Hooking Up - SCP Foundation

Hooking Up

2003

4 October

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

None of the hospital had exploded.

The Health and Pathology Section features a medical ward such as might serve any established urban area in Canada — minus the fact that there are observation galleries with one-sided glass running behind each private room — with a lab tests and services wing, research workshops and offices, and the typical staff amenities. It's essentially a hospital, biological research facility, and pathogen control centre smashed into one. On an average day, most of the rooms in H&P go unused.

It was designed with exceptional days in mind.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

It was all still here. The Psychology and Parapsychology Section next door had been totally obliterated, cast down into the abyss in the series of detonations which had covered Zwist's escape into the hospital. But everything west of that was still intact, and being made excellent use of. The wards were full of families looking hale and well-fed, though far more shell-shocked than the Foundation personnel down south who, after all, had been trained to expect situations like this in the worst case. The recreational facilities were all in use, people exercising and reading books and watching wall-mounted televisions. There was music in the air, something upbeat and chipper but simultaneously non-intrusive. Everywhere Harry looked he saw neatly-labelled boxes of stuff, the stuff of life: toiletries, clothing, and of course a tremendous amount of canned food. The hum of microwave ovens was pervasive.

"You've been down here this entire time?" He watched as a vaguely familiar man played chess with a vaguely-familiar young girl, probably his daughter. Zwist was leading the group back to the lobby as the terminus of their tour.

"We have," the old man nodded.

"Why didn't you get in contact with us?"

"Because your actions led me to believe I could not trust you." Zwist gave Harry a knowing look, smiling with his eyes. He might have been smiling with his mouth, too, but it was difficult to tell behind the beard. "This is something of a running theme with the SCP Foundation."

"You sure talk all buddy-buddy," Roger piped up. "You guys pre-acquainted?"

Zwist glanced back at him. Roger was taking up the rear, looking uncomfortable. "Dr. Blank is the world's ranking expert on the subject of my august self."

Harry spun out in front of them, walking backward and gesturing with a dramatic bow at the old man. "You stand behind the world's single most powerful cryptomancer."

Zwist clicked his tongue. "I'm not sure anyone here, perhaps anyone anywhere, is qualified to make an objective ranking."

"Long story short," Harry told Roger, "he's an undying word magician, and we've got a sort of arrangement."

"And we haven't got time to short story long," Delfina reminded them.

1997

6 May

They sat on a bench together, looking out over the chilly waters of Lake Huron. It wasn't quite summer yet, and their shared lodestar was now cold in the ground. The perfect moment for warm companionship.

"I shall make myself very clear at the outset," the old man began. "I do this for the memory of Vivian Scout, and to protect those unfortunates who still run afoul of my greatest mistake. I will not aid in your odious mission beyond that boundary. I believe you capable of urging me to greater errors still, and I will not allow it."

Harry rummaged in his backpack. "I brought sandwiches. You like bratwurst?"

"Of course I like bratwurst," Zwist snorted. He took the proffered bundle.

"Awesome. Yeah, I wasn't going to ask you to join the containment team or put a hex on a guy or anything. This is strictly a consulting relationship."

Zwist raised one bushy eyebrow. "Your superiors are aware of this arrangement?"

"Yep." Harry took a bite to let that fact sit a little. "Time was they wouldn't have put up with it, but it's amazing what difference a couple of years can make."

"This has not been my experience," Zwist mused, "and I find that old men change still more slowly. Your superiors are, I believe, very old men indeed."

"So are you, and yet… here you are. Changing your ways at three hundred and seventy-five."

Zwist carefully unwrapped his sandwich. "I am taking a chance. Vivian always spoke very highly of you."

"You spoke often?"

The old man paused before responding. "Would it besmirch his legacy were I to admit it?"

"My lips are sealed." Harry smacked them for emphasis. He was discovering that he liked bratwurst, too.

"A fine jest from one such as yourself."

"How do you get the sentences structured like that in your head so quickly? I'd have trouble doing it with a keyboard."

"My brain is wired differently than yours." The old man gestured illustratively. "I speak like a relic from a time long past, you speak like a television character."

"Ouch."

Zwist took a tentative bite, then a second with gusto. Look, we're bonding already. He took out a handkerchief to wipe his mouth before continuing. "But yes, since you asked, we corresponded often. In secret. From an early stage in our relationship, your Director was not actually attempting to capture me."

"He was under strict O5 orders to bring you in. You were considered an active threat to both the Veil of Secrecy and humankind."

"He knew that I was neither." Zwist was looking at the lake as he spoke, just like Scout had once done. Just like he'd done back in April… "He understood that all I wanted was to fix what I had broken."

Harry shook his head. "I still can't quite grasp the scope of that. What you did in 1645. Do you have a name for it?"

"The abhorrence," Zwist whispered.

"I sense a double meaning."

"To be sure. I abhorred the German army for what they had done to my people, and I committed an atrocity upon them. I was as abhorrent to General von Mercy and all his kinsmen as he had been to me, and the lingering legacy of those acts now fills me with a sickness of the heart. Act always swiftly on generosity, Dr. Blank, but consider the repercussions of vengeance at length."

He'd heard that the old man was given to waxing moral. "I'm still confused about your people, the schriftsteller. You've explained that they taught you memeticism—"

"Cryptomancy," Zwist interrupted firmly. He hated the word 'memetics' for some reason Harry didn't yet understand.

"Sure, cryptomancy. They apprenticed you, and you did some work making cognitohazardous signs—"

"I don't like that word either. My work did no harm. It merely provided… a push, here and there."

Harry sighed. "Fine, look, our terminology largely takes the perspective of the overall normalcy-sustaining project. It's naturally going to be unflattering to your magic shenanigans."

"I would prefer 'magic shenanigans' to 'cognitohazards'."

"You know what?" Harry laughed. "Fair enough. I take it you were never fully inducted into the mysteries of your order before von Mercy burned them all."

"Not fully, you are correct."

"Do you know what they were really up to? Because I kind of don't think an ancient cabal of m— of cryptomancers would have used their overwhelming power just to make signs that helped bakers sell their bread."

Zwist considered his half-eaten sandwich. "No. The cardinal goal of the schriftsteller was to counteract the giftschreiber."

"Who you've described as schriftsteller gone bad. Rogue cryptomancers using words to harm, rather than… whatever you think your people were using them for."

"Correct." The old man resumed eating.

"Thanks for not clarifying. But okay, we're at a chicken and egg conundrum here. If their group came from yours—"

"They were never truly a group. Rogues rarely cooperate. They were more of a… phenomenon."

"Alright, cool, but if their phenomena were the result of your society, your society can't have existed to combat the phenomena. Do you see what I'm saying?" Harry had forgotten his own sandwich at this point, in itself a rare occurrence.

"I do," Zwist nodded. "I regret that I am unable to resolve the contradiction."

"How do you know they split off from you?"

A shrug. "It's what I was taught."

"Where did the schriftsteller come from, then?"

"They were taught their craft by ███ ███████ █████ ██████████. ██ ███ ██ ████, ███ ████ ██████ ███ ███ ███████. ██ ███ ██ ██████ ███ ███ ███, and it is my understanding that the schriftsteller ███████ ███ ████ █████ ██████ once they had attained the power to do so."

"I assume ████ ███████ no longer exists?"

"Actually, I am fairly certain that ██ ████. ██ ████ ██ ██ ████████ the giftschreiber, then ran afoul of your organization. It is believed ██ ███ ███████ ██ █ ████ ███████ your own facility."

"Wow. That makes a lot of sense, actually." He'd have questions to ask when he got back to the Site.

"Does it?" Zwist had finished his sandwich, and was watching Harry closely now.

"Yes."

"I will not pry, yet." The old man leaned back on the bench. "Vivian thought very highly of you, trusted in your discretion, took you into his confidence as he did me. I choose to believe he was a good judge of character."

"This is the last place I saw him." It would be easy to monologue the memory, rough though the edges were now that the man was dead. "Well, almost. I sat on this bench with Dr. Scout and the new Director, and we… talked."

Zwist's eyes were aglow with interest, attenuated with a twinge of sorrow. "What did you talk about?"

"His hopes for the future. His regrets about the past."

"The angels and demons of old age," Zwist nodded. "I know them well. I hope he had more of the former than the latter."

"Does anyone?"

Zwist looked down at his hands. They sat there in silence for what seemed like an hour.

"In any event," the cryptomancer finally continued, "the giftschreiber took █████ ████████ lessons to heart, and excelled ███ in destructive capacity before long. They acquired, I know not from where, a millenarian perspective on reality. That it was all leading up to one great cataclysm, perhaps within their lifetimes, or the lifetimes of their children and grandchildren, in which our two schismatic groups would come together in a final conflict at the breaking of the world."

"This sounds like precisely the sort of thing the Foundation prefers to avoid," Harry pointed out.

