SCP-948: Well. Well, |, | think that's a wonderful step 
forward in thinking! Truly wonderful! My friend, Cillian, 
he'd have been delighted. He, he was one. A gay man. 
We'd... he'd have been delighted. 


Dr. Bridge: You don't talk about him much. 


SCP-948: Cillian was an activist when things were, when 
they were rather dire. When, um... well, it wasn't a good 
time, and Cillian had the courage to speak up. | never 
did, always to scared to lose my job, | guess... 


SCP-948 shakes its head. 


SCP-948: | shouldn't be talking about this in the middle 
of a lecture. Rather unprofessional, my apologies. We'll, 


trying to kill someone? Get in contact with someone? Make them put 
the girl to sleep? 


Clef: [manic laughter] Goddamn it, the Stones were right, it really is 
the nature of my game that's puzzling you, isn't it! 


Kondraki: ... what? 
Clef: Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name. 
Kondraki: ... bullshit. You're lying. You always lie. 


Clef: Yes, | do... always lie, don't 1? One might even call me the 
father of lies, considering all the lying | do. Funny that. 


Kondraki: ... women hate you. 


Clef: Of course they do. Considering that little incident with the 
apple tree, I'm not surprised they still harbor some lingering 
resentment. It was all for the best, though... 


Kondraki: [speaking faster] Lilith knew you. She said you loved her. 
You said you never stopped loving her... 


Clef: She was too good for that simpering fool. Untamed, strong, 
and wild, a true woman, not that whiny little submissive slut Eve. Of 
course, that milquetoast asshole preferred the one who'd lie quietly 
and take it, not the one who'd show him a... 


Kondraki: [faster and louder] The wood nymph. . you convinced 
her to flower... 


Clef: Apple blossoms, if you looked closely enough. 
Kondraki: And Sigurrés? 


Clef: Also known as the Alpha and Omega, the Great | AM... I'm still 
not sure what she's doing incarnating again. | mean, it basically 
means Heaven is empty right now, and my people are going to be 
storming the gates any time now. 


Kondraki: My god... 


Clef: ... is currently lying in a coma in a hospital bed nearby, yes. 
Helpless. Alone... completely vulnerable. 


[long silence] 


Clef: [manic laughter] Oh Jesus Christ, you're actually buying this 
bullshit, aren't you? 


Kondraki: ... what? 


Clef: Oh god, the look on your face, it's priceless! It's better than 
when | told Gears that Alice had hacked my optics and convinced 
me to get rid of the competition! He nearly put that little monster 
through an MRI to check for infection in her brain before he figured 
out | was bullshitting him... but hell, that frigid bastard's got no 
emotions at all, that's not nearly as fucking hilarious as you! 


Kondraki: ... YOU LYING SONOVABITCH! 


Clef: [manic laughter, strangled] And here's the really fucked up 
part, Kondraki... what if I'm lying right now? What if | did just tell you 
the truth before, and what you primitive apes call Heaven is currently 
laying wide open, ready to be stormed by my followers? What if you 
die, and your soul crosses the Boundary, and you find those damn 
artemicite gates covered with the bloody wings of the Elohim nailed 
to the walls? And what if I'm there, ready to lead you to your eternal 
reward? And what if I've got, and I'm showing her all the things 
that you'll never [DATA EXPUNGED]? 


Kondraki: You BASTARD! I'll kill you! 


Clef: You'll never un-think it, Konny! It'll always be back there in the 
back of your head, nagging, nagging, tickling you, spinning around 
in an unending spiral... 


Kondraki: [Inarticulate scream of rage.] 


[It is determined that this is the point where Dr. Clef accidentally fell 
out of his chair and struck his head nine times against the corner of 
the desk, fracturing his skull and snapping his neck between the 
second and third vertebrae.] 


<End Log> 


Closing Statement: Dr. Clef remains in intensive care, paralyzed 
from the neck down. Dr. Kondraki has been cleared of all 
responsibility regarding the incident. 


Supply and Demand 


He was back on Vaygach Island, staring out at the dead water of the 
Kara Sea. Behind him something burned. It was screaming, but it 
sounded hollow, like he was listening at the end of a long tunnel. 
Karsten found he couldn't turn around. His feet remained firmly 
planted in the cold, wet mud like a statue fixed to its pedestal. It was 
1999 and he was 24. He was 24, and he'd already seen a lifetime's 
worth of horrors. 


"Don't worry, it won't escape,” said a soft voice from behind him. 
Then came the touch of slender fingers on his shoulders. Magda. 


His heart leapt and he felt the hold on his body disappear. Karsten 
turned, only to be left staring at a hollow, fire-blackened skull. 


He woke up with a start in the relative cool of the tattered tent, 15 
years later and every bit as dead inside. Karsten Eiker rubbed his 
eyes and cursed himself for falling asleep. Ever since landing at 
Aden Adde International Airport, he'd felt like a piece of meat ona 
barbecue. He hated the weather in this place with a passion he'd 
never been able to summon for anything else, but if all went as it 
should, he'd be out of there soon. 


