Per 
Day 0: MarTEEN
Duncan turned to his right and slowly repeated the question, placing emphasis on every word.
“What do you see?”
The man he was speaking to was about fifty years old, the temples of his black hair streaked with grey. He was much shorter than Duncan, powerfully built with a thick black moustache. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit with the identification D-77713 stitched onto the left breast pocket.
He was staring intently into an antique handheld mirror.
As Duncan watched, the man squinted his eyes and pulled the mirror closer to his face. His expression screwed into one of confusion.
He said nothing.
“What do you see?” asked Duncan, raising his voice.
The man hesitated, “Eh, wall?” he offered as if unsure of what he was looking at. He slowly straightened his arm as he spoke, pushing the mirror away from his face.
D-77713 was new to Site-24. His dossier indicated that this was only his third day of active duty within the Foundation. Still, Duncan thought that this assignment was easy enough for anyone. All he had to do was look into the mirror and describe what he saw.
Eventually the man in the jumpsuit was holding his arm straight out in front of him while bending his body away from the mirror. He turned his face to one side and glared at it with one eye as he squeezed the other eye shut. His thick moustache began to contort into a pained grimace.
He looked like a man reacting to a lit firecracker glued to his fingertips.
Except that instead of trying to drop this imaginary firecracker, the man now appeared to be trying to strangle it. His hand was wrapped around the handle of the mirror as if it were a throat. As Duncan watched the fingers of the hand grew white and the arm began to shake.
“D-77713…” Duncan exclaimed, reaching out with his right hand to grab the wrist holding the mirror. He wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the top of the mirror and pulled.
It was standard procedure that all staff refer to D-Class subjects by their numeric designation. But Duncan made it a point to know the name of every D-Class he worked with. This man’s name was Martin. Though he pronounced it “Mar-TEEN.”
The muscles of Martin’s arm were taut as he squeezed the handle. The mirror didn’t budge.
“Martin!” Duncan, barked, demanding the man’s attention.
Martin’s eyes snapped away from the mirror and locked onto Duncan’s. His fingers flew open as he released the mirror. For a panicked moment Duncan was afraid he might drop it.
As soon as Duncan released his wrist, Martin crossed himself.
The two men stared at each other in silence for a moment as the tension drained out of them. Slowly, Martin straightened and his expression cleared. Satisfied that the moment had passed, Duncan turned his attention to the mirror in his hand.
As soon as he looked, Duncan caught sight of his own reflection starting back at him. There was nothing unusual about it. This mirror showed him everything that he’d come to expect from mirrors. That he needed more sunlight. That he had bags under his eyes. That his red hairline was receding. That he needed to smile more.
He had a moment to reflect on how badly he had been sleeping lately, when suddenly, his reflection was gone. In its place was a scene one might expect from a video camera sitting on a table in another room. On the bottom was the white surface of a table. In the foreground was a notepad and a set of keys. In the background was the distant wall of a room similar to the one Duncan was standing in.
Except that this wasn’t a video image. There was no intervening screen. It was if he was looking into a different room through a hole in space ringed by the wood of the handheld mirror. The glass surface of the mirror was simply gone. The effect was thoroughly disorienting. He moved the hand holding the mirror, half expecting to be shown different angles of the other room, but the perspective that he was seeing remained fixed.
He was suddenly struck by an impulse to reach his arm through the mirror frame and touch the notepad on the table. His hand moved forward fractionally before he remembered that this is what Martin was here for. In fact, that Duncan was looking into the mirror himself constituted a breach of protocol.
He turned to regard Martin again and wondered if there were some way to get this man to reach his arm through the portal. Martin stared back at him as if he knew exactly what Duncan was thinking. He leaned forward, chin lifted slightly and gazed calmly into Duncan’s eyes. He had the air of a man who was relieved to finally be presented with a problem that he knew how to solve.
For the first time, Duncan noticed the rough outline of a prison tattoo peeking out of Martin’s open collar.
“You’re coming through loud and clear, Mr. Holstrom,” a voice came through the intercom at his elbow. “And we agree with you. If you try to force him to put his hand through that portal, it’s not going to go well.”
Duncan quickly placed the mirror on the table next to its packing crate.
The voice coming through the intercom belonged to Doctor Eller out of Helsinki. Until he’d spoken Duncan had briefly forgotten the Helsinki team was also involved in this test. That the remote team had caught him breaking protocol by using the mirror was bad enough, that they had also just read his mind was even worse.
The mirror on the table in front of him had been found in an antique store in London nearly thirty years prior. When it was added to Foundation containment it was known to have the unusual property of showing the person looking into it something other than their reflection. People looking into it would sometimes report seeing unfamiliar bedrooms or living rooms. Once someone reported seeing the back seat of a car in motion.
When the Foundation acquired this odd artifact, it did not seem particularly noteworthy compared to many of the other objects held in containment. It was classified it as safe and then put it into storage where it sat for decades. Until one day during routine inspection, someone looked into it and saw what they recognized as the inside of a Foundation facility in another country.
What had followed was the urgent inspection of Foundation testing chambers all over the world to discover if this mirror was, in fact, showing the inside of a Foundation facility. In the end they discovered that the mirror was showing them a processing chamber in Helsinki over four thousand kilometers away.
It turned out that the Helsinki team had recently come into possession of an unusual doll. It was of American mid-century construction. It was made of plastic with blond hair and pale blue eyes that closed when it was placed on its back. The doll had the unusual property of spontaneously saying the strangest things.
Anyone looking through the mirror would see through the doll’s eyes. The doll would sometimes speak the thoughts of whoever was looking into the mirror. The two objects were of different provenance, built and owned thousands of miles apart. There was no reason to think that these two items would be connected in any way. Yet they very clearly were.
The existence of these objects raised a number of important questions. This set of tests had been requisitioned in order to explore them.
“Where you able to get anything from Mar, the subject?” Duncan asked into the intercom.
“Something. Not much,” Doctor Eller responded. “It was garbled.”
“It was religious,” said a woman’s voice through the speaker. This voice belonged to senior researcher Ramirez. “Something to do with a sacrament.”
“You both heard something different?” Duncan asked.
There was a pause. Over the intercom, Duncan could make out two voices quickly conversing in German.
“Yes,” confirmed Eller. “We’re just realizing that we each heard slightly different things.”
“It could be that he was holding the mirror too far away from himself,” Ramirez added. “Get him to hold the mirror closer to his face and try again.”
A quick glance confirmed that Martin was still staring at him evenly.
“Negative,” said Duncan, turning back to the intercom. “I’m going to need different resources on this end. Let me put in an order with staffing and we’ll reconvene to take this up again.”
“Roger,” said Eller. “But let’s try to get this on the schedule for tomorrow. Our site director is breathing down our necks on this one.”
“Roger,” Confirmed, Duncan said. “Look for an update from me later this afternoon.”
When Duncan returned to his desk, he discovered that the screen of his computer had been taken over by a single alert notification. The alert blocked all computer function. Only opening and acknowledging the message would return control of the computer back to Duncan.
He had received only one other message with this level of importance during his time with the Foundation. That time the message had come up on every computer screen at the site and it had been accompanied by claxons warning of a containment breach.
Duncan entered his password into his computer. The message turned out to be a newly scheduled meeting appointment. It was for the following morning at 5:30 am in the Level Four wing of the facility.
This was unnerving. Duncan wracked his brain trying to imagine why he would be summoned to a meeting in the director’s offices. And with a high-priority message.
He clicked a few keys on his keyboard, acknowledging receipt of the message and accepting the appointment.
After a few moments’ hesitation, control of his computer was returned to him.
Day 1: Six
Duncan arrived at the security gate to the Level Four wing of Site-24 at 5:20 in the morning.
This level four wing was only accessible from inside the facility, and only through a security checkpoint which was locked and guarded around the clock. Duncan had only been to this gate once before and that was to meet the site director before going to lunch. He had never been beyond this point.
“I’m here to see Site Director Drucker,” Duncan announced to the guard who sat behind a screen of bullet proof glass.
The guard reached through a hole in the glass partition. “Your ID please.”
The guard consulted a schedule printed on a note-pad in front of him, his face perfectly impassive, “Director Drucker isn’t on site today.”
Confused, Duncan started to protest, when the guard interrupted him. “One moment please.”
The guard consulted a second schedule.
“Your meeting this morning isn’t with Site Director, Drucker,” The agent informed him. “You’re in one of the meeting rooms for a call with the O5 Council.”
Duncan felt his eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
“There must be some misunderstanding…” He heard himself say as the guard stood up to open the door for him.
The guard ignored Duncan’s protest.
“Please come through, sir.” He instructed. He was not looking at Duncan as he said this but at an x-ray screen to one side.
Apparently satisfied that Duncan was not carrying anything that he shouldn’t, he said, “You’re in room two. Across the walkway and on your left at the end of the hall.”
The director wing of Site-24 was located in a separate structure from the rest of the facility and connected only by an enclosed elevated walkway. It was not unusual for this wing of the facility to be empty as the site housed fewer than half a dozen level four staff at any given time. Still, Duncan was a little unnerved to step into a completely deserted hallway on the other side of the skywalk. One hallway extended straight forward while a second ran off to his left.
The heavy door to Conference Room 2 came open with an airtight pop. Once inside, Duncan found himself in a small, windowless conference room bathed in soft indirect light.
The room was sparsely furnished with only a small round meeting table and two office chairs. On the wall opposite the door were three video screens, all of which were dark. Above each screen was a video camera.
An analog clock on the wall read 5:28.
On the table a laminated placard listed some rules:
- Lock the door. The door is to remain locked for the entire duration of your conference. If at any time the door is opened while a conference is in session the conference will be automatically terminated.
- Do not record any part of your conference. This prohibition extends to written notes as well as any form of electronic recording. A transcript of the conference may be made available to you at the sole discretion of the O5 Council
- Vacate this room immediately at the end of your conference. Persons failing to leave immediately for any reason will be subject to disciplinary action.
- Do not leave any personal items in this meeting room when you depart. All items left in the conference room will be confiscated. Persons leaving any items in this room will be subject to disciplinary action.
