"State your name for the record, and we can begin."
"Really, Alice?" The man on the other side of the interview table shook his head. "You gotta be so formal?"
"We're already skating on thin ice, I'd rather not risk any further ire from the higher-ups."
The man sighed. "Agent Robert Tofflemire, Mobile Task Force Sigma-10, the Sloth's Arm. This statement is made regarding the events which occurred throughout Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin on Thanksgiving Day, 2018."
"Right. Where were you when this all started?"

"Waiting for the turkey to be accessible." Dr. Thomas Bailey played with the wrapper of an energy bar. "The Department of Gastronomy can put out a hell of a buffet spread, but there's not much room to actually… spread it in Sublevel 6."
"You're not usually in this neck of the woods," Allison observed. "Antarctica get a bit boring?"
"Oh, no, never. It's just that— well, Trev and I wanted to be here for when Tristan finally popped the question to Claire."
"You mean Dr. Hennessy."
"Yeah." Thomas scratched the back of his head. "Idiot was planning to put the ring in the turkey. Anyway, it was taking the line over fifteen minutes to let us get the main course, I figured I'd go ahead and look at the desserts first. Spoil my appetite a little."
"What first drew your attention?"

"The apple crisp." Montgomery Reynolds admitted. "The crop of Granny Smith hadn't come in this year, and gastronomy had tried some bizarre cooking process to try to make golden delicious apples taste like proper baking apples."
"Did it work?" Allison frowned. "Didn't try it myself. Had a weird vibe about it."
"Almost. Not crunchy enough for actual crisp. More apple mush." Reynolds cleared his throat. "Katherine— Dr. Sinclair— got some pumpkin pie instead. Can't stand the taste of it myself."
Allison resisted the urge to make a comment about him being a pastry philistine. "Anyway, when did you first notice the anomalies surrounding the apple crisp?"

"Hard to say." Cassandra Pike picked at her teeth. "Claude and I were already in a bit of a bad mood. Our car had broken down on the way to the site, and we had to walk all the way up the hill in the rain. So, we were soaked by the time we got there, and 'mildly irritated' is his default mood."
"So, you were saying an argument wouldn't have been unusual at the time?" Alison leaned again the wall of the interview room. Her stomach growled.
Pike rubbed her face. "We're… improving, but at any given moment, we're about three bad sentences away from an argument. As much as movies would love you to believe, marriage doesn't make shit easier."
"I can imagine." Allison nodded. "Anyway, this argument, what was it over?"
"Well, you know that Pathfinder game he runs? He had said he'd wanted to do a session on Black Friday, but was backing out of it at the last minute, and wouldn't say why." She clenched her fist. "And this was right as we were digging into the apple crisp."
"Then what happened?"

"Monty is a man who likes his cider, you have to understand that." Katherine Sinclair adjusted the ice pack on her head. "Other than mead and this one IPA from Iowa, it's the only alcohol he actually likes."
"The cider served wasn't alcoholic, though." Allison flipped through previous interviews on her tablet. "Unless the apples somehow whammied that, too."
"Wouldn't surprise me. Anyway, I had decided to bring a book with me to read while we had dinner— some dumb James Rollins novel. Tom Clancy for Creationists, they all blend together after a while. Monty kept on telling me to put it down so we could talk but… I didn't feel like it, for some reason. I felt like I was pissed at him for nothing, and should have been ignoring him. I don't know why." She squeezed the ice. "I'm going to pre-empt your reaction here: I don't mean it in that sense. After a few glasses of cider, Monty decided to take out his wand and start fiddling with—" Sinclair inadvertently snickered. "God dammit. Why does thaumatology have to involve so much phallic imagery?"
Allison turned her head to hide a smirk. "Since when does he have a wand?"
"We went on vacation to Universal Orlando last Christmas. Went to Harry Potterland, decided to, aheh, modify the $80 wands we got from Ollivander's. Papework's all filled out!" Sinclair said that last part far too quickly. "Anyway, he decided it would be nice if he levitated over some more turkey for us. We're not supposed to use magic outside of the lab without a special writ, but by the time I was telling him this—"
"You had been beaned in the head by a hot ladle. Then what happened?"

"I rushed to help Sinclair." Gwen Liao had her hands folded on the table before her. "Thankfully, her injuries were minor, just some first-degree burns. I've seen worse from standing in a hot shower for too long. But then I just started laying into Reynolds, saying he was acting really irresponsible."
"Did he seem drunk to you?" Allison raised her eyebrow.
"I can't imagine why or how, but yes." The nurse nodded. "He seemed stunned for a moment, and clutched his head, as if he were disoriented and trying to get his bearings. And at that point… well, chaos kind of started ensuing."
"How so? In your own words."

Dr. Margaret Reese sucked in air through her teeth. "Well, for one thing, the Bailey Brothers started yelling at each other. That's… unusual. They get to see each other maybe once every two years, and they start arguing over… pretty much nothing, as far as I can tell."
"Conflict for conflict's sake." Alison tilted her head upwards, deep in thought. "That seems to be a common theme here."
"Yeah. It took me a bit to realize it, but then John— that is, Dr. West, put his hand on my fork and snatched it away from me. We both realized at the same time that there was something in the food. I tried telling people to stop eating, but…"
"That only made things worse."

"It's been a while since we've had a site-wide panic." Agent Seren Pryce adjusted her arm in the sling. "It started on Sublevel 6, and just kind of…. spread upwards. I think someone removed food from the site."
"And in the process, whatever was in the food spread to the rest of the site… and the rest of the town. How's the arm?"
"Sprained. Doc says I should stay away from firearms for a while, which… y'know, kind of sucks." Pryce grimaced as she took a sip of the water in front of her. "Hopefully it'll get healed by New Year's."
"Any idea who took the food from the site, then?"

"I didn't know it was anomalous!" Christopher Hastings, the so-called 'Action Botanist' of Site-87, protested to the allegations. "I just— I had family in town, and we were going to meet at a restaurant to have Thanksgiving dinner. I decided to take a bit of apple crisp for dessert."
"So it's definitely the apple crisp. Did you notice anything strange as you drove along?"
"Yeah." Hastings yawned. "Behind my car, I saw… weird, weird things happening. Like, remember a few years ago when that time-travelling redneck decided to try to rob a Dunkin' Donuts with a few dozen time-displaced copies of himself?"
"God, don't remind me. Delta-T wouldn't get out of our hair for months." Allison groaned. "But… you're saying you saw temporal anomalies?"
"Yeah. Same redneck, except this time, he was riding a dinosaur."
"What."
"I know, right? There aren't even any dinosaur fossils in Wisconsin. Don't know where the hell they came from." Hastings sighed and squinted, nursing a headache. "Then… well, then I crashed my car into a six-foot-tall man-eating turkey."
"How did you know it was man-eating?"
"Well." Hastings chewed his lip. "The fact that it was in the process of mauling a citizen was a pretty good clue."
"Any idea what was happening back at the site, at that point?"

"Well, for one thing, I had started turning into a tree. Again." Dr. Partridge slammed his left branch against the table before him. "I'm sick of being a goddamn cosmic punchline in this town! Just sick of it!"
Partridge's rant continued for several minutes. Allison let him blow it off- this was the third time in five years it had happened, and she genuinely felt for him. The man was more than a punchline— she had read about what he did in Guatemala. Saved dozens of lives. The Foundation Star he'd gotten in 2017 had been his second one.
"Sorry." Partridge held his head with his functional hand. "Sorry. Just. Frustrated by all of this, you know?"
"Surprised you didn't go for the pumpkin pie."
"Don't trust them anymore." Partridge shook his head, the wood of his neck creaking. "Not since poor Jeff Hubble got turned into a vampire by one."
"Right." Allison chewed the inside of her cheek. "God, that sounded like it was weird."
"It was." Partridge tapped his half-wooden fingers against the table. "Anyway, uh. I didn't turn into one immediately. I was talking to Quentin Harrison, head of gastronomy. He said that he found the skins of some of the apples used in the crisp, and they looked… well, wrong. He showed me some of his stock, and I saw a bunch of golden apples. The apple crisp was halfway in my mouth before he had opened the door to the fridge, and I swallowed it in surprise. Idiot."
"Well, at least it's only partial this time. Maybe you're building up a resistance to it."
"I'm actually thinking of getting a genetic test, at this point. I'm Greek on my dad's side, and I can't help but wonder if there's some dryad in me." Dr. Partridge sneezed. Apple seeds came from his nose. "…fuck, I really feel for King, now."
"Anything else interesting happen, that you're aware of?"

"You know how hard it is to build a dark matter reactor?" Johnathan West opened his hands, before clenching his fingers tight around each other. "We've been working on it for over twenty years. Marshall, Carter & Dark are already rolling it out in some places. The fact that a stoned-out-of-his-mind high-school science teacher was able to make one after eating a magic apple is…" He shook his head. "It's not a good look."
"I can't imagine." By this point, it was late, and everyone involved was tired, but Allison had the patience of a saint from spending over three years in the company of Robert Tofflemire. "Thankfully, Wisconsin hasn't legalized marijuana, so he'll probably get a pretty hefty fine."
"Didn't take you for someone who's anti-drug, Agent Carol." West raised his eyebrow.
"I'm not, but the last thing this town needs is a legal dispensery within 50 miles."
"Fair enough." West put his head in his hand. "I used to loathe Halloween. Now I hold contempt for all holidays. No wonder our festology department decided to run for the hills. Something like this happens every year."
"Could be worse. Remember the turkey golems?" Allison's stomach rumbled at the thought of turkey. She hadn't eaten much today. "I only have two interviews left— one with Ewell, one with that guy from the Union."
"Good luck." West snorted. "I don't know what the recreational morgue is, and I don't want to know. Man was white as a sheet when he got out of that building." West stood up. "I take it you're coming downtown after you're done here?"
"Yeah, gonna drive Bob and Ewell. Hopefully it'll have stopped raining by then."

