"I can verify," he said, "that this man was in this facility as late as 
mid-August. | remember seeing and talking to him. | can't remember 
his clearance level, and | certainly don't recall him being D-Class. 
Agent Howard,” he addressed the Head of Security, "| remember 
you talked to him. You too, Professor Reeds. Bear that in mind when 
you start considering who he might have had contact with. Dr 
Skinner was ... everywhere for a while. It's not unreasonable that he 
might have spoken to him or Agent Moon. Lots of us did." 


"Finally someone talking sense," Keagan said. "What happened to 
Dr Skinner? Everyone went nuts when | mentioned his name." 


"He—ah—wasn't quite his own man," Professor Gelding muttered. 
"It's a long story." 


"Well anyway, now how's about you stop trying to figure out who | 
am—” he paused for a moment, a pause which seemed significant 
“—and start listening to me, eh?" 


"We're listening," Edward said. 


Elsewhere: 


Renton shivered in the night air as he waited to be let into the MoD. 
The guards maintained their impassive glare, just a notch short of 
pretending he didn't exist, but he was getting odd looks from people 
on the street—odder than he normally received in his beret and 
socialista garb. ‘Tonight, the fashionable urban revolutionary is 
modelling a soft, blow-dried 'do, honey-brown hair falling naturally 
around his face and neck, and wearing a sleeveless little number 
that comes just short of his belly button.’ 


He had, after much protest, shaved his upper lip, but remained 
staunchly protective of his steel-toed bovver boots which had got 
him through many an anti-fascist counter demo, and their presence 
reassured him. Not that they look particularly intimidating below the 
ridiculous shorts they had made him wear. In all, he felt like a piece 
of meat, and it didn't reassure him particularly that the intent was 
veal. But he was a good soldier, and when the orders came though 
the correct channels he obeyed with only a little protest. 


He would be frisked (first) by the guards at the door. According, he 
carried no weapons. He wished he still had a certain key fob he had 
acquired in his Art Violence period—innocuous enough to get in, 
leave it on the oak desk, no more problem. No more Ministry of 
Defence either, though, which he understood might be a problem. In 
any case, the keychain had been his price of admission into the 
Foundation—the true Foundation—and the salvation of his soul (and 
look where it's got you, a little voice of his own murmured, but he 
quashed it furiously). 


No, he didn't need it. Sir Malcolm was fragile now, emotionally 
weakened—if he had not been, the op would never have been 
sanctioned—and in desperate need of comfort, of many kinds. 
There would be green tea, which Renton despised with every 
particle in his being. It would come on a silver tray, in packets, with a 
pair of scissors. 


Elsewhere: 


distance. Guards readied to shoot. SCP-682 sniffed the air and then 
laughed. 


SCP-682: You call those bullets? 


Dr. King and Guards appear confused. All shots were unloaded, 
then guards were shocked as the bullets were actually appleseeds. 
They stated that they had made sure to double check the magazines 
before entering the chamber. Dr. King leaves furiously, with the 
guards to follow. 


"If only SCP-682 could have turned into an appleseed..."— Dr. King 


Item: One domesticed Equus ferus, deceased, one baseball bat. 


Tissue Test Record: 
Overridden by O5-Command 


Termination Test Record: SCP-682 picked up baseball bat and 
begun to swing it at the deceased equine. SCP-682 appeared to 
enjoy beating the test material. SCP-682 returned to containment. 


Notes: Success! 


Item: SCP-1370 


Tissue Test Record: 
SCP-1370 was defeated by the tissue sample. 


Termination Test Record: 
<Begin Log> 
[SCP-1370 is placed in the testing area.] 
SCP-1370 Free! Free at last! All will be crushed under 


the heel of Doombot! Nothing shall live when | am done. 
SCP-682 Good plan. Can | help, master? 


[SCP-1370 attempts to climb on top of SCP-682] 


SCP-1370 Yes! A ignoble steed of destruction for 


"Alright gentlemen,” Agent Brass announced, "we're officially in 
briefing, which means if any of you talk between now and me saying 
‘any questions?'—no, you fucking smart alec, that didn't count—I get 
to rip your head off and spit down the hole. There's a couple of you 
here, this'll be your first operation with the unit, so a general point. 
This is Mobile Task Force Rho-6, but we don't call it that, because 
frankly whoever came up with that American-college-fraternity 
naming system ought to be shot. We prefer to call ourselves the 
Deifecators, because we shit on gods on a daily basis. That's day-yi. 
Two syllables. It'll grow on you. 


