tore away what was lying on top of it and exposed what was really 
there all along. Men took it and refined it and made it into a shell, 
and inside it they packed explosives, and propellant, and a fuse and 
a primer. This was during the War, the war when they harnessed the 
power of the sun and the Foundation had to sit back and watch as it 
became part of the world everyone thought they lived in. This wasn't 
a nuclear bomb, of course, it was just an artillery shell. They had 
loaded it into a truck and driven it to Salisbury Plain, where 
thousands of men prepared for the invasion of Normandy. Hundreds 
of shells used in target practice. But this shell, it didn't detonate, did 
it? It lodged in the ground, and every time the rain fell it sank deeper 
and deeper, until no-one knew it existed at all. But it wasn't a dud—it 
just didn't go off, a faulty connection in the proximity fuse. It's lain 
here all these years, the charge in its electrolytes seeping away but 
never quite running dry, waiting for the direct pressure that will 
connect its battery plates one last time. And it's—here! It's under 
that tiny raised patch of ground twenty metres, fifteen metres away, 
rushing towards you, longing for this moment, when it gets to fulfil its 
purpose at long last. 


Ten metres. His breath scorched his lungs, aerobic respiration a 
dimly-remembered legend. Five metres. He forced strength into his 
legs, and jumped over the clump that might have been an ant hill, or 
might have been the ensign of something buried there—like a child 
jumps over the patch of floor they imagine is a crocodile, like an 
obsessive-compulsive jumps over the cracked slabs on the 
pavement because they remember the old rhyme. His right leg 
landed first, and his knee gave out under him, and his run went 
three-quarters horizontal, a sprawling scrabbling crawl on all fours, 
desperately, trying to get away, get away, get away from the blast... 


Behind him, as he stumbled, he heard the tulpa accelerate, feet 
hitting the ground impossibly fast. Keagan dropped, hands clutched 
over his ears. 


The detonation pressed him into the ground, tore at him with sharp 
metal fragments, took his senses, filled his mouth with blood and 
grit. He hovered in the space between waking and 
unconsciousness, unsure for a moment if he had really experienced 
what had just happened, doubting everything. He looked back, 


expecting to see something thin and wraithlike taking shape in the 
air, but he saw nothing except the sunlight shining on the muddy 
crater that had replaced the little grassy dome. Thank you, he said 
to the bomb. Thank you for waiting for me. Everything was growing 
watery and hard to see. He could hear someone talking to him, and 
he thought, he'll pop out of thin air any moment, he's been here this 
whole time and | haven't been able to focus, and then he realised it 
was the little voice, talking to him now in quite a conversational tone 
as the world around him disappeared. This is what it said: 


OK, I'm going to make this as easy for you as | can. This is 
something you need to face up to, and frankly there doesn't seem a 
better time, since right now I have a captive audience and there 
might not be a later. I'm going to tell you a story of my own. 


Before | try and break the news to you, | should stress it was a pretty 
desperate situation. You, and by you | mean me and you, us, but 
mostly me, had spent every last pence and cadged and stole more 
off friends and family and spent that too, and borrowed more—lots 
more—from a guy and spent that too. Mostly poker—some horses— 
and I'd tell you there were no Class As involved (and | don't mean 
amnesiacs, though the effect was much the same) but that would be 
a lie too. The guy—you probably wouldn't remember his name— 
started getting pretty lousy when he realised that any extra money 
you had coming in was going right back onto the tables and into the 
bookies. | mean, you tried to explain that you were due a big win, 
right, but he wasn't impressed by that. Incidentally, one thing you 
never really got into was darts, which is ironic really, considering 
how this all turned out. 


This is how it went. You got picked up outside a pretty seedy poker 
club and taken back to his place. Over the Thames. That was pretty 
much its standout feature. He says, pay up. You mention you just 
got cleaned out, for—what?—the twelfth, thirteenth time? Christ, he 
says, I've never known anyone have worse luck. Then he gets a 
look in his eye. He calls over these two goons, fresh meat, probably 
trying to get their start in the sharking business. One of them has 
this straight, black, slicked back hair and picks his fingernails with a 
pocketknife he keeps in his jacket and the other smokes rollups and 


has shit tattooed on his knuckles, as in, just the word 'SHIT' (say, 
here's one—what's brown and steaming and comes out of cows? 
Shit! ... Nothing?). He says to you, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm 
gonna give you a fighting chance just in case you pull yourself 
together and manage to pay me back in the future. A short sharp 
shock. | see you again after this and you don't have my cash, I'm 
gonna have Theo here open your throat. He tells them, throw this 
brown shit out of the window. 


