Facility 862-B

We test the repairs tomorrow will need.

Recorded history

Facility 862-B existed to answer a deceptively simple question: when a system fails, how do you make it work again?

Its staff tested equipment, procedures and recovery methods against biological, chemical, environmental and technical failures. Surviving material is unusually plentiful for somewhere nobody can locate: printed notices, safety posters, staff photographs, identity papers, all insisting on the same handful of ideas. Continuity requires every hand. Continuity is prepared, not improvised. We test the repairs tomorrow will need.

One surviving poster observes that the facility remained operational and the world did not, and states that this is being corrected.

The staff photograph

The clearest image the archive holds of the facility is a staff photograph taken outside the main block, the wall behind them carrying the designation 862-Б in painted characters two metres high.

Fourteen people, arranged in the two neat rows of an institution that expected to be photographed again next year. Lab coats, work jackets, a scattering of suits, identity badges clipped where the light catches them. Behind them the block is unremarkable in the specific way that expensive buildings are when nobody is meant to ask what happens inside.

The archive draws attention to the figure seated at the end of the front row, in uniform. Facility 862-B described itself in every surviving document as a scientific and technical undertaking concerned with repair, continuity and recovery. It nonetheless had an officer, and the officer sat for the photograph with everybody else.

No names are recorded on the print, on its reverse, or in any document the archive holds alongside it. Nobody in the frame has been identified.

The chronology problem

Dr. Borschtovsky claims to have worked here before the Fall as a member of its Reclamation Directorate. He describes corridors, laboratories and procedures in unnecessary detail, refers to pre-Fall colleagues as though he saw them recently, and occasionally complains about administrative decisions whose authors should have been dead for centuries.

Fragments of Facility 862-B documentation do contain his name.

The archive is unable to reconcile these facts and has stopped attempting to. It records them adjacent to one another and leaves the difficulty visible.

Continuity systems

The Doctor's stated interest is in surviving Continuity equipment: field tools designed not to contain a ready-made answer, but to determine what has broken, gather evidence, and provide the means to begin repairing it.

Whether any such device has ever been recovered is not recorded. That he is still looking is.

Archive notes

• Location unestablished. Appears on no map the archive holds.
• Documentation, signage and propaganda survive in quantity; eight plates are filed.
• A Repair & Maintenance Directorate appears on one plate and in no other document held.
• Staff photograph held: fourteen persons, unidentified, one of them a uniformed officer.
• Named as a former employer by Dr. Borschtovsky, whose account cannot be reconciled with the calendar.
• Surviving fragments of its records contain his name.