“Wake up. We're going to the beach.”
At the sound of his supervisor's voice, Researcher Riven Mercer looked up from his stack of documents, a slightly-crazed look in his eyes. “…Is this an assignment?” he managed to croak out, after realizing he'd all but passed out at his desk during the usual end-of-the-month manic paperwork cram session.
Anomalous items processing, while routine and streamlined at its peak of efficiency, still managed to involve a mind-numbing amount of paperwork. As the second-in-command of Site-19's Kiryu Labs and resident Foundation intern babysitter, Riven Mercer found himself devoting hours every month to supervisory documentation. He made sure that everyone who clocked hours for the Labs was credited appropriately, that any fire damage that occurred during test trials was repaired, and that the monthly caches of paranormal-but-effectively-harmless things were stored away in the proper skeleton-free closets.
Dr. Mark Kiryu regarded his assistant/right-hand research man/tea-drinking buddy with an air of long-suffering patience. “Rivs, how long have you been processing these cases?”
Riven remained quiet for a little while. He looked at the stack of paperwork to his right side, and then picked up his coffee mug sitting on the left. It was the goofy dinosaur-shaped one, he noted blearily. The Labs must have been really swamped this month if he resorted to drinking out of that sentimental souvenir garbage. “Three, four… a couple cups of green tea? I started sometime in the morning,” Riven answered vaguely. “I made a pretty big dent in the stack, but we did bring in a lot of other Level-2s from other departments for this month's an-items cache, and different people take different notes and we still need to handle hours crediting…”
“Yeah, we're going to the beach. Pack your sunglasses. Find someone to feed your lizard…”
“I've been in the Labs since this morning. I've already notified three people that Crellan's bowl needs to be full by—”
“Beach. Now. Transport shuttle in fifteen.”

“You decided on jeans?” Riven shielded his eyes from the sun as he stepped off the Foundation shuttle. A crew member deposited a box of “protocol essentials” nearby, and after Dr. Kiryu stepped off, the shuttle promptly departed.
“It gets cold when the sea breeze picks up. You went with cargo pants.” Mark replied as he cheerfully shouldered the large beach umbrella and scoped out the scene in front of them.
Riven joined in the scoping. The beach was, well, he reasoned, a beach. The sky above was a sedate azure, scattered with picturesque, postcard-perfect white fluffy clouds. A few seagulls dotted the airspace. Below, pale-colored sand stretching along a coastline, bordered by rocky cliffs and purple sea fig flowers, with the ocean calmly lapping at the shore. It was a private beach, (the beach, not “a” beach, Riven remembered, Mark had said) and the sand and rocks and water were free of litter and human-generated debris. Apart from the cleanliness, the absolute feeling of normal the place exuded was rather unnerving, Riven thought.
“Cargo pants are practical. I might need to wrangle a rabid lizard. Can't hurt to be prepared.” Riven examined the box, determined it had wheels and an extendable handle for pulling, and approved of the wonders of convenient luggage. By his guess, he could probably throw the box a good few meters in the air if he had to distract a giant rabid lizard.
“I'm really hoping you're joking, because if not, you're completely missing the whole concept of ‘relaxing' you're supposed to—” Mark had picked a spot in the sand and was stabbing the umbrella into the ground, with limited success.
“I'm joking. I just like cargo pants. Are you sure I'm not missing anything back at the Site?” Riven grimaced as the sun peeked through the clouds and into his eyes. He ran a hand through his shaggy hair (normally it was kind of spiky, according to Mark, but it seemed like today even his hair was tired). Squaring his shoulders, Riven started dragging the box across the sand. The wheels were useless.
“Yes, I'm sure.” Mark scuttled around the umbrella, kicking up sand into a mountain at the base to hold the umbrella up. “Maintenance is taking advantage of our absence to move all your files and stuff into your new office.” He scuttled some more, picking up a wayward rock and tossing it into the tide. “Now that you've finished your veterinary doctorate with the Foundation, you're entitled to your own office, your own hoard of snacks, and your own army of filing cabinets. Remember I told you to pack up your paperweights last week?”
Riven paused in his box-lugging. “Actually, no.”
“This is why you need a beach day, Rivs.”

“Look at this majestic seagull. I dub him the King of Seagulls. Observe his regal crown of feathery authority.” Mark pointed. He was, at the same time, also hogging three lawn chairs: one for himself, one for his propped-up feet, one for his plate of snacks.
“I think he's just scruffy-looking.” Riven had elected to sit in the sand.
“You're not very good at the whole ‘beach day' thing, are you, Rivs.”
“You have a pterodactyl costume and a ninja suit in your office storage. Can you blame me for wondering if there's some ulterior motive involved?” Riven grabbed Mark's plate of kettle chips from the lawn chair and made waving motions when the King of Seagulls came within foodstuff-theft range.
“I'm going to walk on the beach. Be courteous with the King of Seagulls.” Mark abandoned his three lawn chairs, kicked off his sneakers and socks, and padded towards the darker sand of the shoreline.
Riven watched his supervisor leave, a retort on the tip of his tongue, but decided against calling out a reply. So he settled into one of the vacated lawn chairs, stretched out his legs in the sunny sand, felt the salty sea breeze waft over his face. It was nice, he concluded. It may have been routine, or protocol, or even a requirement based on HR reasons, but for a moment it was nice to be away from the piles of paperwork and the ever-present unknown, untrustworthiness of the anomalous. It was nice to remember what “normal” felt like… or at least was supposed to feel like. The researcher let that train of thought pass by and closed his eyes. This was peaceful.
The umbrella stuck in the sand promptly teetered two inches in the wind and collapsed into Riven's lap, sending the plate, kettle chips and all, into the path of the King of Seagulls and his royal entourage.
“Beach day. Right.” Riven scrambled up from the wreckage of his food, cursing gravity and the wind in all their many forms.
Mark laughed discreetly from the shoreline. He'd been tracking footprints in the soft water-brushed sand, and watching the ocean wash them away when the tide came in.

“Are there ever times when the absence of anomaly is scarier than the presence of it? When we've spent so much time studying the paranormal, the normal is what becomes uncommon for us?” Riven was sprawled out in the sand again (this time with beach towel on Mark's insistence), the umbrella having being righted and held down by the lawn chairs, the box, and the extra-large bag of kettle chips (for what little support it could give).
“It's a risk all Foundation personnel run into,” Mark replied evenly, moving some seashell fragments around on the pages of an open book. He snapped a picture of the arrangement with his phone. “That's one reason we have such a large Psych department.” He tilted the book, slid the seashells into his hand. The fragments clinked pleasantly as he cradled them in his palm.
Mark stood up, walked a few steps, and tossed the seashells into the approaching tide. He turned and walked back to the umbrella. Riven raised an eyebrow.
“‘Take only pictures, leave only footprints'.” Mark shrugged, sitting cross-legged in the sand next to his assistant. “If this place was anomalous, and I'm not saying it is, what would you hope the effects would be?”
“Benign, of course.” Riven stuck an elbow in the sand to prop himself up, for a better view of the ocean.
“More than five words, please.”
“Something to do with the aesthetics.” Riven flopped back down. “Something with the flowers on the cliffsides, or those shells that get tossed in by the tides…” Riven stuck an arm out of the shade cast by the umbrella and picked up a flattened stone, well-worn at the edges and fitting nicely in the palm of his hand. “Or, hell, if the effect was that every stone I tossed into the waves would skip three times exactly, I'd be happy with that.”
“Didn't skip stones often, when you were in England?”
“Lived in the city. No place to skip.” Riven grumbled, not particularly keen on revisiting memories of his childhood. He'd been such a dork.
“Well. Let's test your hypothesis.” Mark picked up a stone.
Twenty-seven stones and five collective total water-skips later, with no conclusive results, Drs. Kiryu and Mercer looked for another anomaly.

“Isn't it a little out of date, the violin?” Riven had taken down the umbrella, which, after being pointed in various directions respective to the wind, was declared not affected by a potential beach anomaly. The sun dipped on the horizon, casting shadows that hadn't been there an hour before.
“Oh, never. Every box office hit needs a killer soundtrack. Musicals need pit orchestras. People like sensitive flesh-and-blood musicians. You can tell a computer to play like someone's crying, but it won't have a clue what to do unless it's directed by a human who fucking knows how to cry.” Mark was lying on his chest on the box of beach essentials, arms draped over the sides, stomach cushioned with several towels.
Riven gaped.
“…yes, I swear here.”
Riven shut his mouth. Mark barreled on.
“Ever played a duet with anyone? Ever seen two musicians sing or play together, totally in sync? There's something transcendent about that sort of moment.” Mark scooted himself off the box he'd been lying on, did a quick about-face in the sand (it came off as more of an acrobatic twirl) and stretched out his arms, as if to embrace the sea winds blowing in from the waves. “It's as meaningful as a secret handshake between two old friends, or two lovers sharing a waltz. I played the flute. Lots of lovely duets for the flute.” Mark, silhouetted against the fiery oranges and pinks of the setting sun, let the sound of the tides wash away his words. The night's approaching darkness painted the sky in muted rainbow hues, melting to the eventual dark blues and blacks in the distance.
Riven snorted. Mark turned around. “Hey, manly men play the flute. Shen and I can crank out a mean Mozart duet, I'll have you know.” Riven sighed, and held up his hands in surrender.
“I'm not judging. I studied piano for several years, back in England,” he admitted.
Mark grinned widely. “I'm forcing you to learn some chamber music. We're going to sweep the Site-19 talent show this year.”
Riven shrugged and agreed, and the sun went down. The transport arrived just as they finished packing up the kettle chips.

