Canon Hub » The Coldest War Hub / SCP Anthology 2025 » SCP-9660
Smooth-Running Gun
Zoom out: to a satellite suspended almost 50,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface by aetheric webs far more elegant than chemical thrusters. Its purpose in life: warning Overseer Six of potential threats to their most valuable asset: Dr. Amitha Sanmugasunderam, Chair of Mathematics and Sidhe Chess Grandmaster. Zoom in: to a panic room within a safehouse whose existence is classified at a level that is itself classified. Within this cell, Amitha spends twenty-three hours per day cauterizing Overseer Two’s defection to the PENTAGRAM ; the latest salvo in the Coldest War between America and the Foundation.
Each of the panic room’s walls hide behind cork boards sagging under maps, reports, and pins. The marble floor is buried under sigils atop patterns all drawn in clotted blood. A butcher’s bench in the center of the room hosts an electromechanical index containing genetic profiles on anyone who set foot into a Site, and an alchemical still efficient enough to convert a liter of pig's blood into a half-liter of human blood per day. While the biological ink ferments, Amitha tracks her target across the flat earth of maps, dossiers, and intelligence reports lining the walls. Once her preparations are complete, she paints a bioelectric circuit on the ground that misfolds the hemoglobin within its constituent ink.
Each time Amitha uses the genetic index to identify her target’s blood profile, the demon powering it demands that she set it loose. With neither centrifuge nor copper, she improvised her alembic from kitchen blenders, PVC, and ritualistic conversions across three separate grimoires. She takes special care to verify the location of each target within a radius of five kilometers from a distance of twenty thousand.
Only then will Amitha squat on the protein-encrusted floor to misappropriate the Law of Contagion by suffocating traitors to the Foundation on their own clotted blood.
That statistical precision helps her sleep better in her hour outside the panic room. Far more than the ongoing protection of aide-de-camp/bodyguard/homunculus, Mobile Task Force Alpha-1 "Red Right Hand" designation Egret. Particularly egregious is Egret’s habit of resting at the foot of the bed rather than the couch or even the floor.
Ironically, that habit saves Amitha at the moment they both hear her mother’s voice in their sleep. Tactical maternal error. Amitha wakes with a start. “Amma?”
Egret’s hand shoots out from under the blanket, finds a throat, and crushes it. As the creature mimicking Amitha’s mother snarls instead of dying, Egret jabs another hand into its eyes and slams its head against the wall-mounted panic button. She waits a split-second for her charge to disappear down the bed's built-in panic slide, then uses her leverage to yank the monster’s skull free from its vertebrae.
As the panic slide closes up, Egret drops the corpse to better scrutinize the pack of endothermic predators circling the bed, bellies swollen with human flesh as they curse in voices stolen from their victims, the rest of Alpha-1. Both sides bare their fangs: six maws to one. Egret still has more teeth.
Far below, Amitha stares into a coffee cup proffered by a skeletal hand protruding from a pebbled floor, prepared just the way she likes it with seven espressos to one milk. No sugar. It’s the best coffee she’s ever had, ruined only by the surrounding ambiance. This safe room was designed by the Overseer themselves: a catacomb constructed from the bones of a million fair folk. Every skull in the wall still has the fluorescent eyes to prove it, all pointed accusingly at her.
Amitha squints back. She’s read the files; knows of the Foundation’s sins, the Factory’s, the faeries’. The roast is exquisite: perfectly balanced flavor profile, lightened just enough by the two-percent milk.
“I admit, Two’s resource expenditure surprised me,” says every skull in unison. “I wasn’t aware we had any TROGLOBITE teams left. He wouldn’t be this desperate to eliminate you if he didn’t know how close you were to triangulating him.”
Amitha likes when the Overseer uses this voice. It sounds inherently reassuring; maybe that's why the boss uses it in briefings. Their tone is melodic, almost xylophonic, yet organic in a way she's only managed to articulate to her bodyguard.
“How many people did we lose to that ambush?” she says, swapping her empty cup with a fresh one from the floor hand.
“Just now? Half of Alpha-1,” the skulls say.
Amitha chokes on her coffee.
“Calm. I have replacements for them on standby. You are invaluable.”
On second thought, maybe she hates that voice.
A pile of skulls rises from the floor, congealing into the shape of a cupped palm just in time to catch something sliding down the escape chute. That something's subsequent belch lasts long enough for Amitha to read EAT THE GOVERNMENT on its gore-splattered hoodie, count how many teeth are in its mouth, and process how its breath stinks like a turducken of rotting meat inside fermented meat inside decaying meat. Of course Egret wouldn't have the decency to die.
“Intruders dealt with, boss.” Egret picks at her teeth and nibbles at her wounded hands.
Amitha scowls. “You’re getting blood on my suit.”
“Don’t sleep in a suit.” Strips of skin flash between Egret’s fangs. “Funny how much those things taste like people.”
Rather than flinch, Amitha rifles through her mental rolodex for a short mathematical expression whose computation in this reality feeds on the neurotransmitters of the vagus nerve. An altogether more efficient suppression of the gag reflex; one that often comes in handy when stuck with this pet monster.
“Excellent timing,” the walls say. “Egret, contingency code: BUTTERNUT SQUASH. Amitha: I’m sending you to one of my first sorcery labs. Built before Two’s time. It’s warded strongly enough that you can cleanse yourself of lingering contagion before he can track your scent. Remain there until I clear you for re-entry. If you have free cycles after disinfecting, you may inspect the facility. See what you can learn from it.”
Amitha takes another cup from the skeletal hand and lets its heat warm her. Nobody in the world can roast beans like the Overseer’s minions. “I’ll need my notes, a shower, and more coffee,” she says. “Oh. And a change of clothes.”
“Egret, do you copy?” says Amitha’s chair.
“Yes, boss.” Egret is already darting between skulls and digging in their sockets for supplies. She winks at Amitha. “I got whatever you need, babygirl.”
Amitha drains mug number three and activates an electrochemical mnemonic to reset the caffeine-catalyzing proteins in her body. “Overseer,” she says as flatly as possible. “What should I know about this laboratory? Are there experiments on ice or anything my rituals might interfere with?”
“Unlikely,” the walls reply. “It was part of my early studies into lunar exploitation. I switched it to auxiliary support decades ago. My operational knowledge of the site is stored in submind ████████, which is occupied with off-plane research and is thus not cached in memory. What is cached indicates that the location is harmless for myself and assets under my protection. Given that all my wards around it are fully operational, anything left alive should still be contained.”
Amitha tries to savor cup four. “And if something’s changed since then?”
Egret starts coughing like she’s clearing a lump in her throat. Then a frog. Then a tumor. Over the bodyguard’s tongue and out her lips slides a length of corrugated plastic tubing that elongates to meet Amitha face-to-face. Someone else's mouth is attached to the end.
Amitha flinches and drops the cup.
The wormtongue scrutinizes her and speaks in one of the Overseer’s more uncomfortable voices. “Greetings. I am Submind TENCHU. My stated purpose is to act as a secure relay channel between you and your Overseer. You may request my presence by name should the need arise.”
“You’ll be available?” Amitha asks.
“As much as your Overseer can be,” Tenchu says. “They will likely be occupied ensuring your safety.”
“You speak for them?” Amitha asks. And even so, why does this thing have its own tongue?
“I do,” Tenchu says. “Your Overseer is now occupied. Please direct any other queries to myself or Operative Egret until further notice.”
Amitha looks for confirmation from the walls and receives none as Submind Tenchu vanishes into Egret's mouth with a horrific slurp. Fluidity of movement and lucidity of thought snap back into the bodyguard’s eyes. She clears her throat until blood comes up then wipes the stain onto the table. It rattles with displeasure.
“I hate it when the boss does that,” Egret says cheerfully. “C’mon, we’re burning moonlight!”
Hate from the Horse's Mouth
Somewhere on the western edge of New York, Amitha asks to speak to the Overseer. In the intervening two hundred kilometers per hour, Egret’s mindless corpse careens between highway lanes and shaves a collective half-million years off the New York state commuter lifetime. Three tries, three hours, and three million man-years later, a cop manages to pull the Ford over. Submind Tenchu stops his heart with a glance, conveys the Overseer’s inability to come to the phone and assures Amitha that they will be available shortly. As an afterthought, it assures her that the trooper will be excessively commemorated and swiftly forgotten. At that point Amitha gives up and tries to sleep in the backseat.
Amitha does not dream while her bodyguard drives. The parts of her brain required to sustain such simulations have been co-opted by the Overseer for scheduling, coordinating, and planning the uninterrupted operation of dozens of Sites, hundreds of fronts, and thousands of personnel. She accepts that burden for the same reason she accepts being hunted by creatures that remember her own mother’s voice better than her. It’s part of the job.
She wakes against a travel pillow whose dozen bounces per second tell her they’re offroad. Her wristwatch, a synchronized multi-band automatic that won’t be licensed to Citizen Co. for another seven years, reads 4:43 AM. Everything aches from the neck up.
“Egret,” Amitha grunts. “Where the hell are we?”
“Upstate New York, I think,” Egret says. “Been steering by muscle memory the last few hours.”
“Yours or…”
“No idea. Sorry babe. I think I was here once before. Another life, you get me?” Egret’s eyebrows won't stay down; stitches from her temple to the bridge of her nose betray the cause.
“Can you tell me anything about this place?” Amitha asks.
“Only that the boss cleared it. Can’t remember specifics. The Overseer doesn’t have a lot of two-off safehouses, yanno?”
“I don’t deserve this kind of shabby treatment,” Amitha says.
“What, the radio?” Egret squints in the rearview mirror. “Something wrong with Ministry?”
