Borrowing Trouble - SCP Foundation

Borrowing Trouble

2003

9 September

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Lillian Lillihammer was standing on the central daïs in the Theology and Teleology offices. They looked more or less how she remembered them — to the extent she had memory to work from, having never fancied herself much of a god-botherer botherer. A central Rotunda (or was that pentunda?), a pentagon of low cubicles surrounding the raised platform on which she stood. That platform was dominated by the desk of the Section Chair, which so far as she knew was Michael Nass. Where Nass' desk had once been perennially littered with tchotchkes, now it was littered with the remains of a fallen ceiling tile. Offices for the senior researchers radiated away at each of the five corners, two of their doors ajar, two of them closed, one missing entirely.

The decay was so unobtrusive that even her detail-oriented brain didn't immediately take note of it, but as soon as she had determined the environment was not about to collapse on top of her, and was empty of obvious hostiles, details began to filter in. Each desktop was covered in a thin film of dust. The carpet displayed obvious footprints — no, boot prints, the kind made by boots like… well, like the boots she was wearing.

She could remember standing here for a long, long time. But she had to concentrate to remember it, and that was even more troubling than the environmental change or her own change of outfit. She was not used to having to work at calling up her memories; there had never before been a delay. Something was definitely wrong. Not wrong with the world — obviously there was very much wrong with the world — but wrong with her, and that required immediate action. This was a problem with her brain, and her brain was what she used to solve problems.

Lillian was used to playing mind games. She did single player, and she did multiplayer. Single player was for self-development. She had trained her brain to do things which she knew for a fact no other person's brain could do, had been trained to perform this training by the best memeticists who had ever lived, before she had excelled them, since now she was the best memeticist who had ever lived. Not the most experienced, but the most capable of transforming experience into facility. She spent almost all of her alone time tuning the precision instrument of her mind. She spent much of her time in the company of others finding interesting ways to utilize their own blunt instruments, the multiplayer component of the mind game genre. Right now she found herself in possession of a new expansion set, and oh shit here comes multiplayer.

Footsteps from behind. Sloppy leather-slaps in an uneven rhythm. Unworried, unhurried. Someone accustomed to the present context. Someone, presumably, who expected her to be wearing these clothes. Perhaps even expected her to be staring at the wall with an ever-increasing neck cramp. At any rate she suspected she'd break something if she tried to correct the angle, and you're committed anyway because here the fuck they are.

They were Daniil Sokolsky in a tank top, khaki shorts and flip-flops. Lillian had only ever seen him in three modes of dress: business formal, dazzle camo, and nude. She was absolutely certain he didn't own flip-flops. He'd seen her nude as well, and those two facts could not possibly coincide. He stopped in front of her cocked head, and smiled sadly.

"Evening," he said.

"Evening," she said back.

The smile grew sadder as he walked around in front of him. She tracked the motion with her eyes, that same niggling memory telling her it would be a very, very bad idea to uncramp her neck just now. "Some day one of you empties is going to say something coherent and original," he sighed, "and we both know it's going to be you. Well, you'd know if you weren't empty. Maybe there's still something left in that pretty red head of yours that knows what I'm talking about." He reached up and ruffled her too-long hair, which felt greasy and flat on her skin. "Maybe you're just too canny to show it. Right?"

Fighting the urge to strangle him for touching her so casually, she grunted out a "Right." in response.

He shook his head. "Right. Right. You didn't even wander out of the room this time. Still where I left you. At least it doesn't look like you've soiled yourself; a few of your friends haven't got the muscle memory to use the washroom. You even remember to flush, most days! But then, you always were a genius."

She knew what he was doing. She'd caught him doing this in his lab once, when he'd thought he was alone. Daniil Sokolsky preferred to have an audience for his… "Genius," she agreed.

The smile widened a little. "Thanks, I try. And I try. But I haven't been getting far, have I? No, don't bother answering. You've been watching me fuck this up for a week now, haven't you? No closer to cracking it, literally or figuratively."

He walked over to the far wall, the thing she'd been staring at when she'd first come to, where the partitions had been disassembled and somebody had been preparing a dynamite blast. "It's only rock. That's what they keep telling me. But if it's only rock, why can't we drill it? Why can't we even blow it up?" He turned back to face her, made brief eye contact, looked away. "Do you know, I can't even get one of the bosses to come down and take a look? You'd think Wirth could spare a minute. All he'd have to do is hop into your head, then hop back when I'm done showing him what's what. Doesn't even need to get off his ass in F-A." He glanced up at the ceiling. Lillian followed his gaze, making sure to use her head and neck instead of just her eyes, craning slowly to see the camera he was staring at. It was a risk, but she needed to know where it was, so she made the gesture seem as much like mindless mimicry as she could manage. Every tendon in her neck screamed in protest, and she clamped down on the signals. "I don't care who hears that, either," Sokolsky continued. "You want my respect? Do something to earn it. This whole invasion has been an absolute fiasco."

"Fiasco."

He grinned back at her. "I knew you'd agree. We've got most of the Site either occupied or reduced to rubble, a sizable number of the most effective fighters on our side, and yet we can't seem to nip their resistance in the bud. They've got a certified evil genius on their payroll, so to speak," and he thumped his chest like the great ape he was, "and what do they have me doing? Trying to tunnel through an ontokinetically impermeable slab of bedrock! Well, that ends today." He reached into the pocket of his baggy shorts and produced a small piece of electronic equipment. It looked like a bomb built out of two remote controls. "Do you know what this is, Lillian?"

She didn't, but she knew the right answer. "Lillian."

He snorted. "Good guess, but no. If I had you in my pants, I'm sure I wouldn't need to resort to something so crude. This is a mineral resonator. The Pit Bosses and Mole Rats use them for breaking up cave blockages. Fix it to the wall like this," and he pressed it beside the borehole, where it stuck, "and turn it on," and he flicked a switch on the device, "and you can find the resonant frequency of the rock and split it however you'd like. Very effective. Very clean. But I need it to do something a whole lot messier." He thumped the rock with one fist. "You know what's behind there, Lillian?"

"Lillian."

He chuckled. "No, we'd be in serious trouble if they had you! Not in this state, of course, but at your best? I'd have a hard time taking you out of the equation." He cocked his head, half in consideration, half in mockery. "You know they want me to put a bullet in your brain? They're absolutely certain you're never going to recover from this, but they really don't want to take the chance. You might be the only person left down here they're legitimately afraid of. I keep telling them you'd be such a boon to the cause that they'd be crazy to waste you, and so far they've been listening, but I don't think I'm ever going to get completely through to them. So if I was ever going to get completely through to you, it'd have to be pretty soon. I can't protect you much longer."

And he looked right into her eyes again, held the gaze she kept steadfastly empty, searching for some flicker of recognition. She refused to show it.

"But I digress," he continued in a disappointed tone. "I was explaining the plan to you, in hopes you'd find it so barbarically sloppy you'd come out of your coma just to suggest a better way to fry your friends' brains. Because that's what this is going to do, you understand. I'm going to turn the bedrock around the Site into one giant memetic resonator, and I'm going to pump whatever voodoo I can scrounge from what Del Olmo left behind into every single mind in range. If the bosses are feeling good-natured, they'll go for the brainwashing angle like they did with me. If they're not, well, there's a whole range of possibilities. Stunned, so Wirth has a whole bevy of bodies to play with? Wiped, to neutralize the threat and maybe do a little research on the side? Or maybe we'll just pop all their heads, paint the underground town red and call it a day. It's been a pretty frustrating year for everyone, you know, and it might just be time to end it all."

"End it all," she whispered.

He tutted. "Now, don't be fatalistic. There's still time for this to work out in everyone's favour. The bosses have got a plan, and once we're all on the same side, I'm sure they'll be sharing. Don't think of this as the last days of humanity, think of it as the start of a new phase!" He clapped his hands, and rubbed them together. "You know, I think you've spent too long in here, watching me work. I might be able to make a better case that you're going to get better if you take a hike, see the sights. Prove there's something still rattling around in your head."

He walked up to her, placed both hands on her chest below her breasts, and gently pushed. "Go for a walk, Lillian."

She affected an unsteady sway, but remained upright. "A walk."

"That's right. It's for your own good. And mine, honestly; if you do come back to life, I'd rather you didn't know all the details of how the resonator setup works. Last thing I'd want is for you to sabotage it on the way out." He laughed. "Not that it wouldn't almost be worth it, just to see you in action again. Now go."

He grabbed her by both shoulders, turned her around, then gently nudged the backs of her knees with the fronts of his own. She started to stagger away.

"And don't tell anybody I talk to myself," he added as she left. "They wouldn't understand."

Nicolescu was walking backward, and looking over his shoulder constantly. Nascimbeni could read the conflicting impulses with ease: the naked technician was both afraid of what might be creeping up behind them and wishing to secure his escape route from Mukami, who he very much did not trust to have his back. This also had the knock-on effect of hiding his exposed genitals from their view.