Duncan pulled the door closed behind him and locked it, then sat down.
Most employees went their entire careers at the Foundation without ever having any direct contact with any member of the O5 Council. It was not hyperbole to describe to the O5 Council as mysterious. There were supposedly thirteen members of the Council who exercised absolute control over the operations of the SCP Foundation. They were rumored to be powerful, eccentric and well-connected with industry and governments all over the world.
Only one or two were known by name, as far as Duncan was aware. And he’d only seen an image of one, a tall elegant older woman, in a news article dated six years ago. Other than that, the O5 Council operated within a near mythical status. He’d never heard of a case where one had deigned to engage a level three researcher directly.
It was now 5:34 and the extra time Duncan was being given was only allowing his anxiety to rise. He was increasingly sure that this was some kind of mistake. He half expected the three screens to light up and immediately give way to an alert that an intruder had penetrated the level four wing of Site-24.
He wondered if the security team would wait to hear his explanation first or simply start shooting.
It was almost a relief when the time hit 5:42 and there was still no sign of any conference starting. He was beginning to hope that the meeting had been postponed or canceled when one of the three screens on the wall lit up to reveal a dark grey circle on a white background. In the center of the circle was the number six. The other two screens remained dark.
“Please state your name and badge number,” a male voice said through a speaker under the video screen.
“Duncan Holstrom.” Duncan replied. He then recited the eight-digit number which served as his unique employee identifier within the Foundation.
“Thank you for coming.” The voice responded. “Please address me as Council Member Six.”
The voice was deep and cultured. The enunciation, sharp and direct, with the slightest hint of an unfamiliar accent. Unbidden, Duncan’s imagination supplied a face to the voice. That of a particularly demanding college professor. Dark, intensely focused eyes staring out of sharp olive-complected features. The face was about 50 years old with a neatly trimmed greying goatee.
“Okay,” Duncan hesitated, “Yes, Council Member Six.”
There was a long pause, “Mister Holstrom, the Council has voted to restart project Argus. You and I are speaking here today because you are being tasked with bringing the project fully operational.”
This was the last thing that Duncan had expected. Project Argus had been started as a way of forecasting anomalous activity within Site-24. The idea had been to use all incident and testing data collected at the site to train a neural network.
Site-24 housed nearly 50 Safe and Euclid class anomalous objects. Some of which behaved unpredictably. If the neural network could establish any predictive power it would dramatically increase the safety of the entire containment facility.
The project had eventually been shelved after months of testing, when it proved unable to find any patterns reliable enough to predict future events. The research behind it was still considered solid, but they had to conclude that either the patterns that they were looking for didn’t exist or that their model was somehow flawed.
Duncan had been a senior researcher on that project.
“I see,” was all he could manage.
“You do not,” Council Member Six stated evenly.
“The Council consensus is that Argus proved inconclusive because it lacked the necessary scope,” The voice continued. “In this next iteration of the project we will be encoding all anomalous data available to the Foundation and introducing it into the neural engine.”
“All anomalous data…” Duncan was startled. “Everything, from around the world?”
The voice replied. “All Foundation sites will be mobilized for this effort. Additionally, we will be including all available data from remotely monitored anomalous phenomenon. We will also be including data on natural phenomena which we believe to be correlated with anomalous activity. Most of this will come from sources external to the Foundation.”
Duncan’s mind reeled. The Foundation operated over 100 sites situated all over the world. Each functioned relatively independent of the others. Duncan was aware of these sites but his ten-year career at the Foundation had brought him into contact with fewer than a dozen of them. He didn’t even know where they all were.
He was suddenly sure that he was the wrong person for this job. The Brookings team in Stuttgart was where the Foundation housed some of its brightest mathematicians and computer scientists. Duncan couldn’t fathom why they wouldn’t give a project of this scale to that team.
He shook his head rapidly as if to clear his mind.
“Brookings…” he began.
“The Brookings team is purely dedicated to research,” The voice interrupted. “This is an operational project. Access to the Brookings team will be made available to you for specific requests. But let me be clear. You and your team will be leading this project.”
“It’s just that I lack visibility…” Duncan trailed off.
Another long pause. Duncan could feel himself being measured through the video camera.
“You have been provisionally elevated to staff level four,” the voice told him. “You now have the authority to direct all data-collection operations across the Foundation. You also have access to information on most anomalous entities currently in Foundation containment.
The neural engine will be rebuilt at Site-24. All necessary resources will be brought to you.”
Duncan wanted to object. He didn’t want this project. The scale of it frightened him. From where he sat, all he could see were the myriad of ways in which it could fail. At the same time, however, he knew couldn’t say no to a member of the O5 Council. That much was certain. To say no to this would be the end of his career at the Foundation.
In fact, projecting anything other than confidence and commitment at this moment might earn him an appointment with the amnestics team followed by an immediate escort out the door.
“All details have been laid out in the project brief,” The voice was saying. “That brief will be made available to you immediately following this meeting.”
“Understood.”
“There is urgency behind this initiative. You will have every resource that you need to complete this project. Additionally, you will have direct access to me for the duration. You will provide updates weekly.”
Duncan took a deep breath and lifted his eyes to stare directly into the camera. “Got it, sir. I believe I can do this.”
“That’s the spirit,” the voice replied in a tone entirely devoid of warmth or humor.
“The Council believes that the patterns are there, Mister Holstrom. It is now your job to find them.
Good bye.”
The screen before him went dark.
As soon as he was alone, Duncan slumped in his seat. The room blurred for a brief moment as he let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding. As his gaze focused, he found that he was looking at a previously unnoticed small white trash can in the corner. The queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach suggested the reason it was in the room.
Duncan stared at it wondering if he really was sick enough to need it. After several moments his mind began to clear and he again focused on the placard on the table.
“Persons failing to leave immediately for any reason will be subject to disciplinary action.”
“Good,” He thought to himself. Maybe he’d get fired and not have to take this project. He slowly hauled himself up from his chair, unlocked the door and stepped out into the hallway.
Day 3: Chatham
“This is a dangerous project,” Chatham shook his head. “The Foundation is structured as a series of separate sites for a reason. The whole system was purposefully laid out to prevent exactly the kind of cross-contamination that we’re discussing now.”
It had been forty-eight hours since Duncan’s meeting with Council Member Six. Immediately following that meeting his desk had been relocated to a private office in the Level Four building. All of his previous responsibilities had been handed off to another researcher. He was then briefed on the enhanced set of security procedures that as a Level Four employee he was now expected to follow. Finally, he had been left alone in his new office where he spent the next full day pouring over the project brief that had been sent to him.
This morning was Duncan’s first meeting with Security Director Chatham. Chatham operated out of Site 01 but was on assignment at Site-24 to support Project Argus. In addition to his security role, he was temporarily acting as liaison to the other functions that Duncan needed for the project.
The two men sat in Conference Room One of the Level Four Building. This room was larger than the one where Duncan had met with Council Member Six the day before. The central table was large enough to accommodate twelve people. Instead of three communication screens there were five along one wall. All of them currently dark.
The entire wall opposite the communication screens was dominated by floor to ceiling windows looking out into the cold January countryside. But there weren’t any real windows in the Level Four building. These were a row of floor to ceiling video panels all linked to cameras outside. Their main function was to facilitate video presentations, but when not in use they would simulate views of the outdoors.
They bathed the room in harsh morning light.
“How do we handle the hazards?” asked Duncan.
The cognitohazards were what made the entire undertaking dangerous. They could take the form of almost any piece of information. Some were short phrases or symbols written on pieces of paper. Some were images or sounds in recordings. Still others were physical objects such as scraps of wood.
Anyone experiencing them could fall victim to their effects.
These effects varied widely from one artifact to the next. In some cases, victims encountering these objects would lose their memories. In others they would seek to harm themselves or others. In one case, people viewing an old photograph had spontaneously burst into flame.
As people at Foundation sites around the world worked to encode data for Project Argus, they would be sifting through archived reports going back decades. Any one of the tens of thousands of old files, photographs or recordings might contain a previously undiscovered cognitohazard.
The encoders would be working in a minefield.
But unlike mines on a battlefield, these mines were made of information, and translating them into a data file would allow them to be transported all over the world. Worse still, these mines could go off more than once, destroying the minds of everyone they came into contact with.
“We can omit those hazards we know about from the project,” Duncan continued. “But, the unknown ones? We’ll only recognize them when we run into them.”
“We will have to compartmentalize the data collection,” Chatham responded. “Due to the risk, I would expect the work to be done by D-Class personnel on location. Once it’s encoded it will be transported here.”
“Well, there’s a problem with that,” said Duncan. “For one, we’ll have no control over consistency in data collection. We’re talking about sites all over the world. We can’t have everything encoded in Minsk using different assumptions than those used in Jakarta.”
“What do you propose?”
“If we can’t use one team to encode all the data, then we have to make all of these remote teams as much like each other as possible,” Duncan said. “Ideally, everyone collecting the data, no matter where it’s being encoded, will all be speaking the same language. I would prefer that everyone performing the work be English speaking.”
Chatham’s expression didn’t change. He stared at Duncan waiting for him to continue.
“They must also be literate. If they can’t read or write I can’t use them in the data collection.”
Chatham considered this. “That’s going to require that a lot of people get moved around.” He said, “Fewer than forty percent of all Foundation D-Class are English speaking and have a sixth-grade education or higher.”
“How do you plan to move the data?” Duncan asked. Transporting potentially anomalous digital files through the public internet was out of the question. The damage that could occur from a breach was incalculable. Neither man would even suggest it.
“We’ll have to commit it to some physical medium at each site. We’ll transport the hard drives physically.”
“There’s no secure satellite link?” Asked Duncan.
“We cannot tolerate the risk,” stated Chatham. “It is very difficult to intercept satellite communications, but it can be done.”
So, trucks and planes then. All to transport thumb drives.
The two men talked into the afternoon. They then converted the simulated outdoor windows into interactive whiteboards which allowed them to scribble notes and build flow charts together. Throughout the work, Chatham proved to have a phenomenal memory. He could cite the name, location and rough capabilities of all 124 Foundation sites without resorting to notes.
