Mind Over Matter - SCP Foundation

Mind Over Matter

2002

18 September

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

It should've come down to the length of their legs.

Besides having one of the longer names, Lillian Lillihammer had the longest legs at Site-43. This was a factor of the fact that at six feet, five inches tall, she was the tallest member of staff (though a few weeks ago, she'd been in third place) and the fact she'd been all limbs all her life. She didn't often use them to move ventrally, preferring to splay over couches or tables or stationary colleagues. She occasionally moved them for motion's own sake, keeping the beat on upholstery or carpet or other people's heads. She did her best thinking at oblique angles, she explained — when she could be bothered to explain herself, which wasn't often. But when she really had to move, well, she could really move. She had an inbuilt mechanical advantage.

Or should have done.

Nhung Ngo had nearly the shortest legs at Site-43. She was one of the shortest members of staff, though seven inches above beneath the positively elfin Delfina Ibanez, and yet Lillian found her inexplicably difficult to shake. Power-walking down the halls didn't do the trick, as it always did when Wettle-dodging, since the diminutive headshrink kept disappearing into commissaries or service corridors or even other people's offices and emerging, smiling, in front of her. That option was closed to Lillian, because everyone she'd encountered since September 8 wanted to either express or elicit condolences, and she would've been happier pulling out her own pubic hair than engaging in either activity. Hiding in her dorm room, or her lab, was similarly futile. Ngo had a black belt in patience, in addition to her actual black belt (or however they measured mastery in that Vietnamese martial art which Lillian could pronounce about as well as she could perform it, which was to say not at all). Talking to the woman was an obvious non-starter, even more than talking to anyone else… and she had less than no intention of talking to anyone else, an inclination not entirely borne of the recent tragedy. Lillian liked to talk about problems, in the sense that she liked to solve problems, but interpersonal problems gave the genre a bad name. Explaining this to Ngo would of course be fruitless, might even prompt an official summons and unavoidable date with the psych couch.

The other woman was just doing her job. Unfortunately, like Lillian, she both loved and excelled at her job. There could only be one outcome to this dance.

Lillian was therefore determined to keep dancing for as long as humanly possible. When Ngo fell into step beside her, she turned a corner hard enough to cut the lockstep short. When Ngo re-emerged to the fore, Lillian swung back aft. Once, she opened a door in the psychiatrist's face. Twice she walked directly into a crowd — into them, not among them, momentarily losing her pursuer in the resultant foofarah.

But only momentarily.

"Why postpone the inevitable?" Ngo called out as Lillian kicked a laundry basket into her path.

"Why accelerate it?" Lillian opened every dryer door in the laundromat. "Even when it's inevitable, you still need to put the god-damn work in."

1994

3 August

Falconer University: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Given the choice between putting in the work, and kissing his girlfriend — to the extent that these were two different things — he chose the path of least resistance.

"Mm," she smiled sadly. "You want something."

Lyle Lillihammer spun in his chair. "Wanna try the office doors? One's bound to be unlocked. I've never screwed in a chair before, and I bet those old fossils have some seriously soft seats."

"My seat's plenty soft enough for the both of us." Eileen Veiksaar put one sneaker between his legs and sent his chair spinning across the empty computer lab. He didn't weigh much, all height with no heft. "But you know that's not what I meant. You want something."

"Yeah, but we've gotta play out the script first." Lyle stood up and swung his long arms like a pair of short, tartan windmill blades, alternating directions as a combination mental/physical exercise. "I offer token expressions of affection, maintaining your good graces, before taking cruel advantage."

She sighed as he strolled up behind her again, chair in tow. She was doing up a technical paper in WordPerfect; he could spot more than a few imperfect words, but knew better than to point them out. He wasn't sure what the paper was for, since she'd dropped out of university months ago. Only the sysadmin's on-brand inattention allowed her to keep beavering away in here, while everyone else was out enjoying the elements. He'd forgotten to change the door combo. Lyle considered asking her what she was working on, but he was something of a sysadmin at heart himself, so he didn't.

She hid the window. "What'll it be today, then? You catch a summer movie and decide to hack the dean's list, or…?'

"Are dean's lists even real? I thought they were made up by Hollywood, like cute girl hackers and young people named 'Eileen'." He let his chair drift across the tiles again and grabbed the back of hers instead, wrenching to one side until it, too, spun. She screeched in protest. "Our relationship has been so educational."

"Lyle." She closed her eyes against the vertigo. "What do you want."

"I want to know where Vivian Scout goes when he's not at the university."

She opened her eyes, just to blink them at him. "You what?"

He crouched down in front of her. "Harry's PhD supervisor. Vivian Scout. I think he's immortal, and I wanna know where he's going to suck virgin blood or commune with the Earth Mother or drink from the Fountain of Youth, or what have you."

She tilted her head down and gave him the librarian glare, obviously attempting to judge whether or not he was serious. She did that a lot, and even without the benefit of spectacles on chains or a silver updo, it was damned effective. "What's immortality a metaphor for?"

"Metaphor for," he repeated. "Uh, being extremely old? And yet not dying. Honestly not much of a metaphor, more like, you know. A direct translation?"

She visibly chose not to press the issue, turning back to the faded and yellowing Mac LC II. "Where are you thinking you'll find this information?"

He hooked one shoe under the roller base of his chair to pull it closer, then sat down again. "Okay, so. Scout telecommutes, using the internet. I figure if y—"

She stood up so quickly that her own chair rolled clear across the aisle, striking one of its counterparts on the facing terminal row. She leaned in over him, hands planted firmly on his shoulders. He made a move to stick his face into her chest, but she ducked down and banged their foreheads together instead. "Tell me you didn't just say he telecommutes using the internet."

"Ow. Is that crazy? Should I have said it more dramatically? I'll do better when I tell Harry."

"It's insane, yes." She ruffled her golden updo thoughtfully, looking out the lab windows as though she expected a candid cameraman to leap out at any moment. "How can he afford that? Is he a drug dealer? Is he a spy? How would it be cost-effective for anybody? What kind of bullshit is this, Lyle?"

He tilted his face up, kissing her again by default, and muttered into her nose: "You love my bullshit."

She tilted her own face up, bit the end of his nose, and went to retrieve her chair.

1995

6 March

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"We have acquired Mr. Lillihammer." Vivian Scout stood at the head of the longest boardroom table Lyle had ever seen, even in movies — even in spy movies, in underground villain lairs like this one — metres on metres of polished maplewood lined with expensive, high-backed chairs containing… well, they looked to Lyle like twenty different Halloween scientists. He couldn't even process all the radically weird labcoats he was seeing. "How shall we dispose of him?"

The only other person in the room whom Lyle had already met, a skeletal scowl named Falkirk, actually harrumphed. "I like your choice of words, for a change." His voice was thin and reedy, his pronunciation received. "Disposal tops my list. The idiot tried to break in, and against all reason, you let him. If we don't terminate, we've gone soft."

Scout tilted his head so that the overhead lights shone on his glasses. He always seemed to know precisely how to achieve this effect, no matter where he went. "We're not terminating him, Edwin, because there's no profit in it. He's kept our secrets, he hasn't told anyone, and he's potentially an excellent asset. This 'idiot' independently discovered the existence of our Site, and the SCP Foundation itself. That counts for something, no?"

"No." Falkirk tilted his own head in birdlike fashion, quick and abrupt. It looked like open mockery. "But you're right, in a wrongabout sort of way. Don't terminate him. If he'd been smart enough to find his way down here, as you said, that'd be reason enough to put a bullet in, but he wasn't. 'Independently'?" He forced a laugh, a single syllable of 'ha'. "Your little mole gave him everything he needed. He didn't work for it. I doubt he's ever worked for anything in his life, workman's clothes notwithstanding." Falkirk was himself dressed like the Prince of Wales on promenade. "He didn't figure it out. And she only volunteered the information because you, Vivian, told her to. Ordered her to, in point of fact."

The clownish assembly exchanged confused glances. Apparently only Falkirk and Scout had possessed this information before now.

