Billith's Sandbox

"Hit it again."

There was a moment of silence. A brief pause, then chaos.

Through the graphene-reinforced glass, the view turned outward, then inward, folding in on itself. A bright light, free radicals bouncing off the shielded observation deck and back as the space within warped and distorted.

"Alright, we're looking at, uh, shit. D-USUSAS2-G. Dee dash you ess-"

"C'mon, Amber, remember your codes."

"You remember your fucking codes, Campbell. Dee dash you ess you ess-"

Outside, the sounds of gunfire emanated, cut short abruptly by some unknown force from the halls beyond the sealed chamber doors. Somewhere, past the airlock and the secondary shields lie the scourge of humanity. It was, well, the two didn't know exactly what it was. It wasn't even designated. The item was in Special Containment over at the one of the Anomalous Objects warehouses on the Site-19 campus. Low level anomalies. Color-changing ping pong balls, mugs that filled themselves with grapefruit juice. That sort of thing. It constantly leaked a black sludge that would fill its containment area, and this required daily cleanup. No one wanted to deal with it, so management made D-Class clean the chamber and rarely looked back on the thing since. There it was, the end of the world, right there, hiding in plain sight.

"Dimensional, Unstable, Stationary, Unaided…", Dr. Amber Lombardi paused as the entire room shook. They were thirty floors down. They were thirty floors beneath the surface of a doomed planet and they were all going to die.

"Unstable, no go, hit it again."

Another flash of light. The inner chamber turned on a gradient into a deep red, the center of the accelerator rapidly transitioning into dead brush and shale. The interior was now the exterior.

"S-SSUPAH1-G. Spacial, Stable, Stationary, Unaided, Personal Area, Hazardous- no, no, we have to try again."

A muffled slam as a large body was thrown against the outer doors. The two looked up, for an instant, then caught themselves. They didn't have an instant to spare.

There are infinite worlds, endless whens and wheres. Yet, there was but very little time to get there.

With her hand on a lever, Lombardi flung it forward and retracted it back as the dual-spin singularities rearranged themselves in another of a billion combinations. Their topography was key, two rotating black holes that could point to anywhere, anytime. The electromagnetic barriers that held them in place fended off most radiation that leaked from the two meshed rips in space-time, but that didn't stop the device from shaving minutes off their lives every time she flipped that lever.

Inside, the view turned into black, speckled with points of white light. The center of the chamber became deep space, sensors indicating massive strain of force with warning lights and alarms- depressurization. The machine graced their ears with the sounds of bending metal.

"Oh- fuck, no, again. Flip it. Flip it now!"

And she did. And again. And again. All the while, the Idea crept forth and claimed minds. As it did, it gained form, first imperceptible, then slowly gaining opacity, ridges and corners, solidifying themselves within the confines three measly dimensions. The endless halls of Site-19, the hub, ever so cherished, were filling with pools of dark, viscous tar. There, it would remain, perfectly preserved. The remnants of the dead would be lost to oceans of oily black.

Soon later, the whole world would drown.





TWELVE HOURS EARLIER


"Researcher Campbell. Campbell. Campbell. Aberdeen!"

A woman in a white coat raised her head, swiftly, jolted awake by another form that stood aside her desk. In front of her, mounds of paperwork littered the area. She had been drooling on a grant request from RAISA for three thousand red ball-point pens. This is what her life had become.

She glanced up, clearing the grogginess of sleep from her eyes, to see Site-19 Director H. Wyatt with a concerned look on his face. He was a gruff man, whose coarse nature beguiled those around him away from his rather benign self.

"Sorry, Director Wyatt. I didn't sleep well last night, they have me on all sorts of meds after my transfer from Site-01. I still can't think straight. No medical leave though. Them's the breaks."

"Alright, well, if you need to sleep, do it in the lounge. It gives a bad impression to sleep at your desk."

"Yes, of course."

Turning back to look at her desk, Sr. Researcher Aberdeen Campbell let out an exasperated sigh and contemplated her life for the umpteenth time. A few years ago she had been working at the archives over at zero-one, which was not a fun job to have, to say the least. It was probably the most boring place in Foundation ownership. Almost anomalously uninteresting, but not quite. That kind of bland.

