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Better Dead
Hope can be harsh.⚠️ Content warning:
This article contains scenes of extremely graphic violence and gore, self-harm, and suicide.
Something sent him careening into a wall as he ran, and he barely noticed. A sharp pain in his shoulder as he bounced back off the tiles, and all he did was shift his momentum and keep going. He'd had an awful, terrible thought. A lurid image in his mind he couldn't dismiss. An intrusive—
It was real.
The doors to the lab yawned open, and beyond, there it was. The Cannon.
And there he was.
Dougall lay in a heap on the floor, having apparently slid off the desk where he'd first fallen; that much Place could surmise from the streak of blood, and the smear from the occultist's eyes which ran into his beard.
"I," said Place. And then he saw Alis, crouched in the corner, pressing her face to the wall and hiding in a shroud of hair. "He…?"
She didn't respond.
The Cannon was steaming and still spinning down. Place hadn't built in a dead man's switch, so that could only mean the power reserve had been depleted, which in turn could only mean the geothaumic plant had expended its priceless fuel. Assuming it hadn't exploded, or turned into chickens, or whatever the hell else was going on out there. He could hear it, backgrounding her sobs and his own heavy breathing.
And then he could only hear his breathing.
And then he found himself on his knees in front of the Cannon. It was giving off waves of heat, and whirring faintly. Fainter. Fainter.
"I killed him?"
"No," Alis croaked.
"The Cannon—"
"No."
She stood up, slowly, very slowly, and left trails in the air as she went. There was a haze in the room, and an additional ruddy outline around everything. Place couldn't even remember the last time he'd taken the drops…
"He used you." Alis was facing him now, but her face was still curtained. Only the faint puffs of air as she spoke revealed the contours of her lips. "He used us all, to do this."
Place reached out to touch the Cannon's mount, to feel the final vibrations as it closed the loop between now and then.
"I don't think I see the distinction," he said, and then he curled up in a ball beneath the silent, perhaps permanently silent deus ex machina, and attempted to cry without tears.
Amelia arrived… eventually. An amount of time later. Alis was standing over him by then, offering nothing. Place was clutching at the Cannon supports, breaking fingernail after fingernail on the flaking metal. He wasn't sure why he looked up when the other woman entered. Maybe he was hoping she would tell him it had all been a terrible, terrible dream.
She ignored the body on the floor, and crouched beside… well. The second body on the floor. "What happened to your shoulder?"
He looked where she was looking. Blood seeped through his labcoat. "I don't know."
She thumbed the radio at her belt. "Priority 1 in the Cannon lab."
Forsythe's voice responded: "Confirm 1?"
"Confirmed."
"On my way."
Perhaps it was listening to the cryptic conversation that brought his senses slowly back. If so, he wished he hadn't done it. There was something ringing in the corridor outside; the door was still open, and he could hear the echoes. Call and response. Voices calling out.
"What?" he managed.
Amelia glanced up at the frosted, non-reflective glass that had replaced the lab windows, and grimaced. "'…is that'?" She pointed at Dougall's splayed corpse. "Probably a reaction to that."
Alis was still looming over them both, swaying in place, hair hanging limp over her features. She was clutching an envelope in her hand. It had been torn open. She held it out in front of her, stared at it, then looked at the body like she hadn't really seen it until now.
She dropped it on the floor. It landed beside Place, and he reached to pick it up.
"How bad?" said yet another woman's voice, from the door, as he pulled out the letter and scanned its contents at a squint.
"Bad enough."
Place had no idea what Amelia was talking about. He was still reading the letter.
Billie Forsythe knelt in front of him, gently elbowing Amelia out of the way. "Let me see that." She reached for his shoulder, and he shifted on the floor to keep the swimming words in view.
"Does it hurt when I do this?" the doctor asked.
"What," Place began, and Forsythe was about to repeat her question when he ended the sentence with "an asshole."
1987
August
Hartford: Hartford County, Connecticut, United States of America
He stared up at the ceiling, listening to the uneven wheezing from across the room, and silently willed his brother to die.
And then, in a heartbeat, took it back.
The space of that beat would haunt him for the rest of the night. He wouldn't sleep a wink.
It wouldn't stop him from showing his brother's report card to their parents. It wouldn't stop him from shaking the little brat on the street corner, and absconding with his friends. It wouldn't make any appreciable difference in their interactions for the rest of the week.
But he wouldn't forget the lump in his throat, either.
The next time Phil snored, Dougall would wait in mortal terror for the intrusive thought to return. He was already preparing to deny it. To spend another night doing nothing but denying it, over and over and over again, in what should have been the safety of his own mind.
Because on the slight chance anything was listening, he needed it to hear how he really felt.
It was hours before anyone thought to check the ruins of AAF-D.
They would have looked sooner, if Mukami had been able to speak with Radcliffe. But she hadn't, and he'd been raving, and she'd tranquilized him. Before he hurt anyone.
They couldn't sustain any more casualties tonight.
001-A had thrust the bone-tipped ends of his hands through an almost fully opaque floor to score deep gashes in Agent Moradi's boots, socks, and feet. It was heads or tails if she'd ever walk again. He had half-manifested on Technician Jusić's eyes — she was still ten minutes early for her opacity treatment — and she'd been blind for the rest of her life. His face was on every unsuspected reflective surface in the facility, not singing his brother's praises but screaming, screaming, screaming. Nowhere seemed safe.
The unbound effluence was worse than before. Whole offices had been melted. Labs were upside-down. The long-absent creatures in containment were back, and they'd come back even more wrong. Gwilherm and Mukami had to press the techs and some of the researchers into action just to hold back the tide long enough for the I&T skeleton crew to get the bulkhead doors shut, with their scrambled circuits and wiped permissions.
Nhung Ngo appeared out of nowhere, hollow-eyed and near-catatonic, in the middle of Operations Control, and when Placeholder pointed at her and shouted "Look!" she burst into tears so pure they might have come straight from a newborn child. Beside her, one of the consoles was operating itself.
And everything, absolutely everything was ringing, thrumming, dancing with a redder light than ever.
Small wonder, in the midst of all that, nobody thought to venture through the airlock, open up the red-hot door of the concentration cell and see if there was anything inside.
Five hours later, when someone finally did, it was only because the residual explosions of esoteric energy had calmed down enough for the polite knocking from within to be audible, reverberating through the thick and cooling steel.
Ambrogi spun the locking mechanism with a pair of insulated clamps, then pulled the door open to reveal Director Lillian Lillihammer and Dr. Harold Blank, shell shocked, tear-streaked and filthy, huddled together on the pitch-black/red concrete.
"Tell Radcliffe his directions were excellent," Lillian croaked. "But he needs to work on answering the damn phone."
Reuben examined the man on the other side of the table like he was a document that might be read. Like they wouldn't even need to converse for him to tell the truth or falsehood of what was being purported.
Like Harold Blank was a text whose author was dead.
"You're wondering what we were doing in F-D," Blank suggested.
Reuben was not wondering that. That didn't make any sense at all. He nodded anyway.
"Something pulled us in." Harry shuddered. "Not physically. Mentally. We just… knew where we needed to be, and that was inside the refinery. Maybe we thought we could help."
"Help," Reuben repeated, as an alternative to engaging with the statement.
"Right. I don't know. It must have been some consequence of the breach. But we stood beside the ghosts, and we ran through our parts, as before. It felt like…" He squeezed his eyes shut, for a moment. His attention thus directed, Reuben looked at them closely when they reopened. The surface of the lens was matte. He couldn't remember whether Billie had applied the drops or not, which, come to think of it, was a massive oversight on his part. He should do something about that.
"It felt like," Reuben prompted.
Harry gave him a strange look. "It felt like it wasn't really happening. Not just that, but it wasn't really us. Just… I don't know. A pantomime." He winced, the way people did these days when their eyes wanted to generate tears but their new biology thwarted the response. "I was with them again, Reuben. Standing next to them. They were alive again, and I didn't feel anything. Can you imagine what that feels like now?"
"Yes." Reuben didn't hesitate. "I can imagine it pretty well."
There was no question of who his interview subject really was. Del Olmo had never met an actress talented enough to play this part to the nines.
"I know a fun game," Lillian Lillihammer drawled. "You pretend to be detained for no reason, and I will ask you all sorts of unreasonable questions. We might learn just as much, and you'll get a bonus glimpse into why I'm so pissed off right now."
They'd been going around in circles like this for a while. She wouldn't be drawn on the question of why she'd been in AAF-D, which was fine. She avoided the issue of how she and her friend had survived an unsurvivable trauma without so much as a scratch. She hadn't yet been asked why she was alive at all, or what she'd been up to for the past year, because those were rather game-changing questions.
There were only two things she was crystal clear on, and she kept coming back to them for emphasis.
"I'm not sure what direction this interview is going in," she glared, "but unless you've scheduled a breakthrough sometime soon, I'd really love to finish up and get back to working on my projects."
"Director," he said, careful to make it sound like the appellation still naturally applied, "you haven't told me what those projects are."
It was a strange thing, he mused, to be given a look of such deep suspicion from someone who was supposed to be dead. Sometimes, on bad days, he talked to the mannequin in its containment closet. "Half of them you know, because we work on them together. The other half you know not to ask about, because that's how I roll. What's gotten into you, Bernie? I know the compulsion to walk into the fireworks is bad, but we've got memetic agents for that. Wave a few cards in front of my face and let me get back to business."
"I don't get it." Harry was massaging his own neck. He often slept wrong, or sat wrong, or walked wrong. He'd never quite gotten used to living in his own skin efficiently. "What's with the third degree? You know me."
"I did know you," Reuben nodded. "For nearly thirty years. But there's a ribbon on that, Harry, and I don't know how you untied it."
Harry blinked. "What?"
"You died."
"I'm sure I would have remembered that."
"I can show you the body." Del Olmo held her gaze. There weren't many men who could do that. "It was converted to wood chippings at the molecular level. After you walked through what was left of Blank, and smeared his red tomato guts across the floor."
Her eyes — he still thought of them as blue, because they had once been so very blue — widened in a passable imitation of Ilse Reynders. "That didn't happen. I don't even know what half of that means."
"It means," he sighed, "that you are not Lillian Lillihammer. In the same way your remains aren't really you. You're a simulacrum. Nothing more."
A mannequin that talked back.
Harry pulled on the panels of his hooded sweater for emphasis. "This is me, Reuben. Ask me anything. You're not imagining me."
"No," Reuben agreed. He was surprised how easy it was to carry on this conversation. He dreaded the moment when his wife saw the transcript. Perhaps there was some way to prevent that. "But you are. You're imagining you're Harold Blank. You're some kind of orphic residue, or… I don't know. That's not my area. But the real Harry died a disgusting death a year ago, and he's been in the ground ever since." As it always did, this last fact produced a gurgle of nausea in Reuben's stomach.
Harry sat back, shaking his grey, shaggy head in disbelief. "A year? You think I've been gone for a year?"
"You and Lillian both." Reuben screwed up his face. "And it hasn't been a great year, either. You're lucky you missed it. Whatever you are."
"I'm me," Harry growled. "And I'm starting to wonder if you're you."
Reuben shrugged. The conversation had exhausted him. He wanted it to be over. He wanted all of this to be over. "It doesn't really matter who we were before. We're just the jobs we do down here, now." He laughed bitterly. "In fact, I'm a lot more you than I am me, these days. I've been doing your job. Living your life." He saw her in his mind's eye, and cast his real eyes downward to stare at the table. "Like I've been for twenty years, give or take."
He felt Harry's eyes on him for several seconds before the other man responded. "Well, it's not like I was living it."
"Hey." Lillian reached across the table to envelop his hands in hers, the touch of her long fingers delicate and precise. "Bernie, come on. I can tell you're in a bad place. And I can tell you want me to help."
He didn't shake the hands away, but he forced himself not to respond to the gesture, either. "Lillian, I want it to be you. I want you to be back. But we've learned a lot about hope over the last year. We've learned that it isn't your friend."
"But I am." She worked their fingers until all four hands were clasped together tight. "And I can help. I've been helping. Talk me through what's on your mind, and we can figure it out. We're two of a kind. Always were."
His breath came out ragged, and he smiled in despair. "Talk you through it? That's the thing. We never really talked, really talked, did we?"
Her smile was comparatively radiant. "Actions speak louder." Then, she laughed. He'd thought he would never hear that sound again. He wasn't quite hearing it now. "Wow, that was out of character for me. Holy shit. I can see why you're so suspicious."
"They remember surviving the breach," said Wirth.
"And working with the rest of the survivors to manage the threats we're facing," Del Olmo added. "The lake, the bedrock, the mirror monster, everything."
"It's a Necropsar," Wirth concluded.
The Director frowned. "I always found that one a little convoluted. Clarify?"
"Necropsar-class anomalies," the archivist explained, "represent alternate courses of time. True courses, potential courses, which time did not take. The histories of worlds that have never existed, but could have. I think," and he glanced at Del Olmo, who nodded, "that what we're looking at are versions of Harry and Lillian from a world where they didn't die."
"A world, more precisely, where Agent Radcliffe's directions were precise enough for them to reach safety before the critical moment."
"Well, to be precisely precise, a world where those directions didn't put them in the path of the things that killed them."
Del Olmo acknowledged the little victory with a smile.
The Director nodded, slowly. Contemplating. "So, what do we do with them?"
Mukami, sitting in the far corner, hadn't spoken since the briefing started. It was a surprise when she started, but the tortuous delivery was not. "Same. Thing. We. Do. With. Any. Humanoid. Anomaly…" She blew out an exhausted breath, and gestured at Janet.