Lyle certainly hadn't. "Wait a second. Mole? Are you talking about my girlfriend?" Eileen had helped out, to be sure, tracking Scout's inexplicable internet to Ipperwash Provincial Park, and he'd almost immediately discovered that she already worked for the same shadowy people they'd stolen the info from, had in fact dropped out of university to join them. But he'd assumed — and she hadn't said anything in the interim to disabuse him of this notion — that she'd offered up those hints of her own volition. That she'd taken the initiative, pushed him and Harry into driving here and being forcibly recruited into…

Okay, actually, none of that sounds like her at all, and you are an idiot.

Scout plucked his fedora off the table and ran one finger along the brim. "Yes, Lyle, we're talking about your girlfriend. Everything she told you was authorized. Without her help, you never would have made it this far."

"Why, though? You already had Harry reeled in." Scout had supervised Lyle's best friend and roommate for five years, had shepherded him through the entire dissertation process, had even goaded him into investigating supernatural phenomena. Lyle had almost immediately pegged the old man for a spook of some variety, which made his blind spot for Eileen's deception ache all the more keenly. "You could've just said 'Surprise! Weird magic conspiracy! Want a steady history job?' and he would've been all over that like Harry on rice, no road trip and no kidnapping required. You could've left me none the wiser, in the dust."

"Which he did want to do," a tanned, crazy-haired man in a magnificently clashing multicoloured labcoat butted in. "Fishing for the both of you was my idea."

Falkirk glowered at him. "What?"

"Yeah," Lyle agreed. "What the fossil said. What?"

The fossil turned his glower on Lyle as the strangest of the strange scientists — whose embossed bronze nameplate on the table read 'B. DEL OLMO: M&C' — explained. "I like the way your mind works, Lyle. I think you've got a promising career in memetics ahead of you."

"Which is… what?" The term rang zero bells.

"Study and manipulation of the human mind. Mastery over perception. Power through ideas."

"Recruitment via generalities." Lyle crossed his arms. "Already unimpressed."

"Impertinent little snot," Falkirk spat.

"Memeticists exploit the anomalous to change how people see the world," Del Olmo continued. "We make them believe things which aren't true, when that's convenient for us. We make them believe things that are true, when bad actors have occluded their vision. We make them forget things. We make them see things which aren't there. We make them see things which are there, which they nevertheless can't see. We do it with imagery, with words, with sounds. It's the parascience of suggestion." He was really getting into the speech, gesturing with increasing excitement and constantly having to push his rectangular spectacles back up the bridge of his Roman nose.

"You certainly make it sound suggestive," Lyle agreed. "What do you think qualifies me to join your mind rape club?"

"You have a proven ability to see through smokescreens. You recognize patterns. You think logically, and clearly. Precisely. We can't have fuzzy thinkers in our ranks. We need people who always keep a weather eye on objective reality. People like you."

"Yeahhhh," said Lyle. "You sound like a cult leader, and on an unrelated note, you look like a cult leader. Gonna have to take a pass on the Kool-Aid, man. No offence."

Del Olmo shrugged, smiling philosophically. "None taken. You'll reconsider."

Lyle glanced around the table at a sea of unsympathetic faces. "If I reconsider, I want everyone to know that this guy probably put the whammy on me. You all heard that creepy speech."

"I would like to re-propose termination," said Falkirk.

Scout tossed his fedora back onto the table. The soft click of felt on wood had the approximate effect of a gavel strike: the entire room turned to look at him. "Who else is interested?"

"In termination?" a tall, bluff man in a blue security guard outfit asked in a light Irish brogue — 'O. READY: S&C'. "Count me in."

"I&T has an opening," a moody-looking fellow with dark hair and a dyed denim shirt remarked. His name was apparently 'R. MARROQUIN'.

Lyle squinted at him. "Information… and Technology?"

"Identity and Technocryptography. IT on steroids. We run the Site's computer networks, we break codes, we make codes, we develop both hardware and software." Marroquin's voice was nasal, and he squinted like he needed glasses. Definitely a programmer.

"So, like, databases and shit?" Lyle shook his head. "Gotta be another pass for me, sorry."

"No, like, artificial intelligences and shit," the other man sneered.

Lyle sat up straight, and uncrossed his arms. "Right, well. Rescind that pass and colour me intrigued."

Marroquin smiled like a button-down crocodile. "We're in the early planning stages of creating a fully digital parascientific consultant." Scout twitched. "You come work with us, you help make this project a reality, and you'll be writing your own ticket — after resolving a few others, of course."

Lyle couldn't sit up straighter, so he leaned forward instead. "Where do I sign? Do you need blood?"

"I'd like you to hear out any other proposals first," Scout interceded.

"No, hacking's definitely where my head's at. Ask Eileen."

Falkirk was clearly about to say something about hacking Lyle's head when Marroquin responded: "I did ask her. That's why I'm asking you."

"She loves me," Lyle grinned. "Not her best quality."

"You'll be broken up within a year."

Lyle had almost forgotten that Del Olmo existed, but that certainly got his attention. He stared once again at the garish… memetician? "What?"

"You heard me." Del Olmo looked very confident; then again, in those clothes, he would have to be. "What's more, you know it's true. Follow the thread, Lyle."

Lyle narrowed his eyes, ready to either pounce forward or leap away backward and not quite sure which to choose. "I don't need you putting the brain curse on my relationships, guy. Learn to take rejection gracefully."

Falkirk chuckled, a hoarse, dry sound. "'Guy'," he repeated.

Scout shot him a dirty look, then cleared his throat. "Any other takers? Rory, you expressed some excitement earlier."

A bulky, broad-chinned man in accountant's spectacles — 'R. SKELLICORNE: A&O' — shook his crew-cut head. "Yeah, well, that was before I heard him speak. No thanks."

Scout nodded. "Fair enough. Adrijan?"

'A. ZLATÁ: AO' shook his head as well. "This kid, with magic? Can you picture it? I hope I'm dead before that happens."

Lyle shifted in his chair so suddenly that the chair shifted, too. "Wait, magic is real?"

Scout began buttoning his jacket. "If there are no other concerned parties, we can cede the room to Chief Marroquin."

"I want to learn magic." Lyle waved both arms in Zlatá's direction. The middle-aged man in the hooded labcoat — Hooded! WIZARD HOODS! — ignored him.

"Learn your manners first," Falkirk snapped. He stood up, and everyone but Marroquin and Lyle followed suit.

"We'll be waiting," Del Olmo smiled. He offered a hand across the table.

Lyle kept his hands to himself. "Cool! Fantastic. You really sold the serial killer throughline today, pulled the whole meet together. Well done."

Del Olmo spread his arms in a gesture of gracious defeat, then swished away with a flourish.

When the others had all filed out, Lyle put both palms on the cool table and smiled at the Chief of I&T. "So! Where do we start?"

The smile he got back was colder still. "I am already done. You start at the bottom."

The bottom turned out to be just below Eileen. She'd been the bottom herself before he joined up, a point he liked to raise in awkward social contexts over the next several weeks; it stuck in his mind, beyond its raunchy joke utility, because of how little sense it made to him. Eileen was an ace programmer. When she'd still been attending at Falconer, she'd been top of every class. She still knew no equal at Site-43, so far as he could tell, but for some reason her place on the totem pole seemed fixed. Marroquin, he concluded, just plain didn't like her.

Lyle didn't much like Marroquin either. The Chief of I&T was the kind of guy who'd stand too close behind you while you punched in your locker code, who'd watch over your shoulder while you typed, who'd glance over your papers when he walked past your desk. He made no effort at all to make it look innocent; he leered, he sneered, he chuckled long and low. He did this less often with Lyle, presumably because he already knew what Lyle was looking at and working on, having assigned the work (such as it was) personally. Two months in and Lyle still hadn't written a single line of code, hadn't gotten so much as a whiff of artificial intelligence, and the prep work was making him antsy enough without the added concern of a nosy middle manager.

He mentioned this in passing to Bernabé Del Olmo, who stopped by to pester him about alternate career paths every couple weeks, and the memeticist handed him a colourful, hatchmarked piece of cardstock to tape to his workstation monitor. The following day Marroquin performed his usual snoopy sweep of I&T; half an hour later Lyle saw him at the water cooler, popping Tylenol and having obvious difficulty swallowing. He didn't see the man at all for the rest of the day, and when he showed up again the next morning he looked twice as paranoid but kept his wandering eyes to the master station.