Mukami pretended not to notice. She'd taken Nascimbeni's hand, and was tickling his palm whilst merrily babbling away. "So, Paul," she trilled, "what have you been up to lately?"

"Don't talk to me." Nicolescu wouldn't look at her face.

"I thought we were friends," she mock-pouted.

His voice took on a harder edge. "I was friends with Ana Mukami. That's not you."

"Then why do I remember?" She smiled over her shoulder at him. "I remember you at the Christmas party. You drank half the punch bowl and stammered half a 'hello' at me before leaving to go throw up. It was very sweet."

"You took what she was." He looked like he was going to cry. "You replaced her."

Nascimbeni's stomach was tightening. He hated this. "Paul, I really don't see—"

Nicolescu wheeled on him, nearly falling over as he did so. Nascimbeni unfocused his eyes to avoid direct eye contact with the inevitable flesh-flopping. "No, you don't, do you? You always had a blind spot for what she was up to."

The tightness shifted slightly. "What's that supposed to mean?"

The other man stabbed a finger at him as they all stopped walking and faced each other. "She would have gone for you in a second, and you never even noticed. Why would you notice now she's been taken over by some godawful monster from out of space?"

"The monsters loose in this compound are not from out of space," Mukami said softly. She tapped the nearest pipe, an ectoplasmic inversal conduit. "They're from out of the plumbing."

"I asked you not to talk to me, toilet ghost."

"Can I talk to you?" Nascimbeni asked.

Nicolescu crossed his arms, then uncrossed them and belatedly obscured his crotch. "I'm still deciding."

Nascimbeni exhaled hard. "Paul, I legitimately have no idea what's going on. I feel like I got dropped into this situation from outer space. Why did the Director have you spying on the Mounties?"

The rage and hurt in Nicolescu's eyes became tinged with new uncertainty. The change of topic had caught him off guard, distracting him from his diatribe. "Because he says nobody ever suspects the maintenance men. I think his exact words were 'servants pass beneath notice'. I should've known it was some aristocratic bullshit that wouldn't actually play."

"I'm not sure they have much of an aristocratic tradition, where he comes from," Mukami smiled.

Nascimbeni held up a hand. "Let me tackle this, Ana. What I meant was, why is he spying on them in the first place? Are we not on the same side?"

"No," Nicolescu shook his head, "and we are a fourth side. J&M is an enclave between OSAT and the rest of the Site. We're maintaining the systems that everyone else needs, so nobody's interfering with us."

That didn't make any sense. "Why would we not be working directly with the rest of the Foundation personnel?"

"Because the Director is a stupid asshole," Nicolescu grunted, "and he did something you wouldn't forgive him for."

"Which was?"

"You never told us," the technician shrugged.

"And you all just… trusted me?" Nascimbeni didn't know whether to be touched or shocked. "And betrayed the Director on my word?"

Nicolescu met his eyes. "Yeah."

"If you're so loyal—" Mukami began.

"Ana—"

"—how come you were in a position to be bullied into espionage by your Director?"

Nascimbeni bit off his words of caution, and found himself nodding. "I would also like to know that."

Nicolescu looked away. "Because they caught me spying on them, for you."

Mukami looked delighted. "Paul Nicolescu, double agent!" She patted Nascimbeni on the shoulder. "I never figured you for a spymaster."

"You thought it'd work," Nicolescu grumbled. "You said, and again I quote, 'nobody minds the garbage-minders'." He kicked at the floor aimlessly, at real risk of stubbing his toes. "You were wrong, obviously."

Nascimbeni shrugged. "I'm better with pipes than people."

"What I'm hearing," said Mukami, "is that Paul is considerably more likely to be lying to you than I am."

Nicolescu flushed from head to toe. "That's rich. That's very rich. You have lying superpowers. You know how to— CHIEF!"

As though tired of bearing the weight of their argument, the floor had given way.

Lillian passed a few other researchers she faintly recognized in S&C outfits as she headed out of TheoTelo. Some of them were walking, in circles or back and forth, and she had to dodge them without looking like she was dodging them in case someone more mindful was watching her. One, a squat man named Isidore who had hit on her every day for a week before she'd hit him back and ended it, actually swanned over and patted her on the shoulder. It was all she could do not to lay him out again.

I need to figure out the plot, but everyone wants to play fucking co-op. It was either-or, in her experience.

She spotted a broom closet with an open door, and fought to keep the elation off her face. Just the place to have a good long think. She swung her long arms from side to side, rocking farther left and right with each swing until she was swooning drunkenly in the corridor, then with consummate grace walked into the closet's doorframe, nose-first. Stars exploded in front of her, and she staggered back against the door, then slid all the way into the closet. Her bony ass struck the end of a mop, which softened the fall somewhat, and wonder of wonders the door rebounded off the wall and swung softly shut.

With a click. Oops. That was going to be a problem. How could she plausibly get back out, if she was meant to be brain-dead?

It didn't matter. They were doubtless tracking her with the cameras, and even if they weren't, eventually Sokolsky would come looking. For now, she had time to continue the monologue he'd so blithely interrupted.

She scooched onto her back, stretched out her legs, and thumped the rubber soles of her combat boots against the closed door.

She had to think through the mass of new information she'd been presented with, figure out how her new bifurcated memory worked and how she could hack it to her own ends. The main problem was the lack of a manifest. The memory with which she felt the most continuity, the one which had been loaded into her persistent mental framework when reality had unexpectedly gone tumbling into the shitter, had been directly experienced by this iteration of her mind. She knew what it contained, she knew where to go looking for each individual scrap of recorded past. The other was like a jumble of files without a file system, no way to know what was there without digging around, opening everything up, datum by datum, and examining them. There had to be a way to sort things relationally, to arrange them chronologically, but she didn't know what that way was yet. When appropriate stimuli presented themselves, the memories would rise to the fore, and she could tell by their foreign feel that they were the memories of the Lillian she had apparently been in this alternate timespace, and was no longer. But she needed more control than that. She wasn't used to lacking control over her own mind. She wasn't even used to lacking control over the minds of others, truth be told. The possibilities were exciting, but the weakness was infuriating.

She had to learn the code, and then she had to learn how to code.

First, she tried comparison. On September 8, 2002, she had watched the breach from an S&C monitoring room. Did she have any alternate memories of that moment?

As it turned out, she did.

2002

8 September

The New Timeline

Agents rushed this way and that, intent on who knew what — she actually doubted they knew, from the tones of the hushed conversations whipping past her — as Lillian continued her pilgrimage at a steady, stylish lope. Nobody she'd stopped could give her a straight answer about what was going on, and she had absolutely no breach responsibilities whatsoever as a memeticist, so she relied on the power of ritual instead. Dazzle coat flying in every direction, she made for the blackened husk of the experiment chamber where Bernabé Del Olmo██ ████ ███ ████ ██████. The envelope was in her labcoat pocket, and whatever else happened today, she intended to burn its contents.

2003

9 September

WHAT THE FUCK.

Lillian's memory was perfectly eidetic. She could see anything which had ever happened to her with perfect recall. It was so precise as to almost be anomalous; her mentor had once told her she'd been on his shortlist for years before starting with the Foundation because he'd been convinced it couldn't be natural. She didn't remember things wrong. She most certainly didn't conflate the things she remembered.

But she had just remembered September 8, 2003 as September 8, 2002.

Once again she soared ahead of her absent compatriots, who by this point were bumbling about in total bewilderment at their newfound landscapes of conflict and confusion. Her actions in the original breach had been altered to match her actions in its reprise. The reprise, therefore, had been the original breach. For six minutes, she'd gone back in time. She'd done things differently, so things had turned out differently, so everything that happened next had also been altered.

Except, somehow, her memories of the preceding year. She'd instead collected the new set, and laid it parallel to the old, like tracks in a two-way subway tunnel. That wasn't the way it was supposed to work, she was pretty well certain.

She had just begun pulling on that thread when she felt something else pulling her thoughts in a completely different direction, felt suddenly constrained and claustrophobic in her own mind, felt…

…felt…

No longer alone. A new player had entered the game, hacked right into her private server. She was sharing her headspace with somebody else.

That somebody else cursed with her lips and slapped the dank darkness furiously, searching for purchase. It found the empty mop bucket on one side and an industrial sink on the other, and hauled her body up. It reoriented her neck with a soul-shattering crack, and Lillian blacked out.

When she came to she was back in the hallway, crossing it in long strides, heading deeper into Research and Experimentation. Apparently her hitchhiker-hijacker hadn't bothered to feel the pain of snapping her neck back into place, or the dull throb which had replaced it; either that or it was accustomed to blinding, mind-bending agony. It certainly wasn't taking great care with her body, turning the corners tight and overexerting her tired leg muscles like she was a beater car on the way to the supermarket. Panic and resentment fought for control of the part of her mind which was still hers, while she avoided fighting to control the part which was not. Best not to make a fuss. Best not to reveal her presence. Sokolsky thought she was long gone, so whoever this was, they probably thought the same. Sokolsky was never wrong, except for when Lillian disagreed with him.

