It's a Wonderful Ride - SCP Foundation

It's a Wonderful Ride

2024

24 December

Lillian Lillihammer noticed almost immediately.

She noticed it not because her mind was so well fortified against cognitohazards that they rebounded off her like raindrops against a steel roof, or splatted into her defenses like insects on a windshield. Both of these things now occurred with alarming regularity, but not at this particular moment. Because this wasn't a cognitohazard.

She also didn't notice it because her recent training had given her thaumaturgical defences without peer, which could deflect all manner of mystical mischief without her even focusing on the fact, though this was true as well. Because this wasn't magic.

She noticed because she wasn't noticed, and that never happened.

When Lillian Lillihammer walked into a room, somebody always looked up. At least one person in every room with at least one person besides her in it. When she walked into the third sublevel Habitation and Sustenance cafeteria, and that didn't happen, the non-happening was an event. The only event. The wall-mounted televisions were off, the dinner rush was on, the conversations were muted and private as always. There was nothing to distract these people from her, and they looked no more distracted by their own problems than usual.

Admittedly that usual was worse than… usual, right now, had been for months, but she didn't think that was it. There was only one logical conclusion.

Nobody looked up when she came into the room because nobody could see her.

"Ho," she grumbled, and began working the problem.

In the right light, it wasn't not a gift.

Udo Okorie noticed a few minutes late.

She was pacing the halls of Applied Occultism, which were almost always empty of foot traffic, the wizards either shut up in their sanctums or out in the world, plying their strange trades as the name suggested. She thought nothing of the fact that she was alone upstairs until she tried to go back down, at which point she discovered that the stairwells had all been bricked up.

She raised her hands in the air, hoping to probe the blockage with her micamancy, which was when she discovered something considerably worse.

The granules weren't responding.

Her magic didn't work anymore.

Delfina Ibanez noticed immediately.

She'd had to have been braindead not to. She walked out of her dormitory, and nearly tripped over a corpse.

It was a man in an Arms and Equipment labcoat. She could tell by the cut, if not the colour; the colour was magenta, or rather blue stained through with blood. He didn't have a head, and he was missing one leg, and judging from the smell, he was rotting. Judging by the shape, he was bloated. He'd died not long ago, then, but long enough ago that she should have noticed him an hour earlier when she'd popped into her dorm to catch a shower before the dreaded Christmas Eve party.

Finding a corpse in front of her room was not a more welcome distraction.

The light in the corridor was strange. It had only two modes, normally: warm fluorescent, or much warmer emergency incandescent. This was something different. It almost looked like…

Sunlight.

Jennifer Vide didn't notice at all.

It took Lillian no time to decide what to do. Who to find.

After waving her slender fingers in front of a few morose faces to confirm that she was, indeed, invisible to all and sundry, she turned on her heel and stalked out of the cafeteria with long, purposeful strides. Many people at Site-43 could run faster than her, but none could beat her in a power walk. Elstrom came close, but the extra inches still made a difference.

Elstrom herself was sitting, as she always did, on her raised daïs in the middle of Admin and Oversight. She looked, incredibly, worn down and haggard. There were more cubicles clustered around her than usual, and even though it was the off shift, most of them were occupied. Everyone was wearing a headset, either murmuring quietly, nodding, or shaking their heads in what looked very much like despair. There were screens set up all around the perimeter of the room, and they were filled with a myriad of graphs, all trending down. Lillian didn't like the look of that. She liked it less when she read the labels.

She wasn't sure whether she liked what she found on her way to the Director's office or not. Zulfikar Alomerović, long-dead administrative assistant, sat with his forehead on the desk blotter, quietly sobbing. She wouldn't have tried to comfort him if she hadn't been invisible, but it was good to at least have the excuse. She gently opened the door to the Director's office, and slipped inside.

And stared.

"Allan?"

Allan McInnis sat behind the desk, eyes milky white, staring straight forward. He was frowning. "Clio?"

"Yes, Director?" The voice came from the computer terminal on the Director's desk. It belonged to Cliometria.aic, the Site's primary AI.

"Are we alone? I thought I heard something."

"I read only you in the Director's Office, sir. Your assistant is asleep in his office. Should I wake him?"

Allan blinked, and shook his head. "No, absolutely do not do that. It's the only peace he has, these days. Is the report ready?"

