Killing Time 2

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He was less surprised to see her this time, but still she took his breath away.

"You're decaying," he told her.

She gestured at the ripples in the walls, at the red, at everything, without hardly moving a muscle. "It all is."

"Not //that// fast." Her skin was plywood. One of her eyes was missing. Her clothing hung limp and threadbare on her narrow frame, unravelling into fractals on the floor. Her fingers were long and narrow, like melted plastic. Her shadow looked uncannily like it belonged to a mannequin on a stand. When she moved, the whole thing blurred, like reality was trying to make sense of what it saw. Just like Place was.

They were in his quarters. She stood in the door, and Blank leaned on the boards which had replaced the window. There were seams in his flesh, and when he spoke, seeds poured out to stick to his soaked sweater and labcoat. When he gestured, Place could see tears in the armpits which went all the way to the flesh; little cherry tomatoes were fruiting in a hollow in his thorax, and Place had a horrible, intrusive thought: would it be better if they tasted sour, sweet, or flavourless?

The revolting archivist was speaking now. "You ever see those old fair buildings they used to make? Like in Chicago? Never meant to last more than a season, but some of them lingered. People liked them. Kept them around. They lasted just long enough to fall apart, or catch fire."

"Which one are you doing?" Place asked, his voice breathy, far-away.

"Both," Lillihammer smirked.

That seemed enough for the pleasantries. "Are you going to kill me?"

By now the mannequin's body language was nearly all implied. Place wasn't quite sure why that parsed. "What's the point?"

"You'll just come back the next time they screw up," the tomato agreed.

"Man," Lillihammer wheezed. Were her lips even moving? Had she actually smirked? "Remember how much that sucked?"

"No," Blank grinned. His gums were tomato-flesh. "But of course //you// do."

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Blank.jpg]]

"It sucked," she affirmed. "Every little mistake punished with a year of hell. And it didn't even have to be //your// mistake."

Blank shook his head. "God damn Willie."

"We should go see how he's doing."

"He's dead." 

"That hasn't kept //us// down."

Place looked back and forth between them, wondering where his guards were. Wondering where anyone was. Had they all given up on him? Like they had with Torosyan? "I don't understand what you're talking about."

"We're talking about a world where none of this happened," she said.

"Where none of these mistakes were made," Blank continued.

"A doomed world." 

"Like this one." 

Place shook himself back to attention. The back-and-forth was just as hypnotic as she'd been years ago, one-on-one. "This world is doomed?"

"It ought to be," the mannequin rasped. Her lips definitely weren't moving. "But your friends are making it worse."

"They really are," Blank nodded.

"How?" Placeholder asked.

"By trying to fix it," she answered simply.

"By which we mean, most emphatically," Blank concluded, "//stop trying to fix it.//"

Place eyed the open door hopelessly. There was no escaping these two. They were a lot stronger than they looked, and that strength was more than physical. "Will you let me go if I pass on your message?"

"Why do you want to go?" Lillihammer's sing-song was the epitome of mockery. "Are we not scintillating company?" 

Blank glanced at her. "I think you intimidate him."

"All the more reason to stay. They love how intimidating I am."

"I guess we're imposing on him." Blank glanced at Place again with a sly smile. "He has to run back to his lab and... do what, exactly?"

"I..." He swallowed. He swallowed again. "I'm not going to tell you."

Blank's eyes flashed green. He //saw// the green. "I could make you."

"I could //take// you," Lillihammer growled.

"Wouldn't it be more interesting to find out fairly?" Place asked, with no conception of where the words had come from.

Lillihammer snorted. It was barely audible. "Now you're getting it."

Blank rolled his shoulders. A pale, sickly tomato popped out and rolled on the carpet, leaving a stain. It stank immediately, like rotting flesh and cooking soup. "This is going to be fun."

Place slumped back into his borrowed armchair. They weren't going to kill him. //Why// weren't they going to kill him? "You've been... waiting for an opponent?"

Lillihammer's blue eyes -- Lillihammer's eyes were flat, red-lit wood -- took his measure. "You think that's what you are?"

"We've been waiting," Blank said. "We're //still// waiting."

"But you'll do in the meantime."

"Until someone less predictable comes along."

"Don't be a stranger." That disconcerting blur, and she was turned away from him three-quarters in the doorway. "Not that you have much choice."

"None of them do." Blank pushed off the wall. 

"The fun part is," Lillihammer mused, "the more you tell them that, the less they believe it."

"Free will is just an immune response to authority," Blank grinned.

"That's a good one," Lillihammer said. Place could hear an echo of the grin in her ethereal voice. "I'm glad I came up with it." 

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++ 8 September
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He wasn't doing this for Ngo.

He didn't do anything for any particular reason anymore. He just //did// things. That was the purest expression of how he felt. Things had no meaning outside of themselves. They simply were.

These weren't really monsters. They were the memory of monsters. Memories were unreliable. The monsters didn't exist.

These weren't really ghosts. They weren't really alive, either. They were floating signifiers, and he had no desire to affix them to any particular schema. To honour or dishonour them. He was here to deconstruct, and that was all.

It wasn't really even a button...

The shutter snapped up, and he whirled in confusion.

Nhung Ngo leapt onto his southeastern desk, crouched down, and propelled herself onto its northeastern cousin. As she bounded off that desk, too, she saw him. Their eyes locked.

Was it hurt?

Was it confusion?

Betrayal?

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Ngo.jpg]]

Whatever it was, it made her stumble. She twisted her ankle on the landing, and her foot was scalded in a rush of melted documents. She screamed in pain, and staggered out of view.

Zlatá gave the time signal.

Reuben walked to the desk, robotically. Pushed the chair away, and didn't bother to crouch. The papers could burn him straight on, this time. If they'd learned anything from Ambrogi, it was that he wouldn't come back. And that was good.

Because he didn't mean anything, either, and he didn't want to.

At the moment he pushed the button, something heavy hit him on the head. And again. And again and again and again, and he was drowning in a sea of metal, and then the metal was on fire, and he finally believed there was a point to all of this.

The point was that it hurt.

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Del Olmo hadn't realized quite how much stress he'd been under until he popped the filling.

That it happened just before he was meant to sent his message, well. That was unfortunate timing. 

One less screaming pile of skin and hair and fabric on the walls of AAF-D this year. In itself, no big deal. There was already a hefty backlog of the stuff for Amelia to cut her way through, if she ever turned up again.

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It took two hours to dig Reuben out. He was covered in first degree burns, clothing singed, hair gone, the works. For the first hour, while Billie worked on his skin, he stayed perfectly silent. For the next day or so, he barely even breathed. He just listened to Veiksaar in the next bed over, ranting and raving and begging for release, while he massaged the wounds on his flank which would never, ever get better. For a few more hours after that, while Melissa asked him polite questions in a quiet voice, rubbing the back of her skull every now and then and wincing, he didn't move a muscle.

Then, quite suddenly, he started to laugh.

He didn't stop for a long, long time.

When Melissa finally left, he seized Billie's wrist. Examined it closely. She watched him, dead-eyed, as he did it.

"What else have you got in that medicine cabinet?" he asked her.

She smiled. The effect was fully isolated to the lower half of her face. "I'll get us some needles."

"And lock the door," Veiksaar wailed.

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The only item on the agenda this year was another alteration to the calendar.

Clio could keep track of the dates, for when it mattered. Most people hadn't bothered distinguishing one day from the next for years. The best way to make an unfortunate development less depressing was to dress it up as policy.

It wasn't as if they could see the difference, anyway.

It wasn't as if they could see anything.

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Del Olmo was staying late at the booth, running through topics for the next show in his head. The sensory possibilities opened up by the ban on long showers. What the apocalypse had taught them about the afterlife -- specifically that it either did not exist, or was not pleasant. Something about minimum viable populations, how reproduction might be achieved despite communal lethargy, conflict between the moral imperative to repopulate the Earth and the moral bankruptcy of introducing new life to such horrific conditions... yes, that was the one. That was something they all needed to be thinking about, and soon.

When he came back to the world his body occupied, there was another body in it. She stood on the other side of what by convention most people pretended was glass, like a statue, staring down at him like he was so much squashed tomato.

When he retreated again to the world of the mind, she was there too.

In his mindscape, where there was colour -- it made him ache inside, every time -- she could move freely. The years had weathered off of her, and the sawdust skin as well. She was young and full of life, and if he didn't look at her face he could almost imagine it really was Lillian Lillihammer. "Evening, boss."

"Ground rules." He imagined they were standing on an open plain, because why not. Grass and sunlight were a fantasy now. He sat down on a mossy rock, and glared at her. "I'm not going to pretend you're her. You're not going to pretend this visit is friendly. We're not going to pretend we have anything in common. Speak plainly."

She grinned. It was a fair approximation, as though recalled from memory and recreated from scratch. "I do love a challenge. Sounds good." She sat down on the grass, then shrugged and fell back into it. "Let me level with you. You're being used."

"The way you're using her?"

"Exactly." She began moving her arms and legs, as though attempting to form a snow angel in the grass. "Only worse. You got the raw end of the deal. A lot of baggage that makes you worse than bad at everything you try to do. Have you considered that maybe it would all work out better if you didn't try at all?"

"I have considered it," he admitted. "The thing is, if I'm wrong, then the world might end."

"And that would be bad because...?"

He sighed, and looked up at the sky. His mind kept wanting to make it red, and erase the clouds. "The desire to survive is one of the signal virtues of the human race."