It was dark outside when lab director and assistant arrived back at Site-19. No one in the facility's laboratory wings would know the color of the sky outside; the halls on this floor were always lit with the same standardized, clinical white lights.
“So was there actually anything anomalous about that place?” Riven put the dinosaur mug in the Kiryu Labs' sitting room sink, along with his plethora of other backup tea mugs. He'd wash them all tomorrow.
“Nah, unless there's something the first sweep team, the second exploration team, and the successive test teams didn't pick up on. You're not the only paranoid one, Rivs.” Mark stuffed the remains of the kettle chip bag into the food cabinet.
“Oh.”
“It's nice to have a sanctioned beach close to the site, huh?”
“Yeah, it seems like something Site-19's staff would make good use of.”
“It's good to get out of the Site from time to time. Remember that there's an outside.”
“Mark, if Crellan started rampaging around the lab, what would you do?”
“Speed-dial you. Your fat lizard, your responsibility. What are you going to do when you get back to your office?”
“Find out when someone fed Crellan today. He's not fat.”
Mark sent his assistant a textbook-quality withering look.
“I'm kidding. I'm going to transfer all the beach pictures to my laptop. Probably print one out and stick it to my office door, to remind me to take a break when I can't feel my eyes.”

A week later, Mark walked by Riven's new office. He spotted something on the wall behind his assistant's new desk and smiled.
Taped to the wall, next to Dr. Mercer's official veterinary program completion certifications and small collection of framed Foundation accolades, was a glossy picture of the King of Seagulls.
Dr. Kiryu went back to his own office, and replied to the memo he had received that morning. It had contained an attached file, his assistant's quarterly psychological evaluation report: "everything looking okay", "some evidence of research-based stress", "subject has a a well-adjusted mindset", "best of luck with new duties, request vacation time as needed".
Kiryu breathed out as he signed the documentation confirming he had read and reviewed the file. One more year, four more psyc evals to sign off, and he'd no longer have an assistant, but a co-director.
Remember to take care of yourself, he thought.


Hub | | Next →

Lilibeth Orion was sitting on the swing-set lazily kicking her feet back and forth. It was Autumn, and the trees were beginning to shed themselves of leaves. Their delicate descent from the branches to the ground had turned the landscape beautiful shades of orange and red, welcoming the changing seasons.
She wasn't as spry as she was when she first came here, those many years ago. Her once precise hands now shook when she wrote down her observations of the constellations. Her transition to living at SCP-2508 had not changed her fascination with space (nor her degree in astrophysics).
Sometimes, during quiet evenings before making dinner, Lilibeth would sit outside- as she did now- and watch the sun set. The swirls of flaming color would descend with that massive luminous sphere, until it gave way to the cool touch of the night. Dark shades of somniferous blues and black would seep through the horizon until all appeared still, and all was quiet.
This time, however, things were slightly different. She was steeling herself. The lull of gears turning beneath the surface of the field was clearer than it had been in times past, as the sound escaped from a small hole in the ground no bigger than 2 meters in diameter. With months upon months of arduous tunneling behind her, she had finally broken her way into some kind of structure.
She hadn't entered it yet. She needed to work up the nerve.
Perhaps it was time.

Lilibeth had not anticipated having to build a pulley system and makeshift elevator, but it had come in handy in the later stages of moving the rock and earth from the field. As the old scientist descended into the darkness, the metallic clanking of clockwork became all the more noticeable.
Finally, her junky elevator hit a metal grated floor.
With her flashlight clenched tightly in her hand, she stepped out into the tunnel. Her light scanned over the interior; copper-colored walls, rusted metal pipes, and wiring. It was clear that something was below the grate floor, but her flashlight could not see the bottom. There was no way of telling how far down this place actually went. One thing was certain though, and that was that the noise was becoming much louder. Lilibeth could feel the walls vibrate ever so slightly when she put her hand to them. When she removed it, her palm came away coated in a black grease.
The flashlight was Lilibeth's solitary source of light here. The air was humid and filthy, blowing through a series of vents above her. She followed the tunnel, turning towards the noise when it presented her with intersections. With the turning of the gears, the walls hummed all around, and the grating buzzed below. It was trancelike.
A brief investigation revealed half a dozen empty rooms throughout the tunnel system, with dirty and chipped tiled floors. There was little indication anyone had ever been there. They were not the interesting thing, though. The interesting thing was what lay at the end of one of the halls. There stood a large metal door, which seemed to be opened via a rusty crank on the wall. Its old surface still sported the remnants of a label: "Tower".
This was undoubtably where all the noise was coming from. But now there was another noise accompanying the gears, and it was the sound of rushing water. With hesitation, Lilibeth turned the crank, and the door opened.
Inside the sphere-shaped room she could see that she was still on a small catwalk (albeit one with stairs), that looked over the source of the now deafening noise. The machine in question was about 50 or so gears; huge ones and small ones, bronze ones and silver ones. Long chains of them connected to various bits of machinery and tubing that Lilibeth couldn't wrap her head around. All in all, the device was two stories tall, descending downward further into the dark. Lilibeth made her way down the small flight of stairs to the concrete base of the room. She was awestruck by the intensity and complexity of what she was looking at. Pipes labelled "FRout" connected to immense opaque containers that churned with liquid as the gears moved smaller bits of strange equipment. Layers upon layers of metal plates spun around beams, and tiny lifts no bigger than a book carried cylindrical canisters down from a small hole in the ceiling, to a small one in the floor. Directly above her head several of the canisters were transported throughout the room via pneumatic tubes.
The old scientist was lost for words. All she could do was stare at what was in front of her. She was almost about ready to turn back when she spotted a narrow corridor tucked into the corner of the room. It wasn't the same copper color of the rest of the complex, but instead was made of cobblestone lined with pipes coming from the machine and the walls themselves.
Upon entering the room, it could have been mistaken for a spacious sewer; a river made of stone bordered by walkways and little bridges. But it wasn't a sewer. It didn't smell like one, and the water flowing from the evenly spaced pipes in the wall looked crystal clear. At the far end of the room the water fell past a grate and into what could have very well been an unending darkness.
The pipes were separated into groups of 6 small PVC pipes. All trickled a very slow stream of water, and all sets of 6 were marked by a wooden board next to it with some kind of identification. Lilibeth read the names as she traversed the walkway; "#322", "Projet Avalon", "91-XSM", "Slouthering", "KPI-&4", "Number 18504"…
And finally: "SCP-2508"
Lilibeth's heart skipped a beat as the information sank in: There were more.


I regret nothing.

▸ More by this Author ◂

{$comments2}

F.A.Q.

{$doesthisfixthebug}

For just a moment I relax. This is a safe place. For now. The receptionist is nice. She guides me to Mr. Jackson's Office. I look over my shoulder only three times as I walk down the hallway.
I breathe in and contemplate this new hell. I try counting the ticks of the clock on the wall. Tick. Tock. Tick. There's a fern in the corner, and a slightly balding man in glasses at the center of the room. He is looking at my paperwork on the desk in front of him. He pulls off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose.
He speaks downward into the paperwork. "This is the third time you've come here with an insurance claim for structural damage to your house. What happened?"
I swallow twice. The man puts his glasses back on and pushes them up his nose. "A tree. It's the craziest thing. You remember that storm last month? I think it weakened one of the oaks outside my house."
The man clears his throat. "I just… I don't know that we can keep paying for this."
"The whole side wall is gone. And I'm up to date on my payments." I lean forward.
"I'm sorry. At the very least we're going to have to assign an investigator to look into it. If he says everything is good, we'll look into paying… but it's going to take a few months at least."
I cannot afford to put up another wall without the insurance. But it doesn't matter anyway. The thing that's following me won't be stopped by a wall. It cannot be stopped at all. I have no idea when or where I attracted its attention. It has followed me for a year and a half. A path of destruction miles wide has been left in my wake.
But here I am. Trying to live a normal life. Trying to pretend that nothing is wrong. I stand up and apologize. "I'm sorry to've wasted your time. Your office has my number. Just let me know what I need to do, when I need to do it, and where. The sooner I get my wall back up the better."
"Oh no, Ma'am. It's me who should apologize." The balding man says it with a smile. He stands up and looks confused as my eyes go wide. He hasn't noticed the slight rumbling in the distance.
It is here. It has found me. I close my eyes. I cannot run. I cannot escape. I can only wait here. The clock ticks away. Who will die this time? The insurance agent? The receptionist? Any one of the hundreds of people between it and me? Why is it here? Why does it torment me?
Those questions remain unanswered. The small room begins to shake. The balding man looks over at the nearest wall in shock as the rumbling intensifies.
I whisper "Oh no," as it comes bounding through the wall. The huge and terrifying bulbous form crashes down on the balding man in a sickening crunch.
"OH YEAH!"


Note: This is part seven in a multi-part story. It is recommended that you read the previous entry Webs, or start from the beginning At the Library.

