We Stand Divided - SCP Foundation

We Stand Divided

2003

10 September

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Morwen Couch didn't buy into the whole 'good cop, bad cop' thing. There was only one cop in the room with Nascimbeni, and it was her, and he already knew which of the two she was. She wasn't making any effort to hide it, either.

"Run it by me again." She was openly sneering; the request for repetition was more about humiliation than reinforcement.

"She found me when I was doing maintenance." For the thousandth time since waking up, he wondered where Mukami was. He'd already learned that asking was futile.

"Outside your Section."

That had struck him as odd too, but it wasn't as though he could ask his former self what the deal was. "Yes," he bluffed, "it happens. Not everything vital is past the bulkhead doors. You ought to be able to relate to that, seeing as the power in your fortress comes from mine."

That was a guess, but a safe one. J&M was the Site's geothermal hub, and AAF-D still seemed to be ticking over just fine. He could even hear the telltale rumbling in the walls of the little cell — formerly the Ectoelectric Spectrophotometry minilab — which suggested there was still active effluence circulating. He wondered who was monitoring that, and the thought that the answer might be 'nobody' gave him a chill.

"Some fortress," Couch scoffed. "They let you go wandering out and get collared by one of those things?"

"She's not a thing," he bristled. "And she's not one of anything. She's the original. It's the real Ana Mukami." He almost convinced himself, in his earnestness.

"Is that supposed to be better, somehow?" Couch twisted from side to side in her seat, working kinks out of her spine. She'd taken off the bulletproof vest, and she must have been wearing it for a very long time. "Every version of this woman who presently exists has attempted to murder me, or my people, or you and/or yours."

He shook his head, unhappy with the way it moved. They'd taken his hat while he was asleep — knocked out, rather, presumably while they decided what to do with him — along with the rest of his clothing. He was dressed in a D-class outfit now. At least it's still orange. "That's not her. It can't be her. She's nothing like that."

Couch placed her hands on the table between them, palms down. "I'm gonna level with you, Noè. I don't know from shit about memetics. I ought to — by rights the Foundation should have shared that information with us when it started to matter, back in the sixties, but you didn't, and so I don't. I know the gist, but that's it. Your little trade secret. So I'm running blind here, with you two. I know she can't be allowed to open her pretty little mouth, because when she does, she breaks people's brains. But I don't know what horrible things you might be capable of. Until today, I thought you were just a normal working Joe."

"That's all I've ever been." She was bound to believe him. There was no guile in that response. It was the unvarnished truth.

"So that leaves me with two possibilities." She counted on one hand, as though he'd have difficulty visualizing such complex math otherwise. Or maybe she really does need to use her fingers to count, because she's a fucking cop. "One is that you're nutso, like everyone else who comes out east to my swamp. The other is that you're not, and she somehow didn't get to you."

"She wasn't trying to get to me," he sighed in frustration. "She's already defended me from someone who was."

The Mountie raised a thick yellow eyebrow. "That so?"

"Yes!" He threw up his hands for emphasis, then kept them going to add genuine Italics. "She's a good person! I know her better than anyone else does, and I trust her! She's been nothing but helpful since… she's been nothing but helpful." Don't slip up. Don't slip up.

"So we ought to let her wake up, then, and we can all have a nice long chat, and obviously nothing terrible will happen because of that."

"I can see you don't believe me."

She rolled her eyes. "Of course I don't. What you're saying is ridiculous. It flies in the face of everything we know about how this place works."

"Okay. Look at it this way. If she can control people, she has no reason to try and trick them. Right?"

"She can't control everyone," Couch snapped.

"Could she control me? From what you know?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. So if she could control me, she would. Right? No point leaving me with my free will intact. I might fuck things up for her."

The woman was nodding. "Right."

"So, administer me a possession test. See if I've been under her control."

"She could just dump you before you take the test, then resume right after."

That took him slightly aback. "Could she? Is that how that works?"

"You're asking me?" Not for the first time, she looked at him like maybe he should be in a padded cell.

He tried to physically wave her concerns away. "Just do a full cognition workup. It'll prove I'm telling the truth."

"Unfortunately, that's not something we can actually do." Couch shuffled the little folder of papers in front of her, which struck him as a pointless affectation. As if he was meant to believe they had their files down here! Cops love their props. "We've got nobody qualified to run a test like that."

"Seriously? You don't need a memeticist. Even a Foundation nurse should be able to handle most metrics."

"We don't have a nurse." Couch didn't look happy about it. "Right now, you two are looking like one hell of a liability. I suppose we could put a bullet in her head, and pass you off on Falkirk."

He tried to focus on the implication that Mukami was alive, but… "Falkirk?" As bad as the situation was, he hadn't imagined that odious variable was involved.

"But I don't trust that slimy little weasel," Couch continued. "He might get greedy and think he can use you to extort control of the power grid, or you might go on a rampage as soon as you're in there and wipe out the closest thing we have to an ally in this hole. No, I think we're going to keep you safe and sound in here for the foreseeable future."

He could tell this was a lost cause, and that introduced a note of desperation into his next entreaty. "You've got to believe me. I'm not going to hurt you, and neither is she."

"I do believe that," Couch nodded. "Because when she wakes up, she's not going to see or hear anything she can use. As for you…" She warped her lips into a sick little smile. "How do you feel about making yourself useful?"

11 September

Lillian didn't sit down to think.

She worked best in two modes: fully vertical, or fully horizontal. She could often be found on the tips of her toes, or socks, or shoes, arms hanging loose at her sides, eyes closed, smiling in the comfort of her own thoughts. If she wasn't standing, she was lying down — as she was right now, because it worked so much better. More than once she'd worked through a thorny dilemma whilst in the throes of more intimate activities, usually with another person involved. Some of them found it offputting, some found it amusing. Daniil Sokolsky had actively encouraged it; she smiled faintly at the memory.

He wasn't giving her much to smile about in the present tense.

She made sure to spend at least some of her fact-finding mission time with him every day. She'd quickly rationalized that the empty husks wandering about, in whose number she was counted by everyone not in the know (which she hoped was everyone), would tend to wander preset paths and linger in familiar places. This meant she couldn't deviate too much from her usual haunts on any given day. A quick review of her memories of this terrible new timeline confirmed that she'd already gone more than a little too far walkabout on the 9th. The occasional anomaly would be tolerated, probably, but too many risky detours risked drawing unwanted attention. She'd already been spotted by some bafflingly-dressed dandy in black and red who'd seemed entirely too intrigued by her, and had to 'accidentally' knock Du down to make enough of a scene to avoid further scrutiny. Better to lie low.

Then again, she couldn't engage in too many of these little lie-down-and-think episodes either. She'd seen plenty of evidence that the empties frequently knocked each other over, and were often not quick to get back up, so again in moderation it wouldn't look all that unusual. But she was presently back in the closet — which she still found hilarious, in spite of the danger — and that was a pattern that wouldn't bear too much repeating.

But it was necessary now, because she had a lot of filing to do. In two days' time she'd made a complete accounting of everyone easily encountered in Research and Experimentation, a tentative but informed assessment of the enemy's strength. She sorted her findings into three categories: neutral, bad, and very bad. She'd hoped to add 'good' to the list of options, but unfortunately William Wettle wasn't among the converted. She would have liked to see what sort of mayhem he could wreak on their plans, just by trying to help.

So, neutral. They had Rory Skellicorne, the Chief of Administration and Oversight. He was ex-military, but that was decades in the past; he was a capable administrator, but this place operated more on the level of just-barely-structured anarchy. They had Gennady Styles and Noor Zaman, the HR Chief and his most capable analyst; their primary strengths were compassion and patience, neither highly-valued virtues in the army of the damned. They had Koda Anoki, the head psychologist; she had never much cared for the big-headed headshrink, long nursing the suspicion his credentials were faked. Finally they had Anastasios Mataxas, Chair of R&E, who was old and wanted to be a Ghostbuster. She couldn't imagine they were getting much use out of him.

Bad. They had Gedeon Van Rompay, in Lillian's assessment the second-best tactician at Site-43. He would probably have punched her in the face if he knew who she'd placed ahead of him. They had Nhung Ngo, ranks above Anoki in her estimation of the Site's psychologists; with the proper lack of moral restraint the little woman could turn best friends or long-term lovers against each other, and she kicked like a mule to boot. And they had Ana Mukami, in some form; to be sure an expert sniper, but there was only so much damage one woman with a gun could do. Probably. There was definitely something else going on with that one, but until she knew what it was, Lillian kept her cautiously in the only-merely-terrible category.

The very bad list was very, very bad. They had Daniil Sokolsky, the only person Lillian thought capable of almost defeating her in a battle of wits; every day she became more certain that what he was planning could, if completed, kill everyone on the other side of his bedrock barrier. They had Arik Euler, who was at present a far more learned memeticist than she. And they had Xinyi Du, which meant at any moment her side could lose the battle without even knowing why. She despised quantum mechanics, and its parascientific equivalent was the absolute worst sort of magic bullshit.

On the bright side, they didn't have any members of her recently-formed friend group. On the even brighter side, they didn't have her.

She expected that extra brightness to make the difference when it came to dispelling the dark. She remembered, of course could not forget, what Euler had once told her: 'Some day, maybe, you'll outshine us all.'

Today would be good. And tomorrow, if you can spare it.

14 September

Harry roamed the southern server stacks, which Eileen kept free of refugees or supplies for easy access to her most vital systems. He had a vague sense that what she was doing in her little cubbyhole was of the utmost importance — something about countering cyberattacks from whoever was occupying Operations Control, keeping the lights on and the doors locked and the air cycling — but she'd just grunted at him when pressed for details. He'd been cut loose from observation a few hours earlier, after Falkirk had issued an ultimatum to Ibanez: declare the chief archivist free of memetic compulsion, or go Old Yeller on him. So he'd wandered about, picked through the small pile of personal belongings stashed under the bunk he'd been assigned, searched in vain for Melissa, and when nothing else presented itself checked in with his supposed girlfriend and pet his beloved cat.

The cat at least had been pleased to see him. They'd shared a lovely hug, the little dark brown bugger purring up a storm. Probably because Harry's sweatshirt was soft and warm, but he chose to believe there was some genuine affection there anyway.

Once he'd been satisfied Eileen was content, sipping her mug of cold coffee and yelling at her computer screen, he'd left to collect his thoughts. There wasn't much to collect. He hadn't kept a diary, hadn't kept notes on his tablet, didn't know anything Melissa hadn't told him in the infirmary. He hadn't even started sketching, the way he had in baseline reality; getting a solid start on that with what few scraps of paper he could snatch killed a few hours. He was itching to get at the files in A&R, to talk to his archivists — assuming any of them were still alive, since apparently none were here — or, best of all, get access to SCiPnet. He'd always been an historian of the contemporary, and there was definitely a narrative outline begging to be filled in.