Zwist gave him a look which said, clear as the Spring sun, I see what you're trying to do. "I think everyone would prefer to avoid it. All the pieces of that puzzle are not yet in place, however, and as one of the parties to that conflict no longer even exists, the matter of my inadvertent curse remains more pressing at the moment."

"You permanently infected all languages derived from German with a rare cryptomantic disease trigger." He liked to say it out loud, just to remind himself how absurd it was. "Accidentally. How?"

"Are you familiar with the concept of noetics?"

Harry grimaced. "I don't mean how, scientifically. Not 'how does it work'. How are you so powerful that you were able to do that? To alter the realm of thought itself, unintentionally?"

Zwist's mouth fully disappeared into his beard. "I fear some day you will find that intentionality and efficacy have no strong correlation."

"You're avoiding the question."

Zwist inclined his head. "I was young, and I was strong. I had not yet been trammelled by the rules set down by our order to prevent such foolhardy interventions. If I had been properly trained, and a little older, I would never have been able to inflict such great harm on so wide a swathe of humanity."

"So, you couldn't do something like it again?" He had to ask. He didn't have to like it.

"I have done something like it again."

That had come out of left field. "What? What was it?"

"I… cannot tell you." Zwist had the decency to look embarrassed.

"Come on. You can't just drop a bomb like that and not elaborate." Harry balled up the remains of his sandwich and pitched it into a nearby receptacle. It didn't spoil the visual simile by missing.

"You would not understand, if I did," Zwist sighed. "Suffice to say I could not do it again. Not at my great age, with the weight of all these years and sorrows on my shoulders. Nothing so vast and terrible, not without paying the ultimate price."

"You'd have to have a very good reason, then."

Zwist looked up, sunlight and dappled shadows mottling his lined face.

"Yes. You will also find people are capable of anything, if they find the reasons good enough."

2003

4 October

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"Dr. Blank will recall the details, I'm sure," said Zwist.

"Uh…" Harry rubbed his forehead. "Sort of?"

Del was overtly taking tactical measure of the space, eyeing potential choke points and noting camera positions. "So you've been sitting in here, waiting for… what?"

"The opportunity to make a difference." Zwist sat down on a waiting chair, gingerly. Harry thought, as he always did, that he personally would never choose to become immortal after first becoming old.

But another thought was much more pressing. "There's so much bad shit going on around here. How could you think you wouldn't be making a difference by helping out?"

"I have acted rashly in the past. Many times." Zwist twirled his cane, vertically. "It has never, never gone the way that I had hoped."

Harry sat down beside him, the memory of the bench meeting clarifying in his mind — save for the inexplicable missing data. "But that's not the same as just… sitting around, letting people die."

"How would you have suggested I prevent those deaths?" Zwist met his eyes. "Dig around in their collective unconsciousness, find the gene that makes them susceptible to outside interference, and delete it? I'm sure no negative consequences would ensue from such a wise course of action."

"Okay, but—"

"Or would you have preferred that I stand against that walking siege tower of a woman, waving one of my little signs in her face in the hopes of waving off her path of destruction, hoping she didn't glance my way and reduce 'the world's single most powerful cryptomancer' to so much atomic ash? Would that have helped the situation tremendously, do you think?" He tapped the end of his cane on the tiles for emphasis.

"Okay," Harry raised a hand, "but HOLD ON. Are you saying you were waiting to think of a better plan, or you were waiting for someone else to?"

Zwist chewed at his whiskers.

"All that age and all that power, and you don't trust yourself to make the right decision. Is that it?"

The old man nodded, once. "That's it."

"The right decision," Roger interjected, "is to fry all those freaks in the corridors. The ones with the guns."

"Some of those freaks were our friends," Del reminded him.

"Sucks to be them."

"This Site is packed full of hyper-competent people," said Harry. "As far as we know, they could be the most competent people left alive. We can't waste them like that." He turned back to Zwist. "Thilo, you're waiting for something positive to help with. That's right?"

"That's right."

"And I'm sure the people you're protecting could use some humanitarian care, yes? You did have Roger here out stealing supplies."

Zwist's eyes widened, and he turned them on the glowering youth. "Roger? Is that true?"

To his credit, Roger didn't flinch. "Everything was getting low, old man. Everything."

"You didn't send him?" Del asked.

"I most certainly did not." Zwist was clearly miffed. "It was an unwarranted risk, as we are now seeing. It brought strangers to our doorstep, looking for answers."

"We were already looking for answers, and so were you." Harry reached out and put a hand on Zwist's shoulder, as the young felt universally entitled to do with the very old. "This is our chance to look together."

"There it is again." Zwist half-smiled. "That accursed quick-wittedness."

"Well, I'm young yet," Harry smiled back. "Don't blame yourself."

"Yeah," Del scoffed. "He seems the sort not to blame himself, alright."

Zwist stood. "Enough of this. You have a proposal, present it."

Harry joined him, wincing at the ache from his knees. He hadn't walked around for far too long. "You used to disseminate the cure to your 'abhorrence' via bunk medical advertisements."

"Anything to reach a wide audience," the cryptomancer agreed. "Every life saved was a weight off my shoulders."

"How'd you like to get back into the hearts and minds business?"

8 October

They stood on the cusp of what might be a very bad decision.

Udo, Brenda, Imrich and Ilse conferred at the ADDC window. The former two were wearing warm clothing and backpacks — Brenda had just needed to add the backpack to complete this arrangement — while the latter two were the same as they ever were, Ilse particularly.

"Well, what do you think?" Udo tested the weight of her collection of tools and supplies, and thumbed the button on her radio to make sure that it worked. "Am I walking to my death?"

Imrich glanced at her chest, and smirked. "Eventually." He turned to Brenda. "Keep her from getting herself killed, alright?"

"No can do. Neither of us take instruction well."

"That's not true," Ilse smiled. "In Udo's case, at least. Good luck."

Brenda flipped her off, and off they went.

It was a long walk to the farthest extent of their explorations so far, though at least they'd cleared most of the major obstacles in their quest to build the AAF-A supercomputer. That was what Udo was calling it in her mind, though in actual fact it was more of a supracomputer; it would have taken years to build something truly complex with the ways and means at their disposal. She was just proud of it, was all. They didn't speak until they reached the most likely access point to the levels above, an emergency maintenance hatch in the ceiling. All the stairwells were collapsed, and the elevator wasn't working. None of that was a particularly good sign, so they didn't expect to find much above them.

What they found was AAF-A's only non-undercroft sublevel, more modernized and less badly broken. This was the space Brenda had heard people moving through during her long tenancy beneath the filtration tanks, and signs of life were everywhere: footprints in the dust, locked doors with red lights over the key readers, even very distant voices. The MTFs were definitely still here.

Udo didn't acquire any of this information with her physical self, instead sending a thin stream of vim harenae through the lip of the hatch and scouting ahead with a tiny makeshift dust golem. When she was sure there was a clear path to the nearest exit — another hatch, this one physically locked from inside — and not a soul close enough to hear them using it, she drew the powder back and nodded to her companion.

They lifted the hatch with agonizing care not to make a sound, lowered it back with equal care, and crept to the ladder that serviced the hatch. Udo had it unlatched before she could have reached it with her body, one hand on the rungs while the other twirled the sand, and they exited AAF-A to emerge in the surface world for the first time in…

She honestly had no idea.

"What did they do," Udo breathed.

"I had a whole speech planned."

Udo didn't turn to look at Brenda. She couldn't look away. "How did it go?" she asked, and her own voice sounded tiny and tinny. Like a dream, or a memory.

"I was going to say that it looked a lot better up here than I expected."

"But it doesn't."

"Holy fuck it doesn't."

The word that came to mind, once she had stared at the image long enough for words to start meaning things again, was erosion. It looked like someone had drawn all the moisture out of the soil, had converted all the roots to withered straw, had taken out everything that glued one grain to the next, and let it all fall where it would. Trees were careening this way and that, most of them dead. The outbuildings were so much rubble, and the parking lot had dropped about a metre; the cars were canted up or down in cracks and holes. One was just a fender and license plate. AAF-A had been razed to the ground, the hatch they'd climbed out of the only obvious point of ingress or egress in the dusty pile. Papers tumbled like weeds across the disjointed landscape. There were no animals, no insects, no birdsong.

There was no lake.

"Oh my god."

There was no lake.

Lake Huron was gone.

There was a lake-shaped hole where the lake had been. Sixty thousand square kilometres of water, three and a half thousand cubic in volume, a quarter kilometre deep in places, gone. A rotting basin full of sludge. She could see Intake Point 94 a ways out, the glass observation dome around the Site's primary water supply station shattered but the circular footprint still visible. She could see former islands rising up like buttes.

She could see a massive, tremendous, decaying mound of flesh and milk-white bone in the shape of an unspeakably vast serpent coiled around the remains of a container ship. There were no carrion birds. She wondered if they were gone too, or if they simply didn't dare approach.

"Oh my god," she said again.

"Did they take it?" Brenda asked, in a very small voice. "Did they take the lake?"

"What could they even be doing with it?" Udo shook her head, and found once she'd started that she really couldn't stop.

