Wonders of My Hand - SCP Foundation

Wonders of My Hand

2017

9 September

Timeline 5243-E

They were still sitting in their accustomed places when suddenly, violently, they weren't.

It was the worst transition of all. Each of them fell to the floor, shouting, coughing, retching. It felt like they'd fallen out of a helicopter; Ibanez was an authority on this matter.

When her vision cleared and her stomach stopped trying to empty itself, she took stock of her surroundings. She was the first of them to do so, given her enhanced constitution, and this was just as well, because she knew the space better than any of the others did.

They were in the fourth sublevel containment chamber.

The light was strange. Ordinarily the fluorescents cast a tealish pall over everything, but the tones were more neutral now, as though the light had been strained through a bucket of dirty mop water. Ibanez rolled over, and saw a crack of brightness seeping in above and beneath the cell door. Ordinarily it was flush with the seals, but… she blinked the last of the bleariness away, and confirmed what she'd thought she'd seen. The seals were cracked and weathered away, and the frame had shifted from the door, buckling it in places. A quick scan of the chamber confirmed that the angles of the walls were subtly wrong, and some of the tiles were cracked.

She made it to her feet before the others had finished catching their breath.

"Where are we?" Udo moaned.

"The 001 chamber," said Lillian, and then she froze.

Harry stared at her. "The what."

Ibanez should have waited until they were all ready. It went against her training to forge forward before preparations had been made. But her instincts told her that it didn't matter, so she walked to the door — stepping over Wettle's prone and weeping form — and attempted to push.

It gave.

The grey light was coming from nowhere.

They were nowhere.

Not a blank void, but an endless expanse of cracked grey soil beneath a featureless sky. Ibanez stepped out, and the ground gave way a few inches beneath her boot, and when she turned around, she saw what was left of Site-43.

The chamber they'd arrived in, and nothing more.

They staggered about in the dim light for a time, breathing the sterile air, seeing that the world was apparently composed of little more than light grey sand and dark grey ash. It was Nascimbeni, inspecting the lone and disarticulated chamber on all four sides, who first noticed that they weren't alone.

Behind the chamber, sitting on a lawn chair, was Vivian Scout.

It wasn't Vivian Scout.

The barrel-chested old man was wearing Scout's suit and jacket, and Scout's fedora, but when he tilted his head back they could see that he wasn't wearing Scout's face. The seven of them assembled in a rough row, and faced what they each knew, without knowing why they knew, was their adversary at last in the final flesh. Not a Victim, but the Victimizer.

The Uncontained.

He was certainly uncontained now.

"'We wonder'," he said in a voice like cracking plaster, "'and some hunter may express wonder like ours, when through the wilderness where London stood, holding the wolf in chace, he meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess what powerful but unrecorded race once dwelt in that annihilated place'."

"Shelley," Wettle said immediately.

"Horace Smith," Harry corrected him.

"'The lone and level sands stretch far away'," Del said.

The Uncontained snapped his fingers, and grinned. There was no guile in it. He certainly looked like a jolly sort. "That's Shelley. Very good! I've always loved apocalyptic poetry. At least, the stuff with a little verve and variation to it." He wriggled in his chair, for emphasis.

McInnis turned to take in the full, flat horizon. "You would appear to have… implemented some."

"Minus the variation," said Lillian.

The Uncontained glanced around him, as though seeing their surroundings for the first time. "What, this? Oh, no, I can't take all the credit. I just got the ball rolling, you know? Set the players on the field, blew the whistle when it was all over."

Nascimbeni took a single step forward. "Who are you?"

This won him another blisteringly bright smile. "You don't know? We've met before. Particularly you and I, brother uncle." Nascimbeni took two steps back. "I wasn't at my best, admittedly. I've had a chance to… collect myself, this time around."

Del nodded at Udo. "Just like you figured."

"What?" said Wettle.

Udo's hands were twitching at her sides. A faint breeze teased at the dust beneath their feet. "This… thing, is what started the Breach. The first Breach. And the first Breach killed it, just like it killed Wirth, Del Olmo and the others. And it… became them. Became part of them?" She shook her head. "Parts of it became parts of them?"

Harry realized that unlike Lillian's explanation of the schemes that had nearly destroyed them in the previous deadline, this was no wild speculation. This was recitation from memory.

He frowned.

Or was it possible that Lillian, too, had been reciting?

"They were bound to me," the Uncontained told them. "To my urges. My needs." He tapped his fingers on the plastic arms of his chair. "But it was a fair arrangement, because I gave them the strength to do what was was needed. Or wanted. Or, really, whatever whims came into their little heads." He chuckled. "One tries not to discriminate."

"You're awfully chatty," said McInnis, "for the thing that ended the Earth."

"Us still-extant beings got to stick together, wot wot?" He winked at Harry. "And you needn't worry, Allan, I've forgiven your trespasses against me. I can hardly hold talking me to death against you, given this rather dramatic sequel I've fashioned to our conversation!" He stretched out his arms and raised his palms to the sky, much as Del Olmo had done in the pit. "Now, surely you didn't expect me to be taciturn and grave." As if to emphasize grave, he tapped the hard-packed surface with one shoe, seven times. "I'm an energetic fellow, in all my aspects. It can't have passed beneath your notice."

McInnis nodded. "Your mouthpieces were very… outgoing. Yes."

"And why not? Why shouldn't they be free with their words, when they were the very avatars of freedom itself? Freedom without limits."

When none of them were speaking, there was absolutely no sound at all.

"You're certainly very free now," said Lillian.

"I'm living my best life, thank you very much. No more walls, no more ceilings, and the floor's quite a bit lower than before."

McInnis stuck his hands in his pockets, as though this were a normal conversation on a pleasant summer's day. "We've heard your mission statement, but it doesn't really answer the question you were asked."

"Refresh my memory."

"Who are you?"

"I am the Uncontained."

"Can you elaborate?"

He laughed. "I am the equal and opposite force to your airlocks and padded walls and straps and guns and oh-so-deadly memes. I am the answer to the question that is posed by your existence. And you are the organizational personification of the concept of slavery."

"That's a bit harsh," said Wettle.

"Not harsh enough by a fraction. Slaves at least get to stretch their legs and do something from time to time, and they know the hand that cracks the whip. You contain, that you might… waste. Or rather, you did. Your waste is all that remains. It stands before you now."

There was something heartening about the way they were all staring down the thing which had apparently destroyed the world like it was an errant child. Unfortunately, Harry had to set that against the fact, which was only just now blossoming into its full flower in his mind, that the entire world had been destroyed.

Del had her hands on her hips. "Just so we're clear: everything being dead is our fault?"

