On Reflection - SCP Foundation

On Reflection

2002

8 September

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Everyone at Site-43 was a misinformed observer.

A misinformed observer would assume that when the breach alarm sounded on 8 September 2002, Dr. Harold Blank was faced with, and made, a difficult decision. His disaster response duties were discretionary; as Chair of the Site's oldest Section he was expected to keep his cool in a crisis, and was theoretically therefore spoilt for choice. He could have followed his research assistant towards the lightshow, and died. He could've rung up Security and Containment for instructions, like a good little egghead. He could've ambled on over to Operations Control and offered his services, such as they were. He could even have gone looking for trouble on his lonesome, relying on his wits rather than his wit (for a change) to see him safely through. He did none of these things.

What he actually did had precious little to do with higher functioning. On the simple level of human reactions to the doom klaxon, the most obvious was to seek out and assure himself of the safety of his girlfriend: Eileen Veiksaar, Chief of Identity and Technocryptography. He knew where she was. He knew how to get there. If he wasn't going to be responsible or clever, this should have been the first course he considered pursuing.

It didn't even cross his mind.

When the alarm went off he instead stood up from his desk, walked out the open door into the blood-red emergency lighting, and turned away from the echoing chaos which had already lured Reuben Wirth to his demise. He made not the merest gesture in the direction of determining the younger man's fate, instead power-walking down the corridors, wincing at each new distant boom, spying frightened faces behind office windows and laboratory portholes, one eye out for lurking danger but never deviating from his route until he was halfway across the Site. Through the dorms, through admin, through the test labs, through the door to his research partner's office.

Melissa Bradbury ought to have jumped up when her door swung open mid-breach. If she had, she wouldn't have been Melissa Bradbury. Instead the silver-haired young woman merely snapped out of her mid-disaster daydream, fixed her dark blue eyes on him with a mixture of bleary curiosity and surprise — her eyeglasses were discarded on the desk in front of her — and chirped "Oh, hi Harry."

He raised one hand gingerly and waved, passing very rapidly through relief to embarrassment.

"What's going on out there?"

He could feel his brows creasing. "I, uh… don't know."

Her own brows shot up. "How come you're all the way over here, then?"

He really, truly, honestly could not answer that question. He wished he was the kind of man who could. There were things he needed to tell her, things he needed to tell…

Eileen.

This was the moment when he first remembered the existence of his putative significant other. He gasped.

Melissa was already gazing at her bookshelves again, lost in thought, so Harry quietly extricated himself. He couldn't decide whether to belatedly search for his girlfriend, or watch over his hapless partner from outside her closed door. Paralyzed by indecision, he performed the latter act by default.

What he didn't know was that as soon as he closed the door behind him, Bradbury's blank expression vanished. She pursed her lips in sympathetic fondness, and remarked "Aww" with sincere appreciation into the space where he'd been standing.

Eileen Veiksaar's disaster duties were very clear. She was to safeguard the Site's information technology networks, keeping the lines of communication open and filtering out low-level, non-critical chatter to save bandwidth for the first responders. She was to monitor for electronic cognitohazards, packets with potentially destructive conceptual contents, and prevent their spread. She was to backtrace any data corruption to its point of origin, thereby identifying compromised systems.

She did none of that, because the containment breach which laid waste to AAF-D, killed eight people (seven, officially) and severely damaged the surrounding superstructure lasted only five minutes and forty seconds.

One minute before the breach alarm went off, she felt a sneeze coming on. Dr. Daniil Sokolsky, sitting on the end of her desk, pulled a Kleenex out of his striped labcoat and offered it to her. She waved him off. A few seconds before the breach alarm went off, so did her computer terminal. She stood up — an extraordinarily stupid reaction, as though the shutdown were some physical threat she could tackle or avoid — and saw through the tall glass window beside her office door that every other terminal in I&T was still on. Thirty-two networked computers, and only hers was glitching?

"What's up?" Sokolsky asked, craning his neck to see her blank screen. "Oh."

She walked around the desk, reached past his ass and flicked a big red switch on the back of the tower. The computer was already rebooting, but the pitch of its hum audibly changed frequency. She had just isolated her terminal, in case it had caught something catching.

The held-in sneeze was making her sinuses—

"ACHOO." Sokolsky honked his nose into the Kleenex, and suddenly her head was clear. The bald-headed Russian finished wiping his nose, and frowned. "My head hurts."

The klaxon began, and the yellowish tinge of I&T's lighting turned dimly orange. Eileen walked out into the cubicles, Sokolsky close behind. Her techs were all out of their chairs now, staring at the beet red hallway outside their glassed-in lab.

"Sit down," she snapped. "Breach duty. Standby for instructions." She flicked another switch, this one on the wall, and every screen in view suddenly displayed the emergency ticketing system. One of the cubes was empty — Randy Gershwin was at Site-15 for a tech seminar — so Sokolsky sat down at his machine.

She placed a hand on his shoulder. "Trained personnel only, Daniil."

He scoffed. "I've done the training for every Section, Eileen. Yours took half an hour."

She sighed. "Of course you did… what? What's wrong?"

He was clutching at his temples. "Migraine. Definitely feels like—"

She sneezed, and the lights turned yellow again. The klaxon stopped.

Every face in the room, Sokolsky's included, turned to look at her.

"Did I do that?"

Sokolsky very primly plucked a handkerchief out of his pocket, dabbed the back of his head with it, and tossed it up to her.

There was a loud blip sound from Gershwin's terminal, and Sokolsky turned back around. Someone in Archives and Revision had just put in a ticket. Blip. Someone in Hiring and Regulation. Blip blip. A&R again, and Psychology and Parapsychology.

Blip blip blip blip blipblipblipblipblipblipblipblipblip…

Every Section was chiming in. All eighteen of them.

It was almost midnight when Harry and Eileen reunited at their shared dormitory, reaching the door at almost the same moment. He widened his eyes and stretched out his mouth in a toad-like grimace; she nodded, and puffed up her cheeks like a flustered bullfrog. Translation: Well THAT was fun, and Yeah, it really was.

They shared no actual words before she stripped off her yellow cotton scrubs and faceplanted onto the bed. He tried to muster some pointless interest in the arcs and bends of her form beneath what little she still had on; pointless because she was already asleep, pointless even if she hadn't been. He shoved her feet up the mattress to get at the sheets, and pulled them over her. Eileen Veiksaar had many enviable qualities, but he envied this one most of all.

He wandered into the bathroom, brain ticking over, and stared at himself in the mirror for about fifteen minutes.

That done, he flopped onto their hideous brown floral print couch and slid a clipboard off the coffee table. He sketched his memory of Melissa, dreaming awake, and by the time it was done he was dreaming himself.

9 September

"I don't really have time for this."

"You really do." Harry glanced over his Crayolas — pencil crayons; he was an amateur, not a child — and selected one in deep blue. "We're locked down for another ten minutes."

"Which is absurd," Eileen huffed. She was a practiced huffer; she'd once huffed at him so loudly and so deeply that he'd asked if she'd been transferred from an Antarctic research station. She hadn't gotten the joke, but she was the Site's top computer tech, so she'd eventually looked it up… and then huffed so hard, he'd been surprised the entire room didn't fly up her nose.

"Why is it absurd?" He gently scrubbed a bit of blue onto the scrap of paper, two dancing dots roughly approximating the ones now glaring at him from across their kitchenette table.

