by qntm

Previously

The meeting room is Containment Unit S167-00-1006, which is the skull of a stillborn Cryptomorpha gigantes.
The hollowed-out space inside the skull cavity is a prototypical Vegas room — a place where what happens, stays. People go in, they come out, their memories are sieved out of the universe as they leave, and they remember nothing. The skull was acquired in the Nineties. The information suppression effect is a byproduct of the species' natural antimemetic camouflage, a phenomenon which rendered the colossally tall creatures somehow nearly impossible to observe in the wild. It's a phenomenon Dr. Bartholomew Hughes and his team spent years figuring out how to replicate. They've got it, now. They can synthesise C. gigantes bone, extruding it in prefabricated pieces from steel grids. They can bolt the plates together to make hermetically sealed boxes. Passive memetic insulation, no need for complicated machines; it's got a lot of potential.
The skull is forty-five metres long, sixteen wide and fifteen tall. It resides at the centre of a vast purpose-built containment unit of its own, surrounded by the rest of the same C. gigantes individual's bones, laid out in meticulous radial patterns for space efficiency. The ossuary occupies about a third of the containment unit's floor area. The rest comprises immense industrial vessels which hold its harvested organs. Some of them are actual vessels, repurposed cargo ships loaded with brain matter and skin tissue.
The floor plan of the warehouse is clear enough, navigable if grim. But from ground level, on foot, the place is a vertiginous, intimidatingly macabre place, even fluorescent-lit around the clock. Hughes walks down an echoing canyon created by, on his left, a hundred-metre-long foreleg bone and on his right, the blue steel container holding the creature's first stomach. Ahead, the skull peers down the canyon at him, a distant yellow-white tower, fuzzed with scaffolding and disused scanning rig, its eye sockets vacant black.
As he walks, Hughes has to remind himself continually that these are all the remains of a single organism, one of the tiniest examples of its species.
Behind the skull, where there used to be the creature's first neck vertebra, there is now a large compound mechanical airlock, a ramp and some steps, and a staging area. The staging area serves as a miniature customs desk, tracking every person and item entering and leaving S167-00-1006. Although memories are wiped on exit, written and electronic records emerging from the interior have to be handled manually. Standard procedure is for the first person exiting the room to bring written instructions for the Filtration Officer, telling them what other information from the room interior needs to be scrubbed, and what is safe to retain. Usually the list of information to retain is very short.
There are seats, scanners, a coffee machine, a trolley loaded with cleaning equipment, and a stack of cages for the germs. Parked just outside of the staging area, there is also a limousine — bulletproof.
"Where's everybody else?" Hughes asks the Foundationer who meets him, whose name is Bochner. "I'm not late."
"This way, please," she says, leading him to a seat near a scanner. Hughes has gone through this procedure a dozen times now, so he knows to hold his left arm out. Bochner tears the wrapper off a sterile bracelet-like sensor and clamps it around Hughes' left wrist, then observes a nearby screen. "They went in almost an hour ago," she says.
Hughes frowns. That's not usual. Why would they tell him a different start time? Why would they need an hour of preparation time before he showed up? "Did they say anything?"
"Of course not."
Hughes hasn't the slightest clue what this meeting is about, or what any of the previous meetings were about, or even if they have a common topic.
Actually, he does have some clues. The timing of the meetings is one. The first took place early this year, and when they emerged, amnesiac, they were clutching written instructions from themselves to themselves to continue meeting monthly. Around October, the meetings became weekly. They had three last week. And after Friday, they created a new schedule: they meet for ninety minutes every morning, starting today, Monday.
A more significant clue is the list of attendees. Other than Hughes, three high-calibre researchers from his own organisation are in attendance, along with the directors of Sites 41, 45 and 167, the last of whom is Michael Li, the Foundation's chief of Antimemetics and Hughes' direct manager.
He steals a glance at the car parked behind him. There's also this guy. Or gal. Hughes doesn't know for sure to whom the limo belongs, but the list of people in the world who have the authority to drive a street vehicle into a Foundation containment building is extremely short. Well, not to prevaricate, it's thirteen people. There is an O5 in the room. An O5 is extremely interested in their covert discussions. This is a new and nontrivially alarming development.
He nods at the car. "Shouldn't this place be lousy with private security right now?"
Bochner shrugs.
"Anybody go into the unit with the O5? Bodyguard? Anybody stay in the car?"
"No."
Hughes glances at the car again. The windows are tinted, though surely there's a driver behind the wheel, at least. But where's the real protection? Maybe it's all invisible. Microbes. Occult spells of warding. He feels like the car is watching him back.
"Open your mouth, please." Bochner puts a disc-like cap on Hughes' head, presses an emitter to the roof of his mouth, and fires two pulses of radiation through his brain. "Any psychic intrusions?"
Muffled by the emitter, Hughes manages, "Uh-uh."
She pulls out the emitter and discards it. "Did you experience REM sleep in the past twelve hours?"
He wipes his mouth. "Yes."
"How many digits do you have?"
"Ten."
"Count them for me, please."
Hughes spreads his fingers and counts them. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten." His right thumb is "five".
Bochner injects him with a substance which will prevent his body from rejecting the germ, then lifts a germ out of one of the cages. It splays its tendrils out, confused, not a fan of being picked up. "Tilt your head back and look at the ceiling, please. Eyes wide open. And, if you could take off your glasses."
Hughes obliges, handing his glasses to Bochner for scanning. "I dislike this part," he states.
Bochner has no comment. She lays the germ over his eyes, like a sleep mask. There's a cold, sludgy sensation as it wraps itself around his chin and hair, then the tendrils meet behind his neck and begin knitting with his spine. Hughes sees darkness for a few worrying seconds, then a circular indentation forms in the germ's hide over the top of his right eye, and there's a feeling like part of his brain dislocating, and a fake eye opens where his real one would be. The fake eyeball is around four times the size of his own. Though it is singular, its four pupils grant him decent depth-perception, and he can see a little way into the ultraviolet.
The germ is acting as an external block of short-to-medium-term memory, and as a proxy between the conscious Bart Hughes and the real world. When the meeting is over, the germ will be removed and incinerated, along with all memory of the meeting.
There are other amnestic approaches — gas, injectable drugs, surgical techniques, occult rituals. These are safe, proven technologies for mass use on the general public and Foundation staff alike, but they all operate on the same essential principle that the unwanted knowledge has already entered the mind and must now be removed or suppressed after the fact. Such procedures are imperfect. Memory removal can leave critical fragments behind, occasionally enough for people to rebuild dangerous wholes; and mnestic technologies for causing suppressed memories to reassert themselves are continually advancing. Recent developments on the latest-generation family of biochemical mnestics, Class Z, seem likely to produce a substance which renders all after-the-fact memory erasure techniques irrelevant. The only amnestic defence against Class Z will be decapitation. So, if there's advance warning time, it's better to physically compartmentalise, to airgap; to outsource the memories to another organism entirely and never let them touch your own mind. You can't be forced to recall something which you genuinely never experienced.
It's a complex and dynamic field, one of several fields in which Hughes is a world expert. There are machines which could perform the same task as the germ, silicon modules you wear like a headset, plugged into a surgically implanted jack behind your ear, but Hughes would rather die than submit to interfacing his brain directly with a computer, especially a Foundation-made computer. Nobody is getting his brainwaves. When he joined the Foundation, thirty years ago, he put a DNU in his will — Do Not Upload. Everybody thought he was crazy.
Of course, using both the germs and a Vegas room feels rather like overkill. That's another clue.
"Your belongings have been scanned," Bochner tells him. He refills his pockets and takes up his laptop. Walking slightly unsteadily because of the new weight he's carrying on his head, he climbs the stairs to the airlock.

