On the Same Page - SCP Foundation

On the Same Page

1996

15 December

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Harold Blank thought coffee tasted like dirt.

Or, rather, like the idea of the taste of dirt. He hadn't eaten dirt in his adult life, wasn't even sure he'd eaten it as a child, but coffee — or rather his recollection of coffee, since he'd only ever tried it once — tasted precisely the way his gustatory memory insisted that dirt tasted. Hot dirt, through the haze of time.

"Scout has me looking over Boskey's microfilm. Last damn job he gave me before retiring." He sighed, idly sketching his girlfriend's portrait on the back of his daily duty sheet. He'd already sketched himself, overlarge head and terrible haircut inclusive, on the other side. "Boskey saved all his work on microfilm, like he was a spy or a seventies librarian. You know the term 'scut work'? Gonna start calling it 'Scout work'. That can be his legacy. Microfilm gives me migraines."

Eileen Veiksaar smiled absently into her cup of coffee. "Mm. Briggs has been telling me about this new… Jesus, it's weird. Computer anomaly, they're calling it the 'code monkey'. Do you get it? Code monkey. It's an actual monkey. Inside the code." She flipped the page on her technical manual, and resumed reading.

He furrowed his brow, narrowed his deep-set eyes, and looked away. The third sublevel cafeteria was nearly deserted, a prodigious volume of empty space separating him from everyone else in the room.

Well, it was mostly the space.

Although he thought coffee tasted like dirt, he had nevertheless been looking forward to his first day at Site-43 back in April of 1995 because of the promise of bad roasted bean juice. He had a coffee date with Eileen Veiksaar.

"I'd rather have a Coke," he'd said, "but it's still a date." This was, for him, uncommonly incautious phraseology. He was always afraid to call anything what he hoped it might actually be, and he'd very much hoped that this might have actually been a date.

It had been.

"Boskey was looking into foxing." He sipped at his can of Coke. "You know those brown spots on old books? Called foxing. Chemical process nobody understands, but Boskey? He thought he had it all figured out. He thought — get this — that foxing is a parasite which causes books to occlude their own contents. Maliciously." Harry leaned over the table dramatically. "Boskey thought that books can become sentient, Eileen. Infected with sentience! He thought he could hear them talking. Now obviously he meant only anomalous books, like the ones in A&R."

Eileen nodded absent-mindedly, either because she knew Archives and Revision had a vast library of problematic provenance, or because she knew to nod when the talking stopped.

"He didn't know what causes it, whether it's the words we put in them, or the meaning books have for us societally, but he was pretty sure it happens… and he was pretty sure people used to know about it. These books get crafty, try to hide their knowledge from people. That's why it's called foxing — derived from 'to fox', i.e. to trick." He sat back, satisfied.

She turned the page again. "Mm. Oh, I opened up that busted terminal from Tactical Theology this morning. Interior's completely ossified, every circuit turned to bone. Lab tells me it's a genetic match for Saint Isidore of Seville, patron saint of computers. Didn't know that was a thing."

Of course, he'd had plausible deniability. 'It's a date', in the English language, could carry both innocuous and romantic meanings. Probably by design… he'd made a mental note to investigate that some day. Etymology was one of the many ways he avoided thinking about the present-day world.

He'd lost his plausible deniability when she'd responded "Yes. It's a date." and smiled at him in a manner he couldn't fairly call salacious and couldn't accurately call anything else. She was a head shorter than him, she had strong arched brows, and she had a broad mouth which didn't open but simply stretched when she smiled; when she fixed him with a wide-eyed blue gaze at an angle approximating the Kubrick Stare, and didn't so much flash as insinuate an ironic smirk, well, it was more than a little indecent even if completely innocent.

Whether her smile had been innocent, he'd quickly discovered to their mutual delight that her intentions were not.

She was lost in the reading material now, the coffee cup cooling in the crook of her finger, forgotten. He tried one more time. "Do you know who the patron saint of historians is?"

She laughed, and turned the periodical to face him. "Look at that. Site-15 wants us all to switch from Macs to PCs. As if."

He nodded, and stood up. "Catch you later."

