"This may come as something of a surprise to you, Doctor, but this 
isn't my first temporal anomaly," Thad said, watching carefully. 
Waiting for an excuse to call security or kick him out or something. 
Anything. Some manner of clue that he'd seen something he 
shouldn't or knew something he couldn't but something about the 
bags under Dr. Piedmont's eyes said there wasn't much fitting that 
description. 


"Don't | know it!" Piedmont finally said. "This whole office... Well... | 


guess you'll figure it out, soon enough." 


"Pardon me, sir. But is there anything at all you have for me apart 
from cryptic references to future events?" Thad's patience was at an 
end. 


".,.Only that the 'Esoteric Containment' department is your friend. 
And if you find yourself in need of any...let's say pertinent 
information... Well, you've shaken the right hands." Dr. Piedmont 
winked and left a card on Thad's desk, and left. "Good Afternoon. 
Glad we could meet. Again." 


Dr. Xyank looked at the card for all of forty-five seconds before he 
decided ‘what the hell’ and picked it up. 


Dr. Lowell Henry Piedmont 


Ethics Committee / L-3 


Ex. 8-065-92 
"...Oh Goddammit." 


The rest of the afternoon was blissfully uneventful. Quiet calculation, 
a good tasty and nutritious meal followed soon thereafter by a 
relieving and cleansing bowel movement, some postulation and 
speculation and one or two calls to Attie and Marcus to see how 
they were progressing. His own tachyon field detection project was 
about to make the 442/a reality. Six dozen years early, too. And it 
was as he looked at the whiteboard proving it could be done, head 
propped up on one hand, and wondered how it was possible to 
invent something before it was invented, that a knock came at the 
door. 


Quickly, Thad pulled a projector screen down in front of his notes. 
"Door's open." 


Around the jam and into the room came one Agent Bertrand Tomlin, 
looking awfully dapper in a bowler hat with a handlebar mustache, 


believed to be the entrance of the site. Corporal H was ordered to 
remain outside and to monitor URV-1 in order to ensure that the 
device's tether did not become tangled on the exterior protrusions. 


The first sign of trouble occured when Corporal H, while attempting 
to clear a jam in URV-1's sampling claw, reported in with the words, 
"Oh god, help me, help me." He then reported that "some horrible 
tentacle thing" had wrapped around his arm and was dragging him 
in towards a "fucking mouth," and vocalized several distress calls... 
Jesus Christ. | can't do this. Fucking... goddamn it, he was just a 
kid! It was his first fucking mission, | should have kept my eye on 
him!1 


Christ... all right, here goes, guess I'll just let Sarge edit this for me. 
Again. 


So the thing grabbed the kid. It had me fooled to rights. The 
entrance wasn't an entrance, it was just... some cave. The real 
entrance was the big polyp thing on the north end. It grabbed the kid 
and started dragging him towards the mouth. Topside started to 
drag him up, but all they got was a snapped cable. And the kid? He 
got pulled inside and eaten. 


God, | still remember him screaming. He was screaming at us, he 
was crying. "Oh God, Lieutenant, it's eating me, oh god, | don't 
wanna die!" I'm shouting at him to calm down, we're gonna get him 
out of there, and then topside tells us to abort, and they start the 
winches. I'm screaming at them to wait, | had his hand! | HAD him! | 
got the carabiner on, we're hooked together, and topside starts 
winching us up... and we're not getting anywhere. I'm grabbing on, 
I'm telling him I'm not gonna let go, and then the winch starts to 
seize up, and | feel this jerk on the tether and it goes slack, and then 
we're both sliding into that damn thing.2 


It was like... Jesus, | need another drink... fuck. It was like... the 
only way | can think of it was like you know that thing that doctors do 
when they stick a tube up someone's ass and look at the inside of 
their intestines? | saw that on TV once, it was like that, except | was 
going down the throat of some horrible underwater hell-monster, not 
up some poor bastard's rear. There were these... muscular 
contractions, | guess, and they were slowly sliding us down the 


muttonchops and brown tweed jacket. He peeled the facial hair off 
and spat some stray fibers from his lips. "Sorry I'm late. Missed the 
drop by nearly half an hour." 


Before Xyank could mention that it was just as well and he had quite 
a busy morning regardless, a magazine was dropped on the desk, in 
mint condition although the date of publication said clearly "1892" 
right there on the plain blue cover. Just beneath the white text: 
Foundation. "Would you mind telling me what the hell your name is 
doing in this journal?" 


"What?!" Thad grabbed it up and flipped to the contents page. Sure 
enough, there he was. And Athena's name, too. "This really doesn't 
seem like me. Why in hell would | publish findings that haven't been 
found yet?" 


"| was hoping you could tell me." Tomlin said, pulling his collar apart 
and kicking off his ill-fitting shoes. "Now that you've...Wait, you said 
it hasn't be found yet?" 


