The red bakelite telephone on the desk starts to ring.

The door leading out of the office doesn't look any different. It's entirely possible that nothing will happen, although she's not holding out hope. In her experience, everything looks completely ordinary until it suddenly doesn't – clearly visible warning signs are for people under OSHA's jurisdiction.

She checks her accoutrements. The oversize briefcase has everything she's been told to bring. The hidden microphone sewn into her collar is switched on. The hollow acrylic molar holding her L-pill is still intact.

Morgan stands up, straightens her coat, and with some trepidation opens the door.

The hall that ought to be on the other side is no longer there. The doorway instead leads to an idyllic stretch of grassland dotted with magnolias and pines. Going by the sand traps, water hazards, and immaculately-trimmed putting areas, it's either a golf course or something sinister that looks remarkably like a golf course. In the near distance is a palatial country club flying the American flag on the front lawn. From here, there is no one visible.

"Anomaly presents as an extradimensional golf course."

She glances back at the office window. It's the same view.

"… temporary site Upsilon-2 appears to still be located in Sedona. It's just the portal. Leaving now."

It's Safe, according to the briefing material. Morgan has taken this with a small mountain of salt, but she knows they believe it's Safe: she called one of her coworkers last night and got confirmation that she hadn't been retroactively reassigned to the D-class personnel roster for the month. It's probably Safe. Yeah.

She enters the anomaly, lugging the briefcase along.

The sun is still shining, albeit more gently than mercilessly. A pleasant breeze rolls in. The door, which on this side appears to be embedded in the side of a utility shed, does not slam closed of its own accord the moment she crosses the threshold. The golf course is no less welcoming than it was before.

In Foundation documents, Safe does not mean safe. Morgan has warned new hires of this in dire terms for as many years as she's been in charge of orientation meetings. Safe means 'does not pose a threat when handled according to procedure'. A sealed bottle of anthrax bacteria is Safe. Given that she is here in part to write that procedure, Morgan is under no illusion as to how safe she truly is: not in the slightest.

On the other hand, the special containment procedures haven't been written yet, which means she can do whatever she wants.

"I'm leaving the door open."

The telephone obligingly stops ringing.

Morgan begins the trek up to the country club. It's not sweltering here, which is nice, but the briefcase is awkwardly sized and weighs close to sixty pounds. It was designed with a number of extremely important features, none of which involved her comfort. It's a struggle.

"Do you want help carrying that, miss?"

Morgan lurches around in a panic. The speaker behind her is a young man in a white coat, fair-haired and soft-voiced. He is just about the least threatening person she can imagine, which in her line of work means bupkis. At least he's offering to help, which suggests that he's not going to disembowel her at random.

"It's fairly heavy," she says hesitantly.

"I don't mind."

This realm isn't the forest that resists static descriptions; nor is this man a shambling faceless horror keen to feast on her warm entrails. She'll take her chances on accepting.

"Thank you," she says appreciatively, setting it down.

The young man hoists the briefcase with one hand, holding it a good four inches away from his body with no apparent effort.

He looks at it contemplatively. "My goodness. What are you keeping in here, lead bricks?"

"Research materials," she says vaguely, offering him a handshake. "I don't believe we've met. Morgan Waller, clinical virology and infectious disease."

"Herbert West, neurology." He shakes her hand. "We haven't met, no. First time at the conference?"

Time to start pumping the residents for information. The field agents have advised her to act like nothing is out of the ordinary until the anomaly does so itself, so at least she has a starting point.

"First time! They've picked an interesting location for it. I've never been to a conference anywhere like here before."

He chuckles. "It's a new conference center every time. I've heard the management has tried to sign long-term agreements with venues before, but to my knowledge it's never worked out. Not that I'm complaining – variety is the spice of life."

"Huh. Sounds like you've been to a few of these before."

"I have, and I heartily recommend the experience. Academic collaboration has been invaluable to my research career, and the conference has no shortage of like-minded physicians. I take it you'll be presenting some of your own work here?"

"That's what the invitation stipulated. I'm doing my presentation on novel viral infections of interest tomorrow morning."

"Then I'll be sure to attend. I'm conducting my own presentation this afternoon, if you're interested."

"Anything else you'd recommend, apart from the networking opportunities?"

He thinks for a moment. "Some of the seminars double as continuing medical education. They'll be listed as such on the itinerary. Ask the presenter for documentation at the end so you can post it to your licensing board when you go home."

Morgan isn't sure what's more horrifying, the idea of a memetic document that looks like a CME credit or the possibility that the conference is actually registered with American medical licensing boards. That's going to be a nightmare to cover up, if it comes to it, though hopefully not as bad as the Star Signals debacle of '06.

"Thank you for the tip. What will you be presenting?" she asks, probing in a different direction.

"Efficiency gains in mitochondrial transcription and translation… I'm sorry, are you familiar with my body of work?"

"Not really. It does sound interesting, though. Do we have time for a primer?"

Herbert glances at the country club. Still a minute or two away at their current pace, which is not being helped by the briefcase.

"We should. Err, as I'm sure you're aware, the body remains largely intact for six to twelve minutes following cardiopulmonary death. What ensues is autolysis – the enzymes of the cells are no longer directed by metabolism and begin to dissolve the body's membranes – caused by insufficient delivery of glucose and oxygen via the blood. Now, when I was in medical school, it occurred to me that the engines of life are entirely undamaged immediately postmortem. They could theoretically be restarted, so to speak, by the careful application of an external force before too much degradation renders the organism inoperable."

"Like a defibrillator?"

He snaps his fingers excitedly. "Just so! 'A method to stimulate the activity of animal cells in the absence of circulation.' That was the original title of my thesis, though my formulation at the time wasn't effective. I later read the work of von Helmholtz and Gibbs, which suggested that the reagent needed to carry a certain amount of chemical energy in order to overcome the thermodynamic stagnation of death. I added a small quantity of glycogen for energy and dilute oil of vitriol as an oxidizing agent."

"Did that… work?"

"It was promising, but my results were insufficient to garner funding. Luigi Galvani made the limbs of dead frogs twitch with mere electricity in the eighteenth century; modern grantmakers have higher standards." He waves his hand dismissively. "I later determined that although the limit was twelve minutes, a specimen deceased for as little as sixty seconds had much greater odds of seeing a full recovery. With that taken care of, I was able to make the critical refinements that later lead to my reagent accomplishing its intended effect."

"Fascinating. Where were you sourcing volunteers for the procedure?"

"I and my assistant worked as medics with the Red Cross during the war. It was fairly straightforward to locate men whose time of death was scribed in stone and who rather wished it wasn't. That was when we did the bulk of the research."

So, either West isn't sourcing bodies from a patron or he's smart enough to lie about it. She doesn't really care one way or another, but checking for the involvement of other groups of interest looks good in the after-action report. Besides, that research does sound fascinating…

Alas, that will have to wait. They've reached the end of their journey.

On the portico of the country club is a plastic folding table covered in clipboards, staffed by a slightly uncanny woman wearing dark sunglasses. To the side is a pegboard dripping with keyrings.

