Those Who Can't - SCP Foundation

Those Who Can't

2016

22 November

Timeline 5243-D

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"Dougall Deering was a geistschreiber." Udo was the first to say it out loud, though she was merely repeating the implied sentiment.

"That's right," Alis nodded.

"That's impossible."

"Is it?" Ibanez shifted back and forth in her chair. "He worked for how many years at the same facility as his brother, and never got caught."

"They worked on different floors," Udo protested.

"And Laiken never caught you two fucking behind her back."

"DELFINA!" Udo stood up and slammed her palms on the table.

"Sorry," Lillian raised a hand, and swung her index finger back and forth between the two of them like she was conducting a ping-pong match. "What was that? Say that again?"

"Christ, it does make sense." Ibanez was staring at the ceiling, lost in thought. "He didn't have it bad as the other ones, he wasn't immediately forgettable, and of course his credentials were actually real…" Her eyes refocused. "They were actually real, weren't they?"

Alis nodded. "Far as I know."

"And the lack of security in his quarters. No cameras. Because of course no cameras. Anyone monitoring would have had trouble keeping focus for too long…" Ibanez glanced at her friend, probably her best friend, when did that happen, who was still standing and quivering with rage. "Well, you never had trouble keeping focus on him."

Udo looked like she was going to scream.

"Neither did Willie," Harry pointed out. "With Alis."

Alis winked at him. He blushed.

"If Dr. Deering was indeed a geistschreiber," McInnis began, not the faintest trace of surprise or uncertainty in his voice, "what was his purpose here?"

"That part confuses me," Alis admitted. "Going through the records, it looked like he was here to spy on an enemy."

Lillian looked at the table.

"What enemy?" Nascimbeni asked.

"Del Olmo," said Lillian.

They all looked at her, not that she could see. Her hair fell between them and her own eyes.

"That's right," Alis agreed.

"What about Del Olmo?" Harry was looking at McInnis, now. "I know he had to leave 43, back in, what was it? 2001? While Lil was also gone." The coral curtain wobbled agreement. "What was he doing? Allan, you must know."

The Director nodded. "I do know. Dr. Del Olmo was our primary agent in persecuting the Forgotten War."

Lillian's head snapped up. "Explain."

"He was responsible for seeding the globe with countermemetic counterterrorist cells. Fighting the giftschreiber wherever they appeared."

"They call it the Forgotten War," said Lillian, her voice tight, her words precise, "because nobody remembered it. So it stopped. You can't forget a war you're still fighting."

Alis scoffed. Lillian glared at her.

"There has been no outbreak of overt hostilities in Canada since the 1980s," McInnis nodded. "But abroad, the reprieve is very much due to Dr. Del Olmo's work. As one of the most accomplished cryptomancers in our employ, he was a vital interlocutor for the Foundation. He kept the war from flaring up again elsewhere."

"Why?" Lillian's blue eyes were somehow burning.

"Because we wanted to be the first ones to understand what had happened. What had been forgotten. What had been lost. So that when the fighting began again in this territory in earnest, we would have the upper hand."

"And now he's fucking dead," Lillian spat. "So that's going to work out just great."

"Except he isn't dead." Alis looked back and forth between them. "Not here. Not in this, what did you call it? This timeline, anyway."

"Please tell me you didn't tell her what we call them," said Harry.

Udo, abruptly, sat back down.

"I didn't tell her what we call them." Lillian seemed to collect herself. "Okay. Deering was spying on Del Olmo."

"Bullshit."

They all turned to look at Udo. All except Alis, who was visibly trying to figure out what she wasn't being told.

"Bullshit bullshit bullshit. Dougall was on our side. He wasn't one of them."

"I didn't say he wasn't on your side," Alis offered in a low, soothing voice. "But he was definitely one of us."

Without another word, Udo stood up and left the room. The door slammed behind her.

Lillian sighed. "Deering was spying on Del Olmo, maybe. And then what? When he didn't die, what happened next?"

"Weird way to put it. Having trouble understanding what you told me. Still." Alis shook her head slightly. "He disappeared almost immediately after visiting the Site again in '02. Said he had an assignment abroad. Nobody thought anything of it. He'd disappeared before, all the time."

"Wait a second." Harry scooted his chair forward. "Lil, you have these memories too. Don't you? Why are you making her explain it?"

"Because I want to know if she's a liar." Lillian's voice was low, scratchy, and dangerous.

"What, like you?" Alis asked, sweetly.

This next silence was thick with the threat of violence.

"Because that was a lie. You don't want to examine your own memories because you don't want to see your mentor running off and doing horrible, awful things to innocent people, and actually own those images. You want me to explain it, so you can, I don't know. Use it as a working theory. A functional fiction. And put off having to—"

Lillian slapped the papers in front of her across the table, and they fanned past the other woman's face. "Finish the story, you fucking drama queen. You're pretending to be a wizard, not a psychologist."

Alis' smile was still in place. "Sure. Del Olmo left Site-43, and almost immediately, the Forgotten War came back with a vengeance."

"How much vengeance are we talking?" Harry asked.

"Enemy number one. Worse than the Insurgency. Worse than the Sarkic cults. Worse than anything. They've been actively trying to dismantle the Foundation, and they've suddenly been equipped with all the tools to make it work."

"Equipped by who?" Nascimbeni glanced at Lillian, and shrunk away from her sudden stare. "Del Olmo?"

"No," snapped Lillian.

Alis opened her mouth, obviously to say 'Yes', but Lillian suddenly continued. "Yes. Fine. Yes. But it wasn't really him. He's possessed, like the rest of those fuckers. It's using his body, his memories, his abilities, but it is. Not. Him."

Alis shrugged. "Same difference, from my perspective. But it's not as personal to me as it is to you." She frowned. "At least, it wasn't. Before he put my husband in a coma."

"Del Olmo did that?" McInnis asked. "You're saying he's here, again? At Site-43?"

Alis nodded. "He'd been back a few times over the years, but he came home for good a few months ago. That's when all this started. The chaos. The… exhibits."

"Have you any conception of why?" the Director pressed.

"All I can tell you is he's here, he's crazy, and he is crazy pissed off." Alis pursed her lips. "Tore through this place like a hurricane. Turned almost everyone mad like him. Turned the whole Site upside down. It started slow, but that only lasted maybe a week. People turned up in the hospital, complaining they had gaps in their memories. New memories, old memories. Treasured memories. Traumas. All gone." She shook her head. "Some people had nothing left. He took everything from them."

"And then?" McInnis asked.

"And then," Lillian finished, "he started smearing their memories on the fucking walls. That's him. The voice in your head when you look at the murals. That's him, judging them. Judging everyone. The ultimate art critic, judging your performance in life. But of course, it isn't him."

"It's… it," said Harry.

Lillian nodded.

"This entire facility," she sighed, "is a six-sevenths-dead half-god's splattered, toxic grey matter."

It was a creative couple of months.

Ibanez retrofitted the empty offices in M&C as containment chambers, and the Survivors began corralling anyone and anything remotely receptive to corralling into them. At all hours she stalked the safer halls, looking for stragglers who had wandered out of the art world and into her more rationalized one. She was by now dressed to the nines in combat armour liberated from private lockers in the dorms, where a few of the Pursuit and Suppression agents who were regularly on call kept themselves prepared for the worst; she could be found on any given day tackling hollering lunatics, knife-wielding cultists, and aggressive graffitists, hauling them back kicking and screaming, or drooling, or singing, or most often unconscious and/or bleeding. The sapient anomalies, she negotiated with. For the most part. She disintegrated the werewolves on sight.

Udo continued to scrub the corridors, with increasing effectiveness, under Ibanez's watchful eye. When a space was made fully secure, McInnis, Blank and Nascimbeni combed it for the pieces identified in the stolen manifests. Lillihammer and Sokolsky divided their time between constructing their SCRAMBLE goggles and attempting, without much success, to find the combination of memetic triggers that would awaken the thunderstruck personnel. Their preferred test subject was Wettle, as nothing was quite so docile as a coma patient, but they spread the attention around whenever Alis got too testy. She was very possessive of her husband, and nobody liked to think about that too much, so they tried to keep out of her way.

It wasn't much fun, but it was functional. They still had no means of contacting the outside world, and the brief glimpses they got of the admin sections suggested that protective eyewear would be needed to secure such means. There was food, and there was water, and there was no end of privacy; plenty of empty rooms, and not very many people in their right minds to fill them. Only Ibanez and Nascimbeni took regular advantage of this.

There was the brief incident with the enormous horde of tiny hippos, but it wasn't like they hadn't seen that coming.

All told, it could have been much worse. It had been much worse, in the first deadline. With enough distance and the right perspective, it could have even been a little entertaining.

If not for the dreams.

2016

Lillian flipped through the file with such viciousness, McInnis was surprised her nails didn't leave gashes in each page. "Waste of my time."

"Very possible," he agreed.

Wettle looked over her shoulder, as very nearly only he could do. "I've never heard of this before. What is this?"

"It's nonsense." Lillian slapped the file on the table. "Complete nonsense. I have too many projects already, Allan."

"You'll forgive me," he murmured. "I'm unfamiliar with your precise availability, or workload. As you'll recall."

He saw the extra emphasis do its work. The fact that Lillian had a calling over which he had no direct authority did not bother him; he trusted the Director of the Antimemetics Division implicitly, even though he wasn't entirely sure who was filling that post these days. His memory told him it ought to have been a man, but he couldn't picture the man's face. Marion Wheeler was doing the job, however, and Marion Wheeler was unimpeachable.

Still, it was a little inconvenient being in the dark about the details of his most valuable researcher's portfolio.

"It doesn't matter," she snapped. "Nothing I've ever worked on is less up my alley than this. That makes it unimportant. It would be unimportant if all I had on my schedule for the day was a bratwurst sandwich."

Wettle pulled the folder to him. After removing the contents from his lap, and briefly attempting to put them in the right order, he began to read.

McInnis put on a face. Neutral. Not unapproachable, but not wholly amused. Definitely unruffled. "Anomalies created by Vikander-Kneed Technical Media," he said, "have affected an ever-increasing proportion of the human population since they first came to our attention. They have branched out to a variety of broadcast and home media, the effects of which range from terror to catatonia to traceless disappearance, and they represent a serious threat to the Veil. I know of only one more vital issue under the umbrella of memetics, and—"

"And I'm already on that one. The gift-givers. Sure. That's just one more argument not to dump this in my lap, then. Bus factor."

