Not Ready for Prime Time - SCP Foundation

Not Ready for Prime Time

2017

27 February

Timeline 5243-D

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

They stared at the tape recorder.

Lillian cleared her throat. When she spoke, it was hoarse. Barely more than a whisper. "Turns out it really isn't always about me. Or us. Or… the thing. Sometimes."

Harry held her hand. Sokolsky gripped her shoulder. She didn't resist.

"Sorry," said Wettle. "What are we doing?"

McInnis tapped the recorder. "This is Dr. Ngo. We're recording a debriefing."

"Okay." Wettle nodded. "Why?"

Ibanez sighed. "Because odds are good we don't fix what's wrong with the superstructure before September, and we end up in a second deadline in a row. So we're getting our stories straight, on the record, and then Lillian can remember them. For later."

"I was wondering about that." Udo was holding Ibanez's hand. The MTF chief was treating it casually, like it was nothing. "If Lillian's just going to memorize this anyway—"

"Because," Lillian answered before the question was fully posed, "either we'd all be pretending to talk to someone who isn't here without a prop to make it less nonsensical, or we'd be talking to me, or I guess we'd just be talking to each other."

"Would that be so bad?" Harry asked.

Lillian shrugged. "I like the structure. I… I like the structure. We're sticking with it."

"Okay."

"And maybe we do fix the Breach in September, and nothing else happens between now and then, and we can just hand Nhung the tape and go back to our rooms and cry."

He squeezed her hand. "Okay."

<Recording begins.>

Dr. Blank: So. Adventures in the headacheverse.

Dr. Wettle: I've never seen a dimension-hopping show where all the dimensions suck before. It's been very enlightening.

Dir. McInnis: Where should we begin?

Dr. Lillihammer: I'll take point. Feel free to interject with your meaningless humanistic ramblings as the mood strikes you, everyone else.

Dr. Blank: Count on it.

Dr. Lillihammer: So. All of the Site was, and most of the Site still is, wall-to-wall memetic nonsense. If there's an exposed panel, no matter where it is, it's got a fancy mind-virus painted on it.

Dr. Blank: All the world a VW Microbus.

Dr. Lillihammer: If it hadn't been for the decon tunnel attached to my office, we'd have been properly fucked. It's literally impossible to have a creative thought in there.

Dr. Blank: We call it the Wettle Tube.

Dr. Wettle: Nobody calls it that.

Dr. Blank: I do.

Dr. Wettle: My point exactly.

Dr. Blank: And mine.

Dir. McInnis: Gentlemen, we only have the one tape.

Dr. Okorie: Those paintings on the walls have a definite effect on people. A very specific definite effect, with wildly variable results. Would you call them de-inhibitors, Lillian?

Dr. Lillihammer: I'd call them cognition divergence vectors. I've already got the paper half-written in my mind.

Dr. Blank: Explain it to us froufrou hard and social scientists.

Dr. Wettle: I'm not froufrou, you're froufrou.

Dr. Lillihammer: The effect of these weird, artistic fractal-things, these lovely wall-mounted cognitohazards, is to completely transform the way people express themselves. They become incapable of directing their actions towards a specific, predetermined goal. Every problem becomes the branching-off point for a constellation of possible actions, none more attractive than any other. They became curious as cats, and creative as… I don't know.

Dr. Okorie: Pr—

Dr. Lillihammer: Prodigies. Yeah. They became prodigies. Completely free of any inhibitions to their creative impulses. Like a hippie arts commune on every psychedelic substance known to humankind.

Dr. Blank: Have you ever had a day when you wanted to punch literally every person you met? Imagine a whole year of that.

Dir. McInnis: I hope we're not forced to endure this for the entire year.

Dr. Okorie: Depends on a lot of things.

Dr. Blank: But surely the Foundation will respond soon? If an entire Site went offline…

Dr. Okorie: It's a lot more complicated than that, Harry.

Dr. Lillihammer: The landscape outside the Site, topside, is one big cognitohazard. Something in the arrangement of the land, the trees, the structures. You saw.

Dr. Blank: I don't know what I saw.

Dr. Lillihammer: Exactly. You couldn't even focus on it. It's all a garbled mess. Antimemetic. I was able to get a few glimpses of the last few uploads to SCiPnet that happened before we went under, and you know what the Foundation did? Right before forgetting we even existed?

Dr. Okorie: They classified us as an SCP, I'll bet.

Dr. Lillihammer: And you'd get to keep your money. Lightning round: guess which number we got.

<Dr. Okorie stifles a laugh.>

Dr. Lillihammer: Yep.

Dir. McInnis: 5243?

Dr. Lillihammer: 5243. The final log entries suggest they were having trouble getting the Dep of Con officers to remember there was even a file. But before that, you can see the effects the topside contamination was having on everybody. Supplies stopped coming in. So did comms. We were noetically isolated from the rest of humanity. I'm assuming that was Bernie…

<Silence on recording.>

Dr. Lillihammer: Fuck. Sorry.

Dr. Blank: It's okay.

Dr. Lillihammer: Shut up. I'm assuming that was something Bernie did before he came down here for good, putting a cap on top of the bottle. Sealing it off. Setting up his little culture-culture.

Dr. Okorie: The Lake Huron Petri Dish.

Dr. Lillihammer: And it worked. It really, really worked. In ways that shouldn't even have been possible.

Dir. McInnis: Such as?

Dr. Lillihammer: It was bad enough to work on electronic eyes. Foundation Mission Control tasked a satellite to fly over 43, and you know what happened? The satellite's OS became an AI and de-orbited itself, just to see what would happen.

<Silence on recording.>

Dr. Lillihammer: It sent a single message of explanation before it burned up in atmo: "TO FEEL THE FIRE."

Dr. Okorie: Jesus Christ.

Dr. Lillihammer: Three MTF teams came in by helicopter, and immediately started playing tag in the forest.

Dir. McInnis: I suspect the First Nations came into the Site at this point, to avoid them.

Dr. Lillihammer: Another squad came in on foot, according to the security feeds that haven't been replaced with amateur art films. Anybody standing topside stood a good chance of hearing that orgy even a click underground, if they put their ear to the elevator.

Chief Ibanez: And that's not even starting on what they did with the subjects in containment.

Dr. Okorie: Sorry, are we just ignoring the thing that happened outside? Are we not going to talk about that?

Dr. Blank: Let Lillian have a few—

Dr. Lillihammer: I don't need protecting, Harry. And I don't need to get a run up at it. I have no idea what happened out there. I'll be running it over and over in my mind for a long time, so for now, let's focus on the things we do understand.

Dr. Blank: Okay. Sorry.

Dr. Lillihammer: It's fine. It's fine.

Chief Ibanez: So, the skips. A lot of the dangerous ones, the ones we can never seem to dismantle or destroy… they dismantled, or destroyed, and then repurposed for their little projects. Maybe there really was something to that non-linear thinking. Some of what they did, I think we might be able to reproduce. I mean, back home. The dismantling, not the art.

Dr. Wettle: Please, not the art.

Dir. McInnis: I'm afraid the Decommissioning Department would never allow it anyway.

Chief Ibanez: Sure. So anyway, far as I've been able to get out of the camera logs, the skips that had minds better than a cat's took one look at the fractals and became just as wonky as the general staff. I'm really looking forward to the death of this anomaly, but if it's given me one thing in my life, it's the image of a carnivorous tree spirit painting a pastoral landscape on its cell wall. With the door wide open.

Chief Nascimbeni: <loudly> You're absolutely sure I can't take another painkiller yet.

Dr. Wettle: I'm surprised it affected him so badly. I haven't noticed any side-effects.

Dr. Blank: He uses more of his brain than you do. And it wasn't the same thing anyway.

Chief Nascimbeni: You should have left me under.

Chief Ibanez: This is where we account for ourselves, Noè. Super looking forward to hearing how you do that.

Dir. McInnis: For the record, Chief Nascimbeni voluntarily placed himself into a memetic coma. Dr. Wettle, on the other hand, immediately looked at one of the murals when we arrived.

Dr. Blank: We've had training for this, Willie.

Dr. Wettle: Whatever. I got a few months off, and a lot of crazy dreams. Filled a whole sketchbook since I woke up, great stuff. Can we attach some of it to the report?

Dir. McInnis: No.

Dr. Lillihammer: Absolutely not.

Dr. Blank: Share it with your wife.

Chief Nascimbeni: I didn't have any dreams.

Dr. Okorie: You seem a lot less on-edge than before.

Chief Ibanez: He ought to. He didn't see half a spider come out of anybody.

Dir. McInnis: We should speak more about the memetic effects on the staff. It might be useful for handling the giftschreiber, going forward.

Chief Ibanez: Sure. They weren't very dangerous, mostly.

Dr. Blank: Tell that to Melissa and Phil. If they ever…

Dr. Lillihammer: Hey.

Dr. Blank: It's…

Dr. Lillihammer: Yeah, I know. It's fine.

Chief Ibanez: Melissa could easily have done that to herself. She wouldn't be the only one engaging in self-harm for the artistic merit. A few folks got really radical ideas about gravity; we've got elevator shafts, geothermal shafts, just a lot of shafts in general perfectly suited to testing that shit out. Wheeeee!

<Silence on recording.>

Chief Ibanez: Splat.

Dr. Wettle: That's callous.

Chief Ibanez: Who cares? By the time anyone hears this, they'll all be alive again.

Dr. Lillihammer: It was a lot like a carnival crowd hit with a truckload of aerosolized PCP. You wouldn't want to walk the halls without an escort.

Chief Ibanez: An escort with a fuckoff huge blaster gun.