He's lagging behind after hauling a sixty pound briefcase up that last hill. Waller can go first.

Morgan approaches the desk. "Good morning. I'm here to register for the conference."

"Do you have your invitation with you?"

Her words are stilted, almost robotic.

It's in the front pouch of the briefcase, still in the torn envelope it was delivered in. As far as anyone could tell, it was printed on a mundane sheet of A4 printer paper by a laser printer with the forensic pattern deposition feature disabled. She retrieves it.

The woman behind the desk takes the letter and promptly discards it on the ground unexamined.

"Name?"

"Doctor Morgan Waller."

"Which institution issued your doctorate?"

"Stanford. Why, planning to check?"

"Yes. Take one of the brochures."

Maybe they've had to deal with too many 'doctors' who've never been to medical school? That seems like the kind of problem you could run into, hosting an event like this. Hopefully the registrar's office doesn't ask too many questions when they get the call – they only have one asset employed there and she's already overworked.

She takes one of the brochures and flips it open to read the annotated map of the country club.

"Doctor Herbert West. MD from Zurich, PhD from Miskatonic." He hands over his own invitation and picks up a brochure.

It has some useful information, but the branding came from the venue rather than the event. The tagline welcomes them to Celestial Greens LLC, complete with a logo of a smiling unicorn in a golf visor with a putting green in the background.

Wherever you go, you're never far from Celestial Greens! 🦄⛳

The map divides the ground floor of the building into a handful of different areas. Apart from the cafeteria and the auditorium, the rest are labelled with different medical specialties. Some of them are familiar: infectious disease, immunotherapy, genetic screening, radiomedicine. Others are more concerning. Morgan is morbidly curious about 'pseudoelective surgery' and 'augmetics'. Part of the atrium is simply labelled 'trade show', with no mention of who or what will even be there.

The attendant checks off two rows on the paperwork and sets down her clipboard.

"Doctor Waller, you'll be staying in room 301. Doctor West, room 217. Take your hotel keys on the way in. The opening ceremony begins in ten minutes."

She sits back in her chair, completely motionless.

He glances down at the briefcase.

"We should see about having a bellhop take this to your room, or else store it in a cloakroom if you need it today."

"Good idea," she says, watching the attendant closely to see if her chest has stopped moving. "Say, do you know why there are two neurology divisions? Half the room is marked 'reductive' and the other half is marked 'holistic'."

"Depends on where the information is stored."

Morgan startles, adrenaline rushing through her veins. She's going to have to start paying more attention to her surroundings if she doesn't want to have a nervous breakdown before lunch.

(She is not normally this jumpy, but something about walking into another universe has her on edge. She prefers to stay far, far away from Red Sea Objects.)

This time it's another fair-haired, soft-voiced young person. However, despite ostensibly being a twelve year old girl, this is potentially the most menacing person Morgan Waller has ever encountered – and she met O5-11 less than a week ago. There's just something about her eyes that makes Morgan feel like running is futile. She's wearing a stained white smock over a cornflower blue dress, and is accompanied by a floating humanoid figure in a shapeless hospital gown.

"Hello, Miss Davis."

"Hiya Herbie! Good to see you again. Nice to meet you too, lady."

"My pleasure."

"Hey, meatbag! Bonesaw has arrived."

She pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of her front pocket and flicks it at the attendant.

It bounces off her face and lands on the table. She doesn't even blink.

"Which institution is your doctorate from?"

"Do I look like Doogie Howser to you? Don't answer that question."

"Room 303, Bonesaw. The opening ceremony begins in nine minutes."

"Gotcha. Right, lady, let's say you're working on a brain and all the information you care about is stored in the central nervous system – that's reductive neurology. Herbie knows all about that stuff. But then, let's say you're doing exploratory neurosurgery because you want to get at something intangible. Lotsa folks keep their selves outside themselves, and there's some other nifty stuff out there you can't pin down inside a cranium with your forceps, you know? That's more on the holistic end."

"So goes the theory," West says bitterly.

Are they just discussing anomalies now? While there's an anomalous bald girl, floating right there? Apparently so. Neither of them are acting like this is weird, so neither will she. Time to earn some brownie points.

"A lot of psychic phenomena are higher-dimensional by nature. That's how they do the seemingly impossible. If you aim a laser at the moon and flick it from one side to the other, the illumination will travel faster than the speed of light. A perspective embedded in that surface would see something they couldn't explain in the framework of special relativity. The idea generalizes to three dimensions."

"I understand the principle of it – I read Flatland as a child, it was surprisingly didactic and entertaining for a story about talking polygons – but what's always evaded me is the reason. Why would higher-dimensional phenomena pass through the Earth as chill winds and apparitions of the dead?"

… he's got a point there.

Bonesaw holds up two fingers. "Two types of paranormal activity. First, the artificial. Watches have watchmakers. Second, the natural. Brains kinda look like floppy watches if you squint at 'em, but they happened in a stones-rolling-down-a-hill sort of way. I've been studying the shape of that hill, trying to see what makes psychic clocks tick – that's why I brought Gemini."

She pats the floating girl's leg. She drifts with the force of it in a mechanical way, like an ice cube sliding across a flat surface, but otherwise still looks like she's been snowed with midazolam.

"You induced voluntary levitation in a human subject?" Morgan blurts out.

"Psh! Nah, she could do that already. There's a giant thingy standing about a foot away from us along the W-axis holding her up – I call 'em passengers, 'cause they just mooch around in the temporal lobe without paying rent. Anyhow, her mind was already sensitive so I figured she'd make a good pilot study for testing how mental powers develop. Here, I'll give you a sneak peek for my talk later."

She grabs the hem of the hospital gown and yanks it aside.

Beneath the gown, the floating girl's body is depilated but otherwise ordinary – apart from the torso. The skin and fascia are split apart from throat to groin, and in its place are what looks like the head and shoulders of a completely different person. A fragment of a teenage boy occupies the entire body cavity in place of her organs. His head is affixed to where the girl's sternum ought to be, and a single arm protrudes from her belly like a grotesque umbilical cord. The empty space to either side of his face in her thoracic cavity is sealed with a transparent membrane, showing off a network of shielded cables and blinking lights threaded between the remains of her pectoral muscles. The rest has been artfully stitched closed, concealing whatever interventions are currently keeping them alive.

Neither of them have even the slightest alertness about them. The boy's arm sways limply in the breeze, no longer trapped by the hospital gown.

He leans in to inspect the joinery. "Impeccable work, Miss Davis."

Bonesaw kicks the ground bashfully. "Aww, shucks. They're siblings, I didn't even have to muck around much to get them histocompatible."

"Reminds me of that guy from the end of Total Recall," Morgan says. She waves her hand in front of the boy's face and gets no response. Their facial features are very similar – not counting the baldness, Morgan suspects that part isn't genetic.

