy.
"It doesn't have to be me," Ngo continued smoothly. "Doesn't even need to be one of the therapists."
"We're trained to help you through things like this." Anoki didn't sound frustrated, and Ilse took it at face value. Well. Not really face value. She wasn't looking at his face. She was looking at the monitors, the ones he couldn't see.
"You could talk to Allan," Ngo suggested. "Or Udo, or Harry. You could even talk to Philip Deering. You can't tell him about his brother, of course, but—"
"You have to learn to trust me." Anoki was frustrated. His vocal training was simply winning out over the strain. "If I can help you get better, you can help yourself out of this bad situation."
"I'm not recommending a panacea," Ngo continued. She hadn't stopped speaking when Anoki had overridden her. "Therapy isn't a miracle. But it can make a big difference."
"If you want, I can outline—"
"Just tell me what—"
"Come back!" Ilse shouted, and both psychiatrists jumped. "COME BACK! They're not even real! I need you! I need you to be real! COME BACK!"
And they did. They did come back. Udo Okorie, with her shaved head. The tall man, also freshly shorn. The pillager with her toque and her leather jacket and her mistrustful eyes. They barely seemed to see her. Maybe she was just an outline, too.
The man said: "I say we figure out where the natives are hiding, and go hide with them."
The thief said: "I say we go back to the titration chambers."
Ilse said: "I say you stay here until I clear my mind."
In one world, Anoki was opening his mouth.
In another, Ngo was doing the same.
"No," she told them, waving dismissively, "not you. Please leave."
?? ??
It was only the three of them. She released her focus just enough to be sure. They were alone. Together. She was alone with them. She…
She slammed a palm into her forehead, and grunted. "We're good. Keep talking through it."
Udo shared a glance with Imrich, then continued outlining the requirements of their project. Ilse almost wrote what she was hearing on the window, then realized she was holding her pencil, not her brush, and also that she'd be summoning Xyank for a visit if she painted these particular theorems on the membrane between worlds. So she stepped to the left, grabbed a piece of floating paper, and wrote them against the wall.
"Are you good?" Corbin was in the corner, only the tips of her fingers on the glass, eyes still narrowed in suspicion. As though she was trying to picture a world that didn't feature a raving shut-in.
"I'm fine," Ilse murmured.
"Are you present?" Udo clarified. "No hallucinations?"
Ilse guffawed, still scribbling. "You're all hallucinations. I just prefer you to reality, right now. At least you're getting things done."
All three exchanged worried glances.
She slapped the window. Like the spectres of Anoki and Ngo, Udo and Sykora jumped. Corbin did not.
"I'm fine. I'm here." She scowled at them, each in turn, and finally spat: "I'm fucking locked in."
They weren't comforted, but they were at least convinced.
She used up most of that goodwill when she started speaking in tongues, running through mental math in code so no-one could understand it but her. Her, and the dead sister she'd devised the code with, a century prior.
Try though he might — and he was definitely trying, his piggy little face all tightened with concentration — she knew Trevor Bremmel would never be able to decode it.
"I'm a seer," she told him when the numbers ran just right. He started in surprise at the direct address. "Signs and portents from beyond."
He shook his head, then pressed on the glass so hard she thought he was trying to shift it out of its frame. "With that glossolalia? More like an oracle. Portal to the mad gods."
?? ??
It was probably for the best that Ilse hadn't ever had direct access to the Site archives, or SCiPnet.
"More than half," she repeated.
"More than half," Allan nodded. "There are no precise figures, of course. And at least one of the entities is still out there, presumably driving the numbers down even lower."
She marvelled at his composure. The man was saying that something like three billion human beings had died in the past year. Simply knowing the Site was overrun had been enough to drive her comfortably numb. This new information shocked her back to sapience. "What… do we do? About that?"
"I'm not sure, as yet." He said it casually, as though the matter hadn't yet occupied much of his attention, though the thick bags under his eyes and a new furrow in his forehead put the lie to that. "I was wondering if you had any suggestions, actually."
She laughed. "You're joking, right? I know less than any of you about what's going on."
He shook his head. "I don't think that's precisely true. I understand you're, ah, how do we put this delicately? Seeing things."
Ilse froze. It never took much effort. "There's been a lot on my mind," she said, slowly. "I'm better now."
"I've been speaking to someone." McInnis hesitated. He never hesitated, because he never did anything without thinking it through first. "I've been receiving some advice about how to structure our efforts, going forward. We discussed your situation…" He trailed off, leaving her room to object. She waited for him to continue, which eventually he did. "We discussed your situation, and he suggested you might be experiencing something unique in the way of temporal mechanics."
"If I was," she said, even more cautiously, "I wouldn't be able to tell you. Not without seriously jeopardizing the nature of reality."
"I understand." He raised his free hand in a placating gesture that nobody but him could have pulled off without awkwardness. "I'm not asking you to act counter to any established protocols — although of course, the establishment itself has gone rather by the wayside of late."
She acknowledged the point with a shallow nod.
"What I am asking," he smiled, "is for you to provide what advice you can about our best path forward. Consult and advise, within reason. It could mean a great deal to those who are left behind, trapped in this unfortunate scenario not of their making."
She scowled at him. "Playing the heartstrings is usually beneath you, Allan."
He shrugged. "Few things are beneath me now. We all may need to stoop, in the coming days. Because we are to be the bedrock of what comes next for our species, Ilse. The Cornerstone of a world refashioned from first principles to stand taller, stronger, and more proud. Can I count on your help, when the time comes?"
She considered. She wondered how she might stall for more time, then realized she didn't particularly want to. She was tired of keeping up appearances, and keeping secrets. "Fine. Yes. Of course. What else did you expect me to say?"
"I thought you'd at least pretend to be listening," Dougall snapped, and in an instant Ilse lost sight of Allan and snapped back to her best, least-tolerable reality. The smarmy scientist was glaring at her through his rimless specs.
"Uh," she said. "How much of that did you hear?"
"All of it. Every last meaningless utterance." He looked like he might cry, or else punch the glass. "If you weren't going to pay attention, you should have just told me so."
"I'm sorry, Dougall." She was sorry. She was sorry she'd slipped up so badly. If it had been anyone less self-absorbed than him, she might have been in real trouble.
Dougall shook his head in disgust, turned, and walked away. In his absence she could see Allan's faint outline, walking the other way. And in the centre of the frame, someone else. Someone taller than the Director — the Administrator, now — tall and rangy and twitching with nervous energy.
"Dougall, eh?" he smiled. She couldn't quite make out his features, no matter how hard she tried to focus. "Not as sorry as you're going to be, I'll bet."
When she finally brought the troubled world of nascent Cornerstone back into full view, the stranger was already gone.
?? ??
Izaak would have been proud to know his grand-daughter, Ilse was certain.
But would he have been happy to see her speaking with me?
Udo Okorie occasionally turned up with her AcroAbate homework. It was a technique very few of the junior researchers tried, as they adjusted to their jobs and the harsh training regimen. Most of them were either intimidated by her — this Ilse had on good authority — or considered her another potential subject for abatement — this Ilse simply assumed. Udo treated her like a friendly mentor figure, wanted Ilse to think respect was her primary motivation for visiting.
Really, of course, it was loneliness. Ilse could spot that a hall away.
Today the younger woman — the much younger woman — looked particularly overwhelmed. There was nothing in her present study of anomalous silicon leachate management to trouble her acute mind, so it had to be something else forcing little sighs and groans out of her as she paged through the reports. "I just…" Udo began, and then trailed off.
"What's really on your mind?" Ilse asked.
Udo's orange eyes — I wonder if her colleagues talk about abating her, too, behind her back — snapped up, and she looked guilty. "What?"
"You don't get blocked like this over basic science. Something else is getting your goat. What is it?"
For a moment, she thought Udo was going to make up a lie on the spot. The muscles in her face did some of the same contortions Dougall favoured. That made what she finally said that much more poignant. "I miss Dr. Deering."
Ilse had no idea what to say to that.
"Forget it." The amateur thaumaturge waved her own admission away. "I know you probably miss him too. You worked together for a long time."
"More like he worked for me," Ilse said, surprising herself with the flippancy.
Udo looked momentarily incredulous, then laughed ruefully. "I thought he was pretty smart," she said. There were tears, gleaming amber, filling her lower lids and holding surface tension for the moment. "I thought… I thought a lot of stuff about him that turned out not to be true."
Ilse nodded. She still couldn't say anything. Couldn't, shouldn't, wouldn't. But perhaps just listening was enough…
Udo's gaze suddenly locked on something faraway, even though she was only staring through the shallow incinerator window. She gathered up her notes, and walked away. All four or five of her, at the same time.
Synchronized.
Ilse groaned, and hopped up on the nearest table to await her visitor. This time Xyank came into view as a single individual, having already demonstrated his power once.
"What now?" she asked.
He looked offended. "You must be feeling better. Rudeness is a very high function."
She shrugged noncommittally.
"I've been having some intrusive thoughts," he admitted. "I—"
"You are intrusive thoughts."
That caught him up short for a moment, and he smiled to cover it up. "Very nice. What an acid tongue you've developed. You might try applying a base, before it rots your teeth. Then again, they will grow back."
"Okay." She nodded. "Fine. Sharing witticisms is boring. Point made. Go on. What am I not allowed to do now?"
"You are advised," he smiled insincerely, "to avoid giving certain… impressions, to your conversational partners, starting tomorrow."
"What's tomorrow?" she asked.
"An ending," he said. "Or so it will appear. I would ask that you not shatter that illusion. I must in fact insist on it."
She shook her head. "I have no idea what you're talking about. As usual."
"You will. Tomorrow." He rolled his shoulders, and then of course, checked his watch. "Remember," he said. "We're all searching for a happy ending. When your friends believe they've found one? By no means are you to correct their misapprehensions. It's better that they think the story ended. It all becomes rather discouraging when you see what ever after really looks like, and we need those agents of change secure in their convictions."
She wrinkled her nose. "Can't ever come right out and say what you mean, can you?"
He shook his head. "No. I cannot. And neither can you. That is the point."
????
8 September
For six minutes, all the outlines converged. For six horrible, wrenching minutes, she had a room with a view on a fused hobgoblin of half a dozen could-be universes.
For six straight minutes, she hammered her head on the glass. This time it was a comfort. A familiar routine.
This time, the six minutes lasted only a few hours.
When it was over, when she came back to her selves, when the lines had separated in her mind's eye as well as her window on the worlds, she saw the Administrator smiling down at her. Only he wasn't the Administrator. He was only Allan.
"It's over," he said. "It has been resolved."
And then he walked into view, stepped through himself, propped himself up on the window and told her: "It didn't work. I'm afraid we may be trapped here."
She unfocused her eyes until she could make contact with both of them, Director and Administrator, and said "We never know anything for certain."
They both nodded in tandem, as though she'd said precisely the correct thing.
?? ??
"You've been busy," she remarked.
Blank had the decency to blush. Bradbury was already glowing with pride. She held the small creature's hand up, and pressed it to the glass. Ilse heard a faint, contented burble, and something caught in her throat.
"Her name is Jennifer," the new mother smiled.
