The Lines Are Down
On September 9, 2002, the SCP Foundation faced an unprecedented crisis: the loss of its insurance coverage.
The Lines Are Down
An Oral History of the End of the World
(Abridged Edition)
Part One: Manifest Destiny
On September 9, 2002, the SCP Foundation faced an unprecedented crisis: the loss of its insurance coverage.
One month prior, on the tenth of August, Goldbaker-Reinz Insurance Group Ltd. served notice that they would terminate the Foundation's full policy portfolio in thirty days. Goldbaker-Reinz representatives offered no explanation for this extraordinary measure, and became incommunicado on the day the deadline fell. No contact could henceforth be made with the anomalous insurer. September 9 also saw a series of interdimensional peculiarities occur, including but not limited to:
- the failure of all thaumaturgical Ways linking baseline reality with the multiversal hub of the Wanderers' Library;
- the failure of SCP-2264, preventing access to the Nevermeant and the City of Alagadda;
- loss of contact with Temporal Site-01, headquarters of the Temporal Anomalies Department;
- loss of contact with the Multi-Foundation Coalition;
- loss of contact with, and access to, all Exclusionary Sites..Exclusionary Sites exist outside of baseline reality and are designed to survive temporal or dimensional shifts.
It was presumed that baseline reality had sustained serious ontokinetic damage, severing it from the timeplane and all linked dimensions. The Departments of Ontokinetics and Temporal Affairs undertook priority one research on this subject, while a complete audit of Foundation operations was launched to determine the root cause. Though multiple facilities had reported containment failures or breaches on September 9, many precipitated by the multiversal shift, none appeared to carry causative potential. The only incident involving chronological material was a narrowly-averted cascade containment breach at Site-43 in Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-D, but that had taken place a full twenty-four hours earlier and was unlikely to be the culprit.
Dr. Ilse Reynders: In retrospect, of course, we know it was the AAF-D breach which blew us past the pale and into the dark. But it didn't make sense back then, and it still doesn't make sense now. Why did it wait twenty-four hours? What kind of temporal anomaly recognizes and respects the human experience and partitioning of time? It was wholly unconnected to the actual period of the Earth's rotation, it was twenty-four hours to the precise second. Absurd.
On October 1, during Sunday mass, Saint Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica in Ottawa collapsed. Four thousand three hundred and eleven people were killed, officially. Unofficially, a further three hundred and eleven were crushed by masonry falling into Reliquary Area-27, located beneath the church. This was the headquarters of the Department of Tactical Theology, the entity responsible for planning the Foundation's response to deific threats.
Dr. Brenda Corbin: Though the Department had footholds at most major facilities, this disaster made the Theology and Teleology Section of Site-43 the foremost authority on religious counterwarfare. It would have been good to know that's what we were dealing with before we too became trapped, incommunicado, in a different subterranean structure.
Chief Delfina Ibanez: Area-27 wasn't immediately deemed an attack on the Foundation. Separatist or anti-Catholic terrorist action was considered, and it was also possible that this had been either a random act of sabotage or the result of an intrinsic flaw in the basilica's architecture.
Chief Noè Nascimbeni: Post-disaster investigations revealed inexplicable stressors on key load-bearing members, and general material failures which should have been impossible. By that time, however, the rest of the mess was well underway…
Ten days later the aging hulk of Site-246 on the floor of Lake Superior imploded, taking with it one hundred and nine staff members. This facility was so far past its prime that a collapse under any other circumstances would not have been suspicious; the Foundation only maintained it because the cost of reconstructing it should it again become needed would be far in excess of the cost of keeping it mostly intact. Nevertheless, the loss of two facilities in as many weeks was an immediate red flag, and the Foundation was put on provisional alert.
That same day, a tall and rangy woman wrapped in a grey shawl, a few scraps of messy copper hair streaming out around a wan and unsmiling face, walked barefoot down Bristol Beach Park on the Lake Superior shoreline. An amateur photographer took a snapshot of her standing there, looking pensively out over the water. The image was striking enough to win a photography contest a week later, perhaps the last photography contest ever held on the planet Earth.
Chief Delfina Ibanez: And that's how the Foundation first started figuring it out. The figure was positively identified as Janet Gwilherm by artwork specialists at Site-28 scanning for anartists operating in public, and it became clear this was no coincidence.
Dr. Allan McInnis: With the benefit of hindsight, it's quite clear why she attended mass at Area-27 to inaugurate her campaign. Tactical Theology killed gods, and she believed herself to be one.
Dr. Brenda Corbin: Functionally, she was.
Dr. Allan McInnis: It is an unhelpful thought, but a persistent one nevertheless: if only we'd known where this was headed, sorrow and strife beyond measure could have been averted.
