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[[include :scp-wiki:theme:blankstyle]] [[=]] + Words of Duty and Defiance @@ @@ [[image https://scp-wiki.wdfiles.com/local--files/the-b-b-decommission/Asterisk43.png]] @@ @@ + ##990011|2024## ++ 14 October [[span style="font-family: BauhausLTDemi; font-size: 120%;"]]**##990011|Site-01##: Sabattis Christian Parish, Hamilton County, New York, United States of America**[[/span]] [[/=]] ---- The entire Council had been there, and the lights had been on. He was already forgetting what most of them had looked like. The jet black, whirring cylinder was easily the most memorable, and that one he had already met. Most career personnel had to guess who their administrative sponsors were; O5-2 announced itself to each one on their first day, and expected regular progress updates. The others were human, and that was all Harry was willing to swear he remembered. Perhaps the decontamination airlock had amnestics in the misters. Then again, he couldn't remember what he'd eaten on the flight. He couldn't remember seeing Site-01 from his window. He could remember ascending the topside elevator shaft, but only because it had involved a rickety emergency lift and some preliminary demolition. //And because you felt like a monster abandoning them to their ruins immediately after they elected you their leader.// As soon as Eileen and Amelia had gotten the comms back up, they'd sent a status report to Overwatch. As soon as the report had been received, the summons had been sent. The Red Right Hand had arrived in what looked like Canadian military helicopters -- where had they gotten those on such short notice? -- landed on the tarmac in Camp Ipperwash, and set to work extracting him in a matter of minutes. Pursuit and Suppression would have been a hard-pressed to beat their response time from AAF-A. He'd been given a new phone, work tablet, and access card at the first of many checkpoints inside Site-01. They'd taken the copy of 5109 he'd been using to lock up the 001 file, which was now being reviewed by god knew how many committees. He would have to brief them soon. He wouldn't get the Password back, because his brain was now too dangerous to risk taking on potentially deific hitchhikers. He would be expected to weigh in on procedure for Protocol GYRUS. He would be expected to coordinate an overarching defence with Dr. Dan directly. He now had Security Clearance Level-5. He could open almost anything the Foundation had on file. He was the Director of Site-43. Because Allan was dead. The Overseers had wanted to hear his account of the breach. They hadn't asked his opinion on why it had happened, or what could have been done to prevent it. He got the vague impression they were going to come to their own conclusions. Nobody asked him what his future plans were. Nobody asked after the injured personnel. Nobody seemed to really comprehend the gravity of what had taken place. Karen was dead. Her body had accompanied him to Site-01, as had Allan's. They'd parted company outside a church on the way to... No, the church //was// the Site, its topside cover. He'd last seen the caskets headed for a tumbledown graveyard, four heavily-armoured pallbearers to each. Probably they were already underground. //Just like me.// The Director of Site-43. He'd been told he would have a relatively free hand. The Overseers didn't want to fix what wasn't broken. 43 hadn't had a serious breach in twenty years, and all things considered this one could have been much worse. Allan was dead, and Karen was dead, and Bremmel and Vroom and Jessie MacCrum and Ji O and Eddie Simms and dozens more were dead, and one of the world's largest buildings was a yawning pit of groaning superstructure deep, deep down where nobody could reach it and nobody was in charge because he was here being told it was fine, and the //Weight// had never felt heavier. Presumably he made the right noises, nodded at the right times, because eventually they let him go. There was only one more task to fulfill before he could return to the gigantic, compromised sarcophagus he still thought of as his home. He wasn't clear on what it was, and he didn't much care. Something symbolic, something official, a test, a debriefing, whatever. He would do it on autopilot. He would save his presence for the people who needed it. His people. //Because you are the Director,// he thought as his death-masked escort ushered him into a heavily secured detention cell. //Because Allan is dead.// Allan was sitting in the detention cell. Harry didn't hear the door close behind him. He'd stopped breathing, and his ears were about to pop. It //was// Allan. It couldn't be. "Harry," said Allan. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit, and sitting at a steel table. He looked healthy. He did not appear to have been shot. "I'm very, //very// sorry." He looked it. There was no lie in those grey eyes. "Allan?!" Harry managed. There was another chair at the table, but he wasn't sure he could make it. He thought he might sit down on the floor instead. He wasn't sure his knees would give him a choice. "I wouldn't have done this to you if there were any other way." The other man's voice was thick with sorrow. It //was// Allan's voice. He'd sounded almost exactly like this on the day that Vivian had died. "But I had to leave allowances for emergent situations." Harry looked around the room, tunnel vision closing in. Table, chairs, privacy screen in the corner, air vent, wall panels, tile floor, the living dead. He felt dangerously close to laughing. "How are you still alive?" "I'm not." Harry staggered to the table. It was either that or fall over. "I saw your brains blown out." Allan reached up to touch his own forehead, gingerly. "Yes. You did." //This is a dream.// He looked around to see if Karen was sharing it with him, but of course she wasn't, because Karen was dead. Or was she? What if it had //all// been a dream? "What's behind the curtain?" he found himself asking. He didn't know why. Of course it would be the toilet. "And why are you wearing that?" Allan had been wearing his usual: a nice shirt, dress pants and a cozy-looking pullover. He'd been sporting business casual when he died. The other man paused, and Harry knew it really was a dream. Nothing brought Allan McInnis up short. Even this imperfect doppelganger should have been able to play the part more accurately. Still his archivist's mind pulled on the loosest thread. //Would// there be toilet facilities behind a screen in a detention cell? Did the Foundation care that much about the privacy of their prisoners? And why was Allan McInnis, dead or alive, dressed like a prisoner anyway? "What's behind the curtain?" he repeated, and he found himself standing up. "Don't look," Allan said softly. "I will tell you." Harry walked to the curtain. It cordoned off an entire corner of the room. There was something wrong about that corner. Something very bad. "Harry," Allan pleaded. "Don't look." "[[[scp-069|Zero six nine]]]," said Harry. He hadn't been conscious of making the connection before speaking it aloud. He didn't pull back the curtain. "That's right." Allan sounded so very tired. But of course, it was an act. It wasn't Allan. "You're not Allan," said Harry, without turning back around. "I am." "He's dead." "You already knew that." Harry wheeled in place, pointing a finger at the form of his friend. At the SCP object mimicking the thought patterns of the corpse cooling in the corner. "But then you played your sick joke--" "It isn't a joke." That voice cut through his rage as it always did, letting all the air out. The finger dropped. "You know how this anomaly works. I'm Allan McInnis, until I'm not." "For as long as they leave his..." Harry's own voice was little more than an angry choke. He gestured violently at the curtain, and the punctured clay beyond. The effigy hung its head in a fair approximation of regret. "As I said, I'm sorry. I never wanted this contingency to go into effect. But there are matters we need to discuss before the transition can truly take place." "Transition." The Allan-thing met his eyes. "You've been appointed Director." "Yeah." Harry felt like an ass, standing between two mockeries of a man he'd loved and admired. But he couldn't get any closer to the live one, and it felt like a betrayal to abandon the dead. //Like they already made you abandon the living.// 069 was nodding. "That's good. Nim will have refused it, as will Ilse." "Yeah." The thing smiled Allan's smile. "You would have been my choice, anyway." "That doesn't mean much," Harry snapped, "coming from an anomaly." Allan wouldn't have taken visible offence at this, and his replacement didn't either. "You're an historian. The past matters to you. Probably nobody else conceives of that facility as holistically as you do. Its builders are almost all dead, and you've inherited their legacy." The words were right. The inflection and the expressions. If it weren't for the fact that William Wettle had put a bullet through the old man's skull... Harry did sit down on the floor. He put his head in his hands. "I don't want to do this." "You'll get used to it." "Why can't they just..." "Fly my body over to Canada?" Allan chuckled. "Keep it in cold storage in my desk, perhaps?" "Don't." //That __isn't__ __Allan__.// "Don't joke about his death." "I experienced it." Harry rubbed his face vigorously, felt it turning red, felt the bile rising as he glared at whatever this thing really was. "You didn't." "I have the memory." "And Willie has the memory of shooting you. That doesn't mean he //did.//" "His body did." "And your body //didn't die.//" Harry felt the last few hours preparing to bolt out of him as lightning, felt the elecricity inside of him, which //was// him, straining to break free and flee to ground, and he wondered if this was how you became a //giftschreiber.