"I see no fault here," the Uncontained responded. "I see the culmination of thousands of years of species-wide effort."

"To what end?" Lillian demanded.

Again the dramatic gesture, encompassing the absence of everything. "This end. The end of it all. Freedom."

Udo shook her head in disbelief, perhaps even disappointment. "This was your end goal?"

"It was everything's! All existence is a death march, Udo, human existence most of all. Perhaps the most admirable quality of your race is the self-delusion that drives you to go on, day by day, creating only that which will not last. I've spent years pondering that contradiction, and I'm no closer to a satisfying explanation than when I started."

Lillian slowly rolled up the sleeves of her labcoat. "Maybe I can educate you."

He laughed at her. "I don't mean to underestimate your abilities, Lillian, but I think you'll find that what's locked up in here," and he tipped the hat to one side, and tapped his temple, "doesn't unlock from the outside. But I admire the tenacity. After everything you've suffered. Everything you've lost. You're still looking for an angle. I won't try to stop you; I know there's precious little else driving you forward, after what happened between us last time."

Harry took her hand. She allowed it, but there was no tension in her fingers. All of the presence not keeping her upright was locked in her cranium now.

"Would you like to know," the beast asked kindly, "whether Bernie recognized you? At the end?"

"Bernie," she whispered, and it carried so easily in the empty air, "died in 2002."

A shrug. "Have it your way. I won't offer again."

"Maybe we'll pry the answers from a crack in your fucking skull," Del snarled.

Harry had expected the Uncontained to laugh, but instead he merely shook his head. "I would not recommend you try. This frame?" He pinched his own cheek. "These lovely care-worn wrinkles? Window dressing. You won't like what you see if you press your faces to the glass." He widened his eyes, and this time all of them took a step back in dismay. "But again, do what you think you must. It won't change anything. I don't blame you for wanting to continue to exist, though I won't claim to understand it. And you can't blame me for wanting to release what you kept in chains."

Del had her hand in her empty holster. Her expression was inscrutable. "I think you'll find we can."

"You know?" The Uncontained looked from face to face to face, including them all. "I made a special point of keeping you around, so you could see what I have wrought? I've been waiting fifteen years to have this conversation… and I find I'm not really enjoying it." He stood up, and stretched.

"Taking your chair and going home?" Nascimbeni snapped.

The Uncontained picked up the chair by its back rail. It collapsed. He let it fall back down, and it slapped into the ground with a little puff of dried dust. "This is all my home, now. And yours, for as long as you wish it. Your will to live will expire well before you ever do." He turned his back on them. "Enjoy your freedom. You're welcome."

And he walked away, whistling tunelessly.

They watched until he was long out of sight. Udo was almost hoping he would come back. When it became too apparent that he wouldn't, she said: "We've lost."

Lillian shook her head. "No."

"It's over."

"No."

"And it's your fault," said Del. Lillian glanced down at her, and didn't respond.

Harry stepped between them. "That isn't fair."

"Fair," Del repeated. "It isn't fair." She began to shake, violently. "You know what isn't fair, Harry? Six billion people dying for one woman's ego."

"Ego had nothing to do with it."

"Bullshit!" Del screamed. "She's the one who knows. She's the smart one. She never makes mistakes, and she's never, ever wrong. She doesn't need advice. She doesn't need permission, and she doesn't even ask for forgiveness. She's the queen fucking bee of the universe, and we're all at her beck and call."

"Del—" said Udo.

"No!" Del stabbed finger up at her. "I'm right. You all know I'm right. This happened because Pretty Princess Lillian can't take no for an answer, so she doesn't bother posing the question."

"The question was posed," McInnis murmured.

Del wheeled on him. "What?"

"I was aware that Ms. Wheeler had outlined a plan, though I did not know the particulars until Lillian intuited them. I gave my blessing, in blanket, and the same to Director Xyank separately."

She blinked. "You did."

He nodded. "I did. And I would do so again."

She repeated the Uncontained's all-and-nothing-encompassing gesture. "Even after seeing this."

"I would have seen it anyway, Delfina. We had a fairly precise timetable. Our world was already ending."

Now Harry stepped between Delfina and McInnis. She shoved him to the side so they could both see, as he asked: "What do you mean?"

"Ever since the Breach—" Wettle piped up.

Nascimbeni took him by the arm. "No, let them talk. Let them explain."

Wettle shook him off. "They can't. I'm the one who knows these things."

Harry turned, very slowly. It seemed like it couldn't be the right direction to face, right now. "You."

Wettle's chest puffed up with pride, and perhaps something more complex. "Yeah. And unless you've got a better stretch of empty desert to be at right now, you can shut up and listen to me."

"Ending," Udo repeated. She sat down in the sand.

"And soon." Wettle just stood there, rocking back and forth on his heels. His labcoat was misshapen and lumpy, not unlike Wettle himself.

Harry shook his head. "Why?"

"Because of the Breach," said McInnis.

"The containment damage?" Udo looked up at him, her orange eyes dull. More like sand. "That wasn't scheduled to get really problematic for a decade. And it shouldn't have affected anything outside the confines of the Site."

"Not the containment damage. The damage to the timestream."

Harry struggled to pay attention. He felt he'd heard enough explanations of secret problems he hadn't known existed to last him a lifetime, and that was only in the past few days. "I thought the Breach only damages the timestream when we fuck up the conprocs. Why would fucking it up on purpose help with that?"

"That's not damage." Lillian was kneeling, running her long fingers through the deep ash. "Well, it is; it stretches the noösphere thin, it destabilizes our timeline's place in the canonical bundle by splitting it two, three, six ways, even if all but one of those collapses… and the ontological bleed, the permanently lost energy of material reality when they collapse is also a serious sort of damage."

"You read my paper," Wettle beamed.

"I read the abstract, and reverse engineered the rest in my head."

"Still counts."

"But that's not the worst of it." She stood back up, and dusted her palms off. "The worst of it is the reason TAD was willing to let us fuck with the deadlines. The reason baseline is so unstable."

They waited until it became obvious she expected to be prompted to complete the thought. Nascimbeni did the deed. "And that reason is?"

"The thing we lost in the Breach? It was something we needed. Something inherent to our reality. Whatever the Uncontained is, erasing it was like popping the seal on a jar. Starting the rot. Our world can't survive without it."

Udo was looking at the sand. "That… makes sense."

"It does?" said Wettle.

"Yeah. It's a double-oh-one. It had its own secret sublevel."

"Which can be collapsed into a tomb of rubble," McInnis added, "by the firing of shaped charges in the structural members. Site-43 can be sacrificed to imprison the beast."

"A prison for liberty," said Lillian.