…where am I going?
Allan McInnis lived by a schedule. He required seven hours of sleep each night, because Site-43 required focus and alertness from its Director. He required two hours of downtime, because most people required eight hours of sleep and at least one hour of recreation, and if it didn't look like he was getting that, some of his people might be guilted into foregoing what they desperately needed, and he needed them happy and healthy as possible. So at this point in his schedule, around six thirty in the afternoon, he would usually be checking with Operations Control to make sure nothing required his attention — though he'd be paged if anything came up, that seven hour repose would be unattainable without peace of mind — then make his way to his quarters for a simple dinner alone and an easy drift into dreamless slumber.
Even his deviations from schedule, to frustrate assassination attempts per directives from O5 Command, were scheduled. He kept the algorithm private, in case the attempts came from O5 Command.
Today, however, he was breaking with pattern. He'd stopped to visit his cabal of VIP actors in the breach of 2002, discussed the day's resurrections, their possible implications and the inexplicable second coming of the AAF-D disaster. Inappropriate though it was, he'd come to value the input of this unofficial inner circle on the shared central mystery of their lives. He'd made that deviation in sound mind. What happened next, however…
He had walked to the southern dorms when he should have been heading for the Director's Complex. Something in the back of his brain was pushing him that way; something was tugging at his nerve endings, making him move just so. He allowed it, because he knew that if the impetus originated outside of himself, he had means of arresting the process. But more than that, he was trained to recognize the signs of brainwashing or mind control — even in himself, even in the moment of being compromised. He didn't think this was that. This was intuition, a burning certainty that he needed to be past the secondary cafeteria and standing in the southernmost janitorial service room by the time the clock struck—
6:28?
He stared at his watch as he entered the glorified closet, and wondered for a moment whether someone had managed to assassinate him after all. Was he deliriously running the rails of his immaculately-structured life in his mind while his body bled out on the tiles? Or was he a dead man walking, all countermeasures failed, his thoughts despite everything no longer his own?
Or had someone managed to conceptually poison the face of his watch? Because the instant the hour registered, he was suddenly struck by a sick headache.
And then, he wasn't.
"Ah." He nodded. "We've caught up."
Earlier that day he'd engaged in consultation with Thaddeus Xyank, head of the Temporal Anomalies Department. Xyank had been very interested in the story of the seven resurrected breach victims and the diverging timeline they claimed to have inhabited, the year they had lived which had never occurred. He had considered the risk of a temporal rubberband — baseline reality cohering with this alternate sequence of events — exceedingly low. If it was going to happen, it would have happened when the dead first walked again. It certainly wouldn't happen hours later.
It had, apparently, happened twenty-four hours later on the dot.
He wasn't standing in the closet anymore.
He was standing behind it.
Site cartography is a thankless chore.
Nobody really expects the official floorplans to bear anything but marginal relation to reality. The Foundation is so secretive that even its secrets have secrets, so anything purporting to outline the contours of a research and containment facility is bound to be lacking in salient details somewhere, perhaps even throughout. Nowhere is this more obvious than in depictions of the Director's Complex, a feature of most larger Sites. The person of the Site Director is surrounded by more security measures than anyone outside of the O5 Council and a few select Department heads, and their living and working spaces are an excellent example of this. It's not abnormal for the rough physical location to be known; for example, at Site-43, everyone knows that Director McInnis lives in a block of rooms in the northwest corner of Habitation and Sustenance. It is abnormal for anyone who isn't the Site Director to see the inside of their Complex. Vivian Scout, McInnis' predecessor, kept special rooms for his research partner Wynn Rydderech; Edwin Falkirk, in his extraordinarily short term as Director pro tem in January 2003, delighted in showing Section Chairs and Chief around the ordinarily off-limits space. But under McInnis, only situational access is allowed, and only for a vanishingly tiny subset of Site staff. His personal secretary, Zulfikar Alomerović, has the run of the outermost rooms. The All-Sections Chief, who fulfills the duties of Deputy Director, has a standing invitation to enter all but the inmost ones. But only McInnis really knows the state of his entire suite, which results in an interesting quirk not often discussed: the Director of Site-43 absolutely, definitely cleans his own washroom, and makes his own bed. There are also spaces beyond his private quarters to which he has access, of which only the Chiefs of the Janitorial and Maintenance and Security and Containment Sections are otherwise aware. There may even be hardened, maintenance-free areas only McInnis himself knows about.
It's not impossible that some rooms are only known to the O5 Council. Once you start compartmentalizing, it's difficult to know where to stop.
— Blank, Lines in a Muddle
He had often speculated as to the precise location of his bolthole.