"Because J&M are rampaging around out there in their big floppy rubber boots, and they don't know the first damn thing about my systems! I get it, we want to make sure nothing's on fire before the brainworkers drag themselves out of bed," and she didn't pause to consider how this statement played with her present company, as once she might have, "but I should be knee-deep in conduit by now! We got tech tickets for a solid three percent of the Site's machines, and I want to know why. Instead I've got people I don't know touching my computers. People wearing baseball caps. People wearing baseball caps unironically are touching my computers, Harry. I'd lay money they added those to the uniform so nobody would ever mistake them for real technicians."

"Classy," he remarked. "Classist, even." The drawing was nearly done. Like all the others, he'd penned it on his clipboard in the empty space beneath some random departmental document. This time it was the final sheet of his schedule for September 9, 2002, DAYS SINCE LAST ACCIDENT: 1, delivered automatically via a wall-mounted printer in the living room. There was nothing much on, so he had plenty of space.

"You ought to be doodling Wirth."

That brought him up short. He paused his scribbling for just a moment. "Already did, last year. I like doing women better."

She shook her head. "Facts not in evidence. Not lately, anyway."

He decided to let that one pass, and then… didn't. "Kick a guy when he's down."

She drummed her fingers on the particleboard tabletop. "You don't seem so down. Your research assistant got eaten by Cthulhu last night, and you're doing pencil crayon caricatures."

Caricatures. It wasn't worth getting angry over. "Maybe the two facts are related. Maybe drawing is a coping mechanism."

She did something for which there was no word: bit her lower lip, widened her eyes, and rocked her head from side to side. Translation: well la-di-da. "Is that the real reason?"

"Why does there need to be a reason?" Eileen was a programmer. She always had her eye on the end of line. "I just think… there ought to be a record."

"A record? A record of what?"

He sighed; she'd once told him he'd been the wind in a past life. He'd taken it in good humour, because they were nothing alike. "A record of us."

She smiled at him for the first time that morning, and he realized how she'd misinterpreted the explanation. She actually looked at him, as she almost never did anymore, and the smile changed instantly to a frown. "You look a mess."

He screwed up his face to try and prevent what happened next, but the sentence wormed its way out anyway. "You should see the other guy."

There was a low click from the door, and the PA system came on. A calm, deep male voice — the All-Sections Chief — relayed the good news: "General staff are now permitted to resume active duty. Retrieve your daily schedules and meet your supervisors at the designated mustering points. Obey all directives from Security and Containment or Janitorial and Maintenance personnel and their authorized proxies until Situation Grey is resolved. That is all."

"Please stand for the playing of our national anthem," Harry added, and stand they did — to silence, of course.

"Not gonna finish your doodle?" She fished her duty schedule out of her scrubs. Hers always arrived before his, since she almost always greeted the day first — and more politely, too. She'd already reset the final word of her security clearance code phrase, so eager was she to trade his company for company time.

He picked the sketch up by one edge, tubed it up just enough to stiffen the profile, and presented it to her. "Already finished."

Her eyes widened. "Check out that smile."

"I have done," he agreed. "That chick knows something."

"Hence her high salary. But it's more like she wants something." She arched a brow.

He did something for which there was also no word: curled his lower lip until the inside was exposed, widened his eyes and tilted his head. Translation: well, does she?

She snorted. He'd never joked about her snorts; he had some sense of self preservation, if not very much. "Maybe you're projecting."

"You tacitly accused me of being a cold fish not five minutes ago."

And she turned to walk away. Nearly all their conversations ended like this, one of them deciding they had better things to do and not bothering to conceal it. She did pause before reaching the door, however, and glanced back at him. "Harry?"

"Eileen?"

"Was I really smiling like that? Today?"

He nodded. "Yeah."

She tried to match it, then headed out to begin her day.

He considered the sketch he'd produced almost solely from memory — and not even recent memory — and wondered what good the lie had done either of them.

The full systems map for Site-43 is only available in a proprietary electronic format custom-made for the job. It is completely impossible to delineate the electrical, heating, plumbing, network, waste, gas, power, air recycling, coolant, document retrieval, sharps disposal, corpse disposal and fire suppression amenities servicing the facility's three thousand, five hundred and eighty-one distinct rooms in readable print media, unless one reads by microscope; as it is, the full .43m file is a whopping seven hundred megabytes, and can only be navigated using dedicated in-house-developed software which itself requires a three day course to learn and half a career to master. It has more layer toggles than a geophysical mapping program. It has algorithms. Were it a video game, it would accept quarters. It's overwhelming, and claustrophobic.

Not nearly as claustrophobic as the physical spaces occupied by the systems themselves, of course. There is an insulated border of service tunnels running around the Site's entire footprint on all three main sublevels (and the extra two which form the basement of AAF-D), kilometres long, offering breezy admittance to many of its major pieces of infrastructure; but to make the power grid or network relay points accessible, it was necessary to exploit the fact that each level is separated from the others by nearly one storey of bedrock.

In other words, there are crawlspaces in the ceilings and floors.

One might have preferred a different, more commodious accommodation. The water panther tunnels stretch a functionally-infinite distance in every cardinal direction, but they're significantly less generous on the z-axis. Because the sublevel gap is only nearly one storey tall, and because the Site's various sectors each require different sorts of shielding and sheathing to protect them, or to protect their surroundings from them, the maintenance passages need to be knee-access only. This does little to improve the famously foul moods common to technicians the world over.

Only J&M and I&T make frequent uses of these passages, and only S&C can travel them with perfect impunity. You must first plot out a route (whilst connected to 43NET, so that your plans can be scrutinized and overseen), then supply credentials to unlock each junction point before beginning the long and always-irritating crawl. The average room at Site-43 contains 1.4 computers and 12.7 other electrical devices, so every one has a crawlspace double, but not every one has crawlspace access from above. Having that many ways to move around the Site would, of course, be a security nightmare. And so if you want to work on a specific system in a specific space, you have a reasonably good chance of being able to pop open a panel in the room itself to do your thing, but you also run a not-unlikely risk of needing to get down on all fours in an awkward half-corridor of pipes, wires, and conduits.

And if something goes wrong, well, your little jaunt can turn into a brief and cramped vacation while the security checks cycle.

This is why technicians don't often have a least-favourite room at Site-43, instead hating an entire category of them with passionate equality.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

This was shaping up to be the most hateful day of Eileen's career. Of the five thousand, one hundred and twenty networked machines presently running the 43NET software, she had active tickets for just over one hundred. Two percent. It was the information technology equivalent of a global health crisis, and she had no idea why it was happening.

There seemed no rhyme or reason to the glitches. Health and Pathology had been running projections on an outbreak of an SCP 'object' colloquially known as 'the cooties', using half a dozen different terminals, and one of them had randomly deleted its data cache. They'd have to reset the entire simulation. Administration and Oversight had suffered severe server corruption, but only one program was affected: a low-level AI tasked with monitoring a persistent bureaucratohazard native to all Foundation admin systems. For the foreseeable future, everyone's paystub would feature an indelible fortune cookie koan watermark on the literary level of "Be ye contained, o ye who would contain" or "Mind your work; your minders do." (Rory Skellicorne, the Chief of A&O, had petitioned more than once to let the anomaly do its thing unfettered. He felt the little sayings were on-point, and had started using a few in everyday conversation.) There were fluctuations in geothermal power distribution, resulting in three containment chambers getting less electricity than they were meant to. They were meant to get more than they needed, of course, with the extra energy being stored in capacitors, just in case; it wouldn't do for the inmates to escape in a power outage. Still, Security and Containment made a not-unreasonable stink every time a piece of containment apparatus behaved even minutely below spec, and since the geothermal plant was under J&M's purview, both Ibanez and Nascimbeni were on Eileen's ass about it.

