Almost absently, Thad flipped a small switch on the top of his 
device. Athena's eyes nearly fell out of their sockets as the watch in 
her hand stuttered, rewound 2 days, over-wound 5 days, and then 
stopped dead. "Wha—What did you do?!" 


Thad smirked and turned the switch back on. The humming sound 
continued and the watch resumed its forward march as if nothing 
had ever happened. "I'll get to that in a minute," he said, folding his 
hands in front of him on the desk. "| assembled us together today 
because I've noticed something very wrong. And I've been noticing it 
more and more ever since we ran into Mr. McDougal some time 
ago. Do both of you remember that?" 


Tomlin nodded. "Yes. Perceptually, it was about 2 months ago for 
me. He's our first paradox, right?" 


Thad's lips turned into a thin line and his head hung loose on his 
neck. "Right. Though... I'm not strictly sure about that anymore. 
Attie, do you remember our experiment on the oh-eight-four 
phenomenon?" 


"I try not to," she replied flatly. A pleading look from Thad elicited 
from her a sigh, and a nod. "Yes, of course | remember. It was 
probably the scariest thing I've ever experienced. | thought we'd be 
trapped in that room forever." 


Thad nodded, pushing his glasses a little further up his nose. "What 
year were you born, Burt?" 


Tomlin's eyes widened and he stared at Thad. Hard. "I don't..." 


Thad pulled a key card from his jacket pocket. It was black. The only 
lettering on was the title "Department Chair", the Number 5, and the 
character A. "You came into my office once and demanded that | 


invent time travel immediately. | have done so, as of 12 December, 
1997." 


"| never asked you that!" 


"To be sure that you will, | need to know the date of your birth." 
Thad's eyes fixed on a point 3 inches past the surface of Tomlin's 
forehead. "...When were you born?" 


Tomlin's jaw slackened. "31 October, 2048." 


"| KNEW it!" Athena balked, head flying backward with an 
uncharacteristic laugh. "| absolutely knew it!" 


Thad simply nodded and jotted something down on a piece of paper, 
handing it to Athena. "Read that. Make sure it matches the date you 
just heard. Then place it on the far side of the blue line behind you." 
With another flick of a switch, the machine next to him stopped 
whirring. 


"Thad, you're starting to freak me out, buddy," Tomlin said 
nervously. "What are you doing?" 


"Illustrating something. Dr. Anastasakos; how many people are on 
your research staff and what is your quarterly budget?" Thad asked. 


"We have 5 researchers, 22 JR's, 17 clerical personnel and 15 
techs, with a quarterly budget of $10 million." she replied. "What 
does that have to do with anything?" 


Thad didn't answer. Just shook his head and kept writing things 
down. "Agent Tomlin, to the best of your knowledge, who is the first 
person of African descent to be elected president of the United 
States?" 


"Easy, Reverend Al Sharpton, Democrat, in 2008. Why?" Tomlin 
replied. 


Thad stopped writing a second, then sighed again and continued, 
tossing the paper over their shoulders and beyond the blue line. 
"And my name... Is Dr. Thaddeus Xyank... Department Chair... 
Temporal Anomalies. Okay." with the last scrap of paper beyond the 


blue line, he flipped the switch back on, and looked at his watch. 
"You two might not be the ones | started with, but it's close enough; 
it'll have to do. Playing with this Temporal Sink we developed, I've 
stumbled onto something... really odd." Exactly 11.322487 seconds 
after turning it on, Thad flipped the switch again and turned the 
device off. "You both remember our first confirmed paradox, Kevin 
McDougal. There was of course the unconfirmed paradox in our 084 
experiment. I'm still not sure what happened to those six duplicates | 
encountered, or if they were just some kind of elaborate 
hallucination. But I'm beginning to think... I'm beginning to think the 
problem is deeper than we realized. Burt, pick those bits of paper 
up, please?" 


Tomlin leaned over and snapped up the little scraps of yellow paper 
and opened them. "...Who the hell is Barack Obama?!" 


"He's the first person of African descent to become President of the 
United States. At least in the timeline that /'m from," Thad replied, 
opening a drawer and pulling out a stack of newspapers. "But 
apparently, that same year saw the election of Jesse Jackson, Al 
Sharpton, Denzel Washington, James Earl Jones, and the 
Republican candidate John McCain." He patted the stack next to 
him. "And they're all 'correct' answers." 


Athena grabbed the paper from the top of the stack in front of her, 
studying the look of surprised joy on Mr. Sharpton's face closely. In 
the other hand, she grabbed the numbers she had watched Thad jot 
down... 12 researchers, 48 JR's, 30 clerical personnel, 25 techs 


and... "... 50 D class per month?! What on earth would | use 50 D's 
on in a month? I've never even requested ONE!" 


