Next to Nothing - SCP Foundation

Next to Nothing

2011

9 September

Timeline 5243-C

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

He'd been expecting something to happen, of course, or to discover that something had already happened which everyone but he and the other Survivors thought was normal, or had long since come to terms with. He had not expected this, and when confronted with it, was not sure precisely how to react. It didn't matter, however, because the other two people in the elevator reacted so strongly that they couldn't have noticed how taken aback he was.

Pensak made an inarticulate shout of surprise, and O stepped away from the sudden precipice so hard that she collided with the back of the elevator, and yelped. Both of them drew their weapons, as they were trained to do when confronted with the unknown, and there was something almost touchingly naïve about that. About drawing down on a featureless void.

The world beyond the elevator doors simply was not.

McInnis turned to O. "Your radio, please?"

The woman blinked slowly at him, then picked the mic off her lapel and put her thumb over the transmit button. "Who? Who should I call? And what…"

He shook his head. "We're not calling anyone. Please detach your radio, and hand it to me. Just yours," he added as her eyes widened in fear. "I need something with a cable attached, you understand. That's all."

Realization dawned, and she nodded. In her moment of blind terror, she'd probably thought he meant to garrote her to keep the secret silent.

A swift, efficient motion, and the deactivated device was in his hand. He played out the curly cable a little, spun it up, and spooled the radio out into the dark a ways. It passed into the space which did not appear to be a space at all, with no apparent ill effects. The lights from the elevator illuminated nothing but the interior and the plastic of the radio and cord, the darkness intruded no farther into the car than its edge, existence and nonexistence stood side by side in perfect harmony. He realized suddenly that if this had not been the case, if the relationship had been more akin to matter and antimatter…

…that their respiration, and the particulates from the elevator's air cycling, and their dead skin cells whisked out by the opening doors would already have annihilated everything that still remained. No, his instincts to test the waters had been correct. He handed O's radio back to her, then turned to include Pensak in their little council. The wiry agent looked like a deer about to bolt. "Do either of you have any spare change?"

Pensak grunted. "Never, actually."

O shook her head, staring out into the black, mouth in the shape of her surname.

McInnis fished in his pockets, finding nothing there but a sparse scatter of lint. Apparently he'd dressed in a hurry this morning. He gathered up as much as he could, perversely pleased that only in this doomed alternate timeline would anyone know he had ever carried lint in his pockets, and tossed it out into the ether.

It rained softly down, down, down, past the edge of the elevator floor and out of sight.

"At least there's gravity," O breathed. Then added: "Somehow."

He resisted the urge to lean out, and instead pressed the button which closed the doors. For whatever reason, knowing that nothing was out there made it more claustrophobic inside. He turned to them again. "You are not to leave my side until I dismiss you. You will not discuss what we just saw with anyone. I will inform the senior staff, and we will determine what's going on, and what to do about it. I may need your help, and I will absolutely require your cooperation. Are we understood?"

O nodded immediately. Pensak seemed to wait a fraction of a second, until he saw that she was nodding, and followed suit. No worse than he'd expected. "Good. Agent Pensak, could you please radio the Chief of Identity and Technocryptography for me? Her private channel."

Pensak thumbed his mic without removing it from his lapel. He kept eye contact with McInnis as he spoke. "PTF Omega-43 to I&T Actual." Pensak was using the callsign of the Director's personal escort, only a provisionary taskforce because the Director only needed an escort when he left the Site. Or rather, that was how it usually went; right now he required a security detail to protect their little secret, from his own people. It was good that he didn't have time to consider the morality of that problem.

"Veiksaar," came the response from Pensak's radio.

McInnis took a deep breath. "Lockdown, Chief."

A pause. Veiksaar didn't question the order. She never did. "Safe emergency stop complete. System was riderless, sir." She was referring to the Inter-Sectional Subway System, all trains now securely e-braked in their tunnels.

"Very good."

"All exits sealed, aaaand extra-facility communications fully dark. We're secure."

"Excellent." Nothing much surprised Veiksaar anymore. "The topside elevator will be stopping at the third sublevel in a few moments. When the doors have closed and the internal sensors show no-one remains inside, I require the car locked with Level 5 clearance. Understood?"

"Good to go, and monitoring."

"Thank you."

McInnis nodded at Pensak. "Chief Ibanez now, please."

The agent called it in. "S&C Actual," Ibanez replied immediately. Probably she'd been listening in. Furthermore, McInnis knew her tones well enough by now to say that there was already something on her mind. Well, that was fine. They'd be reconvening with a vengeance soon.

Pensak thumbed the mic again so the Director could respond, which he did. "Chief. All access to the topside elevator, helipad, subway and AAF-A are now locked down. Please station guards at all egress points; no-one is to leave Site-43 until further notice. Once this is assured, meet me at the foyer."

"Roger."

"I'm here," Pensak replied, button still down. There was no response. He smiled wryly as he released his grip. "Anyone else you want me to call, sir?"

"Chief Van Rompay."

O was practically hyperventilating by now. Pensak's chest was heaving. His voice nearly broke as he made the call. "PTF Omega-43 to P&S Actual."

The Chief of Pursuit and Suppression growled over the speaker: "If this is the Director's escort, I'm already in contact with Ops."

"Pleased to hear it. I assume you're looking out a window, Chief?"

"For what little good it's doing me, yeah."

McInnis closed his eyes. O began to shake. Pensak looked like he wanted to break something. The problem wasn't restricted to Camp Ipperwash, then; Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-A, where the Mobile Task Forces mustered aboveground, was over a kilometre away. "I presume you and yours are now working to reinforce the lockdown."

"Of course."

"Continue to do so until I order otherwise, and make no effort to investigate this new phenomenon. No personnel are to exit AAF-A by any means. Am I clear?"

"Crystal."

"Outstanding."

And the old soldier clicked off his mic.

Pensak raised an eyebrow, and McInnis shook his head. No, there was no-one left to inform. Not on the emergency channels. "We'll be meeting Chief Ibanez downstairs, then heading to Operations Control. Thank you in advance for your professionalism. We'll sort this out as soon as possible."

O looked pensive, which was hardly a surprise. "Do you think it's something OSAT is doing? Some sort of screen, or… I don't know. A pocket dimensional prison…?

Pensak scoffed. "More likely they tried something stupid that blew them up and blew us out into space."

"Speculation won't get us anywhere," McInnis reminded them gently. "Programmatic and precise response to anomalous phenomena is what we do here. It just doesn't often strike so close to home."

"Not for almost ten years," O agreed.

He found himself envying her.

Ibanez pulled him aside when they reached the foyer, and told him what she'd seen. He had nodded gravely at her confirmation that the timeline had definitely splintered; it was, technically, not something he'd yet seen proof of. He kept what he had seen private, though he ordered her to discreetly locate the others and bring them to his quarters.

"Your quarters?"

"My quarters."

She shrugged, and headed off. He walked the short distance back to Admin and Oversight, juggling options in his head the whole way. By the time he was back in Operations Control, he knew what he had to do.

"Nim," he said, and the All-Sections Chief glanced up from the console he was leaning over. "You've been informed?"

The other man nodded. If he was curious, he kept it off his face. "Chief Van Rompay got in touch immediately, and Chiefs Ibanez and Veiksaar called your orders in after executing them, per protocol. None of it's left this room. Am I qualified to know what's wrong with our systems, or what happened topside with Couch?"

"You are. I'll be heading to the Director's Complex, ah, directly. I'd appreciate it if you'd join me." He scanned the room for the flash of blonde that was Elstrom's stitch-knit topknot, and found her peering at him openly in precisely the manner the ASC had not. "Dr. Elstrom, in Chief Mitchum's absence I would appreciate your taking over here until we return. We are experiencing an emergent situation, but if we keep it under wraps, I believe it can be resolved without serious difficulty. Could you please issue a public address attributing the lockdown to a credible threat? Chief Ibanez will be able to suggest a likely culprit on her secure channel."

Elstrom nodded, blue eyes half-lidded. More resigned than intrigued.

"Very well. There will be a general debriefing soon. In the meantime, please maintain radio silence and ensure all personnel remain within the facility."

No-one questioned him, at least not openly. Pensak and Elstrom both looked like they wanted to.

You'll know when I know, he thought as the four of them headed back out into the hall. Probably.

When they reached the Director's Complex, most of Sampi-5243 was already there. He saw Wettle's blue labcoat disappearing into the reception room, heard Harry and Udo conversing in clipped tones within, saw Ibanez at the end of the hall, no doubt scoping for snoopers. Lillian was standing in front of the open door, one hand on Nascimbeni's chest.

"It's not that I don't trust you," she said, "it's that none of us trust you."

"Get real," he snarled. "Whatever's going on, it affects all of us."

"Yeah," Ibanez agreed as she approached the door, one hand on her holstered service weapon. "Whatever you caused, it affects all of us. We'll come back out to thank you for it once we know the details."

McInnis placed a hand on Nascimbeni's shoulder, and faced the two stone-faced women with a smile. "You may take my word for this," he said. "We are all in this one together. Please, everyone, assemble inside."

Ibanez looked like she wanted to argue the point, but McInnis began steering Nascimbeni through the door, and she bedgrudgingly moved aside. She was the last one to enter, looking at O and Pensak with particularly palpable uncertainty. Almost nobody outside of the senior staff ever got through even this first layer of the Director's private security.

Once inside, he led them past the comfortable chairs and his secretary's desk through to the private meeting room which represented the limin between his professional and private retreats. This was easily a two-layer problem, at the very least. He gestured to the motley group to take seats where they could find them; there were a number of couches, recliners, and tables with chairs scattered about in a way which suggested a very expensively casual decorating philosophy. The ASC immediately located his favourite chair, and the others stumbled into a random arrangement which would serve well enough for what had to be conveyed.

"Wow," said Harry. "Can't believe we were meeting in a dorm room before."

"Who's 'we'?" Pensak snapped.

McInnis raised a hand. "Get settled, everyone, and I will provide clarity. We need to reach our conclusions swiftly and efficiently. We face an existential threat, or perhaps an existential failure, and I am going to need to make a statement on its nature within the next few hours."

That shut all of them up. Even Wettle appeared to be paying attention, though that could have just been an accident of the direction his chair was facing in.

"The topside elevator," McInnis told them, "presently opens on an open void. Facility AAF-A is enshrouded in the same. It is my belief that Site-43 now represents the full extent of baseline reality. Site-43 and baseline reality, I reiterate, are at present coterminous."

