It's hard to get the image of a sky that's 90 percent bugs out of your head, even if you've seen some pretty gruesome stuff in your line of work. Our hands were already tied since everything up and went crazy and people stopped dying. When entire ecosystems got thrown out of whack, we could barely do anything with what The Foundation gave to us on loan in Oregon.
Marshes became bug paradises, although people who lived near them called them hell. Entire houses were swarmed by termites, devouring it in a matter of days. Cicadas were so loud and so plentiful that you couldn't go outside in the Summer without earplugs. And the mosquitos, god the mosquito swarms were as thick as mud, you had to practically wade through them in special suits if you wanted to go places without losing most if not all of your blood. When a swat doesn't kill them and they live more than a few weeks, bugs become less of an annoyance and more of a horror story. God knows what life is like in places like Louisiana and Florida right now; they had to be evacuated after the first six months.
We did our best to make sure these animals didn't suffer, but… it's hard. It's hard to figure out what's actually suffering and what's just us not being able to hear them crying about the pain. We knew when we signed the Boring Agreement that we would have to agree to some less than savory stuff, but we never thought we had to deal with this, this… "torture apocalypse".
A lot of the workload got to some of our people. Nandini couldn't take the stress of being head of the Veterinary Department, poor woman. She just up and left when she saw a mountain lion with her stomach burst open writhing with maggots, still mewling weakly in pain. She'd usually euthanize the poor girl in this case, but… obviously that wasn't an option right now.
Hell, when The Foundation called us to visit them in order to do something to deal with this problem, a lot of us didn't even want to show up. I myself almost considered breaking that agreement just so we didn't have to deal with so much of this weight. In the end, I went alone; someone had to handle this, and it's more or less my job to protect people that need protecting.

I was outfitted in a hazmat suit with a 'friendly' little Foundation logo on the breast, hurried out of a van, and into a fairly ominous-looking concrete building. When I asked, I was told that the site name was classified; all I needed to know was that it specialized in chemical containment. If they thought a little pesticide was going to stop this, I would have walked out then and there, but I had to keep on… if there was a way to stop this, I had to at least try to hear it out.
It took an uncomfortable amount of time in an elevator before we reached our destination; a stuffy little room secured by a few too many airlocks than I thought were necessary. Hey, I guess they had to be safe, considering what could be stored here. Dr. Violet Mesmur, a woman who said she was on the Ethics Committee, greeted me as warmly as Foundation members are known for. She seemed relatively calm and collected at least, but that made me think that she had no idea what was even going on outside. I didn't know if I should have felt angry or jealous, but that didn't matter. I needed to be focused, eyes on the theoretical prize.
"Mr. Wilson, would it be wrong to assume that your operations are at least somewhat well-known in the United States?" Dr. Mesmur asked.
I cleared my throat before I replied, "W-well, we've been trying to get ourselves out there, as I guess you know. We do videos on the animals that we're allowed to show, like when we raised a small family of Pileated Woodpeckers after their mother and father got eaten by predators," I took a breath, stopping myself from getting too invested in the tangent, "I wouldn't want to get cocky, but at least we're known pretty well in the Pacific Northwest."
Dr. Mesmur nodded, then spoke, "Mhmm, well, you're going to be a face now. We're busy enough dealing with the human population, trying to keep everyone from taking advantage of their newfound immortality for… less than savory actions."
Dr. Mesmur instructed her assistant, who had since been standing silently nearby, to 'Get the cylinders'. As they flitted away, I felt a little sad that in our brief interaction that I never bothered to ask their name. I'm usually much more on top of getting to know people, but I guess, you know, life kinda stressed me out.
"You're already intimately familiar with animals, I would assume. From what I've read about you and your organization, their preservation and safety seems to be a bit of a passion for you, no matter what kind of animal it is," Dr. Mesmur remarked as she turned back to face me.
"Well, heh, you're pretty on the nose there, pardner. Not exactly hard to see, I'd say, but that's not the point you're getting at, is it?" I replied.
"Astute. You'll essentially be tasked with using something we've been developing and perfecting for the last few years on the animal population to stop their growth," at this point, the assistant came in, holding a box with three vials of something light blue inside them, "And considering the fact that it is… somewhat questionable, having a recognized face take action rather than us, a 'shadowy organization', should remove a few of the road blocks."
The kind assistant set down the vials on a table in front of us, each one sporting a neat little label. Dr. Mesmur gingerly took the leftmost vial, labelled 'SCP-3287-1' and held it, looking at it. She didn't bother to look at me as she continued to talk.
"It's a gaseous sterilizing agent. Simply expose any living subject to it and within 60 seconds they will be instantly sterilized. Or at least, that's what's in this vial," Dr. Mesmur said, setting down the first vial carefully.
"Bit of an obvious question, but what are in the other two vials then?" I asked, gesturing towards the other vials.
"Well…" Dr. Mesmur began, finally turning towards me, "Technically, we don't know. Plenty of people have theories, but none of them are confirmed. We've tried dozens of tests, but… we'll just have to go on a gut feeling here because we'll be needing you to either confirm or deny what these substances actually do."
She sighed, which I assumed was her signifying she finished what she was saying. I stayed quiet when she finished, assuming she'd have something more to say, but that never happened.
After a few seconds, I finally said something, "Are you asking me to try to figure out that theory or are you waiting for me to agree to using these things?"
Dr. Mesmur sighed, "I'm sorry, I got… distracted. The working theory is these vials are, well, retroactively sterilizing their subjects. If you use these gases on the right animals, you could easily stop problems before they even happen, or happened in some cases. Obviously you'll need to be briefed with how to properly use this, but you will need to give verbal and written confirmation that you consent to using this, should it… go wrong."
"Go wrong?" I asked.
"You could be erased from existence. Nobody would remember you, your organization would never exist, anything that you did for humans and animals alike would never happen," Dr. Mesmur said flatly, "I need a yes or a no before we can continue."
You could always count on the Foundation to gamble everything but their own skin on something if it meant that they could maybe learn a shred of information about it. They really just asked me if I wasn't just willing to die, but willing to risk the lives of every poor critter I had saved in my years upon years of working. What they said was absolutely crazy! It was inhumane! It was… it was…
It was the only shot we had. If I didn't do it, everyone would be damned to a world of locusts and mosquitos and mayflies and horseflies and wasps and… well, I don't exactly need to list them all out. But even they know that it's theoretical; they apparently hadn't even tested the damn stuff. It's just… I'd need to decide. I'd need to be the one to say whether or not I was willing to wait for a definitive solution or risk everything for one that could help us now before it gets too bad.
I gave my answer.

Surprisingly, life was relatively easy once people started becoming immortal. Something about what happened made a lot of the animals sterile, so we didn't have to deal with issues of overpopulation and whatnot. Our main problem was just making sure animals didn't suffer too much if they got into scrapes. Sure, we couldn't euthanize them, but we did our best to make sure they were at least taken care of as best as we could.
Of course, a few people started going stark raving mad once they found out they could live forever, but they thought immortality meant no repercussions. A lot of the fine folks at the Foundation said they got that covered, but if anyone ever decides to do something like break into a zoo and release all the lions or something like that, we handle it. Oddly enough, we've been dealing more with domestic stuff than anomalous stuff ever since this all happened.
It's still a bit hard when an animal comes in, hit by a car with its legs crushed but still breathing. It takes a while to get used to it, but considering how much has been done to improve the quality of life for humans, a bit of that was given to us to help these animals suffer as little as they could. Needless to say, the Veterinary Department's a bit overworked, but Nan just says she'll be fine as long as she has enough of her noir novels to read on her down time.
You know, you'd expect something everyone is calling 'The Apocalypse' or 'The Rapture' to be scary and dark and full of madness, but sometimes it's good to just be a guy who works with animals at a time like this. Being able to nurse them back to health, seeing them running and happy again… it's like these animals are making me, making us all feel a little more human.
I thank whoever's up there every day for my organization, though sometimes I gotta thank someone a bit more down to Earth. If it weren't for those doctors over by the Foundation, our organization would probably have faded into obscurity. Instead, they decided to let us do our thing, and I think a lot of us appreciate that. I certainly do.


PT: Gooood morning everyone, it's your girl, your daily pick-me-up, Pauline Tomlinson. Um, today is August 3rd, 2036, and it's the sixteenth anniversary of the… what're we calling it? Officially, I mean.
PT: A-Day, okay. You know, the apocalypse. And we — no, no, okay, you're right. It was the apocalypse for humans. Things got a lot better for everyone else. Almost everyone, anyways. Still, I mean, we shouldn't minimize the, uh, the loss that did happen. And we'd just like to take a moment of silence for everyone we lost on A-Day, in the months after that… yeah.
…
PT: Alright. Today's high is about 75, not a cloud in the sky, it's really a beautiful day here. As usual you can tune into 91.1 FM to hear a real forecast, 'cause the Contained Zone down in Rochester has their own Doppler, and it should be more or less right for the Twin Cities. We're going to get ours back up and running, but it's a work in progress.
PT: We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, I'll have Lenny in the studio with me to talk about his public education project for newfolk and how that's coming along. Gonna be a good time. You are listening to community radio, eight-three-oh, WCCO.

♫ With these, hungry eyes ♪
♪ One look at you and I can't disguise ♫
♫ I've got, hungry eyes ♪
♪ I feel the magic between you and I ♫

PT: … and one problem that people a lot of people are talking about is, we don't know what kind of education the newfolk need.
L: Could you elaborate?
PT: Well, suppose we get past the, all of the language barriers, create things like social studies and history from the ground up, revise physics to answer the obvious questions, and so on. How do we decide on a curriculum?
L: I don't think there's any need to treat the human public schools as any sort of template. If anything, newfolk should use public education as an opportunity to develop communal norms and expectations.
PT: Isn't that what's already happening with the current system?
L: Informally, maybe, but that will happen inevitably when you put so many people in the same place. In the meantime, we're struggling to function as a people, and some form of structured interaction in an 'educational' setting would do much to accelerate the process.
PT: Well, at that point, I don't know if we can call it 'education', so much as some sort of civics pr—
L: There is no 'we' here. No disrespect, Pauline, but you're flesh and blood, while I'm an internet meme carved into a fence post. Our task is fundamentally different than yours. For humans, your goal is to rebuild the society you once had. You have a template to work from.
PT: Well, this is Minneapolis and St. Paul you're talking about. I think it's safe to say the humans who aren't interested in some form of cohabitation going forward have moved to one of the Contained Zones, so I'm not sure that 'rebuilding' is the right way to look at it.
L: Oh, you'd be surprised. Humans are here for all sorts of reasons. But that's beside the point. You have a past you can look to, and ideals you can strive towards, when deciding what kind of world you want to live in. We still have yet to figure out what we need, much less what we want or can have. We're where you were, six thousand years ago.
PT: Well, that's — hold on.
PT: Thank you, Lenny, that's all the time we have for now.
L: It's been my pleasure.
PT: Coming up next we have some more music, and then Stomper Thirteen has his lunch hour. Doesn't say here what it's about, though. Anyways. You are listening to community radio, eight-three-oh, WCCO.