Dr. Okorie: So the question is, what do we do now? Lillian and Dr. Sokolsky got PROJECT SCRAMBLE working—

Dr. Lillihammer: Thanks for getting that plug in there.

Dr. Okorie: So do we go topside? Get out of the exclusion zone, and warn the Foundation?

Dr. Blank: Given the whole red sky thing, I figure they probably know.

Dir. McInnis: We need to be very careful with our next steps. We may not possess any knowledge germane to the situation they're facing out there.

Dr. Lillihammer: It never occurred to me that there would be a worldwide issue that wasn't related to the Breach. Bernie… I don't know if this was what he meant, but it sounds like he was saying that the giftschreiber were trying to do their thing, and something worse beat them down. I…

<Dr. Lillihammer clears her throat.>

Dr. Lillihammer: I think I'll need a recharge before I tackle something worse than this.

Dir. McInnis: At the moment, it's possible we don't know anything the wider Foundation hasn't already figured out. They may be far ahead of us. And there is also the question of whether or not it matters.

Dr. Blank: What do you mean?

Dir. McInnis: Whatever they're facing is likely unrelated to the question of the deadlines. It might be more prudent, if morally distasteful, for us to ride out the storm in our ready-made bunker.

Chief Nascimbeni: Not so ready-made.

Dr. Blank: What do you mean?

Chief Nascimbeni: The hydroponics are trashed. A lot of our stores went into that weird army of tin can robots somebody—

Dr. Lillihammer: Bremmel.

Chief Nascimbeni: Probably Bremmel—

Dr. Lillihammer: Definitely Bremmel.

Chief Nascimbeni: DEFINITELY BREMMEL, then, welded together. I don't think we have the supplies to keep all these people alive without getting in touch with the rest of the company.

Chief Ibanez: Well, we're going to have a hell of a hard time fixing the topside problem if we need to get back out into the world.

Dr. Okorie: Assuming there's still a world to get back into.

Chief Ibanez: They would've tried using SCRAMBLE to get into the compound, and it obviously didn't work. If we get out, don't tell them anything useful, don't get any supplies, and then afterwards can't get back in…

Dr. Wettle: At least you'd be out.

Dr. Blank: "…and then couldn't get back in."

Dr. Wettle: So? Why would you want to get back in?

<Silence on recording.>

Dr. Blank: TO CONTAIN 5243 AND STOP THE FUCKING WORLD FROM ENDING, YOU GODDAMN FUCKING —

<Recording ends.>

<Recording resumes.>

Dr. Blank: I'm fine. I'm fine.

Dr. Wettle: It's nice to know you care.

Dr. Blank: I'm going to murder you.

Chief Nascimbeni: <clearing throat> So… Del Olmo. The Uncontained. What was he really up to, down here? And why? That might, I don't know. Tell us something about what we're facing.

Dr. Lillihammer: Don't get big ideas, grease monkey.

Dr. Okorie: I was looking at some of the footage with Del. Chief Ibanez. Sorry, the names are confusing.

Chief Ibanez: You were being unprofessional anyway.

Dr. Okorie: We're in an unprofessional setting. It looks to me like Del Olmo didn't offer the other people direction, precisely, but he was definitely urging them on, and even in the images that weren't made from memories he stole and splatted on the walls, the ones that were just pure expression, it looked like he was… conducting? Yeah. Like a conductor.

Dr. Lillihammer: More like a superconductor.

Dr. Okorie: Sure. It was like they were trying to express something that was his. Like they could… see what he wanted, somehow, in their minds. He had a vision, but he was interested in multiple perspectives on it.

Dr. Lillihammer: But it never worked.

Chief Ibanez: Apparently not. From the uncorrupted cam footage I've managed to scrounge, looks like half the time they ended up just grabbing their heads and passing out. Eventually he changed tack, and started just watching to see what they'd do on their own.

Dr. Okorie: I think he wanted to bring out the creativity in everyone. Whatever was inside of him, it was driving him to… express. Express himself. Help everyone else express themselves. Whatever that meant. It means music, to some of them.

Dir. McInnis: Sculpture.

Dr. Wettle: Sex.

Dr. Okorie: But no-one's trying to express themselves in such a way as to inhibit the expression of others. There's something to that, I think.

Dr. Blank: And it's a good thing, too, because if they'd been able to put their heads together, who knows what they could've built.

Chief Ibanez: I'm picturing a nuclear-grade paintball gun, myself.

Dir. McInnis: I wonder if there was any function to the work he was preparing in the geothermal shaft, or whether that was simply the last gasp of his own creativity.

Dr. Okorie: A cry for help, I thought.

Dr. Blank: Or a legacy.

Chief Nascimbeni: Looks more like the gullet of a Picasso monster.

Dr. Wettle: I can't believe you looked at it.

Chief Nascimbeni: I thought maybe it would help with the FUCKING HEADACHE.

Chief Ibanez: Bernie must have done a lot of gore-scraping before he laid down the basecoat.

Dr. Wettle: Not this again.

Dir. McInnis: His intentions seemed less malefic than the norm, did they not? Very different from the way the other aspects have behaved.

Dr. Lillihammer: I think he ran out of hope. He thought he was giving us a gift.

Chief Ibanez: Whatever he was.

Dr. Okorie: I do have a theory about that.

Dir. McInnis: Yes?

Dr. Okorie: Yes.

<Recording ends.>

When the debriefing, such as it was, was over, they filtered out of the Lillian's office to attend to their various tasks. Harry offered to remain, but she told him to go check on Melissa, or make out with her doppelganger, or whatever else he needed to do. Udo, overhearing at the exterior door, contrived not to make a sour face.

Lillian slumped against the curved edge of the tunnel, closed her eyes, and considered.

She fumbled for her breast pocket, and removed the envelope again.

She sat there for a while, holding the sketch in her hand, before standing up and returning to her office.

It would go in one of the filing cabinets, she didn't know which. She'd do the same thing again back in baseline.

Perhaps she'd miss the folder, and the envelope would fall behind the drawer, lying on the bottom of the cabinet until she found it again years later.

Perhaps she never would.

28 February

The secure comms room in the Director's Complex had been kept neat and tidy, presumably by Zulfikar. He'd been one of Ibanez's most recent captures, covered in cuts and bruises and glowing in the dark; a few minutes' observation was all it took to tell them he'd probably never be the same. McInnis was going to need a new assistant, and the pickings right now were slim.

So, alone, he sat down at the console and tapped out his command code.

Nothing happened.

The signal transmitted, of that he was certain. The tower at AAF-A was still up, still functioning. But no information escaped the bounds of the interdiction zone. If they wanted to get hold of the Foundation again, they were going to have to do something about the topside memetic saturation.

If that is what we want.

He wasn't at all certain. But that didn't really matter, anyway. He'd tried, and gotten no response. That was the first step on their aftermath plan.

The next step was going to take months.

Hopefully not more than six.

Ibanez was waiting outside the complex when he emerged, pointing the Bremmelgun at the door.

"Just in case you came out wrong," she said.

He appreciated the concern, and the professionalism.

2 March

"Ungh," the old man groaned. "No. 's absurd. Won't work." He squeezed his eyes shut tight again, and continued to groan. Udo tried not to roll her eyes.

Trevor Bremmel had been the first person outside of the Sampis to be snapped out of his memetic trance. They'd found him knee deep in a heap of computer parts dumped down the shaft of the DUAL Core, attempting to strangle Du himself. The latter had been badly injured, a serious blow to the side of his head, and it was obvious the two had been struggling over the choicer parts in the pile.

Later analysis would show that not all of the mechanical constructions seen throughout the Site had actually been Bremmel's. As Lillian put it, dismay and amusement fighting for control in her tone, "I think they were playing Extreme BattleBots?"

"Buck up," Udo encouraged. Bremmel was lying on a cot in the middle of his lab, while Udo laboured over his workstation. "The headaches will pass."

"Not for Xinyi," the old man sighed. "That weak cranium of his. I always bragged I had the bigger brain."

"Uh huh. So, you were saying about flux relays?"

"I was saying about transflux relays. And that's meaningless, because I made up the term so nobody would know what I was talking about. We're going to have to go back to first principles. Can you find Hoyt?"

She took a deep breath. "Is that a technician? One of your old assistants?"

Bremmel snorted. "If you find any of my old assistants, put them out the door. Assistants are like a bad smell. They're only good for telling you something's gone stale. No. Hoyt on rudimentary paralectronics. Second unit, third shelf. Maybe fourth. Or third unit, fourth shelf."

Udo stood up, and walked past Joanna. The junior engineer was sitting on the floor, now properly clothed again, scribbling on a piece of paper. Concentric circles, interlinked. Almost a schematic, but not quite.

Bremmel threw his arm across his eyes; he'd been in full-on drama queen mode since they woke him. "Months," he muttered.

"Months what?" Udo found the volume Bremmel had indicated; she found it on the third unit, fifth shelf. She didn't say anything about this, because she knew he'd simply blame it on his assistants. "Months to finish this?"

"At best. If I had competent help…" He glared at Udo, furrowing his brow, probably so she wouldn't notice that his gaze had flicked down to take in his stunlocked daughter and her aimless art. He didn't want her to understand, so she pretended not to and put on an offended face.

Joanna wasn't too low on the list of personnel to recondition; they'd get to her within a few more days. She'd be needed for the project her father and Udo were working on, the construction of industrial strength scrubbers to clean the memetic muck from across Site-43. She'd proposed a repurposing of the desupernatured vat of SCP-5281-D's red sand — she didn't like to think about it, but it was probable that the Bonhomme still inhabited the other four in this timeline — secure in the certainty that she could control all of it at once and race through the halls, wiping out the stain of Del Olmo's art colony in one fell swoop, but of course this had been immediately shot down.