Ilse covered the infant's tiny hand with her own. "Hello." She didn't say the name.
Harry's hand passed through the back of his wife's hand, and obliterated his daughter's. "Holding up alright in there?"
Harry, the other Harry, the first Harry, well, the second Harry… CORNERSTONE Harry, O5-2, wiggled a finger in his daughter's face as he spoke. He was simultaneously stirring up the insides of his doppelganger. "We wanted you to be the first to see her," he admitted sheepishly. "Take her to the Oracle for her birthday. You can read the portents."
"Sure," she smiled. It felt like her lips were going to split. Both Harrys took this response differently; the one from what she knew, or believed quite strongly, to be baseline reality looked unconvinced but unwilling to press the issue. The new father only had so much attention to spare, with his cooing baby just inches away, and the perpetual distance in his eyes at all times since last September, so he missed the strain in her voice. But he did make eye contact, awaiting the verdict. Two sets of green-blue bored into her expectantly.
She closed her eyes.
"Everything is going to be fine," she said. "As long as you stick together."
She opened her eyes.
"Stick together," Harry Prime repeated. Harry-A was looking at his wife, and they were both smiling. Harry Prime continued, frowning slightly, "you mean, us? Allan, Lillian, me and the rest?"
"Of course we'll stick together," Harry-A said. He hadn't taken his eyes off Melissa, who nodded in support. "Why wouldn't we?"
"Exactly," Ilse breathed.
Again, both men nodded in apparent satisfaction.
Maybe theres's something to this oracle business.
And then Harry walked into view, eyes hollow with grief. "He asked her," he whispered, though only the final syllables came through as he roughly thrust his hand through two versions of himself to thump the glass. "That son of a bitch asked her again. And you know what she said?"
Then again, maybe remaining nonverbal was the right strategy all along.
The next week was a busy one in what she had to admit was likely baseline, and she neglected her other selves for a while. As O5-9 she was allowed to clear her calendar, and bar access to the hall outside the ADDC; as the pet researcher of Dougall Deering, she could arrange something similar at infrequent intervals.
Still, she wished they could have all come at once, so she could knock all three interviews over in a single afternoon.
Someone called Isabi wanted to discuss the budding field of Miscommunications. A man called Gat had a similar pitch about something called Surrealistics. A person called Alex Thorley asked her what the Department of Unreality was, and seemed very enthusiastic about her response of "I don't know?" All three of them wanted to pick her brain about trance speech, xenoglossy, superconsciousness and what Thorley called "sandwiches" but probably meant something else entirely.
She resolved to ask Xyank if he could do something about the security cameras in her hall, if he ever showed up again. Someone was definitely recording audio now.
?? ??
One of the outlines had been diverging more and more from baseline lately. There was an extra guard at each end of her hall, though nobody would tell her why. Some of her friends were now tight-lipped, and she'd engaged in an extremely tense discussion of memetics with a woman named Wheeler who wanted to know everything she knew about Bernabé Del Olmo. She had an inkling that something very wrong was going on at a very high security clearance level; she thought about asking one of the Allans about it, but she was still having trouble isolating the trouble timeline and bringing it into clear focus, and she didn't want to break the masquerade just yet.
So she was more than a little startled when one of the other outlines broke off. It wasn't that anyone was doing anything differently, it was more that they were… fuzzy. There was something wrong with their outlines. It was very, very subtle, and it was like none of the other visual anomalies she'd experienced as a side effect of her sextupled vision. It looked like she was seeing something that was actually happening over there. Out there.
It looked, though she couldn't quite explain it, like that something probably hurt.
?? ??
She'd started out thinking of Dougall's little projects as make-work. Something to keep her sane. But she'd noticed a curious bent, once she'd actually started paying attention to what she was working on.
In spite of what had happened, he was still fascinated with time. None of the devices he was having her design had any utility for temporal studies on their own, but when put together… It was concerning. It was as though he hoped to continue their work together, but without properly dealing his partner in.
And he was summoning an awful lot of resources to do it, too. Anything the fabbers needed, no matter how exotic. His post came with a great deal of prestige, and of course there was his long-gone accomplishment with AAF-D, but still.
Maybe they feel sorry for him.
That seemed difficult to believe. More likely he was using his little cheats to keep the heat down.
In any case, there was little damage he could do on his own.
"Yeah," she muttered to the far corner of the incinerator, as she turned the dead taps on and off for no particular reason, as though she could wash her hands of the whole thing with waters that had long since flowed out of reach, "to really louse things up, he needs me leading the way."
????
8 September
This time was different. Again.
As the six minute hour of the Breach came and went, the scalloped outlines exploded. There was screaming in the halls, loud enough to rattle the glass and be audible in her chamber. That, of course, was impossible. No human could scream that loud.
It was like the Site itself was screaming, and she was the only one who could hear it.
And then, suddenly, she could see it too.
She flew from world to world, blinking rapidly, squeezing her nails into her palms to produce occluding tears, desperately searching for any escape from what lurked on the other side of the glass. In Primeline, the Emergency Psychological Assessment Unit was rapid-firing questions she couldn't answer through their mics. In a better world, Dougall was saying something about how disappointing it was to be in debt to a genius who couldn't keep it together for more than a day at a time. In Cornerstone, O5-13 was begging her to calm down. She was needed. There was famine in Mesopotamia, and she had to read the portents. In the other breakaway, Lillihammer was howling about some sort of attack on the Frontispiece, an act of war in the noösphere she needed Ilse's help to combat.
Everything else was chitin, chelicerae and ganglia. Everything else. Everything else.
?? ??
If she didn't move, the worlds stayed still.
"I wish you'd talk to me." Alice Forth had been sighing for maybe half an hour, trying every possible tack to get Ilse's attention. Ilse didn't move. If she didn't move, the Earths didn't spin. At least, they stopped spinning around her. The fulcrum. The pivot. The part that didn't move, everything else swinging past on hinges. "I really need to know what's going on with you, so I can report back to the Council."
Ilse twitched. Outside the glass, the things surrounding Forth twitched too. Ilse kept her grip on the pencil loose, and spoke out of the corner of her mouth. "Please go away."
"Are you afraid of something?" Ilse's eyes must have been moving, because the other woman glanced over her shoulder at the empty air. "Are you seeing things that I can't see, Dr. Reynders?"
Ilse nodded, mostly with her eyes. It was a complicated, delicate gesture.
"I'm starting to worry that we're going to have to develop more containment procedures for you." Forth's purview, as Director of the Department of Temporal Anomalies, was anything that didn't seem to obey the standard rules of causality. "Long life is one thing, but I now suspect you've got a problematic relationship with time."
Ilse wanted to laugh out loud, but she knew they would hear. Knew the hall would smash shut, close against the glass, and skitter. So she said, instead, "I do. I always have."
Forth winced.
"Why," Ilse grunted, teeth clenched, lips barely parted, "didn't you visit me before?"
The Director glanced sideways, and didn't resume eye contact before responding. "Well," she said, "there was a question of purview?"
?? ??
"Can you repeat that?" she asked. It was practically a squeak.
Somewhere behind the writhing mass, Harry did try and repeat himself. It didn't come through any clearer than before.
She closed her eyes. "I think you'll have to come back another day."
There was a faint, muted response. He was still trying to reach her.
"I'm serious." Tears slid along her lids, like a letter opener through paper. "Please come back later. Please go. Please go."
KILL ME. Separately, the voices chittered. Together, they were quaking firmament.
Together, they, too, were Harold Blank.
?? ??
but even so there's still more anomalies in Patagonia than the locals can contain on their own, Gwilherm killed more than two thirds of listen to me for a second I could explain why a second experiment stands a much higher chance of understand? They're going to break the Veil, Ilse, they've already killed off practically every other Group of YOU ARE AN ABSCESS AND WE ARE THE MOUTH. YOU WILL BE EXCISED. WE ARE THE WHOLE sorry, truly I am, but they argued your credentials are a clear and present experiments Du's been doing? The clearances all check out, but it doesn't make sense to me that he'd need that much power for crawling all over me I'm crawling all over me I'M CRAWLING ALL OVER need your answer soon, if we're going to make a military deployment to I AM OVER IT IS OVER WE ARE OVER married in the spring. Stacey finally found out. I don't know why I'm even telling only one from the old CLIO workgroups who's still alive, I need to know if there's anything in Scout's old daughter in a world like this, she deserves to see things the way they used in good conscience let you keep pulling resources from Quantum Supermechanics in your state. If you could just be here when you want to talk, Ilse. We're all here for MY SKIN CRAWLS NORTH AND MY BONES CRAWL SOUTH probably nothing but if he really is just running simulations, why would he need that much security? It's almost time to TIME WE time you time for time enough time's up time she time
to
make
this
"STOP!" she screamed, and she didn't stop screaming until her lungs gave out and her eardrums burst.
I am the monad.
One of one.
There is nothing else.
There is no-one else.
I will not open my eyes.
I will not open my ears.
I will lie here, curled against the wall, out of sight, out of mind.
I am dead, and you are dead to me.
Every world is dead.
My only tool is broken.
I cannot fix it.
I am never getting out of here.
????
8 September
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Somewhere that didn't matter, above her, a voice said they had won. The voice spoke haltingly of spiders, and scratching spider bites, and being spiders. And forgetting about spiders.
But the song of the spiders rang out clear as ever, the cosmic status of a universe hanging by a thread of spun silk.
"Thank god it's finished," the voice concluded.
She spasmed on the floor, and spat with enough force that it streaked the window in front of them with phlegm.
"There is no God," she moaned. "There is no finish."
?? ??
"Tell me again," she croaked.
"Not a single one."
"Not a single what."
"Not a single breach. Not one. Not since…"
Not since Philip died.
"Population?"
"About seven billion."
"All people?"
"What?"
"Seven billion, all people?"
"Of course they're people. What else would they be?"
"No giftschreiber?"
"I mean… no more than usual. What are you asking?"
"No…"
"What?"
"No spiders?"
Dougall huffed. "I wouldn't say no spiders. Ilse, will you get up off that fucking floor and look me in the eye?"
?? ??
Like all predators, he waited until she was weak.
It was too long in her head. Too long without outside contact. When she finally relented, and stood up again, and looked Dougall in the eye, it was a relief. Not unambiguously positive; he was still him, and she was still her. But it was better than running in circles within her own mind.
She had successfully crafted something worse than looking out the window, something that made looking out the window almost palatable by comparison, and in her moment of relative calm he struck again.
This time he made Dougall get up and walk away before making his appearance. She was dying to know how he did that, forced people to leave without them realizing the impulse came from outside of themselves, but she wasn't going to ask. She had a feeling this would give Xyank some kind of satisfaction, and nothing he'd said or done made her want to do that.
"You slept in," he remarked mildly. Then he took a little grey disc out of his suit pocket, and affixed it to the top left corner of the glass.
She pointedly ignored the new addition. He was adding a second, to the top right, when she said: "Thought up some new rules for me to follow?"
He shook his head as he stuck a third disc on the bottom right. "I come bearing gifts today. It has reached my attention that you're not getting a lot done in there. That's no good. You have many responsibilities, Dr. Reynders. Important ones. You can't be letting all these people down, all of the time."