"I have no idea." Brenda's entire body was shaking. They were making a spectacle of themselves. In the midst of the great upheaval, they were standing unprotected.

"We need to get out of the open," said Udo.

"How long to Kettle Point?" Brenda asked.

"Five or six kilometres. Maybe an hour or two, depending on the terrain."

Brenda stared at her.

"Okay, so maybe longer."

It was beginning to look like their progress might be measured in days instead of hours.

This hadn't even factored into their analysis. It wasn't something anyone could have imagined. But beyond AAF-A, the land sloped down steeply and became a rat's nest of intertwined canyons and open-air caverns, sometimes even leading into passages that had to have once been far beneath the ground level. Udo had a sneaking suspicion she knew what those were, and felt very antsy about moving into them. Brenda suggested they use the vim harenae to raise themselves up and get a bird's eye view, maybe even head to the camp that way — the same idea Udo had had back in the subway tunnel, before meeting the theologian and the polymath — but Udo had to tell her that wouldn't fly, ha ha, since it would expose them to the enemy's sight. The other woman had nodded agreement, but looked so disconsolate that she wasn't going to get her magic carpet ride that Udo felt she needed to change the subject. So as they walked through a sloping channel the width of a car track and the height of a tall tree, dust sliding down constantly around them as the anomalous erosion continued apace, she asked her friend a question.

"How'd you end up with the Foundation, anyway?"

Brenda's look of disappointment became rueful. "Had a sense of wonder. Best way to get that excised."

Udo chuckled. "Are you one of those people who look thirty but are actually thirty thousand? Because that's how you act."

"Kid—"

"You're maybe a couple years older than me."

"I was thinking college kid. That's where you seem to fit in, emotionally."

"I'm just not jaded yet. What made you that way?"

"Life story? So you'll have the full picture when you're part of my death story, I guess."

"Sure."

They passed into a tunnel which still had its ceiling. Udo struck up a thumb-flame, and quickly searched ahead for existing occupants. Finding none, she nodded that Brenda should continue.

"I was an internet atheist, before the internet."

"Wow, okay. Don't go making admissions you can't take back."

"Right?" Brenda grinned. "Worst kind of asshole. Sits there on the baseline of intelligent human thought — not believing things she has no reason to believe — and acts like that makes her a genius. Only thing worse than being proud you didn't fall for the easy sell is being proud you did."

"You must work with a lot of religious people," Udo reminded her.

"I did, yeah. Wasn't always very nice to them. But by that time I'd found out some of the things they'd believed in were true, if usually not quite in the way they'd expected. It wasn't a great moment for me when I learned that angels are real."

"Who from?"

Brenda's mouth became very small, like she was sucking on a lemon, before she answered. "Myself."

"You met an angel?" Udo almost stopped walking, but they didn't have the time for that. "What did it look like? The halo and harp variety, or the freaky things with the eyes?"

"It was wearing a tall hat, and it was wreathed in wings. I only saw it for an instant."

"I've never heard of angels wearing hats."

"The precise term is fravashi. Zoroastrian angel."

"Zoroastrian? Isn't that some dead ancient religion?"

"Ancient, yes. Dead, no. Few hundred thousand Zoroastrians still kicking around, and my parents are two of them." She looked away. "Maybe were two of them. Probably a lot less still kicking now. Hadn't really thought about that yet. "

Udo placed her free hand on the other woman's shoulder. "Sorry."

"Is what it is. Anyway, my parents were slash are a couple of hippies. Boutique religion shoppers. They loved Cat Stevens, followed him on all his wacky faith kicks — Buddhism, numerology, whatever. They were smoking pot in the loft of an old church house they were renting on a res when they hit on something Cat hadn't tried yet: Zoroastrianism. I think they thought it was funny, lighting up and playing with the fire faith. Ritual purification via skunkweed, real pair of syncretists those two. Thus baked Zarathustra."

"Couldn't pick just one joke you liked, eh?"

"Winners, all of 'em."

Udo felt her arm slipping down Brenda's, and decided not to stop it. They embraced as their little bubble of red light passed through the long well of black. "So how'd you end up seeing an angel?"

"I dunno what it was that caused it, but my parents became true believers." Her voice betrayed no hint that she'd noticed the increased intimacy. They were wearing thick clothing anyway, she probably didn't even feel the difference. "Fully converted, and that's no common thing. They went all in, kept the flame, even thought about moving to India. Caused a bit of a fuss with our neighbours in Utah."

"Utah," Udo muttered. "Jesus Christ."

"Of Latter-Day Saints fame, that's right. So my family was persecuted for having a heathen faith so niche the persecutors didn't even know what the hell it was, really; I can appreciate the humour of that now, but back then it wasn't so nice. More than a few times I told my parents that either Zoroaster had to get out of our house, or I would. Eventually they decided the right thing to do was fly all three of us down to Mumbai and check out a genuine fire temple or twenty." She looked at Udo, and Udo met her gaze. "Christian angels live in some hidden fantasy land up there somewhere." She pointed at the cave ceiling. "Zoroastrian ones live in the stratosphere."

She looked away again.

"The engines conked out on our plane."

"Wait."

"Yeah."

"Are you saying an angel stopped your plane from crashing?"

"Yeah. I saw it plain as day. Okay, it wasn't plain; blue and gold, shiny as you like, with one hell of a wingspan. It kept the plane gliding along until they could get the stall worked out, then vanished. I had the window seat, and I was very small. Had to take off my seatbelt and stand on the chair to get a good look. It was only there for an instant, because that was all we needed, then poof! Gone, before I could stop sputtering and tell my parents to take a look."

"You…" Udo shook her head. "Give me a second here."

"I know what you're thinking."

"Religious Terror at Thirty Thousand Feet."

Brenda laughed. "I did not know what you were thinking!"

"There's an angel on the wing!" Udo laughed with her.

Brenda put her own arm around Udo's shoulders. "I never told anybody about it, though. Didn't think they'd believe me. Honestly, smug little shit that I was, I didn't want my parents to have the satisfaction of knowing they were right. They shouldn't have been right. I wasn't gonna give them any credit for it. There's not a lot of virtue in being correct in your idiocy. But I know the angel wasn't there for me. Gods don't put on a show like that for the unbelievers. When you're that low on acolytes, I guess you do need to show up for the ones you've got. Them helps gods what helps themselves, sort of thing."

"Did you convert?"

"Hell no I didn't convert. As far as I was concerned, even a broken faith can be right twice a millennium. But that was just it; if this one thing was real, somehow, might there be a second thing? Or a third? In my first year of university I took a religious studies class, just to get some use out of all the pointless trivia my parents had piled on me, all the pamphlets they had mouldering away in desk drawers. I wrote a paper about my experience, which by then I'd decided was some kind of psychotic break, or childhood imagination run amok, or even a false memory of William Shatner on TV."

"And a Foundation embed caught it." It was a common story among Site personnel.

"Right on the money. Staking out the universities always pays off. I was top of my classes the previous semester — parents were still hippies, fight the power, fuck the man, and they didn't trust the academy, so I excelled out of spite — and the recruiters were obviously interested. Saw something spooky, wrote about it intelligently, head straight on my shoulders, natural fit. Scout himself came to collect me, gave me the grand tour. Foundation paid my tuition for the rest of my degree, then I came to 43 right after graduation."

"What was the next miracle you saw?"

"I'll let you know if we bump into any." Her mouth hung open, like she still had something to say. She squeezed Udo's shoulder before saying it. "Well. I guess there was the one, but once again I didn't get a good long look at it."

"Would you like to?" Udo asked softly.

"Yes."

"Wow, that was direct. No clever quip?"

"Make with the magic, and never mind the smartassery. I'm better at it."

Udo considered for a moment, then released a little of the vim harenae into the air in front of them. It carried the flame from her fingers, dancing grain to grain, and with immaculate attention to detail Udo traced the shape of a jumbo jet on the back of a long-winged angel with a funny hat. It glowed serenely as she sent it crashing into the cavern wall to explode in a hail of sparks.

"Blasphemous," Brenda breathed. "And timely. That's rad."

"Thought you'd appreciate it."

"Really is a brave new world around here."

Udo flicked her thumb for emphasis, the fire flaring bright. "This came from an older one. Far as I know, the me from here wouldn't ever have made it to where you were."

"That's a miracle on its own."

"Almost enough to give you a little faith, isn't it?"

Brenda snorted. "Not hardly. But nice try."

"They were a cult," Alis said. She said it like she was only now realizing the truth.

"Like, magicians?" Wettle pressed his ear to the server stacks, trying to match the hum with a hum of his own.

"Not occult," Alis laughed, "a cult. Well… there might have been magicians too, but that's not what I'm talking about."

"What's better than magic?"

"It's all magic. The difference is in how you use it. Just like… how poets and politicians both use words, but to different ends."

"Yeah, politicians get stuff done and poets just get poor." Hmm hmm hmmmmmmmmmm. That's still not it. Hmmmmmmmmm.