Of course, maybe there wasn't a SCiPnet anymore. He didn't even know if the rest of the world still existed beyond the borders of Ipperwash Park…

Footsteps. He had a brief flash of hope that Melissa had come looking for him, then a possibly artificial one born of guilt that it was finally Udo Okorie, escaped from the subway… but no. He saw the yellow sweater and dark grey pants, he saw Eileen Veiksaar, and as she slipped around the frame of one of the north-south stacks, he saw her make a beckoning gesture.

He shrugged. He was passively competent with computers, but nothing special. She probably wanted his help moving something heavy, which would explain why this version of himself was relatively fit.

He took the corner wide, and caught the briefest glimpse of her face as she pulled the sweater up over it. There was nothing but her underneath, and she tossed the inverted garment onto a laptop tray before tossing herself onto him.

She had to yank his head down to her level to make the connection, and he turned his head to the side to avoid her probing lips. "Wait," he said. "Wait!"

Her voice was a fierce rasp as she clawed his glasses off, slamming them on top of a whirring hard disk drive. "I've been waiting. All fucking day, and most of yesterday. I'm tired of waiting, and it's your job to keep me from getting tired."

She wrenched his neck to the side, very nearly pulling a muscle for him, and went at his face with gusto. He felt her fumbling with the zipper of his sweatshirt, and with great effort disentangled their lips to gasp out: "Wait! There's something I need to tell you."

"Tell me while you work," she breathed. She had the zipper down.

He squirmed out of her grasp and stumbled into the rack behind him, hitting the back of his head. She stepped forward, pressing into him, and he said: "I'm gonna need a new job after I tell you this."

She stared up at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

He'd finished things with her before, back in the old reality. They'd parted on amicable terms, both reaching the same conclusion at the same precise moment, for very much the same reasons. This was different. She hadn't been trying to jump his bones, back then, and furthermore she hadn't been topless.

She wasn't waiting for him to answer. "Are you breaking up with me, motherfucker?" She compressed him into the servers harder. "After I covered for you?"

He had the sudden image of the entire surviving population of Site-43 listening in on this conversation. Melissa. Del. Alis. Falkirk. "Keep your voice down," he whispered.

She wasn't whispering. If anything, she was getting louder. "Is it Bradbury? I thought you had more brains than this, Harry. You know how many stimulants I'm on right now? I never told you the half of them. I sleep four hours a day, and I wake up buzzing like a beehive."

"Eileen, listen to—"

"Distract me for a few minutes." She pulled on the tassels of his sweatshirt, tightening the half-noose around his neck. "Let me blow off some steam, and you can go play star-crossed lovers with that daffy bitch. I don't ask for a lot. Give it to me."

Okay, fuck this. "I'm not… who you think I am," he told her.

She obviously didn't know how to react to that. "Who are you, then?"

He had the sudden image of Del beating the shit out of him for sharing this information, then the image of Eileen telling Falkirk, then—

Then she asked again. "Who are you?" Her tone was even more dangerous now, but the danger was different. Existential harm rather than mild bodily. "Answer me, or I'm calling security."

"With your shirt off?" he said, just to make the next words ring truer. "I'm not one of them. I'm Harry Blank. I'm just not… your Harry Blank."

She stepped back, wrapping the tassels of his sweatshirt around her hands. "What's that supposed to mean?"

There was little point trying to backtrack now. His back was against the wall, both literally and metaphorically. "I think there's been a timeline shift. Your last twelve months and mine don't match up. Del is the same way, and so's Wettle."

She gaped at him. Her eyes were still angry and hurt, but now there was confusion in there too. "Are you serious?"

"Yes, I'm serious." He zipped up his zipper. "Where I come from, you and I broke up a year ago, and I'm dating Udo Okorie."

She burst out laughing.

"Okorie? You're not in her league. You're barely in mine. You two don't play the same sport. It's like… darts and cricket."

He remembered this side of her. He hadn't missed it. "Eileen, I'm telling the truth."

"We broke up, and you're still not with Bradbury? God, you're this fucking pathetic even in your wild fantasies?" He wasn't sure if she was going to slap him, walk away from him, or kiss him again.

"She's in a coma where I come from," he explained. "Deering's mirror monster attacked her."

"Deering's…?" She shook her head. "He hasn't got any mirror monster. He's dead."

This was bad news. Harry had very much liked Philip Deering… wait. "Which one are we talking about?"

"The only one who ever mattered? Dougall."

Well, that's a relief. "I was talking about Phil."

"Nobody talks about Phil." Eileen examined his face speculatively. "Harry, has it crossed your mind that you got hit in the head out there, literally or not, and imagined all this?"

He shook his head emphatically. "No. Eileen, if even Willie noticed it, it's definitely real."

"And who else are you going to share this with?" Her expression was growing colder by the second, though she was still shuddering with the earlier heat. "Falkirk?"

He didn't answer.

"I didn't think so. Bradbury? You're going to tell her she's in a coma in your ideal world?"

His body wasn't made to process this many different types of guilt. "I didn't say it's ideal," he muttered.

"But you like it a lot better than being stuck here with me." She tugged on the tassels, and his forehead clunked onto her scalp.

He pulled back again. "It's not about you!"

She pulled the tassels hard until the sweatshirt strained against his chest, and almost shouted: "Then what is it about?!"

He actually did shout: "NONE OF THIS IS REAL!"

"THEN WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO YOU FUCK?!" she screamed in his face.

They stared at each other for a moment, listening to the echoes slowly fading away. Dozens of people would have heard that.

"Harry, you moron," she seethed, "I'm living in my computer. I'm rewriting the system twenty hours a day so Mukami doesn't unlock the doors and paste everyone we know, or set off the charges and drop us all into the abyss. I have no time at all for watching you wring your hands. Every minute I'm attending to biology is a waste of precious brainpower. I'd eat a sandwich while we do it if I didn't think you'd get offended; give it a week, and your offence might not even be a consideration. Until your timeline bullshit becomes actually relevant to the job I'm doing, I don't need to know about it."

She wasn't getting it. He had to make her see. "I'm not the guy you've been with all this time, Eileen."

"You think I care?"

He was speechless.

"Yeah? Yeah." She nodded mockingly. "You think I care. What, am I gonna hate myself for sleeping with my boyfriend's time clone? Can you seriously not see how little this changes anything for me?"

"It changed everything for me," he said.

"Because of Okorie?"

He didn't answer.

"Answer me. Because of Okorie?"

He could say it out loud. As he'd never been able to do when it counted, when it could actually do some good, he could simply spit it out. Make it real, reify it, then go and make good on the claim. Show Eileen the courtesy of—

"Because of Bradbury," she said. He could see the cold recognition in her eyes, and the accusation, and the injury. She nodded, pulled back, and walloped him across the cheek with the slap to end all slaps.

"Fuck this," he heard her say as she pushed away from him. "At least we had a proper fight, that's almost as good. For now."

He rubbed his aching face as he watched her pull the sweater back on. He felt as though the slap had reached all the way to the roots of his teeth.

"But if you don't get with the program soon, I'll have to find somebody who will." She was gone around the corner again in an instant, but her parting words floated back to him over the air conditioned current: "Maybe I'll try Phil. Keep that imaginary monster away from your real girlfriend."

Ibanez noticed the shouting by sheer accident. She was following up on a report that one of the server hall's baffle plates was vibrating strangely — she longed for the days when Veiksaar had headed an entire staff of technicians who could handle this sort of thing, but she'd read in her diary what had happened to them, and it made making that complaint out loud seem very poor taste — and as she examined the loose fittings, she distinctly heard the words: "THEN WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHO YOU FUCK?!"

So that was interesting.

She made it to the back of the hall just in time to nearly be bowled over by Veiksaar, moving faster than Ibanez had ever seen. The other woman didn't so much as acknowledge her, huffing and puffing and shaking with rage.

She was not at all surprised to find Harold Blank standing in the stacks, looking like a kid who'd pissed the bed.

"What was that about?" she demanded.

"We had an argument."

"No shit, Wolf Blitzer. Anything I need to know about?"

He started examining the servers, and her heart sank. "Yeah. I told her."

"You told her what?" She knew, but she had to draw it out of him. They always made her draw things out.

"The thing." He knew she knew, but wanted to prolong the inevitable flogging.

"You told her the thing."

"Yes." He was picking at a scar in the rack housing.

"Why did you do that?"

"Because she wanted me to sleep with her."

She put both hands on her hips. "I do not follow."

"She thinks I'm her Harry. I'm not. I explained it to her." He tentatively met her eyes. "Now it's fine."

"It's fine," she repeated again.

"Yes!" He threw his hands in the air. "It's fine!"

"You told someone else our potentially trust-annihilating secret to get out of having sex with them, without asking me what I thought, and you think that's fine."

He looked both frightened and angry, the former undoubtedly due to her very calm tone of voice. "What did you expect me to do? Screw her on false pretences?"

She hadn't worked up a good cold fury in a long while. It wasn't her usual flavour. "That's the only option in your mind? You couldn't just dump her? Say you're impotent? Call her fat?"

"Fuck off," he snarled. "It's Eileen! I'm not gonna—"

"No, Harry, you fuck off." She advanced on him. "You and your stupid problems are not at the centre of the universe. I do not care that you're hung up on Bradbury."

His eyes were suddenly wild. "What the fuck does she have to do with this? This is about Udo!"

"Sure it is," she nodded. The motion was jerky. She felt her fists clenching.

"You're telling me if you were married to, I don't know, Yancy, you'd happily hop into bed with him to keep the secret?"

"Yancy's already married, and anyway he's great in bed."

He blinked. "Wait. Did you s—"

"The point is," and now she was right in front of him, and he was almost cowering at someone only two thirds his height, "you've gone and expanded the circle of people we need to keep an eye on. I needed someone in S&C, and Bradbury was unavoidable, but we can't go around telling people we're from outer timespace whenever we need to shut them down! And the people we do tell can burn the entire group, so we need to decide on this together!"

"You want to give Willie a vote?" he snapped.

"He's been more sensible about this than you have."

He couldn't have looked more gutted if she'd pulled out her gun and shot him there.

"Yeah, hurts, doesn't it? It fucking should. Grow up, Dr. Blank. Behave like the professional you're supposed to be. And go make up with your girlfriend."

"She's not my girlfriend. She's not going to be my girlfriend." There was conviction there, but also petulance.

"I'm sure Udo would give you a pass if it meant saving the world."

"You're enjoying this." To his mild credit, he wasn't backing off. "You're actually enjoying this."

"Obviously I'm going to kick the shit out of you if you cheat on Udo." She favoured him with what she knew was her most unsettling smile. "She's way out of your league."

"I would've said the same about you and Yancy," he grumbled.

