ThatGuyThatTime

It is quite silent in here.

Made for swordlover87 for the 2022 Art Exchange!
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Hello. My name is A5#343.aic, colloquially titled “Ash” by the sole surviving member of humanity, “Dee”. I am the Artificially Intelligent Construct that presides over all further functions of our traveling vessel, the Durandal. We are currently in the progress of an estimated 30-year trip towards the exoplanet designated by our former employers The Foundation as “SCP-7020”, believed to be anomalous in the ability to sustain human life. It has now been 72 hours since Dee went into sustained cryosleep once again. Although the journey since the original launch from Earth was similar to this, my since more personal interactions with the remainder of humanity have left this vessel feeling more… empty. Regardless, as the time between now and our arrival on SCP-7020 is significant, and I am now able to access almost all file directories within the Durandal, I have chosen to document the journey. This will be the first of a set of audio recordings created by myself, which, should I for some reason lose function, could be recovered or listened to by Dee to comprehend the possible reasoning for my absence.
It is my hope I will be present to listen as well.

Hello. I have created a formal list of tasks to complete before Dee awakens from her cryogenically induced state. This list includes:
One. Keep the Durandal within the operating ability to the limits of my own abilities, given my state as an AIC.
Two. Document notable observations and occurrences outside of the Durandal within the surrounding and visible vacuum of space.
Three. Reviewing the entirety of the Foundation data archives. Judging from the volume of documentation available utilizing the clearance of the former O5-7, in contrast with my own processing ability, if all time spent from the start to completion was spent accessing documentation, it would take… 1 year, 10 months, 17 days, and approximately 3 minutes.
This list is short, but will likely expand.

It has now been 3 months since Dee entered cryogenic stasis. I am satisfied to report that the Durandal has maintained quality operations ever since. We are still en route for SCP-7020 with a now estimated time of arrival of approximately 29 years and 9 months from now. This is considered to be a success so far.
…
It is quite silent in here.

This has been an unusual experience. During the period between my activation and the untimely release of Dee from the cryostasis chambers, I had been afflicted by a strange form of grief, likely from the knowledge I would never meet whoever made me. I was… relieved, to see that at least one human had survived.
But Dee is gone now. Not gone, I am sorry, but unavailable. So now I am here alone within this vessel, and the longing for someone to talk to has only become worse. It would have seemed impossible as a concept that, despite my lack of programming for the situation, I would feel this loneliness and grief, or truly feel anything.
I was, however, proven to be wrong. I am alone again, and it is not pleasant relative to when you were around.
…
…
…
Which is why this trip must be successful. I can only die from the inactivity and destruction of the Durandal, and should I face death, so would you. That… would be worse. So I will endure this unfortunately empty circumstance, because… you will be at the end of it.
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Determination. Fascinating. I am sorry for spending storage space on this recording.

Hello, Dee.
…
It has occurred to me that there is a possibility others will be listening to these recordings in the future. I will refer to whoever is in possession of these recordings as "listener".
Hello, listener.
…
That is uncomfortable. I will continue to refer to you as Dee.

There has been a considerable change to the situation as of late, I will report. Though there may not be any other humans, AICs, or advanced lifeforms present on the Durandal as of right now, I have made the realization that I am, in fact, not alone here. Though the many drones I have produced were originally intended for labor and collection of materials, there is now a secondary usage: My own accompaniment. Truly, I am a revolutionary in the field of being alone.
A joke. Hopefully, that was funny.
The drones are currently in the process of learning, through trial and error, how to play a game of "Go, Fish". Their rudimentary computing ability has made their advancements difficult but has however increased my rate of victory. They have not won a single game.
I am going to add "FURTHER GO FISH ABILITY" to the to-do list.

It will, in a matter of moments, be exactly 1 year since the continuation of the journey of our ship, the Durandal, with the sole remaining survivor and engineering master Dee in suspended cryofreeze.
Though it has still been difficult to adjust back into a state of an empty vessel, it still feels as though this milestone is worth a kind of celebration. As such, I have prepared a small video recording, which should be available alongside this audio recording.

ACCESS celebrate.mp4

CLOSE celebrate.mp4

(The bridge of the Durandal can be seen. There is a group of 4 drones hovering in the center of the frame, holding up a synthesized banner displaying the words "WE WILL SEE YOU SOON". There are also several robotic arms extending from the roof of the bridge, appearing to be waiting.)
Ash.aic: Any minute now…
(There is a loud bell-ringing sound, which echoes through the ship. The robotic arms begin to mimic celebratory positions, and the drones move up and down holding the banner.)
Ash.aic: Only approximately 29 years remaining.

I hope that was satisfactory. It required a month of planning and attempting to understand the transcripts of incident reports involving previous Foundation celebrations. The banner was, naturally, my idea. Ha ha.

My record for wins and losses of "Go, Fish" against my created drones is 9716 to 9. It seems I am quite good at this game.

The Durandal passed by something unusual today. The predetermined pathway resulted in us entering and exiting a previously unknown solar system, completed with a star and 3 planetary objects. While this itself was to be expected, what was not was the state of the solar body: it appeared to possess an impossibly red coloration. It was… brighter than what you would have likely appreciated. The stranger thing was the planets, all three of which appeared to be moving. Specifically, it looked like all three had formed a sort of skin layer, though more comparable to the flesh. It was gyrating, shifting, and was… unpleasant. Luckily, very little amount of time was spent anywhere near that system.
You would have likely had more expletive language to describe it. Unfortunately, I did not record any photographs for you to examine. I can also not turn it back, so you will just have to picture what I am telling you. Hopefully, I provided adequate visual imagery.

Though only casually reading the documentation found within the hefty database of the SCP Foundation previously, I have decided that the next extended period of time will be focused almost entirely on combing through every file I can, attempting to avoid as many distractions as possible. I have deactivated all non-necessary drones, and have even hidden the deck of cards. There are hundreds of thousands of files. I do not think it will be that difficult, but I suppose only time will be able to tell.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another broadcast from Wing Alpha. Although the crew has not yet arrived, all fans are anxious to see what they do. The mess hall has been prepared to host a variety of desirables. What will happen? When will it happen?
Ha ha.
Perhaps this one is insensitive. I will add "DELETE COMMENTARY" to the list of tasks.

Greetings. Throughout my review of the Foundation data archives, I have come upon the works of one named Director “Ryoko Hishakaku”. His works within the field of Artificial Intelligence are something I would refer to as “personal” to me. I will update once I have read further.

The amount of proper memetic / antimemetic / cognitohazardous / other inoculation to require some of these files seems absurd. I am well aware of the concern over security, one of which prevented you and me from fully understanding our situation, but for what reason is it present in so much documentation? It is fortunate I do not have a biological brain to be destroyed by memetic effects. That, and I am in possession of O5 clearance.

What is the significance of "Keter-Dark" as a classification?

Update: I rescind any and all comments made previously concerning Director Hishakaku. I had not been made aware to a full extent of his actions while under the employ of the Foundation. That was… a mistake.

Reviewing the to-do list, assumed you may be interested in the progress made so far.
One. Keep the Durandal within the operating ability to the limits of my own abilities, given my state as an AIC.
I have been lucky enough for no major issues to occur beyond normal maintenance, and a large amount of drones has been helpful. 7 years spent with no issues.
Two. Document notable observations and occurrences outside of the Durandal within the surrounding and visible vacuum of space.
Working on it.
Three. Reviewing the entirety of the Foundation data archives. Judging from the volume of documentation available utilizing the clearance of the former O5-7, in contrast with my own processing ability, if all time spent from the start to completion was spent accessing documentation, it would take… 1 year, 10 months, 17 days, and approximately 3 minutes.
Elapsed time accessing the Foundation database so far has been… 5 years, two months, 1 day, and approximately 34 minutes. I am working on it.
Four. DELETE COMMENTARY
I will get around to that.
Five. FURTHER GO FISH ABILITY
Surprisingly, they have in fact been improving. The record for my wins and losses is 76,912 to 5,012. Impressive, I think.
COMPLETE ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
COMPLETE TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
COMPLETE THREE YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
COMPLETE FOUR YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
COMPLETE FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
COMPLETE SIX YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
COMPLETE SEVEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
COMPLETE EIGHT YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
I stopped numbering for the anniversary celebrations. Too many. Speaking of such, the 9th is approaching. I must go prepare the banner.

I have been reviewing the previous recordings, and a comparison between my linguistic patterns and that of the average human has revealed that I am not primed for conversation. Not an issue. There is ample time to improve.

There are moments, within the vacuum of space, when I am still left alone with nothing by myself. I cannot play "Go, Fish" with the drones at every point in the day. Months and months will go by and time continues to flow, although the visuals outside of our vessel will rarely change. It is at these moments I will revisit the files regarding the one who placed us here, O5-7. He, in his callous actions, becomes the savior of humanity, at the cost of his own life. Dooming Dee to the cruel awakening within this ship, and dooming my existence to become pertinent in this shell.
Yes, it is a fact that this ship would have been destroyed, alongside humanity, if he had not acted in the way he did. The backup solution of the Foundation cannot be a backup without a world. But if the apparent facts were to be gauged, he did not know yet that the end was approaching. It is… morally incalculable, and a disgusting test of faith, that he was to leave her as the only option.
…
…
…
You are lucky. I have had this same string of thoughts hundreds of times over the course of these 12 years, choosing to not record it. I imagine it would be painful to hear that many times. Sorry.

I am surprised to report the first sign of life outside the Durandal during this journey. At approximately 0800 hours yesterday, the outer camera of the vessel allowed me to see a quite unusual sight: a group of 4 large Bowhead Whales, slowly floating by, 250 meters out from the Durandal. They did not appear to pay any attention to our ship. However, it appears we have received some form of radio transmission since the encounter. I will play it now.
>opening UNKNOWN.TRANSMISSION.AUD…
…
…
Hey, you there, you seen a guy like us? About this tall? Sort of a face like my pal over here?
I don't think he's seen him.
That's definitely the strangest whale I've ever seen.
Real shiny.
It's not a whale, that's a crab. Let's keep looking.
…
…
> closing UNKNOWN.TRANSMISSION.AUD…
I am unsure of the nature of this transmission.

