Bzt! Bzt!
Gerald opens his eyes and does not move.
The ceiling fan turns. The room is dry. His ribs are whole and his throat is whole and there is no blood on anything, and somewhere down the corridor a door closes on a morning that has already happened twice.
He raises one hand and touches behind his right ear.
The feather is still there.
Not tucked. Not resting. The shaft goes into him now, he can feel where the skin has closed over it, the little ridge of it under his fingertip, warm, and pulsing very faintly in time with nothing.
His other hand goes to his collarbone. The chain is under the skin. He can trace the whole loop of it if he presses.
...
They stayed.
Everything else went back. Lisa went back. Mao went back. The corridor went back, the blood went back, the bullets went back.
And these stayed.
Punish.
It arrives in the middle of his skull like someone leaning over and saying it into his ear, in a voice he heard for the first time yesterday with a man's throat in his hand.
Gerald lies very still.
No.
Punish them.
I said no.
The voice doesn't argue. It doesn't have to. It just goes back to where it was, the way a dog lies down within reach of the door.
He gets up.
— — —
He gets to the break room first this morning, and he is deliberate about it, because he wants to be standing at the machine when she comes in, instead of being found by her.
"Hey Gerald! Nice seeing you up so early in the morning."
Gerald turns around and smiles, and this time it works.
"And it's great seeing you as well, Lisa."
...
Keep it cool.
Don't make any more mistakes.
She raises an eyebrow at the enthusiasm but lets it go, and starts her batch, and hums the four bars.
He lets her get to the end of them.
"I heard you're on your way to work F-02-44. Why don't I come check it out with you?"
Lisa's hand stops on the lid.
"How did you know I was going to work on that Abnormality?"
...
He freezes for a moment before recovering slowly.
"Just a guess." He waves it off. "Haha."
"...I see."
She does not believe him. She also does not push, which he understands now is a thing she does, she files it, the way she files everything into that little notebook, and comes back to it later when she's decided how.
"Well. I guess you could tag along. Though I'm not sure how the manager will feel about it, he probably wants you on something."
"Don't worry about that. I have it under control."
Gerald glances up at the camera in the corner of the ceiling and holds it for a second longer than is polite, and then turns back to her with a face that has nothing behind it but goodwill.
Lisa tilts her head, shrugs, and picks up her coffee.
"Alright. Follow me."
— — —
F-02-44.
They stand in front of the door, and the ominous thing in Gerald's chest gets bigger the closer he gets to it.
Calm down.
I can stop it this time.
"Hey, Lisa. Let's look over the document together."
"Pssh. I've read it over about six times in my dorm."
"Wouldn't hurt to have a refresher. Just in case. Y'know?"
Lisa exhales through her nose in a way that means you are being weird and I am allowing it, and pulls the document out of its bracket.
"Fine. There probably isn't anything new anyway—"
There is.
There's a line at the bottom of the managerial notes that was not there yesterday. It is in the same typeface as everything else, printed as though it has always been printed, as though the machine that produced this document has never known a version of it without this line in it.
IF REPRESSION IS PERFORMED ON THIS ABNORMALITY TWICE, THE AGENT WILL TAKE ITS PLACE.
Gerald looks at it for a long moment.
So that's how it works.
You find out afterward. You always find out afterward. And then it prints, and it's been true the whole time.
He looks up at Lisa. She has gone slightly grey.
"What work were you assigned?"
"U-uhm." She checks her wrist. "Insight."
Insight.
Not repression.
Yesterday it was repression.
...He remembers.
The manager remembers.
Something in Gerald's chest lets go of about a quarter of what it was holding, and he keeps his face where it is.
"Lisa, look. This shouldn't surprise us." He takes the document from her hands and puts it back in the bracket, squares it. "The corporation we work for doesn't care about the individuals working here. That's not a complaint. That's a fact you can plan around."
"Both of us need to expect the worst case. Every time. We can't get caught off guard like this again."
"Y-yeah." She rubs her wrist. "It just took me by surprise. I mean, it doesn't even make sense. How would you prepare for something like that?"