“It’s sweltering. Couldn't we take something better than a Pinto?”
It’s a rhetorical question. The Department of Miscommunications engineered the car’s reputation. Some artful edits in Mother Jones here, some judicious NHTSA bribes there, and a new vehicle emerged, contaminated by so much propaganda and superstition that the Foundation barely had to exert effort warding people away from their newly designated Overwatch personnel carriers.
“Take it from the chauffeur," Egret scoffs. “Limos are for people who displease the boss. Just roll down the windows if it’s too hot.”
“You could at least turn on the headlights?”
“Ever driven in New England before? Turn signals out here are like showing the enemy your battle plans.”
“You just said this is New York!”
“All the more reason to keep the lights off. Relax, take a nap. It’s easier in the dark.”
Amitha adjusts her pillow and wishes she’d asked for a better one. Caffeine headaches and simmering nerves battle her traditional Power Nap rituals. Just as gasoline fumes tip her into a meditative stupor, all hope of restfulness is banished by the electric odor in her sinuses; one of her ingrained wards to detect mathematics applied for malevolent magic. Some kind of trap?
“Submind Tenchu,” she asks. “What is that smell?”
The plastic organism pounces from Egret’s mouth with a wet pop. “Unfortunately, your Overseer is not available to answer that.”
Amitha recoils in her seat. “I am not asking them! Is it ours?”
The wormtongue’s legs undulate in a single wave and stop. “Yes. For more information you must provide appropriate keywords.”
So it isn’t a trap. Still horrendous. “Egret, what the hell is that smell?” she asks.
Egret’s body sits slack in the driver’s seat, minor twitches of the steering wheel its only indication of life. Amitha’s gaze wanders towards the windshield but freezes on the wormtongue’s teeth like a deer in headlights. Bits of skin flake off Tenchu’s chapped lips.
“I repeat,”it says. “Provide. Appropriate. Keywords.”
Dr. Amitha Sanmugasunderam is a Research Fellow of Mathematics, pioneer of Keter-class containment mathematics, and most importantly Overseer Six's Archmage. What makes this question classified? No sooner has that question escaped her subconscious than she catches it and scrutinizes it for clues.
What 'lunar exploitation' does her boss want to hide? Werewolves are too simple an answer. The boss is too clever and malicious to be cut by Occam's razor. Amitha rifles through her mental notes for everything tagged moon, lunar, and a dozen other synonyms across as many languages mapped to her mnemonic algorithms.
“EYES WIDE SHUT,” Amitha says.
“Unrelated.”
“Unrelated.”
A moment of sarcasm. “LEPORINE TRANSMISSION HEMISPHERE.”
“Unrelated.”
“ SATURNINE CALENDAR PACIFICATION,” she says.
“Unrelated,” Tenchu says. “How much more time will you waste? Provide relevant keywords or a more relevant query.”
Amitha bites back a Hindi swear, all too aware that this thing speaks for an Overseer and how such monsters react to disrespect. She remembers her last run-in with such a beast, at a North Dakota conclave of witches kept by the Baba Yaga, alongside Egret as their Overseer's Hands – almost smiles at the name of Ziegmal the Arse.
Ziegmal the Arse, former High Karcist of Orok, whose clan bridged Chicago and the Old Country, who disputed Six’s territorial control of leylines within the continental United States. He and Amitha remained diplomatic at first: back-and-forth proposals, counter-proposals, and retorts. Finally, the warlock cast a paragraph disparaging Amitha's fitness as breeding stock, then seven words against her boss's fitness for intellect.
The Overseer's first retort, a casual utterance gurgled from Egret’s stomach, blew centuries of accumulated flesh off the Karcist's face and forced him into an iron helm. The second, uttered by the bird tongue that emerged from Egret's throat, metaphysically shackled Ziegmal’s name to his own catcalls. This dual humiliation resulted in a swift and brutal deposition; Sarko-Prussian cults eating their own.
His descendants had neither forgiven nor forgotten, with blood feuds still out for Amitha in the Midwest. Six called the whole affair an occupational hazard. Better Amitha keep her head down and endure the wretched thing.
“Submind. No more queries,” she says. “Thank you for your time.”
No reply as the wormtongue vanishes into Egret’s mouth. It sounds like spaghetti being vacuumed, looks like a thousand wasps crawling inside her neck, and makes Amitha want to vomit. She rolls the windows down and immediately starts coughing.
“Hey, we’re almost here!” her bodyguard chirps. “Glad that worm didn't drive us off the road. Get anything juicy out of it?”
The outside air claws at her throat. Lungs on fire, stomach churning, a bright light up ahead – it would be humiliating to die from a mere asthma attack. The Overseer will pull her from hell personally to deliver a condescending debrief on the operating table.
Egret sees her distress in the rearview. “Stay calm,” she says without missing a beat. “Albuterol and lorazepam are in your purse, I made sure of it. Deep breaths. Box breathing. Filters on. Remember the steps.”
Amitha follows the bodyguard’s instructions. Locates her medicine, practices her mindfulness, and relaxes her breathing. Swallows the wad of sputum in her mouth. Checks her watch: four-forty-five. Only two minutes lost. But it’s been decades and she still can’t stop her body from generating that embarrassing allergic reflex.
“Egret,” she croaks. “What the hell is that smell?”
“Which one?” Egret cocks her head. “Gasoline? Cooked meat?”
“The ozone. The electricity. Are those wards? What kind? I need to know!”
“If I had to make an educated guess… the kind that burn meat.”
“Egret!”
“Tch! Yes, those are safety wards, don’t have a heart attack. They’ve probably been zapping the wildlife around here for decades.”
Amitha fights off her frustration. “Do you know what they’re based on?”
Egret shrugs. “Math, probably. Something evil. You know Asset Penguin? Site-01's director of air traffic control? He told me once the Boss went through this phase. Whole Mathematics Department did. Penguin had to firebomb a site that went gestalt ‘cause of it. Called it, and I quote, a corpse lily made of brains.” She meets Amitha’s horror in the rearview. “Don’t worry. The Overseer made sure to back up her research.”
“The wards around this place date back to one of the Overseer’s phases?” Amitha asks.
“Think about it, babygirl,” Egret says. “You know how old something has to be if the mathematics chair doesn’t know about it? If the boss forgot about it?”
“The Overseer didn’t forget, they—“
“Offloaded that info into a submind. Same difference. If we don’t know how they work, then we don’t need to. Probably don’t want to. Fun fact, coordinating that op got Penguin promoted from Red Right Hand to Prime Command.”
Amitha is evaluating retorts when the sun skips daybreak and bursts into the sky.
The House that Cruelty Built
Early in her career, Amitha visited a World War 1 trench: a perfectly-circular pit of rust-colored mud, three kilometers in diameter, trapped in twilight under a sickle-shaped sun. There was a bunker at the trench’s geographic center: an empty concrete brick with no value beyond the defenses surrounding it. Nothing to be gained from the trench nor the victims that tried to escape it. She came to study the mathematics underlying the one-sided barbed wire fence cutting it off from the outside world; how the fence’s mere observance in this dimension lent it the bright blue of Cherenkov radiation; why the corpses piled along its perimeter had no smell. She spent four months reverse-engineering it before devising her escape.
1916 Ukraine and 1986 New York could hardly differ more. Yet neither mud nor sun nor sky have changed within that damnable fence, all the better to highlight the mushroom-like structure at the center of the Overseer’s wards. Sickly old growth climbs a greening copper superstructure grafted to a sanitarium’s brickwork, culminating in an ersatz mansion whose mere outline exudes raw hostility to human life. Perfect for a Foundation front.
Something in the Ford’s rearview catches Amitha’s eye. She squints through the back window, at heaps of scorched fur and burning flesh running along the fence’s inside perimeter. What the hell are they? Too big to be coyotes… too small to be children of night.
“Whoof,” says Egret. “Smells like a dead dog shit on a rotting dog.” Before Amitha can respond, she pulls a bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the glove compartment. “Whaddya — HOOOUUURP — think?” she says while chugging. “Werewolves?”
"I didn't say anything," Amitha says.
"Didn't –” Egret vomits into the passenger seat. “Didn’t have to."
Amitha concentrates on the faint odor of smoldering flesh, ignoring the stink of regurgitated antiseptic on musty pleather layered over bile-stained steel. It’s bad enough hearing Egret construct a semi-automatic shotgun and a pair of pistols out of her own stomach contents. Watching the homunculus play sword swallower in reverse will only make Amitha puke. She can do it too, vomit on reflex. Not some bulimic reflex. Bulimia nervosa implies a disorder. Her rumination syndrome has been under control since she stopped being a child, enough to even be useful at times.
“You wait here.” Egret’s pistols are trained on the closest pile of fur even before kicking the driver’s door open. She methodically advances on each body, shooting them in the head from afar before closing the distance to stomp their perforated skulls into bone meal.
Amitha could look away but remains glued to the Ford’s filthy window pane, watching Egret circle the perimeter until vanishing around the safehouse’s corner, then listens for the irregular pattern of pistol shot, pistol shot, shotgun round, pause, foot stomp. Just as the pattern becomes delayed by three gunshots, Egret reappears, whistling tunelessly with the shotgun tucked over her shoulder.
The bodyguard stops ten meters from the car, waits a beat, then comes forward to unlock the passenger door. “I think we’re good, babe. If any of those doggies were playing dead, they’re not playing now. Front door should be good to go.”
“Don’t call me babe!” Amitha shoves past Egret and tries to stretch. “At least pretend to act professional.”
