-
Info
Red Letter Days
Paint the town.⚠️ Content warning:
This article contains scenes of extremely graphic violence and gore, self-harm, and suicide.
Red Letter Days
She had spent twenty-four hours counting the seconds until this moment.
The others had told her how it usually went, a few years back, when her needing to know had been merely theoretical. She would have mixed feelings, they said. She would have built things she would have to let fall away to nothing. Made friends who, in one sense, she should be required to let die. And she would know these things had happened just long enough to feel the guilt and shame and loss, before the person she had been would die as well, and she would revert to a simpler life.
But in the actual event, she had not been hanging on every tick of his watch out of guilt. She hadn't been lashing out at that bastard out of shame. She had been waiting for this moment because the one thing she couldn't live without would be restored, and weighed against the fate of an entire universe… well.
There were limits to her compassion for things that were never meant to be.
When the watch finally ticked over…
It disappeared off her wrist.
She screamed, and no sound came out. She vomited as she was flung backward, striking something large and metal and pliable which rang like a gong and hadn't been there seconds prior.
Or perhaps she hadn't been here.
Her hands stung, because her weight was forcing the flesh through the gaps in a lattice catwalk. There was a gash on her cheek where she'd struck a step after falling, and it was slick with her blood, and with rust…
It wasn't rust. And this wasn't her dormitory.
This was AAF-C. One of the titration tanks loomed over her, badly battered where her body had struck it. She was lucky she'd landed on the catwalk, and not been dropped two storeys to the undercroft.
Everything was red.
She'd come back in the middle of a containment breach. That was an excessive parallel, even by her recent standards—
The watch disappeared.
It was definitely gone from her wrist, but maybe she'd hallucinated the disappearance. Or maybe she'd lost time after hitting her head. Had it fallen off? Maybe she'd put it in her pocket…
Or maybe it's not on my wrist because…
It was obviously true. She needed it to be true. So she checked her pocket, to check that box…
…and gasped.
What on Earth am I wearing?
She knew what she was wearing. She'd seen a vest just like this in his closet, made him take off his jumpsuit and model it for her, then took it off again for him. The memory made her smile, through the pain. If it had been more than a day, it would have killed her…
Why am I wearing an old J&M vest?
The obvious answer was—
The titration tank exploded.
She was lifted off her feet by the sudden rush of air and water, and struck the next tank down the line. This time she felt a rib crack, and then another when she landed stomach-first on the catwalk rail. She vomited again, and saw stars, and tried very hard to pull herself up before slipping down, banging her skull on the tank and sliding down its bulging side to fall in a heap in the undercroft.
When her breath returned, rattling her shattered bones like an angry drunk coming home and kicking the dog, she cried out. The cry echoed in the vast, metallic space, and became by semitones a peal of mocking laughter.
Then one by one, the rest of the tanks burst, too, and she was baptised, bathed, and swept away to parts even more unknown.
11 September
Now he understood why it was red.
All the world a breach.
They flattened against the walls, as far from the table as they could get; all except for Du, who was already dead. Like a whale breaking the surface of the ocean, the apparition subsided out of view. They all stopped screaming with admirable speed, and nobody crept to the table to risk a second attack.
Then Veiksaar started screaming again, but worse. Much worse. And she threw something across the room, something that made a crack when it hit the wall, and she reached up to claw at her face, and there was blood pouring out of it, and for a moment Dougall thought she'd pulled her own left eye out.
Then Dougall saw, even at a distance, even in the red, that what she'd thrown had been her eyeglasses, and that only one of the lenses had been cracked by the impact, and that the one which hadn't been was occupied by the spectre of his dead brother.
As he watched, the tiny creature popped something into its mouth, and chewed.
Dougall pulled off his own eyeglasses. Around the room, the others did the same.
Then Mukami darted to the door and slapped her hand on the controls, and the entire room was plunged into pitch red-blackness.
"What are you doing?!" Dougall shouted.
"Testing a theory," her voice replied grimly from the dark. At least that was what it sounded like. There was an odd undercurrent in her voice that made every syllable seem… malformed.
For the next few seconds, the only sound they heard was Veiksaar sobbing and whimpering on the floor.
And then their ears adjusted to the relative silence, and like distant music through the filter of madness, they heard their scene of horror reprised in every direction, all at once.
One by one, the lights of Site-43 went out.
There was a master switch to control them all, but it was in Operations Control. There was no-one alive in Operations Control; the big board was bleeding, and all the consoles were bleeding, and all the seats were empty. Elstrom could call in a voice command to achieve the same effect, but that would require the use of a tablet computer, and for a few panicked moments nobody could find one, and then when they did, they realized they couldn't turn it on.
And when Mukami's radio started crackling with report after report of missing persons and mangled corpses, and she snatched the tablet out of Sokolsky's hand, walked to the far corner where nobody else was standing, and prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, a cry from Dougall Deering stopped her finger on the activation button.
"I don't think Karen's breathing!"
Geneviève Voclain, Researcher in Archives and Revision, watched as the spectre stalked the wide glass windows where the Salt Mines looked out on the Site's busiest thoroughfare. All around her, the other archivists were softly weeping in the dark, crouching in the burnt remains of that red-letter day. There was a long, thin strip of flesh hanging from the creature's mouth, and it was masticating in the midst of its endless speech to no-one.
"Dougall only wanted what's best," the technician-thing explained in a very reasonable voice. "He always has everyone's best interests at heart. In many ways, you owe him thanks. None of this would be possible without him."
At the same time, Billie Forsythe was taking a hair dryer to her own eyes. Some glitch kept flicking the lights back on, and even though she wasn't looking, couldn't look, she knew the dead, clawed thing was jumping from corpse to corpse to corpse, gazing up at her from their dead eyes, trying to find a good launching point from which to kill her, too. She wept without tears as it told her: "It's only a matter of time. Dougall will find a much better solution. You just have to wait."
At precisely the same moment, in Arms and Equipment, Joanna Bremmel had her arms around her knees and her back against the wall as she watched the pool of blood beneath the bathroom door slowly expand outward, soaking the carpet and clotting on the spot, illuminated by the lights over the sink. "Dougall's really not that bad," the murderer assured her. "You just need to get to know him first. He'll surprise you. He still surprises me."
And then a wet wheezing sound came from the other side of the door, and Joanna cried out helplessly. Someone was still alive in there.
In the Chair's Complex of Applied Occultism, Alis stared straight into the mirror. She lifted the blood-smeared radio to her lips, and hit the transmission button. "Dougall?" she said. "Are you there?" Then she lowered it again, and waited.
The thing in the glass reached out, tentatively, and she stepped silently aside. It grasped at the air, confused, before withdrawing back into the reflection and disappearing past the edge of the frame.
The second thing they had her do was turn the Site's .aic back on.
Cliometria had been designed as a comprehensive admin assistant, archivist, and systems analyst. She had also been offline since the breach, when the circuits in her servers had been badly scrambled and her personality had become wildly erratic. "If we're going to rely on Placeholder," Sokolsky had pointed out, "I think our bar has been lowered sufficiently that Clio looks pretty good as an option."
Now the computerized voice was humming cheerfully to herself over all the Site speakers while she finished the shutdown of all non-essential light-emitting systems. When that was done — it would take a while, because of course the electrics were also fried all to hell — she would run a quick set of calculations provided by the elder Forsythe, and then begin attempting a body count. Warm and cold.
The first thing Alis had done was bring a first aid kit to the C&C boardroom.
She didn't know what was wrong with Elstrom. Nobody seemed to. The woman had half a dozen handkerchiefs secreted on her person, and all of them were slick and wet. Dougall had been wrong, she was still breathing, but she was breathing bubbles of blood, too. Sokolsky kept her elevated, and she muttered to herself in between sudden wracking coughs.
Veiksaar was stable, and even capable of walking Alis through Clio's activation via radio. She hadn't been very good company for picking her way through the halls full of shattered glass and body parts; one vignette she thought she'd never forget involved a security guard, an empty clip, a bank of floor-to-ceiling glass windows with holes in the glass, and a computer lab filled with motionless techs slumped over terminals with shattered screens. She wondered how many had claw marks on them, and how many had bullet wounds. She didn't want to, but she wondered.
The guard had a bullet wound. Only one, well-targeted.
At least most of I&T was featureless stretches of hall with no glass. Even the light fixtures were dull, textured plastic. As the chief tech wheezed in her ear and swore in slurred tones that both of her eyes were still working, that they could take the warm compress off now and let her see, Alis booted up the .aic and moved on to the next task.
The lights were already flickering as she made her way back north, Health and Pathology her goal. Everywhere she went, people were sheltering in place with their eyes shut tight. Many of them called out as they heard her walk past. Some shuddered. Some fled. One man crouched in a corner screamed, and opened his eyes, and—
Her voice sounded flat, even to her, as she thumbed the radio. "It's getting worse," she told them. "It can move in the ambient light now."
Because even with Clio's Site-wide blackout, there was still a faint red glow in the air. It wasn't immediately apparent when the lights went out, but once your eyes adjusted… well. Only Alis' eyes had time to adjust, because Alis was special.
This meant she was truly alone now. More alone even than she was used to, and she was used to being practically invisible to ten out of every ten people, rounding up by not very much.
Because until Clio finished crunching the numbers, and told Alis what she needed to do, and Alis did it, she was going to be the only living person at Site-43 with her eyes open.
Forsythe was the first to get the reformulated drops. Alis wasn't sure she'd gotten the mixture correct; though the .aic had given precise instructions, and the system had already been set up to produce a weaker mixture to offset the near-blinding glare off every red surface, it couldn't help her with any of the physical processes. Maybe in the future all the lab equipment would be remotely accessible by computer. Then again, probably not; if the Foundation somehow survived, its preparing-for-the-worst ethos could only have become stronger.
Alis wasn't clear how the solution worked, but it obviously did something. There were a few hairy seconds when she pried the other woman's eyes open, one at a time, and expected at any moment to see the vengeful spectre in her irises, dark be damned — particularly when she missed the first two applications, and the precious liquid rolled down Forsythe's tear troughs, already primed for channeling by three hours alone in the void. But nothing happened, and Alis got both eyes saturated with the mixture, and the doctor squeezed her eyes shut even tighter for a few seconds, gasped, then nodded in something not quite like satisfaction.
"That," she whispered, "hurts like a mother fucker." And she opened her eyes, and did not immediately die.
It was a start.
Alis accompanied Forsythe to the eastern dorms, where they immunized and recruited her daughter. The two women embraced so tightly that Alis was afraid they were going to break something; the elder doctor was stocky, the younger less than a twig. When she finally pulled them apart, they made their way up north again to resume the synthesis in bulk, refine the formula and process.
She had to lead them in the dark, of course. At Site-43, SCP might as well have stood for Steel, Ceramic and Polymer. Every surface gleamed when the lights were on.
"How long until everyone's safe?" Alis asked, as the Chief of Health and Pathology bent over her microscope. It had a non-reflective electronic display. There was one on the other side of the room which didn't; it had a pair of eyes speared on the eyepieces, like olives for a martini.
"Safe? Never," the other woman replied flatly. "That's my professional guess." She'd gotten a lot of her terrible bedside manner back since being reunited with Billie.
Everybody's grounded by something. "Sure," Alis sighed, "but I mean, how long until we get the drops applied to everyone, and they can at least see?"
Across the room, decanting more of the silvery material into a set of sandpaper-scuffed ampules, Billie responded. "Depends how many people are still alive." She had the same emotionless voice that was spreading like silence across the staff. "But even then, if we get everybody, it's not over."
"Why not?"
"Because." Helena pushed the microscope away, and rubbed her eyes. "You can't permanently take the shine out of people's lenses without blinding them entirely. These drops are only going to be good for five, maybe six hours tops."
Alis stared at her.
"Yes," the doctor agreed. "If you're thinking that means we'll be doing this for the rest of our lives, however long that ends up being, you're probably correct."
They soon discovered the figure was closer to four hours.
That was how Billie Forsythe became the Chief Medical Officer of Site-43.
Not that she took up the duties with anything like alacrity. Not like she could, tranquilized but still screaming on the cot set up in what had until now been her mother's office.
The man in the straitjacket was staring into space, eyes blank, when the All-Sections Chief walked into the detainment chamber.
He was on the floor, knees against his chest, back to the wall, as far away as possible from the gleaming metal table in the middle of the room.
The table was covered in blood.
The man was also covered in blood.
"Damn," the ASC whispered.