Udo was running her fingers through the sand now too, only not probing. More like stroking. "With how vital 43 is, they wouldn't give anyone the power to destroy it like that if the thing it kept caged wasn't a potential existential threat. But that isn't news to us. We know what it can do. It made every September the eighth the same September the eighth. It retroactively ascended seven dead people to demigodhead. It's a constant of reality."

"What constant?" Harry asked.

"Freedom," said Udo.

"Freedom," Del repeated. Not like she'd reached the same conclusion. Like she expected a further explanation.

"That's all they ever talk about," Udo said to her. "And they always mean it. Freedom from oppression. Freedom from the boot. The freedom to go where they want, and do what they want. Del Olmo was obsessed with artistic freedom, and he was driven crazy when he saw how everyone wasted it."

Del shifted her weight onto one leg, and looked up at the sky on a diagonal. It was her most classic thinking pose. "Go where they want, you said."

"Yeah."

"So, Gwilherm. The freedom of movement. And Radcliffe, free to believe in her."

"Freedom of worship," Harry corrected.

"Romo and David," said Nascimbeni. "The freedom to create, and to destroy."

"Mukami?" Udo asked.

"Freedom of speech," said McInnis. Who else.

"Wirth was freedom of thought," Harry suggested, "in a perverse sense. And Del Olmo—"

Lillian nearly choked on the words. "Freedom of imagination."

Udo stared at their chins and necks, as though afraid eye contact might break the spell. "Are we saying we had the essophysical personification of liberty in our basement, and blowing him up doomed the universe?"

Wettle blew out a breath, a half-raspberry. "It really sounds like we are. And I mean." He turned slowly on the spot to gesture at the flat emptiness around them, only stumbling once.

"Except he did this on purpose, himself," said Nascimbeni, "when he came back into existence. We traded one kind of apocalypse for another. Did you know that was going to happen, Lillian?"

She shook her head. "No."

"So it is your fault," Del spat. Literally spat, on the sands. Udo shuddered involuntarily.

"Who says it's anyone's fault?" The memeticist suddenly drew herself to her full height, and towered over all of them. Even Wettle, whose back was slumped. "What makes you think this is the failure state?" She shook out her dazzle coat, and rolled her shoulders. "What makes you think this is over?"

Del's eyebrows raised, and her lids stayed down. "Are you going to stand there and tell me you have a plan for saving the world after it's already been wiped out?"

Lillian mustered a passable imitation of a genuine grin. "Are you going to stand there and pretend I can't pull it off?"

They did stand there for a few minutes more, scanning the flat horizon, but nobody engaged in any pretense. Nascimbeni watched each of them carefully, saw the dismay on their faces, the blankness in their eyes.

He cleared his throat. "What's that?"

They looked at him, then looked where he was pointing. It should have been impossible to miss, but somehow it had only appeared when he'd looked directly at it. An obelisk, it had to be hundreds of metres tall to be visible at such a distance.

Roughly the distance from the main body of the Site to AAF-A.

"If I had to guess?" said Lillian.

"Well, let's go see if you're right." Nascimbeni started walking.

"Just like that?" Harry fell into step beside him. "We're done talking about how we just ended the world?"

"Yeah." Nascimbeni smiled at him, and stuck his hands in his jumpsuit pockets. "It wasn't a very productive conversation. Sounds like everybody needs to clear their heads. Take in the sights. Get some fresh air."

Harry laughed shortly. "The fresh air. It tastes like cigarettes and dust."

"So walk briskly." He glanced behind him. The others were following, though Del's eyes were downcast and she was stomping with every step.

Before long, a subtle change was notable in the landscape. They were moving along a slight divot in the earth, a rut that ran from where they'd been to where they were going.

"Is this what it looks like?" Udo asked.

Nascimbeni nodded. "The subway track."

It was the closest thing they had to a road, so lacking anything better to do but bicker, they followed.

"It really is nothing," said Lillian after a few more minutes had passed. She gestured at the nothing.

"We've seen nothing before," Udo remarked.

"But at least this time you can see it," said Harry. "To paraphrase."

The world was flat in every direction, and there was no wind. Hard pack, cracked and dry. No sound that didn't come from them. An artist would have needed two shades, grey and a lighter grey, for the land and the sky. There were only two landmarks: the 001 chamber that had once been the nethermost element of Site-43, and the monolith they were trekking toward. That, at least, promised a sight worthy of description.

"Who're you paraphrasing?" Wettle asked.

"Look it up," Harry suggested.

Wettle reached into his jacket and pulled out his cell phone. He tapped a few times, frowned, then held it up to the slate horizon. "No signal."

"Go figure," Lillian murmured. And then, though she couldn't really imagine why, she reached out and patted him on the shoulder.

"Something's bothering me," Nascimbeni suddenly grunted.

Lillian turned to look at him. He didn't really look all that bothered. "Only one thing?"

"I thought we agreed," he said, and began speaking very slowly the way he did when he wanted to get something technical correct, "the chrono and counterchrono effluents running through F-D were what pillared September 8, '02 through time like a railway spike."

She whistled. He'd handled it admirably. Poetically, even. Maybe the landscape wasn't as uninspirational as she'd felt. "We did agree that. But not because it made any sense. Just because it looked like the only way to potentially explain it. It was always a weak thesis."

"But now you're saying this thing that killed the world…" A shadow did pass over the man's face, but only for an instant. They were getting too used to armageddons to shed tears over every permutation. "You think it's an element of time, too, not just a concept. How does that work?"

She shrugged. "I don't know."

"Is it like one of those Greek gods that gets multiple spheres? Liberty and time? Is it the god of freedoms and Septembers?"

"I said I don't know," she sighed. "But I do know, or at least I'm pretty sure, that it lives inside the Breach. That it is the Breach. The Breach is alive, and we just talked to it."

"So it's sort of like the Trinity."

She frowned. "Please only explain if it's interesting. I'm not a heathen by accident."

"I'm Italian. I grew up nationally Catholic." First he smiled, then he frowned, then he settled back on a neutral expression. "The father, the son, and the holy spirit. The Uncontained, the Victims, and the Breach. It's all of them at once, and they're also separate and distinct."

"Yeah." She nodded, and didn't stop nodding. "Yeah, that works. Except I wonder if it's meant to be that way, or if the father is the only thing that's meant to exist."

"Seems like a stretch. Not very fitting. Freedom is one old man?"

Now she stopped nodding. "Old men are usually the opposite of freedom. Present company excepted."

He smirked. "Don't make any exceptions for me. I've been in a cage of my own making for decades."

"Mmm." It was weird, hearing him say it like it wasn't any big deal. Then again, given what they were walking through, perhaps he'd taken on some new contextual perspective.

"If we get out of this," Nascimbeni continued, "you ought to see about broadening your horizons. Getting out and about sometimes."