As they finished, Duncan returned one of the video screens to simulation mode revealing that the world outside had become dark.
They sat back and surveyed their handiwork. On the board was a rough map of the continents. Black stars marked the location of Foundation sites around the world. Long sweeping arrows marked in blue depicted the movement of data files as they made their way from the sites where they were encoded to one of six aggregation sites where they would be tested for errors. The six processing sites all had arrows pointing to Site-24. Other arrows in orange and green showed the movement of people and anomalous artifacts. Red circles marked the sites most likely to house unknown cognitohazards.
There were a lot of red circles.
“This is good enough start for me to bring in the rest of the Directors,” Chatham said, stepping back to take in the whole board. “I can reach out to the logistics, facilities, and containment teams tomorrow and get them to start putting their plans together.”
“We’ll need an isolated lab to work out of,” said Duncan, pointing to the star representing Site-24.
“Already taken care of,” Chatham responded.
“Then, it looks like we’ve thought of everything,” said Duncan, scanning the map.
“Trust me, we haven’t,” Chatham replied. “And it’s the stuff we haven’t thought of which should keep us up at night. We don’t have any room for mistakes.”
He turned to Duncan. “Which brings me to this,” he said sliding a manilla folder across the table to him.
Duncan opened it to find an incident report from two days earlier. The Helsinki team had documented his breaking protocol by looking into the mirror during their test. Martin was also listed in the incident for insubordination. The Helsinki team had recommended the D-Class subject for retraining.
The report had already been signed by the Doctor Eller in Helsinki as well as Senior Researcher Ramirez. The testing room operator on duty at Site-24 had also already signed.
There were two blank lines waiting for signatures. One for him and one for Site Director Drucker.
Duncan felt his face becoming hot as he looked up at Chatham.
“You’re lucky that happened two days ago,” Chatham said. “After today, it will be the O5 Council who signs off on any breaches of protocol that you’re involved in.”
He held out a pen for Duncan’s signature.
“Welcome to the Zero Tolerance Club.”
Day 9: Karen
Duncan sat across from Senior Researcher Karen Lee in a test observation room. Both were reviewing plans on the table between them. Against one wall a large video screen displayed a view of the clear skies above Site-24. The opposite wall was dominated by a window overlooking the testing chamber below.
On the testing chamber floor, a team of four containment specialists carefully lifted a green tortoise shell, roughly two meters in length, out of a heavily reinforced travel crate.
“These safety measures seem extreme,” said Karen, scanning the notes Duncan had made on their data collection plan.
“I’ve never lost anyone on any of my projects,” said Duncan.
“Really?” Karen responded, surprised. “Never? Not even D-Class?”
D-Class employees were often placed in the most dangerous scenarios faced by the Foundation, particularly when it came to interacting the anomalous objects. They were also routinely pressed into duty as test subjects. As D-Class were drafted from prisons and detention facilities all over the world, the dark joke within the Foundation was that the “D” stood for “Disposable.”
Casualties among the D-Class were common.
“Nope,” said Duncan. “There was a serious injury during my first research project at the Foundation. After that I said, ‘No more.’ Any project that results in injury or death is a failure on the part of the research team.”
Duncan was pleased by Karen’s smile as she turned her attention back to his notes. He liked Karen. She had been his first choice to act as assistant director on Project Argus. Prior to joining the Foundation, she had been COO for a Silicon Valley bioengineering startup, a background which made her well-suited for overseeing all of the tests being done for Argus.
He also thought she was beautiful.
On the testing chamber floor, two members of the containment team were carefully working to flip the tortoise shell onto its back. They handled it the way they might handle unstable dynamite.
The shell had arrived on loan from Site-19 the day before. It was the first of four anomalous objects that Duncan had requested for testing as part of the training phase of the project.
The Argus neural network would be used to sift through mountains of data looking for patterns, but first they needed to teach it what kinds of patterns they were interested in. To do this, Duncan’s team would test various anomalous objects and carefully document their effects. The cause-and-effect relationships would then be encoded and loaded into Argus.
Once Argus was trained, they would then load all the effects that the Foundation had observed around the world. Argus would point them to the causes.
The shell, anomalous object SCP-0107, had been chosen for this kind of testing because the effects that it created were immediate and obvious. Also, because of the nature of these effects, they could be easily monitored and accurately encoded.
It was the plan for encoding these effects that Duncan and Karen were working on.
Duncan had decided on strategy of multiple choice for capturing the test results. Each encoder would be given a ledger filled with all possible descriptions of the observations made during testing. Each person would circle the words in the ledger which best described the phenomena they witnessed.
The lists were broken up into sections describing all manner of observable phenomenon such as meteorological, sociological or extradimensional. There was even a section devoted to capturing strong emotions caused by the anomaly like fear, confusion, euphoria and depression. Each observation had corresponding selections in the ledger.
No other writing or images would be allowed in the ledgers. This method ensured that only coded descriptions would be shared between the Foundation sites.
To protect the workers themselves, Duncan had insisted that all encoders be physically separated from each other while they worked. They would only be allowed to handle any artifacts, notes or images for as short a period of time as possible. And that they would be given examinations, psychological and physical, after every three shifts.
Karen made a dismissive snort.
Duncan looked up to see an orange-clad D-Class was being led onto the testing room floor. He recognized Martin.
Before he could react, Karen reached for a microphone sitting on the table between them, “Don’t use that D-Class for this test,” she said. He could hear the echo of her voice broadcast over the testing chamber on the other side of the glass.
An operator on the testing room floor looked up from his clipboard. He glanced at Martin then stared up at Karen, his eyebrows raised in a question.
“He’s going to get us all killed,” Karen said into the microphone. “Please, get him out of there.”
When the testing floor operator continued to stare at her she added, “You can do the test yourself. It’ll be perfectly safe if you just follow the instructions exactly.”
The operator on the testing room floor hesitated for a moment and then gestured to Martin. A few seconds later a guard opened the door and Martin was ushered out of the room. He was closely followed by the containment team as they exited the chamber.
As Karen turned away from the observation window, she flashed a quick smile at Duncan. “I’ve worked with that guy before. You can never tell how he’s going to react to something.”
Duncan wondered if he might be falling in love.
A red light began to flash in the observation room to indicate that a test was in progress. Out in the testing chamber, the operator was carefully pouring water from a graduated cylinder into the upturned tortoise shell.
On the monitor in front of them, the sky was rapidly darkening. As they watched storm clouds boiled out of what had been a clear sky only moments before. Within a few minutes the entire countryside was obscured by a heavy, driving rain.
Duncan and Karen noted the time and location coordinates. They then went through the ledger between them, quickly circling all of the observable effects associated with the test. When they were done, they had a complete description of the cause and effect coded as circled selections in their testing log.
The first of many results ready to be loaded into Argus.
“Ready to take this show on the road?” asked Duncan. The O5 Council had provided Duncan with a list of one hundred and seventy-five anomalous objects that they wanted to have included in the first phase of testing. Duncan had only scanned the list before handing it to Karen. She would spend the upcoming weeks traveling between Foundation sites all over the world to oversee the most sensitive tests.
“This is exciting!” said Karen. “I’ve always wanted to see more of the Foundation!”
“I envy you,” said Duncan, smiling. “It should be pretty cool.”
On the monitor the rain continued to fall.
Day 16: The Child
“Please state your name and badge number,” said Six.
“Duncan Holstrom,” Duncan recited his badge number.
“Report.”
Duncan began his update.
Nearly sixty percent of Foundation sites had established data collection assembly lines in accordance with Duncan’s specifications. Data collection had begun at most of those locations and so far, none had reported any incidents. Duncan’s team was coming together and had been set up in their own isolated lab for the duration of the project. The Argus neural engine had been nearly rebuilt and was awaiting upgrades.
Karen had just returned from her first week overseeing the testing at other Foundation sites. Duncan had not received her report yet but was due to meet with her right after he left his meeting with Council Member Six.
After all of his years as a Level Three researcher, Duncan was amazed to see how fast the Foundation could move for a Level Four Director leading an O5 priority project. All in all, he was pleased with how things were going.
Still, there was one issue:
“My team still isn’t complete,” concluded Duncan. “My requests for senior researchers Park and Long were denied.”
Tom Masterson had been appointed to lead engineer on Project Argus. Tom was a veteran developer from DARPA and had been with the Foundation for decades. He had also been the senior engineer on the first iteration of Argus making him a natural choice to lead the work now.
But while Tom was highly-respected for his engineering skills, he was nearing retirement and it had been a long time since he was on the cutting edge of computer science. He wasn’t the guy to bring the latest improvements in artificial intelligence to the project.
Which is why Duncan had requested two of the strongest researchers outside of Stuttgart.
“Your timeline has been accelerated,” said Six. “You will not have time for new research.
To keep this project on schedule, the Council has elected to make members of the Brookings team available to you for one week.”
“Oh,” Duncan was getting used to rolling with whatever Six threw at him. “Okay. We are ready to accept their assistance at any time.”
“One final thing, Mister Holstrom.” said Six. “I believe your security precautions to be excessive. More to the point, I believe that they are slowing down the data collection process. I understand your desire to protect the people involved in data collection, but that cannot compromise the pace of this project.
Do I make myself clear?”
“I understand,” said Duncan. “I will consider special dispensation for sites that cannot immediately meet the standards I’ve outlined.”
There was a long pause.
“Progress to date is satisfactory,” said Six.
“That will be all.”
Duncan left the small conference room and crossed the skyway into the main site facility.
He was excited to see Karen again after her week on the road. He was looking forward to hearing about how well their testing system was working as well as getting first-hand insight into how some of the Foundation’s most secure sites operated.
Site-24 was broken into separate sections, each dedicated to one of the major functions of the facility. Karen kept an office in the research block where Duncan had worked for years and it was there that Duncan stopped in to see her.
His excitement disappeared the second he saw her face.
Karen looked up from her desk and met Duncan’s eyes. She did not smile. She had bags under her eyes, and it looked as if she’d been crying. She seemed exhausted.
She returned Duncan’s shocked gaze steadily, as if she was fully aware of what her face was communicating and wanted him to see it.