The man said nothing.
The ASC cleared their throat, and still the man said nothing. It took an actual question to finally elicit a response.
The response: the rolling laughter of total surrender.
The question: "I don't suppose you'd like to be the new Chief of Quantum Supermechanics?"
12 September
Alis was exhausted.
Dragging Helena Forsythe's corpse out of the lab had been painful, but at least it was only an event. The rest of her obligations were processes, and they had no end in sight.
The two doctors had managed to get the formula stable enough for wider applications, so the first thing Alis did after that was start seeking out the remaining hospital staff. Not all of them were eager to resume their posts, and not all of those who weren't were responsive to encouragement or threats. She had to leave some of them where she found them, but still, within a few more hours there was something like a functional force in the labs churning out more eyedrop solution, enough that she could delegate a few more experts to first aid and triage. Elstrom, of course, was top priority, with Veiksaar a quick second.
A few quick scans with not nearly enough lab technicians gave a pretty clear picture of what was wrong with the Director. She took the news with the same blank expression everyone else was wearing now, and appointed the ASC as Director Pro-Tem.
"To be permanent," she added, "when this is over."
"When what's over?" Dougall asked her.
In response, she coughed up another wet ball of blood into her hand.
The question of shell-shock had no easy answer. Nobody could seem to find any of the psychologists. Checking on Anoki had revealed only Placeholder McDoctorate; the new Director set him to managing the eyedrop production, while conferring with the other scientists on how they might go about spectre-proofing all the reflective surfaces outside of their staff's eyeballs.
"No big deal," Joanna Bremmel rasped. She'd screamed herself hoarse for an hour after finding her father, and then passed out, and when she'd woken up again she'd started talking the way he had when deprived of his morning coffee. If he'd died, she probably wouldn't have spoken again. "We'll just have to take a belt sander to every shiny tile or pane of glass in the Site. Ten or twenty years, tops."
They'd known it would be bad, but even then. When Clio's headcount came in, it was a punch in the gut for everyone.
There had been just over one thousand people employed at Site-43 before the breach. Approximately one hundred and thirty had died from some combination of the paradox wavefront, the redistributed effluence, and the loss of AAF-A.
Over the course of less than one day, the ghost of Philip Deering had claimed three more lives than that.
So far.
Sixteen people had non-fatal injuries sustained through contact with the constant huntsman. Philip Deering in cameo.
None of those injuries were healing.
Eileen Veiksaar had been screaming non-stop for hours, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. No amount of painkillers helped. Something was attacking her brain, her pain centres, radiating out from the nasty gash where her eye had been surgically removed.
The socket, Dr. Hayle concluded, was rotting. The only treatment option he could come up with involved removing a sizable portion of the skull and surrounding tissue, and also a portion of grey matter. It wasn't clear how they were going to get informed consent from her. The ASC was probably going to have to give the order themselves.
In the end, she spared them the awkward decision by blindly snatching up medical instruments from a nearby tray, and making slashing motions across her throat until she finally found something with a sharp enough edge at the right angle.
Triage was so frantic that nobody even noticed for over an hour that Karen Elstrom had also died of advanced squamous cell lung cancer, alone in her private room.
Her last physical, only a month ago, had found her the picture of perfect health.
Dougall was standing at the cloverleaf, feeling useless. He had been called useless several times in the past few hours, but that had little to do with it.
He felt useless because he couldn't bring himself to leave.
There was something about this junction which had thoroughly horrified him for over twenty years, and that was only getting worse now. It was more than just a curiosity of architecture, the place where a set of corridors and laboratories met.
A genius loci. The crossroads of fate.
This was where bad things started to happen.
He had walked down this hall on his way to consummate his affair with Udo. He had stood here and wasted the last few minutes of his brother's life thinking about… Udo, actually. And somewhere past the now-sealed airlock door, Udo herself had died in the most incomprehensibly horrific manner he could imagine. Probably he couldn't have imagined it.
He was staring at a blank stretch of wall, halfway between A&R and the airlock, and musing on the memories which kept him at bay, when he heard it. The faintest thud.
It was coming from the vault door.
The door itself was shrink-wrapped in spellophane ten layers thick. Beneath that, it had been welded shut. Everything of value inside had already been removed, or deemed to be on the wrong side of risk/reward analyses. Dougall had no idea how he would go about trying to open it.
Thud.
If he'd even been considering such a thing.
He could, however, walk to the end of the corridor and engage the intercom next to the door lock controls. He could do that. Physically, it was a possibility.
Thud.
The hallway was otherwise abandoned. Replication Studies had ceased to exist with Wettle's death, and A&R was still shuttered in anticipation of a very painful reclamation at a later date. Nobody else was going to come and investigate. He supposed he could call someone.
And be called useless for his trouble.
That was enough. Just barely enough.
He walked to the end of the hall, footfalls like lead, and scrutinized the panel until he'd found the right button. Maybe whatever answered would immediately melt his brains. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad.
He pressed the button. "Hello?"
There was no response.
And then there was. A woman's voice. "Not you." She sounded like she'd passed out the ass end of exhaustion into a farther, stranger country.
He blinked, and pressed the button again. "Who's there?"
This time the pause was even longer. "Please, go find somebody else."
It took four hours to open the airlock again, but given all other methods of increasing the personnel pool involved years of work and countless resources, the decision had been easy. Ambrogi and Markey quarantined the approach, Zlatá unsealed the spellophane with a touch, and from there it was just a matter of applying heat and solvents.
Dougall waited by the wall. Nobody asked him to help, but nobody asked him to leave. He wouldn't have if they had.
Which made it feel at least a little unfair when they found her slumped against the inner wall, too tired even to stand, and carried her out to comparative safety, and she absolutely refused to so much as look at him.
She woke up.
This was, on review, not the likeliest result of her fall. Water had thrown her into the undercroft of AAF-C, and she had lost consciousness. She should have drowned. But she hadn't, and it didn't take long to find out why.
Amelia didn't sit up. She tried, but everything below her sternum gave her the sternest talking-to of her life, and she gasped in shock at the pain. A steady trickle of sand was falling from the badly-bent catwalks towering over her. She followed the trail to its source: the titration tank she'd struck. It was bleeding. They were all bleeding. She was probably bleeding, too, internally.
She took a deep breath, and sat up.
When she woke up again, she was leaning on something firm but pliable. More sand. She'd doubled over, passed out, and been supplied with a chair.
Suppose it's a start.
She heard a strange sound, and looked up. There was a very large bird, probably white beneath the glare, looking down at her curiously. It chirped like something a tenth its size, then hopped along the rail to the rent in the nearest tank, and began greedily consuming the sand.
"Okay," she rasped.
Whatever was going on in her insides had either stopped hurting, or was hurting so badly that her brain couldn't process it. That was good, because if she stayed here she was absolutely going to die, so she could do without the useless things the human body's pain receptors did when your injuries weren't anything you could do anything about. She leaned forward until she fell palms-first into the sand, and began crawling across the dunes.
They were already perhaps a metre high, judging by what she could see of the walls. That meant more sand had fallen out of the titration tanks than there had been water inside of them, before… whatever. Before the whatever.
The albatross chirped again, and she said "Whatever."
There was an equipment locker on the other side of this stretch of undercroft, and she crawled toward that. There were also ladders leading back up, which she chose not to think about.
The locker wasn't locked, but it was on the other side of a metre of sand, and so she had to dig the doorknob out. Thank god it swings in, she thought, as she turned the knob and pushed.
And then the sand rolled into the locker, and she rolled with it, and she was less thankful for a moment before becoming less everything for a good long while.
When she woke up again, her face was pressed up against the very piece of equipment she'd been looking for: a portable pump. The sand was trickling down from behind her, and already the device was half-swamped. She scrabbled around its edges until she had enough leeway to pry it free, then turned around — agony — and kicked her feet against the wall — agony — and began the agonizing work of pulling it back up the dune.
When she got to the top, out of the closet, she looked at what she had done and began to laugh. Only began, because it hurt far too much to continue.
"What fucking good," she asked the indoor desert, "is a fucking water pump?"
The albatross chirped merrily, and she looked up at it. It wasn't getting any fuller, and the sand wasn't streaming any slower.
Whatever, she thought. It was becoming a sort of very concise mantra. She checked the power supply — it was hard to read the gauge without recourse to colour, and it was very strange that the red ambient light should affect the readout, but she figured she was good to go — and then stuck the sucking end into the dune, and hit the switch.
Sand immediately began pluming out of the pump's exhaust. It gurgled in the central chamber like water. It had been water.
The illogic held.
There was enough sand, and enough power in the pump, for her to rearrange the dunes enough that she could crawl back out onto the catwalk. The ladders were, after all, an impossibility. She could have cleared the doors leading deeper into the undercroft instead, but that would take her only to the fringes of the telekill sump's northern reach, and she had a feeling she didn't want to go that way after what had happened. After the whatever.
She crawled across the lattice, which had never been meant for crawling on. Her vinyl vest resolutely resisted tears; the old uniforms did have something on the jumpsuits which had replaced them, apparently. Thinking about the vest threatened to remind her of Phil, so she bit her lip until it hurt and looked up just in time to see the albatross looking down.
Then leaping down.
She expected it to pick her up and whisk her away, or else maybe pluck out her eyeballs, or vomit sand into her mouth like she were one of its young. Instead it landed on her back — it barely seemed to weigh anything — and there it stayed, as she crawled up the stairs and towards the exit. She could feel things moving freely in her torso, things which would probably be relieving her of her troubles in short order. But before that happened, she was still going to try.
If only for the chance to determine the precise contours of whatever.
There was a first aid station at the end of the catwalk. The catwalk, however, was a hundred metres long, so she succumbed to yet another bout of unconsciousness before reaching salvation. When she woke up for the fourth time, she was surprised to find that not only was there still a first aid kit on the wall, but a ramp of what looked and smelled like pulled pork running from just inside the door to just below the kit.
She wasn't feeling particularly proud. She climbed up the miniature meat-mountain — it stank like yesterday's barbecue, and perhaps it was — and pulled down the box of relief.
She was a little rusty on her first aid basics. Taping a broken rib had fallen out of favour because it constricted your lungs, and you needed to be able to breathe deeply to prevent said lungs from collapsing. But she was pretty sure this advice assumed you weren't going to crawl around with two broken ribs going wherever the hell they liked, and poking holes in everything they encountered, so she split the difference and taped herself up with only moderate firmness. The painkillers helped a lot more; she hadn't been aware of just how much pain she was in until it began to dull, along with the rest of her senses. There was even a solution for promoting bone density and re-knitting, though she only took this unhappily, since she had no idea how fast it acted or whether her insides were presently in a state where—
She felt a sudden, stabbing pain in her back, and rolled over onto it.
The albatross flapped onto a desk in the corner, chirruping angrily. There was something in its massive beak. Something a much lighter red than everything else, with a jagged end. As she watched, it threw back its head and swallowed the rib whole.
She reached behind her back, feeling for holes. In the vest. In her back. There was nothing.
"…thank you?" she said.
The albatross gave her a very human look of reproach, and hopped up and down on the table, miming the act of stabbing with its beak.
Amelia watched it for a while, then shrugged and rolled back onto her stomach. She felt the bird landing on her back again, and had just enough time to think This wasn't in any of my training before a much richer pain flooded her senses, and then robbed her of them once more.
This time, she woke feeling almost human.
The albatross was still there, snoozing on the desk. It leapt to its feet immediately when it heard her stirring; she stood much more cautiously, noting the strange emptiness in her chest where the ribs had been. She decided to keep the bandages in place. Maybe they'd keep her insides from rattling around too much.
"Thanks," she said. The albatross said nothing in response. For a moment, she'd thought it might.
It was a short walk through not too many rooms to the Inter-Sectional Subway System, though she made very slow progress. There was something new and horrible behind every door. A hall full of empty AcroAbate labcoats and jackets — and she now realized this was what she was actually wearing, the uniform of the Site's handful of AA techs. In the red light she hadn't been able to distinguish yellow from orange. The next room was waist-deep in water which didn't flow out when she opened the doors, so she had to wade past the pile of naked bodies which she assumed belonged to the clothing next door. The albatross avoided getting wet by riding on her shoulders, its beak draped over her face. Then there was the office block full of cheese, which stank in a way she found curiously impossible to think of as unholy. Then the station platform, which was somehow worst of all.