Can you hear me? she thought. It was better to find out sooner than later.

No answer.

The presence yanked open a lab room door and thrust her body through. It seemed to have no difficulty moving her about, all precise actions and deliberate angles without a trace of awkwardness. She had a body unlike any other at 43, so this familiarity could only have come with practice. This had happened before.

There were five people in the room, but only one of them looked like a person. The other four looked like swirling pools of glowing oil in human form. The first one looked like Xinyi Du, except for the way it held its jaw and the way it narrowed its eyes at her approach.

"You." Lillian felt her mouth move again, heard her own voice — curiously clipped and low — and felt her long forefinger stab Du between the lips and chin. "New task."

Du looked irritated. "Look, I'm in the middle of—"

"The hierarchy, right?" Not-Lillian interrupted. She could feel frustration rising in her joints, a frustration which wasn't hers. "You were going to say you're in the middle of the hierarchy, and since I'm at the top, you're going to do whatever I say. Right?"

Du's eyes narrowed further. "I'm never going to get used to your sense of humour."

The thing making her body move forced it to laugh. "You've at least learned to recognize it! That's good! That's progress. No, but you're right of course, Dr. Du. Tell me what you're working on." Lillian had the sense that the mindjacker was merely pretending not to be annoyed, but was genuinely curious to see what the diminutive quantum physicist was up to. She still couldn't read the other's thoughts, but she recognized the quickening of her pulse which came with the anticipation of exciting information.

"Same as before." Du gestured at the terminal he was hunkered over. It displayed a wireframe image of a colossal tower of computer equipment and cooling conduits. "The DUAL Core problem."

The frustration intensified. Her pulse quickened, her face felt hot. "I still don't see why we're wasting you on that."

"It's not a waste!" For the first time, Du actually seemed like himself. He'd never liked having to explain his projects to others, but justifying them was beyond the pale. "The logic is sound. We've already seen that in overflow situations it starts to simulate other universes in microcosm. Extending that to macrocosm will allow—"

"Yes, I know," Lillian saw her own hand swipe through the air to cut him off, "but I don't see what that's going to prove. We know we're fractured. We don't need multiversal data for that. We need to know how to recombine, and then we need to decide if that's even relevant."

"How could it not be relevant?" Du exploded.

"We've all got self-determination so far!" It was getting heated. Whatever this was about, it was a matter of deep concern. "You don't murder a child just because it used to be part of its mother."

"I can never tell how serious you're being in these discussions," Du muttered.

"Default to me not being serious at all, and you won't go far wrong." Lillian's mouth bent the wrong way to form an awkward smile. "But look, Xinyi. I have a request."

Du shut off his screen. "This is where you pretend I can do whatever I want, and you're just making suggestions."

"That's right."

He sighed. "Go on."

"I've heard stirrings in the hab block. There's an OSAT patrol outside of their safe zone. I can't get in their heads, obviously, but you might be able to, shall we say, open them up for me."

He blinked. "You want me to hunt down a Mountie patrol? Seriously?"

"I'm always serious about the hunt. They have finite numbers, and they know things I'd very much like to know. Ana's working on a similar problem right now, but I'd love to beat her to the punch. If you help me out, it'll raise both of our profiles."

OSAT? Mukami? What could it all mean?

"You're really very interested in coming out on top, for a creature of chaos." Du's expression was thoughtful, almost mistrustful.

Her chest heaved with a passing imitation of laughter. "Anarchy and equality are two very, very different things. Will you help me with this?"

"When do I ever turn you down?" he asked sardonically.

"I'm sure you will, one day." She paused dramatically. "But only for one day."

He gathered up his notes. "I'm going already. Drop the routine."

Her fist thumped her chest, in imitation of Sokolsky's earlier gesture. "This is all a routine." She waved at the faceless apparitions. "Take as many grunts as you like."

"I'd like to take none," he grumbled. "They give me the willies. And it's not much better when you string people along like puppets."

"At least I'm playing with the pretty one today!" Lillian's body bent down to smirk up at him, eyelashes fluttering. She felt sick, not only because of the flirtation but also because she had to bend over double to reach his level.

"She's not my type." Du put a hand on Lillian's forehead and pushed her gently away, as Sokolsky had. "If you were taking the seduction angle, you should've picked a man."

Her body straightened. "Duly noted!"

He ignored the pun, if he picked up on it. "You know, the resistance thinks you're evil?" Du walked past her, snapping his fingers once. All four of the strange creatures fell in behind him as he left. "Keep making jokes like that, and you might convince the rest of us too."

She laughed again, and watched him go. When he was gone…

…so was the presence.

Lillian dropped onto the floor, down beneath the sill of the lab window, and pushed up against the wall. She was alone again. She was herself again.

She was in a madhouse. She was a madhouse. A cell, a shell, to be occupied by…

Focus. Okay, so someone else was capable of snatching control of her body at any time. Since she was apparently just one of a small army of wandering zombies, she had to assume the presence was hopping between them as its needs dictated. The zombies might even have been prepared for that very purpose, erased to allow easy entry and control. Her role in the timeline shift might have been the only thing keeping her consciousness intact.

She could think about that later. Right now, she had to figure out what kind of opponents she was dealing with. The most obvious starting point was the shimmering unpersons Du had been using as lab assistants. What the hell were those?

When had she first seen them?

The question pulled up another memory, and this one wasn't at all familiar.

2003

29 July

The New Timeline

"FUCK that's loud," Lillian shouted.

Gedeon Van Rompay, Chief of Pursuit and Suppression at Site-43, eased off the trigger of his assault rifle without lowering it. "I thought I told you to stay inside."

"It isn't any quieter inside! The entrance to my office is a tunnel. Little bit echoey, you know?" She peered down the length of corridor to where it terminated in a blind corner. There was nothing there but a wide dispersal pattern of glowing green and yellow sludge. It shifted on the floors and walls, as if it were alive.

"There's nothing you can do out here." Van Rompay gestured with his shoulder at the squad of Stationary Task Force members who were busying themselves with setting up an imposing-looking barricade. "I have the situation under control."

She leaned on the wall beside him. "I'm smarter than you are."

"No dead person is smarter than any other dead person." The grizzled old man's glare could wither foliage. "You stay out here, you're going to die."

She pointed at the door to her decontamination tunnel. "I stay in there, I'm going to go crazy. Probably do some crazy shit, thinking I'm helping, only I won't have enough information, and it'll fuck everything up. Give me something to do."

Gedeon Van Rompay wasn't the sort of man who took negotiation well. "Dr. Lillihammer. My job is to protect our remaining assets in this area."

"Remaining?"

"Yes. Remaining." He began to count with his right hand, still not taking it off the barrel of his weapon. "We started off the day with four. You, Du, Bremmel and Boswell. Boswell's dead. Bremmel's probably dead. Du sucker punched my best agent, took his gun and took his life, then took off. We're about to lose the Section."

She pushed off the wall while he recited this information, the corridor growing brighter as her eyes opened wide. "You're serious? You're going to lose Mem and Countermem?"

Van Rompay grunted. "Stupid nested Sections. I mean we're losing this entire wing. R&E."

The Research and Experimentation Section is more of a college than a faculty, an overarching structure under which the various specialized units operate. Theology and Teleology, Memetics and Countermemetics, Quantum Supermechanics and the occasional new field are technically subordinate to the R&E umbrella. This wasn't the result of a power grab, nor does it represent a priority differential between these hard sciences and the ones working solely under their own auspices. It came to pass for a very simple reason: work and office space. If every subfield of science had its own dedicated lab, if every workgroup had its own unique meeting room, if janitorial services and fuel and repairs all had to be coordinated separately for each and every ivory tower, the drain on manpower and resources would be immense.

We might be rich and powerful, but underground is still underground.

R&E exists as a separate entity for a different reason entirely, however. Some sciences really aren't subjectively important enough, from the perspective of our overall containment mission, to warrant their own Section. Site-43 employs specialists in astronomy, botany, entomology, mathematics, zoology and any number of other areas of expertise — the mythical SCP Foundation 'researchers', those not lucky enough to become archivists, memeticists, or even theologians. Even behind the Veil, we can't all be special, but we all need something to call home.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

"I thought you people had this under control!"

The other agents, she was just now noticing, looked shell-shocked and beaten down. One of them glanced up resentfully at her as she shouted at their leader. She'd spent the entire afternoon in her soundproof, meme-proof, everything-but-blastproof office trying to math out a solution to the rash of possessions sweeping the Site, and had apparently missed the advent of a much more serious threat.

"We had that, the brainwashing thing, under control. This is new." A humanoid blob of colour appeared at the end of the corridor, and Van Rompay put a tidy cluster of holes into it without shifting his stance at all. The blob exploded, and the distant tapestry of swirling liquid took on new layers and nuance. Lillian's ears would never get used to that rattling roar.