"| asked you the same thing just this morning," Thad said, pulling the 
black-out curtains back and staring at the window with his hands 
folded behind his back. It didn't look broken. It looked normal. It 
looked like a lot of people down below were going about their 
business in a busy city just like they always had and always would. 
"But that's not the worst of it. Look at my card." 


The two of them opened Thad's note together. It wasn't a piece of 
notepaper at all, but a business card, heavy weight, cotton fiber, 
embossed lettering on one face. 


Class-A Foundation Asset 


05-6 


"Y-..." Tomlin started. And then again. "You're a..." 

"I'm an O85, right?" 

He didn't have to hear their heads rattle to know it was right. 
"Which one, Burt?" 

"Six," Tomlin replied, tossing the cursed thing onto the table. 


"Good. That means your birthday card, ought to say... | think 25 
November 2048?" Athena dove for it and opened it up quickly. It did. 
"Right... before you have a coronary, flip the red switch on the 
desk," Thad said, gesturing absently. 


Athena and Tomlin looked at one another for a full minute in silence 
before, mustering up what fortitude she had left, Athena reached 
over and threw the switch. There was a burst of color and light from 
the window the likes of which she had never seen, and together they 
stood in awe as moment upon cascading moment swished and 
swirled and darted and dashed and lumbered and plodded and rose 
and fell outside. 


Buildings they had never seen and never would see rose, burned, 
tumbled down. Human beings spontaneously flashed in and out of 
existence in a flurry of wind and noise, the dust of them reforming 
into trees and bushes and dogs and other people. The cars in the 
street changed color and shape 100 times, or crumpled to rust, or 
flew through the air, or simply weren't there at all. 


"...Make it make sense.” Tomlin demanded. "Tell me what I'm 
seeing." 


Thaddeus Xyank sighed mournfully, turning his back on the 
kaleidoscope of time behind him and raising one open hand. 


"This is the present moment, or what's left of it. More precisely, it's 
every possible present moment in which this office can exist without 
violating history or physical law. From the point of view of this office, 
all of those possibilities are correct." Thad turned back to look over 
his shoulder a moment. Roiling chaos. He had tried to record it 
once, to calculate just how many possible coherent histories their 
must be. Then woke up two days later with a high fever, soiled 
trousers, and one whomper of a headache, with a note on his desk. 


"Stack overflow. | recommend not doing that again. Don't worry | 
covered for you. -Tx" 


Hanging his head, Thad opened the bottom desk drawer. There was 
a bottle of brown liquor (bad bourbon, but who cared) and three 
glasses. "...Would anyone like a drink?" 


"So... wait." Athena rubbed her temples and sat down quickly, trying 
not to look at it. "Why? | thought the whole point of building that 
waypoint in your office was to prevent something like this." 


Thad shook his head, placing the glasses down and pouring into 
them sloppily until they were... reasonably full. After all, it was 1965, 
and in 7 out of 10 versions of 1965 hardly anyone did business in 
New York sober. "| am finding it more and more difficult to believe 
that such a thing is possible." 


Silence. The three of them reached for their glasses and sipped in 
unison. Thaddeus tapped his finger on his chair to keep the beat, 
and precisely 67.934922 seconds after he had turned it on, switched 
the device off again. The flashes faded. Buildings stayed the same 
height, cars resumed driving on the correct side of the road, women 
in colorful hats resumed carrying packages and bags. Business as 
usual in New York city. 


It didn't look broken. Really it didn't. 


"We failed," Athena said. "We shouldn't have meddled." She set her 
glass down brusquely and buried her face in her hands. "I feel like 


I'm going to be sick." 


Thad shrugged, speaking into his glass. "There's good reason to 
think that we were lost before we even started." The hot amber slid 
down his throat and left salt hatred behind. 


"Gettin' real tired of your half truths, Thad," Burt said with a sneer. 
"We're supposed to be a team in this. What do you know?" 


"| know that causality literally can’t exist in a universe in this 
condition, so the idea that we're to blame somehow is completely 
incoherent," Thad snapped. "You want me to get out the black-board 
and show you why, or is that enough?" 


Burt pressed his teeth together hard enough to crack walnuts and 
stared ahead. 


Thad brushed a bit of hair out of his face and removed his 
spectacles, cleaning them with his tie. "If we live in an acausal 
universe, anything resembling a ‘cause’ for this must come from 
outside the universe as we understand it. As it happens, | may - and 
| stress may - have encountered something like that once when | 
was a fresh post-doc." 


"Where?" Athena asked, raising her head. 


Dr. Thaddeus Xyank reached into his briefcase and pulled out an 
unassuming manila envelope with the number 110 written upon it in 
red pen. "Some place I've been avoiding," he said sorrowfully. 
"Southwest of Cobleskill, about 25 years from now." 