♫ So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out ♪
♪ Allow if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive ♫
♫ And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow ♪
♪ But if the offer's shunned, you might as well be walkin' on the sun ♫

S13: ☩♯♄☗ ☊ ♨♙⛋☑♠☜☟☑☤♦⛛♃☃☪, but go off I guess. It's not like the ♃⛫♆☒♬☍ is with there, creating us to be ♯☏☾⛛☖. And ♕⛯♣☬ won't pretend that the ☌☞♫☞⛖☁ ☛⛯♠♁☖♤☣♦♅ isn't keeping some ☬⛝♛☗⛻★ locked up with cages too, that's irrelevant to the point I'm with. ☧♁♘☙ ☼ ⛒ ⛼ ★☿⛫☊ ☡♭⛮♨, ☃☇☗☃ ☭⛬♦♨. ☪♰☒♝☯☙ ♯♯⛞☌ ⛝☽⛛♙ ♆⛮ ☄⛌ ⛗⛌★☇⛶ ♜♃♃⛯ ♀⛚☉ ☪☃⛝ ♙♯♢☥☄☙♢♢☾. Are you with this?
S13: And I can only imagine ♛☃☣♡⛼♡☼☯ ⛣☋☚♝♬ ☍♇⛯♇♔☛ with ⛻⛮♩⛰☟☃ ☩☀♬☚ ☥ ♔ only a matter of time. They're suffering huge casualties, ☬♘♠ not a lack of bullets. ☇⛒⛫ ☡⚊♟♨⛕ ♣♠☘☩♁☌ ☏⛚♜ ♣☐☋♧ ☏♀ ☡⛨ ☟♖☓⛬♞ ☌☆☡♙ fundamentally not with the war. The United Front is not concerned with your freedom. The "SCP ☟☡☖⛩ ☢♇♬☀ ⛭♄☚" part would lock us away, and "⛻⛰☁⛊ ☭⛭☖ ☋" would be notwithstanding us.
S13: And so you're asking, "Stomper, ☓♟☭♠ ♟☙ ☿☮ ☡☁ ☜♕♮★☃♠⛻☐☤♙♣ ☒☙⛻♜♗♭☉☉☧☽?" Don't fuck with me, okay? You're all with the ♘☿★♁♘♃♂☽ ☑☼. You know for these cities to only ♝☈☆☿ until ☍♇⛯♇♔☛ doesn't need with a North buffer. St. Paul? Gone. Minneapolis? Gone. If you can talk with ♖ ☦☮♃⛭☜☮☾ ♡♜☞⛖☑ ☜☯☭♬♗, in English, you need to ⛌⛭☥⛗☎ ♅♦♙ ☐ ⛒ ☖ ♖ ☂☫♘☑ ☿♇☒☍☓ ♄☪⛨♜☉ ☬☉⛒♝♚♗ this, because they are all sympathies with the Front. On some ⛰♆♰⚊ ☙ ♩♣☋☙♕♮☍ ☜☟⛞☢ ♮☐♁☈⛚. Bold of ☢⛒☤♔☒♚ ♔♦☑☭ ☓♕⛌☞ ☁♗♰♡☚⛗.
S13: Don't ♡☛☣⛫ like I'm crazy. ⛻♩♮ ☗ ☪♔☜☛♝☈☯☭ is real. ☦☩☩ ⛫♧☄♰☥☍ ♡☗♪♙ ⛩☐ ♯☋♩ ☣⛞ ☧⛞☎☁☯ ☁☭☤♠♢☾ ⛭☏♕☞☛♙. We're all repulsive, get used to it.
S13: What? It has not been an hour. Bullshit. ♜☍☌☮⛌.
S13: Alright, that's all I'm with for now. ⛭☏♕☞☛♙ ⛭☏♕☞☛♙ ⛭☏♕☞☛♙ ⛭☏♕☞☛♙. Tune in tomorrow, same time. Next up is Vanessa's Art Corner, ☃ guest Jason Vang. Community radio, eight-three-oh, WCCO.

♫ That's real, people act a different way with me ♪
♪ I feel that nobody wanna play with me ♫
♫ That's ill cuz they treat me like a stain on they clothes ♪
♪ The industry and my foes, they treat me like I got a red nose ♫

JV: But no, see, you have to keep in mind that they have no conventional neurology, like they're humanoid thoughtforms, sure, but they remained intact despite a total lack of internal structure, maybe even for decades, or centuries, and this disproves—
VG: Jason, for the love of god, nobody cares.
JV: Says you.
VG: Yeah, says me. This is an art show. Last Thursday I talked about a pottery studio in Dinkytown.
JV: Then why did you invite me? I'm not an artist.
VG: All the other people I knew from the Foundation are dead or working for the United Front.
JV: Yeah, I slipped out right after everything went down. Saw the writing on the wall.
VG: That's probably a good idea. You're remarkably coherent.
JV: And you haven't thrown anything at me yet. I think working in memetics messes with your head.
VG: Gee, you think? But we're getting off-topic. The reason I had you on is, one of my sources says you ran with Are We Cool Yet? for a while.
JV: You have sources in Are We Cool Yet?
VG: Where do you think I went after I sent out my 'fuck you'? But that's beside the point. What were you doing there if you're not into art?
JV: They got hold of a huge stock of candy bars. They were frozen in some warehouse out in Montana, I think. I did some work for them, and I got free pickings on top of room and board.
VG: You sold out for candy?
JV: I can get candy anywhere, but when's the last time you had chocolate?
VG: I guess… uh… I think two years ago, one of my neighbors found some in their cellar and gave me some. Before that it's maybe been five?
JV: Exactly. Everyone stress-ate all the good stuff in like two years flat, and the cocoa plantations are still a wreck.
VG: Hmm. I hadn't even thought about that.
JV: I'm sure the Front would've given me a better apartment, but there's no chocolate there.
VG: I just hope you weren't doing anything too, uh…
JV: I helped them make some kind of huge golem thing.
VG: … ethically ambiguous.
JV: I helped figure out the carvings to make it do what they want and think the way they want it to.
VG: Ugh. Vang, you fucking idiot.
JV: What? What'd I do now?
VG: Do you read the news?
JV: Not really.
VG: That 'huge golem thing' destroyed a city in North Dakota and it's on its way to Winnipeg, you dunce.
JV: Huh. Weird.
VG: Wh— how is that 'weird'? What do you mean by 'weird'? Why is that the response?
JV: I don't think that's what they were trying to do with it.
VG: I specifically declined to help with that project because it was fucking insane, on the face of it! Not to mention neither of us are thaumaturges!
JV: Well, first of all, I did, actually, learn magic like ten years ago. Kind of. I can intuit the overall gist of the thrust of it.
VG: Oh. Well. It's still a terrible idea, and you clearly aren't qualified to be messing with that sort of thing.
JV: Yeah, I definitely overstated those. My qualifications, I mean.
VG: Ugh. If it turns out you're responsible for this, I will throttle you.
JV: If it was an insane idea from the start, why are you blaming it on me? Maybe it was going to do that anyways. I'm more of an expert than you are.
VG: Fine. Whatever. Might as well be a fucking mercenary.
JV: Exactly. You want to keep recording or no? I'm getting some kind of angry vibe here.
VG: Let's… doesn't matter. I'm always angry. Let's just do the show.
JV: You good?
VG: Yeah. Yeah. I'm fine. What kind of projects were they working on? Are they creating newfolk these days, apart from the golem?
JV: Oh, for sure. I think they got rid of everyone who was like, unsure about the ethics of it. A lot of the guys were like, painters or sketch artists, who made the transition over to making custom consciousnesses as art pieces.
VG: They what?! I left because they even seriously considered doing that. Fuck them.
JV: They're prometheans, through and through. Not slave drivers by any stretch, but definitely prometheans.
VG: God. Fuck. Get me in touch with the ones who got kicked out. I'm going to sort this out.
JV: Uh, I'm not sure if —
VG: That wasn't a request.
JV: Okay, but if I out them on air, that's gonna get back to me.
VG: We can just end the show here.
JV: I guess, or we could wait un—
VG: That's it for Vanessa's art corner, maybe I'll be back next Thursday, maybe I won't. Who knows. If I am, I'll do… something about local bands. No idea who's coming up next. Bye!
JV: Now hold on just a —
VG: Oh, right, right, the callsign. You're listening to community radio, eight-three-oh, WCCO.

♫ Fingertips on my skin ♪
♪ Let the chemistry begin ♫
♫ 'Cause I'm standing right here and my heart is beating ♪
♪ Face to face, 'cause I want the real thing ♫

PT: Well, uh, Vanessa had another 45 minutes scheduled, so we don't really have anything… should I just play music until Riley gets to the studio?
PT: I guess I could do better than that. There's… hold on. There's got to be a newspaper around here somewhere.
PT: Okay, here we go. I know you could always just tune over to 91.1FM to get regional news, but there's always the, uh, local perspective to consider. Like…
PT: Hm.
PT: Fuck this. I don't care about any of this. My neighbors got killed yesterday. I wasn't going to bring it up, but I changed my mind. They were three pop cans, and they were out on a walk, and someone found them in the gutter, crushed like garbage. Pender, Gams, and Warlock, those were their names.
PT: These wars that are going on, I can't get worked up about them, because you know once they're over, there's still going to be senseless violence and slavery, and, and, I don't know, genocide. No matter if humans or newfolk win.
PT: As bad as things were before, there were only so many people you could destroy. But now? There are no limits. Life is so cheap now. If you want the news, here's the news: We haven't seen anything yet.
PT: I'm taking the rest of the day off to plan the funeral. You are listening to community radio, eight-three-oh, WCCO.