// "You might remember what Allan knew, but that doesn't make you Allan. You were a world away when he sacrificed himself." "I can see our frames of reference are misaligned," 069 sighed. "I was hoping to give you some comfort, in addition to the information I need to pass on. Perhaps that was naïve." "What comfort could you possibly give?" "I knew I was going to die." "Obviously." "I knew for decades. Before the Breach, even." Harry met its eyes, its familiar grey eyes. His heart still wanted to trust them. "What?" Allan -- there was no point thinking of it as anything else, not as long as it insisted on speaking in his voice -- turned the chair to face him, pushing the table out of the way. "Harry, there's a plan at work here which has been unfolding since before either of us was born, and which hasn't even been conceived of yet. We're sitting at the centre of a cross-temporal constellation of causality the complexity of which staggers the mind. All of it binding our fractured reality together. We are the weavers of that web." He touched his chest. "You and I. Ilse. Viv, and Wynn Rydderech. Zwist. Even the Uncontained and Unyielding, in their ways." Harry shook his head. "You're trying to tell me your death was all part of some master plan?" It was a worse joke than puppeting the Director's body for one last hurrah. It was an absurdity. It was sick. "No. But it was accounted for." "Not by me," Harry whispered. New lines were forming on that strained face every second, and Harry almost wondered if this monstrous form of resurrection came with a time limit. But no, he could see that this version of Allan carried a weight of its own behind those eyes. And it was genuine. "I couldn't tell anyone." "Why?" "I simply could not." Allan stood up, and sat back down again on the floor. Legs crossed, hands on knees. A picture of down-to-earth leadership, more lifelike and true-to-life than whatever they were going to hang up in the portrait hall. Assuming the portrait hall had even survived. "You must believe me that it does not compromise the overall--" "I don't give a fuck about the //plan// right now, Allan." Harry learned this at the same moment the other man did. "I'm talking about the death of my friend." Allan pursed his lips, and waited for the obvious finale. "We're all going to miss you," Harry managed. His voice did some strange things by the end of it, and it wasn't quite right. Not quite specific enough. But he suspected Allan heard the unspoken words, too. "I'm sorry," he sighed. And then he smiled, very sadly. "But I'm also glad. If the Breach had never occurred, things would have been very different." "Better," Harry said. "And worse. We've risen to the occasion. Without it, we might have stagnated." "Noè would still be alive. K--" He couldn't say it. That single word was strangling him to death. But as before, as always, Allan heard the silence perfectly well. This time it really did look as though his face was going to collapse. As though the bullet had finally hit home. That measured composure dissolved away, and all that was left was a very keen agony. "Karen?" he said. "You didn't know," Harry croaked. Allan reached up to rub his eyes. "I didn't know. No. Not about her. Or any of the others. Not before, and not after. Not until this moment." He wanted to say he was sorry. Instead, he asked: "And if you had?" Allan didn't answer. He was breathing deeply, and staring at the floor. "If you had known?" Harry pressed. "Would you have tried to stop it?" They sat in silence a moment longer. "That's what I thought," said Harry. Allan met his eyes again. "This is bigger than all of us." "Nothing is that big," Harry lied. "The Metafoundation is." Harry stared at him. "If we don't stop this rot //here,// Harry, it's going to spread farther. The brothers will have the means to infect realities far beyond our own." "How?" His stomach was a bottomless pit of ever-churning machinery. A boundless gulf. It was eating him up. "I can't tell you." Allan looked rueful, and to his shock, Harry found himself smiling. "What?" "You really are him." Harry shook his head. "So conscientious." That warm smile again, tempered with decades of guilt and the burdens of high places. "There are some truths you need to learn on your own, in the fullness of time. When I'm no longer around to tell you." "And some truths you need to tell me now, you said." Allan nodded. "That's right. SCP-069 is not to be used on high-ranking members of personnel. The danger of our knowledge is too great. And of course, no anomalies can be carried into this facility, for the safety of the Overseers. And yet accommodation has been made, for this single case. That's how important this is." "What happens after?" As if he wanted to know. As if he didn't already. "You'll have to find a way to make the position yours," said Allan. "Site-43 needs a leader." "I mean what happens