Well, it was about two o'clock in the morning and the Thames is 
fucking cold at that time of night. Even you must remember that. The 
shock nearly kills you, and the stench almost finishes you off. You 
get swept along until you find somewhere to claw your way out—the 
bricks come away when you grab at them and by the time you've 
dragged yourself onto dry land it feels like you've torn down half the 
Thames barrier. You get out, shivering like a kicked dog—that 
wasn't your classiest moment, by the way—and shamble along the 
towpath for a while. Then you come face to face with—well, you. 
He's walking in the opposite direction, probably couldn't sleep, off for 
a walk along the riverside. It's like looking in a fucking mirror. | 
mean, spooky alike. He's just as shocked as you are, probably more 
so—you're the one soaking wet, staggering along like the walking 
dead. 


He (you) calms down a bit, and says ‘nice night for it’, which was a 
really fucking stupid thing to say. It's informed my impression of you 
(strange how the word has two meanings like that) ever since. Well, 
you (we) don't say anything back—we're looking at him and his nice 
coat and his nice shoes and we think—he has a life, doesn't he, he 
hasn't screwed everything up like you (we) have. And you realise 
you have a half-brick in your hand from the side of the Thames, 
you've literally been carrying the thing along with you for the past 
half-mile without realising. You don't even question the amazing 
coincidence, the way that you just won the National Lottery after 
years of losing, the way he just pops up the second it finally matters 
in some ultimate, real way. And you (we, |) hit him (you) over the 
head with the brick. Again, and again. He doesn't say anything, he 
just goes down to his knees, trying to put his hands in the way, then 
when those get beaten to a pulp the fight goes out of him and he 
falls over, and you continue hitting him until there's nothing there 


anymore. 


You take his wallet and you see his name. | think you've probably 
worked it out by now. I'm sorry, I'm really sorry. I'm your god and I'm 
a fucking loser. | stripped your clothes off and put them on, and | put 
my clothes on you and kicked you into the Thames. They found me 
(you) a mile or so downriver the next day and | was declared dead. | 
knew | couldn't just go on the way | had been, of course, so | made 
you. My tulpa, my simulacrum of how a stranger might act, based on 
the fleeting moment before | smashed his brains in and took his life. 
| put you in the driving seat, except when it really mattered. You 
didn't have much family, as far as | could see, not many friends. | cut 
myself off from them and made a few new ones, like Lauren. You 
wrote your damn passwords and PIN numbers down on a piece of 
paper and put them in your sock drawer. It was really easy. It was 
really, really fucking easy. I'm sorry. 


What are you sorry for? 


Jesus Christ, you stupid son of a bitch. | killed you. You're not real. 
You're dead. You've been dead for about four and a half years. 
You're a simulation | created. You don't believe me? When did you 
start suffering from the violent moods, the change blindness? And 
the lying. You can't lie because you are a lie. It would be just too 
many levels of metafiction. 


I'm pretty sure I'm not dead. For starters, | can feel the soil I'm 
currently plumped face-down on. That feels pretty real, and not very 
comfortable, actually. 


No, you idiot, you're not getting me. 


| reckon | get you just fine. Who, exactly, did they find in the river 
again? Whose name was on the death certificate? 


It doesn't matter. 


Really? Now, here's a poser. Whose past did 554 erase? That's an 
interesting one, isn't it? Let Professor Reeds chew that one over. 


You don't know. It might have erased me too. Personal 


identification. Hypothesis-A. The experiment was inconclusive. 
We could find out. Look you up. What's your name? 
My name? 


Your name, you piece of shit. If you're alive, and I'm dead, you must 
have a name. I'm Keagan O'Neill. Who the hell are you? 


My name? 


Now fuck off. 


He wakes up briefly to see three armoured trucks idling around him, 
upwards of twenty black-helmets disembarking and aiming sub- 
machineguns. Ah, he thinks, with a sort of dreamy certainty, so 
that's where you keep popping out from. 


They keep shouting ‘Clear!’ as they get closer, which he decides 
doesn't sound very helpful, like someone who insists something is 
perfectly self-evident without bothering to explain themselves. They 
swell in his vision until the blackness of their visors overwhelms him 
and he falls into unconsciousness. 