They didn't want to think about what they'd do if she was possessed by any of the cognitohazards.

Or, perhaps, if her cloud-self was.

"You'll find what you need in Chapter One," Bremmel wheezed. "As of this moment, you're a junior engineer. I'm not going to call you 'doctor' again until you can complete a complex circuit."

You never called me doctor anyway, she thought. But of course, she didn't say it.

9 March

The All-Sections Chief was not, in the end, a difficult case. Save for Del Olmo's frenzied passage through the foyer, the First Nations experience of the Site's collective insanity had been relatively benign. McInnis chalked that up to the fact that they hadn't come in until after the memeticist-in-chief had gone into hiding. His deputy quite agreed.

"We stayed topside as long as we could." The ASC was now walking with a cane; for reasons nobody could yet explain, his left leg had been paralyzed during Del Olmo's flight. His brain simply would not acknowledge the limb's existence, though it carried weight perfectly well. "But people kept wandering into the res."

"People from the Site?" They were walking the path to Intake Point-94, and the observation bubble. The ASC was hoping that enough activity would wake his errant limb, so they'd left the transportation at its dock.

"Some," the ASC nodded. "They were wild. Crazed. Easy to avoid, easy to knock down. I'm afraid we had to kill some of them, though we tried not to."

"Why were you topside in the first place? Meaning you, yourself, Nim."

His deputy sighed. "I was renewing our contract, as we always do annually, when Dr. Del Olmo returned to the Site. I lost communications almost immediately, and when we approached…"

He reached up with his free hand, and clutched at his forehead. McInnis quite understood, and finished for him. "You found that AAF-A was no longer a landscape you could comprehend, and Camp Ipperwash was much the same."

The big man nodded. "Then there was the MTF squad the Foundation sent to make contact, or at least, the one we encountered. They were carving runes into the trees. One of them tried to eat his gun, literally, and it ended up happening metaphorically instead. By that time we knew things were seriously wrong, and not just at Site-43." His expression was grim. "Later, it was worse. Much worse. Those few who strayed into the forest were like uncaged animals. Destroying everything they touched. Hating and desiring everything and everyone they saw. I felt that if we remained above, we'd be destroyed. So we closed our eyes…"

"Nim?" The ASC had, in fact, closed his eyes, and was standing very still in the dark tunnel.

In the distance, carried by the metal of the tunnel sheathe and the glass of the dome beyond, there was a very faint but unmistakeable animal groan. Something was moving at the bottom of the lake.

"We closed our eyes." The ASC opened them, and smiled. "And the creatures brought us home."

The Mishepeshu had already returned to the tunnels around the Site, and the lakebed. Whatever had been roosting in the ruins of the elevator had also gone. The mischievous sprites, the shape-changers of various kinds, all had disappeared as soon as the immediate threat had passed. The status quo was gradually returning.

But the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point Reserve #44 had not yet vacated the space that had once sat beneath Stony Point Reserve #43, the home that had been stolen from them and never returned. From what the ASC had told McInnis so far, it was clear that he did not intend them to.

It was an easy enough request to fulfill. In the deadline.

In baseline, as always, things would be much more complicated.

McInnis thought of Vivian Scout, and wondered, not for the first time, whether that really ought to be the case.

"What about OSAT?" he asked. "Did you have any trouble with them?"

"Oh, yes." The ASC nodded. "The Mounties attacked us in force as we were entering the barracks building, and filing into the elevator. I don't think they were quite in their right minds."

McInnis frowned. "Because they attacked you?"

The ASC laughed. "No. Because they attacked us with their bare hands."

"I see. What happened to them?"

The other man glanced at him meaningfully.

"Oh."

They were almost to the dome. The strange groan sounded again, much deeper, much closer. The ambient light ahead shifted for a moment as something passed. A shadow. It didn't come again.

"Probably for the best," he finally mused.

His deputy did not disagree.

4 May

Far away, very far, but still deep within the bowels of the earth, a man finally finds a woman. He's looked for her many times, though he does not know this, and he's not sure what it means that he has found her.

It doesn't matter.

It's far too late.

6 May

"What's that in your hand?"

Karen Elstrom glared up at her. The Chief of Administration and Oversight could glare up like nobody else. "Stick to your script, kid."

Billie Forsythe extended a hand. "Let me see what you're holding, please, doctor."

The older woman squirmed on the examination table. "I outrank you."

"Nobody outranks me in here, except my mother." It was true. McInnis had given blanket powers to the medical and psych staff: nobody was to leave their demesne unless they'd first been declared physiologically, psychologically, emotionally and memetically sound. And that wasn't going to be Elstrom. Not any time soon.

Karen sighed, and placed the bottle she'd been hiding in Billie's hand. It was, as she'd expected, a little green bottle. Purloined from one of the cabinets, no doubt. The administrative overrides hadn't all been cleared yet. "Which room?"

Elstrom looked to one side, at nothing.

"Come on, doctor. Which room did you find these in?" It became apparent there wasn't going to be a response, so Billie shrugged and placed the bottle in her pocket. "I thought we talked about this."

"You talked." Elstrom nodded jerkily. "You did talk. You people talk a lot."

"Amnestic abuse is serious," Billie pressed. "Your brain will eventually—"

"—lose the ability to form long-term memories. Yes. I know. I was listening."

"And there's been studies that suggest abuse will build up—"

"—toxins, with the results resembling an allergy. I said I was fucking LISTENING," and suddenly the other woman's bright white teeth were bared in a snarl, and she was hopping off the exam table. "But YOU are not listening to ME. I need another round. I require it. To do my JOB. Do you want to be responsible for me not doing my job?!"

Billie was over a foot shorter than Elstrom. Hell, Elstrom's legs alone made her feel short. But she stood her ground. "I'm responsible for you, doctor. I'm responsible for all of you. So sit down, and I'll pencil you in for another session with Dr. Ngo."

"More bullshit I'll want to forget," Elstrom grumbled.

But she did sit back down.

Scrubbing down the Site was filthy, time-consuming, monstrously unpleasant work. The amount of time Nascimbeni had to himself was now restricted to the amount of sleep he needed to get each night, and that sleep came quickly, lasted through the night, and never once presented him with a single solitary dream.

He couldn't remember a time he'd been happier.

At Site-43, anyway.

It lasted until the day Del asked him, after visibly working up to it for over a week, how in the hell they were going to reposition the first sublevel.

19 May

Stacey Laiken was only a little worse for wear, and only in a physical sense.

She had orange marks all over her body which were fading with time; they had glowed neon green in the blacklight studio she'd been found in, and a quick check of the backup SCP database suggested someone had painted her over with ancient Daevite glyphs. A quick bath had smudged them into incoherence, so they no longer did what the SCRAMBLE sets said they would do, which was good. Very good. But the paint had seemingly burned the skin, and it was the burns that had to heal.

They'd found a technician in the studio with her, and either the glyphs she'd painted on him were worse, or her natural talent for the occult had made them more potent. He'd be in a hyperbaric chamber for… well, for the rest of his life, as the prognosis extended past September.

Udo sat down beside the hospital bed, and reached out to take Stacey's hand. The other woman woke up immediately, blinked rapidly, looked at Udo, looked at their intertwined fingers. Smiled a little. "Forward."

"Forward?"

Stacey pointed with her free, shaky hand. "Very forward. Not complaining. Hello, Rabbit."

Seeing her partner lying injured on the bed, Udo's protective instinct had overriden her sense of place. She wasn't dating this Stacey Laiken. She probably never had. But the smile crinkling her big blue eyes suggested that she shouldn't take her hand back yet, and so she didn't.

The smile wouldn't last, anyway. Because something inside of Udo she hadn't even known was in tension had just snapped in half.

"Do you know why he called me that?" she asked, voice trembling.

Stacey's smile became confused. "Something to do with how fast you work, I guessed."

Udo shook her head.

Stacey cocked hers to the side, questioning without putting it into words.

Udo opened her mouth, and of course, now that she was committed, her own words wouldn't come.

But the blood drained out of Stacey's face all in a rush anyway, and she gently pulled her hand out of Udo's grip. "No."

Udo sucked her lips in past her teeth. "Yeah."

She hadn't seen Stacey cry like that since 2002.

She'd never seen her furious.

6 June

The contrast could only have been more remarkable if Lillian had been marrying Del.

Sandy Holt and Lew Bosch were separated by a foot and a half of height. He was the shortest of Site-43's security guards, and she was the tallest; the fact that they were both dead back in baseline had lopped the scale at both ends. Holt's simple white wedding dress had been one of the first complex tests of the fashion fabbers, after Nascimbeni had brought them back online to produce the 'metric fuck-ton' of rags Lillian had requested for the cleanup process. She looked, if not beautiful, then quite handsome. Bosch looked like one of those little muscle men who went clubbing to assert their masculinity. It was an odd fit, but it did seem to be one.

Site-43's chapel doubles as an amateur theatre, because other than weddings — which happen here more often than elsewhere at the Foundation, but they hardly ever happen elsewhere at the Foundation, so that's not saying much — there is little call for religious proceedings among those who know more about which gods do and don't exist than the entire collective priesthood of mankind. It is decorated with symbols of generic faith selected by Michael Nass of Theology and Teleology to avoid invoking the wrath or even the attention of any attested deities, suggestive of the transformative power of the profound without actually weighing in on the oldest debate in human history. In this respect it resembles the chapel on Medina Station in The Expanse, the most apt comparison I can make without recourse to Star Trek. My editors should consider this an act of appeasement.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

The architect of the chapel's vaguely upbeat iconography was sitting beside Nascimbeni, as the seating arrangement had been alphabetized on the organizer's request. The organizer had been Lillian, as it had been necessary to avoid any combination of audiovisual stimuli which might trigger the dozens and dozens of memetic traumas still latent in the attendees; she'd definitely made this decision just to mix everyone up and see if they said or did anything funny in unusual company.

