Pico pushed his hand into The Janitor's neck, running his hands 
down until he hit the base of the mask. It dutifully stayed immobile 
as Pico pulled the mask up, breaking the airtight seal, stretching the 
black rubber until the filter moved up and over its head. Just as the 
mask moved to expose a thin, pink-lipped mouth, The Janitor stood, 
kneeing Pico forcefully in the face; it turned and ran as Pico wiped 
blood from his freshly split lip. 


"Right. You're just the mask. Masks on masks on masks... fucking 
hell.” 


He stood up again, reclining into his body pile. He flipped out a 
phone from his pocket, tapping its screen absent-mindedly. 


"At this point, it's just... utterly devoid of impetus. Things are 
happening, but it's... there's nothing behind it. There's no depth; it's 
just all collapsed in on itself. There's too much going on. Time to 
make terrible decisions." 


To: brother 
16 hartford street come beat the shit out of me or 
whatever 


To: sculptor 
16 hartford street I'm all that's left 


To: the fuckwad brigade 
16 hartford street this is the snipper hello 


To: janitor 
shit's gonna hit the fan 


"It's not even worth it any more. Just finish it.” 


He threw his phone at the opposite wall, breaking it into pieces. Pico 
snuggled among his bodies, drifting into dreamless sleep. 


middle of one is a cancer recruited 
Middle of two is a cancer cured. 
Middle Of Three Is A Cancer's Core 
ALL ABOVE, A MADMAN BORED 
« Disposal And Discourse | Hub | Brotherhood » 


Brotherhood 


NOTE: This is Part 21 of the 23 part series, The Cool 
War. Reading this part first is a very bad idea and will 
spoil a lot of the story. 


From: Pico 
16 hartford street come beat the shit out of me or 
whatever 


Ruiz Duchamp stared at the message blankly. 
"Carol, can I-" 


Ruiz looked up; Carol wasn't behind the counter. Ruiz stood up, 
walking deliberately back to his studio. He paced past the foyer, 
entering the room filled with deathtraps. His brother had clearly 
turned self-destructive; the final phase of his antipsychotic 
withdrawal. Ruiz opened his medicine cabinet, moving his own 
antidepressants and multivitamins to the side, reaching to the back. 
He pulled out a small bottle of Clozapine, shoving it into his right 
pocket. He moved to his closet, grabbing a heavy brown bomber 
jacket. He pulled his elastic band pistol from an inner pocket, 
clenching it tightly in his left hand. 


Ruiz sent two texts, then sprinted to Pico's hideout. 
From: Snipper 
16 hartford street I'm all that's left 


The Sculptor sat and thought. Snipper was a reckless idiot, but on 
the other hand, he was an unpredictable one. Snipper had to be 
removed from the equation. 


The Sculptor turned to the wall of clay, rubbing his hands in 
anticipation. 


Agent Tangerine sprinted down the busy road. Every one of his 
contacts was gone. His cover was unrecoverable, his utility had 
become negligible. He'd be transferred for sure: back to paperwork, 
back to normal fieldwork, back to gunning down The Bad Guys... it 
was all so mind-numbingly simplistic. So boring. 


Tangerine saw the gallery in the distance. A few quick phone calls, it 
turned out, were all that he needed; Ruiz Duchamp's studio hadn't 
moved in years. Stupidity on their behalf for not doing that in the first 
place, but then, there was the assumed lack of carelessness on 
Duchamp's behalf. Tangerine kept running, dodging a man running 
in the other direction wearing a brown bomber jacket. He gripped his 
pistol in its holster tightly as he entered the foyer, turning to the help 
desk. Panting from the run, he blurted out the question: 


"Duchamp's studio?" 


The man behind the counter gestured further into the gallery. 
Tangerine turned and walked, slowing his breath. He looked around 
the corner, finding the room filled with blatant deathtraps. He tapped 
Green's number into his mobile phone. 


"Green, I'm at his studio now. Empty." 


"You stay there, we've got a new lead on the Snipper. Call me if 
anything happens." 


Tangerine's phone beeped as the call ended. He sighed, walking 
through the room, carelessly moving to sit on an available stool. 


Then he noticed the fedora sitting on the electric chair. 


From: [METADATA CORRUPT] 
16 hartford street this is the snipper hello 


"Alright, boys. We don't know what's going on, we don't know what 
this guy looks like, we are going into this as blind as a bat. A 
particularly blind bat. A blind and deaf bat, with self esteem issues." 


Green paused for effect, looking around at Mobile Task Force 


Upsilon-18. 


"Admittedly, we don't know he's in there. It is quite possible, and 
indeed, almost certain, that this is a trap of some kind. Yes, Alcorn?" 


Field Agent Alcorn put down his hand, moderately confused. 
"Why are we walking into a trap, sir?" 


"Excellent question, Alcorn, with a stupid answer: because we've no 
better course of action. We've might have the address of a 
maliciously artistic psychopath, and if he's been stupid enough to 
throw us a bone, then we can't not bite. Moving out in ten minutes, 
gentlemen; striking while the iron's hot." 


Alcorn begrudgingly trudged to the locker room. 