"You've got a real old soul, Dr. Wettle."

"I couldn't afford a new one. My father was a poet."

She guffawed. "Oh my goodness, William Wettle intentionally made a joke."

"Sometimes I'm thinking exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment. You probably won't see it again."

"Well, I'll treasure it then."

They were standing in the barracks infirmary. Ibanez had brought them there for a quick check-in beyond the reach of prying ears, then headed off to resume whatever investigation she was running. Wettle understood this to be a prompt for him to continue his investigation; he was making the effort, drawing Alis on the topic of the giftschreiber, but he was also working on a project of his own at the same time. He didn't multitask often. Even a single task usually made his head hurt.

"What are you doing?" Alis asked when he let the conversation lapse a moment too long.

"Trying to match the hum."

"Why?"

"So we can talk freely wherever we like."

This won him several more seconds of hum-time. He knew why when she started talking again. "You know it's not just the humming noise that blocks out our voices, right?"

He took his head away from the wall, and faced her again. "I did not know that. Thanks."

She shook her head. He knew she was thinking he was an idiot. Obviously she doesn't understand how science works. He reorganized his thoughts, to the extent that it was possible, and asked his followup question: "What did you do at your cult?"

She looked up at the tarp ceiling. "Infiltration."

"Like, with water?"

She suppressed a laugh. "I'm going to start ignoring you when you do that."

"That's how it goes."

"How what goes?"

"First they try to ignore me, then they start making fun."

She closed the distance between them and pushed him playfully on the shoulder. He fell backward into the stacks, and was surprised when they didn't fall over. "Oh, woe is you. I'm trying to tell you that I grew up in an apocalypse cult, and you're whining about your social life."

"Your apocalypse cult and my social life are linked in my mind." He straightened up, and rubbed his now-aching back.

"You did say we've met before." There was a calculating look in her eyes, and he knew the roles in their interrogation had shifted. "What was the context?"

"I'll tell you if you tell me about the cult," he offered.

"Okay." She shrugged. "What do you want to know?"

"How many people were in it?"

"About fifty."

"What were they doing?"

"Tweaking geopolitics."

"Uh, how?"

"Pushing people at the polls to make decisions against their interests. Creating subversive advertisements with anomalous efficacy for things nobody should ever want. Amping up unrest." She said it the way Wettle might have described the jobs his colleagues had, if he'd understood them well enough to do so and had a far better vocabulary.

"Why?"

"Chaos." She smiled.

"Yeah, but… why?"

She sighed. "Because it's time. Order had its day."

A rare flash of insight passed through him. "You think you caused all this? Your cult?"

She began pacing out the infirmary chamber, head bowed in consideration. "I… don't know. I came here to find out why all our records stopped making sense, why we couldn't remember our driving force, and… I felt it. Here." Her hands were clenching and unclenching, like she was physically grasping for an explanation. "I still sort of do, but it's not… right."

"What's not right? I don't understand."

She shook her head, eyes rolling, and when she faced him full-on again her expression was closed-off and serious. "I should talk to someone else about it."

"Because I'm an idiot," he nodded.

"Right," she nodded back.

"Big dumb idiot."

"Right."

"You fucked me."

She blinked. "What?"

"That's what happened when we met." His voice was straining under the triumph welling up inside his chest. "You fucked me."

She stared at him.

"Three times."

She stared at him.

"Now who's the idiot?"

She spoke slowly, as though in a dream. "I feel like… we both must be."

"Blame it on the chaos," he suggested.

Nascimbeni heard the clattering of heavy footfalls in the hall outside, and shook his head. "Wonder where they go."

"Patrol," said the voice in his head. She was slumped against one of the eight massive tanks in the Recondite Deplanarization room. He'd asked her not to do it, to stand up, to stay with him on the catwalk, but she hadn't listened. There was nothing wrong with her legs, but she insisted on falling to the floor whenever he stopped to do his work, like she barely had the will to remain conscious at this point. He couldn't imagine what she was going through, but still he felt she could make the effort.

"Like how they caught us?" he asked. "Watching the front porch?"

"They go a lot farther than that." Her voice was getting better, less scratchy, more tone. Couch would probably be tempted to burn it back out of her soon. "Out as far as the west end of the dorms."

Nascimbeni walked around the northwest tank, trying not to look down. The pit beneath wasn't quite as deep as the one in The Cavern, but a fall would still be plenty fatal and he couldn't see the bottom. The emergency containment technique for these tanks was to drop them into the sump and let entropy sort the contents out. "Seems risky. Don't they get possessed?"

"No."

"No?"

"No."

He stopped what he was doing. There was something in the way she said it that gave him pause. "Why?"

"Because they can't."

He walked back around the tank without bothering to check the meter, and knelt in front of her. "What do you mean?"

She stared straight through him. "They can't be possessed. Not by… my counterparts."

He placed a hand on her shoulder. "As in, it's impossible?"

"As in," she nodded.

"Do you know why?"

Her eyes focused on his. "Did I ever tell you how the Foundation found me?"

He sat down in front of her. He wasn't going to lean on the tank, not when its job was to break down particles which if improperly broken-down could pass straight through solid matter; she might have lost the desire to live, but he hadn't yet. "No."

"I was a cop in Kenya."

"Can't picture that," he smiled.

She didn't smile. "Police sniper. Some of the best in the world, Kenya. Best in Africa, seventh best globally."

"I take it back. The picture is forming."

"Didn't like it much. Some of the worst police brutality in the world, too. Saw some shit. Had to get out."

He knew some of the story from this point on. "You joined the UN Peacekeepers."

"Yeah. Saw some shit there too, in Eritrea. Observed a paraweapons deal going down I wasn't meant to, reported it to Amnesty International, and the next thing I knew I was dishonourably discharged and sitting in a garden shed in Nairobi with no clothes, no air conditioning, and no rights."

"Jesus."

"No Jesus either. Just another cop with a belt and a whole lot of questions he didn't expect answers to. Not anybody I knew on the force, but not all that different from them either. I could probably have broken his neck if I'd wanted to." Her expression never shifted as she told the tale. She had apparently, somehow, processed the entire experience so well that it had no more rough edges. "So you know what I did?"

He knew. She'd never told him this, but he knew. "You talked to him."

"I talked to him. And you know what happened?"

"He let you go."

"He broke my leg."

They sat there in the white noise of echoing burbles for a time, letting the words sit.

"Turns out the Amnesty International complaint made it into the hands of some Foundation mole, and they passed it along, so they put someone on me and tracked the kidnappers. Gedeon god-damn Van Rompay extracted me after extracting the cop's aorta, and they brought me to Site-06 for debrief. Hired me on the spot after my psych eval. Said I was the coolest customer they'd ever found under a hot tin roof."

He wanted to reach out and touch her, but it felt monstrously inappropriate in this context.

"I couldn't get through to that bastard. He died not knowing that what he was doing was wrong. He wasn't some murder monster, he was a human being with a job and a home and a salary, a family probably, and he thought he could beat a woman half to death with a belt and keep living his life like it didn't matter, because of something… I don't know." She didn't look upset. She didn't look traumatized. What was that look in her eyes? Fascination. "Something in his upbringing? Something in his makeup, deep down? Whatever it was, it made him…"

"A fascist." Nascimbeni had grown up in Italy. He knew the long shadow the easy solution could cast.

"A fascist," she nodded. "And that's why I couldn't reach him. All these years later, if I had another chance to try, I still wouldn't be able to. If our places had been reversed, I would have listened. I would have let him go. Because I always kind of knew it, Noè, but where it counts, I was never like him."

She reached out and took his hands.

"I was never a cop."

He nodded.

He felt his mind whirring.

He felt his mouth opening.

He didn't know what to say.

"Yeah," she said.

"That's it?" he found himself asking, barely understanding what his own question meant.

"That's it."

He was glad she was holding his hands. If he'd fallen over backward where he was hunkered down right now, he would have kept falling for quite some time.

"Do they know?" he whispered.

She let go one hand and tapped him on the ear. "If they didn't before, they do now."

"But this means… it would mean…"

She nodded.

"But the MTFs. You said the MTFs were also—"

"Different effect. That was memetic. Memetics work on everyone."

He let go her hand, and stood up. "You can't be right. My people wouldn't fight against… they wouldn't fight against that."

"The ones who understand aren't fighting it anymore. They've gone over. The Mounties think they're brainwashed, but they've just seen the truth. The Foundation and the government were never more than big bullies in a huge playground. Cops in the garden shed. The doctors and the janitors and the paper-pushers, you can show them the light. But not the ones with the guns."

He shook his head. "I can't believe that. They're not all… they're not all like you say. Delfina." He pointed a finger at her. "Delfina is not a fascist."

"No," Mukami agreed. "She is not. She just works for fascists, and does everything they say, and hides in their bunker and eats their food and passes the salt when they ask like a good little girl. She's naïve." She finally smiled. "A little like you."

"So I'd be an easy convert to the cause, then, would I?"

