"Samantha, have Matthew bring in drinks. Wine, red for prefere—no, 
white. White wine." A crackle that signified acknowledgement. He 
put his elbows on the table, templing his fingers, and his smile over 
his fingers was a blizzard, sweeping over the works of man. 


"Ms Deloitte, you can leave now, and as | said, nothing—further— 
will befall you. Or, you can stay, and witness something that will 
show you that everything you believe is false. But, here's the thing— 
you will never be able to publish it. No-one will believe you. You will 
become a crank, a nut. Is that what you want?" 


The golden lure. Of course she would stay. No-one with the 
journalist's inquisitive mind would resist such a challenge. Matthew 
walked in, and Sir Malcolm pleased himself for a moment by 
observing the set of the young man's thick hair, the button left 
undone above his tie. Three glasses. The intern placed them deftly 
on the desk, poured the clear golden liquid into them, and Sir 
Malcolm watched it slosh voluptuously around the bottom of each 
glass before settling as the level rose. 


"Thank you, Matthew, that will be all." 


The door shut behind Matthew as he left. Sir Malcolm turned his 
attention back to the mulatto and his pet journalist. 


"Go on," he said, "pick them up. I'm hardly likely to poison visitors to 
my MoD office, am |? Just—don't drink them quite yet." 


They clutched at the stems of the glasses—rubes both—and lifted 
them. Sir Malcolm wrapped his fingers around the bulb of his own 
glass, stem fitting between his second and third finger, and raised it 
before his face as though giving a toast, then paused. 


"Oh, now why did | ask for white wine?", he said in mock-anguish, 
smiling beatifically. "| don't even like white wine." 


Then he looked for the green seat, the throne in the deepest part of 
his soul he had found during his time in Tibet, the jade chair from 
where he made universes. Now, peace and serenity, he thought. 


And effort. Sheer fucking bloody-minded, coronary-inducing effort. 
Wasn't that how it was supposed to be? 


Keagan watched as Sir Malcolm's grip on the glass became rigid, 
clutching at the bulb with such force he thought it might shatter. The 
Minister's grin had become rigid, strained, his stare fixed and 
venomous. A vein on his forehead had become prominent. The 
chanting in Keagan's head had subsided and he found that for a 
moment he was able to look to his side. Sam was just watching the 
bizarre spectacle of the Minister Without Portfolio wordlessly glaring 
at his glass with such strained fury. Keagan looked back, and then 
he saw it. 


A tiny pinprick of red, in the middle of the glass. Sir Malcolm was 
sweating now, chest rising and falling with some superhuman 
internal effort. The pinprick grew, and the odd little yelp of surprise 
from beside him told Keagan that Sam had seen it too. There was 
now a perfect sphere of translucent red liquid in the middle of the 
glass, suspended in the middle of the wine. Keagan found himself 
petrified, though he was unable to remember why, as though he had 
seen it before in a nightmare. The red substance now filled two- 
thirds of the glass, still refusing to mix with the four quasi-pyramidal 
pockets of gold at the edges—the sphere had been truncated where 
it met the edges of the vessel but retained its shape. The gold 
shrank, and vanished. Sir Malcolm giggled, a heaving, breathless 
sound. 


"Just wait," he said. "Just wait." 


And suddenly, Keagan realised the sphere had not vanished—it 
remained, a ghostly shape in the air around the glass. The light 
inside the sphere had a slightly different quality to the light outside— 
darker? no, flatter? no, just somehow indefinably altered. And it 
continued to expand, accelerating as it engulfed Sir Malcolm's hand, 
arm, desk, body, reached out towards then. Keagan felt somehow 
he must not let the bubble touch him, but remained frozen in his seat 
as it creaked outwards from Sir Malcolm, centred on the glass in 
front of his face and haloing him in that subtly altered light. The front 
reached their glasses, and where it passed it left red where there 
had been gold. Sam watched in horrified fascination as a crisp, 


distinct wall of red marched through the glass. She barely had time 
to tilt the vessel and observe the red did not move with it—what had 
been red briefly reverted to gold as it sloshed out of the sohere— 
before it had advanced up her arm and hit her face. Then the bubble 
met Keagan. There was no overt sensation as it passed—merely the 
sudden and marked notion that something had changed, that the 
carpet had been pulled out from under you and left you standing 
somewhere else. 


Sir Malcolm exhaled sharply, and Keagan turned to see the edge of 
the bubble accelerate off into the distance, expanding across the 
horizon, and after a second the light no longer seemed so strange, 
and one wondered why one had imagined there was any difference. 


"There," Sir Malcolm breathed. "Red wine, and of a good vintage." 
He took a long sip. "It's good. Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei. Ah, 
but you probably never learned Latin at school, so the allusion is 
lost. Tragic." 