"What the fuck are they?" She caught herself taking a single step away from safety, towards the interesting danger. By the way Van Rompay shifted his feet, he hadn't failed to notice. She wondered whether he might put a bullet in her calf to keep her from running; he was a pragmatic one, beyond a fault.

"Targets. That's all I can tell you. Anything else, you'll have to tell me. After the firefight."

"Firefight?" On distant but more focused inspection, she now saw an array of handguns lying in the puddles of goop or laying against the wall panels. She'd missed the last pair clattering to the floor under the cacophony of Van Rompay's rifle report. "Where are they getting those from?

"The armoury." Van Rompay knelt to pick up a magazine from a duffel bag at his feet, and replaced the ammunition in his rifle. "S&C's. They took the southern sector an hour ago, and they've been emptying Ibanez's guns at us ever since."

"Where is Ibanez?" Lillian hadn't forgotten that Van Rompay controlled the MTFs while Ibanez ran in-house security, since she couldn't forget it, but she considered the grunts so essentially interchangeable that the disjuncture hadn't fully registered until now. "Shouldn't she be running this party?"

Van Rompay stood back up, and resumed his shooting stance. "We're in radio contact. Last I heard, she was holding the first sublevel. They've killed most of the anomalies in custody, doctor, and they're moving on to AO as we speak. They're everywhere, you understand? Every—" A yellow head appeared around the far corner, and Van Rompay neatly removed it. "Everywhere."

Everywhere. That was a lot to take in. Was this the fall of Site-43? Applied Occultism was across the Site and up one level from where they were now. While Lillian considered that possibility academically, the part of her that could run on its own without her attention opened wide and said: "This must be like Christmas for you, right?"

"No. There are generally ceasefires on Christmas."

"Maybe at your house," she muttered. She was running over the M&C floorplan in her head, deciding if there was any point less accessible to an attacking force than her own office. She realized there probably wasn't.

"You want to exercise your intellect to help me with my job?" Van Rompay suddenly barked. "Exercise radical self-control and prevent Dr. Lillihammer from fucking up my attempt to keep Dr. Lillihammer alive."

"It can't be that bad." She was only half-listening.

"It's that bad."

"Coming around!" a deep voice bellowed from behind, and Lillian turned to see an unfamiliar cut of beef in a blood-spattered S&C uniform turn the corner opposite the one Van Rompay was covering. The guard jogged over and roughly saluted. "It's going hard upstairs, sir. We've lost radio, and they're in the pipes. Not literally in the pipes," the man blinked rapidly, probably considering the possibility that the watery attackers could travel through the plumbing and rejecting it as too terrible to think about, "but they're rooting around in there, and she's worried they might be sabotaging something."

She would be Ibanez. Ibanez didn't worry for nothing.

Van Rompay turned to Lillian. "What would they be up to in the AO pipes?"

Gedeon Van Rompay had the dubious distinction of being the only Site employee personally hired by Edwin Falkirk, former All Sections Chief and perennial piece of human trash. Lillian had found it easy not to hold this against the man, but only because there were so many other odious things about him to choose from. He was misogynist, he was chauvinistic, he was boorish, he was violent. Just about the only metric on which she rated Van Rompay higher than Falkirk was transphobia; the big man made no distinction between varieties of womanhood, feeling superior to all of them equally.

Except Ibanez. He'd had a hell of time adjusting to that.

But he wasn't the sort to let his prejudices cloud his perception of the available resources. He honestly expected Lillian to be able to help with his tactical assessment. And, of course, she could; she'd been doing it in the back of her mind, where she kept all the good stuff, for the past few minutes. "They're going through the membrane," she said. She stated it as a fact. "They're trying to crawl through the floor."

Van Rompay scowled. He nodded. He glanced up. It made sense; if the attackers couldn't get past his guards on the same z-level, they'd take advantage of the fact that there was access to the third sublevel ceiling partitions via the floor in Applied Occultism.

He pulled a radio out of his bulletproof vest, and thumbed the button. "A-43 Actual to ITC."

"ITC." The voice belonged to Eileen Veiksaar, Chief of Identity and Technocryptography.

"I need eyes on the membrane over SL3, fanning out toward SL2."

"Drones, then." A pause. "Deployed."

I&T had a small fleet of quadrotor drones for patrolling spaces too cramped for regular human traffic. Most of them buzzed around the sensitive and sprawling equipment required by Quantum Supermechanics to do their high-drain calculations, but they could be retasked from a central terminal at Operations Control. Lillian guessed that was where Eileen was, which meant it was all hands on deck, which meant she really had missed an awful lot of shit hitting the fan.

And nearly got it all over yourself. She slapped her forehead. If you hadn't come out to see what all the noise was about, this could have gone real bad real f—

The ceiling caved in above them, and Van Rompay began firing straight up. Lillian caught only snatches of sensory information as she darted to the tunnel door: a humid stench, an electric crackling, the sound of rushing water, a metallic clang. This last was a broken stretch of steel conduit striking the porcelain tile floor, and as she yanked open the door she saw the shimmering gold within it congealing into a human-shaped mass which exploded in a hail of assault rifle fire.

Guess they were in the pipes after all.

She turned in the doorway to see Van Rompay firing blind, an oily green arm around his neck, pulling him back. There were two dead agents on the floor. Lillian started back toward him—

—and he kicked the door shut in her face.

Falkirk had hired Van Rompay under nonstandard circumstances. The soldier had been in command of a Korps Commandotropen operation in the Netherlands, defending a government research installation operating against the Global Occult Coalition's charter from a Foundation inspection-turned-takeover. After a display of shock and awe, Falkirk had offered the enemy agents amnesty and extraction if they would only surrender.

Van Rompay had allowed his men to make the choice for themselves. All of them surrendered, except for him. All of them were subsequently amnesticized, again except for him.

He'd been hired, after convalescing from the injuries required to finally take him down.

Van Rompay, in other words, didn't give up his job until his job was done, one way or another.

Lillian ran down the tunnel and into her office, slamming the door behind her. You're under siege. Resources? There were paraspectral misters in the tunnel, which might take care of the goop monsters. The tunnel itself would dig the brainworms out of any affected personnel, so she wouldn't have to worry about that either. Her office backed on a hallway with a very thick wall, thanks to the services it contained which had once served the janitor's closet she had co-opted for her own workspace…

…shit.

Almost as though it had been waiting for her to arrive at the inevitable conclusion, the back wall exploded in a shower of yellow and green.

2003

9 September

In the distance far above him, someone wasn't happy. "Fuck!" they shouted. "FUCK!"

"Noè!" a far gentler, much more welcoming voice rang out and down. "Can you hear me!"

"God dammit," Nascimbeni muttered. He was lying on his back in pitch darkness. His left ankle ached and there was a dull throb from his right temple, but other than that he seemed okay. His padded vest and rubber boots had absorbed most of the impact.

"Noè!" Mukami repeated, and there was real, unaffected anxiety in her tone.

"I'm fine!" he called to the faint light filtering in from the jagged hole in the ceiling. He fished his cap off the ground, sat up, and winced. "Ankle's a bit twisted, but I'm fine."

"Back up," she yelled. "I'm coming down!"

"The hell you are!" he yelled back. They shouldn't be yelling. "It's not stable. It's very obviously not stable. You don't need to be a structural analysis expert to know that."

"But—" said Nicolescu.

"Get back," Nascimbeni snapped. "You're both too close to the hole. The next support joist is a good six feet behind you, so back the fuck up." The twinge from his ankle and the irritation at this detour was making him cranky. "I'll look around."

"Where's the nearest stairwell?" Mukami asked. His eyes were getting used to the dark now, which made it impossible to make out her face presumably hovering above him in a halo of light.

The basic plan of Site-43 is divided into three sublevels, one stacked above the other: Security and Containment, Applied Occultism, and Everything Else. The stacking is irregular, however, as some elements of sublevel three protrude for an extra storey or two or ten either upward, downward, or both. Quantum Supermechanics has the DUAL Core, a towering edifice of paramechanical nonsense. Janitorial and Maintenance has the geothermal vents which power and heat the entire facility and the massive cooling tower required to service the computers of Identity and Technocryptography. AAF-D has washroom facilities upstairs, draining their mundane waste into the esoteric waste sewer below, and tunnels downstairs for extra pipeage and maintenance access. There's technically an entire sub-sublevel between each 'official' one, for the infotechs to crawl around in and fiddle with their electronic substrata. It should come as no surprise that this overdesigned underground bunker is nearly as complex in a vertical slice as it is when viewed horizontally.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

There were only sporadic access points to these narrow, rustling spaces. He knew where all of them were off by heart. "Back up toward Esoteric Reduction," he told them. He pushed at the debris beneath him and struggled to his feet. "God DAMMIT. That hurts."

He could hear Mukami speaking sotto voce to Nicolescu. "You know where he's talking about?"

"Yeah."

"I'll meet you there," he shouted up at them, trying to keep the pain out of his voice. "Shouldn't take more than five minutes."

"I'll be counting the seconds," Nicolescu replied darkly.