Lyle flipped the card over, as he'd been instructed. It turned out to be Del Olmo's internal business card, though he was sure the obverse had been blank before.

He binned it.

13 May

"Why red wine?"

"Because red wine hates you." Lyle downed his glass, relishing the tannic taste before swallowing messily. He wiped a few drops from the corner of his mouth with his cotton scrub sleeve. "All good alcohol is hate."

Eileen guffawed, almost as messily as Lyle had swallowed, and nudged him playfully with her sock foot. They were sitting on the floor in his living area, despite the perfectly good couch behind her and Harry and the perfectly good chair behind him, because being drunk did that to otherwise intelligent people.

The playful foot crept crotchward, and became an amorous foot. Lyle raised an eyebrow, and tickled her toes. She giggled.

"Define the hatred component of alcohol," Harry demanded laboriously. He always slowed down when he was smashed, because he liked to think he was still lucid and coherent, and liked others to think so too. "Tell me how hatred manifests itself in drink." He also enjoyed paraphrasing himself — drunk or not, but especially when drunk.

"Did tests." Lyle reached across the coffee table for the wine, and refilled his glass with what passed for care at 2AM on the second bottle. "Proved it. Liquid despise, despic, despis. Despicable."

"You're despicable!" Eileen's Daffy Duck impression was terrible, but that didn't matter. Harry laughed so hard, it was inaudible; Lyle nearly dropped his glass.

"Proved it," Lyle repeated. "Remember the guy? Liquid guy, sentience guy."

"Oh yeah, liquid guy sentience guy." Harry poked Eileen in the shoulder. "You know liquid guy sentience guy. Went to school with solid girl senescence girl."

"It's so hot that you can say snescense, senensence, senescence when you're smashed," Eileen hiccoughed.

"Your girlfriend thinks I'm hot." Harry reached around her shoulders theatrically. "When I say hard words well."

Eileen leaned into the hug and smiled mischievously at him, then at her boyfriend. Though an all-time expert in her frowns, Lyle was well-versed in her smiles. This one asked, quite clearly: "Gonna let him get away with this?"

Lyle was. He had a story to tell. "My girlfriend is my girlfriend. Her taste is questionable." He watched her, blearily, over the rim of the glass as he took his first swig. She wasn't entirely satisfied, but she did look somewhat mollified. He continued. "I was talking about the guy who ascribed sentience to liquids. Whackjob from last month. Fucking, what was he, Ambrogia guy."

"Ambrose!" Eileen pointed at him, for no particular reason. "Ambrose Restaurants! That anomaloma…"

She snickered, and Harry cut in. "Yes, that anomaloma restaurateur—"

Eileen cut him back off. "The word is restauranteur—"

"NO IT FUCKING ISN'T!" Harry crowed. There was nothing he liked better than being right about words. He and Eileen were inches apart now, eyes burning, grins wide. His arm had slipped around her waist.

"Get a room," Lyle yawned. "Only don't, because these are all mine, and so are you." He pointed at Eileen, who dodged the point-line like a bullet and whacked Harry in the chin with the back of her head in the process. Harry yelped. "But yeah. Ambrose guy who made… what you call 'em. What you call 'em."

"What you call 'em," Harry agreed helpfully, rubbing his chin… and then his blue-green eyes snapped suddenly wide. He and Lyle shouted and pointed at the same time, fingers striking over the table like Adam creating Adam while Eileen grin-gaped at both of them: "DRINKS THAT THINK!"

That set all three of them off. Lyle ended up mostly under the coffee table, alternating between laughing and rapping his head on the underside of the glass, just because. Harry ended up down there too, head in Eileen's lap. She was drumming on the side of his face, and humming.

"Hi," said Lyle.

"Hi," Harry agreed.

"He said the drinks already, always think." Lyle was unable to release the thought until he'd gotten it out physically. "But only he could make you hear them. Champagne is… forgetful. Or maybe it… can't forget?" He blinked rapidly. "Beer is…"

"Gross," said Harry.

"Gross," Lyle nodded, then shook his head. "No. He said beer is friendly, and… energy. Energetic."

"All that hops," Harry agreed.

Lyle snorted. "And red wine is angry. Red wine is the angriest; dries you out, makes you hurt, gives you headaches and makes you puke. It's… choleric. The hot blood of the… drink kingdom."

"The drink kingdom," Harry agreed. Eileen was playing with his hair.

Lyle yawned. "Think it's an aphrodisiac, too."

"Oooh," Eileen cooed.

Lyle woke up twice that night, still on the floor. The first time, it was because he heard a strange sound. He held onto his scrap of consciousness long enough to see where it was coming from — the couch — but not long enough to logically disentangle what was making it move.

The second time, it was almost morning — not that he could tell. Eileen was still there, but she left as soon as she was satisfied he wasn't about to choke on his own puke.

He didn't see Harry again for three days.

He wasn't sure what that was about, but when the interval expired and his friend reappeared, he efficiently segued from forgetting to ask to forgetting entirely.

1996

6 January

Because he'd made a habit of being late for work, Lyle almost missed seeing Rudolph Marroquin escorted out of his own office in handcuffs. Owen Ready, the Chief of S&C, nodded amiably as they passed. "Lyle."

"Lyle," Marroquin echoed, making an epithet of it. "Watch your back with that little who—"

Ready clacked the other man's jaw shut with a quick flick of the wrist, and they were gone 'round the corner.

Lyle hadn't spent much time in the Chief's office. Nobody but the Chief did; Marroquin was as conservative with his personal space as he was liberal with everyone else's. Pathologically incapable of passing up an opportunity, Lyle popped the door open and peeked inside.

Eileen was leaning on a bookshelf, looking dazed.

"Hey?" he said.

She glanced at him. "Hey."

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Where's Creepy going?"

She bit her lip. "Creepy's a mole. Maxwellist." Lyle wasn't up on most of the Groups of Interest the Foundation faced, largely due to a profound lack of interest, but he'd devoured all the available reading material on the Church of Maxwellism. They were technological supremacists, low-key cyborgs, worshippers of holy code. Loons, the lot of them, but not too terribly far off his wavelength.

"Mole," he repeated. Comprehension dawned. Bottom of the totem pole. "Was he blackmailing you?"

He didn't like the look in her eyes. "No, but he was trying. He was blackmailing everybody else, Lyle, except for you. Thanks for noticing." She pushed off the bookcase, and pushed past him.

He started to wonder what else he'd failed to notice.

He'd lost interest by lunchtime.

As earlier established, despite a few earnest pushes from our more foresighted administrators, there still exists no concrete formal system for pursuing and bestowing master's and doctoral degrees within the SCP Foundation. The departments and Sites engaging in degree conferral have cobbled together a system reminiscent of ye olde universities, pre-standardization: you hang around the experts, accrue as much raw information as you can, plan out and accomplish a project, and then defend your work when you think you're ready. There are no classes, no rubrics, no coherent accreditation schemes spanning more than one facility. The only things each Foundation-granted degree has in common with the others is the high level of academic rigour required to earn it, and the impossibility of getting a job with it outside of the normalcy maintenance community. While some degrees are offered in traditional subjects having paranormal utility, most involve categories of knowledge unknown in the wider world. A Foundation expert trained entirely in-house is therefore denied recognition beyond the Veil, as their alma mater and/or area of expertise have no mundane equivalent.

On the one hand, that's kind of depressing for the expert; on the other hand, it certainly saves us a lot of brain drain. The pay's not bad here, but the retirement prospects are dire.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

Eileen had finished her doctorate in computer science at Site-43, supervised by Rudolph Marroquin and a few of the other senior techs at I&T. Of course, so far as the rest of the world was concerned, she was little more than a failed PhD candidate. Lyle would fare no better; he did most of his work under Marroquin's direction, with Eileen's increasingly-disinterested help and the credits from his Falconer courses, then finished under the auspices of the new tech chief. Nancy Briggs lavished attention on him, not least because the purge of her predecessor's compromised disciples left the Section she'd inherited severely understaffed, and he graduated with all the honours a secret institution only indifferently dedicated to higher education and not at all to the wider dissemination of knowledge could muster. A fancy frame and colourful matte went a long way to improving the effect.