"Yes, Director."

Lillian approached, staring at the man she'd worked under for over twenty years. There were plenty of new lines on his face, and his eyes were almost completely bleached — they were opened wide enough that she could just make out the faintest trace of an iris — but it was definitely him. She felt a lump in her throat as she stared into those unseeing orbs.

"Let's hear it," he sighed.

"Dr. Sokolsky's latest encrypted transmission has been decoded by AIAD. His attempt to breach the third cell was unsuccessful."

Allan sucked in his teeth, and his white eyes watered. Lillian felt faint. "Damn. Are you sure?"

"Yes, sir. The giftschreiber removed his ocular implant and used it to record, then transmit, a video of his execution. The video is three hours long."

Allan slumped in his chair. Lillian sat on the floor.

"O5-8, please, Clio."

"Would you prefer to conduct the call in your secure comms room, sir?"

"No." He closed his eyes, and suddenly he almost looked like himself again. Almost. "No, I don't really see the point, at this stage. I think we've reached the final pass."

It took a moment for Clio to put the call through, then an electronically modulated voice, androgynous and free of aspect, intoned: "Report."

Allan took a deep breath, and when he finally spoke, the tears he wasn't crying came through with crystalline clarity. "Operation FIREBREAK is over, sir. We've lost."

Lillian couldn't help what came next. Allan had always been better at controlling his emotional responses than she was.

To her surprise, and her horror, after a moment, he joined her.

It took Udo a few minutes to calm down. She was trapped, but there was still air. Her magic didn't work, but most people got through life just fine without micamancy. She was standing in Applied Occultism, and that was her domain. She was the only member of Site staff with a bedroom on this sublevel.

So, she went there.

Her ID card didn't work on the reader, which was bad. The retinal scanner refused to acknowledge her presence, which was worse. In the end she had to resort to hauling wires out of the walls and inputting an emergency code manually; for the first time ever, she was thankful for all the times the normalcy community's thaumaturges had tried to kill the person in her post, because it meant at least one of the myriad security features was vulnerable to the fact that she was supposed to be able to get into these quarters. They were hers.

At least, they had been. Less than an hour ago, when she'd first emerged.

Now the decor was more sparse, the furnishings… changed. She'd almost thought unfamiliar, but that was wrong. They were very familiar, if distantly. Like something out of another life.

She absently fingered the two rings she wore, one against the other. They were still there. She was still herself.

But she wasn't sure she wanted to be. Not in here. Not if she was correct about what she was seeing.

There was sobbing coming from her bedroom. She took a deep breath, balled her hands into fists, and went to see whose it was.

As if she didn't know.

It took Ibanez only a brief inspection to understand what had occurred.

There was a kilometre-deep borehole just down the road.

Not a hole Ibanez could step into, but a hole she could look up through.

And see sunlight.

It was already starting to dim, as the sun itself moved beyond the compass of the cleavage. It was perfectly round, perhaps ten metres wide, and smooth. Shiny. Cauterized.

Someone had fired one of the Foundation's orbital cannons at the Site, punched through bedrock to obliterate the security checkpoint that controlled access to her block. The shot had been made with such perfect precision that the tiles beneath were only lightly scorched, though everything else was entirely absent.

A thought occurred to her. She drew her weapon, but walked back to the dormitory door. Before her gorge had a chance to make her rethink the thought, she kicked the corpse over onto its back.

The sloughing skin obscured most of it, but she could still make out the turtleneck. Perhaps not all of the bloating was from gaseous buildup after all. It was Trevor Bremmel's corpse.

She choked down the rush of bile, and headed out of the block. The light from the borehole only got her so far into the musty gloom, but that was alright.

It wasn't the only hole.

The entire facility was silent as a tomb, every corridor lit by at least one dimming skylight, most of them filled with broken machinery and mangled bodies. There were signs of resistance everywhere: barricades, bullet holes, and discarded Foundation-issue weaponry. What looked like red sand wedged into the crevices of a door. She stared at that door for what felt like a lifetime.

The next door had been vandalized with a bit of graffiti, a red dot surrounded by a fan of red and white. The emblem of the Chaos Insurgency.

Because, well, of course. Who else?