She snorted, and was still. "I still don't understand why you believe that. There's an order to birth and growth and decay and death. It isn't chaos. It's not something to be feared."

"Maybe we like chaos," he mused.

"Maybe you're an infection," she responded. She sat up, and picked at the grass. He willed it not to separate from its roots. She plucked it up effortlessly, crushed it under her nose, took in the scent. "All of you. This world is the logical extension of who you all are. Contradictory and unstable. You know that reality tends toward complex structures. You taught me that, once."

"Her," he cautioned. "I taught //her.//"

"Sure," she shrugged. "And you were right. In the absence of red hell, who's to say the universe won't drum up a blue heaven next time?" She gestured at the fields and the sky. "If you just let go, and stop struggling, and go to sleep, you might find yourself waking up in paradise."

He stared at the grass. She followed his gaze, and stared as well.

Gradually, it reddened. Gradually, it wilted.

Eventually it was all red, and his eyes snapped open. She was still standing there, in front of the absence of glass. Observing him like an entomologist with her favourite beetle.

"I don't trust you," he said. It felt strange to speak with his lips again. "I will never trust you. It was a mistake to take her form. None of us will ever believe anything you say, after you took them from us."

She blinked, very slowly. "That's good to know. I might have wasted years on diplomacy. When this escalates, do remember you were the one who put the idea into my head."

"That's memetics," he said, but she was already gone.

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When the Omegas weren't using the password, Alis borrowed it. She was the only one who could forcibly resurface, if only just barely -- she'd been told she appeared as the vague outline of a person, and her speech came out as intimations of intent rather than words -- and anyway what it did was little more than something she'd regularly done to herself, for years on years.

She walked the halls, and watched the people, and from time to time, chipped in. When she found someone concealing their despair, she found little ways to boost their morale. When it seemed like isolated individuals had common concerns, she nudged them subtly together. When sensitive documents were left in inappropriate locations, she defused the resultant crises before they occurred.

She did it because she didn't know what else to do. She had never had much, and she had lost it. There was no way to get it back. Why, then, shouldn't she help the people who could still find something to cling to?

She could have taken her frustrations out on them instead, of course. It would have been easier.

But the world didn't need more people who took the easy course.

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Mark Twain had once made a lot of noise about the concept of snapping twigs.

As he would have it, fellow author James Fenimore Cooper made far too liberal use of dry wood fragments in his woodland adventures. Nobody creeping through the forest could fail to find one underfoot, and give up the game, in spite of the general clamour associated with any respectable stretch of the great outdoors. Mukami had always enjoyed that essay, just as she'd despised the Leatherstocking Tales. She was quite sure she could outshoot Fenimore's ludicrous protagonist in a fair contest, but he certainly had her beat when it came to detecting footfalls on deadfall.

//Snap.//

She pirouetted, and fired. The cackling in the treetops was a little more forced than last time, so she suspected she'd hit her mark. "Even Stewart can shoot better than that!" came the revoltingly wet cry.

The forests of Ipperwash and beyond were like Cooper's dream made manifest. Deathly silent for acres, until they weren't. She could hear a leaf drop, if such a thing as leaves existed these days. The new trees -- they had sprung up seemingly overnight from the red!grey and loose soil -- were towering things set close together, with branches all arcing upward like claws. They no longer contained niches for the tree-people; she'd been finding their corpses everywhere since this new copse sprang up, torn in half along the least likely axis. She hoped whatever was up there would do the same to her obnoxious quarry. Maybe it was the trees themselves.

//Snap.//

This time she pulled the trigger before spinning. Something about the sound was off, and she didn't trust it. It felt like more of a suggestion than a real snap. She wasn't sure why her instincts had chosen the angle they had, but...

//Thump.//

A scrabbling at the ground, which was covered in desiccated hands which crumpled to nothing when touched. A muttered curse, and a snarl on the wind: "You ask Janet for permission to engage?" She'd hit her mark again...

//Crack.//

For a moment, she thought it was another twig or branch snapping. But the sound was louder, more sonorous, and also her shoulder was bleeding. Her opponent had conceded the word games, apparently.

She raised the rifle and raced forward, refusing, utterly refusing to go into shock. That wasn't how it worked, except that //was// how it worked. She had to do so many things on raw will now, and this was no different. She could operate her entire body manually if need be. This chase was going to //end.//

She broke through the treeline, and there it was. The sloshing, sliding, //insinuating// thing that had stolen Delfina Ibanez like an unattended vehicle was beelining back to the remains of the camp -- no, now she was zig-zagging serpentine, frustrating Mukami's aim. She moved like the devil. No wonder her corruption spread so quickly.

Mukami was a solid 1500 yards from the ruined barracks when she stopped, winded, at a slight rise in the land where she'd buried the last of the tree-people. She crested the hill, dropped, and set up her tripod. Ibanez was nearly at the elevator.

One of the first things Mukami had done, when the initial mess was sorted back in 2022, was to go through her husband's old papers. It had been as much a diversion from her difficulty expressing herself as a tribute to the dead man. She was glad of it now.

She thought he'd have been glad of it, too.

Ibanez was grinning as she poured herself through the doors, and slammed the button to seal them shut. Mukami took careful aim as the cab descended, and felt no remorse.

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She had to rappel back down into the Site. She'd probably catch hell from whoever was running J&M these days, but that didn't matter.

What mattered was the streaks of blood and liquified bone, gristle, muscle, flesh and organs smeared all the way down the shaft, gradually congealing into a pile beneath the third sublevel which was showing no signs of getting back up to continue the chase.

Best of all, it was silent.

[[# anchor-2029]]

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In January, Technician Novik accidentally fed his left hand into the biologicals processor. Those gears had an excellent grip, and Technician Novik was duly processed.

In February, Agent Teague walked into the empty elevator shaft. The drop didn't kill her, but being forgotten with two broken legs eventually did.

In March, Dr. Stendahl was flash-fried in his laboratory when he forgot about the experiment he'd been running. The results were still recorded, but without his expert interpretation.

In April -- the first of April -- H&P was so overwhelmed with injuries ranging from minor lacerations to complete amputations, all self-inflicted through inattention, that Billie Forsythe locked herself in her office with a makeshift water pipe and a custom pharmacopia and wouldn't come out until Yancy kicked the door down, and even then it wasn't under her own power.

In May, Eileen Veiksaar had a baby. Nobody had noticed she was pregnant. Melissa didn't even notice the baby.

In June, after a very public fight with Reuben Wirth, Veiksaar fled into AAF-D. They sent guards after her. All of them forgot what they were doing. Some of them came back.

In July, Veiksaar was found wandering the halls of H&P, expression blank, and only Gwilherm's threat of employing MARSTON verification protocol finally elicited something like an explanation from her.

The baby had starved to death, it seemed. Veiksaar had barely noticed.

Wirth became very quiet after that.

Sometimes the rest of them felt bad about enjoying it.

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In August, she finally found him.

This year Lillihammer and the rest weren't camping in AAF-D. Nobody seemed to know where they were, and searching was far too painful. Looking at things right under your nose was almost tolerable; looking long-distance, you might as well have been staring at the pre-Paradox sun. How Mukami had managed topside, Janet couldn't imagine.

So she'd conducted the search alone, tracing the incidents just as her opposite number in S&C had done, and that was how she found him. She should have known, really, except that he'd never been one for self-reflection.

Wettle was staring at himself. Not in a mirror, but through a door. One of the larger labs -- Janet couldn't tell what it had been for, before the bags of the dead giant's eyes had plastered over it -- was dominated by a gigantic brown eyeball gazing out the doorway with watery need. When it blinked, it blew the smaller Wettle's labcoat back, and Janet could see how grossly distended his shape was beneath.

He must have heard her intake of breath, because he turned... no. He didn't so much turn as //stretch,// face wandering along his skull to face her, skull turning more slowly, tendons rearranging in the neck to support the new configuration. It was like rotating a flat image from edge to face, or dragging details across a canvas without changing the overall shape. He was already speaking before the horrific image settled. "Didn't see you there."

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Wettle.jpg]]

"Ha," she said. "Ha."

He glanced at the shotgun in her lap. "You still play rough, I see."

"What's the point of all this, Willie?"

He shrugged. His shoulders didn't quite know where to stop. He looked like a Munch painting. "To keep you guessing?"

A flood of water ran out of the chamber behind him, as though someone had clogged up a toilet. The cyclopean eye looked momentarily less watery. "I'm tired of games," she said. "We all are. Now we know you fuckers die like anybody else, it's just a matter of time. You've got anything to say for yourselves, better start soon."

Wettle considered. "What year is it?"

She rolled her eyes to play for time. She didn't want to admit she didn't know the answer off the top of her head. "2029."

"Okay." He nodded. "You'd have been dead for twenty-seven years by now, Janet."

"What?"

"If all this hadn't happened." Wettle smirked. She'd never seen anything like it on his face before, but then, she'd never seen his face without him behind it. "You'd be dead and gone, and they wouldn't even remember you fondly. The last time most people saw you, you were beating up that sad sack you call a boyfriend. One time, that sad sack reduced you to //nothing.// The only people who give a shit about you, Janet, the only people who don't think you're a waste of skin? They're the people you've got under your rubber right here. This is the only world you've got. The only world //any of you// have got. Everywhere else, you're yesterday's dust."

She nodded. She had no idea what he was talking about, but it didn't matter. These people were always talking shit. "And what are you?"