An hour later, Allison Carol was sitting on main street, in the Cracker Barrel across the street from the Select 8 Cinema. The restaurant was closed to the public— Site-87 had reserved the entire thing as an emergency backup for Thanksgiving dinner. She picked at her turkey, looking out the window, expecting something to happen.
"What is it?" Robert frowned as he smothered his mashed potatoes in gravy.
"I don't know." She shook her head. "I just… get a weird vibe from that place, now. Ever since the Pit Sloth. Ever since…"
"I died?"
"Yeah." Allison looked down at her hands. "Still trying to figure out what my deal is. You can pull plot devices from your pocket. I know I can do something, but I don't know what. Union guy kept on calling me a Narrator." She poured herself a glass of cider from the pitcher on the table. She was at least confident that that wasn't anomalous.
"You have family from Missouri, don't you?" Robert asked.
"They're not from Amityville, if that's what you're asking. And they're only in my family by marriage." Allison looked out towards the cinema. "I'm just… expecting things to go all tits-up. Maybe I should get out of town for a while. Not that I'm sure the nexus would let me."
"I went up to Superior last week. Kirk…" He shook his head. It was always hard to talk about his friend, taken by the Old Man. "Kirk's sister was in town. I try to talk to her whenever I can."
"She Foundation?"
"Yeah." He poured himself another glass of cider. "Maybe we can pop up to the Black Garden after this? Get some actual drinks and not this kiddie cider?"
"Maybe." Allison's attention kept on getting drawn back to the cinema. She didn't know why. The movie posters looked the same as they always did. Fantastic Beasts, The Nun, The Grinch, Plague City, The Girl in the Spider's Web— "Wait." She frowned.
Before her eyes, the poster for The Nun shifted into one for a film called "An Exciting Day in Boring, Oregon." Allison rose from the table, drawing an odd look from Robert. He then looked out the window and saw it too.
Soon, all of the personnel in the Cracker Barrel were outside the movie theater. The posters had been there before, back right after the Pit Sloth. Just a picture and a title, no actors listed, no studio, nothing.
Now, there was a studio. Its logo was the image of a pair of golden apples, with a map of a globe imprinted over them, one hemisphere per apple. The name of the studio was "Discordant Orchard Pictures".
"Well." Allison swallowed. "That… can't be good."
Dr. Partridge blinked nervously. "Jesus Christ. This isn't a horror film anymore, is it?"
Allison clenched her hand.
"It's an anthology."

The story continues this October in
Black Autumn III: Discordant Anthology


The hum of the machinery and pipes around them was dull and constant. Malcolm's little sister curled up on the floor with a blanket. Small, silly looking green men covered it like polka-dots. The only light came from a cracked blue computer screen that gleamed in Malcolm's hands. Malcolm noted today's air quality was at 39% and cursed to himself. The patrols wouldn't be coming down this particular corridor for a few more hours. Running was going to be hard today, though.
His sister mewed in her sleep and rolled over. Malcolm stopped, raised his eyebrow, made sure she wasn't awake, and kept scrolling. Malcolm had been waiting for an opportunity like this since right after his sister was born. It was on the news then, too. A trade ship had landed. Supplies meant a lot, but the important part was it meant they had a way out of here if they played their cards right.
Malcolm tried to picture his mother's face then. They'd dreamed about it together. He looked down at his sister again. Maybe she'd looked like that? Short blond hair, like the both of them? An oval face that came down to a point at the chin? Large wide set eyes?
He tried to place it, but he couldn't conjure anything he recognized. Somewhere in the intervening years his mother had become a feeling of warmth and love. Which was weird, 'cause even when she was around she seemed annoyed that he existed half the time.
The machinery around him knocked hard as the morning cycle started. His sister snorted and sat up on the blanket. "Is it morning?" she said.
"Uh, yeah."
His sister stood up and smacked her lips. "There any water left?"
Malcolm rolled his eyes. "Yes." He tossed her a half filled plastic bottle.
Glenda drained what was left in a few gulps and put the lid back on the bottle. "Well, if you listened to the director, you'd know we're in a shortage."
"The guys at the top aren't having a shortage." Malcolm mumbled to no one in particular.
"Oh my god." Glen chucked the empty bottle at Malcolm. "Join the Serps already."
Malcolm laughed. "I can't, I have to keep you from joining the Empties."
Glen pointed her finger at Malcolm. "Stop right there! Do you have clearance to be in this area?"
Malcolm pointed a finger back. "Yeah, it's called being alive! I'm a free person!"
The two of them paused, looked at their finger guns, and laughed.
Glen started to gather up their only blanket and they went to go find breakfast.

The Crossroads was full of all kinds of people, lights, and sounds. Men and women hawked their wares from small booths along the brown sidewalk. Passers-by avoided the gold tinted street that split the area twice. From time to time a shining vehicle would roll through, almost too quick to see.
The flashing lights above them pulsed orange and green. Each of them displayed advertisements for various products that neither of them could afford. Every once in a while one of the bundles of rags lining the sidewalk shifted. A withered hand would extend and then retract as the siblings passed by.
Black clad guards patrolled the streets beneath reflective face-plates. Citizens gave the guards a wide berth, and the few people who walked near them got a light rap from a baton. Just a reflexive tap on the nearest body part before they both continued on their way.
Glenda was their point-man for this particular operation. Both of them avoided the Empty's batons with well practiced grace. One of the vendors, a large, barrel chested man with a long beard, was selling meats and fruits in small wrapped bundles. He caught Glenda's eye from across the way and perked up. He waved off the withered skeleton of a man who was currently staring at his wares.
The man wandered away, revealing a sign attached to the side of the stand that said "Little Liam's". Glenda flashed her smile at Liam and walked over. Malcolm kept a respectful distance as he stalked around the stand.
Glenda broke eye contact at the last second. "Hey."
Liam leveled his eyes. "Glen. Been a while."
"Yeah, sorry. Been busy with school."
The vendor snorted for a minute before stopping himself. "Sorry. School though? Really?"
"Yes," she said as her eyes widened.
Liam looked Glenda up and down with a practiced eye. "Seems like a waste, but ok."
"Well. You're used to selling meats."
Liam grabbed at his heart in faux outrage before settling back into leaning on the counter. "You buying?"
Glenda leaned onto the counter, getting face to face with the man. "Come on, Liam."
Liam's twinkling eyes went cold. "Not today. There's a shortage. You runners probably didn't get the news down in the tunnels."
Glenda put a hand on the side of Liam's face. "You don't have a little something for me for the day?"
Liam stood up straight and moved away from her. "Come back after I close and we'll see what we can do."
Glenda suppressed a snarl. Then she saw her brother moving away from the back of the stand and shrugged. "Sure hun. Same time as always?"
Liam nodded and grinned until one of the skeleton men bumped into the side of the wooden building and caught Liam's attention. Just to the left of where Liam looked was Malcolm, carrying several bags of food. Liam's eyes went wide, then he looked back into his stall and saw the back door was open. A few other gaunt figures were already helping themselves to part of his stock.
"Thieves!" he bellowed, pointing at both Glenda and Malcolm.
The two of them ran into the crowd as the faceless guards chased them.

They'd settled into a corridor near the spaceport, completely out of breath.
The underground tunnels that crisscrossed the station ran under the docking bays. Usually there was no one out here, docking ships being rare like they were. Today, though, the entire port was crawling with Empties and important looking people. Glen and Mal observed the quiet corner near their maintenance shaft from behind a ventilation grate.
The hangar was large enough to accommodate the massive ship that sat in it, and not much else. The ship was flat on the bottom and rounded on the top, with a series of windows along the sides. The thing was dull white with some lettering on the side that they couldn't quite make out from this angle. Small pods covered the underside. None of the hundreds of people between them and the boarding area were moving things off the ship.
The two siblings melted back into the shadows of the maintenance corridor. An Empty patrol passed as they made their way towards the core of the city again.
"This is the last one, right?" Malcolm whispered, unsure. They'd stopped to avoid another patrol. Glen smiled. Mal knew the tunnels and patrol routes like the back of his hand, but he wanted her to feel included.
She ignored the question. "We don't have enough time to map out the patrols in the hangar. They're all new."
"We won't have to. We'll grab some supplies after they get offloaded, sell them ourselves, and end up living beneath the Spire instead of the Crossroads."
"Big dreams."
Malcolm laughed. "You gotta dream big if you're gonna live big. You wanna keep running around down here like rats?"
Glenda pursed her lips, shook her head, and then said, "They weren't offloading any cargo. They've been here three days and they haven't unloaded anything."
Malcolm cocked his head to the side. It was information he'd already absorbed, but it still didn't make any sense, so he'd ignored it. It was a trade ship, they must've offloaded already. Or maybe they were waiting for something.
Malcolm broke his concentration and said, "I think we gotta talk to Bobbie. She'll know what to do."
The siblings backed into the shadows and continued towards the core of the city. Behind them, a small flying machine tracked their movements.

