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Killing Time
Hold the line.⚠️ Content warning:
This article contains scenes of extremely graphic violence and gore, self-harm, infant death, suicidal ideation and suicide.
She didn't want credit. It wasn't about that.
Amelia had made major strides in containment theory over the past year. Developed a novel means of restricting bedrock growth — and it made use of a renewable resource, even! She now had all the tarp she could ever ask for. Set up an early warning system for the random effluence deposits, so that Markey could clamp down affected areas from his console while going through his otherwise prescribed motions. (She thought she'd probably take that duty herself next year, as she'd been unimpressed with his response time. They could have set it up for automatic triggering, except that automatic systems almost always failed during the breach.) She'd had to set up a few extra bulkheads and doors for this purpose, which had caused her to butt heads with Ambrogi; the man was categorically opposed to any permanent alterations to the Site's superstructure, a compunction well past the border of mania. Even her part in the great political splintering-off had been coldly calculated, as it was less likely that something would wipe them all out at once when they were occupying far-flung corners of the facility instead of clustering in a few hot spots. In previous years, if Habitation and Sustenance had ever gone the way of Theology and Teleology, half the human race would have perished. But of course the sequestering made a lot of things a lot more difficult, so she wasn't expecting any accolades for that. Or any of it. She didn't want credit.
But she wouldn't have minded acknowledgement.
The saloon was neutral territory, and even after Radcliffe's fatal bar fight it was still popular with the diehards. Like Markey. A few cups in and he'd told her Placeholder's theory, explained what the data showed and the correlations they'd drawn from it. They thought the reduced impact was down to something metaphysical, rather than the improvements she'd made. They thought they could fix the breach permanently by doing the same thing over and over again.
Amelia knew a word fitting that definition.
So while Ambrogi cried over spilt milk and talked to ghosts, and Markey drank himself insensate, and Gwilherm attempted to translate her self-assurance into martial law, and Mukami gave up trying to translate her thoughts into language and translated herself into the red open air instead, and Del Olmo was wrong, wrong, wrong about everything, and Radcliffe paid his debt with scut work, and Wirth acted like none of it mattered, Amelia stuck to what was actually doing some good. Actually making a difference.
Extending humanity's collective lifespan, to an unknown end.
31 October
He wasn't meant to walk without an escort.
Most days he didn't walk at all. He parked himself at the Cannon, and tried to piece together how it had functioned before he had torn it apart. He wondered how much his need to destroy was down to the horror of what he'd seen, and how much had been make-work for the year ahead. He parked himself at a terminal, and tried to figure out if there was something he had missed, something he could have done, something he could do now to change the future, when Dougall Deering would doubtless return once more to change the past. He parked himself on his hard slab bench, arms crossed, eyes closed, and tried to logic his way out of the entire situation.
Every few days, though, his muscles needed refreshing on the memory of how to move. So he took off the parking break and walked, with an escort. It was the escort's job to steer him, while he was lost in thought. They'd never steered him wrong before.
This one suddenly steered himself into a closet, and slammed the door shut. Place froze. He realized the halls were unfamiliar. He hadn't memorized the floorplans. He didn't know where he was. Even the colour-coding of the tiles didn't help, since under the red they were all the same level and saturation, just different hues.
"What are you doing?" he said, so quietly it couldn't possibly have transferred through the door. But he had a sudden feeling that speaking in his outdoor voice might not be such a good idea.
And then the source of that feeling made herself known.
She floated into view, he thought, though really of course she was walking. Just something about her gait was wrong. Something about the way her legs bent, or didn't. Her hair was long and thin, and her striking features were poised so perfectly it seemed impossible they should move.
"Meet cute," she said.
He stared at her.
"Well?" Her hair blew in the measured air, occasionally catching on the flakes of her skin. The flakes…?
"Either say something," she smiled, "or get a nosebleed."
He reached down to try the doorknob. It wouldn't turn… no, it wouldn't turn enough. He had a sudden, vivid image of the agent on the other side resisting his torque.
"If you're keeping your mouth shut because you think that'll help," she said, "you might have a few things backward."
"I don't know what to say." This wasn't precisely true, but he wasn't about to tell her he was seconds from petrification.
At least that means I still want to live. Although perhaps that wasn't such a good thing, given the situation.
She floated toward him. He took a few steps back. Not enough. "What to say, what to say, to a beautiful girl, on a beautiful day?" She made it a little ditty. There was a certain sawdust quality to the timbre. "Let's talk about the weather."
"Please," he whispered. Too quiet for her to hear. She would hear it. "Just let me go."
She stopped at a respectful distance. Close enough that he could see the imperfections in her skin. They were perfectly consistent. "But you can't go far. You can never go far enough. I'll always be right around the corner."
"Just let me go," he repeated.
"Not unless you take me with you."
He stared at her.
"And you will. You'll never forget me. I'll be up here, forever." She tapped her temples… no, he felt that she did. Her arms remained motionless at her sides. "I don't get left behind."
"What are you?" he breathed.
"One of a kind. And our kind will multiply."
On the other side of the door, he heard something like a strangled, choking sound.
"Tell me you're impressed," she cooed.
He released the doorknob, and raised both hands. "I'm impressed!"
The choking grew more urgent. "I don't believe you. What are you impressed by?"
He found he could actually answer this truthfully. "You've driven them all insane in the space of a few years."
Her expression changed slightly. A few degrees more wry. "We could have done that in seconds. But what's the rush?" She shook her head, like it swivelled on a ratchet. "You're still not him."
"Who?" The choking sounds were less audible now.
"Him," she breathed. He wondered if the air even noticed. "Maybe I'm the one who makes it happen. Do you think?" She considered him. It was barely a different sort of stillness from her usual. "No. Maybe a little. But there's something else, isn't there. Something worse than me in your makeup. It's you, isn't it?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." The honest truth, again.
She nodded, or rather inclined her head, inclined it back. "Neither do I. There's all these straws in my head. I'm stuffed full of them. There for the grasping. Do you know, she actually…" The woman-creature's eyes suddenly bored a hole straight through him, and in spite of the red, he knew what colour they really were. "No, you're better off not knowing."
"I'm no threat to you," he whimpered.
"That doesn't make you unique."
He took a step back. "You can ignore me. I'll walk. I won't, I won't get in your way again."
"Yes, you will. Or you're worthless to me." The choking had stopped. "Don't be worthless to me."
"I'm…" He spread his hands in utter defeat.
"You'll get there," she grinned, with the sound of splitting wood. "You'll get there."
14 November
It was getting to be a lot, taking the lion's share of leadership and action. They could give themselves a fancy name — Gwilherm's suggestion, Provisional Task Force Omega-001, "See You in Hell" — and draft protocols and make it all sound very important and very formal, but the fact was, the Omegas had been set up by fortune and circumstance as Sisyphuses incapable of shrugging off their loads. It was draining. Some days, it was simply too much.
Ngo, characteristically, suggested the solution. "There's seven days in a week, you know."
It was Sunday. The Lord's day. They didn't have a leader, so this morning the password went to the most credulous of them. Stewart received it gratefully, slipping out of sight and mind for twenty-four hours of blissful release.
Well, almost blissful.
When he spotted Delfina, and she didn't spot him, he knew it was something he ought to report. But he couldn't. So instead he watched her squeeze into an air duct — like someone blowing bubble gum into a straw — and spent the rest of the day wandering around, waiting for the shouting and probably gunfire to start.
"Well," Ngo remarked cheerily when the proxy had taken it back from him, "that's useful information, at least. Whenever someone's being stalked by one of the Puppets, we can take them out of circulation."
Stewart nodded glumly. He was thinking this information was probably not much comfort to the woman in H&P who'd beaten her husband to death with an IV stand over a dispute about what to have for dinner.
25 December
She gave most of the credit to Zaman's people, now the facility's quartermasters, for giving her such a substantial and precise inventory to work with. But she could see that most people saw right through it. That was probably okay.
If they thought this was mostly her doing, it was no terrible thing. Nhung could play Santa Claus. She could be a symbol. Psychologists usually were.
There was presently no need to keep prisoners, so the cafeteria had been turned back over to social functions. This one was a doozy. They couldn't pack all the survivors in at once — "Which is good!" she'd told them at the door, with forced cheerfulness, "Thank you all so much for participating!" — but there was a substantial train in and out, searching the pile. Looking for their names, and the packages attached to them.
Over four hundred packages, one for every known member of personnel who still soldiered on.
It had taken a week to properly cross-reference their most recent psychological reviews with something appropriate in the manifests which could easily be spared, but she'd done it. And judging by the looks on the faces she passed in the ensuing hours, the effort had been worthwhile and appreciated. Spirits seemed lighter. There were some smiles.
Of course, they could have been put on for her benefit. But even that was a positive sign. However it happened, she was keeping them keeping on. They would keep trying. Buy another day. Buy another.
The spirit of giving. Giving all there was left to give. Dreaming of a better world in the midst of a red Christmas.
It helped that not one of the ghosts was so cruel or tasteless as to attempt a broadcast of "Wonderful Christmastime."
2025
21 January
They had to choose their battles.
At first, Melissa had been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of issues. It was hard to even arrange them into a hierarchy of urgency. Was it more of a problem that the breach kept breaching, or that every reflection was death, or that the earth coiled around them like a boa constrictor, or that the lake was even more relentlessly destructive than water usually was, or that everyone outside their walls was dead or worse, or that they were still right on the edge of starvation, or that people kept acting on memories which weren't true, or working to ulterior motives that weren't theirs, or or or or or or or
Or did it matter how severe the issue, so long as a solution was found? That, in the end, was what she clung to. One of the essential doctrines of science. Nobody can figure out everything, but everyone can figure out something. Her primary expertise was in optics, and conveniently, one of their more obnoxious problems was optical.
It had gotten much harder to see in 2023. It was a little harder to see now than it had been last year. Billie's tests hadn't shown serious macular degeneration in any but the most elderly subjects, so nothing beyond what was to be expected naturally, and though the low light and persistent redness was definitely weakening everyone's vision, the haze was something more than that. Some element of the blurry overlap was actually there, in the physical world, to be seen. And that was interesting.
So she borrowed a guard — they were all still loyal to Gwilherm, one of the few pinnacles of stability left — and secured her old lab in R&E, and got to work. She had theories, and there were things she could test. It had been a long time since she'd pursued a practical research project of her own, and the work was more than relaxing. It was diverting. She could almost forget that her husband was who knows where, doing who knows what in his nihilistic funk. She could almost forget who else was wandering around in more distant, darker places.
No. Strike that last item. She could never forget that. It was always in the back of her mind, waiting for a slip.
The slip came with her first revelation. In her fleeting jubilation at the discovery that at least some materials — fabrics, for certain — didn't appear red, but actually were red — she let down her guard, and there he was.
Whether he was really there, or she simply remembered him being there second by second, didn't really matter. Harold Blank was standing in her lab, watching her, smiling. A thin trickle of fluid ran down his cheek and into his beard from the weeping sore. It was carrying a single tomato seed lazily downriver.
"Guard?" she called.
Harry… no. 001-2 sat down on a rolling chair, kicked the floor and spun in a circle. The seed was flung off, and stuck to the door of a counter cabinet. "Should've brought two guards," the monster said.
"Couldn't be spared."
"Really? I didn't know you were so badly off." It stretched. "We could loan you a few of ours, if you like. Used is better than new, when it comes to guards. They're broken in."
"Pass." She felt panic rising. It would have been easier if it'd started monologuing, or cackling maniacally. Trying to force a conversation under these circumstances was beyond insane.
It shrugged, and stopped spinning. "Melissa, I have a problem. I was hoping you could help with it."
She wished she had a weapon. She wanted to blow that alien expression off that well-loved face. "Make me."
It grinned. "You know I could. But in this case I need the real you. I'm curious about my memories."
She glanced at the boarded up window pane behind her. She wondered if the other side was splashed with blood, or if there was any sign that the guard had ever existed. Or if they were still standing there, on guard, unaware that anything was happening. Or if they would shoot her if she tried to leave. "Your memories."
It nodded. "Do you remember a canoe trip?"
She froze. Once, years back, she'd gotten very drunk. She'd had a fight with Reuben over something stupid, and he'd gone to visit his parents, and she'd stayed behind for the annual sad Christmas party. Harry had been there too, and they'd commiserated. She'd told him she had a dream. Two of them, rowing a canoe on a wide, mirror-still lake. No worries. No responsibilities. Just them, and the water, and the wind.
He'd said it sounded like a nice dream. She'd told him she thought so, too.
"I remember," she said. And if you do… what does that mean?
"You were called away." It frowned. "Why?"
She stared at it. "What are you talking about?"
"You were called away, while we were on the canoe. We had to row back to shore. What was that about?"
She was lost. "That wasn't part of the dream."
Now it looked confused. "Dream? I wasn't talking about a dream."
Something in the air between them felt dangerous. She glanced around the lab, as casually as she could, in search of something she could use as a weapon.
It sighed. "Well, thanks anyway. Still getting used to all this." It patted its labcoat and hooded sweater for emphasis. Some of the places it patted didn't resume their former shapes, and a stain began spreading near its left pectoral. It stood up, stretched again, and told her she'd fallen asleep.
That wasn't the only thing it told her. She heard the rest, as she lay on a heap on the floor, and even unconscious she knew it to be true.
Dolly was very interested in Bradbury's report. They'd all been thinking of the red as a sort of filter; the idea that everything really might be red hadn't actually occurred to any of them.
"Do you think we ought to take this to the Administrator?" Bradbury asked.
Dolly shook her head. "I'll tell him during our daily briefing. It's not important enough for a dedicated meeting, no offence."
Bradbury shrugged. "None taken." And then she slapped her forehead, as though only just now remembering something important, and pulled out a gun and shot Dolly in the chest.
April
It took Nhung a while, with Alis as go-between, to set up diplomatic relations. She'd had to think long and hard about her approach, both playing off what she knew about each faction leader and trying not to make it obvious she was doing so. In the end, they agreed to keep the channel open. "Hermes in the underworld," Alis called it wryly.
Debate by correspondence was by necessity slow and awkward, but they were able to agree on a few things over the succeeding months. Food deliveries from the hydroponics, and declaring the farm neutral territory, that was easy. Same with sharing utilities. Defence and jurisdiction issues were stickier, but the pressing threat from AAF-D added enough urgency that eventually a compromise was reached. Gwilherm owned the space between the fiefdoms, and would not press further.
The last easy concession was a reorganization of the calendar. It no longer made any particular sense for the transition between December 31 and January 1 to mark the beginning of a new year. The old seasons were dead, and the ball had dropped in Times Square for the final time.
From now on, each year would end at 6:18 PM on September the eighth, and begin after No Year's Day at 6:34 PM on the ninth.
11 June
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SCP-001-F is a nebulously-defined phenomenon wherein negative personal habits rebound with excessive consequences. It is difficult to disentangle extreme but non-paranormal cases of cause and effect from this phenomenon, but enough outliers have been identified to confirm the anomaly exists. The first documented example was the death from lung cancer of Dr. Karen Elstrom, despite her having received a clean bill of health only one month prior. |
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SCP-001-G is a predatory winged creature hunting the former topside interdiction zone of Site-43. Sightings of this creature have been minimal, but it has the approximate size of a commercial airliner, metallic feathers and scales, a variable number of heads, and a strange protrusion from the back of its neck which appears to change shape before the creature takes decisive action. When at ease, it appears to take pleasure from massaging or scratching at this protrusion, and vocalizing to it. |
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SCP-001-H is a recurrent delusion shared by all members of Site personnel (save for PTF Omega-001) that an additional member of Site personnel, identified as the nonexistent brother of Technician Philip Deering and Dr. Dougall Deering (both deceased), is present in the facility. All personnel report extremely high opinions of this individual, and many obsess over the details of his supposed personal and family life in lieu of performing their duties. |
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SCP-001-I is a progressive condition wherein an individual will begin to associate a specific location within Site-43 with positive emotions difficult to satisfy elsewhere. Examples include: relief, relaxation, peace, freedom from guilt, et cetera. Affected individuals will attempt to occupy these spaces as often as possible, often foregoing food, drink, and attendance to personal hygiene to do so. After excessive time spent in these spaces, affected individuals will find it impossible to experience these emotions outside of them. |
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SCP-001-J is a rare psychological condition wherein an individual is able to access the thoughts of all other individuals in the facility. This condition exclusively manifests among members of the Identity & Technocryptography Section. Affected individuals are either detained or terminated to prevent obvious secondary complications. |
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SCP-001-K is a psychospatial effect wherein individuals recalling certain physical locations are translocated to them via an unknown mechanism. Early occurrences were believed to be cases of abduction, as personnel simply disappeared; it is now believed homesick personnel were translocated to their homes on the surface, presumably perishing as a result. While some use is made of this effect for personal mobility among personnel with extremely low Cognitive Resistance Values — the effect cannot be achieved with a high CRV — most personnel now have memories of locations outside of Site-43 suppressed via an additive in the eyedrops created to prevent SCP-001-A manifestation. |
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SCP-001-L is a nomenclative hazard randomly cycling between all personnel at Site-43 in various quantities. The given names of affected individuals are perceived as offensive terminology, e.g. profanity, slurs, etc., often resulting in violence against them. |
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SCP-001-M is Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-A, presently half-sunk into the former Lake Huron basin. The waters of SCP-001-C and the bedrock comprising SCP-001-D are in constant conflict over this space, which appears anomalously resistant to their effects. Other than transmogrification triggered by the vacuum flush on 8 September 2022, and the fact that it returns to its original waterfront location during each reprise of SCP-001, the facility appears to be wholly intact. |
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SCP-001-N is an ursine entity found in the former Site-43 interdiction zone. It appears to be attracted to natural locations undergoing erosion, and physical structures undergoing collapse; its presence temporarily arrests these properties. Living entities encountering SCP-001-N are uniformly transformed into stone. |
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SCP-001-O is the inability of Site-43 personnel to associate the SCP Foundation with positive qualities of any kind. Whether this is in fact an anomaly, or a natural consequence of how badly we've fucked everything up and the lack of any indication that it's ever going to be better shall be left as an exercise to the reader. |
"Why don't we just stop cataloguing these," David growled.
Amelia looked up from her notes. "Because that would be giving up?"
"Yeah." He nodded. "Exactly."
8 September
It had been Adrijan's idea, so he couldn't back out now.
But as the deadline approached, his confidence diminished. What if interfering in this manner caused some new, unforeseen difficulty? What if he got it wrong? What if—
"You can't make it much worse, Dr. Zlatá," Placeholder interrupted. "They're already going by gut instinct. They don't have time to check the clocks. Precision is key, but even incremental improvements are worth it for our quality of life. You'll do fine."
So Adrijan waited in Operations Control, patched in to each of the seven Puppet Masters — he didn't know whose stupid nickname that had been, but like all stupid nicknames it stuck, and he certainly wasn't going to glorify them by calling them Omegas… yes. He was connected to each of them by a dedicated radio feed, waiting to recite their instructions. He had a full breakdown of the original breach, with events timed down to the millisecond, and five backup systems with blinking reminders to make sure he made his cues. He was going to walk them through this. It was going to be a flawless rehearsal of a play which had already played itself out years prior.
"Are you going to stay here with me?" He felt pathetic asking, but the polymath's presence was soothing. They all felt it, even as they all resented him for what he represented. "Or are you going to go babysit your machine?
Placeholder nodded wearily. "You couldn't pay me to be in that room right now."
There was no gradual fade, no flash of light, not even a sparkling transporter effect. One moment the room was empty, save for Alis and the Cannon, and the next moment Dougall was there.
He rushed to the locker, fiddled around with it for a moment — she couldn't see what he was doing, his back to her — and then he turned around, saw her, and froze.
She raised a hand. "Hey."
He stared at her, mouth working. For a moment she wondered if his ghost was on a different wavelength from her, and couldn't be heard, and then she heard the thin, low whine, and then at last it resolved into speech. "You can't be in here!"
She nodded. "I know what you're going to do. I'm not going to stop you."
His eyes were full of tears. "You're not?"
Her eyes were full of tears now, too. "You've already done it twice. It's part of history." She laughed, furiously, and looked away. "Changing the past for Dougall Deering would be the ultimate in romantic stupidity, wouldn't it?"
"I don't…" He shook his head. "Alis, you can't be in here. I have to make this call. It's important. You know that."
"I do." She thought about seizing him. Taking him away. Socking him away somewhere safe. Holding him close until the moment had passed. Kissing him. Snapping his neck. Instead, she stepped forward, and he stepped back, and she stepped forward again, and he allowed her to approach, and she leaned in to whisper in his ear.
He stiffened, and stepped back once more, clanging against the locker. If it had been anyone else but her, they wouldn't have seen it happen. "What?" he cried. "What did you just tell me?!"
"A secret." She almost couldn't see him now, and it had nothing to do with the red or the overlay or the password or his geistschreiber powers. "Take it to your grave."
And then she left.
It didn't make any sense.
He was telling them the right times. He was right on cue, every time. And they were missing every beat, just a little.
"What's wrong?" the Administrator demanded, in the same strained tones they'd used since the Director had been sent to hospital in critical condition.
Adrijan wanted to cry. "I don't know."