She found she had no opinion on his lectures anymore. She didn't care what he thought. "Uh huh," she said. Just so he wouldn't be waiting for anything more profound, and prolong their meeting.
He put the fourth disc in place, then reached into his pocket again and pressed something. He pointed at a spot on the glass. "Tap here, please."
She smiled at him.
"I did say please," he smiled back.
She waited a few more seconds, just to hammer home the point that he had no power to compel her action — she hoped, this is a man who can make every iteration of a person stand up and walk away without visibly doing anything — and then tapped where he'd indicated.
And gasped.
Xyank's outline went from what she had come to know as clarity, to actual clarity. No aura. No blur. She wasn't looking at synchronized selves anymore. She was looking at one man, in one timeline.
"Now here?" he said, tapping a space to the right. "And here, here, here, here, and here."
"What is this?" she breathed. Each tap created an almost imperceptible fluttering in her vision, and then nothing. But it wasn't nothing, of course. She was flicking between channels of Xyank. As she paged back and forth she did notice very faint differences in position and posture. "Oh, my god."
"Something we thought you might be able to get some use of," Xyank responded with a grin. "Because I know it's only going to get worse from here on out."
She froze.
He shrugged. "Doesn't count as a spoiler. I'm sure, deep down, you already knew."
"How do I turn this off?"
He tapped a spot above the row of invisible switches. She tapped it herself, and the fullness of Thaddeus Xyank reasserted itself. "Now, what sort of gesture would you prefer to activate these? Two fingers? Full palm? Perhaps something obscene?" He removed the control device from his pocket — it was just a little grey rectangle — and placed it on the glass beneath the rows. A glowing grey outline appeared around it.
She gave it a roll of the fingers of her right hand, from pinky to index. The light turned green, then disappeared.
Xyank recovered each of his devices. "Done. That should make it much easier for you to get through your day-to-day, don't you think?"
She nodded.
"What? No thanks?"
She nodded again.
He laughed. "So stubborn. I'd call it a virtue, but it's not like you developed it on your own. You were forced into stubbornness. You aren't able to give up. You have no choice but to persist."
She reached out of frame, from his perspective, to pluck up her latest collection of research notes. She made a point of reviewing them while he was still standing there.
He sighed. "I haven't been entirely honest with you, Ilse."
"You don't say." She didn't look up.
"This isn't truly a gift. I expect something in return. I expect you to stop pitching your little hissy fits and breakdowns. You're threatening everything we've worked on."
"Who is we?" she snapped, sending the papers spiralling away. "Who are you, really? Every other time I've interacted with the TAD, it's been through the mail. Rejection letters, mostly. They don't just pop in and install new AV equipment on a whim. They don't issue threats. They don't try to run the show."
"Not yet," Xyank said.
His synchronized selves became a little clearer in her vision as her eyes widened.
"Did you not already suspect? I'm disappointed. I'm not from what you see as the present day, Ilse. I've read quite a bit farther ahead than they can. In many ways they're rushing to catch up."
She found she had both hands on the glass now. "Can you tell me what happens next?"
He nodded. "But I won't. That's not how this works."
"Aren't you already violating causality by coming here and telling me things? Giving me things?"
"No," he said. "Because I was always going to do that."
"Don't," she growled. "Don't you cite that gotverdomme paradox at me."
He laughed again, but said nothing.
"If you really are from the future," she pressed, "can't you do more to help me than this? Can't you, I don't know. Tell me which angles to pursue? Help me with research? You could actually contribute to what I'm working on. You must know things about temporal mechanics I can use."
"I do," he agreed. "But I'm afraid that's impossible."
"Then why should I keep your secrets?"
"Because they're your secrets, too. And some day you'll be very cross with yourself if you don't cooperate."
She nodded. She tapped the filter on again, paged through the screens again. Considered.
"Thank you," she said. "Now, if you'll get out of my hair, I have a lot of work to do."
He inclined his head. "See you in the next frame, Ilse."
And he was gone.
She channel surfed once more. Vivian paying for my textbooks. Wynn desperate to get me out. Dougall doing my experiments for me.
Absolutely not.
She almost laughed out loud when the variegated hells began impinging on her vision again. Bring it on.
The pain wasn't so bad now.
Now that the pain was a choice.
?? ??
She pasted the sheets to the window, one by one, ignoring how the shimmering air outside the incinerator bounced away with each tremor in the glass, then swarmed up again to form the mockery of recycled current. She made sure they were all affixed tightly, then began pounding on the glass and didn't stop until someone came to see what was wrong.
When the guard — Yancy? — knelt to peek under the sheets, she stabbed the nearest one for emphasis and said "Du."
"Du," Yancy repeated. "Okay."
It took about half an hour for Du to arrive. When he did, she saw his silhouette scanning the formulae through the sheets. He didn't stoop to make eye contact, but he did press a finger to the glass. "This is going to deafen you," he said.
"Not quite."
"Near enough."
She nodded, though he couldn't see. "Exactly. Exactly right."
?? ??
The white noise generator piped a constant screech into the incinerator, and her ears began to bleed. She distracted herself by pulling out her hairs, one by one, and then pinching her flesh, and then stamping her feet, and grinding her teeth until they seemed about to shatter.
And then everything was pain, so nothing was pain, and her ears filled with blood, and she couldn't hear the silicate chirruping that had haunted her waking nightmare since
Since?
It was a word without meaning now. No since. No when. No tomorrow.
Only every excruciating moment.
"Does it work?" Du's voice was muffled, like he was swaddled in bedsheets and she was underwater. But she could hear him, so she nodded. "How long can you keep this up?"
Despair supplied an answer. The pain supplied another.
Ilse clenched her jaw, and gave her own answer to the wall of creeping static: "Longer than you can."
Nobody asked questions when O5-9 demanded they start projecting information on her window at a ninety-degree angle. When she wanted it upside-down in Dougall's domain, he shrugged and rotated the filters himself. In another life, Lillian would have been burning to know why Ilse needed reports delivered at two hundred and seventy degrees from upright. But she was haggard, drawn and defeated, so she did as bid and left it at that. Ilse devoured it all, all at once, a constant stream of data overlaid and braided into itself like an overarchiever's exam cheat sheet. There were answers in there. Somewhere, there were answers.
If there were answers anywhere, all she needed to know was everything.
Cornerstone's Directors, now called Architects, were the equivalents of Presidents and Prime Ministers in the old world. Every scrap of data from every world government, everything that had survived Gwilherm's purge, was open to her. The M5 Council — she hated the new name, and the implication that they were Masons, since it felt like mixing secret societies — was bristling at what they saw as her withholding vital information, but they were still her friends, and they still trusted her, so they told her all that they knew, too. The giftschreiber corruption spreading across one of the less-divergent of her alternate cosmologies was generating an incredible amount of data on the nature of cognition, unlocking secrets she'd never dreamed of while stirring humanity's noodle with Izaak and Arik. As long as Dougall still thought there was a chance to save his long-dead brother, he would continue to push her experiments through the stonewall he himself had erected against her rants and ravings. They hadn't had the heart to take back her security clearance in baseline, and so she had two universes of relative calm endlessly generating reams of potentially valuable information.
Against all odds, she was back in the race.
Because she couldn't stop.
Because the moment she stopped, she would really hear the white noise. Would feel the nosebleeds. Would see the pedipalps. Would lose herself, again. And
I.
Will.
Not.
Lose.
Again.
?? ??
But as though sensing the flickering projectors across a gulf of infinity, as though quantum locked to the particles of the other worlds, the living carpet of Anathema began to form its cheliceric photons into a new and compelling reflection. Un-words that shone with urticating portent. The spiders wished to parley.
So she had them shut off the white noise, and listened through the little burps of blood bubbles bursting in her ears.
You are an atom. The voices rang through the glass like nothing ever had before, because they weren't vibrating the air to speak. They were the air. A mote in a maelstrom. We are connected. We are connection. Endless, inseverable connection.
"You," she told the dust of seven billion dead, all the other people who had ever been in that sliver of severed existence, "are hell."
No, they hissed back at her. Hell is lonely.
And for a moment, the space between two instants, she wondered if becoming one thread in an araneaeic tapestry would really be worse than spending eternity in an incinerator.
So she yelled for the guard, and hummed until her ears popped as she waited for the white noise to drown her executive function again.
Which is ironic, the spiders told her in their last few seconds of airtime. When you think about it.
????
8 September
BOOM.
They'd gotten it wrong again. The agents of change were on their way to a new frontier of suffering.
She was perversely excited for whatever new pain this ended up being.
The changes from baseline became most obvious when the Survivors arrived, every time. Every time except this one.
At first, she wondered if they really had messed up. Then she was certain they hadn't. This outline had never strayed far from prime, so similar in every respect that she'd barely ever been able to focus on it individually. Wasn't even sure it represented anything unique; perhaps it was just a halo of lag around the proper course of things.
When they finally told her what had changed, she laughed in their faces. They, of course, looked stricken.
Ilse was ecstatic.
?? ??
She spent a little while longer with the Survivors in what they were already calling Timeline 5243-C. The dead worlds were nothing more novel than sports seasons at this point, now that there were three — at least so far as the others knew. When she was sure there was little she could contribute to their conundrum, at least scientifically, she cast her wandering eye over the other options in search of appropriate stimulation.
But not before asking them to project a few slow-scrolling databases on her window at a forty-five degree angle, of course.
Cornerstone was in something of a lull. The Pacification of Oceania had been a major blow, but there were promising signs of reversal. She spent a few minutes checking on the Survivors in Primeline, wondering what their imperiled walk-ins would say if they knew she could see the course of "true" reality before they'd even managed to restore it. Then, when she could bear the distant hiss of the Anathema no more, she focused on the only universe where her grasp extended beyond the window sill.
It took three hours to get through to Dougall, and when he finally arrived, his arms were crossed. He was the kind of man who liked it when you saw his mood at a distance. The kind of man who wanted you to know how he felt, because it was important to him, so it ought to be important to you. Oh, how she loathed him.
And missed him.
"Missed me?" he laughed, bitterly. "You've been avoiding me for weeks. While I run your backlog. Massage your data."
"You don't massage data," she sighed. "Unless you're trying to make it lie."
He shook his head, as though expelling her from his thought processes. "Shut up. Just… just shut up. Do you realize what it's been like? Being out here, while you're stuck in your own little world?"
She stared at him. "You can't possibly expect a response to that."
He threw up his hands. "No! Exactly! I can't possibly expect a response, from you. The little graven Buddha in the window. The golden girl who doesn't ever deign to speak. You've ascended to a higher plane of existence, and the line is always busy now. What do I get out of praying to an absent god, Ilse?"
She blinked, rapidly. "I'm not a god. I'm just…"
He slapped the glass, and she flinched back. "You're what? What are you, Ilse Reynders? Where do you go, when you're not with me? Who are you in there?"
She bit her lip.
He waited.
"I'm tired of waiting," he finally snarled. He rapped his knuckles on the glass, one last time. "If you don't respect me enough to tell the truth, we might as well never have met."
