...
Captain Regina Watts checked her watch and took her pulse while watching the squad around her function check their weapons, comms, and gear. 98 bpm. Nervous, like most other times she had pulled the short straw on extraction. Her leg still hurt from the shot she had given herself the previous evening, her hands were blocks of ice with sawdust cuticles. She counted seconds and timed her breath to slow it all down, but it didn't do much. Air puffed out of Regina's lips with a characteristic motorboat sound while she reached into a third back pocket that should not be and retrieved a black package of cigarettes.
Eighteen left.
Third time's a charm?
She closed the pack and stowed it, glancing around the room. Bunch of clowns. Most of them, faces she hadn't seen before today. And it was shaping up to be a hell of a long one.
“Alright monkeys, eyes front. Here's what's good.”
Five hard cases slammed home magazines, spat chewing gum and stood facing Regina with steel in their eyes and fire in their bellies. Exactly what she needed to see.
“SCP-1968 is about to breach containment for the third time. I have it on good authority that this will be the big one. That this one reaches so far back that if we fail here, we'll be spending about a million years banging rocks together in a dust belt where Earth used to be just to ensure we have a planet to come home to.”
A hand went up at the back of the room. Regina rolled her eyes and considered her options for a second but decided that sticking to the script was probably for the best. “Yes, Patterson?”
“Thank you, sir. How-”
“Ma'am, Sergeant,” she said flatly, arms crossed in front of her.
“Yes, ma'am. Sorry, it's just, y'know, habits are-”
“Stow it, Patty-Lou, I ain't got all night,” Regina demanded.
“Uh, Yes ma'am. I understood 1968 was a retro'nomaly? Doesn't that mean it should have already happened?” Patterson asked. “How is this supposed to work?”
“We don't have time just now to be specific, but Doctor X got us all out of bed in the meta-before in a swiftly closing window between this event and our native string. Our mission is to establish causal isolation prior to activation. As Captain, I've got mission-line, so don't fuck up or this is gonna be my whole-ass week,” Regina replied.
Everyone in the room chuckled. She didn't.
“We're coming in hot at the door of the containment chamber. There will be armed Foundation presence that does not know we're coming. Class-C Tranqs for those. Anything that has more than four limbs, pulp it. Any more questions?”
Some murmurs from the back of the room. Patterson, to his credit, checked his bag for an XACTS Mk2 anti-personnel sink and did a function check. Three other clowns realized the same. Twelve seconds passed. Regina compulsively checked her LBV for a pen and paper, just in case. The room suddenly dropped three inches, knocking over canteens, ruffling feathers, and staggering a few of the men. At the rear of the chamber, a light above the door ceased blazing steady red and flashed bright yellow.
“Alright, grab your shit. Ten seconds to insertion,” Watts belted out, drawing a pistol from her thigh and moving to take point.
“You gonna be alright up front, Cap?” Martin Patterson asked as he drew his own tranq gun and checked its chamber.
Regina smirked. “You reckon you'd be asking that question if I hadn't grown tits?”
Patterson frowned. “Look, I'm sorry, but you-”
She put a hand up. “Happens. Don't excuse it. And don't worry, I know where they are. Third time's a charm, right?”
Regina didn't have time to appreciate the shock on his face.
The door opened. Regina drew. Three darts found the necks of three waiting security specialists on the far side.
There's thirty seconds saved.
Wordless, the six unmarked tactical black uniforms piled out from behind what the rest of the world surely thought was an elevator door and into the hallway as the bulkhead beyond slammed closed like a steel casket.
“Cutter. NOW.”
Regina stepped to the side as an E3 with a plasma torch double-timed his way up the steel grated floor, kneeled at the base, and began to cut away the lock.
“They're gonna be angry,” Patterson said, coming up to a stand and glancing sidelong at Regina. “…How many?”
“Three,” she said, glancing at her watch. “We're ahead, but last time they were at 11, 2, and 9. Shouldn't be too far from that when we get through.”
“Is there a reason you're not telling them?”
Regina looked at him sideways. “…‘Cause we're ahead.”
“I mean not telling them this is the third go-round,” he whispered through clenched teeth.
“Blake?” she hollered. “How long?”
The E3 lifted his goggles and blew smoke away from his cut. He peered at it for a moment and winced. “Looks like… two, maybe five minutes?”
“Go for three,” Regina ordered, and turned back to Patterson. “I'm not telling them because I don't trust them, Marty. I don't know how they'll take it and pressure is a bitch goddess I'd rather not provoke.” Regina reached for her back pocket and nearly had herself a smoke, but a chorus of ‘leave no trace ‘ sounded in her head, so she scratched the back of her head instead “Fuck, right now I'm sorry I bothered with you.”
The light from the torch danced across the hallway as Regina checked her watch, counted seconds, and tried to remember the last two fuck-ups.
Alright, the firefight at the door took a full minute the first time and 32 seconds the second. Then the cut, 3 minutes 10 for both. Then the second firefight was a good 93 seconds on one and 77 on two. Sinks are going to take almost 10 minutes to set up no matter what, and we lose up to 12 seconds with each loop which leaves…
Regina puffed out a lungful of worry and closed her eyes. “Damn, that's tight.”
“What?”
She didn't answer. “Blake, give me a 30 second warning, yeah?”
“Yes, Ma'am!” he replied without looking up. Good kid. She made a note of it.
Just in time for a bullet to rip through the door, and a welding mask, and a skull, leaving a fine pink mist hanging in the air where a young man's face once was.
There was a lot of yelling, some fumbling with the torch, some blinded eyes and burnt fingers as the other three soldiers struggled to get back on course. Regina turned around and looked at the door. The elevator's signal light was spinning bright red streaks across the wall and floor of the tunnel. 3 minutes 10 had just turned into 25 minutes. This attempt was fucked.
Patterson stared at her, mouth agape, as she pulled a cigarette from her black pack and lit it. “See you later, cowboy,” Regina said with a wink, and took a good long drag. His mouth had just enough time to form the first phoneme of an expletive.
Time. Stopped.
It took an impossible interval before Regina's mind adjusted to causing movement in a direction one never walks. It didn't feel long enough to be a minute. It couldn't have been less than a decade. The idea of duration was meaningless. Like a portrait peeling itself off of a canvas, she stepped out of the frozen moment, and decided to ride future for just a few more seconds. Sound, light, screams, Patterson finishing an expletive. Heedless of danger, she ran to the bulkhead and knelt, and froze the moment again.
Regina could see clear through the hole the projectile had punched in the door. And also the barrel of the really enormous gun beyond it. And also the new round being loaded into the chamber, ready to punch an even more impressive hole through some poor motherfucker's anatomy.
Wow. Okay. That's far enough, I think.
It is impossible to know that you experience the sensation of directional flow in your veins until you experience its reversal. Watching thoughts instantly appear perfectly formed and then dissolve back into action potentials is even more disorienting. Attempting to keep your consciousness sufficiently detached from your brain to retain information…

“I'll be honest,” Dr. Kitterman said, scratching the back of his neck, “we only know that Loopy works by principle.”
Sergeant Robert Watts frowned, turning the black foil-lined pack over in his hands. “Loopy? You invented a drug that can walk you backward in time and the best name you could come up with is ‘Loopy'?” He chuckled and opened the pack, pulling out one of the black filtered cigarettes inside. He moved to put it back, and suddenly noticed there were only 17 left of the original twenty. “What in the… “ he looked at the cigarette, and then at the package again. 12. This time he put it back immediately, closed and dropped the case. “Fuck!”
“Like I said, ‘Loopy'. It makes you feel like you're losing your mind. We thought it was apt,” Dr. Kitterman said, bending over and picking up the box. “It looks like it defaults back to the last time you looked at the pack? There's really no way for us to know that yet, though. Just… we know that a closed pack is causally isolated; that's relatively easy. So the other option naturally follows.”
“So…what am I supposed to do about it?” Watts asked.
Dr. Kitterman looked Robert in the face and opened his mouth to speak, but decided his first attempt would be a bit on the nose and closed up again. Second time was more confident. “Your record indicates… certain dissociative tendencies… which may make it easier for you to learn how to retain the information. Also you seem to demonstrate some resistance to amnestic drugs, which…” Dr. Kitterman swallowed a mouthful of dry. “Let's say they're of similar structure?”
Watts rolled his eyes. “Right. And you reckon I might also develop a resistance to a drug you based on one.”
Dr. Kitterman said nothing, and handed over the black pack of time erasure. “Why don't you give it another shot?”
Watts sighed and opened the pack, urgently covered his mouth, then closed it and tossed it back, bolting to the wastecan in the corner. Dr. Kitterman looked inside and saw it was empty. “Holy shit.”
Watts would have had something witty to say if he wasn't so busy throwing up, he was sure of it.