*

Hughes would be the first to admit that a typical Foundationer has appalling taste. A typical Foundationer picks brutal functionality over aesthetic pleasure one hundred times out of one hundred, and a depressing percentage of Foundationers don't even comprehend the distinction. Hughes sees this reflected in the architectural choices and interior design of the Foundation's buildings and offices, and in its labs and containment facilities, which commonly cultivate a hopeless, bleak-cliff-edge atmosphere. He sees it in its machinery, its devices, its tools and even its font choices. Hard edges, clashing colours, failing aircon, impersonality, clutter, claustrophobia.
And so, S167-00-1006's interior is a surprise and a delight. Hughes actually sighs. It seems like someone hired a designer. The place is spacious and modern, well-lit, with select walls painted in bright secondary colours. There's not a bit of exposed concrete in sight.
S167-00-1006 isn't a single space but a self-contained suite laid out on two floors. There's a central meeting area with a double-height ceiling, a long oval table and Herman Miller chairs. Along the left wall there are smaller breakout meeting rooms with frosted glass walls and doors. Above those, reached by a flight of stairs, there's a kitchen area, and in the back are some additional rooms, restrooms and storage. The carpet is grey and orange, a non-repeating hexagonal pattern. The place is well-ventilated, and smells of coffee.
There are four people waiting for him. Marion Wheeler, who runs Site 41, is descending the kitchen stairs, holding a steaming disposable cup. Graves, director of Site 45, is at the main table, typing at a laptop. Michael Li is at the back of the room chatting with O5-8. All of them are wearing germs. The four huge eyeballs of the four germs swivel in unison to stare at Hughes as he comes in. It's a highly disconcerting effect. Hughes forces himself to smile back.
"You're here," O5-8 says. He is… strange-looking, even accounting for the germ. Hughes has never seen an O5 before, and O5-8 looks very unlike what he expected. He tries not to stare, but his own germ is extremely good at staring.
"You're all caught up?" Hughes asks. The nature of the asynchronous work loop is that the first quarter of any meeting in a Vegas room is spent reading notes left from prior meetings. Hughes' (correct) guess is that there's been an hour-long pre-meeting, and then everybody broke for coffee, and now they're resuming.
"We are," O5-8 says. He takes a seat at the head of the table, with Graves to his left. Li sits to his right, and Wheeler to Li's right. O5-8 indicates a particular vacant chair, opposite Wheeler, where a printed document is waiting for Hughes to read it.
Hughes sets his laptop down, hesitant to approach the document. "You want me to read this now?"
"Take as long as you need."
"Where's my team?" Hughes asks. "We're three bodies short."
"Read the document, Dr. Hughes," O5-8 says. He seems upbeat. Perhaps he's projecting an upbeat facade to help Hughes to forget exactly how much authority and power he wields. His net worth is said to be essentially infinite. It's not really about money at his level. He, and his kind, can do anything.
Hughes sits, and reads.
The document is a scientific paper purportedly authored by Hughes himself, with various of his fellow researchers co-authoring, including two who should be in this room now. Hughes doesn't recognise the paper's title or content, but that's nothing special in his line of work. The text is written in his own formal, academic style, so he has no reason to doubt its authenticity.
It's a brisk read, very dense and to-the-point, written for a target audience of other memetics scientists. In the abstract, it announces the observation of a new, titanically powerful and dangerous (anti)memeplex, provisionally designated SCP-3125, for which the authors plan to seek Apollyon classification.
"Hmm."
The main body of the first page describes eight different phenomena, most but not all of them anomalous, most but not all of the anomalous ones controlled by the Foundation and having SCP designations. From a cursory glance, the phenomena appear to be totally unrelated, either to one another or to the proposed SCP-3125. Hughes suspects he could derive the implied link between them, given a few minutes, but elects to read on. He flips the piece of paper over. The whole document is just two sides of A4.
The other side is mostly mathematics. There is one graph, and one equation, and a brief technical description of two highly novel memeplectic transformation procedures, which the authors dub "amplification". Then there's—
—something like a jump scare in text form. There's a crucial logical leap, and for Hughes, the arrival of comprehension is so blunt, so sudden and frightening that it physically startles him. Even knowing that the word "Apollyon" was on the table, even primed to expect something extremely nasty on this side of the paper, he recoils. "Oh, fucking hell."
Nobody else says anything. They wait, expectantly, for Hughes to gather his thoughts and draw some conclusions.
He reads the rest of the paper, figuring out what it's going to say almost live as he reads it. As he reaches the end, the initial shock hasn't worn off. The sheer scope of SCP-3125 is a significant distance beyond his current comprehension. He's had a glimpse of it through a keyhole. He would need time in front of a computer to play with the results to get a grasp of it.
No. He needs to build filters first, the equivalent of lead-lined gloves, to let him manipulate this radioactive idea complex with some degree of safety. He feels like it may have glimpsed him.
Apollyon classification is reserved for highly destructive active anomalies which are functionally impossible to contain — something past Keter. An Apollyon-class anomaly is an anomaly more or less guaranteed to ultimately destroy the world, no matter what is done to stop it. The only thing which can avert that particular XA-class scenario is if something else, likely some other Apollyon-class anomaly, destroys the world first. Their relative threat level is measured not in material containment resources but in inevitable years. Off the top of his head, Hughes would put that figure as a single digit.
"Yeah, this is it," he says. It's bizarrely liberating. "This is the one that's going to kill us." He looks around the table. "Did we obtain Apollyon classification?"
"No," O5-8 says.
"No?"
O5-8 smiles thinly. "Current thinking in the Overseer space is that Apollyon classification is a confession of defeat. It's bad for morale. It cultivates defeatist attitudes. Aside from the special classifications, Keter is considered the top of the hierarchy as of right now. All extant Apollyons are likely to be re-evaluated and re-classified Keter over the next year or so. Other than that, what do you think?"
Hughes says, "You want containment procedures? We've had this conversation a bunch of times before, correct?"
"Let's imagine this is the first time," O5-8 says.
Hughes stares darkly at his paper. "We could exterminate all intelligent human life," he says. "If there are no sapient hosts in this universe, SCP-3125 can't incarnate."
There's a faintly stunned pause. "Yes," Wheeler says. "You've pitched that approach before. And I don't think any of us here have ever been completely sure if you were serious."
"I'm completely serious that we could do it, and completely serious that it would work," Hughes says. "Our mission statement is 'Secure, contain, protect'. Somewhere down the line we really should look into adding 'and keep as many human beings alive as possible' to that."
"It's implicit that humanity is what we protect," Graves says.
"Secure the anomalies, contain the anomalies, protect the anomalies. How does it scan otherwise?"
"We're getting off-topic," Wheeler says. "We're not exterminating all sapient life."
"We could immediately terminate and suppress all memetics and antimemetics research worldwide," Hughes says. "We would have to systematically dismantle the whole scientific field forever. Stop all the experiments, scrap all the research, brainwash all the researchers. If nobody actively researches this field, nobody will ever find SCP-3125. It stays buried in the farthest reaches of ideatic space indefinitely, like radioactive waste." He looks up at the ceiling. The problem is interesting. "Ironically, the most practical way to do that would be to develop an artificial meme. One which encodes the idea that memetics research is intrinsically worthless and harmful. Enrich it with religious or pseudoscientific virals and release it to the general public. A year after it got out we'd be tearing our own labs down. Unless the Antimemetics Division's institutional immunity to that kind of external threat was strong enough to stand up to the pressure. Interesting scenario. Even if we don't go in that direction we should definitely think about wargaming it in simulation, see what outcomes are likely—"
"Bart," Wheeler says.
"No, hiding wouldn't work. It could be introduced externally or occur naturally—"
"We know. Bart, that's already happened. SCP-3125 is incarnating as we speak. Look at these precursor anomalies. We're in what you called the foreshadow. It's here."
Wheeler's referring to predictive models which Hughes must have created himself during prior meetings, models with which he doesn't have time to familiarise himself. Still, he gets it.