"I was wandering through a destroyed town and found him like this," she explains. "Went back to his sister, told her I could save him, and Bob's your uncle! I figure, hey, do I really want to wait until conjoined twins fall into my lap, or do I wanna seize the initiative myself? Plus, they both had passengers already – weird things happen when twins get passengers. I didn't want to confound my experiment like that."

"What are your observations thus far?"

"I'm not sure," Bonesaw confesses. "I was hopin' for spontaneous telepathy, but that turned out to be a bust. Maybe they're off having accurate visions of the future where I can't see; I'm not a mind-reader."

Gemini technically had a second trigger event on the operating table, but Bonesaw has caused enough of those by now that it was less of an exciting learning opportunity and more of an unwanted complication during a fairly delicate surgery. Admittedly it was an unwanted complication involving lasers and hallucinatory aliens, which are the most awesome kind, but telepathy it was not.

This is a travesty. She's doing it all wrong!

"The important part is the mental link – once you have enough spare gray matter to work with, it has to be able to pass information around freely. What you need isn't just conjoined twins, you need craniopagus twins. Regular twins work too, if they already have a mental connection, and some non-twin people who have the right phenotype if you figure out how to screen for it. Then you do your active induction, whichever kind you're using."

That might explain why Case 70s are the way they are. If the passengers are using the corona pollentia in both twins and need to physically bridge them, one way to do that noninvasively is moving the twins on top of each other in the fourth dimension and running the bridge through the void.

"Huh. And what kinds of active induction are we talking about, traumatic events?" That would be convenient – Bonesaw is very, very familiar with trigger events.

"Early research into this stuff used crude methods to get the subject into the right mental state, mostly near-death experiences or heroic doses of LSD. That's the psychic version of shaking the vending machine until something falls out. I don't know what people do these days – I'm just a virologist. Maybe you'll find someone here who can show you the state of the art."

Morgan assumes there are hundreds of groups out there refining the methods of creating anomalies, given how fast the central directory of SCPs is growing, but that information is classified. She could look it up over the weekend if she wanted to (being a senior researcher has its benefits), but there would be pointed emails from RAISA waiting for her on Monday morning.

"Thaaaat might be a problem. His noggin was not in good shape when I found it. I could hotwire their central nervous systems together and shoot Gemini full of psychedelics but I'd be risking brain damage – more brain damage, I mean."

"Do you want me to—"

"Wow, would you look at the time? It's been five minutes!" Morgan almost-yells. "We're going to miss the opening if we don't get cracking. Let's go! If we hurry we might not have to stand at the back."

The conference center is packed with men and women and a minority of people who are neither. Some are inhuman, although never in a way that couldn't be the result of extensive and high-quality cosmetic surgery. The only commonality in the sea of attendees is the ubiquitous white lab coat. Everyone is heading in the general direction of the auditorium.

They're in time to get chairs near the back. Morgan ends up in an aisle seat behind Bonesaw and Herbert (Gemini is left to float overhead like a sad party balloon). She pulls out the brochure and looks through it again while they wait, trying to glean more of its secrets.

"Do you know who the hosts are?" asks the woman next to her. "I don't recognize their names at all."

"Neither do I. Hopefully we're about to get an introduction."

She snorts. "Hopefully the introduction ends at some point. You know events like these, they're thrown by blowhards who love the sound of their own voice."

"Been to a few, have you?"

"I've organized a conference or two in my time," she says, grinning. "Wasn't sure about this one, what with the mysterious door that turned my linen closet into a golf course, but doctors are the same all over."

Amen, sister.

At the front of the room is a podium beneath a silver screen. An overhead projector switches on, the lights dim, and the volume in the auditorium drops.

A man – woman? – person approaches the lectern.

"On behalf of myself and the rest of the organizers, I extend a warm welcome to those of us who are joining for the first time. Each of you are leaders in your field, and all of us are grateful that you were able to attend. I am pleased to see a so many familiar faces as well – yes, hello to you too – so many familiar faces in the audience right now. On behalf of the conference, thank you all for your contributions.

"On the topic of introductions, we have a normative policy of having people to introduce themselves and their personal areas of expertise in the context of technical conversations. We've found that this is the most efficient way of fostering interdisciplinary teamwork. I suppose I'm something of a partial exception, giving this speech, so I will simply say that my name is Orochimaru. Some of you may have heard of me."

Laughter ripples through the audience.

"The primary goal of the next two days is professional development. Our focus is on the sharing of practical knowledge and experience in the biological sciences, which as you know covers a wide variety of overlapping scientific disciplines. Vita brevis, ars longa, and so I will restrain myself to a few practical remarks before allowing you all to get started.

"First, we had a number of last-minute cancellations which need to be addressed. I will be filling in for Fabius Bile during today's seminar on human cloning, although my talk is one I'm sure many of you have heard me give before. Paul Moreau and Prudence Cartwright will also not be attending this year's conference. If anyone would like to take their scheduled slots tomorrow, please reach out to me or one of the other organizers by the end of the day."

The projector switches to a photograph of Orochimaru and two other people: a horned woman and a long-haired man with an exposed ribcage. All three of them are smiling and waving.

She's going to have to find these people and talk to them, isn't she.

At least they won't be hard to find.

"Second, Celestial Greens has kindly opened their facilities to us for the duration of the conference. The fitness center, sauna, and badminton court are available on a first come, first served basis. The golf course, which I am assured is an unforgettable experience, has a signup sheet for tee times at the front desk. The swimming pool has already been requisitioned; while it is also free to use, be warned that it currently has a substantial amount of potassium cyanide dissolved in the water and at least one occupant. The bar is open – please do not use the ethanol from the chemical stores for recreation."

"I knew this would be fun," she hisses under her breath.

"Third, I'd like to thank Celestial Greens for agreeing to work with us this year. In previous years this declaration of gratitude has been accompanied by a stern and sober warning to remain cordial towards our hosts, but this year it is less of a warning and more of a promise." The speaker rolls his – her? – eyes. "Celestial Greens is located in a pocket dimension with different metaphysics. As it has been explained to me, mortality is contagious. Should anyone visiting the country club pass away, regardless of the circumstances, expect the rest of your stay to be short and extraordinarily unpleasant. I trust that this will not be a problem? Good."

… on the bright side, this is strictly better than one-oh-six's pocket dimension.

This doesn't sound like a problem to Bonesaw.

Pass away for how long?

"This should be all that you need. Destroy your curiosity, and become stronger."

Orochimaru vanishes in a puff of smoke.

That sounded like a dismissal. The slow, shuffling exodus from the auditorium begins.

"Smashing! There's a gin and tonic with my name on it at the bar, 'scuse me dear." She pushes her way past Morgan and disappears into the crowd.

Bonesaw is quickly engrossed in a discussion with the doctor next to her, a skeletal man with wispy hair who claims to be an American psychiatrist, on the history of LSD in psychic bioengineering. Gemini hovers nearby, third arm dangling through a gap in the hospital gown.

"… I'm going to check out the trade show."

Then so will he.

They're ahead of the pack!

