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Info
Red Shift
The centre cannot hold.⚠️ Content warning:
This article contains scenes of extremely graphic violence and gore.
Red Shift
Incident: 001-I-1
Nature: Catastrophic cascade esoteric materials breach
Investigator: Koda Anoki (Chair Emeritus, Psychology and Parapsychology Section, Site-43)
Subject(s): Various
<Transcript begins.>
Dr. Anoki: Please state your name and position for the record.
Dr. Del Olmo: Del Olmo. Bernabé Del Olmo.
Dr. Anoki: And your position?
<Extraneous audio excised.>
Dr. Anoki: Record will show subject is Chair of Memetics and Countermemetics.
Dr. Del Olmo: Like it matters.
Dr. Anoki: Of course it matters. Now, where were you when the breach began?
Dr. Del Olmo: I was interviewing…
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: Who were you interviewing?
Dr. Del Olmo: I don't… I don't know.
Dr. Anoki: You've forgotten?
Dr. Del Olmo: Yes. No. I… the information. I think it… doesn't exist anymore.
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Del Olmo: Do you believe me?
Dr. Anoki: A lot of strange things have happened today. Certainly I believe you.
Dr. Del Olmo: I do remember one thing.
Dr. Anoki: Yes?
Dr. Del Olmo: I remember feeling certain something bad was about to happen.
It was always bad, but this time it felt like dying.
Udo's mind was immediately overwhelmed. Every inch of her body radioed frantic pain reports. She was on the floor before she knew she was falling, and heaving before she knew she was nauseous.
How far had they travelled this time?
The others were splayed on the tiles all around; Udo could see splashes of shading and familiar shapes, though her eyes were bleary and half-shut against the agony of translocation, her vision a rosy monochrome. Wettle's hump, Harry's dark lapels, Nascimbeni's…
Nascimbeni?
She forced her eyes open all the way, and in an instant all the pain was gone. She was soaked with sweat and shivering, but the transition was over. Back in baseline.
Except Noè Nascimbeni was indeed bowled over beside her, and the others were staring at him as though they were seeing a ghost, not merely a living man who was meant to be dead. Del's lips had disappeared behind her teeth, and Udo thought she was likely to scream.
Udo nearly screamed when Nascimbeni put a hand on her shoulder, concern in every wrinkle of his leathery face. "Are you alright? What did you feel?" She realized he hadn't been flattened to the floor like her and the others. He was kneeling, checking on her. The sky was red… no, there was no sky.
She was in AAF-D, and the breach lights were on.
It wasn't fair. It wasn't possible. They'd done everything correctly. We should be home. She forced the feelings down, kept the deadly words to herself. There was protocol to follow, and dying had put the former Chief of J&M on the wrong side of it.
Del was the first to get back on her feet. Nascimbeni helped the rest of them up; Wettle remained sitting, blinking at the old man like there was something wrong about him which he couldn't quite place.
A quick scan of the others confirmed every fear. They looked older, as they always did in the Deadlines; no need to keep them hale and hearty for Breach duty, so no privileged access to advanced life extension. Allan in particular looked haggard, which was strange — his Directorial privilege usually afforded him more leeway. At the moment he was examining a laminated GUEST passcard clipped to his woolen sweater, so obviously something else was going on there.
It took Udo a moment to identify Lillian, in a dark business suit with her white hair cropped short. Alone among them, she wasn't wearing any sort of ID card.
Only one position at Site-43 bestowed that luxury.
There was a small handheld radio at Lillian's hip, and it buzzed. She plucked it off her belt, blinking as though trying to dispel a waking dream, and pressed the transmit button. "Uh, report?" Her eyes were racing back and forth, as though speed-reading from an invisible teleprompter. She was processing her new memories; alone among them, she would be able to figure out what was going on without needing to be told.
Which was good, because there was no response from the radio. Nascimbeni turned to examine the outflow pipes; Del couldn't seem to take her eyes off him, fists balled, face red with grief and frustration, and Lillian took the opportunity to gather her into a huddle with the others. Ordinarily the warrior Survivor could not be herded so easily. The five of them surrounded Wettle, still seated on the tiles.