Duncan’s greeting stuck in his throat. Instead of saying anything he stepped into her office and closed the door behind him.
“My report,” Karen gestured to a three-ring binder sitting on her desk.
Duncan walked to her desk and picked up the binder. He looked at her again, eyebrows raised. She stared back at him without changing her expression.
Duncan opened the binder and began to flip through the pages.
With each page his shock and horror increased.
After six pages, he stopped and stared at her. His mouth gaped open.
“Three dead?” he asked incredulous.
“Four,” Karen responded. “The surviving test subject died shortly after the test was completed.”
“What the hell is this thing?” Duncan flipped back and forth between the pages of her report.
“Around Site-11, they call it ‘The Child,’” said Karen.
“Is it a child?”
Duncan was now looking at photos of the test. In one, a dark-haired girl, no more than four years old, huddled in a corner on a blood-soaked floor. She was surrounded by corpses which appeared to have been violently hacked to death. He felt he might be physically ill.
“Fuck if I know,” said Karen, rubbing her eyes. “Looks like one to me.”
Duncan was suddenly furious. “How could you let this happen?” he demanded. “Where are your safety protocols?”
Karen responded as if she’d been slapped. “There are no ‘safety protocols’ for that thing!” she shouted. “You have no idea how other sites operate! This was almost routine for them!”
There were only three humanoid containment units at Site-24. And none of the anomalous creatures held there did anything like this.
One of them thought it was Santa Claus.
They both were silent for a few moments. Duncan found that it was difficult to look at her.
He leafed through Karen’s report again and noted that she’d only run the test once. Protocol required that each of these tests each be run a minimum of three times.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s take this thing off the testing schedule. You and I can work out a plan for how to safely get the data we need.”
When she didn’t respond he turned toward the door. “May I keep this?” he asked, holding up her binder.
“Please,” she said. “Take it.”
Day 20: Twins
The research help from the Brookings team came in the form of a pair of identical twins.
Noam and Uri had both graduated together from Cambridge and then MIT with matching PHDs in computational cellular molecular biology and computational physics. While still in school they’d written a program that predicted outbreaks of various communicable diseases by tracking the movement of cellphones. They then became multimillionaires at the age of 28 after selling their startup to a German pharmaceutical concern. Soon afterward they had been recruited to the Foundation. Noam was a classical violinist. Uri played the cello.
They were unfailingly pleasant, direct and professional.
Duncan found it very difficult to keep any hint of jealousy and resentment out of his voice when he spoke to them.
He guided the twins through Site-24 to emerge from the building into an expanse of tightly-packed gravel which ended at a flat open field stretching to a grey tree line on horizon. The gravel was separated from the field by a tall chain link fence topped with razor wire.
This was Site-24’s “Back Lot.”
The winter wind ripped at their coats as they crossed the gravel lot and stopped at a guardhouse standing in front of the fence. Looking through the fence, the most prominent feature of the snow-dusted field beyond was a concrete walkway leading from the gate and off into the distance. Aside from the guardhouse, there were no buildings visible.
Duncan presented his credentials to the officer at the guard house and he and the twins were buzzed through.
The pill boxes were underground bunkers built for active projects deemed a high risk for contamination to the rest of Site-24. In addition to being physically separated from the facility buildings, each bunker had its own isolated electrical and water supply. In the event of an emergency, they could be completely sealed from the surrounding environment and support six inhabitants for up to forty-eight hours.
There was only one line of communication running into the bunkers. An emergency intercom which connected each bunker to the guardhouse at the gate.
“Any incident occurs inside your bunker you, or another member of your team is to activate the emergency line to be connected to the officer on duty.” Chatham had told Duncan when first introducing him to Pill Box Three. “That officer will evaluate the situation remotely and take appropriate action.”
The intercom had a camera and speaker, but both were inactive until someone initiated a connection from inside. They couldn’t be turned on from the guard house without a special override from the security director on duty. The intercom unit was there for Duncan’s team to reach out. Not for the outside world to reach in.
As Duncan led the twins across the field to the bunker where Argus was being assembled, they passed an intersection where the walkway split off to the left and right at ninety-degree angles. On each side the walkway ran for about eighty yards where it appeared to simply end. These would be Pillboxes One and Two. Duncan had never visited these bunkers and they were currently not in use.
The walkway they were on ended abruptly at a post marking the location of Pillbox Three. Next to the post was a set of concrete stairs leading into the ground. Duncan led the way down the stairs and entered a key code into a heavy metal door which, despite its obvious weight, swung open easily.
Passing through an airlock they entered a concrete-lined room, six meters square. In the center of the space was a long work table with three workstations to a side. The team was positioned to face each other as they worked, Duncan’s computer sat across from a space reserved for Karen.
Arranged around the room were various work benches. In the far corner was a computer rack dedicated to Argus. In the opposite corner next to the entrance was the intercom above which was a bulbous fisheye lens.
Most of the light in the room came from several desk lamps on the table and from the computer monitors at each work station.
Duncan introduced the Noam and Uri to the team.
“Call me Syd,” said Siddhartha, enthusiastically shaking their hands.
Syd was responsible for all the input and output that Argus generated and was the youthful presence in the bunker at twenty-seven. His family had moved to Texas from his native India when he was only three. He had gone on to get two masters degrees from Texas A&M in computer science and electrical engineering.
“I’ve heard great things about you in Germany,” he added in his friendly southern drawl. “I’m excited to have you here.”
Tom was more reserved. He barely gave a perfunctory wave and a tight smile from his corner of the room.
The reaction seemed a little defensive to Duncan.
Tom was the project’s veteran, but he had seemed distracted and distant since the start of the project. He was easily the most senior developer at Site-24 but lately Duncan had noticed him struggling with some fairly straightforward topics.
Duncan was starting to worry. He made a mental note to pull Tom aside if it continued.
In addition to the information generated by the Foundation, Argus would be monitoring data from hundreds of external sources. Meteorological events from all over the world, mass-migrations of various birds and ocean creatures, seismic events, stock market tickers, crime statistics and political instabilities. Everything from the alignment of planets to dramatic changes in birth rates would be tracked and compared to the presence of anomalous activity.
Handling all of this data would be Johanna and Clark. Both held advanced degrees in linguistics and mathematics. Johanna was the prototypical Berkeley hippie from the sixties. Clark was ex-military intelligence and had been educated at the Air Force Academy.
They both welcomed Noam and Uri warmly.
Including himself and Karen, the Argus team now stood at a tight six members. All working closely together in the bunker for the six-week duration of the project. Most of the team members were cross-trained to perform any of the other jobs, should the need arise.
Once the twins had been introduced around the Pillbox Three, they were provided with a table and chairs in the corner next to the Argus computer. There they went to work, side by side modifying a set of beefy graphics processors which would be used to power the neural engine. They rarely spoke to each other as they worked, but when they did speak it was in the short crisp exchanges of two surgeons engaged in an operation that they had performed together a hundred times.
“We brought social networking sentiment data,” Uri said to Duncan at one point.
“What?” Asked Duncan.
“Social network sentiment data,” Noam had repeated for him. “To add to your datasets of external phenomena. People will often state online factors which are according to their mood. It’s got timestamps and geocodes. It covers about three billion people. We were able to extract it from all of the major social networks and we’ve brought it here. About ten years’ worth.”
After helping Tom and Syd build two identical processing units, they then uploaded their modifications to Argus. Afterward, Syd requested their assistance matching the newly configured neural network to a set of simulation tools that he had created.
Finally, they instructed the team in everything they’d provided, painstakingly walking them through thousands of lines of exhaustively documented code. Along the way they engaged the team in ad hoc debates about mathematics, statistics, data-shaping techniques and heuristics.
And then, three days after arriving at Site-24 they boarded a plane back to Stuttgart.
Two hours after they departed, the first data began to arrive.
Day 24: D-13639
Duncan sat in his office in the Level 4 suite and pressed the replay icon on the computer screen before him. A video clip started again from the beginning.
A washed-out scene showed a simple white room from the perspective of a wide-angle camera mounted high on a wall. Below, three people sat with their backs to the camera, at work along the same side of a long table. Each worker was separated from their neighbor by a simple wooden divider. All wore orange jumpsuits with the D designation and their number across their backs.
The three were carefully and systematically working through a stack of envelopes before them. Each would take an envelope from a pile on their right, open it and empty out its contents onto the table in front of them. In all cases the envelopes appeared to contain either notes or a single photograph, though the actually images were obscured by black opaque squares that had been edited into the video in post-production. Each worker would then encode the contents of the envelope by checking off dozens of descriptors in a ledger. As they finished with each note or image, they would return it to its envelope and set it in a stack on their left.
As he watched the worker in the center, a woman with long black hair and the designation D-13639 across her back, returned some photos to their envelope but rather than pick up another to repeat the process, she simply stopped moving. For thirty seconds as the two people on either side of her continued with their task, the figure in the center of the frame sat motionless with her hands resting on the table in front of her.
Then, after thirty seconds of inactivity, she stood up, turned to face the camera and collapsed. The people on either side of her quickly stood up and turned to help their fallen companion. As they moved to kneel next to her, a security officer could be seen running into the frame. He immediately began working to separate the two remaining D-Class subjects from the stricken woman on the floor. The situation appeared to stabilize for about three minutes as another security officer, and finally a medical officer entered the frame to attend to the fallen woman. It was at this moment that the other two D-Class subjects collapsed.
Duncan froze the video and turned his attention to the incident report, reading through the clinical description of what was now referred to as incident 2111-063A. All six of the people currently frozen on his computer screen had eventually succumbed to whatever horror was hidden in one of those envelopes. Five of the affected appeared to be recovering. The woman who had directly viewed the images had died.
Duncan had always been aware of the risk, but seeing it play out in front of him was like a punch in the gut.
If the deaths at Site-11 were Karen's fault, then the dead woman on the floor was his. Site-87 was one of those he had allowed to relax some of their safety procedures to stay on schedule. Even if he could not have saved D-13693 he should have been able to protect her neighbors.
Something in the images that D-13639 was working with had killed her. Moreover, once she was affected, she became contagious to anyone making contact with her, causing them to contract the hazard to fall ill as well.
