he was nervous, he would rub his hair if he was curious. | had as 
many attempts and fails as | could have ever wanted, and ten times 
even that. By the end of our captivity, | could tell much better how 
people felt about what | was saying (after the initial shock, of 
course). 


My fluency in English is very obviously helpful to me now. | am only 
slightly more noticeable then a second-generation native, so | have 
been able to do well for myself here. | thought it amusing when | had 
to pretend a thick accent to avoid piquing Andrew's curiosity. Even 
more curious was when he taught me French, and Spanish, and 
Russian. It is amazing, learning a new language; it's as if you have 
put on a new pair of contacts and hearing aids that allow the world 
to be clearly illuminated to you. 


| digress. Perhaps it is time to end my meditation. 


A further note: many have wondered (as | have) how | could have 
survived what the Foundation called my "Iterations." | prefer to think 
of it in a more subjective way. Our minds have a give for engraving 
repetition; by the time | was freed, | could order a meal and speak 
several languages almost by instinct. | read a theory, once, that if a 
group of fans was trapped in a sporting arena, and became aware of 
it, they would at first panic, then fight, then accept it, then, 
eventually, play the game. So many times would they play the game 
that eventually they would become as soulless and predictable as a 
calculator, losing their sentience as humans lost the purpose of their 
ancestral organs. 


| am thankful my mind did not atrophy. | close with a pondering note: 
| do not believe in God, but | do believe something ordained my fate. 
Were | trapped in the same circumstance again, would | be able to 
make use of it? (This, my friends, is why | always carry my laptop on 
me.) 


| do not know if | am blessed, cursed, or simply have bad luck. 
Either way, | have accepted what the world has put me through, and 
am prepared to stare into the abyss if it calls me back. 


It's All Behind Us Now 


Much like our grandparents could tell you what they were doing on 
9/11/2001, or what their parents were doing during the Kennedy 
assassination, our entire generation could tell you with perfect clarity 
where they were when Laser Butt Disease ended modern 
civilization. 


We had known about LBD for about 30 years, an unusual bacterium 
that sat in the colon and occasionally discharged low-power laser 
fire. It made headlines for months, and the late night hosts beat it to 
death, but there really wasn't much to it. Occasionally you'd buy a 
new pair of underwear, a handful of fires around the world a year. 
Once in a blue moon, someone would have a particularly potent 
variant; a Z-Pack from the doctor would clear that up in a few days. 


It was summertime of 2074 that Methicillin-resistant Laser Butt 
Disease became the scare of the year. Years and years of throwing 
antibiotics at the problem kickstarted the evolution of it, and it went 
from a jokey part of the human condition to something far more 
serious. The wattage increased significantly; what was originally a 
joke product called "Lord Explosion's Laser Butthole Ointment" 
became a staple product for most that could afford it. Gramps called 
it "the new Red Ring of Death," whatever that meant. He thought 
that old line was hilarious. 


It was on April 1st, 2076 at the G11 summit that laser butt terrorists 
assassinated heads of state for 11 of the world's superpowers, 
including President Rothschild IV and the robotic brain of Vladimir 
Lenin. Dirty laser butt disease bombs were dropped and pathogens 
released into the jet stream. Before civilization collapsed by way of 
laser butt genocide, a small terroristic art collective claimed 
responsibility on national television. Home grown, right here in the 
States. They made a truly insane statement that still echoes in the 
memories of the survivors. 


"We have been cool for long enough. You know what's cooler than 
being cool? Being on fire." 


What was incredible was just how destructive the new strain could 
be. Stomach cramping was about the only warning you had that you 
were probably about to have your last few minutes on this earth. The 
lasers were anywhere from 200KW to 2TW, the latter of which was 
literally like farting a small hydrogen bomb. Worse was that with the 
increased wattage, our old friend Isaac Newton came by to visit. 
People would get literally launched into their ceilings by laser butt 
disease. The roofers made good money, for a while. Then too many 
cases came, and too many roofers were afflicted themselves. Gas 
stations were, one by one, blown up in huge laser butt 
conflagrations. Oil refineries. Factories all over the world. Data 
centers with lasers clean through a whole row of racks, the 
destroyed capacitors catching fire. The science labs, our only hope 
for stability and a cure, were slowly destroyed and abandoned. Then 
the prison breakouts started. 


There were emergency centers erected at most community pools. 
You felt the blast coming on, you headed to the pool and aimed your 
ass to the sky. When it came, you got launched into the pool. It 
worked well until a bad case showed up and inevitably cracked the 
bottom of the pool, the force of impact with the water ripping the 
flesh off their bones. 