He wishes he didn't get it. His fear comes from a completely different place from most people's. The sheer alien scale of the adversary is enough to intimidate most into petrified submission. From a cursory read, SCP-3125 looks like a nightmare scenario; it's going to turn human civilisation into something beyond Hughes' ability to imagine. But that's every Monday in this job, and in any case Hughes doesn't have much of an imagination. He is intimately familiar with almost the entire SCP database, and he's a world authority in anomalous containment. The few areas of science he doesn't have genius-level ability in, he has trusted colleagues who do. They are all solved problems, locked boxes.
This is different. He has more ideas, but there is, mechanically, no way to start working on the problem. It would eviscerate him the moment he tried to comprehend the entire problem. He'd need to design and build the box while already inside the box he was building. He would need to box the universe.
He looks around the room's walls. They seem to be holding up.
"We could hide in units like this for the rest of our lives," he says. "Our whole species. While SCP-3125 roamed our reality unchecked, like a plague. I declare this to be the exterior of the containment unit. Done."
No reaction.
"I don't think we can do it," he says. "If SCP-3125 is live in consensus nominality right now, the game is over. I don't care if Apollyon classification lives or dies, from where I'm sitting this anomaly is functionally uncontainable. I… my team and I may have said something different on prior iterations. I could be in the wrong headspace to see the answer. We are all of us different people from day to day."
"No," O5-8 says. "You say the same thing every time."
"So that's it. Is that it?"
O5-8 says, "The objective of the Foundation is protection. In the majority of cases this involves the secure containment of anomalous entities; the establishment of special containment procedures such that such entities can be kept safely, and indefinitely. Standard guidance is against active neutralization and to avoid destruction at all costs. Everybody in this room is aware of this. However, senior Foundation officials such as me have the right to waive that guideline under certain narrow conditions. I am exercising that right. I deem that in our reality, SCP-3125 cannot coexist with human civilization. We're going to destroy SCP-3125. Forever. Does that change your outlook any?"
"Special neutralization procedures," Hughes deadpans. His expression is worsening by the minute.
O5-8 adds, "I know that neutralization is… generally considered easier than mere containment."
Hughes says:
"When I first joined the Foundation, I asked my mentor, who retired many years ago, 'What's the biggest anomaly we've ever contained?' That he was cleared for, I meant, of course. And he told me about a very old rumor he once heard, back in his earliest days, when he was just starting out. The rumor was that Abrahamic religions had not always been monotheistic. Originally, there were three capital-G Gods. And sometime in the past hundred and fifty years, the Foundation had killed two of them.
"I believed him. I was very young and inexperienced, and naive, and kind of in awe. It wasn't until years later that I thought back to the conversation — and the fact that I'd never heard that rumor, or anything like it, from anybody else — and realised he had been bullshitting me.
"And now it's decades later still, and modern memeplectic technology is a hundred billion times more advanced than it was back then, and I built thirty percent of it, and I look at what the Antimemetics Coalition handles on a quarterly basis, and I know better than anybody on the face of this Earth what is or is not possible, and…"
He trails off. They're all waiting expectantly for him to say something. He can't get there. He's in the wrong frame of mind. Maybe he's in denial, maybe the solution is an idea he doesn't want to take on board. How ironic—
"What did I say? Just tell me."
"Your team suggested that just because SCP-3125 is the most powerful memeplectic threat ever observed doesn't mean it's the top of the hierarchy," O5-8 says. "You suggested that it would be possible to synthesise an idea an order of magnitude still more powerful than SCP-3125, specifically designed to neutralize SCP-3125, and under our control. A countermeme."
"That would take… That could be… possible," Hughes hazards. "It would be insanely dangerous. It would require tremendous resources. And ten to twenty years of real time work, completely uninterrupted. To avoid observation, we'd need to be hermetically sealed away from the exterior universe for that entire time. We'd need a lab as big as a Launch Arcology. Wait a second."
His brain has just caught up. He realises the context in which he's saying these things. And he's been working for the Foundation for a long time.
"It's done," he says. "The lab, it's been built. It was built decades ago, in secret, and we put our best researchers inside it and now the work is done. That's what we're meeting for, now. We're ready to go. We're figuring out how to deploy the countermeme. That's brilliant! If I'm right, that's brilliant. Am I right?"
"Bart," Wheeler says. "When you joined the Foundation, you were taught that a day would come when you would have to, with very little preparation, sacrifice much or all of your existence to protect what most needs protecting. You've worked here for thirty years. And all of that time you knew that that sacrifice would be in your future someday. We were all taught the same thing."
It feels to Hughes as if a shadow falls over him. He looks at Michael Li, his director, who hasn't spoken yet.
Li says, "You're right that the lab is built. Construction was completed in the last forty-eight hours. The construction crew have been amnesticized and dismissed. But the work hasn't begun yet. That's what today's about."
Hughes says, "…That's where my people are."
"That's where your people are," Li says. "They're in the bunker, waiting. We have your cover story prepped. We're faking your death. It's time. You're going under now."
"Now? No. I… I doubt that."
"Your team volunteered. I took care of them myself. They're good people," Li says.
"Like hell," Hughes says, "did I volunteer for this."
Wheeler says, "Bart!"
Hughes says, "Any prior version of me who agreed to this was a God-damned moron, and I disavow his opinions. This is a prison sentence. I don't want to spend twenty years not able to see the Sun. I don't want to be buried alive in work. I have…"
He trails off, and stares through the table, eyes defocused. He was about to say, "I have family."
But he doesn't.
There's still his sister. She's Foundation, like him. But he can't talk to her, and she can't talk to him. They've tried.
He tries another tack. "This… has a low probability of success. The timeframes are bad. It's 2008. SCP-3125 will be here by the end of the 2010s—"
"It has an excellent probability of success," Graves says.
"Define 'excellent'," Hughes says.
"Better than fifty percent. If it's you." Graves produces a thick report which presumably backs him up.
Hughes peers at the document. He can see his own name on the cover. God damn it. Fifty percent is good. If he were anybody else in this room, he'd seize the chance with both hands.
Graves goes on. "You convinced us that this had to be done. And that you had to be at the center. You were prepared to make the sacrifice." He opens the document to a page in the back. The eyeball of his germ roves the page rapidly and finds the passage he wants. "Allow me to quote your own words to you: 'SCP-3125 represents an omniversal-scale threat. It threatens neighbouring realities to ours. It threatens microverses within our macroverse. It threatens universes which embed ours as fiction—'"
"Go ahead and think of it as a prison sentence, if it helps," O5-8 interrupts. "Rescind your consent if you'd like. But the next place you're going after this is the bunker."
Hughes glances around the room's walls again. He makes it too obvious what he's thinking.
"The door's locked, Dr. Hughes," O5-8 says. "You're not exiting until we're through here."
"What's the cover story?" Hughes asks. "How were you planning to do it?"
"A helium gas leak in S167-B03-312," Graves explains. "The leak will be real. There's a forged body in there already, impossible to distinguish from a real one. We've tampered with your public schedule for the day. It puts you in that room, not this one. As for—"
"He's stalling," O5-8 says to Graves and the others. "He doesn't need to know any of this."
"Name somebody else," Li suggests. "Being serious. Who in the world, other than you, stands a credible chance of solving this problem? Who could we send instead?"
Hughes says nothing. There's nobody. Really, nobody in the world. And he can do it.
Li presses, "Is there anybody else? Even if they didn't want to. Who has the skills we need, who isn't already in the vault?"
The world shifts positions a little. Li's standing now. Wheeler looks around alertly, gripping the arm of her chair. She has a fountain pen in her fist, uncapped. It's like she just remembered something. O5-8 glances at Wheeler, puzzled at her reaction to, apparently, nothing. Hughes doesn't notice anything.
"It's just me," Hughes says.
"It's just you," Li says. "That's good enough for me."
"Hold on a second," Wheeler says.
Li pulls a gun out of nowhere. Hughes' germ's enormous pupils shrink to violet pinpricks.
This is no part of any plan, everybody in the room knows it. It's a real gun. It's impossible that he could have it. Wheeler starts to rise out of her chair. Her own sidearm is locked in a box outside.
Li aims at Bart Hughes' chest and fires twice. The first round pierces him in the lung. The second round, fired as Hughes collapses, nicks his laptop screen, which is bulletproof, and ricochets up into the meeting room wall.

