Killing Time

Link to article: Killing Time.

Module Styles

• :root {
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    --header-subtitle: "SURVIVE ● CONSERVE ● PERSIST";
  
    --accent: 255, 34, 67;
    --head-font: var(--ui-font);
  
    --timeDelay: 1s;
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  .flashback {
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      padding: 25px 25px 25px 25px;
      box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
      margin: auto;
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  .muddle {
      padding: 4px 16px 4px 16px;
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      width: 85%;
      margin: auto;
      margin-bottom: 28px;
      margin-top: 28px;
      background: #21252E;
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  .wettlesplat .image-container {
      max-width: 200% !important;
      width: 200% !important;
      position: relative;
      left: -50%;
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• .earthworm a {
    color: #2F333C !important;
    text-decoration: none;
    cursor: text;
    pointer-events: none;
  .earthworm a[href="/"] {
    color: #355 !important;

Inline Styles

• font-family: BauhausLTDemi; font-size: 120%;

• font-family: BauhausLTDemi; font-size: 120%;

Includes

• :scp-wiki:theme:foxtrot [info]
• :scp-wiki:info:start [info]
• :scp-wiki:info:end [info]
• :scp-wiki:component:info-cw [info]
• fragment:74-killing-time-2
• :scp-wiki:component:earthworm [info]
• :scp-wiki:component:license-box [info]
• :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end [info]

CSS Classes

• anchor

• sidebox

• wettlesplat

• blockquote

Page Source

[[include :scp-wiki:theme:foxtrot
dark=a|
canada=a|
hidetitle=a]]

[[module css]]
:root {
  --header-title: "R\0026 C SITE-43";
  --header-subtitle: "SURVIVE ● CONSERVE ● PERSIST";

  --accent: 255, 34, 67;
  --head-font: var(--ui-font);

  --timeDelay: 1s;
}
.flashback {
    border-left: solid 3px rgb(255, 34, 67);
    border-right: solid 3px rgb(255, 34, 67);
    padding: 25px 25px 25px 25px;
    box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
    margin: auto;
    background: #21252E;
}
.muddle {
    padding: 4px 16px 4px 16px;
    box-shadow: 0px 0px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
    width: 85%;
    margin: auto;
    margin-bottom: 28px;
    margin-top: 28px;
    background: #21252E;
    border: solid 2px rgb(255, 34, 67);
}
.wettlesplat .image-container {
    max-width: 200% !important;
    width: 200% !important;
    position: relative;
    left: -50%;
}
[[/module]]

[[module CSS]]
.earthworm a {
  color: #2F333C !important;
  text-decoration: none;
  cursor: text;
  pointer-events: none;
.earthworm a[href="/"] {
  color: #355 !important;
[[/module]]

[[=]]
[[include :scp-wiki:info:start]]
[[=]]
**Killing Time**
Hold the line.

⚠️ **Content warning:** 
This article contains scenes of extremely graphic violence and gore, self-harm, infant death, suicidal ideation and suicide.

**[[[http://www.scp-wiki.net/this-page-intentionally-left-blank|More by Harry!]]]**
**[[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/placeholder-mcd-s-authorpage|More by Place!]]]**
[[/=]]
[[include :scp-wiki:info:end]]
[[include :scp-wiki:component:info-cw]]
[[/=]]

[[div class="anchor"]]
[[div class="sidebox"]]
[[=]]
__**NAVIGATION**__

[#anchor-2024 2024]
[#anchor-2025 2025]
[#anchor-2026 2026]
[#anchor-2027 2027]
[#anchor-2028 2028]
[#anchor-2029 2029]
[#anchor-2030 2030]
[#anchor-2031 2031]
[#anchor-2032 2032]
[#anchor-2033 2033]
[#anchor-2034 2034]
[[/=]]
[[/div]]
[[/div]]

[[# anchor-2024]]

[[=]]
+ Killing Time

@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@

+ 2024
++ 19 September
[[span style="font-family: BauhausLTDemi; font-size: 120%;"]]**[http://www.scpwiki.com/secure-facility-dossier-site-43 The Ecumene]**[[/span]]
----
[[/=]]

She didn't want credit. It wasn't about that.

Amelia had made major strides in containment theory over the past year. Developed a novel means of restricting bedrock growth -- and it made use of a renewable resource, even! She now had all the tarp she could ever ask for. Set up an early warning system for the random effluence deposits, so that Markey could clamp down affected areas from his console while going through his otherwise prescribed motions. (She thought she'd probably take that duty herself next year, as she'd been unimpressed with his response time. They could have set it up for automatic triggering, except that automatic systems almost always failed during the breach.) She'd had to set up a few extra bulkheads and doors for this purpose, which had caused her to butt heads with Ambrogi; the man was categorically opposed to any permanent alterations to the Site's superstructure, a compunction well past the border of mania. Even her part in the great political splintering-off had been coldly calculated, as it was less likely that something would wipe them all out at once when they were occupying far-flung corners of the facility instead of clustering in a few hot spots. In previous years, if Habitation and Sustenance had ever gone the way of Theology and Teleology, half the human race would have perished. But of course the sequestering made a lot of things a lot more difficult, so she wasn't expecting any accolades for that. Or any of it. She didn't want credit.

But she wouldn't have minded acknowledgement.

The saloon was neutral territory, and even after Radcliffe's fatal bar fight it was still popular with the diehards. Like Markey. A few cups in and he'd told her Placeholder's theory, explained what the data showed and the correlations they'd drawn from it. They thought the reduced impact was down to something metaphysical, rather than the improvements she'd made. They thought they could fix the breach permanently by doing the same thing over and over again.

Amelia knew a word fitting that definition.

So while Ambrogi cried over spilt milk and talked to ghosts, and Markey drank himself insensate, and Gwilherm attempted to translate her self-assurance into martial law, and Mukami gave up trying to translate her thoughts into language and translated herself into the red open air instead, and Del Olmo was wrong, wrong, wrong about everything, and Radcliffe paid his debt with scut work, and Wirth acted like none of it mattered, Amelia stuck to what was actually doing some good. Actually making a difference.

Extending humanity's collective lifespan, to an unknown end.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Amelia.jpg]]

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@

++ 31 October
----
[[/=]]

He wasn't meant to walk without an escort.

Most days he didn't walk at all. He parked himself at the Cannon, and tried to piece together how it had functioned before he had torn it apart. He wondered how much his need to destroy was down to the horror of what he'd seen, and how much had been make-work for the year ahead. He parked himself at a terminal, and tried to figure out if there was something he had missed, something he could have done, something he could do //now// to change the future, when Dougall Deering would doubtless return once more to change the past. He parked himself on his hard slab bench, arms crossed, eyes closed, and tried to logic his way out of the entire situation. 

Every few days, though, his muscles needed refreshing on the memory of how to move. So he took off the parking break and walked, with an escort. It was the escort's job to steer him, while he was lost in thought. They'd never steered him wrong before.

This one suddenly steered himself into a closet, and slammed the door shut. Place froze. He realized the halls were unfamiliar. He hadn't memorized the floorplans. He didn't know where he was. Even the colour-coding of the tiles didn't help, since under the red they were all the same level and saturation, just different hues.

"What are you doing?" he said, so quietly it couldn't possibly have transferred through the door. But he had a sudden feeling that speaking in his outdoor voice might not be such a good idea.

And then the source of that feeling made herself known.

She floated into view, he thought, though really of course she was walking. Just something about her gait was wrong. Something about the way her legs bent, or didn't. Her hair was long and thin, and her striking features were poised so perfectly it seemed impossible they should move.

"Meet cute," she said.

He stared at her.

"Well?" Her hair blew in the measured air, occasionally catching on the flakes of her skin. //The __flakes__...?// 

"Either say something," she smiled, "or get a nosebleed."

He reached down to try the doorknob. It wouldn't turn... no, it wouldn't turn //enough.// He had a sudden, vivid image of the agent on the other side resisting his torque.

"If you're keeping your mouth shut because you think that'll help," she said, "you might have a few things backward."

"I don't know what to say." This wasn't precisely true, but he wasn't about to tell her he was seconds from petrification.

//At least that means I still want to live.// Although perhaps that wasn't such a good thing, given the situation.

She floated toward him. He took a few steps back. Not enough. "What to say, what to say, to a beautiful girl, on a beautiful day?" She made it a little ditty. There was a certain sawdust quality to the timbre. "Let's talk about the weather."

"Please," he whispered. Too quiet for her to hear. She would hear it. "Just let me go."

She stopped at a respectful distance. Close enough that he could see the imperfections in her skin. They were perfectly consistent. "But you can't go far. You can never go far enough. I'll always be right around the corner."

"Just let me //go,//" he repeated.

"Not unless you take me with you."

He stared at her.

"And you will. You'll never forget me. I'll be up here, forever." She tapped her temples... no, he //felt// that she did. Her arms remained motionless at her sides. "//I don't get left behind.//"

"What are you?" he breathed.

"One of a kind. And our kind will multiply."

On the other side of the door, he heard something like a strangled, choking sound.

"Tell me you're impressed," she cooed.

He released the doorknob, and raised both hands. "I'm impressed!"

The choking grew more urgent. "I don't believe you. What are you impressed by?"

He found he could actually answer this truthfully. "You've driven them all insane in the space of a few years."

Her expression changed slightly. A few degrees more wry. "We could have done that in seconds. But what's the rush?" She shook her head, like it swivelled on a ratchet. "You're still not him."

"Who?" The choking sounds were less audible now. 

"//Him,//" she breathed. He wondered if the air even noticed. "Maybe I'm the one who makes it happen. Do you think?" She considered him. It was barely a different sort of stillness from her usual. "No. Maybe a little. But there's something else, isn't there. Something worse than me in your makeup. It's //you,// isn't it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." The honest truth, again.

She nodded, or rather inclined her head, inclined it back. "Neither do I. There's all these straws in my head. I'm stuffed full of them. There for the grasping. Do you know, she actually..." The woman-creature's eyes suddenly bored a hole straight through him, and in spite of the red, he knew what colour they really were. "No, you're better off not knowing."

"I'm no threat to you," he whimpered.

"That doesn't make you unique." 

He took a step back. "You can ignore me. I'll walk. I won't, I won't get in your way again."

"Yes, you will. Or you're worthless to me." The choking had stopped. "Don't be worthless to me."

"I'm..." He spread his hands in utter defeat.

"You'll get there," she grinned, with the sound of splitting wood. "You'll get there."

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@

++ 14 November
----
[[/=]]

It was getting to be a lot, taking the lion's share of leadership and action. They could give themselves a fancy name --  Gwilherm's suggestion, Provisional Task Force Omega-001, "See You in Hell" -- and draft protocols and make it all sound very important and very formal, but the fact was, the Omegas had been set up by fortune and circumstance as Sisyphuses incapable of shrugging off their loads. It was draining. Some days, it was simply too much.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Omega.jpg]]

Ngo, characteristically, suggested the solution. "There's seven days in a week, you know."

It was Sunday. The Lord's day. They didn't have a leader, so this morning the password went to the most credulous of them. Stewart received it gratefully, slipping out of sight and mind for twenty-four hours of blissful release.

Well, almost blissful.

When he spotted Delfina, and she didn't spot him, he knew it was something he ought to report. But he couldn't. So instead he watched her squeeze into an air duct -- like someone blowing bubble gum into a straw -- and spent the rest of the day wandering around, waiting for the shouting and probably gunfire to start.

"Well," Ngo remarked cheerily when the proxy had taken it back from him, "that's useful information, at least. Whenever someone's being stalked by one of the Puppets, we can take them out of circulation."

Stewart nodded glumly. He was thinking this information was probably not much comfort to the woman in H&P who'd beaten her husband to death with an IV stand over a dispute about what to have for dinner.

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@

++ 25 December
----
[[/=]]

She gave most of the credit to Zaman's people, now the facility's quartermasters, for giving her such a substantial and precise inventory to work with. But she could see that most people saw right through it. That was probably okay.

If they thought this was mostly her doing, it was no terrible thing. Nhung could play Santa Claus. She could be a symbol. Psychologists usually were.

There was presently no need to keep prisoners, so the cafeteria had been turned back over to social functions. This one was a doozy. They couldn't pack all the survivors in at once -- "Which is good!" she'd told them at the door, with forced cheerfulness, "Thank you all so much for participating!" -- but there was a substantial train in and out, searching the pile. Looking for their names, and the packages attached to them.

Over four hundred packages, one for every known member of personnel who still soldiered on. 

It had taken a week to properly cross-reference their most recent psychological reviews with something appropriate in the manifests which could easily be spared, but she'd done it. And judging by the looks on the faces she passed in the ensuing hours, the effort had been worthwhile and appreciated. Spirits seemed lighter. There were some smiles.

Of course, they could have been put on for her benefit. But even that was a positive sign. However it happened, she was keeping them keeping on. They would keep trying. Buy another day. Buy another.

The spirit of giving. Giving all there was left to give. Dreaming of a better world in the midst of a red Christmas.

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@
[[/=]]

It helped that not one of the ghosts was so cruel or tasteless as to attempt a broadcast of "Wonderful Christmastime."

[[# anchor-2025]]

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@

+ 2025
++ 21 January
----
[[/=]]

They had to choose their battles.

At first, Melissa had been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of issues. It was hard to even arrange them into a hierarchy of urgency. Was it more of a problem that the breach kept breaching, or that every reflection was death, or that the earth coiled around them like a boa constrictor, or that the lake was even more relentlessly destructive than water usually was, or that everyone outside their walls was dead or worse, or that they were still right on the edge of starvation, or that people kept acting on memories which weren't true, or working to ulterior motives that weren't theirs, or or or or or or or

Or did it matter how severe the issue, so long as a solution was found? That, in the end, was what she clung to. One of the essential doctrines of science. Nobody can figure out everything, but everyone can figure out //something.// Her primary expertise was in optics, and conveniently, one of their more obnoxious problems was optical.

