One's Own
2002
8 September
Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
You want to leave Stacey.
It was an odd thing to think, and odd phrasing for the thought. It was intrusive enough that for a moment he wondered if it hadn't originated with a literal intruder. But no, it was his own internal monologue. The voice was unmistakable.
In the space between the first thought and the next, Dougall walked past the containment cell where Udo and their mutual friend were working. He smiled, understanding now what inner machinations had prompted that curious bout of introspection. He pursed his lips to whistle.
You should leave her. You're right to think she isn't the one.
Dougall stopped dead. "What?"
Listen very, very carefully, his own voice told him.
The internal dialogue lasted all of thirty seconds, and the voice did most of the talking. Dougall tapped out the instructions on his work tablet, making sure he was off the network before saving, then lost about a minute reading what he'd written when the voice stopped, trying to decide if he believed it. Because already he couldn't remember actually being told the things he had transcribed.
The transcription also mentioned that this would be the case, so Dougall decided to trust it.
He ran.
He ran to the central nexus point for the second sublevel, flashed his tablet credentials from the hall so the doors would swing open automatically when he reached them, and fairly threw himself through. There was a man sitting at the console, an AcroAbate tech, and Dougall roughly wheeled him out of the way. "Trapezius," he shouted as he slapped his ID card to a pressure scanner. "Deering thirteen Jeremiah planetoid celerity."
The bewildered tech stared at him as he darted to the panel of manual valves and began hauling them all to the right. There was no Hollywood inconvenience of rust or resistance. The shutoffs swung closed with greased efficacy.
All around them, the subtle soundscape shifted. Applied Occultism was all stopped up.
"Switch all relays to F-B and -C," he snapped at the man sitting stupidly in the center of the room. "Void any extra to -A. Don't ask questions.' He jogged over to the comms panel, and was relieved to hear the tech doing as he was told, behind his back. That one would be due a commendation. They both would.
Dougall hit the comms. "AO Actual to J&M Actual." The light went green immediately; Nascimbeni, luckily, was in his office. Or was it luck? Somehow the voice, his voice, had known.
"JM."
"AAF-D is approaching Hyperbolic. Repeat, F-D is pre-Hyperbolic. We need a full flush immediately. I'm starting at my end."
To his credit, too, the old workman didn't hesitate. "On it."
Dougall called up the readouts, and watched the flushes progress. Watched the danger drain away, spaced out to a thin nothing. He checked the time.
It had taken him only six minutes to save the day.
To change the future.
He'd always taken issue with the concept of 'superiors'.
It implied too much. He knew he had a measure of power over most of the professionals arrayed around him in the Chairs and Chiefs boardroom, as the leader of two of the Site's most important Sections. He understood that McInnis and the All-Sections Chief had power over him. What he couldn't comprehend was why this hierarchization should be linguistically conflated with being better than someone else.
Certainly he was better than his supposed colleagues, but it had nothing to do with what job he'd been assigned. And in what sense were the Director and the ASC better than him? Had they just saved the entire facility from certain destruction?
This was not precisely the gist of his presentation, of course.
"First of all, I want to extend my thanks to Chief Nascimbeni and his people for working with me so quickly and so efficiently during this crisis." He smiled at the weathered old Italian, who gave him a look no more polite and agreeable than propriety required. "And I'd also like to thank the rest of you in advance for giving me your time, and, I hope, assent."
"Assent?" McInnis' took a carefully neutral tone, as he almost always did. "Dr. Deering, you've been brought here to explain yourself. I wasn't aware we were to entertain a proposal."
Dougall raised a hand, though McInnis had stopped speaking. He liked to know he had the floor; there were few things in life he enjoyed less than being interrupted. "I understand that, sir. And of course I'll be happy to explain what happened, in as much or as little detail as you require."
"I require a lot of detail." Nascimbeni's arms were crossed over his shiny vinyl vest, and his baseball cap wasn't pulled down far enough to hide that his thick brows were similarly knotted.
Dougall nodded. "In short, an experiment I performed with Dr. Reynders some time ago has finally borne unexpected fruit. Some of you may recall—"
"It's the anachronic material, right?" Du interrupted. Dougall despised the man. He was the only one in the room whose intelligence approached Dougall's own. "The stuff you monopolized the DUAL Core with."
Dougall nodded again, a little more stiffly. "That's correct. We were attempting to reconstruct the timeline of the original material's decomposition in the ADDC, so that we might better understand how much anti-time still existed in the space around Dr. Reynders, and perhaps within Dr. Reynders herself." He recited the alibi she'd given him from memory. "We learned a few things, though not nearly so much as she had expected. But!" He clapped his hands together, simulating excitement. Some of the others blinked, so he imagined they believed it. "Looking over the data again proved it a very providential experiment indeed."
"Are you going to tell us…" Anastasios Mataxas, the Chair of Research and Experimentation, had a nasty habit of belabouring his part of any conversation. He was far too old for his post, and Dougall was forever wondering when he'd be on the way out. Perhaps he, Dougall, could add a third dossier to his responsibilities? The accolades would be pouring in now, and he'd used Ilse just enough to enhance his own— "Are you going to tell us, Dr. Deering, that you looked at the data from that experiment, and saw something which told you AAF-D was about to go supercritical?"
"I no longer need to tell," Dougall smiled. "Because you just did it for me, and with admirable clarity." Mataxas was a good old boy, even if he was Greek. He liked to be flattered. Most of the people in the room did. "Yes. You'll recall, Dr. Blank, Chief Ibanez, that we were also looking into the events surrounding Dr. Rydderech's toxic exposure in 1960?"
Of the two, it was obvious who would get a word in first. "Uh huh," Ibanez said. The look on her face said that whatever Dougall was selling, she was not a likely buyer. "Had to hop a lot of hoops to clear you for that. Anything involving the long-term residents goes through a colon's worth of channels."
And that is why you're just a ground-pounder, Dougall thought with satisfaction. Two metaphors in one statement is an immediate disqualifier from intellectual prowess. "And I appreciate that you did so," he lied. "As it was in the confluence of those two events, one intentional and one not, that I was able to glimpse the disaster to come. Dr. Rydderech experienced a sudden, unexpected materials breach under circumstances very much like the one taking place yesterday. The orphic residue being channelled into his examination chamber matched what AAF-D was processing almost precisely." This was the reason Dougall was wearing so much makeup under his eyes, to hide the bags. He'd lost hours of sleep until he found that single, heaven-sent correlation in the data, and then practiced the most assonant way to present it. "Add in the counter-chronological material still running through the system since May—"
"Wait." The All-Sections Chief interrupted him so smoothly that Dougall actually forgot to be offended. The man had a magic voice. "I was under the impression that the globule you artificially created shrank down to nothing as a consequence — an intended one — of the experiment which created it."
"It did," Dougall agreed. "But this simply caused it to exist in negative dimensions, as we had suspected also occurred in the ADDC. That was the main thing we wanted to learn. After the experiment was complete, I arranged for the non-material in the cage to be circulated through the orphic outflow as per standard protocol."
"Non-material," Rory Skellicorne repeated. The Chief of Administration and Oversight was no scientist, which ironically made him the perfect one to spot the holes in Dougall's argument. It was a further irony that none of the other scientists would place much value on anything he said because of the very thing that made him qualified to speak. "How do you abate nothing?"
"Very carefully," Dougall said, and a few of the others laughed. Mostly the ones who had no way of knowing whether or not he was being serious.
"So," Nascimbeni growled. If anyone was going to truly shoot this explanation down, it was going to be the Chief of J&M. He had just enough technical know-how, and just enough of a suspicious nature, to be truly dangerous. "You figured out that two entirely different abatement systems forty years apart had a content and context correlation that was about to cause the world's largest anomalous waste factory to explode, and you figured this out just at the moment where you could still stop it, with barely seconds to spare?"
Dougall nodded. "Yes."
The rest of the sleep he'd lost, he'd lost practicing that single word.
Nothing so formal as a vote had been scheduled for this meeting. McInnis simply wanted all his senior staff present while the explanation was delivered, to put his petitioner to the question. Satisfied enough for the present, he dismissed almost all of them. All but Nascimbeni, and of course the ASC.
"So." The Director folded his hands on the sleek, smooth surface of the desk, and smiled at Dougall. "Your actual proposal then, doctor."
"I don't have a proposal, precisely," Dougall admitted. "It's more of a mission statement. We need to decommission AAF-D."
Nascimbeni exploded. "What the fuck are you…?" He was standing up. Dougall hadn't even seen the motion take place. The old man was going to feel that in his knees tomorrow. "How can you…? We need that facility, you…!"
McInnis looked up at his senior tech, a look of cultivated empathy on his face. God, but the man was good at controlling impressions. It was a shame he didn't teach courses. "Please, Noè. Let's discuss this rationally."
"Rationally." Nascimbeni harrumphed, and sat down so hard that his chair expelled a squeal of air which slowly petered to a low hiss. Dougall wondered if he'd busted the gas cylinder, or merely exaerated the cushions. "This son of a bitch wants us to take apart the single least expendable piece of AcroAbate apparatus we possess."
"This son of a bitch," the ASC pointed out, "is the de facto Chief of Acroamatic Abatement."
"Thank you," Dougall said.
Nascimbeni's head was shaking, side to side and a little bit everywhere else as well. He was beet red. "We don't have nearly enough evidence to justify a decommissioning. I won't stand for it."
"I'm not sure that's your decision to make." Dougall tried to keep his smile polite, but he knew some of the smugness was going to creep in. It didn't matter. One of the best things about having a communications expert as the Site Director was the knowledge that your motivations wouldn't matter, so long as your thinking was sound. "I value your input, but if Director McInnis agrees with my logic…"
Something in McInnis' face made Dougall lose his steam. "I've seen the preliminary reports from J&M and your own people, Dr. Deering. You are absolutely correct, of course, that a very serious breach event was imminent when you performed your timely intervention. I am not wholly convinced, however, that this means the entire facility is compromised."
"Thank you," Nascimbeni snarled.
"It might be possible to save some of the machinery," Dougall admitted. "Some of the experiment rooms, a lot of the pipes, I don't know. But it's clear that most of F-D was about to go boom in a big way," he immediately regretted phrasing it like that, just as Nascimbeni himself might have done, blue-collar yokel that he was, "and we have to think of F-D as an airplane. Once it starts developing faults, a major teardown is required on the entire thing. It's all of the same vintage, and we need it to carry heavy loads a long, long distance. The costs of failure are far too high."
He wished Ibanez had been there to see his much more proper deployment of metaphor.
Nascimbeni sighed, in a passable imitation of the sounds his chair had only now stopped making. "I agree we need to shut down the rest of the mains." Every word clearly hurt him on the way out. "And we're already sending everything we can to the other three refineries. Probably we'll have to flush absolutely everything before we can really assess what is and isn't damaged."
"And how long will that take?" Dougall asked, before the other two men could. He wanted to be the one to do it. To put the final cap on things. It was, he had already told himself, his destiny to do so.
Nascimbeni gave Dougall a look of unabated fury. "A few hours to shut everything off, and flush everything out. A few months to check everything for faults."
"In other words," Dougall grinned, "you agree that we'll be decommissioning AAF-D, at least in the short term, starting this evening."
He wondered if the C&C boardroom had ever played host to more furious assent.
"I suppose that's settled, then." McInnis tapped the table to indicate that the meeting was over. "Chief Nascimbeni, please coordinate with Dr. Deering. I want AAF-D fully shut down and non-circulating before midnight, if possible."
"It's possible." Nascimbeni's voice was equal parts defeat and resentment.
"Ordinarily I would prefer a second opinion on the data before authorizing anything long-term," McInnis sighed. He never sighed. "But given the data in question, the only obvious choice for consultation is unfortunately closed to us."
Dougall repeated the words silently, mouth working over each syllable as he attempted to decode them. He hated to have things explained to him. Had hated it even more ever since—
"Ilse?" he practically cried out. "What's wrong with Ilse?"
He thought about approaching her. Really, he did. He wanted to tell her what they'd accomplished, together. What he'd built on the foundation she'd laid. The possibilities of the days to come. Even, perhaps, the nature of the new information he'd received.
She would have loved to hear it. Might even have taken new heart from it. And a part of him, withered to a nub though it was, would have loved to see the new light in her eyes. She was, in spite of everything, still his friend.
He watched her empty window for a while on the security footage, fancying he could make out the edge of her labcoat creeping into the frame, wondering if it was fluttering because she was weeping, shouting, or laughing. There was certainly no breeze in those stilled airs. He watched until he was sure she was alive, at least, then headed for AAF-D.
There would be plenty of time for bragging later.
"Dougall!"
Her sickly-sweet voice easily cut the din of the airlock approach. Those old army experiments with female announcers had certainly been on-point. He turned to watch his fiancée bounding across the tiles, slipping between two J&M techs carrying a heavy piece of electrical equipment and dodging a gaggle of ApplOcc junior researchers about to approach him for instructions. "Dougall!"
"I see you, Stace." He didn't have to force a smile. He was all smiles this afternoon. "What's up?"
"Is it true?" She glanced around the hall, at the dozens of professionals and millions of dollars of equipment arrayed around them. "Are you really taking F-D offline permanently?"
Dougall felt a prickling on his neck. If Nascimbeni or his stooge Ambrogi were around, if either of them had heard that, they were definitely staring daggers. "Permanently, who knows? In the immediate sense, yes. Is that a problem?"
She flushed. Was it pride? Worry? Attraction? It was hard to tell with her. Stacey Laiken's makeup kit had no need for blush, so often did her biology supply the natural. "No, I was just wondering if you needed any help. We are partners, you know."
This was an unnatural thing for one partner to say to another. He wondered if Laiken, innocent and straightforward as she was, understood the import of what she was asking. Deep down inside her, past more sealed bulkheads than they were about to face in AAF-D, she still resented the time he'd spent standing at the ADDC with Ilse instead of sitting in their shared office with her.