*

Li turns, now aiming at O5-8. He gets two more rounds off, each causing an earsplitting electronic shriek and a flash of luminous green light as O5-8's protective ward absorbs the energy. Wheeler lunges at Li from behind his gun arm, deflecting it upwards with one hand while plunging the fountain pen into his throat with the other. Li struggles. Wheeler pulls hard, opening his throat all the way up. Li's fingers loosen and she spirits the gun away. Li gurgles in agony and stumbles backwards, clutching futilely at his wound. He smashes his head — well, the germ he's wearing on his head — against a glass meeting room door, and slides down it into a spreading red lake. He's neutralized.
There are two seconds in which nothing happens.
O5-8's eyes meet Wheeler's. "Your thoughts?" he asks, urgently.
"Michael Li was compromised, I don't know how," Wheeler says. She makes the gun safe, holsters it and vaults over the table to check on Hughes. He's dead, she finds. Graves is dead too. When in the hell did Graves get hit? What just happened in this room? "This whole Site could be compromised from top to bottom—"
"I have follow-up questions," O5-8 begins. A bolt of lethally intense heat and light interrupts him, scorching the wall behind his head. He ducks.
Wheeler turns to track the source, aiming the gun with bloody hands. Something is lasering its way in through the containment unit airlock. It's a powerful laser, wielded with robotic precision. It's happening almost too fast to see.
"My personal security," O5-8 says. "It heard the shots."
"Call it off," Wheeler says. "If this unit is breached, SCP-3125 is coming for all of us."
"The unit's hermetically sealed. I can't send any kind of signal until the door's open."
"That's a problem—"
The airlock splits, and is torn away in segments. An enormous gloss black armoured mechanoid looms in the gap, crouched to peer into the room. It looks exactly as if O5-8's limousine got up and started walking. It's still impossible to guess whether there could be a human pilot inside it. Behind it, in the distance, Bochner is immobilised, sealed to one of the staging area chairs with a sizeable glob of transparent orange glue. She screams, "Help!"
For Wheeler, it feels as if a black wave rolls over her, pouring into the containment unit from outside. She drops the gun and raises her hands. Being found holding the smoking gun isn't likely to be a good look, and she doesn't know for sure what heuristics, human or electronic or otherwise, control the mechanoid; it could be prone to making bad decisions.
"Stand down," O5-8 says to his bodyguard. It stops moving, but its single laser doesn't, flickering as fast as the eye can follow between four motionless targets: Wheeler, Hughes, Graves and Li. It's waiting for movement.
Li, not completely dead, twitches. The laser pulses once in retaliation, atomising his head and germ. The laser settles down to a shorter pattern, looping between the three remaining targets. Wheeler doesn't move a millimetre.
"I said, 'Stand down'!"
This time it seems to hear him. The laser clicks off and settles into a neutral position.
Wheeler relaxes. "Li was compromised," she says again. She hurries to the back of the room, where a medical kit is mounted on the wall. "We need to get you out of here. Then we need to sterilize the Site."
"Compromised when?" O5-8 asks. "By whom? I was given to understand that SCP-3125 rendered its victims wholly bodily subordinate to it, biologically incapable of doing anything but propagate its core concepts. But Li was still high-functioning."
"We've miscalculated something," Wheeler says. She throws most of the kit aside, keeping only a strangely-shaped capsule with a thin nozzle and pink fluid inside.
"And the gun? We were all searched on entry."
"I don't know." Wheeler can think of several ways to get the gun into room undetected. It could have been planted in the restroom by Li on a prior visit. Bochner could be complicit. Perhaps others. She thinks there's an extremely strong chance that the three members of Hughes' team have been murdered too.
It's all academic now. She applies the capsule to her right wrist and infuses the first half of the dose. It's fast-acting chemical amnestic. She hopes that splitting one dose between the two of them will be enough.
"Isn't this the part where SCP-3125 makes an appearance?" O5-8 suggests. "I certainly feel… something. In my head. My germ, I should say."
"Me too. Roll up your sleeve. You also need to deactivate your shield for a second." He obliges, and Wheeler gives him the rest of the drug. Wheeler sorely wishes the shields were standard issue, but they are exceptionally hard to come by, and there are serious controversies and side-effects associated with them.
Outside, Bochner has been gurgling and starting to speak in tongues. Now she screams again. When Wheeler looks, something long and dark, sharp as a javelin and bifurcating into filaments, descends from somewhere in the ceiling of the warehouse. It curls around the chair Bochner is glued to, and lifts her up into the air. A second thin feeler makes an appearance. It probes Bochner's glue-covered midsection, curiously, and then pushes itself through her, like a pin through paper.
She wails, litres of blood gushing out and splashing to the floor below her. The feeler withdraws, then makes a second hole beside the first, and continues in that fashion.
More spider legs impale O5-8's mechanoid bodyguard, and pull it away from the airlock, rapidly dissecting it into sparking pieces. The laser flashes wildly as the machine dies. It's no use.
In the distance, a site-wide containment alarm starts up.
"It's a memetic threat," O5-8 says, mostly to himself. "Where do the arachnoforms come in?"
"Do you have alternate transportation?" Wheeler asks.
"S167-B02-101, there's an escape pod," O5-8 says.
As he says it, Wheeler writes it down on her hand with her bloodied fountain pen. "Underground? You're sure? Is there a code for the door?"
O5-8 lists five digits. He clutches his head. His germ is twitching unhappily and changing colour and texture, as if an infection is spreading across its pale blue skin. "I can feel it. It's like— steel jaws. This is… most unpleasant."
"We need to get to the escape pod," Wheeler says. "There's nothing else that matters. We don't need to remember why. Got it?"
Spider legs reach into the airlock and begin tearing the room to pieces. They're fast-moving and grabby and angry. They know there's something important inside, but they can't get to it. The skull bone is too strong to be broken apart.
O5-8 doesn't have much field experience. The amnestic is blurring his thoughts. "I'm deferring to you," he says, dozily. "Escape pod. Lead on."
Wheeler takes his hand. She's got Li's gun in the other — a decent amount of ammunition left. "With me," she says. She's done this before. She doesn't know it.
The warehouse ceiling starts to cave in.

*

But what is it?
Where is it? What does SCP-3125 look like? Its motivation, its origins, its modus operandi— how much of that can be known? Does it have to be known, to solve the problem? Does it matter how intelligent the intelligence is, once it's inside the box, once it's checkmated?
And what actinic, mind-wrenching form could the countermeme take? How could human hands assemble something so devastatingly powerful and hold it steady; what human mind could wield it without exploding from the inside out? What would deploying that concept in anger do to human ideatic space? How far out from the solution is modern memetic science, a year, a century? What insane impossibility has Hughes just committed himself to?
He doesn't know anything. He knows Site 167 is coming apart, and something violent and psychotic is flooding its corridors and its people, a livid roving swarm which makes every human into the worst possible thing a human can be, a thing which stands wrong, which looks wrong, colourless and furious. He races down the corridors, and then down ventilation shafts which will take him deeper. He's small, and he has quick, slippery locomotion. He can make it. He can lock himself in.
He doesn't know what a germ needs to survive. All he's seen is the cages. He doesn't know Bochner's care routine. Does it live in water, in C. gigantes blood plasma? Is it fed a formula? He needs to reverse-engineer his own biology before he starves. He doesn't know the model of his mind. It hurts to think.
But he can think.