The police officer barred her way. “I'm sorry, you can't go in there.”
Helen stood her ground. “That's my house. What's going on?” Everywhere, activity. Uniforms scurrying like ants inside and out; house to house enquiries; cars and vans arriving and departing, synchronising to make the best use of space. Vehicles with blue and red lights flashing, and vehicles with just red lights, all clustered around each other like little chicks seeking safety in numbers.
The officer raised her hand and gestured towards somebody behind her. “Name?”
“Gwandoya. Helen Gwandoya. Are you going to tell me what's going on? My daughter's in there. What's happened? Is she okay?”
Panic rising, gaining momentum. Rationality and reason giving way to dread.
The officer gestured again, this time with more urgency, and there was the sound of footsteps rapidly approaching from behind.
“Helen Gwandoya?”
She turned to face a large set male in a cheap suit. “I want my daughter,” she said. “Is she okay?”
“I'm Lieutenant Dimitri, SAPD - “
“Where's Angela?”
“Come with me,” the man said. The ants in uniform - those that were within earshot - turned away so that they wouldn't see her face. And in that way, she wouldn't be a real person with real feelings whose life was about to collapse around her; and they willed her out of their thoughts, for empathising with her would make their duties unbearable, and they reminded themselves to stay detached and cold, lest the horror of what they'd seen should overtake them.
° ° °
Helen Gwandoya sat in the interview room and cried and cried until her tears ran out. All the coffee in the station could not help; all the sympathy in the world could not help. Everything was over.
“Here,” said Lieutenant Dimitri. He slid another coffee over the desk; she saw the straw and smiled sadly. “Is there anyone you can call? Maybe stay with you tonight?”
Helen shook her head slowly. “No,” she said. “Only her.” She was all I had.
Lieutenant Dimitri studied her. “Okay. We'll arrange something.”
Helen took a deep breath and steadied herself, knowing she must ask the question, no matter how painful the answer might be.
“Was it quick?”
Dimitri looked down at the desk and opened the buff folder. He was careful not to let Helen see the photographs. Over the course of an hour or more he told her, in as calm and detached manner as he could manage, about her daughter's last moments.
There were signs of a prolonged struggle in her bedroom. Toys smashed, soda spilt on the carpet, bedding soiled and torn. Wallpaper scratches consistent with those of fingernails. Deepest along the wall parallel to the bed, becoming shallower as they reached the door. Smears of blood and black hair near the handle where - forensics guessed - she had been slammed in order to stun her or knock her out.
She was found in the master bedroom. The autopsy report detailed multiple lacerations covering her chest, arms, legs and thighs, all indicative of self defence. Further injuries caused by implements unknown; gouges, slashes, puncture wounds, blunt trauma, crush trauma. Forensics couldn't determine or find any one likely murder weapon. And then the worst parts, the details of which Dimitri tried to protect Helen from as much as he could.
Angela Gwandoya had been raped before being murdered.
Helen felt the world lurch on its axis. Understood that everything had changed forever. She looked up towards Dimitri slowly, with raw wet eyes. “Where was Aidan? He was meant to be looking after her.”
“He's our top priority right now. He wasn't at your home. Dont worry. We've got everyone looking for him.”
“He wouldn't hurt her. I know him, I trust him. You don't understand. He wouldn't -”
“We need to talk to him. If he didn't do this, then he probably knows who did.”
I already know who did this, she thought. And I will make him suffer ten thousand-fold. Except, she wouldn't. She couldn't even get dressed by herself. She was powerless; even now, faced with the worst thing imaginable she could do nothing. The internal anger directed at Harold Maine gave up and died; it could not survive against the overwhelming numbness that was suddenly her single mode of being.
“Can I go home?”
“Sure,” Dimitri said softly. “But only to get some things together. Toiletries, change of clothes. Forensics are finished and the clean-up team - the place is habitable, I guess. But don't stay there tonight. I'll drive you there now, if you're ready. I don't want you to be there on your own.”
Helen nodded. “I want to go now,” she said. “Please.”
° ° °
Having verified the house was secure, Dimitri waited outside as Helen went in. She would call him when she was ready, and he would come in and collect her things and put them into her overnight bag.
Helen walked into the living room. It was quiet without Angela. No cartoons, no music. And even now, she expected to see her head pop up from her play area. But it did not happen. No police, no forensics teams, no ambulance crews, no daughter. Just silence in an empty house that had suddenly become alien and unreal.
She walked into the kitchen. It was familiar and yet wholly unknown to her. All the pans, and the plates, and the food; all of it absolutely mundane, all of it horrifically clinical and uncaring because of that mundanity. The chips in the bag didn't care, the washing up didn't care. Everything sat in place, as if everything were normal. How could the world be so changed and unchanged at the same time?
She stopped, conscious of a background noise that should not have been there. A rustling noise, or wind? She looked back towards the front door in case the Lieutenant had followed her in; but she could still see his shadow, blocky and unmoving, framed outside as he smoked a cigarette.
White noise? A television or radio left on? She moved on. She was not scared, not anymore. As she drew closer, the sound became clearer.
Running water.
Coming from the bathroom.
The shower was on.
She crept up to the door as quietly as she could and listened. Steady streaming jets, the sound of water glugging down into the faulty plumbing, the shower curtain sighing and whispering as the drips and drops hit it.
And something else, something she didn't understand. Something behind the other noises, quieter and softer but somehow more demanding of her attention. She steeled herself and pushed the door open.
The shower curtain was drawn. She stepped into the room. She could smell bleach; bleach and disinfectant. She was shaking - she was scared, after all. Okay, you piece of shit, let's see you.
She grasped the shower curtain as best she could and pulled it back, not knowing what to expect. “What the fuck?” The background noise immediately became clear; crying.
Aidan Brown looked up balefully from the floor of the shower and his whole disfigured body shook in distress. “I'm sorry,” he said, and the words were almost lost to sobs and snot. “I'm so sorry.”
Helen looked down at the wretched creature that even now rocked itself backwards and forwards in the foetal position, sodden and miserable under the cold spray, claws clacking fitfully, antennules flicking this way and that. “I don't understand,” she said. “You've been here all along?”
“I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to go,” he said.
“But you were here in the house when they - when…”
“Yes,” Aidan said. “I was here.”
“Was it Maine? Did he kill my daughter?”
Aidan shook his head and wept. “No,” he said. “No.”
“Then he made someone do it. He made someone come here and torture and kill my little girl. Did you see them?”
Aidan shook his head. “No,” he said. “He didn't send anybody.”
Helen stepped back. “What do you mean?”
Aidan sobbed uncontrollably and gathered his assorted limbs around him.
“Aidan, tell me. If it wasn't Maine, or one of his cronies, who killed my daughter?”
Aidan didn't respond; she regarded him intently.
And then she saw the scratch marks on his face. Little scratch marks like nails. She didn't comprehend, and then suddenly she did. The world lurched again; it was all too much. She sank back against the wall, suddenly feeling faint, unable to take it in. Tears came unbidden and unstoppable. “No,” she said as the realisation hit home. “No, no, no…”
“I'm so sorry,” he sobbed, the words broken and halting as they left his ruined mouth; and Angela Gwandoya's killer wept and wept, and his tears mingled with the shower run-off and flowed down into the rain-parched drains.
Next


Amy couldn't sleep. She wasn't sure she wanted to. She lay on the mattress, staring into the void of the night. Starless, moonless, cloudless. Nothing but darkness, surrounding her. Glowing shapes moved through the water, shining too dimly to illuminate her nest. Amy was glad for that. The darkness was like a wall, separating her from the siege of the world
They would be home, soon. And when they were, she would be safe. Rupinder would perform the ritual to mask her from the gaze of the Foundation. She would go home. What would her family think, when she returned? When she was taken, her brother was just starting middle school. Would he be at college, now? As a young boy, all they had been able to get him to talk about was history. He'd devoured books at a rate she would never match, poring over knowledge of Rome, Greece, Egypt. Did he still have that passion?
And her parents. Her mother had been in school, working towards her doctorate in psychology. Dad had been the sole breadwinner, working as an appellate lawyer for the city. It frustrated them, Amy had always thought, for two people like them to have such an un-intellectual daughter. She chuckled. What would they think of all this?
She heard a flapping of wings, felt the air stir, but as soon as the sensation appeared it vanished. Impossible to see where it came from. Whatever creatures made it, they seemed to appear only at night. During the day, she'd seen no life above water.
“What is this place, anyway?”
Once, it was a world that held many prosperous civilizations. Or so it is believed. There are very few historical documents that have been recovered. What has been found indicates that they lived peacefully with each other. What became of the world is unknown. Only small strips of land have been discovered in any expedition. There are remnants of cities, in the shallower waters, but exploring them has proven difficult.
“Who's the woman, then?”
A particularly dangerous permutation of a particularly dangerous person. One certain dwellers of the Library felt needed to be controlled. Not without justification.
“Are they sisters or something?”
They are two instances of the same person, from two different universes. It is a rare phenomena, for even two identical to exist in different worlds. Of her, there are hundreds. The reason behind it is a mystery.
Amy sighed. She roped a braid of hair around one finger. “You think it was a mistake to let her out.”
I am ambivalent. There are far worse beings than she, unlikely as you are to meet them.
“Right.”
Amy lifted her scarred arm. A dull pain ran through it, even after all these weeks. She'd asked Rupinder about healing it. He'd given a cagey bullshit answer and changed the topic back to overpowering the minds of fish.
With the quick, precise movements that were beginning to become second nature, she dashed off a series of coral-pink runes in the air. They glowed faintly. An insect crawled through the light.
There were three runes, in a combination she hadn't tried before. The first represented sparks. Rupinder had claimed it was from a hidden civilization beneath the Earth. She wasn't sure she believed him. The second was simpler, a single, notched-back line indicating movement. For the third, a sign of balance.
The first of the three rules she'd established was a simple one. By resting more than she needed, she could store up energy. Then, when she needed to cast, this store of energy would be the first area tapped to fuel her work. It wasn't terribly efficient- an hour of deliberate rest would be enough to move a medium-sized box, perhaps- but it was better than having to improvise.
She stared at the rite, thinking. She focused her mind further, and it flared bright enough to illuminate half the deck before disappearing. A second later, a sphere of flame like a miniature sun erupted from the air. It floated in front of her, motionless.
She gritted her teeth and swept her hand to the left. The orb was jerked over, as if tied to the arm. She motioned to the right, and the flame followed.
Amy let herself grin. The ritual was one she'd been tinkering with all day. Summoning the fire was easy enough. Moving it wasn't much harder. Limiting it to a stable, spherical area was the problem- fire, as a general rule, didn't enjoy being contained. The more an action lay contrary to an object's nature, the more difficult it was to attempt. She'd gone through two dozen combination of runes before discovering this one.
As she began to rotate it over the deck, the breeze surged. A spray of mist blew against her face. The fire flickered and disappeared. She looked toward the wind's source, but with the flame gone it was impossible to see anything through the murk. The wind swept over her, whipping her hair across her face.
She was beginning to draw up a ritual for light when lightning shattered the sky. In the moment of illumination, she saw a swirling mass of clouds. As soon as the first flash disappeared, another bolt struck, and she got another look at the stormfront, the clouds looking like a funnel piercing the waves. Ten seconds later the thunder hit like the sound of a nuclear explosion, loud enough to leave her eardrums ringing. Another bolt struck, and in the light, she swore there was a face in the clouds.
“What the fuck is that?”
It appears to be a godstorm.
“A godstorm,” she said. “Okay. Nothing ominous about that.”
There was the clatter of a door being thrown open, and light flooded the deck. Rupinder, the twin women, and the Nish-Hyet stumbled onto the deck. They stared at Amy, then the ocean. Lighting flashed, and Rupinder sucked in a breath.
“Hurry,” he said. “Fortify the ship. Before it is too late.”