On the big board, he watched as Del Olmo delivered his line too early. The red dot representing Okorie didn't move to the pipe. Something still startled Wettle, apparently, but six of them fled the vigil hallway instead of five. A few minutes later, and Ambrogi was off by seconds as well. The warping landscape altered its permutations slightly, and by the time the 'surviving' Puppets reached the containment cell, there were four of them instead of two. Instead of zero, which had been the actual goal.
"How long until we can get in there?" Yancy was glaring at the board, but Adrijan felt the sting just as if he had been the target of the big man's rage.
"Hours," one of the techs responded. "It's worse than hever befohre hout thhhh," and he spat onto his monitor, and his tongue came out with it, slapping wetly on the screen and sliding down with lurid sloth.
The lights went out. When they came back on, the room was pristine. The grime all gone. The techs all gone. The air smelled of rubbing alcohol. Every surface gleamed.
Adrijan dove beneath the nearest console. The Administrator crouched under their lectern. When the screams started, they were familiar. Like an old enemy come to call.
Yancy would later swear he'd seen all seven heat signatures in AAF-D during the breach. He remembered it so clearly. They all did.
"Memory is a tricky thing, though," Blank told him sympathetically. He patted Yancy's shoulder, then steered him gently away from the airlock door before opening it up.
"What's going on?" Nascimbeni blinked. Okorie was covered in blood, and ragged bits of Ibanez, too shell-shocked even to speak.
"We'll find somewhere to talk about it," Blank assured them. "Give it a day, and everything will make perfect sense."
It felt like half a dozen kinds of treason, but the Puppet Masters met again for a debrief once the last of the fallout had fallen.
"Worse than ever," Ambrogi roared. "We are fifty kinds of fucked. I can't fucking see," and he tried to swat his coffee off the table, missing it by inches, "and everything's so badly broken I don't think—"
"Does it matter, though?" Wirth yawned. "I mean, really?"
Del Olmo interceded when it looked like the Chief was about to throttle the archivist. "We obviously did a much worse job this year. Why is that? What went wrong, specifically?"
"Zlatá," Gwilherm grunted. "It has to have been Zlatá."
Mukami shook her head. "No. Checked. Times were right. Execution off."
"We should all talk like that," Markey said. "It's a lot more efficient."
She gave him the middle finger.
"I tried to do what he said," Radcliffe moaned. "I really did."
"Your part doesn't even matter," Gwilherm snapped. "The people you're responsible for killing don't respond to instructions."
"Thanks," he nodded. "That's really encouraging. Is there another reason you're making me do this, then? Punishment?"
"Hey," said Placeholder. They all turned to look at him. He hated that, even if it was what he needed. They ceded authority so easily. "Folks. We do need to figure this out. Zlatá's timings were very good. That should have been sufficient to make everything go smoothly. But most of you seemed to be operating on a significant delay. Was there a problem with the radios?"
Mukami shook her head. "Checked. Antenna good. Waves fine. Tech fine. Not problem."
"What, then?"
They sat in silence for a moment.
Then, suddenly, Placeholder had a thought. "Oh."
"Oh?" Del Olmo repeated.
"We've been assuming you all have some sort of connection to this," Placeholder told them. "Well, I've been assuming. It makes sense given what we've seen. All seven of you are suffering from some sort of anomalous effect, and you're the ones who directed the course of the original breach. What if what went wrong this time is… we changed the formula?"
Del Olmo rubbed his forehead. "Meaning?"
"Meaning we took something meant for seven people, and spread it between eight."
The room was silent again.
"Are you saying," Markey said, very slowly, "that we can't even get any fucking help with this?"
"Worse than that," Placeholder frowned. "If participation is retrocausal — if Zlatá's help gets incorporated the way the rest of your actions did — I might be saying you can't get any more help, but you'll need to keep getting the help that didn't… help, this time. Does that make sense?"
At the end of the third silence, they all stood up and left the room.
"That's a yes, then," he decided.
It was technically unanimous.
9 September
Re-briefing the Puppet Masters a day later was a less tense affair than it had been the first time. Some of those involved were still capable of learning lessons.
It was a fun new wrinkle that Zlatá had joined the ranks of the early adopters. There really was something to Placeholder's theory, then.
"If they were all infirm old men," Dolly remarked, "telling them would feel a whole lot safer."
10 September
It had been a mistake to keep them in the dark.
He could see that now. It had gone against his instincts, at the time, to block the transmissions and record their contents on his own. The protocols Del Olmo had been following had seemed sound, but they had made everything worse. Those otherworldly cries for attention had built in frequency and intensity until finally they'd overcome the defences he'd built up, and the results had been devastating. In the weeks that had followed, he'd passed out the remaining musical messages to their intended recipients; some had followed the implied instructions, and some hadn't, but it wasn't his place to judge. He wasn't even the messenger, just an intermediary — and the problem was that he'd interposed himself. Placed himself between the others and the truth.
He wouldn't make that mistake again.
"Good evening, Site-43," Del Olmo crooned into the microphone. He was alone in the recording booth — really an old security kiosk in the halls of H&S — and he could almost imagine the ruby glow was a harvest moon sunset. "I'm going to start us off with an announcement. In the interests of transparency, you should all know that the evidence of your eyes has been confirmed: this year's breach was markedly more severe than the last. The good news is, we know why. We made a mistake. We applied a new set of hands to the task, and this divided our resources in a way not conducive to success. From this point forward, therefore, I'd like to ask that no personnel not already assigned to breach duty attempt to aid us with containment. There's nothing you can do. Anything you do, in fact, will only make things worse."
This was the right thing to say.
Surely this was the right thing to say.
Janet parked her wheelchair in the middle of the corridor, and raised the riot gun. She had no shortage of rubber tips.
They'd be picking them up off the ground, and out of people's orifices, for hours after the riot finally ended.
16 September
"No," the Chief murmured softly. "Not like that. Like this." He took her hand, and gently maneuvered it to the right position. "Seventeen degrees. No more, no less. You're too calm. Try to worry a little more."
Technician Second Class Ruya Darwish tried to focus on the spanner and the gauges, but she couldn't. A black hole was opening up in her chest, and if she didn't focus on that instead, it would eat her up from the inside.
"Too tight," the Chief sighed. "Pull it back, you'll blow the seals. No, no," he chuckled, "you've still got it wrong."
"It shouldn't be like this," she told him. "The sensitivity is too high." Ordinarily the pyrocaustic flow from the remains of TheoTelo would allow for a little wiggle room. Right now she was finding it impossible to set the gates correctly, though she'd done it a hundred times before.
"It's responding to you," he chided her. "How can you expect your systems to be in balance if you aren't? Ruya, pay attention. Why are you finding it so difficult to concentrate?"
Ordinarily this would be an admonition to laugh at. Concentrate? Here? But she did find her vision blurrier than usual, her mind wandering. She'd taken her daily dose of knockoff Concerta, but it wasn't helping. It almost always helped.
At least the Chief was helping.
"Trust your instincts," he half-whispered.
She trusted him. So it was only a short hop to what he was suggesting. "What if I tried this," she said, and that ended the conversation.
Romolo swore, and he didn't stop swearing.
Where Ruya had been working, the monitors showed nothing but a red-hot glow. He had to back up all the way to the cameras halfway across J&M to finally get a 'clear' picture of the damage: the tiles and structural members had all been melted away, revealing scabbed-up bedrock oozing burnt black-red pus. The outflow from TheoTelo was still pouring out, and it would continue to do so until they found some way of manipulating the burst pipes or stopping the mystical napalm at its source.
The loss of a technician was bad enough, but this was going to throw everything off. Romolo had a tightly defined schedule, a million points of interest to check for decay, disorder or tampering, and he felt like he was losing his grip as he watched that carefully crafted self-contained world give way to this external imposition.
"You can't let this stop you," Nascimbeni told him. "You have to push back. Push it back. Everything where you know it belongs."
But on the screen, brushing ash from his shiny orange-red jacket — torn at the left shoulder, in line with a vertical scar across his face and the brim of his hat — Romolo could also see his uncle. And judging by the way he looked directly into the camera, and smiled, Romolo felt certain he was seen as well.
19 October
Reuben watched his wife cry, and wondered with no great sense of urgency why it didn't bother him.
"He might still be in there," she was saying. Repeating it over and over. "Might still be in there."
Across the table, Reuben shrugged. "Could be. It sounded like he was accessing the original's memories, at least. But that doesn't really matter."
She looked up at him, eyes red, gaping.
Obviously she didn't know what he was talking about. He could muse on the subject, he supposed. He wasn't likely to come to any new revelations, but that didn't matter much either. "If he's still in there, trying to get out, well. Whatever is possessing him has near total control, so it's a doomed effort. If—" He raised a finger. "If we assume our goal here is to survive, then we should kill him regardless. If you judge one person's soul less important than a few hundred, I mean."
She wiped her eyes and mouth. "He might still," she hissed, "be in me. In my head. You can't let me out. That's what I'm saying."
"Oh." He nodded. "Yeah, that's probably true. But then again, that's true of all of us. Who really knows their own mind?" He looked around the makeshift prison which had once been the main cafeteria; the only other occupant, Stewart Radcliffe, gazed back at him sullenly. "Intrusive thoughts are a medical fact. It's a question of where you draw the line. Is what's in your head, you? Or is only the part of you that you identify with, you? Food for thought."
She put her head down on the table and cried, helplessly, into the Formica.
It seemed as appropriate a response as any other, and again he wasn't particularly bothered.
2026
22 February
The bullet wound only hurt when she breathed.
But it would heal, eventually. That was the difference between Dolly and the folks in the support group. So, she hadn't gone. They would have resented her for it. Mukami already thought she was being made fun of whenever the Director stopped mid-sentence to take a breath.
She had decided the solution was to cultivate an air of careful listening. Every time she didn't have to say "go on" was another painful inhalation avoided.
"Go on," she said reluctantly.
"They're all working against me." Amelia was filthy and haggard. Her uniform was torn and burned and melted all over, and her hair was like a mop at the end of its useful lifetime. "Everything I try to fix, they break. I'm starting to think they don't want this to get better."
Dolly gripped the edge of the desk. Its solidity gave her strength, because she had decided it worked that way. Wirth had made the suggestion, though he'd backtracked the next time she mentioned it. "They're at a disadvantage," she reminded the senior technician. "Their memories—"
"—are better than ours," Amelia interrupted. Dolly wondered if she would have interrupted the Administrator this way. Or Lillihammer. Or McInnis. "They remember three years of 001-1, -2, -3 and -4. We don't. They should be more on the ball than we are."
The new paradigm was, of course, much worse than the intermediate one. None of the systems they relied on were anything like reliable now. Power fluctuated wildly. Conduits and pipes failed under moderate loads, machine overperformed in undesirable ways — Placeholder was presently rebuilding the DUAL Core after its overclocking set the whole Section on fire, while Billie rebuilt its namesake with skin grafts borrowed from the late Dougall Deering, repurposed this year as an organ donor. It seemed like anything with a tolerance, a threshold, a balance of any kind was veering wildly back and forth along it now. And that wasn't the worst of it. These people were not trained to do their jobs only under optimal conditions. They knew when something was working correctly, and when it wasn't. They knew better than to make the mistakes they were making. But suddenly it seemed like Dolly had only a crew of idiots under her control — and half a dozen other crews of other idiots working at cross purposes to hers. They hadn't come anywhere close to healing the wounds of September, and the next bout was rapidly racing toward them.
"I don't know," Dolly finally sighed. "They're trying to help. That's been consistent throughout."
Amelia nodded. "But are they helping? Trying doesn't matter. We need success, Dolores. We need a win."
Dolly set her jaw forward, just a little. "You could call me Director."
Amelia nodded again. "You could direct."
5 March
Mukami hadn't been downside in a month.
The eating was much better, topside.
And there were no fucking tomatoes.
18 April
"What if we stopped him?"
David looked up. Alis was leaning over his desk; there had been a time when this would have been distracting. Finding out why that sort of distraction had barely any effect these days was pretty far down his ever-growing list of priorities. "Stopped who?"
She kept looking at him until he got the point.
"Have you talked to Placeholder?"
"Yeah," she said bitterly. "He said something like 'We've already fucked causality. Let's not fuck it again until we see what the babies look like'."
David blinked. "I'm guessing you added the swearing."
"And took out the whimpering."
David dropped his tablet on his desk, and rubbed his eyes. Almost his time again. There had only been one death from 8956 in the last week, an all-time record he was not eager to see unbroken. "Are you asking for a second opinion, or are you asking me to go over his head?"
"I'm asking you what you think," she sighed.
"What I think." He drummed his fingers on the desk; if he did it quickly enough, he couldn't even make out the individual fingers. "I think there's nothing to suggest Dougall offing himself did any damage."
"And it didn't fix anything, either," she reminded him.
"Not that we can see." He was rapidly growing disenchanted with Placeholder's assertions that invisible forces could be manipulated to improve their situation, but he wasn't about to say that in front of a rogue agent. "But I do know one benefit to what he did, and I'm not eager to lose that."
"Say it," she growled. "I dare you."
He shrugged, and picked his tablet back up. "I don't have to. Everybody's thinking it, except you."
"That kind of argument didn't work very well on you lot, back in September."
He should have been able to come up with a comeback for that.
He should have been able to come up with a lot of things.
He was dreading the day when the rest of them realized the successful containment initiatives score was essentially Markey: 0, Torosyan: All.
1 May
He'd never considered giving up.
Sokolsky considered success to be a personal attribute. You made it a part of you, or you didn't. He'd always chosen to succeed, and he always had. Until now.
The things which distinguished him from the others, the things that made him special, were rapidly diffusing. He was a schemer par excellence, but now everyone else was scheming, too, and he had to keep track of them and what they were up to if he wanted a coherent picture of the situation, which he'd need for any schemes of his own. He was always one step ahead, except now there were no steps, just a spiralling slide full of corkscrews and hairpin turns and switchbacks which changed seemingly on a whim. Whose whim, he did not know.
But he still had his signal virtue.
Giving up was still not an option.
Memetics and Countermemetics was a ghost town. There were things living in the holes in the Menger sponges. The patterns on the walls were so voracious that even 8956 had learned to avoid them. Here there be dragon curves. But he wasn't afraid, not really. To be sure, his every physical response was screaming at him to leave. To retreat to comparative safety. To abandon this mad quest.
The thing was, it didn't even matter if he died.
Not because dying would free him of the obligation to not give up, but because even death was not an end anymore. If he died, the next time those idiots fucked the breach — and he knew full well they would — he would probably turn up alive and well, the course of history having shifted once again to omit the circumstances of his death. It didn't work that way every time, and for some people it didn't work at all. Eileen, regrettably, had still been rendered into pasta in her server room. But it would work that way for him.
Because there was no way Daniil Sokolsky would respond to different stimuli with the same response. That just wasn't his flavour of insanity.
So he walked the halls with confidence, mind over matter, and pulled open the unassuming closet door.
The cognitive decontamination tunnel was still just black(red) slabs and tile. He felt a calm coming over him as he walked through, and opened the door at the far end. So far, so good…
Oh. Damn.
"Was it a good plan?" she asked.
"What's it matter?" He shrugged off his dazzle coat and hung it on the hook before closing the door. "You know what they say about contact with the enemy."
Lillian Lillihammer, or a… passable imitation of her, was sitting ramrod straight in the chair behind her old desk. There was something off about the texture of her skin, and her eyes were glossy and empty. Her hair too straight. Posture too stiff. "I've never been your enemy before. That sounds exciting."
"Yeah." He flopped down in the chair across from her. "Sorry about your luck, everyone around us."
She laughed. It wasn't her laugh. "So, tell me. What did you hope to find in here?"
He shrugged. "We search your old office every new paradigm. See if you came back to the old haunts to work on anything."
"Seems silly of you to tell me that."
"You already knew, or you wouldn't be here."
She nodded. "Also you're full of shit."
He nodded back. "Also I'm full of shit. Are you really Lillian? At all?"
She cocked her head to one side, but only a little. As though the joints weren't quite cooperating. Like a mechanical bird. "Do you remember that time in the server room?"
He blinked. "You're talking about Eileen?"
A shadow of a frown. "I'm talking about you and I."
"You and I never happened."
The shadow deepened. "I have very clear memories that it did. How about in here?"
"What?" he snorted. "On the desk?"
"In this chair."
He shook his head. "I'm glad to hear your hallucinations have been having a great time. But Director Lillian Lillihammer had a long stick up her tall ass, so none of that ever happened."
"Huh." Her shoulders moved slightly, and he had the impression she thought she'd shrugged. "That's interesting." She said it like it tasted foul. Then her eyes turned glassier still, and the faint glimpse of the real woman faded from view. "I have a dilemma, Dr. Sokolsky."
"I'm not going to sleep with you."
She rolled her eyes. "I would like to make use of you, but not in that way. The thing is, my means are limited."
"I could impose myself on you," he found himself continuing, "but that wouldn't do at all. I would have no access to your scintillating intellect, and that's the only thing you have of worth to me." It was like suffocating inside his own body. "I could have Harry mess with your memories, make you believe things, but that still might mix your pudding the wrong way. I'd been hoping the new blood would have straight up possession powers, but… oh, all right, stop squirming."
He felt something he hadn't felt in decades — panic — stealing the warmth from his veins as she continued her monologue with her own lips. He was free, for now. "I suppose what I'm saying is I'd like your help, on your own terms. What do I have to do to convince you to see things my way?"
He was composure. It was inextricable from who he was. He was a self-composed sonnet of a man, something clever and ribald. He would not break. She would not have that satisfaction from him. "Your way would have to be correct."
She laughed again. He wished she wouldn't do that, and needed it to continue. To remind him who she wasn't. "Is that all? I am correct. This is a bad world, Dr. Sokolsky. This is the worst result you can possibly hope for. We need to destroy it. Your friends are trying to preserve it instead, and I don't want that. You shouldn't, either."
"My friends," he repeated. "You mean the so-called Puppet Masters?"
She smirked. "There are only two masters, doctor, and fourteen puppets. But this isn't a show. Will you let me show you the truth of things?"
"You need me to believe," he told her. "You don't need me to agree to be proselytized to."
She blinked. "Oh. Well. Yes. That's true, isn't it?"
"But it would have felt more civilized," she said through his mouth, as he stood up and collected his labcoat against his own wishes. "Say, what were you going to do when you came here? …oh."
The laugh didn't sound any better coming out of him.
11 May
Like a fattened grub or an overscaled train, the bedrock pushed its way down the tunnel.
It had already cut off R&E Station, so Romolo had to walk down the silent tracks from I&T to see it. He needed to see it. It was something new, and he didn't care about new things. He needed not to care right now. Just for a few minutes.
The ghosts were silent as he walked. The only sounds were his esomat suit creaking, and the tunnels breathing. Everything close to the bedrock breathed.
He shone his light forward, and there it was. The round, raw stump of bleeding stone. Grey goo poured from the porous rock like pus from the pores of skin, pooling in front of it as it shuddered forward. And in the middle of the stone…
A lot of it was skeletal, the skin and muscle stripped away, but parts of the torso and the underside of the jaw were still intact. Its spine stuck out of the wall, and stone bindings kept the loose bones in place. The jaw was wagging uselessly. Romolo wondered if it was trying to speak.
"Poor Roz," said a familiar voice. "Never can catch a break."
He sighed in relief. One of the ghosts, at least, was back. He didn't like it when they went dark. It was too much of a change.
He turned around.
It wasn't the ghost.
Udo Okorie looked like the thing in the bedrock at an earlier stage of devolution. Her chin and cheekbones poked through her skin, which was bleeding, and her eyes moved too fluidly in their sockets. There were tears in her occultist labcoat, through which he could see tears in her skin, through which he could see ribs. "Hello, lover," she smiled.
He should have brought an abatement tank. But he hadn't. He'd only wanted to see something new, before it destroyed something old.
"You think it's your fault, don't you?" She shook her head ruefully. "You think you could have saved us. But that's so narrow-minded. Rom, you can't hold on to things like that. It just isn't healthy."
He had a sudden, wild thought. She looked fragile as a Halloween skeleton. He could push past her. He could destroy her, if he had to.
He couldn't destroy her. He couldn't destroy anything.
Not even the dead.
She was looking up at the half-rotted corpse again. "She loved me, you know," Udo mused. "Delfina did, too. And Harry. And Stacey. I must be the best-loved person who ever lived here." She turned her orange — actually orange, he could swear to it — eyes on him. "Do you think you're special among them?"
"You're not her."
She raised an eyebrow, then dropped a hand to her belt. To her reagents pouch. She unclipped the buckle, flipped it open, and took out a handful of sand. "Is that what you really believe?"
She blew on the sand, and Romolo flinched away. But it wasn't aimed at him. It soared up, up, to the skeleton on the shuddering wall, and the wall began rumbling, and the floor rumbled, and the tunnel trembled, and there was a single cry of VIVIAN that he felt in his filings, and then the sand wrapped around the pathetic remains, and then Rozálie Astrauskas was looking down at them, still hanging naked from a seam around her midsection.
"Help," she croaked, and sand poured out of her mouth.
"Who am I, Rom?" Udo asked playfully.
Romolo stared up at the effigy. It was crying tears of sand, bleeding sand from its ragged join with the bedrock. "Help me," she wept. "Help me VIVIAN," and the last word ripped out of her like a belch, and her stomach distended and then burst, sand streaming out like a red waterfall. "Help…"
"Nothing is permanent," Udo told him. "Not even death."