His real bolthole, that was. He knew about the official one, the one his most senior Chairs and Chiefs were cleared to know about. It was accessible through the panel directly behind his desk in Admin and Oversight, which slid aside, framed painting and all, to allow access to a narrow passageway leading to a comfortable steel bunker with an ensuite washroom and enough supplies to outlast a brief siege. There was a weapons locker, a set of comfortable cots — he was discouraged from bringing anyone else in with him, particularly since they would subsequently require amnesticization, but contingency plans are by their nature meant to be absent of unnecessarily strict particularities — and untraceable terminal access to both 43NET and the Foundation-wide SCiPnet systems. This was where S&C would look for him, once the shit had stopped hitting the fan and the fan had been stopped and the shit had been mostly cleaned up, in a typical emergency situation. (The existence of 'typical emergency situations' was a sad fact of life at any facility doing containment duty.)
Anyone looking for him there today would be in for a series of incredibly nasty surprises which they would not have long to lament.
In cases where long-term severance of the Site's chief operating officer from its physical plant was required — something which had happened but once during McInnis' tenure — his personal data assistant would be pinged by a single message encrypted in such a way as to only be readable by the Director himself, inducing immediate cardiac arrest in anyone else witnessing it even briefly. The message would come directly from the chambers of the O5 Council at Site-01, and it would carry instructions for accessing the safest of all safe spaces at 43. He had no idea where these rooms were located or how to access them; he had been instructed to enter them once, years ago, and had pointedly disobeyed the order.
He had not, apparently, done so this time.
A figure appeared in the passage ahead, furtive, afraid, arm outstretched. McInnis braced himself for the impact of a bullet. He recognized a firing stance when he saw one.
And then his assistant rushed out to him, terror plastered across his young face. "What's wrong, sir?!" Zulfikar visibly restrained himself from grabbing his employer. "What are you doing out here?!"
"I'm afraid I couldn't tell you," McInnis sighed. "Perhaps you can tell me?"
Upon discovery of the Duluth photograph, Area-08 retasked the Foundation's satellites to locate Janet Gwilherm. She was located three days later on Interstate 29 in South Dakota, just outside Sioux Falls. It should have taken her three times as long to reach that point in her journey, though she didn't seem to be in any sort of hurry. While Foundation Mission Control started taking snapshots, Gwilherm glanced up into the eyes in the sky. They immediately went dark. Telemetry from ground-based telescopes revealed catastrophic system-wide atmospheric breakup, leading potentially to a Kessler effect in Earth orbit and immediately halving the Foundation's global communications capability.
Dr. Brenda Corbin: She never displayed this level of long-distance dissolution again. At the moment it happened, Stewart Radcliffe was ranting on the Site-43 public address system about how his lover's reach was unconstrained by the slippery grasp of gravity. "The stars themselves are no object," I remember him saying. "She could reach up and pluck them down, if she took a notion." Thought it was just romantic nonsense at the time.
Gwilherm's journey west was almost entirely uneventful until the halfway point, when she paid a visit to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. This was no mere tourist stop, though she did visit the world-famous Old Faithful geyser long enough to force it to erupt at many times its usual force, resulting in the scalding deaths of several hundred visitors topside and a sizable number of SCP Foundation personnel belowground. Infrared surveillance performed after the fact revealed Gwilherm approaching an unremarkable park ranger station in the midst of the eruptions, effortlessly erasing its security countermeasures, and becoming the first person ever to force entry into Site-θ. This was apparently a nominal, symbolic act, as she did not descend to the lower levels but instead left the park on U.S. Route 20 heading west. Site-θ was declared lost, all personnel either scalded to death or crushed when the rock and soil above became oversaturated with water. All assets within were presumably destroyed.
Dr. Allan McInnis: There is little point in obfuscating the purpose of Site-θ now. It was used by my predecessors as a kind of 'reset button' for unmanageable XK-class crisis events. Had the connection been made sooner, it might have been more readily apparent that Agent Gwilherm was planning to enact a scheme of such staggering, devastating scope that she expected we would attempt to reboot human civilization to revert it.
The freak eruption was not immediately identified as an anomalous event, and while meteorological studies continued Gwilherm progressed through Idaho and Nevada without making any further stops, reaching California faster than a commercial airliner would have. She proceeded to the City of Sacramento, where she was to inaugurate her plan in earnest beyond simple spot treatments. She approached the perimeter of Technical Site-14 and instigated a security equipment failure at a distance, allowing a small group of previously unknown associates to enter in her stead. These arrived via Sea King helicopters belonging to MTF Epsilon-43 ("Day Trippers"), modified for long-distance travel, and transmitted valid Foundation identification codes. Among those debarking was Dr. Bernabé Del Olmo, Chair of Memetics and Countermemetics at Site-43. Within an hour, the Foundation's primary telecommunications hub in North America was under Gwilherm's control. No warning signals were sent during the initial occupation. Site-to-Site communications in California were disrupted at the moment Gwilherm arrived in the Santa Clara Valley, performing the same actions at Technical Site-15 with the same disastrous results. With the core staff of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Division under memetic control, Gwilherm now essentially owned SCiPnet and possessed the ability to reprogram all helper AIs for her own purposes. Still, these acts were not made immediately visible to the Foundation at large.