Site-01 had been going through a major change of structure, with thousands of hard-copy documents in deep storage still not yet transferred onto the servers, Aberdeen had spent her time there working meticulously with little payoff, just like she did now.

It wasn't always like this. She knew, deep down, that there was more to her story than mountains of cellulose and ink and a bad case of carpal tunnel. She had been reassigned to the archives after having been exposed to some sort of antimeme. Something she had been studying before, when she worked over at Information and Data Analysis. That's what they tell her, anyway. They also told her she had done a good job at it, not that it really mattered at this point.

That period of her life felt like a blur of confusion and headaches. It was a blur of confusion and headaches. Before that it was… Let's just say her memory doesn't get any better going back. Antimemes were some of the worst things that never technically existed.

She furrowed her brow, then drew a slow breath. Pushing herself away from her responsibilities, Aberdeen decided on a much-needed caffeine boost. Meandering out of her cubicle block and into the halls beyond, the humble researcher thought about the many times she had been here, walking through the mostly-Euclidean hallways of Site-19.

In her own little world, mind wandering, free from the confines of the less-than-savory parts of her life, Aberdeen was taken off guard at one of Site-19's many connecting pathways, traveling into the path of someone who was in a rather brisk stride. Since there were no traffic lights in any of the four-way intersections of the complex, who was at fault could not be known.

The two collided in a show of scattered documents and apologies. Campbell didn't recognize the dark-haired woman, but she seemed as though she was in a little too much of a hurry.

"So sorry, I was distracted-", she began, bending down to pick up the papers. Before she could, someone grabbed her wrist.

"It's fine, but, please. Let me." The woman, short but with an air of authority, scrambled to grab the documents. As she did, Campbell was able to make out some of the contents, and her eyes widened.

"In-house spacio-temporal gateways? You mean-"

The woman cut her off with a sharp look and a hush. "Please, have a little tact. What is your clearance level, young woman?"

Taken aback, slightly offended, Aberdeen retorted with one of the few things she had left from her previous work experience. "Four. Don't tell me, you're an oh-five. Or did they make level four-point-five just for you?"

The woman rolled her eyes, then glanced around briefly before turning back.

"Yes, Site-19 just got its first Class-A wormhole generator. And it is beautiful. Amber Lombardi, head of Extradimensional Affairs."

"Abby- er- Aberdeen Cambell, clerical jockey, pleased to meet you."

"Clerical?" She raised an eyebrow. "How does a paper pusher like you, no offense, get level four clearance?"

Campbell was offended. "I used to do a lot more than push papers. I'd share the details but they're a bit hazy."

"Don't tell me, antimemetics? Don't they have drugs for that now?"

Aberdeen thought of the little orange pills. "Mnestics. Yes. Some of them have been shown to aid in memory restoration. And I've been on them for years now. This wasn't your typical antimeme, but they insist I keep trying. Sometimes I'll get flashes of things, like scenes from a film where you can't make out what the characters look like or why they even matter to the story-" She paused. Lombardi was looking at her like she had two heads more than the Foundation was used to.

"Ah, sorry, sorry. You probably don't want to hear my life story."

Amber's eyes softened. "It's not that. I'm just- I'm sorry. That must be so hard."

"I'm getting through it. Listen, I was on my way for a cup of coffee- you want one?"

She shook her head. "Thank you, but I really should get over to Extradimensional. They're expecting a presentation on the new portal."

"I'll leave you to it, then.", Campbell motioned a good-bye and finished her journey to the break room, leaving the other woman to whatever the Foundation needed her for next.






"Your turn, mate."

D-8102 grabbed the mop from his cellmate with a dejected glare.

"You know I hate you, right?"

D-0914 smirked and leaned back against the featureless wall behind him.

"Yeah, you hate all of us, and I don't really like you either. Still." His eyes motioned to the floor.

"Alright, alright."

D-8102 dunked the mop head into a wheeled bucket of gray-brown water and stabbed at the floor like it owed him money. Sometimes you wished you could live another life, sometimes you wished you were dead. D-8102 was feeling a mix of both. He could barely make out his own reflection in the puddle of black ooze he was cleaning, and he didn't recognize the man he saw, clad in orange, toiling until that unknown day where you get gassed like the rest of them. Or so they say. He hadn't been around enough long enough to know if the sweet release of death was actually something he got to look forward to.