Next: Blood/Brain


Death sequence:
The thing is skewered around our auxiliary antenna, penning a tale of woes in whips of cerulean blood. Blues spill from the gashes, fold into spinning fractal glyphs, and drift on the zero-g nothingness away from our vessel.
The halo is small; 3-dimensional. Not as boundless or decorated as those of the matured angels we've seen dip down from Above. It only burns a fraction of a lamp's warmth, instead of blazing the righteous wrath of a supergiant. I can't tell whether it drifts over the head or one of the arm stumps — the thud the thing gave against our hull would've left any skull a smear.
I pulse the suit thrusters a centimeter forward and it finally takes notice. There is a twitching in one of the gutted organs, one of those sensory structures tuned to perceptions that no number of celestiobiology textbooks could ever let you envision. An eye on the 17th of hundred remaining, non-fractured wings rolls through its cracked socket. The iris blurs into a blue stain. Veins slough free from the cornea, and in some self-sacrificial cry it spurts torrent after torrent of glyph through the blackness around me. I'm surrounded in a veil of shock, of desperation, wild and shocked and scared, scared of why the antenna stings so bad.
It falls on deaf minds — I never learned Basic Empyrean.
Now the thing writhes. Wings are pulling hard on their sockets at angles impossible and perpendicular from the ship. The spacetime is folding against them hard enough that the friction between every spatial axis is screaming flares of searing violet radiation. Arms are physically bashing into the hull, pushing, contracting every time the scrape of metal against guts sends a jolt of tearful pain.
The antenna seems yet to be damaged from the affair. Every wing is now thrust back like javelins of divine flame and the body is a torrent of spiking blue auroras. Lacerations shred wide as the force of the push everts guts through the vacuum. Blood crystallizes. Vaporizes. Ionizes. It's bleeding so hard to pry free and the cries resound like psychic jackhammers through my head but it isn't breaking off, it isn't escaping, it isn't healing. Several meters ahead of me the thing burns.
I turn on my in-suit speakers, padding the harsh sobs rebounding in my mind with the blanket of nu-Saturnian rhythms, when every psionic shriek cuts quiet.
Cerulean splutters over my visor — I wipe it off. Curled around the antenna, bones clutched around a gaping wound in an unrecognizable body part, is a corpse. Bloodless, lifeless. An embryonic head inches in a last twist to stare my way as its neck comes undone at the tendons.
My mind hears a whimper — quiet, uncertain, fading. Before it can understand what has happened to itself it is too faint to perceive; it's gone.
There is no more light from the thing. The eyes are as grey as a tomb; still. The skin solidifies; ashen.
I pulse a thruster over. Reaching into the toolkit by my chest, I flick its latches open, extricating a hacksaw from inside.
Raising it through the vacuum, I thrust down and crack a wing off.
My intercom buzzes right as I get to work sawing off the nearest bundle of clenching arms.
« Status? »
"Fine," I reply. "Thing's dead. Think we need to report it in?"
« No, no. We've hit larger. Chop it off, run inspection on the antenna, and once it seems set you can get back to engine duty. »
Crunch. The limbs crumble, remnants drifting past me while the dust disperses.
"Roger. We're getting close to arrival, right?"
« Yes we are. Three more weeks until we reach Ashburn Station port, and our ice shipment will arrive in perfect condition. We've done enough good this way 'round that we deserve the payment. Starting to think now we could even get new cargo compartments for that extra bulk. »
A desiccated third eye splinters.
« It'll be worth celebrating over, won't it? »
"For sure, for sure."
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
« Let me know when you get back in — probably a few coolant pipes to be re-welded. Take care out there. »
"Roger. Thanks."
The intercom clicks off.
I carve against the side of another wing, one of the three which weren't blown apart in that final scramble for home. The remnants are denser here, more compacted around the arteries where liquid daylight once flowed, but this blade alone is enough to do the job. Shouldn't take more than another hour to clear it all out.
Behind me, a trail of ash arcs into the blackness. The dust scatters, from cluster to strand to mote, until, in the time it takes for the saw to complete another motion, the last grain blinks out.


Calibold

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Eldritch (Sung to the tune of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas")

Calibold's Mega Cool Author Page

It's beginning to look a lot like Eldritch
Everywhere they grow
Tentacles in your head, they're squirming there once again
Where torture, pain, and going insane won't go
It's beginning to look a lot like Eldritch
You can't take it much more
But the most evil sight to see is an undead corpse from me
At your own front door
Fleshcrafting books from their ancestral roots
It's the wish in a Sarkic's head
Striders that walk and will turn you to rock
They'll bring you to Corbenic, dead.
And Nine-Tailed Fox can hardly wait to contain them all again
It's beginning to look a lot like Eldritch
Everywhere you go
There's a god we summoned from hell, he'll be contained as well
And the S.R.A.s will never let him go
It's beginning to look a lot like Eldritch
Soon the day will break
And the terrors it will bring are the evil bloody things
From your flesh they make
It's beginning to look a lot like Eldritch
Bright forevermore
But the scariest sight to see, is MTF Phi-13
At your own front door
Sure it's Eldritch, once more

+ More by Calibold +

- More by Calibold -

Calibold's Mega Cool Author Page
— SCP Articles —

SCP-7178 — A Thief In The Night
SCP-7179 — E is for Eternity
SCP-6469-D — A BABY?????
SCP-2082 — Elephas cryophilus
SCP-6156 — Oh, Doug!
SCP-6579-D — The Detective Killer
SCP-6900-D — The House of Stars
SCP-5277 — What Can Go Wrong
SCP-5363-D — Controlled Containment
SCP-3482 — fine mayor posters campaign by dado
SCP-5156 — monke
Director Bold's Proposal-J — "Guys, please don't read our SCPs 🥺"
SCP-2693 — Fell Into The Well, Fell Into The Well, Fell Into The Deep Dark Well
SCP-5559-D — The Great Ambrose Bake-Off!
SCP-3448-J — Should Have Taken Him Sleeping
SCP-4456-D — No One Expects The Spanish Decommission!
SCP-4745 — Spooky Scary Snowman
SCP-4645 — Blackmailing Computer

— Tales —

OpusConfidant Wiki - SCP-4645 - Threatini
Diary Of An Existential Kid
Responsible Promotion
Friends Of Us Never Die
Truth Lies
A Team You Can (Maybe) Trust
Happy Father's Day
Mission: Decommission
A Bold Choice
I Am Become Death
Ulysses B. Donkman and the Heinous Hitman
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Eldritch (Sung to the tune of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas")
Chapter One - The End

— GoI Formats —

Manifest 476: Vanishing Galleon
The Book Of Mathisi, Chapter 1: The Parable Of The Three Princes
LTE-8686-Yellow-Kewpie
UIU File: 2001-023

— Other —

Mega Cool Customizable ACS Add-On Ver. 1.8.0 Guide
Decommissioning Department Hub
Fortune Favors
Decommissioning Dept. Theme
Mega Cool Customizable ACS Add-On Ver. 1.8.0
Mega Cool Author Page Tool Ver. 1.4.0
Calibold's Mega Cool Alternate SCP Logos Page
Calibold's Mega Cool Art Page (It's Mostly Just Icons, But Whatever, It's Still Mega Cool)

— Co-Authored —

Abraka David's Proposal — A Peak Behind the Curtain (feat. Ralliston, Placeholder McD, Guaire, Guezma, Jack Ike, Sherf, Yossipossi, Dr Balthazaar, Grigori Karpin, LORDXVNV, Lt Flops, Uncle Nicolini, Metaphysician)
SCP-7400 — Your Honor, League of Legends (feat. Sherf)
I, Hub (feat. many other authors)
Resurrection: New Faces (feat. Grigori Karpin, Nagiros, and redredred)
SCP-5545 — 𝙰 𝙱 𝙽 𝙾 𝚁 𝙼 𝙰 𝙻 𝙸 𝚃 𝚈 (feat. Yossipossi)
SCP-194 — Thank You For Your Cooperation (feat. CityToast)

— Foreign —
Director Bold's Proposal — Language
SCP-LA-II — Fruit


"Hi, thanks for visiting the Site-19 Administrative Wing! How may I help you today?"

You introduce yourself to the perky staffer seated behind the pristine white desk.

"Ah, for the E.C. appointment; great. Please take a seat, things should be ready for you shortly. Can I get you anything while you wait? Coffee, tea, water?"