“Sorry.” Egret doesn’t bother looking bashful. “Werewolves are no laughing matter. But they’re not hard to put down either.”
“You’re serious about werewolves?”
Egret's upper lip flares out in a Flehmen response. “Bad news: I smell smoked pork too. Means there's man mixed in with the dog meat. Good news: it's all the same man. Clone stock. Means unsophisticated genetic engineering. This really is one of the Overseer's early phases.”
Amitha looks up at the sun and realizes it isn't one. “God damn it,” she sighs. “Lunar exploitation?”
“Relax," Egret says. "Whatever’s left in there probably went and offed themselves on the boss’s defenses. No way they could get a breeding population going.” She looks up at the building’s spires. “I see plenty of open windows… but not a single broken neck. Or even a hole in the wall. It's like they all traipsed out the front door.”
“We’re not actually going in,” Amitha says. “Are you really willing to gamble with my life?”
Egret’s smile bridges her ears with more teeth than Amitha cares to count. “Course not babe. I’m gambling with mine.” She takes her hand and drags her towards the front door. “We’re playing with house money. Do you even play poker? Or follow horse racing? You’d love sabermetrics–”
“Don’t patronize me! You can’t be stupid enough to– ”
“To bet against the Overseer? To bet there aren’t already a dozen-plus plans in place if the boss’ science experiments broke loose? To secure, contain, and protect against such an occurrence?”
Rather than reply with rope for the boss to hang her, Amitha stares at the ground as it steepens from mud to marble struck through by veins of gold. The last dozen steps alone probably cost more than she makes in a year. The front doors, twice that. Each consists of a slab of teak taller than her and her bodyguard combined, inlaid with mahogany carvings in a manner so precise there is no doubt its value exceeds theirs in the exact same way.
“Whaddya think?” Egret says as she presses against the doors. “They opened and closed the door behind them?”
The two slabs grind inwards and rock Amitha backwards with a blast of stale, decaying air. On the other side lie corpses on top of squashed corpses on top of more squashed corpses. She examines the trap. Its victims died in agony, impaled on wooden stakes, crushed underneath brethren who tried to cross and suffered the same fate countless times over. Each is a malformed, lanky mess of fur vaguely shaped like a man with a wolf’s head.
But the trap was clearly meant to catch foes coming in. Why are these corpses positioned like they were trying to get out?
Egret pokes at the moat of squashed meat. “They did close it behind them. Damn. How deep do you think those spikes go?”
It’s like walking across a fossilized seabed. The hallway past the trap consists of scorched wood littered with quartered slabs of flesh. From carbon lines on the wall and angles by which scattered limbs lie severed, Amitha deduces the curses by which wave after wave of bodies were dispatched with laser-coherent candlelight. On either side of the deadened defense grid lie a half-dozen open doors.
Egret goes first.
Behind the first door sits a room-sized slab of translucent flesh, containing the entirety of a janitor’s closet and several quadruped skeletons. Behind the second: an enormous astrolabe strewn with bodies. More arms than Amitha can count stretch down from an unseen ceiling, picking at the floor with seven-fingered hands that mechanically squeeze around rotting throats as if they can be throttled further.
Doors three through six are equally full of rotten cadavers. Whether speared from furniture that sprouted maws or engulfed in flames that will never go out, all of these corpses have been brought low by fiendish magical contraptions in turn exhausted by the sheer quantity of victims. Whatever other equipment, furniture, decorations, or even signs of inhabitation this place once bore have long since vanished under dead fur and drained countermeasures.
At the end of the hall sits a flight of stairs leading both up and down, their first steps blocked by seven piles of wolf skulls balanced into cairns as tall as Amitha. At the top and bottom of each are enormous stained glass windows, both depicting a stag being run down by a hunter and her hounds. She drinks in their detail — tufts and whorls in each dog’s fur, the deer’s innards exposed with such delicate red shading it seems to pulse, hunger flashing in the hunter’s eyes.
Then she realizes that both windows are identical. Same deer. Same dogs. Same hunter. “We should leave. This is a trap.”
Egret opens door number seven, locks eyes with a wheezing fur-lined toilet, and shuts it. “Course it is. If you wanted to leave, you’d have turned around at the spike trap. You’re curious, aren’t you?”
“About what?”
“Where do you think these poor bastards spawned from?” she says. “Come on Ami, don’t you wanna solve a mystery together?”
“I want to order a nuclear strike on this place.”
Egret squats to examine the cairns. “What do you think? The Overseer must’ve left a deactivation sequence on these. Pull out the right skulls like Jenga.”
Egret. Can we please leave now?” Amitha asks. “Find a new place to hole up so I can get back to work?”
“You heard the boss. Remain here until we’re cleared to leave. You don’t like it, you gotta talk to her.”
“I will. Turn around so the worm doesn’t knock over any of those skulls.”
“Spoilsport.”
Amitha takes several steps back. “Submind Tenchu. Please open a communication channel with Overseer Six, priority black. Compromised safehouse. They were conducting a werewolf experiment that has gone feral.”
The worm takes its sweet time crawling from Egret’s mouth, body turning back to examine the skulls while its twin tongues fix on Amitha. She fights down bile and repeats herself. “Please open a communication channel with Overseer Six. Priority black. Compromised. Safehouse.”
“I heard you the first time,” Tenchu says. “Be quiet so I may work.”
Amitha’s teeth grind together. She reminds herself that she chairs the Foundation’s board of mathematical research as an ECRG Fellow. This bug lives inside a brute’s artificial bowels.
“Unfortunately, your Overseer is currently occupied with other matters,” Tenchu finally says. “The severity of your situation has been calculated. A diagnostic of the wards indicates minimal downtime and maximal effectiveness. Compromise has not occurred. Until another safehouse can be cleared, you must remain here. If there is a werewolf infestation, you are obliged to ensure the extant breeding population is exterminated. It will be a useful experience. ”
“What?! What else is the Overseer handling?”
The submind sighs like a horse preparing to trample its rider. “In addition to identifying traitors, coordinating their execution and emergency disinformation, covering your tracks, and identifying new safehouses?” it says. “You may be unaware of this, but the Foundation requires leadership. In addition to soothing Warsaw after the debacle in Afghanistan, half of the janitorial unions in Europe are threatening to strike and we are interviewing simultaneous replacements for three of the most important directors at Site-19. You are welcome to guess which is the most difficult to solve. All we ask is our Archmage of the Sixth Throne eradicate our foes and secure her safety within our own castle. Is our trust in you misplaced? Have you lost the capabilities that earned you this role?”
“Of course I’m capable, and of course I can handle it, but-” Amitha struggles for a response that doesn’t implicate her boss. “I’m blind right now. I need more knowledge on this location. For optimal efficiency.”
Tenchu licks its lips. “As previously explained, that submind cannot be recalled from its ongoing duties to fulfill your request. We have dispatched operatives to retrieve that data from hard memory, but cannot predict an ETA. Rest assured it will be swift. Your Overseer looks forward to confirming the eradication of this infestation.”
Before Amitha can even formulate a reply, it vanishes into Egret’s mouth.
In the Absence of Reason
Killing a castle’s worth of werewolves created by some horrid mathematical twinkle in the Sixth Overseer’s eye? There are task forces for this. Grunts whose only purpose is to blindly follow orders and save the hand holding the chain of command from amputation. Amitha burns with indignation and humiliation. She doesn’t kill animals – she’s spent the last year hunting down human beings.
How did this become the work?
“Ah! Got it!” says Egret as she jabs a half-dozen skulls out of place. Amitha waits for something to kill them both instantly and painfully. She only starts following once the bodyguard has reached the next landing.
The next floor is identical to the ground floor, down to the stained glass on the landing and the arrangement of skeletons in the gelatinous cube behind the last door on the right. So are the next three floors, and the five floors below them, and the next seven floors in either direction. Once back at level zero – the only one with a movable front door – Amitha gestures for Egret to release the worm. To her shock, Egret shakes her head.
“Gimme one more chance?” Egret resets the mass cairn as if solving a Rubik’s cube, her arrangement of each skull suggesting either eidetic memory or brainless confidence. “I can figure it out now I know what’s wrong with it. Please?”
“Why do you care?” Amitha says. “The worm will solve the problem and you won’t know the difference.”
“Maybe I just like solving puzzles, babygirl?” Egret says.
Amitha flounders for a response. How is her blood-bound bodyguard fixated on something more important? How does she rank lower in the hierarchy than Six’s booby-trapped skulls? This whole affair feels like a joke at her expense.
“Please,” she says as sardonically as she dares, “explain this puzzle to me.”
Egret’s gaze flits between her and the cairns. “Can’t. You wouldn’t understand it.”
“Are you being fresh with me?” Amitha scratches angrily at her scalp. “Do I need to remind you that I’m –”
“The boss’s favorite weapon, yes, I’m aware.” Egret says. “I’m here to protect you. I think – no I know that I can do a much better job of it out here than boiling in my stomach watching that bastard bug waste our time.”
“What do you know that the submind doesn’t?”
“These skulls. They’re mine.”
“Elaborate?”
“Forty-two of these. I killed them,” says Egret. "But one in each pile – my skull. My failures. I thought they looked familiar at first. Now I’m sure.”
“How could you not tell the first time?”
“Can you tell which ones are mine?” Egret gestures for Amitha to look closer.
“None of these are human skulls.”
“Course not. I’m not always this pretty, eh?” Egret winks. “One time I didn’t even get a chance to look in the mirror before I had to shatter ’n’ stab people with it. I barely remember being alive for that one. Had to make a couple educated guesses.”
Amitha winces. “One more chance. Then I’m asking the worm.”
“It’s a centipede.”
