CONSTANTS

  While scrolling through that morning’s bombardment of emails, Dr. Sebastian Hale ashed his cigarette into yesterday’s coffee mug. Despite his glasses, he leaned in close to feign poring over memos and invites to staff luncheons. He was trying his best to look busy, in an attempt to ignore the mousy man sitting on the other side of his desk. There was no telling what he was there for, but Sebastian enjoyed testing the limits of strangers.

  They had sat in mostly silence, for nearly two cigarettes.

  “Are you allowed to smoke in here?” the man squeaked.

  This fucking guy, Sebastian thought, raising a questioning eyebrow at him. He shrugged off the question. “In my office?”

  “In the site,” the man clarified. “We’re underground.”

  “A mountain,” Sebastian corrected.

  “Sorry?”

  “We’re under a mountain.”

  “Is that not…”

  Sebastian shifted in his chair. “Who are you, again?” Before the man could answer, he pressed the intercom button on his phone. “Judy, who is this in my office?”

  “Dr. Edward Musick, I’m from—”

  Judy’s voice cracked loudly over the speaker. “That’s Edward Musick, Dr. Hale.”

  “Doctor,” Dr. Musick corrected.

  “What?” Sebastian asked, eyebrows furrowed.

  “Doctor,” the slight man repeated sternly. “Dr. Edward Musick. I’m with the Department of Ontology.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Music?”

  “Musick, yes. With a ‘k.’”

  “Right.” Sebastian’s eyes returned to his twenty-second scroll through a laundry list of nothing. To occupy himself, he kept count of that number, the number of times the words restroom and reprimand appeared in the subject line of an email, nineteen and five, respectively, and also the amount of times Dr. Musick had impatiently stroked his mustache. After two more strokes of his upper lip made it thirty, and Sebastian counted a twentieth restroom in his email headers, he turned his attention back on the man. “Is there something I can help you with, Ed?”

  Dr. Musick cleared his throat. “Yes, there is,” he said, pulling a letter out of the inner pocket of his jacket. “In fact, I think we can both help each other.”

  Taking the unsealed letter from the man, Sebastian made quick work of the envelope. He unfolded the piece of paper, and read it to himself.

  Dearest Doctor Sebastian M. Hale,

  You are compelled to help

  Doctor Edward L. Musick

  with whatever task he needs.

  Love,

  Mister Hippno

  Most confusingly, a pair of spirals had been hastily scribbled at the bottom. Sebastian turned the paper around to point at them, eyebrow raised. “What’s that about?”

  Dr. Musick averted his eyes, trying his best to hide that he refused to look at the page. “What’s what about, Dr. Hale?”

  Sebastian pointed emphatically at the page. “The seashells.”

  “Y-you mean—”

  Caught off guard by Sebastian’s supposed stupidity, Dr. Musick could not help but glance at what he knew were not seashells. His eyes slid across the words, found their way to the spirals, and then rolled into the back of his head.

  “I am compelled to help Dr. Edward L. Musick,” Dr. Musick said in a monotone stupor, “with whatever task he needs.”

  Sebastian crumpled up the piece of paper, and held it out across the desk. “Dr. Musick needs you to eat this,” he told Dr. Musick.

  The enthralled man snatched it from Sebastian’s hand, and then choked it down.