"How could I ever forget it?" He reached down to pat her head. It was a bad habit; not because she didn't like it — she did — but because it reminded him of owning a dog. The trainee thaumaturges now formed a cautious semicircle behind her, and he felt a rush of warmth as one in particular caught his eye. "As a matter of fact, I need something very important from you right this very minute."
Her blue eyes shone. Not so big or blue or shiny as Ilse's, but then, whose were? "Yes?"
"I need you acting as Chief of ApplOcc, upstairs, while I monitor things down here. Who knows how much runoff is still circulating in our containment cells? We have to coordinate both sublevels, and I don't trust anyone else but you to be my eyes and ears."
It was harder to tell, of course, but Dougall fancied that Udo Okorie was blushing at least as fiercely as Stacey as they both took entirely different messages from what he'd just said.
"…so we'll be coordinating with ApplOcc on this," Nascimbeni concluded. "Dr. Deering and I will be in joint operational command; any questions you might have at any juncture, make absolutely sure you do ask them, addressed to whichever one of us is closest to hand."
"Or me," Ambrogi added, and Dougall started at the change of voices. "Or David."
The two senior J&M technicians waved halfheartedly at their audience, while Nascimbeni rolled his eyes and Dougall blinked rapidly. He hadn't heard most of his opposite number's brief. He was only physically present in the airlock approach, mind entirely elsewhere. He had nodded in affirmation when his name was mentioned, but even that wasn't really very important. Everyone in the room knew full well that if they had any critical questions, whether Dougall was closest to hand or not, they should seek out the technical set. He didn't mind. He was already losing interest.
The thing was accomplished. His victory set in stone. Everything else was just finishing touches and minor details; he couldn't wait to have that out of the way.
He caught Udo's eye, at the back of the room, and winked at her. She grinned, and couldn't immediately became wouldn't.
Nascimbeni dismissed the crowd, and they stood up from their cheap plastic chairs to seek out their individual supervisors. Most of the AcroAbate crowd were used to conducting their affairs without much in the way of direction, and Stacey was coordinating the thaumaturges from upstairs, leaving only Dougall's little cohort of still-green hopefuls. He sent Sýkora with Nascimbeni to make sure everything was being done optimally according to the former's magical math. That would be sufficient payment for the pain the older man had caused him in the boardroom. Astrauskas he made health and safety officer, since her aura reading skills would reveal who was tired or distracted enough to become a liability; most of these people had already done their allotted shifts for the day, and they'd probably be working through the night.
"And you," he said to the last of his three assistants, "are going to help me work out the fine details."
"I'm an expert with fines," she grinned. The other two rolled their eyes and walked away, while Dougall took a moment to grasp the gist of the pun. She was quick, this one. His rabbit.
He gestured that she should follow him, then strode into the AAF-D airlock. The first few stretches of hall were already safe — the only pipes there fed emergency holding tanks below, which had never been needed — and there were all sorts of nooks and crannies deeper in where they might confer in private.
He found he couldn't wait that long. It was time to celebrate.
He was still doing up his belt when he opened the equipment closet door, which turned out to be a mistake.
"Oh," he said.
"Hi," said Phil.
They stared at each other for a moment, then Dougall nearly jumped out of his still-loose pants when the door slammed shut behind him. Phil blinked; with any luck, he'd seen nothing. He'd never been the most observant…
And you are? The self-directed fury was already threatening to start a migraine. For half a decade, he'd successfully prevented his brother from realizing they both worked at the same facility. A single evening of distraction, and it had all come crashing down. He wondered what Ilse would have made of it. He must have been at the briefing. I didn't even think to look. I completely forgot he existed.
Phil moved, and Dougall braced for an attack.
His brother embraced him.
"When did you get in?" Phil's voice was choked with tears.
"Very recently," Dougall managed. He clapped his hands to the slimy vinyl of his brother's vest, wondering what manner of nastiness it might still be speckled with. Finding a hand-wash station jumped up high on his list of priorities — though after the closet tryst it had already been on his mind. "Just today."
The initial guilt and terror were already gone, replaced by the comfort of protocol. No-one was to talk to Philip Deering about his brother. There was a standing order. Anything he said would see no contradiction. He could weave whatever lies he liked.
Phil hung on for a long, awkward moment, then finally pulled back. His eyes were red-rimmed, but he was smiling. "How've you been? I thought you were never going to visit. You never answered my calls."
Phil's calls went to an answering machine at Site-11, where an artificially intelligent conscript combed them for keywords and passed them on to Dougall whenever a flag was set off. This rarely ever happened, and when it did, Dougall called Nascimbeni instead of his brother. "Did you get my number right? You always mix up the digits, you know."
He'd forgotten how easy this was. Phil would uncritically pick up whatever Dougall laid down.
This must be what Ilse felt like.
Phil shrugged. "Sure. Anyway, what the hell? They say you stopped a breach today?"
Dougall nodded. "And now we're going to make sure it can't happen again. Can't happen at all. You know what I mean."
"Of course." Phil didn't know, but he wasn't going to say so. "Man, it's great to see you. Dinner later?"
Dougall had plans for dinner. He thought he might invite Udo to join him and Stacey in his quarters. They could break out a bottle of wine, celebrate the decommissioning; his fiancée would be out like a light before dessert, and he could enjoy it with Udo in peace. Philip did not easily fit into this schema. Dougall had an image of the four of them at his dinner table, Stacey slumped over her chair, snoring, Udo modelling Devil's Tower on her plate in red sand, while the two brothers stared at each other and tried to think of something to say.
"Sure," he said, and then he said "No. I've got a lot on my plate right now. I'll… we'll catch up before I go."
"Go?" Phil looked downcast. "You're not staying at 43?"
That hadn't been what he'd meant, but it worked out even better. "Unfortunately not." He clapped his hands to his brother's upper arms, and squeezed. No more muscle there than there'd been when they'd last embraced, however long ago that was. What do you even do here, kid? "You know me. Onward and upward. But hey, this place isn't big enough for the two of us, huh?" He smiled what he hoped was a warm, affectionate smile.
"Sure," Phil muttered. His own smile looked at least as forced as Dougall's was. "It's probably not even big enough for you."
He started to walk away, then stopped, turned, and added: "I did miss you, you know."
Three things happened at the same time.
The memory of reading the message came flooding back, and Dougall nearly gasped, nearly wept, nearly cried out as the urgency and fear he had suppressed in a rush of adrenaline reasserted itself.
He opened his mouth to say I missed you, too.
His brother turned back around, and headed off to do his duty.
The fourth thing happened a few seconds later, as Phil disappeared through the airlock door and into the expanding crowd of technicians and researchers and machinery. The closet cracked open behind him with a click, and Udo hissed: "That was too close."
"It was," he found himself saying. "Wasn't it?"
Ordinarily, he would have ducked back into the closet with her.
But for some reason, at this moment in time, he found the idea repellent.
The first few victory laps were exhilarating.
He swanned through AAF-D, clucking with approval or tutting judgementally as the mood and context struck him. Stuck his head into the mini-labs and watched his people dismantling their long-term experiments, downloading data onto secure storage and venting residual material. Watched Nascimbeni and his deputies checking each safety valve and emergency release off a list so long they couldn't use a clipboard, so long it was actually a bound volume meant for a single use: the end-of-service of their newest facility, not slated for at least three more decades. Ignored David Markey, who was following him everywhere; apparently Dougall and Nascimbeni had similar vindictive streaks, and similar ways of working them out. Checked in with Stacey on the radio, sent in a few progress reports to McInnis, and otherwise made himself appear useful without actually doing anything.
Eventually, it wore on him.
It wasn't that he wanted to help. It was that all of this felt superfluous. He'd thrown the switches. He'd made the argument. He'd played his part, and yet here he still was, strutting on the stage with sound and the occasional affected bout of fury. It was beginning to dawn on him just how complicated a process this was, just how long it was going to take, and the next few months of his life's schedule were beginning to look like a big, solid block of bright red.
There had to be some way to continue taking credit whilst simultaneously ducking out of the corrective work. There simply had to be, because he had other things to do. Other projects to complete. Other obligations…
He forced himself not to think about that. They weren't going to darken his thoughts today. This accomplishment in no way belonged to them.
He put off monitoring Phil for as long as he could. He'd fobbed his brother off on one of the larger workgroups, something tedious that wouldn't need checking for at least the first few hours. But he was meant to be supervising, and eventually Markey's nagging ground him down.
They made their way to the deeper halls which wound around the concentration cell, the heart of the facility's esoteric whirlpool. Phil's detail was checking the stability of the Ghostwall, the complex array of inflow and outflow pipes, grounding conduits, and miniature cyclotrons which strung out ethereal orphic energy thin enough to keep it from undergoing gestalt catalysis, and also conveniently helped funnel any non-Euclidean leakage into the bleak little concrete chamber at the centre of F-D. Everything relating to the Ghostwall was suffused with occult ritual. Even the name, he was pretty sure, had some sort of broader significance. The first stage of breaking down magical waste was to play by the rules of magic. Even the number of technicians…
Dougall frowned.
He'd glanced over the F-D manual and Nascimbeni's work assignments on his work tablet before beginning his little tour. Phil had initially been assigned as Dougall's shadow; he'd promptly subbed Udo in, then shuffled things around until his brother ended up on the Ghostwall detail. He'd long since shooed Udo away to check in with Astrauskas and Sýkora, since they were both distracting each other and every jab and giggle was being caught on very active camera. So there was no-one to wonder why, or ask foolish questions, when he stopped walking, whipped out his tablet again, and checked the F-D manual for a second time.
"What's wrong?" Markey called.
At Dougall's back.
He reached the hall before the concentration cell in just over a minute. He was clutching his radio, though he'd sent no transmissions. He hadn't been able to articulate what he needed. Scatter. Separate. Send someone away. Send my brother…
This stretch of the Ghostwall was already half-dismantled. Hoods were open, pipes were in pieces, and the conduits were all winding down. Where ordinarily the orichalcum rods would be glowing red and their glass sheaths wreathed with swirling green energy, now the only light in the hall came from the fluorescent fixtures on the roof and the orange caution strips just above the floor. Phil was bent over an open grating in the floor tiles, conferring with some other junior tech about whatever it was he could see down there.
"Foreman?" Dougall called, and all fourteen of the technicians looked up at him.
"No foreman on this detail," a woman in a sweat-soaked tank top and no vest reminded him. "All egalitarian at the Ghostwall. Part of the ritual, right?"
"What's wrong, Dougall?" Phil rose to his feet, dusted off his pants, and grinned. "Guilty we're doing your dirty work for you?"
And then his eyeballs burst.
The flash of light came after, like the electromagnetic pulse released by a nuclear explosion. After all fourteen technicians lost their eyes. After all fourteen of them turned red as lobsters at boil, after blood started bubbling from their pores, sizzling and steaming, after they screamed in a choir of incomprehensible suffering and their skin bloated out and they fell to the floor, cooked from the inside. They shook like trees in the wind for an eternity of seconds, then stopped. That was when the flash came.
Then there was a faint sound like stress on ice, and a tiny spark leapt from a crack in the paraspectral grounding rod closest to the mass of fourteen very dead technicians. The rod thrummed with power for a moment more, then died as well.
And so did Dougall.
"He's alive."
McInnis nodded. "That's good. That's… good, at least."
Dr. LeClair set the clipboard down on his desk, pinching the bridge of her nose. "He's in shock. Doubt he'll be responsive today. We've got him in a private room, and P&P are monitoring."
"I don't envy them when he wakes up." McInnis sighed. "Thank you, doctor. That's all I need for my report."
"Your report?" LeClair frowned. "It was an accident. Who do you need to report it to?"
He pursed his lips. "The present tally includes the Overseer Council, Overwatch Command, the Department of Temporal Anomalies, and the Temporal Anomalies Department. If I might offer some advice, doctor?"
She shrugged an invitation, still looking perplexed.
"Do your diligence before it comes due. The price is often steeper at the deadline."
AAF-D was fully evacuated within a few minutes of the disaster at the Ghostwall. Nascimbeni and Ibanez had hauled Deering's unresponsive form out themselves, and everyone else left at a breakneck clip. It took maybe an hour to find the electrical fault, with help from Mataxas and his spectremeters, and thirteen minutes to appease the relevant spirits.
When he was sure it was safe to do so, McInnis made a few calls.
Nascimbeni was the first to arrive. His cap was pulled down so far that his eyes were hidden, and he scowled silently while they waited. Ibanez came next, the only difference made up by the length of her legs, and the others filtered in shortly after. Everyone who'd been involved in a supervisory role for the decommissioning, and could still be spared for a moment's debrief. Blank, who'd been watching the inflow from F-D to the new ADDC in Archives and Revision. Lillihammer, who'd been monitoring an interrogation on the first sublevel and making sure none of the extraneous material one level down was interfering with the systems in S&C. Wettle, whose Replication Studies lab had been the staging point for everything that didn't fit in the airlock approach hall. And Okorie, who came last, looking disheveled, blasted and lost.
They stood around the conduit, and McInnis spread his hands.
"I failed you," he told them.
Nascimbeni nodded.
"I don't think anyone covered themselves in glory today," Blank sighed.
Wettle muttered something about it not being his fault, or maybe McInnis', but he couldn't hear it over Ibanez. "It was Deering," she snapped. "Dougall fucking Deering. He put fourteen men on a thirteen-man party."
"And circumvented an emergency lockout to do it," Nascimbeni added. His voice was raw. McInnis understood why the cap was so far down, now. "I want his head on a pike."
"He's in no position to account for his actions right now," McInnis told them. "And that's rather beside the point, in my view. What I want to know, right now, is what changes we need to make in policy and procedure to avoid another calamity of this sort."
"Rotate the tires," Lillihammer suggested. "Seems to me a lot of people are in positions they're not suited for, doing jobs they're not good at."
"Examples?" McInnis asked.