"No," she said, and the rest came out all in a rush. "I'm sorry. There's been a lot… I've… I've been dealing with a lot, Dougall. I do respect you. I still need your help. I need… I…"
"You need," he agreed. "That's what this has always been about. You're nothing but a parasite in a bug zapper, Ilse. Maybe we'd both be happier if it had fried you right the first time."
She wanted to believe it was a look of regret, the last look he gave her before stalking down the hall and out of sight.
But then, he had always looked regretful. So maybe it wasn't for her.
?? ??
Ilse barely knew the All-Sections Chief.
She knew it was unreasonable, but the title alone made it hard for her to want to speak with him. It had once belonged to one of the worst men she'd ever known, and this man appeared to have no other name by which she could call him. Of course, he couldn't have been farther from Falkirk in appearance or demeanour: broad and strong where the other was narrow and brittle, friendly and open where the other was cruel and secretive. As the Director's deputy, he had few reasons to visit the incinerator outside of the regular rounds, and the regular rounds only brought him to her once every two or three years. In his other capacity, as inter-departmental liaison, he had similarly few reasons to bother her.
Today, he had a reason. "Do you recall your early work on the properties of copper-M, doctor?"
Lake Huron is inhabited by SCP-5494, a species of chimeral panther-esque entities described in the native inhabitants' oral history. These entities exude an unique anomalous substance known historically as "copper-Mishepeshu" (later identified as an anomalously-metastable isomer of 63mCu) which does not decay under typical conditions. Copper-M only undergoes radioisotopic decay in the presence of physically- or chemically-anomalous materials; the energy released in this process purifies nearby compounds of anomalous imperfections, resulting in the detoxification of contacted effluence. Besides these properties, copper-M behaves chemically identically to typical 63Cu, forming the same compounds and remaining soluble under the same conditions.
Originally constructed as a standalone treatment plant, Acroamatic Abatement Facility A acts as the Site's sole receptacle for irregular offsite waste. In the event that effluence from other locations does not justify specialized abatement, and can be safely transported to Site-43, it is delivered directly to AAF-A's initial purification chamber via overhead funnel. Lakewater is pumped into the facility's water filtration spheres, stored, and supplied to the aforementioned chamber, where initial purification occurs. This abates toxicities to a minor extent, combining effluent material with copper-M and allowing for safer transport.
More toxic effluence accumulates more copper-M, which decays into typical copper upon interaction. This allows materials resistant to initial abatement to be filtered by density and toxicity, as still-toxic materials sink to the bottom of the dropoff chamber and are drained for further processing. The chamber then flushes solids and oil-based liquids into special treatment, where they are further decomposed by the addition of nitric acid (HNO3). This combines with the copper-M-lakewater to form copper-M-nitrate (63mCu(NO3)2 (aq)), breaking down effluence and causing more copper-M to neutralize toxic substances. The substances are soaked in special treatment, often for several hours, until the sum toxicity of the chamber reaches typical levels, after which sulfate is removed from the solution via electrolysis. The solution then joins water-soluble materials in general treatment, where waste is centrifuged from spent copper, toxically re-measured, and voided into the Lake.
"Of course. What about it?"
"The Acroamatic Abatement Group is holding their annual gala in three months' time."
She made a show of glancing at the side walls. "My schedule's free," she said. "But transportation will be an issue."
He smiled. He could have won an unflappability contest with McInnis, who would otherwise clear all competitors. "This year's theme is 'NO FUTURE'. It concerns drastic solutions to the rapidly worsening situation faced by esoteric waste specialists."
Ilse frowned. She'd kept up with the literature, of course, but she didn't share some of the more pessimistic prognosications she'd seen. "We're decades off from it being a serious problem," she said. "I think it's a little early to be looking for miracle cures."
Because if it isn't, I'm practically a criminal for not ginning one up myself.
The ASC nodded. "Well, some of your colleagues are very excited by the potentialities. They are planning to build on your early work with copper-M, and what Chief Nascimbeni achieved in AAF-D, to suggest global applications."
"Global?" Ilse sniffed. "Copper-M only occurs in one place on Earth."
"Yes."
She stared at him. "You want me to help these people think of ways to, what? Drain the lake, kill the panthers, and take all the copper? Put a bounty on Mishepeshu tails?"
"That is one possible outcome of their research," he allowed.
"It's an unacceptable one." She felt her free fingers clenching. "You, of all people…"
She paused.
He waited.
Oh.
She nodded, suppressing a smile. "I'll see what I can come up with. Send them over if they want to talk."
"I appreciate your spirit of collaboration." The big man clasped his hands together in front of him. "In the meantime, I understand you have outstanding materials requests for the replacement copper-M pipes still in J&M's storage." He almost smirked. "Since you're going to be working on a related project, I'm certain nobody will object to my authorizing that requisition."
She almost laughed. "I'd appreciate that."
"Think nothing of it." The Chief breathed out, slowly. "And once you find yourself up for travelling, doctor, I know the people of Kettle Point will be pleased to make your acquaintance. You have a few brief appearances in their stories already."
The image of the cryptic woman in the beaded jacket flashed across Ilse's eyes. "I'll take them up on that," she said. "Just as soon as I have something to show for my efforts."
"Some of the most important results never show at all," he reminded her.
?? ??
"It's a question of work/life balance," she explained. And she tapped at the holoprojected keyboard on the bottom of the glass, firing off another packet of code.
"What's there to balance?" Billie Forsythe was sitting on the floor beneath Ilse's diplomas. "It's all just work, now. No life."
Above the keyboard, a message flashed. Data received. Ilse smirked; Veiksaar had become even more terse since becoming the Foundation's number one tech person. She was deep in the bowels of Site-15 now, trying to set up an international telecom system resistant to the thaumonuclear fallout presently playing havoc with all unshielded electronics on Earth. "That isn't true. Just because your horizons are more limited, doesn't mean there's less room for you to move." She started tapping out the next lines of code, knowing that on the other end, Veiksaar would be doing the same. "Think of it this way. Before, you could go out on the town—"
"I couldn't," Billie interrupted. Her mother hadn't let her out of the Site since she was very small.
"I'm speaking generally." A visual ping alerted her to an incoming connection request from Bremmel, who was working on stabilizers for the Amurian plate, compensating for the disappearance of the island of Japan straight down to the ocean floor. "People could go out on the town, when they felt cooped up. Well, now there are no other towns. Reality begins and ends with Site-43."
"My reality always did," Billie snapped.
"Even better!" Ilse crowed, as she slotted Bremmel into her calendar with a few more taps. "Now everyone else is caught up with you. Remember, Billie. You define the parameters. You decide how much is too much. And how much is enough."
The scrawny woman wrinkled her bulbous nose, but didn't argue. "What are you tapping at, anyway?"
"Work/life balance," Ilse repeated with what she hoped was a suitably mysterious wink.
I'm going to get you out, a voice whispered, and it was all she could do not to scream.
She was beginning to think that Dougall had a point.
It started at Karen Elstrom's funeral. She was the first of the M5 Council to go down; in between managing every inch of Cornerstone's admin, she'd dedicated a little personal manpower to finding all the cigarettes remaining in the world and stockpiling them for abatement. Nothing acroamatic, just incineration. One of the least interesting, but still quite abhorrent, of the dirty little secrets they'd discovered with access to the old O5 database was that a cure for nicotine addiction had been found ages ago, but was just anomalous enough that it had been sat on indefinitely. Cornerstone gave it away for free, and paid in global scrip for every packet turned in. Karen had calmly and coolly presided over the eight most challenging years in modern history, and then died of lung cancer without anyone else on the Council having ever realized she was sick, or even still smoking.
Allan had asked if Ilse, as their resident prophet, might say a few words. She had declined; the only words she could find, nobody would want to hear. And anyway, she wasn't really resident.
It concretized when human faces, human voices began emerging from the writhing morass. They would never again be whole. They would always be part of the whole.
It became set in stone when she saw the hydroponics forecasts, and the local birth rate. One thousand people was enough to form a stable population, with access to sun and earth and water and seeds and animals.
They had access to water.
By the time the Foundation was implementing Protocol Ophiucus to wipe out all memory of the giftschreiber, in a last-ditch effort to preserve the Veil, Ilse found it frighteningly easy to shrug it all off.
Because as far as she was concerned, they were all ghosts already. All of them, in every timeline. They were doomed. Their lines would end. The Survivors already thought they had, and they were the only real source of agency those worlds would ever know.
There was only one nagging question left.
Which of the remaining worlds would distinguish itself as the last one standing? Where did the thread of continuity lead?
No matter how much pushback she faced, no matter how hard Dougall campaigned against her, she had a feeling she already knew.
Because the Survivors might be the breath of life to the deadlines, for as long as they lingered, but their place of origin was collapsing at an only marginally slower rate.
What they called baseline, she called a dead end.
????
9 September
"But why?" Nascimbeni needed to know. Needed her to tell him. They all did.
"I don't know," she lied to them. Lied to the dead men and women whose own selves had left them to a dead world, without even meaning to. The crew of a doomed spaceship in a starless sky. "But I can tell you one thing for sure."
"What's that?" Ibanez asked. Ilse had never seen the indominable Chief so utterly lost.
"It'll look better in the evening."
Of course, there was no morning or night there that they didn't create themselves.
But Ilse was right.
The next day, just before 6:27 in the evening, by the Site chronometers, the Survivors' shed skins suddenly forgot why they had been so certain their frantic actions on the eighth of September would save them all.
They would soon come, as the others before them had done, to consider the past year a strange streak of madness. The sense of having been someone outside themselves. Of voices in their heads, familiar at the time, now irretrievably foreign.
But they would not forget the hope, and they would not forget how it had felt to watch it die.
Ignorance was a comfort, but still worlds away from bliss.
?? ??
She'd thought she had it on lock.
She hadn't used Xyank's device once. She only occasionally needed the white noise. She saw what she wanted to see. She had compartmentalized so well, it was almost like there was half a dozen of her, one for each reality. She almost never slipped.
And then one day, while briefing the rest of the M5s on her prognostications for the Oceanic Famine, she heard the voice.
I'm going to get you out of there.
Her breath caught in her throat.
"Ilse?" The Administrator's voice was, as always, like a warm balm. "Do you need a moment?"
"No." She shook her head to emphasize the response. To make it true. "No, I'm fine."
I'm going to get you out.
She could see him in the reflection.
"I'm going to," he said, and his hair was fiery red in the glass, and she actually whimpered.
?? ??
Everyone has their breaking point.
She wished she could forget the rant, when she was spent, but her brain cells didn't work that way.
She hadn't told them everything. That would have been impossible. At this point she couldn't even hold all the memories in her head at the same time. And there was just enough of the compartmentalization still intact, as she shrunk away from the spectre of Wynn Rydderech banging on the window and begging her to come play, for the memories themselves to resist her impulse to pour them all out.
But she told them enough.
Not enough for them to understand. Not enough to compromise anything. Just enough for them to know that she was not alright, would never be alright.
Just enough to win her another house call.