Romolo forced himself to look at the thing which had once been his wife. He pointed a glove at the effigy, shaking. "That isn't life."
"Of course it is," Udo scoffed. "Life is suffering. I thought that was obvious."
There were lights behind her. Someone was coming.
"You can kill me," he said, ignoring the revulsion the thought filled him with. "If you blame me, go ahead. But it won't fix anything."
She attempted to look sympathetic. The awkward way her skin stretched rather ruined the effect. "This isn't about blame, Rom. It's about understanding. The sooner you all get with the program, the sooner we can start getting along."
He could see who was behind her now.
He saw Joanna Bremmel, her ruptured body stitched together by glittering bands of mica. He saw her father, the entire top of his skull replaced with a cap of the same. He saw Azad Banerjee, red sparkles visible under the stretched skin where his crushed body had been expanded back into roughly the right shape. Eileen Veiksaar with a brand new torso of sand, and Chuck Carter in a silicon neck brace. Ruya Darwish swaddled in a dune's worth of skin grafts.
And Eddie Simms, and Randy Gershwin, and Navickas, and Ngata, and Zaman, and a dozen other friends and colleagues he knew weren't dead, all with granular death masks covering their eyes. All of them smiling.
"She figured it out," said Eddie. "How to stop the pain."
"We can't die," said Zaman. "We're not afraid anymore."
"She's…" Romolo's throat was dry. He could barely speak. "She's lying to you. This isn't right."
"Udo," the effigy rasped. Romolo looked up to see it reaching for his wife with its dead hand. "I love you ILSE," and it belched out another plume of sand, and then another, and then another, and then it shuddered, and its spine snapped, and it fell to the tracks with a clatter and began crawling past him, and he stumbled back and hit the curved wall, and leaned on it for support as the bedrock spat out the rest of Rozálie's spine, and then the remainder of her bones, and then Udo began weaving them back onto her crawling, crying corpse, and the hole in the bedrock kept widening, and when it spat out a soggy, sizzling pile of viscera still attached to a second skeleton, and its melted lips formed the name Dougall Deering he threw himself past the crowd of resurrected and newly damned and into the welcoming darkness where nothing was terrible and new.
24 July
It was a different sort of hunt, but the same principles held.
Her target left no spoor, but she could tell where he had been by the changes in environment. Fluctuations of heat. Unexpected collapses. Bouts of insanity, or in one case the opposite — she had heard Placeholder whistling cheerfully while he worked, and knew her quarry was near.
The only question was whether it really was a hunt, or if he was leading her on a chase.
She finally found him in one of the facility's largest chambers. The J&M manufactory was dominated by a single tremendous machine, a complicated array of stamps and presses and saws and conveyor belts capable of producing tiles, wall panels, metal bars, et cetera to precise specifications, or assembling tools, components, even finished goods. Since the breach, it had been regurgitating soggy corpses drawn from the peat bog which had swallowed Grand Bend. Mukami had discovered that herself.
In front of the pile, which was now halfway to the high ceiling, was a thing which resembled her husband.
"I'm so confused," he said. He didn't turn around, but she knew she was being addressed.
She raised the barrel of her Accuracy International sniper rifle. At this distance any weapon would have done just as well, and if he moved it would be a bitch to reacquire the target, but for some reason this felt right.
"There's something wrong," he continued. There was an awful squelching sound from the nearest manufacturing port, and a discharge of mulch, and then another corpse rolled out to join the others. This one was small. A child, perhaps. Or a large dog. It was too sodden and bloated to tell. "I don't know if it's just me, or the others. But it isn't both."
She wasn't going to talk to the thing. She would listen, in case it said something useful, but that was all. She wasn't stupid.
He turned to face her, and she saw the scars. Not nearly enough for the dramatic nature of his death, but symbolic of it. His pants were stained with blood, and a piece of entrail peeked out from the bottom of his vest. His left eye didn't move when he looked at her, and his mouth was frozen on that side as well. "Ana, please. Tell me why it's different."
She kept the rifle raised, and told him nothing.
He deflated. A thin smear of gut lining slid off the exposed tube to splatter on the floor, and his work boots. "There's less to this one than there ought to be. I think I know why. I think I felt it. But I was hoping something would persist. Do you believe in heaven?"
She didn't so much as blink.
"He did. He was a good Catholic. Not a great one, though." The thing chuckled. "Lapsed, like all his other responsibilities… no, that's just Lillian remembers about him, isn't it? That's not what he remembers. He remembers nights on the patio with Gallo, and every birthday Flora had, and… oh, you wanted a child? That's lovely. It's still not out of the question—"
The shot went wild. She hadn't meant to pull the trigger.
The corpse of Noè Nascimbeni twisted half its mouth into a cruel grin. "Off your balance? Not my doing. You're immune to our little tricks, aren't you? The tables turn, but so much stays the same." He paused as another pair of half-digested humans plopped into the teetering stack, sliding down on runners of their own breached filth. "Do you wonder why it has to be so hard? Why everything has to be so god-damn difficult?"
"Yes," she snarled. "Yes, I wonder."
"Ana, it's so simple." He raised those gnarled, calloused, intimately-known hands in a pale mockery of her late husband's body language. "You just need to stop trying so hard. Let it end. There's a garden waiting for you in the next life, one that will last you past the end. And we can grow it together. I'll even let you…"
He reached into his jacket, and she very nearly pulled the trigger again. He pulled out a rustling packet of something, and frisbeed it across the room at her, and she nearly pulled the trigger yet again.
She looked down.
It was a packet of fennel seeds. She'd wanted to plant them, and he'd always said no. "You hated fennel," she said, despairing at the tremor in her own voice. "He hated it."
"I could get used to anything, for you," he smiled. "And I'll never leave you. You always knew our days were numbered. Let it go."
She tightened her grip on the rifle. "I'm going, to kill you, now." The pauses were fewer, and farther between.
"No, you're not," he said, and then the pile really did topple over, an avalanche of spotted red-grey flesh with red-black specks of bugs beneath, breaking the surface, and a river of gunge and stench cut him off from her view, and she fled.
But not before snatching up the fennel seeds.
25 July
Janet suspected all the Puppets' little drop-ins and friendly chats had a nefarious motive. More nefarious than simply throwing everyone off-guard, and occluding the motives of their opposite numbers.
Specifically, they induced complacency.
One day, Lillihammer might taunt Veiksaar — or Veiksaar's very confused silicon-fused corpse — with a few pointed comments on the nature of their decades-gone relationship. The next, Okorie was convincing the more impressionable junior researchers that gravity worked differently in Rydderech's old canyon, and they leapt to their deaths, bedrock licking up their splattered blood with an almost human moan. Ibanez would speculate with Yancy on the likely fate of his wife and children, while Wettle made the cook absent-mindedly chop his own hand off. Nascimbeni reminisced with Markey about all the times the latter skived off work, planting the idea that these things added up, and events might have gone very differently if he'd consistently did his job for a few decades, while Blank walked into the middle of a security patrol and told them "You're all dead," so suddenly, they were.
The thing was, there didn't seem to be any way to stop them showing up wherever and whenever they wanted. They couldn't pull their tricks on the Omegas, but that was no great consolation. There were still hundreds of potential targets they could affect. Janet couldn't come up with a single cogent explanation for why they didn't just go on a spree and do in everybody, then mop up the last seven as a matter of course.
"I might have one," Bernie told her at one of their desultory group meetings. "Maybe they're practicing psychological warfare because they can't actually use their big guns more often than they are."
"They act like they're all-powerful," she frowned.
"They do," he nodded. "And that's how you know they aren't. Nobody who has strength feels any great need to project it."
He glanced around the room after saying this, as though realizing that yet again he had opened his mouth without thinking, and said something he couldn't take back.
28 July
The Lillian-thing released him to his own devices in AAF-D, after what felt like a life-long harangue by Blank. He was less entertaining and less convincing than the real thing had ever been, and Sokolsky found it no great challenge to resist the monster's charms. They really did seem eager to turn him to their way of thinking legitimately — whether because they needed him, which he doubted, or because they thought it would be a fun game, which he suspected — so after weeks of unproductive monologue the fruiting archivist had waved him off, and he'd felt the weight of her presence leave him, and he'd been alone in the dematriculation chamber of AAF-D.
"See the sights," Blank had suggested before taking his leave. There was no point playing the intentions game with them, whether they knew he wouldn't if they said he should, which meant he should if they knew but shouldn't if they didn't because blah blah blah. The fact was they were some sort of fractured god, and he wasn't going to disentangle their motivations from their speech. He did want to see what else was in here, so he was going to, and that was that.
The refinery had been decimated, for starters. Meaning one-tenth of it had been completely destroyed — Sokolsky loved to use words for his own purposes, but refused to misuse them to suit the errors of other people. Eight-tenths had been warped, twisted, changed in countless ways by the energies of the paradox wavefront. One out of every ten spaces looked something like it once had. Nothing was completely unaffected; the tiles echoed with human voices saying "clap clap clap," or the ceiling was the red sky, or cavorting figures on the walls tried to pull him into their Boschian revels. But it was no more dangerous than walking through M&C had been, at this point in the annual cycle, since Blank and the rest used the place to store their various converts. He saw a few of them here and there: old Boswell, the Site's best dedicated antimemeticist, performing something that looked like a root canal on the corpse of Agent O; Zulfikar, repeating confidential code phrases into a pipe of bubbling liquid; an obnoxious man from I&T with a ridiculous jawline whose name Sokolsky had refused to ever internalize, sticking his arm into an open flame and screaming about the results. So, just good solid science, basically.
But the deeper he went, the less structured things became. An esoteric explosion, after all, was a messy thing.
He found the corridor where Ibanez had been punctured by her fleeing colleagues. The flesh was hopping on the hot floor tiles like a pan full of Mexican jumping beans, and he wondered if there were little creatures inside each scrap, reacting to the heat. He found — he was surprised even his practiced eye had spotted it — the hole where the spectral Wettle's bullet had settled after emptying McInnis' brain pan. He wasn't sure he wanted to see Okorie's remains, but that didn't matter because of what he saw first.
The suffering corpse of William Wettle had expanded long past the six eternal minutes of the breach. All around the hall where the Vigil had gathered, for the space of about a city block, the walls and floors and ceiling were covered with age-spotted pale pink skin. The hairs of his beard were now spaced metres apart each, not having grown at the same rate the flesh did. There was an apparently bottomless abyss at one point on Sokolsky's path, and it was stuffed full of blue fabric which could only have been the largest Replication Studies labcoat ever to exist. After a while, he kept on going out of sheer horrid fascination. He'd known what Amelia was doing, of course, but the sheer scope of her resources only now really hammered home. There was Wettle down here for miles.
And some of it lapped over itself. The parts she hadn't been able to cut up were still there, and the new Wettle grew over the old. Sedimentary layers of one massive, very dead man.
And here were his lips.
They stretched over the space the AcroAbate techs had once called the Cavern, hanging over the central walkway, bracketed by the massive tanks stretching down into darkness. Upper lip — he thought — flopped over one rail, lower over the other, folds of connecting flesh tumbling out of sight and rising up on every side. He'd only been able to access this space at all because a massive orifice — Sokolsky hoped to god it was an ear or nostril — had grown over the southwestern door.
He ducked under the fleshy ceiling and emerged onto the catwalk proper, between the corpse's jetliner-sized lips.
Now what??
And the Cavern echoed with a response.
It was a scream, but only the faintest memory of itself. The same scream these lips had been screaming for years. Even dead, Wettle was still suffering. A far more ignominious fate than had befallen any of the others.
"Why is that?" he mused aloud. "Why is it always so much worse for you?"
The moan continued, mournful, hopeless, dead.
"You've always been a sad sack." Sokolsky sat down on the catwalk, thinking. The gigantic chamber smelled like Wettle's breath, and underneath the skin there was a constant drip of internal fluids, but he didn't care. He was thinking.
In the middle of a dead man's sorrow, Daniil Sokolsky had a realization.
"And that," he said to the air, "is why you never the fuck give up."
The air begged him for release, and acting entirely on half-informed speculation, Sokolsky granted it.
4 August
The Administrator had, of course, surrendered Allan's old office to Dolly when she ascended to the appropriate post. They had in fact switched offices — she had protested for a few minutes, which was as long as anyone felt like arguing any particular point these days — so now the nominal head of their in-name-only organization was leading from a workspace of markedly reduced station.
Except it didn't matter, because they were never in their office.
The title of Administrator was a legend within the Foundation. Nobody had ever met the man, if it was a man. References to the existence of such a figure were fragmentary and confused. An urban legend within the conspiracy. But the Overseer who had contacted them — they were all still trying to pretend they didn't know who it was, that obvious last man standing — had bestowed the position upon Nimkii, and while they couldn't have cared less about letting the ghosts of the Council down, there was a symbolic weight to the words which they were glad to shoulder.
If there had been an Administrator before, he had made only a very poor use of that power.
Existing in the shadows, living in rumour, in whispers, did much to deepen one's mystery but nothing obvious to advance the greater project. The new Administrator therefore walked among their people as often as possible, going where they were needed and where they weren't with equal attentiveness, even taking jaunts across the haunted halls to visit the neighbours, who were usually accommodating if only rarely compliant.
They toured the smoky drug dens of Health and Pathology, and had a long conversation with Billie Forsythe about whether all the needle marks on her whip-thin arms said anything troubling about the future of healthcare at the Site. She'd suggested she could stop coming when called, and the Administrator had had the tact to leave it at that.
They visited Amelia's little commune of dissenters, who were busy collecting tools and equipment for their de facto Chief's endless repair efforts. She had declared, point blank, that the only reason she was operating outside the fold was that she didn't trust the self-appointed Puppet Master cabal. The Administrator found it difficult to argue this point; having had to fight them into accepting the memory clawback twice already, the recalcitrance of that reclusive group had become a serious sticking point.
They watched as Sokolsky, covered in bruises and limping, led scrounging parties deep into the most compromised sectors of the Site and returned a little more bruised, carts piled high with valuable supplies, and supporters unscathed. When asked, the memeticist would merely mutter that business had been transacted, and the Administrator need not worry. It was the closest to annoyed they had ever seen the man.
They didn't spend long with Polly Mataxas. The woman was ensconced in about a hundred overlapping ritual circles, genuflecting occultists praying in tongues at the centres of most of them, contorted corpses with terrified expressions and staring eyes that darted to and fro in response to movement in others, and new ones being chalked on the bare bedrock where T&T had merely been scoured away and not permanently set aflame. She had spoken in someone else's voice about burdens, how death did not always relieve them, how there was work yet to be done, and it ought to be done well, and that the dead would know if it wasn't, and that was enough of that. The Administrator was not a superstitious person — it was not superstition to believe in demonstrably real things — but they were a busy one, and ominous portent had few functions beyond the frightening.
There was little time in their schedule for fear. They had deliberately crafted it so.
But they left a few moments every day, when they ducked into their office, only humble in comparison to Allan's — they had never stopped thinking of it as Allan's — and sat at their desk, Dolly's desk, their old desk, and put their head down and sobbed. Just enough to get the mucous loose. Just enough to feel that something, anything, had been released.
But this time, as soon as they sat down, there came a knock at the door.
"Come in," they said, and Markey did. He was carrying a bottle of wine; it looked cheap, which maybe didn't say anything about the state of their stores, since Markey was not a discriminating drunk. He was also carrying two glasses. The Administrator imagined he must have knocked with his head, which did say something about where the bottle's missing three quarters had gone.
"Want some company?" the containment specialist asked, already heading for a chair. The Administrator nodded; it was easier to lie with body language than words. Markey sat down, pulled the cork, and started pouring.
"Does the alcohol help?" the Administrator asked, as Markey pushed a glass towards them.
The man shrugged, tossing his own glass back with abandon. "Depends on what you mean."
The Administrator examined the contents of their own glass. The wine was red, but then, of course it was. "Does it help with the pain? Or your duties?"
"No," said Markey, already pouring himself another. "And no. But it does knock me out occasionally, so there's that."
The wine did smell… well, it smelled like wine. The Administrator allowed themself a sip. They were really just a glorified morale officer, after all. And they had a very high tolerance. "I'm surprised to hear you think you can do your job shit-faced."
Markey coughed as the wine took an unexpected detour past his gullet. "I'm surprised you know that word."
The Administrator smiled. "Taking people off their guard was one of the first tricks I learned as a lawyer. Allan was better at it, though."
"Yeah. He was a good one." Markey wiped his mouth. "But I'm not shit-faced. If I was, well. It wouldn't make that much of a difference."
"Oh?"
"I don't do anything, boss."
The Administrator took another sip, watching Markey carefully. His eyes were glazed, but there was fierceness swimming in back.
"I mean it. I'm useless. I've got, I don't know. Ngo calls it decision paralysis, but it's worse than that. I don't do anything. You ask me how to kill something, I can help. You ask me to put something together? Less than useless. Amelia's doing it all for me. I can't think of a single god damn thing."
"I see." The Administrator swirled their glass. "When did this inability begin, would you say?"
Markey blinked. "It's been happening this whole time. Since the shit first hit."
"Precisely?"
"What do you mean, precisely?"
"Has this difficulty been plaguing you since—"
Markey waved the rest of the sentence off angrily. "It's not that. I don't subscribe to that claptrap. This is a problem with me. It's not some whatever stuck to my brain thanks to sitting too near an explosion. Scientology bullshit."
The Administrator suppressed a smile. "You're saying you can't think of a way out of our dilemma."
"I am saying that. I am also saying I can't think of jack shit else."
"Why would you feel that is your responsibility?"
Markey stared at him.
"We're all working together. No single person—"
"I'm a containment specialist. And the only thing I can hold is my liquor."
"This is a challenge, then. Something for you to work on."
Markey laughed. Angrily. "You don't think I've got more serious problems to deal with?"
The Administrator spread their hands. "If Technician Torosyan is already dealing with them, what can it hurt?"
The old tech looked startled, then stared blearily at the bottom of the bottle where it sat on the desk. "I don't know how you can be so damn reasonable," he muttered. "Even here."
The Administrator finished their glass, and stood up. "That's my challenge," they said. And extended a hand.
It was easy for them to pull Markey up.
It was a struggle for the man to reach out in the first place.
Microcosm.
19 August
Was it better or worse? He simply didn't know.
Romolo objectively did not want to see the thing walking around in his uncle's body. His mind had conjured up a vivid enough apparition for self-torturing purposes, and as a bonus, it actually acted like the real man sometimes. And everywhere his predecessor's possessor walked, things went off-kilter and failed. That was everything Romolo feared now. He couldn't get far enough away.
And yet…
And yet he'd heard Ana's account of meeting the old man in the manufactory. There had been something to it. Something screaming into the void, trying to escape. If there was any seed of the real Noè Nascimbeni in there, shouldn't it want to seek him out? Talk to him? Find the strength to find itself with the help of its last surviving family?
The question nagged at him. Something unresolved. The dead should stay quiet, he felt. Their time had come and gone. Memories were meant to be cherished, not tarnished. What slept was meant to lie, not walk around and burn.
When the main water tank started giving off pressure warnings, he should have ignored them. Or sent an agent. Or one of his handful of still-active techs. But he didn't.
He walked into the silo where the tank was kept. It towered over him, gleaming like nothing else did in the facility. They hadn't ever bothered to scrub it matte, because it was simply too high up on its piles for the reflection to do any harm. 8956 liked to crawl across its surface; sometimes Romolo watched. Sometimes he talked to it.
His uncle's remains were talking to it now.
"You ought to forget him," the familiar voice chided. "He's not coming back. At least, not for long." In the reflection, the creature's bleeding maw twisted into a sneer. It hissed. 001-3 hissed back. "No point raging. What's done is done."
"Funny thing for a corpse to say." The venom in Romolo's voice was encouraging, though it burned a little on the way out. Or maybe that was the rising bile.
The not-Nascimbeni turned to smile at him. "The curator arrives. Come to check on your museum pieces."
"This is life-supporting equipment. I don't think even you want everyone in this Site to die."
"Oh?" 001-3 pushed back its damaged hat, and scratched at its furrowed forehead. A lot of it, an awful lot, came loose in gobbets and splinters. It stopped when its hands were solid red. "That's a novel theory. What's it based on?"
Romolo imagined his stomach was an iron cistern, his throat a sealed pipe. He spoke softly, with only the air already in his lungs. "You're all just playing. You only kill when you think it's fun, or funny, or whatever your sick motivation is. Your lot could have blown us all sky-high already, or chipped us away to nothing. But you don't. This is your own personal torture chamber." He hadn't realized he thought most of that before he said it.
001-3 nodded. "Interesting interpretation." Above them, 8956 extruded himself from the metal and swiped uselessly at them with its long talons.
"So now what? You want to tell me a sob story about how much it sucks to be stuck in a body you stole from somebody you murdered?" Romolo reached down to his belt, and found a wrench. That would do. He clenched his fist over it. "I'm not playing. You're not him." He pointed up at 8956. "No more than that is Philip Deering."
"Dougall knew better," the thing screeched at him, and Romolo dropped the wrench in surprise. It clanged to the ground, and the clanging echoed.
001-3 raised one hand, and made an encouraging gesture. "Well, come on then. If I'm not him, show me. Show me that you don't have questions. That you don't need closure."