The trade show is set up in the west wing of the country club; few of the attendees have beaten them there. Rows upon rows of booths line the halls, every iniquitous facet of the healthcare industry laying out its wares for the discerning mad scientist to peruse. In between baleful steel contrivances and free samples of noxious elixirs are stacks of branded notebooks and pens with corporate logotypes on the barrel. A few people in the same bland uniform as the woman at the door stand around, unmoving.

"Glenn! You're working this year?"

A man in a green shirt waves at him from the nearby RejoovenEsense sales team, beckoning him over.

"I'll see you later, Doctor Waller," he says, leaving her behind to catch up with his friend.

Awesome.

Morgan is now free to wander through the trade show, whispering the names of the companies under her breath as she passes them by. Most of them are in the business of making drugs or medical devices, albeit without FDA approval. She's withholding judgement on the pharma companies, but some of the surgical tools seem… pointless? Cruel? Pointlessly cruel? One company appears to be hawking an endotracheal tube covered in metal spines— actually, no, she can't let that one go without at least asking.

"Hi there," she says cordially, approaching the table. "I'm curious, what are the spikes on this for?"

"They're to hold it in place," says the salesman. "Stops it from coming loose if it's pulled on."

Morgan was under the impression that 'comes loose if pulled on' was a desirable feature in ET tubes. Traumatic extubation is at best highly counterproductive.

"I see. And, how is it that it's meant to be inserted and removed?"

He runs his hand down the length of the tube. The spines, slightly slanted, flex obligingly.

"Then, when you want to extubate, you press this button here…"

The spines fold back into the tube while the button is depressed. He runs his hand the other way.

"Do you find that physicians have this problem often, in your experience?"

"All the time," he says knowingly. "I spent so many years hearing about patients pulling out their central lines that I decided to go into business. That was my first product – I've got one right here, take a look."

The product in question is a hybrid between a venous catheter and a whaling harpoon.

There is no mechanism for safely removing that one. Morgan doesn't even have to ask – it's written on the packaging.

She keeps going.

At the end of this row is a booth for Sentry Chemical Procurement, managed by a young woman with an intense expression.

?

!

No. Absolutely not. This was not in the briefing nor on the mission agenda, what in the secret fucking name of God are they doing here—

"Doc! What've they got you doing here?"

"… giving a talk."

Oy vey. The Foundation silos all activity by default, but there are not one (the central directory), not two (RAISA), but three (O5 Command) separate administrative mechanisms that ought to have warned her about prior Foundation contact with the anomaly before she walked into it. This is a horrific case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

(By most standards. If you were to discuss all such cases ranked by how objectively embarrassing they were it would be a very long time before you were no longer talking about any of the so-called Antimemetics departments. Anything involving memory erasure immediately becomes more complicated than the plot of a time-travel thriller novel. Still.)

Someone is going to pay for this, and it won't be Morgan.

"Mental how they won't stop to say they're sending two birds in at once," she says wonderingly.

"Are you here looking for a moonshot chemical?"

The Foundation has used amnestics to maintain the veil since its inception. The two most common categories are class A (drugs that disrupt memories formed in the last six to twelve hours, typically more effective when those memories are intense or unusual) and class B (incremental retrograde amnesia working backwards from the present, which invariably requires five minutes of plugging formulae into a calculator to get the right dosage), but there are others with more specialized effects. Class A amnestics are the workhorse of the Foundation's rapid response task forces – and most of them are anomalous.

The active ingredient in the most commonly-used class A amnestic is Compound Y-909, and while its source is classified (Morgan has heard it called "eel slime", which is evocative enough to make her stop asking questions) its anomalous nature is not. Various other amnestics come from or are themselves SCPs, a state of affairs the Ethics Committee considered a necessary evil until the late 20^th century. The ongoing research program into mundane amnestics has seen mixed results. The most successful among them, a class A with a shelf life measured in days, has the side effect of replacing lost time with memories of a state of euphoria. This has lead to several highly ironic scandals beginning with stolen goods or research, followed by the emergence of an underground drug trade or illicit manufacturing lab, and inevitably ending in collapse as everyone involved forgets what's happened.

That is not the Foundation's problem – curbing the abuse of mundane drugs is outside their mandate and the secret is self-keeping to a degree – but the need to develop newer and better amnestics has weighed on the Pharmaceutical Department for decades. The conference is certainly fertile ground for that kind of research. This is the only reasonable explanation Morgan can think of for Kelsey's presence today.

"Aye, and to see about making inroads. Have to keep the wheels of progress turning."

Foundation departments with weak management trend towards causing more problems than they solve, a tendency that people like Morgan Waller are hired to keep under control. Employees that cannot perform are amnesticized and let go, committees that endlessly bikeshed are dissolved, but people who get results in unorthodox fashion are kept – kept on a short leash, but kept.

Morgan has a sudden suspicion that her presence here is not a coincidence.

"Have you considered not buying anomalous items from other dimensions? We get enough of those without soliciting them."

"Non-anomalous. And we're here to network, eh? Business-like."

"You're here to buy regular chemicals and meet people?" she says slowly.

"Nah, I'm here to run the booth. You're here to buy regular chemicals and meet people. Here's the shopping list."

Morgan stares at it blankly.

There's an explosion in her, waiting to come out. She is this close to decompensating like Krakatoa; the only thing holding her back is the crowd of strangers. Berating a coworker in public is simply not on – and yet, she still feels as though a strongly-worded interoffice memo won't cut it.

She takes the shopping list, closes her eyes, and counts to ten while imagining waves rolling in on the beach. Lets it all go.

"Okay."

"Next one's in fifteen. Some munter with a bucket on his head, can't miss it."

Morgan is perfectly calm.

"If I find out you had anything to do with this, I will nail your tongue to your desk," she says, perfectly calmly.

Is Morgan going to check out anything else at the trade show in the next fifteen minutes?

That depends on whether there's anything particularly eye-catching.

There's a demo of a massive, multi-limbed machine performing abdominal surgery in the next aisle.

…on a person?

No, it's a mannequin.

The interior of the mannequin is quite lifelike, though. The robot has peeled back the layers of the synthetic belly to expose a rubber gastrointestinal tract, four of its arms holding the skin and fascia still while two more repair a hernia with flawless precision. There are two staff members at the booth, both talking to other members of the audience – supposedly this thing is fully autonomous, although one of the salesmen claims it was built to complement human surgeons. Before their very eyes, the robot picks its stitches apart and closes the incision.

An emoticon of a smiley face briefly appears on the monitor facing the audience before it repeats the cycle.

That doesn't seem evil at all. Who made this?

According to the placard bolted to the chassis it's a Hummingbird Surgical System, designed by Anderson Robotics!

Nevermind! Morgan is instead going to leave, before the Anderson staff and the endotracheal tube guy and Kelsey and the engineers who think that creating cyborgs is a great idea instead of a nightmare realize they're all in the same room and start giving each other ideas.

Giving each other ideas? That's the whole point!

Fifteen minutes and one stiff Irish coffee later, Morgan makes her way to a seminar room near the back of the building. "Introduction to Genomic Engineering," according to the map – a field germane to her own interests, although as a virologist she prefers to study organisms with a single-digit number of genes in their genome.