The question before him now was whether or not to try to continue encoding the data from this anomaly or to exclude it from the incoming data pool.
As he considered the question, he realized that part of the problem was the long pause in D-13639’s movements. Had she immediately risen from her chair and pointed a shaking finger at a single image on the table before dropping dead, it might be safe to assume that whatever was on that image is what killed her. But that long pause suggested that she was stricken by something that she’d seen earlier. Maybe it was the last image she saw. Maybe it was the one before that.
That video had been shot 48 hours earlier in a town outside of Melbourne as researchers at the site there worked to review and encode data from that location. Whatever data they collected was to be sent to a central processing facility in upstate New York where it would be spot checked for accuracy and completeness. After that it would be combined with the data from at least a dozen other sites around the world.
And then it would come here to him and his team.
Whatever had killed D-13639 was doing a number of impossible things. Cogneto-hazards were terrifying enough on their own, but there were no cases that he was aware of where they could kill the person standing next to whoever had seen them.
If it could do that, could its effects also travel to Site-24 even after it had been encoded?
It suddenly occurred to him that his hands were shaking.
All staff who came into recurring contact with any member of the O5 Council were subject to regular compulsory psychiatric evaluations. Duncan’s had started several weeks ago. At the time, he and the “psychiatric wellness coach” had discussed Duncan’s difficulty sleeping and his increasingly vivid and disturbing dreams.
The coach had listened intently and took detailed notes, but had not offered anything other than a prescription for sleep medication.
He appeared to be more interested in guilt.
“It’s normal to feel guilty about putting people in harm’s way,” the counselor had asked. “Losing people under your command can be painful, and it’s important to talk about it.”
“No. I don’t feel that way,” Duncan had replied. “I do my best to take care of everyone.”
The coach had continued to probe, but Duncan was steadfast in his belief that he was doing everything possible to complete his project while protecting everyone associated with it.
Duncan turned his attention back to the image on his computer screen.
The value of any information gleaned from this particular anomaly was not worth the risk. They had plenty of other anomalous artifacts to draw their conclusions from. He would only go back to these obviously dangerous anomalies if it was later determined to be absolutely necessary.
Duncan made a note to remove artifacts from this anomaly from the data pool and to cease all associated encoding.
He could no longer protect D-13639 but he could protect everyone else.
Day 30: Goat
“Please state your name,” said Six to start their conference.
“Duncan Holstrom,” Duncan began to recite his eight-digit employee number.
“I want SCP-2111 put back on the data collection schedule,” Six interrupted.
It took Duncan a moment to realize that Six was referring to the incident in Melbourne.
“An encoder was killed in an apparent memetic attack,” Duncan said. “I removed those artifacts because they’re too dangerous to encode.”
“Before containment, 2111 had been associated with multiple incidents resulting in large-scale loss of civilian life,” Six said. “It is exactly the kind of anomaly that we are building Argus to locate.”
Of course, it had been associated with mass casualty events, Duncan thought. The thing generated contagious, mutating cognitohazards. He couldn’t imagine anything more dangerous.
“We can’t encode it if everyone who looks at it drops dead,” Duncan responded. “There is no safe way to work with it.
“We are not doing this work to make ourselves safe, Mister Holstrom.” Six responded. “If you believe that you can improve the procedures at Site-87, then do so. But either way I want data collection of SCP-2111 brought back on line.”
Duncan stared at the unblinking eye of the meeting room camera. But in his imagination, he was seeing the face of the Melbourne woman in the video recording, just before she died.
“Half of the Melbourne encoders have been neutralized,” said Duncan.
“Then assign more,” Six replied, his voice emotionless as ever. “You have been allocated surplus D-Class subjects for exactly this reason.”
When Duncan didn’t respond, Six moved on. “Explain why the testing of 0053 has not been completed.”
Duncan groaned inwardly.
“We don’t yet have a way of testing 0053 that doesn’t result in the death of all associated test…,” Duncan began.
“There is no way to test 0053 that does not result in death,” Six cut him off.
“We should only be testing lethal anomalies as a last resort.”
“0053 causes anomalous criminal behavior,” Six continued, as if Duncan had not spoken. “This is another pattern that Argus must be trained to recognize. To train it you must supply it with examples of what to look for. Examples you get out of the test results.
I resent being forced to explain this to you.”
Duncan felt his face growing hot.
“0053 is a child!” Duncan said. He was thinking of Karen now. And about sending her back into those testing chambers.
“0053 is not a child,” said Six. “And you do not have the luxury of sentimentality. The Foundation has an ethics panel. They have sanctioned tests of 0053. The Foundation also has an apparatus dedicated to safety.
What the Foundation does not have is a convolutional neural network for predicting emergent anomalies. That is your job. And you are not doing your job.”
“We’re looking for other anomalies to work with…” Duncan protested.
“You are moving too slowly!” Six erupted.
For the first time Duncan heard a note of emotion in the voice belonging to Council Member Six.
“You will immediately restart testing and data collection of 2111 and 0053 and all other anomalies referred to you,” Six had regained his composure. “You will no longer compromise your focus on this project with concerns that have been entrusted to other Foundation staff. If you need more D-Class subjects ask for them.”
Duncan stifled the urge to shake his head in disgust. “Understood.”
“Your performance is unsatisfactory, Mister Holstrom. You will take immediate steps to improve.”
It was too much. Duncan stood up forcefully enough that the chair he was sitting in toppled over backwards.
He scowled into the video lens on the wall before him.
There was a pause, and then, “Your updates to me will be doubled,” Six said finally. “You will now apprise me of project status twice weekly.”
Duncan said nothing. He did not break eye contact with the camera.
“That will be all.”
The video screen went dark.
Duncan left the meeting room, shaking with frustration. He went immediately into his office, shut the door and collapsed into in his chair.
He sat there letting his emotions wash over him.
After a few minutes his heart rate had returned to normal. As time passed, his anger slowly turned into dread. And then into sadness. Finally, he had to admit to himself that he was stalling.
His arms were leaden as he opened his computer console. He logged in and brought up a catalog of the thirty-two unassigned D-Class subjects allocated to Project Argus.
Duncan scanned the list morosely.
The entries on his computer screen didn’t provide much information about each subject. Simply their D-Classification number, age, gender, native language, education level and the site number where they were currently located.
Duncan assumed that he could find out more about each of them if he chose. But a search through the Foundation D-Class database would almost certainly be logged. He didn’t know if his next update to Six would then include questions about why he was digging into the personal background the resources assigned to him, but that this point, he didn’t want to find out.
He had been presented with enough information to do his job. The only thing that differentiated these people to him was their language proficiency and their education. His most pressing problem was that the encoding was falling behind schedule and this work required someone who was literate with fluent English.
He selected the twelve English speaking D-Class with 9th grade education or higher and assigned them to the data encoding work. For these he requested transport to Site 87 outside of Melbourne.
“First world problems, eh?” He thought out loud.
He chuckled, surprising himself.
For the rest of them, he sorted them in ascending order of their designation number and assigned them to be used as test subjects. Some of them he knew would be assigned to testing 0053. Their deaths were nearly certain.
Into the pits with you!
Suddenly it was all very funny. Before he could stop himself, he burst out in giggles which gave way to a stifled laughing fit.
SCP-0053 wasn’t the only fate which could befall any of the D-Class assigned to testing. There were things worse than The Child in the Foundation containment units.
He imagined some unlucky, illiterate goatherd, plucked from god knows where, the hills of Afghanistan or Somalia maybe, for god only knows what crime. Stealing a goat?
He kept imagining the surprised and uncomprehending look on the goatherd’s face as he was sent into a testing cell by indifferent Foundation staff. Duncan imagined the goatherd’s eyes bulging, exaggerated to cartoon proportions, as some eldritch nightmare wrapped him in its tentacles.
Hope you enjoyed that goat!
The next thing he knew he was laughing out loud.
Part of him wondered if he was being watched in his office, but he couldn’t help it anymore. In his mind the imaginary goatherd was calling out to his god in rapid, hi-pitched, sing-song cries as his chest, shoulders and neck were pulled into a wet gibbering maw. Only the head remained, still entreating the heavens for salvation as Foundation researchers diligently recorded his demise in a series of multiple-choice options in a big black ledger.
Tears ran down Duncan’s face.
He was crying now. His laughter gave way to sobs as he sat with his face in his hands.
Day 34: Pillbox One
“Fuck,” Tom exclaimed suddenly. Not loud, but urgently enough that everyone in the pillbox stopped what they were doing to look in his direction.
Duncan felt and eerie calm descend upon him. “Report,” he demanded evenly.
“I think I just…” Tom began, “I may have just erased the master file the twins left us.”
The room sat in complete silence as he clicked away on his keyboard and then rummaged under papers on his desk.
“Oh, hell. Here it is,” He sighed, obviously relieved as he pulled an external hard drive from under a notebook. “Whew! False alarm,” he chuckled sheepishly.
The next thing Duncan knew he was on his feet, his favorite coffee mug shattered against the wall over Tom’s head.
He raised his finger to point at Tom and a voice that he did not recognize erupted out of his chest. “You will get your head in the game Mister Masterson, or I will have you recommissioned to D-Class!”
The room was silent. Tom stared back at him, his eyes wide. An orange chip of the broken ceramic mug was sticking out of his brown hair.
“Do you understand me?”
Tom stared at him in amazement. Then said, “Yes sir. I do,” with a quick nod.
Duncan was dimly aware of something that he’d never experienced before. Everyone in the room was looking at him. And they were all scared shitless. He turned on his heal, grabbed his heavy outer coat and stalked out of the bunker. He climbed to the top of the stairs and paused for a minute, breathing in the cold fresh air. A few snowflakes floated on the wind.
He put his head down and started walking toward the gate. He had no particular direction in mind, but simply needed to move.
His extremities were still buzzing with the energy of the moment. That had never happened to him before. He’d always prided himself on his calm, clear detached approach to problems. The person who he had just exposed to the team was someone that he did not know.
Something was wrong with Tom, though. The man that Duncan had worked with before would never make such rookie mistakes. Sometimes Tom looked as if he had simply forgotten years of development skills. The mistakes were really irritating and Duncan was beginning to worry that they might impact his schedule.