He chuckled. "This is the only world where I'm actually happy. So here's the thing, Janet. //We need to go home.//"

"Home."

"Yes," he hissed beneath his misshapen, spittle-specked beard. "Turn this car around. Bring us //back.// If you set things right again, you can fill that void. You can live again. Cross the threshold and take your empty place. Unless you want to keep playing house-on-fire for the rest of eter--"

A wave of viscera sailed over Janet's head, spattering the back of her neck and scalp and drenching Wettle in gory debris. A few stray grains of sand caught in the artificial breeze, tumbling lifelessly to the ground.

Radcliffe appeared on her right. "Sorry about the coverage." He was holding Yancy's magnum, pointing it at Wettle. "This thing has a bloody punch."

"You'd know," Wettle sneered.

"How'd you find out I was here?" Janet looked up at Stewart's pinched, tormented face. "How'd you know... Okorie?" He nodded. "...was creeping up on me?"

"I didn't," he said.

On her left, Daniil Sokolsky appeared. He looked at Wettle, then the Wettlewall behind him, with a look somewhere between sympathy and hatred.

"We were just taking a walk," Stewart said, "and I got lucky."

"You have //got// to be kidding me," Wettle breathed.

Sokolsky pointed at the broadening bruise on his left cheek. "Three doorframes this evening alone."

"What does it feel like?" Wettle took a step forward. "The effect doesn't transfer over. What does it feel like to have nothing but--"

His chest exploded, and he fell over backward. Janet pumped the shotgun, levelled it at the giant eye, and pulled the trigger again. The rush of red!white and plain old red bled into the translucent tears, and this stretch of the weeping wall suddenly stiffened, and was still. A breeze like a sigh of relief -- it smelled of Cheetos and Pepto Bismol -- briefly filled the air, then passed.

"Now you know," she told the wheezing corpse, before taking aim and scattering him back to September.

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When they were alone, she confessed that his timely arrival had put her in an unusually receptive mood.

Being Stewart, of course, he found a way to ruin that by trading it for a forgiving one.

There was no way to go after Amelia. If she was going to come back, if she was even still alive, she'd need to find her own way. She'd done it before. Perhaps she could do it again.

Janet considered telling the others, and remanding the big idiot to the cafeteria once again.

But something inside her said no.

Said if put in the same situation, she might have done the same dirty deed.

She was up all night, turning that something over and over in her mind. But no matter how it twisted in her grasp, she could never seem to cast any light on its surface.

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++ 8 September
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[[/=]]

The Administrator gave Wirth a citation for valour.

The ghosts of the archivists had all gotten it into their heads, somehow -- probably the gurning skeleton standing outside the shutter had something to do with it -- that they stood a better chance of survival in the Chief's office.

The burns this year were almost more than Billie could treat. And that was just the visible damage.

He would have liked to talk to someone about how it felt to feel another human being's skin, turned to newsprint, burning on his face. What it felt like to look in the mirror and see the text of Veasna Chey's obituary -- never written -- tattooed in inverse on his cheek.

But the only person who would have understood had given him a withering glare as his people shoved him into his office, and out of her spectral sight.

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It had started as the kernel of an idea. Something stuck to the gnashing teeth at the back of his mind, churning up raw material for... this was the wrong metaphor. It was so hard to think these days.

But it had started small, anyway. Place had barely paid it any mind. Then he'd wondered if there was something to it.

Now he was kilometres deep in the Mishepeshu tunnels, lost and confused and wondering why he'd ever considered something so utterly mad.

"You do take a lot of risks," she said, and he closed his eyes, then flicked off the flashlight. He didn't want to see.

"I'm sorry," he muttered.

"For what?"

He felt behind him for the bedrock tunnel, leaned against it, slid down until he was sitting on the warm rock. He hated how warm it was, and the faintest sensation of movement. Like a mattress with bed bugs in it. "I know I'm intruding."

"Do you?"

Her voice was strained, more than usual. Like a lathe scraping on wood. He opened his eyes, and shone the flashlight up at her.

Her hair hung long and limp around her face, and her face was a nightmare. Contorted into a mask of rage. Her eyes were gone. Her torso was bare, and there were whorls in the wood. He knew he shouldn't look at them. He looked at them. He started to weep. "What's happening to you?" he choked.

"The same thing that's happening to you."

He didn't want to think about that. "You're turning into your own corpse."

"Who else's should I turn into?" The mask of rage became a mask of mirth so abruptly that he jolted back, hitting his head on the stone. "But no, it isn't that."

"Then what?"

And suddenly she was right in front of him, and he jerked the light upward, and her angular profile cast moving shadows on the cave ceiling, and //the rock retreated from them as if it were skin, burned.// "I'm becoming the real me."

His hands were shaking. The light danced crazily. "What's that got to do with me?"

"You know."

He did. "I don't."

"Can you imagine a world where you never built that moronic device?"

"I dream of it," he whispered.

"Dreams are the correct format," she agreed. "Half-baked notions. This is the real deal. This is a //crucible.// You're so lucky to be here. To have made this place."

"I didn't make it," he protested.

She didn't answer. She didn't need to.

"I'd trade it for my dreams in a heartbeat."

She sneered. The transition was instantaneous, and every time it made his pulse leap. "You would wake up //changed.//"

"I'm in pain every day," he told her. "I'm afraid //every day.//"

"And you're getting closer, too. Every day."

"Closer to what?"

"To understanding yourself. What you are. Every other version of you will never, ever know. This is a gift."

"I would like to return it," he spat. "Why do you keep coming to me?"

"You came to me, this time," she reminded him. "Something at the end of these tunnels you think you need?"

He tried to shrug, but it wasn't in him. "I don't know. I just... there's something missing. I thought it might be that."

Somewhere in the far, far distance, thuds and thumps and high-pitched squeals. The rock resonated. It shuddered with anticipation.

He sighed. "You do keep finding me, though. Tell me that's a coincidence."

"I find you interesting," she admitted.

"I can't be the only one."

"You are," she grinned. She had no teeth. "I've seen all the others a thousand times. You..." The expression softened, and he could almost imagine she was a real human being for an instant. Just a flash. "You're the one who got away. //Gets// away."

"You let me go. Every time."

"Not every time. Sometimes you escape on your own. You're a slippery customer, by trade or by fate. I like that."

He shook his head. "You act like you know everything about me."

"More than anyone else does. I see both sides of you."

"Meaning?"

"Left to your own devices -- figuratively and literally -- you would become a tame scientist of minor note, and die smiling. A drop of catalyst, though, and you're a runaway reaction. You streak across the heavens, leaving a new design in your wake. The slightest suggestion of an outline and you see the entire picture. And yet you work //commissions.// You should be the architect of your own destiny, //##ff2243|PLACEHOLDER##.//"

Except that wasn't what she said. Not precisely.

She could have struck him, and he would have felt it less keenly. His mind instantly cleared of everything except the faint traces of self left behind where that single word had momentarily been. "//What// did you call me?!"

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Place_Name.jpg]]

"Your wrong name. You want it back." She didn't shake her head, but he had the impression she did. "You shouldn't. You're something more now. Later, even more. Too much to be contained. Too righteous to yield."

"Why..." He found it next to impossible to focus. She had said it. She had //said// it. 

He had experienced the feeling of hearing his actual, his real, his //own// name, had instantly known it for what it was despite not having heard it in decades, but after a fraction of a neuron-spark he could not translate that fact into anything like knowledge or memory of what that name had //been.// When he tried to parse the event, his brain insisted she'd simply spoken that well-worn, abhorrent moniker. But he knew what his ears had heard, in abstract. It was only his mind, everyone's mind, everyone's mind except //hers// apparently, which refused to absorb the phonemes and their meaning. And now...

...and now she was going to use it against him. Naming a thing gave you power over it. He wasn't going to rise to that bait. He couldn't. 

And he didn't need to.

After all, if she could know it, could //say// it, then some day so could he.

He cleared his mind completely, brushing away the last delicate strands of what he had lost for the second time, once again before he had even really understood how precious it was, and cleared his throat with considerably less difficulty. The bitterness in his voice was unavoidable. It would probably last for years. "Why can't you just //tell me what you mean// instead of playing these fucking //games?//"

She was pleased. Of course she was. But there was also something more dreadful in the tenor of her response. "Because I know how mad scientists think, Placeholder McDoctorate. You only truly believe in something if you think you came up with it all on your own."

[[# anchor-2030]]

[[=]]
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@@ @@

+ 2030
----
[[/=]]

Eileen had her headphones on most of the time now. It didn't matter what she was listening to, so long as it was loud.

She listened to music while she worked. She listened to music while she read. She listened to music in bed, whether she was in bed alone or in bed with him, whether she was sleeping or whether she wasn't. It dulled the senses. A few times Gwilherm or Ferber threatened to take the music away, said it was affecting the quality of her tech work, and she threatened to let the whole system rot, and they relented. They didn't want another schism. They couldn't afford it. And her inattention hadn't killed anybody yet, so that was that.

She listened to music while Reuben spoke, at the dinner table, and she shovelled the gruel into her face, and didn't listen. He didn't mind. He even preferred it this way. At this point he only spoke to keep from hearing his own thoughts anyway.

The headphones weren't plugged into anything. The jack was tucked away in her cotton scrubs pocket. But the music came through just the same, and she drank it all up. The elegies. The longing ballads. The warnings. If she had to deal with the living, she could at least take consolation from the unhappy dead.

And then, quite suddenly, the music stopped.