It was barely changed, save for the mummified corpses demonstrating every possible configuration of human agony, and several which were probably impossible. The ceiling panels had fallen, and dozens of apparently endless wires had fallen out, snaking back and forth across the tiles to strangle each and every one of the former techs and researchers like a postmodern and extremely poor taste Laocoön staged in the ruins of Pompeii.
The actual subway tunnel stank of formaldehyde, and the walls were extremely shiny, which told her that the vacuum flush had been initiated and then at least some of the detoxification sprinklers had done their job, laminating the most harmful runoff for later scraping and abatement. That didn't bother her much. She knew there must have been some sort of local breach, and this was the first result she'd actually understood.
What bothered her was the curlicue of shimmering energy which floated above her as she walked the tracks, carrying thousands of bones of every description through the air, from behind where the track curved to ahead where it split off north and west. For all she knew, the osseous train ran the complete circuit of the Green Line.
"Green line," she repeated as she watched a series of femurs and kneecaps and vertebrae sail overhead, some of them human, some more feline in aspect; she fancied she even saw a glinting horn or arrowhead in the mix as it jostled along. "Green line." Colour was rapidly becoming an abstract concept.
At least the energy was luminous, so she could see where she was going. All the lights were off. She'd found a flashlight in the station kiosk, but when she'd turned it on something that wasn't light came out of the bulb, and she'd turned it back off again, threw it into AAF-C, and closed the door firmly.
She reached AAF-D alone. The albatross had leapt off her shoulders just before she reached the platform; she'd last seen it gliding westward, hoovering up the bones with tinny chitters of absolute glee.
She'd had a few worries about what would happen when she got this far. The breach was almost certainly The Breach, and therefore had been centred on F-D. That meant it would be extremely hazardous to pass by, and she didn't have access to any safety equipment; the lockers in F-C had, of course, all been filled with corpses. Not even recent corpses; for all she knew, these had been sourced from The Ward Cemetery by Breach the Great and Powerful. They did look shorter than usual, the protruding bones more porous.
There was good news and bad news at the station.
The bad news was that the breach bulkhead just past the station was closed, and also a tremendous amount of rubble lay on the tracks where it met them, and also she could swear the rubble was moving, so she couldn't even get close enough to see if there was some way through.
The good news — perverse that this was good news — was that an AcroAbate technician's hexmat suit was lying on the tracks just below the platform. That news was kept from unambiguous goodness by the reason it was there: it was at the end of a long, long smear running up the platform wall and presumably all the way into AAF-D, a smear which continued into the suit, and represented the remains of its former occupant. She had to pour them out before putting the suit on. The only reason she even considered it was how easily they poured, leaving no apparent residue behind. Not even a scent. The pureed gore sank into the red-black grit of the tracks, and disappeared.
The hexmat suit's exterior sizzled as she pulled herself up the platform — she could never have done this with her broken ribs, and silently wished the albatross good hunting — so it was probably a good thing she was wearing it. Once back on her feet, she saw that the tiles were upside-down. Not the entire station, just the individual tiles. Like inverted flat-topped pyramids, and she was walking on the flat bottoms, which didn't nearly meet the grout. The corners and edges snapped off as she walked to where the airlock door should have been, but wasn't.
Beyond the door, all the lights were out.
Some of them came back on as she entered. Some flickered on and off and on again at random. It was never enough for her to make sense of what she was seeing. Paths that sloped away until they were perpendicular to pedestrian planarity, then even further until they must have looped back around, and yet as she stumbled along she never felt the faintest change in angle or elevation, though the vertigo was hellacious. Places where the walls didn't quite meet, and when she looked through the gap, it felt like she was seeing every possible angle on the entire facility all at once. Long stretches of nothing but what she had started calling 'redblack' in her head, which gave her the aura she associated with migraines, but not the pain itself.
She hadn't felt pain, in fact, in far too long. It was enough for her mind to start wandering, for her to start wondering…
Why is this happening?
They'd told her it was settled. They'd fixed the problem. They were going home. They couldn't tell her what they'd see when they got there, couldn't make her any promises; they only had one test case to compare with, and that was barely data. But it shouldn't have been this, unless this was the actual, canonical fate of reality on 9 September 2022. This incomparable disaster.
She had the strangest feeling she knew who to blame for the discrepancy.
And lo, and behold.
She didn't tell them the rest of the story. She had no intention of ever telling a living soul.
And what they told her made her realize the scale of the problem now facing her.
She was going to have to keep her own counsel for a good long while, now. Perhaps indefinitely. It was going to be hard sorting the things she could say from the things which would unravel everything, worse than they already were.
Luckily, the complete nervous breakdown she experienced as soon as the initial debriefing was over provided ample time to get her stories straight.
It took Janet Gwilherm virtually picking him up by the lapels — she couldn't do it practically, from her wheelchair — and telling him in no uncertain terms that "You're not helping anything" to finally send Dougall off-duty. He had a feeling she wanted to do something more vicious than merely sending him away, but was holding back for some reason.
Some reason. The same reason everyone else stared balefully at him but rarely ever voiced an actual complaint. The same reason nobody ever wanted to be in the same room as him. Why they hadn't followed through on any of their threats in the boardroom.
They were afraid.
He hadn't slept properly since the breach, only slipping in and out of consciousness as he sat, as he stood, even as he walked. The red heat pressed in on all of them so insistently that they never could fully tell what was real and what wasn't, the difference between the waking and dreaming worlds. But when he finally laid down in his quarters, his body reported in no uncertain terms that it was time to let go.
And then something moved on the mattress next to him, and he tried to recoil in horror. His muscles simply weren't having it, so all he managed was a panicked squeak.
A hand gently brushed his hair from his eyes, and a soothing voice said "Hey."
It was Alis.
Dougall pulled himself into a foetal position, and clenched his eyes tight.
"Hey," she repeated. She put her arms around him, and pulled him close.
"It's not my fault," he whispered.
"Of course not." She kissed his forehead. "It's never your fault, is it?"
13 September
"The floor is lava," Wirth reminded her.
"Not for me." Alis pushed the cart out of the lab, and stared at the endless expanse of softly-gleaming corridor stretching before her.
All across the facility, people were accessing their work stations by dropping sheets and planks of wood and panels of plastic or brushed steel over shiny floors. The lights were coming back on, Section by Section, as the needs of recovery dictated, but no sector could be returned to complete circulation until Alis had performed her little primer.
She liked it better dim. The murderous haze was harder to notice against a canvas of gloom.
She wheeled the cart into the middle of the corridor, thick black boots squeaking on ceramic, and pulled the lever. A thick black liquid leaked out of the bottom, quickly sliding into every grouting crevice and every tile crack, and she pulled the mop out of the cart and started sloshing it around until the reflective, metal-flaked "blue" was a fully desaturated "grey."
Of course, it was really just gradations of red.
When she was finished, and this stretch of tile was temporarily opaque, Bremmel's automated scrubbers came through to scuff the ceramic down permanently. Soon the teams with dry mops fitted with sandpaper could come through and do the walls, secure in the knowledge the floor was no longer capable of eating them.
At first they'd tried sending the scrubbers out alone, without taking any action to prepare each surface. Once the entire first generation of machines had been stolen or torn to pieces by the reflection monster, the present unpleasant chore had been devised. And Alis was the only one who could perform it, of course.
Well.
There was someone else, technically.
It was just that absolutely nobody with any authority trusted him to do anything important, anymore.
He tried visiting Amelia. She stared blankly at the ceiling until he left.
He tried visiting Placeholder instead.
He'd had no idea a man could scream so shrill.
Once, he tried finding Philip.
He was apparently the only person at Site-43 this mockery of his brother didn't want to kill.
He always imagined the best of me.
It was a grim miracle that even in death, Philip was still letting Dougall down.
15 September
So, he wandered.
The lower orders were sometimes happy to see him, he found. Nobody had told them why they shouldn't be. They thought of him as a member of the Site elite, coming to check on them, buck them up, maybe even pass on a few sage words of wisdom. Sometimes he tried to rise to the occasion. It was nice to be looked at and not really seen. And it was harder to see every day, anyway.
All of the Chairs and Chiefs treated him like a mosquito, or an unruly child, or a murderer. He was only invited to the boardroom meetings on the off chance he might remember something about the call from the future or the moment of red shift or the nature of his brother that would be helpful. He never told them that he'd forgotten the call entirely the moment it had ended, that he'd been too busy trying not to wet his pants to pay attention to the spreading red, that he'd never known more about Philip E. Deering than had been required to consider him disappointing. The fact was, he liked being included. Even if every word addressed to him was spat. Even if he suspected it was only the semblance of order cultivated by the new Director and their security personnel that stopped any one of them from taking him somewhere secluded, cutting his throat, and taking their chances with the revenant.
Even if he couldn't quite convince himself they were wrong to feel that way.
Because at least he was part of the process. Not a moving part, not yet, but a part waiting to move. Because he was still a Section Chair — never mind that his authority now only covered half a dozen demoralized rookies, and one senior wizard who pointedly ignored him. He was still an expert. He still had contributions to make, no matter how far in the future they might lie.
In the end, he still had one thing in common with the much-reduced staff of Site-43.
He was still alive.
"What's going to kill us today?" He ducked under the short hatch leading into the Site's second skin.
Romolo Ambrogi glanced back at him, matte eyes squinting so hard against the artificial irritant preventing his violent death that Dougall couldn't tell if he was being glared at or not. "Seepage."
"What's seeping?"
"Cat piss," came the answer from farther down the narrow maintenance corridor. Dougall peeked around Ambrogi's shoulder, and saw David Markey kneeling at a junction between pre-fabricated concrete panels and a stretch of exposed stone. "All the bedrock smells like cat piss now."
Dougall took a step back. "The lake is seeping into the walls?"
"Just the natural ones, so far." Markey yawned; everyone yawned now, all the time. It came from having to set your alarm for three and a half hours every time you went to sleep, because otherwise you'd wake up when your eyes exploded. "Doesn't seem to like the artificial stuff."
"What confuses me," Ambrogi said — to Markey, not to Dougall — "is why it's taking so long. We've seen what this stuff can do. It could've dissolved every inch of rock surrounding the Site by now, from top to bottom."
"Top to bottom?" Dougall interjected.
Ambrogi was still looking at Markey, but he answered anyway. Probably to keep Dougall from repeating the question. "The cavern is full, below, but the lake's also encroaching from up top. We've had to sandbag the elevator. Most of what was Ipperwash is… well. Awash, now."
Dougall was constantly amazed how many varieties of claustrophobia there were, and how many he could experience at the same time.
"Well," he offered. "I guess we'll just have to keep an eye on it?"
Both men turned to look at him. He suddenly became aware how out-of-the-way this little grotto of pipes and backup valves and stone was, with the Site's reduced population and most of the surveillance systems still down.
How nothing in his vicinity was reflective.
How Ambrogi was worrying his wedding ring.
Dougall raised both hands, whether to placate or defend he wasn't certain, and backed away until they both returned to their hushed discussion.
"You asked me that?" Placeholder's arms twisted within the straitjacket sleeves. "I don't remember."
"Well," Dougall shrugged. "You were kind of preoccupied at the time."
"By which you mean I'd gone insane." The man with the curly hair and haunted eyes nodded, a little too eagerly. "It broke my brain, you know. What I saw."
This was clearly an invitation to ask for further information. Dougall passed it up. "But yes, we did ask you. Well, Anoki did." He paused, waiting to see if naming the vanished psychiatrist produced any effect on the eccentric pataphysicist. If it did, well. Dougall was only getting worse at judging people's reactions, in living monochrome. "You thought we were joking."
"It sounds like a joke. The thing is," and Placeholder sat back contemplatively in Du's chair, putting his loafers up on Du's desk — an impressive feat without the use of his hands to balance, "it also sounds like the kind of joke I might make. Not now, obviously. Nothing's very funny right now. But if I got old and boring, sure. I can see myself calling something 'the REISNO Cannon'. It would be a sad day for science when I got to that pass, but. It's feasible."
Placeholder, of all the staff, seemed to have adjusted to the new paradigm the quickest. Dougall wasn't sure he liked that. He might have preferred if the new Chair of QS had a little more of the hopeless affect the rest of the Site's population was presently wearing. "I'm not really interested in the name, or whether you think you might have named it that. You did name it that, or at least, you were supposed to. When you built it. Which you say you didn't do."
"Because I didn't," Placeholder agreed. "I don't build machines on spec. I need a specific reason. A project requirement. An ongoing study. My own personal whims. And this thing you're describing doesn't fit any of those bills."