…She had spent the better part of a year figuring that out.
Blake's head collapsed back together. Patterson complained in reverse. The team piled back in the transit room. The room jumped upward three inches. She ungave a speech. She saw 17 cigarettes in her pack…

Captain Regina Watts checked her watch and took her pulse while watching the squad around her function check their weapons, comms, and gear. 98 bpm. Nervous, like most other times she had pulled the short straw on extraction. Her leg still hurt from the shot she had given herself the previous evening, her hands were blocks of ice with sawdust cuticles. She counted seconds and timed her breath to slow it all down, but it didn't do much. Air puffed out of Regina's lips with a characteristic motorboat sound while she reached into a third back pocket that should not be and retrieved a black package of cigarettes.
Seventeen left.
God. Dammit. Hell of long is right. C'mon number four!
“Alright monkeys, eyes front. Here's what's good.”
Five hard cases slammed home magazines, spat chewing gum and stood facing Regina with steel in their eyes and fire in their bellies. Just like before.
“SCP-1968 is about to breach containment for the third time. I have it on good authority that this will be the big one. That this one reaches so far back that if we fail here, we'll be spending about a million years banging rocks together in a dust belt where Earth used to be just to ensure we have a planet to come home to.”
Patterson's hand went up at the back of the room just like it had before. She decided that was enough misgendering for one goddamn day.
“Yes, Sergeant Patterson, it is a retrocausal anomaly. We don't have time just now to be specific, but Doctor X got us all out of bed in the meta-before in a swiftly closing window between this event and our native string. Our mission is to establish causal isolation on SCP-1968 prior to activation. As Captain, I've got mission-line, so quit fucking up or this is gonna be my whole-ass week.”
Everyone in the room chuckled. Regina, again, did not.
“We're coming in hot at the door of the containment chamber. There will be armed Foundation presence that does not know we're coming. Class-C Tranqs for those. Anything that has more than four limbs, pulp it. Specialist Blake?”
“Yes, Ma'am.”
Regina smiled. Yes. A good kid. “How long does it take to cut a wiring panel open as compared to a bulkhead door?” she asked.
Blake tied his brow in knots for a moment. “Less than half most of the time, I'd say. Depends on the steel.”
“This time we're running with that.”
Blake nodded and gave a thumbs up. “Will do.”
“We've got about 45 seconds for any other questions,” Regina said, and saw Patterson's hand come up in the back again.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“How many loops have we been, Cap? S- Erm, Ma'am?”
Regina sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. Pressure was a hideous bitch goddess… but first impression instincts were clearly not working. “This will be number 4. So think twice before doing anything stupid, yeah?”
To her surprise a few of them laughed as they did a last-second gear check. The room suddenly dropped six inches, sending three grown men straight to the floor and staggering everyone else. At the rear of the chamber, a light above the door ceased blazing steady red and flashed bright yellow.
That felt… different.
“Alright, keep cool. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. 15 seconds to insertion, let's move.”
Regina bolted straight for the back door, compulsively checking a chamber she knew damn well by now had a tranq round ready. She hadn't even bothered with her rifle this time, at least. Patterson sidled up beside her and leaned against the door jam, a little too smooth.
“You gonna be alright up front, Cap?” he asked as he drew his own tranq gun and checked its chamber.
“Ain't my first rodeo,” she said, eyes on the light.
“Never is, is it?” he said chuckling. “Thanks, by the way. I know you didn't have to tell us but…”
Regina felt her eyes soften as she looked at him and really saw him for the first time in maybe a year. A warm thing happened in her belly and she put a hand on his arm. “This is going to suck.”
Patterson smirked at her and punched her shoulder playfully. “Always does.”
Blake groaned. “Will you two quit being so fucking cute?”
The door opened. Regina drew. Three darts found the necks of three waiting security specialists on the far side.
Even, Steven.
Wordless, the six unmarked tactical black uniforms piled out from behind what the rest of the world surely thought was an elevator door and into the hallway as the bulkhead beyond slammed closed like a steel casket.
“There's three on the far side and they've got a goddamn cannon in there, so stay clear of the door. Blake, right hand bottom. You've got two minutes.” She darted over to the rough stone wall and pasted herself to it. Four other bodies did the same, while a fifth moved low and fast to the right of the jam, and began to cut.
Alright, keeping pace, up to 3 minutes for the cut, 42 seconds until the shot, and maybe another shot 10 seconds after that?
“Stay low, everyone. Blake, how long?”
“‘Bout a minute and a half, give or take 10 seconds.”
A bullet ripped through the door and showered the team in hot metal droplets, but to little effect. The color drained out of Regina's face as another shot blasted through a half inch of solid steel and ricocheted off the grate of the floor.
“WHOA! You weren't kidding about that cannon!” Patterson hollered, pressing himself harder against the wall of the passage and whooping in excitement.
It's too early. Thirty seconds too early. This isn't right.
“Blake! When that panel is open, clear away,” Regina ordered. “I'm gonna short the door.”
“I know wiring, I can do it,” Blake said as the third round blasted through the door and hot metal cut through the flesh of his right arm. He hissed, and stopped cutting for only a moment to make sure it hadn't hit anything too important, then lowered his goggles and got back to work.
“Watts ain't exactly my given name, kid!” she hollered back. White hot metal bloomed through the face of the door and tore a hole clean through the back of the transit room on the other end of the passage. Blood had been spilled once already. The clock in Regina's mind ticked mercilessly forward. ”I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. Move aside!”
Blake waved one hand backward at her as the torch belched its way through steel like tough butter. “Yes, ma'am. Christ- 30 seconds.”
“Captain Watts!” one of the no-name faces on the far side of the hall yelled. A huge bullet ricocheted off the grate floor and sprayed hot metal shavings onto his face. “What the actual fuck are we up against?!”
Regina gritted her teeth. “I- I don't know!” She stared at the swiss-cheese door and did everything she could to pry it open with her mind and see the other side as clearly as she had on the first pass. If something had changed, she should have changed- would have changed if not for the Loopy holding her so tightly to her own concept of past. Another shot hit a fluorescent fixture over head, sending sparks raining on the walk and putting out half of the lights in the passage. “This is wrong! They're coming too quick. I think the string is starting to shift!”
“Panel open!” Blake yelled and rolled over to the far side of the passage, painting the wall with himself just in time for another bullet to bounce wildly around the room and glance off of his helmet. “FUCK!”
Regina dove for the open panel and reached inside, pulling up the wire harness with one hand and a pair of stripper cutters with the other. “Patterson, battery.” The strippers went in her teeth. A nine-volt tumbled through the air. Her hand snatched it down effortlessly as another shot whizzed by her face and tagged some poor fool behind her in the shoulder, tossing him back about three feet.
“Wh- FUCK. I'm hit.” He wasn't just hit. A hole big enough for a golf ball to fly through had opened in his upper chest.
Strippers back out of her teeth, Regina distinctly heard herself ordering a medic to put a thoracic seal on the wound before his lungs collapsed. Heard it like someone else was saying it. Regina was too busy tracing wires in her mind to have said such a thing. Tugging. Listening to the tell-tale scrapes and taps of the wires in the floor and ceiling that could tell her what did what. With one cut, the keypad on the other side of the door went dark. With two more, slack returned to the gears holding the door in place. Stripping two ends, she came back to herself, and shorted the motor.
“PERFORTATE ‘EM.”
The portal swung free. Thunder erupted and a cloud of smoke belched metal hail through it and into whatever in hell lay waiting on the far side. After ten seconds she screamed herself hoarse for cease-fire. Five casings still in the air tinkled against the ground. Sulphur and sweat burned her nostrils. A body rounded the corner and this time it was Regina putting another Class-C right in her mark's cheek.
Without words she bade them enter, fast. A 20 mm rifle lay smoking on the floor. Five bodies were strewn behind it, covered in tiny blue darts and dead asleep. Not a drop of blood anywhere. The security team would wake up in a stupor in about 30 hours with a bad case of dry mouth and no clue anything was wrong.
1 minute 57 seconds. That's got to be some kind of record.
SCP-1968 was hard to look at. Not because it was gruesome or ugly, but because it was literally difficult to see through the thickening haze surrounding it. Regina could tell it was made of brass and sitting on the floor in the middle of a white containment unit, but there was nothing else she could make out. In any other circumstance, she might have noticed the burnt bacon smell of the tips of her right fingers, or the rivulet of blood running down her cheek. But this wasn't any other situation. She glanced at her watch. It was running backward.
“We have a problem.”
“What?” Patterson asked, glancing at his wrist. “No. NO. Are we too late?!”
Regina shook her head. “We still exist,” she said, still staring at the watch face. Any count here would be meaningless. At least 45 seconds was lost already on 4 loops. Things were definitely shifting… “Fuck it. I'm not risking it.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a black smoke without looking at it and lit up.
“No WAIT!” Patterson screamed.
Time. Stopped.
And then slowly, tentatively, with neither resistance nor demand, it began to inch forward again.
“Relax,” Regina said, her voice echoing through her head and the room as if it belonged to someone else at the bottom of a long, dark well. “I … can … still … move … forward.”
Patterson closed his eyes for what felt like an hour before opening them. It was a blink. “O … Kay. What … now?”