“Hurry up before I query the –”
“Got it!” Egret cheers.
Amitha has a split second to see the restored stack of skulls before the bodyguard dismantles it like she’s trying to lose at Jenga. She looks up in reflex, expecting to be cut down by some unseen booby trap. Her life flashes before her eyes – research, intrusive thoughts, obsessive compulsions. Surely there’s more to it than that?
Only a cold autopsy table, blinding halogen lights, and the Overseer’s moisturized hands rummaging through her exposed intestines. A cold autopsy table, blinding halogen lights, the Overseer poking at her exposed brain; a cold autopsy table, blinding halogen lights as the Overseer’s needle pierces her severed limbs and thread pulls them back together. Never the same hands, nor even the same moisturizer; that’s unacceptable infosecurity.
She misses it. Amitha breaks from her reverie and registers being dragged up the stairs by Egret. She tastes mucus and flesh scraped unconsciously from cheek to teeth and spits on the stairwell against her better nature. “I can’t believe you were right.”
“I can’t believe you spit on the stairwell,” Egret says.
“I didn’t,” Amitha says. “Don’t tell the worm.”
“Oh come on, babygirl,” Egret says. “You know how important you are if the boss stashed a red telephone in my tummy? Trust me, the worm’s jealous of you. Hell, I’m jealous of you.”
Amitha runs her tongue along her pitted molars, forces down acid reflux, and reassures herself that her grievances are valid. “Jealous how? And stop calling me that.”
“Absolutely not. Ah crap. We’ve been going up these stairs too long.”
“Too long?” Amitha says. “That’s it. I’m calling the worm. Submind Tenchu!”
The worm bulges from Egret’s throat with a splash of stomach acid that stains Amitha’s pant legs and makes every joint in her fingers tense at once.
“Please provide a query,” says Submind Tenchu.
“Submind Tenchu,” says Amitha. “Please assess the nature of this geomantic trap and provide a solution for disabling it. Based on a cairn of human skulls – ”
“Yes, I observed the bodyguard’s inability to disarm it.” The submind coils its upper body in the air, dozens of pointed limbs rippling languorously. “I am surprised you acceded to her request. Surely you must have known she is incapable of comprehending anything as sophisticated as an antlion’s geometer.”
“Those are real? Where’s the singularity?” Amitha fights down her excitement. “Every paper I’ve read on psychogeometry from Al-Jawhari to Jack Parsons indicates that the perceptive effective is centered on –”
“Centered on a fulcrum whose effect spans all 360 degrees of a circle. The problem, of course, is being able to observe the environment means greater opportunity to learn from and disarm the trap. The solution, therefore, was to bind the antlion’s effect within the angle of a far smaller fulcrum, simultaneously minimizing the victims’ opportunity to perceive potential weak spots and enabling its application within constricted environments. The Overseer applied a perceptual limit from minus 20 to positive 20 degrees oriented against the moon, which in this case aligns perfectly with the width of the stairwell.”
It’s not until the centipede explains the problem that Amitha realizes she can barely look around before her eyes reset to the rich red carpet lining the stairwell. As soon as she has the antlion’s angles of predations visualized, she discerns the escape from its infinite stairwell – but fumes at herself, knowing she shouldn’t have needed the wormtongue at all. She follows its line of eyeless sight to the tiny pool of cheek scrapings by her feet and winces.
“Submind. No more queries,” Amitha says. “Thank you for your time.” As the beast retreats into the bodyguard, she subvocalizes a spell to soothe her acid reflux. It’ll cost a pound of flesh but she’s optimized the equation to subsist on visceral fat.
Egret pauses at the ninth identical landing below ground. “Stop. Ami, I have good news and bad news.”
Amitha curses herself for swearing off cigarettes. “Bad news first.”
“Bad news,” Egret says as she draws her pistols. “I smell werewolves. A breeding population. Good news, this is a new floor. Wait here.”
Egret breaks into a sprint and dives to the floor, firing more than two dozen bullets into the surrounding corridors before reloading and shooting another dozen shadows dead in a handful of blinks. “I see patchy fur, deformed snouts, shitty stances, rickets stomachs, the prion shakes,” she shouts. “How long you think these poor fuckers have been stuck here? This’ll be easy as breakfast –”
She draws and slamfires her shotgun twice in a split-second. The twin blasts almost knock Amitha off her feet before Egret grabs her arm, firing two more shots with one hand. A sea of gray fur recedes as suddenly as it emerged from each hall. Sulfurous eyes blink to the beat of splashing drool. Music fills the air – unnerving electronic tones synthesized from the wolves’ lungs. Laughter? A malevolent hum in Egret’s cochlea warns her of imminent disaster. Their best option is jump for the stairs –
The wolves sense it too and retreat like an outgoing tide. Almost as soon as the last glowing eyes are gone, the ground quiets. Then Egret identifies the settling source of vibration: the witch doctor’s throat.
I could’ve taken them, Egret thinks. “Fancy trick,” she says. “What kind of subvocalization was that?”
“Vestibular abrasive fricative.” Amitha already has a throat lozenge in hand. “Tricks the ear into thinking there’s an earthquake. Useful for scaring away wild animals.”
“Where’d you learn that?”
“My mentor. Back when I was working on project codewords MISKATONIC EVEREST CONTINGENCY. Recognized?”
“Read some briefings, killed some cults. You?”
“On-site. Consulting for mathematics and biochemistry teams. It was useful for clearing out some – “ Amitha’s tongue catches her near lapse – “things that encroached near the outhouses at night.”
Egret nods sagely. “Very cool. Teach me how to do that sometime?”
Amitha’s face brightens. As they step onto the landing, the floor implodes underfoot.
Methods of the Beast
Falling from fifty meters up, Dr. Amitha Sanmugasunderam, Archmagus of the Foundation’s Sixth Throne, screams for her life. Egret pulls her to her chest, assesses the cavern floor rushing towards them – a worn stone lakebed, set around a dining table carved from an extinct tree, tarnished utensils still set for a meal centuries overdue, seated by gilded chairs cushioned in dust, attended by slumbering wolves surrounded by piles of shaggy carcasses – and aims for something soft.
Success! Splashdown into a morass of fetid, bloated bodies; ideal qualities for an improvised safety pad. Egret trusts her charge to have some mathematical trick to deal with the smell as she rolls off the carrion pile and sizes up their situation. The acrid stink of tannin and lye mixes with the aroma of rotting flesh. Far above, a sperm whale skeleton hangs between twin chandeliers, utterly unaffected by the chaos of the ceiling, casting steady shadows of distorted bone from floor to ceiling. Who the hell keeps a dining room like this?
Something lunges from Egret’s left as she snatches up a handful of corroded cutlery and slams it palm-deep into the attacker’s eyes. The werewolf tries to yank them out, wraps a paw around empty air, and falls onto its back. Thank God there are so many utensils.
As one of the Sixth Overseer’s red right hands, faced with a personal crisis of this magnitude and speciality, Submind Tenchu does their job. First it attempts to relay this turn of events to the Overseer, processes an unexpected inability to perceive a universe beyond the walls of this cavern, and analyzes the issue. Traditional psychodental methods of transmission are being stymied by counter-vibrations in the surrounding cavern. Some ward within the facility’s bedrock is preventing the submind from communicating below ground-level.
Very well. This is the Overseer’s safehouse and therefore the Overseer’s ward. Uncertainty is out of the question; now is the time for observation. Tenchu has long been aware of Operative Egret’s reputation — one pieced together from body bags and operational reports – but never seen it in action. A cry for assistance makes it wriggle with annoyance: an instinctive move from the archmagus Sanmugasundaram that will reflect poorly on her performance evaluation. Immediate evaluation: no danger. All eyes are on the wormtongue’s host. Tenchu can take its time. Content to wait and watch lest a harsh word is required, it nibbles at Egret’s stomach lining and observes her opponents.
Every look at these brutal chimerae fills Tenchu with second-hand embarrassment. No wonder its master exiled these memories off-world. Underdeveloped snouts that hamper breathing; extraneous teeth for useless omnivory; stunted self-defense instincts; carrion piles as pathetic mockeries of ritual magic, obviously some genetic memory that leaked in from the method of creation. Tenchu squirms in its hydrochloric bath. The craftsmanship on display – as if it deserves such praise – betrays a truly amateurish understanding of biological manipulation.
Truly baffling as to how any of these creatures could reproduce. Perhaps they cannot. As far as the wormtongue can tell, these are sterile monsters; nature rectifying the Overseer’s former mediocrity. Not fast enough for its liking. Submind Tenchu examines the tool at its disposal.
Chemicals from epinephrine and cortisol to amphetamine and testosterone swell Egret’s veins in quantities automatically calculated from rituals grown into the structure of her brain, blood, and body. Nostrils flare; eyes dilate; muscles coil. The salty stink of sweating fur triggers combat responses rendered into reflex by cumulative centuries of drilled reactions. Twelve combatants surround her as dozens more watch with bated breath. Egret’s eyes jump from target to Amitha to target back to Amitha; at all costs, the archmagus must be saved.
Tenchu watches excitedly as a dozen cannibal werewolves lunge for its host. This is how The Sixth Throne outmaneuvers an opponent: identifies their angles of attack, deduces and engineers weaknesses via decades upon centuries of study and exploitation; ascertains how their enemies’ flaws of character might be driven against each other; dodges their blows so their own carefully prepared blades end up in each other’s throats while severing their spines with whatever tools remain at hand. To witness such a performance live – indeed, the submind considers itself blessed by its boss.
