True Art is Cognitohazardous - SCP Foundation

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True Art is Cognitohazardous

2016

9 September

Timeline 5243-D

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

For an instant, Nascimbeni thought he had sleep paralysis.

He'd never had sleep paralysis before, but this seemed to fit the bill. He was on his back, and his lungs were empty of air, and he couldn't move. He felt nauseous. He felt like he was dying. His mind was a blur. He sucked in a breath…

…and he realized he could breathe, and sensation returned to his body. He was hot and sweaty, stuck to the sheet beneath him and…

…the body beside him.

Del sucked in a breath, too, and they both turned to stare at each other.

And groaned.

It felt like someone had taken a wooden tenderizing mallet to all of his muscles at once. The amount of warning signals fired into his brain was overwhelming. He was dehydrated. He was sore. He was exhausted. By the way she shuddered as she rolled and sat up, he could tell Del was going through much the same experience. His skin followed hers for a fraction of a second, and the separation was a sticky snap.

The bedsheets were soaked. It wasn't difficult to figure out what they'd been up to.

But for how long?

Del checked the door as Nascimbeni sat up, groggily. His vision swam. He felt faint. He took long, shuddering breaths to force oxygen into his brain, and he said: "Well."

"Uh huh." Del pressed her eye to the peephole on the door; they were all at four foot level, specifically to enable specifically her to do this. She frowned. She said: "Fuck."

Already have been doing, he almost said, but he wasn't feeling the joke right now. "What?"

"There's a fractal on the wall outside."

Site-wide containment breaches are no joke, and a number of security measures have been installed to give folks at ground zero a fighting chance should one occur. Cognitohazard filters have been installed in the peepholes on every dormitory room; though necessarily thin and weak, these are sufficient to allow personnel with reasonably high Cognitive Resistance Values to escape the worst of any mind-altering effects that might be blowing through the corridors. Personnel with low CRVs are unlikely to be much help in a breach of that nature, anyway.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

"You feeling okay?" he asked her.

She shook her head, and ran her hands along her body. She would never be slim, not with her build, but she was slimmer than usual. Nascimbeni knew from the way his chest felt when he breathed that he was nearly skeletal. "Nothing sucks that didn't suck when I woke up. I think. But that was definitely something memetic. We're going to have to be careful."

He slid to his feet. His knees wobbled fiercely. He tried to maintain his balance. "When we leave to find the others, you mean."

"Yeah."

"Which we definitely should do."

She cocked her head at him. "I'm the Chief of…" She cleared her throat to obscure whatever she'd been about to say. As if he didn't know. "…Pursuit and Suppression." There was a good chance her error would turn out to be correct, in this deadline, anyway. "It's my job to pursue the others and suppress whatever the hell is going on out there." She paused, made as if to press her ear to the door, then stopped herself and shuddered. "I hope it isn't memetic. You've got a good CRV, right?"

He shrugged. It hurt. "Better than average. And I've got the training." Foundation personnel were trained to recognize potential cognitohazards in their peripheral vision, and unfocus their eyes or look away. It was rarely good enough to prevent exposure, but it could sometimes soften the effects.

Del sighed. "I'll lead you. Eyes closed."

He grimaced, but didn't argue. His jumpsuit was balled at the foot of the bed, and he picked it up. "We should search the room first. See if there's any clues."

Del was already pulling on her underwear, which had been discarded on a vanity table. Nascimbeni realized that this wasn't her quarters, or his. They were in a standard dorm room, somewhere in the depths of H&S by the configuration. "Should we, though? We might get exposed to something. Probably better to find Lillian."

That made sense. "This does sound like a Lillian problem," he agreed.

"I hate Lillian problems."

He agreed with that, too.

After he was sure he wouldn't throw up, Harry tried to make sense of the conflicting signals.

On the one hand, the woman in his lap was substantial, silver-haired and blue-eyed behind cat's eye glasses. On the other hand, her skin was dark and warm and she smelled faintly of desert sand beneath fading traces of Melissa Bradbury's shampoo.

"What the fuck," Udo said.

"I," Harry replied. He couldn't imagine what the next word would be.

Udo took her arm back from around his shoulders, and he released his grip on her plump waist. She slid off his lap and onto the couch — the couch, they were in his dormitory — and they both scooted awkwardly away from each other.

She dry-heaved.

"I mean," he said, and he could hear hurt in his own voice he hadn't meant to convey.

"Not that." She waved him off. "That was fine. Uh," and she waved her hands more, as though to usher the additional awkwardness out of the room. "Uh. It's the. Uh. Translocation."

"Yeah." He tasted bile. "That's weird." Normally they, and their deadline counterparts, were drawn to roughly the same space for the transition. From the unsettled feeling in his stomach, it had only gone halfway at best.

She looked up at him, eyes sparkling cerulean. "Weird," she agreed. She picked at the fabric of his shirt. It was smooth. Silk. "Can you see in those?"

She was looking at his glasses, he realized. He also realized that his glasses weren't. The prescription was right, but the frames were all wrong. In fact, there were no frames. He reached up to remove them, and brushed his hand against a much neater, smoother beard than he was used to. He left the glasses alone and reached up further, running his fingers through slicked-back short hair.

He glanced down. He was wearing loafers. He glanced up. Udo was wearing Melissa's favourite orange camisole.

He took a deep breath. "I am guessing," he said, "that I look like Dougall Deering."

Her wince told him all he needed to know.

"Then I am guessing," and he took a deep breath, "that there's some sort of compulsion effect in… effect. Here. Because… yeah."

"Yeah. We wouldn't… yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

They definitely wouldn't.

Definitely wouldn't.

Udo got off the couch. "Mind control, maybe? Wirth?"

"Not Wirth. He's dead." Harry squinted, and frowned. The prescription was correct. He felt…

"You look older," she said. She was squinting, too. "Fitter, though."

"You look… rounder."

She winced again, and reached down to test the shape of her hips. "I haven't ever weighed this much."

"I don't know if I've ever weighed this little. Adjusted for, you know. Inflation. Whatever." He stood up. "So, clearly we were crazy. And now we're not."

"Crazy," she agreed. Her expression was inscrutable.

"We need a cognitohazard screen."

She glanced around the room, and made a little sound of pleasure. Her reagents pouch was sitting on his dining nook table. "I know just the thing." She squinted again, sighed, and took off the glasses. "Glasses and contacts. Ridiculous."

"Ridiculous," he agreed. She looks better without the glasses. More like herself.

He told himself he meant it.

There was almost no disorientation at all. McInnis stood in the empty bolthole — he'd never gotten around to telling Zulfikar that he knew where it was, now — and waited, and when it happened it was so subtle, just a faint popping of the ears and a brief sensation of vertigo, that he might have chalked it up to the palpitations of old age had he not known better.

He blinked.

His assistant was sitting at the dining table, comparing something in a notebook to something on a work tablet. He hadn't noticed the change, because there hadn't been anything to notice.

McInnis took a deep breath. "Zulfikar."

The other man glanced up at him. "Sir?"

"I am going to require, without prefatory questioning on your part, a brief summary of the present situation prevailing within Site-43."

Zulfikar blinked, visibly thought better of questioning the order anyway, and told him. The explanation was admirably succinct.

McInnis nodded. "Very well. That should be well within my range of tolerance." He ran his hands over his clothing. The usual jumper, shirt, and jeans. It would do. "Best estimate on the location of Dr. Lillihammer?"

His assistant's eyes were narrowing. "Hasn't been seen in months. Most likely she's in her office. Nobody goes there, for obvious reasons."

"Very well." McInnis glanced around the room, located his ID badge on the kitchenette counter, and picked it up. "I am going to go and find her."

Zulfikar sat up so abruptly that his chair took a chunk of plaster out of the wall beside him. "Sir?!"

He was already at the door. "Withold your objections, please. I can assure you I've heard them before."

Wettle awoke.

He threw up.

He looked up.

When he woke up again, not that he knew this now or would know it then, months had passed.

Lillian burped in Sokolsky's face.

He didn't react. Maybe she'd done that before. Probably she'd done it before. He did wrinkle his nose, and he narrowed his eyes. "Rations coming back on you?"