She goes inside. It reminds her of a university classroom, with rows of chairs arranged facing a projector that currently shows a faux-crayon drawing of a DNA strand under a magnifying glass. It's nearly full. She takes a seat at the back, next to an unusually tall woman with charcoal-black skin.

A few seconds later, the man running the seminar enters the room. He wears cerise-accented power armor that makes almost no noise as he crosses the floor, complete with a helmet that admittedly does look sort of like an upside-down bucket. He adjusts the microphone towards his face and speaks in a deep, computer-modulated voice.

"Hello. At some point in your journey you may wish to create life. This is a moderately complicated process. I cannot devote time to every edge case in the period we are allotted, nor even to some more common pitfalls – this is an introductory lecture, not an entire course – but by the end you will hopefully know which questions to ask next. I will presume that you are familiar with the central dogma and the basics of trait inheritance; please save questions on those topics for the end."

Moderately complicated?

"I will cover the why first, before moving on to the what and the how. Custom organisms are well-suited for work that baseline humans cannot accomplish."

He clicks to the next slide, showing a cartoon of Albert Einstein performing an overhead press.

"The ultimate limits of human strength and intelligence are relatively low. Whichever metric one hews to, it's clear that the products of natural selection fall shy of what is theoretically possible. No matter how much weight a large man can bear up, he will never compare to the African elephant; in a similar fashion, while there are many ways to estimate intelligence, humans are limited by cranial hardware. The algorithm that produced us did not attempt to maximize anything beyond the capacity to continue one's lineage indefinitely. This reasoning can therefore be extended to other desirable traits, such as magical potential."

A woman in the front row raises her hand and speaks immediately.

"What about performance-enhancing drugs?"

"Useful for reaching peak performance – not for exceeding it. The maximum contractile force a human can exert with any muscle group is partially dictated by their skeletal geometry, which is generally unaffected by synthetic androgen use. The strongest man known to me cannot deadlift more than 2,500 lbs, even with extensive chemical assistance. As for nootropics, they are indicative of a problem in molecular biology to which I shall return shortly."

"All right."

"Once you have come to this conclusion, the natural next question: why new life and not machines? The world's strongest man is famously associated with an inventor and user of power armor, one who can lift 2,500 lbs over his head with no particular difficulty. Such devices are useful," he says, waving a hand at himself, "but must be designed to specification. They lack adaptability, and must be continuously re-engineered as your needs evolve.

"Of course, one might wish to combine the flexibility of conscious life with the calculating power of silicon and the strength of titanium. Accomplishing this in a satisfactory manner remains an unsolved problem in the field."

Next slide: a photograph of an asteroid approaching Earth.

"You are encouraged to experiment with artificial intelligence only in worlds that will not be missed when destroyed utterly."

"With that warning out of the way…"

He brings up another slide, this one a single photograph:

"The growth factor responsible for arresting muscle development is called myostatin. Unlike most genes, its English-language name is a reliable clue to its function. There are several naturally-occurring point mutations that silence myostatin expression, leading to mammals and birds with a gross surplus of muscle tissue. They are, as you might expect, significantly stronger than the wild type. Myostatin is an excellent starting point for your journey into creating transgenic life – it has a more dramatic positive impact than nearly any other individual gene.

"However, myostatin is highly conserved – many species have it, and it rarely changes. If you will forgive some anthropomorphism, natural selection likes myostatin. Can anyone tell me why?"

"Smaller babies, easier births, lower rate of maternal mortality?"

"An interesting guess. You may be surprised to learn that mothers with the knockout gene have easier pregnancy and parturition than the wild type. Anyone else?"

"The mind and the body draw from the same source," says the black woman. "As one waxes, the other wanes. All things in balance."

"Conservation of resources is the main reason, yes. One more, one more."

It looks like no one else is going to answer. Morgan is only passingly familiar with developmental biology, but one obvious guess is that sarcomeres don't always align perfectly on the first try and need myostatin to break down and reform.

"Do the muscles not grow correctly?"

"Correct. The deviation is subtle, but this bull is not quite as strong as a wild type bull with equivalent muscle mass would be. Genes do not code for traits, they code for proteins. Genes form regulatory networks that give cells their identity; phenotype traits emerge from this process after multiple levels of abstraction. MSTN knockouts cannot regulate their production of muscle tissue, which in the ancestral environment with limited access to food is a death sentence. They are also prone to ventricular hypertrophy and dysregulated blood pressure, since their cardiac and smooth muscles are equally overdeveloped, and modern technology cannot answer this challenge so easily.

"Transgenes are guaranteed to start chain reactions that touch organs and systems beyond the one you intended. Mutant phenotypes from a single gene are especially prone to this, as the single gene in question is almost always a transcription factor, responsible for many other genes. Regulatory networks exist in a local optimum – they can be improved upon, but not trivially."

He points at Elliot Mantle.

"This returns to the problem of nootropics. The brain is the most complicated organ, and intelligence its most complicated aspect. How can one drug enhance intelligence? One molecule alone, improving the functioning of such a well-oiled machine? Where such things exist, you must ask yourself: why has evolution failed to make this same discovery?"

"It didn't discover Vyvanse."

"For those who are not familiar, Vyvanse is a variant amphetamine drug invented to better comply with asinine restrictions on stimulant use. It is not a nootropic in the classical sense, but Dr. Mantle is partially correct: it does boost test scores. It is also less addictive than Sapho and less neurotoxic than NZT-48, which means it has a certain… popularity."

The bucket helmet remains motionless, but everyone can hear the sneer beneath the mask.

"Amphetamines enhance concentration by altering the reward system with dopamine and norepinephrine. The boost to executive function is limited by the number of neurotransmitter receptors in the mesolimbic pathway, among other things – high doses of strong amphetamines cause euphoria. Furthermore, the reward system is not especially brittle, but neither is it infinitely malleable. Deleterious side effects take decades to manifest, too long to be relevant for the average medical student looking to pass their next exam, but more effective nootropics undermine correspondingly more important regions of the cerebral cortex."

Blah blah blah drugs are bad, m'kay? Hopefully there's a booth in this joint where she can buy Sapho – if this guy feels the need to warn them about how addictive it is, it's going in the jungle juice at the next house party.

"There are a huge number of possible targets to consider in this space. I will lay out a few more to whet your appetites, in roughly ascending order of complexity. By show of hands, how many of you are from worlds where humans sporadically exhibit supernatural powers?"

Most of the audience raises their hands, Morgan and Semirhage included.

"And is the supernatural known to run in families?"

Most people still have their hands up. Morgan dithers for a bit before lowering hers – some genetic phenomena have been classed as anomalous but most humanoid SCPs are just people with outrageously bad luck.

"Not unusual at all. It was this precise observation that first piqued my interest in esoteric genetics. I had the good fortune of stumbling upon a relatively straightforward instance."

He clicks to the next slide, a human karyogram with several different loci circled in red.