  “Now, Dr. Musick needs you to leave my office and go fuck yourself, Ed.”

  ~~~

  Later that morning, as Sebastian walked the stone halls of Archive VII to the cafeteria on floor 36, he fumed internally over the much closer break room’s missing sugar.

  There were two hundred and eleven packets earlier this morning. I counted. Twice, while the coffee brewed.

  There were plenty of other sweeteners available, mostly various kinds of sugar free substitutes, artificial or otherwise, and honey he could have used. The well-stocked break room even carried brown sugar, both light and dark, and redundantly, molasses. He considered using a number of them, mixing them, wondering what honey in coffee was like, before remembering he hated honey, even in his tea. When his eyes dragged past the Sugar in the Raw, of which there were one hundred and one, for the fourth time, he gritted his teeth and resolved to find the plain granulated sugar he preferred.

  How do two hundred and eleven packets vanish in three hours?

  From the break room just outside of his office, it would take him nine hundred and forty-five steps to reach the cafeteria. He knew that because there was little else to occupy himself with, when traversing the monotonous hallways of Archive VII, than the joys of counting. At his distracted pace, it would take him nearly ten minutes to reach the heart of The Monolith.

  Fifteen… sixteen… seventeen, he counted as he walked.

  One-third of Perpetual Site-02(The Monolith), Archive VII was located on floors 20 through 40 of the subterranean installation. Sandwiched between SecCon housing above, and the Civilization Restoration Program below, the archive was a backup of a backup of a backup, and acted as overflow for the more benign and banal VIOs in Blackwell care. Excavated by classified means, the history of the structure was by far the most interesting thing about it, if only by way of obscurity.

  Four years spent wandering, and pondering, the perfectly uniform, colorless halls, then researching as much as he could about it, Sebastian was no closer to understanding how it was constructed than when he began. His personal theory: a perpetual site, a place shielded from reality and time shifts, was required to be as complex as it was boring, and the mountain had simply bored itself the rock out of...well...boredom. Nothing else could explain the tediously gray monolithic structure, or its lack of decor.

  A prank, maybe? Two hundred and ninety-nine. Redistribution? Who even stocks the break room? Judy? I should have asked. Three hundred...

  In the cold, static corridors of Chronology, Sebastian stopped briefly to stare through a door that had been left open. Through it, the Unified Constant Timeline hung in the air, a brilliant orange and blue hologram of converging and diverging lines. It was being scrutinized by project leads, as dozens of researchers collated, refined, added, moved and removed dates and events from the tangle of it. He only broke away from his ogling, when someone happening by startled him.

  “Do you have clearance for that?!” Greta asked in a gruff, rapid fire way that sounded not unlike a drill sergeant. Then she broke out into chiming laughter, when she saw the look on his face.

  “Yeesh, Greta,” Sebastian groaned, hand on his chest. “Why do you always do that?”

  Greta Jung stood bright and smiling, in her lab coat, holding two cups of coffee in her hands. She was a research assistant working in the Chronology wing. Much more assistant than anything, Sebastian thought, if her running about the halls was anything to go by. Somehow younger than himself when he began working for Blackwell, she had not yet been ground down by the tedium of their surroundings. She had taken to expressing that energy by sneaking up on him any chance she got, after accidentally scaring him the first time they met. For her, it was hilarious, and for the first few times Sebastian welcomed the rush of adrenaline, until it became so frequent it joined the minutia.

  This is the one hundred and twenty-eighth time in two years, he thought.

  “Why’re you always skulking around the halls?” she asked him playfully. “Don’t you work here? Nothing better to do?”

  It was a set of questions she often employed against Sebastian’s own frustrated queries. He offered his own practiced reply.

  “Better than this?” he asked, gesturing sarcastically at her and himself, and the reoccurring situation. An exasperated half-smile sold his mood.

  Greta held the coffees up. “Anyway, I’ve gotta get these to—gah—,” she stopped to brush her blonde bangs from her eye.

  “No, yeah,” he turned to leave, “I’m on the hunt for sugar.”

  “Granulated?” Greta asked, pausing in the doorway. “The white stuff?”

  Sebastian stopped in his tracks.

  “Oh,” he turned around, with an epiphany on his face, “do you guys have an—”

  “Not a single granule! Break room’s all out, believe it or not.”

  “Of course,” Sebastian said, defeated, his brow furrowed in suspicion. Who took all of my sugar? He turned to leave, again.