After over twenty years spent managing the fallout of sudden reality shifts, her feet took her where her heart knew the problem most likely lay. She left the carnage of H&S for the access corridor to AAF-D, but before she made it, her mind added its two cents, and she checked the two offices fronting on the thoroughfare.

Harry's office was a burned-out wreck. The archives were gone, scoured to the back of the salt mines. Salt didn't burn, but it did melt. The colour was brilliant in the bending beams from far above.

Wettle's office was a little different. For one thing, the Deputy Chair's office had a nameplate for G. O'Conner.

For another, there was a framed caricature of Wettle on the wall. The little bronze plaque beneath his gormless gurning visage bore his name, and two dates.

She recognized the first one as his birthday.

It took Jennifer a long time to stop watching them. She wasn't sure what else to do with herself. She didn't know anyone, at least not well enough to impose herself upon them on a holiday. Nobody except for… them, who seemed to be getting along just fine with the distance she'd kept in the past few months.

So, she watched.

She stood in the doorway to the back halls, which led to the voluminous storage facilities in the salt caverns, and watched two people who should have been her parents sitting in companionable silence at the central set of desks in the main workroom. They had the ease of long, long acquaintainship between them, each seeming to know what the other would do or say long before it happened. They hardly even talked anymore, because they didn't need to. Body language said it all.

She wanted to talk to them.

She wanted to say something.

But the rational part of her knew that these weren't really her parents. Her parents almost certainly no longer existed. The man and woman now packing up their files and preparing to head for the desultory party in the main cafeteria, where what little mirth on offer at Site-43 today was to be had.

She could go with them, but why?

They hadn't even acknowledged her, this entire time.

Everything, Lillian saw, was different now.

Absolutely everyone was wearing memetic dazzle camo. She hadn't noticed on her way to the Director's office because she hadn't seen anyone. They were keeping out of the halls. She also hadn't noticed that the message boards were filled with cognitostimulant images, to ward off memetic attacks like a shot of vaccine, because she didn't notice stuff like that at all anymore unless she was in active search mode. It was getting late in the day, but it looked like almost everyone was still hard at work.

And none of them, absolutely none of them, could see her.

She wished she could call up one of Scrooge's protestations to the spirits that had plagued him, but she didn't know any, because she'd never read A Christmas Carol. She'd never even seen any of the movies. Not even the one with the Muppets.

Instead, she walked silently through a parade of almost too on-the-nose examples of the yawning gulf her absence created. Memetics and Countermemetics seemed to take up almost the entirety of Research and Experimentation now, and there were dozens of memeticists she either only vaguely recognized, or had definitely never seen before. Where her office had been was just an out-of-the-way subcorridor and broom closet; the Chair of M&C was camped out in the centre of the complex, in an office she at first thought must have been on fire. But it was only cigarette smoke, wafting out into a bullpen apparently denuded of detectors, and at the end of that smoke was a cigarette, and at the end of that cigarette was…

She'd expected Marion Wheeler. She hadn't expected Arik Euler, who had been dead for nearly a decade.

The old man looked older than he'd looked in his casket. The bags under the bags under his eyes had bags under them. His skin was a grease-spotted fish wrapper. He was openly weeping, and pressing his palms into the blotter on his desk. As she watched, he leaned back and pinched some of the substance he'd been crushing between two fingers, and sprinkled it into both eyes.

The response was instantaneous: the tears stopped, and a weak smile spread across his face. She thought it would split. Eyes now blank, Euler turned to face his terminal and blew out a frustrated breath.

She had missed him, all these years. But seeing him now, like this, she wished they'd let him rest.

As they would have let Marion rest, she realized. Without the tools she'd had on hand back in 2016, she was almost certainly dead.

The scene was repeated, Section after Section. Eileen Veiksaar writing code speech-to-text, her eyes the same milky white as Allan's. Roger Pensak in Del's place in the security bullpen, giving orders with a grin, never having been found out. Edwin Falkirk in Sokolsky's office, Trevor Bremmel fetching him gadgets and dossiers with blinding speed, was the worst of it until she found Phil Deering staring into space in the chief janitor's office, gently rotating his wedding ring, lip trembling and chest heaving. The thing in the mirror apparently had nothing to say that he wasn't already thinking.

Harry was long gone. She didn't have the heart to find out where.

"I get it," she sighed. "I got it before you showed it to me."