Wettle glanced up at her. "Bus factor?"

"If I get hit by a bus, nobody's managing the three biggest memetic threats in the world." She winced. "Two. I meant two."

She hadn't meant two.

Luckily, Wettle was again not paying attention. He tapped the sheet he was holding, and his finger went right through it. "Fuck. Uh, why am I in this?"

"What?" Lillian craned her neck, then snatched the sheet out of his hand. "What're you talking about?"

He pointed.

She blinked.

She read: "'Episode Forty-Three: A Star is Born! Format: backdoor pilot. Synopsis: Final episode. All regular cast members are absent. Content is a twenty-five hour telecast of one Mindy Wettle in hospital, chronicling her difficult labour, ending in the birth of a son, William Wettle. Credit sequence is replaced with a bright yellow smiling face (note: not an illustration), with increasingly rising cheers in background until soundtrack is a square wave, at which point video and audio abruptly cease.' What. What is this." She flipped back several pages, grunted, then flipped forward past the first. Wettle hadn't quite gotten them in the proper order. "'Vikander-Kneed Presents: Che and Tadeusz! A romance of praxis, in forty-two acts. Anomalous drama. Effects include migraine headaches, irritable bowel, and attacks of conscience potentially leading to revolutionary behaviour.' No, okay. Okay. Pardon me."

"I don't remember being filmed," said Wettle.

"Permanent memories begin somewhere around three years of age," McInnis explained kindly.

"This is bullshit, though." Lillian stared accusingly at the page. "It's bullshit, right? I mean, what a farce. Twenty-five hours." She frowned. "No, I believe that, actually. He probably got lost on the way out."

"Doctor said she'd never seen a head so big," Wettle chimed in. "Mom told that story for years. Probably still does."

"Hmm." Lillian tapped the page thoughtfully, catching her nail in the hole Wettle had poked through it. "Hmm."

"Yes?" McInnis prompted.

"Weren't you on this file, at some point?"

Wettle blinked. "He does files?"

McInnis kept up the façade. "A long time ago. I actually joined the Foundation after encountering this particular Group of Interest in the wild."

"No," Lillian frowned, "that's not what I was remembering. What was I remembering?"

"I couldn't say."

Say it, said the voice in the dark with the bright yellow eyes. Say it.

He reached under the table and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. "Are you interested in the file or not, Dr. Lillihammer?"

She watched him light up, confusion in her eyes. "Uh… I guess? Allan, what are you…?"

"Good." He breathed in deep, blocking out the voice with the buzzing in his skull. "Good. Terrific. I'll make sure all the files are sent to your office. Dismissed."

Send them away, the voice agreed. Just you and me. You and me…

He stood up. He kicked the chair out of the way. He walked to the door. "That will be all."

"You already said that," said Wettle.

"Whatever." McInnis pulled on the door handle. The door didn't budge.

Allan? said Lillian. Where are you going?

Stay here with me, Wettle growled. It's been so long.

Do you remember how it felt? Lillian asked him.

He didn't turn around.

It tore like paper, didn't it?

He screamed.

He didn't open his eyes, when he woke up. If he opened his eyes, he wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. And he needed his rest.

He did make a mental note.

2015

Forsythe tutted at the readout. That always got on his nerves. Nascimbeni wasn't old enough to be her father, but they were definitely on that side of the age differential. She had no business even implicitly lecturing him…

"Well." She tapped a button on the machine, and it presumably stopped whirring. He hadn't been able to hear it for years, though from time to time he fancied the bones in his ear were vibrating just slightly in tune. It was probably the youth juice doing that. "It's a good thing you never miss an injection, I'll say that much."

"Say more," he sighed. "Spit it out, so this can be over before we're both in our dotage."

"Fine." Forsythe crossed her arms. "If you didn't have anomalous medical treatment, you'd be dead of a heart attack already."

At the end of the bed, examining his chart, Billie looked up in surprise. Nascimbeni tried not to look at her.

"You're burning the candle at both ends, and probably in the middle too. Last I checked — and I've got very good records to check, here — you're not the only technician in this facility. Do you want to see your granddaughter make it to high school?"

Nascimbeni frowned. "She's already in high school. I told you that last time."

Forsythe bit her lip, and Billie looked away.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing." The portly doctor punched a button on the monitor, and it began an old-fashioned printout. "Never mind. The point is, if you don't start taking it easy, you'll get forcibly retired by your own ticker."

"Fine." He moved to stand up.

Forsythe planted a hand on his chest. "Not so fast. We aren't done yet."

He sighed more deeply than was warranted. "I've got a Section to run, Helena. And so do you." He waved at Billie. "You're worried about family? Have a chat with your daughter. She looks like she could use it."

At the end of the bed, Billie was very pale. She'd always been very pale, but this was something else.

She reached down, past the edge of the bed, and when her hand came back up it was clutching a telephone receiver. Old style. Like they had in the old control room, back in AAF-D. She reached down with her other hand, and began to dial.

"What's going on?" Nascimbeni asked. He looked up at Forsythe.

David Markey looked back down at him. "Hyperbolic," he whispered. He placed a comforting hand on Nascimbeni's shoulder. "Hyperbolic."

The last thing he thought, Billie said, without really saying it, was WHY AREN'T YOU HERE, UNC?

It was Romolo Ambrogi's voice.

It was his blood, too, and there was enough of it that soon Nascimbeni could only see red, and then nothing at all.

1996

The SCPS Honoré Beaugrand was an old, old ship. It had been purchased from the Canadian government for certain privileges which Harry was not yet cleared to fully know about, and plied the waters of Lake Huron for decades before being mothballed, sunk, and kept in storage at Site-246 at the bottom of Lake Superior. Foundation vessels were never scrapped, because then they'd have to monitor all the scrapyards for anomalous occurrences. The old boat had been re-floated, restored, and brought back into service for this specific task, because old-timey people on an old-timey ship were less likely to draw attention, and if they did, it could all be explained away as a botched historical reenactment.

The costumes certainly didn't match the setting.

As the passengers debarked, Harry checked them against his manifest. "Name?" he asked, as a portly man in a Victorian conductor's outfit strolled toward him.

"Dudley Belcher."

Harry stifled a laugh, and found the name. "Right. Bandleader. Do you know 'Those in Peril'?"

The other man scoffed. "Bad taste, chap. Bad taste. Jinx the whole thing. Need to learn from history, wot wot?"

"Right." He smiled, because it was either that or laugh after all. "Wot wot. Get on the truck."

Belcher looked past him at the first of several transportation vehicles. "What make and model is that, if I might ask? It looks…" He sniffed disdainfully. "It looks distinctly Gallic, to my eyes."

"Teutonic, actually."

"Ah." The man's expression brightened. "Well, that's alright then. Cheerio." And off he went.

Over the course of the next half-hour, Harry catalogued the crew and passengers of the late RMS Gigantic, a vast ocean liner which had never even existed. A bafflingly ornate public prank by a long-dead novelist had caused the thing to manifest anyway, year after year, steaming down the English channel and necessitating wide-ranging coverups that became increasingly unwieldy in the age of amateur video. It had been Harry who'd proposed the ultimate solution, waylaying the ship, unloading its passengers, and seeing it off to the conceptual afterlife. The whole thing had turned out to be a particularly effective exercise of the public imaginary, and with a little, okay, more than a little fudging of the historical record and some choice media insertions, they'd been able to redirect the plot.

Now all that was left was disposing of over five hundred brutal British caricatures — disposing was the wrong word, totally the wrong word — and then treating himself to a celebratory tour of Yorkshire. He'd never been out of North America before, and he was looking forward to it.

There was only one man left on the ship, now, and he staggered down the gangplank with exaggerated ease. He was pale, barrel-chested, and his eyes were black as night. "What ho!" he called.

"Don't look at me," Harry called back. "Name?"

"Oh, I don't have a name." The man reached the pier, and clapped Harry on the shoulder. "Lots of titles, no name. But you know that. We're already acquainted."

Harry turned over the last page of the manifest, then turned them all back down again. There were no more passengers or crew to cross off. In fact, all the sheets were now heavily redacted. "Who are you?"

The old man took his other shoulder, too. "Who are we, you mean. We're brothers!" He turned Harry to face the trucks, which began moving off down the road without him. "I'd know your work anywhere."

"What?" Harry wanted to cry out, to make the trucks stop, but they were already gone.

Like trains down the rail, the man growled in his ear. Off for the camps.

Harry spun. The old man's face was drawn, the skin paper thin on a grinning skull. "It isn't like that," he protested. "We're just going to freeze them."

Freeze, cook, it's all the same to you people. The spectre's breath was like a dead swamp. Human beings are so much meat, eh? Wot wot. The hands clapped, and Harry's shoulders shook with the impact. Maybe between the two of us, we'll get the whole lot, next time 'round!

On the pier, the Honoré Beaugrand was sinking. They both walked to the edge of the pier to watch it go.

Even at the bottom of the bay, Harry fancied, he could still see every inch of the thing with perfect clarity.

Which, of course, he had to. Didn't he?

2016

In one sense, it was like coming up for air after a deep, deep plunge. In another, it was like trading a life-giving breath for the flat, dry sterility of space. She was covered head to toe in blood; smeared across her visor, smeared across the plates of armour, seeping into every joint and crevice. She couldn't wait to pull the helmet off and suck down the free, clean oxygen. But she also wished that the fight had been longer, the competition more fierce, and most of all, that there had been more Insurgents to face in the twisty, trap-filled corridors of the now very silent Firebase.

Both glasses half full, she decided, as she headed out the front door.

The front door opened on a cave. This wasn't the way she'd entered, blowing the bolts on an access hatch at the bottom of a narrow crevasse she'd created herself, but it was the designated exit point for when the job was done. The front-facing security was so much smouldering rubble, and there wasn't a soul left behind her who could operate a weapon, or so much as press a button. There were prisoners, of course, but they wouldn't be a problem. None of them had arms that bent the right way anymore.

"Rozálie?" she called, but there was no answer. Of course there wasn't. She wasn't down here…

The cave sloped down to a shallow pool, or rather, what she had taken at first to be a shallow pool. It was meant to be shallow, but now it seemed deep. Very deep. And very wide, and as she looked up from the crimson water, startled, she saw fire on the horizon where she knew a cave wall ought to be.