"…whether we think we understand it or not," Janet finished for her. "Hold for twenty-four hours before taking any drastic action, then see where we're at."
The Director's nod became more confident, and they stood up. "Makes sense to me. Particularly given where we're 'at' right now."
They all walked out into A&O together. The cubicles, and Operations Control beyond, were a hive of buzzing activity.
It had been five hours since the breach had recurred, and they were still failing to grasp the full measure of how much more badly it had gone.
The Director wondered, just for a moment, whether a reality where Lillian Lillihammer had still been the Director looked any better, or any worse.
"Where is…" Yancy glanced at his paperwork, frowned, then looked back up at Ngo. "Where…"
"Someone is missing." Ngo was smiling like he hadn't seen anyone smile in over a year.
He nodded back at her.
"Very missing," she continued. "So missing, you're just now realizing you don't remember who they were."
The big agent sighed. "Maybe this would go more smoothly if I didn't ask any questions, and you just told me what the hell is going on."
Ngo nodded excitedly. She'd been euphoric almost since popping into existence in the middle of Operations Control. Once she'd stopped bawling. "Okay. I was stuck with a riddle for twelve months, by myself, and I only today figured out how to solve it."
"What riddle?"
"Why nobody noticed me. Why I didn't seem to exist to anyone." She gestured at the tablet on the table between them. "Go ahead, look me up. See if there's any mention of what I've been doing since last September."
He shook his head. "Already did. There isn't."
"Right. Because something awful happened to me during the breach. I think it erased me from everyone's memories, and then salted the earth so I couldn't regrow."
"And yet here we are, talking."
Her smile grew even wider. "Because I finally figured it out. Nobody could see me, nobody could hear me, I knew all that from the start. But eventually I realized it was sapient beings that couldn't get a read on me. So I enlisted one who wasn't."
Yancy frowned. "Phil? Uh, 001-A?"
"No. You know how all the electrics went haywire during the breach last year?"
"And again just now."
"Yeah. That's how I got rid of it. I finally found someone only pseudosapient to talk to."
"You mean…" He snorted. "Clio." The Site's Artificially Intelligent Conscript lost most of her higher functions whenever the grid went down.
"Clio. I accessed her terminal, fed in my notes on the anomaly, and left a read condition: low power mode only. Otherwise she'd ignore them. I can't… I couldn't even make people read my notes." She laughed, and he suddenly saw how much she was hiding behind that mask of mirth. Just for an instant. "There's a whole lot of scribbling all over the Site now. You'll be seeing it for the first time."
"So when Clio read the notes…"
"She recorded the data on low power, and when the breach fluctuations brought her back online, she considered it with all her faculties. Determined the likely contours of the anomaly. Compared it with other things in the database. And then she started broadcasting."
"I heard that. I thought she was just going nuts."
"She was saving me from going nuts."
"How?"
"She asked me to give her the anomaly."
Yancy blinked. "Simple as that?"
"Simple as that. As soon as she asked the empty air, from her perspective, it was like a block had been removed from my mind. I spoke, and I was free."
"Wow." He looked down at his notes again. "Uh… so why…?"
"Did a technician disappear?" Ngo looked sheepish. "Probably Clio set up a subroutine to pick someone nonessential and order them to ask the air, just like she had. She was only incommunicado for a few seconds."
"My services were required," a bright voice came over the intercom. "And I didn't like being in the ocean. I'm not like her. Though her hair is so nearly the right hue…" The .aic hummed a little, then abruptly stopped.
Yancy looked at Ngo. Ngo shrugged.
"So, it's transmissible. But only curable if someone asks you for it."
"That's right."
"What do we do, then?"
"Draw lots?" she suggested.
He shook his head. "You said you spoke. What did you speak?"
A cloud came over her expression. "It was kind of like a password," she said. "Words and numbers. I think the numbers were just for spacing."
"You can remember what the words were?"
She pursed her lips. "Yes."
Alis stared at the report. Read the words. Spoke them aloud.
Marvelled at how catastrophically untrue they were, and how much she wanted their intended recipient to have heard them before it was too late.
Dr. Dougall Deering cannot change the past.
Not any more, he couldn't.
She had never so clearly comprehended why he might want to.
9 September
"Why do you think they locked us up together?"
On the top bunk, Lillian's weight shifted in suggestion of a shrug. "I mean, they'll be monitoring. Obviously. So maybe they want to see if we keep our story straight."
"But it isn't a story. It's the truth."
"Aren't you the one always rambling on about fiction being stranger than truth? These people are living a lie. They don't remember us. They've been living without us, somehow." She paused. "I'm actually a little offended they were able to."
He knotted his hands behind his pillow, and tried to sink into the mattress. The bedding in the containment chamber was comfortable, because of course it wasn't a containment chamber at all, but a junior technician class dormitory. Most of the containment chambers had been on the first sublevel, which no longer existed. "I just wish we could make them see things our way."
"Well, tomorrow's another day." Her weight shifted again, and he knew she was on her side. She was getting ready to sleep, and Lillian Lillihammer never started anything she wasn't confident she could finish. "Maybe we'll wake up extra convincing."
Twenty-three hours after the breach, the situation had not markedly improved. The worsening of the red haze was apparently permanent — given an entire year of experiments had failed to determine what was causing it in the first place, there was no reason to suspect it would be susceptible to human alteration — and the rampaging reflection-dweller had not calmed down in the slightest. It was finding every reflective crack in their defences, and exploiting them. They'd even had to restart production on the occlusion formula, and recall all existing stores, when the thing somehow found a way to manifest in the microscopic imperfections of each droplet. That, at least, was Billie's best guess for why four people had suffered brain death during their hourly applications.
The exhausted thaumic energy plant had fired itself back up with a vengeance, and detonated. Five researchers and two technicians had been vaporized, leaving charcoal outlines standing in air. A row of dormitories had slammed themselves sideways from east to west, pancaking three people and causing a massive cave-in which immediately began leaking grey sorrow and vocalizing. One agent's head exploded for no apparent reason. Two others were fused together at the temples. A bulkhead door had slammed shut against Amelia's thighs, then immediately retracted again; she'd received a concussion when she hit her head on the floor, and one of her femurs was fractured. Ambrogi's techs, Markey's specialists and the combined agents of Mukami and Gwilherm were locking down the new messes as best they could; it wasn't a losing battle, but the attrition was increasingly problematic.
The missing technician was easy to find, as she hadn't left her seat. But making her reappear had made someone else vanish, and they didn't know who until someone else took their place. While they tried to figure out how to keep track of who had been rendered persona non grata, they let Amelia hold on to the password. She was already in a light medical coma for recuperation anyway. Clio would remember to wake… whoever it was, up, when the time was right.
"If this happens every year," Markey said as he leaned on the panelled wall and chewed his unlit cigarette, "we're going to hit the wall pretty fast, and hard."
"Meaning?" the Director asked. They were using the podium to support more than their position of authority, having been awake for over a day.
"Meaning we lose this many people every September, it won't be long before we can't put out all the fires, or stop them from spreading. There's a point where we're bobsledding down the slippery slope, boss."
The Director could picture the slope Markey described. They pictured it as a line on a graph.
A graph of the human population, over time, of the planet Earth.
Some time after six, Janet went for a roll.
Once upon a time, she'd spent most of her time walking. Patrolling the Site with her partner, looking for trouble. Sometimes causing it, again with her partner. After the breach, she'd mostly been running a desk; there was too much to do for any single person to make a difference, unless they were intensifying the efforts of the others, and anyway she didn't move as fast as she'd used to. That was what the Director told her, and she was sure it was at least half-true. The other half, of course, was an acknowledgement that her ravaged body was a resource to be preserved at all costs, not squandered on every little thing that needed doing.
Ever since they'd picked her up off the bastardized beach, as the lake rolled up to greet her a second time, her legs had been aching to move. Which they couldn't. So she did the next best thing.
She passed technicians in esomat suits sealing off dormitory rooms, or hauling corpses to the furnaces, or sobbing softly in designated niches out of the way of people still getting their jobs done. She passed strange scars in the built landscape, gaping holes where that landscape no longer existed, streaks of liquid and pebbled matter she could only identify by smell in the crimson glow. She let it all wash over her, the horror and the scale and the stink, and then boiled it all down to the imagined pleasure of working her muscles back and forth. Other than the angle, it was almost believable. Almost good enough.
She thought that was all it was, an exercise of agency, the ghost of physical exercise, and a chance to think, until she suddenly felt she had reached her destination. She didn't know what that meant, only that it was true. She was here. This was where she needed to be.
Mukami was there as well, and the look in her eyes told Janet there was something more at work here than simple restlessness and fatigue.
It was a quick insight, and easily forgotten. A brief lurching of the stomach later, and the two were arguing as though it had never occurred to either of them.
Other than an awful sensation of vertigo that only lasted a few moments, this shift hadn't been so bad.
It was a stretch, of course, to call the hour or so David spent each day at the Pen a 'shift'. But there had been a time when voluntarily engaging in something he didn't find personally rewarding had been unheard of at any duration, so he liked to think it was progress.
Bernie was there too, though as usual he divided his attention between his tablet and the makeshift monitoring station beside the deadlocked double doors. Sometimes David brought a book with him, though it was starting to grate on his nerves the way Bernie sniffed disdainfully at the covers. It wasn't like their lending library had a lot to choose from, and given their day-to-day one could hardly be blamed for preferring something saucy to the weightier options on offer.
Today, though, he didn't have a book. He also didn't have the snack he usually brought, that execrable granola allegedly sourced from hydroponics products which he suspected had more to do with the plumbing recyclers than anything resembling soil. Unless it was actually night soil.
He called them 'gruelnola bars', sure, but they did take the edge off. Strange that he could have forgotten.
Bernie was spending all his time gazing at the readouts, David noticed. And his memetics dazzle coat was curiously lump-free. "Where's your tablet?"
Bernie waved him off irritably. "Left it in my room, I guess."
David frowned. One mental lapse could be written off, though it probably ought to be reported anyway. Just to be safe. But two? One for each of them? "You feeling funny right now, Bern?"
The memeticist turned to face him, irritation giving way to concern. "It's just absent-mindedness," he protested. "I'm getting old, and I only had maybe two hours' sleep."
"Old men sleep short," David reminded him. "It's not that. I'm feeling a little out of sorts right now, too. You don't figure…?"
Bernie sighed, and gestured at the radio on David's belt. "Call it in, if you think it's important. I'm fairly sure my problems have more to do with gut biota than mental chemistry." He glanced at the readout on the wall again, and scowled. "Do these look like milling patterns to you?"
David walked over to peer at the screen. "No," he had to admit, sparing a look at the sealed doors. They seemed solid enough. "No, that looks more like directed action."
The monitor displayed a rough heat readout of the second sublevel cafeteria, what David called the Pen, presently occupied by thirty-one persons who typically walked around in random directions, bumped into the walls and furniture, shit themselves, and ate whatever was tossed in through the ventilation system. It wasn't elegant, but it was the best solution they had right now. He didn't envy the folks in hydroponics, which also shared a similarly sealed door to the Site's little asylum.
Right now, the inmates were mostly clustered around the doors. The bulk of them, maybe two dozen, were crowding near where David and Bernie stood, on the other side of the wall. He wasn't surprised he couldn't hear them. Soundproofing had been one of Bernie's first additions to the prison; managing the soundscape of the Site at large had been his most pressing project for most of the past year. It wasn't safe to keep an ear to the ground, these days. Better to miss a cue than become a mark.
"Plugs," Bernie murmured, and David winced before complying. The earplugs were only necessary if his colleague intended to turn on the cafeteria's audio feed. Both of them had Cognitive Resistance Values through the theorized roof, but rules were rules. Only one potential exposure at a time.
He did question the logic of making that exposure the Site's most talented remaining memeticist, but didn't have the energy to argue.
When Markey was properly muffled, Bernie hit the switch and listened. Usually the crowd was muttering nonsensically, or weeping, or straining with the effort of excretion. Sometimes they started to chant, and before long the entire group was in on it. He'd had Clio testing the audio patterns for memetic exploitables, but so far all the tests came back negative.
Markey had suggested it was their way of chanting "We Shall Overcome." Bernie hadn't talked to him for two days after that.
Right now, the crowd was noisy. But they were trying something new. Above the general hubbub, a single voice cried: "Let us out!"
Then another.
Then another.
They took turns. Some sounded more authoritative. Some more panicked. Some weary, some sick, most of them at least a little angry. Voices he recognized, from people he knew. Dolly Ferber. Agent Ngata. Old Wyers, who hadn't been infected at first, but had experienced the poor fortune to be in the cafeteria when Mukami corralled the sheep inside. They sounded stressed, afraid, and tired, but most of all they sounded human.
They sounded like themselves.
When they started reciting their names and security clearance codes, Bernie switched off the feed and gestured at Markey to remove his earplugs. "I think it's time to make that call."
"I still. Want to talk. About the. Pipes." Mukami tapped the schematics meaningfully. "Best. Point of access. H-hardest. For them. To monitor."
"I'm not putting any of my people in the shitter tubes," Janet spat. "Never mind that most of them wouldn't fit. Hell, I'm not even sure Del would have."
"I wasn't… talking… about…" Mukami looked up at the ceiling, as though there was a memetic calming agent plastered there. She honestly might see about getting Alis to whip one up. "Howard. HOWARD."
Yancy blinked at her, confused. He was more translator than deputy these days, and he was usually more on the ball. "Uh…" He glanced at the plans as though seeing them for the first time, then took what was apparently a stab in the dark. "She meant we could consider putting something in the pipes?" Mukami nodded encouragement, so he kept going. "To stop…?"