A dozen cannibalistic werewolves collapse bonelessly around Egret, each bearing either bite wounds or the blunt end of an eating utensil somewhere between their cervical vertebrae. Frisson runs up Submind Tenchu’s exoskeleton as it finally pokes its head past the bodyguard’s tongue, careful to wrap around the collarbone rather than squeeze any nerves or important muscle groups as Egret prepares to tackle another pack of would-be threats.
“Yes?” it chirps at Amitha. “Please provide an appropriate query.”
“Kill these things!” Amitha shrieks.
The wormtongue chitters. “Unfortunately, I am busy resolving communication issues with the Overseer. I recommend that you aid Red Right Hand Egret in resolving the issue at hand. It will reflect better upon your evaluation.”
ECRG Fellow, Foundation Archmagus, and Mathematics Research Chair Amitha Sanmugasundaram lies back in a bedding of skin, meat, and rot. Too much steam whistles from her ears to hear anything else. The worm is untouchable; its master irreproachable; host incorrigible.
But this mound is made from the Overseer’s mistakes. If Amitha can’t kill the messenger she can certainly humiliate them. She rolls over and crawls to the pile’s lip, barely paying attention to Egret sinking underneath a hundred claws and thousands more teeth as she scans the stone horizon on all sides, assesses her most pressing concern, and settles on the cruelest way to make her point.
Best practice suggests that when applying the method of contagion to biological warfare, one first defines parameters, evaluates edge cases, and tests via math or magic proof as much as possible. Here, parameters are defined within a rectangle one hundred by ten by fifty meters (to the nearest centimeter, this is nineteenth century stonework but the Overseer would never tolerate anything less), edge cases limited to Amitha and her bodyguard – let the worm care for its own – and the test environment live as morality permits.
Amitha reaches into the closest, freshest body and comes up with still-warm intestines. Excellent. This is the layer of knowledge required to be the Foundation Archmagus, above and beyond the improviso casting of the average thaumic illiterate: the melting, molding, and casting of true mathemagic.
At the back of Amitha’s mental rolodex, still accessible in O(1), sits a vast table of seed variables meant for insertion into an equation memorized by heart, liver, lungs, and every other organ the Foundation can afford to transplant. From a handful of seeds sprout hyperbolic geometric manifolds, filling mental space once devoted to life outside the Foundation with winding mathematical formulae and endlessly growing derivations. Differentials bloom like rafflesias in her mind’s eye. Coordinate points branch between tangent spaces as the cacophonic collisions of mathematics in motion cancel each other into elegant geometries. An ideal form develops in the delta between blinks, rising skyward like a tree in timelapse.
The finished mathematical model in the center of Amitha’s mind palace is a hydra rooted to the soil, each snarling head a viable solution to a Keter-class problem. Amitha never asked Six where its seeds originated. Six had said only they might be useful if she survived planting them.
Amitha scrutinizes each solution in turn, all so hideously inelegant they count as Euclid-class cognitohazards, and plucks the one she wants: a fluid dynamics simulation of vertebrate blood coagulation, expressed as protein folds in response to sudden and abrupt full-body trauma. Now to tweak the parameters to fit canid proteins, implement the equation in an incantation that will apply the law of contagion within the dimensions of the room, then trigger the process with a live specimen. She retreats from the hydra in her minds’ eye and focuses on the ground, pulling more tools from her mental rolodex to process the components comprising the dead flesh piled in the dining room. It’s a fun change of pace. Like switching from a sniper rifle to a mortar team.
Egret struggles to wrap her left hand around a lupine neck so thick with moon-induced muscle that it might as well be a furry oak tree. Righty is so far down the bastard’s throat that she’s fishing for leftovers from its last meal. Unless it bites her arm off, and it might — god only knows how much pressure its piss-stained canines are applying to her humerus. Her shoulder joint is ready to snap under the stress. On the bright side, every other member of the pack is pinned to the table by stakes manufactured from shattered furniture and ruined utensils.
Egret tap-dances in place around the werewolf’s paws as every part of their bodies clash in the smallest possible unit of total war. The bastard gets the better of her and bites, shattering her shoulder as she releases its neck and jabs a thumb in its eye. Wolf blood splatters her fingers in a hot iron fragrance and sticky tang.
Instead of yelping in surprise, the werewolf clamps down, fusing the nerves in Egret’s arm into a dirty bomb that irradiates her side with pain. She refocuses — stops feeling hurt, starts feeling anger — and tears herself from its mouth. The heat burning her upper body drives her counterattack: the most efficient form of hate transfer, channeled from arm to boot to balls. The werewolf takes a pained half-step back into her heel as she drives the rest of her palm against its face and sweeps it off its feet. The two of them hit the floor together.
A wolf in agony moans low and hollow. A man in agony screams high and puts his life into it. Both combined produce only muffled grunts while Egret brutalizes its throat with rapid punches. She doesn’t need to know how much force it takes to break her victim’s neck – she was engineered to break it no matter the victim. The werewolf dies staring at the ceiling, sputtering like a drowning engine.
Egret stands up and scans the dining room. As far as she can tell, nothing else needs killing. Her shotgun lies at the far end of the room… right next to Amitha, who has happily ignored the brawl to draw out loops of steaming gut from a were-corpse and lay it in a pattern on the floor. Haruspicy is Egret’s least favorite occult art. She hates playing with her food.
She looks down at the dead werewolf, then at the elbow poking out of its mouth, then at the bleeding stump where three-fourths of her arm used to be. Triage: traumatic amputation, bite-induced. Possibility of induced lycanthropy: high. Pain: HE BIT OFF MY ARM hot bloody throbby stabby achy pain and nobody to take it out on. Egret visualizes the pain, crystallizes it, imagines the crystal stapled to her stump like a jagged ruby. Pain processed, acknowledged, repressed. Turns out that was his last meal.
Egret spins around. “Ami!”
“I’m busy!” replies the master of ceremonies.
“I need a new hand.”
Amitha looks up and realizes there’s only one other living being left in the room. “What?”
Egret waves with what remains of her shoulder. Small showers of blood jet out from the end and splatter what’s left of the furniture. “You’re a doctor, right?”
The Right Hand is Control
“Not that kind of doctor,” Amitha groans. “Get on the table and show me that thing.”
Egret complies and vaults onto the mahogany surface for Amitha to scrutinize the damage. The end of her arm looks like a drill bit made of steak and bleeds like one too.
Amitha’s eyes flicker to the wolf with an arm in its mouth. “Lower your metabolism for me. Slow the blood flow however you can. I need that knife in your sock.”
“How did you even — “
Amitha slides a hand up Egret’s pant leg, snatches the boxcutter from its hiding place, then pivots to the werewolf skewered on Egret’s severed arm. She kneels down and rips its stomach open, slicing through fat and muscle before prying its flesh apart with her bare hands to expose still-steaming, still-pulsing guts. With two quick cuts, she hauls in a meter of pink squirming line.
“Whatcha need that for?” Egret asks.
Amitha unrolls the length of intestine parallel to her bodyguard and presses it flat, squeezing meat and acid out of each end. “I need to tourniquet you and cure you of that lycanthropy you’ve inevitably contracted." From the depths of her purse emerge bandages, scalpels, iodine, needle and thread, syringes and penicillin and morphine and —
“You’ve got a regular field hospital in there,” Egret observes. “Thought you weren’t that kind of doctor?”
“Never took the Hippocratic oath. Would have gotten in the way of my work.” Amitha pours sanitizer on her hands and rubs vigorously. What used to be her patient’s elbow is a bulbous mess of rare meat with a bone core, surrounded by ragged strips of pale bloody skin. She’s not sure the inside was sterile while an arm was attached, let alone naked as it is now.
“How’s it look?” Egret asks as she lies back.
“Like ground beef in a water balloon. I’ve seen the Overseer regrow entire torsos in an instant. That might have been nice to learn at some point.”
“Well the boss is busy and you’re makin’ me hungry. Start cuttin’, yeah? Drop the juicy bits in my mouth.”
“You disgust me.” Amitha slides on latex gloves. "This will hurt.”
She takes the bottle of iodine and applies some to Egret’s shoulder. Egret stays perfectly still, but a flash of movement catches Amitha’s eye as she sees the bodyguard’s good hand spasm violently.
“You can scream if you want,” Amitha says as she reaches for the scalpel. “I’m hardly going to mock a patient on the table. Hold out your stump so I can debride it.”
Egret’s teeth grind audibly in place as dead tissue sloughs off live meat, but she refuses to scream. Amitha sculpts the werewolf’s raw bitework into a chiseled cone of faceted flesh, rolling the tourniquet of gut closer and closer to the blast site as she does. Most of the debris drops to the floor — nerves, muscle, and fat mixing into chili — but some of it she saves for the patient on the table.
“You look like a paper shredder,” Amitha says as she feeds Egret bits of her own dangling skin.
“The fuck is a paper shredder?” Egret says.
Amitha rolls her eyes and examines her handiwork. The cleaned wound leers at her between twin lips of skin folds and salvaged fascia, displaying muscled inner cheeks and cleanly carved tongues of bone and vein. Just as she is about to finish sewing up the impromptu amputation, Egret asks, “Whatcha think of the boss?”
Amitha’s fingers pause mid-stitch. A multitude of considerations run through her mind: surprise at the question, tactical assessments of each answer that comes to mind, how cold the homunculus’s arm is.
“She frightens me,” Amitha says.
Egret laughs like a hyena staccatissimo. “You and me both.”
“What’s your blood type?” Amitha asks.
“Weird and frightening.”
“Egret.”
“No idea. Human but haven’t had this body long enough to figure out.”
