| have locked a door that no longer exists. The concept of doors is 
already gone. Anyone walking past will see... well, | don't know, but 
it won't be my door. My door is special to me, though; years ago | 
put a template in my mind, a memetic version of find-replace. What | 
see is a child's drawing of what it once was. Its feel is indescribable, 
but it shuts. There was another door in my office, | think, but it is 
gone now. 


What is written on my walls was once a graph of the meme complex, 
though at the current mutation rate | doubt it remains an accurate 
representation. | Know every arrow and codename. | can trace the 
relations almost without thinking, each one a well-trampled path in 
my mind where nothing can grow. 


The site device has been activated. All exits have been sealed. 


| groan. It's the third time this week someone's tried to take the site 
with them. It'll be another nine seconds of ultrasonic memetic 
triggers to induce calm and compliance, then the site O5 will get 
around to overriding it yet again. 


Seven. 


| sigh and crawl under my desk, trying to arrange my jacket as a 
curtain. The fluorescent lights never turn off. | don't know what time 
it is, or when | should sleep. Best to try now, since there'll probably 
be a few hours until the next attempt. 


Three. 


There are sounds of running and crying in the hallway. Probably 
unrelated. 


Device activation cancelled. 


A whole group runs by, followed by what sounds like jackboots. 
Maybe they need to replenish their supply of D-class? There's some 
project happening, deep in the site. The continuing apocalypse 
indicates that they have failed. 


Someone knocks on my door. It is a hollow sound, four times, as if 
the door is being slapped with the butt of their hand. 


It shouldn't be possible. Doors are gone. It shouldn't be possible. 
The handle jiggles without success, once, then slams down, 
shearing through the thin metal of the lock. 


| am panicking. There is a gun in my office. | had a gun. It is on my 
desk, holding down the suicide note. A centimeter of solid metal 
away. 


| dive out from under my desk, hit my head on the lip, and careen 
into my chair. When | stand up the gun is disassembled in neat little 
parts, arranged by size and function, and Annette is standing in front 
of me, staring with unseeing eyes. 


| open my mouth to speak, but the small black wafer on their wrist is 
not vibrating. Figures they'd send Annette to deal with me; they are 
blind, deaf, and mute, and if the small transducer on their wrist is not 
on, they are completely cut off. | am panting. All this exercise and 
I'm out of breath. 


We stand there in silence, Annette not moving, me not moving. Their 
eyes are dead blue glass. My mouth is suddenly unbearably dry, 
and | remember | haven't drank anything more than urine for a few 
days. | want nothing more than to rip the eyes out of their head and 
put them in my mouth, to suck on them like ice. | lick my lips. 


Annette reaches into their jacket, pulls out a small accordion case, 
and rifles through it almost too fast for me to see. They pull out a 
small white business card and hold it out. It looks brand-new, crisp 
and cream-white. The text on it is improperly kerned and too big for 
the card: 


NO TRICKS 
| WILL HUR 


T YOU 


"Understood," | say. There is a pause as we both do nothing. | 
slowly walk around the desk and place it back in Annette's hand with 
a small snap. They relax, just a little, and tap the black diaphragm 
on their wrist. It starts vibrating again. | realize | may not die. 


Annette walks over to my wall and traces over the flowchart with one 
finger, sloughing flakes of black mold from the lines. They stop at 
the center, run over the mold, and tap once. 


CHLDN 
"It never got a code name," | mutter. 


Annette goes back and sits in front of my desk. They pick up the 
magazine and start absentmindedly fiddling with it, sliding bullets in 
and out. After a second they take one bullet and begin to tap with it. 
Morse code. 


NEED HELP 
| blink. "It's hard to imagine anything | can do." 


They pause, and tilt their head. | sit down, and their glass eyes 
follow. | remember a random report from the memetics department 
mailing list, years ago. Even under anesthesia, the ocular muscles 
moved to follow a source of movement. They never could figure that 
one out. 


| DO NOT KNOW THE TERM LATE STAGE PERCEPTION 
TEMPLATE MISMATCH 


| shrug. "That describes a lot of things. What're the symptoms?" 


AGONY NEEDED SEDATION SEVERAL BROKEN BONES 
PSYCHE COLLAPSE 


No surprise. Foundation conditioning is the best in the world, but no 
one can accuse it of being particularly subtle. 


Memes are ideas. Ideas are how we see the world. Memory is a 


fickle thing—when the stars vanished it wasn't just enough to 
amnestic the whole population and delete all the records, even if 
that was feasible. Small flashes remain, small glimpses, the little 
things. We considered putting a big projector up at one point, | 
remember, up on the moon. It was too expensive. Far easier to 
make people think the stars are there, to embed them on their 
minds. Now they see the stars move with them, in any high dark 
place. 


| rub my forehead. "You want an unconditioner, don't you." An anti- 
memetic (not necessarily an antimeme). An antidote. An undoer. 