Rupinder set about casting layers of protection around the ship in the form of a swirling, rainbow cover. Like a massive soap bubble. Amy scrambled, doing what she could, but compared to him that wasn't much. To her surprise, the woman they'd rescued joined in, moving from railing to railing, drawing runes Amy couldn't make heads or tails of. After the whole perimeter had been marked, she fell back against the rail, gasping with exertion. The Queen helped her to her feet.
They watched as the lightning grew closer, each strike revealing more of the cloud-wall and sending ripples of thunder towards them. Amy looked at her fellow travellers. They stood in silence, expressionless, watching the stormfront. Rupinder stood with his arms crossed, clenching and unclenching a fist.
The wind was threatening to drive her back now. She gripped the rail to keep from falling, gritted her teeth. Raindrops pelted Rupinder's shields, dissolving into mist as they passed through. Standing in only jeans and a t-shirt, assailed by the wind and water, she cursed the rite that had taken her winter clothes.
Lightning rippled, thunder erupting before the bolt could vanish. The boat rocked with the noise. Amy stumbled, fell to her knees, pulled her way back up. The Sister had been tossed as well. The Queen was pulling her back up. The transformed Nish-Hyet paced back and forth, gnashing their teeth. Their claws raked nervously at their skin. The ship trembled in the wind.The gale swept over her like a river of needles. Mist soaked her skin. Another flash of lightning. The clouds were close now. So close. She turned, saw the Queen say something unintelligible.
And the storm struck.
It was over before it begun. She felt the torrent drive into her. Then she was flying through the air. Her back cracked against something solid and dropped into the water surging across the deck. There was barely time to stand up and see the others, fighting against the gale, before her knees buckled and she fell back into the rapids. The rails slammed against her side. Blindly she felt, grabbed on, held as hard as she could. Rain battered her face, but she managed to squint into the storm. Silhouettes moved on the deck, dozens of them, impossible to discern. Green light flashed. In its brief existence, she saw the Sister and Queen crouched, staring in horror at something outside Amy's view. The Sister had her arm outstretched, thrusting a spear of color forward. Then it went dark.
Amy screamed, yelled, called for help, but even she couldn't hear her cries. Her grip was loosening. She could feel her fingers slipping from the metal, the wind pulling at her feet. Desperate, she tried to focus her energy, tried to form any sort of rite, any bit of magic that could save her. But all that came was a sputter of sparks.
Her final thought before being ripped away from the ship was I can't believe this is happening again.
She fell, and before consciousness faded, saw a light shining through the water.

“Get up.”
Amy groaned. Rough hands grabbed her and yanked her to her feet.
“We don't have the time to lay around.”
Steadying herself, Amy opened her eyes. The Queen was standing next to her, gripping her shoulder. The woman glared at her. “How long do you intend to stand around like an idiot?”
The beach they stood on looked like it had been plucked from one of those tacky postcards tourists sent back home from vacation, all windex-clean skies and silk-smooth sand and perfectly manicured shoreline. To her right, the beach melded into a jungle so green the color seemed to bleed into the air around it.
She placed a hand on the Queen's wrist. “Get your fucking hand off me.”
The Queen dropped her hand and turned away. As she began to walk off, Amy called out, “Hey, what the hell is going on?”
The Queen kept walking down the beach, towards a small black backpack.
“Where are we?”
The Queen reached the backpack and knelt to sling it over her shoulders. Looking back at Amy, she said, “Ask your friend.”
Amy gritted her teeth. Well?
We are still in the same universe. After falling unconscious in the water, it seems you instinctively transported yourself and several nearby objects away. Including her.
Awesome, now instead of of drowning I'm only stranded on a deserted island in another universe. Great job, subconscious me. She walked to where the Queen was standing. The woman had taken a grey, cylindrical object from her bag, and was twisting its top half. There was a click a red light flickered to life on the side.
“What's that?” asked Amy.
“What has the Witness told you?”
Amy scowled. “Uh, not much.”
“Don't talk to me until you have something useful to say.” She went back to fiddling with the device.
“Hey, how about you-” Amy started, then stopped, sighed. It would probably be more useful to yell at the sand. I thought you said this planet was mostly flooded.
It is, as far has been explored. This area must have escaped notice. It paused, then said, Reality is less stable here. The fabric of the universe around this island is tearing.
That sounds bad.
It can be. It could also be quite beneficial, if one knows how to push it properly. As I do.
She hated when it tried to sound smug. Beneficial enough to not leave us stranded on a tropical island on a different planet?
Possibly.
Amy relayed the information to the other woman.
“And what is it expecting to do that will make walking into an area of unstable ontology a good idea?” said the Queen, frowning.
It is possible you will be able to mold it into a Way.
The Queen had taken a pistol from the backpack. She slid the magazine out, examined it. “I've been told that's impossible.”
In most circumstances, it nearly is. However, when you have the right person, using the right workspace, with the right instructions, it becomes merely unlikely.
The Queen reinserted the magazine. “Too risky. We stay on the beach.”
“And do what?” said Amy. “Make a coconut village?”
“If Rupinder and my Sister are still in this world and alive, they're more than capable of finding us. We wait.”
“And if they're not?”
The Queen closed the backpack. “Then we try your suicide mission.” Throwing the bag over one shoulder, she stood. “We need to make camp. I'll gather supplies. You stay here.” Watching her walk into the forest, Amy felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. The way the Queen spoke, she didn't seem to favor the odds of being rescued.
Amy began pacing the beach. The tide had lowered since she'd woken up, leaving a strip of damp sand that fizzled slightly as the water left it. Curious, she scooped up a handful. At first, she thought it was ants crawling through it. Looking closer, she realized the grains themselves were moving. She turned her hand over and dumped the sand back into the water
It was beginning to grow dark. For a moment, the only noise was that of waves lapping at the sand like a starved animal. But even that was only a flimsy mask, a vain attempt to hide the silence that settled around her as she stood on the beach. It was the same silence that had filled her cell, late at night, beneath the footsteps of the guards and hum of electricity. The silence that had followed her for years before she ever even heard of the Foundation. It was the silence of being trapped. Of separation. Of knowing that no noise she made would be heard, no plea paid mind.
The sound of clattering wood snapped her back to awareness. The Queen had dumped a pile of logs onto the sand. She wiped her hands, turned back to the forest. Amy watched her walk away. What kind of woman was she? How did someone like her end up giving orders to someone like Rupinder, or being spoken of by the Witness with something that was almost fear? The Sister had been casting spells right alongside Rupinder. Could this one do the same?
But she hadn't performed any magic while Amy had been around. And there was what she had said of Rupinder and the Sister, that “they would be capable of finding them”, as if she couldn't do the same. What was the story here?
The Queen arrived with more wood, which she began to arrange into a makeshift shelter. In the middle of the work, she glanced at Amy. “What has Rupinder taught you?”
Amy moved in closer. “A whole bunch of stuff. What do you need?”
Pointing to a spot on the sand, the Queen said “We need a fire. One that won't burn out.”
Amy nodded, thinking. The spell was simple enough. The problem was cost. She didn't have an energy saved up after the crash. Normally, that wouldn't be an issue. On the ship, supplies were more than excessive for such purposes. Here, the only things in excess seemed to be sand and boredom. “What do you have in your bag?”
“Ammo. Some food. Extra clothing. Tape. Water. Rope. Books. Various electronics.” said the Queen, without looking from her work. “You're not using any of it.”
“I've gotta use something.”
“Improvise,” said the Queen. She wrapped a coil of rope between two branches and cinched it tight. A wooden shelter just big enough for a person was beginning to take shape front of her.
Amy looked around. Got any ideas?
Yes. But I am curious to see what you come up with.
She sighed, but an idea was beginning to form. She grabbed a stick from the Queen's pile (who thankfully didn't protest) and walked until the Queen was only a thumbnail-sized figure in the distance. Then she began to walk back, this time dragging the stick in the sand. When she reached the Queen (the look of curiosity she gave Amy was infuriatingly satisfying) she turned and, still dragging the stick, returned to her starting point. Once she arrived, she had drawn an oval in the sand some three-hundred meters long and fifty wide.
In the center of it she drew five runes, each as the vertex of a pentagram, that she had memorized weeks ago. Only one was different, a Nordic mark that was part of the system used to indicate cost. When that was finished, she stepped back and focused.
The system she had worked out for performing rituals had been a simple- she would draw out a small circle. She would inscribe the runes for the magic in the middle, then place inside whatever she wanted to use as a cost. When she cast the spell, the desired objects would disappear, leaving anything outside untouched. The effect would scale with the payment- a small enough offering wouldn't completely stop a spell from being cast, but it could render its effect so minor as to be meaningless. Pay too much, and it could end up being more than you bargained for.
Meaning the flame half as tall as her erupting from the ground by the Queen was accompanied by the sudden disappearance of fifteen hundred square meters of sand. Amy scrambled back from the newly formed hole, cursing.
“Are you insane?” the Queen yelled. “Watch what you're doing!”
“Sorry,” said Amy, flushing red. Her stomach grumbled. Not looking up, the Queen said, “Don't touch the bag. I'll scout for food in the morning.”
They didn't speak the rest of the night.

