05-11

  Site ??

  2/08/2020

  The lights never flickered in this part of the facility. They pulsed.

  A slow, deliberate rhythm—white panels embedded into a ceiling that didn't end, humming in a pitch calibrated to sharpen thought and dull empathy. It wasn't meant for the living. These halls had been built for calculation, procession, and movement without friction.

  His boots made no sound against the floor. Polished stone, unmarked by wear—more a concept than a material. A suggestion of ground, rather than something meant to be walked on. The deeper you went, the less real the place became.

  He passed doors that didn't open. Behind them, sealed chambers hummed with soundless pressure. Automated arms dissected corpses still warm from death. Fluids were siphoned with perfect precision and filtered through membranes too thin to be called physical. Lungs sat on metal trays, still twitching. A face peeled back in layers like petals. No screams. Just motion. Clean, practiced, unfeeling.

  Data crawled across glass like rain down windows. Strings of characters not meant to be read, only parsed—probability curves, death rate charts, neural fracture thresholds. Infohazards dense enough to crush a mind to paste. All of it scrolled forward, hungry.

  He slowed beside one of the partitions.

  A small cart was being wheeled out. Two attendants in hazmat gear—clean white, no insignia—pushed it steadily down the corridor. On the cart, strapped down by four-point restraints and humming faintly beneath a heavy sedation field, was a girl. Eight, maybe nine. Pale. Their limbs too thin, as though her body had stopped growing but hadn't figured out why.

  For a moment, his steps paused.

  The weight of her gaze wasn't present. Her eyes were shut. But she had power. He could feel it pressing through the walls, like the faint thrum of an approaching tide.

  He didn't ask.

  Instead, his fingers brushed the wall beside him. It felt like warm glass. He stepped forward—and vanished.

  He fell.

  There was no impact. No grunt of pain. Just the sensation of gravity ceasing to matter. And then, suddenly, he was standing. Not on the floor he left behind, but on another—deep black, faintly warm, with veins of shifting light running beneath the surface like molten circuitry.

  A table waited ahead. Long. Carved from the same stone. Ringed with chairs—each one occupied.

  They didn't turn when he entered. That was not their way.

  He took his seat at the far end. No titles. No greetings. Just stillness. A silence that waited not for comfort, but for relevance.

  A figure three seats to his left spoke first.

  "We've lost most sites in North America. Europe is holding. Asia is fragmented."

  Another voice followed, a haze just barely perceptible. "Projected casualties now exceed two hundred million. That number will barely double within the month unless resistance groups are neutralized."

  The next speaker was clipped, and precise. "We've deployed 058, 3199, and 610. All are performing within acceptable parameters. 076 is still resisting control modifications but the damage it is accruing is within acceptable levels."

  A brief pause followed. A blink in the rhythm of endless optimization of the slaughter.

  Someone adjusted their sleeves, folding gloved hands atop the obsidian table.

  "682 has been temporarily contained," they said. "Relocation from deep-sea coordinates is currently in progress—though it's been difficult."

  "It will eventually return on its own." came the reply. "It will not tolerate life."

  The discussion flowed like a river of ash. Grim, constant, never branching. Successes were measured not by goals but by death.

  Then—

  "Humanoids?" he asked quietly.

  Someone further down the table responded without lifting their head.

  "SCP-239 has been pacified and is currently being modified. Triple-layered memetic suppression. Secondary damping amnestics inscribed directly into cortical tissue. We've also embedded multiple hidden bombs along her body."

  "And the others?" he asked.

  "Most are dead," came the curt reply.

  He waited.

  A breath was drawn—harsh, annoyed.

  "507 remains unaccounted for. 343's status is... unverified."

  He leaned back, letting the weight of that sit.

  "Unverified?" he repeated.

  A nod. "No confirmed activity. No records of termination. No new manifestations. It simply vanished before we could initiate extermination protocols."

  "Does he know?"

  Silence.

  Then someone admitted, almost reluctantly, "We don't know what he knows."

  As if that were an acceptable answer.

  Of course, it was.

  He nodded once. "Then prepare contingency models assuming he's aware."

  That received no comment. Agreement didn't need to be voiced here.

  He shifted forward slightly, resting his elbows against the cold stone.

  The rhythm of the room adjusted.

  "I propose a new experiment."

  This time, there were glances. Not expressions—just motion.

  "173," he said.

  That earned pause. No surprise. Consideration.

  "We've spent too long on wide-area saturation. Blunt force anomalies. The ones that infect, infest, consume," he said. "That's fine for collapse. But the stragglers are adapting. Resistance is organizing faster than we projected. We need more shock troopers."

