The silence goes on long enough to become a thing in the room with them.
Then the manager's fist comes down on the desk.
"GODDAMNIT, AGENT. ANSWER MY QUESTION."
Gerald's hand is on Penitence before he decides to put it there.
"...Yeah. I can." He doesn't take the hand off. "For the last two days, as a matter of fact."
The manager exhales, long, through his nose. He reaches for the wine bottle without looking at it.
It's empty.
He looks at it for a second. Then his hand closes.
CRACK.
Glass goes across the desk and onto the floor. He opens his fingers and lets the rest of it fall and the blood comes up in a line across his palm, and he closes his hand again anyway.
"Angela. Prepare me another glass while I talk to this agent."
"I'm afraid that will not be possible." The assistant does not move from where she's standing. "As the manager, you are required to limit your alcohol intake in order to perform your job correctly and efficiently."
Something passes over his face and is put away.
"Fine. Leave my office. I need to talk to Gerald."
"As you wish."
She goes. The door closes with a click that Gerald feels in his teeth.
...
"Is there anything I need to know about your unique situation, Agent?"
"No, Manager." Gerald keeps his voice flat. "It just happened. After the first time I died to Punishing Bird."
The manager swivels a quarter turn and looks at his screens.
"I see."
He gets up. Crosses to the shelf. Picks up the small cactus in its clay pot and brings it back to the desk and turns it in the monitor light, examining it, the blood from his hand leaving a partial print on the clay.
"You know, Gerald." He says it pleasantly. "I knew something was off. Given your exceptional performance."
He rotates the pot.
"And I really, really tried to look past the weird aspect of it. Write it off as a beneficial anomaly."
"Manager—"
"But then I started thinking." He takes hold of one of the spines between finger and thumb. "This beneficial little anomaly doesn't seem to understand the gravity of where it's working."
He pulls. The spine doesn't come.
"And if it doesn't understand much, who's to say it won't lash out. To save its own hide."
He pulls harder and the spine gives, and takes a bead of blood out of his thumb on the way.
The manager smiles at it.
Then he reaches across the desk and takes the resignation form out of Gerald's hands, and Gerald lets him.
"Do you understand what I'm saying, Agent?"
...
"Loud and clear, sir."
Something in the manager's face softens by about two percent. He picks up a napkin and wipes his thumb and sets the cactus down between them.
"Good. Because you should know the name of the thing you're living in." He sits back. "It's called the TT2 Protocol. When the day fails, it runs. Everything goes back. Everyone goes back." A pause. "Everyone except, apparently, you."
TT2.
Great. It has a filing code.
"Now." The manager lays both hands flat on the desk. "I think I've got just the job for you, Agent."
He leans in, and the smile that arrives is not one Gerald has seen on him yet.
"Are you afraid to die?"
— — —
I hate everything.
Gerald walks out of the office and does not stop at the break room and does not stop anywhere. He goes to the small room with the pillar in it, opens the slot, takes the notepad, and closes his eyes.
Born Again.
He raises Penitence and brings the cross down on his own skull.
CRACK.
The white goes off behind his eyes. The appetite goes out like a snuffed wick. He staggers, catches the wall, straightens.
That gives me a bit of time.
Beep. Beep.
[GERALD — COMMENCE INSIGHT WORK: F-02-44]
A new order. A new door.
Gerald trudges down the Control Team spine until he finds it and stands in front of the nameplate.
F-02-44.
The document hangs in its bracket beside the frame. He skims it the way you skim something while your skull is still ringing, a curse, a castle, a woman who tried to take a count's fortune for herself and was made into something for it. Under that, the work log. Two entries.
REPRESSION — AGENT, CONTROL TEAM.REPRESSION — AGENT, CONTROL TEAM.
Twice, then. Somebody's been in here twice.
He puts the document back in the bracket.
Let's get working, I guess.
— — —
SCREEEE—
The thing in the room throws itself backwards from the door and shakes its head and screams.
It is an abomination that no higher being had any hand in making.
Its hind legs are an insect's, and they are working, actively, constantly at its own flank, scraping down through hide that is clearly mammalian, opening long red gashes it does not appear able to stop making. Its tail is a short depressing lump. Scales cover the underside from the throat back.
Its front feet have had the toes worn off against the floor.
And its head is a real work of art. Two heavy horns, wrapped around by two green vines. Insect mandibles, with a pair of human lips set in the middle of the face. And crammed above all of that, packed edge to edge where the brow should be, perhaps a hundred eyes, all of them moving, all of them taking in every inch of the room including him.
