"Hey," he said. "It's OK, come on." He set the empty dishes down 
and turned the animal around so it was facing away from him and 
roughly stroked its head and back, drawing delighted snuffles. He 
parted its short, piebald fur, noting a few thin spots that might have 
been mange, or worms, or maybe just self-inflicted through bored 
scratching. Its tail drummed on his knee, almost painful. The dog 
kept trying to turn around and eventually he felt he was causing it 
more vexation pushing it back than if he had left it alone. He shooed 
it away and turned his attention to the corner, where another puddle 
of unsanitary material greeted his efforts. Some attempt had been 
made to install a drainage system, but the majority of the waste still 
pooled around it. He looked up at the walls and noted that the 
rectangle that elsewhere seemed to denote an observation room 
was here plastered over, only the faintest hint of its shape 
remaining. He looked dubiously at the makeshift drain—the little 
voice was suggesting that he could crawl down it, but the engineer 
in him was pointing out that it was designed for a small animal's 
excrement and seemed entirely inadequate to cope with even that 
amount of waste product; that even if Keagan were to jettison some 
extra weight (say, everything but one arm), the isolated facility was 
likely not connected to any kind of sewage system and thus the 
hypothetical Keagan-arm would at best claw its way down into the 
stinking darkness of the septic tank. As he looked down the drain, 
he shifted slightly, and the light from one of the diffuse neon tubes in 
the ceiling struck the foul-smelling water accumulating halfway 
down. 


The face of an English bulldog stared out at him from within the 
drainage pipe. Its jowls rippled as it let loose a series of playful 
whufs, which, to make the situation more lunatic, seemed to be 
emanating from behind him. Keagan stood up suddenly, and felt the 
animal pawing at the back of his leg. Its face, however, continued to 
stare from the surface of the water, rippling slightly as the dog 


bounced on the floor, and in its eyes he could see something shifting 
and orange. Its head tilted as it looked up... 


If you see the reflection of the subject anywhere unusual... 


Keagan, half-panicking, unsure what he was looking at, if he was 
even awake at all, roughly kicked the dog away, provoking a hurt 
yelp, and stumbled to the door. There was no handle on the inside. 
He leaned against it then, remembering how it had opened inwards, 
jammed his fingers into the rubbery filler on the open side and tried 
to lever it open. 


"Let me out!" he shouted. There was movement—distant, muffled, 
on the other side of the door. A voice over the tannoy. 


"D-8671, stand by. Please keep the subject away from the door." 


Keagan slumped down next to the door, eyes closed, fending the 
dog away with open palms when it limped up, still trying to get back 
the friend who had stroked it and spoken to it gently. 


Finally, a hydraulic hiss, and the door opened. The tannoy sounded, 
but the voice was present, as well. 


"D-8671, stand up and leave the enclosure. Keep your eyes closed." 


Keagan rose and was guided firmly to a seat. He heard the door 
seal again behind him. He heard rustling, something heavy being 
taken out of a locker and put on. A red-orange glow rose behind his 
eyelids. Finally: 


"D-8671, open your eyes. Look into the light and do not close your 
eyes again until we authorise you to do so." 


Keagan opened his eyes wide, then immediately fought against the 
instinct to snap them shut in the face of the blinding light being 
shone in his face. The white coats had been replaced by long, dark 
hessian outfits, sewn shut at the sleeves so they handled him with 
almost comical mittens. He looked up and saw that their faces were 
covered by hoods of the same stuff, with filtration beaks like plague 
doctors and a single cyclopean camera-eye mounted on the 
forehead that presumably fed a feed to a screen inside the bulky 


goggles. In their third eyes he saw a reflection of his own face, eyes 
watering and jaw slack, but otherwise unaffected. 


"Contamination—negative," one of them concluded. The sound of 
the tannoy had gone—now they addressed him in slightly muffled 
tones from within the hoods. "D-8671, you may now close your 
eyes." 


Keagan blinked desperately to adjust to the light. 


"Is he re-usable?" asked a voice from just outside his field of vision, 
which he recognised as the blue-hat who had been introduced as 
Agent Howard. 


"Yes, yes,” said one of the former white-coats. "He'll be fine, more's 
the pity.” 


"| saw its face," Keagan said dully. "In the drainpipe. That's not 
possible." 


"That's what we call letting you in gently." said Howard. Then, to the 
hooded men: "Sounds like you need to flush the drainage pipe into 
1552-1 storage again." 


"That's another 500ml at least," complained one of his examiners, 

beginning to strip off his plague-doctor hood. "If this stuff behaves 

the way we think it does, any of it getting into the water table could 
be..." 


"We have bigger things on our plate right now," retorted Howard. 
"Right now, this stuff can be contained in a watertight container and 
the evaporation risk while more of the stuff is being piped in is 
minimal." Then, to Keagan again: "D-8671, your participation has 
been noted. You may be called on to assist in research into 
SCP-1552 in the future..." 