  One of the others tilted their head slightly. "You believe 173 can be of use?"

  "I believe it's consistent," he replied. "In its ability to kill. We simply need to spread that."

  He reached into his coat, withdrawing a small file—thin, unassuming, bound in red string—and set it down without comment.

  No rebuttal came.

  Only the soft shuffling of paper as one of the others took the file, scanning through it without expression.

  The decision was made before anyone spoke.

  "We'll begin the experimental procedure," someone said.

  He nodded and leaned back.

  The conversation moved on. Numbers. Projections. Adjustments to the kill curve.

  Outside the walls of the chamber, the Earth continued to burn. It wasn't a clean fire. It didn't roar. It smoldered. Quiet. Persistent.The kind of ruin that seeps into history and stays there.

  But that wasn't enough.

  Humanity needed to die.

  And 05-11 continued to speak—calmly, methodically—on how best to ensure justice for this broken, disgusting world.

  General Robert O'Kelly

  Ohio Zone 6

  2/08/2020

  Robert was not, by nature, a sentimental man.

  There hadn't been time for it—not in his service, not in his career, and certainly not in this mess of a post-civilization world. He had fought on two continents, served under more incompetent officers than he cared to name, and once helped defuse a hostage situation with nothing but a cricket bat and a stiff upper lip. He had thought that qualified him for most things.

  He had been wrong.

  In hindsight, the moment he was briefed on a "secret magical United Nations task force," he should have called it a day and walked off into the nearest pub. Instead, he'd kept his head down and soldiered on, because that's what men like him did. And somehow, that had landed him here—walking across a field outside a half-burnt camp, escorting a handful of jumpy squaddies toward a spatially inconsistent zone shaped like a chunk of Ohio.

  "God help me," he muttered, adjusting his cap against the glare.

  He had finally escaped that hell of a battlefield with his bones mostly intact and a well-rehearsed speech prepared for whichever sorry bastard remained above him in the chain of command. But when he finally made it back to HQ—breathless, bruised, and still lightly dusted with sprinkles—he found the upper brass was gone. Dead. Retired. Eviscerated by a British butler of all things. Killed by a man in a waistcoat with perfect posture and the smile of a man who probably ironed his victims before disposal.

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  He tried not to think about the irony in that.

  Instead, he'd taken charge. Not because he particularly wanted to—he'd had enough of titles—but because someone had to. And since the magical world seemed to run on the same bloody bureaucracy as everything else, his survival alone had qualified him for promotion. General now, apparently.

  In another life, he might have reveled in the rapid climb. There was something perversely satisfying about leapfrogging half a dozen ladders just because the last bloke got turned into jam. But thankfully, responsibility hadn't increased much beyond putting out fires and nodding with grim understanding during strategy briefings.

  Mostly he was managing British forces assigned to this temporary camp. And it was already too much of a handful.

  Especially now.

  The "Ohio Zone," as the locals had taken to calling it, was less a location and more a suggestion. A hazy region of pseudo-reality that felt like someone had cloned a sleepy midwestern suburb, removed all sense of proportion and spiked the universe with amphetamines. He wasn't entirely convinced that hadn't been the exact process in its creation.

  Reality felt twitchy out here. Too clean. Like a freshly vacuumed dream.

  The grass crunched under his boots as he followed the corporal toward the pasture's edge. The others stayed close behind, half out of protocol and half because no one wanted to be the first to spot a talking tree again.

  The corporal glanced back, clearly unsure how to explain whatever he'd seen.

  Robert gestured for him to get on with it. "What is it?"

  "We've, ah... found astronauts, sir."

  That gave him a pause.

  "You mean personnel in suits?"

  "No, sir. Actual astronauts."

  He arched a brow, slowing slightly. "From orbit?"

  The corporal didn't answer. Just kept walking, eyes fixed ahead.

  They reached the slope. Beyond it, the grass gave way to a patch of soil that gleamed faintly under the sun, like someone had sprayed it with varnish. At the center stood two figures—tall, pristine, unmistakable.

  White NASA flight suits. Helmet visors lowered. One with the Union Jack. The other with a flag he didn't recognize—red scribbles on white, shaped like a child's drawing of fire.

  Both stood perfectly still.

  O'Kelly squinted. "This is ridiculous."

  The corporal didn't argue. Just pointed.

  The astronaut on the left raised a hand slowly and lifted their visor. Young face. Pale. Calm. Far too calm.

  And then it spoke.