  “Hey, hold up,” Greta hollered after him. “I’ll come with!” She disappeared into the lab, before he could reply.

  Three hundred and three… three hundred and four… three hundred and five…

  Sebastian considered leaving her, but knew she would just catch up, then spend the rest of the walk there joking about how offended she was. He preferred to not give her ammunition to pester him with, when he was more concerned with having another cup of coffee. Slowing down but not stopping, he resigned to wait for Greta, while trying his best to look like he had not. She’s not so bad, he told himself. At least she’s not the sugar thief.

  Out of Chronology, and into the dust covered warehouse of the Archaeology wing, Sebastian led the way at a brisk pace, Greta in tow, and questioning the route they were taking.

  Following the endless rows of drawers, filled with relics and tomes and other curios, meant that they were moving perpendicular to their destination, rather than toward it. It was, as she said, the much longer way to the cafeteria at the heart of floor 36. The direct route through the file cabinet circle of hell Sebastian oversaw would make the trip shorter, but he was far more likely to run into someone who would want or need to speak with him about something that was not coffee or the sugar related. Better the detours you know, he often thought.

  Five hundred… five hundred and one… five hundred and two…

  Exiting Archaeology, they scurried along the outskirts of the crowded, cubicle ridden offices of the Epigraphy and Linguistics departments. Despite the dull green carpet, and characterless workstations, the hustle and bustle of discovery filled the room with an air of excitement that Sebastian found enviable, and thus obnoxious. It would later fall to him and his branch to file away whatever breakthrough they had, sans joy. In only four years time, he had been relegated to a job he thought most people retired into.

  Seven hundred and fifteen… seven hundred and sixteen…

  “This is what I was talking about, Dr. Hale,” Greta said in a hushed way, despite having to yell over the din of the office. “Should we be here? I’ve never—”

  Sebastian snaked his way through a crowd, paying little mind to who he bumped into, as he went. “Eh, they don’t care,” he told her. “These office drone types aren’t as territorial as you labbies.”

  “Labbies?”

  Sebastian looked back at her, smirking, as he continued forward. “And I told you, you don’t have to call me ‘Dr. Hale.’” Usually, he would have preferred the title, when dealing with people who would prefer the formality returned. With Greta, it made him feel forty years older than her, rather than the six he was. “Sebastian is fine.”

  A man shouted, as Sebastian brushed by him, and stepped on his foot. “Ow! Hey!”

  “Ooops,” Sebastian said, without stopping. He winced dramatically at the man to play up his remorse. “Apologies!” Then threw a brief, half-smile over his shoulder to Greta, before nearly bowling over someone else. “Gah! Sorry!!”

  Eight hundred and sixty-four… eight hundred and sixty-five…

  A few more close calls, for which Greta found herself supplementing apologies, and the two of them made their way back into the anemic granite halls of The Monolith.

  Nine hundred…

  “All of that to avoid your staff?” Greta asked, eyebrow raised.

  But they were close to the cafeteria now, and Sebastian’s focus had turned inward. Nine hundred and twenty. He would soon have his sugar, and if he was lucky, someone would have an answer to his granulated mystery. Seriously, two hundred and eleven sugars? Nine hundred and twenty eight… nine hundred and twenty-nine. No one could possibly use that much sugar. A memory glanced off his mind: someone pouring not one, or two, or three, or four, but five sugars into their coffee. Her face was a pale smudge amid a streak of red hair. She probably could. Gritting his teeth, he tried to return to counting. Nine hundred and… forty? Forty one? No... What was I on?

  As he began to spiral, Greta’s voice cut through, with a phantom inflection. “Seb?”

  The nickname had become taboo to Sebastian. Hearing it was a hammer to his forehead, stopping him dead in his tracks. Stopping the spiral dead in its tracks. Only one person ever called him that. It brought with it a momentary transference of contempt.

  “Don’t call me that,” he told Greta, without turning to look at her.

  “Sorry?”

  When Sebastian realized he was standing five steps past the cafeteria’s double doors, fists clenched and shaking, he deflated with a sigh. She couldn’t know, he thought. Just a weird coincidence.

  Spinning around awkwardly, he flashed a brief, apologetic smile at Greta. “Just call me Dr. Hale,” he told her, before entering the cafeteria.

  Going from the dark halls to the bright, sterile lights and white linoleum of the cafeteria was blinding. Haphazardly closing his eyes to it, as he had done many times before, Sebastian nearly walked right into a group of people on the other side. Despite the abundance of other options in the sprawling room, the group had gathered around the table closest to the door. It was only their oohing and awwing that kept him from running right into someone.