From: The Snipper (Pico Wilson) 
shit's gonna hit the fan 


The Janitor turned around, emitting a buzzing sigh through its gas 
mask. 


Ruiz finished jogging to the abandoned building. Decrepit and 
crumbling, errant piles of broken concrete littered the street in front 
of it. Four stories tall... on the outside, at least. Ruiz roughly forced a 
pick gun into the front door, pulled the trigger a few times, then 
twisted the handle open. He edged in slowly, closing the door 
behind him. 


"PICO!" 


Ruiz shouted out to the cavernous room. Cylindrical concrete pylons 
were distributed throughout; it looked like an industrial warehouse, 
despite sitting in a dilapidated residential neighbourhood. Ruiz 
listened to his own echoing voice, scanning behind the pillars for 
motion. 


"Shhhhhhhhh. Keep your voice down, brother." 


Ruiz twisted to his left, aiming at the sound's source down the 
wooden sights of his gun. Pico's distorted voice came from a small 
handheld radio; clearly modified from a children's walkie-talkie, 
given that it was pink with white flowers on. Ruiz picked it up, 
pushing the talk button in. 


"Pill delivery service, this is Ruiz speaking, how may | help you?" 
"I'm fine without them. They'd kill me." 


"No. No, that's definitely not a thing that's true. You are saying not 
true things, and are also stupid." 


"Allow me to clarify, then: | just consumed ten pills apiece of 
escitalopram and topiramate. | down a single clozapine pill, my heart 
will pretty much explode." 


"Fuck." 
"Anyway. Get up to the top level. Snip snip." 


Ruiz pocketed the radio, static still buzzing from its soeaker, and 
walked over to the rough concrete staircase. Cement powder 
spiralled from the ground with his every step, staining his shoes 
grey. He jogged up the stairs to the second floor, then the third, and 
finally reached the fourth. The final floor, unlike all the rest, was 
almost spotlessly clean. The ground, while still concrete, had been 
polished and shined to almost flawless levels of reflection. The 
pillars, while still cylindrical, rose and descended into decoratively 
carved ends, in effective mimicry of ancient Greek architecture. And 
then, sitting comfortably upon a pile of corpses, Pico Wilson stared 
apathetically at his brother. 


"Ruiz. Long time no see." 

Ruiz levelled his wooden gun at his brother's smirking face. 
"Pico. Why'd you kill him?" 

Pico reached into the pile, pulling out an errant hand. 


"This guy?" 


"You know who | mean." 
"What, so you don't care why | killed this guy?" 
"No." 


"No love at all for Donovan Stilward? You don't want to know why? 
Really?" 


"| don't think there was a reason." 

"He kidnapped, raped, and killed three children." 
"...what?" 

"You heard me." 

"You're lying. You're an indiscriminate murderer." 


"| never lie, brother. Only art lies, and it's a lie that makes us realize 
the truth. And the truth is this: the only truth is in art’s lies." 


"Stop it. Why did you kill The Critic?" 
"Do | need a reason?" 
"Tell me why." 


"So, just to clarify, you think that | killed the big man for a reason, 
but not good old kiddie-fucking Donovan Stilward?" 


Pico waved the corpse's hand for emphasis. 


"Ruiz, your problem is the same as mine: incoherence. Well, that 
and a drastically exaggerated sense of self-importance. Not 
everything happens for a reason, brother." 


Pico jumped off his pile and started walking towards Ruiz, 
gesticulating wildly, Ruiz never taking the aim of his gun from his 
brother's head. 


"See, the only difference between you and me, Ruiz, is | don't lie 
about it. You want to know why | killed Critic? You think it had 


anything to do with you at all? No, brother, no. Nothing of the sort. 
As much as you would like to be, brother, you are not the prime 
mover here, and it's getting under your skin." 


Pico flipped a butterfly knife from his pocket and started to play with 
it. Ruiz steeled his expression. 


"Sometimes, Ruiz, things just... happen. And it's not because of any 
reason, or any cause. People like to pretend there was a cause, 
right? They like to pretend that there's always a reason. They like to 
pretend that there was something that could have been done, and 
think about all of the little things that would have made it turn out any 
other way. And they sit there tossing and turning, trying to reverse- 
engineer the world, as though finding a solution would retroactively 
change things. But it doesn't matter. Those are things that have 
already happened, and thinking about it wastes more time, more 
things will keep happening, and then it all just fizzles away into 
meaninglessly masturbatory hypotheticals." 


Pico took the knife and ran it across his chin, scraping errant facial 
hairs without cutting his skin. 


"Sometimes, Ruiz, things just... | don't know how to say. Perhaps | 
would call it... ‘reversion’. Sometimes things revert, have you 
noticed? It's as though we were living on the edge of a coin. A knife, 
even. Sometimes things revert and the world feels horribly different. 
Can you feel it? You've felt it, haven't you?" 


Ruiz continued staring down his gun. Pico, having scraped his chin 
free of hair, started making incisions on the back of his hand. 