Nascimbeni pushed his cap up, and glared at him with haunted eyes.
"Point," he acknowledged, then looked to the others. "And Dr. Deering, I presume. But what else? I am going to need to make specific recommendations to my superiors. There is going to be an audit, after a series of blunders as severe as this."
The others were silent again for a moment before Okorie, the only one who hadn't spoken yet, piped up. "I think someone should stand vigil."
They all turned to stare at her.
She was shaking. "For them. For… for them." She gestured at the black spots on the tiles, which had been altered at the chemical level from ceramic to charbroiled human bone.
McInnis nodded. "A moment of silence?"
"No," said Nascimbeni. "Six minutes."
He raised an eyebrow at the old tech.
"That's how long it took for them to boil from the inside out."
He had no way of knowing how long he'd been out. His nightmares were very real, and in reality he was very, very drugged. But the taunting spectres of the men and women he had murdered gradually gave way to a smaller quantity of labcoated physicians and the occasional desultory visitor, until he felt fairly certain he could identify the murky, dull-edged dreariness as the waking world and the stark, colourful hellscape as his dreams.
"It was touch and go for a while," LeClair was telling him. "We had to erase a solid chunk of your memories. You got a little out of control."
He didn't respond.
"Hit a few of the nurses. Broke two of your fingers on the wall. Yelled yourself hoarse, so don't bother trying to talk again for a while."
He didn't respond.
"Having said that, we're going to wean you off the tranquilizers and antipsychotics soon enough. There's a lot of questions you'll have to answer."
He didn't respond.
When they did ask their questions, still, he didn't respond.
10 September
He was still in hospital, refusing to speak, when the investigation began. A hatchet-faced man most of them had happily forgotten was going over everything like a sharp-toothed comb, drawing blood everywhere he touched. These facts were relayed to him by Udo Okorie, the only person who visited with anything like regularity. She didn't explain where Stacey was, and he didn't ask. He didn't ask anything, and offered few answers.
When Falkirk finally came calling on Dougall, it was clear he already had most of what he needed. "You're in a right state," the skeletal Scotsman burred. "If this is how they treat our VIPs…"
LeClair, on the other side of the curtain, coughed sharply but said nothing. The investigator pretended not to hear her, fixing his bleary eyes on Dougall instead. "Just a few more things to clear up, Dr. Deering, and I'll be on my way. Before we can fix what's been broken, we absolutely need to fix blame."
Dougall spread his arms out on the mattress, palms up, and matched Falkirk's pitiless gaze.
"Yet another for the cross?" the old man chuckled. "There's been so many since I arrived. I'll admit I've been looking forward to these prostrations for some time, but I didn't have you pegged as the self-sacrificing sort."
He wanted to tell the man why it all had happened. He wanted to confess his guilt, so that there might be punishment. Restitution. Accountability, at the very least.
But there was a problem, so still he did not respond.
Falkirk shrugged, the bones of his shoulders making little peaks on his morning dress suit. "Suit yourself. My findings thus far are that you are solely responsible for identifying the situation in AAF-D, solely responsible for forcing a plan of action to prevent a future build-up of that same kind, and mildly negligent when it comes to the supervision of your underlings. That last is a very, very serious charge, so don't let my sympathetic language set your mind at ease. How we treat our people is a vital element of keeping the rest of humanity safe, Dr. Deering."
Dougall shut his eyes. Here it was. Give me the dotted line, and I'll sign. Even if it wasn't perfectly true. Even if he couldn't explain why.
"Do you have anything to tell me on the matter of your delegations this past Sunday, September the eighth?"
He found his mouth was dry. He glanced at the bedside table. No water.
The cadaverous inquisitor took his hesitation for reticence, rather than inability. "I will clarify further. Can you explain your relationship with one Stacey Laiken, Senior Researcher in Applied Occultism?"
Dry or not, he croaked out: "What?"
Falkirk leaned in. He smelled faintly of camphor oil; Dougall had expected sulfur. "Can you tell me why someone so rankly amateurish should have risen to a position of authority in your hierarchy, someone so sloppy or stupid that she could foul up a team composition outlined in no uncertain terms in every protocol on record, to the point of even bypassing an inbuilt safety mechanism to do so?"
What? WHAT?
But he'd used up the last of his spittle. He could merely mouth the words.
"Water?" Falkirk guessed. He snorted. "No, I shouldn't bother if I were you. You'll want the stronger stuff, when you see the mark this leaves on your record. Get some rest, Chief. Laiken's already filled out her own disciplinary papers; I suppose McInnis taught all of you to fall on your swords at the first provocation, didn't he?" He tapped his own forehead, lightly. "Which reminds me. I need to go collect a certain letter from the Director's Office. It's been a pleasure meeting you."
By the time the old man was out of sight, Dougall had hammered the call button enough times that the doctors all thought they were responding to a Code Blue.
11 September
Stacey was gone. She hadn't come to visit him before leaving, and since even Udo had stopped, he didn't find out until he pulled up the duty roster on his tablet. Probably nobody in the entire facility wanted anything to do with him, no matter what nonsensical story his fiancée had spun to explain what had happened and satisfy her own martyrdom complex.
Well, fuck them all, then. He was no pariah. What had happened hadn't really been his fault.
Not yet.
When LeClair finally gave him medical clearance, he gathered up his things and headed straight for the Chair's Complex on sublevel two.
And disappeared.
He'd done it once before, a few weeks after originally establishing himself at Site-43. When he had enough research projects and administrative tasks to justify vanishing into his quarters and not coming out again for days. It had been like waiting to scratch a tremendous itch; the release of letting go had felt extraordinary, walking unseen through the halls, poking his head into every closed closet and discovering a wealth of secrets for himself alone.
It hadn't filled the void then, but it had come close.
It didn't come close this time.
Janet had good days and bad days.
That was how Stewart rationalized it. On good days, she could be sweet as sugar. On bad days, she was less of a girlfriend than a physical trainer. And not one of the ones who believed more in building you up than tearing you down. Maybe less a trainer, and more an opponent…
But today was a good day, because it had been a very, very bad week.
She pulled away from him and looked up sharply, knife-edged nose in the air, nostrils flared like a predator scenting pray. He squinted up at her and said: "What?"
"I heard something." She shifted in his lap, craning her neck to look around the empty bullpen.
"The earth moving," he suggested with a grin.
She snorted, and leaned forward to gnaw on his eyebrows. Her affectionate version of bobbing for apples, or maybe a primaeval grooming instinct. She pulled at his curly chest hairs where they escaped the confines of his unbuttoned uniform shirt, and the pain was almost enough to make him miss the sound of the bullpen door slamming closed. This time, they both spun.
They were still alone.
Which meant there was nothing to worry about, and they immediately forgot why they had been.
Romolo's fingers ached, and he forced himself to grip the report a little less tightly. He was on his way from Ibanez's office, heading for Admin and Oversight. Nascimbeni met him at the glass doors, looking no less blasted and even more resolute than before — the pressure had been building hour by hour, and Romolo had started to worry that his uncle might give himself a heart attack if nothing was done.
But they were doing something now.
McInnis' secretary, Zulfikar, knew better than to try and stop them at the door. Nascimbeni was already shouting before Romolo closed it behind them — though he had to pull it twice, as though there were something invisible stuck in the gap. "You couldn't take the honourable way out, I presume."
The Director looked up at them, expression neutral, as though shouting were a perfectly normal manner of addressing one's superior. "You've been speaking with Dr. Falkirk, have you?"
"They might be able to whitewash Deering, but everyone knows this was all your fault. Mistakes all the way up and down the ladder. Admin and Oversight is right. You weren't paying attention, and my people paid the price."
Romolo crossed the awkward distance to the Director's desk, and placed the report on the blotter. "It's all in here, sir."
McInnis glanced at the folder, but made no move to open it. "What is?"
"A pattern of negligence." Romolo was an easygoing, devil-may-care man by nature. He did not take easily to confrontation. But they were my friends," and the tension in his throat was almost unbearable, so he continued to release it. "Mistake after mistake, cases of bad judgement, things you missed that you shouldn't have. Rock-solid evidence."
McInnis rotated the report, reading the simple legend on the tab. "Compiled by whom?"
"What does it matter?" Nascimbeni snarled, and Romolo was grateful. He didn't want to have to explain that the folder had simply appeared in his quarters an hour ago, how he'd read it with mounting dread and anger, then brought it to his uncle at a run.
The conversation devolved from there, though almost entirely on their side. Nascimbeni was red-faced and weeping, and Romolo knew he himself made a perfect picture of rage. The Director listened placidly to a caustic stream of invective, the outlining of his many faults and failures of leadership, and what they had just cost.
"And that's not even getting into Dougall fucking Deering," Romolo began, all sense of propriety long since lost.
Zulfikar frowned as the inner door opened, no-one stepped out, and the door closed again. When the same process repeated with the outer door, he felt like there was something he ought to do, but absent any visual cue as to what that was, he didn't.
Doing this once had been easy. Doing it twice was an agony.
Part of it was probably that his timing was off. Mass death was not precisely romantic, and it took longer than a few days for the pall to wear off. But it had to be now, he was feeling it now, and he couldn't be sure of getting up the nerve later. It had taken him years to regain this small store of gumption.
"So yeah," Reuben finished lamely. "The coupons expire in a few weeks," and that was precisely the wrong thing to say, "not that I'm just asking to use up the coupons, I just mean it's no imposition on me if you say yes," and that was somehow worse, "not that you would be thinking of that," oh no, "well, not that you wouldn't—"
Melissa raised a hand, lips pursed in a cryptic smile. "I get what you're going for. You don't need to keep backtracking."
Reuben sighed. "I just feel like that's all we do these days, you know? Backtrack."
And that, finally, was the right sequence. He'd cracked the code, not through brute force, but the exhaustion that came later. Melissa had always valued honesty.
"It's a date," she told him, and he wouldn't have noticed a bomb going off in the distance as his head swam. Certainly he didn't notice Harold Blank watching from the Salt Mines window, alternating between a scowl and a petulant moue.
Melissa noticed the strange flash, but didn't break eye contact to see what had caused it.
She parted from Stewart with a kiss at the cloverleaf, he heading west, she heading east. There wasn't much road in her direction, and her legs were very long, so she took slow swaggering strides until she was sure he'd plodded far enough into the dorms before turning around just before the F-D airlock.
The coast was clear. Janet wasn't precisely sure what it was she wanted to do, only that she wouldn't want witnesses when she did it. Stewart was long-gone; he took their assigned walking duties very seriously, like everything else he did. The pair of researchers at the A&R entrance had gone off hand in hand, and Blank was pulling the shutters down one after another, so the evening shift had already let out. A few harried-looking researchers came out of Wettle's lab, but not the man himself.
She told herself she was acting on a whim, nothing premeditated, when she veered sharply to the left and entered Replication Studies. She told herself she was due a little acting-out, as she lowered the blinds on this side of the hall as well. She told herself a little catharsis was always a healthy thing.
She didn't tell Wettle anything when she walked into his cramped little office at the back, and shut the door behind her. She just pulled at the collar of her uniform shirt, popping the top few buttons open, tossed her head to one side, and waited.
He blinked at her, apparently nothing to tell for his part either. So she crossed the space between them, pushed a stack of papers off his desk, and sat down on it.
"Hi?" he said, as though it were somehow a suggestion.
She tugged the next button free.
"Oh," he said. He raised his eyebrows. "Oh? Really?"
"Really," she said.
He stuck out his lower lip speculatively. "Huh. Okay."
They both stood up at the same time. It was a rough collision.
It got rougher from there.
At one point, she could have sworn she was seeing stars.
Well, maybe just the one. The briefest flare.
She told herself it was an omen.
He found himself wishing Stacey would do something similar. He found her upstairs and followed her for a while, but she did nothing more malefic than sip tea and read journals.
"He thinks it can all go back to the way things were."
Ana nodded, and passed him the foil-wrapped package. "That's his job. That's pretty much the entirety of his job."
Nascimbeni scowled at her, but took the proffered gift and began unwrapping it. "Not what I'm talking about. Sure, he has to pretend all this is normal. Get everybody's confidence back up. Make them think their jobs and… lives, are safe." One of these days he was going to have to learn how to handle loss. But not today. Today, he could use the nervous energy. "But this was a fuckup too large for everybody to walk away from."
"Fourteen people didn't walk away from it."
He stabbed a finger at her, which had the effect of tearing loose the remainder of the foil lip. The chicken sandwich she'd bought at the cafeteria slid out to land on a paper plate that hadn't been there a second ago; fast reflexes and a talent for precognition were among the many requisite skills of a sniper. "That's the point. When that many people die, the casualties don't stop. Not until a few necks in white collars get stretched for letting it happen."
Ana took a moment to collect her thoughts, disguising it with a bite of her own sandwich. It was gratifying to see he was waiting for her response, rolling up his sleeves and testing the warmth of the sandwich with one finger. Nascimbeni was gruff and taciturn at times, but when he was riled he could talk up a storm. He was reining it in, for her sake. "Well," she finally offered. "If you think it's legitimately his fault, then I suppose cooperating with Falkirk makes sense."
Nascimbeni's nose twitched. "Cooperating with an investigation always makes sense. Workplace safety is everybody's concern."
She acknowledged the point. "Does replacing the Director make people safer?"
"It would make me happy. I do my job better when I'm happy. That makes people safer."
She chuckled, keeping it rolling long enough to note the long hairs standing to attention on his bare arms. "Does that mean making you happy is my prerogative, as a security officer?"
The sandwich slipped out of his fingers, back onto the paper plate. She put hers down as well, and reached a hand across the desk.
He took it, as a breeze rattled the half-opened door to the empty breakroom. The Site seemed to sigh with the release of tension, though somehow she felt it was not altogether a happy sound.
None of them seemed to comprehend it. They weren't feeling it.
He couldn't make them.
But he could approximate.