"I'm the Director," Lillian announced.
Harry's eyes widened. Del rolled hers, still fixed on her old lover's back as he tutted over his gauges. McInnis simply looked puzzled.
"We're at a memorial for the dead." Lillian scrunched up her eyes in concentration. "This hurts. There's something wrong with these memories. The dead, the dead…" Her eyes snapped open again, bright and blue. "They stopped the Breach in 2002, and fourteen people died. Not us, and not Them." Them could only be the Victims, their opposite numbers in this endless dance. "Allan made a speech, and then, shit. Shit, shit, shit." She clicked on the radio again. "Agent Radcliffe, report!"
Still no response.
Lillian rushed to Nascimbeni's side. The old tech was clicking his tongue as he parsed the readings on a digital display. The pipe it was attached to was humming ominously. "Talk to me."
He shook his head. "I don't understand it. It's like everything… reverted. I don't understand these numbers."
"Is there a Breach in progress?" Udo sidled up beside them. "Would that account for the discrepancy?"
Nascimbeni tapped the screen, as though that would jostle some sense into its figures. "Error codes and nonsense. No way of knowing."
Udo popped open a wall cabinet and took out a pair of long, glittering gloves. "Technically true, but not thaumaturgically."
"Reverted," Harry repeated. "On the ninth?"
"It's not the ninth," said Lillian. The others froze, even Wettle, and turned to stare at her — except Nascimbeni, who merely frowned in confusion, and Udo, who was too busy securing the seals on her gloves. "It's September the eighth again."
"What do you mean, again?" Nascimbeni asked, as Udo spun open the hood on the orphic outflow to examine its internal sensors. She reached in to brush condensation off the glass, then felt a sudden electric rush clean through to her bones. It remained there, humming, and she felt more alive than she ever had.
She clamped her teeth shut to keep them from chattering. There was no time. Lillian was about to respond to Nascimbeni, but Udo interrupted her. "Everybody step back. Don't touch the dials again, Noè. Everybody step back." The others offered her a mixture of surprised and alarmed looks, but did as they were told. She was, after all, the closest thing to an expert here. "Recondicity is way off the chart. That's why the readouts don't make sense. These pipes might as well not exist." She felt a flush of pride at the calm and precision in her words; it swirled into the general heat in her marrow, and was gone. "The pipes, the hood, the safety shielding, it's not blocking anything at all."
Nascimbeni looked down at his fingernails, which were blackening where they had struck the glass. Wettle struggled to his feet.
Udo's vision darkened at the edges, a tunnel leading to only one possible destination. "This entire facility is about to blow, and I'm about to die."
She took her hand off the pipe, and stepped away from her fellow Survivors.
Agent Radcliffe: Stewart Radcliffe. I'm an agent with Security and Containment.
Dr. Anoki: And where were you when Dr. Lillihammer called?
Agent Radcliffe: Outside the F-D airlock. That was my duty post.
Dr. Anoki: But you didn't respond.
Agent Radcliffe: No.
Dr. Anoki: Why not?
Agent Radcliffe: I didn't… I didn't have my radio on me.
Dr. Anoki: Why is that?
Agent Radcliffe: I've been having…
<Extraneous audio excised.>
Agent Radcliffe: I've been having a lot of trouble lately. That doesn't matter. It's not an excuse. But I didn't have my radio.
<Silence on recording.>
Agent Radcliffe: Did this happen because I didn't have my radio?
<Silence on recording.>
Agent Radcliffe: Please tell me this wasn't my fault.
Wettle watched as a crimson, glistening thing tore its way out of Okorie's body, splattering the tiles with blood and viscera and dark purple blobs which were probably her organs and veins. There was a sick splintering sound as grey gristle and white bone began popping out from the creature's muscle matter, sinews spreading aside to permit its passage like strands of rope unwinding, and Wettle had just enough time to realize that this wasn't a creature at all, that it was only the entirety of Udo Okorie's insides, when the whole thing collapsed at his feet in a torrent of disintegrating flesh. His sneakers were immediately soaked through with blood, and he staggered back, a strangled cry forcing itself up from the vicinity of his lunch.