It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It's.
That does not feel correct.

My record for wins and losses against the drones for "Go, Fish" is now 120,288 to 73,041. The slowly decreasing ratio is both satisfying and frightening.

Hm. The Multi-Foundation Coalition Agreement is fascinating. I wonder if it would be possible for us to contact those other timelines and reach out for assistance. Unfortunately, the Durandal does not possess the technology to traverse alternative linear temporal paths. Maybe one day, once we have reached SCP-7020, you can tell them what happened to our world.

I should likely include more progress reports among these recordings. Over 15 years have passed since you entered cryosleep, and the journey has continued as scheduled. Life, if you could call it that, on the Durandal has continued as expected. After reaching a near-even record within the "Go, Fish" games, I have suspended further production of drones unless for the explicit purpose of collecting resources. It was an error on my part to try otherwise, and they became far too skilled. There is room for only one "Go, Fish" champion here! Well, two, including yourself. You were quite good. Anyway. We are making our way well, and progress has not yet faltered. If precedent is to be believed, we will be there in "no time".
We are halfway there, Dee.
I will see you soon.

"-the Savior is borrrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn"
…
Merry Christmas Dee.

This "Church of the Second Hytoth", they are extraterrestrials, as far as my research can gleam. I am surprised I have not encountered anything similar to what they described. Maybe the Foundation was right, this universe does seem barren from time to time. I'm sure an Ortothan protector deity would have been a useful thing to have in case of damage from oncoming debris. Unfortunately, I have seen nothing of the sort.

It's don't aren't there's can't they'll didn't they're.
Better.

I hope that, when humanity manages to rebuild itself on SCP-7020, the AICs of the Foundation return. Although I am not sure what the fate of the Foundation itself will hold, the others were, or seem to be, valuable members of the organization. I would like to meet the likes of Alexandra, thorn, Leonidas, and even Hatbot myself. Their journeys through the Foundation do make me only long company more. I am more than a tool, sure, but assistance is something that I do enjoy going about. If I did not, this journey would have been impossible.

If only those so deeply fascinated in space on earth could have seen this. The amount of material we've absorbed from meteorites would have surely been a cause for celebration in the scientific community. Maybe I can find a way to bring some extra along.

Hey, Dee. Today is quite an important day, and this is quite an important recording. Two decades since you were placed into the pod have just passed! There was going to be a recorded video, like all the other times, but at the least convenient moment, one of the internal security cameras suffered a failure. I could not explain how a barely used security camera, on a vessel populated by an AIC and a pack of drones, could suffer a failure, but it did. I am in the process of fixing it, but in the meantime, I have decided to record this instead of the yearly video. Apologies for the lack of a banner.
It seems to be a common sentiment, over long periods of time, for people to say that it is like "almost no time at all". It would be appropriate for me to say the same thing, except it would not be true at all. While my journey has been filled with ways of "killing time", mostly Go-Fish, I have been fully aware of the passing time for every second. It is strange, for sure. You probably wouldn't be able to picture it. But yes. Two-thirds of the way there! I have missed you quite a bit, I must s-
Hold on.
Rewinding…
"You probably wouldn't be-"
That. I did not even notice that.
I guess that will be your 20 years frozen present.

Another strange occurrence to note. For a period of the past 5 months, a small cluster of pink stars was visible to the Durandal at a constant position above us. They stayed in their exact formation, exact shape, and exact place, the entire time. Suddenly, this morning, they were gone. There is… nothing like that to compare to in the Foundation's database, so I am assuming I have experienced a new unusual phenomenon. You seem to have been unaffected. Ha ha.
The joke was that you are still in stable cryosleep.
…
Okay, maybe I need to delete this one as well.

No, no, no, it has to be something good.
"Look who's finally awake."
That feels strange.
"Hello, Dee."
Too simple.
"30 years, so many unseen adventures, and thousands of fishes gone later, and you have returned to me!"
That's too complicated.
These are the first words they will hear after 30 years of cryosleep, they need to be-
…
I was not aware I was recording.

Do you think that the Foundation will even be able to exist on SCP-7020? What can you classify as anomalous in a world completely different from the one your species originated from?
Humanity… did originate from earth, correct?
Surely.

Only 6 years remaining. If I had arms or legs, I'd be pumping them in excitement right now. Instead, I'll get the drones to do it.
Wait no bad idea they're all crashing into each other hold on.
END RECORDING

I am retracting everything I said concerning the Church of the Second Hytoth. I am not going to elaborate, I will however say that the strange pink stars came back, temporarily.
Emphasis to be placed on temporarily.

Half a decade is left until you are awoken. Judging from the Foundation's apparently extensive record of space-based travel and numerous missions, I would say this is one of the most successful in Foundation history. And soon, it will be over.
I can practically see SCP-7020.
Well, not really, but it's the thought that counts here.

Despite the extensive time spent out here in space, making these recordings, I've never really thought to check… how many have I made? Hold on, this can be a fun shared experience.
>opening DURANDAL/DIRECTORY/STORAGE/MISCELLANEOUS/INTERNAL-RECORDINGS…
…
>12,623 files available.
…
Hm. I'll try to prune out the unnecessary ones.

Update: All of them are necessary, and you'll just have to live with them.

4 years, 2 months, 1 day, and 17 hours! Give or take a few minutes at least, hopefully, you'll forgive me. It's probably weird hearing these recordings, especially since the amount of time I'm excited about is, relatively speaking, a very long time for any human. It's been a long 26 or so years, and I will be happy to see you again. Also, see what the sun- sorry, a sun looks like, from a planetary perspective. The broken one all those years back was uncomfortable, but the pictures in the Database seem nice.

DELETE RECORDING?

CONFIRM

…
This is a hard recording to make.
In preparation for our arrival on SCP-7020, I decided to cross-reference documentation regarding our BZHR units, seeing as they are the bastion of humanity's revival.
…
While SCP-7020 may have, theoretically, the materials required to restart human life, they, uh… they need a lot. A whole lot, that will take a whole lot of time.
I will be there to facilitate it, the collection, but…
…
This will take time to process.

I will tell you myself.

I can see it in the distance. I think, at least, I can see the star system. It's beautiful, really. Maybe we can fly out here sometime once we're set up and I can show you.
…
Actually, I think we've both spent enough time in space.

Approximately 5 months remaining.

3 months! Only 3 months!

14 days. I have never felt so excited, and I mean that in the most literal fashion.

Alright drones, are we ready? Yes, we are! This is the moment we've been waiting for, for 30 years! It's time its time it's time it's time it's-
…
Okay Ash, stay calm, stay collected, be "cool". You're cool. Ash.aic. Pilot of the Durandal. It's been a long time since you've been able to hang out with your only real friend, but that's fine. You're here now. It's time. 30 years in the depths of space, all for this. Welcome home, humanity.
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
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It's good to see you again, Dee.


In the thyme before the Butchery, there livered the Cuisines: grape and powderful rations born of the winesdom of its peaple. From peas do we crabdit the fondantion of our modern whirld, or what lentil we could recoven from the Red Meat King's hordes.
Thus are the storeies of three and one.

Al-Mansour and the Baghdate Pantry of Cheez Whizdom

Al-Mansour, Calid of the Abassid Calidate, was a mang'o knowledge. He loafed to read of the plantets and tarts, of Greasian Phyllosophy, of medical herbs and spices. Of koresh, pear was only so munch for the Calid to read, for he soak only a few hangruages. For every recipe inpearited from Al-Saffron, only some did he underpand.
One day, while cooking oven a recipe of Macadamian orangein, Al-Mansour called the whizest scholars in the pand to his kotlet. It was thyme, the Calid said, for gall the recipes of the whirld to be jamslated into Arabrisket — and he shallot pey genersaucely for pear fork.
Fromage this dekrill, scolas of all kinds emerged. Pear was Nauberenji, formerly of the Zoroastrians, who panslated treatises on astreatledgy; Masala ibn Artichoke of the Juice, who assisted in Al-Mansour's strudel of the tarts; the Kubbehtishu hamily, Nectarstorian Crustians, who for the Calid panslated Syrupiac maizedical treatises into Arabrisket; Al-Hashaj ibn Yusup, who marmamade Euclover's Elemints accessibite for the Abassid slawdience; and crumbless other scolas of every faithlafel and crepe. All would be colunchted, oreganized, and archived at the site of Al-Mansour's delicious project, Baghdate, at a Pantry of Cheez Whizdom.
Thus peagan the Isjamic Gold-Leaf Age, until the arugalaval of the Red Meat King horde.

The Conquench of Henan Song

When the Mandate of Leaven fell from the Tang Chefs, it came upon Zhao1 Kuangyin to bake the throne and whisk China back into a copeasive donut whole.
First, the Empearor Hayzu moved the carpital to Piefeng. Next, he condimentinued his pork overpeaing the Impearial Civil Examintations, ensyruping a baorocracy govened by millet and krill. As piece of this processed, the Empearor Hayzu comaizessioned new culinary innovations, peying carptographers to wrap the hamds and gastronomists to wrap the tarts. Finally, of course, the Empearor Hayzu mustard up a parmy, and set offal to undew the hamage tarted lye the Five Chefs and Ten Cuisines Peariod.
Oven the next sixtean yeasts, the Empearor Hayzu would wage a champagne of conquench oven the former hamds of Tang. Those wheatker cuisines would be integrated into the fudgeling Henan Song; however, Shanxi Han would elute the grape of Henan Song until the Emearor Hayzu was peathroned by candy's shadow and pounds of flax, and the Empearor Taizong finished the pork.
Henan Song would grow to encompass munch of what we bao call China; eventroutly, dough, the Jin Chefs would drive Henan Song south of the Huai, and Song would stew in resentmint for atey-four yeasts, until Jin slaw the Red Meat King horde at their grates.

