(Pov: Manager)
A very cheery petite girl walks into the office and takes the chair adjacent to the desk without being invited to.
Light brown bob, red headband holding it out of her eyes. Three-piece suit in the company brown, red tie done properly, white gloves. There's a red armband on her left sleeve with a green border and an M on it, and she is carrying a clipboard she does not need.
"You wanted to see me, Malkuth?"
"Yes! I've been trying to get in contact with you for the past five whole minutes!"
"Oh. That's not too long a wait."
Her eye twitches. One leg starts tapping against the chair leg at a rate that is not quite mechanical.
"It was AGONIZING trying to hold my train of thought. Five minutes was like five hours!"
"Haha. Sorry. What did you need?"
Her confidence comes back all at once, and she slides a yellow folder across the desk.
"It's my revision of the code of conduct!"
"Alright. Let me take a look."
He reads it.
It's good. That's the thing. It's genuinely, irritatingly good, twenty pages of procedural tightening, revised handoff protocols for shift changes, an energy routing revision that on paper improves the output by twenty percent, all of it laid out in a font he does not recognize and a level of thoroughness he could not personally have produced in a month.
And then, on page fourteen, under STAFF LIFECYCLE, a subsection.
"Malkuth. Can you tell me more about this 'Retirement Plan'?" He keeps his voice flat. "It's concerning, to say the least."
"Oh, that!" Her hands come together. "It's just a nice way of saying extermination!"
Her smile does not move a millimeter. There is not a trace of guilt anywhere in the shape of her.
"...I don't think that's necessary for the work we do here."
a crack opens up.
"W-what?" The cheer stays on top and something underneath it goes very thin. "But I accounted for EVERY little bit of detail! This is the most optimized method to—"
She stops.
"I. I thought you would like it, Manager."
And for the length of a blink she is not a girl.
The manager's eyes cannot follow what happens, the outline holds and the inside of it doesn't, the headband sitting on nothing, the clipboard held by something that is the wrong shape to hold a clipboard. Then the room resolves and she is a petite girl in a brown suit again, and there is a faint pressure behind his eyes like a lens correcting itself.
What the hell?
"Uh... I never said I wouldn't approve it. I was just—"
"GREAT!" The shimmer is gone. The cheer is back at full volume. "It's decided, then!"
"Thank you so much, Manager! I knew I could rely on you!!"
And she's out the door.
...
What the hell was that.
Was she even listening.
He picks the document back up and takes a pen out of the cup and gets as far as putting the nib on page fourteen before a slender white hand removes the folder from underneath it.
"Seriously? I can't even make changes to the code of conduct?"
"You can." Angela squares the folder against her forearm. "Although it requires revision. If any of the text were altered, Malkuth would need to resubmit, and the resubmission window is thirty days."
"Wow. Isn't that convenient."
He puts his head in his hand.
"Hey, Angela."
"Yes, Manager."
"Why don't you just take my job."
"..."
"That wouldn't make sense. You are the manager here. Not me."
"Yeah, that's true." He waves a hand at the room. "But at the same time, you do most of the things an actual manager does. I'm apparently not permitted to do any of it. I issue orders to agents and I make mistakes."
"I can see how that would be frustrating." A beat. "However. You can always resign."
"Haah." He laughs once, without much in it. "No. I'm not giving in that easily."
He looks at the wall of screens.
"I just wish my control here wasn't so terrible. There are a lot of things I'd change. I sent revisions of my own to the higher-ups. I didn't get a response."
"My apologies for that, Manager. You can always confide in me if you are feeling down."
He closes his eyes and lets them rest.
"Alright. Thank you for the offer."
"..."
"But I could really use some time alone at the moment."
Angela nods and takes the folder out to be filed.
The manager waits until the door closes, and then presses a button.
— — —
(Pov: Gerald)
The armory is busier on day five.
Gerald opens his locker and finds Penitence where he left it, and turns around to find Lisa two rows down in something entirely new.
The suit is dark and heavy and horned at the shoulders. In her hands is a staff, a long shaft ending in a mass of chitin and vine and, set into the whole thing, packed edge to edge, perhaps a hundred eyes.
They are all open.
They are all looking directly at him.
...
"Great job on finally getting E.G.O," Gerald says.