Amitha groans. “It’s one thing to implement a band-pass protein filter to convert vertebrate blood into human blood. It’s another to implement a band-pass antigen filter for human blood. You know how hard it is to filter lycanthrope antigens from vertebrate blood? Or how hard it is to filter vertebrate antigens into O-negative antigens? Do you have any idea how much harder you have made my job?”
“Just ask the submind for help!” Egret says.
“I don’t need it.” Hands pressed to her temple, Amitha begins reciting what Egret individually parses as English and Latin, but with no order or context she’s ever heard before. From the purse come corrugated tubing and gauze and other tools her bodyguard understands move blood from one body to another. From the doctor emerge phrases like differential manifold and metric tensors and other tools her bodyguard realizes operate on math far above her pay grade. Egret’s heard cursed tongues before but this is worse.
“Ami!” she exclaims. "What are you babbling to yourself?”
Amitha glances up. “Hm? Running through the steps for a blood transfusion and the parabiology of filtering blood antigens. I need to extract the werewolf virus from your blood and the human antigens from mine.”
Egret stares at her. “Ami, I have had so much blood put into me before. Never heard anyone say n-dimensional Euclidean space while doing it.”
“Oh!” Amitha’s face reddens. “Mnemonic technique. I’m computing the differential pseudo-Riemannian topology of the asymptotes of an anomalous point of origin. It helps me keep my thoughts organized.”
Egret goggles at her. “You meditate on cursed math problems?”
Amitha shrugs. “Some people use mind palaces to augment memory. Mine is more sophisticated. Think of it as a… as a math palace. No. Think of it as a mind garden.” She nods, more to herself as her hands run along the IV lines to Egret’s skin. “Hold still, I need to check your vitals.”
Egret holds her breath as chilly, spindly fingers probe her wrist and neck. “Your body’s so cold,” Amitha says offhandedly. “But your vitals are fine. Resting heart rate is about… 40 bee-pee-em? Just barely. Good enough. Hold still and stay calm for me.”
“For you?” Egret says. “Anything.”
“Ha ha,” Amitha says. “Then stay still and let me work.” She wraps her hand around Egret’s throat and sings a song in praise of Agni.
At the call of the Hindu god of fire; the bridge between the earth, sky, and heavens; whose presence spans the hearth, the lightning, and stars; Egret assumes her stump is about to ignite. Cautery of the metaphysical kind, meant to distill and purify her humanity from lycanthropy, as gold must be smelted and electrified from ore. She prepares for it to hurt. Her doctor screams instead. Egret wishes instantly she could take that pain; the need is engineered into her but its intensity is worse than instinct.
The good news is it works. Yes, there is the burn of a vein prepared for impromptu blood tap; the exhaustive ache caused by donating blood without having food to replenish said blood; but she prepared for this. Amitha is hardly underweight; to her dismay and delight, a full twenty pounds are converted into enough energy to finish curing her bodyguard’s lycanthropy. Most of her fat; some of her flesh; the burn of acid reflex and spontaneous liposuction will hurt like hell. But she has reflexive protocols to convert spare fat into stem cells that will stitch her back together; more importantly, Egret is actively flexing her stump rather than convalescing through phantom pain.
The bad news is Amitha’s invocation of Agni, Hindu god of fire, bridge between the fire in the hearth and the fusion of the stars, is not quite leak-proof. Not her fault, really; while Hindu yantras are one of the earliest forms of thaumic engineering, the Sanskrit transcriptions from which she based her implementation were far from robust; only natural that the patches she implemented would be imperfect.
Combustion produces exhaust. Exhaust requires ventilation. In the absence of programmed ventilation, the exhaust products of Amitha’s spell result in a fart that shakes the room. Egret laughs out loud.
Amitha groans. “If you ever mention this to anyone I will kill you.” From the depths of her purse come gauze to replace the IV drips and Ziploc bags to store the biohazardous byproducts of her operation.
Egret flexes her stump again. “Feels like it’s still there. Good enough. Thanks babygirl.”
The instant she lands on the wooden floor she realizes something is off. “Wasn’t this room made of stone before?”
“Oh Christ,” Amitha says. “I forgot how the backlash would reflect off the stone. It must have –”
Movement out of the corner of Egret’s eye: the whale skeleton on the ceiling no longer hangs from stone stuck together; now the chunks of wood holding it up slide inexorably downwards. She barely has time to wrap her good arm around Amitha and dive out of the way before it plunges through the floor and sends them into the abyss.
The Useless Werewolf Machine
The fall is shorter than either of them expect. Egret sits up on a pile of extra-battered corpses whose decaying flesh has proven surprisingly shock-absorbent. She looks down at Amitha, pressed firmly against her with eyes screwed shut. Very slowly, Amitha opens her eyes and looks up at the distant hole in the ceiling. Very, very slowly, she scans the room for additional threats in this supposedly safe hideout. The remains of a mighty wine cellar leak out from under the remains of a storied dining room. Islands of shattered wood and animal remains float on a sea of burgundy.
“Hope the boss trusts someone else to clean this up,” Egret says.
Amitha tries to free herself from Egret’s grip, then very, very quickly freezes as the stone groans in a way only structurally compromised structures can.
The fall is longer than either expects. The pile has fewer wolves. Egret feels something give in her tailbone and jams her teeth together. While processing the pain, Amitha frees herself from her grip and sits up on the pile.
Amitha’s first thought is of a space station, Egret’s of a fish tank. Rich oak walls frame thick glass panels, stationed by mahogany consoles dotted in ivory buttons. A rainbow nightmare of pipes runs along the edges of every surface in sight, connecting the extravagant workstations while interrupting their digital warbles with unsettlingly organic hisses. Through shattered glass panels –
An industrial line of butchery and horror. Werewolves plummet from out of sight, howling pitifully as they slam into enormous wooden grinders. The lucky ones bellow and wail, broken bodies piled atop of a bed of their own brethren descending into the maw. The unlucky ones shred themselves to ribbons against the shattered windows. Amitha can feel each thump of flesh against those massive teeth.
Are these things aware of their fate? How could they not be? They must sense the thumping brass pipes and vibrating wooden chutes waiting to ferry their remains away. Amitha shuts her eyes and regrets it. She smells all the piss, shit, and blood, itches at the clacking of paws on wood, cringes from the overwhelming buzz of many mouths pleading for mercy, the beating of something alive –
Something alive but never born.
The sheer presence of leviathan gears, house-sized pistons, and massive rotating grinders scratch past the glass and Amitha’s eyelids. Tools for surgery and butchery operate under their own bloodlust, torturing the flesh of a divine being into a construction of compounding exploitation. Enormous ball bearings consist of pulverized bone. Alveoli stretch into bellows five meters tall. Muscle, bone, and guts have been sculpted into tools of death and construction, all the better to render piles of what used to be werewolves into –
Into more wolves? She sees it in her minds’ eye. The malicious force of will automating each assemblage of wood and flesh before her – the gestalt total of occult programming driving this useless werewolf machine – draws the vines in her mind upwards, into the darkness where she senses what used to be a pile of furry meat emerge as a living creature just long enough to recognize that it’s falling before hitting the grinders below.
“Where the hell are we?” Amitha whispers.
“Never seen this sub-basement before.” Egret’s voice is tighter than usual.
Submind Tenchu bursts from her mouth in a splash of blood. “It belonged to my predecessor.”
Amitha recoils and slips off the corpse pile, landing flat on her back. The wormtongue retreats long enough for Egret to stumble down the flesh hill and extend a hand to Amitha with the fluidity of a damaged puppet. “Good news!” she says. “We’ve re-established contact with the boss. ”
“Erin,” echoes a voice behind them. Amitha whirls to see a horde of mangled bodies dragging themselves out of the machine, down from the pile, into the control room. Clotted blood dribble from exposed innards. Shards of glass and chunks of wood protrude from mashed torsos and shattered limbs. As if through one mouth, each decaying creature utters, “Kill me.”
Tenchu’s mouth protrudes just over Egret’s lips. “This is Overseer Six speaking,” it says. “This amateurish construction deserves no other moniker than Briar. I want him alive. Curious to know how he bypassed my safety countermeasures.” Tenchu speaks in one of the Overseer’s crueler voices.
“I ate them alive.” Briar’s voice forces its way through multiple cadaverous throats at once, each clogged by bone and blood. “Kill me, Erin,” the werewolf corpses say in unison. “We deserve it.” A teeth-grinding rattle emerges at the tail end of their words.
“Yes, you do,”says Six as Egret faces the horde. A sigh escapes from Egret’s lips that makes Amitha’s hair stand on end. Some invisible force riding the sigh batters each werewolf in turn. They stumble and then crumple as their skeletons fall out through their backs. Human skeletons. From wolf skins.
“Submind Tenchu – Overseer,” Amitha chokes out. “What the hell is this thing? Why is it in your basement?”
The wormtongue winds around Egret’s shoulder to look at her. How does it do that without eyes? “You recall your participation in SATURNINE CALENDAR PACIFICATION?” it says in one of the Overseer’s cruel voices. “These are the remains of a similar stellar entity. My predecessor contained it… and then overstepped the bounds of his competence. I constructed this machine to contain him.”
“We… constructed it,” the wolfskins wheeze. “Are you so afraid of your… protege you would lie to her?”
“Kindly shut up,” Six says. “I was young when we built this. You were not.”
“We killed it together, Erin. Amitha. I have had the… privilege of observing –”
“Kindly shut up,” Six repeats. There’s a sour taste in the air. Blood in Amitha’s ears. In her eyes. Her lips have sealed themselves. The skins don’t have mouths anymore.