Dr. Eileen Veiksaar: Smart. So very, very smart. She walked across the entire continent before showing her hand, because she knew that with 14 and 15 under her thumb we'd essentially already lost. Control the technology, control the game. It's what I would have done if I'd wanted to plot out the death of the Foundation.
Zulfikar led him through the entrance to the bolthole proper, as they were standing in what amounted to its antechamber. He turned to the right wall and began patting it rhythmically, as though searching for a hidden panel or testing for hollowness. There was a rhythm to the taps, not precisely jaunty, but definitely familiar. Some of the taps went high up, nearly at the ceiling, and a few were down low, at about knee-level.
McInnis snapped his mental fingers. He had a good ear for music, and knew this one well. Zulfikar was tapping out the lyrical beats to "I'm Still Standing" by Elton John. He, McInnis, had that song on his PDA.
Zulfikar was the kind of person who listened to atmospheric sounds to relax. He didn't know much of anything about music, and didn't care to. He was, however, required to know what sort of music the Director listened to, since he could be called upon at any moment to confirm or deny the identity of someone claiming to be the Director. Still, he was tapping the song out like he really knew—
There was a soft click, and Zulfikar pushed the wall panel with both hands, and it sucked in then slid aside on silent, well-greased runners. This, then, was the entrance to the rest of the bunker.
Zulfikar didn't say anything until the panel was shut behind them again. McInnis watched closely, but wasn't able to discern how the young man had managed to make that happen. "Can I ask what you were doing out there, sir?"
McInnis shook his head. "Momentary disorientation. I'm sorry to make you worry."
One of the cardinal rules of timeline travel was not to tell anyone you were a timeline traveller. They never reacted well to that information, for a whole raft of reasons. If they didn't believe you, that was bad. If they did, it could be much, much worse.
"You haven't stepped out there since we first came in. Are you alright? Running a fever or anything?" The secretary looked concerned, but not suspicious. Good.
McInnis shook his head. "I feel fine." He did feel fine. He felt well-rested and alert, well-fed and clean. He wasn't wearing the same work shirt and pair of pants he'd been wearing just a few minutes ago, but what he was wearing was roughly equivalent; the cut was a little off, the shirt a little baggy, and that all tracked, since someone had obviously stocked the bunker with clothes similar to the ones he owned without having direct access to his wardrobe. Pinching his actual clothes to prepare him for the apocalypse was too Byzantine for even the O5 Council. "It was a momentary thing. I suppose I needed some fresh air."
Zulfikar sighed. "Sir, you know we're in here for a reason. We need to keep the continuity. We're the only ones fully unaffected."
That didn't sound good. McInnis decided to pry, by means of pretending not to. "Mm. I have my doubts on that score."
The other man gave him a funny look, then slipped past to lead him along the narrow passage. It was twin to any number of Level 3+ escape tunnels crisscrossing the bedrock between each Section of the Site. "I know they're not all lost, sir, but they can't have spent that much time in the company of lunatics without suffering some memetic effect."
The general trend seemed to be suggesting there were live staff at Site-43, divided in some proportion between trustworthy and untrustworthy. So, not quite an apocalypse, then. It was a start. "What would you estimate the numbers are? If I asked you to guess, based on only what you personally are aware of."
His assistant's eyes rolled back as he engaged in a little mental math. "We started with, what, six hundred and forty-one people? Not counting the refugees, who…" He winced. "Who don't count for much now anyway, so we'll leave them out of this. About half of those are dead now, so…"
Eileen Veiksaar had once referred to McInnis' facial expressions and body language as, collectively, his 'firewall'. What he was really thinking and feeling didn't show unless he decided to make an exception. There was no outward indication, not that the man walking ahead of him would have seen it anyway, of the effect this casual writing off of over three hundred staff members and untold numbers of civilians had on his equanimity.
"…with about two hundred confirmed losses to Mukami, which may be unrecoverable, there should still be over a hundred people still active and theoretically aligned with the Principles." Secure, Contain, Protect. "But this whole Site is a mess of memetics and mind control and such, not to mention all the unabated material seeping through everywhere, so I'd be hard pressed to trust anyone still working here."