It had gotten much harder to see in 2023. It was a little harder to see now than it had been last year. Billie's tests hadn't shown serious macular degeneration in any but the most elderly subjects, so nothing beyond what was to be expected naturally, and though the low light and persistent redness was definitely weakening everyone's vision, the haze was something more than that. Some element of the blurry overlap was actually //there,// in the physical world, to be seen. And that was interesting.

So she borrowed a guard -- they were all still loyal to Gwilherm, one of the few pinnacles of stability left -- and secured her old lab in R&E, and got to work. She had theories, and there were things she could test. It had been a long time since she'd pursued a practical research project of her own, and the work was more than relaxing. It was //diverting.// She could almost forget that her husband was who knows where, doing who knows what in his nihilistic funk. She could almost forget who else was wandering around in more distant, darker places.

No. Strike that last item. She could never forget that. It was always in the back of her mind, waiting for a slip.

The slip came with her first revelation. In her fleeting jubilation at the discovery that at least some materials -- fabrics, for certain -- didn't //appear// red, but actually //were// red -- she let down her guard, and there he was.

Whether he was really there, or she simply remembered him being there second by second, didn't really matter. Harold Blank was standing in her lab, watching her, smiling. A thin trickle of fluid ran down his cheek and into his beard from the weeping sore. It was carrying a single tomato seed lazily downriver.

"Guard?" she called.

Harry... no. 001-2 sat down on a rolling chair, kicked the floor and spun in a circle. The seed was flung off, and stuck to the door of a counter cabinet. "Should've brought two guards," the monster said.

"Couldn't be spared." 

"Really? I didn't know you were so badly off." It stretched. "We could loan you a few of ours, if you like. Used is better than new, when it comes to guards. They're broken in."

"Pass." She felt panic rising. It would have been easier if it'd started monologuing, or cackling maniacally. Trying to force a //conversation// under these circumstances was beyond insane.

It shrugged, and stopped spinning. "Melissa, I have a problem. I was hoping you could help with it."

She wished she had a weapon. She wanted to blow that alien expression off that well-loved face. "Make me."

It grinned. "You know I could. But in this case I need the real you. I'm curious about my memories."

She glanced at the boarded up window pane behind her. She wondered if the other side was splashed with blood, or if there was any sign that the guard had ever existed. Or if they were still standing there, on guard, unaware that anything was happening. Or if they would shoot her if she tried to leave. "Your memories."

It nodded. "Do you remember a canoe trip?"

She froze. Once, years back, she'd gotten very drunk. She'd had a fight with Reuben over something stupid, and he'd gone to visit his parents, and she'd stayed behind for the annual sad Christmas party. Harry had been there too, and they'd commiserated. She'd told him she had a dream. Two of them, rowing a canoe on a wide, mirror-still lake. No worries. No responsibilities. Just them, and the water, and the wind.

He'd said it sounded like a nice dream. She'd told him she thought so, too.

"I remember," she said. //And if __you__ do... what does that mean?//

"You were called away." It frowned. "Why?"

She stared at it. "What are you talking about?"

"You were called away, while we were on the canoe. We had to row back to shore. What was that about?"

She was lost. "That wasn't part of the dream."

Now it looked confused. "Dream? I wasn't talking about a dream."

Something in the air between them felt dangerous. She glanced around the lab, as casually as she could, in search of something she could use as a weapon. 

It sighed. "Well, thanks anyway. Still getting used to all this." It patted its labcoat and hooded sweater for emphasis. Some of the places it patted didn't resume their former shapes, and a stain began spreading near its left pectoral. It stood up, stretched again, and told her she'd fallen asleep.

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@
[[/=]]

That wasn't the only thing it told her. She heard the rest, as she lay on a heap on the floor, and even unconscious she knew it to be true.

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@
[[/=]]

Dolly was very interested in Bradbury's report. They'd all been thinking of the red as a sort of filter; the idea that everything really might //be// red hadn't actually occurred to any of them. 

"Do you think we ought to take this to the Administrator?" Bradbury asked.

Dolly shook her head. "I'll tell them during our daily briefing. It's not important enough for a dedicated meeting, no offence."

Bradbury shrugged. "None taken." And then she slapped her forehead, as though only just now remembering something important, and pulled out a gun and shot Dolly in the chest.

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@
[[/=]]

It took Nhung a while, with Alis as go-between, to set up diplomatic relations. She'd had to think long and hard about her approach, both playing off what she knew about each faction leader and trying not to make it obvious she was doing so. In the end, they agreed to keep the channel open. "Hermes in the underworld," Alis called it wryly.

Debate by correspondence was by necessity slow and awkward, but they were able to agree on a few things over the succeeding months. Food deliveries from the hydroponics, and declaring the farm neutral territory, that was easy. Same with sharing utilities. Defence and jurisdiction issues were stickier, but the pressing threat from AAF-D added enough urgency that eventually a compromise was reached. Gwilherm owned the space between the fiefdoms, and would not press further. 

The last easy concession was a reorganization of the calendar. It no longer made any particular sense for the transition between December 31 and January 1 to mark the beginning of a new year. The old seasons were dead, and the ball had dropped in Times Square for the final time. 

From now on, each year would end at 6:18 PM on September the eighth, and begin after No Year's Day at 6:34 PM on the ninth.

As for every other day... well. What of them?

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@
[[/=]]

[[table]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]
##ff2243|**SCP-001-F**## is a nebulously-defined phenomenon wherein negative personal habits rebound with excessive consequences. It is difficult to disentangle extreme but non-paranormal cases of cause and effect from this phenomenon, but enough outliers have been identified to confirm the anomaly exists. The first documented example was the death from lung cancer of Dr. Karen Elstrom, despite her having received a clean bill of health only one month prior.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-G**## is a predatory winged creature hunting the former topside interdiction zone of Site-43. Sightings of this creature have been minimal, but it has the approximate size of a commercial airliner, metallic feathers and scales, a variable number of heads, and a strange protrusion from the back of its neck which appears to change shape before the creature takes decisive action. When at ease, it appears to take pleasure from massaging or scratching at this protrusion, and vocalizing to it.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-H**## is a recurrent delusion shared by all members of Site personnel (save for PTF Omega-001) that an additional member of Site personnel, identified as the nonexistent brother of Technician Philip Deering and Dr. Dougall Deering (both deceased), is present in the facility. All personnel report extremely high opinions of this individual, and many obsess over the details of his supposed personal and family life in lieu of performing their duties.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-I**## is a progressive condition wherein an individual will begin to associate a specific location within Site-43 with positive emotions difficult to satisfy elsewhere. Examples include: relief, relaxation, peace, freedom from guilt, //et cetera.// Affected individuals will attempt to occupy these spaces as often as possible, often foregoing food, drink, and attendance to personal hygiene to do so. After excessive time spent in these spaces, affected individuals will find it impossible to experience these emotions outside of them.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-J**## is a rare psychological condition wherein an individual is able to access the thoughts of all other individuals in the facility. This condition exclusively manifests among members of the Identity & Technocryptography Section. Affected individuals are either detained or terminated to prevent obvious secondary complications.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-K**## is a psychospatial effect wherein individuals recalling certain physical locations are translocated to them via an unknown mechanism. Early occurrences were believed to be cases of abduction, as personnel simply disappeared; it is now believed homesick personnel were translocated to their homes on the surface, presumably perishing as a result. While some use is made of this effect for personal mobility among personnel with extremely low Cognitive Resistance Values -- the effect cannot be achieved with a high CRV -- most personnel now have memories of locations outside of Site-43 suppressed via an additive in the eyedrops created to prevent SCP-001-A manifestation.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-L**## is a nomenclative hazard randomly cycling between all personnel at Site-43 in various quantities. The given names of affected individuals are perceived as offensive terminology, e.g. profanity, slurs, etc., often resulting in violence against them.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-M**## is Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-A, presently half-sunk into the former Lake Huron basin. The waters of SCP-001-C and the bedrock comprising SCP-001-D are in constant conflict over this space, which appears anomalously resistant to their effects. Other than transmogrification triggered by the vacuum flush on 8 September 2022, and the fact that it returns to its original waterfront location during each reprise of SCP-001, the facility appears to be wholly intact.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-N**## is an ursine entity found in the former Site-43 interdiction zone. It appears to be attracted to natural locations undergoing erosion, and physical structures undergoing collapse; its presence temporarily arrests these properties. Living entities encountering SCP-001-N are uniformly transformed into stone.

[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]

##ff2243|**SCP-001-O**## is the inability of Site-43 personnel to associate the SCP Foundation with positive qualities of any kind. Whether this is in fact an anomaly, or a natural consequence of how badly we've fucked everything up and the lack of any indication that it's ever going to be better shall be left as an exercise to the reader.
[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[/table]]

"Why don't we just stop cataloguing these," David growled.

Amelia looked up from her notes. "Because that would be giving up?"

"Yeah." He nodded. "Exactly."

[[=]]
@@ @@
[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
@@ @@

++ 8 September
----
[[/=]]

It had been Adrijan's idea, so he couldn't back out now.

But as the deadline approached, his confidence diminished. What if interfering in this manner caused some new, unforeseen difficulty? What if he got it wrong? What if--

"You can't make it much worse, Dr. Zlatá," Placeholder interrupted. "They're already going by gut instinct. They don't have time to check the clocks. Precision is key, but even incremental improvements are worth it for our quality of life. You'll do fine."

So Adrijan waited in Operations Control, patched in to each of the seven Puppet Masters -- he didn't know whose stupid nickname that had been, but like all stupid nicknames it stuck, and he certainly wasn't going to glorify them by calling them //Omegas...// yes. He was connected to each of them by a dedicated radio feed, waiting to recite their instructions. He had a full breakdown of the original breach, with events timed down to the millisecond, and five backup systems with blinking reminders to make sure he made his cues. He was going to walk them through this. It was going to be a flawless rehearsal of a play which had already played itself out years prior.

"Are you going to stay here with me?" He felt pathetic asking, but the polymath's presence was soothing. They all felt it, even as they all resented him for what he represented. "Or are you going to go babysit your machine?

Placeholder nodded wearily. "You couldn't pay me to be in that room right now."

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[[/=]]

There was no gradual fade, no flash of light, not even a sparkling transporter effect. One moment the room was empty, save for Alis and the Cannon, and the next moment Dougall was there.

He rushed to the locker, fiddled around with it for a moment -- she couldn't see what he was doing, his back to her -- and then he turned around, saw her, and froze.

She raised a hand. "Hey."

He stared at her, mouth working. For a moment she wondered if his ghost was on a different wavelength from her, and couldn't be heard, and then she heard the thin, low whine, and then at last it resolved into speech. "You can't be in here!"

She nodded. "I know what you're going to do. I'm not going to stop you."

His eyes were full of tears. "You're not?"

Her eyes were full of tears now, too. "You've already done it twice. It's part of history." She laughed, furiously, and looked away. "Changing the past for Dougall Deering would be the ultimate in romantic stupidity, wouldn't it?"

"I don't..." He shook his head. "Alis, you can't be in here. I have to make this call. It's important. You know that."

"I do." She thought about seizing him. Taking him away. Socking him away somewhere safe. Holding him close until the moment had passed. Kissing him. Snapping his neck. Instead, she stepped forward, and he stepped back, and she stepped forward again, and he allowed her to approach, and she leaned in to whisper in his ear.

He stiffened, and stepped back once more, clanging against the locker. If it had been anyone else but her, they wouldn't have seen it happen. "What?" he cried. "What did you just tell me?!"

"A secret." She almost couldn't see him now, and it had nothing to do with the red or the overlay or the password or his //geistschreiber// powers. "Take it to your grave."

And then she left.

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[[/=]]

It didn't make any sense.

He was telling them the right times. He was right on cue, every time. And they were missing every beat, just a little.

"What's wrong?" the Administrator demanded, in the same strained tones they'd used since the Director had been sent to hospital in critical condition.

Adrijan wanted to cry. "I don't //know.//"

On the big board, he watched as Del Olmo delivered his line too early. The red dot representing Okorie didn't move to the pipe. Something still startled Wettle, apparently, but six of them fled the vigil hallway instead of five. A few minutes later, and Ambrogi was off by seconds as well. The warping landscape altered its permutations slightly, and by the time the 'surviving' Puppets reached the containment cell, there were four of them instead of two. Instead of //zero,// which had been the actual goal.

"How long until we can get in there?" Yancy was glaring at the board, but Adrijan felt the sting just as if he had been the target of the big man's rage.

"Hours," one of the techs responded. "It's worse than hever befohre hout thhhh," and he spat onto his monitor, and his tongue came out with it, slapping wetly on the screen and sliding down with lurid sloth.

The lights went out. When they came back on, the room was pristine. The grime all gone. The //techs// all gone. The air smelled of rubbing alcohol. Every surface gleamed.

Adrijan dove beneath the nearest console. The Administrator crouched under their lectern. When the screams started, they were familiar. Like an old enemy come to call.

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[[/=]]

Yancy would later swear he'd seen all seven heat signatures in AAF-D during the breach. He remembered it so clearly. They all did.

"Memory is a tricky thing, though," Blank told him sympathetically. He patted Yancy's shoulder, then steered him gently away from the airlock door before opening it up.

"What's going on?" Nascimbeni blinked. Okorie was covered in blood, and ragged bits of Ibanez, too shell-shocked even to speak.

"We'll find somewhere to talk about it," Blank assured them. "Give it a day, and everything will make perfect sense."

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[[/=]]

It felt like half a dozen kinds of treason, but the Puppet Masters met again for a debrief once the last of the fallout had fallen.