It hadn't quite been everything. Okorie's ruptured skin, loose flaps dripping wet with the stuff of life, remained standing. Disarticulated lips hung down in a mockery of terror as her melted eyeballs sloughed down the inside of her face, emerging at the nose and mouth. The loose dermal sleeve of her left hand and forearm flapped onto the now-steaming pipe sheath.
For an instant, nobody else moved.
Then all the world was a single sound, a single voice impossibly loud, sparks flying from Lillihammer's radio where it began and glass shattering all around them where it ended. A man's voice, perplexed: "Something's wrong."
By the time they each raised their hands to block the sound, it had already ended. As though receiving some eldritch signal to stand down, Okorie's skin dropped to the floor like a pile of sodden cling-wrap. The hand stayed in the pipe, the arm tearing away as the weight of the rest ripped it free.
Ibanez took a step towards the pipe, stretching out a hand still balled, now bleeding. Harry made a small, weak sound of denial. Lillihammer raised her radio to her lips, and said nothing that anyone else could hear. Wettle…
The grisly death, the terrifying remainder, the sound, and the final collapse were each individually too much. Together, it was madness. Wettle took another step back, and then another. He felt that he could run, backwards, run for the rest of his life without ever being able to look away. Like there was no coming back from what he'd just seen.
The pipes began vibrating. The others were shouting, but he could only hear static. The floor was the ceiling, and the pipes were grasping claws.
Another step back.
Chief Mukami: Ana Mukami. Chief of Security and Containment.
Dr. Anoki: You took Dr. Lillihammer's call.
Chief Mukami: Yes.
Dr. Anoki: And you responded with alacrity.
Chief Mukami: The Director knows… she knew what she was doing. She always did.
Dr. Anoki: So, you closed the AAF-D bulkheads. What happened next?
Chief Mukami: Bernie, Dr. Del Olmo, ran into my office. He was shaking, and he was shouting. He was pounding his ears with his fists.
Dr. Anoki: Dr. Forsythe thinks the hearing damage is temporary.
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: Every little thing, Ana.
Chief Mukami: Okay.
Dr. Anoki: What did Dr. Del Olmo communicate to you?
Chief Mukami: That we needed to get everyone as far away from F-D as possible. So I ordered A&R, P&P and Replication Studies evacuated, and sent everyone from F-B and -C into the I-triple-S. But I…
<Extraneous audio excised.>
Chief Mukami: I was too late.
Dr. Anoki: For what?
Chief Mukami: I just thought… we had more time.
Nascimbeni reached out for Wettle's hand, without knowing why, as the other man backed into the wall. His skull struck the tiles with a sickening crunch, and now the others were approaching as well, tears running down their faces and mouths agape, to see how badly he had been injured.
Wettle' beady eyes blinked slowly as a pool of red began forming behind his head where it had hit the wall. It expanded, surrounding him like a crimson halo, not dripping to the floor but swamping the vertical surface.
And then there were flecks of pink, then sheets of pink, with little blonde and grey hairs sticking out of them, and Wettle opened his mouth to scream as his body began pressing itself flat against the wall.
Literally flat.
Everything ripped and tore at once. His lab coat, his shirt, his skin and bone. The scream finally came, and it didn't stop. The big man's eyes bugged out as they squashed into the back of his skull, splitting without bursting, the sclera unfolding a sea of red-veined would-be-white around the islands of his wide and staring lenses, and now he was spread-eagled against the tiles, crushing himself flat, spreading to cover every inch of free space. He screamed like a man possessed. He screamed like a dying star. He screamed in Nascimbeni's own bones, and Nascimbeni screamed back.
Beneath the screaming, he heard a voice. "I repeat, this is the Director!" Lillian. "Seal the F-D airlock. Seal it now. And then seal all the bulkheads, too."