Romolo wanted to bend and pick up the wrench, but he didn't. "You'll just blow the water tank, and drown me." He shook his head. "No thanks."
001-3 shook its own head in mockery. "You know full well I can't do that. There's not enough water left to blow the seals. You've been keeping that from the others, haven't you?"
Romolo froze.
"So, come on." 001-3 stretched out its hands, his uncle's working hands, like a martyr for the cross. "Dismantle something, Romo. Take me apart. Grow past your programming."
"My what?"
The other man — it isn't a man — chuckled darkly. "You don't know already? Then I guess you never will."
"He's always been like this." Before Romolo could turn, something lifted him off his feet. The voice — her voice — kept talking. "Has to talk himself into things, and he's just not convincing enough. We could find a better guinea pig."
"No," 001-3 said, "that makes him perfect. We don't want to break any of the more important ones. I suppose we could go find Markey, but…"
"…but this one feels right," the other laughed. He knew that laugh, through the extra shading of perversion. "I agree."
And then whatever had him in its grip spun him around, and he was looking down at the living body of Udo Okorie again. Her arms were raised, and sparkling granules extended from her fingertips toward him.
"Please," he said.
She sneered. "You'll have to be more specific."
"Please don't do this."
001-3 walked into view beneath his feet. "Why not?"
Romolo gestured at the machinery.
The others both laughed at him. "If they want to drink," -4 chuckled, "they can lead themselves to water."
"You should thank us for this," -3 added. "You and I both know there's only one way to make people appreciate what they've got."
And then the force pushed him up, and back, and back, and then he struck the water tank with a horrible clang and crunch, and then something sharp crept up one side of his face from the metal, then the other, and the claws gouged into his cheeks, and he screamed, and his uncle laughed, and his wife laughed, and his friend said "Dougall would have known better," and then the claws pushed through Romolo's skull, and he was falling backward into a wash of what he could only hope was his own blood.
Alis had taken to washing her face every few hours. It did seem to settle her nerves, though whether that was an intrinsic property of water, an evolved human response, or the result of watching too many movies, she did not know. The water was greyish-pink thanks to the occlusion formula, slimy to drink and smelling faintly of cardboard…
Except now, when she turned the tap, it was a very dark pink indeed.
Very nearly a true red.
And it didn't smell like cardboard anymore.
The footage was black and white, and grainy — the product of yet another ridiculous local anomaly — but the picture was still clear enough, the sound only a little flat and muted.
In the instant before Ambrogi disappeared into the tank, something shifted on Nascimbeni's ruined face. He gasped. Tears ran from both eyes — water from the right, blood from the left — and he cried out: "Romolo?!"
At the same moment, Okorie let the dust fall from where it hung in the air, and turned the palms of her killing hands toward her empty eye sockets, and gasped, "No!"
And then they both turned to each other, he a Renaissance painting of sheer horror, she a mortified danse macabre, and he rushed to the tank, pounding on the metal and screaming obscenities, and she fled the room with a sound somewhere between weeping and the clattering of bones.
Eventually Nascimbeni looked up at the camera, snarled, and the feed dissolved into static.
"They're still in there," Mukami whispered.
Del Olmo shook his head emphatically. "They can't be."
"They are." Placeholder was staring at the table. "Parts of them, anyway."
"It's a trick." Del Olmo flicked off the viewer. He wished he could smash it, but resources were too scarce for cathartic percussion these days. The Site's single surviving drum kit had a two month-waitlist. "It's something they're doing to demoralize us."
"It's working," said Markey. "I don't care anymore. I don't care about any of this. I just want to go home."
"This is our home," Janet stated firmly.
Markey met her glare with dead eyes. "This is our hell. You made the damn joke first."
Dolly stared at each of them, and one by one they turned to stare back at her.
"What do we do about it?" Bradbury asked. She sounded like she wanted to care, but didn't.
Dolly stared at the Administrator. They stared back at her.
"How is this going to affect the next breach?" Zlatá wanted to know.
Dolly and the Administrator glanced at Placeholder. He shook his head. He had no idea.
"He was my best friend," Markey whispered.
Nobody said anything for a few seconds.
Then "What do we do about it?" Bradbury repeated.
"We kill the bastards," Janet snapped.
"No."
They all stared at Mukami.
"I kill the bastards."
8 September
Parsimony ruled the day.
Zlatá was already involved, so it was his job to take Ambrogi's place. He only had to press a few buttons, and not think too hard about what those buttons did.
Placeholder suggested he supply the timings again this year. "We need to see the effect a replacement has," he reasoned. "We can't change two things from last year's breach."
But two things were changed nevertheless.
Zlatá pressed the button that killed AAF-A, and Delfina Ibanez hauled the group, sans Wettle and McInnis, to the concentration cell far ahead of the breeze which had killed her.
They didn't even bother sending anyone to the airlock this time.
They couldn't afford to lose any more than they already had, and would.
Alis walked out of the laboratory, knuckles aching. Ngo was there, waiting. But she was already shaking her head.
"Why not?" They sparred in the gym every day at this hour. Kicked the shit out of each other, essentially, though Ngo was obviously holding back. It helped. It helped Alis, anyway, and she was sure that was why the other woman did it.
"Bigger fish," the psychiatrist said, and then the ceiling fell in.
A tile struck Alis' shoulder, and something came loose from the pipe cluster concealed above, and in an instant there was a red rake swiping out at her. Then she hit the tiles, and the psychiatrist was throwing her down the hall and racing toward her in a single fluid motion. "Come on!"
Liquid glass was pouring out of the pipes now, splattering the floor and rising up into gleaming sculptures of dolphins and manatees frolicking in a crystalline surf. One appeared in front of them as they ran, and Ngo practically inverted herself, putting her foot through the translucent manta ray's chest and shattering it just as a sawtoothed spectre appeared in its lustre. She was back on her feet in an instant.
Definitely holding back.
9 September
"Dead," said Clio. "Dead dead dead dead dead. Dead. Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead. Dead."
Placeholder had started counting on his fingers after the first few deads. "So," he said to the stunned boardroom. "Definitely worse than last year."
And then he laughed until he couldn't breathe, and they left him unconscious on the scuffed wood.
Noor didn't know why he was running until he saw the blood on his hands.
And then he remembered.
"It was just a joke," Wirth had sobbed. "It didn't mean anything!" His nose was gushing red, and his eyes were wild. "Nothing means anything!"
Janet lay beneath her wheelchair. It wasn't a very good fort, but it was better than being in the open. She squeezed off a few more shots, then cocked her head to listen.
Yancy's footfalls were heavy. Like Stewart's. She could track him as he barreled away back down the hall, around the far corner. He was fleeing.
"What was his beef?" someone drawled, someone wearing untied sneakers and track pants. Then that someone flopped down in Janet's chair, and it took all her self-control not to point her service weapon at the seat and pull the trigger again.
Stewart stared at the man incredulously. The man burbled something like a laugh, then went limp in his hands. He dropped the corpse to the tiles, where it landed badly and broke just a little bit more.
"Not again," he whispered, and it didn't make him feel a lot better when he looked down and saw the knife sticking out of his ribs.
The reprieve this time had lasted only a matter of hours.
In the first variant, Blank and Lillihammer had needed to re-apply the brainwashing to get their thralls back. In the second, the rolling disharmony and wild misconceptions which followed in train behind Nascimbeni and Okorie had been somewhat localized.
This new effect was everywhere, immediately. And apparently had been for years.
They were down to just a few hundred people now, and most of them were at each others' throats. Though nobody had seen her since the breach, it was all too obvious who was to blame.
She'd always been the angry one.
23 September
Bradbury fell to the floor, blood gushing from her split cheek and broken teeth, and Eileen picked up the computer tower.
"Nnn," the silver-haired woman moaned, raising a hand in protest, and Eileen caved her skull in.
24 September
Bernie recited an impassioned obituary that made everyone feel much, much worse. Reuben didn't listen to it. He was building a ship in a bottle, having found an unused kit in Harry's old quarters, and anyway he'd declined the chance to deliver the eulogy himself.
No doubt she'd give him hell for it when she came back next year, or the next.
He wasn't in any hurry.
2 October
It had taken weeks of overtures for Alis to get them all in one room together. By now the Administrator and Director had the speech down to a science, so only Radcliffe reacted with suspicion when informed of the memory issue.
"Why don't you people just fake it?" Gwilherm asked.
"Fake it?" Dolly repeated.
"Pretend you know what's going on. That way you don't risk me shooting you if you're not super convincing."
"Wouldn't you be more likely to shoot if you figured out you were being lied to?" the Administrator asked her.
She considered. "I suppose you're right," she acknowledged. "Man, you're almost making it sound like I'm the problem."
2027
16 January
On the monitor, the subject was writhing. He'd succeeded in loosening his restraints enough to fall off his chair, but not enough to get his hands free. He was shouting something, and Del Olmo was glad the audio was off. It was still being recorded, of course, and no doubt Ngo would be subjecting herself to it later. To learn more. She was always trying to understand people better.
He had found understanding himself now too daunting a task to take on anything more ambitious.
"Why don't we just let him do it?" He'd been thinking it, and now here he was saying it out loud. It was always like that. He didn't know why.
Ngo frowned. "Because if suicide were allowed, we'd lose half the Site's population in a day?"
"And they'd come right back. So…?"
She turned to face him. On the camera, the subject was trying to curl up enough to take a bite out of his straitjacket. "I don't know where people are getting that from. Only the most contingent deaths are reversed. Virtually everybody who died on the 8th and 9th, for example, is still dead. We've never seen Karen come back."
"Du, though. And Veiksaar." And the subject, of course.
"And they've been traumatized," she sighed. "Trauma they can't express, even understand, but it's there. Eileen is the best example, actually. She's died three times, and you can tell. She has persistent phantom pain in the eye they removed back in '22, as well as throat blockages where she cut her own throat, gastrointestinal distress from when 8956 manifested on her chest, and one other problem I don't even want to talk about. You saw the end result when she caved Melissa's head in. Even if death isn't always permanent, it still sort of… wears people out."
Elsewhere in the facility, Veiksaar was wearing a straitjacket just like the present subject. Nobody was monitoring her, because she was effectively comatose.
"Reuben says it doesn't matter," Del Olmo said.
Ngo winced. "Dr. Wirth's perspective on these matters is… somewhat skewed. His psychology—"
Del Olmo raised a hand. "Let's talk about that, actually. You haven't done any real psychoanalysis on any of us."
"Because none of you will agree to be seen."
"Sure," he acknowledged, "but you're still a professional. And you did workups on most of us prior to the first breach, or else Anoki did." He twitched slightly. "What would you say has changed, and why?"
She frowned. "I don't like speculating. It's not good science. But with the caveat that this should stay between you and me…"
"Of course."
"…I would say… hmm." She started counting on her fingers. "Chief Gwilherm has become mentally inflexible, Chief Mukami has a psychological speech block, Agent Radcliffe has all the classic symptoms of paranoia, Chief Ambrogi had an almost pathological inability to deconstruct preexisting assumptions, Specialist Markey is incapable of engaging in constructive thought or action, Dr. Wirth is incapable of generating meaning or applying value to meaning he encounters, and you, Bernabé, have lost all perspective on what is and is not appropriate to share, and with whom."
Del Olmo blinked. "I… why did you single the seven of us out?"
Ngo looked stricken. "I thought that was what you were asking for."
"I thought you'd take 'most of us' to mean 'most of the people still alive'. Is there something special about our group particularly?"
Her lips drew thin. "Frankly, yes. Everyone else displays either a worsening of pre-existing symptoms, or symptoms related to the present situation, or effects we know to be promulgated by the 001 set. Acting out Lillihammer's values, acting on false ideals implanted by Blank, imbalances, misconceptions, conflicts. Your group displays behaviours inconsistent with all of that."
"But, okay. You said Stewart is paranoid. Couldn't that just be Blank making him that way? And what you describe as my problem," a problem he'd been wrestling with every day since the first breach, and it was only getting worse, "couldn't that just be Lillian working on me? Wouldn't Reuben's case be best described as an imbalance? And back to Stewart, weren't his violent outbreaks really just rooted in basic misconceptions, or drummed-up oppositions?"
Ngo shook her head. "I have reams of data on 001-1 and -2 effects, and the others have only just started from our perspective, which is what I based my analysis on. The psychopathology doesn't match. Whatever is going on with you folk, it's unique."
Del Olmo considered this for a moment.
"I would appreciate it," she said, "if you would keep this to yourself."
"Of course," he nodded.
On the monitor, Koda Anoki cracked his head open on the table leg.
17 January
David walked out of the broadcasting booth, fuming.
He could only assume the jackboots would be on their way already.
Through the glass, he could see Bernie engaged in animated discussion with a caller. No doubt picking the memeticist's brain about his peculiar psychology, or David's, or Janet's.
He hadn't wanted to talk about any of it, but it had been the long and clinical discursion on precisely what had been wrong with David's dead best friend that had made him walk out.
He was beginning to think that maybe he needed to outline provisional containment procedures for the Puppet Masters.
He'd leave his own for last.
1 February
Ngo looked troubled. Most of the time she tried to hide it, but occasionally something was awful enough to crack the veneer. This was one such awful thing.
Del Olmo nodded. "That's my interpretation as well."
She gently pushed the report away from her on the desk, as though that might distance her from the implications as well. "What on Earth do we even do about it?"
He shrugged. "Like most of this nonsense, I think we just… record, and move on. We'll tell Janet and Ana, and they'll deal with it case-by-case where necessary."
The report was only data. It had been Ngo's expert interpretation which confirmed Del Olmo's fears, made it something more. An unexploded bombshell.
Dolly Ferber had acquired a fascination with the artistic works of the Group of Seven, and had filled the Director's office with as many examples as she could find in the rest of the Site. Agent Fabre had picked up a flair for computer programming which had no apparent connection to his interests, training, or duties. Dr. Kerimow had suffered from the intrusive and inexplicable belief that Harold Blank was his friend, which the latter had fatally disabused him of. Randy Gershwin now fervently despised Uno, without prompting — no copy of the card game could be found at the facility.
"That's how she does it, then," he sighed. "She's slapping parts of herself over them. She's not possessing anyone, she's plugging and playing with personality."
"And something lingers after," Ngo finished.
He nodded.
"Meaning everyone who's ever been affected by her, the people we've cleared for duty…"
"…are at least partially Lillian Lillihammer, cognitively. Yes."
She blew out a breath, then laughed. "You know why it hurts when you put your hand on a hot stove element?"
He nodded.
"You think that's what the world is trying to tell us right now?" Then she shook her head vigorously. "Ignore me. Long day. Just thinking out loud." Then she paused, and gave him a grim look. "Bernie. Do not repeat that."
He made it an exercise.
He made it a whole week this time.
10 March
She didn't hear him come in. Her heart was suddenly beating far too fast. That, on its own, tipped her off.
"You're different," said the old man, and Amelia took a deep breath before turning to face him. "I'm different, too."
They were standing in AAF-C, in the same chamber of catwalks and tanks where she had first awoken in this rotten new hell. He was approaching her from the exit. She could only flee deeper from here, farther from safety, unless she wanted to chance a physical altercation.
After what had happened to Ambrogi — most of which they could only speculate on — this was not an appealing option.
"Different how?" She'd heard enough about the others' encounters with the 001 set to know that as long as you kept them talking, they would keep you alive.
"I only remember one me." Nascimbeni tapped his vest, and what had to be most of his intestines slopped out. He stepped on them as he advanced on the catwalk, and they burst and split to drip through the grating to the distant floor in great gooey globs. "It's not like that for the others. They have glimpses of more. I want more. It's so lonely in here." And he pulled his cap down over his eyes.
A wild scheme involving calisthenics and the various railings and support beams in the room flashed before her, too embarrassed with itself to linger long. Like that kid in the worst Jurassic Park movie. Only Amelia wasn't young anymore, and anyway she was half-starved. "Okay," she said. "That's you. Now tell me why I'm special."
Nascimbeni shook his head, and she saw that a flap of the skin over his cheeks was only kept attached by the stickiness of the gristle beneath when it separated with the motion. He looked like he might split in half or simply atomize at any moment. "I don't know," he said. "But I can feel it. You're the odd one out. You don't belong to either set."
This was, of course, quite true. Every September 8, Amelia remembered the old order of events, just like most of the Site's population. But she also acquired a new string of memories, just like the seven (six? Zlatá was tight-lipped on the subject) special chosen. She hadn't told anyone that. She wasn't about to tell this monster. "Can you blame me? Half of them are aggressively incompetent, and the other half are useless."
Nascimbeni laughed, then spat over the rail. His left molars went with the blood. "I can feel your heart racing. The blood pounding. You're not protected like the rest."
"I'm pretty good at self-regulating." She started walking backward, minding her step. It wouldn't do to stumble. She was prey being stalked. "I've been manipulated before."
The monster snorted, like a ravening bull. A bloody mist came out of one nostril, and he stuck a finger up there and swizzled. She heard something crack. "I think I know something you don't know, on that score. I'll swap it for your secret."
She responded with the working man's salute.
Now he cracked his knuckles. The popping sound was almost as sickening as the sight of his left lower eyelid dropping away from the sclera. "You're so careful on your feet, Amelia."
In an instant, she lost her balance. She was on her hands and knees against the catwalk, nearly vomiting.
"And you think so clearly."
She knew what he was doing, but it didn't matter. She thought of Phil. She thought of Dougall. She even thought of Nils. She thought of the beavers and their dam, she thought of balloons, she thought of Insurgents with their guns drawn and then Phil again, saving her. She thought of pulling him close and telling him he wasn't a monster, and seeing him believe that she believed it. She thought of the bright amber pseudopod flipping its script to peer at her, and imagined its bubbling surface suddenly splitting into a toothy anguilliform grin. She thought of battling a demon, and winning.
She thought of battling a demon, and winning.
The catwalk was made up of several parts. The central span was higher at the middle, and serviced by stairs at the north and south ends. There were more stairs running perpendicular at each vat, providing access. Nascimbeni was approaching down the central span, and Amelia was crouched at the base of the north steps.
She reached for her belt, ignoring the scream of protest from her wrenched muscles.
"You're different," Nascimbeni was saying. He was approaching in no great hurry. He owned the field, and knew it. He was also limping; beneath the soaked-through jean sleeve and shredded workboot, his left foot must have been only tenuously attached. "So it probably doesn't help anyone if you die. But if you're not going to tell me why you're different, you're not much use to me alive."
"I'm different," she grunted as she suddenly lunged forward, "because the rest of you keep taking the easy way out!"
She turned the wrench rapidly, over and over, faster than she'd ever done before, and the bolt came free, and the catwalk lurched.
It wouldn't have been possible under normal circumstances, but the breach had thrown everything around in here, more than once, and there'd never been any reason to repair it. She'd seen her chance, and taken it, and her instincts hadn't been wrong. Nascimbeni was thrown to one side, then the other as the metal rocked back and forth, each motion working the remaining bolts free, metal fatigue doing the rest of the work, and finally he was flung over backward to land on his stomach with a horrible splat. Amelia quickly ratcheted the bolt up again — it resisted her, and she was only able to get it halfway resecured — then crawled onto the upper level and made her way slowly across.
He rolled over, groaning, and stared up at her. His hat had fallen off, and so had the upper half of his skull. She could see his brains. They were split, too.
He was whispering.
Beside her, the tank sprung a leak. It wasn't sand this time. At some point the alchemy had reversed itself; she was instantly drenched with water.
She blinked.
Except she hadn't blinked. She'd simply blacked out. She was soaked through to the bone now, and sliding off the catwalk.
She blinked.
She was hanging by her legs, and the catwalk was tilting crazily. He was interrupting her brain. He was making her black out.
She pinched her thigh, and pulled herself back up.
"You aren't half the technician he was," Nascimbeni wheezed.
"Who?" She kept pinching her thigh. There was something wrong with the blood flow. Her hands were cold. They were always cold, but now they were nearly numb.
"Me," the monster laughed wetly. It was floating, surrounded by a swirling pool of reddening water. In a few seconds it would be able to reach the grating. "I built this place, you know. And I was a hero."
"Yeah," she said. He doesn't know about Phil. She tried to keep focus on the thought, which might in fact have been a revelation. But it was a struggle even to stay awake, and at the same time she knew she was on the edge of a heart attack. "You were. a hero. And then you died, and I fucking replaced you."
His brown eyes widened, and she blacked out, and a horrible clanging sound brought her back in the space of a heartbeat. Nascimbeni slammed his hands into the grate again, pulling himself over to the lower steps, which were already swamped. She mashed at his fingers, and he laughed.
The catwalk was floating. But soon, it would sink. She hauled herself to her feet, muscles screaming, and made herself move. Keep moving. Keep going.
Through the hall. Through the office. Through the station. Tumbling, crack-kneed, onto the tracks. The green smoke and bones were gone, but the sheen on the walls remained. It had turned yellow, and it stank.
Nascimbeni slammed down beside her, and she scrabbled away. He didn't advance, merely stood there a moment, staring at her. "You really are resilient," he said, clapping his hat back onto his head with a wet slap. "Are you sure you're not one of them?"
"I'm not one of you," she spat. "That's for sure."
"Well." He cracked his neck; a bone popped out on the left, and blood trickled under his collar. "Not yet, anyway. We'll see what happens in the breach."