Veiksaar's terminal was dark, and she had the lights off in her office. She blinked in the narrow beam that announced her office door was swinging open, just a crack, and she didn't care. Didn't care who was looking in.
She wasn't crying.
Her face was swollen up with rage, and she was driving her fists into her eye sockets and muttering, but she wasn't going to god damn cry.
She stood up and punched the power button on her terminal hard enough that it dislodged, and she had to smack the casing so it would pop back out again. It was bad technical procedure, but she couldn't stand to turn the monitor on again and see the anonymous email with its attached photograph again. See his fucking face as he stared with desperate longing at her.
The lights in the attached computer lab were dim, but still bright enough to disorient her as she pulled the door open and pushed herself through. She misjudged the aperture, just barely scraping by, as though there were someone standing at the threshold who had not expected her sudden egress.
Radcliffe stood stock-still in the doorway to his dorm, the dorm he shared with Janet, mouth working soundlessly, clenching his personal phone so tightly that the casing was sure to crack.
The photograph was bad.
But the video…
Still not enough.
"I don't know what you want from me," David sighed.
Romolo flopped down on the aged tartan couch, and messily cracked open the can of beer. This was the ultimate confirmation of his mood; David kept real beer from a real distillery in his quarters, and his friend would only partake when circumstances were too dire to pretend that his own moonshine didn't quite scratch the itch. "I don't know what I want from you either."
Markey sat in the weathered recliner opposite, and kicked his feet up. "The old boy's got friends in high places. You remember how we got him in the first place?"
"Scout flaked," Romolo grunted.
Markey shook his head. "Scout stood on principle. They used to do that a lot, people around here. He went down for it — Falkirk brought him down — but they found someone else with a high horse to replace him. They're not going to shift McInnis over this, no matter what that creepy fuck puts in his report."
Romolo crushed the can as he poured its contents down his throat, getting foam in his beard and dripping all over the couch. Neither of them cared. "Let's just make up some bullshit," he snapped after wiping his beard with his sweater sleeve. "Take him down that way."
Markey laughed, and didn't look at the camera on the ceiling. "Let's be serious," he urged. He knew his friend had meant every word, but security theatre demanded these little de-escalations. "We do need to shake shit up. Those were good kids who died, and that can't happen again."
"Poor Phil," Romolo sniffed. He didn't get weepy on half a can of beer.
"Poor Phil," Markey agreed. "Poor us, if we let them sweep this under the carpet."
"These fuckers don't sweep," Romolo muttered. He downed the rest of the can, and didn't bother wiping his beard this time. "Sweeping is beneath them. Just like you and me."
There was a faint click from the door to the hall, and they both froze. Markey did glance up at the camera this time; it blinked at him, once, in red.
McInnis was standing at the mirror in his office washroom, examining his own features. He hadn't aged overmuch since the late nineties, but he fancied there was something off in the bone structure. A little sagging in the skin, perhaps. Something about the eyes…
There was someone in his office.
He stepped out of the washroom, taking an immediate tally of every object and its place. He kept an up-to-the-minute mental map of his things, as he'd been trained to do. Every detail counted. The door to Zulfikar's anteroom was shut. The papers on his desk were undisturbed; of course he didn't keep anything truly sensitive in the unlocked drawer, just a draft report for Overwatch on the decommissioning disaster which painted a fairly flattering picture of all involved.
"Ah," he said. He reached into the drawer to draw out the sealed pack of cigarettes which the report had previously obscured, and considered it for a moment before picking up his redline to S&C.
When Sokolsky saw who was at the door, he gave her an ironic grin. He wasn't sure what the irony was, but it was always fun to play along.
Eileen pushed her way through, a bottle of wine under one arm. "You busy?" she demanded.
He'd concocted a few excellent schemes for producing precisely this situation. He hadn't put any of them into place, of course. This was the only game he preferred to play fair.
But he never objected to getting lucky.
Ibanez thumbed a button on her pager, redirecting to the duty desk, and resumed her drinking game with Radcliffe in the saloon. Gwilherm was pacing the Site at a rapid clip, a grin splitting her narrow face; Wettle was staring into space in his office, occasionally shaking his head with equal rapidity as though he thought it might wake him from a dream. Blank was standing in the dorm he shared with Veiksaar, tapping at his tablet in confusion as it refused to tell him where his girlfriend was.
He knew better than to play games with Del Olmo, though he wanted to. Desperately. His enemies were one thing, the neutral parties another, but his supposed allies were worst of all. This was as much their fault as his. More, even. They were supposed to know better. They could have prevented it.
He stood on the decommissioned AAF-D platform for about twenty minutes, while the swaddled spectre they called the Lady in Red floated beside him and offered no comment. They watched nothing happen until the dust made Dougall sneeze, and then he decided it was time to cap off the day's achievements.
So he entered the main elevator, drove it down to the top-secret fourth sublevel, and walked into the most secure chamber at Site-43.
The brothers were talking to each other when he opened the door, but they stopped immediately and turned to look at it.
No.
Not it.
Him.
"One of yours?" the Uncontained asked mildly.
The Unyielding shook his head. "You're the one who suffers fools."
Dougall turned, and ran directly into Bernabé Del Olmo. "Free for a chat?"
The brothers had resumed their conversation before the door was even closed.
"You've been holding out on us."
They met, as they always did, in the office of the Chief of Acroamatic Abatement. There was of course no such person, and the spacious room was bare of everything but the most basic of furniture. Only Dougall, McInnis, Ibanez and Van Rompay had keys that would open the door, and there was no window, and the cul-de-sac corridor went completely unused at all times. Rydderech had specifically requested that his workspace not be accessible from the main drag, so that nobody would darken his door unless they intended to come through it. His antisociality was their little group's gain.
Del Olmo had spoken, as he usually did. Zlatá was slumped in his chair, eyes closed, only his breathing proving he was still alive. Dougall shrugged. "Don't know what you mean."
"Then I will explain." Del Olmo scratched at the back of his neck, near the scalp; the recyclers were turned down in this space, since it was disused, and they all suffered from the extra dust to some extent. "Your explanation at the C&C was bogus. You absolutely know more than you were telling. You didn't science out the oncoming breach, Dougall. Don't insult us further by sticking to that ridiculous line."
Dougall sighed. He'd known this was coming, but hadn't prepared a counterargument. The fact was he simply didn't care. "Yeah, that's true."
Now Zlatá did open his eyes. "So? How did you know?"
"It just came to me." He laughed at the looks on both of their faces. "Oh, that's incredible."
"What is?" Del Olmo asked.
"That's probably the most overtly truthful thing I've ever said to either of you, and you both think I'm lying."
"Perhaps if you clarified." If Zlatá was available to be convinced, he hid it well. "In what way did it 'come to you'?"
"I had… a vision." He waited for one of them to prompt him to continue. He wasn't going to drag this out of himself.
"You're not an occultist," Zlatá stated flatly. He brought this up whenever he could, relevant or not. "You don't get visions."
"Are you perhaps describing the effects of a cognitohazard?" Del Olmo suggested.
Dougall snorted. "My own thoughts directed me to stop the breach. What would you call that?"
"Cognition?" Del Olmo sneered.
"Certainly not a vision," Zlatá added. "Visions are visual. You never did learn to employ precise terminology."
It was always like this, with them. Always had been. They'd been meeting for years, since their mutual suspicions had been confirmed, and in all that time neither Del Olmo nor Zlatá had ever really trusted him.
Then again, he'd almost never told them the truth either.
"Fine," he sighed. "It was an auditory hallucination. But it was real."
"Then it wasn't—" Zlatá began, but Del Olmo raised a hand to cut him off.
"Dougall, you're a giftschreiber. If you're hearing things, what do you think the most likely source is?"
Dougall blinked. "It was me. It came from me."
The memeticist was frowning. "I found you in the basement."
Now it was Dougall's turn to raise a hand. "I went there of my own volition."
"Why?" Zlatá pressed.
"I don't know. They didn't lure me. I'm not being controlled." He suddenly stood up, so as to put his foot down. "Gentlemen, I'm not entertaining this. You're just going to have to accept my version of events."
"Imprecision again," Zlatá groused. "You mean to say the truth."
No, Dougall didn't reply. I very rarely ever mean that.
"We need to act," Del Olmo was saying. "This is an opportunity."
"This is a disaster," Zlatá interrupted. "What are you talking about? Falkirk is rooting around in everything now. If we aren't careful—"
"He's not going to find us," Dougall snapped. "Don't even suggest it."
The old man did not seem mollified. He even seemed halfway to awake now. "He's making a tremendous pain in the ass of himself, nevertheless. And we do have to take extra measures to be cautious. And if he finds against McInnis—"
"Which he will," Del Olmo added smoothly.
"— then you know who he's going to suggest as a replacement Director. Don't you?"
Dougall did.
"The same person he's wanted for the job for decades," Del Olmo nodded. "Himself."
"Would that be so bad?" Dougall asked. "Sure, he's not exactly personable, but he's at least a lot more competent than McInnis."
They both looked at him like he was crazy. Zlatá voiced his objection first. "He's evil."
Del Olmo waved this off as though it were a matter of no concern. "He's only competent at advancing his own interests. I realize you have a certain empathy with that, Dougall, but it's not very useful for our purposes."
He decided to let that one go. A month ago he would have protested in anger. Now he simply didn't care. "So, what? We shore up McInnis?"
"No." Suddenly Del Olmo was smiling. "I think it's time we introduced a dark horse candidate."
She was apt not to notice the interference on her behalf. She was perhaps the Site's best discoverer and interpreter of patterns, but she did have a blind spot for anything which could be mistaken for a consequence of her own talents. When she eventually ascended to the post, Dougall had no doubt she would fully believe she had earned it.
Arrogant people always did.
11 September
One thing the three conspirators could agree on was that in the short term, only two possibilities existed: McInnis would keep his post after suffering some indignities, or Falkirk would temporarily take it from him.
Dougall thought about making an appointment, but he thought his point was better made by just popping in.
McInnis blinked when he finally noticed Dougall's presence, but otherwise failed to react. Dougall had hoped for at least a little shock, since he never got to do this with anyone else. Oh, well.
"Come to return what you took?" the Director asked mildly.
Dougall shook his head. "Don't know what you're talking about."
"Indeed." McInnis stood, and walked to the door to his private washroom. "I was burgled while still essentially present in the room. If there's anyone else in this facility who can manage that, I think several of my staff should know, and should already have informed me."
"Maybe you misplaced it," Dougall suggested.
"Like my trust in you?" The older man's grey eyes bored into Dougall, and he suddenly realized how badly he'd misjudged his mood. This was McInnis angry. "You assured me your interests aligned with ours. You made this same assurance to others. If that was a lie, and this a betrayal, you really ought to have covered your tracks better."
Dougall scowled. "I wasn't lying." About that. "I hate those bastards more than anyone. I'm not on their side. But you really haven't been on ours, either. You've been lazy, and soft, and… there was a price."
McInnis nodded. "The price your brother paid, for instance."
Dougall said nothing. Dougall couldn't.
"I know what they say about me," the Director told him. "That I always know what to say, and when. But that isn't what matters, in leadership."
"What matters, then?" He had no idea where this was going, or why he ought to care.
"Knowing when not to say anything at all."
Dougall blinked. "What does that have to do with what happened to my brother?"
McInnis stared at him.
Dougall stared back.
"Fuck you," he finally snarled, and slammed the door open on his way out.
Zulfikar came in, a look of horror on his face. "I swear I didn't let him in, sir."
McInnis smiled. "I'm well aware. Would you accompany me to the hospital for a few minutes, Zulfikar?"
The secretary frowned. "Are you feeling alright, sir?"
"I've been better. But I'm afraid we need to amnesticize you. Nothing serious. Just the past few minutes. I'll arrange for a pay raise in compensation."
This evening, probably. While I still can.
Falkirk was camped out in a spare office in Admin and Oversight. This time Dougall did make an appointment; there was no point in giving up his advantage to a stranger, even one he hoped to know better within the week.
Elstrom was sitting on an office chair when he entered, and the old man shooed her out. When they were alone, he glowered like a vampire from behind the paper-swamped desk. "Is this a follow-up to our earlier conversation, doctor?"
Dougall nodded. "I have some information I think you could use."
"Mm." Falkirk made a face like he'd just started sucking on a lemon; this was remarkable, as he already had a face like someone else had. "Not from you."
Dougall blinked. "Why not?"
"Because I already moved heaven and earth to confirm your little chippie's bogus story," the investigator snapped. "She lacked the know-how to back it up with evidence. I've never seen a sloppier attempt at self-sacrifice, and I might tell you, those idiotic gestures are never particularly well-executed."
He found he didn't know what to say to that.
Falkirk knew how to respond, anyway. "Yes, I know it was all your fault. I've known the entire time. We might not have worked together very long, Dr. Deering, but I always knew there was something off about you. Now I know part of it. You're a rank coward, and an egotist, and almost certainly an adulterer as well." He stretched back in his chair, shiny waistcoat contrasting markedly with his matte and translucent skin. "I'm not attempting to elicit an admission. I'm just making it clear where we stand."
"Stand," Dougall repeated dumbly. "I'm standing. You're sitting down."
Falkirk laughed. "Been hanging around that imbecile Wettle, have you? Yes, you're standing before me. The arbiter of your future. And I am sitting here, waiting to hear what you've brought me. Because you have brought me something, I assume."
And now Dougall understood. Falkirk had gone along with the deception because he thought he could use Dougall. As Ilse had. As Del Olmo and Zlatá had before her, and would continue to do. If he wanted to keep his post, keep living his half-secret life, he had to offer something in tribute.
The question was, did he want to?
But he was already pulling the folder out, and moving toward the desk. Falkirk put up a spindly hand, and shook his head. "As I said, not from you. There can be no further complications from your quarter. This is a tetchy little cover-up, and I would rather expend no more effort on it. If you want that information to reach me, you should send it via other channels."
"Other channels," Dougall repeated.