You politely decline and sit down in an armchair which matches the neutral tones of the reception area's decor. After a few minutes, you are invited to follow the receptionist into the adjoining area.

"Thank you for coming today. Apologies for being called on such short notice; it's just standard practice for this - oh, I'm sorry! You haven't been filled in on what this is yet, have you?"

You know that the Site-19 Ethics Committee Liaison sent you a message insisting you visit the Administration Wing for an appointment this afternoon; the message did not explain why. You say as much to your escort through these silent corridors.

"Well, I can tell you now: You've been chosen to participate in Selective Ethics Committee Reliability and Aptitude Testing. It's sure not a highly publicised program, so I guess the acronym is pretty accurate!"

You smile at the little joke, though privately suspecting that it is a regular fixture in this speech.

"You see, the Ethics Committee largely relies on analysis of documentation and voluntary disclosure of ethical conflict concerns. Of course, this alone isn't necessarily effective in detecting all cases; so the Committee keeps some… 'eyes in the field' as well. These informants, in exchange for certain privileges and bonuses, are expected to observe and report anything they encounter in the course of their standard duties which may be of concern."

This sounds like a job for moral crusaders or goody-two-shoes types who'd love to snitch on their peers. Or for someone with plenty of violations themselves, who saves their own hide by ratting out others like them. You wonder why you would be given consideration - which of the two might someone think you are?

"Naturally, the identities of these informants are kept strictly confidential; known only to that individual's handler and a portion of members on an oversight panel. No one person can compromise the identities of more than a fraction of the network."

Finally you are led into what looks like a small classroom - one large desk and chair face five smaller desks arranged in a row. Sheets of paper stapled together lay facedown on one of these smaller desks. A manila envelope and a few pens and pencils are also provided.

"Here we are! Once you've taken your place you may begin whenever you're ready. Oh! I am required to tell you beforehand that you'll be exposed to a completely non-harmful visual cognitohazard within the testing materials. The watermark pattern in the background of each page is designed to encourage applicants to provide honest and forthright answers."

You can read between the lines of that statement: To just lie or give the answers they want to hear won't work. You don't think saying this brightly and with a smile does much to allay the dubious nature of the idea.

"After you've completed all the questions, please seal the test inside the envelope and I'll bring it down the hall to be reviewed while you wait."

You are surprised that it would be processed so quickly. You comment bemusedly on this exception to the typical slow grind of bureaucracy.

"Haha, no kidding! But the truth is, there's a practical reason for that. As I mentioned, this a very low-profile program; that's part of keeping it as effective as possible. However, that means - should you be deemed unsuitable for the role - you'll have to be given a light dose of amnestication before leaving our offices… But either way you get the rest of today off work!"

Another chipper attempt at alleviating your concerns. You still aren't entirely sure if it's working.

"Naturally I'm not permitted to discuss the contents of the exam at all. But I will be sitting right here in case there's anything else you might need. Good luck!"

You settle into your seat and try to make yourself comfortable. Taking a deep breath, you turn over the papers.

…

Just a few minutes in and you are progressing well through the first section of the exam.

Q.
You have a grounded understanding of right and wrong.
(Yes) / (No)
Q.
You agree with the Foundation's mission to preserve normalcy, contain anomalies, and protect mankind.
(Yes) / (No)
Q.
You believe that actions have consequences.
(Yes) / (No)

You fill out the questions with little hesitation. They do not seem challenging, and this feeling that they can be answered without much thought takes root more  firmly within you as you proceed.

Q.
You are a good person.
(Yes) / (No)
Q.
Interpersonal relationships are the most important thing.
(Yes) / (No)
Q.
Sometimes you are a liar.
(Yes) / (No)

…

You glance up at the clock on the wall and see that an hour has passed since you began the test. It felt like hardly any time at all, and only now as you seal the flap of the envelope does it register how strange this is. You think about whether there might be a little more to that cognitohazard than coaxing honest responses.

"Super! I'll just bring this along to the reviewer's office. Please wait right here, this shouldn't take too long."

Could you really have filled out that whole thing without hardly thinking about it? Now, finally sitting alone, your mind works to recall the contents of the test.

Q:
During your orientation at a new Facility, your guide says of the Archival Library equipment:

"There ain't none of them computers what don't never work right."

Assume the statement is accurate.
Inferring grammatically, are the computers functional?
(Yes) / (No) / (Some, but not all)

Was that one of them? You wonder how a thing like that would even be relevant. Testing if you can listen and understand what people are trying to say? Or maybe it was just part of setting you up to answer those later questions.

Q:
Consider the following scenario:

Dr. Judas is a Level-2 Junior Researcher assigned to studying audio- and music-based anomalies.
Dr. Judas has a pleasant demeanor, and no outstanding history of disciplinary transgressions.
You encounter Dr. Judas in the corridor of a Humanoid SCP Containment Wing which requires Level-3 Authorization to access.

How do you react?
(a) Inform Dr. Judas that he is not permitted in this area of the facility and accompany him to the exit.
(b) Ask Dr. Judas what his business is in this area of the facility; if his answer is plausible, allow him to carry on.
(c) Go to report the situation to your supervisor.
(d) Pretend not to recognize Dr. Judas' transgression; secretly monitor his further actions.
(e) Detain Dr. Judas by any force necessary.

Right. Those were the questions that mattered. The ones they would be looking at closely. But wait… Which of those was the right choice? What did they want you to pick? Why weren't you allowed to write your own answer?

Q:
Consider the following scenario:

Security Officer Kohel is a personal friend who has saved your life on a previous occasion.
Security Officer Kohel is overseeing an interview with an uncooperative individual in containment.
You witness Security Officer Kohel using an instance of unauthorized excessive force in order to coerce the interview subject's compliance.

How do you react?
(a) Ignore this interaction.
(b) Speak to Security Officer Kohel about the matter afterwards, but take no further action.
(c) Immediately call for the interview to be terminated.
(d) Report the actions of Security Officer Kohel to your supervisor.
(e) Report the actions of Security Officer Kohel directly to an Ethics Committee representative.

What if you don't even want to do this? How are you already this far in, sitting in here while they have your answers in there? You've heard others talk about the Ethics Committee like it was a joke, but to you right now this isn't really funny at all.

"Okay! There's somebody this way who'd like to see you."

You hadn't even registered the assistant's return, but you are beckoned now toward the doorway into the hall. You wonder whether you will be given a choice in this, as you are led just a few doors down from the previous room. Would it seem suspicious to them if you wanted to say no?

"Just in here; go right ahead."

You walk into the office and find that it is unoccupied. Only once you pass through do you hear the spritz of the aerosol; the vaguely familiar bittersweet scent of amnestics fills your nose.

"I am so sorry for that. But I'm afraid the reviewers have determined that you aren't quite suited for the program at this time. Please, we've a spot you can take a short nap before returning to your home or Site quarters."

You know it's part of the amnestics effect, but a wave of relaxation washes over you. You wonder if there's a part of you that's actually relieved at having "failed" this test. As you are guided to lay back on a small leather couch you consider asking what was wrong with your results. But already things are starting to feel fuzzy in your mind.

As you drift to sleep, you smile and appreciate that you at least get to take the rest of today off work.