They were in her office. She was still sitting in her chair. He was, now, sitting on her lap. The lights were low, and flickering. She bit his nose, and asked him: "Where were we?"

He hooked his thumb through the back of her bra. "Somewhere around here."

She swatted his hand away. "You have things to tell me."

He considered her archly. "I think you mean you have things to tell me."

"If I had meant that, I would have said that." She took his cheeks in her hands, and made firm eye contact. "I need you to tell me what's happening, because I'm not from this timeline." His eyes widened perceptibly. "I'll answer your questions about that if you answer my question first."

He didn't argue. Why would he? What she was asking for was cheaper than free. He had nothing to lose.

He told her.

"…and all topside access is blocked," he concluded. "You and I are the only ones who can fix it, and we're… brainstorming." He smirked, and hooked his hand through her bra again.

This time, she let him open the clasp. "Stuck inside again," she mused. "Four times in a row. I never thought the apocalypse would be so localized."

"Your turn." He drew the straps from her shoulders. "Four alternate timelines?"

"The breach of '02. It recurs every year, and…"

He busied himself while she explained. When she was done, he looked up again and nodded. "Makes sense. What do you want to do next?"

She gripped the scruff of his neck, and raised his face to face hers again. "Let's brainstorm."

She slipped the bra off completely.

It was a tactical nightmare.

Ibanez kept her eyes unfocused as they moved through the halls. Every wall was a blaze of colour or what was sure to be a literally dizzying array of lines. There were murals on the floor and frescoes on the doors. When she noticed soft music in the distance, growing less soft as they went, she tore off her jumpsuit cuffs and stuck them in her ears. Nascimbeni did the same, keeping the improvised plugs in place by pulling his cap down tight. Two of her best senses self-handicapped, leading a noncombatant with his hands on her shoulders. At least she had her weapon, which she had drawn; she only hoped that if she needed to shoot something, it would be something she could focus on.

She nearly pulled the trigger when she turned a corner, cautiously, and a shirtless man covered in blood came bounding in their direction, laughing manically. She didn't recognize him. He didn't seem to notice them, just sped merrily on his way, crying "PRAXIS!" over and over in hoarse tones.

She heard something else, even through the fabric padding. Something low and large. She hopped up onto a bench in an inset niche, and pulled Nascimbeni up beside her just in time to hear the rats-in-the-floorboards scrabble of claws on tile. Three mottled brown shapes blurred by them, intent on the chase. They left a trail of blood behind them.

"I opened my eyes," Nascimbeni murmured into the back of her neck. Even low, his voice trembled.

"Close them again."

When the sounds of pursuit had faded again, they resumed theirs. She hoped, not optimistically, that any further performance art would be similarly free of audience participation.

It took two direct orders to convince Zulfikar not to follow him. McInnis had enough mental conditioning to withstand all but the most potent cognitohazards, more in fact than the O5 Council was happy with; he hadn't shared this with the other Survivors, but his stint as Administrator in the first deadline had apparently conferred permanent benefits beyond the norm for Site-43's Directorship. It was difficult to test such things safely — if a kill agent got through to you, the test ended rather abruptly — but the experts generally agreed that McInnis' mind was now safe as safehouses.

As he left his safehouse behind, however, the assaults came hard and fast. He unfocused his eyes, as they were all trained to do, and that was enough to restrict the immediate effects to a faint twitch in his eye muscles and a vague feeling of unease, but he could nevertheless immediately tell that every surface which could support a cognitohazard was already sporting one. Some of them were murals, and some of the murals were quite good. Some were crude in style, sometimes in content as well. All of them seemed at least passively memetic.

He moved along the outside edge of H&S, noting that the superstructure remained sound and the halls were clear of rubble and corpses. Some of the doors he passed were open, and he chanced a look inside when the angle was sufficient. Most of the dormitories were similarly adorned with art in a wide variety of mediums which universally made him feel light-headed and made the hair on his arms and legs stand on end. Some were occupied: a short, hairy figure pouring mugs of thick black swill for an eager array of swaying security agents, all of them singing off-key; a pair of engineers from Arms and Equipment squabbling over a piece of blue chalk in the middle of a massive schematic sketched on the concrete walls and floors, all the tiles and carpet torn up and piled in the corner; a naked man pulling out his long brown hair at the root, tying it tight to a piece of wooden dowelling, and resuming a hideous demonic caricature on his kitchen table in blood while a hunched red figure cackled with glee (and, as he passed, turned to grin approvingly at McInnis); two more naked men engaged in what he might have mistaken for a less anomalous form of performance art, if not for the fact that the brief glimpse made his temples ache.

Sensual kinetoglyphs. Demonic possession. Anomalous engineering. Ludwig. He glanced into one of the common rooms, and saw a shadowplay burlesque on the wall; pitch black silhouettes with tall hats and long sticks, dancing to the stoned half-applause of a drooling cuddle puddle on the floor.

Even in the worst of the deadlines, the problems had been confined to the Site staff. Not anymore. Not this time.

The subjects in containment had been freed.

Udo felt huge and awkward, and she hated the way Harry kept pretending not to look at her. There wasn't anything intrinsically wrong with her new shape, but it wasn't hers, and every move she made with it felt wrong. Her metabolism had always been far too fast for her to gain weight; she'd had to eat voraciously to avoid the appearance, perhaps even the fact, of starvation.

She wondered if this was how he felt every time he showed up in a deadline physically fit. She couldn't imagine what this version of her could have done to pack on so many pounds, just as she preferred not to think about why she'd done it.

Or how much more attractive Harry looked in the guise of someone other than himself.

"Face back," she said. "I need to wash up again."

He dutifully turned to face the direction from which they'd come, as she pushed the wave of saturated sand up into the ceiling tiles. A little twist, and the sprinklers came on ahead. She brought the sand back down, and the water washed the corrupted pigments out of each grain and into the drains set low in the teal tile floors. Up again to stop the flow, then back into formation as a silicon screen between them and the painted unknown, with a little particle excitation to burn off the excess moisture.

"Okay," she said, and without turning to see if he'd heard her she pushed the red wall forward again. It shimmered in the low fluorescents, occluding the path ahead as it scrubbed the almost certainly dangerous images off of every exposed surface. Her training screamed at her every time she caught even the faintest refracted glimpse.

At least they hadn't met—

I met you walking beside me

It was a lovely, lilting voice. They both stopped dead.

We both hadn't known you were there

A stranger and constant companion

I wouldn't know you anywhere

"That's Karen," said Harry.

Udo glanced back at him, keeping the screen in place. "How do you know?"

"I've heard her sing before."

Tell me I've missed you

Be unconvincing

I'll sing my intentions

And fall short of meaning

And there she was, clad in a white evening gown and dancing aimlessly down the corridor, zig-zagging in a graceful and effortless blend of ballerina steps and pirouettes. She hummed the chorus and verse of her strange song as she passed through the screen — it was useless to block sound — and across their path.

Harry stared at her as she sashayed toward the dead end of his apartments; Udo watched him sigh. "She seems happy."

"On vacation. We could all use one." Udo focused on the sand again. It was tempting, too tempting to form a more familiar self out of the grains, and retreat into it. Instead she began forming a crystalline lattice; with luck, it might catch the recycled wind and hum like a wine glass. A little sonic protection was better than nothing.

I left you here by my side, love

Karen's singing faded into the buzzing of the light fixtures and aircon, but the unease it sank into Udo's chest was not so easily dispelled.

The brainstorming worked a treat.

When she was sure her mind had been properly bulwarked, and after making Sokolsky promise to come find her if the preparations didn't work — not that she really believed he would follow through — Lillian slipped through the Cognitive Decontamination Tunnel and into Memetics and Countermemetics proper. If the others had any sense, they'd be coming to find her, but she wanted to be able to tell them something they didn't already know when they arrived.

She felt like her eyes were going to pop out of her skull. The cocktail of targeted amnestics, mnestics and fortificants made her heart beat faster, her vision so sharp that every hard edge cut to the ocular nerve, her muscles tight and her skin crawl. It could only last a few minutes at most, or rather, she could; the crash would be terrible, the side effects severe. But she had to know.