The air was thick and stifling this close to the core of the city, especially underground. The siblings burst out into the Warrens with only a little bit of fanfare. The Warrens were a massive underground complex, built into the underlying mechanical architecture of the city. It was one of the few places down here that didn't get regular patrols. Maybe ten or twenty thousand vagrants lived down here, in and around the moving machinery.
A pale and disheveled family passed by the narrow entrance corridor as the two of them came out. The father looked up, but the mother and two children didn't bother. Like everyone else making a life down here, their skin had a sickly green pallor. Without knowing how well they'd been fed, those kids could've been anywhere between 5 and 12 at that size. Either way, the family kept moving, holding to a well practiced habit of avoiding unnecessary trouble.
It was rare, actually, to see a whole family together like that. Kids with living parents were few and far between. Not to mention how many ended up in the Spire's containment cells. The sibling's father had been one of those. Stealing food like them, but not as fast, and not as smart. One day he never came back, and they had to fend for themselves. Their mother took it badly, and then when she got sick…
The two of them moved further into the Warrens, passing dozens of alcoves filled with people and purpose. Most of the people down here had lived their entire lives just beneath the gold streets of the Crossroads, just a few meters away from… well more pain and misery, actually. Being of both worlds themselves, the siblings knew that the people below always thought those above had it better.
Which gave Malcolm pause. Maybe the people living in the Spire were starving like they were. That line of thought stopped once they reached their destination. The First Temptation, a seedy bar at the center of the Warrens, glowed bright green and red in this otherwise dark place. The signs were likely scavenged from above, which meant that those inside had some means, at least.
The First Temptation was, so they'd been told, the first permanent building in the Warrens. The owner, Bobbie Johnson, built it for the Runners and Scavengers that had, before, made their homes in the far flung and forgotten parts of the undercity. Runners like Glen and Mal would never settle down, but having a place to stay from time to time was convenient. The Scavs, on the other hand, made this place a home. And the Empties, try though they might, couldn't get them out.
The rumor was that when it was first built, the Empties came down in full force to clean the undercity once and for all. None of them ever made it back. The bar stood as a monument of sorts to that fight, but no one still alive remembered it happening. There had to be some reason, though, that the empties only came here to chase specific fugitives.
Malcolm opened the door, under the glowing green and red sign depicting a snake wrapped around an apple. The two of them went inside.

Neither of the siblings recognized the song playing on the speakers. They did notice the click as the door behind them locked. The bar was furnished with a collection of metal chairs and tables carved from the undercity itself. A collection of small Christmas lights lined the ceiling in regular intervals, giving off a multicolored glow that illuminated the entire room. The tables were empty except one. Bobbie Johnson, the bar's owner, sat nursing a drink.
Bobbie Johnson was a dark skinned woman with braided hair, parted down the middle. Her eyes were piercing, with red irises flecked with gold. She glanced up at the siblings as they entered and made a sweeping motion with her hand at two empty chairs in front of her.
"Take a seat, children."
Mal and Glen knew better than to argue with Bobbie. The woman had an ethereal quality about her that unsettled them both. Her reputation was one of a dangerous and unpredictable enemy. They needed her to be their friend right now.
They both sat down. Glenda opened her mouth before Bobbie interrupted her. "He doesn't know, does he?"
"No," Glenda said, lowering her head.
Mal looked puzzled. "Don't know what?"
Bobbie smiled. "The Spire is being evacuated."
Mal's eyes went wide and he looked at Glenda. "What…?"
Glenda put a hand up. "They aren't offloading anything. And the patrols have been getting sloppier and sloppier over the last few days. They're undermanned. We stole food and they barely bothered to chase us."
Mal's shoulders slumped. "Why?"
Bobbie's eyes lit up. "Ahh, I can get that one. This place is dying. The supplies are overstretched, the air is dirty, and we lose more and more water every year. In ten years, everyone and everything here will be dead." She paused for a moment, considering the siblings. "You want to get out of here, right?"
Malcolm nodded first, followed by Glenda.
"The ship is a bad choice. The Foundation doesn't play around, and even if you managed to stowaway it wouldn't matter. In a best case scenario, you'd be prisoners, worst… they'd jettison you into space."
Glenda spoke up. "If we're going to die in ten years anyway, what's the harm in trying?"
Bobbie shook her head. "You two aren't going to die here. You're going to save the world." Bobbie paused and broke into a large smile. "But first, you're going to save others."
The siblings looked at Bobbie with a similar confused expression.
Malcolm broke the silence. "Look, all we need are weapons, and we'll fight our way onto the ship. If you send out the word, the rest of the Serps will try to get on board too. They can't stop all of us."
Bobbie smirked. "They can, and they will. Besides, great behemoths of metal with ancient engines are all well and good, but there are other ways."
Just then, a harsh rapping sounded on the door to the bar. The siblings jumped a bit in their seats. Bobbie stood up and pulled a gun from a holster under her arm. She handed it to Glenda and pointed behind the bar. "Go. There's a door back there that leads to a hallway. Keep running until you reach the end. You'll know when you're there."
The rapping on the door stopped. A loud thud followed. Someone was trying to break in the door.
The two siblings looked at each other and ran behind the bar.
Bobbie pulled two more guns from her hips and leveled them at the door as it began to cave inwards. Another thud and it smashed inward, hanging off the lower hinge as the other hinge flew across the floor. Bobbie opened fire immediately as the faceless guards and flying machines poured through.

Malcolm and Glenda were in the back room as they heard the gunfire begin. They ran. The hallway was dark with a faint gold glow at the end. They continued until they passed through and suddenly the oppressive darkness gave way to… blinding light.
Their eyes took time to adjust to the new environment. Their lungs, though, immediately noticed the difference. It was like breathing for the first time; like they'd been drowning all their lives and never noticed. And as their eyes adjusted to the landscape, they understood something important. This place was different from anything they'd ever seen before.
A vast green meadow stretched out before them in all directions. Hills spotted with clumps of trees broke up the flat plain on occasion. Brilliant flowers of all colors covered the ground. Malcolm looked up at the sky and saw nothing but blue at first, with a shining bright orb above them. Near the horizon, he spotted two moons: one a dark brown, and the other, about half as large, a pale gray.
A large flying creature of some kind passed overhead, casting a shadow on them as it went on its way. The siblings looked at each other with a mix of wonder and horror.
Then, a man's head appeared about 4 feet from the ground, out of a similar gold colored portal to the one they'd entered. It sized them up and grinned. "Come on. We've got work to do."
"Uh, what?" Malcolm sputtered.
The head was now accompanied by a disembodied hand that motioned them over. "I don't have all day. Bobbie said you'd have an MTF on your tail?"
Glenda, not for the last or first time that day, looked confused. "MTF?"
"The Empties. Look, I gotta close the ways with or without you. You coming to the Library or not?"
Glenda and Malcolm looked at each other and nodded. Then, they followed the floating head away from paradise.


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Anabasis The Beginning of All Things to End
Start here
Eat more of my SCPs. Eat them all.
Also please eat some of these

Anabasis Hub Probably the greatest story involving a pair of redheaded siblings whose infighting causes the end of the world
Manna Charitable Foundation 2000 The sequel to the above, collaborationed with Dr Reach
The Stuff Industry What happens when everyone around you at work is a complete idiot and so are you, but not only does no one get fired, but you actually turn a profit? I don't know, some stuff.
When MCF and Stuff happen A fun story of incompetence