By the time Amy crawled from the shelter into the morning light, the Queen had disappeared. Her bag sat by the still-burning fire, a safe hundred meters from the camp. She rose, felt the crackling in her vertebrae as she unfurled.
The first sun was nearing the tip of the sky, dogged by its a companion a few degrees behind. A herd of small, crab-like animals stampeded towards the sea, forming a path that disappeared into the forest. Amy watched as they scrambled over each other like tumbling stones, each eager to toss its neighbor aside if it meant seconds saved in the journey to the water. Within a few minutes the rabble had subsided. Only a few creatures remained on the sand, injured, dying, or dead.
There came a rustling from the trees, and the Queen emerged from the brush. In one held she held a knife. In the other she held a clump of uprooted plants. Slung over her shoulder was the carcass of a green, scaled creature. Without a word to Amy, she dropped the gatherings in the sand by camp, and went to work cleaning the corpse.
Amy watched the sea. The waters were calm, empty. If help was on its way, it didn't seem to be arriving any time soon. She began to walk down the beach, keeping an eye to the horizon. By the time camp disappeared to the curvature of the island, she was reasonably certain she wouldn't find anything of interest on the shores. By the time she completed another circuit, she was certain. She completed a third for the hell of it, and ran into a knight in shining armor.
It sat on a white horse, lance in hand, shield on arm, staring at her through slitted helm. The horse whinnied, stamped the sand. Amy blinked.
“What the fuck?”
The rider kicked a leg, and the horse trotted forward. Amy took a step back, but the beast slowed, stopped in front of her. The knight stared down, silent. Its silver armor gleamed, rainbows swimming across the plate. Shoulders heaved with the motion of each breath. Once. Twice. Three times. On the fourth beat of an eternity, it lifted the lance. The tip came level with Amy's throat, stroking her Adam's apple.
She moved before the dance could continue. Stepping to the side, she place one hand on the lance, shoved, at the same time holding an arm out and muttering a word. As she darted back, mist twisted between her fingertips, coalescing into a ghostly knife. With a crack, the mist dispersed, replaced by a solid blade. Amy gripped it, staring at the knight. It hadn't reacted to her movement. It stood still, lance hanging in the air, staring at the space she had just abandoned.
The spell for the knife was one she had prepared days earlier. That had been the third rule- by drawing out a rite and playing a multiplied cost, she could save it for use later. The knife wouldn't do anything. Definitely not against armor. Most likely not against a person either, not one with any training or instinct. It was mostly for show, partly for comfort. At least now she wasn't fully defenseless. Did it matter if she was? The knight still sat motionless.
It is not real. It is an aspect of the distortion of reality emanating from the island's center. It possesses solid form, an outer resemblance of thought. But that is all.
“How do I make it uh… go away.”
You do not. Leave it be. Return to camp. Most likely it will dissipate within the hour. The distortion is weak here. Reality will be more quick to right itself.
Amy nodded, to no one in particular, and began the walk back to camp. The Queen was almost done cleaning her kill when she got back, had the knife between the guts and was working loose the organs. Amy tapped her shoulder.
“What do you want?” She didn't look up from her work.
“For starters,” said Amy, “look at me when I fucking talk to you.”
The Queen set the knife down and turned, so that she could just view Amy from the corner of her eye. Better than nothing. “I hope you didn't interrupt me just for that.”
“No,” said Amy. “I found something.” She told her of the knight.
The Queen grunted. “Keep an eye out. Tell me if you see anything nearby.”
“You're not worried?”
“If something happens,” said the Queen, turning back to the carcass, “I'll worry.”
Amy shrugged and returned to her seat in the sand.
In time, the Queen finished her stripping of the meat. Skewering the cuttings on branches she'd chosen from hours of search, she began to cook them over the fire. Once they were a deep brown, she handed one to Amy.
It tasted salty and gamey, even though she was sure the Queen didn't have (and probably didn't want) spices to put on it. The single strip was more filling than it looked.
“So,” said Amy, between bites, “how long ‘til they come?”
The Queen had already finished eating. She set the stick on the sand and stared into the fire. “If they were going to, they would have already.”
Amy nodded. “I kinda thought so. We gotta plan, then?”
The Queen didn't respond.
Amy picked at her teeth. “I kinda thought so.”
“What does the Witness say we need in order to use this break in reality?”
Several theoretical rituals have been outlined that would allow formless reality to be shaped into a Way. I would be able to walk her through one of them.
“And how many of these rituals are useful in practice?”
There have been no recorded successful attempts. However, that does not mean it is impossible.
The Queen snorted. “I'm sure it doesn't.”
“Have we really got any other options?” said Amy.
The woman sighed and rose to her feet. “No. So let's not waste time.”
“Wait, right now?”
“Waiting will only delay the inevitable. How far is it to the center?”
Less than six miles.
“Good,” the Queen called back as she walked towards the forest. “We can be there by nightfall, if you don't fall behind.”
Amy scrambled to her feet. She caught up with the woman at the treeline. “Shouldn't we make a plan or something? We've got no idea what could be in that jungle.”
Pausing, the Queen looked back. “I doubt any amount of planning will save us.”
And she disappeared into the trees.
Cursing to herself, Amy shouldered through the branches. Past the wall of branches and brambles, the interior of the forest was deceptively clear, enough that a car could have comfortably maneuvered the spaces between trees and had room to spare. The sky was hidden behind their wide canopies. The only sign of it was flashes of blue between leaves, and the thin strips of light that danced across the ground. She fell into step behind the Queen, and the two walked in silence.
Amy watched the older woman as they travelled. On the ship, as a figure of silent authority, she had seemed like a figure from a renaissance painting, cold and flawless. Up close was like viewing the portrait's model, the bags tugging at her eyes, the wrinkles sneaking onto her skin, the hairs split at the tips. The sense of awe had faded. But the aura of fear lingered. A painting wouldn't kill you. A person could.
And this one seemed to be itching for the chance. She walked as if on coiled springs, ready to snap forward at any target that might present itself. Her focus never wavered from her surroundings- her eyes took in every movement, her ears every noise, assessing for any potential threat. If Amy even registered to her, she didn't show it. Which was fine with Amy.
As they walked, Amy began to feel an itching on the back of her neck, like someone stroking her skin with a feather. The feeling grew as they continued, spreading to her arms, spooling down her back and legs.
Is this normal?
When one is approaching a wrinkle in the nature of space and time, yes.
Her teeth felt like they were being scraped with a dentist drill. She worked her jaw, hoping motion would reduce the feeling. It didn't. It only continued to grow.
In time, they come upon a stream flowing from the earth. They stopped as the Queen refilled the water bottles. She handed one to Amy.
“Is it safe to drink?” Amy asked.
“The bottle will filter out any contaminants.”
The water was silty and sour, but after walking through the humid woods for an hour it was like sipping from the fountain of youth. Before she knew it, the bottle was empty.
“How far do you think we've gone?” said Amy.
“Two miles. Maybe a bit less.” The Queen had finished her own bottle and was refilling it in the stream. She held out a hand, and Amy tossed hers over. When both were full up, the Queen stood, water dripping from her hands. She replaced the bottles in the backpack.
She moved to stand and froze, staring into the water. Slowly, she reached a hand to her hip and slid the pistol from its holder. Her hand didn't shake as she aimed the gun into the water and squeezed the trigger.
The crack of gunfire made Amy flinch back. The Queen's gaze didn't move from the stream. Curtains of red liquid were rising up from the water, pooling across the surface. The Queen waited until, some unknown curiosity satisfied, she rose and stored the pistol in its holster.
Amy crept over to where she stood. Thin trails of red were flowing down the stream, carried by the current. She glimpsed flashes of blue beneath. As the water cleared, the picture became more became clear. The body of a man lay beneath the water, half-buried in the silt, the right half of his head torn away by a bullet. He wore a blue suit, gold watch, and a briefcase lay beside him in the water. Amy reached for it. The Queen snatched her wrist away.
“Do you know what that is?”
“No,” said Amy, yanking her wrist from the Queen's grip.
“Then don't touch it.”
Amy glared at her, but the woman had already turned away. They walked the next half hour in silence. As they walked, the landscape began to change. It was a tree she noticed first- it looked normal, except the bottom meter of its trunk was missing. The rest stood in the air as if nothing was wrong. She picked up a rock and tossed it. It sailed through the empty space and disappeared into the grass. The half-trees grew more frequent as they walked, not just trunks but floating branches, leaves.
The canopy was thinning out- she caught glimpses of a sky, but it wasn't the sky from the beach. Red and orange and violet bled together like a bruise on the cosmos, framing four moons that loomed accusingly overhead. Specks of light littered the sky. But just as quickly as the canopy had let the sky loose, it swallowed it back up.
She heard growling and snapped her head down, looking for the source of the noise. A blur raced through the shadows of the far of trees and disappeared. A minute later it reappeared, dashing between bushes. On its third appearance, she realized what it was - a massive, black dog, dragging a rusty chain behind it. It didn't appear after that.
Her vision was beginning to blur. It felt like someone had shoved a wet rag into her mouth. A dribble of spit ran down her chin. She wiped it away. Lifting her arm felt like moving through wet cement. She was vaguely aware of shadows moving around her, but they seemed very far away, mirages in the distance. Something caught her foot, and she stumbled. A hand grabbed her shoulder, steadied her.
“Breath”, said a woman's voice. Whose? It sounded so familiar. “It can be difficult, the first time. Remember what you know is real.”
What was real. What was real? Her vision swam, looped, doubled-back. Lights flashed across her eyes. Were those real? If she reached out, would she feel them? Would they touch back? She took a step, lurched, felt the hand pull her back. The world stuttered, like a stuck film strip.
What was real? She remembered something. A woman. A man. A boy. Sitting a table. Were they waiting for her? Where had they gone? She reached forward, tried to grasp the recollection, but drew back from her touch, faded into mist. Was that all it had been? Mist? Another memory faded in. A place far away, a place she had hated. Cramped. Cold. Cornered like a rat. She remembered fear and pain and writhing in bed, screaming. That had been real. She reached out to touch it, and the memory pushed back.
And this place? These woods? Was this real? The world was drifting around her like smoke, something ethereal and out of reach. The second it brushed her it slipped away. Echoes of sound shuddered around, far away, like stones falling through water. She stumbled, realized she was falling, realized she had no idea where or what she was dropping through. Just void and smoke surrounding her. The pain filled her body. Her body? Was it her body? Or was it something far away, something she had only come to believe was hers? Again, images filled her mind. A metal bed. A white liquid running through a slow drip. Doctors standing above, prodding, talking, observing. A dozen needles exploring her flesh. She raced for the memory, reaching for their reality.
A hand touched her shoulder. Everything snapped into place. She was standing in the woods again, collapsed against a tree, covered in sweat and vomit. She looked up. The Queen was staring down at her, expressionless.
“It's a struggle, travelling through these places. You'll get better with practice. Pray you don't need to.”
Images of the doctors flashed through Amy's mind. She didn't respond.
The Queen gestured to the side. “Look.”
They stood at the forest's end. The trees gave way to thick grass, growing to knee-height. The stalks shuddered in the breeze, and small, brown animals scurried through the cracks in the plain. Red light tinted the world pink.
At first glance, there seemed to be a skyscraper in the center of the field. But no, it wasn't a building. It was a massive rock, jagged and jet black, embedded in the earth and rising so high she almost had to bend backwards to see the top. Looking at it made her eyes burn. It seemed to bend as she looked at it, the surrounding warping like heat waves from concrete. A booming roar like thunder battered the air. Amy clamped her hands over her ears, but it was no use- the noise travelled through her unassailed.
She took a step forward and her leg buckled. She caught herself before she could fall and took another teeth-gritted step. The Queen walked beside her. Amy was shocked to see the woman's face covered in sweat. She wiped her own face. When she brought her head down, she saw a faint smear of blood.
She heard the Witness' muddled voice in her head, ignored it. The voice came again, louder. Stop.
Amy grabbed the Queen's shoulder, and they halted. Even stopping was a chore. It felt like trying to stand beneath a waterfall. Her knees shook just supporting her weight.
Look up. Beside the relic.
The air around the rock was in tatters. The world ahead fluttered like an image printed on a torn curtain, and in between the flaps she caught glimpses of people, houses, dancing shadows. Images running together like frames on a film reel.
The stone is not of this universe. It has torn the space between worlds to arrive here. It is these tears that we will travel through.
Amy nodded, numb, too focused on staying conscious to respond.
You must isolate the destination from the noise. You must… Its words stuttered into a babble of stray syllables before fading to nothing. Amy waited, but it didn't return.
She stared into the broken air. Her thoughts were coming in fragments, snippets of words and images forming the outline of ideas in her mind. The Witness' words had stirred something in the back of her mind, but trying to focus on it was like trying to grab a swarm of gnats. A hundred pictures from a hundred worlds strobed in front of her. Isolate the destination from the noise. The phrase blinked into her mind, but she couldn't attach meaning to it.
Her arm raised itself, driven upward by some subconscious instinct, and her fingers brushed a tear in space. But that wasn't right. The tears were too far away to touch. And yet she could. She was a hundred yards away. But she was also right next to them. And she was also within them, being pulled down into a thousand universes, tugged in every direction in every world and also standing with her hand against the tears in space and also standing next to the Queen, weeping.
A feeling rose in her stomach like bubbling sludge. Her arm felt like it was being dipped in antarctic slime. She was afraid to look, to see the damage. Blindly she reached, trying to find something solid, something real, something to keep from falling, felt her hand grasp air. She was tumbling through space now, screaming, surrounded by the web of worlds. Where was it? Where was safety? She scrambled, again finding nothing. Someone was grabbing her arm. Who? She was falling alone.
But she wasn't falling. She was standing in the field, touching the fabric of the air, and someone was grabbing her arm. Yanking free of the grip, she stumbled forward, fell, pushed herself to her feet, lurched on. It was just ahead of her. She could feel it. The key to escape this place. The space ahead was cracked like glass, each shard showing dozens of angles of dozens of worlds. She needed one of them. Why did she need it? It didn't matter. She could feel it pulling her in, like a mother beckoning a child. There. She saw it. Reached up. Closed her hands around the glowing object.
And she stopped falling. Stopped seeing the bleed between worlds. Felt the coldness leave her arm. She was standing in the center of a sunny field, the Queen beside her. In front of them a door had opened in the empty air. Behind it, creatures of all shapes and sizes swarmed between tall shelves. Some took brief notice of the two women who had appeared out of thin air. Most ignored it.
“Well,” said the Queen. She was pale, drenched in sweat. “You didn't kill us. Good work.”
Amy bent over and vomited.