Dougall rubbed his eyes. They were all rubbing their eyes, now. They felt only a little less sandpapered than the floors and walls did. "Well, you've got your commission. We need a machine that can let you contact your past self. And the only lead we have on how to make that happen is you."
The other man nodded. "I get that. The thing is, even with all the resources in the world, it's an impossibly tall order. Sure," and he raised his hand to stop an interruption Dougall had had no intention of offering, revealing that the straitjacket arms were no longer bound, "there's probably a path from here to there, but I don't know where it starts. For all we know, this theoretical other version of me got the prompt twenty years ago, and it took that whole interval to bring it to fruition. We could be in this for a very, very long haul."
"It'll be a lot longer," Dougall reminded him, "if you don't try."
"Not necessarily." Placeholder reached up to scratch the stubbly mess that sufficed for a beard; Dougall wondered if he even knew it was there. He hadn't seen his reflection in a long time. "If what I'm hearing is true, something's bound to kill us all well before you get bored of waiting for me."
17 September
Stewart was out of his mind.
He knew this for a fact, because he'd always been a true believer. He'd never doubted the Foundation's mission for a second. Not until now. And now it all seemed like nonsense, like a lie, and everything he'd ever read told him that meant he had gone insane.
He should have reported it to Mukami, but he didn't. He couldn't. She wasn't around. He could have told Yancy, her deputy, but he honestly didn't trust the man that well. To spot him lifting weights? Absolutely. To not betray him to the conspiracy? Absolutely not.
And it had to be a conspiracy. That was the only explanation. Someone had known this was going to happen. The stories he'd heard about Deering and some impossible machine were obviously made-up to keep people like him in the dark. This was some kind of test. They were all guinea pigs. Why else had so many of the brightest minds in the Site been sacrificed? Obviously they'd known too much.
And he'd been implicated in their termination, to silence him.
But it wasn't going to work.
Sure, he'd do what he was told. Of course, he'd do his duties. He still believed in those. He still wanted to keep his people safe.
But he was damned if he was going to let Del's sacrifice be in vain.
He'd gone with the first teams into AAF-D, before they sealed it up, and he'd come out with only one trophy of his time in that esoteric battleground. One of the shiny brass buttons from his wife's torn uniform. Every night, before bed, he sat in her favourite armchair and rolled it around in his thick fingers, daring the supposed mirror monster to leap out and savage him.
It never did.
You couldn't fool Stewart Radcliffe. He wasn't stupid, whatever anyone thought. Whatever Janet thought. He wasn't stupid.
He just knew the truth when he heard it, and no amount of facts would change that.
He'd never really been a giftschreiber, but now he wasn't even anything close.
It ought to have rankled him just a bit, what he was doing. But it didn't. Everyone at the Foundation ends up like this eventually, Del Olmo mused as he switched on the radio. In this case, it's probably for the best.
One of the first security measures he'd recommended to the new Director was the removal of all radio receivers from private hands. The security personnel still needed theirs, of course, but anything else was an unwarranted risk. Mukami had come to him after her road trip, stammering something about what she'd heard on the jeep radio, and it got him thinking. So he set up his best radio set in the cognitive decontamination tunnel attached to Lillian's old office, and tuned in to hear what the ghosts were saying.
They'd been playing "Your Time Is Gonna Come," by Led Zeppelin.
There were no bumpers between each track, because this wasn't a real radio station. Back before the apocalypse, these little messages from beyond had worked their way into the schedules of broadcasters around the lake, wherever they could reach the ears of their intended recipients. It had been a stroke of genius by Polly Mataxas to even recognize the anomaly, prompted by a startlingly on-point selection she'd heard in her father's funeral procession. Back then, the evidence had still been dubious.
After a few days in the tunnel, Del Olmo could safely say it was incontrovertible.
Right now he was hearing "Enjoy Yourself," by Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians. Earlier he'd been treated to "Time" by Pink Floyd, and "Five Years" by Bowie. Every single song offered one consistent message, contrasting sharply with the variety typically associated with SCP-6519 manifestations.
Every song was about the inevitability of death.
So really, he was performing a public service by denying Site-43's surviving personnel their access to the airwaves. They might think they needed closure, needed to hear a final message from the great beyond; they might think there was nothing worse than having lost their loved ones to tragedy and never having had the chance to say goodbye. But they were wrong.
The dead no longer cared for relieving the troubles of the living.
The living were on their own.
It was an object lesson, he decided. There was such a thing as too much information, and too much freedom to consume it. If they were going to run a tight ship, loose lips would need to be kept at a minimum. As the Site's foremost authority on communication of all kinds, it was up to him to lead the way. To mark the difference between constructive and destructive speech. To outline which channels were appropriate, and which were forbidden.
As if in response, the radio began playing "Thick As A Brick" by Jethro Tull.
"Yes, Lillian," he murmured, and it didn't echo at all in the cylindrical tunnel of flat black panels. "I know my responsibilities."
He was the only one who needed to know.
20 September
Not all the options for a collective dying-off were as dramatic as the lake or its various ghosts.
"We have food supplies for one calendar year," Dr. Markovich explained. Dougall had become the de facto recipient of such explanations, since it would be bad for morale to remove him from his post, but there was no other apparent use for him. "That ought to be more than enough, especially with the…" She paused. "…ah, the reduced demand as a result of recent events."
"What if we're down here more than a year?" Dougall pressed.
Markovich frowned. "Is that the plan? Tell me that's not the plan." Her hands were beginning to shake. "This can't go on that long. You have to be close to a solution right now."
Dougall shook his head. "Calm down. Be professional." Practice your dead-eyed stare.
The food scientist sat down heavily in her chair. "Okay. Okay. We'll talk it through in hypotheticals." She stared up at the ceiling, where the white fluorescents glowed a serene light pink. "Plants can grow in red light. It won't be normal growth, not by a long shot, but there are certain benefits."
"Like what?"
"Well, your basic red light can encourage growth, I'm pretty sure. Infrared light can be bad for most plants in too high a quantity, but far red light? We could see a definite boost in the size and health of our yields. The problem is, we don't actually know what kind of light we're dealing with, here. We don't really know that it's actually red."
"What else could it be?"
"Our eyes, playing tricks on us. That reminds me." Markovich picked up the little plastic stopper that now featured on every desk in every office across the Site, and self-applied a few drops of silvery liquid. She grimaced in pain, rubbed her eyes again, and continued. "Ah, what was I… right. So, we might be able to expand the hydroponics under these conditions, but a lot of plants won't grow properly without access to more variety in the light spectrum. Photosynthesis is going to be a crapshoot. And that's not even getting into the issue of seeds."
"What about seeds?"
"We don't have any." She shrugged. "We have enough for our small project, which was only ever intended to supplement fresh food from outside and our existing canned stores. I'm going to need all sorts of fruit and vegetable seeds and roots if we're going to build a sustaining, nourishing, vitamin-rich crop down here. Assuming topside is out of the question."
People liked to ask him veiled questions about topside. Most of them had never gone. He never answered. "What sorts of seeds could you use the most?"
Markovich started counting on the fingers of her left hand. "For starters, I'd love to get crops of potato, tomato, and cale going. As soon as possible, before we start to need them." The prospect of this actually occurring visibly diminished her already dampened spirits.
Dougall took a small container out of his labcoat pocket, and placed it on the other doctor's desk. "Let's start you off with these, and I'll see what we can do about the rest."
Markovich picked up the container gingerly, like it might shatter if she jostled it too hard. Her eyes widened as she looked up at Dougall in wonder. "Where did you get tomato seeds?"
1 October
The klaxons were louder now, as a consequence of the breach lighting being indistinguishable from the status quo. Dougall found it almost deafening, so it was something of a surprise that people could still shout over it.
"GET AWAY FROM THE EXTERIOR WALLS!" the security guard roared, waving his hands over his head as though that communicated any extra nuance. "NO! NOT THE MUSTER POINTS! GET TO THE CAFETERIA!"
Dougall stood in the middle of the hall in H&S, just outside his dorm room, and watched the researchers and agents scatter willy-nilly in the heat-wavering miasma. He pulled the radio off his belt, and pressed the button. "This is Deering. What now?"
"Follow. Your. Orders." Mukami's voice was brisk and clipped — and was saying every word like a complete sentence now - and yet still he had trouble making out the meaning. "Get. To. Artificial. Walls. Stay. Away. From. Bedrock. Stay away from the bedrock."
Then his radio issued a unique tone, the one that meant he'd been locked out of further transmissions.
Dougall watched the last of the panicked personnel disappearing down every connecting corridor, then walked back into his room to get his work tablet.
He stopped halfway across the living space carpet, transfixed.
There was a crack in his wall, and it was spreading.
It spread fast. In an instant, the drywall was only so much dust on the carpet. The wooden studs behind it creaked and cracked, then splintered, then surrendered their loads to gravity. Sparks flew from severed electricals, and something leaked out of a ruptured pipe as the walls encroached on the floor space of his dormitory.
Something was pressing them forward.
Stay away from the bedrock.
Where the escape tunnel leading to his office should have been, there was nothing but a pulsating face of stone. Pulsating in precisely the way that stone did not. It was weeping something opaque and viscous, combining with the veins in the rock to give the impression of pus-soaked muscle with the skin torn away.
The bedrock was consuming the edges of the Site.
As Dougall turned to run, he swore he could actually hear the weeping.
Swore it was weeping his name.
And then Dougall started weeping, too. He hadn't been able to for days. He'd thought it would be a relief.
It wasn't.
"Come on!" Markey screamed. "Take my hand!"
"I can't!" Azad Banerjee squirmed in the concentration cell, his esomat suit slick with whatever was leaking from the rock. The concrete walls had collapsed all around him, and the massive steel vault door was canted at a crazy angle, and he was trying to squeeze through the gap, but his oxygen tank was stuck on the rubble and fallen girders.
"I got you!" Markey shouted, fingers struggling for purchase on the other man's slick-surfaced glove. "I got you!"
"David!" Banerjee screamed, and something ruptured, and something snapped. "DAVID!"
And then the bedrock envelope around the concentration cell closed in entirely, and the last thing Markey saw before he fell back into the hallway was Banerjee's wide eyes swimming in blood and sick as the glove of stone crushed him like a grape.
When his vision cleared, as much as vision ever cleared these days, he saw he was still holding the senior technician's hand.
"Vivian," a voice groaned as the tiles on the exterior wall began to crack and tumble down. "Vivian…"
"Best guess?" the Director sighed.
"It's Rydderech," Bradbury responded immediately. Her arm was in a splint. "The bedrock is Rydderech."
"Did we cause this?" Dougall wondered.
Once again, all eyes turned to him.
"You know what I mean," he snapped.
"It could have been SUNDOWN," Sokolsky mused. "But I don't think that's too likely. I've never heard of expanding foam causing noögenesis. No," and he leaned back in his chair, far too casually, "I think it's much more likely we're seeing yet another manifestation of the overall effect."
"What overall effect?" Ambrogi demanded. "This is all just unrelated nonsense."
"Do you think so?" The memeticist looked surprised. "I was working under the assumption these were all just sub-anomalies."
"Sub-anomalies of what?" Ferber asked.
"I'm sure nobody will object if I designate it SCP-001?" Sokolsky arched a brow, and glanced around the room without really appearing to see. "Right. SCP-001, a comprehensive reorganization of reality in the confines of Site-43 and across its immediate environs."
"All of reality is breaking down, everywhere," Dougall reminded him. "How is this special?"
Del Olmo stirred. His speech came out a little mushy, which probably had something to do with the incredibly nasty gash running across his cheek, or the drugs they'd given him to dull the pain. He was still easier to understand than Mukami, who had started mostly missing these meetings. "Did you not read Gwilherm's report?" He glanced at the Chief of P&S, whose legs were no longer bandaged. Dougall wished they still were. "Did you not… oh, of course. We don't actually let him read anything anymore, do we?"
Dougall refused to rise to the bait.
The memeticist grinned as though he'd gotten what he wanted anyway. He'd been more than a little manic since losing his protégé. "Well, here's the gist of it. Outside 43, everything falls apart. The land falls away, the living fall to lower orders, nothing makes sense, nothing lasts. Disarticulation from the fundamental qualities of the real. Without radio contact or long-range travel, we can't know for sure, but there's almost certainly no bright spots of human civilization beyond the shrinking walls of our happy home."
Now Dougall couldn't blink. He stared at the other man in horror, waiting for his vision to blur. Thanks to the drops, of course, it didn't.