"He killed your son," a man's voice said.

Eileen dropped her fork. Reuben kept speaking.

"He killed your baby, and they made you forget."

Something small and dark at the back of her mind, something she'd managed not to think about for ages, suddenly caught the light.

"He'd kill you too, just to feel something."

She bent under the table, hyperventilating, to pick up the fallen fork.

"Harry is dead. He killed Harry. And he killed Sokolsky, too."

She'd seen Sokolsky just this morning. They'd talked about his condition. About how everything hurt, all over. And always would.

"No. He's dead. And you saw him die."

She straightened back up.

"He's going to kill you next."

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

Reuben managed to lock himself in the bedroom, but it was a close thing. He pulled the fork out of his cheek, tore a strip off the bedspread, and clapped it to the bleeding wound.

The wall panel to his escape hatch was open, and the thing that wasn't Harold Blank was leaning in it, grinning. His body and outfit were ruptured all along one side, and red juice and seeds were pouring out onto the carpet. His skin was tight and rippled, and so shiny that Reuben expected 8956 to leap out of it at any moment. Something red!green was sprouting from boils on his exposed skin, and running in lumpy courses beneath his clothing.

"I don't mind you taking my place," Blank drawled. "But you're doing it backwards, son."

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

There was something wrong with the air filters today.

Adrijan's little group of apprentice occultists -- useless, for the most part, but he had hope some day some of them could learn -- each started coughing before the lecture was through. Two of them gagged, as though they'd swallowed a fly, and asked to be let go early. When his own throat began tickling, he called a five-minute recess to consult with J&M.

The technician never arrived, and his students never came back.

"They thought you told them to go home," Okorie explained. She sat down at one of the desks, and peered up at him with a toothy grin. "And your maintenance check was scheduled for tomorrow. Easy mistake to make."

"I'm sure," Adrijan gasped. He'd been lucky so far. He'd never been cornered by any of the 001 phantasms. Okorie was the only one of them with any particular relation to him -- he'd been the external examiner on her dissertation -- but she'd been too busy starting sitcom-level fights in the dorms or making scientists blow themselves up in R&E to come calling. Until now.

Her face, her entire face, hung loose around her neck like a scarf. Or a hood on top of a hood. Most of her scalp was still there, and therefore so were long greasy streaks of her burgundy hair. Her fingers were skeletal, held together by tendons and gristle, and bones protruded from her ruined lab coat at random. She still had her tongue -- fat and purple!red and covered in globular pustules -- but without lips he had no idea how she was speaking.

"I wanted to see how you were doing," she said.

"I'm //sure.//" Already his horror had been replaced with indignation. Udo Okorie had been a brilliant, vibrant young woman. She had not deserved this. This was a travesty. "I'd heard how much you like to chat, all of you."

Okorie leaned forward, tenting her fingers and resting her bony chin on the knuckles. "Yeah, well, //I// thought it was unfair how much you get excluded from things. You're supposed to be part of the club!"

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Okorie.jpg]]

Adrijan wanted to sit down. He was exhausted. Just seeing this death's head abomination in the body of his most promising student was enough to make him wish he could close his eyes and never see anything, ever again. "I'm not interested in this," he told her flatly. "I don't wish to discuss philosophy with you, or debate motivations, or trade barbs, or receive ominous portents about future events. And you have no power to make me."

She raised a hand, and the grains began swirling around each bony fingertip. "Don't I?"

He raised a hand. "No." And the grains fell to the desk in an instant.

Okorie couldn't frown, but he had a feeling she would have liked to. "That's such a nasty power you have. It shouldn't have been allowed."

"Would you like to try your other trick, too, so we can get this tiresome visit over and done with?"

She shook her head. Something rattled around inside her skull, past those unseeing shadowed orbits. "No, I just wanted to offer my condolences. It can't be easy, being the odd one out. The seventh wheel. The stand-in."

"You murdered my predecessor," he said coldly. "I reject your pathetic attempt at commiseration."

She shrugged. "Okay. Well, there //was// something else. Our little dance is coming up, as you well know."

"Partners all picked out," he muttered.

An almost-amber flash from her gaping orbits. "Of course. Well, it's too late in the year to make changes -- you know how it is, all these personal projects, the days slip away and all that -- but we've got big plans for the time after next. I wanted to let you guys know that we're having a full-fledged //party// next year, on the 8th. Everybody's invited."

//Ominous portents anyway.// "And by that you mean...?"

She stood up. "I mean we've let you folks have the run of the place until now, but that can't last. If you're going to figure out a solution, you'd better do it fast -- because a year from now we're really going to put you to the test. All of us."

"All of you?" Adrijan injected a confidence he didn't feel into his voice. "It's not your call who lives and who dies. It never has been."

"No?" she grinned. She couldn't help it, but he could sense this time it was sincere. "Are you sure of that?"

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

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

Having been told the schedule, of course he expected them to immediately violate it.

But for all their many failings, they were still an orderly, strategic set.

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

[[div class="blockquote"]]
__**Patch Notes: 1.9**__
* Nerfed Puppet Master skill tree
* New world event: invisible sinkholes!
* Re-added world boss: Noè Nascimbeni
* Re-added world boss: William Wettle
* Actors reset
* Bugfix: eyedrop solution no longer reliably lasts four hours, but is instead of random duration
* Audio update: persistent, universal tinnitus
* Graphical update: the following items should no longer be discernible at all: people's eyes; keys on a keyboard; warning labels; anything moving; individual hairs; a reason to keep putting up with this bullshit.
* Removed Dougall Deering
[[/div]]

Eileen sent it to the entire Site.

It was either that, or walk into the thaumic crater and cook herself to death.

Though she wasn't ruling out the latter for next morning's activity time.

[[# anchor-2031]]

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

+ 2031
----
[[/=]]

It was Sokolsky's idea, and she took to it with gusto.

Everywhere Wettle went, disaster ensued. Little disasters, but they added up. He would walk down a hallway, and his foot would snag, and down he fell, splattering on the tiles and spreading over them until he could pull himself together. He would walk past a rogue reflection, and suddenly find himself careening into it; this provided a few watching scientists, whom he'd intended to menace, an interesting demonstration of which anomalies were and were not on the same side. He would walk into a room, and bounce off something, and then someone would hit him from behind...

"I don't understand," he muttered. "What the hell?"

"We just thought you'd like a taste of what it was like." Janet rolled into the interrogation room, closing the door behind her. "What he put up with every day. Why your sick joke at his expense is in such bad taste."

"But how did you //do// it?" he asked, and then his face smashed into the table, and then something hit him, hard, over and over, and he tried to shout, but his lungs were no longer the right shape. They expanded out of his mouth, spreading over the table, and then something was pounding them flat, too.

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

Janet watched until the flattened corpse stopped twitching, then nodded. Alis flung the baton into the corner of the room, pushed what was left of Wettle's body off the chair -- it gradually dragged the pulverized tent of skin off the table -- and sat down, winded.

"Satisfying?" she asked, between breaths. "Or upsetting?"

Janet shrugged. "Both. You?"

Alis shrugged back at her. "Just satisfying. Never met the guy, never want to. No offence."

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

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

It had been Place's idea -- he //hoped// the idea had originated solely with him -- to monitor the breach from the DUAL Core. When overloaded with orphic energy, it had a tendency to dissociate from the linear progression of time. Overclock it enough, and it might just be possible to free it from the obligations of Heisenbergian uncertainty. Know both speed and position simultaneously. Avoid the observer effect. Learn something new without interfering, and becoming incorporated as a result.

Du would have never signed off on it. The Core was his baby, and the last thing he had to remember his father by. //Luckily// -- luck was a perverse concept these days, though few knew it better than Sokolsky -- the quantum supermechanicist had already gotten it into his head that the Core had been destroyed, and he had taken a swandive into the telekill sump before anyone could convince him different. It had jaws now, and the thing had played with him for a while before the final snap. 

It was truly impressive what the monsters could achieve when they worked together. And unlike their opposite numbers, they did so constantly. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.

The Director and Administrator wouldn't have signed off, either, considering the danger of what he was proposing to do. Hence why he'd never proposed it. When nobody was qualified to judge the merits of his ideas, what was the point in sharing them?

He was standing at the topmost control chamber, watching as the thing below the railing spun out a mass of fractals of itself, approaching the line between being and not-being, when he remembered the main drawback of working in secret.

He was determined that this time, there would be no surprise. He knew what was going to happen. She wouldn't get the satisfaction.

He turned, sucked in a breath, and breathed out: "//Jesus.//"

She was wearing a dazzle coat like none he'd ever seen. Below where her waist would have been, if she'd had one, it dissolved into spirals and fractals he couldn't seem to focus on. One sleeve hung uselessly at her side. The plywood that made up her person was coloured, and the colours were garish -- he couldn't tell what they were, but he could still tell they were loud. Her skin was a dazzle coat of paint, and it shifted to give the impression her mouth was moving, her eyes narrowing, her brow raising, though he knew that none of these things were true. 

Her legs were gone, and so was her left arm. She really was just a sculpture on a stand, now. Somehow it was so much worse.

Her eyes were black holes. White holes. Red holes.

Blue.

"The thrill's still there," he heard her say. "We're so lucky to have each other."

He could hear her easily over the rising hum of the spinning Cores. His own voice was overpowered, but he knew she'd heard him nevertheless. "You're going to give me a heart attack."

She made the sound of laughter. The paint twisted and bubbled, doing its best to mimic the emotion. "Not quite."