So, a near-apocalypse, then. This was, to put it lightly, disheartening. McInnis had Level 5 clearance, absurdly high, one full point over most of his peers in the Site Director cohort, and that entitled him to know a few things about how the Foundation handled alternate timelines. The unofficial motto of the Temporal Anomalies Department, "Stop Changing the Past," pretty much summed it all up. If the timeline split, well, that was tough potatoes. Going back in time to set right what once went wrong carried far too high a risk of setting it far wronger, not least because the vagaries of cause and effect were complicated enough that even a stochastic supercomputer was unlikely to be able to figure out the precise combination of actions required to revert things back to baseline — assuming baseline's criteria could be fully outlined in a world where they had never existed, and assuming human beings could then execute the necessary courses of action to a tee.
In other words, all of those dead people were going to remain dead.
The tunnel was long, and a bit of mental mapping suggested his bunker was ensconced in a bedrock shell between H&S, I&T, and R&E. That made sense, had in fact been what he'd already suspected beforehand, since that chunk of unused real estate was especially chunky. The distant lights they were approaching suggested he had time for at least one more pertinent question. He chose and crafted it very, very carefully. His first draft asked after the fates of the Chairs and Chiefs, but they could very well all have been taken out in one cataclysmic strike, and then Zulfikar would suspect him for being an impostor for not knowing that.
"At last count," he said slowly, "who were the highest-ranking survivors?"
Zulfikar glanced back at him curiously. "You planning something, sir?" He looked back at the light, shaking off his moment of mild insubordination to come up with the appropriate response. "Zlatá and Msuya are dead. Du, Bremmel, and LeClair are missing, Van Rompay, Anoki, Styles, Mataxas and Skellicorne are all turned. So in order of hierarchical seniority, they're still working with: Blank, Ibanez, Nascimbeni, and Veiksaar. Oh, uh, the Director too, I suppose." He shook his head, as though there were something troubling about that final item.
McInnis certainly found it troubling.
I'm not the Director.
It was in unhappy and confused possession of this knowledge that he walked into the hiding place reserved for the Director-in-self-imposed-exile of Site-43.
The bunker was considerably more spacious than the bolthole, though obviously not a patch on the extensive Director's Complex; certain rooms in the latter had gone unused since the mid-1960s. The central space was a comfortable lounge with a pair of vinyl couches and one vinyl chair, all in black. The floor was whitewashed wood, as were the wall panels, which ended halfway up to reveal the concrete slabs beneath. There was a refrigerator, a bookshelf full of books — McInnis noted copies of most of his favourites, and a large selection of reading material useful to a man running a small war from well behind the front lines. Tactical manuals. Protocol overviews. Threat assessments. All of it with large print on the black bindings, for quick and easy reference. There was a television screen on one wall, hooked up to a placidly blinking modem on a black metal shelf bolted beside it. There were two desks, one large and set back from the wall, one small and pushed up against it. The former was spotless; the latter was plastered with papers. There were doors at each cardinal compass point, leading no doubt to private rooms and even-more-private bathrooms, as well as a library, a server room, and undoubtedly a secure communications station. This wasn't really supposition; Foundation security protocol wasn't hard to judge when you'd worked there for nearly three decades.
"Overwatch wants to talk to you." Zulfikar wouldn't make eye contact now, instead walking over to his desk to straighten out the piles of paper.
McInnis nodded at his assistant's back. "You told them you couldn't find me."
To his credit, the young man turned around and returned the nod. "Yes, sir. I'm under orders."
"As am I," no doubt, "of course." McInnis paused. He had another thorny question; he wasn't actually sure which room contained the terminal he wanted, and wasn't precisely sure how to ask. If he walked into Zulfikar's room instead, well, the game might very well be up. His assistant was quick on the uptake. He had to be.
As it always did, the solution presented itself elegantly after a few moments' pondering. He walked to the refrigerator, opened it up, and examined the contents carefully before selecting a can of generic soda pop. He closed the door, pulled the tab, and took a sip.
Over the edge of the can, he saw Zulfikar's eyes flicker. Zulfikar didn't see him see it.
McInnis finished his gulp, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to dab delicately at his lips, then nodded again. "Very well. I shall phone home. Try to relax, please, Zulfikar."
He walked casually to the door his assistant's eyes had gone to, in his anxiety over the Director's pointed refusal to make the call with alacrity. He was pleased and relieved to recognize one of his suits on the bed within, neatly-pressed and ready for the next day's whatever, and the keycard-locked door leading inevitably to his secure communications channel. Almost as an afterthought, he reached into his vest and produced the piece of paper he knew would be there, glanced at it for confirmation, and nodded.