And he had to admit that the stress of the work was getting to him, too. He really should be bringing these issues up in front of the psychologist. The Foundation knew that the work was psychologically demanding and had tools in place to help employees through the challenges.
The actions required of him now were clear. If he had any reason to believe that he was acting abnormally at all, it was his duty to schedule an emergency psych evaluation and report it. But as stressed as he was about the work, he was even more afraid of what might happen if he were deemed unfit for the job.
On a whim he turned at the signpost marking the path to Pillbox Two. After a few moments the walkway predictably ended at a set of stairs leading down. Except that the staircase was partially full of snow, it was identical to the bunker he and his team were currently working away in.
This pillbox looked deserted.
He turned and walked back the way he had come, then continued along the path to Pillbox One.
He had, also stopped talking about his dreams.
They had been getting worse. The night before, he dreamt that he was standing in sweltering thicket of tall slender trees. Even though it was dark he could feel the heat which hung heavy on him like a rain-soaked overcoat. As he looked up, he saw the trunks surrounding him didn’t actually belong to trees, but were the legs of dozens of enormous pink plastic lawn flamingos. As he looked up at the giant birds they began to chant as they rocked back and forth menacingly, lighting streaked across the night sky above them.
He had awakened in a cold sweat.
Duncan came to a stop realizing that he had come to the end of the concrete walkway to Pillbox One. But here, when he looked down he did not see the downward stairway that he’d expected. Instead, the sidewalk here ended at a long narrow mound of relatively fresh cement.
This stairway had been filled in with concrete.
It took Duncan a few moments to process what he was seeing.
Something terrible had happened here. And the Foundation had simply buried it. As he stood there in the cold, he imagined a cement truck backing up to Pillbox One and dumping tons of wet cement into the stairwell.
Duncan rocked back on his heels and looked up at the cold grey sky. Then he cast his gaze over the rest of the open field off to his left where his own pillbox sat underground. To where his team worked on an incredibly dangerous project.
These weren’t bunkers. Bunkers were designed to keep things out. They were sarcophagi. They’d been designed to seal things in. It had occurred to him to wonder why they had been constructed underground. Now he knew. They’d been designed to be buried.
As he looked out over the cold empty lot, he was suddenly certain that the reason he and his team were given this project was because they were expendable. The reason that Brookings and his fucking Wonder Twins had been excluded from the project was because they were not. The fact that the twins had left Pillbox Three before the data started arriving now took on new significance.
Every member of Duncan’s team was smart, creative and dedicated to their work. But this wasn’t enough to be considered essential to the Foundation. Reclassifying Masterson to D-Class suddenly seemed redundant. He was practically D-Class already. As were all the rest of them.
He was also now certain of what would actually happen were someone to push that emergency communication button inside the bunker and made contact with the guardhouse. The first action of the guard on duty would be to flip a switch and remotely lock everyone inside.
He turned his gaze back to Pillbox One. He couldn’t imagine what had happened here, but whatever it was, it was still down there, entombed permanently under two meters of cement, steel, lead and earth. Possibly along with the team that had worked on it.
As he stared at the concrete mound, he became aware of the soft putting of a nearby engine. Looking out to the middle distance he realized that the Pillbox One’s generator was running.
Whatever was down there still required an energy source.
“This thing better fucking work,” Karen had said in their last meeting.
He had just told her that she had to go back to Site-11 and finish testing with “The Child.”
She had simply looked resigned. Ten years older than the woman he had met only a month ago.
He remembered the fury in her eyes when he’d asked if there were anything he could do to help.
“I’m doing my goddamn job, Duncan,” she’d snarled at him. “You do yours.
You want to help? Make this worth it. This thing better fucking work.”
Duncan slowly turned and started back to Pillbox Three.
He would do his best. But first, he had to apologize to Tom.
Day 36: [REDACTED]
Duncan was deep in the zone. It had been a long time since he had immersed himself so fully in a torrent of information like that currently at his fingertips. Project Argus was bringing vast amounts of Foundation intelligence together in one place for the first time. He didn’t think anyone had ever seen a view of anomalous activity as complete as the one he now commanded.
As he navigated between the files on his computer, new insights presented themselves with only the slightest of coaxing.
How many incidents had occurred at the Foundation since its inception?
- 8,728
How about the locations of incidents that occurred on a Monday involving aquatic creatures? But only those which were recorded by someone who’s first name ended in the letter “y.”
- Borneo
- Venice (twice)
- Batton Rouge, Louisiana
How about…
He felt a tap on his shoulder.
Duncan turned to see Johanna in the seat next to his. She had turned in her chair to face him.
It had become common for all members of Project Argus to spend their days together, side by side, at the long work table inside Pillbox Three. As data arrived in trucks, a backlog had formed as it waited for Clark and Johanna to test and clean it before loading it into the neural network.
He and Karen had both started pitching in cleaning data to keep the project on schedule.
Duncan pulled off his headphones.
Gerry Rafferty singing “Baker Street” faded into the background and he was returned to the predominant sounds inside of Pillbox Three. At the moment these were the soft hum of cooling fans and the intermittent tapping of keyboards.
“Something’s not right, boss,” said Johanna, jerking a thumb toward her computer screen.
Duncan leaned in and focused his attention to the lines she was showing him.
Each data file which arrived at Pillbox Three began with a header containing basic information about the file. In all cases this included the file name, the date it was created, the principal researchers involved in collecting the data and a list of everyone who had touched the file since it had been created.
In the file Johanna was pointing to the names of the principal researchers were listed as [REDACTED].
Duncan couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would hide the names of the principal researchers from his team. It made no sense. Knowing the creator of the file was critical to making corrections were there any problems that his team was unable to fix.
“Where did this file come from?” asked Duncan.
“Site-87,” Johanna replied. “This is the second one I opened with a redacted header.”
“I just got one too,” Clark chimed in from across the table. “This one’s from Site-30.”
Duncan sat back in his chair and stared at Johanna’s screen. He didn’t like this little mystery. The project was complicated enough without untraceable files being inserted into Argus. And redacting this information took a deliberate act from someone with Level Four or O5 authority.
The more he thought about it, the more irritated he became.
“Quarantine any files with redacted provenance,” he said finally. He couldn’t contact anyone to ask about the files from inside the bunker. But his next meeting with Council Member Six was in two days. He would bring it up then.
“I’ll get back to you on what to do with them.”
He turned his attention back to his computer and pulled his headphones back on. His enthusiasm for surfing through the database was somewhat dampened by this new problem.
But he had real work that he should have been doing, anyway.
Argus had been searching for patterns for just over a week. Methodically ingesting new data as it arrived from Foundation sites along with observable phenomena from around the world. As it worked, it would adjust its focus on different inputs and compare the results with known anomalous events. It started its comparisons from the earliest events on record and worked its way forward, one week at a time, through the years to the present day. Each time new files were introduced into its memory it would start again from the beginning.
So far, its success at locating anomalies was no better than random.
Checking the incoming data was tedious work. Opening each of the hundreds of files, one at a time, verifying where it came from and running a series of automated tests to fix any inconsistencies, then moving it into a que to be loaded into Argus.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Duncan had wanted to resist the work originally.
It had been two weeks since the incident in Melbourne and there had been other casualties. Both in the data collection and the testing. The number of dead encoders now stood at five. Duncan had avoided coming into direct contact with the data because it scared him.
Then, one day as he sat watching Johanna and Clark work one file after another, for hours at time, he could no longer direct others to take risks that he was unwilling to take himself.
And so, he sat with his headphones on, listening to his favorite playlist of eighties music, as he checked and sorted thousands of lines of data.
“Good-night,” said Johanna, as she pulled on her coat to leave.
Duncan looked at his watch, it was after 9:00. He had lost all track of time.
“Good-night,” he responded.
Once she was gone, Duncan found himself alone in the bunker with Karen.
She sat directly across from him at the work table. From where he sat, he could see her face, brows knit in concentration. Her eyes focused intently on the screen in front of her.
He was reminded again of her beauty.
In recent weeks their relationship had deteriorated to the point of mere civility. Over time it had become harder for them to look each other in the eye as if the guilt they saw in the other’s face reflected their own. She had also taken on a condescending tone when talking to him. As if his sheltered career at Site-24 now made him too provincial for her to take seriously.
“She hates me,” thought Duncan as he watched her.
He had had such high hopes for getting to know her better.
He knew from the colors reflected on her face from her computer screen that she was looking at the heatmap. An outline of the major continents of the world, flattened and color coded to represent the Argus prediction of areas most likely to have a major anomalous event in the near future. As each new day’s worth of data was read analyzed, the map would shift slightly to represent the updated predictions. The result was an animated simulation of anomalous predictions over time. The colors flowed, like oil in a lava lamp, over the countries and states outlined on the map.
He could also tell whether or not the neural net was producing any useful predictions. The color-coding ranged from dark blue to indicate that the Argus predictions were incorrect, through green, orange and finally red for areas where the neural net’s predictions were accurate.
At the moment the reflection from her monitor bathed her face in a dark blue green.
Duncan had stared at the shifting colors of a heatmap while working many past projects. It was soothing to watch the predictions shift as they updated over time. If you stared long enough you could convince yourself that you could see the patterns even before they were fully rendered on your screen. It was tempting to sit there and let the colors wash over you. The effect was soothing.
Hypnotic even.
In fact…
“Karen. Don’t stare at that.”
Karen’s eyes broke away from her screen to stare into his. “It’s a heatmap, Duncan,” She snapped. “You’re supposed to look at it. That’s how it works.”
Duncan held her gaze for a heartbeat, sighed and pushed his chair back from his desk. It was late. He was failing to make any meaningful progress on the vast rows of data that he was looking at. It was time to call it a night.
He stood up.
“I’m sorry, Duncan,” said Karen.
When he again looked into her eyes, she seemed to struggle for words, “I’m sorry,” she simply repeated.
He grabbed his coat as he headed to the door. “Seriously, don’t stare at that.”