"Why can't you just leave me alone?" Even with years between each reprise, it felt like a tired refrain.

"I simply can't. Not that I want to. But no. No can do."

"Why?" He suddenly wanted to leap forward and pull the head off his department store stalker. "Why is everything in this haunted cellar bent on punishing //me specifically?// I didn't cause this. I don't care what they say. //None of this is my fault.//"

She didn't nod, but the paint shifted up and down regardless. "I heard a guy say that once."

"It //was// his fault," Place snapped. "You can always tell with guys like him, because instead of taking responsibility, they just take //off.//"

"You've taken //on// an awful lot of responsibility."

"Someone has to!" This was the most emotion he'd mustered for years. He'd almost forgotten what it felt like not to fake engagement. "That's not an invitation for you to imprint on more people, by the way."

Not a shrug. "It doesn't work if I'm invited, anyway."

He paused. "What?"

"It needs to be //imposed.//"

And reality made a lurching accommodating, and now she was inches from his face. He could smell the acrylic. He was almost overcome with the urge to reach up and pluck a loose shaving off her cheek. He knew the impulse was foreign, and it filled him with righteous rage. "Why are you imposing on //me// right now? If you can't tell, I'm about to be very busy."

"I wanted to tell you!" She practically chirped it. "I've figured you out."

"I'm not complicated. I have machines for that."

A vibration in her eyebrow-paint acknowledged the little joke. "You're maybe the most complicated thing there is down here. I've been trying to understand what I'm meant to do about you. That's what all this has been about."

"Do about me...?"

"Causality is such a fickle thing," she mused. "We're all swaddled up like mummies at this point. Loops on loops on loops. I'm still trying to understand how I existed before all these incumbencies lined up just //so.//"

"I feel," he said slowly, "like I've stumbled into a lecture series halfway through."

"That's okay," she didn't nod again. "A lot of this only makes sense backwards. The point is, I know what stage you're on, and what part I'm to play in your //development.//"

He didn't like the sound of that, even as the roar of the Cores threatened to drown it out. "Development into what?"

++ ##ff2243|//Me.//##

He staggered back, striking his hip on the rail. The mannequin didn't move, but seemed to grow as the space around them darkened to redblack infinity.

++ ##ff2243|//The first time I saw you was the last time you saw me. The last time I saw you was the __first__ time you saw me. You're a tape running forwards and reverse at the same time. We never meet in the middle, we meet at the __ends.__ We'll meet at the next end, and then maybe the one after that.//##

He put his hands in front of his eyes, but he could still see her. See //it.// "You're not making any sense!"

++ ##ff2243|//I'm planting seeds. You'll understand when they grow.//##

"I don't know who you think I am!" It wasn't phrased as such, but it was still a plea. "Everybody here has a different idea, and they expect me to play along. I'm sick of it! I'm... I'm going to start playing by my //own// rules."

++ ##ff2243|//Yes. You already have. That's why I know it's time.//##

He wasn't listening, even if the words were the world now. "You don't tell a saviour how to save you. None of these people are qualified to direct me. I'm going to..."

And suddenly he saw through it. Saw through //her.// She was just deadwood carved in the likeness of a dead woman. A wig on a dummy on a stand. Nothing more.

"...I'm going to stop telling you these things," he finished. He placed his hands on the railing for strength, and straightened up. "You know, sometimes I forget what //you// are."

"You won't have that luxury soon."

"What?"

Her voice was deep, low. Almost soothing. Almost //intimate.// "I'm not going to give you a heart attack, //##ff2243|PLACEHOLDER##.//"

But again, she didn't say the word which was not his name. He felt his will to resist drain through his feet into the hard tile floor. He fell. He didn't feel the impact when he landed.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Heart.jpg]]

++ ##ff2243|//I'm going to give you my heart.//##

And her heart, of course, was a heart of oak. Rings on rings. Cold. Dead.

Stopped.

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

At this point it didn't matter what they did. Too many of the Puppets were still alive, and they knew the routine too well. Zlatá stopped bothering with the time signals halfway through, when it became apparent that his former pupil's promise was coming true. Wirth got out of A&R just in time to avoid his annual battering, and Mukami sealed off the dozens of new barricades they'd built.

It would buy them days, maybe. Perhaps only hours.

The metaphorical morgues were empty, and all the dead were dancing. 

The seventh seal had opened.

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

They figured out where he was when the power drain from the Cores took out half the electrics in the Site. By then everything was falling apart, but they still sent Billie to revive him. He was still their saviour, and they needed salvation now more than ever.

When they restarted his heart, everything was different.

He could see it now.

As the chaos unfurled around them, Placeholder McDoctorate saw only a veiled order.

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

Her eyes danced with colour. All the colour was red, but it also wasn't. Randy had just enough time to wonder how Eileen was doing it before his cerebral cortex melted.

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

He swung the bat down, over and over. "Pain is weakness leaving the body!" Radcliffe crawled for his radio as Navickas continued to scream. "Take my weakness! TAKE MY WEAKNESS!"

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

She frowned at the needle, then reached for the bottle. That email hadn't lied. Billie couldn't read for shit anymore. But she knew the dosage off by heart. She knew her own biology. She kn--

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

He shook his head. "You're wrong. Common misconception." Dr. Soun uncorked the phial -- it was covered in tiny warning labels nobody left could read -- and tilted it back, downing the last drop. "He can't manifest in--!"

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

They knew it was wrong, but that didn't matter. Taking someone's place was wrong, too. Taking their sense of purpose. //Sitting where he sat.// The Administrator raised it over their head, and Dolly cowered beneath the painting. On this occasion, the pipe absolutely was a pipe.

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

She knew there was something she ought to be doing, but she was damned if she could guess what it was. So she shrugged, and went back to bed. Sasha smiled at her, and Naomi smiled back at them. Across the Site, the tomatoes started getting ideas.

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

He poured the vodka and vermouth, while the stranger spiked the garnishes on the little umbrellas he'd found in Markey's quarters. It had been ages since Trevor'd had a martini; he'd promised his late wife he'd never drink alone. Now he was pouring for the whole saloon, Joanna included. The stranger wouldn't partake; he still had to set the others straight. 

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

Yancy took in the scene at the saloon as though blinking away the bleariness of sleep. The details swam out at him, one after the other, too lurid, too vivid, too awful to be real.

The saloon was almost unoccupied, but it was nowhere near to empty.

Almost every chair featured its own corpse. Skin mottled and red!blue, hands clutched to chests, vomit on the tables and the floors.

In the back, at a table all his own, sat Allan McInnis. He was idly rolling a cube of something light and flaky in his hand, like a tiny, stale marshmallow.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_McInnis.jpg]]

"There is no hope, you know, Howard," the Director Emeritus smiled. Then he tucked the cube away in the hole in his head, stood up, and walked out.

The moment the door closed Yancy put his service weapon to his head, and emptied the room.

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

They were sitting behind his desk, staring into space, when the door opened and the man himself walked in.

Allan glanced at the corner, where one of the Administrator's spare jackets was covering up a grisly sight. "You were always so polite to the help," he remarked. "Whatever came over you?"

The Administrator pointed up and over their shoulder, at the painting. "It shouldn't have worked," they croaked. "Not in here. There's no way."

Allan tutted as he walked to the far wall and pulled up a chair. "Nim, my old friend. You think a simple cognition-cleansing agent is sufficient to overcome that kind of rage? What you feel when someone takes what's rightfully yours?"

"I wasn't angry," they whispered. "I've never been angry at her. She was one of the //best.//"

Allan nodded. "It wasn't your fault. Our bouncing ball of joy made you do it. They'll all understand." He grinned. The Administrator had never seen all of Allan's teeth before. "I certainly do."

"What's the point of any of this?" The Administrator wrapped their fingers around the edge of the desk blotter, then flung it across the room and stood up. "Why are you //doing// this?"

"Because we've been //insulted,// Nimkii. We have suffered the gravest of all insults. Each one of you represents--"

The Administrator slammed their fists into the desktop. It shuddered. Beneath, something snapped. Above, everything had. "Plain speech. You're wearing the body of the best communicator who ever lived here. //Tell me exactly what's going on.// Tell me what you //want.//"

"I want to move forward." Allan reached into the wound in his forehead, and pulled out a misshapen cube of cyanide. He placed it on the desk. "I want a world to make my own, and I do not want //this// one. His first gambit failed -- miserably, I might add -- and so he tries again, the same plan but grander, more complicated, more //idiotic.// He thinks the first failure was merely a matter of insufficient data, and inadequate tools. He imagines he's gotten it right, this time. He thinks me trapped here, but he is //wrong.// The balance of powers is immaterial. A failure in negative is not a success. It is merely a failure //discoloured.//"

The Administrator shook their head. "I don't //understand.//"

"Of course you don't." Allan gestured at the cube. "So, here is my proposal. Kill yourself. All of you, simply kill yourselves. Refuse to play the game. Leave it to the adults to sort. I've waited long enough to see if you can work this out on your own, and it's achingly evident you can't. The only one who came close has been swallowed up by the earth. I know your friends think they're doing the right thing, but they'll never get what they want as long as they're doing things his way. So, be noble. Preserve your dignity. Opt out."

He stood up, cricked his neck, and gestured at the corpse in the corner. "You can make it easy for us, or we can make it so very hard for you. As a show of good faith..." He cleared his throat. "Udo, if you'd be a dear?"

And suddenly, as though a mental block somewhere between the corner of the room and their ears had been lifted, the Administrator heard it.