"What can I say? I love starting shit." But only shit I can afford to finish. "Make up with your woman, Harry. Kissing is optional."

If she was reduced to snooping over mechanical defects and playing politics with the old man, she was certainly going to seize any opportunities for casual cruelty that came up along the way.

She'd hoped to let off steam by shouting at or shooting the shit with the guards at the gate, but found only further frustration there. Falkirk was inspecting the ramparts, like the kings of old.

She thought fondly on the fact that this sort of behaviour had killed a few such kings in the past. But Falkirk was no lionheart; she found these little inspections, which he made daily, hard to square with his otherwise craven behaviour.

"Chief," he nodded. He was dressed in his full formal suit, and holding the suitcase he carried everywhere he went. Probably thought it made him look important. It made him look hopelessly lost.

"Director." She noted that Agent O looked particularly pained, and wondered what bout of casual racism she might have just missed. Conscious or unconscious? The man was a grab bag.

"I was just speaking to your people about the recent thefts," he told her. "They're confident you're going to find the source."

Ah, so that was what he'd been up to. Shit-talking her subordinates to see if they agreed, trying to determine if his new gut impression that she'd lost her touch was accurate. Both O and Ayodele wore expressions of affronted dignity, and she felt a little bubble of affection for them in her throat. "I certainly hope so, sir."

The fact was, she wasn't at all convinced there was a thief to catch. The H&R people had reported missing supplies, but she suspected they'd just ended up somewhere else in the compound. The logistics people were exhausted, overwhelmed, overworked. They were bound to mislay a box or two, or misplace a spreadsheet cell from time to time. If not that, then perhaps there was a little insider trading going on. Not ideal in a survival situation, but not an immediate existential threat.

She should have known better than to ponder this in front of him. "I can see you're not taking this seriously. Agent Holt was much more concerned."

"Of course she was. She's sucking up to you because she wants my job." She wasn't making that up, but she hadn't known she believed it until it came out of her mouth. Holt had been making noises about all sorts of security threats since her boss had come back wrong, clearly posturing to take over, searching for a wedge issue. She'd been the one to report the loose wall plates, even though there was nothing back there but raw telekill. She was getting detail oriented in the worst way.

"Then you'd best do it better," the old man snarled. "Secure the Section. Find the perpetrator."

She sighed inwardly, even as she snapped a dutiful salute. The gesture mollified him somewhat; the briefcase-toting Scot did love his pageantry.

But I bet he'll take a pass on this parade.

16 September

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"You saying we need to do a replication study on me."

Alis gave him a look he'd seen on dozens of faces over the years. It said are you serious? "I don't mean what's the last thing you remember from this present moment. I mean what's the last thing you remember from before you went empty. I thought that would have been obvious."

"Oh." Wettle nodded. "You were wrong. Uh… I don't remember."

She blinked. "You don't remember what the last thing you remember is."

"Well, I mean, okay." He squirmed on the cot. He was lying back, like it was a psychologist's couch, while she sat over him with her work tablet. She'd tried face-to-face interrogation for about five minutes before getting fed up with his inability to meet her eyes; he'd claimed it was emotional baggage, and she'd asked why he apparently didn't have emotional baggage with her chest, as he was staring at that instead, and he'd told her that actually he did have emotional baggage with her chest, and he'd followed up with what he'd thought was a very clever joke about her chest itself being 'emotional baggage', and she'd slapped him, so here they were. "Obviously I remember stuff. But nothing since, I don't know, September."

Her respiration was audibly frustrated, taking in more oxygen than she should have needed. Staring at the ceiling as he was, he could still see her chest heaving in his peripheral vision. It made his cheek ache. "You're saying you're just like Blank."

He tapped his temple. "No, my mind's here, I'm not like… a zombie or anything, but—"

She interrupted him. "Blank. Capital 'B'. Harry Blank. Not blank-minded. You're just like him."

"Oh." He considered. "I think he'd take offence at that. I mean, we have similar degrees, but—"

She was fidgeting with her tablet, pulling the shock-proof casing off and then thumbing it back on again. He had the sudden image of her leaning over and braining him with it. "I don't mean your personalities are the same, Dr. Wettle. I mean you're experiencing the same symptoms. He also claims to have lost all his memories going back to last September."

"Oh." Well, of course. That was simpler than lying about everything, which was what Ibanez was having to do. It was making her even pissier than usual, and that was saying something. "Well, alright then. Yeah. I'm just like Harry." He found the idea oddly heartening.

"Great." She made a note with rough, angry swipes of her forefinger. "That's not really helping us figure out why you snapped out of emptiness, but I guess it's a start."

He put both hands behind his head, under the pillow. "Well hey, we've got all the time in the world, right? When's Forsythe coming to check up on us?"

"I don't know." He hadn't heard that much strain in a woman's voice since… well, the last time he'd had an extended conversation with one.

Whenever that had been.

17 September

Nascimbeni swore.

Profanity Guidelines:

Acroamatic Abatement Section

Personnel working in or around Acroamatic Abatement facilities must be aware of the potentially disastrous effects of unpoliced verbal language. Due to their potential for interacting with anomalous materials undergoing reprocessing, the following activities are strictly prohibited:

invocation of deities

cursing1

uttering oaths

stating your own true name2

1. As opposed to standard profanity, 'cursing' covers all epithets potentially imparting actual negative effects in occult practice (i.e. 'damn', 'blast', 'curses' etc.)

2. For personnel of fae or demonic origin.

What he said was "fuck," because it was the only whitelisted word which fit the situation. The orphic outflow pipes were jammed, and he had less than a day to get them un-jammed, and his monitoring tablet had just bluescreened. His worst fears on arriving at AAF-D had proven true: all the systems were operating on auto, and they were all very badly in need of maintenance.

Which was what he was doing.

Alone.

In a D-class uniform, and without most of his tools.

A sharp screeching sound filled the air, and this time he didn't even wince. Morwen Couch was coming down the corridor, dog whistle still in her mouth. She spat it out to hang around her thick neck on its lanyard. "How we looking, Chief?"

He glanced at the tablet. "Like we're all going to drown in ghosts by tomorrow."

She tutted. "That's no good. Make sure it doesn't happen."

"If you could get me a few good techni—"

"Come with me." She turned smartly on her heel, and walked away.

He put the tablet down on the nearest cart and followed her. He couldn't put it in his pocket, because D-class didn't have pockets. He was surprised Couch had been able to source the embarrassing uniform in the first place, as Site-43's population of death row test subjects was precisely zero.

He'd assumed they were heading to either the makeshift briefing room or the spare closet she'd repurposed for his tiny personal space, but no. They were heading back down the wider corridors, moving into parts of the facility she hadn't let him see yet. Heading toward the centre.

He pinpointed the destination a full minute before they reached it: the concentration cell. The occult heart of AAF-D, where all the worst atmospheric gunk built up through unnatural accumulation. So far as he'd seen, the controlled flow was minimal; if it had been maximal the entire place would have melted down, and up up up, by now. But the concentration cell would still be soaking up some serious Akivas, Humes and Thaums from esoteric heat loss, so he hoped Couch wasn't using it for what he really knew she was using it for.

Behind the thick vault door, already open, he found his foregone conclusion. Mukami was lying on a military cot, unconscious, wearing a D-class uniform like his, a thick black scarf around her eyes and another across her mouth, teeth dug in deep. He'd been asking to see her for days. He'd pitched all sorts of scenarios for setting her free, for letting them both go, and had been rebuffed in every case.

There was an OSAT constable standing beside her, a pack on his back, a glass of what looked like water in one hand, and some sort of stereo walkman in the other.

Couch approached the cot, and with a series of deft motions removed the blindfold. Mukami's eyes snapped open, then closed, and she growled something equal parts angry and agonized.

"Good morning… sunshine!" Couch said, turning the dial on a portable standing lamp beside the cot. The room became painfully bright, by Nascimbeni's standards. Mukami immediately began to whimper.

He pushed past Couch, reached down and took the sniper's hand in his. "Ana," he said. "I'm here."

"Hear that, Ana?" said Couch. "Hope you're listening real close."

Then she took the walkman from her assistant, gently placed the headphones over Mukami's ears, and pressed a button. An ear-splitting screech filled the air. Nascimbeni grabbed at his ears on instinct, and he was only hearing it secondhand. Mukami convulsed for a moment as the shock of the sound poured into her ears, then suddenly stopped moving. For a moment he was afraid that she had died. When she fixed a hateful glare on the chief Mountie, however, he realized she'd merely been deafened.

"God damn you," he muttered.

"Your boyfriend is very cross with me for doing that," Couch smiled, "but you have him to thank. He convinced us that it's better for you to be able to walk around and feed yourself than for us to have to take care of a vegetable. Of course, we wouldn't have bothered. I would've put a bullet in your brain, just like I planned from the start. But he says you're not going to be a problem, so lady, you aren't. What do you have to say about that?"

Mukami didn't answer, not that she really could have through the scarf.

"I'll take your silence as assent." Couch snapped her fingers, and the constable pushed Nascimbeni roughly aside. With the Superintendent helping her up, he yanked down the scarf and poured the contents of the glass down her throat.

She drank it greedily, then began to cough.

Then she began to scream.

"Stop!" Nascimbeni shouted. "You're killing her!"

"Not by half." Couch stood up. "But she isn't going to be much of a conversationalist for the next long while. From what I remember in WHEMIS training, that stuff will make it impossible for her to talk for at least a week. Nothing more than a whisper, at any rate. We'll mic her up, so when she finally rasps something out, you'll hear it. And of course you'll let us know, since we're one big happy family down here."

"This isn't what we agreed on." He felt like cursing, really cursing. Something that would take, and last.

"We didn't agree on anything. You gave me your pitches, and I found a solution we both can live with. You want to haul this walking security risk around with you, that's your business. My business is making sure she doesn't get everyone killed. We'll be recording everything you say to each other and getting it looked at, so no funny business. And no hanky-panky while you're at work." She grinned, and leaned down over Mukami again. "That's right. Your boyfriend is working for us, now. That get your panties in a knot? Actually, they're probably in a knot already. Maybe if he does gold star work, we'll give you back your bathroom privileges."

19 September

The trick was to be unpredictable.

When Lillian was a child, she'd had a Saturday ritual. She'd walk out her front door, down several of the streets of her home town of Peterborough, and into her best friend's house. His parents were always up and about before him on Saturday, because he was a lazy bum, so the door would be unlocked and he would not be awake. She'd go into the living room, fire up the Atari, and start playing games until he came downstairs and chewed her out for yet another instance of breaking and entering. That was his ritual. Then they'd sit together and play, and whenever it was his turn, she'd stare at the walls.