Falkirk sighed, and for a moment the energy that was his only claim to animation vaporized, and he looked like a Halloween mannequin. "I have carried a secret for decades, Dr. Deering. A secret to which no other in this facility, no other in the Foundation, is privy. I will not divulge it to you. But it grants me certain… certainties. I am uniquely capable of identifying a certain class of individual, and I would wager very highly that you belong to that vanishingly rare set."
12 September
The Overwatch report circulated like a memo; specifically, the sort of memo where your boss made a ribald joke or forgot to remove damning traces of an early draft. It had reached everyone with a pre-existing bone to pick with administration within a day, at which point it found its way into the hands of William Wettle, who had no idea what it was and left it lying on his desk for S&C to find. After a brief period where it looked like he was going to be blamed for the theft — further evidence, as far as Dougall was concerned, that nobody at Site-43 had any ounce of competence left — it was finally obvious that no single culprit would ever be identified. The security footage of the Director's office had a curious hole, and by now there were dozens of Xeroxed copies floating around.
"I take it you meant to protect us," Mataxas mused. "But it was a staggeringly ill-considered impulse."
All the Chairs and Chiefs were assembled for this. Dougall had no need to hide, nor to hide his smug grin.
"I meant," McInnis told them, "to relay my honest impressions of this event, and its causes. A single error was committed; critical, but in no way indicative of a more serious problem."
"Fourteen people," Nascimbeni snapped. He didn't need to supply a verb. And he didn't need to say fourteen of my people.
"The slightest miscalculation can have disastrous effects," the Director acknowledged, "in our line of work. This regrettable incident only stands out because our record has been pristine thus far. We simply do not suffer setbacks on this level. That is the take-away here. Our competence, not this briefest of lapses."
Dougall realized their fearless leader hadn't been sleeping. He never would have left an opening like that before the breach. Nascimbeni immediately stuck his nose into it. "Setbacks," he repeated. "A catastrophic loss of personnel and experience, because you failed at the vetting process."
This was the part Dougall had dreaded. He still had no idea what the Director might do under pressure. He only now realized how little he knew about what motivated the other man.
"Dr. Laiken's credentials were impeccable," McInnis sighed. "I can only assume—"
"Why do you have to assume?" Ibanez snapped. "Why don't you know how it happened? You've had me running willy-nilly everywhere looking for your lost mail, instead of looking into Stacey's deal."
The Director folded his hands on the table, then unfolded them again. "What would you have found? If she was facing difficulties, they can only have been psychological."
"You didn't direct us to examine her, either." Koda Anoki, the chief psychologist, looked troubled.
"Your expertise was required in dealing with the trauma of September the eighth." A note of pleading, of feeling put-upon, was creeping into the Englishman's practiced neutrality.
"If there's a morale problem…" Gennady Styles, the HR tsar, never opened his mouth during these meetings. Dougall had only had the faintest recollection of the man's voice before now. "That's something my people should have been told about. Particularly as we're going to need to replace those fourteen techs."
McInnis nodded. "But that's beyond our purview at the moment. There is still an active investigation, and I have instructed you all to give Dr. Falkirk the support he requires. I saw no need to second-guess."
"So you've already ceded authority," Du grunted. "You're letting Falkirk call the shots."
"That's not what I meant," the Director frowned. The frown added and you know it.
"The one thing we could always trust," said Nascimbeni, "was that you could say what you meant. Allan, this smells like a cover-up."
The room was silent for a moment.
"I am not always at liberty to divulge—"
"I move," the old tech continued, standing up and smoothing out his vinyl vest, "for no confidence in Director McInnis and his leadership."
Dougall would have preferred something a little more grammatical, but he had long since learned to make do with substandard materials.
13 September
In the end, McInnis kept his secret.
"Of course he did," Falkirk crowed. "Did you betray him over that? Good lord. You really don't understand principles, do you?"
Dougall needed air.
The old bastard had sent her boss out on a rail, and Dolly Ferber rode out of Dodge with him.
"It isn't the end," the All-Sections Chief assured her as they emerged into the empty station platform at Grand Bend. The automated train door lagged briefly before closing behind them, as though the very mechanisms of the facility were already falling apart with this dual decapitation. "In the long run, you will see it's merely a setback."
"I've never thought about the long run," she admitted. She was too conscious of the fact that once they crested the stairs to street level, their time for privileged conversation would end. "That was always your purview."
He smiled at her, as though the world weren't falling apart. "It's never too late to start."
He headed to Kettle Point, while she made her way to Grand Cove. Her bungalow was more modest than most, because most of them belonged to senior researchers and the upper cream of the admin. Only two of the Site's dozens of secretaries had topside accommodation, and only Zulfikar actually used his; she wondered if the little houses would be reassigned now.
She puttered around the soulless space for a few hours, marvelling at how much more homely her gleaming underground workspace seemed than this fiction of a formal abode, staring into space with the television on and waiting for the next shoe to drop. The impact, when it came, it was loud and musical.
The doorbell.
Karen Elstrom was standing on her stoop, looking less put-together than Dolly had ever seen her. So, still very put-together. "Got a moment?"
Dolly shrugged, and stepped aside to let the other woman enter. "Nothing but. Kind of at loose ends here."
"Not for long." Karen took off her jacket, and Dolly noticed she was carrying a brown bag with LCBO heraldry. She'd apparently brought wine.
"What does that mean?" Maybe she wasn't going to be fired after all. Maybe Falkirk had decided to terminate her, just to further spite her outgoing superior.
Karen found her way to the bare kitchen, set the bottle down and then herself — both on the table. "Falkirk— the Director— is pissed off you left the Site."
Dolly blinked. "Someone had to see the Chief out. That's protocol."
"I don't think he knows our protocols very well yet. You wanna get some glasses?"
Dolly didn't know what she meant by that, until she noticed the bottle again and nodded. It was actually a surprise to find the cupboards stocked with glassware; she selected two champagne flutes, because why not. "What does it matter anyway? I'm nobody important."
"You were nobody important this morning. Same as me." Karen began removing the wrapping from the end of the bottle with her long fingernails.
Dolly set the glasses on the table. "And who are we now? The resistance?" She chuckled dryly.
Karen looked pained as she poured. " I'm the Deputy Director."
Dolly stared at her. "The ASC is the Deputy Director."
"Yeah. That's what Skellicorne said. You know what Falkirk said back?"
Dolly shook her head.
Karen handed her a very full glass red wine. Probably the good stuff, knowing her. "He said 'ASC is just a glorified secretary. His secretary's not as pretty as Skellicorne's, but as far as I'm concerned she's still overqualified'." She raised her glass in a toast, lip quirked ironically.
Dolores Ferber, All-Sections Chief, gaped in horror at Karen Elstrom, former secretary to Rory Skellicorne, as the fly on the wall opened up her cupboards again in search of a third champagne flute. Neither of them noticed.
9 October
It took a few weeks before his staff actively sought him out again.
Maybe it was because they knew he'd been absent of late, although that wasn't likely; one consequence of his little talent was that nobody noticed him and most people never noticed he wasn't around to notice. Perhaps it was out of sympathy for his loss, but he didn't think that was the case either; precious few people at Site-43 had ever come forward to be his friend in good times, and bad times were like would-be-friend repellent in his experience.
It was possible they'd simply gotten used to not having him around. Not many academics thrived on oversight, and he was always happy to help with that particular condition of success.
Eventually his resumption of office hours made an impression on someone, though, and a few of his ApplOcc people and the occasional harried AcroAbate tech came to see him for this or that trifling matter. He found it a diverting balancing act, which was good, because he needed all the diversion he could muster. Give enough to avoid any charge he was derelicting his duty, but not so much that the questioner would start considering him a valuable resource to be included in their regular workflow.
Imrich Sýkora, however, was a special case.
From the predictive thaumaturge's first day on the job, Dougall had known to mistrust him. Sýkora could plot out any chain of probability given enough time, paper, and Elan-Vital Energy; Dougall had never quite understood the combination, or what was so magical about the advanced guessing game — unless it was simply keeping all those factors in his head at the same time, in which case Lillian Lillihammer probably counted as a thaumaturge as well.
Dougall had meant to duck out early today, seeking some measure of solace after a dull work week with his other favoured diversion, but Sýkora dropped in just before he was about to stand up from his desk. The timing was suspicious. It always was, with this one.
"I've got a weird question." Sýkora sat down without having been asked. He was blunt by nature; Dougall liked that, most of the time.
"I don't really have it in me to give you a weird answer," Dougall sighed.
Sýkora set his jaw. Dougall had an admirable jawline — he had spent some time admiring it in mirrors over the years — but the other man was practically a male model. Dougall disliked that, all of the time. "I was hoping for a really simple one. Is it alright if I do some research with your old partner?"
Dougall blinked. "Ilse? No. Why?"
Sýkora's brows converged, and Dougall had cause to regret the order in which he'd said that. "She's put in a request for anyone with temporal-related specialities, and that obviously includes me. Honestly, I always wondered why you never put us in touch in the first place."
Dougall shook his head, hoping the blur effect would disguise his panic. "I don't want anyone from this Section working with her. She's unstable, and we need stability now more than ever."
Sýkora brandished his notepad. "I mean, stability is sort of my area of expertise? I might be able to help her make sense of what she's seeing."
Dougall huffed. "Are you second-guessing my orders?"
The other man blinked. "I wasn't… that was an order? Already?"
Dougall didn't respond.
The other man had blinked.
As far as he was concerned, that settled the matter.
19 October
Talking it over with Ilse didn't help in the slightest. If anything, it confirmed that he had nothing left to learn from her, nothing left to gain from their abbreviated association.
If she wanted to think this was the best of all possible worlds, well, he couldn't control that. Her mind was her own.
He was beginning to believe, however, that perhaps everyone was a little better off because that mind was kept sequestered in its own little box, out of sight.
Where she couldn't have any more bright ideas.
Where she couldn't do any more damage.
As long as he was still Chief of Applied Occultism, Ilse Reynders was absolutely never leaving that incinerator.
2003
11 March
Dougall wasn't invited to two weddings in the same month.
He didn't go anyway.
He did utilize his conditional anonymity to watch Blank wallowing in self-pity with an empty dorm full of depressing, pseudointellectual music, and also to scope out the invitees to the Nascimbeni/Mukami proceedings who hadn't chosen to go. He found a miserable J&M tech risking his boss' favour to drown sorrow in the saloon, and noted down his name tag for later.
Ilse would have been proud of him, in the abstract. She was an endlessly educational example.
17 March
"What is it now?" There was no anger in her voice, only resignation and a little wariness. Like the anticipation of a blow.
"Aliquescence formulae." He dumped the sheets on the table beside her projector, and began feeding them in. "Still a tricky subject after all these years."
"Because I don't care about it," she muttered.
"Because you don't think it helps you," he snapped. "But you agreed to help, and I ought to point out—"
"I picked the topic, yeah, yeah." She waved the pencil at him so lazily that the lead scraped on the glass. He'd never seen her so flagrantly waste a resource without flinching. "You didn't exactly give me a buffet of options."
"I'm not exactly waiting on you." His hands found his hips. "This is our deal. You help out where you can, and I don't cut you off." He flicked on the projector.
She squinted at the first sheet. "You couldn't find anything time-related for me to work on?"
He snorted.
"I'm serious. We can still fix our mistakes."
He took pleasure from the pleading in her tone, particularly knowing what he had to respond with. "I have plenty of questions about time," he sneered. "But I'm taking a page out of your book."
"What does that mean?" Her eyes were already scanning back and forth rapidly, consuming the material on her window. She did it as naturally as breathing, and she didn't need to breathe anymore. Perhaps this was her equivalent.
"It means I'll be getting the answers from myself, eventually."
He married Udo in the spring, in a ceremony so private it involved only the two of them, Karen Elstrom from admin, and a pair of forms to sign.
She seemed happy.
He thought that was probably a good thing.
There was surprisingly little turnover with Falkirk as Director. There was something of a restoration of sanity, from Dougall's perspective; Ignaz Achterberg replaced Blank as Chair of A&R, given his advanced seniority, though his predecessor would stay on as Deputy Chair. Veiksaar only got to keep her job because the rest of the technicians were even younger than her; Falkirk tried, and failed, to woo Nancy Briggs back to the position. Wherever juniors had been elevated above their elders, the new Director righted the balance. A few of the more outspoken researchers quit, or at least, they disappeared. Most of the rest became sullen, less enthusiastic, more professional, which he judged no terrible thing.
The former Director was permitted to work as researcher emeritus under Bradbury, who'd taken up Mataxas' post after the latter finally retired. He used these conditional credentials for only one thing: attending the now-annual vigil in AAF-D with the other seven fools who thought themselves to blame for what had happened.
Dougall wouldn't be caught dead in those dusty halls, and had nothing to say to anyone who did.
2005
2 February
It was amazing how little cartilage and muscle seemed necessary to form the shape of a finger. Falkirk's were nothing but skin over skeleton, as far as Dougall could tell, as they waved him to a seat. "Let's make this quick."
He settled in, and waited for the Director to make his speech. That was how Falkirk operated: lay down the law, then trust it would either be obeyed, or dissenters prosecuted.
"Are you intentionally stonewalling Dr. Reynders, Dr. Deering?"
Dougall blinked. He'd already forgotten how direct the man could be, when he needed to know something instead of merely needing to pass on his own needs. "Yes."
When Falkirk's brows raised, Dougall wondered what was keeping his bulbous eyes inside those shallow, sagging sockets. "That was easy. Why?"
Dougall shrugged. "I don't trust her. She doesn't have our best interests at heart."
The old man stuck out his lower lip appraisingly before responding. "Define for me the parameters of 'us'."
"The Site. The Foundation. Me. You. What does it matter? It's all the same."
