The darkness shifted and blinked, and Sir Malcolm realised it was a 
pupil—a gigantic eye larger than London, dwarfing him in his own 
mind. The jade throne crumbled beneath his fingers, pieces of it 
coming away like cheap styrofoam left out in the rain too long. 


HUNG 


And in the great rumbling chant—an impossible sea of sound 
washing over him, breaking up the order of his mind, sending causal 
threads flying in all directions, ends fraying and tearing open as he 
lost contro-- 


OM 

He heard a voice 
MANI 

And this is what it said 
PEME 

! will not allow another 
HUNG 


And it reached out and took hold of his universe, 240 miles across, 
in its talons, and he felt the terrible pressure as the tips pressed into 
the interface between worlds. Please, don't do that, Sir Malcolm 
pleaded, and he realised he was now kneeling in his pyjamas, the 
rest of his throne blown away by that terrible hurricane. | want it, | 
need it 


OM 


The talons sliced through the skin of his stillborn universe, and it 
popped like a soap bubble in the wind. He staggered, back hitting 
the railings. He looked up and saw them all—the Herald, the 
Chronicle, the Evening Standard, gathered back around him with 
hungry eyes. The old universe was back—no, recreated, as it was 
before the shift. Only the female reporter, Sam Deloitte, had 
remained constant—she was kneeling on the pavement a dozen 
yards or so behind the others, watching him as he reeled, 
disheveled and sweat tousling his hair. He thought he saw a look of 
triumph on her features. 


"Sir Malcolm," one of the reporters called, "just to clarify, you want 
that on the record as your response to the allegations? I'll just read 
that back: 'I'll let you see, you stupid bitch, I'll let you see, | want it, | 


need it'?" The laughter again, this time with a note of unease—the 
sort of unease you feel laughing at someone who is clearly mentally 
unwell. 


"|, I—” Sir Malcolm tried to swallow but something had gone wrong 
with his body. He wondered if he had suffered a stroke—nothing 
seemed to be responding to his brain's orders. He used the railings 
to pull himself along, away from the house. He looked back and saw 
Fran standing in the doorway, watching, listening, and it crushed 
whatever part of him the thing in the box had not already broken. He 
began moving faster, and the reporters followed him along the 
railings, taking pictures, video on their smartphones. The breakdown 
of the century, he thought. "Stay away from me!" he shrieked, and 
began to run. 


Chapter Fourteen: "Keagan and the Bomb" 


It was a very, very long time before the Chaos Insurgency agents 
were able to raise their superiors—or it seemed that way to Keagan, 
who in the meantime had suffered through a fairly amateurish 
interrogation by the agent who had advocated strangling him and 
throwing his corpse onto the B3098. What, exactly, he hoped the 
result would be of his clumsy attempt to pistol-whip Keagan around 
the cheeks and neck, followed by punches to the gut and finally a 
technique whereby he wedged Keagan's hand between two chairs 
and leaned on one—probably excruciating if he hadn't picked the 
hand in which Keagan still hadn't entirely recovered his sensation— 
was unclear, as he never bothered to remove the gag. Come on, 
Keagan thought after the thirtieth attempt to make him regurgitate 
the light lunch he'd had on the way to Sir Malcolm's office the 
previous day, I'd tell you the fucking sky's green right now if you only 
let me. Finally, the other Insurgency agent made a connection on 
one of the cell phones and gestured for his colleague to lay off on 
the unnecessary brutality. He spoke quickly and his frown deepened 
with every response. At length he put the phone down and, 
commandeering the other chair, sat straddling it facing Keagan. 


"Frankly, the people | spoke to found your story as fucking 
unbelievable as | did. Unfortunately, it syncs with red flags which 


have been raised recently about Foundation activity in this Sector, in 
particular some unauthorised centralisation of the London cell 
structure. The upshot of all that, for you, is that we don't kill you just 
yet." He reached over and tugged Keagan's gag off. "Say thank 
you." 


Outside, Keagan heard an engine, the sound of wheels displacing 
small stones on the dirt path. And that, if | Know anything at all about 
cars, is an Audi, Keagan thought. It slowed, stopped. Close. 


"Someone's coming," he said, words slightly slurred by the pain. 


Footsteps now—the agent closest to the entrance stepped back in 
line with the tent wall while his colleague retrieved the magazine and 
reunited it with his Makarov (good luck firing that now, Keagan 
thought, I'm pretty sure you cracked the handle on my jaw). And 
although there was only the faintest whisper of disturbance from the 
bushes outside, somebody stepped through. 


"It looks like congratulations are in order," Sir Malcolm said, wearing 
a look of amusement as he saw Keagan in the chair. The agent 
closest to the door had trained his Makarov on the newcomer but 
put it down immediately. 


