Harry Birthday - SCP Foundation

Harry Birthday

2023

19 March

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

His wife shrieked at him as he stepped out of the washroom.

"Good morning to you, too." He walked across the carpet to the end table where his work clothes were piled up messily, and discarded the towel.

"What did you do?" Melissa Bradbury walked gingerly towards him, one hand raised, as though he were a tiger inclined to pounce on any source of sudden motion. "What the hell did you do?"

"Bleached it." He pulled on his socks. "Considered doing the beard, too, but didn't want to bleach my face."

"Bleached…" She shook her head, and reached out to touch his overlong hair. It was brushed and combed, but still a thick mass. "Where did you even…?"

"Internet." He was half-dressed now; trying not to bonk her in the noggin was slowing him up. "I was careful."

"Oh, good," she scoffed. "He was careful when he damaged his hair. Why would you bleach it?"

"Because I was tired of waiting for it to go white on its own." He went for his labcoat next, and she withdrew to give him space. "I am a self-directed man. Where's my schedule?"

Melissa handed it to him. She pulled it off the wall printer every morning when it came; he was always still in bed. "Like you don't know what's on."

He did know. He took the proffered paper, scanned it, and grunted. "Same old. Just like me."

"Not that old." She beamed up at him. "Happy birthday, dork."

He bent down to kiss her. "Thanks, dummy."

She pushed him toward the door. "Be sure to keep track of all the really fun insults you get on your hair. I expect a full report at dinner."

Delfina Ibanez: "Oh, is it snowing outside?"

Udo Okorie: "Didn't think you could get any whiter."

Allan McInnis: "I'm not sure that will show up properly on your photo ID."

Ilse Reynders: "You look half as old as I feel."

Daniil Sokolsky: "Can I bum a Werther's Originals?"

Polyxeni Mataxas: "You're supposed to tell me when you see a ghost."

Philip Deering: "You look wiser today. It doesn't suit you."

Amelia Torosyan: "Very distinguished!"

William Wettle: didn't notice.

Harry was in something of a mood by the time he reached Health and Pathology. Judging by her solicitousness Helena Forsythe, the top doctor, had no difficulty reading his expression. He imagined his beard was all bunched up beneath his pursed lips.

"That's all the shots for now, except the big one." She tapped a few buttons on a sleek, slim, silver case, and the lid popped open with a faintly audible hiss. "One more poke and you'll be good until next year."

"Can I see it for a second?" The syringe was indeed a fat one, lacking labels of any sort. He and the other members of Provisional Taskforce Sampi-5243 ("See You In September") had been injected with whatever was inside annually since 2003, as part of an advanced healthcare regime designed to keep them on duty interminably.

Forsythe shrugged. "Can't hurt. Just don't uncap the—"

Harry had already yanked the plunger off. He tilted his head back, upended the syringe, and downed its contents in a single gulp.

She was still staring at him in shock when he stood up to retrieve his labcoat. "You've been injecting me with water for twenty years," he told her. "I don't mind needles, but I do mind theatre."

"Mont Blanc moves!"

Harry grimaced at Geneviève Voclain, newly-minted full researcher in Archives and Revision, as he took his seat in the salt mines. There was a light smattering of applause and well-wishes, which he waved off with relative good grace. "Thanks, yeah, yeah. Thanks. It's not a holiday, go back to your microfilm."

He found it curiously difficult to focus on his work today. He had a few documents to review for release to Udo Okorie, scanned at the Wanderers' Library and mailed in an envelope stinking of camphor; he wasn't sure what kind of scanner the Librarians employed, but whatever the iridescent toner smudges were doing was doing a number on his head. There was a backlog of two SCP files to sign off on, but they were low priority and he wasn't at all in the mood. What are you in the mood for?

He shook his head. That was the wrong question. Since when does mood come into this? Do your damn job.

He spent a few hours miserably toiling on things which just a few years ago would have been easy, breezy tasks before the accumulated Coke Zero in his system demanded release, and he stood up. "Anybody need anything?" he called out. "Taking a trip down the hall."

Veasna Chey raised her head from a microfilm reader, and quipped "Oh, don't trip! You might dye."

He left them to their chorus of groans.

He exited the washroom feeling peculiarly tense, when a sense of relief should obviously have prevailed. He was beginning to think it had been a mistake to get out of bed this morning.

"Did they catch whoever did that to you?"

He turned to say something particularly nasty to whoever had flung this latest barb, and was caught up short by what he saw. "Uh," he began unpromisingly, then quickly picked up speed, "did we not catch you?"