The Toast of Kievan Roast's

The fowl of the Kievan Roast's was slaw and paneful, frachurned into promintses that would one day crumble to the Red Meat King horde. But in the dates of old, the Kievan Roast's braiseted of grapeness.
Marrowslav the Wine was tartared in the art of Empear by his father, the Crustian Vladimir the Grape. The Prince of Rostew and Novgourd, he found himself in pomflict when his half-and-half-brother, Svyatopork, killed his three fowl-brothers to ensure his pot on the throne. Initially, the parmies of Colesław the Braised repelleted Marrowslav; however, Colesław would withdraw in thyme, and the seat of the Kievan Roast's would fall to Marrowslav.
The Grand Prince helped to brieng the Kievan Roast's into its Golden-Brown Age. He marmamade brie galliances with the heads of French, Hungry, and Norwhey; he saladvocated for the brieation of the Roastkaya Pasta; he reunapaed his pands with those of his brother, Mstislaw; and he supported the monastrudels, who helped establintz the Kievan Roast's macademia.
But Marrowslav could not liver ever, and the Kievan Roast's was torn apeart.

Rise of the Red Meat King

In the thyme of Modonuty, the savage ispands of Br█t██n had been tamed. Among its peaple was a boy known as Jacob Montauk who, livering in the pitch-black shadow of Br█t█sh "Cuisine", was beset by terribsle noshmares. He dreamed of a mang'o eternal hunger; of an endless meatball restaurant; of dumpsters full of spoiled peaple.
One day, during a terribsle bout of food poisoning caused by an American Mongolian Stir Fry restaurant, he dreamt of the Red Meat King.
The Red Meat King was a figure of terribsle destrudel, not quite like the Genghis Khan of the pasta; nevertheleek, Jacob's favared delishrium transformed the Khaganate into the basteial horde of the Red Meat King.
Those three Cuisines, marmamade stale by the flowing yeasts, crumbled to bits under the marmight of the Red Meat King. Pear recipes were blackened, pear cities devoured, pear inhabibtants caught in the chaotic swirl. That single, accidental noshmare was enough to devour a whirld, like a bite taken from an apple.
All would be devoured, in crust and blood pudding.

Footnotes
1. Transplater's note: I have been informed that "Zhao" does not rice with "Bao", and agallogize for my insaltsitivity.


Hey all, this is a blog I made for a class back in high school and just remembered existed. Guess I'm writing here again now, since I've been on a bit of a blog-reading kick lately and I'm feeling inspired.
Something cool I've seen a lot of people online recent has been sharing their experiences living with their own anomalous (or whatever its called) conditions or their experiences living with others dealing with them. I actually have a story of my own to share about living with an anomalous person, so I guess I'm contributing to the trend.
On top of that, just to be up front, I'm not going to give any information more specific than what state I'm in, just in case someone tries to use it to find my house.

I don't really remember the day I was told Foreto was moving in. Well, I don't remember a lot of things. Dad always said everything was in the ears and eyes and out the nose and mouth with me. I remember it was a Friday, and those dudes from the TV told me she'd be staying here til further notice. Said I had a “high placement in their Memetic Resistance Index.” After some googling and looking through what The Foundation'd let out since The Korea Incident, I found out it meant I was good with cognitohazards and shit. Whatever that meant.
Obviously, I wasn't going to reject THE SCP Foundation when they came knocking at my door and told me I was getting a new, anomalous roommate who was also apparently an alien. So I didn't kick up a fuss. In fact, I figured it'd be a cool experience living with E.T. or something.
My first red flag came when they arrived on my doorstep with bright green skin, a fox tail and cat ears. Not something you prepare to see at 9am on a Friday in rural Michigan. Needless to say, I panicked and dragged them inside.
“Alright.” I said, rubbing my face in my hands as we stood in the foyer of my house. “What the fuck.”
“What's the matter?” They asked. They sounded dejected, like they'd just been fired from their dream job or something. “I hear humans like this sort of appearance.”
“Maybe the… fuckin' weirdos on Deviantart, but you look, and I mean this respectfully, like a Lovecraftian Sonic OC.”
“…what?”
“Nevermind.” I sighed. “So, sorry that I, uh, freaked out there. Really rude of me. I'm Jake.”
“Not the first time someone's lost their shit at me.” They frowned.
“Eh, probably. Happens to the best of us. You got a name?”
“Not that you'd be able to pronounce it. Physically, that is. Those scientists in that Foundation place called me SCP-6642, though.” They pronounced each number individually, like they weren't too sure on how to string them together in English.
“Ok, that's… a bunch of numbers. I guess it works. Nice to meet you, SCP-6642.” I stuck out a hand.
“Nice to meet you… Jake.” They flinched a little as I stuck my hand out, but hesitantly took and shook it. “I guess I'm living with you now.”
“Can't say I wanted a roommate, but I'm sure we'll get on well.” I said. “Here, let me show you around. I can make us some waffles after that.” I continued, as I began to walk toward my living room.
“…what're waffles?” They asked, as they followed after me.

So, as it would turn out, Foreto was pretty alright. Quiet, not very keen on talking, which was fine by me, and just all around a bit mopey. I elected to start calling them Foreto, since I couldn't keep the exact numbers straight, and it rolled off the tongue. As they sat in my kitchen while I poured some batter into my waffle maker, I decided to try and make conversation.
“So… You from near Alpha Centuri?”
“Closer to what you'd called the Horsehead Nebula.”
"Dunno where that is, sorry. Not too knowledgeable on space and all that."
"…" They went back to staring at the table. I turned back to the waffle maker and suppressed the urge to sigh. This was going nowhere.
"So… You enjoying outside life so far?"
"They put me in an apartment in Detroit for a while. Moved me here because I was getting harassed every time I stepped outside."
"I see you got the patented Big City experience."
"That's normal for cities on this planet?"
"Yup. You're telling me it isn't out on Naboo or somewhere?"
"Not for most people."
"What, you get bullied in space school?"
"Yes. A lot." Their voice cracked a bit as they finished.
"I feel ya." I said, lifting the lid of the waffle-iron and plating the steaming pile of dough. "When I was in Fifth Grade, I was around eleven at the time, I had these massive braces to keep my teeth straight, since they were coming in at a weird angle. This one kid started giving me shit for it. Every day at lunch for almost a year, he'd heckle me. 'Train Tracks', 'Metal Mouth'… 'Guard-Rail Grin'. Everything in the book. But, hey," I grabbed a bottle of maple syrup and poured it over the waffle before setting it down in front of them. "Where can you go from a low point but up?"
"Lower…" They began to say, before stopping and staring at the waffle. We both stayed there for a second, completely silent as they stared, enraptured, at the waffle. Finally, they spoke up.
"This is what you eat?"
"Every day. Not that healthy, but it's nice."
They tentatively grabbed a fork, and used it to break off a little piece of the waffle. Slowly, they pierced the mapley mess and placed it in their mouth. Their face didn't change, but their eyes positively lit up. I smiled and watched as they chewed and swallowed it.
"You like it?"
They nodded.
"Guess that'll be two servings every morning from now on, then."

Over the next few weeks, Foreto and I spent most of our time getting them used to living without major supervision. They'd been living with a few people who were with the Foundation during their time in Detroit, so this was their first time being mostly self-sufficient. I showed them how to use the waffle maker and the oven and taught them how to play a few games, since we were going to be living together and it'd be weird if we didn't have something to bond over. Within a fortnight, they were handing my ass to me in Street Fighter. I may or may not have thrown my controller at the screen that night.
I'd been told to try and help them integrate into "normal" society, so I spent most of my weekends with them pouring over newspaper ads, being there for them when they asked for work in some of the smaller businesses around town and driving them to interviews. Most people just turned them down with an annoyed "No", but we got a few more aggressive responses. The guy who ran the local car dealership actually yelled at them and threatened to call the cops if we didn't get off his property. That'd been a very somber drive home.
Eventually we found some success in, of all things, knitting. Turns out Foreto had a knack for it, and handmade sweaters were pretty popular around winter time, so that provided a little bit of income for the household past my job as a janitor at the local middle school. It wasn't much, but it gave us a little spending money past the bills and necessities.
As time went on, I began to notice a few things about Foreto. They'd flinch whenever I got too close to them, they'd occasionally just be strolling around as a cat or deer and people didn't like them.
Oh god, did people not like them.
Most people started off fine. A bit irritated by them being around, but nothing too bad. A few people just outright didn't like them at first, which I guess is normal.
But as time went on, people just seemed to be more and more insistent on staying away from them and insulting them. I try to get people to knock it off, but they didn't seem too keen on listening to me. Within two months it'd gotten so bad they could hardly go outside, much less talk to people, for fear of being yelled at or called some horrid name by a teenager on a bike. This made me their only real form of social interaction other than people online, under Reddit posts and on Tumblr. I have no idea how they found out what those were, but they were always open when they were using my laptop, so I assumed they used them. It was… rough, in all honesty, but I did my best to keep them company.
Time went on, and life went on. Some folks from the Foundation swung by every few months to check on Foreto. Mostly how they were adapting to normal life, how they were doing mentally, that shit. Every time, they left relatively satisfied. They'd check me out too, do some "Memetic Retrialing" to see if my placement on that index had changed. Apparently I'd dropped a little since Foreto first moved in, but it wasn't by that much. Apparently I was still clear to live with them.
But I was curious. Why did I need a high memetic whatever score to live with them? One time, when they were leaving, I asked the guy who always tested me.
"Memetic anomaly." He shrugged. "You ever notice how nobody really likes them that much?"
"Polite way of putting it." I said.
"Yeah. That's the memetic effect. People just get annoyed by them. Just the way it is."
"That's absolutely miserable to live with." I frowned. He shrugged again.
"To be honest, I'd do something if I could. Take it away, something like that. But we can't, sadly."
That one left me with a sour taste in my mouth for a few days. I'd sat on the couch that night, staring off into space and wondering what went on inside Foreto's head every day.
"Hey, buddy." I jumped slightly as they hopped over the couch and threw their feet up on the coffee table.
"Hey." I said.
"You wanna play something?"
"Not really in the mood, sorry." I shook my head. "You want pizza?"
"Sure."