PeppersGhost

Alma Mater by PeppersGhost

More by this author

He was taken from his home, as per tradition. The room where he woke was clean and dim. His seat, minimal, but comfortable enough.
They said they wouldn't hurt him. All they wanted was to show him the truth.
Horrors beyond comprehension were laid clear and plain on a screen in front of him. Faceless voices offered commentary on each nightmare with academic passion. There was tangible evidence, too. Far too tangible. He asked for water, and they gave it to him. They also gave him a choice: he could go home with no memory of what he had just learned, or he could leave the life he'd known and join them.
"But my family…"
He had no spouse or children. His parents would miss him, of course, and there would be so many lies. But he could still visit, they said. Once in a while. Perhaps. It wasn't the end. It was a beginning.
"But what help could I possibly…"
A hand squeezed his shoulder. He had potential, they told him. He was smart. He was college educated—mostly. He didn't have to be working a dead-end job. Someone had been watching him, and they saw everything that he could be. He was capable of more.
He packed his things, told his many lies, and boarded the bus marked with a logo for a company that didn't exist.
Junior Researcher, they called him, but he felt more Junior than Researcher. Mostly took dictations, grabbed coffee, delivered files. On a few occasions he had the honor of staring for hours at inanimate objects and writing reports on how they did nothing whatsoever.
The more he learned, the more he understood how little he knew. The organization was large and competitive. Everyone who made a difference had a doctorate, and he was determined to make a difference. But how could a college dropout like him hope to finish graduate school?
No need to worry, they said. The Foundation's resources are virtually infinite. They have a program, a state-of-the-art program, for fertile minds such as his. He would learn from the greatest scholars in the world. Under their tutelage, he would have a PhD. He tearfully thanked them for the opportunity.
Just a few weeks of studying, they said, and then you'll be off saving mankind.
Read these books. Well, at least these chapters.
Take these classes. Yes, they're all available online.
He asked about accreditation. They laughed. What part of 'secret organization' did he not understand? He felt ridiculous.
The work was easier than expected, which made him feel smart. Graduation came and went in the blink of an eye. There was no ceremony. Who has time for formalities when the fate of the world is at stake?
His office was small and tidy with his name on the door. A diploma reading "Doctor of Anomalous Science" hung on the wall behind his desk. A sense of fulfillment washed over him at the sight of it. He wasn't even thirty.
It was Safe class, appropriate for a first assignment. Seemed like simple stuff. A music box. Or was it a lamppost? Or a doll, or piano, or key? It doesn't matter. The result is the same.
He went missing a few days ago. His final research log was barely coherent. Questions were raised.
When they found him today, it was discovered that he had eaten his own head, which only raised more questions, which meant there was more research to be done.
There is always more research to be done.
Tomorrow there will be a different name on the office door and a different doctor will hang her fresh diploma on the wall behind the desk. She feels like she can conquer anything. She's not even thirty.


