“Precisely. Someone must provide the options. My sister was the 
one for all the sense and order and right judgment. Order and 
chaos, free will and instruction working in unison. Wisdom impotent 
without the full knowledge of good and evil, and that knowledge self- 
destructive without the guidance of wisdom. Beautiful system. Of 
course, dear sister Sophie is in pieces now, which complicates 
matters greatly.” 


Gears clicked into place inside Naomi’s head. 


“Wait, that means she’s...” 


“Aye, she is.” The Serpent paused for a moment. “Were she in her 
right mind at the moment, | feel you would appreciate her company. 
Now, that you can blame me for.” 


The Serpent went back to sorting his books, occasionally writing in 
them with a Europe-sized quill pen, dipped in an inkwell 
Mediterranean. 


After a while, the Serpent spoke again. 

“You are still here. Speak, child. | can tell you are uneasy.” 
Naomi let out a long, tired breath. 

“| don’t know if | can do it anymore. Conducting, | mean.” 
Break the dam, and words keep bubbling out. 


“Everyone always says that I’m so much like my mom, and...I just 
want to tell them so what? | never met her. She’s just like...a name 
and a face but | don’t know who they belong to, and everyone 
expects me to be just like her and | try my best but | just can’t. 


The Serpent was silent. 


“And | can’t talk to dad about this because he still misses her, and 
he’s so stressed with Tribunal work, and | don’t want to disappoint 
him...” 


The Serpent was silent. 
“And | just...I’m just tired.” 
A pause, and then the Serpent spoke. 


“Go along and rest, child. Return when you are ready. You have 
done more than enough good, at a great cost to yourself. No one 
could rightfully blame you. You have not failed. 


"Your mother killed a god, and the shadows of god-slayers are both 
wide and heavy. It is easy to be crushed under that shadow. Too 
many men and women have been. ‘My father has done great things: 


| have no worth until | have matched his feats with my own’ they say 
to themselves, and this guilt of failure eats away until they are 
hollowed out. 


"But you do not have to become her. You do not have to walk in her 
shadow, and | have no doubt that she would have you standing at 
her side, not behind. She did not kill Moloch for her own glory: She 
struck down the Horned King because she loved you. Those around 
you want to see you become good and kind and strong, as she was. 
Any inbred barbarian with a magic sword can kill a god. It takes 
something more to be a good person in a cruel world. 


"You stand on the threshold of innocence and knowledge, passing 
through from the simplicity of one to the bare cruelty of the other. It 
is a test. My test. It is not easy.” 


There was a hint of a smile behind the glasses. 


“But it is not impossible. That is all | have to say on the matter. Go 
now. Your father is waiting.” 


Naomi stood up, and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. 


It was several hours later when Salah returned to the makeshift 
apartment that served as home in the Library. The lamp hanging 
from the rafters was turned low, just enough for him to see his way 
to the bathroom door at the end of the hallway without stubbing his 
toes. 


He poked his head into Naomi’s room, to see his daughter curled up 
on her cot, sleeping as deeply as King Arthur under his mountain. 
She was still wearing her mud-crusted shoes. Salah smiled wearily, 
and went about preparing himself for bed. He was exhausted: trying 
to coordinate order out of chaos of the world was not an easy task, 
and he was not suited for the Tribunal, even in the temporary 
manner he now served, despite what others claimed. 


He completed his proper nighttime rituals, trudged back to his room 
of the room, and saw on his pillow a folded piece of paper. 


The writing inside was in a small, tidy hand, and read: 


Got back okay. 
| love you. 
N 


The N was big and cursive and embellished, though perhaps not as 
detailed as it often was. 


Salah folded the paper back up and set it on the desk by the head of 
the cot, and then turned off the lamp. 


« Hub » 


Footnotes 
1. For inside of most dogs it is far too dark to read. 


ability, until succumbing to exhaustion. If appropriate tools and 
materials are not available, this fugue state subsides, but the subject 
will feel a strong compulsion to make a backup copy of SCP-635-1's 
text "for safekeeping.” (Note: In this instance, it is recommended to 
allow subject to make archive copy of the digital file to Site- 's 
secure on-site data warehouse. Failure to do this may result ina 
security breach.) 