Nass wasn't particularly funny, and neither was Nascimbeni, so they sat in comfortable silence for most of the short ceremony. Christianne Monette, a Jesuit priest in Nass's employ, carried out the ceremony while the Director watched benevolently from the side. When it came time for the happy couple to kiss, Holt grabbed Bosch under his armpits and lifted him up, to uproarious laughter and applause.

Nascimbeni suddenly felt sick.

Nass must have noticed, because he said: "What's wrong?"

A glance to each side showed that everyone around them was engrossed in the kiss, which showed no sign of ending — though Holt's arms were trembling, as her well-built husband had heft to make up for his height — or else chatting with their neighbours, so it felt safe to respond. "Just makes me sad," he grunted.

Nass nodded. He understood. They'd looped him and Corbin in on the situation, as they always did; they were dealing with gods, and getting a consult in each deadline seemed a good way to canvas for variable opinions. "Because it won't last."

This confirmed nobody was listening to their hushed mutterings, because saying that at a wedding was a good way to get stared down. "Yeah."

Nass smiled, and looked back at the stage where the bride was finally putting the groom back on his feet.

The laughter and cheers showed no sign of subsiding.

They'd needed something like this, very clearly.

"You want my professional opinion?" Nass asked.

Nascimbeni shrugged.

The theologian took this as approval to continue. "I believe positive energy can transcend worlds."

As the noise finally died down, Nascimbeni took the opportunity to ask: "What about negative energy?"

The other man inclined his head, acknowledging a scored point.

Nascimbeni would have preferred an actual answer.

16 June

The topside elevator was repaired slowly, because nobody wanted to deal with whatever was going on up there until they had their house in order. But the first test run went off without too many hitches — literal hitches, the car stopping for one hair-raising minute between the first and second sublevels — and after a bit of tweaking, it was crossed off Nascimbeni's list for the time being.

It was never clear how the administrative override had itself been overridden. It should have been impossible for anyone to enter the elevator, let alone induce it to move. Ibanez's best guess, in the aftermath, was that the entire staff had been seasoned with sensitive information by some combination of their corruption and possession by Del Olmo, and Laiken had won the jackpot. Like many jackpot winners, she took the opportunity to get the hell out of dodge.

It was assumed that something had gone wrong with the healing of her Daevite scarring until Ibanez thought to mention the escape to Udo, who immediately burst into bitter tears and profanity.

There was no question of going after her.

No-one in their right mind would head into that blood-red sunset.

18 June

"Well," Carter grunted, pushing out from under the console and rolling the skeleton to Nascimbeni's feet. "It's an approximation, anyway."

"Approximation," Nascimbeni repeated. "That's not good enough."

He was standing in Security and Containment, in the westernmost hallway. Carter was technically nowhere, in the membrane between S&C and Applied Occultism, a metre and a half beneath Nascimbeni, checking connections and structural integrity against the original plans.

Moving the Section back to where it belonged would mean disassembling the entire thing, piece by piece, and reinstalling it manually. They were in the process of doing just that, but Nascimbeni had lost about half of his technicians to the Great Collective Mind-Screw, and some of the ones who were still out of circulation wouldn't be getting back into it before the question was moot.

It didn't help that he had to keep dodging the question of why this realignment was so deucedly important.

"I think that's about all you're gonna get." Carter sat up, so that his head was still a few centimeters below the floor hatch. Nascimbeni sat down on the tiles beside him, wincing at the pain in his knees. "We'll never put it back 100% the same as it used to be. That's just not practical."

"It's our goal. Doesn't matter if it's practical."

"I thought we were one of the Practical Sections," Carter grinned. The Site's subdivisions were organized on two poles, Practical and Theoretical, based (in Nascimbeni's view) on whether they did actual work or just talked about work that other people might some day do.

"Chuck," Nascimbeni sighed. "You just have to trust me that this is important. I—"

Carter waved it off. "You don't need to justify yourself to me, boss. You want us to make the attempt, we'll make the attempt. But with manpower this low, odds are it'll never get done on your timetable."

It was true, and they both knew it.

"Still," Carter mused. "It might make a nice anniversary gift."

Nascimbeni frowned. "Anniversary gift?"

"For the missus." The technician grinned. "Had our first, ah, date on September the eighth, 2002. In the access crawl for the DUAL Core."

Nascimbeni hadn't heard that particular story. He wondered what else he didn't know about the dead man who was smiling up at him, trust written in every line on his lined face.

This man who was long dead in the only timeline they considered good.

1 July

There was nothing for it. They were going to need to call this one in.

The Foundation had resources enough to effectuate the reorientation, if they were informed. And if whatever they were dealing with out there did not preclude providing assistance. Lillian advised extreme caution based on what she'd seen outside, so they disassembled the secure transmitter in McInnis' bolthole — he endured a constant barrage of insults from Lillian and Ibanez when they saw inside of that spacious panic room for the first time — and reassembled it somewhere less safe, but far better connected.

The transmitter sat on a folding card table in the middle of the desk block, humming in or out of tune with the document retrieval systems running through the walls and ceiling. Veiksaar was manning the equipment, while Carter was monitoring the connections and making sure the exceedingly complex device had been set up correctly. Neither of them had ever seen it before, so they had to make doubly sure.

This was going to be a very important phone call, assuming somebody picked up this time.

The Sampis stood at what passed for attention as McInnis sat down beside Carter. It was protocol that the technician make the first overture; there was very little in the way of cognitohazard that could compromise the Director, particularly given his cross-dimensional augmentation, but security procedures were not pick-and-choose. McInnis nodded, and Carter keyed the mic. "CAONCI-Site-43 calling Overwatch Command," he intoned in his best radio voice. Veiksaar smirked. "CAONCI-Site-43, Overwatch Command. Do you read?"

The response came immediately, to the visible relief of all nine of them. Even Wettle. "Five by five, CAONCI-Site-43. Five by five."

Harry whooped. McInnis looked back at him and smiled.

"Five by five," the voice repeated. "Five by five. By five."

Carter turned to his wife, leaned in, and sank his teeth into her throat.

McInnis staggered back and to his feet, the chair flying aside, as a gout of blood spurted from the open wound. Veiksaar screamed, and reached up to claw at her husband's face with her fingernails. She caught one of his eyes, and it burst with a sickening squishy popping sound, and he howled like a wild animal. "Five by five," he bellowed. "Five by five." And the two of them fell to the floor, repeating the madness mantra and spitting and gnashing and wailing, and as the Sampis fled from the Salt Mines to the actual salt mines as a single body, they saw Veiksaar stuff Carter's hand into her mouth and start grinding his fingers off with her teeth.

The salt mines at the back of Archives & Revision were now the nerve centre for Site-43.

They had known it was a risk to make the call, and the preparations Lillian had laid out had been extensive, excessive even. Nascimbeni had rewired the lockdown controls for F-D, S&C and AO to a panel beside the vault door — which was now closed, but they could still hear muffled screaming from the other side — so if need be they could cut off the entire complex from the rest of the Site and operate all the security features they'd need come September the eighth without leaving their makeshift bunker. Veiksaar had forwarded the redline in McInnis' office to his tablet, and set up remote speakers in the bullpen, the A&R workroom and the airlock approach so that Ibanez and Harry and Nascimbeni could at least attempt telepresence, if they couldn't be physically present. They'd even rigged up a pressure-controlled breakaway floor joist to trip the agents in lieu of Wettle's sprawl. Finally, Ibanez had used the Bremmelgun to bore an access tunnel through the salt to Applied Occultism; they'd need to blow the floor open to get at it when the shift came, since any damage done now would be repaired on September the eighth, but otherwise it was probably workable to get Udo where she needed to be to do whatever it was that she did. It was a positive thing, at least, that all of the actions they needed to take in regards to AAF-D involved systems residing outside of it, which could be preemptively modified without fear of reversion.

Which was good, because it was beginning to look like they were going to spend the next few months trapped in a cavernous box together.

The final preventative measure had been to set up a series of wall-mounted monitors hooked in to security camera control, so they could judge the safety of their surroundings if the shit hit the fan.

It was hitting the fan now.

Veiksaar's half-baked .aic was running the camera feeds, and traced the path of destruction beginning in the workroom with brutal efficiency. The views snapped from scene to scene on five second intervals, and it was like watching an interpolation of every snuff film ever made. At the moment Carter snapped, a lunch break in J&M turned into a blood riot when half a dozen technicians dropped their snacks and began cannibalizing each other instead. In I&T, their opposite numbers began beating each other to death with keyboards, chairs, and even computer monitors while their Chief masticated her husband's digits. After that, it took mere moments for the chaos to run rampant across the facility. Billie Forsythe was strangling her patients with their IVs. The security guards were marching through the halls as the organized gang they had always implicitly been, beating down everyone they met with their truncheons. Men and women in MTF gear were executing researchers, technicians and each other without rhyme or reason. Those victims of the first contagion who had not yet recovered were easy prey, and died by the dozens in the first few minutes. Something ripped away the barracks building where the topside elevator emerged, and the restored car came crashing down all the way to the fourth sublevel. Something was howling in the halls, though that didn't last long. An order asserted itself, and the hoods on the furnaces were oped wide, and a final march was organized. The wails of the injured and the roars of the dead-on-the-march overwhelmed the tinny speakers in the cell, and they all watched as nearly one thousand people reduced themselves to a few frantic hundred in less than an hour, then settled into a sustained orgy of battery, rapine and rape with no end in sight but the total depopulation of the entire facility.