What does a Foundation agent even do? Especially once they've been assigned to a contained object with nothing else needed other than protection? A certain skill set was preferable, but most of all the greatest desire was the mental conditioning needed to avoid panic; problem solve under heavy pressure; and either find a way out of harm or make a way out.
Other times they just had to suit up in air-tight hazardous suits and walk around in a raging blizzard for half an hour.
Aurianne Sharpe was yelling at her through the suit's radio. It was completely indecipherable and Locke wasn't even sure she was using the radio.
"Turn on your radio!" She yelled back at her.
Aurianne continued to yell, gesticulating wildly. Locke still couldn't hear so Aurianne ambled up to her and nearly smashed their helmets together to yell through the glass visors.
"I like the snow in South Florida. Let's pick out this spot and camp out!"
"Absolutely not. We need environmental conditions to be near-identical or else the ecosystems will die off."
She sighed and leaned back, looking up at the cloudy sky, "Who cares? We don't need palm trees and alligators here. Besides, they might have them someplace else."
Locke had to keep moving forward; the snow built up deceptively fast and seemed much denser than normal snow once it started to pack down around their boots. Aurianne had less trouble, being nearly a foot taller. They could barely see past several meters, but the ground sloped downward around them, indicating there wasn't a school around them and the ground level was much lower. Nothing could be heard over the harsh wind and there was no sense of anything around or underneath other than more ice and more snow.
Aurianne kept twisting the knobs on her scanners, balancing one over her wrist and the other in her hand. One was for ionizing radiation, the other for any potentially hazardous gases. Their suits were equipped with dosimeters as well, though they couldn't actually read them while wearing the suits. Locke drifted closer to her, reaching out to steady her arm before one of the scanners could tilt and fall off.
"I can't read anything, there's too much flying bullshit around." Aurianne complained and gave up, mashing one of the scanners against its slot on her belt until it slid in place.
"It doesn't matter; they'll read it when we get out." She looked up again. Nothing had changed. If there was anything out there the snowstorm was masking it. It didn't even matter; the climate was incompatible.
They made their way back to where they'd started, where a metal pole was leaning crookedly to one side, having loosened the densely packed snow it was speared through. They stood and waited in silence for several minutes, letting the storm cake them in snow. It wouldn't matter if they couldn't get out of the snow; if they missed their cue or Anabasis malfunctioned and left them stranded there, they'd be dead anyway.
The blinding light appeared, creating a polygonal shape around them. They squeezed their eyes shut and within a moment the snowstorm ended and the snow piled around their feet started to loosen. They were back in the basement of the school, Anabasis set on a metal rack like a film projector, facing them. Two of its handlers immediately started dousing it in warm water as it siphoned heat from the room around it and threatened to ice over from use.
Aurianne was already pulling off the helmet and the gloves and shuffling out of the pile of snow, "Is this our home?" She waved her hands out to them, "4-1-22-XA-1856-QQ-QA-AQA-KZ17."
Edgars nodded and gave a thumbs up, "Confirmed."
"It's got air. It's snowing really bad but no way of knowing if that's permanent or just the weather down here that time of year over there, up there, out there." Aurianne went on, stripping off the suit and straightening up her jumpsuit underneath, "Not radioactive, I think."
"Putting it on the list of hopefuls." Edgars muttered and typed in a laptop.
"Wait, no. We can't use that place. The climate is all wrong." Locke jumped in, "Aside from all the plant and animal life that'll die out, the city, or even the whole state isn't prepared. This is hot, wet swampland, and almost all the buildings have been built for hot, wet weather. People will freeze and buildings will freeze up."
"Doesn't matter. It's habitable." Edgars muttered again, not slowing down in his typing.
"Is that all that matters?"
"Yes." He didn't even look up at her, his face tensing every time she spoke.
She gnawed on her lower lip. She could already hear the words she wanted to spit out at him echoing in the basement around them. It would've been so easy to unload on him again, get into a shouting match that saw her getting written up again. Marlowe, for what ever reason, wanted to keep her, so instead of suspension or re-assignment now she'd just get write-ups and disciplinary actions scheduled for some date in the future that might never come. And in an instant that fire and emotion was gone. She knew Edgars was a transphobe; hated her for what she was and what she wasn't. No matter his professionalism, she knew just beneath the surface was a perpetual ugliness that tinged every encounter they had together. It was always the impetus for her to leap into action against him, raging and shouting and arguing.
But today she felt nothing. She wasn't tired or fed up or resigned. She just felt nothing.
"Okay." She murmured and shed the rest of her suit, heading for the steps with Aurianne going after her. The area they were testing in was specifically dug out from the original school basement by the Foundation, and partially closed off with thick walls and ceiling. The only way in or out was covered by a makeshift sanitary cordon where they'd be scanned, then disinfected in their jumpsuits. Then they'd take those off and get scanned again before being given their work clothes. For about six or seven minutes the guards by the door and the researchers roaming in and out of the basement would see them naked. Locke could easily imagine herself meeting everyone's glance, staring back at anyone who stared at her, perhaps in her peak moment of irrational rage grabbing at her genitals and holding them firmly for everyone to see.
Today she felt nothing. Even people who looked her way didn't seem to really look at her. She was just something momentarily in their line of sight, as they were just things in her line of sight. No one seemed to feel anything anymore.
The only person unaffected seemed to be Aurianne Sharpe, who fidgeted uncontrollably until they were let out and allowed to dress. They passed the little storage room where Anabasis had been found and went up the stairs to the office that had been set up out of a classroom and was now pouring out into the hall with people. Any pretense of Foundation operations hiding out in the midst of a middle school was gone. Anabasis-related documents were filed in boxes left out in the open. A student could have come by, grabbed a few pages, and slipped out into the courtyard and no one would've noticed. No one cared anymore.
"How long has it been with all this? It's been like two weeks and everyone's just given up. Don't they even know what we're doing down there? We're gonna save everyone." Aurianne remarked as they drifted out to the back courtyard.
"It's been a month."
"A whole month? Fuck no. Why has it felt so short?"
"I don't know." Locke muttered, focused only on walking in a straight line along the concrete path that bent to the left towards a basketball court.
"It's these people, with their faces. They're acting like we're all dead already. Why'd they even bother joining the Foundation if they weren't prepared to throw themselves into saving the world? It's insulting, and fucking stupid. We're rich, bitch, we can afford all the wackiest technologies or, or anomalous vacuum cleaners to wipe out an anomalous red plague thing. And even if we don't, we have Anabasis. We can evacuate the entire country to a whole new world without anyone needing to do anything."
Having gone a full month feeling listless and lethargic, Locke was shocked to feel a pang of anxiety strike as Aurianne talked. She glanced sidelong at her cautiously, "Have you been reading the test logs? I mean, in their entirety?"
She shrugged, but was starting to catch on to Locke's tension, "Everyone skips past the technical stuff at the beginning."
Locke grunted and thought back to her last contact with Rhiannon, if it had actually been her.

killo-meters, you said. Killo-meters, you believed. Am I wrong?

"Yeah, I'm not stupid, I know what you mean. The test ranges were tiny but that was chalked up to energy problems. Anabasis siphons heat from the air around it and if it gets too cold it shuts down. We just need to feed it fucktons of energy while it's drawing open its portal or whatever. It'll cause blackouts but we'd be saving humanity. The human race! Plus they're working on getting us a direct feed from Turkey Point. That's a nuclear power plant down in Homestead."
"I know what Turkey Point is!" Locke bit out with a sudden burst of anger. She began to shake, and her throat tightened. She stopped walking and grabbed Aurianne, "Do you seriously believe that's all it will take? Just more heat, more energy? The fucking car isn't starting, just twist the key harder and put more gas in?"
Aurianne looked down at her, startled by Locke's concern, not seeming to share in it, "Why would the Foundation lie to its own people?"
Locke let go of her and put her hands to her face, taking deep breaths and trying not to break down and cry in frustration.

test 1 encompassed a third of the room. test 2 encompassed the whole room. I kno Killy-meeders ain't as big as imperial Miles, but that's not even fuckin close, do u see?

"Priss… Locke…" Aurianne came up beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, gently nudging her, "It's the Foundation. Six months ago, Anabasis was just another object. Just another number in a database of thousands. They gave us some money and some people to play with it a bit. Things have changed. They're going to go all out on this thing. They've got researchers and doctors a whole lot smarter than Marlowe working on it now. The Foundation knows what to do. Plus, Anabasis is actually starting up."
Locke felt that her closest friend deserved the truth, but she just couldn't mount the same level of energy and fire she used to have to pound the truth into her head. No one else cared about the truth, so why should she? It would cost less, emotionally and psychologically, to say nothing, and continue the usual routine.
She sighed and leaned her head back, watching the empty, unmoving sky. "Sure. It's not like I could do any better on my own."

The last of Fats' leads ended when the results finally came back for the wad of dried out gore she'd pried off the floor of that house.
"It's not human and the hair was cut, so there's no follicles to test."
She sighed and dropped into her seat, looking over the brief report one more time. The meat had been from a pig, left to rot and melt into an unrecognizeable wad that someone had stuck some locks of orange hair into. It felt deliberate, to throw off someone like her. There was no way it would fool her but it took time to analyze the sample, especially when the labs were backlogged and took what should've been at most a few days worth of work and made it last over a month. It wasted time. And that might've been all they needed, whoever "they" were. The "biggest ongoing case in Dade County". She felt like a sucker for having believed it.
She pulled herself up to her feet and left the building, making her way to the Metro Rail station. The security footage from that night had amounted to nothing; whoever had run up to the metro station hadn't actually gone up to the platform and gotten on a train.
Trudging up the steps to the platform she realized she hadn't actually used the Metro Rail itself. She drove to the Brickell area, parked, then took the Metro Mover, a much smaller train route that serviced the Downtown and Brickell area. It went around and through some of the buildings at a reasonable speed, and it was free. The Metro Rail was elevated on much higher tracks, and sped down its tracks like a real train, screeching as it came to a stop and hissing loudly when the doors opened.
The voices from the speaker system were different, too. The Metro Mover was newer and had a stilted, digitized voice announcing the arrivals and departures. A text-to-speech program of a feminine voice that could just barely pass for human. The Metro Rail had recorded voices.
"The Northbound train is approaching the station. Stand back from the platform edge."
A lively woman's voice announced, droning on brief safety measures. She glanced around and caught sight of a map of the rail service. She had to look it over again before realizing someone had made a serious mistake.
Northbound. Bound for north. Going north.
"The Southbound train is approaching the station. Stand back from the platform edge."
A much deeper, masculine voice announced for the Southbound train in an uncomfortable monotonous tone.
She looked back and forth at the tracks on either side of the train platform. She'd read the investigative report enough time to see the words in her head.

At 12:10 a.m., she is picked up by security cameras at the Vizcaya metrorail station emerging from a northbound train. Note there is no metrorail stop between Vizcaya and Key Biscayne, and the metrorail does not service the Key Biscayne area.

Therefore it is believed Rhiannon Locke departed from the Rickenbacker Causeway north, either to Brickell or the Downtown area.

She got up and went over to the other row of seats where the metro map was printed on a half wall between them. They were at the Government Center station in Downtown. South from there and across the river was Brickell. Wending to the west and further south was Vizcaya.
If Rhiannon Locke had taken the southbound train after Key Biscayne, and gotten off at Vizcaya, she would've gotten on at Brickell or Downtown. But the report said she'd gotten off the northbound train.
She sighed in frustration and scooped up her bag, heading down the escalator and back to the office.
* * *
Back in her seat, sweaty again from the walk, she pulled up a map of Miami and looked over the video clip from the previous August showing Rhiannon Locke getting off the Metro Rail at Vizcaya. The platform was symmetrical and the camera was facing inward, making it impossible for her to tell which train route was which. She realized then the video had sound, but the sound picked up was very low, almost muted.

call don't fall

She leaned in close to her speakers and turned them up, little by little, angling the computer screen for her to make out the familiar shapes following the same loop.
The noise of the wind, the city, and approaching trains was surprisingly loud. She thought about the speakers at Government Center station. They were all over the platform, clearly audible when the voices came on. Vizcaya station didn't look anywhere near as big. Was it possible it had only one, or maybe no speakers?
She was contemplating going back to the Vizcaya station for more footage and was interrupted by her answer.
A loud, tinny, lively woman's voice was caught by the camera. She sat back to watch and saw the familiar loop play out, Rhiannon Locke twirling out of the train, stumbling and falling onto a seat, then skipping towards the escalators down.
The lively woman's voice played only for the Northbound train. Fats looked over the map of Miami again, pulling back and scrolling west to follow the lines on the map, looking for the next skull-like train icon.
Almost two miles away she found it. Coconut Grove. She bunched up her fingers and placed them against the legend marking out every 2000 feet. She pressed them again on the screen, then moved them again, and again. Six miles from the part of the Rickenbacker Causeway the firefight had happened to Coconut Grove station. The Vizcaya station was almost directly between the Coconut Grove station and the Rickenbacker Causeway. If she meant to go straight home after Key Biscayne she wouldn't have even needed to use the Metro Rail.
She sat back in her seat and grunted softly to herself in glee. Suddenly she had a whole new avenue to explore to pick up Rhiannon Locke's trail. She got up again and left to pay a visit to Coconut Grove.