How was this possible, Keagan thought? Last time he had seen the 
man he had been busy behind his desk in London, and it hardly 
seemed plausible that a Cabinet Minister had been following them 
up the M3, or even for that matter being seen dead in an Audi A4. 
Keagan blinked a couple of times, but it failed to revise the 
impression he had that the man was slightly blurry. Just very slightly 
out of focus. Ah, Keagan thought. 


"Sir Malcolm," the agent who had drawn the gun on him stuttered. 
“To—ah—what do we owe the honour?" 


"A little bird told me you'd captured O'Neill. | thought I'd drop by to 
confirm you had him in custody. You're both due a special reward." 


The agents kept exchanging small, shaky looks. The one who'd 
spent the last half hour or so on the phone verifying Keagan's story 
swallowed, slowly. 


"We'll look forward to that, Sir. Why don't you take a seat, just fora 
few minutes?" Sir Malcolm turned towards him, a beneficent smile 
on his face. 


"No, | think I'll be leaving just as soon as | see Mr O'Neill dead. To 
be honest, I'm surprised you haven't taken the initiative and done it 
already. | do hope you haven't been listening to him spouting 
reactionary propaganda?" 


"Sir, | really think you should take a seat. | need to raise some 
people who want to speak to you." The agent was sweating now, 
and his eyes strayed from the out-of-focus blue eyes to the radio 
and mobiles on the table. 


"| see." Sir Malcolm looked from him to Keagan, at the other agent, 
then back again. "So that's how it is." 


The sudden ice in the voice made the nearest agent's eyes widen, 
and he spun around, raising the Makarov. Half-way through the 
agent's turn, the man with Sir Malcolm's face tensed his arm and 
raised it above his head like a guillotine, so fast it seemed the arm 
simply stopped being here and started being there. Something 
substantial and wet flew past Keagan's ear, splattering him in blood. 
There was a clattering on the table behind Keagan, something 
bouncing off the wall. Then the howling began, the agent closest to 
the door dropping to his knees, staring in disbelief at the void where 
his arm used to be. His compatriot failed for a split second to make 
sense of what he was seeing; when he realised that the Malcolm- 
thing had cleaved the other agent's arm from its socket he screamed 
himself, lifted the Makarov and— 


With the same blinding speed, the Malcolm-thing stepped forward 
and casually, with a whip-like fluidity that seemed impossible in 
anything with bones, poked his arm through the chest of the other 
agent. He died quickly and quietly, his face turning purple. The 
Malcolm-thing absent-mindedly licked blood off his fingers before 
turning to the first man who had by now fallen silent, face bone 
white, but still trying to stem the flow of blood with his other hand. 
"Still alive," the Malcolm-thing said, mournfully. He took the man's 
head in his hands and twisted it, casually. The man lost any 
remaining rigidity and slumped to the floor. 


Keagan sat in the chair, facing the creature. 
"You must be the tulpa," he said. 


"What a dazzling piece of deduction. Very adroit," spat the tulpa, 
looking around at the scene. "What a mess you've made. Do you 
know what a trouble this is going to be for me to clean up?" As he 
spoke, Keagan heard the faint buzzing beneath the words—if he 
had the means to record it and the means to play it back, he had no 
doubt he could slow it down and increase the volume and hear a 
fly's rendition of the heart sutra, knitting the tulpa together. Now he 
was standing still, Keavan realised he wasn't such a good likeness 
of Sir Malcolm as might first have been imagined. He was far less 
polished, like a rough sketch of the man, the eyes blurring whirlpools 
of blue, no pupils discernable. 


"Were you the one who killed Wesley Kellogg?" Keagan asked. 


"What?" The tulpa looked irritated by the question, as though 
Keagan should have figured it all out earlier. "No, that was the 
guard. | forget his name. | had to kill him afterwards." 


"Because you always look out for Sir Malcolm, right?" 


The tulpa's shoulders sagged. "I try. Sometimes he can be very 
stupid. Which doesn't make sense, because I'm him." He didn't even 
sound like Sir Malcolm, Keagan thought. He tensed his wrists and 
heard a tiny click as the restraints gave up exactly one notch. He 
held his breath, but the tulpa didn't seem to have noticed. 


"No, you're wrong." Keagan said. "You're what Sir Malcolm thinks he 
is. |guess that makes you the responsible one." 


The tulpa stood for a moment. "| never looked at it like that. No- 
one's ever taught me anything before." He laughed, a look of 
childish joy on his features. Then it faded, slowly. "You know, | don't 
think you're worth it." He walked over to the table, picked up one of 
the mobiles, tapped on it. "Last number redial. There it is. Hello? 
Hello? Of course not. Answerphone." He crushed it between his 
thumb and forefinger, threw the ruined phone to the ground. 
"Thanks to you | may have to kill the entire Insurgency. | told him 


they weren't toys, that he couldn't play around with them." He pursed 
his lips. 


Keagan slowly braced one elbow against the back of the chair and 
applied pressure to his left wrist, feeling it strain at the point of 
dislocation. 