“That's not supposed to happen,” Dr. Xyank said, bringing a tower of paper from behind his desk and grabbing the first packet. “In fact, I'm skeptical that it did happen.”
Lieutenant Robbie Watts ran fingers backward through his hair and scratched the back of his scalp. “I'm telling you what I see. I smoke one, orient, and just… see everything from the last look to 11 minutes and 20 odd seconds ahead.. ”
Dr. Xyank shrugged, licked his thumb, and started speed reading through it. Watts had never seen a pair of eyes move that fast in his life. “Well… You're either hallucinating… or you're confabulating… or just plain mistaken.” Twenty pages of text read in thirty seconds, he stacked them neatly, signed the last page, and dropped it in the outbox. “What you saw is impossible.”
Robbie scoffed. “Beg your pardon, sir, but I reckon you forgot where we work,” he said, knee jumping madly just out of sight.
The doctor behind the desk sighed, stopped his paperwork, and pulled the glasses from his face, rubbing the bridge of his nose with both hands. “Listen. Watts. I like you. You're clearly very talented, but SCP Four-” he paused. “‘Loopy'? Is that what Marcus called it? It was designed to do a very specific task. That is: stop and reverse cognitive tachyon flux. Conscious control of the direction of awareness? That's something you'll have to prove.”
“You already know I can't.”
“Do I?” Xyank asked, putting his glasses back on and leaning back in his chair. “Alright, tell me how I know that.”
“Any information I retrieve from the future of this conversation can't change the course of it. I can't make changes unless I go back to last looks.” he said. “Maybe no one reported it because they didn't see it as useful, I don't know.”
Xyank tried to stifle a laugh, but could not. “Oh yeah? How do you know that?”
Robbie frowned and raised a burning cigarette above the sightline of the desk, presenting it emphatically to his suddenly very nonplused and rapidly fuming boss.
Dr. Xyank snatched the cigarette from Robbie's hand and dropped it into his glass of water. Never breaking eye contact, he extended his left hand. “Pack.”
Robbie put both hands up next to his face. “I fucking told you so.”
Xyank's right hand jumped to a memorized spot beneath the surface of his desk. There was an audible metallic click. “PACK.”
Watts sighed and hung his head, pulling the black package from his jacket pocket and putting it into Xyank's trembling, furious hand.
“Get the fuck out of my office and report to site security. Now.”
Resigned, Robbie stood from his chair and did a proper about face out the door, down the hallway, and around the corner to where the security kiosk awaited just before the elevator.
The phone at the kiosk rang and the guard answered it. Rapidly, he stood and held up his hand toward the stone-faced lieutenant.
“Robert Watts?”
“Yup, that's me.”
“I'm sorry sir, I can't let you leave.”
Robbie smirked, and raised his hands over his head, laced his fingers together, and turned around, just in time to see a research scientist in glasses and a white coat running down the hallway toward him, a suspicious black box in his left hand. “Wait! Stay right there!” Ten seconds crawled by on the back of a snail as Robbie closed his eyes and dropped to his knees, savoring the last moments before everything would happen. He opened his eyes, and spent a mental hour studying the confusion on Thaddeus Xyank's stupid face as his world rattled at its foundation and a new and obvious piece of the mental puzzle suddenly locked into place.
“…Watts, how did you know no one else had reported it?”
“Would you believe ‘a woman's intuition'?” Watts asked, quirking an eyebrow.
Xyank's eyes widened by about seven inches before he finally broke, pressed his lips together, and did everything in his power to hide the smile in his eyes. “Really? This moment? This is when you're gonna tell me?”
Regina Watts shrugged and grinned sheepishly up at her boss's face. “…Surprise!”

The first thing that she noticed was that the future stopped dead 5 minutes and 37 seconds in front of her in a bright blaze of light. The second thing she noticed was an unfortunate upcoming realization about the room they were standing in. But it was number three that brought her attention back to the frozen present.
Regina Watts was about to save the world.
A rush of emotion loosened her grip, and moments rolled forward.
“That can't be right,” Regina said, suddenly pale. “He… He never said…”
He said you were the only one who could do it. That's what he said. That cold bastard.
“Jesus, Cap,” Patterson chuckled. “Shit must be pretty far-out.” Patterson squatted on the floor and retrieved the bocce-ball sized XACTS Mk2 from his pack, hooked a small carabiner onto a latch on the body, tied a cord to it, and began the startup routine when he looked up. “Oh… Oh, hell no…”
Regina followed his gaze upward. The ceiling was no less than 20 meters away, straight up in the air.
For all its usefulness in creating a human-sized bubble of space in which an individual could weather out the effects of temporal dilation, causal tampering, or rapid tachyon decompression, the XACTS Mk2 was perhaps best described by its limitations. First, the device's field of effect cannot be smaller or larger than 2 m in radius. Second, the power output of the device cannot produce an active field of greater strength than 1.02 watts. Third, due to tachyon flux interference with the stable operation of electronics, the device cannot be configured for self powered flight. In layman's terms? Causal isolation requires at minimum, 4 units in tetrahedral formation around an object, at a range of 2 meters from one another to prevent mutual interference, and to raise the field strength to the 4 watts necessary to halt tachyon flow in the desired region.
Normally, this isn't much of a problem for objects or people inside of buildings. One needed only hang the fourth device from the ceiling and lower it until the fields reached alignment. If there was no ceiling, the object, in any other circumstance, could be quickly moved to a more suitable location until isolation could be established.
This was not any other circumstance. Touch the donut, end the world. Someone was going to have to get trapped inside with it.
“…Set up units one through three,” Regina ordered, and dropped her pack from her shoulders. She pulled the last of the Loopy into her lungs, and pulled a regular old pack of Camels from her left back pocket.
The rest of the squad stared at her, frozen, while she stared at the ceiling and lit up.
“I'll do it,” Blake said. Lightning fast he doffed his helmet and dropped his gear, pulling nothing from it but a tiny, worn Bible.
“Like hell you will,” Regina said, finally pulling her unit out of her backpack and booting it up.
Martin Patterson grabbed her by the wrist and pulled back. “Reggie, you don't-”
“Oh get fucked, Marty,” she said, and jerked her arm out of his grasp. The others were quiet and stock still. It was nothing like the flurry of activity she had ordered to take place immediately. “Listen up, monkeys, here's what's good. Fuck your chivalry, fuck your conscience, and fuck your grief. I am your Captain, and this is the god-damned Nightingale. The gig is down there at the end of the hallway. Your standing order is to activate and place units one through three and go the fuck home.”
“You can loop back, we can-”
“We can what, Sergeant?” Regina demanded, locking her eyes on Patterson's stupid, adorable face. “Come back in for round 5 with 20 men and a vulcan autocannon behind the door? Have this argument again with three of us already dead? No thank you. Now I believe I've given you specific instructions on this matter, yeah?”
Sergeant Martin Patterson closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. “Yes, ma'am. You all heard the Captain, get those sinks set up double-plus quickwise. And Freedman, get Patel back to the transit room, will you? He's turning blue, for god's sake.”
In solemn silence they assembled a triangular frame on the floor, and centered it around the foggy brass object in the middle. Each of three remaining men set their sink for isolation, made the final adjustments on the alignment while Regina sat on her haunches and smoked her last cigarette.
The work done, Patterson ordered the others off, and sat on the ground next to her, puffing air out of his lips as he watched the brass ring on the floor warp and shimmer. “How long have you got?”
Regina closed her eyes and opened them in a motion that must have looked to him like blink. “About two minutes.” She stood up, dialed in the last settings on her sink, and set it to ready. “You better get on.”
“Listen, Reggie, I know I wasn't the best when you-”
Regina held her hand up, sparing him nothing more than a glance. “You shoulda had this conversation when it would have made a difference.”
He grabbed her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and kissed her full on the mouth. In spite of herself, Regina melted into it, if only for a moment. She stood still in that instant for as long as she could bear, savoring the memories, the sensations, the fullness of every moment that meant something and several thousand moments that didn't.
But time can only stand still for so long in any life, and she had already taken more than her share.
Regina put a hand on his chest and pushed him back away. “Go.”
Martin opened his mouth to say one last thing, but managed only a curt nod as he grabbed his gear and booked it out of the containment cell, down the passage, and into the transit room at the far end. In less than a millisecond, the elevator was back, and the room had never existed.
The sorrow left with him, and in its place a grim determination blossomed in her chest. Bootfall echoed on a concrete floor. Three electronic beeps sounded as a tiny bit of electronic esoterica in her hand sprang to life. Stradling SCP-1968, she held her hand above her head, and switched the field on.
The object began to glow. And grow. And morph and twist and writhe and wriggle as the rest of the world around her red-shifted into darkness.
That's right, you little brass bastard, come get you some. Gonna be real fuckin hard to unmake the whole world when you and me are the only ones in it.
The ring expanded, enveloped her, spun in spirals of light in silence around her body. Her fingers were numb to the point of pain and her lungs burned with the smoke left in them from her final drag but she stood, stock still, waiting for her reality to collapse. Just a few more seconds and the ring would fall dormant, and then she and her sinks would cease to be, leaving nothing but an empty containment unit and an un-fucked history of the Planet Earth behind them.
It would be over. She could be done.
However, throughout the multiplicity of timelines in which humans have, do, or will exist, there arises a certain proverb regarding the effectiveness of planning and the futility thereof. While this was not on Regina's mind, apparently the universe had learned it well through repetition, and commenced to assert its truth.
A presence appeared in front of her. Mere inches in front of her. Close enough that she could smell its sweat and feel its breath and even the stubble growing out of its cheek. Immediately in front of her stood one haggard, pale, emaciated, and bleeding Dr. Thaddeus Xyank.
One hand grabbed her by the shirt as he staggered forward. The other was busy clutching a rapidly expanding red spot in his side. His eyes darted back and forth between hers like bottle rocket lightning as he gasped, coughed, and smiled.
“Reggie… Oh, thank goodness. I… I fucked up. I need help. You have to call-”
He leaned forward, exhausted, and before she could push him back, she felt her feet slip and she began to fall.
“No! Xyank, you idiot! - ”