It was a long time before any of them spoke.

"What… is it?" Harry finally asked. "What's happening?"

"What needs to happen," said Lillian. She was standing against a towering documents rack, hugging herself. "I hope."

Del wheeled on her. "You know what this is? You knew?!"

The memeticist shook her head. "Not exactly."

"She's one of them," Wettle groaned. "Oh, no. That's why she's so sexy."

Harry pushed the big man out of the way. "Shut up and let her explain!"

"Lillian." Udo stepped forward and put her hands around the other woman's forearms. "What is this? What do you know?"

Lillian looked to the side, avoiding her gaze. "I can't exactly tell you."

"So tell me inexactly!" Udo shouted.

Lillian winced. "It's like Wirth, only worse. Much worse."

"Much worse because it affects multiple subjects?" McInnis asked. Harry glanced at him. His jumper was covered in blood. Eileen's blood. Eileen is probably dead.

And so was Melissa. And so was Phil. And so were Alis and the ASC and Sokolsky…

Well, maybe not Sokolsky.

"Much worse," Lillian sighed, "because it affects the entire planet."

"Potentially?" McInnis pressed.

She shook her head. "No. Sequentially."

"Explain."

"And then explain the explanation!" Wettle shouted. "My wife—!" Harry shushed him.

"It's memetic." Lillian shook off Udo's hands, and slid down the rack to hug her knees to her chest. "I didn't realize when it happened to Bernie."

The Director frowned. "This isn't what happened to Dr. Del Olmo."

"No, it is. He was just special." She shook her head. "Like we agreed. He was the best."

Harry knelt down in front of her. "What are you talking about? What's happening to everyone?"

"It's a contagion. Not like what we had before. Worse. So much worse. It isn't spread by contact. It isn't spread through vision, or voice, or anything environmental at all. You saw. Eileen and Carter, then the techs and the techy-techs. It affects shared headspaces. The collective unconscious. Everyone whose mind takes a specific shape."

Udo crouched down beside Harry. "What shape?"

"Human shapes." Lillian shivered. "It's an infection of the noösphere. It's spreading out from wherever it started to consume every mind like the mind it started in, patient zero, and then every mind like those minds, and then every mind like those, outward and outward, until…"

"Until?" Nascimbeni repeated. He was standing against the opposite rack, hands hanging loose at his side, fingers twitching.

"Until now," Lillian breathed, "when it's taken almost every single human being on the face of the Earth."

"This is extrapolation?" McInnis asked.

"Partially, but not from this. From other things." She waved vaguely. "Those secret projects of mine you got so snitty about. The meetings I went to, forgot, and came home from with cryptic homework. It was all to prevent something like this happening back in baseline."

Del didn't have to crouch to meet Lillian's eyes. "How do you know?"

"Because I designed the scenario."

That brought them all up short for a moment.

"What scenario?" Harry demanded.

Lillian closed her eyes, and tilted her head back against an old banker's box. "This scenario. The hate-child of the mother of all educated guesses."

2008

Site-167: ████████████ ████████ ███████, United States of America

"Antimemetic antimemetic research groups," Lillian repeated. "You want an invisible army studying invisible things. Why?"

"Because visible armies can be fought," Wheeler said. "And ours is being beaten. By a thing we can't even conceptualize without being destroyed by. And if it destroys us, it destroys everyone else like us. So the only people who can fight it—"

"—are people it can't see," Lillian nodded. "Noetically isolated. Okay. You think you can beat this thing that way?"

"No," said Hughes. "We've got a plan of our own for that. But we don't know if it's going to work, so Marion has proposed… an alternative." He looked bone tired. Like something was eating him from the inside out. "It's a bad alternative. A very dangerous alternative. If it goes into action, something horrible has happened. If it works…"

Hughes had deflated until he had no more breath for words, so Michael Li took over. "We don't have the authority to put Marion's plan into place. We're going to need to seek it out, and we might not get it. But the first step is you setting up these groups, and that much is already a plus, so we're giving you the go-ahead. If you're interested."

Lillian looked at Euler, who wasn't talking; his face was unreadable under the germ. She looked at the two other men, then looked at the woman with the plan. "They're talking about you a whole lot," she said. "What do you have to say for yourself? What's this genius idea you've had?"

Wheeler managed to project cold determination even through the germ. "I'd rather talk you through the rationale, and see if you arrive at the same conclusions I did. What would you say is the likeliest progression of SCP-5243?"

Lillian tried to blink, but of course she couldn't. "Uh. Well. It created an alternate timeline when we didn't understand how to contain it, and containment is still very difficult, so we'll probably foul it up at least one more time. The personnel killed in the Breach get horrible super-powers tangentially connected to their areas of expertise. Depending on who accidentally doesn't die, we'll face a variety of potential problems. All seven of them being alive ended the world in a mish-mash of ways…"

"What ways?" Wheeler pressed. "Who did what?"

"Mukami had compulsive speech and self-duplication, Gwilherm walked all over everybody and was basically invincible, Radcliffe boosted her powers and her signal, Wirth mind-hopped and lacked a physical presence — or maybe he didn't, we never found him either way — Markey created things, Ambrogi destroyed them, and Bernie…" She cleared her throat. "Del Olmo we don't know too much about, but everything he did was memetic. Extremely powerful memetics. So, forecasting…" She looked up at the strange ceiling. "I'd say one or more of them don't get killed, and in the new timeline, they're the top dogs. If it's Ambrogi and Markey, or Mukami, Gwilherm and Radcliffe, it's a typical apocalypse. If it's Wirth, I dunno. Probably he makes us all kill ourselves. If it's Del Olmo, he probably runs rampant with the memetic cults all over the globe. They're already connected to the Breach in a variety of ways we don't yet fully understand. I bet he'd head up the giftschreiber and take them from a nuisance to a K-Class Event level threat."

Wheeler nodded. "Pull on that string."

It was easy to plot out. She knew how all the pieces moved. "If Bernie survives the Breach, he'll probably create a memetic black zone at 43. That's just obvious. That's just thematics." Her voice had become flat and expressionless. "You'd lose me immediately. He'd take me out, as a threat. The Victims know us, and Bernie knows me. Knows what I can do. So if I'm the one who sets up these groups, they don't get set up in the alternate timeline, because the shit hits the fans six years before this meeting ever happens. The Foundation spends a ton of extra resources fighting the giftschreiber, and it probably doesn't go well."

She didn't know the details, couldn't know them — they'd been incinerated along with her germ, as with every other meeting she'd been to in the Vegas Room — but she could make a fair guess. She guessed out loud, and the others listened in horrified awe.

"'They found us'," Harry quoted.

Lillian nodded, striking the cardboard with the back of her skull with each movement, like a soft kind of penance. "Exactly."

Udo placed a hand on Harry's shoulder. "What?"

"You weren't there," Lillian told her. "It's what Bernie was trying to tell me. Another cult co-opted his. A stronger one."

"A bigger fish," Del suggested.

Lillian's eyes snapped open. "No. I hate that phrase, and I hate that movie. There isn't always a bigger fish, but there is often a worse idea. That's what this is. A very, very bad idea, from an alternate idea space, crashing through ours like a rock through a skylight. Shattering everything. I always knew they were afraid of something, Wheeler and the others, but I didn't know what it was, because I couldn't, and neither could they, except for in those meetings that were secret even to us afterward, or it would win." She pointed at the monitors mounted to the rack above Nascimbeni's head, which were still displaying… probably what they'd been displaying this entire time. Nobody turned to look. "Like it's winning right now. Once you know, you know. And so does everybody else."

McInnis hadn't moved an inch, but his voice carried easily in the echoing mine. "That doesn't explain why you claimed to have designed this scenario. Extrapolating the outcome doesn't make you its author."

"I told them what would happen — how the world would be different if we'd never met — and they knew what it meant."

Udo took her hand off Harry's shoulder, reached for Lillian again, and seemingly thought better of it. "Who did?"

"The TAD."

"Should any of this be making sense?" Wettle whined. "It's gone on so long to not make any sense."

She smiled up at him. It wasn't a stable smile. "We're seeing someone's master plan playing out. Well, two someones'. Three?"

Harry turned away and blew out a long, exasperated breath. "This looks like a positive outcome?!"

"No," Lillian agreed, "but of course when we revert the Breach in September, it'll never have happened."

"Then what use will it have been?!" He wanted to reach out and shake her. "It just made our job harder, for no fucking reason!"

She met his eyes. "There's a reason."

"But you just said—"

"I said the events won't have occurred. But some of this will come with us when we leave."

"What?" Del demanded.

"My memories."

Wettle snorted. "So it's all about you after all, then."

"No. It's not about me at all. But it is about memories — or, more accurately, ideas."

Harry placed his hands on her knees. "Worse ideas, you said."

She reached up to cover his with hers. "The worst, and the best."

"State it for me plainly, please," McInnis said. "What are you alleging about Antimemetics and Temporal Anomalies?"

"Remember, I told them everything. I told them what I knew about the Breach, and the deadlines. The way my memories persisted interested them both. The nature of thought, of conceptual space. I don't remember any of the meetings—"

"How does that work?" Nascimbeni interrupted. "You remember everything."

"I only know the vague outline because of the notes I got to keep, to tell me what we'd decided to do after every meeting, when I forgot. Forgot is the wrong word. The memories were never actually in my head. We conversed by proxy." She covered her face with one hand, five digits spread wide, and spoke through her palm. "It's complicated, weird, and gross. Just trust me." She reached down again to clutch Harry's hand. "I don't remember the meetings, but I can guess at what happened in them. And the conclusions the others drew. And what they did about it."

