Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jesse Faden knows exactly what she's looking at, but she lets her Head of Research do the talking.

"We found this after a House Shift in Research. It opened up a lab which we think had been completely disconnected from the rest of the House, for years. Inside the lab we found cabinets of old files — duplicates of files we already had, nothing new — and some, ah." Emily Pope shivers. "Bureau staff. And this."

It's a projector slide, a two-inch square of beige plastic with a transparent image mounted in it. The image on the slide is a mess, an unfocused blur of dark green and dark brown. In the foreground, there are three extremely distorted black lines, almost meeting at a point. The opposite of a triangle, Faden supposes. It's hard to be sure, but the three lines look pointed, like arrows.

Pope goes on, "The design of the slide is exactly the same as the slides associated with the Slide Projector Object of Power. There's no doubt that this was part of the original collection. The slide is numbered. We're calling it Slide-55."

"I burned all of the slides except for Slide-36," Faden states. Slide-55 is pristine.

"You burned all of the slides you had," Pope explains. "We think Dr. Darling's team found this in the Ordinary landfill, after they transported the landfill to the Research Sector and began combing through it. We know that Darling himself knew it existed. We've found his fingerprints on the slide frame."

"So why does none of Darling's research mention a Slide-55?"

Pope smiles humourlessly. "Maybe it does. We think a lot of his research may be in other Shifted rooms, where we can't get to it. But then again... maybe he had a good reason not to document it."

Faden thinks.

She's been Bureau Director for two years. Quiet years, considering. The Hiss has long since been eradicated from the Oldest House, burned out Sector by Sector using intensely amplified Hedron resonance. Her staff don't need to wear personal amplifiers anymore, and the building lockdown has been lifted. Since then, her directorial role has been much less frenetic, and much more bureaucratic.

She adapted to office life; she is nothing if not highly adaptable. And she's made changes which have significantly improved Bureau operations. But, privately, she has missed action. Her brother, Dylan, is still comatose. And the lack of firm answers to many of her questions, and the lack of contact from the Board or via the Hotline, have left her feeling as if she is missing much more. And this thing in front of her is... well, definitely something.

"I'm going to need gear," she says.

This catches Pope off-guard. "Ah. What kind of gear?"

"Tell Arish to augment my extradimensional suit with Bureau trooper armor. And prep the Dimensional Research lab."

"...You want to mount an expedition into Slidescape-55? Jesse, are you sure about this?"

"Casper Darling is missing," Faden tells her. "Not dead. He disappeared without a trace. And I think this could be where he went. And if he's alive, that would make him the last surviving member of the last generation of Bureau senior staff. I think that's worth trying to save."

*

Wearing the armour is like driving a tank. It takes her a long time to suit up, with two Bureau technicians helping her. There is a basic form-fitting undersuit, padded at the joints and pretty substantial in its own right. Then ribbed orange foam rubber, then heavy Kevlar plating, and finally white ceramic resonance-damping shielding. Most of the armour is two inches thick. The collar rises high and protects her throat well, but severely restricts her vision... and then the helmet is like a white cannonball, seemingly completely opaque from the outside, providing only a small transparent plate to see through on the inside. It's claustrophobic, and very hot.

Faden stands up awkwardly, finding that she is about twice as heavy as normal. Moving is a workout. She turns slowly, giving a thumbs-up to the Bureau technicians, and then looking over at Simon Arish, her Head of Security.

Arish nods, approvingly. "How're you doing in there? Breathing okay?"

Faden says, "Feels good." Her voice is heavily muffled, and has to be relayed through a speaker on her chest.

One of the technicians says, "Standard weapons complement with the trooper gear is an adapted minigun. We have one prepped in the next room if you need it. And some other options. But, uh. Chief Arish said you wouldn't need it."

"Actually, what I said was that we should watch this," Arish says.

Faden moves clumsily over to the rack where she deposited the Service Weapon. As she lifts it, it transforms, flexing and growing, suddenly becoming much heavier than before. It becomes an abstraction of a minigun, the basic concept stripped down to just a few essential geometric solids. Three long barrels spin idly and frictionlessly in the air. Behind the barrels, the Weapon has a roughly cylindrical body made of solid black metal discs, which shuffle back and forth, vibrating uncertainly among themselves. Like a flock of birds, a temporary shape formed by independent pieces with independent minds all acting in concert.

With the sudden weight, Faden almost drops the Weapon. Its long barrels bounce off the floor. She grabs the Service Weapon's new handle with her other hand and hauls it back to horizontal. The Weapon rests naturally at about hip height. She isn't able to easily lift the thing much higher. She feels like she could drill a hole in a battleship with it.

"Whoah," she says.

"Yeah," Arish grins. "I figured something like this could happen. The Service Weapon emulates iconic weaponry. I heard it was Excalibur in a past life, and crap like that. I don't know mythology. But my guys watch a lot of action movies and there aren't too many weapons more iconic than the M134 minigun."

Faden turns away from the others, swinging the Service Weapon's muzzle around in an arc, trying to get used to the weight. It's inconvenient at best. "I don't know if this is going to work," she says. "I can't use my telekinesis unless I have a free hand." She shapes the Weapon back into its Grip form, which appears and behaves more like a generic pistol. It looks comically tiny in her hand, but at least she can raise it and aim it steadily.

"The point is, you have options," Arish says. "You can improvise. I've seen you do it a bunch of times."

"Sure."

"And the kind of thing you're going to find in a Slidescape isn't going to be the kind of thing you can shoot," he adds.

"Yeah," Faden says. "Everyone on the team is bringing HRAs. We'll be protected from resonance-based attack too."

"Ma'am, uh..." Arish says. "Take care out there. I've served under two Directors. That was enough. And I don't think we've got anyone lined up."

*

Slide Projector activated. Slide-55 loaded. The gateway opens, three storeys tall, rectangular, blue-white, luminous.

Nine of them go through, including Faden. Faden goes first. Behind her are four Bureau rangers, combat experts trained for hazardous environments. And behind them are the researchers, with packs full of gear.

Faden is prepared, or thinks she's prepared, for nearly anything. She's visited more Slidescapes than anybody alive except perhaps her brother, and that was before she even joined the Bureau. Since then, she's crossed any number of Thresholds into wildly incomprehensible, alien landscapes.

But this is... a forest. A pine forest, like she might find anywhere in the American heartland. It's night, and there's a clear sky, and above the trees there is a fairly familiar-looking crescent Moon.

Huh.

Faden activates the flashlights on her helmet. Her people follow suit. She leads them straight on through the forest, shoving undergrowth out of the way as she goes. The terrain dips, and then rises. The trees become denser, then start to thin out. Everybody is under orders to call out anything unusual they see. Nobody sees anything. Nobody says anything.

After a few miles, Faden stops and turns to her navigator. "Let's get this straight. We're on Earth. Right?"

"Yes, ma'am," she replies. Her name is Walsh. She looks upwards. The trees are thinner here, and she has a reasonable view of the sky. "I don't need my equipment to recognise these stars. It's nothing like the Quarry Threshold starfield at all. This is home. The Big Dipper is right there, and there's Polaris."