Thad looked at Tomlin's stupid face in manner that made it clear 
how stupid that face was. 


"Don't you look at me like that, Thad. Don't you dare look at me like 
that. | have been holding your hand for five years of my life, trying to 
get you caught up with yourse/f and I'm going to damn well tell one 
of you about it!" He slammed the chair onto the ground, and sat in it, 
staring at the Doctor as he purposefully mussed the pomade out of 
his hair. "You told me time travel was invented today. You told me 
this, from my perspective, thirty-seven hours, fourteen minutes 
and... seventeen seconds ago. Factor in that 18.47 hours of that 
was on May ist, 1892 CE. What does your model say?" 


Thad picked up a red pen to write it out and Bertrand knocked it out 
of his hands. 


"Just. Calculate." 


".,.August 19th twenty... no...forty-sev... Yegods! There's no way 
that's right!" 


Tomlin's eyebrows kissed the ceiling as his arms and legs crossed, 
mouth drawn in a tight frown. "I'm going to be honest with you, Thad. 
| don't even remember meeting you anymore. How old | was or how 
old I'm supposed to be or which Causal String is fucking which. 
Now, I'm tired. I'm achy. | smell like dog piss, horses, and rail-yards. 
Something has fucked our shit up royally. Either we've gone too 
deep or not deep enough, and | need to know from you, right now, at 
the very least, that Time travel was invented today!" 


The phone rang, and Xyank picked it up. "Thad Xyank..." 
"Dr. Xyank, it's Athena Anastasakos. Can you-" 


Thad's fingers flew across the keys as his face lit up. "You're not 
serious?" 


"We got the last board in view. It's so simple I'm embarrassed we 
didn't think of it ourselves. The device employs a novel enzyme. 
Dissolve it in water, and it acts as a superfluid at room temperature. 
All you need to do is shake it and the motion of the molecules 
actually causes a /uminous bloom! Relativistic motion in a test tube! 
At room temp!" 


Thaddeus, as though he'd seen a ghost, glanced at the title of the 
paper he had not yet written. "And we can reproduce it?" 


"With a goddamn high-school chemistry set! Erm. Pardon my 
language," she replied. 


Burt Tomlin, just barely able to hear it breathed a sigh of relief, 
finally allowing himself to relax. 


"Okay. First thing tomorrow morning you and | are writing a paper. 
And then we're going to test it." 


"But Doctor, we're months away from a safe, functional prototype!" 
she protested. 


"| understand, but right now | know of at least twenty seven open 

loops that need closing and if | find any more there's no way we'll be 
able to keep track of..." A light bulb turned on in his head. "...Check 
that. Let's talk more about this tomorrow. Something's just come up." 


Thad slammed the receiver down and spun in his chair, raising the 
projector's screen so that Tomlin could see it. "Does any of this look 
familiar to you, Burt?" 


"Yeah, that's a Temp Ex, for TVM." 


Thad frowned and rubbed his nose. "Burt... for the love of whatever 
god you wish, hold my hand for just five minutes longer and repeat 
what you've just said in English, please." 


Tomlin rolled his eyes and sat back. "Fine. It's a Temporal 
Expression." 


Xyank's blank, wanting stare bid him to continue 


"... Temporal Expressions are a memetic/info-nomalous method of 
temporal displacement, allowing any event boundary to serve as 
both horizon and vehicle to the chosen destination. This one 
resolves to 'TVM', or, 'This Very Moment." Tomlin checked the 
board. He grabbed paper and jotted the expression from memory. 
Then pulled a watch from his pocket and studied it closely. "Yeah... 
it's a little archaic, but that's definitely a Temp Ex. | thought you said 
you hadn't invented it yet." 


The Doctor smiled. "Apparently, | have." 


Thaddeus Xyank cleared his throat half-heartedly as he looked at 
his own office window and slipped the package inside. Had it really 
only been a few months since all of this had seemed so hopeless? 
He considered for a moment opening the door and stepping inside, 
patting himself on the back, giving him the pep-talk in person as 
living proof that one day, one day very soon, all the work would pay 
Ofls2 


But he already had not. And so he did not. 


Instead, the good Doctor Xyank pulled a pad of paper from his 
pocket, and jotted down a quick equation. He walked slowly past 
stock-still bodies of friends and colleagues, through all of the rats 
stuck stubbornly in the maze of causality, to the door at the end of 


the hall where Eternity awaited him with arms thrown wide. 


Part Two: The Deep End | Part Four: Exit History 


Ethical? 


"State your name for the record, please." The voice echoed through 
the vast space, amplified by the microphone. 


"Um, Dr., um, Dr. Robert Feldon, sir," he said into the microphone 
timidly. It was the first time he could ever recall being timid. Usually, 
he was the one with the booming voice, echoing out from on high in 
a dark room. 