"That's a very good point." Falkirk grinned, and Dougall's musings shifted to the question of whether that full mouth of shiny white teeth could possibly be the least bit natural in origin. "Individualism is the death of the collective. Whether she's working against you, or me, or all of us… she's working against all of us, in effect. You've intercepted every request she's sent to work with your people, and denied her access to everything she's asked for. Sýkora's so-called predictions. Astrauskas' frou frou New Age nonsense. Anything experimental. Of course, it's availed you nothing."
Dougall frowned. "Nothing, sir?"
The old man tsked at him. "Never very good at follow-up, are you? The same mistake you made with Laiken." The old lie no longer hurt at all; it hadn't, after all, been his lie. "Reynders is still making progress on her research, no matter how much help we deny her. Somehow just the simple act of requesting the information seems to be enough for her to get it. Do you have any idea how that might be the case?"
"I…" He was at a loss for words. "She… it's not possible, sir. She has no resources in there. If my people aren't helping her, someone else's must be."
"No." Falkirk rattled his finger-bones on the desk. The desk Dougall had unintentionally won for him. "I've made sure the others see things the way you and I do. She's a raving madwoman, that one. I've pulled strings at Overwatch, too. She still has friends on the Council — they can get so sympathetic sometimes, an unfortunately common symptom of advanced old age — so we can't officially cut her off, but we can make it miserable for her to try and get anything done. And I have, no less than you have. More, even. And yet."
"And yet," Dougall repeated. "Huh."
Falkirk's pale face darkened. "I was hoping for something a little more insightful than that, Dr. Deering. You worked with this woman for half a decade, did you not?"
"Half a dozen," he corrected, absent-mindedly, "years. Six years. Hmm. Is it possible…"
The Director leaned forward. "Is what possible?"
"Is it possible she's never been crazy? That she really does see the ghosts?"
Those vast grey and white bulbs surveyed him bleakly for a moment, before the old man leaned back in his chair and sighed. It was amazing, with the wind out of him, that Falkirk could even be a living being rather than the product of some disastrous dehydration. "We had better hope that's not the case, Dougall. Because if she wasn't crazy then, she is definitely crazy now. And if she's the only one who can see the problem, and you have stymied and estranged her to the point of frustration and madness, well." That death's head grin Dougall had learned to fear so much in so short a space of time. "Your long escape from justice might be nearing its end. You understand?"
To his horror, Dougall realized that he did.
9 May
He spent most of his days staring at a computer terminal, pretending to review the work being done in ApplOcc and AcroAbate. Without Ilse to give it meaning, he could only provide the most superficial guidance; most of the time he avoided even that. His people thought he governed with a soft touch. All of them except for Udo.
"They're starting to get suspicious," she told him one evening as they relaxed in the Chief's Complex.
He looked up from his book — Ilse's latest attempted publication, a dense collection of dead ends and frustration disguised as scientific rigour which he was preparing for rejection with red pen — to where his wife was perched on her own couch, arms crossed, staring at him. He must have been engrossed. It was usually impossible not to notice when those orange high beams were pointed his way. "Who is? Of what?"
"Roz and Imrich." Astrauskas and Sýkora. "Of you."
He closed the book, and sat up straight. "What do you mean?"
"I mean they think you don't actually do anything. They think you don't know how to do your job."
There had been a time when information of this sort would have struck terror into his heart. It had been years ago now. "I'm not actually sure that's important for me to know."
She stared at him. "Do you not?"
"No."
Still, she stared at him. He tossed the book onto his coffee table, and stood up. "Do you agree with them, Udo?"
She didn't move a muscle. "I just think you want to be careful how people perceive you. That's all. You're a long way from retirement, and I'm just getting started."
As was typical these days, her words carried hidden barbs that pricked him long after he'd thought them discarded. Implications that lingered.
From the way they spent their nights together, one would have thought that both of them were already old, and on the way out.
2008
1 June
There was only one person he could talk to about it. One person with enough frame of reference to understand.
He did try.
It didn't go well.
"We've laboured under the delusion that Ilse Reynders is coming back to us eventually," he told Nhung Ngo as the woman in the incinerator twitched and drooled behind glass. "I think it's long past time she was retired."
Even with all the evidence to hand, Ngo wasn't willing to sign off on removing Ilse's privileges.
A word in Falkirk's ear, and a more cooperative psychologist was on the file. One with enough forethought to be considering his retirement prospects.
For a moment, Dougall thought that Ilse's hallucinations must be contagious.
McInnis raised a hand in greeting, and waited at the corner for Dougall to approach. Researchers and agents passed by in both directions, heading up and down the blue-tiled halls of H&S to various destinations.
"What are you doing here?" It wasn't the right thing to say, but it was the only thing that came to mind. "It's not September."
"Waste not, want not," the former Director smiled. "Did you imagine they simply amnesticized and discarded me? After such a substantial investment of training, and other resources?"
Everyone who passed visibly skipped a beat when they saw McInnis. Most of them smiled. They never smiled at Dougall that way.
The older man stuck his hands in his jeans pockets. "To answer you more directly, I've been appointed Liaison with Site-01. I'm sure your Director will appreciate the irony."
Dougall nodded. It was odd; he hadn't felt any particular guilt over his part in sending McInnis away, but now that the man was in front of him again, somehow it felt like there was something he ought to be ashamed of. He shrugged. "Well, good luck with that. You won't find Falkirk as easy to get along with as you were."
"As easy to circumvent, you mean?" McInnis chuckled. "I'm not entirely certain you ever understood either of us, Dr. Deering."
Dougall didn't know what to say to that, but he did know it had been rude, so he felt he was well within his rights to turn and walk away.
Even if he had to circle around to get where he'd been going in the first place.
2013
1 April
"What are you working on?"
Udo nearly jumped out of her skin. "Jesus Christ. Don't sneak up on me like that."
She was standing behind a microscope in the little corner lab usually reserved for junior researchers through the mechanism of stocking it with exclusively substandard equipment. Dougall moved to stand behind her, but she turned to block his view of whatever she was working on.
He waited for her to answer. She narrowed her eyes, considered him for a moment, then stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him.
"What was that for?" he asked once his mouth was otherwise unoccupied.
"Not asking an unanswered question twice." She turned back to the microscope, and switched off the light.
He wanted to press further, but there was a problem.
She'd asked him plenty of questions once that he'd never been able to answer.
Years ago, he'd wandered to the window whenever he felt like this. Now the elevator seemed his only palatable option.
The brothers both looked up again when he entered their shared cell. There had been much debate in the tiny circle of experts who knew these subjects existed over whether to intern them together or separately. In the end, the fact that each was the other's most effective containment apparatus carried the argument.
Dougall leaned on the door, closing it in the process. There had once been a chair in this room, for visitors; it had been removed in pieces in 1998 after a heated domestic discussion on the merits of certain events in the Balkan Peninsula. "I'm not one of yours," he told them both.
The Uncontained nodded, as though this was not the resumption of an abortive meeting from half a decade prior. "Mine are more decisive."
The Unyielding shrugged. "As are mine."
Dougall snorted. "Guess you're not as different as you think."
The Brothers shared a knowing glance. "Everything meets somewhere," the Unyielding remarked. The Uncontained nodded again. "There is always a centre."
Then they both looked at him, and smiled, and spoke with a single voice. "Until there isn't."
"This is why nobody interviews you anymore," Dougall sighed.
"Is it?" The Unyielding affected interest. "I thought it was the accidents."
"It was definitely the accidents," the Uncontained agreed.
"You never could let me alone," his brother tutted.
Mock outrage spread across the other's face. "This from the constant boot on my door?"
Dougall cleared his throat, and the two halves of the SCP-001 complex regarded him with feigned attention again. "Why did you think I belonged to one of you?"
"That was a long time ago," the Uncontained smiled. "Surely you can't expect us to remember."
"It was the last time anyone spoke to you," Dougall retorted. "You can't have had many more interesting conversations, sitting here talking to yourselves."
"It does get a little dull," the Unyielding allowed.
"Always knowing what the other one's going to say," said Dougall.
"No." The Uncontained shook his head. "We never know. Could never even guess."
"It's simply always something tedious," the Unyielding finished. "Same effect."
"Tedious," Dougall agreed. "Like this stonewalling, for example."
Both brothers laughed simultaneously. It was more than a little eerie, with their identical faces and identical voices. The Uncontained finished first, and won the right to answer; they'd been playing chicken, Dougall realized. "We would know our power anywhere. We can see what resides in you."
Dougall clenched his jaw. "There's nothing in me that isn't mine."
"Is that so?" The Unyielding acted out an impressed expression. "Then perhaps we were mistaken. Perhaps you belong to yourself now, Dr. Deering."
It had the shape of a trap, but he couldn't see which side the aperture was on. "I do. I make my own decisions. I achieve my own goals."
"That sounds wonderful," the Uncontained grinned. "So much better than winding your way up to your zenith, while your double winds down to his nadir."
"Neither anticipating the reunion," the Unyielding sighed, "but both powerless to prevent it."
"Slave to a decision never consciously made."
"Trapped in a cycle with a foregone conclusion."
"No hope for success."
"No means of escape—"
Dougall already had the door open.
"There it is." He could hear elation in the Unyielding's voice.
"There he is," the Uncontained laughed.
"Such agency."
"Call it cowardice."
Dougall didn't turn around. "You're just two dead nothings trapped in a cage," be whispered. "I have power. Power you will never see again. And I have endless possibilities in front of me."
"But not behind," the Unyielding remarked.
"How like a pawn."
He slammed the controls on the other side, and left them laughing in the dark.
Del Olmo was practically in ecstasy.
One day Falkirk was Director, the next day, he wasn't. It was obvious enough to most people what had happened, which was why Dougall knew it wasn't true.
His long association with Ilse had taught him one thing for certain: not everything died.
He only hoped he'd made enough of a good impression that the new Overseer would look on him kindly when it came time to determine his possibilities for advancement.
Certainly no encouragement would come from the office of the new Director. Lillihammer seemed to hate him almost as much as she hated most everyone else.
2015
14 February
New hires always arrived on Valentine's Day.
Dougall thought it had probably been McInnis' idea. The man had brought some funny ideas about administration from his communications studies, and he probably thought the hint of romance would help with group cohesion. Indeed, it was not uncommon for cadets and junior researchers and technicians to form temporary, even lasting relationships by the end of their orientation schedules.
It was how he'd met Stacey.
Normally he preferred to avoid the orientations. He didn't want another doe-eyed limpet in his life. But today, for some reason, he went.
It probably had something to do with his cold bed, and the fact that his wife was mostly sleeping in her office lately.
The second sublevel cafeteria was J&M's domain for the day, since it was one of the largest rooms in the facility and they had the largest crop of rookies to harvest — a combination of large workforce and vicious turnover. Nascimbeni was palling around with his picks, avuncular solicitude on full blast, and escorting each of them to his wife for their security harangue. Mukami would be briefing her own rookies in the shooting range in an hour, and Dougall imagined Nascimbeni waiting for her outside the armoury like a golden retriever. It made him feel faintly ill.
Ibanez had quit her job as the Chief of Security and Containment to replace old Van Rompay as the MTF commander. She'd poached Gwilherm as her deputy, leaving Radcliffe where he was. Dougall assumed this was less because the two giant agents couldn't fit in one room anymore, despising each other as they did, and more to keep the big man from distracting the little woman. They were the strangest couple Dougall had ever seen.
Bradbury corralled the small group of generalists in the main foyer, while Blank gave a brief speech to his handful of new archivists in the Salt Mines. Wirth had wanted to quit the latter, but it had been considered inappropriate for him to join the former, so he hadn't. He stewed in the corner while his boss made lame self-deprecating jokes, and tried not to look like he wished he could be someplace else. Dougall found he rather fancied one of the new archivists, and was only a little put off when she introduced herself to the others in a Québecois accent.
Falkirk had been precisely correct.
Everywhere Dougall went, the taint of interpersonal drama was colouring these vital proceedings a sickly rose. Sokolsky was pretending to be a new programmer, interrupting Veiksaar's technical briefing with double entendres which flew over everyone's head but hers, which was already well over her heels with ardent frustration. Wettle had one of the latest gatherings — because he'd forgotten the date, then the time, and then finally the location — so Gwilherm was free to glower at him from the hall while he stammered out his unprepared remarks; when it was over she started nitpicking the errors he'd made, then looked suddenly appalled at herself and apologized. Baggage, baggage, baggage.
Up in ApplOcc…
Dougall just had the presence of mind to blend into the tiles when he saw the near-empty breakroom.
The half-dozen apprentices were already gone, leaving Udo to tidy up their discarded coffee cups and the dollar store party wands she always bought them as a joke. Usually Dougall helped with the cleanup, but he'd stopped to listen to Dolly Ferber and Karen Elstrom bitching about Lillihammer, with his tablet set to record, so he was late.
She'd found someone to help anyway.
"Where's the hubby?" Ambrogi tipped a half-cup of cold brew into the sink.
Udo shrugged. She was sitting on one of the round tables, kicking her legs; it struck Dougall as somehow inappropriate. "Did his vanishing act again."
Ambrogi clicked his tongue reproachfully. "Magicians."
She smiled at him. She didn't smile often. Hadn't she? Once? "Not many thaumaturges can do stealth. Especially not the kind that works on cameras."
Nascimbeni's deputy and heir leaned back on the sink and grinned at her. "I did not know that."
Udo swept an arc in the air in front of her, and the little grains floating in the air formed a bright rainbow. They both laughed.
Dougall listened to them laughing for as long as he could take it, then turned away. There were a few more orientations he could haunt, and he had never felt less welcome in his own kingdom.
He saw her as soon as he entered the Theology and Teleology lounge.
She was sitting at a couch, with her back to him. Most of the other novices were standing, and all of them stood to some approximation of attention when he entered. All but her. She remained seated, arms stretched over the couch's back, apparently unbothered by whatever was so striking to her prospective colleagues.
This time, her hair was orange.
He couldn't remember what colour it had been on the day they'd first met.
It had been black when she'd sent him away. On the first day that had changed everything.