She'd lived in postwar housing. All the angles were precise, every element mass-produced. She'd hated it. Harry's house was Victorian, handmade, and the angles… oh, how she'd adored the angles in Harry's house. None of them were correct, and none of them were incorrect in exactly the same way. She could look at a ceiling corner, then follow the line along the top of the wall, and when it passed the header of a doorframe she'd notice that the lines were not perfectly parallel. So she'd glance over the frame, and she'd see that the jamb wasn't quite straight either. If she pulled back and considered the room as a whole after performing this exercise, she would be confronted with an endless series of subtle wrongnesses in linear form. The paintings, the wainscoting, the floor, the ceiling, absolutely nothing was one hundred percent level. Over the years she came to love that room more than any other room in the world, because she could sit on the couch and just look at it and her mind would solve each of her problems in turn, actuated into nonlinear thinking by the complete dissolution of the concept of linearity spread out before her.

When they went away to university, she didn't stop. She simply closed her eyes, and saw the space again. Her eidetic memory was often a curse, but far more often a boon. Sometimes when he saw her lost in thought, Harry would ask: "Are you in my living room again?"

She was in his living room now.

She had countless variables to consider, and a constantly variable deception to manage, and she needed to know how everything fit together when all the facts ran in such rampantly wrong directions. She'd heard that Janet Gwilherm had gone topside to end the world, and that she was apparently doing a bang-up job of it. The occasional broadcasts by Stewart Radcliffe reinforced this impression — just an hour ago she'd heard him crowing about how there was 'no more tea in China', whatever that meant — as did Mukami's frequent mentions of a higher authority to which she was obliged to answer, and of whom she was afraid. So, Team Victim was trying to kill everyone. Fine. At the same time, Gedeon Van Rompay was training the colourful blob-persons night and day, attempting to reify them beyond their animating force by imparting enough advice to render them singularly conscious. This was something which apparently worked; she'd seen a few permanent nobodies strolling about, their colours duller, their bodies less transparent, their movements less robotic. It was evidently a difficult process. It was also, so far as she could see, a pointless one. If Gwilherm was trashing the planet already, what did they need with a standing army? When he wasn't yelling at the jello, Van Rompay was whipping his smaller force of real human converts into shape. They were wearing S&C uniforms, but none of them were S&C personnel originally. Why was that? Why were there literally no cops on this side? And for that matter, why had Mukami said there was something special about the Mounties which made them a particular target of interest? She'd already seen more than one sortie planned against the horse pigs, and heard the sorry aftermath. It didn't make sense that OSAT would have any capability the Victims lacked, as OSAT was the laughingstock of the normalcy community. Why not just kill them?

Why not just kill everyone? Why do any of this? Why had Gwilherm not left Site-43 a smoking ruin behind her, with all six siblings in tow?

It was a tangled web, but she knew if she cut enough of the strands it would take coherent shape like the irregular prism of Harry's living room. So she stood in TheoTelo while Sokolsky narrated his plan out loud and she pretended not to half-listen, assigned each tangent a line, ceiling to floor, wall to wall, and tried to work out how they connected. She had the nagging sense that she couldn't keep collecting this data forever. Eventually, she would slip up. Eventually, they would catch her.

Or worse, eventually they would complete whatever their bizarre mission was, and bring the roof down onto her head as punctuation.

21 September

There was precious little archival info in Eileen's servers covering the period after the breach. It was relatively solid until about November, and then when things went to shit people stopped uplinking their devices, systems went down, whole sectors went dark. As for SCiPnet snapshots, there was absolutely nothing from 2003. The entire world could have ended up there, and Harry wouldn't even know. It made piecing this mess together a real problem, and as both an historian and an archivist there was little he hated more than gaps in the evidence trail. Still he sat and sifted through what there was, page by page, on the unlimited access tablet Eileen had set up for him. He lay on his bunk, scrolling 'til the tip of his finger hurt, re-reading datum after datum every time he realized his attention was drifting.

"What?" said Melissa, from the bunk over his.

"Hmm?" He leaned out into the narrow space between the racks.

She leaned way, way over the edge, hair tumbling down toward him then drifting back upward in the recycled air. He had to laugh.

"You were sighing."

"Oh." He shrugged. "Having trouble focusing. Lot on my mind."

"Like what?" She remained inverted.

He always had trouble reading her expression, even right side up. It was one her better features; it had also led to a years-long misunderstanding he'd only corrected a moment too late, back in the old reality. "Uh," he said. He wanted to tell her about the fight with Eileen, or the way she'd been cold shouldering him ever since, or his concerns about Udo Okorie, and his judgement was never right when it came to telling women things, so he told her something else instead. "I'm thinking about the empties."

Perhaps she looked disappointed. Perhaps she was getting dizzy, or vertigo. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." It wasn't untrue. Something about the topic was bugging him. "I don't think Alis is going to figure out anything by studying Willie."

"Studying Willie," she snorted.

He grinned. "Shut up. It's just, there can't be a worse test subject in the world. He's an active impediment to getting anything done."

She nodded; the gesture looked uncanny upside-down. "But who'd be better? They're all the same."

He shifted on the cot to make more direct eye contact. "Are they? Has anyone done a comprehensive examination of how they've acted differently, sighting by sighting?"

"Fat chance. Nobody looks at them too close when they do turn up. Afraid they'll infect you with brain holes."

"Brain holes," he repeated. They both tended to repeat each other's sentences, acknowledging the wordsmithery or reinforcing the sentiments. Not unlike how the empties worked, he thought ruefully. If I say 'Hi', you say 'Hi'. If I say 'No,' you say 'No'. If I say 'Why are you wearing that uniform?' you say 'Don't know'.

"FUCK," he shouted. He jumped up, whacking his head hard on the metal frame supporting Melissa's body. She darted out of the way so he could swing off the bunk. "Fuck," he said again. "Fuck fuck fuck."

"What are you fucking?"

"I'm not fucking." He ran for the corridor.

He jogged back.

"I figured it out, sorry, it's urgent?"

She waved him off. "Go now, explain later. Dork."

Ibanez stared at the capsule in her hand. It was lined with some sort of metal she'd never seen before, and on the inside was another sort of metal almost no one on Earth had ever seen. "We're sure this is safe?"

"For a very brief outing, sure." Forsythe handed her a fanny pack; the nurse was back for the day, and so far Falkirk had exercised remarkable self-control in not demanding she be captured or shot. "Put it in here. The beryllium bronze coating will diffuse the effects a little, so you're not going to feel anything adverse for about six hours. Longer than that, you'll start suffering cognition loss. Brain damage begins around eleven hours. Don't be out for eleven hours."

"If it takes eleven hours to find one furtive asshole," Holt grunted, checking the slide on her service weapon, "we're rustier than I thought."

"We're pretty damn rusty." Ayodele was checking the straps on his bulletproof vest. "I haven't been out of the safe zone since this started."

"Well, we're not going to stay out there any longer than necessary." Ibanez wasn't checking anything, as she knew her gear was sound. She secured the pill in the pack, and fastened it around her waist. "This isn't a pleasure trip, and we're not taking tourists."

As though the words had summoned him, Harold Blank appeared at the door to the server hall. He was running, which was new. "Heading out?" he gasped.

She nodded. "That's right."

He stopped in front of her, hands on his knees to catch his wind. "I wanna come with you."

"That's wrong."

"Seriously." He straightened. "There's a test subject you need to find."

"A test subject?" Ibanez glanced at Forsythe, who shrugged. "We're not going anywhere near S&C, not that there's much left up there anyway."

"She's not in S&C." Harry looked excited, even out of breath. "Last I saw, she was in the dorm library."

"You're talking about Karen?" Forsythe interjected.

"Yeah."

Ibanez stepped in front of the doctor. "Why do you want Karen? Why would anyone want Karen?"

"There's her hips, for starters," Ayodele smirked. Holt gave him a dirty look. O high-fived him.

Harry ignored them, mostly. "Her brain chemistry seems different from everyone else's." He took a deep breath. "She doesn't repeat what you say to her, like the rest. She says nonsense. She's the only one who's different, except for Willie. She might be coming out of it. The secret to curing the empties might be rattling around in her skull!"

"Huh." Forsythe rubbed the back of her neck. "That's interesting. Yeah, we'd best have a look at that."

"Fine." Ibanez cracked her knuckles. "If we see her, we'll bring her back. Thanks for the tip." She started to walk away, and her agents followed.

"Like I said," Harry said, speedwalking beside her, "I want to come with."

"Why?"

"Because you'll need to send someone back with her, and that'd mean sending one of your guards and delaying while they walk home and back, or searching for your thief with one man short. Not very efficient, either way."

"Fine, but why do I need to bring you? Why wouldn't anybody else be just as useful?"

He was too busy defending his case to pause for offence. "Karen knows me. I'm the only person around who was ever remotely friendly with her. If there's a part of her that remembers, it'll be easier if I go."

She chewed the inside of her cheek. "You realize Falkirk is going to ream me out if I take you with."

"I think that'd be good for you."

"What?"

"It's clearly eating you up that he hasn't reamed you out already. Being on good terms with the Tarantula is killing you."

For the second time in recent memory, she thought about shooting him in the stomach. "Fuck off. All right. Fuck… off." She sighed. "Okay. But if we can't find her right away, we're not lingering."

"Sounds like a plan." He fell in step, expression contented.

"Don't say that. None of our plans have gone right so far."

It felt a little strange backtracking the path they'd taken to escape the Mukarmy on September 9, but the way seemed essentially clear. Alis had seeded the halls with memetic kill agents that wouldn't work against anyone pre-inoculated, to keep the road open but prevent pursuit, and they certainly seemed to have worked. There were two dead bodies at the upper entrance to the auditorium, covered in a ton of green and yellow slop. Ibanez didn't stop to see who they were. She saw that Harry wanted to, and pulled him through the door.

"Wait." He pointed at the pile. "If anyone trying to sneak in gets killed by the kill agents—"

"Then how is someone getting past and stealing our shit?" She nodded. "Yeah, it's a good god damn question, isn't it?"

The Mukami bodies were gone from the stage, but the guards she'd shot across the gallery were still there. Apparently all her talk about equality was just that: talk. They hustled down the aisles, then out into the access corridor, without incident. As promised, OSAT had kept the area clear. She wondered what Falkirk had given up to assure it.

The library was a wreck. Ibanez hadn't seen it in this state, or rather this state of her hadn't. Completely plastered with teal fluid from top to bottom, as though someone had left the ghost faucet on in Applied Occultism and it had slowly drained down through the floor. That was probably the gist of what had happened, actually.

Elstrom was standing in the middle of the circulation desk, which was actually circular, walking along the inside edge in a constant cycle. She was singing softly to herself, which was interesting; the empties never spoke unless spoken to. Perhaps Harry was right.

"Hey," he said. He walked up and took Elstrom's shoulder. "We're gonna take you home, Karen."

"Okay," she said. She resumed singing.

"What's that song?" Ibanez wasn't sure why she cared.