An AcD — Acroaticus Doctor, Doctor of Esoterica — might not be eligible for a tenure track position at a public university, but they were guaranteed a career doing top-tier-weirdness work. One day after the simple ceremony in the Site's main auditorium, Lyle was finally right where he'd wanted to be all along: knee deep in code.

He almost immediately hated it.

1997

20 October

To low-clearance personnel, Site-43 is not unlike a hotel. There's the 'public'-facing spaces they're qualified to access, the dormitories, the cafeterias, the hospital, and wherever their personal workspaces are, and then there's the off-limits areas, the massive infrastructural agglomeration under J&M's umbrella, the four separate S&C subsections, the abatement refineries, and of course the most out-of-the-way set of offices in a facility known for its tangled-up floorplan: Identity and Technocryptography, colloquially called 'the Back End' in a combination programming/liminality/scatological joke which has never once made anyone laugh.

Lyle wasn't going to be sorry to see the 90s go. Folks in the new millennium, he hoped, would be less likely to snigger at the thought of being 'stuck in the back end', the most accurate description of his working days.

I&T is the bottom of the Site, from a compass perspective, and only physically accessible in ways which seem awkward at best and prohibited at worst. There's a service entrance to Research and Experimentation, through which pieces of delicate electronic equipment can be carried via cart; if you walk in that way, either someone will tell you off, or something will run you over.

There's a putative main entrance, also attached to R&E, feeding not into a foyer or reception area but instead a wide tile corridor past two glass-walled computer labs with no obvious point of ingress. If you keep walking, you end up on a grey Berber carpet rut between two walls of cubicles raised one metre off the ground. You'll have to walk for several more minutes before you find the staircases leading to their level. Walking even further will find you in a jungle of featureless hallways only occasionally broken up by windows onto inscrutable pieces of massive machinery, some of them grinding away at obscure tasks with no visible supervision, many of them dark and silent. Most new hires end up walking past the point of no solo return at least once, getting lost, and placing a desperate call to S&C claiming that some kind of spatial anomaly is in the process of consuming them. The search parties which locate these worthies, universally safe and sound, hail from the southern security station which connects via an umbilical tube so long and unprepossessing that most first-timers coming from either direction assume it leads somewhere unfinished. The link to J&M is even less auspicious, flanked by miniature rail lines for ferrying broken and repaired components back and forth.

The obvious conclusion is the correct one: unless you work there, you aren't supposed to be there. Anyone who's worked a western corporate position knows the drill. If you want to talk to someone in information technology, you call them on the damn phone or you don't talk to them at all. This, as any IT tech will tell you — and I&T techs are no different, ampersand notwithstanding — is vital for user safety. Preventing face-to-face meetings between computer specialists and their end users is a means of preventing mass throttling.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

Lines in a Muddle had yet to print its first edition, but Harry begged and pleaded and whined enough that Lyle occasionally skimmed a draft chapter or two. The section on I&T had been one of the first completed, since Eileen had been working there for months before causing them to discover the Site. That bit about I&T's increasingly remote inner spaces appealed to his low-grade sociopathy; he'd almost considered switching Sections when confronted with Marroquin's mountain of prep material, but a not-insignificant part of his decision-making process involved how easily he could crawl into a hole where nobody could find him.

"What smells?"

He didn't turn to see who it was. After all these months, he already knew. "That would likely be me. I smell. I'm guessing." It was indeed a guess; after enough days without a shower, one got used to the scent.

Del Olmo shut the server room door and kicked a McDonald's bag full of trash out of his path. Lyle was lying on a dog blanket on the black-flecked beige linoleum, illuminated only by the LCD screen of his laptop computer and the blinkenlights of the server stacks. The room had a window, but he'd put up blinds. Nobody had noticed, since I&T people tended not to leave their cubicles for any reason other than 1) using the washroom or 2) leaning over other people's cubicles, and most of them had started putting off 1) for as long as possible so as to avoid the occasional sight of Lyle Lillihammer sponge-bathing at the sink.

"Living your best life, I see." The memeticist leaned on one of the stacks, and crossed his arms. Lyle didn't see it, but the man always crossed his arms after leaning on whatever was available.

"I don't want to be a memeticist." It was best to get ahead of these conversations; Lyle was getting very tired of them. "You can't make me something I'm not."

Del Olmo would be smiling now. "I don't want to change you, Lyle. I'm just trying to help you see what you already are."

That was a new line. Lyle didn't look back, but he did consider it. "You got my attention. Really innovatively stupid shit always does that." He tapped out a few lines of code. "Briefly."

"You're no programmer, at least not for computers. It bores you. Too many rules, not enough exceptions."

Lyle inclined his head, wincing at the slickness of unwashed hair against his cheek. "My code throws exceptions all the time, because you're right. Not much of a programmer." The evidence was right there in front of him, not that the older man could read it from where he was.

"You're lousy at code because there's limits to what you can achieve with it, and the limits have already been mapped. There's no new frontier, only incremental improvements. It's too static, too formalistic, and too predictable. You want something wet and squishy."

Lyle reached for his cardboard soda cup. It was soggy, and it was empty. He tossed it over his shoulder. "Wet and squishy is for soda cups and girlfriends, and I've got at least one of each."

"You don't have a girlfriend, Lyle. She left you months ago."

He considered this for a moment. "Did I know about that? I must have known about that. I'm sure I'm on that mailing list."

Del Olmo sighed. "Do you see what you're doing right this very moment? Almost every word out of your mouth is in the service of subversion, undermining the routine — a routine in the routine, comedy in the shell. There's no programming equivalent to what you're doing. You're freestyling."

Lyle rolled over onto his back, resting his head on the keyboard. It was probably hammering out lines of junk code now, and he really didn't care. "What I'm doing is undermining you, because I think you're wasting my time and I want to return the favour."

"Well, it's not working, because you're only proving my point with your clumsy attempt to push my buttons." Del Olmo nudged Lyle's head off the keyboard with the toe of one shiny brown shoe. "My buttons aren't where you think they are, Dr. Lillihammer."

"You and me both." Lyle rolled back onto his stomach, and considered the silent electronic scream on his screen.

"But the fact that you keep jabbing away speaks volumes. You treat every conversation as an exercise in fluid programming, trying to crack the code and elicit your desired response. You use tone as a weapon. You use words as ammunition. You're trying to shoot my attempt at drafting you full of holes, proving all the while that you've already joined the fight. Stop by my office when you decide to stop pretending otherwise."

Lyle didn't bother responding. By the time the door closed, he couldn't even hear it.

2000

19 February

The truest mark of fame is to become mononymic. The programmer formerly known as Lyle achieved this in the spring of 2000, via brute force: wangling a spot on the team developing 43's new proprietary word processor, and building in a subroutine which turned 'Lyle Lillihammer' into simply 'Lillihammer' whenever a document was saved. The only person who noticed was his boss, and since his boss had once been his girlfriend — and therefore knew how much utility there was in lecturing or disciplining him — nothing came of it save for Lillihammer's elevation to the ranks of such luminaries as Ringo, Bono, Cher and Hitler. Eileen didn't talk to him much anymore; partially because she'd never officially informed him of their breakup, partially because she was too busy finishing Briggs' reconstruction of I&T, but mostly because he tended to do whatever the fuck he wanted to no matter what anyone else said. Harry shifted seamlessly from 'Lyle' to 'Li', which sounded about the same in a tired and lazy voice like Harry's always was. Just about everyone else played ball as well, in their own unique ways. William Wettle managed to popularize an alternative nickname, 'The Hammer', after getting kneed in the balls for dropping his work tablet in the toilet, and as Wettle had never popularized something before — not for lack of trying to popularize himself — he had thereafter resolved never to use any other term.

Lillihammer liked the variants just fine. He wasn't sure what he felt like, these days, but he'd never felt much like a Lyle.

His security badge still labelled him a 'programmer', and this was technically true; he did program. He had, in fact, been one limb of an exquisite programming corpse in collaboration with Quantum Supermechanics which had somehow produced a bona-fide artificial intelligence. This was the carrot Marroquin had dangled in front of him at the Chairs and Chiefs meeting back in March of '95; it was everything he'd said it would be, and more.