...
Sometimes I wish I'd just stayed in bed.
KRAAAAA—
He takes one step forward and the creature swipes at the air in front of him. Not at him. At the space between them. It doesn't want him closer.
Guess I should take notes on this thing.
Otherwise I might just combust on the spot.
The notepad is in his hand and the pen is in the other and he does not remember drawing either. He writes down what he can see. General appearance. Number of limbs. The scraping, which has not paused once.
Then he tries something. He takes a protein bar out of his pocket and lobs it gently onto the floor between them.
The creature screams and shakes its head and scrapes harder, and opens a fresh gash along its own ribs, and the blood goes onto the concrete.
And Gerald feels a great desire to hurt it.
It's there, clean and available, the same way the anger was in the bird's room. But the notepad has a grip on him, and the notepad wants something else. It takes the desire and turns it sideways and pours it into the work, and what comes out is: find out why.
He writes.
He tries mopping the blood up while it screams, and the screaming drops in pitch. The eyes stop scattering around the room quite so fast.
Then his wrist buzzes.
[COMMENCE ATTACHMENT WORK: F-02-44]
"...The fuck do I say to this thing."
It screeches and taps its limbs on the floor in no rhythm at all.
"How did you end up like this?"
The document had used the word beast, as though that means anything. The document had not prepared him. Nothing in a plastic bracket by a door conveys what it is actually like to be in a room with this.
In response to the question the creature's head trembles, and another shrill cry comes out of it.
And Penitence pulses white against his hip.
It does it on its own. He didn't touch it. The white goes up through his side and takes the murder out of his head and sets it down somewhere else, and Gerald looks down at the weapon on his hip with a distinctly new feeling.
So it can act on its own.
There's still so much I don't understand about this place.
Gurggghhh—
Green foam comes out of the human lips. The creature convulses, and its legs go out from under it, and it lands hard on its side in a spreading pool of what it has been taking out of itself for however long it has been in this room.
It squirms. It looks at him.
And it starts to cry.
Tears come out of a hundred eyes at once and run down the mandibles and the horns and drop onto the concrete, and it extends one ruined front leg toward him and pulls it back before it gets halfway.
The desire to hurt it is entirely gone. What replaces it is not something Gerald has a use for. It's just pity, whole and useless, for someone who caught a curse.
He gets down on one knee and puts his palm on the top of its head, between the horns, and the crying doesn't stop.
...
And then he sees it.
White hair.
Tufts of it. Torn out at the root, scattered across the floor around the creature in a spray, some of it stuck in the blood, one clump of it pinned under the thing's own weight.
And in the middle of the largest clump, a red bowtie.
No.
No.
No. No. No. No. No.
This isn't what I think it is.
The log.
Two entries. Repression, twice.
She told me. Standing at the coffee machine with her hip against the counter, going defensive about it before I'd even said anything, I got a good score, I have to be doing something right.
That was one.
And this morning somebody signed off on the second one.
And then that somebody sat me down in a dark room and talked to me about a cactus.
There's no way. Right?
Penitence pulses white again. It's trying to clear him. It's trying to help.
It doesn't touch this.
He looks at the thing shaking on the floor and puts his hand on the side of its face, very gently, and moves his thumb along the ridge of it.
"You're... Lisa, aren't you?"
The creature nods.
A quiet shrill sound comes out of it, and the shaking does not stop.
...
And there isn't anything he can do.
There is no version of the next ten minutes where he fixes this. He can't undo a curse. He can't call anyone, there's nobody to call, there are nine departments in this building and eight of them are behind time frozen bulkheads with grey creeping out along the floor. There is no medical team. There is no one above the manager who answers. He can put his hand on her face. That's the entire list.
Except.
The loops.
TT2.
He can't fix it.
He can make it not have happened.
Gerald brings his attention back to the thing in front of him and makes his face do something reassuring, which costs him more than anything else today.
"Don't worry. I won't leave you like this."
The eyes track him.
"That would be cruel of me. It's the least I can do." He swallows. "For you. Lisa."
"Please. Just wait for me."
Over a long moment, the crying slows and stops. And the creature nods, once, still convulsing on the floor.
Gerald stands up.
He takes Penitence out of its holster on the way to the door, and he does not put it back.
— — —
The clerks in the corridor go pale as he passes them.
"U-uhm. Gerald?"