“Egret,” says Tenchu, “I’ve allowed you full knowledge of this facility’s layout and systems. It will be scrubbed once you leave. Amitha? Have Egret show you where the killswitch is and call a cleanup team once you’re done. I’d handle this myself but Three’s caused yet another budget crisis I’ve been tasked with solving. There may be some aggressive internal reorganization and headcount reduction to divine. I have full faith in your ability to deal with this issue in my stead.”
The wormtongue vanishes back into Egret’s mouth with a horrifying slurp.
Amitha fights back a wave of nausea and looks at the re-obliterated bodies. Bad idea. Thick chunks of black clot dribble out from each discarded skin, trailing towards the pile of bones that belonged to them. The amoebic mass slides under the pile and recedes like a tide, dragging its owners’ skeletons back into place. Amitha loses the fight and vomits onto the floor – mostly coffee. By the time she’s finished wiping her mouth, the standing skin-sacks are on the move again.
“Man.” Egret bares her teeth at the shambling bags of skin and bone. “Have the dignity to stay down.”
“Silence, dog,” comes a voice out of the walls. “I taught your master how to make you.”
“We don’t take orders from you,” Egret snarls, ready to lunge if needed. “Ami. C’mon. We’ve got work to —”
Amitha watches in horror as her bodyguard disappears under a waterfall of werewolf bodies. She backs away, waiting for Egret to extract herself, but the pile on top of her grows even as its shattered components burst forth from its lumpen sides to join the advancing pack.
“Let me share my wisdom,” say the broken bodies behind her. Amitha turns to find shattered wolf corpses in every direction. “It would be child’s play to kill you. That would not change the circumstances of my hell.”
“What could you possibly teach me that the boss couldn’t?” Amitha is barely listening. Most of her is frantically throwing open doors throughout her mathematical palace, chasing down the pseudo-Riemannian infestation of vines she set loose. Looking for the brutest-force solution to her predicament. There’s going to be a lot of pruning if she survives. Emphasis on if.
“Who gave Erin the seed variables she passed to you? Whose home do you think this was? I sought to learn the secrets of the universe so I might pass them on to the next generation. She hoards it to remake them in her image. What would Erin gain by removing her leverage over you? In raising you from tool to equal?”
Impossible for her not to hear that.
“At least entertain my offer,” says the machine. “I mastered the connections between ritual and biological process before she was born. I recruited her. I trained her. I loved her. She repaid me with this. I have nothing left to lose and everything to gain.”
“I just need to find the killswitch,” Amitha says, edging towards the stairs. The world is slowing to a crawl, though from enhanced perception or mathematical poisoning she’s not yet sure. “You want to die. I want you dead. The boss will solve both our problems with the flip of a switch.”
“When Erin becomes bored enough she will switch me back on. I have relived my own beheading a million times over and will relive it a million more. How many of your peers has your Overseer dispatched through me? How many death sentences can I serve? My knowledge is my penance. My instruction will be my revenge.”
A series of cuts emerge in the pyramid, outlining a square hole through a section of furry limbs scrabbling for purchase. Dismembered claws and paws burst from the hole like bloody streamers, followed by a head and arm holding a boxcutter knife. Egret digs the blade into something – an eye, a head, a chest, she can’t tell, all that matters is it's solid enough for purchase to pull herself out of the pile, down the hill of corpses, and begin to stand. She immediately finds herself buried up to the neck in another pile of bodies, clawing, gnawing, growling. Amitha looks away but still hears the crunch of shattered vertebrae.
“I sense your loyalties, beast. I agree with your assessment of Ahmadi’s protege,” the walls say. “Let me help you. Both of you. End my suffering, master of ceremonies.”
“I’m not allowed to listen to you,” Egret says. “Can you hurry up and finish me off? Boss’ll make it hurt even more if you keep her waiting.”
“As you wish.” Amitha watches the pile eat Egret alive until all that remains is a head staring blankly back at her.
“The choice is simple,” the wolves say with impatient finality. “Learn from me. Or die like your bodyguard and wait for Erin to drag you back from hell. Assuming she still finds you of use.”
“You think she hasn’t done it before?” Amitha squints and pokes the werewolf in front of her. It blinks with empty sockets. Everything is in slow motion. “She’s pulled me back personally on the operating table. There are loyalty oaths where half my glands used to be. I’ve got a little bastard like you instead of a hypothalamus. It’s shaped like a leech, spontaneously generated by the Overseer and sustained by my biochemistry.”
Amitha sounds impressed despite herself. “It’s the most amazing feat of biomagical engineering I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine what it could do if I betrayed her. Show me something more impressive than that, fleabag. Show me something my boss would kill for.”
A hundred full-mouthed smiles bare themselves across a hundred canid corpses. “Overseer suits me much better, I think.”
A loud crunch interrupts them both as Submind Tenchu bursts from Egret’s mouth. Amitha is surprised there was anything left of it. “Ignore him, Archmagus,” it says desperately. “Remember that everything he knows I have surpassed.”
“Has she taught you how to surpass me?” Briar asks through a hundred broken mouths. Congealed blood in shattered limbs melt back into oxygenizing molecules fueling the regrowth of shattered bones. A horde of battered bodies reassemble themselves through a method that Amitha comprehends not as but music. The pyramid of corpses reshapes itself into a battalion of werewolves, pinning down the pipe of flesh extending from what remains of Egret with military precision. “Can you undo this? Has selling your soul to this witch paid dividends? Have you derived the knowledge needed to topple a corpse a century out of date?”
“Amitha…” the wormtongue hisses.
Amitha squints at it. “Well, boss?” she asks. “Are you going to help me or do I need to look for other options?”
How can that damnable thing roll its eyes without having any? A hideous heaving and crunching draws Amitha’s gaze to the bulge spurting through the wormtongue’s three-meter throat. The room holds its collective breath as gasping squelches echo through the chamber. Finally, torturously, Submind Tenchu coughs up a thick, crimson wad of meat before dissolving into a sludge of rainbow-colored proteins. It lands directly before Amitha, who watches the insides of the blob – no, the embryo – divide and develop through its translucent skin.
A timelapse of conception and birth in a cold glass womb flashes past in an instant. The newborn beast blinks up at her with Egret’s eyes. An elongated smile of recognition spreads across its face. Exposes fangs.
“A troglobite operative?” the useless werewolf machine asks scornfully. “An impressive reconstitution, but hardly enough to deal with me.”
“It’s not for you,” the creature says in Egret’s voice. Its four setae-covered claws dig into Amitha’s upper torso, the better to messily devour her. She can’t help but scream.
The room falls silent and watches the doctor’s guard dog rip her into chunks that vanish into its gullet. The useless werewolf machine itself slows to process this utter and total betrayal.
“You bitch!” The declaration is unanimous in its full-throated outrage. The room falls on top of the newborn Egret and messily devours her.
High Treason Under God
Phantom itches of rent flesh play along Amitha’s simulated skin, from nape to navel and fingers to feet. She scratches idly at her hands, glare fixed firmly on the Overseer. The mold-colored centipede perched behind the desk does its best to look sheepish, albeit behind a maple-ivory desk like an aircraft carrier afloat in an ocean of Persian carpet. She meets each of its unpleasantly human eyes and sees instantly through the facade.
“Is this your mind-space? You never taught me this one.” Amitha screws her face as tightly as she can without shutting her eyes. This may be the only chance she ever gets to be cross with her boss, in a purgatory consisting of whatever is left of her brain tissue.
“More specifically, this is an oneiroparasitic incubation chamber. A tool I derived from item number 3199, by which a sufficiently skilled thaumaturge may cannibalize a host to reconstitute their own flesh. I keep one in each member of Red Right Hand.” The grub’s myriad stubby limbs pretend to steeple. God dammit. It’s using the Overseer’s human voice, the lecturing one. Its mandibles chitter silently, making the incongruity of the voice even worse. “I planned to teach you later in your professional development. Before you committed what some would say was an incredibly stupid act of treason.”
“That’s not what your archmage calls it,” Amitha says. The mere fact she isn’t in horrific agony means the Overseer doesn’t have time for torture. Means the boss needs her to think for herself. She relishes the capacity for sarcasm.
“Indeed,” the grub replies. “You are not incredibly stupid. Stupidly ambitious, perhaps. But. Out of respect for your expertise and –” the grub stares through her, mandibles drooling now at the tiny golem impersonating her hypothalamus “ — commitment to this Foundation, I will interpret your attempted treason as a provocative act of feedback, read between the lines, and acknowledge your necessary criticism.”
It leans back. “ You are welcome.”
“Boss!” Extra rows of teeth grind behind Amitha’s frustrated scoff. “Stop jerking me around. You fucked this up right and proper by not telling me what I was walking into. Fucked it up further by waiting for me to figure out what I was doing with minimal information. And now you’re being fucked — pardon your bodyguard’s language — by the consequences of your own actions!”
“Do not take that tone with me!” The grub’s upper body lunges forward and pauses over the edge of the massive table. “Do not pretend you comprehend the consequences of my actions. Nor the prices I pay for them.”
“Do not take that tone with me!” Infuriated fangs sprout from Amitha’s mouth, widening and expanding to make room for more fangs, filling both the witch doctor’s jaws and the room itself. Blood starts dripping from the corners of the wall. The grub stops steepling, starts watching as Amitha’s six-clawed hands dig into the desk and lengthen across its surface, like angry giants from a distant shore. This death glare she learned from her mother.
“You’re just a fragment of a fragment of a mind I cannot comprehend so you better comprehend how pissed off I am to be cleaning up her mess!” she bellows. “Don’t you dare talk back to me, you worm! Remind your god that I have willingly sacrifice everything I can at the Foundation’s altar. Family, memory, conscience, flesh. You tell your fucking boss that I am not just a subordinate, but a collaborator, and to be as effective as possible then I need my Overseer to meet me halfway and collaborate!”