There was a mural on the wall right outside the tunnel door, and she took a deep breath and looked right at it.

Chelsea Smits was a skeletal, twitching old woman, and she disgusted him. She'd wasted her talents and her time, and there'd never been a creative bone in her bony body. She smiled sadly at him, and he couldn't muster an ounce of pity. "I'm sorry, sir. I knew it was wrong. There's no excuse."

Revolted though he was, he nevertheless smiled warmly up at her. "You've done good work these past years, doctor. These trespasses are severe, I agree, but I don't believe they constitute so serious a breach of trust as you do."

She looked confused, because of course she did. She was an idiot, like all the rest. "Sir… I don't…" She looked like she was going to cry. Like a dried up old sponge gradually soaking up a puddle.

He raised a hand, not unkindly, though the urge to snap his fingers in her face and shake her out of this selfish pity spasm was intense. "We should talk about the path forward. There will need to be consequences; people died at the end of this causative chain. I don't hold you fully to blame, but I will be requiring more stringent adherence to security protocols from this point forward."

It was better than she deserved, and she seemed to know it. She sniffled, and he knew that if the snot started dribbling from her nose that he would have no choice but to vomit on the desk. "I've made up my mind," she rasped. God, but her voice was grating. No music in it at all. "I'm going to retire. It's all my fault."

It was. "It isn't."

She shook her head, limp hair falling out of the lazy bun on the back of her cadaverous head. A faint keening came from the farthest reaches of her throat; if she started to cry, he would call security.

"It isn't," he insisted, and although there was nothing but dramatic emphasis in the repetition, she suddenly stopped her sniffling and squalling, and made eye contact for the first time.

"It isn't?"

"No," he lied. "Not entirely. Not irrecoverably. I need each and every person at this facility doing their best, Dr. Smits, and I have no doubt in my mind that you will always be an important part of that effort."

It didn't make any sense. There was hardly any art in it. He was practically on autopilot. She didn't matter. None of them mattered, but her especially. He hadn't really been trying, because why would he? But impossibly, it was working. She nodded. "Okay." She sat down. "Okay. Let's talk about it. If that's alright?"

He smiled through the queasiness in his stomach. He thought he would rather die. "Talking is always alright, Dr. Smits."

Lillian blinked, and the vision cleared. All that remained was the mural on the wall: Chelsea Smits, looking like something out of a danse macabre, slumped in front of the Director's desk while he beamed, literally beamed at her like a beacon of light and hope.

"What the fuck was that?"

Nascimbeni didn't mean to look. But Del hadn't meant to stop so abruptly — it was only that the corpse had been painted so perfectly that it melded into the mural on the floor — and her head was at the same level as his gut, and some things were simply physiological. He nearly threw up, but he more than nearly opened his eyes.

She was at the topside elevator access, in the main foyer. They were counting on her, and she wouldn't let them down, even though deep in her heart she knew that she should. Because what she was doing, what they were all doing, was terribly wrong. Pointless. Insolent.

The army of Ana Mukami advanced on her. They weren't carrying weapons. With their numbers, they didn't need to. Perhaps they only wanted to talk, to bring her over to the side of the angels. But she was cruel, and she would not listen.

She pulled the trigger.

The shiny mass of metal in her hands kicked, hard, and the first wave of Mukamis vanished in a puff of smoke and particulatized skin and bone and gore. They screamed, they all screamed, and there was blood on the walls, but she didn't care. She would pursue this mad crusade to its illogical end. She fired again.

And again.

And again.

And yet still they advanced, because they had righteousness on their side, and because in actuality they were but one, determined, soul. Ibanez stumbled back, still firing, the gun growing hot in her hands, the blood everywhere now, and they were almost upon her, and still she was firing, covered in the infinite remains of her murdered friend, the friend she was murdering over and over and over again. She fired. She fired. She fell, and she fired. They fell upon her, and she fired.

She was still firing blindly into the ceiling, tunnelling a new elevator shaft beside the old, when she realized the rest had dropped dead.

She didn't cry. Unlike them, she hadn't felt a thing.

Ibanez turned to face him, a question in her eyes. He backed away from her, then stopped, then took a single step forward.

"What's wrong?"

He bit his lip, and shook his head.

"Well, alright then. Saddle back up." And she turned her back on him.

He placed his hands on her shoulders again, and they navigated around the painted corpse. If his grip was a little less sure, she probably didn't notice.

Udo coughed, and cursed. She'd misjudged the airflow. It was in her lungs.

"It's looking for something," Lillian said. "It found Wirth, but I don't think it wanted him. Because seriously, why would it?"

"That's not nice," Udo scolded. Udo was a scold. She wasted her gifts on criticizing others, when she could have been advancing every paradigm of anomalous science known to man. It was pathetic, and she knew it, but she was powerless to do better.

"Thanks for the affirmation." Lillian yawned, as a way of covering up the look of contempt creeping across her face. Not that the other woman had a leg to stand on, of course. The things she wasted her time with… "But seriously. All those reports about Verne swooping in to save the day, I honestly think that's bullshit."

"How is it bullshit?" As usual, Udo was following her lead instead of providing leads of her own. She was a born follower. She hated herself for it. "Abatement disaster happens, big orange tentacle shows up and plugs the leak, sucks up the gas, whatever. Happens every time. What more do you want?"

"After all this time, you can't see it?" Maybe Udo could see it. Maybe she just thought it wasn't a problem worth pursuing. Then again, it kept Lillian from focusing on her other, even less meritorious, projects. "It doesn't snake around looking for the source of the breach. It seeks out people. We've got countless accounts of folks having to dodge the creamsicle as it melts its way through the corridors. On the rare occasion it catches someone, it's a catch-and-release. It discards. Because it hasn't found what it's looking for."

"Which is what?"

Lillian shrugged. She did it to look superior, to seem more intelligent than she was. "If I knew that, I could point the fucker in the right direction."

It was just as well that the aerosolized mural hadn't gone down smoothly. Harry mistook it for the source of the confusion, embarrassment and rage on her face as she coughed up a wad of brown paint.

Even through the cloth, Ibanez could still hear the music. It was muffled, but it was there. She couldn't quite make out the words, but she knew the general gist: it was something sappy and sentimental, probably a country song, probably the story of how someone's wife ran off with their dog in the family truck, or whatever the hell rednecks liked to… cry… about…

"But we aren't done," Nascimbeni protested. Not that it mattered; nothing he did mattered. He was the glorified middle manager of a bunch of glorified grease monkeys. But all he had was his tiny amount of power over his tiny little kingdom, and he'd be damned if he let go the opportunity to exercise that tonight. If he did, what was left? A cold bed, and an empty head.

"I told you how much time I had left," Zaman sighed. He often sighed when talking to Nascimbeni. Most people did, and with good reason. "It's a family dinner tonight. I'm not going to miss it."

Nascimbeni gestured at the sorry remains of their meeting. "Personnel review happens at the same time every year." It was almost a whine, but not quite. He couldn't even fully commit to a petulant tone. The less said about his singing voice, the better.

"Well, it can happen a day late this year. I'm the Chief. I get to make those rules." Zaman pulled on his jacket. He'd already moved on in his mind. Nascimbeni envied him the power.

"The rules should be in service of the job," Nascimbeni snapped. The job was all there was. All there was to him. All there ever had been, and ever would be.

"The job is in service to the people," the other man reminded him. He was already at the door; he was going to leave Nascimbeni in the office, alone. "I like to actually see those people from time to time. For perspective. You know?"

If Nascimbeni felt her shoulders tighten under his knuckles, he gave no audible sign. Then again, that damnable music was still keening away in the distance, even after she shook off the unwanted daydream and wiped her eyes of unexpected tears.

It was Harry who had the brilliant idea to cut through the pool room, having gone that way during his race through the Site back in 2003. He knew who he'd been racing with, thanks to the debriefing logs, but he kept that information to himself. The paint on the route Udo wanted to take was so thick that she had to wash her sand out every few metres, so she was amenable to the detour.

They stopped dead in the double doors, however, when they saw what lay beyond.