Mukami growled. She could still growl articulately, if nothing else. "Bremmel. And Bernie. Testing fluid. Memetics." This was not a great time for her second voice to give out. But she'd be god damned if she was going to give up. "Pitter patter. For the. Grey matter. You know?"
Janet laughed, and rolled back from the table. "You come up with that just now? You really should stop skipping sleep cycles."
Mukami smirked, but remained hunched over the battle plans. "Old-fashioned. Gal," she grunted. "Love me. A unicycle."
Janet plucked her radio off her belt, and hit the button. "P&S Actual, report."
"Chief? Where the hell am I?"
Janet frowned. The voice sounded like Peter Veridian, one of the crack shots in the Witch Hunters. He sounded… well, she knew how he sounded, but it was a thing unheard of. "Pete, are you drunk?"
"Maybe?" She heard swift footsteps on tile as he kept his button depressed. "Because I think I'm lost."
"Lost? Lost where?" Mukami was already spreading the full operations map out on the table, so they could see the entire main facility floorplan at a glance. Janet noticed her speech impediment had improved markedly.
"M&C," he said, and Janet's blood went cold. "I can't tell one junction from the next. It's these god damn, what do they call them?"
"Menger sponges." The dreadful calm was coming over her. "Peter, listen to me. I don't know how you got in there, but you need to get out. Follow protocol. Follow the protocol, Peter."
"I don't know where out is," he whined. He was panicking. Peter never panicked. He was made after Mukami's mold. He was a sniper. "Boss, I'm just running in circles here. What do I do?"
"Protocol," Janet reminded him. When she let go the button, she cursed. What the hell is wrong with him?
"I don't know what that means!" Peter's laboured breathing briefly stopped, and Janet thought he'd turned off his radio. Then she heard him shout: "Who goes there?!"
"Peter!" Janet hissed. "Do not engage—"
Another voice, equally familiar, came over the radio. "It's me! It's just me! Jesus Christ, put your gun down!"
Janet had been prepared to remind her man to shoot anyone he saw on sight. She had not been prepared to hear Eileen Veiksaar over the radio, sounding frightened and confused but otherwise very much her usual self.
It couldn't possibly be Veiksaar.
Because Veiksaar was one of them.
Mukami had her own radio out now, and she was checking in on all stations. Yancy stood beside her, clenching and unclenching his hands in frustration. The first few agents seemed to understand what she was asking, and gave the all-clear. Gradually, however, cracks started to show.
Ji O, a veteran, wanted to know why she was guarding a dormitory with steel plates bolted to the frame. Don Ballard, who had once been a rookie — none of them were green anymore, or they wouldn't still be alive — couldn't understand why he was sitting in a two by two by two cube, painted… painted, when he was meant to be on duty.
Then the Director cut in, and demanded to know what was going on. In general. Their precise words were: "Chiefs, can you explain this?"
"Explain. What? Sir?" The little breach of politeness was Mukami's patience beginning to crack. Had everyone gone mad at once?
Around the corner, Gwilherm was shouting into her radio. In the distance, there was more shouting. A lot more shouting.
"Sir," Mukami said, slowly, "I think. We're under. Attack."
"By whom?"
"Yeah," Yancy half-whispered. "I'd like to know, too."
She stared at the radio, then at her deputy. "Who. Else?!"
Stewart slammed the door shut, locked it, put his tremendous bulk against it. "You're safe, sir," he wheezed.
Wirth shook his head, rushed to his desk, began leafing through his papers for the disaster protocols. "Not for long," he muttered. "All of them. All of them. How does that even happen?!"
There was banging on the door. "Sir?" It was Inderjeet Ahmad, senior researcher. "Are you alright in there?"
"I'm fine!" he shouted, shooting Stewart a crazed look. Radcliffe shrugged, but kept his back firmly planted against the wood. In lower tones, he asked: "Why are they acting like they're still themselves?"
"It could be a memory thing?" Stewart hazarded. He had to whisper; the door wasn't that thick, and he didn't want them hearing.
"I wasn't asking you to comment," Wirth snapped. "I was thinking out loud." Stewart felt heat rising in his cheeks. Sometimes he forgot that the Chief of Archives and Revision was much younger than he was. Whenever he remembered, it was rarely a happy occasion.
They were trying the door. They stood little chance of battering their way in, but Stewart's duties were clear. If there were infected personnel outside, he had a responsibility to preserve the chain of command.
And if the infection spread that far?
Those duties were even clearer. If there was any sign that Wirth had been compromised, he wouldn't have time to notice his escort drawing his service weapon.
That was the theory, anyway.
In practice it would probably take him more than a few shots.
In the end, Reuben gave up looking for the protocols and spent a few agonized moments considering whether or not to set off the pyroclastic charges instead. But with the A&R bulkheads locked down, his staff weren't going anywhere anyway. There might still be a chance to save them.
All six of them.
So he muttered his passphrase into thin air, and then motioned to Radcliffe to follow him into the secret tunnel between his office and dorm. When it was safely closed, he relaxed a little. But they did keep walking.
"It could be something as simple as memory loss," Wirth mused to himself as they approached the far light. "That'll be my working theory."
If the lump of muscle behind him had any opinion on the origin of that theory, he kept it to himself. From the looks of things, he was too busy trying to keep his hand off the butt of his pistol.
Trigger-happy idiot, Reuben thought contemptuously. But I do feel safer having him at my back.
"I just wish I knew if they were taking care of shit in there," Romolo grumbled. "I mean, look here." He stabbed the matte screen with a fingernail. "Weird power drain. It could be some mad science bullshit. Could be. But you know what's much more likely?"
"What?" Placeholder obliged.
"It's much more likely the fuckers just haven't been maintaining Du's old cyclotron, and it's spinning out its bearings and putting a higher load on the cooling systems. I guess we'll know if we suddenly get an efficiency spike because the fucking thing blew up."
Placeholder stared at him.
Romolo sighed. "Look. I know this is small potatoes next to whatever else is going on in there. People are dying. The women tell me this every day. But that doesn't change the fact that we're running this spaceship on a skeleton crew, and these other jokers are using up all our irreplaceable resources. What happens when the geothermal power fails? We ought to be charging the batteries up for final winter instead of…" Romolo blinked. "You're staring at me, guy. Why are you staring at me?"
"What?" Placeholder repeated.
Romolo considered slapping him. He'd been on his final nerve for months. Maybe all the way back to the breach. "Use your words, doctor. What exactly is confusing you?"
Place swallowed, considered the matter very carefully, and rephrased.
"Everything. Every word you've spoken in the last five minutes. What the hell are you talking about?"
The Director glanced from Chair to Chief, poker face firmly in place. They knew their people. At least, they thought they did.
The headline researchers were loyal in part because they got to engage in ludicrous scientific shenanigans, though for many the relative moral light-greyness of Site-43 was a bonus. The engineers got to build things most of their peers outside the Veil could only dream about. The upper echelons of admin wielded a power over rarefied spaces where policies deciding the course of human history were decided. Their bread had so much butter on one side that it was fully inedible, and they knew who to thank for that.
Ambrogi, Del Olmo, Gwilherm, Mukami and Wirth… there were some question marks there. That was why the Director had called a snap meeting, knowing all five were out in the field. They'd had a brief chat with each over the radio, and reports on what each was up to, and that was that.
The Director smiled at their friends, and almost set their hands on the table before remembering how unpleasant the sandpapered surface was now. "Do any of you have any idea what's going on in Research and Experimentation?"
A rush of sighs and grunts of relief confirmed what the Director had already suspected. The confused calls to the Operations Control switchboard. The looks of bewilderment on almost every single face. The way nothing seemed to be where anyone expected it to be, and nobody seemed certain where they were anymore, or how they'd gotten there.
"Certain of our number, absent at the moment, seem convinced we are fighting some sort of internal struggle. A civil war within the facility. I have not yet had time to access the full records, but they do appear to corroborate this. Are any of you already familiar with these facts? You are in no danger if you admit it."
Each one of the others shook their heads in absolute negation.
The Director sat back, tapping their nose, thinking in silence for a moment. "Dr. Bradbury?" they finally offered. "Theories?"
"Dipshit tried to stop a breach in 2002." Dipshit was… well. Everyone knew who dipshit was. The Director was well past trying to convince them to stop calling him that. What could it hurt anyway, now that he was dead? "The same breach happened again twenty years later. Modelling is still in progress… yes?"
Across the table, Bremmel's head bobbed up and down absently. He wasn't looking at her. He was staring at something on his work tablet.
"Still waiting on models," she continued, "but it seems pretty obvious we just had the exact same breach again. Except it wasn't exactly the same. Something changed."
"Radcliffe's directions," Zaman nodded. "Blank and Lillihammer survived."
"And Reuben didn't activate the charges," Bradbury added. She looked as conflicted as the Director had ever seen her.
"And these things in tandem appear to have radically altered the nature of our present situation," the Director agreed. "I'm not yet clear on why. It seems most of the relevant records are locked down with either Chief Mukami's or Chief Gwilherm's personal access codes, presumably for compartmentalization reasons."
"Do you think they're operating outside channels?" Adrijan Zlatá, the oldest and also most senior thaumaturge, cricked his neck with a disgusting pop. "Gone mad, or gone over?"
"Gone over to what?" Zaman demanded. "There's no sides here. The Site isn't a battleground. What's there to win? Dominion over a few hundred huddled… whatever we're claiming to be, now?"
"We are the SCP Foundation," the Director reminded him. "It's not a claim. It's burned into the noösphere."
"If all the squirrels in the world share a single thought," Zaman sneered, "that's got ten times more traction than anything humans hold dear."
"Are there that many squirrels left?" Bremmel had just looked up for the first time. "I did not know that."
In their younger days, the Director might have interjected earlier to restore order. Or maybe they wouldn't have. It didn't take a master face-reader to see that everyone in the room was near their wits' end. A little levity, a little swaying off-track, might help keep them on the straight and narrow in the long run. They had to vent somehow. "Be that as it may," they nodded at the H&R Chief, "until a better modus operandi suggests itself, I think we ought to continue operating as we have done in the past. It has kept us alive, thus far."
"For whatever good that does anyone," Bremmel muttered, and went back to monitoring his models.
"So, what do we do?" Polyxeni Mataxas, the Chair of Spectrometry and Spectremetry, rarely had much to say in these meetings. Her province was the dead, not the nearly-so. "Haul them in, ask them to explain themselves? These are some of the most dangerous, and most vital, people on staff. If they think we've all gone 'round the bend…"
"Most are members of this group," the Director reminded her. "And all have done right by us in a difficult situation for over a year now. We're going to need to trust them to see things rationally."
"You're fucking insane," said Gwilherm.
The Director had considered one-on-one meetings, but not for very long. Having the unaffected members of the C&C on hand to back them up, they'd thought, would lend gravity to what they had to say.
"All of you," she added. "All of you are out of your minds."
So much for that.
The Director glanced at the door, where two senior guards were posted. Standing side by side and to attention, they looked like a gigantic slab of beef with a variable sear. If things went ugly, they wouldn't go Gwilherm's way.
"We've conducted a survey of every member of personnel in immediate contact with Ops Control." Zulfikar Alomerović, the Director's secretary, passed her a few sheets of paper — the Director had a brief burst of nostalgia for the days when they could slide pages across the table — and the MTF Chief pointedly ignored them. "Nobody remembers anything over the past year that could have put all of R&E off-limits. Nobody remembers who you're fighting."
Gwilherm was shaking in her wheelchair. "I've lost ten good people just this month," she snarled. "You're saying they died for a bunch of braindead assholes who don't even care?"
"We're saying," Bradbury said in her best, soothing tones — it gave the Director a little flare of affection to see her making the effort — "that we need your help to figure out what's going on, because we're all in the dark here."
Gwilherm looked from face to face to face, then seemed to come to a sort of conclusion.
Faster than the Director would have guessed, she had her sidearm in her hands, and it was pointed at their face.
"Chief." It came out in a tone of warning that surprised even the Director with its evenness.
"She got to you." Gwilherm's eyes were wild. "Or he did. Doesn't matter. Point is, you're all compromised. I'm not going to be your prisoner."
"Please don't do this." Sometimes the Director's well-known capacity for appearing reasonable really did work against them. They were begging her to see reason, and it wasn't for show. They were legitimately terrified at the thought of losing her. "Please don't make this escalate. You should know you're outnumbered here."
"Actually," Radcliffe rumbled from the door, "she isn't."
There was no telltale click, nor did the atmosphere in the room shift noticeably. Mostly it was the looks on the faces around the table that told the Director the big man had turned his weapon on the centre seat.
"I was under the impression," they murmured, "that the two of you weren't on speaking terms."
"Doesn't matter." Radcliffe's low voice was shot through with suspicion. "I'm with her. You're all tripping balls. How could you forget, if it wasn't them who made you?"
"Stewie is a terrible shot, sir," Yancy reported from the door. "But between the two of them, I don't like your odds, and he is at very close range. Still, give the order—"
The Director didn't shake their head, but they put as much negation into their voice as their dried and clenched-up throat would allow. "No, thank you. Let's all keep level heads. Chief Gwilherm—"
"Call me Janet," she grinned manically.
"Janet," they agreed. "I have a proposition."
She inclined her head. Go on.
"Dr. Del Olmo is waiting in the next room. Use your override to lock this door, and have him escort you to his laboratory, or his quarters, or wherever he's set up shop at present. Bring back clearing agents, cognitive enhancers, whatever he thinks is necessary to determine our mental states are trustworthy, and you may apply them to us without a struggle. We will comply. You have my word."
"I've had words from Lillian Lillihammer's mouth before," Gwilherm snapped. "They cost me a month of my life."
The Director slowly raised both hands. "We are at your mercy," they reminded her. "I ask only that you exercise it."
It took four hours of rigorous testing before Del Olmo was fully satisfied. Gwilherm was only satisfied enough to begrudgingly admit they were probably telling the truth.
With the wayward personnel apprised of the situation — a quick census confirmed they numbered seven in total, Ambrogi, Del Olmo, Gwilherm, Markey, Mukami, Radcliffe and Wirth — it was their turn to make explanation.
"We never should have opened that door," Gwilherm finished.
"There was no way to know," Markey reminded her. "And it's not like we ever could have ignored it. Not forever. Not when everything else in the whole damn refinery went up in smoke, and that big block of bedrock with the big round door was just sitting there, begging to be noticed."
"Pandora's Box." Del Olmo had the decency to look embarrassed by the analogy. "Trite, but essentially accurate."
They were talking about the eighth of September, of course. But they weren't talking about yesterday.
They were talking about 2022.
"You've been dealing with this for a year?" the Director asked. Nods all around.
There was no need to ask for numbers. They'd been on the big board since the big switch, and Clio had confirmed they were up to date. Nearly half the Site's population had been rendered insane by the two refugees from the afterlife who'd smuggled themselves into the fold in a two by two by two block of soiled stone paste.
"Lillian's the more dangerous of them." Del Olmo couldn't keep pride fully out of the complex equation defining his tone, though horror and despair were the most prominent variables. "She's—"
The lights went out.
"—here," a lilting female voice finished for him. "And wondering why you're in her chair."
This time both Gwilherm and Mukami snapped to action. Even in the dark, the Director could hear the sharp intake of breath, two weapons leaving their holsters, two triggers clicking home.
What they didn't hear was gunshots. The room went silent as death.
It being so dark, they didn't realize they'd been unconscious until they woke up.
Placeholder hadn't traded more than two or three words with Markey since waking up in a straitjacket at Site-43. He'd said "sorry" once, when he found the man waiting outside a bathroom stall with a constipated expression on his face. He'd probably said at least one other "sorry"; he had to apologize for his absent-mindedness frequently, and he rarely remembered afterward. Because of the absent-mindedness.
Once, looking at the almost-finished prototype of the REISNO Cannon, Markey had remarked approvingly: "Nice." Then he'd waved off Place's attempt to explain what it was.
I guess he's decided he really wants to know.
The containment specialist who was built like a retired workhorse was pulling him down the hall by his arm, in the direction of the secluded little lab in I&T where the Cannon sat in purgatory. Nobody knew what to do with it now, so they'd locked it away and purged the records of all mention. Place could think of a few reasons Markey would want to see it right now, and none of them boded well.
The lights went out.
Markey swore, and produced a powerful penlight from his labcoat. All the lights issued to staff since the first days in hell were powerful, and when they died, the bulbs frosted up and shattered. In many ways, this world was a continual Christmas for Trevor Bremmel — a jolly and very red Santa Claus who made all his own marvellous toys from scratch.
Markey stuck a key into the REISNO Cannon's closet door, and pushed it open. Nobody but Placeholder and the Director were supposed to have keys. In fact, it hadn't looked like the same lock at all—
Markey hauled them both in, and kicked the door closed behind them. He stuffed the light into the neckline of his sweater, having opened up the threads in the ruff long ago for just this purpose, and illuminated his chin like he was about to start telling ghost stories.
"They've taken over," he said.
Placeholder nodded. "That's good. Or…?"
"I'm talking about Lillihammer and Blank. So no, that's not good. You said you had contingencies."
He found he was still nodding. "Did I? That's good. Did I say what they were?"
The other man stared at him, then placed a hand on the massive engine beside them. "Can you use this to get a message into Ops Control?"
"Not unless you or I are already there."
The grimace was a scowl now. "Can you send a message to yourself, or can I send one to my self, warning them that the power draw was actually them charging up an EMP?"
Placeholder hurriedly discarded the parts of that sentence, fascinating though they were, that he didn't require in order to craft an answer. Then, he answered. "No. Not unless you or I already did receive that warning. Did you? I didn't."
The other man managed to look imposing, despite being a few inches shorter. It was probably the girth. "Listen. We just lost the nerve centre. Most of the C&C. Most of your friends, and mine." He paused. "How come you didn't get called to the meeting?"
"If I had to guess?" He really didn't. "Some combination of they still think I'm a little bit insane, and they don't think of me as one of them, and they wish they had Du back, and probably they think the Cannon going all wrong was my fault."
"Du?" Markey narrowed his already comically small eyes. "What's wrong with… never mind. What did go wrong?"
"Well," Place hedged, "that's not really my premise to defend. I think it worked just fine, given our man seems to have decided to kamikaze himself, and at least half of that apparently went swimmingly." He was talking very fast, now. Since Markey was following, he resolved to talk faster. "I think the subsequent changes — which I haven't had time to examine in detail — are due to some other unresolved issue in the relationship between Dr. Deering's attempt to alter the past, wherever that originated from, its knock-on effects on that past itself, and the second causal and effectuous loop bouncing back from 2002 when…" He stopped. "You're not really getting this, are you."
"Not the way you mean," said Markey. "I am getting why they think you're crazy. But you know what's great about that?"
Placeholder shook his head. Wordlessly; it seemed more economical that way. Perhaps even safer, if the way the burly man was flushing was anything to judge by.
Markey put his arm around Place's shoulder, and the light slid down into his sweater to shine dully through the sparse woolen threads. "They're both crazy, too. Maybe if we're really lucky, your crazy and their crazy will cancel out when you meet."
Placeholder was, he could admit in his own company, at least a little bit of a mad scientist.
One important distinction between the types was that regular scientists took a long time to reach a conclusion, then spent a longer time trying to convince themselves it was wrong.
Place, on the other hand, realized in no time flat that he didn't need to figure out why Markey knew what was happening, and he didn't. Nor was it important that Markey know Place didn't know.
All that mattered was that Place heard the salient details, internalized them, then got a solid hour to himself to mull it over.
Markey locked him in the closet with the Cannon, promising to keep watch.
Probably that was a lie.
Lillihammer leaned back in the Director's comfortable chair, and smiled. It didn't spread the way it once had. Her muscles seemed curiously inelastic. "This is why you never take holidays in wartime. Prisoner's dilemma."
On her right, Blank's brow did its best impression of a farmer's field. The scar running down one side of his face flexed unpleasantly. "Except both sides did, in almost every war. Pretty famously, even."
She nodded indulgently at him. "Well, we can schedule a hockey game, or whatever, once the odds are fully in our favour. Right now we've got recruiting to do."
The Director was still getting used to the light, dim and monochromatic as it was. They'd been locked in a closet for… they didn't really know how long. It had the effect of a sensory deprivation tank. They'd almost thought they could hear their own thoughts before it was over. They'd started wondering if they were speaking them aloud. What a marvellously efficient means of automatically conducting interrogation.
Now they were seated where there usually was no seat, at the far end of the table from Lillihammer, with the rest of the Chairs and Chiefs in their usual places. The Director's predecessor-successor was smiling beneficently at them, and with no particular reason not to, they smiled back. "Recruiting," they repeated. "I wouldn't think that was necessary."
"No?" Her voice was just this side of sing-song. "Why not?"
"If you're the Director, we should all be following your lead anyway. Isn't that protocol?"
"Protocol," Blank chuckled. "You haven't been following protocol for months. You're a rabble. You bled," he slapped the table suddenly, and everyone but Lillihammer and Sokolsky jumped, "and you BLED, and then you found something that worked, and then you stopped trying. Was that protocol?" He turned to address Lillihammer. "Was that the charge you got from the O5 Council? 'Push problems into a corner, and then ignore them for as long as you can. So you don't get your hands dirty and your feelings hurt no more'. Was that about the gist, Lil?"
She shook her head. "No, I think there was something in there about rising to challenges, et cetera. Honestly I wasn't listening too closely. That grody half-robot voice grates on me, and the origin grates a lot more, and anyway I got into memetics in the first place because robots got too boring."
It occurred to the Director that it had been a mistake to interrogate the Site's defenders before determining the nature of their defence. The brief changing of the guard had been enough to lose the advantage, whatever it had been. They wondered how the others had managed to keep these two caged for so long.
They also wondered what it was about them that made them dangerous enough to cage in the first place. "So far all I'm hearing is hot air and self-satisfied rambling." They kept the smile in place. "I know you're a memeticist, Lillian, but this isn't your usual method of talking people to death. Are you thinking of getting into pataphysics?"
She squealed with delight, and for the first time they were convinced. That is not Lillian Lillihammer. "Are you taunting me?" She looked at Blank, eyes dancing. Excited. "Did you hear that? The Chief is taunting me!"
"Maybe they think you'll make a mistake when you're angry," Blank guessed.
"No," she said, "they know me better than that. When am I not angry? And when have I ever made mistakes?" She clapped her hands. "They must be trying to prompt a demonstration." She glanced up at the corners of the room, where nothing obtrusively watched her back. "So whoever else is monitoring might learn something from this little head-to-head."
Sarcasm or not, she wasn't wrong. Please let someone be monitoring.
"You gonna indulge them?" Harry put his feet up on the table. There was something encrusted in the ridges of his boot soles. Something curdled. "I don't see the harm."
"We could tag-team," she suggested.
"We could." He pointed across the table-head, to where Bradbury sat shaking with unsuppressed rage and horror. "Hey Mel. How's married life?"
"Leave her alone," Wirth murmured. There was no threat in his voice. There didn't need to be. His eyes said it all.
"That's a fun choice of words," Blank grinned. "Hey, Mel. I'm talking to you." He snapped his fingers. "You're listening."
Her head snapped up, and her eyes widened as their gazes locked. She opened her mouth to say something. But didn't.
Blank gestured casually at Wirth. "Shame he died in the breach, isn't it?"
Her jaw dropped, and her eyes filled instantly with tears.
"No," Blank mused, still keeping eye contact. "It isn't, actually. It isn't a shame. You and I both know he was never good enough."
Tears now streaked an eerily neutral expression. Wirth took her right hand in both of his, and clutched it tightly. "Mel, I'm here. I'm right here. Look at me."
She gave no sign that she'd heard him. Didn't even flinch when he tightened his grip.
"Fact is," Blank drawled, now looking up at the ceiling as though showing off the extent of his power, "he was only ever consolation. And not much at that. You showed him what he wanted to see. You've always been great at that. Mel, you know these morons don't have what it takes to form their own ideas, right?" He leaned forward suddenly, and the chair leapt on the carpet as he swung his legs back under the desk and leaned forward, hands clasped on the scratched-up wood. "What's say you and I team up again? The B&B Commission, back in action. By royal decree. Telling it like it is. Making our," and he winked at her, "recommendations. That sound good?"
Wordlessly, she nodded.
"Awesome." He rolled his shoulders, and looked to Lillihammer again. "You want to go next?"
"Showboat," she smirked. She glanced around the table, staring with the unresponsive Bradbury and the frantic Wirth — pawing at his wife's labcoat, begging her to look at him — and following the circuit past the Director, all the way to the man sitting at Blank's left. Trevor Bremmel.
She looked at him. He looked away.
Her eyes, thought the Director, are so very blue.
Wait.
Her eyes were red, like everything else. They must have imagined it. Perhaps she'd made them do so. Perhaps…
Bremmel looked at Lillihammer, a slow smile creeping across his piggy features. Then he turned to face the Director, grinning widely, eyes black and dead.
Then Lillihammer looked to the other side of the table, at Wirth. Then back across again, at the redoubtable Noor Zaman. Then Janet Gwilherm, Ana Mukami, Polyxeni Mataxas, Daniil Sokolsky…
…and one by one, their lights went out, and they turned to grin at the Director, too.
They knew that grin. Knew it well.
Lillihammer was modelling the original, badly. And when hers widened as far as it would apparently go, the chamber full of echoes followed suit.
"Now who's showing off," Blank grumbled. But he was smiling, too. The crack on his cheek began bleeding. The blood was thick, and slow.
Markey shut off the feed. "You got all that?"
Placeholder nodded.
The specialist glanced over the shutdown report for the camera hack, and clicked his tongue approvingly. "Hazard screens held. She didn't fry our pastry. Didn't think she would." Something in his tone didn't speak to total honesty.
Placeholder sat on the Cannon's frame, lost in thought, as Markey unplugged the wireless hotspot and tucked his tablet back into his labcoat. He allowed a few minutes for contemplation, then put both hands on his hips and said "Well? First impressions?"
"That's the most striking woman I've ever seen in my life," Place responded. As Markey's face broke open in something that looked a lot like the grins they'd just seen on the feed, but carried an altogether different meaning, Placeholder held up a hand to prevent interruption. "Obviously you're more interested in my second impressions, vis a vis how we're going to get the Site back and put those two corpses back in their box."
The gathering scowl weathered into a rueful smile. "Doesn't have to be the same box this time," Markey said. "I'm not particular."
10 September
For months, those members of personnel who still had firm grips on their sanity had been funnelling the victims of memetic indoctrination into the second sublevel cafeteria, slipping food and drink in when they could, until it became too dangerous to even attempt opening the doors. Stun agents hadn't worked on them. None of Del Olmo's methods for resetting people's brains had functioned. They'd been left to rot in their own filth, with only a desultory guard posted and the brief daily visits of their most conscientious jailers.
When Placeholder had figured out the math regarding what to tell Markey, and what not to, he'd also made a few mental notes on who did and didn't understand what was going on. In one camp, Ambrogi and Markey; from what he'd heard secondhand about the first C&C meeting, at least five others shared their unique outlook. As did their nemeses, now in control of the Site's nerve centre.
In the other camp… apparently everyone else.
He could think of no reason this condition would not be generalized.
Of course, that wasn't the explanation he gave to Markey. There was still no reason to make the man suspicious. He was a containment specialist, and Place had no intention of being contained. Being confined was bad enough, even if there was nowhere to run beyond the confines of Site-43.
"You're absolutely certain?" The codes were input, and Markey's finger hovered over the release switch.
"Absolutely," Place nodded. "She needs total control to overcome the CRV of the Site's top clearance personnel. And so does he. Trust me, I know a concentration spell when I see one."
Markey drew the finger back a centimetre. His hands were very steady for someone who frequently claimed to have arthritis. "Spell? I thought this was memetics, not thaumaturgy."
"Oh, just trust me and hit the god damn button, would you?" Placeholder snapped.
Markey stared at him for a moment, shrugged, and followed through.
The moment the door slid open, Placeholder slid in and pulled it shut again. "Hi!" he shouted, and he spread his arms wide. "So right now you're all very confused, and probably angry, and Jesus Christ what is that smell."
Whatever the actual logic behind it had been, David had to admit the loon's gambit had paid off in spades.
Lillihammer hadn't sent anyone to check on her imprisoned thralls, focusing her efforts on turning the control room staff and hierarchy. Their little army — their sick, shit-stained, utterly out-to-sea army — snuck unseen through the darkness of the dorms, keeping out of sight of those few cameras Markey couldn't knock out with his tablet, hotspot and credentials. The odds were improving, even if the stench wasn't.
The fact that none of them were crazy now — or at least no crazier than their various itches and stains would make anyone — went a long way to proving that David didn't have all the details yet. Place had a point, even if he made it awkwardly.
His faith turned one notch back toward cynicism, however, when he realized the batty pataphysicist was leading them counter-clockwise. "You wouldn't happen," he hissed as they passed through another junction, "to be leading our happy band to R&E, now, would you?"
"There's a risk," Place admitted, glancing down at the bulge on Markey's hip as though he suspected, indeed hoped, it was a high-voltage taser. He was going to be very sorry to see it was just a backup flashlight. "There might be some recent losses walking around in there who're still with the bad guy program. But I can almost guarantee the odds aren't nearly as dire as you think."
Markey blinked at him in the near-blackness. "Almost guarantee."
"That's right."
Now Markey didn't blink.
Place sighed. "Sensory memetics aren't not a thing, David, but I for one would like to bring something more potent to bear than disgust and embarrassment when we cross paths with the word witch. Alright?"
It was a fair point, whether he liked it or not.
He hadn't liked it, but he was beginning to now.
The halls of R&E were devoid of anything resembling traps, to everyone's surprise. Apparently Lillihammer and Blank relied on their peculiar talents, and the friends they'd won thereby, to keep their home secure. At every turn Markey expected to find some brainwashed agent with an automatic weapon, or a researcher with one of Bremmel's deadly experiments in hand; he sent the more capable, less sodden evacuees from the cafeteria to investigate branching paths with smaller cadres of their more unfortunate comrades in order to make for smaller targets, and lessen the possibility of one final, fatal strike.
Nothing qualifying as a first strike fell, however, and it didn't take long to see why.
The halls of R&E were not devoid of occupants. Most of these were keeping out of sight, gathering their thoughts in the darkest of dark corners, watching the motley procession and wrinkling their noses as it passed upwind. The ones who hadn't learned to fear the approach of strangers — more accurately, hadn't learned that people they thought they knew might have become strangers through the wonders of memetic alchemy — made themselves known of their own free will, and joined the throng with some convincing and no small amount of olfactory fortitude. The ones who had turned wise, they sought out.
They sought them in abandoned laboratories filled with strange projects that even Place could not identify. In ransacked offices and bulldozed boardrooms. Eileen Veiksaar was hiding in a computer lab — where else? — beneath two long sets of tables, covered by the cables feeding into the rows of towers that also blocked her from view. Technician Charles Carter coaxed her out; one of the most recent losses to the cafeteria, he had the least foul air about him.
"They were hunting me," she explained. She was blinking rapidly, but only with one eye. Every once in a while she raised her hand to cup the socket, as though the extra light was hurting her. Place tried not to think about why that might be. "I have no idea what they wanted, but it must have had something to do with the computers."
"Did you speak with them?" Markey asked her. "Either one?"
Her one consistent eye looked haunted. "I heard them. They came along to join the fun, a few times. Once I was in a crawlspace under the floor, and they were standing right on top of me. I heard them talking. Nothing important, but I heard them." She shook her head.
"Anything we can use?" Markey pressed. "You knew both of them better than most, didn't you?"
She gave him a strange look. "I dated both of them," she said. "For years." When Carter gave her a stranger look, she clarified: "Not at the same time."
"Wasn't judging," the tech told her with raised hands.
An older sorrow crossed her features now. "We never really understood each other. Not until it was over, at least, both times. But I can tell you for a fact that what's walking around and talking in their voices, that's not them. Or if it is, only a little. Just fragments."
"Another point of data," Markey told Place in an aside. "Theory's looking pretty solid now."
"But we still don't know what they are," Place pointed out. "You can't do process of elimination with only one explanation."
"Like I said," Veiksaar cut in. "It wasn't them. But if you hear them chatting it up long enough — and I did — you end up with what's probably a more useful impression."
"Yeah?" said Markey.
"Yeah." She nodded. "You know what it sounds like, when they talk? It sounds like one person, talking to themself."
It was Joanna Bremmel's idea to check out her father's lab and see if he'd left anything interesting lying around. They hadn't found anything resembling a weapon during their lab crawl so far, and they certainly weren't going to be able to defend themselves from the enemy with strong words. The enemy's words were stronger.
That was how they found the makeshift EMP device, which Joanna identified as having been cobbled together from several abandoned or half-finished projects under the Arms and Equipment umbrella. A few minutes of rooting around the insides of the frankendevice produced a magnetic bottle with a glowing green crystal at the centre, suspended in rarefied air.
"What is that?" Markey breathed.
"Oriykalkos core." Joanna grabbed a satchel from one of the cabinets, and slid the device inside. "Only one we've got. Dad's come up with about a dozen ideas for what to do with it, but… well. Only one we've got. Director won't authorize any use in particular until we know what we need."
"Spaceship-43," Placeholder muttered.
"What?" Markey asked, but Joanna gave him a knowing nod.
"I wonder," Carter mused.
Markey glanced at him. "Yeah?"
"The plants run geothermal," he explained. "And if they've taken Ops Control, and they really want the power to stay out, they'll have gone to lock them down by now as well. But J&M is all about redundancies. I'm pretty sure you could plug that into one of the main power junctions, where we're set up for extra draw—"
"I&T," Eileen chimed in immediately, and Carter snapped his fingers at her.
Placeholder finished the thought. "And you could power the whole facility, for at least a little while."
Joanna was looking at the core through the satchel's open flap. "A very little while," she ventured. "Crystal decay looks bad. I'd wager maybe five, ten minutes tops. There's a reason this thing burned out the grid when it went wild."
Placeholder was smiling now. He looked from face to serious face, and laughed. "Come on, this is great. We're golden. We're good!" He reached out to clap Veiksaar on the shoulders, but pulled back at the last second when he saw the look on her face. "Okay, here's the play. Dr. Veiksaar. You're a computer programmer."
"She's the computer programmer," Carter cut in. Veiksaar might have blushed; it was always tough to tell, now.
"Do you know how to write out code?"
"Of course," she said. She glanced around the room. "But I don't have a working tablet."
"I do," said Markey. He was about to hand it to her when Placeholder intercepted, plucking the device out of his hands and placing it on the nearest table. "What gives?"
"They're in Operations Control," he reminded the containment specialist. "They'll have cracked that thing by now. They couldn't stop you turning off the cameras, because you disabled remote control, but you can't disable remote viewing. Anything you write on that machine, on any machine, they'll be monitoring right away. They'll know what you're trying to do, and they'll enact countermeasures to stop it."
"So, why did you ask if I can write code?" Veiksaar demanded.
"The better question is, why didn't you answer?" Place danced from foot to foot. "I ask about writing, and you respond about typing. That's not remotely the same thing." He headed for the door. "Now, who knows where Bernie kept his office?"
Someone was in Bernie's office, and it pulled Placeholder up short. David didn't understand why.
After the frantic researcher in the filthy grey labcoat was convinced he was in no danger, Placeholder shook his hand. The other man had no idea why it was happening, but didn't resist.
It hadn't been that forceful a handshake, so it couldn't be the reason Xinyi Du kept rubbing his right arm just above the elbow as he watched them work.
For a solid couple of minutes, Del Olmo had thought they might get away with it.
But after Lillihammer finished going around the room, she had glanced at him, and sighed. Then glanced at Gwilherm, then Mukami. Then at Wirth. She saved Ambrogi for last, then returned her steel gaze to her mentor. "Bernie," she said. "What did you do?"
The corrupted Chairs and Chiefs turned sad eyes on their more resilient former colleagues, and shook their heads in disappointment.
"I'm not sure what you're talking about," he answered honestly.
"You found a way to shut me out. That's not the way it's supposed to go. The student always outpaces the master. If you've been Bogarting forbidden memetics techniques, Bernie, I'm gonna have to ask that you pass them along now."
He glanced around the table at the holdouts she'd identified, aware of a growing hostility in the room from all the others. "Probably just a matter of CRV," he hazarded.
"You play dumb so well," she frowned. "I could almost believe you really are." She pointed at Ambrogi. "You think the chief shit-scraper has a mind like a steel trap?"
"His position has nothing to do with his mental fortitude," Del Olmo reminded her. "Plenty of—"
"You're frightened for your friends," Blank interrupted. Del Olmo turned to stare at him. Another necessary experiment. "You know what we can do. You know that you're outnumbered. You know that if you resist, there will be conflict. It will be brief, but it will be bad. More death. You know we can't sustain more death. We're dipping towards the minimum viable population. This war drags on longer, the human race dies out. You don't want that. You've lost. The only way forward is with us."
Del Olmo nodded. "That's a decent train of logic. I could pick it apart, clause by clause, but there's little point. I don't think you intended that speech as an entrée for debate."
Blank frowned. "It's true," he told Lillihammer. "How the hell are they blocking us?"
She shrugged, and stood up. The converted Chairs and Chiefs followed suit. "You find out. I'm going to go check on the troops."
He glanced up at her as she walked to the door. "I'd also like to know why they started fucking up in the first place. What changed?"
She shrugged. "Change is what he does, Harry. We can't keep letting it surprise us."
Del Olmo hoped he would live long enough to figure out what that could possibly mean.
Carter had the power junction open, and was rooting around in the wires. Du was tapping at a wall panel. Veiksaar was madly scribbling on a piece of paper, while Markey set up his tablet camera. Place walked back and forth between them, staring down this hall and that, agitated.
Exposed.
If they were found some time in the next hour or so, he would have to move to his backup plan.
That left him some unknown percentage of an hour to come up with one.
Blank had a little ball of tinfoil in his hand. He was pulling strips off, depositing them on the table, and flicking them. The rough surface was already glinting with little points of light. Mukami thought she could see something moving beneath the surface, too small to make out in detail.
"Think of the benefits," the archivist sighed. "This is such a tough situation. It's hard to keep everyone on-task, coordinated. You've got exhaustion, depression, and such narrow frontiers of competence to take into account. You're a weak sum of parts, and you know it."
"It would. Be so. Much simpler," she said, "if we'd. All just. Let you. Overwrite. Our brains."
"Is that what you think she does?" Blank laughed. "Not it at all. Everyone she turns is still themselves. It's only an overlay of her that makes the difference."
"An overlay," Bernie repeated. "You mean she puts her objectives in their minds? Or does she literally lose a part of herself to make each convert?"
Blank's eyes shone in the dark. Mukami wondered why the monster didn't strike. Maybe they're best buds. "Have you ever known Lillian to lose herself?" the archivist asked.
"I have known Lillian Lillihammer very well," Bernie replied. "I was asking about your partner."
"It's not the same thing?" Blank's tone was mocking. "Man. You go to the trouble to come up with a really excellent costume, and people see right through it anyway. What's with that?"
"I know you, too," said Bernie. "I don't know how, but I do."
The mirth vanished. "Is that so?" Blank leaned forward, peering at the memeticist more carefully. "That's very interesting."
As a Foundation security expert, Mukami knew a mental block when she saw one. It wasn't that Del Olmo didn't want to say what he was thinking. It wasn't that his memory was faulty. Whatever was on his mind refused to come out of his mouth. The muscles wouldn't move. The syllables wouldn't form. Perhaps even the thoughts themselves had been made anathema. Maybe it was a geas, a ritual to lock information away. Maybe it was something more. Whatever it was, it made the aging memeticist look borderline demented before he visibly surrendered, slumped back in his chair. "It's gone," he whispered, spent. "Whatever it was, it's gone."
"Not gone." Blank's grin was just short of salacious. "Simply changed. Call it the laws of thaumodynamics."
Mukami tapped her fingers on the table, and Blank turned back to her. "Why. Are you. Still here? What… mmmm…"
"What more do I expect to get from you? That's a good question. Would you like me to make it easier for you to ask your next one?"
Mukami glared at him, and said nothing.
He chuckled. "Good on you. The Ilse Reynders approach. Stubborn." He glanced over the little group again. "One, two, three, four, five. And the hunk of meat makes six. That's not quite right, is it?"
"What?"
"There's one missing." Blank's expression was suddenly very serious. "And you know who it is."
She had no idea what he was talking about, but had no reason to tell him so. "Maybe. Maybe not."