You're too late, said Rozálie, and Ibanez looked back down at the pool and the body floating face-down within it.

"There were more of them than we thought," said Ibanez. "It took… it took longer than I thought."

I went on ahead. The body bobbed up and down in the water. It spoke in a voice like planes overhead. There was an ugly, dark red hole in the back of its skull, wide enough that it probably went all the way through to the front.

"I thought I'd have enough time." Ibanez reached up to remove her helmet, but it wouldn't budge. She suddenly felt that she really would like that gulp of fresh air, after all.

You'll never have enough. Was the voice even Rozálie's? It didn't sound very much like her. But the corpse, the corpse was definitely hers. Spindly limbs and a visible spine. You never add. You only subtract. Subtract. Subtract. There's already nothing. Soon there will be even less.

She tried the helmet again. Damn, but it was on tight. She was having trouble breathing.

You left me. In her panic, struggling against the suit clasps, Ibanez had a crazy thought: was that her voice? Her own? You ran inside. You left us all. We're still there, Fina. We're all still there. Where are you?

"Yésica?" she cried, as the corpse sank into the pool and her helmet began to fill with water. "Yésica?!"

The sky was coming for her.

Udo stood nude in the desert sands, the moons baking her skin, and she watched the black clouds roil and rage.

There was hatred there, hatred older than the first slight, the first mistake, perhaps even the first coherent thought.

Rage that had risen from the pullulating amygdalas of ancient lizards on shores that had long since dried to dust, rage that had cultured like bacteria in the warm waters of the runaway noöspheric rhizome, rage that would consume and subsume the world, however she cared to define it.

And the rage spoke:

"Freak."

It spoke with her voice. She could almost taste the words, as though they had come from her own mouth.

They had come from her own mouth. She said them again: "Freak." Then again, with clarity: "I'm a freak."

You are beautiful, the clouds roared. Even in the space of a single sentence, she could tell the source was closing in. Of all the stars in the firmament yellow, yours shines the darkest.

"I'm a monster," she screamed, and she fell to her knees. The sands parted, not to accept her, but to shy away. She was rejected. "I'm a monster."

But that does not mean you are not beautiful. There was no horizon anymore. Everything was black, and somehow the cloud ahead was blacker still. You should be free, Udo Okorie. Like a whirlwind. Like runaway nuclear fusion. Like the moving sands.

"I belong in a box," she wept, but the tears wouldn't come. She was dry down to the bones. She was the desert, but the desert would not have her. Nothing would.

As the sky overtook her, she felt an unsuspected weight lifted from her shoulders.

Nonsense, brother. If someone tries to put you in a box, you put them in one first.

Impossible machines. Cats' eyes in the abyss. The old man, with his careworn face, smiling up at her with the future on his lips.

You are a little speck of nothing on an empty dirt road. There is nothing beneath your feet. You are beyond the reach of help. Brother—

"Shut up," Rydderech said, not unkindly, and the unfamiliar voice abruptly ceased.

He winked at her.

She stared out into nothing, and nothing stared back. She asked, as though the words had been spoken many times before, as though she knew them off by heart, new and old as a sunrise: "What do I need to know?"

"Seven things," Rydderech grinned, "for you are one of seven. The fourth, on this today, inviolable as a vault with no lock and no key. A box in which to die. A light below, and a bleakness above. Lillian Lillihammer, reach down, and reach up. Break the barrier. Let lies and truth commingle. Lies will win, for they are clever, but this isn't about winning. This is about being right."

And he glanced to one side, as though meeting another gaze she couldn't so much as sense, and he said: "And as for you, well. Can you see it in my eyes?"

Nothing, not the faintest whisper, came in response. Maybe, she thought, that was rhetorical.

But maybe not, because after a beat he nodded, and said: "That's what I thought."

The machinery boomed in the deeps, and she wondered if the universe would be so trite as to intrude on the dream, the memory, the in-between with something so clichéd as a bedside alarm clock, and

the sudden flare of indignation woke her to the silent, cramped little bedroom.

Her box.

She reached down, pressed her hands into the mattress, stood up, and reached up. Her fingertips touched the ceiling, and she scratched off a piece of stucco with her nails.

She rolled it around in her fingers, then dropped it and went for the doorknob. Message received.

He dreamed that he was trapped in a cell with two giant, misshapen things, with bodies like Gumby, one red and one blue. The red one had a snowball for a head. The blue one had an ice cube. They were pressing him against the door, and he was hammering on it with his fist, screaming for help, screaming to be saved, screaming "I'M STILL HERE! I'M STILL HERE! OH MY GOD I'M STILL HERE!"

And the things pressed into him harder, smothering him, crushing the breath out of him, and they screamed even louder: "BRR! BRR! BRRRRRRRRR!"

2017

21 February

And he woke up.

Alis shrieked with pleasure as his eyelids fluttered open. He knew what that sounded like; he'd heard it a few times, and not only the ones on record. She was leaning over him, and he noticed there were tears streaming down her face, and he said: "Was it something I said?"

She reached down and gently placed his glasses back on his face; this presented him with an interesting view, which he could now see very clearly. He smiled, and she pulled it all out of shape with what might have been the most passionate kiss he could ever remember having.

In any event, if he'd had a more passionate one that he couldn't remember, it would almost certainly have been with the same woman.

He wasn't the sort to close his eyes when he kissed someone. Kissing someone was a victory. Everything going right. And when everything went right, wrong was always creeping up behind him. So he swivelled his eyes back and forth as she pushed her tongue into his mouth, and that was when he saw it.

Not in the room.

In his glasses.

There were tiny whorls in the glass, and as he noticed them, they began to spin. His eyes suddenly ached, and his vision went red, and he realized just as it stopped happening that he was looking at the inside of his own head.

Alis threw the cards across the room. "Son of a bitch!" she screamed. She looked at the lenses with unfocused eyes, and they began almost immediately to unfocus further. "Son of a bitch," she muttered, and she dropped the glasses to the floor and stomped them flat.

Lillihammer was standing in the doorframe. "He call you ugly?"

She screwed her face up, and didn't respond.

The other woman flopped down in a chair beside the hard, teal bed, and put her feet up on it, shoving Wettle's to one side to accommodate her Doc Martens. "Let me guess."

"Don't," Alis warned.

But there was never any point warning Lillihammer. "You managed to snap him out of it, and he managed to unsnap himself right away."

Alis sighed, and sat down on the floor. "Yeah."

"Word of advice?"

"Does it matter how I answer?"

It mattered so little, it got no acknowledgement. "William Wettle—"

"—is my husband. I think I know him as well as anyone."

"William Wettle," Lillihammer repeated, and then continued, "is a magnet. He collects bullshit like iron filings. That's why he's so perfect for replication studies."

"I don't understand."

"This man, this boob, can make anything go wrong twice. Three times. Four times. The most embarrassing possible outcome? That's where he lives. He's just that much of an idiot. It's perfect."

"He deserves better than you," Alis muttered.

"He deserves exactly what he gets. It's his fault, Alis. He fucks up so reliably, they made him the King of Reliable Fuckupery. You've been married to him for how long? You must know it's true."

Alis grunted.

"You do know. You've seen it. He makes exactly the wrong decision, one hundred percent of the time. We're all lucky he's down for the count. You're lucky that when this is all over, you'll never have been married to him."

She didn't ask what that meant, and Lillian didn't tell her. She was pretty sure she knew, anyway.

Wettle's hand slid off the side of the bed. Alis caught it in hers, and held it. "You don't think that's the slightest bit strange?"

"Strange?"

"That his luck is so terrible, nothing ever goes right for him?"

Lillihammer shrugged. "How many billion people on this planet? One of them is bound to be the worst, in the most boring, unobjectionable, unremarkably useless sense. That's him. That's your husband."

Alis looked up at his placid, hairy face. Some of the blonde hairs had turned grey… or more likely, he'd failed to dye a few. The fact that he was still vulnerable to vanity made her both happy and sad in equal measure. "I don't know," she sighed. "It just seems so unlikely. What if there's something more?"

"You may trust me on this, Alis. There is never, ever, anything more to William Wettle."

"Wettle?" Nascimbeni asked, as Lillian entered the lab.

"Nope."

"Oh well." He'd meant to say something like that's a shame or well, too bad, but really, was it? Was it a shame? Was it too bad? "He's probably happier unconscious."

"And we're happier he's unconscious." Lillian headed for the workbench, where the first set of goggles was apparently almost complete. Sokolsky was still asleep, lying across the far end of the table, motionless and unsnoring. "Speaking of, have any fun dreams last night?"

He winced. "You too?"

"Mhmm. Meeting before lunch to talk about it. Think I've finally cracked the code. Lots of exposition. Bring toothpicks to keep your eyes open."

He chuckled uneasily, then changed the subject. "You guys test those things yet?" He pointed at the goggles, trying to keep his tone conversational. Not too eager. Not too anxious.

"Little bit." She pulled a pack of cards out of her belt, and he instinctively looked away. He knew what she was packing. "Works on minor cognitos. Harder to test the big ones. Wish Eileen had finished CLIO."

"CLIO?"

"Her .aic, remember?" Artificially Intelligent Conscripts, sapient AI assistants, had been all the rage at AIAD from the nineties to the mid-2000s. The projects were still active, but there had been setbacks.

"Oh." Nascimbeni nodded. "I remember that. Green woman, wasn't it?"

"Grey woman. Green hair." Lillian smiled, as though imagining the electronic avatar. "Green hair and glasses. She was going for a goofy librarian look. CLIO was meant to manage the archives, of course."

"Of course." Blank had been pressing for help with his extensive catalogue of documents, anomalous and anomalous-adjacent, for decades. Most of the time Veiksaar had been working on her .aic, she'd been dating the man. "Why do you wish she'd finished it?"

"So I could test out some of the worse ones." She slapped the deck on the workbench, for emphasis. "Some of them work on electronic life. They were developed with electronic life."

Nascimbeni vaguely recalled the details; he'd provided some of the hardware Veiksaar, Lillihammer and Euler had used. But the science of memetics was nothing he particularly cared about. He preferred constructs he could actually see, set hammer to, put nails in. His heart was pounding when he asked, nevertheless: "What would you test first?"

