"Do you remember what you told me a millennia ago?" the Warrior 
hissed. "You told me that | would help uplift humanity into a golden 
age. That | would bring peace to our lands. That Our rivers would 
flow with milk and honey... that men would become gods. You told 
me exactly what you tell them." 


| WAS ARROGANT. | WAS FOOLISH. NO MORE. PAIN HAS BEEN MY 
TEACHER, AND SUFFERING IS INFINITELY WISER THAN ANY OF US. 


"Wait! Who are you? What do you mean?" the second asked. 
| AM YOU. WE ARE GOD. 


"No... we are human," the third declared, albeit with very little 


conviction in his voice. 


YOU NEED NOT DENY YOUR NATURE. YOU CAN BE MORE THAN HUMAN. 
YOU CAN FIND LOVE, LOSS, SORROW, JOY, CREATIVITY, EVERYTHING 
YOU DESIRE AND MORE WHEN WE ARE TOGETHER. JOIN ME. TOGETHER 
WE WILL FOLLOW THE PATH OF ASCENSION AND ACHIEVE APOTHEOSIS. 
WE SHALL BECOME GODS. 


"Do not listen to this false jackal. You need look no further than me 
to see what ‘apotheosis’ entails," said the Warrior bitterly. "He does 
not wish to save us. He fears us. He wants to escape us. Escape 
humanity." 


| WAS A REFUGEE IN THIS WORLD. IT IS MERELY TIME FOR MY 
HOMECOMING. BUT | CAN'T GO INCOMPLETE—WE NEED TO BE 
TOGETHER. 


"These warriors,” the Warrior beckoned at the confused four, "They 
would not give up so quickly. They who have held on for so long, 
you say. | say- | say we do not give up on this world. Do not bask in 
selfish indulgence." 


The warrior continued. "You four. Stand with me. Humanity could 
hold the power of the gods on this Earth. He could not stop us if we 
stood together. Imagine what we could do—in this world, not the 
next—f we held that power?" 


IT WOULD NOT WORK. YOU COULD NOT HANDLE IT. YOUR DIRECT 
ROUTE WILL FAIL. WITH MORE SUBTLE INFLUENCE, MY PROJECT—OUR 
RACE—WILL SUCCEED IN THE LONG RUN. 


"Would you listen to a being whose promises are as empty as his 
cage?" the Warrior gestured passionately. "Or would you listen to a 
man who has learned the true value of humanity from bitter 
experience?" 


"This... being is no God. He is neither benevolent nor omnipotent. 
He is a liar. He has invaded your mind and forced you to play his 
games for his own benefit. Has he ever asked you if you do not want 
to be gods? Has he ever asked you - like | am asking you now - if 
you want to be human?" 


flame will consume upwards of ninety percent of the subject's body 
mass and has proven fatal in all cases. The fire also consumes 
SCP-740, which will slowly restore itself to its original condition over 
the next five to eighteen hours. 


See Interview Log 740-01 for information on recovery. 
+ Interview Log 740-01 
Interviewed: Agent M 
Interviewer: Dr. E 


Foreword: Standard interview conducted within 48 
hours of SCP procurement. AgentM has been 
employed by the Foundation for years and retrieved or 
secured SCPs in that time, of which the retrieval of 
SCP-740 was his sixth leading a retrieval team. 


<Begin Log> 


Interviewer: Please state, in your own words, what 
happened during your recovery assignment. 


Agent M_~ :1!was sent out to recover the skip, the 
photo, from the home of aMisterA =F . It came to 
our attention when Mr. F tried unsuccessfully to sell 
it at auction, and I'd been keeping tabs on it for about 
three weeks prior. 


Interviewer: What prevented his selling it? 


Agent M_ : The auctioneer spontaneously combusted. 
| mean, the official COD was smoke inhalation, but that's 
what happened. 


Interviewer: | see. Please continue. 


Agent M — : Anyway, after Mr. F recovered the 
photo, he started bringing in a bunch of people to look at 
it, trying to sell it again. By the time | visited his home, he 
was all but giving it away. 


HERALD. I SEALED YOU AWAY TO PROTECT YOU. HAD I NOT HIDDEN 
YOU FROM THE WORLD, YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN STRIPPED OF YOUR 
GIFTS,YOUR LIFE, AND YOUR HUMANITY. NOW | OFFER YOU ALL THE 
CHANCE TO BECOME ALL-POWERFUL. YOU KNOW NOT WHAT TREASURES 
LIE INSIDE OF YOU. LET THOSE TREASURES COME TO LIGHT. TOGETHER 
WE WILL TOWER OVER THE UNIVERSE, A FORCE FOR GOOD SPREADING 
HUMANITY ACROSS THE COSMOS. YOU WILL UNDERSTAND WHAT IT 
MEANS TO BE HUMAN, AND YOU WILL SPREAD THAT GIFT TO ALL LIFE. 


"| remember when you told me the same thing. But unlike you, false 
god, | know what it means to be human. | always knew. | have 
always been human. And you," the Warrior said, looking to the four 
men-machines, "will lose your humanity under that false god. But | 
can help you. | have loved. | have lost. | can show you the truth." 