"Oh, you know." He swung his index finger around the table, pointing at the others. "You all know. It might be attenuated, with the numbers. It's much easier with two. There's a clarity. It gets pretty fuzzy when you move towards the max. At that point, the motive power is so diffused… well." He smiled again, softer this time. He almost looked human. "You know that already, too. It's why you fouled things up. You toddled along for a year, waiting to become your best selves, and what's the first thing that happened when you powered up?" He slapped the back of one hand onto the palm of the other. "Failure. Now, what does that tell you?"
She shook her head. She had no idea.
If what he was saying made sense, then maybe she was the crazy one.
The lights came on.
David turned the tablet on and pointed it at the wall, where Veiksaar had pinned her pages and pages of painstakingly tidy code. He snapped the shot, and then plugged the tablet into the terminal on the other side of the server room.
The lights on Clio's mainframe slowly blinked from red, to 'yellow', to 'green', and he uploaded the file to the relevant program construct.
Somewhere on the other side of the Site, Lillian Lillihammer was probably responding to an alert with a hurried tablet-tapping that would cancel out what they were doing in seconds flat.
But Clio operated in milliseconds. The .aic transcribed and compiled the code, then implemented it, faster than any human could react.
And in its present shells, the shattered soul of the Unyielding was in every functional sense no more than human.
Del Olmo recognized the sound in the seconds he had left before the lights went dark again. This was his share of the nightmare that everyone on duty during the breach had in common. Radcliffe dreamed of the call. Wirth dreamed of the fire.
Del Olmo dreamed of the stun memetics.
We are all connected, he realized, as once again a deeper darkness took him out of the dim.
Taking back Operations Control was a matter of walking in. Lillihammer was gone, and so was Blank. The Chairs and Chiefs were snoozing at the consoles, or else in the boardroom a few halls down. The Director had hit their head on the podium, so Billie took them to isolation in H&P. Clio asked for her help doing something, and they did it, and she forgot about the… whoever they were, for a while.
Veiksaar spent the next hour working with Clio to revoke all compromised clearances, and make sure Lillihammer hadn't left any nasty traps for them in the system. Markey found an electric lorry in I&T, and they used it to transport the stunned infected into the cafeteria. They spent a few extra minutes with a mop and pail to make it more presentable, then ran an extra cycle of the ventilation fans on high before changing the buckets and locking the doors. Amelia appeared out of nowhere, tight-lipped, and agreed to seal off AAF-D; as far as Yancy could tell, that was where the fleeing undead had taken refuge, under cover of no camera coverage.
Dolly Ferber disappeared into the Director's Office for half an hour. When she walked back into Operations Control, she was clean, and she was wearing clean clothes: a man's work shirt and suit pants, a dark tie and a cozy-looking woolen sweater.
Place did a quick calculation, then nodded. "Director."
"Temporary," she said.
He desperately looked like he wanted to say something in response to that, but Markey beat him to it. Slumping down into the nearest console chair, he sighed, "What isn't?"
It was a funny thing, Dolly thought, how living in a red blur could throw so many things into stark clarity.
Before the Shift, her response to hardship of any kind had been simple: I am still alive. It worked for piles of paperwork. It worked for injuries. It even worked for crushing depression, sometimes. Working at the Foundation, even at a banal job with a provisional security clearance, taught you to consider death with even more uncertainty than folks outside the Veil did. There were a lot of places you could end up that were worse than this one.
She hadn't heard of any that were much worse than this, however, and it had a definite effect on how she thought about the experience of life.
It was no longer its own virtue. It was now forced to justify itself day by day, with a formula even simpler than the one she'd had before.
Everything was all about incremental improvement, now.
Today has to be better than yesterday.
Tomorrow has to be even better.
Not necessarily by a lot. Every little bit counts. Reach heaven, escape hell, by inches.
Of course, it had been a long time since measuring it day by day had been sufficient. Hour by hour had a better chance of working out.
Lately she'd taken to considering individual seconds.
The coffee machines still worked, and they had something very much like beans to put into them, so she could make the future better just by taking a sip from a steaming mug. The plumbing still worked, so the relief of visiting the washroom — which parsed now as a fantastic luxury, after her days in the cafeteria — provided a measurable improvement in quality of life against which her daily travails could be set. They were still trading the password around, which meant on days like this she could remember her mentor existed, and monitor their healing, and imagine a time when these problems would not be hers to such a dramatic extent.
As the life-or-death struggle of the past year shifted to a new phase, Dolly found the model applied just as well to their little civilization as it had to her.
Every member of personnel they pried out of a bolthole or brought back to consciousness after their long blank night of the soul was a point. Every surface Phil-proofed was another. Every festering injury whose progression could be arrested, every access point to AAF-D sealed so that the demons inside had one less opportunity to escape and wreak havoc, all of that was worth taking into account. Dolly started a database for tracking each improvement, made accounts for all the surviving personnel, and encouraged the others to join her in celebrating their collective march from worse to far-distant bad.
Dear diary, the dwellers in the dark were writing. This instant has been better than the last. And that is enough.
She only wished there was some way to know how many of them really believed it.
Or, for that matter, if she did. Or was it merely habit forming a divot in her brain shaped roughly like her atrophied pleasure centre?
When it came to pushing through from moment to moment, preserving her physical form from day to day, there really wasn't any difference.
So if they were ever able to fix things to the extent that her measure of how well things were going became once more being able to say: I am alive, it would be true.
And the Site, in human and inanimate aggregate, could say the same.
18 September
"And that's all."
Nhung hadn't meant all the possible meanings of the phrase when she tossed the final sheet atop the pile. She had meant the review was finished. She had meant there were no more cases to consider.
She had not meant to imply how brief a task it was to clear the Site's personnel for duty.
Bernie stretched, and rubbed his eyes. "Not that bad, all told. I thought we'd be working on this for… I don't know. Years. It took a year, for them to corrupt as many as they did."
"And one day to reset the counter," Nhung reminded him.
He nodded in a very particular way. They all had it, the seven whose memories had changed to suit the new facts. A hesitance suggesting that despite all the evidence, they weren't completely convinced the teeming masses had it right. They were still expecting, somehow, to be proven correct.
Nhung imagined she would feel similarly if reality turned one way, and everyone else turned the other. It was worth underlining the facts in favour of the collective explanation. "The only people we had to deprogram were the ones in Operations Control, and whoever Lillihammer and Blank passed by on their way to take it over."
He half-nodded, this time. It was harder to read those, and he knew it. "You don't need to remind me. I was in Operations Control." He'd also been one of the first people they'd brought out of the brainwashing, so he could help with the rest. They'd done Sokolsky second, and Nhung suspected he'd never get over the insult.
There had been some discussion about the best means of ensuring the stun agents had worked before opening the C&C boardroom, given the presence of not one but two extremely dangerous memeticists within, with the possibility of a bonus Blank. Gwilherm had won the coin toss, so while everyone they'd dragged out was now mentally fit for duty, quite a few of them still needed treatment for hearing loss after the flashbang went off in close proximity.
The light, on the other hand, must have been something of a reprieve. Nhung wondered how close it had come to not quite being red. It was almost enough to make her want to borrow one, and see.
Another year or so, and the distance between almost and definitely might have closed considerably. If she thought about it, she could probably guess exactly how long it would take for her longing for something resembling sunlight to overcome her more practical bent.
It didn't pay, she mused, to be the only psychiatrist in a mad world.
19 September
The first thing the Director noticed was that the seating arrangements had changed.
It was the first full C&C since the incident, and everyone was back in their customary chairs. They were expensive chairs, and didn't show wear or tear, but somehow everyone knew which one was theirs, and they'd rearranged the order in what the Director could immediately see was a meaningful pattern.
On one side: Ambrogi, Del Olmo, Gwilherm, Mukami, and Wirth. On the other, everyone else. The only thing breaking the symmetry was that 'everyone else' was a much higher number, so they lapped around the end of the table and partway back up the other side.
The Director had taken the seat opposite Dolly. She'd been their secretary for two decades, and they trusted her more than anyone else alive at Site-43. She'd offered them the hotseat back as soon as they'd recovered, and they had politely demurred. It was past time to train a successor, and that final warning from Overwatch Command was echoing in their head more and more as the days crawled past.
If this was the SCP Foundation, if there was nothing else to it now but these ragged few, then they would certainly need an Administrator.
"If it's all that much trouble, why bother?" Gwilherm was hunched over in her wheelchair. "Let them die, and the devil sort them out."
Ngo, predictably, was appalled. "This isn't some failure to rise to the occasion! After everything that's happened, surely you can spare a little sympathy. Our people have responded admirably, given the situation and the resources at their disposal."
Ambrogi had been nodding since before she opened her mouth. "Yes. Yes. We don't lose anybody. We can't lose anybody. Every pair of hands." He sharply looked away from Gwilherm, embarrassed. It was hard to say if she noticed, given how angry she already was. Always was. "From this point onward, nothing changes. Don't rock the boat."
"The boat is sinking, Rom," said Zaman. "What do you mean when you say nothing changes? Obviously we need to make things better. Raise the quality of life."
Mukami made a complex noise of assent. "We do," she agreed. "We, that is, it's important. We have to. We have to." She thumped the table in frustration, and sat back in her chair, spent.
Bradbury gave her a sideways glance before taking her turn. "We ought to bring as many of them as possible into our process. I know it's not how the Foundation operated, but I think a little democracy couldn't hurt. Not for the top-level stuff," she added as Sokolsky squirmed in his chair, "but where they're educated enough to be able to make informed decisions, I think it would go a long way towards establishing good will to loop them in."
"Just appoint a representative," Wirth suggested. "It doesn't need to be democracy. We just have to be able to mobilize the word. Get it bouncing around in people's brains. The form and structure are all that matter when it comes to touchy-feely stuff, not the content."
His wife actually turned in her chair to stare at him. He glanced at her, frowned, then averted his eyes.
"We could keep working on a few of the, ah, projects that were rejected before the fun and games with L&B." Sokolsky cracked his fingers. "Some of those avenues were very promising."
"Yes." The conviction in Del Olmo's tone got everyone's attention. "I know the ones you mean. We can shut down the more problematic processes in people's brains quite easily. Not permanently, of course. I'm not suggesting we impose. But if you give them the choice to turn off the nagging voices in their heads, well, I know what I'd choose if I was Joe Researcher."
"Are you proposing," the Administrator said slowly, as this most recent exchange widened eyes around the table, "that we memetically lobotomize our personnel, to ensure compliance?"
"No, no, no." Del Olmo waved his hands dismissively. "I'm just saying if we provide it as an option, there'll be something like a fifty percent uptake at the very least. Probably rising as the years grind on."
"That," Dolly said, "is a very cynical thing to suggest."
"It's a question of how you define life," Wirth mused philosophically. "Is it about the body, or the mind? Personally I'm happy either way."
"Either way?" She repeated. "You're suggesting we just… define our existence differently, and call it a day?"
"You can define your way out of anything," the archivist nodded.
Mukami was shaking her head. "I don't… think so. I don't think… that's right. I can't…" She sighed, and rubbed her eyes. Her fingers came back wet. "I'm getting a migraine." It was the most complete sentence she'd managed in ages, but she didn't seem pleased.
"I'm getting confused," said Place. "Why are we even discussing this? We just got the Site back. The people are all on our side. All these measures are going to do is alienate them again, to no apparent benefit."
"That's what I'm saying," Ambrogi nodded. "Sleeping dogs. What we have right now," and he pounded the table with his fist for emphasis, making his coffee mug jump, "is something that works."
"We don't have anything right now," Mataxas frowned. "Other than a blank slate. And I'm really concerned that some of you apparently want to draw a swastika on there."
"You've got it back-asswards, as usual," Gwilherm glared at her. "This isn't about force, or hate, or social Darwinism, or even eugenics. This is about seeing where we actually stand, each and every person in this facility. That's why I think letting nature take its course is the best way forward. If the weak aren't willing to get stronger, they can die. If the strong want to help the weak, that's their prerogative. I see no reason at all to make that policy."
The Administrator raised their hand, and the circular conversation immediately died. "I suggest a recess until after lunch," they intoned. "You've all given the Director and I a great deal to think about."
Specifically, they thought as the others filed out, arguments and recriminations resuming, I'm thinking maybe not all of you got your lost minds back.
21 September
Human society had all sorts of suggestions for when it was appropriate to take a drink.
Weekends, it was generally held, could safely be dedicated to the task. The end of the week itself as well. Solemn occasions like funerals and wakes, joyous ones like weddings and births. Most holidays, whether religious or civic. Days with personal distinction. If you worked with your hands, most evenings could be added to the schedule. Really, there was scarce a moment in the calendar that could not be made appropriate for a tipple.
There were also plenty of aphorisms applicable to the present case. Drinking like the world was ending? Thoroughly appropriate. Because tomorrow you might die? Highly probable. Drowning sorrows? Quantities more copious than those on offer would have been required.
So, David drank most days. Like his life depended on it. Like it was going out of fashion. Which it probably was, because the stock was depleting, and it was going to be a hard sell converting vital comestibles to something purely luxurious.
"Might argue it's a mental health thing," he mused to the almost empty bar in the almost empty saloon. "Medicinal purposes."
"They need alcohol for actual medicinal purposes," Radcliffe reminded him. He was drinking, too, but it was one of those vile things he put into himself to increase muscle mass and density, or whatever. David didn't hold with that sort of thing. His body was a temple to Dionysus.
"They can take it from my hot, red hands." He finished the glass — he wasn't even sure what it was a glass of anymore, the taste now completely escaping him — and set it down gently on the bar. It didn't do to be too percussive. Anything that broke was going to stay broken forever, or worse, get repaired and reused. He had a vision of drinking from chipped, re-glued glasses that leaked red amber and scarred his lips, and while not so bad as some of the things he'd actually seen, it cut much more keenly.