“ - YOU'RE GONNA KILL US ALL!”
Confusion. Unreality. A rock of pain lodged in her skull directly behind her right eye. Regina cringed against the pain and brought a hand to her face as she panted, moaned, and curled over herself in the darkness.
“Mmm… Reggie?” a voice beside her said sleepily. A man's voice. Martin Patterson's voice. “You okay, babe?”
The pain slowly faded and her eyes adjusted to the dark of the room. Her room. Fifth floor, Site-17, staff dormitory. A Sig Sauer and a pack of Camels on the nightstand. A picture of the two of them in Cabo the previous winter. She and Marty were taking a home-tour on an SCP project where a spot had just opened up.
It was a dream.
She rubbed some sleep out of her eyes and grabbed the smokes off of the nightstand, lighting one up. “Yeah… yeah I'm alright. Just a dream.”
“Sounded like a bad one,” Marty said, sitting up and yawning. “What about?”
She pressed her mind backward into unconsciousness to try and grab a sliver of it. But all that was left was this feeling of urgency, of wrongness, of sudden inescapable doom. She turned and put her feet on the cold laminate floor and took a long drag. “I dunno. Some end-of-the-world bullshit, I guess. Y'know. Any given Tuesday.”
Marty scoffed, sliding next to her and rubbing her shoulder. “Job's a real fucker on the head, ain't it?”
Regina smiled and leaned back to kiss his cheek. “You might say that. You'd be right, too.”
Her phone rang in the nightstand drawer, and the realization she was still on call smashed through all other considerations. 0329 on the 25th of April, 2027. Hell of a way to start a Sunday morning.
“Watts here.”
“Reggie! It's Kitterman. Sorry for waking you.”
Marty started kissing her neck. She rolled her eyes and pushed him off. “You didn't, it's alright. What's good?”
“You know that set of Dash-Ones we got down on Sub Level 5?” her boss answered, his voice equal parts exhaustion and excitement. “Well they… They want to talk. Forty-one A just banged his fist into the cell door until his guard answered him and asked for you by name.”
“No… No way. Right now? Literally right now?”
“Cameras are on their way down now. How soon can you be here?”
Regina looked back at Marty who was wearing the most annoying pair of puppy dog eyes she had seen in a year and shook her head, standing and grabbing the first pair of pants she could find in the dark. “I dunno, five, maybe 10 minutes?”
“Awesome. Thanks, Reggie. I owe you one.”
“You owe me a hell of a lot more than that, Marc. See you soon.” She hung up the phone and pulled on her pants and socks and a rough pair of boots in the dark, making sure to grab a non-offensive black t-shirt to wear under her lab coat. “Go back to sleep Marty, I got work.”
He moaned, slumping back on the mattress. “Can someone else do it like, even one time?”
“Okay, smartass, why don't you get dressed and go talk to a Skip for the next few hours?” Regina asked raising her eyebrows as she clipped on her keycard.
“Interest… fading… can't… stay… awake!” he joked, collapsing onto the pillow and closing his eyes in a mock snore.
“That's what I thought.” She clipped the pistol to her belt under the coat, and headed for the door.
“Hey Reggie?”
“Hm?”
“… I love you,” Marty said, looking at her sweetly.
She smiled and blew him a kiss. “Love you, too. Bye!”
The hallway was empty and eerily quiet as she walked for the elevator doing a final check that she had everything. Wallet. Keycard. Pistol. Smokes. …Hang on, there was something else. Looking down she realized she was in her tac pants, which were, frankly, not ideal, but would do alright for black pants in a pinch. But the concern wasn't the pants, it was the conspicuous presence of a certain impossible third back pocket, within which was a certain black pack of cigarettes.
The fuck? I haven't run a loop in like 18 months. I'd have been fired by now if I hadn't turned these in.
As the elevator dinged and she stepped in, a weight pressed hard on her chest and simply would not lift. Carefully, fearfully, she opened the box.
…Sixteen left.

Part 9: Publish or Perish | Hub | Part 11: To be announced…


I woke late this morning
  in a dark and dizzy daze
I looked into the mirror
  and a stranger met my gaze
I fear with every day that I'm
  forgetting more and more
But how can I compare?
  I can't remember from before
Each day another stranger
  claims to be my friend or foe
I'm forced to make hard choices
  based on things that I don't know
My anonymity protects
  and hides me all the same
They wish to know my purpose;
  I just want to know my name
With every step I take I change
  the world before my eyes
I know now my mundanity
  is not just a disguise
I wonder if it's better to
  keep known or disappear;
If failing memory should not
  remain my greatest fear
If I should die tomorrow, though,
  I simply wouldn't care
Content to be forgotten
  as the man who wasn't there


YarrowWilliam 06/21/2015 (Sun) 13:06:55 #59160062

1992

There's a place in the forest by my town where the deer don't die. Time and time again, hunters talk about it, eyes full of darting, half-lidded suspicion. A stretch of roadside south of town, around the Appalachians but not quite in them, where the hunters don't go. You'll hear stories about it if you listen long enough.
Rambling tales of deer that keep on living when shot through the heart, the head, splattered on the windshield of a car, shrugging it off and darting back into the forest. Trappers never seem to catch their quarry there, and the number of times I've seen a car veer off the road in the last twenty years, faced with something that didn't seem to catch the headlights quite right, I can't count on one hand.
I never believed it though. A particularly rough patch of forest, where the animals are healthier than the weak, stick-legged things that walk along wherever humans have gone by. Thin black ice on the road, reflecting starlight to go where it shouldn't. They'll blame it on the Indians, but these folk blame them for all sorts of things. Never actually go and look.
That's where my uncle differed. He was a savvy hunter, a taxidermist too, never really believed in those things. His garage was full of trophies, some of them half-completed, and whenever someone said he couldn't do something, he took it as a challenge. He caught wind of the stories, and one day made it a goal of his to get one of those deer, and bring back its head in the bed of his pickup. We drove there, one night, in his old beatup of a Dodge Dakota. I was the spotter in the back, hid his drink, told him where to stop.
It felt strange, stopping by a roadside most people just drive past. Out-of-staters usually took this route, eyes on the road in front of them. On the ground below me were pebbles of all sizes, tire-worn, dusted with the black coating of rubber that you see on these older stretches of road. Forest was thick, but didn't look unusual to my eyes. There was a smell, though. Barely noticeable through the doors of the car, it still pervaded, a stench seemingly wafting out of the wall of trees to the east and over the asphalt. If my uncle noticed it, he didn't say. Something was dead nearby, was my first thought. Too sour for that, a part of my brain told me. I started to speak up, but a grunt from my uncle told me to keep my mouth shut.
He disappeared into the forest, and it was an agonizing fifteen minutes before he came back out again, slightly agitated.
"I found something," he said. "Tracks. Bigguns too."
He ushered me to follow him, and I did, over roots and sumac. I didn't know what to look for. I could carry a gun, but I couldn't track.
Soon though, clear as day, I saw them. My uncle's flashlight darted across the forest floor, illuminating depressions in the soft earth, cut deep enough to lay a finger in, pooled with water from the recent rain. They leaned long and skinny, close together but far from front to hind, and something had dragged along in the dirt to the side of them, leaving a wavy trail. The spoor was wrong in a way I couldn't pinpoint. Uncle identified it though. Hooves weren't splayed; the deer was lighter on its feet than any this size ought to be. It had moved quickly, too, given the density of the underbrush. Starving, he said it was, probably too sick to move properly. I didn't buy it.
I gripped my rifle more tightly as we continued on. The tracks stayed prominent, ours sinking much deeper into the mud. The stench was hard to ignore, now, although my uncle was indisposed to mention it. It had gained a tinge of sweetness, somehow, like burning honey mixed with sewage. Water dripped.
Our stakeout spot was unwieldy, in the lower branches of a stout white oak. My uncle's breath heaved hot on my neck as we watched. A sick deer couldn't travel far, he reasoned, and the head and bragging rights would be worth more than any meat it lacked. Long minutes passed, the hidden moon failing to give any indication of time. I was about to try to persuade him to call it quits when something moved. My uncle, holding the rifle, didn't hesitate to shoot. A low, dark shot rang out, and whatever had been moving stopped.
Quickly, Uncle dismounted the branch and started walking. Wherever it was, it was distant, and the flashlight's beam didn't penetrate the low branches. The stench was overpowering now; it seemed to come from nowhere in particular, but the air was warm and still. Holding my breath, I continued after him. In moments, the flashlight hit something, and Uncle stopped. A dark figure, lain over in the groundcover as if injured, sat at the edges of the flashlight's beam. It somehow still shown in silhouette, as if the flashlight hadn't touched it. One eye gleamed, the other shot through with a bullet, and the point where its antlers stopped and the branches began wasn't clear. It breathed slowly, steadily.
In a careful, practiced, almost deliberate fashion, the thing that was not a deer got up, turned backward, and started walking away. My uncle was silent, quick to follow.
At that moment, the forest seemed to melt around me as I ran. Sharp thorns and branches blocked my way where Uncle's steps were swift, the flashlight in his hands waving wildly. I gave chase, now acutely aware of my lack of gun, and managed to follow him into a small clearing, a place devoid of trees where a creek must have once flowed. His flashlight tilted up and I stopped in my tracks.
The deer stood before us, gazing intently. The right half of its face was caved in, and from the wound, antlers grew, extending up and into the branches above it. They billowed thick and gnarled, like frozen smoke.
Around it, from either side, heads of deer hung like trophies, encrusted down to the eyes in the same dark material, not quite catching the light. I stood, delirious with the smell, under a canopy covered in the stuff. Hard, finely twisted antlers gnarled together into great burls, half-forming the shapes of heads, or hooves.
Uncle turned my way, looking back to me, smiling.
"You look sick, what's wrong? It's only a deer."
I bolted wild through the night, and woke up sometime later by the side of the road, surrounded by paramedics. My memories for the next few weeks were fuzzy, full of hospital rooms, and doctors, and tubes.
Suicide, they said. Evidence was found in a nearby section of forest. Chunks of brain matter, splattered by gunshot on nearby trees. A flashlight, and some clothes, a couple scattered bones. As for his body, they said the scavengers must have come after it. My name was cleared quickly enough, as it went, after they learned what was inside of my head. Some kind of poison, biological in nature, neurotoxic. Said I was lucky I came out with only minor brain damage. Only thing that saved me was that I was found unconscious on the roadside days before his estimated time of death.
I sometimes hallucinate now, seeing antlers, trees, hearing the clicks of hooves. They blame it on brain damage, but these folk blame that for all sorts of things, never bothering to go and look. On warmer days, through the humidity and the still, heavy air, a smell sometimes wafts into my yard from the south. A sweet smell, like honey, like taxidermy and rot. That still, in that direction, my uncle waits, among the crown of horns.
I take up the scent deeply, now, as repulsive as it once was, and know, quietly in my heart, that my uncle did not die.