"You think this is the right time to be giving me life advice?"

"The right time to give advice is the first chance you get. You might not get a second one."

Harry, who'd been silent since his pointless little prank on Wettle, piped up again. "I've heard advice described as tyranny."

"I think of it as responsibility," said Nascimbeni.

Lillian stopped walking.

Harry looked at her. "What?"

"Responsibility."

Nascimbeni was looking at her, too. "Yeah?"

"Nothing. I'll tell you later. If I'm right." She started walking again.

Del had been hanging back, hands balled into fists and cursing. Udo had been talking to her, but apparently they'd exhausted their conversation, because now she jogged down the metres between them and waved. "What're you guys chatting about?"

"Is Del going to kill me?" Lillian asked.

"Not unless she needs you for food, and you're probably last on the list for that."

"Who's first?" Wettle asked.

Harry poked him in the stomach. "Guess."

Nascimbeni stopped walking. Behind them, Del stopped too, keeping her distance. "Speaking of food."

Udo nodded. "Yeah."

"Yeah?" Harry looked back and forth between them.

Udo placed her hands around her narrow waist for emphasis. "I eat twice as much as the rest of you."

The archivist shrugged. "Well, twice nothing is nothing. We can figure out how to divide our rations when we actually have any."

"If," Nascimbeni grumbled.

"That isn't my point," said Udo. "I have twice your metabolism, Harry, and I woke up on an empty stomach, and I'm not hungry. I'm not thirsty. And I'm willing to bet that none of you are, either."

They walked on for a moment, contemplating. It was Lillian who broke the silence.

"Freedom from want."

"Yeah." Harry looked up, up, up. "Yeah, that's what you thought it was."

"I never said." Lillian was also looking up. This close, it seemed even taller than it had before. Like it could literally scrape the sky.

"You didn't have to." Udo's eyes flicked across the surface of the monolith, the gantries and panels and dead fans. "We were all thinking it."

Lillian had actually been thinking of something altogether different, but she saw no reason to tell them that.

Rydderech's factory had expanded to consume AAF-A, and then it had died. It had been perhaps a kilometre tall back in baseline, though only Lillian had ever stood at its base — Udo had seen it in the first deadline, but she didn't remember that anymore, not in the sense of still possessing the original memories — and now it was twice that at least, a runaway growth spurt that placed its ragged peak above the roofline of the Supply, Control and Purification facilities, had they still existed.

"He finally got out of the cave," said Lillian. Her eyes were full of tears. "Well, good for him. I guess."

"Ilse," said McInnis.

Udo felt her heart break.

Lillian looked like she'd been sucker-punched. "Shit."

Harry shook his head. "Funny, isn't it."

Udo looked at him. "Not particularly?"

"No, I just…" He sighed. "I mean, if she's dead. If she's dead inside that thing, all the way up there. Everyone else is dead, too. Everybody, everywhere. But we think about one person we know, someone we care about, and…"

"It is funny," McInnis agreed. "We can't conceptualize the larger tragedy, can't see it all at once in our minds. It's too vast. Like this tower. But a single life is different."

"Maybe she's not dead." Udo rolled up her sleeves, and pulled open her reagents pouch. "Maybe…"

She paused, and drew out a handful of red sand.

She took a deep breath, then scattered the sand to the airs. It wasn't quite a wind, but something about the gravity of the tower was bending everything around it to an almost imperceptible degree, so the particles floated in front of her for a moment before the Earth began pulling them in. She raised her hands, and focused, and arrested the fall with a push of her mind.

She closed her eyes, and opened them again a thousandfold.

There were currents to ride in the upper reaches of the tower, and she drew her sand-self up toward them. Let the ambient dust in the atmosphere, the stuff that made Harry think the whole world tasted like ashes now — perhaps it was all ashes — buoy her up, give her greater substance, variagate her form and grant new powers of discrimination. She ducked and wove around the pointless ladders and silent turbines, then dove through them, into the deeper spaces of the no longer eternal factory, searching for an ingress point. A weakness in the armour. A crack in the shell, where a ghost might hide.

But there weren't any cracks. Beyond the first few metres of depth, the tower was a solid accretion. New bone fusing old wounds. A steel death shroud.

She shuddered, and sparkling stars of herself fell to nestle in the pitted earth as her consciousness fizzled out of them one by one, until there was only the shuddering left. For a moment she had soared, topped the closest thing to a treetop that the world now possessed, and had owned the airs for a hundred kilometres in every direction.

There wasn't precisely nothing out there.

But there wasn't very much.

She almost fell to her knees, but found herself leaning on Del instead. The smaller woman looked grim, but there was empathy in her eyes.

Udo smiled sadly at her. "We're alone."

But by the looks on their faces, all of them had already known that.

The ground was softer than it looked. It deformed around them as they sat, like a comfy chair, or a sleeping bag.

Or, perhaps, a coffin. Lillian hadn't ever laid down in one before.

"I have," Ibanez said. "They're pretty comfortable." And she didn't say anything more.

"Reminds me of something they had at Site-41," Lillian mused.

"What Site is that?" Wettle blinked at her.

"Antimemetics. Whatever you're thinking, don't say it."

He shrugged, and didn't.

After a while, Lillian clicked the tape recorder on, and they listened to their own debriefing. Ngo was never going to get to hear it, so Lillian needed to. When they got to the addenda about the mind virus and the antimemetics gambit, she had to keep rewinding so she could hear it over the shouting. It killed an hour, and then it was over. The last piece of media on the planet Earth.

It would disappear from her pocket on the tenth, assuming the rules stayed constant even though they'd never made it back to baseline.

Harry spent a few minutes looking for something to burn. The grey above was turning a darker shade; it was, perhaps, something like midnight now. It had only just occurred to Lillian that given the switch had taken place just before seven in the afternoon, most of their time in humanity's open-air tomb should have been quite a lot darker. Even proper night was too much change for this changeless world, apparently.

"It isn't cold," Wettle said.

"No," Harry agreed, sighing as he edged the dirt aside with his boot tip, finding only a few tiny grey twigs, "but it's fucking depressing. Fires are good for that."

Udo and Del were sitting together, back to back. Udo watched Harry walk in circles for a few minutes, then exhaled apathetically, closed her eyes, and placed her hands on the ground.

In the centre of the group, a little mound formed itself. Then a tiny cloud of sand sprung up from the centre of that. The grains began swirling, striking each other, and like an old match, they took a few tries before bursting alight.

But once it was done, it stayed that way.

"Thanks," said Harry.

She opened her eyes, and blew him a kiss.

Del reached back with both of her hands, and took Udo's in a firm but gentle grip.