She barely nodded back, already reabsorbed in technical minutiae. She didn't startle when he crumpled the Coke can, which had been empty for almost half an hour, and she didn't look up when he pushed in his chair and left.

A few months ago, no academic literature or caffeinated beverage could have kept them out of his quarters or hers during a lunch break. The difference between then and now made him feel… not empty, precisely.

More like the fading memory of having felt satisfied.

There was a little old lady standing in his laboratory.

He spotted her from a long way off. His lab was at the centre of a T-junction, and the brushed blue steel door was standing wide open. The woman was also standing wide open: her legs, her labcoat, her mouth. Harry could see the back of her throat in the bright fluorescent light as he walked out of the hall, so far tilted back was her head. Her silver hair sparkled.

She didn't acknowledge his arrival, so he spent one further moment on inspecting her. Just long enough to realize that she was, in fact, a very young woman, a few years younger than him. Mid-twenties, maybe.

With sparkling silver hair.

"Hey." He waved one hand in front of her cat-eye spectacles. "Anybody home? Because this is mine. My home. My lab, at least."

Her eyes slowly focused. Her head tilted forward, and she looked at him. Her mouth didn't close, but it did become somewhat less open. She blinked. "Oh. Hi."

"Hi." He offered her his hand. "Harold Blank. B-L-A-N-K. Like that look on your face just now."

The corners of her lips quirked upward. "Oh wow, sorry. Yeah. I do that. Melissa Bradbury." Her mouth hung open again when she stopped talking.

He glanced down at his outstretched hand. When he glanced back up, she was still staring agape at him. "You're Dr. Blank? I'm your new roommate. Labmate. Whatever."

He groaned inwardly, very nearly outwardly. "Was wondering when they'd get around to replacing Boskey."

Her expression was reblankening by the second. "Boskey?"

"Yeah, Chuck Boskey. My former labmate, and the reason you and I and everyone else down here are now subjected to a regular schedule of mental fortificants. Drank a bottle of India Ink and got shipped off to psych review three months ago, leaving behind a note that read, I shit you not, 'It's what the books wanted'." None of this was strictly necessary, but he loved a good story and had not particularly liked Chuck Boskey.

She had that faraway look again. He sighed, and headed for the microfilm reader at his desk.

She turned to keep him in her line of sight, to his surprise. "Hey," she said.

"Ayup." He pulled out his battered old drafting chair and sat down.

She pointed at a stack of mouldering tomes on a counter in the corner. "Are those your books? Or are they the books that told Boskey to drink India Ink?"

She had been listening after all. That, too, surprised him. He suddenly noticed how big her sleepy eyes were behind those half-rimmed spectacles. "They were his, and now they're mine. I'm stuck reviewing his research notes, seeing if I can prove or disprove his crackpot theory."

"What crackpot theory?" She ran her fingers along the spines of each book.

"Foxing is a parasitic sentience infection." He sighed. "Foxing is… what?"

She had started to smile again, and it had distracted him. She seized the opportunity. "I know all about foxing. Trust me."

He grinned at her. His sense of humor did not allow for the same sort of guileless mirth that hers apparently did. "I doubt that very much, Dr. Bradbury."

"I'm not a doctor yet." She plucked the topmost tome off the heap, and placed one hand on its cover. "But I know a thing or two. Let's take a walk."

They took the subway.

Harry had learned to hate the Inter-Sectional Subway System in September of 1995, when events topside had restricted all staff to the Site's underground facilities. So long as he could pop up for fresh air whenever the mood struck him, sitting in a narrow metal canister in a narrow stone tunnel one kilometre below the earth had been no more troubling than getting stuck in a warm winter blanket. When fresh air became forbidden, however, the extra step of removal had gone positively nightmarish. The memory of that nightmare lingered on.

Melissa Bradbury, however, was a breath of fresh air. She kept Boskey's book in her lap, and occasionally beat its leather cover like a drum. Her head bobbed up and down when she talked, she leaned forward and backward seemingly at random… and then she simply stopped being present, in all but the most literal sense of the word, and he'd think She's forgotten I'm here or She's tired of this conversation or Her hair must weigh nothing at all, it drifts away on the faintest breath of recycled air.