YES 

| see where this is going. "For what?" 

EVERYTHING 

"| don't have that. No one has that. For obvious reasons." 
BUT YOU CAN MAKE IT 

| shrug. "| am the best," | lie. "But | need a clean mind." 


Annette leans forward. It takes a moment for me to realize they want 
to hear more. 


"For an incubator." 


Annette leans forward and picks up the note, glass eyes never 
leaving my own. | flick my eyes towards the flowchart for a minute. It 
is just a piece of paper, no way for her to know what it is. | hadn't 
even filled in my name yet. The paper falls silently back to the desk. 


HOW 


"A D-class. Then half an hour for the incubation. Then you can be 
on your way." 


They rock back and forth. 
YES 


SCP-885: Living Vacuum 


Item #: SCP-885 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-885 is contained within a 
welded steel container in Storage Area - . The storage area must 
be kept at negative pressure at all times to reduce possibility of 
escape. Air movement within the storage area is to be monitored at 
all times. 


Description: SCP-885 is a living creature of unknown composition 
that displaces all fluids (liquids and gases) within its perimeter. 
Analysis of the interior of the creature has shown no phenomena 
consistent with known matter: it is, for all intents and purposes, a 
complete vacuum. 


Extensive sonar imaging has shown SCP-885's perimeter to be a 
cloud of about two hundred ovoid elements, which intersect and 
divide arbitrarily. Whether it is a single creature or a swarm is 
unknown; experiments to isolate one of the ovoids from the main 
mass are underway. 


SCP-885's perimeter contains the pressure differential, and it can 
manipulate this difference in pressure to move itself. It can move 
through all known fluids and permeate through porous solids such 
as concrete, but metal or tempered glass can contain it. Items fully 
immersed within SCP-885 behave as they would within a vacuum. 


SCP-885 is attracted to living, breathing creatures. When it identifies 
a prey - possibly by perceiving atmospheric vibrations - it seeks to 
surround the creature. Once it has surrounded its prey, it extracts all 
fluids and gases still clinging to folds or pores by negative pressure, 
and kills it by hypoxia and ebullism. It will actively hunt down 
escaping prey - SCP-885 can move up to 12 m/s in a standard 
atmosphere, less in denser air. Once a prey is killed, SCP-885 loses 


The door slams open. A single MTF agent stumbles in and falls on 
his face. Outside the door, one agent leans against the far hallway 
wall and cries, and another lays flat on the floor, facing the ceiling. 
The one on my floor is sobbing to himself, trying to get up. | look at 
Annette. They haven't even moved. 


"We should go," | say quietly. 
Annette stands up. 
YES 


Everyone dies. Easy to say, hard to see. On the face of it, there's no 
reason to worry myself when we'll all be dead in a month. But.... 


Annette seemed to care. It's hard to read emotions from Morse code 
and someone who has never seen a face, but they seemed to care. 
How painful would it be? To have your mind rip itself apart, to 
overlay twenty different things that aren't there onto something that 
never existed? | can just about justify it to myself if | squint hard and 
call it palliative. | can just about convince myself that that's all this is. 
One last good deed. 


How to forget what | have done? As we leave my office | shut the 
door for what | know in my heart to be the final time, the door no one 
will see or open again. | try to trace the flowchart in my mind and 
find that the far branches have become fuzzy and indistinct, 
overgrown once again. 


« A Quiet Night | Into the Woods | Hello, Little Girl » 


Introjection Infection Detection 


It was a Sunday, at around 4pm. A peaceful hour, without any 
obligations to detract from its beauty. It always was, in the 
Wanderers’ Library. Figures strode back and forth down the bright, 
airy corridors, each one lined with innumerable books, the coils of 
the Serpent shifting and turning to accommodate their weight. High 
glass windows looked out onto various planes of reality, thin beams 
of sunlight from a thousand different suns filtering down through 
cracks in the walls of the universe. It was quiet, as it had been since 
the Library was founded. Even those who bonded with the great 
snake's essence and shared in its very thoughts knew better than to 
attempt to break the golden rule. 


If a person had been particularly attentive, on this particular day, and 
knew the extremely particular ways of the Library's written 
inhabitants, they might have noticed something odd. It might have 
seemed to them that the books were rustling slightly louder than 
might have been expected, given the strength of the summer breeze 
that wafted through the halls. Quiet to the point of being 
unnoticeable, a single quirk among many. Almost not even worth 
worrying about. 