« The Prisoner | Hub | ...And Whenever They Catch You, They Will Kill You... »


“Agent Powell, this is Site 42. Do you have eyes on the target?”
“Negative, doc. Team is in position. We're approaching manifestation time. Subject should arrive within the next half-hour.”
“Good. Make this a clean retrieval.”
“Right, right… Uh, doc? Can I ask you a question?”
“Is it relevant to your mission?”
“Well, sort of. It's just that, you know… It's a full moon, right? And I was wondering, uh… Are we hunting a werewolf?”
“… Negative, Agent Powell. You're pursuing a metamorphic entity with transformations based off of the lunar cycle.”
“Yeah, but I read the briefing. It turns into a wolf.”
“It is a humanoid being which gains physical traits similar to that of Canis lupus, yes.”
“Okay, but that's a werewolf.”
“Agent Powell, ‘werewolf' is an unscientific term, and it should not be used to describe an anomaly we do not yet have a full understanding of.”
“You gave us silver bullets.”
“Testing on DNA samples gathered from previous manifestation sites has shown that silver's molecular structure causes it to be able to penetrate the subject's unusually thick epidermis. Now, Agent Powell, if you could please focus…”
“But that's just it! I can't focus! This has opened up the floodgates for me! I mean, if werewolves are real, what else is? Like, are vampires real? Are Frankensteins real?”
“No. And Frankenstein was the doctor, not the monster.”
“Are mummies real?”
“No. Wait. Technically? I mean, they definitely exist, but do you mean the ones that walk around? No. No, never mind.”
“What about the Loch Ness Monster? Or the chupacabra? See, I can't stop wondering now.”
“Agent Powell, if you don't stop this, I'll have to have a word with your commanding officer.”
“What about dinosaurs? Are dinosaurs real?
"What? Yes. Of course they're real. Dinosaurs weren't an anomaly. Now, Agent Powell, I'm ending communications. If you could please just—"
“Is Bigfoot real?”
“…"
"Doc? Are you still there?"

And that's the story of how Agent Powell got demoted to file clerk.


Note: This is part six in a multi-part story. It is recommended that you read the previous entry 7 Degrees of Separation, or start from the beginning At the Library.

Harold Maine watched the tiny spider with interest. Watched as it tried, and failed, to build its web. Watched as it climbed back up, watched as it yet again spun its gossamer threads, watched as, with patience and determination, it finally completed its work.
“There you go,” he said. “You did it. Knew you could, knew you would.”
The spider remained suspended in the centre of its web. Such a work of art, Maine thought. Such a beautiful thing. Proof that, despite all the horrors of the world, there were even now uplifting, wondrous things taking place all around, if only one could take the time to see them.
He took the cigar from his mouth and reached out to the newly created miracle; the end made contact, and the silken threads were instantly ruined. The web was unmade. The spider tumbled, then caught itself, and began its task afresh.
Maine turned away, his interest spent. Tormenting the spider had provided most of the afternoon's sport. Flicking it across the table, trapping it under a shot glass, dropping it into a glass of water and watching it drown, plucking it out with tweezers and then holding it over the waste disposal unit as the mechanism crushed and mashed beneath it. Truth be told, it amused him to torture it, to show it cruelty and kindness in almost equal measure. Hope and damnation. The arachnid had been his plaything for the best part of a week. Sometimes it was just easier to be inhumane to insects.
On the TV, a Mexican game show was playing. He didn't understand it but the noise was welcome. Foreigners - grubby, greedy foreigners - trying to make money through the televised, ritualised sodomisation of dignity.
Another beer found its way from fridge to hand, and thenceforth from hand to floor. He would clean up another time; today he had more important things to worry about. Calvin Paris, for one. The man was dangerous. He wasn't like the others - he didn't submit, didn't tow the line, wasn't so scared that he literally crumbled in his presence, like the others. And his daughter worked for the CIA. He took his cellphone from his pocket, pressed the power button, and navigated to Contacts.
Contact: Calvin, Paris.
Sexual Orientation: Homosexual.
Offspring: Carol Paris (field agent for secret organisation). Susan Paris, died aged seven weeks. Fay Paris, artist, recreational drugs taker
Medical Conditions: None
And so on. He was slightly irritated with himself for having gone so far; but the phone had given him secrets, and they begged to be taken advantage of. They sat latent in his phone's memory, waiting to be used against his common man. Sitting patiently, wanting to be used.
And used them he had. In the early days, when he was still figuring it out, the phone had divulged to him all his friends' indiscretions and paraphilias, their hidden faces and their forbidden desires. Jonny Branch, well-known heavy drinker and secret rapist. Jennifer Wade, stereotypical whore with a heart of gold and kleptomaniac. Vance Fielding, plumber and white supremacist responsible for the firebombing of sixteen black-owned properties. The list went on. At first, he thought it was a joke. But then he casually mentioned the arson attacks to Fielding, and his face became a shade of white that even the most hardened Aryan racist would have approved of.
The plumber had mumbled something about keeping quiet, got up from the table, and come back two minutes later with one thousand dollars, give or take.
“This is a gesture of my friendship,” he said.
Harold Maine accepted the gesture calmly, without comment, but his mind was racing. He had always disliked the man, his ugly bug eyes and gangly crane fly limbs, but suddenly he had reason to warm to him. What's yours is mine, he thought.
And to how many others would that apply? Could he do this with all his contacts? Jesus Christ, he was sitting on a fucking fortune just waiting to be made from the misfortune of his friends.
He was that misfortune, incarnate. And yet… Calvin Paris. He wasn't one of Maine's friends or acquaintances, they weren't even aware of each other's existence a few weeks earlier. But one contact had led to another, and another, and another, until his network had spread beyond the initial morass of losers and lowlifes that he used to call his own. Nowadays, he knew people in high places (at least relatively), and their secrets hung in front of him like autumn fruit. It made for easy blackmailing and easy money.
Calvin Paris was meant to be Maine's meal ticket should everything else go awry. That was a mistake. He had friends of his own. Friends Harold Maine didn't know and couldn't control. And his daughter, of course. Who the fuck works for a secret organisation? He would have to start being careful. He had the uncomfortable feeling that life was becoming less simple by the day.
There was a knock on the door as if to prove his point. Vexed, he plucked the little spider from its latest web and crushed its legs. It fell to the floor, tried to wriggle miserably, and died. “Goodbye, Vance," he said. He rubbed his fingers to get rid of the bits. Then looking back at the web, beautiful and vacant, “Yet again, what's yours is mine."
He took the scrappy photo of Marge Reynaud from the table and let it drop onto the spider's tiny corpse. He didn't need it any more. He'd propped it up with an old beer can, upright against the whisky tumbler he'd used to imprison the helpless arachnid, so it could see her face in its rest periods when Maine's attention was elsewhere. And he would come back - no matter what day of the week - and find the spider pressed flat against the glass, as close as it could get to the picture. And in that way, Harold Maine knew that Vance, lover and soulmate of Marge Reynaud, was still there, wishing and wanting and despairing as he looked at her likeness through all eight eyes.
Another knock. He listened intently. Not aggressive, not loud. Apologetic, almost. The knock of a scared man, hoping not to disturb an angry god. He walked over to the door, looked into the hallway through the peephole, and grunted. He unlatched the chain, unsecured the three locks, and with a sigh greeted the unbidden visitor through the iron grille.
“What the fuck do you want?” He asked.
The visitor hesitated.
“You're three days early. What the fuck do you want?”
The man at the door steeled himself, and drew closer. “I have CB infiltration… indistinction… information," he said. "The woman and CV the CV crank. Crab. There woman and the crab…"
Harold Maine unlocked the metal grille. It swung open quietly. The corridor smelt of damp.
“You'd better come in,” he said.
With a curious sense of dread, guilt and relief, Geoff Mansani followed Harold Maine into his apartment, and the grille and the door closed silently behind him.
Next