"I quite agree with Dr. Reynders," Allan said over his shoulder as he headed for the door. "It's a tired old trope. You should each choose to exit on your own terms, not ours. That's true character development, wouldn't you say?"

They didn't hear him leave. They were already in the corner, pulling the jacket off the wheezing, bruised Director, weeping apologies and begging for forgiveness.

Behind them, on the desk, the potential for absolution lingered.

[[=]]
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@@ @@
[[/=]]

They'd long given up on the Christmas celebrations. They were too closely associated with Ngo, who had become a symbol of things nobody very much wanted to think about after her death. But Place found ways to keep the spirits up regardless.

It was either that, or complete his next project in a ghost town. And he didn't much fancy finding a way to feed himself.

He swept into research workgroups and training appointments and board meetings without knocking or asking or announcing himself, speaking complicated nothings he knew would parse as promising. Hints of his progress, exultations, encouraging but cryptic pronouncements. He patted random people on the shoulder as he passed them in the halls. He wrote up a personnel hierarchy sorting the least important from the most, and memorized a few names from the former to create the illusion, with a few carefully-timed callouts, that he knew everybody. That everybody was worth knowing to him, their future saviour. Every few weeks, when he could spare a moment, he barged in on projects to which he was not attached, dropped a few jargon-bombs that reframed everything, and danced out. 

What other people found too daunting or complex was simplicity itself to him, now. He could see all the structures, the order undergirding everything. The connections he was making...

The connections he was making would finally tie down this rogue reality, make it sit still and //listen.// By the time he could do that, he would be fully conversant with its language. He was going to be able to make it sing his song.

He just needed the others to stick with him for that long.

Only for that long.

It was also a fringe benefit, he discovered, that getting to know these people in the context of excessive positivity meant he almost liked some of them. That, he was sure, could only have positive effects on the quality of his work.

After all, in a way, they were all raw materials. He knew how they broke down chemically, but the more ineffable qualities had always eluded him.

With a few more handshakes and kind words, he was sure he could achieve wonders of catalysis. He would be their hero. //The// Hero.

And when he opened the door, he would find a path had already beaten its way to him.

[[# anchor-2032]]

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@@ @@

+ 2032
----
[[/=]]

"I understand you have something exciting to tell our fellow survivors," Del Olmo smiled.

Placeholder nodded, as if anyone else could see that. "Ah, yes. I do. Yes."

"Go on."

The pataphysicist took a deep breath. "In coordination with the late Dr. Du, I've discovered some interesting new scientific principles! Whether they hold true in other worlds, or represent some effect of the paradox defining our everyday lives, I do not know. What I do know is that these principles are very promising!"

Del Olmo felt his eyebrows raising at every unnecessarily punctuated exclamation. The man was more manic than ever. "And what do they promise?"

"That we really can find a way to make things stable! At least, more stable than they are right now."

"That //is// exciting," Del Olmo agreed. "Do you have an experiment drawn up?"

"It's already in the early planning stages," the other man beamed. "Pending approval from the Director and Administrator, I should be able to begin construction very soon!" He abruptly smacked his bottle of recycled water off the table with a mistimed gesture.

Del Olmo gestured that he should leave it. The cap was still on. "And how long will that take?"

Placeholder hesitated, a sudden look of calculation replacing the wildness in his eyes. Del Olmo sighed inwardly. Nobody but him understood the toxicity of dead air, apparently. "Well," the other man finally responded, "it might take months. It //could// take years. But that's not important."

"Why not?"

"Because it means I can tell you now with absolute certainty that there's a way to beat this thing!" The rush of inexplicable energy returned. "An end point to our troubles //does// exist. It's just a matter of holding on until that moment!"

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

They weren't going to muck this up for him.

He hammered out the speech in an afternoon, reaching inward to find that source of persuasive inspiration still lingering in his chest, drawing on a strength residing outside himself to make it sing. Then he memorized it. He memorized it with //ease.// God, but it was addictive being in control of his own thoughts.

[[div class="blockquote"]]
There's a way out of this mess, and I'm going to find it. Until that day, keep performing your duties, keep up your spirits, and keep drawing breath.

Your enemies are all dead. That's the difference between them and you. They're failed, and they want you to fail, too. You're not going to. You're going to find a way to keep going. To spite them. To prove something to yourself. To protect the people you love. //You are going to make this work.//

All you need to do is buy me time. I promise you, the end is near. There is no release except through me. I've managed miracles already, and you know I can do it again.

If you die, you'll just come back worse. If you give up, nothing will change. If you hold your heads up and //burn,// if you make every moment a //refusal to submit,// we will beat them.

Together.
[[/div]]

The words felt outrageously wrong, but he delivered them with conviction each time. First, to the seven. Then to anyone else who would listen. Before long he was seeing them scribbled on sticky notes affixed to monitor bevels, tacked up on message boards and even appended to emails on the signature line. Some idealist had tacked it onto the 001 file itself, like a motto.

He wished he'd started tinkering with the social machinery earlier. Ngo's absence was proving to be a godsend, perhaps even literally.

The more he micro-managed, the more he started to think of it all as little more than a simulation. Tweak the variables, watch the results play out.

It was only late at night, when he was very tired, that he took the time to be horrified at himself.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

It was Dolly's idea to meet in the decommissioned train.

The Administrator had suggested a neutral location. Safe. Populated. The secondary cafeteria, perhaps, or the saloon. "It isn't safe to be alone," they had told her.

"You mean I'm not safe with you," she'd responded. "And I'm not having that."

The siding was nestled between Admin and the northwest wing of S&C, so it was easy to keep it secure. Their isolation was merely symbolic.

The Administrator still appreciated the symbolism very much.

It had taken weeks for Dolly's injuries to heal. The Administrator was a large, powerfully-built individual, and the Director was not. She was making good progress, but still they had to help her cross the gap. She'd left her cane back in her office; on purpose, the Administrator was quite certain.

"Billie says it's pretty clear," she sighed. "There's a direct link to the serum."

"Of course there is." It simply tracked. Half a dozen members of personnel with festering but non-progressing 8956 injuries had suffered sudden onset brain death over the past six months. It had taken this long to come up with a way to test for the cause, and then analyze the results, but they'd all known what they would find.

"Do we disseminate?" Her tone of voice said it all.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Director_Administrator.jpg]]

"No," the Administrator agreed. "And nobody tells Dr. Del Olmo, either." This had become a constant refrain of meetings like this. Del Olmo himself had encouraged it.

"This introduces some obvious complications," Dolly said hesitantly.

They waited for her to go on.

"Placeholder," she finally sighed. "He was injured pretty early on. We can't afford to lose him."

"Are you suggesting he stop taking the serum?"

She shook her head. "No. It would take the entire arm, and probably hijack his nervous system and kill his brain anyway. I'm just saying we need to be prepared for the possibility that this isn't something we can win."

The Administrator examined her levelly. "Dr. McDoctorate's health? The REISNO Cannon situation? The 8956 situation? Or do you mean..."

She nodded. "I mean."

They smiled grimly. "I'm never going to be willing to accept that. Our survival this far has been an extraordinary refutation of the odds. We will continue to find new ways to thumb our nose at fate."

She smiled back, with real warmth. "You know what Wirth says about 8956?"

The Administrator suppressed a groan. "Do I want to?"

"He says it's a metaphor for how some wounds never heal."

They felt a pang of guilt in their chest. "Do you agree?"

She was choosing her words very carefully now. "For one thing, I think it needs to be less one-to-one to be an actual metaphor. And for another... well." She made a breathy sound that was less than half nervous laughter, less than half tension release, and a little bit of gunshot wound and collapsed lung in tandem. "I think the only way to move forward is to assume, every day, that either your wounds aren't the kind that won't heal, or you're not the kind of person who lets them bring you down regardless."

The Administrator chuckled, aware of how much of their own relief was audible. "The only truly fatal thing is fatalism, then."

She nodded, and reached across the aisle. The Administrator took her hands, and was reminded for the thousandth time why she was suited to her post like no other.

A lineal descent from Scout to McInnis to Nimkii to Ferber.

Other people refused to give up until they were spent.

People like them didn't even stop there.

[[=]]
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@@ @@
[[/=]]

It was only a start, but it //was// a start.

They took turns.

Del Olmo spent hours lecturing Markey on the principles of memetics, basic things he'd taught to Lillihammer a lifetime ago. How to formulate meaning. Realize potential. The core elements of human creativity, a force everyone could tap into, no matter what they'd been told, no matter what they believed about themselves and their abilities. Then the old tech locked himself in his office for three days, and came out with a plan.

Every time one of them took the easy way out, Markey dedicated a broadcast to their accomplishments, their hobbies, their relationships, the things that had made them who they were. Made them unique. Made their memory special. "Remember them," he told whoever was still listening. "And stay alive, so the memory lives, too."

Mukami pored over the files in Ngo's R&E office, and had Gwilherm run her through the exercises. "Be merciless," she grunted. "No remorse." She'd reached the end of what she could accomplish on her own. It was time to struggle together.

After that, she hunted McInnis. But she sprang no traps, and fired no shots. She simply followed in his wake, and spoke to his victims. Told them her story. Told them of her struggle. Let them see her fighting for every word. Made them understand that every day was a new opportunity to get it right.

Radcliffe and Wirth debated each other until both of them felt sick. In the face of the archivist's merciless dismantling, none of the agent's prejudices held. Confronted with the passion of that misguided giant, the journeyman nihilist began to believe that there was something, //something// to be said for the process of generating meaning.