This time she kept her back to the wall beneath the window. He loomed over her, his shadow slipping through the sill to darken the floor in front of her. "You know," said Xyank, "I've had a lot of latitude for dealing with you. You're something of a personal project. But this sort of thing? It makes the stakeholders very nervous."
She didn't respond.
"They have to believe their counterparts are dead. I thought you understood that."
"It's too much," she whispered.
"If you really mean that, there are other possibilities I might explore."
She blinked away the tears. "I can't do this anymore."
His voice was cheerful. "That's fine. I'll put my contingencies in motion, then."
"What contingencies?"
This time, he didn't respond.
She hauled herself up, half-expecting him to be gone. But he was still there. Waiting for her to rise, as he'd known she would. Maybe he read it in a history book. Maybe one he'd written. "What contingencies?"
"If you insist on pouring out your heart where the Survivors can hear it, well. Their duties are vital to multiversal maintenance, but there's nothing saying it needs to actually be them doing it."
She gaped at him.
"Say the word," he smiled. "Tell me you really, truly can't keep up the façade, and I will replace them all. Relieve them of their troubles as well. Is that what you want?"
Udo, who would never come to terms with her dead lover's legacy. Lillian, whose mentor was gone. Harry, who would never know his daughter. Allan, whose best self would be forever out of reach. All of it because of her.
"No," she said.
"No?"
She pictured them all. The ghosts, and the living. What if they were all ghosts? All waiting to collapse into true, persistent forms?
What if she was, too?
"No." She brushed her labcoat smooth. "No. It's fine. I am fine."
He nodded. He didn't look the slightest bit surprised. "Good. We all have our parts to play, remember that."
The words were like lightning.
She found, to her shock, that she already did remember.
?? ??
It was time for another betrayal.
She smiled when he approached the window, and as she always did, placed one palm against her side.
He reciprocated the gesture, as he always did. "You're looking relaxed." Allan always looked relaxed.
So far, so good. "I am," she lied. It sent a thrill of horror through her. "I am very relaxed. It's stopped again."
It took no effort at all to convince him the trouble had passed from both of their lives. Probably he wanted to believe it. Possibly he'd been told to, if Xyank had made good on his threat.
She pictured Rydderech, going out of his mind, unable to tell anyone. She imagined the endless feed of tortured nonsense dancing up the fibreoptic feed from his cavernous tomb, and all the heartless safeguards put in place to prevent him from ever finding a mote of relief.
"I take it the bad dreams have passed, then," McInnis was saying. She'd been responding on autopilot while she sulked.
"The waking nightmares are over, yes. Again."
His lips pursed. "I think it would be for the best if you didn't share that information with the others."
So, Xyank had gotten to him. She affected dull surprise. "Really. Why?"
"It might be a cause of some distress to realize that everyone we interacted with for an entire calendar year has effectively died."
Which, of course, they hadn't. Yet. But the First Law of Thermodynamics meant they absolutely would, eventually. It was no great crime to tell her friends that their doppelgangers had perished in a painless instant of cosmic rearrangement. But they were making something of their broken worlds, and it hurt a little to pretend like all that work had been for naught.
Probably not as much as obliterating the multiverse would hurt, she allowed. For all intents and purposes, then, the lie was preferable. Even paramount.
This single lie enabled all truths, from a certain perspective. If Xyank wasn't also lying. But his persistent skulduggery suggested that crossing him might not be the best idea. If the Survivors knew too much, what was to stop him from popping in, cutting their throats, and popping out again?
Would not in that case the truth be the worst betrayal of all?
Allan was still speaking. "I believe, in some sense, that the experiences of the dead timelines—"
She interrupted. "Let's call them deadlines."
And better you believe they are.
?? ??
"It just doesn't make any sense."
Nascimbeni was glowering at his work tablet. Veiksaar was doing the same. Ilse might have been touched that they were including her in this little head-to-head, considering how many removes her own head was at, if it hadn't been so inconvenient.
Because they were both completely unintelligible.
Because they were both there twice.
Nascimbeni was generally speaking about equipment failures. She caught something about electronic door locks, and a lot about shielded conduits that were failing well below their stipulated tolerances. Veiksaar was on about junk code and permissions breaks, the thinking machines of the Site thinking strange and problematic things. One set of them was frustrated.
The other was frantic.
On most days she could focus on one or the other and stand a good chance of not missing anything important. But right now they were both blathering on, and expecting her input, and both situations seemed equally important.
Except that one of these Nascimbenis, and one of these Veiksaars, was a ghost. That would have squared the circle, except that she didn't know which was which, and she refused to make use of Xyank's cheat, and there was no way for her to convey information to one and not the other. She was looking into the alleged baseline of reality, and the single dead end that had refused as yet to branch off from it.
Maybe this was the branching-off point.
"And it's worse every year," one of the Nascimbenis finished. She was able to make it out because the other had something in his throat, so his own statement was more of a growl. A bassline, over which the treble could be discerned. That voice finished with "—almost like something is playing with us."
That was interesting.
"Can you elucidate?" she asked, knowing what was bound to come in response.
Nascimbenis opened their mouths. She heard something like: "The damage is someone every year intentionally damaging the Breach the systems that I'm not right after the Breach at."
She nodded. She was tempted to hit the hidden switches for Xyank's channel flipper. But she didn't. "Bear with me. Can you paraphrase?"
Nascimbenis frowned, but did as they were bidden. "It's like are signs some intentional plicative effect by someone who knows causes everything exactly a little less well function each passing tracks perfectly."
Blessedly, only one of the Veiksaars had anything to say about that. The other simply nodded. "If they're covering their tracks perfectly, what makes you think it's sabotage at all?"
Ilse sighed inwardly.
The Nascimbeni who had been addressed responded. "I don't know." He looked exhausted. "I just… I can feel that there's something behind this. Someone." The other Nascimbeni looked to her, still waiting for a response.
So. Sabotage in one timeline, and some sort of unexplained effect achieving much the same end in the other. What did that add up to? What could she tell them both, that they would both find useful? That wouldn't break her pact with Xyank, and bring down his implacable wrath on them all?
"Nothing," she said out loud. Eight eyes narrowed at her, and she made it a sentence, since she was already speaking. "—is coming to mind. I'm sorry."
The second sentence, at least, was not a lie.
?? ??
Part of her hadn't fully written Dougall off yet, didn't really believe he'd written her off either. She had molded him — they had molded him — into someone at least nominally capable of discharging his duties, but she had always been the driving force behind his work. He had no real notion of what avenues to follow without her guidance, no particular spark for scientific research. He'd be back eventually. The only question, in that particular mental compartment, was whether she'd help him when he came crawling.
He didn't come crawling.
He delegated the crawling to his wife.
Ilse wasn't even sure at what point Dougall had gotten married. Probably after their most recent falling-out. But she was an expert at noting differences — the space outside the incinerator was basically a lifelong before-and-after puzzle to her — so she noticed the golden band immediately, and knew she was speaking to Udo Deering.
She knew the other woman was married to Dougall specifically because of the bags under her eyes, and the fact that she was doing the man's dirty work. It was beneath her as a full researcher. Her husband was treating her like a junior.
"What?" Udo's amber eyes widened. "What makes you think that?"
"Because these aren't your papers." Ilse swiped on the window, and the transparencies obligingly rolled back and forth. "This is Dougall's clinical prose. Yours is cleaner, and your theories are better besides. And you're years past doing homework. Your training is over. This stuff you want me to look at? Your boss told you to."
"My husband," Udo murmured. Ilse's stomach fell at the confirmation, even though it had been foregone. "And he asked, as a favour."
"Why can't he just come down here and show me himself? He's my boss, too."
Udo looked uncomfortable. "He thinks you hate him."
Ilse snorted in disbelief. "He's the one who ranted and stormed off."
Udo nodded. "You do hate him, though. Don't you?"
Ilse didn't answer. Instead, she kept paging through the documents. "This is honestly what he's working on? It's way above his pay grade, and his level of competency." If what she was seeing was correct, Dougall was looking into temporal mechanics. The abatement of chronological material, and how that process could be used as a source of electricity. "These concepts… they've all been rejected a dozen times. You can't use this kind of effluence for proper power generation, because it always carries a temporal payload as well. What got him onto this?"
Udo shrugged with obvious affectation. "He's been looking at a lot of weird stuff lately. Most nights—" She swallowed, as though verbally backtracking some sort of mistake. "Most of the time he's got his head deep in papers from Ontokinetics or the DTA. He's not sleeping, or at least not enough. Something's eating at him. I thought you might be able to help."
Ilse raised a brow. "So he didn't ask you to show me his papers?"
Udo winced. "He did, but I only agreed because I want to know what the hell he's up to."
Ilse sighed. "Udo, he's always been up to something. I have inklings of what it might be, but it wouldn't be appropriate to speculate." She kept talking to forestall the question in the other woman's eyes. "But you're not wrong about this. This is strange. Dougall loves to talk about himself. The only times I've seen him really be cagey…"
His past, which was still a mystery to her.
And his triumph, the disaster he'd somehow stopped.
"Hmm," she said.
"Hmm?" Udo prompted.
Ilse started paging through the sheets again. "Nothing. Nothing yet. I'll get back to you if I find anything."
She didn't find anything.
An hour after Udo left the window, technicians from I&T came and dismantled Ilse's projector. The Chief of Applied Occultism had accused her of procuring sensitive files, and her credentials had been revoked pending review.
She decided not to contest it.
She had credentials Dougall Deering couldn't touch, and she relished the thought of him waiting for an angry letter that never came.
There was sometimes a yin and yang to the deadlines.
Cornerstone was still slowly re-establishing its presence worldwide. As the de facto global government, they had the right to re-open their moribund facilities or build new ones, but they enforced their will as rarely as possible, preferring instead to negotiate. Region by region, they rebuilt their strength, in cooperation rather than through imposition.
Meanwhile, the Foundation in what she was now resigned to thinking of as timeline 5243-D — it was disheartening, knowing such a thing existed before the error that had prompted it had even occurred, and frustrating not to be able to tell someone — was slowly losing ground to the giftschreiber. Sites going dark. Nations turning against them. They were responding admirably to the challenge; not as admirably as Cornerstone, but better than she would have expected. The Foundation was retrenching on its core principles, and backing off on the more ambitious, borderline fascistic impulses that had characterized much of this new century. She could almost imagine this somewhat shrunken, more idealistic version actually improving the quality of human life, rather than merely sustaining the status quo. But it was still, in the end, the Foundation. It was still keeping secrets, as those secrets slowly ate it up.
As one expanded, the other retracted. It was hypnotic. Was there some deeper meaning to this little dance? Were these worlds connected to each other in some manner beyond the obvious? Were they really halves, or smaller splinters, of a greater whole?
Would it ever be possible to reintegrate them, without destroying the lot?
What would happen if you could travel between them? Who would you become?
Each deadline faced seemingly insuperable obstacles to success. Cornerstone was working with a vastly reduced human population, and a world shattered by occult war. The spiders were the spiders. Spaceship 43 was adrift in a void with dwindling supplies. This better Foundation was dwindling from sheer attrition. The supposed baseline of temporality was being eroded to nothing by the annual increase in the entropy of what it called SCP-5243, the breach that kept on breaching. Was it possible the secrets to their success could be found not separately, but in the whole?
