There is a tremor and a terrifying metallic groan. | feel movement 
and | know my fate is now out of my hands. Be kind to me, my 
beloved. 


[T -9 days] 


It was my dad that spotted the problem first. He was the one who 
looked at what happened on the 2nd of November in the year 2000 
and realised the dream was dead, just like that. At the last church 
meeting he'd been given his instructions, where to go, what to take 
and what time His Awakening would happen. 


He came back from that meeting to find me, still just a kid, sat in 
front of the television. "Dad!" I'd said. "Look at this!" 


And he looked, and... have you ever seen someone's face at the 
moment their heart breaks? Just, forever and ever, something snaps 
in their mind and that's it, they're never going to be the same again? 
It was like, just for a moment, | was looking at a stranger. My dad, 
the friendly local butcher, he could never look so sad. Not my dad. 
Not my hero. 


| remember looking back at the television. On it were the faces of Bill 
Shepard, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. Humanity had just 
entered a new age. From now on we would have humans living in 
space. | looked back at my dad. His skin looked pale and clammy 
and his eyes, moist and afraid, were locked onto the screen. 


[T +8 days] 


Time has no meaning now. | find myself lost in thoughts and then | 
realise | have cut myself again. And again. And every cut has a new 
glistening turquiose thread growing from it, floating in the air around 
me, reaching out to find something — anything — to touch. | feel 
warm towards these threads because we share the same need, the 
same hunger, that desire to connect. 


| have been thinking about my escape plan more and more. | know 


that it probably leads to me getting trapped then suffocating. Or | 
burn. If | did it a million times then maybe on that millionth attempt 
my escape leads to you? 


There's nothing for me here. | have not slept in 8 days. Death will be 
the only sleep we can ever know. Because of you. | would rather 
embrace the fire than endure your absence another moment. | hope 
you understand. | love you. 


[T -7 days] 


| wish he was still with us. The thing he had realised, that no-one 
else in the church had realised, was that whilst we'd got this perfect 
plan to put everyone on Earth to sleep all at once and bring forth his 
Beloved majesty into our reality, not every human being was on 
Earth now. That by the time the church was actually ready to 
activate the Lucid Crown, humanity's presence in space would be 
permanent. 


| think sometimes it's better if you never have that sort of hope. 
Having it taken away is worse. But... I'm bringing that hope back, 
Dad, wherever you are! | wish you could see me. 


Anyway I'm writing this from Kazakhstan, they're keeping us pretty 
locked down at this point. Launch will be in a few days. 


[T +6 days] 


| found out what happened to Anatoly and Elizabeth today. | couldn't 
get into that module because | couldn't remember how the controls 
worked and... 


... well that's bullshit. | just didn't want to know. The stench alone 
was enough to know that what happened to them wasn't anything 
good. 


They've been fused together. It is the same material that's growing 
out of the cut in my arm. It had enveloped them completely. 
Glistening blueish green threads wind in and around and through 
their bodies and out towards the walls of the component, leaving the 
ruins of their bodies floating in the air. 


They look surprised to be dead. Have you punished them, my 
beloved? 


| am truly alone. The threads from my cuts seem drawn to the 
Anatoly/Elizabeth gestalt. It is a sign that | can't stay here. 


[T -5 days] 


So the church considered a few ways to solve this problem. The first 
one, the obvious one, was to build a rocket, fly up to the 
International Space Station, put them to sleep. The American Group 
were especially keen on this idea, they thought it'd be fun but when 
questioned none of them knew the first thing about rocketry or 
orbital mechanics. They refused to give up but no-one expected that 
project to deliver. 


The main avenue of attack, of course, was political. We'd had 
members inside political bodies around the world for decades and 
naturally politicians always hate spending money so our attempts to 
get the International Space Station defunded and burnt up in the 
Earth's atmosphere looked very promising. But no matter how much 
money we managed to rip out of NASA's budget, they kept 
sacrificing every program except the ISS. 


Which brings us to the third plan. The Long Game. 
[T +4 days] 


Please let me sleep. Just for a moment. My brain isn't working. | 

used to be a scientist, | think, with a head full of procedures and 

algorithms and equations and fancy words. 4 days without sleep, 
that's all it took to get rid of every bit of that. 