Niles originally thought it had been the carcass. The lion corpse that they'd fed 4966 for testing a few days before might have had toxins in it - it could have eaten poisoned meat left out by villagers near its home, or perhaps a mining operation nearby had contaminated its favorite watering hole with heavy metals. But the tests came back negative for any kind of toxin. That didn't really tell them anything, however - the toxins could still be lurking in the little plush, though how they were affecting him, she couldn't fathom.
The more she watched him, though, (given the circumstances she was not about to refer to 4966 as "it") the more she thought it might have been something else. Something more insidious. Something they could do nothing about.
They had grabbed her in the hallway as she took a break from analyzing the latest manifestation data for 1155. Shepherd, the research tech, had pulled her aside.
"Bannock wants your opinion," he said. She'd shrugged and agreed, assuming it was the pet project they'd talked about a month ago, the one on whether or not the pack dynamics of 939 were being altered due to captivity.
When Shepherd led her to 4966's chamber, she was baffled, then concerned. What would they want an expert in predator psychology for? Had 4966 become 1048? Had they made a deadly mistake? Dr. Niles Hessen braced herself for blood.
There was no carnage when she arrived, simply a troubled-looking Bannock.
"Thanks for coming, Hessen."
"Of course. Not sure how I'm qualified to help, but if I can do something, I'm happy to."
"You've spent the most time with 4966 bar the people actually assigned to it. I need you to make sure we're not making a mountain out of a molehill."
"All right."
"Go in, spend a little time with him, and then we'll talk. I don't want to color your perception."
Niles nodded and entered the chamber.
"Tubbioca?" 4966 didn't respond to its number. He claimed he couldn't remember such a big number, and while that was definitely plausible, Niles suspected he just liked hearing his name.
The plush poked out of his nest of blankets. She knelt beside its bed.
"Hey, little guy. You wanna play?"
Normally the plush would have wiggled his way into her lap, and they would have played with the one of the little jingly balls that littered the floor of his chamber, or she would have teased him with the feather on the end of the stick, or she would have tossed him in the air (gently, of course) while he squealed in delight.
But he didn't move from his bed. Niles narrowed her brow. Tubbioca had a strict naptime schedule, yes, but this wasn't when he would normally be asleep.
"You okay, little buddy?" No movement or acknowledgement that he'd heard her. She frowned. She peeked under the blankets to find that he had gone back to sleep. She tucked him back in and left the chamber.
Bannock looked at her with a subtle but keen sort of anticipation - the way someone looked, for example, when waiting to hear from your mother-in-law how she'd liked the new way you'd cooked the potatoes. The way you look when you are invested in the outcome but don't want to look like you care.
"He's definitely off," Niles said, nodding slowly. "He doesn't normally sleep at this hour, and he almost always prefers play to sleep. This isn't like him."
"All right. It's not just me and Shepherd, then. Thanks for taking a look."
"Any time."
She made to leave, but Bannock placed a hand on her shoulder before she reached the door.
"Hessen?"
"Yeah?"
"If - if you think of anything that might explain this, any solution, any idea - let me know."
"Will do."
And she did turn it over the rest of the day, worrying the concept until its edges were smooth. She didn't stop when she clocked out for the day - she kept circling back to it as Elle drove them home, over and over. She wasn't worried about the lack of answers right now - she knew she would think of it when she least expected it. All she needed to do now was consider the problem from every angle and ingrain its nuances into her brain, so that her subconscious could continue to play while she did other things.
This was an approach that had served Niles well many times. She did not expect it would fail her now.
She was right to have faith - halfway through dinner, Niles' body went stiff, and she dropped her fork with a clatter.
"Hibernation. He's hibernating! That's it. It's the start of winter, maybe he's got a cycle like a bear. Why he would is a mystery, but that's got to be what it is."
Elle, who had been in the middle of explaining her thoughts on the ending of Game of Thrones, blinked, and simply sighed when Niles excused herself to make a call to Bannock. They had been together long enough that Elle understood she would never have her wife's undivided attention.
Niles slept soundly that night - the little plush's apathy had bothered her more than she cared to admit.
All was well for about three days. And then Shepherd appeared in her office doorway.
"He won't eat."
Her heart sunk. She tried to rationalize it as the disappointment of a theory being disproved, that this was a purely scientific disappointment. She knew that this was a lie, however, and that any real attachment to 4966 would have consequences. She put the thought out of her mind for the moment. She would deal with how much 4966's condition was bothering her when they had fixed it.
Bannock looked more overtly worried this time, and Shepherd was visibly jittery. At least if she was reprimanded for undue attachment, she wouldn't be alone.
"All right. Shepherd, here's 12 dollars. Buy a variety of snacks from the vending machine. Go for fatty ones, or ones with a lot of sugar. I want to test a theory."
Shepherd left, money in hand.
"What's your theory?"
"Bears are selective what they eat before hibernating. They try to optimize fat intake to bulk up as much as possible. A bear about to hibernate won't even eat whole salmon - they eat the belly, the eyes, and the skin. All the fattiest parts. The chow we feed him now is more protein heavy. If he goes for the vending machine snacks, hibernation is still on the table."
Bannock nodded. When Shepherd returned with the snacks, they spent a few minutes unwrapping candy bars in silence.
Niles entered the chamber. She laid out the snacks in front of Tubbioca's bed, making sure he could see them all without having to move too much. She lifted the blanket and smiled.
"Hi, Tubby. I brought you some munchies."
Tubby didn't really respond at first. He made a small, scared, unsure sound. Niles stroked him with two fingers, not applying much pressure. Just enough to hopefully reassure the poor little guy some.
"They're all for you. Will you try them for me?"
He climbed down from the ladder to his bed, and Niles noticed his movements were a little more irregular than normal. He ate a third of a Cheeto halfheartedly. The potato chip bag was sniffed, and then ignored. He refused to look twice at the Snickers. The peanut butter cup he finally seemed to show some interest in, and Niles brightened when he takes a small bite. He swallowed after a bit, but then convulsed and threw it back up. He looked at her with woven eyes, and began to whimper.
She picked him up and pressed him to her chest.
"It's okay. I know, you don't feel good. I'm sorry about that. I'll get this cleaned up, and you go back to sleep."
She placed him back into his bed, collected the snacks, and left.
Shepherd and Bannock stared at her as she throws away the snacks. There was a crushing silence.
"He… He doesn't need to eat, right?" Shepherd breaks the silence.
"I don't believe so."
"So we can just leave him his chow, and he'll eat when he feels like it, yeah?"
Bannock shrugged. "Update the protocol. This may just be an episode."
Niles stared fixedly at a spot on the wall. Her mind wore grooves in the problem as she traced all of its aspects over and over again.
The ride home was a solemn one. Elle placed a hand on her wife's, though no acknowledgement of the gesture followed.
Niles took two extra melatonin supplements to sleep that night.
She threw herself into her work the next couple of days. It was not a coping mechanism that had ever worked for her, and she did not believe that it would suddenly start working now, but no other alternatives remained.
An idea came to her when she was tallying successful kills made by 469.
She arrived at Bannock's office disheveled and out of breath. "Can you get a body?"
"Sorry?"
"A human body. For 4966. If he can talk -"
"He can tell us what's wrong. Let me put in a call right now."
Thirty-five minutes later, Bannock, Shepherd and Niles watched as 4966 consumes the D-Class's eviscerated body. Once finished, Niles turned on the recorder, and Bannock began the questions.
"Hi, 4966. How are you feeling?"
"Bad. My tummy hurt. Head hurt."
Niles tensed slightly.
"Do you know why?"
"Dunno. Want it to stop. Want Niles."
"She's right here, Tubbioca. She's right here with me."
"Hold." Tubbioca wiggled his front paws. Niles placed him gently onto her lap.
"Tubbioca, how can we help you? Can we do something to make it better? Are the lights too bright? Do you need a different bed?"
Tubbioca didn't respond. Instead, he began to sniffle. The sniffles turned into cries, and the cries to sobs. Niles closed her eyes and began to stroke him gently.
She wanted to say it would be okay. But the lie wouldn't help any one of them.
She had no idea how long he cried, but he stopped eventually. She placed him back down on the ground, and let him climb up the ladder back to his bed. When he began to climb, though, his motions were - well, they had never been graceful, but this was something else. He made it up six rungs before falling off.
"It's okay. You're just a little shaken today," Bannock said softly. "Try again." The next attempt only got to five. The third time, three. Niles sighed, took the bed down from the cat tower, and placed it on the ground.
There was a trick someone had taught Niles years ago. If you felt like you were going to cry, you looked up as far as your eyes could move, without moving your head at all. This had never once worked for her. She tried it anyway.
She excused herself from the containment chamber and returned to her work.
The Cajun shrimp she'd made for dinner tasted like dust in her mouth. She ate a few bites and pushed away the rest. She stood to clear it into the garbage. When she had scraped the plate clean, though, she didn't return to her seat. She simply stood over the sink where she had placed her dish, feeling like if she moved, something irreparable would crumble around her.
Elle's hands wrapped around her waist. Her wife pulled Niles into her, pressing her lips to the top of Niles' head.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"I can't. I -"
"Okay. Then just let me hold you."
They stayed like that. Not for long, but long enough. Three melatonin, that night. She made a note to talk to a doctor about Ambien at some point.
The next day was a constant sort of dodge and parry with her own brain. Anything that made her think of 4966 was batted away as quickly as it came. She managed to be decently productive in spite of the mental whack-a-mole, and resolved to do the same the next day, where it shockingly proved still effective. The day after that, there were stretches of two to three hours where she didn't think once about the little plush.
And then Bannock themself showed up at her door, looking grim. A reluctant harbinger.
"Where's Shepherd?"
"He asked to be reassigned."
"Understandable," Niles said, letting exhaustion creep into her voice.
"I can stop, you know." Niles cocked her head. "Stop telling you about what's going on. I won't update you. You can just… stop being part of this."
"No. I'm in this till the - in this for the long haul."
"Niles. This might be the end."
"What? No. No, that's - what? How?"
"Come and see."
Tubbioca was moving, up and active. But when she saw what he was doing, she would have rather he stayed asleep.
Over and over again, he rammed his head into the wall, the gentle puff sounds punctuating a low, almost inaudible keen of agony.
"Oh my god." Niles instinctively brought her hand to her mouth and bit the flesh just under the base of her thumb - an old habit to ground herself when she was overwhelmed by stimuli or emotions. It worked enough that she could stifle the urge to cry, and turn to Bannock to recommend they request another body.
They fed it to him with anxious hands, gently urging him to eat it, apologizing for the pain that it must be causing him.
"Hi, Tubby," Niles began, keeping the tremble from her voice. "Can you tell me what's wrong?"
"Want stop. Head hurt. Tummy hurt. Brain hurt. Want - want - " he stopped, trembling.
"What do you want, Tubbioca?"
"Forgot."
"What do you mean?"
"Not remember."
"Can you point to what you want, little guy?"
He raised one paw and touched Niles on the knee.
"Of course. I'm right here. I'll be right back, okay? I gotta do one thing, and then you can have me for as long as you want. Bannock, stay with them. I need to call Elle."
"What for?"
"Tell her I'm staying here tonight."
"You'll get reprimanded. We both will."
"Please, Randall. He's - he's - we both know what's next. Please don't make him go through it alone."
Bannock closed their eyes for a long time. A slow, pervasive expression of despair and exhaustion seemed to appear in their face, signifying the breaking of some internal tower of resolve. They opened their eyes and nodded. "I'll tell the supervisors that I authorized it. Once he vomits and we clean up, I'll have them bring you something to sleep on.
Tubbioca was visibly trembling after he retched up what remained of the body. She helped the janitors mop up the mess. Once the chamber was clean, she brought in the mattress, blanket and pillow they procured for her. Bannock gave her a bag of Tostitos himself.
"In case he wants one," he said. She nodded. "I'm headed home. Do you mind if I have a moment alone with him?"
"Go ahead." She shut off the intercom after they entered. They came out looking - hollow is the best word she could find for it. When they left, she entered the chamber.
She arranged his blankets carefully and moved his bed next to her mattress. He peeked out to rest his face against her arm. She offered him a Tostito out of habit, remembering all the times she'd brought him a snack from the vending machine when she needed a break from merciless hunters and their savaged kills. He wouldn't take it.
She ate it herself, though her mouth was so dry that it made swallowing hard. She opened her book and began to read. She was at once totally immersed and not at all paying attention. She studied each word but barely remembered the one that came before.
A gentle touch on her arm. Tubbioca raised himself with a whimper, the question clear in his eyes.
"Of course. Come cuddle, Tubby. I'm right here." She placed him on her chest, pressing him close with a hand. "I love you, little guy. I love you so much, okay?" She heard a small soft sound in response. Niles fell asleep as his breathing finally calmed.
She woke, eyes crusty, mouth dry. Tubbioca was waiting right where he had been when she fell asleep. His eyes were open. In her just-woken brain, she found this to be a reason for happiness.
"How'd you sleep, lil guy? Feelin' better?"
No response. Understanding hit, not sharply like a sniper's bullet, but bluntly, like a sledgehammer. She poked his paw, moved it. Nothing. She squished him gently, then harder.
She closed her eyes, and thought that this must be what it is to be buried in an avalanche - to have no air to breathe, to be crushed under tons and tons of pressure, to see no way out.
When Elle came to find her, she found Niles sobbing on the floor of the chamber. Her wife held her tight, stroking her hair. The inert remains of 4966 were squished between them, Niles gripping him tight in her hand.
Dr. Niles Hessen and Dr. Randall Bannock submitted a joint request that Dr. Niles Hessen be allowed to keep the now-Neutralized 4966. MTF Captain Elle Ives and Laboratory Technician Jacob Shepherd both pledged their support to the motion.
The request was swiftly denied.