Instances of SCP-635-2 are robots with varying means of 
manipulation and data storage. About 50% of instances constructed 
prove to be viable and autonomous. If an SCP-635-2 built by a 
subject proves viable, it will immediately begin construction of 
another SCP-635-2 based on its own design. Copies tend to be 
imperfect and have flaws, and about 80% of tests have ended with 
less than 3 viable SCP-635-2s before the machines run down and 
become inert. Inthe % of cases where more than viable 
SCP-635-2s have been created, the SCP-635-2s will change 
behavior and build an instance of SCP-635-3, a substantially more 
advanced robot that will have the capability of retrieving data from 
the remaining volumes of SCP-635-1. Once it retrieves what data it 
can, an SCP-635-3 is able to organize and direct SCP-635-2s and 
prevent them from prematurely powering down. Left unchecked, 
SCP-635-3 will disassemble elements of the surrounding 
environment for raw material for more robots. Once 2 or more viable 
SCP-635-3s are active, all robots will begin assembly of SCP-635-4. 
A viable SCP-635-4 will [DATA EXPUNGED] and it is unclear if this 
is due to hostile intent, or from data corruption to the content of 
SCP-635-1 due to age. 


« SCP-634 | SCP-635 | SCP-636 » 


Those Thin, Penultimate Hours 


Bishop of New Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince 
of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of 
the Americas, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the West, Sovereign 
of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God, Pope 
Maximilian, was drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. 


It wasn’t particularly good coffee. It wasn’t even real coffee, for that 
matter. It was the cheap brown slurry common in the regions where 
the beans couldn’t be grown and the genefixed plants were too 
expensive for shoestring paychecks. 


The stump of his left leg was itchy. He hated when that happened. 
He’d have to go excuse himself and remove his prosthetic, and that 
was just incredibly awkward. No one thought of the pope as 
someone who had stump-itches. 


He was on edge, and it had not simply been interacting with Transit 
Authority and watching the headlight hunters run down the 
backroads the night before. He could feel the world falling apart 
around him, the glue he had worked so hard to place stretching thin 
and peeling away, and he didn’t know if he could keep the weight 
shorn up any longer. The flock was small, scattered, and afraid, and 
just as he had managed to gather them together and give them 
someone to follow, he felt the rug torn out from underneath him. 
What good was it then, when their shepherd was just as guideless 
and afraid as they were? 


It was so unfitting, he thought, to be sitting here, in the office of a 
school principal, two plainclothes Swiss guardsmen by the door. Yet, 
to a part of him, there was a great deal of comfort to be found ina 
simple cup of fake coffee, and in the mundanity of being made to 
wait. Someone had decided to treat him like a human being. 


The office was small, plain, very neatly organized. A budget-grade 
touch-screen for the desk, bookshelves of well-thumbed paperbacks 


and yellowed anthologies sorted by author’s last name. A simple 
little nameplate sat on the desk, next to an empty coffee mug that 
had “WORLD’S BEST MOM’ painted on it in childish handwriting. 


The placard read: Dr. Naomi Zairi-Lewitt. 


Maximilian knew the name, though he had never met her in person 
before. The woman was something of a controversy magnet, and 
very clearly someone who did not much care for what the masses 
thought of her: The file they kept on her in New Rome was thicker 
than his thumb was long. 


There were footsteps from outside the door, and the woman herself 
entered the room followed by a grim-looking man with an eyepatch. 


“lam so sorry to keep you waiting, your Holiness, but there were 
some discipline issues that needed sorted out.” 


“It’s no trouble,” he said, standing up to shake her hand. His 
Nigerian accent was, as usual, quite thick. He was quite sure that 
there would be many men of lower rank who would have been 
reduced to fuming indignancy by both the wait and her attitude, but 
he understood. Understanding things was a large part of his job, 
especially understanding where God vested the actual power. She 
was a Teacher, and Teachers very often had Matters That Needed 
Attention. 


She was a small, wiry woman, just around fifty or so, wearing a 
white blouse and a black skirt. Glasses. Dark skin splotched with 
patches of fiery red. Short, light hair. She didn’t look like someone 
who would cause a lot of trouble, which was an instant indication 
that she was both capable of and willing to cause massive amounts 
of trouble. 


Which, for the most part, she had done. Iron-fisted educational 
programs, open criticism of Foundation settlement policies, 
specifically that of the Projects at Caketown, heading the profligation 
of the so-called Universal Texts, teaching six year olds magic. 
Nothing occult, she had gone on record a dozen times clarifying the 
point. It was Applied Narrative Field Manipulation, nothing occult 
about it. There wasn’t even any dabbling involved. 


Maximilian had yet to decide his own feelings on that matter. 
Publicly, he had to condemn the practice. In the privacy of his own 
mind, he had to admit that having settlements where every citizen 
knew how to perform an exorcism was not a bad thing. 


The woman sat down at her desk, and Maximillian had a brief 
flashback to a time forty years before, when he had been in the 
same spot, except with his mother and father sitting on either side of 
him and a crumpled up parent-teacher summons in his pocket. It 
faded quickly. 


“We’re a bit low on the pomp and circumstance today, I’m afraid,” 
she said, smiling. “But it’s good to finally meet you, your Holiness.” 