"And yet," Sokolsky continued, as though his boss hadn't just consigned eight billion people to the wastebin, "we're sitting quite pretty down here. Sure, everything is terrible, and everyone is dying, and there's new nonsense every day that makes the odds a little worse, but the soil's still up there. The steel is still steel. We have drinkable water, we have breathable air, and our bodies mostly work the way they're meant to. And these new anomalies? They're more like old ones, with new features."
"The lake took on the qualities of the Mishepeshu," the ASC murmured.
"Rydderech became the bedrock," Randy Gershwin offered. He'd been a senior technician in I&T before his boss had slit her own throat.
"And I've got a pet theory about what happened to our late, lamented Director, but that one's not quite ready for prime time. The point is," Sokolsky concluded, "it's my opinion that SCP-001 is an effect centred around this facility, suffusing it with potentiality, and sustaining its existence in the face of what is otherwise a generalized entropy."
They sat with that thought for a few minutes.
"The Cannon needs to work," said Bradbury.
Dougall looked at her, and she looked him in the eye.
"This future needs to die."
7 October
It was going to take a lot of power to kill the future.
Romolo had gone over a dozen different plans with Placeholder and the Bremmels, and none of them would satisfy the draw this unearthly machine was expected to need. If the wild-eyed pataphysicist had really known his stuff, if he hadn't merely been guessing in the dark and jury-rigging the thing, he might have been able to produce something which only sucked all the juice out of the geothermal plant. As it was, they were going to need a great deal more.
On the face of it, there was only one good approach. Romolo had approached it with great care, in a hexmat suit inside an esomat suit covered in abatement fluid and spellophane so thick he could barely see, and he'd been facing it for so long that he'd have to start heading back to safety — and decontamination — in a few minutes tops, if he didn't want to suffocate.
If he didn't want to suffocate. There were worse ways to die than simply falling asleep. There were worse ways to die in every direction, all the time, now.
Ahead of him was a stretch of blazing stone which had once been Theology and Teleology. During the initial breach, an incomprehensibly vast amount of Akiva energy being run through F-D's Möbius Stripper had snapped across the facility like a rubber band, tearing a chasm of non-space through everything in its path — walls, floors, ceilings, equipment, people — and making them gone. No trace, no residual energy, simply gone. Keeping to the rubber band analogy, T&T had been the raised finger around which the band was wound. A middle finger, Romolo thought, pointed at every god which had ever existed. And when the band had returned to the origin of its tension, well, the gods had gotten their revenge.
T&T was now a crater that never stopped cooking, like a snapshot of an asteroid impact. The thaumonuclear burn was outrageously strong, and nothing seemed to abate it. If they were going to power Placeholder's ridiculous Cannon, this was the answer.
Romolo was going to build a power plant powered by belief.
He just didn't know where he was going to find enough belief elsewhere to get it done. That was another thing which didn't seem to exist anywhere else at Site-43.
"But you can't do it anyway," she told him. She looked so sad as she placed a hand on his arm. He felt her warmth through all the layers.
"I have to." Never mind how bright her orange eyes. (He could swear they were still orange.) Never mind how gentle her voice, how long and shining her deep maroon tresses. (Still maroon.) He had to do this.
"But it's wrong." She frowned, and he felt his resolve melting away. Tearing out of him, as she had torn out of herself. Her last earthly act had been an exertion of will so strong that not even the limits of flesh could stop her, and being dead didn't stop her now. "Every inch of this place is sacred. We made it sacred. This place is a tomb."
"I know," he whispered. "But we can't give up."
She moved her fingers to his facemask, and caressed the transparent vinyl. "No," she agreed. "No, you can't give up. You can't break down. But you have to leave it be, Romo. You have to let it stand. It's precious to you, and it always will be."
He reached up to take her hand, and held it far longer than he'd meant to. Considering she wasn't there. Considering it didn't matter.
Considering he was gasping for air by the time he reached the quarantine tent, and pulled his helmet off to taste the recycled air, and coughed up a fistful of wet red sand which had long since freed itself from Euclid's rules.
31 October
Reuben had never understood what his predecessor had against digitization.
Harry had dragged his heels for years. No matter how good the technology got, he preferred to keep as many things on hard copy as possible. "What's the point of having a gigantic salt cavern," he'd ask, "if you haven't got a billion boxes of paper to stick in there?"
At this moment, it appeared he'd had something of a point. 43NET had suffered serious damage thanks to the apparition of a tremendous ten-ton beehive in the I&T server rooms, and a great deal of electronic data had been permanently lost. Whatever was on the servers which had been hollowed out in the process of turning half the stacks into honeycomb cells large enough to house bees the size of beagles. The bees had, of course, almost immediately broken open and desiccated thanks to their own weight and the unnatural economies of scale, but that was small comfort to anyone wanting to look up, for example, anomalous horticulture or advanced containment cell design. Dozens of topics of red-hot interest could not be addressed, no matter how many runs Clio took at reconstituting the fragmented packets or how much red honey Carter shucked out of the ruined servers. It seemed like Harry's paper hoarding was finally going to pay off.
On the other hand, "what the fuck is that?"
The salt mines had experienced an incredible amount of tectonic activity in the six minutes of the breach. What had once been a single, vast cave was now an endless maze of tunnels and switchbacks, with canted shelves every which where, boxes squashed between megaliths or upside down without their lids, papers carpeting the floor. A strange, hot breeze blew throughout, roaring up from the depths of wine-dark sinkholes or whistling through natural vents in the crumbling ceiling, and there was moisture in it. This was an errand of urgency.
Reuben kept pointing, pointlessly as Polly Mataxas was already scanning the offending outcropping with her spectrometer. The thing was just so… offensive, that it seemed to deserve the implied accusation. Polly finally lowered her device, and shrugged. "Pseudospectral pseudopod. Best guess? It's an echo of Verne."
Reuben frowned. Their little party of agents and ghostbusters had taken an hour to penetrate this deeply into the caves, and so far the pickings had been slim. They were as likely to find archival racks lying horizontal, spanning bottomless chasms as makeshift rattletrap bridges, as to find them upright with their precious cargo intact. They were going to need to go deeper still, but things like the wriggling papier mâché tail sticking out of the wall made it hard to be sanguine about the task.
The lead MTF agent, a broad-shouldered Māori named Ngata, shouldered her rifle and cast the flashlight forward. Reuben was never going to get used to the way the light—
Ngata stopped abruptly, and raised a hand. Signalling silence. She very carefully removed a thin tablet, the size of a cellphone, from her belt and began tapping out a message. Reuben removed his own tablet from his labcoat, receiving the message as he lifted it to his bleary eyes.
Motion. Come quietly.
Gwilherm's standing orders were for escort and escorted to never break company. Ngata's message meant there was only one way forward, and that way wasn't safe, so they were all going to have to endure the risk together.
The risk turned out to be a continuation of the pulpy… whatever it was. A gigantic hump of slick newsprint sprawled over a narrow ledge, bulbous end hanging into another inky abyss. As they watched, it slowly slid closer and closer to oblivion.
Reuben sighed silently. The thing hadn't been alive. It had only appeared to be wriggling as its bulk squeezed through the narrow aperture in the wall, the dead weight dragging it down. By the time their tiny party was assembled at the ledge, it was already tumbling end over end into nowhere.
They didn't hear it land.
It didn't occur to Reuben until they were on the way back, chattering quietly to each other as they carried suitcases of vital intelligence back to base, that this might have had nothing to do with the depth of the pit.
He understood what had really happened when the fat end of the conical creature slopped its way abruptly back onto the ledge, grabbed Ngata by the legs, and hauled her screaming into its maw with mandibles inscribed in bleeding Sanskrit.
He knew they hated him for it.
Not for what had happened to Ngata; the horror of that steaming, squelching demise was too near to give way to resentment. And anyway, they'd all signed up for the task. They'd had an inkling of the risk, if not the form it would take.
But when he embraced his wife as they emerged back into the archives proper, yes.
Yes, Reuben was quite sure they hated him for that. For having someone to return to.
Yancy had had a wife and child in Grand Bend. Ferber, a husband in London. The Director had lost entire peoples.
He wanted to tell them not to worry. That even his good luck wouldn't last.
That sooner or later, all things would fall apart.
13 November
There was fire in the sky.
Mukami almost didn't see it, given the sky itself. The clouds had long since gone, leaving nothing but an endless scape of baleful red. Fire on the horizon could easily be mistaken for another artifact of her blurry vision. But it wasn't.
It was an airplane.
Nothing so dramatic as an airliner, or even a private jet. Something single-engine with a prop, by the looks of it. Too distant and tumbling too fast for her to capture with her scope, so she squinted at where the sun should have been and watched the one-sided dogfight progress.
Again and again, the bristling blades dove to tear strips off the doomed craft as it fell. Sometimes the prop would sever a few scales, and they would drop like stones in the total absence of wind and the oppressive gravity of the collapsing topside world. Sometimes a strangled half-shriek came out of the burning mass of metallic pinions as it wheeled through the air, grasping the plane with talons the size of a city bus and turning somersaults, flinging pieces of flaming metal every which way. Finally something razor-sharp and gleaming at the end of the plumage smashed through the cockpit window and… yes, the spray of tiny specks she could see from her low vantage point likely represented the end of the struggle. The creature belched fire with a sorrowful cry, and ascended toward the distant stars until it, too, was no more than a speck in the red.
The remains of the plane rained down on the lake, and it rose up to swallow them.
She fixed her attention back on the forest. It had changed, of course, as everything had. What had once been a wooded interdiction zone was now a craggy, eroded waste peppered with perforated, branchless trunks. She counted one, two… three of them with the telltale depressions, perhaps a hundred meters ahead, and nervously scanned for intruders camouflaged in the general empty.
It was still an interdiction zone. This space was still protected.
Up close, the trees had cutouts in their bark, through the heartwood and back out the other side. Holes in the shape of men. Some still had haloes of leaves hanging over them, supported in the air by nothing at all; she had to look at them from a distance, because if she did it up close they fell to earth, landing like bricks, leaving massive dents in the loose grey soil.
Motion caught her eye again, and she raised her rifle. Found her target in the scope. A deer, horned like a ram, with a young woman's face. It was eating…
Best not to think about what it was eating.
She lowered the rifle, and took the audio projector from her belt. She found the range, then found an outcropping of red stone near where the creature was feeding, and made the connection. Then, she spoke.
Or tried to.
She meant to say "Leave this place." But all that came out was a senseless mush of mumbling, and immediately the too-smooth face and its thrice-curled horns snapped up, and it was loping towards her, salivating red-black, and before it had crossed even a quarter of the distance it was dead weight tumbling in air, horns striking the ground and flipping it end over end, breaking its neck.
The bullet had passed through the space between its staring eyes. Mukami cut it out with her hunting knife. No sense wasting good lead.
Ahead, motion again. She raised the scope, again. And then the microphone.
She was going to find something out here she could speak with. She was going to find the words.
Or she was going to keep her sunken home safe.
Either or.
15 November
The others usually winced when Janet rolled up to take her place in their loose circle.
Probably they'd seen too many movies. She was the hard case. She was the one who was going to scoff at their stories, and proclaim herself in no need of aid. Make them feel pathetic for acknowledging infirmity. Insist that she was every bit as strong as she had been before the lake.
After a month of sessions, though, she was starting to resent it a little. She was thinking of biting their heads off for real, if only to retroactively justify all the sidelong glances.
Rasmus Mataxas went first today. "They can't see it," he said. "So they think it's not there."
Joanna Bremmel clutched his hand tightly, and he smiled in gratitude for the support. On her other side, her father glared at the ceiling, giving everyone an excellent view of the festering scar stretching across his balding pate.
"I can't breathe," Mataxas continued. "It's like a stitch in my side. It makes my chest tight. It's like a panic attack. One that won't go away." He took a deep breath between each sentence; he'd learned to speak more succinctly since the apparition had scratched him from armpit to pelvis, halving his combat effectiveness with what had seemed at the time like little more than a scratch. "But nobody can see it. So they see me sitting there. And they think 'what's his problem?' They think 'why isn't he out there'? They think I'm malingering. As if I would."
Enrico Abbadelli, the senior surviving psychologist — he'd been a junior when 001-A had started sprouting from his Section's polished wainscotting to cut all his colleagues off at the legs, and late returning for a coffee run — nodded enthusiastically. "We're all operating on a lot of misconceptions," he said. "And it's hard to want to learn more about where people are coming from when the whole world seems to be against us. But that's just what we need to do, if we're going to get through this."