The government slowly collapsed, trying to run the country from 
bunkers. Even as they slowly died off in their isolation, there was 
nobody in a position to carry out their orders on the ground. Some 
few dedicated cops and soldiers tried to uphold order; most resorted 
to looting or hiding with their families. 


TV stations, one by one, went dark. Only a handful of radio stations 
stayed around, alternating between music to try and keep spirits up, 
reporting on eyewitness news, and hawking home remedies. One 
memorable host went off right in the middle of pitching urine enemas 
as the cure. "I've been doing it for years and 
aaarrrghghhhPEWPEW' 


| think we all knew the end of the world was a foregone conclusion 
when animals started exhibiting laser butt disease. The picture of 


the cow embedded in the Statue of Liberty was our generation's lwo 
Jima. It was all ending. 


We tried to do our job at the Foundation as well as we could, given 
the circumstances. We'd lost most of our network infrastructure, and 
had gone to a paper-only setup for the first time in over 100 years. It 
was boggling how much paperwork we accumulated. There were 
files on skips we wouldn't even contain for another five years, just 
sitting there in the pile. Containment breaches were commonplace, 
and the business of resecuring the skips became much harder when 
half your task force "had to go pew pew" on one retrieval mission. 
We filled 173's storage unit with fast-setting concrete and called it a 
day. We lost the lizard about 6 months back, nobody knows where 
the hell he is now. Best case, he's firing butt lasers in hell. 


noooononononoPEWPEW 


Judging by the klaxons, I'd say something big and mean just got out 
through a man-shaped hole in the wall. I'll be back. 


It's Not Pronounced Like the Thesaurus, Dammit! 


Dr. Roget was angry. He was furious. One might say he was 
enraged, or even wrathful. 


Why? 


Because the world was a terrible place, full of war, poverty, bigotry, 
abuse, greed, selfishness, people who talk at the theater, and 
probably an uncounted number of dangerous anomalies that the 
Foundation had yet to discover and contain. 


...But mostly because people kept mispronouncing his name. 


He had started carrying a thesaurus around everywhere he went, so 
that whenever somebody pronounced his name like the author of 
said thesaurus, he could hit, wallop, bludgeon, strike, or clout them 
with it. However, this method of negative reinforcement served only 
to amuse people, and they kept doing it. Day in and day out, people 
would call to him from all directions, purposely pronouncing his 
name in the way he so hated. 


He was irate. 


After a long day of this (the four-thousand-six-hundred-and-ninth in a 
row, to be precise), he stormed into his office, knocking over the 
multiple photographs of himself, his family, and... 


God, he missed her. Dr. Miriam Webster (pronounced my-REE-um 
weeb-STAY-er), his only true friend in the Foundation. She alone 
knew what it was like to consistently be addressed by the name of a 
popular word reference book. The two of them had had many good 
times together. Physically attacking people for their 
mispronunciations, getting reprimanded by their superiors, attacking 
their superiors when they mispronounced their names while 
reprimanding them... 


Then, one fateful day, Dr. Roget caught her discussing the actual 
thesaurus. He didn't hear the context, and the feeling of betrayal 
was too much for him. Before he knew it, he had picked up a large 
knife, sliced a nearby dictionary into the shape of a sharp object, 
and smacked her in the face with it. (Dictionaries, no matter what 
shape they are, simply can't stab people. The pages are too flexible 
and the covers are too blunt.) Then he ran off crying, transferred to 
another site, and never saw her again. 


So naturally, there was no describing how surprised, astonished, 
shocked, dumbfounded, and taken aback he felt when he looked up 
and saw Miriam Webster sitting on his desk, smiling at him as if he 
hadn't dumped her like last year's encyclopedia all those years ago. 


With kindness, benevolence, good will, and compassion in her eyes, 
she explained to him that she completely understood why he had 
run off. She told him the truth of what had happened that day, while 
he listened attentively; he had long since ceased being angry with 
her, but he hadn't been able to reach out and apologize, because 
the site they both used to work at was not equipped with any sort of 
non-emergency communications system. It just wasn't in the budget. 


The two of them, kindred spirits once more, simultaneously began to 
plead for the other's forgiveness. Roget couldn't believe his luck, his 
fortune, his serendipity. She had shown up when he needed her 
most, and she was here to stay. 


But Miriam had one more surprise for Roget. She winked at him, 
and presented a young girl. Her age was roughly equal to the 
amount of time since the two had last seen each other, minus nine 
months. Roget looked with wonder, awe, and reverence upon his 
long-lost daughter. 


He asked for the girl's name. Miriam told him it was Britannica. 


She pronounced it BRITE-en-ICK-kah. 