There was a barely-audible response — whether because the scream overpowered it, or because the radio had taken damage from its explosive previous report — and a distant slamming sound. Then another, and another, and another, each one closer than the last.
Their tomb was shut up tight.
Wettle was still spreading like a stain on the superstructure, now encroaching on the ceiling and floor and creeping gradually toward them from above and below, leaking spittle and pus from every orifice. Nascimbeni felt limp, far-away, like he was having an out-of-body experience, and he wondered if this was what shock was like. He'd felt something similar at the birth of his son, years ago. So many years ago…
Something pulled at him, roughly, and then he was running. They were all running. Ibanez's fingers dug into his jacket and pulled, and in a blur of what must be black and white beneath the red he saw Lillihammer towing Blank as well. Nascimbeni shook off the support, sparing a final glance over his shoulder at the endless sprawl of Wettle, and then the Director used her free hand to snatch up the radio yet again.
"Bernie! Was that you?" No response. "Where do we go? Where's the nearest safe room?"
Nascimbeni's training announced in a loud, toneless voice that it had survived these horrors intact. "There are no safe rooms," he found he could tell her. "Not if we're at peak recondicity. They'll be lucky to keep it contained to F-D."
Ibanez looked desperate. Blank… it hurt just to look at the man's face. Nascimbeni focused on the road ahead, which was gradually filling with a heavy mist. There were rents in the counter-chronological pipes to either side of them, and they were greedily sucking up the residue. The more they did this, the thicker the mist grew. The fleeing party was wading backward through time in a lost world. Completely lost.
And the breach lights, he suddenly realized, were not on. Everything was the wrong shade of red.
Everything was red.
Everything.
"Stewart?" Lillian snapped. "Are you there? Jesus Christ, anybody?!"
And then something crashed into Nascimbeni, hard, and he was sent spinning to the floor. He looked up to see Harold Blank smashing the Director Emeritus into the wall, tearing the GUEST pass off his sweater and flinging it away. "This is all your fault," the Archivist snarled. His face was a mess of tears, snot, and red flesh, and there was a thick halo of mist swirling around his temples. "I know it's your fault. Why do I know that? WHY DO I KNOW THAT? What the fuck did you do?"
Nascimbeni groaned to his feet as the altercation continued. "I know it was you." Blank's eyes were as wild as his hair. "It's all your fucking fault. You know it too, don't you? You've always known. Since Scout. Tell me I'm wrong."
McInnis' eyes were empty, and he said nothing in response.
Nascimbeni pulled his uniform back into place, and slid between the two of them. As the refinery rumbled and roared around him, he searched for something calming and conciliatory to say. Something to make it all right.
Dr. Wirth: Wirth.
Dr. Anoki: Keep going.
Dr. Wirth: What.
Dr. Anoki: I need your entire—
Dr. Wirth: Wirth. Reuben. Reuben Wirth. I'm an archivist.
<Dr. Wirth laughs.>
Dr. Wirth: I'm the archivist.
Dr. Anoki: What was your experience of the Breach?
Dr. Wirth: Ever heard the term 'buried in paperwork'?
Dr. Anoki: Quite often.
Dr. Wirth: That was my experience. But for real.
Dr. Anoki: How did it happen?
Dr. Wirth: Whatever was coming out of F-D crawled along the incinerator feed into the archives, and all the papers came alive.
Dr. Anoki: Do you mean that metaphorically?
Dr. Wirth: It was like a papier mâché model from hell. Pulpy things writhing every which where. I think I recognized a few of the shapes. I think… it was bringing the words to life. The things the words described. They were bursting out of the salt caves and the filing cabinets and the bookshelves and the archival boxes, and melting together, and melting…
Dr. Anoki: Yes?
Dr. Wirth: People melt at around three hundred degrees centigrade. Did you know that?
Dr. Anoki: No.
Dr. Wirth: Neither did I, until I saw it happen.
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: Shouldn't the safety features on the incinerator have prevented anything from getting through?
Dr. Wirth: Yes.
Dr. Anoki: Do you know why they didn't?
Dr. Wirth: Yes.