I'm seeing things. | thought | had something crawling under the skin 
in my arms. There are no knives here. There's nothing sharp. | 
found a box made of very thin aluminium, realised | could smash it 
and tear at it until | got myself a fragment with a jagged edge. 


| stabbed myself with it, to get at the thing under my skin and... 
something grew out of the hole. At first | didn't see it because when 
you bleed in microgravity it doesn't run down your arm, it jets out like 


you're squeezing a ketchup bottle. In the blood, though, was 
something else. A gossamer thread, like a nerve, and | knew: 


This is you. This is the proof you're here. 
[T -3 days] 


My dad came up with the idea of the Long Game and at first they 
dismissed it out of hand as absurd. Perhaps they just didn't want to 
face up to the reality that he'd realised the moment he laid his eyes 
on that television set and knew, in his heart, he wasn't going to live 
to see The Great Work fulfilled. 


lt would take a generation, he said. Maybe many generations. What 
we do, he said, is turn one of our sons or daughters into an 
astronaut and get them sent to the ISS. 


Find the best of us. The ones who can fly planes, who can do 
science, medicine, those who are peak physical and mental 
specimens. If we don't have anyone like that, he said, we raise 
someone like that. 


We've got to get one of our own on that station. 


And they hated the plan because they knew it was going to be 
years, maybe decades. The older ones, like my dad, they knew what 
it meant. 


And they knew there was no other way. 
[T +2 days] 


I'm running the CFE-2 experiment. | think. It's to find out how 
capillary flow works in micro-gravity. | send the results to mission 
control as normal but | haven't heard from them for 2 days. | still 
haven't heard from Anatoly or Elizabeth, but I'm operating on the 
assumption that they would contact me if they needed me. 


Furthermore, after 2 days of trying to sleep, I've started to accept 
that this state of sleeplessness may be permanent. The data 
correlates with the information in the church's book and | see no 
evidence that contradicts that. 


| can't go home. There is an escape route, of course. Back the way | 
came... but this is a complex procedure and the likely outcome 
without support from mission control is drifting forever or burning up. 
| fear it's already too late, | no longer remember the emergency 
procedure. 


I'm not really feeling myself here. It's not like normal sleep 
deprivation. I've gone without sleep for 72 hours before but, like, 
normally you have these micro-naps where you black out for a few 
seconds. That's... not happening. | was keeping a log of the 
symptoms but struggling to read the computer screen. | feel like I'm 
underwater. Everything's too bright, everything's too loud. 


| keep getting flashes of spiders everywhere, which is worrying. 
Hallucinations are a symptom of sleep deprivation but we didn't 
expect to experience side effects as a result of you being in our 
universe. 


You're in Europe at the moment. Every 90 minutes | fly over you and 
see your crimson magnificence and it's what's keeping me going. | 
love you. 


[T -1 day] 


We'll dock with the ISS in another day. Anatoly and Elizabeth are 
still excited about all the science they're going to be doing and I'm 
mentally calculating the actual probability of being here, right now, in 
this Soyuz module, having been shot into space on a hundred and 
sixty tonnes of propellant. | make it one in four hundred thousand, 
although obviously that's just an estimate. 


Training began two years ago. | learnt Russian. | learnt how to fly 
NASA's special jets. | had medical training. And, somehow, like a 
miracle, NASA's psychologists had never suspected a thing. They 
believed that | was this paragon of ability and virtue. They trusted 
me with one of the most difficult and challenging jobs a human could 
possibly do. That's who they think | am. 


In a way they're right, although my critical job isn't quite what they 
think it is. My real job is simple: put everyone on board the ISS to 
sleep at exactly fourteen hundred hours UTC. On Earth, meanwhile, 


although the original Lucid Crown had again been lost, a new one 
had been made, with new keepers ready to use it. 


They're all just waiting for me. Everything depends on me. Your wait 
is almost over, my Beloved. 


[Zero Day] 


| wake up to alarms blaring. In the dream | asked you, my beloved, 
to send me a piece of yourself. I'd been unable to smuggle 
one of the fragments with me, they're just far too strict for that, but 
fragments are easy to come by: one simply has to sleep and ask. 


The alarm was blaring, though, because the fragment had 
materialised inside the station and fired away from me at high 
speed, smashing straight into a window. Luckily the window 
survived. Anatoly is already dealing with a surface crack, cool as 
you like, but he's concerned about what caused it. | can hear the 
Russian mission control panicking so I'm reassuring them that 
everything is under control. 


| grab the fragment, the fragment of you, and tell Anatoly that | will 
investigate. He seems satisfied. | look at my watch and it's so close 
now. | float through the station and look down at the Earth. So calm. 
So peaceful. So imperfect. 


It's time. | take the fragment and place it against my forehead and | 
close my eyes. | can feel the fragment sending me straight under 
once again. As my consciousness begins to fade | can hear mission 
control worrying that all the crew seem to be losing consciousness 
too. 


| yawn. | giggle. Nothing can stop us now. Dad... Dad this is for you. 
We played the Long Game, Dad... and... we... 


...won. 


And sinking. 
And sinking. 
And sinking. 
And sinking. 
And sinking. 