There was a moment of silence, appropriately, before Nascimbeni cried out: "What?!"

"Everything's gone," said Pensak. He sounded calmer than his words would have suggested he should be. "Completely gone."

"Gone gone," O clarified, in intent if not execution.

"How?" Harry and Nascimbeni blurted simultaneously. Udo looked shell-shocked, and Lillian's eyes had narrowed to points. Wettle was looking back and forth between them all, perhaps judging whether or not he should panic. Ibanez had a look on her face that McInnis recognized from Pensak's, back in the elevator. The All-Sections Chief, by contrast, merely seemed momentarily crestfallen. It flashed across his features too swiftly for anyone else to notice, consumed as they were with their own astonished disbelief, and in the blink of an eye it was gone.

"I don't know," McInnis admitted. "I don't even know if that's what's actually going on. But we're going to need to conduct a thorough search of the facility to determine where the boundaries lie between us and the exterior void, and if nothing beside remains," a strange look flashed over Harry's face at the reference, "then this will need to be swiftly followed by a complete audit and inventory."

"I thought you said we could fix this quickly and… whatever." Pensak's hands were both balled in anger.

"I did say that," McInnis agreed. "And given the scale of the issue, assuming I've identified it correctly, I think my timeline is entirely reasonable. We should be able to revert whatever damage has been done in the scope of a single year."

Allan dismissed them to prepare for a Chairs and Chiefs (and Guests, Harry added mentally) meeting in the main boardroom. Del left first, with her agents in tow, and the rest of them quickly paired off. Lillian resumed her abuse of Nascimbeni as though they hadn't just been told that the entire topside world had vanished in the interim, the Director and his deputy remained behind — presumably so Allan could explain what would actually happen next September, and why he was so confident it would correct the present problem — and Wettle wandered off with his shell shock for company. That left Udo with Harry, leaving Harry with the need to be alone.

If topside was gone, Grand Bend was gone. If Grand Bend was gone—

Delicate hands grasped his shoulders, and spun him around as he walked. He looked down into Udo's simmering eyes, and then she reached up and pulled a hair out of his beard.

"Ow!" he shouted. He'd never known people actually shouted things like "Ow!" before that moment. "What the fuck?!"

She lifted her prize up to his eye level. The hair was bright grey, translucent, like a snippet of fibre optic wire. "You've got grey hairs."

He shoved roughly off, eyes watering. "Thanks for noticing. That's not your problem anymore."

Her jaw pushed forward a few centimetres, and she advanced again. "You didn't have grey hairs on your face back in baseline."

"And Noè didn't have so many," he pointed. The chief tech's slate beard, wagging as he gave far worse than he got in his argument with the raging memeticist, was attenuating to charcoal. "And Lillian…"

He frowned. Lillian's jaw snapped shut, and she looked away from her prey with narrowed eyes. "What about me?"

He walked over, reached up, and gently brushed a single streak of white hair so that it fell in front of her face. Her eyes crossed as she stared at it, transfixed.

"We're older here," said Udo. "What kind of sense does that make?"

"Who knows." Harry walked past, letting the long-gone cats send him off in a random direction. "But don't touch my face again."

Chairs and Chiefs Debriefing

9 September 2011

Presiding:

McInnis, Director Allan J. (Site-43)

Present, Voting:

All-Sections Chief

Blank, Dr. Harold R. (Archives and Revision, Chair)

Bremmel, Dr. Trevor (Arms and Equipment, Chief)

Du, Dr. Xinyi (Quantum Supermechanics, Chair)

Ibanez, Delfina M. (Security and Containment, Chief)

Elstrom, Dr. Karen T. (Administration and Oversight, Acting Chief)

Laiken, Dr. Stacey (Applied Occultism, Chief)

LeClair, Dr. Emilié (Health and Pathology, Chair)

Lillihammer, Dr. Lillian S. (Memetics and Countermemetics, Acting Chair)

Mataxas, Dr. Anastasios (Research and Experimentation, Chair)

Nascimbeni, Noè (Janitorial and Maintenance, Chief)

Nass, Dr. Michael D. (Theology and Teleology, Chair)

Ngo, Dr. Nhung T. (Psychology and Parapsychology, Deputy Chair)

Styles, Gennady (Hiring and Regulation, Chief)

Veiksaar, Dr. Eileen K. (Information and Technocryptography, Chief)

Telepresent, Voting:

Van Rompay, Gedeon (Pursuit and Suppression, Chief)

Present, Non-Voting:

O, Ji (Security and Containment, Agent)

Okorie, Dr. Udo A. (Applied Occultism, Researcher)

Pensak, Roger (Security and Containment, Agent)

Wettle, Dr. William W. (Research and Experimentation, Deputy Chair in Replication Studies)

It wasn't the perfect meeting makeup, but it was close. He would have liked to have included Ilse Reynders, but they still didn't have the systems in place to give her meaningful telepresence, and at any rate she wasn't the Chair or Chief of anything. Neither, of course, were several of the members of his Provisional Taskforce, and McInnis couldn't use said membership as an excuse for inviting them, since in this reality the task had never been set, and the force never assembled. He was forced instead to employ Directorial prerogative to justify the inclusions, and that set several of his executives on edge before he even had the chance to make an opening statement.

As before, however, the statement he had to make functioned somewhat as a reset button. Nothing which had happened before seemed to matter as the import of his words settled over the crowded boardroom.

Du was the first to speak. "It wasn't me." Speaking caused him apparent pain, and he reached up to massage his temples.

LeClair put a supportive hand on his shoulder. "Dr. Du has been cleared, medically, memetically, and psychologically." Ngo and Lillihammer both nodded, the latter with the faintest of smirks. "He is himself."

"Back up," said Bremmel. It was nearly a shout. "You're saying you think someone erased the world outside the Site?" His glassy eyes were uncharacteristically wide. "Everything? Everything outside is gone?"

"That remains to be seen," McInnis murmured. "Part of our response will need to be—"

"And you think he had something to do with it?" Bremmel stood up, pointing at Du with one stubby, shaking finger. "Was it that god-damn Frankenputer, Du? Is that what caused this?!"

Styles tried to ease the portly engineer back into his seat, but he threw the taller man off with a violent shrug. He just stood there, shaking, eyes glassing over further with tears. Nascimbeni was staring at him, mouth agape with horror. Harry was staring at the table. Wettle was staring at the ceiling, and for a change, this seemed to mean something.

"It… might have been," Du allowed. "I don't see how, but it might have been. There was someone… there was something in my head. Something that wasn't me." He bit his lip, suppressing an inappropriate quirk; he was an avid fan of Pink Floyd, and the irony must have just hit him.

"He was possessed," Lillian explained. "By the ghost of Reuben Wirth."

There was a sudden burst of static from the table speaker, and half the room jumped in their seats. "Sorry," said Van Rompay. "Hectic in here. Bumped my mic."

"Ghost, you say?" Anastasios Mataxas was the Site's foremost expert on ghosts, had spent years begging and cajoling his peers into funding a ghost-hunting Section for the Site without success. "The ghost of Reuben Wirth. I wasn't aware we'd declared him dead."

"Dr. Bremmel," the ASC said quietly. "Please, sit down."

Bremmel sat down so hard that his chair made a loud exhalation of protest.

Ibanez tossed a report on the table. "Officially," she said, "Wirth is only missing." McInnis admired her for having had the presence of mind to check the database; she could only have known about the altercation at the DUAL Core for a few minutes before the meeting had begun. "As part of an ongoing investigation I can't talk about right now, we have reason to think he remains at large. And he's very, very dangerous. There's a risk of psychic possession throughout the Site right now."

"Which is why Chief Nascimbeni's techs are already installing telekill dampeners, repurposed from the server hall sheath, and we've moved all personnel to muster stations near them." Ngo scratched her cheek with the clip of her clipboard.

"But they can't stay there long," LeClair added. "We still don't fully understand the health risks of that stuff."

"There was a paper just last month, Em," Mataxas reminded her. She nodded, uncertainly.

The ASC slid neatly back into the conversation. "At any rate, it's a necessary precaution right now. Having voiced concerns about certain temporal discrepancies occurring throughout the facility, Dr. Du has been performing tests with the DUAL Core. Attempting to ensure that the boundaries of reality are sitting where they ought."

"What kind of discrepancies?" Lillian asked. Nobody seemed surprised that she didn't know. Lillian often failed to notice things that were happening to other people.

"Wonky Hume readings around my lab," Bremmel muttered.

"Inexplicable perforations in the inter-level membranes," Veiksaar continued.

"And lost time," Mataxas concluded. "So either we were the subjects of alien abduction events — all thousand-odd of us down here — or there was something ontokinetically awkward going on. Dr. Du tasked the DUAL Core with testing a simulated baseline model of the Site's occult parameters against what actually existed on the ground, and applying spot treatments with Scranton Reality Anchors to bring us back up, or down, to code. That process was completed prior to the disappearance event, as you describe it, sir."

"That's what you meant." Ibanez directed this at the All-Sections Chief. "That's what 'Welcome back to baseline' means."

The ASC nodded. "That's right. You'll have to forgive me the flourish."

A deadly silence descended. The Chief had worked to ameliorate it, but Ibanez had made a bad gaffe in asking that question in front of the others. By the furious look on her face, McInnis knew she knew.

"We've all been worked very hard of late," he smoothly intervened. "Perhaps we're learning that specificity and precision might be substituted for poetic licence, from this point onward. For clearer communication. With respect, Nim."

"Absolutely," the ASC agreed.

"This has been a very efficient emergency rollout," Styles remarked. "We were prepared for something like this to happen?" As one of the few members of senior staff with only basic academic qualifications, the head of HR often resented being out of the loop in conversations like this.

"We were prepared for an attack of some variety," the ASC responded. "Coordination between the Sections has been conducted phenomenally well, however, you're right. Everyone in this room has responded with excellent alacrity."

It would have been considerably more difficult for McInnis to hug his giant deputy than the frail, birdlike form of Ilse Reynders, but the way the man covered for each of them so naturally made him momentarily willing to try it. He wouldn't have traded his staff for any other in the Foundation. Which was today an even luckier thing than it normally was.

"What's this I hear about it being a Serpent's Hand attack?" Van Rompay demanded.

"We've used the Chaos Insurgency excuse too many times," Ibanez answered. "It doesn't mean anything right now anyway. We don't know who did this, or if it was even intentional."

"What's the rest of our response look like?" Elstrom asked. She had taken Mitchum's place at the table. Mitchum had been visiting relatives in Toronto; wherever those relatives were, he was probably still with them now.