"If one of them were standing here, and talking to you, yes. She could show you the light."

"And you couldn't."

"I'm not one of them," she assured him yet again. "I just know what's in their hearts."

"How?"

She stood up, slowly, inching her back along the tank. "Because it's in my heart, too. I've only ever wanted to talk. I've only ever wanted everyone to be free."

This time Sokolsky walked right up to her, as he had on the first day, and made eye contact. "I'm going to miss you, Lillian."

"Lillian," she responded dutifully.

"It isn't my choice, you understand." He sighed. "Everyone else is under a strict no pets rule, and they've made me the exception for far too long now. They're afraid you'll get off the leash and bite someone." He tapped her on the forehead with the tip of his forefinger. "But you're not still in there, are you? You haven't been the whole time. Haven't heard a word I've said. I'm disappointed, but not surprised. You might have been brilliant once, but now you're just one dim bulb among many."

He began pacing through the cubicles.

"I've tried to build you back up. I hoped I might get through to you if I advanced one step every time."

He hopped up onto the raised daïs and leaned down over Nass' desk, using it as a pulpit. He waited until she looked up at him to continue, and when he did it had the cadence and precision of a rehearsed speech. "The last few months have been hard. My resonator project could have used your insight. But today is your last chance to come out and play, Lillian. We were always tuned to the same frequency, you and I. Nobody else measures up to us. Together we could really, truly hit them where it hurts. Be the ones to finally advance these noble causes past the planning stage. I'll solve it without you, and those people on the other side of the fence will join the fold, but… Well, if you're in there, you know I just wish we could have shared this final project. I suppose once we all do what the boss needs done, we'll have reached the end of innovation. No use for Lillian Lillihammer or Daniil Sokolsky, not in the next world. Can't even say I have my doubts, because I know we're right. But it would have been fitting to let you have the last meme. Wish I could flick the switches in there, lose the static, change the channel. But I need to admit defeat, move on, stop clinging to the past like a twenty-something romantic. A pioneer like myself can't afford the luxury of sentimentality on the cusp of greatness, now can I? When you're gone, I'll have to take solace in the knowledge that we had a good run."

He stared at her so intensely she was afraid, for an instant, that he could sense her real presence behind the blank stare.

Finally, he nodded. "I know you understand, or will when the time comes."

He stepped back down, glanced at the devices affixed to the wall with a ghost of a smile, then turned away and headed back down the corridor.

"Goodbye, Lillian."

"Goodbye," she found herself repeating.

She realized what was happening a few moments later.

She ran.

She ran to Nass' office, and set off her countermeasures. All across R&E, the cameras went down. She ran to Bremmel's lab, tablet under one arm, and grabbed the rifle. She sourced the parts and materials she needed, located the safe he thought was a secret from everyone and still was a secret from everyone but her, and emptied its contents into her pockets. She dumped what she couldn't carry into a plastic bag that still had a rotten sandwich in the bottom, then bolted back out into the corridor. There was an alarm blaring in the distance, and footsteps receding away from her. The final fire drill was in progress.

She knew everything she needed to know.

It was her time to shine.

She found a concealed door to the Site's second skin, and stepped into the shadows.

10 October

Karen stirred beneath the blanket. Her eyes opened, clear and bright, and she turned her head to face him. "Where am I?"

He smiled down at her. "The shittiest hospital we've ever had." They were in the infirmary. Alis was on a chair across the room, reading a book. Forsythe was standing at the door; he heard her slump against it in relief and nervous exhaustion.

Karen blinked. "…Harry?"

"That's me."

"What are you doing here?"

He recognized the tone. She was really asking what anyone was doing there. "I've been winning arguments with you," he said. "Guess that's over now."

She reached up and rubbed her temples. "I had a very… long… very bad dream."

"I have very brief bad news for you."

She winced. "I thought you might say that." The wince became a grimace. "Nnngh. My head."

Forsythe stood at the foot of the cot now. "What hurts, Karen?"

"Brain." Karen took a deep breath. "Feels… stuffed. Brain's full."

"It was pretty well empty for a few months," Alis said. She hadn't moved.

"Months," Karen repeated. She looked to him for confirmation.

He nodded. "Yeah."

"Argh." She said it as a word. Argh. "Where are we at now?"

"Very nearly where we were at before," he said, "only now we know how to fix what was wrong with you, which is good, because it was wrong with a whole lot of other people too."

"What was wrong with me?"

"Mental fatigue from being possessed," said Forsythe.

A flash of fear. "Someone else was using my brain."

"And the rest of you," Alis added.

Harry had expected the fear to deepen. Instead he saw a rueful streak in her gaze. "That should have been a vacation for me. Instead I had to…"

"Watch the slides," he finished for her.

She smiled. "Yeah. Yeah. How are you still funny?"

"Thank you."

"But how?"

He glanced back at Alis. "You could say I did get to take a vacation." He glanced up at Forsythe. "You could even say I haven't completely come back yet."

Some of the old imperiousness crept into Karen's features. Her cheekbones seemed to sharpen. "Shouldn't you be out working somewhere?"

"I would, except that I'm in brain jail here with you."

She frowned. "You mean you're visiting me, or you're in here with me?"

She didn't need to hear the whole sordid story yet. On learning that Zwist was occupying H&P and Harry had won him over, Falkirk had immediately reacquired his earlier suspicion. A new series of tests by Alis and Forsythe hadn't allayed them, so here he was again. "I convinced them to let us do time together, so I could be here when you woke up. I am, however, doing time. But!" He resisted the urge to clap his hands; she was speaking quietly enough that her hearing was probably still very sensitive. "You'll probably be out before I am."

"What're you in for?" The note of concern was gratifying.

"Every few weeks the Director decides I've been compromised."

"The Director," she repeated. A cloud passed over her face. "Falkirk?"

He nodded.

"Have you been compromised?

"Nope."

The cloud lifted in the light of a brilliant smile. "Would you like him to be?"

2003

6 July

Karen glanced over her shoulder. The rearguard agent flashed her a friendly thumbs-up, and she nodded. She didn't feel anything remotely resembling safe.

She turned back, and asked the agent in front: "Where are we going?"

"Meetup." The man was wearing a helmet, so she couldn't see his features. He was also wearing a bulletproof vest over his OSAT shirt, like the one behind her. They might as well have been cut from the same cloth. She wondered if they even had names.

"Yes." She put on her best airs. "I gathered as much. Who are we meeting up with?" Falkirk had sent her out when the escorts had arrived, giving her full diplomatic powers and a bogus S&C uniform to make her a less intriguing target, and hadn't deigned to explain the reasons. He'd said she would know when she got where she was going.

"The Commissioner."

"Couch?" He couldn't have sent her to negotiate with Couch. The woman was a monomaniac, she'd be far out of her depth. I'm practically a glorified secretary! "Why?"

"That's between her and the Director. I'm just following orders."

She snorted. "I didn't think anyone ever said that out loud verbatim anymore."

"Why?"

She shook her head. "Never mind."

They passed through the foyer where the topside elevator was located. The massive Site-43 logo on the floor had been scratched out, and nothing put in its place. The elevator doors were crumpled inward. There were body bags blocking the doors to the Hiring and Regulation offices.

She didn't want to think about any of that. "How are things in your compound?"

"We're not authorized to say."

She looked back at the rearguard again, who nodded confirmation.

"Secure, then," Karen ventured. "That's good information to have, thank you."

The front guard turned his helmet on her sharply, then looked away again. "I'd prefer if you didn't speak to me from this point onward."

She smiled. Got you. "Now that, that is something I have heard a few times before."

She'd expected them to keep going down the corridor, to the access junction servicing AAF-D. Instead they walked into the centre of the blotted-out insignia, and the lead guard placed a firm hand on her shoulder.

"Wait here."

A chill ran down her arms. "For what?"

"Just wait here."

"Then what?" Harry asked.

"They left me there alone."

"And Couch never showed up?"

Karen nodded grimly. "She was never going to."

He furrowed his brow. "What do you mean?"

"I mean—"

He understood. "You can't mean."

"I do. Somebody else showed up instead, though I didn't see them coming, and you know the rest."

Harry didn't look at Forsythe. He didn't look at Alis. He looked at Karen, and Karen looked at him. She didn't look frightened, or confused, or even angry. She looked almost triumphant.

"Why?"

"That's a longer story," she sighed, "but I remember it much better."

It took a lot out of her, and it looked like it took even more out of her audience, but when she was done she knew Harry understood the import of what she'd told him. She had that fucker's number. They had it. He was through.

There was another matter to attend to, however.

"You're going to explain it to me, right?"

Forsythe glanced down at her. She'd been tapping on her tablet, presumably preparing the next phase of tests. "Explain what?"

"Why I'm the first to wake up."

Forsythe put her hands, and by extension her tablet, on her hips. "Yeah, we're gonna explain. We pretty much have to. You've got a condition, and you need to be aware of it."

Karen's heart started beating faster. "What condition?"

"Nothing serious. It's not going to kill you."