"I don't exactly know myself." He steps back from the door. "Read everything. Make an educated guess. Assume the document is missing a line."
Lisa nods slowly. Then she perks up.
"Oh, Gerald, there's a new employee starting today. You should meet them after work."
"Oh. Uh. Alright, I guess."
She smiles, turns, and goes through the door of F-02-44, and it closes behind her.
Gerald stands in the corridor and does not move for about fifteen seconds.
Beep. Beep.
[GERALD — COMMENCE WORK: T-09-78]
Fuck you, Manager.
Seriously. Fuck off.
— — —
He takes the long way, and that's how he ends up in the eastern corridor.
There's a clerk on her knees near the junction with a floor scrubber, working at a stain that isn't coming up.
Gerald stops walking.
The wall behind her is clean. Of course it is. It's clean the way everything in this building is clean, because the building went back, and the wall never happened, and the only place it happened is in a body that didn't.
She looks up.
"Oh... morning, Gerald."
Her hair is pinned back badly on one side. She fixes it when she notices him looking.
"...Morning, Vera."
"Is something wrong?"
He becomes aware that he has not said anything for several seconds and that his hands are at his sides doing nothing in a way that is very obvious.
"No." His voice comes out almost normal. "No. You've just... got a lot on today."
"Ha. Always." She goes back to the stain, and then, shyly, as though she's been working up to it: "Um. You were right, by the way. About the name thing." She doesn't look up. "I told the girl on the night shift mine. She told me hers back. Her name is Sofie."
"...Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"That's good," Gerald says. "That's, good Vera."
He walks away before his face can do anything.
— — —
The pillar hums. The notepad hangs an inch above the base plate, water-stained, eighty pages, waiting.
He reaches in and takes it.
I wonder if I coul—
Born Ag—
Goddammit. Do you have to cut me off every single time.
I don't have the patience for this today.
He lifts Penitence, and doesn't swing it.
He holds it out in front of him instead, both hands on the shaft, and closes his eyes.
I've watched this thing clear my head three times now. Twice on its own. It didn't need me to hit myself.
So there has to be a way to ask.
He pushes. Nothing happens except that his headache gets worse. He pushes harder, the way you'd force a stuck lid, and gets nothing but a low chanting somewhere behind his eyes, faint, patient, and entirely unmoved by effort.
So it can't be brute-forced.
Should have expected that.
His head throbs. The appetite keeps talking underneath it, wanting, wanting, wanting to know.
...Maybe if I stop pushing and listen instead.
He stops pushing.
And falls into it.
— — —
It isn't dark, exactly. It's a nowhere with a light in it, and the light is a long way off and also directly overhead, and standing in it Gerald feels his own weight in a way he never does awake.
The feelings arrive before the words do. Regret first, then something flat and enormous he can only call indifference, and then the light gets one degree larger.
Do you seek absolution, or do you fear judgment?
...
Your hands are heavy. What will you do with their weight?
Gerald looks down at his hands.
They're clean here.
I'm trying to do the right thing.
I'm trying to do the right thing and I keep... I keep getting handed the wrong tools and then getting blamed for the outcome it brings.
Why does everything have to be so difficult.
...
The past chains you. But the next step you take is your own.
I will help in that regard.
The regret goes out of him, and the indifference, and something warm comes in behind it and settles across his back and shoulders like a coat somebody has put on him from behind. He is on a cloud. He is sailing through something. He has not felt safe once since he woke up in that corridor and he feels safe now, he does not entirely trust it and he takes it anyway.
He holds onto the light and pushes it down the length of his arms and out into the weapon.
And Penitence answers.
— — —
The staff expands and contracts in his hands, twice, three times, like something breathing, and then settles back into the shape he knows. cross, shaft, little wired-shut skull.
Except now it feels like an extension of his body.
Not a tool he's holding. A limb he's had all along and only just noticed.
Gerald raises it and swings it through the empty air.
The air makes an audible swish, a real one, with weight behind it. The weapon is still as light as a feather in his hands.
A smile starts on his face.
He tries for the white. Tries to make it refresh his mind, the way it did in the armory.