She couldn't stay here.

Lillian was pacing out the boundaries of her prison, pace agonizingly slow thanks to her pretence of being a mindless, ambling zombie. Twice someone walking like they had a prefrontal cortex bumped into her, and she spun, and to keep up appearances she retraced her steps like the dumb animal she was meant to be. It set her back, but if they found her out she'd never be able to escape.

She wasn't sure what she'd be escaping to, and that was a problem. Her solution was to move in the general direction of Administration and Oversight, the Site's nerve centre, in the hopes that it still served its original function for the new overlords. On the way she passed copious evidence that life in the opposing camp was definitely not for her.

She saw researchers in S&C uniforms queued up at wall-mounted ration bar dispensers, and watched cockeyedly as they fought to get the wrappers off and munched mindlessly at the foil. The fact that her own uniform actually fit told her she was probably wearing Gwilherm's, which gave her the worst kind of heebie-jeebies. She saw a grouchy-looking MTF agent roughly yanking the clothes off a roomful of people, shoving them onto soft waterproof mats and setting off a makeshift hydroponics shower at full blast to clean the filth off. She saw a man in a blue labcoat slapping the remains of a human being with a baseball bat, as though experimenting with the bruise and splatter patterns. She saw two people hunched over a cluttered workstation, some sort of massive metal NERF gun in front of them, and realized she was looking through the window into Trevor Bremmel's lab.

She'd seen that gun before.

2002

9 October

The Old Timeline

"Whatcha doin'?"

Bremmel craned his chinless head to side-eye her as she hunched over him. She had to bend almost double to see past the engineer's blues on the little fat man's shoulders.

"Work," he snapped. "Ever try it?"

"If it feels like work to me, it should be someone else's problem." She further violated his personal space to inspect the ugly twisted hunk of hand-battered metal on the table in front of him. "This looks like a problem-solver."

"It'll solve your problems, alright." Bremmel hefted the rifle and stepped back, pushing her away as he turned. "Clean up all your loose ends. Atomically."

"I like the devilry." She backed up further to get a good look at it. It was clearly still in an early stage of construction, and probably not particularly safe. Bremmel had never had a lab explode on him before, but he'd lost more than one lab assistant. As long as the thing was closer to him than it was to her, however, she was unlikely to meet a sticky end. "Now give me the details."

He set the butt against his shoulder and pointed it at her head. "When it's finished," he said, "it will cascade erase entangled particles."

She whistled, refusing to be cowed by the yawning muzzle. "How entangled we talking? Personal, or beyond?"

"Whatever you want, obviously. There'll be a dial." He tapped an empty metal plate halfway down the barrel. "Maybe several dials. Right now it'd probably take out you, your family, most of your friends, and maybe even everyone who's ever wanted to jump in bed with you."

She wolf-whistled. "That's basically everybody with a pulse. Who told you you could make a thing like that, Trev?"

Bremmel set the rifle down again. "It's a side project. Authorized in the nineties. I don't get to spend much time on it, because." He shrugged vaguely. "You know."

She nodded. "Because nobody on the hierarchy would let you keep making this thing if they knew. Right?"

He puttered around the workspace, clearing a path through the clutter of cardboard boxes and plastic tubs toward an ancient coffeemaker. He didn't answer.

She leaned on the doorway, gently nudging the door shut with one sole. He'd been so intent on his fussing with the superweapon, he'd never even heard her come in. "Nineties, eh? Kinda doubt old Scout would've ordered an atomic disarticulation gun. But you'd need pretty high clearance to work with anomalies… I'm assuming you're working with anomalies, and didn't just discover an entirely new branch of science that you're keeping to yourself for pet projects."

He grunted as he searched an overhead cabinet for coffee grounds and filters.

"Meaning you got the go-ahead from the All Sections Chief."

He turned his back on her.

"Meaning Falkirk."

His shoulders slumped. "What do you want, Lillian?"

"Remember that consult I asked you for last week? No? Of course you don't. For starters, you can check your mother-fucking email."

He didn't answer.

"And I do say 'for starters' for a reason, you understand."

Still he didn't answer. From around his bulbous blue bulk, the sounds of percolating coffee filled the lab.

"Let me know before you test-fire that thing, Trev. I don't want you delimiting my romantic opportunities without me knowing."

2003

9 September

It took her a moment to locate the matching memory from the new timeline, which hadn't occurred on the same date. But it was there, and it hadn't gone too differently. It was comforting to think that in any version of reality it would always seem worthwhile to periodically check in on the private doings of Site-43's maddest scientist.

There was precious little comforting about this situation otherwise.

R&E was in an indifferent state of repair. Some of the corridors she lumbered through were immaculate, both undamaged and spotlessly clean. Some were so blasted and scorched that it looked as though a can of black paint had exploded like a grenade in midair. Walls were occasionally absent. Security partitions were everywhere, in odd positions. Many of the modular panels which had once hidden electrical components from untutored view had been removed and re-affixed over the windows to laboratories and meeting rooms, and more than a few of the doors had those fancy lock bars locked across them. R&E was a fortress on the remains of a dozen battlefields—

Arik Euler walked past her. The aging memeticist fixed her with a look of compounded sorrow and hope, which even in her startled state she responded to with blank amicability. He kept walking, and she realized her chest was tight and her breathing rapid. They got Euler. They got Euler. We are turbofucked. Arik Euler had essentially invented memetics, along with a few learned colleagues and the plundered multi-life's work of an immortal Austrian cryptomancer. In what Lillian was now firmly thinking of as the 'real' world, he'd taken up her advanced training after replacing Bernabé Del Olmo as Chair of M&C. He hadn't taught her everything she knew, but he knew most of what she'd been taught. She'd achieved plenty of innovations on top of that under her own direction, and with any luck this version of him wouldn't have access to those, but still…

What is he even doing here? He'd come to 43 because of the breach. If Del Olmo hadn't died, there was no reason Euler would have been summoned back to his old memeing grounds. He was permanently stationed at Site-87 in Wisconsin; were there other transplants on the staff? Other variables she wouldn't be able to account for ahead of time? She liked that even less.

Though the process was already making her feel nauseous, she started sifting through her bifurcated memories to find out what she knew about the old man's presence here.

It was a shot in the dark, but it ended up killing an unsuspected second bird.

2003

18 June

The New Timeline

"But what the fuck are they?!" Lillian hated the frustration and worry in her voice. She preferred to project an aloof attitude. Then again, Euler knew her well enough to see past any false fronts. In a way, false fronts were his primary area of expertise.

"It's early days." The old was taking her deeper into M&C, down corridors she rarely bothered to tread. Lillian thought of the Site's floorplan as a series of impediments between the spaces where she could be alone with her thoughts, so it didn't take much deviation to leave her mildly bewildered. Eidetic memory only worked when you'd actually been paying attention the first time around. "I could speculate, but then I'd be prejudicing you, and—"

"—'a memeticist's mind is their primary asset, and its primary virtue is its difference from all the others'. Yeah. Sure. I think I could stand a little prejudice right now, if it's all the same to you. Fits with the tone of the management change anyway."

Euler winced. "Well, here's how I see it. The brainwashed individuals… they're still passing for the originals, up to the moment where they act out their nefarious agendas. That suggests they aren't being properly possessed, and they haven't been wholly rewritten. I think it's best to think of the effect as something of an overlay."

She nodded. "Yeah, see, that's what I already figured. Prejudice is fine when you're a talented judge. So there's something sitting on top of their personalities, and it only shows up when they need it to."

Euler's face passed through a series of wrinkly uncertainties. "That's part of it, yes. But I think there's a little bit more nuance involved, because they don't seem to have any moral qualms about the things they've done under the influence. They don't start reversing course after the fact. They have a sense of internal consistency between their personal histories and their present impulses."

"So there is some brainwashing going on." Lillian rolled the terminology around in her head as they passed the main lounge, which was empty. Nobody was at their leisure anymore. "Maybe it's more like brain laundering, actually. Impulses and justifications being passed from person to person, making the trail impossible to follow. Everyone's involved."

Euler nodded. "That fits with the evidence so far. But a laundering operation suggests a central authority attempting to make their illicit impulses appear legitimate. What might be the origin of such a thing?"

She'd been trying to find a way to broach this issue with Euler for months, since September in point of fact. Since Bernabé del Olmo had returned to Site-43 for a period of precisely one day, and left without even saying hello. Without even seeing the fruits of her long process of becoming. He'd taken off into the blue again, with somehow less ceremony than the first time he'd done so, and left this wizened old wizard in his place. It was a very personal affront, and that made it very difficult for her to bring up conversationally. She hated to admit the weakness. But! Here at last, an opening.

And she hated the shape of it, because only one conceptual configuration could pass through.

"Bernie." It became damnably real as she heard it spoken aloud. "It's Bernie."

Euler looked pained as they rounded a series of tight corners, heading into some strange corridor spiral Lillian was sure she'd never walked down. "We haven't the faintest idea where he is. He's certainly not here."