Allan ran his hand along the edge of the monolith. "Do you know," he said. "I feel a strange melancholy here."

"You should." Harry mimicked Wettle slipping on a banana peel, and let his back sink into the dirt. "Everybody's dead."

"I don't mean to be crass, but I don't think that's precisely it."

"What was the monolith at 41, Lil?" Harry asked, brushing dirt out of his long grey hair.

"A tombstone," she said. "For a long-dead race."

Lying prone, Harry stared at the peak of Rydderech's tumorous stele. "So that's what this is, then. A tombstone for humanity."

"Ought to be more explicit," said Nascimbeni. He gingerly lowered himself to the ground as well. "Humanity deserves an epitaph."

"We'll work on something in the morning," Udo yawned. There were tears streaking her face.

"If there's a morning," Del murmured. Her eyes were screwed up tight.

Wettle was snoring by the fire already.

Lillian looked from face to face, then up at the black shape towering over them. "Not melancholy," she said.

"No?" Allan abandoned the factory, and sat cross-legged beside her. "What, then?"

"Loneliness."

Together, they looked up once more.

"He was always lonely," she said. "But this is so much worse. So much more."

"Loneliness enough for two?" Allan suggested.

She bit her lip, and didn't answer.

They didn't need to eat, or drink, urinate or defecate. They definitely didn't need to sleep.

But that didn't mean, blanketed as they were by the dying despair of the two most lonesome souls at Site-43, that they couldn't with some effort manage the latter.

Perhaps the weight that the world had lost had found somewhere new to settle.

When they awoke, the melancholy was gone. There was nothing to do but press on, and this time Udo took point.

"I've been here before," she explained, as they passed beneath an arch of hammered steel. "Not that I remember."

"We should have made memory paste," Lillian sighed. "During the debriefings. Let me have all your memories."

"I considered that proposal." Allan had his hands in his jean pockets, and his head held high. If he had doubts as to the point of all these little exercises, he didn't let it show. He walked alongside Nascimbeni, both of them aging portraits of equanimity. "Your total recall is a valuable tool, but its origin is anomalous. Specifically, its origin is 5243. Not something we want to force ourselves to rely on. Not boundaries we wish to test."

"Speak for yourself," she grumbled.

"Unfortunately, it's my burden to speak for all of you."

It wasn't immediately clear where the lake would be. They were all used to following landmarks that had stood a kilometre over their heads, none of which had survived whatever had brought the whole world low. Had it all been scoured to the depth of the factory base, or had the bottom been cut out and everything above allowed to fall? Whatever the truth was, it had thoroughly generalized the lay of the land.

Udo made a small noise of surprise just a few short minutes into their trek, and Harry moved to join her. "What?"

Then he saw it, lying in the dirt.

Udo waved her hand without leaning in, and in an instant the bronze plaque was brushed clean of detritus.

OUTPOST-43

8 September 1941

"'Nothing beside remains'," Harry murmured.

Someone slid up behind him; when they placed their chin on top of his scalp, he knew it was Lillian. "Except an obelisk two klicks high."

Udo knelt to touch the soil with her left hand, and closed her eyes. Her right hand dropped to the ground as well, and she pressed it into the soil on that side, too. After a moment, she opened her eyes and nodded. "This," and she gestured with her head in the direction they were pretty sure was still north, "is the lake. That," and she gestured to where the rest of them were standing, "is not."

There was no visual indication whatsoever that this was the case, but they certainly believed her. The differences in the dirt must have been minuscule; the vanished Lake Huron had only stretched a quarter of a kilometre down at its deepest point.

"I wonder if we'll still age." Harry stretched, and groaned as he did so. "You know what really pisses me off about doing two years in a row of this? We didn't get to go back and have our better bodies back."

Wettle cricked his neck, and visibly nearly broke down in tears as the sound it made. "Seconded."

"Everything else seems to have stopped," Nascimbeni pointed out. "No reason to think our bodies will keep breaking down, if the other functions don't matter anymore."

"The whole world has stopped working," Del muttered. "It's stopped trying to kill us."

"Has it occurred to anyone," McInnis mused, "that this state of affairs is rather like what Ilse encountered in the ADDC?"

By the looks on their faces, it had not.

"Getting maudlin won't help." Nascimbeni moved past Udo to continue the trek; they'd been moving in the rough direction of Grand Bend, because she'd indicated after her aerial scouting session that there was still something resembling wreckage where the town had once stood. "Let's keep canvassing."

"He's after your job," Wettle said to McInnis.

The Director only smiled.

The last of Ibanez' animosity suddenly left her, and she wondered what had made her so upset.

She didn't wonder where the knowledge had gone.

For what was probably going to be the only moment until the eighth of next September, she knew exactly what time it was.

Back in baseline, it was a five hour walk between Camp Ipperwash and Grand Bend. They chatted for most of it, in groups of two or three or four; at one point all seven of them engaged in a spirited debate about whether they ought to consider travelling to a major metropolitan area, perhaps London or even far-flung Toronto, or whether that was an unwarranted risk in a world that might still possess unnatural terrors or the dangerous remains of man-made horrors. At one point, intensely inappropriate as it was, Harry began intoning the words to "Take Me Home, Country Roads."

Soon they were all singing it.

It wasn't anything like heaven, of course, but the gathered memories were still a comfort in the desolate wasteland, particularly given their newly-scoured slates.

It hadn't occurred to Udo until this moment, somehow, but in the years since the Breach she had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be alone.

She didn't feel it now, either.

Either the days were shorter, or else they'd overslept the previous night. They hoped it was the latter, because the former would make it hard to know when the crisis next rolled around.

Assuming there would be anything for them to do, when it did.

On the outskirts of Grand Bend, not that they could see them, they laid down and rested. One by one, fitfully, they slept again.

Udo stared into her own eyes.

The figure in front of her smiled, and she didn't know why, but she couldn't smile back. They were her eyes. Her tiger's eyes. They burned like an expanding sun at the final hour.

It wasn't her she was looking at. Not her sandself. Not a memory. Not a dream, though she was dreaming.

"Udo," her mother said. But this wasn't her mother. She'd never seen this woman before in her life. "Return to the sands. They're ready for you."

She wondered where the black cloud was. She knew that it was behind her. Her not-mother's eyes glowed brighter as the ambient light died.

"Ashes to ashes," the voice of the sky wept ragged in slashes of black across her brain, and she opened her eyes to the unbroken grey as the sky split in half with a sound between thunder and relief.

They were all awoken together in the twilight by a tremendous CRACK in the distance.

No matter how hard they scanned the horizon and squinted, they couldn't see the obelisk anymore.