He does not look at the staff. He looks at Lisa's face, deliberately, and keeps looking at it, and does not permit his brain to finish the sentence it is trying to construct about what she looked like on the floor of that room with the toes worn off her front feet.
"Thank you!" She hefts it, pleased. "I feel a lot safer having a real weapon. The suit's super comfortable too."
"That's nice."
"You okay?"
"Yeah." He shuts his locker. "Let's talk more at break. Manager just sent me something."
"No problem. Cya, Gerald."
He gets out into the corridor before he lets his face do anything, and then he checks the message.
[COMMENCE ATTACHMENT WORK: ONE SIN.]
Alright.
Hopefully today goes smoothly.
— — —
It does not.
A short brown box steps into his path halfway down the containment spine, carrying an armful of files.
"Hello, Gerald!"
"Oh. Hey, Malkuth."
She pulls two sheets out of the stack without looking at it.
"I've been reviewing your activity, and I've noticed a few abnormal things!"
"Oh." Gerald keeps his voice light. "Can you tell me a few of them, if you don't mind?"
"Sure! First, your performance is nothing short of extraordinary! So keep up the good work!"
"And second." The cheer dips by about a third. "The Qliphoth Deterrence system appears to be acting on your body significantly worse than on any other employee in this facility."
...
Well. It's always something with this place.
"It's reached a point where I have some concern that you might simply fall over and die one of these days," Malkuth says, in the same tone. "Gerald, have you been feeling weak or dizzy lately?"
"This can include vomiting, nosebleeds, bleeding from the gums, intense fatigue, but I'm sure you get the idea."
Gerald thinks about the sink on the morning after the bird.
The blood in the mouthwash. Nobody had hit him in the mouth.
And the day after the notepad, when he could barely lift his own arms.
I thought that was the loops.
I thought the loops were doing that to me.
"Yeah," he says. "I've had some of what you listed."
Malkuth's posture drops. Somewhere inside the casing there is a sound of small components grinding against each other.
"That's not good. As the Control Team Sephirah, this is my responsibility."
"I'll triple-check the Deterrence whitelist and make sure you're flagged as a priority exemption."
Then, much smaller:
"Please don't mention this to anyone. I— I can't make any more mistakes."
Gerald looks down at a metal box that is three and a half feet tall and visibly braced for something.
"Alright. Alright, it's fine, Malkuth." He crouches slightly. "It isn't even your fault. Thank you for taking responsibility for it."
She nods rapidly, and shuffles off at speed, and a file slides off the top of her stack and hits the floor behind her.
"Malkuth—"
She's already around the corner.
Hmm.
Gerald picks it up.
It's a plain manila file. There's no department stamp on it. There's no title. There is a serial number in the top corner in a font he has seen exactly once before, on a screen in a dark office, on a panel with two greyed-out boxes.
...
He looks at the camera in the ceiling.
Then he slides it in behind One Sin's document, in the bracket by the door, where a document already lives and one more sheaf of paper is the least interesting thing in the corridor.
Later.
He'll come back for it later.
— — —
The skull hangs in the middle of the room and chants.
Gerald drags a chair in this time, which he has decided he's allowed to do.
"Yo."
The chanting continues.
"Got a few questions for you. Answer if you can."
The silence is a kind of affirmation.
"What are you, exactly?" He sits forward, elbows on knees. "The document says you're a ZAYIN. Lowest risk class there is. Harmless."
He tilts his head.
"Because I'm not sure I believe that anymore."
The skull floats without a care in the world.
"That weapon of yours." Gerald taps Penitence against his boot. "It clears my head on its own. It changes shape when I ask it to. It talks to me in a place that isn't a place. That's not ZAYIN behavior. That's not any kind of behavior I've seen on this floor."
"It's just an observation. Nothing concrete."
The skull turns toward him.
Then it leans in, actually leans, a slow tilt across three feet of air. Its jaw comes open, and the light behind the teeth is not a light so much as a hole with something on the other side of it, and it fills the room to the corners.
You see me, and ask what I am.
Tell me. What do you see?
Gerald's head throbs, hard, and he shuts his eyes.
What do I see.
...
I feel like this has already happened.
Not the conversation. The asking. Like I've stood in a room and been asked this before and I can't remember what I said, and my head hurts, and—
He keeps his eyes closed and answers anyway.