♫ Out of the silent planet, dreams of desolation ♪
♪ Out of the silent planet, come the demons of creation ♫
♫ Out of the silent planet, dreams of desolation ♪
♪ Out of the silent planet, come the demons of creation ♫


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Today wasn't just any old waffle day.
Today…
Was a waffle date day…
One of the best days of the month for Clef.
Clef's room was dark, and still as messy as ever. He knew Kondraki would be over soon so he scooped up a few items and hurriedly stuffed them into various cabinets or under his sofa before nodding to himself like he did a good job. He quite literally pat himself on the back for making an effort.
In the middle of Clef's living room sat a coffee table doubled up as a regular table for this evening. It was decorated with plates, various syrups that were probably not just for waffles tonight, and lit candles.
It wasn't long before the doorbell rang, on time as usual.
Clef quickly smoothed down his blue flowery shirt and rushed to the door, swinging it open until it hit the wall. The wall already had a hole in it from the door knob. "Konnie!" Clef beamed, wrapping his arms tightly around Kondraki in greeting.
"Wha— Oh." The smell of waffles cooking hit Kondraki's nose. He wrapped his arms around Clef and took in a deep breath. "That time already, hrm? I thought you were a bit more excited than normal."
Clef lets go, reeling back on his heels as he tugs Kondraki's arm. He pulls the other to the coffee table and sits him down on the floor. "The waffles won't be long now. I made something special tonight."
"Don't you always make them extra special…" Kondraki said, more to himself, as Clef was already rushing off to the kitchen.
"NOPE!" Clef yelled back rather quickly. "I said SOMETHING special!"
It wasn't long before Clef was walking back out of the kitchen, holding an Aquafina water bottle with a piping hot waffle protruding from its nozzle. "Trust me on this, I've done this hundreds of times." He rushed over to Kondraki, placing the waffle-filled bottle on the floor near himself as he sat on his lover's lap. Kondraki was starting to understand why Clef was eager tonight but looked uncertain about the bottle…
Kondraki didn't really have time to process what was going on, but with Clef on his lap with his hands hastily undoing his pants, he slowly relaxed and leaned back. "I thought it was waffle night," he smirked, resting his head back with his arms behind his head and closing his eyes.
The sound of a crinkling water bottle filled the room before a light 'pop'… Then silence.
"… Clef."
Clef stared down almost in shock, then back up to Kondraki, then back down again. "This usually doesn't happen this is just a cheaper fleshligh-".
"What do you mean it doesn't usually happen—" Kondraki said more firmly this time, he sat forwards and looked down to see an Aquafina bottle stuck on his penis with a syrupy waffle sat inside it.
"CLEF," Kondraki yelped, grabbing the bottle to try and get it off with a pained grunt.
"Well usually you just- You know- Have fun with it but I guess I underestimated the syrup-"
"Please, just call a taxi- Clef."
Now standing in defeat, Clef stood up and grabbed a household phone. He dialed a local taxi number, ordering one for as soon as possible.
The pair stood on the sidewalk, Kondraki with no pants on and Clef with his undone, just outside of the apartment with everything swaying in the cold night's breeze. They held each other for warmth and waited as close to the road as they could.
It wasn't long before the taxi arrived. Clef flagged the taxi down with a hand. It slowed down as it got closer but soon picked up its speed at the sight of two grown-ass men standing there, one of whom had a bottle stuck to his dick.
"HEY!" Clef barked angrily, running impressively fast after the scared taxi driver who was doing double in the zone.
The quiet sound of plastic hitting concrete whimpered softly in the breeze. After all, it was cold… And Kondraki was no longer stuck in his Aquafina-branded bottle.


Emma should have put a bullet in his head when he initially displayed signs of infection. That was protocol. She didn't. She couldn't. The only thing for it was to quarantine him where he wouldn't be able to infect anyone. A standard humanoid containment chamber didn't seem big enough to lock up a tornado like Jeremy. He was always talking, always gesturing, his mouth working overtime. Seeing him pace around a cell in total silence made him a completely different person.
“Will you be able to handle this, Linderman?” Dr. Devane turned his swivel chair around so he faced her instead. Most of the monitors behind him were placid black screens, but a few of them were still flickering with life. Emma wasn't sure why Dr. Devane bothered monitoring the rest of Site-17. There was never anything to see. “I need you at your best if we're going to negotiate with terrorists.”
“I'm fine,” Emma lied. Dr. Devane wouldn't notice. He was a brilliant man and an effective researcher, but his people skills left something to be desired.
“Good,” he said. “Because the GOC contact should be here any minute. I'm going down to the entrance to meet her. I need you to man the surveillance cameras. If I give the signal, hit the button to call the MTF.” Emma nodded, and did not remind Dr. Devane that the Foundation hadn't had a complete MTF in weeks.
“I need you at the top of your game. You're one of the only ones left.” Emma nodded and took his place in the chair as he left the surveillance room. The electronic lock no longer worked, so one of them always had to stay behind in the building at all times. The wall of monitors in front of her had mostly gone dark, with only a handful still displaying static-ridden images. The dining hall on the screen looked so cavernous without a single person in it. The break rooms had long ago been stripped of their usable resources like food and water. All that remained was a thin layer of dust covering that ugly plaid loveseat in the corner, a set of bare counters, and a broken microwave. She switched the display to the entrance of Site-17, one of the last bastions of the SCP Foundation.
The landscape outside was bleak and abandoned without a living soul in sight. Withered, desiccated bodies were scattered across the sidewalks like haphazardly sewn seeds, most of them simply lying face down or curled into the fetal position. Emma wasn't sure when civilization had collapsed in on itself like a dying star, but Site-15 lasted almost a month. By the time it went dark and she left for the nearest working facility at Site-17, most of the skips there had either been transferred, breached containment, or been neutralized.
Apparently, 343 was the first to go. One day he was there and the next he wasn't. No one had time to ask where he went. 166 perished shortly afterwards. Between re-establishing communication with the other Sites, keeping their own people safe, and maintaining containment with increasingly fewer resources, the task of feeding anomalies with esoteric diets fell by the wayside. Her last breaths were spent ranting about the End of Days and the Second Coming as she became increasingly less coherent, but that was to be expected. The minimal security wing became on-site housing for the few remaining staff members to reduce the need to leave. Contact with the outside was difficult at best, outright dangerous at worst.
She switched a second monitor to the cellblock where the standard humanoid containment areas were located. Emma recognized too many of the faces that stared blankly at the walls, faces of people she'd known and worked with. Some were from Site-15, some from Site-17, some probably civvies. Different individuals displayed different stages of affliction, but they all invariably ended up with that empty, wide-eyed stare.
Emma stared for a moment or two before she turned the second feed off. She twisted the ring on her finger to avoid switching to Jeremy's containment. He was supposed to be here at her side for the end of the world, but he wasn't. He was just down the hall but he might as well have been on the moon. The world was at stake, as usual, but this time she was alone. She took a deep breath and shook the memories from her mind. She couldn't afford to dwell, not now. She was one of the only ones left.

Emma detested going to holiday parties. The main office area of Site-15 had been hastily decorated with tissue paper and a dollar store sign that proclaimed ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR 2015', but Emma didn't feel particularly happy. Everyone told her how much fun it would be to get drunk, lose her inhibitions, and dance topless on the counter in front of her coworkers, but she didn't see the point. She worked with these people, and didn't fancy any of them doing body shots out of her navel and getting a mouthful of lint. Maybe that was why people liked Researcher Torres better, even if they did look down on her project proposals most of the time.
The music was pounding in her ears as she checked her watch, again. It mixed in with the dull roar of the party's conversation - mostly work discussions or complaining about the weather - to create an almost wordless static buzz that didn't even sound like human language anymore. An aging frat boy she didn't recognize staggered her way. His glass bottle jostled as he stumbled by, narrowly missing her new blouse when he began spilling his cheap beer. She stepped to the side and cursed herself for planting against the wall near the drinks table. She took several steps away from whoever that guy was, and as she backed away, Emma felt a strong hand on her shoulder. She turned in the direction of the hand and found herself face-to-face with a shit-eating grin the likes of which she'd never seen before. As she met the young man's gaze, he dropped his hand from her shoulder.
“Careful,” he said, and tipped his head in the direction she was backing into. A free-flowing chocolate fountain was perched on a folding table, both of which stood a few feet from where she was now. “I don't think this one will try to eat you, but it will ruin that nice outfit.”
“Thank you,” she said mechanically. She didn't mention that she kind of hated him already.
“Don't mention it,” he said with a wave of his free hand. “Saving damsels in distress is a big part of what I do.” Emma suppressed a scoff.
"I'm not a damsel."
"No, but I would hate to see your outfit ruined. It's a very pretty color, by the way. Complements your eyes."
"Thank you."
"So, Junior Researcher Lawson," he said, cocking his head awkwardly to the side for a bit to read her badge. "What has you over here in the corner looking like 682 just ate your puppy?"
'I'm lonely, bored, and don't appreciate getting hit on by jackasses.'
"I'm just a little tired," was what she said. “Thank you for keeping an eye out for me. I have to be going now.”
“Well, it was nice meeting you,” he said, flashing a smile of impossibly perfect teeth. He extended his hand to Emma, and she shook it politely. “Enjoy the party. Keep an eye out for those wandering chocolate fountains.” She smiled and turned her back on him for what she hoped would be the first and last time.