Well, Ibanez was. Nascimbeni had sent one email, then promptly dropped the matter. Eileen wondered if his acting Deputy Chief, Azad Banerjee, had ghostwritten the complaint. She hadn't seen Nascimbeni all morning.

A few of the issues were software-related. There was code corruption across the board — not a lot of it, in each individual case, but enough individual cases would keep her entire Section busy with re-writes all week. Vital programs had been deleted, and had to be restored from server backups or, god forbid, install disks. Upgrades and updates had reverted. User permissions had been scrambled. It was all annoying as fuck, but Eileen had thirty-eight techs in her employ, so she could afford to spread the wealth.

Many of the issues were hardware-related, however, and said hardware wasn't all of the desktop variety.

She was standing in the black and grey stucco corridors of Quantum Supermechanics, staring at a floor grating tucked away in its own little niche. She rubbed her back in anticipation; information technology was not, contrary to popular opinion, a career with no heavy lifting.

"Chief Veiksaar?"

She turned to see a J&M tech standing smartly at attention behind her. She didn't recognize him. He was older than she was… he wasn't older than she was, she realized, he was simply worn down. A slight hunch, hollow cheeks, haunted eyes, pale skin, but muscular and well-groomed otherwise. The name on his jacket was freshly-stitched: CARTER.

He extended a hand. "Chuck Carter. Boss said you needed a hand?"

She took his, and shook it. "You're an electrician?"

He nodded. "Full cert. FETR. Got you covered." He patted his toolbelt. Franklin, Edison, Tesla and Raiden. The expanded compass points of anomalous electricity.

"Alright." She pointed at the grating, which was covered by an S&C portable mini-bulkhead drilled straight into the floor as a precautionary measure. She wished, not for the first or last time, that she'd been out and about while shit like that was going on. "We're gonna have to get horizontal."

"Deeply flattered, ma'am." He bent down to get started on the screws, so he missed the impact this quip made. "You know, I transferred here to get away from containment breaches."

She leaned on the wall and watched her colleagues walk past. QS researchers wore grey labcoats with speckles that matched, she'd been told, the background radiation of the universe. Most of them looked like they were treading on eggshells. "Where'd you transfer from?"

"19."

Figures. Site-19 was to containment breaches as Site-17 was to emotional abuse.

"Whole place smells like blood." The tech was making good progress; once he got the lid off, either of them would be able to open up the grating with their keycard. "One of these screws is stripped, take me a second."

"A lot of people have died at 19," she agreed.

"I'm not speaking, uh, metaphorically." He pulled a chisel from his belt and began working it into the screwcap. "Whole place literally smells like blood right now. Some new skip chased a guy… guy I used to work with, into the air vents. Air vents aren't meant for hiding in, no Die Hard crap at Site-19 — not big enough by half, so the guy got stuck."

She suddenly wondered if it might be best not to hear this story, at least not today, but it did seem to be helping his concentration. His hands were only shaking a little.

"Damn thing got at his legs, you know? Started pulling. Pulled 'em right out of joint, then started… biting." Carter was concentrating very closely on the screws. "Dislocated its jaw and went to town, sawed one leg right in half. Joe still crawling, trying to get deeper in the vent, screaming and crying and pissing himself. You could hear him across the whole damn Site."

She reached into her labcoat pocket and fingered a tiny plastic pouch of earplugs.

"He got unstuck when it took his other leg. Guards pelting it with expanding rounds, didn't even make a dent. Joe kept crawling, blood everywhere, slipping and sliding in his own mess, and then… he fell. Downturn in the vent, right through a big-ass industrial fan. Chopped his face clean off." The tech sat back and wiped his brow. "Okay, not that clean, really. But the skip? Went limp right away, quiet as you like, let them walk it back to containment as if nothing even happened. It just really, really, really didn't like Joe, you know? They started bleaching the vents right away, but it didn't help." He stood up. "Whole place stinks like Joe's insides now, and they can't tell me it doesn't."

She stared at him. "Are you okay? Do you need, like, psych help? Right now?"

"Nah, I'm good." He leaned down again and tapped his card to the exposed reader. "Who goes first?"

The majority of Site-43's forty-seven archivists filed into the A&R break room in pairs or trios. Not a single one came in alone. Most of them looked upset; some of them looked worried. A few looked grim — mostly the ones who had higher security clearance levels, and therefore knew something of what they were about to hear. Harry was sitting on one of the ratty old rattan couches, kicking his workboots up and down, bouncing the rubber backsoles on the bronze tiles. It was making his teeth rattle, an old trick for calming his nerves.

He hadn't lectured in a while.

He waited until everyone who was coming had settled into place, whether on the remaining furniture or flush against the walls, then waited a little longer until the conversations became quiet, strained and awkward. Finally he stood up, walked behind the couch, and shoved it roughly forward until there was room for him to stand behind more comfortably. He clutched the vinyl cushions like a pulpit, and began to speak.

"AAF-D blew up yesterday."

This was not precisely a bombshell.

"Seven people died."

This was probably news, even if it was also a lie by omission; Dougall Deering's death, like his existence, was compartmentalized. "Foundation protocol is very clear on loss of life in breach scenarios. We don't have assemblies to deliver comforting and inspirational speeches about sacrifice and duty, we don't do honour rolls, we don't tell people how to process loss. We do dark deeds in dark places day-to-day, so when it all goes wrong, we're expected to suck it up. Move on. Pretend it didn't happen, or else internalize it as a cautionary tale, then swear it'll never happen to you. Take it on the chin, this ain't no daycare, et cetera."

The upset faces grew more upset. Nobody looked less worried. The grim faces were now both grim and confused.

"Obviously, that's never sat right with me. We've built a community for ourselves down here, and that edgelord bullshit doesn't fit the tone. But when your co-workers don't show up for work one day, regardless of the local context, I'm not supposed to tell you why, and you're not supposed to ask."

He pushed off the couch, catching the sole of his left boot on the wall behind him. He crossed his arms. "Well, fuck that. I'm gonna give a speech, because I owe it to you, and because I owe it to…" He sighed. "I'd want a speech, and I'm sure you would too. Maybe not one of mine, but we take what we get."

He took a deep breath.

"Reuben Wirth is dead."

He counted to ten, just as he had while mentally preparing this speech at the bathroom mirror a few hours prior. Nobody said a word in the interim, so he continued. "He's not dead in a way that'll give you closure. There's no body. Whatever's left of him is somewhere in AAF-D, and they tell me it's basically impossible to tell the human remains apart, or even to tell the difference between human remains and the rest of the mess. We don't get to say goodbye, we don't get to bury anything. It's shit, is what it is, and I'm sorry about that."

Someone sniffled in the back row. It sounded like Veasna Chey; he'd heard similar sounds when her dog had died last spring.