If there were magic words to end the display, it wasn't those.

Many things, in Udo's view, were unworthy of remembrance.

The prime example lay shuddering face down on her bed, and she hated that she recognized him even from this angle. Just the shape of his body beneath the lab coat, the shape of the hair on the back of his head, even the sound of the sobs that wracked his body.

She didn't want to comfort him. She didn't want to speak to him. She didn't want to be here, but most of all, she didn't want him to be here.

Wherever this was, because it certainly wasn't home.

She left him to his misery, and searched the rest of the complex. She didn't find a way out, though she did find evidence suggesting there sometimes was one: an unfinished ritual circle behind a sealed vault door, almost certainly the egress point for a thaumaturgical Way. The Chief of Applied Occultism — or was he the Director? any amount of ridiculousness seemed possible right now — was no longer content to live in the most secure space in the Site. He needed to be literally inaccessible except under extreme duress.

There was plenty of evidence why scattered throughout. He had a different laptop terminal in every room, and most of them were in sleep mode. They all had different passwords, and it made her physically ill that she was able to guess most of them with only a few tries. And there it was, in living colour. The full extent of yet another colossal failure from the man who had become synonymous with the word.

He was, in fact, the Director. And he was directing the Foundation off a cliff.

There was a long, heartfelt direct message history with Keil Graf, chief memeticist of the schriftsteller, coordinating attacks on isolated giftschreiber and promising all manner of material support. There was a report to the Overseer Council detailing what cryptomantic assets had been loaned to the governments of the United States, China and Russia, stifling free thought and ensuring that a kind of shambling order prevailed in the superpower states while the rest of the world fell to chaos. There were proposals for the decommissioning of two Persons of Interest, comically numbered 1 and 2, to stop their global campaigns of attrition against the Foundation itself. From the first few lines of each, she could easily tell they were Lillian Lillihammer and Daniil Sokolsky.

She found Stacey Laiken's obituary, and Phil Deering's, and a postmortem on the wholesale disappearance of Colorado. She found the files on Gamers Against Weed and Parawatch and the Serpent's Hand, GoIs 102-D, 1109-D and 11-D, respectively. She found an itemized list of every politician who had been replaced by a Saker android, custom-built to O5 specifications. She found the prisoner manifest for Paramax, and the figures for how much money and how many inmates the Foundation was funnelling into it.

In his despair and incompetence, Dougall Deering had finally chosen a side. The fact that there hadn't been a good side to choose did nothing to absolve him of the choice.

A little more targeted digging found the final report of the Acroamatic Abatement Group, which had gone defunct shortly before Austria became the world's first esoteric waste superfund site. The SCP file that had once described Udo, her biological mother, and the city over which the latter lorded now covered only the latter and was brief and to the point: whatever had been there, it wasn't anymore. With nothing to tether them, the rest of the micamancers had fled. She wondered how they'd done so without destroying the entire world.

Not that it mattered. Everything she saw suggested it was going to end sooner or later, anyway. The crackdown, the alliance with the cult of order, none of it was doing anything but making a bad situation worse. SCP-5243 had already made containment of any sort at Site-43 an impossibility. (She was momentarily amused to see that Dougall did her annual duty, until she saw said duty involved finding her own burned corpse in the containment cell.) Ilse Reynders had died in the ADDC, withering away to nothing, still protesting the scheme Dougall had put into practice to free her. Judging by the copious holes in every major document, it seemed that neither the Unyielding nor the Uncontained had been restored to existence in 2019. Their absences were abcesses on the fabric of reality. This world would be lucky to see the end of another year, if the Foundation's tightening fist didn't cause a second Impasse to pop it like a grape in the meantime.

There was a faint buzzing sound from beyond the vault door, and a hiss from the door itself, and she found herself rushing into the makeshift foyer before she even knew what she was doing. Instinct carried her to the edge of the gleaming portal, and a sudden glance revealed the hollow-eyed visage of Amelia Torosyan, two steaming mugs of coffee in hand and utter defeat written in her sunken cheeks, before she made the transit out.

She thought, in the final instant, that she could see the other woman registering Dougall's hacking cries from the distant bedroom.

She didn't see anything resembling a reaction.

Some things, Ibanez mused, stayed the same.