Several faces turned to face McInnis at once, the ones he'd expected to do so, and he gestured at the first one first. Eileen Veiksaar nodded. "I've got control of every network in the facility right now, and I'm running diagnostics. I should be able to tell you the precise extent of the Site's systems within the next few minutes." She glanced down at her tablet, and nodded again in confirmation of her own words. "When that's done, my staff—"

"Please," McInnis interjected. "Keep this as confidential as possible. Don't involve anyone with overlapping skill sets. Skeleton crews only until I make my announcement."

She grimaced. "And you promise that announcement will be soon?"

"That's my intention," he answered by way of not precisely answering. She didn't look wholly satisfied. She had plenty of reasons not to.

McInnis gestured at Stacey Laiken, who alone among the senior staff seemed totally unfazed by their apocalyptic predicament. "We'll conduct distance readings and séances," she chirped, "to determine whether other sophonts still exist beyond the bounds of the Site and subway." The fact that the subway still existed still startled McInnis. It suggested that Site-43 had been selected, lock, stock and barrel, for complete and perfect translation into this negative space… or that everything but Site-43 had been excised from reality with semantically surgical precision.

"I will assist," Mataxas told her. It wasn't a question, and she smiled in easy acceptance.

"Chief Nascimbeni?" McInnis prodded.

The old tech hadn't turned to look at him, and he didn't do so now. When he spoke, his tone was grave and strained. "We'll do a structural review. Confirm stability. And when the inventories are done…" He glanced at Styles, whose realm wasn't only HR, but also supply management. Styles nodded. "…when that's done, I'll see what we need, but don't have, and try and build it with the manufactories." He glanced down at his hand, wriggling the clenched fingers to no appreciable rhythm. "And figure out where our air's coming from. Where our water will."

"Dr. Du?"

"I'm already writing up the experiments in my head. And if we can get the DUAL Core cleared for use—"

"That's my first stop, after the diagnostics come in," Veiksaar interrupted.

"—we can run some new sims, maybe get us closer to the truth a whole lot faster."

"Dr. Bremmel?"

"What?" Bremmel snapped.

McInnis smiled at him. He intended it as a warning. By the way the man's furry brows closed together, he knew the message had been received. "Dr. Bremmel, you will coordinate with Drs. Du and Mataxas and their people as we conduct experiments into the nature of our new… neighbourhood."

The older man nodded miserably.

"Neighbourhood," Blank muttered.

"What's that, Harry?" McInnis pressed.

"How many billion people?"

The brooding archivist made no effort to clarify or streamline his question, just left it lying ragged on the table for all of them to consider. Like a dead dog in the road. A dead world. Billions and billions of obliterated lives.

"We don't know if that's what happened," McInnis reminded him. "And we won't, until we get to work." He straightened, and adjusted the cuffs of his dress shirt to indicate that the meeting was wrapping up. "The remainder of you will receive instructions before the end of the day, primarily in one of two veins: securing sustainability for our operations under this awkward situation, and further determining its nature and cause. Please work quickly, but take the time to get some rest tonight — Dr. LeClair will provide anesthetics as they are needed, to facilitate this. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, as I will need to present some manner of explanation to the rest of our personnel by mid-afternoon at the latest. Hopefully we'll have something worthwhile to tell them by then."

"What should the rest of us do?" Pensak asked. He and the other three 'guests' were sitting at a table in the back corner of the room, watching the proceedings in respectful silence. If any of them were to test their rights in this rarefied space, it was always going to be him.

Michael Nass, who also hadn't spoken the entire time, turned to look at him with haunted eyes. "Pray on it?" he suggested. "Failing that, as the man said, sleep on it."

There was one variable Lillian needed a value for before she'd be able to sleep. Wirth would be a long-term problem, unless she could coax him into her brain for another brush with a kill agent, in which case he could be dealt with at any time, and it wasn't yet urgent. He'd still be smarting from the smack she'd given Du, anyway. Records showed the three security agents were already dead, which bore further investigation, but that was an Ibanez-shaped problem, and Lillian's problems were taller, leaner, and perhaps even meaner, so she focused on them instead. When everyone but their little cabal had vacated the boardroom — several of them staring with undisguised jealousy at this previously-unsuspected inner council — she had volunteered to be the one to nail down those particular moving pieces. Both Ibanez and Wettle protested, but McInnis agreed. "If they're in a hostile mood," he said, "I think Dr. Lillihammer might be the only one capable of neutralizing them."

Ibanez begrudgingly agreed with this assessment. Wettle mumbled something into his beard, and nobody asked him to repeat himself.

Lillian swiped her tablet on, and pulled up the incomplete framework of Eileen's Site AI. A few quick commands, and CLIOMETRIA.EXE supplied an answer that was only half unexpected: a Dr. Alis Lane was waiting for the all-clear at the Arms and Equipment mustering point. It took just a few minutes to make her way there, and no time at all to spot the women in the blue engineer's labcoat with the bright green hair.

Lillian yanked her out of a conversation with a few of Bremmel's assistants, who looked universally relieved to be without the presence of their boss for the time it took him to wander back from the meet, and dragged her around the nearest corner. "Hey," Alis protested. "We're not supposed to leave the muster points!"

"You'll be fine." Lillian tossed her into the nearest office, not bothering to check who it belonged to, and stalked in after her. "And so will I. We're immune."

"Immune to what?" Alis appeared genuinely baffled. It might even have been genuine.

Lillian closed the door, gently, then shoved the other woman into the nearest wall. "Dr. Lane, is it? As in 'memory lane'? You try too hard. I know you need to try too hard, or people forget you even exist, but still. I'd be so much better at being you than you are. You are lousy at being you. I have seen you fall in love with William fucking Wettle three fucking times, Alis. Your terrible taste in names and men are two of the only constants that hold across multiple universes." Alis made to widen her mouth to match her eyes, and Lillian pressed her knuckles to the lips. "I'm talking. You're listening. I know who you are. I know why you're here. I know about the geistschreiber, I know about the cult you belonged to, I know what you're after and what you'll do to get it. I have half a dozen ways of rendering you a rendered slab of meat instead of a thinking, feeling human being, and I have the authority to get off Scot-free for doing so. Instead, I am asking for your help. Do you want to help me, given that alternative?"

Alis said, through the space between Lillian's fingers, "Yes."

"Then tell me where the other three are, and do not presume to ask me what that means."

The other woman's chest heaved with a tremendous sigh, and then she pulled herself away from Lillian along the wall. "The twins are in H&P. Oscar is topside, sending a report back."

"Aww. My condolences." Lillian yanked the door open again, and made an impatient gesture for Alis to follow. "Hospital trip, you and me. Pronto."

"What did you mean about being immune?" Alis demanded as they headed for the umbilical hall to the Admin section. They'd be entering H&P from the rear; better that her targets not see her coming.

"The mind-stealing maniac." She nodded at the crowd assembled by the northern muster point; several of the researchers stared at them, and one even pointed. Lillian pointed back. "The ghost in our shells. Only like I said, not ours-ours. Because I'm unpossessable, to the great and lasting loss of all our local lonely hearts, and you are in cahoots, toots."

The geistschreiber looked less confident about what was happening with every word out of Lillian's mouth. A solid proportion of them had intentionally been discursive chaff. They passed through the foyer of A&O in silence; Karen Elstrom met Lillian's eyes as they swung past Operations Control on their way through the back end offices, a question blazing in blue behind her black-framed glasses. Lillian had no answer for her.

After that, it was just a quick skip through the northwest security station before they emerged into Health and Pathology. Lillian prodded the rival memeticist-cum-engineer to the fore, and followed her to the doctors' and nurses' mustering point in the north wards lounge. Forsythe was there, and her obnoxious goth daughter too. The latter was sulking in a corner, as she did, but her mother looked like she wanted to know what was going on. Forsythe had worked here long enough to know that any information coming from Lillian that Lillian hadn't offered up of her own volition was likely to come with barbs on, however, so she didn't press.

It was the work of an instant to locate Lillian's next quarry, or whatever the plural of quarry might be: two tall, thin women with matching blonde locks and matching white and blue uniforms, leaning on either side of a water cooler and conversing in low tones. Probably some horseshit twin language, she thought as she stalked up to them.

The first Imogen Tarrow — it was probably neither of their names, but it was the only name she had in association with them — didn't see her coming, but she definitely felt the long, thin fingers seize her by the hair and pull. The other got enough of a head start to recoil in confusion at their approach, and Lillian used the momentum to shove her into the adjoining washroom before tossing her sister in after her.

She glanced back at Alis, and gestured at the gently swinging door. "Go on," she snapped. "We can swap smokes, and talk about boys."

When the other woman hesitated, Lillian grabbed her by the neckline and chucked her in, too.

H_Blank

Are you there?

SYSTEM

Message could not be delivered.

H_Blank

Melissa?

SYSTEM

Message could not be delivered.

H_Blank

I'm going to keep trying.

SYSTEM

Message could not be delivered.

H_Blank

I hope you're out there somewhere.

SYSTEM

Message could not be delivered.

H_Blank

I'm sorry.

H_Blank

Melissa?!

SYSTEM

Message could not be delivered.

SYSTEM

Message could not be delivered.

In the absence of anything like a sun or a moon above, Site-43 nevertheless slept. Only the day shifts, of course, but most of the Sections didn't schedule any other. Guards still patrolled their routes or watched their monitors, technicians still roamed the halls or combed the code in search of broken things or bugs, and with the chance to make real headway for the first time in a generation, the sluggish abatement facilities still chugged their glowing gunk, and their minders minded them through the night that only fell symbolically.

One by one the Sampis and their allies retired to their bunks for a few stolen hours of rest, 'til only one was left to ponder imponderables. She would still be hard at work when the others greeted the so-called dawn, as she always was and perhaps always would be.

"I'm sorry," Ilse Reynders told the ghost of Allan McInnis as she hands-free perused the papers the real one had affixed to her window. "I really need to take a look at this. I'll get back to you when…"

But of course, he wasn't really there.

She was still glad of the company. It was lonely going, staying lucid in dreamtime.

1998

Everything that wasn't there yet was beautiful.

Sure, the framework was hideous and the gantries wholly practical. There wasn't an ounce of art in any of it. It was all exposed steel, rivets and capacitors and coils. It looked like the scene of a climactic battle in a science fiction thriller. But where the device would go, the outline of a thing which could encompass every possibility the universe had every itself encompassed… looking up at that emptiness, Xinyi Du knew that negative space could approach the status of art.