The elder Bremmel suddenly screamed. He put his hands on either side of his head, and just screamed into the ceiling. Then he leaned forward, taking a near-foetal position in his chair, and screamed between his thighs. His daughter took him by the shoulders, and when he planted his boots on the carpet, she gently raised him up and led him to the door. Rasmus watched her go with a complicated expression, but otherwise nobody acknowledged the interruption. The old man suffered from recurring cluster headaches ever since 001-A had stuck its talons into his forehead and pulled him into the glass; only a collapsing structural member shattering his medicine cabinet had kept the revenant from removing his head entirely, but in a matter of hours the four vicious nail-holes had stitched themselves together into a necrotic waste that made the surrounding skin slough off, and played havoc with his periocular health.
He got a migraine every time he took the eyedrops, just to add salt into the wound that wouldn't heal.
Amelia sat in silence at one end of the semicircle, and today Janet decided to be proactive. While Abbadelli shuffled his note cards and tried to find a way to recapture his momentum, she cleared her throat and said: "Where'd he get you, Torosyan?"
The dark, freckled face turned to regard her with… dishonesty. Janet knew it when she saw it. Whatever answer she got, it was going to be an invented one. "It's psychological," said the sole surviving AcroAbate technician.
"We're all scarred psychologically," Abbadelli agreed, but Janet raised a hand to stop him, so he stopped. It wasn't always a bad thing, that they found her so formidable.
"Why don't you talk about it?" Janet suggested.
"Because I don't want to." The other woman's teal eyes — now a most disconcerting pink — flashed.
Janet laughed. "Whatever it was, it didn't hurt your confidence any. So why not tell us the story?"
"I'd rather listen."
Abbadelli shifted in his chair. "I appreciate you wanting to help, Chief Gwilherm—"
"That's right," Janet suddenly found herself snarling. "I do want to help. And right now this is the only way I can. Because you know what? You know what, Amelia?" She turned to face the technician again. "They might have charbroiled my fucking legs, but that wasn't the worst of it. They turned my husband into a fucking pancake. Sixty years a joke, and that was how he went out. The sickest joke of all. Steamrolled on a wall, like some god damn cartoon. And me a mile away, up to my ass in acid. You saw him, didn't you? You saw him on your little trek."
Wordlessly, Amelia nodded.
"Did he say anything to you?" Gwilherm's legs were burning, as though in memory of the worst day of all their lives. As though this recapitulation were dredging up the caustic ghosts all over again. "I hear he still talks sometimes. That's why they won't let me see him."
The technician wrinkled her nose. She took a deep breath. She shook her head.
"No? That's not it? Then what the hell was so internally traumatic, Amelia, that your trauma is more special than everyone else's? Tell me. Tell me."
And the other woman suddenly threw off her shiny red-gleaming vest, and pulled up her ribbed t-shirt to reveal what looked like a bullet hole over her heart. As Janet watched, transfixed, Amelia pressed a fingernail to the hole. A small quantity of ash fell out; the flesh beneath was purple, and raw.
Janet found herself nodding. "Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I guess that tracks."
2 December
"If it works, it works," Placeholder shrugged. "If it doesn't, yada yada."
He was almost cheerful, squeaking away with his socket wrench beneath what Dougall could only imagine was one of the backup rotors for the overall machine. On the other side of the lab, Trevor Bremmel was squinting at his customized monitor. Non-reflective, and painful as hell to read. Of course, Bremmel was in pain as long as he was awake anyway. Probably even in his sleep. Dougall suspected it was only sheer orneriness keeping him going.
Particularly since he couldn't wear his spectacles, lacking as he did the top half of his nose.
"Are the overall principles sound, at least?"
"Oh," Placeholder cried, "hell no." He rolled out from under the frame, and grinned up at Dougall. "You told me I made this, and you told me it works. Whatever Back to the Future might have told you, that isn't enough. All it did was let me skip the part where I wonder if it's even feasible. I'm still flying mostly on faith here."
"Faith," Bremmel grumbled with an odd nasal hum, "and forty million points of data."
They'd managed to reconstruct most of the arrays Dougall and Ilse had collected from the anachronic lump experiments, both in the ADDC and in the lab. Bremmel and Clio had been poring over it for months, trying to make sense of it all with Placeholder's input. Half of the time Dougall wasn't sure any of them knew what they were looking for.
The rest of the time he worried they were looking for the wrong thing.
"As long as it's ready on time," said Dougall.
Placeholder gave him a strange look. Bremmel turned around and did the same.
"What?"
"On time," Placeholder repeated. "What do you mean by that?"
"September the eighth. It has to be ready on the eighth."
Placeholder laughed out loud. If he'd been standing, Dougall would have been sprayed with spit. It wouldn't have been the first time. "What? That's ridiculous. Why?"
"It's the anniversary of the call. It has to match up. Doesn't it?"
Placeholder sat up, and began swinging the socket wrench in a right rotation. "The motion of the Earth. The stars. The galaxy. The universe. Entropy. The winds of magic. Erosion. Atmospheric noise. Fuzzy logic. Everything. Everything is impinging on this process, Deering. There's more variables involved than Clio can keep track of. Why on Earth would you think that on top of everything else, you need to make the call on a precise day?" Then his eyes went glassy, just for a moment, and he dropped the wrench. "Of course," he added, "you're absolutely right."
And he dropped back down onto the wheeled skeleton, and pulled himself under the frame again.
Bremmel made eye contact with Dougall, shrugged, then went back to his monitor.
"Okay," said Dougall. He nodded, though nobody was looking. "Good."
He almost made it out of Quantum Supermechanics.
Almost didn't do it.
He walked back into the lab. Bremmel was vomiting in the washroom. Dougall grabbed Placeholder by the loafers, hauled him out, and knelt over the other man's startled visage. "You know what the difference is between you and me?"
Placeholder shook his head.
"They haven't realized how much of this is your fucking fault. You built a toy that killed the world. You hurt all of these people. You broke time. You're the same person. You're innocent on a technicality, and I won't forget that." He leaned over the other man's wide, unglassy eyes. "Talk down to me again, and I'll make sure everybody knows it."
Then he shoved the skeleton back under the device, and headed for the doors.
Behind him, muffled weeping.
"And don't cry," he snapped. "Or the boogeyman will really give you something to cry about."
The strangled sounds as Placeholder attempted to squelch his own sobs were the closest thing to music Dougall had heard since the world went red. It felt redder than ever as he stormed out of newly-conquered territory.
31 December
They stood at the station platform, and watched the thing crawl slowly toward them.
"It reminds me of those tunnel-boring machines," Dolly remarked. "Only in reverse."
The Director nodded as the encroaching stone tube ground millimetres closer and an aperture wound its way out of the centre, producing a small plug of what looked like wet earth which splattered on the rail ties far beneath. "Maybe we'll have McDoctorate whip up a proper one, once the Cannon is finished."
Dolly smiled. "I can picture it now. A lot of shiny metal teeth, and as soon as they bite in…"
The Director nodded, already wincing. "Yes," they agreed. "I rather think we won't do that, on reflection."
Only one other person Dolly knew had said things like "I rather think." She didn't feel it necessary to say as much.
The Director stuck their hands in their pockets. "Have I given you my condolences, Dolores? It's so hard to remember… well, anything, these days."
She nodded. "You did. It was one of the first things you said, when they brought you in from topside."
"Of course." They watched as the slowly churning cylinder disgorged a mass of wet fur and what looked like human hair. It made a long, low, desperate groaning sound. "I apologize for dredging it back up."
"It's always there. Not even below the surface, really." She shook her head. "Except that we're all below the surface, aren't we? All the time."
"All the time," the Director repeated. "Then that means this is the surface, doesn't it? Everything up there," and they pointed at the ceiling, "might as well be outer space."
This time, she repeated. "Outer space. The most perfect desert. Do you think what's happening here…?"
They glanced at her. "Is happening all the way out there, as well?"
The bedrock was throbbing, and as it came into the light it looked like a severed arm, all angry red flesh. Like Du's. That, or a tremendous sausage extruded through the slowest grinder ever built.
"I have a sense," the Director said, slowly, "that it probably is."
Vivian, the bedrock wept. Red-grey tears streaked its face, and as one, the two of them placed masks over their own faces. Vivian…
"All our sins remembered," Dolly whispered.
"And our loves," the Director reminded her. "And our loves."
And then, for the first time, the bedrock changed its tune.
Ilse…
In perfect sync again, they both shuddered.
2023
22 January
They'd assigned him a dormitory in Habitation and Sustenance after the breach had destroyed his old quarters. He'd had to ask, and Zaman seemed reluctant to make the assignment despite all the empty space freed up by the day's events. Dougall got the impression most people thought he should be sleeping in the corridors, like a beggar.
For a while, he slept with Alis. Literally slept; there was probably not a whole lot of anything more intimate going on anywhere in the facility, given… everything. Eventually they both found it easier to tolerate the madness alone, and Alis started sleeping in her own quarters — which Zaman had assigned her without being asked, of course. Even though she wasn't even a real member of personnel. Even though she'd come here as an enemy spy.
In the first few days, practically every mirror in the site had been destroyed. The materials didn't go to waste; nothing went to waste anymore, not even waste itself. Every wall-mounted vector for 001-A, windows included, was smashed and then carefully rubbished.
All except this one.
He'd kept it in his closet at first, while Alis was sharing the space. When that was over, sometimes he took it out and mounted it on the wall across from his recliner. Those nights he watched it until he fell asleep. Sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of movement, though it was usually when he was already nodding off, so it was probably his imagination. Once he woke up to find a thin trickle of blood had leaked out of the corner of the frame.
Tonight…
Philip's skin was lobster-red. His eye sockets were full of blood, which ran down his face to soil his technician's vest, and there was blood in his mouth as well. His teeth were jagged spikes, and his fingernails were wickedly sharp claws. There were boils all over his exposed skin.
He stood there, in the mirror. Unmoving. Unspeaking.
Dougall found he couldn't look his brother in the eye.
And his brother didn't even seem to see him.
It was, he thought, after the spectre had departed and Dougall had wept himself ragged, an interesting inversion.
The visits were nightly after that.
Dougall moved the mirror back to the closet, and watched until he was too exhausted to stand.
He told himself it was solidarity.
The creature's ever-growing grin told him it knew different.
14 February
He hated the way they looked at him.
As far as everyone at Site-43 was concerned, he was pretty sure, if they could see him, he wasn't doing his job. And given that his job was saving all of their lives, and also given the likely state of the rest of the world, that dereliction of duty was tantamount to a crime against humanity.
Must be how Deering feels, he thought as he stamped along the particle boardwalk stretching from Section to Section. Then he stopped thinking about Deering, because thinking about Deering made his throat close up.
These little jaunts to clear his head were necessary. People never understood that. They thought of creative work like you could just sit down and do it, like your brain would just make the leaps and connections over and over and over until the thing was done, like you didn't need fresh perspectives and the occasional change of scenery to enable those great steps forward.
And it wasn't like he was using the downtime to mess around.
Carter was smiling at the matte, flat-panel monitor when Place walked into Veiksaar's office. Gershwin hadn't wanted it, preferring to lead his surviving cabal from the main computer lab next door, so they'd repurposed the space as Clio's main server. When Place rounded the desk, he saw that the deeply-lined J&M tech was smiling at the .aic's digital avatar. A round, bespectacled face with… well, it had once been shocking green hair. In spite of himself, Place started smiling too.
"Say hello, Clio," Carter addressed the screen.
The avatar's face distended in one tremendous pixel artifact, and it made a sound like a belch rendered in square wave.
Carter's smile became sheepish as he shrugged at Place. "Good days and bad days."
"I can relate."
Place sat down beside him, and gestured at the keyboard. Carter scooted back, and Place scooted forward. He opened the command prompt, and started engaging with the racing lines of live code displayed on a second monitor.
On the main screen, Clio's eyelids fluttered. "Oh," she said in drowsy tones. "Oh-oh-uh. Hnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggood morning, Dr. McDoctorMcDoctorMcDo you think she still swims in the depths?"
Place felt his spine straighten, and his throat constrict. "What?"
Clio blinked. "What?"
"What did you just say?"
"I said, 'You should know better than to edit the live branch. Better to work on the backups until you're sure what you're going to get." The .aic suddenly smiled brightly. "Sir!"