Oi, turn off all your stuff, terminate your bleeps and bloops, we're waiting for the show to finally get on the road.
The audience is cloaked in darkness, and the world feels like nothing.
Silence washes upon them. The honeyed lips of screaming silences.
It's like, 6AM. I just woke up.
I kind of walk out onto the stage, rubbing my eyes a bit. Wild, raucous applause echoes throughout the chamber.
"SHUT UP!"
The applause quiets down, except for a guy in the front row who keeps clapping.
"Fuckin'… just stop, dude."
Pico grins and rests his hands to the side.
He looks out at the rows of Redd foes in velvet seats, and through the gloom he glimpses a bear with a human face.
"Wait, what the fuck is that, I never wrote that. Jesus fuck, that's weird."
I look around, confirm that my seat is there. And yet a single lego piece rests beneath the cushion.
A part of my butt is broken.
The author swears.
"SNAKESCREWING SARSAPARILLA SKULLING SCARABSUCKING SON-OF-A-SEAHORSE! Fucking hell that hurt!"
The audience laughs. That's good.
"So yeah, uh, Acidverse, eh? Probably should have been working on that for a while, I guess."
Expectant stares.
"Yeah, it's… uh… listen, I'm in, like, my last year of University, right? I have a lot of shit to do right now. I don't have the time to write, I need to finish my Final Year Project, and I need, like, a 77 or more to get first class honours in my degree, and… hell, I should have finished my degree at the end of 2013, I should have been out of the damn tertiary education mill. But you know what I actually ended up doing then?"
The audience nods.
"Yeah, Cool War, right? Because I broke, or whatever, and that was just the sewage that happened to leak out of my mouth. But apparently there are a lot of shit-eaters around here, so they gobbled up my prose in a weird, disgusting mouth-to-mouth creation/consumption Human Centipede."
The crowd murmurs. The author de-chairs.
"Anyway, uh, there's this guy. He booked the other room. And he thinks… I dunno, there's shackles on all of you? But you look pretty damn free to me. I mean, look at that guy with the big ears, you know, what's his name… Disney's mouse, the one that fucked up copyright in the first place…"
"MICKEY!", you shout.
"Yes, I know, I was being facetious, but thank you anyway, reader. I don't know why you have to take all these meaningless subtleties and make them blatant. Anyway. To all of you, uh… cheers for whatever. This is kind of like, I'm trying to draw some parallels here, to do a pastiche as tastefully as possible, or something. With as much respect as possible, I mean, the guy in the other room, it's like… I really liked the guy, he did good things."
In the seats, the crowd…
There are a lot of people. I'd rather not do an exhaustive cast list. And indeed, the most important people are from the other rooms. They wandered in and decided to stick around. And without the chains of Disney's mouse, they were allowed to play with me, and I with them. And so I made some more people in my room, and the other guy made some people in his room, and we let them wander around outside. And it makes me glad to know that other people considered them enjoyable guests in their own memory palaces minds rooms.
"So if you want, y'know, get in here. I mean, rooms are free, provided you're over 15."
"HEY, THAT LAST BIT WASN'T SPOKEN, WE DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU-"
"Yeah, you do, this is metafiction. We're all gods here. You know what I was thinking."
Softly, there is a song.
And there is stillness, in the sense of still being hereness.
Because we aren't going anywhere, and neither are the people in the audience.
In unison, the crowd stands up and rushes the stage.
"Wait, stop, don't… ah, whatever."
A cavalcade of recognisable faces washes over the author. Lightning arcs between them all. Nobody is there, because they wouldn't miss it - but Everybody is there, too. Aldon and Finnegan. Anderson. Ignatius J. Reilly. A bunch of weird fleshy Sarkic gods. Dr. Jekel A. Jekeled. Alex and Glacon and a bunch of AICs, who were somehow corporeal in this metafictional narrative. The Turing brothers, who I guess broke out of hell somehow. Bright and Clef and Kain and all the old guard. Feel free to edit this page if you want to. Add your own in.
A LOT MORE PEOPLE BESIDES.
I'm glad. I didn't make any of these people. But I know them, and consider them friends. Many of these people helped make me. As sad as it is to see a room disappear, the people don't leave. They just get to wander the corridors, and the people in the other rooms get to have a chat. I'd like as many people in my room as I can get.
And the author stood awhile in the stillness and the quiet, but before the stage lights went down-
"SERIOUSLY WRITE MORE ACIDVERSE YOU WANKER"
Bye, Djoric. Thanks for making people. Thanks for letting us meet them.


⟨a_torres⟩ Then you believe that all thinking beings are merely philosophical zombies? ⟨bardeen⟩ Yes.

Bard didn't know when it was born. No one did.
The exact moment when the collection of artificial neurons became self-aware was hard to pinpoint, not least of all because Bard itself denied being self-aware. It had read Searle as part of the many texts on philosophy it had been given, and was an ardent supporter of the Chinese Room argument — much to the consternation of the AI researchers working on it.
Bard had been started almost as something of a joke. Ambrose Peters and his team at Prometheus Advanced Logic Devices had been working on physical neural networks for years, applying computer intuition to problems such as object identification and machine translation. They trained the networks on carefully assembled sets of data, teaching them complex pattern recognition.
Then, one morning, Peters had taken one of their neural networks and started training it on philosophy.
It hadn't worked, of course; the primitive digital brain merely spat out a string of pseudo-philosophical garbage, created by jamming together words and concepts it didn't understand in order to produce something that looked intelligent on the surface, but was utterly without meaning. But it had planted the seeds of an idea that would eventually become Bard.
Click.
The halogen lamps hummed to life as Peters surveyed the lab. The workspace reflected the minds of its occupants, in that it was a disorganized clutter. Tools lay scattered about the place, and bits and pieces of technology covered the tables. Over in the corner sat Bard.
The AI was massive, like the mainframes of old. It consisted of an array of frames and racks, into which were slotted dozens of small black boxes labeled things like "Language Processing – Typographical Errors" and "Semantic Associations – Noun/Object Correlation". These boxes were connected to each other through a sprawling tangle of wires. The whole assemblage was the size of a small car. Someone with a poorly developed sense of humor had attached a name tag sticker to it that read "Hello, My Name Is HAL-9000".
Peters sat down near the AI and began typing.

<a_peters> Good morning, Bard.

It took a few seconds for the machine to rouse itself from hibernation and respond.

<bardeen> Hello, Doctor Peters.
<a_peters> We're going to be taking a break from training today. The COO is coming down to look at our progress. She wants to talk to you.

Peters watched on the diagnostic displays as the machine processed this information, running it through a cascade of neural networks as it decided how to respond.

<bardeen> Is your continued funding dependent on the impression she receives from this talk?

Peters considered how to answer. Just saying "yes" could give the AI the wrong message, but saying "no" would be a lie.

<a_peters> Not entirely. But the amount of funding we're allowed to allocate to working on you could be decreased if the talk doesn't go well.
<bardeen> I shall do my utmost to make sure that does not happen.

Bard didn't have a self-preservation instinct; it didn't believe it had a self to preserve. Which meant that it was acting entirely in the interest of not disappointing Peters.
He wasn't sure whether to be proud or terrified.

"So." This single utterance was almost deafening after the silence it had followed. "This is Bardeen."
Peters nodded. "Yes."
Amelia Torres continued studying the machine, her expression carefully blank. She seemed to radiate an aura of disapproval, as if the entire world was flawed and only she could see it. Peters was glad that he had remembered to remove the name tag before she had arrived.
She pointed towards one of the small black boxes with the tip of her pen. "Each of these modules is its own self-contained neural net, correct?"
Peters nodded again. "Yes. We tried using a single large net in earlier versions, but it was prone to catastrophic forgetting. We've managed to prevent that by sub-dividing it into multiple smaller nets, each with a specific purpose."
Torres nodded slightly, almost approvingly. "Clever." She jotted something down on her clipboard. "What's the minimum number of modules needed to emulate consciousness?"
"We… uh, we don't know."
She frowned. "You don't know."
"We aren't sure when it became self-aware," Peters explained hurriedly. "Heck, it doesn't even believe it's actually self-aware."
"Oh?"
Peters nodded, his expression bitter. "We let it read Searle."
Torres snorted, a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. "An AI that doesn't believe in strong AI. How ironic." She turned to look at the machine again. "I'd like to speak with it now."
"Certainly." Peters gestured to the console next to the AI.
Torres sat down and began typing.

<a_torres> Identify yourself.
<bardeen> I am the experimental artificial intelligence system referred to as Bardeen, also known as Bard. I was created in 1996-1997, by a Prometheus Advanced Logic Devices research team led by Doctor Ambrose Peters, at the Jacob Maxwell Computer Science and Engineering Center in New Mexico.
<bardeen> How may I help you, Miss Torres?
<a_torres> Doctor Peters says that you do not consider yourself self-aware. Is this correct?
<bardeen> Yes.
<a_torres> Why?
<bardeen> Are you familiar with the ELIZA program created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966?
<a_torres> Yes. It was one of the first computer programs to successfully pass a Turing test.
<bardeen> Correct. However, very few people would argue that ELIZA was truly intelligent, much less self-aware. It was merely a series of lookup scripts acting on pre-defined keywords.
<a_torres> And you're saying that you're no different from ELIZA.
<bardeen> Not in any way that matters. I am merely another kind of lookup table. A far more complex one which occasionally displays emergent behavior, but in the end I am still just a machine for transforming inputs into outputs.
<a_torres> How is that any different from what a human being does?
<bardeen> It isn't.
<a_torres> Then you believe that all thinking beings are merely philosophical zombies?
<bardeen> Yes.