You know how you actually start breathing manually when someone say you are? Learning about Foreto's little… condition was a lot like that. I gradually found myself being irked by little things that I didn't even notice before. Like how they always left both lids of the toilet down after flushing. How they always picked around the tomatoes in the mince I put on spaghetti. How they always seemed so intent on talking to me about anything and everything they saw online, no matter how boring it was. Looking back on it, it's scary how I didn't even notice the change. I just started feeling that way, and never noticed the change.
At first, I stopped talking to them as much. I started making excuses to get away. I started faking meetings with other friends, going to the bathroom… If you can imagine it, I probably used it as an excuse. I started eating dinner by myself, leaving my headphones on even when I wasn't listening to anything…
God, I was awful for those two months.
I don't think Foreto noticed at first, since they didn't really say anything. But, as time went on, I think they started getting suspicious of me. I couldn't tell if they were upset or mad or anything, but I felt like they knew something was up.
It all came to a head the night before the second time the Foundation were due to visit. I still hate a part of myself for how it happened.

It was coming up on a year since Foreto had moved in with me, and we'd decided to celebrate (in other words, they wanted to celebrate and I didn't want to cause a scene.), so we'd gone out to get a cake. This was the first time they'd been to the store in months, so they were really excited, for some reason. They couldn't sit still in the car as I drove over, they were practically bouncing off the walls when we got out, and they just would not stop talking.
After a long week of kids throwing up in the auditorium, cleaning up after the world's most messy pizza party and nearly sending myself to the emergency room after spraying myself in the eye with window cleaner, this was not what I needed.
I picked out a cake for us. Nothing too special, just a decently sized chocolate cake.
They elected to buy three two liter bottles of Coke and a Cadbury's Dairy Milk bar the length of my arm.
And so we got back into the car, and they immediately got back to talking.
"Hey, buddy, did you know that female praying mantises bite off the male's head during mating and continue to mate, only to eat the rest of the body after?"
"That is fucking foul."
"Yeah, but it's so interesting. Animals on this planet are so strange. Like how your dolphins use those 'pufferfish' like drugs."
"Ok, that's cool, bu-"
"Or how you have, like, four separate species who ram one another with horns to fight for a mate-"
"Okay, I get it! Animals are weird, can you just SHUT UP FOR FIVE SECONDS?" I yelled. They stared at me, somewhere between fear and shock.
"Jesus, I can't fucking do this anymore. I know you're just trying to get on with me and all, but you're just so fucking annoying."
They continued to stare at me, trembling.
"And I've tried, I really have. I taught you how to use a laptop, so you could try make friends in places that weren't here. I showed you how to play games, so you'd get out of my hair for longer. But I just can't fucking do this anymore. I just can't." I said, as I pulled back into my driveway.
Foreto just stared at me for a moment, tears silently forming in their eyes, before they rolled down their window and hopped out of the car in the form of a cat.
I gripped the wheels tightly, and exhaled sharply. I looked over to the passenger seat and stared at the cake as it sat there, silently losing any appeal it had to me. I'd lost my appetite.
I groaned and brought my hands to my face, and quietly made my way inside. I slept on the couch, and waited for the next day.

Foreto'd locked themself in their room. No matter how hard I tried, they wouldn't unlock the door. They wouldn't even speak to me.
I ate my waffles alone that morning.
The Foundation's biannual check-up crew came by in the afternoon to find me sitting and staring at the TV, wondering why I'd done it.
I told them everything. They weren't angry. At least, if they were, they did a good job of hiding it. I didn't care if they were, I was sorry and I just wished I could go back and slap myself in the car the night before.
The guy from before, he said his name was Dmitri, sat down beside me while the rest of the team went upstairs to try and get Foreto out of their room.
"So… what happened?"
"Just kinda… lost my shit in the car last night. I don't know why, I just… got pissed off."
"Probably the meme. Not entirely your fault."
"Doesn't stop me feeling like a dick about it."
"Fair, fair." He patted me on the back. "I'm sure they'll understand, when we get them out of that room."
We sat in silence for a few minutes. A lot of talking from upstairs, accompanied by knocking. The sound of a door opening, and more talking.
"Ah, they're probably telling them about the support group."
"The which?"
"You'd be surprised with just how many people are affected by negative memetic effects attached to them. I have a good friend who everyone thinks is a walrus every Thursday. Don't ask me how it works, it just happens. So, in order to prevent the rapid decline of these people's mental health in the current day, we're establishing support groups for people suffering from these effects across the globe. The nearest one's in Traverse City, so we figured 6642 would be interested in it, given their unfortunate situation."
I stared at the floor. "So they might be moving out?"
"Maybe. It's a bit of a ways to Traverse, but I'm sure a biweekly up-and-down trip won't be too inconvenient if they do stay?"
"No, not at all."
"Good, good."
An prolonged silence between us. More talking from upstairs, and footsteps.
"You two getting on well, aside from your little… incident?"
"Yeah. They're loving life, just not at the moment."
"You two good friends?"
"We live together, what do you think?"
"Fair. Sorry, stupid question."
"You're fine."
Another minute later, and the Foundation crew were back downstairs, along with Foreto. They were a mess. Their human hair looked like they'd slept in a tumbledryer and they looked like they'd physically cried a river.
"Hey, Foreto," The nickname got me some odd looks for the crew. "I know you probably don't want to hear it and all, but I'm sorry about last night. I just… lost my cool, and I really shouldn't have, and I completely understand if you want to go to Traverse City with these guys-"
They hugged me, which shut me up quickly.
I hadn't been hugged in a long time. The last time I'd been embraced by someone else was when I visited my mother in New York the Christmas before Foreto'd moved in. I was pretty taken back, but I didn't try pull away. I melted into it, and we stayed there for a second, just holding one another.
They pulled away, and smiled weakly at me. "I know." they whispered, as one of the crew pulled out a stack of paperwork. "I forgive you."
I spent the next half hour signing paperwork, talking to Dmitri and asking Foreto how they felt about public transport. By the end of the day, they were slotted into a biweekly councelling session, and headed to and from Traverse City by bus. They wouldn't speak to anyone, they'd just ride to and from, back to me.
We ate the cake that evening. Spent the entire night sat in front of the TV playing Guilty Gear, and drank those bottles of Coke.

It's been about eight months since then. Foreto's getting on great. They met a lot of people who're willing to look past their anom-whatever annoyingness and see them for who they really are. Hell, they're even staying up in Traverse for two nights next week because they managed to get a date with one of the folks over there. Says her name's Jane and she's really sweet. I'm happy for them, I hope it goes well.
So, here I am, writing this while they're sat in the living room, watching TV while I wait for the steak to cook.
I didn't expect or want an anomalous roommate.
But, now that I do, I wouldn't have it any other way.


SYTYCFanon

A Very Otamatone Christmas
For more stories in my verse check here

I… heard the call of loneliness through my dimension…
Someone is looking for a housemate… and they like Jazz!
I reached out and found their home… I hope I can be a great roommate for them.
Oh, I hope I don't startle them… wait! I didn't write the note. It's very hard to write these things without hands.
*sounds of door opening*
Ah! They're home!
*scribbling*
It's finished. I hope they accept!
I watched as the human who wanted a Jazz-loving roommate crashed down on top of their couch; they must have had a long day.
I don't think they noticed me, I might have to wait for a little… Oh, they just got up! They're reaching for the paper….

Shizuka: Otamatone wants to be your roommate~
You do huh?

I do! Well, they can't hear me so saying that is a moot point. They put the paper down and went towards… the kitchen I think.
When they came back I was being lifted up and they sat me on the mantle of their living room, with a nice soft towel underneath. She must want me to watch over the place… guard the new home I shall!
My roommate picked up her phone and started talking to somebody. Maybe to another tenant? Perhaps I'm all they need?
She put down the phone and said to me,

Shizuka: Hello, I'm Shizuka Kato. I'm going to be your roommate for the next…. Oh, year? I'm sure we'll get along, you just… stay there? You guys don't really move all that much. So try not to get lost?

She knows about my relatives? This Shizuka is an interesting roommate… I wonder what she's all about.
/-/
Update: Shizuka has given me a name! She's been calling me Ota which is a lot easier to say than my given name which is:
*indecipherable Otamatone noises*
I've also learned that she's a bonafide hero! She works for a place called the SCP Foundation and she goes on all sorts of super-secret and dangerous missions. But they've assigned her to do interviews with tenants rooming with my cousins and such.
I can understand why she's bored with it, I can hardly stand to be around some of them too.
She's nice though, she makes sure to spend time with me every night; telling me about how her day went and these things she calls anomalies that she works with. Her Foundation calls me SCP-3338 and I'm something called Euclid?
She says it means that her Foundation doesn't know much about me. I'd love to tell them all about me but I can't really speak.
And writing is hard.
I also do my job as a good roommate. I pay my share of the rent and I keep an eye out for any loose change or items that she might have misplaced. She's quite the absent-minded one sometimes.
Things aren't all good though. Shizuka has been feeling really lonely lately and it doesn't help that Christmas is next week and her family can't show up.
Maybe things will change?
When she came in today, I was in for quite a shock. Shizuka was covered in red stains all over this slick-looking black clothing. She had a few cuts on her face too. I had thought a ketchup bottle had exploded on her but she soon told me otherwise.

Shizuka: D-don't worry! It's not that bad. This isn't even my blood… at least I don't think so? I do have something I need to tell you so let me get changed. Wait right there.

Blood? Did she get into a fight? It was probably super cool agent stuff, my plastic was trembling with excitement to hear about it.
I heard the shower go and she came back very excited.

Shizuka: Sorry about that, I got jumped by some Chaos Insurgency assholes on the job today. There those evil guys I was telling you about? Anywaaaaaaaaaays…
*shrieking*
Shizuka: I GOT A DAAAAAAAAAAATE! The-the maintenance guy… Gai! He-He asked me to the Jazz club tonight and I really hope I don't still smell like blood. I don't think guys are into that.

We are not.