It was time to find out what was what.
The first undeniable evidence of a wider pattern came when Gwilherm trekked across the state of Nevada to attack Armed Biological Containment Area-14. This was the headquarters of MTF Nu-7 ("Hammer Down"), first responders in the event that another facility went rogue or went dark. This time she did something that couldn't be brushed under the carpet, either by her or us: she brought the Ruby Mountains down, killing the entire battalion without a single shot fired.
Area-14 was under minute-by-minute scrutiny, as one of the most vital elements in the Foundation's disaster response plan, and its destruction immediately triggered a declaration from Overwatch Command that a state of internal emergency now existed. The O5 Council attempted to issue a general call to arms from Site-01, but were unable to do so as a massive wave of cyberattacks originating at Site-15 overwhelmed the information technology staff at every loyal facility. Artificially Intelligent Conscripts reprogrammed with malicious code by the AIAD invaded each server, took control of the local systems and began wreaking havoc. Research and Containment Site-56 in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, the largest and most vital containment facility in the American West, immediately failed as its staff had already been engaged in a losing battle to control the variety of spatial and humanoid anomalies under its care. The desert promptly became a topological nightmare looping into, around and over itself, resulting in the loss of two commercial airliners and the entirety of the City of Reno. Research and Development Site-78 in Chugwater, Wyoming was destroyed by the Serpent's Hand after a raid to acquire their anomalous library; a missive from the Wanderers' Library addressed to the O5 Council apologized for the attack, explaining that it had been triggered by the failure of Site-78's internal network as "some knowledge is too dangerous to be lost." The nuclear warheads at Research and Containment Site-23, Research and Containment Site-64, and Containment Area-25 immediately activated, with a civilian death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands. The United States federal government immediately assumed it had been attacked in a first strike by a rival nuclear power, as there had been detonations on both the eastern and western seaboard and the entirety of Portland, Oregon had been lost along with Site-64, and scrambled to find a likely culprit for reprisal. A general collapse of intercontinental relations, both governmental and intra-Foundation, quickly ensued; the progression of Gwilherm's campaign overseas by proxy will be addressed separately rather than concurrently, to avoid further confusing an already overcomplicated narrative.
There was an odd blip in the narrative as Gwilherm headed back east. As she approached Site-41 in Central Colorado, Central Colorado disappeared.
Dr. Lillian Lillihammer: I have my theories, but I'll have to wait and see if they pop back into existence to ask them if I'm right.
Undeterred, Gwilherm proceeded to Cyberanomalous Containment and Research Site-119 in Mound City, Kansas, an AIAD startup facility developing artificial reality projects which had become the de facto headquarters for resisting attacks from Site-15. It was expected that she would simply level the structure, already possessing a dedicated IT crowd in California, but she instead brought down the outer walls so that an attacking force could swarm in and prepare the personnel for conversion by Del Olmo.
Dr. Eileen Veiksaar: The European networks were particularly well-hardened against cyberattacks, and possessed electronic redoubts her AIAD folks couldn't get at. This was presumably an attempt to recruit enough extra programmers and acquire enough extra hardware to overwhelm the folks overseas via sheer force.
The next target seemed obvious: Site-184, one of the Foundation's main North Atlantic seaports. It was expected that Gwilherm would arrive, the Site would collapse into a pile of rubble, and its vengeful Mobile Task Forces would move rapidly to contain her. This was not what happened. Gwilherm's arrival caused MTF helicopters to fall from the sky, wheels to fall off armoured personnel carriers, bunkers and foxholes to seal themselves up, but the Site personnel were not killed as they had been at her previous stopping points. Site-184 became a makeshift holding facility for everyone who worked there: the doors and door locks fused, the elevators ceased to function, and every means of escape or egress was blocked. No casualties were immediately reported, save for the occupants of the more dramatically-trashed vehicles. It wouldn't be for several weeks that we discovered why. In the meantime, supplies would last. The staff of Site-184 had some time to enjoy their curious mercy.
Six days later, as fully expected, Gwilherm arrived at Site-55. She found it largely undefended; the Overseer Council had decreed that only facilities with alpha-one priority would be defended, and so the task forces from 55 had been redirected to Site-19. The cutting of losses had begun. Key members of the Group of Interest research division were relocated to Site-19, along with most of their protectors, while Gwilherm ground their former home to dust.
Chief Delfina Ibanez: Keeping the GoI experts was an act of desperation. Overwatch clearly hoped that whoever this bitch was, she was working for someone they already knew about, or could learn about fast. What they didn't know, however, wasn't what was going to hurt them.