  “You all know there’s a door here, right?” he asked them.

  “What is it?” Greta asked, as she pushed past Sebastian.

  Paying the two of them no mind, the congregation continued fawning over whatever it was they encircled.

  “Oh my gosh!”

  “She’s just so cute!”

  Someone mewed softly.

  “Is it a site pet?”

  Another person meowed loudly.

  “Lemme see!” Greta excitedly wedged herself into the group, becoming only a golden ponytail among the crowd. She squealed joyously when she saw what they were looking at. “Oh my god! Oh my god!”

  “Are we allowed to have cats in the site?”

  “Whose is it?”

  More annoyed than curious, Sebastian leaned in to peer over Greta’s shoulder.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  There, in the middle of the table, bathing, like it might on a sunny day, Sebastian saw a strange creature, soaking in every ounce of attention it was being given. A cat? His eyes began at its tapered tail, and followed its winding body across the table. Hairless and slender, and patterned in wavy, hypnotic markings of reddish-brown and dark orange, its limbless body wriggled in delight at the touch of one of its admirers. As Sebastian reached the other end of it, he squinted dubiously at the triangular ears atop its flat, pointed head. And when it turned around to look for a new hand to be pet by, he saw its face. With wide orbs for eyes, which spiraled to mesmerize, and the suggestion of a heart-shaped nose, whiskers affixed, it did not look completely unlike a cat, if not the strangest cat Sebastian had ever seen. It took a moment before it struck. Not a cat. Then an instinctive flinch ripped through him, like it might leap out to bite him.

  “Sn-snake!” Taking a step back, he put his hand on Greta’s shoulder to pull her away from harm. “That’s a snake!”

  The crowd laughed at him. “Snake?”

  “He’s lost it.”

  “Stop, Dr. Hale,” Greta told him coldly, as she shrugged out of his grip, before returning her attention to the cat that was not a cat. “Awww, look at you.”

  “That is a fucking snake!” Sebastian hollered.

  An offended hiss ripped through the air, and the crowd parted in unison. Their cooing and fawning continued at a distance. It seemed to grow larger from their adoration, if not its own rising anger. They watched in awe, while the snake slithered toward the edge of the table closest to Sebastian. Its eyes bulged and spun around in its head, trying to entrance him.

  A chill ripped through him. A variant, he thought.

  “Holy shit!” Sebastian cried out, putting his back up against the exit, as the realization took hold. “S-someone call SecCon!”

  Not simply just a cat that was not a cat, it was a snake that was not a snake. He had only ever been extensively trained on dealing with variants of the inanimate kind. Ancient tomes and scrolls and other antediluvian relics. The ones that only messed with you, if you messed with them; the kind that came with very specific instructions on how to handle them: always with care. But with the animate variants, the entities with anomalous, otherworldly properties, that wondered around with their own wants and needs, the training was perhaps overly simple, but all the same effective: run away and notify the nearest Security and Containment Team.

  “Greta!” He could not just leave her there. Greta had become a recurrent part of his life at Archive VII. Irritating, at times, but familiar. A near certainty. If Sebastian was ever wandering through the site, and he let his guard down, she would somehow find him. It was something he could count on, not unlike his footsteps or packets of sugar. Back pressed into the one way doors, he tried his best to get her attention. “Hey! Greta! Get away from it!”

  But her eyes, like everyone else, stayed locked on the snake, spiraling to mirror its own.

  “Greta!” Sebastian took a step toward her, toward the snake. “Get away from that thing!”

  It hissed, again, and reared its growing head back. As it sized him up, it became even bigger to compensate his gangly body. The table beginning to creak and crack beneath its weight, the snake opened its mouth to reveal an enormous fanged maw, now fit to accommodate Sebastian.

  Half-frozen in place, he closed his eyes to it, and reached out for Greta. “Greta, pleeaase!”

  Missing her, and grasping at only air, Sebastian was sure he was about to die, and do so in vain. Breathing down his neck, the hissing mouth of the great beast was upon him. And then—

  Someone was clicking their tongue against their teeth, from somewhere behind the snake, like they were calling a cat.

  “Cannella,” a man called out in a thick Italian accent, “that’s enough, my little micio!”

  The hot breath of the eared snake disappeared from Sebastian’s neck.

  Eyes still closed, he listened to it hiss in reply, then the table groan, again, when it turned and slid back across it. There was another sound, this time longer, like air leaving a balloon. The sound grew quieter and quieter as it moved away from him.