McInnis nodded. "Those conclusions would be…?"

"What effect did the, you call them Victims? What effect did their powers have on the seven of you?" Wheeler pressed.

Lillian shrugged. "They basically didn't. Wirth couldn't overpower us. Mukami couldn't convince us. Radcliffe didn't convert us. Del Olmo's memetic traps didn't melt our brains."

"And why do you think that is?"

She suddenly realized that the others had all gone silent. This really was Wheeler's show.

"Because we're not connected to the collective unconscious of the alternate timelines?" she suggested. She'd workshopped this idea from time to time, but couldn't find anyone cleared to brainstorm with her who agreed with her perspective. Still, it seemed right. "Us. The Survivors. PTF Sampi-5243, 'See You in September'. We're cut off from human headspace in the dead timelines. We're not similar in mental makeup to anyone but ourselves. As soon as these versions of us took over our alternate bodies, all whammies were off. We're a noösphere of seven."

She succeeded in blinking this time. The germ squirmed.

"Fuck," she said.

"So…" Udo rubbed her temples. "The mind virus that took over the Earth, and just caught up with the rest of the Site…"

"Right."

"We're immune to it."

"Right."

"So we'll still be able to restore baseline," said Del. "And you're saying they knew that?"

"I think they did," Lillian agreed. "I think they were counting on it. I think this was their plan."

"Some fucking plan," said Wettle.

"To what end?" asked McInnis.

"I think this is the explanation for that dipshit from Overwatch," Lillian said. "The one who threw the Lever into the sun. I don't think he was a dipshit at all. And I don't think he was a geistschreiber, either. I don't even think it was a geistschreiber who fucked up S&C in the first place." Harry looked up at Del, whose eyes went wide at the reference. "I think Thaddeus Xyank sent agents to Site-43, and told them to make sure that Bernie wouldn't die."

Harry took a deep breath, and then another. "What."

"Why?" Del shouted. "What possible reason?!"

There was an answering shout from beyond the sealed door, and then a groan. Something was still alive out there. For a given definition.

"This is your plan," said Lillian. "You want to use our alternate timelines to kill your mind monster."

"That's right." Wheeler leaned forward. "Will it work?"

Lillian shook her head. "No, because the Temporal Anomalies Department will never let you do it."

Wheeler waved the concern away. "Don't worry about TAD. Leave that negotiation to us."

"But why would they do it behind our backs?" Harry asked.

Lillian looked rueful. "Because they couldn't tell us without telling the Overseers. TAD doesn't answer to them, and Antimem can't even get on the agenda. Everybody forgets they exist every couple of months. It's funny, actually."

Udo was visibly at the end of her rope. "What is funny about this?"

"We've spent this whole time not trusting TAD, and they've spent the whole time not trusting us either. Seems like we could've spared each other a lot of grief by just being honest with each other."

McInnis looked unconvinced. "The mechanism by which Dr. Del Olmo was spared, and this deadline created, is obscenely overwrought. And extraordinarily dangerous. Why would TAD have taken such a convoluted course? Why not simply send their agents to usher him out of the interrogation room before the Breach?"

Lillian had the look on her face reserved for when she'd finally figured everything out. A cat with half-lidded eyes. "If I had to guess? I'd say that S&C always ends up getting shifted in mostly the same way, no matter who does the shifting, in all the alternate Earths TAD monitors. They just made sure it happened a little different so that Bernie never got vaporized, and everything else was the same. Maybe it was a matter of a centimetre or less. They're cautious bastards. They have to be. If they interfered with Bernie directly, he'd know. The Uncontained would know. And that would change what happened next. And it's a lot easier to change the framework of those six minutes of Breach than it is to pull off a trick within it, right? Nobody in their right minds would try to custom-build a deadline in that narrow an interval. You'd be bound to fuck it up."

"It sounds to me," Nascimbeni croaked, "like these people are not remotely in their right minds already. I thought their job was to preserve the timeline. This is the opposite of that."

She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. "Well."

"TAD knows how the correct timeline, baseline temporality, plays out," Wheeler continued. "It's their job to make sure it plays out correctly. Our initial overtures suggest Director Xyank is very concerned about the cross-dimensional danger posed by the subject we're discussing at these meetings. SCP-3125."

"Concerned enough to petri dish an entire pocket universe to try and test the cure?" Lillian scoffed.

"Yes," said Marion. "Exactly that concerned. And they're hoping, if this plan works out the way we think it should, that it will give them one universe where 3125 is no threat whatsoever. A control cosmos, if you will."

"The only world where this disaster never happens."

"But it is happening!" Udo cried. "Right now!"

"Not in baseline. Only here. I said that already." Lillian clapped a hand to her head, and laughed. "Oh, no, of course. Of course that's it. What we've been calling baseline really isn't."

"What?" Harry said, again.

"Our reality is a temporal anomaly. We just don't know how to fix it." Lillian staggered to her feet, and they joined her. "Something was erased in 2002, the Uncontained, whatever that is, and that means we've never really collapsed back to the way our temporality was meant to go. We've just been hanging out in the next best thing until we figure out how to revert everything to factory. I've known that intellectually the entire time, but it never occurred to me before now why that's so important. TAD is looser about fucking around with the timestream because we need to play these events out properly to get to the end goal, which is completely healing the timeline. That makes sense. It's got to be something like that. Okay, but the other thing. Right." She shook her head, violently. "I don't know how they knew. I don't know what the explanation is. But I know they did know, because this would be a waste of time if they didn't."

Harry's forehead was like a new-plown field. "What, Lillian? What did they know?"

"A control cosmos," Lillian repeated. "Except okay, it's not a very useful control cosmos. Because if you kill this thing, 3125, in the alternate timeline, you only have until September to observe it, assuming you can even get a temporal agent in there. And I'm assuming you can't, because otherwise I would have expected to have been visited by one already."

"You're right," Wheeler agreed. "Temporal agents can't access your dead timelines, and I don't know anything you don't know about what happens to them once they collapse. All this time travel stuff is beyond me, honestly. I like heady stuff, but temporal mechanics are not my forte."

"Like me and pataphysics," Lillian nodded. "Hate that shit."

"But we have reason to believe that benefits will accrue beyond the site of the final conflict," Wheeler continued. "Are you familiar with Project PNEUMA?"

Lillian whistled. "They let you look at all the fun stuff, huh?"

"Don't tell anyone. I'm sure they've already forgotten I'm cleared for it. I'd rather not have my door kicked down by Nu-7." Wheeler smirked.

"But yeah, sure. PNEUMA's a thing to map the noösphere. Barely made any progress yet. It's going to be the new Human Genome Project, brain edition."

"They did discover one very interesting thing," said Wheeler. "Project PNEUMA is conducted like an archaeological dig. Working its way through the layers, proceeding from the known to the unknown. They picked out a recognizable landmark in the noetic landscape. Can you guess which one?"

It barely qualified as a guess. There was only one sensible candidate. "The thing we stuck in there ourselves. The Frontispiece."

"Which is?"

"We inserted the concept of the Foundation into human thoughtspace. Enshrined it, like in a local ontological constitution."

"Right. Project PNEUMA found it immediately. It left a nasty scar on the noösphere, like all amateur surgery does. But they found something else occupying the same conceptual space, and that they were not expecting."

Lillian had realized where this was going ahead of time, and the excitement took her words away long enough for Wheeler to finish the sentence. "You're saying," she fairly gasped, "that they found two Frontispiece effects in the noösphere."

Wheeler nodded.

"Holy Jesus fuck."

Wheeler nodded again. "One for baseline temporality, and one for the new Foundation you and your friends constructed in the first of your dead timelines, as apparently its establishment required a second such intervention."

"In other words," and Lillian found herself suddenly standing, "unlike true alternate timelines and parallel realities, baseline and all these tangents share a single persistent noösphere."

"That's… incredible." Udo shook her head. "Why would that… How could that…?"

"But even if that's possible—" Harry began.

"It's possible," Lillian told him. "It's not possible they would have done this otherwise .I don't know what proof they had, but they must have had some, and it must have been solid."

He tried again. "But what about that made them do something so reckless? So insanely dangerous? If I'm hearing you correctly, Xyank and your friend from Antimemetics stuck us in this particular deadline intentionally. Why?"

She was shaking all over. "Because Wheeler could tell something was off. She could tell they were losing their fight. I know that much from our annual calls, chatting about the workgroups I was setting up. They were keeping the wolves from the door, but only barely, and all along we were losing more and more antimemetics researchers to that thing that's running loose topside, and now inside the Site. The consequences of this thought-virus unleashing itself couldn't even be conceptualized back in baseline, not without killing the whole damn world. If we weren't here, right now, in this time-tangent, I couldn't even be explaining it to you."

"So finish your explanation," Udo snapped. She looked to be about five seconds from eating someone's hand herself. "What does this unitary noösphere do for us that separate noöspheres wouldn't?"

"Possibly nothing," Lillian mused, "though I'd be very disappointed if that's the case. But possibly… Something really very special."

"There's a room at Site-41," said Wheeler, "a containment cell that Bart built."

"Well," Hughes interrupted. "It's more that the entire world is the containment cell, and that room, and the one we're in now, are the only things outside containment."

"Right," Wheeler acknowledged. "It's safe from 3125's encroachment. It's where we do our research on it. I visit every six weeks, catch myself up on what was already known, add what I know now, and see if we're any closer to a solution. I know my own mind, Lillian, and I can see the trends. We're getting farther and farther away from the good ending, here. Your groups are going to help, help a lot I hope, with combating the cults that have sprung up around the globe to worship fragments of this all-devouring concept. But some day they'll fail, as everything tackling this problem fails, and we'll all die screaming." She rapped the table with her knuckles.