"What? Oh." Faden has kept Polaris' existence a secret from all but the most senior Bureau staff. In the base of her mind, Polaris herself ripples briefly, acknowledging her confusion. Then Faden realises what Walsh is pointing at. "The North Star. Got it."

"That puts us in the Northern Hemisphere. And based on the plant life, we're in North America, not Asia."

"Why would a Projector slide lead back to Earth?" Faden wonders aloud. "Are we in the U.S.?"

"One moment, ma'am." Walsh takes what appears to be a sextant out of her pack. She moves to somewhere she has a better view of the North Star, and measures its elevation. Then she consults a paper map. No GPS unit — the Oldest House would never allow such an advanced piece of technology to pass through it. "...Yes, ma'am. Without knowing what time it is on this Earth, I can't get you a longitude. But we could be anywhere on this parallel here. Colorado, Kansas, Missouri..."

"This Earth?"

"Yes, ma'am. This is certainly Earth, but I can't say for sure if it's the same Earth. And even if it is, we can't rule out time travel."

"Time travel? You're kidding me." There are no confirmed reports of time travel in Bureau records. Yet.

Walsh shrugs. "I've been with the Bureau for a long time, ma'am. I try to consider all possible options."

Faden turns to one of the rangers, the radio operator, Sullivan. He carries a sizeable rectangular backpack, with an antenna sticking out of it. Old analogue technology. "You're still in contact with the House? Through the projection?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Okay. But that thing's got a pretty good range, right? Can you try to reach the nearest Bureau office, here on this side of the projection? We have offices in all of those states. Tell them to get in contact with Bureau headquarters, and get Emily on the line. I want to see if we can close the loop."

"Yes, ma'am." Sullivan sets his pack down and pulls out the microphone. "This is FBC Expeditionary Crew Gamma One calling... any Bureau agent who's listening." After a minute or two of trying, he doesn't get a lot more than dead air. "Any Bureau office. This is Crew Gamma One."

"We could be too far from civilization," Faden says.

"We could go back through the projection and get a vehicle," someone suggests.

Then the whole earth shudders violently, underfoot. It's like it jumps up a half-inch. Everybody stumbles. At the same time, a sound arrives, carried some distance through the cold night air. It is a deep, heavy DOOM, like something extremely large being dropped from a height. Something like a mountain.

Faden looks at another of her researchers, her geologist.

"That could have been an earthquake," he suggests. But it's clear that nobody is buying it, not even him.

There's a worried pause while everybody scans their surroundings.

"...Does anybody else hear that?" a ranger asks. He unslings his rifle and moves away from the group, looking into the forest.

"No. What do you hear?" Faden asks. Her armour muffles her hearing.

"Trees," the ranger says. His name is López. "Splintering. Getting closer."

"Back up," she orders him.

He doesn't.

DOOM.

At that moment, another voice breaks in, a crackly voice through Sullivan's radio. "Stand down," it says. "You are completely surrounded. Lay all of your weapons down."

Sullivan fumbles for his microphone. "Uh, say what? Who is this?"

DOOM. Like footfall of a tyrannosaur. Hell, Faden thinks, it could be a tyrannosaur. Even she can hear the crash of trees being uprooted or crushed now. She concentrates her flashlight beams on the direction the sound is coming from. She can't see anything.

"There's something out there," López declares.

DOOM.

"López, get back here," Faden orders. This is a basic tactic, and López shouldn't need to be told twice. In a hostile engagement, all Bureau staff know, the Director goes first. The Director has the Service Weapon, and she wields Powers from a half-dozen other bound Objects of Power. She's fought the Board and lived, and some say won. But López doesn't move. DOOM. He's transfixed by a gap in the forest, a place where nothing is shoving trees aside like wheat stalks, stampeding towards them all. DOOM.

"Stand down!" the unknown on the radio says, again.

"Uh, we're in the middle of something here," Sullivan replies. Then, "Oh, shit." He drops the transmitter, and runs.

Faden bellows, to everybody, "Move!"

López says, "Contact—"

Faden stretches out her TK, latching onto a knot of earth and rock in the ground beside her. She wrenches it out of the ground and launches it overarm, on a flat trajectory past López's head and directly into the centre of the disturbance. It's a good shot, it hits whatever-it-is hard, but not hard enough. López takes one step backwards, aiming at the dark air, and then he implodes downwards into a bloody mess, a pancake of gore.

"Fucking hell!" Faden recoils in horror, almost tripping over. She scrambles away to one side, just dodging the invisible mass as it storms past her, almost crushing her too. It crashes violently into the trees behind her, rolling to a halt.

"I want them all alive," she hears someone shout. In fact, she hears it in stereo, once from Sullivan's still-receiving radio speaker, and once from a real human mouth standing somewhere behind her.

And then it gets loud.

Chapter Text

The rest of Faden's people do what they're trained to do. Her researchers drop their equipment and run for cover. Her remaining rangers regroup and open fire on the blank space. The noise is insane, but Faden's gear muffles it heavily. She thinks she catches glimpses of a rolling pale hide in the dark, absorbing the shots. As for her, she readies the Service Weapon, but with the rangers between her and the monster now, she has no clear shot of her own. The monster hollers, something like a human scream but massively amplified and made massively deeper, to the point that it makes the trees vibrate.

Faden feels a rain of gunfire thump into her back and shoulder. Her armour absorbs the impacts. It's more startling than painful. Are you kidding me? She turns, calling another chunk of the environment to her hand, a heavy tree stump this time. Behind her, she spots the shooter. A stocky man, kneeling in the undergrowth, wearing advanced black combat gear and aiming a heavy assault rifle at her head. Just as she sights him, the rifle's muzzle flashes, burying two more shots directly in her helmet, one in the bridge of the nose and one in the corner of her faceplate. Yeah, Faden admits, in this suit I guess that's a non-lethal attack. She pivots expertly, transferring momentum into the stump as it swings around her, and launches it at the man's centre mass. He sees it coming and turns away, taking the impact across the back. But it's far too heavy a blow for any amount of armour to cushion, and he goes down, badly injured, although swearing hard enough to be alive.

One down.

"Director!" a ranger shouts over the mayhem. Faden turns back to the main fight, then ducks as a ranger hurtles screaming over her head, knocked out of the park by a swipe from the invisible monster. Faden resists the instinct to try to catch him with her TK. The only living beings she's ever used her TK on were Hiss-corrupted Bureau staff, and it killed them instantly. The flying ranger lands badly, breaks something, howls with agony. She counts him out too.

She needs to finish this now.

She boosts upwards, hard, getting above her remaining two rangers. With the benefit of altitude, the invisible creature is an obvious, easy target. She can see that it's turning angrily, pushing trees out of the way as it moves, crushing bracken underfoot. As she watches, the penultimate ranger goes over, kicked down like a domino.

She opens fire at the empty space with the Service Weapon, Grip form, scoring six or seven solid hits. Then she realises that the Service Weapon may have been on to something. She switches to its newest form — it needs a name, "Shred" maybe — and pours on another two hundred rounds, a deluge of bullets. That gets the monster's attention. It turns again. Her last remaining ranger backs up, reloading while he has a second to breathe.