Coconut Grove was intimidating for her, having only been around the blight of Overtown and the claustrophobia of Brickell in the early stages of gentrification. Coconut Grove was utterly massive by comparison. The map she looked at on the Metro train showed it was some five times larger than Brickell, spreading between the coast and South Dixie Highway. It was a largely white, upper-class neighborhood, green everywhere. It intimidated her; she stayed on the train as it swept past the Coconut Grove stop and continued on further south.
She was overwhelmed by the task ahead, she realized. The Metro ran south for five more stops, but the distance between each stop was huge. The more she studied the map and compared with what she saw out the windows, the more she realized just how much city spread in every direction. There were no sparsely populated stops or mid-range points where there was nothing but trees or industry for a mile in each direction; every stop opened up into another densely packed piece of city. Nowhere near as packed as Downtown or Brickell but all too much for her alone to canvass for any leads on someone who might've drifted by for a few minutes one night seven months ago.
She got off at the last stop and waited for the Northbound train to begin its route, only to see the train she'd just gotten off slither carefully around a narrow bend and present itself to her on the other side of the station. Quickly it started to fill again as she rode it back up the line.
She tried again the next day, starting from the Downtown station. An old man stood uncomfortably close to her in her seat, facing away and hanging on to the overhead railing, sniffling and clearing his throat every other second, it seemed. She finally got up and scooted around him when she noticed he had a brightly colored bunch of papers clasped in his free hand. She recognized the coloring and the font. It was the propaganda papers put up by the cult. Rhiannon's cult.
"Excuse me." She muttered to him. He barely looked her way, towering over her in both height and girth and sniffling harder.
"Perdón," She tried again in Spanish, "Que es eso?" She indicated the paper, "Tu sabes algo del 'Anabasis', señor?"
"Eh?" He blurted out with astonishing volume, "Que quieres?"
"Sabes…. Sabes algo de qualquier persona puso eso papel?" She was trembling now, and felt her Spanish getting flimsier.
"No puede oír. Que esta diciendo?"
A man nearby rose up and approached them, "Papa, cálmese. Ella quiere saber de esto." He took the paper from the old man's hand with an almost casual roughness, holding it to his face like he was blind.
The old man got flustered and started ranting too rapidly for Fats to pick up. Her own Spanish had embarassingly atrophied to elementary levels. The old man started to walk away, leaving her with the other man. He was young like her, taller, hair combed over and a thick beard and mustache. He was dressed like a fascist, the only way she could explain the style, yet nothing about him screamed "WestCiv" aside from the hair.
"He couldn't understand your accent. Where are you from, originally?"
She furrowed her brow, eyes darting between him and the departing older man, "Accent? I didn't think I had an accent."
"It's definitely not the mealy-mouthed mess you hear from the lower class Cubans around here. Where are you from?"
She heard a sickly sweet menace in his tone. Combined with the casual racism, she treaded lightly, "I was born New York, but my parents were from Spain. Valencia, originally."
He nodded and smiled, "That must be it. Valencian accent. Crisp, clean, pure Spanish. Nothing you'd hear in the streets of Miami," He picked up right away on her discomfort, "Are you afraid of me?"
"Should I be?"
He smiled again, leaning against the metal bar and gazing down at her and saying nothing as the Metro speakers announced the next stop, Vizcaya.
"You're a WestCivvie." She said out loud to fill the awkward silence.
"So are you, aren't you? Spain is part of the West. A bastion of Western Civilization, too. The art, the locales, the churches… Something of a Muslim problem but what can you expect being that close to the Maghreb?"
"I've never been to Spain."
He shrugged, "Doesn't matter. It's in your blood, even if it's not exactly in your features." He smiled again, tilting his head slightly as he looked over her shamelessly, "I'd have put you for Greek, myself. Maybe southern Italian. But I guess, with the right makeup and lighting, you could be from anywhere in Europe."
Thoroughly repulsed, she gripped the opposing metal bar and moved away from him, following the path of the older man who had left at the Vizcaya stop.
"What do you want to know about Anabasis?" The man said sharply to draw her attention.
She kept moving, "Nothing at all."
"How about Rhiannon Locke?"
She glanced over her shoulder at him, eyebrows drawn close and her expression firm, "Who?"
"Listen… I'm going to be honest with you, Detective Cortes. Is it Detective or Agent, or Officer?"
Her face remained impassive while every nerve and muscle in her body screamed for her to run away.
"I've been conducting a bit of a parallel investigation. Not exactly following you, more so going along with you. See, I'm interested in finding Rhiannon Locke, too. Mercifully, I happen to have started a bit further south than you. Maybe we can compare notes? I'm sure I could fill a whole lot of empty holes in your case file."
She sniffed and turned to face him, raising a hand to her belt even though she didn't have a gun, "Look, I don't need to put up with your whatever you're even trying to do here. If you've got information on Rhiannon Locke, either give it to me or leave me alone."
A loud cracking sound erupted near the front of the Metro cart as she was talking. The train's brakes squeaked noisily and within seconds it began to tilt dangerously. A dull boom followed and suddenly the man slid off from the metal bar and slammed into Fats, knocking the wind out of her. Then he continued further down until he caught himself on the overhead railing. The train was falling, being dragged down by the other cars chained in front and behind it. Something had happened to the elevated track and they were lurching downward as the connection to the car in front was severed, leaving their car hanging off the track. She gripped the metal bar firmly and held her breath as their train car dragged the one behind it down, the brakes shrieking relentlessly, until the face of the car was pressing into the ground and starting to creak.
The WestCiv man dropped down quickly, forced open the doors and made a run for it. She couldn't follow after him as the train began to lean over to one side, crushing the doors he'd just escaped through into the dirt, the train cars slowly sliding off the track and piling down on the ground like a massive coiling pile of shit. She kept a vice grip on the metal bar and pulled herself in close as the windows started to crack apart, spitting glass as the momentum of the rear train cars pushed hers along the dirt until it was resting on its side and no longer moving. She cautiously let herself down and stood up on the wall.
The metal squealing and shrieking wasn't as loud now and she could hear people in the other cars screaming and shouting. Some had already managed to escape. She hoisted herself up onto the metal bar to reach the opened window and peer outside, scratching her exposed wrists on the broken glass. More cracking sounds like the one before the boom, then scattered pops. She realized they were gunshots. She peered out from the window and saw people moving to the train cars, helping people out. More gunshots went off further away. Another boom further down the Metro line. She pulled herself out from the window and crawled over to the roof of the train, sliding down to the grass below. Pain jolted through her arms as she braced herself on impact, feeling her wrists either sprained or broken. Despite that, she ran.

The bacteria latched on to some people. Some People had other bacteria in them. The Other Bacteria was different from the bacteria in most people. The Other Bacteria welcomed the bacteria in, and the bacteria felt comfortable. Then the Other Bacteria began to panic. A fight broke out inside the Some People, as the Red and the Other Bacteria began to strike one another in a frenzy.
The Red didn't want to fight. The Other Bacteria wanted to fight. The Other Bacteria lost the fight and the Red won. The Red soon found themselves alone and trapped inside the Some People. They ate the Other Bacteria and began to take their place. The Red set to work doing the work the Other Bacteria had done all their lives. Sometimes they did the work better than the Other Bacteria. Sometimes they didn't. All the while, they carried out their work with a guilt and anxiety uncharacteristic of normal people bacteria. We don't belong here, said the Red.