Of course, this room was hardly dark, in fact it was illuminated as 
well as or better than some of the rooms in the facility Feldon had 
worked at before the Masquerade failed. And the man, or rather 

men and women, accusing him were only slightly higher than him. 


He observed the group before him carefully, looking, as he had in 
the past, for weaknesses, for fears, for anything he could use to his 
advantage. 


They stared back with the same expression. 
Feldon began to sweat. 


"And your former position with your past employer, Dr. Feldon?" the 
man in the middle spoke again. 


Balding, slightly corpulent, dark clothing, glasses. A dead stare. The 
same expression many had thought Feldon once wore at similar 
times. Except that Feldon was slightly younger and more fit. 
Completely bald, but in his former line of work, that could only be 
expected. 


Feldon cleared his throat and spoke into the microphone again. 
"Former head of the Foundation's Ethics Committee, sir. Before it 
was phased out to this body, sir." 


"And how long have you held this position?" 


"For the past seven years, sir." 


Despite himself, Feldon heard a bit of pride creep into his voice and 
inwardly cringed. A quick glance confirmed his suspicions. They had 
heard it as well and were less than pleased. 


The group murmured a moment before a glance from the man in the 
middle quieted them. He seemed to be the man in charge, and 
would presumably lead the entire hearing. 


"...1 see. And for how many of these...SCP objects...were you 
involved in devising the ‘Containment Procedures,’ Dr. Feldon?" 


"Well, that depends on what you mean by 'involved' actually. Do you 
mean objects in whose containment and research | was personally 
involved before my appointment to the Ethics Committee, or do you 
mean objects in whose containment procedures | was involved in 
the approval or revision of following my appointment to the Ethics 
Committee?" 


"Answer the question, please." 


"Right," said Feldon, looking somewhat nervously at the other, silent 
members of the panel, "Um, at a guess, something close to, um, 
435. Maybe 437." 


"Any particularly...notable...procedures, Doctor?" 


"To be honest, sir, they all start blending together after awhile. And 
when you consider all the information I've been privy to that is above 
even your paygrade, it's little wonder | remember no specific 
procedures. Sir." 


Shit, why am | back-talking this group, the people who determine my 
future? thought Feldon. 


"Yes, well, that is subject to change. Very shortly, we should have 
access to all the information. As the UN New Committee on the 
Ethical Containment of Anomalous Objects, Events, and Creatures, 
we will require knowledge of all that the Foundation contained and is 
currently containing. Procedures deemed unethical will be revised. If 
no revision is possible, containment on the object will cease. If the 


object itself is deemed inherently inimicable to human life, it shall be 
destroyed without exception." 


Feldon privately wondered how many of them would be left on the 
board after they discovered some of the Foundation's blacker 
secrets. Things only the former O5 Command and the Ethics 
Committee were cleared to know. 


"Doctor, please, the question." 
"I'm sorry, sir. Could you repeat the question please?" 


"Were you involved in the containment of objects numbered, 453, 
231, 158, 239, or any objects classified as ‘humanoid’ by your 
former employer?" 


Feldon looked away, wishing he could lie and deny any involvement. 


"Yes. Inevitably, all the members of the Ethics Committee were at 
some point involved with a humanoid object. We did our best to 
reduce the object's discomfort while keeping it contained. He or she, 
| mean." 


"You are aware, Doctor, that most of your humanoid containment 
procedures violate many laws in many countries, | trust?" 


"We didn't have a choice! If we hadn't, the world could have ended!" 


"Doctor, the general populace still has little knowledge of what your 
organization terms ‘reality benders’. As such, it is thought by many 
to be highly unlikely that a pregnant woman or a young child could 
possibly destroy the world. Have you any evidence to the contrary?" 


"Plenty," said Feldon, beginning to move from the stand at which he 
had been placed, before realizing the two rather large men who had 
accompanied him in wouldn't let him walk around. "Prior to my time 
as head of the Ethics Committee, | observed testing involving 
SCP-239. During testing, | saw 239 shift entire rooms in a secure 
Foundation facility to suit her liking. In this case, a giant doll house. 
This wouldn't have been so bad if she hadn't also shifted the 
personnel in the rooms into life-size, animate ragdolls, complete with 
their memories and personalities. When told she had to turn 


everything back, she told the head researcher to, and | quote, ‘go 
away, butthead’. | trust | don't have to explain what happened to the 
poor man's head, but suffice it to say, he went away. Walked out the 
door and disappeared. Eventually, she got tired of playing with her 
‘dolls' and they simply vanished as well. This was one incident out of 
many and this was by far one of the least serious." 


"And the woman you designated SCP-231?" asked the man in the 
center, already disapproving of an answer that hadn't yet been 
voiced. 


"Sir, there are some things no one wants to know. | assure you that 
is one of them." 


"So you consistently subject a human being to something so horrible 
you won't speak it aloud or commit it to paper, and you see nothing 
unethical in this?"