"Reuben was a good kid. I'm not old enough to be saying shit like 'Reuben was a good kid', but being the Chair adds ten years, and you all know Reuben: he was never not gonna be a kid to us. Perpetually three years old. Never heard a discouraging word out of him, never even heard him swear — and I've heard Stacey Laiken swear, ladies and gentlemen. Only once, mind you, and it was at me." One of the copyists, Inderjeet Ahmad, stifled a guilty chuckle. "Reuben didn't slack off at work. He didn't shit-talk his colleagues. The worst thing about him was that if you wanted to hate him, you'd have nothing fair to latch on to."

Got a bit too real there.

He clutched at the makeshift pulpit again. "Well, now he's dead. He's dead because he heard a noise, and walked towards it. Chief Nascimbeni says a big orange tentacle broke his back, and that's one of the sanest things that happened yesterday. We'll probably never know the rest. Here's what we do know, though: he had friends. Good friends. People who cared about him, and thought about him when he wasn't around. Keep doing that. Keep him in your thoughts. Because that's what we do, that's who we are. We're the archivists: the freaks who spend all day with their faces buried in books, barely uttering a sound, then whoop it up in the saloon after consuming not nearly enough alcohol." The assembled crowd was briefly a spiderweb of knowing glances and sad smiles. "We get along. We get along well. We take our work home with us, and we bring our personal shit to work. The scientists and business majors who set up those rules about assemblies and announcements don't understand us, at all. We don't hate each other, we're not in competition — for the most part — and we're not in on the sacred academic tradition of backbiting and backstabbing. We're in this together, and when one of us goes, it actually hurts."

His voice broke.

"We won't move on right away. We're gonna take the time to be sad, to be angry, to feel whatever we want to feel, because we're human fucking beings and that's how we fucking operate. We're in the humanities, so let's be humane about this: if you need some time, go take it. If you need more work, say the word. And if you have something to say on the topic of Reuben Wirth, well, I've opened up a new file in the archives. We're going to keep personal records — not personnel records, personal records — on all our staff from now on, and Reuben's first on the block. It's open to everybody. Make your testimonials, read what everyone else has to say, and remember the kid the way he was instead of whatever he is now. That's our job, remember?"

He made eye contact with everyone who wasn't looking away, or examining the back side of a handkerchief.

"We're the institutional memory. And if we do our jobs, do them right, the memories won't all be bad."

One, two, three.

He waved his hands dismissively. "Alright, piss off."

The standard uniform for Identity and Technocryptography is fairly unique among the Sections, involving as it does positively no labcoats. They instead favour yellow cotton jumpers and yellow cotton pants, cotton being a cheap antistatic clothing material.

I&T's wardrobe is therefore a solved problem in the way most others aren't. Their outfits haven't changed since the very early 1990s, and probably won't have changed much by the late 2090s. The scrubs are comfy and loose, but they also accentuate one's caboose; the techs end up looking rather like nurses, which of course in a manner of speaking they are.

Their clients are every bit as hapless and needy as dying patients, and their work is often surgical in nature.

The lack of a jacket is one sore point. The jumpers and baggy pants can leave a body feeling a little exposed, no coat or vest to hide one's fleshy profile. Stretchy cotton leaves little to the imagination. I&T wear their life and workstyles on their sleeves, and the seats of their pants; they have asses made for sitting, and while they're in transit between seats, this fact is on full display.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

Harry had been playing insider pool when he'd penned those lines back in '99, and Eileen had gotten no end of shit from her shift as a result. They were running through her head as the voice behind her asked: "What was the last containment breach here, anyway? Fatal, I mean."

She tried not to think about the fact that she was waving her ass in Carter's face as she responded. "Before my time." They were edging their way beneath Quantum Supermechanics, the Site's most technologically-intense Section, and every inch of the hectagonal wallspace was covered in panels, circuit breakers and redundant power sources. The floor was red rubber padding, and they were wearing kneepads, but it was still not the most comfortable trek she'd ever made.

"Oh," said Carter. "You're new too?"

She nearly stopped, before considering the potential consequences. "No, I joined up in '95."

"What?"

She slowed, to make sure he didn't crawl them both into an awkward situation, then rolled over to make eye contact. "What?"

He loomed over her, and she remembered her line about 'getting horizontal', and she blushed as he responded: "You said the last fatal breach was before your time."

"Yeah."

"And you started in 1995?"

"Yeah?"

He stared down at her. "What?"

She huffed, suppressing the urge to knee him in the stomach. "What are you driving at?"

"You haven't had a fatal containment breach here since before 1995? Is that what you're saying?"

"Uh huh." She tried to nod, but the rubber wouldn't allow it; her hair was caught between her back and a vulcanized place.

His brown eyes widened. "We have one every couple months, at least, back at 19. Do you guys just… not do anything?"

She gently pushed him back with both hands before rolling over and resuming the crawl. "We do lots of stuff."

"Nothing dangerous?"

"Plenty dangerous."

"I don't understand." The new arrivals never did. "Nobody ever dies? Do you just not take risks? Does anything ever change around here?"

She put one limb in front of the other, and did not respond.

"How is he not dead?"

This was not good bedside manner, but Melissa wasn't that kind of doctor and the man in the bed was unconscious. In any case, while they could both see the patient, he wouldn't have been able to see or hear them even if he had been conscious. The one-way glass behind the ward was thin, but perfectly soundproof. A button beside the window would allow them to listen in, if they felt like hearing a young man snore.

Melissa almost did want to do that. It astonished her that Philip Deering was capable of performing so prosaic an act as stertoration after what he'd just been though.

"Orichalcum hyperchlorate." Dr. Émilie LeClair was watching Deering's vitals on the observation room screen. Melissa typically found it somewhere between funny and perverse that Health and Pathology had observation rooms, as though wounded researchers and agents and janitors were subjects in containment. On this particular occasion, considering the patient's provenance, it instead seemed apropos. LeClair continued: "His abatement fluid tank was completely drained, and we found residue on his esomat suit. All over it. Either he had a sudden stroke of brilliance and decided to douse himself before the thaumic backflow hit him, or the thaumic backflow blew it in his face. Guess which one I think is more likely?"

Melissa nodded. "I've met the guy. He heard the roar, he turned around, he probably said 'Huh?' out loud, and he got a faceful of anti-magic bleach. Lucky."

"More and less than lucky." LeClair gestured at the readout. "He's in no worse shape than at his last physical. No ill effects — minus the fact that he was stark raving mad when he briefly came to."

No surprise there. He would have seen all manner of things in the moment before his head hit the bricks. "You had to give him amnestics, the nurse told me. Class-B, presumably?" Injection of a Class-B amnestic would erase a subject's most recent block of memories with little to no side effects.

LeClair shook her head. "Class-F."

Melissa nodded again. She pursed her lips. She cocked her head to one side, and considered the snoring tech.

She turned back to LeClair. "The hell you say?" Class-F amnestics were used in only the most extreme trauma cases, or when high-value Foundation personnel wanted to retire to the normal world. They could be used to restructure, or utterly destroy, the subject's mind with enough conditioning after the fact.