This world was habitable but hot. Locke's hazard suit protected her from it but just looking at the heat shimmer made her feel weathered and weary. They emerged from the school basement and found that the top half of the building had been blown away with no trace of debris save for sand and dust. The only trace of wall higher than their knees was the double-door frame at the front of the building with no doors. The vegetation outside was dried out, but tropical. What ever this blaze of heat was, it didn't belong here.
"Is it nuclear?" Aurianne asked, not expecting an answer. Their suits would detect elevated levels of radiation for them. They didn't detect it here.
The heat was overpowering. She thought she could hear a flat, wailing klaxon in the distance, like several thousand wooden horns all blasting the same discordant note endlessly in the distance. It was faint enough that she couldn't tell if it was real or in her head.
"You hear that?" She pointed outward, not knowing exactly where she meant to point.
"No? I mean, yes? What am I supposed to be hearing, the wind?"
"The wind?"
Aurianne nodded in her suit and pointed out to the plants lilting in the heat near where the back exit of the school would've been, leading out into what would be the courtyard in their own universe. There was still a concrete path leading out into a field but no sign of any ball courts or fences in the distance. The trees at the end of the block were much taller, but skinnier. She could see signs of a city in the distance behind them, but much further away than Downtown Miami would've been.
Locke pursed her lips and looked again at the trees, then at the floor around her caked in a thin layer of sandy dust.
"There is no wind." She uttered, tracing a circle in the dust with her foot.
"Then… I don't know. A car horn? Crashed in the distance, someone dead over the wheel from the nuke?"
Locke sighed and stepped out into the courtyard, looking off into the distance. There were roads, but no cars. The houses were different than in their universe, but were intact. Nothing looked devastated or abandoned. There were no signs of life and no sound except the distant klaxon.
"I think there might be people here. The air's breathable, at least. I'll take a sample to see if it's clean." Aurianne chirped as she came up beside Locke.
Locke sighed and clenched her jaw. She felt a burst of anger manifesting in a childish impulse to throw a fit. She was just tired of this. There wasn't going to be any perfect alternate world for them to flee to. Even if they found a picturesque version of Miami rich in life, land, and water, she could easily imagine them finding out too late that the water was laced with some unknowable, unforeseeable substance that would turn them all blind and deaf, or aliens would just happen to be a year away from invading, or the Earth wouldn't move and they'd all slowly burn to death under perpetual daylight.
"Whatever, this is… this is fucked. I'm not even going to bother." Locke sighed and stepped back over to the stairwell.
"Not going to bother with what?"
"With anything, with… Walking around, getting kidnapped by the natives, running soil tests, water tests, air tests, trying to figure out what in the fuck that noise is and whether it's coming from a mile away or eighty thousand miles away. I'm tired of…" She stopped short of the stairwell and slumped against the handrail, "I'm just tired."
Aurianne didn't say anything after that. They silently agreed to go back into the basement and wait until they were brought back. The process of travelling between different universes had always been a scientific joy for Aurianne, always something wild and weird waiting just above or below them in time and space or however the process worked. Somewhere around the last three expeditions she began to feel the strain of it. Now with Locke giving voice to it she too simply lost it. They went through the motions of confirming they were in the right universe, decontaminating their suits and their bodies, filling out debriefing forms and jotting down notes before their next two or three debriefings on just that one thirty minute venture.
Locke sat back on the bench in the quarantined room with Aurianne. Aurianne was gazing blankly into space. Then she glanced over at Locke and stared for a long time. Locke furrowed her brow and looked back at her.
"You're bleeding." Aurianne said after a long moment, staring down at Locke's genitals.
Locke looked down at herself and sprang up to her feet. Her whole body felt hot. She was bleeding. She felt blood run from her nose the moment she got up. Moving felt good. She started to move towards the door. It hurt to stand still. The more she stood still, the hotter she got, to the point of burning pain.
"Breach!" Someone on the outside shouted. "Breach!" People started shouting and rushing towards the quarantine. Locke smiled and tasted blood. Then the lights went out and people started to scream.

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Anabasis Hub


It was raining heavily by the time Langdon Pisk was done with his work. Thick sheets of the stuff were thundering on the windows, and the rhythmic thud of droplets in the bucket by his desk were an ever-present reminder of the faculty's strained budget. He stared at the screen in front of him until a roof-tile clattered to the ground outside, jerking him from his reverie. With bleary eyes he gathered his papers into a pile, shoved them halfheartedly into his imitation-leather satchel, and made his way down the stairwell, straining to avoid any and all human interaction on the way.
He was, ostensibly, a lecturer, though it seemed less and less like it by the day; to say the rest of the mathematics department had something against him supposed that they even recognised his existence. The friendliness that they displayed to students and parents — hell, even to other members of staff — had dwindled from the moment he stepped through the double doors on his first day at work. What was left in its place was a stillness, an icy nonchalance that bordered on contempt. Clipped tones and sentence fragments abounded; people renowned for their outgoing demeanour and pleasant conversation would go out of their way to make him feel…
Unwelcome wasn't the word. Rather, Langdon felt certain of his place at the University, as certain as he'd ever felt about anything in his life. But over the past several months, he'd come to realise that that place was far, far beneath his colleagues, at the bottom of a fathomless pit the sides of which he couldn't hope to scale.
He'd never been to a funeral, but the thud of his office door never failed to remind him of a casket closing shut. It was a very final sort of noise.
So down the stairs he went: past the better-insulated and more thoroughly waterproofed rooms of his supposed equals, past the faculty lounge from which he had been shunned and never again dared to darken, past the signs in the ground-floor corridor advertising a wealth of teaching and managerial positions, and out into the street where, of course, the rain was beating down with the might of Zeus.
Langdon, who had briefly forgotten this detail, swore. He fumbled for the grip of his umbrella, but in doing so dropped his satchel, causing him to swear again. Face flushing red he stooped to pick it up, opened his umbrella with the other hand, managed (just about) to wrestle the bloody thing under control, stepped out onto the pothole-pitted streets of Durham, and was promptly hit by a speeding car.
It was a rather graceless way to go, and as he lay bleeding into a puddle with several kinds of pain shooting down his spine, he prayed to any god watching that someone would care.
His hopes, sad to say, were unfounded. And so Langdon Pisk died.

A sleeper-borne
love-letter dream
of better-meant exception.

::. :: :. : .

A bulkhead formed
from forms of screams
and rent from nociception.

It was raining heavily by the time Langdon Pisk woke up. It had been a light, fitful sleep, filled with inexplicably detailed dreams of his own demise at the hands of a rogue automobile. "No matter", he thought. "I never get much work done past 4 anyway". He scooped the paper into his bag, ran his fingers through his hair — he should at least resemble a functioning member of society — and began to get up from his chair.
A siren stopped him.
It was faint but recognisable, and coming from the street below his window. He peered out, and his heart sank when he saw the ambulance. Judging by the police car pulling up, and the fact that the body hadn't been moved from where it lay, there was nothing anybody could do. Poor guy. Langdon wondered aloud who it was, and the sound of his own voice caught him off-guard — it felt…
Well, disrespectful. Someone had died, for heaven's sake. A bit of basic decorum was the least he could show in the circumsta-
Except, wait.
Backpedal, rewind, reverse. That wasn't, he realised, why his voice had caught him off-guard. It wasn't the disrespect (though granted, he was probably still an unthinking bastard), it was the fact that, but moments ago, he'd heard another voice echo the exact same sentiment. Only that time, he'd been lying out there on the road, and it had been one of his forever-distant coworkers who'd voiced their idle concerns. Professor Rietch, he vaguely recalled. What a bitch.
Still, his heart was sinking lower than he thought possible as his brain tried to process what was happening. Someone down there was dead. He'd fallen asleep at his desk, and dreamt that he'd left the department and been a victim of reckless youth. In the dream, he'd heard a voice. Now, he was the relevant voice. Putting two and two together…
It was probably a coincidence. He was probably generating memories retroactively due to a combination of Seasonal Affective Disorder, poor diet, and a working environment which, had he been in toxicology instead of mathematics, he could have used for another thesis. The stress of seeing a corpse, even sheet-covered, had left his sleep-addled brain open to suggestion. It was logical. It was normal. It was fine.
Nevertheless, by the time he'd reconciled all this he'd sprinted down three flights of stairs and was halfway to the scene of the crime.

"Randall McAllister."
"Say that again, sorry?"
"His name was Randall McAllister. He owned the cafe on Elvet Hill. Did you know him?"
"What? No, no, sorry. I- uh."
How could he possibly explain? He'd been such an idiot, like he always was. So eager to find things out, and now look at him, standing by a circle of screens in the pouring rain, filled with relief that the person who'd died hadn't been-
The policeman interrupted him. "I'm sorry sir", he said, "but are you smiling?"
Langdon raised a hand to his mouth instinctively. "What? Sorry, no, I just…" He trailed off. "I thought it was someone else."
"Oh. Oh, I see. Don't worry, I understand, lot of people leaving work late round about now. Thought it mighta been one of your friends, yeah? And it well could've been, too; it's the second case of dangerous driving here tonight."
That sinking feeling again, that breathless dizziness as his mind tried to make up for what his heart was assuming.
"Wh- what happened?"
"Some idiot," said the officer, in a tone of voice that rather underplayed the seriousness of recent events, "razzed down here with no headlights on, hit the post box on the corner. It's a miracle no-one was hurt then as well."
"Yeah," said Langdon as he felt the world fall out from underneath him. "A miracle. Although I expect if he had hit someone, the road would've been closed off, right? And this wouldn't have happened?"
The man shrugged. "Who can say. Personally, I'm glad it wasn't; you can't trust this sort-" He gestured to the screen behind him. "-farther than you can throw 'em. Obviously I wouldn't say 'good riddance' or anything, but-"
"Yes, well." The world was spinning now, the halos of streetlights swirling amidst the rain. "I'd better be getting off home. Sorry for the trouble."
"No problem. Walk safely now."
"I will," said Langdon with some force. "I definitely, definitely will."
And his conviction, suffice to say, was well-placed. No spectres of death greeted him on the way home, no ghouls of souls unrighteously taken, no vengeful deities out to balance the books. His journey was as uneventful as always, if slightly later than usual thanks to his brief narcoleptic episode.
He stepped through the door in a daze, hung the umbrella (still unopened) on the coat-rack, towelled his hair dry, ate a small microwave dinner for one, brushed his teeth, shrugged on his pyjamas, and went, once again, to sleep. His dreams were thankfully no more vivid or lethal than usual, and he was able (just about) to file the events of the evening under the ever-so-useful heading of Things That Just Sort Of Happened.
Mr. McAllister's death made the news the next day; the previous driver, and Langdon's own oneiric escape, didn't. All things considered, it was probably just as well.
And so, with no small amount of trepidation, Langdon Pisk lived.