"Maybe he doesn't need to be here." She didn't want to be saying this, and Euler obviously didn't want to be hearing it, and that made it all the more obviously true. "He's all fucked up on whatever fucked up the rest of them, and this is his superpower. Brain laundering. He's got some means of turning people against us in a way we can't even detect until it's too late."

Their voyage terminated in a utility door, tucked away in its own little niche out of sight of the already thoroughly out-of-the-way corridor. "I hate to hear you saying this, Lillian," the old man sighed as he pulled out his keychain. "But I am deeply proud that you were able to figure it out, particularly as I know you don't want it to be true."

"Is it true?" She looked down at his suddenly graven image. "Have you already figured this out? Have you been keeping me out in the dark?"

He unlocked the door, and opened it wide. "No," he said. "Not yet."

And he pushed her in.

2003

9 September

It was a juggling act of urgencies, straining his battered body up the stairwell. The twinge from his ankle would not be ignored, but Nascimbeni was also powerfully discontent with the idea of Mukami and Nicolescu walking alone through the supposedly occupied waste facility. He wasn't sure whether they were more at risk from Mountie attack or each other.

It was therefore a potent relief to find them both waiting when he opened the door, looking none the worse for wear.

Mukami darted forward to clutch at his jacket where it overlapped his workshirt. "Are you alright? How's your ankle?"

He forced a wince into a smile. "It's fine. Just a twist, not even a sprain."

"Lucky old bastard," she smirked at him.

"That's too bad," Nicolescu remarked casually.

Mukami turned around, and Nascimbeni stepped up beside her to see the naked technician holding a gun on them both.

"This'll probably hurt a lot more than breaking your neck would've." A sudden grin. "Emotionally, at least."

Nascimbeni could think of no more meaningful response than "Paul?"

The other man gestured at Mukami with the gun. "You should've listened to her."

This was somehow the most upsetting, confusing thing which had happened today. He was having difficulty processing it. What was the junior tech's angle? Was he trying to extort a confession out of her? Was he trying to convince—

"You think you look real threatening, don't you?" Mukami snapped. "Standing there in the buff."

Nicolescu raised the gun and took a shot at the ceiling. The report was loud and abrupt, and a rain of tile dust pattered on Nascimbeni's ballcap. "Paul!" he shouted. "Stop!"

The other man looked rueful as he refocused his aim. "I wanted to see how far I could get with this, I really did. But it's obvious you're not going to stop listening to her, and I'm running out of room." He paused, and glanced down the corridor. Nascimbeni became fully aware of where they were for the first time. "Those fucking cops will be on us any second, and I can't be here when that happens. Maybe if you tell me what you're really up to, Noè, I'll have enough of a bargaining chip with the bosses that they'll let you join us."

Everything was happening all at once. "Us? Who's us?"

"The crazies." Mukami's tone was calm and confident. "He's one of them."

Nascimbeni wheeled on her, pointed at her, and glared accusatorily at Nicolescu. "I thought you said she was one of them!"

A shrug. "And I still don't understand why you wouldn't buy it. I thought loyalty actually meant something to you. All those years Paul Nicolescu gave you, and you still didn't trust him over your hormones? Pathetic."

Nascimbeni had the sudden image of Nicolescu staving in Sergei Vanchev's head with a broken spanner. He couldn't shake it, even with this mockery of the man holding a gun on him just a few feet away.

"He was right not to trust you," Mukami pointed out.

"And a fat lot of good it did him."

"Paul," she said, "don't do this. I know how you feel about me."

The technician shook his head. "Why do you keep calling me Paul? That's not my name."

"Wirth, then," she said.

Nascimbeni put a hand on her shoulder, and forced her to look at him again. "What?"

She met his eyes. There was something hard behind hers. "Wirth is possessing him. Paul is gone."

The words Wirth is possessing him might have been in ancient Sumerian, for all the sense they made.

"This leaves me with a conundrum, though." Nicolescu angled the gun, as though it was now an extension of his mental apparatus. "Which one of you do I shoot? Obviously I want to hop on into whichever has the most interesting stories to tell me, and leave the other one bleeding out on the floor. Paul's just about reached the end of his usefulness, and anyway it's getting drafty in here."

It was the little mistakes, Delfina had told him, which determined the course of each altercation. Not the planning, not the preparation, not the things you did right. The granular detail of error. In Nicolescu's case, he'd lost the battle the moment he'd said the word here. Reminded Nascimbeni, once again, of precisely what their surroundings were.

"Try it," he said.

Nicolescu frowned. "What?"

"You misjudged the distance… Reuben." Nascimbeni's heart was beating faster, and he willed it not to attack him until the prior attacker was dealt with. "We're in Metaneural Declination. These pipes are packed full of psychic suppressants. It's all but impossible to interfere with someone's brain chemistry in this corridor, and it'll get a whole lot worse if you break the seals."

The other man scanned the mass of conduits on every exposed surface save the floor. He'd have to be a very good shot to put a bullet in either of them that didn't stand a very good chance of going wild and hitting something problematic. Nascimbeni could see the wheels turning in his head.

He could see them stop turning.

"Then I guess I'm going to have to move you first," said Nicolescu, and he shot out the tiles at their feet.

Before the aerosolized porcelain had settled on Nascimbeni's steel toes, Mukami was in the air. She struck Nicolescu full on, and clouted him hard across the jaw before they even hit the floor. "RUN!" she shouted.

Nascimbeni lunged forward instead. "ANA!"

Nicolescu was scrambling backward, swatting her away, struggling to bring his gun around as she slapped and scratched and kicked at him. The backs of his boots caught the tile grouting and propelled him into an intersection, and he squeezed off two more shots as he darted around the corner away from them. One hit a rare exposed bit of wall plaster.

The other hit a conduit.

Nascimbeni staggered back as a gout of stuff he didn't want on him came blasting out in every direction, and his thoughts became sluggish and strange. He was having trouble making connections in the sparkling urinal spray. He barely understood what was going on. He only knew that he needed to get away from the rising mist which separated him from her and… him. The other him. Paul.

His friend.

"RUN!" her voice came from beyond the impenetrable yellow cloud. "I'LL CATCH UP!"

"No!" he screamed, not sure what it even meant at this point.

"TRUST ME!" Her voice was already far distant. "GO!"

"Go where?" he asked, as the corridor filled with jaundiced gas.

Lillian blocked the memory. She blotted it out. She didn't want to see again what she'd seen in the brief moment before Euler slammed the door shut, then went off to collect the next unwitting victim. She didn't want to start sampling the sensory information that went along with that charnel vision…

She walked as quickly as she could. She had to get out of here, and she had to do it today.

R&E terminated at a T-junction leading either to the northwestern dorms or the operations hub. Or, rather, it once had; there was now an enormous chunk of rock cutting off access to H&S, leaving only the path to Administration and Oversight accessible. She fought the urge to hurry further down that narrow way, knowing that it would look suspicious, knowing that there were eyes — electronic and organic — in every corner. She'd already wandered more than she should have, and anyone paying close enough attention would be immediately suspicious of her apparent sense of purpose. She'd never felt so oppressed by such a lightly populated area before. It was certainly a unique spin on the panopticon concept, the other prisoners acting simultaneously as her ever-present wardens.

The Chief of A&O was standing on the raised daïs to which his position entitled him, looking down over a scene she could have witnessed on any other day of the year, or indeed any other year. Scattered men and women in casual dress tapping away at terminals surrounded by low wooden cubicles, or tracking back and forth from desk to desk over the warm chocolate tiles. Rory Skellicorne's domain lacked only one perpetual feature, the ramrod-straight Karen Elstrom, to complete the picture of everyday functionality.

She wondered what they could possibly be working on.

Skellicorne glanced down at her, frowned, then looked away. He looked like a United States Marine left out in the sun too long, with his crew cut and declining athletic physique. He had no time to waste on slack-jawed slackers like her. He had troops to muster. She stumbled to the back of the room, and forced herself to stare at the oak panelling to the count of five hundred and ten before swaying through the open door to Operations Control.

This was the nerve centre of Site-43, its Mission Control. Long rows of gleaming wooden tables arrayed with top-end black desktop computers, burnt sienna swivel chairs designed for long-term occupancy, a declining floorplan allowing for magisterial surveillance at the back and a series of wide big picture monitors at the front, one of them wider and bigger than the others. This was her destination. This was where she expected to find the minds behind the madness.

She found, instead, Ana Mukami slumped forward, hands clutching at her own face and neck and shoulders, shivering and humming and babbling inconsolately to herself.

She was wearing one of Elstrom's favourite shirts.

"Bastards," Mukami muttered as Lillian stood dumbly behind her. "Think it doesn't hurt? It fucking hurts."

Perhaps half of the duty stations were occupied. Some of the occupants were people she recognized, though the intense looks on their faces were unfamiliar. Some weren't people at all, and she was surprised to see that the glowing non-humans were capable of anything so technical and constructive as the act of typing on a keyboard, or manipulating a mouse. A few chairs were occupied by 'security' personnel like her who, she supposed, weren't trusted to keep their feet on the floor. Too far gone.