This wasn't the first time she'd seen her entire world destroyed. She'd already walked through the ruins of Site-43 twice before this, in two different universes, seen the corpses of her colleagues strewn carelessly about, seen the consequences of the absence of this single dynamic version of her own self on everyone and everything. It was the first time the danger had passed before her arrival, but that only made it worse. She wanted to do something about this. She wanted to kill something. She wanted to do anything but think about the friends she had lost, the progress that had been erased, the traumas she had lived through which might now have been for nothing.

This charnel house had never known the presence of the Delfina Ibanez who terrorized the Insurgency half into submission, before Wettle's farce did them in for good. The version who had mustered the courage to return to her annihilated origin, after decades away, and finally solve the mysteries that loomed large in her past. The version who had taken up a sword, and…

…and that was part of it, obviously.

Where Sokolsky's ETTRA office had been, there were simply more labs. The containment chambers on the first sublevel were all empty, with every indication they'd been that way for ages. There was no sign that anything more complex than a human being had engaged in combat in these halls. No anomalies had been let loose. Every cell door was missing its identifiers. There were no active experiments in the labs which had survived the orbital attacks, or the melee that had come after.

It wasn't until she reached the Director's bolthole that she found a computer which still had its own power source, and was undamaged. The machine McInnis had once used to call in to Overwatch Command. She fired it up, and was more than a little surprised when the SCiPnet uplink actually worked.

If her mind hadn't already raced to the conclusion, what she saw there would have been a surprise. She would probably have assumed it was an error. If what she saw was true, why would the system even still be active?

As a memorial, of course. A reminder of noisier times.

The SCiPnet database contained only seven thousand active files. This was momentarily a relief, though she had no intention of remaining in this fucked up reality. At least it wasn't as bad as she'd feared.

Then she ran a quick object class search, and nearly gagged.

The number wasn't so low because a thousand anomalies had died in the Impasse. That only accounted for all the new ones which had never come into being.

Of the seven thousand files in the database, over six thousand documented things which had been either neutralized or decommissioned.

She was, perhaps literally single-handedly, responsible for the death of anomalous phenomena on the planet Earth. Through nothing more malicious than absence. And in the absence of anything better to do with all that materiel and manpower, the Insurgency had taken advantage of the Foundation's loss of purpose.

She switched off the machine, and took a deep breath.

She knew the people here, even if they'd never known her. Even if they were gone.

She knew they wouldn't have been content with letting someone else memorialize what had been lost.

She headed back out to the hall, in search of the logical end.

Nothing, Jennifer thought. Nothing at all.

No messages in the messaging system. It wasn't as though she was a social butterfly, but she'd expected to at least get yet another invitation from Flora and Billie, even if they knew she'd politely blow them off. Maybe something from Ngo, who had a preternatural ability to identify the isolated and bring them back into orbit. Honestly, though she wanted to pretend it didn't matter, she was surprised neither Blank nor Bradbury had so much as extended the olive branch. They were still on good terms. They were still working together, and talking. She'd almost felt like they were making progress, the last few weeks, even with all the extra responsibilities everyone was taking on.

Now nobody in the halls would even look at her.

The sad little party in the cafeteria was wrapping up. People were heading back to their dorms, or the subway, or the elevator. Everyone had somewhere to be.

She had nowhere.

So, she faced homeward, and walked.

She walked past the quarters of the Chief of Archives and Revision, then past Archives and Revision itself. She walked past Replication Studies, catching the briefest flash of what looked like a mane of improbably golden hair before the blinds suddenly snapped shut. She walked to the point at which she had crossed from one lifetime to the next, and she closed her eyes as she made the final step, begging the universe to let her open them again on that half-remembered home where she was both beloved and understood.

Of course, it was just a step like any other. It brought her no more than another stride forward.

There were other footsteps behind her, and she turned to see who they belonged to. Not much traffic came this way anymore, what with AAF-D being decommissioned, and anyway it was after hours.

There was no-one there.

She turned her head, and examined the mural painted on the wall. Her father… Dr. Blank had painted it, many years ago. It was imbued with memetic residue from the people who had worked with the five men and two women depicted there, and a vague but sentimental sense of who they'd been washed over her, and she wanted to smile, but instead she screamed and fell to her knees in frustrated anguish.