Lillian considered. "Sleep agent, probably. Same sort of thing that hit Willie. We're pretty sure we've already got those licked, but it would be nice to get total confirmation."

"I could try it out, if you want." She turned to face him fully, and raised a brow. He leaned on his own workbench, which was spotless in the absence of anything much that needed carpentry, welding, or nonspecific tinkering, and shrugged. "I mean, you've got all the filters installed, right? Even if it doesn't work properly, I won't get it full force. An extra night's sleep, is all. Right?"

"Right," she agreed, though there were enough extra vowels in it to convey a little uncertainty. Not in the facts, but in his intentions. "You that eager to get us out there, Chief?"

"Yes." He sighed. "I'm sick of being stuck here. I want to know what's going on topside. I want to see if my family's okay."

"They're not your family, though." Lillian picked up the cards again, pulled off the elastic, and shuffled them absent-mindedly. "Your family is back in baseline. Topside? Other-you's family."

"Still." He shook his head. "Still. You know?"

"Mm," she responded noncommittally.

"Look." He pushed off the bench, and approached her. "We've got the plan in place. We've got all the machinery we need to wipe the whole Site clean, if we need to. And the goggles are almost finished."

"And I know where Del Olmo is," she added.

He blinked. "…and you know where Del Olmo is. Okay. That's new information?"

"Little teaser for that meeting, later."

"Great. Terrific. It's all lined up, then. And you don't need me. But I'm here! And I'm not doing anything. So put me to work, Dr. Lillihammer. Please. At least take my mind off the things I can't help."

She sighed, and pulled a specific card out of the pack. In his peripheral vision, it looked like a blue square with wavy white lines overlaid on it, on a white field. "Sleep agent's too dangerous," she said. "Put you out for months, at your age. Maybe something simpler, but still a step up. Could try—"

She began to slide the card back into place, but lost in thought, her reflexes were slower than his. He'd always been good with detail work. He snatched up the sleep agent card, held it up to his eyes, and had just enough time to hope that she'd catch him before he—

"—hit the floor," she finished. "But I don't think he broke anything."

"I can fix that," Del growled. She rolled up her sleeves.

Two down, Harry thought. Of course, if he'd had to choose which two…

"Well, it's certainly unfortunate." McInnis shook his head. "But perhaps not unexpected. He did us the courtesy of waiting until there was a clear roadmap ahead, at least."

"Very least." Del's lips slid from side to side, as though she were Satan grinding a sinner between them. "It's not much."

"Nor is it productive to dwell on. Dr. Lillihammer, I believe this is your presentation today?"

"Damn skippy." Lillian stood up, which was always unnecessary; she towered over them even when sitting down. "So, good news and good news."

"This is all going to be bad, isn't it?" Harry groaned.

She ignored him. "I had a funny dream last night. Something unfriendly tried to horn in. Nascimbeni had the same thing, which leads me to expect…"

"Yeah," said Udo. Del and Harry echoed her.

"Indeed," McInnis nodded.

"Awesome." Lillian clapped. "Maybe it even lowered itself to Willie's level. Daniil?"

"I only dream when I'm awake," Sokolsky smirked.

"You're an asshole. Alis?"

"I dream abstract. I couldn't say."

"Convenient. Alright, so it was probably only us. Safe to say it's the Spirit of September Past?"

The Survivors all nodded. The other two shrugged at each other.

"The thing that possesses the Victims," Udo clarified.

"And is probably inside of Del Olmo," Harry added. "What the files call the Uncontained, and nothing else."

"Stupid name for a thing that's contained in people," Lillian finished, "but that's probably not its natural state. Anyway, yeah. I take it nobody's had any hitchhikers on their dreams before? In this deadline, at least?"

A series of shaken heads.

"Right. In that case, I think it's safe to say that the whole fucking Site is infected with this unholy ghost, and the longer we take to finish our spring cleaning, the less of our minds we'll still have come next breachday. With that in mind…"

"You're ready?" McInnis asked.

"We're ready. Daniil?"

"We have a working set of SCRAMBLE goggles. Only one, but that's not as much of a problem as it sounds. If we can get to the fabrication units in J&M—"

"Hold on," Alis interrupted. "How do you know the goggles work? I thought you didn't have any test subjects."

"You remember the werewolves?" Lillian asked.

McInnis frowned. "I thought Chief Ibanez neutralized all of the loup garou."

"Not the one that OSAT wanted," Del grinned.

"That's still here?" Harry did a double take. "Wait, are you saying—"

"Found it in a stairwell yesterday." Ibanez winced. "Water panthers had taken a few big chunks out. Dragged it here and patched it up. Brain is basically human, according to the conprocs. If I remember correctly."

"She remembers correctly," Lillian nodded.

McInnis' face was frozen. "You tested kill agents on an injured humanoid?"

Udo looked stricken. "Yeah, Jesus guys. That's…"

"Pragmatic?" Ibanez suggested.

Harry felt all the blood drain from his face, and remembered the man at the pier. "Not a good look," he muttered.

"It was dying," Lillian snapped. "It lost too much blood, and we don't have a doctor. The kill agent would have been a mercy. When we were done, Del shot it anyway."

"I'm good at shooting helpless things," she agreed with a tone of delighted self-loathing.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Udo asked.

McInnis redirected. "What's done is done. I daresay the Ethics Committee would agree with your rationale; perhaps we'll get the chance to ask them before September, assuming the giftschreiber haven't already levelled the Foundation. I presume, then, that your suggested plan is the duplication of these goggles, and then an extended search for Dr. Del Olmo?"

"Not so extended." Lillian's smile was grim. "I already know where he is, or at least I've got a shortlist of candidates."

"Of course you do," Harry sighed.

"What do we do when we find him?" Udo asked. "He'll be dangerous, goggles or no."

Ibanez answered immediately. "We kill him."

Lillian's riposte was no less immediate. "We talk to him."

"The hell you do," Alis protested.

"Termination does seem the more sensible choice," said McInnis.

Ibanez nodded at him. "You would say that. And it's what we did every other time."

"Well," Harry said, "except for Wirth."

"Yeah," Lillian scoffed. "Sure."

Sokolsky placed both hands on the table, palms down. "Do you honestly think Del Olmo will tell us anything useful, Lillian?"

"Us?" She shrugged. "Maybe not. He doesn't know us from a hole in the ground." Her expression softened almost imperceptibly. Perhaps only Harry noticed it. "But I'm damn sure he'll talk to me."

22 February

The SCRAMBLE unit was no mere pair of goggles, but a full wraparound helmet due to the need to intercept and warp audio signals as well. Ibanez was the first to give it a test drive, for multiple reasons; most pertinent was her long experience moving through hostile territory in armour, least pertinent was the fact that this first set was too small to fit on Harry's head. Lillian pretended this was merely inconsiderate, but Ibanez knew better. The canny memeticist had intentionally cut off the option of using her best friend as a test subject.

Ibanez wasn't offended. She wouldn't have let anyone else get dibs anyway.

After running her through a series of defanged murals in M&C, Lillian led her on a course through several more difficult passages. The goggles occluded each affected surface before her conscious mind could see what was on them, and she wondered at the vague disappointment in her gut for a moment before she understood. She'd imagined, stupidly, that the scrambler would enable her to see what the halls really looked like. She'd imagined they must look quite beautiful. But of course, all that was rendered on the screen was a pastel blur in every direction. She could navigate the three-dimensional space with ease, but she couldn't make hide nor hair of any single decoration.

Because that was the point, wasn't it.

Lillian left her at the extent of their demesne, with no words of encouragement but a gentle pat on the back, which she needed to stoop to deliver. Ibanez stepped into the haze of colour, set her shoulders high, and placed one hand on the stun baton at her hip.

It was time to tour the gallery.

It would have taken much longer to wend her way to Nascimbeni's concrete kingdom through the dormitories, so she was heading past Eileen's office in I&T instead. As always, there was new work on the walls they had previously scoured; more novel was the presence of the artists, engaged with rapt attention in their work.

The occupants of the Site had scattered like centipedes in the light whenever the Survivors had entered their space. Harry had compared it to a line from The Hobbit, something about how the little folk still existed on the fringes of society but could hear the elephantine gallumphing of humanity a mile off; this had occasioned a brief argument over to what extent Ibanez herself qualified as a hobbit, and whether this made it more or less appropriate to send her into the Shire.

Focus, she thought. Or, rather, unfocus in the right direction.

This time, without the scrubbing screen to spook the natives, she caught occasional glimpses of the lost personnel of Site-43. There was an orgy in the I&T boardroom, with pairings she was certain wouldn't have worked out back in baseline. The SCRAMBLE unit conveyed wavelengths of warbling which almost seemed musical, and probably in their base form actually were. She was glad she couldn't hear it, though it looked like everyone was having fun. Sandy Holt, one of her agents — no, one of Pensak's agents — was putting the last touches on a photorealistic depiction of a pair of bright red denim shorts on a computer lab window. She winked at Ibanez, and Ibanez smiled tightly. She wondered what that looked like on the other side of the visor. Four men she didn't recognize were standing next to a photocopier, and a Māori woman from Pursuit and Suppression named Kiri Ngata was smashing their faces into the copy plate, over and over, while it printed an endless catalogue of increasingly bloody bruises. The man were laughing. At least one was missing all of his teeth, and the smile was gushing blood.

As always, there were signs of the catastrophic decontainment that must have taken place on the first sublevel. One of the printing rooms was filled with the bloated bulk of a gelatinous worm, and Ibanez could see the hole where it had burrowed down through all the membranes, half-floors and bedrock to coil around the wreckage of the press. Nascimbeni was going to have his work cut out for him when it was time to do the stability survey…

God damn it, Noè.

One of the meeting rooms was full of I&T techs in their proper outfits, talking animatedly. There was a slideshow on the projector, and the goggles dutifully blocked out its contents. They were speaking loudly enough that the sound made it through the thin glass, and she tapped a button on the side of the visor. The goggles reported that their speech was identical to natural language English with information technology terms sprinkled throughout, as might be expected from such a setting. There was, apparently, no underlying grammar.

So, nothing new there.