He pulled open the airtight door, then the heavy outer door, and ascended the stairs. The sun had set and he stood for a moment in the brisk night air. There was very little sound in the air. Just the distant hum of the bunker’s generator.
He crossed the distance to the guard house and was buzzed out.
That night he dreamt he was standing in a ruined SCP Facility facing down a long dark hallway. At the opposite end a blackness approached him. Part shadow, part tentacled beast, black as the void. From within its mass stared hundreds of yellow eyes.
Its voice was familiar as it reached out for him.
Day 37: Rizzo
The day of the breach started like any other.
08:42
Duncan had just settled into his chair to scan another of the seemingly endless files on his computer screen. Steely Dan eased him into his workday through his headphones.
Karen sat across from him as she had the night before. To one side, Clark tapped away on his keyboard. Tom, on her other side, watched the heatmap as Argus implacably loaded one dataset after another in its relentless search for patterns.
Duncan took a long draw of coffee out of his new mug. For this one he had chosen a cheap indestructible plastic.
He was pulled out of his groove by a startled shout.
Looking across the table, he saw Tom staring at his computer screen. The heatmap reflected in his glasses produced a throbbing pattern of bright yellow.
Tom’s eyes were wide with surprise and his mouth began to work wordlessly.
“Got something?” asked Duncan, pulling his headphones from his ears.
Karen shifted in her seat to look at Tom’s screen over his shoulder.
“Prediction accuracy at eleven percent,” she announced to the room.
Johanna whooped from her chair and began to applaud.
Clark stood up and moved behind Karen to look at the simulation.
Duncan stood up as well.
The light reflected on the faces of Tom, Karen and Clark, shifted to orange.
Their shadows danced on the wall behind them as the simulation twisted and flowed.
Time seemed to slow down as Duncan took in the scene. Tom, stared at his monitor, his eyes wide. His mouth yawned open.
Karen rose from her chair, clapping a hand over her mouth as if to stifle a scream.
The heatmap turned deep red.
Clark jerked away from the visions on the monitor like a man struck in the face.
He placed a hand on Karen’s chair to steady himself. When it swiveled under his weight he went down hard. There was a loud crack as his head hit the wall behind him.
Then everything was happening at once.
Syd lunged across the table, placed both hands on Tom’s monitor and pulled. As it came away from its pedestal, Tom looked up and barked a sound deep from his gut. It was not language.
It was the voice from Duncan’s dream.
He winced as the sound grated across his consciousness. Syd recoiled, his hands halfway to his face as if to cover his ears.
“Okay,” said Duncan. His voice clear and firm.
“Everybody out.”
He grabbed Syd by the shoulder, pulled him from his desk and propelled him toward the door.
“Get out of here.”
There was a crash behind him as Johanna tumbled backward over her chair.
“Ow,” she said from the floor.
Across the table, Karen had torn her eyes away from Tom’s computer screen. With one hand still covering her mouth, she reached down with the other to help Clark off the floor.
Tom belched out another sound. His eyes wide as his gaze darted around the room. His expression was still one of complete surprise as if wondering why everyone was leaving in such a hurry.
Duncan winced again as something in Tom’s voice tore at his mind. He covered one ear with his free hand and turned to help Johanna off the floor.
Light flooded the dark bunker as Syd opened the door. His frame silhouetted in the doorway as he held it open.
Duncan propelled the stumbling Johanna past Syd and into the cold rain. He then turned back toward the table.
Tom still hadn’t moved from his seat. His face lit bright red by the simulation on his upturned monitor. His eyebrows raised and his mouth sagged open as he stared back at Duncan.
Clark leaned heavily against the wall. One hand to the side of his head. He eyes focused on nothing.
Karen stood between them.
As Duncan stepped toward the desk her eyes met his.
They held each other’s gaze for a heartbeat.
Then she dropped her hand from her mouth.
And spoke.
08:50
“We have an active Class-2 incident inside Pillbox Three,” Duncan shouted through the gate.
“There are three more still in there. They need immediate extraction!”
Duncan had arrived at the gate with Johanna and Syd to find the guard standing outside his guardhouse, facing them through the fence.
He was not letting them out.
The guard patted the air with his palm in the universal “calm down” gesture.
“Site security has already been alerted of a potential incident. They will be here shortly.”
Duncan had a moment to wonder how the guard had known of the incident. Then it occurred to him. It was the only way explain the three of them hurrying across the open field in the rain without their coats.
“Can we come in out of the rain?” Duncan called as the three of them shivered in the cold.
“I’m sorry,” said the guard. “Site security will be here shortly to make an assessment.”
He seemed rooted in place.
“Please be patient.”
“What the fuck was that,” Johanna turned to hiss at Duncan.
Duncan stepped forward and turned his back to the guard.
He leaned in close to them and spoke in a low voice. “Neither of you say a word until you’re out of here.”
Somewhere in the distance a siren began to wail.
09:01
“Our three team members need help!” Duncan shouted through the gate. “Get them out of there, Please!”
On the other side a five-member local security task force had assembled. They all wore light military armor and carried assault weapons. Four of them stood impassively facing Duncan through the gate.
The fifth member of the task force, the officer in charge, had identified himself as Sargent Rizzo.
“We’re not getting any audio or visual from inside Pillbox Three,” Rizzo said, “No one has triggered an emergency from inside.
No one will be authorized to enter until we have a better idea of what we’re likely to face.”
He turned to gesture to the guard on duty.
“We are going to get you out of the rain though,” Rizzo said, “We’re taking Ms. Cohen and Mr. Rami to Pillbox Two and will hold them in isolation there.
Step back from the gate, please.”
The gate buzzed and two members of the task force entered the enclosure. Their weapons were pointed at the ground, but each rested one hand on their pistol grips as they escorted Syd and Johanna back down the path.
“We’re awaiting authorization to open a channel to the Pillbox from our end,” Rizzo continued, handing Duncan a plastic poncho. “If we do establish video, we’re going to need you to stay and explain to us what we’re looking at.”
09:04
“We got signal!” shouted the officer from the guardhouse.
Duncan packed inside the guardhouse along with the sergeant and the guard on duty. They stood shoulder to shoulder, dripping in the cramped space as they watched the monitor.
Duncan had been wrong. The guardhouse did not have the ability to remotely lock the bunker in the event of an emergency. Instead, the same button inside the bunker which activated the emergency intercom also triggered a deadbolt automatically.
The face on the video screen was Clark, who had apparently engaged the intercom before attempting to leave. He was now locked inside, pleading into the camera to be let out. A large red gash stood out on his forehead and he was bleeding heavily.
Behind him, Tom still sat at his workstation. Nothing had changed about his position except that his mouth now moved continuously.
Karen sat on the floor with her back against the far wall. Both hands were clapped over her ears as she stared at Tom.
“They’re talking!” Clark was saying, his voice slurred. “Help me! Let me out of here!”
As if on cue, Tom’s voice rose in a throaty, incoherent outburst.
Clark cried out and winced at the sound. He covered his ears. As Duncan listened his skin started to crawl.
“You feel that?” Rizzo, asked.
“Yes sir, I do,” replied the guard.
“Kill it,” said Rizzo.
The guard flipped a switch on the console in front of him, cutting the audio.
Clark pleaded into the camera in sudden silence.
After frantically banging on the intercom for a few moments, still using his free hand to cover one of his ears, Clark turned and approached Tom. He grabbed the video screen holding the heat map and wrenched it free of its stand.
Tom stood and appeared to be yelling at Clark.
Clark in turn began struggling with Tom in an apparent attempt to silence the other man.
In the fighting that followed, the two men threw each other around the room. Eventually they fell to savaging each other with anything that could be used as a weapon.
Throughout it all, Karen watched the fighting from the floor with her hands over her ears.
Sergeant Rizzo watched for about thirty seconds, then turned to face Duncan.
Before Duncan could protest, he had been spun around and placed into handcuffs.
10:25
Duncan sat alone in an isolation tent adjacent to the guardhouse. On the table in front of him, a closed-circuit video monitor displayed the view from inside Pillbox Three.
He was still in handcuffs.
The fighting inside the bunker had gone on for ten minutes. Finally, Clark seemed to succumb to his head injury and had simply crumbled to the floor. Now he lay there, unconscious or dead.
Tom, battered and bleeding himself, was shouting continuously as he stalked around the room. His agitated pacing took him from the door to various bits of smashed computer hardware and back again.
Occasionally he would stop to shout at Karen before moving back into his pacing.
Karen still sat on the floor with her hands over her ears.
She now appeared to be talking to herself.
11:09
The scene in Pillbox Three had settled into a tense stasis.
Tom had ceased pacing back and forth and was now facing the corner away from the camera. His head was bowed and pressed against the wall. The muscles in his back expanded and contracted as they worked to force out the shouting that had not abated for almost two hours.
Karen appeared to be tiring. Her hands had fallen away from her ears as she slumped against the wall.
Duncan could not tell if she was still speaking.
There had been cases of cognetohazardous speech being spread through lip-reading. So, as a precaution someone had placed a pink sticky-note on the video screen to cover her face.
To Duncan it seemed one more dehumanizing indignity to someone who was already suffering so much.
Through the closed-circuit monitor Duncan watched as the task force filed into the bunker. They held their weapons ready as they quickly took positions inside the door.
Upon hearing them enter, Tom turned from the wall and moved in their direction, hands outstretched.
Duncan caught a brief glimpse of the same shocked look on his face. He was still shouting.
The gunfire was silent through the intercom as the force of the impacts threw Tom back against the wall.
On the floor, Karen seemed startled by the sound. She raised one hand toward the soldiers as she struggled to rise from the floor.
The members of the task force swung their aim in unison.
Duncan looked away.
23:27
It had taken twelve hours before Duncan had been cleared and released from quarantine.
It was now nearly midnight as he sat alone in a nondescript Site-24 research lab. He was filling out an incident report form.
He had learned that the task force had elected to use non-lethal bean-bag ammunition when they entered Pillbox Three. Karen had been rendered unconscious and brought into the Site-24 infirmary.
There she had been placed into a chemically induced coma.
Clark was still unconscious as well. While it was speculated that his head injury had prevented the memetic hazard from taking up residency in his mind, this would not become clear until he regained consciousness.