"Worse than ever," Ambrogi roared. "We are fifty kinds of //fucked.// I can't fucking //see,//" and he tried to swat his coffee off the table, missing it by inches, "and everything's so badly broken I don't think--"

"Does it matter, though?" Wirth yawned. "I mean, really?"

Del Olmo interceded when it looked like the Chief was about to throttle the archivist. "We obviously did a much worse job this year. Why is that? What went wrong, specifically?"

"Zlatá," Gwilherm grunted. "It has to have been Zlatá."

Mukami shook her head. "No. Checked. Times were right. Execution off."

"We should all talk like that," Markey said. "It's a lot more efficient."

She gave him the middle finger.

"I tried to do what he said," Radcliffe moaned. "I really did."

"Your part doesn't even matter," Gwilherm snapped. "The people you're responsible for killing don't respond to //instructions.//"

"Thanks," he nodded. "That's really encouraging. Is there another reason you're making me do this, then? Punishment?"

"Hey," said Placeholder. They all turned to look at him. He hated that, even if it was what he needed. They ceded authority so easily. "Folks. We do need to figure this out. Zlatá's timings were //very// good. That should have been sufficient to make everything go smoothly. But most of you seemed to be operating on a significant delay. Was there a problem with the radios?"

Mukami shook her head. "Checked. Antenna good. Waves fine. Tech fine. Not problem."

"What, then?"

They sat in silence for a moment.

Then, suddenly, Placeholder had a thought. "Oh."

"Oh?" Del Olmo repeated.

"We've been assuming you all have some sort of connection to this," Placeholder told them. "Well, //I've// been assuming. It makes sense given what we've seen. All seven of you are suffering from some sort of anomalous effect, and you're the ones who directed the course of the original breach. What if what went wrong this time is... we changed the formula?"

Del Olmo rubbed his forehead. "Meaning?"

"Meaning we took something meant for seven people, and spread it between //eight.//"

The room was silent again.

"Are you saying," Markey said, very slowly, "that we can't even get any //fucking help// with this?"

"Worse than that," Placeholder frowned. "If participation is retrocausal -- if Zlatá's help gets incorporated the way the rest of your actions did -- I //might// be saying you can't get any //more// help, but you'll need to keep getting the help that didn't... help, this time. Does that make sense?"

At the end of the third silence, they all stood up and left the room.

"That's a yes, then," he decided.

It was technically unanimous.

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++ 9 September
----
[[/=]]

Re-briefing the Puppet Masters a day later was a less tense affair than it had been the first time. Some of those involved were still capable of learning lessons.

It was a fun new wrinkle that Zlatá had joined the ranks of the early adopters. There really was something to Placeholder's theory, then.

"If they were all infirm geriatrics," Dolly remarked, "telling them would feel a whole lot safer."

"We'll all be infirm geriatrics soon," the Administrator murmured as the clock struck midnight on the first and only meaningful day of the year.

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[[/=]]

It had been a mistake to keep them in the dark.

He could see that now. It had gone against his instincts, at the time, to block the transmissions and record their contents on his own. The protocols Del Olmo had been following had seemed sound, but they had made everything worse. Those otherworldly cries for attention had built in frequency and intensity until finally they'd overcome the defences he'd built up, and the results had been devastating. In the weeks that had followed, he'd passed out the remaining musical messages to their intended recipients; some had followed the implied instructions, and some hadn't, but it wasn't his place to judge. He wasn't even the messenger, just an intermediary -- and the problem was that he'd interposed //himself.// Placed himself between the others and the truth.

He wouldn't make that mistake again.

"Good evening, Site-43," Del Olmo crooned into the microphone. He was alone in the recording booth -- really an old security kiosk in the halls of H&S -- and he could almost imagine the ruby glow was a harvest moon sunset. "I'm going to start us off with an announcement. In the interests of transparency, you should all know that the evidence of your eyes has been confirmed: this year's breach was markedly more severe than the last. The good news is, we know why. We made a mistake. We applied a new set of hands to the task, and this divided our resources in a way not conducive to success. From this point forward, therefore, I'd like to ask that no personnel not already assigned to breach duty attempt to aid us with containment. There's nothing you can do. Anything you do, in fact, will only make things worse."

This was the right thing to say.

Surely this was the right thing to say.

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[[/=]]

Janet parked her wheelchair in the middle of the corridor, and raised the riot gun. She had no shortage of rubber tips.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Gwilherm.jpg]]

They'd be picking them up off the ground, and out of people's orifices, for hours after the riot finally ended.

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[[/=]]

"No," the Chief murmured softly. "Not like that. Like //this.//" He took her hand, and gently maneuvered it to the right position. "Seventeen degrees. No more, no less. You're too calm. Try to worry a little more."

Technician Second Class Ruya Darwish tried to focus on the spanner and the gauges, but she couldn't. A black hole was opening up in her chest, and if she didn't focus on that instead, it would eat her up from the inside.

"Too tight," the Chief sighed. "Pull it back, you'll blow the seals. No, //no,//" he chuckled, "you've //still// got it wrong."

"It shouldn't be like this," she told him. "The sensitivity is too high." Ordinarily the pyrocaustic flow from the remains of TheoTelo would allow for a little wiggle room. Right now she was finding it impossible to set the gates correctly, though she'd done it a hundred times before.

"It's responding to you," he chided her. "How can you expect your systems to be in balance if //you// aren't? Ruya, //pay attention.// Why are you finding it so difficult to concentrate?"

Ordinarily this would be an admonition to laugh at. Concentrate? //Here?// But she did find her vision blurrier than usual, her mind wandering. She'd taken her daily dose of knockoff Concerta, but it wasn't helping. It almost always helped.

At least the Chief was helping.

"Trust your instincts," he half-whispered.

She trusted him. So it was only a short hop to what he was suggesting. "What if I tried //this,//" she said, and that ended the conversation.

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[[/=]]

Romolo swore, and he didn't stop swearing.

Where Ruya had been working, the monitors showed nothing but a red-hot glow. He had to back up all the way to the cameras halfway across J&M to finally get a 'clear' picture of the damage: the tiles and structural members had all been melted away, revealing scabbed-up bedrock oozing burnt black-red pus. The outflow from TheoTelo was still pouring out, and it would continue to do so until they found some way of manipulating the burst pipes or stopping the mystical napalm at its source.

The loss of a technician was bad enough, but this was going to throw everything off. Romolo had a tightly defined schedule, a million points of interest to check for decay, disorder or tampering, and he felt like he was losing his grip as he watched that carefully crafted self-contained world give way to this external imposition.

"You can't let this stop you," Nascimbeni told him. "You have to push back. Push it //back.// Everything where you know it belongs."

But on the screen, brushing ash from his shiny orange-red jacket -- torn at the left shoulder, in line with a vertical scar across his face and the brim of his hat -- Romolo could also see his uncle. And judging by the way he looked directly into the camera, and smiled, Romolo felt certain he was seen as well.

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[[/=]]

Reuben watched his wife cry, and wondered with no great sense of urgency why it didn't bother him.

"He might still be in there," she was saying. Repeating it over and over. "Might still be in there."

Across the table, Reuben shrugged. "Could be. It sounded like he was accessing the original's memories, at least. But that doesn't really matter."

She looked up at him, eyes red, gaping.

Obviously she didn't know what he was talking about. He could muse on the subject, he supposed. He wasn't likely to come to any new revelations, but that didn't matter much either. "If he's still in there, trying to get out, well. Whatever is possessing him has near total control, so it's a doomed effort. If--" He raised a finger. "//If// we assume our goal here is to survive, then we should kill him regardless. If you judge one person's soul less important than a few hundred, I mean."

She wiped her eyes and mouth. "He might still," she hissed, "be in //me.// In my head. You can't let me out. That's what I'm saying."

"Oh." He nodded. "Yeah, that's probably true. But then again, that's true of all of us. Who really knows their own mind?" He looked around the makeshift prison which had once been the main cafeteria; the only other occupant, Stewart Radcliffe, gazed back at him sullenly. "Intrusive thoughts are a medical fact. It's a question of where you draw the line. Is what's in your head, you? Or is only the part of you that you identify with, you? Food for thought."

She put her head down on the table and cried, helplessly, into the Formica.

It seemed as appropriate a response as any other, and again he wasn't particularly bothered.

[[# anchor-2026]]

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+ 2026
[[span style="font-family: BauhausLTDemi; font-size: 120%;"]]##ff2243|**(Temporal Authority Reckoning)**##[[/span]]
----
[[/=]]

The bullet wound only hurt when she breathed.

But it would heal, eventually. That was the difference between Dolly and the folks in the support group. So, she hadn't gone. They would have resented her for it. Mukami already thought she was being made fun of whenever the Director stopped mid-sentence to take a breath.

She had decided the solution was to cultivate an air of careful listening. Every time she didn't have to say "go on" was another painful inhalation avoided.

"Go on," she said reluctantly.

"They're all working against me." Amelia was filthy and haggard. Her uniform was torn and burned and melted all over, and her hair was like a mop at the end of its useful lifetime. "Everything I try to fix, they break. I'm starting to think they don't //want// this to get better."

Dolly gripped the edge of the desk. Its solidity gave her strength, because she had decided it worked that way. Wirth had made the suggestion, though he'd backtracked the next time she mentioned it. "They're at a disadvantage," she reminded the senior technician. "Their memories--"

"--are better than ours," Amelia interrupted. Dolly wondered if she would have interrupted the Administrator this way. Or Lillihammer. Or McInnis. "They remember three years of 001-1, -2, -3 and -4. We don't. They should be //more// on the ball than we are."

The new paradigm was, of course, much worse than the intermediate one. None of the systems they relied on were anything like reliable now. Power fluctuated wildly. Conduits and pipes failed under moderate loads, machine overperformed in undesirable ways -- Placeholder was presently rebuilding the DUAL Core after its overclocking set the whole Section on fire, while Billie rebuilt its namesake with skin grafts borrowed from the late Dougall Deering, repurposed this year as an organ donor. It seemed like anything with a tolerance, a threshold, a balance of any kind was veering wildly back and forth along it now. And that wasn't the worst of it. These people were not trained to do their jobs only under optimal conditions. They knew when something was working correctly, and when it wasn't. They knew better than to make the mistakes they were making. But suddenly it seemed like Dolly had only a crew of idiots under her control -- and half a dozen other crews of other idiots working at cross purposes to hers. They hadn't come anywhere close to healing the wounds of September, and the next bout was rapidly racing toward them.

"I don't know," Dolly finally sighed. "They're trying to help. That's been consistent throughout."

Amelia nodded. "But //are// they helping? Trying doesn't matter. We need success, Dolores. We need a //win.//"

Dolly set her jaw forward, just a little. "You could call me Director."

Amelia nodded again. "You could //direct.//"

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[[/=]]

Mukami hadn't been downside in a month.

The eating was much better, topside.

And there were no //fucking// tomatoes.

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[[/=]]

"What if we stopped him?"

David looked up. Alis was leaning over his desk; there had been a time when this would have been distracting. Finding out why that sort of distraction had barely any effect these days was pretty far down his ever-growing list of priorities. "Stopped who?"

She kept looking at him until he got the point.

"Have you talked to Placeholder?"

"Yeah," she said bitterly. "He said something like 'We've already fucked causality. Let's not fuck it again until we see what the babies look like'."

David blinked. "I'm guessing you added the swearing."

"And took out the whimpering."

David dropped his tablet on his desk, and rubbed his eyes. Almost his time again. There had only been one death from 8956 in the last week, an all-time record he was not eager to see unbroken. "Are you asking for a second opinion, or are you asking me to go over his head?"

"I'm asking you what you think," she sighed.

"What I think." He drummed his fingers on the desk; if he did it quickly enough, he couldn't even make out the individual fingers. "I think there's nothing to suggest Dougall offing himself did any damage."

"And it didn't fix anything, either," she reminded him.

"Not that we can see." He was rapidly growing disenchanted with Placeholder's assertions that invisible forces could be manipulated to improve their situation, but he wasn't about to say that in front of a rogue agent. "But I do know one benefit to what he did, and I'm not eager to lose that."

"Say it," she growled. "I dare you."

He shrugged, and picked his tablet back up. "I don't have to. Everybody's thinking it, except you."

"That kind of argument didn't work very well on //you// lot, back in September."

He should have been able to come up with a comeback for that.

He should have been able to come up with a lot of things.

He was dreading the day when the rest of them realized the successful containment initiatives score was essentially Markey: 0, Torosyan: All.

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[[/=]]

He'd never considered giving up.

Sokolsky considered success to be a personal attribute. You made it a part of you, or you didn't. He'd always chosen to succeed, and he always had. Until now.

The things which distinguished him from the others, the things that made him special, were rapidly diffusing. He was a schemer //par excellence,// but now everyone else was scheming, too, and he had to keep track of them and what they were up to if he wanted a coherent picture of the situation, which he'd need for any schemes of his own. He was always one step ahead, except now there were no steps, just a spiralling slide full of corkscrews and hairpin turns and switchbacks which changed seemingly on a whim. Whose whim, he did not know.

But he still had his signal virtue.

Giving up was still not an option.

Memetics and Countermemetics was a ghost town. There were things living in the holes in the Menger sponges. The patterns on the walls were so voracious that even 8956 had learned to avoid them. //Here be dragon curves.// But he wasn't afraid, not really. To be sure, his every physical response was screaming at him to leave. To retreat to comparative safety. To abandon this mad quest.

The thing was, it didn't even matter if he died.

Not because dying would free him of the obligation to not give up, but because even death was not an end anymore. If he died, the next time those idiots fucked the breach -- and he knew full well they would -- he would probably turn up alive and well, the course of history having shifted once again to omit the circumstances of his death. It didn't work that way every time, and for some people it didn't work at all. Eileen, regrettably, had still been rendered into pasta in her server room. But it would work that way for him.