Eileen Veiksaar, once Chief of Identity and Technocryptography, was leaning on the tile wall and grinning at him. Eileen hadn't grinned at anyone, so far as Harry knew, for over a decade. She was wearing a nice suit, not the kind she should have been wearing — a detainee jumpsuit. "I'm in a special kind of jail," she told him. She held up her ID badge for him to see, and he walked over to examine it.

"Ethics Committee?" he laughed. "Wow, they couldn't just have executed you?" He had to admit, however, that this inexplicable soft landing after her act of treason seemed to have suited her. Her blue eyes were sharp where he remembered them wandering and dull, there were fewer worry lines on her forehead and her back was noticeably straighter.

"You know how it is," she smiled. "Happens to everyone eventually. You break the rules, and they either break you back, or put you above them. And then you get a whole new set!" She was practically glowing. He'd never seen her so content. "Next time they'll probably make me an O5."

"Or a brain in a jar."

She shrugged. "Either or. Hey, happy birthday. You're getting fat." And she poked him in the stomach.

He doubled over, and it was only half-performance. "Thanks. Now tell me how old I am."

"We're both old." She adjusted her jacket. "Like a retirement home around here."

"Well, we appreciate you visiting." Harry headed for the nearest vending machine, fishing in his pocket for his ID card. "Don't forget to write."

"I'm not visiting."

It took until he had the next can of Coke open for the import of that statement to register. Something about the sound of fizzing bubbles always set his brain alight. "Wait, you're staying?"

She nodded. "Apparently someone thinks you guys need some extra ethics down here."

He scowled. "More like they think we need a tighter leash. You spying on anyone in particular, or just everybody?"

"Probably just the new hires. All us fogeys are too set in our ways."

He sighed. "We don't have any new hires, Eileen." He held his breath for a moment, then added: "It's good to have you back. You look… good."

"I feel good. Don't know how bad you need a change until you try, you know?"

He shook his head. "No. By that metric, I do not know."

"You'd never know we were the same age." Karen Elstrom peered down at him from her high perch. The Chief of Administration and Oversight had the best seat in the house; though the architect had clearly intended them to lord on their underlings from atop it, most occupants of the post had preferred to mingle down below.

Elstrom was, as so often, the exception to this rule.

Harry leaned on an empty desk and stared up at her. She managed to look like she was striking a pose, despite sitting down, the back of one hand providing only moral support to her sharp chin. "Yeah, you definitely wear it well. Maybe I should try never smiling."

Elstrom did smile, though not with particular warmth. "Our work isn't happy work, Dr. Blank, and I don't have time to uplift you."

"Hard to get leverage from that high on the ivory tower anyway, I imagine." He glanced at Elstrom's subordinates, beavering away at the tasks which kept the Site's internal hierarchy properly stratified, then back up at her. "You end up going anywhere for your birthday?" It had been just a week before his.

She rolled her eyes. "My brother took me out to dinner. He proceeded to announce that his wife was pregnant, and regaled me with all the fascinating details. Did you know," and she leaned down conspiratorially, still several feet above his head, "that human beings are still capable of reproduction? It's apparently a great feat of strength, worthy of repeated praise from all quarters." She leaned back, apparently satisfied with the fierceness of her complaint… and then a look of recognition flashed across her eyes, and she almost — though not quite — grimaced. "Ah," she added, by way of apology.

Harry waved it off. "Alright, well. Won't bother you further. Tolerate the rest of your afternoon!"

"Wait." Elstrom looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. "You… doing alright? You've got big ugly bags under your eyes."

This was Elstrom's equivalent to being considerate, so he inclined his head in appreciation. "I'm fine. Just a bit tired."

She nodded. "On account of being so old."

He nodded back. "Yeah. Any idea how I stop doing that?"

She considered. "You could die?"

Harry stared at the list. "You serious?"

McInnis nodded. "I am." He usually was.

"You've talked this over with the Council?"

The Director shook his head. "I have not. The prohibition on new personnel is still in place, particularly after the… recent unfortunate incidents."

"I didn't think they knew about those." Something about the list of proposed new researchers was bothering him, but he was having trouble keeping focus. "Wait, so if the Council won't let us hire anyone—"

"We're going to have to convince them otherwise." McInnis assumed his traditional posture of determination, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk blotter, hands clasped in front of his chin. "We've allowed our staff to age into near-obsolescence, Harry. That was never the plan."

"Well, you never shared the plan with me. Far as I know, it was only between you and Scout." Harry leaned back in his chair, adjusted his glasses… then exclaimed "Wait." He tapped the page. "That name. Isn't that the Qu—"

"I want you to review the files for each of these individuals," McInnis interrupted. "I want you to make a case for why they'd be valuable additions to our team. And then I want you to sit on it, until the moment is right."