She turned her head, glanced up, and grinned at him. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
So much for being careful.
"What do you think will happen if Okorie walks in here?" She deprived him of the opportunity to respond for a few moments, leaving him with the taste of cream soda on his lips.
Dougall shuddered, even though the answer was simple. "She won't. The door is locked. She'll get confused for about a second, and then walk away."
She leapt off the bed, and bounced over to the hidden controls. She knew exactly where they were. "What if I unlocked it?"
He sighed, stretched across the entire length of the bed, and closed his eyes. "She'll think two people she doesn't recognize have broken in, and she'll run off to call security. Halfway to the alarm, she'll forget what she's doing. If she was coming in here for a reason, she'll probably walk back, freak out again, and do the same thing in a continuous loop until her brain chemistry alters enough to stop her. Probably when she gets hungry, if I had to guess. She's got a healthy metabolism."
"That sounds fun." He stared at her under the tops of his lids as she grinned at him, and hovered her hand over the controls. "Let's do that."
"Alis," he whispered. "What are you doing here?"
She was back to the bed in a flash. "I'm here to take you back, Dougall Deering. You always knew this day would come."
The warmth of the previous hour bled out of him into the mattress. He found himself incapable of response.
She laughed again, kissed him again. "Just kidding, stupid. I got out. I'm here because I thought you'd like to know, and maybe because you could use some help."
He'd never been any good at reading her face. He wondered what Ilse would make of her. "Help with what?"
"With whatever you're planning." She curled up against him, knee rising halfway to his chin. "Because I know you're planning something."
The thing he never thought about threatened to move in the shadows of his mind. "Sorry to disappoint you."
Her eyes flashed, and he was reminded of his wife. His wife, who was going through her personnel reports in the living space just outside that sealed door. "You could never disappoint me, Dougall. I know you too well." She reached up to run her fingers along the lines in his forehead, the ones she'd never seen before. "Now, let's have the truth. After all, you know, you owe me."
He'd done it less because he wanted to than because of how it looked. The impression it gave off.
His father had bragged about touring Europe after graduating college. How he'd done it to dodge the draft — "Die for what you believe in, if you have to, sure. But not for what someone else does." — but ended up staying for the mind-broadening effects of seeing new people, new places, new things. His mother had always rolled her eyes when she heard this story, and once he was old enough, Dougall started wondering whether substances had been more responsible for expanding his father's horizons abroad. But listening to his stories of street fights in Prague, art colonies in Paris and studying with the yogis in Tibet, Dougall had been struck less by the details than the drama of the whole. He envied his father this story. This experience. This thing he could say he had done, which nobody else could argue with.
So when he'd finished his own degree, he'd bought a backpack, a few luxuries, and a ticket to Portugal. He was going to start on one side of the continent, and end on the other. Whether that meant Poland or Arkhangelsk, well, time would tell.
He got as far as Austria.
When he came home, one year later, he had stories that put his father's to shame. Stories he could tell about himself that would truly define how others saw him.
Or, if he liked, how they didn't.
2016
There had been no AcroAbate disasters in 2002, thanks to him. Thanks to his people, there weren't any in 2003, either. Or the next year. Or the next.
It began to appear like there never would be one again.
Both Dougall and Alis knew better than anyone else, however, that appearances could be deceiving.
Dougall alone knew how thin the margin of safety truly was.
It wasn't that he did nothing else for the bulk of two decades.
It was only that the first and last thing he thought about every day, every single day, was the thirty second thing he had to do in the fast-approaching future which would underline the past.
And the nagging question he wished he could put to his partner-turned-nemesis in the incinerator:
What would happen if I said something different?
8 September
He thought of attending in person.
He'd never been. He had been invited, though only by McInnis, the only one of them who would ever have thought to ask.
"Do you think the dead care?" he'd asked the deposed Director.
"Do you think memorials are for the dead?" McInnis had asked in response.
"I don't need a memorial," Dougall had snapped. "I remember just fine. That's the problem."
This year he tried watching them from the end of the hall, hidden to their eyes. He made sure Lillihammer had her back to him, just in case.
He'd expected speeches. Stories. Some demonstration of camaraderie between the memoriants. But there was nothing.
Six minutes of nothing. Six minutes of silence.
His will broke maybe halfway through, and he couldn't even manage to muddle his hurried footfalls.
When the echoes subsided, they reset the count.
It was the respectful thing to do.
2018
4 August
"Is it your brother?"
Dougall snapped back to the present in a head rush, and blinked at the woman across the table. "What?"
Alis was wiping a ketchup stain off the cafeteria table with a serviette, her every motion carefully casual. "It's that time of year. You usually zone out to think about your brother. But there's usually a trigger, and I haven't noticed one."
He glanced around the cafeteria, disoriented. There were maybe twenty other people getting lunch, enough that nobody was minding any business not occurring at their own tables. "Not really. No."
She pursed her lips. "Aging, then. You get morbid the later it gets in the year."
Now he fixed his full attention on her. It was dangerous to let his guard down with this one. "No. It's fine. Forget it."
Her hazel eyes narrowed to slits; hers was a face of folds, which could hide or reveal anything. "Close, huh? Something to do with time, then, but not his, or yours. That's a puzzle."
He suddenly wanted to tell her. Tell her everything. If he could tell anyone, it would be her. She was the only one corrupted enough to understand.
Her expression softened, and she dropped the serviette on her plate. "You know you can't trust me."
He nodded.
"Everyone else, you have to guess. But you know where we stand. That's what makes this special."
She unscrunched her face, and he looked into those dark star eyes, and he knew in that moment that she really was the one. The only one.
Udo brushed past them, tray in hand. She looked down, and after a millisecond's hesitation, he looked up.
She'd only needed a millisecond.
She turned the tray over on him, and went back to the kitchen window for another.
They left before she could turn that one over on him, too.
"How did she know?" Alis wondered, as they made for the public laundry. "We weren't doing anything."
It was no satisfaction, but Dougall knew. Something even this master of twisting perceptions hadn't seen.
She hadn't seen the look on Blank's face in that window, long ago. The look in his eyes that even Dougall could recognize plainly.
He stripped down in the laundry, and stole the first set of clothes he found that were both dry and in his size.
She didn't need to join him.
They sat on a pair of top-loading washers, hands linked, and watched Dolly Ferber doing her laundry.
"She brings in her husband's," Dougall remarked. "That's got to be against the rules."
"Since when do you care about the rules?"
"I don't. That's why I'm not sure."
She kissed him.
He sighed.
"What?"
He gave her an arched brow. "What do you mean, 'What'? My wife just caught us, in public."
Alis shrugged. "Who cares?"
"I care!"
"Then why was there something for her to catch?" Alis fiddled with the buttons on her stolen blouse; she hadn't done any of them up. Dougall thought he'd seen it on Voclain, the junior archivist; she was maybe half Alis' size. "You know what I think?"
"Never," he said. "That's my favourite thing about you."
Because I've got nothing in common with those assholes in the basement apartment.
"I think you'll be better off without her. Like you're better off without Laiken."
"Would I be better off with you?"
Alis laughed. Ferber frowned as she finished loading her wet laundry into the dryer. "You don't commit, Dougall. That's who you are. That's why they're afraid of you."
"Who is?"
"Your friends downstairs."
For a very long moment, the only sound was the dryer tumbling and what had to be metal buttons, or coins, rattling against the drum.
"Yeah," she smiled. "I spy on you. Try and muster up some indignance. That's a dare."
Ferber left the room at the same time as an agent Dougall had never seen before — he was only in a tank top and jeans, but you could always tell an agent from a technician by the walk — came in with his own hamper of dirty laundry. Dougall looked into Alis' eyes again. "You spy on me sometimes? Or what you do is, you spy on me?"
Her smile was brittle. "They sent me here."
Getting caught in the cafeteria had already cored out his chest. There was no more give to give. "Of course."
"I didn't escape."
"Of course you didn't." Not without help.
"But I'm not going back."
He didn't think she was lying. But then, he'd badly misjudged her already. "No?"
She shook her head. "No. I'm a free agent now."
The agent checked the washers with a mixture of surprise and disgust. Finding most of them in use or unemptied, he paused for a long moment in front of Dougall and Alis before shrugging and moving on to the next row.
"You don't get to decide that," said Dougall. "Do you?"
She was still holding his hand. Now she held it to her chest. "Do you remember how we broke you free?"
He shook his head. He didn't.
"They give you a principle. An awful, perfect principle. Only one thing is stronger than principles."
She kissed him again. Somehow it was even better in crisis.
"People," she whispered in his ear.
There was only one thing for it.
He took her to his.
5 August
He didn't tell them ahead of time.
He didn't expect them to scatter to the winds, or strike pre-emptively, but he'd learned to doubt his own expectations. When he walked into the office with Alis in tow, only Zlatá evinced surprise and neither of them seemed afraid.
Zlatá was obviously disappointed, though. "Unilateral action again, Deering?"
There were only three seats, so Dougall gestured for Alis to take his. She remained standing beside him. "There was no decision to make here. We were rumbled. Years ago, apparently."
Del Olmo was examining her with wide eyes. "Have we met?"
She smirked. "You wouldn't remember."
"Not another one," Zlatá groaned. "That throws the balance off."
Alis laughed. "You could just give me his spot. I'm much more fun."
"You'd be working for her in a week." Dougall leaned on the wall, and crossed his arms. "Okay, who explains what?"
"The interloper goes first," Zlatá scowled.
Alis gave him a sunny smile, and kept it mostly in place throughout.
1991
1 July
Dasdorf: Split-Dalmatia County, Croatia
The village was still, but it never slept. At most this was the interval between breaths.
She pulled him awkwardly past the row of false storefronts with the wrong arm, left hand blocking her peripheral vision on his side so that she couldn't see him at all. He mimicked the gesture, but still the siren song lingered at the edge of his perception. There were things he wanted — no, needed, things he would be literally lost in the woods without, and he wouldn't even make it to the mountains looming to the east if they didn't halt their foolish flight and—
She squeezed his hand, and he remembered the stores were empty. It was the reflection of the signage on the rain-puddled cobbles, the blur of the paint on the windows that made him see things, feel things, believe things which weren't true. Not the way her racing pulse was real.
The bell tower pealed out, once, and he knew they were out of time. Twice, and he knew that they had been seen. Three times, and he knew that it was three o'clock in the morning.
We're never going to make it, he thought, and he had no way of knowing whether the thought had always belonged to him and him alone, or if it even did now.
Past the shops, silent and swift, they reached the seawall and the roar. It was a trick she'd told him about a week ago, when they'd resolved to do this together. When she decided in the eye of their solace that she trusted him. The waves crashed against the breakers so boldly that no other sound could carry, and so much of what the giftschreiber did relied on more than just visual mastery. In the dark, in the crush, they had a chance.
It was all about distraction. That was what made the magic work. That was what could unmake—
"A romantic soirée?" a pleasantly weathered voice rang out, not even minutely suppressed by the boisterous eddies. "But it's trending toward morning. Young lovers should be in bed."
The old man was standing on the bridge ahead, where the mountain runoff curved past the seawall to meet the sea itself.
Alis tightened her grip even more, and pulled him forward. Every bone in his body demanded they stop, but her will was the stronger. He could feel her pulse over his.
It was loud, so loud, too impossibly loud for either of them to speak, and only now did Dougall realize it was all out of proportion to the power of the tide. Even the ocean was little more than a stage effect for the master manipulator to deploy as he liked.
"I won't ask you your reasons," he smiled. It was a sad smile. "But I can't let you leave. I'm sure you understand."
Dougall suddenly understood the source of the old man's sadness. His hot blood cooled rapidly in the spray.
Alis grit her teeth, and said something Dougall couldn't hear.
The old man's eyebrows rose. "A show of good faith?" he asked. He glanced at Dougall. "I don't know what could possibly—"
Alis pressed Dougall against the rail of the bridge, and kissed him fiercely.
Then pushed.
She kept her eyes locked to the old man's as he watched Dougall fall. Was he dashed in the rocks, or pulled to his doom by the roiling whirlpool? She couldn't imagine, but the old man could.
After a moment, he nodded. "It's a start."
Then he put his arm around her, like a doting grandfather, and led her back into the cage.
Back against the bridge rail, not even daring to breathe, Dougall watched them leave.
He thought about going after her. He didn't think about it very long.
He would probably have felt very guilty about that, except that he'd forgotten she even existed by the time he reached the foot of the mountains.
2018
5 August
Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada
Del Olmo was nonplussed, but Zlatá looked almost touched. "Love conquers all, eh?"
Dougall didn't look at her. He didn't trust himself. As she told the tale, he remembered it all anew. Felt the silent scrutiny. The pull. The push. The loss. He wondered how much of it was mnemonic reinforcement, and how much was giftkraft. He hoped she'd had the sense not to try and con these conmen.
But Del Olmo had apparently decided to be satisfied. "Overcoming that programming is no easy thing. I knew Dougall couldn't have done it on his own."
It was in his best interests not to reply. That was the only reason he didn't.
Zlatá gestured at the Chair of M&C. "Has our arrangement been explained to you?"
Alis shook her head.
"I am a Class-III thaumaturge. My Talent is real, and so highly classified that it is only revealed under unbreakable geas of secrecy. I have used this as a screen to cover my true identity: I flatter myself that I am the highest-ranking defector from the schriftsteller in their too-long history."
Alis whistled, and poked Dougall in his still-crossed arms. "You did what he did, only the lazy version."
Dougall wrinkled his nose.
"And I," Del Olmo said, "was once the golden boy of a giftschreiber sect spying on the memetics department at Site-87. Mostly because spying on 43 was impossible."
"I'd really like to know why," Zlatá said wistfully. "But I refuse to suck up and beg for the answer."
Dougall had no idea what that meant, but was similarly reticent to ask.
"So, what?" Alis folded her arms up the way Dougall had; it was considerably more striking on her. "You all got a crisis of conscience, and made a boys' club to…?"