to you?" As if the old man had ever once misunderstood him. Allan hesitated, completing the picture forming in Harry's mind. "As I said, the contents of my mind are... privileged." "They're going to decommission you." It wasn't much of a question. "Yes." Now there was no regret, no uncertainty. Allan was a leader. He never balked at taking the first step in a new direction himself. "And you're going to let them." "I will insist upon it, if necessary." "Does 069 have an opinion on the matter?" Allan shrugged. "It will persist. Take another form. The process is relatively simple." "You're sure about that?" A morbid fascination overtook him. "It feels more likely that they'll try to find a way to kill it for good. So the things you know can't slip out." "You're not the first to have this thought," Allan nodded. "I only know what I perceive to be my own mind, but I suspect my... enabler, knew the risk when it agreed to perform this task. It is not so bad to die as a hero, Harry. Knowing how your end will come, and what will come after." There were tears in his eyes. "Is that how you feel, too?" The Director's voice was pitched very low. "I'm not a hero." "You are." A beat. "Yes, you //are,//" Harry repeated with all the firmness he could muster. His voice didn't crack. Not when it counted. Allan nodded, as though nothing more meaningful than a flight itinerary had been confirmed. Appreciation flickered in the grey, just for a moment. "How is William?" It was too much to think about. Not now. Not here. "We'll get him through it," Harry lied smoothly. At least, he hoped it was smooth. If he had his doubts, the other man let it pass. The master communicator, himself communicated to a different medium for his final duty. "Good." He nodded. "Good. Well, I think it's time we got down to business." Harry nodded. "I'm listening." The older man leaned back, placed his hands on the floor, and looked Harry in the eye. "Ask me the question." "What question?" "//The// question." And somehow, Harry knew. "Does the Black Moon howl?" In his capacity as the Administrator of Cornerstone, in Deadline 5243-A, Allan responded: "When the White Sun is silenced." The soundscape of the chamber changed subtly. A sort of whirring sound from the ceiling had ceased. Harry knew that if he looked up, he would see the red lights on the camera were no longer blinking. "They'll do something about that, won't they?" Harry asked. "They will not. They're handling a rather thorny security problem right now." Again Harry felt an inappropriate smile creasing his face. "The Pariah?" "Among others." Allan cracked his knuckles. "Now, where to begin? Ah. Yes." He took a deep breath. "You were young, when Vivian brought you into the fold. As was Lillian, Eileen. Karen." This time his voice nearly broke. "Most of our cohort. Our... friends. With fresh ideas, and open minds." Harry nodded again. "And the Overseers put a stop to it, when they put a stop to him. Do you know why?" "Because the young haven't picked a side yet." "Because they don't really believe there //are// sides. Their minds are still flexible enough to turn another way. And the Foundation has chosen its course already. Harry, the Overseers are going to side with the //schriftsteller.//" He felt his veins begin to freeze. He felt no warmer than the body in the bag, behind the screen. "They are going to take up the cause of perfect, universal order. Snuff out all resistance. Close a fist around the globe. They will contain //everything,// just as we saw the Uncontained destroy it all. Instead of perfect, terrible freedom, we will have perfect, suffocating tyranny. And then the Earth will crack, and it will all begin again." "And we'll never have another chance to stop it." "That's right." Allan folded his hands in his lap, and leaned forward. "So you need to stop //them.// The Overseers. Overwatch. A great many of my former colleagues. You'll need help. Lillian's friends, and William's, and friends Ilse hasn't yet made. You will need to bring Zwist back into the fold, and somehow bring Dr. Rydderech back to himself. You will need to find the rest of the names on that list. And then you're going to have to make use of the incubator we fashioned together, over all these years, and realize the dreams of our predecessors. For Vivian, for Dr. Rydderech, for everyone we lost today, and every day before. And since. For everyone in the world; all the worlds, in point of fact." "Incubator," Harry repeated. It could only be Site-43. Site-43, where he, Harold Blank, was Director. Because Allan McInnis was dead. "Incubator," he repeated, "of what?" Allan reached out, and pressed a hand into Harry's shoulder. The grip was familiar, reassuring. As though strength could be transferred merely by touch, through skin and fabric, heart to heart. "Of the Second Coming." The light of this final, desperate hope was brilliant in the dead man's eyes. "Of a new Foundation."