"Complete to specs," Nascimbeni announced. He was holding a tablet in front of him, waiting for a signature. They stood on the threshold of the final, critical step of this first perilous stretch. Xinyi smiled, and reached for the pad.

His father appeared as if from nowhere, snatching the tablet out of Nascimbeni's hand and waving it at the old technician as though it were a fan. "Restrictive! We talked about this, did we not? Those supports are too restrictive. It will take more power to turn, now. That will leave less for the simulations. You have compromised the project."

Nascimbeni chewed his inner cheek for a moment before responding. "Qiang, we did talk about this. The way you wanted the thing built, it would shake itself apart without constant maintenance. You saw the spatial constraints. It's going to be a bitch to look after this thing when it's done. You won't let us spin it down for repairs, so that leaves me—"

"Bah!" The elder Du clawed at the tablet. "Here's your damn signature. Now get the hell out."

To Xinyi's surprise, Nascimbeni smiled. "Always a pleasure doing business with you."

Qiang scowled for a moment longer, and then as it always did, the cloud dissipated without a trace. He clapped Nascimbeni on his vinyl back, and together they looked up through the complex socket into which they would one day plug the DUAL Core. "Do you know, Noè? I can almost picture it now."

Xinyi walked behind Nascimbeni to stand beside his father. "It's going to be amazing."

Qiang smirked. "Only amazing? Child, it is going to be incomprehensible. It will take decades to begin to understand the things it tells us. And once we understand, it will put you out of a job."

As ever, it was difficult to articulate a response to what the other man was saying. Xinyi tried anyway. "Only me? Not you?"

The scowl threatened to return, but Nascimbeni's laugh swept it away. "He's learning to kick back, Qi. Watch your ass."

"I don't need child-rearing advice from you," the Chair of Quantum Supermechanics snapped bitterly.

Xinyi wanted to say something to make the seconds that followed less awkward, to reclaim the abortive sense of camaraderie, but if anything would have done the trick, he couldn't think of it in time. The Chief's cheeks hollowed out, and his lower lip crumpled under his upper, and he nodded. "Suit yourself, then. When you've got something worth installing, you know my number."

And he walked away.

"You ruined the moment," Xinyi told his father. "Why do you always have to ruin the moment?"

Qiang snorted, and gestured up at their absent creation. "You still don't understand. After all I've tried to teach you. That," and he stabbed a finger in the empty air, "will let you make every moment precisely what you want it to be. That, is where the future is. Keep your head up, child. Keep your focus high. And before it replaces you, you might get the chance to see the world as it does."

"Will," Xinyi muttered. "Will do. It hasn't arrived yet."

"Then what am I doing, still standing here?" Qiang asked, almost thinking aloud more than responding, and he stalked out after Nascimbeni.

She stood in the desert.

The sands were not warm, but cool. That didn't matter, because she was warm. Udo could feel a blazing heat within her breast, within her eyes, within her soul, and it radiated out to the sparkling expanse of silica which surrounded her. She knew that with a single gesture she could sink into those cool sands and draw them up around her, that the warmth from within would fuse them together, that she could become the desert and in so doing cause the desert to become more. She knew that some day she would do this thing. It was as inevitable as the rising of the moons in the sky.

A stirring of wind against her naked skin, her hair recoiling away in auburn streamers. She turned her head to look, and what she saw was a rising storm on the far horizon.

She was being watched. The air was expectant. Somewhere in the darkening cloud, something stirred.

A bird cried out in shrill protest, then thunder.

It was coming.

2001

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

He was about to ask her to give it to him straight when she said: "I can't do anything more. I'm sorry."

Emilié LeClair had fantastic bedside manner. She was a kind, considerate, empathetic physician despite decades of work at the SCP Foundation, the world's most efficient machine for grinding down goodwill. Perhaps it was that empathy, that insight into the characters of her patients and their loved ones, which had told her how best to break the news to him.

Or perhaps she was simply tired. She always seemed to be tired, these days.

Gedeon Van Rompay looked down at his wife. She was on her back in a hospital bed, blue and white sheets tucked under her chin, eyes closed, breathing shallow but regular. She looked peaceful. He felt like a followup question was indicated, like he ought to protest this casual cutting-off of Diana Van Rompay's life story branches, leaving only the dead leader, but he didn't have it in him. He was tired, too, and if a medical doctor and Section Chair at Site-43 told you there was nothing she could do, then there was quite simply nothing to be done.

Just a day before, Diana had been digging in their garden in Grand Bend. She'd been planting a bed of azaleas. So far as he knew, she'd never gardened before. So far as he knew, she hated bright and garish colours, and that was the only kind of colour azaleas came in. He hadn't asked her why she'd done this, and now he never could.

"Okay," he said finally. He met LeClair's gaze. "What happens next?"

The doctor's deep blue eyes were wells of sympathy now; not empathy, because she'd never experienced anything like this before herself, but instead a generous fellow-feeling. "We can keep her here as long as necessary," she said simply.

Van Rompay had panicked when he found Diana on the kitchen floor, trowel in hand, jeans filthy with soil, drooling onto the asbestos tiles he'd never gotten around to replacing. They're safe as long as the glazing doesn't crack. I can put it off for another year. This isn't relevant. You're spiralling. He'd called his agents at 43 instead of a local hospital, both out of habit and the knowledge that there was no major medical facility within Grand Bend. He'd driven his wife to the clandestine facility himself, carried her down the topside elevator and placed her on a waiting gurney. He'd pulled and abused his rank, and as of yet there had been no obvious consequences. It was only now dawning on him that he'd ensured his wife would die one kilometre underground.

Buried alive, then buried dead.

"As long as necessary," he repeated. "So, until the end?"

"That's right." LeClair didn't tell him there were no other options, this time. He took it as read.

"Can you spare a private room?" he asked, on autopilot. Running through the checklist.

"Isn't this…" LeClair blinked, then raised her hand halfway to her head as though seriously considering slapping her forehead. "Right." She glanced at the drawn curtain beside them as though seeing it for the first time. "She won't need much in the way of palliative care, and frankly it won't be very long anyway. She's only in the ward because we thought we might need to work quickly."

"I'm really sorry," said a male voice from beyond the curtain. Van Rompay had no idea who it belonged to, and didn't care.

He sighed. "Alright. Let's get her settled. Then I need to have a talk with my people."

To his surprise, the doctor reached out to take his shoulder in one spindly-fingered hand. "Are you going to be okay? Do you have some place to stay tonight?"

He laughed. It had none of his usual boisterous bluster. "I have an embarassment of places to stay, Emilié. An empty dorm, a full barracks, and an empty house."

The fingers tightened their grip. "What I mean is, do you have anyone to look in on you? You shouldn't be alone."

This, he felt, was out of line. Off-script. She knew him well enough, everyone at Site-43 did, to know that he could weather any storm on his own. There was something more than concern in her sleepy eyes, now.

He opened his mouth to tell her yes, he'd be fine, and instead he found himself telling her "No."

She squeezed his shoulder. "Stay in your dorm tonight. I'll come by after my shift."

He found himself nodding. He found himself rising from the chair. He found himself taking her fingers in his, and awkwardly shaking her hand before releasing it. He found himself walking for the door, away from the only thing in his life that had ever been strictly personal, and on his way out of the wardroom he saw the fresh-faced and freckled researcher in the next bed with his leg up in a cast.

"Hey," the kid said weakly. "I'm really, really sorry. I hope it turns out okay."

2007

Grand Cove: Grand Bend, Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"You got her all excited for nothing."

Nascimbeni grunted. "I said I'd think about it. That was supposed to mean 'no'."

His son took a long draft of beer. He only tipped it back when Nascimbeni said something that irritated him, and he needed the extra seconds to compose a less cutting response. He had drained most of the bottle this way already. "She's twelve years old, dad. Everything that isn't 'no' means 'yes'."

They were sitting on the back patio of Gallo's bungalow in Grand Bend, watching his granddaughter chase her Labrador retriever in circles on the grass. It was an open question which animal would tire first. Right now it looked like they could romp forever.

"I don't see what the big deal is." Gallo was practically sighing every sentence. "It's a water treatment plant. Other kids are getting factory tours. One of her friends' father works at a meat packing place, and he's not being squeamish. Why should you?"

Nascimbeni had been pulling on the bottle whenever Gallo said something he didn't want to respond to. This had already emptied it entirely. "It just isn't safe."

Gallo tapped the glass table with the bottom of his bottle. "Explain that. Explain how it isn't safe where you work."

"It just isn't. Okay? Trust me on this."

In the yard, Flora screamed. Nascimbeni started, and leaned toward her protectively, but she was only razzling the dog. Gallo hadn't so much as flinched; as her father, he knew the difference between a scream of joy and a scream of fear or pain.

No, that wasn't entirely it. It wasn't just because he was her father. It was because he had actually been here every day for the past twelve years.

"I don't get you." Gallo tapped the glass again to regain his father's attention. "What's had you so on edge?"

"Nothing." Nascimbeni tipped the bottle back once more, just in case. Just for something to do. It was dry as a bone. "Look. I'll see what I can figure out, okay? Maybe there's something.'

Gallo smiled. "No you won't."

"I will!"

"I remember that tone. You sounded just like that when you told me Romo couldn't stay over on Christmas Eve."

Nascimbeni froze.

Gallo frowned. "Christ, is that it? Tell me that's not it."

Nascimbeni set down his bottle, and wiped the condensation off on his jeans.

"He slipped in the shower, dad. It wasn't your fault. It's not related."

Nascimbeni stood up. "I should get going."

"Can I tell her you reconsidered?"

A force he couldn't control sent him stumbling against the table, and as the bottle fell to shatter against the paving stones that he and Gallo and Romolo Ambrogi had set on a sunny summer day not so long ago and not so different from this one, he shouted at his son: "No means no!"

2009

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"No, that's alright," Karen simpered. "I can wait for you to finish this year's report. Right now I want to talk to you about Philip Deering."

The psychologist's face fell further. "Philip Deering."

"I have concerns about his containment procedures."

In the modern era, most structures are planned from first principles. Their forms follow their projected functions. But if they last long enough, they are almost always adapted to suit the specific needs of those little bundles of action and aspiration they are built to contain: their human users. Site-43 is no different.