"This—” he clicks the slide changer in his hand “—is the target. 
Caucasian male, 48 years old, based in London. He's also a 
Government minister." He paused for a moment to let that sink in. 
"And, of course, he's a Bixby. That's what we call reality-warpers, 
probies. From Jerome Bixby. ‘It's a Good Life’. Look it up in your 
own time. Active for at least twenty years, apparently, which makes 
you wonder what, exactly, the retards in Kappa-6 actually do all day. 
Has a daughter, which is going to suck for her, especially since 
she's now going to be under Foundation surveillance for the rest of 
her natural just in case she's inherited it from her daddy." 


Next slide. "To make things harder, the target has recently holed 
himself up in his offices in Main Building and is refusing to speak to 
visitors. He sent for clothes and toiletries from his house in 
Belgravia, unfortunately before we were read into the op, otherwise | 
would have suggested making like Deianeira and putting ricin on the 
inside of his shirt collar. So he's in there for the long haul. And to top 
it all off, he's the centre of a growing scandal about a quashed 
investigation into the murder of an ex-judge in prison. The Director 
has applied pressure to the PM to take the position that it's a private 
matter until the police actually charge our guy. That hopefully means 
we don't have to deal with a pissed-off reality-warper rampaging 
through the largest city in Western Europe, and just leaves us with 
the problem of infiltrating the UK Ministry of Defence, killing a top- 
level official and making it look like a suicide." 


"We have a couple of advantages going in. Our boy has just, as far 
as we can tell, experienced a major failure to launch. Happens to the 
best of us. Shut up. Anyway, he tried to initiate a reality shift in front 


of a bunch of journalists and flubbed it, ended up running through 
Green Park in his jim-jams, screaming his head off. | would NOT 
want to be in Gamma-5 and in charge of taking down all those 
Youtube videos. Maybe he's weakened, maybe he just believes he 
is, which for Bixbies is much the same thing. Also, what makes our 
boy so dangerous—and the real reason he's evaded detection for so 
long—is because he evidently views the whole universe as an all-or- 
nothing proposition. No matter the change he makes to reality, no 
matter how minor, he's apparently been pulling off a universal-scale 
restructuring event, which means he doesn't register on any of the 
usual space-time seismometers. Leave the implications of that to the 
philosophers, gentlemen, the fact is that he's done this God knows 
how many times since the fall of the Berlin Wall and | personally 
don't feel like a different person. More importantly, it means he 
should have slower reactions than your average Bixby. If he starts 
looking like he's trying to pass a log the size of your mother, aim for 
his head. I've never yet known a Bixby who can keep going after 
having his concentration disrupted by a 9mm." 


"Of course, it goes without saying, that when dealing with a Bixby 
there are no rules. Our boy could decide just before we get in the 
door that he would prefer the sun to be made of ice-cream, or for 
gravity to be exempt from inverse square law. It becomes a lot less 
scary when you realise that in the vast majority of worst case 
scenarios that still gives you about eight minutes to blow his mind. It 
might not actually help, but it would sure feel good." Next slide. 


"This is the plan of attack. Four insertion teams of three operatives; 
Team A breaches and deals with unforeseen elements; Team B 
secures the top floor where our boy is currently hiding out; Team C 
secures the floor below and prepares for extraction. Team D will be 
contacting the target and staging the scene. Each of you has a 
briefing pack identifying the teams and various contingencies. For 
those new to ops with the Deifecators, for Christ's sake call your 
family first. It makes a massive difference, it really does. Any 
questions?" He pauses, not long enough for anyone to think too 
deeply. "No? Then get your damn boots. Three words, gentlemen," 
he said to the assembled agents. "You know what they are." 


"Securel", they said. "Contain! Protect!" 


The security of the United Kingdom's military nerve centre was 
penetrated with textbook perfect timing. Cleaner passes had been 
obtained ahead of time and six men entered via the side entrance 
on Horse Guards after submitting to search by armed police. They 
then opened a small door in the adjoining apartments and let in 
another group of six workmen, carrying large and bulky aluminum- 
lined bags containing, to their absolute shock and surprise, not paint 
rollers, electric screwdrivers and step-ladders, but rather twelve FN 
P90s, gas grenades, assault vests, and a considerable quantity of 
specialised equipment, including electromagnetic spectrometers, UV 
and infrared filtered goggles, laser and sonic antipersonnel devices 
and as a final resort a cannister of VFDF with a time release. If at 
least one member of the Mobile Task Force did not survive to flip the 
switch—or if time or entropy were accelerated or if the half-life of the 
pellet of caesium in the cannister's internal clock were tampered 
with—it would release enough cyanotoxin to destroy every 
neurotransmitter in the building. 