Canon Hub » What a Wonderful World Hub / Those Twisted Pines Hub » Take It Away, My Darling » & the Endings Thereof

Chapter I.VI

I wasn't born Faeowynn. When Mom and Dad had me, I was named Felix. Felix was often described as "serene." Friends and family have corroborated that story, saying that when I was little, I was just about the calmest kid they'd ever seen. I could stub my toe, and I'd just frown. My parents would leave me, and I'd sit in the corner. Whatever my unhappiness was, it was expressed silently.
The family anecdote is that I didn't cry when I was born. On New Years Day, 1978, I was pushed into the world, picked up by the doctor, and I just looked at my surroundings. Personally, I doubt it. If I had a child and they didn't scream and kick and cry for their first day on earth, I'd be more concerned than wistful. But I guess they didn't have the time to be concerned about me, because when I was born, Tim got so excited he fainted.
I'll admit it. This isn't a story my dad told me. It's not a story he'd ever want to tell. This is a story I'm telling about my dad and me. Back when he really was Dad. Mom didn't feel comfortable divulging this information either, so I'm using conjecture and recent acquisitions. And I get it, too. I get why this was kept from me. Thinking I'd take the blame, or something silly like that. People do it to themselves. I don't do that to myself.
I lived in a happy household. There was nothing wrong with Mom and Tim. Mom had to take some time off from school to support me, which delayed her getting her degree, but that was okay. I don't remember much about this time in my life, but I owe Tim my first memory. He had a coworker who piloted the boats that he used to take people on scuba diving tours, and when they were both available, Tim would bring me to work. I think it felt natural, because his dad did that with him. It gave Mom time to focus on studies, take care of herself, all that jazz. So my first memory wasn't even with my parents. It was with the guy who piloted the boat.
I remember being in the arms of the pilot, and I think all the other people were in the water, because the boat was stopped and everything was quiet. Owing to my calm nature, the pilot wasn't even worrying about me. I was in a little booster seat, strapped in, looking out the front window of the little boat. It was just a plane of blue. Not entirely calm, but barely moving. Waves were short and manageable. The rocking of the boat was lulling. If I were to guess, I think the memory ends when I fall asleep.
But that's not my only memory on one of the diving boats.

* * * * *

About halfway through my first year of preschool, Tim went on a trip. It was supposed to be just a week or two, but it ended up being a month. Not that I had the sense of time to tell when I was three years old. But when he came back things were different. As a kid, you don't get the concepts to know what's wrong, you can just tell that sometimes, something is. And that's what I was feeling. Tim was doing a good job at hiding it, but Mom wasn't, not really. The dinner table was quieter. The rides to school were tenser. It rubbed off on me, but, like almost all emotions, I didn't show it.
The preschool was connected to a nursery, so when they needed more time at home, I knew to just stay and go there when school was over. Because of this, I was going out on the boats with Tim and his coworkers a lot less. But on weekends, there was still a good chance I ended up on the water. I got to know Tim's coworkers — Tim loved to bring up Bill, "the funny one." He knew how to make me laugh (or, more often, just smile), and keep me occupied. I of course couldn't dive with my dad, so I always had to stay on the boat, but that was okay. I was also a kind of mascot for the diving company, and while I didn't thrive in the spotlight, I didn't mind the attention. Some recurring customers would bring me little toys. Most often sea-themed. I still have a small collection of seashells that started with a lady who gave me hers. I never got as into it as she did, so her mass is still more than half of it, but it says something that wherever I go it gets put somewhere visible in my living space.
That day, though, I was taken by surprise. It was a Sunday, and Dad had taken me to the beach. But instead of getting on a diving boat, we got on a rental motorboat, and headed out. Tim said he wanted to "show me something." Seeing as I had been on the water plenty of times, I didn't get it, but I wasn't one to mistrust Dad so I just sat and went along for the ride. So we went, further and further out onto the waves, further and further away from San Diego.
The air was temperate, the sloshing of the ocean was calming, the rocking of the boat was as lulling as ever. Lifejacket on (in case I fell off), sun in the sky (if a bit clouded), we began to see less and less people, more and more water. Most people weren't allowed to take the rental boats this far, but Tim had built up a repertoire with the people working at Mission Beach, and he was the type to get special treatment. So, beyond where anyone else was supposed to be, the boat came to a stop, and Dad got out of the cockpit.
Not to give the wrong idea, but Tim had always been very good about hiding his emotions. His fake smile was almost as good as his real one, the difference only noticeable with a practiced eye like his family might have. In my three years of life, I guess I had begun to pick up on that, because when Dad came out onto the boat, I could tell that something was wrong. But I didn't say anything. I just let him speak.
So he raised his arms, gesturing to the great blue ocean.
"This," he said, louder than he needed to, "is the wild!"
He waited. Maybe for a response, maybe just to let the words come to him. I didn't say a word.
"You can see the city from here, but we're not in the city anymore. Look around you! It's all the wild blue yonder. Saltwater from horizon to horizon. You ever been out this far?"
I shook my head.
"Can you hear the people on the beach? The motorboats? The thrum of the city from out here?"
I didn't know what "thrum" meant, but I tried to listen for the signature sounds of my city. This far out, though, the waves tapping the sides of the boat were louder than anything else. I could hear the motor of someone going faster than anyone needed to, but I knew what Dad meant, so I shook my head.
"That's right. When was the last time you can remember being so far away from the sounds of the city?"
I didn't know what to say, so I just looked at him.
Tim sat down, and heaved out a sigh like the wind was knocked out of him. "Felix, I can't stay in San Diego. Here. I can't stay… here. Because… I'm not meant to." I just kept looking at him, with that blank, unknowing expression. A being of naivety. The quiddity of innocence. Tim had a hard time keeping eye contact, but he didn't look away.
"I'm meant to be here," he gestured to the ocean again. "All the way out here, in the wild. Where all the animals live, and the sounds are soft and pleasant, and life is free, teeming, out of the…"
He saw that his big words were lost on my small ears. His arms folded to his sides, his mouth hung open a second, and then he composed himself again. No amount of charisma prepares you to be a parent.
"How about, I tell you a story. Would you like a story?"
I nodded.
"When I was a little older than you are now, when I was four or so… I went to the zoo. Do you remember the zoo?"
I did.
"And do you remember all the animals at the zoo?"
I smiled just a little, and nodded.
"Good. Well, didn't they feel magical? Out of this world? Like nothing you'd ever seen before?"
I nodded more enthusiastically.
"Well, there are places where those animals aren't in cages. And that's what the wild is. That's where we are, right now. Have you been to an aquarium?" I shook my head. "Well, an aquarium is just like a zoo, but it's all underwater animals. You know, the ones I show people when I go diving. Well, some come close enough to the bay for me to get a look at, but the rest of them… they all live out here! Beyond the city, under the water, out in these waves we're on right now. And when I was little, I realized that, or something like it, right after I went to the zoo. I realized, that all San Diego can do is keep them in cages, but it can't let you experience them."
He looked down at the floor of the boat.
"But, on some level, I must have been okay with that. Because I stayed here, in the city, for so long. I thought that the beach would be enough, but…"
Tim leaned back and looked up at the sky, his smile weaker still.
"But it's not. I just had to have someone show me. And up north, I did. Remember that trip I took recently? That was me building a relationship with nature, one that you simply can't have living in the city. That was me going to the woods, and discovering myself. And, you might not understand right now, but, I hope that one day, I can show you. What it's like out there."
He turned from me, out towards the water, and put his hand on his face for a second.
"So, I am going to be leaving, in a month."
I stared on. This whole time, I hadn't moved from my seat, nor taken my eyes off of my dad. I just looked at him. And now, he looked back. I waited for him to continue, but he didn't. The ball was in my court. So, after a pause, I said:
"Leaving?"
"Leaving."
"To where?"
"Up north. It's a little town in Oregon, the state right above us. Have you learned the states yet?"
I shook my head.
"Oh. Well, we live in California. San Diego is a city in the state of California, see? And Oregon is a state above California. I'm going to go there."
"Oh."
Tim's smile was gone. "Because it's wild there."
"Oh."
I resumed my process, just sitting and staring, waiting for the moment that new information might come, but none did. He was letting me talk. He wanted me to ask questions.
"How long will you be gone?"
"That's the thing, Fee. I'm going to be gone more than I'm not, now. You'll still see me, but we won't live together."
"Oh."
This time, the pause just continued. All that could be heard was the soft sea breeze, the ever pushing water, and the occasional call of seagulls. He waited for me to say something more, ask something else, but I didn't. I just sat, and stared. Right into his eyes, brown as oak bark. He maintained the eye contact, either at a loss for words or hoping that I wasn't. Or maybe just thinking. Looking at the child he would be leaving, and thinking.
"So," he finally said, "I want to do fun things with you this month, celebrate before I have to go. What do you say?"
I nodded.
His smile snuck back onto his face. "Good. Good! Then what do you want to do first?"
The rest of the day passed without incident. Tim felt like he had done his due diligence, and so we went back to shore, the motor's hum accompanying our return trip. In the coming month, he took me to the aquarium, and to Six Flags, and quite often to the park, where we would eat sandwiches that Mom made and play frisbee (which mostly consisted of Tim throwing it and me running after it, only to inevitably pick it up off the ground and fumble it back towards him). They were good days.
And then Tim left. He packed up his car with all his stuff from our apartment, hugged me goodbye, and left just like that. And afterwards, Mom and I pretended nothing had changed. I went to school, I sequestered myself in the corner just like always. Mom continued her studies, made me breakfast lunch and dinner, and relied on her parents for money until she cut back on her classes and made space for a job. I was spending more time at the nursery. And I put on my best face for Mom, because I had always done that, and nothing should have changed.
But things were different.
I missed going out onto the boats. I missed when he took me out for ice cream. I missed how much he smiled, day to day, hour to hour, all the god damn time.
What this looked like, taking place in the mind of a three year old, is of course up to speculation. It couldn't have stung so clearly, but it couldn't have been nonexistent either. Each day yielded less play, less eating, and came with more apathy, more lethargy, more sleep. I think, looking back, that Mom had realized and accepted something that I couldn't get past.
Dad was immovable. Mom realized that it was part of why she fell in love with him: that he loved nature so much. I don't think she realized quite to what extent, when they married. Tim had another bride, and her name was Mother Earth.
At least, that's the explanation I was given.