His eyes snap over.
A small figure in a maroon suit and a yellow tie, hair pinned back badly on one side.
Vera.
"What is it."
She has gone the color of the wall.
"Well... the others were getting scared. That you were about to do something irrational—"
Penitence pulses white in his hand as his face does something he can't see.
"...Haah." He gets it down. He gets it almost down. "Move out of my way, Vera. This doesn't concern you. Alright?"
"Y-yes."
She flattens herself against the wall and stays there with her hands over her mouth, and Gerald walks past her without looking again.
He knew.
He sat there bleeding onto a napkin, turning that little pot around in his hands, and he knew.
And he asked me if I was afraid to die.
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
Damn.
I don't know what to do.
The manager sits with the cameras in front of him and a shard of glass still on the floor by his shoe that nobody has cleaned up.
That kid can remember things even when TT2 has been initiated.
This is beyond my pay grade.
...
Do I even get paid here?
I'm... not sure. Actually.
Goddamnit, it's almost like all my memories were just fabricated.
He reclines and looks at the ceiling of an office he has never once left.
I don't know how to tell him.
The truth is simple enough and it does not improve with handling. He took the Gerald anomaly as a sign that things were breaking his way, finally, that the numbers might come in. And the white-haired agent had run repression on F-02-44 the day before and come out with twelve boxes and a bad look on her face.
Now, he hadn't been sure that beating the damn thing was the best available option.
But it was twelve boxes. The energy was good. He'd figured one more assignment couldn't hurt.
And then the kid had come through the door shouting about resignation, and he'd had the whole thing sitting on the desk in front of him, the work log, the incident flag, the line item that used to be an employee, and he'd talked about a cactus instead.
...Man.
I fucked up real bad.
I thought maybe the Gerald kid could do something about it.
Fuck, what am I even talking about. What was he supposed to do.
I'm the MANAGER. Everything gets done by me. And if I make one mistake, One. I'm the one who's fucked.
Resetting the day won't help. He'll remember. He's already worked out that I knew.
So I double down. Who cares if he hates me afterward.
This is Lobotomy Corporation, after all.
On the monitor, Gerald comes around the corner of the eastern corridor with the weapon in his hand and tears running down his face.
"Manager. Would you like me to issue an order to restrain him?"
Angela has not moved from her place by the wall.
"If not, the agent will attempt to harm you."
"...Let him."
Her eyes open.
"Are you aware that I cannot permit that, Manager?"
"Then why give me the option at all."
"..."
The speakers come on across the entire facility.
[ATTENTION ALL EMPLOYEES. AGENT 00_3 HAS ENTERED MURDER PANIC. RESTRAIN IMMEDIATELY.]
The manager gets up and walks to the coffee machine. He puts a cup under it and presses the button and the machine begins to whir.
"Nothing is going according to plan."
— — —
(Pov: Gerald)
"I was so close."
The man in front of him is breathing hard. There are bruises coming up on his forearms and across his chest and his suit is open at the seam. He throws away the broken half of a baton.
"So close to the manager's door. And you just had to get in the way."
"Looks like I'm gonna have to teach you a lesson, punk."
Mao raises his hands.
"Look, Mao. I need to get through here."
"Fuck if I'll let you into the manager's room with that on your face." Mao's chin comes up. "You're ready to murder."
Penitence pulses white. Gerald gets a hand back on himself.
"For good damn reason."
"Yeah? Get in line, kid."
"Stay out of my way. For your own good."
Mao doesn't answer. He closes the distance at a speed that has no business belonging to a man of his age.
Gerald swings for his head. Mao ducks it and comes up inside with a haymaker that catches Gerald flush on the chin and puts him back three steps. He recovers, swings wide, Mao reads it, steps in, and drives a fist into his ribs.
Gerald coughs blood onto the floor and throws himself backwards to buy air.
He looks down. There are depressions in the reinforced plate. Fist-shaped.
"The fuck are your hands made out of?"
Mao answers by coming at him again.
Gerald swings broad, Mao ducks it again, and the uppercut takes him under the jaw and rattles his grip loose. Mao's hand is already there, he strips Penitence out of it and throws it, and it clangs off the concrete and skitters away down the corridor.
Gerald's face twists and he throws a straight punch that is fast enough to open Mao's cheek.
And Mao punishes him for it. The elbow comes down into Gerald's throat and something in there makes a sound.
Bleurgg—
Blood goes out of his mouth and onto the floor between them.