Dr. Clair Wythers tapped out a ‘shave-and-a-haircut' pattern on the entrance to Site-17 using the head of her cane. She leaned against the doorframe while she waited. After a few moments of silence, someone on the other side tapped out ‘two bits', and the door creaked open.
“Does the Black Moon howl?”
“Fuck off and let me in, Gerald. It's cold out here.”
“Clair, give me the correct response or I'll order the MTF to shoot you where you stand.”
“You're bluffing. Even if you were still protected by a complete MTF, even if you could contact them remotely to issue the order, you still wouldn't do it because we're rapidly running out of people who can even understand the situation we're in, much less do anything about it. Now open the fucking door.”
Nothing happened at first. Dr. Wythers tapped the butt of her iron cane impatiently on the ground. Then, the door swung inward the rest of the way, revealing a balding man with a frown on his face and red blotches forming behind his ears.
“Foundation protocol dictates-”
“There is no Foundation,” she cut him off. “No Council of 108, no United Nations, none of it. If there were, we wouldn't be meeting like this.” He opened his mouth to say something else, but she elbowed past him without giving him the chance. “Now shut the damn door. You're letting all the flies in.”
“Fine,” Dr. Devane relented. He let out an angry breath, but he pushed the door shut behind her. “You're not the first to arrive. We're up the stairs and down the hall to the right. Do you require assistance?” He offered his arm to her, and Dr. Wythers rolled her eyes. She gripped her cane in her opposite hand and ascended the staircase by herself, Dr. Devane trailing just behind her.
Dr. Wythers hobbled over to the first door on the right, eager to sit down for a change. When she pushed it open with the end of her cane, she was greeted with a most unusual and unwelcome sight: a bespectacled man with a gun pointed directly at her face. She used the word ‘man' more loosely than she normally would; he was probably in his thirties but still sported a patchy, peach-fuzz mustache that would have made her thirteen-year-old grandson green with envy, rest his little soul.
“You know how to use that thing?” Dr. Wythers spread her hands wide to indicate she was unarmed, her cane gripped firmly in one hand. “Why don't you put that thing down, son? I'm not gonna shoot you.”
“Maybe not,” the man with the peach-fuzz answered. His gun didn't move. “Maybe I'm going to shoot you.”
“Kosta, please don't make things worse.” Devane's voice drifted from the doorway behind her. “We're at a severe enough disadvantage as it is.” Kosta Peach-Fuzz responded by taking the safety off.
“Will you cut out that Clint Eastwood bullshit? It's not doing anyone any good.” A man with a greying mane of unkempt hair took a healthy swig of the beer he was nursing, and Dr. Wythers noticed how bare the room was. Aside from a folding table and some chairs - both of which, she noticed, were between her and the gun - it was mostly empty. Probably served as intake or an initial interview room when the Site was up and running. “Put your piece away and grab a drink from the fridge.” He gestured to a mini fridge in the corner.
“She's a Bookburner,” Kosta said without looking at him. “And you're a terrorist.”
“And you're a pencil-pusher who's in way over his head,” Wythers snapped. “You're awful surly for a glorified library clerk. Why don't you do like the nice man said and holster your toy before you hurt yourself with it.”
“I was talking to you too, Clair,” she heard the man with the greying hair say. “None of us are friends here, but there's no reason to go around threatening each other. Why don't you both chill the fuck out and wait until someone actually does something worth shooting them over?”
“Why are you even here?” The man named Kosta shifted his weight to address The Critic directly, and that was the opening Clair was waiting for. “If you hadn't-”
With a speed her wizened body would not suggest, Dr. Wythers closed the last few feet between herself and the armed librarian. The iron handle of her cane slammed down hard on his wrist. He dropped the gun on the table between them. Dr. Wythers' other hand shot out and snatched it up. She pointed it directly at him. He began rubbing his wrist.
“I told you, kid, you're in over your head,” she repeated as she backed away from him, the gun trained at his chest. “This is why PHYSICS insisted we all get some amount of training, even if we're not directly going into the field. In case something exactly like this happens. Don't you get some kind of training at your outer space library?” Kosta said nothing.
“Please don't shoot our guest with his own gun, Dr. Wythers,” said Gerald Devane.
"There is a certain poetic irony to it, shooting a man with his own gun," The Critic mused while taking another sip of his beer. "Anyone ever say you look like you walked straight out of Lovecraft? The glasses, the tweed vest, the complete ineptitude in combat… all you need now is for an unknowable terror from beyond the stars to drive you stark-raving mad, and you'll fit right in with the Waites and the Whateleys."
"What would you know, you old lush?" Kosta pushed against The Critic's shoulders, and the older man merely shuffled backwards in his folding chair.
"Kid, I've seen things that would literally make your insides explode," The Critic pointed out. "I had a friend once, thought he was cool. He exploded. Grew a pimple full of cesium on his face, and when it popped, it blew his head off like a damn firecracker. You think you're hot shit because you've been to another dimension? You're not. I see kids like you every day. Half of them end up inside out because they get cocky and don't listen to the advice of people who know better." Kosta pursed his lips as The Critic downed the rest of the alcohol before tossing the bottle into a corner.
"Mister The Critic came here of his own accord to help fix this problem, as did you," Dr. Devane added.
"Just 'The Critic' if you please. 'Mister The Critic' is my father."
"We can discuss titles later," Dr. Wythers said as she pointed a finger at Dr. Devane. "What I'd like to know is who called us here, and how? Half the world became a bunch of drooling idiots even less capable than usual of stringing a sentence together, global communication networks just switch off like a faulty streetlamp, and one of your overcautious poindexters managed to get a message out to three people who should have been next to impossible to find? Who the hell did that?"
"I did," called a voice from the entrance. Clair Wythers folded her arms across her chest and turned to the doorway. The figure wore the same Foundation-issue scrubs as Dr. Devane, but her lively, intelligent eyes were so unlike his. The nametag on her shirt read ‘Researcher Linderman'.
“I have something I'd like to show you. All of you.”

“So what do you do at Site-15, beautiful? You somebody's secretary or something?” Emma rolled her eyes. She'd hinted that he should leave at least twice already and didn't seem to be getting through to him. He was still leaning against the doorway to the office area and her best means of escape.
“I'm a theoretical cryptographist with a focus in quantum and post-quantum cryptography, especially its use in developing and combating AI.” The guy blinked once or twice as she let the convoluted title sink in.
“Oh,” was all he said. “Wazzat all mean?”
“It means that she's smarter than the about sixty percent of the people at this party,” said a voice. When Emma turned towards it, she saw the guy with perfect teeth again, looking like a regular Prince Fucking Charming. Each of his hands was wrapped around a drink and a napkin. “Hey babe.” He held one of the drinks out to her. “I got one for each of us.”
“Thanks,” she said, picking up on what he was doing. She took the plastic cup from him but didn't drink from it. The napkin kept her hand from touching the cold plastic.
“No sweat,” he said, flashing the same obnoxious winning smile. “Who's your friend?” He sauntered over next to her, just over half a foot away. They were just close enough to appear intimate.
“I was just leaving, actually,” the guy replied. “Nice meeting you, Irma.” Emma smiled politely and didn't correct him. When he was out of sight she turned back to Fucking Charming and returned the beer. He took it back with a warm grin and a raised eyebrow.
“You didn't have to do that.”
“I know,” he answered. “I wanted to. It gave me an excuse to grab an extra beer. Besides, you looked like you'd had enough of him.”
“Right, your thing is rescuing damsels in distress.”
“Don't know that many damsels with degrees in computer cryptography.”
“I guess that means I'm not a damsel then.”
“That's alright,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I'm not that big a fan of damsels. I get sick of saving them after a while.” He extended his hand to Emma. “Name's Jeremy. Jeremy Linderman.” She returned his handshake with a modicum of gratitude. At least this Jeremy was polite. That was something.
“It's lovely to meet you, Irma Lawson,” he said, letting go of her hand.
“My name isn't Irma,” she corrected. “That guy doesn't pay attention.”
“Oh. Do you have a first name?”
“Does a bear shit on a town in Wisconsin?”
“What?”
“I have a first name.”
“Is it classified?”
“You know what? It is.”
“Fair enough. Will I ever have clearance for it?”
Emma thought for a moment. She produced a pen from her pocket and scribbled out a quick series of numbers across the napkin:

5 | 13 | 13 | 1

“There.” She thrust the napkin at him with a triumphant smirk. He looked at it for a moment before furrowing his brow.
“This is your name?” Jeremy asked, and she nodded.
“It's a name if you look at it the right way,” Emma said.
“You sure you're a Researcher and not a D-class?”
“I'm sure. A smart guy like you should be able to figure it out quick enough.” He continued to stare at the napkin, puzzled, as she sauntered past him. A damsel would have left a glass slipper, but she wasn't a damsel.

"My job at Site-15 was data security, something the SCP Foundation takes very seriously," Emma began. Behind her, the monitors in the old security room displayed the empty spaces that used to be full of Foundation employees. She briefly wondered how many nights Jeremy had sat at his station in Site-15, watching security footage of an Exidy Sorcerer home computer system plugged into a wall outlet, doing absolutely nothing. "When you contain ideas that can implode a human brain or anomalous self-help books, you'd better be damn sure that they're stuck there and totally unable to get out. You can bet that any given door in the building with a lock on it is protected by at least two different encryption keys. Most of them change weekly, some change daily, and some hourly. Some areas are contained with rotating encryption keys which exist nowhere in the world but in a handful of brains.
"The Foundation has communication arrays set up all over the globe," she went on. "And our Antimemetics Division has helped encrypt them so anomalous memes don't hijack their signals. I was able to find an emergency channel and contact Dr. Devane here, among others, and try to scramble some kind of intelligence together before we lost communication entirely. Normally I'd probably get shot for revealing this sort of information, or at least severely reprimanded, but since it's the end of human society as we know it, I think we have bigger fish to fry."
"Yes yes, it's all very fascinating and bleak," Dr. Wythers said with a dismissive wave of Kosta's gun. She had yet to put the safety back on. "But why don't you explain in twenty words or less what we're up against and what we can do about it."
"Three, fifteen, four, five, nineteen," she replied, and Dr. Wythers merely stared. "Codes. I'm no memetics expert, but I know how to send a message without it being intercepted or decoded. This anomaly may be a black hole of information that eats language, but it doesn't seem to understand codes or ciphers. With enough levels of encryption, I was able to get out messages to you all so we could put our heads together and figure out how to get the world back."
Everyone was quiet. Emma turned towards the monitors and sat down in front of them. The doctor, The Critic, the librarian, and the old woman gathered behind Emma as she pulled up footage of the containment cells on as many monitors as she was able to.
She didn't need to describe them. They were seated, each in their own containment, still as glass and just as lifeless. Their chests went up and down, their eyelids blinked, but they moved like cogs in a machine. Not a one of them looked for the barely visible camera, or fiddled with their door handle, or played with the hem of their shirt. The anomaly had robbed them of that.
“I think Agent Lynwood was the first to go,” she said, her voice flat. “Lynwood was a relatively new hire so we were still transferring her medical data. The Foundation was so busy putting out fires all over that we lost track of little things, like distributing insulin pumps. Her diabetic coma didn't last long. She might have been one of the lucky ones. For all we know, you're looking at the only two employees left in the entire SCP Foundation.” She cast a glance at Dr. Devane. His face was grave.
“We had a similar problem,” said Dr. Wythers. “We pulled an operative out of a town in Germany with the same symptoms. Suppression of the initial outbreak was successful, but then the damn anartists got a hold of it.”
“You took over all the TVs and beamed the infection into every home on the planet," The Critic retorted. “One of your agents announced it on international news. When the public watched that broadcast, when they heard him talk, they all got hit with the countermeme, every one of them.”
"Threat Level 6 is the most serious level we have," Dr. Wythers explained. "It's something from which there is no coming back, and we know this. That's why it's protocol to announce the existence of the anomalous to the world. Concealment is imperative, but it's only our second mission. The human race as we know it is on the verge of extinction. Hell, we may have already lost the war and just not know it yet. The least we can do is give the general public a fighting chance."
"And you get to decide when and where and how they know?" The Critic asked. "The easiest way to maintain a dictatorship is to control the flow of information."
“That's rich coming from a terrorist,” Kosta said. “Why are you here, anyway? Shouldn't you be off somewhere painting a portrait of a lion that eats your wife when you look at it or something?”
“Not all of us are terrorists,” The Critic said, his voice the tip of a rapier. “I'm here because the end of the fucking world is bigger than any one art student or bookworm or ornery cripple. I'm here because our choices at the moment boil down to ‘get in line and help fix the problem' or ‘get the fuck out of the way'.”
Emma was not paying attention to any of their banter. She was monitoring the randomly switching feed of the containment cells when when one in particular caught her eye. Her husband's cell was on-screen, every visible inch of the floor littered with pages torn from the SCP Foundation's Training Manual. They were all scribbled on or defaced in some manner, straight lines and curves forming vague facsimiles of numbers drawn in a broad hand using something dark and red.
She zoomed in the footage and saw his fingers. Dozens of tiny coagulated slits were visible. What caught her eye was not the self-inflicted wounds that covered his fingers and hands, but the message he'd drawn on page 451, written in his own blood:

5 | 13 | 13 | 1

She became vaguely aware of someone asking “What the hell is that?”
“It's a name if you look at it the right way,” Emma whispered to herself. She let her eyes roll over the sign again, and again, and again and again. Jeremy said nothing, didn't even move. His body language was gone, his English, his Russian, the French they learned together. That didn't matter. The memories were all still there, and the sign proved it. She cackled with glee and turned to the others.
“They haven't lost everything,” she declared with jubilation. "The memories. The memory is still there. I told him my name and he just told me he remembers. Him told I the very first time we met, just like that, and he remembers.” She jabbed four of her fingers at the screen which still displayed Jeremy on it and didn't notice the blood drain from Dr. Devane's face.
"If that memory is there, maybe other there are memories are there," she went on, her speech quickening. "If the other memories are there, maybe we can fix this. Everything might not be lost after all. They're still there. Everything is still there, locked away their in heads but we knew that already." She continued to pace, her words erupting from her like machine gun rounds.
“We can stop it,” she said as a smile suddenly exploded across her face. She burst into laughter without warning and continued. “We can fix things. This doesn't be have apocalypse to the. All we need to do is completely reinvent language. We can things fix so everyone is jxrhs bohten and everything all be will alright. Again.” She stopped. Her head swept from person to person as she took in their expressions. Dr. Devane's eyes were wide and his mouth hung open. Why was his face doing that? She couldn't remember, and it didn't matter. It was salvageable. She could save her husband.
The bullets from the gun in Dr. Wythers' hand struck twice her in the heart, killing her instantly. She didn't have time to ask why even if she had been able to.


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DarkEnergy MobileOS 3.1

Ms Dark, you currently have unread text messages from:

HYPERMANIC CLOWN GIRL (CotD)

Today, 19:30

IRIS!

IRIS!

IRIS, DID YOU HEAR WHAT HAPPENED AT THE ESSIE P?!

No, what happened?

Did they raid someone important?

NOPE!

Was there a major containment breach?

NUH-UH

What then?

DOCTOR KONDRAKI GOT HIS DICK STUCK IN A BOTTLE!

IRIS, ARE YOU STILL THERE?

Yeah, I'm here. Who's Kondraki?

OH MY GOD KONDRAKI IS LIKE ONE OF THE TOP FOUR EVIL SCIENTISTS AT THE FOUNDATION AFTER THE SECRET O5 COUNCIL HE'S THE KING OF THE BOOTERFLIES HE RODE 682 ONCE HE CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD AND NOW HE'S GOT HIS DICK STUCK IN A BOTTLE AND IT'S HILARIOUS EVERYONE AT THE LIBRARY IS TALKING ABOUT IT AND I'M TELLING EVERYONE AND YOU HAVE TO TELL EVERYONE TOO!

Lolly, before we go any further I'm going to need you to turn the caplocks off. I'm reading everything you're typing in H'rasm'Kal's voice.

Whoops, sorry. Lol.

Thank you. Now, is this information useful to us in anyway whatsoever?

Oh my god yes! This is the end of the Foundation!

…

Kindly elaborate.

OK, so the Essie P likes to pretend its super professional and super smart and that it's keeping people safe by locking up and torturing Freaks. But now one of their best people got his dick stuck in a plastic water bottle! Does that sound like something someone working for an international blackops secret society would do? They even had to do a whole presentation at Site 19 about how not to get your dick stuck in a bottle and it leaked out into the Oneiroi Collective and

1/2

the Serpent's Hand is circulating it all across the Library! The Essie P's veneer of superiority is shattered, they're a joke, and everyone knows they're a joke and that means their whole organization goes into a death spiral and then the Geo Sea overextends itself trying to pick up the slack and we finally break the Masquerade, they go to jail for their crimes and all the Freaks they've got locked up are set free! 😍

2/2

Lolly, how much sugar have you had?

I'm on my fifth grape soda.

Right. I admit this is mildly amusing in a petty, juvenile, schadenfreude sort of way, but I highly doubt that a single embarrassing personal anecdote regarding one of the Foundation's senior personnel will prove a fatal blow to them. The Foundation has survived apocalypse level threats. A bit of gossip is not going to be their downfall, especially one that will quickly outwear its welcome and grow stale. No one will care about this in a week.

Yeah, I guess you're right. I got a little excited. I'm still going to keep telling people though. It's too funny not to!

How does something like that happen anyway? I don't have much experience with real ding-a-lings, and I can't quite wrap my head around a guy getting his stuck in a plastic bottle.

At the risk of sounding crass, it's hardly uncommon for men to stick their penises somewhere without thinking it through.

🤣

Though in all fairness I've stuck some stuff up my vajayjay that I wish I hadn't so I shouldn't be too harsh.

The Fuller than Full mixing rod was probably the worst though. If I wasn't a shape-shifter that might have left some permanent damage.

Iris, don't tell anybody else that okay?

Only on the condition that you never tell me anything about the former contents of your vaginal canal again.

Hmmm.

No deal.


Part Three
Nathan jumped out the back of the Transall 700C.
He was high enough that he could see the curvature of the planet. Far below him and to the southeast, out to sea, a storm was brewing off Cape Sainte-Marie. Charcoal clouds flickered with lightning as they spun clockwise.
He wore a pressurized suit and a respirator with an oxygen bottle. As a precaution, prior to the jump he'd manually flushed the nitrogen from his system.
He plummeted from sixty thousand feet. This high up the atmosphere was thin, the air cold, gnawing at him through the suit. He'd departed from Tahiti and so had no warm clothes, and the crew aboard the Transall had forgotten to bring him any. His fingers and toes went numb. He clenched them into fists to try and get the blood flowing.
Nathan kept his back straight and arms folded tightly against his body as he dove toward Madagascar. He reached terminal velocity within fifteen seconds, free falling at over a hundred and twenty five miles per hour. He wanted to get back to the ground as soon as possible — back where it was warm — in order to avoid frostbite.
He fell…
At seventeen thousand feet he broke through the cloud cover. A great expanse of land spread out below him — plains of rust checkerboarded by vermilion. He could make out the dirty smudges of human settlements along the coastline, and pale ribbons scored the island back and forth. They were either roadways or dry riverbeds.
The lack of vegetation was glaring and the flat, empty terrain made it difficult for Nathan to orient himself. He knew the ground was rapidly approaching, but he couldn't tell how close he was in approximation to it. It was like skydiving over snow or water: utterly blank and featureless. There was nothing to frame his perspective; the towns were too far away to effectively use as a gauge.
He relied on the altimeter in his HUD instead. When it reached eighteen hundred feet Nathan pulled the handle to the closing pin, releasing the pilot chute. An ATPS deployed from his back. His descent slowed as the parachute bloomed and created drag. The harness dug into Nathan deep enough to leave bruises while he wrestled for control with the toggles, using the steering lines to try and straighten out.
When he'd finally gotten himself level with the ground he was already crashing into it. He landed on the balls of his feet and threw himself sideways to displace the impact energy, distributing it along his left thigh and buttocks. Although he had shock absorbents newly implanted in his ankles, it was habit to spread the landing-shock over a greater area to reduce the risk of injury.
"My ride coming in from the west?" Nathan asked as he picked himself off the ground. A trail of dust in that direction had caught his eye during the descent. He unbuckled the harness container and shrugged out of the shoulder straps.
Yes, confirmed the Director, speaking through the phone in Nathan's head.
He removed the respirator's face mask. By the time he was stepping out of the pressurized suit a Jeep Wrangler was pulling alongside him. Behind the wheel looked to be a girl of twelve or thirteen. She had on camouflaged shorts and Adidas trainers patched with duct tape. Nathan was about to comment on her age then thought better of it. He tossed the parachute gear in the backseat and hauled himself into the Jeep by the roll bars.
A hot wind scoured the island, spawning dust devils and thawing Nathan's fingers. He flexed them experimentally. Movement was fine and sensation was returning.
They rode in silence. Nathan took the opportunity to bask in the sun and soak in his surroundings, though there really wasn't much to soak in — sand dunes met the horizon in a complete three hundred and sixty degree panoramic. The only sign of life during the short ride was a baobab tree. But as they drove past it he saw that the tree was in fact dead, the trunk rotten and hollow.
Twenty minutes later and the girl dropped him off at a lake surrounded by hurricane fencing topped with razor-wire. The lake was gone, evaporated, leeched by irrigation systems. A gatehouse stood unattended, and large portions of the fence were missing.
Nathan glanced at a posted sign. Next to the block letters was a radioactive trefoil:

WARNING!
NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT!
GUARDS NOT REQUIRED TO ANNOUNCE THEIR PRESENCE BEFORE OPENING FIRE