And then her eyes would flash like a backlit screen, and she'd be present again, and she'd pick up their conversation right where it had left off. It was hilarious. It was charming. It was really quite…

Cut it out.

"So no, I haven't started my doctorate. Still finishing the MSc." She was momentarily dazzled by the whiz-blurred lights of the subway tunnel. "On supernoptics."

"Super what? Super noptics?" Harry shook his head. "What's that extra letter doing?"

"Superno, supernatural. Oculus, sight. Supernoptics: the physics of anomalous light." She pulled a water bottle out of her lab coat, and he instantly knew why: dry mouth. "Every physical property on Earth has an anomalous counterpart."

"Not just the physical ones." Harry splayed out on his bench seat; the subway car was unoccupied, and they were facing each other across the aisle. "You could say I study supernhistory."

"But I wouldn't," she said.

"Me either," he agreed.

"Sounds supernstupid." An absolute starburst of a smile, this time, and he realized that her eyes were deep blue.

Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-A was one of the three terminus stations of the ISSS. It was also the oldest segment of the Site, constructed in 1942 to house the Foundation's earliest experiments in subduing magic muck. That, she said, was key.

"To what?" The subway dropped them off at what he'd thought was the lowest extent of the facility, but she knew different. They were already one level down from the station platform, and he couldn't see the walls or ceiling for all the multicoloured pipes.

"To foxing." She turned to face him, labcoat swinging around her like a ballroom gown, and walked backward whilst brandishing the book. "If my theory is correct, we can wipe out these psychic pathogens and keep the Boskeys of the world from swigging the wrong kind of ink."

He frowned. "What's the right kind of ink?"

"Coffee." She blinked. "Slang for coffee."

"I hate coffee," he said. He wished he'd said it to Eileen, back in 1995.

Oh hey, right. Eileen.

"Me too." She swished back around, just as the corridor ended. He'd expected to have to dash forward and stop her from backing into the keycard-locked door. He felt vaguely disappointed about that.

She pointed at the reader. "What's your clearance?"

"Global two, local three. Why?"

She was still pointing. "Level three lock. I'm universal two."

He raised a brow at her. He had a flair for eyebrow-raising; the heavy forehead helped. "Are you using me for my keycard?"

She nodded cheerfully. "It's a keycard-locked door you haven't seen before in a place that's older than you are. You wanna know what's behind it." She stepped out of the way.

She wasn't wrong.

The space behind the door was green.

It should have been grey. The floors were poured concrete, the walls were brushed concrete, and the ceiling was composed of concrete slabs. Every exposed surface not made for walking on was ribbed with pipes of every size and description, save for their colour: flat slate grey, the colour of

"Concrete." Bradbury shook her head. "Living underground is tough, concrete on top of that is really just too much."

"What is this place?" Harry put one hand on the largest conduit, and felt something moving intermittently within. It was warm to the touch. "Where are we?"

"No idea." Bradbury pulled a rolled-up piece of thick paper out of her labcoat pocket, and tapped him on the nose with it. He was still reeling from the familiarity of the gesture when she unfolded the schematic diagram so he could see.

"Huh. 'AAF-A to AAF-W transition space'. Hell does that mean?"

She retracted the paper and rolled it up again. "No idea. There's another door on a stairwell down that way," and she pointed, "which has, according to the map, and I do not jest, a Level 5 keycard lock. So this is as far as we mere mortals go. But! It's far enough."

She pointed at the sources of the viridian cast on every pipe and slab, a series of gloomy green lamps in thick black metal cages. She handed him the book. She waited.

He waited.

She laughed. "Mercury vapour lamps. Way too inefficient for modern use, but this place is ancient, so I figured… and I was right! Open the book, find some foxing, and hold it up to the light. If you hear any voices, try not to listen to them."

He scowled half-heartedly at her, and flipped the cover open. The frontispiece was plastered with brown spots, as though two dozen different cups of coffee had been resting there for a long period of time. He felt a faint buzzing in his head — or was it just the lamps? He'd been too focused on her to notice — as he lifted the book towards the ceiling.