The white discharges out of the crossbeam instead and travels, a bolt of it, leaving a faint trail across the containment room and hitting the far wall.
...That's not what I was expecting.
It's got range now?
He closes his eyes and holds it out and tries the same thing again.
The weapon changes. The crossbeam draws in and rounds off into a single spherical head with the skull socketed beneath it, and the white comes out of the sphere in a wide cone, decimating the air in front of him with a sound like something tearing along a seam.
Holy shit.
That was awesome.
He focuses. He thinks about a sword, not because he knows anything about swords, but because it's the first shape that comes to mind. The sphere flows out into a long sleek blade with the skull as the pommel, and it obeys him like it has been waiting years to be asked.
He swings.
The pressurized air comes off the edge and shreds a two-foot section of the containment room's wall panel into curls of metal.
...
Shit.
I should probably stop.
He sheathes it. It goes back to a staff on the way down, and lies dormant against his hip like nothing happened.
[ATTENTION. DAMAGE TO COMPANY PROPERTY WILL BE DEDUCTED FROM EMPLOYEE PAY FOLLOWING THE COMPLETION OF THE ONE MONTH AND THREE WEEK PROBATIONARY PERIOD.]
Oh no.
Anyway. That's a sizable increase I can work with.
And now I'm even less sure what E.G.O actually is.
He touches the feather behind his ear.
Like yesterday, when I lost control and went through five people and a friend.
Do these things influence me like that? All the time?
Is that what this is?
Punish.
Not now.
— — —
[GERALD — COMMENCE WORK: PUNISHING BIRD]
Gerald looks at the nickname on the screen for a second longer than he needs to.
Huh.
He goes and does the work.
The bird is on the perch and sharpens its beak at him and then permits itself to be swept up after. He rubs its head. He documents it. He hand-feeds it the granola bar, because it will not accept a granola bar in any other manner, and it takes each individual oat off his palm with the delicacy of something conducting a religious observance.
He looks around the room while it eats. Nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes in here. The perch he asked for is still bolted where it was bolted, in a version of the day where he never asked.
"I'll see you later, little bird."
The bird nods.
What the hell. Why can't you just chirp. Like a bird.
— — —
He takes the notepad back and stands in front of the pillar with it in his hand.
Yeah. I'm still not sure what to make of this thing.
He'd read some of it during the work, he'd had no choice, the appetite made him. Page after page of somebody's handwriting getting worse: measurements, dosages, notes on subjects that were referred to only by number, and over and over again a word he'd never seen before.
Cogito.
No idea. Filed under everything else in this building I'm not cleared for.
He drops it through the slot.
It aligns with the base plate and hangs there.
Gerald wraps both arms around his own chest and locks up completely, bracing.
Scratch.
"FUCK. FUCK. NO—"
A mosquito lifts off his forearm and flies away.
...
...
"...Ahem."
He gets up out of his own fetal position, dusts himself off with as much dignity as remains available to him, and walks out of the room with his ears burning.
Beep.
[GOOD WORK, GERALD. COME SEE ME AFTER THE DAY ENDS.]
The silly expression comes off his face all at once.
"...Whatever. Better to talk to him sooner than later."
[BREAK IN EFFECT — RETURN TO WORK IN XX:15]
Sweet.
— — —
He has been sitting in the break room for perhaps ninety seconds when a new face arrives at his table and does not sit down.
"I'm guessing you're Gerald?"
Green hair, cut short. Arms folded. Wearing the agent's suit like it was issued five minutes ago, which it was.
"Yeah, that's me. Who are you?"
She closes her eyes and smiles with tremendous confidence.
"Just the smartest employee in this branch. Heh."
"..."
Wow. What an introduction.
"Whatever you say."
"Good. At least you know your place." She nods, satisfied. "I just wanted to make sure every employee in this branch knew."
...
Am I really in the wrong if I strangle her?
I mean, come on. She's asking.
Yes.
Not what I meant.
"You're talking a lot of shit," Gerald says, "for someone who started working here about four hours ago."
Her jaw works. She bites the side of her finger.