Janitorial and Maintenance Technician Second Class Philip Deering has had a small but immediately recognizable effect on the contents of Site-43. Unbeknownst to the man himself, he is SCP-5056-B in the Foundation's database. 5056-A is a mirror monster that follows him around relentlessly, which only he can hear. The containment procedures for this joint anomaly are simple: Deering is not to leave Site-43. As he's never showed any initiative to do so on his own, what this looks like in practice is bureaucratic obstruction to make scheduling a vacation seem like too much of a hassle, and workplace propitiation to make transfering careers seem less enticing. His physical containment apparatus is cheaper than most, but omnipresent: a massive program of mirror-mounting throughout the Site to ensure that -A always has somewhere safe to manifest — because it flips its lid with an ear-splitting shriek when it doesn't — which has essentially neutralized the problem.

One man's needs, or rather the necessities of handling one man's personal peculiarities, can have a cascade effect on everyone sharing his space. The staff of Site-43 now see their own faces far more often every working day than do their counterparts at comparable facilities. Luckily, for the most part, they're also much more capable of facing those reflections without shame.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

"What kind of concerns?"

Karen plucked a piece of paper from inside her tight orange vest, unfolded it, and handed it over. It was handwritten, and judging by the look on her face, Ngo recognized the script.

Hello Dr. Elstrom,

You don't know me, but my name is Philip Deering. I was wondering if you

I would like it very much if you

Do you think that you and I

Karen felt her nostrils twitch as Ngo read the simple note. When the psychologist looked up at her, questions in her eyes, Karen said: "He's getting lazier all the time, don't you think? Didn't even bother to cross each line out."

Ngo was obviously confused. "Did he give this to you? It's obviously not finished."

"Yes," Karen agreed, adding as much patronizing sneer into her tone as she felt propriety allowed, "it is obviously not finished. But the point is, he might have finished it. He was going to ask me on a date, Dr. Ngo. With a note."

Ngo's mouth worked back and forth for a few seconds as she considered her next words. "I assume Security and Containment found this while sweeping his quarters."

"Of course. He's a permanent security risk. If we need to step up containment efforts, make them more overt, we need to know that as soon as possible."

"So, what do you want me to do about it? It feels more like an HR issue than anything psychological."

Karen tented her fingers on the other woman's desk. "I want you to comb your other psych profiles, and find another rock for this limpet to cling to. There's enough garbage piled on me already."

Forrestall's Lagoon: Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, Ontario, Canada

Harry stood on the beach, and stared.

Their sailboat bobbed on the water, not that there was very much current in the sheltered inlet. He was far enough up the rocky beach that the bizarrely flat deck was flush with the horizon; he smiled to think how many people had pointed and stared at the little S2 with its washboard profile, though that wasn't much compensation for how often he and his parents banged their skulls on the shortened ceiling. "Watch your head" was the most common thing they said to each other on their Great Lake vacations, typically as ironic commentary on yet another brutal bump.

The water was clear, crystal clear, little more than a coat of gloss on the bowl of Canadian Shield in which they were anchored. He followed the anchor chain down, down, down into the depths, to where it nestled in the forecastle of the massive sunken ship, and shivered in the warm sunlight.

It sat upright on the basin floor, masts intact, rigging still in place. He was no good at judging distance, but it had to be a hundred feet below the surface of the water; the crow's nest was safely beneath the level of the S2's stubby keel, though not by much. Seeing the squat boat rocking gently in waters little more refractive than air above the unmanageably vast galleon — was it a galleon? What made the distinction? — filled him with nauseous vertigo. At every instant it felt that gravity must reassert itself, and the lesser fall into the greater, and be lost.

He walked to the water's edge and peered at the quivering apparition below. The water tinted it faintly blue, like a ghost ship, but he could make out every detail. Bowsprit and figurehead, decks fore and aft, stem to stern he searched the vessel for some clue as to how it might possibly exist. The ship's height and his distance from it made it seem as though it were leaning away, and he squinted to see how solidly its belly rested against the rock, as though in so doing he might discover a fatal flaw, and… what? Do what? He couldn't dive down and stabilize the thing, even had it not been so massive, because he couldn't dive at all. He could only barely swim. He'd never even had the courage to put his head below water and open his eyes, and he certainly wouldn't try it with the Weight looming up from below him.

All that drowned space. What might be floating within it, rotting, rocking in that sunken cradle? Who did it all belong to? Who was responsible?

Beside him, she whispered, "I am," but he felt his own lips forming the words.

1994

████████-██, Village of Zevala, Argentina

Fina ran her fingers over the sleek black sheathe, then experimentally inserted her arm into it. The fit wasn't snug, as she'd known it wouldn't be, but if the manuals she'd been consulting were correct, that wouldn't matter. She grasped the cuff, and twisted; with an almost subaudible hiss, the sheathe conformed to the shape of the muscles in her arm. She flexed, and tested the blood flow to her fingers. The material moved like nothing she'd ever worn before.

She nodded, and left the rest of the suit lying there on the table. For now.

The halls of ████████-██ were stark and windowless, nothing so much as a corkboard to break up the tiled monotony, and not for the first time she found herself missing the cozy, porous shack she'd grown up in. The way it swelled and settled in tune with the temperature, the way it whistled in the wind and moaned with the moving of the earth, the way it smelled. The way the air tasted. In here, it tasted like metal… though probably she should have been glad there was any air at all, considering how long this place had been abandoned.

And how long is that, precisely?

She didn't know. There were voluminous records left lying around, and she'd consulted them over and over across the long ████ she'd already spent living in this spartan space. She had chosen to tackle the problem methodically, much as she'd done while dismantling the Insurgency's hold on her ravaged village; she had always loved puzzles, in her past life, and that approach suited the scene well. An access card here would open a door there, a computer behind that door would unlock a hidden partition somewhere else, and behind that partition she might find a ring of keys, or a cache of documents, or in the case of the locker room she'd just accessed after █ ████ of trying, something she could actually use to settle the situation outside.

Not that it was getting any worse, or more urgent, in her absence. ██ ██████ ███ ████ ███ ████, they'd be waiting for her just the same.

Still. The rarefied air made her sinuses sore, and her feet ached from the lack of give on the hard ceramic floors, and she found herself desperately longing for the sensation of sunlight on her skin. She had been raised on the beach, in the bay, on the hills and in the forests. That was where she had lived all her life, and while so much of her had also died there, that which remained…

She gummed her teeth meaninglessly. For the first few ████ she'd tried to sing, to comfort herself, but the words wouldn't come. Humming had worked no better. She had apparently reached the end of music. More than █ ████ of attempting to talk to herself had been similarly fruitless. Still the words wouldn't come. It felt somehow disrespectful to the dead. Revenants weren't meant to speak. They were meant to avenge.

She reached her final scrounging target for the day. It had taken ███████ █????? █████ to find the Level 4 access key that would open this vault. The schematics she'd found elsewhere suggested it housed some abandoned and forgotten research project, but her time in ceramic hell had taught her that things were rarely as they seemed where the █████████ ████ ██ ██████████ ██████ was concerned. She swiped her card through the reader, took a deep breath, and pressed the big green button.

In another █████, though she could not yet have imagined it, she would be standing on ███████ ██████.

2009

Site-169: Glassford Hill, Yavapai County, Arizona, United States of America

Vincent Bohart was like a pile of laundry. Clean or dirty, it didn't matter.

Probably dirty.

Wettle had always hated putting his laundry back in the dresser, or into the machine. He'd set himself the mental task of hauling it all from the basket and stuffing it in where it went — in the case of his dresser, he had enough wrinkles on his person and his character that wrinkles on his clothes didn't matter — and no matter what, he'd drop something.

Everything worked that way for him. Positively, negatively everything. If he tried not to knock over his drinking glass, knock it over he would. If he tried not to say the wrong thing…

Focus. Vincent Bohart was like that. Like an armful of dirty laundry that was bound and determined to land on your clean new shoes. Or a fly that made it its personal mission in life to land on your eyeball. If you tried to avoid him, he'd zero in like a cruise missile without even seeming to target you intentionally.

"Bilbo!" he crowed, putting an arm around Wettle's shoulders. "How's my favourite…" He let the adjective hang, modifying nothing.

"Vince."

"Some spread, huh?"

Wettle shrugged. The Foundation used Site-169 for social functions, which had always struck him as out of character with its overall shadow government vibe, and he avoided as many invitations to attend as he could. There was an actual hard limit to that; more than one department was dedicated to tracking each employee's progress towards the final crack, and forestalling it as long as possible, so here he was by their polite but firm 'request'. At a mixer, of all things.

Bohart had certainly been mixing, judging by the state of his breath. "You know, Bilbo," he burped conspiratorially, "lotta folks been asking about you since you left. Like whatsisface. And whatsername. And the ugly one."

Wettle nodded.

"What the hell've you been up to, man?!"

He could have said anything. Bohart wouldn't remember in the morning. He said nothing instead.

"Listen." The balding old mooch pulled a deck of cards out of nowhere, and brandished them at Wettle. "These little beauties. You know what we're gonna do with these, you and me? There's a Level 4 poker game in the habs right now, and we're gonna crash it. You know what those other Directors get paid?" He blinked, and a look of almost genuine hurt flashed across his unfocused eyes. "Do you? I don't. But it's a lot. Now, you're my ticket in. I've got just the job for a man of your talents. Remember those chips you used to steal? Same principle. Now, in poker, they use these little plastic discs called—"

"I've been saving the world," Wettle snapped. "There's a magic explosion that happens every year, where I work, and I make sure it happens. That's what I've been up to."

Bohart's brow furrowed. He returned the cards to the uncertain whence from which they'd come. He withdrew his arm from Wettle's shoulder, like footage of Phil Silvers run in reverse. "Magic explosion. Where you work."

"Yes."

"Every year."

"That's right."

Bohart shook his head sorrowfully. "Jesus Christ, you're still just a fuckup?"

1970

The Rambles: Herefordshire, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom

When the lines are in a muddle – as they very often are –

When the break’s a mile away from you, or maybe twice as far,

When you have to sort the trouble out, and fix it on the run,

It’s fine to know that you can go, when everything is done,

To a cosy little dug-out (and the subject of this ode)

Just a comfy little bivvy on the – Road,

A sheltered, sandbagged doorway with the flap flung open wide,

And a pal to grin a greeting when you step inside.

"What purpose is this em dash serving?" Allan asked his father.

"Which?" Malcolm McInnis leaned over the book to see where his son was pointing. "Oh. That's an en-dash, actually."

"Helpful," Allan sighed.