"What condition?" she repeated, firmly.

"I'll let Dr. Naylor explain." Forsythe moved aside so the bubbly bundle of gum could slide over on her chair.

"You remember the day Director McInnis enlisted you?" Naylor asked.

"Is that rhetorical?" Karen didn't like the woman. There was something disingenuous about her. "The bank I was working at turned into a giant tentacle monster."

"More accurately," Alis smiled, because she didn't much like Karen either, "it had always been a giant tentacle monster, and you never noticed until someone showed up and pointed it out to you."

She nodded irritated assent.

"Someone conditioned not to be swayed by illusions—"

"If this is about CRV," Karen interrupted, "I've obviously been tested. I'm in admin, they won't let you in without—"

"I know. I know." Naylor held up a hand, and Karen wanted to swat it out of her face. "Your CRV is one of the highest at the Site. That's actually what this is about, funnily enough."

"I can't wait to hear why it's so funny."

Alis pulled out her own tablet and showed Karen a brain scan, with points of interest highlighted in gold. She couldn't read it. She wasn't a scientist. "Your cognitive architecture is like nothing we've ever seen before. It's something science lacks the tools to explain. Unknown, until now, even by parascience."

"She's special," Forsythe chimed in from the door. She was looking down at her own tablet, continuing the workup.

"She's very special." The memeticist simpered. "Dr. Elstrom, your cognition simply cannot accommodate possessive effects. You have a perfectly invasion-proof brain."

"Okay? That doesn't…" That didn't anything.

"I looked up the former Director's report on the bank. Those other tellers? They all used to be normal people, way back when. The bank took them over. Incorporated them. But it never did that to you, because it couldn't."

"So my brain is safe as houses." Karen nodded. "That's great. Why did that make it easier for you to wake me up?"

"It didn't." Forsythe still didn't bother looking up. "It made it easier for us to understand why you went out so quickly."

"Everyone else who was possessed eventually lost their cognitive faculties," Naylor continued. "Fell into a stupor. You did it immediately, the moment Wirth jumped into your brain. That's because you have absolutely no built-up immunity to cognitive interference. Normal people, they pick up trace elements of human thought, intrusions by the spiritus mundi, every hour of every day. Especially out in public, in crowds, but even alone in a mansion you can't escape the human mental field. Except you have never been exposed to it, at all." The other woman leaned forward, clearly warming to her subject. "Wirth's invasion was powerful enough to get into your head — he's probably the only invader who'll ever be able to crack that particular safe — but he jumped back out immediately because the architecture collapsed under the unaccustomed weight."

Karen struggled to comprehend the implications. "So I blanked out… because I was strong?"

"That's right."

"That's not so bad." It was far better than she'd expected.

"But you never noticed the bank was so fucked up for the same reason," Alis reminded her. "Your condition makes you impossible to straight up control, but absolutely trivial to mislead. You're particularly susceptible to minor illusive properties. You don't notice anything out of the ordinary until it's too late."

Karen felt her face closing up at the revelation of this unexpected weakness. She fully hated Naylor now, and almost hated Forsythe too for hearing the explanation. "You're sure about this," she said through suddenly clenched teeth.

"Pretty sure," Naylor nodded.

"Is there a cure?"

"Might be." Forsythe finally looked up, apparently all tapped out. "We don't have time to work on that right now, but once the larger problems are dealt with, it'll be a priority. Best case scenario, we end up with an administrator who's both unpossessable and unbrainwashable."

"Everyone already knew it was impossible to get through to her," Naylor grinned.

"Everyone should have tried harder," Karen snapped.

"For now, though, Karen," Forsythe walked over to the cot, "we're going to figure out how to simulate your mental architecture in all of the other affected personnel — we've just made a contact with extensive expertise who's offered to help us make it work— and see if we can't finally wake them up."

Something didn't add, and Karen located it immediately. "I think I actually missed the part where this helped you bring me out of it."

"That's just it." Forsythe smiled blearily. "We basically didn't bring you out of it. You were in the process of coming out on your own — the very, very slow process, obviously — and our attempts to excite your neurons just hastened that. Your brain is primed to recover faster from this kind of thing than any other brain in the Site. We just need to make a Karen's Brain shot we can easily synthesize, and stick it in the necks of the other empties, and hey presto. Back in business."

Naylor glanced up at her. "Who first?"

"LeClair," Forsythe said instantly. "She'd want it that way, and I could use her help anyhow."

"You guys want to go work on that?" Karen asked.

"Very much so."

She waved them off. "Go ahead. I'd like to talk to Harry for a second, if he's still around."

"'If he's still around'," Forsythe snorted. She opened the door and beckoned; Harry appeared, yawning.

"You kids behave," Naylor winked as she and the doctor left the infirmary.

Harry sat down in Naylor's chair. "Now I know why you've always been immune to my charms."

"Sure," Karen nodded. "That's the reason."

"What did you want to say?"

"I recognized you. In the library."

His green-blue eyes widened. "You were in there?"

"Faintly," she nodded. "Like a bad dream, with a vaseline filter on the lens."

"Mixing your metaphors a bit there," he smiled.

"You don't dream in film? I guess that's just my superior mental architecture again."

"Must be," he agreed easily.

"The point is, I know you tried to save me." She wanted to reach out and take his hand, but they were both in his sweatshirt pockets and that would have been worse than awkward, so she didn't. "And I know you were hanging around here when you didn't have to. I wanted to say thanks."

He looked appropriately touched. "Hey," he said. "What are friends for?"

"I've never had an answer to that question before now."

She thought he might let the moment linger, but of course he didn't, because then he wouldn't have really been himself. "It's good to know that useful information can still pass into that bank vault of yours."

She narrowed her eyes. "Don't tell anyone I'm the anomalous equivalent of Wettle when it comes to gullibility, please. The other two are bound by confidentiality, but you aren't."

He crossed his heart, then crossed his fingers. "Wouldn't even cross my mind. I, too, am immune to intrusive ideas."

"Is that true?"

"No, but it makes me sound noble. Your secret's safe with me."

She believed him. "And I won't tell anyone you spent prom night in the garden, staring at the swans and crying."

He affected a wounded air. "They don't even know we went to the same school."

"Well I wouldn't tell them that," she chuckled. "They all think I'm homeschooled."

"Must be the way you hold your nose."

"No, I hold my nose because—"

"Low hanging fruit," he laughed. "It's beneath you."

"That's pretty low-hanging, alright. I'm not very tall."

"Your legs are, though."

Given the opportunity, she let the words sit there out in the open for a while.

As she'd expected he would, he broke the silence first. "You better get some rest."

She got comfortable, and closed her eyes. "Next time we talk, you won't be able to hold that over me."

"As long as there's a next time. See you soon, Dr. Elstrom."

"Dr. Blank."

Ibanez listened to both halves of Elstrom's story with her arms crossed. By the time it was over, the joints in her fingers ached. She'd been imagining breaking the bones of both hands on that old Scottish bastard's nose nearly the entire time.

"It's good," she said when the diatribe was finally over. "But it isn't enough."

"How is it not enough?" Harry exploded. They were standing, where else, in the infirmary. Wettle was there, talking in hushed whispers with Alis side by side on one of the cots. Elstrom was standing; she hadn't laid down since Forsythe had declared her medically fit.

"He can weasel out if it." Ibanez massaged her knuckles. "He can say Couch welshed on a deal, and didn't show, and that's why Karen got got. It isn't conclusive. I have another thing I can lay on him, but even the two combined won't do. We need a third smoking gun if we're really gonna smoke this son of a bitch."

"And what," Harry fumed. "You think it's just gonna walk in your front door?"

She shrugged. "The last couple did. Why not?"

11 October

It felt like they'd been wandering for days. Perhaps they had. The sun never seemed to shine very bright in those rare moments when they were out in the light, and more often than not they were ducking under cliffs or burning their way through seemingly endless water panther tunnels. Twice they camped, talked, ate and slept. A walk of a few hours had become an endless trek. Udo knew if she backtraced their path, it would look like an artistic rendering of a bee in flight.

At least she was spending time with Brenda. It hadn't been a bad month at AAF-A, considering the circumstances, and a walk in the wilds with a friend was not the worst way to live out humanity's dwindling days on Earth.

The land sloped up, up, and they found themselves in a small copse of trees which hadn't fallen victim to the erosion curse. Udo realized with a start that she definitely knew where they were, now. They were, in fact, almost at their destination.

"Do you think we should st—"

"Don't move," said a voice. Something metallic went click for emphasis.

Udo fairly exploded with relief. "Thank god."

"Around here, that's a time-consuming proposition." A man with a mohawk — a real mohawk, a topknot — in a tight winter jacket walked out in front of them. "And there's no guarantee they'd even listen to you. But I'll be very happy to, Dr. Okorie. Dr. Corbin."

It was the All-Sections Chief.