"Haah? But I'm definitely smarter than you, though?"
"Yeah? You really think so, newbie?"
"Yeah, I do!"
A hand lands on each of their shoulders.
"Come on, guys. Let's not fight." Lisa is smiling in a way that is not entirely a smile. "This is the first time you two are meeting."
The green-haired woman jabs a finger into Gerald's chest.
"He started it."
WHAT—
"It doesn't matter who started what." Lisa's voice drops about four degrees. "For now, let's make up. Alright!?"
...
The green-haired woman looks at the floor and bites her lip in profound dissatisfaction.
"My name is Yuri. And I'm the smarte—"
Snap.
Everyone looks at the plastic fork in Lisa's hand, which is now two plastic forks.
"U-uhh. And I like. Sweets?"
The last part is more of a question than anything.
"Good!" Lisa beams. "Both of you are now well acquainted."
She goes off in search of the snack bar post haste.
"Whatever." Yuri gathers herself. "Just remember who I am. Or something."
She turns to leave, and pauses, and her head tilts about ten degrees to the left, toward nothing.
(...)
Then she keeps walking.
Gerald watches her go.
...Huh.
This is too damn funny, though.
All these people. All of them completely unmanageable in their own individual way.
I feel like this whole loop thing might not be that bad after all.
[BREAK IS OVER. RETURN TO WORK.]
[COMMENCE ATTACHMENT WORK: ONE SIN AND HUNDREDS OF GOOD DEEDS.]
...
His voice sounds pretty uncomfortable saying all that. Wonder why he's trying so hard.
— — —
The skull hangs in the middle of the room and chants it does not acknowledge him.
Gerald closes the door.
He doesn't bring a chair in this time. He gets down on his knees on the concrete in front of it and puts his hands together, which is not a posture anybody taught him.
"...I still hear them," he says. "From the last loop."
The chanting doesn't change.
"I killed a man named Mao. He was thirty-five and had a bad attitude, but was oddly supportive. I tore his throat out with my hand. He was trying to stop me from doing something worse and he was right to."
He breathes.
"I killed four clerks whose names I never asked for, which is its own thing, I'm going to sit with that separately."
"And I killed Vera."
The word costs him more than the rest of the sentence put together.
"She's a clerk on the Control Team. She's got hair that won't stay pinned. Her name was Beta7 until I asked her for a better one, and she gave me one, and I wrote it down." He looks up at the skull. "And then I put her on a wall."
"She said please. That was the last thing. She said please and I said I'm sorry. I didn't say her name, and I've been thinking about that since I woke up, because me not saying it feels like the part I actually chose."
...
"She spoke to me this morning. She's fine. She's fine, she told me she made a friend, and nobody in this building knows it happened except me and the man in the office, the manager."
Gerald's hands tighten against each other.
"I know redemption isn't on the table. I'm not asking for that. I'm not even sure what I'd be asking."
"But I'm going to try to be better than I was yesterday. And if I have to do this a hundred more times to keep them all breathing, I'll do it a hundred more times."
"I don't care that nobody will remember I struggled."
"I will persevere."
The chanting stops.
For one second, the first second of silence in that room since he first walked into it. There is nothing at all.
Then the thorns move.
They writhe against his scalp and tighten and grow, and it hurts, and it hurts in a way he has room for now, because his tolerance for this specific thing has expanded considerably since yesterday afternoon. He rides it out with his eyes shut and his jaw locked and does not make a sound.
When it settles he puts a hand up to it.
The crown is thicker. Noticeably. The thorns have length on them now, and there are more of them, and one of them has come round far enough to sit just above his right eyebrow where he'll be able to see it.
Click.
"...Well. That's all I've got for today."
The skull shifts in place, and the chanting resumes, low and steady and entirely uninterested in him.
Gerald gets up off his knees and leaves, and does not check the panel on his way out.
[WORK COMPLETE FOR THE DAY — REPORT TO LIVING QUARTERS BEFORE XX:30]
Good. Actually made progress today.
Although these days have started to feel very long.
He turns toward the manager's office.