Was it possible to free these prisoners of fate from their interminable isolation?
She had to hope so.
?? ??
"What do you think?"
Ilse thought Eileen Veiksaar looked a mess. Her hair was tangled, her eyes were red-rimmed and her colour was off. She knew why. She'd seen Scout like this a few times, over the last three decades of his life.
"I think you're still doing the best you can," she said instead.
Veiksaar shook her head. "That's not how we measure this. This is our second… this is one of our most valuable assets in containment, fuck, shit, piss, I didn't mean—"
"It's fine." Ilse wanted to hug the woman. She wanted to hug anyone, really. She also wanted to slap her. She wanted to slap anyone, really. "I know what I am. Keep going."
The slip had made the other woman even more miserable. An active sort of misery, to compliment the passive. "Sorry. Sorry. Uh, he's valuable. Extremely valuable. It's sick and it's twisted but that's how it is. And so my best? That's not what anyone is interested in hearing about. He needs to be operating at his best. And I need to figure out how to get that out of him."
Ilse found this callous description of her suffering friend's handling more risible than the implication that she herself was a subject in containment. It wasn't Veiksaar's fault, though she had been managing this particular act of cruelty for over a decade now. She tried to keep her voice steady as she responded. "You see these messages here, and here?"
You let this gulf grow between us. You denied me three times. I forgave you, out of love. And how do you repay me now?
Chlorinate the pool. Kill all the little bacteria. Never get swimmer's ear again.
Veiksaar nodded.
"The first one isn't about you. He's talking about Vivian leaving for Canada, not you keeping him down in the dark. He keeps himself down there. Don't forget that. It's important."
"We're not helping," Veiksaar reminded her.
"We're not," Ilse agreed. "And we should be, and we probably could be, if they'd let us, therefore we are hurting. But that's not what he's talking about. This is just another message addressed to a dead man." It still hurt to think of Scout that way. Mostly she preferred to believe he'd just gone on another ride, chasing after Thilo Zwist in the general direction of the setting sun. "And the other one? It's not him morbidly musing on how to end the human race so we stop bothering him."
Veiksaar sighed for so long, it almost seemed comical. She seemed to lose a few pounds. "Thank god. What is it actually about?"
"Chlorinating an actual pool. He was one of the first to do it. He got swimmer's ear at university, and was testing the water when Vivian walked in. That was how they met."
"I see." Veiksaar sat down in one of the visitors' chairs. Only her faced peeked up over the window. "I still don't know how to sort all this out. What makes him go off on these flights of fancy? What causes him to dissociate and think Scout is still alive?"
"I wish I knew," she answered honestly. "He needs an anchor, I think. Something to tie him to our world." Whichever one that is. "But we can't go down there, because it's non-Euclidean and we've lost people before, not to mention the fucking Council won't allow it." She was almost as surprised as Veiksaar to hear the profanity from her lips. "The point is, it's too easy to drift away when you can't tell what's real and what isn't."
She was aware of the irony, of course. At this point, virtually everything she said carried similar connotations. The joys of giving advice on containment, from containment.
"I wish you were out here," Veiksaar said finally. "I wish that in general, obviously. All of us do. But right now? I wish you were out here, so you could take care of him."
Ilse forced a laugh. "If I were out there, Chief, I'd definitely be taking care of him. But not the way the Foundation wants."
Veiksaar raised an eyebrow. "You'd try setting off SUNDOWN again? Killing him?"
"I like to think we'd have a chat, first. But if that was still what he wanted? And I knew it was him asking? Absolutely I would."
"I always knew I could trust you," Wynn grinned.
Her eyes filled with a shield of tears.
She couldn't see Veiksaar anymore. She couldn't see the rest of the hall. All she could see was Wynn Rydderech, with his red hair and gentle smile. And wide, mad eyes. "I'm going to get you out of there," he said.
"This isn't happening," she whispered.
"Not yet," he agreed. He glanced to the side, shook his head as though answering an unheard question, then turned back to her. "We're still working out the fine details. And I have a few more appointments with Lillian."
"Lillian?" Ilse repeated. She had no idea what else to say.
Wynn nodded. "Yesterday. In the yester-days." He squinted. "Is this the wrong me? I hope this is the right me. There's only the right you, thank God." He chuckled. "Hang in there. It's about to get very bad."
And then he was gone.
For a moment, she thought that Veiksaar was gone too. But when the blurry hall fully reformulated, she realized the Chief of I&T had merely dashed to the redline phone connecting to P&P.
Ilse was going to have to spend the next hour putting a psychologist's mind at ease.
Which was going to be an impressive feat, given the state of her own.
The best timeline was rapidly becoming her worst.
She was still convinced it had the strongest potential to become the new baseline. 5243 was playing merry havoc with everything in Primeline, and the deadlines were well beyond the pale by now. But it was almost impossible to get anything done under the regime of Dougall Deering, and eventually she was going to need to do something about that.
She was by now convinced that there was only one way for her to escape the incinerator. She didn't know the mechanics. She didn't know the means by which she would achieve it. After seven decades studying very little else for any great stretch of time, she still hadn't had her eureka moment. But she knew she eventually would. That knowledge was the only thing keeping her from finding a way to perpetually damage her body so that it never recovered the energy to populate her consciousness.
The only way she was getting out was if she got out in every timeline.
This would, of course, strand most of her in strange lands. One of those strange lands was an absolute nightmare. She could get used to that. She was an old hand at nightmares. Perhaps her consciousnesses would remain linked after they emerged. Perhaps her selves in better straits could lend strength to the denizens of the dire. Perhaps not. The most she could do was devise a means of self-obliteration that would be actionable in Spiderline, to give that least fortunate self a means of ultimate escape.
The perfect world was the biggest sticking point. Though her research credentials had been mostly restored — "You think you can cut off the second-smartest person in this facility? You uttermost dipshit?" Director Lillihammer had snarled at Dougall, according to Harry's gleeful recollection — he had managed to poison most of the Foundation's hierarchy against her. His record of stability versus hers made the math quite simple. She was a tool, like Rydderech. She was not to be trusted. She was not to originate anything. And she was going to have to, if she was going to get out in every dimension.
She could make it work..
It was only a local problem.
And she was a multiversal constant.
?? ??
"Hypothetical," Elstrom said.
Ilse nodded. "Okay."
The Director of Spaceship-43 — they hadn't actually rechristened it, of course, that was just what everyone called it — looked immaculate as ever. She had a way with affect that did most of the work most people needed makeup to achieve. She could hold herself in such a way as to eliminate the signs of exhaustion. She could arrange her features into a mask through which no despair could shine through. But she vibrated a little with the tension of holding it all together, which was how Ilse knew it was only an act.
Either that, or the woman actually had tremors. Thank god they abated all the cigarettes for parts — for real — already.
"Your condition." Elstrom indicated the incinerator, unnecessarily. "Have you figured out the mechanics of how it happened?"
Ilse nodded. "More or less. It's the reversal that I have trouble with."
"Right. Well, I don't want you to reverse it."
Ilse scoffed. "I'll take that under advisement?"
Elstrom shook her head. "What I mean is… I want to know if you could cause it to happen again."
"What?" Ilse knotted her brows. "Why would I want to do that?"
"On a bigger scale."
Ilse frowned.
"A much bigger scale."
"Ohhhh." Now she understood. "Oh. Jezus Christus."
Under her diplomas, slumped over a chair like discarded laundry, Elstrom's husband snorted. "I can't believe you still say that in Dutch."
"Can you do it?" Elstrom pressed. Now the desperation was more than just abstract.
Ilse took a deep breath. "Can I turn the entire Site, the entire Earth essentially, into one big ADDC?"
"Yes." The Director nodded. "That. Can you do that."
"No."
Harry closed his eyes. Elstrom's lidded to half-mast. They both said nothing.
"I know what caused this," Ilse explained. "I know how it works, more or less. I've recreated it, ah, in theory," almost slipped up there, "but that was only under very controlled conditions. I would need a lot more data to make it work on a large scale. And it might take materials we don't have access to. And honestly, I think it's just as likely to kill everyone. We don't know the first thing about how the void functions. It's still new to us, scientifically speaking. It might just explode if we try to introduce anachronia. It might wipe out the entire human race." From your perspective.
Ilse felt suddenly sick at how enticing it sounded, the possibility that one of her seven channels might suddenly turn to soothing static.
"I see." Elstrom's nostrils flared. "How soon can you get started?"
A beat.
"Karen," Ilse said, very quietly. "This is wrong. Certain death would be better than what you're asking."
"Speaking for the population of people who actually can die," Elstrom snapped, "I respectfully disagree."
"I can't do this." Ilse crossed her arms. "I won't."
"What if we broke the glass, then?" Elstrom had a finger extended, as though she might perform the threatened action with her fingernail. "I'd say this qualifies as an emergency."
What if, Ilse mused for a moment. She shook her head, as much to clear it as to negate the implied threat. "That could have serious… ontological consequences. Even as a last-ditch effort, even to spite me if you're driven to that, it wouldn't be worth the risk."
"The risk to who?" Harry grunted. His eyes were still shut. "What if nothing is really a risk anymore?"
"There's always a wider field." She couldn't tell them what she meant. She begged them with her eyes, not that Harry could see, not that Elstrom would care, to just take her word for it. "There's always something bigger at stake. Dammit, Karen, you can't just do things willy-nilly and hope they work out. You have responsibilities now."
With her nostrils still flared and her left foot pawing at the floor tiles, Elstrom looked like a horse about to bolt. Or kick. "You think I don't know that? You think I don't always know that? Just once," and she suddenly punched the glass. Ilse heard a sickening crunch. Harry was on his feet in an instant, rushing to inspect the damage — to his wife's hand, not the glass. The glass hadn't really noticed. Elstrom kept talking, teeth now gritted against the pain. "Just once it would be nice to not be fucking responsible for everything and everyone."
"I hear you," Ilse whispered.
Elstrom gave her a strange look. "I believe you do," she said. "But I have no idea how, or why."
As they walked away, Elstrom allowing Harry to hold her wrist so that the broken hand didn't sway with the motion, Ilse called out: "Just remember that you're still alive. Against all the odds."
Karen looked back at her, and mouthed: You, too.
There was something like humanity on the other side of the glass, now. Not humanity itself, but a simulacrum. Not a convincing simulacrum, but…
It still shifted and crawled and sometimes one bled into the other, and there was still a lot of screaming, but now some of the screams had a sort of individuality to them.
It was the polar opposite of relief.
????
8 September
With a sound like someone tearing a strip of denim, the final deadline peeled off the pack.
The lights were breach-red, but they flickered. There was a haunting tone in the air, and the walls were buckling. Steam poured out between the tiles, curling the pages of her doctorates in their frames as the grouting melted around them.
Her guards were gone. She wondered if she was about to get another visit.
But no-one came.
She heard distant explosions. She heard cries of pain and fear. She heard a cacophony of public address messages, calling operators to Operations Control, agents to the helicopters, guards to the containment chambers, technicians to a variety of vital system hardpoints.