"I see a bright light. With shackles around it."
Then that is what I am.
"That doesn't make any sense." He opens his eyes. The light is already going out. "Why can't I get a concrete answer out of anyone in this building?"
If I told you the truth, would you really be satisfied with my answer?
Every part of Gerald wants to say yes.
Something further down knows the answer would only produce more questions, and that he is not, presently, equipped to carry them.
"...Whatever. It was just a question. You're not obligated."
The jaw retracts and closes with a soft click, and the chanting resumes, and the room is a concrete room again.
"I'll take my leave."
[WARNING — O-02-56 HAS ESCAPED CONTAINMENT. ASSISTANCE REQUESTED.]
...
Oh, shit.
— — —
He covers the distance in under two minutes and comes around the corner into a scene he can read instantly and hate immediately.
A clerk, backed against the wall, sidearm up in both hands. The bird in the air in front of him, pecking at his raised forearm, small and white and absolutely furious about something.
"S-stop— it hurts—"
"I'll shoot you!"
Gerald puts everything he has into his voice.
"HEY. CLERK. DROP THE GUN—"
The clerk jolts.
His finger closes.
The round goes into the red patch on the bird's chest.
...
It drops to the floor.
And then the white goes out of it, and the veins come up, and the seams on its belly begin to separate, and the clerk makes a sound that is not a word.
CHOMP.
Two feet of floor tile disappears where he was standing.
The clerk is on the ground four feet away with his collar in Gerald's fist.
Shit. How the hell do I calm it down.
"You. Get out of here."
"Y-yes sir!"
The clerk scrambles away down the corridor with his head down.
Gerald turns back.
"Hey, buddy. Calm down a seco—"
The mouth closes on the space where his face was. He vaults it, comes down on the other side, rolls to his feet.
"Alright. So negotiations are out the window."
Punish it.
The feather is burning behind his ear.
It has forgotten its place.
You want me to punish you.
He draws Penitence and it flows into the blade before it's clear of the holster, and he sends a long slash across the corridor that opens the bird's flank and drives it back against the wall.
It rights itself. Its expression, and it has one, that's the horrible part, it has always had one, gets worse.
It comes at him with the mouth open. Predictable. He sidesteps and switches the weapon in the same motion, blade collapsing to the sphere, and puts the muzzle of it an arm's length from the mass of it.
Bzzzt—
The white envelops the whole thing at point-blank and throws it into the far wall.
And it starts to grow.
The frame triples. The beak lengthens. The legs come down out of the body thick as a man's wrist and the talons that unfold from them are the length of kitchen knives, and what lands on the corridor floor is the size of a young eagle and moving at a speed that has no relationship to its mass.
Fast—
Gerald ducks the charge. Comes up firing white, three bolts down the corridor, and it dodges every one of them and takes his face on the way past.
The talon opens him from the eyebrow through the eye.
"Arghh—"
He steps inside and drives the blunt of the weapon into its body, spins, takes a section of wing off at the joint, and backs off.
It's damaged now. It's having trouble staying up. It comes anyway, and the stomach opens, and Gerald knows this one, he knows this one, he has been inside this one—
He dodges.
And something red comes out of the open stomach and hits him across the corridor.
He bounces off the wall and his vision goes in and out. The bird is already coming for the finish.
He rolls. Charges the cross against his own head — white — and the world snaps back into focus.
What the hell was that.
It can use the stomach separately?
The bird answers by lashing at his face with them. Four tendrils, independent, moving in four different rhythms. He blocks two on the flat of the blade and cuts at a third on the counter.
The blade rings off it like a struck pipe.
Why is it so damn durable—
He gives ground, ducks a swipe, and sends an air-slash at its head.
A tendril comes up and eats the whole attack.
Fuck—
And while the tendril is up, the bird closes and puts another one through his chest.
Bleurgghh—
Blood comes out of his mouth and down the front of the plate.
He looks down at the thing going through him.
And then he takes the blade in both hands and drives it into the center of the open stomach with everything he has left.
It goes in. It keeps going. Flesh and something that isn't flesh comes out around the edges of it and sprays the corridor, and the bird makes a long gargling sound that gets smaller, and folds up, and hits the floor.
The tendril slides out of his chest.