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LiterallyMechanical

A Frame Of Mind, by LiterallyMechanical
For the rest of my work, check out LiterallyMechanical's Author Page
A few of my favorites:

SCP-5236 — Ethics Committee Inquest
SCP-4163 — The Tetris Prodigy
SCP-4357 — Slimelord

Training Document ζ0-9A1-3

On 19 May 2023, MTF-Delta-5 "Line of Sight" encountered a civilian under the influence of a Class-II Psychoparasitic Infiltrator, designated SCP-9434. Nine members of the task force were KIA in the struggle, leaving MTF-δ5-3 as the sole survivor. Eighteen nearby civilians were subsequently killed by SCP-9434 before its host succumbed to injuries sustained in its engagement with MTF-δ5.
During debrief, MTF-δ5-3 requested to be transfered to MTF-Zeta-0, "Monsters." The following document was produced by MTF-δ5-3 (now designated MTF-ζ0-1) three days into the ζ0 psychological reconditioning process. Accordingly, it has been entered into the ζ0 training archive.
This document is mandatory reading material for all MTF-ζ0 trainees. You are now instructed to read the text in its entirety. In the course of your reconditioning, you will be asked to produce similar documents, all of which shall be shared among your teammates. You have all suffered, and this suffering cannot be simply put aside. You will learn from each other, and together you will be transformed.
There are no secrets in MTF-ζ0.

In the Second World War, only fifteen percent of Allied soldiers fired their weapons.
The theory goes: nobody wants to kill, nobody wants to look down the barrel and see another human being die because of what you did, because of your finger on the trigger, because you made a decision and somebody died. Somebody died and you saw him fall, and the report from your gun was still shattering your ears when he hit the mud. You smelled the cordite and piss that marked the end of a life, and then you moved forward. The soldier on your left did not move with you, because the man you killed had a friend who had a gun who had a bullet. That bullet was moving down range fast, then, on a comet's trail of blood and brain tissue and bone fragments, and then you moved forward and the soldier on your left did not.
Nobody wants this.
So they changed up the training. They made all sorts of clever tweaks. Human-shaped targets instead of bull's eyes, emphasis on the moral culpability of commanding officers, camaraderie, propaganda, team building, a rigid, formal structure designed to break down human and rebuild soldier. They realized that it was all about your frame of mind, and there are ways to change a mind.
It worked. In the Vietnam war, up to ninety percent of American soldiers fired their weapons.
None of that is true.
The data from World War Two was falsified. The fighting was brutal, and bloody, and fierce. Everybody fired a gun, because anybody who didn't shoot first would get shot, and then Anybody was Nobody, and all that was left was Everybody. The tweaks they made to basic training between the wars were minor, at best, and while they might have done a good job at turning teenagers into halfway-decent marksmen, the psychological burden was much the same. Nobody wants to kill, sure, but it's always been very, very easy to persuade them to do it anyway.
But human-shaped targets were a clever idea.
Large swaths of the Foundation were born out of the United States military. These days, a lot of task force leaders cut their teeth on Afghanistan before they get their entrails eaten by something with too many vertices to fit comfortably in baseline reality. At least two O5's used to be generals or admirals, back in World War Redacted. Entire research teams were scooped out of the Manhattan Project, and Paperclip, and other, weirder groups with black money and no supervision. A surprising amount of the Foundation's occult science started out in ARPA. Pharmacology too. You can thank the Air Force for some of the earliest amnestics.
In the end, psychology was the biggest and best thing to make its way from the US military into the Foundation.
Paper targets shaped like paper people become full-VR simulation, complete with neural taps and a dizzying cocktail of amphetamine and irreality drugs injected right into the vein. Team building exercises get their lethal edge, mock executions — usually mock. The Foundation shapes you to hyper-specialize in one thing. Psionic warfare, chemical weapons, reality anchoring, dreamscape navigation, microgravity, sensory deprivation, afterlife exfiltration. They take your mind and mold you into a blade, scalpel or sword or both. They'll modify your body, too, of course. Brain implants, skeletal reinforcement, muscle growth, new organs or missing organs or all of the above. But beyond anything else, the mind shaping that goes on here is exquisitely exact. Military precision.
But sometimes the training isn't right. Sometimes that specialization is not conducive to an optimal outcome for the mission. You lost your entire task force, and the anomaly escaped into the general population. Eighteen civilians dead, another hundred amnesticized across the sleepy suburb, tens of millions of dollars lost. Its silver teeth tore a bloody swath through your squad. It chewed its way through their flesh, then it got to work on the neighbors. You were schooled in close-quarters combat in 4+ dimensional topologies, your eyeballs modified to see shades of light that have never existed, but your MTF was cut down by—
You weren't trained for that.
Sometimes, what you need to train is as simple as your attitude. Sometimes, you just need to learn to enter the right frame of mind. That's what zeta-zero is for, isn't it? A shift in perspective, a new attitude, a wrong attitude that will become correct.
Listen:
Only fifteen percent of soldiers in World War Two fired their weapons. Intensive, extensive overhauls to basic training raised that number to ninety percent in Vietnam. The data gathered from years of meticulous psychological research allowed the United States military to train ordinary young men and women into killers. It was hard. Nobody wants to kill, and it's very, very difficult to persuade them to do it.
Listen:
In World War Two, the fighting was hot and bloody. People killed, with bullets and bayonets and bombs. They fought with a desperation born out of fear or patriotism or both, and they did not hesitate. Put a teenager in a righteous life-or-death situation and he'll choose quickly.
Listen:
The lives of the innocent are precious above all others.
Listen:
The lives of your squadmates are precious above all others.
Listen:
Secure. Contain. Protect.
Listen:
It's all about your frame of mind. If your new reality doesn't fit within that frame, ask them to break it down and build you a new one. Don't do it for the greater good. The greater good is for people who don't have to pull the trigger. You're here for yourself. You're here for your own pain.
Listen:
Lead your squad into that quiet suburban house, kick down the door, sweep the corners, clear the living room, kitchen, two bodies on the staircase, check for vital signs — looks like the homeowners, both exsanguinated — go upstairs, third door on the left — thaumic levels are off the charts, the entity's got to be in there — on the count of three, Morgan ignores the magic marker warning to "KEEP OUT" and he goes in. You follow.
You see the entity. It looks just like the doe-eyed little girl in the family photograph on the fridge, twelve years old and finishing the seventh grade in two weeks. It's screaming, clutching a teddy bear, blood still dripping from its chin — What's happening? Where's Mom? Mom? I'm so hungry — and it cries and lunges and its teeth aren't sharp at all, just a child's mouth with bloody spittle trailing off silver braces. It's going for Morgan's jugular, and here's the only question that matters:
How do you train a man to kill children?
Do you make him numb to it? Drugs, simulations, subliminal messages, Clockwork Orange his eyelids and beam loyalty directly into his brain? Just kill child after child in his dreams and daydreams until it becomes no different than killing a man, which, after all, is no different than shooting a paper target?
Nobody wants this. Or at least, anybody who does should on no account be allowed to do it. You can't hire a child killer to kill children. You have to make one. Then you make ten more of them, and put them in uniforms, and call them a task force. Monsters. We call ourselves that to remind us this is not good, greater or lesser. Anybody who wants to die in the dark to preserve the light should be immediately taken out back and shot, because the only thing worse than a monster is the greater good. You're here for you and you alone, and don't you dare believe otherwise.
It's May nineteenth, twenty twenty-three, and you kick down the door and climb the stairs to Secure, Contain, and Protect. The bites on the parents' necks match the bloody teeth and panicked eyes of a little girl burning with a parasitic hunger she can't ever sate and doesn't have time to understand. There's always a choice.
Nobody wants this. That's the most important part.
It's all about your frame of mind.