The tulpa turned and began to stalk towards him. "To be so 
dependent on him. To live or die at his whim. But I'm always the one 
who has to pull his arse out of the fire. It makes me sick." 


Keagan felt his lips move, heard his own voice say: 
"Tell me about it." 


Without conscious thought, he wrenched his left hand out of the 
restraint, feeling a faint burning but not much more in the cold- 
crippled hand, reaching with the other for the thing he had heard 
clatter behind him, whose position he had apparently pinpointed with 
uncanny accuracy, as the surviving nerve endings in his 
intermediate phalanges reported that they had closed around it. I'm 
apparently going to fire a gun, Keagan thought. He hoped his right 
index finger was up to the task. 


The tulpa's face barely changed as Keagan brought the Makarov to 
bear and depressed the trigger. The recoil sent shuddering waves of 
pain through his arm but he kept the gun levelled on the tulpa as he 
rose from the chair. Two shots. Three. The bullets hit the tulpa in its 
face and neck, tearing great gouges from its substance. It went 
down, only now deigning to register a vague sense of surprise. Four, 
five. Keagan continued firing into the tulpa until the Makarov 
magazine was empty. The tulpa lay on its side in the middle of the 
tent floor. Its head and upper torso was a ruin—nothing above the 
bridge of the nose left. But it continued to shudder, and Keagan 
realised with a horrible jolt that it was laughing. 


"Oh, what a world,” it chuckled, jaw hanging loose on one side. 
"What a world." The half-liquid half-smoke that had leaked from its 
wounds reversed its flow, seeping back over the floor towards the 
tulpa, the moonscape of its chest beginning to knit back together. 
"Why don't | give you a head start?" 


This isn't a fucking game, damn it! This is a battle for the survival of 
our species, and it is almost certain we are running out of time and 
options. And once we run out of both, well...there are two options: 
kill yourself, or wait for it to find you. Just be sure to turn out the 
lights if you're the last one left. 


So either help...or don't help at all. 


Item: SCP-393 

Tissue Test Record: None 

Termination Test Record: From the testing log of SCP-393. 
Test 393-4 

Begin Log: 

Subject: 1 linked D-class, male 


Description: New subject instructed to do nothing of note for the day 
of //2 , andis continually monitored by CCTV. 


Written: ' Going to somehow defeat SCP-682 today.’ 


Outcome: Outcome is identical to previous test, save for the frozen 
expression of horror on the comatose subject's face. SCP-393 links 
to stand-by D-class. 


Note: It was worth a shot.. - Research Assistant 

End Log 

Item: Dr. King, accompanied by 10 trained and armed security 
guards 

Tissue Test Record: N/A 


Termination Test Record: Personnel entered containment 
chamber of SCP-682. All personnel retained at least 25 meters of 


Keagan felt his abused knees protesting as he half-ran, half- 
stumbled around the creature, throwing the empty Makarov into the 
corner of the tent, and into the glare of the morning light. He 
orientated himself back the way he had gone first time around. On 
the horizon he could just pick out the shape of buildings. It's too far, 
he thought. It's miles away. 


He had got about two hundred metres before the tulpa emerged. At 
this distance, as Keagan glanced back over his shoulder, he was 
little more than a vague suggestion of a humanoid, a blurry shape 
moving over the ground. He pursued with an even, tireless lope, not 
much faster than Keagan's own pace, but fast enough that he would 
close the distance long before Keagan reached the abandoned 
village. He wants me to die scared, Keagan thought. It wasn't long 
before his muscles began to burn, his beaten joints screaming for 
rest. You can still choose where it happens, Keagan thought. You 
could stop here, turn and face him, spit in his face. Don't give him 
the satisfaction of chasing you until you fall. But his limbs kept 
moving, even as the burning turned to a searing, intolerable pain, 
imminent cramp. 


Instead, he thought about what Sir Malcolm had said. Anyone can 
do it, he had said. How do you first realise you can control reality? 
Maybe it's just a case that things seem to go right for you, just a little 
more often than probability should dictate. You visualise it, and it 
happens. You tell a story, and it comes true. It's denial of reality, he 
objected, that's the basic principle of it. Like lying—and how could 
you ever tell if you had really changed reality or simply deluded 
yourself into imagining you had done so? 


You've assumed you have principles, Keagan thought. You don't lie 
because you would rather kill a man than breach your code of 
personal morality. What if you were wrong? He looked at the ground 
beneath his feet, his shadow before him flickering and uncertain. 
There's a man running over a field, he thought, somewhere in 
Wiltshire. | thought that was me. Okay then, he thought, tell a story. 
It's not lying, because it could be true, like everything you've told 
yourself has happened to you. 


Somewhere, under the ground, there was a piece of metal. A piece 
of iron ore. It lay buried for millions of years, until a great machine