Carter bit his lip. Still rattled, Place gave him a cockeyed glance. "What?"
The tech pointed at the screen. "Sounds just like her, when… when she talks like that. Sounds like her. That's all."
"Like who?"
Carter winced, still smiling. Place hadn't seen embarrassment on anyone's face since arriving here. Nobody had the mental bandwidth for it. "Like Eileen."
Now it was Place's turn to wince. "She coded the personality drivers, isn't that right?"
Carter nodded.
"You know this isn't her, though. Right?"
Again, Carter nodded.
"Okay." Place held the other man's gaze for a long moment, then looked back at the code, and started typing again.
"You forgot," Clio sang, "and they forgot, and you looked up and it looked down and then they all forgot, but one day you'll re-mem-ber!"
Place stood, knocking the keyboard tray roughly with his knees. Carter glanced up at him in surprise. "I have to get back," he announced.
"But…"
"Lots to do. I'll be back later." He was already back around the desk, and on his way to the door.
"I thought you said you liked .aics!"
It really did sound like Eileen, though. Just for a moment.
Almost long enough.
2 March
Any direction you move in this facility will bring you to one of two things: more facility, or sheer bedrock.
— Dr. Harold Blank, Lines in a Muddle: A Cultural History of Site-43
That line was on David's mind as he surveyed the extent of his works.
INTERITUS Protocol had given the Site more than a bad case of indigestion. The entire Security and Containment Section had been vaporized, the charges so carefully-placed, the blast patterns so precise, the temperature so hot that absolutely nothing could survive. The damage this had done to Applied Occultism was considerable, and the creatures which had been roaming through it hadn't helped either, particularly when Del Olmo's stun memetics inexplicably reduced them (and the surviving personnel sheltering in place) into a bedrock-to-bedrock pile of encaustic goo. Beneath all that was the charnel house of AAF-D. All together, a three-storey nightmare without compare.
But as they had come very quickly to know since September 8, there was always a way for things to get worse.
The destruction of all those structural members and walls had been meant to cave in the bedrock as well. INTERITUS wasn't just supposed to wipe out Security and Containment, but entomb anything which survived. At first — or rather after an interval, when he could have positive thoughts again — Markey had been pleased to see that this hadn't taken place. The bedrock walls held, even bereft of their artificial supports. It didn't make sense, but it was a rare bright spot in their dark red days.
Until it wasn't.
Vivian, the encroaching mass of rock cooed at him. Vivian…
The loss of this much superstructure had been a gain for what Sokolsky told them all to call SCP-001-D. The wall of living stone, once-black shale veined with glittering mudstone and strange, weeping sores of half-carbonized plant matter, was expanding into the space at a rate of about two metres per day. As Markey watched, it seemed to be receding, but this was an illusion. Not optical, but temporal.
The bedrock wasn't in retreat. It was breathing in.
It would breathe out again, soon, taking up another two metres of space and growing that much closer to the walls of Habitation and Sustenance. David hung in the narrow crawlspace above the third sublevel's membrane, surrounded by gurgling pipes and humming relays, listening to the rocks lament their long-lost love, and thinking about how easy it would be to just let it come. He wondered what would happen if he walked up to Rydderech's burgeoning bulk, and placed a hand on it. Would it consume him, as it had Azad? Or would it forsake him?
Was it possible to be any more forsaken than this?
He was due to talk with Romolo and Amelia in an hour. They were expecting containment solutions, or at least the beginnings of a plan. Suggestions. Options. And he had nothing.
Every time he tried to come up with something, he hit a wall that didn't even whisper. Didn't expand, or retract. A mental block. It was as if every inch lost to the pulsating earth also stole away another neuron in his brain, sapped his creativity, left him struggling for anything resembling a creative thought. Blow it up? Sand it down? Give it a right and proper talking-to? He was the Site's ranking containment expert. He should have been able to come up with something better than that.
Instead he just hung there, watching. Watching the bedrock break and shift and re-seal, bleeding bitumen in great gooey globs which sizzled on the still-hot tiles — thaumic bloom was such a bitch — and produced vapours which had already driven half a dozen techs to throw themselves into the geothermal vents.
Watching the cycle of consumption, and watching his mind eat itself.
Witnessing the loss of ground which could never be regained.
16 April
Amelia spread the tarp over the offending stretch of bedrock, and began gently tapping in the pitons to secure it in place. The rock sighed — she hated that, but it wasn't the worst part of the process by any stretch — and called her by someone else's name as she drove each spike home. The tarp fluttered in no breeze, then gradually vapor locked itself to the stone surface.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, out of tune with its respiration, the advancing wall of doom stopped advancing.
"What is that?"
Her teeth were immediately on edge. She couldn't take this. Not now. Probably not ever. So she turned back to the cart, wheeled it farther down the shattered concrete hall, and plucked out another two by two scrap of… tarp. Best to keep thinking of it as tarp. She was going to need to get a ladder to complete the coverage up to the ceiling—
"Amelia? What is that?"
She turned to face him. He had no idea how much danger he was in. She had no idea. "I'm working," she snapped.
"I'm your boss," he said.
She laughed, hard enough that the pressure over her heart ached, and threw the fat square of tarp back onto the stack. "No, you're not. David Markey is my boss. I transferred."
His scruffy, chiselled jaw locked. "You can't do that."
"I can do whatever the Director says I can do. Do you honestly think anyone here wants to report to you, you…" And that was it. She'd gone too far. She'd crossed the line, and now there was no stopping her. She darted forward, slammed him into the pitted wall, and then slapped him across the face. "You stupid arrogant useless son of a bitch. You… I hate you. I hate you," and she spat in his face, and then shoved off by shoving him harder into the concrete.
They stood there, staring at each other, for a long moment.
"You fucking killed him," she whispered.
Dougall's eyes widened. "Who?"
"You know who."
She stalked back to the cart, and reached for the stack of tarp again. But her fists wouldn't come un-clenched.
"You didn't even know him," Dougall protested.
She turned on him again, and the look of sheer, shocked confusion almost made her scream. He had no idea what she was talking about. He could have no idea what she was talking about.
She needed to stop talking about it, so she picked up her hammer and started nailing the bottom pitons into the sheets she'd already hung.
"I don't understand," he said. Plaintively. The voice of isolation and regret.
"But that never fucking stops you," she snapped. "Does it?" She noticed a single blonde hair sticking out of the tarp, and tore it off before standing again and shoving the cart farther down the hall.
Every inch of space between them was cool relief.
But there wasn't enough space in their little world to make sharing it with him alright.
1 May
There were many ways to experience common cause with your fellow human beings, but somehow this wasn't one of them.
They were both pariahs. One more than the other, to be sure, but they were almost equally isolated from the rest of the survivors at Site-43. This had done nothing to bring them closer together. Place felt quite certain that Dougall liked having someone around who was even more the unknowable, untrustable other than he had made himself, and Place…
At first, Place simply found the man too infuriating to empathize with.
Now he dreaded their every moment together.
After what had to be the thousandth time the occultist stuck his hand into the fan blades or checked the seating of the wires in their sockets or asked what this was, what this did, and was Place quite sure he'd done this correctly, Place threw a wrench across the room. It struck the side of a (probably) bright red tool cart, and dented the finish in the process of producing a sonorous bang.
By the time Deering was done staring at the source of the sound and had turned to stare at the source of that source, a nasty grin growing on his nasty face, Place had his throwing hand balled into a fist. He shook it in the other man's face. "I'm working," he snapped. "I am working. Every day, I work. And what do you do?" He clacked his jaw shut, five times, fast. "Talk. You talk, and talk, and talk, and you do nothing."
Dougall's expression had fallen flat. "You might not have noticed this," he said dryly, "but you talk a lot, too."
"I have things to say!" Place shouted, waving his hands in the air. If he'd still had the wrench, there might have been trouble. "I know things. You don't. You keep wandering around like you want to help, but all you ever do is get in the way. Why are you getting in my way?"
"Because I need to be sure you're going to fix it!"
"Fix it?" Place turned to look at the half-formed cannon on its mount. "Fix it? It isn't even done yet!"
"Not the cannon." Dougall might as well have been a text-to-speech program, for all the emotion in his voice now. "The problem. Our problem."
"You mean your problem," Place snarled. "The problem you caused. You don't think maybe it would be safer for everyone if you didn't stick your sticky hands in my solution?"
Dougall considered him for a moment longer, then nodded. "Ilse never wanted me to help, either. Not really."
"I don't know who that is." Place stalked across the lab, to retrieve his wrench. "And I don't care."
"She was the smartest person at 43." Dougall sat down on the nearest chair, paper crunching as he did so. Place immediately acquired a new crick in his neck. "Smarter than you, probably."
"Then I wish she was here, instead of you." Place bent to retrieve the wrench, and checked it for damage.
"Yeah," Dougall sighed. "Me too. But are you going to do it?"
"Do what?"
"Fix our problem."
Place shook his head as he walked back to the cannon, already considering torsion and torque formulae in his head. "You know what the irony is, Deering? Expecting someone to swoop in and fix your damn problems is what got us into this mess in the first place."
9 July
The son of a bitch was hiding in his closet.
Amelia didn't bother to knock. All such courtesies had gone by the wayside very early. She simply walked in, using her all-purpose technician's key — reduced to sleeping in a standard dormitory, Dougall could no longer rely on the enhanced security provided by a Section Chair's post. And he burst out of the closet and slammed the door behind him, looking more guilty than she'd ever seen him.
And this was a man who looked guilty all day, every day.
Because he was, and they'd all finally made him know it through sheer force of repetition.
"What do you want?" he snapped, but there was no bite in it. He was definitely hiding something.
"I want," she said, "to make sure you're not going to fuck us any worse than you already have."
His shoulders sagged, and he leaned back against the wall separating the main living space from his bedroom. "I wouldn't even know where to start, doing that."
She crossed her arms. "You'd start by deciding you knew better than everyone else. You'd start," and she knew that this was going to end with her shouting, had known it before she'd even walked into the room, "by deciding you could secretly fix it all on your own! You'd start by thinking about what you need, and then we'd all end up suffering for it. But that's not what you're going to do this time, is it? This time you're going to spare a thought for all the other people caught in your awful orbit. Right?"
His jaw set. She was surprised to see he still had it in him, even if only a little. "I'm going to stop myself from changing the future." He said it like he was reciting a grocery list. No enthusiasm, no affect at all. "That's what I'm going to do."
She scoffed. "That's the plan? Tell yourself 'You know that incredibly important job I gave you a few seconds ago? Never mind.' Dougall, you can't convince anyone of anything. How do you expect to convince someone as bloody-minded as you?"
He seemed farther and farther away with each salvo. Now he was looking straight through her. "I don't know why you hate me so much," he said, "but I know what's at stake here. I don't want to keep living this nightmare any more than you do."
"Then I'd expect to see you practicing your lines," she growled. "Not hiding from the boogeyman in your god damn closet."
To her astonishment, for a moment it looked like he was going to laugh. "You don't know what you're talking about. You don't know the first thing about me."
"The first thing about you is Dougall Deering. And that's the only thing."
He shook his head. "You're wrong."
"Then prove it to me." She unfolded her arms, and stuffed them in her jacket pocket. It was either that or strangle him. "Prove it to everybody. Clean up your own mess, just this once."
They stared at each other in silence for a few seconds, then slowly, very deliberately, he asked her: "Who are you?"
A few seconds more.
"I'm something you took away from him," she whispered. "The last in a long line of things. And you're going to give me back." She reached for the door handle, hands shaking. "You're going to put as all back where we belong, or so help me…"
She pulled open the door and left without finishing the threat. She had no idea what she might have said next.
What more could she do to a man who was already Dougall Deering?
It had been a productive year so far, since productivity was the only thing left to them.
Billie Forsythe and her team achieved a minor medical miracle in March, when they were able to successfully contain an infection from the mirror demon to just one arm of the affected subject. They had to cut the thing off, and the stump stayed black and oozed pus like there was no tomorrow, but the subject didn't die. They only wished they had.
In April, fifty percent of the facility was walkable again. Ambrogi declared this milestone the end of the road, because they were running low on sandpaper and abrasives, and anyway most of the spaces they hadn't yet scuffed were now food for the ravenous bedrock beast.
In May, Del Olmo and Wirth began an internal morale-boosting broadcast. The ease with which the former lied, and the latter deconstructed people's worries until they no longer made the slightest sense, were curiously effective at reducing discontent among the lower ranks.