Agent Tomlin, downing the rest of his whiskey in one go, reached for 
the file and began to read. 


"... SCP-110 is an entire city found buried 0.5 kilometers underneath 
a large farm in East Worchester, New York." 


Thaddeus sighed and slumped back in his chair. "Thank goodness," 
he said. "Back where we started, that bit was expunged." 


Part 6: Set Up Thine Altar Here | Part 8: To be Announced... 


The Lady in the Tower 


The lady sits and stands and sleeps, 
forgotten, in her tower. 

Dreams line up to play with her. 

A new game every hour. 


There's a fun old game of Hide and Seek 
in a room that's bare as sin. 


Of course she came up as normal for every test they ran. That was 
the whole point of her. She existed to be normal, to fool everyone, 
including herself. When the coffee machine in the small break room 
a few hallways down clogged, nobody thought it could be 
SCP-1943. When a rat got into the circuitry through a loose panel 
and bit through a few crucial wires, unlocking half of the cells in 
Site-06-3, the only thing that Sarah Gruenwald did was hold her 
door shut until a security officer called through it to say that the 
breach had been contained. 


No culprit aside from bad luck was considered when SCP-1669-65 
appeared in a corridor with a small but incredibly powerful bomb 
strapped to his chest. As the site dissolved into chaos a much, much 
larger bomb under the ground was activated. 


As the architects drew up the plans for Site-06-4, where the few 
humanoids that they had been able to evacuate would be housed, 
nobody ever imagined that SCP-1943 had done anything but 
sacrifice herself to save an old coworker. How could they? She was 
just a normal, scared human being. 


There's the game where winning lies in 
The perfect placing of a pin. 


Sarah woke up and ached everywhere. She had spent hours in a 


machine, being thrashed around, injected, and tattooed all over her 
body. 


Now she was bound hands and feet with a single rope that had been 
braided in the most complex pattern she had ever seen. She would 
have screamed, but her mouth was gagged with the same dusty 
hempen rope. She was wearing a simple white silk robe, and being 
carried over bare red rock by two large men, both patchworks of 
human, machine, and magic. 


The Insurgency. 


She was set down at the center of an immaculately drawn circle 
covered in strange runes. The sky above her was black, no stars, no 
moon. Out side of her field of vision, there was the sound of paper 
being unrolled, and a voice called out, "Has the Portal been de- 
humanized by its former friends?" 


"Yes!" came the reply. 

"How long have the runes sat untouched by the wind and rain?" 
"79 days and 13 hours!" 

"What is the exact longitude and latitude of the Portal's heart?" 
"25.34505683 degrees South, 131.036162539 degrees East!" 
"Then let it begin!" 


There was chanting, hours and hours of chanting, and dances, and 
fire, and water, and other liquids, until finally one of them stood 
before Sarah with a knife. The blade plunged down, and pierced her 
chest. As Sarah Gruenwald's vision went dark, something began to 
fade into being. An eye, serpentine, glowing in the blackness. As the 
Portal died, she heard the poisonous hissing of a being that would 
not stop until the entire world dissolved into the black. 


There's the game where she must make sense from 
The howling of the wind. 


force the animals into a bipedal gait, and are often accompanied by 
crude cosmetic alterations such as the removal of a snout, with the 
apparent goal of making the servitors appear more human-like. The 
nervous system of members of SCP-962-1 is slaved to implanted 
electrodes, which allow them to be controlled by a central source, 
assumed to be the tower itself. 


These servitors fulfill a number of roles. Many of them mine for ore 
in an extensive system of tunnels excavated below the valley, which 
is then refined by the tower. Others repair damage to the structure 
or other servitors. A small number construct roads, apparently to 
facilitate movement of SCP-962-1. The remaining servitors hunt 
down and destroy all non-human life in the valley. There are no 
recorded instances of any member of SCP-962-1 attacking a human 
or a machine, even in self-defense. Frequently, the corpses of 
animals killed in these hunts are brought back to SCP-962 for 
conversion into SCP-962-1. Plants may also be returned for use as 
fuel. Despite the damage caused by their augmentations, servitors 
are very effective at their roles, and seem to be built specifically for 
them. 


Approximately sixty times a day, SCP-962 will release a hydrogen- 
filled balloon from an aperture in the empty region near its top. 
These balloons are made from animal tissue of varying species, 
believed to be from the animals brought in by SCP-962-1. Attached 
to each balloon is a manuscript, written in English and typically on 
paper or vellum. The length, content, and style of writing varies 
greatly. Manuscripts have taken a variety of forms, including poems, 
novels, and collections of essays. These manuscripts exhibit no 
anomalous properties, but are generally of extremely high writing 
quality, strongly suggesting sapience on the part of SCP-962. Of 
possible note is the general optimism present in these writings, as 
well as the lack of any mention of non-human life.