Harry paused to listen, leaning close to the bumbling blonde. "Old pop song from the seventies. She used to do singing competitions when we were teenagers."

"The hell you say." Ibanez shook her head. "I didn't know that voice rose above a monotone."

"Chief!" It was Holt, from the hallway. She sounded out of breath. They rushed back out of the library, everyone but Harry (who had to guide Elstrom more gently), to find the spindly agent sprawled over top of a well-built young man who was thrashing madly against the floor. "Caught him trying to sneak past," the agent grunted.

Ibanez approached them, stopping with her steel toes up to the boy's nose. "Lot of nerve, kid."

"I'm not a fucking kid," he spat. He literally spat, on the end of her boot.

She knelt down to examine him closer. "Then you need less nerve, and more fibre." He was tall, with a harsh, hatchet face and a contrasting sleek black pompadour. He was also quite fit. "What hole have you been hiding in?"

"Your mother's," he snarled.

"Well, that's all kinds of disgusting and illegal." She stood up again. "Sounds like thief talk to me. Guess we're bringing you in."

He suddenly spun on the tiles, shaking off Holt and backhanding her in the face. The tall agent went down as Ibanez dropped to the floor and swept the thief's feet out from under him. They were both back up in an instant, but she was already behind him. She kicked him in the backs of his knees, then circled around to the front as he squirmed on the tiles.

"What's your name, big guy?"

"Eat shit."

She stepped on his chest. "You're the one eating shit right now. I said you have a lot of nerves, right? That's not always a good thing."

She lifted up her foot, and stomped on his groin. He hollered in pain and outrage.

"Your balls are where the nerves end. A lot of them, anyway, and they recover sensitivity real fast. I could start kicking 'til you scream something interesting, or you could offer it up coherently and save me the boot leather."

"I'm going to stick that boot up your clit, bitch," he screamed.

"That's a good pick," she agreed. "My clit's got twice the nerve endings as your balls, which might be why I'm twice the man you are. But you're gonna have to get off the ground to get a shot in, and my boot's got plenty of leather left. So answer my question: what's your name?"

"Roger," he said through clenched teeth.

"Roger what?"

"Roger Wilco, over and out!"

"It's a start. Where'd you come from, Roger? You the prick who's been pinching our supplies?"

"A dog could get at your supplies." His face was beet red, a colourful mixture of pain and fury.

"That's what I'm asking, dog. Was it you?"

He looked to the side, and didn't answer. She looked up, quickly, at the others. Harry was standing in the library door, both hands on Elstrom's shoulders. It was hard to tell with just a quick glance, but he looked almost amused.

"OSAT's been losing shit too," she mused, looking back at the putative thief. "They're not sophisticated like me. Federal cops with no more oversight. Probably just cap you."

"Yeah, you're a real fucking sweetheart."

"I can be, but you need to give me a reason." She knelt down yet again, knee poised for a potentially fatal knee drop to the groin. "Talk shit all you like, but it's not easy to sneak under our radar. We've got the base locked up real tight. Takes skill to get in and out like you did; also takes a reason. We'll start with the first part: where'd you pick up those skills, Roger?"

He still wouldn't meet her eyes. "You'd last maybe a day where I came from."

"Let me put you in a uniform, buddy, and train you up. Spend a few decades containing and protecting, get promoted six or seven times, and you might have a high enough security clearance to find out how absolutely hilarious that statement was. For now, just take my word for it: you've got nothing on me." She considered his features again. "No accent, but that's an Eastern looking face. Serbian? Iranian?"

"Oh, sure. Straight to racial profiling." The cop joke masked a deeper pain… or was it offence?

Click. "Oh, shit. You're Israeli. I should've seen that. IDF? Peacekeeping, maybe? I've known a few Peacekeepers, and you've got the haunted look."

His face screwed up in a rictus of rage.

"Yeah," she nodded. "That's what it is. Probably how you ended up over here. Took an out, did you?"

"None of this shit matters," he muttered, low and soft.

He wanted her to lean in. She wasn't falling for that. "Speak up."

He finally looked right at her, grey eyes cold as the rest of him went hot. "None of this shit matters! The place I'm from is probably gone. Wherever you're from is probably gone, too. They're all dead." He deflated beneath her. "They're all dead."

"They already were, where I'm from." She matched his soft tone, so only he could hear her.

"Then you get it, right?" He was examining her as closely as she'd examined him. "You know what it looks like when everything falls apart. That's what this is. It's all coming down."

"And what do you do when it all comes down?"

"I look after myself."

She nodded. Everyone else, everything else faded away. It was just the two of them, telling the truth. "Latch on to whoever's strongest, or whoever's best at riding it out, then make tracks when the situation changes."

He didn't respond.

"Right? That's how it works. Who'd you find? You couldn't have lasted long down here on your own, and judging by those exposed ribs I'd guess whoever's helping you is a bit down on their luck themselves. You really needed those supplies, huh?"

He wanted to talk. She only had to allow it. Give him the frame, let him fill it out.

"Maybe we could help them. Or maybe it's time you moved on; we really could use a guy like you, and that's no bullshit."

"You don't know a fucking thing." These final protestations carried no force. "You're just squatting your fat ass in the dirt, telling stories."

"I hit more than I missed, or I owe you five bucks. Of course, you'd have to prove it to collect. Want to spill your own story in exchange for a hot meal, a shower, and an unconditional promise that we're going to help your people, whoever they are?"

He shuddered, presumably from the adrenaline comedown. "What if my people don't want your help?"

She grinned. "That's just the sort of help we're famous for."

25 September

"So, which was it?"

"Huh?" Roger turned to look at her. Most agents took a while to pick up her flavour of multitasking, holding important conversations while engaged in important work. The young man was focused on what he was doing, and not expecting interruption. She wanted to train that out of him. You had to be able to take on a second task at any time, because most people weren't considerate enough to only attack when you were otherwise unoccupied.

"IDF or peacekeepers?"

"Oh." He squirmed through the short break in the wall, and she followed him through with considerably more ease due to her diminished height. If the crack had been narrow, the advantage would have been his. "Uh. Peacekeepers."

IDF, then. "See much action?"

"Not really." They were standing in a stretch of the second skin which wasn't supposed to be accessible anymore. The Mountie patrols had missed the break because it lay in shadow, a factor of broken ceiling lights and wall placement. "Pretty quiet."

"You said something about me not lasting one minute where you came from." She switched on her flashlight, and headed in the direction of the server hall.

"I was just trying to sound tough."

"Uh huh. Do the people you were living with think you're tough?"

"They think I'm a police trainee." He didn't smile, but she'd already learned to identify the tone he used when self-satisfied. He was using it now. "Thought they had to deprogram me."

"Enough cops down here," she agreed. She flashed back to Mukami's mental message, the brutal treatment in the hot shed, and felt unhappy uncertainty boiling in her stomach. "They know you were stealing from us?

"Hell no. You guys are DNI. But I got tired of eating hospital food, so."

She mentally noted down that slipped detail for later.

They were almost at the server hall already. The second skin terminated here, as adding an extra access point would have defeated the purpose of its isolated location. "How many people?"

"I dunno, couple hundred?"

She tried to let the number be just that, a number. But she knew there were nearly three thousand people in Grand Bend. If there were two hundred of them in Roger's mystery community, how many could there be in AAF-A from the exiled trains? A few hundred more?

Were the rest of them just dead?

"Here," he said. They were at the end of the line, or rather should have been. The outer plates had been damaged by some sort of shifting of the rock face — what could have caused that? — and there was room to get at the telekill sheathe. Unlike the metal around it, it absorbed rather than reflecting her flashlight beam.

She stepped back to what was supposed to be a safe distance, and said "You walked through that?"

"Yeah."

She grimaced. "You really shouldn't have. Gonna have to get Forsythe to check you out for brain damage."

He looked legitimately worried. "Why? Is this stuff toxic?"

She nodded.

"Then you've got a bit of a problem, because on the other side? Where I came out? There was a whole chunk missing, at about chest level."

She considered. "And you came out though the hole."

"Right."

"Unscrewed the wall plates from the inside?"

He scoffed. "I'm not a wizard. How would that even work? The plates were already loose on the outside."

"Okay. Just a shot in the dark here," and she turned off the flashlight for emphasis, "but did you happen to come out on the southwest corner?"

26 September

He hadn't even gotten to get used to being special.

Granted, it hadn't been a great sort of special. It had been nice having Alis leaning over him every day, that was the kind of sight he could grow accustomed to, but she'd always spoiled it by showing him pictures that made his bladder feel full, or playing a series of tones that made him forget how to stop talking, or on one memorable occasion successfully hypnotizing him with a placebo. She was still a little sore about that last one, he thought.

And now they had someone in custody who could blow the lid off the whole problem, probably, and Alis was champing at the bit to go fuss over them as soon as the mandatory quarantine period was over. Wettle had been moved into his own 'quarters' in the tent city, sharing a bunk bed with Alis so she could keep an eye on him day and night; Falkirk didn't regrow lost trust easily, and he'd never really trusted Wettle that much anyway.

This was their last week together, and then he'd probably have to get a real job. He wondered what use he could possibly be to their glorified refugee camp.

Alis sat down in the chair across from where he was lying, work tablet tucked under her shoulder. He'd tried to claim the top bunk, but lost it the first night after falling out three times. "Hey, stupid," she said by way of greeting.

"Hey." He patted the thin mattress, the wide arm of his hospital gown flapping like a wing. He was wearing tracks pants and socks underneath; his old clothes had been burned with prejudice, and Ibanez had told him he was lucky they'd taken them off first. "Wanna sit somewhere more comfortable?"

"How about on your face?" she snapped. Then her eyes widened, and he realized there must have been a double entendre there he hadn't caught. "So you suffocate," she added.

He shrugged. "Worse ways to go."

She flicked on the tablet. "I dunno what's left to go over. I think you woke up as a freak accident."

"Sounds about right," he agreed. "I have been called an accident freak."

She smiled. He liked making her smile, because it was very difficult. "I guess we'll just go over your story again. See if you remember anything different."

"I have a better idea." The fact that he was supposed to be gathering intelligence occasionally resurfaced in his hazy mind. "Why don't you let me interview you?"

She frowned. "Why would that help?"

He'd given this some thought ahead of time, which was good, because he was totally incapable of thinking on his feet. Even lying down. "You can run a reverse profile on me. Figure out how my brain works based on the questions I choose to ask. Maybe that'll give you a new angle on the problem."

She considered. "I don't think that makes any kind of sense."

"Neither does me being special. Maybe you need nonsense methods to solve nonsense problems."

She tossed the tablet onto his crotch. He winced, but only a little. The nerves there were used to sudden, unexpected punishment. "Sure. Fine. Why not." She leaned back in the chair, which threatened to snap even under her low weight. "Start asking."