The big man walked, as he had of old. He walked everywhere. Anywhere he wanted. He was the proverbial three hundred pound bear; who was going to stop him? And he found people saying things they didn't really mean, meaning things they didn't really understand, and he helped them to see whence these things had come. The obvious mistakes he himself had once made. The disastrous consequences of aggressive ignorance.

Del Olmo had been a teacher, but now he was a student. He had the others assemble a record of every misstep he had made, and explain them to him. He quizzed them on their preconceptions, and they interrogated the origins of his. The urge to speak up without cause still gripped him, but soon he had a manual to consult. He understood the rules. He could work within them without sacrificing his own initiative. He could regulate, and resist the shame that came with knowing he was wrong.

His turns at the microphone became less extemporaneous, more didactic. There were ways to resist intrusive thoughts, whether they came from within or truly from without. There were exercises to raise one's Cognitive Resistance Value which had once been kept from the lower ranks, to preserve the advantage of their betters. Others could arm the survivors. He would help them craft armour.

Gwilherm's legs were atrophied. She now understood the initial immobility had been psychological, and it wasn't as though that had gone away, but it was long past time she did something about it. She didn't want to monopolize the over-stressed medical staff, so she had Radcliffe help with the exercises. She might never regain the ability to walk unaided, but that didn't matter. What mattered was agency. She could try. She could map out her avenues for action. She could define her own terms.

The change in outlook worked wonders. She still used the chair to get around, but she took it farther afield now. Instead of stewing in her control room, she rolled through the halls. Talked to the frightened and hopeless masses huddled in their labs and dormitories. Saw what ailed or menaced them before the only solution was rubber bullets, or hollow tips. A few months of that, and some of them even trusted her.

Wirth found it hard to shake the feeling that none of this mattered. He couldn't see properly, he didn't feel anything, he was tired and bored and irritated at all hours, and pretending he didn't care was still an intoxicating idea. But it //was// only pretense, only an idea. That no meaning was inherent did not make the concept meaningless. It was a challenge. A challenge to go out there, and create meaning for himself.

He stopped trying to contact Eileen, locked away in her den of technology. He said a prayer for the son he'd never known. 

He divorced Melissa.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

It was like being unshackled at the end of a long prison sentence. Or the first splinter of light, as her isolation chamber was finally opened. She'd had no idea just how much he was dragging her down until it was over.

Melissa sat in her office, examined her half-baked pie-in-the-sky plans which had never come to fruition in that interminable dark, and suddenly realized she knew precisely what to do.

[[# anchor-2033]]

[[=]]
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+ 2033
----
[[/=]]

The bedrock was a vast tuning fork, a living vibration that never ceased. David laughed at her explanation, clucked disapprovingly at the specs, and eventually agreed that there was probably something to it, if only because his first instinct was to brush the whole thing aside.

In the north, the bedrock cried most often for Ilse. In the south, it called for Vivian. In between, where the resonances met, they mixed in a sort of harmonic. A song in the stone. So they sounded, inch by inch, treading the last of the Mishepeshu caves which had not yet been filled with a vengeful sloshing or a creeping need, treading on an endless rolled carpet of dead man's skin, until they found the spot where the signal was strongest, and made their camp. Just the two of them. The loneliness surrounded them, rivers of grey running past their oasis in the dark, and they fought off despair as lonely people did.

And in the morning -- what was morning, really? -- they brought the data back home, and the handful of techs who had not already signed off for good ran it through their systems to find the stowaway. A gentle knocking of stone upon stone, easily isolated from the well-attested merging of sedimentary moans. Morse code.

I-A-M-S-T-I-L-L-H-E-R-E

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

A strip of skin two kilometres long was wound into the spinning drill, forcing back the weeping rock, digging deep into the bedrock flesh of a mad, dead god. Just past the halfway point, as the top of the shaft was already beginning to scab up and close itself again, they found her. She clambered up the diagonal cleft, through a perpetual slurry of liquid surrender, weeping and growling and cursing. They slid a rope down to her, and she batted it away, and kept crawling. 

It took her nearly two hours.

They were all there, waiting, when she finally emerged. Filthy beyond all description. Scraped and bleeding, emaciated, contorted, as close to broken as a body could be and still live. They had discussed options while she approached. There had been safe choices, and the right choice.

He'd insisted on the right one.

So the first thing Amelia saw when she dragged her carcass out of the depths was Stewart Radcliffe's terrified face, and his vast, outstretched hand.

She spat on it, then lunged forward to seize his wrist and pull herself into the light.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

This year, the landlords of Site-43 weren't going to bother with their old haunts at AAF-D. They had projects to run, and no more fragments to restore. They were content to work their little miracles, drive the fools ever closer to oblivion, and release. They'd get there eventually. There was no resisting all of them, at once. Certainly not these tired, demoralized, ultimately worthless thralls.

The only one of them who actually realized what was happening was Blank. It didn't have anything to do with his senses, or an accident of location. He simply recalled a line from that long-abandoned history he'd been writing, and understood its ultimate demonstration at the instant it occurred.

[[div class="muddle"]]
Any direction you move in this facility will bring you to one of two things: more facility, or sheer bedrock.
[[/div]]

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[[/=]]

The ragged strips of order pressed against his anarchic flesh, and he recoiled away from it. His song was echoed from a thousand locations, and part of him understood that harmonic resonators were exploiting a map of his thrumming body and encouraging it to expand and contract in specific patterns, but most of him took it as an expression of love. He was seen. He was known. He was //needed.//

He could see the shape of their own need, and he was in an expansive mood. He coiled around the seven little asterisks of hateful structure, and with a contended sigh of //Vivian, one day,// Wynn Rydderech squeezed.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

They stared at the big board.

From her wheelchair beside Janet's, Amelia smirked. Her eyes were shut. She was mapping new frontiers of exhaustion.

"That probably won't work twice," Sokolsky remarked.

The seven glanced at him.

He shrugged. "I'm just saying. You'd better get it right this year."

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

"I wish I knew how to make you stop."

No response. There never was.

"There has to be a way. I should be able to figure it out; it's my god damn job, after all. Nobody else has any ideas. I can't come up with anything myself anymore. All I can do is steal from other people, or follow their instructions. I should have figured this out //years// ago." The words were a flood. If he tried to hold them back, he would burst. "The longer it takes, the more people die. That's all on me. Everyone you killed." He paused. "You killed my best friend. Why couldn't you have killed Dougall instead?"

"Dougall is the only one who deserves to survive."

"That's obviously untrue. You're capable of speech. You've got a brain in there, somewhere. You know he was a sack of shit, and we're better off without him." It got no reaction. Why would it? This wasn't new information. "Rom was a god damn superhero by comparison. He never gave up. He was helping. Me? I'm a waste of resources. If you couldn't kill Dougall, why not me instead?"

The were no answers forthcoming, but that was the point.

"If I was gone, they'd have to replace me. They'd stop thinking of the role as filled, and they'd find someone good enough to fill it. Maybe Amelia. I should let you rip my guts out, and she can take my place. I bet she'd be able to find a way to keep you locked up for good. Maybe something on the Eighth, when your useless brother pops back in to remind us how pointless his existence always was."

"Dougall //is// the point. Without Dougall, none of this exists."

"That's actually true. Very true. Maybe Dougall's the solution, too. We've tried playing voice clips, but you know it's not him. You're a clever little Rottweiler. Still..." //Still.// "There must be //something// there. You're not Phil, but you're not //not// Phil. You think about Dougall every day. You never shut the fuck up about him. We've tried reading you that letter the bastard left behind, but that doesn't work either. There... there's got to be //something// I haven't tried. I guess we never tried asking the idiot himself if he has any ideas."

"Dougall's ideas change everything."

"And yet you're so damn Dougall-averse. He says in his letter you'd sometimes let him watch you, but mostly you keep away and tell everyone else how incredible he is. Was. Will be. I wonder if //that's// the angle, actually." Could it be that simple? Could he have missed it for so long, if it was that //simple?// "Do you exist to make the bastard //witness?// To see how much his jackass mistakes cost the rest of us? But that doesn't make sense, either. As soon as he was gone, you flipped the fuck out. You've been worse and worse while he's been gone."

"Nothing matters except Dougall."

"Nothing matters except Dougall. I wonder," and he sprang to his feet, and collected one of the clipboards on his desk, "if next time we //didn't// recycle the corpse. We could use the data from those old ADDC experiments dumbfuck and Reynders ran, arrest the decay so they last us a year, maybe rig up... yeah. //Yeah.// That could work. I'm going to get started on that. We'll need tracks... no. Casters. Okay. I can work with this."

"Dougall would have--"

David raised a hand. "No, that's good, we're good. Thanks, man. It was a lot safer this way, you know?"

Placeholder nodded absent-mindedly, continuing to scratch away at the blueprints he was sketching. "Sure. Mind if I don't get up? People think I'm booked in your office for another hour."

"Fill your boots." David snatched up his labcoat, and headed out the door.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

"I'm filling everyone's boots," Placeholder told him, but the other man was already out of earshot.

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

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

It was only by chance that Stewart saw him before the curtain fell.

The pataphysicist looked hungry, tired, sad, every failure state under the red rainbow. Almost furtive, like he was out scrounging for food.

Stewart raised a hand in greeting.

He would never forget what the other man did in response.