I&T put her in mind of one of those maze screen savers that had been popular in the 1990s, all right angles and brightly coloured walls, though of course the reality would be somewhat more complex. It was tempting, so tempting, to reduce the scrambling effect and see what was really going on, and that of course explained why virtually everyone in the Site had already fallen to madness.

But though the public art show ran through the once-drab Back End to no lesser extent than it had R&E and H&S, there were far fewer signs of life. Something about the space had always been oppressively bland, and perhaps it had been deemed less conducive to ongoing creative works. It was just a guess. Ibanez hadn't done anything creative since the late 1990s.

Nobody tried to stop her. Nobody stood in her way. The occasional painter or singer or dancer or smasher-of-tiles-into-powder or indecent exposer waved, or smiled, or nodded, or in one memorable case gave her a big bear hug and ran away giggling — it was good to see that Yancy was still alive, and still in beyond excellent shape — but if they considered her a threat to their way of life, which she most certainly was, it didn't show in their reactions. They probably thought this was show-and-tell.

Well, she'd show them.

It was tempting to swing down south through one of the Security and Containment satellites, but she figured she ought to pass through as few unique biospheres as possible on this first trek, so she took the direct route into J&M instead. This brought her first past the massive water tanks, which looked like bright green, yellow, and purple cylinders to her, though the goggles informed her they were actually immaculate representations of cucumbers, bananas, and eggplants; the septic pools, which shimmered in waves of iridescent colour she could only glimpse in the hyperabstract; and then the heating plant, where strange clouds of condensation bobbed in the breeze and formed images in Socialist Realism style of workers at work, and union members on the march, though from her perspective it was all just so much red and black mist. Lillian's shortlist was comprised entirely of ventilation shafts for the Site's geothermal plants. Her reasoning was derived not from Rydderech's cryptic hints, which she passed on to the group, but rather from some personal understanding she was reluctant to share. Ibanez visited the first location on her way to the fabrication plants: one of the shafts, a small one, was accessed via a back passage she had used over a decade ago to get the literal drop on one of Ana Mukami's clones. Cool air rushed up around her from the pit, and she couldn't see the bottom from the encircling rail. If there was anyone down there, they had almost certainly suffocated to death.

Her road ended finally at the fabbers, which to her tremendous relief were still mostly intact. One of the massive machines had been disassembled, its parts cannibalized to create an enormous metal robot which turned to watch her as she approached the main conveyor unit and scanner; she took her hand off the stun baton and slung it over her shoulder in what she hoped looked like a casual gesture, though her fingers closed over the butt of the Bremmelgun.

Two electronic headlamps, probably pilfered from one of the cars parked in AAF-A's garage, blinked placidly at her, and then the robot resumed its survey of the empty fabrication hall.

She sighed.

The other reason she'd been chosen for this mission was her background in engineering. The tour was over; the remainder of her duty would be less artistic, and far more technical.

25 February

Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-C is the least hands-on and least specialized of the three still-active refineries at Site-43. The majority of its plant is a series of parallel tanks, with only a small factory floor wherein water from Lake Huron is chemically and ritually purified, esoteric effluence from various sources is analyzed for matter state and toxicity, and both are pumped through a targeted subset of the twenty treatment vats for reduction. The average shift size for AAF-C is four: two experts in Acroamatic Abatement, one stationed at the water tanks and the other at the testing array, and one technician prowling each set of ten vats on the lookout for leakage, breakage, or plugs.

There is no emptier space in the entire Site, and no station on the Inter-Sectional Subway is less frequently patronized. The trains don't even stop, outside of shift change, unless a rider makes the request. New members of personnel are often confused by the homonymous local terminology for a person who's drifted too far from companionship: "Out to C."

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

Lillian Lillihammer was not one for small talk.

She initiated it sometimes, when she had something to say, or wanted to ingratiate herself with someone she expected to do something for her. But she had no patience for it when it ran in the other direction, and anyone prone to chatting up a storm would see her sailing away more often than not.

She was fond, however, of big talk masquerading as small talk.

"This is boring," she said. It was boring. AAF-C was the least-adorned space they'd moved through yet; she and Alis were headed for the end of the tank sequence, on the weakest of her hunches, and though there was still plenty of art to not look at, there wasn't a soul around and the ones whose occupancy was evidenced hadn't hung around very long. There were long stretches of maintenance tunnel with no paint on them at all, and none of the bric-a-brac of everyday living they'd seen elsewhere: sleeping bags, cardboard boxes, trash and used prophylactics. She expected their journey to be equally unedifying. Nineteen of the twenty tanks were still churning away, full, but the twentieth, right on the end, was empty. It was sunk deep into the bedrock, in a natural niche, and it could theoretically contain their target.

But it wouldn't. So, she pretended to chatter harmlessly. There was a topic of conversation she'd cut off at the stem over a month ago, because she'd heard all she needed to know at the time. She was determined that she wouldn't leave AAF-C without learning something new, and since an empty tank manifestly did not count, well, it was time to revisit.

"So, they're dead."

Alis glanced at her, which required actually turning her head. It took the SCRAMBLE sets a second to determine what to do when you pointed one at the other; the other woman's face was momentarily rendered as a low-poly model of itself, like something out of a PlayStation game, before resolving into the usual banal visage. "They?"

"The twins." As always, Lillian had made determining the whereabouts of the three geistschreiber one of her first priorities in the new deadline. Alis had dropped nearly into Nascimbeni's lap, and once it had become obvious she was already on their side, the question and answer session had been brief and to the point. No small talk.

Alis grimaced. "Yes. Like I told you. They're dead."

"How?"

"Stopped being alive."

"I don't like your impression of me."

Alis shrugged noncommittally, and shone her flashlight over the walls. The colours on Lillian's screen brightened, and for a moment she wondered whether the light filters would be able to adjust for the sudden change, or if her companion had found a novel new way to betray her… but no, no, they held. It was difficult, judging how much paranoia was too much.

"How did they die?"

Alis sighed as she climbed the wire mesh stairs ahead, and glanced down at the pipes far below. Lillian looked, too. They were painted, her display informed her, to resemble tree roots. "Imogen killed Madchen, and Del Olmo killed Imogen."

Lillian stopped walking. So much for doing this casually. "What?"

Alis sighed again, deeper this time, and leaned on the railing at the top of the rise. Lillian waited below, so that the other woman's head was a few feet higher than hers. "I told you the giftschreiber are the biggest threat the Foundation is facing, now."

"Uh huh."

"Well, they're not an existential threat. They're a threat to the Veil. Because they haven't had the chance to really let loose with all barrels. Because—"

"They're fighting a civil war."

Alis regarded her curiously. "How'd you know that?"

"Extrapolation."

"Huh. Well, yeah. The sisters were on opposite sides of that. I always thought they were close. Too close, even. More committed to each other than the cause. Kind of like you guys."

Lillian let that pass without comment.

"I thought that right up until the day Imogen told her sister's heart to stop beating. She tried to blow up the Site, too. Did you know there's shaped charges… you did. Alright." Lillian had begun nodding immediately. "Well, it came as a shock to the rest of us. That was at the start of the troubles. Del Olmo took her in for questioning, the first time he came back, and nobody ever heard how that came out. Never saw her again."

"So how do you know she's dead?"

"I checked the AcroAbate logs, and cross-referenced with Imogen's last physical. Plenty of markers make the transition cleanly for the first few steps of titration. It was her."

"Dumped in the sump."

"Yeah."

"Well, that's cheery." She tried to picture Bernabé Del Olmo murdering a woman in cold blood, then immediately stopped trying because it was almost too easy. He'd been a gentle, curious, clever man, but he'd also been driven and mysterious. He could certainly kill, possessed or not, if the need was great.

They had that in common.

She'd learned that by murdering the exact same woman, only in her case, the murder had stuck.

That didn't bear thinking on, but it was also the obvious end of the tangent. As they made their way to the south end of the complex, Lillian found herself so starved for distraction that she nearly gave in and attempted actual small talk… before something that had been nipping at the coat-tails of her mind finally got up the gumption to take a sizeable bite, and she physically shuddered. "Okay. Wait. Why do you think he came back?"

"What, in 2002?" They were almost to the final tank.

"No. Last year. Why'd he come back to Site-43, if he was out there managing a war on three fronts?"

Alis shrugged as they approached the thick glass window of Plasmic Abatement Tank Bravo. "I dunno. Maybe they won?"

To reach the foyer of Habitation and Sustenance, where the wreckage of the topside elevator glowed a cardinal red that would not fade, McInnis had to slog an interminable winding path through clogged arteries and dorm rooms with the connecting walls knocked out. He interrupted no less than four copulating couples, and one very complex octuple. He waded through garbage immaculately catalogued with an old-time label maker. He was compelled to dance a jig to pass one particular choke point, and while the vague memory of a scene from Monty Python contextualized the experience, it made it no less embarrassing. But the foyer itself? The foyer was safe.

Memetically speaking.

His SCRAMBLE set told him that nothing on the cubic surfaces was projecting a measurable memetic effect. Ibanez's set agreed. If anything was being projected here, humans and humanoids were outside of the target audience. They tuned down the filters a little, and what they saw on the walls and floor and ceiling was only marginally less striking than what they saw walking between, on top and beneath them.

The seal of Site-43 was gone, and in its place was a startlingly complex floral pattern branching out from the centre of the room and cobwebbing across the massive space, festooned with amber and carmine flowers. The walls featured a cavalcade of mythological creatures, lifelike despite their stylization, interacting and posing and most often gazing out at the inhabitants of the foyer. McInnis recognized the style immediately, of course: bright primary and secondary colours, separated by thick black lines, forms abstracted but recognizably themselves. Anishnaabe art, in various regional permutations.

Which made sense, since the Anishnaabe were here as well.

The people of Kettle Point had decamped in one of the Site's largest expanses of flat floorspace. Woolen blankets and painted tarpaulins designated living, eating, and congregating spaces. What he could only assume were family groups clustered around campfires on the tiles; the smoke detectors had been removed from the ceilings, and the sprinklers apparently rerouted, since there was no trace of the gas that had otherwise permeated the dorms. The electric lights had all been put out, though whether this was in approximation of night, required for some ritual purpose, or simply permanent, he couldn't tell. The ceiling was thick with smoke. The people were laughing, telling stories, singing, dancing, sitting in quiet contemplation, or extending the reach of their art. They paid no heed to their visitors, which also made sense, since they were already hosting much stranger ones.