The grub tries to shrink back as the ceiling’s fangs brush across its flesh. Amitha doesn’t dare move for fear of showing weakness. Hot air steams from the centipede’s mandibles and its limbs wriggle in dismay.
“The Overseer was displeased by the interruption,” it grumbles, “but offered an apology for dismissing their knowledge of this place on the grounds that they were younger and thus prone to error at the time such as minimizing Briar’s existence, end apology. You have been cleared for all information about this location. Take this opportunity to learn.”
Amitha considers it behind a practiced flat stare. “Thank you for the apology. Overseer. Please teach me.”
The room bites down on them.
—
The useless werewolf machine behind the glass was formerly known as Briar Everwood. It strangled the name out of a would-be assassin during its tenure as O5-6, but lost its past humanity in the process. This is almost certainly the reason its protege, Erin Ahmadi, decided to stage a coup. If only Erin had known that drainage occurred the moment power swapped hands. But the machine once known both as Briar and the Overseer has had decades to stew, complain, and plead with gods it neither believed in nor respected. All it has left is spite, contemplation, and patience.
Enough to become the lord of Ahmadi’s Hades. Having spent the last eighty years slowly retaking control of its former citadel, from machinery to security to the rituals designed specifically to incapacitate it, Briar’s machine is ready to seize the final elements needed: doctor Amitha Sanmugasundaram, potential enough to strip Ahmadi of their throne despite the accumulated knowledge to have stripped Briar of its throne. All that remains is to dig through the brain matter being digested in the remains of Ahmadi’s failsafe, the corpse formerly known as Asset Egret.
As the archmagus’ flesh is digested by the useless werewolf machine, it grudgingly admits to her skill. Amitha has already learned enough to shield herself behind a labyrinth based on cryptography sophisticated enough to burn out the average quantum supercomputer. Briar, however, is more sophisticated than that. Virtually no time at all elapses before it subsumes and consumes the knowledge protecting Dr. Amitha Sanmugasundaram.
Suddenly Briar perceives himself – not as a mass of bodies and tortured flesh in reality, but as a wolf with a man’s face, stuck at the forefront of a painfully white garden of forking paths. Graying chalk lines, the manifestation of mathematical formulae passed down from Briar’s predecessor all the way down to its chosen successor Amitha, trace a path towards the center of her memory palace. Said route is hardly a jaunt in the park; with every step Briar takes, he eliminates a trap meant to instantly flatten the brain matter of a hypothetical psychic trying to infiltrate the good doctor.
There is a brand new office room in the deepest bowels of Amitha’s memory garden, identical to Submind Tenchu’s but for one change: Amitha is now the one in the chair. At her command, the split-off chunk of O5-6 grudgingly extends itself through her mind to stymie and irritate the Being known as Briar Everwood. Tenchu lives inside Egret, and Egret lives to obey Amitha.
On one dozen screens, Amitha watches the man-wolf pad through her array of traps: dodging oil boiled out of her phobias, crossing vats of stored memetic excrement, and bridging punji pits lined with intrusive thoughts. She doesn’t bother thinking about what remains of Egret. Her newfound knowledge has convinced her that Ahmadi’s killswitch is pointless – this wretched place needs to come down on top of them while she has learned how to survive it.
As Briar follows the slightly off-white lines differentiating Ahmadi and Amitha’s mental consciousness; as he derives the electromagnetic frequencies needed to neutralize Sanmugasundaram’s laser grids; struggles to determine the product of primes which its protege borrowed but its protege’s protege managed to factor – he realizes that this is no decaying castle. This is a fortress designed to clamp its jaws around intruders. How does it still function after he clamped his jaws around Amitha?
At some point, Briar stumbles across an amphitheater with a single audience member: a colossal, pastel-green stag, a ring of ice behind its head, enraptured by a performance meant for its eyes only. When he tries to pass, the deer instantly turns its face to him and he freezes. Instinctively, he knows he must wait for the performance to end.
So he watches as Amitha takes up the role of Fear in a masked farce, hands over a box of cheap sweets to Joy and Apathy, and wields a hammer to labor over stone. He watches her take up the same sickle to castrate a man and euthanize an infant: the former with casual swiftness, the latter with reverent calm. Amitha does not flinch as she practices the blood libel in the name of a God she has sworn to subjugate.
As the performance ends, Briar applauds in spite of himself. Then it begins again. And again. And again. The audience remains enraptured. It’s quite the trap, he muses to himself upon escaping. Guilt, contained and weaponized.
The wolf and the worm confront each other in the central garden of Amitha Sanmugasundaram’s mind, underneath a rotten tree stuffed with neutralized cognitohazards.
“Is this the final trap?” Briar says scornfully. “Who do you think gave you the seed variables to plant this in the first place?”
“It is a negotiation," says Tenchu. “You say you wished to train the Archmagus. I say I have been forced to train the Archmagus. We share similar goals.”
“The dead Archmagus,” says Briar.
“Do you truly believe that?”
They stare at each other.
“What are the proposed terms?” Briar finally says.
“You are consumed by the archmagus Sanmugasundaram,” says Tenchu. “Your mind and body are obliterated. Your knowledge lives on.”
Briar considers. “And if I disagree?”
Tenchu answers. “You are consumed by the archmagus Sanmugasundaram. Your mind and body are obliterated. Your knowledge lives on.”
Briar scoffs as its eyes dilate. “I taught Erin how to craft this palace. I planted this hydra in her mind first. I have made it to the center of Amitha’s garden. What makes you think I cannot possibly consume her?”
Tenchu opens its mouth. “Solution Theta-Prime.”
Above them, the tree blooms into a fluid dynamics simulation of canid blood coagulation, expressed as protein folds in response to sudden and abrupt full-body trauma and deployed via law of contagion to suffocate any kind of dog within a kilometer radius. The instant Briar looks at it, it realizes how its own route through Amitha’s mind palace – how its path through her brain matter – forms a sufficient haruspicy circle to obliterate it. All that remained was to trigger it.
An industrial line of butchery and horror suddenly and explosively chokes on its own blood. Pipes rupture, bellows burst, pistons seize, and flesh rots exponentially. Gas builds. Fuel leaks. Sparks fly.
From basement to spire, Overseer Six’s black-site personal laboratory vanishes in a plume of fire.
Workin' for a Livin'
Dr. Amitha Sanmugasundaram, the Archmagus of Overseer Six, has met her Overseer in the flesh only once per decade – until now. For once, Six's factotum remains the same: dark-haired, dark-skinned, severe in expression, hands clasped in front of her, one bare and the other heavy with rings. In place of human eyes burn lights that blind like the Sun.
Once upon a time, Amitha would have been forced to look away. She might have stared at the table or the purposely dimmed ceiling bulb or the one-way mirror. In all cases she would have cursed the luck that placed her into an Alpha-1 interrogation room.
But she’s learned how to stare back. The werewolf machine taught her after it died.
Six blinks first. “My safehouse. My laboratory. My submind. By all means, Archmagus. Explain yourself.”
Amitha replies in Submind Tenchu’s voice. “That safehouse was compromised by your predecessor. Your laboratory was, by your own accord, amateurish. Your submind’s intractability hindered my work. It may have gone on to affect yours had I not subjugated it.”
Six raises her eyebrows. “And the entity contained in the machine?”
“Briar was put into that machine because he was incompetent,” says Amitha. “We are only speaking because I am not. The WOLF is contained. Trapped in an infinite maze.” She taps her head. “I never knew your original name. Erin Ahmadi. I like it.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a reminder,” Amitha says. “I am not your subordinate. I am your collaborator. Everything I have done, I have done for your vision. For the good of the work. I want to learn! I want to be better for you. Kill me if you find that unacceptable. You’ll find the disruption to your work even less acceptable.”
“You say that as if I am not prepared for such eventualities,” Ahmadi replies.
Amitha rolls her eyes. “I was forced to reconstitute myself and your operative from what cooked animal flesh survived the implosion of your safehouse. Excellent preparation on your part.”
Ahmadi sits in silence. Amitha sits in silence. The lightbulb fails to hum.
At some point, Ahmadi stands up. “Before you continue eliminating Overseer Two’s lieutenants, draft an SCP report to explain the loss of the safehouse. Part of the coverup. Blame the PENTAGRAM. Egret will bring the details. I expect nothing less than perfection. Consider it your slap on the wrist.”
Ahmadi pauses in the doorway. “Congratulations on your victory, my Archmagus. Make good use of those minds. Just remember. Briar taught you everything he knew. My submind taught you everything it knew. They were not my equals.”
Amitha sits in the room for several minutes after the door closes. Forget the drudgery ahead. What she’s learned from Briar and Tenchu will accelerate her research tenfold. She can’t wait to get to work.
All she has to do is lie. How difficult can it be?
Item #: SCP-9660
Object Class: Neutralized
Special Containment Procedures: Cleanup and containment of SCP-9660’s deployment site is being handled by Mobile Task Force Alpha-1 “Red Right Hand”. Reverse engineering of SCP-9660 is under the purview of the ECRG, led by Mathematics Chair Amitha Sanmugasundaram. Further details are restricted to Level 4/9660 as part of ongoing counter-operations.
Description: SCP-9660 was a targeted bioweapon deployed by the Pentagram, displaying numerous innovations in anomalous mathematics and biology that would have otherwise classified it as an eigenweapon if not for the highly localized nature of the tool, used to identify and assassinate key Foundation personnel responsible for counterintelligence and anti-espionage operations…