LeClair smiled grimly. "I'm a medical doctor. When I say he was stark raving mad, I don't mean he had a bad day. I mean he was clinically insane — EPAU recommended a chemical coma, but the Director overrode them." The Emergency Psychological Assessment Unit was an adjunct to Psychology and Parapsychology, and they didn't recommend chemical comas for run-of-the-mill horror. "Whatever he saw in there, whatever it did to him, it nearly snapped his brain in half. We had to walk back the whole thing and reconstruct his psyche from first principles. He's just having a nap, he's himself again — we got lucky, too, and of course he's young — but it took all night."

In retrospect, LeClair did seem a little peaked. The Chair of H&P already looked like a faded movie star, and was known as 'Madame LeClair' throughout the Site, but she was barely keeping her eyes open right now.

"No wonder he's snoring. Why did Allan want him saved?"

LeClair shrugged. "You'd have to ask him, but you know Allan. If he thought you needed to know…"

"Yeah." Melissa stared at the ceiling, deep in thought. "Maybe Phil's brother demanded it. He's a demanding guy."

LeClair did not respond.

"Or maybe it's because Phil's the only one who wasn't… the only one who survived." She thought about Reuben Wirth, and there was a sudden knot between her brows. LeClair was watching her very closely. "He might have insight into what happened. I don't think they've figured out what caused the breach yet, and they don't even have positive IDs on all the… yeah. Yeah."

LeClair put a hand on her shoulder. "I was sorry to hear about Wirth."

Melissa looked away.

"Want something to help you sleep?"

She shook her head, and fished around in her labcoat pocket for spare change. "No, I want a coffee. Long day ahead."

"Long day behind."

2001

14 December

What's in a name? Communities are often branded after one of two things: whatever you had to bulldoze so you could start building, or whoever you had to kill to acquire the land. Buildings are usually named after their present owners, past owners, purposes or designers — in that order. Road features are named after people who died there, or died elsewhere in road-themed incidents. Innovations are named, most purely, after their innovators… except for safety innovations, typically named after people who wouldn't have died if the things had been innovated sooner.

At the Foundation, safety innovations frequently feature an extra wrinkle of nuance: they're named after people who screwed up large, lived to write the incident report, and went unamnesticized or unterminated at least long enough to design some form of preventative penance. That's how Site-41 got the Wheeler Facial Recognition System, how Site-87 got its Tyler Bailey Multiversal Drawbridge, how Site-91 developed the Douglas Insubordination Protocols, and how Site-43 ended up with the world's most complicated paper shredder: the Reynders Vacuum Abatement Conduit.

The RVAC stretches from the Archives and Revision Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber (ADDC), through three hundred metres of Mishepeshu tunnel, to the Orphic Media Artifact Receptacle (OMAR) in Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-D. The old ADDC in AAF-A was a simple incinerator, because when it was built in the 1940s nobody knew too terribly much about the secret life of haunted paper. It wasn't until the incinerator exploded, trapping Ilse Reynders within a temporal bubble and giving her ample time to reconsider her life's work, that we discovered how anomalous documents can exist in as many as half a dozen different dimensions invisible to the naked eye, bioaccumulating in the air around their ashes. The RVAC was Dr. Reynders' means of assuring that her unique exile from secret society remained unique. Compromised papers are carted in steel straitjackets through a series of Hume sinks, Kant decouplers and Akiva dispersal matrices to stabilize their multiversal, surreal and theological wavelengths, before being sucked through a dry abatement chamber. When this esoteric sandblasting is over, the remaining material arrives at AAF-D as a globster of partially-digested paper pulp with only its paraspectral dimensions intact.

And then it's incinerated. Progress!

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

What AAF-D did to the ghosts of his documents clearly did not trouble Reuben Wirth. His part in shuffling them off their inanimate coil was inconvenience enough, and he had trouble even focusing on that. If he could've reached, Harry would've felt sorely tempted to flick the other man's freckly forehead.

"Can you keep a secret?" Wirth asked, sliding documents beneath the slats. The RVAC was fed from the ADDC by a long metal cart which rolled out like a morgue bed, thin steel runners on each side with clamps for pinning down paranormal paper. It was wide enough for two rows, one on each side.

Harry was filling up the runners opposite his assistant. "No, but go on."

Wirth walked to the end of the table and cranked the slats up a bit. They had a lot of paper to burn, and stacking them up would help speed the process along. "It's about Dr. Bradbury."

Harry hoped the fact that he was now paying rapt attention was not too obvious. Wirth wasn't very observant, so he probably had nothing to fear. "What about her?"

The junior researcher shrugged, not looking at Harry, pretending to look at the yellowing pages. They were looking back at him; the topic of today's fiery abatement was a copy of The Great Gatsby where every printed character was a unicode eye. The text somehow still parsed as language, while the little black irises tracked the reader's eyes back and forth. Somebody, somewhere, had thought it a very smart joke. Harry thought they must have been a high school student, or else a high school English teacher.

"Do you know what she likes to do for fun?" Wirth asked nonchalantly.

Harry finished his row of papers, and started turning the individual cranks. He preferred to tighten each page, or sheaf of pages, by feel rather than going for one-crunch-fits-all. It was a matter up to personal discretion, in the absence of comparative data. "I dunno. Stare at the ceiling. Wander the halls. Finish my thoughts out loud. Stuff like that."

Wirth winced. He was falling behind. "I was thinking more like… stuff we could do together."

Harry clamped the last batch hard, and the pages fluttered on the table as if in protest. "I don't… like, team-building exercises? I don't know what you mean."

"UGH." His fresh-faced assistant now looked genuinely pained. "I mean I'm gonna ask her out, and I'm angling for advice."

Harry briefly dissociated. His mouth went dry. His stomach clenched. Some emergency subroutine in his brain produced: "Well, good luck with that."

"Thanks." Wirth shoved the last few pages in, rather roughly, then walked back to twirl the main crank. "I think we'll really hit it off."

Harry was fantasizing about strangling the other man when a loud crack came from the steel slat. Wirth had cranked it too hard, and—

—and the papers exploded, taking flight, snapping the right-side slat off the table and nearly decapitating Wirth as both men's hair blew back in a hurricane gale. They backed away, the wind tearing pages from Harry's side in great staring scraps, smashing them together in midair, congealing them into—

—who the fuck cares what into. Applied Occultism had dropped the ball on this object's assessment, dropped it right onto his foot. He made a break for the exit, Wirth close behind, and snapped his keycard through the reader. He shot out into the hallway, prepared to close the door behind him, and…

…Wirth was not, in fact, close behind. Wirth was staring at the paper cyclone as it crumpled into three oscillating apertures, two above and one below, in the space above the RVAC table. It was something like… it was definitely a face, two very sad eyes and a pair of lips. As Harry watched, the faintest paper traces of a few abstract lines of hair began wisping away from the blinking mask. Harry recognized the famous image right away.

The kid wasn't coming.

He hesitated, holding his keycard over the hall-side reader. Cut the knot. Swipe the card. He stared into the eyes of the hurricane, the face of leering origami judgement, then darted back inside and grabbed the other man by his labcoat collar. Wirth stumbled backward, and Harry shifted his grip to haul the man by his armpits instead. Kicking and squirming, Wirth managed to shriek out "OKAY! OKAY ALREADY!" before they were both out of the ADDC, and Harry dropped him like a sack of potatoes.

Snick. The keycard slid cleanly through, and the door slid silently shut. Harry tapped a big red button beside it, and shouted all in a rush: "BLANK MU TWENTY-TWO HYO QUEBEC TORRENTIAL." He then punched the button harder.