by qntm

Previously

Marion Wheeler used strong mnestic medication nearly every day of her life. Among the Identity Warriors of Mobile Task Force ω-0, "Ará Orún", it was never in doubt that, on the occasion of her death, she would ascend into the noösphere. She would become a Bader-Ramjin Infomorphic Entity or a Type VI Volitional Spiritual Apparition or a "ghostie" or however she wished to describe her new self. Then, she would join the Citizens of Heaven, and continue the Antimemetics Division's fight from higher ground, likely with fearsome effectiveness.
But Wheeler died under terrible circumstances. The Class-Z drug which killed her did more than reinforce her memory; it destroyed her ability to do anything but remember. She ascended, arriving in the noösphere to a hero's welcome, but what arrived was an ideoform so severely brain-damaged that it was barely able to communicate.
After she was made as comfortable as possible and an initial diagnosis had been made, Sanchez off-handedly described her as "a Swiss watch filled with glue".
Ulrich yelled at him for saying it, and would have hit him for his callousness. "How can she make it to Heaven sick?" she said. "Isn't that just Hell?"
The Director apologised, in the corporate, false way in which he always apologised for anything.
"How much more does she have to go through?" Ulrich said. "Who deserves this life?"
It hurt all of them. Regardless of personal investment in the mission, it was difficult not to care for someone whom they had watched and guarded for years. They continued to take care of her in the same way they always had, in shifts. Wheeler, dimly aware of her condition, worked against the problem in the instinctive, fierce way she worked against every problem. She slowly became more coherent, but never became herself again. Ulrich, on her shifts, saw that Wheeler spent most of her existence reliving her final moments over and over. She would recite what seemed to be half of a conversation with SCP-3125 itself, a conversation which several of ω-0 said they recognised from Operation Cold City.
"Ideas can be killed."
"Marion," Ulrich asked her gently. "Where is Bart Hughes? He's the only one who can stop this now. We know he's alive, or he'd be here with us. Just a hint. Just a clue. Please."
She was trying. Ulrich knew that she was trying to say: I don't know. I can't remember something I never knew in the first place. But all she could manage was:
"With better ideas."
"Keep pushing her," Sanchez told Ulrich when she reported back to him. "At least once per shift."
"The questioning is causing her considerable distress," Ulrich said. "We know she doesn't know anything. It's cruel to keep trying. Sir."
"SCP-3125 is coming," Sanchez replied. "With the quick arm of the Antimemetics Division eliminated, there's nothing left which can stop it. Our real-world investigative capabilities are negligible, Hughes' sister doesn't know anything, and this is our sole remaining lead. I know you admire Wheeler more than anyone—"
"She mentored me. She drove me to be the best person I have ever been. She honored my memory when I died. My own family wouldn't."
"Ulrich—"
"We are the saints who guard! I will guard her!"
Sanchez paused. Ulrich's devotion to Wheeler — and the lesser devotion of the others — irked him mildly. He viewed Wheeler as… well, competent enough, but ultimately a failure. She was as much of a failure as everybody else in the Division, with only the uninteresting distinction of being the last of the failures.
But he was vulnerable to the kind of rhetoric Ulrich had just employed. It stoked a kind of fire inside him. Heaven knew he used it in his own communications often enough, for exactly the same purpose.
"Alright," he said. "The trawl in reality is continuing. There's a faint chance we'll find something of substance. Carry on as you were. No questions."

*

SCP-3125 incarnated the following winter.
Its first act upon its arrival — or, depending on the degree of intelligent agency you ascribed to it, the first side-effect of its arrival — was the neutralisation of the Foundation. In the space of a night, an international staff of tens of thousands disappeared into oblivion, or became amnesiac, or simply dropped brain-dead where they were standing. Foundation Sites became hollow, inaccessible dead zones. A few anomalies broke containment in the chaos, to devastating effect; thousands of others were choked into irrelevant obscurity beneath SCP-3125's antimemetic pressure.
The world can only end one way, it seemed to be declaring, gouging its statement into the flesh of reality. My world. My way.
SCP-3125 had skirmished with ω-0 before, but it had always been unclear how much information about ω-0 it retained between skirmishes. In fact it was unclear, fundamentally speaking, how SCP-3125 thought at all. Its behaviour was inconsistent, unpredictable and frightening; records of its activities were cognitohazardous, discouraging close analysis.
In the end, the question proved to be academic. When SCP-3125 arrived, whether it knew ω-0 was there or not, it took no special action against it, and had no need to. Most of ω-0's members' anchors were Foundationers, or Foundation-adjacent. With those people's minds blown away in the first strike, the dense web of mutual memory which had held the Task Force together since its formation tore loose. More than half of the Task Force was cast into the void and died; the final, real death they had evaded for years.
Around dawn, Eastern Standard Time, Sanchez announced that it was no longer possible for ω-0 to stay together as a single entity. He split the remains of the Task Force into three. Ulrich and the malformed memory of Wheeler were assigned to the same subteam. Sanchez gave final instructions to continue to search for Bart Hughes, or any kind of ally among the living, be they Foundation or GOI or civilian. But the instructions were confusing and incomplete. It was because Sanchez didn't have an iota of faith in what he was saying. He couldn't see a way to the far side of this. It was about little more than survival now. It was about figuring out terms on which to face death.
Ulrich never saw him again.

*

She fled, with Wheeler and the others in their little subteam, across the face of a noösphere which was rapidly becoming uninhabitable. The world was warping around SCP-3125's presence at the core of human thought, like real space around a black hole. It was building things, real physical artifacts, in the centre of cities. It was extruding them, as if from spores; monumental concrete structures, into which people were being fed in dizzying numbers. It was difficult to know what was happening inside of the structures. Some of the millions were dying in there. Some weren't. Ulrich didn't look. They found out the ugly way that it was dangerous to look closely.
The subteam was steadily running out of anchors. It could have been a systematic purge, but it could just as easily have been simple statistics. Roving physical and psychic anomalies, vast in their own right and slaved to SCP-3125, were combing the Earth, stripping it of objectors and feeding them into SCP-3125's maw. Ulrich's own anchor, a woman who had never known what the Foundation was but who remembered Ulrich with a heavy heart nearly every day, was killed around that time; found in the hills where she'd been hiding and dragged down into the inferno.
Ulrich wasn't looking. She didn't find out until it was too late. She felt the thread of memory come loose, and followed it, panicking, past its flapping end and down into physical reality, where there was nothing. A collapsed tent. A scuffed-out firepit where everything important had been piled up and burnt.
"Who was she?" another ω-0 operative asked her. Ulrich had never spoken about it.
"I only knew her for two days," Ulrich said. "When I was younger. She saved my life, that's all."
This was it, she realised. She was a career Foundationer. An experienced Mobile Task Force operative, for God's sake. She had gone through unimaginable horrors, and stacked them up as experience and kept going. But this, Julia's tent and silence and no Julia, was the worst thing she had ever seen.
Short of hope and resources, the subteam had to split again, this time into pairs. Ulrich stayed with Wheeler, clinging to her like a rock, remembering her and being remembered in turn. A cooperating pair could survive untethered for a little while, but not forever.

*

They found shelter on a distant edge of the noösphere, in a clutch of arcane structures left there millennia earlier by a long-dead human culture. They were followed, though they didn't realise.
One night, Wheeler managed to talk. She said, "Adam." It was the first thing she had managed to say which wasn't a direct quote from her own expiring moments.
Ulrich was shocked by this. "You remember him?"
The sentence came out agonisingly slowly, as if each syllable was like climbing a mountain: "I remember everything."
Ulrich stared. She knew that Class-Z mnestics made it impossible for the subject to forget. She also knew that they could cause long-erased memories to reassert themselves — some of them, anyway, depending on the mechanism and intensity of the erasure process. She had hoped that Wheeler's memories of her husband were permanently gone, because she knew they ended in a terrible place.
"…I don't know where Adam is," she had to tell Wheeler. It was the truth. Nobody did. ω-0 operatives had, with some solemnity, observed the erasure of Adam Wheeler's mind. But, out of respect for Marion's decision and to preserve Adam's safety, they had intentionally diverted their attention during his relocation, destroying their records. "He might be alive. I don't know." She didn't know which alternative was worse.
"Daisy," Wheeler said. "Look." She was holding something in her hands, a pitiful glowing ideoform. A thought of someone.
It was him. A thread of memory which led right to him. It was some kind of miracle, it had to be, that Wheeler had picked him out from the livid, insensate mass of victims which now formed SCP-3125's core. He was nearly unrecognisable. He was overrun with SCP-3125. At first glance it seemed to occupy every nerve in his body. But there was a flickering seed in the back of his mind, a final remnant of what he had once been. It wasn't growing. There was too much pressure. But it was trying to. He was pushing back.
Ulrich boggled. She had known that there was something weird and highly rare about the way Adam Wheeler's mind was structured, a kind of thick-skulled resistance to external interference. In fact, she knew that thousands and thousands of people in the world shared that immunity — but that was another way of saying that, among the billions, such people were fantastically rare and difficult to locate. Efforts by ω-0 to locate them and recruit them as allies had failed. They did not look special or behave radically differently from others. There was no signal flare which went up. It was possible that they were all dead. It was conceivable that Adam Wheeler was the only one of them left in the whole world.
But he was left. He was alive.
"I see him," Ulrich said.
Wheeler didn't respond.
"I'll get him out of there," Ulrich said. Her stomach was knotting up with the sheer thought of attempting it. "I'll bring him to you."
Wheeler didn't respond. Six original, coherent words had exhausted her. She was crazed with frustration at how incapable she had become. She felt as if she was pinned beneath a huge lead block of memory. It hurt to think. It hurt to exist.
Ulrich's ability to interact with the physical universe was extremely limited. Other operatives of ω-0 had been able to create full-on poltergeist activity, changing the temperatures of rooms and throwing furniture around, but she was not that kind of specialist. She could do little more than place phone calls and write on walls. Those abilities weren't likely to get Adam Wheeler moving. Simple words were never going to reach him. The man wasn't even truly conscious.
What Ulrich could do was something the Task Force dubbed Identity Offense. She could interfere with the internals of living minds to make things happen. Usually enemies; usually the mental equivalent of blunt force trauma, to make them die. But she could act with surgical precision if it was called for.
Operating on Adam Wheeler was difficult and time-consuming. His mind was tough, and it was continually bathed in SCP-3125's radioactive presence. Ulrich would cut, and then wait as Wheeler's mind self-healed, which took days, and then she would cut again. The seedling metaphor served well. The operation reminded her of tending a plant. If nothing else, the whole procedure took real-time weeks. The patience required to keep her hands off for days at a time was nearly inhuman.
Wheeler said nothing else in that time. She was conserving energy. It felt as if she had a finite number of words left in her, and speaking each one brought her an inch closer to the end. She had to wait.
"He'll be here," Ulrich said. "Soon."