And sinking. 


And... 


The Long Goodbye 


Previous: Hartliss Detective Agency 


proven inconclusive. 


SCP-965 will only appear when the relative lighting on the "outside" 
of the window falls below 5 candelas, regardless of lighting on the 
"inside." Such terms are possible because the face will only appear 
in a fully assembled window frame, though it does not need to be 
currently installed. Thus far, SCP-965 has not shown any ability to 
intentionally move from one glass pane to another, even within the 
same installation; it is only able to attain a new manifestation point 
upon the destruction of the current SCP-965-1, at which point its 
new habitat will be reclassified as SCP-965-1. The face is visible 
from the outside portion of SCP-965-1, but despite its two- 
dimensional nature it is described as "looking away, into the room." 


Initial effects caused by SCP-965 are reports of unease, 
nervousness and low-grade paranoia: these sensations will 
overcome anyone within visual range of the manifestation, even if 
obscured (such as by curtains.) Based upon reports pertaining to 
residents of the house where SCP-965 was discovered 
encountering problems sleeping, experiments were conducted using 
D-class personnel who were made to sleep in a chamber where 
SCP-965-1 was installed. An individual that is sleeping in any area 
visible to SCP-965 when it manifests will invariably have dreams of 
a disturbing nature, usually involving being chased, attacked, 
tormented, etc., though without physical contact within the dream. 


With repeated incidents involving the same subject, as few as three 
(3) but never more than ten (10) dream cycles before onset, 
SCP-965 will begin manifesting with a more explicit smile than 
normal; after this point, the subject will begin complaining of 
heartburn or abdominal pain, and often begin to vomit blood or have 
blood in bodily wastes. This is caused by the victim suffering ulcers 
and low-grade hemorrhaging throughout varied locations in their 
gastrointestinal tract. The current hypothesis as to the cause of 
these afflictions is SCP-965's influence artificially accelerating the 
body's reactions to elevated stress and fear levels. 


Subjects who advance to this stage have also reported continuing 
experiences of the facial manifestations in windows during dreams, 
as well as in peripheral vision while awake, even after being 
removed from the vicinity of SCP-965. Most suffer from low-grade 


—the hell am |? 


| yell: " 
Nothing. Not even the sound of my voice. At least, | don't think— 
—wait. Did | hear something? 


No. Just endless white void, as far as my eyes can see. It's like an 
ocean — or maybe a desert. There's no texture, no sound, not even 
the steady thud of my own heart. | try to look at my hands — can't 
see them, can't even fee/ them. It's like they're not there. | try to 
close my eyes, but | still see white. 


Am | dead? 


Think. I've got to think. | try coaxing up some memory, some thought 
of how | might have ended up in this miserable place. There was a 
room — right. A room, and an old woman, and her wheezing 
laughter, and then there was the grenade, and... 


...oh. 

Right. 

Shit. 

There was an explosion, and — without even thinking — | dove 
down through the veil to escape. As deep as | could. Deeper than | 
even knew was possible. And now, I'm... 

Shit. 

What the hell is this place? How many layers deep have | gone? | 
concentrate, focusing — searching for the invisible tether that 
connects me to my world. | wrap my consciousness around it — and 


start to pull. 


| drag myself out of this endless ocean of white — inch by 
excruciating inch. | feel myself press against the boundaries of this 


place. | feel myself pushing through them... 
...and then | feel something grab me. 


| can feel my limbs. My hands, my feet, my body — | still can't see 
them, but | can sense them. Something has me by my ankle. It's 
trying to pull me 'down' — deeper into the layers beneath this one. A 
level below whatever this... emptiness is. 


| pull with everything I've got. It feels like an anchor tied to my foot 
— my muscles spasm as a sharp stabbing pain lances up through 
my calf and knee. It feels like whatever's pulling on me might take 
my whole foot with it. 


If it means getting the hell out of here, it can have my foot. Hell, it 
can have the whole damn leg. | rear my other boot up and slam 
down, feeling the heel collide with... something. Suddenly, my ankle 
slips free. 


| reel myself up, squeezing against the membrane, pressing through 
it — 


— and into an apartment. 


Thick, plush brown carpet coats the floor. The walls are a hideous 
shade of peach-pink. The air is stale and old. | squeeze the pommel 
of my .45 and give the room a quick sweep, looking for anything out 
of place. Am | back? Is this Chicago? My Chicago? 


Everything looks ordinary: Table, desk, sunlight pouring in through a 
window. | take a step toward the light. 


Outside, | see a small corner diner; further in the distance, | see a 
hot-dog cart. | see sidewalks and lamp-posts, store-fronts and 
automobiles... 


...but not a single soul.