“You're expecting me to say something stupid like ‘Wait for Rights to 
have another kid,' right? Well, you’re wrong, and your idea is stupid. 
Pick something that we haven't already dealt with.” 


“Fine. How do you like this one? Video of 597 gets on the internet.” 


“Oh my God.” Melbourne’s eyes went wide. “Do you even know 
what you suggest?” 


“You're probably going to tell me.” 


“Damn straight | am! Look, most hormone-crazed guys only know 
the philosophy of “moar boobs”. The revelation that there is such a 
thing as “too much boobs” would send the ‘net into spiraling anarchy 
followed by implosion.” 


“That's... You know what, I’m not going to say anything." 


“It’s for the best.” 


There was an awkward pause. 
“804 starts spinning out of control,” Breaker said. 


“Try to remember my Boy Scout training? Either that or smash it with 
a rock, | don’t know. You’re supposed to be having fun with this and 
you are definitely not having fun with this. Look, here’s how you do 
it: 231-7 gives birth, coinciding with 682 breaking containment, 
076-2 turning against the Foundation, and something super-bad 
coming out of 354. The combined sum of these causes a 
containment breach on almost every other Keter-level item we 
have.” 


With Melbourne’s trump card played, Breaker was quiet. Nearly half 
a minute passed, the researcher not moving more than a twitch. 
Then, a smug smile spread across his face. 


“You're smiling like that again, Breaker.” Melbourne pointed his fork 
at him. “Good things do not happen when you have that smile.” 


“That’s the easiest one yet.” 
“How so? Suicide’s against the rules.” 


“Still easy. First, | activate the emergency termination protocol for 
the D-class barracks, then | run in there and apply 447 on each and 
every dead body in there.” 


Melbourne’s expression was priceless. 
“What the fuck is that supposed to do?” 


“Well, since things really couldn’t get any worse, the normally 
catastrophic effect of letting 447 near so many dead bodies will 
cancel everything else out.” Breaker stood up, taking his empty tray 
with him. “Or it'd just destroy the universe. Either way it'd be an 
improvement, and | believe that is game over, my friend.” 


|Hub| 


Friday 


While Nexus points of this nature exist elsewhere in the world, it is in 
the United States that they are the most prominent. This is, in my 
opinion, an example of culture’s influence on universal narrative 
principles: bizarre happenings in small town America has been a 
common media trope since the very beginning of the country, to the 
point where it is hardly anomalous to us anymore. The oddities of 
the small town is expected, and as such, these nexus points are 
very easily contained by their own nature: no matter what unusual 
events occur, it will never seem to leave its borders of the town, and 
the populace will remain in blissful ignorance of the happenings. 


Such a principle would not go unnoticed by the Foundation. Of the 

twenty-three confirmed nexuses within the United States, fifteen of 
them have full sites located within the town, and the remainder are 

under some form of observation. Of these sites, Site 87 is, | find, of 
special note. 


- Dr. Philip Verhoten, The Crossroads: A Study of Urban Anomalous 
Nexuses in the United States. 


“You went and did it...” 


‘You almost sound surprised. You know what my job entails. Come 
on, pay up.” 


Harold Breaker sighed, and withdrew a wad of Monopoly money 
from his pocket. He licked his thumb and leafed through it, tossing 
five hundreds in the center of the table, in between the two rather 
disappointing breakfasts. 


“Thank y’kindly.” Ryan Melbourne said with a complete lack of 
anything remotely resembling happiness at the outcome. He added 
the bills to his own wad. Breaker shook his head, chuckling in that 
vague “I can’t believe you’re doing this” manner of people who have 


just witnessed a friend get roped into something stupid. 


“Laugh all you want, but you know what? Hughes bought me this 
shirt, because he’s an asshole. If | was able to turn down a free shirt 
I’d burn the thing faster than you can say hot Texas barbeque! 
Yeah, you can laugh, but you guys have had it easy since Darwin. | 
have to re-write half of the book every other week just because a 
hipster farted and someone put it on the Internet. Do you know how 
much extra work this damn show’s given me? At least twenty 
percent goddammiit It’s in my head and it won't leave!” 


Breaker looked up from his newspaper and sipped his coffee 
simultaneously. The combination of cup angle, location of paper 
relative to the table expression of the eyes, and the length of the sip 
said: “8/10 on the rant: you’re overdoing it a little bit, but it's amusing 
so I’m going to make a snarky statement to further incite the 
situation.” 


Coffee sips are very expressive. 
“You’re still wearing a shirt with My Little Pony on it,” he said. 


“Yes, and! am simmering with the indignity of it. You caused this, 
you know. You and my gambling addiction.” 


“| didn’t think you’d actually do it.” 

“You don’t know how addiction works, man.” 

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step in recovery.” 
“Implying | want to recover.” 

“Probability is minimal.” 

“Exactly.” 

“| hypothesize that this is all incredibly silly.” 