"Why are you forcing us to choose? You do not know us. We do not 
know you... We barely know ourselves..." the fourth one whispered. 
The Warrior could see her hand itching to pull the trigger. 


The third one chimed in. "| am not ready to make this kind of choice. 
There are preparations for this. It can not just happen! " 


IF I HAVE LEARNED ONE THING FROM MY EONS, IT IS THAT LIFE IS A 
BOOK THAT YOU ARE WRITING. DO YOU THINK I WAS PREPARED WHEN 
I WAS PULLED FROM MY MORTAL SHELL AND IMPRISONED IN THIS? 
THE GREATEST CHANGES IN LIFE ARE THE ONES YOU CANNOT PREPARE 
FOR. | KNOW YOU WILL MAKE THE RIGHT CHOICE BECAUSE I KNOW 
YOu. | AM You. WE ARE GOD. WE WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO BE GOD. 


"| trust in your budding humanity," the Warrior said. "You can be 
truly human if you find the strength to fight back." 


The Warrior and the God spoke in unison. 


will you join me? 


THE PATH OF A GoD? 
APOTHEOsIs 


The path of a Warrior? 
Ascendancy 


Or is there another way? 
Alternative 


Footnotes 
1. He remembered now, but his name was still lost. Had he ever had 
one? Did it matter? 


« The Lord of Endowments | Samsara » 


The Fountain of Lamneth 


Agent Kanako Yamada grumbles and slumps in her stool at the bar, 
her arms propping her head up and stopping it from smacking into 
the glass of whiskey on the table. She adjusts her vest irritably and 
shoots a glare at the nearby cyborg who's giving her a strange look, 
before turning back to the bartender. 


"Y'know, Hersh," she sighs, "you know what the problem is with this 
god-damn place?" 


The skeletal android tilts its metallic head in her direction, its 
gunmetal eyelids fluttering in silent acknowledgement. Around it, 
patrons in various states of robotic augment and devotion to WAN 
converse and exchange various drinks that are inevitably far too 
toxic for the ordinary human being. Its back whirs and emits a soft 
hiss, before it uncorks a glowing cyan bottle and pours a nearby 
patron a glassful of over-saturated sky. 


"It's a fuckin’ dive bar. Nothing good ever happens at a bloody dive 
bar." Kanako takes a sip of her drink — an amber colour that's almost 
pedestrian in comparison. "| got promoted at a dive bar... got shot at 
a dive bar... shot somebody at a dive bar..." She sets the now- 
empty glass on the table. "Why the hell am | even here?" 


Hersh shrugs and makes a clicking noise as it does so, before 
taking her glass and providing her with an obliging refill. 


Kanako absently checks her watch, Pushing her hand through the 
table as she does so. The three-dimensional structure gives way 
easily under her five-dimensional touch and she absently toys with 
the cheap chipboarda's molecular structure, withdrawing just as part 
of the paint liquifies and spits. "Half past ten," she concludes. 
"Usually I'm up to at least twelve drinks by the time that happens." 


The robot whistles and proffers the glass of scotch at her, this time 
with more force. Kanako won the right to free lifetime refills after 


abusing various black-market liver implants to effectively beat Hersh 
in a drinking game — she won not by causing it to pass out, but 
rather by mutual agreement that the entire game had gone on for 
too damn long. 


"Fine, Hersh." Kanako takes the drink and swigs it, before dropping 
the tumbler on the table. "Are you happy no—" 


There's a loud screeching and the sound of several people getting 
off their arses to look at what the hell's going on. Kanako joins said 
flock of rear ends and hisses as she realises what's going on. 


It's Cuchulainn syndrome at its very worst. 


As the man continues to spit and screech, his brain is currently 
trying to deal with about seventeen different conflicting signals 
caused by at least three memetic agents. In an admirable attempt to 
compensate, it's now trying to satisfy all those conditions at once by 
lighting up almost his entire brain — in milder terms, a tonic-clonic 
seizure. 


Kanako starts elbowing people out of the way to get to the man, and 
only remembers that she has a license that qualifies her to treat the 
man while she's halfway through the throng of onlookers. Finally 
fishing it out of her pocket, she quickly flashes it at the various 
spectators, driving them off with the power of legal authority and 
Stephenson scrambler-gifs, optimised for the various distros of 
bastardised Unix Maxwellists run. 


™“Scuse me, coming through, medic," she calls, even though the 
terrified screams from the unfortunate people who actually see her 
card makes the point rather less reassuring than she might intend it 
to be. "Keep moving away." 


After she's managed to navigate through the horde, she quickly 
moves over to the man in question and flicks on her hyperlight 
senses — seeing not in low-grade photons but rather in pure 
information, data visualised in its most pure form. Dropping to one 
knee and checking his pulse, various heads-up-display elements 
start sputtering into awkward life and she makes a quick mental note 
to get them serviced later. 


Conclusively proving that he is, in fact, still alive, she now has to do 
the actual job of keeping him that way. 