"We're doing the same thing, always. Alluding to change, but it's not 
real. It's all static, it's fake, it's FAKE! Don't you see, brother? We're 
just playing at... at being gods. What do gods do when they live 
forever? I'll tell you, brother. They just keep hammering each other 
on the back. They tell each other that there is meaning, when it's all 
just easily coined bullshit. And, if they're lucky, brother, some gods 
even get to forget. There's only one truth, Ruiz. Do you get me?" 


"You're insane." 


Result: SCP-726 separated sample into two portions and 
reconstructed nearly the same two copies, one with a red right eye. 


Sample: remains of least divergent duplicate rat, processed into fine 
paste. 
Result: rat reconstituted with slight limp, blind in both eyes. 


Sample: heart from blind rat. 
Result: reconstituted without eyes or pigmentation. Squeaks 
incessantly. 


Sample: heart from eyeless rat, cut in half. 

Result: two eyeless rats. One only walks in tight circles, other 
completely devoid of hair and unusually aggressive towards the first. 
Note: The insect behavior appears to be degrading with the 


physiology. 


Sample: scrap of flesh from hairless rat. 
Result: eyeless, hairless and limbless. Fails to return fully to life. 
Braincase found to contain a liver. 


Sample: liver from "brainless" rat. 

Result: eyeless, hairless and limbless with elongated "worm-like" 
midsection, nodules scattered throughout body appear to be 
incomplete eyes. Drastic increase in aggression, eventually begins 
to consume its own posterior end and expires from blood loss. 


Sample: fresh, complete remains from previous rat. 
Result: large, formless mass of tissues and viscera, trembles until 
extinguished. 


Sample: portion of previous result. 
Result: large, slug-like, motile mass of undifferentiated cells. 
Appears to absorb nutrients through skin. 


Sample: portion of previous result. 

Result: identical to previous test. 

Note: This continued for four additional tests with no divergence. 
I've decided to keep the final "slug" for long-term observation. I'm 
calling him Brundle. 


"No, I'm incoherent, there's a difference. Sanity is arbitrary, brother. 
The consensus of stupid people." 


"WHY DID YOU KILL THE CRITIC?" 
"| guess... because... | could?" 


Ruiz pulled the trigger, sending a supersonic elastic band into his 
brother's chest. Pico fell, winded. 


"TELL ME!" 

"You really want to know?" 

"YES!" 

"Look behind you." 

Ruiz spun in place, then saw his eyes reflected in the dark glass of 
The Janitor's mask. 

"This still feels like a stupid idea, sir." 


Field Agent Alcorn was sitting across from Agent Green inside of the 
white, unmarked Foundation van. The nine-man squad (with the 
addition of Green) was awkwardly squeezed in just one vehicle. 
Every turn pushed or pulled the agents around the vehicle as the 
hurtled towards 16 Hartford Street. 


"You know you're disposable, don't you Alcorn?" 
Alcorn frowned angrily at Green, who appraised him apathetically. 


"Don't take that personally. I'm disposable too. We're paid to be 
disposable. If you weren't, you wouldn't be in the field." 


Green rubbed the ridge of his nose, then continued. 


"There are numerous methodologies that would be safer. We could 
have brought more personnel. We could have gotten some snipers, 
we could have tried to lock the place down. Those would cost more, 


in exchange for lower risk. But we are disposable. And as much as 
we like to pretend otherwise, the men in suits aren't made of 
money." 


Green leaned over and spoke into Alcorn's ear. 


"As bad as it sounds, Alcorn, we are going with the stupidest idea 
because it is the cheapest." 


The van screeched to a halt. Green unholstered his pistol; Alcorn 
gripped his rifle, then pushed open the van's back door, covering his 
squad as they moved to the entrance. Green sprinted to the 
entrance, then scanned the pillars inside. He entered, pistol still 
aimed at eye-level, scanning corners as the members of Upsilon 18 
slowly fanned inside. 


Ruiz stared at The Janitor, stunned like a deer in the headlights. 
Pico slowly got to his feet, laughing lightly. 


"There you are, you beautiful thing. Over here." 


The Janitor turned, making its way over to The Snipper. It kneeled in 
front of him; Pico patted it softly on the head. Ruiz was stunned into 
silence. 


"See, The Janitor here's basically... well, ‘god’ is a bit much. 
Demigod, do you think?" 


The Janitor raised its face up to its master. 
"lam not divine." 


"Oh, but you are divine, my dear, you are. What do you think, Ruiz? 
I'm not sure what we'll do for a wedding dress; white on black would 
be fantastic, though." 


Ruiz recovered, again returning his aim to The Snipper's head. Pico 
simply laughed. 


"You're threatening me with elastic bands, Ruiz. You're threatening 
me with stationary." 


"Why?" 
"Why what?" 
"Why do any of this? What's your endgame?" 


"Why do you think there's an endgame? Hell, what was yours? Kill 
the Critic, then what?" 


"Things would change." 


"Nothing ever changes. Even now, nothing's changed. Everyone just 
changed places, but it's all the same. They're playing a game of 
musical chairs, you stopped the music, but forgot to remove a seat." 


"You're wrong. | cut him out, | sliced him out like a cancer. His side- 
jobs had replacements, but | don't care about them. There is no 
Critic."