Because there was no way Daniil Sokolsky would respond to different stimuli with the same response. That just wasn't his flavour of insanity.

So he walked the halls with confidence, mind over matter, and pulled open the unassuming closet door.

The cognitive decontamination tunnel was still just black(red) slabs and tile. He felt a calm coming over him as he walked through, and opened the door at the far end. So far, so good...

//Oh. Damn.//

"Was it a good plan?" she asked.

"What's it matter?" He shrugged off his dazzle coat and hung it on the hook before closing the door. "You know what they say about contact with the enemy."

Lillian Lillihammer, or a... passable imitation of her, was sitting ramrod straight in the chair behind her old desk. There was something off about the texture of her skin, and her eyes were glossy and empty. Her hair too straight. Posture too stiff. "I've never been your enemy before. That sounds exciting."

"Yeah." He flopped down in the chair across from her. "Sorry about your luck, everyone around us."

She laughed. It wasn't her laugh. "So, tell me. What did you hope to find in here?"

He shrugged. "We search your old office every new paradigm. See if you came back to the old haunts to work on anything."

"Seems silly of you to tell me that."

"You already knew, or you wouldn't be here."

She nodded. "Also you're full of shit."

He nodded back. "Also I'm full of shit. Are you really Lillian? At all?"

She cocked her head to one side, but only a little. As though the joints weren't quite cooperating. Like a mechanical bird. "Do you remember that time in the server room?"

He blinked. "You're talking about Eileen?"

A shadow of a frown. "I'm talking about you and I."

"You and I never happened."

The shadow deepened. "I have very clear memories that it did. How about in here?"

"What?" he snorted. "On the desk?"

"In this chair."

He shook his head. "I'm glad to hear your hallucinations have been having a great time. But Director Lillian Lillihammer had a long stick up her tall ass, so none of that ever happened."

"Huh." Her shoulders moved slightly, and he had the impression she thought she'd shrugged. "That's interesting." She said it like it tasted foul. Then her eyes turned glassier still, and the faint glimpse of the real woman faded from view. "I have a dilemma, Dr. Sokolsky."

"I'm not going to sleep with you."

She rolled her eyes. "I would like to make use of you, but not in that way. The thing is, my means are limited."

"I could impose myself on you," he found himself continuing, "but that wouldn't do at all. I would have no access to your scintillating intellect, and that's the only thing you have of worth to me." It was like suffocating inside his own body. "I could have Harry mess with your memories, make you believe things, but that still might mix your pudding the wrong way. I'd been hoping the new blood would have straight up possession powers, but... oh, all right, stop squirming."

He felt something he hadn't felt in decades -- panic -- stealing the warmth from his veins as she continued her monologue with her own lips. He was free, for now. "I suppose what I'm saying is I'd like your help, on your own terms. What do I have to do to convince you to see things my way?"

He was composure. It was inextricable from who he was. He was a self-composed sonnet of a man, something clever and ribald. He would not break. She would not have that satisfaction from him. "Your way would have to be //correct.//"

She laughed again. He wished she wouldn't do that, and needed it to continue. To remind him who she wasn't. "Is that all? I //am// correct. This is a bad world, Dr. Sokolsky. This is the worst result you can possibly hope for. We need to destroy it. Your friends are trying to preserve it instead, and I don't want that. You shouldn't, either."

"My friends," he repeated. "You mean the so-called Puppet Masters?"

She smirked. "There are only two masters, doctor, and fourteen puppets. But this isn't a show. Will you let me show you the truth of things?"

"You need me to believe," he told her. "You //don't// need me to agree to be proselytized to."

She blinked. "Oh. Well. Yes. That's true, isn't it?"

"But it would have felt more civilized," she said through his mouth, as he stood up and collected his labcoat against his own wishes. "Say, what //were// you going to do when you came here? ...oh."

The laugh didn't sound any better coming out of him.

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[[/=]]

Like a fattened grub or an overscaled train, the bedrock pushed its way down the tunnel.

It had already cut off R&E Station, so Romolo had to walk down the silent tracks from I&T to see it. He //needed// to see it. It was something new, and he didn't care about new things. He needed not to care right now. Just for a few minutes.

The ghosts were silent as he walked. The only sounds were his esomat suit creaking, and the tunnels breathing. Everything close to the bedrock breathed.

He shone his light forward, and there it was. The round, raw stump of bleeding stone. Grey goo poured from the porous rock like pus from the pores of skin, pooling in front of it as it shuddered forward. And in the middle of the stone...

A lot of it was skeletal, the skin and muscle stripped away, but parts of the torso and the underside of the jaw were still intact. Its spine stuck out of the wall, and stone bindings kept the loose bones in place. The jaw was wagging uselessly. Romolo wondered if it was trying to speak.

"Poor Roz," said a familiar voice. "Never can catch a break."

He sighed in relief. One of the ghosts, at least, was back. He didn't like it when they went dark. It was too much of a change.

He turned around.

It wasn't the ghost. 

Udo Okorie looked like the thing in the bedrock at an earlier stage of devolution. Her chin and cheekbones poked through her skin, which was bleeding, and her eyes moved too fluidly in their sockets. There were tears in her occultist labcoat, through which he could see tears in her skin, through which he could see ribs. "Hello, lover," she smiled.

He should have brought an abatement tank. But he hadn't. He'd only wanted to see something new, before it destroyed something old.

"You think it's your fault, don't you?" She shook her head ruefully. "You think you could have saved us. But that's so narrow-minded. Rom, you can't hold on to things like that. It just isn't healthy."

He had a sudden, wild thought. She looked fragile as a Halloween skeleton. He could push past her. He could //destroy// her, if he had to.

He couldn't destroy her. He couldn't destroy anything.

Not even the dead.

She was looking up at the half-rotted corpse again. "She loved me, you know," Udo mused. "Delfina did, too. And Harry. And Stacey. I must be the best-loved person who ever lived here." She turned her orange -- actually orange, he could swear to it -- eyes on him. "Do you think you're special among them?"

"You're not her."

She raised an eyebrow, then dropped a hand to her belt. To her reagents pouch. She unclipped the buckle, flipped it open, and took out a handful of sand. "Is that what you really believe?"

She blew on the sand, and Romolo flinched away. But it wasn't aimed at him. It soared up, up, to the skeleton on the shuddering wall, and the wall began rumbling, and the floor rumbled, and the tunnel trembled, and there was a single cry of //VIVIAN// that he felt in his filings, and then the sand wrapped around the pathetic remains, and then Rozálie Astrauskas was looking down at them, still hanging naked from a seam around her midsection.

"Help," she croaked, and sand poured out of her mouth.

"Who am I, Rom?" Udo asked playfully.

Romolo stared up at the effigy. It was crying tears of sand, bleeding sand from its ragged join with the bedrock. "Help me," she wept. "Help me VIVIAN," and the last word ripped out of her like a belch, and her stomach distended and then burst, sand streaming out like a red waterfall. "Help..."

"Nothing is permanent," Udo told him. "Not even death."

Romolo forced himself to look at the thing which had once been his wife. He pointed a glove at the effigy, shaking. "That isn't life."

"Of course it is," Udo scoffed. "Life is suffering. I thought that was obvious."

There were lights behind her. Someone was coming.

"You can kill me," he said, ignoring the revulsion the thought filled him with. "If you blame me, go ahead. But it won't fix anything."

She attempted to look sympathetic. The awkward way her skin stretched rather ruined the effect. "This isn't about blame, Rom. It's about understanding. The sooner you all get with the program, the sooner we can start getting //along.//"

He could see who was behind her now. 

He saw Joanna Bremmel, her ruptured body stitched together by glittering bands of mica. He saw her father, the entire top of his skull replaced with a cap of the same. He saw Azad Banerjee, red sparkles visible under the stretched skin where his crushed body had been expanded back into roughly the right shape. Eileen Veiksaar with a brand new torso of sand, and Chuck Carter in a silicon neck brace. Ruya Darwish swaddled in a dune's worth of skin grafts.

And Eddie Simms, and Randy Gershwin, and Navickas, and Ngata, and Zaman, and a dozen other friends and colleagues he knew weren't dead, all with granular death masks covering their eyes. All of them smiling.

"She figured it out," said Eddie. "How to stop the pain."

"We can't die," said Zaman. "We're not afraid anymore."

"She's..." Romolo's throat was dry. He could barely speak. "She's lying to you. This isn't right."

"Udo," the effigy rasped. Romolo looked up to see it reaching for his wife with its dead hand. "I love you ILSE," and it belched out another plume of sand, and then another, and then another, and then it shuddered, and its spine snapped, and it fell to the tracks with a clatter and began crawling past him, and he stumbled back and hit the curved wall, and leaned on it for support as the bedrock spat out the rest of Rozálie's spine, and then the remainder of her bones, and then Udo began weaving them back onto her crawling, crying corpse, and the hole in the bedrock kept widening, and when it spat out a soggy, sizzling pile of viscera still attached to a second skeleton, and its melted lips formed the name //Dougall Deering// he threw himself past the crowd of resurrected and newly damned and into the welcoming darkness where nothing was terrible and new.

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It was a different sort of hunt, but the same principles held.

Her target left no spoor, but she could tell where he had been by the changes in environment. Fluctuations of heat. Unexpected collapses. Bouts of insanity, or in one case the opposite -- she had heard Placeholder whistling cheerfully while he worked, and knew her quarry was near. 

The only question was whether it really was a hunt, or if he was leading her on a chase.

She finally found him in one of the facility's largest chambers. The J&M manufactory was dominated by a single tremendous machine, a complicated array of stamps and presses and saws and conveyor belts capable of producing tiles, wall panels, metal bars, //et cetera// to precise specifications, or assembling tools, components, even finished goods. Since the breach, it had been regurgitating soggy corpses drawn from the peat bog which had swallowed Grand Bend. Mukami had discovered that herself.

In front of the pile, which was now halfway to the high ceiling, was a thing which resembled her husband.

"I'm so confused," he said. He didn't turn around, but she knew she was being addressed.

She raised the barrel of her sniper rifle. At this distance any weapon would have done just as well, and if he moved it would be a bitch to reacquire the target, but for some reason this felt right.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Mukami.jpg]]

"There's something wrong," he continued. There was an awful squelching sound from the nearest manufacturing port, and a discharge of mulch, and then another corpse rolled out to join the others. This one was small. A child, perhaps. Or a large dog. It was too sodden and bloated to tell. "I don't know if it's just me, or the others. But it isn't both."

She wasn't going to talk to the thing. She would listen, in case it said something useful, but that was all. She wasn't stupid.

He turned to face her, and she saw the scars. Not nearly enough for the dramatic nature of his death, but symbolic of it. His pants were stained with blood, and a piece of entrail peeked out from the bottom of his vest. His left eye didn't move when he looked at her, and his mouth was frozen on that side as well. "Ana, please. Tell me why it's different."

She kept the rifle raised, and told him nothing.

He deflated. A thin smear of gut lining slid off the exposed tube to splatter on the floor, and his work boots. "There's less to this one than there ought to be. I think I know why. I think I //felt// it. But I was hoping something would persist. Do you believe in heaven?"

She didn't so much as blink.

"He did. He was a good Catholic. Not a great one, though." The thing chuckled. "Lapsed, like all his other responsibilities... no, that's just what Lillian remembers about him, isn't it? That's not what //he// remembers. He remembers nights on the patio with Gallo, and every birthday Flora had, and... oh, you wanted a child? That's lovely. It's still not out of the question--"

The shot went wild. She hadn't meant to pull the trigger.

The corpse of Noè Nascimbeni twisted half its mouth into a cruel grin. "Off your balance? Not my doing. You're immune to our little tricks, aren't you? The tables turn, but so much stays the same." He paused as another pair of half-digested humans plopped into the teetering stack, sliding down on runners of their own breached filth. "Do you wonder why it has to be so hard? Why everything has to be so god-damn //difficult?//"

"Yes," she snarled. "Yes, I wonder."

"Ana, it's so simple." He raised those gnarled, calloused, intimately-known hands in a pale mockery of her late husband's body language. "You just need to stop trying so hard. Let it end. There's a garden waiting for you in the next life, one that will last you past the //end.// And we can grow it together. I'll even let you..."

He reached into his jacket, and she very nearly pulled the trigger again. He pulled out a rustling packet of something, and frisbeed it across the room at her, and she nearly pulled the trigger yet again.

She looked down.

It was a packet of fennel seeds. She'd wanted to plant them, and he'd always said no. "You hated fennel," she said, despairing at the tremor in her own voice. "//He// hated it."

"I could get used to anything, for you," he smiled. "And I'll never leave you. You always knew our days were numbered. Let it go."

She tightened her grip on the rifle. "I'm going, to kill you, now." The pauses were fewer, and farther between.

"No, you're not," he said, and then the pile really did topple over, an avalanche of spotted red-grey flesh with red-black specks of bugs beneath, breaking the surface, and a river of gunge and stench cut him off from her view, and she fled.

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But not before snatching up the fennel seeds.

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Janet suspected all the Puppets' little drop-ins and friendly chats had a nefarious motive. More nefarious than simply throwing everyone off-guard, and occluding the motives of their opposite numbers.

Specifically, they induced complacency.

One day, Lillihammer might taunt Veiksaar -- or Veiksaar's very confused silicon-fused corpse -- with a few pointed comments on the nature of their decades-gone relationship. The next, Okorie was convincing the more impressionable junior researchers that gravity worked differently in Rydderech's old canyon, and they leapt to their deaths, bedrock licking up their splattered blood with an almost human moan. Ibanez would speculate with Yancy on the likely fate of his wife and children, while Wettle made the cook absent-mindedly chop his own hand off. Nascimbeni reminisced with Markey about all the times the latter skived off work, planting the idea that these things added up, and events might have gone very differently if he'd consistently did his job for a few decades, while Blank walked into the middle of a security patrol and told them "You're all dead," so suddenly, they were.