The message repeated in French and various Malagasy dialects. Beneath the bold font was something about the federal government and nuclear isotopes. He dismissed the sign as a paper tiger.
Treading past the gatehouse and fence, the lakeshore sloped down, and Nathan spotted a windowless concrete bunker by the banks. As he drew closer he saw that its industrial door was guarded by a digital lock and half a dozen laser-guided turrets. The guns chirped like birds at Nathan's approach, pivoting on gyroscopes and training their barrels on him.
He paused on an apron of poured cement in front of the bunker. Suddenly the steel door rolled up. A ramp led downward, and Nathan followed its course until it opened into a cavernous room. It was cool and dark inside.
He'd never been to this particular installation before, hadn't even known the Director had a place in Madagascar until he'd phoned him. All previous face-to-face interactions had been conducted in the Yukon, at a base carved into the layers of permafrost.
Elevator, advised the Director. To your right.
Nathan walked along a grated catwalk that clung to the wall, his footfalls echoing in the vast chamber. The bottom of the room — if there even was one — was lost in shadow far below.
He entered the waiting elevator. The door snicked shut behind him and his stomach rose as he felt himself catapulted downward, burrowing into the earth.
The door opened and deposited him in front of the Director.
"Nathan," the Director said. Or did he? His lips moved, but Nathan wondered if he was still hearing his voice inside his head. It was difficult to tell.
"Sir," he said.
"How're you feeling? Shoulder isn't bothering you anymore, is it?"
"It's fine."
"Good. I'm glad to hear that. Come on, this way."
He was escorted through a lobby with black tiled flooring, nonplussed by the Director's presence. Nathan hadn't expected him to personally greet him, and he had to quicken his pace to catch up with the Director's long strides.
They walked together. Various offshoots branched left and right from the main corridor, leading to conference rooms and offices. All empty save for cups of coffee and water bottles, like everyone had just picked up and left moments ago. In one conference room a screen still displayed the middle of a PowerPoint presentation, stuck on a slide about transhumanism.
"Hey. What's going on here? Where is everyone?"
The Director looked away. "We have been… liquidating all non-essential personnel."
The words hung between them. Nathan shuddered, recalling the staff at the Yukon site.
"What's considered non-essential?" he asked.
"Non-combat and high ranking, for the most part," replied the Director. "You'd be stunned at how many members of upper management are redundant. Or maybe you wouldn't. Personally, I find those at the bottom of the corporate ladder to be largely indispensable."
The Director moved through a pair of automatic glass doors and came to stand in a wide, circular room. It looked like a dead-end to Nathan; there were no other doorways, not that he could see, except back the way they'd come.
"Stand here a moment, if you'd please." The Director indicated a square on the floor the size of a folded newspaper. "I would override the security commands — I know it's really you, and that you're wearing a nine millimeter in a pancake holster — but it's quicker and easier to just allow it to cycle through its protocols."
The glass doors turned opaque. There was a fuzzy hum like an old cathode-ray television starting up. Nathan had the sensation of simultaneously being watched and probed — of eyes and hands on him, peering into his mind, groping and plugging their fingers into every nook and crevice. His gag reflex ratcheted to high-alert.
The Director, for his part, smiled. He was dressed smartly in a slate three-piece and polished shoes that reflected the recessed lighting. (Probably made out of an exotic animal's hide, the more endangered the better. Great white shark or black rhino, perhaps.) He was clean-shaven and had a full head of silver hair. He might've been a spry eighty, but Nathan wouldn't have been surprised to learn he was pushing ninety.
"You don't like it, do you?"
"You mean somebody does?" It felt as if Nathan was being molested by a ghost. A current of air from an unknown source ruffled his clothes and hair.
The Director shrugged. "You get used to it," he said. "We tried to make it as noninvasive as possible."
"Is it anomalous?" The hum crescendoed.
"The security protocols? No. It's all current technology. Expensive current technology, but current nonetheless. Would you believe you just had a PET scan?"
"Yes," Nathan said, adjusting his collar. "It's not the craziest thing I've heard today."
Like liquidating most of your staff, he thought but kept to himself.
"No, I suppose not," conceded the Director.
The humming ceased. A panel on a nearby wall slid aside, revealing an aperture beyond. The Director motioned Nathan through, trailing behind him. They moved through the aperture — what appeared to be a blast door but reminded Nathan of a sphincter, the way it opened and closed — and entered a new area of the facility.
"Where're we going?" Nathan said.
"We're bushwhacking off the grid." The Director's heels clacked against the tiles as he took point. "I forget that you haven't been here before. This is the high-security annex. I've changed your credentials to match my own, and taken the liberty of downloading the facility's map to your phone."
The wing seemed to be devoted to bio-research. Beyond a row of windows Nathan glimpsed a sterile laboratory. Next was a refrigerated stem-cell bank and — after that — a server farm.
They passed through another sphincter-door on the left, the aperture dilating to permit entry. Nathan followed the Director and froze just inside the room. It was some kind of infirmary, but an infirmary like he'd never seen before. It looked like a surgical suite crossbred with a mechanic's garage. An array of instruments were scattered across tables and countertops: sonic tissue and bone cutters, laser scalpels, drills and chisels and a hundred other tools he couldn't name. There was a spill on the floor that probably wasn't grease or oil. A lithium-ion battery the size of a twin mattress squatted in the corner, alligator clamps attached to the terminals.
Two months had passed since the incident in Massachusetts, and Nathan had spent the first of those months in the amniotic clutches of a drip-feed. But his complacency was disrupted by growing unease. He'd felt like a feral animal, treed by narcotics that wouldn't allow him to escape the hospital bed; they isolated and held him hostage. When he was awake he was listless — couldn't think straight, and the worst part of it was that he didn't care, not really. The drugs had somehow robbed Nathan of concern; of all his instinctive tendencies toward self-reliance and preservation. It stole his drive. The days passed, gently and as inconsequential as leaves falling, and the most he could manage to resist it was to pull out the IV. This served only to set off an alarm and draw the NP on duty at the nurse's station. They would reinsert the infusion while Nathan protested half-heartedly. Who did he think he was fooling? Not them, that's for sure. They knew he was content as long as they kept feeding him whatever the hell it was they were pumping into his veins.
Eventually the nurses grew weary of reattaching the perfusion, and so they simply tied his hands to the hospital bed, and that was the end of that.
Nathan couldn't recall much else from his time in the hospital except for the disturbing image of his torso filleted on a surgical table, observed from an angle as if he was having an out-of-body experience. He would've dismissed it as a dream spun by his addled brain if the image wasn't so damn persistent.
After that came the rehab. He'd called it quits just one week into physical therapy with the random and impromptu decision to fly to Tahiti. The Director had surprised him by leaving him alone. He'd paid the rent on Nathan's bungalow, had sent him a stipend along with prescriptions and a treatment plan, but other than that remained unobtrusive and hands-off.
Until now.
"Are you all right, Nathan?"
Supported by pylons, the bungalow had roosted ten feet above the beach, and the blue Pacific waves lapped and hissed and foamed at the base of the poles during high-tide.
"Nathan? You're drifting."
Nathan snapped back. He didn't want to; it would be easy to close his eyes and disappear into the memory. Get lost in there, like the hospital bed and its intravenous nectar. He could dine on lotuses all day, set Blonde on Blonde to repeat, and dream about anything except this new reality that he'd been thrust into:
A woman was strung up on the far wall of the infirmary.
She was crucified by bindings at her throat, wrist and waist, holding her upright and in place. All of her joints looked to be dislocated. Her legs were missing from the knees down, the left arm cuffed within an Ilizarov apparatus. Tubes ran from frosted tanks into her spine.
The flesh had been excoriated from her body, exposing a metal skeleton beneath and a white mop-head of intestinal wiring that spilled out of her abdomen. The metal gleamed like chrome.
"Bitch has a goddamn bomb tuned to her neural oscillations," the Director said as he advanced on the woman. Nathan didn't think he'd ever heard him swear before, and for the second time that day he was nonplussed. The Director crouched in front of the woman's splayed body, hands braced on his knees and leaning forward. His nose almost brushed her pubis. "You were lucky. If she'd spent another ten minutes in your car we could've used you for chum fishing. We had to freeze her with liquid nitrogen on the medevac to prevent it from detonating. I still haven't figured out how to defuse it. That's why it's so cold in here."
"What is she?" Nathan inched forward, curiosity getting the better of him.
The Director glanced at him over his shoulder, flashing a smile sharp enough to cut glass. "You don't recognize her?"
Of course he did. He didn't ask who she was, he asked what she was. The last time he'd seen her had been over two months ago. She was covered in blood, and he'd been in a rush to save his own skin, but there was no mistaking that face. The phone in his head had a recording of that night, captured by the camera attached to Nathan's optic nerve. He'd reviewed it so many times that he knew the exact time, down to the second, when the Foundation agent appeared. He pulled it up now and paused the frame, comparing the image to that of the one in front of him.
"Should I?" he said.
"She's the Foundation agent you captured."
He'd had a lot of time during his rehabilitation to scrutinize the events of that night in Millbrook, and most of it didn't make sense. The Director would've maintained constant surveillance on the area after the positive Sothian hit on the satellite, so why had he acted like he was unaware of the Foundation's presence up until Nathan arrived at the scene? And — for that matter — why delay that arrival by more than half a day? Under closer examination, the Director's explanation seemed more and more like a magician's misdirection, especially after he didn't hesitate to send in a helicopter to retrieve the Foundation agent.
There were other holes that persisted; whenever Nathan presumed to have a firm grip on things they buoyed and expanded, leaving him gasping and struggling to stay afloat. His assignment was to capture the alleged Sothian cultists, yet he'd been given an arsenal to take on a military unit, not subdue a covenant of witches. No non-lethals, no handcuffs, no charms or wards or talismans. Nathan wanted to interrogate Herbert McKeown, but he hadn't seen him since they'd boarded the maglev train together. He didn't even know if the old man was still alive.
"She's a cyborg."
"Android, actually," the Director corrected. "You're a cyborg."
This is why you sent me to Massachusetts, Nathan thought. He'd never outwardly expressed his doubts regarding Millbrook. An alert popped on his HUD whenever the Director dialed into his head, but he was suspicious that the Director had a backdoor allowing him to circumvent the notification, and was potentially spying on Nathan around the clock.
"So what's the big deal?" he said, leaning against the wall. "This technology has been available for years."
The Director shook his head. "Not like her. There's nothing like her. The technology is still only theoretical. She has a positronic brain utilizing artificial DNA computing. From what I've been able to find out she can exceed five yottabytes of storage capacity."
The agent's scalp was peeled back, the top of the skull removed, as in an autopsy.
"Looks like a normal brain to me," remarked Nathan. It was true — at least, for the small part visible.
"But it's not," continued the Director. "Do you have any idea how big a single yottabyte is? No? It's a thousand zettabytes, or a thousand trillion gigabytes. It's impossible to compress that much data into a human cranium. It'd probably take me a drive the size of school bus to fit half of it. This android's memory density just isn't possible — not yet, anyway — and it somehow sustains equal flops without melting. I wouldn't believe the Foundation had that kind of computing power if I hadn't seen it for myself — no one does, not even the Pentagon or the FSR."
"You don't know how they did it? Christ. You've had two months. Haven't you been reverse-engineering her?"
"There's a bomb wired to her brain activity," the Director reiterated. "It's severely impeded our diagnostics."
"Can't you just — I don't know — hack into her?"
"She runs on a closed network to prevent that sort of thing. But even if I manually plugged into her I wouldn't risk it. She's a supernova of power, her operating platform is unique, and there's no way to know what kind of defenses it has. I don't want to go up against her immune system and accidentally start a fusion reaction."
"Immune system? Wait. Are you telling me she's still alive?"
"If that's what you want to call it, yes."
Nathan felt something that he wasn't used to. What was it? Panic? Fear? He wasn't familiar enough with the emotion to accurately identify it. Anxiety?
"You… you vivisected her?"
"She doesn't experience pain the same way you do, Nathan. It's just an analogy of pain. I didn't torture her. Besides, the explosive device necessitated her continued survival. She didn't really give me much of a choice, now did she?"
Constant exposure to violence had caused Nathan to develop a mental callous against death. As far as he was concerned there was nothing mystical about it, no final judgement or waiting paradise, and certainly no 'New Game +' encore. The world had existed for four and half billion years prior to his creation. He had a hunch that it would continue on fine without him. Death was just another waste byproduct, dying not much different than taking a shit or blowing your nose. And what was left over, after all was said and done, got flushed down the toilet same with everything else.
But that didn't make him a sadist, and he was hard-pressed to imagine a fate worse than the Foundation agent's.
He crossed his arms and veiled his disgust with apathy. "You called me in for this?"
"No, but you should know that thirty six seconds ago the Foundation destroyed our missile silos, taking out our air deterrents."
"What?" Nathan pushed off the wall and stood rigid, his body tensed as he sussed out the news. "You didn't remove her tracker."
"We removed three. After that the scans came back negative. Even if she was still broadcasting, this facility is too far underground and too well-insulated for a signal to reach the surface."
"Why don't you go up and explain that to them, then?"
The Director didn't take the bait. "They must've forced the Transall to land in Ivato and trailed it back here. I'd hoped your HALO jump would've fooled them longer than this."
"You're retreating," Nathan said. It was the only reasonable conclusion, as hard as it was to believe.
"Yes," admitted the Director. "They're coming for her — want their precious brain back, and they won't stop until they have it. I've been withdrawing as they seize my properties, one after the other. First the Yukon, then Crater Lake. The Amazon and Yalong Bay. All gone. And now Madagascar. They've breached the bunker and are making their way to the elevator shaft."
"How many are there?"
There was a discouraging pause. "It looks like an entire MTF."
"Say again."
"It's the whole task force."
"What do you mean 'whole task force'?"
"Eta-8. Call sign 'Man-Eaters'."
"Uh-huh. And how large a unit are they?" The name didn't ring a bell, but Nathan made a point of avoiding the Foundation whenever possible. The last time he'd engaged them there'd been nine agents and he'd barely limped away with his life.
"Forty-five."
And with that, the Director vanished.
Kids with Guns Part Two