The expression on Sam's face was lost, the face of someone whose 
foundations have just collapsed. Join the club, Keagan thought. 


"What just happened?" she asked, of the room in general. "That was 
white wine. This is—this is some kind of trick, right? With food 
colouring tablets. Your party piece for visitors." 


Sir Malcolm massaged his temples, the colour of his face returning 
to normal. "Not at all. That was a relatively simple shift; | didn't like 

the universe where Matthew brought us white wine, so | changed it. 
It didn't affect anything outside this room, other than the number of 
bottles of each type left in the hospitality rack." 


"Erm," Sam said. "That's not..." 


"Possible? Of course it isn't, my dear girl. That's rather the point." Sir 
Malcolm's grin faded. "You've seen the supernatural, face-to-face. 
Now, what will you do? Some people opt to go stark raving insane. 
That's always fun." 


"What happened to the universe where you ordered white wine?" 
Keagan asked, feeling the blowtorch of Sir Malcolm's triumphant 


fury swinging back to him. 


"Fucked if | know," said Sir Malcolm, and the expletive sounded 
strange in his public school accent. "Probably destroyed; I'm not a 
scientist. If | had let the wavefront touch you, you would have been 
replaced with versions of yourselves who would have seen nothing 
supernatural in what | just did; for whom | ordered red wine and got 
it. Amusing for me, but pointless. The fact is, | might have killed you 
—the you that walked into this room—dozens of times without your 
ever knowing it. And I'm not going to tell you if | did. You're insects, 
trying to bite a dragon. Now, get out." 


There seemed nothing else to be done. Sam was shell-shocked, 
glass trembling in her hands so the red wine threatened to slop out 
the top. Keagan carefully took it from her and put it down on the 
desk with his own, helped her to her feet. As they walked out of the 
office, Sir Malcolm spoke again, a tone of gleeful devastation in his 
voice: 


"| have a Zen koan for you—at least, that's what they say it is. Linji 
Yixuan said—'if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him’. | hate to 
see what modern so-called Buddhists do with that. It's such 
straightforward advice, but they twist it and contort it until they say it 
means you must only recognise the Buddha in your own soul and 
other such claptrap. No, it wasn't a koan. If you meet the Buddha, 
kill him, because the Buddha is the most dangerous man in the 
world. But you're too late, you see? You can't kill me because you're 
too late!" 


Sam hobbled out of the building, walking with the gait of a woman 
sixty years older than her age. Keagan opened the door of her car, a 
yellow Volkswagen Polo, and guided her into the back. She made 
no protest as he took the wheel. London accelerated around them, 
people going about their lives. 


"What now," Sam said, dully. There was no inflection. 


"Now?" Keagan scratched the thick growth of stubble on his chin 
thoughtfully. He looked at the world around them—Horse Guards 
and chippies and Ministries and ferris wheels and Parliament and 
garages. "Now, we go get some evidence and write a story." 


Such freedom! Such blinding, searing, liberating freedom! Sir 
Malcolm had never done that before—never let someone walk away 
with full knowledge of what he was and what he could do. It had 
been reckless, insane—empowering, exhilarating. The only witness 
he had ever exempted from his bubble of altered reality during a 
shift before had been Commodore Schaeffer, to demonstrate to him 
the reality of what he served. That had been the shift after he had 
thrown away the previous universe and replaced it with one where 
Ronald Schaeffer had inexplicably developed an irrationally deep 
and abiding loyalty to Sir Malcolm himself five minutes before 
meeting him—there had been no risk involved whatsoever. Sir 
Malcolm had just had the merest taste what it would be like 
excluding millions from a shift, when he erased Mucalinda, his 
sacrificial serpent, and it felt like jet fuel in his blood. 


He looked down at the papers on his desk, the budgets and 
projections and project checklists. Why, why, why had he given his 
precious time, his very /ife-force, to these irrelevancies, when he 
possessed the power to make them go away with almost literally a 
flick of his fingers? Somehow he had imagined it dishonourable, an 
affront to fair play—like cheating at cricket—but of course it wasn't, it 
wasn't at all. He focused on the hateful documents with searing 
intensity, the feeling of mad, impulsive freedom bubbling up inside 
him. The bubble manifested in the middle of the stack, and the 
letters writhed and changed as it expanded over them. 


Of course, trying to create a universe where he had already done 
the work would be suicide—it would mean not excluding himself 
from his own bubble. He wasn't even sure he could override that 
self-preservation instinct that by default made him the sole survivor 
of any shift, as far as he was concerned. Moreover, he would have 
to visualise each element of the change—just as much work as 
doing it himself. Instead, he imagined a universe where, a few hours 
ago, he had called dear sweet Matthew in and sat him at the desk, 
delicately placed his fine fountain pen in his hand. And this would be 
a universe where, just by chance, Matthew spontaneously decided 
to perfectly forge Sir Malcolm's signature on each document and 
managed to tot up every sum perfectly. 