She's Really Good At Hurting Other People But Not 
Much Of Anything Else 


Panzer let her mind bask in her future victory as she walked down 
the hallway to the stage, as she ran through the hallway, flooded in 
light, ears ringing from the crazed crowd yelling her name, hands 
already sore from high fiving some of the fans before striking a pose 
atop the ropes as her theme faded away and her opponent's theme 
started. She let the crowd’s jeers for her opponent as the announcer 
presented him as the reigning Men’s Openweight Champion 
revitalize her, and the adrenaline giving her back all the strength she 
thought she didn’t have anymore when she slammed his face into 
the ring’s corner, first into the worn cushion that covered the 
buckles, then into the raw metal. And she let the sight of blood goad 
her into wanting more, more as she drove her screwdriver into his 
calf, more as she put him in a standing choke hold and savagely 
stomped on the injured leg when he reached for the ropes, until he 
did her favorite thing in the world: tap out. 


It always felt better when they tapped out. 


Something in the back of her mind wondered what the crowd saw 
the spectacle as, what the anomaly fooled their brains into seeing. 
She pushed that thought away and focused on lifting her arm along 
with the ref. Cries for the new Men’s Openweight Champion 
reverberated across the arena and nailed into her head. She 
groggily took the heavy, golden belt and slung it across her 
shoulder, waving at the fans and stumbling backstage, across the 
long white hallway and into the locker room, into the tiresome 
inevitability of her report. 


“We lost Wolf.” 


“Ukichirou?” 


“Yeah. Fuck.” Panzer would've buried her face in her hands, if they 
weren't too bruised for it. “Ethics board review. For saving Star 
Shooter’s fucking life.” 


“We might get him b-” 


“The hell we will.” Panzer tried her best to focus on the laptop 
screen where her conference call with The Nightwatch droned 
mercilessly on; she had been up for over a day, keeping up a careful 
balancing act of training, doing shows and being consumed with 
worry in the locker room. “You know what ‘ethics review’ means. 
They keep him out of action for half a year, then decide he’s unfit for 
this and send him to another project. Probably mindwipe him too. 
Christ.” 


“Eli-” 


“Unfit for the project, dude. Because it’s so god damn easy to find 
researchers who can wrestle.” 


“Elianna!” The Nightwatch raised his voice uncharacteristically loud. 
“Look, | know this is stressful, but you can’t let it get to you.” 


“Mhm.” 
“Have you taken today’s pill?” 


No. “Yes. Don’t patronize me. You're my project lead, not my dad.” 
And a shoddy project lead, at that, she thought - he’d been running 
in circles in tiny independent circuits for a decade, never close toa 
contract from anyone noteworthy - nothing from CMLL, from NJPW, 
not even from the somewhat larger promotions in England that 
everyone seemed to graduate from. And of course, nothing, ever, 
from the WWE. Wolf was the only one in the team to have ever 
gotten a contract with them, and a great deal of good that'd done 
them for the whole three months he’d held it before blowing his 
cover. Panzer felt a twinge of jealousy, fueled by the knowledge that 
she would have done better - navigating the intricate maze of 
treachery and backstabbing, fending for herself, winning the 
Universal Championship. National television. Foundation honors. 


“You don’t have to get uppity with me. I’m your friend, and | worry 
about you.” It took all of Panzer’s meager self-control not to roll her 
eyes. “You have a two day break after tonight, right?” 


“Yeah.” 


“Relax. | need you to focus if we’re gonna be one man down for god 
knows how long. Just, relax after today.” 


“Thanks.” Fuck off and die. “See you.” Panzer closed the laptop. The 
small bottle of medicine on top of the desk rattled and glared at her 
with nagging insistence. Gingerly, Panzer fished out a pill, crammed 
itin her mouth and dry swallowed it. She gave a weak smile at the 
belt resting next to the computer, closed her eyes and vaguely 
remembered she had to do an autograph session just before she 
passed out. 


Vince McMahon Dies At The End 
« SCP-3144 | Hub | Two Falls Out Of Three 


Tales J 


so far is located at SCP-887 Log. Researchers are encouraged to 
add to it as more information is unraveled. 


« SCP-886 | SCP-887 | SCP-888 » 


It did not bother Thing Called Jack to see the universe end; Thing 
Called Jack had seen many such things, after all, floating and 
drifting as it did. Some would call it a god. Others would call it dust. 
But this isn't Jack's story to tell. Not yet. Not for a long time. 


return 


Jack of Clubs 


It all comes down to names, | think. | mean, if | had had a cool 
name, maybe | wouldn't be such a bad person. | blame Mom. She 
could have named us all something interesting. | mean, hell, she 
even took the name Echidna after she created the four of us. Mother 
of Monsters, but we always just called her Mom. Enough of a classic 
Greek education to choose Echidna, but name all four of your kids 
Jack? That's just re-cock-ulous.