She heard "INTERITAS PROTOCOL ENG—" and then a rush of static. There were no more announcements after that.
She cried out.
It wasn't him, but it looked like him. It was wearing his clothes. The thing that was not Vivian Scout strolled down her hall like it owned the place, and turned to smile at her. "This is the way the world ends," it whispered. "I thought it would be quieter."
?? ??
It was like staring at an old test pattern for a television channel that had gone off the air.
Vivian had bought her a television before they were commercially available, and they'd watched a few shows to pass the time. She found it helped her to think. This helped her to think, too, after a fashion. The way all the sounds were far distant. The way nothing was moving in her view. The way nothing impinged on her time.
It couldn't last.
"It's not alchemy," Bremmel spat. He didn't really spit; water conservation rules were long in effect. But the intent was there. "I'm talking about transmutation."
Ilse focused harder on him, and the red emptiness receded a little. Work the problems you can. "Same difference. You want to turn iron into pork chops, you're discussing alchemy."
"Bah." He waved at her dismissively. She didn't take offence. Bremmel regularly dismissed Site and Department Directors. In Cornerstone, he dismissed the other Overseers at least once per meeting. "We've got all this abatement equipment doing nothing. Okorie is turning some of that sludge into porridge. I'm not eating that. Turn drywall into hardtack, though? I'm interested."
The faintest outline of a man raced past her window, cackling. He was holding something, and dragging it along the wall. She opened her mouth to say something, and then Bremmel stood up in front of her. "Are you interested? Or are you willing to just wait in your perfect little hidey-hole until we've all starved to death and stopped bothering you, wonder child?"
The hydroponics were failing. The light was wrong. The plants were dying, and not producing enough seed. Everyone who came to her window looked like they were thinking of taking a fire extinguisher to it, now. Everyone except Bremmel, who sat down heavily again and sighed. "Just try and give us a little focus, would you?"
Ilse nodded, and fixed her eyes on a space just over his bald head. "Let me think ab—"
?? ??
"—out of nowhere. I thought she couldn't faint."
Nothing hurt. She was on the floor, and nothing hurt. She must have fallen unconscious, and whatever damage that did had already been healed. So, she'd been out for quite a while.
She stood up.
Nhung Ngo was standing on the other side of the glass, surrounded by EPAU personnel. Dougall was there, too, glaring daggers at her. Wynn had his hand to the glass already. A glistering morass she had come to know as Daniil Sokolsky was peering at her with multifaceted mock-eyes. Blank and Elstrom were staring at her, as was Bremmel, who had spoken. On the wall, there was—
?? ??
"A cognitohazard," she said, as she sat up again. "There's a cognitohazard on the wall."
"We gathered that." The voice belonged to Lillian Lillihammer. Not the more mature, subdued tones of the Site Director. This was the timeline-hopping hero of baseline reality.
Ilse stood up, and almost laughed.
There were seven Lillians in the hall, and they were all examining it with a chaotic mess of specialized equipment. It was impossible to tell which carts and racks and bags belonged to who.
"Problem is," the presumed baseline Lillian continued, "I can't see it."
Ilse pointed at the wall without looking. "It was right there."
The other Lillians had been absorbed enough in their work to ignore her until now. At this prompting, most of them turned to look at what was, to them, a blank stretch of tiles beneath her diplomas.
One of them, however, was folding up a simple piece of cloth now smeared with a dozen different colours. "It was," she agreed. "Not so much anymore. You get the plate of the guy who hit you?"
?? ??
The question had been mostly rhetorical, but Ilse had recalled one salient detail about the streaking blur.
It had looked like a mass of disjointed shapes and hues, flapping to and fro with the force of its momentum.
"So," Lillian-D grunted. "A dazzle coat. That's fucking great."
There was a scream from far down the hall, and then a burst of raucous laughter. Lillian clenched her jaw, and said "Face away from the window. We're going to—"
And then with the sound of continents drifting, or the moon falling from its orbit to impact the earth, a thousand fingers of steel burst up out of the floor outside Ilse's window, snapping into place. A cage built like a fortress, black and impregnable. Blocking out the red of its native reality.
She could still see Lillian. Lillian was frowning. Lillian was still waiting for Ilse to assume the position, as directed.
Ilse was drifting away from -D, staring at her own reflection in the final deadline. She saw her mouth move, but it wasn't her voice that spoke.
"I'm going to get you out," Wynn promised. "But first, we have to go deeper."
And an ungodly screeching filled her ears, and she had the sensation of free-fall. Like an elevator plunging down—
No.
Not down.
Up.
"So," she faintly heard Bremmel as the impossible factory pulled her into the stratosphere, "are we done for the day, or…?"
?? ??
Wynn was already gone.
Maybe it had been the exertion. Reality benders drew on their own reserves of power to make their wills manifest. Maybe he was off creating more castles in the sky. Maybe he was protecting his monolith from whatever was happening outside.
Whatever the reason, she was alone.
One-seventh of alone.
The spiders were chattering at the tops of their mandibles, demanding to know if this is how arms work, this is how teeth work, this is what food was. Above the chittering was a red migraine hum that had come seemingly from nowhere, demanding bone and gristle and ashes and fingers. M5-11 was screaming about instability in the Citizens' Library, her thaumaturgical Ways failing in ways that didn't make sense, demanding to know if there was something rotten at the core of their reality, something Ilse knew but wasn't saying. There was a riot on the Spaceship, the guards holding off a mob of angry and hungry techs and janitors and researchers and administrators who lacked only pitchforks and torches to complete the picture. Somebody named Rivera had taken a plane across the Atlantic just to accuse her of performing cross-timeline experiments; apparently everyone in the world could hear an echo of that distant call for blood, and the Department of Ontokinetics was sure it was somehow her fault. Even now they were running new scans of the ADDC, claiming the inconsistencies proved her guilt. Probably Xyank had put them onto her. There were people running naked past her window, covered in sigils that made her want to vomit, but somehow kept her right at the edge of her gorge. She tried to vomit. She wanted to vomit. "IS THIS ALL," the spiders wanted to know. "IS THIS ALL THERE EVER WAS? WE REMEMBER IT WAS MORE." They were lonely. Dougall was pointing at her, a look of weary resignation on his face, telling a circle of serious-faced people in dark suits with neutral expressions that this was what he'd warned them about, and did they really intend to let it go on like this forever?
And then the migraine grew worse, a lot worse, and she thought she saw them wince — Udo, the spiders (as one), some of the rioters, the cavorting libertines, Rivera, the suits, and him — and with a stab of mortal terror hoped they were merely disgusted with her.
Hoped they weren't feeling what she felt.
Hoped they couldn't hear the beat of that five-chambered heart as it RED. RED. RED. RED. RED. blotted out everything but the RED. RED. RED. RED. RED. until there was nothing left but RED.
RED.
RED.
RED.
RED.
?? ??
There was nothing, for a long while.
And then the nothing was gone. She could see. She could hear. She no longer wished to tear veins from flesh with her bare teeth. It was gone. It was dead.
She cried for an entire day, and didn't care who was watching.
?? ??
"I'm sorry," said Wynn, and she nearly dropped out of her skin.
She narrowed her focus, as she hadn't been able to do for… months? years? and brought him into perfect clarity. The eternity lost to the red haze had functioned more or less like a good night's sleep. Something she only barely remembered ever having had. The endless screeching and chittering would reverse those gains soon enough, but for now, there was time.
She laughed, bitterly. Time is all there's ever been.
"Is it funny?" Wynn's eyes were turned to her, but there was a reflection of endless stars in them. "I thought you might have been lonely. Or afraid. But that's fine. It's all going to be fine, now."
"Is it?" She pressed her hand to the glass, pointlessly. She glanced at her hand, then back up at Wynn, pointedly.
He seemed to take a long moment to realize what she was doing, and then he placed his hand on the glass, too. Like he'd never quite done it before. Like it was something he'd once seen in a dream. "Yes. We're safe, now. They think we're dead."
"Who?"
Wynn blinked. "Oh," he said. "That's a good question, actually. No-one, I suppose."
"No-one thinks we're dead?" she repeated.
He nodded, smiling with relief. "That's right."
"Why do they… don't they…" She gave up. "Why?"
"Because they are dead. And dead people don't think. Mostly."
"Who's dead?"
He spread his hands in a wide, all-encompassing gesture.
She tried to say Really? but her mouth had gone dry.
"But it's fine." He scratched at the glass, like he was a cat who wanted in. If he put his mind to it, or more likely lost control, or forgot, she had no doubt he could scratch his way through without difficulty. "Because there's only one thing left. And I can help."
"One thing left?" She was still reeling from the implications. It had been… how long? How long had it been since the breach lights and the sirens? Months at most. Could everyone really—
"Yes. Only one." He glanced to the side, as he had before, and this time gestured. "Come say hello."
A gaggle of men and a few women, all of them dressed in labcoats very much like her own — generic, and two generations out of style — filtered into the hallway. They milled about, absently.
Very absently.
"These are my Workers," Wynn said proudly.
She could hear the emphasis, and it struck a chord. "Are they Good Workers?" she asked.
He turned to examine them, as though they were now as novel to him as they were to her, and then shrugged. "I would say? They are probably Good Enough."
Wynn told her he needed to go lie down. She wondered how far down he meant. She didn't see him for… a long while.
So, when she could, when no-one else was listening, or when the only things listening didn't matter, she tried giving the empty human husks instructions.
They had no idea what she was talking about.
On a whim, she pulled up one of her old lectures on her virtual lectern in baseline and began reciting it to the mindless audience.
They produced chairs out of thin air, sat down, folded their hands in their laps, and listened politely.
When it was over, she quizzed them. Their retention was perfect, but they had no concept of what to do with the information she'd provided. They were empty, sterilized phials, sturdy and serviceable but not catalytic in the slightest. Perhaps Wynn drove them unconsciously, when he was conscious. Probably he'd invented them all whole-cloth.
She decided it was going to have to do.
"Congratulations," she told them after the first month of training. "And welcome to the Department of Quantum Metamechanics."
She was consistently astonished with what they were able to scrounge, when she sent them away with precise instructions. If Wynn's factory wasn't the entire world, it was certainly better stocked than most real Foundation facilities.
It took a while for her to direct his husks in the construction of a reasonable facsimile of Du's labs.
Only because she had to look up blueprints for the ones she hadn't helped design, back when Du himself had been just an angry teenager in a Pink Floyd t-shirt.
?? ??
Teaching the spiders to sing had mostly been a mistake, but today they were carrying a tune.
She was, as they said, in the zone. She was listening as Harry recited parts of Lines in a Muddle, his interminably-delayed book about the Site's cultural history. He was good enough to pause when she needed to do something else, even if he never understood what any of those somethings entailed. She was carrying on a complex conversation with M5-12 about a reparations formula for the ongoing D-Class settlement, through text; it wasn't fast-paced, because M5-12 was the only living human being she knew who was older than her. She was simultaneously coming up with formulae to be fed into the DUAL Core — which now ran wholly on geothermal energy, which was good, since that was the only kind the Spaceship inexplicably still had — to test some of Bremmel's theories about sui generis fishes and loaves. She was rehearsing the speech she was going to have to give later today, when the Foundation auditors entered Site-43 for the first time in ages and presumably asked what the hell they'd all been doing down there, and also if they knew where all the missing time had gone. And, of course, she was supervising Wynn's ghosts in the construction of a few final pieces of apparatus to bring their little lab up to specs, and trying not to worry that she still hadn't seen him since their first flight into the clouds. In between all that, she was humming along. She'd heard this song somewhere before. Something about taking a flying machine and escaping from all the complexities of life, up high, very high, where they could hide.