The monitor displayed a map of the Site, in great detail. It was zooming in and out, and someone was scratching off pathways and moving little labelled dots around: red, blue, yellow, green and grey. She had no idea what it meant.

"Bastards," Mukami repeated. She was still shaking. She rubbed her shoulder. She rubbed the top of her foot. She scratched at the hair on her head, and moaned as she finally straightened back up. "You're going to pay for that."

Skellicorne appeared beside Lillian, and put a hand on Mukam's back. "You had to know how it would end."

"I suppose I did." The woman shuddered.

"Then why did you go?"

She exhaled. "I don't know. I thought if I spoke to them…"

"But you didn't speak to them." Lillian could hear the emphasis, though she wasn't yet certain precisely what it meant.

"I want the decision to be theirs." Whatever that meant, it sounded genuine.

"It's been months," the old administrator told her. "They're not going to change their minds. You need to change them yourself."

"These were new targets," Mukami protested. "Hope springs eternal."

"And what did it get you? Shot in the head, the chest, the legs…"

She gently removed his hand from her back. "I know I tried. I gave them the chance to play at agency. Next time they won't be so lucky."

Skellicorne peered closely at her through his spectacles. "You'll force the issue?"

She nodded. "Yes. Universal freedom is worth a few momentary impositions. They'll come around once they really understand."

"Until then, you need to stop straining yourself so much."

Mukami smiled at him affectionately. "Are you worried about me, Rory?"

He smiled back. He wasn't typically much of a smiler. "Always."

"Well," she said, stretching, "I'm at my leisure now. What say we leave these fine folks to their labours and take a heavy breather?"

He chuckled. "And leave nobody supervising?"

She shrugged. "If they don't want to work, I don't want them working."

"You're the best boss I've ever worked for," he remarked.

The smile became a grin. "But I do make you put it in sweat equity. "

Lillian felt trapped. If she moved, they would notice her. She'd witnessed enough to know that the enemies in comparative control of their cognitive faculties barely even saw the empty-headed cohort she was meant to be a member of. If she didn't move, however, they might very well walk right into her. That would be a lovely way to prove she really was a zombie, taking a hit on the teakettle and lying stupidly on the tiles, but it wouldn't get her any closer to understanding what was going on. So she remained still, head still cocked sideways, and hoped Mukami would say or do something revealing.

She did. "Wirth," she snapped at the air. "I want a word." She patted Skellicorne on the shoulder, and mouthed your place. Ten minutes.

He saluted smartly, and headed back to the office block.

Lillian became aware of a strangely biological sound from the corner of the room, a darkened alcove which had once contained an expensive coffee maker and right now contained two closely-entangled human forms. One was a researcher with a protuberant nose and a gawky look, the other was a J&M tech. They'd been attempting to clean each other's teeth when the tech suddenly wrenched back, dropped his partner roughly, and staggered over to look at Mukami. He spared a moment to look at Lillian, too, and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully, but the quivering woman spoke before he could make an issue of it.

"I thought you were taking care of Ibanez."

The tech, whose vest label said VANCHEV — and who was also wearing a very old vest, Lillian belatedly realized — shook his head. "No, I sent Du to handle the OSAT people. You were supposed to be handling Ibanez."

Mukami grimaced. "She handled me. Who gives a damn about OSAT? We've got Foundation people in the corridors, Reuben, that's obviously the priority!"

"Why?" Vanchev, who was apparently actually Wirth, who was apparently the mindjacker from earlier, wiped at the saliva dripping from his lips. "We're going to get them all eventually, right?"

"No!" Mukami leaned against the guardrail separating her from the first row of desks. "We've talked about this. I'm sure we've talked about this."

"I'm sure we haven't."

"Haven't," said Lillian. It was a risk, but it was riskier to stay quiet. She hadn't yet seen one of her empty-headed peers resist the urge to parrot speech for long.

"See?" Wirth grinned. "Lillihammer's backing me up."

Mukami waved dismissively. "We don't need the fucking cops. They won't listen. They can't listen. We've tried, you know we've tried. Ibanez is almost as bad as a cop, but not quite. We might be able to reach her."

"She wouldn't be much of a vector for the message," Wirth shrugged. "Hasn't got much reach herself, if you take my meaning, unless we're counting that gun of hers."

The woman he'd been making out with before he became someone else slipped quietly out the door beside Lillian, making eye contact with no-one and selfconsciously brushing out the wrinkles in her labcoat.

Mukami tapped herself on the forehead, and her dark brown eyes flashed with rage. "That gun of hers took my fucking head off, Reuben, because I dared to stop and have a chat with two of her friends. One of those friends put a shot through my shoulder for the same reason. But I'm going to keep trying, because they need to hear what I have to say. They're going to god-damn listen. And when they finally do, they'll want to help with the work."

Wirth snorted. "Arbeit macht frei."

She slapped him.

Lillihammer made a soft pop noise with her mouth in response.

"We agreed on this, you little shit," Mukami hissed as Wirth slowly turned back to face her, rubbing his reddening cheek. "Don't be coy about it. This is what it's telling us to do. This is what we've been getting ready for. It's not selfish, and it's not wrong. It's what they fucking need."

"Whatever you say, boss." Wirth shrugged, as though the slap had not driven him halfway to distraction with anger. "For as long as you're the boss here. She'll be back one day, you know."

"I god damn hope so." Mukami turned back to face the rows of desks and workers, blocking Lillian's look at her face. "We sent her out for that bag of milk almost a year ago."

Wirth blinked, then burst out laughing.

Lillian allowed herself to moonwalk back into the A&O offices.

The last thing she heard was "On a similar note, would you learn to keep your fucking pets in their pens?" before the dark woman kicked the door shut in her face.

2003

9 September

The Old Timeline

There was a knock on her office door. This came as something of a surprise, as Lillian had locked the decontamination tunnel after her last snack run. Only the security personnel, the Chairs and Chiefs, and the Director should have been able to penetrate to her inner sanctum's gate. She grunted: "What?"

The door opened and Ana Mukami walked in, resplendent in her indigo Class-E livery. "You got a minute?"

"No," Lillian said, and gestured at a nearby stool. "Sit down." She slid her ass forward on her own, much more comfortable chair, pointed her feet up at the ceiling, and fired her shoes off toward the open door.

Mukami ducked, then took the proffered seat. "What are you up to?"

Lillian gestured at the closed laptop she'd dumped on the floor. "Looking at your brain." The scans had come in from Health and Pathology half an hour ago, and obviously a memetics consult was required; they didn't get many live people claiming to be dead people at Site-43. That was more of a Site-59 thing.

"Oh." Mukami slid her hands forward to rest on her knees, pensively. "What's it look like?"

Lillian shrugged. "Kind of a pink pecan? Sort of thing."

Mukami laughed her gentle laugh. "You really know how to put a girl at ease."

"Yeah. When I want to, I do." Lillian swung her sock feet back and forth, and crossed her arms on her chest. "So what's on your mind?"

"You tell me." The other woman made eye contact.

Lillian held it. She was never the first to look away. "What I can tell you, I can't tell you at such a low clearance level. So if that's what you came here to ask—"

Mukami shook her head. "It's not. I'm kind of… at loose ends, while you and LeClair run your tests. I've had too much time to think, and you know what that's like."

Lillian nodded once, emphatically. "Yeah, I love it. Much bigger fan of thinking than talking."

The resurrected agent picked at her jumpsuit. Lillian noticed there wasn't anything else under it, besides Mukami herself. "Have you always been this confident?"

"Strange question from a woman walking around with no support." Lillian made a quick, rude gesture to explain what she meant. "But no, of course not. There's been times when I've been more."

Mukami was looking at the floor. "Have you ever not known who you are? Ever had… doubts, about your identity?"

"No." She didn't even have to think about it.

"Really?"

"Really."

Neither of them spoke for what felt like almost a minute. Lillian broke the silence first. "If there's something specific you're looking for, I'm not going to make it easy for you."

The other woman sighed. "You've never felt like you were one thing, and you wanted to be another? Or you were one thing, and you were being turned into another?"

I'm not giving you this, so stop reaching out. "No. Whenever I've felt like I didn't like what I was, I stopped being that thing, and became the next thing. And every time I did that, I ended up being even more myself." She hadn't rehearsed this little speech, but it flowed out with ease nevertheless, because it was true.

"The process of becoming," Mukami nodded.

"Evolving, if you have to be dramatic about it. Why are you asking me this? Do you want my permission to call yourself Andy?"

Mukami laughed. "It's just… I'm…"

"I wasn't aware you knew how to stammer." She was known as the most talkative agent Ibanez had ever employed, to both of their detriment.

"It's new to me, too. Things have changed, you know?"

Lillian nodded. "I don't."

"Since the accident."

"It was barely an accident."