Slowly, as though in a dream, Placeholder McDoctorate raised his own hand and waved.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

They hit every mark, right on cue. Zlatá was about to congratulate them, and by extension himself, when he lost contact.

Mukami crowed in triumph, and as if in response, her monitors switched themselves off.

Markey pumped his fist in the air, as all the feeds went dead.

The Administrator watched the big board flicker and fail.

The Director counted heads in the dark, and suddenly realized who was missing.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

They piled into the laboratory, all in a rush. Janet was still in the field, and Zlatá was slow, but the rest of them raced to the Cannon chamber while muted shouts and crashes echoed through the open hallway door.

Mukami was the first one through, and she froze so completely that the others had to shove her forward to get in.

The room was wrong.

The room was wrong, so wrong, so extraordinarily wrong that it took each of them a moment to fully recognize the scale of their betrayal.

The desk and chair sat where they always did. The wires and cables on the floor, and hanging from the ceiling. The locker on the far wall. Alis, and Dougall Deering's peaceful repose. 

Every trapping of this annual occasion, save one.

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

[[table]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]
##ff2243|**SCP-001-P**## is the disappearance of Dr. Placeholder McDoctorate.
[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]
##ff2243|**SCP-001-Q**## is the disappearance of the REISNO Cannon.
[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[row]]
[[cell]]
##ff2243|**SCP-001-R**## is the fact that this car is somehow still motoring without any god damn gas. Or an engine. Or a driver. Or anywhere to go that isn't dead, empty, and ##ff2243|red##.
[[/cell]]
[[/row]]
[[/table]]

[[# anchor-2034]]

[[=]]
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@@ @@

+ 2034
----
[[/=]]

It was going to be fine. It was all going to work out.

The mechanics were clear, according to Du. He had done the calculations -- by hand, deprived of the Core as he was -- and everything they knew about how the breach worked said it could only turn out one way. There would be restoration. Restitution. AAF-A always snapped back to the shore. AAF-D became its old self. The murdered agents, guards, occultists and archivists always returned. Anything implicated was also //incorporated.// As surely as the Cannon had gone around -- wherever and whyever that was -- it would come around again.

And they could keep dialling reality back until they found the home frequency. All would be well.

But then again, Du had to stop calculating every few minutes to curl up in agony as his time-lost physiology interpreted the sensation of being snapped in half by a pair of gargantuan cancer-jaws as the most intense heartburn of his life.

And they'd lost another cheerleader, to boot. Placeholder had taken up Ngo's torch, whatever his motivations, and the sting of his loss -- the doubt, the anxiety, the rage when they realized he hadn't disappeared, but //departed// -- was a nearly-mortal blow to what they cynically called morale. All they had was the math, so the math would need to be enough.

It was one thing to know, and another entirely to believe. Even if the logic was sound, convincing one's colon to unclench was more of an emotional dilemma. So those few in the know kept it to themselves, jamming down their uncertainty and despair, and hoped for the promised best. 

They all developed ulcers within a month. Anticipation had always been the worst part of the yearly round, but now it was wholly unbearable.

But they survived it, nevertheless, as they always had. Attending to little things as the big ones loomed, far-off and invincible. Achieving minor victories, finishing up their little projects.

When it was good, it felt like the tail end of packing-up. Preparing for a long-earned vacation. Their ship would come in. It //would//.

When it was bad...

When it was bad, it didn't matter. They didn't count the days, good or bad. It all came out in the red wash.

[[=]]
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[[/=]]

"Philip." 

On their own, neither of David's projects was particularly successful.

"You might think I don't love you. After what I'm about to do, you might become //certain// I don't love you. You're never going to hear from me again, and you might not ever know why. I hope that some day, somehow, you'll understand the reasons behind the things that I've done."

As exercises of his own faculties, they'd had merit. The sense of relief he felt at finally having had a truly original thought brought him past the brink of tears.

"They'll probably never let you read this letter. I'm going to maintain the fiction that I'm speaking to you, however, Philip, because the idea that my death will mean your life is the only thing keeping me going."

The mirror monster hadn't been nearly so profoundly affected. It certainly noticed, but that was it. Not enough to distract him from the hunt.

"I always resented you for my success. Can you think of anything pettier? Me, with my two doctorates and my super-secret laboratory, irritated beyond belief by your laziness and lack of ambition. The more vital I became to the Foundation, the more I hated to imagine my brother pushing a mop down some god-forsaken sewerhole. As if having a working man for a brother somehow undermined my own achievements. And then I undermined them myself. Let me tell you the story of my failure."

In tandem, however, the two ideas produced a remarkable effect.

"When I received that fateful call from my future self, you didn't even know we were working at the same facility. I'd kept that from you. I didn't want to see you. I didn't want people to know you were my brother. And then that voice started speaking in my head..."

8956 followed the macabre display as it rolled down the hall, push and pulled by a pair of repurposed floor scrubbers on the corduroy road. 

"I don't even remember what it felt like, receiving that knowledge, but there's a security camera in my office so I know what it //looks// like it felt like. It looks like it felt like someone had told me the entire world was about to end. I wish you could have seen what that knowledge did to me. I wish that was how you could remember me, not cold and callous and permanently disapproving, but absolutely terrified at the thought of losing you to a slow decline and a sudden demise. You would have known what you'll never know, now, what I didn't know until that moment: I love you, and I could never bear to lose you."

The recording was on loop. Dougall's voice cracked several times.

"I was watching when you died. When they all died. And now you're watching me, every minute of every hour of every day. A twisted reflection of you, a mockery of the man you were, a reminder of how stupid a man I was when I dialed in that device and placed a call across the gulf of time... That's why you're watching me, of course. Because it's all my fault."

They'd edited out a few exchanges in between: several where Alis encouraged him to get through it, one where she urged him to hurry up. A few lines Placeholder had told them were cognitohazardous, and nobody had tried to gainsay him. Like nearly everything else on the 8th, it had gone off without a hitch.

Nearly everything.

"You're my own personal albatross now, Philip. I don't want to believe it's actually you, of course. The things you've done, the notches you've added to my list of failures... but... more than once, late at night, when the red-rimmed walls close in and I can't sleep and I can't keep my eyes closed against the throbbing in my head, I open my closet door and stand in front of the only remaining mirror in Site-43. And you won't look at me."

The corpse on its rack, spread-eagled like the Vitruvian Man or an ancient criminal or a messiah on an angled cross, flopped lifelessly with the motion of the cart and its minders.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Dougall_Dead.jpg]]

"I've decided it doesn't matter if that //is// you, or not. It's not going to be you for long. I'm going to bring you back, not for me, not for anyone else trapped in this endless hell, but for the people at the other end of this forked road. I'm going to bring you back, I'm going to bring //all of them// back, by making one last mistake to cancel out the very first one. I'm going to put a bullet in the brain of the man who caused this, and you're not going to die in 2002, and you're not going to die in 2022, either. I'm going to write a better story."

Dougall rattled on through his final, eternal victory lap.

"I can't live without you. But, after what I've done to you, I hope you can live without me."

And hell, remarkably, blissfully, followed with him.

"Your brother, Dougall."

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++ 8 September
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[[/=]]

The crowd milling behind the closed door -- Alis had insisted the masquerade be upheld -- were all pacing and cursing and staring blind-eyed into the near distance, quietly frantic, as the seconds ticked down. 

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While the breach staged its rage and the Puppet Masters called their shots, the rest of them were waiting to hear that most crucial of annual reports.

Clio's notification was badly corrupted -- it sounded like she said "Time's up," which was definitely not in her programming -- but they barely heard it. There was a mad rush for the door before the phonemes could even register.

Desk. Letter. Locker. Cables. Alis.

Dougall.

"Where's the Cannon?" Amelia forced her way to the front, barely able to keep her feet. "Where's the fucking..."

And then she simply stared.

"There is no Cannon," Dougall Deering whispered, ashen-faced where the instrument of his demise had once stood, and would apparently stand no longer, and then everything disappeared in an impenetrable torrent of shivering red which gushed from his idiot's tongue.

[[=image https://scp-sandbox-3.wdfiles.com/local--files/56-this-forgotten-babylon/OT_74_Paradeux.png]]

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[[/=]]

[[div class="flashback"]]
[[=]]
+ 2023
++ 8 September
----
[[/=]]

The terrible beauty of it was, she would never need to forgive him.

Of course she would hate him for it. Would not understand. Would refuse to accept his reasons. But that didn't matter.

All he had to do to fix it all, fix it forever, correct his mistake, was what he'd always done.

Take the easy way out.

The Cannon spun up, and the aperture at its heart opened wide, revealing a bright, shining light. So bright it almost wasn't red. When it met his eyes, and the sync was complete, the light dimmed down and the spinning grew faster and faster. He could see the greased bearings and the shining off-silver shaft as it turned and turned, hypnotically.

He folded up the envelope, and placed it on the table.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

//What?// replied the voice in his head. If thoughts could sound young and naive, these ones did.

//I'm sorry,// he repeated, even though it wasn't true. It was the sort of thing he might have liked to hear, he thought, in the instant before he died.

Dougall Deering raised the scrap of card up to his eyes, and the last thing he thought was //This is for you, Philip.//

But the last thing he saw was a pair of lacerated lips around bared, red fangs, in the red-silver heart of the Cannon, and the last thing he heard was a scratchy roar: "IT'S ALL FOR YOU, DOUGALL. IT'S __ALWAYS__ BEEN ALL ABOUT __YOU__."
[[/div]]