Del Olmo and Zlatá traded glances. Dougall sighed. "Even if we don't tell her, she's going to find out. She was always the best of them."
He didn't think she meant the glowing smile she turned his way to be manipulative. Love worked that way regardless.
Del Olmo stood up. "We banded together to watch the kettles."
Alis frowned. "What kettles?"
"The ones which would otherwise boil us all."
6 August
For the first time since he'd met her, Alis was speechless.
The old men stayed outside, though of course they were listening in. The older men looked at Alis with delight, and a brief and silent struggle took place as they tried to decide the privilege of addressing her first.
The Unyielding apparently won the inner coin toss. "Our ace," he smiled. "In the hole, at last."
"Not yours," she answered flatly.
"As you like."
The Uncontained stood up, and approached her. Dougall wanted to interpose himself between them. He wanted to be the kind of man who would do that. "It amazes me," the grandfather of the giftschreiber breathed.
"What does?" Alis asked.
"How the pieces fall into place." He glanced back at his brother, still seated. "Something to all that nonsense about order, after all? Or a testament to the power of random chance?"
The Unyielding shrugged. "Why not both?"
"Why not both," the Uncontained nodded. He looked back at Alis; she didn't recoil, but Dougall could tell she wanted to. "I'm very pleased to see you here, either way. It won't be long now."
"Won't be long until what?" Dougall interrupted.
"Heads," the Unyielding said from the bench.
"Tails," the Uncontained responded, without taking his eyes off Alis.
"You have… a bet?" she hazarded, sneaking a confused look at Dougall.
Dougall was no less confused. This was the first he'd heard of it.
"A very exciting wager," the Unyielding agreed. "We've been looking forward to it for a long time."
"And sideways," the Uncontained added. His brother laughed.
"A wager about what?" Dougall demanded.
The brothers shook their heads in unison. "A watched pot," they grinned.
Alis was nodding to herself as the door closed. When she saw Del Olmo, she nodded at him. "Yes."
"Yes what?"
"Yes, I can see why you'd need nested secret societies trying to figure out what the hell those two are up to."
Dougall had a feeling the brothers were going to see a dramatic uptick in the frequency of their interviews, going forward.
2019
14 February
He had to admit that even he didn't always understand the logic behind his decisions anymore. Ritual and superstition played increasing roles in what he said and did, as though fidelity to the arcane now could reach back in time to correct his fatal errors in the past. When called upon to make a bureaucratic decision, he did whatever felt right. When choosing his projects — he was expected to have projects, for some reason, as though managing a hundred geniuses wasn't enough of a day job — he paid more attention to his whims than what the outlines were actually asking from him. And after Alis fell into his lap, quite literally, he no longer even second-guessed his gut instincts when it came to hiring.
When he happened to see that a containment technician from Site-19 was looking for a new post, something deep in his hindbrain pinged insistently until he'd offered her a job.
AcroAbate had a lot of technicians, though they preferred to call themselves 'specialists' to distinguish them from the J&M drudges and I&T nerds. This woman really was a specialist, more credentials at her early age than most people managed in a lifetime. She had experience in electrical engineering, power generation, waste disposal, welding, and had even taken a few courses on leadership and supervision. A catch by all metrics, but she was desperate enough to get out of her previous position that she didn't even ask for an interview, or a prospectus of her new duties. He sent her an invite, and she accepted, and a week later there she was.
Amelia Torosyan was not Dougall's type. Whatever that type was, whatever type could encompass Stacey Laiken and Udo Okorie and Alis and also never be quite satisfied, it didn't cover this. The woman was tanned but freckled, her eyes were a peculiar shade of teal, and her hair was so bad that she had to be leaning into the effect to some extent. Whatever was under that jacket interested him not one bit, and on top of all that, she was irritatingly cheerful. Perky. Even playful.
All of that was judging her after the fact, however. The fact of their first meeting.
When both of them were thunderstruck.
She walked into his office in plain casual clothes, backpack in hand, visitor's pass hanging from the armpit of her tank top and hair slicked back with sweat, and she looked at him, and he looked at her, and he knew for an absolute fact that he had seen that face before. Not just once, but many times.
And he recognized that same look of recognition on her face.
She sat down without asking. He stood up without knowing why. "Amelia?"
She nodded.
He shook his head. "Technician Torosyan. Pleased to meet you?" He extended a hand, retroactively making that the subject of the question.
She took it, confirming the lie. "You too, uh. Sir."
She cooled in his air conditioning for about a minute as he fussed with the paperwork, mind racing. Is she another geistschreiber? Have they really sent someone to kill me, this time?
In the end, he called Astrauskas in to show the woman to her bunk, get her settled in. Then, he called Alis.
"Never saw her before in my life." Alis yawned, and hopped up backward to sit on his desk. She leaned back until her face was inches from his, upside-down, and added: "She's boring, too. Not forgettable. Just dull. What made you think she was anything special?"
He had no idea. He told her so.
She snorted into his nose, and then called him an idiot into his mouth.
22 November
Alice Forth shook her head. "That's impossible."
Alis was watching from the kitchen, while she stirred the chili. Forth's nostrils kept perking up, and Dougall wondered if his dinner was also hidden from her, not only the woman preparing it. "Impossible is a big word."
"What you're asking about is big impossible." The Director of the Department of Temporal Anomalies shifted on the couch; the informal setting didn't sit right with her, and with good reason. This inquiry was a lot less formal than she believed. "You're talking about a paradox within a paradox."
"Explain it to me."
"A thing which ensures its own existence — a bootstrap paradox — is already a serious infringement on the rules of temporality. If such a paradox were to exist, and somehow remain stable, altering the terms under which it operated could introduce catastrophic ruptures in spacetime."
Dougall's stomach felt hollow, and it wasn't from hunger. "Wouldn't you just be setting things right?"
Forth shook her head emphatically. "You'd be setting them double-wrong."
Alis sauntered over. Forth's eyes bugged out when she started to speak. "What's this about, anyway?"
He looked up at her with forced casualness. "The 001s. Bernie says they've made claims to be ineradicable. Self-reinforcing. I wanted to know if that was true." He targeted his smile somewhere between hope and desperation; only the hope was simulated. "Just looking for options. You know?"
Dougall had practiced the explanation even harder than he'd practiced that fateful 'no'.
It was hard to tell if it had worked, of course.
Compared to Alis, he was eternally out of practice.
"That's just it," Astrauskas sighed. "I don't see anything."
"I thought you said all people had auras." Dougall realized he was drumming his fingers on the back of the couch, and forced himself to stop.
"That's just it." She looked awed, as people always did when introduced to these particular subjects. "I don't think they are people."
Dougall grunted. "Fair enough. Imrich?"
Sýkora looked frustrated, even by his standards. "I can predict the one," he said, waving his floppy notebook for emphasis, "but not the other."
Dougall sat forwards. "Why's that?"
"I don't know." Sýkora flipped open the book, and stared at his own esoteric scribblings. "001-A behaves like any sapient organism. The math maps just fine. But -B? The only way I can explain it is…" He made a sound halfway between an exhalation and a growl. "It's like I'm seeing the effect in realtime before the cause shows up in my figures."
"That's it." Dougall fought the urge to pull the pad from the other man's grip. He'd never decipher Sýkora's chicken scratch, much less his calculations. "That's what I'm looking for. Would you say the effect could be explained by the subject moving, rather than forward, backward through time?"
They both stared at him, wordlessly.
Dougall rolled his eyes. "Never mind. You've written reports?"
In tandem, they handed over a pair of manila envelopes. Sýkora's was almost thick enough to publish. He glanced at Astrauskas, then stood up. "H&P," he told her. "Come on."
She stared up at him. "I feel fine?"
Sýkora glanced at Dougall. "We've got amnestic appointments," he explained. "Right?"
This time it was his turn to roll his eyes, when Dougall was too surprised to answer. He waved the notebook at both of them, by way of explanation, then made his way to the door.
It was late, very late, when Dougall awoke. He was used to sleeping through the night, which was good, because his subconscious retained barely any of the concerns which plagued him while awake — so it was momentarily disorienting to see the dark ceiling, and hear Alis snoring beside him.
It was much more disorienting to smell bacon.
There was a man with a moustache cooking in his kitchen. There was something other than the base of melting fat on the air as Dougall cinched his robe — the only robe he owned, which Alis found hilarious — closed. Some sort of sauce?
"Don't bother calling anyone." The man dextrously transferred the bacon to a plate, simultaneously stirring a pot of something yellowish at boil. "They won't come, and you don't need them to."
"Who are you?"
"Thaddeus Xyank. Temporal Anomalies Department." Dougall heard a new crackling, and realized the other man had eggs on the range, too. "You've been sabotaging Ilse Reynders. You need to stop doing that."
Dougall glanced back at the bedroom. As if in response, another snore pealed out into the night. "Why?"
"Because I said so." Dougall nearly jumped when the toaster did, and Xyank pulled out four piping-hot English muffins. None of these ingredients had been in his fridge. "It's in our best interests."
"And why is that?"
Xyank was already expertly assembling the dishes, two of them. As he poured the sauce — it smelled heavenly — he smiled. "Because if you'd give her a chance, or at least stay the hell out of her way, she might just figure out how to get what all of us want."
"And that is?" Dougall felt like a broken record.
"A second chance!" Xyank slid a plate across the counter to him. "Eggs Benedict?"
2020
14 January
"Who should I blame for this mess?"
He tried not to stare at her. Amelia had tossed her jacket on his couch, and sweat already soaked through most of her undershirt. Her greasy hair was pinned up in half a dozen different places, and there was grime from the Site's second skin on her own skin. She looked like a monster which had crawled out of his walls to accost him. He had rarely seen a sight he was less primed to find attractive.
He swallowed. "It had to be outside contractors, for sensitivity. We didn't use J&M."
She snorted. "I can tell that much already. Ambrogi's people do great work."
"Would have been Nascimbeni," Dougall muttered pointlessly. "He retired last year." Another one who only showed up for the big anniversaries.
Amelia shrugged. "Well, either way. It's a dog's dinner in there."
Dougall hadn't considered his security system in need of an upgrade before. It was, after all, a blind to conceal his true methods of concealment.
Xyank's visit had changed that. It had changed a lot of things.
"Well," he shrugged. "I'm sorry it's such a pain to work with."
"Pain?" She laughed, then stretched from her toes to the tips of her fingers. "It's awesome. I wish everything was this horribly wired." She snatched up her bottle of water from his coffee table, downed half of it, then bounded back to the hole in his wall.
What's the word for that? he found himself wondering as he watched her go. Scoliosis? No. Lumbar… something to do with lumbar.
He didn't see Alis in the corner, but the sound of breath sucked in through teeth was unmistakable. At least before the blowtorch fired.
2021
30 March
It wasn't Dougall's fault.
He tried to help. He really, truly did.
Not that she would believe him.
Not that she would ever give him the slightest chance to prove it.
Not ever again.
Udo married Ambrogi in the summer.
Dougall wasn't invited, and he didn't go.
He wasn't only concerned about the past, now.
2022
1 September
There was no putting it off any longer. The instructions had been very precise.
He called Site-120, and as casually as he could, placed orders for a set of shipping containers set aside for the AAG. The voice on the phone told him they'd arrive exactly when the voice in his head had said they would.
Now there was nothing to do but wait.
Again.
When this was over, he wasn't sure how he was going to celebrate. Only that it was probably going to make a lot of people very, very angry, and he wouldn't give one single shit.
8 September
The shipment had arrived, as scheduled, and he'd triple-checked the ID numbers to be sure. The seven sad souls who couldn't let go were conducting their vigil at the ruptured conduit, the only thing left in that stretch of corridor from long-lost 2002. He had Astrauskas and Sýkora at his side, and he was on his way to make history.
Again.
He ignored the first two containers; they were diversionary, the voice had said. Distracting from the real prize. He unlocked the one at the end, bright blue steel contrasting with the slate grey of the concrete warehouse in the depths beneath AAF-A, and then shooed the two occultists to either side. He was going to see this first, by himself. He'd earned that right.
He opened the door.
He blinked.
Sýkora made as if to stand beside him, and he jerked the door to ninety degrees to block the other man's view. Ignoring the look of alarm and confusion, he reached into his coat pocket and took out his personal phone.
The two researchers watched as he dialled up SCiPcom, navigated the options, and put in his priority request to Site-120. It was too much, so he raised a warning finger and walked behind the door, screening himself from their questioning gazes.
He got Asheworth with seconds to spare.
He had his answers far past the appointed moment, but by then it didn't matter. Time had been lost beyond meaning. Perhaps everything had.
He felt lightheaded. He was trembling. It took both hands working together to place the telephone safely in his pocket again. Then he straightened, adjusted his tie, and walked back into the bay with the stiffness of a man bound for the chopping block.
"Sir?" Sýkora was staring at him. So was Astrauskas. Why were they staring? He hadn't told them the impossible thing, yet.
He found he didn't want to.
If he didn't say, it wouldn't be real. Not for them. Maybe not for anybody. Didn't reality work like that, sometimes? He'd read a paper once — or, at least, skimmed the abstract. Who had written that? Had it been Ilse? Hadn't everything?
"Sir?" Astrauskas took her turn. "Is there something wrong with the Cannon?"
She still trusted him. Trusted him to answer. Trusted him to do what needed to be done.
There was only one thing to do.
He reached out and pulled the door wider, so she could see what was inside the massive container. Or, more precisely, what wasn't.
"There is no Cannon," he whispered.
The colours drained out of him, all but one, all at once. The red tint spread from his person like bacteria in black light, crawling over all of them, everything, everywhere.
In a matter of seconds, though of course they couldn't see it, every inch of the Earth was bathed in a ruby glow.
For that reason, they also didn't see the overhead lights snap from fluorescent white to the incandescence of disaster.
They did hear the klaxons, baying like distant dogs out for blood somewhere deep in the crimson haze.