  When he heard the shuffling of feet, Sebastian finally opened his eyes.

  The group of snake worshipers, Greta included, were now standing around another table, with an older gentleman seated at it. Looking like he had just stepped off of the streets of Milan, the man was wearing black designer sunglasses, a light green jacket over a dark green vest, and a white dress shirt beneath it all to match his gaudy white pants. He had a gray, slicked back widow’s peak, and a well kept white beard. One hand was resting on the snake, now much smaller, as it lay in his lap. His other hand held a torn open sugar packet up to his mouth.

  The sugar thief, Sebastian thought.

  “Ciao!” the man bellowed. His head fell back, his mouth popped open, and he poured the sugar directly onto his tongue. When he was finished, he tossed it onto the table to join hundreds of other empty packets.

  “Gah…,” Sebastian’s face contorted in disgust, “…got bit of a sweet tooth, there, guy?”

  The man looked at the table, then back at Sebastian. “By the looks of it, more than one,” he said, with a perfect grin. Another glance at the mess, and he shrugged it off. “I should not have, but… how do you say?” A brief moment of contemplation passed. “When in Rome, yes?” Pleased with himself, he let out a breathy, galloping laugh.

  “What?” Sebastian’s look of disgust became one of irritated confusion. He looked around at the hypnotized group. His eyes held on Greta, before darting back to the snake, then up to the man’s smug grin. “What the hell is going on here? What’d you do to them? Who—”

  “Yes, yes,” the man interrupted, waving off his concerns, “you have questions, and I have answers.” Carefully, he scooped the snake up in his hands, and set it in the middle of the packet covered table. “Cannella,” he said, taking its eared face in one hand to better direct its attention. He waved his other hand around indifferently at the snake’s victims. “Say ciao, and send them on their way.”

  It lazily looked around at them all, with its spiraling eyes.

  After a moment, it yawned, then laid its head down, and let out a disappointed hiss.

  Suddenly, everyone snapped out of it.

  They all shared a look of confusion, yet still ignored the strangeness in front of them. When they returned to their lunch, Greta joined them.

  “Greta!” Sebastian called out after her. “Hey!”

  She walked over to the buffet line, paying him no mind.

  “Your friend is fine,” the man told him, before abruptly standing to present a chair to Sebastian. There was the jingle of keys at his hip, with every movement. “Now, come. Join me.”

  There was no doubt that the man, despite his enormous presence, was smaller than Sebastian. He wondered, for a moment, if he could take him in a fight. He’s old, at least, he thought. Picturing himself laying the guy out with a straight, he realized he would then have his pet to deal with. The fear he felt only a few moments ago, as the variant was bearing down on him, ran up his spine. He thought better of that approach. His training told him flight, not fight. Run and get an SCT, they’re right upstairs.

  But right upstairs was really twenty floors up.

  Seeing his hesitation, the man took a step forward. Then another jingle of keys.

  Closer to him now, Sebastian could see what looked like a 13 tattooed on his forehead, just above the bridge of his sunglasses. It was scrawled in thin, black handwriting, somewhat messily, as if the man had done it himself.

  “Perhaps, I should introduce myself, no?” The gentleman chuckled, taking another step toward Sebastian, and presenting his hand. “I am Cavaliere di Gran Croce decorato di Gran Cordone, il Signore Felice Tredici, Duca di Monte Sibilla,” he said in a flourish of Italian, “but you may call me Lord Tredici.”

  Caught off guard, Sebastian could not help but awkwardly shake the man’s hand.

  During the handshake, he took a moment to process it. Did he just cast a spell at me? he wondered. Most of it sounded like a rolling mess of nonsense to Sebastian. Everything but the last part. Monte Sibilla? That part sounded familiar, but because he had only ever read the name, and not heard it, the context escaped him. “Sorry, who? Lord Tredici, you said?”

  With a slightly offended sigh, Lord Tredici broke off the handshake.

  “You’re with Blackwell?” Sebastian asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here.”

  “An unfortunate thing,” Lord Tredici said on his way back to his seat, “to be seated so highly those below you do not even know your name.” As he sat down, he presented the chair across from him to Sebastian. “But I know you, Dr. Hale. A longtime associate of your mother’s, if that helps.”

  “My mother?”