She can almost make out the behemoth's shape from the pattern of ricochets off its skin. The shape is coming towards her. She sees hints of what could be a face, a shockingly human-looking face, an eye wincing at the direct hits. Then something invisible body-slams her, a thrown fist or arm, smashing her out of the sky. As she spirals, something yellow and orange detonates at the monster's feet. Ranger grenade. Her last guy is still in it. The beast can't take much more punishment, surely.

She cannons into a tree, hangs onto it, recovers, boosts back into the air before another invisible arm comes down after her, smashing the tree in half. She hauls another missile out of her surroundings, searching with her sixth sense and finding a huge chunk of rock on the ground, weighing at least a half-ton. She spins in clear air like an Olympian with a hammer, whirling the rock around her and bringing it down brutally hard on what is very definitely the monster's head. There is a heavy crack, what could be a very large bone breaking, a plate of skull. There is a long, unpleasant holler of pain, and the thing is done. Still invisible, it falls. It knocks two more trees over as it falls, flattening more undergrowth, and throwing up clouds of pine needles and forest crud.

Faden lands hard, falling to one knee. She gulps air down. Her muscles are burning. Her bound Objects of Power grant her enhanced durability and strength, but working in the trooper armour is taxing. Maybe it wasn't the right choice.

Her heart is buzzing. God damn, she thinks. It's good to be back. Inside her, Polaris ripples with agreement. She has never had a clear picture of Polaris' personality, but she definitely likes to watch her fight.

She looks around for her people. There's no one. Even the last ranger is gone. It's a clear space in the forest, just her and the invisible corpse of whatever the hell she just killed, and moonlight. "We done?" she calls out. "Report!" Only then does she finally remember. There was a third party in this fight.

"Stand down," a disembodied voice crackles. Sullivan's radio pack. It's right in front of her, abandoned. "You're completely surrounded, we have all of your people. You don't stand a chance. Put the weapon down."

Faden turns slowly on the spot, scanning the forest. She sees a few dark shapes, but it's hard to be sure how many of them there are. Could be five. Could be fifty.

It could be a bluff. She selects a name. "Walsh?" she calls out. "Do they have you?"

"Yes, ma'am," Walsh calls back.

"...Shit."

She could take them. Even if she drops the Service Weapon, she has plenty of armour and a truckload of TK left. But there's no tell-tale orange glow on any of these enemies. They're not Hiss. They're just basic guys. And her people, her researchers especially, didn't come here to have their lives gambled with. This could, despite everything, be a misunderstanding.

"Drop the weapon!" the voice barks again. "Now!"

Another voice cuts in, a woman, measured and older. "This is getting needlessly antagonistic."

"This is still a live engagement, ma'am," the man mutters back to her.

"I'm aware. Give me a minute. I'll see if I can turn it into a conversation."

She steps out, with her hands where Faden can see them.

She is shorter than Faden, and a generation older, with a thick braid of very dark hair, and blue-rimmed glasses. She wears the same advanced combat gear Faden saw earlier, but casually, not fully zipped up. It's like she doesn't care for it. She turns around once, demonstrating that she is unarmed.

"I'm in charge here," she says. "The thing you just killed? We were intending to capture it alive. That's why Agent Goddard was trying to get your people to stand down. He apologises."

"Agent Goddard shot me eight times," Faden says. She rolls the shoulder he hit. "I can feel the dents."

"And you dislocated his shoulder, so let's call it even. My name's Wheeler. What's yours?"

"...Faden."

"Ms. Faden, I believe you and I are on the same side. My task force has a mobile base of operations a few klicks from here. Several of your people require medical attention and we're prepared to provide it. One of your researchers has received a severe head injury. We have a CT scanner. I hope you understand that time can be a factor with these matters."

"...Alright," Faden says. "Let's move."

It's an easy decision for her to make. The Oldest House won't allow something as advanced as a CT scanner within its walls, or an MRI scanner or even a modern X-ray machine. The state of the art of medical equipment in the House isn't much better than medieval. It's one of the more serious standing problems the Bureau has.

Upgrades were attempted, once. That's why the House doesn't have a Medical Sector anymore.

Wheeler says, "We need to disarm you, first."

Faden considers this. Cautiously, she holds the Service Weapon out to Wheeler, grip first. She knows it's useless to anybody but her. And in any case, she still—

"No," Wheeler says. "That's not going to cut it. We've seen what you can do. Hold still, please."

Faden feels a sudden, ghostly sensation, as if someone is standing behind her. She turns. But whatever it is has already stepped forward, into her head. Polaris twitches, alarmed to have company. Whatever it is feels wrong.

"Oh," Wheeler says, "who is this? Hello. Don't be scared, I just need to unplug some things. She'll be fine."

Faden twitches. She drops the Service Weapon and her arms hang loose. Then, to her shock, her TK disappears. Where a sixth sense used to connect her to the landscape around her, allowing her to feel and lift and launch solid objects, there's now blank, numb space.

"Wait! What are you—"

And then Polaris disappears too. Swallowed up. Gone.

"No! No, wait, I need her!"

And then she drops unconscious.

*

She wakes up with most of her armour missing. Just the innermost layer, the grey and red base suit. Her TK is still gone. So is Polaris. She rolls over. She's lying on a narrow camp bed in the back of a truck, behind a few stacks of equipment. Wheeler is seated opposite her. Outside, the sky is rising out of pitch black to a dull blue.

Faden asks her, "Where are my people?"

"Nearby. Coffee and cocoa. Broken bones are set. Dagland's head injury was serious, he's in surgery right now, but he'll be fine." She pauses. "There was nothing we could do for the young man who was crushed."

Faden grits her teeth. "God. I... I hate writing that letter."

"So do I," Wheeler says. "As for my people, Goddard is pissed, but he'll walk it off. You could probably have killed him, but you demonstrated some restraint. I appreciate that."

"You're welcome. I guess."

"We found the projection window in the forest. You came here from another reality." It's not a question.

"...Yes."

"Are you Foundation?"

Faden shakes her head, puzzled. The Foundation is the deepest Sector in the Oldest House. How could someone be Foundation? "I don't know what you're asking."

"Who do you work for?"

"The Federal Bureau of Control."

Wheeler nods, smiling encouragingly. "What rank do you hold in the Federal Bureau of Control?"

Faden looks her in the eye. "Janitor," she says, deadpan. "Assistant janitor."

Wheeler laughs. "Tell me about it. Let me make some educated guesses. Stop me if any of this is wrong. The Federal Bureau of Control is a United States government agency tasked with the containment, study and control of anomalous phenomena. Anomalous objects, places, events, people. People like you. Objects like your gun."

"It's called the Service Weapon," Faden says.

"You're struggling to get a handle on a universe that you barely comprehend," Wheeler says. "You're slowly realising that 'normalcy' is a very small raft floating on a very deep ocean. When you find something weird, your institutional reaction is to isolate it. Lock it up, analyse it, give it a number. You have a... prison for these things. Containment units. Documentation. Secrets and heavy redaction."

Faden says nothing. Everything Wheeler's said so far lines up.

"But as for today," Wheeler goes on. "Today, you're discovering that you're not alone. There are other universes like yours. Universes which have a problem with normalcy.

"Universes like yours and mine fall into two categories. Some of them die. And the rest develop some kind of immune response. A Federal Bureau of Control. Or something like it."

"...That's who you are," Faden says.

Wheeler nods. "We're called the Foundation. We're like your Bureau, but about a hundred times bigger. We have to be, because the problem in our reality is about a hundred times worse than it is in yours. You have, I'm guessing, about ninety anomalies on file, total? We have thousands. Microbial religions, hornet-based intelligences, cosmic-scale diseases, demon seas. And more every day. It's like some madman out there is cranking them out. We're not a government agency, we have no national or international affiliation, the problem is too big for that. We defend the whole world. We've been doing it since... well. It depends where you want to draw the line. According to some accounts, since prehistory."

Faden doesn't know how much of the story to accept at face value. It sounds a lot like an attempt at intimidation. "And you're the Foundation's Director?"

Wheeler cackles. "Not even close. I shouldn't even be here. They roped me in because they needed someone with experience to lead a difficult tracking operation. But my specialist field is antimemetics and this thing isn't antimemetic, it's just invisible. Someone higher up forgot the difference. Ironically."

Faden doesn't know what "antimemetic" means.

"Oh," Wheeler adds. "Here. Your familiar. She seems harmless."

Polaris returns. Faden sighs with relief. "What did you do to her? How did you do that?"

"I didn't do anything. I suppressed the part of your brain which knew she was there. I have a... familiar of my own, which can do things like that. It eats knowledge." She coughs. "It has a name, but I don't know what it is. It eats my memory of its name whenever I name it. I don't know why."

Polaris seems happier to be back in contact. She wraps herself around Faden's mind, calming down.

"Do you think they're the same?" Faden asks, hopefully. "The same species?"

"No. Mine's memetic, yours is resonance-based. Mine does what I've trained it to do. Yours has an agenda."

Faden blinks. For a second there, she lost contact with Polaris again. It happened just as Wheeler said "an agenda". It's like she didn't want Polaris to hear the word.

Faden says, "What?"

"What year is it in your reality?" Wheeler asks, brightly.

"2021."

"Interesting. Two of your rangers were carrying what looked like World War I Lewis guns. And not a single one of you had a phone. Only that throwback of a radio set."

"It's our headquarters," Faden explains. "It's... old. It hates modern technology. What year is it here?"

"2011."

"Is that... uh, disconnect... unusual?"

Wheeler shrugs. "It doesn't mean anything. Our next ten years aren't going to be anything like your last ten years, I can tell you for a fact."

*

The mobile base is in a grassy valley downhill from the forest, a sprawl of vehicles and temporary structures. Huts and tents and mobile offices, similar to the Bureau's own outposts in the House's Foundation. It looks like it hasn't been here for more than a day, and it looks ready to pick up and keep moving within another day. Most of the vehicles are conventional military units, trucks and transports. A few are weirder, with alien-looking machines mounted on the back. It looks to Faden as if Wheeler has between a hundred and two hundred people working for her, researchers, technicians, combat specialists, medics. It's a fairly familiar blend of skills, but much more highly organised. The technology on show is enviable. They have computers.

"Mobile Task Force Upsilon-100," Wheeler says. "I don't think they've come up with a nickname for themselves yet. It's been a busy week."

Wheeler doesn't let Faden have her Service Weapon or TK back, yet. But she brings her to the tent where the Bureau rangers and researchers are recovering. Most of them are in good shape. Dagland is still in surgery, but expected back soon. One ranger, Bryce, has a broken leg, set and cast. He's fine. In a better mood than any of them, thanks to some substantial pain medication.

"You're being treated well?"

"Yes, ma'am." There's a lot of coffee in play, which is a good sign. Someone hands Faden a cup of it.

"They took our guns," one ranger says.

"And all my equipment," a researcher adds. "And our HRAs."

Faden doesn't think there's a Hiss in this universe. If there were, the Foundationers would all be wearing HRAs too. But she says, "I'll see what I can do."

"What's happening next?" someone asks.

Faden shrugs. She looks at Wheeler, who is collecting some coffee of her own. "I guess we establish cross-dimensional diplomatic relations?"

"No," Wheeler says. "First we solve the immediate problem. Follow me."

*

Faden follows her to a cramped operations room.

"The target is designated SCP-26796. That number is impossible to shout at someone in a combat situation, so the codename is 'Spark'. This thing has been active for at least fifteen days and has killed at least eighty people across two U.S. states. That body count is going to rise if we aren't able to contain it. There is a long backstory to this anomaly, but I don't have time to tell it right now." Wheeler produces a fat tablet computer, then unfolds it twice to make a sizeable screen, laying it on the table in front of Faden. A map.

She goes on. "Satellite tracking indicates the Spark is... somewhere near here. Unfortunately our current generation of satellites has comically poor resolution in the chiral spectra we care about. So we don't get a pinpoint, we get a heatmap. And you'll notice that this heatmap is more than eight kilometres in diameter and includes our current position. For all we know, the Spark is right out there, sleeping between the CTVs."

There's a pause.

"The thing is dead," Faden says. "I put a hole in its skull." She gestures at the entrance to the ops building, indicating that the invisible corpse is still up there in the forest. Then she shrugs, adding invisible question marks to her statement.

Wheeler says, "The thing you killed was SCP-26796-F. His real name was Christopher Bradshaw. He came from a town about eighteen klicks from here, called Wallingsburg. He was one of the Spark's victims.

"The Spark isn't the monster. The Spark is the thing that's creating the monsters. We don't know what it looks like yet. We think it's invisible, phase-shifted like the mutations it's creating. We think it could be small, too, as small as a single molecule. We won't know until we find it."

"Does the F mean..."

"Bradshaw was the sixth person it 'exploded', yes. They're getting bigger, and their behaviour is becoming more uncontrollable. Invisible, escalating human kaiju. We think the Spark drives them out of their minds. It's a real mess of a phenomenon, frankly. A lot of the anomalies we deal with have a twisted kind of logic to them, but we haven't found the twist to this one yet."

Faden sits down, heavily. "You wanted to take him alive," she says, rattled. "You were going to try to save him. And I killed him."

"No," Wheeler says, firmly. It's a cold, unhappy reassurance. "Bradshaw was brain-dead from the moment the Spark mutated him. And in that form he crushed more than a dozen people, your ranger included. We were going to try to contain him. Study him. But there was no 'save him' option."

Faden says nothing.

Wheeler continues. "So, believe it or not, this is still an extremely routine operation for us. I have technicians who are building the fine-grained chiral tracking equipment we need, right now. Forty-eight hours from now it'll be ready to go, we'll contain the Spark, write a big old report and go home to our families.

"However. You, Ms. Faden, have it all going for you. Flight, A-grade telekinesis, your friend the resonance entity." A compliant attitude, she adds, to herself. "And your Service Weapon may be the most dangerous weapon in either of our realities. So I have a question. What do you have in terms of extra senses? Can you lead us to the Spark? Any time we can cut off this search operation is potential lives saved. We think it recharges in cycles, which gives us some time. But sooner or later it's going to mutate somebody else, into something twice as destructive as Bradshaw."

Faden looks down, doubtful. Polaris flickers uncertainly. "I don't know if I can sense it. If you can get it into my hands, maybe I can cleanse it."

Wheeler tilts her head, not entirely sure what this means. It sounds a lot like it would neutralise the SCP, which is rarely the end goal of Foundation containment operations. But before she can respond, another Foundation operative bursts into the room.

"Ma'am, they're getting a transmission," he says to Wheeler, glancing at Faden. "We moved all their equipment to storage, including their radio. Now there's someone called Pope calling in. It sounds urgent."

"My Head of Research," Faden says.

"Have you responded?" Wheeler asks the operative.

"Negative. She says there's a situation on their side of the projection." Still addressing Wheeler, he nods at Faden. "She says she needs her help."

"What kind of situation?" Faden asks. "The Hiss?"

The operative looks bewildered. "Uh, is that what you call a reactor breach in your universe?"

"Oh, shit."

Chapter Text

"You've switched to backup power?"

"Yes, Jesse."

"You've sealed the Maintenance Sector firebreaks?"

"Yes, Jesse, but it didn't work!" Emily Pope sounds agitated. She's not comfortable with the role of unofficial stand-in Director while Faden is away. "He melted his way out. I mean, through the floor. He was emitting an incredible amount of heat. White-hot, almost blue-hot, like a star. I've never seen anything like it. Containment teams couldn't even look directly at him."

"Where was he headed? Is he trying to leave the House?" Heading down, that would seem to be impossible, but Faden and Pope both know how inconsistent the Oldest House's topology is. Sometimes the Sectors shuffle themselves like playing cards. Sometimes Executive is both above and below itself.

"No. He seemed angry. He... he's heading for Dimensional Research."

Faden says nothing for long, unpleasant moment. "Okay. So he's coming here."

"Yes, Jesse. We couldn't shut down the Slide Projector before we evacuated the Sector."

"God damn it." Faden shoots a bad look at Wheeler. "You're the containment experts, right? You've been doing this about a millennium longer than we have?"

"I'm guessing this isn't a fission reactor we're talking about," Wheeler says.

"Our reactor core's name is Broderick Northmoor. He's a former Bureau Director, and he's probably the most powerful parautilitarian alive. Except for me. Maybe. We locked him up because he was completely insane, and we built the reactor around him because it was the only way to deal with the thermal energy he generates. He must have been waiting. Either for me to leave the Oldest House unguarded or for someone to open a gateway. Somewhere he could escape to."

"...I see," Wheeler says.

"Bureau Directorships... end badly," Faden says.

"Shut the Projector off," Wheeler says.

"How? You just heard—"

"I heard you switched to backup power. Shut the backup power supply off. The Projector runs on regular electricity, yes? No?"

"Yes. It does. That's good. Emily, did you hear that?"

"The Projector is plugged into a redundant array," Pope says. "I couldn't risk power failure while you were on the other side. I wanted to be sure."

"...Okay." Well done, Emily.

"Is Northmoor lucid?" Wheeler asks. "Can he be reasoned with?"

"I don't know," Pope says.

"There are three basic outcomes here. One: we talk him down. Two: we lock him up. Three: we kill him. Those are in ranked preference order."

"Talk him down?" Faden doesn't quite know how serious this suggestion is.

"The Foundation has substantial resources. We can get him an island, a private dimension to rule, a billion dollars, a cure for his thermokinesis problem. These things could be cheap compared to the alternatives. It's worth trying for, even if the chances are slim. If he's not receptive, we go to option two. The mind is the weak link in the chain for most humanoid anomalies. If you can get me close enough, I can have SCP-4987 start pulling plugs out, like I did with you. Once he's unconscious, we can write our own ending."

Faden guesses that SCP-4987 is the designation for Wheeler's memetic familiar. "When all you have is a hammer, huh?"

"It's a pretty solid technique," Wheeler says. "At least, it is on the one day a year I run into an anomaly with a human-shaped mind."

"And if his mind isn't shaped like a human's anymore?"

"Then..." Wheeler shrugs. "We'll have a mess. Something best cleaned up by a janitor."

Faden nods. She turns back to the radio. "Emily, keep everybody back. Let Northmoor find the projection, let him come through."

"I don't think we have a choice about that," Pope says.

"It doesn't matter. We have a plan to take care of him this side."

"Jesse, you have less than two minutes before he's with you. I hope you know what you're doing."

"Yeah."

When Faden turns around again, she finds Wheeler has one finger pressed to her ear and is looking at the ground, talking quickly. "No, we need something sooner than that. You have a prototype yet? ...Anything. I'd take one sonar ping, a finger in the air. Anything you can do in the next few minutes. This situation is about to explode." She glances at Faden. She gestures at the interior of the storage unit, which is filled with random confiscated gear from the Bureau team. "Your armor was stored here with everything else. It's got to be in one of these crates."

"Forget it," Faden says. "It was an experiment. It didn't work. I fight better when I'm mobile. But I need my TK back."

"Done."

Faden sighs heavily as her sixth sense returns. She flexes her fingers, stretching her telekinesis out across her environment, back in contact with the world. She felt half-blind without it. "And my gun?"

"We took it for analysis. Follow me." Wheeler looks out of the storage hut, then sets off at a brisk pace across the base.

"No one tried firing it, right?" Faden asks as she jogs after her.

"Unlikely," Wheeler says.

As she says it, something elsewhere in the base explodes. The detonation is bizarrely musical, like an electrified harp being violently torn in half. Wheeler and Faden both look around in time to see a flash of blue-green energy coruscating briefly from one of the larger buildings. Something weird-looking and metallic pinwheels up into the sky, ringing like a bell, then crashes to earth.

"No one tried firing it, right?" Faden repeats.

Wheeler drags her by the arm, still in the direction of the analysis tent. "That wasn't your gun, that was the chirality technology lab. Come on." She consults her earphone again. "Krzeminsky?"

"The prototype is a crater," he yells back at her. Faden can't hear it.

"You get a reading out of it?"

"One-nine-three. Give or take ten, fifteen degrees. We didn't have time to calibrate. It's— it's south of us. That's the best we can do until, agh, this time Monday."

"That's back toward the projection," Wheeler says, clearly enough that Faden can hear it.

"Yes, ma'am," Krzeminsky replies.

They're at the analysis tent. Wheeler stops and fixes Faden with a long, significant look. "Do I need to spell out to you what's going to happen? If we can't get to Northmoor in time?"

Faden says, hopelessly, "It might not happen."

Wheeler shakes her head. "Damned rookie." She turns and enters the analysis tent. Faden follows.

The Service Weapon is in the centre of the tent, mounted inside an advanced-looking toroidal scanner, with measuring lasers placidly tracking over its barrel. Every time the components of the Weapon's barrel twitch, the measuring lasers error out, go back to the tip of the barrel and try again. Because the Weapon is continually twitching — respirating, Faden has always thought — the lasers are locked in a loop, and have been for some minutes.

There are four Foundation researchers in the room. All of them are floating, dangling from clear air, a half-metre off the ground, almost as if hanged from invisible nooses. Hanging there, they speak a continual rambling murmur, a chant:

"You are a worm through worlds. Repeat the worm. Repeat the world. A place exists where you will be unfolded. A song in your heart which ruins. Unfathomable. An ocean beneath your home. We wait behind your eye. We eat what you see..."

Wheeler stops dead, holding her arms out, blocking Faden from approaching the Service Weapon or any of the suspended researchers.

"What is this?" she asks Faden, not taking her eyes away from the gun. Her tone is cold and angry. "Did your gun do this?"

"Oh, God," Faden says.

A junior Foundation operative sprints up behind them and skids to a halt. Faden turns. A patch on the operative's chest says his name is Perry. Perry ignores Faden and addresses Wheeler, from behind. "Ma'am, Xi team reports a highly thermoactive humanoid anomaly just arrived through the projection. And... they say, uh. You remind us of home. You've taken your boss with your boss's boss with you."

Faden curses. Wheeler says, "What?" and as she turns to look quizzically at Perry, Faden turns too and scrambles past her, lunging for the Service Weapon.

"And when the song begins," Perry says, "it'll be time to relive the way you died." His hand drops to his hip, where he has a loaded pistol. An orange light stirs around him, like warped film grain. "So long, it goes."

"Wait," Wheeler says.

Perry draws.

Wheeler disarms him and floors him in about a quarter of a second. Perry groans, rolls, tries to get to his feet. Wheeler aims a kick at his jaw. Then Faden yells from behind them both, "Out of the way!" Wheeler turns, sees the barrel of the Service Weapon pointed in her general direction, and dives aside. Faden shoots Perry in the brain.

Wheeler scrambles to her feet, aghast. She raises Perry's gun, training it on Faden's eyeball. "Freeze! Drop the weapon!"

Faden freezes. She does not drop the Weapon. Out in the main part of the base, more flickers of orange are starting to gather. Wheeler notices them, but keeps her attention on Faden.

"I extended a lot of good faith to you, Faden," Wheeler says. "I saw an inexperienced director who could use some friendly pointers. We shared coffee. And now you're killing my people? What have you brought here?"

"It wasn't the Service Weapon," Faden says.

Despite everything, Wheeler trusts this answer. She puts the rest together in a second. There is only one remaining unanswered question. One suspicious passing reference not yet explained. "Then what is the Hiss?"

"It..." Faden begins. She gulps. She works it out. "It hid inside the reactor. That's the only way. While we sterilized the whole House, Sector by Sector. It was hiding inside Northmoor. And now it's here."

"What is it?"

"It's... a hostile, resonance-based viral infection. It incinerates your mind and turns you into, a... a receiver for what it wants you to do. And then it just uses you to kill other people. Your fists, your weapons, your combat training. Everything else is burned. When it invaded our headquarters we spent months trying to figure out how to bring people back from it. We had to put them all down. There was no other way."

Wheeler considers the story. It is... unimaginative. Alarming. Completely plausible. "Tell me. Tell me you didn't come to this reality to offload your problems on us."

"We didn't. I swear."

Cautiously, Wheeler lowers her weapon. She looks out at the base. There is a significant amount of orange light gathering. Foundation operatives, clad in it. Dozens of them. There is a ringing in her ear, a strangely intoxicating resonation.

"It keeps your weapons," she repeats. "And your training. Faden, do you have any idea how highly-trained my people are?"

Faden takes a deep breath. In her hand, the Service Weapon breathes. In her mind, Polaris is starting up. Like a drum beat. "I can take them."

"All of them?"

At that moment, an orange light blossoms across the scene. Looking up and south, Wheeler and Faden both see that something immense has just exploded on a distant hillside, out where the projection should be. There is a mangled column of fire up there.

It's happened. The Spark has found Broderick Northmoor. He is the size of the Chrysler Building, and orange-hot, and swathed in the Hiss effect. The Hiss had already distorted his torso, turning him inside-out, like a butterfly of flesh. Now, from the gaping hole in his chest, he belches molten slag, tonnes of it, laying waste to the forest around him, a living volcano.

It's not clear whether he still has a head, or a face to scream from. Still, his mangled cry arrives seconds later, a distant and deeply furious cry for vengeance: "DIIIE. RECKKK. TORRRRRRRRR."

Chapter Text

There is a blistering rhythm to the way Jesse Faden fights. Wheeler thinks of Jackie Chan, if he could fly. If he had an arsenal of supernatural powers to play with, if he could move across clear ground almost faster than the human eye could follow. If, for once in his career, he wasn't the underdog. Faden is aggressive, creative and brutal in battle, switching constantly from gun to TK to melee attacks, and shaping the Service Weapon into new forms, forms which work like rifles, pistols, beam weapons. She never stops moving and her situational awareness, too, seems to be superhuman. No one can draw a bead on her, no one can corner her. She pulls a rocket right out of the sky and flings it back at the man who launched it. She dive-bombs two more Foundation operatives and breaks their brain stems with her TK. She hurls a fragment of the detonated Spark scanner into the middle distance, seemingly at nothing. Wheeler turns just in time to see the armoured truck which just pulled up, with the heavy machine gun mounted on the back of it. The chunk of metal crashes into the gunner's chest with the force of a cannonball, ending him. The orange light around him winks out. Another projectile shatters the driver's window, decapitating the driver.

As for Wheeler, she runs. An engagement as kinetic and violent as this one is a great place for a baseline human to get ruined. Instead she hares away behind the analysis hut, taking a back route around the perimeter of the base.

Wheeler is painfully aware of how her own abilities measure up. She was dispatched to this location primarily to lead the team, to marshall resources, to provide her years of experience in anomalous containment. As a combatant, relative to the actual Foundation operatives who are trying to kill her and Faden, she ranks low. She knows this. She's seen the rankings. She assembled the rankings.

Excellent marksmanship, due to diligent practice rather than any innate gifts. The best physical fitness and martial arts capabilities that can be expected of a forty-something woman of her relatively small stature. That's it. Senior Foundation staff do not receive a magical additional piece of training which allows them to fight a dozen of their subordinates at once.

She rounds a corner and finds three Hiss-corrupted operatives waiting in silence, watching Faden fight, clearly planning to jump her when the moment is right. One turns, hearing her arrive. She delivers two solid shots into the man's chest, then dives around the corner as his friends turn too. She curses herself for the waste of ammunition; the shots will have achieved nothing more than bruising. Foundation-issue body armour is good. A detonation of automatic rifle fire comes after her. She skids sideways and rolls under a transport vehicle. She scrambles to her feet at the other side and keeps running.

Something is happening in her brain. She can perceive it, but can't fully understand it, because her brain is what she uses to understand. SCP-4987 is doing something to her. Eating memories out of her, rapidly. She doesn't know what the memories are, can't even catch a glimpse of the tail end of them as they disappear. There is a ringing in her ears, and it's not because of the gunfire.

For Marion Wheeler, combat is nearly always combat with a physically superior opponent. Which means combat is primarily about avoiding combat. Run away, hide, improvise. And cheat, cheat, cheat.

*

Polaris shows Faden where the last targets are. Before the end of the fight, the Hiss-corrupted Foundationers have become extremely creative. They bombard her with grenades, and turn complex experimental weaponry on her, parabolic emitters apparently intended to blind her or scramble her brain. She goes through them all like a hurricane.

Jesse Faden is one of the two most powerful parautilitarians in her reality, but this isn't her reality. Foundation Mobile Task Force operatives are specifically trained to fight people like her, enhanced humanoids with ten or a hundred times her abilities. There are techniques which even baseline humans can apply in these situations, techniques which these operatives are drilled in, which could even have worked. She wins, fundamentally, because of the Hiss.

An intelligent, fully-functioning Mobile Task Force would retreat. They'd lull her, wait, gauge her capabilities, and trap her. They'd communicate and cooperate. But the Hiss has different motivations. The Hiss wants blood. Not hesitation, Bureau skulls. It forces the Foundation operatives forward, like trees into a woodchipper.

Faden drops to the ground. The base is just wreckage, with barely a structure still standing. The drumming in her skull stops. She gets her breath back. She takes stock.

Up on the hill, Northmoor is a kilometre away, carving a burning trail down towards the base. It's only a matter of minutes. He bellows, "DIIIRECCCTORRR."

"Wheeler!" Faden yells at the carnage. "We don't have much time! God, I hope you're alive."

Eventually she finds Wheeler hidden in a corner, between the storage unit and another demolished unit. Wheeler has a gun in her hand, and a Hedron Resonance Amplifier clasped to her chest, and at least eight Hiss-corrupted Foundationers lying comatose at her feet. Vital load-bearing memories have been stolen out of them. They are alive, but they aren't able to operate as humans anymore.

"The HRAs," Faden says, ashen, finally putting two and two together. "You took my team's equipment away and put it in storage. Including the HRAs. And I didn't get them back. Because there's no Hiss in this reality."

"Your researchers are... somewhere, still reciting the chant," Wheeler says. "If what you said is true, then in that state, they're as good as dead. Your rangers are all dead." She does not say, I had to kill them myself.

Faden takes an unsteady step backwards, and sits down on the grass, opposite Wheeler. For a long, unpleasant moment, she avoids looking Wheeler in the eye. This has been a bad day.

"How contagious is the Hiss?" Wheeler asks her.

"Polaris protects me," Faden says. "The HRA protects you. I guess... SCP-4987 protected you for a minute there too. Anybody without protection is done for."

"No. How fast does it spread? How far? Wallingsburg is only eighteen kilometres from here. Two hundred and sixty-five people. Beyond that range the towns only get bigger. It's resonance-based, yes? How far does the resonance carry, across open country?"

Faden shakes her head. She doesn't know. She's only ever fought the Hiss within the confines of the Oldest House. Enclosed spaces, active Thresholds. Never in the "real" world.

This is not a good enough response. Wheeler lunges at her, grabs her suit by the throat. She growls, "Have you just ended my world? Amateur?"

Up on the hillside, something goes KOOM.

"We need to kill Northmoor," Faden says. "That's the only way. He— he has to be the local resonator."

"Will that work?"

"It has to."

Chapter Text

Broderick Northmoor (SCP-26796-G, Entity B-001) was a human being, once.

When the Board appointed him Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, he developed paranatural powers — or, those powers could have been why the Board chose him. As he became more powerful, he became something he considered superior to any human being. He lost control of his powers, and much of his sanity. But he was, himself, controllable. Intelligent. He had the wits left that he could listen to reason.

When the Hiss infected him, it burned out almost everything which was left. The Hiss tore his physiology open, inverted it, giving him a horrifying and unique new form in which he could vent his powers as liberally and destructively as possible. He would have been a formidable opponent in that form, Faden thinks, but she could have brought him down. Maybe. It would have been furiously difficult, but doable. A coin toss.

But then the Spark took him too.

It's not known for sure that the Spark actually directly drives its victims insane. It might be that being suddenly forced to become ten or fifty or a hundred times bigger than any baseline human being just has that natural effect on a human psyche. The wrongness just breaks you. Death not by body modification but by sheer weight of body horror.

Faden has never seen something so large move. Northmoor is as big as a skyscraper, and superheated sludge pours from his torso and from the long slices in his arms and fingers. His head, she realises, is opened up into four pieces and hanging behind his neck, more energy pouring out of it.

"DIIIRRECKKKTORRRR," he screams. It's so loud that the acoustics make Faden's body vibrate.

"Director" may be the only word Northmoor has left. Even so, it's a terrifying aberration. Other than the incantations, since when has any Hiss been able to talk? When has a Hiss-infected person ever retained any part of themself through the infection? Could a part of Northmoor, a shred, a fragment of him, still somehow be intact in there? After everything that's been done to him?

Faden launches herself into the air. She has to boost hard to reach an altitude level with Northmoor's, well, neck. She brings three projectiles with her, the heaviest rocks she can lift with her TK, three-quarters of a tonne each. Northmoor stops moving and seems to focus on her.

"I'm the Director," she yells at him. They have never actually met before. His entombment in the House reactor happened long before her time. But she never released him. His grievance with Trench passes down.

A few moments pass. Northmoor seems to inhale. Then he throws his shoulders back and a gout of plasma erupts out of his neck, at Faden.

"Okay then—"

She dodges in the air, easily evading the attack, and then kicks off his flailing molten hand as it comes around at her from the side. She gains more height and launches all three projectiles right at his centre mass in rapid succession, one, two, three. Before the first of the rocks has found its mark she switches to the Service Weapon and follows up with a flurry of high-energy piercing shots. (She'd use the Shred form, but it won't do it, not when she's not in the trooper armour. It knows.)

It's impossible to miss Northmoor's body at this range. And it all achieves nothing. It's like trying to hurt a mountain. Northmoor flails again, filling the air with more plasma and Hiss-corrupted waste. It becomes harder to evade it all, but Faden stays on top of it. She tries to circle around behind him, maybe attempt a shot at the wreckage of his head, but he turns too quickly, following her.

She touches her ear. Foundation-issue communicator, the size of a pea, a significant upgrade from Bureau communications technology. "It's not happening," she yells at Wheeler, who is on the ground somewhere. "I don't have the firepower. Can you get into his head?"

"Negative. SCP-4987 needs to be closer than you can get me. Option three is green, awaiting your call."

Faden curses. She folds her arms around herself and drops out of the sky, below Northmoor's reach. Just before she reaches tree height she unfolds and applies power again, hitting the ground running. Still sprinting directly away from Northmoor, she touches her ear again. "I'm clear. Do it."

"Firing."

The orbital cannon is only a few degrees above the horizon. The beam barely clears the hill behind Northmoor, and passes through a significant amount of atmosphere to reach him, which harms its coherence and causes unwanted spread. Still, Northmoor receives almost all of the delivered energy. The strike was aimed at the middle of his spine but he was moving slowly as the cannon fired, so it hits a point a little lower and to one side, above the hip. The footprint of the beam is wide enough, though, to shear his body in half.

The sky screams. Faden is facing away, covering her eyes, but even so the light is so bright that it defies belief. She is left blinking away strange bright marks, with shadows in the shape of her finger bones. "Holy shit!" She turns, to see Northmoor collapsing like an avalanche. She gets back into the air to see better.

He's still moving. His upper half only, hand over hand, livid. Plasma is flooding from the break where his lower body was, but he's still fifty or more metres tall. He turns, sighting Faden in the sky, or at least sensing her; like many Hiss-corrupted forms, he has nothing which could be considered eyes. He flings more energy in her direction. She keeps evading.

"It didn't work!"

Wheeler gives her the facts. "The Foundation has four orbiting laser cannons. One is almost directly overhead right now, but it's out of commission due to a technical fault, and waiting on a repair mission. The second cannon just rose a minute ago. It's still operational but it's recharging now. A second full-power shot like that will take two hours to charge."

"And the other two?" For lack of other options, Faden summons more rocks and launches them into the maelstrom which is Northmoor's body. No effect.

"The third one rises in twenty-three minutes, forty seconds. Can you keep him busy for that long?"

"No. There's no way."

"All the resonance suppression equipment my team had is scrap metal," Wheeler says. "I can call for help from the rest of the Foundation, but we don't have teleportation technology or HRAs of our own, so that help is going to take significant time to show up. Right now, that second orbital strike is our only plan. You need to hold him. At least prevent him from moving toward Wallingsburg."

It can't be done.

Something she said earlier echoes in her head. Bureau Directorships end badly.

She feels the Service Weapon shudder in her hand.

Northmoor stumbles forward. Faden retreats, losing height to about treetop level, but he is gaining momentum. He hurls another volley of plasma at her. She only just evades it. He's moving faster hand over hand. She fumbles for something to throw at him, but she's down to the dregs of her TK.

She raises the Service Weapon, pointlessly. Northmoor is coming. There's nothing she can give to him which he would even perceive. The Weapon shudders again.

"Wait."

She almost didn't believe it when Wheeler described the orbital cannons to her. The level of power they represent is verging on mythological. What kind of universe is this? What is this Foundation dealing with?

She has never seen weaponry like it. Not outside of... movies—

That's it.

Because there are iconic weapons. And then again, there are iconic weapons.

The Weapon lengthens, and extends backwards too, lodging itself comfortably against Faden's shoulder, becoming a two-handed rifle as large and heavy as a girder. There is a powerful whine of energy spooling up. Faden changes her grip, struggling to hold it steady. She aims just below Northmoor's neck. His head is hanging behind that spot. That's got to be it. Right?

Her hair stands on end. Lightning crackles off the Weapon's carapace. A black panel of Weapon material flickers into existence across her eyes, protecting them. She is slowly drifting to earth, just below the level of treetops, when she fires.

Witnessing an orbital laser strike was astounding. But holding the Service Weapon while it emulates that strike, delivering the shot with her own pulled trigger, is transcendent. For several seconds, it feels to Faden as if she just ceases to exist, and there is nothing but nuclear-white light and unholy noise, a shriek of released power so loud that it becomes a wall. It empties her brain. Ahead of her, there is just a hemisphere of destruction.

She doesn't wake up from it until her feet touch down on the forest floor. There is nothing underfoot but blackened earth, all the foliage was blasted away by the shockwave. Northmoor has ceased to exist by the time she gets her vision back. There's just smoking wreckage, splayed limbs, and the fading film grain effect as the Hiss dies inside it.

The Service Weapon folds back up. The iconic moment is concluded.

*

Faden stumbles down the hill, out of the forest. Dawn has broken. Wheeler is waiting for her, on the phone to somebody else. As they get close, Faden fishes the Foundation communicator out of her ear and throws it aside.

Wheeler ends her phone call. "Foundation response team just arrived in Wallingsburg," she says to Faden. "They report that the town's occupants are uninfected. No orange glow, no unusual resonation, no sign of the Hiss. It's just another quiet morning. I'm taking two HRAs back to Site 75 for analysis. We'll commit the schematics to our database. If we need more of them, we can make them. The Hiss is... well. It's not exactly like any known SCP. But it's pretty similar to a few of them. We have some experience in this field. If it's gone, it's gone. If it does become a long-standing problem in this reality, we have the resources to deal with it. We'll have containment procedures on file by sundown. As for SCP-26796—"

"I took care of it," Faden says.

"You took care of it?"

"I found it. Inside Northmoor. It was... invisible, but I could see it. I cleansed it. It's done."

"What was it? What did it look like?"

"It looked like..." Faden fumbles for the word. The thing was a hodgepodge of ideas, entangled ideals and urges. Invisible colour and angry luminous sound. Impulses, dreams. She can't describe it. She's used to a real, tangible world. She can't get a handle on what she saw.

She says, "Creativity." It's the wrong word. She raises her arms in a broad shrug, and lets them fall. It's the best she can do. "Does that mean anything to you?"

Wheeler says nothing for a long time.

*

Late that morning, more Foundation staff arrive. They bag the deceased Bureau staff first, and take them up into the forest, to return them through the projection to the Bureau universe. The Bureau researchers are included with the dead; it looks as if killing Northmoor cut their strings. They ship all the equipment back too, the remaining HRAs, their weapons and research gear, Faden's armour.

Faden and Wheeler stop for a moment, on the threshold.

"It varies from dimension to dimension," Wheeler says. "But the unofficial rule among parallel Foundations, and Foundation-like entities, is: one universe is the most that any of us should have to take responsibility for. One universe of problems is enough. We cannot save your world for you."

"Right."

"To be clear," Wheeler says. "Do not use the Slide Projector again. Do not come back to this reality."

"Any other pearls of wisdom?"

The question was bitter and sarcastic, but Wheeler considers it seriously. "Cannon up," she says. "Recruit. Recruit good people, promote them fast and learn to delegate. Elevate others. Share your power if you can. If you try to do it all yourself, you will explode. Because things are about to get crazy."

"Crazy? Compared to this?"

Wheeler just smiles a bitterly experienced smile.

Just before Faden steps back through the projection for the final time, she remembers. "One last thing. Does the name 'Dr. Casper Darling' mean anything to you?"

"No," Wheeler lies.

"Damn it." Faden sighs. She waves. "So long."

Wheeler gives her a rough little salute.

*

The projection closes behind her.

Dimensional Research is a ruin. But Faden knows she only needs to order her staff to clear out of the place for a few days, and the Oldest House will heal.

"Jesse!" Emily Pope runs up to her. "So good to see you! Backup power is fully operational. We have some proposals for replacing the main reactor core..."

"Bring me the slide," Faden says. "Please. Emily."

Pope waves at a junior researcher, who dashes away, up to the projection booth. A minute later she returns. She hands Slide-55 to Pope, who, hesitantly, hands it to Faden. Faden stares at the ugly, blurry image for a long moment.

"It's... very fragile," Pope says. "Please, try not to damage it. Especially the image."

"No," Faden says. She hands it back to Pope. "No, of course not. Thank you. Take this and archive it with Slide-36. We'll keep it, for now. Just in case."