"Squidface leaving you be?"

D-8102 paused his task and wiped his brow, contemplating.

"Not really. Why do you care?"

"I don't. Small talk."

The monstrous asshole they had affectionately termed "Squidface" existed solely as a lingering presence. The two could feel it in the air, and hear it in the soft, indeterminate whispers that danced around their ears. It was nothing new to D-8102, who had been assigned to the task of lamp cleanup two weeks prior. D-0914, on the other hand, was fresh out the pen. For your first interaction with the anomalous, ol' Squiddy was a bum rap. Sure, there were plenty of worse things, things that would turn you inside out but keep you ticking, things that dissolved you, slowly, over a period of a thousand years. Something about that lamp was just rotten, and it wasn't the rancid sludge it wept through nonexistent eyes. It was its persistence that really got to the two, and it got to everyone eventually. Not being able to shut it up or ask the lab goons for help made it all the worse. Sure, there would be the ones who tell you that you were doing something honorable or making up for the shit you've done, and that might have been true, but there was something awful about quietly losing your mind and not being able to tell anyone.

D-8102 absentmindedly prodded the mop against the floor, listless. He looked over at the lamp, then away when it got to be too loud. He felt the otherworldly presence it was linked to, a being of terror and madness and black oil. He felt the hairs on his neck stand and pushed the presence away as best as he could.

"Hey, fucking watch where you're mopping-" D-0914 chastised him, his white shoes now covered in a sticky dark paste. Trying to clean it off, he struggled to free his footwear from the tar. He pulled, and it gave way, but he had over-calculated, throwing him off balance. The prisoner fell, grabbing at the the nearby nightstand for balance. It caught him, and he began to right himself, but stopped, looking up in shock as the lamp tumbled from its place.

Transfixed, the two watched, almost in slow motion, as the lamp hit the ground, shattering, plunging the room into complete darkness.

Then the laughing began.






Campbell was on her way back to her desk when the alarms started. Standard containment breach klaxon, which was not uncommon for Site-19, a place that had its fair share of problems. Silently, she and her coworkers stood and waited for the announcement on the PA- one that would tell them whether or not they should evacuate, hide under their desks, or pray to whatever god they choose. After a minute, they worried it would not come, that something had happened to them and would soon happen to all of them. Another moment later, a sitewide tone echoed through the hallways, followed by:

"Attention Site-19 personnel. Containment breach of unknown magnitude in progress. Evacuate immediately. Avoid AO Warehouses if at all possible. AO Warehouse B confirmed compromised."

So, something had gotten loose in the Anomalous Objects warehouses, the place where mundane artifacts go to die. Something that had been a little more dangerous than the folks who dropped it off there had realized.

"Attention Site-19 personnel. Containment breach of unknown magnitude in progress. Evacuate immediately. Avoid travel through AO Warehouses. AO Warehouse A and B confirmed compromised."

And it was heading this way, by the looks of it.

Campbell's desk was eight floors below the surface of the planet. Her colleagues had already begun their ascent, but she hadn't moved. Was she paralyzed with fear? Anticipation? She wasn't sure. Something in her gut told her not to go up. Sure, there weren't any other ways out besides through the surface, where the unknown threat approached. Perhaps, she had thought, they would recontain it soon enough, and there would be no need for an evacuation, the day would continue as it normally does.

The klaxon cut short abruptly a second later. Then, the light disappeared with the loud whir of power loss followed by silence, the entirety of the Site-19 campus plunging into darkness. Aberdeen stood, eyes waiting to adjust, heart pounding as a new sound started, a commotion in the upper floors. Then, someone screamed.

The darkness persisted, and Aberdeen waited with her heart in her throat. How long does it take for the backup generator to kick in? Why did the lights fail in the first place?

Unknowns filled the gaps in Campbell's mind, the seed of anxiety, growing in a multitude of paths. There were two stairwells that ran the depth of the facility, used primarily for emergency situations, and