And a thin trickle of sand bounced off the brim of his stained hat, falling past his eyes like a curtain of water.
He looked up.
There was a sudden blur of red/white, and Nascimbeni's left side imploded from the neck down. The albatross pulled back, claws tight on the platform edge, and guzzled down half of his collarbone with a wet gulping noise. Its throat bobbed up and down, and it cackled, and then it leaned over the edge again and vomited on him. A rush, a torrent of sand poured into his mouth, and he coughed up blood, then coughed no more as his lungs filled with silicon, and it rushed out of the ragged seams where the girder had perforated his organs and ripped up his clothing, and it abraded his exposed entrails to filthy ruin, and he fell to the tracks, and the sand kept coming, and then the bones, and they bounced off his head and chest, and the skin peeled back, and he screamed, and there were more bones, more than could possibly have fit inside the bird's swelling chest, and the last few bones looked red and cracked and Amelia felt a pang in her chest when she saw them, and then the sand covered it all up, and Nascimbeni was scrambling up the growing pile of sand, his chest ballooning out, and he reached for the albatross with gnarled fingers—
—and the pile of sand erupted, throwing him back onto the tracks, and Amelia heard his spine crack, and the sand fell on him like an attacker, and he attacked it with a mad thrashing. His nails scraped off the sand, and Amelia saw that the bones had knit into place beneath it, beneath the skin of what could only be a homunculus of her own body. And the homunculus pressed its lips to his, and breathed, and even in the horrible haze she could see the more horrible result as his eyes bugged out, then burst, and a rush of sand poured out of the sockets while his body split all over, and he simply fell apart in a wash of blood and dust.
On the station platform, the last few grains of sand fell from the albatross' beak. It ruffled its feathers, called to her once in its shrill voice, then turned and toddled back the way they'd come.
"Thanks," she said. She felt more sure of it, this time.
The homunculus was going the other way, apparently. She didn't try to stop it.
She only had to knock once for the airlock to open. Alis was waiting on the other side.
It was a much more welcome sight than Dougall had been, though she chose not to say as much.
"What happened?" the other woman asked as she put Amelia's arm around her shoulder.
"An eye for an eye," she grunted. "Hand for a hand, in this case."
19 July
It was all bullshit, he'd decided.
Stewart was as big as most of the others put together. He could take all the others apart, even if Janet had still had the use of her legs. They were afraid of him, so they'd contrived this nonsense.
He'd been framed.
He didn't know if it was something he'd eaten, or something in his drink. After all, they controlled all that. And the hydroponics people were cagey as fuck about what went into the food; acted like it was a state secret, classified, Director's eyes only. For all he knew, this was just one big social experiment. He had half a mind not to do his duty when the Eighth rolled around again, except that his duty was already moot. He still engaged in that tired radio play every year, but it didn't matter; last time Lillihammer had recited a racy poem at him while he sent the instructions.
Everything was a joke. To her, to the others, to everybody but him. The only one who wasn't in on it.
"Widen your stance," she barked, and before he really understood what he was hearing, he did as he was told. Even snapped off a single shot, which missed the target, but it was a nearer thing than usual. This damn red haze…
…he turned around.
She looked awful. No visible wounds, like the others had, but this was somehow even worse. Her flesh wouldn't stay put. It wobbled in the recycled air. It sloshed when she moved. Her cheeks hung low, and her eyelids drooped, and her chest was like a pair of overfilled balloons secured to her sternum at the neck. When she spoke — "Pleased to see me?" — he could barely hear it over the sound of meat slapping meat.
He brought the weapon up—
—and it was in her hand, then in pieces, then scattered all over the floor. Delfina Ibanez was more than capable of taking all seven of them apart, even combined. Field-stripping a Glock she could do with her eyes closed. "I won't take that as a 'no'. Just a reflex action. Because we're friends."
Stewart tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go but the firing booth. "We were more than friends," he said.
She hopped up and down. "Is that an invitation?"
He turned back to the range, and vomited onto it.
Her laughter brought him back to himself. "You think this is bad? Ask Harry what's in your BLTs."
He vomited again, and his head filled with a red haze entirely independent of the one surrounding them.
She patted him on the flank. "You were always so sensitive. Gotta be rough for you."
He thrashed against her, kneeing her in — he didn't want to think about it — and scrambling for the door. It was closed, and locked, and he fled senselessly into the far corner. Fell to the floor, put his arms up around his face for protection. Watched her approach; her boots were solid but her feet flapped loosely within them, and she stood on her ankles at awfully wrong angles, and it was more like she sloughed than walked the intervening space. Beneath the uniform, something gave. A red stain appeared on either side of her tumbling stomach. "Stewie," she cooed. "I just wanted to make sure you're doing alright. I know all this conflict is bad for your nerves."
"My nerves," he whimpered.
She nodded, and the upper lid of her right eye caught over the lower lashes, and stayed shut. "It's fun playing all these white knights and heroes off each other, but I know you're already off-kilter by default. I'm just stopping by to ask if you'd be interested in a truce."
He stared at her. "Truce."
She smiled. Her smile had always been disconcertingly wide, past the edges of her gums and teeth. Now it was like a rift opening up in the skin; he could see her rear molars in side profile. "I'll stop stirring up trouble for a while. I'll even get those bastards up top off your back, given them someone else to pick on, if you do me a teensy, tiny little favour."
"Favour."
She rolled her eyes. The only visible one stayed rolled, and she watched him with just the whites. "Somebody hurt a friend of mine." She affected a pout as the iris rolled slowly back down to fixate on him again. "I'd like you to hurt her for me."
He clenched up tighter. "I don't want to hurt anybody."
"Sure you don't," she nodded. "But this woman, she isn't your friend either. She's plotting. They're using her. Have been from the start. You know who I'm talking about." The worst thing was, he did know. "She thinks she's better than you. Keeps apart. Works in secret. You know anybody like that?"
He didn't want to answer, but the words came out anyway. "Amelia."
"Amelia," Delfina repeated. "She's working against you. She's never going to stop working against you."
"I'm not going to kill her," he groaned. "I… I won't kill her."
Both eyes widened, the lazy lid snapping up like a Venetian blind. "Oh, I don't want her dead. I just want to remind her whose side she's supposed to be on."
8 September
Alis waited until the last minute, then sighed. "Give me the password," she said to the empty air.
Amelia had offered to do the deed this year. Said she'd been looking forward to the break.
Alis would have been happier facing the newest set of fireworks than reducing her lost love to semantic invisibility, then leaving him to die yet again.
But needs must.
Reuben was beginning to resent Ngo's psychoanalysis.
He'd decided that this year, he wasn't going to bother running past his resurrected staff members and sparing them their pulpy torment. He was simply going to stay in his quarters with a good book; he'd found a few video game instruction manuals he thought might make suitably pointless reading, since he didn't like video games and there were very few systems set up that he could access. But he'd made the mistake of stopping to make small talk with the psychologist on his way there, and as she always did, she found out. Wheedled it out of him without appearing to even try. And when the secret was there in the open, she punctured it precisely with an impressive display of logic: "If nothing matters, isn't going through the motions just as valid an option as not? Isn't intentionally avoiding that display of nihilism actually a way of assigning value to the thing you're deciding not to do?"
So, fine. He was on his way to A&R, on schedule. He would push the button, again. He couldn't even bring himself to argue. It was perversely pleasurable being proven wrong with his own philosophy…
Something moved at the edge of his perception. He chose not to react to it. But now that felt wrong, too. By making a choice, wasn't he—
He screamed, and fell to the floor. It was suddenly slick with his blood. He screamed again. It definitely meant something.
"Dougall," 8956 hissed at him as he shook violently on the boards, grasping at the seeping wounds. "It means Dougall."
Nhung heard the scream, and started running immediately.
She was one of the fastest runners at the Site, and easily the most nimble. She found Wirth in a matter of seconds, knew what had happened immediately, and had a call in to Billie before her conscious mind had even found the appropriate protocols. The doctor said something morose, and Nhung said something encouraging from a mental library of stock phrases, and then Wirth was grasping at her skirt and moaning.
"What?" She knelt down in front of him. "What is it?"
He let go of her skirt, and pointed down the hall. Towards A&R.
She could barely make out his finger. The blurring and haze were now that bad.
She nodded. "Okay. Hang in there."
And she left him, potentially to die, as she took up his burden to kill.
She heard Zlatá's time signal for Wirth as she reached the shuttered doors. Lost another few seconds convincing Mukami to lift the shutter. Had to vault over the papier-mâché monster without looking at it, because she knew if she looked at it she would probably lose her mind, and then clamber up onto one of the Chair's L-shaped desks to survey the damage.
The archivists were already all gone. Melted into the pot. Everything around the central desks was consumed with sizzling paper; the door to the Chair's office caught fire as she watched, and the stink and the heat suddenly washed over her…
And then the shutter door slammed closed again, and she knew what she had to do.
There was only one way to set off the pyroclastic charges, and that way was now shut. She'd seen Volcano at the theatre, on a date, and the scene of the old woman wading through superheated water and slowly boiling to death had been particularly memorable. She knew that if she tried to cross that river of steaming documents, she'd catch fire like the door had and die screaming in seconds. She'd never make it to the button.
She crouched, took a single long step, and then vaulted to the next desk. Used the momentum from that leap to propel her over the bubbling corpses at the north door — one of her shoes landed in something soft and hot, and she kicked it off — and kept moving, fleeing into the hallway which led to the archivist offices and library. There was a security kiosk not far from here, where the overrides were kept.
If the blazing ideoforms weren't setting off the sprinklers, then something must have overwhelmed the sensors. She could still activate them manually. Put out the fires. Soak the newsprint until the ink ran. It wasn't the right solution, but it was better than doing nothing.
It was better than dying.
They didn't have hexmat suits big enough for Yancy and Radcliffe, so they wouldn't be going in. But their strength was needed to pry open the doors, which no longer responded to remote commands. A unit of Mukami's people stood ready in their shiny red!teal suits, abatement wands at the ready, waiting to brave whatever horrors were within. For her.
For the only one who truly, definitely cared.
Yancy grunted with effort, veins bulging on his forehead, and Radcliffe's face was beaded with sweat, and then suddenly there was give, and the shutter on the door sprang up, and the door itself immediately swung open.
Something clattered out, spilling into the hall, scattering the startled agents. Something which rolled, or spun to a stop like a top, or unfurled long black tongues across the tiles…
Tape reels.
After a moment in which nobody moved, Yancy finally crept to the door again, and peered inside.
Tape reels, wall to wall.
"Is she under there?" Agent Navickas asked, voice already weary.
Radcliffe rolled up his sleeves. "If she is, then we'd better get digging."
Ngo was in there, Del Olmo concluded.
After a fashion.
RECORDING: …and I don't know what to tell them. I don't… I can't tell them what I really think. It's not my job to have opinions about that sort of thing. I have to be objective. I have to treat each of their cases as unique. Everyone who comes to me, they want me to help them. They don't need to be told that there's nothing to hope for. That nothing is ever going to get better now. They know that already. They want me to help them. They know I can't help what's happened. They just… want to draw strength from me. Like I'm this deep, deep well of strength that never runs dry. Like I'm not giving them something I need for myself, to live, so that they can go on pretending they'll make it through this somehow. And I don't know if I can keep doing that. I don't know if I can keep pretending I'm okay, that it's okay for them to take this out of me, that I'll always be there to comfort them even when the only sane response to all of this is to go insane. And I think that if something were to happen to me, I think… what would that do to the rest of them? Nobody else is thinking about the big picture. Nobody else cares how the others are doing. I think I'm the only one who gives a damn. And I don't think they really give a damn about me, except that they can use me to make themselves feel better. And I know that's what I signed up for, but I just wish… I just wish they'd pretend, even for a moment, that how I feel matters. I think that would make a big difference for me. But it never happens, and now it never will, because it's so dark in here and I'm all alone except for you and you don't care, you don't care about anything, and I'm never going to get out, and this is all there is, and… oh god… please… just stop listening, stop making me go over this over and over and over, stop the spinning, please, just stop listening, stop the tape…
She woke up in the dark.
She remembered the fall, and the long, painful slide. She'd left a lot of skin on the rocks behind. She remembered the tube closing in around her, and a few breathless moments of feeling stuck before the rocks breathed and she started falling again, deeper, deeper, beyond all light and memory.
She remembered being pushed.
She remembered being tricked.
"Paranoid son of a bitch," she muttered as she blinked in the pitch red-black. Even so deep in the earth, she couldn't escape that crimson cast.
Ilse.
She froze.
Vivian?
The voice was in her head. But it wasn't her voice. Those weren't her thoughts.
Without knowing why, she burst into tears.
Then something wet and slimy landed on her hand, and she reached up to touch the weeping stone, and she cried until she could cry no more, and the rock gave out again and she tumbled wailing deeper still.
The year-end conference was, all things considered, a success. Not all of the interested parties and factional leaders could attend, of course; several were out responding to the newest breach-related outrages, though this year's had been predictable and the past few months of prep had reduced casualties to the expected margins — and as a bonus, for whatever reason, the ghost of Nascimbeni hadn't made it back out of AAF-D this year. The Administrator felt certain that great strides had been made to reduce the friction between each camp, and the Director agreed. They were still in hell, but they were weathering the flames together.
Even if Amelia had curiously chosen not to attend.
Even if Radcliffe, in a characteristic fit of pique, had completely failed to show up for his breach duty.
Even if their only sane psychologist had been transmuted into 2128 reels of suffering audio/videotape.
Even if Polly Mataxas had tried to abate them — the official story — or sacrifice them to the Great God Crater — what had actually happened — and turned seven of her initiates into petroleum jelly which wouldn't stop burning.
The next few weeks went about as well as could be expected. The lack of a practicing psychologist was probably a problem. It was hard to say, since nobody was talking about their feelings anymore. Talking about your feelings started fights, or worse. Without its leader, the commune eventually broke camp and returned to A&O. Dolly took them back graciously; they were well past the point of standing on ceremony, and as far as the Administrator was concerned, since humanity and the Foundation described the same things now, the Foundation could stand to be a little more humane.
Within a few months, the rest of the holdouts had returned to their senses as well. Markey had worked out a water recycler after bashing his head against the problem for almost a year, and they now had a source of clean, mineral-rich, off-tasting water that made you sob tearlessly every time you drank it. He wouldn't divulge where it came from, but the symptoms made it clear enough.
It was better than drinking microparticles of Ambrogi. Some wag in R&E had called it 'Ambrogia', and Markey had beaten him halfway to death.
The funny thing was, disasters notwithstanding, the work of containing the breach had seemed easier than ever. As though the absence of containment's strongest soldier had caused the rest of them to take up the torch and hold it higher. Rising to the occasion.
Placeholder had another theory, but he kept it to himself. He'd been watching Del Olmo enough to know a thing or two about morale.
2028
14 April
He was less surprised to see her this time, but still she took his breath away.
"You're decaying," he told her.
She gestured at the ripples in the walls, at the red, at everything, without hardly moving a muscle. "It all is."
"Not that fast." Her skin was plywood. One of her eyes was missing. Her clothing hung limp and threadbare on her narrow frame, unravelling into fractals on the floor. Her fingers were long and narrow, like melted plastic. Her shadow looked uncannily like it belonged to a mannequin on a stand. When she moved, the whole thing blurred, like reality was trying to make sense of what it saw. Just like Place was.
They were in his quarters. She stood in the door, and Blank leaned on the boards which had replaced the window. There were seams in his flesh, and when he spoke, seeds poured out to stick to his soaked sweater and labcoat. When he gestured, Place could see tears in the armpits which went all the way to the flesh; little cherry tomatoes were fruiting in a hollow in his thorax, and Place had a horrible, intrusive thought: would it be better if they tasted sour, sweet, or flavourless?
The revolting archivist was speaking now. "You ever see those old fair buildings they used to make? Like in Chicago? Never meant to last more than a season, but some of them lingered. People liked them. Kept them around. They lasted just long enough to fall apart, or catch fire."
"Which one are you doing?" Place asked, his voice breathy, far-away.
"Both," Lillihammer smirked.
That seemed enough for the pleasantries. "Are you going to kill me?"
By now the mannequin's body language was nearly all implied. Place wasn't quite sure why that parsed. "What's the point?"
"You'll just come back the next time they screw up," the tomato agreed.
"Man," Lillihammer wheezed. Were her lips even moving? Had she actually smirked? "Remember how much that sucked?"
"No," Blank grinned. His gums were tomato-flesh. "But of course you do."
"It sucked," she affirmed. "Every little mistake punished with a year of hell. And it didn't even have to be your mistake."
Blank shook his head. "God damn Willie."
"We should go see how he's doing."
"He's dead."
"That hasn't kept us down."
Place looked back and forth between them, wondering where his guards were. Wondering where anyone was. Had they all given up on him? Like they had with Torosyan? "I don't understand what you're talking about."
"We're talking about a world where none of this happened," she said.
"Where none of these mistakes were made," Blank continued.
"A doomed world."
"Like this one."
Place shook himself back to attention. The back-and-forth was just as hypnotic as she'd been years ago, one-on-one. "This world is doomed?"
"It ought to be," the mannequin rasped. Her lips definitely weren't moving. "But your friends are making it worse."
"They really are," Blank nodded.
"How?" Placeholder asked.
"By trying to fix it," she answered simply.
"By which we mean, most emphatically," Blank concluded, "stop trying to fix it."
Place eyed the open door hopelessly. There was no escaping these two. They were a lot stronger than they looked, and that strength was more than physical. "Will you let me go if I pass on your message?"
"Why do you want to go?" Lillihammer's sing-song was the epitome of mockery. "Are we not scintillating company?"
Blank glanced at her. "I think you intimidate him."
"All the more reason to stay. They love how intimidating I am."
"I guess we're imposing on him." Blank glanced at Place again with a sly smile. "He has to run back to his lab and… do what, exactly?"
"I…" He swallowed. He swallowed again. "I'm not going to tell you."
Blank's eyes flashed green. He saw the green. "I could make you."
"I could take you," Lillihammer growled.
"Wouldn't it be more interesting to find out fairly?" Place asked, with no conception of where the words had come from.
Lillihammer snorted. It was barely audible. "Now you're getting it."
Blank rolled his shoulders. A pale, sickly tomato popped out and rolled on the carpet, leaving a stain. It stank immediately, like rotting flesh and cooking soup. "This is going to be fun."
Place slumped back into his borrowed armchair. They weren't going to kill him. Why weren't they going to kill him? "You've been… waiting for an opponent?"
Lillihammer's blue eyes — Lillihammer's eyes were flat, red-lit wood — took his measure. "You think that's what you are?"
"We've been waiting," Blank said. "We're still waiting."
"But you'll do in the meantime."
"Until someone less predictable comes along."
"Don't be a stranger." That disconcerting blur, and she was turned away from him three-quarters in the doorway. "Not that you have much choice."
"None of them do." Blank pushed off the wall.
"The fun part is," Lillihammer mused, "the more you tell them that, the less they believe it."
"Free will is just an immune response to authority," Blank grinned.
"That's a good one," Lillihammer said. Place could hear an echo of the grin in her ethereal voice. "I'm glad I came up with it."
8 September
He wasn't doing this for Ngo.
He didn't do anything for any particular reason anymore. He just did things. That was the purest expression of how he felt. Things had no meaning outside of themselves. They simply were.
These weren't really monsters. They were the memory of monsters. Memories were unreliable. The monsters didn't exist.
These weren't really ghosts. They weren't really alive, either. They were floating signifiers, and he had no desire to affix them to any particular schema. To honour or dishonour them. He was here to deconstruct, and that was all.
It wasn't really even a button…
The shutter snapped up, and he whirled in confusion.
Nhung Ngo leapt onto his southeastern desk, crouched down, and propelled herself onto its northeastern cousin. As she bounded off that desk, too, she saw him. Their eyes locked.
Was it hurt?
Was it confusion?
Betrayal?
Whatever it was, it made her stumble. She twisted her ankle on the landing, and her foot was scalded in a rush of melted documents. She screamed in pain, and staggered out of view.
Zlatá gave the time signal.
Reuben walked to the desk, robotically. Pushed the chair away, and didn't bother to crouch. The papers could burn him straight on, this time. If they'd learned anything from Ambrogi, it was that he wouldn't come back. And that was good.
Because he didn't mean anything, either, and he didn't want to.
At the moment he pushed the button, something heavy hit him on the head. And again. And again and again and again, and he was drowning in a sea of metal, and then the metal was on fire, and he finally believed there was a point to all of this.
The point was that it hurt.
Del Olmo hadn't realized quite how much stress he'd been under until he popped the filling.
That it happened just before he was meant to sent his message, well. That was unfortunate timing.
One less screaming pile of skin and hair and fabric on the walls of AAF-D this year. In itself, no big deal. There was already a hefty backlog of the stuff for Amelia to cut her way through, if she ever turned up again.
It took two hours to dig Reuben out. He was covered in first degree burns, clothing singed, hair gone, the works. For the first hour, while Billie worked on his skin, he stayed perfectly silent. For the next day or so, he barely even breathed. He just listened to Veiksaar in the next bed over, ranting and raving and begging for release, while he massaged the wounds on his flank which would never, ever get better. For a few more hours after that, while Melissa asked him polite questions in a quiet voice, rubbing the back of her skull every now and then and wincing, he didn't move a muscle.