The pool was filled with undulating serpentine bodies, sleek black with copper barbs and shining emerald eyes. The cats glanced lazily in their direction; in the water, one of them purred, and a stream of bubbles rose into the air.

Harry and Udo backed away as one.

"Step by step it is," Udo breathed, and she closed the door again.

She did her best, as she always did, but trace outlines remained as they pushed forward now. He didn't blame her, but it was unfortunate that she couldn't quite erase the foundations of each… memory…

Lillian waved the other woman off. It would only annoy her, but maybe that was what she wanted. She was a peevish, uncooperative, selfish woman at heart, and causes bigger than herself were only cause for aggravation. "I don't have the resources. I don't have the time. The giftschreiber are fucking up everything, Marion. Globally. My people are working double shifts." Most of it was true, for what it was worth.

"At least you have people," Wheeler sighed. When Lillian glanced at her, she saw a shrinking woman of middle age with deep lines on her forehead, bags under her eyes, the pale skin of a chronic insider, and absolutely zero imagination. One grey blot of billions on a pale blue dot. "I can't seem to hold on to anyone these days."

Lillian arched a brow. "Hold on to, as in keep them employed, or hold on to, as in remember they exist?"

"Either or. We're underfunded, understaffed, and behind the curve. You've got to be able to spare something."

Lillian shook her head. Wheeler's problems were practically invisible to her. Not like the giftschreiber. That was something tangible, something real. Something wonderful, something bound for glory, and she hated it because she knew that one day it would defeat her, because it was the masterpiece of all movements. She would not go gently. She would not go gladly. She would fight the new paradigm tooth and nail before, inevitably, it erased her just as Wheeler's people were being erased. She was too stubborn to stop now. And so, she waved again. "I wish I could help. Really I do. But these fuckers are going to end the goddamn world if I let my guard down."

Wheeler picked up her handbag, and stood. "If you don't help me, they might not get the chance."

But Lillian wasn't listening anymore.

To the extent that she ever had been.

Harry frowned. That didn't seem right. Not the memory transference, which was of course a new and unpleasant addition to the nonsense they'd dealt with so far in this strange new world, but the contents of that specific memory. He could still see the sketch of Lillian on the wall, brushing off the sketch of Marion which stood defiantly at her desk, demanding aid that she would not receive.

No, that didn't seem right at all.

He'd have to remember to ask Lillian about it, if they weren't eaten first.

"Replication studies are my entire job, Harry!" Wettle screeched. He knew he shouldn't. He knew that what he did was an unjustifiable duplication of effort, requiring expenditures the Foundation couldn't spare, and unimaginative in the extreme to boot. But he'd said it anyway, because he was a stupid, talentless boob.

"If they're your entire job, Willie," Blank shouted, "why are you so fucking bad at them?" He waved the report in Wettle's face. "Because seriously, what is this shit? 'Definitely something spooky going on here'?! Write up your conclusions properly and re-submit, you hack."

That sounded like work. Blank and Wettle weren't really friends, and they weren't really colleagues. He had no intention of rising up on behalf of a fellow waste of skin, and he made up his mind to say so. His mind, of course, was like a bed in a crackhouse: it never stayed made up long. "It is spooky! We dressed Deering up like his brother…"

"Which Deering?! Jesus fuck, Willie, precision matters in science!"

"The other one! Whatsisname! Dougall. We dressed Dougall up like Phil, and the mirror monster knew which one was which. How is that not spooky?!"

"How is spookiness data?!"

"You're not my god damn boss, Harry!" Wettle had reached his limit. It was time to do what he did best, besides fucking up: moaning like a big, swollen baby. "My boss is your boss, and your boss told me to re-do your work. You know why? You want to know why?"

Blank did not want to know why. The need not to know was written across his fat, hairy face, an only slightly less shapeless mirror to Wettle's own.

Wettle told him anyway. No, not anyway. Because. "Because nothing you do with this skip is objective. Because it hurt your girlfriend, and you—"

Blank didn't slap him. He was too much of a coward to follow through, as he had been all his life. But he did pull back his hand, and that hurt almost as bad.

"That's curious." McInnis pondered the mural: Harry's look of rage, Wettle's dull fear. The malformed contents of the message. Its contradictions. "Very curious indeed."

"What is?"

McInnis reached the tunnel first, and Lillian walked him to the door. They made idle small talk for half an hour; by common agreement, the Survivors would not discuss the scenario until they either fully reconvened or knew that for some reason, they could not. Sokolsky stayed in the office, gathering up their notes for the presentation.

Del and Nascimbeni arrived next, both looking troubled. Lillian sent them inside to freshen up; there was a washroom with running water in the attached laboratory, what Lillian called her 'lavoratory'. They could very evidently use a splash of cold water on their ashen faces.

Harry and Udo looked like they'd both seen more than one ghost. They separated wordlessly at the door, Udo heading in while Harry remained without. He had that look he got when he had something to tell Lillian, but wasn't sure if he should. That was fine. He always decided in her favour.

Wettle never arrived.

"So, memetic contagion." McInnis nodded. "That was Zulfikar's impression as well."

"He's unaffected?" Harry asked.

"He was when I left. How many more personnel can we count on?"

"Roughly?" Sokolsky grunted. "I would say zero. Your bolthole and Lillian's office are probably the only safe spaces in the entire facility. Everyone else is turned."

"Turned to what?" Udo asked.

"The world's shittiest artist colony, and I don't say that lightly." Del kept looking at Nascimbeni, who kept looking back at her. They both looked confused. "We saw plenty of people still painting, out there. The walls. The floors. Each other. The skips."

"Skips?" Harry frowned. "We saw Mishepeshu in the pool—"

"What," Nascimbeni interrupted.

"—but we didn't see any others. Just the art, and some of the artists." He wrinkled his nose. "Saw Karen doing a song and dance. And I think that was Astrauskas outlining people against the wall, but we didn't get a closer look."

"I didn't want a closer look," Udo murmured.

"I saw a great many SCP objects," McInnis confirmed. "I believe our lost personnel have been releasing the subjects in containment."

"Good god," Harry breathed. "All of them?"

"We saw the fucking werewolves," Del snapped. "I'd say all of them."

Nascimbeni blinked. "We did? When was that?"

"Are you trying to take Wettle's place?"

"I had my god damn eyes closed! You're telling me the werewolves—"

"Where is Dr. Wettle?" McInnis interjected, without it feeling like he was really interrupting anything. He had that gift. "Did he cross paths with any of you?"

Shaken heads all around.

"I mean," Sokolsky said.

Lillian nodded.

McInnis raised an eyebrow.

"He definitely looked at the first fractal he saw, right?" Sokolsky glanced between each of them. "Right? That's definitely what happened."

Harry sighed. "Definitely."

Nods all around.

"Well, we'll need to retrieve him." McInnis folded his arms in front of his chest, waiting for Sokolsky to protest. Curiously, he did not. "Now, I understand that Drs. Lillihammer and Sokolsky have a tentative plan for restoring order to the Site. Is that correct?"

"Other than the tentative part," Lillian grinned. "I don't do anything tentatively. Let's take this one step at a time. We need to be able to move around out there without squinting, or scrubbing, or plugging our ears. I don't have a solution for that last one, yet, but the rest? SCRAMBLE goggles."

Nascimbeni frowned. "SCRAMBLE? I thought those didn't work."

"I don't even know what that is," Udo said.

"In brief," Sokolsky explained, "SCRAMBLE goggles intercept and occlude cognitohazards before the brain can fully process them. And they do work. They just don't work on magic bullshit, which is what they were designed for."

"Designed by who?" Harry prompted.

"Two dead guys I used to know. But that's not really relevant, because we don't have their version here anyway."

"What version do we have?" Nascimbeni asked.

"No version," Lillian grinned. "We're going to have to invent them again ourselves."

Del groaned. "You're going to suggest we go scrounging for parts, in this hellhole?"

"I'm going to suggest we get a manifest of all the shit lying around the Site, and make targeted sorties. That's much fancier-sounding than scrounging, so take heart."

"Does such a manifest exist?" McInnis asked. "I doubt this deadline is quite as organized as the previous one was by its end, given the difference in circumstances."