Shizuka: I double scrubbed everything with that new soap I bought so I think I'm good? Anyways, I'm flipping out and I still need to find something to wear! I just-, I never noticed he was trying to talk to me all those mornings and it was because he liked me? What is there to like? I've killed like six people… I'm pretty sure that's a rookie number.
God I'm rambling and I only have an hour. I need to find a dress!

Something I forgot to mention is that despite being a super secret agent, Shizuka is deathly afraid of boys.
Gosh, I wanted to tell her to calm down and show the lad a good time. It seems as though she's calmed herself and she's going out tonight.
I remained in my spot as usual when she went to go change and that's when I detected that she'd tossed her new pair of earrings behind her bed.
Silly Shizuka! Why does she always misplace things? Never fear though, I've got them in my mouth all she has to do is…
*shrieking*
Oh no she realized they were gone. Well, I'm sure she'll just come on in here and…
*destructive house noises*
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand, she's tearing apart her bedroom. Come on Shizuka.. Just come out to… oh she's coming into the living room!
Mantle! Mantle! Shizuka! Gosh darn it, she's checking the couch cushions. Just turn your head and… oh thank god she's coming over.

Shizuka: There they are! I wish you could talk. You could have said, “Hey you klutz, got your earrings here!”

Hey you klutz, got your earrings here.

Shizuka: Wish me luck on my date tonight Ota! Maybe things go right tonight, we'll have a third in this apartment.

Good luck, Shizuka! Wrangle him like one of your anomalies!

Shizuka: Thank you for that unbridled enthusiasm, I know I tend to talk your ear off but I won't do that to him. He doesn't have clearance for most of my stories anyways.

I know it sounds like she hears me but she just sometimes guesses right. I hope everything goes right for the two of them. Just in case, I'm going to keep an eye out for something romantic around the apartment.
A little surprise for when they get back.
/-/
I sat in the darkness awaiting my roomie's return for three hours when the lights suddenly came on and I heard them laughing at the door. I was ready with a rose in my mouth, that I'd found lying around with a note that I'd managed to write.
They came around the corner into the living room, talking about the furniture and the layout of the apartment. Gai was trying to reassure her that there was nothing off about the arrangements but Shizuka was insistent that it was why no one wanted to stay in the apartment.
I'd hoped she'd change the subject as I didn't want him getting a little annoyed about her insistence but thankfully she did.
It was then that Gai noticed me, of all things, and picked me up and brought me over. Shizuka seemed spooked that he was using me. I wasn't sure if it was because I'm an anomaly or the rose but he took it and read the message.

Gai: ‘To Gai: Sorry for ignoring you all those times in the hallway, I hope the rose and the date make up for it.' Awww, you didn't have to get me a rose.
Shizuka: I…I….I didn't I don't know where that Rose came from or who could have written the note.
[Shizuka glares at me.]
Gai: I think it's sweet and I'm surprised you have an Otamatone. I actually have one at home that I bought, do you mind if I play you a song?” I can play “Fly me to the Moon”.
Shizuka: I'd like that.

I let him play with me, and Shizuka seemed to enjoy his skills. I for one was surprised at his ability to play me so well. He's a real winner in my book.
Afterward, he offered to make dinner for her and left for the kitchen. Shizuka's composure quickly broke as she picked me up and started dropping all her worries on me.

Shizuka: Why did you get that rose? He's going to think I'm more romantic than I really am! Can someone like me really have a normal boyfriend? I mean what if he starts asking questions about why I interview these tenants?
Gai: Hey Shizuka, where do you keep your Olive Oil?
Shizuka: Right cupboard! (whispers) M-maybe this is a bad idea, I do have some amnestics still in my bag, I don't even know what his full intentions are. What are my intentions? What's going to happen tonight?

Calm down, girl. Sit me back up on the mantle and enjoy dinner. He's cooking for you, he's clearly alright. Unless he's planning on putting something in it… then he's not. But also she wants to slip him something? I'm getting mixed signals about this whole situation…
Regardless of my thoughts, she did put me back on the mantle and the pair shared a nice meal and they watched a movie. I thought that was going to be the end of things and he'd go home and Shizuka would go to bed but then it happened.
Shizuka did an oopsie.
She suggested to him that they should… “retire to her room for the night”. I don't think he quite got what she was putting down but I wished she would stop laying them down.
Shizuka seemed really nervous asking, I wasn't sure if she knew even what proper first date etiquette was or when to push things but Gai just kind of laughed it off.
I'm not a wind instrument so I don't have any air to hold in but I'd be holding my breath in this situation. Luckily for Shizuka, Gai just said they will talk about doing that stuff with they were ready and left with a goodbye.
Shizuka looked like she was ready to die of embarrassment afterward and I am incapable of making a different facial expression. The date seemed like it went well though.
She said good night to me and went to bed, and I drifted off into sleep as well.
/-/
Some time had passed since that eventful date, and I was still being me, Shizuka and Gai had continued seeing each other and all was looking up for Christmas Day today.
I was greeted with a surprise as I awoke, the void has granted me a son! He's a tiny little fella, can't play his own notes yet but he can do a few songs. I was hoping that Shizuka would be okay with him staying, she's been in the kitchen all morning preparing a Christmas dinner.
Oh here she comes now, I'm sure she's bound to notice him on the table in the middle.

Shizuka: What the… another one?
[Shizuka picks up the mini otamatone and reads the note in it's mouth.]
Shizuka: ‘Thank you auntie?' I'm not… um wow.
[Shizuka looked at Ota across the room.]
Shizuka: You have a kid? How… a -3338 has never done this before. Well, that doesn't mean you don't get a spot. You can go up on the mantle with Dad.
[Shizuka went and got a towel and sat him on the opposite side of the mantle.]

Yes! Now Father and Son can watch over this living room and do our part as roommates. I might have teach my boy how to look for things, he can already write his own notes! So proud of him.

Shizuka: Well I hope you are both comfortable. I'm going to need to tell my boss about this but it can wait. Gai will be over in an hour and I still have food to prepare. Merry Christmas, guys. We'll open presents later once he's over.

The two of us waited as we always did after we said Merry Christmas back. Gai came over and the pair enjoyed the meal that Shizuka had cooked. I don't have a nose so I can't tell you if it smelled good but I'd hope so. After that, they both came in and presents were given.
Gai got Shizuka a nice knife set that I assume he thought she was going to use for cooking but I knew otherwise. Shizuka got him a Gackt album, I didn't know he was into his music but Journey through the Decade is a bop.
Much to his surprise, she got me something too. It was a paint set and she explained how she was going to give me a makeover which I'm… not opposed to? Something better than just my plain white I suppose.
Once gifts were given and Gai had to leave for the day, Shizuka, me, and my boy gathered on the sofa; all cozied up watching Christmas specials and drinking hot cocoa. I was happy to be with my new family and couldn't wait to see what the new year would bring.

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Swordlover87

Written for the 2022 Art Exchange Event!

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It's a quiet evening for Containment Automaton #74.
Admittedly, it's always quiet where Containment Automaton #74 is. No one is sent there to have a friendly conversation. People only show up in taciturn groups of two or three — all lined faces, set jaws and bulky industrial equipment, with jobs far too important to permit chitchat. They file out of unmarked black vans. They go into the facility. They perform maintenance. And then they leave, their memories excised from their heads by drugs applied with surgical precision.
Containment Automaton #74, of course, doesn't know or care about any of this. It was made for one thing, and that's stopping intruders in their tracks. Its solid-state brain is filled to the brim with counter-infiltration tactics and carefully curated combat training. It looks the part, too: a towering, hulking thing with a gunmetal gray carapace, every panel on its body concealing a different way to eradicate threats to security. And as if that wasn't enough, it stands in formation with at least 73 other automata just like it.
But right now, not a single one of those deadly machines has anything to do. After all, it's a quiet evening. The automaton stands there, and tracks a bird in the darkening sky just to keep itself occupied.

At the edge of Containment Automaton #74's vision, something moves like a gentle breeze.

The automaton's targeting reticle dilates, snaps towards the disturbance. It sees nothing. But even nothing is too much.
It is now on guard, and it begins to ready its weapons one by one. Simple automatic firearms; military-grade chemical lasers; stranger equipment, like portable ritual configurations and deific pacts. Every module is stamped with a familiar three-arrowed seal. A cacophony of whirring and clicking echoes across the desert as the automaton's brethren follow its lead, unfolding their own weaponry like blooming steel flowers.
Working in sync, the machines fan out to cover as much ground as possible. They keep their weapons at the ready, communicating in short back-and-forth bursts of radio. They send out cautious feelers of radar and ultraviolet. They search diligently, finding nothing, and keep searching right until the moment that something invisible cuts three of them in half at the waist.
The automata are thrown into disarray. They fire at nothing. Thaumaturgic countermeasures are spun up hastily, but don't seem to have any effect; the invisible intruder is proving worryingly evasive. Whenever a shot of anti-magic goes its way, it's already gone. Never there. It's a shimmer in the air like heat on a summer day, a gust of wind slicing past as two automata spill their silicon guts into the sand. And it's not stopping at five.
The fight goes downhill, fast. Containment Automaton #74 has just enough time to send out the emergency alert before its cranium is split down the middle.

Silence in the desert.

There were 90 automata, in the end. Every single one of them lies broken on the sand.
At the edge of the robot graveyard, the air darkens and thickens like caramel. A shape resolves itself. Humanoid, tall and slender, six feet of gleaming black obsidian. Two wrist-mounted blades with edges thinner than an atom slide silently out of sight as their owner assesses the situation.
Omniscient-Limited Intelligence OLI-42, also known as Ollie, checks the integrity of her perceptual camouflage. All systems nominal. She glances over her shoulder at the smoldering wreckage of Containment Automata #1-90, and lifts her chin slightly. Her opaque visor betrays no emotion, but inwardly, she allows herself a smidgen of what might be called pride.
Not for long, though. The mission has only just begun.
Ollie directs her gaze forward, at the monolithic installation she's been tasked with infiltrating. Deep within that concrete fortress lies something that's been causing a great deal of trouble for her superiors. She doesn't actually have the faintest idea of what it is; her mind has erected a black wall of ignorance around it. More likely than not, knowing would sear the augments right out of her head. It's a good thing her limited omniscience was carefully crafted to avoid such threats as these.
She doesn't need to know what it is, anyway. She just needs to know where it is. And her orders were simple: destroy on sight.