  "Wait... it's all Ohio?"

  Before anyone could answer, the second astronaut turned, drew a pistol, and shot the first cleanly through the helmet.

  The crack echoed like a slap across stone.

  The first astronaut crumpled. Their suit buckled. The visor shattered.

  What poured out wasn't blood.

  It was jelly beans.

  Dozens of them. All colors. Bouncing gently across the varnished soil like they belonged there.

  Robert froze.

  The corporal made a strangled noise.

  He said nothing. Just stared as the jelly beans scattered like celebratory confetti.

  Then, he cursed as he pulled out his gun and shot the other astronaut in his head..

  And of course.

  Of course it was jelly beans.

  This was his life now.

  The remaining astronaut laid, the pistol dangling at their side like it weighed nothing. Their visor slowly shattered. Another human face—early thirties, perhaps. Brown eyes. Slight smile. Friendly. Familiar, even.

  Robert stepped forward, boots cracking sugar shells underfoot.

  His men moved in, working with quiet discipline to clear and scavenge the bodies as best they could.

  Two squaddies in exo-gloves were collecting the suits with surgical precision—one dragging the collapsed astronaut by the ankle, the other using a broom to gather the jelly beans like they were some tragic holiday spill. A containment bag had been given by one of the mages. It growled softly every time they opened it, but no one asked questions.

  O'Kelly watched in silence, arms crossed behind his back, jaw tight.

  He wanted—desperately—to curse. Not at the soldiers, not even at the situation, but at the world. Whatever version of Earth this was. The one where everything looked a bit too clean and tasted faintly of menthol and madness. The one where jelly beans had become a biohazard and astronauts were starting to feel like an endemic species.

  But before he could muster something satisfying, something properly British and deeply profane—

  In the distance, the ground began to rot.

  A wet, fibrous creaking rippled through the soil like some massive wound peeling open. Grass hissed as it withered. Roots twisted into brittle threads. The air sharpened. Wrong, all of it.

  And then came the scream.

  It wasn't loud. Not at first. It was tired. Wet. Full of something old and unfinished.

  A figure crawled up from the dying earth—a man, or what used to be one. Limbs sagging with damp decay. Clothes hanging like molted skin. His voice scratched against reality like someone dragging bone through tar.

  Robert's hand went to his pistol. He'd been briefed on the thing before. The Old Man, they called it. A nightmare that circled the safe zone like a vulture made of crap and rotten eggs. It usually stayed on the edges. Today, apparently, it had taken offense.

  He was about to signal retreat.

  And then the first astronaut reappeared.

  It dropped from the sky like a stunned bird, landed directly in front of the rotting man, stood up straight, and declared:

  "Wait... it's all Ohio?"

  Robert opened his mouth.

  The old man shrieked.

  The astronaut was immediately shot.

  The body flew back—launched like a cannonball—and smashed into the old man with a crunch that felt theological.

  And then another astronaut appeared.

  "Wait... it's all Ohio?"

  Another shot. Another body. Another smash.

  Then another.

  Then ten.

  Then fifty.

  A cascade of astronauts, all identical, all declaring the same confused revelation before being shot, bodies catapulting into the mass of rot and burial and jelly beans. The old man wailed beneath the avalanche of crushed suits and fractured visors, his arms flailing out from a growing mound of synthetic fabric and shattered helmets.

  Robert stood stock still as the pile grew. The crunch of sugar under his boots had become ambient. The corporal beside him had stopped breathing.

  By the time the seventy-ninth astronaut delivered their final question—"Wait... it's all Ohio?"—and collided with the heap like a sack of bricks, the creature was no longer visible. Just a twitching bulge of limbs and debris buried under layers of philosophical inquiry and polymer insulation.

  And then—

  Silence.

  It held for a moment, the air stretched taut.

  Then came the scream. Louder now. Raw and furious.

  The mountain of suits exploded outward in a burst of jelly beans and cloth.

  The rotting man disappeared back into the ground like a curse escaping into the earth itself, trailing rust and black goo, vanishing with a shriek of anger.

  Silence returned, humming at the edges.

  Robert stared.

  "...Right," he said finally. "Collect everything that's not bolted down and someone send for one of those wizards."

  He turned slowly, wiping something sweet and red off his sleeve.

  It smelled like cherry.

  "A smoke sir?" his corporal offered him.

  Robert took three. Lit them all at once.

  He took a deep drag. Held it.

  Then exhaled with the weight of a man betrayed by reality itself.

  "…Bugger," he muttered, as jelly beans popped under his boots.