The thing was, there didn't seem to be any way to stop them showing up wherever and whenever they wanted. They couldn't pull their tricks on the Omegas, but that was no great consolation. There were still hundreds of potential targets they could affect. Janet couldn't come up with a single cogent explanation for why they didn't just go on a spree and do in everybody, then mop up the last seven as a matter of course.

"I might have one," Bernie told her at one of their desultory group meetings. "Maybe they're practicing psychological warfare because they can't actually use their big guns more often than they are."

"They act like they're all-powerful," she frowned.

"They do," he nodded. "And that's how you know they aren't. Nobody who //has// strength feels any great need to project it."

He glanced around the room after saying this, as though realizing that yet again he had opened his mouth without thinking, and said something he couldn't take back.

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The Lillian-thing released him to his own devices in AAF-D, after what felt like a life-long harangue by Blank. He was less entertaining and less convincing than the real thing had ever been, and Sokolsky found it no great challenge to resist the monster's charms. They really did seem eager to turn him to their way of thinking legitimately -- whether because they needed him, which he doubted, or because they thought it would be a fun game, which he suspected -- so after weeks of unproductive monologue the fruiting archivist had waved him off, and he'd felt the weight of her presence leave him, and he'd been alone in the dematriculation chamber of AAF-D. 

"See the sights," Blank had suggested before taking his leave. There was no point playing the intentions game with them, whether they knew he wouldn't if they said he should, which meant he should if they knew but shouldn't if they didn't because blah blah blah. The fact was they were some sort of fractured god, and he wasn't going to disentangle their motivations from their speech. He did want to see what else was in here, so he was going to, and that was that.

The refinery had been decimated, for starters. Meaning one-tenth of it had been completely destroyed -- Sokolsky loved to use words for his own purposes, but refused to misuse them to suit the errors of other people. Eight-tenths had been warped, twisted, changed in countless ways by the energies of the paradox wavefront. One out of every ten spaces looked something like it once had. Nothing was completely unaffected; the tiles echoed with human voices saying "clap clap clap," or the ceiling was the red sky, or cavorting figures on the walls tried to pull him into their Boschian revels. But it was no more dangerous than walking through M&C had been, at this point in the annual cycle, since Blank and the rest used the place to store their various converts. He saw a few of them here and there: old Boswell, the Site's best dedicated antimemeticist, performing something that looked like a root canal on the corpse of Agent O; Zulfikar, repeating confidential code phrases into a pipe of bubbling liquid; an obnoxious man from I&T with a ridiculous jawline whose name Sokolsky had refused to ever internalize, sticking his arm into an open flame and screaming about the results. //So, just good solid science, basically.//

But the deeper he went, the less structured things became. An esoteric explosion, after all, was a messy thing.

He found the corridor where Ibanez had been punctured by her fleeing colleagues. The flesh was hopping on the hot floor tiles like a pan full of Mexican jumping beans, and he wondered if there were little creatures inside each scrap, reacting to the heat. He found -- he was surprised even his practiced eye had spotted it -- the hole where the spectral Wettle's bullet had settled after emptying McInnis' brain pan. He wasn't sure he wanted to see Okorie's remains, but that didn't matter because of what he saw first.

The suffering corpse of William Wettle had expanded long past the six eternal minutes of the breach. All around the hall where the Vigil had gathered, for the space of about a city block, the walls and floors and ceiling were covered with age-spotted pale pink skin. The hairs of his beard were now spaced metres apart each, not having grown at the same rate the flesh did. There was an apparently bottomless abyss at one point on Sokolsky's path, and it was stuffed full of blue fabric which could only have been the largest Replication Studies labcoat ever to exist. After a while, he kept on going out of sheer horrid fascination. He'd known what Amelia was doing, of course, but the sheer scope of her resources only now really hammered home. There was Wettle down here for //miles.//

And some of it lapped over itself. The parts she hadn't been able to cut up were still there, and the new Wettle grew over the old. Sedimentary layers of one massive, very dead man.

And here were his lips.

They stretched over the space the AcroAbate techs had once called the Cavern, hanging over the central walkway, bracketed by the massive tanks stretching down into darkness. Upper lip -- he thought -- flopped over one rail, lower over the other, folds of connecting flesh tumbling out of sight and rising up on every side. He'd only been able to access this space at all because a massive orifice -- Sokolsky hoped to god it was an ear or nostril -- had grown over the southwestern door.

He ducked under the fleshy ceiling and emerged onto the catwalk proper, between the corpse's jetliner-sized lips.

//Now what??//

And the Cavern echoed with a response.

It was a scream, but only the faintest memory of itself. The same scream these lips had been screaming for years. Even dead, Wettle was still suffering. A far more ignominious fate than had befallen any of the others.

"Why is that?" he mused aloud. "Why is it always so much worse for you?"

The moan continued, mournful, hopeless, dead.

"You've always been a sad sack." Sokolsky sat down on the catwalk, thinking. The gigantic chamber smelled like Wettle's breath, and underneath the skin there was a constant drip of internal fluids, but he didn't care. He was //thinking.//

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In the middle of a dead man's sorrow, Daniil Sokolsky had a realization.

"And that," he said to the air, "is why you never the fuck //give up.//"

The air begged him for release, and acting entirely on half-informed speculation, Sokolsky granted it.

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The Administrator had, of course, surrendered Allan's old office to Dolly when she ascended to the appropriate post. They had in fact switched offices -- she had protested for a few minutes, which was as long as anyone felt like arguing any particular point these days -- so now the nominal head of their in-name-only organization was leading from a workspace of markedly reduced station.

Except it didn't matter, because they were never in their office.

The title of Administrator was a legend within the Foundation. Nobody had ever met the man, if it was a man. References to the existence of such a figure were fragmentary and confused. An urban legend within the conspiracy. But the Overseer who had contacted them -- they were all still trying to pretend they didn't know who it was, that obvious last man standing -- had bestowed the position upon Nimkii, and while they couldn't have cared less about letting the ghosts of the Council down, there was a symbolic weight to the words which they were glad to shoulder.

If there had been an Administrator before, he had made only a very poor use of that power.

Existing in the shadows, living in rumour, in whispers, did much to deepen one's mystery but nothing obvious to advance the greater project. The new Administrator therefore walked among their people as often as possible, going where they were needed and where they weren't with equal attentiveness, even taking jaunts across the haunted halls to visit the neighbours, who were usually accommodating if only rarely compliant. 

They toured the smoky drug dens of Health and Pathology, and had a long conversation with Billie Forsythe about whether all the needle marks on her whip-thin arms said anything troubling about the future of healthcare at the Site. She'd suggested she could stop coming when called, and the Administrator had had the tact to leave it at that. 

They visited Amelia's little commune of dissenters, who were busy collecting tools and equipment for their //de facto// Chief's endless repair efforts. She had declared, point blank, that the only reason she was operating outside the fold was that she didn't trust the self-appointed Puppet Master cabal. The Administrator found it difficult to argue this point; having had to fight them into accepting the memory clawback twice already, the recalcitrance of that reclusive group had become a serious sticking point. 

They watched as Sokolsky, covered in bruises and limping, led scrounging parties deep into the most compromised sectors of the Site and returned a little more bruised, carts piled high with valuable supplies, and supporters unscathed. When asked, the memeticist would merely mutter that business had been transacted, and the Administrator need not worry. It was the closest to annoyed they had ever seen the man.

They didn't spend long with Polly Mataxas. The woman was ensconced in about a hundred overlapping ritual circles, genuflecting occultists praying in tongues at the centres of most of them, contorted corpses with terrified expressions and staring eyes that darted to and fro in response to movement in others, and new ones being chalked on the bare bedrock where T&T had merely been scoured away and not permanently set aflame. She had spoken in someone else's voice about burdens, how death did not always relieve them, how there was work yet to be done, and it ought to be done well, and that the dead would know if it wasn't, and that was enough of that. The Administrator was not a superstitious person -- it was not superstition to believe in demonstrably real things -- but they were a busy one, and ominous portent had few functions beyond the frightening.

There was little time in their schedule for fear. They had deliberately crafted it so.

But they left a few moments every day, when they ducked into their office, only humble in comparison to Allan's -- they had never stopped thinking of it as Allan's -- and sat at their desk, Dolly's desk, their old desk, and put their head down and sobbed. Just enough to get the mucous loose. Just enough to feel that something, anything, had been released.

But this time, as soon as they sat down, there came a knock at the door.

"Come in," they said, and Markey did. He was carrying a frosted bottle of wine; it looked cheap, which maybe didn't say anything about the state of their stores, since Markey was not a discriminating drunk. He was also carrying two frosted glasses. The Administrator imagined he must have knocked with his head, which //did// say something about where the bottle's missing three quarters had gone.

"Want some company?" the containment specialist asked, already heading for a chair. The Administrator nodded; it was easier to lie with body language than words. Markey sat down, pulled the cork, and started pouring.

"Does the alcohol help?" the Administrator asked, as Markey pushed a glass towards them.

The man shrugged, tossing his own glass back with abandon. "Depends on what you mean."

The Administrator examined the contents of their own glass. The wine was red, but then, of course it was. "Does it help with the pain? Or your duties?"

"No," said Markey, already pouring himself another. "And no. But it does knock me out occasionally, so there's that."

The wine did smell... well, it smelled like wine. The Administrator allowed themself a sip. They were really just a glorified morale officer, after all. And they had a very high tolerance. "I'm surprised to hear you think you can do your job shit-faced."

Markey coughed as the wine took an unexpected detour past his gullet. "I'm surprised you know that word."

The Administrator smiled. "Taking people off their guard was one of the first tricks I learned as a lawyer. Allan was better at it, though."

"Yeah. He was a good one." Markey wiped his mouth. "But I'm not shit-faced. If I was, well. It wouldn't make that much of a difference."

"Oh?"

"I don't do anything, boss."

The Administrator took another sip, watching Markey carefully. His eyes were glazed, but there was fierceness swimming in back.

"I mean it. I'm useless. I've got, I don't know. Ngo calls it decision paralysis, but it's worse than that. I don't //do// anything. You ask me how to kill something, I can help. You ask me to put something together? Less than useless. Amelia's doing it all for me. I can't think of a single god damn thing."

"I see." The Administrator swirled their glass. "When did this inability begin, would you say?"

Markey blinked. "It's been happening this whole time. Since the shit first hit."

"Precisely?"

"What do you mean, precisely?"

"Has this difficulty been plaguing you since--"

Markey waved the rest of the sentence off angrily. "It's not that. I don't subscribe to that claptrap. This is a problem with //me.// It's not some //whatever// stuck to my brain thanks to sitting too near an explosion. Scientology bullshit."

The Administrator suppressed a smile. "You're saying you can't think of a way out of our dilemma."

"I am saying that. I am also saying I can't think of jack shit //else.//"

"Why would you feel that is your responsibility?"

Markey stared at them.

"We're all working together. No single person--"

"I'm a //containment specialist.// And the only thing I can hold is my //liquor.//"

"This is a challenge, then. Something for you to work on."

Markey laughed. Angrily. "You don't think I've got more serious problems to deal with?"

The Administrator spread their hands. "If Technician Torosyan is already dealing with them, what can it hurt?"

The old tech looked startled, then stared blearily at the bottom of the bottle where it sat on the desk. "I don't know how you can be so damn reasonable," he muttered. "Even //here.//"

The Administrator finished their glass, and stood up. "That's //my// challenge," they said. And extended a hand.

It was easy for them to pull Markey up.

It was a struggle for the man to reach out in the first place.

Microcosm.

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Was it better or worse? He simply didn't know.

Romolo objectively did not want to see the thing walking around in his uncle's body. His mind had conjured up a vivid enough apparition for self-torturing purposes, and as a bonus, it actually acted like the real man sometimes. And everywhere his predecessor's possessor walked, things went off-kilter and failed. That was everything Romolo feared now. He couldn't get far enough away.

And yet...

And yet he'd heard Ana's account of meeting the old man in the manufactory. There had been something to it. Something screaming into the void, trying to escape. If there was any seed of the real Noè Nascimbeni in there, shouldn't it want to seek him out? Talk to him? Find the strength to find itself with the help of its last surviving family?

The question nagged at him. Something unresolved. The dead should stay quiet, he felt. Their time had come and gone. Memories were meant to be cherished, not tarnished. What slept was meant to lie, not walk around and burn.

When the main water tank started giving off pressure warnings, he should have ignored them. Or sent an agent. Or one of his handful of still-active techs. But he didn't.

He walked into the silo where the tank was kept. It towered over him, gleaming like nothing else did in the facility. They hadn't ever bothered to scrub it matte, because it was simply too high up on its piles for the reflection to do any harm. 8956 liked to crawl across its surface; sometimes Romolo watched. Sometimes he talked to it.

His uncle's remains were talking to it now.

"You ought to forget him," the familiar voice chided. "He's not coming back. At least, not for long." In the reflection, the creature's bleeding maw twisted into a sneer. It hissed. 001-3 hissed back. "No point raging. What's done is done."

"Funny thing for a corpse to say." The venom in Romolo's voice was encouraging, though it burned a little on the way out. Or maybe that was the rising bile.

The not-Nascimbeni turned to smile at him. "The curator arrives. Come to check on your museum pieces."

"This is life-supporting equipment. I don't think even you want everyone in this Site to die."

"Oh?" 001-3 pushed back its damaged hat, and scratched at its furrowed forehead. A lot of it, an awful lot, came loose in gobbets and splinters. It stopped when its hands were solid red. "That's a novel theory. What's it based on?"