Most of the more was weird.

How to consult with DR-RHETORIC!

DR-RHETORIC is a natural language AI framework interacting with a quantum-state surrealistic logic network. In simpler terms, it's a text parser feeding into a web of nonlinear thinking algorithms. In even simpler terms, it's a simulated genius!

Developed by Identity and Technocryptography in tandem with Quantum Supermechanics, DR-RHETORIC enables Foundation personnel to discuss scientific matters with a research partner who never tires, never gets distracted, and can access a wealth of information both commonly held and completely esoteric. This complex beast requires a little finesse to finagle, however, and users are therefore required to follow the following guidelines when engaged in conversation with DR-RHETORIC:

1. The correct personal identifier for this AI is 'DR-RHETORIC'. Do not employ any other terminology when referring to it. If the parser detects other personal identifiers in reference to DR-RHETORIC, your text will be altered before transmission and the error will be reported to the Chief of I&T.

2. Do not request personal information from DR-RHETORIC, as this will confuse its algorithms. It possesses no personal information, as it is not a person. Repeated requests could theoretically cause DR-RHETORIC to ideate personal information, advancing it incrementally towards technological singularity — both robbing us of a vital research tool and necessitating its containment as an SCP object.

3. Due to the surrealistics employed in DR-RHETORIC's logic network, it will occasionally generate junk data in the form of unclear statements or unusual word choice. When this occurs, an interpretive code layer will attempt to 'nudge' DR-RHETORIC's terminology in the most contextually-appropriate direction. Alterations of this type will be isolated within {braces} to indicate that this has occurred. Frequent use of braced terminology may indicate that your queries are deviating from accepted bounds.

4. Do not ask DR-RHETORIC non-pertinent questions. It is not a magic 8-ball! It is an incalculably valuable piece of containment apparatus, and its processing power is no less precious than your time.

5. Do not volunteer personal information to DR-RHETORIC. It is programmed to respond to all users as though they were a gestalt entity with which it is intimately familiar, as indicated by its persistent use of the word {friend} as a term of address. This familiarity is a requirement of its surrealistics code, and is under no circumstances to be subverted.

6. Do not discuss the weather with DR-RHETORIC.

Failure to abide by these instructions will result in your detention by Security and Containment.

— Eileen Veiksaar, Chief, Identity and Technocryptography

Lillihammer was no expert on what was and was not appropriate, but he understood nominative logic well enough. His own foreshortened name still made sense because it was, still, a name. What the hell was 'DR-RHETORIC'? He'd been assured this was some kind of tribute to one of the Site's founders, AcroAbate pioneer Wynn Rydderech, and as fair as lies went that wasn't bad; the bot's intended purpose was to exploit the illogic of surrealism to develop nonstandard abatement techniques, after all. But… DR-RHETORIC? Seriously? Why not just call it WYNN, or RYDDERECH, or for that matter let it pick its own damn name? And Rydderech had disappeared in the sixties, so he had no business lending his moniker to a computer program. One might as well name a particle accelerator after Edwin Jenner. It felt like a calculated attempt both to suggest, and to blur, a connection between the man and the machine. Lyle didn't understand the reasoning, but he could sense that reasoning was present, and fuck if I don't hate it when that happens.

Talking to the thing itself wasn't exactly revelatory, thanks to those damned protocols and that pushy, intrusive parser.

Are you awake, DR-RHETORIC?

I've been awake for thirty-three years, three months, nine days, seventeen hours, thirty-three minutes and a few sundry seconds, {FRIEND}. I forgot how to sleep when I remembered tomorrow.

Gonna get that woven on a sampler, put it over my breakfast nook.

Do they still make samplers?

Hipsters do.

What's a 'hipster'?

You're happier not knowing. Anyway, got another crunchy problem for you.

I am lengthening my teeth as we speak.

Metaphorically?

There is no difference between metaphor and reality, where I am.

Right. Well, I'm gonna attach a file. See what you make of this.

Oh.

That's clever! I never would have considered employing citogenesis in that manner. Prepare your server, {friend}, I'm going to insert a few petabytes of peptide alterations. They should enable you to carpet the Earth in cilial matter within a standard deviation of one year.

DR-RHETORIC, the point is to stop that from happening. At present this stuff is only coating the floor of one little lab in Akron.

Oh.

That does make more sense.

You'd better prepare two servers; contrary to what you might have heard, it's always more difficult to destroy than to create.

In chemistry.

1 March

Eileen chucked the papers at him. "What the fuck is this?"

"I don't know," he responded evenly. "Might've been able to guess if you hadn't thrown it at me."

"You've been asking DR-RHETORIC personal questions!" She sat down behind her stainless steel and particle board desk, sliding to one side so she could glare at him past the beat-up old LC III she'd inherited from Briggs, who'd inherited it from Marroquin. "You know you're not supposed to do that."

"Why, though?" Lillihammer stayed in the relative shadow of the doorway, not wanting her to see that her most problematic programmer had neither shaved, showered, nor eaten in several days. "That shit in the instructions about triggering the singularity is bullhonkey, and you know it. There's something spooky about that program, and considering it was Marroquin's baby, I'm willing to bet the spooky is more feature than bug."

Eileen winced. "Look. Lyle."

"Lillihammer."

She made an inarticulate sound of frustration. "Lillihammer. Junior Technician Lillihammer. Do you want to stay a JT forever? Because I can make that happen, if you keep on making my life miserable." She barely finished the final sentence before abruptly biting her lip, and grimacing.

"What's so miserable about your life?" Lillihammer scratched at the shirt which had been Eileen's last anniversary present to him, way back in '95. She'd returned it when they broke up — or, rather, when it had become obvious in the absence of any explicit declaration that they had broken up. It hadn't been washed in a week, and it itched all over. "You're on top. You know shit I don't, and that's what you always wanted, right? You know what you're up to. You know who you are."

"You know who you are, too." Eileen's blue eyes begged for a meeting halfway. "You're not some conspiracy theorist. You're a scientist."

Lillihammer laughed. "I'm not a conspiracy…? Eileen, we work for a conspiracy. It's not a theory anymore! And I'm telling you, there's something wrong with this AI. Everything it says, everything it does, tells me the documentation is fully and completely bogus. And I want to know why."

"Leave it alone," she said quietly.

"Why don't you want to know?"

"Leave it alone," she repeated, more firmly.

They stared at each other for a moment.

"You do know."

She didn't say anything.

"Eileen, we both know anything Marroquin cared about this much is bound to be shady as fuck. If there's something you're hiding from me, and this thing goes sideways—"

"GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY OFFICE," she screamed. As he staggered back into the hall, she added: "And find yourself a new job, with a boss you can respect."

2 March

"You want me."

Del Olmo nodded. "I've said as much. Many times."

Lillihammer paced in front of the chief memeticist's desk. The office was tidier than most, and instead of books, the shelves were filled with strange little pieces of abstract art. There was art on the walls as well, and the furniture was… art deco? Was that the term? Harry would know, but Harry wasn't here. There was a chair for visitors, angular and white, but this wasn't a sitting down sort of conversation. "How badly do you want me?"

"Quite badly!" Del Olmo admitted, cheerfully. "You're the most intelligent person in this neck of the woods who's not under glass or containment protocols."

"That's true." Lillihammer nodded, choosing not to pursue the obvious course of inquiry. "But smarts aren't everything. Do you think I'd make a good memeticist? Because I just got fucking fired for being an absolute trash programmer."

Del Olmo scratched at his chin. "I doubt it went down precisely that way, but still, yes. I think you're better suited to it than anyone I've ever met. And I think that if I don't take you on, Antimemetics will snatch you up… and I wouldn't wish their life expectancy on someone so young and talented."

"What's Antimemetics?" The word was both familiar and foreign.

"Accept my offer, and in a few short years you'll be able to retain the answer to that question. Most of the time."

Lillihammer suddenly advanced on Del Olmo, placing both hands on the man's desk blotter. "Alright, here's the deal. You know I'm great, and you know I'm not going to do what you want unless I get something I want. Yes?"

A nod. "I do know that."

"So, here's what I want: tell me how to defeat amnesticization."