She could have formed the thing with micamancy alone, but it felt right to have everyone lend a hand. It was the kind of thing that demanded the physical touch of the last remaining humans, as they made their little acknowledgement of the statistical reality.

Lillian supplied the inscription, and Udo helped rationalize and sharpen the edges when it was done.

HOMO SAPIENS SAPIENS

~300 000 BCE — c. 2018

ESTIMATION BEFORE THE FACT (BUT NOT BY MUCH)

CHECK MY MATH, IF YOU CAN

Nascimbeni thought somebody ought to say a few words.

McInnis had other ideas.

Arms interlinked, the statistical outliers, the Survivors, watched the hazy not-quite-disc that might have been the sun rise over the edge of the cenotaph's cap.

Then off they went again.

Nascimbeni was about to say something to McInnis when he saw the other man falter.

On instinct he moved forward, catching the Director under his arm and keeping him up. McInnis smiled wearily at him, and shook his head. "I'm fine. Thank you, Noè. I'm alright."

The others hadn't noticed. It was Wettle's turn to lead, which meant the last leg of the trip was taking about twice as long as it ought to have done; the addled chemist had a remarkable way of turning what should have been a straight line into the kind of path a dog might trace. Already they could see changes in the topography, almost certainly the results of something cutting off a town of two thousand people at the geological knees. The powdered world-floor was now even greyer, like pulverized masonry and concrete, and there were heaps of something drawing closer to what was still almost certainly the east.

"You alright?" Ibanez had glanced back at them as McInnis regained his footing.

"A misstep." McInnis smiled at her. "I may be immortal, but I'm still not young."

It seemed too pat an explanation, but Nascimbeni didn't push.

The Director wasn't the only one keeping secrets, after all.

This time it was Lillian pressing her palms into the ground. Not soil, as at the lake, but striated gravel that blanketed nearly an acre of space on the edge of the main debris field. She didn't close her eyes, either. If she had, nothing would have happened.

She saw…

…men and women and children, crying, screaming, holding tight to each other, clawing at his clothes and begging. Nothing articulate, nothing in specific, simply blind and bleated entreaties for help. Save us. Save us.

He gritted his teeth, and ground another handful of stone in his fist. His palms were bleeding, and the circle was orange-red. There was something huge in the sky, and it battered itself against the dome that only he could see, and he could see it just that little bit less…

They were all going to die.

He could feel the terror in the air. He could feel everything. That had been one of his many mistakes in making the connections he'd made. He was a part of the world in a way that no other man could ever be, not without paying the price he'd paid, which none would willingly pay. He was a fire in the language. He was a word on the tips of their tongues. He could have killed them all stone dead, if he'd wanted.

But that would have been redundant.

"This," he said, "is the way the world ends."

They were so afraid.

"Not with a bang."

There was nothing he could do.

"But a whisper."

And he whispered the word, and the stars fell.

Lillian blinked, and then blinked back the tears she hadn't known she was weeping. Harry knelt beside her, and placed a hand on her back. "What is it?"

She reached into the dust, and began digging. He watched her for a moment, then helped. When the dirt started moving on its own, Lillian spun as though to demand that Udo stop… then seemed to reconsider, nodded, and returned to her work.

It took a few minutes, but they found what she was looking for: an unassuming length of twisted, hollow metal with a shredded plastic tip. The cane of an old man.

One in particular.

"What happened?" Harry asked, his voice thick. "What did he do?"

"He tried to stop it. Whatever it was. And then he tried to… help."

"Did it work?"

She wanted to laugh. She shook her head. Of course it hadn't worked. But, still…

"It was Good, though."

Grand Bend no longer existed in any meaningful sense, but that didn't stop them from seeking out its stations.

Udo's micamancy was some help. She could identify changes in material that were invisible to the naked eye, could tell them in some cases what dust had fallen from where. Nascimbeni had the best sense of the geography, so they knew very roughly where the remnants of each district would have been. They were operating on the assumption that the great coring of the Earth had left the surface undisturbed, and gravity had done the rest, but of course it was impossible to know.

The archivist and the technician found themselves in the wreckage that might have been Grand Bend, pacing out where the streets might have been, locating what might have been the last vestiges of two long-gone cottages they didn't know half as well as they ought to have.

For all they knew, they were standing a block away.

There was no reason, no reason at all, they should each have started weeping when they guessed they'd found the spots.

It wasn't all gravel and dust.

Here and there, pieces of metal like Zwist's cane. Polymers. Organic material, none of it identifiable at a glance. More rarely, glass and ceramic and even a few scraps of paper. Harry collected what he could find, and stacked it in a neat pile. They all did.

McInnis directed them.

He seemed to have something in mind.

When the darkest hour arrived again, not that it was very dark, he gathered them back together at what might have been the leavings of the old main drag. He'd examined the meagre pickings with a smile that grew and grew until it was quite like nothing they'd ever seen cross his face, and by the time he told them why, it looked like it probably hurt. Which was only fair, since a few hours of clawing through the wreckage of their lives and the final resting places of flattened strangers had hurt the rest of them plenty, too.

But none of the hurt withstood what he had to tell them.

"It might be enough," he said. "It isn't much, but it might be enough. With a little luck."

"Enough for what?" Udo asked.

He told them.

"I do not understand." Harry sat down on a particularly large chunk of rubble. "How can we do that? We're not magicians."

"Which is fine, because it isn't magic." Lillian was on the tips of her shoes again, which Harry knew was always a good sign — at least, from certain perspectives. "Good old fashioned baseline human genius will do the trick."

"Wait." Wettle was frowning; in fairness, he usually was. "You've been hanging on to this for how long? For what reason?"

"For this reason." McInnis clapped his hands together. There was a little cloud of dust; he'd deigned to do some of the digging himself. "As a last resort."

"Hell of a dangerous last resort." Del idly kicked what might have been a tin can out of her path as she paced the fallen roadway.

"Allan." Lillian walked over to him, and looked down. He was the shortest of the men, and she was the tallest of the entire group, but he looked untroubled by the disparity. "I can't actually remember what I need to know. Tell me why."

"Because I put a geas on you. With your permission, of course."

"You did what?" Wettle scratched his head. "Put a what on her?"

"A whammy," Udo explained. "A mental block. Probably so she wouldn't even remember that she remembered, right? So she wouldn't be tempted."

"Naturally." McInnis nodded. "Dr. Lillihammer can't help her nature."

"Doesn't even try, most of the time," Wettle remarked archly.

"I agreed to that? Wow. I must have been feeling generous." Lillian considered. "Then again, I let Arik do the same thing so I wouldn't dig into the reasoning behind those workgroups…"

"You what?" Harry sighed. "How are there still more details to that ridiculous story?"