  His mother, Eleanor Rose Hale, née Blackwell, was not only the niece of the Blackwell Foundation’s administrator, she was a member of its lauded Advisory Board. Formally known as Advisory Board Member-01, or AB1 for short, she raised both of her children to refer to her as such, as they would one day be required to call her that professionally. They were to follow in her footsteps, even though, her seat could only ever be filled by one of them. The Hales were a Foundation family through and through. However beautifully the story was told, the joining of the Hales and Blackwells was only ever about two things, and neither being love. The consolidation and furthering of power was the end all, be all, for both families. In that way, relationships became strained, if not completely broken, when Sebastian chose to become a lowly archivist. There was no route to the top of the mountain from a dusty, dark room beneath it, he often imagined his mother saying, if she had said anything to him, at all, since she found out about his position.

  Drawn in by curiosity, like the victim of a hypnotic snake, Sebastian sat down.

  “You’re an advisor?” he asked.

  “Molto bene,” Lord Tredici said, smirking as he nodded. “The fifth, to be exact.”

  Sebastian’s eyes jumped up to the number on the man’s wrinkled forehead. “Not the thirteenth?” There was only twelve board members, and he knew that, but a strange tattoo seemed to seek questioning. And he had been taught that the best way to get a proper answer was to assume the wrong one.

  Lord Tredici laughed in his breathy, rapid-fire way. He took off his sunglasses, and folded them up to stick in his breast pocket. Pointing a crooked finger at the tattoo, he smiled, his striking green eyes flashing gold in the light. “More a warning, than a designation, if you will.”

  “A warning?” he asked, raising a dubious eyebrow. “What kind of warning?”

  “One that one such as yourself mustn’t worry himself about.”

  One such as myself? Sebastian thought about continuing to play the parrot, but allowed the look on his face to question the man.

  “Tell me, Dr. Hale…,” Lord Tredici shifted in his chair, and crossed his legs. Lifting a loose wrist, he flopped his hand around, as if to lazily invite answers. “…how exactly is it you saw through Dr. Musick’s ruse?”

  Sebastian recalled that morning’s meeting, which now felt like it was weeks ago. So that’s what that was about? His assumption was that it had been some kind of security test meant to probe for weaknesses to noemahazards, a special form of variant object whose variant effect was activated by the perception of it. They could take countless forms: a sound, a word, an image, like a pair of spirals written on a letter, or a smell, a flavor, or even an entity, such as a strange snake. The only way to resist them was to have a high Mental Rigidity Value(MRV), which, to Sebastian, sounded too much like an insult, when he found out about his own. Off the scale, they had told him.

  “Every department lead has had noemetic training,” Sebastian told him. “There’s even a section about Mister Hippno and his spirals in the handbook.”

  Lord Tredici smiled knowingly. “As an example of why one should not so willfully read a random note or letter they might be handed or happen across. A warning.” His eyes pointed up, in the direction of the 13 on his forehead. “But a warning does not always betray the problem, or offer a solution beyond utter avoidance.”

  At first, Sebastian tried to keep up, but he could tell the enigmatic man enjoyed hearing himself speak. It was going to be a chore to parse information from his cryptic ramblings. “Sorry, what?”

  “I’m saying you have grown either careless, or never cared, about such training, because you have never once heeded that warning,” he leaned forward to pet the creature on the table. “Because you have never needed to.”

  “Yeah, my MRV, right?” Sebastian asked, certain he knew the answer. “A value of 10 or higher, ‘off the charts,’ I think they said.”

  Lord Tredici shook his head, and chuckled. “That is something required of every Perpetual Site staff member.” Looking around the cafeteria, he gestured at everyone sitting around them, eating their meals, and paying the two of them no mind. “In that regard, you are no more special than any other person here, myself included.” He put his hand on the snake resting between them, and it lifted its head to sleepily hiss at him. “Yet, everyone here, including myself, sees my Cannella as a cat, while you see...”

  “A weird looking snake,” Sebastian finished.

  The snake hissed angrily at Sebastian.

  “There, there, Cannella,” Lord Tredici said, with a comforting stroke of its head.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Today, you have crossed paths with no less than three variants,” Lord Tredici explained, holding up three fingers. He subtracted one. “Two of which are capable of not just altering the mind of its victim, but reality itself in order to do so. That means they are not your traditional noemahazard, and your resistance to them cannot be explained by a value system they are not bound to.” Subtracting another finger, he used his index to point at Sebastian. “Do you know what that makes you, Dr. Hale?”

  He said three variants, Sebastian thought, returning to his favorite pastime. Mr. Hippno is one, and this snake makes two. Lord Tredici’s question slid past his occupied mind. What was the third?