"What's your favourite colour?"

She stared at him. "Seriously?"

"I dunno, are you really serious about colours?" He pointed at her hair. "You don't seem very colour-serious."

"Grey," she snapped. "Next question."

"Where did you grow up?"

She looked away. "Big house, far off."

"Oh." He favoured her with a sympathetic look which had been described to him by Lillian Lillihammer as 'sad, punchable puppy'. "I'm sorry. That must have been very hard."

She looked at him funny. "What? Why would that be hard?"

"You know. Growing up in prison. Were you born there? Your parents were cons, and…?"

She laughed. "You fucking idiot. Not 'the big house'. A big house." She paused. "Do you think if a kid is born in prison, they have to stay in prison?"

He shrugged. "I don't know how they do things in Wales."

"I'm not from Wales. I'm from…" She was looking at him even funnier, now. "I don't remember where I'm from, originally. But I grew up in a big house, a very big, very old house, with a lot of rooms, and a lot of rooms you couldn't go into. That's where my parents lived. And I couldn't leave…" She paused, perhaps thinking that he'd hit closer to the mark than he'd intended, and wondering if he was smarter than he let on. He hoped that was what she was thinking. He hoped she decided he was. "And we stayed there for a long, long time," she finally continued, "until they said we had to leave."

"Why?"

"So we could start doing the work."

"What kind of work?"

She didn't respond for a few seconds. When she did, her voice was grave. "The final work."

"Oh." He said that a lot, oh. He knew people didn't think most information penetrated his thick skull, so he liked to give them signposts for when he had legitimately understood something. "Your apocalypse thing."

"Yeah."

"Why're you trying to do an apocalypse thing?"

She bit her lip.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know what's wrong?" It was mean turning it back on her, but still quite satisfying.

She leaned forward, eyes locked on his. "I don't know why I was trying to do it." She placed a hand on his shoulder. "I don't remember why it made sense. I don't understand my own motivations. I can't see the plan anymore, even though it was right there in front of me the whole time."

He looked at her hand. It was very small on his fat shoulder. He wanted to touch it. He didn't. "So what are you gonna do now?"

She looked at her hand as well, then pulled it away and picked up the tablet without brushing against his crotch. There's always next time. "Whatever your blackmailing bitch friend tells me, I guess. We done bonding? I'm gonna run you through the Berryman sequence again."

He winced. "Is that the one that makes me sneeze, or the one that makes it so I can't sneeze?"

The most distracted Nascimbeni had ever been at work had been during his divorce.

He'd thought about his wife every minute of every day while she was filing the requisite papers, talking to her lawyer, packing her things. He'd found it impossible to focus on the tasks in front of him, no matter how important they were. Eventually he'd had to pawn everything off on his deputy and go home to confront the collapse of his life in full. What followed was a week of getting his house in order, which had ended with Lena cancelling the divorce proceedings and committing to stay.

So he'd gone back to work, and focused on it solely and completely to the day she died. Alone. In their home, without him.

It felt crass to compare that to what was happening now, but he couldn't help it. He was expected to keep fixing AAF-D while Mukami sat rigid against the wall, mouth working like she had ill-fitting dentures, shaking her head like her ears were ringing, and occasionally shedding tears of real pain. From time to time she'd whisper something, and the mics would pick it up, and he'd hear. It wasn't always meant for him, and he felt terrible about hearing it. When it was, he felt worse.

Like now, for instance.

"Help me," she said. It came through his headphones as a sort of rattling rasp.

"I just work here." He spoke softly, knowing that every word out of her own headphones made her eardrums ache. He tapped the gauge on the inflow pipe, and checked it against the readings from yesterday. Stabilization. Good.

"It hurts," she said. He believed her. "I need a diversion."

He knew what she was doing. She was calling back to their conversation on the way through AAF-D with Nicolescu, when she'd been leading him to the subway, in a way the Mounties listening in wouldn't notice. "We need to create a diversion," she'd said. He supposed it was still true, if they were going to escape.

He just wasn't sure they were going to escape.

So he ignored the voices in his head, hers pleading and his wanting to help, and headed for the next conduit.

"Good news!" Couch rounded the corner, a dour-looking woman in a white and blue labcoat in tow. "You've got a house caller."

Nascimbeni blinked. It wasn't an affectation; he really did need that laser surgery, he realized. "Nurse Forsythe?"

"Nurse?" Couch glared at her companion. "You told me you're a doctor."

"And you told me you had them in detention." Forsythe glanced down at Mukami, then waggled a finger in protest. "This woman looks like a torture victim!"

Couch shrugged. "It's much easier to torture someone when they're detained."

"What did you do to her?" The nurse knelt beside Mukami, who was softly muttering to herself. Nascimbeni couldn't make out any words this time. "I need to know if I'm going to treat it."

"You're not going to treat her." The Mountie gestured at Nascimbeni. "You're here for him."

"Sure, but she—"

"Let me rephrase." Couch dropped the artificial affability. "You're here for him, or you're not here at all. We've made the changes you wanted to your clinic all set up, so you can get back to work on the empties right away."

"Empties?" said Nascimbeni.

"Fine." Forsythe grunted as she stood back up. "What's wrong with him?"

"Nothing, hopefully. You brought it?"

Forsythe patted the medical pouch at her waist. "I did. I also told you I'm not the best at this. I had our memeticist show me what to do, but—"

This time it was Couch holding up a finger. "Do you know enough to tell if someone's in their right mind?"

The nurse nodded. "Yeah. I probably don't even need the kit. Tests are pretty simple."

"Excellent. Well, we've got your test subjects lined up in the back for when you finish." Couch headed back down the corridor. She turned for a moment, without pausing her retreat, and added: "Oh, yeah. If you try to spring them, or do anything other than what we've agreed on, I'm going to shoot your test subjects. All of them. Let me know how it goes!"

She waved goodbye.

"Now imagine if she and Falkirk had a kid," Forsythe muttered.

Nascimbeni snorted. "I don't know which mental image to reject first. Thanks."

"How you holding up in here?" Forsythe was rummaging through her bag. "And how'd you get here in the first place?"

"Long story. Where did you come from?"

"Headquarters. Where pretty well everyone else is."

A new lump formed in his already lumpy throat. "Delfina? Chief Ibanez?"

"Yep."

"She alright?"

"Yep." He and Forsythe had a lot in common, personality-wise.

"That's good," he said.

"Yep." She raised something that looked like a sleek black periscope between them. "Close your left eye."

He did as he was told, and a series of flashing lights came out of the small device. "What did she mean about test subjects?"

"I'm trying to restore mental functionality to the empties. Right eye."

"What's an empty?"

"Well, there's definitely something wrong with your memory, I'll say that much." She returned the device to her pouch. "An empty is someone who's been possessed too much, and they basically turn into a drooling zombie."

He hadn't seen anything like that. "And you're trying to figure out how to wake them back up?"

"That's right."

"What about mind control?"

"What about it?"

"You going to cure that, too?"

She shrugged. "I guess that's the second hurdle. Haven't even considered how I'm going to approach it yet."

"Would either process be helped by having access to her?" He gestured at the silent third party. "She's the pattern all other Mukamis are based on."

Forsythe glanced at the agent with new appreciation. "No shit? How'd you figure that?"

"Because she told me." He felt like a moron saying it, so he rushed to the next clause. "And because she hasn't got the powers they've apparently got. She's been talking to me for days, and… well, you tell me. Am I compromised?"

"Not so far as I can tell. And honestly, I would have been able to tell. The signs are pretty obvious, and I've never seen a case where it was subtle. You're clear."

"That's a relief." It certainly was.

"Did you think you maybe weren't?"

"No," he lied, "but I'm glad you'll be able to tell them I am. I need to get out of here, and start figuring out what's going on."

She zipped up her pouch. "Well, good luck with that."

"Will you tell the others I'm here?"

"Honestly? No. I will not. Couch trusts me, but only barely, and I'm not going to blow that by passing along information."

"Guess I can't blame you for that."

"You can, but it won't do anyone any good." Her smile was less than half apologetic. "I'm the only go-between we have right now, and I've got to make the most of it. Losing this place would put a serious dent in our survivability. We need the OSAT guards."

"Why? There's maybe two dozen of them, max."

"Because they're resistant to mind control."

"What?!"

"Like, super resistant. As though they've all got CRVs beyond the max. There's no recorded case of an OSAT constable being affected. They're the only ones who can walk unmolested through the corridors right now, and nobody but them knows why."

"You're sure they do?"

"Well, no." Forsythe frowned. "But they've been holding it over Falkirk's head this whole time. Basically working the Site-43 security contract while he hunkers down and plays dead in I&T. Our folks get mighty queasy after just a few minutes outside, and they eventually crack. Damn near everyone who doesn't wear a gun is gone in seconds."

Couch made no effort to hide her approach, boots clacking on the tiles. "That's enough conspiring," she called out.

"We weren't conspiring," Forsythe groused. "Obviously you were listening in the entire time, so you know that."

"You're too world-wise to be a doctor." The Mountie stopped between them. "Are you sure you're not secretly a spy?"

"Consider my origin. Who would spy for Edwin Falkirk?"

Couch's expression shifted to what passed for genuine delight on her face. "You've got me there. Alright, what's the verdict?"

"He's safe. Completely and totally. You can let him wander around, he's no threat."

"Well," Couch said. "He's not the kind of threat I'm most worried about. He's still an agent of the Foundation, and we're not precisely chummy right now. What do you say, Noè? You wanna go back home?"

He refused to let her fan his hopes. "You're not going to let me."

"No, I'm not," she agreed. "We've got a lot of machinery needs fixing 'round here, and you want to make the point that you and your chum there aren't a threat. The way you make that work is, well… you make with the working."

"You really trust me to keep tending this machinery?

She narrowed her eyes. "I know what the machinery does, more or less. Anything you could do to fuck with it would fuck the entire Site up. Since we know you're not a mass murderer now, I'd say we can leave it safely in your hands."

"I'd like to examine the other one now," Forsythe reminded her.

"She's fine," Couch said.

"I mean for my study. It might be useful to get a look inside her head, considering whose head it is."

The Mountie considered. "I guess that's fair. See if we can't scrounge you up a surgery kit."

Mukami made a small, frightened noise in Nascimbeni's ears. Forsythe's eyes opened wide for the first time since she'd arrived.

"I'm kidding! I'm kidding. I know what you meant. God, what a low opinion you all must have of me."

Lillian had data-mined almost everything she could from the occupied R&E Section. Her checklist — her list of things to check — was declining rapidly, and there was only one more big-ticket item on it: the DUAL Core, Xinyi Du's pride and joy.