"Presumably you'll tell me when that is."

McInnis shook his head. "We'll be needing a transfusion of new blood sooner, rather than later. It'll be obvious, when the time comes."

Once again Harry found himself scowling. "You've been talking to Zwist too much. More cryptic every damn year."

The Director relaxed his posture, and smiled. "Comes with the job, you know."

"No." He folded the paper and tucked it into his labcoat pocket. "I barely know my own job, at this point. How do you do it, Al?"

McInnis waited placidly for something firmer.

"How do you do the same shit, day after day, and not get worn down? How do you keep up the momentum?"

"Oh." The Director shrugged. "I suppose I keep my eye on the prize. I remember what it is I'm working toward. Every day, it gets a little closer."

"And that's enough for you?"

"Why wouldn't it be?"

Harry didn't have an answer.

"You're late." She was splayed on her dorm room couch — in actuality their old dorm couch from Falconer University — surrounded by countless stacks of paper and no less than three different laptop computers.

"An archivist is always late, Lillian Lillihammer." Harry flopped down beside her, upsetting one of the computers. It disappeared over the edge, hitting the carpet with a plastic clunk. "Precisely as he means to be."

"Leaning into it, Gandalf? Acceptance is the last stage of grief."

"You're every stage of grief." He scrunched himself into the cushions, and closed his eyes. "Happy birthday."

"Happy birthday. Feel as old as you look?"

"Older." He opened his eyes, and side-eyed her. "How old you figure we are?"

She considered. "Hard to judge without knowing how much they've been diluting the 006—"

"I'd say about half," he hazarded. "The rest is saline solution."

She raised a white eyebrow. "How do you know that?"

"It tasted about half-salty."

She guffawed. "I won't ask. Alright, so half. I don't have access to the top level version of that file, but I'd say, given twenty years of application at half dilution, starting when we were thirty-seven and continuing up to fifty-seven, and using what I can assure you is very complex and sophisticated mathematics well beyond your ken, biologically we're both around—"

"Forty-seven, right, okay, yes." He grimaced. "Honestly that's not a lot better."

"A spry forty-seven, though, when you factor in all the other health treatments." She leaned forward, squashing a few sheets of paper under her sock feet, and tugged on his long white hair very hard. "Which makes this performative grandfatherliness a bit hard to take."

He swatted her hand away. "How long has yours been white for, again?"

"That's different. You don't let red like that wither away to nothing. You want people to remember it for how awesome it was." Her own mass of blank tangles was tied behind her back. "Anyway, there's a difference between getting ahead of the curve and being a copycat — not that I mind the flattery."

"I'm not copying you." He squirmed. "I'm acknowledging the reality. Biology notwithstanding, I'm old enough now to feel old. And I do."

"So what?"

He reached over, placed one hand on her forehead, and pushed her back to her side of the couch. "So, it sucks. What do you mean, 'so what'?"

Lillian slammed the lid of her nearest laptop shut. "Everything sucks, Harry. The whole world sucks. Everything turns grey and falls apart. Why should you be special?"

He thought about that for a moment. "Because I'm me," he said finally. "I see it from the inside, so it's different. I'm rotting, Lillian."

"You never struck me as a solipsist. What's the issue? You expected never to get old?"

"I don't know." He drummed the cushion. "Maybe I expected to have gotten more done by this point. I've had the same job since before the millennium turned. I don't have any… Melissa can't…"

"Yeah," Lillian bluntly offramped that tangent for him. "Go on."

"I'm out of shape, and I've lived down here for so long I can't imagine living anywhere else. I'm not making any progress on the things I should be… progressing. My life doesn't change, Lil."

She nodded. "Do you want it to?"

"I don't know!"

"Have you tried talking to our resident immortals about this? They might have a different perspective."

"I'm not in the mood for a Shakespearean monologue today, so Thilo's straight out. And Ilse…" He grunted. "I don't think anyone can talk to her about feeling stuck in a rut without being a tremendous fucking asshole for doing it."

"I could do it for you," she offered. "I enjoy being a tremendous fucking asshole."

"I know you do." He stretched, and yawned. "Maybe I'll turn in early tonight."

She caught his hand, and yanked hard. He fell off the couch, knee striking the third laptop hard enough to audibly crunch the lid. "Ow!"

She leaned down over him, white hair on white hair, and snapped "Or maybe you'll stop moping and do something, you whiny fuck. If I'm not old, neither are you." She glowered at him magnificently. "And I am not old."

There was an armed guard waiting for him when the elevator opened. He flashed his security badge; they nodded, and tapped a code into the keypad lock. They then tapped it with their security badge. He then tapped it with his security badge. The guard then spoke their passcode into a speaker, and Harry did the same. He wondered who had access to the much faster version of this security theatre which definitely existed for emergency situations, and by the time that thought had passed, the door finally slid open.