*

Now Ulrich watches from a great, abstract distance, as Adam Wheeler folds up.
Marion Wheeler is dead, finally, truly dead, and Adam Wheeler's mind is breaking apart. It's an awful and incredible thing to watch. Even passing into the maw of SCP-3125 and back wasn't enough to permanently break him. But this was it, the silver bullet. This was the way to hurt Adam Wheeler in such a way that he would never recover. Present his wife to him, a brain-damaged wreck, just in time for her to die.
Ulrich writes on the blackboard — off to one side, so as not to mar the image of Marion, and in different handwriting:
I'm sorry
I'm so sorry
Adam, please come back to the phone
I need your help
Adam is prostrate on the floor, and becoming catatonic. He doesn't hear it when Ulrich tries calling the other office phone, the one on the other desk.
And she, too, is dying now. She and Marion were anchoring one another as best they could, but it's the end of the line. She has, perhaps, hours.
"Alright," she says, to no one. There is no one else left.
She rolls up her figurative sleeves. This will not be too difficult for her. Adam Wheeler's revived memories of his wife shine inside him, and around the edge she can see the faint scar where they were burnt out the first time. She has a better vantage point; she can do a cleaner, more permanent job.
This will hurt. Just as much as it did then.
"I need her," Adam says. He's still face-down. "Don't take her. Please."
Ulrich writes,
You need to save the world
There's nobody else
Adam doesn't look up, but he says:
"To hell with the world. It can burn."

*

He recovers a second time. He's fine. Upbeat, game. Eager to get moving.
She explains everything she can. Tersely. Just the keywords. The Foundation, the Antimemetics Division, the situation, the objective. He absorbs it all surprisingly well. He asks cogent follow-up questions, which is always a positive sign.
"This 'thread of memory' which was sustaining you," he says. "Don't I count? I'll remember you."
"Your memory could be strong enough," she replies. "But you just don't know me well enough."
"Ah. That's regrettable."
Ulrich tells him, in detail, how to find Site 41. It's going to be an immense trek, made significantly longer by Wheeler's need to avoid urban areas. She describes the antimemetic shroud which obscures Site 41 and most other Foundation Sites, a shroud she and the rest of ω-0 found to be totally impenetrable — a shroud which Wheeler, if he prepares himself, may be able to walk straight through. She warns him about the psychotic hurricane-like anomalies, and the violent roaming agglomerations of SCP-3125-occupied non-humans. She describes a few techniques for avoiding their attention. She decides not to voice her private hope that, as a recent escapee from SCP-3125's interior, Wheeler will still "smell right" to them and be able to pass. She doesn't want him becoming overconfident and incautious.
She explains basic survival skills.
"I hike, I camp," Wheeler says. Still, he has never hiked or camped in an occupied foreign world. He has never gone months without electricity and plumbing. They find that they have plenty to talk about.
They are on the phone for long enough that Adam notices that the red Sun outside the office window isn't moving. It hasn't risen. It hasn't set. Either the world's stopped turning completely, or the thing hanging out there isn't the Sun.
"Unknown," Ulrich has to tell him. "There was a Foundation which could answer this question, once."
"It seems like this Foundation had the world's better interests at heart," Wheeler says.
In Heaven, Ulrich laughs, weakly. "The Foundation was never so simple," she says.
"…Ms. Ulrich, I sense we're coming to the end of our time together."
"Yes."
"The odds stacked against you were tremendous," Wheeler says. "But you saved my life. And the odds stacked against me are, well, still appalling. But significantly better, thanks to you. I'll do my level best. And I will remember you, even if it doesn't make a difference."
"Kill this thing, Mr. Wheeler," Ulrich says. "When you get the chance, don't hesitate."
"Aye," Wheeler says.
And at the same time, someone behind Ulrich laughs, sharply, once.
She turns. There's a man there, standing with her in the noösphere, a gaunt younger man with an awful, open-mouthed grin. He has been waiting, silently and excitedly, for an unknowable amount of time for Ulrich to notice him. And now that she does, he gets everything he could possibly want from her reaction, a rush of delectable horror and alarm. Then he cuts her off, killing her instantly, before she can get one syllable of warning to Wheeler.
Wheeler hears nothing. A faint click, and then a dial tone.
He hangs up.

Next: Wild Light


This is your reminder that Tuesday, September 10th has been canceled. All activities which are scheduled for, intended for, or predicated upon the existence of Tuesday, September 10th have been canceled. Rescheduling of related events is strictly forbidden.
At the sound of the tone, there will be 300 seconds remaining before the activation of Protocol Atelis-Alpha. It is recommended that all personnel locate a secure area in the event of loss of consciousness.

DING

"So what are you going to not do with your Tuesday this year?" Dr. Eates flipped his file folder shut and leaned back in his desk chair; the announcement had changed his tone and body language significantly and it was time to get casual. The chair was an old, worn, wooden thing but it had a deeply satisfying creak to it especially as he cranked back like this. He took good care of it, changing the spring every six months, oiling the joint, weather-treating the wood for the dry environment of Site-19's R&D wing.
"Well," Dr. Wilkes similarly relaxed in her seat but the fixed back had stopped her from mirroring the body language of her co-worker. "I scheduled one of my divorce arbitrations for tomorrow."
"Michelle, I'm impressed. That's actually very tastefully spiteful."
"Thank you, Manny. I was proud of the idea at the time although it took a bit of convincing to get the date set that far out. I think my ex took it as a sign I wanted more time to work things out. But…"
"But you know what you know and he doesn't."
"Precisely."
Dr. Eates raised his hands behind his head and interlocked his fingers as he idly studied the ceiling tiles. Dr. Wilkes uncrossed her legs, shifted her weight to the other hip, and recrossed them with the other leg atop. The moment of silence was nice.
"What about you?" Michelle asked her idle coworker.
"Prostate exam." Dr. Eates said flatly.
"Manny, I can't tell if that's one of your jokes or not but that's probably not the type of thing you should skip. Health is important."
"It was a joke, Michelle."

This is your reminder that Tuesday, September 10th has been canceled. All activities which are scheduled for, intended for, or predicated upon the existence of Tuesday, September 10th have been canceled. Rescheduling of related events is strictly forbidden.
At the sound of the tone, there will be 120 seconds remaining before the activation of Protocol Atelis-Alpha. In order to preserve normalcy, absences which have begun on Monday the 9th and end on Wednesday the 11th or later will honor Tuesday the 10th.

DING

Dr. Eates thought out loud, "Do you ever wonder how many of these we lost before we became aware of the anomaly? How many of those days floating around in our heads are implants and how many are real? The Foundation was around long before you or I got here and presumably, the anomaly was too. So, how many…?"
"Oh, you haven't looked?" Dr. Wilkes batted her eyes and smirked over the answer, which she already knew.
"No, I can't. I'm a Containment Specialist, not a researcher. And, in case you didn't hear the PA, this one already has a set of ConProcs that work just fine."
"Yes, I know, I just wanted to rub it in that I know and you don't."
Manny rolled his eyes at her small victory and blew a long sigh out through his nose. "I should probably put my hands down for this."
"You probably should." Dr. Wilkes fished around in her purse until she withdrew a light blue piece of rubber shaped vaguely like a horseshoe.
"What the heck is that?"
"It's a mouthguard," She spritzed it with a small spray bottle, some sort of gentle cleaning solution. "For if I pass out. I had a mild concussion thanks to the last one of these and I'm not about to repeat that. I need my leave time. Vegas trip coming up."
Manny shrugged at the idea. It seemed like an apt precaution.

This is your reminder that Tuesday, September 10th has been canceled. At the sound of the tone, there will be 60 seconds remaining before the activation of Protocol Atelis-Alpha.
If you or a member of immediate familial relation was born on September 10th, please report to Pataphysics upon the conclusion of this Atelis-Alpha event.

DING

"It's kind of cheap that things have to play out this way."
"How's that, Manny?" She secured her purse beneath the chair and settled back in, mouthguard at the ready.
"Well if at least one of these happens every year and you live to be at least sixty, that's at least two months of your life just out the window that you don't get to live. You can't get them back. I might have done some really neat things with tomorrow."
"At least you can just do them the day after."
"Can I though? Things still change. It's not like we all just skip tomorrow and stay in bed. Things get different; not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, but they do get different. Maybe I won't be able to do the things I wanted to. What if…what if I was innocent of all of this and my wedding was supposed to be tomorrow?"
"Manny, you know paining yourself over shit like that is how guys like you wind up at the bottom of whiskey bottles with dead careers, right? Keep your chin up. Don't make me go into the propaganda machine any deeper than I already have." She leaned forward and held her hand out, palm open and facing up as she slipped the mouthguard in.
The furrowed brow of Dr. Eates softening, he too leaned forward as his chair reliably creaked and groaned. He took her hand. "Yeah, I know you're right Michelle. It's just…you know how I get. She would have been 38 tomorrow."
"I know." They held each other's hand in gentle reassurance, both attempting to relax. The static of the PA crackled to life. "She gets tomorrow so that you and I can have the day after."

Protocol Atelis-Alpha begins in 5…
4…
3…
2…
1…

Tuesday had been canceled.

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