"The Chairs and Chiefs kept independent inventories on their machines," Lillian said.

Del's groan was more of a grumble now. "So all we have to do is sneak into the offices of probably the worst offenders in the ongoing art attack. Great."

"Nah." Lillian stood. "Just one. It's a technical problem, right? So, we take it to I&T."

There was a helpful mural just around the corner from the tunnel entrance. Lillian presented it to the group with a flourish. "Ignore the weird editorializing," she told them. "I think I might know what's causing that."

The thing about working for a covert world government is that you're already primed for subterfuge.

It had taken months to break down her natural antipathy to standing up for what's right — if she'd been really that moral, she would never have come to work for the Foundation in the first place — but eventually Marroquin had managed it. In his defence, he'd probably been trying. He wanted all of his technicians compromised, like he was, the better to badger and blackmail them into extending his little fiefdom within Site-43.

But he hadn't counted on Eileen's stubborn streak.

Hacking a hacker meant digging in by degrees. She couldn't just go at him, brute force his office door and see all the secrets laid out in front of her. She'd need to be subtle. He was a man prone to rabbitting, and worse, this rabbit had teeth. He could get her fired, or even terminated probably, if she acted in too hasty earnest. So the first thing she did was backdoor the Site's travel tracking software, and when she was absolutely certain Marroquin was at a layover halfway around the world and halfway to the security conference he was attending, she made her first move. There had been problems with the Trans-IAAAC Cable of late, and she took advantage of that to cut off his access to 43NET. He probably wouldn't notice; she knew he did most of his work disconnected, probably because it wasn't the stuff he was meant to be working on. But she disconnected him anyway, because if anything she touched sent out an alert, she'd want to be able to squelch it.

She was a disaster with painting, with music, with words that could stir the soul of a living being. But in the cold and sterile language of the machines, she was a goddess. For what little that was worth.

Her roundabout path to the office permissions took an hour or so to navigate. She routed the commands down all manner of innocuous angles, at one point even involving the fire control systems. She'd spent her months of inaction learning how the Site's wide variety of electronic architectures interacted, both intentionally and potentially. By the time it was done, she was confident that even her paranoiac supervisor would be incapable of tracing the signal back to its source.

Not that she intended to let him discover the signal. She wasn't going down for this. She was far, far too selfish to sacrifice for a cause.

Marroquin's office was immaculate. She didn't really expect to find anything she could use against him in here. She did hope there would be further breadcrumbs to the real stash, perhaps a password that would open up a new network pathway, or…

Eileen loved puzzles, so she was sorry to find the solution to this one so quickly. She hadn't even been consciously reading the room for things out of place, but she saw one straight off anyway, in her peripheral vision. She'd seen it before, but it simply hadn't registered as important until now.

They'd long since gotten rid of I&T's crop of Macintosh LC III computers, but Marroquin's had stayed on his massive desk, shoved over in the corner and turned toward the wall. She'd thought perhaps it was sentimentality; the chief tech had occasionally spoken fondly of the Mac architecture, how easy he found it to program for. But in the absence of the man, she realized this had been an obvious blind. Marroquin didn't get sentimental. Anything that didn't have a use for him was so much chaff. He could have been an excellent Hollywood executive.

She booted up the machine.

There weren't very many files in the structure. The squat pizza box had only eighty megs of disk space standard, and Marroquin had not elected to upgrade his machine, or employ any portable drives (so far as she knew). There were simply very few places he could hide anything, and in any case, he hadn't really tried.

She stared at the unfamiliar icon. "Total Area Network." What the hell did that mean?

She clicked on it.

It took her four hours to figure out the password, because of course it was password-locked. When she did, she was initially unimpressed. Network access. Remote folders. There was a text file nestled up against the TAN icon, and inside she found instructions for drilling down to specific locations. She typed through a few of the chains, frowning as she did. Device ID numbers made sense, but some of these other data points sounded more… geographical. That wasn't how network access normally worked.

She was even more disappointed when she saw the contents of each filespace. Nothing but bog standard I&T docs. Maintenance schedules. Technical specs. Emails. Emails…

She froze.

One of the emails was hers, a request for information from Jack Turlough. The other tech hadn't responded, because she'd thought better of sending the message. Turlough was a prick.

Unsent messages were stored locally.

She was looking at the file structure of her own Mac 475.

Which she'd turned off before coming here.

The Total Area Network gave Marroquin access to every computer in his department, whether they were active or not.

Now that, that was art.

"Hmm," said McInnis.

"I'm not quite seeing it," said Harry.

"Yeah," Udo agreed. "That's interesting and all, but somehow getting access to every ancient Mac in the Site seems kinda limited, as far as information collection goes. Any manifests on those machines have got to be a dozen years or more out of date."

But Lillian was already walking back into the tunnel. "You get the gist, little angels. That's all you need right now. Leave the details to us devils."

Sokolsky and Lillihammer had spent most of their self-imposed incarceration using standard remote access to get as clear a picture of the Site as possible, as opposed to going out there and actually doing anything directly. They had partial maps of each Section, and rough sketches of the hazards they'd been able to espy through the cognito-hardened cameras at each main corridor junction. Every path to I&T was perilous in a different way, and it was going to be impossible to simply waltz in.

But they were in the heart of one of the world's most advanced R&D facilities. Every lab and office was potentially stocked with equipment that could allow them to neutralize the threats in their way.

And, so, they scrounged.

It was like cleaning a large, complicated room. They started at a corner — Lillian's office — and gradually worked their way outward in concentric circles. The first few days were the worst. Harry lost his eyesight for an hour. Udo's skin broke out in an orange rash. Del was forced to spend an afternoon learning a dance supposedly inspired, somehow, by Spells of Coming Forth By Day. (Her instinct was simply to flatten the little cluster of eager participants, but unfortunately their number included all six foot four inches of Howard Yancy, and even if she managed to knock him down, the odds were good he'd simply crush her as he fell.) Nascimbeni was, very briefly, chased by a bear. (He felt certain this honour would have fallen to Wettle, had the hapless chemist been around. Probably he was encountering something worse, wherever he was.)

By the end of a week, they'd had better luck. Udo was able to secure a supply of diatemaceous earth, which she found much more efficient as a medium for her scrubbing screens, particularly after Nascimbeni added paraindustrial solvents to the mix. Lillian found a half-complete projection system she'd been working on with Bremmel — not in baseline, but that was fine, since she had her deadline memories anyway — and when she and Sokolsky completed it, they found it could totally overwrite the visual profile of any rectangular space it was set in. This allowed them to bypass one particularly hinky hall of murals, although they'd need to build a second unit if they wanted to be able to leapfrog. (McInnis suggested this might not be such a great idea anyway, given that it increased their chances of being trapped in an island surrounded by a sea of cognitohazards. Still, it was something to do.

Harry busied himself finding food and water, since the stores in the office had only been meant to support two researchers. McInnis directed, as usual, and each of the others marvelled at least once that they didn't find this irritating. Sometimes, apparently, management wasn't a solely parasitic arrangement.

Sokolsky stayed in the office. He wouldn't tell anyone what he was working on, not even the Director.

Nobody pressed him. They were too busy pressing in every other direction.

20 September

They weren't not looking for Wettle, but he was nowhere on anyone's list of priorities. That wasn't why it was a shock when Udo accidentally found him.

He was lying in the middle of a corridor in H&S, just outside the entrance to the Research and Experimentation supercomplex. It had taken ten days to trim the metaphorical tall grass low enough to allow safe passage in that direction; on the way in, everyone including McInnis had needed to screw their eyes tight and hum to make it through cognitively intact. Perhaps one of them had even stepped on the wayward doctor; there was a bootprint in the middle of his garish lime green shirt.

Udo didn't notice this until later, however, because the really surprising thing about chancing onto Wettle was the thing that had chanced upon him first.

Purring softly, ears pressed back, eyes closed in contentment, a six-foot-long water panther was lying across the bulge of his belly. It looked up sleepily when Udo approached, and yawned a toothy yawn.

There were frozen steaks in the Admin and Oversight mini-cafeteria, and a microwave. Her father would not have approved, but she was in a hurry. The cat turned out to be no connoisseur anyway.