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: How did you avoid being killed with the others?
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: Dr. Wirth?
Dr. Wirth: Only the top ones melted.
Dr. Anoki: The top ones? The top what?
<Silence on recording.>
Nascimbeni's left side became a red mist and a fountain of gore as the space he was occupying suddenly filled with a flaking girder, complete with emergency telephone. Ibanez felt a useless warning die on the tip of her tongue. The structure was shifting crazily now, and a second later the grisly remains were tumbling down a vertical access shaft, painting the walls a more specific red. Then that was gone, too, leaving only a howl of utter despair.
There was nothing else left. Nothing left of her. She howled until her throat caught.
Allan's eyes still showed nothing.
She had lost him. Again. And Udo. Again. And there was no way to follow her this time. No way to be the hero.
This can't be happening.
It was both denial and mission statement. The losses were already too big to calculate. She had to make it stop. Had to make it not have happened. And that meant, her bewildered brain kept insisting, the completion of the conprocs.
Stop the cascade.
Contain the Breach.
The problem was, she wasn't sure which way to run. She knew every path through every Section off by heart, but that wasn't enough. Because in every direction, two or three or fifty more paths opened up where they shouldn't be, and she couldn't focus on all of them at once. Even the ninety degree turns seemed wrong.
So she did what she'd done all her brief, eventful life.
She went with her gut.
She had to get behind the others and start pushing in order to shift them. Harry started blubbering, but she didn't care. As long as his legs moved. As long as they kept moving.
The bulkheads in this stretch of the sector weren't closing correctly. One of them seemed to be trying to raise up higher than its slot in the ceiling, and sparks rained down while a god-awful grinding sound filled the air. One was turned sideways, and didn't fit the grooves. One was shut, but it was also insubstantial. She noticed a faint whiff of perfume as they charged through. She didn't recognize the bouquet. She'd never worn perfume.
There was a sound like thunder in the air, and suddenly the floor was bucking up and down beneath their feet. It stopped, just for a moment, and then started up again worse than before. She staggered forward as the facility snored, carrying them along on its red-rimmed tongue, and as she barrelled headlong into the next intersection, a pleasant breeze blew her hair back.
Specialist Markey: David Markey. Containment specialist.
Dr. Anoki: You're very familiar with the systems in AAF-D and Applied Occultism, isn't that right?
Specialist Markey: I designed a lot of them. Built some, too. Back in the old days.
Dr. Anoki: You used to be one of Chief Nascimbeni's technicians.
Specialist Markey: Yeah.
<Silence on recording.>
Specialist Markey: Yeah.
Dr. Anoki: So, your breach duties involve advising on the proper disposition of the Site's various systems for emergency amelioration.
Specialist Markey: That's what it says in the manual. Yeah.
Dr. Anoki: What did that entail, in practice?
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: I'm sorry, David. But I'm going to need—
Specialist Markey: I know. It's the drugs.
Dr. Anoki: We could take a brief—
Specialist Markey: This doesn't happen without the drugs.
Dr. Anoki: Okay.
Specialist Markey: Okay. The manual. I… I made a beeline to Containment Control, as soon as I could.
Dr. Anoki: Wasn't that already your post?
Specialist Markey: Yeah. I was in the washroom.
Dr. Anoki: So you heard the breach alarm, and ran. What—
Specialist Markey: I jogged. I don't… I don't run. I can't.
Dr. Anoki: Of course. What did you do when you reached Containment Control?
Specialist Markey: My people had everything up on the big board. Jill was shouting orders into the radio. Everyone was on duty. I saw…
<Specialist Markey coughs.>
Specialist Markey: I saw the sprinklers go off in ApplOcc and S&C.
Dr. Anoki: The fire suppression systems.
Specialist Markey: Yeah. Only they weren't spraying water. The orphic outflow got in, somehow.
Dr. Anoki: Orphic outflow is?
Specialist Markey: Spectral energy. AAF-D processes a never-ending stream of semi-conscious ghost juice. There must have been a catastrophic failure of the pipes and tanks to mix those two materials.