His father didn't seem to hear him, locked into lecture preparation mode. "Well, there's two possibilities. Sometimes in the late Victorian era and a little while after, they'd do that with proper nouns for some reason. Just sort of cross them out. That's one possibility. Of course, it's also a war poem, so the name of the road might have been stricken by the censors. Army security. And you can't discount the possibility that he just never came up with a name he liked, and forgot to finish the line. Either way, it doesn't matter."

"Mm." Allan twiched his nose. "It does break the scansion, though."

He could hear his father rolling his eyes. "That's not the sort of detail I'd like you to focus on, Allan."

When the weather’s simply damnable – cold sleet and driving rain –

When the poles snap off like matches and the lines are down again,

And you rip your freezing fingers as you work the stubborn wire,

It’s great to get back home again, and dry off by the fire.

In a cheery little dug-out (and you know the kind I mean)

With a red-hot stove a-roaring, and a floor that’s none too clean,

A pipe that’s filled and waiting and a book that will not wait,

And a cup of steaming coffee if you come back late.

"What would you like me to focus on, father?"

Malcolm sat down at the polished oak table and tapped the poetry book for emphasis. "Tell me what mood he's going for."

"Cozy."

"Yes. But in contrast. Contrast with what?"

"War. He is making the unique and percipient observation that war is unpleasant."

Malcolm's nose twitched, too. Allan made a mental note to lose the affectation. "Keep reading."

It may look a little crowded, and the roof’s a trifle low,

But it’s water-tight – or nearly – and it wasn’t built for show,

And when Woolly Bears are crumping and the shrapnel sprays around,

You feel a whole lot safer if you’re underneath the ground

In a rat-proof, rain-proof dug-out (and it’s splinter-proof as well)

Where we got the stuff to build it is a thing I mustn’t tell,

But we’ve made it strong and solid, and we’re cosy, rain or shine,

In our happy little dug-out on the firing line.

Allan closed the book. "So, solidarity."

"Correct."

"Forbearance."

"Also correct."

"The comforts of home as a salve against troubles without."

"Precisely."

Allan considered. "This regards my applications."

He had applied to a wide swathe of Europe's colleges and universities, in the secret hope against hope that England's best wouldn't want him. No such luck, of course; he'd been courted by Oxford and Cambridge both almost immediately, and King's, and London, and Manchester. Helsinki, Copenhagen, Utrecht and the rest flooded in after, and though he'd tried to intercept that mail before it reached his parents, no such luck. His father's response had been typically McInnis: he'd entered the library of their spacious manor home, and didn't come out until he'd located this precise volume, and presented it to his son for perusing and commentary.

"Is the point well-taken?"

Allan considered further. "Helsinki is cold?"

Malcolm sighed. "Allan, the perspective in that poem was hard-won. Some people have to go through great hardship to discover the value of home. Some don't have to, because they can learn from the mistakes of others. War is almost always a mistake. Leaving your people behind is almost always a mistake."

"Mm." Allan popped the book back open to the correct page. His fingers just had the knack. "This says it was written by Edgar McInnis. Relative?"

"Distant."

"In which sense?"

"Both. A distant relative on distant shores. I believe he teaches university in Canada, now."

"Ah. One of those."

A cloud came over his father's face at the oblique reference, and his body language closed off. "Is this going someplace?"

"A Canadian's words instruct me on the value of English hearth and home, presumably learned in… France, I would imagine? Travel truly does broaden the mind."

Malcolm picked up the book, and stood. "You're determined to be stubborn, then."

"I understand those to be synonyms."

"Well, I only hope you remember 'Our Dug-Out' when you're cold and alone, wherever you end up."

"I think I shall," he nodded. "I heartily agree that there's much to be said for warmth, shelter, and wholesome good company."

1999

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"Come in, technician."

McInnis could have left the last word off, and she would never have known if he knew his ten o'clock from his eleven. Or ten thirty, or ten fifteen; she wasn't really clear how much of his schedule she'd laid claim to when his secretary pencilled her in. He'd appended her title so she'd know he knew, and she appreciated that.

Perhaps he knew that too. Maybe he was feeling agreeable. Maybe they could come to an agreement.

Maybe stop thinking, start walking, and start talking.

Eileen entered the Director's office. McInnis was sitting at what she still thought of as Scout's desk, hands clasped, friendly smile in place as always. He gestured with his forehead at the visitor's chair. "Please."

She tried to cross the empty space with alacrity, but there was rather a lot of it, and her legs weren't very long. The void left McInnis and his tiny scatter of furniture the room's focal point, which made him look strangely small — he wasn't very tall, but he looked positively elfin from a distance, sat behind that monstrous credenza. She found this inexplicably calming; inexplicable until she realized it gave him a superficial resemblance to his predecessor. Scout had shrunk quite a lot in the last few years of his Directorship. Perhaps this, too, was a sign.

She sat down.

"What can I help you with today, Dr. Veiksaar?"

Not just in general, but today specifically. He might help with something else tomorrow, if she needed it. She was overthinking in her panic, but his degree was in communications, after all. He was undoubtedly overthinking his own words too. She only hoped she had chosen hers just as carefully, rehearsed as they would be. "Sir, I have a moral concern about DR-RHETORIC."

He nodded. No surprise, and the smile didn't falter. "I see. Please, go on."

DR-RHETORIC was an expensive, complicated lie. Site-43 claimed to be developing a predictive machine with superhuman intelligence, capable of answering all manner of scientific queries, particularly in regards to the sticky field of acroamatic abatement. Eileen and her fellow technicians had spent years developing AI algorithms and self-repairing circuitry, enough to plausibly support such an electronic agent, but much of it was only a blind. All the DR-RHETORIC program really did was filter out the more problematic noise issuing from its central processing unit: reality bender Wynn Rydderech, very much a living, breathing human being, driven slowly mad by his own immeasurable powers in an endless underground factory of his own design. Her team had fed fibre optic cables down through the Site's ventral membranes, and set up their dishonest human-to-human interface, and published their lies to a smattering of polite applause. The system worked. Dr. Rydderech was contributing again to what Scout had called the Good Work, whether he really understood it or not.

"I've been going through the noise reports." DR-RHETORIC parsed out anything personal or inscrutable that Rydderech attempted to communicate, and wrote it to a junk file for review and deletion. To keep up the illusion. To allow his abusers to abuse him in innocence. You should be saying this out loud. Instead, she said: "He's becoming more erratic. I believe he's in pain, sir."

McInnis nodded again. The placidly welcoming expression hadn't changed. "Do you judge DR-RHETORIC's efficacy as a project has been negatively affected by these developments?"

It was so precise, so measured, that she almost wondered if he'd rehearsed his response without first having heard her complaints. But he had always been honest with her so far, at least so far as he'd been able, given their respective positions and clearance, so she owed him the truth. This was, after all, at least partially about what was true. "No, sir. Efficiency continues to rise. It's possible… I've heard it suggested by the analysts," those few who were cleared to know where all this data was really coming from, "that he produces more data, and better, in a state of agitation. But…" She spread her hands hopelessly. He had to meet her halfway, or there was no point in making this entreaty.

"But you don't believe torturing a mentally ill old man is justified by the value his ramblings bring our organization."

She exhaled. She hadn't realized it, but she'd stopped breathing for a moment. "That's right, sir."

Once more, he nodded. "So noted. What else is troubling you this morning, Eileen?"

He hadn't called her Eileen before. He'd parcelled her identifiers out, one at a time — technician, Dr. Veiksaar, Eileen — demonstrating mastery of the subject, humanizing the interaction by degrees, and pacing the conversation at the same time. But he hadn't actually resolved that conversation's topic, had he? "I… well, I mean…"

He placed both hands on the desk blotter, palms up. It was a very Scout thing to do. "You may rest assured that your moral indignation will be taken into account. There are considerations in this matter to which you are not privy, but I promise that my commitment to Dr. Rydderech's well-being is unflagging. If there is anything else I might help you with today, by all means let me know."

She swallowed. Again her body had been hard at work without her knowledge; a lump she hadn't felt before jogged up and down as the gulp passed through. "No, sir," she breathed hoarsely. Lamely. "That's all, sir."

He clasped his hands again. "Thank you. You're doing excellent work, technician. Chief Briggs is very pleased."

She nodded. She stood. She glanced down at the desk blotter, then with some effort, up at him. "Excellent work, sir?"

"That's right."

"But is it good work? Sir?"

She thought she saw a flash of something in his grey eyes, just then, but it might have been her still-hopeful imagination. She'd imagined a lot of things about Allan McInnis, thought she'd seen quite a lot in him, and apparently she had been mistaken.

He still looked like Scout as she exited the office and looked back, gently shutting the door between them. But in her mind's eye, try though she might, all she could see was Rudolph Marroquin.

There were gears grinding in the distance, and the sound of padding footsteps, and black-slit yellow eyes watching from every corner.

Rydderech hardly seemed to notice. "Seven things, for you are one of seven. I can tell you only one today, and this, I do regret." He smiled with a sadness so pure and profound, aged to expressive perfection, that even in the dream of the memory she felt tears welling up in her own eyes. "That is the key, the theme, the central node of this network of cascading failures. The child of memory and the mother of shame."

"What?" she said. "What is?"

"We are breaking the laws of the universe, Lillian," he scolded her. "The least you can do is pay closer attention."

She woke up.

2011

9 September

They were quite a throng now, Nascimbeni thought. McInnis had everyone not on the taskforce but implicated in the crisis camping out in his secretary's workroom and personal quarters — Zulfikar had endured the ignominy with faux good grace, and retired to a single room down the hall — which were now filled with bedrolls and bug-out bags. Until the announcement, which would come in a few short hours, they didn't want to lose sight of anyone whose knowledge stretched farther than their trustworthiness.

Pensak and O were told to keep an eye on the three geistschreiber, which allowed for the maintenance of the polite fiction that the two agents weren't themselves awkwardly overinformed. Ibanez made a point of keeping out of their hair; if she'd taken a strong interest, that would have rung hollow. It wasn't safe for anyone to feel ill-used until after the cat was well out of the bag.

Nobody saw where the ASC was sleeping. Probably there were extra bedrooms tucked away in the deeper reaches of the Director's Complex; it had once been the Directors' Complex, after all.

"I've got a lead," Lillian was saying. "Don't ask what it is yet, in case it doesn't pan out."

"Why would that preclude you from telling us?" Udo asked.

Lillian glanced at Harry, who would normally explain his friend's eccentricities to the group with a dose of wry sarcasm. But he wasn't on speaking terms with Udo anymore, so he glanced back at her and shrugged defiantly. "Because," Lillian sighed, "I hate being wrong. So let it be."