I've got a few things I want to say to him.
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
Knock. Knock.
"Angela. Open it."
"As you wish, Manager."
The door swings and Gerald walks in casually and takes a seat before he's offered one.
"Manager."
"Haha... Gerald. How've you been?"
"Dunno. Hard to tell lately."
"Well. That's not... great."
The manager adjusts his position and forces a smile onto his face and reaches for the bottle on the desk.
"I've got champagne. Do you want to try some?"
"No. I don't drink."
Goddammit. Why is he making this so difficult.
Ah. Well. Besides... that.
"Anyway. I wanted to clear some things up about yesterday."
Gerald raises his eyebrows. "Oh, really."
The manager feels the migraine arrive on schedule.
"Yes. Do you have any complaints about it?"
"Yeah, I've got complaints." Gerald leans forward. "Why can't anyone else know about the loops? Everything would be easier."
"Would it." The manager pinches the bridge of his nose. "Everyone panics. Work efficiency drops to nothing. And every single time it runs, we start again from zero, because they don't keep it. So we'd re-explain it. And re-explain it. And re-explain it. Steps one and two, forever, and we'd never reach step three."
"Well it's just not fair that—"
"Take a look around you, Gerald." He gestures at the wall of screens, half of them dark, a small padlock in the corner of each. "Is anything here fair?"
"I'm not exempt from it either. My control over what happens in this facility is laughable. Information is restricted until criteria I'm not told about are met. And at the same time, apparently, the manager is expected to take care of everything."
He glances at Angela out of the corner of his eye when he says the last part. She does not react.
"Look. If we want to end this, you and I have to cooperate. There isn't an easy way out."
Gerald sighs. Then he nods.
"I'm still angry that you didn't tell me about Lisa."
The manager's face loses some color.
"I understand that. And I'm sorry. It was a delicate matter, and my incompetence showed."
He does not say: I had the work log open on this desk while you were sitting in that chair.
"Believe me when I say I'll try to prevent anything like that happening again."
"Alright." Gerald watches him for a second. "I believe you."
And I noticed she was on Insight this morning, is what he doesn't say either. So I know exactly how much you remember. And I'm letting you keep the apology.
The manager smiles and puts his hand out across the desk.
"Then do we have a solid agreement, Gerald?"
Gerald grins and reaches over and takes it.
"I guess we do."
As they shake, he adds: "But do I really have to be the guinea pig for every Abnormality that comes through the door?"
"You don't have to." The manager shrugs. "But it would make things a great deal easier if somebody could remember what a thing likes and what it doesn't. Before we find out the expensive way."
He pauses.
"It would also prevent something like... that happening again."
"...Alright. I'll do it."
"Good. You can head back to your room. Unless there's something else."
There is one thing.
"The bulkheads." Gerald sits back down. "Western end of the floor. The one with the window in it."
The manager's fingers stop on the desk.
"There's a woman standing in there," Gerald says. "I've walked past her three times now. She's got one heel off the floor. There's a clipboard under her hand that's been falling for three days."
"...Ah."
"Is she dead?"
"No." The manager looks tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. "She's on a different clock."
He turns one of his monitors a few degrees so Gerald can see it. A panel Gerald hasn't seen before, three entries in a column. Two greyed out. One with a completion bar sitting at full.
"Control Team research. That is the complete list of things which are currently in progress." He taps the top entry. "Read that one."
Gerald leans in.
TT2 PROTOCOL You can accelerate the flow of time during management up to 2x by using the TT2 Acceleration Protocol.
"That's the product copy," the manager says. "That is, word for word, the entirety of what I have been told about it. It's licensed. It belongs to somebody else, and they wrote that sentence."
"So the thing that puts the day back—"
"Same protocol. Larger setting." He sits back. "And what's behind that bulkhead is the time in there turned down to almost nothing, while the rest of us get up to speed."
"So she's not frozen."
"She's slow. There's a difference, and she'll never know about it. When her department opens, she'll finish that step. She'll put the clipboard down. As far as she's concerned nothing will have happened at all."
Gerald looks at the two greyed-out entries below it.