"Unless we don't."

"Unless we don't," Lillian repeated.

"I'm going to be the one who gets us all killed." Wheeler's smile was rueful. "One day I'm going to go into that room, and I'm going to know that we're all out of resources, and that the plan Bart alludes to is the only hope for killing that thing, and I'm going to find a way to leave the chamber without being amnesticized."

"Which will mean it starts to eat your brain, and every brain like your brain, and every brain like those, on down the thought-chain."

"Right. And I'm going to try to use my last moments on Earth to put our plan in motion, because I'll have realized that by the time of my next forty-two day appointment, it'll already have happened anyway. If that happens in baseline temporality, life as we know it will end, even if I'm ultimately victorious. The whole world will have gone mad before the solution goes into effect. We can't expect the Foundation or the Veil will survive. It's not a very happy ending."

"And you know this for a fact," said Lillian.

Li answered. "We did say we've been in contact with Director Xyank."

Lillian narrowed her eyes. "He must be out of his gourd to have confirmed that for you."

"Marion did say he was concerned," Euler pointed out.

"There's concerned, and there's 'willing to neglect your duties of custodianship over the entire collective timestream'. But okay, let's say I believe you. You know you, and Thad knows time, and what you say is true. Bad thing happens here, shit is bad forever. Bad thing happens in one of these tangents…" Lillian nodded. "It burns itself out in a world that only exists for twelve months anyway, and since there's only one noösphere, if you erase it there, you'll erase it everywhere. But!" She realized she was still standing, and sat back down. "But, if there's only one noösphere, won't everyone on Earth in baseline also go crazy? No!" She raised a hand to forestall Wheeler's response. "No, it won't, because baseline is never affected by what happens in the dead timelines. It proceeds like they don't exist, minus poor Ilse Reynders seeing double for twelve months. Successfully containing 5243 in September and closing the loop will mean nobody dies but 3125, if your plan works out."

"And nobody dies if it doesn't," Wheeler concluded. "Until inevitably everyone does."

Lillian exhaled mightily. The edges of the germ flapped on her face. "That is some Grade-A level bullshit insanity, Marion Wheeler, and I would be tempted to tell you it will work, simply for the joy of seeing you try."

"But?" Wheeler said.

The room was very still.

"Yeah," Lillian laughed. "There's no but. It totally will work." The laugh suddenly caught in her throat. "You are going to tell me before you spring this on us, though, right?"

For the first and only time, Lillian saw Marion Wheeler grin.

It was a shame she wouldn't remember it.

It was a rough month, roughing it in the breach.

Being restricted to Site-43 was nothing new. It hadn't even been anything new in the third deadline. But being trapped in a single space, even a tremendously massive one full of switchbacks, with six other people was enough to drive anyone mad.

They'd stocked up on food and sundry supplies, enough to last the lot of them until September if needed, though they had obviously hoped no such need would arise. Nascimbeni remarked, with a tone that suggested a part of his soul had died, that the hydroponics problem was now essentially solved. Del tunnelled into the firewalled space around the A&R library, after first closing the bulkhead doors, so they could access the unisex washroom with its decontamination shower that could double as the mundane sort. Plenty of the cul-de-sacs in the caves had been partitioned off to store more sensitive materials, allowing them to pick and choose from a variety of personal living spaces with completely identical decor. They bedded down with the sleeping bags and pillows that had been socked away for use by the workers rather than subjecting them to long treks across potentially compromised spaces during the cleansing initiative.

Only Lillian didn't spend much time sleeping. She was thinking aloud, and she needed a captive audience for that.

Harry was staring at the ceiling of Mid-Yield Storage Facility 7, waiting for a break in the litany. When it came, he did his duty and supplied the expected prompt. "And you're saying Wheeler knew this would happen. Whatever it even was."

"No. Not at all." Lillian had set up her sleeping bag on an empty line of shelving, elevated five feet off the ground. "But she knew her own mind. She knew what she'd do if she realized the end was near, and she had no allies — the condition she must have been in, in this deadline. She'd scramble to set up whatever their best plan was, and put it into action. And that has to be what she did." He'd never heard such a voice of awe come out of her before. "Harry, she intentionally picked an ally she knew wouldn't be an ally, wouldn't be available, outside of baseline. That has to mean she was patient zero for bringing this thing in. Whatever plan she had to kill it involved sacrificing herself, and a lot of other people. A horrible, awful, terrible and not any good plan. The kind of plan you'd only implement if you were desperate. So she contrived a way to never be desperate in baseline before she was desperate in deadline, so if she snapped and tried to fix the thing, she'd try in there first. In here. Like defusing a bomb in a bomb-proof bunker."

"Because Xyank put her in the position to do it."

"If I know her, and I do know her, she probably told Xyank that if he could figure out a way to put her in that position, a way that wouldn't fuck up anything that wasn't getting fucked up already, he should do it. I think that thing outside is the reason Antimemetics had so many layers of security around their most secret meetings. They knew it was the real asteroid, coming to pulverize us all. They had to kill it off, at any cost."

"So this was a long shot."

"The longest." The admiration in her voice was palpable.

"You know," he said, "to the extent that I thought about TAD at all, which isn't much, because we don't know jack shit… I kind of thought they were supposed to be the adults in the room? With this explanation, they sound more like…"

"Gifted kids?" Lillian chuckled. "I'm not sure there's any point speculating on their motives. They're weird."

"But you're saying this woman… saw the logical end of the decline of Antimemetics, and picked your brain until she had enough info to plot out a Hail Mary where her alternate self could try to force the issue, destroy this invading, alien concept in a pocket timeline, and still live to guess at the story back in baseline. That's what you're saying."

"Yes."

"And you think that's less crazy than none of this having been on purpose at all, and all of it being a coincidence."

"Yes."

He shook his head. "She… must know herself pretty well."

"I can't think of a higher compliment for someone."

"Because it makes them similar to you." For the first time since he'd seen his ex-girlfriend exsanguinated in front of him, he smiled. If only a little.

By the sound of her voice, she was smiling a lot. "See? We do have the same headspace, you and I."

"Well, too bad it didn't fucking work, huh?"

Lillian chuckled. "I dunno. Give her time to cook." She took a deep breath, and resumed working it out in the close air between them. "I can only assume it always starts in 2016, and Xyank knew that. So they had to make sure that this exact deadline happened on this exact year, to sequester the inevitable apocalypse away from our reality like Marion suggested, using her scheme on Xyank's schedule. Maybe in every world that hasn't got me, or this exact version of me, or the Breach, baseline plays out like this deadline."

"Meaning Wheeler doesn't have the tools to set up her crazy scheme."

"I prefer not to think of myself as a tool. But other than that, yes."

"So that makes this time… very special. Doesn't it?"

He could tell she was pausing to cook up a one-liner to sign off on. It was very late, not that it really mattered given the present situation.

"If there's one thing I've learned from all this bullshit, Harry," she said finally, the smile in her tone more apparent than ever, "it's that every time is very special."

3 August

No language can properly express what happens, which is kind of funny when you think about it, because the noösphere is at least partially a creature of language.

Suffice to say that something ontologically evil, though too stupid and profound for that to mean anything outside of limited human perception, meets its counterpart in opposite, and that counterpart is travelling at a high rate of conceptual speed.

The formula works itself out rapidly. The best anyone could ever have hoped for was an end result of zero equals zero.

But when the chalk dust settles, one still remains.

And she is singing.

Ilse Reynders stops slamming her head against the glass of the Anomalous Documents Disposal Chamber when she feels the change. The pressure is relieved.

She sees the man pouring sealant into the crack she's made with her forehead, even through the haze of blood from her broken nose which smears her window on the world, and she also sees no man, no sealant, and a window that was perhaps one more solid blow from breaking open. She wonders what would have happened if the past and present intermingled. A part of her files it away in the part of her brain reserved for unresolved questions which might, some day, converge on a single answer.

The rest of her sits down heavily, on the floor, and begins to laugh and cry in equal measure.

Because there are so many of her, she can feel the absence more keenly than anyone. She knows that something is gone, not like a tooth, more like… an ache.

And all around her, and far to the south, the realization dawns on the rest of them too.

The few ragged dozen who are still alive.

It was probably over. Probably. In the morning, they'd begin the long, careful process of making sure. For now, one final clarification.

"So… the thing that was coming." Harry rolled over on his bedroll, hating the feel of the granular ground beneath, and the ache in all his bones. "The thing that… maybe… just died, if you're right. It was fully manifested in the noösphere."

Lillian yawned. "That's right." The rest of them hadn't noticed any change they couldn't see on the monitors, but Lillian had. Probably her five conflicting memory sets had enabled her to sense the hole in conceptual space more fully. Assuming she hadn't just finally been driven insane by them.

"And it died there. Was killed. Somehow." He shook his head. "How?"

"No clue." She sounded like she was curious, but trying to suppress it. "Eigenweapon. Bacteria. Chess match to the death. Doesn't really matter. Point is, it's gone."

"And because it died in the shared noösphere…"

"Yeah."

"It died in the deadline, and died in real life."

"That's about the size of it," she agreed.

"The size of it…" He sighed. "…is too big for my fucking brain."

"Yeah, well." He heard her patting down her pillow. "That's us geniuses for you."

4 August

Site-43 was a charnel house.