“Likewise. | hope that...well, | hope that this can be something of a 
fitting show of goodwill before, ah...” 


“Before the end of the world?” 


” 


“Yes. 
Naomi nodded. 


“Would you mind if we went outside?” she said. “It gets stuffy up 
here, and the weather’s been good today.” 


The lake and the processing plant could be seen from the top of the 
school’s south wall, past the line of pine trees on the shore. The still, 
stagnant water was cut up into neat squares and rectangles, choked 
with green and brown and red around the skeleton in the center of 
the lake. Sequoia-sized ribs shone bright white under the morning 
sun. 


Down below on the school grounds, classes were changing. 
Students wandered in packs across the quad, dragging out their little 
moment of freedom as long as they could before heading back into 
the fortress-like, bomb-shelter buildings. Some of the older students 
who had free periods were lounging by the lake or orchard. Mr. 
Tickman’s biology class was tending the west gardens. Rifle cracks 
could be heard from the firing range on the north side, paired with 


the bounce of rubber balls on asphalt from the courts just under the 
south wall. Seen about the quad were several of the school’s 
golems: massive Tzor lumbering across the field with a shipping 
crate on one shoulder; short, round Even waddling along beside Dr. 
Tau; blocky, graffiti-covered Selah keeping watch from the center of 
the green; gentle Gir drawing chalk pictures on the sidewalk outside 
the math building with some of the littlest students. 


“You have a remarkable school here, Doctor,” Maximilian said. 
“Despite our disagreements, | really do appreciate what you’ve done 
here. | know there are plenty of others in the Church who agree, 
even if they don’t like admitting it.” 


“Thank you, your Holiness.” A pause. “My biggest regret is that we 
can’t go much farther than our own borders. Everything the Initiative 
has is focused in so few areas.” 


“You do what you can.” 
“Never feels like enough.” 
“I know. It never does.” 


“Headmistress!” A voice that sounded like a woman trapped in a 
large marble cube called out from the orchard. Maximilian looked 
down to see that the woman emerging from the trees with a basket 
of fruit was actually made of marble, quite stout around the 
everything, and studded with smoothed chunks of amethyst. 


“Yes, Ahlama?” 


“We've got vampires in the watermelons.” She reached into her 
basket and pulled out a small, blood-stained melon with a wide, 
snaggle-toothed mouth. It snarled and snapped at her, but did not 
bite, being smart enough to not bite the hand of someone who was 
made out of marble. 


“Tickman’s got a class in the west garden, they can help you root 
them out, but put up a sign just in case.” 


“Right.” 


“Thank you very much, Ahlama.” Naomi shook her head and smiled 
as the golem walked off. “Just got her last semester. Wonderful 
woman, but a little self-conscious about her weight.” 


They continued walking down the wall, enjoying the sun and the 
breeze and the laughter of children playing and the stench of algae 
pools. 


“Do you know what will happen?” he said, after a while. It was the 
question that had been gnawing at his mind since long before he 
arrived. 


“Only as much as anyone else does. The nistarim will re-unite at the 
Pit and then...God only knows after that. Everything will be made 
right, or so it’s claimed, but it’s vague on the how and — Lin! L/N/ Put 
the dodgeball down, please. If you and your sister send anyone else 
to the nurse’s office you’re going to be cleaning algae filters for 
detention!” She sighed. “It’s vague on the how. Whether or not 
there’s going to be a fight.” 


“Evil doesn’t die without a fight.” 


“And that’s what I’m worried about. | hope and pray that these kids 
aren't going to have to go through that. 


“For their sake.” She nodded towards a train of small children 
holding hands crossed the campus, led by a group of teachers. 
Each of the little figures had the bulging eyes and flabby lips and 
misshapen heads signature of fetal telekill poisoning. “They'll wake 
up tomorrow morning, and maybe they'll be cured. Maybe they'll 
wake up and be able to speak and understand, and dress 
themselves, and not be trapped in their own minds. Maybe we'll 
wake up tomorrow and there are no more tooth fairies in the river 
slums.” 


“And maybe the mothers of New Rome will have enough food for 
their children.” 


“And at the same time, part of me, the little teacher part that likes to 
look at all the angles, says that there’s no way it'll just all be given to 
us like that. You can’t just be given the prize without the work. Or 


maybe we’ve done the work already.” She motioned to the man with 
the eyepatch, who was standing a distance away with the Swiss 
Guardsmen. “Elihayo, my bodyguard, he was there at the Fall of 
Jerusalem. In the Pit for fifty-one hours. Lost an eye, his voice, and 
half of his mind. He’d be first in line, and it'd be a crime if he wasn't. 
Him and all the rest who've given that much.” 


Maximilian nodded.