And the body on the tile shrinks, draws in and in, until what's lying there is a small white egg with a red patch in the middle of it.
...
Gerald coughs onto the floor and goes to the wall-mounted kit.
He gets the chestplate off. The suit underneath is in ribbons. He cuts the cloth back with the scissors and finds the hole, and the hole is producing blood at a rate he does not like at all.
He gets the stitching tool and closes it as far as he can manage one-handed with his teeth together, which is not far, and then wraps the bandage around himself and watches it go red faster than it should.
...Good enough.
He picks the egg up. It's warm.
He carries it back down the corridor and lays it on the floor of the containment unit, under the perch he asked for, and straightens up.
I think I'm at my limit.
He gets the door open, and then the floor comes up.
Blood runs out of his mouth onto the tile. His vision goes red at the edges and then pink and then nothing much at all. There are clerks around him, several of them, talking over each other in a way that suggests urgency, and he cannot make out a single word, because there is a ringing over everything and it is getting louder.
His eyes close.
— — —
(Pov: Lisa)
I came as fast as I could.
She'd finished with Beauty, she is not going to stop calling it Beauty, regardless of what the document says, and met Yuri in the break room, and they'd both heard the announcement, and they'd both gone straight for the eastern corridor.
And the doors were locked.
Why the hell were the doors locked?
Lisa hits them with the flat of her hand for the fourth time.
"What do you make of this, Yuri?"
"There's no way doors lock themselves." Yuri is crouched by the frame with her face about four inches from the handle. "Look. No smudging on the plate. Nobody's touched this handle in hours. It wasn't done from this side."
"How the hell can you see that?"
"Shh. I'm not finished."
She straightens up.
"This was planned. Think about the timing. How convenient is it that the doors jam the exact moment an Abnormality breaches?"
"Right?! Can you get it open?"
Yuri shakes her head slowly.
"No. Door control routes through the manager's office. To override it from out here I'd need authority higher than his."
Lisa opens her mouth to ask the obvious question, whose authority is higher than the manager's... and then,
the doors open.
By themselves.
"..."
"..."
"Let's go, I guess."
— — —
They come through into a hallway full of clerks pacing in small circles.
"What's going on here?"
One of them steps forward, a green-haired girl, entirely bloodless.
"G-Gerald collapsed—"
"What?"
Lisa gets a look at the agent on the floor and the world narrows down considerably.
Oh god. It's him.
She's on her knees beside him with two fingers on his throat before she's decided to be.
Good. There's a pulse.
...It's really faint.
"Yuri. Give me a hand."
"Y-yeah."
They get an arm each and take him to the main room, where the regenerators are, and lay him out on the couch. He slumps. His face keeps twitching at something.
The blood has come through the bandage in a patch the size of a dinner plate.
"A-are there any medical staff here?"
Yuri shakes her head.
"No. That department hasn't opened yet."
— — —
(???)
There is a place that is not dark, because dark would be a property, and this has none.
He opens eyes he isn't sure he has. There's nothing to see. Not blackness, the actual absence of the option. No color. No distance. No up.
He tries to open his mouth and cannot locate one.
Hold on. Locate? Can he even do that?
Nothing here is real. Everything here has been assembled, meticulously and at speed, by something that wanted it to look like nothing.
And then —
Whirrr...
A sound. A sensation of a sound, arriving from a direction that does not exist and getting louder.
Dread fills the entire volume of him. This is not right. He is not supposed to be here and something is aware that he is.
Ẅ̶̘̄ͅh̷͉̗̍̕õ̵̠ ̶͕̿͂l̶̈́̓͜e̶͙̅̈́ẗ̷̲̝́̈́ ̷̱͆́ ¿
The words come in without passing through anything, and etch themselves into every corner of a mind that has no corners.
G̷͔͒ţ̸̫̯̎̕͝ ̷̱͆́ ̴̧̬͗̽ō̴̱u̴̢͒̀͠.
The pressure comes down on him like a hand closing over an insect, and his mind folds under it, and everything warps sideways—
— — —
"Gerald?"
He opens his eyes.
Lisa rises out of the chair beside the couch. There are tear tracks dried on her face and she has not done anything about them.
"Finally. You're awake."
She sits down on the edge of the couch.
"What happened back there? Can you remember?"
Gerald takes a breath, and takes stock.