The first deadline had badly depopulated the place, but not this badly. Lillian claimed that even the classified events of the second, which only she remembered in full, hadn't resulted in this many casualties, though she was careful to put qualifiers she wouldn't explain on what precisely 'life' and 'death' had meant in that context.

Many of the bodies were burnt beyond recognition in the boilers and heat pumps and thermal plants. There'd been disassembly lines set up. More were littered in the corridors, left to bleed out, or kicked to a pulp, or squashed like grapes in an old style winery. Some of the staff were not yet dead, but they were dying, and there weren't enough of their peers in any condition to help to arrest their inevitable decline.

The Survivors — the term had never felt more relevant — filtered out of A&R and into the vast well of carnage without. Del exited first, and disposed of the corpses of Eileen and Carter via a garbage chute connected to the sump. They couldn't do anything about the blood, for the time being. The comms equipment was smashed, which was honestly something of a relief.

It would be the only solace they experienced for a long, long time.

But in helping who they could, and helping who they couldn't in a different way entirely, they were able for a time to forget the even bigger problem on the horizon. Udo threw up forcefields of sand to prevent harm or self-harm or both, over and over and over again. Lillian walked the halls wearing a shirt plastered with what she assured everyone was a memetic stun agent; it looked just like the kill agent gating access to the SCP-001 database file, but as she patiently explained to McInnis, in art, context is everything. They did the best they could, but it was mostly doomed effort.

Because there was no Lever. There was no DUAL Core — it was a shattered, twisted mess of glass and metal and polymer sherds. If their brief exposure to the way the world outside had been operating was anything to go by, there was possibly not even an SCP Foundation.

There was no way they would be able to reposition the first sublevel before the Breach took them again.

And where might it blow them off to this time?

Of course, McInnis knew there was one possible solution. But he didn't think they'd have time to make it work, and anyway he wasn't quite ready to play that card just yet.

7 August

They alternated between bouts of frenzied activity and despair. During the former, they worked in pairs, or small groups. To nobody's surprise, Sokolsky turned up alive and well; he'd apparently locked himself in the decon tunnel as soon as they'd gone to make the call. They'd thought about making the call from the tunnel, as with Lillian's periodic conferences with Wheeler, but if the protection hadn't been enough, they would never have been able to reach their appointed stations on the eighth, so they hadn't.

During the latter, they congregated in the Director's Complex.

After what they found in Udo's dorm, they wouldn't have felt very comfortable in there.

Lillian was curled up in an expensive old Victorian armchair. It didn't recline, but it was obviously more expensive than the rest of the furniture, so she liked it almost as well. "Harry," she murmured, as though talking in her sleep.

Across the room, sitting at McInnis' writing desk, Harry twisted to look at her. "Yeah."

"You remember Myst?"

Harry laughed. "I was just thinking that!"

"What?" said Wettle.

Harry ignored him. "The chicken or egg thing?"

This time Lillian laughed. "Yeah!"

"What?" said Wettle.

"Myst is an old PC adventure game from the early nineties," Harry explained. "Lil and I played it at university. It's about an island full of books with little picture panels you can touch, and they teleport you to the worlds you can see there."

"What?" said Wettle.

"Yeah," Udo muttered from a divan in the corner, "I'm not seeing the relevance yet either."

"There's debate in the world of the game—" Lillian began.

"More in the sequel," Harry interrupted, "and the tie-in literature—"

"—about whether or not creating the books creates the worlds, or if the worlds are preexisting and the books just link to them."

McInnis, standing at the doorway to his more private quarters, nodded. "I see the connection now."

Nascimbeni, staring white-faced at a set of blueprints he'd tacked to the wall as though pouring his fear into them might produce a solution, shook his head and didn't look at any of them. "I do not."

"You're asking whether the deadlines are created when we foul up the Breach," said Udo, "or they're fully-fledged parallel universes or timelines or whatever."

Del, cleaning her gun, looked either exhausted or exasperated. Perhaps both, actually. "Why? What prompted that?"

Lillian gestured, like a monarch granting permission to speak. "Harry?"

"Well," he said, "for me it's about the content."

"The content of what?" Del asked, not sounding like she particularly cared. They all liked to keep the conversation going anyway, no matter what it was about. If they chattered enough, they could almost imagine there were still plenty of people alive at Site-43.

"The world. In the first three deadlines, everything seemed to revolve around us. And the Victims. Our story was the world's story. It was easy to think that everything existed solely because of what we did."

"Double easy for me," Lillian yawned, "since that's my default position."

Harry pointed at her. "But there's something happening here that isn't connected to what we did."

"Weirder than that. Our story made way for theirs. Our people focusing on our issue left everyone else vulnerable to an outside context problem."

A light had dawned in Udo's eyes, quite literally. "Doesn't that make this deadline make more sense, though? Just because 5243 created the Victims, doesn't mean they're the most dangerous things in existence. Even with the threat boost of whatever got ripped apart by the Breach, they should never have been the main event. The whole reason the Foundation has a Tactical Theology department is that universal threats are dime a dozen. This just feels like reality finally ensuing, after three false starts."

Lillian curled up tighter, in the fetal position she assumed on the edge of sleep. She'd acquired that quirk at university, where very few of the beds were long enough to properly accommodate her length. "But no, that wasn't really what made me think of the Myst thing. I was more wondering if it even makes sense that our other selves are like… vessels we can inhabit, with personal histories and unique situations, and then we hijack them, like they were waiting to be hijacked, and then… nothing. All that energy comes out of the universe, and then goes right back in, or is lost in the transfer. You know how much energy it takes to create a whole universe? And what kind? I don't, but I know AAF-D wasn't carrying enough gunk to do it."

"I know the unit, and the value," said Udo, "but neither would mean anything to you. You're right. It's a lot."

"In Myst," Harry mused, "you can edit the book and edit the world. It doesn't prove anything in that setting, but it could in ours. That might be how we test this."

Nascimbeni glanced at him, briefly, then returned to his hopeless task. "Meaning?"

Udo answered for him. "Meaning we can find out if the deadlines predate our reality if we can edit them, by editing the Breach."

"What?" said Wettle.

"If I ever start a garage band," said Del, "it's going to be called 'What' Said Wettle."

Harry laughed. "I was just thinking that!"

Delfina Ibanez had received a Foundation doctoral degree in Civil and Esoteric Engineering one year after the events of Zevala. Whilst entombed in the hidden facility on the village's outskirts — no trace of which could subsequently be found — she'd entertained the whimsical idea of repairing the damage, all of it, from one end of the bay to the other, and restoring the survivors to their shacks. That had been before she'd emerged to find herself the only survivor, and embarked on a less constructive path.

Her examiners had been flabbergasted. For someone so young, and from such a relative backwater, she was far better educated than she ought to have been. And she'd educated herself. Volume on volume in the facility's library had taught her first the basics, then the deeper secrets of construction, maintenance and repair. She knew about stresses — more than most. She knew about tension, and torque, and resonance. By the time she emerged in a suit of futuristic armour and laid waste to the Insurgents who had laid waste to her home, she'd even begun regulating her emotions on those same principles. She had become a machine for carrying out a task.

She now turned that machine to the task at hand.

The only doctor who had survived the purge was Billie Forsythe, who was able to provide relief to the wounded only after they subjected her to a painful course of amnestics that wiped the past few months from her memory. It was a risk, and odds were she'd endured permanent brain damage from it, but did that really matter? None of these people would even exist soon. They only needed that existence to be a little more comfortable while Nascimbeni and Ibanez worked to erase their reality.

There wasn't much they could get done with just the two of them, plus the others to help with heavy lifting. The others weren't really very good at heavy lifting, except for Wettle, who was a problematic helper because he always dropped anything over a certain weight on his feet. The steel toes in his boots were getting dangerously close to his actual toes from the repeated impacts. Even McInnis pitched in, and the two engineers did their best to rearrange the components and circuitry and most important of all, the pipes, with a little help from Udo's micamancy when they needed more force than their bodies could provide.

A final run through the whole system with the red dust suggested that everything was as close to settled as it could be by early September, so McInnis made the decision they'd all been waiting for.

They would make no attempt to contact the Foundation again.

If this world persisted past the eighth of September, it would be a world with no Site-43. Its few remaining residents would live out what remained of their lives in a black, twice-compromised pit underground.

That possibility had been clearly outlined in all the recruitment materials. It was just that nobody had ever believed it would happen to them.

And certainly not here.

8 September

It was good not to have to test their backup systems. None of them had articulated it out loud at the time, since there hadn't seemed a point, but each had held their own suspicions that it wouldn't have been enough. The ghosts were on autopilot, to be sure, but they were still to a certain extent responding to external stimuli.

It felt particularly ghoulish going through the motions this year, however.

As McInnis answered the redline, he mused that Ambrogi's shout of "Hyperbolic!" in response to the Breach was itself a case of hyperbole, compared to the disasters which had preceded it.

As Harry sent Wirth to his doom, his guilt over all the previous repetitions seemed quaint in light of the recent body count.

As Ibanez gave her orders, the sense of futility was stronger than ever.

As Wettle hit the floor, and the footfalls struck him, the enormity of it all came in a solid third place for the most unwelcome impact.

As Nascimbeni resealed five fates in a few hectic minutes, he was keenly aware that the dead already far outnumbered the living.

As Lillian sealed the bulkheads and watched her mentor tumble into the failing refinery, for the very first time she realized he was already dead to her before the carpet of roiling fluid consumed him.

As Udo reached the hall, she didn't know whether seeing Dougall Deering alive or dead would have comforted her more.

As they all filed into the dorm room, settling into their respective places, none of them dared to ask the question on all of their minds.

Had it been enough?

Those Who Can't

The Breach Goes On: Deadlined

Wonders of My Hand