What followed was a flurry of activity, as this portion of the Eastern Seaboard was lousy with Sites and Areas. Gwilherm stomped Site-28 in SoHo without breaking a sweat, but left its collection of anomalous art curiously untouched. She performed similar acts at Site-58 in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, though the results were markedly different. At Site-28, just about everyone she freed was happy to go rampaging through New York. At 58, she couldn't even goad the animals into attacking their former handlers. As at 43, that facility's staff had pursued more humane containment methods as a programmatic experiment, and the results were plain to see. There were escapees, of course, and damage was done, but on the whole the scene remained more calm and orderly.
This state of affairs would not, however, last. On the day Gwilherm walked out of 58, leaving barrackses full of guards with jammed guns and tasers with dead batteries and keycards that could unlock, but could not lock, their doors, the first wave of her followers broke on the Nova Scotian shore. The modified long-distance Chinook helicopters once utilized by MTF Pi-43 ("Garbage In, Garbage Out") to transport anomalies and VIPs to and from Lake Huron arrived at Site-184 carrying a dark woman dressed in bright colours, flashing a bright smile and interacting eagerly with each individual 'rescued' from the rubble. These were the first converts to the cult of Ana Mukami outside of Site-43, and they would proceed in Gwilherm's wake in the days to come, turning Foundation employees and recalcitrant anomalies to their singular cause. Mukami continued on to 28 and 58 as well; her work apparently able to take care of itself from that point onward, she flew back home and left her underlings to carry on.
Chief Delfina Ibanez: If you ask me, Gwilherm and Mukami didn't like working together. Those seven freaks had a lot in common, but familiarity seemed to breed a whole hell of a lot more than just contempt between them.
So it was that when Gwilherm arrived at the outskirts of Site-19's interdiction zone in Pennsylvania, she had an army with her. They had already despoiled the three major facilities within the city of Philadelphia: breaking down the Foundation's primary containment R&D projects at Site-98, converting the humanoid anomalies integrated into the Foundation's command structure at Site-322, and arming themselves with a variety of anomalous tools from Area-179. For the first time in its history, the largest research and containment facility on the globe, the centre of the Foundation's operations, was under credible threat of destruction from a hostile Group of Interest.
Dr. Jay Everwood of the GoI research group, formerly based in Site-55, proposed a radical solution. Gwilherm's activities were obviously targeted against systems of control, order, and most of all, containment. The majority of the hostile and neutral organizations against which the Foundation regularly acted were opposed to at least one of those principles. They might, in a pinch such as this, provide willing and useful allies. The request was forwarded on to Site-01.
The O5 Council unanimously rejected it.
"Allan. You indicated that this date and time would be optimal for your next briefing."
"As indeed it is," McInnis remarked mildly.
"Hold any questions for the end, as always." He had expected the image on the screen to be a wall of black silhouettes, if he were meeting with the entire Council, or just one if he were meeting with his sponsor. What he had not expected was to be looking at three silhouettes, a curiously truncated set of Overseers. "Now, this month has seen a dramatic decrease in the number of fallen facilities, as the report on your screen will show, but that's obviously a factor of Vector-1 re-entering the continental United States and travelling along the Mexican subcontinent, having thoroughly destabilized South America. Early projections for her path proved entirely accurate; she traced a straight line between each of our most important containment facilities, so that was where we concentrated our forces."
McInnis nodded. He didn't need the context to understand such a basic analysis. "Naturally. Though you would have suspected a last-minute variance, a feint, a change of course, and prepared for that eventuality."
The tinny, processed voice he associated with O5-8 was the only one speaking. The other human outlines were staring into the camera, unmoving; they could have been cardboard cutouts. "Yes, we suspected it, but no, we didn't prepare. You of all people should know that the priority list stands."
The facilities priority list was a dark secret known only to the highest clearance personnel of the SCP Foundation, though virtually anyone else could have deduced its existence after a few moments' thought. There were facilities which could fall without bringing the Veil of Secrecy down with them, and facilities which would not go gentle into that good night. There were Sites and Areas containing anomalies or ameliorating external threats which would explode into the public consciousness if their minders disappeared, or even faltered; worse, the duties of some Site Directors ensured the continued day-to-day survival of the human race, and could not be left unattended-to for any length of time. For that reason, a small selection of Sites were considered irreplaceable: Site-01, the home of Overwatch Command and the 05 Council; Site-19, the largest research and containment facility the Foundation boasted; Site-17, the second-largest and home to a reality shift-resistant Deepwell computer storage system; Site-34, the hub of Spanish-speaking containment efforts globally; and Site-43. Why Site-43 was on the list, no one could say. One of the most hardened pieces of data in the Site-17 Deepwell, completely inalterable and alternate timeline-proof, was this simple scrap of poetry:
As they stand, so stand we all
43 must never fall
The remainder of the filesize was taken up with seventy-nine independent verification signatures. This piece of information had been encoded by the Council themselves, by its computer expert (and actual computer) O5-2, and carried the active endorsement of the Multi-Foundation Coalition to boot. It was a hell of a thing.