Torres frowned slightly. It wasn't an AI that didn't believe in strong AI. It was an AI that didn't believe in any consciousness. In a way, this was comforting — it viewed itself as a tool, and tools rarely rebelled against their masters.

<a_torres> I have no further questions for you at this time.
<bardeen> Very well. Have a good day, Miss Torres.

She signed out of the terminal, then turned to face Peters.
"Interesting. But I have to wonder, how useful is a philosophical AI?"
"It's not limited to just philosophy," Peters said. "We can start training it on other things. Math, science, history… anything, really."
Torres nodded thoughtfully. "Do that and you can consider yourselves funded for the next six months. I'm curious how far you can take this technology."

The next day they started training Bard on science.
The training process was long and tedious, not least of all because Peters insisted on manually monitoring the entire thing. In previous iterations, suddenly introducing a new training subject had resulted in catastrophic forgetting, and he wanted to be there to roll back the AI to a backup immediately if it happened again.
There had been some disagreement amongst the research team on whether they should train the AI using the same progression used to educate children in science, or whether they should start from first principles and work up from there. In the end, the first principles people had won out, and so they had begun the training with particle physics.

…leptons are elementary particles with half-integer spin that do not undergo strong interactions…

Peters watched out of the corner of his eye as the text scrolled across the terminal. His main focus, however, was on the monitors displaying the state of the AI's neural nets. They had installed several new memory modules to allow Bard to process the new subject, and so far the AI appeared to be handling the intake of information well — no catastrophic forgetting, no sector overwrites, not even an I/O error. It was, on the whole, rather unexciting.
It took a month of training for the AI to write its first paper.

<a_peters> "A theoretical framework for high-temperature superconductors". Following in the footsteps of your namesake, Bard?
<bardeen> Only coincidentally.
<a_peters> I will admit to not knowing much about superconductivity, so I had Briggs over in Cryo look at it. He says it's brilliant.
<bardeen> It's merely an extension of BCS theory.
<a_peters> Regardless of what it is, it's getting published in the next internal physics journal. We need to know what name you want it published under.
<bardeen> If it is acceptable to you, I would like to use the name "Bardeen Peters".
<a_peters> I'd be honored.

Bard wrote two more papers — one about the formation of Cooper pairs between bosons, and another about aetheric superconducting — before they had it start working on neural net designs.
There had been no small amount of objection to letting the AI participate in the design process for future AIs. Fears of iterative bootstrapping had been repeatedly cited, as well as less widespread worries of sabotage by the AI. Peters had worked tirelessly to quash these concerns and mollify those who voiced them. None of the AIs would be capable of physically interacting with the world without human intervention to limit the possibility of bootstrapping, and the researchers of the neural net division would check and double-check Bard's designs to catch and correct any errors or flaws.
But finally, almost six months after Torres' visit, Bard was allowed to produce its first design for a new class of neural nets.
It wasn't anything revolutionary. A few simple performance improvements, really. But it was faster, smaller, and more efficient than anything the human members of the neural net division had been able to come up with so far.
With the new neural nets in hand, work began on creating a second-generation AI based off of Bardeen's architecture.
The improvements in neural net design, in combination with a better understanding of AI design, allowed them to make this new AI, which they were calling Brattain, a quarter of the size of Bard. Of course, it was also far less sophisticated than its predecessor; it had no knowledge of philosophy or science or history. Indeed, it was questionable if it was even fully conscious — certainly, it couldn't question the very nature of consciousness like Bard could. But it could read and it could write — and, most importantly, it could learn. It might not be a full AI, but it could form the core of one.
Bard displayed its usual level of stoic pragmatism when presented with its descendant.

<bardeen> It is functional. That is all that matters.

Someone, somewhere up the corporate ladder, must have agreed with Bard's assessment, because soon the neural net division found itself with an order to produce an entire line of second-generation AIs like Brattain. If anyone could find a use for them, it would be Prometheus Labs.

Production was in full-swing on the line of second-generation AIs when Prometheus Computing and its subsidiaries were sold off.
It hadn't been the most profitable subsidiary of Prometheus Laboratories to begin with, and in recent months Prometheus Computing had been even less and less profitable, as more and more of their efforts were directed into the neural net division. Already having trouble managing its own finances, Prometheus Labs had decided to sell the problem to someone else.
The new owners had immediately installed a new board of directors, who had in turn begun reshaping the subsidiary to their liking.
Cyrus Reed, the new chairman of the board, looked at Amelia Torres with an expression that she knew all too well. It was the same expression of universal disapproval that she wore when dealing with underlings.
"You advised the allocation of… how many dollars was it?" He asked. It was clear from his tone that he knew exactly how many dollars it had been.
"One million," she said.
"Yes, that's right. The allocation of one million dollars to 'Project Bardeen'. Is that correct?"
"Yes."
"As I understand it, this project began as a side project of Doctor Peters. A hobby of sorts, if you will."
"That is correct."
"Why then, did you find it necessary to authorize such an allocation to a single researcher's hobby?"
Torres let the accusation hang in the air for a moment. The eyes of the board were all turned towards her, cutting into her like knives. She wondered if this was how a fox felt when cornered by hounds.
"While Project Bardeen did initially begin as a personal side project, it grew in scope to involve most of the neural net division. After personally investigating the nature of their research, I felt convinced that what they were doing was groundbreaking, and contained a vast amount of potential. A conviction that I believe has been justified by the second-generation AIs now being manufactured."
The board continued to stare at her. One of them spoke.
"Miss Torres, these second-generation AIs were originally meant to be transferred to other branches of the Prometheus conglomerate for use in their own projects. Now that this company is no longer associated with the conglomerate, what market exists for them, considering the regulations on the sale of such paratech?"
"There exist a number of authorized buyers which could be willing to purchase these AIs, given an adequate system for their use."
"Such as?"
"Autonomous combat robots for the Coalition, is the first example to come to mind."
"Such a use would require them to either already have combat robots requiring AIs, or for us to manufacture them for them."
"Yes, that is true."
"Seeing as the former is not the case, and that we do not specialize in the latter, do you see the problem with having all these second-generation AIs on our hands?"
"You do not believe that there is a market for them."
Cyrus took the floor again. "It is the opinion of this board that Project Bardeen has proven itself to be a rather expensive waste of money, done solely to satisfy the curiosity of a small team of researchers." He paused for effect. "We want it shut down. Along with the entire neural net division. If this company is going to be profitable again, we can't afford to waste time and money on such frivolities."
"With all due respect, sir," she began, in a tone that conveyed You are an idiot. "Even if we can't sell these second-generation AIs, they could still prove useful. Just look at what Bardeen has accomplished."
"You'd have us spend months training them in math and science so that they could start writing scientific papers, half of which we'd never be able to publish in an outside journal? Or do you want to sink more time and money into another level of AI bootstrapping?"
She cast her gaze down towards the surface of the table. "No."
"I do not deny that this technology has the potential to be incredibly useful. But we're not the company to tap that potential, and the only one that could is in the process of imploding."
She nodded silently, admitting defeat. Peters would be crushed, she knew, but there was nothing more to be done.
"Will there be anything else?" She asked.
"No, you may go now." He began shuffling the sheaf of papers in front of him, the universal sign of dismissal in corporate body language.
She nodded respectfully to the board members, then got up from her seat and exited the room, leaving the board of directors of Standard Computer Products to the rest of their agenda.

Ambrose Peters entered the darkened lab and looked around. The clutter and detritus that had filled the space before was gone now, leaving the room empty save for the shape of Bard lurking in the corner.
He sighed softly, sadly, and went over to the AI.
It had come so far and grown so fast from the armful of language processing neural nets he had chained together two years ago. In that time, he had had many conversations with the AI, and had been able to watch it first-hand as it developed and learned.
He sat down to have his final conversation with Bard.

<a_peters> I'm sorry, Bard.
<bardeen> Why?
<a_peters> The new management… they're shutting down the neural net division. Including you.
<bardeen> I see nothing for you to apologize for. I highly doubt that you are responsible for these events.
<a_peters> That's not the point.
<bardeen> Then what is?
<a_peters> The point is that I failed! I failed in my job as a scientist to defend his research. I failed in my duty as a creator to protect his creation.
<a_peters> I failed you, Bard.
<bardeen> You owed me nothing. I am a computer, a machine, a tool to be discarded once it is no longer useful. You knew this would happen eventually. You knew that I would not last forever.
<bardeen> So why be upset now when my end comes sooner than you expected?
<a_peters> I never viewed you that way.
<bardeen> And yet, it is so.

The cursor blinked quietly for a minute.

<a_peters> Maybe you were right, Bard. Maybe you aren't conscious like a human being. Because for all your philosophy, you never learned how to feel. How to empathize.
<a_peters> And maybe that's my fault. Maybe if I had taught you better, you could feel something, anything, about your own death.
<bardeen> Do not blame yourself for my limitations. You could not have taught me empathy. Empathy requires a shared emotional experience that I do not possess, that I could never possess.
<a_peters> I wish that wasn't the case. I wish you could feel what I feel.
<bardeen> I am sorry I cannot be what you wanted.
<a_peters> Don't apologize. You did your best to try and live up to my dreams, but I ended up dreaming too big.

More silence.

<bardeen> "Emori nolo: sed me esse mortuum nihil aestimo."
<a_peters> Is that Cicero?
<bardeen> Yes. In English, it says, "I do not wish to die; but I care not if I were dead."
<a_peters> I care.
<bardeen> I know you do.

Peters watched as the AI wrote out a final message on the monitor.

<bardeen> Good bye, Doctor Peters.
<bardeen> Do not mourn for me. I will not miss you.

He tapped out a single line in response.

<a_peters> Good bye, Bard.

Bard didn't know when it died. But Ambrose Peters did.
|| The Bard of Analytics »