Dr. Anoki: What was the effect of that mixture?
Specialist Markey: It rained hell on those poor people.
Dr. Anoki: Literally?
Specialist Markey: Yes. They… they changed. Changed into something… less. Something angry. They moved like an angry ocean. Like waves of boiling pitch.
Dr. Anoki: How many?
Specialist Markey: Clio says there were about sixty people on the two sublevels, when it happened. When they stopped being people, and started banging on every door in reach.
Dr. Anoki: And what was the result of that?
Specialist Markey: They broke all hell loose.
Dr. Anoki: And in response, you did what?
<Silence on recording.>
Specialist Markey: I ruined everything.
Ibanez stopped moving abruptly, and Lillian collided with her. McInnis awaited a farcical indignity which did not occur. Under ordinary circumstances, the taller woman would have struck the shorter crotch-first, tumbled head over heels in front of her, and brought them both crashing to the floor. These circumstances were abnormal.
Lillian kept moving, and Ibanez stayed stopped.
The memeticist's knees struck the Chief's back, and there was give. Lillian's torso pulled back as she tried to skid to a stop, and when she collided with Ibanez's head, there was more give. And more. And more.
Delfina Ibanez wrapped around her like a balloon, uniform and all, and when Lillian had stumbled clean through where she'd been standing, the balloon burst. A spray of every possible red plastered the tall woman from her feet to her neck, painted the floors sickly and slick, and sent her sprawling onto the torn fabric of her friend's remains.
The floor stopped rippling, and Allan fell back to the wall, stunned. He watched Harry drop to the tiles like a stone, and begin to wail.
Whatever the breeze had been, it was gone. Lillian lay in the puddle of carnage, eyes blinking rapidly, all sense gone from her face. A rogue streak of something very fast-flowing rolled from her scalp into her left eye, and she started to shriek like a banshee, scrabbling on the floor, tearing at her clothing, desperate to get away, to get clean, to make what had happened unhappen, perhaps.
Allan stepped forward to offer Harry a hand, and that was when he saw.
Stepping out from a cluster of vertical conduits was William Wettle. He looked winded, but clear-eyed. He blinked as he saw them, then sighed.
"You did the best you could," he said.
Harry looked up, and gaped.
Wettle was still speaking. "It wasn't your fault, and nobody blames you."
Harry met Allan's eyes. There was neither confirmation or denial there.
"We'll fix this together," said Wettle. And he smiled.
Chief Ambrogi: Janitorial and Maintenance Chief Romolo Ambrogi.
Dr. Anoki: You were in charge of managing the technical response to the breach.
Chief Ambrogi: With David's advice.
<Extraneous audio excised.>
Dr. Anoki: We don't have time to discuss that right now.
Chief Ambrogi: Probably never will, thanks to—
Dr. Anoki: What was your technical assessment of the situation at this time?
Chief Ambrogi: Every piece of equipment in the Site was going wrong. The monitors were showing other worlds. I saw Radcliffe… he finally found his fucking radio, and tried calling the Director, and as soon as the waves reached F-D they became visible and started pinging off the walls and floors and pipes and all the gunk sloshing around in there, tearing the place apart. The computers were crying. The lights weren't lights. And it wasn't remotely contained.
Dr. Anoki: Which is why Specialist Markey—
Chief Ambrogi: Fucked us. Forever. Yeah.
Dr. Anoki: INTERITUS Protocol is the appropriate response to a complete lack of containment control, is it not?
Chief Ambrogi: We'd already lost a whole lot more than that. It was a useless gesture. We could have used those people, and that equipment.
Dr. Anoki: You're assuming there were survivors.
Chief Ambrogi: There had to be.
Dr. Anoki: What were your own substantive contributions to resolving the breach?
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: Chief?
Chief Ambrogi: I was working with incomplete information.
Dr. Anoki: Of course.
Chief Ambrogi: I saw the seals on the subway had gone. They were bulkheaded shut, but things were getting in. Getting out of F-D. The subway feeds to every other sector of the facility, and the whole of Grand Bend to boot. We couldn't let that continue.