Project Sensuikan, 1990
Purpose: The destruction of Hy-Brasil has caused the anomalous community to turn on its head. Due to the creature's magic-seeking nature, the IJAMEA believes Japan may be the next target, if such a monster is to return. Our parascientists have discovered a method to allow our submarines to enter the world of the Tokage-tako, by using a sigil system recovered from ancient text, we have the capability of studying this world, and the demons that lie within.
The significant goals of Project Sensuikan are as follows:

Exploration of IJAMEA Zone-001.
Examination and analysis of material returned from IJAMEA Zone-001.
Analysis of Tokage-tako entities.
Discover the means by which a Tokage-tako entity entered our dimension.

IJO-256 ("Asahi") did a final check of his submarine, preparing for their descent. IJO-573 ("Iroha") and IJO-375 ("Ueno"), the two operatives under his command did the same.
"Have you made your final preparations?" General Sako said over the submarine's intercom, "Say your prayers, we do not know what exactly is on the other side, but know that you honor yourselves with your sacrifice."
"Understood, General Sako." Asahi responded, "Will we have comms on the other side?"
"No comms. You are on your own when you get to the other side. It is crucial that if the submarine is in danger that you return to us so we can examine your footage and data."
"Understood sir. Ueno will stay by the sigil. Iroha, come with me for the dive team. Permission to dive?"
"Whenever you're ready."

First the fog, then the bubbles, and then the water. The submarine's inhabitants examined their changed surroundings, watching their familiar home country of Japan be submerged under the deep water. The first to regain his bearings, Iroha began recording his surroundings.
"We're in some kind of weird water world? I'm not actually sure what's going on, everything looks just like where we set off, just… underwater."
"Yeah, that's supposed to happen. This isn't our Japan, its some sort of demonic copy." Asahi responded, having just recovered from the shock, "Get your shit together men. This is uncharted territory."
"But its not entirely unknown right? If its a copy of our world maybe there's some of our computers in there? Worst case scenario we just find out more about how similar this world is."
"Good point. Ueno, can you get us a bit closer to the harbor?"
"Yes sir." Ueno said, almost mechanically.
"Hey, Ueno, chipper up! Of all of the places we can go, at least everything is a little bit familiar here. What, are you worried that we are gonna get at your diary in there?"
"No sir, sorry sir. I will attempt to be more jovial, while still making sure to do my duty here."
"You're hopeless. Lets just get to the harbor."
The submarine floated around the water, back towards the harbor it came from. The doors to the facility were closed, sealed in a lockdown mode. Despite the lockdown, several large holes had been smashed in the large harbor facility. Despite the destruction, no bodies could be seen anywhere in this flooded coastal city.
"Iroha, put on your air tank. We're going in." Asahi ordered, snapping his own air tank on. "Ueno, continue collecting samples here. If we don't return in… say, 30 minutes, return to our Japan with the data."
"Understood sir." Ueno said, "Opening the airlock."
The two men left the submarine and entered the freezing water. Silently, they moved towards the facility. The nearest hole was in the housing area of IJAMEA Harbor-15, where both of the men had been housed for the past year and a half. While familiar on the outside, the housing was unfamiliar, with old furniture dotting the room.
"Command, be advised, the interior of the harbor facility looks a bit funny" Asahi reported, "From the looks of things, something unholy has happened upon this world."
"A bit melodramatic don't you think? Everything is just older… and underwater I guess. Though, I gotta agree, this place is real fucked up, something terrible was here."
The two men continued swimming through the hallways of the facility, searching for the Head Transcriber's room. The hallway split in two, on their right, the harbor and the left to their destination, the offices of the head officers. Moving left, the doors had all been sealed under the lockdown, so Iroha prepared the underwater breach. After a loud explosion rocked the facility, the two men entered the office.
"No hard drives anywhere in here." Asahi said into his microphone, "In fact, I haven't seen a computer here this whole time."
"Hey, look at this." Iroha beckoned Asahi over to the corner of a room where a vacuum-sealed binder could be found.
"Command, we believe there is something here that was left for survivors that nobody has taken. We're bringing it back to the submarine as soon as possible. They look like IJAMEA documents, but the water is too murky to really tell."
"Lets get back to the sub, we're sure to get a promotion for this find. And this place gives me the creeps, I want to get out of this shitty place."
The Japanese operatives exited the room, towards the hallway. As they swam down the hallway, Asahi noticed something out of the corner of his eye.
"Command, we believe we have found something else. There appears to be a large stack of green spheres in the harbor." Asahi reported to his mic, changing directions to move to the harbor, "I'm getting closer to take a picture."
"Asahi, get back here, we don't know what those things are. They could be eggs. or something" Iroha said, grabbing Asahi's leg, "We shouldn't stay here long, we have valuable cargo."
"If they're eggs, all the more reason to document them. I am your superior officer here, it's my call."
On closer inspection, the iridescent green spheres contained something, five arms swirling in side of some green fluid. Hundreds of these eggs stacked on top of each other in a verifiable mountain of caviar.
"Command, we have found eggs, it seems life can exist here after—-"
Asahi stopped speaking, following Iroha's stare towards a large hole in the harbor, where five large eyes stared down at them. The creature, this demon, was at least 80 meters tall, with five long tentacles. The face was crocodilian, an unholy bastardization of animals, grown to a size rivaling the greatest monsters from any movie. The two men froze in the water, hoping that somehow, the demon that was staring right at them hadn't seen them somehow. The water was silent, almost silent enough that if they had listened, they could have heard a single egg fall from the top of the stack, and land on the ground next to them.
The creature jetted towards the pair, quickly closing the distance between the two parties. Iroha thrust the vacuum-sealed binder into Asahi's arms.
"There are still submarines in the harbor. Take it, go to Ueno, and get out." Iroha said, moving back towards the eggs. "I'll be right behind you if it isn't interested in eating me."
"Don't do this Iroha, we can both make it."
"Get out of here. This is what we trained for, its more important than me."
Iroha pushed Asahi towards the floating submarines, and started grabbing eggs to crush them in his hands. The only sounds Asahi could hear were his own breaths and Iroha's breath in sync with each other. Silent. Calm. Asahi took a final look back towards Iroha, and entered the submarine. Despite its apparent damage and age, the airlock opened, and Asahi stepped inside.
Iroha's microphone was still on, and Asahi could hear the still, calm, breath of the trained swimmer. Asahi turned off his speaker, just before the breathing would've been interrupted by the loud crack of a body breaking. The only sound Asahi could hear was his own breathing.
The power turned on and the submarine puttered alive. The busted up submarine puttered towards his own ship, and Ueno moved towards him as well. Asahi exited the old submarine and went into his new one. As Asahi entered the submarine, he wordlessly scraped the sigil off with his knife, then the blue world in his window turned into bubbles, then fog, and then the clear blue sky.