Even the dead were remembered.

"I'M ALIVE," she cried hoarsely, and she heard the footsteps again.

Lillian Lillihammer stared at Udo Okorie, who stared at Delfina Ibanez, who stared at Jennifer Vide, who stared at the other three one at a time. They were all at the foot of the 5243 memorial, faces drawn, eyes hooded, lips trembling. They each spoke, but not at once.

Lillihammer: "Oh, thank fuck."

Okorie: "You guys, too?"

Ibanez: "About time."

Jennifer: "What?"

Because the latter was kneeling, Ibanez was almost at her eye level. The MTF chief put a hand on the junior archivist's shoulder, and said: "Did anyone report me missing?"

"Or me?" Okorie asked.

"If any of us was missed," Lillihammer attempted a faltering grin, "I'm sure it was me."

Jennifer blinked in confusion. "You… missing? You weren't. Were you? I thought I saw…" She looked at the other two women, one after the other. "You were all at the party, or somewhere in the halls. I saw you."

"Shortest deadline ever," Lillihammer murmured.

"Long enough," Okorie murmured back. The memeticist nodded agreement.

"And localized, I'm guessing." Ibanez looked up at the others. "I got a Code Capra. You?"

They nodded. Okorie blew out a breath. "Three in one night. That's a record. This might literally be Last Christmas, if it's getting that bad."

"What is?" Jennifer rose unsteadily to her feet. "What are you talking about?"

Lillihammer had her phone out of her jacket already, and was paging through something. "Fifty goddamn messages," she sighed. "What, was I just sleepwalking around? I hate this shit."

"Can the universe pick on someone else, for a change?" Okorie agreed, her own phone in hand. "Del, Roz is freaking the fuck out."

"You can go unfreak her while I take our report to the Director," Ibanez growled. "And then we're scheduling brunch for Boxing Day."

"Guys?" Jennifer waved her hands frantically. "Please tell me what's going on."

Lillihammer seemed to really see her for the first time. "Reality failures. Folks falling into fucking fractures. What are you doing out here? This time of night?"

"On Christmas Eve," Okorie added.

"In front of this." Ibanez kicked the floor moulding beneath the mural for emphasis.

Jennifer shrugged. "I dunno," she lied. "I just… I felt like. It. I came here because I felt like it."

"Did something nudge you?" Lillihammer asked.

"Did you feel a pull?" Ibanez had narrowed her burgundy eyes to pinpricks.

"Like you had to be here?" Okorie didn't look up from her phone, tapping out a message, presumably to her absent significant other. "Like you couldn't stay away?"

"I guess?" Jennifer shrugged. "Does that mean something?"

"Check your phone," said Okorie.

"There won't be anything—"

"Check," Ibanez intoned, in her deepest and most serious voice, "your, phone."

Jennifer checked her phone.

H_Blank

Swing by the office when you get a moment, would you?

M_Bradbury

Spare a minute?

H_Blank

We're at the cafeteria. You coming to the party?

M_Bradbury

Harry and I want to ask you something.

H_Blank

You busy?

M_Bradbury

Don't make me ask Clio to locate you!

H_Blank

Jennifer?

M_Bradbury

Clio says you're walking in circles.

H_Blank

Hello?

M_Bradbury

Are you going to make me call security on you on Christmas Eve?

H_Blank

Melissa and I are going back to my old place for Christmas.

H_Blank

Thought you might want to drop by.

H_Blank

The rest of the gang might, too. Get out of the basement for a change, you know.

H_Blank

There's lots of spare rooms.

H_Blank

No pressure.

Jennifer couldn't speak, but her eyes communicated volumes.

Lillihammer was already off, her long legs taking her out of earshot in an instant. "I'll tell the boss." Ibanez followed close behind, somehow almost keeping pace. "I'll call TAD. For what little that'll do." Okorie stayed behind, and gave Jennifer a look of mixed sympathy and empathy.

"I don't know what's going on," Jennifer said. Her voice came out in a rasp.

"Welcome to the club," said Okorie. "Merry Christmas."

And she set off after her friends, with a kind look back and a gentle wave.

Jennifer stared back down at her phone.

She couldn't hardly make out the words.

She stuffed it in her pants pocket, and broke into a jog.

"Hey!" she called out. "Do you guys carpool?"

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