It was Sunday, and even the hub of global British force projection 
was quieter than normal. A few dedicated souls were quietly taken 
and tranquilised. They would be administered a Class C amnesiac 
and told they had stayed home that day with a fever. The guards 
waiting outside Sir Malcolm's office with expressions of long- 
suffering patience were met with the strange sight of a little ball 
rolling over the plush carpet of the top floor hallway. A second later, 
they saw no more—it emitted a flash of light in a spectrum not 
recognised by science that ionised the rhodopsin in their eyes, 
overloading the visual cortex and taking with it all perception of time. 
They twitched slightly as they leaned back against the wall and sank 
slowly to a half-sitting position; they would recover their senses later, 
together with a slight headache and the vague sense that they had 
been sleeping on duty. 


The Deifecators breached the inner sanctum of the Minister Without 
Portfolio with flawless small unit tactics, spreading out from the door 
to cover all angles, sweeping a visual-spectrum laser through the 
room to blind or disorient their adversary. Agent Brass took point— 
you didn't survive long, career-wise, as head of a MTF unit if you 
made a habit of avoiding that responsibility—and, being a veteran of 
more such ops than both of his comrades combined, he was the first 


to shake off the adrenaline rush of the breach and realise what he 
was seeing. 


Sir Malcolm hung by his belt from the fake-crystal lampshade, 
rotating a little in the breeze from the sudden entrance, toes just 
barely touching the ground. His chair was overturned a couple of 
feet away and his face was grey. There was a bloom of blood from 
his neck, staining his rumpled shirt, but after a couple of seconds 
one noticed the little silver scissors, dangling from the loosely curled 
fingers of Sir Malcolm's left hand, and one realised the desk was just 
within reach from his position. The scenario readily presented itself: 
he had decided to do the deed, climbed the chair to fasten a fairly 
shoddy noose around the light fixture, and then submitted to gravity, 
only realising too late that his weight was enough to pull the mock- 
chandelier from its socket, leaving him slowly asphyxiating at the 
end of the electric wires, feet not contacting the floor sufficiently to 
spare his life, nor far enough away that he could stop himself from 
kicking them out to prolong the process, leaving him dancing on 
tiptoes between life and death. In desperation, he had grabbed the 
scissors from the tea tray on his desk and made several attempts at 
plunging it into his neck before finally finding the carotid artery and 
losing consciousness. It was a good narrative, and one Agent Brass 
might have used himself. Except, of course, that as far as they knew 
Sir Malcolm wasn't left-handed. 


The team did due diligence, of course—one could never assume a 
body was conclusive proof of death when dealing with Bixbies, when 
it could just as easily be an illusion, or someone else's body 
moulded into the shape of the Bixby, or just a piece of meat that had 
never been alive, conjured out of thin air at the whim of an insane 
god. But after scanning the room for electromagnetic anomalies, 
examining the corpse through a series of different filters, sweeping 
for subsound and infrared presences and manually intersecting 
every part of the room in co-ordinated movements to make sure 
their quarry had not simply rendered himself invisible and inaudible, 
they concluded that the scene was probably exactly what it looked 
like, or at least, exactly what someone had wanted it to look like. 


Sir Malcolm's eyes were open in death, but seemed dull, faded, 
beaten. His trousers had fallen to mid-thigh, exposing Union Jack 


boxer shorts. Agent Brass took a long, final look at the body. 
"Job well done, gentlemen,” he concluded. "I won't tell if you don't." 


The MTF exfiltrated with the greatest of ease, the cannister of 
deadly nerve agent deactivated, the weapons folded and stashed 
away in the bag, which was placed in an outgoing parcel in the 
mailroom addressed to a military base in Wiltshire. They left a terse 
note at the front desk that they had found the room they were 
supposed to refurbish on the fourth floor locked and that there had 
been no-one around to ask about it, and that in future they would 
prefer a weekday appointment, as this had been an expensive but 
ultimately unnecessary piece of overtime for twelve men. 


The process of debriefing was much the same in the Foundation as 
it had been in the Insurgency; you sat in a room for hours on end 
while serious-faced men asked questions and made little scribbles in 
notepads or tapped away on laptops. From time to time they would 
go off into a huddle and one of them would be dispatched to initiate 
some action based on what you had said. Then you would be taken 
into a bigger room and introduced to an even more senior officer of 
the Foundation and asked to repeat some or all of your story to him. 
Eventually the men got so senior Keagan wasn't even allowed to 
see their faces—just voices behind stylised silhouette icons on 
teleconference screens.