"The X-gene, so named because of its location on the q arm of the X chromosome, is found in the genome of a small number of humans, apparently independent of geographic location or ethnicity. In most human X chromosomes it is not merely silent, it is absent. Expression of the X-gene was shown to be near-perfectly correlated with potent supernatural abilities. When I first obtained a sample of mutant DNA as an undergraduate student, I extracted the X-gene and established an E. coli bioreactor to secure a steady supply of the protein. At the time, I was convinced that the protein was the source of those superhuman abilities. Now, why was I mistaken?"

"Protein got misfolded by the E. coli."

"It needs magic to become a magic protein."

"The X-gene only works when paired with the Y-gene?"

"Red herring!"

"There is no Y-gene. Female Homo sapiens superior exist, although skewed inactivation means there are about twice as many males. 'Why' is an open question."

He goes back to the muscular cow slide.

"Like MSTN, the X-gene codes for a transcription factor. The mutant phenotype comes from millions of genes scattered across thousands of genomes – all with an identical promoter region. It is unclear who first discovered this fact, as there was no seminal paper published on the subject. The earliest use of this knowledge was likely the anonymous individual who released 492 winged monkeys in Central Park six months after my first failed experiment, as they were later found to have been created using DNA from Warren Worthington III.

"With that in mind, I acquired a tissue sample from Scott Summers and isolated the nineteen other genes responsible for his powers. Then…"

All right, moment of truth: what crime against nature did this man commit?

He skips ahead again. On the projector is a photograph of a dark-furred lab rat with glowing red eyes, being held and stroked behind the ears by a person wearing a white coat. It looks remarkably self-satisfied, for a lab rat.

"Twenty transgenes are sufficient to convert the eyeball into a dye laser. The basal layer of the sclera is mirrored below the retina, turning the interior into a concentric resonating cavity. The optic nerve is adapted into a laser pump; the vitreous humor serves as the gain medium. The cornea is partially reflective, which impairs vision somewhat but acts as a beamsplitter for the output. This rat, in addition to being perfectly healthy, can produce kilowatt 640 nm laser beams from each eye."

… what an unfortunately adorable crime against nature.

Semirhage's English is not strong enough to follow this discussion. It does not sound like he forcibly linked the rat to the One Power, despite the glowing eyes. In fact, it sounds like the glowing eyes may have been the entire point? She'll have to ask what a 'dye laser' is some other time.

"This research not only contributed to our ability to turn living cells into lasers, but to our ability to create mutant clones. The rat was born with no congenital defects and passed all of her medical examinations with flying colors—"

— until she figured out how to slice through the latch on her cage and scared his roommate into killing her with a desk lamp while she raided the pantry, rest in peace Nyarro—

"— which paved the way for more ambitious work. The Cyclops genes are among the easiest to transfect into other mammals. Jean Grey has on the order of 32,000 total genes, close to four billion base pairs. Charles Xavier's more modest 29,000 genes are interspersed through thousands of plasmids, a type of circular DNA that exists independently inside the nucleus which would ordinarily be detected and destroyed by the immune system. It's a wonder neither of them are infertile…"

He shakes his head. It's always tempting to get into mutant chimerism and mitochondrial DNA, but he only has half an hour for this talk.

"Regardless, there is a pitfall in esoteric genetics that I would be remiss to not bring to your attention. It is of particular danger to unsophisticated practitioners, unless they are forewarned."

These people have 25% more DNA than the average human and weren't stillborn? They have children?

"Mendelian traits in humans are mostly of interest because they cause disease. Nevertheless, the ease of identifying the characteristic 1:3 inheritance pattern makes it straightforward to check whether a supernatural trait is truly caused by a single gene. Sex-linked traits are even easier. If you believe a supernatural trait to be caused by a single gene, and that gene is not a transcription factor, and you can find no other grounded explanation for the trait, attempting to tinker with that gene may be dangerous.

"This is because, as one of you so astutely informed the class, 'it needs magic to become a magic protein.' There are two possible explanations. In the first, another genomic engineer has designed a simple allele lock to regulate access to an external magic supply. They may not take kindly to you interfering with their work. In the second, a natural phenomenon you do not adequately understand is acting on a material you have large quantities of in the same building as you. Rectify your understanding before proceeding."

Mad scientists rarely heed warning unless spelled out in dire terms, so he'll do his best to make this one stick.

If only people were born with this intuition, instead of having to learn it the hard way.

"The frontier beyond plagiarizing other scientists is plagiarizing evolution. Unlike your peers, the blind idiot god has spent billions of years refining its work. Also unlike your peers, its genomes are path-dependent and have an abysmal signal-to-noise ratio. I will say this until it sinks in: genes do not code for traits. For the most part they do not code for anything. If you wish to add the torpedo ray's electric organ or the elephant's prehensile trunk to an unrelated organism, it cannot be done by cutting out the 'electric gene' or the 'trunk gene' and injecting it into the zygote on your desk. Those genes do not exist."

He pauses briefly.

"Of course, it can be done. Let me show you how."

His audience is roughly an even split between people who are incredibly skeptical and people who don't have enough context to be skeptical.

(Anyone who'd be unimpressed by this feat has other things to do with their time – this is Introduction to Genomic Engineering, not Advanced Topics in Genomic Engineering.)

"The important regions of DNA have shockingly little variation. The building blocks of life are time-tested, rarely needing improvement: nuclei, ribosomes, mitochondria, vacuoles, and so on. The disparity of species – and individuals, for that matter – comes from a relatively small number of what are called morphogenic proteins. Like drops of blood in a glass of water, morphogens create overlapping chemical gradients that cells can read to learn their location and identity. The rest of the body plan is arranged by cells communicating with their neighbors, activating some systems and silencing others, selectively bonding to form membranes and mechanical parts. It is remarkably elegant.

"Learning what morphogens do is a matter of deleting them from the genome and observing what does not happen. If you are the first to try this for any given protein, please refrain from immediately naming it after the first thing you see it do, as morphogens are each responsible for several aspects of development. The morphogen system that handles the dorsal-to-ventral axis was initially called wingless, because of how fruit flies grew when it was damaged. It was later discovered to be responsible for far more than that and was renamed wingless-related integration, because biologists from my homeworld do not learn from their mistakes.

"Once you have determined all the morphogenic systems involved in the patterning of your choice, it is not enough to splice those genes wholesale into a new host. Activating those genes is contextual – their promoters are tuned for cell locations prescribed by a higher level of morphogenic direction in the original species. When you are more comfortable with genomic engineering you will be able to design new binding domains that operate the donor genes in tune with the host's body plan, but as a beginner I found it much easier to transfect cells as the embryo developed."

Next slide.

That… is either a picture of a human infant with an elephantine trunk, or a convincing forgery.

Morgan has several questions, two of which are "why" and "how". She is admittedly also curious as to what complications the procedure had, and whether this man's homeworld is so infested with abnormal human physiology that he felt he could get away with this in the long term. Is this what happens on Earths without normalcy organizations?