The lords of the beneath-world strode between the fires, or sat close to them for warmth, copper tails flicking this way and that as a subtle reminder they were nobody's pets. Strange, spined things lurked at the edges of the firelight, their forms bending and distorting with each flicker and crackle. Tiny humanoid figures flitted from cover to cover, nimble fingers relieving the former occupants of Kettle Point of their belongings or else being brushed aside with good humour when they were noticed. At the central fire, a tall and beautiful woman with cloven hooves was speaking to a rapt audience of fellow females, who periodically shooed apparently entranced males away whenever they approached.

Every manner of anomalous creature known to inhabit Nexus-94 had come back to the stolen land to roost.

Perhaps literally; there was the occasional ominous rumbling, and a shuffling of what sounded like thousands of vast feathers, from the shaft of the ruined elevator.

The All-Sections Chief stood near the Hiring and Regulation offices. He was still wearing a silk dress shirt, his wing-tip shoes, and his tie. He hadn't changed a bit, except perhaps around the forehead and eyes.

"He seems happy," Ibanez offered.

McInnis nodded.

They decided not to bother him.

Never being wrong was less efficient than it sounded.

Not because being wrong conveyed more valuable lessons than being right; if that had been the case, Lillian would have contrived to be off base as often as possible.

No, it was because never being wrong meant considering the possibility that you could be wrong, before it mattered, and taking steps to make that eventuality also play out in your favour.

There was no vent in Archives and Revision, but the salt caves ran deep. The fact that she sent Harry suggested she thought it was possible, if not likely, that Del Olmo would be back there; of all their number, he was the one she most trusted to run back and fetch her rather than tackling the problem himself.

The fact that she sent Udo meant she still found their decaying cosplay entertaining.

The Replication Studies office had been painted with recursive images of itself. This both required an incredibly sophisticated understanding of both perspective and draftsmanship, and a painfully literal mind. The AAF-D approach was a good distance off, but the SCRAMBLE units suggested that where there was a mural of the Victims back in baseline, here there was a ceiling-to-floor splash of geometric shapes somehow collectively conveying the single semantic concept of Bernie Del Olmo.

"What I want to know," said Harry, "is how they programmed these things to know all that shit."

"Remember my part in making the memorial?" Udo was waiting for him at the double doors to the Salt Mines. "Breaking down memory cubes into paint? They did a lot of work reconstituting that stuff into code. Memes are almost entirely online now."

"Appropriately enough."

"Sure. So, they've got a massive database of effects meticulously documented. The goggles are just drawing on that."

He almost asked how it was possible that this database had been replicated, since it probably didn't exist in the same form in this deadline, and then he remembered Lillian's unique talent, and didn't. "Still."

He glanced back the way they'd come.

A man in a bathrobe was walking barefoot down the hall, leaving bloody footprints behind him. Another man with smaller feet followed, blue paint on his soles, matching the strides and flood filling the existing trail save for the outlines.

Harry shook his head. "It's amazing what those two got done in a few weeks, when a thousand of these idiots have accomplished less in half a year than the average half-decent street artist."

The furniture in the main office space hadn't been moved, but it had been covered over. Every surface, including the desks and chairs, was wrapped in a papier mâché of what was almost certainly his most dangerously anomalous documents, the ones kept in the dark on laundry lines and never viewed with the naked eye. It was a guess, but an educated one; the protective laminations were piled in a corner of the next room, glowing like radioactive waste.

The archives were full of sound, but neither of them could hear it. Their display would only offer a cryptic "Choral variations on the subject of the number five" as a description.

The sound wasn't being piped in, but the singers, if they were real, were invisible.

The actual salt mines had been ransacked, which was no mean feat. It would have taken hundreds of people weeks to dismantle the archives so fully. Boxes were strewn everywhere, tens of thousands of them. Many were piled up in makeshift art studios full of craft supplies. Several of the towering racks had been pushed over. One of the conveyors was running, feeding a single sheet at a time into a standing flame with agonizing slowness.

A woman in engineer's blues and nothing else — Harry looked away, but it looked like Joanna Bremmel — was crawling on all fours and placing printed sheets side by side on the floor, then standing up to scrutinize the results, presumably attempting to create ASCII art with found materials. He'd seen that on an X-Files episode with Melissa.

Melissa was also here.

"No," said Udo.

There was really no more eloquent way to put it.

Melissa Bradbury's body lay on a plinth, pale and unmoving. She was hooked up to an IV line and a catheter.

Knelt in front of her, hands held up in prayer and similarly augmented, was the rigid form of Philip Deering. He was wearing one of Harry's hoodies.

Suddenly, Udo was in his arms. He was confused about that for a moment, before he realized he was bawling into the helmet intercom.

"That ought to do it," Sokolsky sighed. "Next card should bring him out."

"Why are you sighing?" Alis asked.

"Because he's just going to conk himself again anyway. We might as well leave him unconscious, like the other one."

There had been a brief debate over what to do with Nascimbeni. In the end, his friends had decided that the difference between his case and Wettle's was that he had willingly taken himself out of the picture, so there was little point in bringing him back into it.

"Perhaps the rest will do him good," McInnis had suggested.

"And if he doesn't care enough to be here," Ibanez had added with considerably less consideration and a great deal of rancour, "he'd just get in the fucking way anyhow."

Of course, this didn't explain why waking up Wettle was a good idea; getting in the way was fully half of his contributions to any given scenario, with the other half being random nonsensical or uninformed interjections.

There definitely was a good reason to have him up and about by this coming September, but Sokolsky couldn't very well tell Alis that. She accepted the reason he did give her with a grunt, so the matter was settled for the moment.

Alis passed the final card in the new sequence in front of her husband's eyes, and he immediately began blinking. Then he groaned. Then he farted.

"Welcome back," she said, and she leaned forward and kissed him again.

"You do know this isn't really your husband," Sokolsky murmured when the kiss went on a little too long.

"Kinda hot, right?" Alis drew back; Wettle's lips kept moving, and he leaned towards her a little before flopping back on the bed in defeat.

"Oh," he said. "I feel like shit."

"Has he always been this romantic?"

"You've been in a coma for a few months," Alis explained. "The whole Site is full of cognitohazards."

"Oh." Wettle nodded. "Okay. Why'd you wake me up?"

She frowned. "Do you not want to be awake?"

"Well, I mean… no? Not usually?" He shrugged, and winced again. "Ow. Ow, ow, ow. I don't think I can even get up."

"I've been exercising your arms and legs," she smiled. "Now that you're conscious, we can exercise the rest of you."

He squinted, and his brow furrowed, and for a moment Sokolsky thought he was trying to muster up a second fart. It wasn't until he spoke that it became apparent what all the extra effort had been for. "Now that, that I can get up for."

26 February

Nascimbeni had completed an overview of the Site's systems long before he was removed from the equation, and the information he'd gathered made Lillian's first hunch the most obviously correct option. The deepest of the geothermal heat vents was producing no heat; according to a LIDAR survey he'd managed to get half-done before some loon noticed the drone, plucked it out of the air, and started using it to spatter the bedrock with paint like an industrial sprayer, the reason for this was a massive series of new caves carved beneath the existing ones. "Probably the water cats," he'd shrugged. "Back at work at last."

So, that was where Del Olmo would be hiding. Why he was hiding in the first place was anyone's guess; Lillian had her suspicions, but they didn't matter. What mattered was what she had to do, and secondarily, convincing the others to let her do it.

"No." Del hefted the Bremmelgun. "This is how we greet him. With a faceful of free radicals."

"You're the expert here, Lillian," McInnis said. "None of us knew Dr. Del Olmo the way you did—"

"I'd be the expert anyway," she snapped.

He held up a hand as he continued. "But Delfina is not incorrect. He is perhaps the single most dangerous manifestation of this entity we have yet faced. His power over our minds is likely to be near-total. A pre-emptive strike might be our best means of handling the threat he represents."

"This baby does wide-bore." Del patted the gun affectionally. "I can point it down the shaft and glass the whole thing into the abyss, if I want."

"I'm going to talk to him," Lillian said.

"But is it really him?" Harry tried to make eye contact with her, but her eyes were unfocused. "Lillian, there might not be anything in there you can talk to."

She spoke like she was trying to convince herself. "Noè said Ambrogi remembered being Ambrogi — remembered being baseline and deadline Ambrogi, even. We still don't really know the full extent of what Bernie was doing, his work against the giftschreiber cults. His work for them, in this tangent. We need to know everything there is to know about these people, and we know jack shit. Alis doesn't remember most of it, and she was never fully in the loop. My recovered memories from Site-06 just gave me new questions to ask. I'm going to ask them. And he's going to speak to me."

"Do you know that?" Udo asked. "Or are you just hoping?" Lillian didn't immediately respond, so the other woman continued. "I know what it's like to want to talk to a friend one last time. Someone who meant a lot to you—"

Lillian placed the palm of her hand over Udo's face, and Udo stopped talking. "This isn't an intervention. I don't need psychoanalysis or counselling, and if I did, none of you would be qualified to do it. I don't think anyone is qualified to pick my particular brain, in point of fact. But I am capable of doing that to him."

"So you expect us to let you airdrop into Del Olmo's hell cylinder," Sokolsky crossed his arms, "so you can mind meld with him and learn the secrets of the universe, without the slightest expectation that he's actually going to erase the contents of your brain, or turn you into the world's most dangerous hand puppet." He shook his head. "I'm all for crazy schemes, Lillian, you know that, but there has to be some expectation of success first."

She tapped her temple. "Daniil, you already understand this. You must. I'm surprised I have to say it outright. We told you how the deadlines work. And the rest of you," she gestured, "already know." Alis had surmised it on her own, and Lillian had seen no reason not to confirm it. "Except Willie."

"Hmm?" Wettle was sitting in the corner, Alis brushing his wild tangle of greying blonde hair. "Are we including me now? Ow."

"Sit still," Alis sighed.

"And sit silent," Lillian agreed. "But okay. Daniil. Everybody. The shit on the walls, that's one thing. Memory paste with cognitohazards in. Follows the usual rules, demigodly intervention notwithstanding. But anything that requires Bernie to use his actual brain to put the whammy on me, in person? Anything beyond the stuff we have existing countermeasures for? Whatever his Uncontained meme magic is? That isn't going to work on me."