Romolo imagined his stomach was an iron cistern, his throat a sealed pipe. He spoke softly, with only the air already in his lungs. "You're all just playing. You only kill when you think it's fun, or funny, or whatever your sick motivation is. Your lot could have blown us all sky-high already, or chipped us away to nothing. But you don't. This is your own personal torture chamber." He hadn't realized he thought most of that before he said it.

001-3 nodded. "Interesting interpretation." Above them, 8956 extruded himself from the metal and swiped uselessly at them with its long talons.

"So now what? You want to tell me a sob story about how much it sucks to be stuck in a body you stole from somebody you murdered?" Romolo reached down to his belt, and found a wrench. That would do. He clenched his fist over it. "I'm not playing. You're not //him.//" He pointed up at 8956. "No more than //that// is Philip Deering."

"Dougall knew better," the thing screeched at him, and Romolo dropped the wrench in surprise. It clanged to the ground, and the clanging echoed.

001-3 raised one hand, and made an encouraging gesture. "Well, come on then. If I'm not him, show me. Show me that you don't have questions. That you don't need //closure.//"

Romolo wanted to bend and pick up the wrench, but he didn't. "You'll just blow the water tank, and drown me." He shook his head. "No thanks."

001-3 shook its own head in mockery. "You know full well I can't do that. There's not enough water left to blow the seals. You've been keeping that from the others, haven't you?"

Romolo froze.

"So, come on." 001-3 stretched out its hands, his uncle's working hands, like a martyr for the cross. "Dismantle something, Romo. Take me apart. Grow past your programming."

"My //what?//"

The other man -- //it __isn't__ a man// -- chuckled darkly. "You don't know already? Then I guess you never will."

"He's always been like this." Before Romolo could turn, something lifted him off his feet. The voice -- //her// voice -- kept talking. "Has to talk himself into things, and he's just not convincing enough. We could find a better guinea pig."

"No," 001-3 said, "that makes him perfect. We don't want to break any of the more important ones. I suppose we could go find Markey, but..."

"...but this one feels //right,//" the other laughed. He knew that laugh, through the extra shading of perversion. "I agree."

And then whatever had him in its grip spun him around, and he was looking down at the living body of Udo Okorie again. Her arms were raised, and sparkling granules extended from her fingertips toward him.

"Please," he said.

She sneered. "You'll have to be more specific."

"Please don't do this."

001-3 walked into view beneath his feet. "Why not?"

Romolo gestured at the machinery.

The others both laughed at him. "If they want to drink," -4 chuckled, "they can lead themselves to water."

"You should thank us for this," -3 added. "You and I both know there's only one way to make people appreciate what they've got."

And then the force pushed him up, and back, and back, and then he struck the water tank with a horrible //clang// and //crunch,// and then something sharp crept up one side of his face from the metal, then the other, and the claws gouged into his cheeks, and he screamed, and his uncle laughed, and his wife laughed, and his friend said "Dougall would have known better," and then the claws pushed through Romolo's skull, and he was falling backward into a wash of what he could only hope was his own blood.

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Alis had taken to washing her face every few hours. It did seem to settle her nerves, though whether that was an intrinsic property of water, an evolved human response, or the result of watching too many movies, she did not know. The water was greyish-pink thanks to the occlusion formula, slimy to drink and smelling faintly of cardboard...

Except now, when she turned the tap, it was a very dark pink indeed.

Very nearly a true red.

And it didn't smell like cardboard anymore.

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[[/=]]

The footage was black and white, and grainy -- the product of yet another ridiculous local anomaly -- but the picture was still clear enough, the sound only a little flat and muted.

In the instant before Ambrogi disappeared into the tank, something shifted on Nascimbeni's ruined face. He gasped. Tears ran from both eyes -- water from the right, blood from the left -- and he cried out: "Romolo?!"

At the same moment, Okorie let the dust fall from where it hung in the air, and turned the palms of her killing hands toward her empty eye sockets, and gasped, "No!"

And then they both turned to each other, he a Renaissance painting of sheer horror, she a mortified //danse macabre,// and he rushed to the tank, pounding on the metal and screaming obscenities, and she fled the room with a sound somewhere between weeping and the clattering of bones.

Eventually Nascimbeni looked up at the camera, snarled, and the feed dissolved into static.

"They're still in there," Mukami whispered.

Del Olmo shook his head emphatically. "They can't be."

"They are." Placeholder was staring at the table. "Parts of them, anyway."

"It's a trick." Del Olmo flicked off the viewer. He wished he could smash it, but resources were too scarce for cathartic percussion these days. The Site's single surviving drum kit had a two month-waitlist. "It's something they're doing to demoralize us."

"It's working," said Markey. "I don't care anymore. I don't care about //any// of this. I just want to go home."

"This //is// our home," Janet stated firmly.

Markey met her glare with dead eyes. "This is our //hell.// You made the damn joke first."

Dolly stared at each of them, and one by one they turned to stare back at her.

"What do we do about it?" Bradbury asked. She sounded like she wanted to care, but didn't.

Dolly stared at the Administrator. They stared back at her.

"How is this going to affect the next breach?" Zlatá wanted to know.

Dolly and the Administrator glanced at Placeholder. He shook his head. He had no idea.

"He was my best friend," Markey whispered.

Nobody said anything for a few seconds.

Then "What do we //do// about it?" Bradbury repeated.

"We kill the bastards," Janet snapped.

"No."

They all stared at Mukami.

"//I// kill the bastards."

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++ 8 September
----
[[/=]]

Parsimony ruled the day.

Zlatá was already involved, so it was his job to take Ambrogi's place. He only had to press a few buttons, and not think too hard about what those buttons did.

Placeholder suggested he supply the timings again this year. "We need to see the effect a replacement has," he reasoned. "We can't change two things from last year's breach."

But two things were changed nevertheless.

Zlatá pressed the button that killed AAF-A, and Delfina Ibanez hauled the group, //sans// Wettle and McInnis, to the concentration cell far ahead of the breeze which had killed her.

They didn't even bother sending anyone to the airlock this time.

They couldn't afford to lose any more than they already had, and would.

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[[/=]]

Alis walked out of the laboratory, knuckles aching. Ngo was there, waiting. But she was already shaking her head.

"Why not?" They sparred in the gym every day at this hour. Kicked the shit out of each other, essentially, though Ngo was obviously holding back. It helped. It helped Alis, anyway, and she was sure that was why the other woman did it.

"Bigger fish," the psychiatrist said, and then the ceiling fell in.

A tile struck Alis' shoulder, and something came loose from the pipe cluster concealed above, and in an instant there was a red rake swiping out at her. Then she hit the tiles, and the psychiatrist was throwing her down the hall and racing toward her in a single fluid motion. "Come on!"

Liquid glass was pouring out of the pipes now, splattering the floor and rising up into gleaming sculptures of dolphins and manatees frolicking in a crystalline surf. One appeared in front of them as they ran, and Ngo practically inverted herself, putting her foot through the translucent manta ray's chest and shattering it just as a sawtoothed spectre appeared in its lustre. She was back on her feet in an instant.

//__Definitely__ holding back.//

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++ 9 September
----
[[/=]]

"Dead," said Clio. "Dead dead dead dead dead. Dead. Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead dead. Dead."

Placeholder had started counting on his fingers after the first few deads. "So," he said to the stunned boardroom. "Definitely worse than last year."

And then he laughed until he couldn't breathe, and they left him unconscious on the scuffed wood.

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[[/=]]

Noor didn't know why he was running until he saw the blood on his hands.

And then he remembered.

"It was just a joke," Wirth had sobbed. "It didn't mean anything!" His nose was gushing red, and his eyes were wild. "//Nothing// means anything!"

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[[/=]]

Janet lay beneath her wheelchair. It wasn't a very good fort, but it was better than being in the open. She squeezed off a few more shots, then cocked her head to listen.

Yancy's footfalls were heavy. Like Stewart's. She could track him as he barreled away back down the hall, around the far corner. He was fleeing.

"What was //his// beef?" someone drawled, someone wearing untied sneakers and track pants. Then that someone flopped down in Janet's chair, and it took all her self-control not to point her service weapon at the seat and pull the trigger again.

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[[/=]]

Stewart stared at the man incredulously. The man burbled something like a laugh, then went limp in his hands. He dropped the corpse to the tiles, where it landed badly and broke just a little bit more.

"Not again," he whispered, and it didn't make him feel a lot better when he looked down and saw the knife sticking out of his ribs.

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[[/=]]

The reprieve this time had lasted only a matter of hours.

In the first variant, Blank and Lillihammer had needed to re-apply the brainwashing to get their thralls back. In the second, the rolling disharmony and wild misconceptions which followed in train behind Nascimbeni and Okorie had been somewhat localized.

This new effect was everywhere, immediately. And apparently had been for years.

They were down to just a few hundred people now, and most of them were at each others' throats. Though nobody had seen her since the breach, it was all too obvious who was to blame.

She'd always been the angry one.

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[[/=]]

Bradbury fell to the floor, blood gushing from her split cheek and broken teeth, and Eileen picked up the computer tower.

"Nnn," the silver-haired woman moaned, raising a hand in protest, and Eileen caved her skull in.

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[[/=]]

It had been, all told, an inauspicious way to ring in the new year.

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[[/=]]

Bernie recited an impassioned obituary that made everyone feel much, much worse. Reuben didn't listen to it. He was building a ship in a bottle, having found an unused kit in Harry's old quarters, and anyway he'd declined the chance to deliver the eulogy himself.

No doubt she'd give him hell for it when she came back next year, or the next.

He wasn't in any hurry.

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[[/=]]

It had taken weeks of overtures for Alis to get them all in one room together. By now the Administrator and Director had the speech down to a science, so only Radcliffe reacted with suspicion when informed of the memory issue.

"Why don't you people just fake it?" Gwilherm asked.

"Fake it?" Dolly repeated.

"Pretend you know what's going on. That way you don't risk me shooting you if you're not super convincing."

"Wouldn't you be more likely to shoot if you figured out you were being lied to?" the Administrator asked her.

She considered. "I suppose you're right," she acknowledged. "Wow, you're almost making it sound like //I'm// the problem."

[[# anchor-2027]]

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+ 2027
----
[[/=]]

On the monitor, the subject was writhing. He'd succeeded in loosening his restraints enough to fall off his chair, but not enough to get his hands free. He was shouting something, and Del Olmo was glad the audio was off. It was still being recorded, of course, and no doubt Ngo would be subjecting herself to it later. To learn more. She was always trying to understand people better.

He had found understanding himself now too daunting a task to take on anything more ambitious.

"Why don't we just let him do it?" He'd been thinking it, and now here he was saying it out loud. It was always like that. He didn't know why.

Ngo frowned. "Because if suicide were allowed, we'd lose half the Site's population in a day?"

"And they'd come right back. So...?"

She turned to face him. On the camera, the subject was trying to curl up enough to take a bite out of his straitjacket. "I don't know where people are getting that from. Only the most contingent deaths are reversed. Virtually everybody who died on the 8th and 9th, for example, is still dead. We've never seen Karen come back."

"Du, though. And Veiksaar." And the subject, of course.

"And they've been traumatized," she sighed. "Trauma they can't express, even understand, but it's there. Eileen is the best example, actually. She's died three times, and you can tell. She has persistent phantom pain in the eye they removed back in '22, as well as throat blockages where she cut her own throat, gastrointestinal distress from when 8956 manifested on her chest, and one other problem I don't even want to talk about. You saw the end result when she caved Melissa's head in. Even if death isn't always permanent, it still sort of... wears people out."

Elsewhere in the facility, Veiksaar was wearing a straitjacket just like the present subject. Nobody was monitoring her, because she was effectively comatose.

"Reuben says it doesn't matter," Del Olmo said.

Ngo winced. "Dr. Wirth's perspective on these matters is... somewhat skewed. His psychology--"

Del Olmo raised a hand. "Let's talk about that, actually. You haven't done any real psychoanalysis on any of us."

"Because none of you will agree to be seen."

"Sure," he acknowledged, "but you're still a professional. And you did workups on most of us prior to the first breach, or else Anoki did." He twitched slightly. "What would you say has changed, and why?"

She frowned. "I don't like speculating. It's not good science. But with the caveat that this should stay between you and me..."

"Of course."

"...I would say... hmm." She started counting on her fingers. "Chief Gwilherm has become mentally inflexible, Chief Mukami has a psychological speech block, Agent Radcliffe has all the classic symptoms of paranoia, Chief Ambrogi had an almost pathological inability to deconstruct preexisting assumptions, Specialist Markey is incapable of engaging in constructive thought or action, Dr. Wirth is incapable of generating meaning or applying value to meaning he encounters, and you, Bernabé, have lost all perspective on what is and is not appropriate to share, and with whom."

Del Olmo blinked. "I... why did you single the seven of us out?"

Ngo looked stricken. "I thought that was what you were asking for."

"I thought you'd take 'most of us' to mean 'most of the people still alive'. Is there something special about our group particularly?"

Her lips drew thin. "Frankly, yes. Everyone else displays either a worsening of pre-existing symptoms, or symptoms related to the present situation, or effects we know to be promulgated by the 001 set. Acting out Lillihammer's values, acting on false ideals implanted by Blank, imbalances, misconceptions, conflicts. Your group displays behaviours inconsistent with all of that."

"But, okay. You said Stewart is paranoid. Couldn't that just be Blank making him that way? And what you describe as my problem," a problem he'd been wrestling with every day since the first breach, and it was only getting worse, "couldn't that just be Lillian working on me? Wouldn't Reuben's case be best described as an imbalance? And back to Stewart, weren't his violent outbreaks really just rooted in basic misconceptions, or drummed-up oppositions?"