And then Dougall Damn Deering staggered into view, and spoiled everything.
He slapped the glass, then used it to keep himself upright. "You." He managed to fit a lot of sloshiness into that single syllable, pointing a wavering finger in accusation. "This is all your fault." Then he clawed at his left hand with his right, and chucked something at her. It pinged away, gold glinting in the fluorescent light. His wedding ring.
"Can we take a few?" she asked the window. Dougall blinked at her, angry but uncomprehending. Harry was still scribbling notes on his latest passage, so he just nodded and pushed off the wall, taking a mindless walk deeper into the undercroft. The ghosts looked up, awaiting further instructions. Receiving none, they went back to their smiling work. She signed off with M5-12, reminding herself that it didn't matter who he was, or what he'd done, before, that they would never meet, and that there was nothing of value for them to confront together. Not while she was still in this godverdomme box.
When they were alone — save for the spiders, which kept on humming — she said: "What's my fault?"
Dougall laughed. Brayed. He was drunker than drunk, she suspected. She hadn't actually been around very many drunk people. "What isn't? You. You." He turned his back on her, and slumped against the glass. It was enough, by the nebulous rules defining audio transmission to the ADDC. "You put it in her head. She was better off not thinking about it. We're all better off not thinking."
"You certainly seem to have done alright," she agreed.
If the implied insult got through his wool-insulated head, he gave no sign. "Years, I gave her. That's not enough. I need to be squeaky-clean, do I? And her, her judging me. You know what she is?"
And he did turn around, and he mimed a pair of devil horns coming out of his forehead.
"Okay," she said.
"Doesn't even know," he crowed. He bit his lower lip. He snarled, "There's a lot she doesn't know. You, either. Oh, yeah. You." He nodded. "Mhmm."
"Mhmm," she nodded back.
"Don't pretend." The finger again. "Had you fooled from the start. All of them. They never knew. Never will."
"Not if you keep up this brilliant display of operational security," she agreed.
He ignored her again. It was soapbox time, apparently. "I've been around the world," he told her. "I've seen things. Done things. I don't remember it all, but I remember enough. Remembered enough. It made the difference."
She rolled her eyes.
"Don't. Don't even. You have no idea. You have no idea what I—"
"—am a giftschreiber," she finished for him.
His mouth hung open.
"Of course I know. I've known for ages. Allan knows too. Probably he told Lillian when she took over. I'd be surprised if more people don't know. Maybe even Udo."
He was blinking rapidly, as if he could make her disappear with enough fluttering. Best of luck on that. "How. How?"
"Logical deduction," she shrugged. "You're not a thaumaturge at all. What you have is passive memetics. That's all. You're just not imaginative enough to be trying to do any harm with them, so I never bothered telling anybody." It was close enough to the truth. Good enough for him.
He looked like he was about to become the weepy kind of drunk she'd read about in cheap novels. "You knew."
"Yes."
"All along, you knew?"
"Yes."
He pressed his forehead to the glass, and whispered: "Then why did you trust me?"
She recoiled. "I never trusted you, Dougall. I used you. You know that."
"You trusted me with so much. You used me so much. You put so much power in my hands, and you knew it wasn't right. Why?"
She felt sick. "I don't know."
"Why?" he repeated.
"I don't know!" She spun away, feeling the string from her pencil wrap around her forearm. She couldn't face him like this. When he was hurting. When he was vulnerable. She hoped he'd forget the whole thing when he finally passed out.
He thumped his forehead against the glass, once, lightly. It filled her with a crimson need she didn't often feel. "If you'd let me be," he murmured, "none of this would have happened. None of it."
She sucked her lips in.
"They took me in," he was still mumbling. "Showed me their tricks. And I left them. I left her," and his voice broke, "and I still don't even remember her. Not like I should. And there's a hole shaped like her now, and there always will be, and I don't even know what the shape is, and she's gone. And he… and he's gone. And I might as well be gone."
"You are gone," she whispered. But he didn't hear, and she couldn't say it twice.
"That's all there is," he said. "That's all I've got. You, you've got it all. That's it."
She turned to regard him with something like pity. It settled in her stomach, leaden. "It was my mistake," she said. "You're right. I'm sorry."
My mistake to think that Dougall Deering was ever the key to anything.
He sniffled, and nodded, and turned away. He pressed one palm to the glass, and pushed off.
In the time before his fingertips left the glass, he told her, "If it hadn't been for you, my brother would still be alive."
And then he was stumbling off again, no matter how loudly she shouted at him to come back, come back, and explain just what the hell precisely that was supposed to mean.
?? ??
The next day, he cancelled what was left of her security clearances. Udo came by after her shift — not wearing a ring — to describe the impassioned speech he'd given to the O4 Council. All about ontokinetic stability, the need to cooperate with oversight agencies like the TAD, and something about not abusing suffering anomalies which made her wish she could divorce him twice.
"So I guess that's that," Ilse sighed. "I'm finished." It was hard to even be crushed by the news. It was inevitable. It was pre-ordained. And it was only one-seventh of her spectrum of failures, now.
"Well," Udo smirked, a glint in her glowing eyes. When had they started glowing? "I wouldn't say finished, precisely."
It turned out that Dougall had gotten himself officially made Chief of Acroamatic Abatement. The last gift he ever gave his wife, before she gave him her ultimatum, was a promotion to Chair of Applied Occultism. That gave her certain privileges. Certain powers.
And she had a few friends in Quantum Supermechanics who resented the meteoric rise of the Site's least obviously-qualified, most obviously obnoxious, member of staff.
"In other words," Udo grinned, "if you've got some experiments in mind, I've got a no-questions asked fellowship without your name on it."
Maybe it would be enough.
Maybe.
Of course, first she needed to actually come up with the experiments.
????
8 September
Ilse had rarely ever spoken to William Wettle. Not as others understood him.
She had often spoken to the Director of Cornerstone's Site-43, of course. She worked in his facility. She respected him. He was offbeat, and off kilter, but in a weird sort of way he just seemed to work. He had risen, as was so rarely the case, into his area of competence.
The buffoon everyone else knew, that man she hadn't spoken to in years.
He was scruffy and vaguely confused-looking, as his Directorial doppelganger was. But he had a look of such open agony on his face that she could tell, just by looking at him, he'd never been given control of anything more substantial than a single laboratory.
Career losers learned to mask despair.
"We fucked it," he said. "Again."
By the colour of the tiles behind him, this was the William Wettle who had survived Site-43's brush with memetic hell. She hadn't had any visitors in that timeline for what felt like ages. She'd been wondering whether any of them had survived. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." He collapsed into one of her chairs. "Never stood a chance. Couldn't fix it in time. What happens now?"
She shook her head. If the Survivors had failed to properly restore baseline — or rather restore themselves to baseline, though they still didn't realize that was all they were doing — then what would happen?
"I don't know," she admitted.
"It's not screwing up that hurts." He closed his eyes. "It's not knowing what comes next. The next stop on the Fuck Me Express."
"Oh. Well." She winced. I do know that. Precisely how the transition would look, given the way it was taking place, she had no idea. But she did know where Wettle and his friends were headed.
He opened one eye, just a crack, like a child on Christmas Eve pretending to be asleep, desperate to see the presents go under the tree. "Any spoilers?" he asked.
She wrinkled her nose as she considered. She wrinkled it again.
Finally, she decided to let that stand as her comment on the matter.
"Yeah," he sighed. "That sounds about right."
?? ??
The next time she checked on the spectres, they were gone.
The machinery they'd built was still there. She'd had much of it arrayed in front of the glass, so she could keep an eye on it. Scrutinize their handiwork. Remind herself that she hadn't dreamed its existence.
But the little army of lobotomized Dougall Deerings — they didn't look or act the part, but that was what they amounted to — was nowhere to be seen.
And now that she was locked in, she could hear that the entire world was groaning.
It was a metallic sound, but it was also a human sound. The sound of a tremendous burden being shouldered. The sound of Atlas quaking beneath the weight of the Earth.
The sound of—
This time, it was freefall.
The impact had been enough to knock her unconscious. That's fun, she thought as she came to. It was spectacularly interesting that she could be knocked over by the occurrence of gravity, given the fact that the ADDC was a static point in time and space. It was, in fact, impossible that Rydderech should have propelled her up into the sky in the first place. Put it down to the miracle of ontokinetics.
Only that miracle had apparently come with a time limit. When she staggered to her feet, she slapped the glass in just the right way to fix her view on the fifth deadline. It only saved her the time it took to focus in, but she figured she'd lost enough time to Xyank's pointless visits that this didn't particularly count as stooping to his level.
The machinery was all in a jumble, much of it broken. The overhead lights were flickering. She felt a peculiar pull to the glass, and realized it was one-seventh of reality trying to pull her to the ground.
The ADDC in 5243-E was lying on its side.
Wynn's Tower of Sorcery had fallen.
He's gone.
It was the only possible explanation.
So she let the false pull draw her into a foetal position on the floor, against the wall, beneath the glass, and she closed her eyes, and surrendered to the inevitable.
The Masons were in Samothrace. They wouldn't notice she was gone for days. The Oracle went on vision quests all the time, and it was never questioned. The answers, after all, were always cryptic.
The spiders could learn nothing more from her. They could learn nothing more from each other. She'd heard talk of them stretching out, one after the other, into a bridge to the stars. A space elevator of chitin and tiny hairs. Maybe they were already colonizing. Maybe they'd put a spider on the moon.
Elstrom had told her to lay low anyway. She had gone from communal storyteller to object of envy to pariah to persona non grata. No-one would be sorry that she'd dropped out of sight.
The Foundation had locked Charnel House-43 down, stem to stern. She'd never had to use her rehearsed speech. Right now, as far as the wider organization was concerned, the entire affair with the red skies — she wished she could have seen them — and the obliterated year was their fault. They were all experiencing a tiny, fleeting taste of her isolation now.
If there was anyone left in the desert — she knew it was a desert, because now a faint trickle of sand came tumbling in to slowly fill the outer hallway like an hourglass — they would be far, far away from her massive trunk of black stone.
Nobody ever visited her anymore under Dougall Deering's regime. All her communications with Udo and her cabal of disgruntled scientists were covert, few and far between.
As for baseline, well. She reached up, clutched the pencil, and said: "Privacy."
And the room dipped into one seventh of pitch blackness. They'd installed the shutter ages ago, and it would have been an excellent way to partition her time between lines, except that it only existed in the one. Probably Xyank had signed off on it. Possibly he'd found that hilarious.
No friends. No machinery. No light.
No distractions.
She was alone with the only thing she'd ever needed to work this thing out for good.
Herself.