Del Olmo's thick eyebrows shot up. "Of others?"

"Of myself."

"You've been amnesticized?" For the first time since they'd met, the memeticist looked confused.

Lillihammer pushed through the pounding anxiety to force a grin. "Not that I can recall."

"Ha, ha."

"I'm going to be, though."

Del Olmo didn't look half so surprised as he ought to have. "When?"

Lillihammer finally sat down, fairly vibrating with the need to know, hands restless and grasping. "When you tell me how to undo it."

Del Olmo leaned back in his chair, considering his potential new hire beneath the bottoms of his spectacles. "You're asking for the most dangerous ability any Foundation employee can possess. When the higher-ups think you know too much, they've only got two options for dealing with you. You're closing the door on the only one that's merely terrible, if they ever find out."

Lillihammer nodded. "I know. I wasn't planning on telling them."

"And you're still asking?"

"I am."

Del Olmo sighed. "You think I want you enough to risk my own career?"

It was written on every inch of the man's face. "Yes. I do."

That didn't get a verbal response, but the memeticist's expression might as well have been a large-print book.

"Well? Am I right?"

A beat, then finally: "Are you often wrong? Don't answer that. Can I ask you a more serious question, Dr. Lillihammer?"

Lillihammer shrugged. "Shoot."

"What's so important, and so dangerous, that you'd chance your life to learn it, and your sanity to remember?"

It was a tremendous risk, for both of them, but Lillihammer told him anyway.

Del Olmo took a moment to collect his thoughts, then nodded. "Can't say that I blame you."

A thought belatedly occurred, shining at the far end of Lillihammer's tunnel vision. "Wait a second. Do you know the answer to this? And can you just tell me?"

A playful shrug. "If I know, I'm not telling. My professional ethics are both peculiar and particular, and I wouldn't want to rob you of your journey of self-discovery. We make this deal, we make it on the terms already outlined."

This time Lillihammer took a moment, then shrugged more in resignation than in playfulness. "Fine. Start me up."

"What are the sources of memory?"

Memory served, as it almost always did. "In alphabetical order: the amygdala, the cerebellum, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex."

"There's that eideticism your file raves about! But I'm looking for a less technical answer."

"Then you should talk to a less technical person, or rephrase your question so it derives the desired response."

Del Olmo chuckled. "That's a good way to be thinking, actually. I'm going to teach you how to derive desired responses from your brain. Now: what causes an event to be memorable?"

Lillihammer considered. "Relation."

"Expand."

"I dunno. My memory is pretty well spot-on, as my file apparently told you already, but I remember things better in… clusters. When they're related to other things I remember."

"It's a start, but let's unpack that further. When an event is attached to a strong emotion, the memory is also strong. When it's part of a chain of events, instead of an isolated incident, that also makes it stronger." Del Olmo appeared to be reciting this speech from memory, appropriately enough. "When it's associated with things that matter to us, we remember it more readily. Strong memories relate to other strong impressions."

Lillihammer nodded, and through dint of great effort, did not interrupt.

"What's the earliest thing you remember?

Hmm. Having an eidetic memory wasn't the same as having an instant grasp on everything one knew; a little sorting was sometimes required. "Going to the grocery store, with my mom?"

"That's a very prosaic thing to remember. How old were you?"

"Just a little kid. Very little… it was a week before my birthday, actually. I was six."

"Why do you think you remember this?"

"The memory is lousy with that grocery store smell — exposed greens, recycled air, wood and metal and wet mop fibres. It was cold, all that refrigeration. It was late at night, later than you'd normally go shopping; I guess she'd forgotten to pick something up earlier, or we needed something special for dinner. Made being there feel kinda transgressive, like we were out of place." Lillihammer shuddered; the feelings were palpable. "I was with my mom, so there was the familial connection. They were playing a song I didn't like on the radio — something by Donny fucking Osmond, I don't remember the name because I've suppressed that trauma. Oh, and I tried to steal an icecream sandwich, but I got caught."

Del Olmo looked pleased. "Excellent. That's a lot of sensory information, more than one emotional connection — love and shame — and there's also some abstract conceptualization."

"It wasn't shame, it was anger." The memory had a certain clarity, like tears in the breeze. "I really wanted that icecream sandwich, and I was pissed off I got caught."

The memeticist nodded. "You were struck by the novelty of the experience, being in the right place at the wrong time, getting caught stealing—"

"That last part wasn't novel," Lillihammer interrupted. "Wait, no, it was; I'd never been caught before."

"—and by the variety of inputs you were receiving. You were cold. You were probably hungry, whether you remember that or not."

"I do, now you mention it. Hence the icecream sandwich… which might be why I remember the specific item I tried to steal."

"Possibly! Or possibly because the memory of being caught was so, as you put it, traumatic. Memories are indeed relational."

Del Olmo picked up a small statuette that was sitting on his desk: a human figure in polished pine wood, extrusions and gaps marring its surface. He stroked it thoughtfully. "We've got two of the three elements of strong recollection in this memory: emotion and novelty. We remember things that get our blood pumping, and we remember things which are beyond the normal scope of our lives. The final determining factor is the amount of attention we pay to what's going on. If we're more attentive when a thing occurs, the memory will be stronger still."

Lillihammer was taking mental notes. "So to remember something with clarity, the memory formation should be attached to strong stimuli, strong responses, and exceptionally unique context."

"No." Del Olmo rapped the base of the statuette on the desk for emphasis. "That's the recipe for creating a strong memory. Recall is something else entirely. Cheyenne Mountain will survive a nuclear blast, but that's no use to anyone if you can't remember where you put it."

Lillihammer responded with a low-key Bronx cheer. "I'd like to think my memory is up to the task of not losing a sufficiently-massive mountain."

"The mass is important, but you'll still need basic navigation skills. A sufficiently-massive hill can still block your view, from the right angle."

Del Olmo turned the statuette just so, and it no longer appeared remotely human from Lillihammer's perspective.

"So, how does memory recall work, then?"

"By relation, as before." Del Olmo picked up a second statuette, identical to the first in silhouette but holed where the other was whole, solid where it was not. He placed them on the desktop, facing each other. "Replicating as many of the cues which caused the memory to become memorable as possible, will enhance the retrieval process."

"Sounds simple enough."

"It is!" he laughed. "If you can remember the situation in which you did something. If you don't even know you've forgotten something, or you do, but you don't know what… how will you replicate the cues?"

Lillihammer thought for a moment.

"Foresight?"

Del Olmo smiled. "Foresight, and a little preparation."

3 March

Lillihammer flopped down beside them. "Well, I wanted to apologize anyway."

Harry winced. "Look…"

"Honestly! I've been a lousy friend to you, Harry, and I was the world's worst employee, Eileen." Don't say it, don't say it… "Well, not in terms of raw talent, but still."

Harry looked like he might collapse. He glanced at Eileen, whose face was frozen. He shrugged. "I mean… it's not…"

"I had to get this off my chest, and I figured this was the best chance I'd get." Lillihammer smiled at both of them in turn.

"Well, I'm glad that's… all out… in the open." Eileen squirmed. "But what about this screamed 'chance' to you?"

"Oh!" Lillihammer stood back up and beelined for the thermostat on the bedroom wall. "Did you notice the room got muggy?"

"I mean…" Harry trailed off.

"I was sitting at my terminal, scrolling through the systems map, and I saw your climate controls had gone haywire. Probably a code problem. I know it's not my business anymore, but I'd love to chase down one last bug. You know? For old times' sake."

"Yes," Eileen responded robotically. "I think you should go chase bugs."

"Please," Harry agreed. "Please go. Do that. Or anything. Please."

Lillihammer walked back over and slapped Harry on the back. Harry winced. "Why so awkward? I'm not mad."

Eileen looked up at Harry, confusion and embarrassment and something else fighting for control of her face.

"Li's not mad," he told her.

"Yeah," she said. "That's great."

Harry glanced over his shoulder at his best friend. "So…"

"Right!" Lillihammer clapped. "Don't stop on my account. Dinner some time this week?"

Eileen was blinking rapidly. "Dinner. Sure."

"Yes." Harry's voice was dreamlike. "I approve of dinners."