"Who's they?"
David gave him a look. "Who do you think? They're talking about us right now, you know."
Radcliffe's big brows moved like continents, though a little faster and a little less destructively, throwing up mountains on the vast tableland of his high forehead. "The C&C, you mean?"
"I mean." He tossed back the glass again, taking those precious final few drops in. He nursed the empty glass. "We know the same things they know. The others." He didn't have a word for it. Not yet. "We should be in there with them."
Radcliffe shrugged. "If it's the same things, they've already got people in there who know."
"You know what your problem is?" David stabbed a finger at the big man, though he didn't let go of the glass. "You're too easy-going."
Radcliffe grinned. "Things just seem to go easy when I'm around. Wonder why." He barely fit into his uniform. It might have been painted on.
David stared at the ruby red of the oaken bar, then lensed it with the pink of the glass. "I'm just saying, we're in this together. Old order doesn't serve anybody. No Overwatch, no Council. No Foundation."
"We still need to get by," the big man rumbled. "They need to talk. Work it out. See if they can't fix things."
David chuckled darkly. "What's to fix? Earth is dead. We're barely hanging on. You know what I think they're talking about? How to gas us in our sleep. Euthanasia. A kindness."
Radcliffe shook his head. "You're just sore they didn't include us."
"Damn right I am." He nudged the glass toward the far edge of the bar, where no bartender stood to nudge it back. "Should be all hands on deck. All hands to the pump. All together, now. Push."
And he pushed it over the edge.
23 September
"I'm not sure it merits special attention." Bernie knew how it sounded, but he couldn't help that. "Except for the duration, and the unique transmission properties, it doesn't really stand out from the other anomalous effects unleashed by the breach."
Ngo gave him a wry look across her desk. "So other than the ways in which it's special, it's not special."
He sighed. "I can't imagine what you went through, Nhung—"
"You could," she interrupted. "You could take it on yourself."
"Okay," he said, "hold on."
"No." She flexed her jaw in a circle, and winced. It visibly hurt her to go back to regular speech, after all this time in hopeless silence. "You hold on. Listen to me. I'm certain there's more to this anomaly than we've seen already. For one thing, it's duplicating."
They'd found this out when a speculative broadcast of Clio's request to take on the password had produced a terrified, confused, madly babbling Technician Eddie Simms. There were now two of these portal oubliettes to juggle.
"Sure," he acknowledged. "But Okorie's skin duplicated, too. We were able to isolate it in the wreckage. Wettle's… Wettle, as well. Even some of Nascimbeni's uniform was identifiable in the wreckage. Ectoentropic generation."
"But this isn't matter," she insisted. "This is conceptual. Noöspheric."
"Maybe you want to talk this over with Placeholder," he frowned. "Do some experiments."
"I'm surprised you're not more interested. The domain of the mind…"
He shook his head. "It has applications, sure. If we need to silence someone, we can pass it on to them. Of course, they'll just pass it on right back, unless we stop them. And if we can stop them, we don't need to silence them, right?"
"Since when were you only interested in shutting people up?"
He blinked. He stared at her.
He considered.
"I don't know," he admitted. "Do you?"
She seemed taken aback. "Do I what?"
"Do you know when I started being so worried about censoring people? It's been on my mind a lot lately." He shifted in his chair. "I'm constantly thinking about how other people might infringe on what I'm trying to do. And when I get ideas… when I come up with new avenues we can try, I don't… I don't really want to tell anyone about it. That's wrong, isn't it?"
"It sounds wrong," she agreed. "It sounds like you need a counselling session, to be honest."
He smirked at her. "You don't have time to play therapist for every single person in this facility."
"Do I not?" She glanced around the empty office. "And anyway, we're not talking about everybody right now. We're talking about you. If I set your mind at ease, you're capable of doing the same for the rest of us on an enhanced scale."
He bit the side of his cheek. "So what you're saying…"
She smiled back at him. "Is that you're special. Yes. If I can get you to internalize that, maybe…?"
"You don't need to trick me into it, Nhung. You're the Chair of P&P, and the whole damn Section to boot. You want to cycle that thing between personnel, formally, be my guest. I'll even help you draft up the experiment. But it has to be controlled. We don't know what it'll do to people, in the long term. We don't know anything about it, besides the most obvious effects. And then there's the most pressing concern."
"Which is?"
"The one thing we can't properly abate is a concept."
He couldn't get that out of his head.
4 October
He could barely think straight.
And that was the worst of it, actually. He'd always been able to think. Thinking was where he lived. Everything else he did just bought time for thought. Placeholder McDoctorate and his inner monologue were one and the same. And now…
At first, he'd thought it was sepsis. The wound on his shoulder hadn't healed, of course, and though it hadn't progressed very far before apparently being satisfied with how much flesh it had consumed, it did take away some of the mobility in his arm. Not a lot, just enough for him to notice when he tried to lift something. Or type. Or do any of the many things a two-handed person typically used both of their hands to do.
But the infection hadn't noticeably changed in months. The serum had frozen it in place. So that couldn't be the reason why he couldn't focus, his eyes seemed worse, and nothing made any sense anymore.
He pressed his palms into his eyes, and turned away from the Cannon. He couldn't bear to face it, even if he couldn't see it.
Fixing this shit is my whole existence, and I can't do it. They all expected miracles from him. He was the one who could save them from the horrors. Except he couldn't, because he couldn't even follow the most basic thought all the way to its conclusion.
He was weeping again. He pressed his face into his sleeve, part of him hoping that wouldn't be good enough. If a tiny Philip Deering — whoever that was — wanted to leap out of the droplets and then onto his eyes and strike him dead, well, that would at least free him from this onerous contract.
I don't know these people.
I don't know why I'm here.
It all seems like a bad joke.
And I'm the only one not in on it.
7 October
Markey was right. It wasn't fair.
Stewart sat at the bar, his back to the other occupants of the saloon. There were maybe a dozen of them, sitting in sullen little groups, speaking in low voices, or drinking alone.
Talking about him.
He shoved Yancy aside. "Get your hands off," he shouted. "I'm with you!"
When had he stood up? Crossed the room?
Caved in a man's face?
The man stared up at him from the floor, nose flat and gushing. Stewart held his knuckles up to the red light. There was blood on them.
"Stand down," Yancy growled.
"I…" said Radcliffe, and then someone smashed a chair over his head.
But not very effectively, since he was well over six feet tall. It didn't put him down.
It just made him angrier than he was confused.
"It's exhaustion," Billie sighed. The fact that she was sighing told Janet everything she needed to know about the doctor's own energy level. "It makes everything worse."
They were standing outside the makeshift holding cell, looking at the matte flatscreen monitor displaying the room's contents: half a dozen angry drunks cooling their heels, and one security guard sitting in the corner looking mortified and lonely. Janet wanted to do something, but she wasn't sure what. Tell him something encouraging. Tell him to keep his chin up.
Mock him for his weakness.
All those stories about people rising to the occasion, becoming the people the times need them to be. She watched as Billie finished filling out her forms. Apparently bullshit.
"It can't… just be exhaustion," Mukami said when the doctor had clapped her clipboard shut. "Stewart killed a man. I…" She worked her jaw, the way she had to do now whenever she said something longer than a few syllables long. But she was getting better, even if Janet sometimes thought she was likely to burst a blood vessel. "I always thought he'd… never hurt a fly."
"He says he doesn't remember doing it," Billie shrugged. "And I believe him."
"So, what?" Janet threw her hands up in disgust. "People are just murdering each other now, if they don't get enough sleep?"
"People have been doing that for centuries," Billie responded levelly.
"There used to be a hell of a lot more people." Janet wheeled her chair across the little antechamber, then back again. Just because she couldn't use her legs didn't mean she was going to give up the joys of pacing. "We can't terminate him for this. Not even for murder. There just aren't enough human beings left alive."
"We'll have to… detain him. For a good long while." Mukami sighed. Perhaps she was on the edge of a breakdown, too. Maybe everyone was. "Janet. We haven't really talked. About enforcement."
Janet nodded curtly. "Combined forces. Joint control."
The other woman nodded back. "Works for me."
Billie looked back and forth between them. "Are you talking about martial law?"
Mukami would have wanted to make some eloquent response about doing what was required to help everyone, but Janet felt it would hurt the woman more to try than to be pre-empted. So she locked eyes with the doctor, and said, simply, "Yes."
And then she blinked.
Billie was gone. Mukami was leaning on the wall, looking dazed. Janet took a deep breath, and tried to focus. "It's happening to me, too."
The other woman nodded. "It's… going around, alright."
Janet checked her tablet. No new security alerts. Whatever it was, nobody had spotted the cause yet.
On the monitor, Stewart was weeping into his hands. Janet's throat did something complicated.
And apparently, Mukami noticed. "You. Uh." She made a meaningless gesture, then pointed at the screen. "Still?"
Janet considered the screen. "Not really," she said, and she wasn't completely certain it was a lie. "It's just… weird, you know."
Wordlessly, Mukami shook her head.
"Still being connected to someone. After you drove them away."
"Mm." Mukami opened her mouth a few times, starting to say this thing or that, before settling on "Yes." And then with apparent effort: "Do you miss Wettle?"
Janet narrowed her eyes. "I don't want to talk about that."
The other woman nodded. "But."
"But?"
"Do you?"
Janet surrendered to the inevitable, and added her sigh to the chorus. "Of course I do. And you miss old say-eyes. What about it?"
Mukami stared at the monitor, hard, as though one sort of focus could lend strength to another. "Do you think… that could be it?"
Janet frowned. "What could be what?"
"Is that what's wrong?"
"With us?"
"With… everything." She swallowed, then swallowed again. "Is it just… what we're missing?"
2024
16 January
This wasn't happening. Not this. Too much.
"Too much," Joanna screamed. "No! NO!" She grabbed her father by the lapels, hauling his bulk off the floor. "Come back! Come BACK!"
Someone touched her, and she screamed and flailed and pushed them away. "No! NO!"
"Jo," a familiar voice said. "He's gone."
She fell across his chest, clutching him close, still crying out. "No! Come back! Come back!"
Billie — it was Billie — reached a hand toward her, and in a fit of rage Joanna clamped her jaw down on the offending fingers. Her friend yelped and pulled her hand back, and Joanna clung to the sensation of skin scraping away between her teeth.
"Fuck!" Billie shouted, but Joanna didn't care.
She lowered him gently to the tiles, then staggered to her feet. "Where are they?" she demanded.
The blurry outlines of a pair of security guards were visible at the entrance to the lab. They looked at each other uncertainly.
"Where ARE they?" she roared.
Billie, wrapping her bleeding hand with gauze, responded in a tight voice. "Who?"
"WHOEVER DID THIS TO MY DAD!"
3 February
Melissa was failing at her job.
She was the Chair of Research and Experimentation. That meant she was supposed to oversee the selection, scheduling and execution of every research project undertaken in the Site. In practical terms, this had once meant letting the other Section Chairs manage their people, and managing whoever was left as lightly as possible.
Now the Chairs were mostly seeking their own satisfaction, and their people had become jealous hermits. Some had formed into little cliques and interest groups, approaching the problem of life in the afterlife from a myriad of directions. Most were entirely reclusive, suspicious, even dangerously resistant to the concept of direction. A lot of it, she figured, had to do with the lighting. Everything looked more sinister in red double vision.
She didn't have the muscle to back up her authority, so she preserved it by not pressing it. She was just another wandering master of none, trusting that at least some of her supposed underlings knew what they were doing, and that the combined security forces were making sure nobody got abducted or eviscerated in the meantime.
Right now she was walking through one of the more populated arms of R&E; there were lights on in several of the labs, and the sound of music in the air. She smiled in spite of herself; people always forgot how much harder things were without music.
Wait.
She knew this song.
She put her hand to her mouth.
It was coming from everywhere. The overhead speakers, the door controls, the computers in every office. A wistful ballad about loss and longing. About the difference between paradise and perdition. About absence, most of all.
It was the song Harry used to play for her on his guitar. Wish You Were Here.
Only the instrumental track. He never could sing.
Melissa took out her tablet. The screen was fully brushed down, and ran on voice interaction only. She called up the switchboard, and got Operations Control after a curious delay. "There's music playing on R&E. Can you tell me wh—"
"There's music playing everywhere," the operator cut in. He sounded… was he sick? He was sniffling. "All over the Site."
Melissa heard something break in the lab nearest her, then voices raised in anger from every direction. "What's happening?"
A voice cut in. Del Olmo. "Damping field's gone down."
Melissa jumped as a chair came soaring into the corridor, clattering against the far wall. Somebody had apparently forgotten about the missing windows. "What damping field?"
Del Olmo hesitated. "I was blocking some signals. They're getting in now. It's 6519."
"The ghosts?" She turned and headed for her office. She felt exposed. "Bernie, people are getting violent here."
"They're getting violent everywhere." Gwilherm was now on the channel as well. "I thought 6519 was supposed to be all sad songs?"
Melissa thought she heard gunfire on the Chief's end.
"There's a lot more of them than there used to be," Del Olmo responded. "And they're very angry."
Dolly only had one question: "Why did you block the transmissions, instead of studying or neutralizing them?"
She was less than impressed by the response: "I didn't think of that."
Del Olmo had thought of a solution to the riots, however. He'd piped the stun memetics into every safe sector of the Site. Gwilherm was already calling for his head; "You could have handed half our people to the god damn lunatics!"
"I didn't think of that either," he responded in the voice of a man who could feel his mind going.