3 October

"Not… yet," Nascimbeni grunted through gritted teeth. He let go the button, and the cacophony ended.

It started again when the response came through, underlining and undermining the gravity of the words. "Keep working on it. They're trapped out there."

"Don't you… think I don't…" He slapped his forehead. Get it right, or you'll have to keep hearing this garbage. "Do you think I don't know that? I'm working on it. Let me work."

No response came this time, which was a mercy. The walkie-talkies used a dedicated frequency that was theoretically safe from outside interference, but given the entire facility was now a colourful war diorama, inside interference was a very real possibility. Lillian had presented the solution: play an antimemetic trigger on loop over the walkies whenever they were being used. It had been a simple modification, and she'd had a song in mind.

"Witch Doctor" by The Cartoons.

Nascimbeni had never liked talking on the radio, but now it was actively infuriating.

He was standing at the master control panel for the electrics in H&S, tucked away at the corner of the dorms where their cleaning efforts had so far been good enough to penetrate. Udo and Lillian had been repeatedly scrubbing the halls over and over, but it seemed like every time they left, someone new came swooping in with artistic intentions and a head full of dangerous thoughts. Complicating matters was the lack of firearms in the Site; Del had quickly discovered that all her usual boltholes and secret armouries were empty. Radical pacifism was in effect, which was something of a problem given how many carnivorous cryptids were presently roaming the halls.

It had been Harry's idea to try securing the salt caverns at Archives and Revision. They stretched back for kilometres, and were packed full of material which wouldn't easily support memetic markings. A second safehouse on the opposite side of the facility from Lillian's office was an enticing prospect, particularly as they expected to begin their scramble for SCRAMBLE parts in the next few days, so he'd set off as the expert and Del had tagged along as an expert in violence, tool-assisted or not.

And then all the sprinklers had gone off at once, and the entire Section had filled with a hallucinogenic gas. Nascimbeni could still smell it now, a pungent of mix of camphor oil and sulphur.

They first they'd heard of it was at the top of Zulfikar's lungs. McInnis had left one of the walkies with his assistant, along with instructions to stay put and keep the door locked. It was therefore a mystery why the otherwise level-headed young man had been caught out in the open when the deluge began, with the almost immediate result that he had torn off his expensive silk shirt and begun pounding the tile walls with his closed fists, screaming "THE MEDIUM IS EVERYTHING" and "EVERYTHING IS A MEDIUM" over and over as his knuckles splintered. The last they'd seen, from the glass double doors to R&E, he'd gone chasing after a squall of tiny pixie-like figures which had been rapidly shifting form and gibbering inchoately. There was still a trail of blood in the teal fluid that now covered every floor surface in the dorms, to mark his passage.

Luckily, Lillian possessed a very large black umbrella.

Nascimbeni had insisted on going alone. "You barely need me anyway, and anyone who could come with is too important to lose. I know where I'm going, and I won't be long."

"That's what Harry and Del said." Udo had looked miserable, and she hadn't been wrong.

Nascimbeni sighed as he flipped the final switch up and down one last time. So, the masters had been re-routed. The Site's electrics had become yet another crazed art project, or else the sabotage had been intentional. Perhaps the deluge was a coordinated assault rather than some comic book impetus to further creativity. That was interesting, if it was true. He sighed again, picked up his toolbox, and headed for the door where he'd left the umbrella.

He stopped.

Whatever was in the sprinklers, it didn't smell like camphor oil at all. Sulphur had been the only discernable note.

"Who's in here?" He turned back to the master switches, and began opening panels at random. "Come on. I know you're—"

There was a loud crash behind him, and he spun to see a woman dropping out of the drop ceiling and onto the ceiling tile she'd kicked out of it. She had green hair, was wearing the uniform of an Applied Occultist and was holding, miraculously, a pistol in her hand.

He suppressed a laugh of relief. She looked too twitchy for loud noises. "What's it this time? Alis Rydderech, Alis Lane, or something new?"

She narrowed her eyes at him. "My name," she spat, "is Alis Wettle."

"I thought men couldn't cross their legs without crushing their balls."

Harry finished settling his back against the wall, and grimaced down at her. "Men use ball crushing as an excuse to sit the way they want. Balls evolved to not be crushed. That's why one hangs lower than the other. The men who told you that are liars." He smirked. "You should kick them in the balls."

"Statistically, I probably did." She took another pull on her bottle of gin, and sighed contentedly.

They were sitting in the back rooms of the Director's Complex. Harry had never been this far into Allan's private domain, and had been surprised to find that it hadn't been Allan's at all. The decor, the furniture, the personal effects; these rooms had gone functionally unchanged since Vivian Scout had died in the mid-1990s. The wallpaper was… well, for starters, there was wallpaper. It was fancy, all dark warm tones and scrollwork. There was oak panelling. There was a coat stand with a very familiar grey overcoat on it, not remotely moth-eaten, and on top, there had been a fedora.

The fedora was now in Harry's hands. (He'd washed them first.) He rotated it thoughtfully as he clenched and unclenched his upper arm muscles against the comforting bulk of the wine bottle he'd found in Scout's liquor cabinet. "You ever wonder if we're letting him down?"

"I'll drink to that," she hiccoughed, and followed through.

"I'm serious. He had high hopes for us, you know. The young Turks. Gonna make big changes. Shake up the establishment. Twenty years later, and what? We are the establishment."

Del wiped her lips with her sleeve, which hung loose from her shoulders. She'd unzipped her jumpsuit to the waist. She'd been oddly relaxed ever since the spray outside had settled into a fine, muggy mist. Del never stops, because she never has to. Well, now she had to, and she was apparently going to make the most of it. It reminded him of— "Speak for yourself. I've still got a skyscraper full of acronyms over my head at all hours. TAD won't tell us what the fuck is going on. O5 won't let us set our own terms. Even Allan isn't telling the whole truth."

Harry shrugged. It was easy to shrug in Dougall's silk shirts. He almost thought he could get used to the feeling. "He's got a lot on his shoulders. And really… isn't he part of the problem?"

She peered up at him, eyes already a bit bleary. "How so?" The last, barely audible radio call had suggested the halls couldn't be made safe for at least another sixteen hours. Plenty of time to tie one on, and then let it slowly unravel in the usual way. They'd even found a pair of buckets in the Director's supply closet.

He set the hat down reverently, on a towel he'd spread on the floor in case they needed it to mop up a spill, and took a gulp of the red wine. He'd felt a pang of guilt dipping into the old man's secret stash, even if he was long, long gone, until he'd remembered that he could down the entire bottle and it would still be there come next September. Stalling complete, he presented his carefully curated thoughts. "Scout wanted us to make the world a better place. Allan was his replacement. Allan was supposed to do what Scout couldn't. I don't see that he has."

Del grunted. "I don't see how he could. We're just one Site. You can't change org culture in one lifetime, from one… I don't know. Node? It doesn't work that way."

"It definitely doesn't work when you don't work on it."

She reached over and tipped the bottle back up to his mouth, and didn't let him stop drinking until he'd started to splutter.

"Alright," he said, shaking his head and spraying red droplets in every direction. "Point taken. We're on break."

"Damn right." She reduced the bottle, thick as it was, to the halfway-mark with a Herculean chug her body should hardly have been able to support. "Of course, you're always on break."

He bristled at that. "You don't need to get personal. Udo…" He trailed off. He really didn't have anything to say on the matter, at least nothing that would be useful to talk through with Del.

The little woman's eyes widened. "I just meant you're lazy, guy. But if you want to cry about your relationship troubles…"

He looked away. "You're intolerable."

"I get more tolerable when I'm incoherent." He could hear her attacking the bottle even more fiercely.

"If you had your pick…" Harry stopped. He wasn't sure where that had come from. Probably somewhere in the middle of his own bottle.

His shoulder was shaking. She was shaking his shoulder. "If I had my pick what? Pick of what?"

He looked back at her. "If you could pick anyone, who would you pick? You know."

She shook her head. "I don't know. What you mean, I mean. I mean." She burped. "Sex? Yancy, every time."