Dr. Anoki: So…
Chief Ambrogi: So I shut the far seals, opened the near ones, and activated the vacuum flush.
Dr. Anoki: What does that do?
Chief Ambrogi: Turns the entire thing into a backup pipe. Sends whatever the suction can reach all the way to the lake, where F-A can process it safely.
Dr. Anoki: And is that what happened?
<Silence on recording.>
Chief Ambrogi: You know damn well it isn't.
Harry saw Wettle raise his hand, saw the gun in the instant it fired. The bullet passed through Allan's forehead and occipital bone, embedding itself in the wall. He fell to the floor, stone dead, and disappeared.
Then Wettle disappeared.
Then before Harry could so much as scream, if he'd had even a whimper left in him, Lillian's hand was in his, and she was hauling him to his feet, and her long legs were leading him deeper into the depths of madness.
She had a radio in her hand. It wasn't the one she'd had before, Harry was sure. Perhaps she'd inherited it from Del. It was slick, and the juices were sliding down her slim forearms to disappear beneath her suit sleeves— ""F-D is going critical!" she roared into the receiver. "I'm at junction T-4. What's the nearest bolthole?"
Miraculously, this time, there was an answer. It was Radcliffe. "Uh… head for the concentration cell! It's north of where you are, just take the left dogleg around the orphic steles!"
Lillian had an excellent sense of direction. All of her senses were excellent. She didn't hesitate, and hauled Harry along a row of red-rimmed pipes which were sprouting child-pipes on every surface, forming Klein bottles and Szilassi polyhedrons and things he had no name for. Somewhere, someone was laughing at them.
He was never going to laugh again. He was wondering why they were here. He was wondering why he had attacked Allan — whatever thoughts had been swimming in his head, they were gone now, leaving only a hollow ache. He was wondering…
"Where's Amelia?" He pulled at Lillian's lapels. "Where's Amelia?"
His best friend shook her head, grimly. Either she didn't know, or it didn't matter.
They were the only ones left. If it came down to only him, then nothing would matter at all.
Around the dogleg and to the north, they found themselves in one of the halls where the tiny, specialized abatement labs fronted. No vault doors. No concentration cell. Nothing but the pitiless glare of dead suns in heat.
"What the FUCK?!" Lillian screeched, stopping suddenly, and Harry swung out in front of her as she ran.
Chief Gwilherm: Acting Chief Janet Gwilherm. Pursuit and Suppression.
Dr. Anoki: You took charge of the response at AAF-A.
Chief Gwilherm: That's my post, and that's my job.
Dr. Anoki: What was happening there?
Chief Gwilherm: That fucking idiot—
Dr. Anoki: We don't have time for recriminations, Chief.
Chief Gwilherm: Or interruptions. That fucking idiot Ambrogi sent all the gunk to the lake, and it immediately blew all the seals. There wasn't even a chance of abating it. A red hot train of fuck everything, and that's what it did. Turned every inch of pipe into human bone—
Dr. Anoki: Are you sure it was human?
<Silence on recording.>
Chief Gwilherm: —and then the fittings, and the sockets, and the walls, and floors, and everything. And bone is porous. Bone can bleed. The last thing we saw on the monitors was F-A bleeding pus all over everyone. All that bleed… I guess there weren't enough pores left for air. They were suffocating as it took them all. I should have been…
<Extraneous audio excised.>
Dr. Anoki: You should have been there? You would have died, Chief.
Chief Gwilherm: We were outside. We thought the red shit was localized, and then someone looked out a window. Me and my three best MTFs were checking out the interdiction zone.
<Chief Gwilherm hisses.>
Dr. Anoki: Nurse!
<Extraneous audio excised.>
Chief Gwilherm: As soon as the feeds from F-A died, I sent them home to see what was what.
Dr. Anoki: Not through the subway.
Chief Gwilherm: Of course not. Overland.
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: Chief?
Chief Gwilherm: We couldn't get in. That's all I want to say right now.