Site-19: Zero Eight Hundred, the Day after The Caper
Site-19 was an absolute shambles in the wake of the cookie caper. Dr. Magnus strode through the halls, flashing his shiny new Level 3 badge at anyone who dared look at him wrong. It had taken far more hard work and even more begging with his superiors to even be put back in the consideration for promotion, let alone attain it.
With a bit more hard work and luck, maybe he'd stop being killed and subjected to horrible soul-shattering agony to come back to life. He had gotten his chance to work with higher level staff, and his research had begun to show promise. Metaphysical reality experts weren't totally useless, in an organization which routinely dealt with the anomalous, shocker.
His first task as a Level 3 was to find out who had stole a cookie, of all things, from a jar in Site-19. It had been made infinitely clear this was a trial of sorts.
He approached the security checkpoint, and flashed his ID against the scanner. The doors quietly hissed open, and the room inside was as tense as a mexican standoff. Six members of MTF-Epsilon-22 were stationed here full time.
“I'd like a full situation report.” Magnus said. He hoped his voice exuded the confidence he didn't really have.. He was still getting used to not getting line-jumped in the cafeteria. He snapped his fingers at the task-force member nearest to the actual jar.
“Sir. All we know is that someone took a cookie from—” his face contorted for a moment, and he continued, “the cookie jar. All we know is who it couldn't be.”
Magnus nodded, and approached the clear cookie jar, containing quite a few cookies, but a very conspicuous absence near the top of the pile. “I see. And there's no indication of who could actually have done this?”
“Sir, we have a list of who we can confirm didn't do it.” He handed over a sheet of paper to Magnus, who studied it carefully.
“Wait, I've been cleared, and it says….I was ‘on my bullshit' here?” Magnus raised an eyebrow frowning at the guard.
“Sir, I don't know who compiled the list, I just—” Magnus waved a hand cutting the agent off.
“Fine fine. I want to interrogate every other person in the Site not on this list. Have them report to the holding area.”

Sixteen hours later, Dr. Magnus returned to the office that he shared with Dr. Kensington, exhausted. He collapsed into the chair in front of his desk. “Fuck me sideways.”
Dr. Kensington looked up from the comic book he was reading, and raised an eyebrow, “What's wrong, Magbutt? Didn't find out who stole the stupid cookie?”
Magnus raised his hands at the elbows in a gesture of defeat. His voice was muffled by his face smushed against his desk. “No, not a goddamned thing. No one knows who took the cookie from the jar.” Magnus lifted his head, “I also have no idea why anyone cares so much. It was just a cookie right? It wasn't even a skip?”
Dr. Kensington threw his comic book on his desk, and sat up properly. “You really don't read the reports the directors send you, do you? That's part of being level 3, you know.” Kens shifted some of the papers on his desk, and flung a stapled packet across to Magnus' desk. “It's an anomalous item. Everyone that considers eating one is fiercely protective of them. They supposedly improve overall health a bit, but not like 500 does. Just a little nudge, not a panacea.”
Magnus scanned the page, his eyes turning deadly serious for a moment, before putting it down. He reached over for the stale coffee turning rapidly cold on his desk and took a sip with a grimace. “Okay, so we know three things: These cookies make you feel a bit better overall, everyone wants to keep them safe, and someone managed to take one anyway. I'm guessing they must have had a good reason.”
Kens shrugged, and picked up a different comic, flipping to a dog-ear, “I guess. Hey, did you find out what I asked, by the way?”
Magnus nodded wearily, “Yeah, he's getting out today, he should be ready for visitors in an hour or so. Why didn't you just ask yourself?”
Kens stood up, and smirked at Magnus, “Because, mag-butts, I had important level 4 things to do. I can't be assed to do the little things anymore.”
Magnus glared, and gave Kensington the finger, before starting to hammer ineffectually on his keyboard, chipping away at the cookie caper.

Dr. Kensington's feet echoed down the hallways of the medical wing. It was always oppressively quiet, but at least it's better than when it wasn't. Kens had his fair share of bad experiences in this exact wing.
He approached the nurses station, and flashed his ID, “Hi there,” he glanced at his nametag, “Dan. I'm looking for Charles Gears' room.”
The young nurse at the desk hesitated for a moment, “I'm sorry sir, even Level 4 staff aren't being permitted to see him. His doctors don't want anyone to disturb him at this time considering the number of anomalies on-site. Not even level four, I'm sorry Dr. Kensington .”
Kensington nodded, and gently thumbed the near-invisible stud on his ID back, flashing a series of symbols across the front. “Perhaps you'd reconsider?” He said, the memetic emblem of an O5 council member flashing in the young nurse's eyes. He would allow whatever request was made of him, and forget exactly who the bearer was. Neat trick for staying hidden in plain sight.
“Yes, of course sir, my apologies. Room 177.” He swallowed hard.
“Thanks, Dan. Keep up the good work.” Kens turned with a small smile, the heels of his dress shoes clacking down the hallway towards room 177. As Kens rounded a corner, Dan shook his head for a moment, then went back to the scheduling duties in front of him, none the wiser.
Monitors beeped softly from various rooms, as Kens finally came to room 177. He scanned his ID reader at the door and quietly slipped inside.
WIthin the room was a single bed, containing a man in his mid-fifties, balding, but otherwise healthy. His face was slightly sunken from the recovery process. A vase of flowers was on the windowsill. He looked up from the book in his lap, and considered Dr. Kensington. “Doctor, may I ask to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
Dr. Kensington smiled slightly, and crossed to the flowers, reading the tag. Get well soon, -Agatha. “Pleasure Charles?”
Dr. Gears cocked his head slightly, “A figure of speech. How can I help you doctor?”
Kens crossed the room, and sat on the foot of the bed, “I just wanted to come by and see how you were doing. I know the cancer wasn't as bad as it could have been, but…”
Dr. Gears nodded, “I am in adequate condition, considering the circumstances. Thank you for taking time out of your day to check in on me, Dr. Kensington. It was very considerate.”
Kens smiled faintly, and stood up, pulling a sandwich baggie out of his pocket. Inside was a single cookie, only a few crumbs missing. “Hey, I know you don't go much for sweets, but it would mean a lot to me if you would eat this.”
Dr. Gears considered for a moment, and ate the proffered cookie. Dr. Gears was not a man prone to emotions, but a very faint smile crept on to his face. “Thank you Doctor. If you don't mind, I would like to get back to reading.”
Dr. Kensington nodded, and quietly exited Dr. Gears' hospital room. He walked down the halls of Site-19 with more energy in his step than in a long time.


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⚠ Content warning: This work of fiction involves scenes which depict or allude to topics which may be particularly distressing for some readers. Please scroll for a list of such topics contained in this piece.