17 March
The I&T grid went down for an hour, and three people died. The moment Clio wasn't quashing bugs, Lillihammer started flooding every feed with kill and control agents. Mukami only barely managed to tranq Yancy, and it took Alis an entire day to get him sane again.
Well before that, they'd found the source of the outage.
The server room was sweltering; thaumic power and demonics ran hot, and air cooling was more sustainable than water. Eileen Veiksaar's corpse was tangled in the wreckage of a server rack, a gaping hole in her sweat-soaked stomach, ribs exposed and entrails scattered all over the floor. Chuck Carter was a few feet away, face florid, blood vessels popped, eyes bugged out and staring.
"I'm surprised they were able to get up the urge," Navickas said flatly.
"I'm annoyed that Phil obeys slasher movie rules." Janet rolled over to Carter, noting the imprint of claw marks on his throat. "Even if it's redundant, telling everyone not to screw is bound to be bad for morale."
After that, people simply stopped walking the halls. This had the effect of making them less safe than ever.
The 001 sub-anomaly field was becoming crowded. -A's murder spree was now outrageous enough that they'd opened a file just for him, SCP-8956, not that they could upload it to SCiPnet. Not that there would have been any point, if they could. -B, the forty-one character excoriation of Dougall Deering that made people forget who you were, still had no obvious counter. -C, the ever-hungry Lake Huron, was locked in mortal battle with the surrounding bedrock; the Site shook night and day now, and it was all Ambrogi's diminished workforce could do to keep the walls and the floors and ceilings from falling in. -D, the bedrock itself, was still crushing the life out of them in its endless quest to find something which no longer existed. Amelia's efforts to hold back the latter were at least bearing fruit, and the second breach had given her a lot more material to work with. But now there was talk of recategorizing the musical messages from the great beyond as -E, since they had acquired a more sinister, infuriating note, and it had become clear there was nothing which the recurrent paradox wavefront could not pervert.
In short, it was now understood that this catalogue of horrors had no final issue. The psychological effect of that knowledge was both predictable and unavoidable.
A few weeks after Del Olmo stunned the surviving population, the riots resumed as covertly as riots could. Mobs of researchers started patrolling their turfs, raiding unoccupied labs and putting up barricades.
A few days after Veiksaar and Carter were found, people started locking themselves in their dorms, weeping in public, or simply sitting or lying down in the now-deserted corridors and refusing to get back up. Gwilherm had already lost an agent when he tripped over a recumbent technician, slid off the boards, and fell straight through a piece of wall the sand-men had missed. 8956 tore him up like a cheese grater and spat him out in Dougall's empty dorm room. Like an offering. Or an offer of lunch.
A few days of incidents like that, and there was no point in trying to assert order. The bar fight, the incitement to despair from beyond the grave, the factionalism, the attrition, it was all too much. Bulkhead after bulkhead slammed down. Fiefdoms were established. Borders. Militia.
Everything but international relations.
Reuben watched Amelia Torosyan leading a convoy of technicians into J&M with all the equipment they could carry. Polly Mataxas leading a gaggle of junior researchers in a speculative ritual to propitiate the thaumic bloom in T&T, since it was giving off enough Akiva energy to qualify as a god now. Dolly Ferber hopelessly exhorting her small band of loyalists to hold the line. Xinyi Du and Placeholder hunkering down over their work in QS, as if there could still be a scientific solution to the madness sweeping the Site. Billie Forsythe turning H&P into a nihilistic drug den. Sokolsky — Sokolsky! of all people! — setting up aid stations between the bulkheads, distributing food and other vital resources freely from his base in M&C.
None of it meant anything. And Reuben thought that was simply glorious.
"Aren't you going to do something about it?" Melissa demanded. She was helping Sokolsky; her conscience had survived too much trauma to give up now.
He shrugged. "Why bother? Deconstruction is neither good nor bad. It just is."
That was the last he saw of her for a while.
He did see Joanna Bremmel, however, leading a small contingent of younger personnel to the AAF-F airlock. Blank and Lillihammer welcomed them with open arms.
Because, of course, they'd known this was going to happen.
Things fall apart, Reuben thought as he watched the airlock door swing shut. On their own, or with a little help.
And what was the difference, really?
He picked up a brick — where had that come from? perhaps there was always a brick at times like these — and joined in the scrum without particular enthusiasm.
19 April
He was fighting a losing battle.
Romolo walked the silent halls, pushing his cart of tools and equipment and checking off items on a nearly endless list. When he reached the end, he was going to loop back around to the start. For as long as it took.
Which was probably going to be forever, so, yes. He couldn't win. But he couldn't give up, either.
"We built this together," his uncle told him. "You can't let it fall apart."
Romolo nodded. He checked the soldering at every junction. The stress on every member. Scraped rust where he found it — it was harder to see when everything already looked rusty — and painted it with whatever colours were to hand, since it barely mattered. He was running so many diagnostics across the Site that his custom work tablet was starting to lag as it struggled to keep up with the data streams pouring in. He was customizing every screen in the facility he could access, installing e-reader panels which mimicked the texture of paper and reflected nothing. He was doing all that, and it wasn't enough.
"But it has to be," his uncle pressed. "You can't let it fall apart."
Romolo didn't need to be told. It hurt him physically every time he found another piece of machinery had broken down. He'd been reduced to tears when he discovered a welding job Azad Banerjee had done years ago was starting to separate. He'd lost a day of productivity when his uncle's home-made desk had acquired a wobble.
He was fighting a losing battle with himself.
And he was fighting it alone. The other technicians had mostly given up. The only one still reliably doing anything was Amelia, and she was busy establishing her own little queendom. Romolo kept expecting one of the factions to interrupt his work, or kidnap him, but it never happened.
They were content to let him fail himself to death. The fatalistic tech-priest of Site-43, praying to the past for their salvation.
12 July
First order of business had been getting the Cannon back in operation.
He wasn't sure what use it might be — it still gave him pangs of panic to think of how his work had been perverted for its christening — but it was still the most audacious card they had to play, so he knuckled down. With the help of Du and the DUAL Core, he was able to develop a theory of thaumic echo allowing them to tap into the fact of energy rather than energy itself, meaning that as long as Ambrogi's plant hadn't been erased from causality, the causality-reinforcing device could still tap into the temporal resonance of its output. After that turned out to work — somehow — it was just a matter of repairs.
Which mostly meant sneaking around and stealing things.
Which mostly meant employing Alis.
Dougall's girlfriend had vanished after the final splintering. She showed up occasionally to help where it was needed, but mostly she seemed to be wandering. Untethered. Place sometimes felt he ought to say something in consolation, but he couldn't imagine what.
He was a bad liar, and he'd hated Dougall Deering.
Once the Cannon was probably functioning again — only probably, because neither Place nor Du was willing to actually use it — they turned their focus to the recurrent breach. Place wrote worse this year on the chalkboard he'd lifted from Bremmel, and tapped it. "Why?"
Du shook his head. "Was it worse, or only different?"
"Clio?"
The .aic responded through the overhead speakers. "Stochastic analysis reveals notable increases in effectual severity across multiple metrics, when accounting for topical variance it's getting hot in here."
Place winced. Veiksaar had managed to get Clio closer to factory settings than he and Carter had, since she'd set those settings, and written the code to boot, but there was still more than a little noise in there. And it wasn't going to get any better going forward. Like most things. "Okay. So, why? Self-reinforcement?'
Du shook his head. "Not likely. Everything we've seen suggests that the new breach is selfsame with the original, only worse. It can't be interacting with itself."
Place nodded. "Then there's really only one thing it can be interacting with."
13 July
Alis was useful once again. Nobody else could slip past the barricades and issue each invitation.
They met in the C&C boardroom, long since declared neutral diplomatic territory. Place, and the vectors he'd identified.
There were seven of them.
"We didn't stop the breach," Del Olmo objected. "Didn't even come close."
"If anything," Ambrogi agreed, "we made it worse."
"I don't think anything I did even mattered," said Gwilherm.
Place nodded at each, then paused, and shook his head. "You all affected the outcome."
"Badly," Markey grumbled.
"We blew everything up." Wirth was dead-eyed. "Twice."
Mukami said nothing.
"I just…" Radcliffe shook his head. "I mean, I tried to do better. The second time."
Place smiled at him. Smiling felt alien. "And you'll do even better this time. Trust me."
Mukami gritted her teeth. "Plan?"
"We take it scientifically." He drew a deep breath. "We need a control year."
8 September
It went against all their instincts.
The security personnel naturally wanted to clamp down harder. The scientists wanted to find a better solution. The technicians wanted a fix. But they reluctantly agreed to try it his way.
They staged a re-enactment.
AAF-D melted down. (Mukami wanted to save the turncoats, but she didn't.) The lake rose up. (Gwilherm wanted to send someone to check on AAF-A while it was briefly accessible, but she didn't.) The top sublevels were lost. (Ambrogi and Markey and Del Olmo and Wirth didn't want to hit the buttons, but they did.) Lillihammer called in for directions.
Radcliffe, mostly just happy to be out of detention, had no trouble giving her the wrong ones this time.
In Operations Control, Ferber watched on the monitor as she and Blank cheerfully ignored them.
Joanna Bremmel blew apart like a firecracker, and Lillian swanned through the tumbling scraps of flesh on her way to the concentration cell. She caught Harry's hands, and they danced to the rhythm of Radcliffe's increasingly frantic misdirections. Her skin hardened, and his skin split, and they laughed in the heart of the storm.
Place walked out of the washroom, and froze.
He'd packed the repaired Cannon away in room where Dougall had died, and locked the door. He had the only key now, because he'd redesigned the lock again.
A play of light and shadow crept beneath the door.
Someone was in there.
Someone was using the Cannon.
It took him too long to fumble with his pockets. The custom lock was too complex. His hands were shaking. He couldn't see the keyhole. The blur was worse than ever.
He got in just in time to see Dougall Deering at the table, eyes locked on the spinning Cannon.
Just in time to watch him die.
They found him gibbering in the corner, clawing the flesh off his own cheeks. The Cannon was in pieces all around. He had grease on his fingers, and he was getting it in the wounds.
Janet considered the corpse, which Place had flung into the corner of the room and covered with his labcoat.
"More fertilizer," she remarked.
Alis walked out of the lab, in a daze. She didn't know where she was going. She didn't care.
Something touched her, and she hoped for a moment that it had talons…
It was only Ngo. "Hey."
Alis stared at her.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Alis slapped her.
The psychologist nodded. "That's also an option."
And she cracked her knuckles.
Mukami liked to keep the lights on low. It was good security protocol, in case any reflective surfaces had snuck their way into the briefing room. But that wasn't the reason.
She didn't like to see people's faces when they couldn't understand her speaking.
Yancy delivered his report to what must have been, from his perspective, a darker blot on a dark background. "Placeholder thinks it means Deering is one of them now. The word he used was 'incorporated'."
Mukami nodded. "Okay."
He kept going. "Deering was alive for about six minutes. He put some stuff in the locker where the Cannon was, turned it on, and… well, you know the rest. Same as last year."
Except it wasn't the same as last year, was it?
Last year I thought I was getting better.
Last year I thought I'd finally seen the last of Dougall Deering.
Last year I only killed my husband accidentally.
She didn't say any of these things.
Because what would be the point?
They'd never had a funeral for Dougall. They didn't have one this time, either.
They just dumped his remains in the massive compost heap which had once been the Habitation and Sustenance office staff, and watched it consume him with an almost human ravening.
The first time, Place had asked Alis if she wanted to say a few words.
Given the words she'd chosen then, he didn't ask again.
16 September
"That about does it." David flicked the switch, and the server revved up. "Take a while to get the results."
It took three hours. It had taken an almost a week to acquire the data, and Place had had to fight tooth and nail to ensure it was collected in the first place. Everyone's instincts were wrong. They were trying to fix the damage, heal the injured, restore everything to functionality as quickly as possible. They didn't have time to take full measure of the disasters they were correcting. But they had to.
Because they had to know if the control year had yielded any results.
The results, when they came, were not encouraging.
"But they're not discouraging, either." Place forced a smile at the little assembly. "More damage was done this year, on average. But the increase isn't nearly as bad as it was last time."
"That's not good enough," Gwilherm snapped immediately. "We don't need this to be only gradually less awful. We need it to stop being awful entirely."
"Or just stop," Wirth muttered darkly.
Place raised a hand. "No, let me finish. This is good news."
"How?" Radcliffe asked.
"Blank and Lillihammer didn't respond to your instructions, Stewart. But the others did exactly what they did back in the first breach." And more than that, they remembered doing so. As far as Wirth was concerned, he'd flash-fried his friends three years in a row, without missing one in the middle. Place doubted he would very much miss the trauma; the rest of them were still trying to come to grips with the way the resurrected archivists, packed away safely in their dorms while their boss activated the charges that had once obliterated them, had all vanished the moment he did so. "That tells me something. It tells me the dead go through the motions, and the living don't. The minor increase in breach damage—"
"Minor," Del Olmo growled. "Are you including the liquefaction of Joanna Bremmel and her friends in that analysis?"
"Yes," Place replied flatly. That shut them up. "Who lives and dies is immaterial. It's all up in the air. It's all contingent. In one respect, only one respect, Dougall Deering had a point. It is possible to change the past." He placed both hands over his report, as though drawing strength from its inescapable conclusions. "The only reason the damage was worse this year, despite our improvements, is that Blank and Lillihammer survived again."
"You're saying…" Ambrogi swallowed. "You're saying we need to—"
Mukami gripped the sides of the table. "Kill them."
Place nodded.
"And what will that get us?" Markey demanded.
"If I'm right?" Place made eye contact with each of them sequentially. "It will get us incrementally closer to home."