And the feather pulses against his ear.
People have been committing sins since long ago.
A low sound starts somewhere underneath his ribs, in a register human lungs do not produce.
Why do they commit sins, knowing it's wrong?
The feather sinks. He can feel it, the shaft going in through the skin behind his ear, and the chain at his collarbone going down through the flesh under it, both of them settling in like they're being filed.
It must be because there's no one to punish people for their misdeeds.
His veins come up across his neck and his forearms and his skin floods red.
GRAHHHHHHH—
If someone takes that role, then no foul act would happen in this world ever again.
The one holding the weapon is gone. The one on the floor is not a person anymore, and neither is anything else in the corridor.
The man in front of it is a shape that has been standing in the way.
It hits him at the waist and takes him down. It winds its fist back and drives it at his face and misses by two inches and leaves a crater in the floor beside his head. The man kicks up into its chest and gets clear and runs.
"Fuck. Fuck— kid, what the hell happened to you?"
It comes after him with both arms fully extended and no interest at all in what happens to itself, intending to take his face off.
The man rolls it. Stumbles over the weapon lying on the floor. Grabs it.
He swings for the obvious attack coming at his head.
What the man does not see is the smile.
It changes the line of its arm mid-swing, comes in underneath, and takes his throat out.
Blood goes across the wall, across the floor, across the thing that did it, until there is more red on it than there is anything else.
The man stumbles back with one hand at his neck. His eyes go unfocused. And with what he's got left, he brings the weapon down on the top of its skull with everything he has.
It's enough.
The white goes through it like a knife through a paper wall.
Gerald recoils, and his head hits the concrete, and the red drains out of him in a long shuddering wave, and he is lying on the floor of the eastern corridor watching Mao's body go down.
Mao lands on his side.
His eyes are already going. He gets a hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes.
He doesn't get one out.
...
Nothing seems real.
"FUCK. FUCK. GODDAMNIT—"
Gerald has both hands in his own scalp and is pulling.
I didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to do that.
"Gerald—"
He looks up.
There are clerks at the end of the corridor. Five of them, maybe six. They have the sidearms out of the wall lockers and they are holding them the way people hold things they have only been shown once.
Vera is at the front.
"G-Gerald. Please just surrender." Her hands are shaking so badly the barrel is describing a small circle. "I don't want to shoot you."
"...Please."
His face comes apart at the word.
"Don't worry, Vera." He gets a knee under himself. "I can make this all better."
He stands.
"I can reverse today. We can just start ag—"
Bang.
A hole opens in his cheek.
"Wha—"
And then all of them fire at once.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
The rounds go into the armor and stop, mostly. The head is not armored. He takes several and keeps coming forward, and blood runs down into his eye, and something white shows through above his ear.
And his fist clenches.
GRAHHHHHHH—
The heat comes up through him again and the veins stand out and the bullets in the plate work themselves loose and drop out onto the floor, tapping.
The first shape's skull comes apart under its fist like a dropped melon.
It reaches the second so fast that the corridor smears, and the impact opens him across the wall.
It puts a hand into the back of the third and takes out the spine, and uses it, because it is long and it is rigid and it is there, to pin the smallest shape to the wall through the stomach.
She can't do anything but look at it.
It walks up. It takes her head in both hands.
Something very far down in it, in a room it can't get back to, is still going.
"I'm sorry."
CRACK.
She goes limp, and the wall behind her doesn't.
— — —
It does not say anything else on the way.
The door of the manager's office comes off its upper hinge.
"Manager."
The man behind the desk has his hands folded. He is sitting the way a person sits when they have already run the scene in their head and found no version of it they liked.
"Agent."
Penitence pulses white in his hand. Over and over. His face twitches with each one, and something behind his eyes keeps almost surfacing.
"Restart the day."
A slender hand comes out of the dark and settles on the manager's shoulder.
"Agent 00_3. That is not something you have control over."
"I didn't ask you."
His grip closes on the weapon and he lunges at both of them—
Click.
And the world stops moving.
Gerald hangs in the middle of the office, mid-stride, the weapon at the top of its arc, the blood on him holding still in the air where it left him.
The manager lets out a breath he has been holding for some time.
"Angela. Is there any way I can salvage this?"
"I'm afraid not, Manager."
...
He gets up. He walks around his desk and past the agent hanging in the air, close enough to see the fragment of skull above his ear, and does not look at it.
He puts his hand over the button.
[TT2 PROTOCOL]
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