Ngo shook her head. "I have reams of data on 001-1 and -2 effects, and the others have only just started from our perspective, which is what I based my analysis on. The psychopathology doesn't match. Whatever is going on with you folk, it's unique."

Del Olmo considered this for a moment.

"I would appreciate it," she said, "if you would keep this to yourself."

"Of course," he nodded.

On the monitor, Koda Anoki cracked his head open on the table leg.

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[[/=]]

David walked out of the broadcasting booth, fuming.

He could only assume the jackboots would be on their way already.

Through the(re was no glass), he could see Bernie engaged in animated discussion with a caller. No doubt picking the memeticist's brain about his peculiar psychology, or David's, or Janet's.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Del_Olmo.jpg]]

He hadn't wanted to talk about any of it, but it had been the long and clinical discursion on precisely what had been wrong with David's dead best friend that had made him walk out.

He was beginning to think that maybe he needed to outline provisional containment procedures for the Puppet Masters.

He'd leave his own for last.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

Ngo looked troubled. Most of the time she tried to hide it, but occasionally something was awful enough to crack the veneer. This was one such awful thing.

Del Olmo nodded. "That's my interpretation as well."

She gently pushed the report away from her on the desk, as though that might distance her from the implications as well. "What on Earth do we even do about it?"

He shrugged. "Like most of this nonsense, I think we just... record, and move on. We'll tell Janet and Ana, and they'll deal with it case-by-case where necessary."

The report was only data. It had been Ngo's expert interpretation which confirmed Del Olmo's fears, made it something more. An unexploded bombshell.

Dolly Ferber had acquired a fascination with the artistic works of the Group of Seven, and had filled the Director's office with as many examples as she could find in the rest of the Site. Agent Fabre had picked up a flair for computer programming which had no apparent connection to his interests, training, or duties. Dr. Kerimow had suffered from the intrusive and inexplicable belief that Harold Blank was his friend, which the latter had fatally disabused him of. Randy Gershwin now fervently despised Uno, without prompting -- no copy of the card game could be found at the facility.

"That's how she does it, then," he sighed. "She's slapping parts of herself over them. She's not possessing anyone, she's plugging and playing with //personality.//"

"And something lingers after," Ngo finished.

He nodded.

"Meaning everyone who's ever been affected by her, the people we've cleared for duty..."

"...are at least partially Lillian Lillihammer, cognitively. Yes."

She blew out a breath, then laughed. "You know why it hurts when you put your hand on a hot stove element?"

He nodded.

"You think that's what the world is trying to tell us right now?" Then she shook her head vigorously. "Ignore me. Long day. Just thinking out loud." Then she paused, and gave him a grim look. "Bernie. //Do not repeat that.//"

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[[/=]]

He made it an exercise.

He made it a whole week this time.

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[[/=]]

She didn't hear him come in. Her heart was suddenly beating far too fast. That, on its own, tipped her off.

"You're different," said the old man, and Amelia took a deep breath before turning to face him. "I'm different, too."

They were standing in AAF-C, in the same chamber of catwalks and tanks where she had first awoken in this rotten new hell. He was approaching her from the exit. She could only flee deeper from here, farther from safety, unless she wanted to chance a physical altercation.

After what had happened to Ambrogi -- most of which they could only speculate on -- this was not an appealing option.

"Different how?" She'd heard enough about the others' encounters with the 001 set to know that as long as you kept them talking, they would keep you alive.

"I only remember one //me.//" Nascimbeni tapped his vest, and what had to be most of his intestines slopped out. He stepped on them as he advanced on the catwalk, and they burst and split to drip through the grating to the distant floor in great gooey globs. "It's not like that for the others. They have glimpses of //more.// I want more. It's so lonely in here." And he pulled his cap down over his eyes.

A wild scheme involving calisthenics and the various railings and support beams in the room flashed before her, too embarrassed with itself to linger long. Like that kid in the worst //Jurassic Park// movie. Only Amelia wasn't young anymore, and anyway she was half-starved. "Okay," she said. "That's you. Now tell me why //I'm// special."

Nascimbeni shook his head, and she saw that a flap of the skin over his cheeks was only kept attached by the stickiness of the gristle beneath when it separated with the motion. He looked like he might split in half or simply atomize at any moment. "I don't know," he said. "But I can //feel// it. You're the odd one out. You don't belong to either set."

This was, of course, quite true. Every September 8, Amelia remembered the old order of events, just like most of the Site's population. But she also acquired a new string of memories, just like the seven (six? Zlatá was tight-lipped on the subject) special chosen. She hadn't told anyone that. She wasn't about to tell this monster. "Can you blame me? Half of them are aggressively incompetent, and the other half are useless."

Nascimbeni laughed, then spat over the rail. His left molars went with the blood. "I can feel your heart racing. The blood pounding. You're not protected like the rest."

"I'm pretty good at self-regulating." She started walking backward, minding her step. It wouldn't do to stumble. She was prey being stalked. "I've been manipulated before."

The monster snorted, like a ravening bull. A bloody mist came out of one nostril, and he stuck a finger up there and swizzled. She heard something //crack.// "I think I know something you don't know, on that score. I'll swap it for your secret."

She responded with the working man's salute.

Now he cracked his knuckles. The popping sound was almost as sickening as the sight of his left lower eyelid dropping away from the sclera. "You're so careful on your feet, Amelia."

In an instant, she lost her balance. She was on her hands and knees against the catwalk, nearly vomiting. 

"And you think so //clearly.//"

She knew what he was doing, but it didn't matter. She thought of Phil. She thought of Dougall. She even thought of Nils. She thought of the beavers and their dam, she thought of balloons, she thought of Insurgents with their guns drawn and then Phil again, saving her. She thought of pulling him close and telling him he wasn't a monster, and seeing him believe that she believed it. She thought of the bright amber pseudopod flipping its script to peer at her, and imagined its bubbling surface suddenly splitting into a toothy anguilliform grin. She thought of battling a demon, and winning.

She thought of battling a demon, and //winning.//

The catwalk was made up of several parts. The central span was higher at the middle, and serviced by stairs at the north and south ends. There were more stairs running perpendicular at each vat, providing access. Nascimbeni was approaching down the central span, and Amelia was crouched at the base of the north steps.

She reached for her belt, ignoring the scream of protest from her wrenched muscles.

"You're different," Nascimbeni was saying. He was approaching in no great hurry. He owned the field, and knew it. He was also limping; beneath the soaked-through jean sleeve and shredded workboot, his left foot must have been only tenuously attached. "So it probably doesn't help anyone if you die. But if you're not going to tell me //why// you're different, you're not much use to me alive."

"I'm different," she grunted as she suddenly lunged forward, "because the rest of you keep taking the easy way out!"

She turned the wrench rapidly, over and over, faster than she'd ever done before, and the bolt came free, and the catwalk lurched.

It wouldn't have been possible under normal circumstances, but the breach had thrown everything around in here, more than once, and there'd never been any reason to repair it. She'd seen her chance, and taken it, and her instincts hadn't been wrong. Nascimbeni was thrown to one side, then the other as the metal rocked back and forth, each motion working the remaining bolts free, metal fatigue doing the rest of the work, and finally he was flung over backward to land on his stomach with a horrible //splat.// Amelia quickly ratcheted the bolt up again -- it resisted her, and she was only able to get it halfway resecured -- then crawled onto the upper level and made her way slowly across.

He rolled over, groaning, and stared up at her. His hat had fallen off, and so had the upper half of his skull. She could see his brains. They were split, too.

He was whispering.

Beside her, the tank sprung a leak. It wasn't sand this time. At some point the alchemy had reversed itself; she was instantly drenched with water.

She blinked.

Except she hadn't blinked. She'd simply blacked out. She was soaked through to the bone now, and sliding off the catwalk.

She blinked.

She was hanging by her legs, and the catwalk was tilting crazily. He was interrupting her brain. He was making her black out.

She pinched her thigh, and pulled herself back up.

"You aren't half the technician he was," Nascimbeni wheezed.

"Who?" She kept pinching her thigh. There was something wrong with the blood flow. Her hands were cold. They were always cold, but now they were nearly numb.

"Me," the monster laughed wetly. It was floating, surrounded by a swirling pool of reddening water. In a few seconds it would be able to reach the grating. "I built this place, you know. And I was a //hero.//"

"Yeah," she said. //He doesn't know about Phil.// She tried to keep focus on the thought, which might in fact have been a revelation. But it was a struggle even to stay awake, and at the same time she knew she was on the edge of a heart attack. "You //were.// a hero. And then you died, and I //fucking replaced you.//"

His brown eyes widened, and she blacked out, and a horrible clanging sound brought her back in the space of a heartbeat. Nascimbeni slammed his hands into the grate again, pulling himself over to the lower steps, which were already swamped. She mashed at his fingers, and he laughed.

The catwalk was floating. But soon, it would sink. She hauled herself to her feet, muscles screaming, and made herself move. Keep moving. Keep //going.//

Through the hall. Through the office. Through the station. Tumbling, crack-kneed, onto the tracks. The green smoke and bones were gone, but the sheen on the walls remained. It had turned yellow, and it stank.

Nascimbeni slammed down beside her, and she scrabbled away. He didn't advance, merely stood there a moment, staring at her. "You really are resilient," he said, clapping his hat back onto his head with a wet //slap.// "Are you sure you're not one of them?"

"I'm not one of //you,//" she spat. "That's for sure."

"Well." He cracked his neck; a bone popped out on the left, and blood trickled under his collar. "Not yet, anyway. We'll see what happens in the breach."

And a thin trickle of sand bounced off the brim of his stained hat, falling past his eyes like a curtain of water.

He looked up.

There was a sudden blur of red/white, and Nascimbeni's left side imploded from the neck down. The albatross pulled back, claws tight on the platform edge, and guzzled down half of his collarbone with a wet gulping noise. Its throat bobbed up and down, and it cackled, and then it leaned over the edge again and vomited on him. A rush, a //torrent// of sand poured into his mouth, and he coughed up blood, then coughed no more as his lungs filled with silicon, and it rushed out of the ragged seams where the girder had perforated his organs and ripped up his clothing, and it abraded his exposed entrails to filthy ruin, and he fell to the tracks, and the sand kept coming, and then the bones, and they bounced off his head and chest, and the skin peeled back, and he screamed, and there were more bones, more than could possibly have fit inside the bird's swelling chest, and the last few bones looked red and cracked and Amelia felt a pang in her chest when she saw them, and then the sand covered it all up, and Nascimbeni was scrambling up the growing pile of sand, his chest ballooning out, and he reached for the albatross with gnarled fingers--

--and the pile of sand //erupted,// throwing him back onto the tracks, and Amelia heard his spine crack, and the sand fell on him like an attacker, and he attacked it with a mad thrashing. His nails scraped off the sand, and Amelia saw that the bones had knit into place beneath it, beneath the skin of what could only be a homunculus of her own body. And the homunculus pressed its lips to his, and //breathed,// and even in the horrible haze she could see the more horrible result as his eyes bugged out, then burst, and a rush of sand poured out of the sockets while his body split all over, and he simply fell apart in a wash of blood and dust.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Homunculus.jpg]]

On the station platform, the last few grains of sand fell from the albatross' beak. It ruffled its feathers, called to her once in its shrill voice, then turned and toddled back the way they'd come.

"Thanks," she said. She felt more sure of it, this time.

The homunculus was going the other way, apparently. She didn't try to stop it.

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[[/=]]

She only had to knock once for the airlock to open. Alis was waiting on the other side.

It was a much more welcome sight than Dougall had been, though she chose not to say as much.

"What happened?" the other woman asked as she put Amelia's arm around her shoulder.

"An eye for an eye," she grunted. "Hand for a hand, in this case."

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[[/=]]

It was all bullshit, he'd decided.

Stewart was as big as most of the others put together. He could take all the others apart, even if Janet had still had the use of her legs. They were afraid of him, so they'd contrived this nonsense.

He'd been framed.

He didn't know if it was something he'd eaten, or something in his drink. After all, they controlled all that. And the hydroponics people were cagey as fuck about what went into the food; acted like it was a state secret, classified, Director's eyes only. For all he knew, this was just one big social experiment. He had half a mind not to do his duty when the Eighth rolled around again, except that his duty was already moot. He still engaged in that tired radio play every year, but it didn't matter; last time Lillihammer had recited a racy poem at him while he sent the instructions.

Everything was a joke. To her, to the others, to everybody but him. The only one who wasn't in on it.

"Widen your stance," she barked, and before he really understood what he was hearing, he did as he was told. Even snapped off a single shot, which missed the target, but it was a nearer thing than usual. This damn red haze...

...he turned around.

She looked awful. No visible wounds, like the others had, but this was somehow even worse. Her flesh wouldn't stay put. It wobbled in the recycled air. It sloshed when she moved. Her cheeks hung low, and her eyelids drooped, and her chest was like a pair of overfilled balloons secured to her sternum at the neck. When she spoke -- "Pleased to see me?" -- he could barely hear it over the sound of meat slapping meat.

He brought the weapon up--

--and it was in her hand, then in pieces, then scattered all over the floor. Delfina Ibanez was more than capable of taking all seven of them apart, even combined. Field-stripping a Glock she could do with her eyes closed. "I won't take that as a 'no'. Just a reflex action. Because we're friends."

Stewart tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go but the firing booth. "We were more than friends," he said.

She hopped up and down. "Is that an invitation?"

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Ibanez.jpg]]

He turned back to the range, and vomited onto it.

Her laughter brought him back to himself. "You think this is bad? Ask Harry what's in your BLTs."

He vomited again, and his head filled with a red haze entirely independent of the one surrounding them.

She patted him on the flank. "You were always so sensitive. Gotta be rough for you."