Then, quite suddenly, he started to laugh.
He didn't stop for a long, long time.
When Melissa finally left, he seized Billie's wrist. Examined it closely. She watched him, dead-eyed, as he did it.
"What else have you got in that medicine cabinet?" he asked her.
She smiled. The effect was fully isolated to the lower half of her face. "I'll get us some needles."
"And lock the door," Veiksaar wailed.
The only item on the agenda this year was another alteration to the calendar.
Clio could keep track of the dates, for when it mattered. From this point onward, the rest of them weren't going to bother distinguishing one day from the next.
It wasn't as if they could see the difference, anyway.
It wasn't as if they could see anything.
Del Olmo was staying late at the booth, running through topics for the next show in his head. The sensory possibilities opened up by the ban on long showers. What the apocalypse had taught them about the afterlife — specifically that it either did not exist, or was not pleasant. Something about minimum viable populations, how reproduction might be achieved despite communal lethargy, conflict between the moral imperative to repopulate the Earth and the moral bankruptcy of introducing new life to such horrific conditions… yes, that was the one. That was something they all needed to be thinking about, and soon.
When he came back to the world his body occupied, there was another body in it. She stood outside the glass, like a statue, staring down at him like he was so much squashed tomato.
When he retreated again to the world of the mind, she was there too.
In his mindscape, where there was colour — it made him ache inside, every time — she could move freely. The years had weathered off of her, and the sawdust skin as well. She was young and full of life, and if he didn't look at her face he could almost imagine it really was Lillian Lillihammer. "Evening, boss."
"Ground rules." He imagined they were standing on an open plain, because why not. Grass and sunlight were a fantasy now. He sat down on a mossy rock, and glared at her. "I'm not going to pretend you're her. You're not going to pretend this visit is friendly. We're not going to pretend we have anything in common. Speak plainly."
She grinned. It was a fair approximation, as though recalled from memory and recreated from scratch. "I do love a challenge. Sounds good." She sat down on the grass, then shrugged and fell back into it. "Let me level with you. You're being used."
"The way you're using her?"
"Exactly." She began moving her arms and legs, as though attempting to form a snow angel in the grass. "Only worse. You got the raw end of the deal. A lot of baggage that makes you worse than bad at everything you try to do. Have you considered that maybe it would all work out better if you didn't try at all?"
"I have considered it," he admitted. "The thing is, if I'm wrong, then the world might end."
"And that would be bad because…?"
He sighed, and looked up at the sky. His mind kept wanting to make it red, and erase the clouds. "The desire to survive is one of the signal virtues of the human race."
She snorted, and was still. "I still don't understand why you believe that. There's an order to birth and growth and decay and death. It isn't chaos. It's not something to be feared."
"Maybe we like chaos," he mused.
"Maybe you're an infection," she responded. She sat up, and picked at the grass. He willed it not to separate from its roots. She plucked it up effortlessly, crushed it under her nose, took in the scent. "All of you. This world is the logical extension of who you all are. Contradictory and unstable. You know that reality tends toward complex structures. You taught me that, once."
"Her," he cautioned. "I taught her."
"Sure," she shrugged. "And you were right. In the absence of red hell, who's to say the universe won't drum up a blue heaven next time?" She gestured at the fields and the sky. "If you just let go, and stop struggling, and go to sleep, you might find yourself waking up in paradise."
He stared at the grass. She followed his gaze, and stared as well.
Gradually, it reddened. Gradually, it wilted.
Eventually it was all red, and his eyes snapped open. She was still standing there, in front of the glass. Observing him like an entomologist with her favourite beetle.
"I don't trust you," he said. It felt strange to speak with his lips again. "I will never trust you. It was a mistake to take her form. None of us will ever believe anything you say, after you took them from us."
She blinked, very slowly. "That's good to know. I might have wasted years on diplomacy. When this escalates, do remember you were the one who put the idea into my head."
"That's memetics," he said, but she was already gone.
When the Omegas weren't using the password, Alis borrowed it. She was the only one who could forcibly resurface, if only just barely — she'd been told she appeared as the vague outline of a person, and her speech came out as intimations of intent rather than words — and anyway what it did was little more than something she'd regularly done to herself, for years on years.
She walked the halls, and watched the people, and from time to time, chipped in. When she found someone concealing their despair, she found little ways to boost their morale. When it seemed like isolated individuals had common concerns, she nudged them subtly together. When sensitive documents were left in inappropriate locations, she defused the resultant crises before they occurred.
She did it because she didn't know what else to do. She had never had much, and she had lost it. There was no way to get it back. Why, then, shouldn't she help the people who could still find something to cling to?
She could have taken her frustrations out on them instead, of course. It would have been easier.
But the world didn't need more people who took the easy course.
Mark Twain had once made a lot of noise about the concept of snapping twigs.
As he would have it, fellow author James Fenimore Cooper made far too liberal use of dry wood fragments in his woodland adventures. Nobody creeping through the forest could fail to find one underfoot, and give up the game, in spite of the general clamour associated with any respectable stretch of the great outdoors. Mukami had always enjoyed that essay, just as she'd despised the Leatherstocking Tales. She was quite sure she could outshoot Fenimore's ludicrous protagonist in a fair contest, but he certainly had her beat when it came to detecting footfalls on deadfall.
Snap.
She pirouetted, and fired. The cackling in the treetops was a little more forced than last time, so she suspected she'd hit her mark. "Even Stewart can shoot better than that!" came the revoltingly wet cry.
The forests of Ipperwash and beyond were like Cooper's dream made manifest. Deathly silent for acres, until they weren't. She could hear a leaf drop, if such a thing as leaves existed these days. The new trees — they had sprung up seemingly overnight from the red!grey and loose soil — were towering things set close together, with branches all arcing upward like claws. They no longer contained niches for the tree-people; she'd been finding their corpses everywhere since this new copse sprang up, torn in half along the least likely axis. She hoped whatever was up there would do the same to her obnoxious quarry. Maybe it was the trees themselves.
Snap.
This time she pulled the trigger before spinning. Something about the sound was off, and she didn't trust it. It felt like more of a suggestion than a real snap. She wasn't sure why her instincts had chosen the angle they had, but…
Thump.
A scrabbling at the ground, which was covered in desiccated hands which crumpled to nothing when touched. A muttered curse, and a snarl on the wind: "You ask Janet for permission to engage?" She'd hit her mark again…
Crack.
For a moment, she thought it was another twig or branch snapping. But the sound was louder, more sonorous, and also her shoulder was bleeding. Her opponent had conceded the word games, apparently.
She raised the rifle and raced forward, refusing, utterly refusing to go into shock. That wasn't how it worked, except that was how it worked. She had to do so many things on raw will now, and this was no different. She could operate her entire body manually if need be. This chase was going to end.
She broke through the treeline, and there it was. The sloshing, sliding, insinuating thing that had stolen Delfina Ibanez like an unattended vehicle was beelining back to the remains of the camp — no, now she was zig-zagging serpentine, frustrating Mukami's aim. She moved like the devil. No wonder her corruption spread so quickly.
Mukami was a solid 1500 yards from the ruined barracks when she stopped, winded, at a slight rise in the land where she'd buried the last of the tree-people. She crested the hill, dropped, and set up her tripod. Ibanez was nearly at the elevator.
One of the first things Mukami had done, when the initial mess was sorted back in 2022, was to go through her husband's old papers. It had been as much a diversion from her difficulty expressing herself as a tribute to the dead man. She was glad of it now.
She thought he'd have been glad of it, too.
Ibanez was grinning as she poured herself through the doors, and slammed the button to seal them shut. Mukami took careful aim as the cab descended, and felt no remorse.
She had to rappel back down into the Site. She'd probably catch hell from whoever was running J&M these days, but that didn't matter.
What mattered was the streaks of blood and liquified bone, gristle, muscle, flesh and organs smeared all the way down the shaft, gradually congealing into a pile beneath the third sublevel which was showing no signs of getting back up to continue the chase.
Best of all, it was silent.
2029
In January, Technician Novik accidentally fed his left hand into the biologicals processor. Those gears had an excellent grip, and Technician Novik was duly processed.
In February, Agent Teague walked into the empty elevator shaft. The drop didn't kill her, but being forgotten with two broken legs eventually did.
In March, Dr. Stendahl was flash-fried in his laboratory when he forgot about the experiment he'd been running. The results were still recorded, but without his expert interpretation.
In April — the first of April — H&P was so overwhelmed with injuries ranging from minor lacerations to complete amputations, all self-inflicted through inattention, that Billie Forsythe locked herself in her office with a makeshift water pipe and a custom pharmacopia and wouldn't come out until Yancy kicked the door down, and even then it wasn't under her own power.
In May, Eileen Veiksaar had a baby. Nobody had noticed she was pregnant. Melissa didn't even notice the baby.
In June, after a very public fight with Reuben Wirth, Veiksaar fled into AAF-D. They sent guards after her. All of them forgot what they were doing. Some of them came back.
In July, Veiksaar was found wandering the halls of H&P, expression blank, and only Gwilherm's threat of employing MARSTON verification protocol finally elicited something like an explanation from her.
The baby had starved to death, it seemed. Veiksaar had barely noticed.
Wirth became very quiet after that.
Sometimes the rest of them felt bad about enjoying it.
In August, she finally found him.
This year Lillihammer and the rest weren't camping in AAF-D. Nobody seemed to know where they were, and searching was far too painful. Looking at things right under your nose was almost tolerable; looking long-distance, you might as well have been staring at the pre-Paradox sun. How Mukami had managed topside, Janet couldn't imagine.
So she'd conducted the search alone, tracing the incidents just as her opposite number in S&C had done, and that was how she found him. She should have known, really, except that he'd never been one for self-reflection.
Wettle was staring at himself. Not in a mirror, but through a door. One of the larger labs — Janet couldn't tell what it had been for, before the bags of the dead giant's eyes had plastered over it — was dominated by a gigantic brown eyeball gazing out the doorway with watery need. When it blinked, it blew the smaller Wettle's labcoat back, and Janet could see how grossly distended his shape was beneath.
He must have heard her intake of breath, because he turned… no. He didn't so much turn as stretch, face wandering along his skull to face her, skull turning more slowly, tendons rearranging in the neck to support the new configuration. It was like rotating a flat image from edge to face, or dragging details across a canvas without changing the overall shape. He was already speaking before the horrific image settled. "Didn't see you there."
"Ha," she said. "Ha."
He glanced at the shotgun in her lap. "You still play rough, I see."
"What's the point of all this, Willie?"
He shrugged. His shoulders didn't quite know where to stop. He looked like a Munch painting. "To keep you guessing?"
A flood of water ran out of the chamber behind him, as though someone had clogged up a toilet. The cyclopean eye looked momentarily less watery. "I'm tired of games," she said. "We all are. Now we know you fuckers die like anybody else, it's just a matter of time. You've got anything to say for yourselves, better start soon."
Wettle considered. "What year is it?"
She rolled her eyes to play for time. She didn't want to admit she didn't know the answer off the top of her head. "2029."
"Okay." He nodded. "You'd have been dead for twenty-seven years by now, Janet."
"What?"
"If all this hadn't happened." Wettle smirked. She'd never seen anything like it on his face before, but then, she'd never seen his face without him behind it. "You'd be dead and gone, and they wouldn't even remember you fondly. The last time most people saw you, you were beating up that sad sack you call a boyfriend. One time, that sad sack reduced you to nothing. The only people who give a shit about you, Janet, the only people who don't think you're a waste of skin? They're the people you've got under your rubber right here. This is the only world you've got. The only world any of you have got. Everywhere else, you're yesterday's dust."
She nodded. She had no idea what he was talking about, but it didn't matter. These people were always talking shit. "And what are you?"
He chuckled. "This is the only world where I'm actually happy. So here's the thing, Janet. We need to go home."
"Home."
"Yes," he hissed beneath his misshapen, spittle-specked beard. "Turn this car around. Bring us back. If you set things right again, you can fill that void. You can live again. Cross the threshold and take your empty place. Unless you want to keep playing house-on-fire for the rest of eter—"
A wave of viscera sailed over Janet's head, spattering the back of her neck and scalp and drenching Wettle in gory debris. A few stray grains of sand caught in the artificial breeze, tumbling lifelessly to the ground.
Radcliffe appeared on her right. "Sorry about the coverage." He was holding Yancy's magnum, pointing it at Wettle. "This thing has a bloody punch."
"You'd know," Wettle sneered.
"How'd you find out I was here?" Janet looked up at Stewart's pinched, tormented face. "How'd you know… Okorie?" He nodded. "…was creeping up on me?"
"I didn't," he said.
On her left, Daniil Sokolsky appeared. He looked at Wettle, then the Wettlewall behind him, with a look somewhere between sympathy and hatred.
"We were just taking a walk," Stewart said, "and I got lucky."
"You have got to be kidding me," Wettle breathed.
Sokolsky pointed at the broadening bruise on his left cheek. "Three doorframes this evening alone."
"What does it feel like?" Wettle took a step forward. "The effect doesn't transfer over. What does it feel like to have nothing but—"
His chest exploded, and he fell over backward. Janet pumped the shotgun, levelled it at the giant eye, and pulled the trigger again. The rush of red!white and plain old red bled into the translucent tears, and this stretch of the weeping wall suddenly stiffened, and was still. A breeze like a sigh of relief — it smelled of Cheetos and Pepto Bismol — briefly filled the air, then passed.
"Now you know," she told the wheezing corpse, before taking aim and scattering him back to September.
When they were alone, she confessed that his timely arrival had put her in an unusually receptive mood.
Being Stewart, of course, he found a way to ruin that by trading it for a forgiving one.
There was no way to go after Amelia. If she was going to come back, if she was even still alive, she'd need to find her own way. She'd done it before. Perhaps she could do it again.
Janet considered telling the others, and remanding the big idiot to the cafeteria once again.
But something inside her said no.
Said if put in the same situation, she might have done the same dirty deed.
She was up all night, turning that something over and over in her mind. But no matter how it twisted in her grasp, she could never seem to cast any light on its surface.
8 September
The Administrator gave Wirth a citation for valour.
The ghosts of the archivists had all gotten it into their heads, somehow — probably the gurning skeleton standing outside the shutter had something to do with it — that they stood a better chance of survival in the Chief's office.
The burns this year were almost more than Billie could treat. And that was just the visible damage.
He would have liked to talk to someone about how it felt to feel another human being's skin, turned to newsprint, burning on his face. What it felt like to look in the mirror and see the text of Veasna Chey's obituary — never written — tattooed in inverse on his cheek.
But the only person who would have understood had given him a withering glare as his people shoved him into his office, and out of her spectral sight.
It had started as the kernel of an idea. Something stuck to the gnashing teeth at the back of his mind, churning up raw material for… this was the wrong metaphor. It was so hard to think these days.
But it had started small, anyway. Place had barely paid it any mind. Then he'd wondered if there was something to it.
Now he was kilometres deep in the Mishepeshu tunnels, lost and confused and wondering why he'd ever considered something so utterly mad.
"You do take a lot of risks," she said, and he closed his eyes, then flicked off the flashlight. He didn't want to see.
"I'm sorry," he muttered.
"For what?"
He felt behind him for the bedrock tunnel, leaned against it, slid down until he was sitting on the warm rock. He hated how warm it was, and the faintest sensation of movement. Like a mattress with bed bugs in it. "I know I'm intruding."
"Do you?"
Her voice was strained, more than usual. Like a lathe scraping on wood. He opened his eyes, and shone the flashlight up at her.
Her hair hung long and limp around her face, and her face was a nightmare. Contorted into a mask of rage. Her eyes were gone. Her torso was bare, and there were whorls in the wood. He knew he shouldn't look at them. He looked at them. He started to weep. "What's happening to you?" he choked.
"The same thing that's happening to you."
He didn't want to think about that. "You're turning into your own corpse."
"Who else's should I turn into?" The mask of rage became a mask of mirth so abruptly that he jolted back, hitting his head on the stone. "But no, it isn't that."
"Then what?"
And suddenly she was right in front of him, and he jerked the light upward, and her angular profile cast moving shadows on the cave ceiling, and the rock retreated from them as if it were skin, burned. "I'm becoming the real me."
His hands were shaking. The light danced crazily. "What's that got to do with me?"
"You know."
He did. "I don't."
"Can you imagine a world where you never built that moronic device?"
"I dream of it," he whispered.
"Dreams are the correct format," she agreed. "Half-baked notions. This is the real deal. This is a crucible. You're so lucky to be here. To have made this place."
"I didn't make it," he protested.
She didn't answer. She didn't need to.
"I'd trade it for my dreams in a heartbeat."
She sneered. The transition was instantaneous, and every time it made his pulse leap. "You would wake up changed."
"I'm in pain every day," he told her. "I'm afraid every day."
"And you're getting closer, too. Every day."
"Closer to what?"
"To understanding yourself. What you are. Every other version of you will never, ever know. This is a gift."
"I would like to return it," he spat. "Why do you keep coming to me?"
"You came to me, this time," she reminded him. "Something at the end of these tunnels you think you need?"
He tried to shrug, but it wasn't in him. "I don't know. I just… there's something missing. I thought it might be that."
Somewhere in the far, far distance, thuds and thumps and high-pitched squeals. The rock resonated. It shuddered with anticipation.
He sighed. "You do keep finding me, though. Tell me that's a coincidence."
"I find you interesting," she admitted.
"I can't be the only one."
"You are," she grinned. She had no teeth. "I've seen all the others a thousand times. You…" The expression softened, and he could almost imagine she was a real human being for an instant. Just a flash. "You're the one who got away. Gets away."
"You let me go. Every time."
"Not every time. Sometimes you escape on your own. You're a slippery customer, by trade or by fate. I like that."
He shook his head. "You act like you know everything about me."
"More than anyone else does. I see both sides of you."
"Meaning?"
"Left to your own devices — figuratively and literally — you would become a tame scientist of minor note, and die smiling. A drop of catalyst, though, and you're a runaway reaction. You streak across the heavens, leaving a new design in your wake. The slightest suggestion of an outline and you see the entire picture. And yet you work commissions. You should be the architect of your own destiny, PLACEHOLDER."
Except that wasn't what she said. Not precisely.
She could have struck him, and he would have felt it less keenly. His mind instantly cleared of everything except the faint traces of self left behind where that single word had momentarily been. "What did you call me?!"
"Your wrong name. You want it back." She didn't shake her head, but he had the impression she did. "You shouldn't. You're something more now. Later, even more. Too much to be contained. Too righteous to yield."
"Why…" He found it next to impossible to focus. She had said it. She had said it.
He had experienced the feeling of hearing his actual, his real, his own name, had instantly known it for what it was despite not having heard it in decades, but after a fraction of a neuron-spark he could not translate that fact into anything like knowledge or memory of what that name had been. When he tried to parse the event, his brain insisted she'd simply spoken that well-worn, abhorrent moniker. But he knew what his ears had heard, in abstract. It was only his mind, everyone's mind, everyone's mind except hers apparently, which refused to absorb the phonemes and their meaning. And now…
…and now she was going to use it against him. Naming a thing gave you power over it. He wasn't going to rise to that bait. He couldn't.
And he didn't need to.
After all, if she could know it, could say it, then some day so could he.
He cleared his mind completely, brushing away the last delicate strands of what he had lost for the second time, once again before he had even really understood how precious it was, and cleared his throat with considerably less difficulty. The bitterness in his voice was unavoidable. It would probably last for years. "Why can't you just tell me what you mean instead of playing these fucking games?"
She was pleased. Of course she was. But there was also something more dreadful in the tenor of her response. "Because I know how mad scientists think, Placeholder McDoctorate. You only truly believe in something if you think you came up with it all on your own."
2030
Eileen had her headphones on most of the time now. It didn't matter what she was listening to, so long as it was loud.
She listened to music while she worked. She listened to music while she read. She listened to music in bed, whether she was in bed alone or in bed with him, whether she was sleeping or whether she wasn't. It dulled the senses. A few times Gwilherm or Ferber threatened to take the music away, said it was affecting the quality of her tech work, and she threatened to let the whole system rot, and they relented. They didn't want another schism. They couldn't afford it. And her inattention hadn't killed anybody yet, so that was that.
She listened to music while Reuben spoke, at the dinner table, and she shovelled the gruel into her face, and didn't listen. He didn't mind. He even preferred it this way. At this point he only spoke to keep from hearing his own thoughts anyway.
The headphones weren't plugged into anything. The jack was tucked away in her cotton scrubs pocket. But the music came through just the same, and she drank it all up. The elegies. The longing ballads. The warnings. If she had to deal with the living, she could at least take consolation from the unhappy dead.
And then, quite suddenly, the music stopped.
"He killed your son," a man's voice said.
Eileen dropped her fork. Reuben kept speaking.
"He killed your baby, and they made you forget."
Something small and dark at the back of her mind, something she'd managed not to think about for ages, suddenly caught the light.
"He'd kill you too, just to feel something."
She bent under the table, hyperventilating, to pick up the fallen fork.
"Harry is dead. He killed Harry. And he killed Sokolsky, too."
She'd seen Sokolsky just this morning. They'd talked about his condition. About how everything hurt, all over. And always would.