In June, Markey proved conclusively that the sudden rash of suicides which had claimed twenty-nine lives since the walls started closing in could be traced back to exposure to the material leaking out of those rocky pores, which caused chemical damage to the brain indistinguishable from crushing clinical depression. Better access control, and some new air filters in the outermost habitable sectors, got the number down to just two or three suicides per month.
In July, Sokolsky and Alis finished formulating a whole suite of new self-applied memetics. These included pain inhibitors, pleasure centre activators, and coma inducers. They had to discontinue production of the third type when half the facility demanded access, but it was otherwise a boon to productivity.
In August, Placeholder McDoctorate completed construction of the REISNO Cannon.
"Of course it couldn't have been done sooner," he snapped as Dougall stared at the prototype. It looked like a single automobile engine on an axle, suspended off the ground on a frame, and festooned with cables running every which way. "It's a god damn time machine. Timing is everything."
At least, that was what the voice had told him to say.
30 August
"You know what you're going to say?"
"I've known for over twenty years."
They were sitting in her quarters on the third sublevel — the only sublevel — staring into matching mugs of very viscous coffee. The mugs were rough enough to give them regular canker sores, and the coffee was sweetened with something that tasted like pure aspartame and prevented the formation of enough surface tension to permit reflection. And sometimes caused it to bubble out, and burn their skin.
Caffeine, on the other hand, was one of the few things the new world hadn't taken away from them. At least not until the hydroponics failed.
She took his hand. "No. No. You're not going to tell him what he told you. That's what got us into this mess. You're going to tell him not to stop the breach."
Dougall nodded, absent-mindedly.
She clutched his fingers until the knuckles ached, and he met her eyes. "Right? Right?"
"Right." He pushed her hand away, and downed the rest of the mug. "Obviously. I know what I'm doing."
"It's only that the continued existence of the human race depends on you saying the right thing." She smirked. "And knowing you as well as I do…"
"Yeah, yeah." He stood up, stretched, and rubbed at his eyes again. They hurt all the time. Most of his body did, even if he was one of the few people left with no visible scars.
"You've got thirty seconds," she reminded him. "The grid can give you enough power for thirty seconds."
"Thirty seconds across twenty-one years," he corrected her. "Placeholder says the distance matters. If we have to do it again next year, I'll have even less time on the air."
She scowled. "Why would he have to do it again next year?"
He gave her a look.
She stood up, took her mug to the kitchen, and tossed the unfinished coffee into the custom-built liquid recycling unit, where it would soon mingle with expired medication and urine and various sundry waste to become something almost drinkable again in short order. "Sure. Right. Sorry. I keep forgetting what a dirty word optimism is, these days."
7 September
With an excellent sense of dramatic timing, on the eve of showtime, the Site's reconstructed radio antenna over the ruins of Camp Ipperwash picked up its first and only long-range broadcast.
There was no video, only audio. And it sounded like an odd mix of recording and text-to-speech, though Clio identified the speaker as possessing Clearance Level-6 credentials.
The Director had the message played on the big board in Operations Control, with the remaining Chairs and Chiefs in attendance.
"This message is directed to the ranking, surviving member of loyal personnel at SCP Foundation Lake Huron Research and Containment Site-43."
Most of the older staff recognized something in the voice immediately. Some of them instinctively cringed, though they weren't sure why.
"Satellite surveillance and communications monitoring has determined within a three-point-seven-seven-nine-repeating margin of error that all other Foundation facilities will have ceased operations by the time this message penetrates the ontokinetic disruption surrounding yours. If you are hearing these words, therefore, the Overseer Council is dead, and you are the Administrator, and you are alone."
The words, precise and measured though they were, carried the tone of weathered leather scraping on rusted steel. The affect was not entirely of man, not entirely machine. A hint, though just a hint, of brogue undercutting the robotic flatness.
"This is, make no mistake, your fault. You claimed to be the best of us, and yet you fell first, and dragged us all down with you. You killed the world. You broke time itself. This crisis is your failure, and you will atone by resolving it."
There was a metallic screech on the recording, and the strangely hybridized voice increased in pitch and urgency, as though racing to the end of a short script in a shorter window.
"Your facility is the seed vault of humanity. Carry us forward. Do not fail again."
A beat.
"Secure. Contain."
If the Overseer had finished its final phrase, the recording cut off too soon for them to hear it.
"What's left to protect anyways?" Ferber muttered, as they all wandered back to their posts.
8 September
The plan was for Placeholder and Alis to monitor him as he delivered his message of hope and despair to the past. Until the moment he stepped up to the machine, he knew it would be rough going at best. Didn't know how he could possibly pull it off.
And then the klaxons started in the distance, and both of his minders received messages on their pagers, and with no word of acknowledgement from Place and a quick kiss on the cheek from Alis, they were both gone out of the laboratory at a run. Their coats and flapping feet left trails in the air.
He closed the door behind them.
And locked it.
"What's the problem?" Alis demanded, at the same moment she saw for herself.
Operations Control was a jury-rigged mess in the post-reflective world, a series of projectors at odd angles sufficing to present the necessary information in a way offering no risk to life or limb. Bright bulbs and diffused lenses. It was a testament to the fascist training regimen that all new Foundation hires went through that they didn't fall apart in such a desperate situation, with their awkward equipment.
The same self-certain arrogance that had driven the man she sometimes loved to do the things he'd done.
At first she thought the projectors were even more out of whack than usual, and then she realized the extra outlines were also visible on the doorways, desks, even the people occupying the half-cocked consoles. The Director confirmed it when she and Place took up stations beside them: "Instability is increasing. This wasn't in the simulations."
Deep in Quantum Supermechanics, the DUAL Core was running a fusion energy simulation using orphic energy siphoned from the hungry lake. Spinning out of time and space, realizing a power that was only barely possible in the real world, magnifying it, and funneling the results into the lab where they'd left Dougall Deering. That had to be the reason.
This time, Placeholder voiced it. "It's the leadup to the call," he said. "Got to be."
The Director turned to him. "You were expecting this?"
"No," he shook his head. "Not as such. But it makes as much sense as anything else."
A klaxon sounded. Alis was so used to klaxons at this point, she didn't realize this was a new one until one of the techs stood up at her console and turned to face them, pink-faced. "Intruders, sir."
"What?" The Director leaned forward, as though the problem had been a mistake of mishearing. "Where?"
The woman opened her mouth, turned back to her console to double check, and didn't meet their eyes again when she answered. "They're in F-D, sir," she said. Her voice ran the razor's edge between hilarity and horror. "Sir, I think it's the Vigil."
Janet slipped off the seat and lay in the crumbling earth, at the terminus of two deep ruts where her wheelchair had dug itself in too deeply. She didn't know why she was here, and she didn't care. Ahead of her, the empty crater that had once been the basin of Lake Huron. Above, the glittering arc of what those waters had become.
Then down, down, down they flowed, and she heard those familiar sounds once more.
Laughter.
Splashing.
Screaming.
Structure was everything for Romolo now. What little remained. Whatever he could preserve. He couldn't bear to break it down further.
"And you don't have to," she cooed in his ear. And he went through the motions, in her memory, without even thinking.
David's job description hadn't changed since the breach. David had, but not enough to make a difference.
One of the first things they taught you, as a containment specialist, was that sometimes your role was to set things wrong where once they had gone right.
Setting them wrong twice was a short sideways hop from that.
Reuben was halfway out the door when the lights shifted subtly. He turned around to see a vision of the past: the Salt Mines as they had been, and could never be again. The desks. The cabinets. The people.
The files.
"No," he said, as Chey cried out exactly the way she did in his dreams. As the sizzling started.
As his dumb feet propelled him to an impossible reprise.
Completely impossible, as it turned out.
Whenever Mukami wasn't topside, she made her nest in the S&C monitoring room. Not giving orders — she left that to Yancy, who could still express himself fluently — but simply keeping an eye. Whatever was going on in her language centre, her instincts and reactions and training were still impeccable.
Given the same stimulus, she would always make the same choice. Every time.
Radcliffe was halfway across the Site, in the firing range, when the call came in. He'd been improving his aim recently; by the end of the year he hoped to be somewhere around the average mark for the first time in his long career. That was only a secondary consideration, however. Radcliffe adored the range, now.
It was one of the few rooms in the facility that had never been particularly reflective in the first place.
He had his radio on him, but some combination of the sound and the vibration from his service weapon meant he missed the first few messages. When the last one came in between changing targets, he picked up the receiver, saw the message waiting light, and cursed at the same moment he hit SEND. "Radcliffe."
"F-D is going critical!" a woman's voice screamed. "I'm at junction T-4. What's the nearest bolthole?"
He'd heard it time and time again, for what had felt like years. Maybe it had been. His psych evals would show. The voice in his nightmares.
This was a dream.
It was going to be a good dream.
What he didn't say was that the voice should go north. The destruction of AAF-D had inverted the cardinal directions. Instead, he gave her a clear path with landmarks along the way, so that no matter what else went wrong, she'd have something, anything, to seize on in the moment.
He gave her perfect directions to the concentration cell, and changed the past forever.
That was the moment at which he should have woken up.
But the nightmare wouldn't be dispelled so easily.
Del Olmo was in the process of preparing a new broadcast — a memorial, light on detail and heavy on innuendo — when a frantic message came in on his radio, and he turned on his scrubbed-down monitor.
This evening's show would be an encore.
"F-D is a smoking crater," Alis protested.
"Not anymore," another technician chimed in. "I'm getting readouts from all the decommed sensors. Power. Water." The woman's voice took on a quaver. "Effluence loadout."
"What." Placeholder stumbled across the room to stand behind the woman who'd spoken, and grabbed the back of her chair so tightly his knuckles turned white. "That's impossible. It's all…"
Gone, he was going to say. But he didn't.
"That's impossible. It's all…"
Gone.
"It's all…"
Gone.
"What." White knuckles on the back of the chair.
"Not anymore," the woman chimed in. "Not anymore."
What.
And the walls closed in again, only this time the bedrock had nothing to do with it. It was light, burning light, burning red, redder than before, and it washed over all of them, and then the technician next to Placeholder screamed, and stood up, and her shirt caught fire, and something near-white-hot burned its way out of her stomach, fell onto the floor, and burned its way through that, too, as she crashed messily into her chair with the stink of her cooking guts rising to the air filtration vents in the ceiling.
The Director hit a button on their podium, and shouted: "HYPERBOLIC."
And Alis knew it was an understatement.
Six minutes later, it was all far from over.
Clio's headcount showed a discrepancy of about twenty people, in the wrong direction. There were strangers in the cafeteria with friendly eyes and nothing inside their mouths. One entire hall of dormitories had been glassed, literally turned to glass, with a handful of occupants inside. They were still alive. Radcliffe was threatening a junior agent with his service weapon, insisting at the top of his lungs that nothing except him was real. AAF-D was a bedrock bowl full of fire and smoke again, with a tiny little patch of calm at the heart of its storm.
The survivors in Operations Control — the ones who were still mostly whole — stared at the big board as Clio funnelled all reports into the master system, and tried to make sense of the chaos.
"Was it him?" Ferber breathed. "Did he make it worse?"
Placeholder turned to see the glass doors into admin swinging wildly open and shut. He could just about make out a mane of hair that looked red, but probably wasn't, flying behind an occultist labcoat as Alis burst out of the cubicle block and out toward the secure comms chamber in R&E.
It wasn't a dramatic reveal. No-one stopped her — no-one ever did — and nothing was locked, no obstacles in her way. She pulled open the door, and there he was.
Slumped over on the desktop, the REISNO Cannon in front of him, still spinning down. It was giving off an acrid smoke, and whining. He was bleeding from the nose and mouth. Something had wrenched his head to the side, hard. He couldn't have done it himself…
Yes, she realized. He could.
He was clutching something in his right hand, and she recognized it as M&C card stock. She averted her eyes immediately.
One of the kill agents she'd developed with Del Olmo, as a last resort.
Dougall's last resort.
The only thing stopping her from shoving him off the chair and stomping that placid look of sheer relief — or was it terror? awe? — off his face was spotting the envelope on the desk, beneath his splayed left hand. An explanation? A final testament? A way to make her understand?
There was one name on the cover, four letters, underlined, and until she leaned over the dead man for a better look, she really did think it was hers.
In the distance, the intended recipient roared in what sounded very much like anguish. A scream of fury, of loss, of unspeakable pain.
A keening of absolute agonized despair.
It was the first of the evening, but not the last.