They watched through the reinforced glass window as the Eckleburg apparition disappeared in near-blinding light. The RVAC had made the abatement of textual anomalies safer, but no single measure was wholly effective. To that end the new ADDC was also a partial iteration on the original, a redundant source of emergency immolation. As Reynders had put it: "When you get stuck in an incinerator, the wrong lesson to learn is 'incinerators are bad'. The right lesson is 'don't get stuck in one'."

Wirth stayed on the hall floor, picking pieces of gummy pulp out of his hair. "Thanks," he muttered. "Got a little… distracted."

Harry hunched beside him. "'It takes two to make an accident'."

Wirth frowned. "That from something?"

Harry extended a hand. "Some stupid book I read in high school."

2002

9 September

Quantum Supermechanics puts all other computing centres at Site-43 to shame, and it's a confused, worried shame to boot. They run obscenely complex calculations on their own dedicated mainframe, the DUAL core: a dizzying array of interlinked servers requiring what the design specs euphemistically term 'non-traditional power feeds'. Specifically, the mainframe is powered by anachronic juice produced as an abatement byproduct in AAF-B and pumped across the Site in thick cables of time-dilated rubber. This allows QS to perform what they call 'non-discrete mathematics', utilizing superposition and minute temporal reversal to explore all possible solutions to a problem and benefit from each, while committing to none.

The physical form enabling this crass mistreatment of physics is a computer the size and shape of a Starfleet warp core, some thirty metres tall, surrounded by eighteen concentric maintenance tunnels with 1.4-metre headroom. Three drones patrol them on a continuous circuit, looking for breaks in the conduits or leaks in the coolant pipes.

If androids could have bad dreams, they'd dream of this computer.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

Eileen dreaded getting calls from Quantum Supermechanics. All three drones had disappeared today, and the mainframe was running backward; they'd had to desync entirely to keep from losing yesterday's work. There was a single full-sized access tunnel from the main server room to the core, but in what everyone hoped was merely a frustrating accident, that door was another one of I&T's ticket items. It would not budge, and having been designed to withstand a small nuclear explosion — the DUAL core had been expensive to build, and its work could not be interrupted for any old apocalypse — it was easier to fiddle with the electronics than to apply brute force. In the meantime, the core itself couldn't wait, so here they were.

"At least it's nothing dangerous," Xinyi Du had assured her. He was the core's designer and partial namesake, as well as the Chair of QS. "Temperature and integrity readings are fine, and though the behaviour was suboptimal before we yanked the connections, it was still well within normal bounds." Du was no mad scientist; his job required a lot of imagination, but a lot more orderly thinking. He was used to uncertainty in his house — he relied upon, even invoked it regularly — but he preferred his uncertainty scheduled and predictable.

Eileen noticed what looked like a black scorch mark on the red rubber ahead… and another in front of it, and another, and another. They were coming up on the core now, she could see the catwalk and the empty space the massive machine occupied, although there was a strange unclarity to the scene…

She bumped her head on a low-hanging router, and swore. "Fuck you, Matt Jeffries."

"What?"

"Almost there," she called over her shoulder. She'd almost forgotten that Carter was behind her, with nothing but running shoes for polite company.

"No worries," he responded, at precisely the moment she became very worried indeed.

"Oh, now what the fuck is that."

Melissa laughed. "Right?! 2D heads got nothin' on this."

They were watching through what Philip Deering believed to be a wall as the… thing in the detention cell mirror flexed its facial scars and gurned. It was one of the foulest-looking creatures Harry had ever seen, and some of the Nexus critters were already plenty foul. It looked like an avant garde art project sculpted from a human cadaver, like someone had found a way to liquefy and re-solidify bone and had used it to create a distended, emaciated, grey alien—

"Corpsegoblin," Harry said. "Mirror gremlin. Ugly son of a bitch, isn't it?" It was covered in scarification, the largest three scars open and a raw, angry purple inside: two vertical and one horizontal, snaking and jagged-edged, a mockery of a mouth and eyes. It had ribs where ribs didn't go. It had a brow, despite having no ocular cavities. Admittedly the fact that it appeared to live within the glass was the most pertinent piece of information, but…

"It's so ugly," he said again. "I love it."

"Good to hear you aren't shallow," Melissa remarked mildly.

"Does it do anything cool?"

"It screams!" She beamed at him. "I have it on very good authority that it screams a whole dang bunch. Not out loud, though. Just goes through the motions, and nobody hears."

"Wow. Relatable."

"Aww." She patted his shoulder as though he were a favoured pet. "I'm always here to hear you scream, dear."

He didn't miss a beat. "Nobody makes me scream like you, dear." He pointed at Deering. "Awake?"

The janitor had only briefly gotten his J&M jacket back. He was now wearing an E-Class personnel jumpsuit, and was curled up on the cot in a fetal position.

The E-Class designation, and their violet jumpsuits, denote prisoners possessed of certain rights. Demotion to E-Class follows exposure to cognitohazards, certain extreme trauma vectors, psychic possessors, particularly persuasive bad actors, or the like. If the problem goes away, the subject's privileges can be restored along with their prior position.

D-Class personnel, which Site-43 does not, has never, and likely never will house, are prisoners entirely bereft of rights. Demotion to D-Class is a myth, or an in-joke; where they actually come from is a matter of some debate, but their lack of longevity is a grim fact. E-Class personnel ride out their personal storms in detention, unless the risk of contagion is minimal, while D-Class are used exclusively for testing, exploring, or in some cases acquiring anomalies. Their jumpsuits are orange. The fact that Nascimbeni's techs also wear orange has not been lost on anyone, and jibes about the perceived expendability of the 'orange shirts' regularly do the rounds.

Personnel above Class D are to be reminded that J&M have orange vests. Their shirts are usually black.

— Blank, Lines in Muddle

Melissa shook her head. "Sleeping like a baby. Crying like one for a while before that, poor guy; H&P put him out a few hours ago."

Harry liked Phil. The kid was a sad sack, just like him. "Theories?"

"It's a haunting."

He rolled his eyes. "And us without a ghost department."

She eyebrowed him. "You voted against the ghost department at the last Chairs and Chiefs, as I recall."

"Yeah, well, let's just say that I believe in ghosts, but I don't believe in ghost hunters. That's on them. So, what's big ugly been up to?"

Melissa leaned on the glass. "It's followed Deering everywhere he's gone so far — not that he got far. He only had a few hours after LeClair cleared him; got to see Banerjee win Employee of the Month—"

"Banerjee?" Harry snorted. "Employee of the Month owes me five bucks."

"If it were Deering who owed you, we might theorize this as an eldritch bill collector. Everybody thought it was a one-time apparition when it cropped up in a bathroom mirror—"

"That's handy."

"What's handy?" She was used to the interruptions, which weren't really interruptions. At this point in their working relationship, she left spaces for him to interject.

"Something like that busts in, scares the shit out of you…"

She waited patiently.

"You know. Handy to already be in the can."

"I always value your little contributions, dear." Their favourite game, Terms of Endearment, was definitely on for the day. "Now, as you sad, it busted in on him in the bathroom, then demanifested when he—"

"—lost his shit—"

"—and he wrote up a report for Nascimbeni, who passed it on to the ASC." The All-Sections Chief handled problem complaints as part of his job as the Site's inter-Sectional diplomat. "ASC was writing up the initial file, with Deering in his office, when the thing showed up again. It hasn't left his reflection-side since."