“| concur with your hypothesis.” 


“The data supports it.” 


“Final conclusion: this conversation is incredibly silly, and we should 
probably stop.” 


“Agreed.” Breaker went back to the paper, and surprisingly enough 
looked like he was actually reading it. “Though I’m going to have to 
give Hughes a chewing out for his bad taste. Twilight Sparkle is the 
best pony. Lynn says so.” 


Melbourne did a passable imitation of a trout for a few moments, 
blinked several times, and went back his corn flakes, defeated. How 
did he forget the crucial fact that his friend had a six-year-old 
daughter? Of course he’d made the bet. He knew the stakes, had 
contextual knowledge. he knew the bet would be fulfilled, and then 
knew that he’d get to have the humorous final comment when it was 
all done. That bastard... 


The cafeteria went quiet again, though granted, Breaker and 
Melbourne were the only people in there and the former was busily 
plotting vengeance on the latter. 


A few minutes of coffee-sipping, cereal-chewing, newspaper-reading 
and vengeance-plotting later, the door to the cafeteria opened, 
revealing a lanky, brown-haired man with a boyish face and small, 
rectangular glasses. 


“Oi, Bailey!” Melbourne called out to him. “Which one are you 
today?” 


“Same one |’ve been every day from the last five months.” Tristan 
Bailey walked over to the cabinets and began shuffling through the 
contents. Someone would have to buy bread soon. 


“Dammit.” Melbourne handed Breaker a fifty. “l swear, you’re going 
to pull that switcheroo joke on us one of these days and | am going 
to be ready for it.” 


“Going to be hard to do that, with Trev at 19 and Tom in Antarctica.” 
Bailey put four slices of wheat bread into the toaster. There was no 
peanut butter. 


“Yeah, yeah, keep trying to fool me. I’m watching you.” Melbourne 


made the universal sign of “I’m watching you punk”, though the 
effect was greatly mitigated by his choice of shirt. Breaker finished 
the last of his coffee and continued read about how some people 
were killing some other people somewhere in the world by means of 
sundry mundane methods. 


Some time was spent waiting for toast. 
Ding 


“Finally.” Bailey removed his toast. “I think old four-slot has seen 
better days.” He chose normal butter to make up for the lack of 
peanut butter. “Is it just me or is this place dead this morning?” 


“Eh, it’s Friday. It’s always dead on Friday.” 


Bailey placed the butter back in the fridge, took up his plate and 
mug, and sat down next to the other two. 


“And what a wonderful death it is. What’s on the agenda for today?” 


“Gonna try knocking out a good chunk of the security meme update 
package, then data collection, and then several hours of staring at 
the ceiling and wondering where everything went wrong. Same as 
usual,” Melbourne said. “How about you?” 


Bailey swallowed a mouthful of toast. 


“More negotiations over mining rights in F-3426-Delta. Dumb 
bastards have been sitting on top of enough rare earths to plate the 
goddamn Statue of Liberty in iridium, not doing a thing with it for 
centuries, but the moment we ask to mine some of the stuff they dig 
in their heels.” 


“Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.” Breaker gloated with well-practiced 
theatric fakery. “All | have for today is the final paperwork for the 
E-5503 tests, and then the whole bunch is off to Resources and 
Processing. I'll be done by lunch.” 


Melbourne glared at him with the special loathing only acquired by 
being forced to wear a humiliating t-shirt in public for fake money. 
This was not something you just let people get away with. No, this 


required action. 
“Bailey, | need you as witness to this.” 
“lam witnessing it.” 


“Good.” Melbourne took out his considerably thick wad of pastel 
bills, Kept one for himself, and slammed the rest on the table. 


“| bet you all of this that you won’t get done by noon today.” 


“Fair enough.” Breaker’s tone was so noncommittal, so flat, so 
accepting. No, no this wouldn't do. This wouldn't do at all. 


“Okay, you know what, no. Stakes aren’t high enough. | have 
seventy-five dollars and a Steak n’ Shake gift card in my wallet. | am 
willing to bet all of that on you having to stay past noon. Deal?” 


“Deal.” 


They shook on it. 


Site 87 woke up, or in the case of the night shift, went to sleep. In 
both cases it was much like a cat, with yawns and stretches but no 
particular hurry to do so. Some cars entered the parking lot of S & C 
Plastics, others left, and absolutely no one outside found anything 
unusual about the fact. 


Ryan Melbourne sat down at his desk and sighed. Stupid, stupid, 
stupid. Why did he bet real money? The entire point of the Monopoly 
money was so that he’d stop betting real money. He booted up his 
computer. The desktop wallpaper was a picture of Earth from the 
ISS. 