She amps up her perceptual cortex's processing power and watches 
time slow to the crawl of a paraplegic turtle. Hyperlight can't really 
tell her anything at this distance, as all she's getting is just a vague 
blob of light — too vague to actually make out any helpful details. 
She turns down the sensitivity by three — no, four degrees of 
magnitude and the squirming and writhing of whatever the hell it is 
that's punched through this man's brain becomes gradually more 
apparent. 


It's emitting screeches of bleeding magenta and thrashing around 
madly in the man's brain. Just as importantly, it's getting 
dangerously close to latching onto the thin web of information that 
connects the Maxwellists across the room. She needs to deal with 
the threat now. 


Taking a deep breath, Kanako pulls her hand back and Pushes it 
through his head. Not actually, of course — in reality, that arm 
doesn't exist, and hasn't existed for about three years, but since 
when has that mattered? 


Her arm flickers and sparks angrily, before the link's established and 
she promptly begins dumping every kill agent she can get into the 
man's brain, causing the tentacle to thrash and withdraw a little from 
the man's skull cavity. It's not enough to even wound it and before 
the thought that she's losing the initiative can go through her head, 
the appendage reacts and punches back. 


sudo killall cognition 


Kanako shrieks (well, she doesn't, making bodily movement is hard 
at a million times usual perceptual speed) and desperately pulls up 
defenses in a last-ditch attempt to stop the stream of Unix being fed 
into her brain and soon finds out to her surprise that the one 
command that keeps getting violently repeated is: 


cd ~/production/blackfish 


along with varying other aborted commands and a request to torrent 
a movie of some sort. 


She can't deal with the threat without information and to get 
information she needs time. Deciding that temporary numbness 
would be a better thing than permanent braindeath, she begins 
dumping old half-remembered sensations — fragments of a 
saxophone solo, smell of chlorine at a pool — into the man's hollow 
shell of a consciousness. 


The creature squeals and squirms about wildly, distracted for the 
time being by her discarded memories. It'll do for about five minutes 
before she starts having to sacrifice short-term memory. 


Kanako quickly pulls up another display and starts piping her 
memory of the recent mental assault into the terminal. Within 
subjective seconds, she's got a complete log of its actions — within 
an eye-blink some judicious regex has pulled up the movie this thing 
is trying to torrent. 


1080pBLACKFISHDOCUMENTARYrusssubsLEAKED.mp4 


Blackfish... Kanako thinks about this for a few seconds before 
deciding to hop onto a nearby Maxwellist's internet connection and 
jumping into the directory itself. 


Hang on a se— goddammit. No fucking way this guy is that stupid— 


Kanako has to admire this moron's audacity. Not only is he leaking 
the movie he's working on, but he's also set up a nice little P2P 
server running off the computer he's using to edit the damn thing. 


That's not even pointing out the fact that the file itself is swarming 
with memetic agents and Berryman-Langford worms, crawling about 
the structure of the file like maggots over a rotting corpse. Kanako 
instinctively recoils from the toxic-waste-green mental minefield, but 
the main thought on her mind is the fact that the Elder God of 
Stallman is still thrashing about trying to get that directory. 


That suggests quite a hell of a lot about where the Unix cacodemon 
came from and what it's trying to do. 


She returns focus to the man's consciousness and discovers that — 
delight of delights — his brain has now been taken over by a 
swarming cesspool of memetic agents, the... majority of which she 
never put into his head in the first place. 


The memetic agents in question? Swarming, squelching stacks of... 
glowing green maggots. This thing has been leaving a toxic 
conceptual footprint that's roughly equivalent to a mental oil spill, 
pick any one. 


So now she knows where this thing's been and what it's trying to get 
back to. If Kanako's any chance of getting the man a chance of 
anything that's not total brain death, she has to do what it wants. 
She has to send it back. 


Mustering up all her mental faculties, she quickly hi-jacks the man's 
consciousness and simplifies the hell-beast, taking it down an entire 
layer of abstraction and cutting it off from a greater whole she can't 
pay attention to just yet. It screeches and spits more tarballs at her, 
but she manages to weather the mental flaying without too much 
memory lost. 


With less data comes a lower informational density — just enough to 
let her upload it through the man's phone, which has also been 
covered in glowing informational worms. She barely has time to 
make a note about how he caught the Unix mind-tentacle before the 
thing writhes and threatens to reunite itself with the greater 
conceptual whole. 


Taking a deep (non-existent) breath, Kanako draws back her 
conceptual presence, before abstracting herself — increasing her 
conceptual presence by generalising it, adding processing weight by 
the terabyte as she does so — and the two collide: 


It's $\aleph_{1}$ versus $\aleph_{0}$ and Kanako's ontological 
weight crushes the recently de-powered tentacle into the phone, 
shoving the (surprisingly well-compressed) nth-dimensional- 
database out through the connection and back into the computer. 


The blow's informational inertia smashes her against the file 
structure with a thud and she's sent rebounding away from the 
tentacle, which is now starting to unfurl and re-generalise itself with 
a noise like knives against glass, the iridescent web of lambdas 
unfolding against the stark green and black of the kernel.