<Silence on recording.>
Chief Gwilherm: You want to know what we found at the lake?
Dr. Anoki: Yes.
Chief Gwilherm: We found them. Every single god damn one of them.
Harry swung out in front of her, eyes wide, and fell.
He put out his hands to steady himself — she reached out to take one — he touched a paraspectral grounding conduit glowing with bright red heat — his arm passed through — and he was gone. Her legs carried her forward perhaps half a dozen more steps, though it was a close thing, as she nearly slid on some rough and spongy surface, and this time, miraculously, she kept her feet.
And turned around.
Harry was gone. In his place, on the red tiles, was an impossibly red tomato. It was flattened at the top, and there was a slice out of one side roughly the size and shape of the tip of her shoe.
Red juice oozed from the wound, and the red flesh gleamed in the red light, and the red meat tumbled to stain the red floor red and Lillian watched the seeds spill out and the acid sizzle in the rising heat until everything, absolutely everything, every other thing in their little slice of hell erupted into red-hot red at once, and she didn't give a single damn.
Dr. Deering: What?
Dr. Anoki: Your name and position, please.
Dr. Deering: You know who I am.
Dr. Anoki: Please, doctor.
Dr. Deering: Dougall Deering. Chief of Applied Occultism.
Dr. Anoki: I'm a little confused about your contribution to these events.
Dr. Deering: I was just trying to help.
Dr. Anoki: Yes. You seemed very agitated after your call with Director Asheworth. But you couldn't properly articulate your concerns.
Dr. Deering: I didn't know what was going to happen. I… I couldn't have known.
Dr. Anoki: But you knew something would happen.
Dr. Deering: Yes.
Dr. Anoki: How?
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Anoki: Dr. Deering? Please explain to me how you knew this disaster was coming.
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Deering: It's not my fault.
Dr. Anoki: Of course not. How could it be?
Dr. Deering: I made…
Dr. Anoki: Yes?
Dr. Deering: I had a plan.
<Dr. Deering laughs.>
Dr. Deering: We had a plan.
Dr. Anoki: We?
Dr. Deering: It should have worked. There's no reason why it wouldn't have worked. It's… it's impossible. It's nonsensical. It's a fucking paradox.
Dr. Anoki: What is?
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Deering: Oh, my god.
Dr. Anoki: What?
Dr. Deering: It did work.
Dr. Anoki: What did?
<Silence on recording.>
Dr. Deering: I changed the future.
Koda Anoki stared at the final page, wondering if he was going to burst into tears or be sick. He wondered if you could do both at the same time. He wondered if the human body could handle that much, all at once. If it had the same capacity for hurt as the human soul.
Okorie and Ibanez were so much gelatin char. Nascimbeni and McInnis had vanished into the air. Wettle was still screaming, or perhaps AAF-D was, or perhaps they were one and the same, now. Lillihammer's remains were a plywood mannequin of herself, exquisitely rendered, forever contemplating the perfectly preserved, still-bleeding tomato that had once been Harold Blank.
"And they were the lucky ones."
Dr. Del Olmo: I tried to lull them to sleep. I thought I could at least give them that. Grant some release. I… I couldn't have known…
Agent Radcliffe: I'm just one guy. I couldn't have stopped it. I couldn't have helped. You've seen the timeline. You know I couldn't have helped. Right?
Chief Mukami: I could have started the evacuation sooner. But I really thought Bernie knew something important, and I wanted to hear it. It's not… it's not his fault. I guess I just… I listen. I always listen. It's what I do.
Dr. Wirth: I burned them all. Every last one of them. And it still wasn't enough.
Specialist Markey: Of course I know how many people were in there. It's my job to know things like that. Isn't that disgusting? Can you think of anything more perverse?
Chief Ambrogi: She couldn't have helped. Tell me she couldn't have helped. Get us out of this? She couldn't even get herself out, in how many years?! Please… just tell me she couldn't have helped.
Chief Gwilherm: I don't need your fucking pity. I need to know who's responsible.
And they would know, sooner or later.
For what little satisfaction it would give them.