"No. He's dead. And you saw him die."
She straightened back up.
"He's going to kill you next."
Reuben managed to lock himself in the bedroom, but it was a close thing. He pulled the fork out of his cheek, tore a strip off the bedspread, and clapped it to the bleeding wound.
The wall panel to his escape hatch was open, and the thing that wasn't Harold Blank was leaning in it, grinning. His body and outfit were ruptured all along one side, and red juice and seeds were pouring out onto the carpet. His skin was tight and rippled, and so shiny that Reuben expected 8956 to leap out of it at any moment. Something red!green was sprouting from boils on his exposed skin, and running in lumpy courses beneath his clothing.
"I don't mind you taking my place," Blank drawled. "But you're doing it backwards, son."
There was something wrong with the air filters today.
Adrijan's little group of apprentice occultists — useless, for the most part, but he had hope some day some of them could learn — each started coughing before the lecture was through. Two of them gagged, as though they'd swallowed a fly, and asked to be let go early. When his own throat began tickling, he called a five-minute recess to consult with J&M.
The technician never arrived, and his students never came back.
"They thought you told them to go home," Okorie explained. She sat down at one of the desks, and peered up at him with a toothy grin. "And your maintenance check was scheduled for tomorrow. Easy mistake to make."
"I'm sure," Adrijan gasped. He'd been lucky so far. He'd never been cornered by any of the 001 phantasms. Okorie was the only one of them with any particular relation to him — he'd been the external examiner on her dissertation — but she'd been too busy starting sitcom-level fights in the dorms or making scientists blow themselves up in R&E to come calling. Until now.
Her face, her entire face, hung loose around her neck like a scarf. Or a hood on top of a hood. Most of her scalp was still there, and therefore so were long greasy streaks of her burgundy hair. Her fingers were skeletal, held together by tendons and gristle, and bones protruded from her ruined lab coat at random. She still had her tongue — fat and purple!red and covered in globular pustules — but without lips he had no idea how she was speaking.
"I wanted to see how you were doing," she said.
"I'm sure." Already his horror had been replaced with indignation. Udo Okorie had been a brilliant, vibrant young woman. She had not deserved this. This was a travesty. "I'd heard how much you like to chat, all of you."
Okorie leaned forward, tenting her fingers and resting her bony chin on the knuckles. "Yeah, well, I thought it was unfair how much you get excluded from things. You're supposed to be part of the club!"
Adrijan wanted to sit down. He was exhausted. Just seeing this death's head abomination in the body of his most promising student was enough to make him wish he could close his eyes and never see anything, ever again. "I'm not interested in this," he told her flatly. "I don't wish to discuss philosophy with you, or debate motivations, or trade barbs, or receive ominous portents about future events. And you have no power to make me."
She raised a hand, and the grains began swirling around each bony fingertip. "Don't I?"
He raised a hand. "No." And the grains fell to the desk in an instant.
Okorie couldn't frown, but he had a feeling she would have liked to. "That's such a nasty power you have. It shouldn't have been allowed."
"Would you like to try your other trick, too, so we can get this tiresome visit over and done with?"
She shook her head. Something rattled around inside her skull, past those unseeing shadowed orbits. "No, I just wanted to offer my condolences. It can't be easy, being the odd one out. The seventh wheel. The stand-in."
"You murdered my predecessor," he said coldly. "I reject your pathetic attempt at commiseration."
She shrugged. "Okay. Well, there was something else. I wanted to let you guys know that we're having a party next year, on the 8th. Tenth anniversary of the first do-over, you know. Everybody's invited."
Ominous portents anyway. "And by that you mean…?"
She stood up. "I mean we've let you folks have the run of the place until now, but that can't last. If you're going to figure out a solution, you'd better do it fast. Because when that big anniversary rolls around, we're going to put you to the test. All of us."
"All of you?" Adrijan injected a confidence he didn't feel into his voice. "It's not your call who lives and who dies. It never has been."
"No?" she grinned. She couldn't help it, but he could sense this time it was sincere. "Are you sure of that?"
Having been told the schedule, of course he expected them to immediately violate it.
But for all their many failings, they were still an orderly, strategic set.
Patch Notes: 1.9
- Nerfed Puppet Master skill tree
- New world event: invisible sinkholes!
- Re-added world boss: Noe Nascimbeni
- Re-added world boss: William Wettle
- Actors reset
- Bugfix: eyedrop solution no longer reliably lasts four hours, but is instead of random duration
- Audio update: persistent, universal tinnitus
- Graphical update: the following items should no longer be discernible at all: people's eyes; keys on a keyboard; warning labels; anything moving; individual hairs; a reason to keep putting up with this bullshit.
- Removed Dougall Deering
Eileen sent it to the entire Site.
It was either that, or walk into the thaumic crater and cook herself to death.
Though she wasn't ruling out the latter for next morning's activity time.
2031
It was Sokolsky's idea, and she took to it with gusto.
Everywhere Wettle went, disaster ensued. Little disasters, but they added up. He would walk down a hallway, and his foot would snag, and down he fell, splattering on the tiles and spreading over them until he could pull himself together. He would walk past a rogue reflection, and suddenly find himself careening into it; this provided a few watching scientists, whom he'd intended to menace, an interesting demonstration of which anomalies were and were not on the same side. He would walk into a room, and bounce off something, and then someone would hit him from behind…
"I don't understand," he muttered. "What the hell?"
"We just thought you'd like a taste of what it was like." Janet rolled into the interrogation room, closing the door behind her. "What he put up with every day. Why your sick joke at his expense is in such bad taste."
"But how did you do it?" he asked, and then his face smashed into the table, and then something hit him, hard, over and over, and he tried to shout, but his lungs were no longer the right shape. They expanded out of his mouth, spreading over the table, and then something was pounding them flat, too.
Janet watched until the flattened corpse stopped twitching, then nodded. Alis flung the baton into the corner of the room, pushed what was left of Wettle's body off the chair — it gradually dragged the pulverized tent of skin off the table — and sat down, winded.
"Satisfying?" she asked, between breaths. "Or upsetting?"
Janet shrugged. "Both. You?"
Alis shrugged back at her. "Just satisfying. Never met the guy, never want to. No offence."
8 September
It had been Place's idea — he hoped the idea had originated solely with him — to monitor the breach from the DUAL Core. When overloaded with orphic energy, it had a tendency to dissociate from the linear progression of time. Overclock it enough, and it might just be possible to free it from the obligations of Heisenbergian uncertainty. Know both speed and position simultaneously. Avoid the observer effect. Learn something new without interfering, and becoming incorporated as a result.
Du would have never signed off on it. The Core was his baby, and the last thing he had to remember his father by. Luckily — luck was a perverse concept these days, though few knew it better than Sokolsky — the quantum supermechanicist had already gotten it into his head that the Core had been destroyed, and he had taken a swandive into the telekill sump before anyone could convince him different. It had jaws now, and the thing had played with him for a while before the final snap.
It was truly impressive what the monsters could achieve when they worked together. And unlike their opposite numbers, they did so constantly. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The Director and Administrator wouldn't have signed off, either, considering the danger of what he was proposing to do. Hence why he'd never proposed it. When nobody was qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, what was the point in sharing them?
He was standing at the topmost control chamber, watching as the thing below the railing spun out a mass of fractals of itself, approaching the line between being and not-being, when he remembered the main drawback of working in secret.
He was determined that this time, there would be no surprise. He knew what was going to happen. She wouldn't get the satisfaction.
He turned, sucked in a breath, and breathed out: "Jesus."
She was wearing Du's labcoat. One sleeve hung uselessly at her side. The plywood was coloured, and the colours were garish — he couldn't tell what they were, but he could still tell they were loud. Her skin was a dazzle coat of paint, and it shifted to give the impression her mouth was moving, her eyes narrowing, her brow raising, though he knew that none of these things were true.
Her legs were gone, and so was her left arm. She really was just a sculpture on a stand, now. Somehow it was so much worse.
Her eyes were black holes. White holes. Red holes.
Blue.
"The thrill's still there," he heard her say. "We're so lucky to have each other."
He could hear her easily over the rising hum of the spinning Cores. His own voice was overpowered, but he knew she'd heard him nevertheless. "You're going to give me a heart attack."
She made the sound of laughter. The paint twisted and bubbled, doing its best to mimic the emotion. "Not quite."
"Why can't you just leave me alone?" Even with years between each reprise, it felt like a tired refrain.
"I simply can't. Not that I want to. But no. No can do."
"Why?" He suddenly wanted to leap forward and pull the head off his department store stalker. "Why is everything in this haunted cellar bent on punishing me specifically? I didn't cause this. I don't care what they say. None of this is my fault."
She didn't nod, but the paint shifted up and down regardless. "I heard a guy say that once."
"It was his fault," Place snapped. "You can always tell with guys like him, because instead of taking responsibility, they just take off."
"You've taken on an awful lot of responsibility."
"Someone has to!" This was the most emotion he'd mustered for years. He'd almost forgotten what it felt like not to fake engagement. "That's not an invitation for you to imprint on more people, by the way."
Not a shrug. "It doesn't work if I'm invited, anyway."
He paused. "What?"
"It needs to be imposed."
And reality made a lurching accommodating, and now she was inches from his face. He could smell the acrylic. He was almost overcome with the urge to reach up and pluck a loose shaving off her cheek. He knew the impulse was foreign, and it filled him with righteous rage. "Why are you imposing on me right now? If you can't tell, I'm about to be very busy."
"I wanted to tell you!" She practically chirped it. "I've figured you out."
"I'm not complicated. I have machines for that."
A vibration in her eyebrow-paint acknowledged the little joke. "You're maybe the most complicated thing there is down here. I've been trying to understand what I'm meant to do about you. That's what all this has been about."
"Do about me…?"
"Causality is such a fickle thing," she mused. "We're all swaddled up like mummies at this point. Loops on loops on loops. I'm still trying to understand how I existed before all these incumbencies lined up just so."
"I feel," he said slowly, "like I've stumbled into a lecture series halfway through."
"That's okay," she didn't nod again. "A lot of this only makes sense backwards. The point is, I know what stage you're on, and what part I'm to play in your development."
He didn't like the sound of that, even as the roar of the Cores threatened to drown it out. "Development into what?"
Me.
He staggered back, striking his hip on the rail. The mannequin didn't move, but seemed to grow as the space around them darkened to redblack infinity.
The first time I saw you was the last time you saw me. The last time I saw you was the first time you saw me. You're a tape running forwards and reverse at the same time. We never meet in the middle, we meet at the ends. We'll meet at the next end, and then maybe the one after that.
He put his hands in front of his eyes, but he could still see her. See it. "You're not making any sense!"
I'm planting seeds. You'll understand when they grow.
"I don't know who you think I am!" It wasn't phrased as such, but it was still a plea. "Everybody here has a different idea, and they expect me to play along. I'm sick of it! I'm… I'm going to start playing by my own rules."
Yes. You already have. That's why I know it's time.
He wasn't listening, even if the words were the world now. "You don't tell a saviour how to save you. None of these people are qualified to direct me. I'm going to…"
And suddenly he saw through it. Saw through her. She was just deadwood carved in the likeness of a dead woman. A wig on a dummy on a stand. Nothing more.
"…I'm going to stop telling you these things," he finished. He placed his hands on the railing for strength, and straightened up. "You know, sometimes I forget what you are."
"You won't have that luxury soon."
"What?"
Her voice was deep, low. Almost soothing. Almost intimate. "I'm not going to give you a heart attack, PLACEHOLDER."
But again, she didn't say the word which was not his name. He felt his will to resist drain through his feet into the hard tile floor.
I'm going to give you my heart.
And her heart, of course, was a heart of oak. Rings on rings. Cold. Dead.
Stopped.
At this point it didn't matter what they did. Too many of the Puppets were still alive, and they knew the routine too well. Zlatá stopped bothering with the time signals halfway through, when it became apparent that his former pupil's promise was coming true. Wirth got out of A&R just in time to avoid his annual battering, and Mukami sealed off the dozens of new barricades they'd built.
It would buy them days, maybe. Perhaps only hours.
The metaphorical morgues were empty, and all the dead were dancing.
The seventh seal had opened.
They figured out where he was when the power drain from the Cores took out half the electrics in the Site. By then everything was falling apart, but they still sent Billie to revive him. He was still their saviour, and they needed salvation now more than ever.
When they restarted his heart, everything was different.
He could see it now.
As the chaos unfurled around them, Placeholder McDoctorate saw only a veiled order.
Her eyes danced with colour. All the colour was red, but it also wasn't. Randy had just enough time to wonder how Eileen was doing it before his cerebral cortex melted.
He swung the bat down, over and over. "Pain is weakness leaving the body!" Radcliffe crawled for his radio as Navickas continued to scream. "Take my weakness! TAKE MY WEAKNESS!"
She frowned at the needle, then reached for the bottle. That email hadn't lied. Billie couldn't read for shit anymore. But she knew the dosage off by heart. She knew her own biology. She kn
He shook his head. "You're wrong. Common misconception." Dr. Soun uncorked the phial — it was covered in tiny warning labels nobody left could read — and tilted it back, downing the last drop. "He can't manifest in—!"
They knew it was wrong, but that didn't matter. Taking someone's place was wrong, too. Taking their sense of purpose. Sitting where he sat. The Administrator raised it over his head, and Dolly cowered beneath the painting. On this occasion, the pipe absolutely was a pipe.
She knew there was something she ought to be doing, but she was damned if she could guess what it was. So she shrugged, and went back to bed. Sasha smiled at her, and Naomi smiled back at them. Across the Site, the tomatoes started getting ideas.
He poured the vodka and vermouth, while the stranger spiked the garnishes on the little umbrellas he'd found in Markey's quarters. It had been ages since Trevor'd had a martini; he'd promised his late wife he'd never drink alone. Now he was pouring for the whole saloon, Joanna included. The stranger wouldn't partake; he still had to set the others straight.
Yancy took in the scene at the saloon as though blinking away the bleariness of sleep. The details swam out at him, one after the other, too lurid, too vivid, too awful to be real.
The saloon was almost unoccupied, but it was nowhere near to empty.
Almost every chair featured its own corpse. Skin mottled and red!blue, hands clutched to chests, vomit on the tables and the floors.
In the back, at a table all his own, sat Allan McInnis. He was idly rolling a cube of something light and flaky in his hand, like a tiny, stale marshmallow.
"There is no hope, you know, Howard," the Director Emeritus smiled. Then he tucked the cube away in the hole where his right eye ought to have been, stood up, and walked out.
The moment the door closed Yancy put his service weapon to his head, and emptied the room.
They were sitting behind his desk, staring into space, when the door opened and the man himself walked in.
Allan glanced at the corner, where one of the Administrator's spare jackets was covering up a grisly sight. "You were always so polite to the help," he remarked. "Whatever came over you?"
The Administrator pointed up and over their shoulder, at the painting. "It shouldn't have worked," they croaked. "Not in here. There's no way."
Allan tutted as he walked to the far wall and pulled up a chair. "Nim, my old friend. You think a simple cognition-cleansing agent is sufficient to overcome that kind of rage? What you feel when someone takes what's rightfully yours?"
"I wasn't angry," they whispered. "I've never been angry at her. She was one of the best."
Allan nodded. "It wasn't your fault. Our bouncing ball of joy made you do it. They'll all understand." He grinned. The Administrator had never seen all of Allan's teeth before. "I certainly do."
"What's the point of any of this?" The Administrator wrapped their fingers around the edge of the desk blotter, then flung it across the room and stood up. "Why are you doing this?"
"Because we've been insulted, Nimkii. We have suffered the gravest of all insults. Each one of you represents—"
The Administrator slammed their fists into the desktop. It shuddered. Beneath, something snapped. Above, everything had. "Plain speech. You're wearing the body of the best communicator who ever lived here. Tell me exactly what's going on. Tell me what you want."
"I want to move forward." Allan reached into his empty eye socket, and pulled out a misshapen cube of cyanide. He placed it on the desk. "I want a world to make my own, and I do not want this one. His first gambit failed — miserably, I might add — and so he tries again, the same plan but grander, more complicated, more idiotic. He thinks the first failure was merely a matter of insufficient data, and inadequate tools. He imagines he's gotten it right, this time. He thinks me trapped here, but he is wrong. The balance of powers is immaterial. A failure in negative is not a success. It is merely a failure discoloured."
The Administrator shook their head. "I don't understand."
"Of course you don't." Allan gestured at the cube. "So, here is my proposal. Kill yourself. All of you, simply kill yourselves. Refuse to play the game. Leave it to the adults to sort. I've waited long enough to see if you can work this out on your own, and it's achingly evident you can't. The only one who came close has been swallowed up by the earth. I know your friends think they're doing the right thing, but they'll never get what they want as long as they're doing things his way. So, be noble. Preserve your dignity. Opt out."
He stood up, cricked his neck, and gestured at the corpse in the corner. "You can make it easy for us, or we can make it so very hard for you. As a show of good faith…" He cleared his throat. "Udo, if you'd be a dear?"
And suddenly, as though a mental block somewhere between the corner of the room and their ears had been lifted, the Administrator heard it.
"I quite agree with Dr. Reynders," Allan said over his shoulder as he headed for the door. "It's a tired old trope. You should each choose to exit on your own terms, not ours. That's true character development, wouldn't you say?"
They didn't hear him leave. They were already in the corner, pulling the jacket off the wheezing, bruised Director, weeping apologies and begging for forgiveness.
Behind them, on the desk, the potential for absolution lingered.
They'd long given up on the Christmas celebrations. They were too closely associated with Ngo, who had become a symbol of things nobody very much wanted to think about after her death. But Place found ways to keep the spirits up regardless.
It was either that, or complete his next project in a ghost town. And he didn't much fancy finding a way to feed himself.
He swept into research workgroups and training appointments and board meetings without knocking or asking or announcing himself, speaking complicated nothings he knew would parse as promising. Hints of his progress, exultations, encouraging but cryptic pronouncements. He patted random people on the shoulder as he passed them in the halls. He wrote up a personnel hierarchy sorting the least important from the most, and memorized a few names from the former to create the illusion, with a few carefully-timed callouts, that he knew everybody. That everybody was worth knowing to him, their future saviour. Every few weeks, when he could spare a moment, he barged in on projects to which he was not attached, dropped a few jargon-bombs that reframed everything, and danced out.
What other people found too daunting or complex was simplicity itself to him, now. He could see all the structures, the order undergirding everything. The connections he was making…
The connections he was making would finally tie down this rogue reality, make it sit still and listen. By the time he could do that, he would be fully conversant with its language. He was going to be able to make it sing his song.
He just needed the others to stick with him for that long.
Only for that long.
It was also a fringe benefit, he discovered, that getting to know these people in the context of excessive positivity meant he almost liked some of them. That, he was sure, could only have positive effects on the quality of his work.
After all, in a way, they were all raw materials. He knew how they broke down chemically, but the more ineffable qualities had always eluded him.
With a few more handshakes and kind words, he was sure he could achieve wonders of catalysis. He would be their hero. The Hero.
And when he opened the door, he would find a path had already beaten its way to him.
2032
"I understand you have something exciting to tell our fellow survivors," Del Olmo smiled.
Placeholder nodded, as if anyone else could see that. "Ah, yes. I do. Yes."
"Go on."
The pataphysicist took a deep breath. "In coordination with the late Dr. Du, I've discovered some interesting new scientific principles! Whether they hold true in other worlds, or represent some effect of the paradox defining our everyday lives, I do not know. What I do know is that these principles are very promising!"
Del Olmo felt his eyebrows raising at every unnecessarily punctuated exclamation. The man was more manic than ever. "And what do they promise?"
"That we really can find a way to make things stable! At least, more stable than they are right now."
"That is exciting," Del Olmo agreed. "Do you have an experiment drawn up?"
"It's already in the early planning stages," the other man beamed. "Pending approval from the Director and Administrator, I should be able to begin construction very soon!" He abruptly smacked his bottle of recycled water off the table with a mistimed gesture.
Del Olmo gestured that he should leave it. The cap was still on. "And how long will that take?"
Placeholder hesitated, a sudden look of calculation replacing the wildness in his eyes. Del Olmo sighed inwardly. Nobody but him understood the toxicity of dead air, apparently. "Well," the other man finally responded, "it might take months. It could take years. But that's not important."
"Why not?"
"Because it means I can tell you now with absolute certainty that there's a way to beat this thing!" The rush of inexplicable energy returned. "An end point to our troubles does exist. It's just a matter of holding on until that moment!"
They weren't going to muck this up for him.
He hammered out the speech in an afternoon, reaching inward to find that source of persuasive inspiration still lingering in his chest, drawing on a strength residing outside himself to make it sing. Then he memorized it. He memorized it with ease. God, but it was addictive being in control of his own thoughts.
There's a way out of this mess, and I'm going to find it. Until that day, keep performing your duties, keep up your spirits, and keep drawing breath.
Your enemies are all dead. That's the difference between them and you. They're failed, and they want you to fail, too. You're not going to. You're going to find a way to keep going. To spite them. To prove something to yourself. To protect the people you love. You are going to make this work.
All you need to do is buy me time. I promise you, the end is near. There is no release except through me. I've managed miracles already, and you know I can do it again.
If you die, you'll just come back worse. If you give up, nothing will change. If you hold your heads up and burn, if you make every moment a refusal to submit, we will beat them.