"I've read Veiksaar's report," Nascimbeni grumbled, "and compiled my own. Long story short, we seem to be sustainable for the moment. All systems are getting enough of what they need, be that air, water, or electricity. The power's coming from the geothermal vents, which are still intact so far as we can see; no idea how far down the bedrock goes. The water supply's always been overstocked for AcroAbate purposes, and like the vents, the wells are still active too. As for the air, I don't really understand it, but there seems to be no shortage. The empty space around the Site is packed with breathable oxygen-nitrogen." He rattled it all off like it was nothing, because to his mind, it was. He'd cried himself to sleep, and woke up feeling empty on a cold, dry pillow.

"Just about everybody in AAF-A knows the world fucked off out there," Del said. "But Gedeon's got them under control. We'll pipe in the announcement when you make it, Allan, but I'd like to send some extra guards through the subway just in case it gets ugly over there."

"Assuming the subway is still breathable," McInnis mused, "I think I'd rather we ferried them back here for the address. We should face this crisis a single, united body."

She shrugged assent.

"Nothing in the archives yet to explain what happened." Harry's voice was low and lazy enough that he could have been talking in his sleep. He didn't make eye contact with anyone.

"I don't know what's going on either," Wettle added unnecessarily.

"Dr. Okorie?" McInnis prompted.

By the sound of her voice, she'd been crying too. The glasses hid most of the damage. "Distance readings pick up no human beings past the boundaries of the Site. Séances only function for people who died down here." She wrinkled her nose. "I'd like to try contacting the spirits of people who died in baseline, but not this timeline. I didn't explain it that precisely, of course, but Mataxas is game."

"I'm sure he is," the Director smiled.

"We've lost thirty-four personnel topside," the ASC began as soon as McInnis turned to face him. Always in tune, those two. "Including Chief Mitchum, the camp patrols, and of course the Nexus-94 reserves."

They let that sit for a moment, respectfully. The big man had just described the potential annihilation of all the people he'd worked for years to safeguard. His face was unreadable; it probably helped that McInnis had briefed him on the nature of the alternate timelines, but it could only help so much.

Nascimbeni knew that for a fact.

He remembered a few things he hadn't already said, but needed to, and interjected when the moment had passed. "Exterior survey is underway, techs and guards and drones. So far, it seems pretty clear that the Site and its environs have been deliberately preserved."

"Or modelled," said Du, "and replicated." His temples were now a brilliant shade of violet.

"Our friends in the back room claim not to know anything." Lillian suddenly grinned. "I agree with that assessment. But I'll be grilling them anyway, and just about everyone else besides. Harry can keep digging in his old files, but I'm going to produce a few new ones."

"How many?" McInnis asked her.

"You said we've lost thirty-four people, Chief?" The ASC nodded. "Then roughly one thousand, minus thirty-four."

The auditorium was packed. McInnis looked out from the central stage at his people, nearly all of them, shifting his stance and pacing the little square of carpet to grace each compass point in turn with attention and affection. He'd discarded the podium, and his hands were in his pockets. It wasn't a conversation, and they weren't all equals, but he wanted them to know that they were all affected equally just the same.

The furor had risen and fallen like a summer storm. A few shocked exclamations, a sudden smattering of bewildered coughs and cries, a torrent of confused shouting, a roar of voices like wind in the treetops, then finally the gradual fall of a stunned silence. He waited patiently for the last mutterings to die away before resuming his address.

"I have stated this plainly, without elaboration, so that you might understand the gravity of what we do next. Every act performed in this facility for the next twelve months can potentially contribute to the restoration of the human race, if indeed we are its final representatives, or at least our restoration to the fold, wherever they or we may presently roam. It might also contribute to our permanent stranding out here in the black, a testament to our own lack of planning and discipline, or conversely the very extinction of our species should we fail to rise to the occasion. One thousand men and women may be sufficient to produce a stable human population, but I for one would rather prefer not to chance it."

He could see, amongst the anguished faces looking down at him from every direction, faint glimmers of hope and humour. Some at least could glimpse the edges of the jokes he'd sanded down to an almost homeopathic vestige. Others could see that their leader was unafraid, unbroken, and as effortlessly loquacious as ever, and draw strength from his apparently unflagging supply.

"I am not at liberty to disclose the results of our initial investigations, nor will I likely be informing you when those investigations conclude. You may never know precisely what placed us in this predicament. What you will know, as you have known it before, is the warm embrace of our wayward friends, family and neighbours. For I pledge to you now that should you carry out your duties, as ordered, as you would have done without question had nothing changed between this day and the last, that the status quo as you knew it will assert itself once more. We shall be reunited, every and all, by our own sweat and toil within the confines of this, our home."

"To restore the light, my friends, we must for a time reside in the dark. Hold fast to each other, and trust in yourselves, as I have always trusted in you."

"Dismissed."

Pensak was still serving in the Director's honour guard during the speech, so he stayed by the stage as the crowd dispersed back to the mustering points. Ibanez waited until the room was mostly clear, just a few of the Chairs and Chiefs holding back to speak with McInnis about whatever they had to report, then rose to the back bleachers and motioned the lanky agent to join her. With the extra elevation in her favour, he noticed quickly and complied with due speed.

"Got something to ask," she began as he headed up the steps between them. He stopped climbing, and they stood nearly at eye level. She made a mental note to talk in here more often.

"So ask." Even in the midst of potentially the greatest tragedy ever to befall their shared species, Pensak was still insolently flippant.

"My deputy was visiting his wife when the curtain came down." Howard Yancy had been the first person not in their little group she'd sought out in both of the previous timelines, and she had named the little ache beneath her ribcage on the left side after him and his disappearance. "I therefore have no deputy. You don't have seniority, but you have got the chops. Want the job?"

For the first time since she'd collected him from subsidized housing in Grand Bend, in an apartment with no air conditioning and only four blades on its five-bladed ceiling fan, she saw what it looked like when he smiled. Not smirked, or grinned, or faked the real thing, but the real thing itself. He was genuinely pleased by the offer. "Damn right I do."

"Good. We're going to my office, and we're going to talk about what martial law looks like."

The smile turned nasty. "Now you're speaking my language."

"We're going to talk about what it looks like, because we need to make sure it doesn't look like that here. These people are going to be freaked the fuck out for the forseeable future. They probably need to be, if we're going to get out of this. But I don't want to have to shoot anybody doesn't need shooting, and that means managing expectations. You get me?"

He inclined his head.

She matched the incline. "Roger. I need to know that you get me."

"Sure. I get you. Gunpowder's a finite commodity, now."

Lillian took a moment to dodge into her office and confirm that it was, in every way that mattered, still her office, then headed back to the Director's Complex to resume her interrogations.

Intarrowgations.

She hadn't anticipated it, but taking a detour and taking the time to snicker into her labcoat at her own terrible joke produced a nevertheless unsurprising outcome: Daniil Sokolsky was standing at the door to McInnis' quarters when she arrived. That he was flanked by Nhung Ngo qualified merely as a detail.

"What's up?" she drawled, as if she didn't know.

"Do you know what I do," Sokolsky asked her, "when I'm listening to a boring speech in the auditorium?"

"Masturbate in your seat?"

Ngo made a face that was twice her age.

"I do a headcount. I see who else is there. I keep track of how many people work in every Section, and I try to pick each one of them out. I don't usually remember the names, since of course I'm not as gifted as the immortal Lillian Lillihammer—"

"I'm not immortal, see?" She pulled the white hair down in front of her face again, to demonstrate. "And I don't memorize people's names. Why would I do that? That's their job."

"—but I'm pretty good with faces, and I'm very good with pattern recognition, and I'm just plain fantastic with facial pattern recognition, and I guess where I'm going with this is: where's the missing engineer, Lillian, and where are those twin blonde doctors, and why have you got them locked up in there?"

She sighed. "Nhung, have you been with him since he left the auditorium?"

The psychologist nodded. "Why?"

Lillian jerked a thumb at her. "She act weird?"

Sokolsky shook his head.

"Okay." She smiled humourlessly at Ngo. "You're clean, then. He'd notice."

"Notice what?"

"If you'd been possessed. And he can't be, so."

"I can't?" Sokolsky's expression was mild as milk.

"Nope."

"How do you know that?"

"Figure it out yourself, if you're so smart. Alright. You grabbed Nhung and you came here, which means you not only know we've got them stashed inside, but you know I'm going in for a chat, and you want in on it. Yeah?"

"Yeah. I brought her so we don't accidentally torture them."

"Good thinking."

Ngo blinked. "Beg pardon?"

"We're probably really good at interrogations." Lillian shifted focus from Sokolsky to Ngo, partially because she was addressing the latter, mostly because the former was clearly mouthing intarrowgations. Oh, she did rather like him. "I mean, scary good. Both of us at once, there's a chance we discover some new form of extreme rendition the GOC needs to ban next year."

"If there is a next year," Sokolsky smirked. "Or a GOC."

"He's already figuring it out. Good for him. What a champ." Lillian patted Ngo on the shoulder. "You're here to make sure we actually learn something from these chicks, instead of just driving them nuts."

"So you're fine with the company?" Sokolsky asked, one eyebrow raised.

"More fine than I'd be with not knowing where you are, and what you're doing there."

They'd had a long-standing agreement, the Survivors, on who could always be trusted to know the nature of their temporary reality. Prominent in that list were members of personnel who could be counted on to figure it out themselves eventually; this included Ngo for her psychoanalysis, Sokolsky for his overanalysis. Since it was likely to become germane, Lillian quickly briefed the two of them before the interrogation started.

Sokolsky didn't seem surprised, but he did seem excited, which was probably a bad thing.

Ngo, however, visibly realized something the moment the explanation was out, and laughed. "That," she said, "explains why I had a dream last night about a thing that never happened."

It did not, in fact, explain that, and Lillian would be pondering the meaning of the dreams for a good long while yet.

Veiksaar shook her head. "I really don't get it."

"Neither do I." Du tore off the manual printout, and compared it to what was on his screen. "This doesn't make any sense."

"What doesn't?" Nascimbeni was sitting at one of the monitoring consoles in the DUAL Core control room, watching the two of them work. He was a hardware man, and he still thought of 'software' as his television producer brother-in-law's industry term for re-runs.

"I don't remember doing any of this." Du waved the printout at him. "But the raws and the programs match. In addition to the baseline checks, I've been running unreported sims. Lots of unreported sims."