  Sebastian answered with his own inquiry. “You said three variants?”

  The well dressed man sat there in silence, offering nothing but a moment of contemplation.

  When it dawned on Sebastian, he could not help but glance up at the 13 on Lord Tredici’s forehead. I guess he makes three, he thought.

  “Your mother’s idea of a joke, I think. A cruel one, no?”

  Sebastian gritted his teeth. “AB1, you mean.”

  “A truly repulsive woman, if you don’t mind my saying,” Lord Tredici said, as if to agree with something Sebastian left unsaid. “But I digress.” His knowing smile became serious. “You see, when I first crossed paths with Blackwell, before even asking my name, they designated me VIO-013. And while I am not unreasonable, I am also no animal to be labeled and caged.” Despite his smile, the lord’s jaw had tightened. “They tried to rob me of my name and my title, calling me ‘variant’ and ‘object’ instead, but I could accept no such insult. So, I refused containment, and they refused my freedom. And for two decades, we played cat and mouse. Much was lost on both sides, until an impasse was reached. We settled on a deal: a partnership of sorts.” He writhed in his chair. “I say an occupation is a different kind of cage, no? One that both sides agree on the parameters of.” He scoffed. “But your mo—,” interrupting himself by clearing his throat, he continued more carefully, “—AB1 maintained that I had used my variance to finagle my way onto the board. A poor loser, if I have ever seen one, but a willful one.” Pointing to the thirteen on his forehead, he grimaced. “Managed to mark me, while my back was turned. A warning to all who met me, she said.”

  He finished with a dramatic dry spit.

  “Right,” Sebastian said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. His best attempt at a poker face stretched across his face. “I-If this is about getting back at her…,” he paused to choke on the words, the thought of it, “…if you think she gives a shit about me. If that’s what this is abou—”

  “Dio mio! No, no,” Lord Tredici said, shaking his head and laughing at Sebastian, “I think I’ve said either too much, or not enough. No, Dr. Hale, this is not about who you are, but what you are.”

  “What I am?” Sebastian hoped he looked as bewildered as he felt. “What am I?”

  “Uffa! What are you?!” Putting his palm on his forehead, Lord Tredici rolled his eyes dramatically, managing to somehow get his entire body into the gesture. “It must be the long day playing havoc on your mind.” His hand fell from his face to point listlessly at Sebastian. “When is the varied not a variant,” he asked, hand flopping about, as he tried to step his audience of one through the puzzle, “or the variance truly invariable?” A dramatic sigh poured out of him. “I’ve laid bare the pieces for you, so tell me, Dr. Hale, what are you?”

  A riddle? Sebastian wondered. Riddles were a strong suit of his. Folklore and fables made up a good portion of parahistory, and you learn very early on to think in varied ways, tangentially, or sideways, as some called it. Varied but invariant. On any other day, maybe even that one, he thought, somewhere between his first cup of coffee and the missing sugar mystery, he would not have even needed it to be laid out so plainly for him in a riddle. He had read the files, he knew about the staffing policies. At least one was required at every site, but their identity was always kept a secret. Even from themselves. Is he saying I’m…

  “I’m a constant?”

  Not unlike a Perpetual Site, a constant was a person or thing bound to baseline reality in such a way that they remain unaffected by variant radiation, reality shifts and time shifts as well. They were the ultimate consensus. Monitored and used as a measuring stick, a constant was deemed necessary at every site to act as a warning system for changes to reality’s baseline. And in some cases, they were even used as sponges for variant effects.

  “Bravo!” Lord Tredici cheered, drawing no attention from the people around them.

  Sebastian was caught between a smile and frown. A canary in a coalmine, he thought. On one hand, he was unique, not just someone meant to look after and make sense of discoveries made by others. On the other hand, his uniqueness was the kind born from being so utterly normal that his normalcy looped back around on itself to become abnormal. His was not an active talent, but a passive one. A constant. Not just meant to look after dusty old tomes and texts, he was really, really meant to look after them. He was not wallowing in a sea of minutiae, he was king of it.

  “Your sister…,” Lord Tredici began talking, but the first two words drowned out the rest of it.

  My sister? Sebastian turned inward at the thought of her. The smudge of a memory, with her obnoxious red hair. “Seb the Pleb!” the smudge yelled at him, cackling like a witch. “Sebeian the Plebeian!”

  After the animated man had spoken for over a minute, without Sebastian hearing more than two words of it, Lord Tredici finally noticed.