Together.
The words felt outrageously wrong, but he delivered them with conviction each time. First, to the seven. Then to anyone else who would listen. Before long he was seeing them scribbled on sticky notes affixed to monitor bevels, tacked up on message boards and even appended to emails on the signature line. Some idealist had tacked it onto the 001 file itself, like a motto.
He wished he'd started tinkering with the social machinery earlier. Ngo's absence was proving to be a godsend, perhaps even literally.
The more he micro-managed, the more he started to think of it all as little more than a simulation. Tweak the variables, watch the results play out.
It was only late at night, when he was very tired, that he took the time to be horrified at himself.
It was Dolly's idea to meet in the decommissioned train.
The Administrator had suggested a neutral location. Safe. Populated. The secondary cafeteria, perhaps, or the saloon. "It isn't safe to be alone," they had told her.
"You mean I'm not safe with you," she'd responded. "And I'm not having that."
The siding was nestled between Admin and the northwest wing of S&C, so it was easy to keep it secure. Their isolation was merely symbolic.
The Administrator still appreciated the symbolism very much.
It had taken weeks for Dolly's injuries to heal. The Administrator was a large, powerfully-built individual, and the Director was not. She was making good progress, but still they had to help her cross the gap. She'd left her cane back in her office; on purpose, the Administrator was quite certain.
"Billie says it's pretty clear," she sighed. "There's a direct link to the serum."
"Of course there is." It simply tracked. Half a dozen members of personnel with festering but non-progressing 8956 injuries had suffered sudden onset brain death over the past six months. It had taken this long to come up with a way to test for the cause, and then analyze the results, but they'd all known what they would find.
"Do we disseminate?" Her tone of voice said it all.
"No," the Administrator agreed. "And nobody tells Dr. Del Olmo, either." This had become a constant refrain of meetings like this. Del Olmo himself had encouraged it.
"This introduces some obvious complications," Dolly said hesitantly.
They waited for her to go on.
"Placeholder," she finally sighed. "He was injured pretty early on. We can't afford to lose him."
"Are you suggesting he stop taking the serum?"
She shook her head. "No. It would take the entire arm, and probably hijack his nervous system and kill his brain anyway. I'm just saying we need to be prepared for the possibility that this isn't something we can win."
The Administrator examined her levelly. "Dr. McDoctorate's health? The REISNO Cannon situation? The 8956 situation? Or do you mean…"
She nodded. "I mean."
They smiled grimly. "I'm never going to be willing to accept that. Our survival this far has been an extraordinary refutation of the odds. We will continue to find new ways to thumb our nose at fate."
She smiled back, with real warmth. "You know what Wirth says about 8956?"
The Administrator suppressed a groan. "Do I want to?"
"He says it's a metaphor for how some wounds never heal."
They felt a pang of guilt in their chest. "Do you agree?"
She was choosing her words very carefully now. "For one thing, I think it needs to be less one-to-one to be an actual metaphor. And for another… well." She made a breathy sound that was less than half nervous laughter, less than half tension release, and a little bit of gunshot wound and collapsed lung in tandem. "I think the only way to move forward is to assume, every day, that either your wounds aren't the kind that won't heal, or you're not the kind of person who lets them bring you down regardless."
The Administrator chuckled, aware of how much of their own relief was audible. "The only truly fatal thing is fatalism, then."
She nodded, and reached across the aisle. The Administrator took her hands, and was reminded for the thousandth time why she was suited to her post like no other.
A lineal descent from Scout to McInnis to Nimkii to Ferber.
Other people refused to give up until they were spent.
People like them didn't even stop there.
It was only a start, but it was a start.
They took turns.
Del Olmo spent hours lecturing Markey on the principles of memetics, basic things he'd taught to Lillihammer a lifetime ago. How to formulate meaning. Realize potential. The core elements of human creativity, a force everyone could tap into, no matter what they'd been told, no matter what they believed about themselves and their abilities. Then the old tech locked himself in his office for three days, and came out with a plan.
Every time one of them took the easy way out, Markey dedicated a broadcast to their accomplishments, their hobbies, their relationships, the things that had made them who they were. Made them unique. Made their memory special. "Remember them," he told whoever was still listening. "And stay alive, so the memory lives, too."
Mukami pored over the files in Ngo's R&E office, and had Gwilherm run her through the exercises. "Be merciless," she grunted. "No remorse." She'd reached the end of what she could accomplish on her own. It was time to struggle together.
After that, she hunted McInnis. But she sprang no traps, and fired no shots. She simply followed in his wake, and spoke to his victims. Told them her story. Told them of her struggle. Let them see her fighting for every word. Made them understand that every day was a new opportunity to get it right.
Radcliffe and Wirth debated each other until both of them felt sick. In the face of the archivist's merciless dismantling, none of the agent's prejudices held. Confronted with the passion of that misguided giant, the journeyman nihilist began to believe that there was something, something to be said for the process of generating meaning.
The big man walked, as he had of old. He walked everywhere. Anywhere he wanted. He was the proverbial three hundred pound bear; who was going to stop him? And he found people saying things they didn't really mean, meaning things they didn't really understand, and he helped them to see whence these things had come. The obvious mistakes he himself had once made. The disastrous consequences of aggressive ignorance.
Del Olmo had been a teacher, but now he was a student. He had the others assemble a record of every misstep he had made, and explain them to him. He quizzed them on their preconceptions, and they interrogated the origins of his. The urge to speak up without cause still gripped him, but soon he had a manual to consult. He understood the rules. He could work within them without sacrificing his own initiative. He could regulate, and resist the shame that came with knowing he was wrong.
His turns at the microphone became less extemporaneous, more didactic. There were ways to resist intrusive thoughts, whether they came from within or truly from without. There were exercises to raise one's Cognitive Resistance Value which had once been kept from the lower ranks, to preserve the advantage of their betters. Others could arm the survivors. He would help them craft armour.
Gwilherm's legs were atrophied. She now understood the initial immobility had been psychological, and it wasn't as though that had gone away, but it was long past time she did something about it. She didn't want to monopolize the over-stressed medical staff, so she had Radcliffe help with the exercises. She might never regain the ability to walk unaided, but that didn't matter. What mattered was agency. She could try. She could map out her avenues for action. She could define her own terms.
The change in outlook worked wonders. She still used the chair to get around, but she took it farther afield now. Instead of stewing in her control room, she rolled through the halls. Talked to the frightened and hopeless masses huddled in their labs and dormitories. Saw what ailed or menaced them before the only solution was rubber bullets, or hollow tips. A few months of that, and some of them even trusted her.
Wirth found it hard to shake the feeling that none of this mattered. He couldn't see properly, he didn't feel anything, he was tired and bored and irritated at all hours, and pretending he didn't care was still an intoxicating idea. But it was only pretense, only an idea. That no meaning was inherent did not make the concept meaningless. It was a challenge. A challenge to go out there, and create meaning for himself.
He stopped trying to contact Eileen, locked away in her den of technology. He said a prayer for the son he'd never known.
He divorced Melissa.
It was like being unshackled at the end of a long prison sentence. Or the first splinter of light, as her isolation chamber was finally opened. She'd had no idea just how much he was dragging her down until it was over.
Melissa sat in her office, examined her half-baked pie-in-the-sky plans which had never come to fruition in that interminable dark, and suddenly realized she knew precisely what to do.
2033
The bedrock was a vast tuning fork, a living vibration that never ceased. David laughed at her explanation, clucked disapprovingly at the specs, and eventually agreed that there was probably something to it, if only because his first instinct was to brush the whole thing aside.
In the north, the bedrock cried most often for Ilse. In the south, it called for Vivian. In between, where the resonances met, they mixed in a sort of harmonic. A song in the stone. So they sounded, inch by inch, treading the last of the Mishepeshu caves which had not yet been filled with a vengeful sloshing or a creeping need, treading on an endless rolled carpet of dead man's skin, until they found the spot where the signal was strongest, and made their camp. Just the two of them. The loneliness surrounded them, rivers of grey running past their oasis in the dark, and they fought off despair as lonely people did.
And in the morning — what was morning, really? — they brought the data back home, and the handful of techs who had not already signed off for good ran it through their systems to find the stowaway. A gentle knocking of stone upon stone, easily isolated from the well-attested merging of sedimentary moans. Morse code.
I-A-M-S-T-I-L-L-H-E-R-E
A strip of skin two kilometres long was wound into the spinning drill, forcing back the weeping rock, digging deep into the bedrock flesh of a mad, dead god. Just past the halfway point, as the top of the shaft was already beginning to scab up and close itself again, they found her. She clambered up the diagonal cleft, through a perpetual slurry of liquid surrender, weeping and growling and cursing. They slid a rope down to her, and she batted it away, and kept crawling.
It took her nearly two hours.
They were all there, waiting, when she finally emerged. Filthy beyond all description. Scraped and bleeding, emaciated, contorted, as close to broken as a body could be and still live. They had discussed options while she approached. There had been safe choices, and the right choice.
He'd insisted on the right one.
So the first thing Amelia saw when she dragged her carcass out of the depths was Stewart Radcliffe's terrified face, and his vast, outstretched hand.
She spat on it, then lunged forward to seize his wrist and pull herself into the light.
This year, the landlords of Site-43 weren't going to bother with their old haunts at AAF-D. They had projects to run, and no more fragments to restore. They were content to work their little miracles, drive the fools ever closer to oblivion, and release. They'd get there eventually. There was no resisting all of them, at once. Certainly not these tired, demoralized, ultimately worthless thralls.
The only one of them who actually realized what was happening was Blank. It didn't have anything to do with his senses, or an accident of location. He simply recalled a line from that long-abandoned history he'd been writing, and understood its ultimate demonstration at the instant it occurred.
Any direction you move in this facility will bring you to one of two things: more facility, or sheer bedrock.
The ragged strips of order pressed against his anarchic flesh, and he recoiled away from it. His song was echoed from a thousand locations, and part of him understood that harmonic resonators were exploiting a map of his thrumming body and encouraging it to expand and contract in specific patterns, but most of him took it as an expression of love. He was seen. He was known. He was needed.
He could see the shape of their own need, and he was in an expansive mood. He coiled around the seven little asterisks of hateful structure, and with a contended sigh of Vivian, one day, Wynn Rydderech squeezed.
They stared at the big board.
From her wheelchair beside Janet's, Amelia smirked. Her eyes were shut. She was mapping new frontiers of exhaustion.
"That probably won't work twice," Sokolsky remarked.
The seven glanced at him.
He shrugged. "I'm just saying. You'd better get it right this year."
"I wish I knew how to make you stop."
No response. There never was.
"There has to be a way. I should be able to figure it out; it's my god damn job, after all. Nobody else has any ideas. I can't come up with anything myself anymore. All I can do is steal from other people, or follow their instructions. I should have figured this out years ago." The words were a flood. If he tried to hold them back, he would burst. "The longer it takes, the more people die. That's all on me. Everyone you killed." He paused. "You killed my best friend. Why couldn't you have killed Dougall instead?"
"Dougall is the only one who deserves to survive."
"That's obviously untrue. You're capable of speech. You've got a brain in there, somewhere. You know he was a sack of shit, and we're better off without him." It got no reaction. Why would it? This wasn't new information. "Rom was a god damn superhero by comparison. He never gave up. He was helping. Me? I'm a waste of resources. If you couldn't kill Dougall, why not me instead?"
The were no answers forthcoming, but that was the point.
"If I was gone, they'd have to replace me. They'd stop thinking of the role as filled, and they'd find someone good enough to fill it. Maybe Amelia. I should let you rip my guts out, and she can take my place. I bet she'd be able to find a way to keep you locked up for good. Maybe something on the Eighth, when your useless brother pops back in to remind us how pointless his existence always was."
"Dougall is the point. Without Dougall, none of this exists."
"That's actually true. Very true. Maybe Dougall's the solution, too. We've tried playing voice clips, but you know it's not him. You're a clever little Rottweiler. Still…" Still. "There must be something there. You're not Phil, but you're not not Phil. You think about Dougall every day. You never shut the fuck up about him. We've tried reading you that letter the bastard left behind, but that doesn't work either. There… there's got to be something I haven't tried. I guess we never tried asking the idiot himself if he has any ideas."
"Dougall's ideas change everything."
"And yet you're so damn Dougall-averse. He says in his letter you'd sometimes let him watch you, but mostly you keep away and tell everyone else how incredible he is. Was. Will be. I wonder if that's the angle, actually." Could it be that simple? Could he have missed it for so long, if it was that simple? "Do you exist to make the bastard witness? To see how much his jackass mistakes cost the rest of us? But that doesn't make sense, either. As soon as he was gone, you flipped the fuck out. You've been worse and worse while he's been gone."
"Nothing matters except Dougall."
"Nothing matters except Dougall. I wonder," and he sprang to his feet, and collected one of the clipboards on his desk, "if next time we didn't recycle the corpse. We could use the data from those old ADDC experiments dumbfuck and Reynders ran, arrest the decay so they last us a year, maybe rig up… yeah. Yeah. That could work. I'm going to get started on that. We'll need tracks… no. Casters. Okay. I can work with this."
"Dougall would have—"
David raised a hand. "No, that's good, we're good. Thanks, man. It was a lot safer this way, you know?"
Placeholder nodded absent-mindedly, continuing to scratch away at the blueprints he was sketching. "Sure. Mind if I don't get up? People think I'm booked in your office for another hour."
"Fill your boots." David snatched up his labcoat, and headed out the door.
"I'm filling everyone's boots," Placeholder told him, but the other man was already out of earshot.
"Philip."
On their own, neither of David's projects was particularly successful.
"You might think I don't love you. After what I'm about to do, you might become certain I don't love you. You're never going to hear from me again, and you might not ever know why. I hope that some day, somehow, you'll understand the reasons behind the things that I've done."
As exercises of his own faculties, they'd had merit. The sense of relief he felt at finally having had a truly original thought brought him past the brink of tears.
"They'll probably never let you read this letter. I'm going to maintain the fiction that I'm speaking to you, however, Philip, because the idea that my death will mean your life is the only thing keeping me going."
The mirror monster hadn't been nearly so profoundly affected. It certainly noticed, but that was it. Not enough to distract him from the hunt.
"I always resented you for my success. Can you think of anything pettier? Me, with my two doctorates and my super-secret laboratory, irritated beyond belief by your laziness and lack of ambition. The more vital I became to the Foundation, the more I hated to imagine my brother pushing a mop down some god-forsaken sewerhole. As if having a working man for a brother somehow undermined my own achievements. And then I undermined them myself. Let me tell you the story of my failure."
In tandem, however, the two ideas produced a remarkable effect.
"When I received that fateful call from my future self, you didn't even know we were working at the same facility. I'd kept that from you. I didn't want to see you. I didn't want people to know you were my brother. And then that voice started speaking in my head…"
8956 followed the macabre display as it rolled down the hall, push and pulled by a pair of repurposed floor scrubbers on the corduroy road.
"I don't even remember what it felt like, receiving that knowledge, but there's a security camera in my office so I know what it looks like it felt like. It looks like it felt like someone had told me the entire world was about to end. I wish you could have seen what that knowledge did to me. I wish that was how you could remember me, not cold and callous and permanently disapproving, but absolutely terrified at the thought of losing you to a slow decline and a sudden demise. You would have known what you'll never know, now, what I didn't know until that moment: I love you, and I could never bear to lose you."
The recording was on loop. Dougall's voice cracked several times.
"I was watching when you died. When they all died. And now you're watching me, every minute of every hour of every day. A twisted reflection of you, a mockery of the man you were, a reminder of how stupid a man I was when I dialed in that device and placed a call across the gulf of time… That's why you're watching me, of course. Because it's all my fault."
They'd edited out a few exchanges in between: several where Alis encouraged him to get through it, one where she urged him to hurry up. A few lines Placeholder had told them were cognitohazardous, and nobody had tried to gainsay him.
"You're my own personal albatross now, Philip. I don't want to believe it's actually you, of course. The things you've done, the notches you've added to my list of failures… but… more than once, late at night, when the red-rimmed walls close in and I can't sleep and I can't keep my eyes closed against the throbbing in my head, I open my closet door and stand in front of the only remaining mirror in Site-43. And you won't look at me."
The corpse on its rack, spread-eagled like the Vitruvian Man or an ancient criminal or a messiah on an angled cross, flopped lifelessly with the motion of the cart and its minders.
"I've decided it doesn't matter if that is you, or not. It's not going to be you for long. I'm going to bring you back, not for me, not for anyone else trapped in this endless hell, but for the people at the other end of this forked road. I'm going to bring you back, I'm going to bring all of them back, by making one last mistake to cancel out the very first one. I'm going to put a bullet in the brain of the man who caused this, and you're not going to die in 2002, and you're not going to die in 2022, either. I'm going to write a better story."
Dougall rattled on through his final, eternal victory lap.
"I can't live without you. But, after what I've done to you, I hope you can live without me."
And hell, remarkably, blissfully, followed with him.
"Your brother, Dougall."
8 September
It was only by chance that Stewart saw him before the curtain fell.
The pataphysicist looked hungry, tired, sad, every failure state under the red rainbow. Almost furtive, like he was out scrounging for food.
Stewart raised a hand in greeting.
He would never forget what the other man did in response.
Slowly, as though in a dream, Placeholder McDoctorate raised his own hand and waved.
They hit every mark, right on cue. Zlatá was about to congratulate them, and by extension himself, when he lost contact.
Mukami crowed in triumph, and as if in response, her monitors switched themselves off.
Markey pumped his fist in the air, as all the feeds went dead.
The Administrator watched the big board flicker and fail.
The Director counted heads in the dark, and suddenly realized who was missing.
They piled into the laboratory, all in a rush. Janet was still in the field, and Zlatá was slow, but the rest of them raced to the Cannon chamber while muted shouts and crashes echoed through the open hallway door.
Mukami was the first one through, and she froze so completely that the others had to shove her forward to get in.
The room was wrong.
The room was wrong, so wrong, so extraordinarily wrong that it took each of them a moment to fully recognize the scale of their betrayal.
The desk and chair sat where they always did. The wires and cables on the floor, and hanging from the ceiling. The locker on the far wall. Alis, and Dougall Deering's peaceful repose.
Every trapping of this annual occasion, save one.
| SCP-001-P is the disappearance of Dr. Placeholder McDoctorate. |
| SCP-001-Q is the disappearance of the REISNO Cannon. |
| SCP-001-R is the fact that this car is somehow still motoring without any god damn gas. Or an engine. Or a driver. Or anywhere to go that isn't dead, empty, and red. |
2034
8 September
It was going to be fine. It was all going to work out.
The mechanics were clear, according to Du. He had done the calculations — by hand, deprived of the Core as he was — and everything they knew about how the breach worked said it could only turn out one way. There would be restoration. Restitution. AAF-A always snapped back to the shore. AAF-D became its old self. The murdered agents, guards, occultists and archivists always returned. Anything implicated was also incorporated. As surely as the Cannon had gone around, it would come around again.
And they could keep dialling reality back until they found the home frequency. All would be well.
But then again, Du had to stop calculating every few minutes to curl up in agony as his time-lost physiology interpreted the sensation of being snapped in half by a pair of gargantuan cancer-jaws as the most intense heartburn of his life. So the crowd milling behind the closed door — Alis had insisted the masquerade be upheld — were all pacing and cursing and staring blind-eyed into the near distance, quietly frantic, as the seconds ticked down.
While the breach staged its rage and the Puppet Masters called their shots, the rest of them were waiting to hear that most crucial of annual reports.
Clio's notification was badly corrupted — it sounded like she said "Time's up," which was definitely not in her programming — but they barely heard it. There was a mad rush for the door before the phonemes could even register.
Desk. Letter. Locker. Cables. Alis.
Dougall.
"Where's the Cannon?" Amelia forced her way to the front, barely able to keep her feet. "Where's the fucking…"
And then she simply stared.
"There is no Cannon," Dougall Deering whispered, ashen-faced where the instrument of his demise had once stood, and would apparently stand no longer, and then everything disappeared in an impenetrable torrent of shivering red which gushed from his idiot's tongue.
2023
8 September
The terrible beauty of it was, she would never need to forgive him.
Of course she would hate him for it. Would not understand. Would refuse to accept his reasons. But that didn't matter.
All he had to do to fix it all, fix it forever, correct his mistake, was what he'd always done.
Take the easy way out.
The Cannon spun up, and the aperture at its heart opened wide, revealing a bright, shining light. So bright it almost wasn't red. When it met his eyes, and the sync was complete, the light dimmed down and the spinning grew faster and faster. He could see the greased bearings and the shining off-silver shaft as it turned and turned, hypnotically.
He folded up the envelope, and placed it on the table.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
What? replied the voice in his head. If thoughts could sound young and naive, these ones did.
I'm sorry, he repeated, even though it wasn't true. It was the sort of thing he might have liked to hear, he thought, in the instant before he died.
Dougall Deering raised the scrap of card up to his eyes, and the last thing he thought was This is for you, Philip.
But the last thing he saw was a pair of lacerated lips around bared, red fangs, in the red-silver heart of the Cannon, and the last thing he heard was a scratchy roar: "IT'S ALL FOR YOU, DOUGALL. IT'S ALWAYS BEEN ALL ABOUT YOU."