But that was how he worked, right? Things got stuck in his head. 
Melbourne is a compulsive gambler. Everyone knew that. Melbourne 
would bet his own grandmother on what someone had in their lunch. 
lt was a meme. It stuck in their heads, and it stuck in his head. You 
didn’t think about memes, you acted on them. They were automatic. 
You threw “implying” at the beginning of sentences. You said that 


things were twenty percent better when it didn’t even make sense. 
You made references that no one else understood, just because 
they made sense to you, and your mind wouldn’t let you stop. That 
was a good deal of memetics in a nutshell: programming the mind 
through the transmission of ideas. 


Good God, he needed help. The pony on his shirt didn’t mean 
anything anymore: this was one of those moments where a man 
realizes that something is very much wrong and he needs to act 
immediately before the moment passes and he falls into 
complacency. 


He grabbed a pen and a pad of sticky notes. 
Make appointment with Dr. Talbot 


He stuck it to his computer monitor with a sharp jab, adding an 
emphatic period to the statement. 


He paused for a moment and then wrote another note: 
Stop pitying yourself. 


He then began reviewing dispersion patterns. 


“We do not consider your case a pressing need.” 


It was the same response that Tristan Bailey had been hearing for 
the past two weeks of his adventures in bureaucracy. The 
translation software had latched onto the phrase, spouting it and 
variants in its metallic monotone. It seemed to fit the man sitting 
across the negotiation table: bald and tall, with a thin face and nota 
spark of life anywhere in his eyes. At the very least he didn’t have a 
“sub” or “vice” anywhere in his title. He might actually have some 
power. 


“That may be the case, but as | have said a thousand times before, 
your society can’t be without needs. Tell us the need, and we will be 
more than happy to supply you.” 


“| have no authority to make decisions of this scale.” 
That same answer. No one seemed to have any authority. 


“Are you sure? There’s absolutely nothing your people need or want 
from us? Luxury goods, cultural knick-knacks, anything?” 


“| have no authority to make decisions of this scale.” 


Bailey argued back and forth with himself in his head. There was a 
significant amount of valuable materials available here, and two 
weeks wasn’t an abnormal time for negotiation. Maybe he was just 
too used to dealing with primitives who saw them as gods or fellow 
institutions of the paranatural. But, there were only so many extra- 
universal contacts and contracts that could be held at any one time, 
and leaving this one open for weeks without progress would just be 
taking resources away from something that needed them more. This 
was a judgment call scenario. 


The mining could wait. It wasn’t like Multi-U was low on options. 
Bailey stood up and straightened his tie. 


“Well, it appears that you won’t be swayed by any of my reasoning, 
so I’m going to have to take my business elsewhere. Good day to 
you, sir.” 


They shook hands. For a brief moment, the thin man took notice of a 
slight prick in his palm. His eyes went glassy a brief moment later. 
When he woke from his stupor, all he would remember was a plain 
looking foreigner who had been attempting...something. 


Bailey walked out of the room, and hoped he had better luck in 
F-3426-Gamma. 


Harold Breaker smiled to himself as he checked his watch. 
11:46. 


It wasn’t so much that he had won the bet. Caring about those 


succeeding in hiding them somewhere in the system not covered by 
surveillance. 


It is recommended that the surveillance network be reviewed and 
these previously-unknown holes in its coverage filled. 


things was Melbourne’s job. He was just happy that the project was 
done and out of his hands, as were the creatures themselves. That 
was always a good feeling, getting something done. What made 
things even better was that E-5503 had proven itself to be quite 
fireproof, enough so to justify farming the things for their leather. 


He knocked on the wall of Melbourne’s cubicle. The man himself 
was hunched at his computer, typing away lines of code. 


“Of course. Today is just not my day.” He jabbed a thumb at a small 
pile of cash on top of a filing cabinet. “Right over there.” 


Breaker scooped up the money, took the two steps necessary to 
cross the cubicle, and set it down next to his mouse pad. 


“I’m in need of a ballpoint pen and | am willing to pay seventy-five 
American dollars for it.” 


“Well, what do you know? That’s my asking price.” Melbourne 
grinned “You can keep the card. There’s only like four bucks on it 
anyway.” 


The next day was Saturday, which meant it was Harold Breaker’s 
visitation day. As such, it involved cartoons about friendship, 
followed by burgers and milkshakes for lunch. 


|Hub| 


Last Days at Camp 


"All right, Campers! Who hasn't fed Big Bear yet? We can't go to bed 
until Big Bear's nice and full!" At the back of the dining hall, a shy 
little girl held up her hand. She hadn't said a word since she had 
arrived at Camp Krakkow, and had spent all dinner looking at her 
plate. Counselor Dan simply smiled at her. "And what's your name 
little lady?" 


"Mary." 
"Well, step on up, Mary! Is this your first time at Camp Krakkow?" 


Mary nodded, stepping forward and standing in front of Big Bear, an 
ornate carving of a grizzly with an open mouth. 


"There's a special reason we feed Big Bear every night, Mary. He 
keeps the camp safe from bad things in the woods. So, whaddaya 
say?" Counselor Dan stepped aside, handing Mary a small bit of 
steak.