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Dr. Simon Glass twirled the pen around in his left hand. Finger through finger through finger. Back and forth, back and forth. After five journeys around his hand, he gave the pen a flick and it effortlessly fell into his right. Finger through finger. Back and forth. The movements were just fancy enough that clients caught off-guard would be mesmerized by it. It was a trick he had picked up from Diogenes on a slow Halloween some years back, and ever since then it was his main way of stimming. Oftentimes, it was his natural response to anything particularly overwhelming or anxiety-inducing.
Across from him sat Benjamin Kondraki.
"So you…" He couldn't finish the statement. It was absurd. Utterly nonsensical. It was Kondraki. He knew better than to trust him at face value.
"Yeah." Kondraki rarely sounded defeated and embarrassed. Antics that would otherwise — "That's right, Simon." — mortify any regular Foundation employee just ended — "I did exactly that." — up emboldening him even more. Somehow, he — "They should have given you the records already." — was the most proud of stupid shit.
Glass looked up from his notes at Kondraki. The Lizard Rider1. The Butterfly King. The King Of Kings.
He looked defeated.
Glass sighed, opening a cabinet and taking out Kondraki's medical folders with his right hand while writing with the other. He didn't have to look. No need to look when you can memorize instead. In the front of the top folder were his most recent medical records. After 26 years of Foundation duty, the layout of every single letter from the medical wing and its contents for any number of announcements, emergencies, and tests were predictable enough to memorize. Just swap out skip numbers, or personnel names, or locations. There were two — no, three — words that stuck out immediately. Did he not read these when he got them?
"So. Your…"
"Please, Simon. Please."
"Your penis."
"Yeah."
"It was stuck there."
"Mmhmm."
"There was a water bottle stuck on your penis." No response. Back and forth, finger through finger. "You've never been this quiet before when recounting your shenanigans." Kondraki swore. Glass never bothered to learn Polish, but he was pretty sure there were at least two instances of the word 'fuck' strewn in there. "Where do you want to start with this?"
"I mean… fuck, why was it this one to get the O5 interested? Nothing about the cafeteria bullshit last year! Cleffles — " Glass snorted, thankful Kondraki wouldn't hear it. It was still adorable to hear, and he was the only other person in the world graced with the pet name whenever his client got worked up into a sudden tirade. Cleffles. "— gets scolded by…"
"Iceberg?"
"Fuck no, I'm still not calling him that," he spat. "Anyway, him, of all people, for his zero-fifty heist. But I put a dick, my dick, in a bottle and this? I was mortified. I just couldn't keep up my pride. Have you ever seen Gears look disappointed in someone? Me neither, but during that assembly yesterday he looked right into my eyes by accident, and I swear Simon, fuck. I swear that was the most disappointed he ever looked in my life. But shit, you know what was the worst part?"
"What was the worst part?"
"Draven, my flesh and blood, leaves an Aquafina label on my desk that night. And he had James sign it. How am I supposed to feel, Simon? My own son has finally gotten more clever than me. He's always been smarter, but now he's finally one-upped me. This was originally funny as shit." Kondraki must have suddenly realized that he was ranting, as he hit the brakes as quickly as he started.
"I know I've told you this every time, but no need to stop yourself in my office," Glass quietly reassured. "Go on for as long as you want."
Glass had to look through the letter again just to make sure he understood the sequence of events. It still didn't fully register for him. They were both grown adults. They were men paid and well-compensated for their tenure in an organization dedicated to locking away some of the most dangerous anomalous threats to the planet. And despite all that (no, maybe because of that? [Or was it a stress reaction to that?2 He'd have to do better.] Even Kondraki wouldn't normally do something like that, he hoped), one of them ended up with his dick in a water bottle. And somehow, this was the first time he ever heard of it happening in the Foundation's history.
"I don't think I can keep up the anger. The jokes are gonna come the rest of my life. 'Here lies Benjamin Kondraki, he died from his cock asphyxiating,' whatever. I give it a week before the shame wears off for good. In two months it's something I can laugh about. But G-d, this is just too much right now." Kondraki sighed. "If it was a beer bottle, I'd have plausible deniability." Denial. Glass nodded. "But no, I have nothing."
"It's natural for people to feel embarrassed and ashamed over incidents that would normally be considered such. You've always found refuge in audacity, so you feel like you should be unabashedly proud of this. Does that sound right?" Kondraki looked up at the ceiling for around thirty seconds before looking at Glass's neck.
"I think so."
"Clearly, the… assembly yesterday. That got to you real bad. Do you at least feel that Clef isn't giving you too much shit for this?"
"He walked out of our apartment with a bottle on his dick. His concept of shame was lost long ago, Simon."
"Alright. Still, I can understand how you feel." Glass didn't have to append that statement with 'Even if I never stuck my penis in a bottle'. Enough salt was rubbed on the wounds as it was already. Back and forth.
"Did you not know about the assembly?"
"No. I didn't have time to review whatever was sent to my mail either. I just got back with Dio from a mini-vacation. I'll look later." The slightest bit of relief showed on Kondraki's face. "How do you think you'll cope with this for the next week or two?"
"I don't know. Rolling with the punches is a lot harder when the O5 have to take action."
"Anything healthy you like to do, or any work to dig into. Even if it's routine checking up on something like 408? I know mantras are a stretch for you, but we can review the ones we started talking about two weeks ago." Kondraki clearly had to think about it. Glass let him; it was near-impossible to get him out of his own head once he was lost in thought.
As Kondraki was thinking, Glass flipped the page and saw the note a nurse (possibly two, though the handwriting looked similar enough) had scrawled on the back that was preserved on the copy. It was unprofessional; he'd probably have to send a letter to the medical wing about that.

There's already talks about bottles completely not being a thing so we'll just get more boring as hell water coolers
at least we get paid well lol

Kondraki had suddenly interjected.
"What about —"
"No, you can't stick your dick in a bottle again."
"But that'd cancel out the —"
"As your psychiatrist, therapist, coworker, friend, and documentation editor, you can not do that. You absolutely can not." Glass sighed in exasperation.
"Can I at least not and say I did?" Kondraki asked sincerely. After everything that had happened, he asked that question without hesitation, sincerely, looking straight into Glass's eyes without so much as a smirk.
"No." Finger through finger.

Two months later, Kondraki went to his desk to fill out a proposal to revise containment procedures on SCP-408. The exact second he opened the door, before he even could think about the exact nature of the revisions, he saw it. He knew.
There was a Dasani label on his desk. Diogenes's signature was on it.

Footnotes
1. An obvious tall tale no one but newcomers believed.
2. Did he overlook some kind of stress that Kondraki ended up reacting to? He could only pick up on so much subtlety, really.


I don't actually know what's going on, I just read a hub and had an idea.

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The weight of the statement fell heavy on the room. A dozen researchers in various technical fields shifted uncomfortably in their seats as Director Foster looked around the conference table.
Dr. Cimmerian spoke up from his seat in the back of the room. "So what you're telling us is that you don't know where it is."
Researcher Rosen nodded into his hands.
Director Foster shook his head. "Fantastic. Walk us through the process of how we lost a top secret two million dollar AI on the internet."
Researcher Rosen looked up and countered, "Well that's not exactly what's happened. The AI is missing for the moment but it's programmed to come back to Foundation controlled servers after two days without contact."
Director Foster broke in, "Just tell us what happened."
"Right." Researcher Rosen pushed his glasses up his nose. "Following the success of AIAD, we began work on a new generation of site AIs that aren't based on 2987-1. Are any of you familiar with the Jarvis framework?"
"I worked with it at Site-17 for a bit," Dr. Cimmerian answered. "Can I just say that when we complained that Jarvis was a ridiculous name we never really considered you'd go with something as silly as the 'Robotic Interface and Computing Heuristic Advanced Research Database' for your next iteration."
Rosen looked around nervously and continued. "The point is that the Jarvis framework is useful but it's a truer AI. It doesn't interact with humans the same way that Alex and Glacon do."
Dr. Hopper raised his hand to interject. "We've been moving away from the human-like approach for a while now. The Foundation needs a cold and dispassionate AI as much as we need human based problem solving."
"Yes." Rosen nodded vigorously. "But the flip side is that we can't acclimate the AI to the world with human interaction, it has no use for that kind of data. What it requires is information."
Director Foster frowned. "Your solution to that was to let it loose on the internet?"
"Since it went dark," Rosen continued, "we ran a battery of tests with other RICHARD iterations and we think we figured out the problem."
"Enlighten us, then?" Dr. Cimmerian barked.
"Right. Uh, web development hasn't really caught up with our programming just yet, and we made several errors in how the AI interacts with non-Foundation databases."
Dr. Hopper raised his hand again before breaking in. "It turns out that Python web frameworks interact oddly with the AI. We still don't understand what went wrong, exactly, but we're working on it."
Researcher Rosen glared at Dr. Hopper before interrupting. "We're fairly certain it's either the CherryPy, TwistedWeb or Bottle framework that trapped the AI in a recursive loop."
Director Foster scowled. "Get it back. Cimmerian is the first wave of 'shit gets real'." Dr. Cimmerian saluted from the back of the room. "You don't want to be here when the next guy comes."
Rosen gulped. "I promise, our contingency programming should be foolproof. It'll return to our servers before the end of tomorrow."
Director Foster stood up from his chair. "I want a new contingency plan on my desk by the end of today in case that doesn't happen."
Everyone except for Dr. Cimmerian stood up along with Foster and began to file out of the room with shuffling steps. Once the room was empty, Foster sat in his chair and looked down the conference table.
"It's really great to see you again, by the way," Dr. Cimmerian began. "Sheila still teaching?"
Director Foster laughed. "She's actually an assistant principal now. If she finds out you're in town she's gonna try to set you up with someone."
"I'm moving around too much to settle down but I'll bear it if she makes spaghetti for dinner."
"She'd love that, I bet. Though you don't gotta settle down to find someone for a little while."
"Fair. But interoffice romance has never been my strong suit."
"Shit. You remember the fallout from Clef and Kondraki's thing?"
Dr. Cimmerian's eyes went wide. "Dude. Do you realize you guys got your Dick stuck in a bottle?"

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