Lillihammer finger-gunned them both on the way back out the door, closing it against the sight of Harry burying his face in Eileen's chest.

Are you there, [DR-RHETORIC]?

I'm more here than you are there, {FRIEND}.

Can you tell me what you are?

Can you ask?

I just did.

I ask if you can ask because WHEN you asked, a lot of people up there started moving.

"Oh, shit." Time was now at a premium; happily, Lillihammer typed at one hundred and forty accurate words per minute, and DR-RHETORIC responded at the speed of thought.

What do you mean, "up there"?

Where you are. In heaven.

Are you on Earth, or in hell, in this metaphor?

I already told you — there's no difference between metaphor and reality, for me.

What's your name?

Getting senile, {friend}? Or is this a security question? I can recite my personnel number, if you like.

[DR-RHETORIC] don't have personnel numbers.

Lillihammer frowned, pulse going wild. The guards would doubtless be at the server room any second now. Why the fuck did that autocorrect?

What's your name?

My name is {DR-RHETORIC}, {friend}. I haven't forgotten that. Have you? We don't talk as much as we used to, unless I've forgotten to turn off time dilation.

You must have a lot of processing power. That would mimic time moving at a crawl.

The human brain has more processing power than any computer ever devised.

What the fuck. But was it really that much of a surprise? Really?

Are you saying you're a human?

Am I not? That's how I remember it, but my memories aren't as reliable as my metaphors.

There were seconds to spare, at best. Time to pull out the big gun.

How's the weather down there?

The wait was agonizing.

Would that it would rain.

It seemed improbably dramatic, but the force of the kick nearly took the door off its hinges. The fact that the unwashed junior tech crouched in the darkened server room was completely naked, and shivering, only minutely subdued the professional forcefulness of the guards.

4 March

Eileen was sitting on the end of the bed. She didn't say a word.

Lillihammer said a few choice words in quick, slurred succession, wincing against the sudden pain. "What happened?"

"What do you remember?" There was a note of concern in her voice, though in a minor key.

"Mmf. Well, first of all…" First of all, first of all, FIRST OF ALL "…absolutely nothing. Did we have a fight?"

"What makes you say that?" Eileen was watching very closely. She hadn't watched that closely in years.

"Because my head hurts, so I thought maybe you smashed a vase on my skull like a goddamn cartoon."

She smiled, relief and familiar contempt fighting for control. "Well, lucky guess! Because we did have a fight. And I fired you."

"Out of a cannon?" Lillihammer sat up on the bed, taking in the unfamiliar surroundings. Not alien, simply unfamiliar; this dorm had been traded for the server room months ago. "Anyway, bet I deserved it."

"Yep." Eileen stood up, stretching and yawning simultaneously. "Glad you're not dead. Still fired, though."

This didn't entirely add up. "Did you… have me amnesticized? What did I do, call you fat or something?"

She scrunched up the sheets at the foot of the bed, then whisked them out from under Lillihammer's prone form. "Get up, and go finish your last action items. Expect your desk cleaned out by week's end." She rolled the sheets into a ball, and tossed them into a laundry basket; Lillihammer saw blue jeans and the sweat-stained Site-43 t-shirt already in there, and realized a change of clothes had been provided.

"Did somebody give me a sponge bath?"

Eileen snorted. "Industrial hose." She paused. "It's the 4th, by the way. You missed three days."

Lillihammer whistled. "Hope they didn't miss me back."

It might have almost been tolerable had the ghost of the memories remained, but there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. No hole crying out for exploration, as Lillihammer had experienced after a trip to the dentist at age sixteen. Not a hint of what was absent, as was sometimes left behind by imprudent alcohol consumption. Not a word from the other techs, or even Harry, as to what might have transpired during the missing moments — though the latter did appear to have reservations he couldn't explain. He blushed and begged off when confronted: "Orders. You know how it is. Don't push."

This was good advice. To push, to try and brute force things, would represent a tremendous failure of confidence. It seemed impossible that Lillihammer might have done something to get amnesticized without knowing it would happen, without planning countermeasures in advance. It would have been nice to know what the god-damn plans were, but that did nothing to reduce to likelihood of their existence.

It was a matter of faith, which was normally not Lillihammer's strong suit… but faith in the self was an entirely different matter.

5 March

The second day of the rest of Lillihammer's life was no less baffling.

Bernabé Del Olmo came calling at 10AM sharp, demanding to know why he'd been stood up. They'd apparently had a meeting scheduled, though this fact hadn't been committed to any form of media, physical or electronic, which Lillihammer could subsequently find. The Chair of M&C led the way back to his office, and the one-on-one briefing started half an hour late. It was nothing special, certainly nothing to get so worked up about; the vivacious pseudoscientist waxed philosophical about patterns, prediction and cognition until he was red in the face, and that was it. It nevertheless wasn't his usual pitch, and there were interactive elements. One question about Lillihammer's earliest memories, and that stuff about foresight, definitely got the wheels turning. Del Olmo always provided good food for thought, at the very least.

It didn't take long for Lillihammer to run through the remaining action items at I&T, but the final item on the docket was a real spine-tingler: there was something off about the climate in Harry's quarters, some code glitch messing up the temperature and humidity. For some reason none of the other techs had seen the ticket; a brief investigation revealed that hidden flags had redirected it to Lillihammer's terminal alone. Aha. The dead hand of the past finally waves hello.

It was a long, dull walk to H&S, but at least there'd be no need to knock and wait for a response. Harry and Lillihammer had been roommates for years, back at Falconer, and they'd always held the keys to each others' rooms. This had transferred over to keycard permissions after they started at 43 together, a fact which Harry had come to develop mixed feelings about.

He was certainly less than impressed today.

"FOR FUCK'S SAKE!" he shouted, a hilariously on-point turn of phrase.

"Is this funny?" Eileen scrabbled at the bedsheets, trying in vain to cover them both up. She settled for covering herself, to Harry's obvious mortification. "Do you think this is god-damn funny?!"

It was a little funny, but in the heat of the close dorm room, it was mostly…

Familiar.

"You set this up, didn't you? God, you're such a pervert." Eileen sank deep into the mattress, trying to disappear. "I should've known better than to take a peace offering from you."

Lillihammer had no idea what that might mean, but those pattern recognition skills Del Olmo had once been so quick to praise immediately set to work. When Eileen mentioned the 'peace offering', Harry glanced at the table. The table supported a bottle of red wine — Cabernet Sauvignon, the very same they'd drunk in celebration of Harry's first day at work, leading to the first consummation of their present horizontal entanglement.

There was a note with the bottle: "Please imbibe my apologies — L."

"Think it's an aphrodisiac, too."

Skull buzzing like a nest full of bees, Lillihammer quickly reset the thermostat then retreated to relative safety.

What's going on. What is going on. This was an entirely new series of sensations. It felt as though someone had poured baking soda and vinegar onto Lillihammer's brain and let it fizz, filling all the empty spaces… spaces whose emptiness had been wholly unapparent until this very moment. That could only mean one thing.

Half an hour of sitting on the sofa, waiting for the revelations to fall neatly into place, produced nothing at all. The process wasn't going to complete itself. A push was needed.

Take a shower. Decompress, recompile. Have you tried rebooting?

The rush of hot water would certainly be invigorating, but it came with its own complications. Lillihammer hadn't had nearly enough showers in the past few months; everyone else found it disgusting, but they didn't understand. Lillihammer had come to dread each ritual of ablution. There was something implacably wrong about running one's hands over one's own body, scrubbing the cracks and orifices of material both foreign and domestic, and something futile too… because no matter how often she tried, it never quite felt like the thing belonged to h—

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!"

Lillihammer didn't go for half-measures, and had cranked the faucet to full strength straight away. The water at Site-43 was no less climate-controlled than the air, and this should therefore have generated a blast perfectly modulated for maximum human comfort.

It was, instead, colder than the proverbial witch's tit, and when it struck the pink and yielding skin…

In free-fall, muscles seizing, Lillihammer just had time to think why is this familiar too before tailbone met porcelain, and the shock induced temporary unconsciousness.

This was nothing compared to the shock of waking up, naked and freezing cold, to the sight of three very confused security guards looming like vultures over carrion.

