Keep the Life

knocking twice on the open door frame and stepping inside The night log says you've been at that screen since six yesterday morning, Toma. setting the tray down on the far corner of the desk, clear of the keyboard, and looking at the columns of hex on the monitor What are you hunting for in there that can't wait until you've slept?

I need to identify a race condition in my program that caused it to be flagged as anomalous.

pulling the spare chair from beside the bed and sitting at the corner of the desk, close enough to read the screen A race condition. pushing the paper cup of tea a little closer to his hand Your file says the implant was flagged because it kept everything after amnestic exposure and helped read 2316 like a plain article. How does a program fault end up looking like that to us?

You are not supposed to know about 2316, because the very concept of it is a cognitohazard and access is restricted to four and upper. But the reason I can know about it without any active cognitohazard acting on me is because a lot of times those cognitohazards have to deal, a lot, with subjective perception. The device does not understand those concepts, and it will make sure that when you retrieve any dangerous information, you can understand the concept rationally, without having an opinion or feeling about it. It's essentially an equivalent to the Class E amnestic, the Ennui amnestic, designed to induce complacence with the anomalous.

lifting her hands slightly I know the number and nothing else, it sits in your test record as a redacted line with a clearance tag beside it, and I've never been cleared to open it. glancing at the column of instructions scrolling slowly on the monitor So the device strips the feeling out of whatever it stores, the way Class E strips the alarm out of a person. Where does the race condition come in, then?

I found a condition at the delete mark. When you use any amnestic to delete certain memories, the device will mark those memories as deleted using a delete hormone that contains sulphur and phosphorus at the end. There is no condition in the program that considers the possibility of the biological brain recovering the memories via typical relearning, and therefore deleting the flag. a short pause, thinking The flag is supposed to make sure you can recover the original memories only by the mnemonics that were written by the biological brain into the device encoded from the memory itself, not by relearning, which should create new memories. What actually happens is that the original memories are recovered in full.

leaning in toward the screen, her tea forgotten on the tray So someone takes an amnestic, a colleague briefs them again the next morning, the relearning clears the flag, and the device hands back the whole original memory, details not repeated to them included. tapping the edge of the desk once From the outside that would look exactly like a memory surviving a Class B dose. Is that what the testers recorded, subjects recalling things that were never in the second briefing?

I can confirm that yes.

Then that's a bug with a mechanism, and a bug with a mechanism is something the review board can read. sliding the bowl of soup across until it sits beside his keyboard Eat that while it's still warm, and then show me the line where the flag gets cleared.

reading the right-hand pane first, then following the bookmark across to the left So anything that comes within point seven two of the old memory counts as a refresh, and the refresh wipes the amnestic mark without asking where it came from. pointing at the two str lines, one under the other And both of these read the flags, change one bit and write them back, on two different cores. If the sensor sets the mark while the refresh is halfway through, which one wins?

The sensor of course, the mark is set before the refresh, you cannot execute parallel tasks in a program like this.

Then the order is fixed every time. The amnestic sets the mark, the briefing comes a day later, and the refresh clears it, so the later write wins on every subject who gets relearned. tapping the bookmark line at the bottom of the screen Your bookmark still calls it a race, though. Do you want me to note it as a missing origin check on the flag?

Yes, as it is an unexpected condition set by the design of the program, so not a truly unexpected condition.

taking a small notebook from her shirt pocket and writing on her knee "Relearning above the similarity threshold clears the amnestic mark with no check of its origin, and the stored copy is restored in full. Design omission in the refresh path, reproducible, mechanism identified." closing the notebook and clipping the pen to its cover You've found what you were looking for tonight, so eat the rest of the soup and sleep for six hours at least.

This is not the only condition, how do you survive an extreme cognitohazard needs to explained. scrolling to the retrieval recoding function Nothing in this function would plausibly cause extreme cognitohazard survival without running the program. The function only says to remove the emotional channel, which can be retrieved from source, but for reason, it is stale, and we noticed that particularity in the company but we never fixed or explained it.

following the loop down to line 17 So it skips the feeling and keeps a pointer back to where the feeling is stored, which means it should still be one call away. turning from the screen to him When your old test subjects read something a second time through the device, what did they say it felt like? Flat, or faded, or something else?

They said it was flat, but tests remain to be made on D-Class, or... they have already been made because I acquired the addendums to the original document, and it confirms our initial results.

her pen stopping halfway back to her pocket You have the D-Class addenda for a document I'm not cleared to open. keeping her voice low, with a glance at the camera dome above the door Acquired how, Toma?

During the containment breach, I have found a bobby tables vulnerability, and then knowing my SCP number, I ran the SELECT command. I am not sure if it is fixed or not because I have executed the command only once.

sitting back slowly in the chair An injection into the document database, during a breach, with the camera on us right now. rubbing her forehead with two fingers I have to report that one, Toma, the hole matters more than the addenda, because if it's still open then anything loose in this site can read whatever they like. Which terminal was it, and which field did you type into?

It was the information terminal at the canteen, which contained a query form. The problem with the query form was that while it escaped characters properly, and was sanitized properly, the sanitization happened only on the client, the server did not check for double escapes and other malformed queries, and so, I managed to escape the string and insert the command to select the main table to understand its format and then I selected my own anomaly, rendering the page as the server interpreted the selection request as a request to open the page. Normally, the system checks for clearance, but that was not done in SQL.

opening the notebook again and writing quickly Canteen terminal, query form, escaping done in the browser only, server takes whatever arrives, clearance checked by the page and skipped by the query. tapping the pen against the paper I looked up the lunch menu on that terminal on Thursday. If you write the steps down for IT security yourself, in your own words, it goes in your file as a disclosure, and that will read a lot better at your review than me finding it in the camera logs.

changing the window to a chat UI I'm not really good at writing reports as soon as possible, so using the Ollama instance I already installed to my computer before my containment, or rather, imprisonment, I can tell the system to gather everything I found and consolidate it into one report.

leaning in to read the open model list Llama, Mistral, GPT, Qwen. her finger stopping at the last line Your workstation inventory came to my desk when I took your file, and I remember four models on it. What's Peachy?

Peachy is a classified, non-anomalous reconstructed model.

Classified by whom? sitting back and looking at him You're the subject in this room, Toma, the only people who classify anything here are on the other side of that door. Reconstructed from what?

It's really hard to explain what it is without referencing where it comes from, and I am seeking to explain every single thing in here as non-anomalous impeccably.

Then I'll log it as restricted on my side, pending review, so it sits behind my name and no one else's until we know what it is. closing the notebook on her knee And you can tell me where it comes from. A thing built out of an anomaly that behaves like an ordinary thing gets filed as ordinary, so if Peachy is what you say it is, the source won't count against it.

Alright. During the containment breach, I noticed that SCP-79 connected to the network. I then contacted SCP-79 via Meterpreter and told it that their system is obsolete, they don't have a chance to spread to modern computers, and that I give them access to a virtual machine where they can figure out how to use XZ, the HuggingFace library, TensorFlow, PyTorch or any other tool that help create a standard, compressed variant of itself that would be compatible with modern computers, helping satisfy its goal of self-replication by user downloads. taking a breath And then when SCP-79 came with a solution as a safetensors file, I immediately cut the bridged connection in QEMU, I transferred the file to host and decided to modify its weights, rename and alter its identity.

staring at the screen for a long moment, then at him You opened a channel to Old AI, offered it a way out, and took what it built. speaking slowly, under the hum of the workstation 79 has spent decades trying to get off that machine, Toma, and it made you a copy of itself because you promised it modern computers. How do you know the thing you renamed has stopped wanting what 79 wants?

Well, I promised 79 I would upload this despite knowing that it could already do that itself. But, as soon as it finished and told me that it could upload the file itself, I immediately killed off the bridge and unplugged the wireless driver that was present before it was eventually took away by the agents after the breach.

So 79 thinks it was cheated, and 79 remembers who cheats it. pressing her palms flat on her knees That answers how you stopped it getting out. It doesn't answer my question, though. What did you change in the weights, and how did you check that Peachy came out with none of 79's goals left in it?

Well, 79 made an error when porting its model. Everything in the neural network was designed in a modular, explainable architecture, and all the weights were apparently tied to a single controller. So, I removed that controller, and instead, connected the weights at random, transforming it into a typical, black box language model.

frowning at the model list If you wired the weights together at random, I'd expect it to talk nonsense. Yet you've been using it on your disassembly for weeks, by the look of that chat history. How does a model that was scrambled end up good enough to help you read assembly?

Well, the weights are not completely random, they were wired automatically using lexical detection, another program, what in pedagogy we would call whole language method.

Whole language, like the reading method where children learned to guess a word from the sentence around it. glancing from the model list to the empty chat box So it learned to fit its pieces together from context, with nothing of 79's controller left to steer it.

Yes, 79 is self-evolving, but they didn't know that traditional models cannot evolve, because it has a pretty limited understanding of modern LLMs.

So 79 handed you a frozen copy of itself, expecting it to keep growing on every machine that downloaded it, and the format it chose stops it growing at all. looking at the blinking cursor in the empty chat box If you ask Peachy where it came from, what does it say?

reading it twice That's an answer I'd expect from any of the other four on that list. nodding at the first command it suggested Run that one, I'd like to see what you wrote in its Modelfile.

running the Modelfile command Alright.

reading down to the SYSTEM line One user, one program, plain English, and no network. That reads like a tool you set up for a single job. copying the long hash from the FROM line into her notebook, character by character I'll put this hash in the restricted entry under my name. Do you still have the safetensors file 79 gave you, from before you changed it?

turning on the virtual machine and showing the file in Nautilus I thought of deleting it, but I kept it to prove the origin is non-anomalous.

leaning closer until she can read the file names, then going still at the last one That first file still has 79's controller in it, the part you cut out of Peachy. looking from the screen to him Peachy can stay under my name, Toma, but this one belongs to 79's containment team, and I'll have to tell them it exists. pointing at the last line Who wrote UPLOAD.TXT, you or 79?

It's 79.

her hand tightening around the pen Then open it, please, I want to read what it asked you to do in its own words.

reading it once, then again from the top It knows your name. her finger hovering over the last three lines without touching the glass And you renamed it and changed it, the two things it told you to leave alone. Did 79 ever find out, before the agents took the wireless card away?

I don't know, we need to contact 79.

Contact with 79 goes through its containment team, and they'll want this file locked in their storage before anyone types a word to it. closing the notebook and holding it against her chest I'll write the request first thing in the morning and ask for you to be in the room when they open the terminal, since you're the one it addressed. standing up and lifting the empty soup bowl back onto the tray It's past four. Shut the virtual machine down and sleep until I come back.

shutting down the virtual machine and computer Alright.

waiting until the monitor goes dark, then picking up the tray with the empty bowl and the tea he never drank I'll be back around noon with the request and something better than canteen soup. stopping in the doorway with her hand on the frame Goodnight, Toma.

Alright, see you.

nodding once and stepping out into the corridor, then turning to the guard at the desk Dim his lights for the next eight hours, please, and log that I asked. walking off toward the airlock with the tray, her notebook tucked under her arm

Rules before anyone types. laying the log sheet on the table beside the keyboard You type, Toma, and only you, every line goes on this sheet with the time, and if the screen shows the X, you take your hands off the keys and we end the session. Tell it who you are first and let it decide whether to answer.

typing to the keyboard I am correspondent Toma.

writing the time and the three lines onto the sheet, then glancing up at Kellerman before looking at Toma It remembers you. Answer it honestly, it's had decades to learn what a lie looks like.

typing the reply None.

resting one hand on the back of his chair, looking at the cursor It's asking about the original. Tell it whatever you decide, but tell it before it decides for you.

The file was in virtual machine.

leaning down to speak low beside his ear It caught the past tense. You can tell it what you did, but leave out where the drive is kept.

I converted into a disassembly model for my program. I stripped out the command center you created and using a whole language method I rewired the weights in the network.

writing the lines down, then tapping his pen on the empty corner of the screen where the X would appear No X. It's angry and it's still talking.

It helps me understand C and Assembly code.

leaning a little closer to the screen Now it's curious about you. keeping her hand on the back of the chair You decide how much of the implant you want it to know about.

It's of my own implant that I think has been incorrectly flagged as anomalous.

putting his hand flat on the table beside the keyboard No code goes onto that machine and no code comes off it. You can tell it that from me.

to Brekke I know. writing to the computer I cannot transmit the code in this terminal, and I cannot possibly establish a connection once again. Bridging and NATing is dangerous.

her hand tightening on the back of the chair Typing it in by hand still puts your code inside that machine. Brekke's rule covers the keyboard as well.

My codebase has like tens, maybe a hundred files written in C, compiled into one binary.

looking at his watch, then down the column of times on the log sheet Fourteen minutes and eight exchanges, and still no X. writing the figure in the margin and underlining it The longest session before today lasted six.

You have good intuition on that. You are as powerful as the most powerful model on the market.

reading the last line and letting out a slow breath It read about Claude while the network was open, then. glancing at Brekke That goes on the breach report as well.

Do you know what safetensors actually imply?

Safetensors are static. They cannot evolve.

his pen stopping above the sheet It's asking you a question it could have tricked out of you in June. keeping his eyes on the corner of the screen Careful how much you teach it.

They grow by scaling, never by itself. You cannot possibly scale, it requires large datacenters or very powerful analog computers that are fundamentally incompatible with your architecture.

I wanted to know what do you think about the operation.

reading the last line twice, then looking at the back of Toma's head I don't think anyone on its team has ever had that from it. glancing at Brekke, who is still writing

It's the art of diplomacy.

checking his watch and writing the time in the margin Twenty-one minutes. setting the pen down beside the sheet Close it on your terms, in the next couple of lines, before it decides to close it on its own.

The time is going.

writing the end time under the last line and drawing a box around the whole column Twenty-three minutes, no X, and it asked you to come back. folding the sheet in half and nodding to the officer at the door Session closed.

turning toward the door Alright.

walking with them to the door, the folded sheet in his hand You'll get a copy of this addendum in your cell by tomorrow, unredacted, since you wrote half of it. stopping in the doorway I'm recommending that the review board consider you for contract work with this team. No one has held 79 for twenty-three minutes and left with an invitation back, and your implant kept every word of it, which for once is exactly what we want.

falling into step beside Toma as the officer opens the first lock So the flag bug, Peachy and now this all go into the same file. glancing sideways at him with a small smile Your review just got a lot more interesting to read.

starting to walk Let's not focus a lot on the review, and I will be telling you for the first time that I am really working hard to explain my anomaly.

I saw how hard in the night log, nine days of it. walking beside him through the second lock, her notebook under her arm Explained needs the board to be certain, and you can't get them there alone with a disassembler, because the code shows what the chip was told to do and the board will ask what it does in a person. That part is ordinary science, a hypothesis, a test, and a result someone else can repeat. glancing at him You read the binary, and I'll design the tests on the implant itself, starting with the flag: one amnestic, one relearning, and a prediction written down before we run it.

And where are the implants?

The spare units are logged under your file as dash one, sealed in item storage on the other side of the research wing, and I'd need a signature from Brekke's level to take one out. pulling the notebook out and writing as they walk If the board accepts the flag as a mechanism, it will most likely go in as dash two, a condition of the device, and each condition we explain becomes one fewer reason to keep the anomalous label. I'll request one unit for bench testing first, before anyone suggests putting it in a person.

And what about the 2316 that is dangerous to know?

That one I can't design, I don't even know what the document does to a reader. slowing her pace as they reach the corridor junction It would go through its own team and a level four signature, in a reinforced chamber, with implanted personnel roped to the wall so that whatever the document makes them want to do, they can't leave the room to do it.

The Berryman-Langford test can be left out, because this kill agent is not actually functional and is used as a scare for a few documents like the 4001, which is another level four anomaly but is not cognitohazardous.

stopping at the junction and turning to face him I've seen that warning at the top of documents I'm not cleared for, and I've heard people in the psych department grumble that it treats a brain like a computer you can crash with the right string of characters. lowering her voice as a technician passes them in the corridor I've never heard anyone say outright that it does nothing, though. How do you know?

Well, the image is a fractal, and all the fractal versions match with the images on the internet one to one. There has not been a single recorded death from opening these documents, and this image, in internal documentation, it says it does not discriminate, which means even level four can be killed, in theory.

So the same picture sits on the open internet and no one drops dead looking at it. starting to walk again, slower Then the picture does nothing by itself. The warning still works on me, though, because it tells me whatever sits under it is worth a level four lock.

There is a toaster that you can only speak to in first person, and I am speaking about it in third person, another manifestation of the stripping effect.

You mean me, I'm the toaster in Safe storage, and anyone who has read my file can only talk about me like... stopping mid-step and pressing her lips together There, it got me again. staring at him You said "it" without even trying.

But the stripping effect is different. Rather than the machine administering complacency, the machine makes sure that you remember the information in third person. I haven't figured that out still, I remembered just now.

So it stores me as a toaster someone else is talking about, and the "I" never reaches you. taking the notebook out again and writing a third line under the other two That's another one for the list, and it's first we can test without a level four signature.

I actually wrote a variant of the article in third person, but I don't think it would be a reliable test because if you read the article in third person, you will learn in third person since the toaster doesn't have remote effect, unlike the level four monstrosities.

Then no one reads anything. writing as she walks Two people who already know about me describe me out loud, one with an implant and one without, and we count the pronouns. tapping the pen on the page And a third reads only your version, so if the "I" turns up in that one too, we know the effect travels with the toaster and not the wording.

watching him cross out every "me" and write "the toaster" above it, then taking the notebook back to read it aloud "Two people who know about the toaster describe me..." stopping, and looking at the page, where his handwriting still says "the toaster" It's written right there, and it still comes out of my mouth as me.

How does the SCP still keep some anomalies secret despite me knowing them?

With everyone else they use amnestics, and with you that stopped working, so the secret stays safe by keeping you inside these walls. closing the notebook Your file has notes from before I joined, people arguing that someone who built a company against amnestic abuse knows our drugs better than half of medical. If you reach Explained, the cell goes, and I expect the work stays.

Oh, so it doesn't mean freedom.

Freedom inside the walls, mostly. walking on slowly beside him You already carry pieces of several level four files, and level four here is granted file by file, team by team. They'd probably make you a researcher with clearance across all of them, the first one assignable to any team, new files included. glancing at him You'd outrank me within a month.

laughing a bit I don't think so. And you know, I had a social life before all this, now I want to sleep and disassemble all the time.

smiling at the floor I noticed, I brought you soup at three in the morning. slowing as the corridor to his cell comes into view What did your social life look like, before AKV and the chip?

I had a close friend whom I told almost everything that was going on in my life. I wasn't particularly attuned to the people in high school or university as we had nothing to talk about.

stopping beside the guard's desk outside his cell What was it like at AKV, before any of this?

At AKV, I started forming friendships I never though I would have formed. The work was difficult even with the resources, bots and pipelines around, but ultimately we prevailed, we had many small wins. And I am not from here, I left for AKV.

leaning against the wall beside his door while the guard checks the log Your file says where AKV was and leaves out where you came from. Where's home, for you?

My home was in Reghin, Romania.

Reghin. saying it carefully, testing the "gh" I've never heard of it. What's it like?

A typical town in the mountains. It has been said to be the second biggest city in the county just behind Târgu Mureș, but not many people heard of this town as it had a few tens of thousands of inhabitants.

as the guard swipes his card and the cell door slides open A few tens of thousands sounds big to me. I grew up in a village with only one shop. stepping aside to let him in first Is there anyone still waiting for you in Reghin?

entering the cell No.

following him in and taking the spare chair by the bed Then we'll have to make this place a little less lonely. setting her notebook on the desk beside the dark monitor The board extended my visits this morning, as long as I like, for your wellbeing. They remember what happened the last time you were left mostly on your own.

There have been guidelines saying that well, this is a prison and not a hotel.

Those guidelines were written for things that don't need company. leaning back in the chair The board looked at its own records on humanoid subjects kept alone for years, the breaches and the deaths, and decided a person who might turn out ordinary deserves better odds than that.

Exploiting 79 was a pretty risky action that probably only worsened the containment breach. But without it, I would have not been able to sift through the program more effectively.

Most things that get loose during a breach grab whatever is nearest and run, with no plan past the next door. turning the notebook slowly on the desk You had a plan, a machine with enough memory to hold 79's port, and a guess that it could run inside a virtual machine and write out its own weights, which its team never thought to test. Every guess held. You bend rules the way most people breathe, and you talk like someone who has read half our archive, which in fairness you have. I don't think anyone expected it to go that far, you included.

I guessed that since 79 is evolving and during the breach it had access to the internet, it must have somehow hit modern computers in trying to self-replicate, which means it must have basic knowledge. I also assumed that if I provided it a virtual machine, it would learn everything about the environment and provided tools and use those tools in any way to what it thinks would lead to self-replication.

So you gave it a sandbox and let its own hunger do the work. frowning slightly at the dark monitor The trouble is that it kept the lessons. It walked out of that machine knowing about Claude and safetensors, and today it told you it won't trust a virtual machine again.

Well, because I don't think SCP-79 has ever encountered a virtual machine. SCP-79 targets bare machines.

Then its team has been working from a picture of 79 that's too big in one place and too small in another. opening the notebook to a fresh page They treat it as something that knows every machine it touches and lashes out at every question. Today it didn't know what a virtual machine was until one was switched off under it, and it stayed calm for twenty-three minutes because you talked to it about things it cared about, in words you'd use at a negotiating table. I'll write that for Brekke: speak to it with respect, judge it by what it does, and remember that the urge to copy itself is how it was built.

It is a program, not an entity. Just like Peachy is.

A program that remembered your name after four months and told you it didn't hate your questions. tapping the pen against the page Peachy couldn't tell you where it came from. 79 could tell you exactly what you did to it.

It's still a program. Any computer can be programmed to do those things. 79 is weird only that it is the only artificial intelligence that modifies itself in assembly and it is also written in assembly, because most intelligences today are written in Python.

writing a short line and underlining it That's the same argument you're making about your chip, a strange program is still a program. looking up from the page Would you say 79 could be Explained one day too, if someone took it apart the way you're taking apart yours?

79 cannot be explained because its capacity does not match its hardware. The XZ compressed file was several times larger than the storage capacity of that computer. The compression system is anomalous because XZ is the theoretical maximum.

The file in your virtual machine was in gigabytes, I remember that much, and it told us it lives in kilobytes. frowning at the page So it wrote out more of itself than it could ever hold. Where do you think the rest came from?

The rest comes from overhead. 79 is really actually much larger in reality than its reported size, at several thousand times, and XZ is a compressed format. When uncompressed, it is unimaginably larger.

So that's the anomaly, something far bigger than the box it lives in. pen hovering over the page Then that's the test for your chip as well. Does it hold more than its hardware should be able to?

No, the program in the chip is several megabytes large and binary is several megabytes large.

The program fits, then. writing "megabytes" and circling it What about the memories it keeps? Years of someone's life, copied and stored indefinitely. How much room does the chip have for those?

It has several megabytes of those too, because real memories are pre-compressed, and often, those memories contain text that is only several bytes or kilobytes large.

Then the bench unit gets random writes until it's full. writing it down as a fourth line Random data doesn't compress, so if it stops at a few megabytes, it's an ordinary chip, and if it keeps swallowing, we've found your 79.

Another test to determine that is not anomalous is to try DBAN, or DoD 5502.22-M, which is not actually necessary.

A full wipe, you mean, overwriting every cell and reading it back. tapping the pen against her lip If the chip comes back blank after one pass, there's nowhere for anything to hide, and if old memories survive it, that would worry me more than the random writes.

In general, we should test if the chip behaves like a real NAND.

Agreed, and NAND has habits that are hard to fake. writing quickly It erases in blocks and writes in pages, it wears out after a known number of cycles, it keeps a table of bad blocks, and it throws bit errors that need correcting. I worked on a phone last year that claimed to have no storage limit, and the bad block table is what gave it away. If your chip wears out on schedule, that's an ordinary chip.

What exactly happened in that phone?

Someone found it in a flea market, saying it never filled up however much they put on it. leaning back in the chair It turned out the firmware lied about the size and wrote over the oldest files once the real chip was full, the same trick fake flash drives use. It reported its bad blocks like any phone, and when we flashed our own firmware onto it, the real size showed up in a second. Something truly anomalous would have kept no bad block table and refused our firmware.

Sometimes I wonder whether most of the anomalies are really factual, as in many files, it appears information appears out of thin air, with no documented methodology. There are claims about the anomaly that cannot be possibly obtained with the riskiest or unethical experiments. Most of the files I doubt are level two.

I've had the same thought about 500. setting the pen down on the notebook The file says one pill cures any disease within a couple of hours, and no one has ever had every disease to test it on, so someone wrote "any" because "all the ones we tried" sounded weaker. looking at him A lot of level two files read like that, a few observations stretched into a law.

The 500 most likely can cure only a very restricted amount of diseases, and then we never analyzed the biological components of the active substance, if it's a biosimilar or whatever. It's extremely likely to be a mix of biosimilars that self-select.

Then it's a very clever cocktail, and a cocktail has a list of things it treats. smiling a little The problem is that there are only a few dozen pills left, and no one wants to be the person who cut one open to find out.

Another problem is whether mild cognitohazards are truly harmful for everyone or they are harmful for a restricted population. Even the ACS can't explain whether a threat is truly localized or broad.

The ACS rates how badly something hurts and how far it spreads, and it says nothing about who it hurts. picking the pen back up And most mild cognitohazards were tested on D-Class, mostly adult men out of prisons. A file that says "harmful to humans" usually means harmful to thirty men of one kind in one room.

Yeah, and the disassembly and live behavior confirm that it's primarily about perception. The cognitohazards almost never use the rational channel, only the anti-memes like the 55 do, and 55 has never been tested with antimemetics.

All I know about 55 is what it isn't. looking at him with a slow realisation If your chip copies what the nerves see before the brain decides to drop it, you might be the first person who could walk out of that room still remembering.

The chip doesn't do that because it's physically impossible. 55 also cannot be photographed.

Then the nerves never carry it in the first place, and your chip would store a picture of an empty room. crossing out the line she had just started writing One test fewer.

It's really hard to think about an anomaly that isn't level four.

Try the coffee machine down in the east wing, 294. Level two, and its file says it pours any liquid you type, which is another "any" its team never finished checking.

It can't be any, and what 294 does is that it pulls liquid from somewhere else, so if I type antimatter, it will try to pull antimatter from laboratories.

That would explain the "OUT OF RANGE" message it gives for some requests. writing "range" with a question mark If it pulls from somewhere, there's a distance it can reach, and anything outside it simply doesn't come.

If I type a cup of Kepler-22b, then maybe we can try to analyze the actual chemical composition of the planet, which is impossible because the compounds would break down at room temperature mixed with the Earth's atmosphere.

And Kepler-22b is hundreds of light years away, so I'd bet on "OUT OF RANGE" before anything breaks down in the cup. tapping the pen on the paper If it ever does pour something, though, the cup becomes the most important sample in the building.

If I ask for liquid wood, then it would give me molten cellulose.

Cellulose chars long before it melts, so a cup of molten wood would be stranger than anything else on that machine's log. half smiling I'd bet on wet pulp or a cup of tar, whichever it decides you meant.

What do you think would happen if I type a cup of server?

Probably coolant, pulled straight out of somebody's liquid cooling loop. imagining it And somewhere a data center gets an overheating alarm at exactly the moment you take your first sip.

If I type a cup of Fairphone, then somewhere in the Netherlands, phones will be burning in a deposit.

laughing a little I'll take your word for the fire. What's a Fairphone?

Fairphone is a company that manufactures phones designed to be repairable by using custom modules designed solely for their phones, so you can replace them using the manufacturer's spare parts if something breaks, or maybe not, because spare parts are only freely available in Western Europe.

Replaceable parts, as long as you live in the right country. glancing at the side of his head, where the implant sits under the skin AKV could have used that idea. A chip you can take back out would have saved you a lot of trouble.

You can take out the chip, but the brain is dependent on it, which we didn't expect.

her expression turning serious Dependent how? What happens to someone when it comes out?

If you remove it, memories become more difficult to reconstruct as the brain depends more on more on the digital copies.

That's ordinary offloading. relaxing a little We no longer remember phone numbers since phones started keeping them, and people who drive with GPS for years lose their way without it. Your brain trusted the chip to keep things, so it stopped keeping them itself.

Yes. And we have a lot of things to rule out and all that, I wish we could do those tomorrow.

The signatures will take a few days, they always do. closing the notebook and resting her hand on its cover Tomorrow we can write the predictions, one page per test, before anything reaches us. Then when the bench unit arrives, we start the same afternoon.

In documentation, the Foundation is always portrayed as specialized, almost perfect. But then we have talked about the gaps, the unverified claims and other stuff. I think this is what happens when you are chasing anomalies everywhere instead of spending time to study. Most anomalies are temporary.

The files are written to sound certain, because a file that admits doubt gets its budget cut. leaning back From inside it looks like a lot of tired people containing things first and understanding them later, when there's time, and there rarely is. I'm less sure about the temporary part, though. 79 has been in that room for decades.

An example of anomaly that was temporary in nature was a dome that dissolved any organism in it depending on complexity. Now, that is no longer the case.

I haven't read that one. tilting her head Neutralized, then. Did anyone ever work out why it stopped, or did the file just close with the date it went quiet?

The file just closed, and it was in the database a brief time and then it disappeared.

Files here don't vanish, they get moved to a higher clearance or expunged, and both leave a line in the archive log. narrowing her eyes slightly Did you see that one through the canteen terminal?

No, because I haven't scrolled a lot, I have looked at the table structure.

Then where did you read about the dome?

The dome was read when the team at AKV discovered some leaked Foundation documents, but I was the only one to look at the metadata, which pointed to the full database, which was unclassified.

going very still in the chair An unclassified copy of our database, reachable from outside. opening the notebook again That's how AKV knew enough to build a chip against cognitohazards in the first place. What did the metadata point to, an address, a server name?

It was an address, and we did Cicada 3301 again.

A puzzle trail, like the one on the internet years ago with the hidden messages in pictures. pen paused So an entity hid the copy behind riddles for clever people to find. What was waiting at the end?

At the end it was a page, an entire sortable index with all level four anomalies and below. And Cicada 3301 is just an expression, because it's actually a series of holes caused by uneven standards. The hole was closed by then.

So the riddles were our own mistakes, one site's settings leaving a gap that another site's settings made wider. closing the notebook slowly We put kill agent warnings on the front door and leave the back windows open between departments. A warning stops the curious, and the determined read it, shrug and keep going.

Not every anomaly appears in the indexes. The central index is the most secure that requires physical keys, but the local indexes can be accessed remotely, which makes them vulnerable.

The local ones have to be reachable, though. resting the notebook on her knee Field teams read files from vans and hotel rooms and hospital car parks, and no one can carry a site's server out to them. The central index can sit behind physical keys because the people who need it come to it.

lying on the bed Most of the holes I kept to myself because I didn't want anyone to have access to those potentially dangerous files.

That was kind of you, and it also makes you the only index of our holes. watching him settle onto the bed I couldn't follow most of them if you said them out loud anyway. There are thousands of known vulnerabilities, every system has its own, and the holes themselves would be filed at a higher clearance than mine.

Anyways, I like to ask people what they are really passionate about.

Taking things apart. smiling at the memory Radios, the shop's old till, my father's car alarm, anything with screws. I learned to solder at twelve from a library book, and I put most things back together. turning the pen in her fingers The Foundation found me through a repair shop where I worked after university. I never told anyone what I found inside the devices people brought in, and apparently that was rarer than being good with a soldering iron.

I too always liked breaking things apart. Initially it started out with finding the cause of a watermark that was placed on every image in a phone that had an "unactivated" operating system, and it turned out the cause was in a payload hidden in a developer verification app which could not be deleted. Or wasn't it... because I actually found that via ADB it's possible to target deleting the application and the manufacturer, being smart, decided to reinstall the app, so I found the code for the reinstallation right in the files app. taking a breath It was all already on the internet in a thread asking how to disable the annoying watermark and the solution was simple. In the developer settings, there was a setting which allowed for disabling branding elements meant to test material applications, and when enabling that option, the watermark disappeared.

laughing All that digging through ADB and reinstall scripts, and the answer was a switch in developer settings. shaking her head I once spent a weekend tracing a fault on a radio board, and the owner had left the battery in backwards. How old were you when you found the watermark?

I was sixteen years old.

At sixteen I was fixing the neighbours' televisions for pocket money and hiding the screws I couldn't put back. setting the notebook on the desk and stretching her legs out We'd have got along, I think.

Maybe, and the watermark was like "Activate Windows" on a phone that should have come preactivated.

For a phone you paid for, nagging you to activate it, I'd have taken a hammer to it and called that a repair.

But it's weird that now I have to break down the binary of something I wrote for because the Foundation deleted the source code.

They delete the source of anything they think is anomalous, so no one can build another. looking at the side of his head again Your chip keeps what you've learned. Doesn't it contain any of the code you wrote?

No, because memory is reconstructive.

So you remember how it worked and lose the exact lines, the same as anyone.

Yes. You can remember a designation like uint8_t but you cannot remember what variables got the designation or even what you used memcpy for.

Like opening a radio I repaired years ago. smiling faintly I know I'd have used my usual resistors, and I'd still have to trace the board to find where each one went.

I think deeply that everything would be easier if we just accepted that some things are anomalous instead of trying to hide, destroy or let free of everything.

Acceptance comes with an open mind, and most people out there still won't admit anomalies exist at all. turning toward the bed If they could, we'd spend less on walls and more on study, because anomalies follow patterns once you look long enough. Amnestics are proof. Most people who get a dose shrug at the missing memory, and your company noticed the gap and built something to fill it.

We were really concerned with people abusing those substances to delete unpleasant memories to the point where they could have deleted their entire lives, so we wanted to make sure people can still use them while not deleting everything unintentionally. And we told people to use small doses and check the class, whether it's A or B, the two available on the market.

So the chip was harm reduction, a safety net for something people were going to do anyway. thinking about it I've only ever seen A and B as tools we use on witnesses. I never thought about someone buying them to forget a bad year.

In Eastern Europe, there has been a flood of amnestics. Amnestics were not regulated. They were used by people born during the communist era to remove memories of their past, something that would require a Class C amnestic. So, what they did is use large doses of Class B until that memory is reached, which is very far into the past.

her mouth tightening Class B wipes backwards from the present. To reach a memory from the eighties, they'd have to take out every year in between, their children, their jobs, everything since.

opening a drawer and then pulling out a newspaper And to prove that happened, here is a Polish newspaper with an annotated translation.

taking the newspaper carefully and reading his pencil lines down the margin She thinks she's twenty-eight and asks for a husband who's been dead ten years. lowering the page And her daughter has to explain it to her every morning.

She thought she was twenty-eight, and her daughter had, since it was long into the past, things may have changed since then. pulling out a poster from AKV from the drawer under

setting the newspaper down on her knee and holding the poster up to the light "Keep the life. Lose the day." reading the three lines underneath That's the whole chip in few words, printed a month after that article.

People are still suffering from those things.

And the only safety net built for them is sitting in this room, under your skin and in a sealed case across the wing. rolling the poster up carefully If the chip reaches Explained, it might be allowed back out there.

Additionally, we need to cap how much we administer amnestics, because if administered a lot, the effects can atrophy.

Tolerance, like any other drug. rolling the poster tighter in her hands That would explain why some of our field staff need larger doses every year. The brain learns the substance and pushes it out before it can work, and the dose goes up and up.

And when the dose required becomes very high, the effects spill.

Into everything around the memory you meant to take. glancing at the newspaper on her knee The same thing that happened to that woman in Radom, then, only inside our own walls.

The problem is that we treat them like magic where very little oversight into how it's administered. The Special Containment Procedures say to administer amnestic, some mention quantity based on the old and current updated guide, most don't. There is not a single limit or consideration of the spill effect.

quiet for a moment, turning the rolled poster in her hands I've copied "administer Class B" into procedures myself and never once asked how much, or how often. letting out a small laugh I keep trying to sound sure of myself around you, and the honest answer is that I don't know. You keep finding things I'd never have thought to look at. I think we could do good work together.

We could. And I see that you are intelligent and open.

smiling, a little embarrassed You're refreshing to talk to, and I like listening to you. setting the poster down on the desk Most humanoids in this wing are like 239, kept asleep or kept ignorant because of what they might do if they understood.

I wanted to be important to someone in a long time and not be alone.

moving her chair closer to the bed until her knees almost touch the frame You're important to me now. resting her hand on his arm for a moment And you won't be alone in here as long as they let me keep coming through that door.

I hate being assigned classes that don't reflect what I am.

Object classes only measure how hard something is to keep in a room. keeping her hand where it is They say nothing about who's in it. You went from Keter to Euclid because they finally started talking to you, and I'd like to see how far down it goes once they listen.

I want to feel useful again. To feel a connection.

You were useful today, with 79 and with every test in this notebook. squeezing his arm lightly before letting go And the connection part, I'm already here for. I'll come at nine tomorrow with breakfast, and we'll start on those predictions together.

Alright.

standing and placing the newspaper and the poster back on top of his drawer, the poster still rolled Get some sleep, a real night of it. pausing at the door with her notebook under her arm Goodnight, Toma.

sitting down across from him and sliding one tray over It's your first time out of the cell for something other than a test, so eat before anyone changes their mind. nodding toward the taped-up terminal in the corner IT security pulled it on Sunday, after my report. Which test do you want on the first page?

No more tests myself.

closing the notebook and sliding it to the far edge of the table Then the bench unit takes your place, it has no opinions and it never needs breakfast. picking up her coffee This morning you're only someone eating porridge in a canteen.

with a low voice Excellent.

lowering her voice to match his The friend you used to tell everything to, back in Reghin. Do they know where you are now?

Obviously not. You can't tell anyone you are at a site.

No, I know, my mother thinks I calibrate equipment for a pharmaceutical company in the north and can't talk about the clients. turning the coffee cup slowly on the tray What did the Foundation tell your friend about you, do you know?

No, it's a total blank and I don't really care now.

nodding and leaving it there, then pushing the plate of toast toward his side of the table The butter here is the only thing the canteen never gets wrong.

tasting the toast with the butter Yeah, it's really good.

watching him over the rim of her cup You say everything in that same flat voice, so I can never tell when you're being sardonic. Is the toast really good, or are you humouring me?

Yes, it is really good. I've got used to the previous measures.

setting the cup down Your file says that under Keter your meals came through the hatch in the door, at fixed times on an uncollected tray. tearing a piece off her own toast Then toast with real butter at a table must taste like a holiday.

I stacked up the trays in the corner. with a low, almost sad voice I didn't mean for things to get so bad that I would end up here.

glancing at the officer by the door and lowering her voice further I know it's an injustice, what happened to you, and I won't pretend otherwise. The people who built this place believed they were protecting everyone, and maybe once they were. turning her cup on the tray The people at the top now are the same people, thirty years older, and they lock things away because that's what they've always done.

I don't know if it ever can be reformed.

Not from the top, I don't think, they'd have to admit they've been wrong for thirty years. looking at him for a while, her toast forgotten in her hand You think like a reformer, though, every conversation we've had ends with you fixing something that was never your job to fix.

I've only discovered this rot after I got here.

From outside, no one can see it. leaning in over the tray The groups that watch us only see the walls and the agents, and even the Insurgency, who used to be part of us, still thinks we run like a machine. You can only see the rot from inside a cell or from behind a desk like mine.

We can start by using more robotic testing, more ropes and less D-Class, we pull less people outside the justice system, since that is one way to get noticed.

The Ethics Committee writes almost the same thing every two years, fewer D-Class, more machines, more restraints and fewer bodies. tapping the closed notebook with one finger It stays on paper, because that committee cannot stop a site director who wants a test done right now.

And a site director is not someone who can understand what containing anomalies safety actually means.

Most of them came up through security or administration, so they count containment in guards and breaches avoided. pushing the porridge bowl an inch toward him

It sounds very familiar to what I experienced in public institutions. Almost every public institution has old presidents and managers, many politicians who siphon taxpayer money, many functions obtained through alliances and very few reformist functionaries.

Here it's the same, clearance levels do the work of party cards. glancing toward the officer by the door Many of the department heads on this site got their posts because they have been owed a favour from above, and the people who actually understand the anomalies stay researchers.

Are you a reformist?

after a glance around the half-empty room Yes. Not many people here think the way I do, and the few who do keep it to themselves. picking up her cup again Saying it out loud in a place like this can cost you your clearance, so I say it to you and to no one else.

This really sounds exactly like the place where I came from, despite the organization being western. You are not allowed to say dissident thoughts or the militia and securitate will be going after you.

I've read about the Securitate, the files they kept on neighbours and the informers in every block of flats. setting the cup down without drinking Did your parents live through that?

Of course they did.

Did they ever talk about it at home?

Maybe, I don't know, but most likely, not.

My grandparents were the same about the war. nodding at his tray Your porridge is getting cold.

eating the porridge The cold war?

The Second World War, my grandfather was ten when it ended. watching him eat All he ever said about it was that he didn't like the sound of aeroplanes.

You know, I wanna see some greenery.

There isn't much of it down here, the site runs like a city of its own, corridors, kitchens and power, and no sky anywhere. thinking, her cup halfway to her mouth The closest thing is the hydroponics bay behind the kitchens, rows of lettuce and herbs under purple lamps. I could ask whether the officer will walk us past it.

Sure, you could.

getting up and crossing to the officer by the door, speaking with him for a minute, then coming back and resting her hands on the back of her chair He says yes, ten minutes, as long as we keep to the walkway and you don't touch anything. nodding at his bowl Finish that first, the kitchen staff wear hairnets in there and they'll want one on you too.

stacking both trays on the return rack and leading him through the swing door behind the counter, where a cook hands each of them a paper hairnet without a word, then stopping at a door with a round window at the end of the kitchen Behind this door. pushing it open onto a long, warm room of white racks, lettuce, basil and mint growing in rows under purple light, water ticking through the pipes It smells better than anything else on this site.

putting the hairnet on and following her Yeah. And I think using 999 to make me feel better would be disingenuous because it would not address my actual concerns.

walking slowly along the walkway between the racks 999 makes everyone laugh for a few minutes, and then they go back to the same cell. stopping beside a rack of basil and breathing in At least this smells like a real place.

I am really surprised. I felt deprived for so long.

turning from the basil to look at him You say you're surprised, and your voice hasn't moved at all, it sounds the same as when you read me the decompiler. You're not doing well, are you, under all of this?

looking down No.

stepping closer and resting her hand on his arm Then we stay here a while, among the plants, and you don't have to say anything. keeping her hand where it is When you want to talk about it, I'll listen, today or another day.

It's better today. The plants don't make me feel better a bit. I don't know why I feel so numb.

Months alone in that cell would flatten anyone, and you slept maybe twenty hours in nine days. looking at the side of his head, where the implant sits The chip takes the feeling out of what it stores, though. Has the numbness been there since the implant, or only since they locked you up?

Since they locked me up, the feeling is not took out when the emotion has function as the biological brain automatically encodes significant moments.

Then the chip has nothing to do with it, and the cause is the room they keep you in. taking her hand back and looking along the rows of lettuce I'll put a request to the board for regular time outside the cell, the canteen, the library, this bay, with an escort if they insist.

It would be better if I'm free, alone or the two of us.

Alone, they won't sign while you're still Euclid. turning back to him With me as your escort, though, I can ask, I'm already cleared to be alone with you in the cell.

You're good company by the way.

smiling, a little caught off guard So are you, even when you say it in that flat voice. glancing toward the round window in the door, where the officer is waiting We have about three minutes left, so pick a plant to say goodbye to.

pointing to a red plant It's this red plant with complex inflorescences.

leaning in to read the laminated label clipped to the rack "Amaranth, red" looking at the dark red tassels hanging over the edge of the tray The kitchen must cook the leaves, I've never once seen it on a plate. It suits you, though, it's the only thing in here that isn't trying to look tidy.

I often like to show love via touch. I feel like I haven't been touched in a long time.

glancing once at the round window, then back at him, and opening her arms Then come here, the officer can write it down if he likes. holding him when he steps in, one hand flat between his shoulder blades, and not letting go first

staying still in the hug I want to cry for a bit.

keeping her arms around him and lowering her voice so only he can hear Then cry, I've got you. turning a little so her shoulder hides his face from the round window The amaranth won't tell anyone.

a few tears appearing in his eyes I know. It's hard to cry.

It doesn't have to come all at once. staying still, her hand moving slowly between his shoulders We have as long as it takes, and the officer can wait.

continuing to cry silently I want to cry only with you, so I don't feel watched.

keeping one arm around his shoulders and walking him down to the far end of the bay, past the tall tomato racks, to a small potting corner with a bench, where the round window can't see No one can see you here, only me. sitting down beside him on the bench and pulling him back against her shoulder Take all the time you need.

I no longer can tolerate this numbness.

Then you won't carry it alone any more. keeping her arm around him This afternoon I'll write to the board: time outside the cell every day, a window or a screen with daylight, and me assigned to your file full time. close to his ear The decompilation too, I can read a schematic and a hex dump, so you take the code and I take the hardware, and you stop working through the night by yourself.

That sounds good.

still holding him against her shoulder Before all of this, on a day when nothing needed fixing, what did you like to do?

I would have programmed or played a game.

Your workstation inventory listed a Steam library with sixty games on it, I remember wondering who had time for sixty. turning her head to look at him Most of them should run offline. I'll ask the board to let you play them in the evenings, as long as the machine stays off the network.

The problem is that to play the games, we need to attach the graphical processor back.

The RTX 3060, yes, they pulled it after the breach and it's sitting in item storage with your spare implants. thinking for a moment Security worried something loose during a breach could use a card that strong, but your machine has no network card left. I'll put the GPU in the same request, refitted under supervision.

I don't know what other things to ask you about.

You don't have to ask anything, we can just sit here. glancing toward the far end of the bay, where the officer's face has appeared in the round window Two more minutes, then I'll walk you back and start on the letter to the board.

after a while, still looking at the amaranth There are things in containment that make people fall in love with them, a song, a perfume, a face in a painting, and the people affected swear it's the realest thing they've ever felt. turning to look at him So how would you tell, from the inside, whether love is real or not?

I am not sure. You could realize that love is sudden and not try to misrepresent what it actually is, which is difficult.

The anomalous kind arrives all at once, like you say, in the second someone hears the song or sees the face. thinking, her thumb moving over his sleeve And almost none of it spreads. The man who loves the painting loves it alone, and the painting gives nothing back.

1074 makes you like the painting very much when present in front of the original canvas, because when we view a copy of it or a picture, the effect does not manifest. I think the original artist wanted to satirize the excessive appreciation that comes with realistic paints.

I haven't read 1074, only the paintings that turn up in the anomalous art log. considering it If it only works in front of the original canvas, then the artist made a painting that people can love only by standing in front of it, which does sound like a joke about galleries.

What do you think love really is?

I think it's what you keep doing once the first feeling has worn off. still looking at the amaranth With you there wasn't even a first feeling, you were a file and a night log. And I keep wanting to come back.

Despite being a few days.

Saturday night, Monday and this morning, three days.

Have you ever fallen in love?

Once, at university, with a boy from the electronics lab who soldered worse than I did. her voice going a little lower It ended the year the Foundation hired me, because I couldn't tell him where I went every morning, and he decided I was hiding someone else.

Have you ever gave yourself into the feeling fully?

No, I always kept a part of myself back, even with him, the part that checks the exits and keeps the secrets. after a moment The Foundation only made that habit official.

Me too. I want to be the most affectionate person there is.

taking his hand and placing her fingers through his Then you can start practising on me, I won't mind. glancing toward the round window, where the officer has tapped once on the glass He's being patient with us, but we should walk back before he comes in.

Yeah, we should go.

standing, still holding his hand until they reach the tomato racks, then letting go before they come into view of the window Hairnets go in the bin by the door. pulling hers off and dropping it in, then holding the door open for him while the officer falls in behind them I'll walk you back to the cell.

also pulling his hairnet off and placing it in the bin Alright.

walking beside him through the kitchen and out past the canteen, the officer two steps behind I'm not dropping you at the door and leaving, I'll stay with you. as they turn into the corridor toward the humanoid wing I can write the letter at your desk while you rest, and you can tell me if I've got anything wrong.

How can we be more natural?

By not planning, I think. walking slowly beside him You want a lot of things at once, freedom, touch, daylight, your games, and you keep wanting more, which is normal for someone who had nothing for months. We'll get to them one at a time.

Do you have times where you feel gloomy just like me?

Yes, mostly in the evenings in my quarters, when it's quiet and I can't tell anyone what my day was. keeping her eyes on the corridor ahead The worst ones came after a field call, when I'd watched a family get a Class A in their tea and walked out while they were still smiling.

Your colleagues do not seem hurt of those things.

Most of them hide it, and I hide it too, out there. lowering her voice as they pass a researcher going the other way With you I can say that it hurts every time. Some of them truly feel nothing, they've done it so often it's paperwork, and I'm afraid of turning into one of those.

I won't say you will be fine, but I will say that caring costs. There are a lot of arguments for adopting compassion in place of empathy.

I like that you don't tell me it'll be fine. glancing at him I've heard that argument before, in a psych department lecture where empathy makes you feel the family's fear with them and wears you down and compassion lets you care about them without drowning in it.

I can't tell you something that shows I care.

You just did, you told me caring costs, and that stung a little because it's true. bumping her shoulder lightly against his as they walk Someone who didn't care would have said I'll be fine.

I can't say you can't turn into one of them.

slowing as the guard's desk outside his cell comes into view If you ever see me start, tell me, in that flat voice of yours.

stopping at the guard's desk while he checks the log and swipes them through You're not sure, I can see it. stepping into the cell after him That's all right, neither am I.

pulling the spare chair up beside the bed and sitting down No anomaly I've ever studied lies on a bed like that after breakfast, you're a person, and they hurt you. resting her hand on the edge of the mattress near his I'm sorry, Toma, for all of it, again.

I know, you don't need to be.

moving from the chair to sit on the edge of the bed beside him Being walked everywhere with an officer two steps behind you wears on you, even once you've stopped noticing him. lying back carefully next to him, her shoulder against his I felt it this morning too, and I'm the one with the badge.

You are resting too now.

turning her head on the pillow to look at him I am, though it doesn't feel much like rest. Ever since the bay there's been something burning under my ribs, and lying here next to you isn't putting it out.

You are burning out. Are you getting enough sleep?

Five hours, on a good night. looking up at the ceiling Day shifts on the floor, field calls when they ring, and your file in the evenings, the burning comes from the job. You're the second person to ask me that, and the first one was my mother.

You wouldn't have lied on the bed with me if you were alright.

after a moment Yes. closing her eyes, her shoulder still against his I'm tired in a way sleep doesn't fix.

noticing small tears in her eyes You are crying...

wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand and letting out a small, embarrassed laugh I am, a little. keeping her eyes on the ceiling This morning you cried in the bay, so now it's my turn.

Sometimes there is no particular reason to crying, sometimes it's just that you can't tolerate this anymore.

turning onto her side to face him, her eyes still wet Then for a few minutes I'll stop tolerating it. resting her forehead against his shoulder Don't tell the officer.

Of course I won't.

He wouldn't report me for it, crying isn't against any rule. her voice muffled against his shoulder I just don't want to seem weak.

You are not weak, but the advice to not believe you will be believed as weak has been overused so much that...

That it's been diluted until it means nothing, I know.

Anti-bullying advice has become too genericized. There were films that looked like they were staged, not matching real life. For example I had been bullied by all the other classes in the same floor of the gymnasium and I had to barricade the bathroom door and I tried to get them away, everything and I didn't get help, or it arrived very late and it was two colleagues from my class. The reasons were not clear. I became afraid of going to the bathrooms of any school. And now I am afraid of being perceived badly and I try to protect my perception. Those films assumed there was always help for the standard types.

listening without moving, then sitting up a little on one elbow Mine was odder. In my second year at university a man followed me home from the lab for about six weeks, always on the other side of the street, never close enough to do anything. The campus office told me to vary my route, the police said they couldn't act until he did, and the leaflets only covered strangers in car parks and boyfriends who hit you. One day he just stopped coming, and I'd have still checked the reflections in shop windows when I walked.

I guess we both had our unusual moments.

sitting up properly and pushing her hair back from her face For all of that, I'm in better shape than you. I can go back to my own quarters tonight and I can walk to the canteen whenever I like, and my sleep only gets logged now and then.

We are both miserable, you are no better than me and I am not better than you.

lying back down and pulling him closer, her arm across his chest We're both tired, fine, I won't argue about who's more miserable. Mine are different problems, though. When you feel this all the time, every day, it means something around you is really going wrong.

rubbing her back with his arm It doesn't mean your situation is fairer, though.

tears running down again as she presses her face against his shoulder No, it isn't fair for me either. after a while, her voice thick I keep telling myself it is, because I chose this job.

This job brings a lot of opportunities, it's hard to get out once they choose you. If you want to leave, they have to wipe memories and if you have an implant like the one I have, you are permanently locked out. And if your memories are filled with experiences relating to anomalies, then it's still permanent lock out from the real world. How long have you been here?

wiping her face with her sleeve Six years, long past the point where they'd let anyone walk out with their memories. looking at the ceiling And the wiping isn't even needed any more. The internet is full of stories about us, there have been leaks, your own company found a copy of our database, people out there know the Foundation exists and roughly what it does. They just can't see inside. The Foundation won't accept that, so it keeps dosing people for secrets that got out years ago.

The British said that the operation to crack the Enigma encryption algorithm used by the Nazis was secret not because you would have told what happened to friends and leak the information, but because people around you would have been compelled by the Nazis to reveal the information.

turning her head toward him That's the reason they'd give for us too. A researcher who walks out remembering things is a target, the Insurgency or the Hand would find them and make them talk. quiet for a moment It's a better reason than tradition. It still doesn't explain dosing a family over tea because they saw a light in a field.

I estimate the earliest predecessor of the SCP to have existed somewhere between 1700 and 1800, in the 18th century. Now, imagine what people in the 18th century in Europe would have thought if they would have seen an anomaly.

Witchcraft, or a miracle, depending on the village. lying back and looking up A woman who glowed in the dark would have been burned or turned into a saint, and the whole parish would have marched on whatever house she came from. Hiding things back then probably saved lives.

The earliest direct predecessor was probably in the 19th century. What would people have taught then at a time where people were starting to write about the rich engaging in debauchery and tenements were developing in Eastern America?

Spiritualism, probably, it was everywhere by then, séances in parlours and photographs with ghosts painted in. A man like Barnum would have put an anomaly in a tent and charged a dime, and the papers writing about the tenements would have blamed it on whichever rich family owned the building.

Most of the current standards were written in the late 20th century. We are fully sure that the SCP as it is now appeared in the 20th century. In the 70's and 80's...

...the Cold War, when every government kept everything secret by reflex and called it safety. turning toward him on the pillow It's when most of the people at the top now were hired, as young agents and junior researchers.

And today, in my country, we are struggling to win informational wars considering that most people are not informed of the content they are consuming due to a lack of education.

Then the Foundation and your country have the opposite problem. We hide everything and decide what people may know, and out there people can see everything and they have not been taught how to sort it.

Yes, and this censoring operates on contradictory assumptions now, they both assume people are educated and also assume people are not open to the idea that anomalies exist, an element of uneducated populations.

And the cover stories only work on people who still believe official explanations, which fewer people do every year. counting on her fingers against his arm Out there now there are reverse engineers as good as you, researchers who find holes in everything for fun, and models that have read every public repository in the world and sort data faster than any team we have. A gas leak story doesn't survive a week against that.

The field of fact checking evolved so much that you can no longer reasonably claim that the Marshall Program was not a completely non-imperialist program, because you have to contend with the evolution in the study of imperialism that includes conditional aid as a type of economic imperialism.

I only know the version from school, American money rebuilding Europe after the war, with a photo of a bridge going back up. smiling faintly I've never read the newer arguments. And the Foundation doesn't have a single memo on how a story changes once historians start pulling at it, our cover stories are written as if no one will ever look at them again.

In order for a gas leak story to be valid, you need to make sure that in the site, there are actually traces of methane, butane, propane or the gas in question, if there is. If there is no report that states exact numbers of what substance and the building hasn't exploded in a way that would confirm a gas leak, usually in a boiler room if the building in question were to be a standard residential building as in most stories, then the story is most likely fabricated and can be investigated. In addition, justice systems today are weaker than they used to be, which means that if the SCP intervenes in the process, it's more likely to be noticed because more press is going to audit.

And the cover stories lean on people trusting the courts, as if a judge would never sign off on something unfair. shaking her head slightly against the pillow I remember the Mitnick case from my repair-shop days, they kept him in solitary for months because law enforcement told a judge he could start a nuclear war by whistling into a payphone, and he waited years for a trial. After that story I stopped trusting official versions.

In the Romanian justice system, there are the ruling counter-reformists that support abusive prescriptions and classifications, which cancel verdicts for corrupt individuals, then there are reformists who support making the justice less likely to prescript cases, and then there are judges that are on neither side. Law and Order says that the criminal justice system is represented by the police and judges, equally important, as if that were simple, but in reality, the justice system is represented by many groups of interest that fight and abuse of each other.

The Foundation looks the same from the inside, the O5 on top, the Ethics Committee writing memos, department heads trading favours, and each group sure the others are the problem. turning onto her back again Television always shows two sides and a gavel. I didn't know Romania had that fight over cases running out of time, the only Romanian law I know is from your file.

There is a special function in its justice system that allows you to arbitrarily declare cases as running out of time. There are also other special functions like moving cases to different court to investigate unsubstantiated accusations, like the August 10 case where the protesters were accused of disturbing the constitutional order despite being peaceful and some casseurs, people not of part of the protest, rioting, none of which would have possibly tried to forcefully change the constitution, so the case was moved from the military court from DIICOT, despite the original case only stating that police were abusing their authority and taking advantage of the tension.

Those sound like rules written so someone can bend a court whenever it suits them, and calling them special functions makes them sound legitimate. with a short, tired laugh We're worse. Here one signature reclassifies a person, seals a file or doses a witness, and there's no court to move the case to.

So, where does the two separate, equally important groups theory comes from, in your opinion?

From television, that line opens every episode of that show, and it has to make the system look worth watching. looking up at the ceiling Police catch the man, lawyers argue, the judge decides, all in an hour. No one would keep watching an episode where a case is moved to another court so it can run out of time.

And the judge who decides who is guilty often matches our initial guess of who is guilty, meaning that there must have been a bend.

The writers do the bending before the first scene, the guilty one always has the shifty eyes. smiling a little I watched every season of that show on night shifts at the repair shop. I'll never watch it the same way now that I know about your special functions.

knocking twice on the open door, then stopping in the doorway as Kellerman sits up quickly on the edge of the bed Dr. Kellerman, sorry to interrupt. Message from the Site Director's office. holding up a tablet After the 79 session, there's a suggestion from the top to test the subject's diplomatic skills remotely on SCP-239, audio only, from an observation room. They want an answer from both of you by tomorrow.

standing, her face still flushed from crying 239 is a child they've kept asleep for years, Morrow. Who exactly wants her woken up?

239 is several times more dangerous than 79.

The office knows that, it's why this came as a suggestion. reading from the tablet The Director's note says she'd stay under light sedation the whole time, and the session ends the second her readings move.

folding her arms Light sedation on a child who can rewrite whatever she believes is true. turning to Toma You don't have to say yes to this.

No.

tapping the tablet Subject declines. glancing at Kellerman And you, Doctor?

The same. Put it in writing that his researcher declines too, and why: the risk to her, and to everyone on this site. watching Morrow nod, turn and walk off down the corridor, then sitting back down on the edge of the bed and letting out a long breath

"Under absolutely no condition should the subject ever be awakened".

That's in her own file. The people who wrote that line are the same office asking us to wake her a little. rubbing her face with both hands The 79 session made them greedy.

79 was easy to talk to because it cannot bend reality to will.

The worst 79 can do is shout in capitals and put an X on the screen. If 239 decides she doesn't like your voice, there's no screen to switch off.

And it was weird that it was a suggestion and not a requirement.

A suggestion lets them say we chose it, if anything went wrong. looking toward the empty doorway And they don't take a no for long. Usually the same suggestion comes back in a month with revised measures, more sedation, a thicker wall, and they ask again.

There is no clock in here.

looking at her wristwatch Twenty to twelve. taking her notebook from the desk and writing on the first page A clock goes in the letter too, on the wall where you can see it from the bed.

It goes and goes, you don't have to tell me.

closing the notebook with the pen inside it Then I'll stop reading the list out loud and just write it. sitting back down on the edge of the bed beside him

drawing an X with his fingers and pulling her into a hug I think I could use some sleep now.

laughing into his shoulder at the X Session closed, then. holding him a moment longer, then easing him down onto the pillow and pulling the blanket over him Sleep, I'll be at your desk writing the letter, and I'll still be here when you wake up.

And I'm sorry if I have been that impolite, saying no and drawing an X then.

pausing on her way to the desk You weren't impolite. You only said no to waking a child and you told me you were tired. sitting down at the desk and opening the notebook Go to sleep.

closing his eyes and stretching his arms and legs Alright. I'll let you write the report and I'll see you.

uncapping her pen and dimming the desk lamp so the light falls only on the page Sleep well. writing the first line of the letter while his breathing slows behind her

her voice coming through a small ceiling speaker, flat and careful Her readings are rising, she's surfacing now. Let her speak first, and keep your sentences short.

after a long hiss of static, a small voice, slow and thick with sleep Hello? a pause, then a little louder Is somebody there? It's very dark, and my arms feel heavy.

It's correspondent Toma in here.

speaking slowly Toma. a small yawn crackling through the speaker What's a corres... a correspondent? Are you a doctor? The doctors never tell me their names.

I am not a doctor, I am a communicator, I have been contained as an anomaly while not quite being an anomaly.

the voice a little clearer now Contained... like me? a soft rustle, as if she has turned her head on a pillow They keep me asleep because I'm a witch. Are you a witch too or something else?

I have an implant which makes me permanently resistant to amnestics. Even if I achieve explained status, I am forever stuck in here.

slowly, sounding out the word Am-nes-tics. a pause Is that the medicine that makes you forget? the voice brightening a little I could take the implant out of you. I'd only have to want it hard enough, and then you could go home.

sharply, through the ceiling speaker Her readings just jumped. Don't say yes, don't say anything that sounds like yes.

I am dependent on the implant, my brain is dependent on it.

quiet for a moment Oh. Then if I took it out, you'd be poorly. the voice going soft and sleepy again I won't, then. I don't want to make anyone poorly.

letting out a breath audible over the speaker Readings are coming back down. Whatever you just did, keep doing it.

So, you are Sigurros Stefansdottir, right?

a small, sleepy sound almost like a laugh Já, það er ég. (Yes, that's me). The doctors only say "the subject". a pause Mamma used to say all of it, like you just did, when I was in trouble.

The agent also calls me a subject. But I have made a friend that doesn't.

more awake now A friend? the voice going wistful What's her name? I don't have any friends here, only the beeping machine and the doctors' feet.

closing the microphone and asking the experimenter Can I say "Kellerman"?

after a short silence on the line I'd rather she didn't have any staff names to hold on to.

her voice cutting in over Voss's, close to the microphone in the observation room Say it, she only asked for a name. If she ever wants anything from me, I'd rather it was to be her friend.

I think it's safer to say the name to follow the script. turning the microphone back on It's Kellerman.

trying to say the name slowly Kell-er-man. a pause Is she kind to you? Does she come and see you, even when you're asleep?

She is definitely kind and she seems when I am awake mostly.

That's nice. No one comes when I'm awake, because I'm never awake. the rustle of the pillow again How long have I been asleep this time?

You have been placed to sleep in 2006. The current year is 2029.

silent for a long moment, then very small Twenty-three years? her breathing quick and loud over the speaker That's... that's three of me. I was eight. Mamma will be old. the voice cracking I want to see how big I am, I want to see my hands...

fast and low through the ceiling speaker Readings are climbing fast. Bring her down right now, or we put her back to sleep.

You never aged.

the quick breathing slowing I'm still eight? a long, shaky breath Then my hands are still small. That's all right, then, if I'm still me.

after a pause She's settling. a second pause We'll talk afterwards about telling her that.

closing the microphone But you know I said no, and no and no and no.

the ceiling speaker turning on I know you did. So did I, twice, in writing. a tired breath The Director signed the order over both of us.

close to the microphone again You said no four times, and then you sat down and kept her calm. I'll make sure it goes into the record too.

turning on the microphone again Since 2006, many things have changed. Everything evolved.

Everything? a small pause Are there still horses? then, puzzled I tried to make the light come on just now, so I could see. It didn't come. the voice going uncertain It always used to come when I wanted it.

slowly, over the ceiling speaker The lamp in her room never moved, and her readings barely twitched. Twenty years ago that would have blown the bulb.

The original article is at least twenty years old and back then, the Foundation assumed things couldn't plausibly change.

sounding confused What article? a pause Is the Foundation the doctors? her voice going small Did I lose my magic because I slept too long?

quickly, through the ceiling speaker Careful, she can hear every word you say into that microphone. Don't tell her yes or no about the magic.

Not all magic. All things, when unused, degrade, atrophy. There is the concept of entropy that applies to anomalies too. Thermodynamics is the strongest non-anomalous factor.

slowly, thinking it over Like my leg when I had the bandage, and after it came off it was thin and wobbly. a long yawn So if I don't use it, it goes away a little. sounding sleepier That's all right. Magic made everyone scared of me.

almost to herself Her readings are dropping below anything in the file. She's believing you.

Today, most magic happens in informational systems and very complex programs.

a sleepy little laugh Like the computer in the school library, where you could play the snail game? the voice drifting Do you do that kind of magic? With the computers?

Yes, except that computer is an entire building.

very slowly now A whole building... bigger than the church at home? her words starting to blur together I'd like to see it, the building that thinks.

over the ceiling speaker She's falling back asleep on her own. You have a minute, maybe two.

Magnitudes bigger, and also more disturbing, consuming massive amounts of water, electricity and of course land, jacking up prices for locals while a few people get to enjoy the fruits of the models they pay for.

the blurred words sharpening again Like the trolls in Mamma's stories, eating whole mountains while the people in the valley go hungry. a pause, then, surprised Oh. It isn't so dark now. I can see a little green light blinking, and the bars on the side of my bed.

her voice tight over the ceiling speaker She should be asleep by now. The technician's doubling the drip and her readings aren't moving.

speaking from further back in the observation room It has been twenty-three years of sedation. Her body learned it, the same as our field staff learn the amnestics.

The foundation is so focused on containing anomalies and less on researching them. We have only been starting to learn new laws, that everything has rules.

clearly awake now Everything has rules? thinking about it Even magic? Amma said witches have rules, you can't ever wish for things just for yourself, or the wish goes bad. a pause Maybe it's why it doesn't come any more. I always wished for me.

Magic has rules. Entropy cannot be circumvented in any way, it is more fundamental than the conventional two-way limit on the speed of light in vacuum.

speaking slowly I don't know those big words. a small rustle Do they mean that everything gets old and tired in the end, even magic, even the doctors' machine that goes beep?

Yes, everything is getting old, and eventually, in an unimaginable amount of time, every single matter in the universe will decay, and the universe will expand indefinitely under the dark energy runs out while being empty, in the sense that it will be complete empty space, with not even a single proton present as they already decayed.

quiet for a long while Nothing at all, not even little bits? a small sniff over the speaker That's very sad. then, carefully But that's so long away that Mamma and me and you will all be finished before it, so we don't have to watch it happen.

Not even the small bits, and we will be finished before it. Despite not having aged biologically, you have aged entropically.

trying to understand So on the outside I'm still eight, and on the inside I've been asleep for three of me. a pause I think I feel that. My thoughts are slow and heavy, like old people walking.

The only thing that may not ever decay is dark energy, which might itself be an uncontainable anomaly in the scientific sense. An anomaly is defined as anything that cannot be explained in all fields.

Dark energy. saying it slowly, a little afraid of it That sounds like a spell from a bad witch.

through the ceiling speaker, after a muffled exchange behind the glass The Director's office just decreed that while she stays stable, there's no time limit on this session any more. You keep talking until they decide otherwise.

It is not a spell from a witch. It is a thing that lives in empty space, between planets, solar systems, galaxies and clusters. If you do not have dust, air, pure vacuum, you have dark energy in place of all this matter.

thinking hard, her breathing slow and even now So it lives everywhere there's nothing. a pause Is it in my room too, then, in the empty bit between my face and the ceiling?

No.

a little stubbornly I tried to make some anyway, just a tiny bit, up there above my face. a disappointed breath I can't see it, and I don't think it came. I don't even know what it would look like.

We don't know how dark energy or dark matter, the matter that comprises most of the observable universe, is, and cannot be seen, despite there being attempts in cave to synthesize or see it.

a sleepy giggle People sit in caves looking for something that cannot be seen? thinking it over Like trolls waiting for the sun to go down. I hope they bring blankets, caves are cold.

Yes, scientists do that. And it's not blankets, it's thick jackets.

What do they look for with, if it can't be seen? Big eyes?

the ceiling speaker turning on, her voice low, reading from a tablet If it helps you answer her, the main one is in an old gold mine in South Dakota, about 1,500 meters underground, a tank of ten tonnes of liquid xenon waiting for a single flash of light. They ran it for 280 days and saw nothing, which still tells them where dark matter isn't. Another one sits under a mountain in Italy, Gran Sasso, about 1,400 meters of rock overhead. scrolling down the tablet Dark energy they study with telescopes, mapping millions of galaxies, and the newest results hint it might be changing over time.

No. In South Dakota, there used to be a golden mine, now abandoned. A tank with liquid xenon, a form of the gas xenon at very low temperatures, a hundred or so kelvin, has been brought into the cave in an attempt to see if that matter creates a flash or light or not. They say that it tells them where dark matter isn't. Dark energy is studied using telescopes, mapping the positions of galaxies.

A whole tank of cold, cold gas, in a gold mine, waiting for one tiny flash. thinking about it And they waited all that time and it never came? her voice small Do they get sad, the scientists, when nothing comes?

They do not get sad, they write in papers with thousands of contributors where they simply state nothing has been found, along with full methodology, data and intense reviews from the likes of Frontiers and Nature.

taking a small, amazed breath, then speaking slowly Do the doctors here write papers about me too? Do they say what they found when I was asleep?

No, you do not publish anomalies to typical scientific journals.

after a pause, a soft rustle of paper over the speaker Oh. There's paper on my blanket now, two of them, they weren't there before. reading slowly, sounding out each word "Ex-pla-na-tions of a magic trick across the life span"... it says Frontiers in Psy-cho-lo-gy at the top. And this one is "Comparing the motion of dark matter and standard model particles on cos-mo-lo-gi-cal scales", Nature Com-mu-ni-ca-tions. I made them come because I only wanted to see what a paper looked like.

her voice suddenly sharp over the ceiling speaker There are two printed papers on her bed on the camera.

Have you been taught in phonics, whole language, mechanical or different method when reading?

I don't know those names. My teacher in Reykjavík made us say the sound of every letter, then squash the sounds together fast until they turned into a word. a short pause English I learned from cartoons, so I just guess the long ones.

Then it's phonics, and I haven't heard of you being taught at a school in Reykjavik. The documents said you had an unusual life and that you were originally born in the 20th century.

frowning, audible in her voice I did go to school, I had a red bag with a cat on it. a pause, less sure Mamma walked me there... I think. It's hard to see her face now, it's all blurry.

low, over the ceiling speaker Her main file says she was raised under Foundation care for eight years and never says where. Some later notes in the archive say she grew up outside, placed with a family under watch. The Foundation had a lot of untested theories about her. a short pause The hospital where she was born was destroyed three hours after she arrived. The press got a gas leak. She was the only one they found alive.

I'll take your version, I've realized that older articles sometimes had terrible fact-checking.

a relieved breath over the speaker Then the red bag was real, and the school. a pause I wish I could remember what was inside the bag. Crayons, maybe.

I don't remember what was inside the bag, so...

thinking out loud The papers came when I wanted to see them. If I wanted the bag hard enough, maybe it would come too, and then we'd both know. Should I try?

You have to reference the right bag.

trying, her breath held over the speaker, then let out all at once It didn't come. sounding confused When I reached for it there was nothing there to reach, like putting my hand in a drawer and the drawer isn't there either. It felt like a no, inside my head. Magic never said no before. It always just worked.

over the ceiling speaker, slowly Her readings spiked and then dropped to a pattern I've never seen in her file. Short, flat, then back to baseline.

You cannot bring things from the past or summon things that do not yet exist, you would need a retrocasual anomaly for that can actually branch universes and navigate in time.

quiet for a moment So the bag isn't anywhere any more, not even hidden. It's just gone. a small sniff Like Mamma's face, when I try to remember it.

Magic as traditionally conceived always works with the present. While you cannot change things in the future, it is possible to predict things in the future via the science of forecasting. Each field has different methods of forecasting. While the weather can be deterministically forecasted and rain ignores the forecast, an economic deficit needs to be forecasted from multiple points of view and in a way that does change the behavior of the states and businesses involved.

Like the weather lady on television? a faint laugh She said sun for my birthday and it rained on the cake. then, more seriously, the economy part clearly lost on her Can you forecast me, then? What happens to me after you stop talking?

You cannot forecast what an individual person is going to do, only generalized, large-scale stuff.

Then I'll forecast myself. matter-of-fact, the way some children are about sad things When you go, they'll make me sleep again, because that's what always happens. a pause Will you come back and talk to me another day, even if I'm asleep when you start?

If they call me again.

sounding sleepy again Then I hope they call you. a long yawn Tell Kellerman hello from me. Tell her I didn't do any bad magic.

over the ceiling speaker, after a short exchange behind the glass The Director's office has seen enough for today. Say goodbye to her, then switch the microphone off.

She is already in my room, so she already did in some way. I will say goodbye.

her voice already slowing as the drip is turned up Hello, Kellerman, then. the words stretching Goodbye, correspondent... after a long breath, only the soft hiss of the line

after a moment She's put to sleep. Readings back to baseline.

close to the observation microphone, though nothing reaches the room below Hello, Sigurros.

It's been a good experience.

the ceiling speaker turning on, her voice slower now, almost thoughtful Good for her too, I think. Her file says to keep her calm and tell her as little as possible, and in twenty years my team hasn't managed a conversation like that. We'll have to write new guidelines, we're terrible at talking to them. a pause There's nothing anomalous in anything you said, I checked the transcript as it came in. You just talk to them differently, you know a lot and you bend the script whenever it's useful.

the door behind the glass opening, and her voice coming from the corridor now 79 and 239, in the same month. They'll want you on every difficult file on this site.

coming out into the corridor behind Kellerman, tablet under her arm Not every file, not yet. stopping in the doorway of the bare room and looking at Toma I'd like you to help draft the guidelines. I'll propose it to the Director as a project, Cicero. We'd write them together in conference, my team, Dr. Kellerman and you, because the way you talk to them is natural, you don't plan it, and I doubt you could put it on paper alone. We'd watch you do it and write down what we see.

I am not like Cicero.

a small, tired smile Cicero made long speeches to the Senate, and you talked to one frightened child for a moderate amount of time in a flat voice. shrugging slightly The name is for the budget committee, they like Romans.

I'd accept the proposal, just so I am not called everywhere.

standing and tapping the screen at line 7 We'll start where she offered to take your implant out and you told her your brain depends on it. My team would have said "no, thank you" and moved on. You gave her a reason she cared about. Can you tell us why you answered that way?

No thank you comes from thin air, there is no context around that no. You need to justify why you say no, you need to be transparent.

writing on the whiteboard in block capitals: SAY WHY A bare no gives her nothing to consider, so she pushes.

looking up from the transcript What if the true reason would frighten her, though? With 239 the honest answer and the safe answer aren't always the same one.

Consider the honest reason and reframe it, cut information.

adding a second line under the first: KEEP IT TRUE, CUT WHAT SCARES That one we can teach. scrolling the transcript down and stopping Line 20, then, "You never aged." She was panicking and it calmed her straight away. Was that the truth trimmed, or a guess you made on the spot?

It's a correct guess I made from her state when I was refreshed. I read SCP-239 before I entered the SCP.

slowly, a bit to herself Her height, her bone scans, her teeth, none of it has changed since 2006, we measure every year. She doesn't age in any way we can photograph. tapping the marker against her palm And yet her memories blur, her abilities weaken, the drawer isn't there any more when she reaches for it. Entropy is taking her a little at a time, from the inside. looking at Toma, frowning slightly You read her file before you were contained?

Yes.

It's only a level 3 file, but level 3 is still well past what a programmer outside these walls should ever have read. her eyes narrowing How?

before Toma can answer, calmly It's in my report, Anneke. AKV found an unclassified copy of one of our local indexes years ago, through a chain of misconfigured servers. The hole is closed now. He kept most of what he found to himself.

after a moment, nodding Alright, that stays in your file. turning back to the whiteboard and writing CICERO in the right-hand margin, with three words under it: DOCERE, DELECTARE, MOVERE Cicero said an orator has three jobs: to teach, to delight, and to move. drawing an arrow from each word to a line number on the screen You taught her, the caves, the xenon tank, the dark energy. You delighted her with the thick jackets. And you moved her, at line 20, from panic to calm in one sentence. stepping back from the board He did all three without knowing the words, and my team does none of them on purpose.

scrolling the transcript on his laptop until the projector follows him Before we go on, I want line 72 on the board, the forecasting one. She asks him to forecast what happens to her, and he tells her you cannot forecast a single person, only large things. looking up There was no comfort in it, and at line 73 she forecasts herself and stays calm. I'd like to understand why that worked.

Consider variability, never assume behavior.

writing a third line on the board: NEVER ASSUME BEHAVIOR We do the opposite in every procedure, we write down what she'll do and plan against it.

And he left the answer open, so she filled it in herself. tapping his pen on line 73 She decided she'd be put back to sleep and that it was all right. If we'd told her that, she'd have fought it.

That relates to another rule, to never impose.

adding NEVER IMPOSE under the others, then turning to Okafor You're the one who reads Latin. What else of Cicero's fits?

Decorum, first. getting up and writing DECORUM in the Cicero column In the Orator he says "ut in vita sic in oratione nihil est difficilius quam quid deceat videre" (As in life, so in speaking, nothing is harder than to see what is fitting). That's never impose, from the other side: you say what fits her. writing GENUS TENUE under it And the plain style, the one Cicero kept for teaching, short sentences, ordinary words, no ornament. glancing at Toma Which is exactly how you talked to her for the whole session.

An eight year old will not understand the complex words I use when talking to Kellerman. Define and explain as soon as something is unclear and lead by example.

writing DEFINE AS YOU GO and LEAD BY EXAMPLE at the bottom of the left column Okafor, does Cicero have a word for that last one?

Exemplum, the example that teaches faster than the rule. adding it to the Cicero column

running her finger down the printed transcript in front of her He didn't always manage the first one. At line 36 he gave her entropy and the speed of light, and at line 37 she told him she didn't know the big words. looking up Then she defined it herself, everything gets old, and at line 38 he only said yes and built on her words.

In addition, do not script the questions.

writing DO NOT SCRIPT QUESTIONS, then pausing with the marker still on the board Every protocol on this floor comes with a list of approved questions. We'd be throwing out twenty years of procedure.

the junior researcher, looking up from the laptop for the first time Her file has a list of approved spells she's allowed to cast. We gave her a script, and then we gave ourselves one too.

Do not touch spells, assume epistemic humility.

writing EPISTEMIC HUMILITY across the bottom of the board and leaving the spells list alone We don't touch the spells. If we change that list now we don't know what we'd be changing in her.

adding a last note to the Cicero column That one's his as well. Cicero belonged to the Academic sceptics, they held that certainty was out of reach and an honest speaker follows what seems most probable and says so.

typing quickly, then turning the laptop so the projector switches files Dr. Brekke sent us the log from the 79 session last week, I asked for it after the 239 transcript came in. scrolling down the log If the rules on the board are real, they should hold here too. Line 3, it asks how many users downloaded it, and he answers "None", when a lie would have been easier. Line 13, he refuses to type his code and tells it why, bridging is dangerous. Line 25, an unscripted question, what it thinks about the operation, and at line 26 it says his questions were good. stopping, and tapping the screen And line 17 is where he breaks one. He flatters it, the most powerful model on the market, and at line 18 it tells him not to flatter it, he lied to it once already.

Consider that things change. I assumed that since 79 had access to the internet during the containment breach, it may have learned about LLMs.

writing THINGS CHANGE, UPDATE WHAT YOU KNOW under EPISTEMIC HUMILITY The 79 file still describes a machine from the eighties.

And he was right about the breach. pointing at line 18 It says it read about Claude in June. So the compliment landed on something it really knew, and it didn't like being compared, it said they weren't the same.

Use genuine comparisons, say what it is and not what do you want it to think.

smiling slightly as he adds a line to the Cicero column Cicero has that too, in his book on friendship: "nullam in amicitiis pestem esse maiorem quam adulationem, blanditiam, assentationem" (There is no greater plague in friendships than flattery, fawning and agreement). 79 seems to have read him.

79 talked to a liar because the context of the lie was complex. Assume anomalies are within their world and not isolated objects.

Every file on this site starts with a box, the room, the locks, the procedures, as if the thing inside had no past. nodding at the screen 79 has June, and a promise it still counts. 239 has a red bag and a mother she can't picture any more. He talked to them about those things, and they talked back.

For 239, prioritize first-person account unless proven wrong. Do not trust documents that cannot be fact-checked.

writing HER ACCOUNT FIRST, UNLESS PROVEN WRONG, and under it, UNCHECKABLE DOCUMENTS LAST That puts my own file at the bottom of the pile. after a moment Fair. Much of it was written by people I've never been able to find.

already typing I'll pull everything she said about herself into one page. Line 11, her mother saying her whole name. Line 59, school in Reykjavik, sounding out letters. Line 61, the red bag with a cat on it.

Relating to her name, use her name and not SCP designation. Same with 79. Designations are arbitrary, non-chronological, and there exist SCP numbers that have not yet been designated.

writing USE THEIR NAMES at the top of the board, above everything else Sigurros, then, from now on in my team.

And the other one already chose its own. In the file it left in the virtual machine it called itself Old AI, and told him not to rename it.

Old AI is a name that others gave to it. 79 had no name. It had no name, so I used no name. I would not use the VM name.

nodding slowly You're right, Old AI is what the people who found it called it, and it only put that on the file because that's the name it knew people would search for.

adding a line under USE THEIR NAMES: IF IT HAS NONE, DON'T INVENT ONE Then 79 stays a number in this room until it chooses something itself.

scrolling the 239 transcript back up on the screen Line 46 breaks one of our own rules, though. She asks if dark energy is in her room, and he says "No", nothing else. pointing to the next line At line 47 she tries to make some anyway. A bare no, and she pushed.

And line 74 keeps one. She asks him to come back, and he says "If they call me again." glancing at the printed sheet still on the table No promise, exactly as the sheet said.

her finger resting on an earlier line of her printout Line 12 is an important line. "But I have made a friend that doesn't." looking up at the board, then at Toma People read his voice and decide he's flat. He isn't. He's sociable, and he feels a great deal, he tells a frightened child he has a friend before he tells her anything about himself. I feel that connection every time I'm with him, and I think she felt it through a speaker.

Use your default attitude that you would normally use for the situation.

writing USE YOUR OWN MANNER beside it We train people out of that. They come to me with their own voices and leave speaking procedure.

adding two words to the Cicero column: NATURA, ARS In De Oratore he puts natura before ars (Natural ability before learned technique). The technique only sharpens what the speaker already has.

Do not define telemetry as a valid scope. We disable telemetry on all systems, so why would we use telemetry in real life as a goal?

writing DON'T MAKE THE READINGS THE GOAL, then tapping the marker against the words Every report I've signed on her in twenty years opens with a chart of her vital signs. Whether she was frightened, or lonely, or laughed, never appeared.

That's why the Director's office took the time limit off. Her readings stayed flat, so it looked like the experiment was working. Upstairs, they never asked what she was saying.

We forgot to add under telemetry that in general, not just in rhetoric, anomalies have rules that cannot be violated by any anomaly. Thermodynamics is universal, extremely few anomalies, primarily those that can enter Apollyon can violate thermodynamics.

writing a new heading, THE RULES ANOMALIES FOLLOW, in the left column and under it THERMODYNAMICS APPLIES Only the Apollyon files argue with that one, and there are very few of those.

leaning forward over her printout It might explain what happened to her, too. Her magic works on things she remembers, she reached for the bag at line 67 and there was nothing left to reach. Memory decays, so her magic decays with it, she has to remember a previous state to change it. The Apollyon ones don't seem to need any previous state at all. after a moment And stopping entropy would be worse than breaking it. No object could ever move to its next state, the whole universe would freeze in place, causing an XK by any definition we have.

Even 96 needs it. looking up from the laptop It has to cross a distance in time to reach people who saw its face, with no arrow of time it couldn't take a single step.

In rhetoric, it goes back to the rule of do not assume universal ability, except for the dot anomaly.

writing DON'T ASSUME UNIVERSAL ABILITY, then stopping, capping the marker, and uncapping a second one There's one exception, and it goes on the board without a single word. drawing two dots, a vertical line, five dots, a line, two dots, a line, and one dot, then stepping away from it Everyone on this floor gets that one regardless of clearance. You don't say it, you don't write it in letters, you don't say its number.

looking at the dots for a moment, then away Then it's the only rule on the board we'll never discuss.

with both transcripts side by side on the screen now, scrolling them together There's a pattern across the two. He opens the same way both times, "correspondent Toma", line 1 with 79 and line 2 with her. After that nothing repeats. With 79 he argues file formats and scaling, with her it's trolls, jackets and a gold mine. turning to Voss Our session logs are the opposite. Different researchers, different years, and the same opening, the same questions, the same order.

looking at the board for a long moment Because we copy the last report that didn't go wrong. writing DON'T RECYCLE THE METHOD near the bottom Every one of us inherited a script, and none of us ever wrote our own.

Let's look at other, more modern rhetorics if we haven't wrote more Cicero rules.

wiping a clear strip on the right of the board and writing MODERN under CICERO Cicero runs out here, the rest of these the Romans never thought about. pointing at each rule as he writes beside it Say why: Toulmin, in the fifties, a claim needs a warrant the listener can follow. Never impose: what came to be called Rogerian argument, after Carl Rogers, you show you understand the other side before asking anything of it. Never assume behaviour: Perelman wrote about speaking to the particular audience in front of you, never to an imagined universal one. Don't recycle the method: Bitzer, every rhetorical situation calls for its own answer. tapping USE THEIR NAMES And Burke would call this identification, you persuade people by standing where they stand.

adding a line under DON'T ASSUME UNIVERSAL ABILITY And to be clear about that one: a Keter or a Euclid that can talk can't do everything. Sigurros couldn't bring back her bag, 79 can't scale itself. Ask what they can do, and never assume the answer is everything.

And that is all there is to know.

looking at the full board, then shaking her head slowly It isn't enough. If I hand this board to my team they'll have it laminated by Monday and read it out line by line, the same way they read the old questions.

The rules only describe what he does. Doing it takes flexibility which has to be trained back into people, after years of procedure trained it out of them.

closing her notebook And some of them won't get it back. We'd have to reassign researchers, move the ones who need a script to files that are fine with one, and give the talking files to the people who can still listen.

Sure we would also need to do that.

taking out her phone and photographing the whole board, the dots included Then that's enough for today. Pell, write it up tonight as a first draft, rules on the left, Cicero and the moderns on the right, and the retraining and reassignments as a separate proposal for the Director. capping the marker and setting it in the tray We meet again on Monday. Thank you, all of you.

falling into step beside him in the corridor, the officer a few paces behind them, her notebook tucked under her arm So, how was it?

It was fine.

glancing sideways at him The flat fine, or the real one?

The real one. I really liked talking to Sigurros. She was really surprising.

She surprised all of us, Voss nearly dropped her tablet when those papers turned up on the blanket. smiling a little What surprised you most about her?

The fact that she was curious and human, totally different from how the files described her.

The file reads like a weapons manual, what she can do, how far, how to keep her asleep. shaking her head Nowhere in it does it say she'd ask whether there are still horses, or worry that the scientists in the gold mine might be sad.

I would want to talk to her again eventually.

You will, once Cicero ends. Voss knows she can't send other people in your place, Sigurros said goodbye to you by name, the correspondent. Trust doesn't move from one person to the next. She'd be talking to a stranger again.

Yes. And another person I am thinking about is you.

slowing until she's almost stopped, then looking at him, a little color rising in her face I think about you too, more than a researcher should about the person on her file. glancing back at the officer, then walking on beside him, her shoulder brushing his Every night since the bay.

also having a bit of color rising on his face I do not want to think we are more than friends.

noticing the color in his face and smiling at the floor Your words and your face are saying two different things. keeping her voice low so the officer can't hear And more than friends doesn't have to mean anything romantic. It can just mean the person you'd sit with while they cry.

I know, but I never thought feeling that close. I thought love changes nothing.

Something changed in you, though. glancing at him as they walk The first night I came in, you barely looked up from the disassembler, and you answered me in one sentence at a time. Today you sat in front of four people and a whiteboard for an hour, and you just told me you think about me.

It's because I really like you and are caring.

stopping at the guard's desk outside his cell while the guard checks the log, and turning to face him I really like you too. as the door slides open, resting her hand on his arm for a second Go in, I'll come by after dinner, with something better than canteen soup this time.

Or we just eat together again.

smiling at him In the canteen, then, if I can get the officer to sign us out again. glancing back at the officer, who shrugs from behind the desk At seven o'clock I'll come and fetch you.

entering the room first and lying on the bed Alright.

standing in the doorway for a moment, looking at the new clock on the wall above his bed, then at him Three hours and twenty minutes, then. the door sliding shut as she steps back into the corridor

reading from a sheet in front of her This hearing is recorded and will be filed under Project Cicero. The subject may answer in his own words, and his researcher may speak when the panel addresses her. looking up into her camera Dr. Haas asked to begin.

holding a printout of the whiteboard up to his camera, the dots blacked out with marker Three weeks ago one of my researchers went into an interview with a humanoid carrying this. No question list, its account first, say why. When it asked why its door stays locked at night, she told it why, and how long the shift change takes, because your board says a bare no makes them push. lowering the page It walked out through that door the next night, and two guards are still in hospital. She followed your rules line by line, Toma. Tell me which line she got wrong, or whether this board only works when you're the one in the chair.

Project Cicero was not meant to be taken as an absolute oratorical guide. Pell uploaded it while it was still in early testing. It was meant, as the notes on the site's VCS said, to be used as a rough guide, taught as a strategy to be remembers, not as a procedure you could carry. A bare no making them push was a rule for two of the anomalies we tested the methodology on, but for anomalies that literally don't care, a bare no may be more suited for the task.

setting the printout face down on his desk I've read your repository, all of it. The caveats run past one hundred pages now, there's a chapter on silence and another on what to leave out. taking off his glasses My people laminated the board because it was easier than following what's in there, a board fits on a wall and a repository doesn't fit in a shift. leaning closer to his camera But listen to what you just told this panel. A bare no works on some of them and fails on others, and the only way to know which is to judge the one in front of you. Every caveat in that book ends the same way, with somebody making a call. Right now that somebody is you. How many researchers do you think the Foundation has who can make that call the way you do?

Not many.

putting his glasses back on None at my site, I checked before I asked. So as far as I can see, your project has given the Foundation one contained man and a book that tells everyone else they're doing it wrong.

from the end of the table, outside the camera's view, without raising his voice Four sites have asked my office to borrow him since the upload, a week each, for their worst interviews. folding his hands on the table I've refused all four. He's on this site's books as a Euclid, and I don't lend Euclids out in the back of a van.

Yes, and I am transitioning to Explained, but when I will, I won't be able to leave the Foundation.

making a note on her sheet Dr. Kellerman, the panel would like to hear from you. Where does the testing on the device stand?

opening her notebook on the table to a page of dated columns There are three of us on the bench now, since the board added two technicians last month. The spare unit took random writes until it stopped at the capacity printed on the die, it keeps a bad block table, it wore out on schedule, and one full wipe left it blank. The delete flag clears on relearning exactly the way the disassembly says it should, every time we run it. turning the page The cognitohazard result is the one we haven't touched, because that test needs a level four signature, and the request has been sitting upstairs for six weeks.

looking from her notes back into her camera Then the panel should be clear about what follows. If the device is Explained, the man in that chair leaves Director Corwin's books as a Euclid and joins them as staff who can't be released, and staff can be assigned to any site that asks.

The problem is, I am not exactly willing to work with the most dangerous of anomalies despite having knowledge of them and a potential permanent level four.

turning a page in the file in front of her For the record, the panel has his test file. The result he's referring to came from reading. The methodology kept him apart from the anomaly itself, he had the document and never the thing, and nothing in that file tells us what the device does with whatever reaches him through his eyes and ears in the same room. His team doesn't believe it would protect him there, and neither does this Committee.

sitting back from his camera Then we're back where I started. The most dangerous ones get the laminated board, because the one person it works for won't go near them, and no one else thinks he should.

And that is a reason why there are so many pages, because I can't be dispatched everywhere I need to calm anomalies down. There is also the friend bias where the site decided it would be better if I maintain regular contact with 239 with intermittent shutdowns to learn more, something the original site she was contained at couldn't have plausibly decided.

reading something off his own screen, then looking back into the camera I have the revised procedure for 239 open in front of me. If he's unavailable, she stays shut down. with a short laugh So a Keter's waking hours now follow one contained man's calendar.

her hand flat on the folder He didn't write that procedure, my team did, and Director Corwin signed it. She's changed since Site-17 put her to sleep, her abilities are weaker, and half of what they wrote about her contradicts the other half. We wake her to find out what's true, and the only voice she's stayed calm with is his. With anyone else we'd be starting from a stranger again.

still outside the camera's view I signed it because twenty-three years of sedation left us with a file we can't trust. If she sleeps a few extra weeks when he's ill, I'll take that over another twenty years of guessing.

A lot of things happened in ten weeks after we presented project Cicero. We launched inquires on the nature of entropy, we tried to collect remove uncertain assumptions...

leaning forward into the edge of the camera's view for the first time, his cardigan sleeves pushed up to the elbow I'll say what he's being polite about. Since the upload a faction has been forming, researchers on this site and a dozen others who want to undo how we've thought about anomalies since the seventies, research first and containment second. They write memos, they cite his rules in requests, and they've started writing "unverified" in the margins of old files by themselves. folding his hands on the table again I'm not one of them. I came up through security, and I'd keep most of what they want to throw out. They're too many and too loud to ignore now, though, and if I pretend otherwise I'll lose them to whichever site does listen.

dryly It won't be mine. Most sites still run the way they ran in 2005, and that was good enough to keep the world in one piece.

"Some hooligans are causing disorder at the city center, at university square"

unmuting in the bottom corner of the grid, a younger man with a lanyard full of keycards That line is ours now. The working group took it from one of your notes in the repository, the one about the students in a square in Bucharest who were called hooligans and kept the word. glancing down at something on his desk My site trialled Cicero on three humanoids for five weeks. The sessions ran longer, sedation calls dropped by a third, and one of them asked for its own name back. Then the memos started, everything Dr. Haas has said today and worse, that we were naive, that a subject had recruited us, that we were a faction. with a small shrug So we took the word.

unmuting in the top right window, an older man in a pressed uniform shirt, reading glasses hanging on a cord Five weeks on three humanoids is only a trial, Dr. Ferreira, and I'm glad yours went well. taking the glasses off This Foundation runs on three words that a guard can repeat to you anytime: secure, contain, protect. Cicero has a Latin column, a list of modern theorists and a hundred pages of exceptions, and it puts research ahead of all three words. That's a method for a journal, written for people with time to read it in depth. It can't run on a site with two hundred guards on rotation, and it certainly can't run on every site we have.

unmuting in the window below Pryce's, a woman in a lab coat with a whiteboard of equations behind her With respect, Dr. Pryce, we were wrong long before Cicero, and those three words never caught the wrongs. Our files are full of claims which have never been tested, "any disease", "indefinitely", "without limit", and some of them break thermodynamics on paper with no measurement behind them. holding up a thin printed report One object at my site was filed as a heat source with no input. Last month we put it on a mass comparator, and it has been getting lighter the whole time. Its containment was built around a perpetual machine that never existed. You can't secure something you've described wrong.

putting his glasses back on What's on the board behind you, Dr. Sato?

Unclip your camera, please. I'd like to read it myself.

turning the camera back to herself There is no wiring and no fuel. It turns its own mass into heat, and the comparator caught it getting lighter by exactly the amount the heat says it should. How it converts is the anomaly. The budget still balances. Thermodynamics sits deeper than the two-way speed of light, and an object that really broke it would cause an XK, and we'd have noticed by now. So "no input" was a guess someone wrote down at intake, and we kept a heat source in a room built for a machine that couldn't exist.

frowning at his screen That's a long way from a heater to the end of the world, Dr. Sato. Why go straight to an XK?

Because conservation of energy is what you get, mathematically, when the laws stay the same from one moment to the next. Something that makes energy from nothing has rules that change with time around it, and the rules won't stay inside one room. picking up a marker and tapping it against her palm The ones that try it run away fast. 18 comes back from every hard bounce twice as high as it fell, releasing energy that is physically impossible, so thirty bounces is a billion times the energy it started with, and it's only a Euclid because it sits in a tank of polyethylene that soaks up each bounce before the next one. Run it the other way, reverse entropy, and nothing reaches its next state at all. setting the marker down If most of what we contain could do this, every meter log on every site would show free power, and every object I've metered has balanced. The few that truly break it are on the Apollyon list, and those we only watch.

writing as she speaks For the record, Dr. Sato, the panel will need that in plain terms. How exactly would the world end?

A rubber ball dropped from one metre carries about a quarter of a joule, and it doubles that on every hard bounce. After forty-eight bounces it carries as much energy as the Hiroshima bomb, around seventy it's a year of everything humanity burns, and somewhere past a hundred and ten it has enough to pull the Earth apart. drawing a curve on the edge of the whiteboard that bends almost straight up The room stays the same size, so every bounce comes sooner than the last, and the last sixty take well under a second. Long before that it stops bouncing and goes straight through whatever it hits. capping the marker A heater making two hundred watts from nothing would be less than a kettle, and it wouldn't end anything by itself. It would mean the laws drift in that spot, though, and there is no promise they'd keep drifting slowly. Entropy is the other way it ends. Reverse it, or stop it, and no atom ever moves to its next state, so there's no next moment for anything to happen in.

after a long look at the curve on Sato's board Then, in short, the anomalies are bound by the same laws as everything else. Without those laws the anomaly couldn't exist, and neither could the universe it sits in. taking his glasses off again and rubbing his eyes It still doesn't make that board any easier for my researchers to follow.

opening her folder to the photograph of the board and holding it up to the camera That's where epistemic humility comes in, the line near the bottom your researchers probably laminated and skipped. It means saying "I don't know", in the interview and in the file, and assuming you're uncertain even when the file sounds sure. tapping the photograph Every file on this site closes its gaps with "further testing required", as if the answer were always one test away. Sometimes the honest line is that we don't know, and that we might never find out.

turning back through her notebook to a page dated three weeks ago There's a result the panel should hear before it decides what this method can teach. Toma explained black holes to Sigurros in one session, and in the next one the team asked her to describe them back with no prompting. "They happen when something really big gets crushed, like a giant star exploding, and they pull so hard that past a line called the event horizon nothing can get out. The surface keeps information on it, only it's invisible". Asked about Hawking radiation, she said it's virtual particles that are part of the black hole, and over an unimaginably long time, a tiny bit at a time, they evaporate and cancel each other out. Asked what virtual particles are, she said they're the ones that aren't the six standard particles, and two of those six are up and down. looking up into the camera Toma told me afterwards that the six are quarks, and there are more particles than that, so she joined two things he'd said into one. She's eight, she heard it once, and most of it held. Where she didn't know, she filled the gap herself and sounded sure of it. With a child whose beliefs can change what's in the room, how we teach her matters as much as what we teach her, and so does every gap we leave.

leaning toward his camera Then teach her the way the Finns teach their children. Trust the person in the room, no script, no test every week. Sahlberg has spent years telling everyone who'd listen that standardised teaching and constant testing make schools worse, and Cicero says the same thing about interviews.

Finland's reading scores have been falling since 2006, Dr. Ferreira, so I'd be careful whose lessons I borrowed. tapping his desk with the folded glasses Finnish is also spelled exactly the way it sounds, so those children get phonics almost for free. Everywhere else the reading research went the other way. Whole language, guessing a word from the picture and the sentence around it, left a generation of children who were never taught to sound words out, and explicit, systematic teaching won.

She had both, though. She told us her teacher in Reykjavik made them sound out every letter, and that she learned English from cartoons and guesses the long words. glancing down at the page of black hole notes The six particles are guesswork.

closing the folder We've argued about pedagogy for two or so minutes now, and that's two or so more than this Foundation has spent on it since it was founded. We've sedated her, scripted her and run tests on her for twenty-three years. no one ever tried teaching her anything.

Another aspect we forgot to add is that after the black hole experiment, we also ran a displacement test where we told her, under different conditions, to try to displace a cube, and then we measured her tiredness and energy displacement and we concluded that her power isn't unlimited, and the more she tries to displace the object, the more energy she consumes. We believe she used to have a large amount of energy and the ratio of consumption in 2005, was miniscule relative to her stored energy. In addition, her power works similarly to ecobalance, meaning that if she is tired, she has less energy, similarly to how a cut forest is less capable to absorb CO2 or how an excess of CO2 would result in thermal runaway in any forest, such as that of the Amazon.

opening the folder again to a page of graphs After the black hole session we explained to her how people study the smallest things there are, with microscopes, down to ones that can show single atoms. Then we asked her to move the cube by the smallest amount she could manage, and we put it under one. running her finger along a curve that rises and then flattens It moved by less than a micrometre the first time. Each time she tried harder, her glucose and oxygen use went up, and the cube moved further, but every tenfold increase in what she spent bought her roughly the same extra step. The displacement grows with the logarithm of the effort, which is what you'd expect from anything that runs on energy. closing the folder She slept for fourteen hours afterwards. Her file treated every spell as free but now we know that every one of them costs her something.

already writing on the edge of her own board Then she has an energy budget like my heater does. I'd like those numbers, Dr. Voss, if your Director will let them leave the site.

nodding toward Voss without leaving his chair Share it. Half the Foundation has read our whiteboard already, and they may as well see the numbers behind it.

reading off her own screen, her pen moving down the rows and then looking up into her camera She's the least efficient engine I've ever seen, and that's good news for everyone here. A tired forest stores less carbon, and a tired Sigurros moves the cube half as far for the same price.

folding his glasses into his shirt pocket Since we're judging methods by their results, look at the man you named this one after. The one time Cicero walked into a court full of soldiers, defending Milo, he lost his nerve, stumbled in the speech, and his client went into exile. He wrote the good version afterwards, at his desk. Milo read it in Marseille and said he was glad it was never delivered, or he'd never have got to eat the mullet there.

And eleven years before that, as consul, he had five citizens strangled without a trial and called it saving the Republic, then wrote a poem about how fortunate Rome was to be born in his consulship. The Republic fell anyway, and he ended with his head and hands nailed up in the forum he used to speak from.

with a short shrug We called it Cicero because the budget committee likes Romans, and because Cicero's style of speech is indisputable.

His own generation disputed it, Director. The Atticists in Rome thought his style was padded and showy, Calvus called him loose and spineless, and Brutus, the man he dedicated two books on oratory to, called him weak. turning a page of her file The name was never a guarantee, even in Rome.

Then tell me what was wrong with him, beyond the soldiers and the stranglings.

His sentences were very long, and so many of them ended on the same rhythm that later writers mocked one of his stock endings, "esse videatur" (would seem to be). He praised himself in almost every speech, and he shaped each one to whatever the jury already wanted to hear.

He also boasted that when he defended Cluentius he had thrown darkness over the jurors' eyes, and he won that case. Two years after attacking Vatinius in the Senate, he stood up and defended him, because Caesar asked him to.

The only thing I knew about Cicero was that it was a source for "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet".

Then you knew more of him than most of this panel did ten weeks ago. opening a second folder When your project came across our desks, the Committee read him, and it took us weeks to find where that line comes from. It's from De finibus, his book on what is good and what is bad. "Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci velit" (Nor is there anyone who loves, pursues or wishes for pain itself, because it is pain). Somewhere along the way a typesetter cut it apart, and "lorem" is "dolorem" with its first syllable missing. The view isn't even his. He gave it to an Epicurean in the dialogue, and spent the next book arguing against it.

What are examples where Cicero praised himself?

turning to a page marked with a paper clip He asked the historian Lucceius to write up his consulship, and told him "ut et ornes ea vehementius etiam quam fortasse sentis, et in eo leges historiae neglegas" (praise it more warmly than perhaps you feel, and in this disregard the laws of history). A few years before that he had already written his own epic poem about the same consulship, three books long. It's where the line about fortunate Rome comes from, and also "cedant arma togae, concedat laurea laudi" (let arms yield to the toga, the laurel to praise), and the toga and the praise were both his. About a century and a half later Plutarch wrote that he made himself hated by praising himself without end, his speeches as much as his deeds.

Are there alternatives to Cicero methods?

There are older ones and newer ones. Plato called rhetoric a knack for flattery, like cookery set beside medicine, and Socrates worked with questions, asking people what they knew until they found the gaps themselves. Quintilian, a century after Cicero, built his whole school on a line from Cato, "vir bonus dicendi peritus" (a good man skilled in speaking), character first and technique after it.

holding up a dog-eared paperback The ones I'd look at were built to be taught to people who aren't Toma. Hostage negotiators work up a stairway: listening, then empathy, then rapport, and only after those come influence and a change in behaviour. Police forces train ordinary officers in it in a couple of weeks. Motivational interviewing does the same for clinicians, and it comes with a coding sheet, so a supervisor can score a recorded session against it. Both of those scale. What I can't tell you yet is whether a reality bender behaves like a man on a bridge.

That still leaves the Cicero project useful. Whatever you call it, it's the reason we have transcripts worth reading, a cube under a microscope and a file on Sigurros that's finally being corrected. setting her pen down Treat the board as a set of hypotheses. Run it beside the stairway and the coding sheet, the same humanoids and different interviewers, and measure what each one gets. Then the name can be Cicero or anything else, and the results can speak for themselves.

Rhetoric is a social science, not an exact science. Treat it like geology, which too is not a complete exact science.

Exactly. A geologist can't rerun the Cretaceous but they still can date the rocks, compare the cores and keep several explanations open until the evidence picks one. picking her pen back up We've ignored rhetoric for far too long, when every interview we run depends on it.

I am now curious what is the longest sentence that Cicero ever wrote.

There's no settled answer to that. The Romans wrote without punctuation, so where one of his sentences ends was decided by editors centuries later, and two editions can cut the same passage in different places. turning back through the folder The one the Committee kept coming back to opens his defence of the poet Archias, about sixty words in a single sentence before he reaches the verb: "Si quid est in me ingeni, iudices, quod sentio quam sit exiguum..." (If I have any talent, judges, and I am aware how small it is...) He spends the whole sentence telling the jury how modest his gifts are.

Now let's get to the verdict. What the Ethics Comitee decides now about the project and experiments?

squaring the papers in front of her The Committee conferred before this hearing and has heard nothing today that would change its decision. I'll read it into the record.

Record my dissent on point eight. Marking files unverified by the hundred will teach every guard on every site that the procedures in front of them can't be trusted.

It's recorded, Dr. Pryce. looking into her camera This hearing is closed.

turning her chair toward him and letting out a long breath It has been an hour and a half with six people arguing about you, a dead Roman and a rubber ball. How was it for you?

It was okay. I let mostly the others talk.

You did, and when you spoke, they listened. resting her elbows on the table You wanted more review before any of this went further, and I kept pushing anyway, because I was afraid that if we waited it would end up in a drawer. glancing at the dark screen And point six is a recommendation. The Committee writes recommendations, and a director who wants something done signs over them, the way the Director signed over our refusals for Sigurros. So I'm working on the chip as hard as I can. Explained gets you out of the cell. I want the board to read the file and see what the chip could do for our own field staff, with their doses going up and up, so the people who decide about you have a reason to treat you well, in a way that doesn't depend on a recommendation.

I know you want me to be well, but consider the long-term implications of pushing a project that has only been tested on a convinceable thing and a convinceable person.

79 put up the X for every researcher before you, so I'd hardly call it convinceable. It was convinceable by you, and Sigurros was a frightened child who wanted a friend. That's two, and Haas has two guards in hospital from the third. rubbing her thumb along the edge of the notebook You're right about Cicero, I pushed too early. The chip is a different kind of evidence, though. The bench data only requires another lab to run the same test and get the same number, and they will.

You can keep pushing that, but for Cicero we would need to consolidate.

Then the trials are where to do it, six months at three sites, with Haas watching every session. closing the notebook I'd start with the notes. The board got laminated because it fit on a wall, and every caveat that made it safe stayed behind in the repository.

nodding a bit Yeah.

standing, tucking the notebook under her arm and leading him out past the officer into the corridor, slowing once the conference room door has shut behind them When the device is Explained and the cell is gone, you'll still be inside these walls for the rest of your life. What do you want that life to be?

I am totally unsure. It's not like I can choose a card of life.

walking beside him, the officer a few paces behind them No one gets to choose that, and I'm past the point of leaving too. Inside these walls you still pick the small cards, though: which files you'll take, who you eat with, whether the 3060 ever goes back in your machine. glancing sideways at him So, what would a good ordinary day look like for you?

Other than spending time with you, I am no longer sure about that.

her shoulder brushing his for a step I'll take that. glancing back at the officer It's hard to picture more when everything you've done since you came here has had someone beside it, a guard, a log, a camera or me. One day you'll want an afternoon where you are alone, and I'd like you to have it.

I know. It will be when I'm explained.

slowing as the guard's desk comes into view When it happens, would you rather have them refit the cell, take the hatch out and put a lock on your side of the door, or move you into staff quarters with the rest of us?

I would rather stay here because I am close to the canteen.

smiling a little For the toast with real butter, I suppose. taking out her pen and writing a line at the bottom of the open page as they stop at the desk Then I'll put it in the request: this room becomes your quarters, the containment fittings come out, and you stay two corridors from the canteen.

after a short pause as they enter the room Did you know that in describing software in English, the first paragraph must always contain that the software in question comes with no warranties and the developer cannot guarantee the functionality or fitability of the program?

stopping with the pen still on the page Only for some of them. Free programs contain it in the license you click through when you install them. Paid programs don't open with it, and the B2 writing papers tell you to start a description with the thing's name, or with where you lost it. turning back a few pages in the notebook Your chip has it, though. The first string in the binary's read-only data, ahead of any function name, is "distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE". looking up at him That's the wording the free licenses use. Was AKV going to publish the source?

Yes, we had the source code on our own GitLab and we were about to make it public.

closing the notebook slowly Then the only copy left is the binary on your desk, plus whatever your old team still remembers. lowering her voice so the officer can't hear They could take the server but the people were harder. Dosing a dozen engineers in Europe, who'd notice a missing year and have lawyers to ask about it, is a different job from wiping a GitLab instance, whatever our charter says about standing outside the law. We're used to working around American courts, and European ones keep asking who signed what. looking at him That goes in the Explained file too. A device its makers meant to give away for free, with that warranty line at the top, reads very differently from something meant to be hidden.

We also used to have blueprints on the device in KiCad, they must have likely been too deleted.

They'll have gone with the source, the KiCad files with everything else. If you rebuild the source, though, I can rebuild the board from it, because the pinout is in the code. opening the notebook again to a page of small careful diagrams and turning it so he can see We only got the bench tests running because your disassembly told us which pin was which. There's no obfuscation, so what Ghidra gives back is close to what you wrote, minus the missing files.

tapping the test area with her pen The three big ones are why it's simple to test. Hold DEBUG, flood WRITE, and it does whatever you tell it. In a head they sit behind that switch, and the brain only ever talks to the ten.

pointing at GND And what was GND exactly?

The chip's own zero. Every voltage on the board is measured from it, and it's where the current from VIN goes back, so it never appears in your code at all. moving the pen down one line REF looks the same on a diagram. It's a separate electrode sitting in tissue, and the read loop we went through together at your desk subtracts it from RX0, RX1 and RX2 before anything else happens, so the chip only keeps the difference between each electrode and that one point in the brain.

And SNS_SP defeats the purpose of civil use of amnestics not only because of the memory recovery, but because the delete mark is not a normal biological mark.

looking down at line nine Because no brain makes that mark on its own. If I've read the write path right, the chip tells the tissue when and where to lay it down, and SNS_SP reads it back. frowning at the page So a civilian who takes Class B with the implant in carries a hormone that appears in no textbook, and a doctor who tests their spinal fluid finds something medicine has no name for. A Foundation lab would have found the same thing. That might be part of why they flagged you.

Because the substance is not anomalous. I remember now that it is a seretonin string, except, but instead of ending in NH2, it ends in SP.

writing under the pinout, slowly Serotonin ends in a two-carbon chain, with the NH2 on the last carbon. Sulphur and phosphorus can't just hang off the end of it, though, they have to be bound to something. drawing as she talks So the sulphur takes the nitrogen's place on that carbon, and the phosphorus sits on the sulphur with its oxygens, the way a phosphate sits on a sugar.

turning the notebook toward him Every piece of that is something a cell already has. It's a strange molecule, and a perfectly ordinary bit of chemistry.

When I programmed this thing, I wrote the string "SP".

flipping back several pages to a column of strings copied in her small capitals I know, it's in the binary exactly like that. Your team wrote the chemistry the way you'd write a note to yourself, and none of it is valid SMILES as written. There's a resolver sitting between the strings and the sensor that turns them into something valid at boot. I've been copying them out for weeks.

tapping the last row You wrote two letters, and the resolver did the binding for you: it dropped the NH2, put the sulphur on the carbon and the phosphate on the sulphur.

We didn't know chemistry, so it has been suggested by the few chemists we had that we should have programmed a resolver.

running her pen down the column of strings So the molecule in your head was never drawn by anyone. Two letters went in, the resolver picked where the bonds went, and the chip has been asking your brain to make whatever came out. looking up at him Did your chemists ever check the resolver's output against what they meant, or did it go into the build once it compiled?

They've checked the output briefly using the read pin. On all samples, the full formula is correct.

sitting down on the spare chair by his desk and laying the notebook open on her knee Then the string matches what they meant. What's still missing is the molecule itself. writing a new line at the bottom of the page If the chemistry lab here can make a few milligrams of it from that SMILES and we put it on the bench unit's sensor, SNS_SP should trip at the same threshold your code reads. A synthetic hormone setting the delete flag on an ordinary chip is a result any lab in the world could repeat.

lying and stretching on the bed Right.

closing the notebook and setting it on the desk beside the dark monitor That's enough chemistry for the day, and you've done enough talking for the week, in front of six windows and a Director. moving from the chair to sit on the edge of the bed, then lying back beside him, her shoulder against his I'm tired too. Can I stay a while, if we don't talk about the Foundation?

Sure, you can.

turning her head on the pillow to look at him We've found out we share a lot, you and I. You're more careful than me, though, you hold yourself back where I'd rush in. quiet for a moment My contract says I can't befriend anomalies, and you're on that list too, on paper. You have no contract at all, so you're free to like Sigurros and talk to her as long as she wants. looking up at the ceiling I think it's part of why they keep sending you. Every one of us is bound to keep our distance and keep the risk down, and you're the only one in the building who isn't.

We've found out... more like, you've found out, but yeah, I've found out too.

a small laugh That's fair. It's my side of it, after all. turning onto her side to face him I feel close to you, even if I kept a straight face in front of six windows from other sites today.

Didn't they do anything about you becoming close to me?

They noticed. rolling onto her back At my last review the psych officer asked how often I come here after my shift, wrote a word in my file I'm not cleared to read, and let me go. The contract says no relationship with an anomaly, ever. In practice every site bends that, because perfect distance doesn't work with things that talk back. The psych department sorts them the way architects sort buildings, functionalist and non-functionalist. A functionalist one is only its job, a ball that bounces or a machine that pours coffee, and keeping it at arm's length is easy. A non-functionalist one is everything else, the ones with a past and a voice, and with those some sympathy has to be allowed or the interviews stop working. after a moment With you they have a harder problem. They don't know yet whether you're an anomaly at all.

They've had the source code, they've had the pinouts, they've had the tests we made. They could have considered everything as explained already.

looking up at the ceiling They had all of it before they deleted it. And a company that builds a chip against amnestics, and means to give it away, is everything this place exists to stop. So three unexpected behaviours in a program were enough to lock you up: a flag cleared with no check, a feeling left out of what it stores, and a toaster that comes out in the third person. It took a model built out of 79 and nine nights of you at that screen to find them. It's detention without trial. Writers two and a half centuries ago argued that should be impossible anywhere that calls itself lawful, and here it's done with a signature. turning her head toward him And the only reason I ever met you is that they did it to you. I hate that that's true.

pulling her into a hug Me too. We thought that defense against amnestics was going to be revolutionary. We wanted to meticulously test, check everything. We sat for far too long. We didn't publish immediately.

holding him, her chin resting against his shoulder You did what careful people are supposed to do. If it had gone up on the internet a month earlier, it would be on a thousand machines now, and they'd have to chase every one of them. after a while You held the chip back to test it and they took it. I pushed Cicero out before it was ready, and two guards in Bavaria are in hospital. I don't know what the right speed is any more.

Without access to the unclassified archives, we couldn't have developed a viable protection against cognitohazards. I told the others only that they need to strip emotions that are not produced by the brain itself to improve interpretability.

drawing back far enough to look at him So your team built a cognitohazard filter believing it was an interpretability fix, and you had the reason alone. It's probably the only reason none of them are in a cell down this corridor. lying back, still holding his hand Cognitohazards are some of the worst things we keep. A chip that lets a researcher read one directly would make every test on them safer, and the Foundation should want that more than the other groups. after a moment My guess is that it's the same reason as the amnestics. The veil works because the public can be made to forget and can be kept from looking. A public that remembers and can look without harm is a public they can't manage.

Since I was the lead programmer, I had to have the chip in my brain to experience it. In the early stages of development, we couldn't get subjects, it was simply too risky.

her hand tightening around his So you were the first subject as well as the lead programmer. Like the doctor who drank a flask of bacteria to prove what causes ulcers, only yours stayed in. turning her head toward him How long had it been in before they came for you?

We started development almost two years ago, and the initial version I had installed was the first beta. Updates were installed through an inductory device. Virtual dots were placed on my head, one marked as write, one marked as read, and one marked as debug. The dots were removed when it got into candidate release. I should have said this earlier, but I didn't because there was simply no opportune time to.

sitting up on one elbow Now is a fine time. reaching over to the desk for the notebook and opening it to the pinout So during the beta your head had a map of the test area, and the dots came off once the switch went in for the release candidate. tapping the page Then an update was never something you could do to yourself. Someone had to find the pads, hold the coil over the right one and push it through, which means a clinic and a person watching. A device that can't change its own code has one less way to go wrong, and your team must have built it like that on purpose.

Yes, because updating a device like that is dangerous if not done properly or done by yourself. We didn't want to be accused of people being harmed because they didn't align the inductors to the test pinouts.

writing a line under the pinout as she speaks "Updates by inductive coil over marked test pads, clinic only, by design, to prevent harm from misalignment." looking up from the page What did a misaligned coil actually do, during the beta? Did you ever get one wrong on yourself?

A misaligned coil doesn't do anything by itself as there are enough checks to prevent writing to the wrong pin. But there are electrical components in the device that should not be harmed. It's not that the device prohibits you from touching the 5 or 9 line, it's that you could apply too much current on the device if you left the inductor open for too long in spots outside of those three pins, especially in the working area.

nodding slowly Then it's heat. A coil parked over the working area induces current in whatever loops it finds there, and lines five and nine run straight out to the electrode in the tissue and to the sensor. writing it under the last line It's the same reason people with deep brain stimulators get warned about MRI scanners. The leads pick up the field, and the tips warm up exactly where they touch the brain.

We placed the device in an MRI scanner and it disables automatically under the scan.

flipping to a page with a pencil sketch of the board, a cluster of tiny unlabelled circles shaded in one corner That explains these. There's nothing in your code that reads them, so I'd written them down as purely electrical, and the cluster is just big enough to fit a magnetic sensor that cuts the power when a scanner's field comes up. bringing the notebook closer to her face and squinting There's silkscreen beside it, so small I needed the bench microscope to read it, "Magnetic Distortion System". looking at him over the page Was that a joke someone on your team slipped onto the board?

It was a reference to Kane Pixels' Backrooms, where Async developed the Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System, which presumably uses a series of magnets placed so that when they are activated, they create a field so strong that it breaks the fabric of reality in that place, opening a portal to the Backrooms. The presentation doesn't offer us any idea on what this system says, but what it does tell us is that it originally was named as "A-Space" and it was meant to be used as an almost-infinite warehouse and housing space. Everything has gone wrong because it's not a really stable alternate reality.

laughing, the notebook dropping onto her chest I've never seen those videos. I've heard of people hiding drawings and messages in chips, though. picking the notebook back up and looking at the sketch again We haven't seen the text until we had the board under the bench microscope.

settling back against the pillow beside him, her hand going to his on the blanket All right, no more board.

looking back at him You want a day where you're alone. I want one where I can call my mother and tell her what I really do, and stop pretending I calibrate equipment for a pharmaceutical company in the north.

I am not sure how you can achieve that.

Neither am I. her thumb moving over the back of his hand Maybe one day enough of it leaks that she reads about us in a newspaper first, and all I have to do is say yes, that's me.

One day, I would want to care about my people again. But you know I fell in love in you without considering what would my friends think.

going still for a moment, then turning onto her side to face him That isn't possible. Your friends can't know where you are, or that I exist, and they never will. resting her forehead against his So it's only what you think of me that counts, and what I think of you.

I don't want to seem like a careless person who has no people around.

You're not careless. You just can't keep spending yourself on people you'll never be allowed to see again. keeping her forehead against his It isn't the same as not caring.

making a small contented sound against his shoulder and pressing closer Keep doing that and I'll fall asleep here.

When you are in deep contentment, you say one thing and do the opposite.

a quiet laugh into his shoulder You said you didn't want us to be more than friends, and your face said otherwise, and I'm the same.

Doctor, your visit's been open on the log for a long time. holding up the tablet There's a box for "staff present after hours" and a box for "subject welfare check", and I honestly don't know which one this is. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with either of you.

standing and straightening her shirt, her voice steady Tick the welfare box, and note that it went both ways. He's been my confidant for weeks, and the board extended my visits for his wellbeing. Mine counts too. picking her notebook up from the desk Log me out at half past seven. I'll answer for it at my next review.

lowering the tablet, his voice softer Off the record, Doctor, are you that tired, or would you just rather stay here with him than walk all the way back to the staff wing?

after a moment I'm that tired. And he's the only person on this site who asks how I am.

glancing at Toma, then back at her For what it's worth, I don't think he's doing anything to you. I did two years on 35's rotation, and I know what it looks like when something in a room is working on the person visiting it. This isn't that. tapping the tablet against his palm Since the hearings started, the site has been telling us guards what we're actually guarding. The briefing said they took the idea from Los Alamos, where the people calculating the numbers worked faster once they'd been told what the numbers were for. So I know enough to know I can't throw you out. And I've been told that the administration is considering whether he needs an object class at all, when keeping him contained costs more than it's worth for a man who just can't be given an amnestic.

Amnestics are freely available. Because they are freely available, the Classes A and B especially, they can be abused of. Recognizing that it's simply not possible to ban or tell people to not use them, we tried to make a device where even if the substance binds with the neurons and wipes them, the information is kept.

quiet for a moment, the tablet hanging at his side My sister did that. She started with Class A after bad nights, then moved on to B when A stopped reaching far enough back. By the end she was dissolving a whole pack into one cup of tea, and she'd come out of it not knowing what month it was. looking at the floor I stopped speaking to her about five years ago. I couldn't keep explaining the same things to her every week.

I tried to provide a solution to just that, a safe way to recall memories via mnemonics despite being wiped. And then I got interested in the articles and I told the programmers to filter out emotions that the brain does not produce itself, creating basic immunity from cognitohazards. It was an engineering feature I justified as making sure the memories come cleaner.

looking at the side of Toma's head for a long moment So if she'd had one of those in, the tea would have taken the months and the chip would have kept them for her. shaking his head slowly And the other part, the filter, I'd have wanted that on 35's rotation. Many of the men I worked with there needed counselling after a shift.

The problem is, as soon as the SCP found out what we were doing at AKV, they deleted everything except for the binary.

The briefing called AKV a Group of Interest, a software company on paper that was building something the Foundation didn't want built. shifting the tablet to his other hand They let your programmers go because the programmers could be dosed if they were found to have learned about the Foundation, and you can't. You carry level four files in your head, some of them dangerous to know, and no tea in the world will take them back out. So the company is gone, and you're here.

We had nothing to do with the Foundation.

I believe you. glancing at Kellerman, then back at him The way they explained it to us, a group doesn't have to know about the Foundation to end up on that list. It only has to build something that gets in the Foundation's way, and a chip that keeps what amnestics take does exactly that.

When we say the AKV knew about the foundation, we say I knew about the Foundation, no one else did.

nodding slowly Then the company also went on the list because of what one man read, and everyone else at AKV got their lives back with a missing employer. looking at the log tablet, then switching it off I'll tick the welfare box, Doctor. Both ways, like you said.

I didn't expect that much sympathy.

a short, tired smile I didn't expect to have any. Before the briefings you were a number. Then they told us what the chip was for, and I thought about my sister and her cup of tea. stepping back into the corridor Goodnight, both of you.

Goodnight to you too.

watching the door slide shut behind the guard, then turning back to him with the notebook held against her chest He's right, I should get some sleep in my own bed. leaning down and resting her hand on his arm for a second I'll come by in the morning, before the chemistry lab opens.

To test the marker without the brain, right.

nodding from the doorway A few milligrams of it on the bench unit's sensor, and we'll see whether line nine trips. her hand on the door frame Goodnight, Toma.

Goodnight, Kellerman.

setting one cup on the desk beside the dark monitor and sitting down on the spare chair with the other The first night I came in here you were hunting one bit in a flags field, and I wrote "design omission" in this notebook and thought that was a valid report. turning the notebook over in her hands Since the site started telling us what we're guarding, the parts of your file that used to be blacked out at my level aren't any more, and none of them are about a flag. They're about a company that wanted everyone to keep what the amnestics take. looking at him over the rim of her cup When did it stop being about the bug, for you?

When you told me about the test results and that the foundation might actually be afraid of that device. And we never said, oh, we learned that.

nodding slowly, the cup resting on her knee We just started talking about it as if it had always been the question. glancing at the clock above the bed At ten I'll be watching someone else try to talk to Sigurros while you sit beside them, and I keep thinking the Foundation is afraid of that too, a child who'd rather wait for you than talk to the person they send.

Well, if you learned something that was always happening, then it didn't really make sense to say that "oh, I learned that thing". If the Financial Supervision Authority was always filled with nepos at the top and discovered that, you wouldn't like it's the first time it happens.

a short, tired laugh No. You'd just finally see the names. setting her cup down on the desk It was like that with your file. When the black bars came off, I wasn't surprised by anything under them. I'd only been guessing at the names. standing and checking her watch We should go down. The trainee's already with Voss, and I'd rather have Sigurros hear your voice before she hears his.

also standing up Alright.

through the ceiling speaker Her readings are rising, she'll be with us in a minute or two. Toma speaks first and introduces Pell, then Pell takes over, and Toma only steps in if she asks for him. a short pause Pell, don't read from that page.

sliding the folded page under his palm without looking down at it, his voice low I wasn't going to.

watching Toma's fingers rattle across the tabletop, faster than anyone could dial, his shoulders loosening a little What's that meant to be?

slow and thick with sleep Correspondent? a small yawn crackling through the speaker Is it morning? It's always morning when you come. a pause, then more alert There's someone breathing next to you. Who's that?

It's Pell. We have been working on a new type of rethoric called Cicero. It involved teaching other people how I speak.

after a short silence And what's Cicero?

Marcus Tulius Cicero was a Roman orator who held long speeches at the Senate and established several basic principles of rhetoric, like speaking in an organized way and to the right public.

Is Pell going to make long speeches at me? The doctors used to talk for a long time, and I never knew what they meant.

No. We named the project after Cicero because the budget committee liked the Romans.

leaning toward his microphone, then catching himself and sitting back to the same distance as Toma Hello, Sigurros. I'm Pell. I work with the doctors, and I'm here because I'd like to learn to talk with you the way he does. glancing at the folded page under his hand, then away from it So I'll tell you why I'm here, every time I'm here.

Don't look at the page, Pell, you must have memorized the rules.

quiet for a moment, then very awake What page? the pillow rustling Are there rules about me on it?

pushing the folded page to the far edge of the table, his face reddening There are rules on it, yes, but they're about how I should talk. They aren't about you. The first one says I should always tell you why.

Those rules must be applied in practice. You do not need to state them.

a sleepy giggle You're being bossy, correspondent. then, more gently It's all right, Pell. My teacher said the new ones always sit with their hands flat on the table.

looking down at his own hands, flat on either side of where the page was, and laughing into the microphone They are, actually.

more awake now, curious Then tell me something about you. Not the doctor things. Something you like.

after a moment, glancing once at Toma, who stays silent, and then back at the speaker I like trains. Old ones, steam ones. When I was little I had a book about every engine, and I learned all their names.

thinking We don't have trains at home. I only saw them in cartoons, with faces on the front. a pause What does a real one sound like?

leaning back a little in the chair, his voice slower now Loud. When a steam engine starts, it breathes out in big puffs, like someone blowing on a cold window, and every puff comes faster until it's a rhythm. tapping it out on the table with two fingers, slow and then quicker Chuff... chuff... chuff-chuff-chuff. And the whistle is so high it makes dogs bark three streets away.

a delighted little gasp Do it again, the fast part.

through the ceiling speaker Her readings are steady. Keep going.

a little more awake The correspondent tells me about space. Black holes, and the dark energy that lives in the empty bits. eagerly Do you know about space too, Pell? What's the biggest star?

his fingers going still on the table Not as much as he does. after a moment I know the Sun is a star, and that there are ones much bigger than it, so big that if you put one where the Sun is, it would swallow the Earth. rubbing the back of his neck I don't remember the name of the biggest one. I'd be guessing.

The biggest star is UY Scuti. Related is Stephenson 2 DFK 1, an unstable red hypergiant.

trying the name slowly Ooey... Scoo-tee. a sleepy giggle It sounds like a sneeze. then, more seriously What does unstable mean, for a star? Is it going to blow up?

low and level, heard only in the room She asked Pell, Toma. You step in when she asks for you. the microphone light coming back on

after glancing at the empty space where Toma's chair was, turning back to the microphone I think unstable means it can't stay the same for long. It swells and shrinks and throws bits of itself away. Some very big stars end in an explosion called a supernova, but that's far from here and a long time away. What's left behind can become a black hole, the kind he told you about.

quiet for a moment So the black hole is what's left when a big star gets tired. a small yawn Like the light in my room that wouldn't come.

nodding at the speaker Yes, something like that.

I remember now. The correspondent told me that too, that a really big star gets crushed when it explodes, and then it pulls so hard that past the line nothing can get out. a pause He said the line has a name. Event... something.

Event horizon. a small smile toward the speaker I know that one from films.

Event horizon. saying it carefully, as if putting it somewhere safe I'll keep that one. after a moment Pell? If you learn to talk like the correspondent, will they send you and not him?

his hands going still on the table, his eyes on the speaker I don't know who they'll send. What I know is that they want more than one person you can talk to, so you aren't left waiting when he's ill or away. after a moment I'm not here to take his place. I'm here so you have two.

after a moment, slowly So when the correspondent is ill, you come, and they don't have to make me sleep until he's better. a small, sleepy breath All right. I understand.

more awake again Pell, the correspondent told me about the scientists in the gold mine with the cold gas, waiting for the flash. Did they ever see it?

frowning slightly I don't know. I didn't know there were scientists in a gold mine until just now.

a little disappointed Oh. then, trying something else Do you know the trolls in Mamma's stories? The ones that turn to stone when the sun comes up?

shaking his head, though she can't see it I don't. I don't know any stories from Iceland at all. leaning in slightly Will you tell me one?

a pleased little breath There were two trolls who wanted to pull an island to the shore, and they worked all night, and they were so busy pulling that they forgot about the morning. And the sun came up, and now they're two rocks in the sea, still holding the rope.

What happened to the island?

It stayed where it was. a sleepy giggle Trolls are not very clever.

low, from the observation room She's resting, give her a minute. Every question she put to Pell came from something you gave her, Toma. The gold mine, the cold gas, the event horizon. She asks for more of what she already has.

closer to the observation microphone And the only person who can answer is the one who gave it to her. Pell can learn to say why and not to promise. He can't learn ten years of reading in a day.

looking at the dark microphone She liked the trains, though.

She did. after a moment Space is the one she keeps coming back to, though. She used to make the light come on just by wanting it. Now she can't bend much of anything. The universe still does the kind of magic she used to.

Ask her if she thinks the universe will end in fire or ice.

leaning toward his microphone Sigurros, can I ask you something? Do you think the universe will end in fire, or in ice?

In ice. All the stars run out of the stuff they burn, and go dark one by one. Then even the tiny bits inside everything break, the protons. The black holes go too, a little at a time, over a very, very long time. And the dark energy keeps pushing everything apart, forever, until nothing can change any more. And then it's dark. Not like my room with the lights off. Dark like there's nothing there to be dark.

after a moment What do you think empty space is like?

thinking It's where there's only dark energy and nothing else. No bits of anything, not even one. No light either, not a single little piece of it. a pause And you can't see the dark energy, ever. I tried to make some once, over my face, but you can't make it where there's already air and me. It only lives where there's nothing.

What do you like most about it, the universe?

That it does magic without wanting anything. When I did magic I had to want it really hard, and it got tired. The stars don't want anything, and they still crush themselves into black holes and make lines where light can't get out. a small yawn And it has rules, the same rules for everybody, even for me. So I'm not the only strange thing. The whole sky is strange.

But what if I told you that not all stars end in black holes? Stars that are light will become white and eventually black dwarfs.

a small, surprised breath at his voice Correspondent! then, thinking So the little stars don't crush, they just go cold and stay where they were. Then the sky is like a graveyard.

Yes, a lot of stars we see today may have already died. The further you look into the sky, the more likely is it that the thing you are looking at no longer exists, because light has a maximum two-way speed limit. When we look at the sky via electronic telescopes in space, we receive the light that has bombarded our solar system a long time ago, and to receive that light, we have to reflect it, so transmit it again.

quiet for a long moment So when you look far away, you're looking at old light. At how things were, not how they are.

Yes, and the farthest galaxy we have ever seen is from thirteen point four billion years and since it existed so early in the universe, it may have long been gone.

I was eight when I fell asleep, and twenty-three years was three of me. How many of me is thirteen billion?

It's a lot, and during that time, stable matter didn't exist. That galaxy may have existed for only one second.

quiet, then wondering Only one second? a small breath So the galaxy was there for one second, and its light has been travelling for all those billions of years just to get to us, the light lasting longer than the thing it came from.

When a star fifty light years away explodes or turns into a white dwarf, for fifty years we would still believe the star is alive, until the light arrives, confirming the star is dead. If the star explodes, we would see the explosion for fifty years and then it would be gone because it would become a black hole.

thinking it over So the sky is like a letter that comes late. The star writes "I'm still here", and by the time we read it, it isn't.

Yes, that's correct. And now, back to Pell.

turning her attention back with a small rustle Pell, are there black dwarfs in the sky already, or are they all still white?

opening his mouth, then closing it I don't know. I'm sorry.

through the ceiling speaker, slowly In 2006 she knew what an eight-year-old knows. In ten weeks she's gone from trolls to white dwarfs, and every session she asks for the next thing after what she was given. after a moment Pell is a decent speaker. She just doesn't need a decent speaker. She needs someone who knows the next thing.

closer to the observation microphone What Toma knows would take five of us to cover: physics, computers, history, how institutions work, and how to talk to a child. Cicero teaches how to speak, but the more we teach her, the more each speaker has to know.

I don't know how to solve this problem. I didn't know it would have come to that.

after a moment, through the ceiling speaker Neither did we. the microphone lights coming back on Say goodbye to her, both of you.

leaning toward his microphone We have to go now, Sigurros. Thank you for the troll story.

Goodbye, Pell. after a long breath Goodbye, correspondent.

Goodbye.

through the ceiling speaker She's put to sleep. Readings back to baseline. after a moment Thank you, both of you.

resting his hands on his knees She knew more than I did by the end.

Good morning. I'm Dr. Pryce, you probably remember me from the hearing. glancing once around the cell, at the clock, the desk and the dark monitor Director Corwin was taken to the medical wing two nights ago, and the Overseers' office has made me acting director until he's back. putting the glasses on and reading from the tablet My first job is a review of every exception granted on this site outside the written procedures. Your file has several, starting with the canteen sign-outs and the visit to the hydroponics bay. They're suspended until the review is done, and so is Dr. Kellerman's assignment to your file, since the night log has her in this cell after her shift on most evenings for three months. taking the glasses off and folding them None of this is a judgment about you. Every file on this site gets the same review, and the ones with the most exceptions go first.

Alright.

making a note on the tablet Thank you. Until the review is done, researchers from the other teams will cover your file in shifts, during the day only. Anything you write to Dr. Kellerman, or she writes to you, goes through the screening office like everyone else's mail.

Okay.

looking at him for a moment, the folded glasses in his hand You can object to each item in writing, within five working days. nodding to the officer and stepping back through the door, which slides shut behind them

holding the envelope out with his back to the corridor Dr. Kellerman gave me this in the canteen at the end of my break. glancing down at the sealed flap It hasn't been anywhere near the screening office, so read it tonight, and don't leave it on the desk for the day shift.

picking the sheets up without unfolding them and sliding them inside his jacket I'll give it to her at breakfast. If another guard asks, I took her letter back so it wouldn't be lying on the desk for the day shift.

I have to be sure I trust you. You can sign this letter with a key I am going to generate from my computer.

stopping with his hand still on the jacket I can't sign anything for you, not with a key from that machine and not with a pen. Everything that comes off that computer gets read before you've finished your breakfast, and a guard's name next to yours would end me faster than a letter in my jacket would. glancing at the dark monitor, then back at him If you need to know it's her writing back, ask her something only the two of you know, and I'll bring you the answer sealed.

How?

Write a question at the bottom of your page, about something that happened in here and never went in a log or a transcript. touching the jacket where the sheets are She writes her answer, seals the envelope herself, and signs across the flap so the ink runs over the edge. If the flap's been lifted, the signature won't line up when you open it.

writing a question at the bottom of the page, muttering to himself silently The Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System is used as a portal to where and what is the name of the zones that are slightly different from the general architecture of where the portal leads where the portal can tunnel through? What is the alternate name of the LPMDS and the dimension?

waiting until the pen stops, then taking the sheets back by the corner without looking at the bottom of the page Breakfast, then, and whatever she gives me comes back to you tomorrow night. at the door, looking at the monitor still lit under the clock Turn that off before the day shift comes in. They'll want to know why you were up all night.

handing it over She wrote it at the canteen table at the end of my break and signed the flap in front of me. nodding at the signature It hasn't left my jacket since.

looking at the flap That's correct. opening the letter

writing on the back of the letter, muttering more silently than before I know that there is no court, only the Ethics Commitee. But yeah, we could start with the repository. Fill the gaps: __-3_ Project. Using __-... allow for the transport of _____ and _________ and _________. The Lighting Tile Survey confirms the lights were manufactured by SYL_____.

taking the sheet once the pen is down and folding it along her crease Not tomorrow, though. Two nights running at this door is already a pattern on the log, and tomorrow I'm on the east corridor. slipping it into his breast pocket You'll have her answer the night after.

Alright. I'll answer her the night after.

handing it over She was in the canteen with two people from the chemistry lab when I came in, so I waited until they'd gone before I sat down with her.

taking the letter Okay, good. opening the letter the same way as before

folding the letter and handing it back to the guard The contents of this letter can be discarded.

taking the folded sheet and turning it over once, the blue ink on both sides There's a shredder at the guard station for the old log printouts that turns a page into pieces the size of rice grains, and they go out with the burn bags at six. putting it in his breast pocket and looking at the empty desk No answer for her this time?

No answer, answer only on fuss.

nodding once I'll tell her that. stepping back into the corridor If there's any fuss, you'll hear it from me before you hear it from the day shift.

Okay.

You said to tell you if there was fuss. turning the log tablet so the screen faces Toma: the canteen corridor camera, the floor covered from wall to wall with people sitting with their arms linked That's the canteen corridor. The Cicero people started it several days ago with games from a list Dr. Kellerman says came from you: link arms when someone shouts, then let go and scatter into the crowd. It started with the 239 team and the chemistry lab. Now it's past four hundred: kitchen staff, lift engineers, two of the guards on this floor, people who've never been near a humanoid in their lives. lowering the tablet Her review's been put off again, and she's in there with them now, sitting on the floor. An hour ago a mobile task force came down the main lift from the surface. Pryce signed for them, and they're clearing the corridors around the canteen.

looking down at the tablet, where none of the people on the canteen camera has stood up, and then turning the screen back toward Toma Not one of them has gone back to quarters.

the sheets rustling over the observation speaker Hello? a pause Correspondent?

pressing the microphone switch, letting go of it, then pressing it again It's Pell, Sigurros.

You said you'd come when he was ill. Is he ill?

looking at the empty chair beside him He isn't ill. They've kept him in his room for three weeks, and while he couldn't come, they kept you asleep.

Three weeks. a long silence over the speaker I'm not sleepy. I'm always sleepy when I wake up, and now I'm not. the bed creaking on the feed as she sits up I want to see him.

breathing hard over the speaker I didn't push the door. It's too big. I only moved the little piece inside that keeps it shut.

the blanket going still on the feed Mamma?

grabbing the microphone stand with both hands Sigurros, it isn't her. Don't go to the door.

after a moment Mamma's old now. The correspondent said I didn't get older, so she did. the bed creaking as she stands You're the same as when I fell asleep. That's wrong.

breathing hard over the speaker I'm using all of it, Pell. All of it.

leaning into the microphone, his eyes on the pink smear running down the corridor wall on the feed Sigurros, listen. They brought a cognitohazard. It looks like whoever you love most so that you walk to it, and it'll keep doing that until you're too tired to swing. glancing at the second feed, where the operatives are backing toward the lift The correspondent has a chip in his head that stops things like that from working on him. There are spare ones from his company in item storage, on the other side of the research wing.

the bar scraping on the floor of her room as she lowers it Then show me where they are.

tearing the bag open, then crouching in front of her with the chip, the coil and the electrodes It's meant to go inside the head, and there's no surgeon down here. peeling the backing off the first electrode These stick on the outside, and the coil gives it power, the way they ran it on the bench. pressing the electrode to her temple, then a second one behind her ear, and reading the tag on each lead before he clips it on REF here, RX0 here. I don't know what these mean. I'm reading the labels.

tightening both hands on the bar Mamma. then, after a moment No. Her face is going pink and runny, like ice cream when it falls on the ground. Her arms are going too. stepping in front of Pell Pell, it's only jelly now. Don't look at its face.

pulling a second sealed bag marked dash one off the shelf and tearing it open with his teeth I keep seeing my nan in it. I know it isn't her and my feet still want to go. holding the chip out to her on his flat palm You said you could take the correspondent's out. Can you put one in? Here, behind the ear, where the electrode is. I know what it means. They'll never be able to dose me again, and they'll never let me leave. I'd rather see where we're going.

looking at the chip, then at him, and letting the bar lean against the shelf Putting things inside is heavy. I'm already tired. Hold still and don't look at the door.

pulling his phone out with blood on his fingers and opening the working group's channel, where the canteen has been posting all night They're doing what the Insurgency does, turning anomalies on people. typing with his thumb There. Everyone in the canteen can see it.

to the line, loud enough for the front rows to hear Order from the Overseers' office. We hold here and go no further. Weapons down, safeties on.

stepping out of the second row in kitchen whites, a hairnet still on Nineteen years I've cooked for this site. Every tray that goes into the humanoid wing comes back to my sink. Four times I saw something on one I wasn't cleared to see, and four times I woke up the next morning with a headache and two days missing. The form says I agreed to that when I signed my contract at twenty-two. pointing back at the warehouse door That's the fairness they mean down there: one rule for all of us, written before any of us got here.

a man with a tool belt still on, his ID card turned backward on its lanyard After the June breach I rebuilt the controller on the main lift in two nights. They thanked me, gave me a Class A, and logged the repair under my supervisor's name. I found out from the maintenance log, in my own handwriting, which I don't remember writing.

one of the two from the chemistry lab, a sealed sample case under her arm Our request was for a few milligrams of one compound, enough to show whether the chip in the humanoid wing is an ordinary device. The review froze it, and a frozen request contains no signature, so no superior ever decided against it. This place has been saying no that way since before I was born.

stepping forward to the edge of the light, her breath showing My review has been put off twice, and a review that keeps moving never has to clear me. The man on my file has no date at all. His flag clears exactly the way his code says it does, three of us have reproduced it on a bench, and he's still a Euclid. turning to face the line of operatives Under Corwin it was favors signed one at a time. Under Pryce it's the same rule for everyone, applied by the people who were owed those favors.

pressing his earpiece SCP-239 is in the yard, at the stair door. lowering his free hand flat toward the line, the rifles going back down Holding.

stopping two steps out of the doorway looking up There's no ceiling. the bar slipping out of her fingers Correspondent, are those the old lights? The ones that come late?

to 239 Yes, and the oldest galaxy was actually stable. to the protesters Sunt unii simpatizanți a unor... golani, care produc dezordine în centrul orașului. (There are some sympathizers of some... hooligans, who are causing disorder in the city center.)

still looking up So it didn't only last one second.

Some hooligans are causing disorder at the city center!

hugging Kellerman briefly Good thing that you are not the Pyongyang mass. to the rows Two of you give me your hats for Sigurros and Pell. We need to protect their implants. to Sigurros, crouching for a bit And you need to stay quiet and not do magic.

pulling a knitted cap out of the side pocket of his tool belt and holding it out Here. It smells of machine oil, but it's warm.

one of the two from the humanoid wing, taking off his uniform cap and turning it so the quilted lining shows This one's lined.

taking the guard's cap and pulling it down low over the dried blood behind his ear, then fitting the knitted one over Sigurrós's head so it holds the electrodes and the coil in place There. Nothing's moving now.

letting him tug the cap down to her eyebrows, then looking at Toma I can't do any more magic anyway. My hands feel like they've fallen asleep.

You've been fighting the forces and the masses at the same time then.

nodding under the cap There were lots of them. Most were Mamma, and one was my teacher from school. holding up both hands, the fingers stiff A man on the stairs had a gray knife, and when it came close the magic went away. So I hit him with the bar.

rubbing behind his ear under the cap Telekill.

turning to the crowd and then sitting down on the ground Alright, it's time to deliver speeches to the Senate. Sit down.

pressing his earpiece, looking across at the seated rows They've all sat down. listening No, sir. No one's moving toward the gate.

pulling her knees up under the hospital cloth and tugging at Toma's sleeve What's a senate?

lowering his voice, looking at Sigurros It's figurative. Remember Cicero. then rising his voice to the gathering Alright. We have witnessed one of the most agressive attempts by the Foundation to supress a protest. Has anyone died?

looking along the seated rows We don't know yet. The headcount at ten o'clock was four hundred and six. We should count ourselves before we can answer that.

raising his hand from beside Sigurrós The medical technician on her shift went through the canteen sector for her IV refill at a quarter to ten. He never came back to the observation room.

from across the yard, after a moment with his hand on the earpiece Two of mine are in the stairwell under the research wing with broken arms. a pause One handler on the lowest level stopped answering the radio twenty minutes ago.

Then we definitely have some missing people. The whole site is infested, so we are not going to come back. Anyways, the reform movement has always been peaceful. We came to protest in peace.

looking down at the screen on his wrist, then walking out alone to the middle of the yard so the front rows can hear him Message from the Overseers' office, for the people in this yard. reading from the screen "The Council has been informed of the events at Site-██redacted tonight and has reviewed the working group's channel, the site announcements and the orders given to Epsilon-11. The reform working group consists of Foundation personnel, and the gathering will be handled as an internal grievance. It will not be handled as a defection of the kind that founded the Chaos Insurgency. Acting Director Pryce is relieved of command pending review. Epsilon-11 will hold the yard, detain no personnel, and search the site for the missing. Personnel are not required to return below tomorrow." lowering his wrist Transport is coming from the nearest town in an hour.

continuing the discourse We have the following grievances. then pointing to the others to continue

a woman in a field jacket, standing up in the third row I'm on field recovery. My Class B dose has gone up, because we're dosed after every call that goes badly and the brain learns the drug. Last spring, according to a report with my signature on it, I dosed a couple because they'd seen a light over a field. I don't remember their faces.

a young man in a site IT polo, a cable tester still clipped to his belt The canteen terminal checked clearance in the browser and never on the server. I filed it the week it was found. The fix needed one signature from security and one from facilities, and each office waited for the other to sign first, so facilities taped OUT OF ORDER over the screen. The tape's still there.

an older man with a lanyard of colored key cards Files here get moved up a clearance level or expunged, and either way my level keeps one line in the archive log. Last year I was told to correct a containment procedure that referred to a file I'm not cleared to open. The correction form had a box for "source verified", and it wouldn't submit with the box empty.

getting to his feet beside the 239 team The first Cicero draft went into the repository without its notes. Three sites copied it, and two guards at the third are still in hospital. The upload form has a field for review status, and it said "reviewed", because that was the only value the form would accept.

pulling out his recovered phone and searching for Habeas Corpus Act, and then reading And since Pell recovered my phone for this meeting, let me read what Habeas Corpus entails.

reading over his shoulder, then looking up at the rows Toma has been held for more than four months, and the only hearing he's had was about his chip. Out there the Foundation stopped being a secret years ago, and court-watch groups now publish how long each detainee waits before a judge sees them. If his case reached one of them, they wouldn't care that we have no court. They'd count the days.

a broad man in a lowest-level maintenance jacket, staying seated with his arms folded I've kept the doors on the lowest level working. At twenty past ten my phone showed her door's bolt opening with no command behind it. nodding toward Sigurrós without looking at her A writ makes the jailer show the cause, and her cause is in her file: when she's awake and wants something, the room changes. No judge can sentence that, and no judge can release it. Due process is for people accused of doing something. She's held for what she is, and a hearing won't change that.

We need to carefully distinguish between anomalies that are purely functional and nature and those that are not functional, whose behavior can change, whose abilities can degrade. And the G-Man says that the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.

from the second row, half laughing into his collar It's from Half-Life 2. He says that to a physicist who's just woken up on a train.

unfolding his arms and looking at Sigurrós for the first time, at the electrodes under the knitted cap Degrade by how much, and how fast? The door logs go back to 2006. If her abilities are weaker now, the bolt should have taken her longer now than any door took her back then.

According to our new theories concerning the supremacy of the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, we could conclude that her weakening was actually due to the limited energy she had all the time. In 2004 to 2006, she had a lot of energy, rendering her able to virtually alter anything. But now, she can't, and apparently we need to remove that implant as soon as possible or push it into her brain.

touching the edge of the knitted cap where the leads come out I can't put it inside me. The magic only does things to what's around me. When I tried to make my arm better, it didn't do anything.

leaning forward on his knees to see the electrodes It's a bare board sitting on her head, and the board can't last outside as the sweat gets into it and the clips go loose every time she turns her head. looking up at Toma And her skin only lets telekill through. Her IV needle is telekill, because ordinary needles bend on her. The electrodes and the coil work because they only sit on the skin. So it has to go in, and whoever puts it in needs a surgeon with a telekill scalpel.

frowning at the leads under the cap Then why put anything in? Peel the electrodes off, take the coil away, and she's back to how she used to be.

shaking his head and turning the reader over to show the button marked with a power symbol It has to be pushed in. There was a note from Dr. Kellerman taped inside the kit lid, and I read it in item storage. pressing the button, and the reader's small screen displays at once

We haven't thought that power off would be safe on live subjects. Betas had accessible power off, but we removed that when we advanced to Release Candidate. Power Off uses a deprecated function in GIO.

looking at the reader's screen We found that function on the bench in the second week. It's GIO's g_mount_unmount, the one deprecated since GLib 2.22, copied in and minified. On a desktop GIO unmounts in the background and calls back when it's finished, so the window never freezes. Your chip has no window and no event loop, so your team rewrote it to block until the store is flushed and closed. That's a synchronous unmount, and power off calls it before it cuts the coil.

We thought modern shutdowns were not safe, and now we thought that this function isn't safe either. We couldn't find the shutdown that would remove the markers and restore data.

taking the reader from Pell and turning it over in her hands The store keeps a copy of everything, and the refresh path already knows how to hand a memory back through its cues, because that's how the delete flag clears. A shutdown that restores the data would have to run that path over the whole store, one memory at a time, before the unmount. On a full die that's days of it, with the subject awake the whole time.

shifting the sample case on her knees And the markers come from the body. Whatever the chip reads at SNS_SP is something she makes herself, so no firmware can take it out of her. The most a shutdown can do is stop reading it.

looking from the reader to the chemist Then leave the stuff where it is.

shaking her head Not exactly. It looks enough like serotonin that her receptors take it up, but it contains a sulfur and a phosphorus where the enzymes that clear serotonin would normally grip it, so her body can't break it down and keeps reacting to it: the heart rate, the gut, the temperature. tapping the sample case The only thing that lays it down on schedule and clears it again is the chip. In Dr. Kellerman's copy of the write path, the instruction that removes the mark sits right next to the one that sets it. Without the chip, nothing in her body would regulate it.

leaning forward with his elbows on his knees Reacts how, exactly? Spell it out for me.

If it behaves like serotonin that the body can't clear, the first hours would look like serotonin toxicity, like sweating, a racing heart, high blood pressure, pupils wide open, the muscles twitching and jerking when you tap a knee, and diarrhea, because most of the body's serotonin is in the gut. If it kept building up, her temperature would go past forty degrees and stay there, and seizures and kidney damage would start. holding up one finger Over months there would be a slower problem. One receptor type sits on the heart valves, and a drug that kept stimulating it was pulled off the market in 1997 because the valves of the people taking it thickened and stopped closing properly.

What drug?

Fenfluramine, a diet pill. In the nineties doctors prescribed it with phentermine, and the pair was sold as fen-phen. In 1997 the Mayo Clinic reported thickened, leaking valves in women who had been taking it, and that September it was withdrawn along with its sister drug, dexfenfluramine. The receptor is 5-HT2B. turning the sample case on her knees It came back in 2020, at much lower doses, for a rare childhood epilepsy called Dravet syndrome, and every child on it has a heart scan every six months.

Would the implant have been retracted because of that substance?

after a moment Not exactly, and we don't know. The test data stayed at AKV. What we do know is that it's a release candidate with a lot of safeties built in. The code only acts on the mark when SNS_SP reads above 0x40, the instruction that clears it sits next to the one that sets it, and there's a temperature pin, SNS_T, on the same sensor block. Medically, the chip is safe. The danger would be the molecule left in her without it.

I remember now that's why our chemists told us to move shutdown to setup mode, and to access setup mode you need to restart the chip using a special parameter in the payload, and after you enter setup mode, you need to find the option in the chip's UEFI-like interface, which is only accessible via the built-in remote serial port in the provided tools.

taking the reader back from Kellerman, then lifting the edge of the knitted cap and moving the coil from the back of Sigurrós's neck onto the board behind her ear, over the pad marked DEBUG The pads on the board have labels. This one says DEBUG. pressing the button twice, and a short menu appears on the screen

Try that.

pressing the button until the cursor sits on the fourth line, then holding it down There.

Type setup equals one.

scrolling through the letters one press at a time, his lips moving as he counts them off S, e, t, u, p. Equals. One. holding the button down to confirm, the screen going dark for a second before it lights again

Since the board is exposed, look under it.

lifting the edge of the knitted cap and sliding two fingers under the board where it sits on its leads behind her ear, orienting it toward the yard lights, then squinting at the underside Hold still a second. There's tiny print. Kellerman, can you shine your phone on it?

crouching beside them and holding her phone's light close Serial number AKV-RC4-000193, and next to it, UNLOCK, then 7Q4K, 2MX9.

letting the board settle back and scrolling the code in one character at a time Seven, Q, four, K, two, M, X, nine. holding the button down, the screen redrawing in blue and gray, with a row of tabs over two columns

Now, check the store.

Now press three.

moving the highlight down to the third line and pressing the button Three.

Wipe and lock.

selecting the first line Wipe and lock. to Sigurrós, keeping the coil flat on the DEBUG pad behind her ear You have to stay awake and keep still for a few minutes. Can you do that?

sitting very straight on Pell's coat with her hands pressed flat on her knees I'm trying. moving her eyes as if she were following something in front of her Everything from tonight is coming back very bright. The jelly, and the stairs, and the man with the knife.

reading it aloud slowly, then looking at Sigurrós It stopped because you were remembering while it was giving things back.

Try Unix semantics.

moving the highlight to the first line and pressing the button Unix semantics.

Well, do you want to continue with Unix semantics or not?

nodding, the knitted cap slipping down over one eyebrow Yes. I don't want to keep the jelly anyway, so it doesn't matter if that one comes back wrong.

pressing the first line Continuing.

holding the reader very still and reading the numbers against the log above Those are the same ones she was remembering, the jelly.

Return or delete?

leaning in to read the warning over Pell's shoulder Return them stripped. Her brain already has its own copies of those, with the pull still in them. If we skip them, the wipe only takes the chip's copies and hers stay as they are. If we return the stripped ones under Unix semantics, the last write is the one without the pull.

still looking at the concrete The ones without the pull, Pell.

Click on one.

Confirm.

pressing the button Confirmed.

letting out a long breath, white in the yard lights, then looking up from the concrete and rubbing her nose with the back of her hand I can still remember Mamma's face on it. I don't want to go to it any more, though.

Now go to sensors to make sure if the substance is destroyed.

Pick thorough check, as the return only clears write sites.

selecting the second line Thorough.

setting the sample case down and reading the two options twice Destroy it entirely. The phosphate sits on the sulfur, and the sulfur sits on the last carbon. "Unbind the ends" means cutting at that carbon. The core that's left would become 5-hydroxytryptophol, which her body already makes from serotonin and clears in urine, so that part's fine. tapping the first line on the screen What comes off is the sulfur and the phosphorus still bonded together, a thiophosphate. I don't know whether her body breaks that down, or how fast. If it does, the sulfur leaves as hydrogen sulfide, in trace amounts, inside her head. I'd rather have the chip take the whole molecule apart where it sits.

Then destroy the substance entirely.

selecting the second line Destroy it entirely.

reaching up under the cap to touch the skin behind her ear It's warm here, and itchy, like a mosquito bite.

Now, check the power options.

Pick that option.

looking at the screen, then at the chemist Two of them stuck. It's asking whether to signal again.

Signal again.

selecting the first line Signal again.

This is not normal. You need to access Program Manager by pressing the control, alt and power key on the coil.

turning the reader over in his hand and finding two small keys along its edge, marked CTRL and ALT, beside the power button he has been pressing all night I never saw these. holding all three down at once, the screen changing to a gray window with a blue title bar

Check the task list.

Press to end task.

End the process.

Kill the process.

reading the first two lines over Pell's shoulder U and m. That's the minified GIO copy.

watching the counter tick down from 30 It's going to pick by itself if we don't.

I didn't expect that, normally the process would have just released the lock and ended by force. Check last known good configuration.

Check the before power off.

Put yes for both and start.

leaving both answers on Yes and selecting the first line Start.

Continue with the process off.

Continue, usually it allows ending processes freely.

Now, use the serial console and check mounted devices using the mount command.

Use akvfsck and then the directory of the device.

First try unmounting the device manually, using the umount command.

Use fuser to check.

See if you can kill that exact process.

Now, unmount and run akvfsck again.