The buzzing briefly increased in pitch, then suddenly stopped. (The lamps were, indeed, also humming on a lower register.) He lowered the book again.

The foxing was gone.

"No way," he said. "What the f… What the hell?" He wasn't sure why he'd tempered his language.

Sure you're not.

She stood up on the tips of her shoes and looked over his shoulder, resting her chin on his collarbone. "Ha! I knew it."

He should have closed the book, and demanded an explanation. He probably should have suggested that she wasn't, strictly speaking, observing professional etiquette. He definitely shouldn't have stood stock-still and let her breathe softly on the side of his face while she stared at the book and he forgot he was holding it, and he definitely should have questioned both of their motives across the entirety of this little underground road trip.

She finally detached, landing back on her soles with a smart click on the concrete. "So, puzzle it out. Smart guy."

The universe expanded to include more than just Melissa Bradbury, and he reluctantly considered the book again. The foxing hadn't gone, precisely; the paper was still stained, just not nearly so completely. "Chemicals," he said.

"Hmm." She bit her lip.

"Bacteria?" he hazarded. "Bacteriological, do you think?"

"Maybe!" She bobbed up and down brightly, rocking on her heels.

He pointed at the lamp. "Mercury whatever lamps are… germicidal?"

"Exactly!" She beamed in the ghastly green glow. "AAF-A is the oldest scary goop sewer in existence. Every inch is imbued with thaumic radiation. Low level, not enough to hurt anyone, but more than enough to lend an extra dimension to the local physics." She spun in place, for no apparent reason, then considered the ceiling for no other apparent reason. "Light, as a general rule, kills bacteria. Germicidal light kills it better. Germicidal light becomes thaumatogermicidal light in a thaumic field. So, magic mercury vapour exposure is enough to kill, or at least drive into hibernation — we'll have to check — the foxing biblioparasite." He suddenly realized how impossibly smooth her features were in the eerie light.

Side effect of lapsing into a neutral expression every few minutes? As if on cue, her eyes and facial muscles went suddenly slack and her mouth dropped slowly open.

He snapped the book closed, and she started. "Did you just make up those words? 'Thaumatogermicidal'? 'Biblioparasite'? Is smashing words together your thing?"

She nodded. "I've got a lot of things, but yeah, that's one of them. Optics is physics! Physics is all about smashing stuff together."

He just barely resisted the urge to follow up on that statement.

16 December

Eileen Veiksaar drank her coffee alone the next morning.

She didn't notice.

"Good morning, Dr. Blank."

"Good morning, Miss Bradbury." Harry paused, examining the matte black nameplate in his hand. "That sounds like a spy name."

"Like Miss Peel." Bradbury was sitting at her desk, staring at the ceiling; he couldn't see her eyes from the fluorescent glare on her polycarbonate lenses.

"Who?" He slid the plate into the metal frame on the door, and considered it critically.

Blank, Dr. Harold: Archives and Revision

Bradbury, Melissa: Research and Experimentation

"Miss Peel. From The Avengers?" Her head slowly drifted back to reality. "Oh! Good morning, Dr. Blank."

He smirked. "You already said that."

She smirked back. "Guess it's really good, then." She pointed at the door. "They get our names right?"

"Yep. Three cheers for B&B."

"Bed and breakfast," she agreed.

"At least buy—" me a drink first died on his lips, and he cleared his throat frantically. The first thing that came to mind was the next thing to come out: "…the B&B Commission."

She arched her brows — though they were already quite pre-arched, he noticed — and asked: "The what?"

"Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. History thing." He walked briskly over to his desk, hiding his face as best he could, and regarded the microfilm reader with a mixture of resignation and familiar contempt.

"Nerd." She stood up from her chair and stretched. "Old things nerd."

"You just quoted a TV show from thirty years ago." He flopped down in his chair, wincing at how much it squeaked, and punched the power button on the reader. "That's old enough for the both of us."

"A matched set." She strolled across the lab, humming something tuneless between mouth-breaths, and leaned over his shoulder again. "You do a page, I'll do a page. Spare your eyes."

She'd obviously meant for him to close his, between pages.

He didn't.

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