He'd gotten a ride out here to the middle of the desert from a local 
Chaos Insurgency contact, a man he knew as Jilbis. Google 
Translate told him it meant "viper" or "cobra". He'd never gotten the 
need for code names; in this information age, no amount of 
obfuscation could shield you forever, let alone a simple one-word 
code name. Regardless of his personal preferences, he'd gotten 
"Laertes". He'd never been a fan of Shakespeare; too much tits and 
death for his tastes. 


Someone entered the tent. 


"You come highly recommended by a Russian friend of mine, Mr. 
Laertes." 


The speaker, a local warlord known only as The Tiger of Jilib, 
blocked most of the light as he stood in the opening. He was a 
massive man, not just in height, but also in girth. Karsten knew him 
as Yusuf al-Hilam, the son of a doctor and a car mechanic, who 
nursed the trauma of his parents' mismatched social status and the 
accompanying bullying like a hobo nursed his last beer. He was 
everything you'd expect from an East-African dictator: crude, 
gullible, vain and most importantly of all, predictable. Karsten smiled. 


"That's good to hear," Karsten said, "considering I'm not on very 
good terms with my Russian friends." 


The Tiger didn't even seem to register the reply and simply nodded, 
grabbing a bottle of what was probably booze. He looked at Karsten. 
"Would you like a drink, Mr. Laertes?" 


Karsten got up from the rickety folding chair he'd been napping in 
and nodded. "Sure, why not? | need all the moisture | can get, eh?" 
He tried to sound whimsical, but the dream had disturbed him, even 
if he'd dreamt it countless times before. He never seemed to get 
used to it. 


The warlord poured him a shot and handed him the chipped little 
glass. It had something in it that smelled like it'd come out of a dead 
animal's rectum, but The Tiger didn't seem to let that bother him; he 
downed his glass without thinking twice. Karsten was thinking twice, 
possibly even three or four times about joining him, but he still 
emptied his glass. It wasn't that bad really, so he gracefully 
accepted a refill when he was offered one. 


"Shall we sit?" the warlord said and gestured at the arrangement of 
colorful but completely mismatched chairs in the tent. They stood 
arranged haphazardly around a small camping table that was as 
rickety as the chair Karsten'd woken up in. At the moment, this table 
held Karsten's reinforced metal briefcase. 


"Let's," Karsten said and strolled back over to the chairs. He sat 
down and raised his glass in salute. 


"Do you have family, Mr. Laertes?" The Tiger asked. 


Karsten took a sip of the foul concoction and shook his head. "No. In 
my line of work, a family is a big fat target.” 


The warlord nodded. "Of course, of course. Not even parents or a 
brother though? Surely you are not entirely alone." 


"| had a sister." 


The way he said it made The Tiger wary of digging any deeper. 
"Well, let's not waste any more time on smallitalk, Mr. Laertes. | take 
it you have brought me the item you were so enthusiastic about?" 


Karsten silently put his glass away and touched his finger to a little 
black pad on the briefcase's top. After a few seconds of satisfying 
whirring it opened with a soft click. 


"There you go," he said. 


He saw his customer's face light up and at that moment he knew 
that all of this would go off without a hitch. Here was a man who had 
no greater motivation for what he was doing than the simple, 
animalistic desire to destroy. 


The Tiger of Jilib peered into the briefcase and cleared his throat. "Is 
this the only one you brought?" 


"Just the one, yes," Karsten answered. "We'll be producing more, 
but these things take a long time to manufacture. This is the first, 
and may | say, you're getting a very good deal here." 


"lam sure that we are, but you will forgive me my misgivings. What 
you have promised me sounds sounds quite...unbelievable." 


Karsten nodded. "Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as 
they say. How about we take this baby out for a test run then? | 
assume you have a suitable weapon somewhere around here? 


"Yes, of course," the warlord said and barked an order at one of his 
many soldiers, most of whom looked like they liked holding guns, but 
weren't very good at using them. 


Karsten watched as they brought out an RPG-32 Hashim. He 


motioned for them to bring it to him. Inspecting it, he saw it hadn't 
been taken care of very well. Not that it really mattered, not for the 
purposes of this test. He carried the grenade launcher over to the 
briefcase and took the specially crafted ammunition container out of 
its protective packing material. It felt light and balanced, almost too 
light for the sheer amount of destruction contained within. For a 
moment he hesitated, unsure what was going to happen exactly, but 
then he attached it to the back of the launcher. 


"Ready when you are, Yusuf," he said and passed the weapon to 
the Somali. "Did you have a target in mind?" 


The Tiger glared at him, unaccustomed to being addressed by his 
given name. 


"You will refer to me as the-" he started before Karsten interrupted. 
"Tiger of Jilib, yes. I'm sorry." 