Punishing Bird changed.
It has never changed before. Not once, in any of the times I've been in that room, and the document says nothing about it. Not one line.
Is it me?
Am I doing that?
"Gerald?"
He comes back to the room and puts a smile on, because she needs one.
"I went to suppress Punishing Bird. A clerk had shot it, so it went off."
"Originally I was going to walk it back to its unit. Obviously nothing goes to plan."
"While I was pushing it back, it changed. Got bigger. A lot bigger."
He touches his chest.
"I put it down. Although."
Lisa looks at the bandage and then at him, and something in her face gives out, and she puts her arms around him.
"!!!"
Gerald sits very still with his hands in the air.
Then, hesitantly, he brings them down onto her back.
...
This is nice.
This is really nice, actually.
"...Thanks."
She lets go and clears her throat and sits back up straight.
"It's decided, then."
Gerald tilts his head.
"I'm going to protect you from now on."
"What? Lisa, it's fine. I can manage myself just—"
She reaches out and presses two fingers, very lightly, against the bandage.
Gerald's whole body folds around it.
"...You were saying?"
"..."
He has, unfortunately, nothing.
The door bangs off the wall.
"THE GENIUS HAS ARRIVED!"
Yuri comes in with both arms full of packaging.
"I just got authorization for the medical stores. Now ca—"
Her eyes land on a very awake Gerald looking at her with mild irritation.
"Oh, wow. Is that all for me? I didn't know you cared so much."
Her expression darkens and a pill bottle catches him on the forehead.
"Who's worried about who? Huh?"
"That hurt, you bastard."
Her face splits into a shit-eating grin.
"And what are you gonna do about it?"
She sticks her tongue out, which does more damage than the bottle.
Lisa smacks both of them across the back of the head.
"Both of you stop fighting, Gerald is hurt— wait."
She looks at her hand. Then at Gerald.
"Sorry Gerald, are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, don't worry about it." He waves it off, laughing, which hurts. "Really."
Yuri sighs and puts the bag down.
"Whatever. I did my job. I'm leaving."
"Thanks for caring, Yuri. Heh..."
Her fist closes. But she leaves, apparently unwilling to risk another Lisa.
The door opens again on a mature-looking man with his suit in complete disarray.
"Yo, kid. Heard the news. You alrigh—"
He clocks Lisa sitting on the edge of the couch and stops.
A grin arrives on his face like the sunrise.
He puts one finger under his nose.
"I see. Looks like this junior's already begun his healin' process."
"Mao—"
"I won't intrude any further."
He shoots Gerald a wink on the way out.
Lisa tilts her head.
"Do you know him?"
"Yes. Unfortunately."
Then, because her face falls slightly:
"Haha. I'm kidding. He's a good guy. Way more experience than me."
Lisa nods and starts going through the bag.
"Here, take some of these. What is this again?" She turns the bottle. "Says it's... Enkephalin Extract."
"Abnormalities produce Enkephalin, yeah." Gerald takes the bottle and reads the label. "This is refined. Diluted way down, probably, so it doesn't do to us what it does undiluted."
He goes quiet.
Can I even trust this?
What if the dose is wrong. What if it kills me.
Then I'd have to start the whole day again, and Lisa would be on repression, and—
Lisa takes a tablet out and holds it up between two fingers.
"Either you take these yourself, or I put them in you."
Gerald raises both hands. "No, no, it's fine, I'll take it."
She smiles and sets the bottle on the table beside him.
"Take the day off. The manager isn't going to work you in this state."
Gerald nods and pockets the pills.
"Thank you, Lisa. For everything."
"Anytime."
He waits until she's out of the room.
Then he stops smiling and puts a hand on the wall and gets to his feet, because there is a manila file behind a document bracket at the other end of the floor and he has been thinking about it since the second his eyes opened.
He makes it perhaps six steps before the corridor tilts and the wall arrives against his shoulder.
...
Later.
He'll come back for it later.
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
It happened again. That same variable.
Just who is Gerald, anyway?
"Angela. Have you got me his file yet?"
"Yes, Manager. It's right here."
A yellow folder lands on the desk.
He opens it.
He reads the first page.
He reads it again, slower, with one finger under a line about a third of the way down, and the finger stops moving.
"...This is—?"
.
.
.
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