Body horror
Child abuse
Child death
Graphic violence
Kidnapping
Mental illness
Sexual abuse
Torture
Violence

Readers with particular sensitivities should also be aware that this story also depicts or alludes to the following subjects which are less prevalent among content advisories, but nevertheless have the potential to be disturbing:

Abuse by religious authorities
Orphan abuse
Mechanical injury

PeppersGhost

The Clock at Saint Claude's by PeppersGhost

More by this author

spectralsprite 08/12/09 (Tue) 03:01:22 #76385640

The children of Saint Claude's.

Despite popular belief, the building is still occupied. I've come to be on a first name basis with a couple of the men who guard the property, so I won't make their jobs more difficult by giving out the actual name of the place. Still, those of you who are from the area will know the building I'm talking about, and anyone else dedicated enough can probably find it with some clever googling.
Suffice it to say that somewhere in the United States there was a peculiar orphanage. Let's call it "Saint Claude's Orphan Asylum." Before it was an orphanage it was a boarding house, and before then it was a would-be dormitory. Throughout the years it came to form the foundation of our town's folklore, and today it is the wellspring from which an entire local mythology flows.
Most of it is bullshit, of course. After all, it's a spooky old orphanage——the place probably would've attracted stories even if nothing bad ever actually happened there. The fact that bad things did happen there is just the icing on the cake. It's the perfect source for campfire fodder. I can personally attest to that: my first exposure to the tales of Saint Claude's took place at a sleepover in third grade, told in hushed tones amidst blankets and flashlights.
In recent years I began to wonder how much of this lore was fact and how much was fiction. Obviously the stories involving ghosts and curses and whatnot would be difficult to verify, but what about the human horrors? I decided to do some research.
Right off the bat, I was shocked to find that several of the most lurid atrocities attributed to Saint Claude's weren't just matters of public record——they were practically mundane by virtue of how many similar cases you can find in the history of our country's orphanages. Based on everything I've read, I can say with no exaggeration that for most of the twentieth century, orphanages could murder children with no effort or consequence.
There were countless acts of cruelty committed on the grounds of Saint Claude's. Every case of abuse is a tragedy and I don't mean to diminish the significance of any injustice by excluding it—but exclude I must. For today's purposes, we won't linger on the beatings, humiliations, molestations, or alarming number of accidents involving stairwells and electrical sockets and pointed shafts of wood. You see, many orphanages have been places of cruelty, but today I'm going to tell you why Saint Claude's was fucking weird.

spectralsprite 08/12/09 (Tue) 03:01:20 #76385640

The first thing you need to understand is the building itself.
In its earliest life, it was intended to be a dormitory for a privately funded college, but the private funder went broke and plans for the college came to an abrupt halt. Still, the dormitory was mostly finished, and a couple of enterprising businessmen finished it up to use as a boarding house. One key feature remained incomplete, though: the clock on the facade. The face was set up and ready to go, numerals embossed and polished, but no hands had ever been installed.
The issue seems to have stemmed from a miscommunication between the clock-maker and the architect. Normally there's a shaft which connects the hands on the face to the clockwork mechanisms housed inside the building, but the shaft piece delivered to the site was too short to bridge the gap and too wide to fit through the opening in the wall.
The clock-maker and the architect each blamed the other for the mistake and neither one would agree to fix the issue unless fully compensated, so naturally, nothing else was done about it until the Catholic Church paid to have the clock face covered by brickwork when they acquired the property two decades later. As for the clock's internal mechanisms? Never removed.
The second thing you need to understand is the children.
Despite what some may assume from the name, Saint Claude's Orphan Asylum did not house mentally ill children. What's more, the children weren't even orphans in most cases, just kids who got extracted from troubled families by the church or government after their parents were deemed lacking in morals or money.
Children up to the age of thirteen were accepted at Saint Claude's, though they sometimes stayed through early adulthood if they could find nowhere else to go. Adoptions were rare, and when they did happen, each new pair of grinning adoptive parents was often said to look suspiciously similar to the last. The Sisters taught the children employable skills they could use in the future—and only in the future, as actual employment was not permitted while under the Sisters' care. Whenever an enterprising scamp would sneak off to work odd jobs in town, their wages were confiscated without fail. The Sisters always knew, and the Sisters always punished.
Of course, punishments didn't always require an actual offense. The children of Saint Claude's had a reputation, you see. Many came from other orphanages that were 'ill-equipped' to deal with such ‘troubled' youths. The Sisters attributed the children's issues to spiritual matters: generational sin, usually, though satanic influence wasn't out of the question.
One former inmate of St. Claude's recalled an incident where a 5-year-old girl was accused of black magic. A nun claimed to have seen the girl levitating, and when the girl embarrassed her by failing to reproduce the effect for the other Sisters, she took the child in her arms and threw her out a second story window. The girl reportedly screamed "Catch me! Catch me!" as she fell. By the time the witness made it outside, the little girl was nowhere to be found, and she was never seen again. The Sisters simply said she had gone home to be with her parents.
Fear was a constant companion for the children of Saint Claude's. All punishments and reprisals were the stuff of nightmares, but the one that brought me to write this today is the winding of the clock.
The foyer of Saint Claude's takes up both stories. It has a curved staircase and a small balcony on the second floor to give the impression of grandeur. Unfortunately, the clock was built on the central gable directly above the front entrance, which means that there's no way to access it directly from the floor below. Instead, one must traverse a narrow attic that protrudes along the center of the building from front to back like a spine. The only entrance to the attic is, of course, at the other end of the building.
Almost every single day, a child would be forced to climb up into the attic, travel the full length of the building, and wind a "clock" that had no hands, no face, and no bells.
On the days they didn't send a child into the attic, there would still be one up there from the day before.

spectralsprite 08/12/09 (Tue) 03:01:20 #76385640

Urban exploration of an abandoned space is, in most cases, considered a form of trespassing. On the other hand, trespassing in an occupied space is hardly ever considered urban exploration, and that always struck me as a double standard. Don't get me wrong——there was no forced entry involved. I'm not a thug. All I had to do was become buddies with one of the guards. After we got to know each other, I explained the history of the place and assured him I only wanted to look around, and he gave me an hour. I walked through the front door.
Saint Claude's is a clergy house nowadays. The only folks who live there are a few old white men who go to bed before 10 PM. The floors are creaky, but the rooms are close enough together that they'd just blame each other for the noise, so getting to the attic was a piece of cake. Getting through it was the hard part. There was crap everywhere: walls of furniture, mountains of bibles, boxes of Christmas decorations, all of it ancient, ruined by water damage and infested with rot. The ceiling was lower than expected; just a little under five feet of clearance. Explained why they only sent kids to do it. Walking more than two dozen yards while hunched over would be bad enough on its own, let alone when you have to constantly stop and crawl over a moldy loveseat or a spider-infested pile of tinsel.
The far end of the attic drops down a couple of steps leading up to the gable, which allowed me to stand up straight again. The clock mechanism itself isn't terribly large, or at least not to an adult. About four feet tall; roughly the size of a chest of drawers. A skeletal frame wraps around the base like the edges of a box, leaving every tooth on every cog fully exposed. To wind it, one must affix a detachable crank to the top of the device and give it a couple dozen turns. Now, if you're about five feet tall, this is no problem. Unfortunately, most of the kids at Saint Claude's were under ten years old.
If you're having trouble picturing the issue here, let me walk you through it:
You're eight years old. The nuns threaten to send you to bed without supper (or worse) if you don't wind this damned clock. You clamber up into the pitch dark attic with only a box of matches. Maybe an oil lamp if you're lucky. You're too short to reach the crank, so what do you? You climb up on the frame and kneel over it. The crank is stiff and heavy, you can't see shit, and you're shaking like a leaf because you're fucking terrified.
The crank hits a hitch. You lean on it with all your weight. It suddenly gives all at once, catching you by surprise. Your foot slips. Your leg slides between the gears. The heavy clockwork snaps your body in three different places as it pulls you in.
More than a dozen children are said to have died this way. No bodies were ever found, but there were remains. One survivor told me that she was put on clock duty a few days after a little blonde girl had vanished, and sure enough, she found a knot of wispy golden hair snared around a sprocket. She took it for evidence and hid it in her pillow, but a Sister discovered it two years later.
Having seen the clock myself, I can't quite tell you whether I think it's as deadly as the stories say. The machine and the area around it are clean; no blood or hair or even rust to be found. The teeth on some of the gears look quite sharp, and there are certainly a lot of pinch points, but it doesn't strike me as a meat grinder for children. I guess my verdict is that any child who fell inside probably wouldn't be reduced to a pulp, necessarily. But they would definitely come out broken.
At any rate, while I was inspecting the machine firsthand, I made a discovery. Three of them, actually.
The first is that there's a ladder right behind the clock mechanism. It's wedged in tight, so it's not like someone stored it there carelessly. It's clean, too.
The second is that there's a conspicuous rectangular seam in the wood beneath the machine. Just big enough to fit a small adult through.
The third discovery, and the reason why I'm sharing this with you all today, is that it's still ticking. Someone is still winding the clock.