The aim of this test was to measure how long it would take 682 to 
return to its usual size after being resized via SCP-1056. Depending 
on the results, this would have given new opportunities for 
containment or termination of SCP-682. 


For this test, a chamber was constructed to the same dimensions of 
1056's platform so the platform could act as the floor for the 
chamber. The cable connected to 1056's dial had been fed into a 
control room below so the dial could manipulated from here. 


SCP-682 is introduced into the chamber. The chamber is sealed 
after 682 has entered. The dial is set to 0.25 and activation button 
pressed. 


SCP-682 makes numerous vocalisations and appears to experience 
multiple convulsions. Various points of 682's body expand and 
retract. SCP-682 then disappears. All scans of the containment 
chamber reveal no signs of 682. 


The containment chamber remains sealed for several hours, 
believing SCP-682 is still in the chamber and will ambush personnel 
once the chamber is opened. At 16:57 local time, SCP-682 is 
spotted outside of Site-19 having resized itself, breaching 
containment. 


MTF-Lambda-9 ("Big Fucking Guns") is deployed. SCP-682 
releases a wave of energy appearing to cause MTF-Lambda-9 to 
disappear. Lambda-9 is subsequently found later having been 
resized (For further info please see SCP-3198). 


SCP-682 is eventually incapacitated and contained by other MTF 
teams. 


Notes: Whilst it was expected that 682 would possibly be able to 
manipulate its size to counteract 1056, it was not expected that 1056 
would enhance its existing ability to resize itself. It used this to shrink 
to a size far exceeding that of 1056's capabilities to escape 
containment. It is unknown how 682 was also able to manipulate the 
size of other objects and it's unlikely we will ever know due to the 
dangers of repeating this test. - Dr. Sanders 


The bubble expanded, and he struggled to maintain it against the 
pressure of the minutes-old universe where he had ordered red 
wine. It pushed back at him, begging to stay alive. He smothered it, 
mercilessly, breathing into the bubble until it covered the desk, the 
papers rearranging themselves into neat stacks. Then, having 
engulfed the area immediately affected by the changes, it achieved 
critical pressure, expanding suddenly and explosively until the new 
universe was one where all the paperwork was done and Sir 
Malcolm could spend the rest of the day reading the Mahayana 
sutras. Perhaps there would be time for golf this afternoon. 


Wait. Something on the desk caught his eye. No. No, no no. What 
was now the top paper on the stack wasn't a budget. It wasn't a 
projection. It was a letter. He focused on it. 


Dear Jacky 


I'm sorry to hear you've been having trouble from 'Brock'. 
A brock, of course, is a male badger, and | do so hope 
you aren't badgered. Tell me, what soap do you use? | 
should like to purchase the brand and keep a little 
rubbed into my wrists so it reminds me of you. | look 
forward so much to our meeting. To being able to see 
your face. 


Ryokan was a wise man who was once robbed. Having 
given the robber even the clothes on his back, he looked 
up at the moon and said 'I only wish | could have given 
him this beautiful moon’. Soon, | will have surpassed 
Ryokan, for | will be able to give you the moon in the sky, 
if you adore me. Do you adore me? 


Buddy Sattva 


Buddy fucking Sattva. It had struck him at the time as a piece of wild 
genius at the time, but now it stared out at him like an accusation. 
Because that letter did not exist. Because he had never posted it, 
because he had been called on a stupid fucking junket to Jakarta 
and by the time he returned he had thought better of rising to the 
obvious bait of the clearly fictitious prison bully, even in the playful 
manner he had written it. Because he had personally fed that letter, 


envelope and all, into a cross-cut strimmer and put the remains in 
the priority tray to be incinerated. Yet here it was, called back into 
existence from his subconscious, the paper crisp and white, 
unfolded, unmolested. He hadn't even realised he had thought about 
it during the shift. 


He sat down, hands trembling, staring at the stack beneath the letter 
with dead eyes. It was probably the only one. Just a gentle reminder 
from the Buddha to himself that he wasn't god yet. No! That's death. 
That's absolutely death. He could not dare leave until he had read 
through every word, every line, and ensure that he hadn't sabotaged 
the numbers for the entire fucking nuclear defence programme or 
replaced parts of the briefing to the Cabinet with the lewdest 
passages from the Satyricon or left a detailed confession of 
everything he had done or was about to do on page fucking 57 of 
the cruise missile contractor agreement with Boeing. 


He thumbed through the Favourites on his mobile with quivering 
fingers. 


"Hello? Daddy?" 


"Fran. Fran, I'm sorry, I'm going to be late tonight. Very late. It's 
important, sorry. Order ... order yourself a pizza. You know my 
card's PIN number." 


"Again?" 
"I'm so sorry."