McInnis had always wondered about it. Most of all he wondered about the rhyme, which he considered rather poor.
In any case, he knew why Eight had brought up the list in the first place. He was telling McInnis that if this threat, whatever Vector-1 was, had changed course to target a lower-priority installation, the Council would have made no effort to alter their defense plans.
"As one recipient of that largesse, I'm hardly in a position to complain."
The other man cocked his head. "You're awfully chipper today, Allan. Loquacious. I rather thought we were going to have to replace you, based on our last conversation, which would have been quite the chore. You know, considering the state outside your doors."
McInnis put a pin in that. Determining what things looked like topside had already been on his shortlist of things to do, but hearing that something was definitely wrong up there elevated it considerably. "I've had a change of heart. But please, do continue."
"Well, as I said, we've had fewer losses recently. V1 went through Site-88 like a blowtorch through aluminum foil. Might have even said she seemed to have something against the Ethics Committee, the way she… well, suffice to say, we're going to need to appoint a new committee chair. But after the losses they've suffered at the other facilities, we might not even bother." The concept of a toothless, perhaps nonexistent Ethics Committee did not seem to bother Eight overmuch. "In any event, she looped back up through Texas to take out 73 — word from down south is patchy, you know how anarchy-prone the region is, but at the moment we're not seeing any sign of survivors — and even swung by Nevada to knock over 666. You can imagine how their neighbours are taking it."
McInnis imagined the neighbours were taking it quite well. Site-666, as its name so subtly suggested, was the Foundation's liaison with hell; specifically, the demon enclave of Undervegas. Without a mediating influence…
"Hell on Earth," he murmured.
"It's been here for months already." Eight glanced down at his desk, then up again. "The word from abroad isn't nearly so cheerful." McInnis narrowly avoided shaking his head in dismay; if what he'd just heard was to be considered cheerful, this year had not been kind to the Foundation. "The global instability occasioned by setting up a continental quarantine after losing 19 last month has had catastrophic consequences. We've lost Portugal entirely, and the Germans are up against the wall trying to deal with all the anomalies we lost when 54 went dark. They've got a dense organization up there, very efficient, so they're coping, but they're too busy to lend us any help, and they're asking kindly if we can deal with V1 before she makes her little trip from Cape to Cape."
McInnis nodded. Whatever Vector-1 was, it apparently had plans to cross the most violent ocean on Earth.
"Which of course, brings me to you." Eight folded his pitch black hands over top of the report. "Any progress on determining the origin of this disruption?"
McInnis smiled. "I'm sorry, sir. I don't know."
"To whom am I speaking?"
He blinked in response.
"The biometrics checked out, and you aren't dead, so you are Allan McInnis. Allan McInnis doesn't tell jokes, so: why don't you know who I am?"
"Flatland."
The silhouette stiffened at the uttering of the code word. "You're certain?"
"I am. I believe we are no longer occupying baseline reality."
It took the Council member nearly a minute to respond. When he did, his tone was colder and his words to the point. "Sell me."
McInnis patted his breast. "My continuity phrase has changed. My Site has changed. Not a few minutes ago, we were fully operational and no single SCP-001 file was rated at Alpha priority. I have seen my surroundings entirely transformed. I retain my knowledge of the prior circumstances, and have undertaken tests for memetic interference. My mind is clean and functioning correctly. Reality has been altered."
The other man whistled. "I'll inform the Council, of course. Two will want to run Hume tests, so I'll get back to you on that." He paused. "Everything I just told you came as a complete surprise, then."
"Yes, sir."
"And yet you didn't even blink."
"I blink when it's useful and necessary, sir."
The other man would be smiling thinly now, judging by his tone. "Of course you do. Don't know why I even mentioned it. Ah… have you told your assistant?"
"No."
"Do you intend to?"
"No."
Eight nodded. "Good. Best not to let on. There's enough briefing material on that terminal to get you up to speed; I suggest you read it. It'll come in handy should we choose to re-integrate your staff into the command structure."
This time, McInnis blinked. "Re-integrate…?"
The Council member's stance shifted slightly, looking as sympathetic as a vague outline could. "Oh, you don't know. Of course you don't. Ah…" He leaned forward, toward the camera. "You and Zulfikar are the entire command structure of Site-43. You've had no contact with the rest of your people for months, and they are officially considered lost."
Source: SCP Foundation · CC BY-SA 3.0
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