"He kicked it," interjected one of the scientists tersely. "Give him to 
Reeds or Barker. I'm done with him." 


"...or not," Howard continued with a grin. "Come on, get up." 


In addition to Marv Hagman, who had disappeared off the face of 
the earth, it appeared a further three D-Class personnel had failed to 
return to the dormitory after less than a week. There was a 
dangerous silence in the dormitory as Ronny Feldspar mounted the 
bunks with the stub of red chalk he had smuggled back in from one 
of the laboratories inside his cheek and made Xs underneath their 
missing compatriots’ lists after enough days had passed to conclude 
they were not merely sleeping it off in the hospital wing. Patrick 
Goettsch was absent again, but a quick roll call revealed he'd taken 
Travis Lemure's place testing with 1062, a number which, Travis 
had noted with some alarm, tended to precede marked changes in 
handwriting in those who listed it on the wall. 


Keagan was the first to break the silence. Getting an audience with 
the pack leader in the Alpha-2 dormitories was significantly easier 
than HMP Wormwood Scrubs, though no less intimidating. Cancer 
was squatting on the edge of his bunk, playing with the plasticine 
dice. He would roll them again and again until he got double sixes, 
then thrust them aside before reluctantly picking them up again and 
starting again. Looking for a miracle, Keagan thought. The motion 
exercised a strange fascination over Keagan, the way the cubes 
tumbled over each other—a distant thrill as they came down that 
came from somewhere he couldn't quite explain. 


"Mr Herrigan," Keagan began, tearing his eyes away from the dice. 
How does this even work?, he thought. Do you bow? Curtsey? 


"And who might you be?" asked Cancer, wetly. His throat sounded 
worse since he had arrived; probably the mildewed air in the 
dormitory. 


"Keagan O'Neill. I'm coming to you because—well, | thought I'd 
better show respect." Did the Irish mob put the same value on that 
as an armed robber? Too late now, of course. 


"Hkk. What do you want outta me?" 
"Patrick Goettsch. Shortish, chubby guy, avoids being here 


whenever I'm around. He was with me in the Scrubs. | got a problem 
with him." 


"Okay." 


"He ratted on me about a murder inside, but Hagman—that's the 
guy you beat down first night here—put him under his protection. | 
wanted to make sure you weren't, | guess, carrying forward his 
promises or anything." Put like that, it sounds perfectly... stop it, he 
thought. It was the Cliff Notes version of events—not even bothering 
to deny that he'd killed the Judge—but enough, he guessed, for 
Cancer. 


"Lemma get this straight. You're coming to me to ask permission to 
do over or kill this Goettsch guy? Fucking be my—AKOHK. Be my 
fucking—AKKAK, KAK, KOUHK." 


Keagan waited patiently for Cancer to finish his choking fit. 'Guest' 
would be a favourite way to end that sentence, he thought. ‘Bitch’, 
rather less so. 'Murder victim’ is probably the bottom rung here. 


"KAAAUGHF. Jesus. Anyway. KAK. This guy Goettsch comes to 
me, he says, there's this black shit who wants me dead, protect me. 
| ask him why. He won't tell me. | tell him, screw you, you don't trust 
me, you don't trust me to protect you. Go hang. So he makes 
himself scarce. The hell | care." 


Keagan nodded as Cancer broke off into another bout of coughing, 
but inside he was vibrating. Something Goettsch knew was so 
explosive he would rather risk unknown death at the hands of the 
SCP Foundation's experiments rather than disclose it to another 
prisoner, even here with all links to the outside world purportedly cut 
off. What that meant depended on whether Goettsch was thinking 
rationally and had a good idea of their current situation. If not, it 
probably meant nothing more than the forces that had conspired 
against the Judge were politically powerful. If so, it meant Goettsch 
suspected they could reach him even in the custody of the 
Foundation. 


Professor Reeds was an elderly white-coat with a vague, dreamy 
manner who seemed wildly enthused about the potential of the 
experiment Keagan and Ronny Feldspar had been assigned to 
undertake. 


"It's something like the Milgram shock experiments," he said, before 
adding reassuringly, "but far less ethical. Now, the questions we 
hope to answer today will be extremely penetrating—” here he 
seemed to lose his train of thought. "Yes. Penetrating. The nature of 
identity, intent, and action at a distance! It goes without saying, of 
course, that each of you must follow the instructions given to you to 
the letter. Do you understand, D-8671 ?" 


Keagan nodded. 
"D-7780?" 


Ronny pretended not to hear, then when the designation was 
repeated, responded sullenly "That's not my name." 