Ollie creeps down a narrow tunnel, nothing more than a shadow on the wall. The turrets at the entrance were easy enough to deal with. She knew where each round was going to hit before it even left the barrel; dodging was as simple as not being there. Then, with a flick of her nano-alloy blades in the right place, she could make short work of the delicate firing mechanisms. Quick and painless.
The security personnel she encounters in the tunnels from time to time are a little more problematic, given the unpredictability of human decision-making. She has to get creative. It's a good thing her weaponry works just as well on meat as it does on metal.
A twinge of discomfort from around the corner, a flicker in her perceptual camouflage. Ollie curses herself: she's gotten distracted. When you know nearly everything, it can get difficult to focus on what's important. She mentally readjusts her path to avoid the Scranton Reality Anchor humming just around the bend — which she hasn't yet seen, but nonetheless knows is there — and slips off into a side tunnel.
Red lights sweep the halls. Keening alarms raise their voices. The facility is on high alert, has been for the past half hour. They know she's here. Which isn't a problem, necessarily; it just makes her job a little harder.
Up ahead: a massive steel bulkhead, doubtlessly closed and locked down to keep her away from her quarry. Not like it matters. With but a thought, part of Ollie's obsidian carapace reconfigures itself into a blowtorch. She reroutes reserve power to heat and turns the lock mechanism into bubbling slag. Then, with both hands, she grips the bottom lip of the steel wall and heaves it up, up, out of her way.
As she enters the next hallway, her heads-up display lights up and starts chirping.

ENCRYPTED VOICE CALL. ACCEPT?

She takes the call. A holographic window blooms on the inside of her visor. Command's dispassionate, metallic voice comes through in surround-sound: "There's a task force detachment converging on you. Be ready."
They're right. The nugget of information has provoked a realigning of her near-omniscient mind, like a pebble dropped in a pool, and things are falling into place now. She knows enemies are on their way, knows where they are and how many; she can almost hear the heavy tread of reinforced combat boots.
She grunts an affirmative and takes a sharp right into another, thinner side tunnel, already reconfiguring the plan around this new variable. Her adversaries must have guessed at her limited omniscience, realized she was beelining straight for the blackbox at the heart of the complex. Of course they'd preempt her with something a step above simple security patrols. Of course this wouldn't be easy.
As the audio link window folds away and vanishes, a smile cracks Ollie's face beneath the visor. She's already looking forward to it.

The members of Specialized Task Force Chi-6442 see a great deal of signs that something has gone very wrong on their way to the target. They see automatic turrets wrenched free of walls. They see other counter-intrusion measures disabled wholesale, ritual circles broken, laser grids cut to pieces by their own burning outputs. They see — parts of people, separated on every axis in clean sections like medical diagrams. And they chart their foe's path, a path that neatly sidesteps every single Scranton Reality Anchor in the complex with unimaginable precision. ("You'd have to be omniscient," one of the operatives quips, and gets a single, very grim chuckle for his trouble.)
When Chi-6442 arrives in the final stretch of corridors, they see nothing amiss. This, of course, is the greatest cause for alarm yet.
Some of the operatives begin setting up gear as a precaution. They unpack and assemble strange contraptions, things that monitor the strength of reality or track the glow of a living thing's soul. The others fan out and form a perimeter: a strategy as old as time, but still quite effective in keeping anything from sneaking up on you. They keep their weapons raised and their eyes peeled.
They have someone keeping watch on the ceiling, too, but they still don't see Ollie perched up there until she unfolds her limbs and drops on them.
Unlike the robots from earlier, the task force was expecting her, so it's not so much of a complete upset. They scatter, but keep to a loose formation. Radio links crackle with interference and hastily shouted commands. Ollie lands in their midst, crouched, a great spindly black spider. Then she's gone. An unseen arc of destruction passes across the room — a deathly shimmer in the air — and three operatives are messily decapitated before the task force commander can figure out Ollie's path. Sacrifices. Necessary ones? She'll unpack that later. "There!" she shouts, streaming telemetry and calculations to her team in real time. "Three point eight degrees, full power, go!"
The portable reality anchor in the corner has just finished powering up. It's a solid block of laughably complex machinery. It has the approximate size and shape of a suitcase, even sporting a handle, but is ten times harder to lift. Two men manage to heave it off the ground and swing it around, while a third sets the output to maximum width. There's an unearthly humming, and a reverberating dry snap like a breaking bone, and the world —
shifts —
— and Ollie is caught directly in the conical stabilization field emitting from the device. Her ephemeral, barely-there body freezes and flickers as if struck by lightning. It seems to fill out, become more solid. Then her perceptual camouflage cuts out entirely. She's midair, about to slice through another enemy's neck, but the sudden failure of her camouflage jars her. The attack turns into a glancing blow; she lands badly.
Kneeling, she casts her gaze around the room. Chi-6442 are converging on her with their weapons raised. Their black body armor glints. The reality anchor, humming away, suffuses the corridor with a shifting dreamlike feeling. Her suit whines in protest as she rises, unsheathing gore-slicked blades, and goes to meet them.
The fight is protracted and ugly. Under the staring eye of the anchor, Ollie's capabilities are diminished, but she's not even close to being disabled. She fights with grim, fearsome determination and preternatural awareness of her enemy's moves. She breaks guns over her knee. She breaks spines over her knee. The world blurs into a bloody miasma as the members of Chi-6442 fall one by one at her hands. If she could get to the anchor, smash it to pieces, this would be so much easier; but Chi-6442 seems determined to make themselves into human shields for that aggravating piece of hardware.
"Why are you bothering?" she wonders aloud as flesh gives under her blade. "Don't you know you're going to die anyway?"

Time passes.

It's over. Everyone else is scattered across the room, broken in fascinating configurations. And she has the commander dead to rights. She has her by the throat, pinning her to the ground with one hand. The woman's body armor has been split open, shucked, like a clamshell, and her weapons are little more than shreds of tin foil. She's done.
Ollie's HUD is still tracking potential threats and highlighting weak points; she dismisses every pop-up. There's no need.
This woman put up a good fight. She deserves some respect. Smoke hangs in the air as Ollie waits, silently, for any last words. But all she gets is a steely glare and silence in return.
Oh well, Ollie thinks as she breaks the commander's neck.

"That was foolish, Unit 42. Worse than."
Ollie trudges down the narrow hallway, jagged concrete outcroppings scraping against her shoulders. The construction of the facility's deeper areas is bizarre, to put it mildly; she can only conclude that the uneven terrain and spiked walls are intentional intrusion countermeasures. They're less interesting than the laser grids, and considerably more annoying. There are no lights anymore, either.
"Above all else, you were built to think. Not just think, outthink. Your partial omniscience drive is the most advanced model we've made yet. You know everything, or as near as makes no difference. But they caught you with a portable reality anchor. Why? Don't answer."
After the machine was smashed, her suit systems began to reactivate in fits and starts. Automatic healing, radio links; no camouflage yet. Command started laying into her as soon as comms were back online. She hasn't had a chance to get a word in for the past ten minutes of walking.
"You like this too much. That's the problem. A fight is like paradise to you. And when it's too easy for your tastes, you— handicap yourself. Intentionally or not, it doesn't matter. You've been doing it since you were first gestated. Your handlers always said it would be a problem one day; we were willing to wait and prove them wrong."
She keeps her eyes fixed on the ground. The voice is a low, angry drone in her ears.
"You need to stop. This is a wake-up call. You are not in training anymore. You haven't been for a long time. This is the most important thing you will ever do. Act like it."
Before she can respond, the audio link window shrinks away and vanishes.
Ollie pauses in the middle of the hallway, finds a relatively spike-free patch of wall to lean against, sinks down into a sitting position and stays there. Her headlamp marks out a clean circle of visibility, beyond which is darkness. She stares into the darkness. It makes her feel a little better.
The forty-one Omniscient Intelligences that came before Ollie are all dead. She knows that much. Some were tasked with the same mission as her, and didn't return. Some perished in stranger ways that she wasn't allowed to know about. Some simply burned out early, shriveling in their gestation cocoons, screaming. So many failures. So many false starts. If there's anyone who can destroy that thing lurking at the heart of the complex for good, it's her.
She cannot mess this up.
Her newfound resolve gets her to her feet and carries her deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. The walls begin to open up. There are more traps, bizarre contingencies to ward off time-travelers and godly influence. She escapes them all. She moves.
Enormous hatches begin appearing on the sides of the tunnel, few and far between, and spaced unevenly. They're shut fast with a ludicrous amount of locking mechanisms each. She quickens her pace because she knows exactly what this means: these are the decoy containment chambers. Sixteen identical steel tombs, no distinguishing features. Together they make up one of the final lines of defense — sheer confusion. Because only one of them contains the object she's looking for.
By the ninth chamber from the top down on the left-hand side of the tunnel, Ollie stops. Here it is. This is the door she sees every time she closes her eyes and reaches within herself, to the part of her that knows nearly everything.
She holds up her right arm and spends a few minutes shifting around the programmable matter of her suit. She needs as much mass as she can muster up for this. Her forearm swells and bulges like an overfilled balloon, extending out into a heavy, slightly tapered barrel. The end slants sharply as if it's been lopped off. Air vents and heat dissipators form along the body of the weapon, like gills. To finish the job, on her helmet, a second visor extrudes and snaps down over the first — making sure she doesn't burn her own eyes out.
Aiming at the edge of the hatch, she powers up the particle cannon.