If he regained consciousness.
It was still uncertain that either Karen or Clark would survive.
Tom was dead. The autopsy, while inconclusive, pointed to cardiac arrest.
Duncan was no stranger to incident reports, having completed several over the years.
But as he reached the end of the one that he was working on, he discovered that the form had recently been updated. It now included pages of multiple-choice questions regarding the exact nature of the incident.
He leafed through the pages reading the headings that he had ordered to be appended to every incident report and test log in the Foundation.
“Indicate any strong emotions which you directly attribute to the anomalous indecent.”
The form offered a list:
- Fear / panic
- Confusion / disorientation
- Nausea / incontinence
- Anxiety
- Thoughts of violence or aggression
- Thoughts of suicide
- …
Duncan grunted, and circled every option.
Day 38: Duncan
“Please state your name,” said Six.
“You know damn well who I am,” said Duncan.
There was a long pause.
“Report,” said Six.
Duncan was providing his update from the Level Four wing’s large conference room for the first time. On the wall in front of him, four of the room’s five video panels were active. In addition to Council Member Six, Council Members Four, Nine and Eleven were also present.
As he sat alone at the long conference table, the artificial windows along the wall behind him showed the bright, spring morning outside.
The only thing on the table was a manila folder containing his letter of resignation.
“I’ve provided a full, written report,” said Duncan. “Project Argus was successful in modeling world-wide anomalous behavior. At the time of the incident, we were seeing twenty-seven percent accuracy in locating anomalous objects and seventeen percent accuracy in predicting new anomalous events. I believe those numbers could be radically improved with additional work.”
“We’ve all read your report,” said Nine in a woman’s voice. Wise and grandmotherly. “What we’re here to discuss is the breach.”
“I’ve told you all I know,” said Duncan. “As the prediction accuracy increased, the monitor displaying the heatmap began to generate a memetic hazard. There was a viral component to the spread of the hazard. Affected team members…”
Duncan paused.
“Please continue,” prompted Nine, gently.
“Karen,” Duncan continued. “Karen and Tom had been looking at the heat map and began to transmit the hazard aurally.”
“The data you introduced into Argus had been cleaned at its collection site,” stated Four in a man’s voice. Thick with age. “And it had been checked twice before you introduced it into Argus. There were no other incidents concerning those files once they left their collection sites. Is that correct?”
“The data had been checked three times,” Duncan said. “Once it arrived here at Site-24 we checked it again ourselves. Our inputs were clean, but the outputs were anomalous just the same.”
“Then, how do you account for what happened?” Four pressed.
“I don’t know,” admitted Duncan.
“The data was clean, but the patterns it formed within the simulation were anomalous,” he said. “It’s as if the pattern of all anomalous activity is itself anomalous.”
“Go on,” said Four.
“That would explain why only the heat map was hazardous,” Duncan continued slowly, thinking out loud. “It’s possible that any simulation would have the same effect. Anything that could hold a dynamic image of world anomalous behavior would produce the same anomalous pattern.
The pattern would be anomalous whether it was contained in a software simulation or in someone’s head. Once it was present, it could be spread visually or aurally.”
A new thought occurred to Duncan.
“In fact,” he said. “You might not need the simulation at all. If a person has sufficient mental capacity, simply reading enough incident reports and test logs might allow them to see the patterns in their heads.”
The room was quiet for a moment as he considered this.
“The O5 Council would probably be at the most risk. You have access to all of the information produced by the Foundation.
If you’ve got any super-geniuses on the O5 Council you should tell them not to try to read everything. Even if what they’re reading is hazard-free, if they’re smart enough to form patterns in their minds, those patterns could become anomalous. If that happens, everything they say…”
Something in the back of Duncan’s head told him to stop talking.
He looked from one camera to the next.
“Oh, dear god,” Duncan breathed. “It’s happened, hasn’t it? Someone’s read too much.”
Silence from the four monitors.
“Told you,” said Four.
“Well, now it appears we have confirmation,” said Nine. “Of course, we still have to figure out what to do about it.”
“That’s a different problem,” said Four. “In the meantime, I think we got what we’re looking for. Excellent work as always, Council Member Six.”
There were murmurs of assent from the other council members.
“If this hypothesis is true, then reports that come out of Argus should be safe to look at,” said Nine. “It’s only watching or listening to the simulated patterns that is dangerous. I believe that is the next thing to test.”
“Agreed,” said Four. “But we should definitely keep the firewall in place.
How about it, Duncan? You ready to take this project to the next step?”
Duncan stared slack-jawed at the cameras in front of him. “You knew!” He shouted at the cameras. “You knew this would happen and you sacrificed us anyway!”
“We suspected,” responded Nine. “After the first breach we couldn’t be sure if the cognito-hazards were in the data going into Argus or generated in the output. We needed to be sure.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” shouted Duncan. “We could have protected ourselves!”
And then, “Wait, what breach?”
“You did not want to know,” said Six. “Both you and Tom Masterson elected to take amnestics to nullify the memory of the most recent attempt. There had been multiple casualties in both the data collection and the development team.”
Duncan opened his mouth to speak.
Then he thought of Tom fumbling through basic development procedures. Along with the horror of the breach, how much more of his memory did the amnestics take from him? And all the files with the names redacted. He now felt sure that they were from a previous attempt, and that one of the redacted names was his own.
It was suddenly all too cruel to be a part of anymore. He was more certain than ever that he couldn’t do this another day. He remembered bragging to Karen that he’d never lost anyone before. Now the thought made him sick to his stomach.
Duncan reached for the folder on the table next to him.
“That your resignation?” asked Four. “This isn’t the first time you’ve brought it to us.”
Duncan froze. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Let me remind you,” said Six. “You directly violated protocol by not initiating the alarm from inside your research bunker.”
“If I’d initiated that alarm, you and I both know that I’d still be down there,” said Duncan.
“And by not doing it you put all of Site-24 at risk,” responded Six. “Your violation gives the Foundation broad latitude in determining any disciplinary action. Those actions can include compulsory amnestic treatment followed by termination.”
Duncan knew that if he underwent the amnestic treatment again that he would be right back here in two months leading the next phase of project Argus. Except that maybe it would be Syd leading engineering rather than Tom. And he, Duncan, would still be boasting that he’d never lost anyone on any of his projects.
Maybe Pillbox Three would be buried in cement and his new team would work out of Pillbox Two.
“Just as you were the person best positioned to take the project forward last time, you are still the person best positioned to finish it,” said Four. “We’d prefer you kept your memory. It would save us a lot of time.”
Duncan looked at his letter of resignation and thought of Tom, so close to retirement. And Karen, so bright and beautiful. Both deserved so much more than to simply be forgotten.
And then he remembered his dreams. The amnestic had wiped the experience of the first breach from his conscious memory. But they hadn’t cleared his subconscious.
“Duncan?” prodded Nine.
He would have those dreams forever.
“Mister Holstrom,” said Six.
“No,” Duncan said, finally.
“I have a better idea.”
Day 212: Epilogue
The sun was setting as Duncan strode into the low thatch hut. The sky was a fantastic orange and red over the hot Amazonian jungle. The air was filled with the cries of tropical birds and the buzz of insects.
It had been over six months since he was formally employed by the Foundation. In the end, they had just let him walk out the door. Just as important, they’d let him take his memories with him.
The O5 Council now considered him a “Person of Interest.”
In return for being allowed to leave he’d promised to report back monthly as he worked to unlock the secrets buried deep in his subconscious. Somewhere in the numerous efforts to build Argus, Duncan had been exposed to enough of the unformatted data that his unconscious had started to understand.
Apparently, he wasn’t smart enough to hold the patterns in his waking mind. And what he had been able to retain had been wiped by the amnestic treatments that followed.
His subconscious remembered, though. But it could only talk to him through his dreams.
And his dreams were terrifying.
Six months he’d spent. Hypno-therapy, meditation, active dreaming, psychoanalysis. And then the harder stuff, psilocybin, peyote, LSD. All in an attempt to unlock the door to his unconscious mind. To give him access to the Argus in his head.
And now he was here, deep in the Amazon seeking the mother of all psychic teachers.
For centuries the Shipibo people had been teaching themselves to spirit walk. Shaman guided tribal members on the path of discovery and enlightenment.
Westerners had been coming to the Amazon forests for generations to drink the sacred ayahuasca. Each was called to a spiritual journey. Most looked for answers of a personal nature. Insights about their particular life’s path.
And their stories were remarkably similar. They sometimes came back with tails of jaguars and serpents as animal guides to the innermost secrets of creation. Many went back to their lives in Manhattan or Silicon Valley with a renewed sense of purpose and connection with their spiritual selves.
But that’s not what Duncan was there for. He was on a reconnaissance mission.
Somewhere deep in his head was the scrap of a map of the anomalous world and he intended to use it. He was done waiting for strange and anomalous objects and creatures to show up in his reality – Earth 616 or C-137 or whatever the nerds were calling it these days.
Today he was going into theirs.
Straw mats were arranged on the floor along the walls. Sitting on them were people from all walks of life. Here, a banker from New Jersey. There, an artist from Copenhagen. All sweated in loose clothing as they waited for their turn at the altar.
At the end of each mat was a bucket.
Duncan took his seat on the last remaining straw mat as helpers around the shaman joined their voices in ritualistic song. Some blew thick smoke from pipes filled with tobacco.
People around him were going up to the shaman as the air slowly turned heavy with tobacco smoke. Around him, people were already falling under the influence of the potent hallucinogen that they had taken.
Then it was his turn. Duncan was called to the front of the hut and sat on the floor facing the shaman.
The shaman’s face was deeply lined with age. He was nearly toothless and spoke almost no English. But he had the eyes of someone who was on a first-name basis with the unknowable.
He chanted along with the singers as he poured a thick, brackish sludge into an earthenware cup.
Someone off to one side of the room began to moan and heave as the powerful effects of the psychedelics took their hold.
The old man handed the cup to Duncan. He met Duncan’s eyes with a knowing smile.
Douglass smiled back and took one last look around the room.
Then he threw back his head, and drank.