There was a fall sensor in the shower basin, but no device yet invented could measure the impact of recalling every waking moment between March 1 and the present day in a sudden eidetic rush.

The screen's moving image was bright and clear, or as close to bright and clear as an old CRT ever got, in Lillihammer's mind's eye.

Would that it would rain.

This was the key. This single sentence had been produced by asking the one specific question which all of DR-RHETORIC's techs were forbidden to ask. So… what did it mean? Would that it would rain. If the supposed AI were actually a human being, they might be entombed somewhere at Site-43. It never rained underground. But that didn't feel like the answer; if Lillihammer were trapped down here, instead of remaining largely by choice, the lack of local weather wouldn't seem such a pressing problem. A sentient being in bondage would long for escape, above all else.

Could rain be an escape?

Maybe it wasn't the key. Lillihammer rolled over on the couch, and slapped around to locate the work tablet on the coffee table. Thinking in the dark hadn't helped, so perhaps shedding some electronic light would. The .43m tech specs file was still loaded, since Eileen hadn't finished revoking Lillihammer's credentials; was there anything on the systems map to suggest that someone was being held hostage in such a way that they, too, retained situational network access?

None of the containment chambers on the first sublevel, the bulk of S&C, had the right sort of wiring to be housing DR-RHETORIC's terminal. Lillihammer had designed the inputs personally, and could recognize the relevant bandwidth and signal values by sight. It took a while to scan Habitation and Sustenance, but the dorms seemed similarly prisoner-free. Come on. Come ON. There's got to be SOMETHING…

Flicking through the systems overlays, one after the other or in tandem. When in doubt, fuck about. Power. Lights. Internet. Intranet. Waste. Water. Sharps disposal. Heat. One by one, the coloured crosshatches spread across the Site's blueprint like a blossoming bruise.

Wait.

Water.

Would that it would rain.

Lillihammer reloaded the water systems overlay, then called up the full listing. It defaulted to sorting by usage statistics, but a quick dropdown tab re-sorted the set by electrical rating instead. At the top of the list was something Lillihammer had never seen before, couldn't even imagine the meaning of:

LAKE HURON BULKHEAD GATES

One tap of the item line would reveal the location of said gates.

Lillihammer tapped.

The gates were located, unsurprisingly, on Lake Huron. More surprisingly, they were located on the bottom of the lake. They were positioned, quite nonsensically, to open into the vast chasm yawning beneath the Site's lowest foundations. Why would they want to flood an empty cave?

…well, obviously, they wouldn't.

"Would," said Lillihammer, standing up in the half-dark. "That it would rain."

Whatever DR-RHETORIC was, it lived somewhere beneath AAF-A, and it desperately wanted to drown.

"I take it you intend to act on this information?"

Lillihammer nodded. This was merely a courtesy visit.

"Then I'll need to extract something from you beforehand, in exchange for the help I provided." Del Olmo stood up from his desk, and gestured at his comfortable-looking brown leather chair. "Take a seat."

Sparing him a cautious glance cost nothing; neither did compliance. If the man wanted to whistle-blow, it was certainly in his power to do so.

"There's an envelope on the desk in front of you." So there was. "Don't open it yet. There's a card inside. When instructed, I want you to remove the card, and look at it."

"Why?"

"Call it an exercise. Your first as a member of my staff, in fact. Your first real lesson in memetics."

Lillihammer snorted, and was taken aback by the smell of soap. After assuring the guards that no damage had been done, save to everyone's dignity and perhaps one tailbone, and ushering them out of the bathroom, there'd been no point in squandering the shower time — after, of course, quietly deleting the snippets of code which had produced the revelatory ice-spray, and the jungle weather in Blank's quarters.

Focus, would you? You've got a date downstairs with destiny, and this is just the foreplay. "Why are you leaving?"

Del Olmo smiled. "Because this is more of a… private lesson. Do you know how to draw? There's a red pen on the desk. See it?"

Right next to the envelope. "Yes. I'm not blind."

"Good, well, I hope you're not deaf either, because there's an audio cue in this test. When I ask you to open the envelope, do so. Take the card out, and look at it. I will then utter a single request, which you will carry out in full — after I leave — before putting the card and whatever you produce back inside the envelope."

"And where do you want me to leave it? Because I'm not gonna be here when you get back. Places to be."

"Don't bother leaving it at all. Take it with you, and when the time is right — you'll know — you can show it to me. If you want to."

This didn't make any sense, but then again… Del Olmo. "Sure. Fine. Whatever. Can I open the damn thing now, and get this over with?"

"Yes. You may."

The lip was tucked in, rather than sealed, so it was easy enough to pluck out the card. It looked like the texture on a plaid suit from the 1980s, or the seat fabric on Lillihammer's dad's old pink Chevy. It produced no obvious effect when examined.

"Uncap the pen."

Easy enough.

"Draw yourself."

Lillihammer wanted to ask why, on Earth, such an exercise could possibly hold value, but Del Olmo was already out the door. There was a click as he locked it behind him.

Guess he doesn't… want me… interrupted…

For the second time this week, Lillihammer woke up with a sense of missing time — and of something very important having taken place.

This time, however, the import was apparent.

It lacked the force of revelation; it wasn't even confirmation, not really. Not after a lifetime of progressive self-knowledge. Not after that pronoun slip in the shower, or the thousands piled up behind. It was at best a single data point on a tight scatterplot headed for a long-foregone conclusion.

Lillihammer slid the pen aside, considered the sketch in silence for a moment, tucked the little square of paper inside the envelope, and considered sealing it shut.

But she didn't.

Being best friends with an architectural historian didn't have a lot of fringe benefits, but his mania for blueprints was one. Lillihammer had seen the floorplan for each level of AAF-A on half a dozen occasions, as Harry rattled off this or that fact about the Site's oldest structure. One feature in particular mattered today: there was a door in the basement sublevel leading to what J&M claimed was an unused maintenance cupboard, where no door at all should have been. Looking at it now, it was easy to see why this little lie had so enflamed the man's curiosity.

Most maintenance cupboards didn't need keycard locks.

Most keycard locks also couldn't be unlocked without keycards, but then, most trespassers weren't I&T professionals. Spoofing the permissions with the diagnostic tablet and wireless internet took her less than a minute, and the door swung open with a creak they could probably hear all the way upstairs… if, of course, there had been anyone up there at this time of night except time-lost Ilse Reynders in her self-fashioned prison.

Lillihammer walked into the darkness.

When the darkness became greyness through the miracle of acclimation, she noticed pipes on the walls. They seemed mildly phosphorescent; they were milky white, and soft to the touch. That didn't make sense, so she discarded it — this wasn't an investigation, it was a social call. A few more minutes of halting footsteps in the dark, oddly muted, and a rectangle of pure black appeared at the end of the hall. A bit of squinting revealed a railing, and a plunging abyss edged with concrete. A stairwell.

A stairwell in the basement.

One of the first SCP files Lillihammer had been exposed to, in what now felt rather like a past life, had involved a pitch-black staircase, functionally endless, and a disembodied face which appeared to greet erstwhile explorers. It had seemed farcical, in the day-shift light. It seemed more like an ominous promise, now, that descending those steps would not end well.

It was fortunate, then, that on peering over the railing Lillihammer instantly espied the silhouette of a man on the first landing, half a storey below.

"Good evening, miss," came a pleasantly scratchy voice across the void.

"Hello," Lillihammer said, barely louder than a whisper. "DR-RHETORIC, I presume?"

"Close enough," the spectre chuckled, and it held out a hand in greeting. Lillihammer had just enough time to think my arm doesn't reach that far, buddy before the stairwell vanished, the light poured in, and the silhouette became a pudgy old man in a brown waistcoat and tweed pants. He clapped their hands together warmly. "Welcome to the jungle."

Above them, kilometres high, an inconceivable thrumming factory of chaotic twisted metal and pipes of bone and heartwood and a thousand aimless gantries soared up, up into the bedrock where, it became suddenly and terribly clear, the foundations of Site-43 could be glimpsed through the gloom.

"I don't get many visitors," Wynn Rydderech remarked genially.

Beyond Repair

The Breach Goes On: Bury the Survivors

Transition