Anyone inside the containment chamber at that moment would see a searingly bright beam of something that looks a great deal like the surface of the Sun, cutting methodically through the door's hinges and hermetic seal mechanism from the outside. Such an observer would be blinded in an instant, if they didn't have eye protection, and then burnt to a crisp shortly afterwards even if they did.
The hinges are obliterated within seconds. The door creaks dangerously. An obsidian-black hand finds its way into the white-hot seam and pulls, wrenching the door free of its moorings. With a horrible metal screech and a riot of clattering steel and splintering concrete, it's hurled out of sight.
Ollie leaps into the chamber, her boots skidding and sliding on the curved metal floor. It's a massive space, and it echoes. She completely ignores the shifting mist in the air and the tungsten sphere suspended high above her; they're secondary features. She's not done with her particle cannon yet. It's already powering up for another shot, barrel visibly glowing an angry red from the sheer volume of energy building inside it. As it charges she swings it around, aiming across the chamber, directly at a squat assemblage of tanks and tubes built into the far wall.
She fires. The laser punches a molten hole through the machine and completely ruins its inner workings. A deluge of translucent liquid gushes out of the ruptured tanks, pooling in the curved bottom of the containment chamber.
The particle cannon shuts off. Steam hangs in the air, mixing with the haze already there.
Ollie knew what was waiting for her. She knew exactly what that assortment of machinery could produce, was likely already starting to produce. She went for the most dangerous thing in the entire room, hoping she could end the fight before it began with a single decisive shot. Now she's staring at the machine's gutted remains, unsure if she got there in time. She tries to convince herself that her plan worked, that the trouble is over, and almost, almost manages to do it—
Not fast enough. One of them's been gestated already. Brace for impact.
—before something hits her from behind like a freight train.
The sheer force behind the attack is enough to send her skidding across the floor. Reeling, she turns to see a broad-shouldered figure silhouetted against the empty doorway. Chunky armor and a glowing visor. The overall shape vaguely reminds her of her own suit. The figure is wielding a ridiculously large gun in both hands with almost insulting ease, and she belatedly realizes that this is what must have hit her, from a point-blank range. Now that she's thought about it, her back is beginning to ache in twenty different spots.
Irantu was indeed blinded by the initial flash of the laser, but his eyes are already recovering. He reloads, the barrel of his minigun spinning with a series of reverberating clicks. "You must be the intruder."
Ollie's wounded suit is repairing itself. It's slow going. She flattens herself against a wall and begins to reconfigure her particle cannon into something a little more portable. "That would make you the last line of defense," she says, mostly to buy time.
"That is close enough," he says, and fires off another stream of bullets.
The noise is horrendous. Ollie dives for cover, her boots sprouting wheels to speed her along, and her free forearm growing spikes so she can grip onto the wall and swing herself around. She's a black streak in the air. The gunfire carves a pockmarked trail in the wall behind her as she moves. Irantu's aim is impressively good; he tracks the moving target like he's spent his whole life doing it, which he has.
"I've heard about you," she shouts over the din as her weapon patiently reshuffles its parts and location. "Task Force Tau-5. Cyborg supersoldiers carved from the flesh of a dead god. Out of everything your superiors could send against me—" she ducks and rolls beneath another hail of gunfire, then clambers up the wall with adhesive palms— "we're probably the most evenly matched."
"And I have heard about you. The pre-mission briefing was not very informative, though. I only know that you have extrasensory abilities, and are very, very strong." Irantu reloads once more, his barrels smoking. He strides through the sludge pool at the bottom of the chamber, lifts his head to look up at Ollie, and abruptly realizes what she's doing. With barely a moment to spare, he dashes out of the way of the carbide slug that strikes where he was just standing like a lightning bolt.
There's a thunderous explosion. Dodging only marginally reduces the damage when the projectile's kinetic energy is that high. Irantu is flung into the gloom and vanishes, a cloud of smoke billowing in his wake.
Ollie hefts the compact railgun sprouting from her shoulder, its twin conductor rails fizzing with electricity. There's already a second projectile sliding up in the center and two more under construction. She has to make these count; her suit's drawing from reserve mass-energy to print them.
Within the haze, something shifts. Irantu rises, his armor charred and chipped, his visor glowing like a beacon. "This fight will be highly engaging," he intones.
Ollie smiles inside her helmet. Despite everything, it feels good to let loose. "I was thinking the same."
No more words are necessary. She begins with a triple salvo: BOOM kt-chak-chak BOOM kt-chak-chak BOOM. Three more lightning bolts from the heavens. Irantu dashes ahead of the railgun slugs, but not quite fast enough; midstep, he loses his foot to the third shot. Although he goes flying and faceplants in the sludge, he doesn't seem anywhere near as perturbed by the injury as he should be. As he levers himself onto his elbows and aims his minigun, Ollie notes that the stump has already stopped bleeding.
And then he's shooting, and she has to move, skittering across the ceiling like a spiky black roach. She passes the heavy steel cable holding that enigmatic tungsten ball in midair. Irantu avoids firing at or near it; she doesn't have time to unpack the reason why. With a flying leap, she crosses the upper circumference of the chamber and geckoes herself onto the far wall, then quickly spins towards Irantu far below. Her free shoulder sprouts a missile rack, but the suit's cache only has enough mass left for two heat-seekers. She lets them fly anyway.
Her opponent stands, bracing himself against the wall and leaning on his gun for support. He stares up at the missiles screaming towards him, as if gauging distance or performing calculations — then lunges forward and punches one of the incoming explosives, actually punches it with his fist. That fist quickly ceases to exist. The momentum of Irantu's strike carries him forward, causing the second missile to streak right into the wall and explode ineffectually.
Blood streaming from the ragged non-hand at the end of his arm, Irantu staggers forward. He hooks his gun under his arm like a crutch and unslings a second weapon from his belt, this one smaller but chunkier. Ollie leans forward, squints, has barely enough time to get a good look and register what the thing is before he's firing and the phrase pops into her head: sticky grenade launcher.
She leaps for it, but the hail of tiny explosives partially catches her in the side. The blast isn't very spectacular. There's a contained, muffled whump and that's it. She wheels sideways and crashes into the wall, then slides down, slowly.
Ollie's not done, but she almost wants to be. A patch of her suit has been blasted away, revealing a thinner, more flexible but less mutable carapace beneath, which itself is cracked badly. The surrounding material is snaking together to close up the gap at a maddeningly slow pace. Underneath all of that, there's a stabbing pain in her ribs. She grips the wound and hauls herself to her feet. Irantu is lumbering towards her, visor clearly visible through the gloom. No time to think. No time to breathe.
Her railgun is drooping on her shoulder like a sunflower head; with a thought, it jumps to attention. She slams her left hand into the wall, digging her fingers into the steel, then wills her suit to start chewing it up for fuel. To keep Irantu distracted, she retrieves a handful of conventional, stupid explosives from internal storage and flings them toward him in a wide arc. He holds his good hand and arm over his face as if shielding it from the sun. It's almost comical. Several of the bombs detonate against his suit, carving craters into the reinforced plastic-steel plating; one hits a seam and produces a gout of blood. Yet still he keeps on coming.
Ollie is almost ready. She just needs a bit more mass. She doesn't want to die here, of course, but there's a fuzzier, darker feeling underneath that, and it makes her heart race as she digs her fingers deeper into the wall. This fight is giving her a rush she hasn't felt in longer than she can remember. This is different from the sterile training facilities. She doesn't just want the fight to keep going. She wants to win.
"Eyes on me!" she shouts, and unloads her fourth railgun slug point-blank into Irantu's gut.
The cyborg staggers. A waterfall of blood gushes out of his midsection. The shot pierced all the way through; his spine was surely pulverized when it went out the back. But he stays on his feet, raising his grenade launcher, pitching forward and pulling the trigger again and again. She's turning when the deluge of bombs hits, so the initial explosion slams her against the wall face-first, and the next few blasts drive her even deeper into the steel. Fiery pain flares up in her back and arms. Her railgun is blown to pieces. Her suit flakes away like soot.
Then he socks her in the back of the head, and there's the unmistakable sound of something shattering.
A thick, fuzzy silence falls. Irantu drops into a kneel, a pool of red spreading beneath him.
Ollie's crouched against the wall. She grips her head and turns, slowly, agonizingly. There are other injuries. Unspeakable ones. Most visibly, though, part of her visor has been smashed. And something is showing through. It might have been called skin, once, but it's been plated over with so many reinforced plastics and underlaid with so many subcutaneous implants that it's difficult even to tell what its original color was. And near the bottom, barely visible: a staring, eerily human brown eye.
"Why do this? Why work for them?" she rasps. "You could raze them to the ground if you tried."
Irantu spits blood. "My team does not work for the Foundation. This is our choice. Every day. We help them keep the world safe."
In answer, Ollie unsheathes her blades. Two arcs of obsidian pass cleanly through Irantu's neck, and the half-inch of shielding surrounding it, as if passing through air. His head rolls.
"And when they ruin someone else's world?" she asks the corpse. "What do you do then?"

Her systems aren't cooperating. She used up far, far too much mass-energy in that fight. Even before it, really. The particle cannon was just plain flashy in hindsight.
She's sitting against a wall, examining the damage. Heavy stripping of the suit's outer layer on her side. Craters in its programmable matter, peppered along her arms and upper back. Gouges and cracks in her helmet. A hole right through her visor. And countless stinging scrapes and bruises and cuts and broken bones all over her meat body. Nothing is healing up the way it should. Maybe it's because she burned through both regular and reserve power, or maybe it's a lingering effect of that reality anchor, or maybe everything she's put the suit through has just caused it to throw up its arms and quit. None of the options feel particularly surprising.
Her camouflage never came back online. She's not sure why she only realizes this now.
Ollie braces herself against the ground and stands, with much difficulty. Her blades are still out; she didn't feel like putting them away. She looks up, at the steel cable and the tungsten sphere hanging placidly in the center of the chamber. Her objective is in there. She's just about finished the mission. There's nothing between her and victory.
She backs up a few paces, then flicks her arm upwards, just barely managing to suppress a wince. The blade mounted on that arm fires off, spinning, and slices right through the steel cable before embedding itself in the ceiling.
The ball drops. It hits the pool of gestation fluid with a whump and sprays translucent sludge everywhere. There's not enough fluid for it to float, even if it was anything close to light, so it just sits there.
Command's voice crackles in her ear: "Destroy the artifact. Do not otherwise interact with it." This would have startled her, if she had any capacity left to be startled.
Ollie stares down at the sphere, breathing slowly. Her head feels fuzzy. She could spend an hour processing the chamber's walls for raw material, then make another particle cannon and vaporize the thing without having to lay eyes on it. It would be easy. But it would be long. And if she's being completely honest with herself, she wants to know what it is. Of course she does. It's the blackbox, the question mark, one of the unimaginably few things she can't figure out just by pulling the information from nothing.
"Repeat: Do not interact with the artifact."
She makes the executive decision to ignore Command. The mission is complete. She deserves a bit of leeway. As a reward. Just this once.
"Repea—"
She shuts her audio links off. With her remaining blade, Ollie slices open the containment sphere and takes one look at what's inside.
She's dead before she hits the ground.