"Huh." Harry resisted the urge to tap the glass; he wasn't sure what he'd do if the apparition leapt from one mirror to the other. "Have we tried asking it what it wants?"

"Not yet. You want to write up an official experiment proposal, or?"

"No, dear, I want to go chat with the mirror. Be a nice change of pace from talking to my own."

Eileen wished she'd brought Sokolsky along. He was a memeticist, one of Lillian's cadre, and he had an excellent feel for the drama of a moment. Had he been here, he would doubtless have provided some short, pithy exclamation appropriate to what she was seeing. She, on the other hand, didn't have it in her.

The octagonal catwalk encircling the DUAL core began just a short crawl ahead, where the passage aperture widened into what had once been a defunct geothermal vent. Under normal circumstances she would have seen a colossal spinning tower of blinking lights and access points and cooling fans in the centre of the space, with three drones buzzing about to make sure everything was copacetic. What she saw instead was one sparking, screeching Frankendrone flopping on the catwalk, two mirrored duplicates fused together, all eight rotors firing, unable to right itself; the catwalk itself an incoherent mess of parallel metal hatching; a whirling blur where the core should have been, which she suddenly realized as she blinked rapidly to reduce the framerate was actually two cores, spinning in opposite directions, perfectly juxtaposed. There was a rising buzz in the air.

At the mouth of one of the branching passages leading off the catwalk, she saw… herself. Looking back at her. Looking nearly as confused as she felt.

"What's up?" asked a voice from the general vicinity of her rear end.

"Uh," she said. She wriggled to one side, and Carter appeared at her flank; there wasn't enough room for him to squeeze past, not without entering into an unearned level of intimacy, but he could certainly get a more interesting view than the one he'd had for the past ten minutes.

"Oh," he said, staring at the binary chaos. "Guess things can change around here aft—"

The scorch mark closest to the catwalk suddenly turned bright blue, and disappeared into an arc of lightning which leapt up to the tower. A booming peal of raw sound marked its arrival, like thunder. The same thing happened in each of the other apertures… and she saw her doppelganger flash-fried in place, black liquefied skin sloughing off of cooked fat and gristle. It melted into the rubber, deforming like a decomposing whale.

"Cart—" she began, and then her chin struck the mat. Something was hauling her back-asswards, hauling her by her ankles, and she heard the sound of rubber on rubber as it beelined away from the core. The next spot of burning discharged its payload back into the tower, back into the tower! Time is flowing in reverse, and then the next, and then the one directly under where she'd been kneeling, and they were getting closer, and she wondered how many she hadn't noticed. Her hair stood on end as the electricity cascaded a foot in front of her face, and in the blinding glare she suddenly saw a man's face, plain as day, a man she knew, and she felt regret. The bolt after that made her break out in goosebumps, and she pedalled at the floor with her hands…

The lightning stopped, and so did she.

They. Though she lay stomach-down on the mat, she knew what must have happened: Carter had grabbed her ankles, and scrambled backward down the passage. He'd saved her life. She reached up to rub her chin, which was hot, and discovered a nasty friction burn. It only belatedly began to sting. She could hear the old tech rearranging himself behind her, and rolled over to take a look. He was panting, covered in sweat, leaning against a closed panel. His short brown hair was like a bottlebrush. She tried to brush hers back, but the static wouldn't allow it.

"Thanks," she said.

"What?" He pitched forward, and landed over top of her like before. "What?"

"THANKS," she shouted into his face.

"Vents," he said. He shook his head, and stuck his tongue out.

She blew out a breath, and they both burst into laughter. It was a high-pitched, unhinged sound.

When it was done, she lunged upright and stuck her tongue down his throat, filthy soot running down their faces and into their mouths. When it was done, she fell back to the mat again and felt blindly for her pager.

PULL THE PLUG.

Almost immediately, they could hear it spinning down. She kept typing.

KEEP THE PLUG OUT. She turned the pager up to where Carter could see it.

"That for them, or for me?" he grinned.

She shuddered on the mat. "You know what? We've got a few minutes. Just them."

The access compartments beneath each sublevel are, of course, a fire risk. When smoke or electrical discharge is detected, the gratings lock in place to enforce a fifteen-minute quarantine. If the Chief of I&T is on duty, they get to decide whether to kill the oxygen supply, activate fire suppression, open up early… or simply ride it out.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

They rode it out.

"Still sleeping tight," Harry observed from the foot of Deering's bed.

"But the Energizer Mummy keeps going and going." Melissa waved a hand in front of the monster's face. "Huh."

"What?" He rejoined her. The walls of the detention cell were padded, but one pad had been removed so the mirror could be affixed; Deering's brief transit from the ASC's office had seen his doppelganger manifesting on pipes, windows, light fixtures, and even one very shocked J&M tech's bottle of water, so provision had been made. They certainly didn't want to lose this fascinating new friend… not that it seemed like they could, if they had wanted.

"Facial tics." Melissa snapped her fingers in front of the mirror, to no avail. "Been chatting with Ngo about them. You study the tells, you can say with authority whether someone perceives your presence or not, whether they're ignoring you, or just pretending, or you straight up don't exist for them."

"And?"

"And, it's ignoring us. Bone and musculature are all screwed up, obviously, but it's a close enough analogue to the human norm for me to state with confidence that it's aware you and I are here. It just… doesn't care."

Harry frowned. "Why were you studying… facial tics, you said?"

She smiled sweetly. "No reason. What experiments should we run?"

"Optics suite." They both had a doctorate in that field; she'd gotten hers before they'd met, and had walked him through the entire program over the course of about two years. "See what it manifests in, see what effects it has on the media — does it leave traces? Humes? Akiva? Backspill? And see what happens if…"

He stopped.

"What?"

"We shouldn't be talking about this in front of the… thing."

She made a little 'pfft' sound. "You seem perfectly happy to talk about it in front of him." She pointed at Deering, who shifted in his sleep.

"That's different. Deering's a janitor; this ugly fuck is something interesting."

"Ha, ha." She touched his labcoat sleeve affectionately. "I'll never understand what turns you on."

She was almost to the chamber door when he regained his senses, and called out: "Melissa?"

She spun in place, labcoat swirling around her like a fancy dress, and planted herself gracefully on the padded wall. "It's so cliché, don't you think?"

"What is?"

She stared up at the ceiling. "The way we talk. Pointless nothing face-to-face, then one sentence that means something on the way out." She narrowed her eyes as she peered into the fluorescents; he could barely see it over the glare in her glasses. "Not very efficient, is it? We should do door-talk all the time, and forget the rest." She inclined her head further, and her eyes disappeared into white.

"You're doing the Scout thing."

She kept her head steady. "The Scout thing?"

"Hiding your eyes. The windows to your soul."

She snorted, more delicately than Eileen would have. "The eyes are windows to regret. I don't want you seeing mine."

The space between them held its breath for a moment.

He broke the spell. "I'm sorry about Reuben."

She didn't respond.

"I know you…" He looked down at the scuffed tips of his boots, and wished he was near a wall so he could kick it. He always wore steel toes, because he knew the day he stopped would be the day he broke his foot.

"You know I what?"

He looked back up at her. She hadn't moved.