"An elephant's trunk is a muscular hydrostat, much like a human's tongue. They call for some clever design tradeoffs, which have not only been solved by evolution but implemented in both species. By transfecting the morphogens for muscular hydrostat development into the cells of the frontonasal prominence, the region began to develop more like a tongue than a nose. Additional morphogens were required to ensure the nasal passages formed in the body of the trunk, but at the level of muscle groups it was unnecessary to micromanage the transition. Paired muscles were able to identify one another and grow in tandem using existing human gene regulatory networks – a shortcut which cannot always be counted on, especially for more exotic modifications – and so on for innervation, angiogenesis, and the other necessary features of any body part.

"Bear in mind that this will take trial and error. Finding the morphogens you need is the easy part. The hard part is using them without damaging other critical systems. It does you no good to add the genes you want if the resulting organism is born with four heart defects and no kidneys. Less is more."

What is with these people and wanton human experimentation? First Dr. West, then Riley, now this armored megalomaniac. Couldn't he have made a dog with an elephant's trunk instead?

"You waited until week four to turn a baby into a GMO? What about placentation, how did you reimplant it without terminating?"

"The procedure was conducted in utero."

"Whoa. Where'd you find the mother who agreed to that?"

"I ran an advertisement in the classifieds of the New York Times," he says, irritated by the repeat interruption. Finding a woman willing to put up with an abnormal pregnancy For Science™ was not the onerous part – arranging for childcare was much, much harder. "It took less than—"

"The nose is much shorter than a young elephant's nose, if they were the same size," Semirhage says thoughtfully. "The width also, it is not the same."

"Elephants are much larger than humans; there was far less antenatal hormone exposure, even accounting for the mother's exogenous sex steroids. There may also have been—"

"How did you get enough of the cells expressing elephant growth factor to stimulate the process in the first place?"

"Did the primary palate form correctly?"

"Why are the eyes—"

He taps the microphone twice, sparking a painfully loud burst of feedback.

"Thank you," he says, once everyone's taken the hint. "There were no issues with the primary palate. One instance of maxillofacial surgery was necessary to repair cosmetic defects, but otherwise the experiment was a success. As to the implementation details…"

"… in this case we used a modified adeno-associated virus, which has the useful property of not integrating the elephant DNA into any host chromosomes. Wild type AAV can integrate, targeting 19q13, but for embryonic modifications such integration is unwanted. Localized expression of the elephant morphogens during the pregnancy itself was sufficient – the trunk's development post-partum was accomplished entirely via human proteins. AAV has a limited payload size, which can be problematic if a single segment of foreign DNA is more than 4,400 bases in length, but this will usually not be the case. The actual injection was several different AAVs in the same micropipette."

"There are more ways to tinker with DNA than you have months in which to learn them, but for our purposes there is a single best method. Transforming embryos is highly specialized, done by clamping a single cell in place and piercing it with a micrometer pipette…"

What follows is a remarkably ordinary explanation of how to use IVF tools to transfect mammal cells without heat shocking them first, by way of using a very small needle to pierce the nucleus. Once inside the nucleus, reverse transcriptases in the payload incorporate the foreign DNA into the genome, trading increased precision for the need to modify each embryo by hand. It's a worthwhile exchange, if you know what you're doing and plan accordingly.

This feels like being back in embryology class, only this time her instructor is a passionate genius instead of a geriatric moron with too many malpractice lawsuits under his belt. She pays rapt attention, typing notes into her phone as fast as she can.

The lecture concludes with a few remarks on existing research for aspiring newcomers to the field, followed by the inevitable.

"Does anyone have any questions?"

Most people raise their hands. Elliot just starts talking.

"You've implied that the rate of off-target edits is a rounding error – definitely not my experience with germline cas9 editing, we had fatal mutations about half the time, made it impossible to do more than two or three genes per embryo. What was the solution?"

"This was an issue with earlier versions of the CRISPR method using the original enzyme from S. thermophilus. Modified versions of cas9 with lower DNA binding affinity have much lower off-target rates, closer to ten percent for each gene, and restriction endonucleases specific to the desired target site have virtually no problems whatsoever. We still had some failures, mostly due to equipment malfunction, but customizing everything beforehand substituted a lot of paperwork for even more labwork."

"Where were you ordering the enzymes from?"

"Oscorp and Illumina-Fisher. Anyone else?"

"Did you use the same process for all the uplifts or is it unique to each species?"

He emits a computer-modulated sigh.

"Everyone who has questions about uplifts, please lower your hands."

Almost everyone lowers their hands.

Typical.

"True intelligence enhancement is its own subject. I will request one of tomorrow's open seminar slots to give it a more thorough treatment, since there appears to be some demand for it. Does anyone have any questions unrelated to uplifts?"

"How did you discover so many safe harbor sites? What was the payload division scheme, by chromosome or by upstream dependence? Did you grow all of the embryos in vivo, or just the human ones? Was this research legal? Where was your revenue coming from?"

He checks the clock in his suit's HUD.

"I have tee time in thirteen minutes. Care to discuss this more while golfing?"

Score! Potentially in more ways than one, assuming this is a person and not an android. Maybe even then, Elliot's not picky. She gives him a thumbs-up and sits back, satisfied.

That seems to mark the end of the interesting questions. Morgan has a few herself, but at this point she just wants to collect Kelsey's delivery and leave. She waits in her seat until people start trickling out, then gets up and approaches the podium.

"I'm with Sentry," she says, opting for 'bored' rather than 'impatient'.

He nods.

"One moment, please."

He retrieves an incongruously rustic leather bag from somewhere on his person and dumps its contents on the podium: a sheaf of papers, two fist-sized gemstones, something that looks a bit like a Star Trek phaser, and a bundle of Falcon tubes held together with rubber bands are the first things to tumble out. He offers her the tubes.

"Twelve doses of super soldier serum, Abraham Erskine's original recipe. I have the package insert here as well…"

He plunges his arm into the bag, well beyond where the bottom ought to be, groping blindly.

"Didn't you say performance-enhancing drugs were, uh…?"

"'Super soldier serum' is both a misnomer and a common misconception," he says, still rummaging through the bag. "It's actually a radiation hormesis agent, invented in 1942 as a prophylactic against fallout from nuclear war."

"Where did the misconception come from?"

"What would happen to an ordinary man exposed to a massive dose of ionizing radiation? A man deliberately exposed to nitramene gas, or an unshielded man blasted with a thousand sieverts of gamma rays from a nuclear weapon, or a man injected with a venom gland's worth of polonium-210?"

"Those all sound like fantastic ways to die slowly and painfully."

"Modern problems require modern solutions."

He pulls out a folded sheet of paper, tucks it into the elastic band on the Falcon tubes, and leaves without further elaboration. Doctor Mantle follows him out.

The package insert helpfully informs her that this drug is incredibly toxic and should only be administered in anticipation of acute radiation poisoning. Common side effects are indistinguishable from radiation poisoning; the list of uncommon side effects is five pages long and written in painfully small font.