They walked through the camp together. There were plenty of trailer houses, and actual trailers, parked Airstreams and Winnebagos, as well as a veritable throng of winter tents. There were people everywhere, doing camping things: cooking food, chopping wood, setting up fences, checking equipment. The vast majority had tanned skin and prominent cheekbones, but other than that it could have been any jamboree anywhere.

Udo thought about asking why only one of them had a mohawk, then silently congratulated herself on figuring it out. Only one of them is a Mohawk. "How long have you been out here?" she asked the ASC.

He favoured her with his paternal smile. "I believe the traditional response is 'we have always been here'."

"Ho boy," Brenda exhaled.

"I haven't always been one for the traditions, however. We've been here since Falkirk took control of the Site."

"You got out while the getting was good," Brenda assured him.

"Little about the surface world is good now, Dr. Corbin. These people have only managed to eke out a living because of their knowledge of this place, and the patrimony of their ancestors."

"You're being protected by the Nexus creatures?" Udo asked.

"I'll bet it's not as simple as that," her companion said.

"You are correct." The ASC turned his smile on Brenda. "I'm pleasantly surprised, Dr. Corbin."

Udo frowned. "I don't get it. They're on your side, aren't they?"

The big man was still looking at Brenda. "Would you care to lecture her?"

Brenda raised both hands to ward off the offer. "No. It was only an educated guess, and I know enough about culture to defer to local authorities."

He nodded. "I'm no authority on most of the cultures arrayed here at Kettle Point, but I can explain the gist well enough. The Anishnaabe had a give and take relationship with the creatures of the lakes in time immemorial. Propitiation. Negotiation. Avoidance, where necessary. The creatures had and have today their own agendas, proclivities, wants and needs. When Anishnaabeg homes were colonized they turned on the colonizers, who did not perform the proper rituals or lacked the spiritual context to truly understand them. They thereby became ancestral protectors of a sort. But the colonizers are gone now, and the balance has been restored."

"You're saying it's primordial up here," said Udo.

"I am saying that these people have relearned their ancestral fear of the Mishepeshu. The cats are no longer unambiguously 'on our side', as you put it."

"That's depressing." Udo noticed that there were guards posted at every entrance to the vast, serpentine clearing, and understood now that they weren't just looking out for an MTF incursion. "I was hoping to find you in the middle of a large army of myth monsters we could use to attack the Site."

He considered her gravely. "Why would you want to attack the Site?"

"I mean," Brenda interceded, "you already have been. Haven't you?"

He shook his head. "Not directly. We've taken on a few patrols that were getting dangerously close to our camps, but that's it."

"It was enough to get on their radar," Brenda pointed out.

They stopped in front of a large, squat building with a protuberant veranda. The windows were boarded, and two men with rifles stood watch over the door.

"Of course," the ASC agreed. "Not enough to make it worth their while to come looking for us in force. They probably expect Gwilherm to circle back around and root us out once she's finished her little world tour."

"Gwilherm?" Udo asked.

"You don't know?"

"She doesn't know a lot of things." Brenda reached over and hugged her sideways. Udo smiled with tremendously intense embarrassment.

"Then we have a lot of things to talk about."

After stopping to provide them a shower and fresh clothes — an experience not quite as liberating as the first time had been, but still plenty refreshing — the All-Sections Chief gave them a more complete tour of the camp. It was sprawling. There were people everywhere, hundreds of people. There were vehicles running back and forth, children playing, woodworkers working wood, metalworkers working metal, people with clipboards walking between stashes of gear and supplies, the whole nine yards. It was equal parts army camp and army follower camp.

"I take it this isn't what you were expecting," the ASC said to Udo.

"Black lady from Britain," Brenda butted in again. "Probably expected tipis and wigwams."

"Tipis and wigwams are the same thing from different places," Udo bristled. "I know that much."

"That much is incorrect," the ASC chided her gently. "But no, most of these were never tipi people. That's a plains thing. In these parts, people lived in longhouses, though not for a very, very long time."

"I didn't mean to offend." Udo could feel the curve of the situation arcing away from her second by second. "I know you're not some relic from a bygone era or anything."

"No," he nodded, "we're not. Each of us can claim a stronger link to who we once were than most of the peoples of the Earth, hardened by the necessity of fighting to retain the right to remain ourselves, but we live in the modern world nevertheless. If you came here looking for a society of master trackers who speak to the wind, you're going to be sorely disappointed. We do have quite a few elders — more than we did in the time before the breach — but the majority of our population is the ATV and speedboat crowd, those who could afford them."

"How did you get more elders?" Brenda asked. "I heard they were rounding them up, at the start."

He looked pained at the mention. "Pan-Indian groups throughout North America have long been passing along the idea that this region could become a First Nations haven in the event of an ecological collapse or political catastrophe. Many migrated here as Gwilherm's walk began destabilizing the continent."

"So you've got a whole lot more than the original reserve population stashed away in here," Udo said. That made sense.

"Yes, though not as many as I'd like. We've lost quite a few to predation, and more to those patrols from the Site. I daresay this is one of the largest remaining population centres in this part of the country, but resources are scarce. As I said, the image of noble savages living off the land does not describe us in the least. We were unprepared for a reversion to first principles; better prepared than the rest, of course, but still. It's been a difficult transition."

"Have you seen any thunderbirds?" Brenda asked suddenly.

"My uncle had one back west," the ASC reminisced. "He bought it secondhand and restored it himself, considered it both a status symbol and a delicious irony. Drove it into the ground eventually."

"Very funny." She wasn't laughing.

"True, though. My equivalent joke was purchasing a Cleveland Indians shirt in my youth."

"So you haven't seen any thunderbirds." Brenda's tone was flat.

"No. They roost in Thunder Bay, unsurprisingly. This far south they rarely descend below the stratosphere."

"Gliding with the angels," Udo murmured.

He looked perplexed, but didn't press. "We see signs of their passing from time to time. Violent storms from the beating of their wings, and flashes of lightning from their eyes. Typically when someone from AAF-A strays too close to Kettle Point. I'm surprised that didn't happen to you."

"I wouldn't have minded," Brenda said quietly.

"We would have drowned," Udo reminded her.

"Maybe I still wouldn't have minded."

"They have never visibly appeared to persons of European descent, to my knowledge," the ASC said quietly.

"Well, that's fine." Brenda gave Udo a strange look. "Because I descend both ways."

"Huh?"

"Remember I told you my parents were living on the res? White people don't get to do that. He was Métis, and she was married to him. So I'm Métis, too."

"Oh!" She wasn't sure how to react to this information. "I assumed—"

"I'd be redder?" Corbin laughed. "Like the way you're turning now? Most white people can't tell the difference, a lot of the time."

Udo decided to change the subject to something she already understood. "We need your help," she told the ASC.

"I surmised as much from your foolhardly journey."

"We think we can get back in contact with the main Site from F-A, using the comms array, but there's still a few MTF squads guarding it."

"You wish us to provide a distraction, then."

She nodded emphatically. "Yes."

He looked over the field of refugees, then up at the sinking sun behind its veil. "I'm not sure the proposal would go over well here. It's been a long time since we led an attack, but it was rarely profitable for us."

"I'm not proposing you sacrifice yourselves," she said hastily. "We just need them drawn off for a while."

"And if you're genuinely in danger, won't the Nexus creatures come to your rescue anyway?" Brenda asked.

His upbeat expression downshifted subtly. "We have been in threat of extinction before without it stirring them to help. Nature is capricious. That's one of the things the First Nations have always known, which others find difficult to grasp. I do have a question: why do you believe contacting the Site would help?"

"Because I know some things they probably don't," Udo said, "and also we have Ilse Reynders."

His eyes lit up. "She's alive? We thought for sure the collapse of the upper levels would have killed her."

"She's alive."

"Lady can't catch a break," Brenda added.

"That alone might be enough to convince me," he mused. "If anyone can devise a plan for dealing with this series of calamities, it's her. Still, I will need to hear precisely what you want for us to do, and I will need to present it to the others en masse. They will decide if they wish to help or not."

"You can't just, I don't know, convene the elders and make a decision?" Udo urged.

"I will confer with the elders," he said pointedly, "and they will aid me in advising the camps. We do not make decisions of this nature unilaterally. I must convince everyone."

Brenda was fidgeting. "What're the odds you can?"

"I've convinced them to tolerate the Foundation for seven years running," he smiled. "I think my odds are quite favourable."

Udo felt a little faint after carrying the torch for so long, so she took a nap in the main building while the ASC gave Brenda a more detailed tour. She was meeting with the people of the camp now, some of them her people — there was a family from Red River, and she'd expressed polite interest in being introduced.

I don't like it.

What didn't she like? Being left out? Her friend making connections without her? Being alone? Was she nervous, anxious, afraid?

When she found the right word, she marvelled at it until dark.

They sat on a little hillock now, together again. The night air was warmer than expected, and they were still bundled up in their outer layers, but they huddled close anyway. For the heat, Udo told herself. Only for the heat.

The stars were coming out. She wished she'd known them well enough before to say whether they, at least, had stayed the same.