"Lots of lots of unreported sims." Veiksaar closed the panel she'd been peering into, and shut off her penlight. "I'd say you went through three component generations doing this." She walked to a supply cupboard along the back wall, and pulled it open. "Mm. Four. I guess you wiped the sockets between replacements at least once."

This, Nascimbeni more or less understood. "He wore out the moving parts? They're rated for what, a year's workload each?"

"A year's hard workload," Du corrected. "And as far as I remember, we weren't working it that hard. One big sim takes a lot less load than a lot of smaller ones, because of code duplication. The logs say the Core has been running non-stop since last month. I'm amazed nobody came to check on the power draw."

Veiksaar knelt beneath one of the control consoles, turned her light on again, and stuck it in her mouth. "Ouat's dah tranthfer meeder thay, Dini?"

Du leaned around the Core's apex to check a dial just above his eye level. "Ten megawatts."

"At westh?!"

"At rest."

"Ouat dah thuck."

"I concur. Anything interesting down there?"

"Durn it oth."

"You're sure?"

"Durn it oth right now." She was rolling back out, the light in her hand again. She switched it off. "The wires are bleeding."

Du sat down at the master console and abused the keyboard rapid-fire. The ambient hum in the room died down to the level of the circulating fans, and beneath them, the rotating central processing unit slowed its relentless churn. "It's off."

"What are the wires bleeding?" Nascimbeni stood up. "Were you looking at the fluidics, or the coolant flow, or—"

"The power lines, Noè. They were bleeding actual blood."

"He must have tied it into the orphic outflow." Du whistled. "Son of a bitch, that worked? That worked. I guess we owe him one for testing it out."

Nascimbeni knew that Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-D's orphic outflow conduits produced an electric charge due to friction between the oriykalkos lamination and the ectoplasm within. But that was bled off in paraspectral conduits, because unlike normal power sources, orphic outflow had a tendency to haunt whatever it was plugged into. "Are you telling me Wirth was running extra simulations on ghost juice?"

Du nodded. "Lillian did say he was a ghost. So I guess that's apropos."

"That's got to be it, then." Nascimbeni pulled off his baseball cap and scratched at his sweaty scalp; whatever was meant to be keeping the Core cool hadn't been doing its job. He wondered if the fans had been transformed into bat wings, or were sporting human teeth now. "That's what he did. He used the Core to imprint a new reality over the old one."

Both of them snorted at once. "What makes you think it can do that?" Du snapped.

"That's ridiculous," Veiksaar agreed. "You can run more sims with more power, but the CPU would bottleneck you well before you reached ontokinetic potentiality. And it's still just a computer."

"The best computer ever made," Du corrected her with narrowed eyes, "but yes, I mostly agree."

Nascimbeni had been remembering the anomalously duplicated DUAL Core, from what Lillian had started calling the "QUAD Core Incident," back in baseline reality. The orphic connection had been key there, too. Obviously the two situations weren't perfect analogues, and certainly he was playing inside pool. But that was easy enough to brush past, because "I'm not a computer guy. So sue me. Though if the Core didn't remake reality, what the hell was he doing with it?"

Du shrugged. "Practice?"

"So, a semigod then."

Ibanez stared at her. So did Michael Nass. The office of the Chair of T&T was full of effigies and haloed portraits gazing down on them beneficently, or else glaring in condemnation of whatever impure thoughts might presently rule their minds. Brenda Corbin's casual heresy would do nicely.

"Semigod," Nass repeated.

Corbin rolled an empty tube of rolling paper between her fingers. "New one on both of you? Mike, I'm shocked."

"I've heard of demigods," said Ibanez.

"How about hemigods?"

"Brenda," Nass sighed. "I don't see how this is helping."

The wiry little theologian sat forward in her chair, and tapped the butt of the empty cigarette against her forehead. "It matters how we think about these things. You know that. We need to make sure we use the right words, build the right frameworks. The things we describe might actually be responsive to those descriptions. You've read the ASC's paper."

"Yes, but that relates to indigenous myth figures. We have no reason to imagine it's relevant here."

Ibanez raised a hand to interrupt what was starting to sound like an old argument resumed after an interval, rather than starting for the first time in her presence. "Could one of you fill me in?"

Nass's eyes rolled back a little as he tried to recall the details. "He postulated that indigenous cultures might still, even after colonialism, be coherent enough in comparison to colonial ones to keep the connection to their deities intact. So despite reduced numbers, his people could still see their beliefs reflected in the world around them. They know what they're looking at, so they can actually see it." He met her eyes again, then Corbin's. "But I think his description of European systems is more pertinent. Something like 'Belief can make a god'."

"Humankind," Corbin murmured. "'One human can make a difference. Humankind can make a god'."

"Sure. That. So if we're dealing with the more common type of deity here — assuming it's a deity at all — we might literally be able to wish it out of existence, rather than trying to make our descriptions align with what it already is."

"Which is a semigod, apparently," said Ibanez. "Whatever that means."

"I just made it up," Brenda admitted. She winked. "But it seems accurate to your description. Something big got blown up in that breach all those years ago, and bits of it stuck to anyone unlucky enough to be inside. Got into them. Partially deified them. Semigods."

"Sure." Ibanez shrugged. "What's a hemigod?"

"An equal half-god. Split right down the middle. Demi- carries an implication of being less-than."

"If Wirth is a semigod, where do you think the other six parts ended up?"

"Out in the ether?" Corbin squashed her lips flat and widened her eyes in a froglike gesture of not knowing. "Maybe nowhere. The point is, he's not the real deal. He's a microdeity. That's a lot more manageable. If we can suss out his nature more precisely, we should be able to develop a response that works better than telekill and prayer."

"Don't discount prayer," Nass smiled. "Gods need it badly, don't you know."

"We have that in common, right now," Ibanez reminded them.

Apropos of nothing, Corbin winked at her again.

Stacey Laiken was sitting on a vinyl couch, surrounded by binders and tapping on a laptop computer. She often liked to do her paperwork in the common area, because she was a gregarious creature at heart. Udo took a seat nearby, at a right angle, and spent a few seconds rearranging her labcoat, hood, and mass of tangled curls.

"So much for baseline." Laiken set aside her laptop. "What a mess."

"No kidding." Udo yawned. "But at least we're doing something about it. Allan— the Director wants me to run a few tests."

Laiken raised one yellow eyebrow. "No kidding? The ouija boards weren't enough for him, huh. What sort of tests?'

Udo unclipped her reagents pouch and hefted it where Laiken could see. "Gonna take a tour, make sure there's nothing strange in the air. You up to supervising?"

The other woman beamed at her. "Anything for a fellow wyrd sister."

Udo laughed. She reached back to bundle her hair up into a ponytail — Harry called it a mare-tail, since most ponytails weren't three feet long — and then pulled the hood up over her head. "Don't let anybody burn me while I'm out."

"Cross my heart." To Udo's surprise, Laiken reached out and took her left hand. Her skin was very soft.

Udo undid the drawstring, reached into the pouch, and drew herself out grain by grain. Before long she was a constellation of silicon, soaring through conduits of steel and polymer, but somehow she never quite lost track of the sensation of Laiken's fingertips brushing against her palm.

McInnis parcelled out access codes to the other Survivors, and a select few of his administrative staff, for clearance to the topside elevator. "I don't want anyone going up there without one of us present," he'd told Harry. "We know things they don't. We might spot something they won't. And they might see things we don't want becoming general knowledge."

Del had naturally responded: "If they see something they shouldn't, can I push them off?"

McInnis hadn't responded, and she'd never clarified whether she was joking.

Harry was a connoisseur of atmospheric horror. He didn't care for jump scares, he found most gore appalling, but he enjoyed a palpable sense of dread from time to time. That was part of the attraction of marrying archive-diving with paranormal research. Detective work, with the added bonus of a chill down your spine. For that reason he lasted until just after midnight of the second day before abusing his access to the edge of eternity. Bremmel and Nascimbeni had supervised the erection of a gantry where the barracks block had been, rated for the weight of twenty persons and surrounding the elevator exit on all four sides, extending out two metres over the black, and since he couldn't sleep anyway he figured he might as well enjoy a few cheap thrills alone.

When the doors opened, however, he saw that wasn't in the cards.

Karen Elstrom was leaning on the gleaming steel rail, staring out into nothing. She didn't turn to look as he approached, didn't react as the doors slid shut again behind him. Harry took a deep breath; he wasn't sure what he'd expected, the recycled taste of Site-43's artificial supply or the cool autumn breeze that would have prevailed here back in baseline, but the warm and tasteless air of utter nowhere wasn't it.

He looked up, but only for a moment. It was disorienting. He looked down, through the tight lattice grating, at the industrial supports riveted into the sturdy elevator shaft, and shivered. There was only one safe direction, for a given definition, and he finished his approach to it.

Karen did glance at him as he took a station beside her at the rail. Together they looked at nothing, said nothing, did nothing else for several minutes, and then she pulled a package of cigarettes out of her pants pocket, and stared at it instead.

He felt compelled to lecture her. To discourage the activity she already knew she shouldn't engage in. It was no fun, but it was the right thing to do. A moral obligation. Sometimes peer pressure was—

She flipped the packet over the edge. The cellphane wrapper caught on the tip of her finger and tore as the cardboard plunged down, and when it too slipped away it left a spiralling streamer which caught the worklights mounted to the gantry and was still visible for quite some time. Harry leaned over the edge, and saw a thing no living person had ever seen before yesterday: the upper membrane of Site-43's first sublevel, one kilometre down. It was festooned with lights, and some of them were moving. Like a city in the distance, translated from horizontal to vertical.

The Outer Limits, he thought, and he almost chuckled.

There was a faint whoosh of air from the elevator vents behind them, and they both looked up as a cloud of sparkling particles rose up into the emptiness above them, pinprick lights in a cloudless night sky. When he looked back down, she was looking up at him. She took off her glasses, and he watched the false stars dancing in her eyes.

She usually held her head high, and tilted back, so she could look down her nose at people, but she wasn't doing that now. Each held the other's gaze for a long, long moment — he hadn't seen her eyes so wide and warm in years — and then they turned back to the void together. She put her glasses back on.

Some time later, he couldn't be sure how long, she shifted her stance and pressed her thigh against his, using his weight as support. He waited for a while, not looking, in case it was a fluke. When she didn't pull away again, he tentatively reached around her waist and rested his hand against her hip.

It was certainly better than nothing.

Nothing Happens

The Breach Goes On: Deadlined

Nothing to Worry About