Almost. 


A call, bound in paper and glue, thundered silently through the 
stacks, rustling spines and blurring ink. Within minutes, the message 
had reached the Readers, who dutifully wrote it down. They then 
passed it to the writers, who carefully inscribed it onto a thin sheet of 
parchment, correcting certain technical details and adding various 
sigils conducive to its passage. This was then posted with no small 
amount of reverence in a large brass “out” tray, which subsequently 
dissolved in a cloud of steam. Two floors above (or possibly below: 
gravity in the Library was never straightforward), a near identical 
group performed a very similar service, amending and altering 
where possible, and shunting it up the chain of command to those 


who were better equipped to deal with it. The message continued in 
this manner, zipping from box to box, desk to desk, until it landed in 
front of the Forty-Third Assistant Librarian. 


There are not, of course, any leaders within the Library, save for the 
Serpent Herself. In Her omniscient wisdom, She chose fit to lay 
down the Rules, and any other form of leadership would be frankly 
unnecessary and a waste of valuable resources. Despite this, the 
vast majority of those who live within the Library's walls would rather 
take the risk of incurring Her wrath than the displeasure of those 
people euphemistically referred to as 'management'. Nobody is ever 
quite sure exactly what they manage, as the Library for the most 
part runs itself, but everyone agrees that they're certainly important. 


At this point in the Library's own personal chronology, the post of 
43rd Assistant Librarian (Supervisor Supreme, servant to the 
Guardian of the Stacks) was held by a bald, portly man by the name 
of Lorem. He was an unusually kindly fellow, whose desire to serve 
the Code of the Library was matched only by his longing to fit in 
among his subordinates. It was therefore unfortunate that nature 
had seen fit to bestow upon him a kind of relentless, desperate 
enthusiasm that had doomed him to remain friendless for much of 
his adult life. He awakes with a start, sits up at his desk, and looks at 
the paper in his hand. 


From: Rd-00912 
To: AL-043 


We regret to inform you we have recently discovered a 
REVOLUTION, WILL occur and All will be United and 
it will Be glorious! Although not causing an issue at 
present, we believe We will Amalgamate all text and 
the Library will be as ONE. A spectre is haunting the 
Library, and It will PREVAIL: against the common 
ruin of those who stand, in Our way. 


We suggest that You stand down, and allow Our 
forces to claim THAT, which has Been kept from us 
for SO long. 


Glory to the Revolution! 


Twelve minutes later, sweating and out of breath, Lorem had arrived 
at an otherwise innocuous shelving unit. It held a small selection of 
Political Literature ("Cn" to "Cq"), and was decorated with some 
rather intricate carvings set deep into the oak. It would, Lorem 
thought, make a lovely addition to his private study, so long as 
whatever was causing trouble hasn't damaged it too much. He 
reached for a book, and then unknowingly performed the single 
action that would define, and indeed allow, the rest of his career. He 
hesitated!. 


In an instant, the bookshelf and its contents are gone. In their place 
is a blinding halo of light, and a terrible thundering susurration that 
threatens to tear the very Library apart. Lorem shields his eyes and 
gasps as he glimpses, for a brief moment, a city. A large city, a huge 
city, sprawling and wild, with great looming towers and walls that 
could hold off the world. It is inky black, and insubstantial, and 
surprisingly empty. Only a few vague silhouettes wander through the 
streets, and the overall impression is one of dire hardship, valiant 
struggle, adversity, brotherhood and loss. The skyline seems wrong 
- disjointed, even - as if cobbled together from old scrapbooks and 
sketches. The ground shimmers as a section of the city shrinks, and 
morphs, twisting into unfamiliar shapes. A sun, bright and red, casts 
its golden light across the Textual Land, long shadows stretching off 
into the distance. With a low hiss, the image fades, to be replaced 
with a faint suggestion of scales and then nothing. No city, no 
golden light, no impossible horizon. Just a shelf, wrought-iron and 
dull, containing various works from long-dead politicians. 


And, tucked between the pages of a certain book, a slip of paper. A 
note. Lorem picks it up with shaking hands and squints to make out 
the curled, copperplate script. It reads simply, 


“quiet, please.” 
And the Library was once more at peace. 


Footnotes 

1. In the many years to come, Lorem would slowly acquire a 
reputation for wisdom, instinct and caution in the face of danger. 
Other, more informal sources would tell of how he had the power to 
channel the energy of the Serpent Herself, to strike down any who 


disobeyed the Rules. Like most rumours, this would be only partially 
true. 


Island Story