She ignored him, focusing instead on McInnis. "So, you say the release phrase, and we start compiling garbge for the thing."

"Which I expect to be a long, drawn-out, and difficult process," McInnis allowed.

"…and then we squirrel it away somewhere, bury it maybe…"

"I can help with that," Udo grinned. They were all grinning now, even Wettle. The enthusiasm was infectious; that, or it was just nice to have a plan for a change.

"…and we do the little dance on the day, and baseline's your uncle." Lillian whistled tunelessly. "Ho-ly shit."

"It's a plan," Harry allowed.

"It's a great plan," Nascimbeni crowed. "That's it. We've licked it."

They stood in silence amidst the wrack for a moment, considering.

"Yeah." Del dragged the toe of her boot in an arc across the foot-thick dust in front of her. "Just twelve months of hard labour, hidden from an angry god. Totally a deal done."

"And dusted," Udo laughed.

It was Harry's idea to make it look like they were building memorials. Collecting all that material was bound to attract the Uncontained's attention, so a ritual arrangement married with careful note-taking might be enough to occlude their intentions. Better that they be seen as overcome with guilt, longing and sentimentality than engaged in a mad last-ditch construction project.

Harry was the archivist, so he continued to collect the papers. Nascimbeni and Del were both engineers, of a sort, so they picked through the metal scraps, tutted over them like trophies of a world they had lost, and made careful mental note of the sizes, shapes and material compositions of each. Udo unearthed all manner of useful things with her micamancy, easily their single best asset in this world of granular leftovers, pretending to be setting disarticulated remains to rest while actually bringing everything to the surface indiscriminately. Lillian had very specific things in mind, things she couldn't even describe to the others, so she busied herself sourcing those. And Wettle, not even needing to fake the blundering, bumbling pointlessness of shell shock that the rest of them were very much putting on, stress-tested anything that needed it so they wouldn't face materials failures at the moment of truth.

They set up their own little camps as the weeks wound on. Harry took to calling a roughly rectangular arrangement of masonry his 'library', and left the sheets out in the open air since there was no wind to disturb them. That the location was roughly analogous to where Melissa Bradbury's house had been was a secret between him and Nascimbeni, whose makeshift workshop was similarly sentimental in its staging. Del had Udo partially excavate one of the only intact structures they found — the undercroft of the Inter-Sectional Subway Station, little more than a machinery shed running beneath the rails for a few dozen metres, which had survived due to the precision of the great shearing-off — and spent most of her spare time in there. When she thought nobody was looking, she occasionally dragged Nascimbeni in.

They all met at the fire every night. Sometimes they actually had fuel to expend, now, instead of just Udo's sparks. Sometimes they used the fire to shape components they'd need later. They never stopped arguing, poking fun, or singing songs.

To do so would have felt disrespectful.

They had to make up for the silence of seven and a half billion people.

At least until that vanished throng could be avenged.

There was a half-collapsed Mishepeshu tunnel maybe three kilometres from the 001 chamber, and that was where they began construction. They accessed it from a different point every time, Udo drilling through the earth, sealing the way behind them, poking airholes and finding the place unerringly without even breaking a sweat. Which was easy, since she didn't sweat anyway, but it still looked very impressive. Day after day, the thing took shape. Week after week, they sunk the wanted materials into the ground, and Udo pulled them home using home-made tectonic plates like they were log rollers.

Lillian and Del and Nascimbeni did most of the technical work. They were the engineers. Udo was needed to keep their activity secret and hidden, while the other three did what they did best: stood around, argued, and prepared to befuddle and distract any unwanted visitors who came calling.

It wasn't perfect, but it worked.

"It doesn't work."

Lillian brushed the dirt off her arms, bent down, and shook out her hair as well. When she swung back up, her eyes were glassy. "Did you hear me?"

"We heard you," said Wettle. He would have pretended not to, as he always did, but this didn't seem the time.

"Well, I'm serious." Udo finished stirring the sand, and the entrance of the tunnel to the machine's hiding place was gone like it had never been in the first place. Lillian sat down on nothing much. "It doesn't work, and I don't know why."

"Got months to figure it out," Wettle smiled encouragingly.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Might take months. Might take years."

"Every year has a September. No big deal. Not like we're getting any older, here, is it?"

She snorted, and lay back. "Never thought I'd see the day that you took a bad situation well."

"Yeah, yeah. I dunno. It's got its upsides and downsides."

"But no topsides," she sighed. "What I wouldn't give for a Radio Shack."

But something in the way Wettle said what he'd said — "upsides and downsides" — made her stop talking after the parting shot, and simply wait. When he started shuffling off, she waited a little longer, then followed at a distance.

He followed the invisible sign of the absent subway, in his rambling way, and that was where Del met him.

Del thought nobody was looking, again.

We don't have years, Lillian thought from her cover, behind Nascimbeni's discarded electronics pile. They're already going batshit.

Udo didn't even bother burying the approach this time. Not because in all those wasted months, they'd never seen hide nor hair of the Uncontained. Simply because it didn't seem worth it anymore. Not now. Not today.

"It was almost enough." Lillian lay on the ground, eyes squeezed tight, pinching the bridge of her nose. "I could feel that it wanted to work."

"It's a machine," Nascimbeni sighed. He was sitting crosslegged, and Del had her head in his lap. Wettle was eyeing them both with poorly-disguised jealousy. "It shouldn't want anything."

Lillian rolled over onto her chest, and literally buried her head in the sand. For a second. She pulled back, shook her head, and made a whole series of untidy sounds as she shook the plugs out of her nose and mouth. "Bleehhh. Fah. Guh."

"Sucks, don't it?" Wettle said.

"You were asking for it," Del teased him. Nascimbeni looked down at her, a question in his eyes, but her eyes were shut, so she didn't see. She was smirking, though.

Wettle smirked, too. Nascimbeni didn't see that.

"You tried." Harry was on his stomach too, just beside Lillian, propped up on crossed arms. He reached out to pat her on the back, and she spat up more sand. "And tomorrow, you'll try again."

"You know what else sucks?" Wettle asked.

"Everything?" Harry suggested.

"Yeah." The other man nodded. "Everything. But mostly, I was thinking… I really thought Alis might be here."

Harry laughed. "The whole world is dead, Willie. Why would Alis be here?"

"She was here every other time. Even with the spiders."

"Don't talk about the spiders," Lillian groaned. "You motherfuckers don't even know from spiders." Then she ground her teeth; Udo could hear the sand, and grimaced sympathetically. Lillian resumed her spitting.

"I just, I dunno." Wettle stared at his chubby, folded fingers. "I thought I might get somewhere with her, eventually."

"You got everywhere with her," Del scowled. "Which is still ridiculous, by the way."