Karsten held up his hands apologetically. "| forgot my manners, sir. 
Please forgive me the discourtesy." 


The warlord frowned but nodded. "Apology accepted. And no, | have 
not yet selected a target. How about that building there?" he said 
and pointed at a shack some 100 meters off. 


Karsten relaxed and smiled. "Fine by me. Have a blast." 


The stupid pun was lost on The Tiger, who immediately brought the 
scope up to his eye and gleefully fired. The rocket sped towards the 
low building and when it impacted, just for a moment, nothing 
appeared to happen. Then the air seemed to fold in on itself and 
with a loud screeching sound, everything disappeared. Karsten's 
senses were telling him it was all gone. The desert, the building, the 
warlord, his troops, their command tent, everything. It wasn't 
darkness, because you could see darkness. It was an absolute 
nothing, and within that nothing, something was screaming - 
something inhuman. 


Then reality seemed to reassert itself. The Tiger of Jilib was on the 
desert floor, eyes wide and empty. His skin was nearly translucent 
now, showing the tissue beneath like a morbid anatomically correct 


model. He seemed smaller somehow, shriveled inside his clothes. A 
cursory glance told Karsten that The Tiger's soldiers and every 
animal in the immediately vicinity had suffered the same inexplicable 
fate. He watched, senses deadened, as the sands shifted and 
scores of dead scorpions rose to the surface of the desert. 


When his battered and beleaguered brain had finally managed to 
grab ahold of reality again, Karsten felt a burning sensation. Then 
the pain hit him like a full-on collision with a semi. He ripped open 
the thin white shirt he had on and looked down. The tear-shaped 
pendant he'd been wearing had left a burn mark in its exact shape. 
The smell of his own flesh cooking was nauseating and he 
staggered back for a moment before falling down on his ass. He 
wanted to rip the pendant off its simple twine string, but he knew 
better than that. 


"Okay," he muttered, "okay, let's recap. Jesus." 


Karsten was silent for a moment. The only sound he could hear was 
the rushing of the wind as it already began covering the corpses with 
a thin layer of desert sand. 


"Okay." 
He got up and dusted himself off. 


"So they work, that's for goddamn sure," he said to no one in 
particular, and took out a small tablet from his inside pocket. It was 
amazing what money could buy in terms of connectivity out in the 
middle of nowhere. He woke the thing up and tapped out his 
password. A few seconds later it was connected to one of the 
Insurgency's secure communications servers. After supplying his 
credentials, he accessed his list of contacts and sent a message to 
his handler. 


From: Laertes 
To: Hephaestus 


Subject: Ninurta Project Field test 


Field test successful. Yield exceeds expectation, but 


operators need to be shielded better. Burnt a hole in my 
chest and | wasn't even firing the fucking thing. ETA 
approximately 14hrs from now. Will debrief. Get me a 
coke and a tuna sandwich, I've earned it. 


P.S. The UN should pay us for cleaning up here. 


He put the tablet away and took in the scene in front of him one last 
time. There was no fire, no smoke, there was nothing to show that 
any weapon had been fired. Just a 5 meter deep crater where once 
a little shack had stood. That, and the lifeless bodies of sixteen men, 
nine goats, two cats, three dogs and give or take fifty-four scorpions. 


Karsten fixed his shirt as best he could and calmly went looking for a 
vehicle to drive into the nearest town. With any luck Magda wouldn't 
be there the next time he slept. Then again, luck played little part in 
his life these days. 


Surfaces 


Matthew Andrews was seated in front of a table. This alone wasn't 
very unusual, and indeed, the fact that he was seated there didn't 
cause Matthew any undue concern. The table, located in the 
interrogation room of an otherwise mostly vacant sheriff's office, 
didn't provide much in the way of spectacle, he observed. Plastic, 
scratched, the typical shabby build quality you get with the 
government issue stuff. The entire thing would probably collapse on 
itself if he gave it a good shove. Sadly, this was a theory he could 
not properly follow through, since his hands were cuffed behind his 
back. Also, he imagined, the two detectives seated in front of him 
might object. They seemed rather agitated about something, 
probably whatever one of them kept droning about. 


"-And this is very important, Mr. Andrews-" the bald one said, trying 
and failing to hide his anger by burying his nose in his brown 
notebook. 


"Please, call me Matt." 


"It is very important, Mr. Andrews, that you understand just how 
serious these allegations are, and that you tell us everything you 
know. Because right now, | feel like you're not." 


"In fact, | feel like you're fucking with us," said his mustached 
partner. 


"Me? Heavens no. | have nothing but respect for men of the law. In 
fact, | consider myself one." 


"You work as a Clerk in a lumber mill." 
Matthew smiled, and said nothing. 


"Where are they?" the bald one asked again, eyeing Matthew ina 
way he must have imagined was professional and detached but 


um, where were we? Right, okay, counselling the 
parents of children who have been recently diagnosed 
with terminal disease. Tough topic...