The project had been inaugurated by his father, Qiang Du, a computer technologist and the first Chief of Identity and Technocryptography. They'd worked on it together, father and son, until the former's death in 1999. The latter had not been impressed when Lillian suggested a name she found appropriately credited both of the device's creators: the 'DUDU Core'. It summed up the way she felt about it: it ought to be gotten rid of, and was dangerous to keep lying around. She'd been proven right after the 2002 breach, when a backflow of occult energy along the Site's power lines had given the machine ontokinetic powers with which it had begun to impose a simulated reality on top of the real one.

And Du was du-ing something no doubt equally nefarious with it now. She needed to know what; she'd needed to know what for weeks, but it had never been left unguarded, and there had been other opportunities to learn other terrible things, so she'd put it off until she was sure she knew the angle to work.

It was a logic puzzle, and she was terrific at those. Logic puzzles weren't about actually addressing the logic, thinking it through objectively, because that would get you to an answer twice removed from the right one — because you did not experience an objective reality, and neither did the person who created the puzzle, and neither of your subjective realities matched. You needed instead to try and guess the shape of theirs. Reconstruct the way their brain worked, and run some scenarios through the sim. Not unlike what the DUAL Core did with its microuniverses, really; take as many variables into account as possible, and try your luck. As a memeticist, this was what she'd been trained to do. As a natural superstar at memetics, it was what she had been born for.

Du wouldn't leave his Core alone if there were any other option. It had three kinds of value to him now: sentimental, academic, and practical. He'd only go somewhere else if someone more important told him to. They'd only do that if he was the best man for the job. He'd only be the best man for the job if…

She wasn't sure, actually. Why had Wirth sent a quantum theorist to lead an attack team, back on the ninth? She thought back to the encounter she'd witnessed. Was there a clue there?

Of course there was. She replayed their dialogue, settling on one strange thing she'd been forced to utter by her controlling spirit: I can't get in their heads, obviously, but you might be able to, shall we say, open them up for me. She'd thought it meant murder, but if course it hadn't. Even ghosts would have trouble interrogating a dead Mountie.

Du had been meant to take brain scans, so he could simulate their mental chemistry via the DUAL Core. Something about the way their minds worked mattered to the enemy, and Du was the closest thing they had to a brain surgeon.

So all she had to do was convince her erstwhile hosts that they could get into where the Mounties were, and they'd send Du away, and she could get a read on what he was up to with his terrible machine. Without appearing to be anything but a brainless zombie in the process.

Piece of cake.

On one of the worst days of her life, Lillian had locked down Applied Occultism and let her mentor die to avoid destroying the rest of the Site. She still had clearance to control the doors, and AO was stacked on top of AAF-D. All she had to do was get a secure terminal, make the uplink without anyone noticing, and open up a path they couldn't fail to see. She could then check out the Core, and shut down the doors again before Du made it halfway through the dorms.

And if you mess up?

Then frankly, oh fucking well. They were only cops.

There were over one thousand duty tablets at Site-43, so it was no trouble at all finding one. Finding one she could hack was pretty simple too; she only had to make sure it wasn't Eileen's or Allan's. Finding one that wouldn't be missed, wouldn't be on the network already, and wasn't presently being monitored… well. There was only one of those, and she saw it every day.

Daniil Sokolsky had the internet hygiene of a hypochondriac. He had schemes within schemes within schemes, and didn't want them on anybody's record. His tablet was firewalled harder than any other, and even now she doubted it was phoning home to Ops Control. It was just a matter of separating him from it for maybe five minutes, tops.

She'd already written the program she needed in her brain.

She'd never had the nerve to sock away a spare tablet for emergency use, since I&T treated that sort of thing with the compassionate understanding typically reserved for unlicensed concealed firearms with the serial numbers filed off. But she did have the next best thing, courtesy of her little blackmail date with Bremmel over his big dumb gun, and when she checked the loose floor panel in the blind corner near her office, she was relieved to find it still there. Her portable fire drill.

She carried it into TheoTelo, lodged between her teeth. She was a very precise biter, and it was waterproof — Bremmel built things to last — and she didn't want to be caught on camera thumbing a device before the mayhem started. When Sokolsky strutted in, she favoured him with her best bovine stare.

"Afternoon," he said cheerfully. "Big day coming soon."

"Soon," she said, careful not to dislodge the device or open her mouth too wide. She didn't want him checking her teeth like the cattle she was pretending to be.

"I'd say we've got maybe four weeks." He picked up his tablet and headed to the wall. Since the first day she'd woken up in uniform he'd added another half dozen devices, and tinkered 'til they were all in tune. "Shall we say Halloween?"

She said "Halloween," but she shouldn't have tried. It was too complex a series of phonemes, and came out a little mushy.

He frowned. "Feeling alright? Not getting worse on me, are you? Lillian?"

"Lillian," she said, and when she closed her mouth she bit down hard.

There was a faint beep from the camera which she only heard because she knew to listen for it. Sokolsky didn't hear because instead he heard a sudden hiss of static from his tablet, and saw… well, he didn't really see it. Memeticists were trained to recognize memetic kill agents in their peripheral vision, and Sokolsky was no slouch with security. He dropped the tablet — it hit the floor almost silently due to the shock-proof casing — and when the overhead speaker began playing a jaunty German drinking song, he bolted.

She made sure he saw her collapse. She was both grateful and a little miffed that he made no effort to save her, but she was not at all surprised.

When she was sure he was gone, she hunched over the tablet and made her interventions. He'd never know the difference. It took her less than a minute, since she could utilize shorthand she'd built into 43net behind Eileen's back during her mostly unfruitful stint in I&T. The network's primary architect and their first supervisor, Rudolph Marroquin, had been an unscrupulous Maxwellist mole and had incorporated a number of backdoors that he thought in his arrogance nobody else would ever be clever enough to spot and exploit. Not all of them had been closed in the interim, since like any modern operating system the newest version was little more than an iterative gloss on the older ones. A talented infotech could walk the lines of code as easily as one of their J&M counterparts might take a shortcut through the second skin.

The best part was, when Sokolsky backtraced the kill agent — which was conceptually flawed, the imperfect fractals only capable of inducing a migraine headache at worst — he'd find the digital signature of Eileen herself. That ought to raise her profile as Mukami's digital nemesis, and direct attention away from Lillian's activities.

So far, the people-pushing had gone perfectly to plan. She wondered if Imrich Sýkora would be interested in sharing notes when all this was over.

She hadn't just used Sokolsky's tablet to unlock the doors at Applied Occultism; she'd also located and unlocked the duty tablet belonging to Michael Nass, which was still sitting in his office in TheoTelo. Off the grid, all references deleted, but still with a working 43NET connection she could activate as soon as she'd set up proper spoofing. She waited for the timer on the audio to run down. She'd chosen one she had a perfect natural immunity to, what memeticists called their 'whip hand': something playing on your natural brain chemistry in such a way that only you would be able to process it properly. Apparently there was something in her core makeup which vibed with mind-melting German beer polka. When the sound stopped, she counted to sixty. When she would have hit sixty-three, Sokolsky walked cautiously back into the room. Always just that little extra bit unpredictable, aren't you? He reached under her armpits and hauled her to her feet, which was something of an awkward process given she was several inches taller than him, and she decided not to make his life more difficult by falling down again. It would have been funny, though. He bent to pick up his tablet, which was just the way he'd left it, and walked out without a word. If he was suspicious, he didn't show it.

In general, not just this time.

She headed into Nass' office to tap out a few more lines of code, which took less than half the time she'd given herself before the camera came back online. She made absolutely certain it got a good look at her, then waited an agonizing hour before beginning her amble towards Quantum Supermechanics. By now she could stumblebum around on autopilot, having in effect set up a random walks routine inside her brain. She didn't even glance at the glowing parade which rushed past her as she ambled down the main access corridor; she could see the little man in his little grey labcoat out of the corner of her eye, and that was all she needed. It was pain, sheer pain, not being able to beeline for her target, but this was the worst and most likely time to make a sloppy mistake. When it was all coming together. When she was at her cockiest.

She'd been right about the nobodies, they required somebody's full focus to manifest. The DUAL Core was unguarded, the door simply locked. She'd had a running count in her head since leaving T&T, and she'd given herself such a generous window that it was a distressingly long wait until she heard the ping of the cameras going off, and could set to work on the door locks. For anyone else, it would have been an impossible task, but she'd helped write the subroutines covering this equipment when she'd been a lowly code monkey. It was child's play, even on an access point as theoretically secure as this one.

The DUAL Core monitoring room wasn't anything special, not even meriting a paragraph description in Harry's long-winded architectural masturbation manuscript. It wasn't anywhere near the Core itself, for safety reasons, and all it contained was a long table with six computer monitors attached to three sleek, black thinking machines. These were linked up with a bank of dedicated servers boasting zettabytes of volatile storage, tied into the enormous device itself. Lillian wasn't overfamiliar with the exact code used to execute its functions, but she could figure it out quickly enough. Du could probably think circles around her on the terms of his own field of study, but neither him nor anybody working for him could code better than she could. This thing did what it did with quantity, not quality. She scanned the most recent inputs and outputs, the most commonly-run subroutines, the raws, and she fired off everything that would fit into Nass' distant tablet. She could probably have captured enough snapshots of the code with her eidetic memory to reconstruct it later, but that would be a truly painful exercise.

The few glances she did steal at the data as it flashed across the screen told her something wondrous and terrible was going on in this room.

So far as she could tell, Du was doing two things. He was simulating a combination of seven brains into one gestalt identity, which was strange, and he was trying to find the simplest possible route to storing and printing the parameters distinguishing this version of reality from the universal average, which was abominable.

In other words, he was preparing to overwrite everything, everywhere, with the horrible here and now.

She tapped out a complex set of instructions to lurk in the background, then left the room and locked it again. What he was trying to do would take years, even with his fantastic equipment, but if he ever tried to go off half-cocked with what he'd already gotten done, he'd be in for a nasty surprise.

And if that didn't work, well…

I'll never know, so again, who cares?

29 September

Forsythe snapped her fingers. "Come here, Karen."

"Haha."

"She's certainly a lot friendlier this way," Alis remarked as Harry maneuvered the former administrator over to Forsythe's desk. She was wearing a hospital gown, her hair clean and tied back.

"Come on, girl. Chew me out for wearing a jacket I'm not entitled to." Forsythe produced a tongue depressor from a jar. "She used to go feral over uniform code violations. Open wide."

"Ahh." Karen displayed a full mouth of bright white teeth.

"She's way more compliant than the others," Alis noted.

"She is. That's another oddity."

"I mean," Harry shrugged, "You did use a compulsion agent on her." He pointed at the discarded plastic slab on the desk, which he couldn't look at too closely without his eyes crossing courtesy of his Clearance Level 3 conditioning.

"But it didn't make the rest so tractable." Forsythe poked around in Karen's mouth for a while to no clear end, then nodded, removed, and binned the little piece of wood. "Hmm hmm. Let's try something a little riskier. Alis?