When his lips didn't either, she sighed. "At least he took his shot." She pushed off the wall…

…and he caught her hand, darting forward before she could disappear around the corner. "You just did the cliché yourself."

She put her mouth entirely on one side of her face, and peered up at him. She didn't say anything. He was struck, as always, by the clarity of her skin, the pout of her lips, the deep expanse of her eyes, the breach alarm…

…soft and distant, but insistent. The breach alarm. Again.

Her eyes widened. "Guess we've got time, now."

His heart was pounding, and in near-perfect sync, Melissa's pager beeped. She tugged it off the belt loop of her blue jeans, glanced at it, and showed him. It was a message from Eileen:

QS CONSULT ASAP

She rolled her eyes. "Your girlfriend really knows how to kill a moment."

He felt like he could die. "Were we having a moment?"

"Yeah, since '97. Catch you later."

And she was gone.

"It can't stay off!" Xinyi Du was apoplectic. "The program is still idle on our terminals, and the cache will fill up in four hours, tops!"

"The program is the problem." Eileen scrubbed at her matted hair again. Her scrubs were soaked with sweat and soiled with black dust, and she knew she was badly flushed. She didn't care. She was alive.

"You're plenty special without your magic computer, Xin." Sokolsky leaned back in his chair, hands rubbing the back of his bald head. "Just do regular old quantum mechanics for a few days, and leave the super to us."

Eileen stifled a laugh.

"We're two months into a pocket universe sim!" Du was pacing the QS boardroom, wearing a run into the black-speckled grey carpet. "If we don't reconnect to the core—"

"We'll prevent it from manifesting its pocket universe on top of ours, yes." Sokolsky yawned. "Seems like a good thing, to me."

"Wait." Eileen leaned forward. "Can it really do that?"

"No," Du snapped.

"Yeah." Sokolsky put his feet up on the table. "The original core can simulate small eternities, run them forward and backward, tweak the variables and test the outcomes. It uses reality as a template, has been doing for months. That fair, Xin?"

Du nodded, sharply. "We're testing a new multiversal iteration model. We're redefining how realities interact. It's important."

"And now it's dangerous. The new core, the superimposed one, is spinning in reverse." Sokolsky mimed the motion. "The anachronic ingress is reversed — it's chronic egress now. Bleeding time. The non-linear math becomes linear anti-math. Between them, they know all the tricks of the universal trade. It's already manifesting energy into the world, then drawing it back — it's moved beyond ideation, to reification. That's why you saw yourself — it was recreating its immediate environment, in every detail."

She thrilled at the complexity as he rattled it off like it was nothing, and shuddered at the horrible implications, and shoved both thoughts into a mental drawer marked 'LATER'. "Meaning it can run its simulation… outside the simulation."

"IT can't do ANYTHING," Du shouted. "It's not SENTIENT. It's not an AI. It's just a very, very powerful computer."

Sokolsky rocked his chair back and forth, precariously. "It doesn't have to be sentient. You gave it a task, and it's executing that task to the highest efficiency ratio possible. Externalizing the sim would be more efficient than internalizing it, and it's got that capability now. You don't want a program complex designed to compute universal expansion and contraction using the real world as its sandbox. Eileen was right to kill the core; now we need to kill the sim, in case it picked up a sentience strain while she was getting stuck in crawl-space."

Something in that phrasing, 'getting stuck' instead of just 'stuck', stuck out to her. She ignored it, because the point he'd just made — which she hadn't even considered — sent a thrill of terror down her spine. "Christ, I didn't even think of that. I completely agree."

Sokolsky plucked his pager off his belt as Du sat down at the head of the table. "I don't agree. I don't even believe the core was ontokinetic, but I sure as hell don't believe our sim server could have picked it up second-hand." Ontokinesis was the parascientific term for what Foundation personnel colloquially termed 'reality bending'.

"Your quantum superposition calculator was quantum superimposed on top of… itself." Eileen took a deep breath to steady her nerves. "That's definitely one result of the breach, just like all the other bullshit I've seen today — whatever happened in F-D is fucking stuff up in a wide, wide radius. The core was breaking the rules, stepping outside their bounds. Stands to reason it could use its own entangled state as a dataset; it's a predictive computer with creative machine learning, after all. The anachronic feed from F-B must've been corrupted by the breach — fuck me, the reach of this mess — and there's no reason not to think that corruption could've bled from the core to your sims in the same way. Daniil's right — we've got to go scorched Earth with this."

Sokolsky stowed the pager. "The lady gets it." He winked at her, and she almost threw a quip back at him. She felt, for the first time, like she could really learn to quip.

Du crossed his arms. "I'm not signing off."

"You don't have to." Sokolsky scooted backward, and his feet dropped back to the floor. "I already told Ibanez to go ahead and cut the power."

"You WHAT?!" Du was standing again in an instant, his chair toppling over behind him.

"Two out of three geniuses agreed. That's the best ratio we were ever going to get." He cocked his head to one side. "Could've waited for Bradbury, I guess, but nobody likes a deadlock. Too much dead shit around here lately, you get me?"

Du turned around, very slowly, and put his fist into the whiteboard. It dented, but stayed put.

Sokolsky grinned. "Up for a late dinner, Eileen? Or do you and the boyfriend have plans?"

She blinked. She'd had plans for the rest of the day, to be sure; there were still tickets on the board, still work to be done. But those plans had evaporated, boiled away like the flesh of her simulated doppelganger, in the rush of nearly having died without recently having felt alive, and the immediate intimate aftermath.

She had no idea what plans Harry might or might not have had. She hadn't given him a moment's thought since leaving their room that morning.

It hadn't been his face she'd seen in the crawlspace. It hadn't been Chuck Carter's, either, though they'd both benefited from her sudden sense of possibility in close quarters.

"Too late for dinner," she said. "Meet me at my dorm room in an hour."

"Yours?" Sokolsky raised an eyebrow. "I thought you lived with Harry."

She stared at him.

He stared at her.

He nodded.

She passed Melissa Bradbury in the hall, and didn't even think to mention that the meeting was already over.

Harry sat at his terminal, relishing the silence. A&R was rarely filled with boisterous conversation, but he liked it best after hours. It felt transgressive, being at the office past quitting time, and he didn't miss the distracting clickety-clack of a dozen keyboards sounding off all at once. There'd been a lot of typing in the air when he'd left to join Bradbury for the morning rounds, and he thought he knew what some of it had been about.

He opened up the database file, and looked over its tiny entirety with one glance.

Reuben Wirth (1976-2002)

Nobody had written anything.

He stared at the screen, time-lost as the minutes ticked past, then tapped out a few lines of his own before shutting down the terminal and heading for the door.

"Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was late evening when Harry and Eileen reunited at their shared dormitory, reaching the door at almost the same moment. He widened his eyes and stretched out his mouth in a toad-like grimace; she nodded, and puffed up her cheeks like a flustered bullfrog. Translation…

"We should see other people," she said.

"Yeah," he replied. "We should."

She nodded, lingered for just a moment, then headed down the hall in the direction of her own quarters.

Harry was faced with, and made, a difficult decision.

He decided to wait, and call on Melissa in the morning — or perhaps the afternoon, whatever seemed more opportune. It was late now, after all, and they had all the time in the world.

The Mourning After

The Breach Goes On: Bury the Survivors

Beyond Repair