"What are the other two?"
"I'll find out when I'm allowed to."
"...Which Wing is it?"
The manager opens his mouth. Closes it. Glances, briefly, at his assistant.
"...Angela?"
"That information is not required for the performance of your duties, Manager."
...
"That's horrifying."
"That's an operating cost."
The manager waves at the door. "Goodnight, Agent."
Gerald leaves. Angela closes the door behind him and hands the manager a yellow folder.
"Apologies, Manager. The research file completed today."
She sets it on the desk and steps back.
"Joint Command. Will this be of any use tomorrow?"
"I'm afraid not, Manager. New departments open on Day Six. They are still in preparation."
"I see." He rubs his eyes. "Is that all?"
"Malkuth needs to speak with you. It's urgent, apparently."
"Alright. Send her in."
"As you wish."
Angela goes. The manager looks at the champagne for a while.
Then he gets up and makes himself a coffee instead.
— — —
(Pov: Gerald)
"Hey, kid. C'mere a sec, won't ya?"
Mao is on the bench outside his dorm with his ankles crossed and a cigarette going.
Gerald's stomach drops about a foot.
He is alive. He is sitting there being alive, with his terrible haircut and his mean architectural face, saying c'mere a sec as though he has not, in the last twenty-four subjective hours, bled out on a concrete floor with his hand in his jacket pocket.
"Haha. Sure."
He sits.
Mao holds out the pack. Gerald looks at it.
"...I'm alright, thanks."
"Suit yourself."
Mao blows out a plume and flicks something off his knee.
"Y'know, I didn't take you for all that competent at first. In this line of work."
That catches him.
"How so?"
"Well, three days back. When you were a clerk." Mao squints into the middle distance. "Didn't talk much to anybody. Kept to yourself."
He shudders, theatrically, and then a little less theatrically.
"Your stare went right through a man. Anyone tried to say good mornin' to you, you'd just — look at 'em. Gave me the chills, if I'm bein' honest."
Huh?
Was I like that?
Was I like that, or was it—
"Doesn't matter now," Mao says. "You've changed. I can see it in the eyes. You got the spirit, kid."
Gerald smiles at his own wrist and fiddles with the strap.
"Kid this, kid that. How old are you, anyway?"
Mao smirks with tremendous self-satisfaction.
"Thirty-five and countin'. What about you?"
Uh.
Wow. I don't even know how old I am.
"That's not important."
"What— you don't gotta be so obvious about it. I'm older than you. Heh."
He rubs a finger under his nose and assumes the bearing of an all-knowing senior.
"Maybe you oughta call me uncle or somethin'. Heh heh."
"You wish, old man."
[ATTENTION — QLIPHOTH DETERRENCE ACTIVATING. REMAIN IN YOUR QUARTERS FOR THE DURATION OF THE NIGHT CYCLE.]
"Well, junior." Mao grinds out the cigarette. "Looks like our little conversation's gettin' cut short."
"Fuck off."
"Hahaha. Get some sleep, yeah? You looked rough all mornin'."
Gerald sighs.
"Yeah. Well. It was nice talking to you, Mao."
"It's Uncle to you, kid."
"...You're really going to drag this out."
"Heh. Comes with the charm of bein' an adult."
Gerald doesn't correct him. He lets him get two more laughs out of it before the man disappears into his room.
Then he sits on the bench alone for a minute in a corridor at half lighting.
— — —
He sits down at the desk instead of going to bed.
E.G.O is really weird.
Moving forward, I need to know what it actually is. What it's for. What it's doing to me while it's helping.
He picks up the Lobotomy Corporation handbook off the desk and cracks the spine for the first time.
Looks like I'm going to have to read all of this if I want to plan ahead.
I need to stay prepared. Mistakes don't sit right with me, especially not when they cost somebody who isn't me.
He flips. Onboarding. Uniform standards. Cafeteria conduct. Then a section header:
SAFETY PROCEDURES.
What the hell is this rubbish.
Punish.
Not tonight.
He turns the page.
Looks like it's going to be a long night.
.
.
.
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