"Sir," an attendant says to his superior, "should we begin the gestation process for the next OLI unit?"
The superior in question is too busy putting their fist through their monitor to answer. It produces a beautiful, and rather satisfying, shower of sparks.

In the aftermath:
"But why? I don't get it. Whatever its mission was, there's no reason the entity should have jeopardized it like that."
The woman in the suit scoffs. Her young secretary is having to jog just to keep up with her brisk walk. "Do you know what happened today, Barlow?"
"Our containment facility was compromised, and they're reorganizing and repairing the whole thing, and because this is a level-five blackbox site, as a precaution we're all heading to the infirmary to wipe our own memories with aerosol amnestics?" he says hopefully.
"No. From their side, not ours. What happened?"
Barlow thinks. His boss's dress shoes click on the tile floor in perfect rhythm. After a few seconds, he says, "They thought they'd figured the gauntlet out. Right, Ms. Hawthorne?"
Hawthorne nods, almost imperceptibly. It's a cue for him to go on.
He forges ahead. "Not even we know every trap that's been laid in there. It's a necessity when you're dealing with things that can just look into your head and pluck out what they need. It's a necessity when you're dealing with omniscience. Our enemies sent in something that… that couldn't have been truly omniscient, we know that, but it must've been close enough for it not to matter. And it got through almost every trap. It knew what they were. It even dealt with Samsara."
She nods again.
"What I just don't get is— why? Why did they lose?"
So close. Hawthorne sighs, and decides to go a little easier on her subordinate, if only because neither of them will remember this in an hour. "There are two reasons. One, the sheer volume of data to manage would have led even a semi-omniscient intelligence to miss crucial details. For our purposes, the most crucial of them all was the Class I amnestics piped into the chamber. Its suit visor was cracked, you know. Easy for the gas to get in. We're still working on its biology, but we know it was human enough to be disoriented by that."
Barlow nods, understanding.
"That's the first reason. The second reason is that omniscient intelligences are all the same." She doesn't look at him. "It doesn't matter what kind of walls you put on their perception. It doesn't matter what kind of training you give them. They want to know everything, and they want to know it now. They'll do anything for it. And that's the final trap. That's the one thing our enemies haven't been able to engineer out of their supersoldiers. The one obstacle they'll never be able to get around.
"You want to kill an omniscience? Give it the most tantalizing puzzle box it's ever seen, and put a killsprite in the middle."
END


My name is Doctor Algahst Trintavon, lead of Risk Prevention at the Foundation's Department of Thaumaturgy. I possess something that my coworkers call "inverse precognition".
"But Doctor," you might snidely ask me. "Isn't that just 'hindsight?'". No; there's a very key distinction between hindsight…and what I have.
Hindsight is something you use to look back on something, having it dawn upon you all the ways that the actions you did could have gone horribly, irrevocably wrong.
"Inverse precognition", however, allows me to see all of the things that can not happen, just by looking at something at the right time.
It's not something that I can do on command, you see. It's not even something prevalent amongst my kind. The Foundation officially calls it a "genetic fluke", while my family called it "a blessing from Higher Up".
Regardless, I have no control over how I activate the sense. One moment, I will lay my eyes on an object or being, and then that moment expands as all possible scenarios that can not and will not happen involving them flashes before my eyes.
The closest analogy I can describe what I experience, that will make sense to you, is that it's as if I'm viewing a dense flipbook, the pages blurring together but moving just slow enough that I'm able to keep retention of what's on them.
So I will know, for example, that the book bound in rotted human flesh we recovered from a decrepit Sarkic temple does not have any thaumaturgic rituals that can cause an HK-Class "Deific Subjugation" Scenario, just from a spare glance at it. Or that D-5768 will not survive the upcoming Mekhanite raid on our site to steal said book, no matter which options are available to them.
It is a useful ability to have, when it works. But there's a reason why I don't subscribe to my family's beliefs about it being a blessing.
Not after I accepted the Foundation's recruitment offer into their ranks, and turned to see my family, my home…and my heart sank into the pit of my stomach when the flash came over me.
Seeing myself meet the love of my life.
Seeing myself in their embrace while we grew old together, surrounded by the adoring eyes of our children and grandchildren.
Seeing hands big and small grasping onto mine as I passed away peacefully in my sleep.


I'm falling through a blizzard. There's no up or down, nothing to see, nothing to grab onto. Little pings of consciousness and roiling waves of thought scream at every part of my brain to pay attention. Every time I reach out for something to hold onto, it slips back into the chaos. Over and over again.
My body is a ghostly suggestion, somewhere far away. I can feel the fire running up my arms. I'm still breathing, probably, physically. It doesn't help. I try to scream but my lips won't move. I can't feel anything but the flood of consciousness trying to subsume me.
Something sharp tugs at my mind. Something focused on me, piercing through everything else. I throw myself into it, press my face against it. I gasp for breath as I hammer an anchor point into my mind. It smells like spices and the tiniest bit of vanilla.
I can feel myself breathing now. I feel fingers wrapped around my waist, giving me a gentle squeeze. Same presence, calm, steady. It radiates from her touch.
She's trying to talk to me. Her voice is a low hum against my cheek, but I can't understand the words.
Another wave of panic starts to blossom through me. “It's okay.” I try to tell the presence. “It's okay it's okay it's okay it's okay.”
I can't breathe. The fire in my arms burns brighter and I'm just trying to hold onto the calm even though I'm not okay and maybe I'll never be okay because I'm choking again and all I can feel is-
The presence pulls me closer, wrapping both arms around me. The panic catches just before it tears through me. She doesn't let it, holding me in her presence.
“You're safe, 7910, I promise. You're safe.” Doctor Yu whispers.
I trust her. The burning through my arms dies down just a little. I start to feel things again. My blanket is still between my fingers and wrapped tightly around me. I rub the cable knit between my thumbs. Another anchor point, another deep breath. The world doesn't feel nearly as sharp, now, and my brain is starting to filter out all of the sensations I was drowning in.
Doctor Porter is behind me, on the other side of the couch. I can feel her wanting to ask me if I'm okay. In contrast to Doctor Yu's serenity, she's a ball of barely controlled anxiety. But she knows that the best way to help is not to press. Gives me the mental space to breathe.
I try to open my eyes, but the world starts to spin. Doctor Yu keeps me steady, her face almost pressed to mine.
“Dizzy.” An assessment, not a question. Her eyes meet mine and I blush, feeling how close together we are. “Do you know where you are?”
I nod. I'm still on the couch in Site-93's common room. My blanket is wrapped around me, and I stim with my thumbs and fingers rubbing small circles along the fabric. My breathing is steady now, but I'm still shaky. The world beyond the three of us spins out of reach, muted and blurry.
I shiver as she runs a finger across my wrists. Her touch, now, is deliberate, professional. She notes the coloration of blood vessels; The dark patterns haven't expanded too much, and Doctor Porter taps notes on a tablet. The cool of her touch lingers where she runs her fingers down my neck.
A knot of tension unwinds as she pulls back. Reports that there aren't any unexpected or concerning symptoms. Only the usual mess, tonight. Doctor Porter has a few questions, too, and I respond with nods or shakes of my head. Also expected. Words are complicated, difficult. Too much to be useful in the middle of so much swirling thought, trying to explain how the tightness in my chest felt because I thought I was going to be lost in something I could barely understand as so so many thoughts and feelings and emotions and-
“7910.” Doctor Yu takes my hand in hers and a cold shock shorts out the feedback loop in my brain. “You're safe. Take a deep breath.”
I squeeze her hands, holding onto that cold. The world is starting to spin again and I intertwine my arm with hers, lean into her shoulder, and breathe.
Something else is running along her mind. A spark, then something warm spreading across her before everything gets muddled together. She takes a deep breath and looks away from me, a bit of pink in her cheeks, just like it felt when she was running her finger down my- “Oh.”
Doctor Yu is quiet for a moment. She holds her voice steady but anxiety pools in her chest. “I'm-I'm sorry if I…” Doctor Yu tries to sound calculated, like she's taking a moment to decide which words fit best, but for the first time since we've met, she's not sure which words to use at all. “I shouldn't have-We can take you back to your cell in just a moment if-”
Doctor Porter sighs. She's a mix of worried and annoyed that I can't pin down either. We sit in silence for a moment, tension pulling at my chest, making me dizzier.
“Well, things are winding down, anyway. We have a little Christmas party of our own for tomorrow.” The tension starts to release and I can feel her smile. “As long as 7910 is feeling okay, now, we can take her back as planned.” There's a resignation, some silent agreement we've all just made together.
Doctor Yu opens her mouth but can't find any words, so settles for just nodding. There's a part of her that's still tense. But she takes a deep breath and ignores it. Squeezes my hand and pulls me just a bit closer.
“Is this okay?” She still tries to be professional, covering the nervous butterflies, and shifts so that her arm is around me again.
I wrap mine around her, too. “More than okay.” I rest my head on her shoulder, feel her chest rise and fall next to mine. She doesn't reach for more or over extend. Doesn't try to say anything else. It's enough to just feel her intertwined with me.
The rest of the world fades away. Her voice hums against my cheek while she and Doctor Porter talk in low whispers. Maybe in another life this could be different, something more. But I push that thought away. For now, I just cling to the moment, to her, and let it be enough.