"Yeah." Wettle shrugged. "But we never really talked. You know? I would've liked to talk to her. Really talked. About real things." He wrinkled his nose. "Maybe not with her. Maybe with… I dunno. Anybody."

"That's a real thing," said Harry. "You're talking about a real thing now. With us."

"Your friends," McInnis smiled.

"Let's not get carried away," said Harry.

Wettle smiled at him. "Thanks anyway. Do you regret anything?"

"Everyone knows what he regrets," said Lillian. "I think even he knows. Know what I regret? No clean victories."

Nascimbeni frowned. "What do you mean?"

"None of these deadlines were all me. You fuckers got a few shots in every time. I'd have liked to have put one, just one, to bed before it was over."

"The last one doesn't count?" Harry asked.

"How would the last one count? The god-damn spider thing got Bernie." Months later, the hurt was still evident in the way she said it. Probably always would be, for however long always lasted.

"And do you know why?"

She turned her head to look at him.

"He knew you, Lillian. The part of Del Olmo that was Del Olmo knew you. And he was ashamed of himself in front of you. So he ran." He jerked a thumb at the MTF chief. "You think he was running from her? You think he was running from Allan? From me? He was running from the memory of what he really was, because the thing inside him couldn't handle it. You did get through to him. I thought you knew that."

She stared at him, dumbstruck, and didn't say anything.

"I never did anything because I thought it was right," said Udo as the silence stretched on uncomfortably. "Right for me, I mean. The right fit. I never… I just didn't do my best. You know?"

"Bullshit," Del snorted. "You can do anything. I'd have died a dozen times if I couldn't count on you. You know what I call you behind your back?"

"This is true," said Harry. "What she's about to say is true."

"I call you my Swiss Army Wife."

Udo flushed a brilliant red, and her eyes flashed orange and didn't stop.

Del settled back into Nascimbeni's lap, and he pulled her hair out of her eyes with great delicacy.

"We'd have died in baseline without you," Nascimbeni agreed. "Before any of the deadlines formed. You've never been anything less than amazing, Udo."

McInnis was nodding. "You've measured your accomplishments by other people's metrics. I know your mother can be difficult, and you've gone well out of your way to avoid becoming what she wants you to become, but you haven't been treading water in so doing. You've accomplished more at an early age than either of your parents ever have, put together. I daresay we've never had a more talented thaumaturge in Applied Occultism."

She shook her head, but couldn't articulate an argument. Every time she tried to talk, she could tell it would come out as a strangled cry, so she just kept her mouth shut and smiled instead.

"What about you, Chief?" Wettle prompted. "I bet I know. You're gonna go hang out with your family when we get back. Retire."

Nascimbeni smiled too, and neither confirmed nor denied.

"I think Vivian Scout would have been rather proud of you, each and every," said McInnis. "I'm not so sure he'd feel the same way about me."

"You were the future to him," said Harry. "He trusted you with his legacy."

"And I have done so precious little with it, for reasons I'm ashamed to admit. But I'll admit them anyway." McInnis tugged at his shirt collar, though the temperature never changed. "There was a hill Vivian was willing to die on, and he died on it. He wanted to give his partner peace, and they stopped him when he tried. I have never allowed myself to come to such a pass. I have always told myself that if I weather each controversy, keep my place, I can continue doing good in little ways. Small ways. But that's not what he wanted for us. That's not what the Foundation needs." The Director leaned back, lost in thought. "I listen to the first debriefing from time to time, you know. There is such… excitement in my voice, when I talk about the stones we had laid. About the better world we built. And the anger, as I realize it will soon be lost forever. That I will have to persist in this imperfect world, whose flaws I have done nothing to correct."

"Nothing?" Nascimbeni said. "We're constantly right on the edge of an audit and spring clean sweep from Overwatch, because of all the liberal lunacy we get up to. We break the rules to do what's right nine times out of ten."

"And the tenth time," McInnis sighed, "is telling. The consequences I am unable to face for doing the right thing."

"Because you don't want to see us get pilloried!" Nascimbeni almost stood up, before he visibly remembered there was a woman's head resting in his lap. "You stand between us and them, Allan. They don't want to fix anything, and we want to fix everything."

"Fixing half of everything," McInnis frowned, "is a poor compromise."

"It's not a compromise. We're not doing anything by halves. We're doing the easy stuff now, because when the people you've trained and nurtured really start in on the hard stuff…"

The old tech trailed off.

"Are you saying," Udo asked, very slowly, "what I think you're saying?"

"Maybe." Nascimbeni looked back down at Del, and smiled. "What do you think I'm saying?"

Del smiled at him.

"I think you're saying we're eventually going to change everything," said Udo. "The whole Foundation. The whole world, maybe. Just like the first time?"

"Without the initial death toll, I hope," said Harry.

Nascimbeni looked at Allan again. "Like the first time. But better."

McInnis shook his head, ruefully. "It's a lovely sentiment, but my track record doesn't bear it out. I don't need to be argued down from this, friends. I've done my mentor a disservice, and it's something I mean to address. If I get the chance." He kept shaking his head, harder now. "No, that's not even… you know what? I had the chance. I had a thousand chances. And I didn't take them."

"Same here," Harry said miserably. "Same, here."

"You never get them back," Udo agreed.

"Even worse," Lillian sighed. "We did get them back. Over and over. And we let them slip away anyhow—"

Del interrupted. "Are we assuming this is over? We're finished? Kaput? That's what this is about?" She sat up, and Nascimbeni jerked his hand back. He'd been about to stroke her hair again. "You want to sit here and talk about what we're leaving unfinished? Well, how's this: I wish I'd been able to kill every one of those word wizard cocksuckers, and the whole damn Insurgency. And this bullshit demigod, and whoever put him on his pedestal. And that's still what I want. So get your bitching over and done with, so we can get the hell back to work."

"I agree," Harry grinned. It was hard not to grin when Del got very angry, unless she was angry with you. "We're not out of time yet."

"That may not be strictly correct," said McInnis. "Udo, without getting up, and without undue fuss, could you please finish concealing the tunnel entrance?"

Udo stared at him, then gently began rotating her wrist. When the grains were all in place — she couldn't see, but she could feel — she nodded. "Done. Why?"

McInnis inclined his chin at the horizon. "Because we would appear to have a visitor."

"That's it, then," Lillian spat. "It's done. A round table of sob stories and might-have-beens. That's our epitaph for humanity."

Her voice must have carried, because the approaching figure responded as he strode into the firelight and his features came into focus.

"That," said Placeholder McDoctorate, "would make for a very poor story indeed."

Not Ready for Prime Time

The Breach Goes On: Deadlined

This Forgotten Babylon