"You think anything will ever be the way it was?" she asked. "Anything at all?"

"I hope not." Brenda leaned closer to her.

"Why?"

"Because things were shit," the other woman whispered.

"It wasn't all bad." Udo stretched out her shoulders without taking her arm from around Brenda's back. "Civilization was progressing. Starts and stops, but mostly forward motion."

"Your historian boyfriend tell you that?"

"Yeah," she admitted, "but it's true."

"Well anyway, I'm not talking about civilization. I'm talking about… us, honestly."

Udo turned to look at her. Brenda's eyes shone in the dark. "Us?"

"The Foundation." She looked up at the stars. "A lot of what was wrong with the world was our fault."

"Okay," Udo nodded, leaving her chin on the other woman's clavicle when it landed, "but we had to do what we did, mostly. We had to preserve normalcy. All I've ever wanted was to be myself, and not have to worry that someone else was going to burn me at the stake for it. The Foundation gave me that. I never wanted to be special, you were right about that. I never wanted to conform to someone else's expectations. This job is the only thing that lets me pretend I'm normal."

Brenda rested her ear against Udo's forehead. "But you aren't normal, and you shouldn't want to be. What you are… Udo, we killed things like you." She was shaking, and Udo held her closer to still the motion. "We killed our gods, and demigods, and even the priests and priestesses. We hid the miracles. We choked all the joy out of everything, so misery could rush in and fill the holes up. And we never even took the time to really enjoy… the joy. We were joyless about the joy. We went at it with scalpels, and wrote papers about what was inside. We never stopped to smell the roses, we made cuttings and pressings just to compare them with the orchids and the daisies so we could learn how they worked and stop them from spreading, like they were weeds. But they were flowers, Udo. We locked the flowers up away from daylight, and… and I…"

Udo realized Brenda was crying.

"And I never got to see them."

Udo lifted her chin, touched Brenda's cheek, turned her head. They faced each other in the moonlight.

"All that time," Brenda whispered, trembling lips an inch away from hers, "and I never saw any flowers."

"But that's better now?" Udo asked. If she'd interrupted, they would have kissed.

"Yes." Brenda shifted subtly, and pressed the next words into Udo's lips. "That's so much better now."

She advanced forward, and Udo let herself be lowered to the blanket.

"I'm living in a dream of flowers, now."

"What a cheesy line," Udo giggled.

"Really was, hey?" Brenda twirled a finger through Udo's hair.

"Fucking flowers," she snorted into the other woman's chest.

"It worked."

"I'm a fucking flower."

"If you were, you're not anymore."

Udo guffawed.

"Because of the fucking."

Udo squeezed her partner rudely. "You're terrible."

"No, that's you." Brenda's voice was high and lilting, almost singsong. "Great and."

"The Wizard of Ipperwash," Udo agreed.

"Witch."

"Wicked," she agreed. She frowned.

Brenda must have sensed it somehow. She pressed her chin into Udo's scalp, and asked: "Do you feel bad?"

Udo looked up suddenly, and kissed her yet again. "Did I give you that impression somehow?" She nibbled Brenda's nose.

"I meant—"

"I know what you meant." Udo pressed her face into Brenda's hair, and hid. "Yeah."

"Yeah. Sorry."

"It's not like you did something to me."

"Didn't I?"

Udo snorted into her neck. "You know what I meant."

"Still, I knew about the guy."

"But you don't know him. It's my problem."

"Is it?"

"Is it what? My problem?"

"A problem."

Udo re-emerged, sliding over her partner's body to look her in the eyes. "I don't follow."

"Only one of us is a problem, Udo. Him or me."

She didn't move.

"You don't have to decide right now," Brenda said.

"That's good."

"I was kind of hoping you would, though."

"I bet."

"Like, instantaneously. "

"Uh huh."

"A snap reaction. Maybe even cut me off a little while you said it. Would have been super romantic. A magical moment."

Udo rolled off. "Yeah, well, sucks to be you I guess. Forever deprived of the magic you crave."

"There's workarounds." Brenda held up her discarded underwear. "You could put a little of that sand in there, so that—

"Clothes on," Udo commanded. She started looking for her own. "We're out of fuck around time."

"Nice to know it exists, though." Brenda sat up. "We'll have to do a replication study later."

"Several," Udo agreed.

"Dr. Wettle will be so jealous."

"Yeah." She chuckled. "That'll be such a new experience for him."

"I grew up on a farm."

"What?" Alis answered from the top bunk. The overhead lights were dimmed. It was simulated night in the server hall.

"I grew up on a farm," he repeated.

"And now you're growing old in one."

A pause. Then: "What?"

"A server farm."

A longer pause.

Then: "What?"

She sighed. "What sort of farm did you grow up on?"

"You ever see Green Acres?"

"No."

"That sort of farm. We grew weeds."

He heard her make a small noise, not quite a laugh but on the way to one. "You're exaggerating."

"True." Wettle tried to put his hand behind his pillow, but stuck it through the pillowcase instead. He didn't bother adjusting. "The weeds grew themselves. My dad planted seed for the birds. He didn't know that was what he was doing, but they did."

Her legs appeared over the edge of the bed, then the rest of her dropped down bouncily. She squatted beside him, hair pulled back in a bun, pink and blue bunny rabbit pajamas sticking out in the dim greyness of their desultory surroundings. "You're kinda funny, you know that?"

"Looking," he added.

"What're you looking at?" she half-sang back at him.

"No fair stealing my trick."

She crossed her arms on the bed beside him, leaned forward and rested her chin. "You admit it's a trick then."

"Of course it is. I'm not an idiot. We don't hire idiots."

"You don't hire anyone," she said. "Last I heard, your staff was you."

"I'll have you know you got along very well with my staff," he mock-snarled.

She shook her head. "I'm having a lot of trouble picturing that."

"I could show you."

"Not what I meant." She shuddered, and he wondered how much of it was an act. "No offence, but I really don't see why you would have been my type."

"Well, you were trying to murder me."

"Before the sex or after?"

He ran through the sequence in his mind, as best he could. It took about a minute. "Aaaaafter," he said, uncertainly, "but not because of."

She performed a complex series of quick respirations which also were and were not laughter. "What was the reason, then?"

"We never found out. You wouldn't talk." Or so he assumed; it was also possible that whoever she'd talked to hadn't felt the need to loop him in.

"Hmm."

"You could talk now."

She turned around, leaning against the bed and resting the back of her skull against his pillow. "What would I say? It wasn't me. It didn't even happen, now."

"What would be important enough to you, that you'd kill for it?" he pressed.

She shook her head. "I can't think of anything."

He didn't believe her. "You told us you were going to kill everyone, everywhere, and Ibanez says you seemed really excited about it."

"Sounds like I'm a pretty terrible person," she remarked.

"Pretty, terrible," he agreed.

"I don't think those balance each other out."

"You should get to know Ibanez better, then. Or Lillian."

"I doubt they're implicated in any omnicides."

"Might be surprised. You must know about it, though." He hated himself for asking, even though he knew he had to. Even though she'd once pointed a gun at him, attacked him, broken his glasses and kicked him in the gut. "The big plan."

"Yeah."

"Tell me."

"I don't want to." For the first time, her voice was small. Uncertain.

Vulnerable?

"You think I'm going to stop it?" he scoffed. "Me?"

"That's not…" She sighed deep and loud. "I don't want to think about it. I don't want to say it out loud. I don't want you to look at me while I say it. Not even in the dark."

"Why?"

"Because it's bad. Very bad. The worst, worst thing. And I was going to go happily along with it."

"Why aren't you happy now?"

"Because I don't understand why."

"You're not happy because you don't understand why you're not—"

She spun, darted forward, and kissed him.

He blinked, rapidly. She was still leaning over him, pink hair suddenly untied, hanging loose and screening their faces from bland reality.

"That shut you up," she purred.

"Other you figured that out too."

She looked… something. He was no good at reading expressions. Hurt? Worried? "Other me was doing something I can't comprehend, and I was gonna do it too. If I'd seen my chance last year, I would've raised hell. I believed."

"What did you believe?"

"That this go-around wasn't good enough. That we needed to start over."

"Start what over?"

"The world," she breathed. Her breath was, unsurprisingly, like bubblegum.

"You can do that?"

"That's what they said. They used to make it sound so good."

"Who did?"

"The giftschreiber. "

"Is that Santa Claus in German?"

She waited.

"Only joking."

"They convinced us there was a cycle," she continued, "and it was coming to an end. They explained it, and we understood. But when I try to remember…" She was fidgeting with his gown. "There's a hole."

"Already? I just got this thing washed!"

She kissed him again, and settled on top of him. Things started to happen. "I don't know what I am."

"I don't know what you are either."

She kissed him once more. "What do you want me to be?" He thought he could read her wide eyes now: innocent, longing. Hopeful?

"Naked?" he suggested, and she pulled the gown up over his head.

We Stand Divided

The Breach Goes On: Wrong Tomorrow

Meeting in the Middle