Foundation Agent George Barsin is monolithic: nearly two metres tall and rectangular-shouldered, like a Bruce Timm cartoon. He is bald, bearded, and immaculately presented. His suit is tailored; there are few which will fit him off the rack.
He arrives at the Green place first thing after dawn, six o'clock. The address is isolated, an acre or two of ill-maintained scrubland off a spur of a spur of the main highway north out of Ojai.
Barsin is part of the Foundation's Anomalous Religious Expressions Division. They do cults.
"Green" is not the name of the cult which Barsin is here to confront, but a codename. Barsin doesn't know the real name. At the briefing last night, it was explained that there are legitimate security reasons to use codenames instead of true names here, but those reasons were not explained. Barsin, no fool, took this to mean that there is some form of cognitohazard surrounding the true names. Or a memory-clouding phenomenon which makes them impossible to record. Or — and he's dealt with Foundation research staff for far too many years to not consider this — somebody just straight-up forgot to record the real names, and is trying to cover for themselves.
If there's an SCP number, he hasn't been told it.
*
The house is an ugly white sprawl. One storey, wood construction, no two windows alike in design... decaying. There are piles of junk, lumber, rusted vehicle components, drums of filthy green water. Willow and sycamore trees are encroaching from two-and-a-half sides, drizzling leaves and seeds and miscellaneous biological gunk all over the roof, clogging the gutters. Through the windows, only closed curtains and blinds are visible. The front door is standing ajar.
Barsin proceeds inside, cautiously. The entrance opens almost directly onto a large lounge/diner/kitchen area. The room is darkened, light mostly spilling from the entrance door — Barsin leaves it open — and feeling its way around the edges of the window coverings. The place is dirty, and smells of mould. The still air is like an oven, and it's extremely quiet except for the faint, animated sound of someone talking, away down the hall, words not entirely clear.
"—wasps and, yeah, it's going to be sharp inside. When you're made to move, that's tloi kwrlu dlth you'll bleed from—"
Barsin goes down the hall, passing a wall decoration which was once a mirror but has been completely painted over in black.After a brief search, during which he ascertains that the rest of the house is empty, he comes to the final room. This door is closed, but the focused rambling is coming from inside:
"—at home, it's super easy. I'm going to give you something. An easy two-part project for you to take away, and don't forget alth amnth below. Part one: find someone weaker than you—"
Barsin knocks, loudly, twice.
The patter stops. Nothing else is heard. Barsin opens the door.
The room is dark, its window blocked with a thick curtain. There's a computer desk in the corner opposite the door, about as cluttered as a desk can realistically get, strewn with partially disassembled hardware, USB keys, chocolate wrappers, scraps of paper, ballpoint pens. There's a gaming mouse, unable to move for junk. There's a good-quality video camera setup, a monitor, video feeds on the monitor, dust.
There's a cheap, skeletal swivel chair in front of the monitor and a young man of about twenty slouched uncomfortably in the chair. He is skinny, with discoloured, pale skin which Barsin thinks could be caused by malnutrition. He has what was at one point a stylish, fashionable haircut but is now in some disrepair, and when he turns around Barsin sees that he has dark rings around his eyes. It looks as if he hasn't slept in a year. He reeks. The room is filled with that odour, almost thick enough to see.
In the same way that the anomalous viral/religious phenomenon — the cult, gathering around and above this young man like an anvil cloud — is named "Green", he himself is named "Red".
"Good morning," Barsin says. "We saw your streams."
The youth pulls his headphones down. "The fuck are you?"
"My name's George Barsin. I'm part of an organisation which— ah—"
Red launches out of his chair like a rabid greyhound from a cage. He comes fist-first, losing the headphones. Barsin shifts his weight slightly to his left, leaning away from the punch. He catches Red's arm and pulls it forward, violently, deflecting the attack's momentum and bringing the youth teeth-first into the door frame. Red stumbles back, crouching. He finds his footing swiftly. Froth is developing at the corners of his mouth, mixing with blood. Scrabbling around the junk on the floor, he puts his hand on a soldering iron.
As Red comes forward again, Barsin wastes a critical split second trying to trace the iron's cable, to figure out whether it's plugged in and hot or not. It's not, but that's enough distraction that Red gets right up there, driving the iron up into Barsin's gut with both hands. There's an electronic screech and a spark of orange light; the iron holes Barsin's shirt but skitters off his abdomen, opening a long tear. There's bare skin underneath. His shield is invisible, partly mythical, and protects his seemingly exposed head just as well as the rest of him.
Barsin takes Red in a headlock. Some haphazard kicking ensues, less well-choreographed. Red has a demon's energy behind him but Barsin has, to be blunt, arrived prepared. In a few more moves, Red is disarmed, stunned, flat on his back and good for nothing.
Barsin takes stock. The number of genuine, fight-for-your-life fights he's been in is still in single digits. This one ranks about in the middle. Fifteen seconds of activity; both of them made mistakes. A learning experience.
"Then I'll dispense with the introductions," he says to Red. "The live streaming vector was novel. We hadn't seen that before. Very effective compared to the generic self-help-book-and-walled-compound model. You get one point for originality, out of ten. But we predicted it decades back and we had the containment procedures ready to go. We have people at the streaming services. As I speak, we're locking you out of your account. We're using your own channels to distribute inoculation codes."
Barsin tries to tidy his shirt up. It's not going to work. Never mind.
"But you're the source," he says. "A simple inoculation code would glance off. Physical intervention is required." He reaches inside his jacket — where he has a perfectly serviceable gun, which he elected to leave where it is for this confrontation — and produces a device not unlike an ophthalmologist's scope. He kneels, lifts Red's right eyelid and aims the scope at it, projecting a brilliant white spot of light which bathes the entire eye and causes it to lock open. Almost all of Red's musculature locks up as well, effectively pinning him to the floor. His teeth clench.