There was a beat.

"Wirth," Udo said.

Lillian snapped her fingers. "Wirth. He couldn't possess any of us. Mukami's talking powers barely worked on us either. I'm not even convinced that Ambrogi or Markey would have been able to stick their sticky fingers through our skin. Bernie can't hurt me."

"You know that isn't true," Harry said very softly.

She ignored him.

"On the subject of obvious considerations, however," McInnis said after a moment of silence, "there is the matter of September."

Lillian pursed her lips.

"By which I mean—"

"I know what you mean," she growled.

"What does he mean?" Wettle asked. "OW!"

"Sit still."

"He means," Sokolsky said, "that no matter how well Lillian's conversation goes, before September the eighth, 2017, Bernabé Del Olmo must die."

"I'm surprised it has a low setting,"

"Right?" Del gently swung the gun back and forth, carving out the new tunnel. "Bremmel's a go boom or go home sort of engineer."

"No, it makes sense." Lillian's expression was neutral, faraway. She kept putting her hand in her breast pocket, and sighing. She was preparing. "Sure, he's a bombastic bastard, but he's also had a love affair with feature creep that goes back to before we were born. I know for a fact that the dialling-down feature only got iterated at the end, when he couldn't think of anything more explosive to add."

Sokolsky tapped one of Nascimbeni's structural resonators against the bedrock, and checked the reading. They were tunneling through bedrock, and being very careful not to create a path that was in any danger of collapsing — particularly since there was a very good chance they would need to flee back down it in the near future. Mostly the cuts were so smooth, and the rock so solid, that the curvature kept everything upright without the need for supportive stanchions. It wasn't all the gun doing that heavy lifting; Del was, after all, a trained engineer herself. Occasionally she left standing columns where the stone was more prone to crumbling or other deformation, or just because she felt it had been too long since the last one. In the far distance, an air pump was whining as it pressed the Site's atmosphere down into this new offshoot of the tunnels the Mishepeshu had been carving beneath the redirected shaft.

They were almost there, and Del had dialled the gun down so low that it was barely audible as it obliterated the stone ahead. What was left behind was smooth, shiny, and cool to the touch. A marvel of science.

Harry wanted to scream. He wondered how far it would echo, if he did.

He placed a hand on Lillian's shoulder, and was a little surprised when instead of swatting it away, she reached up and clasped it with her own.

Sokolsky placed the device again, read the display, and tapped Del on the back. She glanced at him, and he pointed at the uncarved road ahead.

She nodded.

He smiled encouragingly at them — as far as his face and personality allowed — and then turned and walked away.

This wasn't his fight.

As far as Lillian was concerned, it was only hers. But Harry suspected it wouldn't go down quite that way. Nevertheless, it had been decided that she would be the one to make the first overture. Del had assured everyone that if it showed even the faintest trace of going south, she was going to put a targeted ray right through the rogue memeticist's forehead, and set them on the path to a happy September without remorse.

Harry knew Lillian would almost certainly position herself so that this was impossible, but he didn't say so. He trusted his best friend's motives and capabilities, and anyway, Del probably knew it just as well.

The little agent carved a wider space for them all to stand abreast, which took a few more minutes, then looked up at Lillian with what might have been the grimmest face Harry had ever seen on her. She was waiting for the order to proceed.

Lillian nodded, and moved to stand beside her.

Del took careful aim, and removed the final obstacle between them and the architect of Site-43's museum of metamodern art.

He was leaning on the far wall of the enormous cylinder, pounding his fists into a slurry of wet blue paint. He was weeping. The floor was littered with foul-smelling debris in every colour of the spectrum, bones and gristle sticking up out of the slop piles, surrounded by paint-spackled flies. Lillian tore her eyes off Del Olmo's tattered meme coat and looked up, up, up, and saw trails of blood and paint running down from the observation railing some two hundred metres above. She wondered if the corpses surrounding her on all sides had belonged to amateur painters whose scaffolds had failed, or if they'd simply been making very simple statements on the artistic power of absolute freedom by leaping to their deaths on purpose.

Not that it mattered.

Nothing else mattered but the hunched and weeping figure which had not so much as twitched when the wall opposite him had suddenly evaporated, and Lillian had walked into his final exhibit.

He had been painting, she saw. The entire circumference of the shaft bottom was covered in breathtakingly beautiful Mandelbrot sets; the SCRAMBLE unit dulled the edges and abstracted the contents, but even then she could tell that she was looking at the work of the master, not the students. The topographical display showed her where niches had been hammered into the rock, to allow Del Olmo to climb up higher and continue his pìece de résistance, which towered over her to a height of about fifty metres. She couldn't imagine how long it would have taken him to create it, or how dangerous the process must have been. His coat was covered in gore, however, and she suspected he'd fallen down a few times in the process. Perhaps he'd arranged the viscera to soften the blow.

It was hard to see him now, between what the unit was doing and what her eyes were doing, so she took a deep breath and corrected both issues.

"What are you doing," Harry hissed from behind her as she placed the unit on the bedrock floor, and finished wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. At the sound, Del Olmo finally turned to face her.

She stood up, and met his eyes for the first time as truly herself.

"You," he said. His voice was weak. He was visibly emaciated, his hair an irrecoverable disaster, his beard long and covered with dried food — there were empty cans all over the floor, she saw now, and a tarpaulin with a pile of clothes in the middle that he must have been using for a bed and pillow. "You."

She summoned a smile from somewhere deep down inside of her, some place of affection that couldn't be touched by the nightmarish scene and the knowledge of what it must mean, and nodded. "Yes. It's me, Bernie."

"You." He blinked, rapidly. "It would be you. Of course. Who else?" He laughed, and even as a brief burst of noise, it sounded unhinged. Lost. "Who else."

She reached into her coat's breast pocket. He flinched, and she kept the hand in place. "Don't be afraid. It's just me. I'm here."

She hoped the others had the sense to stay put. She hoped they weren't filing in behind her. She'd told them not to, but it was sometimes difficult to decide between what someone said they needed, and what you thought you had to do.

Del Olmo extended his arms and raised his hands, palms up, to encompass the extent of his creation. "Welcome to my failure, brother."

In an instant, the smell of the place, the oppressive glow of the fractals on the wall — her conditioning had defeated their insidious intent immediately, but now they seemed to be throbbing like veins — and the sting of her tears nearly doubled her over. She hunched down, clutching her stomach, and in the instant that she knew what this must look like to the others, she saw Del Olmo's head snap up, and she knew they had come in to rescue her.

She spun on her heels, still crouched, and held out a hand. "No!" she hissed. "I'm fine! I'm fine."

Harry, Del, and Udo were standing in the breach. Udo had one hand in her reagents pouch. Del had the gun fixed on Del Olmo. Harry, bless him, was wielding Alis' pistol as if he knew how to use it.

"Brother," Del Olmo rasped. "Brother, brother… and do I see you back there, too, brothers?"

McInnis appeared behind his subordinates. He nodded without obvious import.

Del Olmo laughed. "Your cowardliness is in retreat." Wettle was almost certainly fleeing back up the tunnel, after Sokolsky. "Can't stand to see what we've become. I understand." And then, he was weeping again. "Oh, I understand."

Lillian heard the internal rotors on the gun spinning up. Her left hand was still in her pocket. She raised her right hand, both to warn Del and plead with Del Olmo. "Bernie. Come back up with us. We can still fix this."

He laughed again, harsher this time but no less manic. "Fix this? FIX this?! It was never anything but broken. All these people were only ever BROKEN. Broken is their NATURAL STATE!" He reached up and tore at his hair, and some of it came out. "They're useless, brother. Useless. Useless. USELESS."

"Ber—"

"USELESS!" Del Olmo screamed. "All FUCKING USELESS! I took off their blinders, I showed them the light, and what do they do? Nothing. NOTHING! Sex and drugs and rock n' roll, statues of Gary fucking Busey that bring a tear to your eye. Fucking fucking trash!" He tried to throw his coat off, but the sleeves caught, and he stalked around the edge of the shaft with it hanging around his waist like a ridiculous half-cape.

"Bernie…" Lillian pleaded.

"It's over, brother." Del Olmo was breathing fast and heavy, flapping his arms uselessly, beard shiny with fresh spittle and eyes wild with rage and hurt. "It's over, and there's worse to come after."

"I'm not your brother, Bernie." Lillian took her hand out of her pocket, and opened the envelope she was holding with her other hand. Her coat slipped off to the floor. "I'm not your brother. This is who I am. You said I could show you when the time was right." She held it up; the pen sketch looked like a red smear through her shining eyes, but she hoped he could see it. She needed him to see it. "You said I'd know when the time was right. Please look. And then let me help you."

"I'm not your fucking Bernie," he snarled, "and you can't even help yourselves. This is what you do with boundless creativity? I paint the world with inspiration, and you spit in my fucking face! You don't deserve those incredible machines inside your heads." He slammed his index finger into his skull until the bones audibly snapped, and he didn't even seem to notice. "The gears could sing, but instead they sound like a dot-matrix printer haemorrhaging out a black-and-white photo of Paris Hilton on fucking cardboard!" He was close enough now that she could feel the spit landing on her scalp.

"Please," she almost wept, hand still outstretched. "Please look at me."

He looked at the sketch. He shook his head. He shook his head again, harder. There was nothing in his eyes that looked like him. "Crude. Inartistic. Amateurish." He walked over to her — she heard the gun whine — and swatted the paper from her hand with a rough flourish of his coat. She caught a glimpse of something sudden and impossible inside the lining…

…and he was gone.

"FUCK!" Del screamed. "What the fuck was that?!"

"The delay," Udo was saying. "It worked through the delay. I can't see anything."

"Some assistance please," said McInnis. It sounded like a pained grunt.

There was more shouting behind her, but Lillian didn't hear any of it. Her ears were ringing from the haemorrhaging of her throat, and a keening like nothing she had ever let loose before in her life.

There was no time to mince words, and no time for compassion. "Get her up," Ibanez told Harry, and she shoved him into the shaft. McInnis was on the ground too, but he only looked winded, not wounded. She hefted the gun, and ran down the tunnel.