"Ahoy."

"Do you have any really mild, weak cognitohazards?"

"I almost feel insulted."

"But?" Forsythe gave her a look suggesting near-total lack of patience for friendly banter.

"But I do, yeah. For testing purposes only."

"Sure," said Harry. She shot him an irritated glance,

Forsythe didn't seem to notice. "Got any on you?"

Alis pulled a shiny piece of cardstock out of her jumper. "I've got this one."

"What does it do?"

"Makes you think you have gas."

"What possible use could that have?" Harry asked.

"Part of the standard suite for CRV." Alis handed it over to Forsythe for examination. "Enough to be measured, not enough to make you hurt."

Forsythe turned it over in her hand, then held it up to Karen's eye level.

"BRAP," Karen said immediately. "BRAP."

"What the hell," Alis muttered.

"BRAP," Karen continued. "Blargh. Ugh."

"What is Dr. Elstrom's CRV, Alis?" Forsythe set the card down. Karen's cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk's, but she didn't BRAP again.

"Top percentile." Alis was looking at her the way Harry would look at a document with the wrong date on it. "Virtually unpossessable."

"That was my experience," Harry muttered.

Forsythe shook her head. "That doesn't make any sense." She leaned on the desktop. "In fact, none of this makes any sense. Wirth never should have been able to get inside her head in the first place. What the hell happened? Let's take a look at that security footage."

Eileen had provided a few minutes of tape scrounged from the Habitation and Sustenance feeds showing Karen's initial possession. One moment she was standing alert in her security outfit — what the fuck was she doing in that? — and looking at her escorts for protection, the next she was struggling wildly against them, the next… she was standing stock still. Her head canted fifteen degrees to the left, and she was calm.

"Now that is very strange." Forsythe replayed the tape. "Are you seeing this?"

She was asking Alis, and Alis responded. "It looks like Wirth just kind of… bounced off her. Like the water was too cold."

"Or the tank wasn't big enough," said Harry. He didn't mean it, he just wanted to contribute. He, too, wished the prickly secretary would berate him for his insolence.

"Or she hasn't got water on the brain at all." Forsythe stretched, and stood up again. "Dr. Naylor, I'm going to ask you to assist me in a full cognition workup for Dr. Elstrom, including several things we don't typically test for."

"To what end?"

"The end of emptiness, hopefully. I think Harry's right. There's something very wrong with this woman's head, and if we find out what it is, it just might help her fellow sufferers clear theirs."

4 October

It had taken Ibanez almost two weeks to properly get through to Roger. The callow young man with the haunted eyes was about as responsive to friendly overtures and promises of aid as she would have been at his age — she was only a few years older than him, by visual estimates, but she was confident she'd seen more shit in the interim than he had. Falkirk wanted her to either submit him for memetic deprogramming, which Alis said she was fully capable of administering, or give him the treatment she'd secretly been considering for Alis a few weeks prior. She'd managed to wheedle out an agreement with the old man: put a tracker on the kid, let him scrounge outside the safe zone for a few hours every day, and let her follow him around with the telekill pill. Forsythe was back at AAF-D right now, so she wasn't around to pooh-pooh the plan on a medical basis, and the supply situation was tight enough that Falkirk reluctantly agreed. "He might as well help put back some of what he stole," the Director had rationalized it. "Once we're at zero sum, though, he's either turned coat or he's dead."

He'd turned coat. On their last outing he had confided in Ibanez that he came from a fifth population centre within the Site's floorplan, one which had somehow flown beneath the collective radars of Falkirk, Couch, Nascimbeni, and Mukami for almost a full calendar year. Better yet, it was where she'd thought it might be: in the ruins of H&P, which so enflamed Ambrogi's animal instincts.

Hospital food.

Whoever was heading up the secret community was apparently capable of administering something that made their people immune to kill agents. That alone was a prize to make this outing more than worth the risk.

She'd asked Roger to take them there, and she'd mostly gotten her way. The only thing she wasn't thrilled about was that 'them' once again included Harold Blank.

"I still think we should have left you back at base," she said. She'd said something similar three or four times already.

"I still don't know why you didn't." Harry sprang onto the next pile of rubble they passed in the shattered hall, clearly enjoying the chance to really stretch his legs for the first time since early September. "Never known you to give in to demands so quickly."

"It wasn't a demand," she growled. "The kid says you need to come, you need to come."

"I'm still not a kid." Roger was leading them along the outside edge of H&S, past the library, towards A&R. From Harry's report, it looked like the damage that had been present a month ago was steadily worsening. The Site needed some serious maintenance attention, and soon. Not for the first time, she wondered where Nascimbeni was. "And I don't know how to explain it better, so you'll understand. I'm not supposed to talk to you, but if I do talk to you, I'm supposed to talk to him." He gestured at Harry. "So that's why he needs to tag along. The boss will want to see him."

"Does the boss not know where I've been all this time?" Harry asked.

Roger shrugged. "You can ask him. I get the feeling he would've been happier not talking to any of you ever again, after what happened."

"What happened?"

Roger gave him an incredulous look. "With the subway."

"Oh." He nodded. "Sure."

She was still trying to get to the bottom of that particular rabbit hole, but it would keep. The mystery of the hidden subterranean civilization had a much more compelling draw.

Twenty minutes later they were standing at the junction where the path from the ISSS station fed the dorms and the hospital wards. "Okay," said Roger. "You see that wall right there?

She glanced at it. "I mean… yeah."

"Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't see it." Roger looked at the floor. "Don't look at that wall. The entire way down this next corridor, do not look at it."

"You're shitting me."

He twitched impatiently. "If you don't do everything I say, and I see you've stopped following me, I'm going to keep on walking. Follow my instructions and we'll make it there okay. Ignore any of them, and you'll wander off with a migraine."

"I get enough migraines honestly," said Harry. "I say we do what he says."

"Thank you."

"Who cares what you say?" she snapped. "This mission hasn't got a voting mechanism." She tapped Roger on the shoulder, and he looked up at her — up from the floor, that is. "Don't fuck with us, alright? We're the good guys. We're going to make things right with your people."

He didn't look impressed. Then again, she hadn't seen him look impressed yet. "They're not really my people. They're people who helped me not die. I believe you people can help me not die more efficiently, and I believe you can do it even more efficiently if you've got them on your side."

"The more you talk, the more relatable I find you."

They didn't look at the wall.

Ibanez had read a report from the Mounties who patrolled this sector of the Site. They had described the vast, gaping chasm where once H&P had been. She'd seen fragments of the recording of the event which had produced said chasm, and while none of them really focused on the body of the hospital, the implications seemed clear. It had been obliterated in a tremendous explosion, along with a sizable subsection of the evacuated Grand Bend survivors. The report had also mentioned an overpowering sense of nausea experienced by anyone who got too close, suggesting radiation or some anomalous analogue. Ibanez didn't notice anything like that now, as she stared at the floor and the one wall she was allowed to see.

After a moment, they were far past where the hole should have started. The corridor continued on. Shenanigans.

A stroke of brilliance occurred to her. "Sandy?" she said.

Holt's voice came from behind her. "Yeah boss?"

"I'm going to need a rearguard, and I want to multitask. Can you quickly glance up at the verboten wall, then down again?"

"Roger."

Roger glanced back, grimacing as he realized he wasn't being called. Wow, she thought. You told me your real name, after I stomped your balls? I'm flattered. Her musings were cut short by an abortive "ack" sound, and then the sound of someone sitting down suddenly. Ibanez turned, careful not to look at the offending architecture, to find Holt slumped against the safe wall. Her eyes were closed.

"You alright?"

Holt nodded weakly. "Like a gutpunch. Definitely can't go on right now."

"That's fine. I just wanted to make sure how it worked. Lew, stay with her. Obasi and Lei will stick with us." Ayodele and O nodded in response, as did Bosch who knelt beside Holt with his back to the memetic drywall.

Harry shared a look with her, and she pointedly ignored it. Yes, I am leaving the ones who trust me least behind while we do this. I'm sick of being spied on.

A few more metres of tunnel that shouldn't have existed, and they were at the wide double doors to the H&P lobby. There was another set beyond; they took contagion seriously at all Foundation facilities, but especially the underground ones where all the air was pumped in from elsewhere. Roger looked at them, to show that they could look again, and nodded. "This is it."

"I haven't been here in ages," Ibanez said.

Roger smiled nastily. "You couldn't have made it without me."

"Sure, pat yourself on the back." She spread her hands. "What do we do now?"

He tapped a button on the door lock. Zero. Calling operator. "We say a code phrase."

"What's the code phrase?" She was conscious that the green light over the keypad meant a channel was presently open.

"A code phrase. A poem."

"What poem?"

"Any poem by Yeats that doesn't rhyme."

"What?"

The smile turned a degree more genuine. "You heard me."

Harry cleared his throat. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre—"

"Oh god," she interrupted, "not that one, it goes forever."

He gave her a surprised look.

"What, I don't get to know poetry?" She called up a long-distant memory, pleasant in a way that stung, and recited in measured cadence:

That crazed girl improvising her music.

Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself

Climbing, falling She knew not where,

Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,

Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare

A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing

Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred

She stood in desperate music wound,

Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph

Where the bales and the baskets lay

No common intelligible sound

But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

Harry looked a little awed. "You had that memorized?"

"Yeah." She pushed past him. "Let's go."

They walked through the doors. When they were all through, the doors closed. She turned around, and walked up to them again.

They didn't open.

Neither did the next set.

"Okay, now what?" The sense of having moved into a tactically inadvisable situation struck her. "This is an airlock?"

"More or less." Roger leaned on the wall next to a decontamination mister. "Now do one that does rhyme."

She blew out her cheeks. "Seriously?"

"Yeats again?" Harry asked.

"Yeah."

He cleared his throat a second time, and she let him have his go.

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above:

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love:

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

She vaguely recalled that one, "A Something Airman Foresees His Death." She took a stab in the dark. "Didn't know you were Scottish."

"I am," he said, "but the poem's about an Irishman."

"Po-tay-to, po-tah-to." She glanced over the other members of their little party. "We good?"

"You were better than good, Chief Ibanez," said a voice from the overhead speakers. "Dr. Blank recites like he's embarrassed to do so, but the choice of subject was apropos."

The second set of doors slid open. The foyer was filled with cardboard boxes and metal shelving units, but otherwise little changed from the last time she'd seen it. Standing in the centre was an old man with a long, bushy beard, leaning forward on a can and smiling.

"Oh," said Harry. "Well, of course. Good to see you! Been a while."

"Not as I reckon time." Thilo Zwist, immortal Austrian cryptomancer, tipped his bucket hat in welcome. "But our frames of reference differ — these days more than ever."

Working Wonders

The Breach Goes On: Wrong Tomorrow

Hooking Up