  “Hello? Hello?!” Lord Tredici said, snapping his fingers for attention. “Am I speaking to a wall?”

  “My sister?” Sebastian asked suddenly. “Sorry, what? What about her?”

  With a sharp, dramatic sigh, a flurry of exasperated Italian fell out of the lord’s mouth. “As immune to my words, as he is my effect.” He snapped his fingers, again. “Are you with me?”

  After a moment to make sure Sebastian was locked in, Lord Tredici repeated an abridged version of his previous ramblings. “Up until two days ago, like you, your sister was a constant. Now she is not. As Director of the Ontology Department, it falls on me to find out why. And you are going to join me in my investigation. Is that understood?”

  “Was a constant?” Sebastian asked, trying to process the information.

  “Now a variant,” Lord Tredici replied matter-of-factly.

  “A variant?” he asked in disbelief. “How?!”

  “There it is!” A smirk cracked across Lord Tredici’s face, and he shot up from his chair, the keys on his hip jingling loudly. “Therein lies the curiosity that drives our inquiry! Come, Dr. Hale! Come!” He looked down at the half asleep snake, as he turned to go. “Sii buona, Cannella,” he told it. Glancing at Sebastian, he gestured for him to follow. “Andiamo!”

  And then he was off, not toward the exit, but cutting across the cafeteria, making a beeline to the supply closet.

  Eyeing the snake left on the sugar packet covered table, Sebastian hesitated to follow. When it lifted its head and hissed at him, he jumped up from his chair to follow after the casual lord. “Sh-should you leave that there?” he asked Lord Tredici, when he reached him. “The snake? I mean, your cat? Is it safe?”

  At the supply closet door, Lord Tredici was fiddling with the ring of keys he had pulled from his hip. He was mumbling to himself, and ignoring Sebastian’s question, as he chose a key.

  “Is it safe, Lor—,” Sebastian felt ridiculous saying it, and corrected himself, “—AB5, is it safe to leave it?” Then his confusion over why they were standing at the supply closet struck. “Wait, why are we… what do we need from in there? Supplies?”

  “Lord Tredici, I told you,” he chided, as he played eeny, meeny, miny, moe with the keys. A finger landed on a random key. “This’ll be it!”

  Sebastian watched in bewilderment, as he slid the chosen key into the door knob of the supply closet. The turn of the key produced a loud click, and then a twist of the knob opened it.

  Swinging the door aside, Lord Tredici revealed an extravagant walk-in closet full of expensive looking clothes. Racks and cubbyholes full of shirts, pants, shoes, sweaters and scarves in every color and pattern imaginable.

  “Where did this…,” Sebastian did not know what he was looking at. Wide-eyed, he watched Lord Tredici enter the room he was certain had once been a supply closet. In the past, that was where he begrudgingly found the napkins, when they ran out on the line. A variant, he thought. The keys?

  Lord Tredici pondered a rack of coats, then plucked one out. A long, hooded down jacket, dark green to match the rest of his ensemble. Then he eyed Sebastian, scrutinizing his outfit: a blue sweater over a dress shirt, and black chinos, turning up a disappointed look. Diving into the rack, he vanished for a moment, before exclaiming something muffled and in Italian, and then struggling back out of the wall of jackets. “Here you are, Dr. Hale,” he said, out of breath, presenting him with a puffy black parka, fur-lined hood included. “It will barely help, but where we are going, you’ll want it.”

  Sebastian reached out, hesitating to cross the closet’s threshold with his hand.

  Lord Tredici sighed at him, pushing past him to exit the closet, and leaving the parka in his hands. “Dr. Hale, I need you to snap out of it,” he told him. As he swung the closet door shut, he snapped his fingers in Sebastian’s face. “Do you hear me? Put that on. Chi si ferma è perduto!”

  The Italian flourish broke through the stupor.

  “What?” Sebastian asked, as he began putting the parka on. “What’s that mean?”

  Lord Tredici ignored his question, once again, returning to his giant ring of keys. Sliding his finger along them, they chimed lightly, as he chose another. “This one is certainly it!”

  The parka was snug, and Sebastian felt like a fool standing in the climate controlled facility. He thought about complaining, but the urge was overwritten by his blossoming curiosity at what Lord Tredici might reveal behind door number two. He watched carefully, while the man slid the next key into the door knob.

  Another easy turn, and a loud click.

  Lord Tredici turned the knob, and suddenly the door was blown open by a frigid gust of wind. “Dio mio!” he yelled, letting out a gleeful howl at being startled.

  With the wind, snow and ice ripped into the cafeteria from the moonlit, frozen landscape beyond. Sebastian threw his hands up at the sensory explosion, instinctively taking a step back, as he choked on the icy air. “Whaaaaat?!”

  “Chi si ferma è perduto, Dr. Hale!” Lord Tredici yelled at him. “He who stops is lost!”