He opened his mouth, and his brow furrowed, and he didn't ask what he almost asked. "Okay. Not what I meant. I meant… you know."

She adjusted her legs so she could kick him, lightly, with one boot. "Stop saying I know. If I knew, I could answer. You mean mushy shit? Who do I want to wake up next to every day for the rest of my life?"

He nodded.

She took another long draught of the rum, and because for a moment he forgot who he was talking to, he thought she was taking the delay to consider, as he had done. He thought this right up until the moment that she turned and sprayed the amber liquid in his face.

And laughed.

"Nobody. Somebody different every time. Sappy shit! That's not me." She glanced around him, at the hat. "Did I hit it?"

He glanced down. "Little bit."

"Oh. Sorry."

He shook his head. "Not the real hat anyway." He pulled the towel out from under it, and began dabbing the rum off his face. "Aren't you going to ask?"

"Ask what? And don't say I know."

He made a face at her.

She laughed again. "Who you'd pick? You expect me to ask that out loud? Harry, every sentient being in this hole, plus Wettle, has known the answer to that for twenty years."

There really wasn't anything to say in response to that.

So they drank until dawn, instead. They couldn't see it, but some biological rhythms are immutable.

21 October

The hall outside Eileen's office was lit up like an exploded Christmas tree.

Not exploded violently, as with actual explosives, but geometrically. Someone had grabbed the relevant nodes and cranked everything to eleven, so that there were blinking bulbs and glittering lines of sparkling electricity from ceiling to wall to floor. Lillian could see any number of potential vectors for transmission: the colours of the lights, the patterns they were flashing, their arrangement in 3D space, the crackle and hum in the air as they pulsed out whatever malign message they'd been encoded with.

Eileen herself sat cross-legged on the floor, in her underwear. Her skin was covered with electrical burns, and she was sucking her teeth and shaking her head. "Almost there," she said.

"Sure thing," Lillian agreed. She examined the complex device hooked up to the I&T chief's keycard reader. Anybody's guess what that is. Another impediment, because of course.

"Almost picking them up." Eileen extended a shaking hand at the nearest LED, a tiny screwdriver in her hand. She began twisting it through the wire, and the lights flickered — Lillian only saw this peripherally, of course — in a subtly different pattern. "I can almost make it out."

"Alan Turing would be proud." Lillian knelt to examine the strange mechanical override. The work of another couple hours, no doubt. Eileen could out-engineer anyone in the Site when it came to computers, Lillian included, but given enough time there were few code-based shenanigans she couldn't entangle. "Give it a few months, we might all make it out."

Eileen laughed so abruptly that Lillian nearly stood up, startled. "Yeah," she agreed. "Yeah, everybody's gonna hear it soon. That's for sure."

22 October

"Okay." Udo examined the small, cigarette smoke-yellow computer critically. SCP-5295 was horizontal rather than vertical, covered in striations that were as much about looks as heat exchange, and now hooked up to a massive wide-screen monitor on Lillian's office wall. She'd left the old CRT behind, for reasons beyond obvious. "Now are you going to explain why this was worth spending three weeks to find?"

Lillian, typing rapidly on the keyboard with one hand, raised her personal phone up with the other. There was a photograph on the screen, and Udo just had time to think you could just fucking tell me before the encoded memory took hold.

The wizened old traitor pressed his warped fingernails to the exposed wire, and raised his already reedy voice to a querulous whine: "How's that?"

Eileen nodded. "Disrupted. I think I can get at the code now. How long can you hold it?"

Zlatá laughed. That hateful, hateful laugh. "Forever, as long as I'm kept fed and watered. The effect might be impressive, but the means by which it's achieved are rudimentary at best."

"That tracks. From what I've seen, this is sub-demonics level circuitry. But that's Maxwellists for you." The apostates from the more literalist Church of the Broken God were electromancers par excellence, but they didn't generally believe in being any flashier than that needed to be. There would be minimal enchantments on Marroquin's device. Anything that could be accomplished with code, would have been. That meant all she needed to do was use Zlatá as a sort of thaumaturgical resistor, and her fancy fingerwork could do the rest.

The rest of this terrible, terrible, unforgiveable thing she was doing.

As though able to read her thoughts, or perhaps actually reading them on her face, the ferret-faced oldster posed a question. "Have you considered the moral ramifications of this?"

Eileen snorted, like the flexible livestock she was. Open minded to the point of an empty conscience. "Of course I have."

"And you aren't bothered?"

"Of course I am. But this goes beyond what I think is right. What I think we need is always going to take precedence."

"And you think we need this… violation?" This of course was rich, coming from █ ██████████████ as it did, but if Zlatá felt a pang of guilt… well. His kind never did, did they?

"I think there are worse violations in the offing. Can you move on to the next circuit?"

Zlatá complied, deft motions belying his general decrepitude, and waited for her to continue.

"You and I both know there's enough shady shit going on down here to bring the whole world crashing down. The only thing that stops them all from blowing up on any given day is that every schemer needs to waste half their time keeping out of the way of everyone else's schemes. But we can't rely on that time sink forever. Eventually something's got to give, and I'd like to know what it is in advance, because I'm going to be on the picking-up-pieces crew by default."

"Because you're the Chief of I&T?" Zlatá offered.

Eileen sucked on her teeth. "No. Because everyone trusts me."

A more sour truth she had never savoured.

Udo blinked, and the scene vanished. Lillian had finished typing, and was looking up at her questioningly.

The answer came slowly. It was like shaking herself out of a deep sleep. She wondered if memetic contagion was bioaccumulative. "They changed it," she finally managed.

Lillian nodded.

"So it doesn't just access other old Macs?"

Another nod.

Udo felt her lunch plunge. "…oh, Jesus."

This time the nod was accompanied by a knowing grin. "Yeah. On the plus side, I'm sure you're much too wholesome to have socked any porn away on your work computer, so your record's probably still clean."

23 October

McInnis watched with a mixture of curiosity and mild surprise as Alis mopped the sweat from Wettle's deeply lined brow. "Having bad dreams?" he offered.

She shook her head. "No, he gets forehead sweat when he sleeps. Doctors don't know why. Just one of those things."

"And you married him," said Harry. Nascimbeni elbowed him.

Alis rubbed her husband's temples, counterclockwise. "Life is a slow, mostly boring trip to some very strange places."

"The very strange places are just pit stops." Lillian was still hammering away on the old Mac, compiling her scavenging list. Udo and Del were already out searching for the first few pieces. "The destination is actually, well." She waved one hand at the ceiling, the other effortlessly taking up the slack. "Everyone who works here is already there. You know?"

"Will he wake up?" Alis asked.

Lillian didn't answer. Harry walked over, selected a single strand of coral hair, and walked away until she yelped. She stood up, shoved him over — into a chair, he knew what he was doing by this point in their relationship — and stalked over to the sick room bed they'd hauled into the spacious office. "He isn't dead. I added some medical equipment to the list. The bottom of the list, mind you. We'll see how much brain activity he's got going. Thing with Willie—"

Alis raised a hand. "Don't."

"What?"

"You were going to say something like 'it's hard to tell the difference between Willie's regular level of brain activity, and brain death'."

Lillian looked impressed. "I was going to say almost exactly that. Yes."

"Why are you always so down on him all the time? It's not like he is the way he is on purpose."

"It's not?" Harry asked.

Alis glared at him. "You're supposed to be his best friend."

"I am?"

She sighed. "I just think he's been through enough. You don't need to put him through more."

McInnis saw Harry's brows knit together, his hands clench and unclench. The archivist's physical subtlety was somewhere around the level of Noh theatre. "Alis, I've spent twenty years around this guy. He doesn't change. We change. We improve. We get better. Him? He doesn't even try. He stays the same, and his same is crap."

She nodded. "And you think he does that because he enjoys it?"

12 November

It was not unlike knowing how a story should end, but needing to write everything that happened first before you could get to the payoff.

Or working for the weekend from Monday's perspective.

But she got there eventually, and that was what mattered.

At the centre of a wasteland of cancelled memes and whitewashed murals, Ibanez found the lab that she'd been looking for.