"Ah!" Professor Reeds declared. "We'll see about that! Yes, that's 
one of the things we'll be determining. But we'll get to that. What 
we'll be doing today is playing a game. Darts. Now, one of you must 
be the player. The other participant will be the scorer." 


"| don't want to be the player," Ronny said, before Keagan could get 
a word out. Keagan shrugged to indicate he had no preference. 


"Quite right, D-7780." Professor Reeds said, his eyes glinting. "Both 
of you, follow me." 


Keagan and Ronny followed the Professor into the next room, which 
had been fitted with an adjoining wall dividing the room into roughly 
one- and two-thirds. The narrower side contained a chair, facing a 
blank wall. The other side had measures of distance marked into the 
floor, with a dartboard on the far edge of the room. 


A vague crackle was audible as Professor Reeds turned on his lapel 
mike and gestured to the technician visible in the brightly-lit 
observation room. 


"D-7780 is also known as Ronny Feldspar, as well as 'Ronny of the 
family Feldspar' and variants influenced by freemen-on-the-land 
ideology. He was also widely known in the summer of 2010 as the 
Docklands Shooter; his real name was not released to the press at 
the time of arrest for reasons of national security." 


Keagan was startled. If what the Professor said was true—and 
Ronny seemed in no hurry to deny it—the young man was one of 
the most prolific spree killers of recent years. The Docklands 
Shooter had blocked the doors of his workplace and gunned down 
his co-workers with a hunting rifle. When he had killed a dozen or so 
of his close acquaintances he had taken to the roof and begun 
taking pot-shots at passers-by, eventually giving himself up to the 
police when he ran out of ammunition. 


"D-8671, also Known as Keagan O'Neill, is a violent offender initially 
incarcerated for a double homicide and charged with a third murder 
in prison. He will be assisting in the implementation of this 
experiment. D-7780, please take a seat in the area to the left. 
D-8671, please move up to the darts board and pick up the first set 
of darts to your right. | will continue to co-ordinate this experiment 
from the observation deck." 


Ronny, visibly nervous but glad to be the furthest from the action, 
disappeared on the other side of the partition wall and Keagan 
walked up the right-hand side of the room. The darts board was 
faded and battered, the paint on the double and triple rings chipped 
in several places. The only thing that looked new about it was the 
gold letter on the outside section that read ‘Property of Marshall, 
Carter & Dark’. Not any more, he guessed. He kneeled down and 
picked up a foam block containing black darts. Some seemed to 
have a piece of paper wrapped around them—others didn't. The 
block was marked ‘Control’. 


"Thank you, D-8671. Please remove the darts in any order you wish 
and embed them in the dart board by hand—do not throw them. 
Please embed at least one in the inner bull." 


Keagan pulled the darts out of the foam, noticing how their points 
glittered in the light. Holding them overarm like a dagger, he 
punched them into the board, finishing by placing one dead centre. 


"Am | supposed to be keeping track of this?" Ronny yelled from the 
other side of the dividing wall. "I can't see shit." 


"That won't be necessary, D-7780. For the record, no anomalous 
effects were observed from the control group of darts. D-8671, do 


you feel any ill effects?" Keagan replied in the negative. "Please 
remove the darts from the board and replace them in the control 
foam. Then collect the second group of darts and stand behind the 
3m line." 


Keagan collected the second foam block, labelled 'Live', and 
retreated towards the door until the toe of his boots crossed the 
green line indicating that he was three metres from the dartboard. 


"Thank you. Please withdraw the dart labelled with a red band and 
in your own time throw it at the dartboard. If you are a novice player 
| understand the optimum position to aim is just left of centre at the 
bottom of the target." 


Keagan hefted the projectile thoughtfully. The last time he had 
played darts had been on his thirtieth birthday. Lauren had been 
there, though they hadn't been together then, she'd been with 
Parker. Keagan had had way too much to drink and could barely hit 
the board at all, but the others, determined to let the birthday boy 
win, executed feats of poor aim that resulted in at least one full beer 
glass being knocked over, the pub cat's tail soeared and the party 
nearly barred. 


"Throw 1," intoned Professor Reeds. "Dart contains strip of paper 


reading ‘The Docklands Shooter’. 


"What?" Ronny shouted, apparently under the impression he had 
been addressed, but if the Professor heard he gave no response. 


Keagan slung the dart at the target where, to his surprise, it lodged 
in the section labelled '19', just missing the inner triple ring. There 
was silence for a moment. 


"D-7780, do you feel anything?" asked the Professor. 


"No. Am | just supposed to sit here?" Ronny shouted back through 
the dividing wall. 


"For the moment. D-8671, please withdraw the yellow-banded dart. 
Throw 2—” as Keagan pulled out the second dart on the block. 
"Strip of paper reads 'D-7780'." 


This time the dart lodged in the outermost double ring, in the section 
marked '7', then gravity took over and it sagged down.