So, reading between the lines, this is a potentially-anomalous drug that temporarily renders you immune to radioactive waste in exchange for spinning the roulette wheel of bizarre outcomes. Not a bad idea if this is somehow mundane – most things are better than acute radiation poisoning – but it's looking more likely that Kelsey was just lying when she said this was a regular chemical. The name 'super soldier serum' should've been a clue, in retrospect.

Morgan is hit with the temptation to flush it all down the toilet and claim that she and Kelsey never met up, but the way today is going she's worried it'll turn this golf course into a Superfund site haunted by giant sewer reptiles before she's safely back in Arizona.

She pockets the drug samples and goes to the cloakroom.

It is a beautiful day at Celestial Greens, and few of the horrible people here wore anything heavier than a summer windbreaker. The cloakroom is nevertheless jam-packed with their luggage. A disconcerting number of the bags and suitcases stacked against the walls have biohazard symbols and fire diamonds taped to their exteriors, to say nothing of the cages holding live animals.

An attendant wearing the same black tie uniform as the woman who handled registration watches Morgan impassively as she hunts for the briefcase, his eyes hidden behind dark shades.

It's at the back of the room, naturally. The thing she's looking for is the cell phone holstered in a charger on the side, a modified Foundation-issue Nokia 3310 (the internals are factory standard but the phone's reputed indestructibility has been enhanced from figurative to literal). They've got a miniature base station running in the office building on the other side of the door for her, which is how Morgan plans to vent her spleen request an update on the mission objectives before visiting the next mad scientist on the list.

"Can you take my briefcase up to room 301?" she asks the staff on the way out. No reason to leave it out here in public.

"Yes," he says, after a prolonged pause. He lifts the briefcase as though its substantial bulk is nothing to him and leaves with it, giving the impression that he has only recently learned how to walk using only two legs.

The Nokia's display shows no signal.

Moderately alarming. It's possible that radio waves can't travel through the doorway between worlds, but if that were the case she'd expect them to move the base station to this side and hide it behind the utility shed once her microphone cut out. Maybe the building is blocking the signal?

She goes outside, pointedly staring at her useless phone so as to give the (accurate) impression that she does not care to be roped into any ongoing conversations, even ones that would not make a bioethicist weep.

It is gloriously sunny; perfect weather for golfing. The hill on which Celestial Greens sits has a commanding view of an eighteen-hole course, surrounded by sparkling blue waters that fade into the distance in all directions. There is no signal until she makes it a few feet further away from the door, at which point she suddenly has four bars and the phone starts ringing.

"Upsilon-2, this is Waller,"  she answers, not bothering to hide the fact that she is both annoyed and scared. "Looks like there was a network outage—"

"Negative, your wire has been broadcasting continuously since you left Sedona. We started the call about ten minutes ago, only noticed there was a problem when you reached your phone and we couldn't hear the ring – I'll have one of the technicians look into what caused the delay, it's probably on our end. The chief pharmacist at Site-101 says you're supposed to… meet up with one of our guys in there?"

The fact that the MTF commander is phrasing it as a question and not a statement does not fill Morgan with confidence.

"Affirmative; I have the sitrep from Oliphant," she grumbles. "By the way, during your little chat with Vihaan, did you happen to get ANY-FUCKING-THING relevant to my mission from this CRITICAL UPDATE to which I was SOMEHOW NOT PARTY? Such as, for instance, details on the ALTERNATE FUCKING DIMENSION I blithely walked into with EFFECTIVELY ZERO INFORMATION?"

"We asked. The Pharmaceutical Department keeps records on the conference you're attending. They're unclassified, but none of them came up when we searched for Celestial Greens on the mainframe."

Because, Morgan realizes belatedly, the conference is held in a different location every year. The SCP doesn't reference Celestial Greens because the two haven't been associated before. The earliest anyone could've put the pieces together was when she read the name of the golf course off the pamphlet on the way in, at which point her Nokia was not only in another room but also having technical difficulties.

The fact that this isn't anyone's fault in particular takes most of the wind out of her sails. It's almost impossible for her to whip herself into a frothy rage over mistakes that can't rectified, since screaming at the uncaring cosmos as it doles out misfortune is much less productive than screaming at insufficiently careful employees before they can invite death and destruction into her lab.

She sighs heavily, feeling deflated. "Take the procurement list he gave you and run it by the HMCL supervisor. I have another thing to go to."

"Ma'am, the HMCL supe is just going to assign us a hazardous waste containment team."

Gosh, a HAZMAT team? What a distressingly predictable consequence of due diligence that would be.

"Do it anyways. Have someone read through the Pharmaceutical Department's containment procedures and text me if there are any instances of Foundation personnel dying or resigning within four months of visiting one of these places. Waller out."

She hangs up before he can get a word in edgewise. This weekend's grocery run is going straight to an analysis lab in a sealed neoprene bag, and no one whose primary qualification for this line of work involves firearms is going to contradict her.

The back half of the conference center is a dining hall, the largest room in the building by a fair margin according to the map. Most of the doors in and out have been closed and barricaded, funneling traffic to a chokepoint near the auditorium that the map identifies as an 'airlock'.

It is not an airlock. It's not even locked. There's an elderly man dressed in plain white robes sitting in a rocking chair next to the door, holding a lit censer on a chain with both hands, who could theoretically be a guard of some kind. He could also be asleep; it's hard to tell.

Morgan gamely attempts to enter the dining hall without interacting with the nonagenarian cultist.

Apart from being doused with the scent of burnt incense, passing through the 'airlock' does no apparent harm.

The dining hall has been filled to bursting with cubicle curtains to form an ersatz emergency room. Tall humanoid figures in bleached teflon suits roam the corridors, each of them gifted with an imposing, grotesque stature that their shapeless uniforms can't disguise. Neither they nor the cubicles' occupants are particularly loud. The far end of the dining hall is completely hidden by a red theater curtain hung from the ceiling – judging by the sound of unhinged laughter and pneumatic tools, that's where all the mad scientists are at work.

The whole room is filled with the sharp smell of carbolic acid, which was not especially noticeable from the hall outside.

The woman Morgan is supposed to meet isn't difficult to spot. She stands even taller than Semirhage, her body writhing and shifting minutely beneath an oversized medical gown. A pair of crude iron electrodes protrude from either side of her head at the temporal bone; rows of unhealed sutures divide her face into mismatched regions of different ages and colors. Despite her patchwork appearance she's remarkably pretty, a masterwork of plastic surgery. Some might call her inhuman, but humans are the only thing she's made of.

She's in the process of closing a subcostal incision on a jaundiced man in one of the cubicles, though her position allows her to see Morgan the moment the door opens. She tosses his gall bladder into an emesis basin and waves at her.

"You must be Doctor Waller!"

Everyone is bizarrely enthusiastic about their work here – it's not the weirdest part about this place, but it does make the top ten.

"What gave it away?" she asks dryly.

"The CME starts doesn't start until four so that's not it, and you haven't brought any equipment so you're not helping with the construction project either. I suppose you could be here to ask for my help with a rare, life-threatening medical condition?" she adds hopefully.