In a multiverse of chaotic diversity, she thanked a god she knew wasn't real that Bremmel's ridiculous blaster rifle was one inexplicable constant.

"Seriously?" Nascimbeni said. "I thought we were looking for… transistors, for starters."

"There's transistors in this." She pointed. "So probably lots in the drawers and cabinets." She clutched the weapon to her chest. "These ones are mine, though."

He couldn't help but smile. It was all coming together.

18 November

Most of the others were sleeping, in various offices close by the tunnel which had been cleared of memetic material (no small feat in the middle of Memetics and Countermemetics, though the latter clause obviously did help) and barricaded with whatever security materials had survived the apparent purge. Lillian had left SCP-5295, the magical Mac, unattended, and Nascimbeni sat down to do some browsing. McInnis had encouraged this; the more they knew about the deadline, they better they'd be able to manage its conclusion. He'd encouraged them not to go snooping for personal files, and everyone except Del had honoured that request so far.

Nascimbeni didn't think it was cheating to access the personnel roster for J&M. That information could prove useful, he reasoned. Rationalized. If they could cure whatever ailed the people of Site-43, the most technically capable personnel should obviously get first priority.

He was pleased to see that Banerjee was still alive, or at least had been by the time his alternate self had traded record-keeping for keeping Del company in the dormitories. And he'd never moved on to the admin track at Site-36, which was a definite point in this universe's favour. Chuck Carter was still around, too, because of course it was only baseline reality that had seen him come to a grisly end. Some of the new trainees from the past few years were there, though not all of them, and there were plenty of names he didn't recognize. Fourteen years of alternate history would do that. He was surprised the differences weren't more profound.

He was tired, he realized. He realized because he found himself scanning and re-scanning the early letters of the alphabet after doing so for a solid ten seconds, or more — old machines like this one didn't often have a visible clock, screen real estate being limited with a resolution so low. He looked one last time, to make certain that the thing he'd been subconsciously searching for wasn't there, and when it definitely wasn't, he began accessing files from other Sections to find out why.

He found his answer in the Health and Pathology system. Technician JM64 had been injured in a materials handling accident in Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-B on February the 22nd, 2013. Failed a spot check, and immediately thrown into a coma from which it was suspected he would never recover.

It shouldn't have meant as much as it did. It wouldn't take. And was that fate really so much worse than what Phil was suffering back in baseline?

He told himself it wasn't.

But his self wasn't so sure.

21 November

Lillian had partitioned her workspace many times since first moving in, all those years ago, and many of the partitions were still in place, though so much of the rest of the world had no doubt changed position around them. The little sleeping quarters tucked away in the back of what had once been an expansive storage room and was now her lab had been built in precisely the same place in every timeline so far, which was kind of heartening, really. It meant there was something consistent in her reasoning, that the reasoning was somehow sound. She chose not to pursue that thought any further; comparing every set of memories to rate her multiversal confidence in each action taken since 2002 would be a fun new way to drive herself completely insane.

And there's no shortage of those around here, she thought as she stared at the stucco ceiling.

There was a knock on the door. Lillian didn't get up, because if she did, the door wouldn't be able to open without crushing her knees. "What?"

"Can I come in?"

It was Alis.

Lillian shrugged, though nobody else could see it. She did most things for her own benefit first. "I guess."

The lights in the workspace were dimmed. Sokolsky was napping in a purloined armchair. Blank was in a cot, his cat on his chest. Not the same cat; in this universe, Scout had apparently passed away of natural causes a few years back. Lillian was anticipating the lightbulb going on in his head with great excitement. Less exciting was the geistschreiber in the wizard robe, but Lillian knew there were at least a few fascinating facts trapped behind that sour face.

"Hey," said Alis. She sat down in the doorway, on the floor, because there was really no other option. The room was long enough for a long, long bed, to accommodate Lillian's long, long legs, but that was it. "So, when are you going to tell them?"

She didn't have to ask. "Tomorrow, probably. Allan and Daniil already know."

"Yeah." Alis sighed. "I guess you've figured out the thing with the murals."

"Everybody has. Or at least part of it." She frowned at the ceiling. "Is that something everyone knew about? While the shit was going down?"

"No. Just the memeticists who could look at the walls without losing their minds. So, basically, you and me. You want to say it out loud, so I know we're still on the same page?"

"Why not. The memories in the murals are all just that, memories. From the actual people who actually lived the actual events depicted. Except the ones that aren't from around here, which I don't understand, but I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. Point is, they were put there by someone else. Someone else who had the memories."

"Took the memories," Alis murmured.

"Right."

"And you know who that was?"

She wished she didn't.

22 November

The Memetics and Countermemetics boardroom is large enough to accommodate everyone presently assigned to that Section, though this is a pointless accommodation. Memeticists don't sit down for long, and they certainly don't do so together. They wander the halls, they pace their offices, they seek fresh perspectives in new locales, they keep their minds moving by moving their brainpans from place to place, and they allow their flashy duds to remind everyone else that they still exist, so that they will continue to do so. But they don't, as a rule, congregate together unless absolutely necessary. This isn't only because memeticists are, as a rule, antisocial — although they are. And it isn't because they're too busy to waste time socializing, or because they prefer to pursue solo research.

Memeticists don't mingle because everything that goes wrong in their minds, and the minds of others, because of their curiously contagious area of study, goes much more seriously wrong with an amplified signal.

—Blank, Lines in a Muddle

It felt like a wide, open space with only seven people to occupy it. Alis took Wettle's place — to make up the numbers, not in intellectual capacity — while the latter continued to doze in the lab-cum-dormitory. Today, at any rate, she was both guest of honour and keynote speaker.

"I've already explained most of this to the Director," she began. "And Dr. Lillihammer."

"Why Lillian?" Nascimbeni asked. "What's so special…"

He sighed, and waved his own question off. Lillian grinned, and waited for Alis to continue.

"The short story is this: I haven't been a giftschreiber, at least in terms of allegiance, since 2009."

"What happened in 2009?" Udo asked.

"The giftschreiber took over the world," Lillian explained. Then smiled apologetically at the other cryptomancer in the room. "Sorry. Hijacking presentations is addictive."

"No problem." Alis cleared her throat, to punctuate the interruption and mark it concluded. "They didn't take over the world; not the world beyond the Veil, at any rate. But they became one of the most active and dangerous Groups of Interest faced by the SCP Foundation. Every memetics and antimemetics research group in the world was bent on their destruction, because they were bent on ours."

"How'd you acquire that particular possessive?" Harry asked. "The Foundation being yours, I mean."

"I understand you have some familiarity with the process." Again, Alis made eye contact. Lillian nodded. "I was away from my handlers for too long. Whatever they'd done to me, it wore off. And I saw what they were doing with fresh eyes, so…"

"So you pretended to be a Foundation thaumaturge," Udo said, "and worked against them covertly?"

Alis shook her head. "No. I turned myself in."

"What?" Ibanez glared at her. "To who? Because I would have just shot you."

Alis gestured at the door. "I turned myself in to Dr. Wettle."

"I've had nightmares like that," Harry said.

"Dr. Wettle," Nascimbeni repeated. "Noted authority figure Dr. Wettle."

Alis laughed. "He always understood me better. He listened."

"Sure," Ibanez agreed. "Who wouldn't, with those shirts you wear?"

The geistschreiber ignored her. "He helped me determine the limits of my remaining conditioning. With replication tests. Eventually we determined that I was almost totally devoid of foreign interference, so we went to the Director, who brought in Dr. Lillihammer. By that time the Foundation was hurting for allies with inside knowledge. They set me up as a credentialed thaumaturge, because my abilities are indistinguishable from magic anyway. It was an easy niche to fill." She gestured at Udo. "You know."

Udo frowned. "What do you mean? What niche?"

"I'm the Chair of Applied Occultism."

Udo's eyebrows approached her still-silver hairline. She'd noticed that the trim on Alis' wizard coat was red instead of teal, but her mind had simply refused to make the connection. "A geistschreiber is the Chair of AO?"

"Of course. It's not the first time."

McInnis became very aware of the sound of the air cycling through the vents overhead.

Stop the Clock

The Breach Goes On: Deadlined

Those Who Can't