He walked in.

SCP-001-A was sitting on the edge of his simple cot, holding a paperback novel: Finnegan's Wake. Harry winced at it. "Little light gibberish of an evening?"

"Chaos keeps the mind sharp." The barrel-chested old man smiled up at him. "To what do I owe the pleasure, Dr. Blank?"

"It's my birthday." Harry grabbed the visitor's chair and sat down. "And I'm bored."

001-A nodded sagely. "Would you like me to tell you a bedtime story? I could relay a few comforting facts about the onrushing end to eternity."

"Nah." Harry folded his arms and slid back in the chair. "Tell me why you're still alive instead."

The other man blinked. "I haven't died."

"Right. Why is that?"

"I don't understand the question." 001-A spread his arms wide. "Are you getting existential on me? Because that is absolutely my preferred variety of dread."

"No. What I mean is this: you're old as dirt. You've been doing what you do for many years, I'll bet you can't even name me a number. You've got a dozen death cults to your name, you've killed countless thousands of people—"

"Billions," 001-A interrupted. "Credit where due, please."

"—and you have to have seen what feels like every version of the life you've chosen to lead, all spread out behind you, and they've all led you here. To an empty cell. All your work behind you, and none ahead. What keeps you going?"

The old man laughed. "I've heard immortality described as the feeling you get when you stay up all night, and every inch of you is bone tired, but you can't sleep. The people who say that? They haven't lived long enough. You get a second wind eventually, and that's when you start really seeing things clearly. Your first go-around is all a muddled mess, but the second, and the third? When you already know the script?" His jaw suddenly clacked shut, so quickly it put his tongue in mortal peril, and he switched tangents as Harry sat up straight again. "Did you really come here to talk about mortality? Has your life become so—"

"What precisely did that mean?" Harry asked, deadly calm, feeling his eyes focus in for the first time all day. "'When you already know the script'? What does that mean?"

"Civilization is cyclical." 001-A waved vaguely. "None of this is new. You're no different from the ones who came before you. Your bars are no stronger. You'll—"

"That's not what you meant. You've talked about the cycle before. This was something different." Harry leaned forward. "What script? Human history? Is that the script? Do you already know how this ends, and not just theoretically?"

001-A snapped the novel shut, but said nothing more.

"And… 'billions'? What do you mean, billions?"

Still nothing.

Harry stood up. "You know what? This was a good day for rambling. I had no idea where I was going when I started, and now I do." He headed for the door.

"What does that mean?" the hateful creature growled from behind him. "You can't forestall the end."

"It means I've got a job to do, a few monographs and your 001 proposal to finish, and my own script to follow." He glanced over his shoulder, not really seeing the other man anymore. "As long as we keep moving, there isn't going to be an end."

Melissa found him at his desks, sliding from each to each on his rolling chair, hammering away at his keyboard and scrawling on multiple reports with purple pen. He didn't notice her immediately, but as he finished the second SCP review he felt the familiar sensation of her breathing over his shoulder, and turned his head to kiss her hello again.

"It's past seven," she said into his cheek when the moment had passed.

"Yeah, just finishing up." He tapped out a few last commands, then reached up to put his arm around her shoulders. "Didn't get much done this morning."

"So you thought you'd spend your birthday doing extra paperwork?"

"Better than moping." He saved his last open file — "TL-5243-A" — switched off the terminal, then in one swift motion swung her down into his lap. Her perennially lazy eyes were now wide awake. "Moping is unproductive."

"You're in a productive mood now?" she asked, face a mask of innocence.

He reached under the desk, and tapped the button for the window shutters.

It was always a little gratifying when the rush of birthday wishes washed over him, seasoned as they were with tired jibes about his advancing age and fresh ones related to his bleached keratin. It wasn't until midnight, when Melissa was already asleep and Harry was flaked out in his plush armchair, cat purring softly in his lap, that the notifications stopped flooding in and he could focus on the day's final task.

He drew out McInnis' list, and examined it closely.

"That is definitely the Queen," he murmured. "And the Queen is dead."

The cat's chest heaved, and Harry stroked his back slowly before scratching under the chin. Scout had been a kitten when his namesake had died, some twenty-six years ago, and at this point he divided his time between Harry's lap, Melissa's lap, and the heat register. They'd had to swap out the metal one for plastic when they found burns on the cat's stomach; there simply wasn't that much fire left in him. Like so many other things he'd thought about today, Harry didn't much like to think about that.

So he picked up his tablet, pulled up the first name on SCiPnet, and didn't.

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