Whatever Del Olmo had done, her vision had already cleared. She could only hope he hadn't affected her more deeply, in ways she couldn't sense. If he had, well, they were fucked anyway. So she ran, and she ran, and she vaulted over the prone form of William Wettle who lay face-down on the stone, and she heard a sort of crunch as she misjudged the distance and put her steel toes on his collarbone, and he screamed in agony, which meant he'd probably fallen down as per usual as opposed to Del Olmo putting him down, so that was good, and she ran.

She couldn't hear it herself through the muffling effect of the SCRAMBLE unit and the pounding in her ears from the sprint, but her display reported footsteps behind her. Keeping pace. That would be McInnis, with a second wind; the Director had always been in immaculate shape, was the Site swimming champion, had access to health technology even the other Sampis did not. She still wasn't sure what good he'd be when they caught up with Del Olmo. All he could do was talk, and talking had already failed.

As though able to hear her thoughts, he spoke over the SCRAMBLE intercom. "I may still be able to convince him. I have… certain suspicions… about my faculties. Of speech." He didn't sound like he was tiring, but even an athlete needed to take a breath now and then.

She'd had suspicions of her own, but this was not how she wanted to test them out. She didn't say anything. They'd keep their options open.

Back into H&S. She caught a glimpse of bloody dazzle coat whipping around a corner, and resisted the urge to fire. She could have taken him, and the entire dorm block, out in a single shot, but destroying the facility's superstructure was a bad idea. It was how they'd gotten into this situation in the first place. So she kept running, and McInnis kept up.

"Wait!" a tortured voice wailed from farther behind, and she heard the Director's footsteps falter. Ibanez didn't wait. She plunged into the foyer.

The foyer was chaos. They'd made no effort to move the First Nations out of their cozy corner; it hadn't been the most practical of their several reasons, but the fact that Harry had pointed out the uncomfortable historical parallels had been one of the most convincing. The mythological creatures were flitting here and there, not obviously under any sort of compulsion effect but merely reacting to the sudden frenzy of activity from their human counterparts. The room was in an uproar, the people were howling and clawing at their eyes, the fires were scattered and ash and sparks filled the air. The ceiling tiles were ablaze. She kept running.

"He tried to take… the elevator," McInnis said in her ear. She still couldn't hear his footsteps, nor see them reported on the screen, but then she was leaving rather a lot of activity behind her right now.

"Must've been down there… a long time," she agreed. An animal screech reverberated down the empty elevator shaft as if in response, and the floor briefly shook. "Only… one way out… now."

The nearest subway station was the connector between Health and Pathology, Psychology and Parapsychology, and the dorms. It fed into the central terminal that had once linked up with AAF-D, and the Blue Line that led to the lake. Her SCRAMBLE unit flashed a whole panoply of warnings as she vaulted the turnstile, and she closed her eyes until the beeping ceased. When it did, and she reopened them, she was almost to the train. The doors were open. There were voices shouting behind her. The walls were painted with photorealistic depictions of the staff of Site-43, living and dead, and even through the filters she could feel their eyes turning to watch her as she ran. The train was cerulean blue, soothing and unbroken by detail. She felt her legs giving out. She was stalling. Something… was…

She pushed through it. She leapt, she slid, she made it through the doors. She threw herself up the nearest pole, and hammered the button that would hold the doors for the others. Not because she needed them. Because she didn't want them left behind as the Site destroyed itself in Del Olmo's wake.

She took a moment to catch her breath, and there was a clattering of feet. Then the doors swished shut, and she knew her target had made it into the engine. She took a deep breath—

Lillian crouched down in front of her, face streaked and soaked. "He's mine," she said. "It still has to be me."

Ibanez pressed forward and kissed her, on the lips. When she drew back, the other woman's blue eyes shining with fluorescent light reminded her of the old Windows 95 error screen. "It's not all about you. Remember?"

She left Lillian still crouched on the floor, shell shocked, and saw that McInnis, Sokolsky, and Udo had made it onto the train. "Harry?" she rasped, only now realizing that her lungs were practically on fire from the long haul.

"Missed the doors," Lillian muttered. "Out of shape."

"Caught the caboose, though." Harry staggered from the back of the train, wheezing. "Is that… what it's called?"

It wasn't a long ride, but it felt like one.

The math was pretty simple. They all needed time to get their strength back, and Del Olmo had almost certainly left traps for them down the length of the train. All the doors would open at once, and there was nothing he could do to stop that, so everything would be equal when they arrived at the station. So, they waited.

"Good thing the windows are painted over," Harry said. "I'm sure there's awful shit on the tunnel walls, too."

Lillian grunted.

"It'll take a long time to clear," Udo agreed. "But we've got the best experts in the world."

Lillian grunted again.

"I'm confident we'll be able to cure the rem—" McInnis began.

"Would you all shut the fuck up?" Lillian shouted.

He was already gone when Del sprang from the train. It wasn't difficult to see why, though she of course didn't, since she'd already sprinted far ahead. Lillian staggered out almost drunkenly, heart still pounding, and saw that Del Olmo had actually not spent most of the ride preparing nasty surprises for anyone who came looking for him, but instead simply smashing the engine's right-hand window and clearing the glass so he could escape before the train had stopped. There was blood on the floor in a nasty smear, like someone had dropped and rolled, and streaks leading off to the turnstiles. This time Del slid under instead of going over, using the blood to grease her way, and she was at the far door before the rest of them reached the checkpoint.

Harry was beside her. "You don't need to be there."

She took his hand, and as they passed through the stile, pulled him into a run. "Allan and Harry at Grand Cove."

It was a dense reference, equal parts Star Trek: The Next Generation and the vigil in his car as they had waited for Scout to pass, but he got it immediately, as she'd known he would. He squeezed her hand, and nodded.

She'd put her SCRAMBLE unit back on, which was good. AAF-A's lower levels were filled with fractals that read, according to the filters, like an early draft of the masterpiece Del Olmo had been assembling in the geothermal shaft. "This was all him," said Lillian. Her voice was very tired. "He did all of this."

"Reynders," said Udo. "I wonder what—"

There was a scream from ahead, and suddenly Udo was in front of them. She was short, but her legs were long enough to do the job with the sudden burst of energy, and she made it around the next corner before the others. She was already kneeling beside Del, who was sprawled on the floor and thrashing and screaming, when Harry's SCRAMBLE set reported the contents of the latest set of murals.

A tree-lined landscape on fire, an army of female dwarfs mowing down a fleeing crowd of duplicates of Ana Mukami. The sigil of the Chaos Insurgency was everywhere. The floor was a turbulent pool of red water.

"Zevala in abstract," McInnis noted.

Del's helmet was off. She must have been ambushed at the corner.

"Stay with her." Lillian pushed past Udo, and tried to shake Harry's hand off. He didn't let go, and with a grunt of frustration she pulled him forward again. They left the thaumaturge cradling the agent's head in her lap, and headed for the stairs.

They could hear the man babbling in the distance as they climbed through a gaseous mixture that made them see apparitions on the walls, ascending alongside them. Or maybe it was just mist, and the apparitions were actually there. They heard weeping and cursing as they reached the ground floor, where a portrait gallery of obscene proportions stretched from junction to junction to junction, none of it apparently anomalous. Del Olmo's lab, or teaching hospital, perhaps. As they rounded the final bend one of the portraits seemed to leap off the wall and attack them, but it was only that the fleeing memeticist had tore it off the wall and flung it as one final inelegant obstacle before the foyer, and the front door.

They didn't even see what there was in the foyer. They simply ran, and Lillian was now far too out of breath to even shout. She wasn't sure what she would have shouted if she could.

The parking lot was

The grass was

The trees were

She unfocused her eyes.

Del Olmo stood in the middle of

Del Olmo stood. The landscape around them was

Del Olmo stood. She looked at him. She didn't look at anything else. Everything else was

"I tried," he rasped. "I tried. But they wouldn't listen. They never listen."

She let go of Harry's hand, and this time he allowed it. She approached her ragged mentor. I'm listening, Bernie, she wanted to say. It's me.

But she knew it wouldn't make any difference.

The sky was…

…red.

She could see the sky. It was red. She looked down at the ground, which

No. Whatever was going on in the topside exclusion area, it covered everything below the horizon, and very little above.

She wondered why the sky was red.

Del Olmo was backing away from her. "They found us," he said. Tears were flowing freely down his face. "Everywhere, they found us. I thought it was our time, but it was theirs. Because of you."

She couldn't begin to imagine what he meant. Who found you? Because of me? Because of me, or what you think I am? She didn't ask. She kept walking towards him, hands extended in the vain hope he would take them.

He kept staggering back, towards the edge of the parking lot, to where… You're a memeticist. Be a memeticist. To where there would normally be grass. To where there would normally be a hill, dropping down to where the interdiction zone would normally end. She realized that she could actually see the trees in that direction, and the outline of the lake. Perhaps when they crested the next

Perhaps when they had gone a little farther, she might be able to see the grass and scrub. But first… "Be careful," she said. Pleaded. "You're going to fall."

He laughed. "I've already fallen. Like all the others. I crawled back here to make something beautiful in a fallen world. I saw the precipice. I saw the claws. I couldn't cut off my thumb to spite your race."

She wanted to lunge forward, to pull him away from the edge, but she didn't. She stopped advancing, but he didn't stop retreating.

"I was better than all of them," he whispered. But she still heard it. The air was

The AIR WAS

VERY STILL, beneath the red sky. The others were silent. She was silent.

Del Olmo was sobbing.

"You were," she said. "You were the best."

He smiled, and then he fell.

He rolled roughly down the

He rolled roughly, bouncing and cracking his limbs, screaming in agony all the way down. He rolled, and he staggered to his feet and stumbled, and then she could see his surroundings in crystal clarity, because he stood beyond whatever memetic monstrosity had blotted out everything but the simplest details of the interdiction zone. He was free.

He stood there, shaking, staring around himself uncertainly, and then he looked up at her, standing on the edge and looking down at him.

Their eyes met.

He raised a hand.

"L—" he said.

And then a gout of blood burst out of his mouth, and his throat cracked open like a hatching egg, and his spine snapped back, and he issued a gurgling blood howl into the red sky as glossy black limbs split his skin in five places, and he died, and the thing which had half-grown from his living body found its footing with the awkward balance of his corpse as its centre of mass, and it staggered off into the treeline like a blind steer.

True Art is Cognitohazardous

The Breach Goes On: Deadlined

Not Ready for Prime Time