Chapter Fifteen: "Gunning for the Buddha" 


Edward rose, made his bed, and wandered through into the staff 
living quarters. There were a few other 'boarders' at the Sector-25 
facility, mostly through choice; people who couldn't give any more of 
their lives to the Foundation without actually living and sleeping 
there, so they did; others stayed at secure residential sites in the 
surrounding area, carefully shielded from the outside world. Edward 
was the only one effectively in protective custody; it had taken them 
a while to actually agree that he held a formal title within the 
Foundation (strictly speaking, he was a Junior Researcher) and his 
status still seemed fairly fluid, hopping from department to 
department, part-time psychiatrist (ne had just about completed an 
undergraduate degree in Philosophy, which sector management 
apparently considered close enough), part-time computer 


troubleshooter, part-time consultant on the Group of Interest that 
called itself Marshall, Carter & Dark. 


Edward wandered over to the coffee machine and fiddled with the 
dials, frowning. then felt around behind the back. The LED display 
resolutely refused to come on. 


"I've tried all that," said a ferret-faced young researcher called 
Mames. "It's completely busted." 


Edward turned and blinked. "This is literally the earliest | have ever 
seen you up.” 


"I'm surprised you slept through it," Mames said. "There's been 
some excitement." 


‘Some excitement,’ in Sector-25, could mean anything between 'new 
tub of Ovaltine' to ‘microscopic Germans from an alternate timeline 
have just nuked the break room’. 


"Oh. What's happened, exactly?" Edward gave up on the espresso 
machine and fished around in the cupboard for the French press. 


"There was an explosion out on the SPTA, a quarter mile out." 


Edward raised an eyebrow to suggest this was hardly an unusual 
occurrence on a live-fire training ground. 


"No, no, listen, they found a guy near the crater, covered in blood, 
most of it someone else's." 


"And we got involved why? Sounds like a case for the British Army." 


"It was the underpants. Apparently we get them off the books from a 
domestic supplier in South Korea; officially they've failed quality 
control and been incinerated. Very peculiar stitching up the centre, 
not very comfortable for, er, bigger people. Anyway, they don't sell 
them over here. But we do issue them to D-Class. Also, his hands 
were frostbitten, which all just seemed a bit too weird to leave to the 
squaddies." 


"| see. So, we took him in?" 


"Put him up in the medical wing until he regained consciousness. 
He's claiming to have been D-Class in this facility a couple of 
months back, only he doesn't have the tattoos, we don't have any 
record of him under the name he's given and, well, a couple of 
months, right?" 


Edward nodded, slowly. Mames continued: 


"So they take him to Conference Room 2, which is when | get up to 
see what all the fuss is about. At first he wants to speak to 554-2, 
but of course she's never heard of him either, and it turns out he 
means the /ast 554-2, which was kinda sad. Then he starts on about 
talking to Skinner, which really raises everyone's blood pressure.” 


"| can imagine," Edward said. He had left the coffee and the packet 
of bagels he'd been fiddling with on the side, and walked over to the 
chair. "And let me guess, he mentioned Dr Barker, only Dr Barker 
can't remember him, though that's pretty convenient if he says he 
was here while Skinner was in charge?" 


"Yeah. How did you know?" 


Edward sighed. "I have a horrible idea my quiet half-morning has 
just gone up in smoke. What was his name?" 


"Erm, oh damn, it's on the tip of my tongue. Er, ah, something Irish, 
which you wouldn't think to look at him, since he's a—hey, wait up?" 


"Keagan," Edward shouted back as he strode along the corridors, 
following the orange lines towards the Conference Rooms. "Keagan 
O' sodding Neil." 


He pushed open the door to Conference Room 1 a second or two 
before he remembered he wasn't dressed yet. Too late now, of 
course. 


"| know who he is." 


The man at the far end of the table from a cluster of Sector-25's 
most distinguished professionals and interrogators looked up, and 
beamed widely. 


"Edward—Gardley? Gradley, that was it! | should have asked for 
you. Immune to memory wiping! Give that man a fucking promotion." 


Professor Gelding adjusted his spectacles and stared at Edward. 
"Edward, you can confirm this man's story about being D-Class?" 


Edward stood still for a moment, Keagan looking on expectantly. 
Come on, Edward, think on your feet, you used to do this for a living 
in the City. You've just walked into an interrogation of a man who, 
the last time you saw him, was about to be irrevocably disappeared 
by a Euclid-class skip after confessing to cross-contamination with a 
Keter-class reality-warper who lives in a hermetically-sealed steel 
cube. Assuming, of course, this is the actual Keagan O'Neill and not 
something that looks and sounds a lot like him and has all his 
memories—which, let's face it, happens more often than it should, in 
this line of work—you sort of have an obligation to try and ensure he 
doesn't get vivisected, at least before he actually tells us what led up 
to his being covered in someone else's blood, staggering towards 
the facility over a field full of unexploded ordnance. So, please 
maestro, let's have your best quality not-quite-lie here: