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• rating: +45

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  Terminal Terminal
  End of the lines.

  Colour Blind Mode

  More by Harry!
  More by Place!

  ---

  rating: +45

She could go for days on end like that, but sometimes she preferred not to. The timescale was now quite clear, and it wouldn't do to rush. Some things had to proceed at a snail's pace, to avoid calling too much attention. So from time to time, she dropped out of hyperfocus, stopped seeing everything at once, and settled for something like humanity.

Today was a little of both.

"We have a theory," Lillian told her.

Ilse nodded.

"We think there's another one."

Ilse tried not to exhale with too obvious relief. "Another one like the Uncontained?" The Survivors, having escaped from the deadest of deadlines, had managed to restore the missing Brother to existence. She'd been pondering how to break the rest of the news to them, and now it seemed she didn't have to.

Lillian was nodding. "Chaos and order. Yin and yang. Two sides of the same coin. That's why nothing's made sense until now, and why this year everything's coming up heads. We're at the tail end now." She grinned, even though the metaphor was really quite awful.

"Makes sense," Ilse hazarded.

Lillian laughed. "I know you're not supposed to share your secrets," she said. "Or maybe you can't. But do you know anything about this that can help?"

She considered. She operated under two onuses. One, from the Temporal Anomalies Department. One, much older, from Vivian Scout.

She took a deep breath.

She could almost picture him smiling at her through the glass.

She smiled back. "So, we used to call it The File…"

It had been a bad habit.

For the last few years — rapidly approaching two decades — Ilse had begun turning down consultation requests. Not all of them, of course. Just the ones she couldn't personally use. But the fact that her mind wasn't frozen, and that humans were distinctly social animals, meant that she needed to see fresh faces from time to time. A whole lot of people worked at Site-43, but she'd already seen a whole lot of permutations of them, and honestly, it was making her more than a little sick.

She was in regular correspondence with six different versions of William Wettle. If she didn't get some variety, and soon, she was going to start screaming.

Her pen pal relationship with Jay Everwood was one means of coping. The Groups of Interest expert had been visiting 43 on occasion, to discuss the rise of giftschreiber activity worldwide, and they'd hit it off well enough at the window to continue their acquaintance at a distance. Whenever the numbers went too high, the weary spectres fumbled too badly, or Dougall's scrutiny caused too serious a work stoppage, she called a mental time-out and dictated a letter to her friend.

She glanced at the floating envelope, then turned back to the window.

She frowned at the display. It kept putting exclamation marks on the ends of her sentences. Was she really coming across that eager? Or had Lillihammer programmed something pernicious in there, to make her sound like an excited child?

It was too disconcerting when she did. It always started floating, very slowly, towards her shoulders again. If she waited long enough, it would try to put itself back on. This she had scientifically proven.

"—tering jantje," she swore, and then tapped the glass until the transcription erased it. Then she turned the transcriber off. "What the hell."

She assessed the feelings neutrally. First, surprise. That was natural. She only engaged in this sort of speculation every few decades, and it never ended well. Next, guilt. That didn't make much sense, but then, it rarely did. And what was left, when she eliminated those?

Hope.

She wrote the equation down, underlined it, and got back to work.

"Am I to believe you're brain damaged now?" Xyank was tapping his foot. "Permanently? That doesn't quite gel with our understanding of your plight."

She ignored him, focusing on the terminal. He could probably turn it off, or see what she was typing, but he obviously considered it beneath him.

"You're working it out, aren't you? You can't hide from me. You can't hide from anyone, in there. If you think you're going to think your way out of this—"

"What?" She snapped her eyes to him, and grinned. "What are you going to do, Thad? Kill me?" She thumped her chest, above the heart. "It's all in me, now."

He scowled at her. "What is?"

"You know. You probably always knew. The only way I die is if everything that made me what I am, goes back out of me. And if that happens, everything I did rewinds. Everything predicated on me. And you don't want that." She laughed. "Thad, are you part of the cycle, too? Did I make you? Or make you what you are?"

His eyes blazed. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Then why are you afraid?"

If he'd had an answer, she was sure, he would have given it instead of disappearing.

It was a question of math.

The most complex math equation of all time. It would take thousands of mind-hours to work through. Perhaps tens of thousands. It would take most, but not all, of the paper in the incinerator. It would take the DUAL Core. Probably several of them, set in competition. It would take the shapes she saw stirring in the darkness of the fallen tower, the last vestiges of a man she had loved, still reaching out in his ontological death spiral to try and take her hand.

It would take, at last, one final lie. Because she couldn't tell them all what she was really doing. Couldn't tell them how it worked. They couldn't know how she was saving herself, and might some day save all of them. And the man who told her they couldn't know, couldn't know either.

Vivian had been right about the importance of communications. Wynn had been right about the power of transformation.

Dougall had been right about… something, probably.

Ilse was right about to enter the home stretch.

Sokolsky was doing something ridiculous.

That was nothing new.

She played her part, and thought nothing else of it. It was a thing of the moment, a single day of banal activity. Ilse had her eyes fixed on airier things.

On the clock.

"They should have called it Sokolsky's Cannon," he smirked at her after it was done. "A literary device which, once invoked in jest, turns out to be much too real."

"Mhmm," she responded. She had no idea what he was referring to, but it didn't sound important.

She did notice when the breach alarm went off, and she definitely noticed when the announcement system announced the entire facility was about to be blown up.

She simply assumed it was part of the plan.

Getting time on the Core in baseline was a piece of cake. Du and his people were used to running calculations for her, and only barely understanding what they meant. It was a little more difficult running what she needed through Udo to the anti-Dougall underground, who had to parcel out their tasks and present them to Dougall-Du — she really needed to think of a better word for that seventh reality — with something like a reasonable rationale. The Core had been partially cannibalized for parts in the Spaceship, but she knew how to convince Elstrom to restore it back to spec. She was even able to negotiate for resources with the Foundation in -D, in exchange for a few choice explanations of what precisely had gone on in the missing year. Nothing destabilizing. Nothing Xyank could object to. She didn't tell them her information came from Marion Wheeler, who they either thought was dead, or had never existed.

The spiders helped, too, in their way. And in the darkness of the shattered tower, something yet stirred. Something was pulling itself together. She told herself it was her own strength of will that attracted these signs of new life.

"I'm going to get you out of there," she whispered to the wisps of Wynn.

It would have been easier if every world had taught her something new, if each of them offered unique resources combining to enable her escape.

But it would not have been more gratifying.

Instead, each timeline presented its own obstacles. She had to keep the Survivors in Primeline unaware of her septupled vision, whilst simultaneously coordinating with their supposedly-deceased colleagues on a variety of very involved ventures. Simply getting enough alone time to converse without being caught was becoming a problem, and it was maddening how often her friends decided to help by parking in front of the window and talking over themselves. She couldn't keep the shutter down indefinitely if she didn't want them talking behind her back, instead.

She was so vital to Cornerstone that they were petrified of losing her, so every experiment which looked like it might be applicable to her case was scrutinized for safety beyond all reasonable concern, and any data of unclear origin — for example, everything she knew from research performed in Primeline — was treated with such suspicion that she started inventing provenance rather than claiming she'd done the work in her head.

The spiders worked together too well, and had trouble adapting to the needs of a lone subject. They were also making everything out of spiders.

Spaceship-43 had settled into a sort of disconsolate equilibrium, but resources were still scarce and trust was still low.

The Foundation had decided to decommission Site-43 in the world where there was no Antimemetics Division, given the excessive structural damage, the severely depleted personnel pool, and the nagging suspicion that the whole fiasco had somehow started there, and might start up again if it was restored to working order. She had to beg and borrow for supplies and equipment while the slow deconstruction took place; Nascimbeni and his skeleton crew were sympathetic, but it was clear that if she didn't get out soon, AAF-A was going to become her tomb.

And in Wynn's own tomb, the man himself was slowly reasserting. His spectres occasionally toddled off to perform bizarre experiments, downing tools on her own projects in the process. Some of them sat down and wailed like small children. Some of them called for their mothers. Some called for Vivian.

All of them were formless, now. Yellow static bodies with black, gaping orifices. All their personhood pulled away to reform the sorcerer of the tumbledown sewer.

Finally, she was nearing the point where she couldn't pretend any longer that she hadn't been performing experiments under Dougall's nose. That was going to be an exciting conversation.

But the thing was… it was working. The plan was working. It was going to work. There were still a few pieces to put in place, but she was confident she'd have the answers when the time came.

All she needed now was a plausible excuse to cover the provenance of her scheme.

And when the fallout of Sokolsky's mad operation finally settled, she found just the right waters in which to float that false Eureka.

Maximilien Vroom was very handsome. If she or Lys had brought him home for dinner, their mother would have been very pleased. Ilse had other plans, but it was still nice to listen to him talk, hear the half-forgotten tones of home.

Even if they did now sound a little silly to her ear. A lifetime of listening to the clipped, nasal drone of the North Americans.

Vroom was replacing Veiksaar, who had done something problematic which nobody wanted to talk about. She wondered who was managing Wynn. Perhaps it would be her, soon.

She'd thought the man was visiting to fix her new voice controls, which seemed to be picking up an echo that wasn't there and misinterpreting the results. She had obvious misgivings about that particular snaffle. But no, Vroom hadn't come solely to bring his gifts to bear, today. He was bearing news.

It wasn't surprising news, though she affected surprise anyway. She'd known this particular twist was coming.

TAD had retroactively approved her cross-temporal studies, and offered her unrestricted access to a wealth of related data. Purely, she imagined, for the humour value, Xyank had also authorized Vroom to install a direct line to his office for her. As if they didn't already have an established procedure for when he wanted to gloat, or lord his power over her.

She knew what it really meant, of course. It was an acknowledgement.

Xyank knew she was almost ready. He wanted her to know that he knew.

It gave her great satisfaction to ignore database and telephone both.

"Well," Vroom was saying. "Let me know if I can help you out with anything."

She decided to have a little fun at his expense. "Help me out," she repeated.

He blanched. "I mean..."

She shot him a reassuring grin. "I'm going to help myself out, any day now." She nodded, and for the first time it didn't feel like she was trying to convince herself. Simply acknowledging the absolute fact of the matter. "It was always going to be me."

Vroom's eyes widened. "You've figured it out?"

"Not yet," she lied. She hoped she wouldn't need to lie many more times before it was done. "But with all these new options, I'm sure my research will progress very quickly."

Time, she told him, was both particle and wave. Self-permeable and infinitely transmissible. Her long-finished experiments with Dougall had supplied a wealth of information on how those waves and particles travelled though the ADDC, and through her. She told him that she had finally accrued enough data to not only replicate the effect — what she and Dougall had failed to do in 2002 — but also achieve its precise opposite. Cancel out the stopped time. Restore the balance. And as luck would have it, most of the equipment she would need already existed thanks to her years of unrelated study.

He bought it, of course. Never even suspected the deception. Because it was all true, except in one key aspect. One simple omission.

It was still a gratifying success.

But he was only the trial run.

Dougall was outnumbered.

She sent her proposal to the Director, knowing it would go before the Chairs and Chiefs. Lillihammer would be on her side, as would Blank and Okorie. Nascimbeni, Ngo, Zaman and Wirth had kind hearts. Bremmel, Du and Sokolsky never turned down mad science. Veiksaar would vote in her favour out of misplaced guilt.

Elstrom, Ibanez and Mukami might have reservations about any proposals originating from the Site's long-term loon. Bradbury had a long memory. Del Olmo apparently hated her.

But Dougall was the only one she knew, for certain, would vote to deny her. Even if he swayed a few of the others, the conclusion was foregone.

He was smiling as he approached the window, and she wondered what could possibly have gone wrong.

"Congratulations!" he said, and in motion the smile was revealed as thin and brittle. Dougall was furious. "You got what you wanted."

"You don't think I deserve it?" she hazarded. She had no idea why the C&C would have chosen him to bear the good news, assuming that was what this was.

"You've put in the work," he acknowledged. "Brain work, anyway. And you've suffered enough, too. Obviously it's time you rejoined society."

Victory was no time to be ungracious, but she couldn't very well let that pass. "If I've been absent from society," she told him, "don't you think you had something to do with that?"

He waved dismissively. "Our personal issues don't matter. It doesn't matter how I feel about you. You're going to be a rising star again. Rising right out of this backwater. With any luck, once you put your plan into place, neither of us will ever have to look at the other again."

She wanted to be sad about that. They'd had a few good years working together. Confidences had been shared, and hopes too. Disappointments. But it was too late for that. She had lived too many lives in the interim. "That's probably for best," she agreed.

He nodded stiffly. "Well, like I said. Congratulations." He paused. "I understand a lot of the machinery you're going to need has already been built."

Uh oh.

"How lucky for you that so many of my people were able to find time in their busy schedules to build bits and bobs for your future escape mechanism."

"Dougall," she began. She had no idea how she was going to end that sentence.

"Forget about it." He was working his jaw and wincing, as though chewing on solid rock. "All in the past. Today, we need to start coordinating the final steps toward your future."

She nodded…

…then stopped nodding. "We?"

"That's right," he suddenly sneered. "I'm in charge of executing the final stages, on our side. I told them all your fancy equipment was built on my say-so. A going-away feather for my cap, from you." His eyes glinted in cold fluorescent. "Unless you'd rather I told them just how much bullshit you've been up to behind all our backs."

The machines were ready. The same machines in each timeline, doing mostly the same things, to similar degrees. Very different operators, of course, but all bent to the same result.

She'd been tempted to use her redline to Xyank only once, when a variety of experts across the spectrum of worlds had balked at executing what seemed, to them, like barely half a plan. A plan-fragment, even. She knew he had the power to smooth things over, and since he was apparently resigned to the fact that she was finally getting out…

But no. No, not even now, at the end, would she relinquish control. Having to loop Dougall in was bad enough, even though he was simply too incompetent to mess anything up, because he had no expertise that could justify direct involvement in the event. He was supervising, nagging, irritating her assistants and making snide remarks at her, but he couldn't go against the grain of his colleagues or his boss.

So, here I am. Where I started. Where I always have been.

Where, with any luck — no. With hard graft and brilliance. With hard graft and brilliance, she was never going to step foot inside this vast and dusty sepulchre ever again.

It started with the soft fluttering of an emitter. The narrow beam of light passed through the glass, and into the darkness of the incinerator. Not the incinerator itself, which Ilse had recently torn apart and reconstructed, but the chamber which was its namesake. The fluorescents in the hall were off, and no ambient light fell on her thanks to the careful application of grease-painted sheets at strategic intervals throughout the chamber. The laser struck a mirror-fragment in a vise grip mounted in front of her, and bounced back through the glass to strike a receiver on the other side. On every other side. Orange light danced in the eyes of the watching Masons — the ones for whom this wasn't always the case — as the first reading was taken. Then Ilse lowered the mirror, and the laser struck her between the clavicles, and the clock began to tick…

…and now the spider-hive watched yellow lightning take her measure. The beam refracted in their multifaceted eyes, and the hive began calculating just as machines were already doing in every other reality…

…and now black light lasers began painting a rectangular prism through the window to acquire a confused collage of every ADDC. Karen Elstrom watched with narrowed eyes, the deal they'd struck clearly foremost on her mind as Ilse's escape to her motionless star craft loomed…

…and now the DUAL Core began to run the first of its two final programs, considering the nature of Ilse's identity. It isolated likely candidates for the fragment of her universal signature embedded in the laser signal, and set up tentative simulations while preparing to send the information abroad. Change-over-time projections started out slow and inaccurate, gradually growing in confidence as they were tested against the incoming data with each iteration and each new reading set. O5-8 had flown across the border to witness this experiment. Ilse had promised answers. It was a promise only part of her would keep…

…and now something very much like the DUAL Core, whirring away in the distant desert, an outgrowth of Wynn's fallen stele protecting it from stale air and the attention of the surviving Survivors, took its ultimate program for a spin. Absorbing the ADDC cage data, and preparing to receive the multiversal decryption keys. Wynn was operating all of the machines himself, though his hands were balled in his waistcoat pockets. He manipulated the controls through sheer willpower, but there was nothing else ontokinetic in this intervention. He had finally learned his lesson: the final hurdle was hers, and hers, and hers et cetera to clear…

…and now the final numbers were pouring in, and Dougall was pretending to understand what it meant, though he could not possibly, because the malicious code Ilse had included in each program occluded the combination process and the remarkable means by which it had been achieved. Only Wynn knew the truth, because his relationships with time and causality were already skewed, and someone needed to set the connection process in motion. Every Core was spinning in tandem, and in conversation, running the same calculations and comparing them across the multiversal boundary. Each machine had acquired the coordinates of the others when Ilse had bounced the first laser back out of the ADDC, and they found each other by exploiting one of the more expensive, less calamitious, and for Ilse's purposes most instructive of the 2002 Breach's effects. It had been discovered that tampering with the orphic energy powering the Core could cause it to occupy the same space as its alternate iterations; with a little tweaking, and a lot of math, it was possible to link only their quantum states, not their physical shells. The combined Cores put Ilse's identity fragments together, determined her true temporal signature, and imagined the ultimate contours of each fragment's localize version of the ADDC…

…and now it was possible to construct accurate antichronon snapshots of each combination of chamber and occupant, as they would exist when desynchronized, and to determine the precise frequencies at which they should vibrate to disentangle. Now Ilse risked oblivion for a chance at seven splintered lives. She wished Vivian could have been here to see her take the plunge. Jay was in Massachusetts — their bosses wouldn't let them off work just to visit a friend, and watch a light-show — but Allan, Harry and Max were standing by her degrees, trying not to look nervous. Only Allan was managing it. Du massaged the controls like a pro, checking readouts against her estimates and preparing for the final step. He looked up, and she knew it was working before he smiled. "Say the word," he said…

…and now she took a deep breath, and nodded, and said "Goodbye." Then she pressed her palm to the hotspot in the centre of the glass, and set a panoply of processes in parallel motion…

…and now Joanna Bremmel, in response to the final directive Ilse would issue across all worlds at once, hit a switch with gusto. She loved mad science, as her father had, and in this moment Ilse loved them both. The synchronization machine fired a beam of solid gold at the chamber, in this reality; across the multiverse, it flashed in every colour of the rainbow. The machine's hum was audible through the glass, but nothing visible occurred…

…and now the spiders activated their chronon beam, as their counterparts were doing in the other timelines, matching the DUAL Core's models to a T. Ilse thought she could hear the spiders howling in their distant centrifuge, screeching across the space between spaces to share their base 8 data with the non-arachnid sets…

…and now Elstrom watched hungrily as flames danced against the window. Ilse gunned the pilot light, and the reconstructed incinerator roared to life…

…and now Nascimbeni's dolorous tones informed her that the final countdown had begun…

…and now Wynn was laughing…

…and as Udo announced that desynchronization was finally possible, and Dougall asked what precisely that meant, and Udo said she didn't precisely know, because she didn't, Ilse stepped up to the window and playfully tapped her way through the offerings on Xyank's channel-switcher, taking final stock of what she was leaving behind, and winking at her dopey former partner before striking the final, invisible button to make him disappear forever for most of her multiple selves. As she did so, an alarm—

And now now now now now now? the chamber filled with light of every colour…

a void filled with sand and spiders and a tower on two cracked foundations filled with dreams that never came true and something is missing

…and then no colour at all…

a soul is torn from seven bodies as seven corpses leap out of the fire, fall to life

…and then resolved into stark reality as her view became crystal clear.

No blur, no outlines, no overlap.

And now she knew she was the luckiest one of all.

Tears streaming down her face, she crossed the chamber and stepped into her makeshift equalizer. "Go," she rasped, and Du flashed her a thumb's up.

This beam was pure white, and it momentarily blinded her. When her vision came back, it was a vision of horror. The cardboard boxes fluoresced with mold. The eraser on her pencil cracked and popped off. She pressed a button on the incinerator, and the control rods jury-rigged from incandescent ceiling tubes glowed violet, and the rising smoke collected in the chromite culture hanging over her head, which flaked apart and showered her in iron-glinting sparks. The ones that missed her disappeared before they reached the ground. The ones that didn't fell through her body like it wasn't even there, and did not reemerge. The laser that had taken her multiversal reading was now feeding chronon levels to the DUAL Core, monitoring the effect of the time debt on Ilse's fragile biology, consulting its completed simulations and the ongoing readings to feed precise timings back through the projector, flashing on the window. The code had taken her months and months of painstaking work, all for a process that would be over in less than one minute. The signal flashed, and Ilse pressed the button again.

Her hair felt dry. The moisture was gone out of the air, and then suddenly it was back with a vengeance. Her papers melted into foxing and fungus, formulae and caricatures and mad ravings all. The grout on the window sill separated. The floor tiles cracked. The signal flashed again, and Ilse pumped the primer. The air was thick with antichronon spores. The ceiling tiles began falling in, rotten to the core, revealing split pipes with nothing in them and badly pitted structural joists. Lightbulbs cracked, or exploded. Her tables and chairs were eaten away by rust that momentarily held their forms, then crumpled up on itself and carpeted the floor with red. The red melted, solidified again. There was a roar in the air so loud that she almost missed the next cue, wincing as she was, but she hit the button on instinct anyway. Allan bolted to the window and pressed his hand to the glass, just the same as he always had, and then the signal began flashing like a strobe, so she pressed the button again and bathed in the glinting chrome detritus which had trapped her here so very long ago.

And then everything still standing save for her, equalizer included, steel and polymers and plastics all, simply vanished in a violent puff of smoke, and Ilse breathed it in, and doubled over coughing, and put her hands in the gritty muck, and there was a violent SNAP and a cry of surprise, and she knew that the glass on the window had cracked. The chronon beam caught the cloud of generalized particulate, filling the chamber with sparkling cloud cover…

…and then it was gone, and the dust began to settle all around her.

Skin slick with sweat and stippled with grey, Ilse stood shakily to her feet again. As though waiting for her attention, the only other thing which had survived the instantaneous ravages of eight vengeful decades and too-long-denied entropy, her envelope, fell to the filthy floor with an anticlimactic slap.

And then the door unsealed and slid noisily open, and the air rushed in and blew the disintegrated contents of the ADDC into her face, and then there was a loud clanging sound above her as the air vents unsealed, their covers in metal fragments on the floor, and with a violent vacuum rush the airborne particulates were sucked out of sight. Long-dormant fans began humming, and Ilse's hair began to drift as the chamber filled with another force of nature greedy to renew its claim.

And she could see clearly once again. She could see the window.

She didn't look at it.

She was never looking out of that window again.

She staggered, first. Then she stumbled.

Then, she ran.

She stooped to collect the envelope, and she ran.

The dust of her tables and chairs and boxes and eight decades of notes kicked up in a cloud around her, and she ran.

At the slot in the floor where the door had sealed, it felt like something struck her. Pain blossomed from her knees and forehead, but she kept running.

And crossed the last limin.

The Oracle emerged from her temple.

The Pantheon welcomed her.

The last holdout joined the swarm.

She was no longer alone.

The outcast came back from the void.

Another mouth to feed.

The relic was freed from her tomb.

She was the last to leave.

The taskmistress entered the afterlife.

A guardian angel took her hand.

?????????

Where loose ends went to die.

Ilse Reynders walked out of the incinerator.

Ilse Reynders walked out of the incinerator.

She stood there, just past the door, in the hallway. Her lip trembled. Her eyes watered. She heard what the air recyclers sounded like. She smelled the recycled air. She felt it on her skin. The folds of her labcoat smoothed out with the application of gravity. Her hair followed suit. Her nose itched. Her stomach growled. Tears ran down her cheeks. Only down. Her glasses fogged, and she took them off, and they didn't tug her hand back in the direction of her face, and she put them in her pocket, and they stayed there. She felt short of breath, so she took a breath. And she breathed.

She sniffled. Her nose was running.

Allan stepped forward, proferring a handkerchief.

She fell into him, clawed at his back, pressed her face into his chest and wept and wept. Harry put a hand on her shoulder, and she pulled him in too. The two men embraced her awkwardly, keeping clear of each other, and they laughed. And she heard them laugh. She could hear them. Truly hear them. With no filter.

And she laughed, with no filter, too.

She didn't know how many of her first minutes since 1942 were spent like that. But eventually the tears stopped, and her muscles began to ache, and she let them go.

"I," she said, and she laughed again. Threw back her head and let the world have it.

She laughed until she was hoarse, and it didn't correct itself.

Allan nodded.

"Quarantine?" she managed.

He shook his head.

"All clear," said Du. He was looking at the monitor. He was speaking the first clear words she'd heard since the Second World War. "You're clear for the walk upstairs, at least."

"At least," she repeated. Her world had expanded over a thousandfold. Whole new continents opened up in what Billie Forsythe…

Her eyes filled again.

"Ilse?" Allan made no move to catch her, and that was right. She didn't want to miss the first time she truly fell again.

She didn't fall, but she did reach out to steady herself. Cool and smooth on her palm and fingers. "I'm the lucky one," she whispered. She was only now realizing it. "Oh, my god."

Not in Cornerstone. Not in the Colony. Not on the Spaceship. Not in the Tomb. Not in the Tower.

Not with Dougall.

Her hand slipped, and it made a curious squeaking sound. She looked.

She was pressing her flesh into the glass. Palm against the window. In the dark of the ADDC, she saw her reflection looking back.

She kept eye contact for a moment, then pushed away.

She could see past Allan and Harry now, see the rest of the hallway. She hadn't seen it in decades. It had changed utterly.

They had left the stretch she could see looking mostly as it had looked when she'd built it. A museum piece of architecture. The past. Ahead, only the future.

There was a partition, the one she'd designed to protect the rest of AAF-A in case something went wrong. Beyond was the main hall loop encircling the rest of the undercroft. The door opened with a hiss, and Max Vroom stepped out. She hadn't seen him leave, but then her attention had been overwhelmed.

He raised a hand in greeting. He was grinning.

She didn't wave back. She was sure he'd understand.

She hugged Du on her way to join him. He took it like the champion he was.

As she approached, Max crooked his left arm and presented it to her. She took it, clutched it tight, as the other two men fell in behind them.

Max led her through the door, to where…

She lost control.

"We didn't want to crowd you," he explained sheepishly as she bawled her eyes out.

Every piece of machinery at Site-43 could run on automatic for up to twenty-four hours at minimum.

Apparently, at this moment, all of them were.

She didn't hug everyone. But she did lose count.

"Was that everybody?"

It was a good thing she was looking where she was going, because Max was staring at her as they walked. She felt she would never be lost in thought, in transit, ever again. Walking for more than a few seconds without hitting a wall, walking and actually getting somewhere, was never going to lose its novelty.

"Close enough," Max was grinning. "Practically all of them know you, and absolutely all of them know who you are."

He went on to say that they'd even called in a few agents from Site-232 to watch main facility and topside interdiction zone, so the usual guards could be there for her moment of triumph, and a few visiting fellows from the AAG were watching over the other two still-functioning refineries. He was also talking about a barbecue on the AAF-A lawn, since it was a rare thing that the entire Site could down tools at the same time. She was not expected to attend. Allan understood what the past few minutes would have done to her social batteries, working so long at minimum charge.

She heard everything he said, but she was much more focused on her surroundings. Nothing looked the way she remembered it. Most of the corridors went in the same direction, but most of the rooms had different purposes now. There was a lot more storage then there had been, even in the early days when F-A had been the only functional part of the Provisional Site, and far fewer labs. She had known, academically, that most of AcroAbate had refocused around F-B through -D after her accident, but it was still interesting to see. Also interesting were the new construction materials on display, the new equipment; even the signage was fascinating. She suddenly realized that she could probably wander these sublevels for a year and still not feel her wanderlust satiated.

And there's a whole godverdomme world out there.

It gave her a profound sense of vertigo. And then of inexpressible sorrow.

She had traded a narrow view on eternity, for the whole of one existence.

There was no way it wasn't going to be worth it.

Still prattling cheerfully — she now realized he was her designated handler for the afternoon — Max led her to F-A's first sublevel. They took the stairs. She adored the stairs. He'd suggested the elevator, but for no reason she was allowed to explain to him, elevators gave her the chills now. And the exercise…! Oh, the exercise was glorious.

Dr. Forsythe was waiting in the clinic, as was her daughter. Ilse had known Billie as a wide-eyed child, a sullen teen, an angsty young adult and a variety of different women of multiple maturity matrices. This one was a nurse. Most of them were.

Helena had a tray set up next to the examination chair. There were syringes on the tray, and at first Ilse thought someone must have just taken them out of the box, in preparation for storing them in cupboards or drawers. When the doctor indicated she should sit down, and she did, she realized the syringes were all full.

Helena must have noticed her eyes widening, because she laughed. "Yeah," she said. "You've only missed 47 distinct inoculations. I hope you don't mind needles, because you're going to be getting a lot of them over the next few weeks."

"I don't mind pain," said Ilse. She paused. "Why don't we do them all today?"

Helena frowned. "Because that would trigger all kinds of undesirable immune and histological responses?'

"Are you sure?" Ilse shrugged. "Why don't we get started, and see what happens?"

"Badass," said Billie. Ilse winked at her as her mother scowled.

The first shot was for the flu. Helena made her wait fifteen minutes, for monitoring, before taking off the tape and cotton to examine the wound.

There was no wound. The pinprick hole had disappeared.

A quick run through the clinic's TRI machine showed that Ilse's body had already produced the required amount of antibodies within the time allotted, and was no longer reacting to the vaccine. It was as though her immune system, though badly in need of updates, was running hardware better than any other on Earth.

"I wonder what that means for…" Helena began, then trailed off.

"For?" Billie prompted.

Ilse and the doctor shared a meaningful glance. They were both thinking the same thing.

Forsythe put her foot down at twenty-four inoculations. Ilse could get the rest tomorrow. In the meantime, an all-purpose fortificant would protect her against anything novel floating around, assuming she needed protecting at all.

"And you're not carrying any ancient bullshit around that we can detect," Billie grinned. "So I'd say six hour quarantine, and you're good to go."

It should have seemed like the blink of an eye, or a lifetime, set against her long sequestration or her eagerness to see the rest of the Site. Instead, she found herself comfortable with the delay. Even the exam room was an exotic locale to her.

She asked if she could be alone for a while, and the medics obliged. Max was waiting outside, and she suspected the Survivors weren't far away.

She heard, very distantly, sounds of laughter. Music. The barbecue. They'd still be going by the time she was out. They would wait for her, just in case. She could join them. Eat. Drink. Maybe even dance.

She put her head in her hands and cried, cried, cried.

When she stopped crying, the door opened and Udo Okorie walked in. She was holding what Ilse knew was a telephone, even if it didn't look like one. "Call for you," the young thaumaturge smiled.

She smiled even more when Ilse put the awkward little rectangle up to her ear. "Hallo?"

"Welcome home," said the voice on the other end, and now Ilse felt truly free.

They talked for the remainder of the quarantine, and a little while longer than that. Then Jay signed off for bed, and Ilse endured a second checkup by the Forsythes before finally being discharged. Max came in to collect her, and off they went.

They had arranged for her to exit AAF-A by a side door, since the main entrance opened on the parking lot where everyone else was already partying, and it would have been impossible to slip away if she'd wanted to. Max remained behind as she reached for the doorknob.

She hesitated.

"I can't do this," she said.

Max didn't say anything.

She closed her eyes.

She was spoilt for choice. Vivian. Wynn. Allan. Udo. Harry. Even Max, though he'd only known her a few short weeks. Any one of them would have told her there was nothing she couldn't do.

Or she could picture Dougall, or Xyank, or Falkirk. Or Zwist. Press on just to spite them. Live in defiance.

She could picture Lys.

Instead, she pictured the lake. The trees. The orange sky at dusk. She'd never paid them nearly as much attention as she should have, but somehow she'd never forgotten.

She opened the door.

The lake, the trees, the sky.

They were still there, much the same as they had ever been.

She knew she herself looked no different.

And that, that, was the final lie.

It was an all-out attack on her senses.

The whip of the wind. Moisture in the air. The scents of pine, grass, and water. Gull-cries, crickets, music and merriment. The crackling of fire and a hint of smoke. And the sky, the sky, the sky, so vast and so high that she felt she could fall into it, and wished that she could fly, and she fell to her knees and put her palms in the grass. Ran her fingers through the blunted little blades. Scratched at the earth, and smelled that, too.

She looked back at the door. It was still open, flies buzzing around the light, but there was no silhouette. No-one was watching.

So she pressed her face into the grass, stretched out her limbs, and rolled.

As she lay on her back and stared at the striated clouds, backgrounded and stunning reds and oranges, she heard a crinkling in the grass. She turned her head to see a form approaching. A man, holding a plate.

She sat up, and he sat down. It was Allan, of course. He handed her the plate. "Shish kebab?"

She took it. The plate was paper. She hated the texture against her fingers. She loved how much she hated it. The food…

She knew that smell. Even all these years later, she still knew that smell.

"The word for this," she smiled as she plucked the stick and brought the pork to her lips, "is karbonade."

Oh, his eyes said as he nodded easily, I know.

She bit down.

It was like falling in love for the first time.

They sat in silence while she ate — not counting her occasional gasp or murmur of gustatory glee — and listened to the sounds of the celebration dying down.

Allan checked his watch, then looked to the north. Ilse followed his gaze just in time to see the first starburst over the water, in startling white. Then red, orange, green, every colour of the rainbow. Then as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

"Don't wish to draw too much attention," Allan mused mildly.

She put her plate on the grass, marvelling at gravity's microadjustments, and took his hand, and squeezed it.

He smiled at her. "You are so very welcome, Ilse."

"What do I do now?" The way her voice didn't echo, the way it carried…

"Whatever you wish. Perhaps you made a list?"

His smile was just a little cockeyed now. He knew. "Jay told me to," she agreed. "I have a few ideas. But…"

"You don't know where to start?" he suggested.

Hearing it out loud, she realized it wasn't true. "I do, actually. Uh…" She glanced back at the door again. It was closed, and Max was leaning on it. "I don't suppose I have a right to privacy…?"

"You have every right," he said softly. "Everything we've denied you for so long. But there are certain practicalities to take care of before you can fully enjoy the benefits. Tonight, you will need a shadow. Tomorrow, and the next day, well. We shall see."

She nodded. "I would like to take a walk in the park, if I could." She felt a pang of sour on her lips, and immediately Allan was handing her a paper kerchief.

"Of course." He looked away politely as she dabbed at her mouth. Her stomach was gurgling now. Digestion in action. Forsythe would be interested.

"Could you and Harry show me?" she asked.

He nodded. He knew what she meant. He rose to his feet, with none of the difficulty she would have expected from a man of his age. Perhaps Vivian had shared that bottle with more than just Wynn?

Wynn. He was very near the top of her list.

Just below Lys.

Allan and Harry sat with her on the bench until the sun was down, and they remained there when she stood up and walked back into the trees. Max followed at a discreet distance, and she didn't mind. He rather reminded her of Effie's young man, actually. Lys would have found him handsome.

The metal drum was waiting in the dark. She placed the envelope inside, then took it back out and opened it. She could barely see the scrap of newsprint, but she didn't need to. She'd long since memorized the words.

A scrap of nothing. Half a story. She didn't know how it ended, or how the title related to anything. Nobody had this issue of this paper on file anymore. For all she knew, this was the only remaining evidence it had ever been set to press.

She laid it, and the envelope, back into the barrel. Then lit a match, and savoured the phosphorous smell.

The paper had been old before it entered the incinerator. It was gone in an instant.

She had been old, too. And she wasn't getting any younger. But perhaps she wasn't getting older, either. Time would tell.

For the moment, as the little burst of smoke disappeared into the moonlit clouds, she felt very young indeed.

She had quarters at both F-A and the main facility. She would visit the subterranean monolith for the first time tomorrow. For tonight, she retired to her old rooms.

On one side of the door, a tired but modern hall. On the other, the austere apartments of a busy woman in a world at war. Save for a change of bedding, it was just as she had left it.

She laid down on the mattress, and as soon as she closed her eyes, knew that she could sleep. Biologically, it was possible.

She lay in the dark, and listened to the humming of the heat registers and air exchangers. A mechanical lullaby.

Her door was locked. There were no windows. Max was in the next room over, for tonight. She had his number if she needed anything, but he would not otherwise intrude. No-one would.

For the first time in almost eighty years, Ilse Reynders was truly alone.

An hour later, she was up again. She left her rooms, still wearing the old lab coat, the knees of her pants still stained with grass, and made her way back to the undercroft. Here, too, everything was as she had left it. There would be countless experiments to run on the ADDC now, but they were left for her. The hall was deserted.

So nobody, unless the camera operators were up very late, saw her walk back into the incinerator, close the door behind her, curl into a ball on the floor beneath the window, and cry herself to sleep.

She headed back to her quarters before first light, to make herself presentable. She stripped off the old labcoat, then checked the water closet on a whim; of course the taps responded, so she stripped the rest of the way and stepped into the stream of water. It was warm, and fresh, and stranger than anything she'd seen in the window. Except, perhaps, the spiders.

She found a few new articles of clothing in her dresser, mostly conservative shirts and pants in sensible hues. Nothing to alarm her ancient sensibilities. She dressed again, and stared at herself in the mirror until she realized what was wrong.

It wasn't only that she hadn't seen herself clearly since 1942.

Apparently the light in the park had been just good enough, because her sclera had turned green.

First, then, to the old AcroAbate offices on the first floor. Max tried not to stare at her as she rummaged through the low-yield storage until she found what she was looking for: a greying envelope, and an absurd little advertisement inside.

There was nothing else for her here. It was time to take the next step.

"How would you like to go?" Max asked her. "Subway, car, or walk?"

"I don't think I should drive," she responded.

He laughed. "I wasn't suggesting you should."

"Subway, then. I don't want to tire my legs just yet. I have a lot of walking to do today."

The subway was claustrophobic and dizzying. Too deep in the ground, too constricted a space, and the train moved much too quickly. She was happy to step off when it arrived at R&E Station, to a welcoming committee of Melissa Bradbury and Udo Okorie.

It was strange to be embraced by the former. Ilse had known a Bradbury with mixed feelings about her. Every Udo she knew, of course, was precious to her, so that was a different sort of strange.

They took her on a tour of the labs and offices. Everything gleamed. The tiles were white, and the corners curved. R&E was like a dream of platonic science, and everyone she passed smiled at her in recognition.

She felt like a fake. Somewhere out there, in worlds thought long-dead, other Ilses were receiving a mixed welcome. All of them would now be accountable for her acts in the incinerator. And she would not.

Maybe that's why you never believed this was truly the baseline. The perfect world is one where they know you are to blame.

The colours shifted to blue as they entered Habitation and Sustenance. Her guides took her around the Section's circumference, stopping at a long, low-traffic corridor lined with framed portraiture. She gasped when she realized what she was seeing.

It wasn't everyone who had lived and died at Site-43, but it was an awful lot of them. Izaak Okorie, whose final correspondence still awaited in her second quarters. Martin Strauss, like her there from the beginning, though she'd never really known him. Technicians and guards she didn't recognize by sight. The Victims of the Breach. Noè Nascimbeni — there were flowers on the floor in front of his portrait, and they were fresh. No Edwin Falkirk. No Dougall Deering.

Allan was waiting at the centre of the hall, where…

Ilse put both hands over her mouth.

It was Vivian and Wynn, side by side. Together, as they ought to have been, divided only by a narrow strip of wall.

"I need to talk to him," she whispered. "I need to go to him."

"I would recommend against such a trip," Allan murmured. He reached out, tentatively, and she grabbed his hand and placed it on her shoulder. "But I do believe a transfer of responsibilities would be appropriate, given certain preconditions."

"Meaning?"

She had seen enough of enough of him to know vulnerability, though it was one of his rarest states. "Chief Vroom has agreed to forgo his claim to the DR-RHETORIC file with you, so long as Dr. Okorie is prepared to surrender certain powers pertaining to her post, also to you." Both of the named parties nodded as Ilse stared at them, confused. "I took the liberty of preparing these concessions, but you are not yet bound to accept them yourself. You are the master of your own destiny from this point forward, Dr. Reynders. All I do today is make an offer."

"What offer?" she breathed.

"I asked you once before, and I ask again now. Would you take up Dr. Rydderech's position as our Chief of Acroamatic Abatement? You need not answer—"

His hand was already in hers, so she pulled it off her shoulder and shook it vigorously. Then, as Vivian and Wynn looked on, she hugged him again for good measure.

She stood beneath the Site's shielded basin, looking out across the endless chasm to the factory city beyond. She was alone there, on the precipice. They said nobody had ever caught more than a glimpse of the king of that distant domain. Most days it was barely more visible than a patch of luminescent moss.

Today, all the lights were on. On a lone promontory, what might have been a man stood black against the glare.

She raised a hand.

He raised his in return.

And then he shook his head. Not yet.

She couldn't see it. Not at this distance.

But still, she knew.

And then she knew why.

She waited patiently as Alice Forth outlined the terms agreed on for her release from containment. She was not to resume her civilian life in Canada, as it had previously existed. A new identity would be manufactured, but that would take time. Her bungalow in Grand Bend — "I have a what, in where?" — would be off-limits until the paper trail was set up properly. She would be allowed the run of the Site, and the Camp, and the Park, and after a phone call the DTA Director confirmed that she could take up the ASC on that offer of Kettle Point's hospitality as well. If required, she might be transported in Foundation vehicles to other Foundation facilities, but for the time being she was to otherwise remain under the radar.

These warnings stopped briefly to accommodate a frazzled-looking woman who barged in, blinked at both of them, and then declared that she'd "mistimed the room" before leaving just as abruptly. Forth told her not to worry about it.

So, she didn't.

She sipped her coffee, and signed a few forms, and then she was free to go again. She had an office in AAF-A, and one each in -B and -C for that matter, where she could choose to assume her new post. She had another call with Jay scheduled for later in the evening. She was having lunch with the Survivors, and dinner with Max, and she expected to embrace all of them well past the point of embarrassment. (She had started introducing herself with "I might try to hug you"; so far, only Bremmel had told her not to. But he hadn't told her unkindly, and anyway he probably didn't want to transfer the esoteric spills from his engineer coat to the museum piece she was wearing.) She had a meeting with Zaman in HR, and she was planning on taking a walk in the woods at some point, and she was also planning on walking down every corridor she hadn't already walked down, and then starting over again from scratch. Pacing out her new cage, in anticipation of future freedoms so all-encompassing they were terrifying to even consider.

She could have started on most of those items whenever she liked.

Instead, she excused herself to the washroom.

For the first time in a long time, Ilse Reynders danced to some of the same beats, the same drums, as did the rest of planet Earth.

It was a most welcome imposition.

Not so welcome, this.

She had cried a lot more, today. She had made friends of former acquaintances, through the mechanism of excessive squeezing. She had poked her head through every door that would open. She had tasted cafeteria food. She had tasted a sugar-free soda. She had tasted several sodas with sugar in them. She had eaten an entire bag of Doritos, and then washed her face. She had told Jay about all sorts of things that absolutely everyone took for granted, made it sound like some sort of grand adventure, and her friend had not once taken the opportunity to make fun of her.

And she had come home to her main facility quarters, a space she had never once seen, to find Thaddeus Xyank sitting in what she was going to have to start thinking of as her armchair.

She sat down on the couch across from him. "You gave me a whole day. That must have taken a lot of restraint."

He shrugged. "Travel time is the same for me, no matter when I'm arriving. Departure date as well."

"That's fair." She yawned, and then chuckled. She hadn't heard that sound in… she was going to need new terms to describe that yawning gap of time. "Can you make this brief? I'm exhausted."

"Sleep debt," he smirked. "Can't make up for a lifetime with one night."

"Depends on how you spend the night," she smirked back.

He tugged at his jacket lapel. "Ilse—"

"Dr. Reynders."

"Dr. Reynders," he resumed smoothly. "I hope you understand that our little arrangement is at an end, now."

"Oh," she said, widening her eyes in mock anxiety. "Oh, no."

"Just because you chose not to avail yourself of my aid," he said, "doesn't mean you should discount its value. I have resources you will never possess. I know things you literally cannot know. I have seen histories whose vantage points have long passed, and will not come 'round again. There will come a day when you really do require a helping hand, and you will be sorry if I'm not there to provide it."

"Right," she nodded. "I'll take that under advisement." She suddenly stood up again. "Do you know how I got out of that incinerator, Xyank? By. My. Self. You tried to make it harder. Dougall tried to make it harder. Everyone who helped…" She smiled, though her brows were still attempting to trade places below her forehead. "They helped because they wanted to see me succeed. Because they were my friends. Because they believed in me. I'm going to spend every waking moment paying them back for that, but I'm not sorry. I'll never be sorry. You know everything, and I knew nothing, but I figured it out anyway, and I will always have that."

"Yes." He stood, smoothing down the archaic lines of his suit. "Yesterday, that was enough. But Dr. Reynders, my dear Dr. Reynders, there are just so many tomorrows."

He walked around her, to the door. Predictably, he stopped with one hand on the handle. "You think I'm your enemy," he told her over his shoulder, "but I'm not. That little display of yours only proves me right. You're going to need quite a lot of help to resolve the next dilemma, if you even can. Your next opponent will not be so gracious in defeat."

"Bring them on," she snapped.

And for the first time, he laughed with what rang as sincerity. "Yes," he agreed. "You will."

And struck the door handle, hard, and before it had finished rattling back into place, he was gone.

She lay in bed, lost.

No longer lost in reflection. Nor in misery. She was no longer time-lost. And yet, there was something missing. Something nagging at the back of her mind. Something denying her sleep, though it wasn't like she really needed it. She had a physical later today, and she already suspected what they'd find. She had all the time in the world, now, and more. All the time of so many worlds. That was what her ordeal had gained her. Those were the wages of her long sequestration.

She also had a cool seven million dollars in the bank, and a house she'd never visited, and a friend in a country she'd never been to who was going to visit as soon as possible, and a mantle to take up, and a mentor to save, and what precisely had she lost that could keep her rest at bay?

Nothing. Nothing at all. She had become a sum, and she had become parts. She had branched out, become more, without becoming lesser. Seven from one. Many things from something. All of them whole.

Why, then?

Why did she feel as though some part of her still lingered, alone, in that darkened incinerator?

This much, Ilse already knew well. They had lived it. It had been their entire life.

This much was not enough.

They sat back in their comfortable chair, and considered the tidy pile of memoirs on their charming little elmwood desk. Lifetimes of questions. Precious few answers.

"Snotverdomme," they growled at the unhelpful papers. "I hate paradoxes."

Most of the files and notes were monochrome, whether white or grey or yellowing. One scrap bore dark, angry streaks, and she pulled it out of the stack to face the light.

Out there… she would find it. She would find it in the past, in history, perhaps; in things that were past, in beautiful noble things that were dead, peacefully dead and still beautiful.

It still eluded her. A century and half a world away, and she was no closer to that ultimate truth. She hadn't found it in the past. She doubted she would find it in the present.

Lys hadn't known it. Vivian hadn't either. They had gone to their rewards. Ilse had hers, and they were ample, but the sense of incompleteness still lingered. This story had gone on too long to conclude without tying up all the loose ends.

They had to go deeper. They knew that much. Wherever their digging took them, it would take them down.

Jay's hand appeared on her shoulder, and she reached up to squeeze it out of habit. Time for bed. Time to consider the darkness.

Together they passed the room where James was sleeping, timeless as his mother but untroubled by the fact. He simply was. Ilse loved him for it. Hoped she could love him, love them, forever.

No matter how far they had to dig, they hoped they could hold on to that light. No. They refused to let it go. They had crawled up out of the pit once, alone. With the strength of those they loved, they could do it again.

But Ilse been raised a good Christian, though the practice was thoroughly lapsed.

So they knew what traditionally lurked in the uttermost depths of the pit, and what it took to make him part with his secrets.

Kaleidoscope

The Breach Goes On: Over Time

One's Own