He thrashed against her, kneeing her in -- he didn't want to think about it -- and scrambling for the door. It was closed, and locked, and he fled senselessly into the far corner. Fell to the floor, put his arms up around his face for protection. Watched her approach; her boots were solid but her feet flapped loosely within them, and she stood on her ankles at awfully wrong angles, and it was more like she //sloughed// than walked the intervening space. Beneath the uniform, something //gave.// A red stain appeared on either side of her tumbling stomach. "Stewie," she cooed. "I just wanted to make sure you're doing alright. I know all this conflict is bad for your nerves."

"My nerves," he whimpered.

She nodded, and the upper lid of her right eye caught over the lower lashes, and stayed shut. "It's fun playing all these white knights and heroes off each other, but I know you're already off-kilter by default. I'm just stopping by to ask if you'd be interested in a truce."

He stared at her. "Truce."

She smiled. Her smile had always been disconcertingly wide, past the edges of her gums and teeth. Now it was like a rift opening up in the skin; he could see her rear molars in side profile. "I'll stop stirring up trouble for a while. I'll even get those bastards up top off your back, given them someone else to pick on, if you do me a teensy, tiny little favour."

"Favour."

She rolled her eyes. The only visible one stayed rolled, and she watched him with just the whites. "Somebody hurt a friend of mine." She affected a pout as the iris rolled slowly back down to fixate on him again. "I'd like you to hurt her for me."

He clenched up tighter. "I don't want to hurt anybody."

"Sure you don't," she nodded. "But this woman, she isn't your friend either. She's //plotting.// They're using her. Have been from the start. You know who I'm talking about." The worst thing was, he //did// know. "She thinks she's //better// than you. Keeps apart. Works in secret. You know anybody like that?"

He didn't want to answer, but the words came out anyway. "Amelia."

"Amelia," Delfina repeated. "She's working against you. She's never going to stop working against you."

"I'm not going to kill her," he groaned. "I... I won't kill her."

Both eyes widened, the lazy lid snapping up like a Venetian blind. "Oh, I don't want her //dead.// I just want to remind her whose side she's supposed to be on."

[[=]]
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[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
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++ 8 September
----
[[/=]]

Alis waited until the last minute, then sighed. "Give me the password," she said to the empty air.

Amelia had offered to do the deed this year. Said she'd been looking forward to the break.

Alis would have been happier facing the newest set of fireworks than reducing her lost love to semantic invisibility, then leaving him to die yet again.

But needs must.

[[=]]
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[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
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[[/=]]

Reuben was beginning to resent Ngo's psychoanalysis.

He'd decided that this year, he wasn't going to bother running past his resurrected staff members and sparing them their pulpy torment. He was simply going to stay in his quarters with a good book; he'd found a few video game instruction manuals he thought might make suitably pointless reading, since he didn't like video games and there were very few systems set up that he could access. But he'd made the mistake of stopping to make small talk with the psychologist on his way there, and as she always did, she found out. Wheedled it out of him without appearing to even try. And when the secret was there in the open, she punctured it precisely with an impressive display of logic: "If nothing matters, isn't going through the motions just as valid an option as not? Isn't intentionally avoiding that display of nihilism actually a way of assigning value to the thing you're deciding not to do?"

So, fine. He was on his way to A&R, on schedule. He would push the button, again. He couldn't even bring himself to argue. It was perversely pleasurable being proven wrong with his own philosophy...

Something moved at the edge of his perception. He chose not to react to it. But now that felt wrong, too. By making a choice, wasn't he--

He screamed, and fell to the floor. It was suddenly slick with his blood. He screamed again. It definitely meant something.

"Dougall," 8956 hissed at him as he shook violently on the boards, grasping at the seeping wounds. "It means //Dougall.//"

[[=]]
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[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
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[[/=]]

Nhung heard the scream, and started running immediately.

She was one of the fastest runners at the Site, and easily the most nimble. She found Wirth in a matter of seconds, knew what had happened immediately, and had a call in to Billie before her conscious mind had even found the appropriate protocols. The doctor said something morose, and Nhung said something encouraging from a mental library of stock phrases, and then Wirth was grasping at her skirt and moaning.

"What?" She knelt down in front of him. "What is it?"

He let go of her skirt, and pointed down the hall. Towards A&R.

She could barely make out his finger. The blurring and haze were now that bad.

She nodded. "Okay. Hang in there."

And she left him, potentially to die, as she took up his burden to kill.

[[=]]
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[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
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[[/=]]

She heard Zlatá's time signal for Wirth as she reached the shuttered doors. Lost another few seconds convincing Mukami to lift the shutter. Had to vault over the //papier-mâché// monster without looking at it, because she knew if she looked at it she would probably lose her mind, and then clamber up onto one of the Chair's L-shaped desks to survey the damage.

The archivists were already all gone. Melted into the pot. Everything around the central desks was consumed with sizzling paper; the door to the Chair's office caught fire as she watched, and the stink and the heat suddenly washed over her...

And then the shutter door slammed closed again, and she knew what she had to do.

There was only one way to set off the pyroclastic charges, and that way was now shut. She'd seen //Volcano// at the theatre, on a date, and the scene of the old woman wading through superheated water and slowly boiling to death had been particularly memorable. She knew that if she tried to cross that river of steaming documents, she'd catch fire like the door had and die screaming in seconds. She'd never make it to the button.

She crouched, took a single long step, and then vaulted to the next desk. Used the momentum from that leap to propel her over the bubbling corpses at the north door -- one of her shoes landed in something soft and hot, and she kicked it off -- and kept moving, fleeing into the hallway which led to the archivist offices and library. There was a security kiosk not far from here, where the overrides were kept. 

If the blazing ideoforms weren't setting off the sprinklers, then something must have overwhelmed the sensors. She could still activate them manually. Put out the fires. Soak the newsprint until the ink ran. It wasn't the right solution, but it was better than doing nothing.

It was better than dying.

[[=]]
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[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
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[[/=]]

They didn't have hexmat suits big enough for Yancy and Radcliffe, so they wouldn't be going in. But their strength was needed to pry open the doors, which no longer responded to remote commands. A unit of Mukami's people stood ready in their shiny red!teal suits, abatement wands at the ready, waiting to brave whatever horrors were within. For her.

For the only one who truly, definitely cared.

Yancy grunted with effort, veins bulging on his forehead, and Radcliffe's face was beaded with sweat, and then suddenly there was //give,// and the shutter on the door sprang up, and the door itself immediately swung open.

Something clattered out, spilling into the hall, scattering the startled agents. Something which rolled, or spun to a stop like a top, or unfurled long black tongues across the tiles...

Tape reels.

After a moment in which nobody moved, Yancy finally crept to the door again, and peered inside.

Tape reels, wall to wall.

"Is she under there?" Agent Navickas asked, voice already weary.

Radcliffe rolled up his sleeves. "If she is, then we'd better get digging."

[[=]]
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[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
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[[/=]]

Ngo //was// in there, Del Olmo concluded.

After a fashion.

[[div class="blockquote"]]
**RECORDING:** ...and I don't know what to tell them. I don't... I can't tell them what I really think. It's not my job to have //opinions// about that sort of thing. I have to be objective. I have to treat each of their cases as unique. Everyone who comes to me, they want me to help them. They don't need to be told that there's nothing to hope for. That nothing is ever going to get better now. They know that already. They want me to help //them.// They know I can't help what's happened. They just... want to draw strength from me. Like I'm this deep, deep well of strength that never runs dry. Like I'm not giving them something I need for myself, to //live,// so that they can go on pretending they'll make it through this somehow. And I don't know if I can keep doing that. I don't know if I can keep pretending I'm okay, that it's okay for them to take this out of me, that I'll always be there to comfort them even when the only sane response to all of this is to go insane. And I think that if something were to happen to me, I think... what would that do to the rest of them? Nobody else is thinking about the big picture. Nobody else cares how the others are doing. I think I'm the only one who gives a damn. And I don't think they really give a damn about //me,// except that they can use me to make themselves feel better. And I know that's what I signed up for, but I just wish... I just wish they'd pretend, even for a moment, that how //I// feel matters. I think that would make a big difference for me. But it never happens, and now it never will, because it's so dark in here and I'm all alone except for //you// and //you// don't care, you don't care about //anything,// and I'm never going to get out, and this is all there is, and... oh god... please... just stop listening, stop making me go over this over and over and over, stop the spinning, please, just stop listening, stop the tape...
[[/div]]

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Ngo_Tapes.jpg]]

[[=]]
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[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
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[[/=]]

She woke up in the dark.

She remembered the fall, and the long, painful slide. She'd left a lot of skin on the rocks behind. She remembered the tube closing in around her, and a few breathless moments of feeling stuck before the rocks //breathed// and she started falling again, deeper, deeper, beyond all light and memory.

She remembered being pushed.

She remembered being //tricked.//

"Paranoid son of a bitch," she muttered as she blinked in the pitch red-black. Even so deep in the earth, she couldn't escape that crimson cast.

//Ilse.//

She froze.

//Vivian?//

The voice was in her head. But it wasn't her voice. Those weren't her thoughts.

Without knowing why, she burst into tears.

Then something wet and slimy landed on her hand, and she reached up to touch the weeping stone, and she cried until she could cry no more, and the rock gave out again and she tumbled wailing deeper still.

[[=]]
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[[image http://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/75-red-shift/RedAsterisk43.png]]
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[[/=]]

The year-end conference was, all things considered, a success. Not all of the interested parties and factional leaders could attend, of course; several were out responding to the newest breach-related outrages, though this year's had been predictable and the past few months of prep had reduced casualties to the expected margins -- and as a bonus, for whatever reason, the ghost of Nascimbeni hadn't made it back out of AAF-D this year. The Administrator felt certain that great strides had been made to reduce the friction between each camp, and the Director agreed. They were still in hell, but they were weathering the flames together.

Even if Amelia had curiously chosen not to attend.

Even if Radcliffe, in a characteristic fit of pique, had completely failed to show up for his breach duty.

Even if their only sane psychologist had been transmuted into 2128 reels of suffering audio/videotape.

Even if Polly Mataxas had tried to abate them -- the official story -- or sacrifice them to the Great God Crater -- what had actually happened -- and turned seven of her initiates into petroleum jelly which wouldn't stop burning.

The next few weeks went about as well as could be expected. The lack of a practicing psychologist was probably a problem. It was hard to say, since nobody was talking about their feelings anymore. Talking about your feelings started fights, or worse. Without its leader, the commune eventually broke camp and returned to A&O. Dolly took them back graciously; they were well past the point of standing on ceremony, and as far as the Administrator was concerned, since humanity and the Foundation described the same things now, the Foundation could stand to be a little more humane.

Within a few months, the rest of the holdouts had returned to their senses as well. Markey had worked out a water recycler after bashing his head against the problem for almost a year, and they now had a source of clean, mineral-rich, off-tasting water that made you sob tearlessly every time you drank it. He wouldn't divulge where it came from, but the symptoms made it clear enough.

It was better than drinking microparticles of Ambrogi. Some wag in R&E had called it 'Ambrogia', and Markey had beaten him halfway to death.

The funny thing was, disasters notwithstanding, the work of containing the breach had seemed easier than ever. As though the absence of containment's strongest soldier had caused the rest of them to take up the torch and hold it higher. Rising to the occasion.

Placeholder had another theory, but he kept it to himself. He'd been watching Del Olmo enough to know a thing or two about morale.

[[include fragment:74-killing-time-2]]

@@ @@

[[include :scp-wiki:component:earthworm
| first=false | last=false | hub=yes
| previous-url=https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/73-better-dead | previous-title=Better Dead
| next-url=/ | next-title=Clockwork
| hub-url=https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/over-time-hub | hub-title=The Breach Goes On: Over Time
]]

[[=]]
[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box
|author=Placeholder McD and HarryBlank]]
=====
[[<]]

Character concepts for Harold Blank, Lillian Lillihammer, and Allan McInnis directly derived from designs by [[*user Dino--Draws]]!

Illustrations in this series use reference material created with DAZ studio, and are licensed by the author as such:

> **Author:** [[*user HarryBlank]]
> **License:** CC BY-SA 3.0

The following images:

> **Filename:** OT_74_Ibanez.jpg, OT_74_Homunculus.jpg, RedAsterisk43.png

are partially derived from:

> **Name:** Philadelphia Pride Flag
> **Author:** Government of Canada
> **License:** Public Domain
> **Source:** [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Philadelphia_Pride_Flag.svg Wikimedia Commons]

> **Name:** Lake Huron Drainage Basin Map
> **Author:** Philadelphia City Council and Tierney
> **License:** Public Domain
> **Source:** [https://www.canada.ca/en/canada-water-agency/freshwater-ecosystem-initiatives/great-lakes/great-lakes-protection/maps/lake-huron-drainage-basin.html flickr]

and imagery created for "Внутренние службы" on http://scp-ru.wikidot.com, by Osobist, released CC BY-SA 3.0: http://scp-ru.wikidot.com/list-of-foundation-s-internal-departments.

----

The following image:

> **Filename:** OT_74_Omega.jpg

is partially derived from imagery created for "Внутренние службы" on http://scp-ru.wikidot.com, by Osobist, released CC BY-SA 3.0: http://scp-ru.wikidot.com/list-of-foundation-s-internal-departments.

----

The following image:

> **Filename:** OT_74_Ngo_Tapes.jpg

is derived from:

> **Title:** Grundig TK 340 Hi-Fi 
> **Author:** itsclipping 
> **License:** CC BY-SA 2.0
> **Source:** https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/b5417432-89a8-49b7-95fb-6cf205ac2371 flickr

----

The following image: 

> **Filename:** OT_74_Heart.jpg

is derived from [[[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/art:forgotten-babylon-comic |Burning Down the House]]] by [[*user Dino--draws]].

[[/<]]
=====
[[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]
[[/=]]