"I know, but…" Mukami inhaled for a few long seconds, showing off the extra lung capacity Ibanez imbued her agents with via the running track in Ipperwash Park.

"You're supposed to be the communicative one," Lillian snapped. She wasn't the sort to run laps herself. "Why am I having to drag this out of you? You came into my office."

"I'm trying to work through it. I thought you might have some insights. You haven't always been a memeticist, right?"

"I was in I&T before, sure."

"So you were a technician."

"Right."

"And now you're a memeticist."

"Right."

"Did you stop being a technician?"

What the hell was she driving at? "I mean, yeah? But I can still do the work. You thinking about quitting your job? Is that what this identity crisis is all about?"

"I don't know. Maybe." Mukami zipped up her jumpsuit; there was a slight draft in the office, which had once been a large janitorial closet. "Maybe I've been this version of myself too long. Maybe that's what I'm feeling."

"Maybe you should be talking to a shrink about this," Lillian added.

A cryptic smile. "I don't think it's all in my head."

"You're sure you don't want me to call you Andy?"

Mukami stood. "Obviously I'm overthinking things. Thanks for the chat."

"Hey, wait up." Lillian slid her feet back under the desk.

Mukami waited.

Lillian's mouth migrated to one side of her face, then back again. "I… was hoping something clever would come to me just now. It didn't."

The agent nodded. "That's alright. I probably just need to work this out myself. We all play a lot of different roles in life, you know?"

Lillian shrugged again. "I guess."

"I'll narrow down my options eventually."

2003

9 September

Nascimbeni came back to himself as the yellow cloud receded around him. He didn't know how long it had taken. The only reason he knew it was still the same day was the feeling of contentment radiating from his stomach. He'd apparently eaten not all that long ago. He certainly didn't remember that.

He remembered the last thing of note which had happened to him, and it nearly bowled him over. He took one step towards the corner Nicolescu had disappeared around…

…and Mukami came suddenly around it, at a run. She stopped when she saw him, and he tried not to let her look of relief cloud his judgement any more than the dissipating antimemetic mist was. "Where is he?"

She shook her head. "He's gone."

He took a threatening step towards her, not knowing what the threat could possibly be. "Where is he?!"

"HE'S GONE!" she screamed, bent forward, hands back, mouth wider than he'd ever seen it.

He turned away, and punched the wall. He had a new image of Nicolescu, lying in the loup-garou habitat in a puddle of his own entrails, steaming in the humidity, entering a new biosphere via nature's red tooth and claw. "GOD DAMMIT," he hollered, blind to one pain in the red light of the other. "Second fucking chances!"

"What?" Her voice was tired, hoarse, behind him.

He put both hands on the nearest pipe, and rested his head on the cool surface. Something gurgled beneath, and he didn't care what it was. He started to speak again, this time in affectless monotone. "It always goes like this. You get a second chance, and what happens? Same shit from the first time through. Time is fucking cursed."

There was a hand on his back, sliding over the slippery plasticized fabric. "There was nothing you could have done. I'm surprised he didn't find us sooner. In fact, the longer we stay out here—"

"Is he dead?"

Her throat caught, and the wait tore him to shreds.

"I don't know," she finally managed. "Maybe. Maybe not."

He flexed his fingers against the pipe, wondering if he could burst it with just the strength of his calloused — and now bleeding — knuckles.

"Noè," she whispered. "There's a lot of people who are still alive down here. You can still help them."

He didn't turn around. He still didn't trust her, not even now. "How?"

"We're almost to the—"

The pipes exploded again. He pushed off, screaming, as the leading edge of a superhot steam brushed the tip of his hat and scalded the grey rubber over top of his steel toed boots. As she pulled him away, he wondered Did I do that?

And then the second bullet found an electric box beside him, which blew open in a hail of sparks, and he realized they'd been making rather a lot of noise for a band of trespassing thieves.

Mukami pulled him back around the corner, where he half-expected to see Nicolescu brandishing his gun again. The coast was deceptively clear. He leaned as close to the edge of the wall as he dared, and called out: "Stop shooting, god dammit!"

To his surprise, they did. A stern male voice responded: "Identify yourself!"

"Noè Nascimbeni!" He cleared his throat. The lip of his cap was dripping hot… something. "CHIEF Noè Nascimbeni! Janitorial and Maintenance!"

There was a moment's pause, and then: "You're with an enemy of the state!"

"I'm not!" He looked into her dark brown eyes, and searched for the lie reflected there. He couldn't see it. "She's not! It's not what you think!"

A longer pause. "Don't move!"

"We're not armed!"

"If either of you speak again," the voice snapped, and he could hear the nervous strain beneath the bravado, "you're both dead. Step into the hall, slowly."

He raised his hands, and followed orders. He almost thought Mukami wasn't going to follow him, her eyes flitting back and forth as if considering all the possible angles of escape or resistance, but finally she strolled from behind her cover with hands hanging loose at her sides.

The steam had dispersed already, and the hall was filled with officers of some variety in police uniforms with riot vests and shields and helmets. He couldn't see most of their faces. Two of them were advancing, and one of them raised a nasty-looking black club.

"No! Wait!" he shouted, and then Mukami screamed as her collarbone shattered. He reached out to stop the second blow, and caught it instead on the right forearm. He had only an instant to register the pain before the second cop tackled him to the ground.

"Get off me!" He writhed on the floor of the facility where he had once ruled as undisputed lord, the world-saving factory he had built with his own two hands and an army of men and women who might as well have been his kin. A boot pressed his nose into the grimy lino. Someone yanked his ballcap off.

"Well hey, if it isn't our furnace guy." A woman was chortling, and a strong hand pulled him onto his back so he could look up at her, and her down on him. "Didn't think we were due a service for months!"

She was back in the closet again.

Normally she would have spared a moment to laugh at the implication, but she didn't have moments to waste, and anyway there was nobody else in the closet to laugh first. She was going to live a life of mimicry for the foreseeable future, because she wasn't going to be able to escape any time soon after all.

She was a natural mimic. She was a master of it. She had more raw talent for memetics than anyone Del Olmo or Euler had ever taken under their respective wings, had been promised she would exceed them both, had been invested with so much of their time and energy that she'd even deigned to sacrifice a little of her own in service of their dream. That she would some day replace them. That she'd own every inch of this place, not just the closets but the offices and labs, become the memer-in-chief of Site-43. And why stop there? Memetics was the science of seeing both the big and little pictures. If she ever got tired of actually getting things done, she could easily see herself in the big chair itself.

The one Mukami was presently occupying.

And to make that happen, to justify the trust she'd demanded of her friends, colleagues and mentors, but much more importantly to prove to herself that she was who she knew herself to be, she was going to have to correct this conundrum. Play along, learn everything there was to learn, and then employ it in explosive counter-action. Memetics, and counter-memetics.

Piece of cake.

She was confident she could do it. She had apparently come back from having her own mind wiped. She had once defeated the pinnacle of amnestic science. She was Lillian Lillihammer, and that was something she had created whole cloth. A small army of idiots and halfwits was literally no match at all.

But still, while she was pondering her next move, it wouldn't hurt to give herself a little extra pep talk. You could never have enough confidence, when your job description was 'magical confidence woman'. She reached into her storied database of personal affirmations, and selected one of the absolute strangest, for flavour.

2000

5 March

The Old Timeline

"What else do you need to tell me? What do I need to know?"

They were suddenly standing in a lightless abyss. There were gears grinding in the distance, and the sound of padding footsteps, and black-slit yellow eyes watching from every corner.

Rydderech hardly seemed to notice. "Seven things, for you are one of seven. I can tell you only one today: it will not be your fight to win, for your chance to shine will come later, but your part will be no less important to play for that."

He looked her directly in the eye, and his expression turned very grave.

"You are steel, and your mind is a trap. You are the source of your own solutions. You are memory in the Lethe, Lillian Lillihammer, and you will reverse its flow. You are ineradicable. You will believe you understand this. As ever, you will be correct."

The eyes were getting closer, and the drone of machinery was getting louder. She had no idea what to make of what he'd just said, but she also knew she would never forget it, and so they could still move on. "The other six things?"

Rydderech's voice wasn't cut by the rising din. "Only five remain. I can't explain to your now-self, because it's your later-selves who will need to know. But you will need to know these things; another change is coming, and another, and another, and another after that, and then one more. The worst will come to pass again, and again. Only you can see us through it. So remember: I am still down here, today. Only today, but always today."

"I don't understand." She could barely focus on his words. "Today only comes once. Ever."

Rydderech laughed sadly. "Oh, wouldn't that make it all so much easier."

2003

9 September

She could have dropped down dead from shock, had she not already been lying down. It was impossible. Even by the standards of anomalous science, it was totally and completely beyond the realm of possibility.

Her memory of the meeting had changed. Her memory of the advice had changed. And in that memory, Rydderech had somehow known that this was happening.

This impossible, Earth-shattering thing which had happened over two years before the breach.

The Short Version

The Breach Goes On: Wrong Tomorrow

Hidden Depths